YEAR IN REVIEW 2000: ART-ANTIQUES-AND-COLLECTIBLES

Antiques and Collectibles During 1999 the prices paid for antiques and collectibles were influenced by sales at Internet auctions, shopping malls, specialty stores, and collector-club World Wide Web sites. Inexpensive items like hand-painted plates sold for higher prices on-line than elsewhere. Although expensive items also sold well on-line, they were often previewed in person before an on-line auction. Owing to the popularity of television shows featuring experts who appraised antiques of uncertain value, there was a new appreciation and awareness of the value of family heirlooms. Celebrities also helped boost prices; Michael Jackson paid $1.5 million for the 1939 Best Picture Oscar for Gone with the Wind. Record prices for posters were an important indicator of collector interest. The 1999 release of the motion picture The Phantom Menace pushed up prices for 197879 Star Wars memorabilia, including the Birthday poster at $2,185 and the Star Wars Symphonic Suite concert poster at $3,738. A 1933 King Kong poster commanded $244,500. Lamps with glass shades continued to rise in price. A Tiffany Magnolia floor lamp sold for a record $1,762,500, and a Pairpoint puffy Orange Tree lamp fetched $34,100. A Handel lamp with a reverse-painted underwater scene sold for $82,500. Although clock prices were mostly stable, a few set records. An ormolu mantel clock featuring a figure of George Washington (c.1800), by Jean-Baptiste Dubuc of Paris, brought $156,500, and an American tall-case Chippendale clock by Duncan Beard sold for $452,000. Rare toys continued to sell well. A Lehmann tinplate toy, Boxers, fetched $27,500. Schoenhut's Humpty Dumpty Circus (c.1928) brought $17,250, and the 1912 Teddy Roosevelt set auctioned for $135,000. A Buddy L Red Baby Truck (c.1935) sold for $22,000, and the boxed Matchbox No. 27D convertible Mercedes-Benz brought $6,683. A 1916 French bisque doll by Albert Marque sold for a record $135,000, and the 1959 Ponytail Barbie No. 1 in its original box brought $13,500. The Ty number one Beanie Baby red bear signed by company president Ty Warner sold for $12,000 at an on-line auction. St. Louis Cardinal Mark McGwire's 1998 70th home-run baseball commanded $3,005,000, more than 23 times the price paid for Babe Ruth's first home-run ball hit in 1923. Other high-priced collectibles included a Hubley doorstop, the Bugler, for $8,250, a hammered copper Jarvie vase for $28,600, and a dog-head cane that unscrewed to become a Remington gun for $6,875. Although average pieces of art pottery were best-sellers at shows and Internet auctions, prices for them remained static. Record prices were set, however, for a yellow-and-green Grueby pottery floor vase by Wilhelmina Post, $66,000; a Roseville Futura vase, $3,850; a Cowan Boy with Fawn figurine, $4,840; a Rhead vase from California, $15,400; and a pair of Volkmar pastoral vases for $5,500. Clarice Cliff's deco designs set more records: $9,775 for a May Avenue pattern sugar sifter and $11,040 for a Latona Red Roses coffee set. Glass, too, was popular. A turquoise Croesus pattern cut-to-clear decanter sold for $30,000, and a blue Sandwich glass inkstand brought $52,000. Pressed glass returned to favour after 30 years. A Horn of Plenty honey dish with cover and tray was $24,000; a Sandwich Vine pattern goblet with gilt highlights, $10,500; and a Three Face goblet, $5,100. A rare Casin's Grape Brandy bitters bottle sold for a record $44,000. Prices for American furniture were strong, with over 20 record prices set, 4 for over a million dollars. A plum-pudding mahogany dome-top secretary desk and bookcase with silver hardware (c. 1745) signed by Christopher Townsend sold for $8,252,500, the second highest price ever paid for a piece of American furniture. A Bartlett family block-and-shell carved chest of drawers made in Newport, R.I. (c. 1775), sold for $1,212,000, and a tilt-top Philadelphia piecrust tea table brought $1,540,000. Later, another Philadelphia piecrust tilt-top tea table was auctioned for $1,485,000. A 17th-century Southern armchair brought $288,500; a Charleston, S.C., Pembroke table, $226,500; a Philadelphia Queen Anne baroque side chair, $336,000; and a Massachusetts Federal sideboard, $255,000. An Aesthetic Movement Pottier and Stymus side cabinet set a record at $104,500. Records were set for a dozen Arts and Crafts pieces by Gustav Stickley, including a trapezoidal china cabinet, $187,000; two-door bookcase No. 703, $52,250; Morris chair Model 2342, $46,750; child's wardrobe No. 920, $25,300; library table No. 456, $12,100; and wine cooler No. 553, $9,350. Ralph and Terry Kovel Art Auctions and Sales In 1999 the auction market enjoyed strong consumer confidence, benefiting from a formidable stock market, particularly in North America. Sotheby's and Christie's also made significant investments for the future. Christie's moved its Manhattan operation into a renovated location in Rockefeller Center, dramatically increasing its gallery and office space. Sotheby's, also in Manhattan, completed the first phase of a six-floor addition, enjoying the benefits of museum-quality gallery space. Sotheby's announced two major on-line initiativesthe formation of sothebys.com, a new Internet auction business for art, antiques, jewelry, and collectibles, and a joint on-line auction site, sothebys.amazon.com, which it formed in a 10-year alliance with Amazon.com. Christie's originally planned to launch an on-line operation in early 2000 but backed off in November. One of the year's highlights came in May with the Sotheby's New York sale of Impressionist and Modern art, which brought a staggering $208 million; 22 paintings sold for more than $1 million each. Contributing enormously to the success of this event was the single-owner sale of 50 paintings from the collection of Mr. and Mrs. John Hay Whitney, including Paul Czanne's Rideau, cruchon et compotier for $60.5 million and Georges Seurat's Paysage, l'le de la Grande Jatte for $35.2 million. That same month Christie's New York offered Vincent van Gogh's La Roubine du roi, which brought $19,802,500 in a sale that earned $65,919,500. Sales of Contemporary art also hit a high note in 1999. In its May sale Christie's New York offered 62 works in an auction that totaled an impressive $62,670,500. Two Flags of 1973, by painter Jasper Johns, was the pinnacle of the evening, selling for $7,152,500. Also in May, Sotheby's New York held a strong show of Contemporary art, including works from the Kraetz collection, the sale of which totaled $25.2 million. The unquestionable star of the event was Andy Warhol's 1966 image of Marlon, which made $2.6 million. In the various-owner sale, The Painter's Mother by Lucian Freud achieved $3.3 million. Sotheby's American paintings, drawings, and sculpture sale in New York in May, which included an excellent private collection of western paintings, totaled $29.2 million. Achieving the second highest price was Frederic Edwin Church's To the Memory of Cole (1848), which commanded $4.7 million. Also from the Whitney collection was Winslow Homer's Woodchopper in the Adirondacks, which brought $992,500. Christie's American paintings sale in May was distinguished by Frederic Remington's A Renaissance, which earned $5,172,000 in a sale totaling $18,547,800. Sales of Latin American art were also strong. At Sotheby's New York June sale, records were set for the works of 12 artists, including Maria Martins's Brouillard noir (Black Fog), which fetched $233,500. The June sale of Latin American art at Christie's New York set records for 18 artists, including Wilfredo Lam's Fruta bomba, which made $937,500. The jewelry divisions at both houses recorded robust sales. Christie's May sale in New York of magnificent jewels totaled $14,616,535, with a 17-carat diamond ring by Chaumet earning $816,500. Sotheby's April sale in New York totaled $12.8 million, with 8 of the top 10 lots selling above their presale estimates. The top lot was an exceptional pair of diamond ear clips, which went for $1.5 million. The decorative arts sector continued to build on its tremendous strength. In January Sotheby's important Americana sales in New York achieved an outstanding total of $20.9 million and thereby affirmed new levels of vigour in the market. The sale's centrepiece was the Nathaniel Appleton secretary bookcase, which realized $8.3 million, the second highest price ever paid for American furniture at auction. At Christie's New York Americana sales, a painting by Edward Hicks entitled Peaceable Kingdom (1837) soared to a record $4,732,500. Sotheby's held a variety of single-owner sales that bridged the diversity of the collecting world. In April the sale of furniture and decorations from the Whitney homes totaled a strong $13.2 million. The works offered included a watercolour by Sir Alfred J. Munnings, Violet Munnings' Horse Chips at Chantilly, which fetched $739,500. The three-day March sale of the collection of Giuseppe Rossi by Sotheby's was the largest of its kind to have taken place in London in the 20th century and raised a total of 21.1 million (1=about $1.66). The top of the more than 1,300 lots was a highly important gilt-bronze mounted mahogany centre table stamped Youf, late Restauration, c. 1834, selling for 606,500. Also at Sotheby's was the sale of Chteau de Groussay, the largest house sale held in France in the 20th century; the total of F 167.7 million (F1=about $0.16) far exceeded the presale high estimate of F 100 million. This landmark sale, a collaboration between Sotheby's and French auctioneers Poulain-Le Fur, offered the contents of what was originally home to Charles de Beistegui. The top lot was a pair of mid-18th-century gilt-bronze mounted Meissen porcelain potpourri vases and covers, which sold for F 4,360,000 million. In New York in March, Sotheby's offered the contents from the Paris apartment of noted interior designer Alberto Pinto; the sale totaled $6.3 million. At Sotheby's New York in September, nearly 2,500 lots from the Barry Halper collection of baseball memorabilia were offered in a series of 16 live auction sessions, a sale that totaled $21,812,577. The collection, unrivaled in scope and depth, included Lou Gehrig's last baseball glove, which skyrocketed to $387,500. Christie's New York sale in April of property from the Alexander collection realized an impressive $27.5 million, a record for a private collection of French furniture and decorative arts. The star lot, a set of four Louis XVI ormolu twin-branch wall lights delivered to Versailles for Marie-Antoinette, brought a record for a pair of wall lights$1,817,500. Unforgettable: Fashion of the Oscar's, held by Christie's New York in March, offered 56 dresses worn to the Academy Awards. The sale benefited the American Foundation for AIDS Research and totaled $786,120. The highlight was the sale of Elizabeth Taylor's 1969 Oscar presentation gown for $167,500, then the third highest price paid for a dress at auction. In June Christie's offered works from Ven House in Somerset, Eng. Featuring more than 1,200 lots, the sale brought over 4.7 million. Among the top lots was Franois Boucher's painting Venus Discovering the Body of Adonis, which earned 309,500. In New York in November Sotheby's sale of Impressionist and Modern art brought $242,688,925, and Christie's series of 20th-century art realized $220,784,460. The October Christie's New York single-owner sale of personal property from the estate of Marilyn Monroe totalled $5,360,500. The happy birthday dress Monroe wore when she sang to Pres. John F. Kennedy brought $1,267,500, a world auction record for a woman's dress. Amy Todd Art Exhibitions Although many in 1999 were fixated on the fast-approaching new millennium, international museums kept an eye on the past and presented several important historical shows. The National Gallery in London held the debut of Portraits by Ingres: Image of an Epoch. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, among the most influential painters and draftsmen of his time, depicted France's elite in exceptionally refined and luxurious surroundings. Another important traveling exhibition, featuring still lifes and genre paintings by Jean-Baptiste-Simon Chardin, opened at the Grand Palais, Paris. Chardin's paintings, still admired for their immediacy and harmony, were described by Denis Diderot in 1760 as representing nature itself. In New York City the Whitney Museum of American Art presented The American Century: Art & Culture 19002000. Parts I and II, covering the years 19001950 and 19502000, were mounted in the spring and fall, respectively, included works in all media, and gave the museum a chance to display its extensive permanent collection. Although some examples may have been more historically or technically significant than others, collectively they laid bare aspects of a national sensibilityfor better or worse. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art featured approximately 60 works by American artist Lee Krasner. Although she was perhaps better known as Jackson Pollock's better half, Krasner was an abstract painter in her own right and a significant figure in the 1940s and '50s. The year marked the 400th anniversaries of the births of two of the 17th century's greatest masters, Diego Rodrguez de Silva Velzquez and Anthony van Dyck. Velzquez and Seville at the Cartuja Monastery in the city of Velzquez's birth was one of several exhibitions honouring Spain's cultural hero. Meanwhile, teams of archaeologists searched Madrid's underground tunnels and crypts for the missing remains of the painter. Eighty works by the celebrated portraitist van Dyck were shown at the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp, Belg., the artist's birthplace, and also traveled to the Royal Academy of Arts, Londonthe city where van Dyck was court painter to Charles I. At the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, Amazons of the Avant-Garde featured six Russian women artists: Aleksandra Ekster, Nataliya Goncharova, Lyubov Popova, Olga Rozanova, Varvara Stepanova, and Nadezhda Udaltsova. Their talent was a substantial force in the early avant-garde, and this exhibition, which focused on painting, gave some extraordinary works of art their due recognition. The show was then to travel to London and Venice. Matisse and Picasso: A Gentle Rivalry embodied a similarly focused curatorial approach. The Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, assembled paintings, drawings, and sculpture that revealed the complex nature of a 25-year-long dialogue between extraordinary modern masters Henri Mattise and Pablo Picasso. The New Orleans Museum of Art mounted the well-received Degas and New Orleans. Edgar Degas, the only artist of the Impressionist circle to have traveled to the U.S., visited his mother's Creole relatives from October 1872 through March 1873, completing penetrating portraits of family members and the remarkable A Cotton Office in New Orleans (1873). This exhibition also traveled to the Ordrupgrd Collection, Copenhagen. The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, also in Copenhagen, displayed the work of Surrealist Ren Magritte, aiming to consider Magritte's influence on subsequent generations of artists, specifically his relevance for Pop and Conceptual art. The Jeu de Paume, Paris, presented France's first exhibition of Gutai, the Japanese avant-garde artist group. Active from 1954 to 1972, Gutai artists engaged in body-oriented performative actions, and these, as well as the results of some of these actionse.g., paintings created by smashing jars of pigment on canvaswere recorded in films and photographs. An ocean awayliterally and figurativelywas Land of the Winged Horseman: Polish Art, 15721764, the first major U.S. exhibition of Polish art from that period. More than 150 examples of religious and secular objects, metalwork, and textiles were amassed for this show, which debuted at Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore, Md., and was scheduled to travel to three additional U.S. venues before opening in Poland. Two institutions held major exhibitions of ancient Egyptian art and artifacts. The Metropolitan Museum of Art debuted Egyptian Art in the Age of the Pyramids, the first fall blockbuster to open in New York City. Viewers lined up to see hundreds of examples of sculptures, paintings, and relief carvings from the Old Kingdom (c. 26502150 bc). Continuing the wave of Egyptomania, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, offered Pharaohs of the Sun: Akhenaten, Nefertiti, Tutankhamen, displaying nearly 300 Amarna period (135336 bc) artifacts, many of them loaned by Cairo museums for the first time. Chinese artifacts from the Neolithic Period (45001700 bc) through the T'ang dynasty (618907) were assembled for The Golden Age of Chinese Archaeology: Celebrated Discoveries from the People's Republic of China. The 200 objects presented at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., were culled from 25 Chinese collections. The recovery of these objects in recent decades seemed to suggest new evidence about when and where cultural development occurred in ancient China. Another consideration of Chinese relics was Gilded Dragons: Buried Treasures from China's Golden Ages, which opened in October at the British Museum, London, and was reputed to have contained the greatest number of national treasures . . . to be on display in one place. The Bowers Museum of Cultural Art, Santa Ana, Calif., exhibited (as would five future venues) spectacular ancient artifacts from Mesopotamia. Treasures from the Royal Tombs of Ur featured an array of gold and bejeweled Sumerian objects (dated c. 26002500 bc). The visibility of Irish artists was increased in several enlivening group exhibitions. The Berkeley Art Museum at the University of California mounted examples of figurative work by 20th-century Irish artists, many of whom were previously unknown to U.S. audiences. The exhibition traveled to New York University's Grey Art Gallery, coinciding with P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center's 0044, a show of new and recent work by contemporary Irish artists. The McMullen Museum, Boston (and other future venues), held Irish Art Now: From the Poetic to the Political, which concentrated on Irish artists of the 1990s, including Willie Doherty and Kathy Prendergast, among others. Several artists who began their careers in the 1980s were afforded solo retrospectives. The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam showed 55 paintings by American artist David Salle, whose work juxtaposes figurative or decorative motifs with imagery from both high and low culture. This show was also to travel to venues in Italy and Spain. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City, featured the work of Francesco Clemente. Inspired by the three countries in which he made his homeItaly, the U.S. (New York), and IndiaClemente turned to the personalmostly his friends and family and often the spiritualfor inspiration and subject matter. Visual artist, AIDS activist, and prolific writer David Wojnarowicz was the subject of a much-anticipated show of 75 works at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York City. It was a welcome opportunity to experience the efficacy of a body of work that reflected the highly charged artistic and political atmosphere of 1980s New York. Tiboricity: Design and Undesign by Tibor Kalman: 19791999, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, featured 200 examples of printed matter and objects by maverick Kalman (see Obituaries), who with his firm, M&Co., revolutionized design concepts for museum exhibitions, urban spaces, typography, and a range of consumer products. His untimely death was a loss felt by the international design, art, and publishing communities and beyond. Meghan Dailey Painting and Sculpture The 48th Venice Biennale, held in June 1999, was a natural midyear vantage point from which to survey what had happened in artistic practices. For 21 weeks scores of international artists and their works were praised, damned, scrutinized, and sometimes even honoured. Bruce Nauman and Louise Bourgeois were the recipients of the Golden Lion, the top award. The three winners of the International Prize cut across conceptual approaches and national identities. China's Cai Guoqiang presented a large-scale narrative piece, Venice Rent Collecting Courtyard (1999), which consisted of numerous life-size clay figures; American videographer Doug Aitken's Electric Earth (1999) chronicled a black man's surrealistic stimuli-laden journey through the Los Angeles streets; and Iran's Shirin Neshat's Turbulent (1998) captivated viewers much as her earlier film Rapture had. Both of Neshat's filmsconsisting of black-and-white images on two facing screens, one side showing women, the other, menruminated on the entrenched gender divide that governs Iranian life. In the American pavilion Ann Hamilton's installation Myein (1999) was a commentary on the intensities and weaknesses of human sensory perception. A layer of reddish-coloured dust, emitted from holes in the walls, gradually accumulated on the floor and dusted large Braille dots on the walls. Another large project was Thomas Hirschhorn's Welt Flugplatz (World Airport, 1999), which examined the phenomenon of globalization. Constructed mostly from cardboard, wood, aluminum foil, and plastic, the piece included 1.5-m (5-ft)-long airplanes emblazoned with the logos of national airlines from the Balkans, Africa, Great Britain, and France, among others. Other elements included walls collaged with media clippings of current events juxtaposed with found photographs and an airport lounge where viewers/passengers could read about Hirschhorn's work. Great Britain offered its own international gathering of talent with the Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art, organized by curator Anthony Bond. The main section, entitled Trace, featured 50 artists, including Miroslaw Blaka (Poland), Pierre Huyghe (France), Alastair MacLennan (Ireland), Bashir Makhoul (U.K./Lebanon), Adrian Piper (U.S.), and Jane and Louise Wilson (U.K.). Works in all media, including painting, video, and sculpture, were on view in Trace and its companion curatorial enterprise, Tracey, which offered various site-specific artists' projects in locations around Liverpool and other cities. Elsewhere, artists continued to blur the line between installation-based practices and the medium of sculpture by combining sculptural elements with a range of techniques and materials. Tony Feher and Diana Cooper turned to everyday materials as a source. Feher cleverly reinterpreted a Minimalist aesthetic by attaching commercial detrituslike plastic beverage bottlesto the wall, placing roughly cut blocks of polystyrene in stacks, and piling coins and marbles together on the floor. Cooper's work shifted between two and three dimensions. Some pieces remained primarily grounded in the medium of drawing (she used ballpoint pen on paper or unstretched canvas stapled to the wall to compose proliferating patterns of lines and shapes), whereas other works consisted of networks of strips of paper, pipe cleaners, small plastic tubes, and brightly coloured pom-poms attached to floors and walls. Los Angelesbased artist Liz Larner also made use of existing architectural elements, utilizing corners and columns as bases for her abstract sculptures. Larner exploited the malleability of plastic to create distorted cubes or an aggregating web of bright green tubing. Paul McCarthy and Jason Rhoades cocreated the visceral installation Propposition (1999). Upon entering the gallery space, visitors' senses were confronted by the aroma of Wonder Bread and doughnuts. As they made their way past plastic barrels full of fermenting items and skirted past a rapidly spinning mechanical bull, they were rewarded with the sight of a red Ferrari dismantled down to panels, seats, and parts. The suggested thrills of motion, sweets, and speed were driven to a literal climax via the hard-core pornographic video projected onto the walls. German artist Andreas Slominski constructed sculpture-as-trapsfor birds, mice, and other small animals. As viewers carefully inched closer to these slightly menacing yet appealing and aestheticized objects, they were lured by their unknown promise, as any animal prey would be. This examination of the nature of reality and artifice also figured in Roxy Paine's work. Paine investigated the relationship between the natural and the artificial with handmade hyperreal beds of grass, flowers, and mushrooms. Drawing out this commentary on the nature of originality further was Paine's SCUMAK (1998), a mechanism that dispensed melted plastic onto a conveyor belt. The white plastic hardened into irregular mounds that rolled off Paine's assembly line and, during the course of the exhibition, formed an ever-growing pile on the floor. Also notable was Mike Kelley's ambitious new sculpture, the unruly title of whichFramed and Frame (Miniature Reproduction Chinatown Wishing Well built by Mike Kelley after Miniature Reproduction Seven Star Cavern' built by Prof. H.K. Lu), (1999)suggested something of the sprawling nature of this large-scale piece. Kelley's reconstruction of the Chinatown Wishing Well, Hollywood's memorial to Chinese-American film actress Anna May Wong, complete with smiling Buddha figures and bright paper lanterns, was situated near a patio-like brick structure enclosed on two sides by chain-link fencing and barbed wire and by red-painted Chinese gates on the other. The result was an ambiguous admixture of kitsch, history, fear, and personal narrative. Ellsworth Kelly: The Early Drawings, 19481955 was organized by Harvard University Art Museums and the Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switz., and featured many previously unexhibited works. Also shown was Line, Form, Color, a group of collages and drawings originally intended for an artist's book; the unfinished 1951 project was completed by Kelly (see Biographies) especially for this exhibition. Even when video or installation may have been the dominant idiom, painting was not entirely absent. An engaging and successful fusion of public sculpture with painting (as well as photography) was Billboard, an exhibition mounted by the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art as part of the much-anticipated May 1998 opening of its exhibitions spaces. Twenty-five different billboards featured reproductions of works by such artists as John Baldessari, Sue Coe, the Guerrilla Girls, and Gary Simmons (five pieces were commissioned especially for this project) and could be seen in locations around the region near the museum. Several gallery shows of important established painters indicated that the medium was thriving. Philip Taaffe presented new works, and Ross Bleckner showed recent abstractions. Robert Ryman's most recent white paintings were small, but there were over 30 of them on view in one impressive exhibition. Nor did all young artists forsake painting for flashier mediums, but rather many sought to invigorate the grand manner with their own particular sensibility. Lisa Ruyter used snapshots as a starting point for her paintings of suburban exteriors, and many others relied on the vocabulary of graphic art for inspiration, appropriating the flatness, iconography, saturated colours, and elements of design and the motifs and typography of advertising. Culling imagery from consumer culture, Michael Bevilacqua's bold, psychedelically hued paintings perfectly embodied this urge to look outside the realm of art to that of music, products, and fashion, among other things, while still relentlessly referencing the work of other painters and styles. Karen Davie's large works depicted bending, curving stripes that reinterpreted Op art works by retaining something of their disorienting illusionism while treating Op's geometry with a looser hand that mimicked the natural plasticity of the pigment itself. Meghan Dailey Photography The ways that photographs were bought, sold, auctioned, and merchandised as art increased dramatically during 1999 with the Internet's explosive growth. Whereas the world's first on-line photography auction had taken place only a year previously, by the end of 1999 such auctions had become commonplace. Swann Galleries in New York City was experimenting with the idea, and Sotheby's New York teamed up with Amazon.com to hold Internet photo auctions. Artnet.com offered photo aficionados a convenient one-stop World Wide Web site where they could bid electronically at auctions, explore member galleries, and browse through its virtual bookstore. Anyone wanting to sell photographs or photographica could also arrange to use eBay, the vast electronic auction house. One of the most outstanding photographic auctions of the year took place in traditional fashion, however, when Sotheby's in London sold a famous private collection of Andr Jammes and his wife, Marie-Therese. (A preview exhibition was shown at Sotheby's New York.) Valued at an estimated $3 million$6 million, the collection included rare and historically important examples of 19th-century photography, especially French, as well as modern masterpieces from the 1920s and '30s. Fame After Photography was a rollicking show organized by Carole Kismaric and Marvin Heiferman at New York's Museum of Modern Art. It provided an irreverent look at the symbiotic but changing relationship between photography and celebrities from Queen Victoria's day to the paparazzi of the present. On exhibit were not only photographs but newspapers, magazine covers, newsreels, movie trailers, excerpts from television programs, and commercials. The entertaining but dizzying survey left the New York Times reviewer Michael Kimmelman wondering, Now that everyone is famous for 15 minutes, is anyone really famous any longer? The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., launched an ambitious new project: a multiyear presentation of the world's largest and most complete collection of photographs by Alfred Stieglitz. More than half of the 1,600-print collection had never been published. The gallery opened the project with a new edition of the award-winning but out-of-print Alfred Stieglitz: Photographs and Writings, and by presenting Alfred Stieglitz: New Perspectives, a series of seven productions on the gallery's Web site. The entire collection was scheduled to be published in a 600-page catalog in 2002 in conjunction with an exhibition. Shown during the year at several museums was Stray Dog, a powerful retrospective exhibition of Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama's work. Influenced by William Kline's book of photographs New York and the spirit of Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road, Moriyama was among the photographers, cinematographers, and graphic artists who strongly influenced the postWorld War II Japanese cultural scene. Nearly 200 of his characteristically gritty, high-contrast images were included. As the 20th century neared its end, photographic reviews of its events, heroes, villains, and lifestyles abounded. Among them was Picturing the Century: 100 Years of Photography from the National Archives, at the National Archives' Washington, D.C., headquarters. From this vast collection (more than eight million still and nine million aerial pictures in Washington plus millions more from 30 regional archives), curator Bruce Bustard selected 190 photographs, many of them virtually unknown. They ranged from the historically momentous, such as the Wright Brothers' first powered flight at Kitty Hawk, N.C., to the charmingly trivial 1917 image of nature sliders coasting down a snowy slope on the waxed seat of their pants. Daguerreotypes created news during the year. The late David Feigenbaum left a superb collection of 240 daguerreotypes, mostly made by the famous Boston team of Southworth & Hawes in the 1840s and '50s. Sotheby's New York auctioned the collection for a total of $3.3 million. A whole-plate image, Two Women, set a new world auction price record for a 19th-century photograph at $387,500. Photographs from Robert Ripley's Believe It or Not! archives, exhibited first at the Kansas City Museum, might claim the title as the silliest but most amusing photo show of 1999. It included images of a man blowing up a balloon with his ear, the world's largest shortcake (weighing 2 tons and feeding 12,000 people), and Perry L. Biddle celebrating his 90th birthday on a flagpole by holding himself horizontally outstretched like a flag. Getty Images announced plans to purchase Eastman Kodak's the Image Bank. The latter included still imagery from United Press International, Reuters Group PLC, the Chicago Historical Collection, and George Eastman House. The acquisition would double the size of Getty's holdings, it was said, and create one of the world's largest privately owned collections of photos and film archives. The Witkin Gallery, a landmark of the New York photographic gallery scene, closed its doors in 1999. When it first opened 30 years earlier, it was the only commercial photography gallery in the city. (Others had tried and failed.) Founder Lee Witkin and his successor, Evelyne Daitz, established the gallery's widely held reputation for encouraging new talent and fostering a pure, unpretentious esthetic. Its final exhibition was, fittingly enough, Clothes Off. Harry Callahan, influential photographer and photographic teacher, died in March. (See Obituaries.) Influenced by Ansel Adams and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, he developed a highly personal style that combined straight photography with technical experimentation. He attempted, he said, to find a visual way of revealing the subject in a new way to intensify it. The 1999 Pulitzer Prize for spot news photography went to John McConnico of the Associated Press for his photograph of Prudence Bushnell, the U.S. ambassador to Kenya, after she laid a wreath at the site of the embassy bombing in Nairobi. Susan Walsh of the Associated Press won the Pulitzer for feature photography with her photograph of Pres. Bill Clinton with Hillary Rodham Clinton next to him as he addressed U.S House of Representatives Democrats outside the White House during his impeachment proceedings. At the 56th Annual Pictures of the Year contest, sponsored by the National Press Photographers Association and the University of Missouri School of Journalism, Newspaper Photographer of the Year went to Bill Greene of the Boston Globe, and Chien-chi Chang was named Magazine Photographer of the Year. Chang, a Taiwanese-born New Yorker and associate member of Magnum Photos, also won the W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography for Divided Lives, his ongoing documentary on the plight of illegal immigrants in New York's Chinatown and their family members left behind in China. Tom Stoddart of IPG Flash Matrix won the Canon Photo Essayist Award for his U.S. News & World Report coverage of famine in The Sudan. Recipients of the two 1999 W. Eugene Smith Fellowship Grants were Alaskan freelance photographer Bill Hess Bill and Spanish photographer Fernando Moleres. The Howard Chapnick Grant for the Advancement of Photojournalism Leadership was awarded to teacher/photographer Peter Mecca. Arthur Goldsmith