Andy Warhol has been stolen again: The news broke late Friday. A very “clean” theft, police
said, took place at the West Los Angeles home of Richard Weisman. Thieves captured a collection of works that Weisman commissioned from Warhol in the late 1970s, including 10 silk-screened portraits of athletes and one of Weisman himself (right). According to Reuters:

Among them were boxing great Muhammad Ali, tennis champion Chris Evert, Los Angeles Lakers basketball star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Olympic skater Dorothy Hamill and former football star turned “Trial of the Century” defendant O.J. Simpson.

An “anonymous donor” — presumably Weisman — has offered a $1 million reward for the return of the art. A housekeeper noticed that the works, which hung in Weisman’s dining room, were missing on Sept. 3, but there was no sign of forced entry.

According to the Art Loss Register, Andy Warhol is one of its top ten stolen artists. It has 212 missing Warhols in its database.

Weisman’s name should ring a bell: He comes from the famous art-collecting Weisman family: His father, Frederick R. Weisman, is responsible for the Frank Gehry-designed Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota, an eponymous museum at Pepperdine University, and an eponymous art foundation.

Frederick Weisman once headed Hunt Foods, owned by Norton Simon (the company). He married the founder’s daughter, Marcia Simon — Norton’s sister. Norton Simon’s own collecting is of course even more legendary; here’s a link to his museum. 

The Weismans built a huge collection — I heard stories of stacks of paintings (do I recall hearing that some hung on the ceilings?). Starting in the early ’50s, they bought Abstract Expressionism and Pop art before those movements earned critical acclaim, and once owned one of the most important private collections in the U.S. It was split by their divorce in 1979. Marcia gave many of her works to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. She died in 1991; he died in 1994.      

Their son Richard, the victim here, published a book of his collection, Picasso to Pop: The Richard Weisman Collection, in 2003. 

Here’s a link to the Reuters story and here’s a link to the LAPD’s crime alert, which has pictures of the stolen works.

Photo: Courtesy LAPD 

 

The Museum of the City of New York* has just named its version of “the 400” — a new elite of the city’s movers and shakers — paralleling the list put together for Caroline Astor by Ward McAllister, the late-19th-century arbiter of social status, as suitable for being entertained in her ballroom. 

This list was made to help mark the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s epic 1609 voyage into New York Harbor, and create excitement about “New York 400: A Visual History of America’s Greatest City,” published by the museum for the occasion. It includes the living (who number 46) and the dead. It was released yesterday for the opening of a small exhibition, mostly cityscapes related to the book.

Now New York likes to think of itself as the cultural capital of the U.S., if not the world. So I perused the list carefully, counting how many were artists, definintg that loosely to include some in pop culture.

Turns out the Museum did pretty well: 137 of the 400, at least, are artists, architects, actors, writers, choreographers, filmmakers, critics, or other kind of cultural bigwig. That’s more than a third, and the number includes Berenice Abbott, Alvin Ailey, Woody Allen, Diane Arbus, Harold Arlen, Louis Armstrong, Brooks Atkinson, Louis Auchincloss, John James Audubon, Richard Avedon in the As alone. (In the Bs, there was Margaret Bourke-White, above.)

Granted, my count was personal and therefore somewhat arbitrary. Jackie Gleason, yes; Elsie de Wolfe, no. J.P. Morgan — as omnivorous collector and patron that mattered — yes; Henry Clay Frick, no. Your count, then, could be even higher — have a look for yourself.

Don’t go to the museum looking for an exhibit of the 400, though. For the moment, the list is just a list. But at a reception on Wednesday, the museum was taking nominations for its next version — for release next year?  

The book, on the other hand, is a physical presence: It’s hefty, containing more than 500 images from the museum’s collection and dozens of essays by historians of the city — much bigger than any September issue of Vogue.  

*Disclosure: a consulting client of mine supports the museum.   

 

I’ve written about museum hours before (here): I think they need an overhaul. Museums should open at night, because that’s when people have time for leisure activities. If it means opening later a few mornings a week, or closing an extra day, so be it.

Libraries, it seems to me, have an even greater responsibility to be open and accessible as much as possible. I was totally taken aback when I read here on ArtsJournal last week about the Seattle Public Library’s decision to save money by shutting its doors and even its website for an entire week. I don’t buy the logic, and I wrote why in an opinion column just published on Forbes.com called “Bookless In Seattle.” Here’s an excerpt:

The questions must be asked: Is it simply easier to close for a week, than to orchestrate more complex rolling closures? Is it simply more convenient for staff? Can you imagine a critical service business shutting for eight days without losing customers? Only a “monopoly” like a city library would try that.

The Seattle Library, with its Rem Koolhaas building, has basked in the glory of being a model for the 21st Century. It has a responsibility to live up to on this issue as well as on its architecture.  

It may not be news at all that states are decreasing their arts funding. Nonetheless, a recent Associated Press article noted the same trend I did last week in corporate funding, namely, that it’s getting worse. Here’s the money quote:

The National Assembly of State Arts Agencies estimates states reduced their arts funding an average of 7 percent in the fiscal year that began July 1. That average doubles to 14 percent when Minnesota is not included because the state almost tripled its art budget to $30.2 million thanks to a new sales tax.

In financially strapped states like Arizona, South Carolina, Georgia, Ohio, Louisiana and Florida, the reductions are steeper, falling 30 percent or more, forcing agencies to trim the amount or value of grants, shutter programs that provide arts education and lay off employees. In two states that haven’t completed their annual budgets – Pennsylvania and Connecticut – lawmakers are considering eliminating their state arts agencies entirely.

The rest of the article can be read here.

On the other hand, yesterday The Gap showed that corporate sponsorship is still alive, announcing that it will sponsor the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum’s spring show: American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity.  

Considering the trouble Gap Founder and Chairman Emeritus Don Fisher has had trying to build a museum for his extensive contemporary art collection in San Francisco, written about here, that may be a wonder. It’s a natural marketing match for The Gap, of course. 

The show, by the way, makes use of the “newly established Brooklyn Museum
Costume Collection” at the Met, according to the press release. The clothes were transferred to the Met from Brooklyn last year, because Brooklyn had neither the room to exhibit them nor the ability to care for them. 

Details about the Gap sponsorship and the spring show are here.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum

Yesterday the British press weighed in on Charles Saatchi’s new book, My Name Is Charles Saatchi and I Am An Artoholic. The Guardian’s take is here and the Daily Telegraph’s is here. Both are pretty mild views, with the Telegraph headline talking about his “secret life laid bare.”

Not so fast. Eileen Kinsella, writing in the ArtNEWSLETTER, details how art-world veterans on this side of the Atlantic are disputing Saatchi’s tales. She focuses on sales he made of works by Sandro Chia and Sean Scully, and whether or not he related them as they happened.

She also brings us up-to-date on Saatchi’s art-world reality show:

Saatchi and the BBC have plans for a reality television show documenting the U.K.-wide search for an artist who possesses the “talent, ambition and passion to make great art,” as it is described in a memo from Saatchi’s office. A panel including Kate Bush, Frank Cohen (known in Britain as “the Charles Saatchi of the North”), Matt Collings and Tracey Emin selected six undiscovered artists from more than 3,000 applications. The four-part series, which will be broadcast on BBC Two next month, will reveal which artist was selected by the panel and Saatchi to be included in the exhibition “Newspeak: British Art Now” at the State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg (Oct. 25-Jan. 17).

Can’t wait.

Here’s the link to her story.