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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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

A month-long hunt for invasive Burmese pythons in Florida’s Everglades didn’t result in much of a haul, but scientists and outdoors experts say the data collected will be invaluable.

By CHARLES RABIN

crabin@miamiherald.com

“The data we’ll get will be unbelievable,” he said.

Stalking a Python: Florida’s wildlife agency is organizing its first python hunting competition. A group known as the Florida Python Hunters is out to win the challenge. Will it even catch one?

By LIZETTE ALVAREZ

Published: January 23, 2013

HOMESTEAD, Fla. — For as long as anyone can remember, hunters here have wielded machetes, knives, rifles and crossbows as they swept past thickets of mosquitoes and saw grass in pursuit of alligators, feral hogs, bobcats and vermin of all sizes.

But on the outskirts of the Everglades this month, a different kind of hunt is taking place, and among those on the trail are three men with little macho swagger and zero hunting finery. They drive up gravel roads alongside the brush in a red “man-van” (a well-lived-in Toyota Sienna) and a blue Prius (“You can’t beat the mileage,” says one).

And when they get lucky, they clamber down from their vehicles and snare enormous Burmese pythons with their bare hands, shrugging off the inevitable bites.

Two of the hunters are brothers, reared in the swamps of Central Florida with eight other siblings. The third is a Utah native, now a Miami high school teacher, who met one of the brothers in the apartment building they share. They quickly discovered they have much in common — they are Mormons, for one thing, and not afraid of snakes, for another.

Theirs was truly a chance encounter, considering that pythons far outnumber snake-savvy Mormons in South Florida.

“We don’t hunt on the Sabbath,” declared Blake Russ, 24, a Florida International University student, as he peered out the open door of the man-van.

But on this day, the brothers are in it to win it. They have joined Florida’s “Python Challenge 2013,” the open-invitation contest organized by the state’s Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. So frustrated are wildlife officials with the prolific Burmese pythons that on Jan. 12 they began a one-month python hunt in South Florida, opening it up to just about anybody over the age of 18. The hunt is taking place mostly on state land, not national park land, which is off limits.

The only requirement is that contestants must take a training course — online. A prize of $1,000 will be awarded to the hunter who catches the longest snake and $1,500 to the one who “harvests” the most snakes. About 1,300 people have signed up.

The pythons, considered invasive and uninvited, arrived here as pets. After some escaped or were let loose by fed-up owners, they slithered toward marshy land, mostly in and around the Everglades. There, they snack regularly on native wading birds, gators, deer, bobcat, opossums, raccoons and rabbits. They breed easily, laying 8 to 100 eggs, depending on the size of the female.

Killing the snake is a requirement of the “Python Challenge,” and for this the event’s Web site suggests a firearm or a captive bolt (the slaughterhouse stunning tool used to chilling effect in the film “No Country for Old Men”). Chopping off the head is permissible, the Web site explains, but difficult, because the brain lives on (for a while). For decapitation, machetes are the state-recommended weapon.

“Regardless of the technique you choose, make sure your technique results in immediate loss of consciousness and destruction of the Burmese python’s brain,” the Web site states.

The task is daunting. Estimates of how many Burmese pythons live in the wild here range from 5,000 to more than 100,000.

“Do we really know?” asked Skip Snow, a wildlife biologist at Everglades National Park. “No. No, we don’t.”

The snakes are everywhere and nowhere. Catching them is easy. The pythons — which can stretch to 20 feet and more — are lazy. They dislike moving. They rarely travel. Instead, they wait out their prey and ambush it, sinking their teeth in to hold it in place while they wrap it up tight, suffocate it and swallow it whole, little by little.

It is finding them that will drain hunters of all patience and fortitude, until the clocks ticks down and it’s time for a beer, or, for the three hunters in their man-van, a roadside fruit shake. Because the snakes blend in with the yellowish, brownish brush here, they are almost as hard to find as a Glenn Beck fan on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

“It’s like looking for a piece of camouflage,” said Devin Belliston, 26, the science teacher in the group.

Seeing just one “Burm” is enough to rev up a hunter for days.

“It’s like seeing Bigfoot,” said Bryan Russ, 35, Mr. Russ’s older brother, who once unleashed 30 garter snakes in an Idaho college dormitory. (He got kicked out of school, which he called a “great life lesson.”)

Mr. Belliston and Blake Russ make up part of a fivesome who call themselves the Florida Python Hunters. Founded by Ruben Ramirez, who has been catching snakes for 27 years, the five men are licensed to hunt pythons. They have an impressive success rate at spotting snakes, catching them with their hands and turning them over to state wildlife officials. Last year, Mr. Ramirez and George Brana nabbed an imposing 16-foot, 8-inch python. Mr. Russ and Mr. Belliston, who started python hunting in May, have caught 15 pythons since then.

“You grab them, and let them strike at you and strike at you until they wear themselves out,” said Blake Russ, who leaned out of the man-van as it rolled slowly near an abandoned mango orchard and a canal. His eyes scanned the edge of the grass. Nothing.

Once Blake rode a scooter to a hunt, his flip-flops planted firmly on the floorboard. He spotted a python, hopped off, wrangled it into a pillow case, hopped back on and sped away.

Studying the python lifestyle is critical to success. Hunters must know that the best time to find one is the morning after the temperature drops into the 60s or below. The snakes surface to warm up in the sun. They stay close to water, so canals and levies are a good bet. They like rock piles.

Most savvy hunters stick to gravel paths or roads that abut grassy areas with water nearby.

At night, especially in summer, the hunters “road cruise.” Pythons come out then, sometimes onto the asphalt, because it is cooler at night. Sound does not bother them.

When caught, “they squirt out a mixture of feces and urine,” Bryan Russ said. “It smells like musk, like wet dog. Ruben calls it, ‘The smell of success.’ ”

How many pythons have been caught in the competition’s first week? As of Tuesday, all of 27. Mr. Ramirez and his team have caught eight.

The men scoff at those machete-toting novices from out of state who have shown up in their python-hunting finery.

“This guy had brand new clothes, beautiful new boots,” Mr. Ramirez said, of a fellow he had spotted nearby. “He was standing there on the water’s edge. I was just waiting for a gator to take him and do a gator death roll.”

Their prediction: After a couple of days of tedium, “these guys, they’ll all be like, ‘I’m going to South Beach,’ ” Bryan Russ said.

But the Florida Python Hunters persist.

Spying a black clump on a patch of grass, Blake leapt from the man-van and scooped it up. The Everglades racer whipped around and bit him several times. “It’s like a pinch,” he said. Blood bubbled up.

Not quite a python, but for these hobby herpetologists, any snake is better than no snake.

“People should really know that this is what it’s like,” he said, referring to the success rate, not the blood.

By day’s end, the team’s python count was zero. Nothing but optimism prevailed. “We’re going out road cruising tonight,” Blake Russ said. “Do you want to come?”