Displaying items by tag: Modernist

Glafira Rosales, a 56-year-old Long Island-based art dealer has been arrested in connection to the scandal surrounding the disgraced Manhattan gallery, Knoedler & Company. One of many suits stemming from the ongoing Knoedler drama, federal authorities charged Rosales with tax fraud following the discovery that a collection of Modernist masterpieces, which sold for millions of dollars were actually forgeries.

Prosecutors claim that Rosales never disclosed the $12.5 million she made off of the sale. It was also discovered that she maintained a bank account in Spain where she had stashed much of her earnings from the transaction. If convicted on all counts, Rosales faces as many as 34 years in prison but based on federal sentencing guidelines, will most likely receive much less.

Rosales began selling forged works through the offices of Knoedler & Company in the mid-1990s. The works were new to the market and they were said to have come from an unnamed collector based in Zurich and Mexico City. Knoedler accepted the works and proceeded to sell them, bringing millions of dollars in revenue. After multiple experts claimed that Knoedler was selling fakes, the F.B.I. launched an official investigation. Knoedler closed in 2011 after 165 years in business. The company, which had been New York’s oldest gallery, found itself at the center of 6 lawsuits filed by clients who had purchased Rosales’ works.

While tax evasion charges have been leveled against her, Rosales still has not been charged with knowingly selling counterfeit artworks.

After receiving some criticism for its meager collection of 20^th century art, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas made a number of major acquisitions. The works will debut at the museum later this month as part of the 20^th Century Art Gallery’s rotating exhibition schedule. Along with the newly acquired works, Mark Rothko’s (1903-1970) No. 210/No. 211 (Orange), which was purchased by Crystal Bridges in 2012, will be reinstalled.

Highlights from the museum’s recent purchases include Andy Warhol’s (1928-1987) Hammer and Sickle (1977). The 6 x 7 foot acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas work is a part of Warhol’s Hammer and Sickle series. Crystal Bridges also acquired a major copper and Plexiglas sculptural work by the minimalist artist Donald Judd (1928-1994). Untitled 1989 (Bernstein 89-24) (1989) stands nearly 19 feet tall and is comprised of ten box-like elements made of copper and red Plexiglas. The sculpture is a prime example of Judd’s pioneering work.

In addition to the works by Warhol and Judd, Crystal Bridges acquired Max Weber’s (1864-1920) early modernist painting, Burlesque #1 (1909); Agnes Pelton’s (1881-1961) desert inspired oil on canvas work, Sand Storm (1932); and Marvin Dorwart Cone’s (1891-1965) Stone City Landscape (1936), which is executed in the Regionalist tradition.

On December 22, American Legends: From Calder to O’Keeffe opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. The exhibition features works by defining artists of the first half of the twentieth century including Charles Burchfield (1893-1967), Alexander Calder (1898-1976), Stuart Davis (1892-1964), Arthur Dove (1880-1946), Marsden Hartley (1877-1943) , Edward Hopper (1882-1967), Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986), and Elie Nadelman (1880-1946).

Drawing from the Whitney’s impressive permanent collection, the yearlong show is organized into small-scale retrospectives for each artist and includes iconic and lesser-known works across a range of mediums. While, many of the works have not been on view in years, the show also includes some of the Whitney’s best-known holdings including Edward Hopper’s A Woman in the Sun (1961), Jacob Lawrence’s War Series 1946), and Georgia O’Keeffe’s Summer Days (1936).  

Curated by Barbara Haskell, the exhibition will undergo a rotation in May 2013 so that other artists’ works can be installed. Including realist and modernist masterpieces, American Legends illustrates the dynamic and varied nature of American art during the early twentieth century.  

A printmaker and painter, there is a quiet, striking quality that pervades all of Will Barnet’s art. Best known for his portraits of women, children, animals, family members, and friends, Barnet passed away at his home in Manhattan on November 13. He has lived at the National Arts Club building on New York City’s Gramercy Park since 1982. Barnet was 101.

A native of Beverly, Massachusetts, Barnet studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and then, starting in 1931, at the Arts Students League in New York. It was here that Barnet studied briefly with the early Modernist painter Stuart Davis and became acquainted with Arshile Gorky, a major influence on Abstract Expressionism. Four years after joining the League, Barnet was named the official printer and went on to work for the Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project. He also made prints for well-known artists such as the Mexican muralist Jose Clemente Orozco and the painter and cartoonist William Gropper.

Barnet started out as a Social Realist printmaker and had his first solo exhibition in 1935 at the Eighth Street Playhouse in Manhattan. Three years later, he had his first gallery show at the Hudson Walker Gallery. It was during this time that he married Mary Sinclair, a painter and fellow student. They had three sons.

In the 1940s Barnet was inspired by Modernist inclinations and his paintings became more colorful and fractured, depicting family scenes and young children. By the end of the decade Barnet moved towards complete abstraction after becoming involved with the Indian Space Painters, a group that created abstract paintings using forms from Native American art and modern European painting.

In the 1950s Barnet divorced Sinclair and remarried Elena Ciurlys with whom he had a daughter. It wasn’t until the 1960s that Barnet returned to representational painting, often using his wife and daughter as subjects. Barnet’s style had evolved and the portraits from this time are flatter and more exact. He also made a number of portraits of the architect Frederick Kiesler, the art critic Katherine Kuh, and the art collector Roy Neuberger during this time.

Barnet never stopped painting and continued to experiment and evolve stylistically, returning to abstraction in 2003. In 2010 he was the subject of the exhibition Will Barnet and the Art Students League at the Phyllis Harriman Mason Gallery in Manhattan. He was awarded a National Medal of Arts in 2011, which he accepted from President Obama at a ceremony at the White House. The subject of many museum retrospectives, Will Barnet at 100, which took place at the National Academy Museum in 2011, was the last.

   Besides his work as an artist, Barnet was also an influential instructor. He taught graphic arts and composition at the Art Students League in 1936 and went on to teach painting at the school until 1980. Barnet also taught at Cooper Union from 1945 to 1978 and briefly at Yale, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and other schools.

Barnet is survived by his wife, three sons, one daughter, nine grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren.

One of Mark Rothko’s Seagram murals was defaced on Sunday at the Tate Modern. Black on Maroon (1958), which is valued at tens of millions of dollars, was a gift to the museum by the Modernist artist.

The defacer, Vladimir Umanets, scrawled “Vladimir Umanets, A Potential Piece of Yellowism.” in black ink in the lower right-hand corner of the piece. Umanets claims that it was not an act of vandalism as he was adding something new to the piece and acting in line with the bizarre art movement, Yellowism.

One of modern art’s most important figures, Rothko painted Black on Maroon as part of a series originally commissioned by the Four Season in New York City which was located in the Seagram Building, a renowned modernist skyscraper. Rothko decided not to give the paintings to the Four Seasons upon completion because he did not want them to become a backdrop for wealthy diners. In 1965 he donated some of the works to the Tate and nine were delivered in 1970 on the day the artist died.

Held in New York on September 25^th, Christie’s American Art sale counted two Norman Rockwell works on paper as the top lots. Study for ‘The Runaway,’ perhaps the artist’s most iconic image, brought in $206,500. The original estimate for Study at auction was $80,000–$120,000. In 1958, the completed work, which features a young boy at a diner in conversation with a policeman, was used as a Saturday Evening Post cover.

The other Rockwell that fared well was Keeping His Course (Exeter Grill) which had an estimate of $100,000 to $150,000 and ended up selling for $218,500. The work was originally conceived as an illustration for the book Keeping His Course (1918) by Ralph Henry Barbour. A less recognizable Rockwell, A Man’s Wife, didn’t quite reach it’s $30,000–$50,000 estimate and ending up selling for $27,500.

Edgar Alwin Payne’s Western painting La Marque Lake, High Sierra more than doubled its $25,000–$35,000 estimate when it sold for $80,500. Other works that exceeded expectations were Andrew Wyeth’s watercolor, Front Door at Teel’s (estimate: $50,000–$70,000), that realized $93,700 and Josef Mario Korbel’s Andante (Dancing Girls) (estimate: $30,000–$50,000), a bronze that brought in $62,500.

The auction offered over 160 lots including Impressionist and Modernist works, Western pieces, illustrations, and bronzes. Artists on the block included Stuart Davis, Milton Avery, Will Barnet, Edward Hopper, and William Merritt Chase. Expected to reach in excess of $2.5 million, the total sale realized for the auction was $2,649,475.

While the auction reached its estimate, only 63% sold by lot and 76% by value. Debra Force of Debra Force Fine Art, Inc. said, “63% is terrible but there are many reasons for the poor performance. September is too early in the season for a sale. People are just getting back from summer, putting kids in school, and it’s in the middle of the Jewish holidays.” Force added, “The important collectors don’t look at these mid-season sales. They should, but they’re waiting for the major sale.“

Gavin Spanierman of Gavin Spanierman Ltd. echoed Force’s sentiments. “63% is pretty scary if you’re a seller but that’s representative of mid-season sales. However, the fact that the two Rockwells did well considering they were not phenomenal, shows that there is strength in the market.”

Although a number of American still life artists who gained prominence during the nineteenth century were still active and influential after 1900, the still life genre in America in the early part of the twentieth century was profoundly impacted by modernist developments. Generally European in origin, American painters experienced these influences either through travel abroad or through exposure to those who had directly encountered the modernist current in France or Germany. No one modern movement influenced still life painting the most; instead, various painters brought stylistic changes to the genre based on their prevailing interests.1

In the decades before World War II, many artists were thrilled by the steel- and fossil-fuel-based technology embodied in trains, planes and automobiles, and edifices like the Eiffel Tower and the Chrysler Building. Few were more inspired by the promises of industrial modernity than the sculptor John Storrs.

The subject of an excellent, taut survey at the Grey Art Gallery that focuses mainly on work from the 1920s, Storrs (1885-1956) compacted utopian, machine-age dreaming into Cubist-Art Deco sculptures resembling pieces of architectural ornament and models of skyscrapers. There is nothing quite like his dense, carefully wrought stone and metal sculptures in early American — or European, for that matter — Modernism.

The exhibition, “John Storrs: Machine-Age Modernist,” was organized by Debra Bricker Balken, an independent scholar and curator, for the Boston Athenaeum, where it opened last spring.

Born and reared in Chicago, Storrs studied for short periods at the Art Institute of Chicago, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. He trained in Hamburg with Arthur Bock, a Vienna Secession-style figurative sculptor, and in Paris with Auguste Rodin.

For most of his career he lived in France, but in accordance with a stipulation in his father’s will, he maintained residency in Chicago and thereby stayed informed about developments in art and architecture in the United States. In New York he was acquainted with members of the Société Anonyme, including Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and Charles Demuth. In Europe he met Constantin Brancusi, Alexander Calder and many other players on the avant-garde scene.

The most conspicuous influences on Storrs’s sculpture, however, were not artists but architects: the American Modernists Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, whose Chicago works Storrs knew well. In the late teens and early 1920s, Storrs created suave, chunky, semi-abstract statues of people. “Le Sergent de Ville (Gendarme)” (modeled in 1919, cast in bronze in 1923) has a square head and a blocky body whose angular, faceted planes are selectively plated in silver. This muscular little fellow projects a heroic manliness, but, at just over 16 inches tall, there is something humorous about him; he is a Cubist RoboCop.