Hirst. (Courtesy Getty Images)

The Art Newspaper reports that this spring Gagosian Gallery will publish a catalogue that lists every Damien Hirst spot painting.

In total, a source tells the paper, there are around 1,400 spot paintings around the world. That precise figure wasn't exactly known and, according to some dealers, that may have made them harder to sell.

From the piece:

“I’ve heard estimates ranging from 2,000 to 7,000,” says Harry Blain, co-founder of the gallery Blain/Southern. He believes that the publication will increase confidence in the series because it will allay fears that the paintings are much more numer­ous than they actually are. He says it will also show the series’ variety. “People often say the spot paintings are all the same, but they’re not—far from it. The catalogue will give an understanding of the many subsets within [the spot works].”

Installation view of 'Painted on 21st Street: Helen Frankenthaler from 1950 to 1959' at Gagosian. (All artwork © Estate of Helen Frankenthaler/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/Photo by Rob McKeever)

More than two dozen canvases from the 1950s, the decade that made Helen Frankenthaler the iconic Color Field pioneer, have been gathered on 21st Street. It’s the first such show in New York since 1960. Most of them are stain paintings, alternately brilliant and facile, titanic and slightly nauseous. Some, like 1953’s Open Wall, a landscape-format metaphysical unfolding of the concept of division in blues and browns, are cool and philosophical, while others, like Trojan Gates or Holocaust, both 1955, are hot and anxious. All of them are—not because of the chromatic effect of garish colors clanging like bells and then fading into unsized, off-white canvas, but because of their compositional organization—like flowers: the elements always grow from the center, even if you can’t quite tell exactly where that center is. But the show’s real jewels come from before the explosion: 1950’s Painted on 21st Street, borrowed from the Smithsonian, and three 1951 canvases, The Jugglers, The Sightseers and one untitled, all borrowed from Ms. Frankenthaler’s estate.

Painted on 21st Street is a primordial desertscape rendered in oil paint, sand, plaster and coffee grounds. A tumult of whisks and whooshes form a singular but unnameable shape with the mystical unity of a windstorm. It’s like seeing the face of God in a column of smoke. If you were to divide it, however, you might see, to the left, Don Quixote mounted on a lion with ram’s horns, holding onto a black, turquoise and sand-colored pommel, and on the right, a cluster of overlapping grapes carved out of plaster adjoining a dried-blood splotch partially enclosed by an ear-shaped ocher line beneath a sandy dark chair speckled with coffee. None of it makes sense, but some strange alchemy enlists even the spontaneous dabs of ocher and turquoise, or the tentative little black marks, into the same overriding purpose—unless the alchemy is operating in the other direction, and it’s spontaneity itself that is the effect.

In The Jugglers, this tidal energy is turned 90 degrees and confined to the picture plane. Patches of orange, blue, white, green and yellow are divided by and wash over thick black lines, with red and green sometimes forming experimental extensions of their own. Every section postpones resolution to the next in an infinitely vibrating circuit; every shape or border says, “yes, but,” or “yes, and also.” Only by the fact that no part is complete is the whole made irreducible. It’s like an argument for the necessity of human imperfection. In the untitled canvas, the same rough shapes and debris remain on the surface, but the color falls back into blue sky and desert sand—and then, after that, the deluge. (Through April 13, 2013)

(Illustration by Brett Affrunti.)

It’s possible that the Upper East Side changed the night last September when the fire department broke up the disco party at 980 Madison. The building houses, among other businesses, a luxury spa and Gagosian Gallery. Soon it will have a Gagosian-owned “neighborhood restaurant,” as Larry Gagosian described it in a recent interview with Peter Brant. There will be chili. And waffles.

On the third floor of 980 Madison is Venus Over Manhattan, an art space opened last year by Adam Lindemann, a contributor to this paper and the disco party’s host. The crowd had gathered to celebrate a show by the artist Peter Coffin. Young women carried trays of tequila shots. Around 8 p.m., the festivities moved down the hall to a room dimly lit with red lights. From the street, you could hear DJ Harvey playing records. Professional roller skaters skated around on glowing LED wheels. A cluster of young men and women nonchalantly smoked near the entrance.

When the fire trucks came, part of the crowd decamped across Madison Avenue to Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle, where a pianist played selections from the Great American Songbook and the martinis cost $21.

“We knew the fire marshal was going to show up,” Mr. Coffin told me. “In that neighborhood, if the noise is too loud, you don’t call your local police department. You call your Congressman.”

In the arc of art-world history, the Upper East Side started out as the neighborhood with the most groundbreaking shows. Leo Castelli was up there showing Warhol, Rauschenberg and de Kooning. As the art world expanded, dealers moved to Soho, and then Chelsea. Uptown gained a reputation for stodginess. But when the most recent recession hit in 2008 and Madison Avenue was laced with empty storefronts, things started to change.

In 2010, the Chelsea dealer Marianne Boesky rented a townhouse on 64th Street—“a five year laboratory” is how she described it in an e-mail message—and gave the space over to young curators and artists like the Italian art collective Lucie Fontaine, whose members lived in the house while organizing a show there. Alex Zachary opened a gallery inside a grimy duplex and showed work by, among others, the greatest of all lost feminist artists, Judith Bernstein (charcoal drawings of enormous penises), and Lutz Bacher (she filled the duplex with sand). Dominique Lévy, formerly of 78th Street’s L&M gallery, is moving to an old bank building on Madison in the spring and giving the radically contemporary Paris dealer Emmanuel Perrotin the ground floor. Lower East Side galleries are heading uptown. Los Angeles’s Blum & Poe has an Upper East Side broker and is, according to sources, “actively looking” to open in the neighborhood. Is it possible that the Upper East Side is cool again?

“If you look at the neighborhood, it’s a different spirit,” said Ms. Lévy. “I went to an opening [at Venus Over Manhattan] and looked at the crowds coming out of the elevator. I joked to Adam, ‘Did you hire these people to come here?’”

More than any other neighborhood in New York, the Upper East Side projects its mythology onto people. It conjures images of wealth and status, prep schools, women in fur coats with diamonds and converted carriage houses off Park Avenue. The neighborhood has tropes that can be played with, more than, say, Chelsea does.

“In January 2010 when we started the gallery the art market had more or less bottomed out,” Alex Zachary wrote in an e-mail message. “So opening a dingy gallery on 77th Street seemed a succinct way of framing the problem, though maybe too cute by half.”

Mr. Zachary announced earlier this year that he and his business partner Peter Currie would move their gallery to Harlem. He finds the Upper East Side to be “closer to its old self,” in the sense that when money returned and the storefronts on Madison started being bought up, having a gallery there became “somehow less cute.” But most dealers I interviewed brought up Mr. Zachary when talking about how the neighborhood has changed, saying that he made a certain kind of gallery seem possible there.

“People said no one would come,” Mr. Zachary said, “which turned out to be wrong, but more to the point, it made no difference either way. At this stage in the art world, you can have a gallery in Harlem or on the Upper East Side or in Bermondsey or on the moon—I truly believe our physical location is meaningless; we’re not a dry cleaner. And amazingly, people still say to me, ‘Oh honey, don’t move to Harlem, no one will come.’”

The city is legendary for its rigid line dividing uptown and downtown. In the art world, at least, such divisions are becoming more fluid as the market continues to expand.

“It’s not any more that it’s only Chelsea, and then the trendy Lower East Side and the posh Upper East Side,” said Marc Payot, vice president of Hauser & Wirth, which runs a gallery on 69th Street off Madison and just opened the city’s largest commercial gallery on West 18th Street in Chelsea. “It’s all one big thing. Today, the whole art world is like that. It allows a mix of all kinds of things. It’s not a world that divides, it’s a world that includes.”

“One time, we got a very silly review of Aaron Curry’s exhibition,” said Gordon Veneklasen, director of the Michael Werner Gallery, which opened a contemporary program on the Upper East Side in 1990 in the same space that once housed Castelli. The reviewer “found it odd that this artist was showing in this area. Leo Castelli opened in ’55. The Warhol pillows were shown there in ’66. The Upper East Side at that time was probably more formal then than it is now. I think the idea of saying that certain artists have to show in certain areas is almost provincial at this point. Is Chelsea really cutting-edge? I don’t think so at all. It’s silly. It’s like saying New York is one thing and L.A. has no ideas. We all know that that’s bullshit at this point.”

It depends on who you ask. Ms. Boesky, whose flagship gallery is on West 24th Street, said Chelsea “may be the best zone of free culture in the world.” In Chelsea, you can get hundreds of visitors a day, which is good and bad. Amalia Dayan, of the Upper East Side gallery Luxembourg & Dayan—which recently filled its space with a “surrealist garage sale” by Norwegian artist Bjarne Melgaard complete with S&M tableaux—opened uptown in 2009 after co-running a gallery in Chelsea.

Chelsea, Ms. Dayan recalled, “was very saturated. I did not enjoy sitting there on Saturday and having a million people coming and going, and maybe having one person be very interested in what we were doing.” Uptown, she’s shown Marcel Duchamp, but also photographs of Jeff Koons having intercourse with his former wife, a porn star.

“You can do anything on the Upper East Side today,” she said. “Historical, contemporary, very young or very old. And the collectors live up here.”

Still, spaces in Chelsea are easier to come by, and they’re larger, if you’re into that sort of thing.

“If you have an artist who wants to park two buses in the space, that’s tough,” said Mr. Veneklasen. “But I don’t want to work with those kinds of artists anyway.”

“What are some of the advantages specifically of being on the Upper East Side?” I asked him.

“Civilization,” he said evenly.

In New York, some dealers think of Chelsea as a shopping mall, the way Soho was before everyone moved out. Others were rattled by Hurricane Sandy, which set back a number of wealthy galleries for weeks and threatened to destroy smaller businesses altogether. Some dealers characterized the Lower East Side as becoming just another art district.

It makes sense, then, that Bill Powers, owner of Half Gallery on Forsyth Street, who described the old gallery as being “in violation of the Geneva Conventions, it was so small,” is reopening this week in a townhouse on 78th Street. The old gallery was known for openings that spilled out into the street in order to accommodate everyone who showed up to drink mini-cans of beer (and, at one exhibition, have their picture taken with Terry Richardson). The new space will be open by appointment only.

“The reality,” Mr. Powers said, “is that, with the exception of one person, anyone that I sold to lived a hell of a lot closer to our new location than the old space on Forsyth Street. So you do the math on that.”

Uptown now has some of the novelty that the Lower East Side had a few years ago. Fergus McCaffrey, who owns a gallery on 67th Street but recently decided to open a second space on West 26th Street in Chelsea, said he first opened uptown because it was “a way of distancing oneself from other galleries.” He also saw it as a place where artists could be freer to experiment. “You can take risks on the Upper East Side that you can’t afford to take in Chelsea,” he said. “If you look at the succession of younger artists who have had shows at Upper East Side galleries and just blown it, the scales are less intimidating. It’s less a career-ending risk than a 7,000-square-foot space in Chelsea, which, if you fail, your career is over, basically.”

People are opening spaces uptown that a few years ago might have been more likely on Orchard Street. Art adviser Eleanor Cayre and curator Vladimir Roitfeld’s new project space is inside a townhouse on 78th Street, the former home of an Upper East Side old-timer, the dealer Christophe Van de Weghe. Despite the fancy digs, there’s something casual about the whole thing. They’re not advertising, and their names will be kept off the door. Mr. Roitfeld moved in upstairs. There’s no fixed schedule of exhibitions. And that doorman on opening night a few weeks ago—on a Sunday, the same night Lower East Side galleries hold their openings in tandem—wasn’t deliberate; he just kind of came with the place.

“Everyone is in the middle of an identity crisis,” one Lower East Side dealer told me.

He’s been looking into a space at 980 Madison and envisions it as a “showroom,” with art, furniture and anything else that could turn a profit. The money difference is substantial—the asking price is about $100 per square foot, almost double the price of the Lower East Side. Still, the dealer said, the market has changed to such an extent that having a classic kind of gallery downtown, with a small roster of artists you represent and cultivate, just won’t work anymore. In today’s market, the minute artists start making money, they decamp for a larger gallery.

If the Lower East Side has a reputation as the main arbiter of the avant-garde, the dealer said, now that neighborhood “is an establishment in and of itself.” He said there are still interesting galleries there, but “the avant-garde now is about giving people what they want, wearing a $4,000 Prada suit, discovering that guy who’s going to make a ton of money at auction a year from now. Even the artists are market-driven. They see all their friends doing well, buying shit with all the money they make from dripping a little sweat on charcoal. So they end up wanting to take it to the source”—the Upper East Side, where the money is. “The avant-garde,” he said, “is about being with money.”

mmiller@observer.com

Going to Hollywood. (Courtesy PMC)

Yesterday, the Academy announced its nominations for the Oscars. Exciting news for the world of pop culture, less so perhaps for the art world, which is generally more curious about shows of a different kind—those that will be opening in Los Angeles’s galleries on Oscars weekend.

The most-talked-about exhibition tends to be at Gagosian Gallery, in Beverly Hills. Back in 2008, when Julian Schnabel was on the menu, John Waters characterized the event to The Observer as “Hollywood’s chance to wear black and look at art and pretend they’re New Yorkers,” and the opening dinner tends to be a star-studded affair. (And there's even been a kind of synergy with Hollywood: in 2011, Oscars co-host James Franco showed work at Gagosian.) The Observer has learned what’s on offer this year, and it promises not to disappoint: up this time is new work (including new paintings) by Richard Prince, one of Gagosian’s star artists. Mr. Prince’s last solo exhibition at Gagosian’s Beverly Hills space, in 2005, also in the Oscars slot, was his first with the gallery. Like other of Gagosian’s Oscars-timed exhibitions (think Andreas Gursky in 2010), it augured his joining the Gagosian stable, which he did in 2008. That show was also of major new paintings, in that case his “check paintings,” so called because he had pasted canceled checks onto the canvas.

But Mr. Prince, whose show opens on Feb. 21, won’t be the only game in town. On the following evening, in nearby West Hollywood, Ohwow gallery is debuting new pieces by young artist Nick van Woert in his first solo show with the gallery, called “No Man’s Land.” On the 23rd, Prism Gallery opens a show of Mario Testino—he’s been called “fashion’s favorite photographer,” which should ensure a glitzy crowd—and, on that same night, Regen Projects opens an exhibition of a very different photographer, Catherine Opie, who was in the news over the summer as one of the artists to depart the board of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, over curator Paul Schimmel’s departure. Also exhibiting photography is Perry Rubenstein, with a show of Iwan Baan. Meanwhile, L.A.-based artist Henry Taylor, who had a large one-person show at MoMA PS1 last year, will present work at Blum & Poe.

And that’s just a sampling of L.A.’s rich art offerings that week. Sure, as Mr. Waters put it, Angelenos may take art as an opportunity to make like they’re New Yorkers. But as things continue to heat up on the city’s art scene, New Yorkers might want to book their tickets for Los Angeles.

Installation view of 'Junction / Cycle' at Gagosian Gallery in 2011. (Rob McKeever/Gagosian Gallery)

Amidst talk of artists leaving the Gagosian Gallery, news of any artists who show with Gagosian doing exhibitions elsewhere is likely to be closely scrutinized, and potentially misunderstood. Gallerist can reveal that, while Richard Serra, a longtime Gagosian artist, will have an exhibition of historical work at David Zwirner gallery in the spring, the artist's relationship with Gagosian remains unchanged, and, in fact, he is planning a major exhibition of new sculpture for next fall at Gagosian's two Chelsea locations.

The exhibition of historical sculptures will take place in Zwirner's new West 20th Street gallery. According to John Silberman, Mr. Serra's longtime attorney, Mr. Zwirner approached Mr. Serra about the exhibition, and the artist was enthusiastic about it.

The fact of the Zwirner exhibition does not, however, alter Mr. Serra's relationship with Gagosian Gallery, Mr. Silberman emphasized, and should not be confused with any kind of defection. Gagosian Gallery has been the primary gallery for Mr. Serra since the 1990s. (They've actually worked together for several decades.) The relationship has long been non-exclusive, and Mr. Serra, who works independently, does exhibit with other galleries—for instance, at the moment, new drawings on Mylar comprise an exhibition that closes this week at the Craig F. Starr Gallery, on the Upper East Side.

Mr. Serra is currently at work on major new sculptures, to be exhibited in both of Gagosian Gallery's Chelsea locations in the fall, Mr. Silberman confirmed. Judging by past exhibitions of Mr. Serra's mammoth steel works at Gagosian, such as fall 2009's "Blind Spot Open Ended" (at West 21st Street) and, more recently, and more grandly, fall 2011's "Junction/Cycle" (in the vast West 24th street location), the Gagosian exhibitions are likely to be monumental in scale.

The Zwirner exhibition will open in April and include artworks dating from 1966 through 1971. Also at the 20th Street space, Zwirner will feature another historical show that runs concurrent with the Serra exhibition, of works by the late German artist Blinky Palermo. Both shows will be in the vein of historical exhibitions that once took place at Zwirner & Wirth, the now-defunct secondary market gallery co-run by David Zwirner and Iwan Wirth, proprietor of Hauser & Wirth gallery.

Correction 5:45 p.m. An earlier version of this story misstated the location of the Palermo show. It too will run at 20th Street.

Bob Dylan "Playboy Magazine, Sharon Stone," 2011-2012. (Courtesy Gagosian Gallery)

The paintings in Bob Dylan’s first exhibition at Gagosian Gallery, on view last fall, showed scenes of everyday life throughout Asia that the artist purportedly witnessed “first-hand,” according to press materials, during breaks from his touring schedule. The exhibition caused a bit of an uproar—by art-world standards, anyway—when viewers got wise to several paintings’ spot-on resemblance to iconic photographs by the likes of Leon Busy and Henri Cartier-Bresson. To say that Mr. Dylan has reappropriated the work of others in his music is a vast understatement—it’s more like the music’s reason for being, and Mr. Dylan’s primary stylistic trait. As just one example, take “Duquesne Whistle,” the opening song from his 35th album, Tempest, released earlier this year. In it, he takes elements of the melody, chorus and structure of a 1929 Memphis Jug Band song, “K.C. Moan,” and also toys with its lyrics. “I thought I heard that K.C. when she blow/She blow like my woman’s on board,” goes the original. Compare that with Mr. Dylan’s “Listen to that Duquesne whistle blowing/Blowing like my woman’s on board.” Then this line is slowly rewritten in a repeating structure over several verses before becoming unrecognizable as a traditional folk song in the penultimate couplet: “The lights of my native land are glowing/I wonder if they’ll know me next time around.” But whatever mastery Mr. Dylan has achieved as an editor of musical traditions, from prewar blues to Mexican ballads, it couldn’t really help his Asian paintings. The line is thin between appropriation and plundering, and even if he didn’t cross it, the work seemed pretty phoned-in.

Mr. Dylan’s latest exhibition at Gagosian, which opened last week, is fittingly titled “Revisionist Art.” He’s silk-screened 30 canvases with the logos of iconic American magazines—Time, Life, Rolling Stone and Playboy, the same publications that used to scrutinize Mr. Dylan’s lyrics looking for secret messages that might lead to world peace, and asked him ridiculous questions like, “Why do you think rock ’n’ roll has become such an international phenomenon?” (Playboy really did ask him that in 1965.) Beneath the logos are invented covers, some of which approximate the real-life insipidness of the glossies. “Bare-Bosomed Courtney Love Strikes Back!” announces the headline on a cover of Mr. Dylan’s Rolling Stone, dated April 9, 1999, and graced by a photo of someone who is bare-bosomed but is not Courtney Love. (The real cover of Rolling Stone roughly coinciding with that date had a 17-year-old Britney Spears, wearing a bra and underwear and clutching a purple Teletubby doll, as photographed by a 36-year-old David LaChapelle, with the headline “Inside the Heart, Mind & Bedroom of a Teen Dream,” although this knowledge does not elevate Mr. Dylan’s work to anything approaching meaningfulness.)

Some of these pieces work slightly better as satire. A cover of Architectural Digest from January 2008 has an image of a woman in a black cocktail dress and pearls. She looks how you would expect a wealthy homeowner to look on the cover of a magazine, except that she’s pulling up the hem of her garment and revealing the hair of her mons pubis. The caption reads, “Houses of the East Coast.”

But others come across as adolescent humor, the kind of doodling and obviousness you’d expect to find in a high school notebook. A fake cover of Life dated August 23, 1996, shows a close-up of a performance photo of two members of the Rat Pack, splashed with the words “Frank Sinatra and Joey Bishop have a laugh at fundraiser for presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani.” The pieces just don’t come together.

Maybe that’s the point? If there’s anyone who should have a few bones to pick with the incoherence of American media, it’s Bob Dylan. In a recent interview in Rolling Stone leading up to the release of Tempest, he responded to some of the accusations that he had failed to “cite his sources” in his lyrics, an accusation that fails to remember that folk music especially is a circular craft based on quotation:

Wussies and pussies complain about that stuff. It’s an old thing—it’s part of the tradition. It goes way back. These are the same people that tried to pin the name Judas on me. Judas, the most hated name in human history! If you think you’ve been called a bad name, try to work your way out from under that. Yeah, and for what? For playing an electric guitar? As if that is in some kind of way equitable to betraying our Lord and delivering him up to be crucified. All those evil motherfuckers can rot in hell.

“Judas” here refers to the most famous heckle in the history of music, when Mr. Dylan was finishing up his electric set at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall during his 1966 tour and an audience member shouted that “most hated name in human history” at him.

All of which is to say that that’s about the closest I could come to finding a crux to this exhibition—that Bob Dylan is doing a critique of the media machine that has lambasted him for 50 years. When his commentary works, it works only slightly; when it doesn’t, it’s just plain dumb. And I write this as someone who can find something redeeming in the worst Mr. Dylan has to offer, like the paper I wrote in college about how the 1985 album Empire Burlesque was intended to sound over-produced and cheesy, that all the reverb and multi-tracked reggae guitars and choruses of ridiculous backup singing had to exist in order to make way for the spare and brilliant closing track “Dark Eyes,” the impact of which is only fully felt after having suffered a bit. (“Poorly argued,” was the comment I received.)

I tried studying these canvases for secret messages. They couldn’t just be half-hearted parodies of magazine covers. No way. I scanned dates and images and the names and residences of the addressees (subscriber mailing labels are printed in the corners of most of the pieces). I searched for a “Mr. Orville” residing at 573 Tuxedo Terrace and found no listing. I tried to convince myself that “Richard Staehung” was a coded identity and not just an immature dick joke. All I could come up with was a conspiracy theory cooked up by a friend, that both of Mr. Dylan’s shows at Gagosian are actually the work of Richard Prince using “Bob Dylan” as a pseudonym, making the ultimate statement on art and artifice, and proving once and for all that Bob Dylan is whoever you want him to be.

mmiler@observer.com

Andy Warhol, 'Flowers,' 1965, at Eykyn Maclean. Silkscreen ink on fabric, 24 x 48 inches ©2012 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York)

It’s auction time again in New York—between this week and last, around a billion dollars of modern and contemporary art is on offer at Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips de Pury & Co.—and so it’s tempting to start griping about money’s corrupting influence on culture. But another option is to revel in the sheer number of top-quality artworks on view around the city. The auctions themselves bring out pieces that have been hidden away for years, and in many galleries, particularly those on the Upper East Side, dealers put on museum-style exhibitions, readying themselves for the heavy-hitter international collectors who fly in from around the world. Three shows on view right now comprise a happy art-historical coincidence: all of them are devoted to artists (Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly and Richard Serra, respectively) who helped forge the look and feel of postwar art in America while showing at the Leo Castelli Gallery in the 1960s and ‘70s.

Andy Warhol, 'Flowers,' 1964. Acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen, 24 x 24 inches. (©2012 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York)

The Warhol show, at Eykyn Maclean, blossoms with 49 paintings from the artist’s “Flowers” series—each one silk-screened with an iconic image of four puffy, anonymous blooms looking flat against a patch of grass. Since Warhol made the first one in 1964, the image has become so firmly stitched into the fabric of American pop culture that it feels wonderfully uncanny to be confronted with so many of the real things in one place. The show’s centerpiece is a grid of 16 two-by-two-foot paintings—64 total flowers in a hypnotic selection of colors.

The “Flowers” series began during the summer when Warhol was preparing for his debut at the Castelli Gallery, art historian Michael Lobel tells us in his superb, expansive catalog essay for the exhibition. Up to that point, Warhol’s paintings had focused predominantly on consumer culture and political strife, silk-screened with Campbell’s Soup cans, Coca-Cola bottles, electric chairs, car crashes, race riots. The rambunctious Met curator Henry Geldzahler claims to have stopped by Warhol’s studio one day and said, “Andy, maybe it’s enough death now,” and then showed him a page in Modern Photography magazine that had a photo of flowers printed four times with different color variants.

One wall features a reproduction of Warhol’s notations on that magazine page. He cropped the image of seven flowers down to just four to create a square, and added a note to his silk screen maker, asking him to do just half the contracted labor, since he did not have enough money for the full job, an irony considering the tens of millions that his pieces now fetch at auction. (One 1965 work on linen appears to have been made with two separate screens.) Warhol also asked an assistant to run the image through a photostat machine to wash out details, creating a ghostly template of flowers that he and his assistants could alter with color.

Andy Warhol, 'Flowers,' [early] 1965. (Silkscreen ink on linen, 14 x 14 inches
©2012 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York)

Midway through the Castelli show, Warhol showed up with a batch of news photographs of Jackie Kennedy taken in the aftermath of her husband’s assassination. In light of these, his flowers became tokens of mourning, Mr. Lobel argues, and the Castelli’s gallery morphed into a sort of ad hoc shrine. Warhol drained any latent hippie cheer out of the flowers the next year, when he made tiny ones and left out the green grass for a show at the Sonnabend Gallery in Paris. The free-wheeling ‘60s weren’t yet dead, but one of the decade’s defining artists seemed to be indicating that the party was over. A year later, the photographer who shot the image sued Warhol. Yes, one of the first-ever copyright battles involving appropriation art—more would pop up periodically over the next half century—was settled out of court.

Installation view of 'Cy Twombly: The Last Paintings' at Gagosian. (Courtesy Gagosian Gallery)

A FEW BLOCKS NORTH, Gagosian Gallery has an exhibition of eight paintings by another postwar master, Cy Twombly, whose solo debut at Castelli came four years before Warhol’s. The Gagosian show is a kind of swan song—these big, wildly gestural abstractions on plywood are among the last works Twombly made before his death in Rome last year at the age of 83.

Cy Twombly, 'Untitled (Camino Real),' 2011. Acrylic on plywood, 99 3/8 x 72 7/8 inches. (Courtesy Gagosian Gallery)

In the last few years of his life, Twombly painted boldly and brashly, channeling just the sort of Abstract Expressionist language that his early career seemed to question and subvert. Each painting has a ground of vibrant mint green, on top of which Twombly, using long paintbrushes, drew tall spiraling lines in red and orange and yellow—like elongated script—that drip wildly down the panel. It’s as if he’s zoomed in closely on a tiny notation from one of his old paintings and blown it up to gargantuan proportions. These paintings evince a love of pure color, and though they lack the subtleties and risks of his best works—the scrawled phrases, the airy, empty spaces—they certainly pack a punch.

The great surprise in the neighborhood right now comes courtesy of the Craig F. Starr Gallery, which is showing new lithographic drawings on Mylar by Richard Serra. Now best known for his monumental steel sculptures—like those shown at Gagosian last fall—Mr. Serra began his career with smaller sculptures, and had his first solo show at Castelli in the 1970. (Some of his early works are on view at Gagosian, two floors below the Twombly show.) To make the pieces at Starr, he applied lithographic ink to both sides of the transparent paper, sandwiched that between two more sheets, heated the ink, and then worked the top paper with various tools, pressing the ink onto both sides of the central paper.

Richard Serra, 'Transparency #1,' 2012. Litho crayon on Mylar, 30 x 24 inches. (Courtesy the artist and Craig F. Starr Gallery)

Stripping the outer sheets away revealed what we see in the show: a virtuosic selection of forms dancing across the paper, that seem to be echoed—precisely in some places, loosely in others—on the back of the sheet. (He often picks the bottom side, which he is unable to see while working, as the front of the work.)

Some of these pieces recall Mr. Serra’s signature drawings—large all-over fields of deep black oil stick. But with others, like the ones that feature what look like ashy black tornadoes in which bits of the lithographic ink almost seem to hover over the Mylar like smoke, he’s nimbly exploring new territory. Those accustomed only to Mr. Serra’s intimidating, room-dwarfing sculptures may be surprised at his ability to tease out quiet elegance on a modest scale.

arusseth@observer.com

The work in question, Roy Lichtenstein's 'Girl in Mirror.' (Courtesy Christie's)

Earlier today David Baum, a lawyer representing plaintiff Jan Cowles in her ongoing lawsuit against Larry Gagosian and his gallery, filed papers that seek to unearth Mr. Gagosian's financial records and includes Mr. Gagosian's complete deposition in the case, which took place a few weeks ago. It offers a fascinating look at the dealer's business model. In it, Mr. Gagosian describes Gagosian Gallery director Deborah McLeod’s now infamous solicitation for a "cruel and offensive" offer from collector Thompson Dean for a 1964 Roy Lichtenstein work as amusing, though he wishes it hadn't been in writing. You'll find the entire deposition at the end of this post.

Mr. Gagosian's lawyers have argued that their client’s fiscal records need not be revealed, except if he loses at trial and a jury finds that he must pay punitive damages. Mr. Baum argues that he is already entitled to such discovery rights, given the overwhelming case made in the testimony.

His main argument centers around the fact that, in his testimony and in documents related to the case, Mr. Gagosian and his cohorts regularly represent both buyer and seller in art selling deals, without telling either party that this is the case.

Mr. Gagosian's newly released deposition features a number of colorful exchanges, to say the least. On the subject of the "cruel and offensive" offer ("Q" represents Mr. Baum, "A" represents Mr. Gagosian):

Q: Have you ever used that phrase?
A: No.
Q: Why not?
A: It's not the way I talk.
Q: Do you find it to be indiscreet?
A: I find it amusing, to be honest with you. Not that somebody in that situation is, amuses me, but I just thought it was kind of a funny way to put it.
Q: Do you think it was amusing that Charles Cowles was in desperate financial straits?
A: I just made that distinction. I don't find— I found the language because it was so hyperbolic, kind of excessive to the point of being amusing.

Mr. Gagosian goes on to concede it was "strange language to use in connection with an art transaction" and "kind of cruel." And he even chastised Ms. McLeod for using that kind of language, though his main problem seems to be that it was in writing.

Q: Have you ever indicated to her that you were displeased that she used that language?
A: Yes, I have.
Q: When did you do that?
A: After I saw it.
Q: And what did you say to her?
A: I said you gotta, you know, things in e-mails can get out in the world, one way or another, not necessarily through legal proceedings, but you know, you don't want to see that in print because it must be a little bit embarrassing for you, and she was quite embarrassing [sic].

"The deposition testimony and documents tell a disturbing story of gross misconduct," Mr. Baum told The Observer. "Substantial punitive damages are warranted." The entire Gagosian deposition is available below.

The deposition:

Gagosian. (Courtesy Patrick McMullan)

A week before the opening of Gagosian's latest space in his gallery chain, a 17,760-square-foot gallery in northern Paris at the Le Bourget airport, the art dealer talks to The Wall Street Journal's Kelly Crow about the mood in the market, how he caters to different tastes at his 12 galleries around the world, the "home run" at the ArtRio fair and the difference between art and luxury goods.

It's well worth a read in its entirety, but here's one bit to whet your appetite:

Where are you putting your money beyond the art market?

I don't own stocks, never have. I don't understand it, and I'm not comfortable making paper investments. I have clients who run hedge funds who ask if I want to get involved, but it doesn't work for me. Basically, I have art, some nice real estate and I like to have money in the bank. I can still make mistakes with art, but at least I can learn from it. If I make a mistake in the financial markets, chances are I'll make it again. I stick to what I know.

Oh, and though it's located at the Paris airport, Mr. Gagosian says, "It's not duty-free."

West with his Golden Lion at the 2011 Venice Biennale. (Courtesy Marco Secchi/Getty Images)

During Frieze Week, Gagosian Gallery's Britannia Street outpost in London will present a solo show of work by Franz West, who passed away over the summer. West was "actively engaged with the preparation of this exhibition" up until his death, according to a press release.

The show is called "Man with a Ball" and will include " a forest of standing sculptures the size of small people," a three-dimensional depiction of Ludwig Wittgenstein's signature and West's collage work, among other things.

The exhibition opens Oct. 9 and will run until Nov. 10.