By TOM MASHBERG

Published: July 1, 2013    

The decision by the Metropolitan Museum of Art to return two ancient Khmer statues to Cambodia last month, less than a year after their ownership was challenged, shows how quickly museums can act on cultural property claims in an era when source countries are far more demanding. But given the implications of surrendering an item, speedy decisions remain rare.

More typical are disputes like one between Turkey and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles over a fifth-century bronze bed known as a Lydian kline, which has been an item of contention since 1995.

Last year two scholars, whose research was supported by the Getty, found that the bed was likely looted from Turkey in the 1970s. The Getty has called the findings intriguing but “circumstantial” and said it hopes to continue talks with Turkey while awaiting “more secure and compelling evidence.”

Is the disparity in time — some cases resolved quickly, others unsettled for decades — simply a matter of which countries present the more convincing evidence?

Hardly, according to experts who say the calculus of repatriation involves less cut-and-dried measures like the outlook of the museum and its board, the institution’s public relations needs at the moment, the identity of the donor of the disputed item and even the identity of the country that is asking for its return.

In dealing with the Met, Cambodia was diplomatic, made a targeted claim and reacted to the return with effusive praise. Both sides also saw an opportunity to strengthen their ties, and Cambodia has agreed to a major Khmer exhibition at the Met next year.

The Turks have been more ambitious and strategic in their demands, refusing to participate in loan exhibitions with several museums under a tactic that some officials have compared to blackmail. In the case of the Getty, officials there say the Turks first questioned the museum’s ownership of several dozen items without providing any backup, then cut that number in half.

“Our experience with these requests does not give us confidence in their merit,” said James Cuno, the Getty’s president.

And it is not clear, Getty officials say privately, that simply returning the bed will do much to sate Turkish interest in a host of other items.

For their part, Turkish officials have said characterizations of their repatriation requests as aggressive and unsupported by the evidence are self-serving.

Even as Western museums have grown more receptive to cultural property challenges in the last decade, they remain bound by fiduciary obligations, ethical principles and burdens of proof that can vary by institution.

“Museums must untangle a lot of knots before making such an irrevocable decision,” said Stephen K. Urice, a professor and expert on cultural heritage law at the University of Miami School of Law in Florida.

The stickiest question is what constitutes proof positive that a holding violates the intent or spirit of laws and rules adopted since 1970 to help stem the trade and acquisition of illicit artifacts. For example, in 2008, the Association of Art Museum Directors, the industry’s major trade group, wrote sweeping guidelines advising museums that they “normally should not” acquire a work unless solid proof exists that the object was, before 1970, outside the country where it was discovered in modern times, or was legally exported from that country after 1970.

But there is a wide latitude in what constitutes solid proof or how to interpret phrases like “normally should not,” according to experts like Ricardo A. St. Hilaire, a cultural heritage lawyer. He said the lack of “a clear evidentiary or procedural standard that universally guides provenance investigations at museums” contributes to uneven decision making among institutions.

In one case last September, the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology agreed to a Turkish request to return 24 gold pieces. They were sent back on indefinite loan. Among the evidence the museum relied on was a speck of soil lodged in a pendant that matched a site known to have been illegally excavated.

The museum had acquired the items in 1966, which is in accord with the museum association guidelines, but the return was also based on other factors, including assurances that the university can continue excavations in Turkey and hold an exhibition of new artifacts dug up from royal tombs.

A similar interest in building a relationship to support future loans played a role in the decision by the Getty last January to repatriate a stone “Head of Hades“ to the Archeological Museum in Aidone, Italy. Getty officials were swayed by the discovery of fragments of curls from the head near Morgantina, Sicily, which the museum said was the site of illegal excavations in the late 1970s. Many antiquities in museums do not have unbroken chains of custody stretching back to the moment they left a source country. In some cases, the absence of records may well be evidence that they were exported illegally. In other cases, it may only show that until recently many ancient items changed hands without copious documentation because challenges to ownership were infrequent.

In such instances, the decision to return an item — or not — may require research to find, for example, that it had passed through the hands of a dealer with some history in the illicit trade. Still, the evidence will often be far from definitive, meaning many decisions become judgment calls.

“The act of returning is based on an ethical judgment informed by evidence but not necessarily by a ‘smoking gun,’ “ said Maxwell L. Anderson, director of the Dallas Museum of Art and chairman of Association of Art Museum Directors’ task force on archaeological materials and ancient art.

In 2011, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, agreed to return the top half of an 1,800-year-old statue, “Weary Herakles,” to Turkey, but the decision only came after years of dispute. Turkey argued the statue had been looted from an excavation site in the 1980s. A dealer involved in selling the object to the museum had asserted the statue was in Germany in the 1950s. The debate continued even after the dealer’s story was debunked, and after a plaster cast of the base of the statue, still in Turkey, was matched in 1992 to a cast of the top half.

The decision to return was delayed by other issues: The museum shared ownership of the piece with collectors until 2003, and restitution was opposed by the longtime curator of its classical antiquities department, who died in 2008. Since then the museum has become among the most active in returning acquisitions with dubious paper trails.

“As we strive for greater diligence today, these past acquisition mistakes provide our greatest learning tool,” Victoria Reed, the museum’s curator for provenance, said in an e-mail.

The Justice Department, acting on behalf of Egypt, said that it has sufficient evidence to compel the St. Louis Museum of Art to return an ancient Egyptian burial artifact, the Mask of Ka-Nefer-Nefer. The museum bought the mummy mask for $500,000 in 1998. The government contends in court, where it has sued the museum to secure the object’s return, that it was stolen from a storage case in the 1950s, and that the dealer who sold it to the museum has a history of trafficking in illegally obtained objects.

The museum’s director, Brent R. Benjamin, said that the institution “takes seriously any suggestion that it illegally or improperly possesses any object,” but that it is the rightful owner.

Museum officials said that as they ponder the validity of claims, they must also weigh their financial duty to trustees, donors and the general public, which supports such collections through tax benefits and sometimes direct government support. One worry of theirs is that a return based on noble sentiments, but scattershot evidence, only opens a museum to a time-consuming flurry of similarly meritless demands.

Still, if keeping an object threatens to “damage a museum’s reputation,” a director might well decide the “best course of due diligence would be to return it,” said Arthur Houghton, a former curator at the Getty who has represented museums as a member of the State Department’s cultural property advisory committee.

“Evidence is only one component of the analysis,” Mr. Urice said. “Of equal, if not greater, significance are the ethical issues presented. A museum has a duty to consider more than just evidence.”

Museums Faulted on Restitution of Nazi-Looted Art

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By Erik Olsen

Heirs Fight Museums to Reclaim Art: Marty Grosz, the son of German artist George Grosz, seeks the return of some of his father’s works that were acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

By PATRICIA COHEN

Published: June 30, 2013

Not until 1998, when 44 nations including the United States signed the groundbreaking Washington Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art, did governments and museums formally embrace the idea that they have a special responsibility to repair the damage caused by the wholesale looting of art owned by Jews during the Third Reich’s reign.

Now, 15 years later, historians, legal experts and Jewish groups say that some American museums have backtracked on their pledge to settle Holocaust recovery claims on the merits, and have resorted instead to legal and other tactics to block survivors or their heirs from pursuing claims.

In recent years judges have dismissed several cases after museums argued that recovery claims had been filed too late. California legislators were so disturbed by one blocked claim there that they passed a law in 2010 to help Nazi-era (and other) claimants avoid tripping over legal deadlines.

In some of the cases, museums like the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum have tried to deter claimants from filing suit by beating them to the courthouse and asking judges to declare the museums the rightful owners.

Critics also charge that museums have not followed their own guidelines, which urge them to be forthcoming with provenance information that could help people trace the history of a contested work of art.

“The response of museums has really been lamentable,” said Jonathan Petropoulos, the former research director for art and cultural property for the Presidential Advisory Commission on Holocaust Assets, who has been hired by claimants to do research. “It is now so daunting for an heir to go forward.”

The question of whether museums are deciding claims on the merits has recently been pushed to center stage again by a series of law journal articles, legal forums and rulings in the United States and abroad. At stake in this emotional debate are the fate of valuable works of art, the reputations of elite cultural institutions and the legal issue of whether the American judicial system is capable of addressing restitution claims.

Both the Association of Art Museum Directors and the American Alliance of Museums insist that their members consistently follow ethical guidelines requiring them to respond “quickly and scrupulously” to restitution requests.

Christine Anagnos, executive director of the museum directors association, said its members were committed “to resolving questions about the status of objects in their custody.” Most cases, she said, are resolved through negotiation before claimants feel compelled to file suit.

Museum officials also say they turn to procedural tactics like invoking time limits only after they have carefully researched a claim and concluded that it is unfounded.

But Stuart E. Eizenstat, a former special State Department envoy who negotiated the Washington Principles, said museums have adopted a harder line in the last seven years or so, partly in response to some court victories by art institutions and waning pressure from the government.

“The essence of the Washington Principles comes down to one sentence,” he said. “Let decisions be made on the merits of the case rather than technical defenses.”

No one disputes that, even with databases that list looted art, it takes considerable effort and money to track artworks from Nazi-occupied countries, which typically have gaping holes in their provenance.

There is also agreement that not all claims are valid, which requires that museum directors respond cautiously to safeguard their collections.

Simon J. Frankel, a lawyer who has represented the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, pointed out in a recent law journal article that since 2010, when the museum went to court to block a Nazi-era restitution claim, it has settled with the heirs of two Jewish art dealers and returned a 14th-century embroidered panel to a museum in Trento, Italy.

Neither side can agree on how many people have approached American museums with restitution claims. The museum directors association, which emphasizes that few cases end up before a judge, lists two dozen cases where institutions, including the Detroit Institute of Arts, returned art to individual heirs without going to court.

But critics, including the Holocaust Art Restitution Project and the Commission for Art Recovery, say problems arise in the less straightforward cases, where documentation is missing or it is unclear whether Jewish owners freely parted with a work of art or were coerced by the Nazi authorities into selling it for a pittance.

Mr. Eizenstat is among those who have long argued that the courts are inherently ill suited to resolving restitution cases and that to avoid litigation the United States should create an independent mediation board, as several European countries have. This spring, a New York chapter of the Federal Bar Association put forward a resolution calling for the creation of an American commission along those lines.

Douglas Davidson, the State Department’s current special envoy for Holocaust issues, said at a conference at The Hague in November that “alternatives to litigation are preferable,” but he conceded that a similar American commission is unlikely to emerge. One major obstacle is that whereas in Europe, museums are typically government-owned, most American museums are privately run, making it difficult to mandate compliance.

Such panels are not necessarily insulated from criticism in any case. The Dutch Restitutions Committee, for example, drew criticism last month after it ruled that the interest of two museums in retaining paintings outweighed the heirs’ interest in restitution.

Raymond Dowd, a partner at the Manhattan firm Dunnington, Bartholow & Miller who often handles restitution claims, complains that museums often review the evidence and decide on their own if a case is valid. Museums often fail to make their original research on a work’s provenance or sale available or to submit the scholarship to peer review, he added.

He cited the case of a family that is seeking to recover art once owned by Fritz Grunbaum, a popular Viennese cabaret performer who died at a concentration camp. He said that 10 American museums including the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College have works by Egon Schiele that were listed on a 1938 German government inventory created after Mr. Grunbaum was shipped to Dachau. Some of the museums failed to provide full information about the provenance of the works, he said, and the Allen did not even list Mr. Grunbaum in the Schiele’s provenance.

Andria Derstine, the Allen’s director, said in an e-mail that the museum had cooperated with Mr. Dowd’s requests for information and that it has concluded after its own investigation that the claim had no merit. It did revise its online listing last month to reflect that Mr. Grunbaum once owned the Schiele.

For years, the family of the artist George Grosz has fought to recover three works from the Museum of Modern Art, arguing they were the subject of a forced sale after Grosz fled the Nazis in 1933.

A federal judge dismissed the Groszes’ lawsuit in 2011, citing the statute of limitations. Before the case landed in court, the museum hired researchers at Yale University and the former United States attorney general Nicholas deB. Katzenbach (who died in 2012) to review their evidence. Katzenbach concluded that Grosz’s Jewish dealer, Alfred Flechtheim, had fair title to the works and freely sold them. The Groszes’ own experts, though, challenged his report and declared that Flechtheim was forced to flee Germany after his Düsseldorf gallery was “Aryanized” in 1933 and given to a Nazi Party member.

That interpretation was affirmed in April by a ruling from the German government’s advisory commission on plundered art in an unrelated case involving the Museum Ludwig in Cologne. While there is “an absence of concrete evidence,” the commission concluded that on balance, “it is to be assumed that Alfred Flechtheim was forced to sell the disputed painting because he was persecuted.”

Margaret Doyle, a spokeswoman for MoMA, said the museum has no interest in retaining works to which it does not have clear title. “After years of extensive research,” she said, “including numerous conversations with Grosz’s estate, it was evident that we did in fact have good title to the works by Grosz in our collection and therefore an obligation to the public to defend our ownership appropriately.”

But George Grosz’s son Martin, 83, points to a letter his father wrote in 1953 after seeing one of the works, “The Poet Max Herrmann-Neisse,” hanging at MoMA: “Modern Museum exhibits a painting stolen from me (I am powerless against that) they bought it from someone, who stole it.”

 “I can remember talking with my father about it,” he said of the painting.

“He was very reluctant to in any way assail or complain about the treatment he got from anybody in the United States,” Mr. Grosz said, explaining why his father never fought to recover the work.

When refugees complained, Mr. Grosz said, his father would respond: “You should kiss the ground you’re walking on because they let you in.”

Contemporary Art, Media and Notoriety

By CURTIS MORGAN

Cmorgan@MiamiHerald.com

The George Lindemann Journal

By CURTIS MORGAN

Cmorgan@MiamiHerald.com

BY RAY JUDAH

ray.judah@icloud.com

By Patricia Mazzei

pmazzei@MiamiHerald.com

Ellsworth Kelly has been on earth for 90 years — his birthday was Friday — and he has been making abstract art for over 60 of them. Now the New York art world is treating him, and us, to a big party. His boldly colored, emblematic paintings and reliefs can be seen in five exhibitions around town. In unusually gorgeous terms, they attest to a lifelong fusion of austerity and high spirits, and a narrow yet deep exploration of pure colors and simple shapes.

The shows range from a mini-survey at the Mnuchin Gallery on East 78th Street, to an array of brand-new work at the Matthew Marks Gallery‘s three locations in Chelsea, to a radiant exhibition of Mr. Kelly’s 1971 “Chatham Series” at the Museum of Modern Art. The 14 paintings in the series have not been exhibited together since they made their public debut in 1972 at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo.

All told, these exhibitions present 82 works produced from 1951 to 2013. They reveal an artist who is making some of his strongest work right now, at times with a decidedly erotic undercurrent.

Mr. Kelly has spent much of his career romancing the vaunted monochrome in Modernist painting. He has approached this absolute without reverence or irony; it is simply the main building block of his art. For him, the monochrome has been something to particularize through shape and color, render in metal, or combine with another monochrome of a contrasting color, whether they are side by side or overlapping. The results are not so much paintings as crisp, flat objects devoid of spatial illusion. Yet the best of them are so perfectly made that we tend to forget about their physical nature, concentrating solely on their visual effects instead. Their perfection creates an aura of eternal newness that can sometimes seem antiseptic but just as often is central to their power.

Whether by plan or not, these exhibitions outline the three basic ways that Mr. Kelly has used monochrome panels. Consistent with its title, “Singular Shapes 1966-2009,” at Mnuchin, surveys his single-shape works. It starts with his first, “Yellow Piece of 1966,” a fat yellow rectangle with two rounded corners at the lower left and upper right. It could be the daffodil-colored emblem of a fifth suit of playing cards — something between a diamond and a heart.

The show’s most recent work is the declarative “Blue Curves” (2009). It instantly reads as a heart shape turned on its side with its point lopped off — and as breasts or buttocks. (The art historian Pepe Karmel notes in the show’s catalog that the artist himself has said as much.) It also resembles, fittingly, a capital B.

For the “Chatham Series” at MoMA, Mr. Kelly made shaped paintings using a brilliantly obvious method: abutting two ordinary rectangles to form an inverted L. The looming vertical paintings evoke giant rulers, or details of architecture, especially posts and lintels.

Each rectangle is decisively colored — red, blue, yellow, green, black or white — and their combinations pack a punch. There is a white rectangle above a black, and black above white, as well as black above red, blue, yellow or green. Red above yellow or blue. No two works have exactly the same measurements.

Seen in a quadrant of spaces formed by two intersecting walls, the “Chatham” paintings encourage a dizzying process of compare-and-contrast that is less about shape than about the perception of color in terms of weight, balance and proportion. From the end of one wall, you can see one painting that is red-blue and, in the opposite direction, one that is blue-red. From another juncture, two red-blue works with completely different proportions are visible, along with a black-white and a yellow-red with similarly squat proportions but no common color. After a while the show starts to feel subtly animated, as if the blocks of color were expanding or contracting, elongating and shrinking as you move around them.

The Chatham series is shown with a group of 40 small drawings and collages from 1951 whose geometric configurations presage, on a small scale, motifs later developed by artists as disparate as Sol LeWitt and Brice Marden. They also remind us that Mr. Kelly’s career lacks the traditional linear development of most artists of his stature. Most of his compositions first appeared in his works on paper in the 1950s and early 1960s, which he has repeatedly mined. Now he seems interested in circling back to translate them, almost verbatim, into larger sizes or heftier materials, or both.

That is the case with “Blue Curves” at Mnuchin, which is based on a 1956 collage reproduced in the show’s catalog. And such translations figure prominently in the shows at Matthew Marks. Here the third use of the monochrome — one laid on top another — often dominates, and the libidinous undercurrents continue.

At Mr. Marks’s newly renovated 24th Street gallery, four works from 2011 employ some abrupt curved shapes from the early collages and a green and orange painting from 1964. Now the shapes are separate canvases painted red, green, yellow, or blue, laid over white rectangles. More physically defined, these bulges suggest big, cartoonish tongues.

“Black Form II” (2012) in the big Marks space on West 22nd Street reiterates a double-lobed black motif from a 1962 collage. But now it is a funny, suggestive, magnificent wall relief, nearly 7 by 6 feet and over 4 inches thick, in aluminum painted a high-gloss black. The satisfying fat capital C that results looks as if one of Myron Stout’s meticulous black-on-white abstractions had been repurposed by Jeff Koons, only it’s better.

Another standout in the big West 22nd Street showcase is “Yellow Relief Over Blue,” from 2012. Basically it is a blue vertical rectangle whose bottom half is covered by a yellow almost-rectangle with a gently curved top edge. It’s like sunrise from the sun’s point of view. The blue and yellow are so intense and equal in strength that the physicality of the piece all but disappears. And the experience of pure, dense color is no less effective in the details. From the side, the continuation of the blue panel behind the yellow is breathtaking. It encapsulates, in miniature, the passion for color that fuels Mr. Kelly’s singular art.

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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.

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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