By WILLARD SPIEGELMAN

Tulsa, Okla.

Black gold, aka oil, turns into real gold, which often makes for artistic wealth and civic pride. Consider the case of this city in the green country of eastern Oklahoma, a landscape that resembles the gently rolling hills of adjacent Kansas, Missouri and Arkansas more than the dustbowl plains of the western part of the state or the Texas panhandle. Until the mid-1950s, Tulsa was the undisputed international capital of the oil industry. Men became rich, almost overnight. Some of them did great things with their gains.

Waite Phillips (1883-1964), whose brothers had already amassed a major company in Bartlesville, developed his own petroleum company here and sold it in 1925 for the then-enormous sum of $25 million. That's when the real fun began. The grand result was his in-town villa, Philbrook, 72 rooms on 23 acres, which he had built in 1927 for himself, his wife and two children, and which he began filling with the art that still hangs on the walls and stuffs the cabinets here. This estate would not seem out of place in Hollywood. But the Phillips family stayed here for less than a dozen years. In 1938 they deeded the house to the city. Then they moved to the penthouse of a downtown skyscraper; and the Philbrook Museum opened in 1939.

The "house museum" is a lovely genre whose members include the more famous Frick Collection in New York and Gardner Museum in Boston. We go to them for the art and also to breathe the air and get a feeling for how the owner-occupants lived and what made them tick. Philbrook mixes Greek, Italian Renaissance, Baroque and Southwestern styles, the building covered by red-tile roofs, in an engaging hodgepodge. Its beautifully landscaped gardens, which include fountains and a classical tempietto, are the go-to spot for Tulsans who want backdrops for wedding photos.

Phillips had a taste for western things—his "man cave" rooms are on the ground floor—while his wife, Genevieve, went in for French style. The museum's collection has 12,000 items and constitutes a modest encyclopedia as well as a fortuitous anthology of Phillips and post-Phillips bequests, the most splendid of which are 40 Italian Renaissance works (34 paintings, six sculptures), a handout from Samuel H. Kress, the five-and-dime-store magnate who disposed of his vast holdings, most generously to Washington's National Gallery, throughout the mid-20th century.

Enlarge Image

Close

Evan Taylor

The main Philbrook campus includes beautifully landscaped gardens.

The Kress works at the Philbrook include some strong and interesting pictures: an "Enthroned Madonna" attributed to Gentile da Fabriano; Tanzio da Varallo's very buff St. John the Baptist (1627); a Madonna from a follower of Andrea Mantegna; a splendid small portrait of a bearded man attributed to Giovanni Bellini; and other impressive pictures by Carpaccio and Piero di Cosimo. For a schoolchild in the middle of the middle of the country, far from Chicago or even Kansas City, these works—no four-star masterpieces—define what we used to call the Renaissance. They are approachable (when I visited the museum in mid-April, it was as silent as a tomb) and all are in perfect condition.

Most of the Phillips furniture has gone, and the original building has been adapted for the display of art. Architectural additions have been made, but the bones of the house survive, as do charming details, like the frescoes by Philadelphia artist George Gibbs on the walls of the music room, which depict four "tempos" (Allegro, Andante, Rondo and Scherzo) in neoclassical tableaux with young girls who look like nothing so much as 1920s flappers with bobbed hair and flowing gowns.

Although the villa's low ceilings and dark rooms are not ideal for the display of art, French pictures by Rosa Bonheur, Eugène Boudin, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, Gustave Courbet, Charles-François Daubigny and Edouard Vuillard look pretty good. Even better, in an adjacent gallery added to the original house, is the Herbert and Roseline Gussman Collection (he was a New Yorker who moved to Oklahoma, one of several prominent Jewish oilmen in the state), 450 works that came to the Philbrook. Paintings by Wassily Kandinsky, Emil Nolde, Georges Roualt, Pablo Picasso, Raoul Dufy and André Derain comfortably command the wall space.

The appealing house really cannot display larger, modern and contemporary work. But on June 14 the museum is opening Philbrook Downtown, an industrial space, in the Brady Arts District. Like much of Tulsa, this wonderful old neighborhood of low brick buildings and unused warehouses is redolent of Art Deco style. New restaurants, galleries and lofts are springing up. Think Brooklyn, or even Berlin, on the Arkansas River. Much of this development comes courtesy of the George Kaiser Family Foundation. The new place will free up space in the villa for the display of some of the collection's 600 Asian works, none of which is up now. More American Indian pottery and baskets will come out of storage, and will be joined in the downtown facility by the newly acquired Eugene B. Adkins Collection.

Under the energetic leadership of Randall Suffolk, the museum's director since 2007, the Philbrook has increased attendance by 50% and changed its programming to include more family-friendly events. In a city where horrible race riots occurred 90 years ago, and which still bears traces of the American Indian displacement of the 19th and early 20th centuries, Mr. Suffolk proudly notes that 42% of the museum's visitors come from minority populations, versus an average of 9% nationally.

The downtown facility joins a complex of arts buildings (plus a lovely adjacent green space, on which concerts and exercise classes are already taking place) that includes the archives of Woody Guthrie, one of Oklahoma's most famous sons, embraced more warmly after his death than during his life. This socialist songwriting minstrel of the plains has been reborn, courtesy of his state's wealthy philanthropists. It's an appropriate irony. This land is everyone's land.

Mr. Spiegelman, who writes about the arts for the Journal, lives in Dallas.

The George Lindemann Journal

New Guide in Venice

Samuele Pellecchia for The New York Times

Massimiliano Gioni, 39, the 2013 Venice Biennale curator is also the associate director and director of exhibitions for the New Museum. More Photos »

By CAROL VOGEL

Published: May 23, 2013

Massimiliano Gioni, the artistic director of this year’s Venice Biennale, was marveling at the rich history of this 118-year-old international contemporary art exhibition.

“Klimt showed there in 1905,” he said. “That is mind-blowing to me. Since then there has been Morandi and Picasso, Rauschenberg, Johns and so on. Maybe I’m romanticizing, but the past is still very present.”

On a rainy afternoon in April Mr. Gioni was having lunch at his regular haunt, a tiny Italian restaurant in Lower Manhattan near the New Museum, where he is associate director and director of exhibitions. His BlackBerry was buzzing with e-mails and his phone kept ringing. Yet Mr. Gioni, 39, ignored it all, speaking earnestly with his usual intellectual intensity jolted with unexpected moments of deadpan humor. He was explaining what it’s like to be the youngest artistic director in 110 years to organize the first, oldest and most venerable international art event in a calendar packed with an unrivaled number of them.

“Of course I’m nervous,” he said. “This is center stage and it’s difficult because it comes with so many expectations and so much history.”

As he braces for the art world to descend on Venice for three preview days beginning on Wednesday, followed by the public opening on Saturday, Mr. Gioni estimated that nearly 500,000 people would come to see the Biennale by the time it ends on Nov. 24. As artistic director, his job is not only to be the diplomatic face of the Biennale but also to organize an enormous exhibition in two sites: one in a central building in the shaded gardens at the tip of Venice where the national pavilions are, and the other in the nearby Arsenale, the meandering medieval network of shipyards. The job entails an overwhelming amount of juggling and his ambitious vision has only made it worse.

Even though Mr. Gioni was born in Italy — in Busto Arsizio, 40 minutes northwest of Milan — the logistics of working in a city like Venice are a notorious nightmare. Adamant that this will not be a boiler plate survey of contemporary art, Mr. Gioni has enlisted 158 artists, nearly double the number of the two previous Biennales.

“It will zigzag across histories, covering 100 years of dreams and visions,” said Mr. Gioni, noting 38 countries are represented. “A biennale can be pedagogical without being boring.”

“The Encyclopedic Palace” is the theme. It is taken from the title of a symbol of 1950s-era Futurism — an 11-foot-tall architectural model of a 136-story cylindrical skyscraper that was intended to house all the knowledge in the world. Its creator, the self-taught Italian-American artist Marino Auriti, dreamed it would be built on the National Mall in Washington. The model now belongs to the American Folk Art Museum in Manhattan, which is lending it to the Biennale. “It best reflects the giant scope of this international exhibition,” Mr. Gioni said, “the impossibility of capturing the sheer enormity of the art world today.”

Paolo Baratta, the longtime president of the Biennale, said that “after 14 years of having traditional curators I thought it was time to ask a man of the next generation.”

“At a time when contemporary art is flooding the world,” he added, “it seemed to make more sense to present a show that doesn’t just include a list of artists from the present but rather looks at today’s art through the eyes of history.”

Philippe Ségalot, a private art dealer, called Mr. Gioni “a rising star.”

“Even though he’s so young,” Mr. Ségalot said, “he’s already a brand and one of the most sought after curators around. As a result expectations are unusually high. Everyone wants to see what he’ll deliver.”

Mr. Gioni is mixing high and low, with masters mingling with self-taught and outsider artists. Besides Mr. Auriti, there will be work by names likely to be unfamiliar to even art world insiders. There are arcane objects like a deck of tarot cards created by the British occultist and artist Aleister Crowley, abstract paintings by the Swedish artist and mystic Hilma af Klint and shaker drawings on loan from the Hancock Shaker Village in Pittsfield, Mass. For one show within a show, the photographer Cindy Sherman is organizing an exhibition at the Arsenale. Known for photographing herself transformed into hundreds of different personas, including movie stars, Valley girls and menacing clowns, she appealed to Mr. Gioni because, he said, “image plays a big role at this year’s Biennale, and Cindy has spent her life representing herself as others.” Ms. Sherman is creating a kind of bizarre doll’s house with works by little-known artists, prison inmates and popular figures like Robert Gober, Charles Ray, Paul McCarthy and Rosemarie Trockel.

An old ship is coming by boat from Iceland; a 200-year-old church is en route from Vietnam; and dozens of contemporary artists need hand-holding while they grapple with installing videos or preparing for complex performances. “Right now I wish there was another me,” Mr. Gioni said with a sigh.

Besides organizing the event he has also been a fund-raiser. Money is always tight at any Biennale, and his budget of about $2.3 million simply wasn’t enough to cover his expenses. He has raised more than $2 million on top of that, he said, “mostly from private individuals and foundations and philanthropists.”

Although Mr. Gioni is considered something of a star within the close-knit world of contemporary art, he had a larger presence early in his career as the doppelgänger of the mischievous Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan. Mr. Cattelan, who is more than a decade older, routinely sent him in his place to do radio and television interviews and even lectures. The prank worked for a while, Mr. Gioni recalled, until a series of mishaps. He was speaking at a lecture organized by the Public Art Fund when Tom Eccles, its director, showed slides of Mr. Cattelan’s self-portraits. “It was obvious I wasn’t him,” Mr. Gioni recalled.

Then there was the time he posed as Mr. Cattelan on television and the station’s switchboard became jammed with viewers complaining that an impostor was on the air.

“Maurizio was so in demand and I liked it because I thought it was a way to be a committed critic, giving your words to an artist,” Mr. Gioni said.

Less than a month before the Biennale was set to open, Mr. Gioni could be found sitting around the dining room table of his apartment, a spare sun-filled East Village walk-up that he shares with his wife of three years, Cecilia Alemani, director of art at the High Line. With him were three assistants, each glued to laptops. Wearing jeans, a white shirt and red sneakers, Mr. Gioni had a way of juggling complex issues with a cool head, quoting wise words from a philosopher one moment and making a wry joke the next. The group was reviewing each artist in the exhibition, name by name, and checking the status of their work.

What about Roger Hiorns? Mr. Gioni asked.

“He’s concerned his installation will be too near a door,” replied Helga Christoffersen, an assistant.

Mr. Gioni explained, “It’s a pulverized altar from a church from England.”

“That’s going to be a big hit with the Catholic folks,” he said deadpan, receiving a big laugh from the group. (For the first time the Vatican is represented in its own pavilion at the Biennale.)

Camille Henrot? “Missing in action,” Mr. Gioni said slightly nervously.

The group then looked at images online of the “S. S. Hangover,” the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson’s fishing boat that will have six horn players performing on the water in the Arsenale for four hours every day for six months. “We’re working with a conservatory in Venice to find the players,” Mr. Gioni said.

When trying to visualize the installation of the circular entrance in the main pavilion where he plans to display 40 pages of Carl Jung’s “Red Book,” an illuminated manuscript on which he worked for more than 16 years, Mr. Gioni grabbed a ruler, went into the living room and measured out the space on the floor with masking tape, trying to figure out the correct height for the climate-controlled vitrine.

“He’s obsessed,” Mr. Cattelan said. “When he gets in bed at night he’s not just thinking about the big picture but also about the number of electrical outlets or the height of a video. He gets caught up in the details most curators normally don’t take care of. Being super bright helps; so does his superior knowledge of art.”

Mr. Gioni’s methods may be a bit unconventional, but then he didn’t come to the job in the same way as many of his predecessors. He never got a Ph.D. in art history; nor did he spend years climbing his way up the curatorial ladder. But at 39 he has had more hands-on experience overseeing biennales than anyone of his generation: In 2003 he was the curator of the section called “La Zona” at the Venice Biennale. In 2004 he was co-curator of the fifth edition of the traveling biennial Manifesta, a roving European event that was held that year in San Sebastián, Spain; in 2006 he organized the fourth Berlin Biennale in collaboration with Mr. Cattelan and Ali Subotnick, a curator at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. And in 2010 he was the youngest and first European director of the Gwangju Biennale in South Korea, its eighth, which attracted more than 500,000 visitors and got rave reviews.

Besides his role at the New Museum, where he has spearheaded many ground breaking shows including “The Generational: Younger Than Jesus,” its first triennial, he is also artistic director of the Nicola Trussardi Foundation in Milan. Lisa Phillips, director of the New Museum, said Mr. Gioni “sees curating as an art form.”

“He is terribly well read without being academic so that he can cut across centuries and create a new story,” Ms. Phillips said.

Although it all sounds like pretty serious stuff, but Mr. Gioni has a lighter side too. In 2002 Mr. Gioni, along with Mr. Cattelan and Ms. Subotnick, started “The Wrong Gallery,” a minuscule space that was little more than a doorway with a classic Chelsea aluminum-glass front door on West 20th Street. (In 2005 the spoof gallery was evicted, then decamped to the Tate Modern in London in 2005, closing three years later.)

Mr. Gioni’s parents are retired — his mother was a schoolteacher and his father was the manager of an ink factory. When he was 15 he moved on his own to Vancouver Island in Canada, where he attended the United World Colleges; later he received a degree in art history from the University of Bologna. The youngest of three siblings, he describes himself as the black sheep of the family.

To support himself through school he worked as a translator and eventually became editor of the Italian edition of Flash Art, where he met Mr. Cattelan; in 1999 he moved to New York as its American editor. He met Francesco Bonami, now an independent curator, and did some work with him. Mr. Bonami was the artistic director of the Venice Biennale in 2003 and it was he who asked Mr. Gioni to organize “La Zona” there. Ms. Phillips hired him at the New Museum in 2006 after seeing the Berlin Biennale, which she called “a standout.”

Despite the instantaneous nature of culture today and the proliferation of art fairs and giant exhibitions, Mr. Gioni still believes there is a place for biennales. “I grew up with them,” he said. “I saw my first one in Venice in 1993. They are no longer a fixed formula. This is the first decade of a new century and this show will deal with our age of hyperconnectivity, by looking at what goes on in our heads rather than online. It is about the synchronicity of the past, the present and the future.”

The George Lindemann Journal      

Organizers hope to draw 60,000 visitors to the initial Art

By David Walter

Special to the Miami Herald

George Lindemann Wins Inaugural Better Beach Award

March 26, 2013

Congratulations, George Lindemann!

By ELLEN GAMERMAN and MARY M. LANE

A lady in a bonnet is shaking up the art world.

When "After Lunch," Berthe Morisot's portrait of a doe-eyed woman, sold for $10.9 million in February, it set a record as the most expensive work ever sold by a female artist at auction. It also helped power a wave of interest among collectors and dealers looking to identify undervalued female artists.

Yayoi Kusama/David Zwirner, Victoria Miro Gallery, Ota Fine Arts, Yayoi Kusama Studio Inc.

YAYOI KUSAMA: The 84-year-old is the top-selling living female artist of all time, fetching $118 million total at auction.

A woman's signature in the bottom corner of a painting has long spelled a bargain—men in the same artistic school or period can fetch more than 10 times the price of a woman's best sale. While an age-old debate rages over whether talent, sexism or lack of promotion has held many women out of the art world's boys club, everyone agrees that prices for female artists have always lagged behind those of their male counterparts.

Today's flourishing art market—marked by last year's record-setting sale at auction of Edvard Munch's "The Scream" for nearly $120 million—has lifted prices for male and female artists alike. As the supply of great pictures diminishes, more collectors are priced out of blue-chip works and are combing the market for previously overlooked names. A number of highly regarded women artists are seeing their prices rise as a result.

"Remember 'plastics' from 'The Graduate'? It should be 'women,' " says Tony Podesta, the Washington lobbyist who is one of a handful of collectors aggressively buying work by women artists.

  

This winter, a painting by Berthe Morisot sold for $11 million--the most ever paid for a woman's artwork at auction. Along with other big art-market moments for women in recent years, the record has auction houses and dealers re-examining this historically undervalued niche. Ellen Gamerman reports.

The records are toppling. Nine of the top 10 auction sales of work by women occurred within the last five years. The last two years marked record-high prices at auction for artists including Joan Mitchell, Tamara de Lempicka, Louise Bourgeois, Irma Stern, Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine, Helen Frankenthaler, Rosemarie Trockel and Louise Lawler.

Auction experts and collectors are anxious to see how three Morisot paintings will sell next month during Impressionist and modern sales in New York, two at Sotheby's BID +2.20%and one at Christie's.

"Whereas before we looked at female artists as the land of opportunity, with prices like these, collectors say the window is closing for gender-specificity bargain buying," says Gabriela Palmieri, a senior vice president and contemporary-art specialist at Sotheby's.

Cindy Sherman/Metro Pictures

CINDY SHERMAN: In 2011, the artist was the auction world's highest-priced photographer, male or female, with a $3.9 million sale. Here, the artist models in an untitled portrait.

Spanning centuries and a wide variety of styles, work by women is hardly a cohesive market category. Still, some collectors eagerly seek out female artwork.

Prominent women like Wal-Mart WMT +1.47%heiress Alice Walton, pop queen Madonna and songstress Barbra Streisand have long collected work by women. Barbara Lee, a national activist for women in politics, has filled her collection almost entirely with work by women partly to support artists she believes are underrepresented by museums and galleries. She recalled visiting Louise Bourgeois's studio in the early 1990s. "It was filled with sculpture from every period of her life—no one had purchased it," says Ms. Lee.

Others have less-altruistic motives. "A lot of collectors look for undervalued groups of art, and women could easily be considered the last big group," says Michel Witmer, a New York collector and board member of the European Fine Art Fair.

Dealers and auction experts are using several tactics as they scour the market. One is to find female artists whose works, backgrounds or artistic movements mirror those of prohibitively expensive male artists. These artists include: Joan Mitchell, who worked in the shadows of Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock; Natalia Goncharova, one of the turn-of-the-century Russian artists led by Wassily Kandinsky; and Agnes Martin, who forged a path in a male-dominated period led by minimalists like Donald Judd.

Others track female artists whose works have hovered just under $1 million at auction, expecting them to pop into seven figures. Among those attracting attention: conceptual artist Sherrie Levine, known for appropriating photographs by artists like Edward Weston and Walker Evans; and Barbara Kruger, who plasters black-and-white photographs with loud slogans. Both their prices have been dwarfed by the multimillion-dollar sums fetched by fellow contemporary artists like Richard Prince or Christopher Wool.

Another contender: Helen Frankenthaler. There's some debate over the merits of the late abstract expressionist's work compared with those of the men who came before her—like Pollock, whose biggest auction sale topped $40 million—but collectors have shown they're ready to bet on her. Frankenthaler's auction record is just under $1 million, but her early work was recently featured in a show at New York's Gagosian Gallery, where a canvas sold privately for $3 million, according to a gallery official.

The evolution in the market for Joan Mitchell's work illustrates how collectors have recently "discovered" an artist long in the shadows of her male counterparts.

Mitchell, the late Chicago-born painter known for splattering strokes and bold colors, operated just outside circles of older abstract-expressionist peers like de Kooning and Pollock. In 1951, she exhibited alongside them in New York, but by the 1960s she had exiled herself to France.

In 2006, as the art market boomed, a 1970s de Kooning sold for $27 million at Christie's. A Mitchell work fetched $2 million, a big sum for the artist at the time, but one that suddenly had the whiff of a good deal in the Christie's salesroom. New York art adviser Abigail Asher remembers the scene: "A client turned to me and said, 'Wow, doesn't that seem inexpensive?' " she recalled of the collector, who had just bought a Mitchell privately earlier that week.

By 2011, Mitchell's market had climbed as hedge-fund managers and other trophy hunters pegged her work as a good investment. Ms. Asher recalled chasing a Mitchell canvas past its $6 million high estimate against another bidder at Sotheby's. The piece, a large-scale canvas in a riot of colors, sold for $9.3 million—her highest sum ever at auction. Ms. Asher, who lost out, slumped in her seat after the hammer fell: "It was the feeling of: 'The cat's out of the bag.' "

Last year, Mitchell's canvases were the two most expensive works by any woman artist sold at auction, according to auction database Artnet. Her work now hangs in museums around the world, including Ms. Walton's Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark. A 1958 Mitchell painting will be on the block next month at Christie's.

A number of theories exist for why women have languished in the art world's bargain basement. Experts point to the smaller supply of work by women from certain periods—after all they're called Old Masters, not Old Mistresses—which limits the frequency of sales and holds down prices. Women also are underrepresented by major museums, where purchases and exhibits boost prices. Famous artists like Georgia O'Keeffe and Frida Kahlo do appear in museum shows, but the permanent modern art collections of most major institutions are comprised largely of work by male artists.

Others say women haven't marketed themselves as well as men. "Male artists are much more pushy and power-related," says Eva Presenhuber, a Zurich-based dealer who noted she recently threw a toned-down party for the artist Karen Kilimnik because the artist doesn't like to promote herself with splashy events.

Indeed, the upper echelons of the art world still belong to men: All of the top 100 works ever sold at auction were created by male artists, and fewer than 3% of auctioned works over $1 million last year were by female artists, according to Artnet. No living woman has cleared $10 million at auction to date, compared with scores of men.

One reason Morisot took off, experts say, is because she and artists like Mary Cassatt have styles similar to those of famous male painters of the period, in this case Manet and Renoir. They also have recognizable brand looks that are easy to live with. "It's no coincidence that the art you see reproduced in doctors' waiting rooms is [their] type of Impressionist work," says Philip Hook, a senior specialist in Sotheby's Impressionist and modern art department.

Morisot and Cassatt were prolific artists, but most of their work is ferreted away in museums, making those paintings that do crop up on the market highly sought-after.

In a packed Christie's salesroom in London last February, the Morisot canvas, "After Lunch," sold for roughly three times its high estimate after a protracted back-and-forth between two telephone bidders from Russia and the U.S. The piece is believed to have gone to an American.

The market prizes other female artists because of artistic styles and cultural sensibilities that translate well over time. Tamara de Lempicka, a Polish-born artist with a booze-and-party-fueled lifestyle, moved to Hollywood in 1939 and became a wild fixture on the movie-industry scene. Her Art Deco paintings, brimming with men in tuxes, busty blondes and lesbian trysts, draw famous admirers today—and have reached record auction prices in recent years. Sotheby's will feature a moody Manhattan skyline by the artist during next month's sales.

Madonna, who owns at least two de Lempickas, has collected her for decades and considers her work a source of inspiration, a spokeswoman confirmed. When the singer's "Vogue" video came out in 1990, featuring Madonna's de Lempickas in the background, it sent a frisson through auction houses and art galleries. For years later, whenever anyone had a de Lempicka to sell, the reaction was always the same: "Everyone said, 'Oh, offer it to Madonna,' " says David Norman, Sotheby's co-chairman of Impressionist and modern art world-wide.

Other avid collectors include Barbra Streisand, who was first drawn to the artist's paintings in the 1970s when she was building a house in Art Deco style. "I found Lempicka's work to be so original," Ms. Streisand said in an email, praising the artist's style and technique. "The fact that she was a woman artist made her even more intriguing."

The gender gap narrows within smaller niche markets like photography. Cindy Sherman, a 59-year-old chameleon who spends years planning portraits of herself in various personae, briefly held the title as the auction world's highest-priced photographer, female or male, in 2011. An image of herself splayed across a brown linoleum floor sold for $3.9 million. Ms. Sherman's works, which sold for $1,000 at her long-standing gallery Metro Pictures in 1981, now typically fetch $450,000 at the gallery and are collected by art-market heavyweights such as Los Angeles billionaire Eli Broad and Christie's owner François Pinault.

An older generation of women artists sees a much different art market today than the one they grew up with. Pat Steir, a 74-year-old New York artist who pours paint down her monumental canvases, recalled one summer in 1964 visiting a friend whose father was an abstract painter. One of his guests was Mark Rothko. Ms. Steir approached him, explaining that she had just gotten out of art school. "I said, 'Mr. Rothko, you're such a great artist, I admire your work so much,' and he said, 'You're a pretty girl. Why aren't you married?' "

Ms. Steir's art now hangs in most major museums across the U.S., including the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Partner Without the Prize

By ROBIN POGREBIN

Twenty-two years after being passed by, the architect Denise Scott Brown, 81, said at an awards ceremony for women in architecture last month that it was time she share in the 1991 Pritzker Prize that was given to her design partner and husband, Robert Venturi, with whom she had worked side by side.

 

 

 

Arielle Assouline-Lichten, foreground, and Caroline James started the Pritzker petition.

By Erika Bolstad

McClatchy Newspapers

Sen. Denise Grimsley was credited with bringing the opposing sides together to resolve their differences over her water supply planning bill. File photo by Ana Goni-Lessan.

A bill that was shaping up to be the most controversial fight over water in the legislative session now has support from environmental groups that were opposing it.

SB 948 by Sen. Denise Grimsley, R-Sebring, would place the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services on par with utilities in water supply planning. The bill is a priority of Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam.

Agriculture department officials said the bill would help ensure water is available to support agricultural jobs and to ensure that estimates of water use are standard across water district lines. Environmental groups, though, said they were concerned the bill would place a priority on agricultural water use at the expense of springs, wetlands and streams during droughts.

But a series of amendments offered by Grimsley on Monday in the Senate Committee on Agriculture won support from opponents. The bill passed with support from The Nature Conservancy, Sierra Club Florida, Audubon Florida and the Florida Wildlife Federation.

"We had some concerns about the bill," said Janet Bowman, director of legislative policy and strategies for The Nature Conservancy's state chapter. "Some comfort language that tightened up the bill was worked out."

Eric Draper, executive director of Audubon Florida, said environmental groups "remarkably" now are supporting an expansion of the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services into water planning, an issue where he sees a historic alliance among the agricultural water users and environmentalists.

"The sponsor, Denise Grimsley, took a controversial subject and brought people together to resolve the other issues and demonstrated what is often missing in these environmental debates: a willingness to really sit down and give people a chance to talk through things," Draper said.

A series of amendments offered by Grimsley ensured that water conservation be factored into projections of agricultural water use and  water projects on private lands. The amendments also ensured that water supply projects on private lands meet the state "public interest" test for water use and don't harm existing users.

The bill passed with support from the Florida Farm Bureau Federation, Associated Industries of Florida and the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services.

Adam Basford, director of state legislative affairs for the Florida Farm Bureau Federation, said the bill wasn't a power grab by agriculture and the amendments made that "explicitly clear."

"Agricultural water use is important to our state," he said. "Having the Department of Agriculture (and Consumer Services) being able to provide accurate data, we think it's a no-brainer."

Elements of the bill are in SB 1684, which is being heard Tuesday by the Senate Committee on Environmental Preservation and Conservation. That's the Senate companion of a wide-ranging environmental permitting bill, HB 999, that has faced environmental opposition in the House.

Portions of SB 948 also are contained in HB 1063, which passed its first committee stop in the House last week and has two more to go. 

By Carl Hiaasen

chiaasen@MiamiHerald.com

A bridge to help heal the EvergladesBy CURTIS MORGAN

Cmorgan@MiamiHerald.com