Displaying items by tag: postwar art

A commercial statement filed in New York this summer has raised questions about the circumstances surrounding the sale of a painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat at Christie’s, New York, on 13 May.

The work, The Field Next to the Other Road (1981), was consigned to the auction house by the dealer Tony Shafrazi and included in the Post-War and Contemporary evening sale where it sold for $37.1m, the sixth-highest price of the night.

On the heels of its historic sale, "The Artist's Muse," which combined Impressionist and contemporary masterworks, and achieved a new $170 million Modigliani record, Christie's focused this evening's sale purely on postwar and contemporary art.

The sale realized $331.8 million compared with expectations of roughly $320 million. While, overall, it was a solid night, it was clear that the real fireworks had already passed; they happened the previous night.

Though Christie’s elected not to publicly list the estimated sale price for Louise Bourgeois’s Spider (1997), which will be auctioned as lot 10 in the house’s postwar and contemporary evening sale on November 10 in New York, it is high enough to break some major records.

ARTnews has learned that the enormous sculpture will have a low estimate of $25 million and a high estimate of $35 million.

Bay Area artist Richard Diebenkorn kept sketchbooks for his entire career; they served as a sort of nomadic studio where he experimented with visuals that bridged figurative and abstract ideas. Recently the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University acquired 29 of Diebenkorn’s sketchbooks, and this September they’re going on view to the public for the first time in Richard Diebenkorn: The Sketchbooks Revealed.

“The books are filled with stunningly gestural sketches of bits and pieces of daily life, both mundane capturing of everyday things, and powerful vignettes of intimate family moments,” Alison Gass, the Cantor’s associate director for collections, exhibitions, and curatorial affairs, told Hyperallergic.

ArtHamptons, the longest running art fair in the Hamptons, is celebrating its eighth year with a new date and location. The highly anticipated event has been moved up one week to coincide with Independence Day weekend -- the region’s official summer season kick off. This year’s fair, which begins with an opening night preview on Thursday, July 2, will take place at an opulent private estate on Lumber Lane in the posh Bridgehampton neighborhood. 

ArtHamptons, which welcomes around 15,000 collectors and art enthusiasts during its four day run, continues to grow with...

The best artists, the sculptor Donald Judd wrote, are “original and obdurate; they’re the gravel in the pea soup.” During a career of almost four decades, Judd was never shy about relegating other artists to the soup and positioning himself as the gravel, in more ways than one. In addition to being one of the most important sculptors of the postwar period and a pioneer of the Minimalist movement, he was combative, doctrinaire and wholly uncompromising about his work.

Asian collectors snapped up paintings by Vincent Van Gogh, Pablo Picasso and Claude Monet at a Sotheby’s auction in New York that totaled $368.3 million.

The tally on Tuesday was the second highest for an Impressionist and modern art auction at Sotheby’s and a 67 percent increase from a similar sale last May. The auctioneer also surpassed its high presale target of $351 million despite failing to sell 14 of the 64 lots.

It’s a small work of art — precisely the size of an old Savarin coffee can jammed with artist’s paintbrushes — but in the history of postwar art and in the career of Jasper Johns, one of the most important artists of the last half century, it looms large.

Created in 1960, “Painted Bronze” has been a fixture for more than three decades at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where it has been on long-term loan from Mr. Johns’s personal collection. But now it will migrate north to a permanent home at the Museum of Modern Art, which will receive the sculpture as a promised gift from the collectors Henry R. Kravis and his wife, Marie-Josée Kravis, the Museum of Modern Art’s president, who recently bought it.

Mark Rothko once said that his formula for a good painting included a dollop of hope – “10 percent to make the tragic concept more endurable.” When bidders gather on May 13 at Christie’s to do battle for the next big Rothko to come to auction – a blazing red and black work, “No. 36 (Black Stripe),” painted in 1958, a banner year for the artist – they will have to bring a lot more than hope.

The painting, being sold by the German collector Frieder Burda, who has given it pride of place in his museum in Baden-Baden for several years, is estimated to sell for $30 million to $50 million. But prime Rothkos have become so rare and sought-after that the competition is likely to be fierce. Rothko’s auction record was set at Christie’s in 2012, when “Orange, Red, Yellow,” another of his trademark horizontal color-slab paintings, from 1961, sold for almost $87 million.

Magnificent Obsessions: The Artist As Collector, which opened at the Barbican Art Gallery in London earlier this month, is the first exhibition in the UK to present the personal collections of post-war and contemporary artists. Ranging from mass-produced memorabilia and popular collectibles to unique curiosities, rare artifacts, and natural history objects, each collection allows an unprecedented glimpse into the oftentimes eccentric predilections of some of today’s most collected artists.

Organized by Barbican curator Lydia Yee, Magnificent Obsessions features the personal collections of well-known artists such as Sol Lewitt, Damien Hirst, Peter Blake, Martin Parr, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Andy Warhol, and Martin Wong/Danh Vo, alongside at least one example of their work. The exhibition aims to use these collections as a means to provide insight into these artists’ inspirations, influences, motives, and fascinations. According to a press release from the Barbican, Jane Alison, Head of Visual Arts at the gallery, said, “What a joy to have brought together the treasured private collections of the fourteen artists in Magnificent Obsessions: The Artist as Collector. The thrill of collecting is something we can all relate to, and I am sure visitors will enjoy this deeply personal and endlessly fascinating show.”