1. Brits Fight for Arts Funding
British art-world heavyweights have begun a letter-writing campaign to the government protesting proposed budget cuts for arts funding. Famous patrons like Lord Stevenson argue that philanthropic gifts cannot replace government funds; gallery directors plead for a 10 percent, rather than 25 percent, cut.

Our take: Cutting funding for an industry that yields at least 2 euro for every 1 euro invested isn't just desperate-it's bad business.  
[The Guardian]

2. Medici Cold Case: Solved!
Scientists concluded that Francesco de Medici and his wife Bianca were not poisoned to death, as drama-loving art historians previously believed. After exhuming the bodies of the nearly 400-year-old art patrons in Florence, researchers confirmed the two died of malaria.

Our take: All this anthropological art news is fascinating, but it makes us wonder what Italian scientists could innovate if they weren't picking at the bones of dead Renaissance figures all day.
[Discovery News]

3. Rem Koolhaas to Receive Golden Lion
The Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas-famous for creating buildings that evoke the sentiment, "The future is now"-will receive the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 12th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice.

Our take: The man has been one of Time's 100 Most Influential People and he was knighted into an order established by Napoleon Bonaparte. A Golden Lion just seems logical.

4. Picasso and Chagall Forgery Ring Busted in France
Twelve men involved in a French forgery ring were imprisoned and fined up to $1.2 million for trafficking over 100 fake versions Picasso and Chagall paintings between 1997 and 2005. They approached buyers as down-on-their-luck heirs in need of fast cash.

Our take: Attention, Russia: This is what an art crime looks like! (Clarification: It's not curating a show that includes Jesus with a Mickey Mouse head.)
[AFP]

5. Art World on the Move
More than six galleries will move to new, expanded locations this fall, including two of Chelsea's most prominent galleries, Lombard-Fried and Zach Feuer. Gallerists cite a number of reasons for the geographical shuffle, like low commercial real estate prices, marketing, and increased appeal to artists.
 
Our take: Some say mid-priced galleries are still struggling and paying for their expansions out of savings. It's unclear whether those investments will actually pay off.
[NYO]
 
6. Egon Schiele Restitution Dispute Resolved
After more than a decade of complicated legal action, the Leopold Museum in Vienna agreed to pay $19 million to buy an Egon Schiele painting from the heirs of a Jewish gallery owner from whom the Nazis stole the work in 1938. The painting was seized by the US government while on loan to MoMA in 1997 and held for the duration of the dispute.

Our take: The fact that the dispute took ten years to work out means the only ones really winning here are the organizations' lawyers.
[NYT]

7. Christie's Founds New Art Fair
Christie's will sponsor a fair devoted to contemporary prints, editions, and photographs during the week of London's Frieze Fair in October.  The fair will model itself after the annual Editions/Artists' Book Fair in New York.

Our take: Although the idea of yet another art fair is daunting, Chistie's smartly identified a gap in Frieze's programming and a good opportunity. 
[Bloomberg]

8. Rodarte Collaborates with Catherine Opie on Art Book
The sisters behind the fashion label Rodarte have invited artists such as Catherine Opie and Gregory Krum to interpret their designs through photography for the book "Rodarte: Mondo Rodarte," due out in November.

Our take: The "art-as-side-project" trend hits a new high. (Celebrity fashion lines: out. Fashion fine art projects: in.)
[Artinfo]

9. Aspen Gallerists Accused of Unethical Practices
Several Aspen art galleries were accused of unethical business practices, such as selling slightly altered imitations of work by established local artists signed with fake names and manipulating the market by selling works at a 70 percent discount. So far, the gallerists have been cleared of any wrongdoing; federal prosecutors declined to pursue the case, citing a lack of evidence.

Our take: The story is a case study of the effects of pricing on the art market as a whole. What the gallerists are doing may not be illegal, but it's definitely cheating.
[Aspen Daily News]

10. Art Market on the Rise
According to a survey released by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, art prices are rising in all sectors of the market except ceramics. Price increases in the $75,000-plus bracket doubled in the second quarter of 2010, compared with the first three months of the year.

Our take: Any market recovery is a good thing, but lower to mid-price segments of the market may still be looking at a rough road ahead.
[BBC]

A month earlier, the Nazis had deported Grünbaum to Dachau.

In his absence, Grünbaum’s wife Lilly kept watch over the hundreds of works of art. In September of 1938, the moving and shipping company Schenker & Co. A.G. requested Nazi permission to export the collection on Lilly Grünbaum’s behalf. Stamped with the Schenker insignia and Nazi swastikas, the export license was approved. The receipt for the shipment listed 21 oils, more than a dozen watercolors and nearly 300 drawings.

Grünbaum died in Dachau in 1941. The following year, the Nazis murdered Lilly in Minsk. And Grünbaum’s singularly exquisite collection—including works by Oskar Kokoschka, Max Oppenheimer and Egon Schiele—vanished.

Among the five oils and more than 70 sheet drawings by Schiele was a gouache-and-black-crayon drawing of a headless woman clutching her knee. It has meandered for decades through art galleries and private collections before ending up in the middle of a pitched legal battle in New York’s Southern District court, where two of Grünbaum’s heirs—Leon Fischer, a New York stamp dealer, and Milos Vavra, who lives in Prague—have bickered for two years with the drawing’s owner, David Bakalar.

Now, a key Swiss gallery owner is prepared to give a deposition for the first time about the drawing’s provenance, and the presiding judge has expressed his eagerness to resolve the case.

At the same time, the heirs’ New York lawyer, Ray Dowd, is weighing the potentially momentous step of going after the Viennese company Schenker & Co. A.G.

Schenker’s global network of shipping firms amounts to one of the world’s largest logistics companies, with more than 40,000 employees in dozens of countries and more than $10 billion in turnover a year. Mr. Dowd contends that the company, which serves as the Olympic Games’ official movers, stole the drawing and set in motion a litany of fictitious provenances that skip from Vienna to Brussels, from Bern to New York.

In pursuing Schenker, Mr. Dowd has drawn renewed attention to the company’s unsavory Nazi-era history. At the same time, he has attempted to vastly broaden the definition of looted art to any work once seized or stored by Schenker.

If Mr. Dowd proves his case—which recent developments suggest is a long shot—the result would be a dramatic, even epochal, shift for the collectors of German and Austrian art, including Ronald Lauder, the New York billionaire and avid Schiele collector.

“If that receipt from Schenker is valid and nobody is contesting it, then it [the drawing] was stolen and we win,” said Mr. Dowd, who argues that the company essentially confiscated Grünbaum’s collection. “If Mr. Lauder or any of the other collectors take one of Grünbaum’s Schieles into their hands, they just stepped into the shoes of a thief.”

While the validity of the receipt has gone unchallenged, Mr. Dowd’s opponents point out that there is no proof that Schenker ever physically took possession of the collection. They say that the provenance of the Schiele drawing is clear. After the war, they say, the collection ended up in the hands of Grünbaum’s sister-in-law, Mathilde Lukacs. How she got her hands on it after the Schenker inventory is a mystery, they concede, but the important thing is that the works stayed in the family and then passed legitimately through the art market and into Mr. Bakalar’s hands.

Mr. Dowd, 42, has a history as an agitator. As a Green Party candidate in 2000, he ran an insurgent campaign to remove the all-powerful State Assembly leader, Sheldon Silver, from his downtown district. Mr. Dowd lost, and he has since contented himself with delving into copyright law and representing the likes of Paolo Zampolli, the founder of ID Models and a gossip-page mainstay.

But the case of the allegedly looted Schiele has once again sparked his flammable sense of outrage. This time, Mr. Dowd seems intent on bringing down the firmament of Austrian art collectors and some of the city’s most venerable cultural institutions.

“Schenker was an instrumentality. It was run by Nazis; it was used to plan the invasion of Austria in 1938. I mean, you had people giving their stuff to Schenker with money for export, and they were taking money and putting them on trains and executing them. This is hand-in-hand, in tandem,” said Mr. Dowd, adding: “We’re up against billionaires here. Not just one—it’s billionaire after billionaire. You’ve got major institutions.”

Mr. Lauder, a likely candidate to run for president of the World Jewish Congress, is a prominent advocate for the restitution of art looted from Jews during the Holocaust. A chairman emeritus of the Museum of Modern Art and the co-founder of the Neue Galerie on Fifth Avenue, he has been collecting Schieles since his bar mitzvah years.

Mr. Dowd says that those credentials make the opacity of Mr. Lauder’s private collection and the shrouded provenance of his present or past Schiele paintings all the more troubling.

Renée Price, the director of the Neue Galerie, pointed out that in 2006, the court rejected Mr. Dowd’s attempts to include the museum in his suit.

“It has been clearly established that the only works in question with any connection either to Mr. Lauder or to the Neue Galerie—two drawings by Egon Schiele—were sold at auction by Mr. Grünbaum’s sister-in-law, not looted by Nazis,” Ms. Price said in a statement. She added that “Ronald Lauder has been an international leader in getting stolen art back to its rightful owners—doing more, investing more and accomplishing more than nearly anyone else.”

Mr. Dowd’s other critics—some of them prominent gallery owners whom he has accused of being fences for the Nazis or exploiters of Holocaust plunder because they bought works from the Grünbaum collection—have responded with assertions that his case is “ludicrous,” a “smokescreen” and “irrelevant.”

MR. DOWD'S CASE SUFFERED A SETBACK on the afternoon of Friday, Feb. 9, when he appeared with lawyers for Schenker’s New York affiliate and for the drawing’s owner, Mr. Bakalar, in courtroom 11D of a federal courthouse on Pearl Street. While the two white-haired attorneys representing white-shoe law firms chatted amiably on the soft crimson carpet, Mr. Dowd hunched over documents in his chair.

Immediately after rising to the lectern, Mr. Dowd, dressed in a subtle pinstripe suit and burgundy tie, hammered on the importance of the Schenker receipt.

“It sounds wild and preposterous, I admit, but these are Schenker’s documents themselves. If there is a thief in the chain of property here, it is stolen,” said Mr. Dowd. “We have shown that Schenker & Co. received all of these Schieles.”

Mr. Dowd offered arguments that Schenker’s American affiliate should be held responsible for the theft, despite being formed nearly 10 years after the Austrian company’s alleged crime against Fritz Grünbaum. The case’s presiding judge, William H. Pauley III, responded with a mocking smirk.

“I want to know what Schenker Inc., which was formed and sprang into being in 1947, did,” Judge Pauley said deliberately.

He then dismissed all of the claims against the American Schenker affiliate, effectively removing from the case the alleged perpetrator upon which Mr. Dowd has based much of his argument. Mr. Dowd’s only recourse now would be going after Schenker’s European headquarters, a much more arduous legal challenge involving international diplomacy and painstaking negotiations.

Only minutes after the judge dealt this blow to his case, Mr. Dowd sat in a restaurant a few blocks from the court and pondered the difficulties of holding Schenker & Co. A.G. accountable.

“I’ll have to now take another look at my options and see whether there is room for us to serve Schenker A.G.,” said Mr. Dowd, later adding about the Grünbaum drawing: “They have a receipt that they got it. They let it go somewhere. Where is the receipt that shows who they gave it to?”

For its part, the company said that if there ever was a receipt, it is long gone.

“We do not have the painting, and we do not have any documentation,” said Dr. Gerhard Lipowec, the general counsel for Schenker & Co. A.G. “The first point is that, according to Austrian law, all Austrians are obliged to keep their records for seven years.”

He said that many more years than that had passed, and that Allied bombing raids had destroyed the company’s headquarters and warehouses during the war.

“We do not have any paper records,” he said, adding that if Mr. Dowd attempted to investigate or take legal action against the company, “we have to react. We have to defend ourselves.”

According to Mr. Lipowec, “there has not been” a class-action lawsuit or a major settlement with Holocaust survivors or heirs involving the company. In 1999, though, Schenker authorized a group of historians to write an account of the company’s activities in the years leading up to and including the Nazi era.

According to that report, the company’s namesake, Gottfried Schenker, founded the forwarding firm in Vienna with two Jewish partners in 1872. In 1931, the German National Railway secretly acquired Schenker under the guise of a Zurich holding company in order to avoid paying further World War I reparations to the Allies. As a result of the takeover, central management of the company moved from Vienna to Berlin. Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, and by 1935 the company was under a new, more sinister management.

The Nazi leadership forced the appointment of Dr. Edmund Veesenmayer to the company’s board. A talented economist, he was also an SS member trusted by the German leadership with establishing local Nazi groups in Vienna before the 1938 Anschluss. (Hence Mr. Dowd’s claim that Schenker helped plan the German annexation of Austria.) Veesenmayer later went on to greater infamy in the Foreign Service. In 1941, he moved to Zagreb and played a major role in the deportation of Serbian Jews. In 1944, he oversaw the deportation of Hungarian Jews to concentration camps.

“He was a behind-the-scenes man,” said Efraim Zuroff, a war-crimes expert with the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

Throughout much of his notorious career, Veesenmayer kept his job on Schenker’s governing board. In the meantime, all the company’s Jewish workers were purged, and Schenker began storing and shipping art looted by Nazis.

“Essentially, they were a transport company, and the Nazis used them to transport the stolen art,” said Hector Feliciano, author of The Lost Museum: The Nazi Conspiracy to Steal the World’s Greatest Works of Art. “There was no way that they didn’t know.”

Schenker is not a new name to historians of art pilfered during the Holocaust.

According to Sarah Jackson, the historic-claims director at the Art Loss Register, a London-based group that tracks lost or stolen works of art, the name Schenker on the back of a picture is a “red flag” for a collector to question its provenance.

“We have certainly heard their name before in relation to works of art put into storage with intended shipment by Jewish families to get out of Austria,” Ms. Jackson said. “A number of the shipping companies worked with the Gestapo—a unit called the Vugesta—to make sure that the works were impounded in Austria and never got to their intended destination.”

Greg Bradsher, a senior archivist with the National Archives and Records Administration, who oversaw the agency’s Holocaust-assets project, said that he’s long considered Schenker the “Mayflower Movers” of the Nazi regime.

FOR MR. BAKALAR'S LAWYERS, the entire mystery surrounding Schenker amounts to a fanciful distraction.

Jim Janowitz, a partner at Pryor, Cashman, Sherman & Flynn, argues that the Schenker receipt upon which Mr. Dowd has based his accusations never specifically identifies the Schiele drawing in question.

“The work of art never fell into the hands of Schenker,” said Mr. Janowitz, pointing out that the receipt only lists the works in broad categories such as oil paintings, drawings or prints. “You can’t assume that our work of art was included in that group, and there is every reason to think that it was not.”

Mr. Janowitz asserted that, despite Mr. Dowd’s “smokescreen,” the provenance is readily apparent.

After the appraisal and disappearance of Fritz Grünbaum’s collection in 1938, the drawing next appeared in 1956 in Switzerland, in a gallery owned by Eberhard Kornfeld. Mr. Kornfeld has said he bought the drawing, along with many other Schiele works, from a Brussels-based woman named Mathilde Lukacs. Only decades later, he has said, did he discover that Lukacs was the older sister of Grünbaum’s wife, Lilly, whose name appears on the Schenker receipt.

Mr. Dowd says that Mr. Kornfeld is a deceitful profiteer of plundered Jewish art who attempted to invent a provenance by forging signatures and otherwise falsifying records, including the purported correspondence with Lukacs. For the first time, Mr. Kornfeld, who is now in his 80’s, is prepared to give a deposition for the New York court. Mr. Janowitz expects him to testify as early as April and thinks that the case could be decided within the year.

“Here in Switzerland, a deposition will be made, and the originals will be put on the table,” said Mr. Kornfeld’s lawyer, Dr. Peter Bratschi. “It is said that the drawing has not been handed over by Mathilde Lukacs. And Mr. Kornfeld says that it is wrong, that the paintings were given to him by this person.”

In 1956, Mr. Kornfeld sold the drawing to the New York collector Otto Kallir. Like Grünbaum, Kallir was an active collector of Schiele who founded, in 1923, Vienna’s Neue Galerie (after which Mr. Lauder’s New York museum is named). Kallir fled Vienna in 1938 and became one of the many Jewish refugees to set up shop in New York, eventually opening the Galerie St. Etienne in 1939 and mounting the country’s first major Schiele exhibits.

“It was like being in Vienna,” said Jane Kallir, remembering her grandfather’s apartments. “You were surrounded by Austrian furniture and art.”

Ms. Kallir inherited much of it, as well as the gallery and a library of sensitive information. Mr. Dowd accuses her of withholding the present whereabouts of Schieles connected to the Grünbaum collection. He also alleges that Ms. Kallir’s grandfather knew Grünbaum well enough to recognize the pieces from his collection when they came up for sale in the 1950’s.

“He knew him, but not well,” said Ms. Kallir, who literally wrote the book on Schiele, a 719-page catalogue raisonné published in 1990. “To know someone and to remember exactly what they owned decades later is a different thing.”

Her gallery, on 57th street off Fifth Avenue, is just a few blocks from Mr. Lauder’s office atop the General Motors building. It is a bright and roomy space showing etchings by Picasso and Kiki Smith and lithographs by Chagall and Kokoschka on display.

But it is Austrian art, and Schiele in particular, for which the gallery is best known. And Mr. Dowd’s case has made a committed adversary out of Ms. Kallir, its influential and widely esteemed owner.

On Thursday, Feb. 8, Ms. Kallir, a petite, gray-haired woman dressed in an orange sweater, charcoal skirt and gold-and-pearl necklace, sat in her office in the back of the gallery, surrounded by pencil drawings and bookcases crammed with volumes on Austrian art.

Ms. Kallir said that she had spent about $100,000 in legal fees in the 10 years since people started questioning the provenance of Schiele works owned and sold by her gallery—a fact that frustrates her, because of what she said was the role she’s played in helping to restore looted paintings to their rightful Jewish owners. She is the expert witness for the government in the case involving the Portrait of Wally, a Schiele painting that was on loan to MoMA and then seized in 1998 by District Attorney Robert Morgenthau’s office, after a claim arose from a Jewish family.

“I’m the farthest thing from an art looter that you can find,” said Ms. Kallir, opening a beaten-up copy of her catalog, bound in orange leather, and pointing to drawing No. 1974: the headless female figure dressed in bloomers and clasping a folded leg.

Talking about the present case over this drawing, she added: “We are crossing a line now between just restitution and coercion.”

She sees Mr. Dowd’s attempt to incriminate Schenker & Co. A.G. as both desperate and dangerous, considering how many collectors and institutions possess works that were once potentially stored with or shipped by the company.

“That’s just way too broad a statement to make,” she said. “And it’s never going to be provable.”

That very same conclusion seemed to be nagging at Mr. Dowd after his setback in court on Friday afternoon. He couldn’t help but wonder whether his clients would have the necessary patience—and if even he could sustain the necessary indignation—to go after a multinational corporation of Schenker’s size and scope.

“We have to see if we have the will and the resolve and the resources to pursue Schenker,” he said, adding: “There is a little bit of the tilting at windmills going on.”

Once upon a time, a fellow billionaire asked Mr. Trump why he’d never amassed a collection of art. Why, in fact, wasn’t he interested in art at all? “You know what a Van Gogh is?” asked an annoyed Mr. Trump in return. “It’s a piece of cloth with some colored mud on it.”

The story is probably apocryphal, but anyone who’s watched The Apprentice will recognize the brusque and dismissive reply as being perfectly in character.

So there he was, The Donald, haunting me as I gazed at the most expensive painting in the world. One hundred and thirty-five million dollars, he whispered in my ear. That’s a lot of money for a piece of cloth with some colored mud on it.

Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907) is a feather in the cap of the Neue Galerie, the Upper East Side jewel-box museum devoted to early 20th-century Germanic art. Certainly the purchase of the painting by Ronald S. Lauder, the cosmetics heir who founded the museum, provided plenty of boffo media coverage.

The art of Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) straddles the 19th and 20th centuries—and yet he’s not quite a Modernist. His serpentine compositions, sickly eroticism and decorative flair are beholden to academic precedent and too self-conscious to completely reimagine or revitalize artistic form. A misplaced experimentation, not forward propulsion, defines the oeuvre. Compared to Bonnard or Matisse, Klimt is just a bit stodgy.

All the same, the development of 20th-century Austrian art is inconceivable without him: He co-founded the Vienna Secession in 1897 (roughly speaking, the Austrian stylistic equivalent of Art Nouveau); he was mentor to the exceptionally gifted and eternally adolescent Egon Schiele; and Klimt’s paintings, never less than accomplished, are often magnificent, particularly the landscapes.

But in the greater scheme of things, Klimt is small potatoes. Forget Modernism: If $135 million is considered a commendable investment for a picture by a minor artist, what price tag do we put on a painting by Fra Angelico, a sculpture by Donatello or a drawing by Durer? The question is undoubtedly lodged in the overexcited minds of museums, collectors and auction houses the world over.

To entertain the question at all is to risk making art an adjunct to capital. The relationship between art and money—or power—began on Day 1. (You’d best believe the tribal chieftain had something to say about the paintings daubed on the cave wall.) Yet the greatest works of art have an independence that thrives outside the dictates of wealth, prestige or dogma. This is what has always pissed off those who would seek to control it: Art is alive in a way that confounds practical consideration. Art fetches obscene amounts of money for a reason: Though freedom is impossible to quantify, its presence is real, its value indisputable. Some things can’t be bought. Ponying up $135 million for a painting is, in a roundabout way, an admission of defeat.

There’s another, more heartening story about the Neue Galerie’s newly acquired prize. Adele Bloch-Bauer I—along with four other Klimt paintings—has only recently been returned to the heirs of the Bloch-Bauer family after having been looted by the Nazis.

Though the official line condemned “degenerate” modern art, the Nazis liked these particular Klimts enough to claim them as their own. The pictures wound up in Vienna’s Österreichische Galerie Belvedere. Attempts to recover them led to the United States Supreme Court, and ultimately Austria returned the pictures to the Bloch-Bauer family. It’s hard not to find a certain satisfaction in history having come full circle.

It might be impolitic, after all the money lavished on it, to note that of all the Klimt paintings on view at the Neue Galerie, Adele Bloch-Bauer I is the least interesting. It’s a flashy performance, that’s for sure. Klimt was savvy enough to flatter his subject and do so with bells and whistles.

Compare Adele Bloch-Bauer’s features as seen in an adjacent photograph to the subtle, yet marked, stylizations of the painting. Lips and eyes are enlarged; the face is ascetic and lean. The body is engulfed by a Byzantine field of gold leaf, silver and an ascending array of geometric motifs and abstracted eyes, vaguely Egyptian in character. Klimt’s idealization of Adele, not to mention the painting’s over-the-top ornamentation, is almost ridiculously erotic. Did the painter and his subject have an affair? Standing in front of the canvas, the question seems a no-brainer.

Less showy, and considerably more satisfying, are the four other paintings from the estate, three landscapes and the only other portrait that Klimt painted of Adele. In Adele Bloch-Bauer II (1912), decorative overkill is stifled by a consistent application of oil paint. Leaving the gold leaf and silver well enough alone, Klimt did history a favor by being truer to the art of painting, not to mention the physical characteristics of his subject.

In the landscapes, Klimt achieves a frazzled intensity with his pitter-pat brushwork, transforming the lessons of Impressionism (especially Seurat’s Pointillism) into a veritable pressure cooker of spiritual portent. Houses at Unterach on the Attersee (c. 1916) is as solid as a stained-glass window, Birch Forest (1903) as memorable as the most disquieting of dreams. Apple Tree I (1912), with its gentle, umbrella-like composition, has both the charm and the menace we associate with the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm.

The hubbub surrounding Adele Bloch-Bauer I will die down; the painting will become less burdensome to consider. The Neue Galerie has filled out a rather specialized collection, and the overpriced Klimt will claim its place as the centerpiece. Yet a nagging question remains: Are inflated prices for art an indication of a culture’s well-being or a symptom of its insecurities? Donald Trump couldn’t care less. The rest of us should.

Gustav Klimt: Five Paintings from the Collection of Ferdinand and Adele Bloch-Bauer is at the Neue Galerie, 1048 Fifth Avenue at 86th Street, until Sept. 18.

Once upon a time, a fellow billionaire asked Mr. Trump why he’d never amassed a collection of art. Why, in fact, wasn’t he interested in art at all? “You know what a Van Gogh is?” asked an annoyed Mr. Trump in return. “It’s a piece of cloth with some colored mud on it.”

The story is probably apocryphal, but anyone who’s watched The Apprentice will recognize the brusque and dismissive reply as being perfectly in character.

So there he was, The Donald, haunting me as I gazed at the most expensive painting in the world. One hundred and thirty-five million dollars, he whispered in my ear. That’s a lot of money for a piece of cloth with some colored mud on it.

Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907) is a feather in the cap of the Neue Galerie, the Upper East Side jewel-box museum devoted to early 20th-century Germanic art. Certainly the purchase of the painting by Ronald S. Lauder, the cosmetics heir who founded the museum, provided plenty of boffo media coverage.

The art of Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) straddles the 19th and 20th centuries—and yet he’s not quite a Modernist. His serpentine compositions, sickly eroticism and decorative flair are beholden to academic precedent and too self-conscious to completely reimagine or revitalize artistic form. A misplaced experimentation, not forward propulsion, defines the oeuvre. Compared to Bonnard or Matisse, Klimt is just a bit stodgy.

All the same, the development of 20th-century Austrian art is inconceivable without him: He co-founded the Vienna Secession in 1897 (roughly speaking, the Austrian stylistic equivalent of Art Nouveau); he was mentor to the exceptionally gifted and eternally adolescent Egon Schiele; and Klimt’s paintings, never less than accomplished, are often magnificent, particularly the landscapes.

But in the greater scheme of things, Klimt is small potatoes. Forget Modernism: If $135 million is considered a commendable investment for a picture by a minor artist, what price tag do we put on a painting by Fra Angelico, a sculpture by Donatello or a drawing by Durer? The question is undoubtedly lodged in the overexcited minds of museums, collectors and auction houses the world over.

To entertain the question at all is to risk making art an adjunct to capital. The relationship between art and money—or power—began on Day 1. (You’d best believe the tribal chieftain had something to say about the paintings daubed on the cave wall.) Yet the greatest works of art have an independence that thrives outside the dictates of wealth, prestige or dogma. This is what has always pissed off those who would seek to control it: Art is alive in a way that confounds practical consideration. Art fetches obscene amounts of money for a reason: Though freedom is impossible to quantify, its presence is real, its value indisputable. Some things can’t be bought. Ponying up $135 million for a painting is, in a roundabout way, an admission of defeat.

There’s another, more heartening story about the Neue Galerie’s newly acquired prize. Adele Bloch-Bauer I—along with four other Klimt paintings—has only recently been returned to the heirs of the Bloch-Bauer family after having been looted by the Nazis.

Though the official line condemned “degenerate” modern art, the Nazis liked these particular Klimts enough to claim them as their own. The pictures wound up in Vienna’s Österreichische Galerie Belvedere. Attempts to recover them led to the United States Supreme Court, and ultimately Austria returned the pictures to the Bloch-Bauer family. It’s hard not to find a certain satisfaction in history having come full circle.

It might be impolitic, after all the money lavished on it, to note that of all the Klimt paintings on view at the Neue Galerie, Adele Bloch-Bauer I is the least interesting. It’s a flashy performance, that’s for sure. Klimt was savvy enough to flatter his subject and do so with bells and whistles.

Compare Adele Bloch-Bauer’s features as seen in an adjacent photograph to the subtle, yet marked, stylizations of the painting. Lips and eyes are enlarged; the face is ascetic and lean. The body is engulfed by a Byzantine field of gold leaf, silver and an ascending array of geometric motifs and abstracted eyes, vaguely Egyptian in character. Klimt’s idealization of Adele, not to mention the painting’s over-the-top ornamentation, is almost ridiculously erotic. Did the painter and his subject have an affair? Standing in front of the canvas, the question seems a no-brainer.

Less showy, and considerably more satisfying, are the four other paintings from the estate, three landscapes and the only other portrait that Klimt painted of Adele. In Adele Bloch-Bauer II (1912), decorative overkill is stifled by a consistent application of oil paint. Leaving the gold leaf and silver well enough alone, Klimt did history a favor by being truer to the art of painting, not to mention the physical characteristics of his subject.

In the landscapes, Klimt achieves a frazzled intensity with his pitter-pat brushwork, transforming the lessons of Impressionism (especially Seurat’s Pointillism) into a veritable pressure cooker of spiritual portent. Houses at Unterach on the Attersee (c. 1916) is as solid as a stained-glass window, Birch Forest (1903) as memorable as the most disquieting of dreams. Apple Tree I (1912), with its gentle, umbrella-like composition, has both the charm and the menace we associate with the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm.

The hubbub surrounding Adele Bloch-Bauer I will die down; the painting will become less burdensome to consider. The Neue Galerie has filled out a rather specialized collection, and the overpriced Klimt will claim its place as the centerpiece. Yet a nagging question remains: Are inflated prices for art an indication of a culture’s well-being or a symptom of its insecurities? Donald Trump couldn’t care less. The rest of us should.

Gustav Klimt: Five Paintings from the Collection of Ferdinand and Adele Bloch-Bauer is at the Neue Galerie, 1048 Fifth Avenue at 86th Street, until Sept. 18.

The mystery and wonder of Klee’s work is easier to stomach than Schiele’s unapologetic narcissism—no surprise there, really—but the work isn’t without limitations. If anything, Klee and America confirms the Swiss artist’s minor standing even as it highlights his almost unerring acuity.

The exhibition traces the reception of Klee’s art in the United States, a country he never visited and, apparently, never had any interest in visiting. Though an enthusiastic audience eventually coalesced here, it was slow in coming. His influence on the burgeoning movement that came to be known as Abstract Expressionism was pivotal, but his work was too modern and, perhaps, too idiosyncratic to make early headway in the States.

A “strange meteor from Switzerland” is how Henry McBride, writing in 1924 for the New York Herald, described Klee. It’s a phrase that nicely underscores the artist’s startling otherness. As his fortunes fell in Europe, due largely to Hitler’s campaign against “degenerate art,” Americans would come to embrace him as “one of the greatest child/poets in the world” (as Diego Rivera put it).

The full story is told in the sizable catalog. A small side gallery dutifully displays photographs of Klee’s American admirers, along with explanatory texts. (The photos feature, among others, Rivera and a stunningly beautiful Frida Kahlo, playwright Clifford Odets, MoMA spearhead Alfred Barr, and important collectors like Katharine Drier and Louise and Walter Arensberg.) The real impetus for the exhibition, though, is to gather choice works by one of the most beloved painters of the 20th century.

Given the diverse charms of Klee’s art, that’s not such a bad deal. His precisely rendered miniaturist tableaus are an elusive mix of parable, reverie and fairy tale. The lessons of Modernism, particularly those of Picasso and Robert Delaunay, are easy to discern. After that, the work goes global. The cross-cultural references are broad, but they’re incorporated seamlessly and uncannily. Every time you catch yourself snagging on this or that influence—Byzantine designs, Native American totems or Egyptian hieroglyphs—Klee’s witty and elusive fictions whisk it away.

Titles count for a lot: Fool in Christ, Agricultural Research Station for Late Autumn, Sacred Islands, Owl Comedy, The Whole Is Dimming—these aren’t explanatory captions, but specific poetic renderings of the quizzical, often absurd events pictured. This verbal precision matches Klee’s approach to pictorial form. Whether orchestrating a field of staccato brushstrokes or scrubbing oils into a coarsely woven jute support, he instinctively took the pithiest route to embodying a given motif. His visionary intent was inseparable from his confidence with means and materials.

For a while, anyway. Ultimately, Klee’s sophistication as a painter is less a boon than an obstacle. His fantasies are diminished by an almost machine-like proficiency. The handling of materials, while always fetching, is surprisingly prefab. The grainy, pinkish ground of Gifts for J (1928) and the ghostly smudges of oil transfer in Abstract Trio (1923) aren’t consequences of painterly exploration but effects expertly put into place. Contrivance hampers the vitality of Klee’s intricate, toy-like symbolism. The pictures begin to feel rickety, their poetry thin, their emotions false.

The resulting loss of tone—of magic, really—is disheartening. Nonetheless, Klee’s allure as a painter remains intact. There are beautiful pictures full of oddball lyricism included at the Neue Galerie. Sacred Islands (1926), Red Balloon (1922), Cold City (1921) and Fear (1934), with its cosmic, all-seeing eye, are glories of concision, touch and allusion. Klee and America may prompt a niggling disenchantment, but it’s a modestly winning exhibition all the same. Small pleasures are better than no pleasure at all.

Klee and America is at the Neue Galerie, 1048 Fifth Avenue, until May 22.

Taking Action

There are few greater satisfactions a critic can experience than being wrong—that is, if being wrong affirms the greater cultural good. Six years ago, I complained that the paintings of veteran West Coast artist Ed Moses were “flimsy,” “overbearing and slick.” Walking through the Jacobson Howard Gallery, which is exhibiting some of Mr. Moses’ canvases from the late 1980’s (and one from the early 90’s), a question came to mind: What was I thinking?

The paintings, particularly those in the gallery’s second-floor space, are visceral but elegant, harsh but lyrical. Mr. Moses works in a familiar mode—action painting, with its play-it-where-it-lays, go-with-the-flow ethos. But it’s thrilling to see how he deepens tradition with an eye trained on history and a foot putting the pedal to the metal.

Mr. Moses may take umbrage at the “action painting” tag. Harold Rosenberg invented that conceit for his buddy Willem de Kooning; from Day 1, it was a wrongheaded bit of P.R. privileging self-expression over aesthetic resolution. “Zen boogy woogy”—Mr. Moses’ description of his method—is better; it reveals a self-deprecating sense of humor. Existentialist BS isn’t on the agenda.

Yet Mr. Moses does surrender himself to process. The pictures are literally painted with a broad brush (or sometimes a squeegee). Great swaths of black, white and ocher, along with teasing slurs of red and pink, cascade from the top of each canvas, creating supple elisions of space and atmosphere. The canvases are as tangled and dense as swamps and as immediate and raw as graffiti-covered walls.

Miró is in the mix, particularly in Mr. Moses’ use of black, as are the exquisite spontaneity and keen attention to tone characteristic of Asian art. How you regard the pictures will depend on how much you value innovation or, more accurately, novelty. The paintings are inconceivable without the examples of Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell and Barnett Newman. For my money, you can keep them all: Mr. Moses’ art expresses greater breadth, nuance and accomplishment. To hell with who was there first—Mr. Moses deserves a place in the firmament. Perhaps this exhibition will help get him there.

Ed Moses: The Dune Series is at the Jacobson Howard Gallery, 22 East 72nd Street, until March 31.

“If it wasn’t for this snowstorm, we’d probably have more of the Beverly Hills crowd flying in, and it’d be even sicker. But it’s always pretty wild,” said Matt—he didn’t give a last name—the men’s-room attendant at the nightclub Marquee. He was dressed in a white three-piece suit for work, and his voice was bassy and radio-announcer reassuring. “Looking sharp,” said a well-dressed man as he took a paper towel from Matt to dry his hands. He dropped a $20 in Matt’s tip jar. “Thought I’d dress up for the anniversary party, man,” Matt said, smiling broadly. “How’s that Hummer cologne?” the ad man asked, pointing at a bottle in the middle of a cluster of colognes. “Nice,” Matt said, but the man was wearing his own cologne already, and he declined to sample it.

“We get people in here wearing incredible fashions,” Matt said, “and I ask them where they got that suit, or those shoes, and they say London, or some secret place in Soho, and I go there and I see. It’s like with the colognes—I like to try to have the really best and the newest so people will say, ‘Oh, you’ve got that already?’ And I say, ‘Mm-hmm.’ It’s like a game we play, a little game of always keeping up on top. And that keeps you going till the wee hours of the morning, polishing up your game.”

It was about 10:30 last Thursday night, and the relentlessly celebrity-studded nightclub was still pretty dead. That night was a party for the club’s second anniversary, and the main players wouldn’t make their entrances until midnight or later. In the club itself, an abiding sense of the nervous lack of energy that fills the high-school prom before the jocks and cheerleaders and good-looking kids show up and start high-fiving and making out and spiking the punch suffused the main room.

A group of execs warmed themselves around a $325 bottle of Belvedere at a banquette in the room’s center. Snow was called for that evening; inside, giant cutouts of snowflakes hung from the ceiling, adding a layer of Christmas Eve anticipation to the night, and the silver buckets with black napkins draped over them for bottle service were all lined up with care. The D.J. played a bewildering and joylessly nostalgic mix of New Wave and 90’s party house music at high volume.

Back in the men’s room: “You always get the regulars—Paris, Leo, they all come here,” Matt said. “One of the reasons people come to the Marquee is that they read a lot about it in Page Six, and this is a town that’s so driven by celebrity and parties. We continue that 80’s party atmosphere, and a lot of people come for that allure. And they say, ‘I can’t believe I’m seeing this person or that person, I can’t believe I’m here.’

“And even though New York is such a big town,” Matt said, “you still get this same group in here week after week. What happens is that we’ve come to know them so much, we see them more than we see our own families. Like last week we had Britney and Kevin and Bruce Willis and Paris. Those same people you read about come here—I guess they come here because it’s one of the last bastions where you still have that party atmosphere and that energy every night.

“Me,” Matt said, “I’m from Philadelphia. I came to New York for the energy, and because I’m nocturnal.

“I was so driven because I always heard about the New York nightlife in the 80’s: Studio 54, all those places you read about when you grew up—it was like Disneyland. And there, they always need something bigger and better than the last generation had, the new ride. And when you come here, you’re looking for that new ride, and we provide that. And even if you had a bad day, you come here and you get caught up in this energy, and you forget about your problems.”

“It’s an escape from reality,” a man in a brown suit, sun-kissed highlights in his hair, shot over his shoulder as he walked out of a stall. There was a certain fatigue in his voice, the sound of a man exhausted from the demands of a life lived among the less-than-dazzling. Maybe it reflected a schism between the Technicolor fantasy of what he thought adulthood was going to be like and the relentless, surprisingly tedious grind that so many find it to be.

“You see,” said Matt, “it’s the 2000’s version of ‘I’ve arrived.’ It’s like, you went to school for so long—say you went to Harvard, and now you’ve got a job at Salomon Brothers—and it’s like, ‘Where can I go to celebrate?’ And this is where they all come, until 4 in the morning. And unlike L.A., where it’s only people from television or from the movies, here you’ve got all these type-A personalities from fashion, Wall Street, the media, music, and they all come here and they all know each other. And they can talk about everything—they can talk about fashion, they can talk about Madison Avenue. It’s where hype meets hype, and the expectations are met, and you all know what you’re talking about. It’s cross-pollination—you say, ‘I’ll take what this group is talking about over drinks in this corner, and I’ll take it back to my corner.’ You look for someone to give you that catalyst to keep you going, that little spark.”

Out in the main room, the social temperature had risen significantly. The faithful had begun to file in, and the faint whiff of loneliness was replaced by an electrical affirmation. Perhaps because The New York Times had run a piece in Thursday Styles that morning about the sense of power and self-assurance that wearing only a sports coat conveyed, a lot of guys in line only had ski caps or scarves or gloves to check, and girls in little dresses fresh from car services and limos walked straight in, nearly blue from cold and clutching at their too-slender sides, like shivering presents waiting to be opened.

Within a few moments, the actor Scott Speedman and his almost unnaturally good-looking entourage had been whisked to a banquette in the back room. Names arrived: Chloë Sevigny, Paul Sevigny, Dylan Lauren, Chris Heinz. When Simple Minds’ timeless and adolescent plea for freedom and affirmation and recognition, “Don’t You (Forget About Me),” boomed over the sound system, those in the crowd who weren’t frantically sending text messages went pretty near crazy. Three guys in suits and loosened ties punched their arms into the air just like Judd Nelson’s misunderstood burnout in the final freeze frame of The Breakfast Club. The nostalgic theme of the music began to make sense.

This was where these people came to have their idealized teenage aspirations authenticated; where being in the presence of models, and movie stars, and all the people they read a lot about in Page Six, made righteous sense of their choice to leave their unpopular friends behind and go to their fancy colleges and devote themselves wholly to their fabulous and exhausting careers.

And outside, a throng of party hopefuls shivered and charmed and cursed in the wind. A man in a camel-hair coat gave up and walked away from the throng, muttering, “Asshole.” It was a sharp reminder that for a party to be exclusive, it is required that some are not called. For some to be on the supercharged, glittering inside where every night is like Christmas, many more would have to be left on the sidewalk outside, in the cold, waiting for the snow to fall.

—Jason Rowan

A Gala

On Thursday, the not-so-Neue Galerie celebrated its fourth annual Winter Gala. The gala, which is sponsored by a different something every year—this time it was Gucci—has become a curiously fashionable cocktail party overpopulated with supermodels and dirty hems.

This year, for the first time, an “intimate” dinner had been arranged for the lucky chairwomen and their hangers-on in the second floor’s main room. One chairwoman, Gwyneth Paltrow, didn’t attend; she was “otherwise committed.”

Once the dinner ended in time for the gala’s official 9 p.m. start, the usual alpha suspects—Aerin Lauder Zinterhofer, Lauren duPont and Renee Rockefeller—and their favorite fantasy dates, the dreamy design duo Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, made way for the betas like Zani Gugelman, Coralie Charriol and Fabiola Beracasa.

The shiny black tables—seating for 50—remained empty and unwieldy as the after-dinner hoards arrived. Three trays containing Sachertorte and similarly pernicious treats tumbled and crashed to the ground.

Downstairs, Luke Janklow and his wife danced on the edge of an otherwise empty dance floor in the museum’s canteen turned discotheque, Café Sabarsky. A heavily beaded and feathered octogenarian refused to identify herself as she twirled her arms into mysterious shapes in front of a large mirror. “It’s a bit much to ask people to wear black tie to a cocktail party, don’t you think?” a social type was overheard saying. Her train was promptly stepped upon. Amanda Cutter Brooks, with the collected plumage of three magpies on each shoulder, explained that she had been waiting a lifetime to wear this, her mother’s old frock. Liya Kebede, the good-willing, child-bearing Estée Lauder “spokeswoman,” breezed past in a transparent black gown, floor-length. She had presided over dinner. A great deal of attention was paid to the bar, slow, and very little to the paintings by Egon Schiele, oooh, that currently adorned the walls. “I’m so bored,” a young man said. “It’s definitely not cute,” said his friend, as more guests crushed into the room. “Can we smoke in here?”

Before midnight, guests filed out into the cold, into waiting town cars destined for that No-Chel standby, Bungalow 8. Gift bags containing scented Gucci candles were provided as parting gifts. “Smells like the cheapest deodorant ever,” said the young man. “I’m leaving it.”

—Jessica Joffe

Last week Monday, which was Halloween, Tracey Emin’s new drawings were already in place in her gallery, Lehmann Maupin. But her new neon work was still being manufactured, though the exhibition would open on Saturday night. One piece, Sleeping with You, was being modeled from a long, jagged line that she had drawn on the wall by hand, and would be revealed on Saturday as a saddening and pretty falling streak of white light.

In her second and most recent solo show in New York, just back in 2002, the neon was blue and had spelled out the words “People like you need to fuck people like me.”

Things were still being put into place on Monday morning, like a small, worn trolley cart filled with what looked like splintered lattice slats. Also, one unwitting preparator had moved a sculpture that morning, resulting in a bit of being yelled at by Ms. Emin. “I asked him if he knew exactly where it had been, and he didn’t,” she said later. “And neither did I.”

After that, her tall art dealer, David Maupin, peeled off a few hundred bucks in cash—some walking-around money—and sent Ms. Emin out to the black car waiting.

In the car, distressed, she talked on the phone. At the gallery, she had been exhausted, and eagle-eyed for any signs of things about to go wrong: with the day’s lunch, with the show itself, with anyone’s behavior—a hyper-vigilance for disaster. She wore sneakers and black pinstripe pants; a little sea-foam sweater over her low-riding black strap top; a big, beige, knee-length London-chichi veloury and furry coat; and a gold necklace and earrings.

She has a gorgeous, scrunchy face, eyelashes like a giraffe, and a famously harsh and fun Margate accent that has mellowed with time. She is famously fearsome, and has been engaged in a war with notoriety for much of the last decade—a war fought mostly with herself, and only then incidentally documented by the tabloids. Much of that war was also fought with chemicals and sex. In London, she has been, for most of the last eight or so years, treated (to make an American translation) as a cross between Paris Hilton and Elizabeth Taylor—a damaged goddess, drunk and disorderly, both scorn-worthy and a boldface name that moves papers. Her famous Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-95—believed to have been destroyed in the famous Saatchi warehouse fire in 2004—was a tent embroidered with names that met the title’s description, and was widely construed to be about penetration rather than what it actually was: a more domestic and straightforward use of the word “slept.”

The playwright Christopher Shinn once said something about why people think actors are crazy that applies to Ms. Emin as well: It’s because they openly face horror every day, and this disgusts and embarrasses people. Ms. Emin is also described by associates as a diva, and she said much the same thing herself, with a twist: “I am an icon for gay men,” she said.

Now, she is 42. (“But I’m all right,” she said.) She doesn’t smoke any more. Off and on—but seemingly mostly on these days—she doesn’t drink. She texts a lot. She doesn’t have blackouts on television programs and wander off-set. She sleeps only with her cat.

By 1 p.m., the car had gotten her uptown, to the converted mansion that is the Neue Galerie, where Ronald S. Lauder and Serge Sabarsky have lent their collections of drawings by Egon Schiele for an exhibition.

In that show, packed among the overload of biographical information, there’s a copy of the last letter from Schiele’s wife, Edith. She died three days before he did, both so young, in an influenza epidemic. “I love you eternally,” Edith had scrawled, “and love you more and more immeasurably and boundlessly.”

Those could easily have been words from one of Ms. Emin’s drawings, which now circle the second room of Lehmann Maupin. Ms. Emin’s work in general is sometimes like a sewn or drawn record of the sort of words one might issue while dying, or perhaps what a Laura Palmer might scream on the side of an abandoned road while illuminated by motorcycle headlights: I LOVE YOU AAAGH I LOVE YOU DO YOU HATE ME? I LOVE YOU HEY I LOVE YOU DON’T YOU LOVE ME? BECAUSE I LOVE YOU GODDAMIT HELLO I LOVE YOU.

The Neue Galerie also has a Schiele death mask. “See, he was good-looking,” Ms. Emin said.

She read some wall text, which described how Schiele ditched his lover to marry better. “What a cunt,” she said. She walked off. “They were all selfish and chauvinist cunts then, weren’t they?”

Ms. Emin had eight solo exhibitions around the world last year. She used to make blankets—quilts, really, sometimes described as appliqué blankets. In her 1999 show at Lehmann Maupin, her first in New York, there was a blanket in which the largest text read “PSYCHO SLUT.” She can’t seem to make them right now, she said, because where she should see images, she sees only pounds and dollars. There’s a waiting list of collectors for these blankets—“10, maybe 15 people,” Ms. Emin said. “I know that doesn’t sound like much.” The list is actually a bit longer, and includes many museums. If any more blankets are made, they will probably fetch a price, give or take, of £100,000.

She made her rise fairly contemporaneously with the artist Damien Hirst, who once was notoriously constantly drunk, and is now 40 and has graying hair and two sons and lives on a farm, and who was the first living Briton to be paid one million pounds for a piece of art. While Mr. Hirst’s success, and that of many of the other Young British Artists who are decidedly Ms. Emin’s contemporaries, may have much to do with being purchased early and often by mega-collector Charles Saatchi, Ms. Emin said that she actually didn’t “allow him to buy my work until 1997.” Since the early 90’s, Mr. Saatchi was buying up much by the London artists—but Ms. Emin’s earnest work doesn’t really fit in with the heavy-on-the-irony shock-and-wow Saatchi context. Also, the vast amount of control his collecting has over an artist’s financial prospects was fearsome as well.

There was a Schiele drawing of a woman in perspective, from knee height, that Ms. Emin was incredibly taken with. And the fashion in some of the drawings—not the actual drawings made by Schiele for fashion purposes, but one depicting a girl in a swirly, poufy, stripey colored skirt turned up completely around the crucial regions—that she thought was balls-out gorgeous. “Imagine Marc Jacobs doing that,” she said. And the 1910 self-portraits: amazing. “Yeah, it’s brilliant,” she said.

Ms. Emin waited in line for a seat in the Café Sabarsky. In London, she never waits for anything. There, she’s recognized on the street more often than not. She’s used to it, and so what anyway? “But then David Bowie comes over on the Tube with a baseball hat on, so …. ” Still, being out of London is like an unnerving vacation. In the café, she ordered the goulash and a salad—and the spaetzle came with it, which was delicious. She was captivated by a number of women who were eating there alone, particularly a woman of possibly 60, who sat by the window, not reading her paper.

“The second one, I wasn’t happy about,” Ms. Emin said of her most previous New York show. “It was like getting married on your birthday.” It was the very first show in Lehmann Maupin’s then-new Rem Koolhaas–designed space, and surprises and uncertainty upset her. More and more friends would be arriving in New York for just the weekend as Saturday approached—which Ms. Emin didn’t understand, as she suffers from terrible jetlag. She said that although her primary market is in London, it’s important to show in New York—and she worries quite a bit about reviews, in part at least because it’s not good when word gets back to London that an artist has bombed in New York. This time, she took the installation so seriously that no collectors were allowed in for early peeks. It wouldn’t be until the Wednesday before the opening, after a week and a half of work, that proper appointments for collectors would be permitted.

In Ms. Emin’s new book, a really quite good memoir called Strangeland, she recounts an earlier trip to New York. “The last thing I remember is having mad sex on a pier looking out across the Hudson River as the bats flew above us, and little ships glided past like shooting stars. Woke up Sunday feeling great.”

This trip would clearly be different, although there were still parties every night. Tuesday would be something for Yves St. Laurent, and Wednesday was something about Elton John, and Thursday was a Fendi party, and Friday was some foundation party, and on “Monday I’m flying to L.A. to see the Rolling Stones.”

The café’s staff brought her some cake in a bag to take away. In the Neue Galerie’s gift shop, she looked at everything and bought a good book of Schiele drawings, and also a copy of Hermann Hesse’s Demian, which she gave to The Transom, though she said it didn’t need to be read, as it might not have held up, or just might not have been actually good, as she thought it had been when she read it many years ago. The introduction has an epigraph. It reads, “All I really wanted was to try and live the life that was spontaneously welling up within me. Why was that so very difficult?”

By 6 p.m. on Saturday night, half the work in the show would be sold; the least expensive drawing in the show is priced at £3,000. And by 7 p.m., Sting, looking healthy and as if his face had been buffed and waxed, would slide in. Trudie Styler, his wife, would walk as if she had something horribly wrong with her pelvis, as if terrible amounts of yoga had led her to a bad place. Vogue’s Hamish Bowles and Miami artist Naomi Fisher would smile, and Cecilia Dean, the Visionaire queen, would wear a severe black trench coat and extreme, barely-there shoes that none of the women present would be able to stop looking at. A limo would pull up out front and one blonde, two blondes, three blondes and a small boy-child would pop out. Ms. Emin would wear big oxblood or rust-colored boots with buckles on the side and a ruffley white top and look great and even just plain normal-nervous. In the back room of the gallery, a washy film would play, shot in Cyprus, of a dog at the seaside slowly, sadly licking its left rear leg and then shuffling off away from the beach. “To know your smile, the touch of your skin,” Ms. Emin’s scratchy writing flickering on the film would plead, “I love you.”

—Choire Sicha

#@!‡*% Puppies

Susan Stroman was thrilled to have completed her duties as director of the film version of The Producers just the day before, she said on Monday night, after a long year and a half’s work. “I can no longer change it,” she said, and laughed. “It’s done.”

The elegant ladies, who had gathered in the decadent Crystal Room at Tavern on the Green for a fête in honor of Ms. Stroman by Primary Stages, may have looked deceptively sweet in their brooches, shawls and pearls, but their tongues belied a darker wit.

“Who do you have to fuck to get out of this?” cracked a bawdy old lass as a photographer dallied too long in setting up a shot.

“I made chili for Elizabeth Taylor, you know,” said Diane Judge, a Broadway press agent for more than 40 years. “We were in France. And she couldn’t wear her engagement ring on the set, so she asked me to wear it. So there I was, making chili with this giant ring on, and her fucking puppies were jumping all over me.”

Fucking puppies! Nathan Lane honored Ms. Stroman, 51, in a heartfelt speech, his trademark showmanship and broad vowels front and center.

“You may not have noticed during dinner, but three people were mugged outside,” he said, gesturing to the wall of windows behind him, “and two waiters consummated their relationship.”

“Not funny!” barked Ms. Judge, though the rest of the room laughed. She was a little miffed from an earlier conversation with Mr. Lane.

“He’s a diva,” she said. “A diva! He was very dismissive of me.” She shook her head and took another sip of wine.

Mr. Lane was spotted draining his own glass after the festivities.

The Transom congratulated him on wrapping up The Producers. “Annnnnnnd?” he responded impatiently.

How had the evening gone? Had he enjoyed himself? “Yes.”

He thawed slightly when speaking of Ms. Stroman. “I love her,” he said. “I just think she’s so talented.” He then turned to reveal the back of his head, and took another sip of his wine.

—Nicole Pesce

The Safra Sale

At last week’s Sotheby’s auction of the Edmond and Lily Safra collection, Madison Avenue map dealer W. Graham Arader III introduced a new technique. Forget the lowly $1,000 and $10,000 bidding jumps—Mr. Arader, who sometimes buys for Bill Gates and was bidding by phone on a pair of Regency globes, ratcheted up his successive bids by $100,000 increments. The audience was aghast at his pricey bravado.

It used to be that antiques auctions were the musty dull cousins of the art world’s exciting to-dos. But with bidders like Mr. Arader, Sotheby’s cleaned up big time—to the tune of $48.9 million, in fact, with some items fetching 10 times their expected price. The auction has now gone down in history for the highest total ever achieved at a decorative-arts auction in Manhattan, and it may be just the beginning.

Of course, the Safra name comes laden with a considerable pedigree; the banking family’s roots stretch back to the Ottoman Empire. Sadly, they were, shall we say, extinguished when Edmond Safra was killed in an intentional blaze in his Monte Carlo digs back in 1999.

And Lily Safra hardly came to her taste from humble circumstances. Her father made a fortune in Brazil importing decrepit railway carriages and spiffing them up, and her choices in wealthy husbands outshines practically all others among the major leagues. Her second husband left her with £200 million, and Safra, her fourth, sold off his Republic Bank of N.Y. and Safra Republic Holding Co. for a staggering $9.6 billion just before his death. Now Ms. Safra is believed to be richer than the Queen of England.

When it came to household furnishings, Ms. Safra took to the task the way Imelda Marcus took to shoes. She and her husband shopped nonstop for antiques and objets d’art at the tonier dealers internationally and at auctions regularly. They had a lot to furnish, after all: multiple homes on the Riviera (it’s the former Agnelli estate called La Leopolda), London (she paid £23 million for an Eaton Square townhouse several years ago but now opts to reside in a Belgravia flat), Paris, Geneva and, of course, Manhattan.

They craved the ultimate luxury brands: André-Charles Boulle (ébéniste to Sun King Louis XIV) and Carl Fabergé (court jeweler to the Romanovs), among others. Provenance was the key to their shopping selections—if John Paul Getty had owned a particular piece, they threw it on the cart.

“Her taste is exquisite,” cooed Mario Tavella, Sotheby’s Europe deputy chairman, of the 68-year-old Ms. Safra, whose surgically tweaked appearance has been compared to that of “a lacquered china doll,” according to one London hostess.

But why was Ms. Safra ditching her hard-won antiques? “Since Edmond’s passing,” she herself wrote in the sale’s catalog, “I no longer have the time nor the scale of residences to enjoy our collection as I once did.” She described it as “a difficult decision.”

Mr. Tavella added another spin to her housecleaning. “She’s changing her style,” he said, noting that Giacometti’s spare cast-bronze furniture flecked with tiny birds and frogs are her latest taste.

And so, at the auction, dealers, designers, advisors and Russians practically clawed each over the Safra holdings: $4.7 million for a Louis XVI desk; $2 million for a Persian rug; $1.2 million for a pair of Chinese porcelain ewers.

When it comes to “smalls”—those lady-like accessories that the decorators adore for setting on round, skirted tables—Safra buyers really raised the price bar. Now, for a diminutive six-inch-high desk clock or an enamel cigarette box, prices climbed over a million dollars.

Even the Safra trinkets cost a fortune. A bonbonniere (a jeweled box for stashing chocolates) by Fabergé cost $307,200. It’s only 13¼8 inches high, in enameled oyster set with teeny-tiny diamonds, sapphires and the occasional ruby.

And the Safra sale is actually the pinnacle of a spate of billionaire shopping expeditions. At Brian and Anna Haughton’s 17th Annual International Fine Art and Antique Dealers Show vernissage on Oct. 20, heavyweight tycoons and their shopping wives turned out in droves.

Spotted shopping were Ms. Safra herself, as well as Julia and David Koch, Calvin Klein, Christine and Stephen Schwartzman, and the boutique investment banker Roberto de Guardiola and his wife, the interior designer Joanne de Guardiola, who was bedecked in a cunning chinchilla shrug.

The de Guardiolas undoubtedly need some housewares, as they just sold their townhouse on East 64th Street for a cool $30 million and snared five apartments—pretty much an entire floor—in the Sherry Netherland Hotel.

On the fair floor, the London-based Ronald Phillips Ltd. touted an elaborate console with an eagle pedestal in the manner of William Kent, and closely related to one in the State Drawing Room of Chatsworth. Its price tag—in the region of a cool million—didn’t faze a New York client; in fact, it’s now out on approval. Jeremy Garfield Davies of Ronald Phillips believes that shoppers are drawn to powerhouse provenance. “Today’s modern counterparts to the young Duke of Newcastle, who commissioned these tables, certainly must experience the same challenges, aspirations and triumphs in building their similarly influential and powerful careers and great houses,” he said.

Plus, the tables still bore their original gild; that’s like catnip for antiques fanciers.

And over at the American Hospital in Paris designer showhouse, the excessive look is front and center. Manhattan designer Charlotte Moss created the latest spin on the 19th-century men’s retreat billiard room. Billiard chairs, horned sconces, and antlers filled the room, which Ms. Moss estimated cost $1.5 million for the trimmings. “There’s a high demand for opulence, and the luxury market couldn’t be stronger,” she said.

How true! Check around town: Dealer Tony Ingrao just packed up a pair of George III giltwood mirrors for a seven-figure price. The 1760 mirrors had all the right bells and whistles, and were from an important country house—that of Sir Arthur Cory-Wright, Ayot Place, Welwyn, Hertfordshire—and had been hawked by mega-dealer Charles Duveen back in 1920.

“They went to a Palm Beach collector,” said Mr. Ingrao. “People in Palm Beach want beautiful things in the same way that they did when their grand mansions were built in the 20’s. It’s all happening again down there.”

To keep such buyers happy, Mr. Ingrao has stocked his establishment with a bevy of million-dollar antiques, including a library table identical to one made for the English Treasury, as well as dining chairs circa 1755 by John Cobb, the queen’s cabinetmaker.

Those hyper-priced antiques are the talk of the town. Socialite-watcher and publicist R. Couri Hay dubs them “the new boy toys.” Still, what’s fueling such sales? Aren’t these supposed to be dire times?

Europe’s biggest bank, UBS, just reported a stunning 71 percent hike in its third-quarter profits. They attribute it to the blazing boom in oil-related wealth in the Middle East—and those oil riches could zoom even higher. Closer to home, Merrill Lynch is barreling forward with a 49 percent increase in earnings—and Apple’s profits quadrupled.

Still, why antiques? It’s almost a why-not—“Once you’ve got your Mercedes and a Rolex or two,” said Bob Israel of the Kentshire Galleries, “then it’s onto antiques.” Edward S. Cooke Jr., the art-history chair at Yale University, noted in an e-mail of the Safra sale in particular: “It sounds like this sale is a little more driven by spectacle—the fascination with celebrities, especially those whose end was mysterious—than by the consumer hedonism of the 1980s ‘Bobos in Paradise.’”

Just in time for Christmas shopping, on Dec. 14 and 15, Christie’s London is hawking the famed Nathan Wildenstein collection—he was shopkeeper to Henry Clay Frick, Sir Richard Wallace and Calouste Gulbenkian—which is filled with $1-million-plus (estimated) bureau plats. That auction is expected to fetch a cool $25 million—but with so many multimillionaires competing for de rigueur antiques, the Christie’s sale may rival even the Safra madness.

—Brook S. Mason

No sooner did the romance of Weimar in the 1920's seem to run its course, with The Threepenny Opera off the boards and the movie version of Cabaret relegated to the video-cassette market, then it was quickly supplanted by an emerging cult of fin de siècle Vienna. After the delectations of Weimar-style cynicism and immoralism, what was wanted, apparently, was a taste of Vienna-style repression and hypocrisy made all the more glamorous by the elegant end-of-empire décor and fin de siècle pathos that are the inevitable accompaniment of such a revival.

And so, as our own revolution in sexuality and morals continues on its merry course of disaster and disarray, there is a certain piquancy in pondering the repressions of Altwien , the old Vienna whose most enduring legacy has proved to be the mystagogy of Freudian psychoanalysis. Cultural life at the end of this century does indeed move in mysterious ways, offering up the sufferings and failures of the past as compensation for the ruin we have brought upon ourselves.

In this calendar of compensatory cultural revivals, the exhibition now devoted to the art of Egon Schiele (1890-1918) at the Museum of Modern Art must be regarded as somewhat belated. Upon the young, Schiele's erotic art may still have an impact out of all proportion to its intrinsic esthetic merit, for the younger generations-to judge, at least, from the movies and pop music they consume in such gigantic quantities-seem to have acquired a taste for the kind of brutalized sentimentality that Schiele brought to the depiction of his own erotic obsessions. Yet whether, even among the young, Schiele's drawings and paintings are any longer capable of eliciting their intended frisson , remains a question. And stripped of the voyeuristic shudder that was so much a part of the artist's vision, Schiele's art tends now to look more historical-a document of its era-and a good deal less artistically compelling.

It is, of course, the art of a young artist, dead at the age of 28-and an artist, moreover, who didn't live long enough to acquire any real mastery of the art of painting. Schiele's art is that of a gifted draftsman who, in appropriating some of the formal devices of Jugendstil design, the central European version of Art Nouveau, moved quickly to place them at the service of his own unruly erotic passions. There had always been an element of sentimental eroticism in Jugendstil decorative art, but in keeping with the hypocrisies of the society it adorned, Jugendstil eroticism remained, for the most part, elegant, artificial and discreet.

It was Schiele's distinction to have made a specialty of explicitly depicting the rebellious sexuality that the genteel decorative art of the Jugendstil era lavished such elaborate artifice on concealing. In that endeavor, which remained the ruling passion of his explosive, short-lived artistic career, he made the young naked body-his own and those of the girls he persuaded to pose for him-the iconic focus of a remorseless sexual polemic. The ferocity that Schiele brought to this project, the unforgiving quality of the emotions he invested in its realization and the unrelieved tension that sustained it, resulted in a graphic style that is in some respects almost as artificial as that of the Jugendstil subterfuge it was meant to supplant. That is the great irony of Schiele's art: that its punishing account of a rebellious eroticism remains locked in the restrictive stylistic mannerism of the era he was determined to subvert and escape.

Even his deliberately provocative concentration on depicting the genitalia of his subjects-his own included-never quite escapes that mannerism. It simply inverts the artificial beauty of Jugendstil into the artificial ugliness of his own iconography.

The exhibition that Magdalena Dabrowski has organized in Egon Schiele: The Leopold Collection, Vienna has the merit of bringing us many of the artist's most accomplished drawings and watercolors. All of the work is drawn from the collection of Dr. Rudolf Leopold, an Austrian ophthalmologist, which will become part of the Leopold Museum, scheduled to open in Vienna in the year 2002. But an exhibition of this scale for an artist who died so young-some 150 works-inevitably leaves us with a vivid sense of Schiele's shortcomings as well.

As for where the exhibition fits into the larger revival of fin de siècle Vienna we have been witnessing in recent years, it is my own impression that it doesn't add a lot to what we already know about that brilliant and deeply corrupt era. In this respect, it is worth recalling something that the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig wrote about the period that is so vividly documented in Schiele's work. In the memoir called The World of Yesterday , which Zweig completed just before his suicide in 1942, he wrote: "We should not permit ourselves to be misled by sentimental novels and stories of that epoch. It was a bad time for youth. The young girls were hermetically locked up under the control of the family, hindered in their free bodily as well as intellectual development. The young men were forced to secrecy and reticence by a morality which fundamentally no one believed or obeyed." That we have now turned that epoch into an object of yearning and nostalgia says more about us than about fin de siècle Vienna.

The exhibition remains on view at MoMA through Jan. 4.