'The Adoration of the Magi' (ca. 1375-1385) by Bartolo di Fredi. (Courtesy the Museum of Biblical Art)

One of the must-see exhibitions of the summer is now on view at the Museum of Biblical Art, a young, jewel-box of an institution that few New Yorkers know about, let alone visit, and that is currently facing financial and organizational challenges.

With only seven works, the exhibition is stunning in its simplicity and shows off some of MOBIA’s strengths—displaying rarely seen art, and in illuminating new contexts. It is titled after its centerpiece, “The Adoration of the Magi by Bartolo di Fredi,” an over-six-foot-high 14th-century altarpiece that has been temporarily reconstructed at the Upper West Side museum through Sept. 9. A difficult-to-obtain loan from Siena, Italy, that came about thanks in part to a tale of alleged international antiquities smuggling, it is finally reunited, after hundreds of years, with two of the small predella pieces that originally ran along its bottom. “It’s Bartolo’s masterpiece,” said Bruce Boucher, the director of the University of Virginia Art Museum, which first hosted the show and owns one of the predella panels. The other is loaned from the Lindenau-Museum in Altenburg, Germany.

MOBIA has added two more altarpieces by Bartolo that were not in the Virginia show by borrowing them from the Metropolitan Museum of Art—there’s an Adoration of the Shepherds from the Cloisters uptown, which the Met cleaned for this show (“We have always had a good relationship with them,” said Patricia Pongracz, MOBIA’S acting director and director of curatorial affairs), and an Adoration of the Magi from the Met’s Lehman Collection. It’s the first time all three Bartolo “Adorations” have been shown together, Mr. Boucher added.

Even though this show is only the latest of several small spectaculars, MOBIA, despite its substantial credibility among academics, has yet to make it onto the general public’s radar screen, Ms. Pongracz said. Since opening in 2005, it has attracted a steady trickle of only 15,000 to 17,000 visitors a year.

One of those visitors in 2011 was Mr. Boucher, who was searching for a major-city museum partner to satisfy a requirement for landing the Siena loan.

Requesting the altarpiece from Siena was “audacious,” Mr. Boucher said, but it became possible because of the unusual role his museum played in a tale of international antiquities intrigue.

Some years earlier, Virginia’s professor emeritus of classical archaeology, Malcom Bell III—who has been director or co-director of U.S. excavations at Morgantina in Sicily since 1980 and is a forceful advocate of repatriation—“had known about two archaic Greek sculptures in New York that had [allegedly] been illegally exported” after being looted from the Morgantina site, Mr. Boucher explained. “Shortly before the Italian government was to file a claim [for the works], the owner agreed to hand them over to the Virginia museum, which would keep them for five years and then send them back to Italy.”

The two works had been bought by a famous American collector, for what sources say was an estimated $1 million, in 1980 from British dealer Robin Symes, who allegedly traded in looted antiquities. In 1988 they turned up at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles as anonymous loans.

But after Italy claimed the works were looted, the Getty promptly sent them back to the donor, and they weren’t seen again until they popped up at the University of Virginia Art Museum in 2002. The owner has been identified by The New York Times as Maurice Tempelsman, a major art collector better known as Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s last companion. (Mr. Tempelsman, who has never been accused of wrongdoing with respect to the works, did not respond to telephone and e-mail inquiries.)

In recognition of the university’s role as an intermediary in returning the sculpture to the nation, the Italian Culture Ministry entered into a written agreement under which Italy agreed to cooperate in lending it art. “Without the agreement, it would have been hard to get the loan,” Mr. Boucher said.

However, Italy would lend the altarpiece to the Virginia museum only if it was also shown in a major metropolitan setting and shown in 2012. “We approached [large] museums, but they were booked,” Mr. Boucher said. “I had just seen ‘Passion in Venice,’ [a well-received 2011 show at MOBIA that had international loans] and realized they are a major museum and have a track record.” MOBIA became “a critical component” in making the Siena loan happen, he said.

The Siena altarpiece demonstrates an important aspect of narrative religious imagery—telling a story to people who do not know how to read. It depicts four narratives of the magi’s journey in the upper part of the painting, moving from right to left. Siena itself is depicted as the New Jerusalem in these scenes—at the upper left is the city’s famous cathedral and bell tower, and the medieval cityscape is surrounded by the fortified walls of a medieval Italian hill town.

But as splendid and innovative as the Siena altarpiece is, it is not the most gripping work in the exhibition. That honor goes to a small Madonna and Child with Saints made for private devotion and attributed to another 14th-century Sienese artist, Naddo Ceccarelli, about whom very little is known. (“It’s a firm attribution,” Ms. Pongracz emphasized.) Only two works by Ceccarelli are signed, and they are highly valued. When a British seller offered one at Christie’s London in 2005, it went for £1.24 million (about $2.15 million at the time). The U.K. at first refused to grant an export license for the auctioned piece while it attempted, ultimately unsuccessfully, to raise funds to keep it as a national treasure. What makes the small Ceccarelli altarpiece at MOBIA extraordinary—it measures less than two feet on either side—are its humanistic, lifelike modeling—especially in the faces—and the sensitive, detailed rendering that draws the visitor in for intimate viewing.

Another stunner is the Crucifixion in the shape of a cross more than six feet high by Francesco di Vannuccio. It shows a suffering Christ with toes and clawlike hands so tensed that they are painful to look at.

This variety “demonstrates what a hotbed of artistic work was going on in Siena in the second half of the 14th century,” said Ms. Pongracz, adding that Sienese art from this period was previously considered primitive and has only recently come to be appreciated.

But names like Bartolo di Fredi are unlikely to bring in a large number of visitors, she admitted. “When you have a big name like Dürer, you draw more,” she said, referring to MOBIA’s 2008 show of works by the masterful German artist.

She said that she believes another obstacle to bringing in the general public is the fact that the museum doesn’t have a permanent collection that would give visitors a predictable experience. “Everything we do is a risk,” she said.

The museum is also about to be faced with having to raise substantial sums in order to cover its operating expenses. Since its founding, MOBIA has been dependent on the American Bible Society for cash grants. In fiscal year 2011, the ABS contributed $1.2 million of the museum’s $3 million budget and provided free office and exhibition space in its building at Broadway and West 61st Street, estimated to be worth $500,000 in MOBIA’s 2010 financial report. But as part of a plan agreed to by the museum and the society, those guaranteed cash grants are currently being scaled back and will cease altogether in July 2015.

Ms. Pongracz said that although the museum is not being asked to leave, it is looking for a new space—one with more galleries and a freight elevator. At the moment, she said, “I worry first about getting work through the doors, and then worry about getting it up the stairs” because the public elevator isn’t large enough.

All of this will take money. When MOBIA’s founding director, Ena Heller, left her post in June, she told USA Today that one reason for her departure was that she did not want to do any more fundraising.  (The search for a new director will kick off in earnest after Labor Day, Ms. Pongracz said.)

At the moment, the museum has no endowment, as is the case with many smaller institutions around the country. It raises money for each exhibition individually and has a staff of just nine full-time employees and a few part-timers.

“It’s a heavy lift in front of us,” Ms. Pongracz said, one that entails establishing financial independence, finding a new space and building an endowment. But it has already solved one issue, erasing a $500,000 debt. Its fiscal-year 2011 ledger “shows money in the bank.”

With backers like Howard and Roberta Ahmanson, evangelicals who contributed millions of dollars in support of California’s Proposition 8 (which outlawed gay marriage in that state) and sponsored the Caravaggio exhibition in London in 2005, another money spigot may be at the ready. The two are MOBIA’s largest private donors—according to The Chronicle of Philanthropy they have given already $1.2 million this year—and Ms. Ahmanson, who sits on the Collectors Committee of the National Gallery, chairs MOBIA’s board of trustees.

Ultimately, Ms. Pongracz said, MOBIA would like to amass a permanent collection. “It’s a dream right now—a strategically planned-for dream.”

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The removals began around three months ago, in order to protect the objects from vibrations caused by the major construction stemming from the renovation of the Costume Institute.

The 18,000 objects have been padded, shielded or removed altogether to storage.

The Met’s chief spokesperson, Harold Holzer, provided the figures and confirmed the removals to The Observer. They will be off view until 2014. Some 3,000 other Egyptian artifacts have been moved within the galleries, Mr. Holzer said.

The construction involves the total reconfiguration of the Costume Institute. That work produces vibrations from the jackhammer-like machines and drills that are tearing up floors and knocking down walls. The Met has blanketed the Egyptian galleries with state-of-the-art vibration sensors.

Mr. Holzer emphasized that “we use machines historically in the museum that have been tested and do work with less vibration than jackhammers.” The renovation of the Costume Institute, which does not include any expansion of its footprint, is expected to be finished by Dec. 2013, Holzer said.

Also, in recent days, original papyri in two galleries have been replaced with stunning digital reproductions. Mr. Holzer said that this move “doesn’t herald a change to use reproductions in place of originals” when originals for some reason can’t be displayed. Rather it was done in this instance because the papyri are “favorites” with visitors.

The removal of so many objects has necessitated the closing of some of the 39 galleries–with the closings following the path of the construction below–and the blocking of portions of other galleries with temporary walls, screens or fabric.

Still, there are a lot of empty cases, and whole walls with nothing on them.

When the objects were first removed, the Met put up small signs explaining that the objects had been removed to protect them from damage and that they would be back on display in 2014. But these signs have been removed and replaced with signs that merely state, “Please pardon our appearance during a construction project beneath these galleries.”

Earlier, Mr. Holzer told this reporter that more information would be given to the public, not less. When questioned about the change in signage, Mr. Holzer said that no concealment was intended. The decision to go to more generic signage “really just reflects the way we do things in the museum,” he said. “We like to be specific [at first] and then more generic as it becomes obvious that the work would continue.”

When the Stedelijk Museum loaned works by Malevich to the Menil, a legal battle was sparked. (Photo by Eric Arnau/Flickr)

Eight years ago, while a group of paintings by the Russian modernist Kazimir Malevich was on loan to the Menil Collection in Houston, the artist’s heirs, who had been attempting to recover them, sued the city of Amsterdam, home to the Stedelijk Museum, which had loaned the works. In 2005 the U.S. federal court hearing the case ruled that even if loaned art could not be seized under federal law, the presence of the artwork in the U.S. could still provide a basis for suing the foreign-government lender for damages. The decision effectively opened up a new path to allow litigation for chasing wrongfully taken art, and some foreign governments refused to lend to U.S. museums out of fear that they would be hauled into court.

That may soon change. A new bill seeks to effectively overrule the court’s decision in that 2005 case, Malewicz v. City of Amsterdam. Passing it would give American museums something they’ve sought for years—a law that would grant foreign governments nearly unqualified immunity from lawsuits when they loan preapproved artworks.

The proposed legislation, called the Foreign Cultural Exchange Jurisdictional Immunity Clarification Act, has already been passed by the House of Representatives and is now under review by the Senate Judiciary Committee, where its key sponsors are Diane Feinstein (D-CA) and Orrin Hatch (R-UT). Just prior to the House vote on March 19, one of its cosponsors, the powerful Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), told the House, “As a general matter, the benefits of cultural exchange … outweigh the provision of a U.S. forum (the courts) for disputes about the ownership of cultural property that is held by a foreign government.”

The House Judiciary Committee report states that the legislation reflects Congress’s choice “to promote Americans’ exposure to objects of cultural significance over the potential rights of individual claimants.”

Federal law already shields the artworks themselves from being seized, because of the existing Immunity From Seizure Act, which protects art registered in advance with the State Department and immunized by the U.S. But the proposed new legislation goes much further and states that, except in limited circumstances, if the art itself is immune from seizure, the lending government is also immune from any related lawsuits in American courts, even if the suit is for damages or a declaration of who is the rightful owner of the art. The only exception is for certain Nazi-era art claims—and leading lawyers who litigate for the return of that art consider that exception much too limited for claimants whose ancestors were Holocaust victims.

Some believe that pressure to resolve an embargo by the Russian government—which stopped all Russian loans to U.S. museums beginning in August 2010, because of a separate federal court action against it­—may be playing a part in how swiftly this new legislation is being pushed forward. Charles A. Goldstein, counsel to the Commission on Art Recovery, has called the virtually identical House and Senate bills “stealth bills” because of the remarkably quick action that has been taken so far. The bill was introduced in the House Judiciary Committee on Feb. 24. A mere three-and-a-half weeks later it was passed by voice vote in the full House and forwarded to the Senate. That speedy passage, Mr. Goldstein says, “suggests government juice”—pressure by the State Department to mollify the Russian government.

According to the legislation’s advocates in Congress, the 2005 Malewicz decision undermines the purpose of the Immunity From Seizure Act—encouraging foreign loans—and has severely affected U.S. museums. “The Los Angeles County Museum of Art and other museums have made clear to me the chilling effect of that decision on artistic exchanges,” Rep. Howard Berman (D-CA) stated on the House floor before the vote.

Representative Conyers reported that the director of the Detroit Institute of Arts had told him that the Czech and Russian governments “are refusing to lend” to American museums, and he said that “the Metropolitan Museum of Art withdrew a loan request to a Middle Eastern museum out of fear that once the works were in the U.S., their presence would be used as grounds for a lawsuit.” (He was referring to a 2008-09 exhibition at the Met and loans from museums in Syria, Harold Holzer, the Met’s senior vice president of external affairs, told The Observer. Mr. Holzer described it as a “unique situation [for the Met],” but he added that “further incidents at other museums show a need for correction.”)

The Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) has informed Congress that “these concerns are widespread,” a congressional staffer with knowledge of the specifics told The Observer. The AAMD declined to answer inquiries. The AAMD “requested” the legislation, according to a memo from a House Judiciary Committee counsel to the committee chair, and the AAMD, and “museums around the country,” helped draft the legislation, the legislative person close to the proceedings said.

The Malewicz case concerned the attempt by heirs of the artist Kazimir Malevich to recover paintings that had been left by the Russian artist for safekeeping with a friend in Germany. Years after Malevich’s death, the works were sold—fraudulently, according to the heirs—to the Stedelijk Museum, which is owned and operated by the City of Amsterdam. The heirs sued Amsterdam when 14 of the contested works were on loan to the Menil Collection in Houston, only two days before the exhibit was to close.

The paintings themselves could not be recovered—and they were returned to Amsterdam on schedule—because they were protected by the Immunity From Seizure Act. (Most museums do the paperwork to get immunity as a matter of course.) But the heirs argued that even though the art was immune, they could still sue Amsterdam for damages and a declaration of rights.

A different law, the Foreign Sovereign Immunity Act, in ordinary circumstances protects foreign governments and their divisions, such as the City of Amsterdam, from lawsuits in U.S. courts out of a need to protect governmental interests. But the Malewicz family cited one of the exceptions in the FSIA, called the “expropriation exception.” That exception permits a foreign state to be sued if it took property in violation of international law and “the property is present in the U.S. in connection with a commercial activity carried out by the foreign state.”

The federal court found that the exception applied because the art was in the U.S. when the suit was brought and because Amsterdam’s art loan was a commercial activity. The court ruled that the case could continue, and an out-of-court settlement resulted.

The proposed legislation amends the FSIA to say that if the loaned art has immunity from seizure, any activity of a foreign nation associated with those loans is not “commercial activity” and thus does not waive the nation’s immunity from suit.

“The court held, in effect, that immunity from seizure does not mean immunity from being sued,” said art-law attorney Howard Spiegler of Herrick Feinstein, who represented the Malewicz heirs. The new legislation means that “immunity from seizure also means immunity from being sued, except in certain limited circumstances,” he stated.

The “limited circumstances” in the proposed legislation are in a carve-out for claims related to art taken by the Nazis. The law would prevent claims like those of the Malewicz family and those related to stolen antiquities. It would also not permit claims related to artworks on loan that were “stolen through other means or in other wars that end up in foreign national collections,” said Patty Gerstenblith, a professor at DePaul University College of Law and an expert in art museum and cultural law.

“No one has a right to deal with stolen property,” said Mr. Goldstein. “The museums want a right that no one else has.”

Some lawyers fear that the Nazi-era exception is so ambiguously drafted that it will keep even some Holocaust victims from getting through the courthouse door. The bill exempts only claims to artwork “taken in Europe in violation of international law by a covered government.” So it apparently precludes claims based on seizures during the Nazi era if they occurred in culture-rich North Africa, Asia or elsewhere.

And the bill’s definition of a “covered government” is limited to the Nazis and its allies and affiliated governments, so apparently no claims can be brought against U.S. World War II allies such as the Soviet Union, which plundered cultural treasures in Nazi-occupied territory at the end of the war. Mr. Goldstein, among other art-law specialists, also fears that limiting Holocaust-era claims to art “taken” by a “covered government” might result in the dismissal of lawsuits based on the action of nongovernmental third parties. Many claims, he said, are based not on the Nazi government’s taking of the art but on forced sales or sales under duress. Auction houses, for example, conducted below-market sales of art owned by Jews as the price of their fleeing Germany. The Claims Conference, which works to return Jewish-owned art plundered during the Holocaust, is “trying to work with Feinstein’s staff to change the bill,” Mr. Goldstein said.

Asked why the legislation has been introduced only in 2012, seven years after the Malewicz decision, Mr. Spiegler said he would be “speculating,” but suggested that the Jewish sect Chabad’s high-profile case against Russia, which triggered Russia’s embargo on lending art to U.S. museums, “may have spurred interest in immunity again. Certainly, the museums that have been affected [by the embargo] may have felt that this was the time to try to assist foreign governments.”

If what Mr. Goldstein calls “the Russia factor” did play a part in instigating the new legislation, it would not be the first time that Russia’s actions have resulted in protective legislation for art loans. The Immunity From Seizure Act itself was passed in 1965 in response to the Soviet Union’s concerns that its art would be seized if it was shown in the U.S.

editorial@observer.com

Update, April 3: An earlier version of this article incorrectly reported that Rep. Conyers had stated that the Russian and Czech governments were refusing to loan to the DIA. In fact, he said that the DIA director had informed him that those governments were refusing to lend to American museums.

The Nadezhda, via http://www.odin.tc

On Friday, Russia ordered one of its ships used for military training purposes, the Nadezhda, not to make a scheduled landing in San Francisco, citing Russia’s ongoing dispute with the Brooklyn-based Jewish sect Chabad, which has led to an embargo on objects loaned between Russian and U.S. museums. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that Russian Consul General Vladimir Vinokurov attributed the change in orders in the landing, which had been scheduled as part of a good will tour, to "a long problem" involving Chabad’s claims.

Ironically, the incident comes close on the heels of Chabad’s latest tactic: attempting to start negotiations. After seven years of hard-fought litigation in the federal courts that resulted in a default judgment in its favor and a Russian embargo on lending art to U.S. museums, the sect now says it wants to try talks with the Russian government.

The default judgment, issued in July 2010, ordered Russia to turn over to Chabad a library and archive of religious books and manuscripts that the group claims Russia wrongfully took from it. Russia had abandoned the case, stating U.S. courts had no jurisdiction over it, and it termed the judgment illegal.  Soon after the judgment was issued, Russia imposed its art embargo, saying it feared Chabad would seize any art on loan in the U.S. to enforce the judgment.

The embargo has affected U.S. museums nationwide, and in July the Metropolitan Museum cancelled a planned loan to the Kremlin Museum in response.

Chabad’s motion to begin enforcement proceedings was granted in July with the express proviso–added at the request of the U.S. government–that Chabad would not attempt to attach any art that was protected from seizure by federal statute. Last April Chabad also requested that monetary sanctions be imposed against Russia, and that motion has not yet been decided.

Earlier this month, the group’s approach changed. In an Oct. 19 filing in District Court in Washington, D.C., Chabad did what seemed to be an about-face.  The filing states that Chabad wants to try “to commence negotiations with the Russian Government.”  Chabad therefore requested that the court hold its motion for sanctions in abeyance for 60 days and it also stated that it would not seek to attach any Russian property during that period.

What has caused Chabad’s 180-degree turn?

Authorities agree that Chabad’s judgment is unenforceable in Russia, and it’s questionable whether it’s enforceable in the U.S. either.

On the other hand, there is a procedure by which, under Russian law, Chabad could pay Russia for some of the property it seeks–the archive that was taken from the Germans during World War II but not the library that was nationalized after the Russian Revolution, the latter being sacrosanct patrimony in Russia–if it goes through U.S. government channels.

Chabad had decided not to take that route because, it has been suggested, it didn’t want to give up its claim to the library. Is Chabad now willing to settle for less than all of what it wants, given the difficulty of enforcing its judgment?

The sect’s latest move and Russia's cancellation of the docking of the Nadezhda comes at a time when the U.S. and Russia are again butting heads diplomatically–they recently exchanged blacklists of officials who will not be issued visas because of the death of a whistle-blower in a Russian prison.

Calls to Chabad’s lawyers were met with a “no comment.”

Josephine Halvorson, "Generator," 2011, oil on linen, 34 x 28 inches. (Courtesy the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co.)

Josephine Halvorson makes small artworks that have a huge impact. Why do viewers stop dead in their tracks in front of her pieces—humble oil paintings that are descriptive close-ups of such unlikely subjects as a machine valve, crumbs in a cake pan or the blocked window of a salt-water taffy shack—and then linger there?

To some, this reaction might seem puzzling, because—although Ms. Halvorson, 30, at times resists the label—her work is realistic, at the very least in the sense that she sets up her easel in front of real things in the physical world and paints what she sees. A new exhibition, her second solo show at Chelsea gallery Sikkema Jenkins, opened last Friday.

Her work is so direct—there’s no intellectual or ironic overlay, no sexual or political provocation, no art world cleverness—that it makes her realism new and fresh even though it rests on an ancient tradition that Ms. Halvorson draws on freely. “I look at Roman frescoes and still-lifes and the answers are right there, all the way up to Wayne Thiebaud,” she told The Observer in her Brooklyn studio.

Amid the cacophony of the contemporary art world, a quiet, unmediated experience of paint and object comes across as radical. Then there’s the sheer beauty of it—the melding of the sensual, creamy paint with the thing represented, the sophisticated compositions that play off the shape of the canvas, and the rich color. Her loose brushstrokes make emphatically clear that she is not creating an illusion of reality. “I don’t make pictures [of objects],” she said. “I make paintings.”

In a highly unusual practice, Ms. Halvorson is an itinerant artist who paints on site. “To me, working in the studio is like immaculate conception,” she said. “Being outside the studio is like meeting a partner and giving birth.”

So she goes on the road—to a rail yard in coastal California, a plastics factory in the U.K., an abandoned mining site halfway to nowhere in Death Valley—toting her portable easel and the ironing board she uses as a palette. If you look closely you can sometimes see caught in the oil paint flecks of insects and other chance aspects of the environment she painted in.

Her rejection of the usual New York white-cube studio tradition—“It was all about ideas. I need something to engage with to make art”—is just one of the things that sets Ms. Halvorson apart. She also completes an entire painting in one day, neither making studies beforehand nor modifying it afterwards. “I want it to be really immediate and fresh in my mind how I’m encountering this thing,” she said.

In interviews at her studio, which she uses for storage and to prepare canvas and during a walkthrough of her show at Sikkema Jenkins, she showed a disarming modesty and a clear delight in painting. “It’s got to be fun,” she said. “I’m not embarrassed about pleasure.”

Ms. Halvorson grew up in Brewster, Mass., the only child of a sheet-metal worker mother and a blacksmith father, who taught her, she said, to “trust in the physical, the hand-made, the things that humans can’t really destroy.”

A hand-operated machine that her parents still use is just one of several machines depicted in the show. “Imagining through looking what it would be like to operate machines, that’s exciting to me,” she said. “If I had another life I would become an electrical engineer or something.”

As a teenager, Halvorson worked in a candy store and a bed and breakfast to pay for an art class in Provincetown, and she attended Cooper Union—the only art school she applied to­­—because it was free. “I didn’t have a college fund so I was nervous about what that meant for myself and my family.” After a year in Vienna as a Fulbright scholar, she went on to earn her M.F.A. at Columbia.

She started painting on site only four or five years ago, when she had a residency in Paris. There’s “no better place to have a studio practice” than New York, “and nothing is more embarrassing than having a French easel”—a portable easel with collapsible legs. “It’s like a leisure thing, or you aren’t professional. There’s something kind of dorky about it.”

But in France “people don’t even bat an eye” at someone painting outdoors. She didn’t show her work to anyone for almost a year and, she explained, “something I considered almost impossible in New York all of a sudden became very easy.”

Ms. Halvorson feels a special relationship with the objects she paints. She called her show “What Looks Back” because “it’s not the objects I’m choosing. I often feel as though they are choosing me.”

She sees each painting as “a record” of an exchange she had with each object, and “proof that I was there.”

Ms. Halvorson likes to paint in places that pique her curiosity. When she was in Iceland a few months ago she knocked on the door of a slaughterhouse. “The man who owns the slaughterhouse said, ‘Do you want to see the slaughter?’ . . . That was what I was hoping for, and I didn’t see the animal actually get killed but I saw the moment after and saw how it was butchered.”

The next day she painted the carcass of a cow that she had seen butchered. “I was painting these objects that I think have life to them, and I wanted to see what it was like to paint an object that has life as we know it.”

She has planted her easel in front of gravestones, corroded metal, sign holders on a railroad car but with the signs missing, an overturned machine on which someone had spray painted “shame,” a stone statue covered with nicks. Some might see her paintings as a metaphor for life’s brevity or emptiness or as expressing a certain kind of resignation. For Ms. Halvorson it’s simpler. “I love painting something residual that implied an activity before,” is one explanation she offered. Another was, “I love how the face of time has worn on objects.” She also said, “I’m trying to understand the world around us.”

Her choice of subjects is, she said, driven by artistic necessity, and she is reluctant to provide any further explanation, emotional or otherwise. “It comes down to my ideas of painting. Painting is flesh, painting is a frame, is a window, is history.”

“I don’t deny my own subjectivity when I paint or that it’s very idiosyncratic,” she added. “But I want the objects and the paintings themselves to have their own voice unencumbered by my autobiography.”

In part, she attributes the responsive chord her work seems to have struck to a larger cultural context. “Before the economy crashed, people thought of my work as not as relevant, maybe too feminine. … The Jeff Koons ’90s I think very quickly turned into something very different. I think that over the last 10 years, especially the last three to five, there have been big shifts toward smaller-scale production which not that long ago seemed very quaint, but right now seems very urgent and political.”

She also considers herself fortunate that the painting-is-dead refrain has been pretty much silenced.

“I know that there were decades when people were struggling to make painting relevant, and I’m very lucky that I’m just the right age and in the right place to be able to make paintings without feeling that it’s a constant struggle. I have absolutely no doubts that [painting] has a place in the world. I don’t know if I’d feel the same way if I were up against what people were up against even 10 years ago.”

But not all of her New York art world “relevance” battles are over. “Do I want to try to convince people that I’m a very politically, socially engaged person through my paintings? A lot of people who are interested in that look at my paintings and think they’re very conservative and that they aren’t doing anything except demanding very high prices, [that] they’re elitist.

“My definition of making socially conscious art is to go to places that aren’t my social sphere. To get outside your art world with your work, especially in its creation, that to me is very political, is very socially engaged.”

editorial@observer.com

The entrance hall of the Met. (Photo: Michael Gray / Flickr)

When it comes to contemporary art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art tends to focus on super-safe exhibitions of canonized artists deep into their careers—think Robert Rauschenberg or John Baldessari—or small shows of well-established mid-career figures like Neo Rauch and Tara Donovan. Only occasionally has it explored recent art history, as it did with its 2009 "Pictures Generation" show.

But now it appears that it will venture down that path, with a new group show called “Regarding Warhol: Fifty Artists, Fifty Years,” which is scheduled in open at the museum in fall 2012. Details are scanty at the moment, but the description Gallerist has seen, culled from museum fund-raising literature, promises nothing less than “an in-depth examination of the nature and extent of the Warhol sensibility.”

The show will be organized by various themes, “each of which will be delineated by several of Warhol’s works, along with objects by other artists who have worked in his wake. The aim is not only to show direct influence but also to indicate how an artist may have developed Warhol’s example into new areas.”

Sure, it’s Warhol, so it’s still super-safe—the Met isn’t going out on a limb when it says he’s had a huge influence—but curators will be forced to make some tough decisions nonetheless, not just in defining “the Warhol sensibility” but in choosing how to present his impact and deciding which living artists to anoint.

Given Warhol’s popularity, the show seems likely to bring in large crowds. (The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles’s 2002 Warhol retrospective stands as the second-most-visited show in its history.) It may also help attract some of the new money of the hedge-funders who pay millions of dollars for contemporary art.