The arts

There might be a few agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation who could sit down at a piano and run through a Chopin Fantasie to calm their nerves, as Robert K. Wittman used to do. But there probably aren’t many who could also chat knowledgably about Cézanne’s influence on Soutine. Or who have studied formalism at the Barnes Foundation art museum outside of Philadelphia. Or who have found themselves in Hollywood, Fla., eating lunch with — and probably being targeted by — two large French assassins nicknamed Vanilla and Chocolate, while tantalizingly close to recovering paintings from the biggest art heist in American history, the 1990 robbery of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. For 15 years, until his retirement in 2008, Mr. Wittman — the author of a rollicking memoir, “Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World’s Stolen Treasures,” released last week by Crown Publishers — was the driving force behind the F.B.I.’s efforts to pursue art thieves, a … [Read more...] about His Heart Is in the Art of Sleuthing

The drab free port zone near the Geneva city center, a compound of blocky gray and vanilla warehouses surrounded by train tracks, roads and a barbed-wire fence, looks like the kind of place where beauty goes to die. But within its walls, crated or sealed cheek by jowl in cramped storage vaults, are more than a million of some of the most exquisite artworks ever made. Treasures from the glory days of ancient Rome. Museum-quality paintings by old masters. An estimated 1,000 works by Picasso. As the price of art has skyrocketed , perhaps nothing illustrates the art-as-bullion approach to contemporary collecting habits more than the proliferation of warehouses like this one, where masterpieces are increasingly being tucked away by owners more interested in seeing them appreciate than hanging on walls. With their controlled climates, confidential record keeping and enormous potential for tax savings, free ports have become the parking lot of choice for high-net-worth buyers … [Read more...] about One of the World’s Greatest Art Collections Hides Behind This Fence

NEWARK, Del. — It may not summon up a sense of international intrigue like Geneva or Luxembourg, but this small city, just off the Interstate and down the road from Wilmington, can now boast that it has joined those more glamorous locales as a tax haven for art collectors. Fritz Dietl, who for years watched collectors ship artworks from sales in New York to tax-advantageous free ports overseas, has opened his own here in a former foam peanut packing factory beside the train tracks. He is gradually filling it with plywood crates containing artworks. The warehouse, he says, offers art owners the same benefits as its better known European counterparts: discretion, security and tax savings. “In the past, they would have shipped it to Switzerland,” he said one morning recently, gesturing at about 20 large crates in a 16,000-square-foot, climate-controlled space. The artworks packed in the crates were worth in total about $10 million to $15 million, he said. But more would … [Read more...] about Art Collectors Find Safe Harbor in Delaware’s Tax Laws

It was a week the art world had never seen before. For the first time, an auction house sold more than $1 billion of art — over three days at that — a vast outpouring of money that amazed even the wealthy and the celebrities who flocked to the auction floor. On Wednesday, Christie’s said it sold $658.5 million worth of work at its postwar and contemporary art auction, added to the $705.9 million for 20th-century works auctioned off on Monday . The billion-dollar threshold was a symbolic coup for Christie’s and seemed to widen the divide with its rival Sotheby’s, even if actual profits were unclear. Sotheby’s on Tuesday raised $379.7 million , with fees, from 63 lots of American-oriented contemporary pieces. At its auction last week , it proclaimed the result, $368 million, as the second highest modern and Impressionist sale in its history. “It’s a spectacle of excess at the highest level,” said Abigail Asher, partner in the New York and Los Angeles art consultants … [Read more...] about Christie’s Has Art World’s First $1 Billion Week

EAST HAMPTON, N.Y. — Lonnie Holley’s life began at an impossible place: 1950, seventh among his mother’s 27 children, in Jim Crow-era Birmingham, Ala., the air thick with violent racism toward him and everyone he loved. Things got even worse as he grew up. At four years old, he said, he was traded for a bottle of whiskey by a nurse who had stolen him away from his mother. Later, as the story goes, he was in a coma for several months and pronounced brain-dead after being hit by a car that dragged him along several blocks. Then he spent time in the infamous Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children until his paternal grandmother — he refers to her simply as “Momo” — was able to take him away at the age of 14. He forged his way out of the miry roads of his origins, becoming a musician and filmmaker, and teaching himself to make visual art. Since then, he has come far, far enough to have just completed a residency as an artist at the Elaine de Kooning House in this celebrity-filled … [Read more...] about Lonnie Holley’s Life of Perseverance, and Art of Transformation

Bill Arnett had spent two decades collecting and dealing antiquities from around the world — African art was his passion — when, in 1986, he had an epiphany in Birmingham, Ala. There, the artist Lonnie Holley assembled sculptures from salvaged junk, and on his first visit, Mr. Arnett bought one — a statement about racism made from a mannequin and chains. It inspired him more than anything he had seen in Europe, Africa or Asia ever had. “Nothing has been the same since,” Mr. Arnett told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 1993. “I had to go out and tell the world that there’s this forgotten civilization doing this great work.” To Mr. Arnett, Mr. Holley’s work — and that of other Black painters, sculptors and quilters he would soon encounter, most of them poor — was as distinguished as that of acclaimed white artists like Willem de Kooning , Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. He became their fan, promoter and patron, paid at least 20 of them stipends of $200 to … [Read more...] about Bill Arnett, Collector and Promoter of Little-Known Black Art, Dies at 81