Corey Helford Gallery

Chloe Early: Paradise Lost oil on aluminium 60"X 80"

Speaking of affordable contemporary art at prices you can afford truck on down Robert Crumb style to the Corey Helford Gallery in Culver city Los Angeles and check out the work of innovative contemporary artist Chloe Early. Her show opens Saturday October, 10 @ 7pm. Chloe’s current show represents a voluptuous fusion of modern figurative and abstract dynamics that will complement any serious collectors wall. Prices are around the $2000-$10,000 price point. Corey Helford Gallery is a one stop shop for cutting edge contemporary artists  frequently hosting shows  by such notables as Coop, Pizz, and Kukula

The great Art Exodus

Basquait: it’s worth how much?

Time line Los Angeles 2010 and three great art collectors are dead. Actor Dennis Hopper, gallery director Robert Shapazian and computer pioneer Max Palevsky. The result a multi million dollar art sale bonanza at Christie’s, where paintings by Basquait, Lichtenstein, Warhol and host of other famous names will re-enter the art market. The ensuing greed fest has caused much wringing of hands amongst West coast art lovers, who are looking on teary eyed at the inevitable dispersal of these great artists works to private collections throughout the world. If only these paintings could remain in LA…

Why? 

Would the people of LA want to spend $28million for Jasper Johns (iconic though it may be) American flag? Would they want to spend $106.5 million on yet another Picasso? No. And quite right too.

Basquait, Lichtenstein, and Warhol are all as East coast as it is possible to be, what do they have to do with Los Angeles? Who cares if Palevsky’s collection of Roman artifacts goes to the four corners of the world? He has already donated over 500 objects d’art to LACMA in the past 20 years. Isn’t that enough?

Art collectors, public galleries and museums are the same the world over. They worry when big ticket masterpieces are sold outside their artistic jurisdiction. Such ‘losses’ as they are often called, are frequently interpreted as an economic and cultural snub by the forces of international fine art capitalism. Fighting the tide of fine art economics will always be a loosing battle for cultural institutions. For every overpriced work of art that is ‘saved’ for cultural posterity, dozens will be lost to the bank vault obscurity of art investors and billionaire dilettantes.

Far better for cultural institutions to buy work of cultural importance when prices are still sensible. Why no Rbt Williams at the LACMA? Why no Rick Griffin? Why no Mouse & Kelly? All artists with a world wide cultural impact. All artists that define the very essence of Californian culture and the West coast dream. Why are they not represented? Is it because art institutions cannot realize arts true value until they cannot afford it?

The Barnes Foundation

Henri Matisse, Le bonheur de vivre -the joy of life (1906)

The Who? Quite. And that, is part of the problem. The Barnes Foundation is an art institution based in the boondocks suburb of Merrion a charming residential neighborhood in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The institution languishes several miles outside the part of town where anything of note ever happens. Why you may ask should things concern the average juiceling?

The answer is an art collection that is estimated by some to be worth more than $25 Billion. The foundation owns 2500 works of art including 800 major paintings: 181 works by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 69 by Paul Cézanne, 59 by Henri Matisse, 46 by Pablo Picasso, 21 by Chaim Soutine, 18 by Henri Rousseau, 16 by Amedeo Modigliani, 11 by Edgar Degas, 7 by Vincent Van Gogh, 6 by Georges Seurat, as well as numerous other masterpieces by Giorgio de Chirico, Paul Gauguin, El Greco, Francisco Goya, Edouard Manet, Jean Hugo, Claude Monet, Maurice Utrillo, William Glackens, Charles Demuth and Maurice Prendergast. The statistics are frankly staggering.

Relocation for the collection to a more well trodden part of town has been planned for some years. This is perhaps not surprising. What is puzzling is the enormous brouhaha boiling up in cultural quarters. Critics, pressure groups and even architect Robert Venturi have been puffing and panting about the move for some time. There has been much incredulity that in these perilous economic times, the city of Philadelphia should spend $200million on a new art gallery, when the thoroughly charming building in which the collection now resides could be revamped for a much more modest fee. Concerns have been raised about the suitability of the new gallery to house such a prestigious collection. And much amusement has also been created by New York architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien and their absurd statement that they want their new building to represent the architectural equivalent of a “Philly cheesesteak”. Tasteful.

It is clear these pundits are missing the point. Plans for the relocation obviously lack vision, and for the solution the Barnes foundation should look to the world of sports. If you want your team to succeed and cannot get enough support at home, just up and move town. Like the Brooklyn Dodgers. Now I am sure the denizens of Philly and the poobahs at the Barnes Foundation would find this suggestion shocking. But if you have one of the best artistic teams in the world do you let it play little league ball in boondocks Merrion for the rest of it’s life, or do you do you place it at the very forefront of the artistic major league where it belongs?

$25 Billion? You can buy a lot of Philly cheesesteak for that.

Beauty & the Beast By Tony Bulmer

Beauty and the Beast, but which is which in the world of allegory? 36"X36" Acrylic on Canvas. The latest cheeky painting by Tony Bulmer.

Footsie with Flora by Tony Bulmer

 A new painting by Tony Bulmer  Tamara De Lempica  meets Bill Ward, No not the drummer from Black Sabbath Dummy, The other Bill Ward, the one that people in sandals fear and loathe! 36"X 36" Acrylic on Canvas.

LACMA loans Picasso

Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Sebastia Juñer Vidal, 1903, oil on canvas, David E. Bright Bequest,
© Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Pablo Picasso, Harlequin, 1917, oil on canvas, Museu Picasso, Barcelona,
 © Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

LACMA recently loaned its prized  portrait of Sebastia Juñer Vidal(1903) by Pablo Picasso to the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and the Museu Picasso in Barcelona for their exhibition Picasso Looks at Degas. Not wanting the galleries to be without an example of Picasso’s figural portraiture, the curators have arranged for the Museu Picasso’s Harlequin (1917) to be on view in LACMA’s modern art galleries through the end of January 2011. This painting demonstrates Picasso’s return to  neoclassical style after his earlier cubist experiments.

The Portrait of Sebastia Juñer Vidal is from the Picasso’s famed Blue Period, where his blue palette and his portraits of tragic outcasts display the palpable loneliness often present in his work.

Visit Picasso In Vienna

Picasso: Peace and Freedom an exhibhition from  England’s Tate Liverpool, has gone on display at the Albertina gallery in Vienna this week.

The critically acclaimed exhibition, which drew almost 100,000 visitors to Tate Liverpool over 14 weeks this summer, is now drawing Austrian gallery goers to view the vast collection of Picasso’s paintings, prints, sculptures, drawings and ceramics. The exhibition, which attracted over two thousand five hundred visitors in the opening three days, continues until 16 January, before travelling to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark where it will be displayed from 11 February to 29 May 2011.