Artlover in Antibes

Modigiliani Portrait

2011-05-19T15:32:00.002+02:00

Modigiliani Portrait to Feature in Bonhams Impressionist & Modern Art Auction artlover000008888888778


Amedeo Modigliani. Portrait de femme. Estimate: £1.5-2.5 million. Photo: Bonhams.
LONDON.- Bonhams Impressionist & Modern Art auction on Tuesday 21st June will include an exciting selection of works by artists including Boudin, Modigliani, Chagall, Picasso, Renoir and Miro. The current highlight of the sale is Portrait de Femme by the Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani which was painted circa 1917-1918. Modigliani is renowned for his portraits of women, and this is a fine example which comes to the market from the Grace Vogel Aldworth Trust. It is estimated to fetch £1.5-2.5 million. Nu, Etude pour ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’ (1907) by Pablo Picasso is also expected to generate a lot of interest. The watercolour and gouache study is one of a number of works that Picasso created in preparation for his finished masterpiece, and is recognisable as the figure on the lower right of the final composition. The study manages to communicate the sense of violent energy that Picasso's final picture stands for, and reflects the influence of African tribal art on his work. It is estimated to fetch £300,000-500,000. Other Picasso works in the sale include Tête de matador (£150,000-200,000), Femme nue assise (£165,000-175,000) and Personnages (£20,000-30,000). A further highlight of the sale is L'Écuyère bleu au coq rouge by Marc Chagall. This watercolour and bodycolour work on paper displays the dream like and playful qualities prevalent in the artist’s work and is expected to sell for £60,000-80,000. With their bright colours and sunny scenes, Carlos Nadal’s (1917-1998) works often prove popular at auction. He has been described as ‘the last wild expressionist of Spain’ and the influence of the Fauvist painters is evident in his paintings. Fenetre Ouverte has attracted a pre-sale estimate of £20,000-30,000. Another Spanish artist Oscar Dominguez (1906-1958), was influenced by Salvador Dali in his early works, but he later developed his own Surrealist style and experimented with automatism and decalcomania. Paisaje Cósmico or Cosmic Landscape, fuses the disparate elements of Dominguez’s personality and the concerns of the wider Surrealist group into one dreamscape. The realistic draughtsmanship of flowing lava pays heed to the volcanic eruptions and landslides that were part of the landscape of Dominguez’s homeland in the Canary Islands, yet the composition itself is rich in the spirit of Surrealist automatism. The painting was initially owned by Eduardo Westerdahl, the main patron of the small Surrealist movement in the Canary Islands, and it is estimated to fetch £100,000-150,000. Deborah Allan, of Bonhams Impressionist and Modern Art Department comments, “We are delighted to be offering a selection of important Impressionist and Modern art works for sale in our forthcoming 21st June sale, and expect there to be a lot of interest from around the globe.”

A French Kitten in Summer 2011 on the Cote d'Azur

2011-05-18T10:53:00.000+02:00

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Sherrardswood_The Best Of DAYS_1965 to 1968_Pt_2

2011-01-13T15:06:00.000+01:00

Exhibition of Works by Painter Amedeo Modigliani Opens at the Municipal House in Prague

2010-12-10T11:07:00.001+01:00

Exhibition of Works by Painter Amedeo Modigliani Opens at the Municipal House in Prague artlover6644558888888


A visitor walks past a painting of Italian painter and sculptor Amedeo Modigliani as he visits the Modigliani exhibition in Prague, Czech Republic, 09 December 2010. Unique exhibition of the works of the world-renowned early 20th-century Italian painter and sculptor Amedeo Modigliani is open from 09 December 2010 to 28 February 2011 at the elegant venue of the Municipal House in Prague. EPA/FILIP SINGER.
PRAGUE.- The Municipal House opens a unique exhibition of the works of the world-renowned early 20th-century Italian painter and sculptor Amedeo Modigliani (1884–1920), which will run from December 9 to February 28, 2011 at the elegant venue of the Municipal House in Prague. The organisers chose the artist’s own magically sounding name as the exhibition’s title. The exhibition aims to acquaint the public not just with Modigliani’s work, but also with the man himself and his life. To complement the works of Amedeo Modigliani the exhibition will also show paintings by Modigliani’s friends and peers, such as Pablo Picasso, Max Jacob, and Gino Romiti, and the last curatorial section of the exhibition will be a parallel display of the work of Amedeo Modigliani and the Czech artist František Kupka (1871-1957), whose paintings will be part of the Amedeo Modigliani exhibition. The curator of the exhibition is Ms Serena Baccaglini, whose name has already been behind numerous important projects. She organised eight exhibitions about Picasso, the special collection Bosè/Dominguin, and an exhibition about Salvador Dalì. The AMEDEO MODIGLIANI exhibition will contain works on loan from public and private collections around the world, for instance, from the Israeli Museum in Jerusalem, the Estorick Collection in London, and from private collections in Germany, France and America. Thanks to cooperation with the Modigliani Institut Archives Légales in Rome original documents will be shown that illustrate the life of Amedeo Modigliani in the early 20th century during the wonderful years of the birth of contemporary art. The exhibition presents Modigliani as an Italian artist, but it does not overlook that fact that in the early 20th century he was also an important figure of the ‘Paris school’. The exhibition will be showing Modigliani’s paintings, but also many of his studies and drawings, and thus it constitutes an important contribution to our understanding of Modigliani’s works as a whole. As will all geniuses, especially in the field of drawing, they reveal to us the beauty of his style and allow us to witness the first signs of the origin of an idea. The exhibition will also present works by the famous Czech artist František Kupka. Serena Baccaglini came up with the new idea of showing side by side the works of these two artists, who exhibited together in 1912 as part of the Autumn Salon in Paris. Modigliani and Kupka were two great innovators in art, with similar life paths and bringing them together again, it is a new, magical, and exciting occasion. At the exhibition in 1912 Modigliani showed his sculptures, while Kupka presented his paintings Amorpha, Fugue in Two Colours and Warm Chromatics which can be regarded as the first real abstract works in history. Modigliani and Kupka are thus meeting up again for the first time in Prague, more than a century later. The exhibition will also show some paintings by friends of Modigliani, with whom the artist lived through the inspirational period of the artistic avant-garde in Paris in the years before the First World War. Thus, we will be looking into the background of the time when modern art was born. Thematically the exhibition will focus also on the artistic relationship between Modigliani and Jeanne and on questions that have left the figure of Modigliani shrouded in mystery. Jeanne Hébuterne, the love of the artist’s life, was the model for his best work. Those who love Modigliani will certainly recall his nudes and portraits with the typically elongated faces, almond eyes, long, sharp noses, and melancholy expressions. Unfortunately, a few days before Modigliani and Jeanne were to marry the artist died of tuberculosis at the age of just 36. Jeanne Hébuterne followed him soon after, as, unable to bear the loss of her great love, she jumped from the window of her parents’ home. It is almost extraordinary that an exhibition of the work of this major artist has never taken place in the Czech Republic. Similar exhibitions, for instance, have been held recently in Milan, Madrid, and Bonn. Not long ago the National Gallery had two of the artist’s works on loan. The first major exhibition of Modigliani’s more important work to take place in Prague is thus only happening now. The exhibition’s organiser, the director of Vernon Gallery, Monika Burian Jourdan, says of the exhibition’s significance: ‘I am only coming to realise the importance of the exhibition and its impact in a historical perspective just now, in the course of its preparation. For me Modigliani signifies elegance, mystery, success, and human tragedy. Amedeo Modigliani’s works possess an Italian charm that in a certain sense we can also feel from Prague architecture...’ The curator’s gusto and enthusiasm for the life and work of Amedeo Modigliani is enormous, and her energy and professional experience and ability promise art lovers a great exhibition experience. On the exhibition Ms Baccaglini adds: ‘A great passion for Modigliani and Prague was a tremendous incentive to me to obtain special works that would allow us to encounter the great artist as a genius and as a man."

Colombian Fernando Botero's Matadors, Chile's Matta Top Latin American Auction at Christie's

2010-11-20T11:33:00.001+01:00

Colombian Fernando Botero's Matadors, Chile's Matta Top Latin American Auction at Christie's artlover66554888888 "Family Scene," by Colombian artist Fernando Botero


Colombian artist Fernando Botero's 2002 bronze sculpture, "Seated Woman," is pictured in outside Christie's in this undated handout photograph released on November 18, 2010. The piece drew $842,500 at Christie's Latin American art auction in New York on Wednesday evening. REUTERS/Christies Limited. By: Walker Simon
NEW YORK (REUTERS).- A portrait of an infant matador and his bullfighting elders, painted by Colombian Fernando Botero, topped Christie's Latin American art sale, which also set auction records for postwar Brazilian, Colombian, Mexican and Argentine artists. Botero's 1985 "Family Scene" of bullfighters fetched $1.7 million, the top lot of an $18.65 million sale on Wednesday evening, which also underscored strong demand for Chile's Matta, whose work bridges abstraction and surrealism. Voluminous Boteros sold well. The corpulent bullfighters in "Family Scene" feature matadors in their finery, including a crawling toddler wearing a red tie and white stockings. Botero's bronze "Seated Woman" sculpture sold for $842,500. Matta's 1956 "S'Enroseer" and his 1942 "Untitled" also ranked as top lots, respectively at $866,500 and $842,500. Matta taught budding U.S. abstract artists in New York, such as Robert Motherwell and Jackson Pollock. Typical of his surrealist, abstract blend is the 1942 "Untitled," inspired by sprouting Mexican volcano Paracutin. It mixes dropped pigment with strokes of liquid color, centered on a fury of fiery reds, pea-like greens and sunbeam yellows. Brazilian Adriana Varejao's "Paisagem Canibal" (Cannibal Landscape) set an auction record at $602,500. Argentine Julio Le Parc's flickering early 1960s "Seuil de Perception, Continuel-lumiere-Mobile" set a record at $506,500. It consists of wood, metal, nylon strings and light bulbs. Brazilian Helio Oiticica's "Mataesquema (Dois Brancos) fetched $362,500. Colombian Alpio Jaramillo's blend of Cubism and social realism, "9 de abril," paints the fury and slaughter of the 1948 urban riots which convulsed Bogota after the assassination of a progressive presidential candidate. The painting's sale for $110,500 marked the first time Jaramillo's work was brought to international auction. Mexican Julio Galan's oil, ribbon and found objects on canvas, his 1992 "Mis Amigos Secretos" (My Secret Friends), set a record at $98,500.

2010-11-03T11:36:00.000+01:00

A New Auction Record for Amedeo Modigliani at Sotheby's Evening Sale in New York

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A Sotheby's employee discusses the merits of the painting "La Belle Romaine" by Amedeo Modigliani during a preview of Sotheby's Impressionist & Modern Art auction in New York. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson.

NEW YORK, NY.- Sotheby's Evening Sale of Impressionist and Modern Art is currently underway in New York and a number of exceptional prices have already been achieved:

· A new auction record for Amedeo Modigliani was set tonight when the artist’s iconic Nu assis sur un divan (La Belle Romaine) sold for a remarkable $68,962,500. Five different bidders competed for the stunning nude, driving the price well past the more than $40 million* that had been expected. La Belle Romaine is from Modigliani’s most important series of nudes, all painted circa 1917.

Other highlights thus far included two works sold tonight to benefit YoungArts, the core program of the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts (NFAA): Le Bassin aux Nymphéas, a spectacular canvas from Claude Monet’s iconic water lilies series which sold for $24,722,500 and Amedeo Modigliani’s Jeanne Hébuterne (au chapeau), one of the artist’s first major portraits of the muse that dominated his art in the final years of his life which brought $19,122,500.

Founded in 1981, YoungArts is the only national program that recognizes artistic excellence in 17- and 18-year olds by providing them with life-changing experiences that inspire their pursuit of the arts. YoungArts provides more than $500,000 in grants annually to support artistic endeavors and studies for these aspiring artists, and ensures that they will be exposed to mentors and tools that will lead them on a pathway to a serious career in the arts or prepare them for schools like Harvard, Juilliard, Carnegie Mellon or many others.

Amedeo Modigliani

Frank Gehry Presents Luma: Parc des Ateliers Project at Venice Architecture Biennale

2010-08-27T12:02:00.000+02:00

Frank Gehry Presents Luma: Parc des Ateliers Project at Venice Architecture Biennale

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US-Canadian architect Frank Gehry presents Luma, Parc des Ateliers project for Arles, France, at a preview of Venice Architecture Biennale in Venice, Italy, 25 August 2010. EPA/ANDREA MEROLA .

VENICE.- The Parc des Ateliers in Arles is a model and a master plan for a new type of cultural utopia. Imagined, invented and designed as the ultimate cultural destination by artists, architects, art professionals and intellectuals, in accordance with local inhabitants who have an intimate knowledge of the town of Arles, it is an open campus for creative production, display, study and preservation. Photography and the moving image are its central force and innovative research and exchange are its ongoing mission. Aligned with the aims of the LUMA Foundation, its founding body, the Parc des Ateliers unites culture, education and the environment, and encourages a fruitful dialogue between disciplines and visions rich in contrast as vital elements of a forward-looking society. Located in the heart of the city of Arles and surrounded by the unique environment of the Camargue, it acts as a bridge between the industrial heritage and the UNESCO-protected historical core of this multifaceted city. It also recreates the public park that was once the meeting place of every layer of its population, and thus becomes a project for and with the people of Arles. The master plan was created in 2008; the estimated completion of the project is 2011.

The Regional Council of Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur (PACA) and the city of Arles initiated a study for the economic and urban development of the area of the former SNCF railway garage, located in the very center of Arles. The final decision was to establish a cultural landmark. The LUMA Foundation – a non-profit, Swiss-based foundation, created in 2004 by art collector and philanthropist Maja Hoffmann, specializing in projects combining the environment, education, and culture – took the cultural vocation given to the site by the City and the Region one bold step further.

Joining this creative initiative are Actes Sud publishers and Les Rencontres d’Arles and with the initial observations of the ABF (Architecte des Bâtiments de France) and input from the ENSP (École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie), together they have contributed to the design of a visionary master plan for the area. The new regeneration project combines a vast cultural campus which offers exhibition and archive space, with an office and service building for Les Rencontres d’Arles, the publishing house Actes Sud, the school of photography ENSP, a cinema, commercial and residential areas and a hotel complex, and with the hope of adding over time a new train station, and a memorial museum for the railway workers. The building project will be set in a landscaped public garden.

The LUMA Foundation recruited Los Angeles-based visionary architect Frank Gehry, and Gehry Partners, LLP to create a landmark building to house the Foundation, and to create the master plan of the site. French real-estate giants Nexity are providing their expertise in terms of the commercial development and how it relates to the site planning.

A snapshot of this work-in-process can be seenat the Venice Biennale of Architecture and at the festival des Rencontres d’Arles with an exhibition of Frank Gehry and Gehry Partners, LLP’s models of the Parc des Ateliers

Stunning Nudes by Photographer Rankin at Annroy Gallery, London

2010-08-02T11:00:00.001+02:00

Stunning Nudes by Photographer Rankin at Annroy Gallery, London

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Lily Cole © Rankin Photography.

LONDON.- Rankin blurs the boundaries of fashion, photography and fine art in Painting Pretty Pictures, a collection of painterly studies of feminine beauty. Using digital retouching as a tool for artistic effect, stunning nudes of some of the world’s top models, including Yasmin Le Bon, Heidi Klum and Lily Cole, are transformed into apparent oil paintings.

Always keen to explore the limits of his chosen medium, Rankin reframes the debate surrounding the use of digital image manipulation, creating a new hyperreal aesthetic that merges fantasy and reality. With Gerhard Richter amongst his inspirations, Rankin departs from his trademark style, creating images which seem almost classical through the use of the latest imaging technologies.

Painting Pretty Pictures will run from 30th July – 29th August at Annroy Gallery, Rankin’s own Kentish Town gallery space.

Synonymous with dynamic and intimate portraiture, the photographer Rankin has shot everyone from royalty to refugees. His powerful images are part of contemporary iconography, and mix a cross section of his own personal interests with commercial campaigns, from Nike to Women’s Aid. His work is regularly exhibited in galleries around the world from Sao Paolo to Moscow, London to LA.

Rankin first came to prominence when he co-founded style bible Dazed & Confused with Jefferson Hack. One of the most important magazines of the 90’s, it established its stylists in the fashion elite, broke some of today’s top designers and nurtured the budding careers of a generation of creative photographers.

Earning a reputation for creative portraiture and a talent for capturing the character and spirit of his subjects, Rankin quickly became a formidable force in photography, shooting Brit-pop bands including Pulp and Blur and darlings of pop such as Kylie and Madonna. Rankin’s career continued to blossom and covers for German Vogue, Harpers Bazaar, Arena and GQ quickly followed.

His body of work includes some of the most influential politicians, popular musicians, revered artists and celebrated models since the early 90’s. However, Rankin also continues to take on projects that feature ordinary people, often questioning established notions of beauty, causing controversy and igniting debates along the way. Most recently he travelled to Johannesburg with the BBC to film South Africa in Pictures, a documentary in which he traced the country’s photographic history.

Rankin is affiliated with a number of charities and has created hardhitting campaigns for Women’s Aid and Oxfam to name but a few.

A number of books of Rankin’s work have been published, including a retrospective of his work Visually Hungry, a collection of his most recognisable portraits Celebritation, a book of Rankin’s images of his model wife Tuuli Tuulitastic, Alex Box, a collaboration with the avantgarde make-up artist and a book to accompany the BBC documentary, RANKINJOZI.

Between 2004 and April 2010, Rankin has co-directed music videos, commercials and feature films with Chris Cottam. This included their debut film The Lives of Saints, penned by Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas writer Tony Grisoni, which enjoyed success on the festival circuit and won the grand jury prize at the Salento International Film Festival. Rankin now continues to film commercial and personal projects independently.

Rankin lives in London with his wife Tuuli and his son Lyle.

IVAM Opens First Exhibition in Europe by Chinese Artist Wang Xieda

2010-07-28T10:10:00.001+02:00

IVAM Opens First Exhibition in Europe by Chinese Artist Wang Xieda

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Chinese artist Wang Xieda poses between his sculptures 'Sages's Saying 013' (L) and 'Sages's Saying 058' (R) at an exhibition on his work organized by the Valencian Institute of Modern Art (IVAM) in Valencia, Spain, 27 July 2010. The exhibition, that was inaugurated today and can be seen until 29 August, shows 12 sculptures and 14 drawings of the Chinese artist for the first time in Europe. EPA/MANUEL BRUQUE.

VALENCIA.- The exhibition presents for the first time in a European museum this artist's work brings together 12 sculptures and 14 drawings Xieda Wang's calligraphy, Chinese artist who combines in his works the influence of calligraphy in the Eastern tradition and contemporary currents of Western art .

This is the first exhibition of the Chinese artist Wang Xieda in an European museum. It consists of 14 drawings and 12 sculptures that shows his artistic production. This production allows us to appreciate the expressiveness of the artist who moves away from figurative tradition and from the limits of the traditional artistic structures. His work conceptually goes into new sculptural techniques. Wang Xieda's work combines classical techniques using ink and paper from the traditional calligraphic arts with an sculptural abstraction reminiscent of western avant-garde.

The catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition shows the exhibited works and publishes texts about the artist written by Consuelo Císcar, the IVAM's director, by the director of the Z-Art, Centre of Shanghai, Gong Yunbiao and by the exhibition's curator Li Xu. It also includes a chronological biography of the artist.

Wang Xieda (Liaoning, China 1968) is an atypical sculptor who exhibits his drawings and large works made with rice paper and charcoal on canvas. His bronze moulds can remind western spectators of the attenuated and "drawn" forms in the space of Giacometti and David Smith. However, Wang Xieda's sculpture derives, as it is said, from Wang Xizhi, the calligraphic master of the fourth century. The transformation of the two-dimensional works into three-dimensional ones is analogue to the use of his own drawings that have 1.2 meters height. Those works are the starting point of his smaller sculptures: abstract representation of bulls, birds and human figures. They are also a vivid reminder of the fact that the drawings can provide a closer and more intimate perspective of the artist's thoughts and sometimes, it can be an opportunity to approach the unconsciousness.

In the last twenty years, Wang Xieda, who lives and works in Shanghai, has been devoted to the study of text and calligraphy. The artist isn't just an admirer of the ancient China, but an admirer of all the ancient civilizations of the world. After years of studying, he realized that many of the pictograms of the first human civilizations were similar. Pictograms were the common way to represent the nature synthesizing the abstract forms in simple metaphors. Lines are the communication language and the more basic and effective way of dissemination taking into account all the visual forms. Chinese characters, a kind of hieroglyphics' extension used during the human civilization, are still used today. Former Chinese characters began crystallizing during the Banpo phase 6000 years ago. The first textual system totally completed appeared in the Chinese history during the Shang Dinasty in the fourteenth century BC. Like in some other ancient civilizations, the original characters were based on representations of natural images. That leads to a theory about the traditional Chinese art which ensures that painting and calligraphy have the same origin.

Wang Xieda's recent works show an old style and an elegant pace, reminiscent of the aesthetic origins of the ancient civilizations. His sculptures and paintings create concise and unforeseeable moulds by using simple lines. Wang explores an abstract and purely aesthetic feeling through these visual forms, as for example with primitive totems and the first calligraphic symbols. He perfectly controls the harmony of the dimensions while creating a suitable space. A lot of spectators fall in love with Xieda's works due to the fact that spectators and author simultaneously see the eternal beauty of concision.

In contrast to the changes of the twenty-first century, cultural and national traditions should find a new and contemporary language in order not to get out of time regarding the aesthetic expressions. This is the only way for younger people to study and inherit the traditions voluntarily. As an artist, Wang Xieda has looked for a common artistic and human experience. His efforts aren't intended to repeat the past but to use the simplicity and extent of the ancient art in order to recreate it. What makes his art contemporary and timeless is the clear interpretation of the ancient language with the current syntax that he uses to express his experiences and feelings. We can see a natural and serene confidence in Wang Xieda's works even in difficult and variable environments, exemplified by his competent expression of the national aesthetic. This exhibition that takes place at the IVAM is the first individual exhibition of Wang Xieda out of his country. We hope that the work will be appreciated and understood by western spectators.

Pera Museum Welcomes Colombian Artist Fernando Botero's First Encounter with Istanbul

2010-05-10T11:17:00.001+02:00

Pera Museum Welcomes Colombian Artist Fernando Botero's First Encounter with Istanbul

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Colombian artist Fernando Botero poses in front of his paintings "La Fornarina, After Raphael" (L) and "After Velazquez" at the Pera Museum in Istanbul, during a preview one day before the opening of his first exhibition in Turkey. REUTERS/Murad Sezer

Colombian artist Fernando Botero poses in front of a self portrait at the Pera Museum in Istanbul, during a preview one day before the opening of his first exhibition in Turkey. REUTERS/Murad Sezer

ISTANBUL.- Suna and İnan Kıraç Foundation Pera Museum welcomed one of the most exceptional artists of the 21st century, Fernando Botero in İstanbul for the very first time with an exhibition comprising a selection of 64 works.

Botero’s art is not exclusively a narration or a representation, but brings with it the force of an inner vision, of his knocking on life’s door. Protecting his Latin and Colombian identity, Botero has succeeded forming his own style nourished not only by folkloric elements but also by the works of grand masters, and has poured his rich inner world into his works with a sophisticated, humorous and wise approach.

Botero has brought a new interpretation to the aesthetics of our times, and the exhibition depicts this interpretation in six sections – the circus, the bullfight, Latin American people, Latin American life, still lifes and versions from past masters of the history of art. The works of the artist contain many references to his own culture and life, and in a unique style they question the concept of beauty in our century.

From acrobats to matadors, dancing people to naked lovers, cardinals to sad clowns and to musicians, the exhibition invites us to discover Botero’s lyricism and his enchanting world.

Still Life
Still-life paintings play a crucial role in Botero’s work. By the end of the 60s they were regularly nourishing the seduction of an image that went beyond the simple composition of fruits or objects arranged on a table, often revealing a fully fledged world – a world rich and diversified, governed by well-entrenched rules.

“When I paint an apple or an orange, I know that it will be possible to recognize them as mine and that it is I who painted them, because I seek to give to every painted element, even the simplest, a personality that comes from a profound conviction.” Thus, for Botero the overriding issue is to confer an authentic image even to inanimate objects, to still-lifes.

In principle, the elements that make them up are enclosed in a restricted space, made even tighter by the presence of heavy tables that flaunt their rounded volumes and sizes as in Still Life with Lobster, and in the elegant Still Life with Fruits , where Cézanne’s influence is discernible in the studied complexity of the layout and in the abundant drapery that acts as a biding agent for the composition.

The claustrophobic sense of this “scenic cube” is often overcome by the inclusion, within the painting, of a reflecting mirror, or an opening that allows the gaze to look outwards. This is very clear in Still Life with Watermelon where Botero utilizes the reflections of the objects and the presence of a door on the background to lighten the architecture of the painting and to give it depth, and to create, not only chromatic balances (the blue of the jug with the blue of the sky) but also structural ones by focusing on the contemporary presence of horizontal elements on the foreground set against the verticality of the room.

It is but rarely that in Botero still-life paintings correspond to open air compositions such as in Picnic , which offers to the observer the possibility to admire landscapes, which are, indeed, very unusual for the artist.

Versions
One of the elements that best characterize Botero’s paintings is his ability to combine his original Latin-American culture, as nourished by the penchant for the hyperbolic and the fantastic, with the European one in an outstanding manner. Europe is obviously referred to through the much loved painting tradition of the likes of Giotto, Piero della Francesca, Leonardo, Mantegna, Velázquez, Goya, key reference points during his travels in Italy and Spain in the early 60s. It is the works of these masters that he will learn to admire in the halls of the Prado and the Louvre. These were successively flanked by Dürer and Rubens, Manet and Cézanne, as a testimony of the intellectual curiosity of Botero and his willingness to establish an ideal relationship with the great European art of the past and of the modern age, whose masterpieces have acted as beacons in the development of his art right from the outset. It is significant, in this light, his seeking inspiration, as early as in 1959, from Leonardo’s Mona Lisa.

The history of art is a broad and practically unlimited hoard of images to be ransacked but not imitated. Botero does not imitate: he recreates in his own way, producing images that demand their own autonomy.

His approach is surely not the imitation of the works of the masters or the mechanical replica of a model. What we have are full reinterpretations in which Botero wishes to pay homage, also by applying a dose of benevolent irony, to very famous paintings such as La Fornarina by Raffaello or The Arnolfini Wedding by Jan van Eyck, or Las Meninas by Diego Velázquez. He thus recreates their spirit after many centuries by presenting them in contemporary terms and by aligning them to his original idea in terms of volume, space, sign and color.

Bullfight
“I dared painting the corrida (bullfight) because I was very much familiar with the theme. It is impossible to paint if there doesn’t exist a strong relation between the subject and one’s soul. This relationship is absolutely necessary inasmuch as it gives you a sort of moral authority. That authority I had for the theme, flowed out from the sangre (‘blood’) and from my own life.”

The bullfight was a theme that couldn’t be neglected in Botero’s work – a fascinating and highly suggestive theme that is deeply engrained in the tradition of his people.

Obviously, what truly mattered for Botero is not only the combat between man and bull but all that takes place around this laic ritual: from the ‘taking of the habit’ on the part of the protagonists celebrated in the splendid elegance of their costumes and seen as modern-day heroes, to the entry on horseback of the matadors and picadors into the arena with the crowd that throng the stands applauding their idols – everything seems to be part of an extraordinary popular pageant where the violence that is inherent in the bullfight itself appears to be alien or experienced in a natural way even when at its goriest as in Dying Bull (p.??). The attention of the artist is focused on the spectacular choreography rather than on the tension of the moment, on the blood that is poured on the arena.

As is his wont, Botero in these works relies on that felicitous process of contamination involving color and light, pictorial surface and substance itself of that kind of painting that underlie many of his painting, identifying himself with the theme to such an extent as to immortalize himself as a torero in the Self Portrait.

Circus
Botero fell in love with the circus in Mexico, where he often spent the winter months. It was there that he became enthralled by the characters that crowd the circus, loving the colors, the movement, the life and the stories that are the stuff of the circus show – a show both archaic and new that has been immortalized by artists of the calibre of Picasso, Léger, Chagall and many more.

“A truly beautiful and timeless subject,” Botero has often said. He stages, narrates and illustrates circus life to its fullest, highlighting the work of the circus hands as they get the show ready as in Circus (p.??), or focusing on those moments when everyone is taking a break before or after the show, when the members of the large circus family rest for a while and share a moment of relax and conviviality as in Circus People with Elephants (p.??). Botero, though, offers us, above all, a gallery of very beautiful portraits, from Pierrot to Harlequin, from the equestrienne intent on her show to the acrobat-cum-contortionist, from the lion and tiger tamer to the clowns on their highly improbable stilts, from the elephant to the horses and camels… Botero offers us a gaily-colored and kaleidoscopic universe. The characters are captured during their performance, with maximum concentration showing on their faces, while the scenes evoke the distillation of the moment as mirth blends and alternates with melancholy, which are both inherent to the circus show.

Botero, in fact, passes no judgment but simply describes in great detail without showing any indulgence or cruelty, and does not mock or ridicule. His images apparently amusing, funny and ironic reveal – for all those who are willing to go beyond a first cursory glance – meaning, and his circus suddenly becomes the great metaphor of life.

Latin American Life
In the works focusing on this subject matter, Botero insists on the vitality of man that cannot be extinguished even in the direst conditions of misery, in shantytowns, in places where life has no apparent reason… In Botero’s paintings there is a “people’s” background, a loyalty to his own Latin-American culture, a vivid memory of his childhood fancy.

No matter how much his style has been perfected and enriched through the contact with Europe, the characters of civic and private drama, the daily grind, the whorehouses, the dancing fetes, the priests and cardinals are and continue to be tenaciously present in his work.

Botero freezes on the canvas scenes from the daily life of Colombians – scenes often dramatic as in Street, where a runaway is being chased by the policeman amidst total indifference, or as in Suicide, where a desperate man plunges to his death from a window. While Botero also paints scenes of working life, such as the outstanding Sewing Workshop where each character is deeply intent on carrying out his or her task in an atmosphere of intense commitment, he also focuses his gaze on an instance of ironic meditation, as in The Seminary where five young priests are captured together as if posing for a rather unusual family portrait.

And, of course, there are moments of entertainment as in Dancing, where couples dance away in a dancing hall, or in the crowded and more problematic End of the Party where in the pink confetto atmosphere, life passes against a backdrop of sexual intercourse, music and cigarettes and where the much flaunted existential promiscuity is but a way to stress the inner solitude of the individual.

Latin American People
“You can find in my painting a world I got to know during my youth. It is a sort of nostalgia, which I have turned into the central theme of my work. […] I lived fifteen years in New York and a long time in Europe, but this has changed nothing in my Latin American approach, nature and spirit. The communion with my country is total.”

The points of reference for the young Botero were inevitably the multicolored boards and sculptures of colonial art, the direct and essential language of popular art and, with regards to the pureness of form, pre-Colombian art. These elements continue to be present in his paintings. They are the traits of a poetics that has refined over the years but which contain a cultural heritage that continues to be as spontaneous as ever, generating the same narrative force and impeccable finish.

A recurrent feature in this group of works is the single individual, mostly female figures, such as the stern Standing Woman, or the monumental girl of Woman in Bathroom. The posture of the women is memorable and so are their clothes and gazes. Through them, Botero is able to forcefully show their personality and to tell us something about their lives, thoughts and desires.

These are flanked by paintings featuring couples, such as Man and Woman, respectable middle-class persons who meet on the street almost as if it were a still from an early 20th century film, or Lovers , a man and woman who, naked, passionately embrace each other in a seedy hotel room.

Also impressive are the group subjects that reveal the sheer existential variety of a community: from the joyous mirth of At the Park, where the background provides a glimpse of sheer beauty, to Three Women Drinking which is dominated by sadness, and The Sisters, an outstanding work featuring five women of varying ages whose poses reveal their personalities as well as the lives they have led in what is a disenchanted portrait of an age.

Exhibition of Monumental Sculpture by Colombian Artist Fernando Botero at Marlborough

2010-04-29T10:09:00.001+02:00

Exhibition of Monumental Sculpture by Colombian Artist Fernando Botero at Marlborough

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Fernando Botero, "Rape of Europa", 2007. Bronze, 114 x 120 x 62 inches. Photo: Courtesy Marlborough Gallery

Fernando Botero, "Woman on a Horse" 2006. Bronze. 114 1/8 x 87 3/8 x 55 1/8 inches. Photo: Courtesy Marlborough Gallery.

NEW YORK, NY.- On April 29, 2010, Marlborough Gallery will present an exhibition of monumental sculpture by the world-renowned Colombian artist, Fernando Botero. The exhibition will feature work with classical subjects such as Leda and the Swan, 2007 (67 x 127 x 55 in.), and Rape of Europa, 2007 (114 x 120 x 62 in.). Botero’s large-scale sculptures have been exhibited to critical and popular acclaim in public exhibitions around the globe, including on the Champs Elysées in Paris, Park Avenue in New York, Chicago, Venice, and most recently in Berlin, Athens and Seoul.

Botero’s monumental sculptures are formal masterpieces of composed volume and mass. He has said of his sculpture, “I never give particular traits to my figures. I don’t want them to have personality, but rather that they represent a type that I create. My sculptures do not carry any messages, social or otherwise… what matters for me is the form, the voluptuous surfaces which emphasize the sensuality of my work.”

In addition to Leda and the Swan and Rape of Europa, Marlborough’s exhibition will include Woman on a Horse, 2006 (114 1/8 x 87 3/8 x 55 1/8 in.) and Reclining Woman, 2006 (65 3/8 x 137 3/4 x 56 3/4 in.). With these works, Botero contemporizes historical precedents such as the equestrian sculpture and the reclined nude, both of which have their artistic roots in antiquity. Standing over nine-feet tall, Rape of Europa is a unique interpretation of this mythological theme. The nude maiden reclines on her side on the back of the massive bull, balanced, with one hand supporting her head and another outstretched. The figure is poised in a relaxed manner as the strong bull supports her. The serenity of the pair are in contrast to the dynamic, shifting elements of Europa’s story as related by Ovid. Here, Botero depicts a languid Europa, with no trace of fear as described in Metamorphoses. Jupiter as the bull is attentive and his curled tail implies a degree of domesticity: Europa seems to have tamed him completely.

Equally striking is Botero’s sculpture Leda and the Swan. Here the swan squats on Leda’s chest and stretches its elongated neck in an almost Mannerist gesture towards Leda’s turned face. The warm brown patina of the sculpture encourages the eye to explore the highlights and the shadows of the bird’s pointed wings and her voluptuous bronze body. Woman on a Horse, weighing over 1,600 pounds, is an imposing sculpture that impresses the viewer through its scale and solidity. Both the rider and her mount communicate a sublime stillness. Similar to Botero’s Reclining Woman, this sculpture has a rich, dark grey patina that absorbs light along the expansive volumes of the sculpture.

Botero was born in Medellin, Columbia in 1932. He moved to Bogota in 1951 and had his first show there the same year. His first retrospective took place in 1970 in Germany at museums in Baden Baden, Berlin, Dusseldorf and Hamburg. Since then, Botero has continually showed in museums all over the world. In the last ten years he has had an astounding number of museum shows in the following countries: Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, France, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Uruguay, Venezuela, and the United States.

Botero’s work can be found in forty-six museums. Among the most prominent are the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Neue Pinakothek, Munich, Germany; Pushkin Museum, Moscow, Russia; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia and the Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne, Germany. Numerous monographs have been published on Botero’s work in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Chinese and Japanese.

2010-03-12T10:19:00.001+01:00

Unique Series of Craeyvanger Family Portraits On Display at the Mauritshuis Museum

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German Chancellor Angela Merkel, left, and Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende, second left, look at the painting "The Girl with the Pearl Earring" by Johannes Vermeer during a visit at Mauritshuis museum in The Hague, Netherlands, Thursday March 11, 2010. Merkel is in the Netherlands for a one-day visit. AP Photo/Robert Vos.

THE HAGUE.- The Mauritshuis is displaying ten exceptional portraits of Arnhem’s Craeyvanger family until 16 January 2011. The paintings are the only known series of portraits of the members of a single family - father, mother and eight children - to have survived from the seventeenth century. The series’ existence was relatively unknown until the paintings came up for auction in 2009. A private collection has lent the works to the Mauritshuis, where the unique ensemble are on display to the public for the first time in the Netherlands.

Craeyvanger Family
Willem Craeyvanger and Christine van der Wart were married on 20 November 1639. He was 22 years of age, and she was likely to have been somewhat younger. As well as being a cloth merchant, Willem was also the Rentmeester, or land agent, for the city of Arnhem and Governor of the city’s guild of merchants, the Guild of St. Nicholas. The couple prospered and had a big family: six boys and two girls survived infancy. Even by seventeenth-century standards, this was a large number of children. In 1666, fate intervened. The couple went bankrupt in March of that year and their possessions were seized, with the exception of the portraits, presumably because these were of little interest to the creditors. The Craeyvanger family portraits were handed down from generation to generation for several centuries. As a result, very few people – and even fewer art historians – knew of their existence. In 2009, a private collection acquired the entire series after they were put up for auction, ensuring that after 350 years the family would remain together.

Unique Series
In the seventeenth century, it was not uncommon for the portraits of an entire family to be painted. Usually this took the form of a group portrait. The Craeyvangers, however, decided to commission ten individual portraits, a highly unusual thing to do at that time. Even more remarkable is the fact that the result is the only surviving series of seventeenth-century portraits to depict the members of a single family.

The portraits were painted at different times. During a visit to The Hague in 1651, Willem Craeyvanger had his portrait painted by the local painter Paulus Lesire (1612-c.1654), who originally came from Dordrecht. Christine’s portrait followed in 1655. Lesire had died in 1654, so the commission fell to the young Caspar Netscher (c.1635/36-1684). Together with his master, Gerard ter Borch (1617-1681), Netscher painted all eight of the couple’s children in 1658. Ter Borch painted the four older children, Netscher the younger four. And just as their parents had been, the children were painted in pairs, neatly organised by their ages and the attribute they were holding.

The Craeyvanger family portraits are displayed together in one room of the museum, together with several other portraits by Gerard ter Borch from the Mauritshuis’ own collection.

2010-03-05T14:43:00.001+01:00

Christie's to Offer Monumental Masterpiece by Yves Klein in New York in May

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A Christie's employee stands next to French artist Yves Klein's masterpiece 'ANT 93, Le Buffle' (The Buffalo), 1960-61, as another walks past it at Christie's auction house in London, Britain, 04 March 2010. The painting by the French artist is offered for the first time at auction in New York, USA, on 11 May and is expected to fetch 10 million USD. Klein used females bodies as the paintbrush along with his distinctive 'International Klein Blue' colour, the artist's patented pigment. EPA/FELIPE TRUEBA.

NEW YORK, NY.- Christie’s will offer a large-scale masterpiece by Yves Klein at the auction of Post-War and Contemporary Art in New York on the evening of 11 May 2010. ANT 93, Le Buffle (“The Buffalo”), 1960-61, is a monumental work from the artist’s celebrated Anthropométrie series that stands over 9 feet wide (70 x 110 3/8 in. / 177.8 x 280.4 cm.). Offered at auction for the first time, the work is expected to realise in the region of $10 million. The sale coincides with the first major American retrospective of the artist’s work for 30 years, Yves Klein: With the Void, Full Powers which will be held at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C., from 20 May to 12 September 2010 and The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, from 23 October 2010 to 13 February 2011.

The strength of Klein’s market was demonstrated at the London sales held this February, where the works of Yves Klein achieved a combined total of £16,355,500/$25,576,169, with £10,234,500/$15,988,406 sold at Christie's alone. The particularly buoyant results that have been realised by Klein reflect the current wave of vested interest in the Art Zero Movement, of which ANT 93, Le Buffle (“The Buffalo”) is a perfect example.

ANT 93, Le Buffle (“The Buffalo”) was executed in 1960-61 and is a monumental work from the last great series created by the artist before his untimely death by way of heart attack at the age of 34. Photographs of the artist in his flat in Paris in the early 1960s reveal ANT 93, Le Buffle (“The Buffalo”) hanging prominently on his sitting room wall; the artist with Martial Raysse). Additional examples from this small and rare group can be found at The Centre Pompidou, Paris and Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao.

Painted in the distinctive ‘International Klein Blue’ – the artist’s patented pigment for which he is most recognised– it is a work that captures and presents the artist’s fascination with movement, form and human existence. Over a giant support, Klein orchestrated the movement of curvaceous women coated in his signature pigment to create this glorious rhapsody in Klein Blue which has literally used the beautiful female form as the paintbrush to create a giant animalistic image, hence the subtitle, Le Buffle (“The Buffalo”). “I personally would never attempt to smear paint over my own body and become a living brush; on the contrary, I would rather put on my tuxedo and wear white gloves. I would not even think of dirtying my hands with paint. Detached and distant, the work of art must complete itself before my eyes and under my command. Thus, as soon as the work is realised, I stand there, present at the ceremony, spotless, calm, relaxed, worthy of it, and ready to receive it as it is born into the tangible world” said Yves Klein as quoted by N. Rosenthal in ‘Assisted Levitation: The Art of Yves Klein (pp.89-135, Yves Klein 1928-1962: A Retrospective, exh. cat., Houston, 1982, p. 124).

Yves Klein (1928-1962) is recognised as one of the most influential artists of the Post-War period. Having lived in Japan studying as a judo teacher in the early 1950s, he returned to Paris in 1954 where he first found fame for his exhibitions of monochrome paintings and then for Le vide, an avant-garde exhibition held in 1958 which consisted of an empty gallery with white painted walls and a large cabinet. Klein experimented with a number of methods for applying paint including sponges and rollers. In 1960 he first exhibited works from a new series he called Anthropométrie for which he applied paint using the flawless female bodies of naked models. Also referred to as ‘living brushes’, Klein often dressed in evening wear and pristine white gloves to conduct the production of his painting, done to the accompaniment of an orchestra playing his Symphonie Monotone – a single note played for ten minutes and alternated with ten minutes’ silence. These works drew a great reception in Europe and Anthropométrie become one of the artist’s most celebrated series.

Happy New Year all you TIGERS!!!

2010-02-08T14:29:00.005+01:00

Happy New Year all you TIGERS!!!

Hi guys, tout le monde,Gong Xi Fa Cai!!

Most photos taken by Marianne DOGGETT in Hong Kong

2010-02-01T17:24:00.001+01:00

Nassau County Museum of Art Announces Exhibition by Fernando Botero

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Fernando Botero, "Venus", 2005. Oil on canvas, 67 1/2 x 50 1/2 inches. Photo; Courtesy: David Benrimon Fine Art LLC.

ROSLYN HARBOR, NY.- Nassau County Museum of Art (NCMA) will present a major exhibition that showcases work by one of the most honored Latin American artists working today. Fernando Botero includes a range of paintings, drawings and monumental sculpture that exemplify Botero’s most familiar themes: commonplace scenes of everyday life, life in the bedroom, life of the streets and people rapt in the excitement of music or family activities. Throughout, Botero’s characters are seen in their “Botero-esque” girth and grandeur. Works by this famed artist were previously seen at the museum in a major 2005 exhibition. Fernando Botero opens at NCMA on March 13, 2010 and remains on view through May 24, 2010. The exhibition is sponsored by David Benrimon Fine Art LLC.

A native of Colombia, Botero has resided in New York, Paris and Tuscany. In the 1960s, he began to achieve acclaim for his satirical paintings of oversized, flesh figures with large limbs and small bodies. In 1971 he began making sculptures as well, an example of which is Man on Horseback —a self-assured gentleman in a suit and bowler hat, his legs as large as those of the horse. This work greets visitors along the wooded path leading to the museum and is a permanent part of NCMA’s Sculpture Park. Botero’s smooth rounded depictions of people and animals exhibit a comic disregard for correct proportions. This skewing of form is central to works by Botero. He has said: “In art, as long as you have ideas and think, you are bound to deform nature. Art is deformation.”

Botero’s work and vision were honed in his studies of art history. He was strongly influenced by the masters of the Renaissance and Baroque period, most especially by Diego Velázquez. The greatest master of the Spanish Golden Age, Velázquez has traditionally served as both inspiration and challenge for artists, especially those from Spain and Latin America. Botero came into first-hand contact with Velázquez’s work in Madrid, in 1952 when he studied at the Royal Academy of San Fernando. Botero particularly connected with the humanity, individuality and compassion of Velázquez’s portraits of the dwarfs of the court of King Philip IV, employed as jesters and caretakers for the royal children.

Botero is additionally one of the most well-known and respected of the late 20th-century still-life painters. His representations of fruits, flowers, vegetables, sweets, meats and cheeses embody many of the characteristics that are observed in his other subjects. They display a marked engagement with sensuality. There is a sense of the sacramental or the ritual in many of these paintings. A number of Botero’s still lifes have particular resonance within the context of Colombia, often displaying distinctively Colombian meals, birthday tables or references to other occasions celebrated in that country.

Cars by Warhol,

2010-01-22T10:37:00.001+01:00

Cars by Warhol, Fleury, Longo, Szarek from the Chrysler Collection Opens at Albertina

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A visitor takes a photo of Andy Warhol's Mercedes-Benz 300 SL Coupe (1954) at the Albertina museum, in Vienna, Austria, Thursday, Jan. 21, 2010. Under the title "Cars" the Albertina museum is showing an exhibition from the artists Andy Warhol, Sylvie Fleury, Robert Longo and Vincent Szarek. AP Photo/Ronald Zak.

VIENNA.- CARS presents works from the Daimler Collection, by artists Andy Warhol, Robert Longo, Sylvie Fleury, and Vincent Szarek. Common to all of the works is their examination of the history, the types, or the design of the Mercedes-Benz car. The core of the exhibit are the thirty-five silkscreen paintings of Andy Warhol’s (1928–1987) series CARS, which employ eight selected types of Mercedes to document the history of the automobile. This important late series by Warhol remained unfinished and after around twenty years is being shown again complete. Joining this series are drawings and airbrushed paintings by Robert Longo (*1953). Videos by Sylvie Fleury (*1961) blend the myth of the legendary Mercedes-Benz automobile with some of the most contemporary ideas from the art and fashion worlds. Vincent Szarek (*1973) uses design elements from the Mercedes-Benz SLR as the starting point for his group of sculptures, which were digitally developed as a modern form of drawing, rendered with 3D programs.

Andy Warhol’s CARS series from 1986/87 can be seen as a highlight in the late working phase of the Pop artist. Commissioned on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of the automobile, it would be the artist’s last series and remained incomplete. Of the eighty planned pictures, intended to use twenty selected Mercedes-Benz models to document the history of the car from the 1886 Daimler Motor Carriage and the Benz Patent Motor Car to 1986, Warhol completed thirty-five paintings (thirty-two of them belong to the Daimler Art Collection) and twelve large-format drawings showing eight different models. The first eight models were completed by early January 1987, each in two versions: a single and a multiple portrayal. The artist produced the three additional large-format works in the last two weeks before his death on February 22. Between 1988 und 1991, the Warhols CARS serie has been exhibited in museums internationally, starting in the Kunsthalle Tübingen and in the Guggenheim Museum New York as well as in Tokyo, Bern, Madrid und Barcelona. After around twenty years the series is again shown complete.

The commission that went to Andy Warhol in 1986 was groundbreaking for the intense cooperation with artists as well as for the early international direction taken by the Art Collection. A second commission went to the New York-based artist Robert Longo in 1995, who created a sequence of five black-and-white automobile “portraits” and a “big-screen” grid profile of a compressor convertible. Vincent Szarek, New York, examined the phenomenon of individualized mass production, using his shiny-painted picture objects to connect the design history of the car with hybrid surfaces from the Baroque to the contemporary wireframe.

In 2005, Sylvie Fleury created a series of six three-channel videos for the Mercedes-Benz Center in Paris. These films, which form an outstanding part within Fleury’s multimedia work created since 1990, blend the appeal of legendary Mercedes-Benz automobiles—from the Lightning Benz and the Gullwing to the C 111— with the latest contemporary ideas from the worlds of art and fashion.

Since the eighties, commissions to design and realize site-specific works have gone to Max Bill, Heinz Mack, François Morellet, Walter De Maria, Nam June Paik, Robert Rauschenberg, Ben Willikens, Tamara K. E., Gerold Miller, Auke de Vries, Pietro Sanguineti, Franz Erhard Walther, Jan van der Ploeg, Nic Hess, Andreas Schmid, Stephane Dafflon, and other artists, who created large sculptures, wall objects, or murals for various company sites.

The Daimler Art Collection is one of the most renowned German corporate collections. It focuses on the area of twentieth-century Abstract Art: from the circle of artists around Adolf Hölzel in Stuttgart in the nineteen-tens, Bauhaus, Constructivism, Concrete Art, the European Zero avant-garde, Minimalism, Conceptual tendencies, and Neo Geo, all the way to the most recent contemporary art. There are areas dedicated to photography and media art as well as a total of thirty large public sculptures in Stuttgart, Sindelfingen, and Berlin. In-house exhibitions, at the Daimler Contemporary exhibition space at Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, and at international museums as well as grants awarded to upcoming artists communicate the Daimler Art Collection to a wide audience.

Picasso and Renoir, Unseen for Over 40 Years, Go on Public Display at Christie's

2010-01-21T10:19:00.002+01:00

Picasso and Renoir, Unseen for Over 40 Years, Go on Public Display at Christie's

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A Christie's employee looks at a 1963 painting entitled "Tete de femme (Jacqueline)" by Pablo Picasso on display at the auction house in London, Wednesday, Jan. 20, 2010. The painting is to be auction at 'Impressionist and Modern Art' sale on Feb. 2 with an estimated price of 3 to 4 million pounds (US$4.9 to 6.5 million or 3.5 to 4.6 million euro). AP Photo/Sang Tan.

A visitor looks at a the 1936 painting "Nu aux jambes croisees" by Henri Matisse, on display at the Christie's auction house in London, Wednesday, Jan. 20, 2010. The painting is to be auction at 'Impressionist and Modern Art' sale on Feb. 2 with an estimated price of 2.5 to 4 million pounds (US$4.1 to 6.5 million or 2.9 to 4.6 million euro). AP Photo/Sang Tan.

LONDON.- From 20 January 2010, Christie’s will host a public exhibition showing masterpieces by Pablo Picasso, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Natalia Gonchorova that have been unseen in public for nearly 40 years, as well as an outstanding masterpiece by Yves Klein and important works by Henri Matisse, Peter Doig, Rene Magritte, Frank Auerbach, Kees van Dongen and Martin Kippenberger.

These are the leading highlights from the forthcoming series of auctions of Impressionist and Modern Art and Post-War and Contemporary Art which will take place at Christie’s in London from 2 February, and which is expected to realise in the region of £120 million.

Jussi Pylkkanen, President of Christie’s Europe and Middle East: “Christie’s modern exhibition space in London allows us to present to the public works of art that have often been hidden in private collections for decades, and which may be sold to private collectors and be unseen for years to come. From 20 January we look forward to hosting a special exhibition that will show exceptional works of art from the 19th and 20th centuries, including important works by Picasso, Renoir, Matisse and Goncharova that haven’t been seen in public for over 40 years, alongside one of the most important works by Yves Klein ever offered at auction, and masterpieces by Peter Doig, Natalia Gonchorova, Frank Auerbach and Kees van Dongen.”

Works of art on view:

· Tête de femme (Jacqueline), 1963, by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) is a portrait of the artist’s second wife. It has been unseen in public since 1967 and is expected to realise £3 million to £4 million.

· Mademoiselle Grimprel au ruban rouge, 1880, is an important work by Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) which dates to the highpoint of the artist’s portrait painting. It will be shown in public for the first time since the 1960s and is expected to realise £1.8 million to £2.5 million.

· Relief éponge or (RE47II) is an outstanding masterpiece and one of only two gold sponge reliefs ever created by Yves Klein (1928-1962). It is expected to realise £5 million to £7 million.

· Espagnole, circa 1916, by Natalia Goncharova (1881-1962) is one of the finest examples of the artist’s work to be offered at auction. It will be exhibited to the public for the first time since 1971, and is expected to realise £4 million to £6 million. Gonchorova holds the world record price for any painting by a female artist sold at auction.

· Head of J.Y.M., 1973, by Frank Auerbach (b.1931) is one of the artist’s most important portraits and portrays his most famous Muse, Juliet Yardley Mills (estimate: £900,000 to £1,200,000). The artist’s Head of Helen Gillespie VI, 1966, will also be on view (estimate: £600,000 to £800,000). Auerbach is one of the most important living British artists alongside his great compatriot and one of his biggest fans, Lucian Freud.

· Gitane, circa 1910-1911, by Kees van Dongen (1877-1968) is a striking portrait by the Dutch artist which was executed at one of the most important periods of his career. It carries an estimate of £5.5 million to £7.5 million.

· Nu aux jambes croisées, 1936, by Henri Matisse (1869-1954) will be exhibited to the public for the first time since 1951 (estimate: £2.5 million to £4 million).

· Anthropométrie (ANT 5) by Yves Klein (1928-1962) is the largest of only six works from this celebrated series to incorporate a mixture of fire and blue pigment (estimate: £1.5 million to £2 million)

· Concrete Cabin West Side by Peter Doig (b.1959) is arguably the greatest example from the series that was the inspiration for the artist’s Turner Prize installation at the Tate in 1994 (estimate: £2 million to £3 million).

· La robe du soir, 1955, by René Magritte (1898-1967) was painted for the celebrated Belgian writer Jan-Albert Goris (1899-1984) (whose pseudonym was Marnix Gijsen) and will be offered with an estimate of £400,000 to £600,000.

· Untitled (from the series Lieber Maler Male mir / Dear Painter Paint Me), 1983, is an important self-portrait by Martin Kippenberger (1953-1997) (estimate: £800,000 to £1,200,000).

Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation Presents Never Before Seen Photos by Robert Doisneau

2010-01-18T15:17:00.000+01:00

Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation Presents Never Before Seen Photos by Robert Doisneau

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Two visitors to the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation look at photographs by Robert Doisneau. EFE/Lucas Dolega.

PARIS.- The Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation opened an exhibition of approximately 100 photographs taken by Robert Doisneau. The photographs have been gatheres from the Foundations collections and other museum and private collections. The exhibition aims to show the viewer the world Doisneau wanted to prove existed.

The catalog, published in French by Steidl, is accompanied by a text written by Agnès Sire and of a review made by art critic Jean-François Chevrier in 1983.

"There are several photographs in this show that have always been presented in other exhibitions, but there are others that have never before been seen,"said the curator Agnès Sire to EFE.

Robert Doisneau (April 14, 1912 - April 1, 1994) was a French photographer noted for his frank and often humorous depictions of Paris street life.

Robert Doisneau was one of France's most popular and prolific reportage photographers. He was known for his modest, playful, and ironic images of amusing juxtapositions, mingling social classes, and eccentrics in contemporary Paris streets and cafes. Influenced by the work of Kertész, Atget, and Cartier-Bresson, in over 20 books Doisneau has presented a charming vision of human frailty and life as a series of quiet, incongruous moments. Doisneau has written: "The marvels of daily life are exciting; no movie director can arrange the unexpected that you find in the street."

Among his most recognizable work is Le baiser de l'hôtel de ville (Kiss by the Hôtel de Ville), a photo of a couple kissing in the busy streets of Paris. The identity of the couple was a mystery until 1993, when Denise and Jean-Louis Lavergne took Doisneau to court for taking the picture without their knowledge. This action prompted Doisneau to reveal that he posed the shot in 1950 using actor/models Françoise Bornet and Jacques Carteaud. Françoise was given an original print as part of her payment. In April 2005 she sold the print for 155,000 € at an auction. Paris was one of the favorite photographic subjects of Doisneau.

Doisneau's work gives unusual prominence and dignity to children's street culture; returning again and again to the theme of children at play in the city, unfettered by parents. His work treats their play with seriousness and respect. In his honour, and owing to this, there are several Ecole Primaire (Primary Schools) names after him. An example is at Veretz (Indre-et-Loire).

Van Gogh's Starry Night Named World's Most Popular Oil Painting of the Decade

2010-01-12T11:26:00.002+01:00

Van Gogh's Starry Night Named World's Most Popular Oil Painting of the Decade

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Van Gogh's Starry Night Named World's Most Popular Oil Painting of the Decade

"Cafe Terrace at Night" by Vincent Van Gogh. The second piece in the "Van Gogh Starry Night Trilogy". It's popularity in the past decade has soared and is a synonym for style and sophistication.

"The Kiss". Gustav Klimt.

WICHITA, KAN.- overstockArt.com, the leader in handmade oil painting art reproductions, has officially released its Top 10 list of the most popular oil paintings from the past decade. Topping the list is Vincent van Gogh’s irrefutable magnum opus, "Starry Night".

“We release an annual Top 10 list and thought it would be interesting to look back over the past decade to determine the trendiest and most sought after hand painted oil painting reproductions,” said David Sasson, CEO of overstockArt.com. “Not surprisingly, the notoriously eccentric artist, Van Gogh, leads the list with his masterpieces "Starry Night" and "Café Terrace at Night".” According to overstockArt.com’s statistics, Van Gogh’s total sales numbers have far exceeded those of any of the other great masters.

The top ten oil paintings sold online in the last decade according to overstockArt.com are:

1. "Starry Night" – Vincent van Gogh
2. "Café Terrace at Night" – Vincent van Gogh
3. "The Kiss" – Gustav Klimt
4. "Poppy Field at Argenteuil" – Claude Monet
5. "The Mona Lisa" – Da Vinci
6. "Le Rêve" (The Dream in French) – Pablo Picasso
7. "Luncheon of the Boating Party" – Pierre August Renoir
8. "The Scream" – Edvard Munch
9. "Red Cannas" – Georgia O’Keeffe
10. "Persistence of Memory" – Salvador Dali

In the past decade overstockArt.com sold more than a million oil paintings. They are one of the Web’s most successful distributors of wall décor items with over 10,000 daily visitors and 100,000 loyal customers. “As the Modern Art movement was conquering the auction floors getting record breaking numbers in Sotheby’s and Christie’s, we slowly became the destination for art lovers who could not afford the high price tags of galleries, but wanted to enjoy the hand painted art of the great masters in their homes,” explained Sasson.

One of the interesting points that the top 10 oil paintings of the decade presents is that the modern artists from the turn of the last century such as Van Gogh, Monet and Klimt are still the most desirable artists in the world. “Our numbers indicate that as the years turn and our world evolves some things remain consistent,” said Sasson. “People are still captivated by the elegance and beauty that the classic artists bring to their home. It will be interesting to see when, if ever, this trend begins to fade.”

David Hockney's Bigger Trees Near Warter Presented at Tate Britain

2009-11-26T15:07:00.001+01:00

David Hockney's Bigger Trees Near Warter Presented at Tate Britain

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David Hockney walks in front of his painting "Bigger Trees Near Warter" at Tate Britain in London. Photo: EFE/Felipe Trueba

British artist David Hockney poses for photographers near his painting "Bigger Trees Near Warter" at Tate Britain in London. REUTERS/Suzanne Plunkett.

LONDON.- David Hockney gifted Bigger Trees near Warter 2007 to Tate in 2008. The oil painting, his largest ever, was made on fifty canvas panels and was executed outside, en plein air. Measuring 4.6 x 12.2 metres (15 x 40 feet), its subject is a typical Yorkshire landscape, west of Bridlington. The work was first exhibited in 2007 at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. David Hockney also presented Tate with two digital photographic renderings of the painting on paper sheets in the same dimensions as the oil.

Focusing on the arrival of spring before trees have come into leaf, Bigger Trees near Warter features two copses, a mighty sycamore tree, buildings and a road curving to the left flanked by early flowering daffodils.

Hockney’s ambition to paint such a large-scale canvas posed a problem as it was impossible for him to step back and view the whole work. He began by making drawings and used these to locate where each canvas would fit in the composition. From these a computer-mosaic of the picture was generated enabling him to step back, albeit in a virtual space. Hockney was then able to take the individual canvas panels to the site and thus create his enormous work over a six-week period.

David Hockney said: ‘My picture is adaptable. You can split it in two and show one or both halves, or even a quarter of it. Or show the painting with two full-scale reproductions that would almost make a cloister.’

Commenting on the gift, Nicholas Serota, Director, Tate said: ‘Standing before David Hockney’s Bigger Trees near Warter, the viewer is overwhelmed by the beauty of the winter trees and the energy of the Yorkshire landscape. In this work he has deftly joined together the tradition of painting en plein air with digital technology on a monumental scale.’

East Yorkshire first engaged Hockney’s imagination as a teenager. As an adult, he has intermittently returned to this part of England when visiting his mother and sister at their home in the coastal town of Bridlington. However, he only became fully absorbed by the landscape over the past four years, making it the primary source of inspiration for his art. Five paintings from David Hockney’s East Yorkshire landscape series were exhibited for the first time in the UK at Tate Britain in a display entitled David Hockney: The East Yorkshire Landscape.

There are seven paintings by Hockney in Tate Collection including The First Marriage (A Marriage of Styles I) 1962, acquired as early as 1963, the celebrated A Bigger Splash 1967 and Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy 1970 -71. The Collection also includes many works of paper.

David Hockney was born on 9 July 1937 in Saltaire, Bradford. He graduated from the Bradford School of Art in 1957 and studied at the Royal College of Art from 1959-1962. While there he met RB Kitaj and became instrumental in the founding of the British Pop Art movement. Hockney settled in Los Angeles in 1978. He has been the subject of countless solo exhibitions worldwide including a major touring retrospective held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and the Tate Gallery, London in 1988.

Tormented Italian Master Caravaggio and Francis Bacon Connect in Rome Show

2009-11-13T11:22:00.001+01:00

Tormented Italian Master Caravaggio and Francis Bacon Connect in Rome Show

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Visitors walk in front of Francis Bacon paintings during an exhibition at the Galleria Borghese in Rome. Photo: Reuters/Max Rossi.

A man looks at a Caravaggio painting during an exhibition at the Galleria Borghese in Rome November 11, 2009. Portraits by Italian master Caravaggio and Irish-born 20th-century painter Francis Bacon stand side-by-side in a new exhibition, connecting their tormented views of humanity despite contrasting approaches to realism. The show at Rome's Galleria Borghese marks 400 years since Caravaggio's death and 100 years since Bacon's birth and at its heart lies their shared fascination with the human form and their predilection for the expressive portrait. Reuters/Max Rossi.

By: Ella Ide

ROME (REUTERS).- Portraits by Italian master Caravaggio and Irish-born 20th-century painter Francis Bacon stand side-by-side in new exhibition connecting their tormented views of humanity despite contrasting approaches to realism.

The show at Rome's Galleria Borghese marks 400 years since Caravaggio's death and 100 years since Bacon's birth and at its heart lies their shared fascination with the human form and their predilection for the expressive portrait.

Both were radical for their times: against the distorted idealism of high mannerism, Caravaggio was driven by obsessive attention to the real, while Bacon was derided for his refusal to relinquish the human figure in favor of abstraction.

"Bacon can be compared to Caravaggio above all in terms of intensity," said art historian Michael Peppiatt, co-curator of the exhibition and Bacon's close friend and biographer.

Both painters have been seen as icons of gay, tormented genius and their tragic natures and lives marked by violence -- Bacon's lover committed suicide and Caravaggio was condemned to death after killing a man -- are echoed in their works.

"They were both conscious of the shortness of life and of the fragility of humanity, and each powerfully conveys this consciousness through his art," said Peppiatt in a statement.

Seventeen works by Bacon are featured alongside 14 paintings by Caravaggio, six of which, including the "Madonna with the Serpent" and the "Sick Bacchus," belong to the Borghese's permanent collection.

Many of the works by Bacon, including "Head VI," the result of his studies of Velazquez's portrait of Pope Innocent X, are on loan from London's Tate Gallery.

The lavish entrance to the Galleria Borghese is devoted to Bacon's triptychs, painted after the suicide of his lover George Dyer, with chilling scenes of distorted, semi-naked male figures whose life oozes from them to form flesh-colored puddles.

The show runs until January 24, 2010 and has already attracted well over 67,000 visitors, with the record numbers forcing the Borghese to extend its open hours and increase the number of tickets available for the daily tours by 30 percent.

Andy Warhol's Iconic 200 One Dollar Bills from 1962 Sells for $43,762,500 at Sotheby's

2009-11-12T11:05:00.001+01:00

Andy Warhol's Iconic 200 One Dollar Bills from 1962 Sells for $43,762,500 at Sotheby's

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Andy Warhol (1928 - 1987), 200 One Dollar Bills, 1962. silkscreen ink and pencil on canvas, 80 1/4 x 92 1/4 in. Est: 8,000,000—12,000,000 USD. Hammer Price with Buyer's Premium: 43,762,500 USD. Photo: Sotheby's

This photo shows a 1965 self-portrait by Andy Warhol. The painting belongs to Cathy Naso, who was 17-years-old when she got a part-time job as a receptionist at Warhol's Factory. The painting sold at Sotheby's for $6,130,500, soaring past the $1.5 million high estimate. AP Photo/Sotheby's.

NEW YORK, NY.- Tonight at Sotheby’s in New York, Andy Warhol’s monumental masterpiece, 200 One Dollar Bills, brought a remarkable $43,762,500, soaring past the pre-sale estimate of $8/12 million. Competition was fierce. Auctioneer Tobias Meyer opened the bidding at $6 million and was immediately met with an almost unheard of response - a bid of $12 million, twice his opening bid. Five more bidders raised their paddles before the winning bid was cast by an anonymous purchaser bidding on the telephone. The Warhol was the top-selling lot in a sale of Contemporary Art that brought an outstanding total of $134,438,000, far-above pre-sale expectations (est. $67.9/97.7 million) and with all but two lots finding buyers. The sale was 98.6% sold by value and 96.3% sold by lot – the highest sold-by -lot total by lot in about twenty years, with only one exception. New auction records were established for Alice Neel, Jean Dubuffet, Juan Muñoz and Germaine Richier; as well as for a sculpture by Willem de Kooning, a neon by Bruce Nauman and a work on paper by Jackson Pollock.

“The desire for great art is very strong,” said Tobias Meyer, Worldwide Head of Contemporary Art. “In a market that has been characterized by pent-up demand, we were able to offer fresh material with conservative estimates, and our sellers were rewarded with the remarkable results we saw this evening.”

Anthony Grant, International Senior Specialist of Contemporary Art, noted, “The stars aligned tonight. With an offering of true icons of post war art, we saw bidding from all corners of the world, from both dyed-in-wool collectors and new clients alike. The Myers Collection in particular offered a great international sampling of artists – Richier, Gottlieb, Appel and Neel - and attracted a great depth of bidding, both private and institutional.”

“Andy Warhol’s 200 One Dollar Bills is a hugely important work for American art history,” said Alex Rotter, Head of the Contemporary Art Department in New York. “Not only was it one of the starting points of Pop Art, but this picture had the perfect ownership history – directly from Warhol’s dealer to the legendary collector Robert C. Scull, and then from his estate sale at Sotheby’s to the current owner who acquired it in 1986 for $385,000. We are immensely gratified by the extraordinary price of more than $43 million achieved for the work this evening.”

In addition to 200 One Dollar Bills several other works by Andy Warhol achieved strong prices tonight. A Self- Portrait from 1965 that the artist gave to Cathy Naso, a young receptionist at The Factory, sold for $6,130,500, more than tripling the pre-sale estimate of $1/1.5 million. More than seven bidders fought for the painting, which had been kept in a closest for 42 years, giving the colors a stunning quality and freshness.

“I think I am dreaming,” said Ms. Naso, who attended the auction this evening but chose to keep a low profile. “I’m simply overwhelmed, both by the amazing price and also by all the attention this painting received. After all these years in the closet, the painting has now come out and has travelled to London, to Hong Kong and has been seen all over the world. Andy has made me famous for fifteen minutes and I’ve come to realize that fifteen minutes of fame is more than enough.”

An Untitled 1962 drawing of a roll of dollar bills, also by Warhol, that came from the collection of Leonard Newman, eventually sold for $4,226,500 against a pre sale estimate of $2.5/3.5 million with seven bidders competing.

Other works that achieved strong prices include Jasper Johns’ Gray Numbers (lot 29), which saw seven bidders drive the price to $8,706,500 (est. $5/7 million). Orange, Red, Orange (lot 47) by Mark Rothko from the Estate of Lucia Moreira Salles had not appeared on the market for nearly 30 years and fetched $3,386,500 (est. $2/3 million) after a contest involving six bidders. Trinité-Champs Elysées (lot 48) by Jean Dubuffet made $6,130,500 (est. $4/6 million) and set a new record for the artist at auction. Violins Violence Silence (lot 27) by Bruce Nauman established a new record for a neon work by the artist when it sold for $4,002,500, comfortably in excess of the $2.5/3.5 million estimate.

The sale began with a group of 20 works from the Collection of Mary Schiller Myers and Louis S. Myers, noted collectors and arts benefactors from Akron, Ohio. Two world auction records were set by works from the Myers Collection: a record was set for American artist Alice Neel when six bidders competed for Jackie Curtis and Rita Red (Lot 2), which brought $1,650,500, well exceeding its estimate of $400/600,000, while Germaine Richier’s La Feuille (lot 4) was sought-after by six bidders, driving the price past the previous auction record and its estimate to bring $842,500. A new record for a Willem de Kooning sculpture was achieved by Large Torso, which sold for $5,682,500, well over the previous record of $3.9 million. Untitled XV, an abstract landscape from perhaps the most exuberant period in de Kooning’s rich and complex career, brought $6,130,500 against an estimate of $5/7 million. Donald Judd’s copper Untitled also exceeded expectations, bringing $1,650,500 against an estimate of $800,000/1.2 million.

2009-09-22T14:24:00.002+02:00

The Stadel Museum will Show the First Monographic Exhibition on Sandro Botticelli

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Sandro Botticelli (1444/45-1510), Idealized Portrait of a Lady, ca. 1480. Mixed technique on poplar, 82 x 54 cm. Frankfurt, Städel Museum. Photo: Städel Museum

Sandro Botticelli (1444/45-1510), Minerva and the Centaur, 1480 - 1482, canvas, 207 x 148 cm. Florenz, Uffizien. Photo: Uffizien, Florenz.

FRANKFURT.- The Städel Museum will show the first monographic exhibition on Sandro Botticelli (1444/45–1510) in the German-speaking world from 13 November 2009 to 28 February 2010. Taking the artist’s monumental Idealized Portrait of a Lady, one of the Städel Museum collection’s highlights, as its starting point, the exhibition presents numerous works from all productive periods of this great master of the Renaissance in Italy about 500 years after his day of death (17 May 1510). The exhibition opens with portraits and allegorical paintings that illustrate the degree of sophistication with which Botticelli drew on this highly developed genre and enriched it with new impulses. While the second chapter centers on his famous mythological representations of goddesses and heroines of virtue, the third part is dedicated to his abundant religious oeuvre. With a total of more than forty works by Botticelli and his workshop, the show presents a comprehensive selection of his work surviving worldwide. Forty further exhibits, among them works by such contemporaries as Andrea del Verrocchio, Filippino Lippi, and Antonio del Pollaiuolo, will allow to understand Botticelli’s precious creations in the historical context of their genesis. The presentation is supported by outstanding loans from the most important collections of paintings in Europe and the United States. These include the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, the Louvre in Paris, the National Gallery London, the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, and the Old Masters Picture Gallery in Dresden, as well as the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

Sandro Botticelli’s painting has become a landmark of Italian Renaissance. The delicate beauty, elegant grace, and unique charm of his frequently melancholic figures make his work the epitome of Florentine painting in the Golden Age of Medici rule under Lorenzo the Magnificent. Initially trained as a goldsmith and then apprenticed to Fra Filippo Lippi, Sandro Botticelli soon ranked among the most successful painters in Florence in the second half of the quattrocento next to Verrocchio, Ghirlandaio, and the Pollaiuolo brothers. From 1470 on, he received prestigious public commissions and established himself as a painter of large altarpieces. Throughout his life, Botticelli was in the ruling Medici family’s and their supporters’ good graces. Fulfilling their wishes for innovative decorative paintings, the master could not only rely on his personal knowledge of Florentine traditions and of ancient art, but also on definite suggestions and concepts from the circle of humanists gathered around Lorenzo de’ Medici. Held in equally high esteem as both a panel and a fresco painter, Botticelli enjoyed a high standing beyond his native Florence and was thus one of the artists summoned to decorate the walls of the Sistine Chapel in Rome by Pope Sixtus IV in 1481. It was particularly his much-discussed late work that brought out the characteristic features of his original style in an extreme manner. Guided by the art of drawing – the exhibition includes an outstanding selection of preparatory sketches – Botticelli followed his penchant for presenting his figures with sharp contours, strong movements, and abundant gestures, grounding his compositions on textures of lines and surfaces rather than on spaces and volumes. In this respect, his painting had already stood out against his competitors’ works and current theoretical demands in his early years. This is one of the reasons why art-historical research, which has devoted a vast number of major monographs and work studies to Botticelli since the beginnings of the twentieth century, still assigns a special position to the artist without fail.

The starting point and center of the cross-genre exhibition is provided by a main work from the collection of the Städel Museum not only very well known in Frankfurt: the master’s idealized portrait of a young lady, who is probably to be identified with Simonetta Vespucci, the beloved jousting tournament lady of Lorenzo’s brother Giuliano de’ Medici. This portrait is less aimed at a true-to-life likeness of the subject than at the ideal of a woman characterized by perfect beauty and equally perfect virtuousness, an ideal also reflected in the poetry of that time. Such an ideal defines itself not least through its rapport with antiquity: thus, the beautiful female wears a piece of jewelry round her neck which is obviously based on an ancient cameo showing Apollo and Marsyas, which will also be on display in the exhibition. In the Städel Museum, Botticelli’s famous portrait of Giuliano from the National Gallery of Art in Washington will offer itself for comparison with his beloved Simonetta’s likeness. Both paintings make up the center of the first part of the presentation, which is devoted to Botticelli’s art of portraiture and, drawing on prominent examples, illustrates the interplay between social norm and artistic form as well as the different genre conventions of the male and the female portrait.

The second chapter of the exhibition deals with Botticelli’s mythological pictures, which number among the artist’s most original creations. The Uffizi Gallery in Florence, which safeguards the most comprehensive and significant collection of works by the artist in the world, supports the exhibition in Frankfurt with one of its most popular works among others loans: the famous Pallas and the Centaur, one of Botticelli’s monumental mythological paintings, to be seen in the context of Medicean self-presentation. Together with Botticelli’s Primavera, it once adorned the walls of a bedchamber in a Florentine palace owned by the family of bankers. We see Pallas taming the wild centaur indulging in his passions through her wisdom and virtue. The control and cultivation of emotions was a central issue in ancient philosophy and – combined with Christian thought – of the Renaissance, too; among the painters of the time, Botticelli offered himself as a congenial interpreter for such subjects. The political dimension and the reference to the patron family are symbolically present in the form of two intertwined diamond rings on Pallas’s gown, which were an emblem of the Medici family. Another great female figure featuring in the Florentine artist’s oeuvre is the goddess Venus. His life-size Venus from the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin is a repetition of the central figure of (the unloanable) Birth of Venus in the Uffizi Gallery, which he isolated from the context of the scene and set off against a black background. This work is one of the first monumental nudes of postancient painting.

The third and last section of the exhibition is devoted to Botticelli’s religious pictures. Next to his portraits and mythological works, Botticelli has owed his continuing fame to his Madonnas. According to theological thinking, Mary stands out as the ideal woman among the saints: she is the most virtuous and the most beautiful female, the bride of the Song of Songs. Besides many other works spanning from Botticelli’s earliest works still revealing the influence of his teacher Fra Filippo Lippi to examples of his late style, the exhibition in Frankfurt shows one of the artist’s most beautiful Madonnas: The Virgin Adoring the Sleeping Christ Child. The Madonna’s physiognomy of this painting from the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh, whose brilliant colorfulness has only been uncovered through restorative measures some years ago, is rendered in the vein of the same female model which the painter developed for his idealized portraits and pictures of ancient goddesses. This chapter also includes a number of narrative pictures, such as a removed Annunciation fresco once to be found in the vestibule of the hospital of San Martino alla Scala in Florence and preserved in the Uffizi Gallery today. Not only the enormous size of the fresco (243 x 550 cm), but also its qualities as a painting testify to Botticelli’s extraordinary importance in this medium. Four panels depicting scenes from the life of St. Zenobius, an early bishop and patron of Florence, offer a further highlight, with which the exhibition ends. Usually scattered to museums in London, Dresden, and New York, they have been brought together for the first time in Frankfurt again. Ranking not only among his most significant late works, but also among his very last, the panels are to be considered as Botticelli’s legacy as an artist

2009-09-15T10:09:00.001+02:00

Tiffany Exhibition Coming to VMFA in May Opens at Musée du Luxembourg in Paris

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Image showing three lamps made by Louis Comfort Tiffany at the exhibition “Tiffany: Color and Light” which opened at the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris, France

VMFA Director Alex Nyerges (left) chats at the Musée du Luxembourg with Robin Nicholson, VMFA's deputy director for exhibitions, and Anna Eschatasse, executive assistant for special exhibitions at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. The three attended today's preview in Paris of the show of Louis Comfort Tiffany works that will be on view at VMFA in May. Photo: Jay Paul)

PARIS.- Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Director Alex Nyerges, in Paris today for a preview of one of the most significant exhibitions ever mounted of works by the master of American glass, Louis Comfort Tiffany, called the show “dazzling.”

“Here in Paris, the City of Light, the color and light of these Tiffany masterworks are spectacularly appropriate,” Nyerges said.

The exhibition opens to the public at the Musée du Luxembourg Wednesday, Sept. 16, and continues through Jan. 10. It will then travel to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts for a showing from Feb. 11 to May 2.

The American première of “Tiffany: Color and Light” will be at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond May 29. VMFA will be the only American museum to show the exhibition, which will continue in Richmond through Aug. 15.

“Tiffany: Color and Light” will be the first major exhibition to be shown at VMFA after the grand opening May 1 of the James W. and Frances G. McGlothlin Wing, now under construction.

“The Tiffany exhibition will be the first of many international exhibitions in the expanded Virginia Museum of Fine Arts,” Nyerges said at the Paris preview.

When the museum reopens, “gallery space will be 50 percent larger and special-exhibition space will double,” he said. “We will be able to accommodate much larger and more extensive special exhibitions than ever before in our history,” he said.

The expansion will add some 165,000 square feet to VMFA's previously existing 380,000 square feet.

“The Tiffany exhibition will occupy 8,500 square feet of the 12,000 square feet of special-exhibition space in the new wing,” he said.

Conceived by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and organized in collaboration with VMFA and the Musée du Luxembourg, “Tiffany: Color and Light” celebrates the work of the renowned designer who achieved original and spectacular effects in hand-blown glass vessels, leaded glass windows and lamps, and other decorative objects.

“Our own large treasure of works by Tiffany makes Richmond an ideal venue, and we are delighted to have been able to lend 14 important works to the show,” Nyerges said.

The exhibition’s approximately 170 objects will include blown-glass vessels; lamps; leaded-glass windows; and decorative objects such as mosaics, bronzes and jewelry; along with paintings, watercolors, architectural elements and silver. Four of the windows, created for the Erskine and American United Church in Montreal, have never before been shown in the United States.

Tiffany (1848-1933) took advantage of the new technology of electric lighting to reveal the jewel-like hues and sparkle of his leaded-glass lampshades. The wide popularity of his lamps made Tiffany’s a household name.

“Visitors to the exhibition will see first-hand evidence of Tiffany’s love of exoticism, rich ornament, fine craftsmanship, and the abstract qualities of color that placed him squarely in many of the artistic movements of his time, from Arts and Crafts and the American Aesthetic Movement to Art Nouveau and Symbolism,” says Barry Shifman, VMFA’s Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Decorative Arts from 1890 to the Present.

The exhibition’s curators are Rosalind Pepall, senior curator of decorative arts at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, who is the Anthony W. and Lulu C. Wang Curator of American Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; and Martin Eidelberg, professor emeritus of art history at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J.

2009-09-14T11:30:00.001+02:00

Nassau County Museum of Art to Present Norman Rockwell: American Imagist

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Norman Rockwell, Breakfast Table Political Argument (oil study) 1948, oil on acetate on board, 10 1/4" x 11", signed lower right and inscribed, "To Herb Herrick, Sincerely, Norman Rockwell" Saturday Evening Post cover oil study, October 30, 1948, study for America, illus 134, study for LNM #C445 © 2009 National Museum of American Illustration™

ROSLYN HARBOR, NY.- “I paint life as I would like it to be,” said the great illustrator Norman Rockwell. Seeing himself as a storyteller, Rockwell created the images that defined America and Americans, in this country and abroad. His enormous impact was achieved through the 321 covers he created for Saturday Evening Post from 1916 to 1963, including his famous Four Freedoms series of patriotic wartime paintings.

Norman Rockwell: American Imagist, opening at Nassau County Museum of Art (NCMA) on Sunday, September 20, 2009 and remaining on view through Sunday, January 3, 2010, is organized by American Illustrators Gallery, New York City and The National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, Rhode Island. The exhibition is curated for NCMA by Constance Schwartz and Franklin Hill Perrell and includes approximately 300 Saturday Evening Post covers and about 48 Rockwell paintings. The exhibition is sponsored by Sterling Glen Senior Living and David Lerner Associates with support from Wachovia Bank and Wells Fargo and Company, the New York State Council on the Arts and Arizona Beverages.

A poet of the American heartland, Norman Rockwell was born 115 years ago in Manhattan’s Upper West Side. He demonstrated drawing talent from his earliest years, sketching as literary works were read to him aloud. While in high school, he studied at the Chase School of Fine and Applied Art. Leaving school before graduation, he went on to attend the National Academy of Design, later transferring to the Art Students League. His earliest commission, at the age of 16, was for Christmas cards. He was then retained to illustrate a series of children’s books. Rockwell became the art director for Boy’s Life, the official publication of the Boy Scouts of America. His association with the Boy Scouts was to continue for a half century. Rockwell began freelancing his services to magazines, among them Life, Literary Digest and Country Digest. At 22, he began his legendary association with The Saturday Evening Post, the most prestigious magazine of that era. Rockwell’s first work for the Post was Mother’s Day Off which ran on the May 20, 1916 cover. From then, until 1963, he went on to produce 321 Post covers. It was these illustrations that came to be his greatest legacy.

2009-07-09T10:18:00.000+02:00

Chronological Survey of Le Corbusier's 60-year Oeuvre Opens at Martin Gropius Bau

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A woman observes a work of art made by Le Corbusier (1887-1965), at the retrospective exhibition that is on view through October 5 in Berlin. Photo: EFE/Rainer

Chapel Notre-Dame-du-Haut, Ronchamp, 1950-55 © FLC / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2009.

BERLIN.- Berlin’s Martin-Gropius-Bau is presenting the first comprehensive exhibition since 1987 of the wide-ranging work of the Swiss architect Le Corbusier (1887-1965). The architect’s links to Germany and Berlin will also be stressed. There will be a total of about 380 exhibits to be seen in the Martin-Gropius-Bau.

“Le Corbusier – Art and Architecture” provides a chronological survey of his 60 year oeuvre. At the same time, by virtue of being divided into three relatively autonomous areas – “Contexts”, “Privacy and Publicity” and “Built Art” – it highlights leading themes that are important to an understanding of Le Corbusier’s work. These include his interest in the Mediterranean and the Near East, his pursuit of organic forms in the 1930s, and his fascination with new technologies and media. The juxtaposition of these aspects illustrates Le Corbusier’s central concept of a “synthesis of the arts”, which manifests itself in the interplay of architecture, urban planning, painting, design, film, and other disciplines.

Taking account of the latest research and critical scholarship, the exhibition takes an explicitly contemporary look at Le Corbusier, while also serving as an introduction to the work of the architect.

The core of the exhibition is made up of a large number of exhibits from the Fondation Le Corbusier in Paris, including original paintings, sculptures, numerous original pieces of furniture, original drawings and plans, first editions of Le Corbusier’s books plus numerous small objects from the architect’s private collection, which he used for purposes of inspiration, orientation and demonstration. Le Corbusier’s most important structures are illustrated using both original and new, specially constructed architectural models, while a number of installations based on historical interiors bring his spatial concepts to life.

Among the most impressive exhibits are the giant mural from Le Corbusier’s Paris office in the Rue de Sèvres (1948) and a walk-in model of the Philips Pavilion (1958), which shows how close this project was to today’s computer-generated architecture. The film material shot by Le Corbusier himself in Arcachon and Rio de Janeiro and the reconstruction of the historical model of the “Plan Voisin” (1925), his radically utopian master plan for Paris, are among the major features of the show.

Le Corbusier’s practice of always working closely with his contemporary artists is shown by such exhibits as original pieces of furniture by Charlotte Perriand and Jean Prouvé and paintings by Fernand Léger and André Bauchant.

Le Corbusier and Berlin
For its Berlin presentation “Le Corbusier – Art and Architecture” will be supplemented to include such exhibits as original plans, sketches, books and films concerning Le Corbusier’s relationship with Germany, especially Berlin.

This connection is shown in three stages: First there is Le Corbusier’s long stay in Germany in 1910/11. In 1910 Le Corbusier received a grant to study the German arts and crafts movement known as the Werkbund. From April 1910 to April 1911 he stayed almost uninterruptedly in Germany, working for six months with Peter Behrens and meeting many leading representatives of the Werkbund. The second phase covers Le Corbusier’s dealings with the Bauhaus and Werkbund movements in the 1920s and his participation in the great Bauhaus exhibition of 1923 in Weimar. In 1927 Le Corbusier built his first two buildings in Germany for the Werkbund exhibition at the Weissenhof estate in Stuttgart. Finally the exhibition shows Le Corbusier’s work in Berlin after the war, such as his Unité d’Habitation (dwelling unit) built near Berlin’s Olympia Stadium in connection with the 1957 International Construction Exhibition in Berlin and his contribution to the Capital Competition for International Ideas in 1957/58.

2009-06-25T10:30:00.001+02:00

Homme a l'epee Sells for 7 Million and Leads Sotheby's Sale of Impressionist & Modern Art

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Pablo Picasso’s Homme à l’épée selling at Sotheby’s this evening

Claude Monet, Route de Giverny en hiver, 1885. Estimate: £3-4 million, sold for: £3,849,250. Photo: Sotheby's.

LONDON.- Sotheby’s Evening Sale of Impressionist & Modern Art tonight brought a total of £33,531,150/ US$55,323,044/ €39,479,519* – a figure comfortably within the pre-sale expectations of £26,750,000-37,270,000 – and saw 23 of the 27 lots offered find buyers. The sale achieved the best sellthrough rates since last June for an Evening Sale in this category at Sotheby’s - a sold-by-lot rate of 85.2% and a sold-by-value rate of 90.8%. Furthermore, eight works sold for prices in excess of £1 million, with an average lot value of £1,457,876. The auction saw active bidding within the room and on telephones from international collectors. Pablo Picasso’s Homme à l’épée (lot 8) was the top-selling lot of the evening when it realised £6,985,250/US$11,524,964/ €8,224,421, comfortably within its estimate of £6-8 million, and this represents the highest price of the Impressionist & Modern Art sales series in London this summer.

Commenting on tonight’s results, Melanie Clore, Co-Chairman of Impressionist & Modern Art, Sotheby’s Worldwide, said: “Tonight’s auction saw strong prices achieved across the board and this is a very positive message for the market. We were particularly delighted with the £7 million realised for Picasso’s Homme à l’épée - the highest price of the season. The sell-through rate of 85.2% was the highest that we have seen in an Evening Sale in this field at Sotheby’s since last summer. This impressive performance is testament to our discriminating selection process when assembling the sale to respond to current market conditions. This evening, we’ve seen once again that there is still a very healthy ongoing market for great Impressionist and Modern works of art.”

The top prices of the evening were:
Pablo Picasso’s Homme à l’épée from July 1969 (lot 8), which sold to a private collector for £6,985,250/US$11,524,964/ €8,224,421 against an estimate of £6-8 million. The richly coloured and monumental depiction of a musketeer from the artist’s late oeuvre is one of his most important and iconic subjects of this period. Throughout his career Picasso projected the different sides of his own identity in a number of ways and the musketeer was one of the most celebrated subjects and guises of his latter years. The painting starred in the seminal exhibition of Picasso’s work at the Palais des Papes in Avignon in 1970 and was selected for the poster advertising the exhibition.

Discussing the price achieved for Picasso’s Homme à l’épée tonight, Helena Newman, Director of the Evening Sale and Vice-Chairman of the Impressionist & Modern Art department, Sotheby’s Worldwide, said: “This striking painting from 1969, which had never been at auction before this evening, came to the market at a time when the interest in and assessment of Picasso’s late oeuvre has never been stronger. It was extremely satisfying to see the painting so admired during its pre-sale exhibition. The price it achieved tonight is indicative of its rarity, quality and iconic nature, having been selected for the poster advertising the seminal exhibition of the artist’s work at the Palais des Papes in Avignon in 1970.”

A second work by Picasso - a larger-than-life nude entitled Nu debout from 1968 (lot 17) - also performed strongly tonight, selling for £4,297,250/ US$7,090,033/€5,059,575, in excess of the estimate of £3-4 million; it was the second highest lot of the sale. The painting, which belongs to a series of major works that Picasso undertook on the theme of the female nude in the late-1960s, had been in the same private collection for more than 35 years. Executed when Picasso was a man in his late-80s, it is a striking example of the breathtaking flood of invention and fantastic vitality that characterised Picasso's late years.

Claude Monet was represented in the sale by a quintessential winter landscape entitled Route de Giverny en hiver (lot 11), which sold to an Asian private collector for £3,849,250/ US$6,350,878/ €4,532,100, near its high estimate of £4 million. The classic Impressionist scene from 1885 depicts the snow-covered road leading to the town of Giverny, where the artist lived at the time and where he painted some of his most celebrated works.

The sale was also distinguished by strong prices for sculpture. In particular, three works by Alberto Giacometti from a private European collection (lots 5, 6 and 7) were highly sought-after and sold for a total of £7,403,750/ US$12,215,447/ €8,717,162, above the combined estimate of £4.2-6.3 million. Diego (Tête au col roulé) was the subject of the lengthiest bidding-battle and soared above its estimate of £1-1.5 million to sell for £2,729,250/ US$4,502,990/ €3,213,414. Dating from the early-1950s, the plaster sculpture merges Giacometti’s talents as both a painter and a sculptor. Prominent British artist Barbara Hepworth’s unique largescale stone carving Three Standing Forms - inspired by her triplets - ranked among the most important works by the artist ever to appear at auction and it sold for £780,450/ US$1,287,664/ €918,900, against an estimate of £700,000-1,000,000.

The eye-catching vista of Istanbul by Paul Signac entitled La Corne d’or. La Suleimanie (lot 15) attracted interest from a number of prospective buyers and sold to a private collector for £1,385,250/ US$2,285,524/ €1,630,991, against an estimate of £1.2-1.8 million.

2009-06-22T10:42:00.000+02:00

Colombian Museum Hosts Largest Exhibition Ever in Latin America of Andy Warhol's Works

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Several people observe "Mao" made by Andy Warhol in 1972 at the exhibition "Mister América" which opened in Colombia. Photo: EFE/Leonardo Muñoz

BOGOTA.- The exhibition, organized by Museo de Arte del Banco de la República in conjunction with the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and curated by Philip Larratt-Smith, offers a complete panorama of the work of this fertile artist and it is the largest exhibition ever organized in a Latin American museum. The list of works of art comprises 26 paintings, 57 silk screens, 39 photographs and 2 installations (‘Silver Clouds’ and ‘Cow wallpaper’). Fourteen of his films will also be screened at the Fundación Gilberto Alzate Avendaño.

Andy Warhol, Mr. America explores all aspects and periods from this multi-facetic production from this artist, with a particular emphasis in the period between 1961 and 1968.

It was during the 1960s that Warhol began to make paintings of iconic American products such as Campbell's Soup Cans from the Campbell Soup Company and Coca-Cola bottles, as well as paintings of celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe, Troy Donahue, and Elizabeth Taylor. He founded "The Factory," his studio during these years, and gathered around himself a wide range of artists, writers, musicians, and underground celebrities. He began producing prints using the silkscreen method. His work became popular and controversial.

Among the imagery tackled by Warhol were dollar bills, celebrities and brand name products. He also used as imagery for his paintings newspaper headlines of photographs of mushroom clouds, electric chairs, and police dogs attacking civil rights protesters. Warhol also used Coca Cola bottles as subject matter for paintings.

New York's Museum of Modern Art hosted a Symposium on pop art in December 1962 during which artists like Warhol were attacked for "capitulating" to consumerism. Critics were scandalized by Warhol's open embrace of market culture. This symposium set the tone for Warhol's reception. Throughout the decade it became more and more clear that there had been a profound change in the culture of the art world, and that Warhol was at the center of that shift.

A pivotal event was the 1964 exhibit The American Supermarket, a show held in Paul Bianchini's Upper East Side gallery. The show was presented as a typical U.S. small supermarket environment, except that everything in it from the produce, canned goods, meat, posters on the wall, etc. were created by six prominent pop artists of the time including the controversial (and like-minded) Billy Apple, Mary Inman, and Robert Watts. Warhol's painting of a can of Campbell's soup cost $1,500 while each autographed can sold for $6. The exhibit was one of the first mass events that directly confronted the general public with both pop art and the perennial question of what is art.

As an advertisement illustrator in the 1950s, Warhol used assistants to increase his productivity. Collaboration would remain a defining (and controversial) aspect of his working methods throughout his career; in the 1960s, however, this was particularly true. One of the most important collaborators during this period was Gerard Malanga. Malanga assisted the artist with producing silkscreens, films, sculpture, and other works at "The Factory", Warhol's aluminum foil-and-silver-paint-lined studio on 47th Street (later moved to Broadway). Other members of Warhol's Factory crowd included Freddie Herko, Ondine, Ronald Tavel, Mary Woronov, Billy Name, and Brigid Berlin (from whom he apparently got the idea to tape record his phone conversations).

During the 60s, Warhol also groomed a retinue of bohemian eccentrics upon whom he bestowed the designation "Superstars", including Edie Sedgwick, Viva, and Ultra Violet. These people all participated in the Factory films, and some, like Berlin, remained friends with Warhol until his death. Important figures in the New York underground art/cinema world, such as writer John Giorno and film-maker Jack Smith, also appear in Warhol films of the 1960s, revealing Warhol's connections to a diverse range of artistic scenes during this period.

Tamara de Lempicka's Art Deco Paintings on View for the First Time in Mexico City

2009-06-11T11:09:00.000+02:00

Tamara de Lempicka's Art Deco Paintings on View for the First Time in Mexico City

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A man stands beside the painting "M. Tadeusz Lempicki" during the exhibition of works of art made by Tamara de Lempicka which opened at the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City. Photo: EFE/Mario Guzmán.

MEXICO CITY.- President Felipe Calderón inaugurated the Tamara de Lempicka Exhibition at the Palace of Fine Arts, adding that during his government, an enormous effort has been made to enable Mexicans to discover and enjoy great national and international exhibitions, some of which have been unparalleled.

He said that Tamara de Lempicka belongs to the great 20th Century women painters who were attracted to Mexico and found refuge and a source of inspiration here, such as Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington and Alice Rahon.

Of Tamara de Lempicka, the President said that her fascinating, avant-garde plastic discourse made her one of the main exponents of Art Déco.

“Although Tamara was a citizen of the world, at the end of her life, she found a refuge for her last years in Mexico. As historian Fabienne Bradu noted, She fled her entire life, from exile to exile, eventually choosing Mexico as the last stage of her journey and life," she said.

The exhibition gathers 48 paintings, 15 works on paper and 21 photographs, that come from private collections in France, Belgium, Germany, Spain, United States and Mexico. It is important to mention that Jack Nicholson’s collection has been included in the show.

International museums who loaned works of art include: Centre National d´Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou en París, Musée d´Art Moderne de Saint-Etienne, Métropole Musée d´Art et d´Historie de Saint-Denis, Musée d´Art et d´Industrie André Diligent in Roubaix, Musée Departémental de l´Oise in Beauvais, Musée des Années 30 in Boulogne-Billancourt, Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nantes, Musée Malraux in Le Havre, Muzeum Narodowe w Warszawie in Warsaw.

For her first major show, in Milan, Italy in 1925, under the sponsorship of Count Emmanuele Castelbarco, de Lempicka painted 28 new works in six months. She was soon the most fashionable portrait painter of her generation among the haute bourgeoisie and aristocracy, painting duchesses and grand dukes and socialites. Through her network of friends, she was able to display her paintings in the most elite salons of the era. De Lempicka was criticized and admired for her 'perverse Ingrism', referring to her modern restatement of the master Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, as displayed in her work Group of Four Nudes, 1925. A portrait might take three weeks of work, allowing for the nuisance of dealing with a cranky sitter; by 1927-8 de Lempicka could charge 50,000 French francs per portrait (a sum equal to about US $2,000 then—perhaps ten times as much today). Through Castelbarco she was introduced to Italy's great man of letters and notorious lover, Gabriele d'Annunzio. She visited the poet twice at his Lake Garda villa, seeking to paint his portrait; he in turn was set on seduction. After these attempts to secure the commission, she left angered while both she and d'Annunzio remained unsatisfied.

In 1929, she painted her iconic work Auto-Portrait (Tamara in the Green Bugatti) for the cover of the German fashion magazine Die Dame. As summed up by the magazine Auto-Journal in 1974, "the self-portrait of Tamara de Lempicka is a real image of the independent woman who asserts herself. Her hands are gloved, she is helmeted, and inaccessible; a cold and disturbing beauty [through which] pierces a formidable being—this woman is free!" De Lempicka won her first major award in 1927, first prize at the Exposition Internationale de Beaux Arts in Bordeaux, France for her portrait of Kizette on the Balcony.

During the Roaring 20s Paris, Tamara de Lempicka was part of the bohemian life: she knew Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, and André Gide. Famous for her libido, she was bisexual, and her affairs with both men and women were carried out in ways that were scandalous at the time. She often used formal and narrative elements in her portraits and nude studies to produce overpowering effects of desire and seduction. In the 1920s she became closely associated with lesbian and bisexual women in writing and artistic circles, such as Violet Trefusis, Vita Sackville-West, and Colette. She also became involved with Suzy Solidor, a night club singer at Boîte de Nuit, whom she later painted. Her husband eventually tired of their arrangement; he abandoned her in 1927, and they were divorced in 1928.

Obsessed with her work and her social life, de Lempicka neglected more than her husband; she rarely saw her daughter. When Kizette was not away at boarding school (France or England), the girl was often with her grandmother Malvina. When de Lempicka informed her mother and daughter that she would not be returning from America for Christmas in 1929, Malvina was so angry that she burned de Lempicka's enormous collection of designer hats; Kizette watched them burn, one by one.

Kizette was neglected, but also immortalized. De Lempicka painted her only child repeatedly, leaving a striking portrait series: Kizette in Pink, 1926; Kizette on the Balcony, 1927; Kizette Sleeping, 1934; Portrait of Baroness Kizette, 1954-5, etc. In other paintings, the women depicted tend to resemble Kizette.

In 1928, her long time patron the Baron Raoul Kuffner visited her studio and commissioned her to paint his mistress. De Lempicka finished the portrait, then took the mistress' place in the Baron's life. She travelled to the United States for the first time in 1929, to paint a commissioned portrait for Rufus Bush and to arrange a show of her work at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. The show went well but the money she earned was lost when the bank she used collapsed following the Stock Market Crash of 1929.

De Lempicka continued both her heavy workload and her frenetic social life through the next decade. The Great Depression had little effect on her; in the early 1930s she was painting King Alfonso XIII of Spain and Queen Elizabeth of Greece. Museums began to collect her works. In 1933 she traveled to Chicago where she worked with Georgia O'Keeffe, Santiago Martínez Delgado and Willem de Kooning. Her social position was cemented when she married her lover, Baron Kuffner, in 1933 (his wife had died the year before). The Baron took her out of her quasi-bohemian life and finally secured her place in high society again, with a title to boot. She repaid him by convincing him to sell many of his estates in Eastern Europe and move his money to Switzerland. She saw the coming of World War II from a long way off, much sooner than most of her contemporaries. She did make a few concessions to the changing times as the decade passed; her art featured a few refugees and common people, and even a Christian saint or two, as well as the usual aristocrats and cold nudes.

In the winter of 1939, Tamara and the Baron started an "extended vacation" in the United States. She immediately arranged for a show of her work in New York, though the Baron and Baroness chose to settle in Beverly Hills, California, living in the former residence of Hollywood director King Vidor. She became 'the baroness with a brush' and a favorite artist of Hollywood stars. She cultivated a Garboesque manner. The Baroness would visit the Hollywood stars on their studio sets, such as Tyrone Power, Walter Pidgeon, and George Sanders and they would come to her studio to see her at work. She did war relief work, like many others at the time; and she managed to get Kizette out of Nazi-occupied Paris, via Lisbon, in 1941. Some of her paintings of this time had a Salvador Dalí quality, as displayed in Key and Hand, 1941. In 1943, the couple relocated to New York City. Even though she continued to live in style, socializing continuously, her popularity as a society painter had diminished greatly. They traveled to Europe frequently to visit fashionable spas and so that the Baron could attend to Hungarian refugee work. For a while, she continued to paint in her trademark style, although her range of subject matter expanded to include still lifes, and even some abstracts. Yet eventually she adopted a new style, using palette knife instead of brushes. Her new work was not well-received when she exhibited in 1962 at the Iolas Gallery. De Lempicka determined never to show her work again, and retired from active life as a professional artist.

Insofar as she still painted at all, De Lempicka sometimes reworked earlier pieces in her new style. The crisp and direct Amethyste (1946), for example, became the pink and fuzzy Girl with Guitar (1963).

After Baron Kuffner's death from a heart attack in 1962, she sold most of her possessions and made three around-the-world trips by ship. Finally De Lempicka moved to Houston, Texas to be with Kizette and her family. (Kizette had married a man named Harold Foxhall, who was then chief geologist for the Dow Chemical Company; they had two daughters.) There she began her difficult and disagreeable later years. Kizette served as Tamara's business manager, social secretary, and factotum, and suffered under her mother's controlling domination and petulant behavior. Tamara complained that not only were the paints and other artists' materials now inferior to the "old days" but that people in the 1970s lacked the special qualities and "breeding" that inspired her art. The artistry and craftsmanship of her glory days were unrecoverable. In 1978 Tamara moved to Cuernavaca, Mexico, to live among an aging international set and some of the younger aristocrats. After Kizette's husband died of cancer, she attended her mother for three months until Tamara died in her sleep on March 19, 1980. Her ashes were scattered over the volcano Popocatepetl by Count Giovanni Agusta.

De Lempicka lived long enough, however, for the wheel of fashion to turn a full circle: before she died a new generation discovered her art and greeted it with enthusiasm. A 1973 retrospective drew positive responses. At the time of her death, her early Art Deco paintings were being shown and purchased once again. A stage play inspired in part by her life ("Tamara") ran first in Toronto, then for two years in Los Angeles (1984-1986) and subsequently at the Seventh Regiment Armory in New York City

2009-06-04T14:41:00.001+02:00

Metropolitan Museum of Art Announces it will Show Vermeer's Masterpiece The Milkmaid

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Johannes Vermeer (Dutch, 1632-1675), The Milkmaid, ca. 1658. Oil on canvas, 45.5 x 41 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam SK-A-2344

NEW YORK, NY.- On the occasion of the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s historic voyage from Amsterdam to New York, the Rijksmuseum is sending The Milkmaid, perhaps the most admired painting by the Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer (1632—1675), to The Metropolitan Museum of Art. To celebrate this extraordinary loan, the Metropolitan Museum will present Vermeer’s Masterpiece The Milkmaid, a special exhibition beginning on September 9, which will bring together all five paintings by Vermeer from its collection, along with a select group of works by other Delft artists, placing Vermeer’s superb picture in its historical context.

Along with Rembrandt and Frans Hals, Vermeer is now counted as one of the greatest Dutch artists of the Golden Age. Until a century ago, however, his rare paintings – only 36 survive today – were little known and often misattributed. During his brief career, Vermeer sold his exquisite works to a small circle of discerning collectors in his native Delft, and in the neighboring court city of The Hague. The Milkmaid, dating from about 1657-58, was one of the first paintings by Vermeer to be purchased by the Delft collector Pieter van Ruijven, who by 1670 owned 21 of the artist’s works. Vermeer’s Masterpiece The Milkmaid will mark the first time that the painting has traveled to the United States since it was exhibited at the 1939 World’s Fair 70 years ago.

In addition to the Metropolitan Museum’s five Vermeer paintings – among them Young Woman with a Water Pitcher (ca. 1662), A Maid Asleep (1656–57), and Study of a Young Woman (probably ca. 1665–67) – this focused presentation will include important works by Pieter de Hooch, Gabriël Metsu, Nicolaes Maes, Emanuel de Witte, Hendrick van Vliet, and Hendrick Sorgh, all masters who, like Vermeer, were active during the remarkable period of exploration, trade, and artistic flowering that occurred during the Dutch Golden Age in the 17th century. Vermeer’s Masterpiece The Milkmaid will also feature several works on paper that illuminate the artist’s theme, including engravings by Lucas van Leyden (The Milkmaid, 1510) and Jacques de Gheyn II (The Archer and the Milkmaid, ca. 1610), both from the Metropolitan Museum’s collection, and Jacob Backer’s beautiful drawing A Woman with a Jug (ca. 1645), on loan from the Maida and George Abrams Collection.

Francis Bacon's Provocative Works Featured in Exhibition at Metropolitan Museum of Art

2009-05-20T11:07:00.001+02:00

Francis Bacon's Provocative Works Featured in Exhibition at Metropolitan Museum of Art

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Triptych Inspired by T. S. Eliot’s Poem “Sweeney Agonistes” Oil on canvas, 198 x 147.5 cm. 1967. New York, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Gift of the Joseph H. Hirshhorn Foundation 1972.

NEW YORK, NY.- The first major New York exhibition in 20 years devoted to Francis Bacon (British, 1909–1992)—one of the most important painters of the 20th century—will be presented at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from May 20 through August 16, 2009. Marking the 100th anniversary of the artist's birth, Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective will bring together the most significant works from each period of the artist's remarkable career. Drawn from public and private collections around the world, this landmark exhibition will consist of some 65 paintings, complemented by never-before-seen works and archival material from the Francis Bacon Estate, which will shed new light on the artist's career and working practices. The Metropolitan Museum is the sole U.S. venue of the exhibition tour.

"Bacon is more compelling than ever: despite the passage of time, his paintings remain fresh, urgent, and mysterious. Never before has this work been more relevant to young artists," noted Gary Tinterow, Engelhard Chairman of the Metropolitan Museum's Department of Nineteenth-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art. "For these reasons, we are very pleased to be able to present a retrospective spanning his entire career to our viewing public."

Entirely self-taught, Francis Bacon emerged in 1945 as a major force in British painting. He rose to prominence over the subsequent 45 years, securing his reputation as one of the seminal artists of his generation. With a predilection for shocking imagery, Bacon's oeuvre was dominated by emotionally charged depictions of the human body that are among the most powerful images in the history of art.

The exhibition's loosely chronological structure will trace critical themes in Bacon's work and explore his philosophy about mankind and the modern condition with visually arresting examples. The earliest group of works, from the 1940s and '50s, focuses on the animalistic qualities of man, including: paintings of heads with snarling mouths (Head I, 1947–1948, The Metropolitan Museum of Art); images of men as pathetic and alone (Study for a Portrait, 1953, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Germany); and the human figure portrayed as base and bestial (Figures in a Landscape, 1956, Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery, England). The exhibition also features numerous versions of Bacon's iconic studies (1949–1953) after Diego Velázquez's Portrait of Innocent X (1650). Mortality is addressed directly in his last works (Triptych, 1991, The Museum of Modern Art, New York).

In the 1960s, working in his classic style of much looser, colorful, and expressive painting, Bacon showed the human body exposed and violated as in, for example, Lying Figure, 1969 (Foundation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Switzerland). In the following decade he increasingly used narrative, autobiography, and myth to mediate ideas about violence and emotion, as in the 1971 painting In Memory of George Dyer (Foundation Beyeler) and Triptych Inspired by the Orestia of Aeschylus, 1981 (Astrup Fearnley Collection, Oslo, Norway).

A number of important works by Bacon will only be presented at the Metropolitan Museum, including Study for Portrait I, 1953 (Denise and Andrew Saul); Painting, 1946 (The Museum of Modern Art, New York); and Self Portrait, 1973 (private collection, courtesy Richard Nagy, London).

Central to an understanding of the artist's working methods are the large caches of archival materials that have only become available since Bacon's death, especially the contents of the artist's famously cluttered London studio. A rich selection of 65 items from the studio, his estate, and other archives will be included in the exhibition. The objects include pages the artist tore from books and magazines, photographs, and sketches—all of which are source materials for the finished paintings on view in the exhibition.

2009-05-15T16:27:00.002+02:00

Guggenheim Museum and Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Celebrate Visionary Architect

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Frank Lloyd Wright, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1943–59, Exterior view. © The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York.

NEW YORK, NY.- Fifty years after the realization of Frank Lloyd Wright’s renowned design, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum celebrates the golden anniversary of its landmark building with the exhibition Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward, co-organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. On view from May 15 through August 23, 2009, the 50th anniversary exhibition brings together 64 projects designed by one of the most influential architects of the 20th century, including privately commissioned residences, civic and government buildings, religious and performance spaces, as well as unrealized urban mega-structures. Presented on the spiral ramps of Wright’s museum through a range of media—including more than 200 original Frank Lloyd Wright drawings, many of which are on view to the public for the first time, as well as newly commissioned models and digital animations—Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward illuminates Wright’s pioneering concepts of space and reveals the architect’s continuing relevance to contemporary design.

The exhibition takes its title from Frank Lloyd Wright’s musings on the importance of interior space in shaping and informing a structure’s exterior. “The building is no longer a block of building material dealt with, artistically, from the outside,” Wright said. “The room within is the great fact about building—the room to be expressed in the exterior as space enclosed.” Few designs in Wright’s oeuvre so well illustrate the concept of designing “from within outward” as the Guggenheim Museum, in which the interior form gives shape to the exterior shell of the building.

Richard Armstrong, Director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and Museum, stated, “Fifty years ago, the trajectories of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Frank Lloyd Wright became intertwined. When it opened in October 1959, the museum drew both criticism and admiration, but what was indisputable was that Wright had reinvented the art museum.” Armstrong continued, “How fitting that we open our fiftieth-anniversary celebrations with Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward, an exhibition that documents and challenges how architecture influences the way we live and how we experience art.”

“Rather than a retrospective, this exhibition focuses on the diversity of Wright’s vision and the ways he sought to realize it, conveying fresh perspectives on how the buildings themselves celebrate that vision through spaces that enrich our lives with their transformational power,” said Phil Allsopp, President and CEO of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, the only organization established by Frank Lloyd Wright to be the repository of his life’s work and the first to bear his name. “The concept of the exhibition also reflects a growing recognition of the enormous relevance today of Frank Lloyd Wright’s design philosophies, which embrace culture, technology and environment. The exhibition articulates the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation’s public mission and active engagement in education, scholarship, design, research, historic preservation, and public policy.” The Frank Lloyd Wright Archives, which the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation owns and operates at its headquarters in Scottsdale, Arizona, is the primary source of loans for the exhibition.

During his 72-year career, Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959), who died just six months before the opening of the Guggenheim, worked independently from any single style and developed a new sense of architecture in which form and function are inseparable. Known for his inventiveness and the diversity of his work, Wright is celebrated for the awe-inspiring beauty and tranquility of his designs. Whether creating a private home, workplace, religious edifice, or cultural attraction, Wright sought to unite people, buildings, and nature in physical and spiritual harmony. To realize such a union in material form, Wright created environments of simplicity and repose through carefully composed plans and elevations based on consistent, geometric grammars.

His innovative designs complement the surrounding environment of the site and intensify the physical, emotional, and social experience of flowing, continuous space within them. In his earliest designs, such as the Larkin Company Administration Building (Buffalo, New York, 1902–06) and Unity Temple (Oak Park, Illinois, 1905), Wright carefully deconstructs the box-like environment of his European contemporaries by opening up corners and using walls merely as screens to enclose tranquil interior spaces. Wright’s architecture is a translation of his conception of society into a spatial language that can be understood intuitively and enhances the everyday experience. While the aesthetic strength of Wright’s work has invited people to revisit his idiom, it is the ambition of Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward to celebrate the basic idea behind his architecture—the sense of freedom in interior space—and inspire visitors to see the potential that architecture can carry for the here and now and for the future.

Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward is organized in a loosely chronological order and is installed to be viewed from the rotunda floor upwards. Off the first ramp in the High Gallery is an original curtain depicting Wright’s native Wisconsin landscape from the 1952 Hillside Theater at Taliesin, Wright’s home and studio in Spring Green, Wisconsin (1911–59). On loan from Taliesin, this curtain creates the backdrop for a sound installation of recorded oral histories from the collection of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, which feature the voices of clients, friends, apprentices, and architects reflecting on the revelatory experience of living and working in Wright-designed spaces.

Highlights of Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward include newly created three-dimensional scale models that examine the internal mechanics of functional space in relation to exterior form in a variety of Wright’s projects. Among these are an exploded version of the Herbert Jacobs House (Madison, Wisconsin, 1937); a mirrored model for Unity Temple; and a sectional model of Beth Sholom Synagogue (Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, 1953). Large-scale models of unrealized urban schemes for projects, including his Plan for Greater Baghdad (1957), the Crystal City for Washington, D.C. (1940), and the Pittsburgh Point Civic Center (1947), provide insight into Wright’s visions for the landscapes of the city. The models were developed by Michael Kennedy of New York–based Kennedy Fabrications Inc., which specializes in architectural models and prototyping, and Situ Studio, a Brooklyn-based firm focused on research, design, and fabrication.

Special animations offer viewers the opportunity to experience an interpretation of nine of Wright’s un-built or demolished projects as well as his own Taliesin and Taliesin West. The animations were designed by teams of students from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design Interactive Spaces course taught by Allen Sayegh and from Madison Area Technical College, with the assistance of Archi Zarzycki of arc.studio.3d and ZD Studios (both also of Madison).

The curatorial team for Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward includes Thomas Krens, curator and Senior Advisor of International Affairs for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation; David van der Leer, Assistant Curator of Architecture and Design; and Maria Nicanor, Curatorial Assistant, all for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, in collaboration with Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, Director of the Frank Lloyd Wright Archives; Margo Stipe, Curator and Registrar of Collections of the Frank Lloyd Wright Archives; and Oskar Muñoz, Assistant Director of the Frank Lloyd Wright Archives. Mina Marefat, an architect and Wright scholar, has served as Curatorial Consultant for the Baghdad module of the exhibition. The exhibition installation for Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward has been designed by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in collaboration with the design firm Wendy Evans Joseph Architecture.

Media partner Thirteen/WNET.

The Legacy of Frank Lloyd Wright In 1990, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum was declared a landmark by the New York City Landmark Preservation Commission and in 2005 was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. On October 7, 2008, the Interior Secretary of the United States named the Guggenheim a National Historic Landmark in recognition of the museum’s significance within American history and culture. UNESCO World Heritage Center also is considering Wright’s legacy: ten of the architect’s most relevant buildings, including the Guggenheim Museum, Taliesin, and Taliesin West, his home and studio in Scottsdale and the headquarters of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, have recently been included on the United States’ World Heritage Tentative List, which identifies the most significant cultural and natural treasures worldwide.

In anticipation of its 50th anniversary in 2009, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum recently undertook a four-year restoration, the results of which were unveiled in September 2008. At the outset of the restoration project, a team of architects, structural engineers, and conservators undertook a comprehensive condition assessment and found that, while the building remained in good structural condition, the removal of 11 coats of paint, the infilling of exterior cracks, the treatment of corroded steel structures, and the repair and reinforcement of the concrete were essential to insure the ongoing health of the structure.

With its legacy grounded in the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, the Guggenheim is dedicated to exploring the connections between design, architecture, and other forms of art, especially in the context of the city. Design exhibitions organized by the Guggenheim have included the 2001 retrospective of the work of architect Frank Gehry, which became the most attended show in the history of the New York museum, and a retrospective of the work of architect Zaha Hadid in 2006. With such projects at the forefront, the Guggenheim has initiated the development of a broad program in which architecture and design become a means of expression to document, divert, and direct our increasingly urban societies.

Exhibition Tour Following the presentation of Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the exhibition will travel to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Bilbao, Spain, where it will be on view from October 6, 2009 through February 2010.

Publications Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward is accompanied by a fully illustrated exhibition catalogue published by Skira/Rizzoli. With forewords by Phil Allsopp, Richard Armstrong, and Thomas Krens, the catalogue will include essays by Wright scholars Richard Cleary, Neil Levine, Mina Marefat, Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, Joseph M. Siry, and Margo Stipe.

In addition to the exhibition catalogue, The Guggenheim: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Making of the Modern Museum will be published on the occasion of museum’s fiftieth anniversary and in association with the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. This first-ever book to explore the 16-year construction process behind one of the greatest modern buildings in America will examine the history, design, and construction of Wright’s masterwork. Fully illustrated with preliminary drawings, models, and photographs, the book includes three major essays by Hillary Ballon, Neil Levine and Joseph Siry.

Education and Public Programs In conjunction with the exhibition, the Sackler Center for Arts Education at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presents a full roster of educational programs, including Learning by Doing, an exhibition featuring a selection of shelters designed, built, and lived in by students at the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture in Arizona and Wisconsin over the past seven decades. Curated by David van der Leer, Assistant Curator of Architecture and Design, in collaboration with the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture, the exhibition provides an opportunity for visitors of all ages to create their own designs, which will be incorporated into Learning by Doing over the course of the summer.

In addition, the Sackler Center will present the two-day symposium Frank Lloyd Wright: Now What Architecture?! on May 14 and 15 in the Peter B. Lewis Theater at the museum. Based upon the architect's captivating 1931 question, this symposium––which will include debates on contemporary architecture and urban design among scholars, architects, designers, and cultural critics from around the world––will introduce Wright’s ideas about space into the 21st century’s dialogue.

Among the additional public programming offered, The Architecture of Writing: Wright, Women and Narrative will be presented on Wednesday, June 10 at 6:30 pm. Moderated by Sarah Williams Goldhagen, The New Republic, participants will include Carol Gilligan, New York University, Gwendolyn Wright, Columbia University, and Beverly Willis, FAIA. Honoring Taliesin Fellow Lois Gottlieb, this special evening features the premiere of A Girl Is A Fellow Here: 100 Women Architects in the Studio of Frank Lloyd Wright, a new 15-minute film produced by the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation, followed by a panel discussion that seeks to expand definitions of architectural genius in which collaboration, in general, and women, in particular, assume greater stature in the remarkable history of Frank Lloyd Wright and in the rich history of American architecture. This event is co-organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation. For more information, visit www.guggenheim.org/education or contact the Box Office at 212 423-3587.

On April 13, one month before the opening of Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward, the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) at Columbia University will host the panel discussion Frank Lloyd Wright in the 21st Century: Being Versus Seeming? Moderated by Kenneth Frampton, Ware Professor of Architecture at Columbia, with Michael Maltzan, Michael Maltzan Architecture, Los Angeles; Shohei Shigematsu, OMA*AMO PC, New York; and Marion Weiss, WEISS/MANFREDI–Architecture/Landscape/Urbanism, New York, the panel will include an introduction of the Guggenheim Museum’s spring Frank Lloyd Wright programs by David van der Leer. For information contact Benjamin Prosky, Director of Special Events, GSAPP, Columbia University, (212) 854-9248, or visit www.arch.columbia.edu.

2 well-known French painters conquer China

2009-04-28T12:20:00.017+02:00

2 well-known French painters conquer China

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FU Ji Tsang & Denis RIBAS are two well-known French contemporary artists who are staging an exhibition of their latest works in China. The following are some current details:-

SYNCRETIZE CHINESE WESTERN VISION

25^th April – 20^th June 2009

www.samlinam.org

Please also refer below to some earlier information about David FU Ji Tsang at Autour de l'Art, an art gallery in Antibes.

http://artlover06.blogspot.com/2006/12/fu-ji-tsang-french-artist-for-all.html

Deux bien connus peintres français vainquent la Chine

FU Ji Tsang et Denis RIBAS sont deux bien connus artistes français contemporains qui mettent en scène une exposition de leurs œuvres derniers en Chine. Trouvez suivante des renseignements au courant:-

SYNCRETIZE CHINESE WESTERN VISION

25^th April – 20^th June 2009

www.samlinam.org

Référez-vous aussi ci-dessous à l'information précédente sur David FU Ji Tsang à Autour de l'Art, une galerie d'art à Antibes.

2009-04-27T11:55:00.001+02:00

More than 70 Large-format Paintings by David Hockney on View at Kunsthalle Würth

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British artist David Hockney poses in front of his painting “Three Trees in the Proximity to Thixendale Summer”, at Kunsthalle Wurth in Germany. More than 70 works of art made by this artist have been gathered in the exhibition titled “Just Nature”. The exhibition will be open from April 27 through September 27, 2009. Photo: 'EFE/Norbert Foersterling

David Hockney, Three trees in the proximity to Thixendale winters 2007, Oil on five canvases, ever 91.5 x 122 cm, 183 x 487.5 cm, © David Hockney Photo: Richard Schmidt.

KUNZELSAU.- British artist David Hockney (b. 1937), celebrated for decades as the “painter laureate of Southern California,” is doubtless one of the most interesting and important painters in contemporary art. Yet anyone who believes they are entirely familiar with Hockney’s art will be forced to reconsider in light of his recent work. Contrary to his earlier assertions, he has returned to his native Yorkshire and rediscovered the beauty of his home county’s landscapes, which held little inspiration for him as a young artist. Since then, he has been creating precisely observed, magically glowing natural scenes in which his new enthusiasm combines with his many experiences gained over a lifetime of experimental painting. Hockney’s broad interests and his knowledge of artistic techniques lend these works a special character – seemingly naturalistic, they nonetheless continually question the potential of painting. It is perhaps this masterful mixture of apparent simplicity and great conceptuality that makes Hockney’s art so popular, and at the same time manifests the aesthetic demands he places upon himself.

Hockney’s somewhat unreal-looking version of “realism” arises from the combination of emotion and perspective in his painting. In order to capture a motif as a whole, he not only relies on continual shifts from close-up to distant viewpoints but on a gradual development of the picture, which often consists of several equal-sized canvases. In this way, he creates extended formats that enable the viewer to virtually roam through the picture. The eye is drawn so close to the visual scenes that we have the feeling of actually standing inside the unframed views. In addition, there are entire series of works in which the artist observes selected landscape motifs at different times of day or different seasons and depicts his impressions with great precision. The colours, that change with the intensity of the sunlight, are translated into colourful, energetic images that reflect the immediacy of natural light. Yet here, too, it is not a faithful recording of actual appearances that is foremost but the subjectivity of human vision, an artistic transformation that always contains something unspoken and wonderful.

Over 70 large-format paintings, drawings and inkjet printed computer drawings of landscapes, selected by David Hockney especially for the Kunsthalle Würth, are on view here for the first time in such a comprehensive exhibition.

2009-04-22T16:36:00.000+02:00

City of Linz to Return Gustav Klimt Painting to Descendants of Jewish Family

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Portrait of a Woman (Ria Munk) made by Gustav Klimt.

LINZ.- The Mayor of Linz, Franz Dobusch, announced yesterday that the town will return the painting titled, Portrait of a Woman (Ria Munk) made by Gustav Klimt to the descendants of a Jewish family who were robbed of it by the Nazis.

An independent expert has confirmed the painting was seized from Mrs Munk by the Nazis after she was deported to a concentration camp where she died in 1941.

Family lawyer Alfred Noll applied in 2007 for the return of the painting, which made its way into Linz's collection from an art dealer after the Second World War.

Gustav Klimt (July 14, 1862 – February 6, 1918) was an Austrian Symbolist painter and one of the most prominent members of the Vienna Art Nouveau (Vienna Secession) movement. His major works include paintings, murals, sketches, and other art objects, many of which are on display in the Vienna Secession gallery. Klimt's primary subject was the female body, and his works are marked by a frank eroticism--nowhere is this more apparent than in his numerous drawings in pencil.

Klimt became one of the founding members and president of the Wiener Sezession (Vienna Secession) in 1897 and of the group's periodical Ver Sacrum (Sacred Spring). He remained with the Secession until 1908. The group's goals were to provide exhibitions for unconventional young artists, to bring the best foreign artists' works to Vienna, and to publish its own magazine to showcase members' work. The group declared no manifesto and did not set out to encourage any particular style -- Naturalists, Realists, and Symbolists all coexisted. The government supported their efforts and gave them a lease on public land to erect an exhibition hall. The group's symbol was Pallas Athena, the Greek goddess of just causes, wisdom, and the arts -- and Klimt painted his radical version in 1898.

In 1894, Klimt was commissioned to create three paintings to decorate the ceiling of the Great Hall in the University of Vienna. Not completed until the turn of the century, his three paintings, Philosophy, Medicine and Jurisprudence were criticized for their radical themes and material, which was called "pornographic". Klimt had transformed traditional allegory and symbolism into a new language which was more overtly sexual, and hence more disturbing. The public outcry came from all quarters — political, aesthetic, and religious. As a result, they were not displayed on the ceiling of the Great Hall. This would be the last public commission accepted by the artist. All three paintings were destroyed by retreating SS forces in May 1945. His Nuda Verita (1899) defined his bid to further shake up the establishment. The starkly naked red-headed woman holds the mirror of truth, while above it is a quote by Schiller in stylized lettering, "If you cannot please everyone with your deeds and your art, please a few. To please many is bad."

In 1902, Klimt finished the Beethoven Frieze for the 14th Vienna Secessionist exhibition, which was intended to be a celebration of the composer and featured a monumental, polychromed sculpture by Max Klinger. Meant for the exhibition only, the frieze was painted directly on the walls with light materials. After the exhibition the painting was preserved, although it did not go on display until 1986.

During this period Klimt did not confine himself to public commissions. Beginning in the late 1890s he took annual summer holidays with the Flöge family on the shores of Attersee and painted many of his landscapes there. These works constitute the only genre aside from the figure that seriously interested Klimt, and are of a number and quality so as to merit a separate appreciation. Formally, the landscapes are characterized by the same refinement of design and emphatic patterning as the figural pieces. Deep space in the Attersee works is so efficiently flattened to a single plane, it is believed that Klimt painted them while looking through a telescope.

Klimt's 'Golden Phase' was marked by positive critical reaction and success. Many of his paintings from this period utilized gold leaf; the prominent use of gold can first be traced back to Pallas Athene (1898) and Judith I (1901), although the works most popularly associated with this period are the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907) and The Kiss (1907 - 1908). Klimt traveled little but trips to Venice and Ravenna, both famous for their beautiful mosaics, most likely inspired his gold technique and his Byzantine imagery. In 1904, he collaborated with other artists on the lavish Palais Stoclet, the home of a wealthy Belgian industrialist, which was one of the grandest monuments of the Art Nouveau age. Klimt's contributions to the dining room, including both Fulfillment and Expectation, were some of his finest decorative work, and as he publicly stated, "probably the ultimate stage of my development of ornament." Between 1907 and 1909, Klimt painted five canvases of society women wrapped in fur. His apparent love of costume is expressed in the many photographs of Flöge modeling clothing she designed.

As he worked and relaxed in his home, Klimt normally wore sandals and a long robe with no undergarments. His simple life was somewhat cloistered, devoted to his art and family and little else except the Secessionist Movement, and he avoided café society and other artists socially. Klimt's fame usually brought patrons to his door, and he could afford to be highly selective. His painting method was very deliberate and painstaking at times and he required lengthy sittings by his subjects. Though very active sexually, he kept his affairs discreet and he avoided personal scandal. Like Rodin, Klimt also utilized mythology and allegory to thinly disguise his highly erotic nature, and his drawings often reveal purely sexual interest in women as objects. His models were routinely available to him to pose in any erotic manner that pleased him. Many of the models were prostitutes as well.

Klimt wrote little about his vision or his methods. He wrote mostly postcards to Flöge and kept no diary. In a rare writing called "Commentary on a non-existent self-portrait", he states "I have never painted a self-portrait. I am less interested in myself as a subject for a painting than I am in other people, above all women...There is nothing special about me. I am a painter who paints day after day from morning to night...Who ever wants to know something about me... ought to look carefully at my pictures."

In 1911 his painting Death and Life received first prize in the world exhibitions in Rome. In 1915 his mother Anna died. Klimt died three years later in Vienna on February 6, 1918, having suffered a stroke and pneumonia. He was interred at the Hietzing Cemetery in Vienna. Numerous paintings were left unfinished.

Klimt's paintings have brought some of the highest prices recorded for individual works of art. In November 2003, Klimt's Landhaus am Attersee sold for $29,128,000, but that was soon eclipsed by prices paid for other Klimts.

In 2006, the 1907 portrait, Adele Bloch-Bauer I, was purchased for the Neue Galerie in New York by Ronald Lauder for a reported US $135 million, surpassing Picasso's 1905 Boy With a Pipe (sold May 5, 2004 for $104 million), as the highest reported price ever paid for a painting. Adele Bloch-Bauer I is one of the five paintings referred to below in the Legacy section and an NPR report. On August 7, 2006, Christie's auction house announced it was handling the sale of the remaining four works by Klimt that were recovered by Maria Altmann and her co-heirs after their long legal battle against Austria (see Republic of Austria v. Altmann). Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II was sold at auction in November 2006 for $88 million, the third-highest priced piece of art at auction at the time. 'The Apple Tree I' (ca. 1912) sold for $33 million, 'Birch Forest' (1903) sold for $40.3 million, and 'Houses in Unterach on Lake Atter' (1916) sold for $31 million. Collectively, the five restituted paintings netted over $327 million.

Amedeo Modigliani Exhibition Opens Today at The Art and Exhibition Hall in Bonn

2009-04-17T12:08:00.001+02:00

Amedeo Modigliani Exhibition Opens Today at The Art and Exhibition Hall in Bonn

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Amedeo Modigliani, Reclining Nude (Céline Howard), 1918, Private collection, Geneva.

BONN.- Amedeo Modigliani was one of the most important artists of the 20th century. His iconic works are deeply engrained in the collective pictorial memory. The Art and Exhibition Hall wants to celebrate this outstanding artist, who died tragically young at the age of only 35, with a comprehensive retrospective exhibition.

Born in Italy in 1884, Modigliani was painter, draughtsman and sculptor. With the exception of a handful of landscapes, his creative energy was entirely devoted to portraits and nudes. Modigliani's paintings are deeply rooted in Italian art history, drawing particularly on the formal languages of the Renaissance and Mannerism. These he combined with elements from Expressionism, Cubism and Symbolism as well as African sculpture, whose perceived primitivism and iconic presence fascinated him and many avant-garde artists of the time. His work cannot be easily classified as belonging to any of the contemporary styles like Cubism or Fauvism. Yet it bears eloquent testimony to the restlessness and exuberance of an artist who was only too aware of his own vulnerability and mortality and who needed the euphoria of intoxication in order to live and work. Modigliani’s idiosyncratic, at times melancholy portraits captivate the viewer to this day.
The exhibition follows the biography of the artist and reflects the decisive turning points of his life. The Art and Exhibition Hall hopes to be able to present a representative selection of some paintings, drawings and a few sculptures from 1900 to 1919 that allows viewers to form an impression of the oeuvre of this exceptional artist.

Important Works by Tamara de Lempicka From the Collection of Wolfgang Joop to be Sold at Sotheby's

2009-04-07T16:14:00.001+02:00

Important Works by Tamara de Lempicka From the Collection of Wolfgang Joop to be Sold at Sotheby's

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Tamara Lempika, Portrait de Marjorie Ferry, 1932. Est. $4/6 million. Photo: Courtesy of Sotheby´s.

Tamara Lempika, Portrait de La Duchesse de La Salle, 1925. Est. $4/6 million. Photo: Courtesy of Sotheby´s.

NEW YORK, NY.- On May 5 and 6, 2009 ten paintings by Tamara de Lempicka from the collection of noted fashion designer Wolfgang Joop will be offered at Sotheby’s New York. It is the finest group of paintings by the artist ever to appear at auction. Four paintings will be included in the evening sale of Impressionist and Modern Art on May 5th and six will be offered the following day. Highlights will be on view in London from April 22-25 prior to the exhibition and sale in New York.

Emmanuel Di-Donna, Vice Chairman, Impressionist and Modern Art Worldwide and Head of Sotheby’s Evening Sales, New York, commented, “This group of paintings, all from Lempicka’s prime period, embodies the spirit of the Art Deco era and its sense of style and modernity. These iconic images range from intimate and sensual to bold and monumental. As an artist, Lempicka drew on the avant-garde art and design around her, Cubism in particular, to derive a distinct aesthetic all her own.”

Recent decades have witnessed a resurgence of interest in Tamara de Lepmicka, a figure who occupied an important position in ‘Roaring Twenties’ Paris. Her glamour has inspired celebrity collectors in the movie, music and fashion worlds. A voracious collector, Wolfgang Joop has spent several decades amassing an extraordinary collection of modern and contemporary art and 20th century design. Benjamin Doller, a Vice Chairman of Sotheby’s commented, “As a key player in the fashion industry with his collection Wunderkind, it’s understandable that Mr. Joop would appreciate the Hollywood glamour and decadence celebrated in Lempicka’s work. A pioneer in many areas of collecting, he was among a handful of early enthusiasts to rediscover her in the 1970s. ”

“Tamara’s appeal to me is comparable to that of a blue diamond,” said Wolfgang Joop. “From the first moment I saw her paintings, I was captivated by the unique way in which she presented women, and I have been fortunate to enjoy a long and intimate history with her. In turn, she inspired my work with a distinctive style that embodies the image of a modern woman.”

Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale – May 5, 2009
Among the works that will be offered in the evening sale on May 5th is a painting that has become synonymous with Lempicka's style – Portrait de la Duchesse de la Salle (est. $4/6 million). Sexy, bold and monumental in its presentation, this spectacular picture from 1925 celebrates the strength and power of the modern woman.

Also included in the evening sale is a sultry portrait from 1932 - Portrait de Marjorie Ferry – which exemplifies the sleek and sexy aesthetic that defined Lempicka's art (est. $4/6 million). The model is the English-born Marjorie Ferry, a cabaret singer living in Paris, who is transformed by Lempicka into a modernday goddess, cloaked in marble-crisp drapery in front of a Doric column.

Lempicka's Portrait of Mademoiselle Poum Rachou from 1933 is one of her most recognizably Cubist-inspired compositions, calling to mind the 1920s Le Petit dejeuner series of Fernand Léger (est. $1.8/2.5 million). A dynamic still life from 1931, Arlette Boucard aux Arums, features a portrait of Arlette Boucard, a young woman whom Lempicka painted as an adolescent in 1928 (est. $800,000/1.2 million). For this new composition, Lempicka pairs a photograph of the girl with a bouquet of arums or calla lilies, a dual symbol of purity and seduction and an allusion to Arlette’s passage from youth to womanhood.

Impressionist and Modern Art Day Sale – May 6, 2009
Le Telephone II will be the cover lot of the Impressionist and Modern Art Day sale on May 6th. Painted in 1930, the year after Lempicka moved into a large Art Deco apartment with a studio on the Left Bank in Paris, the present work exemplifies the modernity of the age and of the artist herself (est. $800,000/1.2 million). Pulp magazines had gained enormous popularity in the 1920s and the femme fatale became the central figure in these works, soon to be immortalized in the novels of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, and in the film noir classics of the thirties.

Wolfgang Joop
Wolfgang Joop was born in Potsdam, Germany in 1944 and studied Drawing, Sculpture and the Theory of Art before working as a freelance artist. He was invited to be an honorary professor of Life Drawing and Design at the University of Art in Berlin, and his drawings and paintings are included in the permanent collections of several contemporary art museums, including the Hamburg Museum of Art and Industry which houses over 100 of his works. Wolfgang Joop, founder and creator of the world renowned fashion company WUNDERKIND has become one of the most influential designers for luxury fashion in the world. With the creation of the label WUNDERKIND he has built the only German fashion house of its kind, offering their worldwide clientele a sophisticated range of luxury ready-to wear collection and accessories. The company's products are sold in more than 100 of the best boutiques and stores worldwide. End of 2008 the brand opened its first international boutique in London’s Mayfair district, on 16 Mount Street. Wolfgang Joop’s collection ranges from paintings and furniture dating from the seventeenth-century to the present day, and includes works by Jeff Koons, Tim Noble & Sue Webster, Alexandre Noll, Charlotte Perriand, Jean Royère and Jean Prouvé, among others.

Pompidou Offers Comprehensive Overview of the Work of Russian Artist Wassily Kandinsky

2009-04-07T16:08:00.001+02:00

Pompidou Offers Comprehensive Overview of the Work of Russian Artist Wassily Kandinsky

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A woman observes the painting "Red Spot II" made by Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky which is on view at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Photo: EFE/Ian

Improvisation 19, 1911. Oil on canvas – 120 x 141,5 cm. Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich. Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich. Gabriele Münter-Stiftung © ADAGP, Paris 2009.

PARIS.- This exhibition offers, for the first time in 25 years, a comprehensive overview of the work of Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky, documenting the key periods of his artistic career (Munich, Paris / Munich/ Moscow / Weimar, Dessau, Berlin / Paris) through a selection of major paintings dating from 1907 to 1942. Thanks to the unprecedented collaboration between the Centre Pompidou, the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, this international retrospective, showing in Munich, Paris and New York, has been able to draw on the three largest public collections of Kandinsky’s work, as well as loans from other institutions and private collections.

Through some hundred exceptional paintings, this unique exhibition examines Kandinsky’s contribution to modern art, its chronological organisation revealing the logical unfolding of his ideas and his relationship to his time.

At the Centre Pompidou, the retrospective is complemented by a selection of recent additions to the Centre’s own holding of Kandinsky’s work: watercolours and manuscripts of the so-called “Russian” period from 1914 to 1917, and the Bauhaus portfolio celebrating his 60th birthday in 1926. The last major Kandinsky exhibition in Paris was held at the Centre Pompidou in 1984, to mark the accession of the Nina Kandinsky Bequest.

Kandinsky is curated by Tracey Bashkoff, Associate Curator for Collections and Exhibitions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Christian Derouet, Curator at the Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris; and Annegret Hoberg, Curator at the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich. Karole Vail, Assistant Curator, assisted with the organization of the New York presentation.

The exhibition will offer a comprehensive chronological survey of Kandinsky’s work through a selection of his most important canvases, including examples from his series of Improvisations, Impressions and Compositions, while investigating his formal and conceptual contributions to the course of abstraction in the twentieth-century. The unprecedented collaborative efforts of the Guggenheim, Pompidou, and Lenbachhaus will assemble works that have rarely traveled together, such as Munich’s early masterpiece, A Colorful Life (1907), or the Guggenheim's Light Picture (1913)—a seminal work among the first of Kandinsky's truly abstract canvases which has not even been exhibited in the museum’s own galleries since the 1970s—offering new contexts and comparisons for those works that have been held apart.

The survey will trace Kandinsky’s vision through thematic motifs, such as the horse and rider, mountainous landscapes and tumultuous seascapes, apocalyptic imagery and other religious subjects, and follow the artist’s painted realizations of his well-developed aesthetic theories, allowing a re-examination of the geographical- and time-based periods traditionally applied to his oeuvre.

Wassily Kandinsky (b. 1866, Moscow – d. 1944, Paris ) was one of the pioneers of abstraction and great theorists of Modernism. His seminal pre-World War I treatise, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, published in Munich in 1911 lays out his program for the development of art independent of observations of the objective world. Interested in synesthesia, and more particularly in the relationship between painting and music, Kandinsky strove to give painting the freedom from nature he felt in music. Kandinsky’s discovery of a new subject matter based only on the artist’s “inner need” would occupy him throughout his life.

Hockney's Beverly Hills Housewife Highlights Christie's Post-War & Contemporary Art Sale

2009-03-24T14:59:00.002+01:00

Hockney's Beverly Hills Housewife Highlights Christie's Post-War & Contemporary Art Sale

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An employee from Christie’s contemplates the work of art titled 'Beverly Hills Housewife', made by artist David Hockney, during the presentation at Christie’s in London, today March 23. Photo: EFE/Andy Rain.

Andy Warhol’s Portrait of Man Ray, 1976. Estimate: $2-4 million. Photo: Christie's Images Ltd 2009.

NEW YORK, NY.- Christie’s will offer a selection of works from the Collection of Betty Freeman in the May 13 Post-War & Contemporary Art Evening Sale. Leading the selection is one of the most important works to come to the auction market by David Hockney, Beverly Hills Housewife, (estimate: $7-10 million), 1966-1967. The Evening Sale selection of works from the collection comprises 19 lots and is estimated at $26-40 million.

Laura Paulson, Deputy Chairman and International Director of Post-War and Contemporary Art stated: “Betty Freeman’s deep commitment to the arts was demonstrated by a lifetime of indefatigable dedication and passionate support. David Hockney’s epic Beverly Hills Housewife is one of the artist’s most fascinating and iconic works and remains a perfect, timeless tribute to Freeman, a modern-day Medici, who will be remembered as an influential patron of our contemporary culture.”

Marc Porter, President of Christie’s Americas said: "This was a highly competitive consignment won by Christie's through creative marketing commitments, the expertise of its specialists and our long-term relationships with the consignor rather than through any revenue sharing arrangements."

A diptych measuring twelve feet long and six feet high, David Hockney’s Beverly Hills Housewife depicts a 1960’s California housewife standing on the patio of her well-appointed home. The painting’s modernist setting is testament to the refined and minimalist sensibilities of the subject, who is none other than Freeman herself. Having recently arrived in Los Angeles, the British artist asked Freeman if he could come to her house and paint the swimming pool in her backyard for a series that would become famously representative of his oeuvre, the ‘California Dreaming’ series. Upon arriving, Hockney decided to focus the work on Freeman, immediately finding that she, like many Los Angeles residents he had met, was very much a function of the space that she existed in, and the space that she existed in was very much a function of her.

Infused with pervasive and powerful silence, Beverly Hills Housewife not only captures the artist’s detached fascination with the California landscape, it also demonstrates his predilection for scenes bathed in crisp light and hyper-real colors, a distinct departure from the work being created by Hockney’s Post-War British counterparts at the time. Painted between 1966-1967, the work depicts a tanned, sculptural Freeman in bright pink dress standing on her covered patio. Hockney added the antelope trophy head on the wall to create a deliberately humorous face-off between the Freeman and fictional character.

Beverly Hills Housewife would become the centerpiece of Betty Freeman’s collection. She was to remain in the same house, memorialized on canvas, for the remainder of her life. The painting not only conveys the essence of the California good life, it also stands as a testament to the remarkable life-long friendship between the subject and the artist.

A much-admired, generous supporter of avant-garde contemporary music, Betty Freeman was also drawn to the work of the contemporary artists of her day who challenged the boundaries of painting and sculpture. She began collecting art in the 1950’s and gathered works by Abstract Expressionist artists. As with the composers she supported, Freeman forged friendships with artists David Hockney, Roy Lichtenstein, Dan Flavin, Clyfford Still, and Sam Francis, and followed the development of their careers throughout her lifetime. Freeman was also an accomplished photographer, who published and exhibited portraits of musicians and composers.

In addition to Beverly Hills Housewife, the New York Post-War & Contemporary Art Evening Sale will also feature works from the Collection of Betty Freeman by Roy Lichtenstein, Dan Flavin, Alexander Calder, Sam Francis, Andy Warhol, and Claes Oldenburg.

Roy Lichtenstein’s Frolic, 1977, (estimate: $4-7 million), was inspired by his own 1962 painting, Girl with Ball, by ads and comic books, and by one of the greatest painters in art history – Pablo Picasso. In Frolic, Picasso is seen through the filter of Pop, as his celebrated 1932 painting Baigneuse au ballon de plage in the collection of New York’s MoMA is interpreted with an unusual and irreverent twist.

Andy Warhol’s Portrait of Man Ray, 1976 (estimate: $2-4 million), will also be featured as part of the collection. One of Warhol’s most definitive portraits, his execution of Man Ray is a testament of his adoration of the celebrated artist. Man Ray’s work had a very significant impact on Warhol’s career, but with this portrait it becomes evident that Man Ray’s being had just as much of an influence. This portrait reinforces the larger theme within Warhol’s oeuvre regarding the concept of the artist as celebrity, putting Man Ray among the ranks of the glittering cultural icons by which Warhol defined his life and work, including Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando, Mick Jagger and Mohammed Ali.

Typewriter Eraser (estimate: $1.4-1.8 million), epitomizes Claes Oldenburg's revolutionary approach to sculpture as an objectification of mundane objects. Produced in 1976, this work marks a period of technical expansion for the sculptor, in which he experimented with new materials and an everincreasing scale.

A rare, early painting by Sam Francis from 1954 entitled Grey (estimate: $2.5-3.5 million) will also be offered. First exhibited in Dorothy Miller’s seminal Twelve Americans show at the MoMa, the work was acquired directly from Francis’ private collection by Betty Freeman, who enjoyed a long and close relationship with the artist.

Vermeer Masterpiece Back in Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum Presents Top Vermeer Work

2009-03-12T15:05:00.001+01:00

Vermeer Masterpiece Back in Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum Presents Top Vermeer Work

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Johannes Vermeer, Woman Holding a Balance (ca. 1664).

AMSTERDAM.- A major work by Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675) is temporarily back in Amsterdam. From 11 March to 1 June 2009, the Rijksmuseum presents his Woman Holding a Balance (c.1664) from the United States. The Rijksmuseum proudly presents this important work alongside four other masterpieces by Vermeer from the museum s own collection. Vermeer did not produce many paintings, so this is a unique moment for the Rijksmuseum as the only museum in Europe to be able to show five works by the renowned artist together. The painting is on loan from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, from which it rarely leaves.

Woman Holding a Balance
Among the items sold in 1696 in the sale of the estate of Jacob Dissius, a bookseller in Delft, were 21 paintings by Johannes Vermeer, a fellow townsman and already in his day a much admired artist. Isaac Rooleeuw, an Amsterdam merchant, managed to snap up two of the artist’s most important and expensive works in the space of five minutes: The Milkmaid and The Woman Holding a Balance. For five years they hung side-by-side at his home in Amsterdam, until Rooleeuw went bankrupt and the paintings were sold. The Woman Holding a Balance remained in private hands in Amsterdam for another century until shortly after 1800 she left the Netherlands and eventually in 1942 found herself via a circuitous route through Europe in Washington’s National Gallery of Art.

Vermeers reunited
For the first time in more than 200 years, The Milkmaid and The Woman Holding a Balance are once again together in Amsterdam, in the Rijksmuseum. Together with The Woman Reading a Letter, they represent the essential Vermeer. In all three works, he presents a domestic scene with a young woman standing in a typical Vermeer room, as she busies herself with some everyday activity, absorbed in thought. While Vermeer manages with his exceptional sense of detail to make us believe that we are watching a slice of real life, each of these scenes is minutely choreographed. He was careful to give each object its place, making clever use of perspective and the soft daylight entering the room from the left.

Vermeer in the Rijksmuseum collection
Since 1921, the Rijksmuseum has been able to show four masterpieces by Johannes Vermeer: The Little Street (c. 1658), The Love Letter (c. 1669-70), The Woman Reading a Letter (c. 1664) and one of Vermeer’s best known works, The Kitchen Maid, or as most people know her, The Milkmaid (c. 1658-60). Over the years, these paintings have become firm favourites alongside Rembrandt’s paintings at the Rijksmuseum, attracting more than a million visitors each year from around the world. As far as we know, Vermeer produced far fewer paintings than his famous contemporary. We know of 34 works by Vermeer, found today for the most part in the world s principal museums.

Guest appearance
The Vermeer from the National Gallery of Art in Washington is on loan to the Rijksmuseum from 11 March to 1 June 2009 as part of an annual series of guest appearances by major works at the museum. Each year the Rijksmuseum welcomes an outstanding exhibit from a leading international museum which relates in some way to works in the Rijksmuseum’s own collection. Vermeer’s illustrious predecessors include Catrina Hooghsaet by Rembrandt from Penrhyn Castle in Wales, The Leaping Horse by the 19th-century British artist Constable from the Royal Academy in London, and the Portrait of Jacopo Strada by Titian from Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum.

Gerhard Richter - Abstract Paintings Exhibition Opens Today at Haus der Kunst in Munich

2009-02-27T11:49:00.001+01:00

Gerhard Richter - Abstract Paintings Exhibition Opens Today at Haus der Kunst in Munich

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Gerhard Richter, Claudius, 1986, Öl auf Leinwand, 311 x 406 cm, Sammlung Landesbank Baden-Württemberg. © Gerhard Richter.

MUNICH.- Haus der Kunst presents today Gerhard Richter - Abstract Paintings, on view through May 17, 2009. Gerhard Richter has been painting his abstract paintings since the 1970s. Today they comprise two-thirds of all his work. With its concentration on this painting type, this exhibition differs from past Richter retrospectives, which primarily focused – each updated – on the proportional shift from the artist’s photograph-based paintings to his abstract ones.

The series "Cage" from 2006 and "Wald" (Forest) from 2005 – the latter on view for the first time in Europe – serve as the show’s point of departure. The exhibition traces Richter’s artistic development – represented in these series – to its roots, which stretch back to the mid-1980s: from the four-part series "Bach" (1992) and the color-reduced "St. Gallen," (1989) to earlier, more vibrant paintings such as "Blau" (Blue) (1988) and "Claudius" (1986).

Gerhard Richter uses the expanse and height of the exhibition rooms in the Haus der Kunst to flexibly interpret the serial character of the more than 60 large format paintings: to depict the sum of the individual works through their concentration in one room ("Bach"), or to emphasize the individual works by hanging them in different, successive rooms ("Cage").

Abstraction with Richter: Work on the basic questions of painting - In the mid-1980s Gerhard Richter produced an unusual number of large format paintings, frequently in series of three or four works. These paintings – with all their formal analogies – are characterized by a graphic multi-formality and form an open work group.

A main concern of the artist was to overcome the randomness of visual experience and to heighten the individual effect of color and form. Gerhard Richter applies the elements and structures of paint with brushes, squeegees and palette knives, so that the already existing layers are overlapped or completely obliterated by new ones. The traces of these tools and the layers of paint combine to create structures of spatial or landscape impressions without their consolidating into a recognizable object. Arbitrariness, chance, coincidence and destruction allow a specific type of painting to emerge but never a predetermined image. For Richter this multi-layered manner of painting is not based on a found motif or existing image; the artist, rather, works his way free of all motif specifications. "Every consideration that I use to ’construct’ a painting is incorrect and when the execution succeeds then this is only because I destroy this in part, or because it works despite this fact, by not disturbing and appearing planned." (Gerhard Richter)

Since the late 1980s Gerhard Richter has created paintings by dragging a squeegee in vertical or horizontal paths over the entire width or height of the canvas; in this way paint can be both applied as well as removed. Undercoats thus emerge smooth and diffused and are simultaneously superimposed again in a complex manner. Over the course of his artistic development, Gerhard Richter has developed various painting strategies. His abstract works are witness to his unrelenting preoccupation and formal examination of the condition of his own medium.

The beginnings of abstraction were characterized by an attempt at renewal. Abstraction was considered to be the most appropriate means of artistic self-expression and the aspired-to ’pure’ representation of representational techniques developed into subjectivism and high pathos for artists such as Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. Postwar artists, however, had experienced the collapse of a civilization; they made use of abstraction’s vocabulary in order to paint themselves free of their despair in their age’s circumstances. This partly violent gesture led Gerhard Richter to realize early on that the works of his predecessors, such as Jackson Pollock, as well as Lucio Fontana and Yves Klein, would, in the long run, fall pray to the "stockpile of the spectacle." (Buchloh) Richter, therefore, had to ask himself how a contemporary painted abstraction, which was born out of disillusionment and hopelessness, could now look like. Out of the tension between the utopia of a new beginnings and the mourning over the losses of these, he came to his own conception of painting and was ultimately able to find his own expression of abstraction.

As with his predecessors, the question of his abstract paintings’ relation to the world is also an issue with Richter: Is a sense of unease or the deficit of a particular social situation apparent in Richter’s abstract works? Do they express a general sense of the times beyond their subjective mood? It is typical of the reception of Richter’s abstract paintings that no answers have been formulated that point in a singular direction; rather the critique of the dialectical interplay of coincidence and structure, and of materiality and mentality typical of Richter are positively emphasized. The abstract language he has developed maintains moderation between accessibility and reserve. "The painting of Gerhard Richter is a discreet painting. It is a painting that knows how to distinguish between too much and too little with regard to the expression, reflexivity and self-accusation of painterly means." (Beate Söntgen)

The exhibition is developed in cooperation with the Museum Ludwig in Cologne and is curated by Ulrich Wilmes, who joined the Haus der Kunst in Munich in spring 2008. A catalogue with contributions by Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Beate Söntgen, Gregor Stemmrich and Ulrich Wilmes has been published by Hatje Cantz, ISBN 978-3-7757- 2248-3, museum price 49,80 Euros. Supported by the Gesellschaft der Freunde Haus der Kunst.

Welcme to your kingdom - Princess KISHA

2009-02-11T11:05:00.000+01:00

Make a Smilebox scrapbook

2009-01-15T10:13:00.001+01:00

David Cerny Laughs at Europe with Installation at the Council of the European Union

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Detail of the installation "Entropa", which represents several European Community countries, on view at the European Council building in Brussels, Belgium. Photo: EFE/Olivier Hoslet.

BRUSSELS.- The idea was simple but good. So effective that he convinced the presidency of the European Council, which this semester is headed by the Czech Republic, to give its blessing and the 500,000 Euros needed to finance it. Czech artist David Cerný promised the following: a collaboration between 27 artists from the European Community who would put forth their vision from their own countries. France was portrayed as a labor strike, Spain as a slab of concrete and Italy into a soccer field.

The only problem is that behind this work of art, which has caused great controversy reducing Greece to a huge fire, Romania into a Dracula castle, there is only one creative mind, that of David Cerný.

Czech Deputy Prime Minister, Alexandr Vondra, has confessed feeling "surprisingly sorry" after discovering that the only author of Entropa is Cerný and not 27 artists, as had been stipulated in the contract with the artist.

"David Cerný is the only person responsible for not fulfilling his commitment", said Vondra, who added that the Czech presidency is analyzing what to do with the installation, which has already been placed at the Justus Lipsius builiding of the EU Council building and which was supposed to be inaugurated on Thursday.

Meanwhile, Cerný, known for his sculptures such as Freud hanging in the middle of the streets in Prague or for painting a rose on a Soviet tank, has laughed all along and said that he wanted to prove "that Europe could laugh at itself".

Cerny, who also invented 26 false names of European artists that had supposedly collaborated with him, recognizes that he knew the truth would come out and says that economic restrictions and lack of time motivated him to do the whole work by himself.

Belgium appears as a chocolate box, Denmark constructed with Lego and the map of Sweden below a box that looks like the ones Ikea uses.

On his website, the artist posted the fllowing comment:

Europe is unified by its history, culture and, in recent years, also by a jointly created political structure. More or less diverse countries are intertwined by a network of multi-dimensional relationships that, in effect, results in an intricate whole. From within, we tend to focus on the differences between the individual European countries. These differences include thousands of important and unimportant things ranging from geographical situation to gastronomy and everyday habits.

The EU puzzle is both a metaphor and a celebration of this diversity. It comprises the building blocks oft he political, economic and cultural relationships with which we 'toy' but which will be passed on to our children. The task of today is to create building blocks with the best possible characteristics.

Self-reflection, critical thinking and the capacity to perceive oneself as well as the outside world with a sense of imny are the hallmarks of European thinking. This art project that originated on the occasion of Czech Presidency of the Council of the European Union attempts to present Europe as a whole from the perspectives of 27 artists from the individual EU Member States. Their projects share the playful analysis of national stereotypes as well as original characteristics of the individual cultural identities.

That much is stated in an official booklet of the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs. However Entropa is not a real pan-European work by artists-provocateurs, but a mystification. At first glance, it looks like a project to decorate official space, which has degenerated to an unhindered display of national traumas and complexes. Individual states in the European Union puzzle are presented by non-existent artists. They have their names, artificially created identities, and some have their own Web sites. Each of them is the author of a text explaining their motivation to take part in the common project. That all was created by David Cerny, Kristof Kintera and Tomas Pospiszyl, with the help of a large team of colleagues from the Czech Republic and abroad.

The original intention was indeed to ask 27 European artists for participation. But it became apparent that this plan cannot be realised, due to time, production, and financial constraints. The team therefore, without the knowledge of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, decided to create fictitious artists who would represent various European national and artistic stereotypes. We apologise to Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek, Deputy Prime Minister Alexandr Vondra, Minister Karel Schwarzenberg and their departments that we did not inform them of the true state of affairs and thus misguided them. We did not want them to bear the responsibility for this kind of politically incorrect satire. We knew the truth would come out. But before that we wanted to find out if Europe is able to laugh at itself.

At the beginning stood the question: What do we really know about Europe? We have information about some states, we only know various tourist clichés about others. We know basically nothing about several of them. The art works, by artificially constructed artists from the 27 EU countries, show how difficult and fragmented Europe as a whole can seem from the perspective of the Czech Republic. We do not want to insult anybody, just point at the difficulty of communication without having the ability of being ironic.

Grotesque hyperbole and mystification belongs among the trademarks of Czech culture and creating false identities is one of the strategies of contemporary art. The images of individual parts of Entropa use artistic techniques often characterised by provocation. The piece thus also lampoons the socially activist art that balances on the verge between would-be controversial attacks on national character and undisturbing decoration of an official space. We believe that the environment of Brussels is capable of ironic self-reflection, we believe in the sense of humour of European nations and their representatives.

2009-01-08T11:40:00.001+01:00

Seattle Art Museum Presents Iconic Paintings by Edward Hopper in Edward Hopper's Women

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Edward Hopper, New York Restaurant, 1922. Oil on canvas, 24 X 30 in. Collection of the Muskegon Museum of Art. Michigan. Hackley Picture Fund Purchase.

SEATTLE, WA.- The Seattle Art Museum (SAM) presents some of Edward Hopper’s best known paintings in the exhibition Edward Hopper’s Women. The paintings, along with three etchings by the artist, paint a poignant image of the emergence of the modern American woman, through the eyes of an artist with an uncommon ability to convey seemingly unremarkable human situations in ways that elicit powerful associations and emotional responses. Edward Hopper’s Women will be on view through March 1, 2009 at SAM downtown, First Avenue and Union Street.

In 2007 SAM announced the promised bequest of Hopper’s Chop Suey, a seminal painting from 1929. With Edward Hopper’s Women, the museum unveils this evocative painting in the context of a very specific set of social circumstances in New York in the late 1920s -- and the changing role of women within it.

"The tensions that still seem to emanate from this painting are testament to the penetrating power of Hopper’s gaze," noted Patricia Junker, Curator of American Art at SAM. "Hopper revealed himself an uncommonly close observer of people and place, and it was with Chop Suey that he found his most potent, enigmatic subject in the American city—the modern American woman."

Organized by Junker, Edward Hopper’s Women brings together a group of paintings that shows Chop Suey as part of an extended narrative of human vulnerability that evolved as Hopper studied New York women in new kinds of social spaces. Through works such as the early New York Restaurant (1922), and the later Compartment C, Car 293 (1938), visitors can appreciate the universality of Hopper’s themes and the communicative power of his art across time. The paintings, together with related etchings on the theme, suggest that the artist’s near obsession with the idea of human frailty occupied him through his entire career, informing his most potent -- and now iconic -- works. The exhibition is supplemented by a selection of photographs from the Seattle Art Museum’s permanent collection by Edward Hopper’s contemporaries, including Imogen Cunningham, Walker Evans and Ben Shahn, among others.

Bonnes fêtes, best wishes for 2009!

2008-12-23T14:17:00.001+01:00

Make a Smilebox slideshow

2008-12-12T14:12:00.007+01:00

Best Wishes For All Mankind

I love to watch a woman dance

I love to watch a woman dance
She bows her head and lifts her hands
Her hips begin to circle slowly
Her eyes have closed; her face is holy
She holds the whole world in trance
I love to watch a woman dance
Yeah, I love to watch a woman dance

She likes the slow songs of love lost
They take her a million miles away
'Cause to dream, sometimes, is the only way
To go places you can't get to any other way
Our eyes connect; she takes my hand
I love to watch a woman dance
Yeah, I love to watch a woman dance

I feel my heart beating, and I wonder
Will it ever satisfy my longing?
I'm gonna hold on to you for as long as I can
For who knows, this dance may be our only dance

So we danced together, close and slow
So slow we're almost standing still
Her warm breath against my neck
Slowly breaking down my will
The room spins so I can barely stand
The song ends; then, she lets go of my hand
There's so much I don't understand
But I love to watch a woman dance
Yeah, I love to watch a woman dance

What do I do with my heart?

You don't have to say a word
I can see it in your eyes
I know what you wanna say
It's so hard to say goodbye

I can hold back my tears
And try to be strong
While our love is fallin' apart
I know what I'll say
If you walk away
But what do I do
What do I do with my heart?

I'm not gonna say a word
I know I can't change your mind
You know where you need to go
I know I'll be left behind

I won't hold you back
I won't stand in your way
If you need to make a new start
But I still wanna know
When my arms let you go
What do I do
What do I do with my heart?

Oh, girl, don't you remember?
It was not so long ago
We were makin' plans for two
Just me and you
Now you tell me that you've found somebody
Someone who loves you better
No one could ever love you
The way I do

Tell me you're not leavin' now
Tell me you're not leavin'
Tell me that you're gonna stay
Please say you'll stay with me, baby
Tell me that you love me still
Say you love me still
For this and this alone I pray
Fall down on my knees and pray

I'll do anything
Yes, I would
To save what we have
To keep you by my side
I'll love you 'til death do us part
But what do I do
What do I do
When I'm still missing you?
What do I do
What do I do with my heart?

Busy being fabulous

I came home to an empty house
And I found your little note
"Don't wait up for me tonight"
And that was all she wrote

Do you think I don't know that you're out on the town
With all of your high-rollin' friends?
What do you do when you come up empty?
Where do you go when the party ends?

And you were just too busy being fabulous
Too busy to think about us
I don't know what you were dreaming of
Somehow you forgot about love
And you were just too busy being fabulous, uh-huh

A little time in the country
A day or two to slow down
A bottle of wine and a walk in the moonlight
Maybe some foolin' around

But you think time is just a magazine
And money's just a thrill
I've waited so long for you to change your way of livin'
Now I realize that you never will

'Cause you were just too busy being fabulous
Too busy to think about us
Lookin' for something you'll never find
You'll never know what you left behind
'Cause you were just too busy being fabulous, uh-huh

You tell a joke and everybody's laughin'
That's something you know how to do
You've always been the life of the party
But now my baby, the joke is on you

'Cause you were just too busy being fabulous
Too busy to think about us
Running after something that never comes
What in the world are you runnin' from?

And you were just too busy being fabulous
Too busy to think about us
To drink the wine from your winner's cup
To notice the children were growin' up

And you were just too busy being fabulous
Too busy, too busy
Too busy
Aw, baby

No more cloudy days

Sittin by a foggy window
starin at the pourin rain
fallin down like lonely teardrops
memories of love in vein

these cloudy days
make you wanna cry
it breaks your heart when someone leaves
and you dont know why

i can see that you've been hurt
baby i've been lonely too
i've been out here lost and searchin
lookin for a girl like you

now i believe
the sun is gonna shine
dont you be afraid to love again
put your hand in mine

baby i would never make you cry
i would never make you blue
i would never let you down
i would never be untrue
i know a place where we can go
where true love always stays
theres no more stormy nights
no more cloudy days

i believe in second chances
i believe in angles, too
i believe in new romances
baby i believe in you

these cloudy days
are comin to an end
and you don't have to be afraid
to fall in love again

baby i would never make you cry
i would never make you blue
i would never turn away
i would never be untrue
i know a place where we can go
where true love always stays
theres no more stormy nights
no more cloudy days

Long road out of Eden

Moon shining down through the palms
Shadows moving on the sand
Somebody whispering the 23rd Psalm
Dusty rifle in his trembling hands
Somebody trying just to stay alive
He got promises to keep
Over the ocean in America
Far away, the master sleeps

Silent stars blinking in the blackness of an endless sky
Gold, silver satellites, ghostly caravans passing by
Galaxies unfolding and new worlds being born
Pilgrims and prodigals creeping toward the dawn
And it's a long road out of Eden

Music blasting from an SUV
On a bright and sunny day
Rolling down the interstate
In the good old USA
Having lunch at the petroleum club
Smoking fine cigars and swapping lies
They say, "Give me 'nother slice of that barbecued brisket
Give me 'nother piece of that pecan pie"

Freeways flickering; cell phones chiming a tune
We're riding to Utopia; road map says we'll be arriving soon
Captains of the old order clinging to the reins
Assuring us these aches inside are only growing pains
But it's a long road out of Eden

Back home, I was so certain; the path was very clear
But now I have to wonder - what are we doing here?
And I'm not counting on tomorrow and I can't tell wrong from right
But I'd give anything to be there in your arms tonight

Weaving down the American highway
Through the litter and the wreckage, and the cultural junk
Bloated with entitlement, bloated on propaganda
Now we're driving dazed and drunk

Went down the road to Damascus, the road to Mandalay
Met the ghost of Caesar on the Appian Way
He said, "It's hard to stop this binging once you get a taste
But the road to empire is a bloody, stupid waste"

Behold the bitten apple, the power of the tools
But all the knowledge in the world is of no use to fools
And it's a long road out of Eden

Picasso Presents Living Things: Picasso Figure - Still Life

2008-11-28T10:43:00.000+01:00

Picasso Presents Living Things: Picasso Figure - Still Life

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Pablo Picasso, Still Life with Guitar, Juan-les-Pins, 1924, oil on canvas, 97,5 x 130 cm. Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. © Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. © Sucesión Pablo Picasso, VEGAP, Madrid 2008.

BARCELONA.- Museu Picasso presents Living Things: Picasso Figure - Still Life, on view through March 1, 2009. One of the primary objectives of the Museu Picasso in Barcelona is to constitute a centre of reference for research and the generation of knowledge about Picasso and his work. The Museum has brought together under the auspices of its Rethinking Picasso programme a number of projects that offer vital new approaches to the artist, moving beyond traditional biographical narratives and stylistic classifications to seek new perspectives and free the subject from the weight of convention and cliché.

Christopher Green, Professor of History of Art at the Courtauld Institute in London, has significantly advanced that working objective by accepting the Museum’s proposal to curate and present in Barcelona the exhibition Living Things: Picasso Still-life/Figure, which puts forward new readings of the artist's work based on the latest researches of this leading authority in the field.

The exhibition, exceptionally rigorous and innovative in its premises, presents a very judicious selection of some 60 works—drawings, prints and paintings—made by Picasso between 1907 and 1933, including four of the magnificent still-lifes that the artist made in 1924.

Many prestigious institutions and private collectors have lent works for this exhibition — these include: Musée National d'Art moderne/Centre de création industrielle, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; The Detroit Institute of Fine Arts; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, and The National Gallery of Ireland.

It is a pleasure to acknowledge our debt of gratitude for the loan of works by many private collections around the world and, in particular, to private collectors in Barcelona and to the artist’s family.

Living Things - From 1907 on Picasso opened his work to metamorphosis, devoting himself more and more to transforming one thing into another. In particular, he turned human figures into objects and objects into figures, even creating objects that are also figures. The present exhibition brings together sketches, studies, prints and paintings that show some of the ways in which this metamorphic process was materialized in Picasso’s works during the artist’s Cubist period and between 1924 and the early 1930s, the years of his involvement and exchange of ideas with the Surrealists.

The exhibition is entitled Living Things because Picasso’s interchanges between figures and objects bring the inanimate to life. A head is also a guitar, a still-life becomes an automaton and ultimately, in the last rooms, objects behave as if they were actors on a stage or are broken in pieces like the helpless victims of a violent attack.

Museu Picasso in Barcelona Presents Living Things: Picasso Figure - Still Life

2008-11-22T10:08:00.000+01:00

Museu Picasso in Barcelona Presents Living Things: Picasso Figure - Still Life

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Pablo Picasso's "Still Life with mandolin" (left) and "Mandolin and Guitar" (right). EFE/XAVIER BERTRAL.

BARCELONA.- Museu Picasso presents today Living Things: Picasso Figure - Still Life, on view through March 1, 2009. From 1907, Picasso opened his work to metamorphosis. He increasingly made one thing into another. In particular, he turned figures into things and things into figures, or even created things that were also figures.

This exhibition brings together sketches, studies, prints and paintings to show some of the ways in which this happened in Picasso’s work through the Cubist period and then between 1924 and the early 1930s as he engaged with and responded to the Surrealists.

It is called ‘Living Things’ because Picasso’s exchanges between figures and objects animate the inanimate. Heads are also guitars, still-lives become automata, and finally, in the later rooms, objects perform like actors on stage or are pulled apart as if the defenseless victims of attack. The exhibition presents 68 artworks, most of them by Picasso: 49 paintings, among them 2 oils by Juan Gris, 9 drawings, 8 photographs by Waléry, and 1 print.

2008-11-20T10:31:00.000+01:00

British Architect and Designer Ron Arad: No Discipline Opens at Pompidou Centre in Paris

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Ron Arad, Acrylic Oh Void 2, armchair 2004. 66 x 115 x 58 cm. Editor The Gallery Mourmans, Maastricht. Private collection © The Gallery Mourmans. Photo Erik & Petra Hesmerg.

PARIS.- The Centre Pompidou is to devote an exhibition to the work of British architect and designer Ron Arad, his first major one-person show in France. From its beginnings, the Centre has played a key role in presenting design and designers to the wider public, with exhibitions such as Design Français 1960-1990 (1988), Manifeste: 30 ans de création en perspective, 1960-1990 (1992) and D. Day, le design aujourd’hui (2005), as well as monographic exhibitions devoted to such figures as Carlo Mollino (1989), Ettore Sottsass (1994), Gaetano Pesce (1996), Philippe Starck (2003), Charlotte Perriand (2005), and now Ron Arad.

Born in Tel Aviv and trained at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem, Arad moved to London in 1973 to study at the Architectural Association. Having settled in the British capital, he has since produced a diverse array of objects, sinusoidal, elliptical or ovoid in form, from one-offs to limited editions to mass-produced pieces.

Mention of Ron Arad’s name immediately brings to mind such pieces as the Bookworm bookshelf (1993) and the Tom Vac chair (1997) but, his ground breaking work, has taken him beyond conventional categorization: a creator who recognizes no a priori boundaries, who in his practice moves freely between architecture, design and the visual arts.

In 1987, he was invited by the Centre Pompidou to participate in the exhibition Nouvelles tendances: Les avant-gardes de la fin du XXème siècle, and he has several pieces in the design collection of the Musée national d’art moderne/Centre de création industrielle. This retrospective will present emblematic examples of Arad’s work as a designer, from prototypes to mass-produced objects, as well as a number of architectural projects, together with audio-visual documentation.

Ron Arad’s design for the exhibition in the Galerie Sud draws the visitor into a strikingly distinctive world. The first space offers an identical reproduction of his foyer and staircase for the Tel Aviv Opera House (1994), onto whose elliptical form is projected a film on the Holon Design Museum currently under construction, while plasma screens on the wall present some two dozen of his architectural projects.

Beyond this reconstruction, a luminous divide revealing the mysterious silhouettes of objects beyond delimits an intermediate space in which are displayed one-off pieces, prototypes and limited editions. This long ribbon also encloses another space, visible from the street, where visitors and passers-by will find a scaffolding composed of a multitude tubes of varying diameters housing examples of mass-produced pieces, while others contain small screens showing videos. On the floor are more pieces, some of them mobile, equally visible from the street.

The work exhibited illustrates as well as Arad’s long-standing interest in technology, the way in which innovative research, materials engineering and the use of high-precision machinery are combined in unique experiments: sculptural chairs in carbon fibre or silicone, vases produced by stereolithography, lamps that receive and display text messages. And in his work for manufacturers, these technical and formal innovations find expression in the design of everyday objects. Arad’s architecture is equally idiosyncratic, identifiable by its deployment of a formal vocabulary that suggests the application of design to space, as in his Y’s Store for designer Yohji Yamamoto in Tokyo, the Duomo hotel in Italy, and the Holon Design Museum in Israel.

After the Centre Pompidou, the Ron Arad exhibition will be shown at MOMA, New York, from July 28 to October 19 2009, and then at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, in the Spring of 2010.

Born in Tel Aviv in 1951, Ron Arad studied at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem from 1971 to 1973. After graduating in 1973, he settled in London and continued his training at the Architectural Association. His teachers included Peter Cook and Bernard Tschumi, and he became a close associate of Nigel Coates, Peter Wilson and Zaha Hadid. He qualified as an architect in 1979, and worked in an architectural practice before setting up his own design agency, One Off Ltd, with Dennis Groves and Caroline Thorman, in 1981. One Off functioned as a showroom and design workshop, and Arad soon began designing and distributing his own unique pieces or limited editions – surprising objects using unusual, salvaged or recycled materials. These included his remote-controlled Aerial lamp (1981) made from a car radio aerial, the Rover Chair, made from a salvaged car seat (1981) and the Concrete Stereo hi-fi unit, set into a block of raw concrete (1983). He explored materials such as tempered steel and soldered steel sheets, used for the Well Tempered Chair (1986), the Tinker Chair (1988), and the 'Big Easy Volumes' series in polished stainless steel (1988). In 1989, he founded Ron Arad Associates Ltd in London, with Alison Brooks and Caroline Thorman, followed by Architecture and Design (incorporating One Off Ltd) in 1993 and, in 1994, the Ron Arad Studio at Como in Italy, for the production of limited series of hand-crafted pieces, previously made in the London workshops.

Technology has always taken centre stage in Ron Arad's work; his unique, experimental pieces exploit the essential characteristics of their raw materials, draw on the very latest applied research, and are made using high-precision machine tools. They include sculptural seats in carbon fibre or silicon (such as the Oh Voïd chairs of 2002), vases modelled using stereolithography (the Perfect Vase of 2001 or ceiling lamps such as Lolita (2004) which can receive (and project) text messages from a mobile 'phone.

Ron Arad has collaborated with Galerie Mourmans since 1998, creating collections of furniture including the BOOP (Blown Out Of Proportion) series. The gallery continues to support his experimental work, and produces limited editions of his most recent creations: the Blo-Glo series, presented at Dolce & Gabbana in Milan in 2006, the Bodyguards collection at the Milan Furniture Fair in 2007.

Ron Arad has also made his technical and formal innovations available to numerous, large-scale international manufacturers, creating mass-produced everyday objects based on his original, one-off works: Alessi, Cappellini, iGuzzini, Driade, Kartell, Magis, Moroso or Vitra. Some objects have become design icons, such as the Bookworm shelves (1993), the FPE (Fantastic Plastic Elastic) chairs of 1997, Tom Vac (1999), the Victoria and Little Albert seating collection (2002) or the Ripple Chair (2005), and the Pizzakobra lamp (2007).

At the same time, Ron Arad has continued working as an architect and interior designer, designing his own London office before embarking on a host of projects including the foyer and auditorium of the Tel Aviv Performing Arts Centre in Israel (1994-1998), the Y’store for Yohji Yamamoto in Tokyo (2003), the Design Museum in Holon, Israel (work began in 2004) or the Notify corporate showroom in Milan (2008).

Ron Arad also creates urban sculpture: Domus Totem in Milan (1997); Big Blue at Canary Wharf in London (1999); Evergreen at Roppongi Hills, Tokyo (2003).

Arad teaches in the department of Design Products at the Royal College of Art [LR: pas Arts] in London. He organises workshops in Germany, France and Italy, and lectures at design schools all over the world.

His work features regularly at leading design fairs, helping to establish his reputation on the international scene. A major retrospective of his work was held in Barcelona in 2003, and he was the subject of a solo exhibition at Barry Friedman Ltd in New York, in 2005.

He has won numerous awards: Designer of the Year at the Salon du Meuble, Paris (1994); co-winner of the Perrier Jouët Selfridges Design Prize, London (2001); the Barcelona Primavera International Award for Design (2001); the Oribe Art & Design Award Japan (2001); Architektur & Wohnen Designer of the Year (2004); FX Magazine Designer of the Year Award, 2005.

Ron Arad's work features in numerous public museum collections: the Centre Pompidou, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, the Fonds National d’Art Contemporain (Paris); the Vitra Design Museum (Weil-am-Rhein); the Design Museum, Nuremberg; the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; the Stedelijk Museum of Modern Art, Amsterdam; the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Powerhouse, Sydney; the Design Museum, Osaka.

He lives and works in London.

Largest Collection of Works by Wassily Kandinsky Opened at the Lenbachhaus in Munich

2008-10-27T11:58:00.000+01:00

Largest Collection of Works by Wassily Kandinsky Opened at the Lenbachhaus in Munich

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This large and ambitious retrospective includes some 95 paintings from all the important periods of Kandinsky’s oeuvre.

MUNICH.- The Lenbachhaus in Munich, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Guggenheim Museum in New York are the three museums worldwide that hold the largest collections of works by Wassily Kandinsky. Together these three museums organized a large joint show on this outstanding modernist artist and founder of abstract painting.

This large and ambitious retrospective includes some 95 paintings from all the important periods of Kandinsky’s oeuvre, with the collections of the three participating museums complementing each other perfectly. While the Lenbachhaus draws on the outstanding collection of works from Kandinsky’s Blue Rider period from 1908 to 1914 donated by Gabriele Münter, the focus of the collection at the Centre Pompidou is on the artist’s output during the Russian Revolution and his Bauhaus years from 1917 to 1933, although it is also in possession of some extraordinary works from the Paris period donated by Nina Kandinsky. Finally, thanks to the purchases made by Solomon R. Guggenheim and Hilla Rebay, the exhibition also features a number of Kandinsky’s late works produced in Paris between 1933 and 1944, together with several of the early Expressionist gems now held at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

The coming exhibition is based on an unprecedented number of paintings of great variety from each of the three participating museums. To be able to shed light on the role Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) played as both a pioneer and theorist of abstraction, the organizers intend to bring together only those major, large-format works that were crucial to his development, and hence to focus the show on some of the very best examples of work he produced when at the height of his powers.

In addition to an ideal selection of the best works from the three aforementioned collections, the show also includes some magnificent loans from Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod, New York, Washington, Philadelphia, Basel, all chosen so as to present Kandinsky’s series of large-format “Impressions,“ “Improvisations,” and “Compositions” as comprehensively as possible.

By bringing together three separate collections never before loaned on such a vast scale, this first—and to date only— collaboration between the world’s three largest Kandinsky museums provides a unique opportunity to experience the artist’s work more directly and more intensively than ever before, and to review the periods he spent in Moscow, Munich, and Paris, and his collector contacts in America. It also constitutes an unprecedented opportunity for international cooperation between major museums.

For the Lenbachhaus, this Kandinsky retrospective represents a new high-water mark in its role as exhibitor of treasures by the Blue Rider group, as well as enabling it, for the first time on these premises, to show Kandinsky in a larger context encompassing even the late works of 1942. It is also the last major show to be held at the Lenbachhaus before it closes for the modernization work due to commence in March 2009, immediately after the exhibition finishes.

Diana and Actaeon. The Forbidden Glimpse of the Naked Body Opens in Dusseldorf

2008-10-25T10:12:00.000+02:00

Diana and Actaeon. The Forbidden Glimpse of the Naked Body Opens in Dusseldorf

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Eric Fischl, Bad Boy, 1981, Öl auf Leinwand, 167,5 x 244 cm. Privatsammlung, Courtesy Thomas Ammann Fine Art, Zürich. Courtesy: Eric Fischl.

DUSSELDORF.- Around a core of works of art that explicitly relate to the myth of Artemis/Diana and Aktaion/Actaeon as told by Ovid, this exhibition brings together over 300 works in a scope to be shown as such only in Düsseldorf. On its agenda is that view afforded at all periods of art, upon ‘The forbidden glimpse of the naked body‘. Diana’s fate is also that of Venus, Susanna, Bathsheba, Nyssia, Phryne, Potiphar’s Wife, Baubo, Sheela-na-Gig and a host of unnamed nudes in modes classical and explicit who pass before the visitor’s eye.

They do so now in works by more than 200 artists, as paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs and videos from German and international private and public collections. Together they provide a unique account of a broad field interesting from both an art-historical and cultural-historical angle - of chastity and desire, of seeing and being seen, voyeurism and exhibitionism.

The exhibition tells first of attraction and desire, that is to say, as much of the tangle of connections between sexuality and sex, and beauty, truth, ecstasy ! and death; it tells of taboos and their breaching, of guilt and retribution and of knowledge that cannot be had in innocence. The show looks, too, at the ambivalent fascination of the beautiful female body exposed to view, in other words both the erotic and eroticising relish, the sensuous charge in beholding and the horror that the beholder may sense in looking on the naked truth of the demonstratively, shamelessly unconcealed female sex: the apotropaic effect, then, of Baubo. The exhibition tells of the exhibitionism, but so too of the voyeurism of works of art and of artists male or female, of eyes cast upon the naked body and again of representation ! the presentation and provocative exposition of the unveiled sex. (Beat Wismer)

In the Metamorphoses, Ovid relates the story handed down from Classical Greece, of the hunter, Aktaion/Actaeon, who surprises Artemis/Diana, goddess of hunting and the guardian deity of feminine chastity, at her bath together with her nymphs. He looks on; she punishes him, the mortal who has looked upon her, the goddess, in her nakedness, by changing him into a stag: his own hounds spontaneously hunt him down, to the kill.

With progressing interest in Classical Antiquity, this fatal, conceivably chance meeting with Diana, culminating in Actaeon’s death, became a favourite subject for artists from the Renaissance to the Classicists. By the twentieth century this myth had already passed out of general knowledge and become in principle the preserve of exclusive epistemological circles, of psychologists and those with an iconological interest, with some few artists processing the concept in various media. One of those to have engaged with the Diana-and-Actaeon myth consistently if not indeed obsessively over several years as a painter and draughtsman as well as a philosophical writer, is Pierre Klossowski - grounds enough for his work to be given its own area within the exhibition.

In exploring the mythological sources of erotic art the exhibition describes a wide radius, traces the complex question of the forbidden gaze into the art of our own day, presents the progress of the female nude through the ages from a figure of chastity to one flirting with her nakedness and sensuality; light is cast on the voyeuristic traits inherent in images of the nude all the way to the playgrounds of erotic and pornographic art.

Besides works from Classical Greece and Rome and by the "classics# of older art history, for example Artemisia Gentileschi, Rembrandt, Peter Paul Rubens and Paolo Veronese, the show presents works by masters such as Pierre Bonnard, Lovis Corinth, Marcel Duchamp, Ferdinand Hodler, Gustav Klimt, Pierre Klossowski, Pablo Picasso, Auguste Rodin, Egon Schiele and, from the realm of contemporary art, standpoints represented by Nobuyoshi Araki, Balthasar Burkhard, J udy Chicago, Marlene Dumas, Noritoshi Hirakawa, Robert Mapplethorpe, Markus Raetz, Arnulf Rainer, Cindy Sherman and others.

Marlene Dumas, the winner of this year’s City of Düsseldorf Art Award, will be installing her own gallery with her latest works for this exhibition.

To accompany the show a comprehensive publication is being prepared with plates of all the works in the exhibition. This catalogue contains texts by authors whose take on the subject is not only art-historical but also incorporates philosophical and literary perspectives.

General Director and co-ordinating curator of the exhibition: Beat Wismer. Co-curators: Sandra Badelt, Mattijs Visser.

Musée de la Musique Opens Serge Gainsbourg Exhibition

2008-10-22T14:09:00.002+02:00

Musée de la Musique Opens Serge Gainsbourg Exhibition

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Salvador Dali (1904 – 1989), La Chasse aux papillons, 1929 – 1930. Ink on paper. Charlotte Gainsbourg collection. Photo: Serge Anton.

PARIS.- The Musée de la musique dedicates an exhibit to Serge Gainsbourg (1928-1991) at a time when his popularity is expanding internationally. While in London and New York, contemporary pop is discovering the poetic and melodic talents of this “French artist”, Tokyo is experiencing a veritable “Gainsbourgmania” through the mixing and sampling of his compositions.

This exhibition is organized thanks to the remarkable loans granted by the family, and particularly Charlotte Gainsbourg, as well as by close friends of Serge Gainsbourg.

The Musée de la musique has entrusted the organization of this project to the artist and sound illustrator Frédéric Sanchez. Cutting-edge in its operation, a mix between an exhibition and an installation, the project serves as homage to a present-day artist with one of the most significant French musical personalities in the 20th century.

Successively a painter, writer, poet, author, performer, composer, actor and director, Serge Gainsbourg was an artist who, throughout his life, used the image in all its forms and particularly his own, revealing an aesthetic universe that eliminated the boundary between “major arts” and “minor arts”.

The exhibit emphasizes the different aspects of this multifaceted work, recognized distinctly as a catalyst of the ages for forty years, following the examples of David Bowie in England and Bob Dylan in the United States. Gainsbourg was always ahead of his time: his writing, compositions, collaborations, aesthetic tendencies and even the course of his personal life often preceded and influenced moral evolution and that of artistic and cultural movements.

By playing with words and references, borrowing as much from classic culture as from popular culture, moving forward, transforming and arranging, he invented a new form of composition made from montages and collages.

The exhibit emphasizes the modernity of his work with music, words and images. Sampling, mixing, remixing, borrowing, quotation, self-quotation and alteration predominate and foreshadow the images and sounds of present-day culture. The exhibit features over one hundred animated images, excerpts from films and audio-visual documents, photographs…

The public will also discover objects or works of art once owned by the artist, such as the statue of L’Homme à tête de chou (Cabbage-headed man) by Claude Lalanne, which inspired the album of the same name, or Paul Klee’s painting, Mauvaises Nouvelles des étoiles (1913), which provided the title for Gainsbourg’s album in 1981.

The famous Autoportrait painted in 1957, sometimes reproduced, will be presented for the first time to the public as well as a large number of original manuscripts, objects and documents demonstrating the written work of Serge Gainsbourg.

Vanessa Paradis, Bambou, Alain Chamfort, Isabelle Adjani, Jaine Birkin, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Catherine Deneuve, Jacques Dutronc, Lulu…A sound design was created by Fédéric Sanchez based on Gainsbourg’s texts which are read by these artists, who either met him or were inspired by him at one point in their lives.

For forty years, Gainsbourg relentlessly created associations and correspondences between words, images and music.

This exhibit is visualized as an authentic spatial positioning in three dimensions, inviting visitors on a dream-like voyage into the artist’s universe, a voyage that solicits the imaginary like that of Alice by Lewis Carroll, a writer often called upon by Serge Gainsbourg.

In the style of Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin in Jean-Christophe Averty’s film Melody Nelson, made for television in 1971, the visitor finds himself plunged into the heart of the artist’s poetic and sophisticated universe and his numerous references and sources of inspiration.

The setup of the visit is a basic walk in a maze of thematic totems, each three meters high, upon which several hundred pieces of lighting equipment present photographic and audiovisual documents. A procession of images with sounds
that move through the space: screens with synchronized images, spatially composed sound… The visitor creates his own rhythm by passing from one “period” to the next…

Shortcuts, accelerations, flashbacks, connections and false connections, the setup of the exhibit resembles a labyrinth of images and sounds.

Manuscripts and objects are displayed in a long showcase window with a background of mirrors, creating the illusion of increased space and infinitely reflecting the images calling to mind of Gainsbourg’s kaleidoscopic universe.

More than three hundred sleeves of records recorded by Serge Gainsbourg and his different interpreters are displayed in a smaller room adjoining the exhibit. Listening booths permit the visitor to listen to the Serge Gainsbourg’s works of his choosing.

The exhibit focuses on four major periods:

I – The “Blue Period” (1958 -1965)
The first thematic ensemble of the exhibit retraces the years of Serge Gainsbourg’s artistic education in a literary manner, his outset as an “accursed painter” and “promising songwriter”.

In the 1920s, Joseph Ginsburg, painter and pianist, left Russia with his wife Olga and arrived in France via Constantinople. Images of Crimea, loaned by Jacqueline Ginsburg, Serge’s sister, portray their native region, which is also that of Tchekov. Bosporus, the required crossing point for Russian emigrants bound for Europe, is captured in Maurice Pialat’s short film La Corne d’or. A made-fortelevision film from the 1960s, Lapin de Noël, depicts the Russian cabarets frequented by Serge Gainsbourg in Paris.

Lucien Ginsburg was born in Paris in 1928. He grew up in the neighborhood of la Nouvelle Athènes (9th arrondissement), between the homes of George Sand and Gustave Moreau, whom he would film, camera in hand, in 1982. His father developed his taste for an existence essentially dedicated to the arts and creation, beginning rigorously with the piano and the study of musical geniuses of the 19th and 20th centuries, such as Stravinsky and Chopin, from whom he particularly enjoyed the Studies and Preludes. On the radio station TSF, he listened to two legendary interpreters, Alfred Cortot, the “decipherer” of Chopin, and Horowitz, “the genius of the century”. Without the knowledge of his father, he also listened to the corny, popular refrains of Charles Trenet and the dramatic odes of Fréhel, one of the most popular realist singers in the 1930s, both of whom touched and inspired him. Joseph Ginsburg, studying under Fred Adison at Maxim’s at the time, introduced Lucien to jazz and the piano-bar atmosphere.

Likewise encouraged by his father, Lucien took drawing classes at the Académie Montmartre from André Lhote, a renowned post-impressionist painter, and from Fernand Léger, the celebrated inventor of “tubism”. At age twentytwo, he was “impressed by cubists, surrealists and post impressionists”. As a second job, he began to play the piano in cabarets and jazz clubs, such as Madame Arthur, Milord l’Arsouille and Les Trois Baudets, on the “right bank” of Paris. After “seventeen years of paint, canvases, colors”, Gainsbourg, who wanted to paint without getting his hands dirty, could not find a patron and abandoned painting during his thirtieth year. His Autoportrait is displayed in the exhibit as one of the rare testimonials to his pictorial production. In 1986, he confided: “Perhaps, in the eyes of those affected with mental blindness, I will have never accomplished more in my life than a self-portrait with all the turbulent implications of a Francis Bacon”. An exceptional photograph from the Roger Viollet agency shows him facing one of his canvases, having since disappeared.

It was the combination of two meetings that caused Serge Gainsbourg to turn away from painting: Boris Vian and Michèle Arnaud, two figures tutelary to the beginning of his career. Still infatuated with the divide between major arts and minor arts emphasized by his father, he discovered Boris Vian onstage and was introduced to Michèle Arnaud, Vian’s back-up musician. Boris Vian, an agitator, polygraph, producer, jazz amateur, and writer of humorous, cruel and caustic songs, was, onstage, a true “shock” for Lucien. He then decided, at the Milord d’Arsouille, to show his compositions to Michèle Arnaud, who initially interpreted them herself before forcing Lucien onstage. In 1958, either inadequate for the art market or so visionary to the point of wanting to create a different type of image, Lucien Ginsburg abandoned both his first vocation and his name. He released the song Le Poinçonneur des Lilas under the family name of Serge Gainsbourg. “I shored along the terrifying beaches of pop music and left painting adrift.” (À bout portant, 1973)

At the end of the 1950s, one no longer described a song as intellectual, but rather as “rive gauche” (left bank). After having been “rive droite” (right bank) with the blonde Michèle Arnaud, Serge Gainsbourg obtained a passport for the “left bank”, landing him in Saint-Germain-des-Près with a brunette this time, Juliette Gréco, for whom he wrote La Javanaise, an homage to Boris Vian’s “Javanese java”. Later, in 1976, Serge Gainsbourg dedicated his first feature film, Je t’aime moi non plus, to Boris Vian. Serge Gainsbourg, like Brel and Brassens, gained the favor of those devoted to intellectual songs: Boris Vian, after reading a collection of texts from Cole Porter, told Gainsbourg that he had “the same prosody, the same enjambment technique alliteration” and the writer Marcel Aymé signed a congratulatory note on the jacket of his first LP record.

Serge Gainsbourg, and not without humorous reference to Picasso, characterized the first part of his career as the “Blue Period”, marked by a certain melancholy: the blues of a poinçonneur (ticket-puncher) who, subjected to a loathsome task, creates for himself a mental Eden; the always thwarted illusion to love and to be loved, as expressed in Ce mortel ennui, Les Oubliettes or En relisant ta letter; or even the benefits of self-destruction through artificial highs (L’Alcool, Intoxicated Man, Coco and co). The Connection (1960), a play by Shirley Clarke about drugs and staged by the Living Theater, deeply impacted the singer through its aesthetic representation of jazz. Through his references to love poetry, sometimes even putting these poems to music (Baudelaire, Le Rock de Nerval, La Nuit d’octobre) and by borrowing from jazz and African rhythms, Serge Gainsbourg became a stunning character in the panorama of the French realist song genre.

II – The Idols (1965 -1969)
In the mid 1960s, Serge Gainsbourg’s rhythmic compositions – “the atonal music and the free verses of modernity” – and text-based songs were judged as conventional by his contemporaries who had since become fans of yeye. Yeye, a regressive French form of English pop, was the common denominator among young hit singers talking about love to a public of mostly seventeen-year-olds. Gainsbourg explained to Denise Glaser on the June 16, 1963 broadcast of Discorama: “I am the new wave. I care very little about how many issues of Tintin were released this week and I don’t really want to add a ‘y’ to my stage name. I practice a different trade, and that [yeye] is just sub-titled American music. French music must not passively follow that of America. One must take modern themes, sing about the concrete, tractors, the telephone, the elevator, and not just narrate, especially at age eighteen when you’re in love and when you’ve broken up. In modern life, there is an entire language to invent.”

After having defended the idea of a music variety which borrows from classic music and realism in song, Gainsbourg ultimately changed his mind. Like Charles Aznavour, who also began his career in cabarets and who wrote Retiens la nuit for Johnny Halliday and La plus belle pour aller danser for Sylvie Vartan, Gainsbourg offered his talents to another teen idol, France Gall, by writing Poupée de cire, poupée de son which earned her a Eurovision prize. Assisted by his arranger, Alain Goraguer, he became a “pop author” and wrote more than one hundred songs in 1967.

The second part of the exhibit highlights this period of prolific creation, where Serge Gainsbourg surpassed the title of “promising songwriter” to that of artistic director. His appearance with Jean Gabin in La Pacha promoted this image of a composer en vogue, accustomed to recording studios and hidden by plumes of smoke. His departure from the stage for the studio coincided with his growing interest in English pop and new teen idol singers. He introduced English arrangements into his music, blended in Anglicisms which he would murmur using the talk-over method and played the role of the “White Negro” much like Mick Jagger. Moreover, he began to delight his fans by writing several yeye melodies whose lyrics take a derisive tone toward pop idols: N’écoute pas les idoles or Les Sucettes, both deliciously perverse, were written for France Gall, as well as Teenie Weenie Boppie which describes the effects of LSD on an innocent young girl. In 1967, the ORTF aired a musical, Anna, produced by Michèle Arnaud and directed by Pierre Koralnik, which brought together the avant-garde of film, technology and music to a primetime audience. Anna Karina and Jean-Claude Brialy, both members of the New Wave, played the heroes of the story, with Victor Upshaw as choreographer. Serge Gainsbourg composed the music while also appearing onscreen with Marianne Faithfull and Eddie Mitchell. Some excerpts and exceptional images of the “making-of” are displayed in the exhibit.

Gainsbourg began collaborating with William Klein, a New York photographer previously responsible for the visual design of Zazie, dans le metro, for whom he composed the music for Mister Freedom, a work of fantasy pop art, similar to the style of comic strip which deals with the invasion of American culture in France. It was a time when superheroes were frequently headlined: Mister Freedom, Guy Peelleart’s Pravda la Survivreuse inspired by Françoise Hardy, Barbarella and her younger sister Marie Mathématique by Jean-Claude Forest, and of course Brigitte Bardot in Comic Strip.

After having written for Anna Karina, France Gall, Françoise Hardy, Mireille Darc and Valérie Lagrange, Serge Gainsbourg began composing for Brigitte Bardot (more a French icon than an idol), most notably a series of memorable songs created for the Bardot Show on December 31, 1967: Harley Davidson, La Bise aux hippies, Bonnie and Clyde and Contact, all featured prominently in the exhibit. Their artistic collaboration soon took on the form of an adulterous and scandalous affair at the Cité des Arts, Gainsbourg’s home at the time, which led to the creation of the sulfurous duo Je t’aime moi non plus, an ode to physical love. Brigitte Bardot attempted to prevent its release, but only managed to delay it. The end of the affair a few months later inspired Gainsbourg in a moment of valor, captured forever on camera by Yves Lefebvre in the very beautiful Essai sur la naissance d’une chanson. In 1968, accompanied by the arranger for the Rolling Stones, Arthur Greenslade, he recorded Initials B.B. in the Chappell Studios in London, a pure collage combining a deconstruction of Antón Dvorák’s Symphony “From the New World” and a pastiche from The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe. In the song, Brigitte Bardot is glorified, exalted as an idol whose far-off image becomes blurry and disappears into the English fog. Louis Malle’s film Vie Privée depicts this poetic vision.

In September 1973, in the television broadcast of À bout portant, Gainsbourg declared: “I am but a poet assassinated by a consumer society.” If the 1960s marked the beginning of his collaboration with the record industry, they also equally underscored the ambiguity of his work, which oscillated between entertainment and the avant-garde, the use of commercial recipes for success and the quest for novelty, cynicism and sincerity.

III – Decadance (1969 -1979 )
The international scandal provoked by the release of Je t’aime moi non plus, “the first pornographic song ever written in the minor arts”, recorded by Jane Birkin an octave higher than Brigitte Bardot, launched a ten-year period of intense innovation that fully transgressed the boundaries – as musical as they were thematic – of French pop music.

The fortuitous meeting of Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin on the set of Slogan, as said by director Pierre Grimblat, was that “of a secretive, irritating, caustic and ironic character and of a woman-child, a woman-flower, a simple creature, full of grace”. The setup of the exhibit, by showing the screen tests of Marisa Berenson, favored for the role, and those of Jane Birkin, as well as a film clip, highlights the media-centered birth of the most sulfurous couple of the 1970s. A clip from a mockumentary, directed by Agnès Varda in 1987 and rarely broadcast, Jane B. par Agnès V., along with several slides, shows visitors “Jane Blow-up Birkin”, which inspired Serge Gainsbourg for five of his albums. In 1970, the director of Anna, Pierre Koralnik, wrote and directed a baroque and sensual thriller, Cannibis, devoted to the couple. The music, dedicated to Jimi Hendrix and Béla Bartók, was composed by Serge Gainsbourg and Jean-Claude Vannier, initiating a fruitful collaboration.

Serge Gainsbourg, with 69, année érotique and La Décadanse, exploited the sexual side of his relationship, to the point of making a promotional image of the couple, as shown in a photograph by Helmut Newton. Gainsbourg played on the twenty-year age difference between himself and Jane Birkin, and his references to Lolita and the “nymphomaniac” character of Humbert Humbert were suggestive in Jane B., as well as in the album L’Histoire de Melody Nelson (1971) which narrates the story of a fatal love between a grown man and a young girl “of fourteen autumns and fifteen summers”. This album inaugurated in France, in the wake of Gérard Manset’s La Mort d’Orion, the idea of a concept-album with a musical and narrative ensemble.

The exhibit dedicates a large section to L’Histoire de Melody Nelson by airing the video adaptation by Jean-Christophe Averty in its entirety and by projecting Tony Frank’s unedited photographs for the record cover. It was after this album, whose importance is apparent in light of his later work, that Gainsbourg effectively sparked the interest of the public and the rock and roll press, described as not just a music genre, but a “personality ethic”. From this point forward, Gainsbourg played the role of a dandy, invigorated by his own public image, the transgression of conventional values and the favor of art over life. This behavior as a dandy is reflected in one of the most beautiful designs of the 1970s: l’hôtel particulier on rue de Verneuil. It was in this black-walled universe, reminiscent of Salvador Dali’s apartment in Paris, that Gainsbourg recreated a chamber of wonders worthy of Des Esseintes, the hero in À rebours by Huysmans. He demonstrated his taste for the works of Paul Klee and Dali, 19th century furniture and the felted atmosphere of decadent interiors. The house’s staircase was decorated by what Gainsbourg wanted to be “the stations of the cross with photos of Marilyn”, which leads to a photo of her dead body in the morgue and then to a library jumbled with anatomical dictionaries, doctors’ manuals and collections of poetry. The installation on rue de Verneuil betrays Gainsbourg’s self-obsession, still fostered by his first training as a painter, which found its most complete form of expression in 1976 through the film production of Je t’aime moi non plus. By announcing: “my cynical writing is not a style but a vision”, Gainsbourg established himself as an image-maker. The aesthetic quality of his film, featured in the exhibit, is inspired by David Hockney’s hyperrealist compositions for the saturated blue of the sky, and by those of Edward Hopper for his use of depth of field and a wideangle lens.

By means of his three concept albums, Serge Gainsbourg intensified the expression of his favorite themes: Vu de l’extérieur (1973) focuses on scatology, Rock Around the Bunker (1975), assisted by the voice of Clara Torry, who participated in Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd, deals with the rockabilly style of Nazi perversions, and L’Homme à Tête de chou (1976) centers on threesomes and passionate murder. Serge Gainsbourg, through his preference for somber subjects, followed the American tradition of Berlin by Lou Reed.

In 1977, French punk, more mundane and literary than in English, wanting to reinvent life, found in Gainsbourg’s music a provocative yet sophisticated universe. The album Rock Around the Bunker became a part of the retro wave of the 1970s, which cultivated a cynical and perverse fascination with Nazisim, calling to mind as much Les Damnés by Visconti as the aesthetic quality of Fassbinder and Ingrid Caven, and above all heralding the future provocations of punks. Gainsbourg featured two portraits on his Steinway: one of Chopin, and the other of Sid Vicious. It was this paradoxical combination of high culture and low culture that attracted the group Bijou, which covered Les Papillions noirs, and the columnist from Libération, Alain Pacadis, whose dual interview with Serge Gainsbourg published in Façade was an indicator of this new revelation. Gainsbourg abandoned the stage in the 1960s to devote himself to his in-studio creations in the decade that followed, his “films and [his] books…[his] artistic side”; it was the new wave of rock that prompted him once again to take the stage,before becoming a national icon.

IV – Ecce Homo (1979 – 1989)
The final part of the exhibit focuses on the 1980s, which, for Serge Gainsbourg, made way for a grand gesture on a political scale this time. The reggae version of La Marseillaise solidified his position as a dynamic iconoclast similar to Jimi Hendrix with The Star Spangled Banner and the Sex Pistols with God Save the Queen.

At the end of the 1970s, Serge Gainsbourg’s artistic director, Philippe Lerichomme, organized a meeting with Bob Marley’s musicians, Sly Dunbar, Robbie Shakespeare and his back-up singers, the I Three, in Kingston, Jamaica, allowing for the release of Aux Armes etc. A large portion of the exhibit space is devoted to the congregation of these different talents, to the Rastafarian culture that Gainsbourg helped promote in France and the scandal that it provoked. Unseen photographs from 1979 of Lord Snowdown and Philippe Lerichomme, documented by images that invite us into the reverie of Bob Marley, Negusa Nagast and Haile Salassie, and those of the mythic concert at the Palace, with a décor created by Gérard Garouste, attest to the journey of the singer and his return to live performances. Two audiovisual documents from the INA archives also evoke the significant events following the broadcast on the waves of Aux Armes etc.: the parachutists in Strasbourg in 1980 and Gainsbourg’s auction bid for the original manuscript of Rouget de Lisle in 1981.

The importation of reggae into French music gave way to a second album in 1981, Mauvaises Nouvelles des étoiles, produced by the same team of artists and recorded in Chris Blackwell’s mythic studio in Nassau, which solidified the beginning of Serge Gainsbourg’s mixing of cultures, already generic in the 1980s. One can think of the song Bana Basadi Balalo in the Bantu dialect, and of the Talking Heads from the same period. Gainsbourg’s new fascination for Africa and its eurhythmics, after having experimented with different forms of reggae, lead him back to blues and jazz. He worked with old references from his jazz years, such as Billy Holiday and Louis Armstrong, in Gloomy Sunday, Amour sans amour or Vieille Canaille. In 1982 he directed for television a pastiche in black and white, Scarface 82, with Daniel Duval and Jane Birkin, based on Scarface (1932) by Howard Hawks. In film, his second feature-length work, Équateur, with Barbara Sukowa (one of Fassbinder’s muses) and Francis Huster, filmed in Africa and based on Georges Simenon’s novel, Coup de lune, uses the sadistic tyranny exercised by European colonists on the natives as a backdrop. The back-lighting of his photography copies that of 1940s Hollywood films: Tay Garnett’s Le Facteur sonnetoujours deux fois (1946) and Schoendsack’s King Kong (1949), of which two film clips are featured in the exhibit.

In 1984, Gainsbourg recorded Love on the Beat at the legendary Power Station of New York with Billy Rush, having not been able to get Nile Rogers, the producer of David Bowie’s Let’s Dance. This electro-funk album allowed him to collaborate once again with William Klein, who designed a very subversive record cover, where Gainsbourg is dressed in the same style as Andy Warhol. The album crudely deals with incest, homosexuality and drugs. Gainsbarre, a media alter-ego and voluntarily deviant from Serge Gainsbourg, was born. Like Ubu for Alfred Jarry or Rrose Sélavy for Marcel Duchamp, Gainsbarre was a character of transference, an anti-hero, who reflected an image lacking complacency for society by defying its taboos.

The 1980s, a time of a mixing of cultures, genres and styles, were signature years for Gainsbourg. As a director, he wrote songs for actresses Isabelle Adjani, who sang Beau oui comme Bowie, and Catherine Deneuve, photographed by Helmut Newton for the cover of his album. Serge Gainsbourg is credited for titles sung by Vanessa Paradis, from which the clip Tandem is directed by Jean-Baptiste Mondino. Gainsbourg could also guarantee the artistic quality of advertisements: with Gini, for example, he was recognized for his mastery of writing slogans, while his photographs of Bambou, published under the title Bambou et les poupées, divulged the erotic fantasies similar to the surrealist visions of Hans Bellmer.

But beyond Gainsbarre’s media and audiovisual mask, Serge Gainsbourg discovered himself with all seriousness in underground cinema. “Music is my trade; film and books, my artistic side.” Despite the critics’ perplexity and the Nabokovian ambiguity of their theme, Charlotte for Ever (1987) remains a declaration of love for his daughter and Stan the Flasher (1990) expresses the suffering of an ugly esthete. At the end of the exhibit, the images of the Sacré grand-père Michel Simon (with whom Gainsbourg began his film career) and his confessions on Henry Chapier’s couch reveal a panel of modest emotions, though always repressed.

Serge Gainsbourg, like Andy Warhol at the end of his life, manipulated his image in the media, while cultivating in the privacy of rue de Verneuil a pronounced taste for classic culture, combining otium and negotium, the interdisciplinary nature of his talents and the desire to make a masterpiece of his life.

One Hundred Works by Latin American Artist Fernando Botero on View in Memphis

2008-10-20T10:28:00.001+02:00

One Hundred Works by Latin American Artist Fernando Botero on View in Memphis

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Work of art made by Fernando Botero.

MEMPHIS.- This fall, the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art presents The Baroque World of Fernando Botero, the first major U.S retrospective of the artist's work in more than 30 years, through January 11, 2009. Recognized as one of the most well-known and commercially successful artists to emerge from Latin America, the Colombia native now has his work exhibited and collected by major museums around the world.

Fernando Botero (born 1932) is a painter, sculptor, and draftsman who highlights the comedy of human life-moving or wry, baroque in expression, sometimes with a mocking observation, sometimes with a deep, elementary emotion. Working in a broad range of media, Botero has created a world of his own, at once accessible and enigmatic, with a particular blend of violence and beauty. Fernando Botero has spent most of his years as an artist away from his native country, Colombia, but his art has maintained an uninterrupted link to Latin America.

The 100 paintings, drawings, and sculptures in this exhibition span the length of Botero's career-from paintings executed in 1959 in Colombia, to sculptures executed as late as 2005. The works were selected by John Sillevis, curator of the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, and editor and contributor to the accompanying exhibition catalogue. The exhibition is organized and circulated by Art Services International, Alexandria, Virginia.

All of the works are generously on loan from the artist himself. This collection, assembled over the last 50 years, includes favorite works that Botero was heretofore unable to part with, as well as pieces reacquired years after they left his possession. Many of these objects are being exhibited in public for the first time, providing an opportunity to investigate the complex workings of this artist not only by viewing some of his most renowned masterpieces, but also by studying his most personal works of art.

The Baroque World of Fernando Botero presents a selection of the best works from various stages in his development as an artist, with occasional "flashbacks" to the early works of the 1950s, when Botero devised images of children that resembled giant dolls with frightening expressions. Here his struggle to define his own style is still evident. In 1957 he painted "Still Life with a Mandolin," enlarging the volume of the musical instrument in a manner that we now identify with Botero's style. He continued in this vein, painting a figure of a young girl inspired by Leonardo da Vinci's "Mona Lisa." This painting was acquired-against the current of abstract expressionism that was dominating the art world in the United States at the timeÑby Dorothy Miller, curator at the Museum of Modern Art for that collection. After her initial support of Botero, museum curators the world over soon followed suit, presenting Botero's works in major solo exhibitions.

The exhibition also follows Botero in his extensive studies of the history of European art. In Spain he was particularly entranced by Velázquez's Infantes-the daughters of the Spanish king-in their elaborate court dresses. In France he studied Ingres, the nineteenth-century master of neoclassical perfection in line, and Delacroix, the master of romantic color. Botero would find inspiration in Italy through artists from the Renaissance, including Uccello and Piero della Francesca.

As a young boy he had already admired some contemporary artists, such as Pablo Picasso. He was now confronted with the paintings and sculptures of Giacometti, who was in the habit of reducing his figures to an extreme slimness. These encounters were important for Botero's development. He was inspired by European art, but not seduced. He turned his attention to Mexico, where the monumental murals by Diego Rivera and David Siqueiros had a profound impact. Botero absorbed the dramatic self-portraits of Frida Kahlo and her idiosyncratic interpretation of Latin American folklore, and was intrigued by the mysteries of pre-Columbian artifacts.

The Baroque World of Fernando Botero is divided into eight sections, corresponding to epochs and themes in Botero's oeuvre. First, early works from the 1950s, the period during which Botero first defined his unique style. Second, paintings which draw from colonial baroque pieces Botero observed in Latin America, including religious images of clergy, Jesus Christ, and the Virgin Mary. The third section contains works inspired by European masters, ranging from Titian to Vincent Van Gogh. Fourth, are Botero's eerie still lifes of lush and decaying fruit and flowers. Fifth, are images of power and violence in Latin America: scenes of presidents, earthquakes, and executions. The sixth section is based on memories from Botero's childhood in Colombia: street scenes, intimate interiors, and local figures. The seventh section focuses on Botero's works on paper, including detailed chalk drawings and watercolors. Lastly, the exhibition closes with Botero's elegant and imposing monumental bronze and marble sculptures.

Money money money

2008-10-13T16:57:00.000+02:00

Nude Portait of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin Unveiled in Chicago

2008-10-03T10:24:00.001+02:00

Nude Portait of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin Unveiled in Chicago

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Sarah Palin by Bruce Elliott.

CHICAGO.- Bruce Elliott, 68, of Chicago, has unveiled a nude portrait of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin in his bar in the North Side of Chicago, the Old Town Ale House. The work is four feet tall and is drawing crowds to the bar. In the portrait, the governor is wearing her trademark hairdo, holding an automatic rifle and standing naked on a polar-bear skin rug.

Bruce Elliott said, "I don't see how she could be offended by this. I made her into a sex figure."

Bruce Elliott admits to being a supporter of Senator Barack Obama. He also said that his daughter posed nude for the painting.

He said, "My daughter is a heck of a stand-in for Sarah Palin. She can even do the voice."

Bruce Elliott further stated, "I've been following her (Sarah Palin) religiously. I had never heard of her before, like everyone else. I find her bizarrely fascinating, even though I pretty much despise everything she stands for."

Bob Dylan - The Drawn Blank Series Takes to the Road with International Exhibition Tour

2008-10-01T10:14:00.003+02:00

Bob Dylan - The Drawn Blank Series Takes to the Road with International Exhibition Tour

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Bob Dylan, Woman in Red, from the Drawn Blank Series © Bob Dylan

LONDON.- Halcyon Gallery has announced details of the first UK leg of The Drawn Blank Series museum tour, with Bob Dylan’s unique and impressive artwork set to be exhibited at The Lightbox museum and gallery in Woking from 25th November 2008.

The Drawn Blank Series was launched at Halcyon Gallery, Mayfair, in June 2008 to widespread critical acclaim, and is the most comprehensive and authoritative collection of Bob Dylan’s paintings ever assembled. The Lightbox exhibition will be the first chance to view the works outside London, and the tour will continue in 2009. Further details of The Drawn Blank Series UK and international museum tour will be announced by Halcyon Gallery later this year.

Dylan has been a committed visual artist for more than four decades, and this collection casts a new light on the creativity of one of the world’s most important and influential figures. The Drawn Blank Series echoes the themes and images of Dylan’s prose, poetry and music, and the paintings are based on sketches made while on the road during the period of 1989 to 1992.

Paul Green, President of Halcyon Gallery commented: ‘The launch of ‘The Drawn Blank Series’ earlier this year at Halcyon Gallery was hugely successful. This museum tour, beginning at ‘The Lightbox’, gives even more people in the UK and internationally the chance to view this remarkable body of work.’

One of the most exciting gallery spaces in the South East, The Lightbox was awarded The Art Fund Prize for museums and galleries in May this year; the UK’s largest arts prize. The Lightbox was designed by Marks Barfield Architects and opened to the public in September 2007

100th Anniversary of Gustav Klimt And The Kunstschau 1908 at Belvedere in Vienna

2008-10-01T10:10:00.002+02:00

100th Anniversary of Gustav Klimt And The Kunstschau 1908 at Belvedere in Vienna

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Gustav Klimt, Der Kuss, 1908. Öl auf Leinwand, 180 × 180 cm. Belvedere, Wien © Belvedere Wien

Gustav Klimt, Die drei Lebensalter, 1905 Öl auf Leinwand 180 × 180 cm Roma, Galleria nazionale d‘arte moderna © Roma, Galleria nazionale d‘arte moderna. Su concessione del Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali.

VIENNA.- Following disagreement within the Secession and the spectacular leaving of the “Klimt-Group”, the inscription “To the time its art, to art its freedom” was removed from its building’s doors in 1907 and made the motto of the Kunstschau 1908, an exhibition that is still regarded as trailblazing for the development of Modern Art in Vienna.

The Kunstschau 1908 was conceived by numerous artists around Gustav Klimt and coincided with the celebrations held in Vienna on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the reign of Emperor Francis Joseph I. The artists were not invited to participate in the imperial procession but were offered the use of construction land as an exhibition venue which had been designated for the location of the Konzerthaus in the city centre and was temporarily lying fallow. In only a few months, Josef Hoffmann, Gustav Klimt, Otto Prutscher, Koloman Moser, and others built and furnished wooden structures accommodating 54 exhibition rooms, gardens, interior courtyards, a small cemetery, a café, and a summer stage - as well as a two-storey, completely furnished country house. Painting, sculpture, the graphic and decorative arts, and stage design were combined to create a Gesamtkunstwerk – a synthesis of the arts – on exhibition premises covering 6,500 square metres. Indoor and outdoor floor space, walls, and showcases were filled and covered with works by 176 artists, including Carl Moll, Franz Kupka, Max Oppenheimer and numerous students from the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts, like Oskar Kokoschka.

The art historian Werner Hofmann described the concurrence of the procession – the Kaiserjubiläumshuldigungsfestzug – and the Kunstschau as a “synopsis of the monarchy’s official art and intellectual histories”. Whereas the procession staged the Habsburg monarchy’s long tradition and national diversity, Gustav Klimt, in his opening speech, declared the Kunstschau to be “a display of the performance of artistic volition in Austria”, compiled by artists who “were not affiliated with a collective, an association, or a league”, but who had “gathered in an informal fashion solely for the purpose of this exhibition”.

Notwithstanding the euphoric press reviews, the public failed to show up at the „large-scale show“ - Berta Zuckerkandl wrote in the Neues Wiener Journal: “Hevesi, Richard Muther, and I frequently met at the small café at the Kunstschau, deliberating how to counter the […] campaign against the Kunstschau. ‘It’s futile,’ Hevesi said, ‘but in twenty years it will turn out that we were right.’”

On the occasion of its 100th anniversary, the show is going to be revived in the Belvedere’s exhibition: as from October, a large part of the original exhibits – which will partly be presented in replicas of the former exhibition rooms – as well as documentary photographs, models, original plans, and films, will serve to illustrate the details and dimensions of this extraordinary event. An architectural model measuring four square metres will demonstrate the location of the Kunstschau premises within their urban context. An authentic spatial experience is going to be conveyed by three halls to be reconstructed in their entirety: “Room 50”, with works by leading members of the Wiener Werkstätte, “Room 10”, with reproduced posters pasted directly onto the walls as they were then, and “Room 22” which was designed by Koloman Moser using major works by Gustav Klimt, the highlights of the show – both then and today. Among other works, Gustav Klimt presented Fritza Riedler (1906), Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907), The Three Ages of Woman (1905), Danaë (1907/08) and his most famous work The Kiss (1908), which was acquired for the collection now housed in the Belvedere while the exhibition was still running.

Further exhibits come from the former rooms devoted to “Theatre Art”: Richard Teschner’s monumental glass mosaics and puppets, stage designs by Alfred Roller, and a two-metre-high costume design by Emil Orlik for Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale, staged by Max Reinhardt. For “Room 27”, Otto Prutscher had designed an impressive wall ensemble of marble, ornamental brass sheet, and a glazed display cabinet; its individual parts have been assembled from all over Europe and now appear reunited. From the original room “Art for Children”, Magda Mautner von Markhof’s doll’s house has been made available as a loan; the “General Painting” section is represented by works of Adolf Hölzel, Wilhelm List, Leopold Blauensteiner, Maximilian Kurzweil, Broncia Koller-Pinell, Elena Luksch-Makowska and others.

Research conducted for this exhibition has led to a new scholarly approach to numerous artists who appeared in the Kunstschau and have largely fallen into oblivion today, such as the sculptor Franz Metzner, to whose work the Kunstschau devoted two rooms.

The exhibition is on from 1 October 2008 to 18 January 2009 at the Lower Belvedere and will be accompanied by a publication.

Andy Warhol: Pop Politics at Manchester's Currier Museum of Art

2008-09-27T12:17:00.002+02:00

Andy Warhol: Pop Politics at Manchester's Currier Museum of Art

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MANCHESTER, NH.- Andy Warhol—one of the most influential American artists of the twentieth century—captured the likeness of some of the most visionary and powerful political leaders of the 20th century. Images of John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Queen Elizabeth II, and Mao Zedong, among others will hang side-by-side when the Currier Museum of Art presents Andy Warhol: Pop Politics from September 27, 2008 through January 4, 2009.

“For the first time ever, you will see Warhol’s political works together in this exhibition,” notes Sharon Matt Atkins, curator of Andy Warhol: Pop Politics. “His prints, paintings, drawings, and photographs of political figures reveal intriguing insights into Warhol’s own celebrity status and political leanings.”
Warhol’s portraits of American presidents and presidential candidates, queens, Communist dictators, and other political figures comment on the interrelationships between politics and celebrity culture in the late twentieth century—connections that remain ever present today. Time to coincide with the 2008 presidential election, this exhibition offers a probing and entertaining look through the eyes of America’s most famous Pop artist at the leaders who shaped the twentieth century.

Pop Art and Political Leaders - Warhol (1928-1987) rose to fame in the 1960s and became synonymous with Pop art and American culture of the period. He played upon the increased bombardment of advertising and media images to develop a signature style that employed commercial subjects rendered in bold, graphic designs and colors using mass production processes. In capturing the rebellious spirit of the time through his work and personality, Warhol created a body of work that transformed our understanding of art by blurring the boundaries between art and popular culture and shaped a new aesthetic that came to symbolize the counterculture. His now iconic work has influenced subsequent generations of artists and continues to resonate with audiences today, both young and old.

Building upon a long history of political portraiture dating back to Egyptian pharaohs, Roman emperors, and European monarchs, Warhol pictured twentieth-century politicians in his graphic style which likened them to commercial products like Campbell’s soup and Coca-Cola. In so doing, Warhol connected his images of these leaders to America’s fascination and consumption of all aspects of contemporary culture. His portraits are not just records of the individuals; they also position the leaders within the context of cultural taste and political values.

A dedicated portraitist, Warhol captured the likeness of an astonishing number of individuals including those of friends, artists, actors, athletes, and world leaders. His depictions of John F. Kennedy, Mao Zedong, Queen Elizabeth II, and others were derived from widely circulated official or media photographs. Warhol’s appropriation of these stock images signaled his interest in how political leaders ascended to celebrity status as a result of their constant representation in the media.

America’s “Royal Family” - The exhibition highlights Warhol’s fascination with America’s “royal family”—the Kennedys—through his images of President John F. and Jacqueline Kennedy and Senators Robert and Edward Kennedy. Struck by the media coverage of President Kennedy’s assassination, Warhol created a series of works based on news images of Jackie, both as glamorous First Lady and as grieving wife. Seven of these paintings will be shown alongside rare preparatory studies. The exhibition features a recent Currier acquisition: Flash—November 22, 1963. Produced five years after the assassination and exhibited now at the forty-fifth anniversary of the tragic event, this print portfolio includes eleven screenprints based on related news images including the book depository, Lee Harvey Oswald, and President Kennedy’s campaign poster—making it the only work by Warhol to depict the President. It also reproduces the teletype text from the four days between the President’s assassination and funeral, with the sheets bound like a book. Accompanied by archival materials and unique trial proofs related to this project, another major highlight is a one-of-a-kind, never-before exhibited screenprint of Senator Robert Kennedy that Warhol did not include in the final edition of the Flash portfolio. Also featured are excerpts from a 1965 reenactment of the assassination filmed in Warhol’s New York City loft known as the Factory. These works are shown for the first time alongside Warhol’s 1980 portraits of Senator Edward Kennedy.

In addition to selecting certain leaders as his subjects, Warhol was also commissioned by political hopefuls such as Edward Kennedy and Jimmy Carter. Their patronage of Warhol was intended to help position them as contemporary and progressive. That these projects—like his print Vote McGovern featuring a green-faced Richard Nixon created to support George McGovern’s presidential campaign against the incumbent—were produced to raise funds for candidates’ presidential campaigns, illuminates an active, even if veiled, political agenda by Warhol, who claimed he only voted once. Warhol’s elevated status in American society also gave him entrée into the world of politics including invitations to governors’ mansions and state dinners at the White House. The exhibition highlights these portrait commissions through photographs, drawings, prints, and paintings of each subject.

Warhol’s Artistic Process - Central to the exhibition’s focus is Warhol’s process for creating his portraits. The artist was more directly involved with his portrait commissions than with any other works. Rather than manipulating images he found in mass media outlets, Warhol began his commissions by taking dozens of Polaroid images of his subject. After selecting one or more of these photographs, Warhol transformed the sitter’s likeness into his signature style, often first producing drawings and then prints and paintings. This exhibition presents these Polaroids alongside related works of a single subject, capturing Warhol’s process as well as the repetition of images that became a hallmark of his work. This repeated image is further underscored with the inclusion of a large section of Mao wallpaper that the artist created for a gallery presentation of his work in 1974.

Ever the multimedia artist, Warhol also produced and directed films and created his own television shows. These projects helped shape his presence in American culture. The exhibition also includes excerpts from several of Warhol’s film and television programs that include political content: Since (1965), The Life of Juanita Castro (1965), Afternoon (1965), and an episode of Andy Warhol’s T.V. featuring an interview with New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1983).

Throughout the exhibition, works are accompanied by rarely seen archival materials from Warhol’s “time capsules.” Beginning in 1974, Warhol collected papers, photographs, correspondence, business records, and other objects in cardboard boxes, amassing over six hundred boxes by his death. Highlights relating to the exhibition include a solicitation from President-Elect Nixon for recommendations for his administration, an invitation to Nixon’s inauguration, a signed letter from Senator Robert Kennedy expressing his thanks for Warhol’s support, and a handwritten note from First Lady Nancy Reagan. These materials yield new insights into Warhol’s connection to the political celebrities he portrayed and how those relationships extended beyond his portraits of them.

Andy Warhol was born Andrew Warhola in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1928. He studied at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh from 1945 to 1949, before moving to New York and working as a commercial artist and illustrator. In the 1960s, he rose to fame as a central figure in the Pop art movement. Responding to images from popular culture—particularly advertisements—Warhol began creating works that first shocked audiences by their similarity to commercial images. He accented this comparison by adopting technical processes used by professional printers. He further distanced himself from the physical production of the work by employing the help of studio assistants at his New York City loft called The Factory. His most famous works include series of images of Marilyn Monroe, Campbell’s soup cans, and Coca-Cola bottles.

In 1965, Warhol announced his retirement from painting to focus on filmmaking. However, he later continued to paint and produce monumental print editions. He also collaborated with The Velvet Underground rock band to produce multimedia events with light and film projections. On June 3, 1968, Warhol was shot by Valerie Solanis, founder and sole member of SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men). In 1969 he began publishing Interview magazine. In the 1970s, Warhol increasingly focused on portrait commissions, capturing the likeness of celebrities, politicians, and high society elite. He also created two cable television shows, Andy Warhol's T.V. in 1982 and Andy Warhol's Fifteen Minutes for MTV in 1986. Warhol died in 1987 following a routine gallbladder operation. A lifelong devout Catholic, a memorial service was held in his memory at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York and attended by more than 2000 people. In 1994, The Andy Warhol Museum was founded in Pittsburgh and now houses an extensive collection of his works and archives.

First Major French Retrospective of the Work of Jacques Villeglé at Centre Pompidou

2008-09-25T11:17:00.002+02:00

First Major French Retrospective of the Work of Jacques Villeglé at Centre Pompidou

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Jacques Villeglé, Rues Desprez et Vercingétorix – La Femme, 12 March 1966. Torn posters mounted on canvas 251 x 224 cm. Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany © Adagp, Paris 2008.

PARIS.- The Centre Pompidou presents the first major French retrospective of the work of Jacques Villeglé, an artist who since 1949 has succeeded – using one single material, the torn poster – in producing a very substantial body of work of astonishing formal richness.

Bringing together some hundred works dating from the 1940s to the present, the exhibition adopts a thematic approach to the artist’s work, from the typographical explosions and colored abstract compositions of the beginnings to the recent rhythmical juxtapositions derived from concert posters.

Villeglé is not a creator of readymades, even if he does nothing (except lend the occasional “helping hand”) to the posters he finds in the streets and then mounts on canvas. He sees himself rather as a flâneur, and his work is to reveal among the urban chaos the beauties hidden in the layered paper torn and sometimes written on or otherwise marked by anonymous hands.

Villeglé’s work offers a seismographic record of our shared reality as it finds expression in the urban space whose history it returns to us in the distinctive history of its walls. It reveals how much our way of seeing is conditioned by this everyday visual environment, reactivating our memory to critical yet at the same time playful ends.

Combining elements of the practice of such now “historic” movements as the New Realists, the Lettrists and the Situationist International, Villeglé’s work, rooted in the contemporary, is held in high regard by many of the younger artists of today.

Another important thread in the artist’s work is his “socio-political alphabet,” used in a whole series of works (on posters, canvases, school writing slates, etc.) and derived from the modified lettering often found in graffiti (e.g. the encircled A of the anarchists). These works are shown in a parallel display.

The exhibition also includes Villeglé’s work in experimental film, which incidentally offers parallels in sound to his own work, the soundtrack to Étude aux allures (1950-54) being a work of concrete music by Pierre Schaeffer, that to Un Mythe dans la ville (1974-2002) a piece by the poet Bernard Heidsieck. This interest in music can be seen too in a recent series of posters on the theme of amplified music, produced in collaboration with the Atelier d’Aquitaine (an informal workshop set up in 1997 to promote the gathering of posters in different regions of France), and again in the juxtaposition of Villeglé’s work with music by composers such as Pierre Henry, with whom he has collaborated on three occasions, and who, for this exhibition, offers a first performance of a new work.

Organization of the Exhibition

1. Introduction
It was in February 1949, in Paris, where he would move a few months later, that Jacques Villeglé, together with Raymond Hains – with whom he had become friends in 1945 – peeled from walls the materials for their Ach Alma Manetro – his first torn-poster work. The gesture inaugurated a practice of appropriation to which Villeglé would remain attached throughout his career: the recuperation of posters from the urban environment. Composed of debris from the ‘Atlantic Wall,’ recovered in 1947 from the port of Saint Malo, his sculpture Fils d'acier – Chaussée des Corsaires (Saint-Malo), a ‘drawing in space,’ as he called it, can be seen as foreshadowing this approach. During the 1950s, Villeglé and Hains would experiment with film, obtaining the images for Pénélope by filming colored motifs through reeded glass. The sound version of the film, produced in collaboration with the artists by composer Pierre Schaeffer in 1960, takes its name from the latter’s composition, Études aux allures. The fragmentation and distortion of the motif is applied also to letters, recalling the Cubist and Futurist explorations of lettering and the programmatic claims of the Lettrists whom Villeglé and Hains were close in the early 1950s. Hitherto unpublished studies for the book Hepérile éclaté, a reworking of a poem by Camille Bryen, attest to the thoroughness of the two friends’ artistic researches as they developed their new vision. Their artistic collaboration ended in July 1954.

2. The Lacerated Letter
Consisting mainly of posters for musical performances and neighborhood cinemas, this series deploys the letter and the fragmented word in a new visual register. “The type swarms in such profusion,” says Villeglé, “that its interactions, by inducing its vibratory quasi-disappearance, take us into the domain of the happily illegible, of the Mallarméan ineffable.” From the great frieze of Nymphéas to the Tapis Maillot (which gets it name from its being displayed on the floor at Villeglé’s exhibition “Lacéré anonyme” at François Dufrêne in 1959) and the ABC shown at the first Biennale des Jeunes in Paris that same year, the letter and the word, amputated and distorted, create a “a lexical assemblage ‘contradictory and almost perverse,’ comparable to the assemblages of Picasso, the collages of Max Ernst, the hubbub of Dada, the objectively fortuitous encounters of automatic writing, the disjointed successions of Apollinaire’s Fenêtres (a revelation to James Joyce), the broken sentences of Céline…”.

3. Images
Reacting to critics of the time who saw in his work of the 1950s only an abstraction in the tradition of Cubist collage, Villeglé produced a series deploying figurative images culled from the advertising posters that began to spread everywhere in the 1960s. It is no doubt this series of cheerful and often large-scale works that leads to Villeglé’s being sometimes seen as a precursor of Pop Art. Yet his approach, outlined in his foundational text, Des réalités collectives (1958), written in the wake of his first, misunderstood, exhibition at Galerie Colette Allendy in 1957, is distinguished by the critical distance introduced by the tearing of the posters by anonymous hands, which brings something new to the gesture of appropriation.

4. Torn Color
Bringing together a number of the artist’s characteristic themes, among them “No Letters, No Figures” and “Transparency”, this section presents one of the most immediately attractive phases of Villeglé’s work. He focuses here on the wide band of color that until the mid-1960s was often used as a border for advertising posters. The surface may be fragmented into a kaleidoscope of colors, divided into large areas of monochrome, or it may reveal an unexpected motif. In other works, Villeglé exploits the effects of the rain, which can result in a thin layer of paste being left on the poster beneath when the poster above is peeled off, toning down the colour and giving a somewhat vaporous aspect to the whole.

5. The Socio-political Alphabet
It was in 1969 that Villeglé produced his first graphic work using an alphabet drawn from the modified lettering often used in graffiti, an alphabet in which “A is anarchistically encircled, a star and crescent C faces a rounded-out D with a horizontal bar, the cross and circle of the Celticising [nationalists] (...) E becomes Chakhotin’s three arrows, counterattacking the swastika of the F, the creative whirlwind catastrophically hijacked by the Nazis, likewise N and Z, G is a hammer and a sickle with its star, within the H are inscribed I and S, I is stripy, J remains untouched, K, P and R become chrysm for the propagation of the faith.” After a period of further gestation lasting to the late 1970s, this vocabulary then returns in different forms to occupy – in accordance with the same logic of appropriation that governs the posters – all kinds of supports (synthetic canvas, paper, school writing-slates etc.). Today it represents the bulk of the artist’s production, now that he has stopped collecting torn posters.

6. Politics
“This brings together,” says Villeglé, “posters evoking international tensions, government policy, and village council elections – manoeuvres great and small, as the playwright Arthur Adamov might have put it.” This jarring display, culled from a graphic corpus both familiar and disturbing, offers a political history of France across the decades. Here the angry and destructive gesture of the passer-by takes on a particular resonance, while the obliterations and bucklings of the images effect a troubling critique.

7. Un Mythe Dans La Ville
In 1974, Villeglé was commissioned to produce an art film. In this he planned to combine views of Paris – more particularly of the “trou des Halles” and of the Centre Pompidou then under construction – with shots of an ‘unpublishable’ book created especially for the film by Denise Aubertin and shots of photographs and collages, together with various animations (some using the ‘socio-political alphabet’), a sequence on self-tearing posters, and finally a series of works based a poster for a Dubuffet exhibition. With the bankruptcy of the production company, these materials were set aside, finally to be assembled together, thanks to the assistance of the Film Department of the Musée National d’Art Moderne, only in 1998-2002. Villeglé offers a critical look at the Paris of the 1970s that is seconded by poet Bernard Heidsieck’s soundtrack, planned to accompany the piece from the very beginning, which intercuts one of his own texts with snatches of sound from the events May ’68 and extracts from debates in the French National Assembly.

8. Villeglé and the Hourlope
Hourloupe is the overall title of a series of works not by Villeglé but by Jean Dubuffet, composed jigsaw-fashion of flat, often hatched, cells in white, blue and red. Dubuffet ended the series with a group of paintings that he showed at the Centre National d’Art Contemporain in 1975. Villeglé was captivated first of all by the invitation-card, and then by the posters for the exhibition, which he started collecting from the walls. This led to the production of forty works, most of which would be used in the film Un mythe dans la ville. The Dubuffet figure which appears on the poster reminded Villeglé of a character from a novel by Jarry, a writer whom he had always admired for his audacity in reworking an existing text to produce his masterpiece Ubu roi. In the film, Dubuffet’s little man also embodies the figure of the walker, open to a wide range of critical interpretations. This series inspired by Dubuffet was exhibited for the first time in 1985.

9. Decentralization & The Atelier d'Aquitaine
The regulation of poster-advertising changed the face of Paris and by the early 1990s had made it impossible for Villeglé to find his materials there, forcing him to turn to other French cities: “In the 1980s, because fly-posting threatened the legitimate poster business, the professionals joined with local councillors to ensure that the law was enforced in the capital. So in 1991 I began to systematically decentralise my activities.” 1997 saw the establishment of the Atelier d’Aquitaine, a small, informal group that assisted Villeglé in collecting posters – mostly on the theme of rock music – in different regions of France, but also in Barcelona and Buenos Aires. The Atelier’s expedition to South America marked the end of Villeglé’s poster-collecting, and he now devotes himself almost exclusively to work with the socio-political alphabet.

Serpentine Gallery Presents Major New Work by Gerhard Richter: 4900 Colours: Version II

2008-09-25T11:14:00.002+02:00

Serpentine Gallery Presents Major New Work by Gerhard Richter: 4900 Colours: Version II

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LONDON.- Gerhard Richter is one of the world’s greatest living artists. Since the early 1960s, he has tirelessly explored the medium of painting at a time when many were heralding its death. He has produced a remarkably varied body of work, including photography-based portrait, landscape and still-life paintings; gestural and monochrome abstractions; and colour chart grid paintings.

The Serpentine Gallery presents 4900 Colours, a major new work comprising bright monochrome squares randomly arranged in a grid formation to create stunning sheets of kaleidoscopic colour. The 196 square panels of 25 coloured squares can be re-configured in a number of variations, from one large-scale piece to multiple, smaller paintings. Richter has developed a version comprised of 49 paintings especially for the Serpentine Gallery.

4900 Colours is parallel to Richter’s design for the south transept window of Cologne Cathedral, which replaced the stained glass that was destroyed in World War II. The window, unveiled in August 2007, comprises 11,500 hand-blown squares of glass in 72 colours that are derived from the palette of the original Medieval glazing. The seemingly arbitrary distribution of colours was generated using a specially developed computer programme and this renewed interest in using chance to define composition led the artist to develop the concept for 4900 Colours.

Richter produced the first in his series of grid paintings in 1966 in which he replicated, in large scale, industrial colour charts produced by paint manufacturers. As with his photo-paintings, the use of found material as a source removed the subjective compositional preferences of the artist, however, the Colour Chart Paintings took this a step further, eradicating any hierarchy of subject or representational intent, and focusing on colour to create an egalitarian language of art.

Since 1964, Richter has had more than 100 solo exhibitions worldwide. He represented Germany at the 36th Venice Biennale in 1972 and was the subject of a major touring retrospective, Forty Years of Painting, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2002.

The Serpentine Gallery exhibition is curated by Gallery director Julia Peyton-Jones, co-director Hans Ulrich Obrist, and exhibition curator Rebecca Morrill. It precedes two other major presentations of the artist’s work in the UK in 2008 and 2009: at the National Gallery Complex, Edinburgh from 8 November 2008 and at the National Portrait Gallery, London from 26 February 2009.

Damien Hirst / Jeff Koons – Artistes et managers

2008-09-24T14:09:00.003+02:00

Damien Hirst / Jeff Koons – Artistes et managers

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Les deux artistes les plus médiatiques et les plus chers de l´art contemporain ont d´autres points en commun. Ils bénéficient d´une actualité de premier ordre, font polémique, ont enregistré leur record respectif aux enchères en 2008… et connaissent bien les rouages de la communication, voire de la finance. Le mois de septembre 2008 a consacré les deux artistes à cinq jours d´intervalle. L´Américain Jeff Koons, artiste vivant le plus coté aux enchères, se frottait à la Grande Histoire, inaugurant son exposition au Château de Versailles (10/09/2008 au 14/12/2008), tandis que Britannique Damien Hirst défrayait la chronique en passant directement par Sotheby´s pour vendre ses œuvres…

La crise des subprimes, les banques en faillite, les troubles de Wall Street… rien ne fit frémir les collectionneurs et marchands venus participer au bal d´enchères le plus médiatique de la rentrée 2008. Sotheby´s Londres, les 15 et 16 septembre dernier, se substituait aux prestigieuses galeries White Cube (Londres) et Gagosian (New York), qui promeuvent habituellement l´œuvre de Damien HIRST, en lui dédiant deux vacations. Court-circuitant son réseau traditionnel de galerie, Hirst vient d´écrire une nouvelle page de l´histoire des ventes aux enchères et de montrer que le marché est capable de digérer des œuvres au sortir de l´atelier, qui n´ont d´autre pedigree que la signature d´un artiste starisé, et ce malgré un contexte économique alarmant. Le risque pour Hirst d´être boudé par les acheteurs était majeur. Il n´en fut rien, Sotheby´s enregistra 70,5 millions £ le 15 septembre (plus de 127 millions de dollars) et 40,9 milions £ le lendemain, faisant la fortune de Hirst. En devenant son propre manager, l´artiste a trouvé le procédé le plus rentable pour vendre ses œuvres.

Les 11 jours d´exposition avant vacation, drainèrent quelques 21 000 visiteurs selon Sotheby´s. Puis la grande vente du 15 septembre, ordonnée comme un spectacle, fut prise d´assaut. Les mains se sont levées à cette grande fête païenne ou l´on a adoré le Veau d´or, qui devint son œuvre la plus chère, frappée à 9,2 millions £. Plus ostentatoire que ses autres installations, ce veau baigné dans un aquarium de formol, érigé sur un piédestal de marbre et coiffé d´un disque recouvert d´or, fit monter sa cote d´un cran supplémentaire. Le précédent record enregistré pour Lullaby Spring, s´élevait en effet à 8,6 millions de livres sterling ( juin 2007, toujours chez Sotheby´s).

Jeff KOONS, comme Hirst, gère son entreprise artistique de main de maître. Tous deux emploient une centaine d´assistants, sont soutenus par des poids lourds comme la Gagosian Gallery, collectionnent les enchères millionnaires. Le record de Jeff Koons s´élève d´ailleurs à 11,5 millions de £ (22 947 100 $) pour l´œuvre Balloon Flower (Magenta) vendue le 30 juin dernier chez Christie´s Londres. Ce n´est pas tout. Leurs velléités d´indépendance et leurs connaissances des rouages du marché datent des années 80 : le jeune étudiant en art qu´était Hirst en 1988 s´érigeait en champion de l´autopromotion en orchestrant l´exposition Freeze. Il fut alors repérer par le publiciste, collectionneur et marchand d´art Charles Saatchi, celui qui lança en 1997 les Young Bristish Artists. A la même époque, son aîné Jeff Koons était trader à Wall Street. Lancé dans une carrière artistique, il bénéficia lui aussi d´un sponsor de premier ordre : François Pinault.

Aujourd´hui, leur notoriété est telle que les rôles semblent se renverser : on fait appel à Koons pour « dépoussiérer » le patrimoine culturel de Versailles, à des œuvres « fraîches » de Hirst pour renouveler ce que l´on appelle le second marché.