– Tilda Swinton Takes a Nap at MoMA, Plans More: Actress and semi-professional David Bowie fan Tilda Swinton caused a stir over the weekend when she took a nap in the lobby of the Museum of Modern Art. Her stint snoozing in a glass box was, in fact, a recreation of a performance she did 18 years ago at the Serpentine Gallery in London. Swinton will reperform Cornelia Parker's "The Maybe" six more times this month, each time without warning, in different locations at the museum. [ITA, Independent] 

– Sexism in the German Art World: Der Spiegel investigates the sexism and machismo that permeate the German art world. In addition to some dismal statistics — since 1948, Germany has been represented at the Venice Biennale by 90 men and nine women — the newspaper gathers reactions from heavy-hitters in the German art scene, including gallery owner Monika Spruth, artist Katharina Grosse, and Vienna Kunsthalle director Nicolas Schafhausen, curated the German pavilion's presentation of Isa Genzken at the 2007 Venice Biennale. "I'm still waiting for the day when someone writes about Isa Genzken as an artist, instead of about her as Gerhard Richter's ex-wife," he said. [Der Spiegel]

– Annie Lennox Gets Museum Show: David Bowie isn't the only music legend getting the museum treatment. An exhibition devoted to singer and songwriter Annie Lennox opened at Scotland's National Portrait Gallery this weekend. Curated in partnership with London's V&A, the exhibition brings together photographs, videos, and costumes, including Lennox's "androgynous two-piece leather suit worn during the Eurythmics 1980s Revenge tour." [Press Release]

– MFA Boston Ships Japanese Exhibition Abroad: The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston is getting in on the exhibitions-for-hire trend. The institution is sending its collection of Japanese masterpieces on a 15-month tour of Japan. As critic Sebastian Smee writes, "The traveling exhibit, drawn from what is widely recognized as the greatest collection of Japanese art outside Japan, has reminded the Japanese — no doubt to the consternation of some — that many of their most historically important artworks ended up in Boston." Due to space constraints and light sensitivity, however, most of the works will return to storage after their Japanese tour rather than be displayed in the MFA's galleries. [Boston Globe]

– Sound Art Takes Over U.K. Airwaves: British nonprofit Artangel has commissioned five artists to create original three-minute sound pieces that are being broadcast every morning this week on BBC's Radio 4 at 9:02am, when the station typically has some 3.8 million listeners. The series, titled "Open Air," debuted this morning with a piece by Christian Marclay and will conclude Friday with a work by Mark Wallinger. "Radio 4 is a part of most of our lives, and that’s sort of an iconic slot just after the 'Today' program," said Wallinger. "Most of the arts programming happens at night, and most of the avant garde sound takes place over on Radio 3. Radio 4 stands for a lot of the core ideas of the BBC." [Telegraph]

– Artprice Founder's Neighbors Paying the Price: Artist and entrepreneur Thierry Ehrmann, who founded Artprice in 1993, has transformed his 17th-century home in St.-Romain-au-Mont-d'Or, a town in eastern France, into a living museum of sorts, dubbed the "Abode of Chaos." Its programming includes a massive sculptural rendition of Ground Zero, a crashed helicopter, and a biennial exhibition of artists' new works and happenings. The only problem? Ehremann's neighbors aren't thrilled. "Perhaps we lack artistic flair," says local real estate agent Pascal Paysant, "but the fact is this house depreciates real-estate value in the town." [WSJ]

– Another Candidate Joins Louvre Leader Shortlist: Following complaints that culture minister Aurélie Filipetti had ruled out too many candidates in her recommendations to French president François Hollande for the next director of the Louvre — recommending only Lyon Museum of Fine Arts's Sylvie Ramond and Louvre curator Jean-Luc Martinez — outgoing director Henri Loyrette advocated for the addition of Laurent Le Bon, the Pompidou Metz's curator of modern art, in a meeting on Friday with the president. Filipetti, for her part, disputed claims that Ramond was a shoo-in for the job: "I never said that the new director will necessarily be a woman. It's absurd to present things that way." [Libération]

– Surreptitious Beatles Snapshots Sell: Photos taken by amateur photographer Marc Weinstein of the fab four's famous 1961 Shea Stadium concert, where he used a fake press pass to sneak backstage, were sold at Omega Auctions last week. A Washington-based South American collector and Beatles fanatic bought the lot for £30,680 ($46,700), well above the pre-sale estimate of £15,000-£20,000. "I had a method of operation," Weinstein said after his coup. "I just acted like I belonged." [BBC]

– Tamar Harpaz Takes 2013 Kiefer Prize: The Wolf Foundation's Anselm Kiefer Prize, which bestows $8,000 on a promising Israeli artist under the age of 35 each year, has been given to Tamar Harpaz, a Tel Aviv-based artist who works with light, sculpture, video, and installation. Established by Kiefer in 1991, the prize's past honorees include Guy Ben-Ner, Rona Yefman, and Yael Bartana. [Artforum]

– Video Wins Big in Portrait Competition: The winners of the National Portrait Gallery's triennial Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition have been announced. First prize went to Bo Gehring of Beacon, New York, who won $25,000 for a video titled "Jessica Wickham"; second prize went to Jennifer Levonian of Philadelphia for her video "Buffalo Milk Yogurt." Sequoyah Aono of New York won third prize for a self-portrait sculpture. The winners were selected from more than 3,000 entries and are currently on display at the Washington, D.C. museum. [WaPo]

VIDEO OF THE DAY

Tilda Swinton sleeps at MoMA

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VIDEO: 60 Works in 60 Seconds at TEFAF

For more art news throughout the day, check ARTINFO's In the Air blog.

A new documentary on Herb and Dorothy Vogel, the legendary New York collectors who managed to accrue a world-class trove of minimalist art on a government employee’s salary, premiered last week at the Whitney Museum, a month after an excerpted version of the film opened the REEL Artists Film Festival in Toronto. “Herb & Dorothy 50x50,” directed by their stalwart documentarian Megumi Sasaki, picks up where the previous film, “Herb & Dorothy,” left off: Previously, the couple had just given their entire collection to museums in each of the 50 states, and made plans to travel the country to see the newly donated collections. Before they could embark on this tour, however, Herb Vogel passed away. Dorothy Vogel has since closed the art collecting chapter in her life, echoing Herb’s earlier comment that “what we did then is now art history.”

A recent New Yorker review of the new film notes its melancholy, with Herb’s failing health and the couple’s marriage making for a more intimate and heartbreaking documentary. (When Dorothy attended the Whitney screening alone, an audience member’s question about what artwork Vogel missed most was met with the reply, “I just really miss Herbie.”) ARTINFO Canada’s recent conversation with Vogel saw her subdued — though she was clearly buoyed by the presence of Sasaki. Over the course of an hour, the two discussed the challenges of breaking up and placing the various parts of the Vogels’ vast collection, the trick of enjoying “difficult” contemporary art, and moving forward after a loss.

A curator in Hawaii comments, in this second film, that “this is very American work.” Was there any notion, when you were initially deciding what to do with the collection, that you might donate to institutions outside of the U.S.?

Vogel: I don’t know what she meant by that, because we have people in the collection who aren’t American. It was never a consideration that they had to be from anywhere in particular. We didn’t make those distinctions. It’s just that we lived [in the U.S.], so most of the people we met were American, that’s all. My husband was asked if we might give things to institutions abroad. He was always emphatic that he wanted the collection kept in the United States, though. I’m not sure what his reasons were.

Did you agree?

Vogel: I thought it was valid that we kept it here. First of all it would be more accessible to us… [laughs]

As you gain distance from the collection, how are you seeing it?

Vogel: It’s a part of my past.

How would you describe the collection as an entity?

Vogel: Contemporary art; work done in our time.

What were your criteria for choosing these 50 institutions?

Vogel: The first group was chosen because we had personal relations to them. We had either loaned work to them, had shows there, knew people who worked there, [or] visited. The first choices came from our personal feelings. And then for the others, where we couldn’t possible know [the institutions] – we’d never been to Hawaii or Idaho, or places like that – we relied on curator Ruth Fine and her personal contacts.

Were there any challenges that stand out, in this process?

Vogel: One of the institutions went out of business before the project had really gotten underway – in Las Vegas, Nevada. We had to find another institution, and that was a challenge. We ended up choosing the university [University of Nevada, Las Vegas]. If you see the catalogue, though, there is a different institution than what’s on the website, now, as a result of this.

I imagine your knowledge of New York would have made it quite difficult to select a home for the work there. You ended up not selecting any institutions in the state. Why was that?

Vogel: We felt it was not needed in New York. There are many institutions there that carry the same kind of work. We felt the collection would better be served elsewhere.

Did collecting become curating as you moved into a position of bestowing the work onto institutions?

Vogel: I never thought of it that way. But we maintained that what Ruth Fine did was curate 50 shows at the same time. I don’t think I could have done it.

Were there any works you felt a connection to, or couldn’t part from?

Vogel: No, no. I liked the works that were up, because I lived with them. But I had no personal feelings that they had to stay there. I felt they were getting a better home.

Are there any of the 50 collections that you’d really like to see in person?

Vogel: I think I’d like to see the one at Yale. They’re making their own catalogue, asking a lot of questions, and really taking an interest. They’re also borrowing from our collection at the National Gallery, and adding work from their own, too, so it’s going to be a major exhibition. I’d like to see that.

This kind of experience would surely bring attention to what certain states, institutions, or systems are lacking in terms of resources. Did you get a sense of that, as you decided which institutions to donate work to?

Sasaki: Certainly everyone’s trying to keep their heads above water right now; survival seems to be the priority for these museums. But the most interesting thing about it, for me, was the varying tactics these places are employing to engage audiences. All these programs aimed at bringing people in … it was pretty interesting to see the thought that goes into this.

Megumi, was the impulse to do a second film quite immediate after the first, or how was it borne-out otherwise?

Sasaki: I didn’t plan to make the second one when I was engaged in the first. But when I saw the first of these 50 exhibitions, in Minneapolis, it was very impressive, and it finally set in, the eye [that the Vogels] had. It struck me then that I didn’t know very much about their collection, considering I’d made a film about them, and had followed them for four years, and captured their life. I still knew very little, and it made me want to learn more.

Vogel: This project came about in the working stages as Megumi was finishing the first film. There is a statement at the end of the first film that mentions it, but for the majority of our time with Megumi, we weren’t able to discuss the 50 States project. Finally it was fait accompli and we made our announcement. Megumi came to the press conference where the museum representatives were receiving the news. It was sort of momentous.

There is a quote from Chuck Close from the first film: “they like the most unlikeable art.” Now that the collection is disseminated across the country and available to ‘the masses,’ how do you regard its accessibility?

Vogel: I think if you take the work of Richard Tuttle, for instance, his work is difficult, and people have to see it a few times to get into it. A lot of the work from the collection is like that: at first glance, it’s hard, but you see it again and again and again, and it grows on you. You have to take the time to reflect on it.

Some of these works might have been originally passed up because of that, and we were there to grab it. 

Sasaki: For me, contemporary art can be so inaccessible, there is an intimidation around it. Whether it’s the kind of work that Dorothy and Herb collected, or something else, people get really intimidated, and I was too. You feel like you have to explain why or why you don’t like it. One of the greatest lessons I learned from Herb and Dorothy is that you don’t have to explain, you don’t have to theorize art to like it. The important thing is to look. It’s a visual art.

Richard Tuttle mentioned that in the first film: what makes them so unique is that they take the information from their eye straight down to their soul. They don’t process it in the brain. And that turned out to be the most important lesson of the first – and then the second film, as well.

Vogel: People equate wealth with knowledge. One has nothing to do with the other. You don’t have to be wealthy, but you have to have a little knowledge, and mostly insight. My husband was self-taught in the sense that he audited art history classes from the best art historians of his day. He learned from the best. But he did not matriculate. You don’t have to get the degree; you can go on your own, and follow your own destiny. This is what my husband did: he followed his own destiny.

What’s your advice on collaboration?

Vogel: It’s more fun to collaborate, like I did with my husband. I always said when it stopped being fun, we would stop. It stopped being fun the day he died.

Do you have any advice for young collectors who don’t have the advantages you just mentioned?

Vogel: I have a lot of advice. Keep good records: as much information as you can; later on, people want to know these things. And I think people need to follow the heart. Don’t listen to a lot of people; if you do, you won’t be happy. Listen to yourself.

But mostly, it’s good to have someone to collaborate with, to be appreciated, and share the knowledge with and to enjoy it with. It’s an enriching way to collect. I have no incentive to do it myself.

Howard Greenberg, owner of New York’s Howard Greenberg Gallery, is showing part of his photography collection at Paris’s Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation through April 21, in an exhibition that originated at the Musée de l’Elysée photography museum in Lausanne, Switzerland. Greenberg has been involved with photography in a number of ways: first as a photographer himself, also as a gallerist, and as the founder and chair of the board of directors of the Center for Photography at Woodstock. ARTINFO France sat down with him recently to talk about the new show, the magical quality of original prints, and how he first realized he was becoming a collector.

Why did you choose to show your collection for the first time at the Musée de l’Elysée and the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation?

The idea for the show came about during a conversation with Sam Stourdzé, the director of the Musée de l’Elysée. We’re colleagues, and we’ve already worked on several projects together. When I asked him what he wanted to do in the museum, he told me that he wanted to show private collections. At that stage he hadn’t realized that I myself had a vast collection, so I showed him some images on CD and since he liked them a lot, he decided to come to my house and see them with his own eyes. After that, everything happened very naturally.

You discovered the New York School, the Photo League, and the Czech School. How did that come about?

Well, I didn’t “discover” them. However, there is an anecdote I can tell you about my personal discovery of the Photo League. At the time, I was a young photographer in Woodstock, New York, and I had just gotten interested in the history of the discipline, which I was studying through books and exhibitions. One day, I went into the local frame shop, and what should I come upon but 20 prints of New York dating to the middle of the century, impressive images. So I asked whom they were by, and found out that they were the work of the owner of the local movie theater, who was a friend of mine. I had no idea that he had been a photographer, much less that he was part of the Photo League! I knew this group a bit because, in 1980, the International Center of Photography had organized an exhibition of their work. But that was only a brief encounter. These photos were a revelation for me, and right away I wanted to know more about them. A few years later, I did a big show on the League in my first gallery.

As for Czech photography, everything started with Josef Sudek. When I was a young photographer in the 1970s, I studied Sudek along with other Czech artists of the ’20s and ’30s, [František] Drtikol and [Jaromír] Funke, for example. No one knew a lot about them at the time, so I started researching them and this was exciting for me. The first prints that I got my hands on inspired me a great deal.

When did you start collecting?

I’ve always been a collector. As a child, I gathered all kinds of objects. I started collecting prints when I got involved in photography; my friends and I traded them. In 1972, I had a studio with Jerry Uelsmann, and I gave him cigar boxes in exchange for my favorite images by him. However, at that stage I didn’t yet see myself as a collector.

Maybe the beginning of my collecting goes back to the purchase of an image by Karl Struss, a pictorial work from 1910 of New York. A California collector had given it to me to resell. It cost $4,000, a large amount at that time, in 1987. I tried as hard as I could, but I couldn’t sell it. Six months later, in my gallery, I made a good sale. Because I had some money put aside, I told myself that since no one wanted it, well, I would buy it. By then I had become completely fascinated by this photo.

Why don’t you collect photo series?

I don’t buy images because of the name of the person who took them, or for their genre. On the contrary, I base it on my personal experience. I love the beauty of the object — it must evoke something special and unique for me to want to acquire it. Therefore it’s often an image that is related to something I experienced at that time. I can’t be called an intellectual collector. Through my purchases, I’m not trying to establish the history of photography or put together a conceptual collection starting with a certain idea; I don’t work that way.

Still, when we look at your collection, it does sketch out a history of the 20th century.

I have different sources of influence and all kinds of contacts; in my life, people have shown me an impressive number of photographs. I could have collected pictures of other periods, of the 19th century for instance, but I feel most at home in the 20th century.

Is this exhibition representative of your collection?

Yes, totally. It shows the incredible enjoyment that original photos give me on their own, and the power of certain specific images, which can create a transcendental experience. I love beautiful photographs, but above all it’s the magic of the medium that excites me. You can see it clearly in my collection, even in the pieces that aren’t part of the show.

You also pay a lot of attention to the quality of the prints. What does the material aspect of a photograph reveal?

My taste for and love of photography go way back, to well before anyone could even imagine the arrival of digital. I learned photography by printing images in a darkroom. It’s a very special place, and I love the artisanal quality of beautiful photos. The combination of craftsmanship and vision is very strong, and very moving. That’s exactly what I’m looking for. Or, to be more precise, that’s what moves me and, in these moments of emotion, something happens inside me. I’m talking about a magical process; as I said before, I’m not an intellectual, I do things deeply.

I have an example: “Three Welsh Miners” by Eugene Smith, which I saw for the first time at MoMA in 1970. Over the years, in my gallery, I’ve seen many prints of this photo, without ever wanting to own one. One day, I was lucky enough to have access to the original print, the one that LIFE magazine used for its reproductions. It was less about contrasts, less about intensity, but to my eyes this photo had something special. Each print changes according to its quality.

Different schools are represented in this exhibition. It makes visitors want to know everything about these images. To appreciate them, is it necessary to have a thorough knowledge and to know the entire work of the photographers who took them?

This question calls for a very long answer. So I’m just going to say that each photo provides information and tells a story in its own words. Nevertheless, you can sometimes appreciate an image even more after learning about its context.

Some of these images are very hard to look at. Is looking at them a way of confronting reality? I’m thinking about several pictures in your collection, especially one of an execution in Vietnam by Eddie Adams.

In his photographs Eddie Adams confronted war and death. I’m talking about his major works, his documentary photography, which, indeed, often shows the reality of armed combat. An image can say a lot about war and its horrors. You don’t walk away from it unscathed because what you have just seen actually happened — the photographer was there to bear witness. Plus, in this context, original prints have a unique historical value. Of course, there is also a personal dimension, given that they speak of a time that I experienced; they evoke facts that were reported to us in real time. That’s why they’re in my collection.

There are also more personal and poetic photographs. Do they additionally represent a vision of reality?

To begin with, a photograph is a document, the “faithful representation” of the real world. However, when a photographer has something to say, something that belongs to him alone, looking at the world, then he uses the medium to give shape to his vision, his opinion. Therefore objective truth and photographic truth are not always the same thing.

The Center for Photography at Woodstock is going to celebrate its 35th anniversary soon. What are some of the highlights of its history, and how would you describe its development?

Such a long existence is a little miracle in and of itself. It’s a small-scale organization that doesn’t benefit from any financial support. It’s people’s passion that has let it hang on for so long and it will keep on going this way. In 1972, I discovered Woodstock, a community of artists, of people who love to create, an artistic colony that had already existed since 1902. For years now, its photography center has had the mission to inform the public about the history and the implications of this medium. We help young photographers with workshops and exhibitions. We help them to find themselves, to find their way. That’s where we are today.

What work have you acquired most recently for your collection?

I recently purchased an important piece, “Man’s Hand Next to His Ear” (1929) by Brett Weston. He was very young at the time. I had never come across one of his original prints [until] I bought it from a Hungarian musician who had visited Weston in California around the time of this image. This photo had never been sold; it’s incredibly beautiful. It’s been attractive to me ever since I started working as a photographer.

Steven Spielberg is to oversee a new adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 novel “Rebecca” for DreamWorks. It will be directed by the Danish filmmaker Nikolaj Arcel, whose “A Royal Affair” was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar this year.

The movie is not intended to be a retread of the 1940 “Rebecca,” Alfred Hitchcock’s Gothic melodrama (and his first American picture) that won David O. Selznick the Best Picture Oscar. As reported on Cineuropa, Arcel told the Danish film magazine Ekko that “it will be a radically new interpretation of the novel, not a remake. Think epic drama.”

Hitchcock’s “Rebecca” starred Joan Fontaine as the unnamed new wife of Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier), the wealthy owner of the isolated Manderley estate in the south-western English county of Cornwall. Rebecca, his previous wife, had died mysteriously. Her memory is obsessively guarded by the housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson), who was almost certainly in love with her former mistress and threatens Mrs. de Winter with her very presence.  

Hitchcock was not satisfied with the film. “It’s not a Hitchcock picture; it’s a novelette really,” he told François Truffaut. “The story is old-fashioned; there was a whole school of feminine literature at the period, and though I’m not against it, the fact is that the story is lacking in humor.”

That “Rebecca” was scripted by Robert E. Sherwood (“The Petrified Forest,” later “The Best Years of Our Lives”) and Joan Harrison. Hitchcock’s secretary-turned-screenwriter, Harrison had adapted du Maurier’s “Jamaica Inn” for the last British picture Hitchcock made before leaving for Hollywood. Since Hitchcock, Harrison, Fontaine, Olivier, and co-star George Sanders– and the story – were all from the old country, Hitchcock considered it “a completely English picture.”

He told Truffaut, with a hint of snobbishness: “I’ve sometimes wondered what that picture would have been like had it been made in England with the same cast. I’m not sure I would have handled it the same way. The American influence on it is obvious. First, because of Selznick, and then because the screenplay was written by the playwright Robert Sherwood, who gave it a broader viewpoint than it would have had it been made in Britain.” Hitchcock reportedly banned Selznick from the set.

There is a strong British presence on Arcel’s “Rebecca,” too. It is being written by Steven Knight (“Dirty Pretty Things,” “Eastern Promises”) and produced by Eric Fellner and Tim Bevan of Working Title. This may indicate that the film will be shot in du Maurier’s Cornwall. Hitchcock’s version was filmed in Hollywood and Northern California – Manderley being created mostly with miniatures.

Arcel’s film will eventually be compared with Hitchcock’s, of course, as the 1959, 1978, and 2008 remakes of “The 39 Steps” were compared with Hitch’s 1935 original, and Gus Van Sant’s 1998 shot-for-shot remake of “Psycho” was with the 1960 version. (The 1962, 1980, and 1997 television versions of “Rebecca” are not regarded as classics, though as the 1962 production starred James Mason as Maxim, it can scarcely have been without merit.)

Trespassing on Hitchcock’s territory has invariably proved a fool’s errand. Last week’s reviews of “The Lady Vanishes,” which was directed by Diarmuid Lawrence for the BBC and aired in the UK on March 17, were not generally enthusiastic.

Although the film was based more closely on Ethel Lina White’s novel “The Wheel Spins” than was Hitchcock’s great 1938 comedy-thriller and was praised for its impeccable design and costumes, several reviewers could see little point in it. “There wasn’t much drama, nor any particular reason to care whether the lady had vanished or not,” wrote Adam Sweetingat theartsdesk.com. Maybe the upcoming “Rebecca” will have more compelling reasons for justifying its existence.

It’s finally happened: the Daft Punk album that’s been talked about since the French house duo Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter signed with Columbia Records in January has been confirmed. The build-up to the announcement shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone, as the group and label have been heavily hinting that this is where we were headed. A mysterious 15-second teaser aired during “Saturday Night Live” earlier this month, and Sony (which owns Columbia) registered 13 untitled songs with PPL, a UK-based organization that licenses recorded music, just over a week ago. But we’re no longer dealing in possibilities. It was revealed on Saturday that the group’s fourth studio album, “Random Access Memories,” will hit physical and digital stores on May 21 (the album was also made available for preorder on i Tunes). And, if only to whet our appetites even more, another 15 seconds of new music was premiered later that night, again on “SNL.”

So why is this a big deal? Daft Punk, probably more than any other artist, have made house music palatable to American audiences. There’s no debate that musicians like The Chemical Brothers, Fatboy Slim, and Prodigy helped popularize electronic dance music in the ’90s, but no one has had more sustained success than de Homen-Christo and Bangalter. There have been gold records, Grammys, and, of course, some extremely memorable music videos. The duo was immortalized on “The Simpsons” and people were actually excited that they scored Disney’s 2010 “Tron” sequel. Americans love the band, but our devotion pales in comparison to that of the rest of the world, particularly Europe, where de Homen-Christ and Bangalter are considered living legends.

And while Daft Punk have managed to stay in the public eye (at least as much as two guys who constantly wear robot masks in public can), this will be the first studio album from the band since 2005’s fairly disappointing “Human After All,” a title which proved to be a little more apt than the duo probably intended. There’s been a celebrated live album and the “Tron: Legacy” score, but nothing that could be compared to the group’s beloved first two albums, 1997’s “Homework” and 2001’s “Discovery.” No, this isn’t as big as My Bloody Valentine releasing a follow up to “Loveless” 21 years later, but it’s about as close as you’re going to get on the anticipated new album list of 2013.

March 2 Teaser

March 23 Teaser

Before Jean-Michel Basquiat could afford studios and canvases, he painted all over his apartments — on walls, doors, refrigerators, and any other bare surface he could find. In 1979, the still unknown artist began transforming his girlfriend Alexis Adler’s East Village home into just such a living installation, covering one wall in a glyph-like mural that reads “Olive Oyl,” painting crowns and “Famous Negro Athletes” on a door, and the word “Milk" on a radiator. Although the couple broke up a year later, and Basquiat died in 1988, Adler, now an embryologist at New York University, bought the apartment they once shared and never painted over his work.

Obviously that turned out to be a wise decision — as was storing his notebooks, postcards, painted clothes, photographs, and drawings on yellow legal paper. Thirty years later, Adler has now begun to assemble a team of advisors to help sort through the material in preparation for a book on the collection and, in all likelihood, an exhibition and sale. “Part of the issue has been that I am a working biologist who has raised two kids on my own and have not had time or energy to deal with it,” Adler said. “Now is the time, however.”

That’s an understatement given Basquiat’s current superstardom. Thousands of attendees visit the 24th Street Gagosian Gallery each day to see the survey of Basquiat paintings that opened last month. In November, bidders topped out his auction record at $26.4 million. And, next year, an exhibition of Basquiat’s notebooks is scheduled to open at Paris’s Musée d’Art Moderne.

Adler has enlisted Basquiat’s former assistant, Stephen Torton, to represent her in future sales, and she already has interest from filmmaker Sara Driver and art critic Luc Sante, a college friend of Adler’s who's a good candidate to write an essay for the upcoming book. Fine Art Restoration's Lisa Rosen is refurbishing and removing the wall, and former Gracie Mansion gallery director Sur Rodney Sur has catalogued the 65 or so items in the collection.

“The thing that’s most interesting is the material she has to support the actual artwork,” Sur said. Apart from the paintings and drawings, Adler has a script for a play Basquiat wrote and some 50 rolls of 35mm film documenting the artist at work, modeling his painted clothes, and just going about everyday life (back when he still sported a shaved head). “A lot of the signage he used in his work over and over again, this was when he was developing it. The idea that it’s all together in one place makes it even more important.”

For instance, Sur credits Basquiat’s sometime depiction of scientific formulas and compounds to his time with Adler, who was a biology student in those days. He said Basquiat was fascinated by her textbooks and copied much of the imagery.

Adler has not confirmed any plans for a sale yet, but the endeavor would have interesting results. For one thing, the market for Basquiat's archival material remains largely untested. “Auctions typically like blue-chip work, not ephemera,” said art advisor Wendy Cromwell. While Christie’s has had success selling off a trove of minor works from the Andy Warhol Foundation, that collection bears the estate’s stamp of approval. The Basquiat Authentication Committee endorsed six of Adler's paintings and drawings before disbanding last year.

Private sales, however, seem to be opening up to certain kinds of nontraditional works from the era, like Keith Haring’s subway drawings, which were once impossible to authenticate but have been popping up on the market more frequently in recent times. Three years ago, a 1984 Basquiat door, also painted with crowns, sold at Phillips for a hefty $1.8 million.

Educational institutions present another viable opportunity for the collection. “I would think the Smithsonian would be all over this kind of thing, the archives of American art, where you would want a repository of photographs documenting the work,” said Cromwell.

This early work, after all, is most likely to attract serious Basquiat fans and scholars who are interested in the artist’s evolution. “When he was partnered with Alexis they were just a couple; no one then knew that Basquiat would become what he became. That's why this work is so important,” said Sur. “We tend to get trapped in what we know of his art production and think of everything as an extension to that model, which it’s not. These were very important explorative times for him, although his signature style was already formed.”

Regardless, Adler is in no hurry. She says she is financially secure and has already waited 30 years, after all. “I just want to show it,” she said. Her two children are now grown and she has a boyfriend who lives uptown, which means that these days her cats are the main witnesses to the mural. “And that’s a damn shame,” she said, “because it’s a beautiful piece of art.”

To see more breaking art news from Artinfo.com, click here.

This Thursday, Adeline Hazan, mayor of the French city of Reims, will receive an exceptional donation of 663 works by Franco-Japanese artist Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita. According to AFP, the donation, which is estimated at €1.7 million ($2.2 million), comprises 15 paintings, among them a self-portrait from 1922 and a depiction of Chaim Soutine’s studio. The works also include stained-glass windows, ceramics, and many preparatory drawings.

Foujita’s career took off during the Roaring Twenties, when he moved to Paris and became friends with other up-and-coming artists such as Picasso and Modigliani. A painter, illustrator, engraver, and even a sometime filmmaker, Foujita left instructions in his will that his works should be kept together in one place, and his ten heirs have respected his wishes. When it opens in 2018, the new Musée des Beaux-Arts in Reims will have the largest collection of works by Foujita in Europe.

Why Reims? It may seem surprising that this famous artist, who was born in Tokyo in 1886, who lived in Paris but also in New York, Japan, China, and South America, and who died in Switzerland in 1968, decided to leave his work to this small city in the Champagne region.

The reason behind the choice is a religious one. While visiting the Saint Remi Basilica in Reims one day with a friend, Foujita felt himself called to the Catholic faith. He soon converted and was baptized in the Gothic cathedral in Reims. His godfather, René Lalou, was the director of the Mumm Champagne company. Foujita, who took the name Léonard after being baptized, had the Notre-Dame-de-la-Paix chapel built in Reims, which he decorated himself and where he is now buried next to his wife.

The signing of the act of donation by the artist’s heirs will be followed by a mass on Good Friday under the crucifixion fresco that the artist himself painted.

– Mo' Endowment for MOCA: Since turning down LACMA's offer of a takeover and $100-million funding boost, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art has been on a fundraising tear, securing pledges amounting to $60 million towards a goal of raising its endowment to $100 million. (That's a huge boost given that its endowment had dwindled from $38.2 million in 2000 to $5 million in 2008, and was still just $19.86 million in mid-2011.) Eli Broad, who came to MOCA's rescue in 2008, has pledged to match up to $15 million in endowment donations, though observers remain skeptical of how the money will be spent. "We're concerned that no mention is made of funding for the day-to-day operating costs of the museum and the hiring of new staff, including a chief curator," said MOCA Mobilization co-founders Cindy Bernard and Diana Thater. "We hope that further details are forthcoming." [LAT]

– Is Julian Schnabel Staging a Comeback?: The celebrity artist — synonymous with the late-1980s market boom — has new exhibitions at the East Village storefront Oko and the Brant Foundation Art Study Center, as well as an (unconfirmed) fall show at Gagosian Gallery. Still, not everyone is convinced that the man now making plate portraits of Peter Brant's children is an artist for the ages. "That incredibly grand gesture that he makes," said artist Robert Longo, "the best compliment I can offer Julian is I was incredibly jealous when that...shit actually worked." [Gallerist]

– Steve Cohen's Been Selling, Too: Before purchasing Picasso's "Le Reve" from casino mogul Steve Wynn for a whopping $155 million, the hedge fund billionaire had quietly been offering other artworks for sale through private channels, dealers say. Cohen's sell-off was perhaps an effort to raise cash ahead of his blockbuster purchase, which comes less than two weeks after his hedge fund, SAC Capital Advisors, agreed to pay $616 million to settle accusations of insider trading. [NYT] 

– Age of "Isleworth Mona Lisa" Still Uncertain: Despite carbon dating tests by Zurich's Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, the dates of the so-called "Isleworth Mona Lisa" — a version of the iconic Leonardo da Vinci portrait whose owners claim it predates the one hanging in the Louvre — remain uncertain. The latest data suggests with 95 percent probability that the canvas on which the Isleworth version was painted dates from between 1410 and 1455, while the Louvre "Mona Lisa" began in 1503. Not surprisingly, the results of the tests have raised questions about why da Vinci, who lived from 1452 to 1519, would have used canvas between 45 and 90 years old to paint this preliminary version of his portrait. [TAN]

– Sotheby's CEO Makes Less in 2012, But Still More Than You: William F. Ruprecht, Sotheby's CEO and chairman, earned $6.3 million in 2012, down 10 percent from a year earlier in the wake of declining auction sales. The still-hefty paycheck includes an automobile allowance, club dues, and personal financial planning fees. Sotheby's profit fell 37 percent in 2012. [Bloomberg]

– Fruitmarket Seeks Sea Water: As part of Tanya Kovats's upcoming exhibition "Oceans" at Edinburgh's Fruitmarket Gallery, the artist is using word of mouth and social media to bring together water from all of the world's seas that will be used in her aptly-named sculpture "All the Seas." The water must arrive at the gallery — in a container or bottle labeled with the name of the sea in question — by December 15. Each donor's name will be included in the work when the exhibition opens in March of next year. [Artdaily]

– Taiwan Taps Trio for Venice: Curator Esther Lu, working with the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, has selected Taiwanese video artist Chia-Wei Hsu, German-Taiwanese mixed-media artist Bernd Behr, and Czech conceptual artist Kateřina Šedá to represent Taiwan at this year's Venice Biennale. "This project resonates with the context of the historical circumstances and current conditions of the Taiwan Pavilion’s participation in the Venice Biennale," Lu said. [e-flux]

– Artist Loses Copyright Case Over Porn Collage: The Danish artist Kristian von Hornsleth — whose current project involves plunging a giant aluminum sculpture containing 5,000 people's DNA to the bottom of the Mariana Trench — is in hot water over another work. Hornsleth used a photo of art journalist Camilla Stockman (who had just written an article critical of his work) and collaged it onto a pornographic image. Now a Danish high court has ordered von Hornsleth to pay the photographer of the porn scene, Lizette Kabré, nearly €5,000 ($6,300) for using her copyrighted work without permission. [TAN]

– InSight Program Offers Blind Museum Tours: Each month, a group of visually impaired art lovers tour the Museum of Modern Art with an expert guide as part of its Art inSight program. The AFP rode along with the group on its recent visit to the exhibition "Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925." Though most of the works included are fragile paintings and drawings, visitors were permitted to touch some sculptures. "You touch what’s being described to you and it becomes total reality," said Barbara Appel, 62. "I'm still seeing. I’m still taking in the arts as I did. There’s wonderful sight in the mind of a person." [AFP]

– Old Masters Get a Temporary Homecoming: This May, over 70 Old Masters paintings will temporarily return to their original home at Houghton Hall in Norfolk, where they were originally brought together by Britain's first Prime Minister, Robert Wapole, in the 1720s. The show marks the first time these works — including pieces by Van Dyck and Rembrandt — have been seen in England for 234 years. Campaigners Art Not Oil called the involvement of lead sponsor BP "a great shame." [BBC]

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For more art news throughout the day, check ARTINFO's In the Air blog.

Life and death in the ill-fated Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum is at the heart of a new exhibition at the British Museum. 

For the first time in 40 years, more than 450 objects from the preserved cities are going on display in London, many of which haven't been seen outside Italy.

Pompeii and Herculaneum on the Bay of Naples in southern Italy were buried by the catastrophic volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. As both cities were unprepared for the event, the daily life of its citizens were preserved until they were discovered nearly 1700 years later.

The exhibition has been curated by Dr. Paul Roberts, who also acts as Senior Curator of Roman Archaeology at the British Museum. He told Reuters "When we look at Pompeii and Herculaneum what we see are real people, ordinary cities. They weren't Rome, they weren't Alexandria, that's why they're so important to us, because when they were buried,  Pompeii and Herculaneum preserved for us what life was like in two ordinary cities. They're quite different between themselves.  Pompeii was a much bigger city, Herculaneum was a sea side resort if you like."

The exhibition is split into different areas of daily life, from the high street, to the living room, garden, and kitchen and contains tools and belongings of that time. "They were things that people commissioned, bought, loved, enjoyed, used, handled," said Dr Roberts, "They were things that belonged in their homes and by looking at their possessions, we can look at the people behind the possessions."

Because of their geographical locations around Mount Vesuvius, both cities were buried in differing ways leading to artifacts being preserved or destroyed in different ways.

"Herculaneum was buried under a phenomenally hot avalanche of volcanic material, 400 degrees Centigrade - four times the heat of a boiling kettle" explained Dr Roberts, "and what that did was to carbonise wood, so wooden furniture and even food was turned into charcoal, turned into carbon and we just don't get that in  Pompeii, we only get that in Herculaneum so the seven pieces of furniture we have in Herculaneum are amongst the most special things we have."

The exhibition displays Herculaneum with a loaf of bread perfectly preserved in carbon, as well as furniture and finally a woman whose remains have been preserved.

However, the thing that makes Pompeii so famous are the casts of people, which were almost overlooked when they began excavating the site. Dr Roberts said "when they discovered a hole in the ash, they dug down and there were usually bones at the bottom of it, so they understood they were dealing with people. Then in the 1860's a man called Giuseppe Fiorelli thought I'll pour plaster of Paris down the holes and he did so and let the plaster set and when they dug the ash away there were the bodies, of people from Pompeii, people in the moment of their deaths and that's one of the things that's so moving about  Pompeii."

"Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum" runs at the British Museum from 28 March to 29 September.

Bentley's new Flying Spur hits the road this summer.  So what kind of luxury does a driver get for $200,500? Here are some answers from the New York International Auto Show.

Since moving to Los Angeles last summer, Perry Rubenstein has already made a mark for himself as a power player on the West Coast art scene. Now that he has settled, ARTINFO chatted with him about his new gallery, the difference between the coasts, and just what he will do with all that outdoor space.

In an interview with the L.A. Times’s Jori Finkel shortly after you announced your L.A. move, you said, “The idea that we can embrace indoor/outdoor life here is a breath of fresh air.” How have you taken advantage of that idea now that you are settled?

Without question. The outdoors is inescapable. The landscape here informs everything. Space itself is defined differently. One is always moving from place to place in L.A. Even the time spent in transit, sitting in the car, is valuable. It’s time to think, to talk, and to listen. Frankly, the car may be the most vilified but unheralded place to allow yourself to hear, arguably even to create.

For me personally, the space is not just refreshing, it’s inspiring. The movement is activating, and necessary. For our artists and our audience, we made certain to embrace that space in the architecture and design of the gallery. Its courtyard separating the east gallery from the west was my first decision, a mandate of sorts.

I wanted room to think between spaces and for others to enjoy the same.

In interviews from the last couple of years it seems like you were an L.A. convert before you even moved there. Now that you have had some time to adjust, can you elaborate on how you feel about L.A. versus New York (both in general and art-specific)?

I was and still am. I often joke that the powers that be should deputize me as the president of the Chamber of Commerce here as there is nothing like the zealotry of a convert. That said, I learned quickly not to choose, or more accurately, why it wasn’t and /or isn’t necessary to choose between cities.

Barbara Kruger said it best when I first arrived, convinced L.A. was not only the present and the future but the only place to be. She said not to stress, that they are both great cities, and they are both still here. Thinking back, it still makes me laugh. She was right, of course.

What was your number one reason for moving?

The challenge to make a mark.

Has your collector base significantly changed since moving to L.A.? Is it now heavily California-centric, or is it more global?

It has expanded. In many cases where I had pre-existing relationships here, it has grown deeper and richer. As far as new collectors, we have met many that we had little or no relationship to previously. What’s fascinating here is that when people do come to the gallery, they have chosen to come, not merely to stop by or in. We get incredible face time with our visitors, the chance to actually speak about the work, to build a relationship.

As or more gratifying than any of the above, is the fact that here in Hollywood, we are a destination. It seems that everyone who comes to L.A. comes to visit. And I am speaking about [those ranging from] luminary directors and curators to the most prominent collectors in the world.

The recent sale to MoMA recently of the magnificent Mike Kelley was seen by an incredible audience but competed for by some of the most elite collectors and institutions worldwide. I don’t honestly know if exhibiting it in NY would have had the same impact. Or effect. Either way, we couldn’t be more pleased.

The L.A. art scene seems like it’s becoming increasingly important. How do you see the balance of power (in the U.S. market) changing in the next 5-10 years?

Quite simply, all eyes are on L.A. You can feel it. There is a freshness, a newness that doesn’t exist elsewhere. At least not here in the U.S.

I say this not as a New Yorker and a 30-year resident of West Chelsea and a professional of the same number of years. The world has changed. And is changing fast. New York is still very central, but it is far from the only center.

Los Angeles is precisely what I thought it was when we made the decision to migrate; a great city and a major art center. The artist alone would have made it so, but the will of the community, the shift in buying habits to a more global platform, has made L.A. not just critical but imperative.

“The influence of anxiety” is one way of describing many of the 31 films in the Museum of Modern Art’s impressive “The Weimar Touch” exhibition, which starts next Wednesday, April 3, and runs through May 6. 

 As opposed to a conventional retrospective of German Expressionist films made during the Weimar Republic (1918-33), the program was curated from subsequent international movies that were topically or stylistically shaped by the movies of that era, or shared talent with them. Expressionism – described by Thomas Elsaesser as “a rebellious artistic intervention” – was only one strand of a cinema that in “the battle between popular culture and high culture tilts notably in favor of the popular.”  
 
Inevitably, though, the lighting, the mise-en-scène, and the intimations of instability and the coming inferno that characterize Expressionist films shade those made by Weimar’s diaspora. So there is fear and paranoia aplenty in such MoMA selections as Joseph Losey’s remake of “M” (1951), Edgar G. Ulmer’s “The Black Cat” (1934), Fritz Lang’s “Fury” (1936), Robert Siodmak’s “Mollenard”/“Hatred” (1938), Frank Borzage’s “The Mortal Storm” (1940), and Charles Laughton’s “The Night of the Hunter” (1955).
 
Dread isn’t the only emotion: the season includes two classic comedies of gender identity in Reinhold Schunzel’s “Viktor and Viktoria” (1933) and Billy Wilder’s “Some Like It Hot” (1959), and two Shakespeares in Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (1935) and Paul Czinner’s British-made  “As You Like It” (1937). Made on a Warner Bros. sound stage, “Dream” is the most glorious convergence of German Romanticism and Anglo-American acting outside of film noir. I am fond of it as the first film I wrote about professionally, but also because James Cagney, Mickey Rooney, and Olivia de Havilland give sublime performances in the tangles and shadows of Reinhardt’s Athenian Arden. There are hints, too, of Hieronymus Bosch.
 
Also featured is Dieterle’s “The Life of Emile Zola,” which in 1937 was a timely account of the Dreyfus Affair. It’s unfortunately billed on different days to another 1937 film, Ulmer and Jacob Ben-Ami’s American Yiddish comedy-drama “Grine Felder (Green Fields)” (1937). 
 
Wilder, Ulmer, and Siodmak had worked on a famous silent portrait of pre-Hitler Berlin, “Menschen am Sonntag” (1930), with cameramen Fred Zinnemann and Eugen Schüfftan. “The Weimar Touch” includes directors Zinnemann and Emilio GomézMuriel’s “Redes (The Wave/Nets)”, a socialist realist drama about striking Mexican fishermen that was originally conceived as a documentary and photographed by Paul Strand. Schüfftan photographed Siodmak’s “Mollenard/Hatred”; two of its stars, Harry Baur and the French Resistance fighter Robert Lynen, were murdered by the Nazis.
 
So, too, was the Jewish actor-director Kurt Gerron, who had played the clown opposite Marlene Dietrich in Josef von Sternberg’s “The Blue Angel” (1930). He ignored von Sternberg and Peter Lorre’s entreaties to join him in Hollywood, remaining in Europe. The MoMA season includes “Het mysterie van de Mondscheinsonate” (1935), a crime drama about a murdered dancer that Gerron directed in the Netherlands. 
 
Arrested and sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, he was forced to stage a cabaret there and perform “Mack the Knife” (as he had done in the original 1928 run of “The Threepenny Opera”). He was also forced to make a Nazi propaganda film, “The Fuhrer Gives a City to the Jews,” about the camp’s “humane” conditions. He and his wife died in Auschwitz in 1944, reportedly on the last day before the gas chambers were closed. 
 
Other stand-outs in “The Weimar Touch” are Max Ophüls’s Dutch-made Depression film “Komedie om Geld”/”The Trouble With Money” (1936) and Jacques Tourneur’s anti-Nazi spy thriller “Berlin Express” (1948). Starring Robert Ryan and Merle Oberon and set in Allied-occupied Germany, the latter was written by Siodmak’s brother Curt and featured Reinhold Schünzel (the “Viktor und Viktoria” director) and Weimar director and “Pandora’s Box” star Fritz Kortner. 
 
Finally, the Technicolor and Oscar-anointed special-effects sci-fi flick “When Worlds Collide” (1951) doesn’t sound like a Weimar offshoot, but its end-of-the-world scenario suggests a blend of Nazi-era Götterdämmerung and Cold War catastrophe. Two Austro-Hungarians made it: the director was Weimar cinematographer Rudolph Maté; the producer was George Pal, a former UFA client who graduated to Paramount's Puppetoons in the 1940s. 

“The Weimar Touch,” April 3- May 6, 2013; The Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters, Museum of Modern Art, New York City; (212) 708-9400; www.moma.org.

LOS ANGELES — Following the success of his offbeat comedy “Rubber” on the film festival circuit, French writer, director, and musician Quentin Dupieux has crafted an equally unique and odd movie titled “Wrong,” which he described to BLOUIN ARTINFO as a vehicle he used to look at “the absurdity of life.”

The story focuses on Dolph Springer (Jack Plotnick from “Reno 911”), who can’t find his dog. Devastated, he hunts for his missing four-legged friend and on his journey he comes into contact with a series of eccentric characters that cause him to spiral into insanity.

The outlandish humor prevalent throughout the unconventional indie film might not work for mainstream audiences, but Dupieux, known as electronic recording artist Mr. Oizo in music circles, is acutely aware that he’s not making movies for everyone – and he prefers it that way.

Dupieux spoke with BLOUIN ARTINFO about his latest project, which opens in theaters Friday, and why he likes making smaller films.

Why do you like to shoot in the U.S. versus France?

Yes, mainly for the actors I have to say. There is something about the actors here. First when they say “yes,” they come for real. They won’t come with their ego. When someone says yes, even someone famous, they come on the set and they are ready. They know the lines and the script and are focused. They just want to do it. This is priceless for the director and I only find this here in the U.S. It’s very different from France.

How so?

In France there is a lot more emotion involved. You have to make friends with the actor. You have to be nice to them. You have to talk to them a lot to make them feel comfortable. You have to take care of them on the shoot. It’s complicated. The American actor from my experience is always focused. I don’t have to explain everything everyday. That’s what I like here. 

Given the fact that this is a small indie film and not a huge summer blockbuster with A-list names, how challenging is it to get a movie like this made?

I don’t need a lot of money to shoot this. I think my movie costs half the day of “G.I. Joe.” I’m not even joking. With half the day of “G.I. Joe”’s money you can make a film. We only shoot for 22 days and it’s super cheap. I’m making very small movies, but that’s what I like. I can do whatever I want and I don’t have to please the entire world. I’m not trying to reach 25 million viewers. I don’t really think about that.

The main character didn’t have any sort of normal interactions with anyone he encounters in the movie — not one. Talk about that aspect of the film.

I wanted to point out the absurdity of life. I know everything looks weird in my movie and every situation is not like real life, but that’s the point. I’m just trying to show life differently.

So would you say this is how you see life?

Of course, that’s part of everyday life. If you try to find meaning everywhere, you realize quickly there is no meaning.

Explain why Plotnick’s character went to work everyday after he was fired.

There are people who will die when you fire them so it’s the end of the world because you have your own reason for going to work everyday and then someone tells you you’re done. It’s very hard to find some new excitement I think.

Anytime you showed the office where he was formally employed it would be raining inside the building and the characters would be drenched. Why?

It was just to show the boring [part] of his life. It is terrible for a human being to go to a stupid job where you don’t care at all what you do. I was just trying to show how tedious office life can be. It’s just a funny way of showing boring. We never see what they’re doing. My guess would be a travel agency, but you don’t see the work. You don’t see what it’s about, but the rain was there to show you it was a boring job.

I understand you really like to explore the relationship between a man and his dog. Why is that subject so interesting for you?

It was a good way to talk about love without using a guy and a girl. I was trying to talk about what happens when love goes awry. The dog was good because I think when you own a dog and you love him, when [something happens and] he’s gone it’s terrible. You can’t do anything.

Can you talk about casting and how you decided on this group of actors?

Jack Plotnick had a small part in my movie “Rubber.” I really enjoyed working with him. He surprised me a lot. He was really funny. I only shot about three days with him on “Rubber,” and I was frustrated by that so I decided to write a movie for him. Then for Eric Judor, he’s a friend of mine and a very famous French actor.

I was reading you don’t like to have rehearsal time on your films. Why do you prefer that style of directing?

Because I like to keep it fresh. When you do rehearsals, you destroy the lines and you kill the magic and you have to work a lot to find the magic again. I experienced that the last time. When you work too much on dialogue or scenes you have to go through that process and remove the magic. My process you don’t touch it. It works. Usually we don’t do rehearsals and after three takes I get what I want.

And how did the actors feel about not having rehearsal time?

I’ve shot four movies in the U.S. and every time everyone enjoys it, but that doesn’t mean we’re not working. We’re trying different stuff and [we] talk about the character, but we shoot very fast. This way nobody gets bored and you don’t go crazy trying to find the perfect scene. I’ve been lucky that way. Everyone has been super happy to work on my sets.

“Wrong” is available on VOD and iTunes now and opens theatrically in select cities Friday, March 29. For a full list of screening locations and dates, click here.