Pablo Picasso Cubist Masterpiece Buffalo Bill will Highlight Christie's 20th Century

Pablo Picasso Cubist Masterpiece Buffalo Bill will Highlight Christie's 20th Century Evening Sale in New York

17 November 2022

PABLO PICASSO (1881-1973)

Buffalo Bill

Oil and sand on canvas 18¼ x 13⅛ in. (46.3 x 33.3 cm.)

Painted in Paris in spring 1911

Photo courtesy of Christie's

$10,000,000-15,000,000

Christie’s announces Pablo Picasso’s Buffalo Bill as a leading highlight of the 20th Century Evening Sale taking place at Rockefeller Center Thursday, 17 November 2022. Estimated to achieve $10 million – 15 million, Buffalo Bill carries an esteemed provenance. The painting’s first owner was the legendary art dealer of the Cubist movement, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. It comes to Christie’s from a distinguished private collection where it has remained for more than thirty years.

David Kleiweg de Zwaan, Christie’s Senior Specialist, Impressionist and Modern Art remarks: “Buffalo Bill’s daring exploration of new territory as a scout resonated with Picasso, who himself was reconnoitering new frontiers in his pioneering Cubist art. With the recent opening of the Cubism show at The Met, we are thrilled to bring this rare Cubist portrait depicting an icon of the American West to the market in our 20th Century Evening Sale in New York this November.”

Painted in 1911 during the highpoint of Analytical Cubism, Buffalo Bill is singular within Pablo Picasso’s oeuvre, standing as one of the few named male portraits that he painted in the years of pre-war Cubism. It is exemplary of the artist’s practice during this period of radical artistic experimentation, as Picasso interpreted the well-known image of Buffalo Bill, an icon of the American frontier, through his newly conceived language of deconstructed lines and forms. In it, Picasso pushed the boundaries of representation to their extreme, reducing the well-known image of the Wild West star to its essentials, whilst retaining glimpses of his signifying characteristics—such as his flamboyant goatee and famed Stetson hat.

Pablo Picasso was a great fan of the rugged frontiersman and identified with this heroic adventurer and showman. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show first toured to Paris in 1889, and returned in 1905, filling a 17,000 seat arena to capacity for months. In letters to his Cubist accomplice, Georges Braque, Picasso signed himself “ton pard,” short for the cowboy “pardner,” playfully indulging in their shared love of, as they called it, “Le Far West.”

Buffalo Bill has been in a number of important exhibitions. Picasso selected it for his landmark 1932 retrospective at the Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, followed by the Kunsthaus Zurich, and it was included in the 1989-1990 exhibition Picasso and Braque, Pioneering Cubism at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The sale of Buffalo Bill coincides with the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s current show, Cubism and the Trompe l’Oeil Tradition, open through January 2023. The exhibition is one of 40 exhibitions participating in the International Celebration Picasso 1973-2023, a worldwide initiative marking the 50th anniversary of the artist’s death and celebrating his lasting legacy.

CHRITIE'S NEW YORK

20 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, NY 10020

www.christies.com

Claude Monet Masterpiece @ McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas

Monet and Whistler in London

McNay Art Museum, San Antonio

Through January 23, 2022

Claude Monet

Charing Cross Bridge, brouillard, 1902

Oil on canvas

Collection of Art Gallery of Ontario

Gift of Ethel and Milton Harris, 1990 

Photograph © AGO

Bodies of water have long captured the imaginations of artists, particularly Claude Monet, who often explored the magical effects of light and atmosphere on water at different times of day. The McNay’s exhibition, Monet and Whistler in London, features rarely seen artworks from nine artists in the McNay Collection in conversation with a Claude Monet masterpiece reflecting the River Thames in England. 

On loan from the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, Claude Monet’s Charing Cross Bridge, brouillard (1902) shows one of the major bridges over the 215-mile-long river and the Houses of Parliament in the distance. The artist accentuates the effect of fog as it diffuses sunlight into a soft, golden glow. Other artists were similarly fascinated with the unique atmospheric qualities of the Thames, including American expatriate artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler. His lithograph Early Morning on view in the exhibition shows how the famous London fog creates a symphony of subtle gray tonalities.

Additional artworks include James Tissot’s Les Deux Amis (Two Friends), which depicts one man bidding farewell to another at the dock’s edge—a scene inspired by the excitement and adventure of travel. Winslow Homer’s Perils of the Sea highlights the dangers of the deep as women anxiously await their husbands with a roiling sea in the background. Additional artists focus on waterways as important arteries of commerce and industry, like Joseph Pennell’s Sunset, from Williamsburg Bridge or Otto Kuhler’s The Valley of Work.

Monet and Whistler in London presents many of these artworks for the first time in years, including John Marin’s studies of the Brooklyn Bridge. This exhibition also includes a contemporary woodcut by Yvonne Jacquette. Jacquette’s Midtown Composite focuses primarily on the skyscrapers of Manhattan, but also reveals a tiny sliver of the East River.

Monet and Whistler in London is organized for the McNay Art Museum by Lyle W. Williams, Curator of Prints and Drawings, Curator of Modern Art.

McNay Art Museum

6000 N New Braufels Avenue, San Antonio, TX 78209

www.mcnayart.org

Masterwork by Clyfford Still @ Phillips' Evening Sale of 20th Century & Contemporary Art

Monumental Rare Masterwork by Clyfford Still to Star in Phillips’ Evening Sale of 20th Century & Contemporary Art

Phillips, New York

Auction: December 7, 2020

CLYFFORD STILL

PH-407, 1964

Estimate: In the Region of $17 million

Photo Courtesy of Phillips

Phillips announces a rare, Maryland work by Clyfford Still as a major highlight of the fall season. Known as one of the fathers of Abstract Expressionism, Still was regarded as an influencer to some of the most significant artists of the 20th century, including Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock. This magnificent, large scale work was painted in 1964 after Still left the New York art scene and relocated to the Maryland countryside, specifically keeping his work out of public view. A testament to his concern for the paintings he created during this time, he left a will with strict instructions to keep them together in a Museum dedicated to his works. As a result, PH-407 is now one of only a few dozen paintings that are estimated to remain in private hands. It is a superb example from the artist’s body of work from the Maryland years of production, which are being celebrated for the first time in the current exhibition at the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver. Bearing impeccable provenance and exhibition history, this monumental masterpiece is estimated in the region of $17 million and will be included in Phillips’ Evening Sale of 20th Century & Contemporary Art on 7 December at 7pm, marking the first time that it is being sold publicly.

Miety Heiden, Deputy Chairwoman and Head of Private Sales, said, “Clyfford Still is a titan of 20th century Abstract Expressionism, but his work seldom appears on the market. Only 30 to 40 are estimated to remain in private hands, with the vast majority held in The Clyfford Still Museum and other institutional collections around the globe. His Maryland works, such as PH-407, are especially rare as he only allowed one gallery show in the last two decades of his career, refusing to part with these works and only selling on the fewest of occasions. We are honored to include such a magnificent work in our December sale, especially during a larger art historical reconsideration of his mature period.”

Despite his widespread influence, Clyfford Still’s process was particularly unique. Instead of filling canvases with expressive yet momentary gestures, as many of his peers did, the artist would gradually build up the surface of his works layer by layer, forming complex expanses of paint and emotion. While the red field that composes much of PH-407 may appear monochromatic at first glance, upon further inspection the tonal nuances and brushstrokes begin to reveal themselves. Featuring a chromatic intensity and emotive depth characteristic of Clyfford Still’s finest works, the incendiary crimson expanse and jagged black and blue shapes of PH-407 pulsate with energy. What truly defines Clyfford Still’s late work, however, is the sense of simmering movement that permeates throughout. Towards the bottom of the painting, a black form evoking a flame flickers, emitting a vibrant cobalt ember and scarlet smoke. This dynamism—lent to the work not by one form but by the relationship between multiple forms—is characteristic of Still’s mature canvases, which coalesce kinetic energy with a reductive approach. Continuously shifting in color and texture, PH-407 is emblematic of Clyfford Still’s extraordinary approach, which forever altered the course of art history. The concept for the work was originally conceived five years earlier in 1959 in a pastel study that is now part of the Clyfford Still Museum’s permanent collection. He did not return to the subject until 1964, during his famed Maryland years.

Clyfford Still refused to conform to the rules of the commercial art world and the desires of critics. And so, in 1961, he relocated from New York to an overgrown ranch in rural Maryland, a lifestyle closely resembling his childhood in Alberta, Canada. Though he had already disconnected himself from the New York art world, in order to keep developing his craft and to continue growing as an artist as he aged, Still felt he had to establish empty physical space around him to fill with his work. He converted a barn on the homestead into a studio and felt a renewed and refreshed drive to paint.

Clyfford Still went on to spend the last two decades of his life in Maryland, unequivocally the most fertile period in the artist’s career. Between 1961 and 1980, he executed approximately 380 paintings and 1,100 works on paper, more than he had created in the forty years prior. Most of these works remained in his collection and are now held in the Clyfford Still Museum, as he strived to keep them all. In 1969, however, he sold about 35 works on canvas, including PH-407, to Marlborough-Gerson Gallery—the only time his works entered the commercial art world following his disassociation from his gallerists in 1951. Several of those Marlborough works have since entered institutional collections: one has found its way back to the Clyfford Still Museum, and others are now housed by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. 

In 1979, the Metropolitan Museum of Art honored Clyfford Still with the greatest highlight of his career, a monumental retrospective, for which he selected 79 paintings to include from his own collection. The Met retrospective’s emphasis on Clyfford Still’s time in Maryland illuminated how the artist regarded his late period as the culmination of his oeuvre: almost half of the paintings exhibited were from the last two decades of his career.

PH-407 is only the third work from Clyfford Still’s Maryland period to ever appear at auction.

PHILLIPS NEW YORK

450 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10022

www.phillips.com

Jan Matejko's Copernicus @ National Gallery, London - Conversations with God

Conversations with God: 

Jan Matejko’s Copernicus

National Gallery, London

25 March – 27 June 2021

JAN MATEJKO 

Copernicus. Conversations with God, 1873

Jagiellonian University, Kraków 

© Photo courtesy the owner

In spring 2021, an iconic painting of astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, by the most famous Polish painter of the 19th century, Jan Matejko, will make a rare visit to the National Gallery, the first time it will ever have been seen in the UK. 

The 10-foot wide painting, which rarely leaves its home in the Senate Chamber of the Jagiellonian University, Kraków, will be part of a new exhibition introducing visitors to the work of Jan Matejko (1838–1893). Despite being largely unknown outside his homeland, this highly original and distinctive artist is widely regarded as the national painter of Poland.     

Jan Matejko, (pronounced Ma – tay – coe), is revered by Poles for his huge, teeming, minutely detailed depictions of key moments in the nation's history. This particular work celebrates the achievements of Polish astronomer Copernicus (1473–1543), the first person since the ancient Greeks to realise that the sun rather than the earth is at the centre of our planetary system and that we revolve around it.

The monumental canvas was painted in 1873 to mark the 400th anniversary of the astronomer’s birth. Rather than depicting Copernicus at the moment of his discovery of heliocentrism – in the painting his chart of the heavens can already be seen there by his side – Jan Matejko chose to paint him on a rooftop in his hometown of Frombork discussing the matter with God. Unlike Galileo, some 73 years later, who reached similar conclusions but who alienated the Catholic Church, Copernicus was never excommunicated for challenging traditional belief; indeed, enlightened clerics of the day celebrated his breakthrough.   

This painting of a genius at work achieved almost instant fame when it was first exhibited in Kraków. It was circulated in thousands of reproductions and was subsequently acquired by subscription for the Jagiellonian University in 1873.

At the time Poland was still partitioned and debate raged about the nationality of Copernicus with both Germany and Poland claiming the astronomer as their own. This painting, showing him kneeling awestruck against a starry sky on the rooftop of the Tower at Frombork near the city’s cathedral where he served as canon, clearly positions Copernicus as Polish, thereby striking a chord with Polish people then in search of national figureheads and the work became both a symbol of Polish cultural identity and a vehicle for Polish nationalism.

The exhibition will include a copy of Copernicus’s 'De revolutionibus orbium coelestium', 'On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres', published in 1543 (National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London) which marked a turning point in human understanding of our place in the universe, together with astronomical instruments (The Jagiellonian University Museum, Kraków) and a self portrait and study for 'Copernicus, Conversations with God' (The National Museum in Kraków).

Christopher Riopelle, The Neil Westreich Curator of Post-1800 Paintings at the National Gallery, says: ‘Matejko saw his role not merely as recording great events from Polish history but at expressing their deep inner meaning for Poles. He stands at the end of the long tradition of history painting and, as the wider world is re-discovering, was one of its most ingenious and provocative exponents.’

Dr Gabriele Finaldi, Director of the National Gallery, says: ‘This is the second in a series of exhibitions supported by the Capricorn Foundation, in memory of Mr H J Hyams, and brings one of Poland’s most famous pictures to the National Gallery. Matejko’s Copernicus demonstrates the artist’s ambition to create defining images for a nation that yearned to recover its sovereignty and independence.’

THE NATIONAL GALLERY

Trafalgar Square, London WC2N 5DN

www.nationalgallery.org.uk

Thomas Cole @ The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Thomas Cole's Journey: Atlantic Crossings
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
January 30 - May 13, 2018

Thomas Cole (American [born England], Lancashire 1801–1848 Catskill, New York). 

View of the Round-Top in the Catskill Mountains (Sunny Morning on the Hudson), 1827. 

Oil on panel, 18 5/8 x 25 3/8 in. (47.3 x 64.5 cm). 

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 

Gift of Martha C. Karolik for the M. and M. Karolik Collection of American Paintings, 1815–1865 (47.1200). 

Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Celebrated as one of America’s preeminent landscape painters, THOMAS COLE (1801–1848) was born in northern England at the start of the Industrial Revolution, emigrated to the United States in his youth, and traveled extensively throughout England and Italy as a young artist. He returned to America to create some of his most ambitious works and inspire a new generation of American artists, launching a national school of landscape art. Opening January 30 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the exhibition Thomas Cole’s Journey: Atlantic Crossings examines, for the first time, the artist’s transatlantic career and engagement with European art. With Thomas Cole’s masterwork The Oxbow (1836) as its centerpiece, the exhibition features more than three dozen examples of his large-scale landscape paintings, oil studies, and works on paper. Consummate paintings by Thomas Cole are juxtaposed with works by European masters including J. M. W. Turner and John Constable, among others, highlighting the dialogue between American and European artists and establishing Thomas Cole as a major figure in 19th-century landscape art within a global context. The exhibition marks the 200th anniversary of Thomas Cole’s arrival in America. 

Thomas Cole (American [born England], Lancashire 1801–1848 Catskill, New York). 

Clouds, ca. 1830s. 

Oil on paper laid down on canvas, 8 3/4 x 10 7/8 in. (22.2 x 27.6 cm). 

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Morris K. Jesup Fund (2013.201). 

Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The exhibition follows the chronology of Thomas Cole’s life, beginning with his origins in recently industrialized northern England, his arrival in the United States in 1818, and his embrace of the American wilderness as a novel subject for landscape art of the New World. Early works by Thomas Cole will reveal his prodigious talent. After establishing himself as the premier landscape painter of the young United States, he traveled back to Europe. 

Thomas Cole (American [born England], Lancashire 1801–1848 Catskill, New York). 

View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm—The Oxbow, 1836. 

Oil on canvas, 51 1/2 x 76 in. (130.8 x 193 cm). 

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Mrs. Russell Sage, 1908 (08.228).

Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art 

The next section explores in depth Thomas Cole’s return to England in 1829–31 and his travels in Italy in 1831–32, revealing the development of his artistic processes. He embraced the on-site landscape oil study and adopted elements of the European landscape tradition reaching back to Claude Lorrain. He learned from contemporary painters in England, including  J. M. W. Turner, John Constable, and John Martin, and furthered his studies in landscape and figure painting in Italy. By exploring this formative period in Thomas Cole’s life, the exhibition offers a significant revision of existing accounts of his work, which have, until now, emphasized the American aspects of his formation and identity. The exhibition also provides new interpretations of Thomas Cole’s work within the expanded contexts of the history of the British Empire, the rise of the United States, the Industrial Revolution and the American wilderness, and Romantic theories of history. 

Thomas Cole (American [born England], Lancashire 1801–1848 Catskill, New York). 

The Course of the Empire: The Consummation of Empire, 1835–36. 

Oil on canvas, 51 1/4 x 76 in. (130.2 x 193 cm). 

New-York Historical Society, Gift of The New-York Gallery of the Fine Arts (1858.3). 

Digital image created by Oppenheimer Editions

Upon his return to America, Thomas Cole applied the lessons he had learned abroad to create the five-part series The Course of Empire (1834–36). These works reveal a definition of the new American Sublime that comes to its fullest expression in The Oxbow (1836). Finally, the exhibition concludes with an examination of Cole’s legacy in the works of the next generation of American landscape painters whom Thomas Cole personally mentored, notably Asher B. Durand and Frederic E. Church. 

The exhibition was organized by Elizabeth Kornhauser, the Alice Pratt Brown Curator of American Painting and Sculpture at The Met, and Tim Barringer, Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art at Yale University, with Chris Riopelle, Curator of Post-1800 Paintings at the National Gallery, London. 

Exhibition design is by Brian Butterfield, Senior Exhibition Designer; graphics are by Ria Roberts, Graphic Designer; and lighting is by Clint Ross Coller and Richard Lichte, Lighting Design Managers, all of The Met Design Department.

It is organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and The National Gallery, London. 

The exhibition is made possible by The Peter Jay Sharp Foundation. Additional support is provided by the Henry Luce Foundation, White & Case LLP, the Enterprise Holdings Endowment, and the Terra Foundation for American Art. It is supported by an Indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.

THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, NEW YORK
Exhibition Location:
The Met Fifth Avenue, Floor 1,
Gallery 746, The Erving and Joyce Wolf Gallery
www.metmuseum.org

Rodin at The Met, NYC

Rodin at The Met
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Through January 15, 2018

Auguste Rodin (French, Paris 1840–1917 Meudon)

The Thinker 

Founder: Cast by Alexis Rudier (French)

Modeled ca. 1880 cast ca. 1910

Bronze

Overall (wt. confirmed): 27 5/8 in., 185 lb. (70.2 cm, 83.9 kg)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Thomas F. Ryan, 1910

Auguste Rodin (French, Paris 1840–1917 Meudon)

Orpheus and Eurydice 

Modeled probably before 1887, carved 1893

Overall (confirmed (wt. on pallet)): 48 3/4 × 31 1/8 × 25 3/8 in., 914 lb.

(123.8 × 79.1 × 64.5 cm, 414.6 kg)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Thomas F. Ryan, 1910

On the centenary of the death of AUGUSTE RODIN (1840–1917), The Metropolitan Museum of Art celebrates its historic collection of the artist’s work in Rodin at The Met,. Nearly 50 marbles, bronzes, plasters, and terracottas by Auguste Rodin, representing more than a century of acquisitions and gifts to the Museum, is displayed in the newly installed and refurbished B. Gerald Cantor Sculpture Gallery (Gallery 800). The exhibition features iconic sculptures such as The Thinker and The Hand of God, as well as masterpieces such as The Tempest that have not been on view in decades. Paintings from The Met’s collection by some of Auguste Rodin’s most admired contemporaries, including his friends Claude Monet (1840–1926) and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824–1898), are presented in dialogue with the sculptures on display.

Auguste Rodin (French, Paris 1840–1917 Meudon)

The Tempest 

Carved before 1910

Marble

Overall (confirmed): 13 5/8 x 14 7/8 x 7 3/4 in., 73lb.
(34.6 x 37.8 x 19.7 cm, 33.1126kg);

Footprint of sculpture (confirmed): 14 1/2 x 6 1/2 in. (36.8 x 16.5 cm); 

Length of rod mount: 2 9/16 in. (6.5 cm)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Thomas F. Ryan, 1910

Auguste Rodin (French, Paris 1840–1917 Meudon)

Pair of Standing Nude Male Figures Demonstrating the Principles of Contrapposto according to Michelangelo and Phidias 

Ca. 1911

Terracotta

Height (each): 14 1/2 in. (36.8 cm)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Foundation, 1987

The extraordinary range of The Met’s holdings of Auguste Rodin’s work is highlighted in an adjacent gallery (Gallery 809) with a selection of drawings, prints, letters, and illustrated books, as well as photographs of the master sculptor and his art. This focused presentation introduces visitors to the evolution of Rodin’s draftsmanship and demonstrate the essential role of drawing in his practice. It will also address Rodin’s engagement with photographers, especially Edward Steichen (1879-1973), who served as a key intermediary in bringing Auguste Rodin’s drawings to New York.

Auguste Rodin (French, Paris 1840–1917 Meudon)

The Embrace 

1900–1910

Graphite, watercolor, and gouache on cream wove paper

12 13/16 x 9 7/8 in. (32.5 x 25.1 cm)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, John Stewart Kennedy Fund, 1910

Rodin at The Met begins a new chapter in the Museum’s long-standing engagement with Auguste Rodin. In 1912, The Met opened a gallery dedicated to Auguste Rodin’s sculptures and drawings—the first at the Museum devoted exclusively to the work of a living artist. Displayed in that gallery were almost 30 sculptures and, within a year, 14 drawings. During the late 20th century, the historic core of The Met’s Auguste Rodin collection was further enhanced by Iris and B. Gerald Cantor and their Foundation’s gifts of more than 30 sculptures, many of them from editions authorized by the artist and cast posthumously. Today, The Met’s holdings of Auguste Rodin’s art are among the largest and most distinguished in the United States.

Auguste Rodin (French, Paris 1840–1917 Meudon)

The Age of Bronze 

Founder: Cast by Alexis Rudier (French)

Modeled 1876, cast ca. 1906

Bronze

Overall (wt. confirmed): 72 in., 275 lb. (182.9 cm, 124.7 kg)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Mrs. John W. Simpson, 1907

Auguste Rodin (French, Paris 1840–1917 Meudon)

Eternal Spring 

Modeled ca. 1881, carved 1907 Marble

Overall (wt. confirmed): 28×29×18 in., 433 lb.
(71.1 × 73.7 × 45.7 cm, 196.4 kg)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of Isaac D. Fletcher, 1917

Rodin at The Met is organized by Denise Allen, Curator in The Met’s Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts; Ashley Dunn, Assistant Curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints; and Alison Hokanson and Asher Ethan Miller, both Assistant Curators in the Department of European Paintings.

The exhibition is made possible by the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Foundation.

MMA, New York
The Met Fifth Avenue
B. Gerald Cantor Sculpture Gallery
www.metmuseum.org

Masterpieces of Design and Photography @ Christie's London

Masterpieces of Design and Photography
Christie's London
3 October 2017

Christie’s Frieze Week season will launch on 3 October 2017, including, for the first time, an evening auction that showcases two complementary collecting categories: Masterpieces of Design and Photography. The auction will showcase masterworks of the 20th and 21st centuries and tell the story of the extraordinary expansion of creativity in both design and photography from 1865 to the present day. Featuring major names including Diane Arbus, Gilbert & George, Andreas Gursky, Allen Jones, Finn Juhl, Robert Mapplethorpe, Carlo Mollino, Marc Newson, Helmut Newton, Irving Penn, Gio Ponti, Jean Prouvé, Gerrit Rietveld and Thomas Struth, the auction will provide an opportunity for both established and younger collectors. On view at Christie’s, King Street from 26 September to 3 October. 

Francis Outred, Chairman & Head of Post-War and Contemporary Art EMERI: “I am delighted to present Masterpieces of Design and Photography: a new concept sale for Frieze Week 2017. Coinciding with our Post-War and Contemporary Art auctions, it is the sheer breadth and depth of materials on display in these 39 objects which underlines the extraordinary expansion of creativity from 1875 to the present day. The way that these ‘artists’ have responded to technological evolution by inventing new ways and approaches to deal with their vision of the world is truly breathtaking. Across 15 photographic works there are no less than six different process, but comparing the Platinum print in Robert Mapplethorpe’s masterpiece Self Portrait from 1988 with that of Baron Adolph de Meyer’s from 1906 creates two very different experiences. The touch and ‘texture' of photography is what I hope that this auction and exhibition encourages. Colour in the hands of Thomas Struth is very different to that of Andreas Gursky for example. These aspects are all heightened by the context of the surfaces, forms and textures of Design which surround them. Virtually each of the 24 pieces uses a unique set of materials from hand-blown glass to cutlery and porcelain, from steel mesh to stainless steel and painted steel and riveted aluminium. These pioneers of Design have tackled the human relationship with the world, making functional yet beautiful works, none more so than Marc Newson’s Lockheed Lounge. By placing these works within the context of twentieth- and twenty-first-century painting and sculpture – as celebrated in our Evening and Day Auctions, as well as our themed sales Thinking Italian and Up Close – we will bring new stories and artistic relationships to light. With prices ranging from £20,000 to £1,500,000, we are looking to encourage both established and younger collectors to come together and experience the special excitement and drama of an evening auction at Christie’s King Street.”

Highlights of the sale include Allen Jones’ Table, Chair and Hatstand (Hatstand estimate: £600,000 – £800,000; Chair estimate: £600,000 – £800,000 and Table estimate: £600,000 – £800,000), which are icons of British Pop Art and were created at the height of Jones’ career. Executed in 1969, the works were acquired that year by the pioneering collector, filmmaker and photographer Gunter Sachs, and remained in his possession for the next 43 years. Doubling as purposefully provocative pieces of household furniture, three exaggerated feminine figures are contorted into subservient postures. Illuminating the sexual undercurrents that ran through commercial advertising in the 1960s. Laced with seduction and critique in equal measure, they capture the Zeitgeist of this revolutionary period.

The pared back colour of Gilbert & George’s Red Morning (Hell) (1977, estimate: £800,000 – £1,200,000), from the landmark ‘Red Morning’ series of seventeen mural-sized works, with examples in various museums including Tate Modern. Red Morning (Hell) stands apart from others through its complete absence of red colour, resulting in a composition of austere monochrome impact. Red Morning (Hell) captures a pivotal moment in Gilbert & George’s career – the year was 1977, the Silver Jubilee of the Queen, but it was also a year rife with political and social unrest in Britain. The series’ title is a reference to the socialist movement which grew in the UK from 1976-77 and refers more broadly to tensions that coursed through many aspects of English culture at the time, from economic difficulties and police strikes to the anti-establishment punk movement, conveying deep social unrest.  

One of the leading design pieces in the auction, Gerrit Thomas Rietveld’s 1919 ‘Elling’ sideboard (estimate: £60,000 – £90,000) is one of the most articulate examples of furniture as art and mirrored the evolution of minimalism and conceptualism in painting and sculpture such as that of Gilbert & George. The cabinet reveals the interior as exterior, the components identified, exploded and now held static in time, space and volume.  As a member of the Dutch De Stijl collective, founded in 1917, Rietveld embraced the group’s conceptual abstraction that adopted a streamlined, reductive personality that was now guided by bold use of line, plane, and colour. The ambient, deconstructed imagery of the painters Theo van Doesburg, Bart van der Leck, and Piet Mondrian, amongst others, found synergy with Rietveld’s experimental abstractions of furniture.

Stretching over five metres in width and two in height, Andreas Gursky’s May Day IV (2000, estimate: £500,000 – £700,000) offers a vast, panoramic spectacle of humanity. Viewed from a staggering aerial vantage point, a sea of semi-clad revellers pulses to an unheard beat. Executed in 2000, it is the second from an edition of six photographs, examples of which are housed in the Kunstmuseum NRW, Düsseldorf, the Kistefos Museet, Oslo and the Castello di Rivoli, Turin. The work was included in the artist’s 2001 touring exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York – Gursky’s first American retrospective – where it featured on the front cover of the catalogue. Capturing a split-second of frenzied activity in intoxicating detail, it is a consummate example of Gursky’s ability to distil the chaos of contemporary human experience into a single, crystalline image. Merging and manipulating multiple different shots, his works play with radically intensified colour, overlapping perspectives and dramatically enlarged scale. Andreas Gursky’s Rheine II (1999) holds the record for a single photographic print, selling for $4,338,500 at Christie’s New York in 2011.  Gursky leads a field of major photographers of the German school including Thomas Demand, Thomas Struth and Wolfgang Tillmans, also featured in the auction. 

At the other end of the 20th century, Marc Newson’s pioneering A Lockheed Lounge (designed 1985-1988, this piece executed before 1993, estimate: £1,000,000– £1,500,000) inaugurated a new aesthetic language for the twenty-first century, and confirmed Newson’s status as a universal creator whose sensitivity, diversity and sense of innovation remains unparalleled. A Lockheed Lounge holds the highest price achieved for a contemporary design by a living maker, selling for £2,434,500 in 2015. This chaise longue was designed to investigate mobility and movement and was was inspired by a classical furniture form – a daybed – however, through the use of a biomorphic form and the rich texture of the riveted aluminium surface, it was updated to now become the leading icon of contemporary design.  In 1993 the Lockheed was brought to a wider audience when featured as the centrepiece in Madonna’s video for her single, ‘Rain’. Two years later Vitra Design Museum included the Lockheed in their exhibition of ‘100 Masterpieces’, and in 2000 the chaise was the focus of the Carnegie Art Museum’s aluminium retrospective, occupying both front and back covers of the exhibition catalogue. The innovative status of this landmark design was now assured, and swiftly the few remaining examples that had not already been secured by museums became the focus of pioneering collectors, many drawn from the fields of contemporary art, transcending the traditional boundaries that were perceived to exist within the fields of the fine and the decorative arts.

Another stand-out work, Robert Mapplethorpe’s Self Portrait (photographed and printed in 1988, £300,000 – £500,000) is an edition of three platinum prints, with two of them in the permanent collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and the J. Paul Getty Museum / Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles. An icon of twentieth century portraiture, Robert Mapplethorpe’s Self Portrait signifies one of the very last self-representations he would make before his life – and profound contribution to the history of art – was tragically cut short in 1989 at the tender age of 42. Seen clad in a black turtle-neck that intentionally blends with the background and disembodies his brilliant, sharp mind from the decaying, ailing body it underlines the artist’s understanding of his impending death. Clutched in his right hand is a walking cane, an open confession of physical frailty, adorned with a shiny metal skull, turning the entire composition into a vanitas and aligning Mapplethorpe with other greats who foretold their own death.

Carlo Mollino’s dining suite (1954-55, estimate: £300,000 – £500,000) is another highlight, and this is the first complete suite featuring a rectangular dining table with six chairs to be offered at auction in nearly two decades. The present suite is consciously rugged – its construction designed to withstand regular use and stylistically informed by Carlo Mollino’s studies into Alpine, vernacular furniture and architecture. Carlo Mollino is today celebrated as one of the most strikingly original creators of mid-century Italian architecture and design. He was a passionate skier and as such was naturally attracted to design in the context of winter sports. This suite was designed for just such a commission, the Casa del Sole ten-story apartment complex, in the Italian Alpine resort of Cervinia in Italy.

CHRISTIE'S LONDON
8 King Street, St. James's
www.christies.com

Vincent van Gogh, The Bedroom, 1889 - On Loan From the Art Institute of Chicago at the Norton Simon Museum

Van Gogh’s ‘Bedroom’ on Loan From the Art Institute of Chicago
At the Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, California
December 9, 2016 - March 6, 2017

Vincent van Gogh (Dutch, 1853–1890)

The Bedroom, 1889.

The Art Institute of Chicago, Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection.

The Norton Simon Museum presents an installation of Vincent van Gogh’s tender and intimate Bedroom from 1889, a highlight of the Art Institute of Chicago’s superb 19th-century collection. A meditation on friendship, hope and crushing disappointment, Van Gogh’s Bedroom serves not only as a kind of self-portrait, but also as a symbol of the artist’s wandering existence and search for an elusive sense of repose. The second of three versions of the interior scene, the Chicago Bedroom was painted by the artist while at the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France, in September 1889. Its installation at the Norton Simon Museum marks the first time the painting has been on view on the West Coast, and it will hang in the Museum’s 19th-century art wing, surrounded by the Simon’s own important collection of Van Gogh works, from Dec. 9, 2016 through March 6, 2017.

Says Museum President Walter Timoshuk, “The Norton Simon Museum is delighted to feature Van Gogh’s mesmerizing masterpiece in our galleries this winter, and we are grateful to President James Rondeau, to Chair of European Painting and Sculpture Gloria Groom, and to the board of Trustees at the Art Institute of Chicago for making this exceptional exchange possible.” Adds James Rondeau, President and Eloise W. Martin Director at the Art Institute of Chicago, “Our recent exhibition featuring Van Gogh's Bedroom reaffirmed what we have long believed about the power of this beloved picture to remain relevant and resonant to new generations of audiences. We hope the Southern California community will enjoy the opportunity to see Van Gogh’s Bedroom, which has been a star in our permanent collection for nearly 100 years.”

About Van Gogh’s Bedroom

In his brief life (just 37 years), Van Gogh sought a place to call home in four countries and 37 residences. In only one of these did he find something approaching contentment: his leased rooms at No. 2 Place Lamartine in Arles, the so-called “Yellow House,” where he dreamed of establishing a “Studio of the South.” He painted his bedroom in situ for the first time in autumn 1888 (a picture today in the Van Gogh Museum), having spent two days confined to his bed by a fit of exhaustion. In an Oct. 16 letter to his brother, Theo, he explained:

I had a new idea in mind... This time it’s simply my bedroom, but the color has to do the job here, and through its being simplified by giving a grander style to things, to be suggestive here of rest or of sleep in general. In short, looking at the painting should rest the mind, or rather, the imagination. The walls are of a pale violet. The floor — is of red tiles. The bedstead and the chairs are fresh butter yellow…

(16 October 1888. Van Gogh Museum, Vincent van Gogh: The Letters, No. 704).

The artist’s specific interest here in the decoration of his home betrayed nervous excitement in anticipation of Paul Gauguin’s arrival the following week. Already Van Gogh’s friend, competitor and artistic idol, Gauguin was to be his collaborator at last, to live and work by his side in the Yellow House. The violet walls, the butter yellow chairs and bedstead, the selection of portraits on the wall in the bedroom: these were all carefully chosen with Gauguin’s future residence in the adjacent room in mind.

The dream of a shared Studio of the South, however, proved short-lived, descending before the year was out into a nightmare, when Van Gogh experienced a nervous breakdown in late December and presented a severed portion of his own ear to a local prostitute. In and out of the hospital at Arles through the spring of 1889, Van Gogh admitted himself to the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in early May. It was there, the following September, that he undertook the second and third versions of his Bedroom, today in the Art Institute of Chicago and the Musée d’Orsay, respectively. Both were adapted from the original canvas, which had sustained serious water damage in a flood at Arles. As he copied the damaged Bedroom in his asylum studio at Saint-Rémy, the hopeful moment that picture had once captured must have seemed to Van Gogh far away. Yet the second version—the Chicago picture—is, if anything, more startlingly vivid than its predecessor, its colors more vigorously contrasted, its surface more thickly covered in paint. Hoped for, lost, and longingly remembered, the peaceful scene here rematerializes with the intensity of a fever dream.

Van Gogh’s ‘Bedroom’ on Loan From the Art Institute of Chicago is organized by Chief Curator Carol Togneri. The painting’s installation at the Norton Simon Museum comes shortly after the Art Institute’s revelatory exhibition “Van Gogh’s Bedrooms” (Feb. 14–May 10, 2016), which brought together all three versions of the interior and presented new research on the works. That exhibition’s curator, Gloria Groom, chair of European Painting and Sculpture and the David and Mary Winton Green Curator at the Art Institute of Chicago, will present a lecture on Van Gogh and his ‘Bedrooms’ at the Norton Simon Museum. Information about additional events, including a lecture by Van Gogh Museum Director Axel Rüger, will be made available this fall.

Van Gogh and His Bedrooms

Gloria Groom, Chair of European Painting and Sculpture and the David and Mary Winton Green Curator at the Art Institute of Chicago

Saturday, Jan. 7, 2017, 4:00–5:00 p.m.

NORTON SIMON MUSEUM, PASADENA, CA
www.nortonsimon.org

Sebastiano del Piombo: Acquisition by the Art Institute of Chicago

The Art Institute of Chicago acquires newly discovered High Renaissance Painting, Christ Carrying the Cross, by Italian master Sebastiano del Piombo

SEBASTIANO DEL PIOMBO

Christ Carrying the Cross, 1515/1517.

The Art Institute of Chicago.

Lacy Armour, Ada Turnbull Hertle, Mary Swissler Oldberg Acquisition, Charles H. and Mary F. Worcester Collection funds; Wirt D. Walker Trust; Alyce and Edwin DeCosta and the Walter E. Heller Foundation Fund; Estate of Walter Aitken; Frederick W. Renshaw Acquisition, Marian and Samuel Klasstorner funds; Edward E. Ayer Fund in Memory of Charles L. Hutchinson; Lara T. Magnuson Acquisition, Director's funds; Samuel A. Marx Purchase Fund for Major Acquisitions; Edward Johnson, Maurice D. Galleher Endowment, Simeon B. Williams, Capital Campaign General Acquisitions, Wentworth Greene Field Memorial, Samuel P. Avery, Morris L. Parker, Irving and June Seaman Endowment, and Betty Bell Spooner funds.

The Art Institute of Chicago announces the exciting acquisition of SEBASTIANO DEL PIOMBO’s Christ Carrying the Cross (1515/1517) to strengthen its focused collection of Italian High Renaissance painting. The first major discovery of a work by Sebastiano in recent years, it was brought to light by Colnaghi, the renowned London-based art gallery, who facilitated its transition to the museum’s world-class collection. It represents one of the most popular compositions by one of the most distinguished painters working in Rome in the first half of the 16th century. Celebrated by the founding voice of art history, Giorgio Vasari, and given major commissions by Pope Clement VII, Sebastiano was hailed both in his time and beyond as a master of inventive painting who reimagined the monumentality and power of Michelangelo’s style, and the grace and balance of Raphael’s.

“We couldn’t be more thrilled to have this rare and wonderful opportunity to bring such an important painting—our first by Sebastiano—into the Art Institute’s permanent collection,” shared Gloria Groom, Chair of European Painting and Sculpture and David and Mary Winton Green Curator. “This acquisition affirms that through the extraordinary support of our generous donors, we can take our reputation for excellence in collecting to the next level, and tell a more creative and complete story in the galleries that feels exciting and relevant to our thousands of visitors to the museum each day.”

Jorge Coll, CEO of Colnaghi offered, “It was very exciting to have discovered this lost work by such an important Renaissance master, and it is extremely satisfying to know that it now belongs in one of the most important and visited museums in the world. It is of the utmost importance for Nicolas (Cortés) and me as the new partners in Colnaghi that we continue the company’s long and storied tradition of placing important works of art in the world’s greatest museums. This painting was the subject of the first of our new series of publications called ‘Colnaghi Studies’ – catalogues written by leading scholars in order to shed light on lesser known artists and unknown works of art – and we hope that there will be many more works from the ‘Studies’ series that find such prestigious homes in the future.”

Sebastiano developed the innovative composition for Christ Carrying the Cross to heighten the emotional charge of the image. The painting’s dramatic visual impact comes through in the monumental figures and their poignant expressions, the powerful diagonals of the cross, the dynamic and sculptural effect of Christ’s drapery, and the luminous landscape background. The popularity of the composition led Sebastiano to paint several versions and variations of the subject—the Art Institute joins the Museo del Prado, Madrid; Hermitage, Saint Petersburg; and the Szépmüvészeti Museum, Budapest in sharing Sebastiano’s iconic invention with audiences from all over the world.

The painting, now on view in Gallery 205 within the Art Institute’s world-class collection of European Painting and Sculpture, offers visitors a new and exciting opportunity to understand a richer and more inclusive story of Renaissance art and is poised to educate and inspire our visitors for generations to come.

The Art Institute of Chicago
www.artic.edu

Paint, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen

PAINT
Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen
26 November 2015 - 3 March 2016

Vincent van Gogh

Landscape from Saint-Rémy, 1889

Oil on canvas, 70,5 x 88,5 cm

Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen

This winter’s exhibition at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek celebrates painting as an art form – directly, openly and stripped of any framing devices and narratives. Quite literally, too: a special range of selected French masterpieces are exhibited without their lovely, heavy golden frames in settings that focus attention on the art itself and on its key quality: its ability to invite contemplation.

Traditionally, frames have served as dividers that set up a boundary between the pictorial space and the space occupied by the spectator. PAINT rips van Gogh, Cézanne, Degas, Courbet, Rousseau, Manet, Sisley and Monet out of their frames. Freed from the clear-cut boundaries provided by the frame, the masterpieces presented in this exhibition take on new and unexpected qualities. A simple, but effective device – and the exhibition makes the most of it by not only giving the paintings plenty of space to breathe, but the visitors, too.

Behind the frame

Without the frames the canvases and their subjects appear exactly as they were when the artists stopped working on them. Their brushstrokes, hatchings and layers of pigment are revealed to us in new ways, unveiling more of the creative process behind the painting. PAINT delves under the skin of nine selected masterpieces, offering rare insights into their hidden aspects; insights of the kind usually reserved for conservators and art historians.

Théodore Rousseau

Thuderstorm over Mont Blanc 1834. 1863-67

Oil on canvas, 143 x 240 cm

Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen

Undisturbed

PAINT prompts contemplation by offering plenty of space, time and quiet calm for the works and visitors alike – thereby allowing the sensuous qualities of each painting to emerge with even greater clarity. Our focus is shifted away from traditional concerns such as chronology, theme and narrative to home in on the basic forms of each work’s appearance and inception. PAINT not only challenges the visitors, but also the Glyptotek institution itself as it asks what is most important in an exhibition context: the perceptions held by art, history, the museum or the visitor?

With the Salon next door

PAINT extends across no less than two floors of the Glyptotek. Things look very different on the third floor, where the Glyptotek’s collection of French art is on display in an all-new temporary rehang. Here you will find pictures still in their frames, densely hung from floor to ceiling, interspersed by small sculptures: just as you would find art presented at the Salons of nineteenth-century France.

Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen, Denmark
www.glyptoteket.com

Villa Grisebach, Berlin: 200th auction celebrated with seven artworks auctions

Masterpieces of German Expressionism and Twentieth Century Art 
Exceptional Offerings at Grisebach’s Fall Auctions - Inaugural Auction ORANGERIE - Selected Objects From Two Millennia  
At Villa Grisebach Auction House in Berlin, Germany

Villa Grisebach invites to Fasanenstrasse in Berlin to celebrate her 200th auction. From November 28 to December 1, 2012, in seven auctions, each accompanied by a separate catalogue, a total of more than 1,200 works of art with a pre-sale estimate of 17 to 23 million euros will be offered.  

OTTO MUELLER, Zwei Mädchen (Zwei Mädchenakte in Dreiviertelfigur), Circa 1924  

Distemper on burlap. Relined. 120 x 89,5 cm 

Photo Courtesy Grisebach, Berlin

Masterpieces of German Expressionism take the lead with the large-format painting “Zwei Mädchen” by Otto Mueller of 1924 (€ 800,000/1,200,000), Schmidt-Rottluff’s important 1919 double portrait “Frauen am Meer” (€ 400,000/600,000), Max Pechstein’s powerful “Sonnenuntergang am Meer” of 1921 (€ 400,000/600,000), Erich Heckel’s “Blick aufs Meer” at the Flensburg Förde of 1920 (€ 300,000/400,000) and a watercolor, saturated in intensely glowing hues, by Emil Nolde, “Zwei bärtige Männer (Apostel)” (€ 300,000/400,000). 

OTTO DIX, Sonnenaufgang, 1913 

Oil on paper on cardboard. 50,5 x 66 cm

Photo Courtesy Grisebach, Berlin

Another piece of museum quality is “Sonnenaufgang” by Otto Dix (€ 300,000/400,000), created in 1913 it can be seen as an apocalyptic vision of the First World War. Originally in the collection of the Dresden Stadtmuseum, the painting was displayed in the 1937 propaganda show “Degenerate Art.“ Since the 1960s, due to its significance, it has been included in many exhibitions in Germany and abroad. 

WILLI BAUMEISTER, Kessaua statuarisch, 1954 

Oil with resin on masonite. 65 x 81 cm 

Photo Courtesy Grisebach, Berlin

German post-war art is represented by superb works by Willi Baumeister (“Kessaua statuarisch,” 1954,  € 250,000/300,000), Ernst Wilhelm Nay (“Motion,” 1962, € 300,000/400,000), and Emil Schumacher (“Hephatos,” 1959, € 220,000/280,000) leading over to the contemporary art section. 

Here, Andy Warhol’s  large-format “Friedrich der Grosse,” entrusted to Grisebach by the Daimler AG (€ 700,000/1,000,000), and Anselm Kiefer’s “Odin and the World-Ash” (€ 400,000/600,000) take first positions.  

ANDY WARHOL, Friedrich der Grosse, 1986 

Acrylic and screenprint on canvas, 213 x 184 cm

Photo Courtesy Grisebach, Berlin

ANSELM KIEFER, Odin and the World-Ash, 1981 

Oil over woodcut over wove paper on burlap, 170,5 x 190,2 cm 

Photo Courtesy Grisebach, Berlin

On the occasion of Villa Grisebach’s 200th auction the renowed german auction house's program expanded once again: The new department “ORANGERIE” offers selected objects from an Attic stamnos from  the 6th century B.C. (€ 80,000/100,000) to four of Mies van der Rohe’s “MR10” tubular steel chairs of 1927 (€ 10,000/15,000). The 2012 celebrations of Prussian King Frederick the Great’s 300th birthday are reflected in this auction by the rediscovered first marble bust of his descendant, Queen Luise, created by Christian Daniel Rauch in 1804 and believed to be lost until recently (€ 100,000/150,000).

Bernd Schultz: “We are pleased to offer in our 200th auction museum-quality examples of German Expressionism that, in many cases, have not surfaced the market for several decades. The strong offerings in our post-war art section is a sign for the  growing importance of the activities in our contemporary art department. For me, a  personal pleasure is our new department, ORANGERIE, which we designed to entice our clients to collect exceptional objects from ancient times through today.” 

Villa Grisebach's Auction dates 

- 19th Century Art: Wednesday, 28 November 2012, 2:30 pm
- Modern and Contemporary Photographs (read previous post): Wednesday, 28 November 2012, 5 pm
- ORANGERIE - Selected Objects: Thursday, 29 November 2012, 11 am
- Selected Works: Thursday, 29 November 2012, 5 pm
- Modern Art: Friday, 30 November 2012, 11 am
- Post-War and Contemporary Art: Friday, 30 November 2012, 2:30 pm

- Benefit Auction for the Max Beckmann Distinguished Visitorship of the American Academy in Berlin: Friday, 30 November 2012, 7 pm

- Third Floor - Estimate up to € 3,000: Saturday, 1 December 2012, 11 AM (Part I) and 2:30 PM (Part II)

All auction catalogues are available at www.villa-grisebach.com. Preview exhibitions will be held in Berlin from November 23 to 27 at three venues at Fasanenstrasse.

Text by Micaela Kapitzky

Villa Grisebach Auktionen GmbH  
Fasanenstrasse 25 • D-10719 Berlin

Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait, 1889 on Loan from the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC at the Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, California

Vincent van Gogh: Self-Portrait, 1889 

Loan from the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC 

At the Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, California

December 7, 2012 - March 4, 2013

The installation of Vincent van Gogh’s Self-Portrait at the Norton Simon Museum is the first time the painting has been on view on the US West Coast, and while Southern California is home to several outstanding works by Van Gogh, none of his self-portraits are in collections here. The loan is part of a special exchange program between the Norton Simon foundations and the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC. 

VINCENT VAN GOGH, SELF-PORTRAIT, 1889

Vincent van Gogh (Dutch, 1853-1890) 

Self-Portrait, 1889 

Oil on canvas 

57.2 x 43.8 cm (22 1/2 x 17 1/4 in.)  

Collection of Mr. and Mrs. John Hay Whitney, 

National Gallery of Art, Washington 

Vincent van Gogh (Dutch, 1853-1890) is among the world’s most beloved and admired artists, yet he was virtually unknown during his lifetime, and struggled with depression and mental illness. After voluntarily committing himself in May of 1889 to the mental asylum Saint-Paul-de-Mausole at Saint-Rémy in France, the tormented Vincent Van Gogh began the isolated and recuperative process of calming the delusions, paranoid panics and poor health that had plagued him for much of his adult life. Only six months before, he had quarreled with his dear friend Paul Gauguin in Arles and then severed part of his own ear in a fit of desperation and despair. The National Gallery of Art’s jolting, Self-Portrait is one of the last renditions of Vincent Van Gogh’s interpretation of his own visage. Only three of his 36 self-portraits depict him as an artist, holding his palette and brushes. With his wounded ear turned away from the viewer, he confronts his own gaunt image, full of introspection and intensity. Unable at this point to confront other patients, or reality itself, he assumes the dual role of model and artist. By September 1889, after creating Starry Night (now at the Museum of Modern Art, New York) and painting the wheat fields that could be seen from his rooms at the asylum, he wrote to his brother Theo in Paris about two self-portraits he was painting:

So I am working on two portraits of myself at this moment—for want of another model—because it is more than time I did a little figure work. One I began the day I got up; I was thin and pale as a ghost. It is dark violet–blue and the head whitish with yellow hair, so it has a color effect. 

The rapid, almost violent background strokes, painted thickly, shimmer in dissonance and contrast with the artist’s deeply penetrating stare. Emerald highlights in his face, the blue of his smock, and the golden yellows of his hair and beard are all echoed on his palette—pigments that had only recently been ordered and sent as a care package from his brother. The rapidity and repetition of his linear movement belie the amount of forethought and precision that Van Gogh has applied to this composition; it is with utmost restraint that he circumscribes the nose with that bold green outline and calculates the effects of the brilliant yellows and blues. He was known as the redheaded madman by locals, and yet he carefully composed hundreds of moving letters that demonstrated his love of nature, of man, of literature and language. In 10 short years, from 1880 to 1890, he painted almost unceasingly; more than 850 oil paintings are attributed to him today. One can only imagine his legacy, had he lived beyond his short 37 years.

Art exchange program

In 2007, the Norton Simon foundations entered a new phase in their history by forming an art exchange program with both the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and The Frick Collection in New York City. Works of art from the Norton Simon foundations are lent to both of these estimable institutions for special viewings and, in return, masterpieces from their collections make their way to the Norton Simon Museum. The exchange is an opportunity to promote the Norton Simon collections to a much wider audience while simultaneously providing Southern California audiences the chance to view some of the world’s most significant and visually compelling paintings.

NORTON SIMON MUSEUM
411 W. Colorado Blvd, Pasaneda, California 91105
www.nortonsimon.org

Georges Braque: Pioneer of Modernism – Exhibition at Aquavella Galleries, NYC

Georges Braque: Pioneer of Modernism
Acquavella Galleries, New York
Through November 30, 2011

GEORGES BRAQUE: PIONEER OF MODERNISM, a retrospective of seminal paintings curated by Dieter Buchhart, is on view at Acquavella Galleries in New York. The exhibition include over forty major paintings and papiers collés by the artist, all on loan from prestigious international public and private collections. The exhibition marks the first major Braque retrospective in the United States since the Guggenheim Museum’s celebrated exhibition in 1988.

Best known as the co-founder of Cubism with Pablo Picasso* and as the inventor of the papier collé technique, Georges Braque’s legacy is better understood in the context of his lasting influence on artists for the past century. “The purpose of this retrospective is to present the artist not only as the cocreator of Fauvism and Cubism but also as a profoundly passionate, progressive and influential painter all the years of his life, well beyond his early triumphs,” explained William Acquavella.

As a young man, Georges Braque was a leading member of the Fauves, together with Henri Matisse, André Dérain, and Maurice de Vlaminck, before being inspired by the structured compositions of Paul Cézanne. This adherence to structure would guide Braque for the remainder of his career, especially during his close six-year collaboration with Picasso.

Together, Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso invented a new aesthetic by portraying their subjects from multiple vantage points. They created a new pictorial world in which an object was deconstructed and then reconstructed on the basis of geometric criteria. They used forms that resembled geometric cubes, leading art critic Louis Vauxcelles to assign the name “Cubism” to the new movement. Still lifes became Braque’s preferred vehicle for innovation, and he was celebrated for instilling the most everyday objects with a profound spirituality usually reserved for devotional painting. Georges Braque described his fascination with the genre, “A lemon and an orange side by side cease to be a lemon and an orange and become fruit. The mathematicians follow this law; so do we.” In addition to fruit, other familiar objects such as tobacco pouches and musical instruments became frequent sources of inspiration.

At seventy-nine, Georges Braque became the first living artist to be accorded a solo exhibition at The Louvre museum and was awarded state honors at his funeral in 1963. His work is held in the permanent collections of the world’s foremost museums including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Tate Collection, London; The Albertina, Vienna; The National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; The Art Institute of Chicago; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Kunsthaus Zurich; The Phillips Collection, Washington DC; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; many of whom have loaned work for the exhibition.

Georges Braque: Pioneer of Modernism, Exhibition catalogue, 2011
Photo © and Courtesy Acquavella Galleries, New York

Georges Braque: Pioneer of Modernism is accompanied by a 160 page hardcover catalogue which will include essays by Dieter Buchhart, Isabelle Monod-Fontaine and Richard Shiff.

ACQUAVELLA GALLERIES, NEW YORK, NY
www.acquavellagalleries.com

Picasso and Braque: The Cubist Experiment, 1910-1912 is on view at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art through January 8, 2012

Gainsborough, Dulwich Picture Gallery, London. The masterpiece represent the National Gallery of Art Washington DC at the Bicentenary celebrations of Dulwich Picture Gallery

The masterpiece Mrs Richard Brinsley Sheridan by Thomas Gainsborough (photo) from the collections of the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, on view in London at the Bicentenary celebrations of Dulwich Picture Gallery

Thomas Gainsborough

Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788), Mrs. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, 1785-87 

Oil on canvas, 220 x 154 cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Andrew W. Mellon Collection

Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington

Known in their times as the ‘nightingales’, Elizabeth and Mary Linley were the most beautiful and talked-about young girls in Bath’s society in the 1770s. From a musical family, they were applauded on the theatre stages of Bath and London, as much as they appeared in the newspapers of the day as society figures. They were portrayed together, in 1772, by THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH, who was a close friend of their father’s, and their neighbour in Bath. The painter had seen Elizabeth and Mary grow before his eyes and tenderly represented them in their magnificent large canvas known as The Linley Sisters, now at Dulwich Picture Gallery.

In the same year as the Dulwich painting was finished by Gainsborough, Elizabeth eloped to France with the young playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, causing a great scandal. A year later, in 1773, the two were married. Elizabeth did not expect the marriage to be an unhappy one, constantly marked by Sheridan’s infidelities. Elizabeth gave up singing and supported her husband in his career as a writer and politician.

Gainsborough was to portray Elizabeth at different points in her life. This is his last image of her – aged thirtyone- only a few years before her untimely death of tuberculosis in 1792. Elizabeth sits under a tree in the open countryside – a windswept valley so different from the delicate violets and primroses of the earlier double portrait at Dulwich. Elizabeth’s entire figure is transformed by the romantic wind in the canvas, just as passion swept her short life. After her death, William Jackson noted that ‘as a singer she is perished forever, as a woman she still exists in a picture painted by Gainsborough.’

Earl A. Powell III, the Director of the National Gallery of Art Washington, said: “We are delighted that Gainsborough’s Mrs Richard Brinsley Sheridan will represent the National Gallery of Art at the Bicentenary celebrations of Dulwich Picture Gallery.” 

Every month during the Gallery’s Bicentenary celebration year a spectacular masterpiece will hang on the end wall of the Gallery’s enfilade. The masterpiece will be on display from 6 September - 2 October 2011.

DULWICH PICTURE GALLERY
1811-2011 Gallery's Bicentenary celebration
LONDON SE21 7AD
www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk