By Daniel Edward Rosen 11/30/11 10:24am

art crime

427 Washington Street.

The Scoundrel of Washington Street: Is Mihaly Kovacsezics the Mayor of Tribeca or a Sticky Fingered Art Thief?

If you ask the well-heeled residents of the western-most parts of Tribeca what they think of Mihaly Kovacsezics, the kindly Hungarian immigrant who painted their walls, installed their televisions or, in some cases, managed their lives, they’ll tell you he was the most adorable and bighearted man in Manhattan.

And at 427 Washington Street, where, from 2007 to 2010, he worked as the handyman for artist and building owner Shirley West, Mr. Kovacsezics—better known as Mike—was everything to everyone in the co-op building: a dog-walker, a personal shopper, a bag-carrier.

At Ponte’s, an Italian restaurant where Mr. Kovacsezics worked as a contractor for 10 years, he was the good-natured handyman who performed odd jobs and enjoyed the occasional espresso at the restaurant’s bar.

“Everyone loved him here,” said Ileana Romero, a Ponte’s bartender. “He was sweet and he was very kind.”

To Shirley West’s niece, Mr. Kovacsezics was like a member of the family. “He was like the Mayor of Tribeca,” said Roxane West. “I loved him.” Read More

By Mario Naves 8/05/08 3:56pm

Beckmann Is Back

Felix Nussbaum’s Self in Concentration Camp (1940), a painting included in the exhibition “Max Beckmann: Self-Portrait With Horn” at the Neue Galerie, is as bleak as the title implies. Wearing a wool cap, a tattered jacket and a lean beard, the artist looks askance with steely distrust. In the background, a figure defecates into a Read More

By Mario Naves 3/05/07 12:00am

Met Gets Convincingly Contemporary With Neo Rauch’s Dreamscapes

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has been attempting to fit contemporary art within its walls for some time now. The results have been fumbling, if never less than earnest. Acting on the muddled assumption that major reputations are necessarily earned by major art, the curators have devoted valuable space to Thomas Struth, Bill Viola, Tony Read More

By Mario Naves 2/12/07 12:00am

All That Glitters Isn’t Gold: Weimar Visages Laid Bare

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the 1920s is an exhibition that submerges pleasure beneath the burden of history. It’s a dark and sometimes trying examination of characters from the Weimar era, that brief moment when a fragile German republic, caught between the First World War and the Third Reich, Read More

By Mario Naves 10/23/06 12:00am

Bearden’s Collages Encompass Bruegel’s Babel, Harlem Blues

In his essay What the Sixties Meant to Me, the painter Rackstraw Downes writes of an encounter with a painting by the Flemish master Pieter Bruegel. Mr. Downes describes The “Little” Tower of Babel (c. 1563) as “densely legible, a thousand stories in every square inch” and “equivalent to two or three books of the Read More

By Hilton Kramer 8/29/05 12:00am

Dix and Beckmann: Two Painters Convey The Horror of War

Given the horrific history of Germany in the modern era, it was not to be expected that German art from the period would have much to do with scenarios of sweetness and light. A culture of violence and intolerance was bound to produce an art dominated by violent emotions and a sense of dislocation and Read More

By Hilton Kramer 12/13/04 12:00am

Beckmann, Picasso: Painters Reunited For the First Time

In a rare collaboration between two elite art dealerships, Richard L. Feigen and Co. and the Jan Krugier Gallery have joined in organizing an exhibition devoted to a pair of major artists-Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and Max Beckmann (1884-1950)-whose works, though they belong to the same generation of European modernists, are rarely seen in close, Read More

By Hilton Kramer 9/06/04 12:00am

Oh, That Weltschmerz! German Expressionism About Dark, Not Light

Artists, critics, art collectors and curators for whom the delights of French painting remain a standard of modern pictorial achievement are often troubled-if not, indeed, repelled-by the very different character of modern German art. Instead of the subtleties and graces to be found in French painting, German art, more often than not, confronts the viewer Read More

By Mario Naves 10/20/03 12:00am

Dense, Humane and Moral, Bearden Sets a Fine Example

The Romare Bearden retrospective now at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., will, after winding its way through the United States, arrive at the Whitney Museum of American Art next fall. That gives New Yorkers who admire this important American artist something to look forward to. Still, I wish the retrospective had traveled Read More

By Mario Naves 10/20/03 12:00am

Currently Hanging

Dense, Humane and Moral,

Bearden Sets a Fine Example

The Romare Bearden retrospective now at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., will, after winding its way through the United States, arrive at the Whitney Museum of American Art next fall. That gives New Yorkers who admire this important American artist something to Read More