Monkdogz Artblog

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….

A woman has joined a select club of people who’ve accidentally put a tear in a painting.

Wandering around with her art class at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York on Friday, she stumbled onto the Picasso painting “The Actor” considered to be worth $130million and a rare example of his rose period when he painted itinerant acrobats in costume according to AP and MSNBC. The damage, a six inch irregular vertical tear in the bottom right hand corner is expected to be unobtrusive when completed.

The other person to famously tear a Picasso is Steve Wynn who put his elbow into “Le Reve” when he was showing it to some friends just after he negotiated to sell it to Steven A. Cohen for reported $139million. Wynn put a small thumb-sized hole in the canvas and the deal with Cohen fell through. It’s rumored that he said at the time “Thank goodness I did it and not someone else!” I hear that it hangs in Steve Wynn’s office today.

Unfortunately, I am also in this club, not a Picasso, but a large painting “Wild Irish Rose” a rose colored work that Robert d. Hogge gave me when I first really got to know him. I was hanging the work up in the house, when my hand slipped and it fell onto a sharp corner of a cabinet. It made a right angled tear of about 3 inches in the middle of the lower half of the painting.

I felt absolutely awful. Really sick to the stomach. Mortified. Devastated.

I feel dreadful even now when I think about it. I don’t know how I plucked up the courage to tell Bob about it but I did, knowing that he would see it before long. He was very good about it and brushed it off; reassuring me and saying he could repair it easily.

Bob did repair it well and he kindly says that he can’t see where it was now, some 7 years on. I can sense it, because it’s burned into my mind but it is hard to see. It hangs in my bedroom today where I see it every day. It’s one of my favorite paintings. It reminds me to be grateful, humble, know that life goes on and that friendship survives.

32 drawings by Picasso in a sketch book dating from 1917-1924, worth a total of $11million has gone missing from a glass case in The Picasso Museum in Paris, France.  The drawings were missed late on Tuesday morning when the museum is closed to the public, leading to officials suggesting that they may have been stolen on Monday night.  However police have said that there were no signs of a break-in and on of the museum’s alarms had been triggered. 

The sketch book is about 6”x 9” and has a red cover with the word “Album” inscribed in gold letters.

Paris police have said that the black market for stolen art work makes it much more difficult to recover such items.  In an interview with Lepoint.fr experts in art theft have suggested that thieves may only recover 5% of the market value of the work and if they panic, they could easily destroy the work by burning it to erase the evidence.  Scotland Yard suggests that 7-10% of the value may be achieved by the thieves.  (Also reported in The Times)

Currently there is no significant co-ordination between international agencies for the recovery of stolen art.  However there are frequent conferences and discussions to try and rectify this situation. Currently the largest database of stolen art is the Art Loss Register which was formed in 1991 and is a partnership of leading international auction houses and art trade associations, the insurance industry, and the International Foundation for Art Research.

Although it is difficult to really quantify the value of this criminal activity as much is often not reported, the general consensus (supported by the FBI Art Theft Program) is that the worldwide black market for art amounts to $6billion a year and is considered the third or fourth most profitable international crime sector after drugs and arms smuggling and possibly money-laundering.  High-end stolen art is often used as collateral in drug deals. Low-end art is just resold at estate auctions, flea markets and to antiques dealers.

Interpol’s records show that France and Italy are the most popular countries for art theft followed by Poland, Russia and Germany.  However the world most expensive art heist was from Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990 when two thieves stole 13 pieces of art worth $300million including 3 Rembrandts, a Monet, a Vemeer, 5 sketches by Degas, a Flinck and several historic artifacts. The items have not been recovered so far and a $5million reward is still being offered for information leading to the return of the items.  

Recovery of stolen items is thought to be only 5 – 8%.  Many repeat thefts also occur, if security weaknesses are suspected, often from residences, galleries and museums.  This leads to many urban myths of galleries being hot beds of money and art laundering establishments…..but there is that saying “there’s no smoke without fire”.  What do you know?

1.4 million people voted for in the London Times Top 200 Artists of the 20^th Century, which was organized in conjunction with The Saatchi Gallery.  

Unsurprisingly, Pablo Picasso won the competition with 21587 votes, nearly 500 more votes than 2^nd place Paul Cezanne. Gustav Klimt was a surprising 3^rd place followed by a more expected Claude Monet and Marcel Duchamp. All of these early European artists have been dead for more than 35 years or more.

The first American artist in the list is Jackson Pollock at 7^th place and the first living artist on the list is another American, Jasper Johns at 19^th place.

The top female artist was Frieda Kahlo, probably there in part because of the success of the movie of her life.  

The online version of the list has a good review of the list, but is not attributed to anyone.  It starts:

“At first glance, the results of this poll may seem rather predictable — but the longer you look, the more telling the quirks and anomalies become. This is precisely its point. It’s not there to agree with. It is there to argue against.”

For me, what is really intriguing are the artists who made it into the 200, but were towards the bottom of the list.  I was surprised to see that there were over 2000 people who knew Marsden Hartley in England let alone thought that he was the greatest artist of the 20^th Century.

Who would you have chosen as your most important/influential artist of the 20^th Century?  

Marion Boddy-Evans has started a fun list that may strike a chord.

You Must be an Artist if:

·                    You don’t have a single pair of pants without any paint on them.

·                    You can name more than 29 colors.

·                    You’ve dipped your paintbrush in your coffee too many times to count

·                    The highlights in your hair are from your color palette and not from the hairdresser.  

·                    You know the color of the lichen on the tree outside of your window.

·                    You chose to buy that new Russian Sable Number Six Round instead of a Big Mac, a Large Fry, a Milkshake, Desert, and five gallons of gas.

·                    You buy semi-precious stones to grind them up to make paint rather than wearing them around your neck.  

Are there any other quotes that describe you?

With the current extra excitement about anything Picasso, helped by the show at Gagosian, Sotheby’s is very happily promoting their next Impressionist & Modern Sale with Picasso’s portrait of his daughter Maia, holding a favorite boat toy. 

The painting titled “LA FILLE DE L’ARTISTE À DEUX ANS ET DEMI AVEC UN BATEAU”( Oil on canvas.  28 3/4 by 21 1/4 in. 73 by 54 cm) is estimated in the catalogue at US$16-24 million.  It was painted in 1938 just after Picasso painted the famous Guernica which depicts the suffering people, animals, and buildings wrenched by violence and chaos caused  by the bombing of the town by 28 German bombers during the Spanish Revolution.

As usual with Picasso, it’s all a bit complicated.  Maia was the daughter of Picasso’s mistress, Marie-Thérèse Walter.  However at the time he was still married to his first wife Olga Koklova and had a son Paulo. On Picasso’s death in 1973, Paulo’s daughter Marina Picasso inherited the painting. 

Jan Krugier of Galerie Krugier’s became Marina’s exclusive agent, handling one of the largest collections of Picassos in the world, although it had been somewhat decimated by the French government which had taken many pieces for inheritance tax after the death of Picasso.  Jan had helped Marina’s brother Pablito, when he was ill in hospital after what would become a successful attempt at suicide by swallowing bleach.  

Jan Krugier handled the painting on consignment and it was sold to art dealer Arnold Katzen of New York who owned the Arnold Katzen Gallery and American-European Art Associates, Inc. sometime after 1983.  

The current private collector bought the painting in 1986 and it had not been shown in public since until this auction.  It is hanging in London until Saturday when it will be flown to New York in time for the auction next Tuesday evening, May 5^th.  

There are only 38 items in this particular sale and it will be interesting to see how well the whole Spring sales will fare.

As a gallery owner representing contemporary living artists, the emphasis placed on dead artists seems to me to be a bit of a cop-out.  There is little risk in buying and selling these works and for a collector there is only a role of voyeur.  The collector is not a part of the development, growth and excitement of the rising career of a living artist.  

However, I felt that the new show at Gagosian “Picasso:Mosqueteros” was a risk to take.  Picasso exhibited his late work in 1973 just before he died.  He was slammed by the critics and unappreciated by the public.  So to exhibit these works took either a leap of faith or some insider information.  It was obviously the latter; the collection was put together by Bernard Picasso, the artist’s son and curated by John Richardson, a friend and biographer of Pablo Picasso.  

I was surprised by the gushiness of the New York Times review and slightly put off to be honest.  Yet last Saturday, there were over 5000 people who came in through the doors, with many waiting for over an hour to get it as the line snaked down the block to the West Side Highway.  There were so many people in the gallery, they had to allow 20 people to leave to allow another 20 people in for safety and security reasons.  People have been coming in from all over the continent and around the world specifically to see this show.

The show has been hung very creatively by John Richardson to best showcase the paintings, drawings, and prints.  It is a very dynamic show of powerful work.  I was there for nearly an hour today but it was not nearly enough.  Not all the work is of the same stature in terms of quality and technique, but for a man who created nearly 50,000 pieces in a lifetime and spent the last 6 years of his life, after a major operation, continuously working in his late 80s and 90s, the achievement is phenomenal.  

I’m going to go back again to see the show next week to give the old man his due and myself another education.  If you’re going to go and see it, I recommend seeing the interviews on Gagosian’s site and reading whatever you can before you go.  It will be worth your time. 

Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso

Born   25 October 1881   Malaga, Spain

Died   8 April 1973   Mougins, France

Current Exhibition

The National Gallery in London is currently hosting the very successful exhibition “Picasso: Challenging the Past” which continues until June 7th.   It is billed as the unleashing of a frenzied, Spanish bull and explores the ways he took up the artistic concerns of the painters of the past and made audacious responses of his own.  It is based on his renditions of many of the classical masters.  El Greco, Velázquez and Goya were of crucial importance to him, as were Rembrandt, Delacroix, Ingres, Manet and Cézanne. He tackled the likes of Velázquez, Delacroix and Goya head-on, proclaiming: “Any work they could do, I can do better.”  

Various sources differ on Picasso’s volume of work, but one thing is certain, Picasso was exceptionally prolific throughout his long lifetime. John Selfridge (1994) states “the total number of artworks he produced has been estimated at 50,000, comprising 1,885 paintings; 1,228 sculptures; 2,880 ceramics, roughly 12,000 drawings, many thousands of prints, and numerous tapestries and rugs. 

Picasso did not leave a will and on his death many of his paintings which were still in his possession were taken by the French government in lieu of death duties.  Many of the pieces in this London show is on loan from the Museé National Picasso in Paris following a financially successful, but critically slammed show last year titled ‘Picasso et les maîtres’ which showed Picasso’s works next to works by the classical masters that the curators claimed were the inspiration for Picasso’s pieces.

Quotes

“Bad artists copy.  Great artists steal.”

“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.“

“Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth. ”
“Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life. “