Kathy Fuld, Wife of Lehman CEO, to Auction Artworks

(here comes the fall out)
By Lindsay Pollock

Sept. 26 (Bloomberg) -- Kathy Fuld, the art-collecting wife of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. Chief Executive Officer Richard Fuld, is selling a $20 million set of rare Abstract Expressionist drawings at a November auction, according to two art dealers.
Christie's International, which is offering the works in New York on Nov. 12, declined to reveal the seller's identity. The auction house announced the sale of the drawings, including three by Willem de Kooning, four days after Lehman filed the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history on Sept. 15. Two New York-based dealers who specialize in similar works said Fuld is the seller. They declined to be named.
``These kinds of drawings are extremely rare,'' said Amy Cappellazzo, co-head of Christie's Postwar and contemporary art department. ``The collector considers drawing as a primary art form.''
Richard Fuld earned $34.4 million in 2007 running the fourth-largest U.S. investment bank -- pay that lawyers said may be the target of lawsuits by creditors. He sold Lehman shares that were worth $247 million a year and a half ago for less than $500,000 last week after the stock price collapsed.
The Christie's auction includes the de Koonings, five Barnett Newmans, four Arshile Gorkys and four Agnes Martins. De Kooning's kinetic orange-haired 1951 ``Woman'' in graphite, charcoal, pastel and oil on paper is expected to fetch as much as $4 million.
The collection was assembled over a number of years, according to Cappellazzo, who said the seller first approached Christie's and rival Sotheby's about an auction in the summer. Christie's completed the deal in August, she said. Fuld is well known in the art world for her passion for works on paper. High-Level Buyer ``She buys at the highest level,'' said New York dealer Joan Washburn. ``If you have a great drawing, you offer it to her.'' Fuld is vice-chairman of the board of trustees at New York's Museum of Modern Art and has promised a number of artworks to the museum including works by Jasper Johns and Louise Bourgeois. Phone calls and emails to the press offices of Lehman and MoMA seeking comment from Fuld were unanswered.
Among the drawings slated for sale is a 1946-47 Gorky drawing titled ``Study for Agony I,'' estimated to sell for up to $2.8 million. The drawing is a study for ``Agony,'' a 1947 red and brown abstract painting owned by MoMA.
Newman's 1960 black-and-white ink-on-paper ``Untitled'' is expected to fetch up to $2 million. The same work sold at Sotheby's in New York in 1997 for $244,500, according to the Artnet pricing database. Billionaire Ronald Lauder is listed among prior owners in the 2004 Yale University Press ``Barnett Newman: a Catalogue Raisonne,'' a directory of the artist's output.
The Fulds lent two other Newmans to the artist's 2002 retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, curated by Ann Temkin, who was recently named MoMA's chief curator.
Larger Collection
Dealers say the works at auction are a small part of a larger collection which also includes contemporary artists such as Brice Marden. A New York dealer said a Jackson Pollock drawing owned by Fuld was offered for sale this summer at the Art Basel art fair held in June in Switzerland. The works are likely to sell well, some dealers say. ``Judging from the images, I'd say the drawings are all at least A-minus works and my feeling is they will find homes,'' said New York art adviser Thea Westreich.
Since the Lehman collapse, Kathy Fuld has kept up her public appearances. Guests noticed her on Tuesday night at a farewell cocktail party at MoMA for retiring curator Kynaston McShine.
(Lindsay Pollock writes on the art market for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are her own.)
To contact the writer of this story: Lindsay Pollock in New York at lindsaypollock@yahoo.com. Last Updated: September 26, 2008 15:33 EDT

Truman Marquez', Some People Never Go Crazy,

prior to "Context" deconstruction exhibition

While the opening night deconstruction offers a public gifting of the art segments,

the cut outs reveal wall text and "under-painting" of seated figure shooting himself in the mouth. The figure is presumably the artist "going crazy".

Artists and collectors alike often speak of the last great “movement” in art and the next. Perhaps the “movement” we are in the midst of today is the “Commercialism Movement”. No matter what the astronomical price of the week, we can rest assured it has been artificially driven and inflated by the “king makers” ie. the dealers who guarantee auction houses a minimum for contemporary works sold to establish a market value. While this new paradigm sets the monetary value of fine art, the quality of the art is diminishing. The investment angle has become more monumental than the work itself in our pervasive commercial society. Collectors are buying art with the hopes it will increase in value. They're looking to inflate their egos by owning the next best thing even if they don't like it, respect it or understand it. It is no wonder artist are going of the deep end and making works with dung and bodily fluids or desecrating and gifting art. Buying art for too many is no different for some than buying real estate to flip or commodities trading. As an artist there are days when I’d like to erase the word “market” from the English language and as the recently appointed promoter for painter, Truman Marquez, I understand the art market – like it or not.

I came across the Fine Art Adoption website at DC Art News and found the public gifting of art conceived by NY artist, Adam Simon to be a revolutionary concept. It is a site which hosts portfolios of a select network of artists offering works available for adoption. This has brought an experience from last fall to mind when I met artist, Truman Marquez. It was at his sophomore solo show at CAN NY where the paintings exhibited were deconstructed at the opening. The attendees removed segments of the works with artist issued knives and templates exposing works behind the canvas and leaving the works in ruin on the walls. This public gifting art marked a turning point for Marquez also disgusted with the commercialism of the art world. He, like the creators of fine art adoption are just a few of the many artists and collectors who are disgusted with the “Commercialism Movement”. Below is an article I wrote following “Context” at CAN NY last November.

Performance art and public gifting of work – a catharsis
An accounting of Context at New Art Center, NY on November 8, 2007

THE PERFORMANCE

It was with an authoritative gesture and a sharp blade that Marquez began the performance of his last experimentation with performance art. With irreverent authority he looked away from Call me Horse for Now while cajoling the audience with synthetic exhilaration he made the first decisive and expansive incision. The sound of the canvas tearing resonated like a mortal scream or the first cry of a newborn. Simultaneously the death of the painting surface gave birth to the newly created dissected and deformed works with wall text and secondary imagery. His year’s accomplishment hung mutilated before him as did his psyche when he surrendered control to the audience. This public gifting of art was undoubtedly disturbing for Marquez, exposed and incapacitated, as he and months of his most expressive work lay vulnerable to the desecration before him. The unabashed audience began to remove random pieces of the first canvas and four others with the provided templates and blades. While many coveted the forged segments referencing the masters, Gauguin, Cezanne, de Kooning and Pollock, others became more noticeably intrigued by the secondary works beneath the paintings which emerged with each cut. It was not the deletion of imagery but the addition of the windows which became more vital to the performance and the work as sub-messages in the form of wall text, found objects and paintings relevant to each piece were revealed with successive cuts.
The addition of the secondary plain in Context, contrary to the pure evisceration of work in the first performance, ConTemplate - 2006, contributed a new dimension both physically and intellectually. The participants rewarded with possession of each painting-ectomy were duped as it was evident the nothingness left behind possibly had more relevance to the finished piece and henceforth a greater significance. The removed segments became diminished out of context and of meaningless importance, henceforth value.

Marquez surrendered himself through the sacrifice of his work (a metaphor of the physical artist’s body and psyche) as an eager audience with disregard enthusiastically carved with a growing hunger like a feeding frenzy of piranha. A few participants abandoned the templates all together and feverishly carved and threaded sliced strips of the canvas intuitively into slits while the greedy covetously removed multiple segments. In a statement Marquez said, “…the paintings are surrogates for the artist, his person, his thought, his creativity. Offering up the canvases to be cut, the artist, metaphorically speaking, offers himself.” This intense emotional experience marks a psychological purging necessary to more clearly define himself and his impending work – a catharsis.

THE WORK
In Severed Voting Fingers Marquez implies a possible conclusion to the Iraq war. The fallen soldier lying dead in the shadows of severed fingers is a metaphor for the ineffectiveness of Western intervention. Furthermore, as a reminder of hopelessness, the crouching Iraqi woman severing her own “voting finger” along with others before her whose severed fingers on the bloody floor cast the shadows, speaks to the fear and uncertainty of democracy and surrender to insurgents. The wall text reveals the number dead and wounded (possibly in vane) while the surface of the painting accentuates dispiritedness of human sacrifice.

Call Me Horse for Now: The artist incorporates the segments of de Kooning, Pollack, Gauguin and Matisse before which are being taken by the figures with jousting poles in harlequin garb who surround a horse (representative of Marquez) charging through the center of the painting. The horse, analogous to the artist seeking direction as he charges away from the painterly elements referencing art history.

Kalashnikov Orb: Nail Rain Series: The depiction of Christianity under threat. A praying figure of a monk crouches near a corner in the shadow of an enormous orb with the lifeless body of Christ appearing in the surface of poles attached to its surface. Within the shadow of the orb’s poles is a hidden image of a Kalashnikov rifle referencing the violence of fundamentalist religious fanatics suggesting the doom of Christianity while nails are weightlessly suspended in a space without gravity of a surreal world.

METAMORPHOSIS
The works of Marquez are compelling on their own exclusive of the performance incorporating the audience deconstruction. Socio-political and religious references swathed in surreal, optical illusions with an emphasis on an intriguing physical and intellectual perspective form a haunting beauty juxtaposed with disturbing grotesqueness. While the deconstruction aspect is essential for the revelation of the supportive work beneath, one might view the performance reprehensible as the unscathed work is significantly compelling on its own. Furthermore, the egregious desecration before preliminary consideration of the imagery is disturbing. Concealed imagery and the consequent artist intent is too easily misunderstood and then in a fleeting moment the ephemeral paintings are gone.

The performances were initiated as a psychological experiment to strip the artist of his control rendering him defenseless and exposed to reach a better understanding of self and artistic direction while perpetuating the public gifting of art and making an important commentary on the "Commercialism Movement". Normally paintings and artists are venerated, untouchable and guarded against mutilation but like a self-inflicted torture, Marquez watched while participants took control allowing himself to become completely exorcised to ultimately reach a catharsis. Marquez’ temporary psychosis spawned by “Contemplate” and “Context” marks a departure as he is resurrected to redefine Truman Marquez. More about the works of Truman Marquez on his Blog.

Worried Dealers, Cross-Dressing Potter

Open Armory Art Fair
By Lindsay Pollock

March 27 (Bloomberg) -- Collector Donald B. Marron noticed a less-frenzied pace at New York's Armory Show art fair yesterday as he strolled the aisles during the VIP opening.
``You can see people contemplating the art,'' said Marron, chairman of Lightyear Capital LLC, with his curator at his side. ``It's the way you ought to look at art.''
Following a seven-year jump in prices for contemporary art and a proliferation of international art fairs, the speculative boom may be losing some steam.
``I'm not sure, at the end of the day, how good business is,'' said Roland Augustine, head of the Art Dealers Association of America and co-founder of Chelsea gallery Luhring Augustine, which isn't exhibiting. ``I'm not sure if the market can absorb all this.''
The fair, a showplace for 160 international galleries selling from booths on Pier 94 on the west side of Manhattan, runs through Sunday. Last year attendance topped 52,000 and organizers reported sales of $85 million.

Marie-Josee Kravis, chairwoman of the Museum of Modern Art's board, and real estate developer Arthur Zeckendorf were among other VIPs. Europeans, particularly French and German, attracted by the weak dollar, were out in force.
Some dealers fretted over few or no sales, but business was brisk in some quarters. Chelsea gallery Friedrich Petzel sold works by Allan McCollum, Sarah Morris and a $120,000 sculpture by Cosima von Bonin, made from grungy stuffed animals dangling on clothespins.
Pendulous Breasts Greenberg Van Doren Gallery sold their priciest work, a $275,000 androgynous wooden sculpture by Katsura Funakoshi with an elongated neck and pendulous breasts.

Sales outperformed London dealer Victoria Miro's expectations. ``Everyone is quite nervous about the economy,'' she said, ``but it's been quite normal.'' Miro sold three vases by the Turner Prize-winning cross- dresser Grayson Perry, priced $30,000 to $90,000. She sold five paintings by Varda Caivano, a young artist whose subtle pastel- hued abstractions cost $12,000 to $18,000.

Renee and Robert Belfer, philanthropists and collectors who have a named gallery at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, raced over to a dealer to buy two photographs. ``They were already gone,'' he said. Die-hard collectors were oblivious to gloomy economic forecasts. Don and Mera Rubell, who own a private museum in Miami, charged around in black sneakers. They said they weren't inclined to buy less.
``After 40 years of collecting, are we pulling back? No! We are buying a ton of art,'' said the tanned, white-haired Don Rubell. ``But if everyone else pulls back, we'd be delighted.''

With over 2,000 artists on view, the art tended to blur, but one-person booths stood out. A one-woman show of Jenny Holzer paintings, marble footstools and LED installations based on declassified U.S. documents at Cheim & Read gallery seemed more museum-like than most.
Annette Lemieux's installation at Paul Kasmin Gallery, based on a country fair, featured gingham paintings, old barn wood, and free apple pie served with whole milk from the jar. A bumper sticker proclaiming ``No Bull'' cost $1.
Most of the art wasn't rebellious, but Joe Bradley's bland beige painting at the Lower East Side's Canada gallery poked fun at ``art as luxury goods,'' said Wallace Whitney, a dealer at the gallery. ``This is a tough piece.'' The ``Bread'' painting -- Whitney said the color reminded the artist of Wonder bread's crust -- was priced at $30,000. There were no takers.
(Lindsay Pollock writes on the art market for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are her own.)