According to pals at The New York Times, J. Ezra Merkin, the financier who lost billions of his investors' money in the Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme, has agreed to sell his famed collection of Mark Rothkos (plus some Giacomettis)  for $310 million. The deal is expected to lead to a settlement of charges made by New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo. Here are the critical paragraphs in a breaking story: According to people briefed on the matter, Mr. Merkin was paying as much as $60,000 a month for insurance and had … [Read more...]

Here's one contemporary art collector who's trying to help out artists: Glenn Fuhrman, the co-managing partner of MSD Capital LP, which manages money for Michael Dell, is giving artists whose galleries have closed a show this summer. My friend Lindsay Pollock wrote a story about it for Bloomberg (here).  Here are the key paragraphs: Titled "Re-Accession: For Sale by Owner," -- a combination of "recession" and "de-accession" -- the summer- long show opened June 23 at Fuhrman's Flag Art Foundation, located on the 9th … [Read more...]

The National Archives has been in the news in recent days for releasing another raft of Nixon materials -- some 30,000 pages of documents and 154 hours of tapes were opened to the public on June 23. But they've been well-covered in the national press, and I'm not writing about them here. Rather, as the National Archives celebrates its 75th Anniversary -- and the picture here illustrates the condition of some War Department records, held during the 1930s in a White House garage, before their creation -- I simply want to call your … [Read more...]

At the Brooklyn Museum* on Friday, I stopped in to see the just-opened Yinka Shonibare MBE exhibition, which runs through Sept. 20. Unbeknownst to me, it beautifully illustrates one of the strategies I was going to bring up at my lunch with Director Arnold Lehman for getting people interested in seeing museums' permanent collections. Lehman and the museum's curators were one step ahead of me: they had already displayed some of Shonibare's works within the permanent collection galleries. Most of the Shonibare show … [Read more...]

You don't often get to write in newspapers or magazines about works of art that have been in collections for decades -- after all, what's the news value? That's one reason I love the Saturday column in The Wall Street Journal called "Masterpiece: Anatomy of a Classic." Every week someone describes and details what makes a work worthy of the distinction. Today, I had one about the Alexander sarcophagus in Instanbul's archeological museum; here's the link. (There's one error: the WSJ picture is mis-captioned: that's a side panel, showing … [Read more...]

I come to praise the Brooklyn Museum* today. Over the past couple of weeks, I've obliquely mentioned a few of its failings: the lack of people in its permanent collections here and its American art galleries, which I consider to be woeful, here. Over the years, I've also disliked its penchant for mounting shows on the edge of art, or beyond it, like "Hip-Hop Nation" and "Star Wars: The Magic of Myth." There's more, but I won't catalogue my quibbles here. But I give Director Arnold Lehman a lot of credit. After my post about the … [Read more...]

Your faithful reporter can not follow up on the summer meeting of the Association of Art Museum Directors, which I wrote about here several days ago. The agenda, we knew, included plans to talk about a new strategic plan, the economy, the need for better statistics, deaccessioning, and other things. I made a few suggestions for topics needing discussion, and so did some commenters. Janet Landay, AAMD's executive director, spoke with me before the meeting, and I told her that I'd check … [Read more...]

As anyone who keeps up with the news knows, Wal-Mart is one of the few companies that is doing just fine during this recession. Why? Value. Forget luxury purchases; everyone wants value for their money now. So I took notice a few weeks ago when I saw something about a "Fairfield/Westchester Museum Alliance," which offers the members of six museums free admission to all the others (as well as a 10% store discount). Non-members that pay at one museum receive free same-day admission to any of the … [Read more...]

The Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City claims "one of the strongest" American art collections in the U.S., and the opening in April of new galleries for that work, art made in the U.S. from colonial days through World War II, was an occasion. The museum spent $7 million to gut its old space, conserve and reinstall about 175 works from the 3,000-plus works it owns. It also borrowed a few works to fill gaps. Among the works on display are the marvelous Marsden Hartley, Himmel, from 1914-15, at right, … [Read more...]

Even while galleries in Chelsea are closing, or hinting that they will this summer, there are people who believe that the art market is close to its floor. That's the message today from ArtTactic, a British company that tracks, analyzes and  comments on the art market, is out today with a new U.S. and European Art Market Confidence Survey -- much like the consumer confidence index for the U.S. economy published by the University of Michigan. Art Tactic charges 75 British pounds for the report, and therefore doesn't publish … [Read more...]