Henri Janneau, left, of Naples and Denis Floch, of Port St.

 

By CURTIS MORGAN

cmorgan@MiamiHerald.com

Italy’s Artistic Upstart, the Maxxi Museum, Strives to Make a Splash

Nadia Shira Cohen for The New York Times

The national museum for art of the 21st century in Rome, called the Maxxi, hopes to become a global player in contemporary art.

By ELISABETTA POVOLEDO

Published: July 22, 2013

ROME — It’s hard enough to be the new attraction in town when you’re up against some of the world’s most famous ancient Roman, Renaissance and Baroque monuments. But Italy’s national museum for art of the 21st century, known as the Maxxi, faces even bigger challenges: attracting a Roman audience, so far largely indifferent, and establishing a reputation on the international scene while the government is sharply cutting financing for the arts.

So the leaders of the three-year-old museum here have established a new strategy: playing to the crowd as it strives to broaden its mission and become Italy’s premier institution of contemporary culture.

“We need the public to animate this space,” said Giovanna Melandri, president of the foundation that runs the Maxxi, whose name is a play on the Roman numerals for 21.

Thus, on a recent muggy summer Monday, a day when the institution is closed to the public, the place hummed with activity — frenetic last minute preparations for an opening; a seminar attended by dozens of young architecture students; and children on skateboards racing around the museum’s concrete courtyard.

Events in the near term included lectures on yacht design, Italian fashion, the art market and the links between food safety and architecture; jazz and Indian music concerts; a film series on contemporary architects; and a yoga class. That’s on top of what Ms. Melandri calls the museum’s “core business”: six current exhibitions, including a retrospective for Francesco Vezzoli, one of Italy’s best-known contemporary artists.

In the staid world of Italy’s state museums, such hyperactivity is nothing short of revolutionary. And it demarcates the role that administrators believe the museum must play.“Our task is to become the hub for a network of like-minded Italian institutions as well as the national center for contemporary art and architecture,” Ms. Melandri said.

Officials hope the museum’s goals will come into sharper focus when its first director is named, a move expected in September. Up to now programming has been defined by the directors of various sections — art, architecture and so on.

Inaugurated in May 2010, the Maxxi has had considerable growing pains, principally because of a shortage of financing. In a country where the state foots the largest share of cultural budgets, austerity measures have left most of them gasping and on the lookout for new forms of support.

But arts philanthropy has struggled to find a workable legislative formula here in the face of the culture ministry’s jealous hold on Italy’s cultural patrimony and the prospect that tax revenue could decline if the government instituted wide-ranging tax credits for donations.

“Our strategic objective is to build a cultural institution in Italy equally sustained by public and private funds,” Ms. Melandri said.

Maintenance costs alone for the museum, a mammoth structure of overlapping flowing spaces designed by Zaha Hadid, have ranged from $6.6 million to $7.9 million a year.

In its quest for revenue, the museum has brokered deals with tour operators and events organizers and rented out spaces for gala dinners and corporate meetings. A museum membership program has been retooled, and corporate sponsors, like the apparel maker Ermenegildo Zegna and the Italian energy company ENI, have been enlisted for joint projects related to their brands.

Last year, for example, Zegna commissioned a show for the artists Lucy and Jorge Orta, who used Zegna fabrics for their installation, and ENI provided archival material like sketches of old service stations for a current show about “oil and postoil” architecture. The museum has also added bike racks, a rarity here.

In May the Maxxi organized a fund-raising dinner related to the Vezzoli show that raised $525,000. Donors included Italian fashion houses and national and international dealers and collectors.

Giancarlo Politi, the editor of Flash Art magazine, said it took Mr. Vezzoli’s star power to attract donors, a move he described as an “intelligent” model for other struggling institutions to follow. “Maxxi doesn’t have international clout yet — it’s not MoMA or the Tate,” he said, referring to the top modern art museums in New York and London.

Michele Trimarchi, a professor of cultural economics at the University of Bologna, suggests that the Maxxi has yet to identify a strategy that will allow it to establish a global presence. “Creating things, that’s how you become international,” he said. Otherwise, “you’re relegated to fund-raising efforts that barely cover the maintenance costs.”

The Maxxi has been trying to bolster its profile by collaborating with institutions abroad on shows that feature both Italian and foreign artists. “Galleria Vezzoli,” for example, is the first segment of a three-part international exhibition titled “Trinity.” It also includes “The Church of Vezzoli,” a show at MoMA PS1 in Long Island City, Queens, in which the artist will reconstruct a deconsecrated church whose parts are transported from Italy. The third segment, “Cinema Vezzoli,” is expected to open in early 2014 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

Still, the Maxxi’s precarious financial situation makes long-term planning difficult, a problem common to many cultural institutions in Italy.

“Without continuity we lack credibility for supporters and even private donors who might want to bequeath art to a museum and have assurances that their donations will be safeguarded,” said Gianfranco Maraniello, director of the Museum of Modern Art in Bologna. “You can’t build up a public that way.”

In the short term, however, the Maxxi’s strategy has reaped dividends. Visitors in the first six months of this year topped 130,000, compared with 101,200 in the first half of 2012.

“I will be happy when visitors come to Rome to see the Colosseum, the Vatican City and the Maxxi because it is such a special museum,” Ms. Melandri said.

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

Play video

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 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 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.

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.