Actor and philanthropist Ben Stiller posing for a photo with Chelsea dealer Tony Shafrazi during the 2010 Art Basel Miami Beach fair. Photo: Patrick McMullan Company.

Gallerist David Zwirner, former president Bill Clinton and actor Ben Stiller announced today that they will co-chair a gala in September to benefit the Stiller Foundation, which is working to rebuild schools in Haiti that were damaged in the 2010 earthquake there.

The dinner will take place on Sept. 23, at the Skylight Soho event space in far west Soho. The day before, Christie's will host a benefit auction, called Artists for Haiti, which will include works by Louise Bourgeois, Chuck Close (who has painted a portrait of Mr. Clinton), Urs Fischer, Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman, Marlene Dumas and Jasper Johns (who received a Presidential Medal of Freedom from the current U.S. president earlier this year), among others.

Ben Stiller has been popping up at art events with some regularity over the past year, alighting, for instance, in Miami during the 2010 Art Basel Miami Beach, where he dined alongside Whitney director Adam Weinberg and Marc Newson manager Stuart Parr at a dinner hosted by super dealer Larry Gagosian, Wendi Murdoch and collector Dasha Zhukova.

Details for some of the works in the charity auction are available here. Charity bidders will be competing for some impressive works, including one of Dan Flavin's iconic 1967 "monument" for V. Tatlin light sculptures and a new painting by Luc Tuymans that measures more than seven feet tall.

The Observer hopes that art critic Jerry Saltz will attend, since it would give him the opportunity to update his Facebook photo, which has long shown him posing next to Mr. Clinton.

Donald Judd (2011) at David Zwirner.

While much of New York’s art world is away on a European grand tour—starting with the Venice Biennale, moving on to Art Basel, the annual art fair in Switzerland, which opens next week, and winding up in London for a round of auctions—a handful of museum-worthy exhibitions make this a good time to visit Chelsea’s galleries. Artists on view through June include both past masters (Pablo Picasso, Vladimir Tatlin, Donald Judd) and living legends (Jasper Johns, John Chamberlain).

If you are interested in the spectacle of powerful men having affairs—and judging from the recent media attention given to Arnold Schwarzenegger and Anthony Weiner, who isn’t?—it’s worth visiting Gagosian’s “Picasso and Marie-Thérèse: L’amour fou.”

This focused glimpse into the private lives of a famous man and his young, secret lover is curated by the couple’s granddaughter, the art historian Diana Widmaier Picasso (along with Picasso scholar John Richardson). It is a story of a very private arrangement told through 80 Picasso paintings, sculptures, drawings and photographs.

The exhibition begins with photos of Marie-Thérèse Walter, a confident, sunny 17-year-old French girl. Picasso saw her on the street in 1927, when the already-famous artist was 45 and married to Ballets Russes star Olga Khokhlova. “I am Picasso,” he said to Marie-Thérèse. His name meant nothing to her, but she said later that she found him charming.

In snapshots of Marie-Thérèse taken in Monte Carlo and Chamonix, we recognize the blonde bob and Grecian nose of one of the great Picasso faces: the crescent profile of the women in Guernica, the female figure in many of his best works.

Their affair lasted for over a dozen years, with Picasso arranging for his lover to be near his family at all times. But it began as a secret even from their friends, and remained so, to a certain extent, even after Marie-Thérèse had their child in 1935. When people would catch a glimpse of the girl, he’d call her the gardener’s daughter.

In Nue endormie (1932) and Nu couché (1932), charcoal-on-canvas sketches of a sleeping Marie-Thérèse, undulating lines trace her body. In early paintings she is abstracted, her figure broken down into geometric shapes; in others she is shown with lips sewn shut, or reduced to a set of initials on a vase: a cryptic monogram hidden in plain view.

This show has a tension that derives from placing intimate matters on display. That their relationship was clandestine, that Gagosian keeps the lights so low, and that many of the works come from private collections creates a frisson of voyeurism: Picasso may have made these works to be seen, but seeing them in this context we feel we are getting a peek at something that wasn’t meant to be shown.

In paintings and drawings of Marie-Thérèse such as Femme nue dans un fauteuil rouge (1932) and La sieste (1932), Picasso drew attention to her breasts and pudenda. Judging by the number of sculptures in this show, he clearly enjoyed representing her voluptuous body in three dimensions. (One  Picasso catalogue notes dryly that the artist’s wife, Olga, a dancer, was flat-chested). Yet in his work, Marie-Thérèse also becomes an allegory for eternal youth, her skin rendered in lilac and a range of pinks. She is girlish even when most womanly, e.g., even when pictured nursing their daughter, Maya: while her nipples are depicted protruding pertly from her swollen breasts, her daughter might be a toy in her arms.

Most of all, Marie-Thérèse provided an endless site of experimentation for Picasso: sometimes she appears in electric, fauvist colors; other times the palette is muted; sometimes her figure is painted thickly and sometimes she is rendered by a single line; sometimes she is dressed up as the bride she would never become, Sleeping, thinking, reading, playing with dolls, nursing, Marie-Thérèse is a paradise of seemingly uncomplicated sexual and artistic fulfillment.

Some might consider Picasso a pederast for taking up with a girl not yet of the French age of consent. Yet he paints himself as the wounded minotaur. In Minotaure blessé et Naîade (1938), he is a love-sick boy or Humbert Humbert, the victim of his passion for a young girl. And yet, to hear him tell it, this passion is what restored him: he said at one point that meeting Marie-Thérèse saved his life.

In a film loop composed of old photographs, she seems happy, entertained by the adoration of Picasso’s camera, a model for only one pair of eyes.

The Gagosian exhibition is tightly focused: it omits Dora Maar, whom Picasso was seeing concurrently with Marie-Thérèse, as well as Françoise Gilot, his much-younger mistress through much of the 1940’s. Also missing is the postscript: his marriage to Jacqueline Roque in the 1960’s after his divorce from Olga in the 1950’s. (Roque, like Marie-Thérèse, took her own life after Picasso died.) It’s a show of strategic omissions and extraordinary visceral pleasures—a fitting framework for an affair.

It was not Picasso’s dreamy Marie-Thérèse paintings, but his cubist guitars that inspired the Russian Constructivist artist Vladimir Tatlin when Tatlin encountered them in Paris in 1914.

Shafrazi gallery’s exhibition of Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International (1915-20) is dedicated to the dynamic architectural model of one of the most famous unbuilt buildings of the 20th century, on view for the first time in the United States.

Tatlin’s original 16-foot model was destroyed in 1932. The electric-powered piece at Shafrazi is a (rather disappointing) Swedish 1960’s scale reconstruction, albeit one with an impressive pedigree: it was built under the supervision of Tatlin’s original collaborator.

The 1,300-foot-tall behemoth this lost Constructivist curiosity anticipated ran into engineering problems and steel shortages and was never realized. Yet the utopian piece loomed large in the collective imagination of American artists of the 1960’s: during his lifetime the minimalist Dan Flavin, known for his fluorescent light tube sculptures, assembled 39 homages to Tatlin’s tower.

At Shafrazi, gears grind wearily, turning stacked geometric shapes intended to house branches of the Communist government. (The original model was operated by a small boy, hidden from view, turning a hand-crank.) The surrounding scaffolding is one part Eiffel tower and two parts vintage roller coaster. The structure is set at an improbable angle corresponding to the axis of the earth’s tilt.

Accompanying the Tatlin replica is a side exhibition, “Revolutionary Film Posters: Aesthetic Experiments of Russian Constructivism, 1920-1933,” consisting of two rooms of terrific vintage Soviet film posters shown to a blaring soundtrack of music from Sergei Eisenstein’s films. It is entertaining, but ultimately slight.

Tatlin’s notion of truth to materials—his belief that wood, metal and glass impose different necessary conditions on the art object—and his interest in the fusion of art and technology are one of the precursors of Donald Judd’s Minimalism, currently on view at David Zwirner.

Zwirner’s gallery, which recently began representing the Donald Judd foundation, reunites 12 works that figured in a 1989 Judd exhibition at the Staatliche Kunsthalle in Baden-Baden. For obsessive enthusiasts of Judd’s work—and there are many—this chance to observe the first time Judd used colored anodized aluminum in such a large, floor-mounted format, as the gallery’s literature puts it, is cause for excitement.

For those not enticed by this formal description, however, there is the overall appearance of the exhibition. Light falls from the Zwirner skylights, catching each of the regal open aluminum boxes, hitting the orange and turquoise plexi interior panels and radiating onto the walls of the gray aluminum cubes. A subtle effect is produced that is both atmospheric and antiseptic.

From drawings on display we glean the logic of the show: large, open aluminum boxes with black, blue or orange inserts configured systematically; the dozen boxes together create a set of repeated forms.

Judd famously defined his works as “specific objects”—neither painting nor sculpture. He jettisoned most of the qualities that people associate with art (representation, flatness, composition) while retaining others (rectangularity, space, form and color). Judd’s objects are simple forms that employ new industrial materials like formica, aluminum, cold-rolled steel, plexiglass and brass.

As usual, Judd’s claim to the pure logic and compositional order seems suspect, and what you experience here is the beauty of the color and texture of these supposedly banal materials, and the eccentricities of what he proposed were systematic compositions.

As New York’s museums battle for visitors and put on exhibitions that sometimes seem safe or uninspired, commercial galleries are increasingly filling in the gaps. Dealers hire guards, pay commercial rents and manage block-long lines. Sure, these shows may be ways for galleries to advertise their clout to prospective clients, but they display remarkable artwork at no charge to the viewer, so, in the end, we all profit.

editorial@observer.com

To most people who have been following the art market for the past seven years, auction fever is as unknown a phenomenon as disco fever. But on that November day at Christie's, the untitled Basquiat drawing sold for a record $255,500. Richard Marshall, a curator who has worked with the Basquiat estate and served on a committee that authenticated the untitled drawing, said that he knew something was up after the price quickly passed the $100,000 mark. "It was kind of exciting because it kept going," Mr. Marshall recalled, referring to the bidding. "It was entertaining and surprising. I turned around to see who was bidding. The auctioneer kept saying, 'In the back of the room,' and I wanted to see who it was."

The person in the back of the room was Leo Malca, an art collector from Cali, Colombia, who rented a gallery last year to show his collection of Basquiats, as well as works by Kenny Scharf and Keith Haring. Mr. Malca, a self-described "passionate collector," told The Observer that he was determined to buy the drawing but grew anxious as he realized that not one but two other people were bidding against him. One was on the telephone with Mr. Ségalot. The other was seated in front of him.

"When it went higher and higher, I thought the other two people were not going to stop. For some reason, they stopped at that price. I had a ceiling. It was where I stopped," he said. His last bid was $230,000. With the buyer's premium that Christie's charges its clients, Mr. Malca paid a total of $255,500 for the drawing. A year ago, according to Tony Shafrazi, a dealer who specializes in works by Basquiat, the drawing would have been worth $100,000, "tops."

To Mr. Shafrazi, Basquiat is "a daily meal," he said, and the renewed strength in the Basquiat market is not a surprise. Basquiat, who died in 1988 at the age of 27, left an estate that contained thousands of artworks, a legacy that resulted in a movie, Basquiat , and a cult following that rivals that of Andy Warhol. According to Mr. Shafrazi, the market for Basquiats dropped precipitously in the early 90's, like the rest of the art market. "Where works had been going for $550,000," he said, "they were worth $300,000. Some works did not sell at all." But now, according to Mr. Shafrazi, the market is back, "but with intelligence. That drawing is one of the 10 great drawings done by Basquiat. It is as great as a Picasso."

The drawing, which features a central figure in the middle of a deeply worked ground of calligraphy, does look like a late Picasso, an analogy that does not seem to have hurt the drawing. "When you think about it in terms of Picasso," said Mr. Shafrazi, "this is a really good buy. A Picasso drawing like this would be worth a million dollars." The other Basquiats in the Christie's sale also achieved high prices. An untitled drawing that was expected to go for $60,000 to $80,000 went for $195,000. "Made in Japan," a drawing that depicts a masked figure, was sold for $134,500. "Gin Soaked Critic," an insectlike stick figure baring his teeth of gouache on paper mounted on board, also fetched $134,500. "These are the best Basquiat drawings you can find," said Mr. Ségalot, who also compared the drawings to Picassos, the benchmark, it seems, for art garnering high prices at auction. "I was not surprised by the prices," he said confidently.

Gerard Basquiat, the father of the late artist who also manages his estate, was not available for comment. But Mr. Basquiat may have been the least surprised by the auction results. Two years ago, he stopped the flow of artworks from the Basquiat estate that had been going into the market at a steady clip since the artist's death. Mr. Marshall, who advises Mr. Basquiat on curatorial matters, said that he does not know why Mr. Basquiat decided to withhold the pictures in the estate from the market. But it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that basic supply and demand would invariably drive up the price of individual Basquiats once such a major source has been stopped.

Still, Mr. Malca feels that he has made a good investment. "I have already been offered more than I paid for it," he said.

He Never Signed a Work: Hugh Auchincloss Steers

If Hugh Steers had lived longer, he might have become the next Lucien Freud. That, it seems, was the consensus of a group of Chelsea art lovers and family members of the late artist, who died of AIDS in 1995 at the age of 33. They had gathered at the Richard Anderson Fine Arts gallery on the evening of Nov. 22 for the first show of the artist's work since his death. It is also the debut show at the relocated gallery.

In loaded paintings that centered on figures drawn with the facility of a Renaissance artist, Steers, like Mr. Freud, used flesh in deeply personal ways. In Steers' case, the figures have to do with his male sexual preference and fascination with the accouterments of downtown drag culture.

"I just hope that Hugh doesn't get pigeonholed as a gay AIDS artist," said Burr Steers, the artist's brother and one of the co-heirs of the estate. Mr. Steers is a Hollywood-based movie actor whose next role is as a "door Nazi" in The Last Days of Disco , Wit Stillman's film about Studio 54 that opens next summer. "I play the guy at the door who tells people they can't come into the place," he said. Their mother Nina Auchincloss Straight was the stepsister of the late Jacqueline Onassis and half-sister of Gore Vidal. Mr. Steers pointed out, though, that his brother consciously refused to trade on his family's name.

"Several dealers wanted him to go as Hugh Auchincloss Steers. That's his full name. He refused. He would threaten to wound you," said Mr. Steers. "I really admired that. He lived the artist's life on Avenue B. He could have painted horses and debutantes and made a lot of dough up in Newport selling stuff to our relatives."