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Case Study (via NYTimes): Whaam! Pow! Lichtenstein Foundation Starts to Wind Down With Big Gifts
Roy Lichtenstein’s “Sweet Dreams, Baby!” from 1965. The screenprint is one of the works going to the Whitney Museum of American Art from the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation. Credit Estate of Roy Lichtenstein
At a time when some single-artist foundations are exploring new ways to stay relevant by hosting artist residencies, or giving prizes, the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation is making a dramatic impact by beginning the process of winding itself down.
AES in Observer: The Bad Planning That Leaves So Many Artists’ Estates Tangled in Lawsuits
Robert Indiana with his 'Love' sculpture in Central Park, New York City in 1971. Photo: Jack Mitchell / Getting Images
Daniel Grant quotes Founding Partner, Jason Andrew, in his article The Bad Planning That Leaves So Many Artists’ Estates Tangled in Lawsuits on the occasion of the deputed legacy of Robert Indiana.
Review (via NYTimes): Edith Schloss at Meredith Ward
Edith Schloss "Rignalla," 1967, Oil on canvas, 13 3/4 x 21 1/2 in.
We are very pleased that the exhibition, Edith Schloss, organized by Artist Estate Studio at Meredith Ward Fine Art has been reviewed in The New York Times by Robert Smith.
Case Study (via ARTNEWS, Sept 2000): The Embattled Legacy of Kurt Schwitters
Download the complete article at the ARTNews archive here.
Exhibition News: Edith Schloss at Meredith Ward Fine Art opens Feb 8
Meredith Ward Fine Art is pleased to present Edith Schloss: By the Sea, an exhibition of 20 paintings and works on paper painted in Italy during the 1960s and 1970s (February 8 – March 30, 2018). This is the first exhibition of Schloss's work at the gallery and includes several paintings that will be on view for the first time. "Schloss's colorful and whimsical still lifes are a revelation," said Meredith Ward, President of the gallery. "They add an entirely new dimension to our understanding of figurative painting in the 1960s and 1970s." This exhibition was organized in collaboration with the Estate of Edith Schloss and with the support of Artist Estate Studio, LLC.
Intrinsically linked to the milieu of postwar American art, Edith Schloss was an integral member of the Chelsea-New York art world, which flourished around the New York School and include photographer and filmmaker Rudy Burckhardt (whom she married in 1947) and the Jane Street Group around Nell Blaine.
In 1962, having separated from Burckhardt, Schloss with her young son in tow, left New York City for Italy. There, with Rome as her base, she sought out the legendary Giorgio Morandi, befriending him and drawing inspiration from his subtle and calculated still lifes. Among the first paintings Schloss produced in Italy were a series of still lifes that are the focus of this special exhibition. In these paintings, which border on the bittersweet, fragile, and naïve, Schloss lines up vases, teapots, flowers, and other objects and paints them against the Mediterranean Sea.
These whimsical works display vitality, inventiveness, and a distinctive painterly abstraction.
Schloss wrote of her work, "What I really do is what any painter worth his salt has always done, I abstract color and line from life around me, and make another life out of it." Among the highlights of the exhibition are two paintings titled Rignalla, which are being exhibited here for the first time. Over several summers, Schloss accompanied her lover, the composer/musician Alvin Curran, to Florence where he had a gig playing Dixieland Jazz at the Red Garter. From her room along the via di Rignalla, she painted several still lifes, which became mementos of her sojourns there.
About Edith Schloss
Edith Schloss (1919-2011) was born in Offenbach, Germany. As a young woman she traveled extensively in Europe. Working as an au pair in London during the Blitz, she was evacuated to the United States and landed in New York City. There, she met the political refugee Heinz Langerhans, who introduced her to Bertolt Brecht, and other intellectuals at The New School for Social Research.
From 1942 to 1946, she studied at the Art Students League with Will Barnet, Harry Sternberg, and Morris Kantor. In 1945, Schloss met Willem de Kooning through her friend, the painter Fairfield Porter. Around the same time, she became connected with a group of artists, poets and filmmakers in Chelsea, including Ellen and Walter Auerbach, Nell Blaine, Edwin Denby, and Rudy Burchkhardt. She joined the Jane Street Group, New York's first artist cooperative gallery, and in 1947 had her first one-person show at the Ashby Gallery.
Schloss married Rudy Burckhardt in 1947 and the couple spent summers with Fairfield Porter and his family in Maine. In 1962, she and Burkhardt separated, and Schloss moved to Italy. Schloss’s paintings have been shown in exhibitions in Rome and New York and her work is represented in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Keats-Shelley House, Rome; the Hessisches Landsmuseum, Wiesbaden; and the Offenbacher Stadtmuseum, Offenbach, Germany.
In 2015, a landmark retrospective of work by Edith Schloss was curated by Jason Andrew and held at the Sundaram Tagore Gallery in New York. That exhibition marked the first show of the artist’s work in New York in twenty-five years. This exhibition at Meredith Ward, with a focused look on the works from the 1960s, continues the momentum and renewed interest in the artist’s work.
This exhibition was organized in collaboration with the Estate of Edith Schloss and with the support of Artist Estate Studio, LLC. The exhibition will be accompanied by an online catalogue.
About Meredith Ward Fine Art
Meredith Ward Fine Art opened in 2004 specializing in American art from the 19th century to the present. The gallery is the exclusive representative of the estates of John Marin, Larry Day, Steve Wheeler, and Flora Crockett. Meredith Ward Fine Art is located at 44 East 74th Street in New York City and is open to the public Tuesday through Friday, 10am to 5:30pm and Saturday by appointment.
For more information or images, contact Julia Wilcox at 212-744-7306 or
info@meredithwardfineart.com | www.meredithwardfineart.com
Lecture: "Biala: The Woman Painter Among Men" at ASL
Biala: The Woman Painter Among Men
Thurs, Jan 11, 6:30pm
RSVP (seating is limited)
Art Students League
215 West 57th Street
NYC
__________
Painter Janice Biala (1903-2000), known to history primarily by her surname, was an integral figure in the art scene of mid-twentieth century Manhattan. Sister of painter Jack Tworkov, friend of Willem de Kooning and critic Harold Rosenberg, Biala was in the thick of a milieu that gave rise to the New York School. But before all that, she was the lover of the English novelist Ford Madox Ford.
Curator Jason Andrew will trace the remarkable life and art of Biala from her early days of hitch-hiking to Provincetown in the ‘20s, to jumping on a boat to Paris and later her dramatic escape from Nazi occupied France in the ‘30s, to her early support of Willem de Kooning and participation in the New York School in the ’40s. Above all, she left a history of painting noted for its sublime assimilation of the School of Paris and the New York School of abstract expressionism.
This lecture coincides with the exhibition Biala and the Harvey and Phyllis Lichtenstein Collection, on view through February 10 at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, 15 Rivington Street, New York.
Announcing the formation of Artist Estate Studio, LLC
After many years of working independently as a consultant and estate representative, Jason Andrew has combined forces with his long time artistic collaborator of 25 years, Julia K. Gleich to form a new entity serving artists and estates of artists.
Based in Cypress Hills, Brooklyn, this newly formed team will consult and represent artists and estates of artists to further their careers and their legacies.
Avedon, Unsigned
Ruedi Hofmann, master printer for the photographer’s magnum opus, “In the American West,” understood that his payment would be a set of signed prints. He has the prints, but they were never signed. Whose prints are they, anyway?
By Richard B. Woodward
Hanging in the foyer of Ruedi and Ann Hofmann’s art-filled home in Newburgh is a large black-and-white photograph by Richard Avedon.
Unsettling in scale as well as content, it’s a half-length portrait, larger than life-size, of a curly-haired teenage boy who stands against a white background holding up the sagging skin and shiny entrails of an eviscerated rattlesnake. The headless animal’s dark blood is spattered across the bib of his overalls; its curdlike guts squish through the fingers on his right hand. The boy’s hieratic gesture is like that of someone performing an ancient sacrifice, and his hard gaze suggests he has been doing this for much of his young life.
Not many would choose such an image to welcome visitors. Mr. Hofmann is clearly proud of it, though, and more than 100 others like it.
As master printer on Avedon’s last major project, “In the American West,” Mr. Hofmann was responsible for bringing out the myriad gray shades and material details in “Boyd Fortin,” the portrait of the 13-year-old rattlesnake skinner, and the other images of weathered, hard-bitten characters featured in the landmark 1985 exhibition and book.
Judge Awards Three Pals of Robert Rauschenberg $25 Million
Court decision could prompt more artists to specify trustee fees in trust documents.
Robert Rauschenberg.
Photo: maría josé/Flickr.
On Friday, August 1st, a Florida judge granted Robert Rauschenberg’s accountant and two other longtime associates $24.6 million in fees for overseeing the artist’s estate—more than 60 times what Rauschenberg’s foundation deemed reasonable. “The amount awarded certainly gives new meaning to the phrase ‘friends with benefits’, when an artist’s pals are so richly rewarded,’’ said Thomas C. Danziger, an art lawyer who wasn’t involved in the multiyear court battle, in an e-mail.
Rauschenberg died in 2008, at age 82. The three trustees of the Robert Rauschenberg Revocable Trust, which was founded in 1994, had originally sought a fee of $60 million. At trial, they dialed back their request to between $51 and $55 million. The foundation, the prime beneficiary of the trust, argued that a total of $375,000 divided among the three was fair.
The court decision could prompt more artists to specify trustee fees in trust documents, Danziger said.
Christopher Rauschenberg Responds
Christopher Rauschenberg, the artist’s son, is chairman of the Rauschenberg Foundation, which provides residencies to artists on Captiva Island, Florida, and makes grants to arts and environmental organizations, among other endeavors. He was disappointed by circuit court judge Jay Rosman’s decision. “As we have said all along, we believe this case is a simple matter of evaluating the value of the services by the trustees, which we consider to be modest and not meriting an amount of this magnitude,’’ he said in a statement.
Robert Goldman, a lawyer who represents the foundation, was asked in June whether Rauschenberg would be turning over in his grave given the trustee demands. “Turning over is mild,’’ Goldman said in a video interview with the News-Press of Fort Myers, Florida. “He probably would come out and choke a few people.’’
The trustees are Darryl Pottorf, an artist who assisted and lived with Rauschenberg for over 25 years; Bennet Grutman, the artist’s accountant for 18 years; and Bill Goldston, a Rauschenberg business partner with a fine art–print publishing company. Their lawyer, Michael Gay, didn’t return an e-mail seeking comment. As they had already split $8 million in fees, the judge ordered that they were entitled to another $16.4 million, totaling $24.6 million. Their accomplishments on behalf of the trust included developing and executing a plan to withdraw Rauschenberg work from the market when he died, “to prevent a decline in value from speculators or collectors flooding the market with his art,’’ the judge wrote. Rosman cited appraisals stating that the value of assets soared from $606 million in 2008 to $2.2 billion four years later. While the rising art market and Rauschenberg’s talent were “contributing factors” in the appreciation, the judge ruled that the trustees’ performance played a key role. “The court finds that the trustees made very good decisions and rendered very good service,’’ Rosman wrote.