MILAN—With a new location that makes it independent from the Salone del Mobile—the huge international furniture fair that opened here on Tuesday—this year's SaloneSatellite, an event focused on promising young designers, is presenting the work of 650 talents under the age of 35. 

“Why is this man smiling?” asks the cunning poster for “The Unknown Known,” documentarian Errol Morris’s new film about former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. It’s a pertinent question, and one that, as you watch the film, becomes more and more absurd. Why is this man smiling, really? And how do we wipe that smile off his face?

Another pertinent question might be: Why did Rumsfeld agree to be part of this?

While the film charts Rumsfeld’s career through multiple administrations and two terms as Secretary of Defense (1975-1977 under Gerald Ford; 2001-2006 under George W. Bush), Morris is less interested in humanizing his subject — which is the case in the flawed Netflix documentary “Mitt” — as probing that smile. When pitted up against the Interrotron— Morris’s device for conducting interviews, which forces the subject to look directly in the camera lens, giving the effect they are addressing the audience —will that smile crack? Will we understand its omnipresence?

Or maybe we won’t understand it at all because there is nothing behind that smile.

But the smile is what interests Morris, or at least what it says. It’s used in the film as a framing device, and Morris lets the camera linger on Rumsfeld’s face in close up for an uncomfortable amount of time. We become acquainted with that smile. It shows up in the interviews and historical photographs and footage. You can feel it in audio recordings. It becomes a recurring joke, maybe even a dark one.

For the most part, Morris lets his subject laugh while being laughed at. There is no hard condemnation of Rumsfeld or his colleagues for the crimes of the Bush years, but a critique remains. This is most evident in Morris’s unraveling of Rumsfeld’s bizarre and twisting logic, which includes publicly stated phrases such as “the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” or the “unknown unknowns” that give the film its title — the statements seem more like deflections than answers to questions. Everything with Rumsfeld is an evasion, the ultimate spin and a way to avoid direct blame. When he becomes prickly, challenging Morris on the semantic meaning of a word or phrase, the filmmaker will contradict what’s being said with quick bursts of text that display the actual definition of the word or phrase in question.

“The Unknown Known” won’t receive the accolades of “The Fog of War,” Morris’s documentary about former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, which won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and is most easily comparable to his portrait of Rumsfeld. The two are companion pieces certainly, but a carbon copy wouldn’t have been interesting. What makes the “The Unknown Known” worth watching is the ways in which it is not like its predecessor; where McNamara dry and direct, Rumsfeld is slippery and hard to pin down. The film is the ultimate known unknown disguised as a known known, to use Rumsfeldian terminology. Or to untangle the logic a bit, it’s a film about a subject we think we know but really don’t, and maybe never will.  

As spring fever expectations heat up for the big May auctions, ARTINFO has learned that Sotheby’s New York will be offering Andy Warhol’s large-scaled and wildly colored “Big Electric Chair” from 1967-68 at an estimate of $18-25 million.

Measuring 54 by 74 inches, only 14 canvases of the fatal image depicting an empty electric chair centered in a minimally appointed chamber and appropriated from a black and white newspaper photograph of the deadly contraption at Sing Sing Prison in Ossining, New York, were created in the large format.

Of those, at least half reside in major museums and private collections, including the Menil Collection in Houston, the Eli Broad Art Foundation in Los Angeles, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and the Stefan Edlis collection in Chicago.

Perhaps more strikingly, this example is the only one in which Warhol radically divided the canvas in three distinct fields of uniform color and silkscreened the surface twice in jarring shades of purple and forest green. It appears as a kind of oscillating flag, creating an all-over Technicolor field, and a grim one at that.

Earlier iterations of the electric chair from his stellar “Death and Disaster” series of 1963 were executed in black-ink silkscreens on monochrome grounds. It is one of the few subjects Warhol returned to in later years, with this group created between December 1967 and January 1968.

“It makes it more of a still life,” said Alex Rotter, Sotheby’s co-world-wide head of contemporary art, “than an action based painting.”

Although the painting lacks Warhol’s direct signature, it bears the stamp of both the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Estate of Andy Warhol and is also listed in the second volume of “The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonne: Paintings and Sculptures 1964-1969” as number 2044.

The most expensive electric chair painting to sell at auction was back in November 2007 at Christie’s New York when “Little Electric Chair” from 1964-65, measuring 22 by 28 inches and set against a garish pink background, sold for $5,641,000.

Large version works from the series of 14 are quite rare at auction — “Big Electric Chair” from 1967, searing in shades of burnt orange and green, sold for £1,653,500 ($2,339,417) back at Christie’s London in June 1999, and “Big Electric Chair” in a pale pink shade brought in $4,959,500 at Christie’s New York in November 2002.

The priciest Warhol from his “Death and Disaster” series, “Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster) in Two Parts,” from 1963, also represents the record price for his work at auction, making $105,445,000 at Sotheby’s New York last November.

The current example goes on view at Sotheby’s London New Bond Street headquarters on April 11 for a five-day preview.

Though Sotheby’s is not identifying the seller or any other details about the deal, it is understood to be the property of former hedge fund manager David Ganek. The seller acquired the work from Pace Gallery in 2010, according to the provenance prepared by Sotheby’s.

There’s always a learning curve for a brand new art fair, and perhaps even more so for one in Silicon Valley, a corner of the United States known more for birthing iPhone apps than art careers. This week, we’ll find out what sort of market actually exists in the region, as Silicon Valley Contemporary comes to San Jose from April 10 through 13. Fair organizers are consciously banking on attracting a crowd that appreciates both circuitry and artistry — they cite the popularity of the likeminded Zero1 Biennial, which kicked off in 2006 — although event programming seems to be pulled in several contrary directions.

Certain forward-thinking gallerists, like Kathy Grayson of the Hole, have found a way to simultaneously appeal to the tech-geek and the art purist: Paintings, made by drones, which are then couched in the language of Abstract Expressionism. Those works are the brainchild of Katsu, an artist perhaps best known for converting fire extinguishers into massive paint-delivery systems that can then be used to tag walls (like the one that he illegally augmented at MOCA in 2011). They’re made by outfitting a DJI Phantom 2 consumer-grade drone — retail price of around $700 — with a spray-paint can and hardware from Home Depot and Lowe’s. “It’s this bizarre collaboration, with me assisting the technology as much as it is assisting me,” said Katsu, who is prone to vaguely anthropomorphizing the drone, almost suggesting that it approaches a sort of low-level quasi-sentience while making the paintings. Canvases are suspended from the ceiling with fishing wire, and Katsu determines — or tries to determine — both the drone’s movement and the paint application via remote control. He compares the experience to becoming so immersed in a video game that “you enter a zone where it’s almost out-of-body, where your connection with the remote becomes so fluid it’s like you’re moving your limbs.” The end results are airy, abstract pieces in which lines of pigment dissolve into vaporous contrails. It’s difficult, as a viewer, to step back and appreciate them simply as paintings, rather than as paintings-made-using-drones; for that reason the Hole is showing a short, abstract film that captures the process (the actual drone, however, won’t be on display). Even so, Katsu wonders how the Silicon Valley crowd will react, and what they’ll actually respond to. “I think people will probably be eager to point out all the things that were wrong with it, technologically,” he said. “How it could have been simply programmed to perfectly execute a Jackson Pollack.” For Katsu, the experience itself was infinitely more humanistic than that. “I don’t think the drone has the capacity to learn,” he said, “but we did improve our relationship over time.”

Other elements of Silicon Valley Contemporary straddle a similar line between the domain of the art lover and the gadget fetishist. A crew from the Marina Abramovic Institute is bringing the “Mutual Wave Machine” to the fair, an “interactive neurofeedback installation, that embodies the elusive notion of ‘being on the same wavelength’ with another person through brainwave synchronization,” according to press materials. (The work’s “concept trailer” is similarly oblique, and makes the whole project look a bit like a sci-fi horror nightmare). Untitled is bringing a slice of Lower East Side chic, with work from web-obsessed Brad Troemel, as well as Jon Rafman, whose practice often touches on what would seem to be Silicon Valley-friendly tropes (video games, interactive worlds like Second Life, Google Street View photography). Yet some gallerists are keeping it simpler, hanging the Richters and Basquiats that by now are the wallpaper of international art fair monoculture. Pace Gallery adds a measure of instant blue-chip cred to the fair; while they don’t have a booth per se, they’ll be exhibiting a 2011 “pin drawing” by Tara Donovan, measuring 10’ x 10’, in the VIP Lounge. (Pace is also initiating a pop-up space in nearby Menlo Park, California, where an Alexander Calder show opens April 16, followed by a Donovan exhibition opening May 22.)

As to who will actually be attending the fair, looking at — and hopefully buying — this eclectic range of work, that’s an open question. “Obviously, we have invited VCs and bankers and doctors and lawyers and the average public” in addition to tech-industry workers, said Rick Friedman, executive director and founder of the Hamptons Expo Group, which is behind Silicon Valley Contemporary. Collectors, he ventures, might be a bit younger than at other fairs: “In Silicon Valley, people have become financially successful at a relatively early age, so it’s not unusual for guys in their 30s or 40s to have cashed out and be thinking about their next venture.”

Stereotypes that linger in the air over the typical Silicon Valley collector — highbrow nerds in Google Glass! Anime freaks with a jones for post-post-Internet art! — may be rendered moot by the ever-present bottom line. “We sell art to people in the tech industry,” Grayson said, matter-of-factly. “We’ve sold art to the head of Rockstar Games, the head of WireImage. When people have a lot of money, they usually buy art — whether they are excited about it, or always wanted to and couldn’t afford it. It’s just something that people above a certain income level like to do, and are able to do.”

Click on the slideshow to see images from Silicon Valley Contemporary.

— DIA Art Back in Danger: Yesterday, one of Detroit’s creditors presented four possible offers for monetizing the Detroit Institute of Art’s collection. These new proposals throw a wrench in the “Grand Bargain” plan backed by Governor Rick Snyder to keep the art out of the city’s bankruptcy dealings by transferring it to a nonprofit owner. “Blindly proceeding with the obviously below-market ‘Grand Bargain,’ in the face of the proposals, is a fundamentally flawed approach,” said Stephen Spencer, a financial adviser to the Financial Guaranty Insurance Company, referring to the city’s favored deal. “The result will be less money in the pockets of retirees and the perception that municipal investment in Detroit is a fool’s bet.” [NYT]

— Chicago Courts George Lucas Museum: Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel declared his interest in bringing George Lucas’s museum to his city a few months ago, but now Emanuel is getting serious and creating a taskforce to identify potential sites for the museum. Emanuel’s senior adviser David Spielfogel said the city plans to give a proposal to Lucas in the next few months. “The city of Chicago has enthusiastically welcomed me and I consider Chicago to be my second home,” Lucas said. “I look forward to working with community leaders to see if Chicago can become home to the Lucas Cultural Arts Museum.” [Chicago Tribune]

— Frieze Will Use Union Labor: After prolonged labor disputes, Frieze New York, the Teamsters Joint Council 16, and the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) have come to an agreement wherein fair organizers will employ union laborers to set up the fair’s Randall’s Island tent. Union members publicly protested the fair last year and negotiations for the subsequent deal have taken two and half months. George Miranda, president of Teamsters Joint Council 16, said, “It was a great win.” He added, “We’re satisfied with it. Our goal all along was to make sure it was 100 percent union labor, and that’s what we accomplished.” [GalleristNY, Crain’s]

— Richard Serra’s Qatar Desert Sculpture: Sculptor Richard Serra has erected four 50-foot steel pillars in the Zekreet Peninsula of the Qatar desert for his latest project, “East-West/West-East.” [Independent]

— Ukranian Protest Art Gets a Show: The exhibition “I Am a Drop in the Ocean: Art of the Ukranian Revolution” at Vienna’s Künstlerhaus features 35 artists and collectives, including art objects used during protests in Kiev’s Independence Square. [WSJ]

— Senegal’s Controversial Gay Art Show: An exhibition in Senegal meant to highlight gay persecution and the African media’s slanderous coverage of same-sex couples will go forward, despite warnings from a leading academic who feels the show will cause unwanted controversy. [TAN]

— 30-year-old archaeologist Monica Hanna is using social media to save Egyptian artifacts from looting. [NYT]

— As part of his current board fight with Sotheby’s, Daniel Loeb has created a website called Value Sotheby’s, which has some ridiculous art-themed infographics. [Value Sotheby’s]

— Brandon Ruud will be the Milwaukee Art Museum’s new curator of American and decorative arts. [Art Daily]

ALSO ON ARTINFO

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Check our blog IN THE AIR for breaking news throughout the day.

Of all the historic Place Vendôme players, only one has resisted the call of the luxury groups: Mellerio dits Meller. The storied family-owned house, located on Paris’s Rue de la Paix, also happens to be the world’s oldest jeweler, clocking in just over 400 years of existence, having survived countless wars, including the French Revolution and the occupation of France during WWII.

A framed picture of Marie-Antoinette hanging in one of the salons of the company’s flagship pays testament to another claim to fame - as jeweler of the queens. The house also owes its very existence to one of France’s high profile sovereigns—Marie de Médicis, who on October 10, 1613, issued a royal decree granting the family trading privileges in the French kingdom.

A legend passed down through the family narrates the story behind the decree. The story goes that the Mellerios, a family of Italian origin—who prior to going into jewelry, peddled small luxury objects, such as tobacco boxes—moved to Paris from their village of Craveggia in the Vigezzo Valley in northwestern Italy in 1515, settling on Rue des Lombards - then home to the city’s Italian community. It so happened that one of their new neighbors, Jaques Pido, owned a chimney sweep business, and one of his main clients was the Palais du Louvre. One day, when one of Pido’s workers overheard a plot to kill the country’s young king, Louis XIII, it fell upon Giovanni Mellerio, Giacomo del Braccio, and Saverio Tadini, as elected consuls of the community of the Rue des Lombards, to take action.

After intense deliberation, they consulted Leonora Galigai, a confidant of Marie de’ Médicis, who in turn informed the regent. The plotters were arrested, and the aforementioned decree was awarded to the informants for services rendered to the court.

Another known theory is that the decree was linked to a diplomatic role played by the Mellerios, who in exchange, guaranteed exclusivity of passageway through its village’s valley— a strategic route from France to Milan—during the Thirty Years’ War, for instance. Each of the successive kings of France renewed these privileges to the Mellerios. And it was Philippe, Duke of Orléans, in 1716, who extended the decree to commerce of mounted jewelry, goldsmithery, and precious stones. Marie de Médicis is believed to have ordered creations from the Mellerios, though the house’s first jewelry purchase by a royal is said to be a bracelet of seven cameos, interlinked by rubies sold by Jean-Baptiste Mellerio to Marie-Antoinette, who offered the creation to one of her ladies-in-waiting, Madame de Bladis. The piece today belongs to a private collection. A number of ladies from the ill-fated queen’s entourage, including Madame de Craufurd and Pauline de Tourzel, the last governess of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette’s children, are also said to have purchased jewelry from Mellerio dits Meller, both before and after the French Revolution.

In Mellerio’s history, the queen with the greatest appetite for precious stones was Queen Marie-Amélie, wife of Louis-Philippe, the last king to rule France, who reigned from 1830 to 1848, according to Vincent Meylan, author of Mellerio dits Meller, Jeweler to the Queens, which was released in 2013 during the house’s 400th anniversary celebrations. “Marie-Amélie bought pieces from Mellerio almost every week between the years 1818 and 1860, hence across 42 years,” he said, adding that she owned a stunning set in emeralds and diamonds signed by Mellerio, made up of a necklace, tiara, drop earrings, and a Sévigné brooch. “She shopped for herself, but would also buy gifts for her children and family, and her daughters also became loyal customers of Mellerio; altogether the orders from this one family alone would have represented several hundreds of pieces,” said Meylan. “Mellerio dits Meller for sure has the richest number of links to royalty and royal courts, but for one simple reason—its age. The house has existed for 400 years, which on average is four times the lifetime of any other jeweler.”

According to Jean Ghika, director, jewelry department U.K. & Europe at Bonhams, Mellerio dits Meller pieces rarely come up at auction, citing among the most recent pieces sold by the house, brooches ranging in date from the 19th Century to the 1950s. “I certainly think Mellerio is a prestigious jewelry house and is known for creating jewels for French and Spanish royalty in the 18th and 19th Centuries...The jewels, with French assay marks, appear in Mellerio fitted cases, and are thus attributable, but are usually unsigned,” she said. Marie-Laurence Tixier, the Paris jewelry department director for Christie’s, whose most important recent Mellerio dits Meller sales include a sapphire and diamond brooch that sold for US$3.64 million, agreed that pieces by the house are hard to come by. “I think it’s because they tend to stay within families who hold onto them as heirlooms,” she said.

Of all of the generations of Mellerios, François Mellerio, who moved the company to Rue de la Paix in 1815, figures among the most important figures in the family’s history, meanwhile, according to Emilie Mellerio, who, as president of the board, is the first ever woman to hold an executive position in the history of the company.

“He was a true visionary and made the company what it is today, or at least set the foundations for it to develop and become what it was in the 19th Century, referring to the House’s  richest period. “But what is interesting in the dynasty is that each of my ancestors were very different from one other, each one brought his own sensibility,” continued Mellerio, who for her own part brings “this combination of right brain and left brain,” having trained both in creation and business analysis (Mellerio’s CV includes a six-year stint at LVMH-owned jeweler and watchmaker Zenith—first at Zenith International Switzerland, then Zenith France). Her vision for the company moving forward remains service oriented, with the desire to increase the focus on made to order, which until 2004 (the year in which the company entered new markets like Asia and the Middle East, and started creating reproducible lines, specializing in engagement rings), made up “99%” of the company’s business, versus around 60% today.

The small company operates a few points of sale and shop-in-shops in Japan, though France remains its first market.

Though the jeweler’s archives house around 500 books tracing orders and visitors to the boutique across the centuries (one of the oldest stock inventories is dated 1766, likely penned by Jean-François Mellerio), along with correspondence between the house and its clients and suppliers, plaster jewelry molds, and 120,000 drawings from 1820 to the 1950s, a lot of information has been passed down orally, confirmed Mellerio who, like every generation of Mellerios, grew up immersed in the company’s history and creations. She brought her own daughter to visit the company when she was just two years old. “It’s also a way for us to make sure we can pass on the knowledge and passion to the next generation.” The idea behind the house’s name, which in English means “Mellerio aka Meller,” was to mix the Italian and French versions of Mellerio, she said, as “when we arrived in France in 1515, being Italian was not really an asset.” This interesting mix of Italian and French also pervades the House’s jewelry designs. “We have the Italian origins, with all the enthusiasm, the love of beauty, detail, and rich design, and also the very classic French tradition. We are not as Italian as Buccellati can be and we are not as French as Chaumet or Cartier can be,” said Mellerio.

In terms of image, Mellerio dits Meller over the centuries, has built a reputation for its graceful designs, impressive stones and technical and stylistic innovations. After all, they had a constant flow of influential royals to please. The company has recorded a number of patents across its history, such as for Paris’s inaugural Exhibition Universelle (great exhibition) in 1855, where the house introduced one of its innovations: a brooch with a flexible stem meant to mimic a leaf moving in nature. Then, at a later edition in 1867, they presented what was possibly the first ever jewelry interpretation of a peacock—a key motif of the Art Nouveau movement, which came much later.

Innovation was also front and center in the house’s 400th the Médicis Collection, by guest jewelry designer Édéenne, who dedicated the line to Marie de Médicis. Édéenne was inspired by the modernity of the queen, who is said to have maintained an unbridled passion for jewelry, and would sport gems in her hair and all over her body, even sewing them onto clothes. She is also said to have designed her own jewelry and knew how to cut stones. In that spirit, several pieces in the new collection offer new ways of wearing jewelry,  such as the breathtaking openwork articulated necklace shaped like a regal raised collar. Comprising 15 ultra rare rubies, the piece took 4,800 hours to craft. Borrowing a clever system used on the chatelaine watches created by the house in the 19th century, meanwhile, a stunning brooch is designed to clip to the bra in the hollow of the wearer’s breasts, leaving a cascade of strings of pearls ending in emerald buds to move freely. Édéenne chose as the line’s central motif, the lily - a flower never before interpreted by Mellerio dits Meller, despite blooms and naturalism being one of the house’s main codes.

 “For the anniversary, we wanted to inject a strong creative impulse, something really new,” said Mellerio for whom Édéenne (who by coincidence became a jewelry designer following a diving accident in Lake Maggiore, a stone’s throw from the cradle of the Mellerio family), was the right anniversary fit. “She’s a bit different, a bit out of the box,” said Mellerio.

 “There is always a risk being 400 years old; the talk is always about how old we are, but actually the reason we are still alive today is that we kept on being creative the whole time. And we strive to continue to do that.”

The mood was light as the 34th edition of the AIPAD Photography Show opened its doors last night to a buoyant crowd of dealers, collectors, curators, and fans. Photography, a medium that has grown comfortably into its malleable place within the art discussion, certainly attracts a friendly crowd, with dealers popping into each other’s booths throughout the evening.

“Howard Greenberg was impressed with these,” Steven Kasher said, pointing to his cleverly curated corner, where Marcella Cacciola’s “Brass on Tin,” 2013, was paired with a tableau of 1870 cartes des visite portraits of students at a blind academy. Cacciola’s work, an assemblage of contemporary tintypes featuring face-on, close-up portraits of street jazz musicians in New Orleans, evokes a memorializing quality similar to that of the small albumen prints from 1870, which had also been arranged as a grouping.

Portraiture was alive and well, with some fantastic inclusions from Julie Blackmon, at Robert Mann Gallery, of her seemingly stylized vignettes of nuclear families, and Song Chao, at M97, whose shots of mine workers read as political statements that are visually reminiscent of work by Michael Halsband.

The conversation between contemporary and classic could best describe the wares on offer at AIPAD — and not simply because vintage photo dealers sat snuggled beside crossover galleries. Take 798 Photo Gallery, for example, which arrived from Beijing with up-and-comer Zhang Wei, whose series “Artificial Theater” is a mixture of old and new techniques and subjects. By referencing Renaissance portraiture, such as the work of Leonardo DaVinci and Giovanni Ambrogio de Predis, Zhang layers composites of computer-generated imagery of women’s faces and bodies to create a final black-and-white image that feels entirely familiar but in fact has never existed.  Similarly, Ysabella Lemay, who was introduced to the market through Santa Fe’s Verve Gallery, stood out at Catherine Edelman’s booth with her “Photo Fusion” series, which slyly combines black-and-white nature shots with overlaid almost-surreal flora and fauna in vivid colors. Lemay’s works veer on kitsch but her many layers remain subtle and delicate, especially in how they pop off their Plexiglas mounting. 

Non-traditional photography materials were in full force, seen in work by Kamil Vojnar, whose small haunting images are printed on canvas at Verve, and Timotheus Tomicek, whose moving photographs are singular images that sway. The latter’s “In Sync,” 2014, with two flames flickering, is a clear reference to Gerhard Richter’s “Two Candles,” and is tucked in the corner of Jenkins Johnson’s booth.

Yossi Milo swapped his usual people-focused offerings for complex textural works, including Chris McCann’s modernist mash-ups with burns and slashes a la Yves Klein’s “Fire” paintings and Lucio Fontana’s signature oeuvre. But the radical constructions of Marco Breuer, which relinquish the use of a camera and instead are hand-wrung manipulations of material, speak to the medium pushing its own limits, a phenomenon that lately has taken an institutional center stage — the recently shuttered MoMA  “New Photography 2013” exhibition is one such example.

Of course, AIPAD offers plenty reminders that the origins of photography are still are as edgy as ever. Work from the 1870s by Charles Marville, on view at Hans P. Kraus, are sensitive sepia-toned albumen prints that serve as proof that the five classic principals of photography — frame, balance, light, perspective, and tone — render timeless images. With many booths transparently labeling work and even disclosing prices, AIPAD epitomizes the convivial fair-going experience — which, perhaps like the medium itself, hardly lacks for variety but certainly retains its focus.

Click on the slideshow to see images from AIPAD.

Related: Video: 60 Works in 60 Seconds at AIPAD 2014.