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    Collector Sues to Block Investigators From Seizing Roman Bronze

    Lawyers for the collector, based in California, said the Manhattan district attorney’s office did not have the jurisdiction or the evidence to support seizing the ancient statue.A California collector has gone to court to block efforts by New York investigators to seize an ancient Roman bronze statue that they assert was looted from Turkey in the 1960s.In a federal court filing last week in California, lawyers for the collector, Aaron Mendelsohn, 74, disputed the evidence they said investigators had presented indicating that the ancient statue of a man was stolen from an archaeological site in Turkey. The lawyers said that investigators had no jurisdiction to seize items in California and so were overstepping their authority.It was the latest in a series of recent challenges to efforts by the Manhattan district attorney’s office to seize artifacts believed to have been looted. The Cleveland Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago are also engaged in legal challenges with the investigators over items with disputed histories.In Mr. Mendelsohn’s case, his lawyers have accused the investigators of using the threat of prosecution to pressure their client into giving up the statue. In addition, they have argued that by pursuing the statue in a potential criminal proceeding, the investigators can avoid the fuller disclosure and access to evidence that would have been required in civil court.The district attorney’s office “has invoked New York criminal process in an effort to intimidate Mr. Mendelsohn into relinquishing the Bronze Male, without affording Mr. Mendelsohn a legitimate opportunity to fully explore the evidence that DANY claims casts doubt on Mr. Mendelsohn’s ownership or to litigate its true ownership,” Marcus A. Asner, a lawyer for Mr. Mendelsohn, wrote in court papers filed in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, Western Division.The Manhattan district attorney’s office responded with a statement that said: “Our Antiquities Trafficking Unit has successfully recovered thousands of stolen antiquities that came through Manhattan from galleries, homes, and museums around the country. We will respond to this filing in court.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    At Los Angeles Galleries, Savoring the Waning Days of Summer

    During an often quiet season in the art world, several outstanding solo shows and one group show offer a feast for the eye and the mind.Rick Lowe’s “Cavafy Remains,” 2024, acrylic on canvas, in the group exhibition “Social Abstraction” at Gagosian Beverly Hills.via Rick Lowe and Gagosian; Photo by Thomas DubrockThe traditional summer lull in the art gallery calendar typically spurs a rash of phoned-in group shows, a chance to drag unsold works out of storage and repackage them under limp catchall themes. Not so much this month in Los Angeles, where several eye-catching solo exhibitions feature artists who are overdue for a moment in the sun.On the evidence of these shows, there’s no single dominant trend in art right now, but rather a general sense of permission to take seriously a broad spectrum of artists and positions, especially those of older generations. In this late-summer heat, it’s a welcome respite.‘Magdalena Suarez Frimkess: The Finest Disregard’Through Jan. 25. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles; 323-857-6000; lacma.org.Top to bottom: “Minnie Mouse Wearing Venice Canals Dress,” 2004; “Minnie Mouse Wearing Pineapple and Palm Tree Pattern,” 2005; “Minnie Mouse in a White Dress With Red Polka Dots,” 2007; “Minnie Mouse in a Green Dress With Pink Polka Dots,” 2007; and “Minnie Mouse in a Pink Dress,” undated.via Magdalena Suarez Frimkess and Los Angeles County Museum of ArtAt 95, the Venezuelan-born Magdalena Suarez Frimkess has waited a long time for her first museum retrospective. Trained in Chile as a sculptor, she came to the United States on a fellowship in 1962 and met Michael Frimkess, a classical ceramist. They were soon married, and settled in Los Angeles. After he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, she began applying her Pop-inflected imagery onto his elegant vessels, painting them with colored glaze.This exhibition of ceramics, furniture, paintings and drawings at LACMA, curated by José Luis Blondet, takes its title from an astute review in Art in America by Paul Harris: “The work of Magdalena Suarez Frimkess — the most daring sculptor working in Chile — is distinguished by the finest disregard for whatever is supposed to be so.” We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    June Leaf, Artist Who Explored the Female Form, Dies at 94

    Womanly power was a recurring theme of her work, expressed in idiosyncratic sculpture and paintings that did not align with prevailing trends.June Leaf, a painter and sculptor whose exploration of the female form, by turns whimsical, graceful or ominous, paved the way for later generations of feminist artists, died Monday at her home in Manhattan. She was 94. The cause was gastric cancer, said Andrea Glimcher, her agent at the Hyphen management firm and a friend.Ms. Leaf worked for much of her long career outside the mainstream. Idiosyncratic and intuitive, she developed a unique blend of expressionism and primitivism, allied with a childlike sense of play. Her varied output included toylike kinetic sculptures, frantic ink drawings with a nervous, tensile line, satirical social scenes, and macabre skeletons painted on canvas or tin.Womanly power was a recurring theme, expressed early on in goddess-like figures with hugely distended hips and breasts and women with batlike wings or gyroscope torsos, and later in a powerful series of metal heads reminiscent of tribal sculpture.At no point did the work align with prevailing trends in contemporary art, and for much of her life Ms. Leaf was overshadowed by her husband, the photographer Robert Frank, whom she married in 1975. She nevertheless commanded a devoted audience attuned to her unique frequency, as well as the admiration of a small group of critics and curators.Reviewing her first solo New York show in 1968, Hilton Kramer of The New York Times called her work “remarkably forceful and robust — the product of an earthy imagination with a striking talent for projecting images that are at once ferocious and macabre, satirical and touching.” He added, “She is that rare thing in painting today: a poet with a taste and a talent for complex images.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Cleveland Museum of Art to Return a Rare Ancient Icon to Libya

    A 2,200-year-old sculpture of a bearded man carved from basalt, unearthed in the 1930s, is believed to have been stolen in the early 1940s.While excavating an ancient Greek palace in eastern Libya in the 1930s, an archaeologist dug up a large earthen storage jar, looked inside and spotted something unexpected — a 2,200-year-old sculpture of a bearded man carved from basalt, a dark volcanic stone.The two-foot-tall antiquity, most likely chiseled during ancient Egypt’s Ptolemaic Dynasty, was a rare find. Known as a striding male figure, it is one of only 33 statues like it known to exist, Egyptologists say.But it wasn’t long before thieves got ahold of the bearded figure and took it on an illicit odyssey that brought it, in 1991, to the Cleveland Museum of Art.On Wednesday, after curators had reviewed abundant proof that the item was stolen from Libya, including photos of it on display in the 1940s at a small museum near its discovery site, the museum agreed to transfer ownership to Libyan officials.“When confronting a situation like this we look at all the material and try to come to an agreement that is beneficial to all parties,” said Seth Pevnick, curator of Greek and Roman art at the Cleveland museum.“It’s less about ownership and more about access” to the object, he said, adding that the museum is hoping to display it on loan for five more years.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    A Land Artist’s Work Evades Demolition

    A federal judge granted a temporary restraining order protecting a work by Mary Miss. A Des Moines museum wanted to destroy it, citing safety concerns.A work of environmental art by Mary Miss has evaded demolition — for now. A judge in the U.S. District Court in Des Moines on Friday granted her request for a temporary restraining order that would bar the Des Moines Art Center, the museum that commissioned the land art installation, from dismantling it. The museum maintains it has become a safety hazard and that the resources to repair it are not available.The decision, the Art Center said in a statement, amounts to “a court-ordered stalemate.”While the judge, Stephen H. Locher, found that destroying the work, “Greenwood Pond: Double Site” (1989-1996), would violate the Art Center’s contract with the artist, he also said that Miss could not force the museum to restore it to its original condition. He wrote, “The end result is therefore an unsatisfying status quo: the artwork will remain standing (for now) despite being in a condition that no one likes but that the court cannot order anyone to change.”The lawsuit is the latest twist in a fight over the fate of “Greenwood Pond,” which has highlighted the difficulty of preserving large-scale public artworks, especially for smaller institutions. Located on the grounds of a city-owned park next to the museum, the installation is a collection of sloping walkways, wooden sitting areas, huts and towers that encourage visitors to engage with the landscape. Over the years, the wood has degraded substantially, and the Art Center estimates that it would cost between $2 million and $2.6 million to restore it. (Miss contests that, but has not provided another figure.)In an interview on Tuesday, Miss said, “I don’t know why the museum wouldn’t come to me at this point and try to work this out instead of spending more money on legal fees.”Having visited “Greenwood Pond: Double Site” while in Des Moines to testify, she said she felt a newfound appreciation for the work. “I just can’t imagine this whole thing going south at this point,” she said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Petrit Halilaj Takes Flight

    When the Kosovar artist Petrit Halilaj received an invitation for his biggest project ever in the United States, he knew just where to go: back to school.For “Abetare,” his spare, smart, absolutely delightful sculptural installation on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Halilaj, who is 38, traveled to elementary schools across southeastern Europe, documenting the doodles that generations of schoolchildren left on their desks and walls. (The project’s title refers to the Albanian-language ABC book from which Halilaj learned the alphabet.) Those children’s drawings from the Balkans formed the templates for the sprightly, sometimes bawdy metal sculptures that now garland the skyline of New York — large ones, but also flowers, birds and graffiti that nestle in the topiaries, and hide behind the cocktail bar.Halilaj was born in 1986 in Kosterrc, a small village outside the town of Runik. (At Art Basel one year he answered that perpetual question, Where are you from?, by dumping 60 tons of Kosterrc soil in the white cube of the art fair.) His own school days took place amid the most horrific fighting in Europe between World War II and the present war in Ukraine. Serbian forces burned down the Halilaj family home in 1999, at the height of the Kosovo war, one of the most brutal chapters of a decade-long nightmare of ethnic and religious conflicts in the Balkans. The family fled to Albania, where psychologists in a refugee camp encouraged the boy to draw. War reporters at the time chronicled an ambidextrous child prodigy, drawing chickens and peacocks with both hands.Petrit Halilaj’s “Abetare (Spider)” seems to be smiling mischievously at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Roof Garden.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesHalilaj now lives in Berlin, but in both art and life he remains deeply engaged with Kosovo, which became independent in 2008 and where Halilaj is advising the culture ministry on the creation of a museum of contemporary art. (He figures among an exciting generation of artists from Europe’s youngest country, including Flaka Haliti, Alban Muja, and Doruntina Kastrati, the last of whom just won a prize at the Venice Biennale.) And for a decade now I’ve been captivated by Halilaj’s art, which pirouettes around questions of nationality, family and sexuality through a dense register of symbols — especially birds, whose wings and claws appear everywhere from the surface of Balkan antiquities to the fuselage of a Boeing 737.In two conversations, which have been condensed and edited, he and I spoke about the trauma of displacement, the magic of flight, and the universal language of schoolchildren’s scribbling. While we were on the Met roof one morning he pointed out his little sculpture of a dove, high up in the sky. A pigeon — an echt New Yorker — had touched down next to Halilaj’s bronze bird, and was making friends with its Balkan counterpart.At left, “Abetare (Wall of Symbols),” and at right, “Abetare (Flower, Toshe, Messi).”Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesThe project you’ve done for the Met roof continues one that began more than a decade ago, when you went back to your elementary school in Kosovo. What was it like, returning to the village you had to flee as a child?In 2010 I went back to Runik for a holiday. My old school — which had actually survived the war — was being torn down to build a new one. [The Serbian army] had burned 99 percent of the town, this was one of the few buildings that remained, and still it was going to be replaced by new, cheap construction! And while I was at the school all these kids showed up. Some were teenagers, but others were very little, maybe 8, 9: little devils. A classic small-town crowd of naughty kids. I loved them.Some of them knew me, that I’m an artist, and they were like, “You have to go in. ”We entered, and I started filming. They started doing everything you are not supposed to do in a school — just out-of-control fun.These kids would have been born after 2000, after the war.Exactly. They started painting on top of pictures of national heroes and poets, which, honestly, I would have never had the courage to do when I was a kid.Then one of the kids took me into a classroom. And then I see the pile of these green school desks there since before the war. The desks were older than me. And this kid says to me, ‘‘Come see the drawings,’’ because there is everything there. These desks contain 40 years of unconscious, crazy secrets. There’s this encyclopedic aspect, these layers of generations. But you also see how local and global these things are, and also how funny.I was just so touched by the language of drawing, and in a moment I saw another loss — this time not from the war, but from the postwar craziness, wanting everything new. I asked the principal if I could save at least one classroom of desks. He said, “Yes, if you finance new desks.” We made a deal. I hope he used the money to really buy them …“Abetare (Big Flower),” one of the bronze sculptures that ring the walls of the Met roof.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesFrom left, a tiny bird perched on the giant spider; the letters “KFOR,” a reference to the NATO peacekeeping force in Kosovo; and a star atop the artist’s “Abetare (House).”You exhibited the desks from your hometown in a show in Cologne in 2015. Why did you go further, all around the Balkans, for the Met project?It was a personal journey. I started three years ago, going to Kukes, in Albania, where I was a refugee. Then to Rozaje, in Montenegro, where we used to go on holidays before the war. Very, very, very small towns. I actually went to all the countries of ex-Yugoslavia, except Serbia, where I had friends send me images.What I was amazed by, as I was going to the schools, was to feel so connected everywhere. For me, these drawings are a language that I just get. I had experts in education, or from museums, or even local artists, who accompanied me everywhere. Because otherwise it’s hard to convince a school superintendent that you aren’t a maniac. “Can I enter your classrooms to see the drawings of kids?” [Laughs] You have to really take time and build trust.Some sculptures on the Met roof clearly refer to the Balkans. There’s one with the letters “KFOR,” a reference to the NATO peacekeeping force in Kosovo. But there are also birds and stars, and Lionel Messi, and the Chanel logo, and then the same naughty drawings of body parts you could find on a school desk in America.It’s a really funny way of seeing history, through all these politically incorrect drawings. But I love the queerness in them, these secrets. They are codes. You can see the euro symbol screwing Yugoslavia …One little queer joke I caught up here on the roof is the sculpture that spells out “IDGAF” — which stands for “I don’t give a [expletive],” but is also a song by the unofficial president of Kosovo, Dua Lipa.[Laughs] It’s kind of a tribute to her, but it’s also a little celebration of new possibilities. Both locally in Kosovo, or regionally, there is a chance for new generations to really question all these static historical, nationalist narratives that are so hard to move.Petrit Halilaj in the 2020 exhibition “To a raven and hurricanes that from unknown places bring back smells of humans in love,” at the Crystal Palace in Madrid.Oscar Gonzalez/NurPhoto, via Getty ImagesInstallation view of “Petrit Halilaj: Runik” at Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, in 2023.via Petrit Halilaj and Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; Photo by GLR EstudioTell me about why birds have such a notable place in your work. For your 2017-18 New Museum show, you translated antiquities from your hometown, many of which are now in museums in Serbia, into birdlike figures with spindly claws. There were giant brass bird claws in your show in Madrid, and a performer dressed as a white raven.The birds and the chickens always bring me back to the Albanian ABC book, the Abetare. In the lesson for the letter P, there is a boy named Petrit. “Pulat e Petritit.” Petrit and the chickens. So imagine, when you are little, and people ask you, “What’s your name?” I would say “Petrit,” and they would say, “Ah, Petrit with the chickens!” I didn’t get it for years. Why am I Petrit with the chickens?! I just knew we had chickens in our garden …Later on, I understood that all these adults went through this Abetare and learned this lesson.Language politics were such a flashpoint in the wars of the 1990s.Students were allowed to learn in Albanian until 1989, with the ending of autonomy. After that it’s this story of hidden classrooms, hidden universities. The school became a place of discussion, where we could see what was going to happen. My Abetare was burned when they burned the house in ’99.In shows before this one you’ve incorporated your own childhood drawings of birds, and also flowers. Is there something that links those redeployments of your drawings as a refugee with the doodles you found for the Met project?Questioning adulthood, or questioning established canons by going back to a part of childhood is the way to understand the world around me that scares me the least. Going through the schools and the desks, there was a way to build a counternarrative: a network of symbols and alphabets and drawings that come to the Metropolitan Museum and form a kind of joint landscape.A view of “Petrit Halilaj: RU,” 2018, at the New Museum, featuring an imagined landscape populated by whimsical creatures fashioned from pottery fragments, found objects and other detritus.via Petrit Halilaj and The New Museum, New York; Photo by Dario LasagniTwo years ago you did a wonderful project on the roof of the Grand Hotel in Pristina, Kosovo’s capital. Once it was a five-star hotel; and as it declined through the war years, the stars on its roof sign were taken down one by one. You restored the stars, added dozens of new ones, and replaced the sign “Grand Hotel” with a phrase from a Kosovar child: “When the sun goes away we paint the sky.”This is a work that I ended up donating to the city, to the people of Pristina. We’re talking about, literally, the hotel where Tito was coming to sleep. You can still sense this glamour that was once there. I mean, you had this fantastic article in The New York Times about it …The then-president of Kosovo told our reporter, “I don’t think it is the worst hotel in the world, but that is because the world is very big.”And I had this idea of coming back to Kosovo and lighting it back up. Making something that is rotten into a 28-star hotel. Poetically, you can dream of something bigger than the hotels in Dubai, you know?But to me the stars against the blue Pristina sky were also the stars of the flag of the European Union. The installation is just as much about Kosovo’s still incomplete recognition as an independent European state.It was about bringing in a different language that we hardly see in public spaces. And also about seeing sculpturally a fallen ideology in these fallen stars. In Yugoslavian times, there was a whole generation of people who were so proud of this hotel, and they had no money to enter.An artistic project by Petrit Halilaj at Grand Hotel Pristina, 2022. Halilaj restored the stars, added dozens of new ones, and replaced the sign “Grand Hotel” with a phrase from a Kosovar child: “When the sun goes away we paint the sky.”Armend Nimani For The New York TimesYou have these two rooftop projects, in Pristina and in New York, both rooted in the voices of children. And what interests me most is how these children’s voices, even as they cement a claim to Kosovo’s independence, also escape the nationalist traps of so much artistic advocacy.At the Met there is an equilibrium. Maybe there are some nationalist symbols. But then you have a big heart. You have “Michael Jackson” written on the walls in Albania. You have group agendas, but also personal things. I felt like an archaeologist, discovering how people are so much more interconnected, more global, more human, than the national politics that dominate this area of Europe. And to me, that is really good news. More

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    On the Met Roof, Skywriting His Way to Freedom

    Petrit Halilaj of Kosovo began drawing as a refugee child in the Balkans during a violent decade and invented a calligraphic world of memory.When this old world starts getting me downAnd people are just too much for me to faceI climb way up to the top of the stairsAnd all my cares just drift right into space …I’ve found a paradise that’s trouble-proof …Up on the roofSo crooned the Drifters in 1962, making the inner-city rooftop — “tar beach” — a very cool spring-and-summertime place to be. And while the roof of the august Metropolitan Museum of Art may not have figured in anyone’s getaway plan back then, it does now, thanks to the Roof Garden sculptural commissions the museum has been installing, seasonally, over the past dozen years.The latest of them, “Petrit Halilaj, Abetare,” which opens on Tuesday, is one of the airiest looking so far. Indeed, drawing — or skywriting — rather than sculpture is what I’d call this openwork tangle of dark bronze-and-steel calligraphic lines tracing silhouetted images — of birds, flowers, stars, a giant spider and a fairy tale house — against the panorama of Manhattan beyond and Central Park below.It’s a funky, sky-reaching fantasia. But Paradise? Uh-uh. The spider looks mean. The house tilts as if melting. And what’s with a scattering of spiky phalluses, and a Soviet hammer-and-sickle emblem, and mysterious words and anagrams — Runik, Kukes, KFOR — with explicitly down-to-earth connections?And what to make of the fact that all of these images and words were lifted from a single prosaic source. They were found, scratched and doodled on the surfaces of classroom desktops by generations of elementary school kids in the Balkan territories of Europe during a time of brutalizing regional war.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Hudson Yards ‘Vessel’ Sculpture Will Reopen With Netting After Suicides

    The 150-foot-high tourist attraction, which closed in 2021, will be fitted with stop people from jumping.Nearly three years after a series of suicides shut down the Vessel, the 150-foot-tall centerpiece of the Hudson Yards complex in Manhattan, the project’s developer said on Friday that it would reopen this year with new safety measures.The beehive-shaped sculpture, with a labyrinth of about 2,500 steps and 80 landings, opened in 2019, along with much of the rest of Hudson Yards, a gleaming development in Midtown West. Not long after, in February 2020, a 19-year-old, Peter DeSalvo III, died by suicide there.Over the next year and a half, three others died by suicide there as well, including a 14-year-old boy in 2021, prompting the developers to close off access to the stairs.The attraction will reopen once “floor-to-ceiling steel mesh” has been installed on several staircases, said Kathleen Corless, a spokeswoman for Related Companies, the developer of Hudson Yards. The measure will preserve the “unique experience that has drawn millions of visitors from around the globe,” the company said in a statement.The reopening, first reported by The New York Post, will take place sometime this year.On Saturday morning, tourists craned their necks against the chilly wind to take in views of the massive, brassy art piece. Although it was still closed, a careful look at its third floor showed an initial section of the upcoming changes: black mesh, resembling a fish net.Simon Pierre, 37, a high school teacher visiting from Montreal, said it reminded him of factories in China where the owners installed nets after a wave of suicides. “It’s sad that it’s needed,” he said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More