EXPLOSION OF LILLIES (Detail)

Girl with an explosion of Lillies (Made for Mischief)

Girl with an explosion of Lillies. (Made for Mischief) Acrylic on Canvas 24"X48"

Modern Art in Dallas Fort Worth

The Artist visited MOMA at Dallas Fort Worth recently. Designed by Japanese architect Tadao Ando, the building is a triumph of high minded modernity, Part Neo Stalinist concrete bunker, part green-house water feature. This unlikely melange of austere modernist vision creates a restful and strangely calming space. The museum contains a number of important works by such artists as Warhol, Jackson Pollock, and Hockney. Particular highlights include a stunning example of Twenty-Five Colored Marylins (1962) by Warhol and a 1938 painting entitled Masqued Image by Jackson Pollock, a painting that for me reveals a missing-link connection between the figurative modernity of Picasso and the worlds most famous abstract expressionist. Whilest the permanent collection is a minor if visitable gathering of the usual artistic suspects upstairs in the museum, the yawnsome art school conceptualism of Vernon Fisher is perhaps best avoided. Obsessive and self indulgent, there is not a single stand out piece that as an art collector I would want to own. Is this the standard by which contemporary art should be judged? Or is the intellectual journey writ large on the gallery wall justification enough for such arts existence? Vernon Is a Fort Worth Artist made good, for this I give him and the gallery credit. Galleries should push local talent, but is this the best that Texas in general and Fort Worth in particular has to offer? I think not.

Ambroise Vollard and the Vault of Fauve

Sotheby's holding selling a long-lost treasure trove of paintings, prints, books and drawings by key avant-garde artists of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. The works belonged to Ambroise Vollard, the legendary Parisian art dealer who played a pivotal role in the development of the Impressionist and Modern Art market: the artists he represented ranged from Renoir and Van Gogh to Cézanne, Picasso and the Fauves. Vollard’s contribution to the development of Modern art is perhaps unparalleled, as he created the market for Impressionist  & Modern art . 

The extraordinary trove of art treasures were discovered in 1979 in a bank vault at the Société Générale in Paris. The works were deposited there in 1939, soon after Vollard's death, by Erich Slomovic, a young Yugoslav associate of Vollard to whom the dealer had consigned the works. Soon after, Slomovic fled to Yugoslavia where he died in 1942 at the hands of the Nazis. The contents of the vault remained untouched for 40 years. On 21st March 1979, the bank was permitted under French law to open the vault and to sell any contents of value in order to recoup some 40 years of unpaid storage fees. As a result, the collection was consigned for a sale to be held at Hotel Drouot in Paris in March 1981. The announcement of the sale however, was swiftly followed by legal challenges, as a result of which the sale was cancelled. Those challenges now finally resolved, and the works are to be sold by agreement among the legal beneficiaries of the Vollard Estate. 

A second sale at Sotheby's in Paris reveals the broad range of Vollard’s enthusiasms. Highlights  include an early portrait by Cézanne of his childhood friend, the great novelist Emile Zola as well as risqué monotypes by Degas including the celebrated La Fête de la patronne. The sale also showcases a striking example of Gauguin's rare and inventive monotypes, or transfer drawings, that he made with Vollard's encouragement and such important early prints by Picasso as Le Repas frugal, 1904 from the artist's Blue Period and Les Saltimbanques, 1905 from the slightly later Rose Period. There is also a very touching self portrait by Renoir dedicated to Ambroise Vollard, as well as a striking colour lithograph of Le Chapeau Epinglé, one of the most popular printed works by the artist. Alongside these remarkable pieces, collectors will find smaller gems such as an anonymous photograph showing Vollard at a dinner table surrounded by his artist friends, and handwritten pages penned by Chagall recounting his first arrival in Paris.

http://www.sothebys.com/

André Derain everyones favourite Fauve?

André Derain’s Arbres à Collioure has sold  at Sotheby’s London for a record £16.3 million ($24 million). It doubled the previous record for the artist set at Sotheby’s in November last year, when Guy Bennet bought Barques Au Port de Collioure for $14.1 million. The sale also established the highest price ever paid for any Fauve painting.

Derain’s Fauvist works are more desirable than his rather more accomplished, if generic later paintings. Juicelings should check these out, and judge for themselves. I find it interesting that Matisse, who coached Derain extensively, sold an equivelant painting Odalisques Jouant aux Dames at the same Sotheby’s auction for £11.8 million. Matisse famously  visited Derain’s doubtful parents, to persuade them their son should become a painter rather than an Engineer .

Arbres à Collioure is  the kind of painting that has every art philistines blood boiling, ‘My twelve year old daughter could have done that,’ they will invariably moan. What a hundred years ago? Before color magazines, films, and television, when the world was still dominated by monoprint engravings, linocuts and black and white Victorians? I think it is about time you increased that child’s pocket money, about sixteen million should cover it.

www.artmarketinsight.com/wallet/amidetails/showweb/158

Los Angeles Art Festival 2012

The Hammer Museum has teamed up with non profit gallery LAX Art to organise a biennial Art festival in 2012 that will span the city of Los Angeles. Exhibitions will take place at a variety of public sites and feature artists from the LA Area. Plans for the biennial grew out of conversations between Ann Philbin Director of Hammer Museum and Lauri Firstenberg the founder of LAX Art. Hammer curator Ali Subotnick has previously co-organized an edition of the Berlin biennial and Deputy Director Douglas Fogle has previously organized the Carnegie International. LAX art regularly introduces the work of New LA based Artists. The 2010 biennial opens at the  Orange County Museum of Art on October 24.