Cartoons Are Invading the Upper East Side

"White Ghost" by Yoshitomo Nara

The cutesy yet devilish cartoon characters created by the Japanese neo-Pop artist Yoshitomo Nara will soon be familiar sights on the Upper East Side landscape. On Aug. 29 a pair of whimsical, 12-foot-high fiberglass dogs will stand guard like 21st-century Komainu, those mythical lionlike statues commonly placed at the entrance to Japanese shrines to ward off evil spirits.

Organized by the nonprofit Art Production Fund, which presents art around the city, the outdoor installations — one across from the entrance to the Asia Society at 725 Park Avenue, at 70th Street, and the other at 67th Street and Park Avenue just in front of the Park Avenue Armory — will give New Yorkers a hint of a much larger initiative. The Asia Society is presenting a major retrospective of the artist’s work, “Yoshitomo Nara: Nobody’s Fool,” from Sept. 9 through Jan. 2. It will be the first time the entire museum will be filled with the work of just one artist and will include more than 100 works — drawings, paintings, sculptures, record album covers and large installations — that span the 50-year-old Mr. Nara’s career.

But before the retrospective opens, the public will have a chance to see him in action. For three hours daily from Aug. 23 through 27, Mr. Nara will stage his version of an artist’s studio inside the cavernous Drill Hall of the Park Avenue Armory. Visitors can watch him and Hideki Toyoshima, his longtime collaborator on installation designs and a founding member of the Japanese design collective “graf,” as they create special structures that resemble an artist’s studio, a stage and a carnival tent. And with the help of assistants from Japan — working as a team with the artists called YNG — the two will make new drawings and a large-scale billboard painting. Both the structures and the artworks will eventually be moved to the Asia Society as part of the retrospective.

And since the museum is hoping for a particularly young audience, it has also teamed up with students from Hunter College, which is nearby, who will help at the armory and blog about the project on the museum’s Web site. The Asia Society is also developing a special iPhone app for the show that will include exhibition highlights; images from the show linked to related music clips; photographs of past installations in various cities; and an English translation of tweets from narabot, the artist’s Twitter name.

DENNIS HOPPER, COLLECTOR

Dennis Hopper may always be known for the drug-addled characters he played in “Easy Rider,” “Apocalypse Now” and “Blue Velvet,” but Hopper, who died in May, was also a passionate artist and collector. His own work — photographs, paintings and sculptures — are on view in “Dennis Hopper Double Standard,” at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. During his life he was friends with Warhol and Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, John Baldessari and Julian Schnabel, among other artists, and over the years bought their works.

“Dennis was passionate about art from Day 1,” recalled Bob Colacello, the writer who interviewed him shortly before his death for a story in this month’s issue of Vanity Fair. “He bought Ed Ruscha’s first Standard gas station painting, which is now in Sid Bass’s collection, and one of Andy’s Campbell’s soup cans for $75 in 1962.”

In the early 1960’s, Mr. Colacello said, Hopper transformed his house in the Hollywood Hills into a haven for Pop Art. He bought several billboard images and literally wallpapered the house with them. The home was filled with art by Warhol and Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein and David Salle. “He would mix real art with folk art and found art,” Mr. Colacello said. But after his marriage to Brooke Hayward dissolved in 1969, “she got most of the collection in the divorce and has been selling it off piecemeal,” Mr. Colacello said.

And that was just his first marriage. It proved tough keeping a collection together through four more. (He was estranged from his fifth wife, Victoria Hopper, when he died.) His estate has consigned what is left to Christie’s, which will be auctioning it off Nov. 10 and 11 in New York. Highlights include a portrait of Hopper that Andy Warhol painted in 1971, which is estimated to bring $800,000 to $1.2 million, and a 1987 Basquiat painting expected to sell for $5 million to $7 million. All the works are estimated to bring $10 million.

THE PARRISH’S NEW HOME

On Monday the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, N.Y., will finally break ground on its new building. It’s taken five years of planning, during which the original scheme was streamlined into a considerably more modest building. But when it is completed in 2012, the institution says, it will be the first art museum built on the East End of Long Island in more than a century.

Designed by the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron, the Parrish will move some two miles from its current location, on Jobs Lane in Southampton Village, to the 14-acre site of a former nursery in Water Mill, N.Y., next to the Montauk Highway. The Parrish bought the property in 2005 for $3.8 million.

What was once an $80 million project has been scaled back to a $25 million one, with nearly 70 percent of the money needed already raised. “We redesigned it when the world economy collapsed,” said Terrie Sultan, the Parrish’s director. “The new design is simpler and more flexible.”

Consisting of two connecting, parallel wings, the new museum will be, at 34,500 square feet, nearly twice the size of the existing building. “We are now housed in an 1898 building that was never intended to function as a museum,” Ms. Sultan said. “We have a collection of more than 2,600 objects that most people don’t know we have.”

The new building will include 7,500 square feet earmarked to show off its permanent collection, which includes examples of contemporary painters like Roy Lichtenstein, John Chamberlain, Chuck Close, Eric Fischl, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Lee Krasner as well as American painters like William Merritt Chase and Fairfield Porter.