The action at 25CPW has been nonstop. Following its successful show last week, featuring the artwork of guards from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the temporary art gallery on Manhattan’s Upper West Side hosted a silent auction featuring the original creations of Afghan women and children. Several thousand dollars were raised at the event, which was organized by 25CPW guru Bess Greenberg and Brianne Leary, the driving force behind Saving Afghanistan and journalist who covered the Soviet/Afghan conflict through the 1980s. The financial result, says Leary, addresses an immediate need for specific refugees in transition.
The prices at the one-night auction were purposefully kept accessible, given the prevailing economic climate, says Leary, and the event was well-attended. Get the full story directly from Leary in the video below.
If you’re looking for a crafty excuse to visit London in the next few months, I’ve got a good one for you: Quilts 1700 - 2010, a new exhibit opening at the V&A Museum.
The exhibit, which opens March 20th and runs through July 4th, focuses on quilts both historic and contemporary. The quilt pictured above, “At the End of the Day”, is a 2007 creation of artist Natasha Kerr; historic quilts include those commemorating the lives of Admiral Lord Nelson, Charles II and the Duke of Wellington, among others.
(Bonus for fans of Tracy Chevalier, who wrote the novel Girl with the Pearl Earring, which became a movie starring Scarlett Johansson — she’s written a story based on the George 111 quilt, which is in the museum’s magazine. There’s a great video of her research process here.)
For the art market, this is the first chance to see how high demand for art is outside the auction houses. Private deals don’t offer the transparency of the gavel scene, but the transactions can be far more interesting. By the end of Tefaf, we’ll know just how deep the art market recovery is running. VIP guests will be allowed to visit tomorrow, ahead of the great unwashed.
The largest group of dealers at Tefaf this year will be those representing pre-20th century pictures, with more than 70 exhibitors. Sandro Botticelli’s “Madonna and Child with the Infant Sant John,” reaching back to the late fifteenth century, will be available for $15 million by Dickinson of London. Dickinson is also showing Paul Gauguin’s “Deux Femmes,” with a price tag of $24.4 million. Both are being sold by private collectors.
Looking for a unique item to add a regal flourish to your interior decor? An extremely rare, important and well-preserved neo-Gothic terracotta chimney piece commissioned for Franz Joseph I, Emperor of Austria, King of Bohemia and King of Hungary, in the late 19th century, is being offered for sale during Sotheby’s‘ Origines, Architecture & Heritage, Decoration and Garden Statuary auction in Paris on March 31. The incredible 8.5-ft. tall piece, built to surround a kingly fireplace at one of the imperial Hapsburg family palaces and bearing the emperor’s coat of arms, is expected to fetch up to $700,000. Two knights standing on Corinthian columns flank the mantelpiece, which also bears the Emperor’s motto Viribus Unitis, “With united forces.”
There’s an update in the Annie Leibovitz debt saga. For the last year Leibovitz has been struggling with a heavy debt load. She borrowed $24 million from Art Capital Group and as collateral the company took not only her two homes and all her negatives and the copyright to her photographs but also an agreement to sell her archives to repay the loan and the rights to arrange the sale. Now Businessweek reports that Colony Capital LLC has agreed to take over her debt after she bought back control of her works and real estate from Art Capital Group.
The situation got ugly last year when Art Capital sued for breach of contract claiming she wasn’t letting real estate agents into her homes and was blocking attempts to sell her photos. In the new agreement, Colony, will help market her photos. Art Capital has confirmed that its debt has been satisfied. Like so many people, Leibovitz ran into trouble with real estate. She bought several properties and spent a small fortune renovating them, using the properties themselves as collateral. She was also late in paying $1.8 million in federal taxes in 2007 and 2008.
Art Capital is in the business of making money off art and sometimes, artists. The company issues loans of $500,000 or more at interest rates from six percent to 16 percent to those who have artwork worthy of making such a loan. Another artist, Julian Schnabel also ran afoul of Art Capital. He took out an $8 million loan in 2006, when he was building his pink folly known as Palazzo Chupi and later sued Art Capital.
Colony might be more interested in the real estate than the art. Colony Capital still owns Michael Jackson’s Neverland ranch (and may be able to sell it eventually for $50-$100 million). Leibovitz’s property holdings include three contiguous brownstones in Manhattan as well as 220 acres in Hudson Valley, New York that was once part of the Astor family’s estate Ferncliff.
The Upper West Side of Manhattan was once again home to an exciting and unique art exhibition last week. 25CPW, a temporary art gallery occupying a vacant retail space on Central Park West hosted an art show for a unique group within the Metropolitan Museum of Art: the guards. It turns out that some of the people protecting the masterpieces on the other side of Central Park also like to create, and from what I saw on Thursday night, when I attended the opening, they are pretty damned good at it.
The Thursday night opening also included the launch of Sw!pe Magazine: Guards’ Matter, an art journal that accompanied the exhibition.
On display were paintings, drawings, photographs and other pieces. The styles varied but were displayed intelligently, preventing contrasting styles from crowding each other and leaving each artist enough space for his work to stand out. Nelson Diaz, an artist and friend who attended the how with me, was as electrified as I was - both by the works on display and the energy in the 25CPW space.
The next 25CPW event is on Wednesday, March 10, 2010 night at 6:00 PM, when the Afghan Art Auction will be held to benefit the George Dritsas Anthropos Fund. The fund was created to help refugees in transition, so do find a way to open your wallet. The money raised will also be used to help the Afghan Women Council, which seeks to assist women and children inside Afghanistan.
For the past week, the art community has focused on New York City’s annual Armory event, in which artists put their best pieces forward, dealers and galleries are on the prowl and collectors look for new finds that will someday redefine their portfolios. Momentum from the contemporary art auctions at Christie’s and Sotheby’s was certainly present, as all in attendance seemed focused on opportunity rather than window-shopping. The efforts at the Armory were consistent with a marketplace that’s active, not the crushing fear that characterized the art market through the second half of 2008 and most of 2009.
1. Koons went bare What was expected to be the most controversial event of Armory Week turned out to be subdued, though well attended. Jeff Koons offered a tribute to open sexuality with an exhibition that opened last Tuesday. Protesters weren’t in sight, but musicians Cyndi Lauper and The Edge (guitarist for U2) checked out the show.
2. Solo booths were back in style According to ArtInfo, “Solo artist booths were everywhere you looked.” Individuals were ready to put themselves out into the market. Collectors had the opportunity to focus on specific artists as a result, rather than see disparate artwork crammed together by galleries and dealers managing inventory as if they were grocers. The good news, however, is that this shift isn’t indicative of an art market slump. Rather, it’s a sign of optimism. There’s a belief out there that art collectors are ready to buy, especially given what we’ve seen at auction so far this year.
Director David Slade is known for providing movie watchers with chills and thrills in movies like “Hard Candy” and “30 Days of Night” and he’s set to delight Cullen fans with “Twilight 3: Eclipse,” but Slade also has a side that is downright sweet. The LA Times reports on Slade’s Fubear Studios website which features adorable and quirky illustrations and charmingly weird animated films.
He has come out with his first line of giclee prints celebrating two cute characters, Scarfdog and Duck. Their story is one of unrequited love, Scarfdog loves Duck but she doesn’t share his feelings. The signed, limited-edition 8.5-by-11-inch prints are sold exclusively at Yolk in Silver Lake for $30 each or $100 for the set of four which illustrate the story of Scarfdog’s devotion. Slade tells the LA TImes that film is his main focus but that designing and publishing his own work is something he will also always do.
Lucian Freud is coming back to the Centre Pompidou for the first time since his first retrospective was held in 1987 - at the same museum. Historically, these exhibitions have been great for collectors of Freud’s work, according to Artprice.
A 2002 Freud retrospective at the Tate kicked off a nearly immediate 185 percent increase in the index for this artist, and by 2004, he became a staple at prestigious auctions, and his sales revenue surged 450 percent. In 2005, the Freud price index, according to Artprice, gained 41 percent, and demand for his work was substantial. He debuted on the list of top 10 artists at auction, with an aggregate total of $33.7 million for the year.
Of course, the 2005 results paled in comparison to 2008, in which Roman Abramovich made Freud the most expensive living artist (seizing the title from Jeff Koons) with the $30 million purchase of “Benefits Supervisor Sleeping” - a familiar enough topic for anyone who’s looked for some help from the human resources department. Yet, the upside was short-lived.
No piece by Freud crossed the $1 million mark in 2009, and with only $405,000 in auction results, he ranked 1,327th at auction, just above … someone who is likely irrelevant in the global art community. The auction houses couldn’t try to sell the good stuff, though, because nobody would put it on the block. Only prints and drawings were offered.
This interesting publication is certainly not safe for the family room. Dating back literally hundreds of years, Japan (among other cultures actually) has a history for high quality erotic art. Much of it was produced during the ukiyo-e period that ranged from the 17th - 19th century. The art has a feeling just as you would expect from traditional Japanese art, and much of the work was done by some of their major famous historic artists - such as Hokusai, Utamaro, and Kuniyoshi. Those instead of a large wave, fishing boat, or calm mountain scene, these paintings are are taboo defying images of sexuality and hidden passions from a culture that mostly repressed such thoughts from being publicly discussed. The images here are “safe for all eyes,” but not that the majority of these works are for adults only. This is old-world Japan hentai - a sexually charged art style popular in Japan today.
This classic art (known as Shunga, or “spring images”) and stories from this era were contained in “pillow books.” Pillow books had a variety of purposes similar to what we would use such imagery today - to inform, entertain, and of course arouse. The difference is the quality of the work being on par with the era’s finest paintings and other master works. Shunga works were mostly originally done on wood, and are great collector’s item all over the world. In the upcoming publication Poem of the Pillow and Other Great Stories: Erotic Japanese Art by Utamaro, Hokusai, Kuniyoshi and other artists of the Floating World, by Phaidon Press, much of this famous art is collected in one source. The book will have 350 full color images done in Phaidon’s typical high quality style. The 384 page, beautifully presented book will be available soon and comes with a large erotic scene image by Utamaro that can be framed. Price is just $49.95 and available in June.
Last month, an auction stunned the world when a Giacometti sculpture, L’Homme Qui Marche I, sold for an incredible £65,001,250 ($104,327,006) at the Sotheby’s London Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale . It was only estimated at £12-18 million but it managed to set a world record as the most expensive piece of art ever to sell at auction. Now the name of the buyer has been revealed and it’s a name we’ve heard before. Billionaire Lily Safra has been named by Bloomberg News as the deep-pocketed art lover. If the name sounds familiar on this blog, it’s probably in connection with another name, Villa Leopolda. Safra, the widow of banker Edmond Safra who died in a fire in his apartment in 1999, owns the world’s most expensive house. Villa Leopolda in the Cote d’Azur, once had a reported price tag of $750 million and was nearly sold to Russian billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov. She also owns an apartment at 820 Fifth Avenue in New York City as well as a place in the Belgravia area of London which is where the statue was delivered.
The Bloomberg article on the big reveal of the Giacometti buyer has an interesting quote from Philip Hoffman, chief executive of the London-based Fine Art Fund, who calls the big sale “a freak result” and says that the sculpture is not an investment piece and not likely to rise exponentially in value over the next ten years. The article indicates that she had tried to buy a different cast of this same sculpture through a dealer but that deal was never made so the art may have more value for Lily Safra than it would for another buyer.
It’s no Starry Night but “Le Blute-fin Mill” is a Van Gogh after all. Experts have said that the painting of windmills and people against a pale sky is by the Dutch artist. The painting doesn’t immediately strike the eye as a Van Gogh, but experts at Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum have verified that it dates back to 1886.
“Le Blute-Fin Mill”, was put on display in the Museum de Fundatie in Zwolle, Amsterdam. It was bought 35 years ago by Dirk Hannema, the founder of the museum, who kept the painting in his own home until he died in 1984. The painting then made its way to the museum but was only displayed a couple of times. Hannema paid around $2,700 for the painting in Paris and was certain that it was an original. His words went unheeded because he had been discredited years before when he bought a Vermeer (one of the works of forger Han van Meegeren) and made it a star exhibit. Hannema had a preferences for seeking out the works of masters that were yet to be attributed to them, the problem was that he was not always right and his eagerness made him an easy target for an enterprising forger (for a riveting read on van Meegeren, check out The Forger’s Spell).
The museum had tried back in 1993 to have the windmill painting authenticated but at that point the experts weren’t available. Its is believed that Van Gogh painted the work in Paris, the canvas bears the stamp of an art store that he was known to buy materials and pigments from, according to an AP interview with Louis van Tilborgh, curator of research at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.
A year from now, we’ll look back on the art market 2009 as that last slither though the gutter before picking itself back up in 2010. But, we’re not there yet: 2009 is in the rearview mirror, so it will remain our baseline for the next 12 months. When looking at the top performers at auction last year, there’s a pretty consistent story - revenue declines ranged from 55 percent to 77 percent relative to 2008. Top 10 mainstays - such as Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, Alberto Giacometti, Edgar Degas and Claude Monet - got thrashed. These conditions led to some changes, as well, with a Chinese artist making the top 10 for the first time. In fact, he pushed into the top three.
1. Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso is back on top, after giving up the #1 position in 2008. And, it took only $121 million in auction sales to get him there. From 1998 to 2008, total sales for Picasso gained 96 percent, before falling by 54 percent last year, with pricing off 15 percent. The number of sales pushing past the $1 million mark declined precipitously, from 39 in 2008 to only 15 last year, and his top sale was for “Mousquetaire a la pipe,” which moved for $13 million on May 6, 2009, at Christie’s. This year could be a bit tough for Picasso collectors, as Artprice believes certain paintings were still overpriced.
A church in Brattleboro, Vermont is hoping for a little divine intervention to keep from selling its prized possession, a stained-glass Tiffany window. The First Baptist Church in Brattleboro, Vermont operates a homeless shelter and the congregation voted to sell off the valuable window if it needs the funds in order to keep the shelter open.
A notice on the church website declares that the church has a mission to serve the needs of the homeless and that it does not want to sell the window if it can help it. The message goes on to define the church as The Homeless Warming Shelter of Brattleboro, Vermont. The shelter provides between 30 and 50 people with a warm place to sleep and a hot meal in the chilly months of December through March. An article in The Art Newspaper reports that small donations have arrived in the last couple of months since the vote to sell the window if necessary was announced. Money raised from the sale of the window would be used for winter heating bills, the homeless shelter and repairs to a leaky roof.
The window depicts St. John the Divine and is signed by Tiffany Studios. It was given in honor of Levi Knight Fuller who died in 1896. He was the former governor of Vermont from 1892-1894 and engineer and vice-president in the Estey Organ company of Brattleboro Vermont. The church has been offered $75,000 for the window but could bring $100,000-$120,000. Reverend Suzanne Andrews holds on to the hope that if it is God’s will a donor will come forward to help the church keep the window.
One thing you mustn’t miss in Vienna is the Museum of Fine Arts. The building is so astonishing, one assumes it was originally a palace of some kind — but the Viennese were wise and appreciative of art; the building was built to house the great many collected (and stolen) masterpieces of the Austrian Empire. Their wisdom continues today: they have a delightful Thursday night program for both tourists and locals to enjoy the art and each other.
Thursday nights at Vienna’s Museum of Fine Arts are catered by Gerstner, one of Austria’s finest caterers (and perhaps one of the world’s). Purchase a 48 euro ticket in advance to gain admission to both the museum and a roped off area in the center of the museum where you can feast on appetizer and dessert buffets, as well as be served your choice of delicious entree. Drinks are not included, but plenty are available, from spirits to Viennese wine, and the staff is attentive and friendly. The best part of all this is that you can dine at your leisure from 6:30 to 10:00 PM and visit the various exhibits between courses.
Have a bowl of bisque and a glass of champagne, visit the Bruegels, munch on a Caprese salad, visit the Raphaels, order a bottle of red and a delicious filet, go see the Rubens, choose a few little desserts, then see more by Velazquez, Dürer, Titian, Tintoretto and others. Doesn’t that sound like the best way to spend a Thursday evening? Personally, I’d have trouble topping that.
This weekend the first of what’s planned to be an annual fine arts show will be on display in a historic location in New York City’s Harlem: the 369th Regiment Armory.
The building itself is worth a visit all on its own: it dates back to 1933 and is Art Deco in style. It was built for the only, solely African American unit of the New York National Guard at that time. The 369th Regiment had already distinguished itself as the first all-African American unit sent to battle overseas, which it did during World War I, albeit under French command due to segregation policies of the US Army.
The men of the “Harlem Hellfighters”, as they became known, were greatly decorated. Members were awarded the Croix de Guerre by France — Private Henry Johnson of this regiment was the first American to ever be so honored — as well as the US Congressional Medal of Honor, among many other honors. What’s more, the regiment’s jazz band included many Harlem musicians, and has been credited with introducing jazz to Europe. (Another musical history note, Rafael Hernandez Marin, the celebrated Puerto Rican composer also served in this regiment.) Read more about the history of the regiment here (PDF).
I’m a sucker for the priceless piece in the attic stories. I think a lot of people are, it fuels our fantasies that treasure might exist right under our noses. That’s certainly the case in the story of Oliver Chanler who paid little attention to a George Washington portrait hanging in his parents library. He assumed that the painting was a copy but found out around 10 years ago that the picture is actually an original Gilbert Stuart. Stuart’s paintings of Washington hang in museums around the U.S. and some sell deep in the millions. That won’t be true of this one, the smaller piece is up for sale on March 27 through Cottone Auctions in Geneseo, N.Y. with an estimate of $200,000 to $300,000. The painting has never been restored or cleaned. Chanler happens to be related to the the United States’ first multimillionaire, John Jacob Astor, so the provenance seems assured and it could be possible that Astor was the original owner of the painting. Chanler’s great-grandfather, John Winthrop Chanler, who served in the House of Representatives definitely owned the work.
1938 Porsche Type 64 - Click above for high-res image gallery
Way back in 1938 - a full decade before the legendary 356 - Ferdinand Porsche developed what the German automaker now considers the “first ancestor of all Porsche sportscars.” Called the Type 64, this car employed a number of construction methods and styling that would later come to typify the brand that carries its designer’s last name from the aforementioned 356 all the way to today’s 911.
The streamlined Type 64 has sat as the “first and most prominent exhibit” at the Porsche Museum in Zuffenhausen since it opened in January of 2009, and it will be shipped outside of Germany for the first time since being carefully restored by the automaker as it makes its way to the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia.
The Type 64 will be on display in Atlanta for the The Allure of the Automobile exhibition from March 21st until June 20th. During this time away, the Porsche Museum in Germany will show off the wooden buck that was used as a frame to pound out the Type 64’s complex aluminum bodywork. Check out our high-res image gallery below and make the jump for the official press release.
Looks like Bob Dylan isn’t the only celebrity with an art show in London. A collection of 50 paintings by Sir Anthony Hopkins are being shown at Gallery 27, Cork Street, London until February 20. The show includes 38 paper and seven acrylic works as well as five limited-edition prints. The prints are available for purchase. This isn’t his first foray into exhibiting his art. In 2007, he held an exhibition titled Dreamscapes in Aspen, Colorado just a few years after he had started to paint. His paintings can sell for upwards of $20,000. Check out pieces from the exhibition in the gallery below.
How can you tell the difference? Well, the fact that Alberto Giacometti’s “L’homme qui marche I” set a new record at £58 million while Lucian Freud’s much-hyped self-portrait with black eye failed to reach the low-end presale estimate, despite the fact that Sotheby’s billed it as “the most important self-portrait by the artist ever to he appeared at auction.” This represents a profound departure from the prices of $30 million or more that his work used to command.
Afghan Refugees to Benefit from 25CPW Art Auction originally appeared on Luxist on Thu, 11 Mar 2010 06:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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