Birou Notarial8

Curators make hard choices at 9/11 museum

1 of 8. A recovered FDNY Squad 252 helmet belonging to deceased FDNY member Kevin M. Prior is seen in this photograph before becoming a part of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York August 22, 2011. Kevin Prior, a firefighter with Brooklyn's Squad 252, can be seen in video footage of the North Tower lobby recorded after the first plane hit getting ready to go upstairs. Responding to a mayday call sent out by fellow firefighters encountering breathing problems, he and five other members of the squad are thought to have been on a floor in the 20s when the tower collapsed. Prior's body was found three weeks after the attacks and buried on Long Island, but his mother was troubled that his helmet had not been returned to the family, and said as much in a television interview. An employee at the city's Office of the Chief Medical Examiner happened to catch the broadcast, recognized Prior's squad and badge numbers, and hand-delivered the badly damaged helmet to his grateful family. The museum, which occupies seven stories below the ground of the World Trade Center site--is still being built at the site of the fallen towers. It is due only to open in 2012, on the 11th anniversary of the attacks.

Credit: Reuters/Lucas Jackson

By Jonathan Allen

NEW YORK | Tue Sep 6, 2011 4:55pm EDT

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Curators are making hard choices at the museum memorializing the September 11, 2001 attacks at the site of the World Trade Center's toppled twin towers, aiming to convey the horror of the event without trespassing into ghoulishness.

"We're not here to traumatize our visitors," said Alice Greenwald, director of New York's 9/11 Memorial Museum that is due to open in its underground home at the Ground Zero site next year on the 11th anniversary of the attacks.

"Monumental artifacts are one thing, but we also have a human story to tell," Greenwald said.

Some of the most potentially disturbing exhibits are being set aside from the main exhibition spaces in special alcoves to allow visitors a chance to decide whether or not to view it.

It is here that museum curators have placed material such as images of people plummeting from the burning towers after the buildings were struck by airliners hijacked by al Qaeda militants, and a recording of the measured voice of a flight attendant aboard one of the planes moments before her death.

For museum curators, deciding whether to include examples of some victims' painful final moments was one of their toughest dilemmas as they sought to pay tribute to the nearly 3,000 people killed without piling more grief onto the living.

It's a familiar problem for people aiming to memorialize wars and atrocities.

"We're not just a history museum, we're also a memorial institution and so the tension that happens between commemoration and documentation is a flash point," Greenwald said in an interview at the museum's offices overlooking the ongoing construction of a facility that will occupy seven stories below ground at the World Trade Center site.

Greenwald is no stranger to these debates. For almost two decades she helped create exhibits at the National Holocaust Museum in Washington memorializing the murder of millions of people at the hands of the Nazis during World War Two.

'THE 9/11 STORY'

Greenwald and her colleagues are aware that there are countless objects that might overwhelm a visitor.

There will be photos of the 19 al Qaeda hijackers, although Greenwald said they will be presented as "criminals."

Another difficult question for curators was whether to include disturbing pictures of victims who jumped or fell from the towers. Excluding such pictures would be a serious omission, Greenwald said. The photos will be located in an alcove clearly marked with a warning and none of the people pictured are identifiable, she added.

"It is one of the aspects of the 9/11 story that if you didn't include it, you're not telling the story," she said.

In choosing audio recordings of the last words spoken by some victims, the museum avoided some of the most distressing calls to the 911 emergency phone number. "That's a form of human remains," Greenwald said. "We will include nothing that feels like a moment when we shouldn't have been there."

Instead, curators chose recordings with the permission of victims' families that show what Greenwald called the "exceptional nature" of many of those killed in the attacks.

This includes the remarkably composed voice of Betty Ong, a flight attendant on American Airlines Flight 11, as she relays details of the bloody hijacking to colleagues on the ground in the minutes before the plane crashed into the North Tower.

The museum has acquired hundreds of items belonging to victims, survivors and first responders.

The significance of a horribly crushed fireman's helmet is obvious. Other items might be more subtle in their importance: dust-caked shoes, a crumpled wallet, clothing, a never-finished knitting project, a blackened doll -- all commonplace items that have taken on the air of relics.

The museum has been sculpted out of the vastness of the World Trade Center's foundations, and incorporates part of the slurry wall, originally built to hold back the waters of the Hudson River and which survived the buildings' collapse.

There will be a memorial exhibition for the 2,982 people killed in the September 11 attacks and in the 1993 bombings of the World Trade Center that were a prelude to the later event. The exit of the museum has been designed so that visitors emerge at the heart of the 9/11 Memorial -- cascading waterfalls set into the footprints of the fallen towers surrounded by bronze panels bearing the names of the dead.

"For every heart-wrenching story you have 10 stories about the goodness of human beings," Greenwald said. Referring to future visitors to the museum, she added, "They're going to come out with a lot to think about."

(Editing by Will Dunham)

Crazy Horse sculptor's widow carries on mountain dream

1 of 5. The nearly 90-foot-tall carved granite face of Crazy Horse peers down on what will be the extended left arm and hand on the mountain carving in progress in South Dakota's Black Hills June 2, 2011.

Credit: Reuters/Pat Dobbs/Crazy Horse/Handout

By Greg McCune

CUSTER, South Dakota | Mon Sep 5, 2011 5:40pm EDT

CUSTER, South Dakota (Reuters) - Nearly every morning for more than half a century, 85-year-old Ruth Ziolkowski rises around dawn, puts her feet on the ground and gives thanks she is part of a dream.

Since 1947, she has worked at the Crazy Horse monument to Native Americans in the Black Hills of South Dakota, where she is leading the effort to literally move a mountain.

"I'm tickled to death to get up every morning and go to work," Ziolkowski, president of the non-profit Crazy Horse Memorial Foundation, said in an interview this summer.

Billed as the world's largest sculpture, Crazy Horse is only a 20-mile drive from better-known Mount Rushmore, where faces of presidents George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt are carved into granite.

A few more miles down the road is Pine Ridge reservation, a mostly barren land where more than half the residents live below the poverty line, according to government figures.

Pine Ridge is where many Sioux Indians of Crazy Horse's Oglala tribe were put after they were pursued by the U.S. Army, starved of the buffalo they hunted, and had their traditional lands confiscated.

RIVAL TO RUSHMORE

Unhappy that a monument to white leaders was carved into mountains the Sioux considered sacred, Lakota Sioux elder Chief Henry Standing Bear invited to Pine Ridge Korczak Ziolkowski, who in 1939 had won the New York World's Fair sculpture prize.

They decided to carve a rival monument to Native Americans featuring Crazy Horse, a Sioux warrior who helped lead one of the most famous Indian victories over the U.S. Army -- annihilating much of General George Armstrong Custer's Seventh Cavalry at the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876.

Korczak Ziolkowski began working on the granite mountain along with volunteers including young Ruth Ross from Connecticut. Ruth and Korczak were married in 1950, and raised 10 children at the foot of Crazy Horse.

"He felt we had done them (the Indians) a terrible wrong and he wanted to right some of that wrong," she said.

Many people thought Korczak's plan was indeed crazy.

Mount Rushmore took 14 years to complete, cost $1 million at the time of which 85 percent was government money, and used around 400 workers, according to the National Park Service.

Stubbornly independent, Korczak accepted only private donations. He sketched out a monument much larger than Mount Rushmore, with the warrior on horseback and hand outstretched.

All four of Mount Rushmore's presidential heads would fit inside just the warrior's head at Crazy Horse, said Pat Dobbs, spokesman for the monument. Korczak also wanted to carve completely around the mountain, while the presidents' faces are only on one side of Mount Rushmore.

NATIVE AMERICAN OPPOSITION

Some Native Americans opposed the project. They said Henry Standing Bear had no authority to invite a white man to carve the monument, and said it was desecrating the Black Hills and exploiting an Indian hero. They said Crazy Horse, described in history books as a quiet man, would not have approved.

Indian activist Russell Means said the Crazy Horse carving was like going to the Holy Land of Israel and carving on Mount Zion. "It is an insult to our entire being." he said in 2001.

Korczak worked virtually alone on the mountain for years and died in 1982, 16 years before the first part of the carving -- the giant face of Crazy Horse -- was completed in 1998.

To this day the horse and outstretched hand of Crazy Horse are only in rough shape. Plans are to complete the horse's head next, although Ruth was careful not to give a completion date.

Whether the unfinished Crazy Horse is a monument to sheer persistence or utter futility, the project has expanded, with a visitors center including a museum, restaurant and gift shop, and numerous events. A fundraising drive begun in 2006 netted $19.3 million by end-2010, including in-kind donations.

About a million people trek to Crazy Horse every year, and the entry fees account for 40 percent of revenues with most of the rest from private giving, Dobbs said. On some days tourists can view a dynamite explosion as mountain blasting continues.

EMPHASIS ON EDUCATION

But the most important change has been an emphasis on Native American education. Ruth said her husband always dreamed an Indian University of North America would be on the site.

A dormitory has been built, and beginning in the summer of 2010, Crazy Horse provided a program for students, some of them Native American, to work at the tourist center and take classes such as math and writing in preparation for college.

One of those students, Dylan Tymes, who grew up on the Pine Ridge reservation, said he is hoping to start his sophomore year of college soon. Tymes said Pine Ridge is a rough place, a "ghetto," with few jobs and many people living on food stamps.

Tymes said even some of his own family were skeptical of the Crazy Horse memorial, but the education project and summer job won him over. "If it wasn't for the Crazy Horse program I don't think I would even be in college right now," he said.

Some prominent Native Americans also are joining with the Ziolkowski family to help. Five of the 26 foundation board of directors are of Native American heritage.

Billy Mills, a project advisor and Lakota Sioux, who in 1964 became the only American ever to win the Olympic 10,000 meters run, said the warrior Crazy Horse was one of his boyhood idols. After Mills' mother died when he was a young boy, his father spoke of Crazy Horse to calm his son's anger and lift him from the self pity that Mills said destroys many Indians.

Mills does not believe Crazy Horse would be angry about the mountain carving if he were alive but would "use it as an opportunity to teach the world about indigenous people."

Ruth Ziolkowski is fine with the fact that she will not see Crazy Horse finished in her lifetime. But to her nine living children, two of whom are on the foundation board and a third a foreman on the mountain directing work, she has a clear wish.

"If this project stops because I die, my life has been wasted," she said.

(Additional reporting by Eric Johnson; Editing by Jerry Norton, Mary Wisniewski and Peter Bohan)

luni, 5 septembrie 2011

Chinese artist Ai Weiwei wins fans in Los Angeles

Dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei closes the door to his studio after speaking to the media in Beijing June 23, 2011.

Credit: Reuters/David Gray

By Jordan Riefe

LOS ANGELES | Fri Sep 2, 2011 5:42pm EDT

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei is living a heavily restricted life in Beijing after being released from detention earlier this year, but his work is speaking volumes to people in the second-largest U.S. city.

Ai's touring installation, "Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads," opened two weeks ago at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and has been introducing people here to the work of a man about whom, until recently, they may have only read about in headlines telling of his recent detention in China.

The work is a series of 12 massive, 800 lb. bronze heads depicting the animals of the Chinese Zodiac. Standing among them on the museum's sunny North Piazza, people have been posing for photos standing next to the figures, leaning against them, and taking in the surface with their fingertips.

"I think he's questioning everybody, the entire idea of possession and of cultural permission and of nationalism," Franklin Sirmans, a curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) told Reuters about the installation.

"You see little kids going up to it and interacting with it in a way that is not necessarily about the same thing you or I might be interested in," Sirmans said. "Of course there are many other layers that come to mind as you learn more about the history behind the objects."

The installation is based on a series of sculptures carved by Giuseppe Castiglione, an 18th century Milanese artist and court painter to Ching Dynasty Emperor Kangxi. The original figures encircled a fountain in the Yuanming Yuan garden outside Beijing.

During the Second Opium War in 1860, the sculptures were looted by French and British troops. Of the original twelve figures only seven are known to exist, including two belonging to Yves St. Laurent which turned up at a 2009 auction.

ACTIONS SPEAK LOUDLY

At the time, the Chinese government protested the sale, claiming the sculptures for China as a point of national pride. But Ai was among the first to ask whether they were even Chinese art, as they were made by Italian hands.

"It's interesting that the Chinese government used that (the auction) to take attention off of what is really happening domestically and sort of instill a sense of patriotism," said Stephanie Kwai of the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

She wasn't the only one to notice.

With "Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads" Ai chooses the zodiac, a symbol of fate and destiny, to sculpt with his own hands as if to say he and he alone will shape his future -- not a government or ruler.

The internationally renowned artist has taken to Twitter in recent years, freely criticizing the Chinese government on various subjects ranging from the lax response to the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan to the Beijing Olympics.

For comments like those he was arrested in April this year and charged with tax evasion. When released in June after more than 80 days, he was sent home under heavy restrictions. He cannot be interviewed by journalists, meet foreigners, use the Internet or interact with rights advocates for a year.

Still, Ai has refused to stay completely silent. Just this week, he wrote a commentary that was published on the website of Newsweek magazine in which he called Beijing, "a city of violence." He criticized the Chinese government for rampant corruption and its policies toward migrant workers.

Fortunately his work can do a lot of his talking for him, in Los Angeles, and beyond. "Zodiac" will travel to Houston, Pittsburgh and Washington, D.C. where each new context will likely bestow new meaning on its audience.

(Editing by Bob Tourtellotte)

vineri, 2 septembrie 2011

Auction house gears up for week of Asian art sales

By Chris Michaud

NEW YORK | Thu Sep 1, 2011 2:34pm EDT

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Precious jade, modern masterpieces, museum-quality furniture and rare ceramics and porcelain are among thousands of art objects on offer during Christie's Asia week sales in September.

The four days of auctions, which are estimated to take in in excess of $50 million, begin September 13 with the South Asian modern and contemporary art and the Indian and Southeast Asian art sales.

The Indian sale is led by a Maqbool Fida Husain's "Sprinkling Horses," a large oil-on-canvas painting estimated to sell for about $1 million.

The auctions conclude with a $19 million sale of rare Chinese ceramics and works of art.

In between, there will be sales of Japanese and Korean art, jade carvings, and property from the collection of Xu Hanqing, a prominent Chinese banker and government official who became known as an accomplished calligrapher.

Asian art, which officials say is a key driver in the global market, has seen strong activity in the past half-year, and the market -- and collectors' -- enthusiasm for Asian art has only grown.

Tina Zonars, Christie's international director of Chinese ceramics and works of art, said the auction house held high expectations for the series of sales featuring art from China, Japan, Korea, India, the Himalayas and South East Asia.

Its most recent Asian art week in March realized its highest total ever in New York, which she called a testament to the "remarkable strength of this market."

Christie's president of Asia, Francois Curiel, recently affirmed that its long-term strategy was to continually reinforce its presence in Asia.

Other highlights of the sales include Emperor Qianlong's Chunhua Ge Tie rubbing, two sets of boxes containing five albums each of rare ink-on-paper Chinese calligraphy, estimated to sell for about $1.2 million at the Xu Hanqing sale, which is expected to total some $7 million.

The two-day sale of Chinese ceramics and works of art is led by a Ming dynasty bronze figurine of Vairocana, expected to fetch $1 million to $1.5 million.

A large, rare white jade covered vase from the Quinlong/Jiaqing period is estimated at $750,000 to $1 million, while Kim Whanki's "Landscape in Blue," the top lot of the Korean art sale, carries a $2 million estimate.

Highlights from the sales will be on view at Christie's Rockefeller Center headquarters in New York for one week starting September 9.

Sotheby's Asian art sales are schedule for September 13-15.

(Reporting by Chris Michaud; editing by Bill Trott)

Gallery finds art by Nazi-branded "degenerate" Dix

Gallery owner Herbert Remmert looks at recently discovered paintings of German artist Otto Dix during an exhibition in his gallery in Duesseldorf, August 31, 2011.

Credit: Reuters/Ina Fassbender

By Natalia Drozdiak

BERLIN | Wed Aug 31, 2011 2:14pm EDT

BERLIN (Reuters) - A gallery has discovered four paintings by Otto Dix, the German expressionist whose art chronicled the horrors of World War One, the depravity of the Weimar Republic and was labeled "degenerate" by Adolf Hitler.

Famous for works critical of the darker side of German society in the 1920s, Dix's paintings were discovered among the belongings of his wife, gallery owner Herbert Remmert told Reuters Wednesday.

The paintings were found in a portfolio untouched for decades on an estate in Bavaria owned by the ancestors of a Duesseldorf doctor and art collector who remained close to Dix even after his wife left him for the artist.

The three watercolors and one painting-study date from the first two years Dix spent in Duesseldorf from 1922-1925.

"This period represents some of the most important years for Otto Dix as an artist," Remmert said. "It was during this time that Dix really developed his themes. Even his technical skills developed -- his watercolor paintings matured and became more refined."

Dix was one of the leading artists of his era. When World War One broke out in 1914, he volunteered for the army and served on various frontlines, including the Somme, until he was wounded and discharged from service in 1918.

He initially produced gruesome drawings and paintings portraying mangled soldiers in battle. As time went on, Dix also became increasingly critical of postwar German society during a period in which soaring inflation meant financial ruin for most.

In his works from the 1920s, he captured the depravity of indulgence and destitution that marked the Weimar Republic.

His famous 1928 triptych "Metropolis," contrasts a crippled veteran surrounded by prostitutes in a Berlin red-light district while rich patrons dance in an American-style jazz club.

When the Nazis took power in 1933, Hitler branded Dix a degenerate and had many of his most important works burned.

Gallery owners Peter Barth and Remmert tracked the works down at the Bavarian estate by accident. They were searching for other art on the estate owned by the daughter and granddaughter of the Duesseldorf collectors Hans and Martha Koch.

Dix became entangled in the lives of the Kochs in Duesseldorf. Hans Koch was a doctor and a leading art collector. Koch's wife, Martha, fell in love with Dix and their affair led her to divorce Koch and leave her two children. Dix later married Martha in 1923.

Hans Koch and Dix nevertheless remained close.

The Remmert gallery in Duesseldorf has collaborated with the family for more than 20 years and has discovered other treasures on the estate. But this is the first Dix discovery.

Last year, Remmert and Barth found a watercolor by Dix contemporary George Grosz titled "Germany, a Winter's Fairytale."

Dix was famous both for his portraits and his dour depictions of Weimar society. The new discoveries will likely add to his legacy.

Among the works found, two watercolors are titled "Naechtens" and "Soubrette" and the third is a large-scale work titled "Strich III," depicting a street-scene with prostitutes.

The fourth work is a study for the portrait of art-dealer Alfred Flechtheim. The famous portrait painted in 1926 currently hangs in the New National gallery in Berlin.

The newly found works are valued at about 200,000 euros ($287,960) each, according to Remmert.

The Remmert gallery plans to show the discovered paintings among other Dix works in an exhibition later this year.

Remmert suspects the Koch estate holds additional undiscovered works. The estate also houses several children's books painted by Dix but the family wants to hold off on releasing them.

"For that, we will have to be a bit more patient," Remmert said.

(Reporting By Natalia Drozdiak; editing by Erik Kirschbaum and Paul Casciato)

Pakistani art makes U.S. debut amid political challenges

By Paula Rogo

NEW YORK | Thu Sep 1, 2011 5:26am EDT

NEW YORK (Reuters) - An exhibit of rare Buddhist sculptures, architectural reliefs and works of gold and bronze opened on Tuesday at the Asia Society Museum after a long and tumultuous journey from Pakistan.

The works, many of which have never been shown before in the United States, are from the historically rich Gandharan region of Pakistan.

They had originally been scheduled to be shown in March but roadblocks, U.S. visa problems for Pakistani officials accompanying the works and a new Pakistani law delayed the opening until this month.

"Bringing the show was a major feat," said Melissa Chiu, the director of the Asia Society's Museum. "Within the political arena, U.S. and Pakistan have had challenges over the past six months to a year. Even if we are not a government organization, this obviously has a broader impact."

Most of the works in the three-month exhibit, "The Buddhist Heritage of Pakistan: Art of Gandhara," are on loan from the National Museum in Karachi and Lahore Museum in Lahore.

Buddhist art flourished in the region, near present-day Peshawar in northwest Pakistan, between the second and fourth centuries.

"It was an early culture. It was a Buddhist culture and it was one of the first occasions where we see Buddha represented in his figurative form," Chiu explained.

Among the highlights of the exhibit are Vision of a Buddha Paradise from the 4th Century and a winged Aphrodite leaning against a pillar from the 1st Century.

Although Pakistan is a strategic ally of the United States, relations between the two nations has been strained since U.S. forces killed al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden in Pakistan on May 2. The raid led to questions about Pakistan's willingness to tackle Islamist militant groups on its soil.

The start of the exhibit was also hampered by a new Pakistani law that shifted decisions about art loans from a central department to the provinces where the museums were located.

"It was not just us on the U.S. side that wanted to bring objects, but people in Pakistan really wanted to see the show happen," Chiu said.

The show is the first Gandharan art exhibit in the United States since 1960 when the Asia Society held the first exhibit on Gandharan sculptures.

"We want people to see the very rich cultural heritage of Pakistan that is lesser known here in the U.S."