YEAR IN REVIEW 2001: ART-ANTIQUES-AND-COLLECTIBLES

Antiques and Collectibles The Internet continued to influence the prices paid for antiques and collectibles, but major shops, shopping malls, and regular auctions remained the most important barometers of sales in 2000. Regional auction houses were enjoying astounding results for important examples of folk art, toys, Arts and Crafts furniture and accessories, and art pottery. The sales of ordinary 1950s and '60s furniture were slow, however. Although ignored 25 years earlier, Arts and Crafts and art pottery were in demand at every price point, from $10 table runners to $900,000 tables. High-style pieces made after 1950 were popular even though many of these items were still being made. There was less buyer interest in clocks and 18th-century porcelains than in the past, but a record price was paid at auction for a watch-$11,002,500, for a 1933 18-carat gold Patek Philippe pocket watch with 24 complications- special features such as a calendar, dual power source, or central alarm. The biggest surprise of the year was the sums paid for folk art, notably the $195,500 fetched at auction in Bedford, N.Y., for a 33-cm (13-in)-long early-19th-century paint-decorated box. Other impressive folk art sales included a miniature Pennsylvania painted blanket chest dated 1777, $220,000; a hooked rug with stars and stripes, $46,000; and an 1857 American carved game board painted with flags, $46,000. A 1917 sleeping Canada goose decoy by Elmer Crowell made $684,500. Lamps, especially those with glass shades, continued to sell well. Three Pairpoint puffy table lamps set records: a Lilac lamp, $145,600; an Orange Tree lamp, $60,480; and a Begonia lamp, $67,200. A Tiffany Poppy table lamp went for $123,200, a Handel Peacock table lamp brought $56,000, and a Tiffany Daffodil lamp sold for a record $67,200. Toys remained popular, especially tin banks, trucks, and cars; mechanical toys sold for high but not record prices. Records were established for British lead soldiers. A Boy Scout display set of 44 pieces auctioned for $2,912, and a soldier set of British army infantry officers made in the 1940s went for $5,264. A prototype Hot Wheels hot pink Volkswagen Beach Bomb with rear-loaded surfboards sold for $72,000, and a full-size (c. 1891) Ohio Diamond Frame safety bicycle auctioned for $164,820. A signed 1937 first edition of Dr. Seuss's And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, his first children's book, sold for $8,625. Sports memorabilia sales slowed. A Babe Ruth-signed baseball fetched $76,020, and a baseball autographed by Pope John Paul II in 1987 was auctioned for $33,979. The famous Honus Wagner baseball card that sold for $640,500 in 1996 commanded $1,265,000 in 2000. Unusual collectibles set records, including a 1954 Superman tin lunch box with a thermos, which brought $11,500, and a 1905 Vermont license plate with a white number 9 on a blue plate made $14,850. The sale of a Titanic lunch menu dated April 14, 1912, commanded $74,750. Collectors were also buying old computers; a component of ENIAC, the first general-purpose digital computer (constructed in 1946), sold for $79,500. Prices continued to soar for American art pottery. The Cowan Pottery jazz bowl designed in the 1930s by Victor Schreckengost for Eleanor Roosevelt sold for $121,000. A Newcomb College high-glaze vase-15 cm (6 in) high and made c. 1907 by Leona Nicholson-set a record at $82,500. A 46-cm (18-in)-high Teco vase with green and charcoal glaze brought $66,000 at auction. An English George III lady's secretary bookcase by Thomas Weeks (c. 1800) auctioned in New York for a record $167,500, and a cabinet made in 1679 set an American furniture record when it went for $2,422,500. Records for 18th-century furniture were also set: $2,862,500 for a Cornelius Stevenson Chippendale mahogany card table, $1,432,500 for a John Cadwalader Chippendale mahogany side chair, and $910,000 for a pair of Chippendale carved mahogany game tables. Although record prices were paid for Arts and Crafts furniture toward the end of 1999, none of the high prices paid in 2000 were records. Eames furniture rarities set records: the DTW-3 three-dowel-leg dining table, $10,350; a wall unit ESU-421-C, $70,700; and a set of six DKR-1 dining chairs, $10,063. The one-of-a-kind prototype DCW armchair went for $107,000. Ralph and Terry Kovel Art Auctions and Sales Defying all expectations, the art market in 2000 sustained substantial growth over 1999. Major auction houses Christie's and Sotheby's, however, came under scrutiny for commission fixing, and they agreed in September to pay $512 million to settle a civil suit against them. Bolstered by a bull stock market and increased consumer wealth, the auction houses continued to see record prices for high-quality works of art, through both traditional auction venues and transactions conducted via the Internet. In January 2000 Sotheby's launched Sothebys.com, an e-commerce art and antiques World Wide Web site that achieved $31,000,000 in sales in its first six months, a total punctuated by the $8,140,000 sale of a rare first printing of the Declaration of Independence, by far the most expensive item ever auctioned on-line. Although Christie's opted not to conduct auctions on Christies.com, the auction house greatly expanded its on-line capabilities by hosting live Webcasts of its important auctions. In the sale of Old Master paintings held in New York City, Christie's achieved $39,290,500, its highest total in 10 years. The high seller was Canaletto's The Grand Canal Venice, Looking East from Campo di San Vio, which went for $6,602,500. Records were also established for artists Giovanni Battista, Carracci, and Carlo Maratta. In May Christie's New York offered the single-owner Karl Lagerfeld Collection, which fetched $7,217,121. Christie's London in July offered one of the most important drawings ever to appear at auction; Study for the Risen Christ by Michelangelo Buonarroti realized $12,378,500. Reaching a sale total of $47,482,575, the Old Master auction at Sotheby's included Peter Paul Rubens's Portrait of a Man as the God Mars, which fetched $8,252,500 and set a record for the artist. The Rebuke of Adam and Eve by Domenichino also set a record at $3,302,500. The sales of Impressionist and Modern art and Contemporary art at both auction houses were resoundingly successful. At Sotheby's New York in May, the totals for these sales were the second highest in 10 years, with Impressionist art earning a staggering $140,354,000, earmarked by the sale of Claude Monet's Le Portail (Soleil), which fetched $24,205,750. An Henri Matisse sculpture entitled La Serpentine-Femme la stele-l'araignee sold for a record $14,030,750, the highest price paid for a sculpture at auction. Christie's New York set a world auction record in May with the sale of Gustave Caillebotte's L'Homme au balcon, which commanded $14.3 million in a sale that earned $104.5 million. Monet's Nympheas reached $20.9 million, the highest bid of the evening. Sotheby's London Impressionist sale in June totaled $80,327,040 and was underscored by Edgar Degas's Petit danseuse de quatorze ans, which sold for $11,547,740 and established a European record at auction for a sculpture. In June Christie's London sold Paul Czanne's Still Life with Fruit for $18.2 million. In its sale of 20th-century art, Christie's New York set 15 auction records in a sale totaling $14.5 million. The apex of the auction was Sigmar Polke's atypical dot painting Zwei Frauen, which realized $1,650,000. In its sale of 20th-century art, Christie's offered Pablo Picasso's Nature morte aux tulipes, which achieved $28.6 million. Also in May, Sotheby's New York held a robust sale of Contemporary art. The highlight was a 1956 painting by Mark Rothko, Yellow over Purple, which sold for $14,305,750, an unprecedented price for this artist at auction. The June sale at Sotheby's London gave way to eight new auction records for Contemporary artists, including one for Gerald Richter, whose Martha set a record for an abstract painting when it realized 443,500 (about $643,075). The Christie's June sale in London earned $8.9 million. In New York Sotheby's American paintings, drawings, and sculpture sale in May totaled $38,497,075. The sale was highlighted by 10 lots that realized winning bids of more than $1,000,000, notably Ralph Albert Blakelock's Indian Encampment Along the Snake River, which fetched $3,525,750 and set an artist record. Christie's American paintings sale earned $33,164,800, the highest total for this category in the auction house's history. Highlighting the sale was Frederic Edwin Church's Mount Newport on Mount Desert Island for $4,186,000. At Sotheby's New York sales of Latin American art on May 31 and June 1, a record was achieved for a rare self-portrait by Frida Kahlo, which sold for $5,065,750 and established the highest auction price ever paid for a work by a woman artist. The June sale at Christie's New York of Latin American paintings realized $8,984,757 and gave rise to seven auction records, including the $468,000 brought for Fernando Botero's sculpture Reclining Venus. Both Christie's and Sotheby's boasted strong results in the worldwide jewelry market. In May Christie's New York sale of magnificent jewels totaled $19.3 million. The top lot was a 27.49-carat ring, which went for $1,381,000. Christie's Hong Kong had the best sale results of the spring series with Magnificent Jewellery I: The Far Eastern Collector and Magnificent Jewellery II: Tradition and Innovation Jewels Without Reserve, which together realized $36.3 million. Sotheby's New York offered the private collection of Mr. and Mrs. Lloyd H. Smith, which commanded $19,986,472. The spring jewelry sale in Geneva totaled $32,229,427, owing in large part to the sale of the magnificent jewels of Marie Vergottis, whose sapphire and diamond necklace sold for $1,035,450. Sales in antiquities brought Sotheby's the highest total for a various-owner sale in the auction house's history; the June sale realized $9.5 million. The bronze head of an athlete-a rare Roman copy of a lost original by Greek sculptor Lysippos-stole the show and sold for $4.5 million, a record price for a classical antiquity at auction. At Sotheby's New York in June was the sale of the items from the shipwrecked SS Central America. The cache aboard this treasure ship, recovered after 132 years, consisted primarily of gold bars and coins. The sale brought $5,567,815; an 18,779.9-g (663.6-oz) gold bar made by Kellogg and Humbert, Assayers, San Francisco, fetched $265,000. Christie's achieved impressive sales results for books and manuscripts and in New York set a world record for a printed book with the $8,802,500 sale of John James Audubon's The Birds of America: From Original Drawings by John James Audubon. Christie's London sold the private library of William Foyle for $18.9 million, the highest European price ever realized for such a collection. Sotheby's London attained great success with the sale of the 16th-century Book of Hours, illustrated by Renaissance illuminator Simon Bening, for 2,610,500 (about $3,785,000). Amy Todd Middleton Art Exhibitions Some of the most significant exhibitions of 2000 focused on single artists. One of the most important of these monographic retrospectives recognized American painter Alice Neel. The show was organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and debuted at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City. It was the first comprehensive exhibition of Neel's output and featured 75 works, including cityscapes and still lifes among her famous portraits. In the 1930s, early in her career, Neel was an artist with the Works Progress Administration, and she worked as a figurative painter for decades before attaining recognition for her portraits, which depicted those closest to her with an unflinching, canny, and insightful eye. Sol LeWitt was featured at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in another much-anticipated solo exhibition. The focus was on LeWitt's signature wall drawings-works executed directly on the wall in pencil, crayon, ink washes, and, recently, acrylic paint. Many of these, as well as LeWitt's works on paper and "structures" (his preferred term for sculptural works) dating from the past 40 years, were shown in this traveling exhibition. Wayne Thiebaud, another artist who came of age in the 1950s, was featured in Texas at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, which held the most comprehensive overview of the California artist's career to date. Over 100 works were shown, including Thiebaud's signature Pop art-inspired still lifes of sliced cakes and pies as well as his later San Francisco cityscapes. "Amazons in the Drawing Room: The Art of Romaine Brooks" at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., was the result of a steady reassessment of Brooks, an American expatriate known as much for her unconventional life as her art. This survey focused on her portraiture and more general artistic interests, which were tied to ideas about personal identity, class, and sexuality. Another independent woman who had exerted a profound impact on her cultural milieu was Yoko Ono, whose work was featured in New York at the Japan Society, Ono's first major American venue. Included were her early Fluxus works, installations, films, photographs, and unique musical output, which was captured on a compact disc produced especially for the occasion. Video artist Nam June Paik was the subject of a retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City. This spectacular show included a laser waterfall in the museum's rotunda and many of his installations, which reflected on the ways in which electronic media, particularly television, impacted aesthetics and perceptions of art in the world at large. There was no shortage of historical surveys in 2000, one of which looked back at the turn of the last century. "1900: Art at the Crossroads" appeared at London's Royal Academy of Arts. The exhibition was inspired by the 1900 "Exposition Universelle" in Paris, where many of the approximately 250 paintings and sculptures were first exhibited. To indicate the vast range of styles being practiced at the time, 1900 was arranged by genre-Portraits, Bathers and Nudes, and Interiors and Still-Lifes, among other categories-and offered a chance to (re)consider them both at the turn of the last century and at the dawning of the new millennium. Another nod to the 1900 Paris exposition was the Victoria and Albert Museum's "Art Nouveau 1890-1914," which gathered an impressive number of objects rendered in the sensuous fin de sicle design mode-jewelry, furniture, and glassware among them-produced mostly between 1890 and World War I. The show was also on view at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., where additional objects were added. The lure of the exotic was explored in "Noble Dreams, Wicked Pleasures: Orientalism in America, 1870-1930," a traveling exhibition that unraveled the fascination with so-called Oriental art and cultures and featured nearly 100 works at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Mass. Paintings by John Singer Sargent and Frederic Edwin Church were included, as well as examples of popular culture, the decorative arts, and photographs. "Taoism and the Arts of China" at the Art Institute of Chicago was a consideration of the undeniable overlap between the philosophical-religious force of Taoism and the visual arts; the exhibit included calligraphy, books, and textiles. The Portland (Ore.) Art Museum presented "Stroganoff: The Palace and Collections of a Russian Noble Family" in cooperation with the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. For the show, masterworks were reassembled from the collections of one of imperial Russia's most influential families (more than 230 objects, many of which never had been seen outside Russia), and the exhibit included a selection of Russian icons from the Stroganoff School and 18th-century French paintings by lisabeth Vige-Lebrun, Antoine Watteau, and Jean-Baptiste Greuze. "The Triumph of French Painting," which debuted at the Philbrook Museum in Tulsa, Okla., focused on the 19th century and its notable painters-Eugne Delacroix, Claude Monet, and Henri Matisse among them. A different aspect of Europe was revealed in "The Splendor of 18th-Century Rome" at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. On display were an unprecedented 380 works by more than 160 artists, including paintings, sculpture, works on paper, decorative objects, architectural renderings, and models inspired by Rome and its treasured antiquities and Renaissance and Baroque monuments. Several exhibitions were devoted to works from the collections of Giuseppe Panza di Biumo. The Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain; the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice; and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles, all exhibited Panza works. Many site-specific sculptures by artists of the 1960s and '70s were housed at the Villa Panza in Varese, Italy, which opened to the public in 2000. The Panza holdings included some of the most important works of Abstract Expressionism, Pop art, minimalism, and postminimalism by artists such as Carl Andre, Franz Kline, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, Robert Irwin, and Richard Serra. These exhibitions were intended to celebrate the prescient vision and generosity of the Panzas. An eclectic group of exhibitions were shown in European museums, including "Samuel Beckett/Bruce Nauman" at the Kunsthalle Wein (Vienna), which explored the conceptual connections between playwright and writer Beckett and Nauman's activities as a contemporary artist via their respectively radical considerations of space and relentless questioning of perception and the human condition. Since the early 1970s, artist Adrian Piper had been addressing similar notions of selfhood but focusing on racial and gender stereotyping in her personal, often performance-driven work. Piper's uncompromising text-based photographs, videos, and drawings were the subject of a show at the Fine Arts Gallery, University of Maryland at Baltimore. Also, "MEDI(t)Ations," a presentation of nearly all of Piper's audio and video works, was shown at the MOCA. The MOCA was the site of the first major retrospective devoted to influential California artist Paul McCarthy. McCarthy had produced some of the most provocative and challenging performance and installation work of the past two decades, much of it in European collections; this venue provided a significant opportunity to see his output in the U.S. Ed Ruscha, perhaps the quintessential West Coast artist, was given a retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. Ruscha's witty post-Pop gestures in the form of books of photographs (such as the iconic Twentysix Gasoline Stations of 1963) and paintings incorporating logos and words anticipated the issues of originality and seriality that would become the preoccupation of Conceptual artists in the 1960s, '70s, and beyond. Meghan Dailey Painting and Sculpture There were two important opportunities in 2000 to view contemporary work in New York City. An exhibit focused on broader American production, and another show concentrated specifically on activities of artists in New York. The latter, "Greater New York: New Art in New York Now," was organized at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center and intended to showcase the best of art in all mediums created in the city that was still considered the most important place for artists to live and produce work. Among the participants who made painting their focus were Inka Essenhigh, Ellen Gallagher, and Brad Kahlhamer. Jeff Gauntt's architecturally inspired work and James Siena's small abstractions were also shown. Cecily Brown and Giles Lyon both made large-scale gestural abstract paintings. Lyon's works were intended to suggest visually the profusion of influences and stimuli that bombarded the spectator in everyday life. The everyday was rendered in sculptural terms by Rob de Mar, whose sculptures depicted small segments of landscapes mounted to walls or often situated atop slender poles, which forced the viewer literally to take a different perspective on the environment and his work. DeMar cut wood into the shapes of mountains, trees, and fragments of roadways and covered these forms with velvety flocking material, rendering the materials of the environment with abbreviated accuracy. E.V. Day's sculptures involved an element of the destructive in their execution. Her materials included, most memorably, blow-up sex dolls, which were inflated to the point that they exploded. The remaining pink vinyl fragments were suspended from floor and ceiling by taut stainless-steel wires. Day was one of several artists whose work could be seen at both P.S.1 and the Whitney Biennial. The Biennial aimed to present the broader aspect of artistic practices in the United States. A curatorial team of experts put together by Maxwell Anderson, director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, selected 27 artists who it believed best represented the existing state of American art. The exhibition had a substantial video, film, and, for the first time, Internet component, but painting and sculpture were also represented by such significant artists as John Currin, Robert Gober, Joseph Marioni, Josiah McElheny, Sarah Sze, Richard Tuttle, and Lisa Yuskavage. Several painters focused on the human figure. Kurt Kauper's series (also part of the Whitney Biennial), Diva Fictions, comprised full-length portraits of imaginary opera stars. The series, highly realistic in style yet representing individuals who had never actually existed outside the frame of these works, derived its power from the symbolic, between high artificiality and intense realism. Neo Rauch relied on such sources as 1950s and '60s advertising, propaganda, or popular magazine imagery that he encountered while growing up in East Germany. Rauch situated his figures in uneasy juxtapositions, and his vignettes-which played on nostalgia and the disruption of the seemingly routine-were uneasy and ambiguous. Polly Apfelbaum exhibited new work in Los Angeles for the first time in several years. Her pieces-made from hand-cut pieces of bright-coloured dyed-velvet fabric arranged in circular patterns on the gallery floor and around the perimeter of the exhibition space-blurred the boundaries between painting and sculpture. Another artist whose work questioned standard definitions of mediums was Jeremy Blake, who referred to his craft as painting, although technically he did not apply paint to canvas. His digital video disc "paintings" of projected computerized light allowed the varied aspects of the medium, flatness as well as depth, to emerge and be seen simultaneously. Tom Friedman transformed everyday materials-sugar cubes, hair, fuzz, and Play-Doh-into art objects. Among his works were his self-portrait carved into an aspirin, a pair of identically wrinkled pieces of paper, and a sculpture constructed from 30,000 toothpicks. These labour-intensive and humorous pieces made allusions to process-oriented art and conceptual practices. Lucky DeBellevue also used "humble" and often unexpected materials for his sculptural works. Bright-coloured pipe cleaners were densely woven into pyramids and organic moundlike shapes, and plastic compact-disc storage racks stuffed with foam tubes were wrought into objects with a deliberately low-key sensibility. A more traditional rendition of sculpture, at least in terms of function if not form, was the much-anticipated Holocaust Memorial by British sculptress Rachel Whiteread. The memorial was unveiled at its Vienna site in late October, although Whiteread had completed her design in 1996. The large reinforced concrete sculpture was characteristic of Whiteread's other projects in that it represented the interior of a room essentially turned inside out. In this case it was the space of a library; the spines of the books were facing inward so that the volumes became part of the sculpture itself. The structure was intended to represent a library symbolically and to suggest the "immaterial heritage of Judaism." In London one of the most exciting art-world events was the opening of the new Tate Modern in London. The enormous space renovated by the museum-a redesigned and adapted power station on the South Bank of the River Thames-provided a spectacular location for three monumental works by American sculptor Louise Bourgeois. Three 9-m (30-ft) steel towers entitled I Do, I Undo, I Redo (1999-2000) were installed in the Tate's 152-m (500-ft)-long by 30-m (100-ft)-high Turbine Hall. Adjacent to the towers was one of Bourgeois's enormous 10.7-m (35-ft)-high spider sculptures. Visitors were invited to climb the spiral staircases on the towers, each of which supported a platform with chairs surrounded by a series of large swivel mirrors that were intended to provoke heightened contemplation and conversation about the viewers and their surrounding space. The impact of technological discoveries on creativity and artistic practices was the object of "Paradise Now: Picturing the Genetic Revolution" at New York's alternative exhibition space Exit Art. Curated by Marvin Heiferman and Carole Kismaric, this exhibition was a chronicle of 39 artists' reactions to social, personal, and ethical implications of cloning and of the biotechnical alteration of foods and animal and human bodies. It spoke to the controversy surrounding the amount of control humans have over their genetic makeup in the wake of the completion of the Human Genome Project. (See LIFE SCIENCES: Special Report.) Some "works" included tanks containing donor sperm and eggs, a vast computer printout of the human genome sequence hanging from the ceiling and ending in a large stack on the floor, and plastic containers holding frogs that were being bred. More traditional mediums were represented, such as Alexis Rockman's painting depicting a genetically modified barnyard in which an enormous drooling pig containing human organs was flanked by a basket of pillow-sized tomatoes and the neatly squared-off body of a cow. The show elicited equal parts of optimism and paranoia. For a dose of pure romance, there was Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone's New York solo debut. "Love Invents Us" featured his "target" paintings, which achieved Op-art visual effects, and a group of stylistically unrelated black-and-white photographs. The centrepiece was a room-sized video installation, It's Late and the Wind Carries a Faint Sound . . . (1999-2000), a montage of different repeated filmic images of people engaged in repetitive motions such as swimming and dancing, accompanied by a haunting sound track sung by the artist, who repeated the refrain, "Everyday sunshine." Meghan Dailey Photography Despite a roller-coaster stock market and rising interest rates, photography auctions continued to reflect what might seem, in U.S. Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan's words, "irrational exuberance." In late 1999 at Sotheby's New York, Charles Sheeler's Criss-Crossed Conveyors, Ford Plant commanded a whopping $607,500, establishing a world auction record for one of his photographs. Alfred Stieglitz's From the Back Window, 291, New York, 1915 did the same for him with a price of $420,500. Gustave Le Gray's Grand Vague-Ste topped both figures when it sold for $840,370 at Sotheby's London. In 2000, top sales at Christie's included $314,000 for Cello Study, 1926 by Andr Kertsz and The Terminal, New York, 1892 by Stieglitz, setting a world auction record for this work at $215,000. The Internet's explosive growth continued to expand the alternative ways available to buy, sell, view, research, and enjoy photographs. Among an abundance of eye-boggling World Wide Web sites was Corbis-The Place for Pictures on the Internet (www.corbis.com). The site provided a way to dip into the enormous photographic collection acquired by Microsoft chairman Bill Gates from thousands of sources, including the famous Bettmann Archive. Newly featured among a wide array of Corbis's products and services was "The Living Lens: 75 of the Most Intriguing Photographs of the 20th Century," chosen from Bettmann. Described as "museum-quality" photographs, they were available for purchase on-line in a limited edition of 250 prints of each photograph at unusually affordable prices. George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y., showed "Migrations: Humanity in Transition," a visually and emotionally powerful exhibition of black-and-white images by Brazilian-born Sebastio Salgado. Taken in some 40 countries during the 1990s, Salgado's latest "photographic investigation," as he called his projects, explored the growing, wretched plight of migrant workers and refugees worldwide. His compassionate but unsparing vision and elegantly graphic images continued to establish him as a modern master of documentary photography. Photojournalist James Nachtwey continued to win acclaim for his coverage of contemporary warfare. His exhibition "James Nachtwey: Testimony" at the International Center of Photography in New York City, however, was not about war itself but about its catastrophic impact on civilians. The photographs were taken during the 1990s as Nachtwey witnessed atrocities and their aftermath in Romania, Somalia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Rwanda, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), and Chechnya, Russia. Large-format colour and black-and-white prints pictured a hell on Earth in harrowing, sometimes gruesome images in which the distinction between living and dead became blurred. The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles opened "The Man in the Street: Eugne Atget in Paris." The exhibit explored Atget's richly inclusive vision as he documented his beloved city with a tripod-mounted view camera and glass-plate negatives from about 1897 to 1927. New York City's Museum of Modern Art presented "Making Choices," the second installment of "MoMA2000," a blockbuster millennial celebration of modern art in all media. Focusing on the years 1920 to 1960, it included a series of 24 exhibits exploring the "contentions and vital complexities of modern art's middle years." Four shows were exclusively devoted to photographers-"Walker Evans & Company," "Man Ray, Photographer," "The Observer: Cartier-Bresson After the War," and "Ideal Motif: Stieglitz, Weston, Adams, and Callahan"-while a number of other exhibitions in the series also included photographs. The art of the artless snapshot provided the theme for a delightful exhibition, "Other Pictures: Vernacular Photographs from the Thomas Walther Collection," at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. The 90 or so black-and-white images were made by anonymous amateurs from about 1910 to 1960 and gathered by well-known collector Walther from images found in family albums, dusty shoe boxes, and flea markets. Cocurator Mia Fineman called them the "crme-de-la-snapshot. . . . Each one is a little lure for the imagination, an enticement, a revelation." Also at the Met, a retrospective "Walker Evans" exhibition surveyed, for the first time in its full scope and mostly in vintage prints, this photographer's influential body of work from the late 1920s to 1974. It traced the course of the "certain severity, rigor, or simplicity, directness, clarity" that Evans so successfully achieved in his photographs, from his early New York City street scenes, through his Depression-era images for the U.S. Farm Security Administration and his book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), to his later work for Fortune magazine. Organized by the Aperture Foundation and opening at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, "Mary Ellen Mark: Photographs" was this highly acclaimed photographer's first major exhibition to focus exclusively on her American work. Included were some 140 black-and-white photographs, many never before exhibited. Mark's compassionate but astringently unsentimental vision gave a panorama of sad, funny, and disturbing views of contemporary American lifestyles from documentary projects such as "Streetwise," "Beauty Pageants," "Rural Poverty," "Texas Rodeos," and "Spring Break." "Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America" at the New-York Historical Society aroused shocked attention with tormenting postcard images from a dark side of American social history when, between 1882 and 1968, an estimated 4,742 blacks were killed by lynch mobs. Collected over a period of 15 years by James E. Allen and John Littlefield, the pictures showed the corpses of sometimes mutilated victims hanging from a tree branch or makeshift gallows, often in front of a large crowd of onlookers that includes children. The postcards had been sold as popular mementos of these "hideous spectacles" that, according to Allen, left "even the dead victims without sanctuary." Appearing at the Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills, Calif., was Cindy Sherman's (see Biographies) most recent collection of staged self-portraiture. Her elaborately costumed and histrionically posed depictions of Hollywood women offered provocative commentary on film, glamour, artificiality, and social clichs. The 2000 Pulitzer Prize for spot news photography went to the photo staff of the Denver (Colo.) Rocky Mountain News for its coverage of the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School. Carol Guzy, Michael Williamson, and Lucian Perkins of the Washington (D.C.) Post won the Pulitzer for feature photography with their photographs of fleeing Kosovar refugees. At the 57th Annual Pictures of the Year contest, sponsored by the National Press Photographers Association and the University of Missouri School of Journalism, John Stanmeyer of SABA Press Photos/Time magazine received the Magazine Photographer of the Year award, while Rob Finch of the Beacon-News/Copley Chicago Newspapers was named Newspaper Photographer of the Year. The International Center of Photography Infinity Awards included presentations to Nachtwey for photojournalism for the third time and Helmut Newton for SUMO (2000), a massive book of his controversial, often voyeuristic images of famous personalities and models. The 2000 W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography went to Brenda Ann Kenncally and the two W. Eugene Smith Fellowship Grants to Nigel Dickenson and Francesco Zizola. The Howard Chapnick Grant for the Advancement of Photojournalism was awarded to David J. Spear. Arthur Goldsmith