Portrait By Xu Beihong to Lead 20th Century Chinese Art

Portrait By Xu Beihong to Lead 20th Century Chinese Art artlover828

Xu Beihong (1895-1953), Portrait of a Lady, Oil on canvas, 136.5 x 98 cm. Painted in 1939. Estimate: HK$20,000,000-25,000,000/ US$2,564,100-3,205,100. Christie's Images Ltd. 2007.

HONG KONG.- One of the most iconic and significant portraits by Chinese master Xu Beihong, alongside signature pieces by some of the most celebrated Chinese artists, will be offered at Christie’s Hong Kong 20th Century Chinese Art sale on 27 May. Representing milestones in the development of Chinese art history, these superb pieces are destined to draw tremendous interest from international collectors. In this Spring auctions series, Christie's Hong Kong will introduce a real-time multi-media auction service Christie’s LIVE™, becoming the first international auction house in Asia to offer fine art through live online auctions. Christie’s LIVE™ enables collectors around the world to bid from their personal computers while enjoying the look, sound and feel of the sale. Xu Beihong (1895-1953) - The star lot of the sale, Portrait of a Lady, is an important large-scale work by Xu Beihong (1895-1953) executed during his Southeast Asia period (estimate: HK$20,000,000-25,000,000/ US$2,564,100-3,205,100). Ever since his first visit to Singapore in 1925, Xu had kept a close connection with the overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia. Soon after the Sino-Japanese War broke out, Xu moved to Singapore. During his stay, he produced extraordinary portraits for well-known members of the Chinese community there. The present work is one of two monumental portraits produced during this period, and arguably one of the most iconic portraits by the artist ever to appear on the market. Another work, Portrait of Governor Thomas, now resides in the permanent collection of the National Museum of Singapore. Xu donated proceeds from these works to help fund China’s war effort, adding historical significance to this piece. The graceful Cantonese woman in the painting, Jenny, was a close friend of the vice consul of Belgium in Singapore, who commissioned Xu to create this work. Dressed in the long cheongsam fashionable in the 30s, the sitter reclines in a rattan-backed rocker unique to Southeast Asia and is wreathed in soft light from the window. Painted in 1939, Portrait of a Lady best exemplifies the unrivalled style of Xu and the depth of his artistic achievement. While applying Western Realist technique to paint with rigorous attention to the details, Xu skillfully adopts the Eastern aesthetic approach in capturing the emotions and glamour of this elegant lady. This unmistakable combination of artistic elements captivates viewers with its lively yet lyrical appeal. More significantly, this allows Xu to break through the tradition and cliché of the European portrait. A new type of Eastern beauty fully distinct from both the Chinese and Western traditions at the time is brought to this exceptional canvas. Wu Guanzhong (born in 1919) - Wu Guanzhong reached his first peak in the creation of oil painting in the 60s and 70s. He successfully infused resplendent and colourist expression of Western oil with the freewheeling, vibrant appeal of traditional Chinese ink-wash. Painted in 1973, Scenery of Northern China (estimate on request) is the most outstanding and only piece by Wu available in private hands that depicts the vast landscape of Northern China. Positioning the view from a high vantage point, Wu captures the vividness and imposing presence of the nature of his mother country. Snowy peaks, pines, roaring waterfalls and the Great Wall are well featured and testify Wu's skill at structuring a complex composition from multiple perspectives. Nature and landscapes have clearly been a central theme in Wu's work. Also on offer is his Scenery of Guilin (estimate: HK$2,500,000-3,000,000/ US$320,500-384,600). Wu travelled extensively throughout China to search for subjects which best represent the cultural hallmarks of both the northern and southern regions. Under his brush, the diversity, poetic ambience and wordless beauty of the Chinese landscape come alive before the viewer’s eyes. Flowers in the Mountain (estimate: HK$1,800,000-2,200,000/ US$230,800-282,100) is one of Wu’s rare works that took on the theme of fruit and flower. In fact, flowers are a testament to the difficult circumstances which Wu went through at the time. Under Wu’s vibrant brushstrokes, the subject appears particularly delicate and charming. A Large Haul (estimate: HK$3,000,000-4,000,000/ US$384,600-512,800) depicts fish writhing and jumping as they are being caught. This vigorous scene perhaps suggests the artist's own eager determination to achieve further artistic breakthrough. At the same time, the rich fishing ground symbolizes bounteous prosperity and Wu’s confidence in his career. Zao Wou-Ki (Zhao Wuji, born in 1921) - Using abstraction to re-interpret the spirit of nature in traditional Chinese landscape painting, Zao Wou-ki forged a very distinctive style that meticulously combines elements of Eastern and Western art. Inspired by ancient Chinese bronzes and oracle-bone inscriptions, Zao began exploring abstraction in 1953 through a series of superb early works that have since become an important milestone for his career. Le cité se reveille (estimate: HK$6,000,000-8,000,000/ US$769,200-1,025,600) is a prime example imbued with suggestive and calligraphically-derived symbolic emblems. The exquisite and well-matched colour brings about an expansive space of imagination, in which motion and energy find harmony. The work is also reminiscent of the sense of the intimate dialogue between men and nature suggested by China's ancient literati painters. Zao’s later works including 14.12.59 (estimate: HK$5,000,000-8,000,000/ US$641,000-1,025,600), and 15.10.63 (estimate: HK$4,500,000-6,200,000/ US$ 576,900-794,900) are all lovingly crafted works featuring a red tonal palette. With a practiced and flowing brushwork purely his own, Zao expresses the depth of his feeling for China. 14.12.1959 and 15.10.63 are in fact a revelation of the "vividness and harmonious energy" so often alluded to in Chinese culture. Around this time, Zao also began to scrape paint from the canvas with the brush’s wooden handle to create fine lines in the midst of the broad strokes of the pigment. The result is an enchanting textural beauty that vibrantly illustrates his different moods and inner thoughts. His rough and imposing brushwork spreads across the surface in a burst of energy and strength. 14.12.59 15.10.63 Chu Teh-Chun (Zhu Dequn, born in 1920) - Chu Teh-Chun's abstract works are not merely an expression of symbolic shapes, but more a kind of lyricism reflecting the artist’s deep feeling and source of inspiration. From the free and evocative spaces of his paintings, one easily imagines mountain landscapes, waterfalls and gushing springs. In La saule est ombre (estimate: HK$1,500,000-2,000,000/ US$192,300-256,400), Subtilite Hivernale (estimate: HK$1,500,000-2,000,000/ US$192,300-256,400) and No. 116 (estimate: HK$800,000-1,200,000/ US$102,600-153,800), the strong and agile inky black lines moving across the canvas are reminiscent of classical calligraphy's cursive script, and the strong and flowing movement in Chinese gongfu sword work. These works construct a union of refinement and energy that can always be found in classical Chinese art. Sanyu (Chang Yu, 1901-1966) - Subjects familiar to Chinese intellectuals became the vehicles for Sanyu’s inner feelings and ideals. His works often seem as much poetry as art, speaking in pure and moving voices with all the clarity of verse. Typically, Sanyu’s subjects appear in clear outlines against spacious backgrounds, and through choice of subject and the structuring of space, Sanyu’s work enteres the expansive realm of the imaginative, freehand style of Chinese painting. On offer is his exceptional work Pink Rose in a White Vase (estimate: HK$2,000,000-4,000,000/ US$256,400-512,800).

Auction World Record for Banksy at Bonhams

Auction World Record for Banksy at Bonhams artlover908

Space Girl and Bird by artist Banksy.

LONDON, ENGLAND.- A spray paint on steel titled ‘Space Girl and Bird’ by the elusive artist Banksy, soared twenty times its estimate to create a new auction world record of £288,000 at Bonhams 25 April 2007. The previous auction record for Banksy’s work – ‘Bombing Middle England’ sold at Sothebys for £102,000 earlier this year. After intense bidding in the saleroom room and nine telephone bidders, the final bid was relayed on the phone to the auctioneer of the Vision 21 sale, Pippa Stockdale. The work sold to a US buyer. This work was part of a series of designs commissioned by pop band, Blur for the cover of their Think Tank album and featured on the cover of the Blur’s 5 track CD issued by the Observer Newspaper. A spray paint on steel work titled ‘Think Tank’ from the same series of Blurs Think Tank designs fetched £90,000 – 3 times its estimate. A bidding war broke out at the start of the sale for an oil and spray paint on canvas titled ‘Self Portrait’ by Banksy. The price rose to five times its estimate to fetch £198,000 after six telephone bidders battled it out. This broke the auction record but ‘Space Girl and Bird’ far exceeded this auction record to break Bonhams’ own record. The unframed work (122 x 122 cms), was purchased at Severnshed Exhibition in Bristol in 2000. A spray paint on sheet metal titled ‘Untitled, TV Girl’ fetched £38,400 - 3 times its estimate. The work was commissioned for the band’s appearance on the cover of the launch issue of Observer Music Monthly magazine, whilst they were headlining at the Leeds Festival. The Press shoot was threatened two days before when Banksy was arrested in Berlin for spraying a building, and on his eventual arrival, further complicated, as the festivals rural setting provided no walls for the artist to paint on. A neighbouring farmer was happy to grant permission for the artist to work on his property and the present lot was one of three works produced. It was painted on the door of the duck shed, which was recently renovated with the owners consigning it for sale. Bonhams , Gareth Williams, commented on the Vision 21 sale, “We are delighted with today’s result. The art market for contemporary cutting edge art is booming and Banksy’s work has become part of this culture.” Vision 21 is the innovative sale that delivers great design, diverse style and inspiration dating from 1945 to the present day. Conceived 4 years ago, Vision 21 encompasses Post War Paintings, Prints, Photographs, Sculpture and Modern Design. Bonhams in Knightsbridge has a long-held reputation for innovative ideas and, over the years, has introduced many new areas of collecting – such as Contemporary Ceramics and Rock and Pop Memorabilia, which have challenged traditional auction categories.

Three Men Convicted of Stealing Edvard Munch Works

Three Men Convicted of Stealing Edvard Munch Works artlover108

left: Edvard Munch, Madonna. right: Edvard Munch, The Scream.

OSLO, NORWAY.- Three men were convicted in Oslo of stealing two works by Edvard Munch, The Scream and Madonna, by an appeals court. The works were stolen from the Munch Museum in 2004 and were damaged when the police recovered them. The thieves were sentenced to different prison terms, ranging from five and a half years to nine and a half years. They were also sentenced to pay $263,000 in damages. The longest sentence was for the driver, Petter Tharaldsen. The one who planned the theft, Bjoern Hoen, was sentenced to nine years. Stian Skjold, who entered the museum wearing a mask, was sentenced to five-and-a-half years after being acquitted of the crime last year. They all pleaded not guilty. The fourth thief died of a heroin overdose last year, according to police.

Edward Quinn at Michael Hoppen Gallery

Edward Quinn at Michael Hoppen Gallery artlover908

Rita Hayworth and daughters. Golfe Juan 1951 © www.edwardquinn.com.

LONDON.- We are delighted to announce the first UK exhibition of vintage prints by Edward Quinn. Best known for his photographs of celebrities on the French Riviera in the 1950s, to label Quinn a celebrity photographer would be to reduce both him and his work. The exhibition will also include his later portraits of artists, writers and politicians along with documentary work on the gypsies in the Camargue and evocative portraits of his native Dublin. The similarity between all of Quinn's work is that his subjects were never consciously posing -these are all true, unguarded portraits. A musician and RAF radio navigator by trade, Quinn found himself in Monte Carlo soon after World War II and was astute enough to realize he could make a living photographing the stars relaxing off-screen. At this time the Riviera was a stage for the beautiful, rich and famous and a star's off-screen image could be pivotal in their career. Quinn developed relationships with many film stars amongst which Grace Kelly, Brigitte Bardot, Marlon Brando and Sophia Loren, which enabled him to capture them spontaneously and unguarded in his portraits. These photographs are a poignant memento of the golden age of the Cote d'Azur before it was irreversibly changed by publicists, paparazzi and tourism. One of the first celebrities Quinn met was Picasso, at the opening of an exhibition in 1951 and their friendship lasted until the artist's death in 1973. Quinn's lack of formal training and talent for taking improvised shots proved invaluable when photographing Picasso -he wanted to capture his true character rather than staged shots of the artist. Picasso admired Quinn's improvisation and said of him "Toi, tu sais faire un portrait" (You know how to make a portrait). Quinn's portraits of his contemporary artists, politicians, writers, musicians and racing drivers have rarely been seen before but are amongst his best work. Photographs of Somerset Maugham obscured by shadows at his desk, Winston Churchill appearing from behind a curtain, Dizzy Gillespie horsing around and Picasso paddling in the sea all offer us a fresh glimpse of these key figures, an alternate view from familiar staid portraits of the time. Quinn also applied his eye to capturing his native Ireland. Born in Dublin his portraits of the city and her people are atmospheric and evocative portraits of the 1960s. "I have lived through an exciting, unique period on the Riviera. As Shakespeare wrote 'All the World's a stage, And all the men and women merely players...' The Cote d'Azur during the "Golden Fifties" was one of the largest and most beautiful stages in the world. Its actors were often magnificent and glamorous. And though the curtain has gone down, the memories remain. "

Arman: Accumulation of Friends Opens in New York

Arman: Accumulation of Friends Opens in New York artlover408

NEW YORK.-The French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF) is launching its new FIAF Gallery with the exhibition, Arman: Accumulation of Friends, a portfolio of 82 black & white and color photographic portraits from the 1960s and 70s displayed for the first time in the United States. When famed French-born American artist Arman (1928-2005) first came to New York in 1960, the art world was taking a new turn with Pop Art, Minimalism, and Conceptual Art. Arman soon became acquainted with the surrounding artists and befriended a great many of them. This exhibition features portraits of these friends, including most of the leading American figures of the time, such as Bill Copley, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Marcel Duchamp, Robert Indiana, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, Bernar Venet, and Andy Warhol. Known world-wide for his “Accumulations” and sculptures, Arman’s personal hobby was photography. He was often seen carrying a camera and taking pictures of artists at openings and parties. The New York artists’ community was then small and very convivial. Arman recognized that he was living in what he called “a period of exception” and considered this portfolio to be “a reunion of portraits as souvenirs or snapshots with a documentary connotation.” Viewed together, these images speak to that camaraderie and form a historic portrait of the vibrant art scene that was then New York. The photographs were rescued from obscurity and erosion, printed, and put into a portfolio in 2000. Arman’s notorious “Le Plein” installation at Iris Clert Gallery in Paris and New York debut at the Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery began his international career. He subsequently exhibited his works all over the world in museums and galleries. In February 2007 Arman’s most recent public sculpture, Stop, Look and Listen, 2004-2006, was officially unveiled at the opening of the Kaohsiuing train station in Taipei, China. Arman’s sculptural work is currently featured in the major “Nouveau Réalisme” retrospective exhibition at the Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais in Paris, alongside Yves Klein, Daniel Spoerri, and Jean Tinguely. The exhibition was curated by Gabrielle Bryers. It is made possible by the generous loan from the Arman P. Arman Trust.

Lucian Freud To Open at Irish Museum of Modern Art

Lucian Freud To Open at Irish Museum of Modern Art artlover808

Lucian Freud, Sleeping Head, 1979-80, oil on canvas, 40.32 x 50.48 cm, Private Collection, Photo: Courtesy Acquavella Contemporary Art, Inc.

DUBLIN, IRELAND.- Lucian Freud is arguably the most important and distinguished figurative painter working today. This exhibition comprises some 50 paintings, 20 works on paper and etchings, from the last six decades, several being completed just months prior to the exhibition and others never shown before in a public venue. The exhibition also includes a selection of photographs of the artist. Best known for his portraits and nudes, Freud’s subjects include his family, friends, lovers and fellow artists. His early paintings and works on paper are often associated with a meticulous control of the brushstrokes and line, depicting people, plants and still-life, including several made while living in Ireland . From the late 1950s he began to paint people using more various flesh tones and thicker pigment. A number of ‘fragments’ in the exhibition give an indication of the artist’s willingness to leave a picture partly bare. The works in the exhibition are organised thematically and focus on several of the artist’s key areas of interest, for example, paintings of the same person at different ages, self-portraits, animals and double portraits. The formidably detailed study of his garden in Notting Hill Gate, The Painter’s Garden, 2005 – 2006, is as dramatic as any of the nudes. Lucian Freud, grandson of the renowned psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud, was born in 1922 in Berlin , but moved with his family to the UK at the age of 11. He studied at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London and the Cedric Morris’s East Anglican School of Painting and Drawing in Dedham . His first solo exhibition, at the Lefevre Gallery in 1944, featured the now celebrated painting The Painter’s Room, 1944. Since then Freud has become one of the best-known and most highly-regarded British artists of recent times. A major retrospective of his work was held in Tate Britain in 2002. He lives and works in London . The exhibition is curated by Catherine Lampert, specialist on the work of Freud, a model for the artist’s friend Frank Auerbach and former Director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery . The exhibition will travel to the Louisiana Museum, Denmark, from 15 September - 28 January 2008 and to the Gemeente Museum , The Hague , from 18 February - 8 June 2008. The exhibition is presented in association with THE IRISH TIMES. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue with texts by Catherine Lampert, art critic and writer, Martin Gayford, and Freud’s son, Frank Paul.

LONDON LETTER

LONDON LETTER

artlover308

Installation view of "Very Abstract and Hyper Figurative" at Thomas Dane

Installation view of "Very Abstract and Hyper Figurative" at Thomas Dane

George Condo Metamorphosis 2006 Simon Lee

George Condo Female Rock Thrower 2007 Simon Lee

George Condo The Smiling Sea Captain 2006 Simon Lee

Ian Monroe Parrallel 2007 Haunch of Venison

Ian Monroe Instant City 2007 Haunch of Venison

Ian Monroe 5464 KrTG 2007 Haunch of Venison

Avish Khebrehzadeh Still from Backyard 2005 Parasol Unit

Christine Rebet Still from Bullet Sisters 2005 Parasol Unit

Naoyuki Tsuji Still from Children of the Shadows 2006 Parasol Unit

Still from The Lotus Eaters, 2001-2007, film transferred to DVD Courtesy Timothy Taylor Gallery Copyright the artist

Still from The Lotus Eaters, 2001-2007, film transferred to DVD Courtesy Timothy Taylor Gallery Copyright the artist

Marcel Dzama Untitled 2006 Timothy Taylor Gallery

Are categories helpful? This rather unpromising question seemed to be the starting point for a nevertheless intriguing exhibition at London’s Thomas Dane gallery, "Very Abstract and Hyper Figurative," Mar. 13-Apr. 14, 2007. The show featured contemporary paintings installed in two large, glass vitrines, one containing exclusively "abstract" works and the other filled with "figurative" art. Both were set up to be labeled and peered at like a bunch of dusty fossils in a natural history museum.

Since they’re contemporary paintings, of course, these categories are somewhat provisional. Sarah Morris, who had a painting in the "abstract" vitrine, isn’t really an abstract painter. Her painting Rockhopper (Origami) depicts a penguin made of flattened folded paper -- a figure to be sure, albeit in a De Stijl-inspired idiom. In the postmodernist manner of artists like Peter Halley, Morris has given the language of modernist abstraction a bit of new life by taking it back over the threshold of representation.

It was curator Jens Hoffman, former director of exhibitions at the ICA, who organized and displayed these pictures as though they were relics from a bygone era. And seeing blue-chip market darlings like Marlene Dumas, Peter Doig and John Currin hung as cultural flotsam did give a certain satisfaction. The paintings could be seen from the back, provenance labels and all, as if to show the behind-the-scenes structure that underlies the convergence in such big-ticket artworks of esthetic importance and cold monetary value.

True, the best works, like Mark Grotjahn’s shimmering insect-wing abstraction and a creamy, palette-knifed Wilhelm Sasnal, were obscured by the highly reflective glass and a curatorial conceit that literally came between the viewer and the art. But what the display was pointing out is the unreliability of categories -- that is to say, the institutional frame -- and it’s these categories that the viewer was actually inspecting in this installation.

As it happens, this also makes the exhibition a fine introduction to two other shows in London galleries, one by an apparently "figurative" artist and another by an apparently "abstract" artist, both of whom defy expectations.

Last year George Condo threw the UK tabloids some red meat when he painted a bug-eyed and bulgy-cheeked Queen Elizabeth, putting a particular irreverent chipmunk spin on that genre of ossified power, royal portraiture. In his latest show at Simon Lee, Feb. 7-Apr. 21, 2007, Condo infiltrates another staple of the Renaissance tradition -- the female nude. Condo’s no sneering iconoclast, though. His paintings combine a love of Renaissance painting with a funhouse-mirror version of Analytical Cubism.

Condo sees Western portrait painting, a genre designed to nail down the fleeting lives of monarchs into something approaching immortality, through the fog of howling kitsch. In the series of nudes at Simon Lee, Condo’s women bend their arms behind their heads in imitation of ideal beauty -- but their faces are car-crashes of cats’ grins and clowns’ eyes.

With their raised arms, Condo’s pin-ups make an obvious reference to the gruesome line-up in Pablo Picasso’s 100-year-old Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Condo’s sketch, Female Rock Thrower, even contains an echo of Picasso’s abandoned male presence -- the medical student found in his sketches for Les Demoiselles, but elided from the final painting -- in the person of an oblivious, walkman-wearing teenager sitting on a park bench reading, ignorant of the leering female monster poised behind him with an immense boulder.

Like Picasso, Condo is obsessed with metamorphosis, both in terms of physique and genre, but what he loves more than anything is painting. The Smiling Sea Captain is a three-quarter-length portrait of a man whose puncturing with a spear recalls Renaissance depictions of St. Sebastian. But rather than pouting beatifically, he’s grinning wildly; not gamely suffering death but madly, stupidly alive.

On the other hand, New York-born Ian Monroe’s works at Haunch of Venison, Mar. 2-Mar. 31, 2007, were as far away from Condo’s as something still called a "painting" could be -- flat and geometric where Condo is loose-limbed and rich -- but they have in common an interrogation, even a resurrection, of a kind of carnival modernism. Where Condo channels Picasso via Philip Guston, George Herriman and Hanna-Barbera, Monroe views El Lissitzky and Kazmir Malevich through Halley, Archigram and The Sims.

The exhibition’s title, "Planit," refers to a long-lost plaster sculpture by Malevich -- entirely absent and undocumented, yet suggestive of an all-encompassing project -- which is as perfect a metaphor of the Russian artist’s obsolete-seeming utopian dream as you could want. In the face of this failed modernist promise, Monroe has created vast-seeming virtual worlds on canvas, like hypothetical architectural drawings, which react to Malevich’s ideal future by imagining apparently endless geometric vistas. Parallel, a two-panel freestanding work in black and grey vinyl on aluminum with eye-popping single-point perspective, encapsulates the push-and-pull of utopian ideology. It looks good, but you’d ruin it if you stepped in.

Monroe’s works speak to an obsolete idea of the space-age, reminiscent of the labyrinths of computer games. His deft handling of his materials makes the works engaging, and the neatness of the cut Formica and veneer gives them the geekish charm. There’s something endearing about a meticulously rulered line, with its tiny but significant nicks and flaws.

Such glitches and speckles abound in "Momentary Momentum" at the non-profit Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art in East London, Mar. 3-May 12, 2007, a survey of recent animated drawings created by artists, quite the opposite of the slick CGI films from Pixar and the like. These art animations seem filled with all kinds of social melancholy.

For example, Avish Khebrehzadeh’s Backyard is a projected digital animation with the somewhat naive, graphic look of a children’s book illustration. Slow metamorphoses taking us between a girl in a patterned dress and a lamb curled up in her lap are reminiscent of the deadpan logic of a children’s book. Khebrehzadeh often refers in her work to her childhood in Tehran, and the gauzy scrim on which the animation is projected, which part-conceals, part-reveals a wall-drawing depicting fragments of architecture, evokes the process of memory -- names and places lose focus, points of sensory impact resonate. Shown in an endless loop, the animation has the beguiling repetition of a dwelled-upon incident from a distant past, just beyond the reach of words.

Bullet Sisters by Christine Rebet makes good use of the wobbles and disruptions of hand-drawn animation to present a reconstruction of childhood in a style reminiscent of DIY adolescent pursuits. Viewers of the work sit in a theatre-cum-garden shed, which for the British carry nostalgic memories as a children’s retreat -- an eternal crucible of Dungeons & Dragons marathons, go-kart construction and amateur vivisection. In Rebet’s animation, the tiny movements of the characters in not-quite-consistently painted inks flickering from frame to frame project the hand-drawn obsessiveness of the young imagination. The image of a boy’s cup-and-ball magic trick, stretched over numerous frames, acquires an unexpected gravitas, an effect that is in part due to the film’s loping, indie-rock soundtrack, which gives it a melancholy that holds adolescence at arm’s length.

Finally, Naoyuki Tsuji’s whimsical, sometimes disturbing Children of the Shadows is a fantastical charcoal animation that -- like William Kentridge’s Tide Table (which also makes an appearance in this show) -- makes great use of the build-up and erasure of mark-making. After a dramatic outburst from a monstrous gouge-eyed father figure depicted sitting at the dinner table, cups and dishes tumble to the floor. Several frames later, their ghostly paths remain -- a metaphor for the persistence of trauma in the young mind?

Mining this same vibe of sinister whimsy was Marcel Dzama’s new half-hour film, called The Lotus Eaters, which was the centerpiece of his recent exhibition at Timothy Taylor gallery, Mar. 8-Apr. 13, 2007. Best known for his occasionally cute, occasionally powerful drawings of fantastical creatures and stiffly posing humans, Dzama’s film is, relatively speaking, something of a leap forward, in which his cast of characters is rooted in a poignant, if obtuse, narrative context.

A makeshift cinema in the back of the gallery sets the oddball scene immediately. Old-fashioned cinema seats, one of which is occupied by a cross-legged bear-man effigy in a thrift-store suit, sit in front of a player-piano which another bear-man is pretending to play, while wildly grinning at visitors. The film itself -- an apparent homage to silent movies with its leaps and flickering movements -- is shot on a combination of old and new film stock and framed as though seen through a fuzzily discernible keyhole.

An artist (played by Dzama’s own father) sits on a high stool in a cave-like studio, moodily enacting clichés of the tormented artist as he sketches familiar Dzama-like animal-men. Leaping occasionally into speckly pen-and-ink animation, the sketches come alive, most powerfully the figure of a woman, who transforms herself from a sketch into a giggling, filmed nude presence, into whose most intimate orifice a tiny version of the "artist" gleefully clambers.

The "artist" then plunges into his own fantasy world, appearing in a mask in a filmed dinner party peopled by his characters, played by actors in outlandish masks and costume (most of which are on display in the gallery). Slowly the rest of the dinner party discovers the imposter in their midst, and, in the best tradition of fairy tales, turn on their creator -- apparently devouring him.

The film’s enigmas are best unraveled through the props and other items displayed in the gallery outside. There, one finds that a masked mannequin skimming along the ceiling is a quotation of John Heartfield’s Prussian Archangel from 1920. A Polaroid of the bear-man posing on an anonymous roof is subtitled "the bear dances on the roof, even," a play on Marcel Duchamp’s famous Large Glass. And the collages that line the walls are straight out of Hannah Höch’s ‘20s photomontages. There’s even a doctored Mona Lisa (a la Duchamp’s LHOOQ) -- this time wearing a Zorro mask.

As a whole, then, this is an exhibition about a man -- the artist? -- whose subconscious has been ransacked by the ghouls of art past. The revolutionary art of the Dada and Surrealist collagists and filmmakers has been recast as creepily comic fairy-tale. And there is something nightmarish and fantastical about all those mad masks in any modern museum -- something that draws us back to our first experiences with art and which sits in our heads like a dream, sometimes remembered.

Changing Face of Childhood. British Children's Portraits

Changing Face of Childhood. British Children's Portraits artlover608

Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun (1755-1842), Maria Christina of Bourbon-Naples, 1790, Oil on canvas, 121,5 x 92,5 cm, Museo e Gallerie Nazionali di Capodimonte, Naples. Courtesy: Museo e Gallerie Nazionali di Capodimonte, Naples.

FRANKFURT, GERMANY.- In the course of history, the view of childhood has again and again been subject to fundamental changes. Today, it has become perfectly natural to regard children as individuals with subjective needs, wishes, and interests who have ideas of their own concerning their life in society. Yet, the issue of children’s position in the family and the family’s position in society has been of essential importance long before 2007 of course. The origins of this development date back to the early eighteenth century. What provided the occasion for this exhibition on the evolution of children’s portraits in eighteenth-century England and its spread on the European continent was the recent purchase of the painting “The Children of Lord Cavendish” by Sir Thomas Lawrence by the Städel. The pictures shown reflect the new attitude towards childhood: inspired by John Locke’s and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s writings, this stage of life began to be understood as a significant period of human development. The portraits feature children as autonomous personalities whose sprightly naturalness also fascinates today’s public. The years covered span from Sir Anthony van Dyck by way of Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds, and Henry Raeburn to Friedrich von Amerling and Franz Xaver Winterhalter. The exhibition comprises loans from the Musée du Louvre, Paris, the National Gallery of Art, Washington D. C., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Royal Collection – Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, and other institutions. The exhibition is sponsored by the American Express Foundation. Additional support comes from the Stanley Thomas Johnson Foundation. The English philosopher and Enlightenment thinker John Locke’s landmark treatise “Some Thoughts Concerning Education” was published in London in 1693 (German edition: Leipzig, 1708). Addressing the English gentry, but also the English middle classes, it called for a new concept of how to educate children: instead of raising them to become affected beings that imitate the behavior of grown-ups, their education should rather be aimed at supporting their natural talents. The objective was to get children used to a simple way of life and to instill them with a morally upright attitude so that they would be able to be of great use to society. The new understanding of their specific world informed new values since children were now not only regarded as descendants guaranteeing dynastic continuity but as persons with independent characters on whom the family’s care and pride focused. The view of childhood as a decisive phase of life in which children develop to become autonomous personalities also exercised a formative influence on portrait painting. The Städel’s exhibition opens with Anthony van Dyck’s (1599–1641) portraits of “Maddalena Cattaneo” and “The Balbi Children,” which the artist painted during his stay in Italy in the 1620s. Despite the representative form of the pictures and the attributes documenting the children’s superior social status, van Dyck introduced his subjects as endearing childlike creatures. His understanding of portraiture was taken up by his successors and was still valid in the 18th century. Yet, when Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788) and Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792) fell back on these models, they set new standards. The subjects of their portraits, like Reynold’s “Miss Crewe,” radiate a carefree presence thanks to the meticulous depiction of their childlike behavior, which is emphasized by the artist’s fresh and light brushwork. Landscapes constitute a crucial element of composition: Baroque staffages with their columns and balustrades hinting at sovereignty and land ownership are increasingly replaced with representations of pristine nature. Comparing Thomas Gainsborough’s portraits of “Master John Truman-Villebois and His Brother Henry” and “The Marsham Children,” which he painted in 1783 and 1787 respectively, exemplifies this shift. Hardly formed by man, the landscape corresponds with the children’s unrestrained natural behavior and provides an ideal environment for their play, which was regarded as an expression of their independent appropriation of the world. What came to bear here was the French-Swiss author, philosopher, and theorist of education Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s influence whose treatise “Emile: or, On Education” (1762) was also read widely in England. Rousseau assumed that all human beings are born with a good disposition. In order to escape the harmful influence of the notions and conventions advocated by society that deform their character, children should be brought up far from civilization in the countryside, in nature. Their guardian should always serve as a model and take care that children learn to rely on their reason when judging people, things, and society. In its focused selection of 27 works, the exhibition presents only pictures of children unaccompanied by grown-ups in the open. “The Children of Lord Cavendish” by Thomas Lawrence from 1790 in its center provides a characteristic example for this kind of portrait illustrating the educational ideals of that time. The wild, rough terrain calls for the elder brothers to act responsibly: considerately, they hold their little sister by the hands. Their cheerful looks and rosy cheeks underscore that the three are growing up healthily and that their outlook upon the world is full of self-confidence. William Beechey’s (1753–1839) “Portrait of Sir Francis Ford’s Children Giving a Coin to a Beggar Boy” conveys charity as a philanthropic ideal of education. The approach of English children’s portrait painters soon spread all over Europe. Artists such as Angelika Kauffmann (1741–1807), who visited England to see the admired models in the original, ensured the wide dissemination of this “modern” type of portrait. Her portrait of Henrietta Laura Pulteney is included in the exhibition. The novel understanding of children met with great interest on the part of the enlightened contemporaries on the continent: for the Weimar court, a center of enlightenment in Germany, Johann Friedrich August Tischbein (1750–1812) portrayed Count Karl August’s children in a park landscape. The scenery reminds us of the gardens on the Ilm river which the prince planned together with Goethe. The unusual portrait of “A Running Boy” by the Danish painter Jens Juel (1745–1802) also breathes the new principles of education, evidencing that sporting activities began to be considered a crucial part of education in those years. The French Revolution of 1789, Napoleon’s assumption of power, and the wars that were caused by his expansionist ambitions and spread over almost all of Europe also molded the artists’ attitude. Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun’s (1755–1842) close relationship with Marie-Antoinette became her undoing: because of her contacts with the royal court, she could not stay in France after the outbreak of the revolution. Painted in Naples, her “Portrait of Maria Christina of Bourbon,” Marie Antoinette’s niece, documents how the acclaimed artist tried to find her feet again in her exile. The child’s informal clothes, the sensual depiction of the fabrics, and the motif of picking roses show Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun employing patterns of representation she had already used for her portraits of the Queen of France. For the European princes’ alliance against the “usurper,” Napoleon’s defeat in the Battle of Waterloo marked a great triumph. King Georg IV commissioned Thomas Lawrence (1769–1830) to paint portraits of the military and political leaders who had made this victory possible, which were then show

White Space Gallery Presents Being Beauteous

White Space Gallery Presents Being Beauteous artlover408

Russian Beauty. Circa 1989. Courtesy: Archive of Modern Conflict.

LONDON, ENGLAND.- White Space Gallery presents Being Beauteous, on view through June 2, 2007. The exhibition features Elliott Erwitt, David Goldblatt, Tony Ray Jones, Erik Kessels, Jacqueline Hassink, Martin Parr, Stephen Gill, Juergen Teller, and rare archive photos from Soviet-Russia. Being Beauteous brings together rarely seen vernacular archive photographs from Soviet Russia with images by internationally renowned photographers. The curatorial concept sets out the key theme of feminine beauty along two axes: Public/Private, and Western/Eastern. The exhibition is divided into two parts, the first of which is Public Beauties: Vignettes from the world of beauty pageants, glamour modeling, and advertising - works that document public visions of westernized feminine beauty from the position of critical remove. The second part is Private Beauties: Images that record private, Eastern, sites of feminine beauty - shot through with the trace of western mass-culture. Central to Public Beauties is competition; being seen and judged 'of a standard'. David Goldblatt's Saturday Morning at the Hypermarket: Semi-final of the Miss Lovely Legs Competition is from his Boskburg series, set in a small white community in apartheid-era South Africa. As much about the black spectators - present only by special permission - as the white contestants, the photograph alludes to a broader spectrum of aesthetic judgments than the contest formally enshrines; to do with race, sex and society. Child beauty pageants feature in photographs by Parr and Erwitt. Martin Parr's Miss Rosebud Competition, from the New Brighton series, depicts young girls in tutus, clutching star-topped wands, while Elliot Erwitt's grave-looking American tots and their determined mothers are shown milling around a hotel lobby. Juergen Teller's portraits of Miss Guatemala and Miss Poland, strive to capture the people behind the competitors, beneath the make-up and the hairstyles. No less to do with competition and judgment is Car Girls, by the New York-based Dutch photographer Jacqueline Hassink, which have as their subject a vision of feminine beauty that is pitched, or reduced, to the level of ornament. The photographs depict the smooth curves of the latest model (car), with women draped across their bonnets. Taken at international automobile shows, Hassink records the surface sheen two mass-cultural consumer products. Comic relief is supplied by Parr's picture of an also-ran marrow at a Yorkshire agricultural show. Private Beauties includes Stephen Gill's conceptual series Russian Women Smokers. In these pictures, unseen - ostensibly Russian - beauties are referenced by a spectrum of red and pink lipstick traces on discarded cigarette butts from the streets of St Petersburg. Lest we forget, as Germaine Greer notes, 'after the implosion of the USSR the first western shops to open in the old Soviet cities were cosmetic franchises; before a Russian woman could buy an orange or a banana she could buy a lipstick by Dior or Revlon'. Finally, the show features vernacular images of Russian Beauties by an unknown photographer, from a private archive. These provide a rare glimpse into the hidden world of a few women at the end of the Soviet era - training at home for the novel phenomenon of beauty contests. These rare documentary artifacts recall the genre of fizkultura in Socialist Realist painting as much they do American glamour modeling. In Being Beauteous we witness the collision of self-image, private desire, and historical forces, presented with humor and pathos.

Poiret: King of Fashion at Costume Institute

Poiret: King of Fashion at Costume Institute artlover628

Georges Lepape (French, 1887-1971), Les choses de Paul Poiret / vues par Georges Lepape, 1911, Pochoir print, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Irene Lewisohn Costume Reference Library, Special Collections.

NEW YORK.- Metropolitan Museum's Costume Institute will present "Poiret: King of Fashion," on view May 9 – August 5, 2007. Paul Poiret – who at the height of his career in pre-World War I France was the undisputed "King of Fashion" and whose sweeping vision led to a new silhouette that liberated women from the corset and introduced the shocking colors and exotic references of the Ballets Russes to the haute couture – will be celebrated with a landmark exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from May 9 through August 5, 2007. He has not been the focus of a major museum exhibition in more than 30 years. "The historic significance and influence of Poiret's work is breathtaking, and felt in fashion to the present day," said Harold Koda, Curator in Charge of the Metropolitan Museum's Costume Institute. "Poiret pioneered a seductive modernity based on woman's self-confident femininity, and envisioned a 'total lifestyle' that extended from how she dressed and what fragrance she wore to how she decorated her home – an approach reflected in the strategies of many of today's fashion houses." Presented in a series of tableaux, the garments on view will highlight the multiple facets of Poiret's astonishing inventiveness – including the beauty of his draped, unstructured fabrics and his fascination with the Ballets Russes, the Wiener Werkstätte, Orientalism and the 1001 Nights – and will be complemented by paintings, illustrations, furniture and examples of the decorative arts that explicate his expansive artistic vision. At the core of the exhibition will be a grouping of the stunning creations the Metropolitan acquired in the much-heralded 2005 auction of clothing from Poiret's estate. The exhibition is made possible by Balenciaga. Additional support is provided by Condé Nast. To celebrate the opening of the exhibition, the Museum's Costume Institute Benefit Gala will take place on Monday, May 7, 2007. François-Henri Pinault will serve as Honorary Chair of the Gala. Co-Chairs will be actress Cate Blanchett, Nicolas Ghesquière, Creative Director of Balenciaga, and Anna Wintour, editor-in-chief of Vogue. More than any other designer of the 20th century, Paul Poiret – who is credited both with liberating women by making the corset démodé and with restricting their gait with narrow-hemmed hobble skirts – elevated fashion to the status of art. Like the artists with whom he collaborated, Poiret's work was fueled by the dominant discourses of the day, including Classicism, Orientalism, Symbolism, and Primitivism. Known as the "King of Fashion," (the title of his 1931 autobiography) he introduced the vivid colors of the Fauvists and the exotic references of the Ballets Russes to the haute couture. Poiret's protean genius extended beyond fashion to the realms of art, theatre, architecture, and interior design. As well as discussing his design legacy, the exhibition will focus on Poiret's collaborations with such artists as Paul Iribe, Georges Barbier, and Georges Lepape. Poiret's designs will be presented in a series of vignettes evocative of the drawings of these artists for such fashion periodicals as Art, Goût et Beauté and La Gazette du Bon Ton. The exhibition will include several garments from the May 2005 Paris auction of the private collection of Poiret's descendants, many of which had never been photographed or put on public display. The Metropolitan Museum acquired several of these garments – which were made for Poiret's wife Denise, who was his muse and wore his designs without concession to prevailing tastes – at the auction. While apprenticing in his teens to an umbrella maker, Paul Poiret entered the world of fashion when he sold some of his sketches to Madeleine Cheruit at her Paris fashion house. After stints with designers Doucet and Worth, he opened his own house in 1903 and was boosted by the patronage of Réjane, a famous actress of the period, among others. In his groundbreaking designs, he led the way to the chemise dress with his revival of Directoire silhouettes and his referencing of the simple cuts of ethnic costume. In 1911 he became the first fashion designer to create and market his own perfume, which he named after Rosine, his oldest daughter. Also in 1911, he created a series of workshops for the production of fabrics, furniture, and a range of decorative objects as an extension of his overall aesthetic. He and his wife were renowned for their glamorous excess and sumptuous entertaining, marked by fêtes such as the now-legendary "Thousand and Second Night" party in June 1911 – at which guests were required to wear appropriate costume. Poiret spent the last decade of his life in debt, having been superseded by other designers including Coco Chanel and Jean Patou. As the famous, and perhaps apocryphal, story is told, of the 1920s chance encounter between the "King of Fashion" and young Coco Chanel: Poiret inquired of the black-clad Chanel, "For whom, madame, do you mourn?" to which Chanel replied, "For you, monsieur." "Poiret: King of Fashion" is organized by Harold Koda, Curator in Charge, and Andrew Bolton, Curator, both of the Metropolitan Museum's Costume Institute. A book, Poiret, published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and distributed by Yale University Press, will accompany the exhibition, which will also be featured on the Museum's Web site (www.metmuseum.org). The design for the 2007 Costume Institute gala benefit will be created by Jean-Hugues de Chatillon and Raul Avila.

Les leaders du marché de l´art contemporain aux enchères belges

Les leaders du marché de l´art contemporain aux enchères belges

artlover608

En avril, à Bruxelles accueille l´un des grands rendez-vous en matière d´art contemporain : Artbrussels. Pour sa 25e édition, cette foire d´art contemporain belge regroupe 123 galeries, près de 2000 œuvres et reçoit 30 000 visiteurs. Afin de présenter une vision des plus actuelles et novatrices, certaines galeries regroupées dans la zone First Call ont été sélectionnées par un comité de collectionneurs afin de donner davantage de visibilité à un certain nombre de galeries prometteuses ; 38 autres galleries sont regroupées dans Young Talent afin de mettre en exergue le caractère jeune et novateur d´Artbrussels.

Aux enchères belges, le marché de l´art contemporain est bien moins dynamique. Il ne représente que 1,2% du produits de ventes des enchères belges sur 10 ans. Les noms qui ressortent : Jan Fabre, Robert Combas, Philippe Vandenberg ou encre Christian Silvain.

Avec 114 000 euros de produit de ventes sur 10 ans, Jan Fabre est sans contexte l´artiste phare du marché contemporain belges. Seules 11 sculptures ont été dispersées en ventes publiques, la dernière, "Flemish Warrior (guerrier flamand)" est constituée d´une armure métallique d´où émerge une forme animale recouverte d´une multitude de scarabées. Dispersée par la maison de ventes belge De Vuyst, elle changeait de main en 2005 pour 17 000 € établissant la plus haute adjudication de l´artiste. Quatre ans plus tôt, la même maison de ventes soumettait une œuvre similaire aux enchères : intitulée "Le chapelet du guerrier" et constituée d´une armure et des mêmes insectes, l´œuvre décrochait à l´époque 500 000 francs belges, soit près de 12 400 €. Ces deux guerriers demeurent, jusqu´à présent, les deux sculptures les plus imposantes de Fabre soumises aux enchères.

Face à la pénurie de sculptures en 2006, l´amateur pouvait se consoler avec des œuvres en deux dimensions comme les deux petits "Projekt voor nachtelijk grondgebied" (19x12 cm) réalisés en 1979 qui partaient pour 400 € chacun le 25 avr. 2006 chez Campo à Antwerpen. Plus récemment, De Vuyst dispersait un ensemble de 6 dessins de 1978 mêlant crayon et sang, "My blood, my body, my landscape" qui fut enlevé pour 12 000 € le 09 décembre dernier à Lokeren.

Leader en France, Robert Combas est le deuxième artiste contemporain du marché des ventes publiques belges de ces dix dernières années ; il doit notamment son excellent positionnement à deux galeries qui le représentent en Belgique : la galerie Guy Pieters (Knokke) et la galerie Dewart (Bruxelles). La cote de Robert Combas est en pleine progression : +147% depuis 1996. Malgré tout, l´artiste français n´a pas en Belgique autant de succès qu´à Paris. Les trois dernière toiles présentées le 10 mars 2007 chez De Vuyst n´ont pas trouvé preneur. En 2006, seule une Chaise peinte de 1993 a changé de main en Belgique, pour 1 600 euros.

Régulièrement présenté en salles de ventes belges, avec 19 adjudications sur 10 ans, Philippe Vandenberg occupe la 5e place du classement par produit de ventes. En mars dernier, il a décroché une enchère record de 6 500 euros avec "Compositie", une toile de plus de 2 mètres de large, chez De Vuyst. Les artistes contemporains les plus souvent vendus aux enchères belges sont Christian Silvain (61 lots vendus en 10 ans) et Jan Vanriet (80 enchères en 10 ans).

ART MARKET WATCH - April 07

ART MARKET WATCH April 2007 artlover108

Mark Rothko White Center 1950 est. $40 million Sotheby’s New York May 15, 2007

Jean-Michel Basquiat Untitled 1981 est. $6 million-$8 million Sotheby’s New York May 15, 200

Andy Warhol Green Car Crash (Green Burning Car I) 1963 est. $25 million-$35 million Christie’s New York May 16, 2007

Xu Beihong Put Down Your Whip 1939 $9,230,769 Sotheby’s Hong Kong Apr. 7, 2007

Liu Ye Sinking Ship 1995 $902,564 Sotheby’s Hong Kong Apr. 7, 2007

William Adolphe Bouguereau Chansons de Printemps 1889 $1,720,000 Christie’s New York Apr. 12, 2007

Adalbert Cuvelier Along the Scarpe River, near Arras 1853 $240,000 Sotheby’s New York Apr. 13, 2007

Apr. 16, 2007

BIG-TICKET LOTS AT MAY SALES
The major May sales of Impressionist, modern and contemporary art in New York are on the horizon, and the two big auctioneers have begun to announce some of their star lots -- all works from the post-war category, as it happens, an indication of the current state of the market. Sotheby's specialist Oliver Barker told Linda Sandler of Bloomberg News that the top of the market consisted of 10 to 15 buyers worldwide, many of them seeking postwar art.

On May 15, Sotheby’s New York is selling a Francis Bacon "pope" painting, Study from Innocent X (1962), which is estimated to go for over $30 million. The Bacon is reportedly being put on the block by Mona Ackerman of New York, the daughter of pioneering corporate raider Meshulam Riklis, who bought the work more than 30 years ago. Bacon’s $27.6 million auction record was set in London in February 2007.

Another star lot in Sotheby’s May 15 sale is Mark Rothko’s White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose) (1950). Estimated at $40 million, the work is being sold by David Rockefeller, 91, who bought the painting for less than $10,000 in 1960. White Center is considered a pivotal work, one of the first in the artist’s signature style, and the estimate is well above Rothko’s auction record of $22.4 million. According to Carol Vogel in the New York Times, Sotheby’s has given Rockefeller a guarantee of $46 million. Museum of Modern Art curator John Elderfield told the Times that Rockefeller first offered the picture to the museum, but Elderfield declined. "We already have five Rothkos from the ‘50s," he said.

Last but not least, Sotheby’s May 15 sale includes an untitled 1981 painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat that was given to the Israel Museum in 1985 by Barbara and Eugene Schwartz. The museum, which has a second Basquiat from that period, is selling Untitled to set up a Barbara and Eugene Schwartz Contemporary Art Acquisition Endowment Fund. The presale estimate is $6 million-$8 million. Basquiat’s auction record is $5.5 million.

As for Christie’s New York, the firm’s May 16 sale features Andy Warhol’s Green Car Crash (Green Burning Car I) (1963). The picture carries a presale estimate of $25 million-$35 million, well above Warhol’s current auction record of $17.4 million, and "is bound to set a new price structure for the artist," the firm says.

Christie’s is also offering a 1962 Yellow Marilyn by Warhol that the unnamed consignor supposedly bought for $250 from Eleanor Ward’s Stable Gallery in New York in 1962. The painting now carries a presale estimate of $15 million.

NEW AUCTION HIGH FOR CHINESE PAINTING
Sotheby’s four-day series of sales in Hong Kong, Apr. 7-10, 2007, put over 1,200 lots of art, jewelry and watches on the block, and totaled more than $135 million U.S. The auctions were kicked off with a sale of contemporary Chinese art that totaled $27.6 million, a new high for the category at Sotheby’s.

The top lot was Xu Beihong’s Put Down Your Whip (1939), an academic realist painting of a World War II era anti-Japanese street performance, which sold for $9,288,000 U.S., a record for any Chinese painting at auction. Auction records were also set for Liu Ye ($902,564), Wei Rong ($184,615), Michael Lin ($69,230) and Hou Chun Ming ($61,538).

NEW RECORDS FOR ORIENTALIST ART
Christie’s New York sale of 19th-century European and Orientalist art on Apr. 12, 2007, totaled $11.7 million, with 197 of 229 lots finding buyers, or 78 percent. The top lot was William Adolphe Bouguereau's Chansons de Printemps (1889), which sold for $1,720,000, above the presale high estimate of $1.5 million. Twelve new auction records were set in the Orientalist section alone, including for Rudolf Ernst ($552,000), Pierre Tetar van Elven ($432,000) and Eugène Devéria ($240,000).

MUSEUMS LIKE THE CUVELIERS
The "white glove" sale at Sotheby’s New York on Apr. 13, 2007, of 41 photographs by Eugène Cuvelier, plus two by his father, Adalbert Cuvelier, was 100 percent sold, totaling $2,892,000, well above the presale high estimate of $2.1 million. New records were set for both father ($240,000) and son ($288,000), with several institutional buyers. The Tel Aviv Museum of Art won the record-setting lot by Adalbert, Along the Scarpe River, Near Arras (1853), while the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, took home Eugene Cuvelier’s Ferme du Parc de Courances for $103,200.

Joan Mitchell at Hauser & Wirth

Joan Mitchell at Hauser & Wirth artlover908

Joan Mitchell.

LONDON, ENGLAND.-Hauser & Wirth is delighted to present the first solo exhibition of Joan Mitchell ever to be shown in the UK. Mitchell is widely recognized as one of the pre-eminent painters of the Abstract Expressionist episode of American art. She came to critical attention in the early 1950s but it is only recently that her work has fully gained the recognition that it deserves. Between 1960 and 1964 she produced work of peculiar darkness and intensity. Painted during a difficult time in the artist's life soon after her move from New York to Paris, the works of this period reveal a distinct shift in sensibility. In these paintings Mitchell rejected the all-over style and bright colors of her earlier compositions in favor of sombre hues and dense central masses of pigment expressive of something startling and primordial. Rhythm and vibrancy were displaced for inchoate matter. There is an astonishing physicality to these works. Paint has been flung and squeezed onto the canvases, smeared on by Mitchell's fingers, and spilt and spluttered across their surfaces to create sculptural and tempestuous terrains that attest a vital reckoning with the world. Joan Mitchell (1925 - 1992) came to attention in the early 1950s when still in her twenties, exhibiting at the Stable Gallery in New York alongside Joseph Cornell and Robert Rauschenberg. She traveled to France in the summer of 1955 and settled in Paris permanently after 1959 after beginning an affair with the French Canadian painter Jean-Paul Riopelle. There have been numerous gallery and museum exhibitions of Joan Mitchell's work including two major shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1974 and 2002, which toured across the United States. Her paintings can be seen in museums worldwide. Joan Mitchell, Leaving America is presented in co-operation with The Joan Mitchell Foundation and Cheim & Read, New York. A catalogue published by STEIDL Hauser & Wirth will accompany the exhibition. Joan Mitchell, Leaving America: New York to Paris 1958 - 1964 features twenty color plates and a comprehensive essay on the artist by Helen Molesworth.

Zao Wou-Ki Masterpiece at Heffel Fine Art Auction House

Zao Wou-Ki Masterpiece at Heffel Fine Art Auction House artlover808

Zao Wou-ki, 5.11.62, oil on canvas, signed, 32 x 46 inches, Pre-sale estimate: $400,000 - $600,000 CAD.

TORONTO, CANADA.- The Heffel Fine Art Auction House in Toronto will be offering a magnificent, large scale Zao Wou-ki canvas, completed by the artist in 1962, for sale in the upcoming April auction of Fine International Art. This important painting, from the most sought period of the 1950s to the 1960s, has never been offered for sale on the public market. 5.11.62, titled after its date of execution, was acquired directly from the artist by Laing Galleries, Toronto and subsequently sold to the present Private Collection shortly thereafter. G. Blair Laing, the renowned Toronto art dealer, began making trips to Paris in the mid- 1950s to meet some of the Canadian artists who had moved to Paris to study, and to potentially acquire new inventory to offer Canadian collectors. He was excited by the work of the Canadian School of Paris artists such as Pellan, Borduas and Riopelle, amongst others, and subsequently went on to represent Riopelle in Canada. It is likely that through this association Laing was introduced to Zao Wou-ki. "We are fortunate to have had pioneer dealers in Canada such as G. Blair Laing who brought Zao Wou-Ki to Canada, and now these masterworks are resurfacing 40 years later, fresh to an enthusiastic International Art Market." remarks Robert Heffel, co-owner of Heffel fine Art Auction House. Zao Wou-ki came to Paris from China in 1948 as a result of political troubles and civil war in his homeland, and to continue his studies of modern art. He quickly became one of the most important artists of the Tachisme Movement, a group that also included Jean Dubuffet, Sam Francis and Jean-Paul Riopelle. This Paris-based Chinese artist has works in major collections and museums worldwide, and is one of the most successful Chinese artists of the 20th century. The sale will close on April 28, 2007. During this time the work will be previewed at Heffel's Toronto viewing showroom location at 13 Hazelton Avenue, as well as at www.heffel.com.

Christian Schumann First Solo Show in Spain

Christian Schumann First Solo Show in Spain artlover908

Christian Schumann, Farm & Fleet, 2007.

MADRID, SPAIN.-Pilar Parra & Romero is proud to present Christian Schumann’s solo show for first time in Spain. With a large trajectory as an artist, Christian (Rhode Island, 1970) presents a total of eight paintings and five drawings. This recent set of paintings, all of uniform size, all operates with the same internal mechanisms of improvisation despite their disparate appearances. In a departure from his previous body of work, which is an tendency to a minimal style, this group returns to techniques of collage and transfer of paint and paper, a method of construction which he has purposely not approached in several years in the spirit of experimentation. In general, Christian’s work has been characterized not only by surfeit information, but also by the use of a range of different sources. As a result of combining painting with borrowed images and collage, the surfaces of his pictures vary from smooth grounds of opaque color, to areas that have been creased, or worn by abrasion. He also adopts a wide range of drawings styles often raiding the aesthetics of popular culture: cartoon imagery is prevalent, and he also borrows the structural devices of comic book layout. In addition, uses texts -verbal puns, song lyrics and nonsensical dialogue– to suggest disjointed narratives ‘’content is formed by the act of breaking apart meaning, corroding ideals, restructuring life of debris. Fractured, an internal nature reforms. Improvisation of the detached, purposeful in its oblique qualities. Personal limitations and psychology are the compositional and thematic structure. When mnemonic becomes flesh and flesh becomes pollution, artificial intelligence rules unto an inorganic world”. Christian Schumann has been exhibited recently at Patrick Painter and Gagosian in L.A, Leo Koenig in New York, Carlier Gebauer in Berlin and White Cube/Jay Jopling in London. In addition his work has been included in exhibitions such as “Proliferation,” at MOCA Los Angeles, and “Pop Surrealism,” Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art Christian Schumann currently lives and works in Los Angeles.

Gilbert & George. Major Exhibition To Open at Haus der Kunst

Gilbert & George. Major Exhibition To Open at Haus der Kunst artlover108

Gilbert & George, The Wall, 1986, 242 x 353 cm. © The Artist. Courtesy Jay Jopling / White Cube (London).

MUNICH, GERMANY.- Haus der Kunst will present Gilbert & George. Major Exhibition, on view June 11, 2007 to September 9, 2007. This exhibition presents Gilbert & George’s artistic body of work over the last forty years. "Gilbert & George. Major Exhibition" will not only present the photographic works, but also all the mediums with which the artists have worked, including documentations on their performances as "living sculptures," books, large format drawing installations from the early 70s, postcard sculptures and films. This allows the artist duo’s formal and conceptual development to be observed, from the extension of what the term sculpture signifies to the anticipation of photography as a decisive discourse in contemporary art. In addition to the works presented in Tate Modern, "There Were Two Young Men," a series of large charcoal drawings in six parts from 1971, will also be on view at Haus der Kunst. Living Sculptures - In 1967 Gilbert and George met in a sculpture class at St. Martin’s School of Art, London. Since then they have been a couple in both professionally and privately. After finishing their studies at the art academy they had the feeling of being empty-handed – without a gallery or studio, yet with a remarkable idea: they simply declared themselves to be artworks and appeared as "living sculptures." In 1969 Gilbert & George formulated their personal laws of sculptors, which are still valid today and have become a kind of manifesto for all their art: "1 Always be smartly dressed, well groomed relaxed friendly polite and in complete control 2 Make the world believe in you and to pay heavily for this privilege 3 Never worry assess discuss or criticize but remain quiet respectful and calm 4 The Lord chissels still, so don’t leave your bench for long." (The laws of sculptors, 1969) In 1969 Gilbert & George performed as "singing sculptures" for the first time with the song "Underneath the Arches." In this song two homeless people praise their lack of sleeping comfort ("The Ritz we never sigh for / The Carlton they can keep / There’s only one place that we know / And that is where we sleep"). Many more performances followed in different cities. In everyday life one was able to experience Gilbert & George as walking, eating, drinking and philosophizing sculptures. Their singing performances and systematic drinking binges in neatly tailored suits were somewhat irritating to the public – after all, the bourgeois disposition, which Gilbert & George cultivated in appearance, stood in contrast to the anti-bourgeois provocative content of their ludicrous performances. Early Photographic Works and Development - The early photographic works show that Gilbert & George give the appearance of behaving with bourgeois decency. In this way they create an area of freedom in which they can break social taboos by undermining the system from within. The early black and white montages posses a formal austerity and are sparingly colored by hand. Gilbert & George pose as melancholic gentlemen in almost claustrophobic spaces or on the streets of London’s East End. Through the occasional inclusion of graffiti such as "Are you angry or are you boring?" the images have a poetic quality, as well as a primitive strength that is not unlike that of Punk culture. In the early 1980s bold colors were added. The use of such colors is reminiscent of Pop Art, which made conscious use of elements from kitsch, advertising and popular image design. From this point onwards subsequent series usually include one or more works on a monumental scale. From the beginning to the present these tableaux have been made up of rectangular fields that are surrounded by a black border. Rather than developing and enlarging their photographs in the dark room and coloring them by hand, Gilbert & George now scan their originals and rework them digitally.

Le Nouveau Réalisme at Galeries du Grand Palais

Le Nouveau Réalisme at Galeries du Grand Palais artlover608

Raymond Hains, Saffa, 1964, Bois peint sur contreplaqué. Collection privée, Paris. Courtesy Galerie Georges-Philippe et Nathalie Vallois. © ADAGP, Paris 2007.

PARIS, FRANCE.- Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais present Le Nouveau Réalisme, on view through July 2, 2007, An exhibition jointly produced by the Rmn, the Centre Pompidou, Paris and the Sprengel Museum Hannover, Hanover, to be shown at the Sprengel Museum Hannover from 9 September 2007 to 27 January 2008. Lasting from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s, New Realism was part of an overall drive to renew artistic forms and themes in a booming consumer and industrial society, in reaction to the immediate post-war period: Neo-Dada, Pop Art, Fluxus, Zero Group, New Realists…Klein, Hains, Villeglé, Tinguely, César, Arman, Spoerri, Raysse, Dufrêne, Rotella, Niki de Saint Phalle, Deschamps, Christo – dubbed the "New Realists"* by the art critic Pierre Restany – held many group shows and happenings. They integrated scraps of the everyday urban industrial world into their works (fences, barrels, plastic items, rubbish, cars or traffic signs...) - Compressions by César, Accumulations by Arman, scraped and slashed posters by Hains and Villeglé, Assemblages of ordinary plastic items by Raysse, Trap-Pictures by Spoerri, sculptures that self-destruct by Tinguely, Shootings by Niki de Saint Phalle… - in a truly radical approach which has now been forgotten. Although New Realism was at the cutting edge of the French art scene in the post-war period, it is nearly twenty years since it was last presented as a movement in a major exhibition (1960.The New Realists, Paris, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1986). Many of its artists (Martial Raysse, César, Arman, Tinguely, Hains, The Poster Artists…) have benefited from a retrospective since the 1980s, but the fact that they belonged to a group which was active on the international scene in the 1960s (United States, Italy, Germany) is now little known and often played down. It is time for a fresh look and a new interpretation. Moreover, at a time when these artists are disappearing, one after another, – Niki de Saint Phalle, César, Hains, Restany, Arman, Rotella… – it is important to collect the last first-hand accounts of a period which is fast becoming history, although it is being reclaimed in an astonishing way by many young artists today. The exhibition of about 200 works shows the vitality of “New Realism” through the reconstitution or display of some installations and a thematic and historical circuit which explores the special features of the movement and the highlights of their shared adventure. It focuses on a decade – from 1958 to 1965/69 – the time of its group shows, an extremely dense and lively period which was later obscured by the artists’ individual careers. As well as works by artists directly attached to the movement, the exhibition includes a few pieces by artists who were close to them (the "Objectors" united by Alain Jouffroy such as Raynaud, Pommereulle, Dietman, or again Malaval and Jacquet; artists who came from Fluxus such as Filliou or Vostell, or from Zero Group, such as Günther Uecker; American neo-Dadaists, Rauschenberg, Stankiewicz, Johns, Bontecou, Chamberlain…) in an effort to show the many different currents that animated the movement and to avoid reducing New Realism, as is too often done, to an emblematic, schematic presentation of a few actions. Klein, Raysse, Arman, Dufrêne, Villeglé, Hains, Spoerri, Tinguely and Restany himself signed the Declaration of New Realism on 27 October 1960 – a spectacular gesture staged by the critic for a group which in Arman’s opinion would last only twenty minutes. In a deeper vein, it was more an attitude and a movement which became known as New Realism, encompassing the signatories and other artists close to them : Deschamps, Niki de Saint Phalle, Rotella, Christo.

Le Nouveau Réalisme

Le Nouveau Réalisme

artlover708

Le Nouveau réalisme est à l´honneur cette année : suite à l´hommage rendu à Yves Klein au musée Georges Pompidou jusqu´en février dernier, tout le mouvement fait l´objet d´une exposition aux Grand Palais de Paris jusqu´au 2 juillet 2007. La cote des Nouveaux Réalistes a progressé de plus de +120% depuis 2000. Toutefois, les productions de ces artistes sont encore valorisées à 30% en dessous des niveaux de prix atteints en 1989-1990.

Le groupe des Nouveaux Réalistes émerge en France autour d´une déclaration rédigée en 1960 par le critique Pierre Restany chez Yves KLEIN. Conscients de leur « singularité collective », les nouveaux réalistes recyclent des objets industriels : CÉSAR les compresse, Fernandez ARMAN les casse ou les accumule, Daniel SPOERRI les fige en Tableaux-pièges, Jean TINGUELY les mécanise, Klein les transcende via la couleur, Raymond HAINS, Jacques VILLEGLÉ et Mimmo ROTELLA les déchirent… opérant une vision poétique de la réalité quotidienne.

Yves Klein a marqué l´histoire de l´art par la profondeur de son bleu IKB (International Klein Blue). Les Etats-Unis et le Royaume-Uni soutiennent activement l´artiste français et réalisent 80% du produit des ventes contre 9% sur l´hexagone. L´œuvre Yves Klein, est la plus appréciée du groupe et a dépassé le seuil du million de dollars à 20 reprises dont 7 fois en 2006 !
Son record date de novembre 2000 avec RE1 qui a décroché 6,1 millions de dollars chez Christie´s New York. Aujourd´hui, il faut compter entre 50 000 et 80 000 € en moyenne pour un monochrome de 20 cm de côté, mais les amateurs se disputent âprement les pièces, comme le 10 mai 2006 chez Christie´s NY ou Ikb (21,2 x 17,7cm) doublait son estimation haute pour partir à 140 000 $ (110 138 €). Ses Anthropométries, où les corps de femmes imprégnés du fameux pigment sont utilisés comme pinceaux, sont également très prisées. Le 8 février 2007, la maison Christie´s dispersait une Anthropométrie de 65x50 cm à Londres qui fut adjugée pour 240 000 £ (364 000 €). Les anthropométries de plus d´un mètre de coté peuvent dépasser les 500 000 £ comme la veille chez Sotheby´s Londres ou Ant 69 (109 x 69 cm) partait pour 550 000£ (834 000 €). Les amis Nouveaux Réalistes de Klein, tels qu´Arman et César, détournaient des objets de consommation courante dans leurs œuvres. Le « gardien du bleu » s´est aussi prêté à l´exercice en revisitant des reproductions de sculptures emblématiques telles que le fameux Esclave de Michel-Ange (300 exemplaires). En 2000, un Esclave était accessible pour moins de 20 000 € (vente de Briest à Paris, le 27 octobre 2000). Il faut compter aujourd´hui entre 40 000 et 50 000 € pour la même œuvre.

Des éditions post-mortem comme les tables basses en Plexiglas renfermant du pigment bleu, rose ou encore des feuilles d´or, s´échangent actuellement entre 15 000 et 25 000 €. En 1997, une table bleue de la même série était accessible autour de 5 000 €… A l´heure actuelle, pour un budget avoisinant les 5 000 €, l´amateur peut espérer emporter de petites pièces telle qu´un Carton d'invitation bleu affranchi avec le timbre bleu de 1957 ou de 1959. L´un de ses cartons d´invitation était adjugé pour 4 800 € le 25 novembre 2005 à Paris (P.Bergé-Buffetaud-Godeau-Chambre-De Nicolay).

Avec 400 à 500 pièces proposées annuellement aux enchères, l´artiste niçois Arman est le sculpteur contemporain français le plus représenté en salles des ventes. Dans les années 60´, il réalise ses « colères » et ses « coupes » : objets brisés, sectionnés en tranches ou encore brûlés. A la fin des années 70´, Arman s´inspire de ses anciennes séries pour des sculptures en bronze, qui s´échangent aujourd´hui entre 1 000 et 10 000 € en moyenne. Face à la pléthore de ces tirages sur le marché, 50% des œuvres demeurent accessibles et trouvent acquéreurs pour moins de 3 000 €. En parallèle, les pièces historiques peuvent décrocher plus de 100 000 € : entre 2005 et 2006, 12 sculptures ont dépassé ce seuil, deux fois plus que sur les 15 années précédentes ! Depuis son décès en octobre 2005, la demande s´est particulièrement intensifiée pour les pièces anciennes, si bien que la boîte de sardines Full Up, tirée à 500 exemplaires, ayant fait office d´invitation à la galerie Iris Clert en 1960, est partie pour 3 100 € chez Leclere à Marseille le3 mars 2007. Cette pièce s´était vendue l´équivalent de 680 € en 2001. Autre exemple de cette inflation : une version de Poubelle, contenant une accumulation de papiers et détritus, éditée à 100 exemplaires en 1964 se vendait 1200 € chez Calmels-Chambre-Cohen. En mars 2006, chez Cornette de Saint-Cyr, les amateurs se la sont arrachée à 4 700 €. Le marché d´Arman est dynamique en France avec 53 % du produit des ventes réalisé sur l´hexagone mais l´artiste est aussi très apprécié par les collectionneurs anglo-saxons (23% du produit des ventes réalisé aux Etats-Unis et aux Royaume-Uni) et italiens (14% du produit des ventes).

César est l´un des artistes les plus populaires en France mais il est aussi représenté par les grandes maisons de ventes anglo-saxonnes. Ses bronzes de grandes dimensions (de plus d´1 mètre à 3 mètres) s´échangent entre 100 000 et 250 000 € en moyenne comme Fanny Fanny (233x245,1x121,9 cm) réalisée en 1990 qui fut emportée pour 240 000 £ (plus de 187 000 €) le 16 novembre 2006 chez Christie´s NY. Comptez désormais 20 000 – 30 000 € pour une poule en bronze signée César de 20 à 30 cm de haut. Il est difficile de trouver des sculptures de l´artiste à moins de 2 000 € : ses petites compressions de 6 cm de haut réalisées à partir de capsules de bouteilles s´échangent aujourd´hui entre 2 500 et 3 000 €, contre à peine 1 000 € à la fin des années 1990.

Deux artistes suisses comptent aussi parmi les nouveaux réalistes sculpteurs : il s´agit de Jean Tinguely et de Daniel Spoerri. Le marché de Jean Tinguely est international avec 39% des transactions réalisées au Royaume-Uni et 61% en Suisse et en Europe. Malgré cette visibilité élargie, sa cote n´est pas au beau fixe et reste encore légèrement dévaluée par rapport à 1997. Ses œuvres paraissent abordables avec 80% d´adjudications inférieures à 5 000 € mais il est nécessaire de préciser que 70% des lots concernent des estampes et des dessins tandis que la majorité de son produit des ventes est dégagé par ses sculptures mécanisées qui engendrent 74% du produit des ventes.

Daniel Spoerri a vu sa cote doubler entre 2004 et 2006. Ses Tableaux-pièges, qui piègent le réel en figeant des reliefs de repas, sont ses pièces les plus recherchées et s´échangent entre 15 000 et 40 000 €. L´univers plus ludique de Niki de Saint-Phalle, qui a gagné sa notoriété avec la série des Nanas (figures féminines épanouies et hautes en couleurs) séduit les collectionneurs de toutes nationalités. En effet, 17% du produit des ventes est réalisé aux Etats-Unis. Niki renoue avec sa cote de 1990, au pic de la bulle spéculative : à l´époque une Nana assise de 1968 (77x73x81 cm ) était adjugée moins de 100 000 £ (autour de 130 000 €). La même œuvre dispersée en décembre 2006 chez Sotheby´s Paris a trouvé preneur à 180 000 €.

Suite à sa disparition, Raymond Hains a connu la plus forte hausse des prix du groupe depuis 2005 : +260% ! Ses affiches lacérées des années 60´ font l´objet de toutes les convoitises. Il faut désormais compter 30 000 – 40 000 € pour un format d´un mètre de côté, contre moins de 10 000 € dans les années 1990. Mais l´artiste a aussi créé des petites pièces qui s´échangent encore à moins de 1 500 €, comme le petit arrachage de 1959 (8 x 6 cm) dispersé pour 1 100 € le 20 mars 2006 chez Cornette de Saint-Cyr. Hains entamait son ascension de son vivant avec la dispersion de La lessive génie qui quintuplait son estimation chez Sotheby´s Londres le 25 octobre 2005 (50 000 £, soit 73 800 €). Lors de cette même vente, son ami Jacques de la Villeglé signait son record pour Avenue de la Liberté, Charenton qui décrochait 75 000 £, soit 110 700 euros. A l´instar de Hains, ses arrachages des années 60 et de formats honorables cotent désormais entre 30 000 et 40 000 €. Les œuvres récentes sont beaucoup moins prisées et plus accessibles comme l´affiche lacérée Sans titre de 1992 qui changeait de main pour 1 800 € le 27 mars 2007 chez Piasa (Paris). Les décollages de Wolf Vostell sont rares mais ne prêtent pourtant pas à surenchère. Vostell est le plus abordable des « décollagistes » avec près de 90% des œuvres adjugées moins de 5 000 €. Une œuvre de 1959 fut par exemple emportée pour 3 700 € le 11 novembre 2006 chez Sturies Andreas à Dusseldorf. Enfin, François Dufrene dépasse allègrement la barre des 5 000 € pour des œuvres de la même période. En octobre 2006, le marteau tombait à 26 000 £ (près de 38 600 €) chez Christie´s pour son décollage de 1960 intitulé Apéritif.

Tine Lundsfryd: Recent Paintings

Tine Lundsfryd: Recent Paintings artlover608

Lundsfryd, lego, 2005-06, oil and pencil on canvas.

NEW YORK.- From April 17th to May 12th , 2007, Lori Bookstein Fine Art will present Tine Lundsfryd: Recent Paintings. The 15 square or near-square canvases comprise her second solo show at the gallery, and continue her exploration of abstract geometric form using unexpected palettes. After first laying down a graphite grid onto the surface, the artist uses its vertical, horizontal and diagonal axes as an armature from which to build up more complex forms. Variously-shaped triangles and quadrangles, and the eight-pointed star, remain her building blocks, but she has introduced the motifs of pinwheels and puzzle-like pieces to her most recent work. Both playful and mathematical, Lundsfryd's patterning derives its structures from sources high and low, religious and secular. On a trip to her native Denmark last year, the artist encountered early-Christian eternity symbols in an 11th century church, whose intersecting circles she then incorporated into her canvases. Domestic Dutch tiles, as well as Islamic and Hindu tiles and ornaments, also inform her painting. Lundsfryd avoids horizontal- or vertical-shaped supports, finding them to be too laden with connotations of landscape or portraiture. Similarly, her color choices, which vary from clear, bright reds and blues to murky browns and neutrals, tend to be about conveying abstract ideas rather than emotional states. There is something scientific about the way the artist tests out one color against another: through juxtapositions, layering, and mixing the artist creates myriad combinations. Viewed at a distance, Lundsfryd's forms appear to be hard-edged particles, but a closer inspection reveals that each component is made up of visible brushstrokes with sensuous, imperfect borders. The layers of paint are often thin enough to allow an area's previous iterations of color to show through, as well as the underlying grid—a kind of linear, modern-day pentimenti. This semi-opacity fosters a reading of the fractured planes not as pure geometric modeling, but as a negotiation between spatial depth and the flat lushness of the painted surface. In his review of her 2004 exhibition, Mario Naves wrote that there is " something meditative about the gentle and tenacious way that Ms. Lundsfryd applies oil to canvas—something skeptical, too. That the pictures embody contradictory impulses without straining attests to Ms. Lundsfryd's ability to endow limited form with manifold meaning." The artist herself has said that the work is about "disorder and rebuilding"—and, indeed, whether the images are meant to be coming together or shattering apart, there is a unified quality about them. Simply put, Lundsfryd takes "broken information" and "makes it whole." Tine Lundsfryd was born in 1964 in Nyk óbing, Falster, Denmark. From 1984 to 1987 she studied under the artist Carsten Dinnsen, while concurrently attending courses at the Anthroposophical Society in Copenhagen. She joined the Vaerksted 82 (Studio 82) in 1987, an artist collective consisting of ten young artists working together in a shared studio space. In 1990 Lundsfryd was the recipient of numerous awards, including grants from the American Women's Club in Denmark, the Danish-American Foundation and the King Frederik and Queen Ingrids' Fund for Humanitarian and Cultural Purposes. That year she mo ved to New York City, where she studied at the New York Studio School (1990-92); later receiving her MFA in painting at the Parsons School of Design (1995). She has exhibited at Lori Bookstein Fine Art; Artpage Gallery, New York ; Diamantina Gallery, New York; and the ISA, Monte Castello di Vibio, Italy, among others. Group shows include the CMP Gallery, Washington, DC; Sideshow Gallery, New York; Artist's Space, New York; and A.I.R. Gallery, New York. In 2000 the artist received the Cultural Award from the American Scandinavian Society. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

David Roth: The Interference Color Paintings

David Roth: The Interference Color Paintings artlover908

David Roth, #8 Green, Orange, Violet Oxide on Black Gesso Interference Paint on board, 2006.

PHILADELPHIA, PA.- Always eagerly awaited, new work by David Roth, one of the most important conceptual abstract artists of the past 45 years, will debut in David Roth: The Interference Color Paintings at Moderne Gallery, 111 N. Third Street , Philadelphia PA 19106 (215-923-8536; www.modernegallery.com). The exhibition opens on First Friday, May 4 and continues through Saturday, July 14, 2007. This is the first exhibit of contemporary art presented by Moderne Gallery and David Roth’s first solo exhibition since 2001. David Roth: The Interference Color Paintings will include at least 20 new works, extending the artist’s fascination with “the reflection of light on a ‘necessarily’ elusive material surface.” His strokes “know their place in a motif that exists entirely within the painting.” According to Roth, these new works in Interference Color paints – ephemeral, chameleon-like paints that reflect light and change color when seen from different angles -- are an attempt to realize his earlier, well-known “Graphite” works in color. The dynamism of the colors adds to the dramatic actuality of the paintings. “David Roth is an important and innovative Modernist painter of the 20th - 21st centuries. We have been pleased to present his vintage works and now are excited to step into the contemporary art scene with his most recent paintings here at Moderne Gallery,” says owner/director Robert Aibel. “I am eager to see his art receive the recognition it deserves.” The Interference Color Paintings are David Roth’s most advanced work, exploring ideas and solving aesthetic problems in which he has always been interested, but now more than ever “an exploration and adventure into the previously unseen.” In attempting to introduce a visual experience that has not been experienced before, Roth paints in many different ways and from many different angles, sometimes in one color, sometimes in many colors. Colors blend, space appears and curves, movement happens – always in a deliberate dynamic that is optically real. A surface and space are “found” through the very act of painting. The previously “invisible” abstract motif emerges simultaneously – is revealed-- with the artist’s execution of it. “This motif is really what the new work is about,” says Roth. The Interference Color Paintings exhibition at Moderne Gallery will consist of mostly square paintings, from 3’ x 3’ to as large as 8’ x 8’ – on canvas, plexiglas, masonite and string. There will also be a group of smaller, much earlier works that exhibit the genesis of Roth’s aesthetic. The Roth exhibition is a natural outgrowth of Robert Aibel’s interest in presenting significant 20th and 21st century decorative arts, in all forms, and is an important development in the leadership role of Moderne Gallery in the art world.

Christie's To Offer Most Valuable Warhol Painting

Christie's To Offer Most Valuable Warhol Painting artlover808

Andy Warhol’s Green Car Crash (Green Burning Car I) from his seminal Death and Disaster series. Pre-sale estimate of $25 – 35 million. © Christie’s Images Ltd. 2007.

NEW YORK.- On May 16, Christie’s in New York will offer Andy Warhol’s Green Car Crash (Green Burning Car I) from his seminal Death and Disaster series. With a pre-sale estimate of $25 – 35 million, Green Car Crash (Green Burning Car I) is expected to far exceed the previous record for the artist which was established at Christie’s New York in November 2006 when Warhol’s iconic Mao, 1972 was purchased for $17.4 million. Not only has Green Car Crash (Green Burning Car I) resided within the same private collection for over three decades, the painting is also the most important work of Warhol’s seminal Death and Disaster series to have ever appeared at auction. This sale is bound to set a new price structure for the artist. “The appearance on the market of Warhol’s Green Car Crash (Green Burning Car I) will send a shock of excitement through the art world,” said Brett Gorvy, Deputy Chairman and International Co-Head of Post-War and Contemporary Art. “This is a painting that has been considered the Holy Grail by a legion of contemporary art collectors and for years this work has been on every major wish list. Warhol’s uncanny, oracle-like sense of what the future will bring is striking to say the least. As the Mao series was a prelude to the rise of China as a super power, the Death and Disaster series was indicative of today’s cult of the self. YouTube, MySpace, FaceBook – everybody and anybody acting out their tragedy and on stage for the world to see. Warhol got that ‘15 minutes of fame’ concept down to an art long before it changed our lives irrevocably and forever.” Warhol’s Car Crashes – created between late 1962 and early 1964 – remain among the most powerful, challenging and provocative paintings made in the Post-War era. Among this group, Green Car Crash (Green Burning Car I), is based on what is arguably the most extraordinary, strange and disturbing source image of them all. The scene is a mundane, suburban street transformed in an almost surrealistic nightmare in which an overturned car in flames is shown in the foreground while the catapulted body of the driver can be seen hanging, limp though still alive, impaled on a post. What renders the image even more morbid is the figure at the heart of the picture, a man, hands in pockets, passing by nonchalantly, seemingly oblivious of hell happening on the other side of the sidewalk. Like something from David Lynch’s Twin Peaks or Blue Velvet, where a charming and banal idyll of a suburban community is shown to be nothing more than a shallow artifice of respectable surface appearance beneath which there lurks a darker reality of horror, Green Car Crash (Green Burning Car I) reveals a similar disconnect in the world of appearances. The extraordinary contrast between the mundane normality of everyday suburbia and the exceptional tragedy and violence that periodically strikes at its heart is exactly what Warhol wished to express with supercool detachment in the Death and Disaster series. Besides showing Warhol’s morbid fascination with the fleeting aspect of life, the series also presents Warhol’s razor-sharp criticism of the moral complacency middle-class America had stumbled into in the 1960’s. In his own inimitable and targeted way, Warhol – once described as ‘a rather terrifying oracle’ – holds up a deeply incisive mirror, shattering the American dream mercilessly. Green Car Crash (Green Burning Car I) leads the extraordinary group of works by Andy Warhol Christie’s will offer in the Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale on May 16 – the value of the entire group is expected to realize in excess of $67 million. Among the other highlights are Yellow Marilyn, 1962 (estimate on request), Four-Foot Flowers, 1964 (estimate: $5 – 7 million) and Self Portrait, 1966/67 (estimate: $5.5 – 7.5 million). Christie’s evening sale of Post-War and Contemporary Art in November 2006 was a landmark event for the Warhol market. Christie’s not only established a new world auction record for the artist at $17.4 million for Mao, 1972, but seven further works realized extraordinary prices, including Orange Marilyn, 1962 ($16.3 million) and Sixteen Jackies, 1964 ($15.7 million). The Warhol group in that sale totaled $59.7 million. Auction: Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale May 16 at 7 p.m. Viewing: Christie’s Galleries at Rockefeller Center May 11 – 16.

Zhong Biao: American Debut

Zhong Biao: American Debut artlover208

Zhong Biao, Middaysun, 2006.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- For nearly five years, Frey Norris Gallery has presented the work of Chinese artist, Zhong Biao, during which time the global thirst for Chinese art and artists has grown exponentially. Highly publicized record auction prices, and hoards of art world speculators flocking to China have driven both interest in and scholarship on contemporary Chinese art. Why should anyone care about the American debut of a Chinese artist when an ever-increasing profusion of galleries have begun focusing on Chinese art? Some years from now, the dust will settle from the Chinese art craze and the first bursting of the first speculative collecting bubble. While no one can readily predict what the future will hold for individual artists or works of art; one thing is relatively certain; this period of massive cultural change will mark a tipping point in art history, a shift away from more Euro and American-centric orientations and towards a pluralistic global art community, wherein Chinese artists and thinkers will play a pivotal roll. The public should take note, if only to experience a microcosm of this mad, mad art world through the looking-glass of a relatively modest, thoughtful and diligent artist, one who’s paintings embody some of the more nuanced and sincere aspects of an important generation of Chinese creativity. While Zhong Biao may be a rock star in China, pressured to show in more and more museums around the world or to see his work realize higher and higher prices on the open market, this artist remains entirely cognizant that his chance to make a mark and be known is fleeting. His opportunity to speak his truth on canvas or in our catalogue’s interview is an opportunity that was not afforded to many of his ancestors. It will then, ultimately, be the public that decides if his efforts are sufficiently important to endure. About the Art - Zhong Biao will exhibit thirteen new large scale canvases in his signature surreal style, one that juxtaposes the old with the new, the East with the West and the individual with the collective. Large areas of raw linen canvas surround images that evoke lives packed with quick indulgences and battling ideologies. Paintings such as “What a Great Country: You Can Do Anything” serve as meditations on a newly divergent spectrum of socio-economic classes within China, the unities and divisions of the haves and have-nots. A depicted banner in this painting proclaims, “In the vast world, there are plenty of opportunities to fulfill one’s potential,” inviting the viewer, outsider or Chinese citizen to question the verity of this slogan. The first in this new body of work, appropriate for his American debut, is entitled “Welcome,” incorporating a Han Dynasty figurine, spear-wielding children drawn from 1960’s Cultural Revolution propaganda and an English language banner that seems pulled from the chest of a beauty pageant winner. “Mid-Day Sun,” the second largest canvas in the show and arguably the centerpiece, covers a number of jarring juxtapositions; a Black Hawk helicopter invokes the threat of war or armed conflict, a crowd resembling a graduating college class or corporate group displays saccharine smiles, and a sensuous woman confronts the viewer on an unmade mattress, her pointed heels directed into the extreme foreground. Is the “Mid-Day Sun” the light of governmental transparency, the heat of sexual provocation or simply a description of the weather? Perhaps no one understands the artist and his visual skills better than the curator and essayist for the exhibition, Britta Erickson, a close friend of the artist for nearly ten years: Zhong Biao’s approach to his focal concern of simultaneity of existence has become increasingly sophisticated, beginning with an appreciation of the relationship between the past, the present, and the future—including the changing significance of historical objects as they move through time—and progressing to an understanding of the coexistence of diverse individual psyches, disconnected and yet interrelated. We should not let the lush young women and bright arresting colors of his recent works distract us from an appreciation of the images’ philosophical underpinnings. In fact, such a combination of easy superficial attractiveness overlaying a search for spiritual meaning vividly reflects the lives of many members of China’s urban intellectual elite who, having achieved a comfortable metropolitan lifestyle, now seek for deeper meaning.

Musée Picasso Presents Picasso - Carmen - Sol & Sombra

Musée Picasso Presents Picasso - Carmen - Sol & Sombra artlover308

Femme à la mantille, Woman in a mantilla, full face, P.Esperon, Madrid, embroidered postcard, 13.5 x 8.7 cm, Archives Picasso, Musée Picasso, Paris. DR.

PARIS, FRANCE.- Musée Picasso presents Picasso – Carmen - Sol & Sombra (Sun & Shade), on view through June 24, 2007. Exhibition organised by the Réunion des Musées Nationaux and the Musée National Picasso. Carmen, provocative and rebellious, the icon of passion, haunts the work of Picasso. The mythical heroine of Prosper Mérimée (novella published in 1845), and of Georges Bizet (opera created in 1875) had haunted the artist since the first painting of his youth where the sulphurous auras of whores and the gypsies intermingled. This exhibition shows how Picasso’s fascination with Carmen resembles a long, imaginary, secret quest on the theme of tragic love. About 220 works relating to this “Carmen theme” have been brought together for this show: paintings, drawings, etchings, photographs and documents from the collection and the archives of the Musée National Picasso, along with works on loan from the Meseu Picasso, Barcelona, the Fondación Museo Picasso, Málaga, the Salomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York and the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. Presented both thematically and chronologically, the exhibition looks first at the artist’s early work (1898-1903). As far back as 1898, the sketch of a gypsy girl he did in Madrid mentions the name “Carmen”. This started a series of works influenced by Goya’s black vision in the Caprichos and the Sueños where Bohemian women and majas (the beauties), merge into the symbolic figure of Celestina, matchmaker and witch, (Fernando Rojas, La Celestina or the tragi-comedy of Callisto and Melibea, 1499; Pablo Picasso, La Célestine, 1904). Then, through the distortions of a fantasy Spain, full of mantillas, shawls, large combs and fans, the artist completely transforms the heroic femme fatale and submits her to his most radical visual experiments. Thus, for the first time in Paris, this exhibition brings together some of the great paintings produced by Picasso between 1904 and 1918. They form a veritable portrait gallery of women in Spanish dress, combining modernity with references to old masters and contemporary great artists (Goya, Velazquez, Manet): Fernande à la mantille, 1905 (Fernande in a black mantilla), Portrait de Benedetta Canals, 1905 (Portrait of Benedetta Canals), Grand Nu au peigne, 1906 (Woman with a comb), Femme à l’éventail, 1909 (Woman with fan), Femme à la mantille, « La Salchichona », 1917 (Woman with mantilla, “La Salchichona”), Portrait d’Olga à la mantille, 1917 (Olga Khokhlova with mantilla), Blanquita Suarez, 1917, Olga au fauteuil, 1918 (Olga in the armchair). Bizet’s funereal opera finishes with Carmen’s murder set against the background of the death of the bull in the ring. This symmetry of the sacrifice of the wild animal and of the woman particularly inspired Picasso’s surrealist work. This is clearly seen in the exhibition in the rich variations of the bullfighting myth, in drawings and etching, depicting the embraces and combats of the toreros/toreras from the years 1920 to 1935. It was in the fifties when Picasso finally worked on illustrating Mérimée’s novella, with a beautiful series of aquatints and etchings where the Picasso “Carmencita” appears as the incarnation of painting itself (Pablo Picasso, Prosper Mérimée, Louis Aragon, Carmen des Carmen, Paris, Editeurs français réunis, 1964). Carmen, the source of a passionate, iconographic symbolisation, reveals the face of a double, of the painter himself, reflected in the mirror of the woman, of the other.

Art 38 Basel - "Art Statements"

Art 38 Basel - "Art Statements" artlover908

Aneta Grzeszykowska, Untitled Film Stills #15, 2006, 25 x 20 cm (Courtesy Raster, Warsaw).

BASEL.- This year the «Art Statements» sector is being expanded to include 26 one-person shows of young artists. Chosen by the Art Basel Committee from over 250 applications, the artists come from 16 different countries. For over 10 years now, «Art Statements» has been providing young artists with a special platform that brings them to the attention of an international audience of curators, collectors, and the media. The 26 projects promise art enthusiasts fascinating discoveries and intriguing encounters with the work of the latest generation of artists. In conjunction with «Art Statements», two artists will be awarded the Bâloise Art Prize, which is linked to a long-term encouragement program. This year Art Basel's selection committee has focused above all on artists who are as yet little known or whose approach is not easily accessible. The projects on show are being created especially for Art 38 Basel. (A number of the artists are employing materials and techniques typical of the constructivist avant-garde of the 1920s, recasting them in contemporary form.) The participating artists come from China, France, Germany, Holland, India, Israel, Italy, Lebanon, Norway, Poland, Portugal, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK, and the USA. The following artists have been selected: Markus Amm, born in 1969, lives and works in London (Galerie Karin Guenther, Hamburg) Alexandra Bircken, born in 1967, lives and works in Cologne (Herald St, London) Kate Davis, born in 1977, lives and works in Glasgow (Sorcha Dallas, Glasgow) Andreas Eriksson, born in 1975, lives and works in Kinnekulle (Galleri Riis, Oslo) Matias Faldbakken, born in 1973, lives and works in Oslo (Standard, Oslo) Delia Gonzalez, Gavin Russom, born in 1972 and 1974, live and work in New York (Galleria Fonti, Naples) Aneta Grzeszykowska, born in 1974, lives and works in Warsaw (Raster, Warsaw) Anthea Hamilton, born in 1978, lives and works in London (Ibid Projects, London) Dani Jakob, born in 1973, lives and works in Berlin (Vilma Gold, London) Peter Liversidge, born in 1933, lives and works in London (Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh) Ariane Michel, born in 1973, lives and works in Paris (jousse enterprise, Paris) Amy O'Neill, born in 1971, lives and works in Geneva and Brooklyn (Blancpain Art Contemporain, Geneva) Rosalind Nashashibi, born in 1973, lives and works in London (Harris Liebermann, New York) Susan Philipsz, born in 1965, lives and works in Berlin (Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin) Riccardo Previdi, born in 1974, lives and works in Berlin (Francesca Minini, Milan) Bernd Ribbeck, born in 1974, lives and works in Berlin (Galerie Kamm, Berlin) Jimmy Robert, born in 1975, lives and works in Amsterdam (Galerie Diana Stigter, Amsterdam) Ahlam Shibli, born in 1970, lives and works in Haifa (Max Wigram Gallery, London) Naama Tsabar, born in 1982, lives and works in Israel (Dvir Gallery, Tel Aviv) Jiten Thukral, Sumir Tagra, born in 1976 and 1978, live and work in New Delhi (Nature Morte, Bose Pacia, New Delhi, New York) Kerry Tribe, born in 1973, lives and works in Los Angeles (Galerie Maisonneuve, Paris) Ricardo Valentin, born in 1978, lives and works in Lisbon (Galeria Pedro Cera, Lisbon) Jordan Wolfson, born in 1980, lives and works in Berlin and New York (Galleria T293, Naples) Haegue Yang, born in 1971, lives and works in Berlin, Frankfurt am Main, and Seoul (Galerie Barbara Wien, Berlin) Akram Zaatari, born in 1967, lives and works in Beirut (Galerie Sfeir-Semler, Hamburg) Zheng Guogu, born in 1970, lives and works in Yang Jiang, Guangdong Province (Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou) The exhibition architecture designed by the Basel architecture firm of Steinmann & Schmid provides for variable spatial configurations adaptable to the individual artists' projects. It offers an ideal context for the young artists' 26 solo shows. The exhibition platform is complemented by a bookstore, a cafeteria, and the «Art Lobby» discussion forum, where artists, art mediators, and the public can meet and exchange ideas. Art Basel has been committed to promoting young artists for over three decades: «Perspektiven», «Neue Tendenzen», «Young Galleries», and, since 1996, «Art Statements» have offered galleries of contemporary art an annual reduced-rate forum guaranteeing them a high level of attention. That Art Basel has, over the years, become the international yardstick for cutting-edge art production and that it is where kunsthalles and museums go to select artists for their exhibition programs is a tribute to the enormous success of the meanwhile legendary «Art Statements» sector. Apart from the fact that sales are excellent, gallerists and artists know that whoever is allotted one of the coveted encouragement booths will be sure to enjoy the attention of the trade to a degree virtually unmatched anywhere else in the world. Word travels fast here when top curators invite artists to participate in their exhibitions or when works are acquired for distinguished collections or placed in well-known museums and galleries. Mariko Mori, Vanessa Beecroft, William Kentridge, Pierre Huyghe, Elisabeth Peyton, Gregor Schneider, Jorge Pardo, Ugo Rondinone, Kara Walker, Manfred Pernice, Ernesto Neto, João Onofre, Hans Schabus, Ghada Amer, Gary Webb, and Kader Attia are only a few of the artists who made their appearance here before going on to become world-famous artists. Since1999 the Bâloise Insurance Group has supported two outstanding «Statements» every year with the Bâloise Art Prize of CHF 25,000.-- each. The company also purchases works by the award-winning artists and donates them to such important museums as the Kunsthalle Hamburg or the SMAK in Gent.

Max Beckmann in Amsterdam at Van Gogh Museum

Max Beckmann in Amsterdam at Van Gogh Museum artlover208

Carnival, triptych, 1942–43, Max Beckmann, University of Iowa Museum of Art, Iowa City. © c/o Beeldrecht Amsterdam 2007.

AMSTERDAM.- From 6 April through 19 August 2007 the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam will host the exhibition Max Beckmann in Amsterdam, 1937-1947. For the first time, the Amsterdam period of one of Germany’s most notable twentieth-century artists will be examined in depth. The exhibition will show more than 100 paintings and works on paper, drawn from international collections, both public and private. Furthermore the exhibition will include a section on the general situation in Amsterdam during the Second World War. Max Beckmann (1884-1950) is widely regarded as one of the most important artists of the twentieth century. In his use of colour, spatial composition and levels of symbolism Beckmann exerted a major influence on modern art in Germany and beyond. Beckmann himself drew inspiration from the work of the Flemish Primitives and Vincent van Gogh, among others. Above all, it was his daring use of colour that ranked Beckmann alongside Matisse and Picasso as one of the most sensational artists of the first half of the twentieth century. Beckmann succeeded in expressing the mysteries of life like no other painter. He created his own entire lexicon of images, with which he communicated his dreams and fears by means of a highly personal symbolism. The question of the meaning of existence is a dominant presence in his work. Beckmann came to the conclusion that man is not free, but is shackled by earthly chains. He looked on life as a play or a masquerade, in which each person plays their own role. In 1937 Max Beckmann fled the Nazi terror in Germany to settle in Amsterdam in the Netherlands, where he was to live for the next ten years. The immediate cause for his flight was the radio address Hitler gave in the run-up to the Entartete Kunst exhibition, which showed the works of artists the Nazi regime condemned as depraved – including some by Beckmann. Beckmann painted over a third of his entire oeuvre while in the Netherlands. This period may thus justifiably be identified as his most productive. It was here that he produced five of his nine monumental triptychs. These spectacular works of art, comprising a central panel with flanking wings, rank among the icons of modern art. In 1947 Beckmann was given a visa for the United States, where he died after just three years. The exhibition shows masterpieces from this Amsterdam period, including the three impressive triptychs Carnival, The Actors and Perseus. His paintings bear witness to his interest in the world of the cabaret, Dutch landscape and life in Amsterdam. Through his diary, letters, photographs and an impression of his studio, the visitor to the exhibition is given an insight to the life Beckmann lived in Amsterdam. Max Beckmann in Amsterdam 1937-1947 is organised in conjunction with the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich. The exhibition will be on show in Munich from 13 September, 2007 through 16 January 2008. Running concurrently with the exhibition in the Van Gogh Museum, the Bible Museum in Amsterdam will show The Apocalypse, a major series of lithographs by Beckmann. ‘Beckmann walking tour’ - Alongside a visit to the exhibition art lovers can go on a walking tour of 25 venues in Amsterdam where Beckmann lived, worked and garnered inspiration for his paintings. The historical city map In the footsteps of Max Beckmann is on sale in the museum shop.

IMMA Opens Miró and Calder Exhibition

IMMA Opens Miró and Calder Exhibition artlover608

Alexander Calder, Polygons on Triangle, 1963, Sheet metal, bolts and paint, 289.6 (h) x 185.4 x 243.8 cm, Courtesy Calder Foundation.

DUBLIN, IRELAND.- An exhibition of sculptures by two of the giants of 20th-century art – the American sculptor Alexander Calder and the Spanish painter and sculptor Joan Miró – opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday 4 April 2007. The eleven works in Alexander Calder and Joan Miró have been brought together in IMMA’s magnificent 17th-century courtyard in celebration of the long-standing friendship between the two artists, which began in the 1920s and continued up to the time of Calder’s death in 1976. The exhibition opening is sponsored by The Tea Room Restaurant at The Clarence. Unlike some previous presentations of their work, the exhibition does not set out to highlight the formal and conceptual connections between Calder and Miró’s art, concentrating, rather, on the powerful burst of creativity which both artists enjoyed in the later years of their career. Works range from the Calder’s dark, majestic The Tall One, 1968, to Miró’s playful and colourful Personnage (Personage), 1967. One of the other Miró Personnage sculptures in the exhibition, from 1974, has already proved a great favourite with Museum visitors since it was given on loan to IMMA by the Successió Miró in May of last year. Alexander Calder and Joan Miró met in 1928, in Paris where they both had studios. They quickly became good friends seeing each other frequently in France and Spain in the following years, a crucial period in the development of modern art. Their work was first shown together in1932 and, again, in a larger group exhibition the following year. In 1937, Spain ’s Republican government invited both artists to create new works for the Spanish Pavilion at the World Fair in Paris , and later that year they had there first joint exhibition at the Honolulu Academy of Arts. In 1951 the Contemporary Arts Association in Houston presented the first joint post-war exhibition of their work, and in 1955 both received commissions for the new UNESCO headquarters in Paris . In 1971, Calder donated Mercury Fountain, originally created for the 1937 World Fair, to the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona , and the following year Miró wrote a remarkable catalogue text – in the form of an illustrated poem – for an exhibition of Calder’s work in Palma de Mallorca. Calder and Miró’s friendship also had an interesting Irish dimension in that both were also close friends with the distinguished Irish-American art critic and curator James Johnson Sweeney (1900-86), who curated separate retrospectives of Miró and Calder’s work at MoMA in New York in 1941 and 1943 respectively. This association of the artists’ work has continued into the present century with, most notably, the spectacular Calder Miró exhibition in Basel in 2004. Born in Pennsylvania , Alexander Calder (1898 – 1976) was one of the most innovative and influential sculptors of the 20th-century. Calder developed a new method of sculpting by bending and twisting wire – he essentially “drew” three-dimensional figures in space. He is renowned for his striking mobiles, whose suspended, abstract elements move and balance in changing harmony. Calder also made large outdoor sculptures from bolted sheet steel for public buildings and spaces. He is also noted for his book illustrations and stage sets. In 1977 he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States ’ highest civilian honour, by President Gerald Ford. Born in Barcelona , Joan Miró (1893-1983) is widely recognised for his immense contribution to Surrealist and Modern art. His enormously varied body of work, drawn from the realm of memory and imaginative fantasy and created over 75 years, is among the most original of the 20th-century. Miró paintings are instantly recognisable from their distinctive use of bright colours – especially blue, red, yellow, green and black – and their unaffected mixture of childlike innocence and artistic sophistication. Sculpture was a major focus of his work in the 1960s and ‘70s, both painted sculptures and bronzes. He also worked in a wide variety of other media, including etchings, watercolours and collage. The exhibition is curated by Alexander S C Rower, Director of Calder Foundation and a grandson of Alexander Calder, and Enrique Juncosa , Director, IMMA. Alexander Calder and Joan Miró continues until 1 July 2007. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue with a foreword by Enrique Juncosa and texts by Alexander S C Calder, Emilio Fernández Miró, grandson of Joan Miró and administrator of the Miró Estate, and Dr Elizabeth Hutton Turner. The publication will include views of the works installed at IMMA.

Seattle Art Museum Celebrates its Upcoming 75th Anniversary

Seattle Art Museum Celebrates its Upcoming 75th Anniversary artlover408

Edward Hopper, "Chop Suey", oil on canvas, 32 x38 in., 1929. From the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Barney A. Ebsworth.

SEATTLE, WA.- The Seattle Art Museum (SAM) announced an unprecedented series of gifts—the largest in the museum’s history—from prominent museum patrons and collectors. The gifts, which commemorate the museum’s 75th anniversary in 2008 and represent art from across time and cultures, will include nearly 1,000 works from over 40 collections. In a dramatic show of support, entire collections by some of the Northwest’s leading collectors have been committed over time, featuring such landmark works as Constantin Brancusi’s modern masterpiece Bird in Space (1926); Ellsworth Kelly’s Blue, Green, Red II (1965) and Edward Hopper’s iconic oil painting Chop Suey (1929). In addition, donors have supported major purchases for the collection, including Richard Serra’s Wake (2004) at the Olympic Sculpture Park; John Singleton Copley’s portrait of Dr. Silvester Gardiner (ca. 1772), SAM’s first 18th-century American painting; and Inopportune: Stage One (2004), a monumental installation featuring nine automobiles by the Chinese-born contemporary artist Cai Guo-Qiang that will be installed in the museum’s new Brotman Forum. “This is a landmark commitment for SAM and our community,” said Mimi Gates, SAM director. “The private art collections in Seattle have evolved and grown over the last two decades. Great works of art, art of international significance, have been finding a home in Seattle and it is very important to SAM and the community that these collections stay in Seattle for the benefit and enjoyment of our community and beyond.” Among the collections committed to SAM are: • Susan and Jeffrey Brotman Collection, a major international collection with a concentration of contemporary German artists such as Anselm Kiefer and Sigmar Polke; • Jane Lang Davis Collection, a nationally renowned collection of postwar painting, with signature works by major Abstract Expressionists such as Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, and Clifford Still; • Barney A. Ebsworth Collection, the finest collection of early modern American art in private hands which includes works by Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keeffe and Marsden Hartley among others. • Marshall and Helen Hatch Collection of Northwest Modern Art, the premier collection of Northwest masters such as Mark Tobey and Morris Graves; • A group of Afikpo masquerade works field-collected in Nigeria by University of Washington professor emeritus Simon Ottenberg; • Sam and Gladys Rubinstein Collection of early 20th-century European painting including works by Alexei Jawlensky, Robert Delaunay and Frantisek Kupka; • Jon and Mary Shirley Collection, which includes iconic sculptures by Constantin Brancusi and Alberto Giacometti, and particular depth in the work of Alexander Calder and Chuck Close; • Griffith and Patricia Way Collection of Modern Japanese Painting, one of the finest collections of Nihonga painting in the United States; • Virginia and Bagley Wright Collection, the most extensive collection of modern and contemporary art in the Northwest. Assembled over the last 50 years, their collection includes works by artists such as Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Kiki Smith, Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Ed Ruscha, John Chamberlain and Helen Frankenthaler.

Pablo Palazuelo at The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Pablo Palazuelo at The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao artlover708

Pablo Palazuelo, Omphale II , 1962, Oil on canvas, 277 x 207 cm. Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul. Photo : Claude Germain.

BILBAO, SPAIN.- The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao presents one of the most complete retrospectives to date of the work of Pablo Palazuelo (Madrid, 1915), a key figure in Spanish art of the second half of the 20th century who, sadly, has yet to enjoy the kind of international recognition his oeuvre deserves. Organized by the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) and co-produced with the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the exhibition takes up the entire third floor of the Museum. On show are some 350 works, many of which the general public has never seen, as they come from private collections or the archive of the artist and his family. Also included are a number of artworks from the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Collection. Unlike previous anthologies of Palazuelo’s work, which were limited to presenting his artistic development chronologically, Palazuelo: Work Process looks at the most neglected aspects of his oeuvre, displaying gouaches, paintings, sculptures and a number of sketches and drawings. Together, the works provide a sort of personal rulebook for his creative processes, which he considered to be even more important than the finished artwork. Recent art historiography has tended to class Palazuelo’s work as a kind of idealist abstraction, with close links to currents of spirituality and a holy conception of the artist and his work. A major influence in his career was his twenty-year sojourn in Paris, where he became interested in esotericism, the Cabbala and forms of knowledge not associated with Western thought. References to art history are also clear in his work, particularly the notion of line derived from the work of Paul Klee (a complete revelation for Palazuelo), Russian Constructivism as practiced by Gabo and Pevsner, and the early work of Kandinsky and Mondrian. But his interest in scientific thought, in math, music and the physical laws of nature, was every bit as important—if not more so—to his career. Indeed, both exhibition curators, MACBA director Manuel J. Borja-Villel and Teresa Grandas, believe that such interests “helped him develop a very personal mode of abstraction based on the analysis of natural forms and the use of geometry, linked to a rational, ‘preformative’ process.” This explains why the exhibition is not the traditional kind of retrospective giving a chronological overview of the different stages of his career. Instead, it focuses on works that illustrate more clearly the artist’s search for a type of abstraction closer to notions of process, performance or relation. This is particularly true of his production from the 1950s and 60s, which in this exhibition is given a more extensive outing than is usually the case. Theatricality in the work of Palazuelo - In his famous 1967 essay Art and Objecthood, Michael Fried coined the concept of “theatricality”, intended as a criticism of certain practices, in particular Minimalism, which, from the viewpoint of modern visuality, implied the disappearance of the autonomous artwork and its confusion with the ordinary. In other words, according to this notion of theater, the meaning and value of a work is not an intrinsic truth to be revealed, but depends more on the exchange occurring between the viewer and the work in its public setting and the discursive structures around it. The viewer thus becomes an interpreter of the work, an actor in a play that is updated through his experience and which therefore is caught in a potential, open state quite the contrary to what is understood by modern autonomy. Rather than using an established idea or an unambiguously uniform figure as the platform for his works, Palazuelo concentrates on the relationships established between forms. In his work, the modes of visuality proper to modern abstraction coincide with performative, theatrical working methods more akin to Fried’s notion of theatricality as formulated in his critique of Minimalism. The unending quest for new forms - So Palazuelo’s forms are open, and it is up to the spectator to complete them. His forms generate transformations restlessly, forever fuelling dialogues that act on the relational spaces emerging between them. Imagination plays a major role as an activator of hidden reality; the real world is, in turn, an organ of knowledge. The works selected for this exhibition, produced by Palazuelo in different stages over a period of more than fifty years (1949–2005), highlight the creative metamorphosis arising from this unceasing quest for form. Throughout his career, forms undergo continual transformation, appearing, disappearing and surfacing again in different guises, gradually coalescing into “families”(his term for the groups of works with clear biomorphic relationships to each other). This evolution of forms is the result of an analysis of structure and of the needs and sensations they produce in him. “In a way, making geometric forms fulfils a much deeper need to discover what lies behind things, the deep structure”, said Palazuelo in a monologue for television filmed in 1996. For this reason, the exhibition does not seek to underscore the much-fêted mystical or esoteric facet of Palazuelo’s work. What it concentrates on instead is its “definitively theatrical” side, distinguished from classical abstraction in its renunciation of autonomy of forms in favor of the tension between them, of the process and transformation they undergo. Which is why Palazuelo’s formal explorations break with modernist tenets, except for the fact that, unlike the object literalness of Minimalism, the literality in his work is the result of an internal, reflective process. So it is hardly surprising that, after the research done to organize the exhibition, Manuel J. Borja-Villel should refer to Palazuelo as a solo artist, the lonely “bachelor” of Duchamp’s machinery of desire, who seeks to reaffirm his idiosyncrasy in Spanish—and even French—art circles. Didactic approach to the exhibition - To aid visitors’ understanding of the life and work of Pablo Palazuelo, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao has paid particular attention to the Didaktika section accompanying the exhibition. Together with an introduction to his life, Didaktika offers a series of key concepts including quotes from Palazuelo himself, notes from catalogues and essays on the artist and his oeuvre, plus definitions supplied by theorists and scholars of his work, all of which facilitate our understanding of the show. Didaktika also gives an insight into the artist’s creative process by screening two documentaries produced by Spanish public television corporation RTVE in 1977 and 1996, scripted and directed by journalist Paloma Chamorro. Several pieces are also played to give listeners an idea of the musicality that pervades the work of Palazuelo.

Museum voor Moderne Kunst Presents Bernardí Roig

Museum voor Moderne Kunst Presents Bernardí Roig artlover608

Bernardí Roig, Leidy B.

OSTENDE, BELGIUM.- PMMK, Museum voor Moderne Kunst presents Bernardí Roig – The Light Exercises Series 2000 – 2005, on view through June 3, 2007. This exhibition, commissioned by Pilar Ribal, brings together a selection of 33 of the artist’s pieces, created between 2000 and 2005, in which the focus is on the use of neon light as an expressive medium. Mainly based on the symbolism of light as well as the idea of blindness as a metaphor for human lack of communication, the works on show here byBernardí Roig, entitled “The Light-Exercises Series”, represent the culmination of a path of exploration that Roig started on almost ten years ago. As an imaginary world that feeds on our literary, artistic and cinematographic obsession, among others, Bernardí Roig’s recent work reflects upon our modern day isolation, on "blindness" and “invisibility" as a metaphor for the loss of stability affecting the individual today, a person who has been deprived of the traditional guarantees with which he can anchor his or her certainty. Mutilated, battered bodies which have been blinded, cut off and turned upside-down by a nameless force of evil parade before us, the consummate expression of malaise and perverse fascination with the image. In this, the most recent of Bernardí Roig’s series of works, light becomes an element that prevents us from seeing, once and for all obscuring our vision. And yet at the same time, this obscured vision is, by extension, the dismantling and disappearance of all that is symbolic, whose fundamental underlying element is desire. The light that these pieces emit is not one that illuminates - quite the reverse in fact. It is a light that stops us from seeing them, one whose only function is to add to the opacity of our blindness. It achieves this, not through the absence of sight, but by creating the possibility to represent that intangible element that has been removed from sight which permits us to look deeper. This deeper vision is the bastion of resistance to the hyper-visibility which currently seems to be the definitive method by which the invaluable act of seeing is being exterminated. If a rejection of all that is real, or the desire to see it extended, typify the “double phantasmagoria” produced by the human hand, then Bernardí Roig’s doubles must bear the additional burden of idiocy and madness. As Clément Rosset (1) says, “it is the drunkards who are renowned for seeing double, whilst all human beings have two eyes, and therefore, two images of reality which are normally superimposed, one upon the other...” These are two versions of reality which are also superimposed in Bernardí Roig's measured, lucid and insightful way of seeing. A vision which has undoubtedly been nourished by his literary passion and lust for all things visual in which he manages to combine the tradition and symbolism of great art with an awareness that is at the cutting edge of all that is contemporary. Roig’s sculptures, drawings and videos reflect a state of infinite tension between a world in the process of demolition and its ever ephemeral doppelganger which resides in our own spirit.

MiArt 2007 - International Modern and Contemporary Art Fair

MiArt 2007 - International Modern and Contemporary Art Fair artlover508

Davide Nido, I coriandoli nell'eclissi lunare, 2007, colle su tela, cm 100 x 100.

MILAN, ITALY.- MiArt 2007, the twelfth edition of Milan's International Modern and Contemporary Art Fair, offers an exhaustive art panorama through its different sections, which span the modern to the most innovative contemporary artworks. Through their participating galleries and curatorial projects, the sections present Italian and international art from the historic avant-garde to the latest experimental art, attracting collectors with diverse interests and backgrounds. Special attention has been given to the Anteprima section, which this year is more experimental than ever. Paola Capata, Alessandro De March and Federico Luger, the three members of the Selection Committee with the job of defining the philosophy of the section, have reserved the space for recently – including very recently – established galleries involved in the promotion of young artists who work in different media. In selecting the galleries, preference was given to those that establish almost exclusive relationships with their artists, forming a pathway for mutual growth and work. These are galleries that are on the edge, almost unknowns. For some this will be the first time they’ve participated in an art fair. And for this first, they’ve chosen Milan and MiArt, understanding the potential of the city and its unusual and refined slant on art collecting. It’s the intention of the curators that the galleries form an ongoing exchange with the curatorial projects that make up MiArt 2007 while, to a different degree, forming a dialogue with themselves Through a careful selection of galleries and artists, Arcipelago Olanda (The Netherlands archipelago), held as a part of the Anteprima section, offers a cross-section view of the Dutch art scene with original works and installations created specifically for the exhibition. The Video and Film Lounge project, curated by Maria Rosa Sossai in collaboration with Ian White and Christian Merhliot, and presented in partnership with the Province of Milan, features a series of video screenings. It analyzes one of the reasons for the revival of this contemporary creative practice, that is, the use of film, along with the desire to rewrite the rules of the film industry. In attesa di giudizio (Awaiting judgment), conceived by Milovan Farronato, Francesca Pasini and Michele Robecchi, will present the work of nine up-and-coming Italian artists. The project, made possible through a partnership with IULM University and the Departments of Culture of the Region and Commune governments of Milan, reaffirms the commitment to promote the most experimental expressions of contemporary art, offering the selected artists the chance to present their works to the market and collecting public. Il Premio Artegiovane: Milano e Torino incontrano… l’Arte 2006 (The Artegiovane art award: Milan and Turin meet… art 2006) is, on the other hand, a space conceived as an installation – a genuine antique fruit orchard, inspired by the work Verdecuratoda by Ettore Favini, joint-winner, with Massimo Grimaldi, of the second edition of the award. It is presented with the backing of the Milan Chamber of Commerce. Within the event, an Art Café will be a hive of activity with meetings organized by journalists and the Artegiovane association. The last curatorial project held as a part of Anteprima is Indicativo presente (Present indicative), an exhibition conceived by Luca Beatrice, Alessandro Riva and Maurizio Sciaccaluga that, again through the works of nine young artists, sets out to offer an alternative artistic vision. This project is also the product of the partnership with IULM University and the Departments of Culture of the Region and Commune governments of Milan. The curators have selected promising artists who focus on painting techniques and drawing. They come from diverse backgrounds but work with enormous technical skill and an in-depth knowledge of the language used. The section reserved for galleries with historic works boasts the participation of the prestigious Basel-based Foundation Beyeler, which marks its first appearance at an art fair outside of Switzerland. The foundation, which in 2007 is celebrating its tenth anniversary with the largest Edvuard Munch retrospective ever presented outside Norway, is featuring two important works from its collection at MiArt: A mixed media on card by Christo, executed in 1998 on the occasion of an exhibition dedicated to him, and Océanie, la mer, a large decoupage on canvas by Henri Matisse. Also staged as a part of the Modern section, Omaggio a Mercedes Garberi (Homage to Mercedes Garberi) is a major exhibition curated by Luigi Sansone. It pays tribute to a figure who for more than twenty years directed the group of museums that make up Milan's Civiche Raccolte d’Arte (Civic art collections), contributing to this heritage in part through acquisitions of works by emerging artists. Representing numerous art movements from the second half of the 20th century, the selection of works on display are the property of Civiche Raccolte.

BA-CA Kunstforum Presents Eros in Modern Art

BA-CA Kunstforum Presents Eros in Modern Art artlover908

Pierre Bonnard, Toilettenzimmer mit rosafarbenem Kanapee, 1908, Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brüssel. © VBK, Wien, 2007.

VIENNA.- BA-CA Kunstforum presents Eros in Modern Art, on view through July 22, 2007. The encounter with all forms and varieties of Eros – love, passion and lust, desire, union and secret longings – has always been and still is one of the basic impulses for artistic inspiration. The BA-CA Kunstforum is now addressing this theme with an exciting exhibition. More than 200 works by prominent artists from the late nineteenth century until the present day give striking and immediate expression to the fascination exercised on artists by the theme of eroticism. But the exhibition is not confined solely to the subject of the human body and portrayal of the act of love. The concept far more involves works that address the erotic sphere of temptation and union, desire and fantasy, dream and the subconscious, in a multitude of forms. The show illustrates the artists’ fascination for Eros as the dynamic principle that keeps the world in motion – and therefore art as well; a principle that is just as much responsible for life as it is inevitably associated with death. It is a fitting vehicle for the artists who have constantly faced the challenge of showing something in Eros that in its totality can only be grasped by allusion, that throws up questions for which there are no universal answers – such as the idea deriving from the nineteenth century that the “origin of the world” can be found in the teeming womb of woman. Is this idea born of a typical “male” point of view? Is there a specifically female view of Eros? How does the relationship between art and pornography present itself from the modern perspective? And – perhaps most difficult to answer: why is art so evidently connected to Eros? Why – to quote Picasso – is art “never chaste”. The complexity of the theme is reflected in the key works of the exhibition. On the one hand, the leitmotif of Eros enables us to throw a new and unconventional light on modern art. Meanwhile, the show traces a development in depicting eroticism ranging from nude painting that frees itself more and more from conventions to the works that put eroticism on show not so much through the nude body as germinate it in the mind of the beholder. The exhibits range from French interpretations oriented on Paul Cézanne and Edouard Manet, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec und Auguste Renoir to the erotic motifs of Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele in Austria; from the works of the Classical Modern movement including Pablo Picasso, Kees van Dongen and Joan Miró to the Surrealist masterpieces of Max Ernst, Man Ray and Salvador Dalí. Rounding off the exhibition are the rich variations of art inspired by eroticism after 1945 – the pop art of a Tom Wesselmann, the objects of a Louise Bourgeois and the monumentalising of flesh in the paintings of Lucien Freud and Francis Bacon.