Monkdogz Artblog

Yet more art world records were broken yesterday, when Modigliani’s “Tête”; a limestone sculpture of a head was sold for just under $52.5million at the Christie’s Impressionist and Modern art auction in Paris.  The price was the highest ever for the artist worldwide and the highest ever for a work of art sold in France at auction.  

The piece was originally estimated to bring $5.4 – $8 million according to the catalogue.  However the heated bidding for the work continued for 10 minutes, starting with 20 bidders; 15 of whom were bidding via telephone.   By the time 24million Euros ($32.4million) was reached only four bidders remained.  The post auction press release said “The successful buyer – who wishes to remain anonymous – defeated a European and an American bidder on the phone to claim the prized work.”  Does that mean the winner was an Asian, Russian or perhaps a Middle-Eastern collector?

There are 27 known sculptures in existence in the world of which 17 are in significant museums around the world.  10 are in private collections as this one was; owned by Gaston Levy, the businessman who co-founded Monoprix, supermarket chain, artist and collector.  The work has been in the Levy family since Gaston purchased it in 1927.  The work is unusual in that I has a impeccable provenance in terms of exhibitions, catalogues, photographs, illustrations, critiques, anecdotes, memoires and quotes. 

This is part of the reason that even during these uncertain economic times, Masters, Impressionist and Modern art prices continue to rise and break records.  So many of these works are picked up by museums and foundations, or donated to them by collectors, from where they are unlikely to be released for sale or to auction.  Thus the number of pieces coming onto the market are becoming scarcer and scarcer.  Serious collectors are starting to panic with each piece that becomes available that this may be the last opportunity to own one of these significant works of arts.  When the piece also has an impeccable lineage and provenance plus is considered a masterpiece, the stakes are even higher. 

This means that this record breaking trend is likely to continue for the foreseeable future.  Are the prices crazy or are they really worth this money?  The collectors obviously think so and that’s what the art market is based on.  The next batch of sales in the fall should provide some exciting moments.

Frequently people who are not part of the “art world” will say to me ‘I just don’t understand modern art’.  They’re the people who don’t know that “we” in the art world differentiate between modern and contemporary art.  To these people I usually say ‘you don’t have to understand it – you just have to experience it.  If it makes you feel, think, say or do something – that’s great and if it doesn’t – move on….next.’  However as with many things in life, the more you know about something the more interesting it usually is, but we also all tend to have an opinion about most things that we come across whether we know much about it or not. 

Currently in England and in particular in the North East, despite the World Cup (soccer) fever (due to start tomorrow) that is gripping the country, people have had the time and wherewithal to comment on the latest Anish Kapoor sculpture “Temenos” that was unveiled today in Teesside.  The public art project which cost just over $4million is certainly getting people to talk. 

Temenos is Greek for “sacred ground” and according to The Times Kapoor described it as “two rings and a pole” with a steel net strung between them. It is just under 50m (164ft) high and almost 110m (360ft) long but has an “ephemeral, elusive” presence in what the artist called “a landscape of giant objects”, such as the local soccer stadium, the Transporter Bridge (an intriguing contraption that can carry 200 people or 9 cars in a suspended gondola ), dockside cranes and two rusting ships.

As is inevitable in these turbulent economic times, many have suggested that it has been an inappropriate use of public money.  Others in defense of the project say that the increase in traffic to the area which according to the BBC is one of the “bleakest industrial landscapes” in Britain will generate enough money to validate the expenditure.  The mayor Ray Mallon has gone as far as to complain that the detractors are “people who know the cost of everything and the value of nothing” and that in two or three hundred years Kapoor and his engineer Cecil Balmond might be talked about “like people talk about Rembrandt now”. 

Anish Kapoor the Indian born British artist has many fans both amongst the art establishment who chose him to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1990 awarded him to the Turner Prize in 1991 and installed him in the Tate Modern, and the public who has seen his many works and are awaiting to see his sculpture which will dominate the Olympic skyline of London in 2012. 

However not everybody is as pleased.  The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones says “the truth is that Anish Kapoor is a very ordinary, conventional artist – an art teacher’s idea of a radical.   His art exhibits a colossal lack of anxiety about its own value, indeed about art’s value. He’s the artistic equivalent of the first-class honors student who gets a top job straight from uni(versity) and never looks back – the artist as an establishment man.”  That has to hurt. 

Jones wants contemporary art to grab him by the “short and curlies”.   Have you had that experience looking at art?

I’m not an aficionado of antiques, but I do enjoy watching the Antiques Road Show because of the element of possibility that always exists of finding a significant piece amongst the oceans of the mundane.  So in the same vein I always love hearing the stories of the painting that was found in the attic or had been hanging around the house that nobody had bothered to look at let alone dust. 

The latest such story turns out to be one of the very few Tintoretto’s outside of Italy.  Jacopo Tintoretto was one of the masters of the 16^th century in Venice along with Titan and Veronese.  The piece titled “Apollo and the Muses” was bought by William Bankes and sent back to his home in England in 1849.  He was known even in his lifetime as a having an excellent eye for quality work.  However this piece remained hanging in the dining room of Kingston Lacy the Dorset home of Bankes for nearly 150 years before it was donated to the National Trust who then put it into storage for 30 years until they could raise the money to clean and restore the work.

500 years of dirt, cracked paint and varnish stains resulted in only half of the painting being visible, but all this was meticulously removed from the painting which and restored at a cost of $56,000 to reveal that it was indeed a Tintoretto.  The legacy and reputation of Bankes, a flamboyant and controversial celebrity in Victorian England, who ended up exiled to Italy, has been further enhanced and validated.

For additional information see:

The Independent

BBC (above image courtesy of the BBC)

"Double Standard"

Jeffrey Deitch officially started his new job at MOCA today, although apparently he has already been working quietly since his appointment was announced in January.  He is the fourth director of the museum in its 30 year history and the first art dealer to be appointed to lead a major museum in the United States.   The museum has had some financially turbulent times but insiders suggest that things have been improving since its worst moments in 2008.

So here is the opportunity for Deitch to show how innovative and uniquely suited he is to this position and what does he do?  His first show is “Dennis Hopper Double Standard“, a 50-year survey of art made by the late actor and organized by painter and movie director Julian Schnabel which opens on July 11.  Of all the contemporary artists in the whole world that he could have chosen, he chooses Dennis Hopper? 

According to the Culture Monster, Deitch came up with the idea while visiting Schnabel, a long time Hopper friend, a couple of months ago.  “Dennis is a very inspiring figure for me,” said Deitch. “The American art world often likes to put artists into boxes. You’re an artist, not a filmmaker. You’re a photographer, not a painter. But Dennis shows you can blur those boundaries, which is very current and exciting.” 

Hopper was a significant actor, few I think would disagree.  His death earlier this year was a huge loss.  In his life he took some interesting photographs particularly of celebrities.  He also painted; abstract expressionist and graffiti work, but there were a number of “Hopper” paintings which were done with the help of others.  Anyway Tony Shafrazi just did a Dennis Hopper show “The Signs of the Times” last fall.   There is nothing new or creative here. 

What a missed opportunity.

Louise Bourgeois’ art can be found in many of the world’s top art galleries and a list of significant contemporary artists would not be complete without her name.  However Bourgeois did not find critical and financial success until the mid 1970s when she had five solo shows in New York and a retrospective of her work was shown at MoMa in 1982.  In recent auction results her work has fetched over $1million. 

Interestingly, Bourgeois studied geometry and philosophy at the Sorbonne.  It was the love of geometry and art that then lead her to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. She continued her studies in art by working as a docent at the Louvre and studying at the Ecole de Louvre as well as prominent artists of the time such as Fernand Leger.

In 1938 she moved with her American husband Roger Goldwater an art historian who specialized in primitive art, to New York.  She enrolled at The Art Students’ League.  Her first solo show of her paintings was as in 1945 followed by her first solo show of sculptures in 1949.  The 1950s and 1960s however were lean years for her despite participating in the annual Whitney Museum of American Art’s Annual Exhibition.

In 1993 she represented the United States at the Venice Biennial and in 2000 she was commissioned to create a sculpture for the inaugural show at the Tate Modern in London. 

Bourgeois is known for her Cells, Spiders books, drawings and sculptures as well as organic sculptures in rubber, wood, steel, stone and fabric often with sexually explicit tendencies.  Her works are emotionally charged and often full of contradictions; ferocity and fragility, birth and death, survival and decay, soft and hard, nurturing and reserved. 

Louise Bourgeois taught for many years in the public schools in Great Neck, Long Island, as well as at Brooklyn College, the Pratt Institute, the School of Visual Arts, Columbia University, Cooper Union, New York Studio School and Yale University, touching and influencing many art students.  Prominent contemporary artists such as Damien Hirst and Tracy Emin have also credited Bourgeois with influencing their own work.  She lived in Chelsea and continued to host artists in her home on a regular basis until last year engaging them in dialogue about art.   

Louise Bourgeois’ influence on the art world will no doubt be felt strongly for many years to come.

For more information please see:

New York Times

The Times (above image courtesy of The Times)

Recently there have been several issues with artwork with seemingly reasonable provenances being refused authentication by artists’ estate executors and foundations. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has gone one step further and suggested that a piece of work once disowned by Pablo Picasso is actually an original Picasso.

I am sure that when anybody creates over 50,000 pieces of work, they may forget one or two that they may have created, but how much more professional or expert can you get in authenticating a body of work than the artist himself? Surely, if an artist wishes to disown a piece of work, then everybody else should bow to his word? Even with scientific and mathematically analysis such as sparse coding analysis which claims to find a “fingerprint” or “signature” of an artist’s style, who is to say with absolute certainty that a piece of work is by a specific artist, if that artist is denying the fact?

The piece in question is titled” La Douleur” and also known as the “Erotic Scene” or translated literally as “The Pain” shows a naked women with her head on a reclining young man’s lap, doing who knows what. Declared “slapdash” by the Met Curator for Nineteenth- Century, Modern and Contemporary Art and Engelhard Chairman, Gary Tinterow, who also said that it was “not very good”. Pablo Picasso said that the painting was ‘a joke by friends” according to AP.

The artwork will be part of a landmark exhibition at the Met being the first time the complete collection of the museum’s holding’s of the artist’s work will be shown together. According to the website, the museum’s collection reflects the full breadth of the artist’s multi-sided genius as it asserted itself over the course of his long and influential career.

The exhibition “Picasso in the Metropolitan Museum of Art” will run April 27th – August 1st 2010. The museum says that it won’t be the highlight of the show, but I bet a lot of people will want to have a look at it.

I wonder what it is that makes people excited about the biggest, smallest, oldest, longest, heaviest, fastest, shortest or most expensive. What ever it is, it does seem to add value to the item. I suppose that often it makes the item unique, there can only be one biggest, one smallest etc. etc., unless there’s a tie of course and that probably doesn’t happen too often at any one time.

So here is Picasso’s largest work in the news. A stage cloth that measures 10 x10 metres (approx. 33 x 33 feet) that he created for Serge Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes called Le Train Blue in 1924, is to be part of an exhibition at the V&A Museum in London titled “Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballets Russes, 1909 – 1929” from September 25 to January 9 2011.

It was not actually painted by him, but by scene painters who created it from the original painting titled “Deux Femmes Courant”. However Picasso was so pleased with it he signed the canvas and dedicated it to Diaghilev, the man credited with revolutionizing ballet.

Picasso was one of several renowned artists who collaborated with Diaghilev such as Vaslav Nijinsky the dancer and choreographer, Igor Stravinsky, the composer, Coco Chanel the designer and Henri Matisse a fellow artist. These artists working together must have generated dynamic creative environments which lead to results which are still enjoyed by many today. I would have liked to have been there.

For more read the Times….

It’s the stuff that movies are made from and it’s from a source that’s already produced the 2007 movie “Charlie Wilson’s War”. Joanne Herring who was played by Julia Roberts in the movie, has filed a suit claiming that a painting currently held by Sotheby’s on behalf of their client Geoffrey Rice who was trying to sell it at auction, is in actual her painting.

Herring claims that having bought the painting at auction from Christie’s in 1980, in 1986 she had sent it to be framed at a framing store, from where it was stolen. She has a receipt from the auction house, documentation that the painting was in her home, a police report from when the theft was reported and she reported it to the Art Loss Register.

Rice claims however that he bought the painting from Hart Galleries in late 1984 or 1985. The company which no longer operates and who’s owners Jerry and Wyonne Hart are currently involved in legal case where they have pleaded guilty to misapplication of fiduciary property of more than $200,000 have stated that they never sold the picture or anything else to Rice. Nor can Rice apparently produce a receipt for the painting.

However Rice denies Herring’s claim and Herring is adamant that she wants her painting back which Sotheby’s values at $15,000 to $20,000. The trial is not starting until next year and with both sides unwilling to back down, the legal costs are set to be much higher than the value of the painting itself.

If you saw such a plot in a movie, you’d laugh and say “That’s crazy – that would never happen in real life”.

Life’s a funny thing.

Read more in the Houston Chronicle…

If success is measured by the length of queues of people waiting to get in, then French artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s current conceptual installation at London’s Barbican must be a huge success. With waits of over 90 minutes, visitors are still coming out of the exhibition with smiles on their faces and enthusiastic positive comments.

The exhibition is a walk through aviary housing 40 zebra finches and musical instruments such as guitars and cymbals which are connected to speakers which fill the room with sounds. The birds are landing on the guitar strings as perches and the cymbals which are filled with bird seed and water and in the process creating music with their feet.

It is a truly unique and creative installation providing much joy to many people; the visitors to the Barbican and to the nearly 750,000 visitors to the youtube video shown above.

Boursier-Mougenot says, “If you want to understand a creature then you have to interact with it. Here, I am not using the birds, I am collaborating with them.” He said the birds were happy in their new aviary and having fun, he hoped.

According to the Guardian “it is not the first time the artist has created a sound piece. Previous works include him using surveillance cameras to create sounds based on New York street life and then Harmonichaos 2000-06, an installation of 13 vacuum cleaners which have harmonicas attached to their suction nozzles.”

The exhibition continues until May 23rd.

See also the Times for more.

How do you feel about selling, gifting or donating your art….is it like giving up your children for adoption? Do you care where it goes? Do you ever wonder how they are being treated, whether they are still being enjoyed, whether they have been sold-on or forgotten?

Does it matter little, matter somewhat or matter a lot?

I was given a painting today by an artist. I had seen it birthed and develop. I’d like to say I had a little influence in how it turned out in the end. I brought it home and I’ve been introducing it to my home, looking to find somewhere it will feel most comfortable, most at home and shown in it’s best light. I already feel a possessiveness that wants to show it but not share it.

I have another piece of artwork in my home that a friend covets. I would open my house to her, give her the shirt off my back, but I feel very selfish about the painting. There’s a strong connection that really tugs at me; memories, emotions and needs flood my senses. I feel like I’m being asked to give my child or my cats up for adoption. I don’t think I could ever give it up…..I know that I would never give it up. I feel that way about most of the artwork I own.

Is my possessiveness weird? Is it unusual? Do I need therapy? Is that why people collect?