Displaying items by tag: Modern Art

Today, artist Richard Serra will receive France's highest honor, the insignia of Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor, at the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in New York, "The Art Newspaper" reports.

The prestigious award—created in 1802 by Napoleon Bonaparte to reward outstanding services rendered to France—celebrates the close relationship of the American artist with French art institutions and galleries, as well as his great contribution to contemporary art.

“Russian Modernism: Cross-Currents of German and Russian Art, 1907-1917” at the Neue Galerie is a lively, scattershot exhibition, with numerous paintings of great interest, others of not so much and many by Russian artists most of us have barely heard of.

Containing 53 paintings and 21 works on paper, the show spans a decade when modern art movements were breaking out all over Europe — Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Dada and De Stijl. To the east, Russia was no exception. The show’s ambitious title introduces an immense subject that is beyond the resources of this small jewel-box museum.

When Bernard Blistène arrived at the Pompidou Center just over 30 years ago as a young curator, the massive factory-like windows of the Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano-designed museum didn’t look out onto the sun-sprinkled streets of Paris as they do today.

“It was the mid-1980s and people wanted walls,” recalls Mr. Blistène, 60 years old, who succeeded the museum’s longtime director Alfred Pacquement in 2013.

It is nearly impossible to convey the original impact an artist from the past had on his contemporaries. What matters is his artworks’ impression in the here-and-now. But art and artists don’t exist in a vacuum. A painter’s worth can be entangled, complicated, multifarious. Through hindsight, he can become more—or less—estimable; and the value of his initial reception may outweigh that of his oeuvre.

After a year of world domination—having taken three of the top five spots in the most visited contemporary art shows of 2014—the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama is due to bring her popular polka dot art to northern Europe. The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark will host “the first Kusama retrospective in Scandinavia,” says Marie Laurberg, the curator of the show.

"Yayoi Kusama: Towards Infinity" (September 17-January 24, 2016) will display works that have “rarely or never been shown since [Kusama] first made them.”

As Frieze Week’s flurry of contemporary art fairs and auctions comes to a close, the art world  is gearing up for another whirlwind of events. This week, New York City will...

To continue reading this article about the upcoming American art events in New York, visit InCollect.com.

Christie’s Evening Sale of Impressionist and Modern Art realized $202,608,000 (£128,721,728/ €178,022,150) with sell-through rates of 93% by lot and 99% by value. Bidders from 34 countries competed in the room and on the phone for works by Impressionist and Modern masters, including Piet Mondrian, Chaïm Soutine, Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani and Fernand Léger. Bidding on Modern works was particularly active, a testament to the energy brought to the market by crossover collectors and the success of Christie’s curated week of sales spanning both Impressionist & Modern and Post-War and Contemporary categories.

The National Portrait Gallery in London is to stage the first portrait show for an artist whose work ranks as some of the most recognizable of the 20th century.

Alberto Giacometti is well known for his tall and spindly sculptural figures. But he is far less well known as a portrait artist – a situation which the gallery hopes to redress with an exhibition opening in October.

According to Paul Moorhouse, curator of 20th century portraits at the NPG, the show has been five years in the planning. “Giacometti is one of the giants of 20th century art, one of the giants of modernism, but there is a great deal to be discovered about Giacometti,” he said on Tuesday.

Some paintings act like object lessons in tracking the global migration of wealth, bouncing from one owner to the next in timely turns. Such was the case Tuesday when Sotheby’s sold a $46.5 million Mark Rothko abstract that previously belonged to U.S. banker Paul Mellon and later to French luxury executive François Pinault.

Rothko’s latest taker? An anonymous Asian collector who outbid two rivals to win the work.

To a medley of whoops, hollers and gasps on Monday night, Pablo Picasso’s 1955 painting “Les Femmes d’Alger (Version ‘O’)” sold for $179.4 million including fees at Christie’s “Looking Forward to the Past” sale of artworks spanning the 20th century. The price was the highest on record for a work of art sold at auction, the company said, and was well over its estimate of $140 million.

Once the bidding reached $120 million, the Picasso was pursued by five clients on telephones, often in agonizingly slow, $1 million increments, before finally being sold to a buyer represented by Brett Gorvy, Christie’s international head of contemporary art.