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It was 1938, and Beckmann was nearing his mid-50s when he made “Self-Portrait With Horn.” The year before he and his wife, Quappi, fled Germany, where he had been one of the country’s most esteemed and successful artists until the Nazis rose to power and declared him a degenerate. In his painting he portrays himself as an artist in exile who fears that his art will no longer be “heard.”

The story behind Beckmann’s self-portrait is told in a brief, illuminating book by the art historian Jill Lloyd recently published by the Neue Galerie. The museum has celebrated the occasion by assembling a small exhibition of portraits by other German artists centered around “Self-Portrait With Horn” and two other Beckmanns from the 1920s, a self-portrait and a small political allegory.

According to the LA Times, at times it was enough just to stay alive, or to keep from breaking down when friends were dying and soldiers came knocking. Ugliness replaced beauty, and the finer things -- art, music, poetry -- seemed unbearable luxuries, like a rich dessert on an empty stomach.

But after nearly two decades of devastating conflict, of violence made more horrific by the achingly lovely natural surroundings, times are better now in Kashmir, the Himalayan region fought over by India and Pakistan. The two countries are engaged in a peace process, and the arts here are slowly coming back to life.

Over the last two or three years, Kashmiri painters, sculptors, filmmakers, poets and playwrights have again started plowing ground that had lain fallow for so long. Their cautious reemergence comes at a time when civil society as a whole is beginning to reclaim the space formerly monopolized by the Indian army and Pakistani-backed militants, whose confrontations have left more than 60,000 people dead since 1989.

Do you have a Verdult painting and want to get the full value out of the painting as well as do some good in this world? Then consider participating in Yazzy’s Fine Art Charitable Tax Donation Program.

Here is an opportunity to get the full market value out of your artwork and do some good in this world too!

The program is designed to help individuals and businesses get the full market value out of their assets while getting a tax break and helping a worthy Charity or non-profit organization. Yazzy's Charitable Tax Donation Program is designed to help art lovers and investors with Verdult paintings as well as those owning other art to get market value out of their investment.

Wealthy individuals have been donating art to museums and other organizations for years and have received acceptable and legitimate tax write-offs.

While known to be the exclusive domain of the wealthy, tax payers with modest incomes as well as businesses can participate in the Charitable Donation program and receive a significant tax write-off.

Each individual’s situation is obviously different, but done properly; a significant tax write-off is possible. In some cases the tax write-off can amount up to 50% of your annual gross income with amounts being carried forward until you have used up the full amount of the write-off.

In most cases the write-off amount is based upon the fair market value of your artwork as determined by a qualified and competent appraiser providing an appraisal for tax purposes. For example, you may have acquired a Verdult painting at auction in year 2005 for $3,500; and based upon a fair market appraisal by a qualified appraiser, the fair market value of the painting is now $27,000.00.

Depending upon your gross income, and regardless of the $3,500 price initially paid, you may be entitled to the full deduction of $27,000.00. As long as you donate the artwork in accordance with the applicable laws to a qualifying agency who will use the art for a reasonable purpose in accordance with its mission.

In addition to having acquired the painting and held it for over 12 months there are other rules that apply and must be met before the write-off can be taken.

Click to go get additional details...

Fashion thrives on the same expectation: Buy this hot dress or pair of Jimmy Choos, and see if you don’t feel curiously invincible at the next party. To an extent all superheroes, like some of the most flamboyant creatures in fashion, are playing a role inadvertently thrust on them by circumstance, their true identities and physical shortcomings concealed. What separates the nerdish Bruce Banner, who morphs into the Incredible Hulk, from the mousy Luisa Annan, who as the outlandish Marchesa Casati aspired to look like a wild animal and for one Belle Époque-era ball wore a necklace of live, writhing snakes?

The answer is nothing. They each make their claim on the world by becoming Another. The ideas that dominate fashion — identity, performance, gender, body shapes, sexuality, logos and the quest for state-of-the-art materials — pretty well describe the world of the superhero.

Yazzy’s deals virtually exclusively with Verdult art work. Conducting over 3,000 auctions and selling hundreds of limited edition lithographs and original paintings, the Corporation, with its cutting edge websites and blogs, is the premier destination for Verdult art.

Frequently major auction houses say we are the place to go for Verdult art work. We have conducted over 3,000 auctions of Verdult artwork and counting. As a public reporting company, we have audits by the Security and Exchange Commission registered Certified Public Accountants including Verdult art, and often commissioned the National Institute of Appraisers to conduct independent appraisals of Verdult art.

Focus

We are the only site on the Internet, and the only entity in existence that specifically tracks the market - primarily cash market - for the artwork of William Joseph Verdult.

We actively track and have verifiable records of cash sales for Verdult art.

To enhance shareholder value, we work with key on-line sites that track major artists' work to include William Joseph Verdult’s artwork in their data base. Artnet.com who recently signed an agreement with Sotheby's’ and other major on-line art locations and galleries are now beginning to maintain a list of works by William Joseph Verdult.

We work closely with owners, museums and major organizations to exhibit and promote artwork.

We have conducted thousands of auctions of Verdult art with hundreds of cash sales of both lithographs and original works.

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Left, Peter Coffin’s “Untitled (Greenhouse)” when it was installed in the Andrew Kreps Gallery. Right, the band Black Dice, which performed inside the artwork.

According to the New York Times as graphic designers take up farming in Columbia County, N.Y., and the “locavore” movement infiltrates Bushwick, Brooklyn, the art world is becoming a horticultural hotbed. The courtyard of P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in Queens is currently host to a working farm. And in the recent Whitney Biennial, the artist Phoebe Washburn exhibited a floral ecosystem irrigated by a sports drink.

Green art is also flourishing, improbably, in a Midtown office building. In an unlikely marriage, the UBS Art Gallery has joined with the Horticultural Society of New York for an exhibition called “Implant.” Organized by Jodie Vicenta Jacobson, a curator at the society, it includes roughly 100 works by 45 contemporary artists.

Ms. Jacobson was inspired by Michael Pollan’s 2001 book, “The Botany of Desire,” which suggests that plants are using us for evolutionary purposes just as much as we are using them. She extrapolates in the exhibition brochure: “Is it possible that when an artist uses plants, i.e. flower, tree, or natural landscape in a composition, the connection has been directly suggested by these presumably innocuous living things?”

It’s an eyebrow-raising idea, though more persuasively expressed in Mr. Pollan’s well-researched prose than in the artworks at UBS. To paraphrase Gertrude Stein, a rose is a rose is a rose — whether that flower is in a painting by Jane Freilicher or in a photograph of Stein’s grave by the conceptual artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres, which are both on display.