Right strokes
DNA - 31 Oct 2007
Shakti Burman’s daughter Maya on her being a ‘lucky painter’.
With cousin Jayasri Burman, mother Maite Delteil and most importantly, Sakti Burman for a father, Maya was born with a ‘silver brush’ in her hand. “But it’s about doing something you want to & not because everyone in your family is doing it,” Maya explains.
Given that she has been a professional artist for a decade now, she feels that her work has matured a lot more now. “But the spirit & the essence have stayed the same. Also, I’m very comfortable with water-colours and inks on paper and so the medium hasn’t really changed even today,” reveals Maya, whose works will be on display at Art Musings gallery from November 2-December1, 2007.
In fact, her works are a portal to that aspirational space where we all want to be, a perfect world of peace and merriment, away from chaos and violence. And as this France based artist does come down at least once a year to India, both the countries have influenced her works. “But then, anything could be inspiration; I even get inspired by my dreams,” she replies.
We then veer to the obvious question, that of the pressure of living up to her parents’ name. “To tell you the truth, I’d rather be compared to my parents than anyone else; it’s a compliment of sorts. Apart from the use of bright colours, the love for detailing and the joyful mood, my work is quite different from theirs,” she elaborates, adding that she doesn’t take take advice from her parents but they indulge in long talks about each others’ art & art in general.
And does she consider herself lucky? “Yes, but my family name has only helped to a point; beyond that it’s only the talent that survives. I’m lucky because I belong to this generation. I mean, look at my father - he didn’t have to face as much competition as we are but then he had to struggle to make ends meet and I don’t have to do that,” she signs off.
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Graffiti Goes to Market
Artinfo.com - 31 Oct 2007
LONDON—"The race is on to discover the next Banksy," the Daily Telegraph reports. The growing popularity of graffiti, street, and urban art and its transition to the market is evident in the exhibitions taking over London. Sotheby's also is organizing a special street art section for its next contemporary art sale here on December 12. "We have targeted artists where demand is currently outweighing supply," said auction house spokesman Ralph Taylor, "and for some it will be their first appearance at auction." In addition to Banksy pieces, the sale will include works by Miranda Donovan, a young graffiti artist, Paul Insect, whose last show was bought out completely by Damien Hirst, and Space Invader, a street artist inspired by computer games. One highlight is Suicide Bomber (est. £10,000 to £15,000), a painting on cardboard by Adam Neate, who recently sold out a show at Lester Gallery.
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ART MARKET WATCH
Artnet - 31 Oct 2007
MUSCLE AT OCTOBER AUCTIONS
"Buyer confidence remains high," said Christie’s New York contemporary-art specialist Robert Manley at a recent press lunch, taking the temperature of the current art market with four concise words. Indeed, art auctions in New York, London and other major cities this October have scored new highs in almost every category. Most observers see no signs that the anticipated slowdown in the U.S. economy, prompted by the weakness of the mortgage market or the high price of oil, has even touched the fine art business. Yet. Some highlights:
* Sotheby’s London sales of contemporary and Italian art, held on Oct. 12-15, 2007, and timed to coincide with the Frieze Art Fair and ancillary events, totaled £66,250,000, almost double the firm’s London total from a year ago. The action kicked off on Friday night with a sale of contemporary art that totaled £34,865,300 ($70,692,882), with almost 84 percent of lots finding buyers.
Highlights included a world auction record for a Chinese work of art, when Yue Minjun’s Execution (1995), a rather repellent play on execution scenes by Goya and Manet -- everyone’s laughing, of course -- sold for £2,932,500 after a long battle between two telephone bidders.
Another auction record was set, this one for an Indian work of art, when London-based artist Raqib Shaw’s three-part Garden of Earthly Delights III, a phantasmagoria of glitter, rhinestones and enamel on board from 2003, sold for £2,708,500. According to the Baer Faxt, the buyer was New York dealer Jeffrey Deitch, who gave the artist his first and only New York solo show in 2005.
Artist records were also set for Banksy (£322,900), George Condo (£276,500), Rosemarie Trockel (£252,500), Yang Shaobin (£240,500), James Turrell (£216,500) and Martin Kobe (£72,500).
Sotheby’s London evening sale of 20th-century Italian art on Oct. 15, 2007 -- an annual sale that was launched in 1999 -- totaled £15,197,475, a new record for a sale of 20th-century art. More than 87 percent of the lots found buyers. Piero Manzoni’s Achrome (1959) sold for £2,260,500, a new auction record for the artist.
Six other artist’s records were set at the sale: Alighiero Boetti (£1,180,969), Michelangelo Pistoletto (£345,300), Nicola de Maria (£78,500), Salvo (£58,100), Luigi Ghirri (£12,500) and Ugo Mulas (£11,875).
* Christie’s London post-war and contemporary sales, held on Oct. 14-16, 2007, totaled £66,565,575 ($135,108,066), a mere £315,000 more than its archrival Sotheby’s. Christie’s sold the top lot of the week, Francis Bacon’s "rent-cheque" painting, Study from the Human Body, Man Turning on the Light, for £8,084,500 ($16,468,730).
Although some observers thought the Bacon should have gone for more, it did pretty well for the Royal College of Art, which was given the painting directly by the artist in 1969 (as rent for a studio) and was selling it to raise funds for a new campus.
Another highlight was Marc Newson’s Lockheed Lounge (1986), which sold for £748,500 ($1,515,713), a new auction record for any living designer.
New artists records were set for Beatriz Milhazes (£228,500), Shiro Kuramata (£156,500), Scott Burton (£156,000), Ron Arad (£120,500), Jonathan Meese (£132,500), Robert Longo (£192,500), Olafur Eliasson (£748,500), Anselm Reyle (£311,700), Yin Zhaoyang (£156,500) and Carsten Höller (£30,500).
* Phillips, de Pury & Co. launched its new London showroom with a series of four sales, all held on Oct. 13, 2007. The Marino Golinelli collection of contemporary art sold 126 of 137 lots, or 92 percent, for a total of £5,054,520. The John L. Stewart Collection of Russian art sold 59 of 65 lots offered, or almost 91 percent, for a total of £3,625,320.
Phillips contemporary art evening sale sold 103 of 123 lots offered, or almost 84 percent, for a total of £23,106,800. And the "Farber Collection of China Avant-Garde" sold 40 of 45 lots offered, or almost 89 percent, for a total of £10,147,440.
* Sotheby’s New York sales of photographs, Oct. 15-16, 2007, totaled $12,709,389. The top lot was Edward Weston’s Nautilus (1927), a gelatin silver print signed on the mount, which sold for $1,105,000, above the presale high estimate of $900,000 and a record for the artist at auction. The buyer was Pace-MacGill gallery.
The sales also set new auction records for Imogen Cunningham ($361,000), Peter Beard ($277,000), Louis Faurer ($133,000), Frederick Sommer ($85,000), Aaron Siskind ($73,000), and Herb Ritts ($109,000), among others.
* Christie’s New York sale of photographs, held in three parts, Oct. 17-18, 2007, totaled $9.78 million. The sale of 37 photographs from a private collection was 92 percent sold, with three lots bought in, for a total of $2,061,150. The top lot was Robert Frank’s Trolley, New Orleans (1955), which went for $623,400, well above the presale high estimate of $250,000 and a new auction record for the artist. The buyer was an anonymous U.S. dealer.
The collection of Rex, Inc., a Rhode Island private equity firm, included 51 lots -- largely portraits of artists; 33 sold, or 65 percent, for a total of $1,184,025. Top lot was a black-and-white Cindy Sherman Untitled Film Still that sold for $205,000, about double the presale estimate. Among the other interesting lots was a Francesca Woodman nude Self Portrait with Lily, Rome (1977-78), which sold for $43,000, well above the presale high estimate of $30,000.
Christie’s third and final sale offered 259 lots; 183 sold, or 71 percent, for a total of $6,532,825. Among the interesting results was the $361,000 paid for a 1978 print of Irving Penn’s 1948 photo, Cuzco Children (it carried a presale estimate of $200,000-$300,000), and the $217,000 paid for Robert Mapplethorpe’s Calla Lily (1988), well above the presale high estimate of $120,000.
* Phillips, de Pury & Co. held its New York sale of photographs on Oct. 17, 2007, selling 189 of 243 lots, or almost 78 percent, for a total of $4,321,383. Top lot was Hiroshi Sugimoto’s hazy black-and-white print of Villa Savoye, Le Corbusier (1998), which went for $336,000, almost double the presale high estimate.
The sale set new auction records for Massimo Vitali ($72,000), Lewis Baltz ($72,000), Ruud van Empel ($45,600) and Renée Cox ($15,600), among others.
* Swann Galleries in New York held its photography auction on Oct. 15, 2007, and the house notched its first million-dollar lot when a partial set of Edward S. Curtis’ The North American Indian, number 74 of a planned edition of 500 and signed by Curtis, the financial backer J.P. Morgan and Theodore Roosevelt, sold for $1,048,000 to a private collector.
* Sotheby’s New York sale of 19th-century European art on Oct. 23, 2007, totaled $24,169,288, with 163 of 272 lots finding buyers, or almost 60 percent. In an amusing demonstration of the breadth of the category, the top lot was a painting by Gustave Courbet, while the next five top lots were by William Adolphe Bouguereau. Courbet’s Le Veau Blanc (1873), a painting of a brown-spotted white heifer looking out at the viewer as it stops to drink from a stream, sold for $2,505,000, considerably above the presale high estimate of $380,000. The buyer was anonymous.
The top Bouguereau lot was Jeunesse (1893), a ca. 75 x 48 in. painting of young woman at a well stopping her ears against the imprecations of two earnest cupids. It sold for $2,393,000, rather towards the low end of its presale estimate of $2,000,000-$3,000,000.
* Christie’s New York sale of 19th-century European and Orientalist art on Oct. 24, 2007, totaled $14,756,475, with 183 of 283 lots finding buyers, or 65 percent. The top lot, Arthur Von Ferraris’ The Blind Man (1892), a small (ca. 25 x 19 in.) oil-on-panel of a rather touching Arabian genre scene, sold for $937,000, more than double its presale high estimate of $400,000, a new auction record for the artist. The buyer was reported to be a Middle-Eastern collector.
The sale saw new auction records for Rudolph Ernst ($657,000), Jehan Georges Vibert ($481,000), Ramon Casas ($445,000, bought by French & Co.) and Benjamin Constant ($421,000). The fourth highest top lot was Bougereau’s Le jour (1884), a floating nude being brought flowers by small birds, a flowing magenta drapery coyly covering her sex. It sold for $577,000 (est. $500,000-$700,000) to an anonymous buyer.
* Christie’s Los Angeles sale of California, Western and American art on Oct. 24, 2007, totaled $3,866,625, with 66 of 87 lots finding buyers, or 76 percent. Top lot was Nicolai Fechin’s Tonita, a schmaltzy portrait of a contemporary Indian maiden holding a bouquet of flowers and wearing what looks like the Native-American equivalent of Ugg boots, which sold for $1,105,000 (est. $700,000-$1,000,000), a new auction record for the artist. The sale also set new auction records (in the top ten alone) for Colin Campbell Cooper ($289,000) and Thomas L. Hunt ($199,000). Most of the buyers in the top ten were U.S.
* On the level of personnel, word on the street is that Cary Leibowitz has left Christie’s print department and is starting a new print division at Phillips, de Pury & Co. -- though not for six months, due to a non-compete clause in his Christie’s contract. Christie’s seems to be a primary poaching ground for employees -- the house also recently lost its modern print expert Kelly Troester to Bloomsbury, a London-based auctioneer that is opening a branch in New York.
SUPER HIGHS FOR AFRICAN-AMERICAN ART
Easily the most under-valued sector of the modern and contemporary art market is that occupied by African-American artists. Thus, the Swann Galleries sale in New York on Oct. 4, 2007, of 94 works from the African-American art collection of the Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Company, one of the oldest such black-owned firms in the U.S., was closely watched. Of the 94 lots offered, 87 sold, or 92 percent, for a total of $1,421,470.
New auction records were set for 31 artists, an incredible number. The sale was the second auction by Swann’s new African-American department, which is headed by Nigel Freeman. &The strong results demonstrate the tremendous growth in appreciation of these artists,” he said, from important masters to artists whose works were offered for the first time.”
The sale included no less than 23 artists whose works had never appeared at auction before.
The sale’s top lot was Charles White’s General Moses (Harriet Tubman) (1965), a dignified and large-scale (47 x 68 in.) ink drawing of the heroic opponent of slavery, done at the beginning of the Civil Rights battle. It sold for $360,000, well above the presale high estimate of $250,000.
Other significant lots included Hughie Lee-Smith’s Slum Song (1944), a dark and romantic oil of a young man playing the flute on a rooftop, which sold for $216,000 (est. $40,000-$60,000), and John Biggers’ Market Woman, Ghana (ca. 1960), a richly patterned scene of daily life, which was purchased for $96,000, somewhat below its $100,000 presale low estimate.
New auction records were also set for Varnette P. Honeywood ($15,600), Samella Lewis ($16,800), John Riddle, Jr. ($15,600), Beulah Woodard ($19,200) and Richard Wyatt, Jr. ($18,000).
For complete, illustrated auction results, see Artnet’s signature Fine Art Auctions Report
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The ones that got away
FT.com - 31 Oct 2007
Some art dealers are merely greedy, while others can damage artists’ careers by encouraging them to lapse into commercially successful yet arid formulae. Ernst and Hildy Beyeler, by contrast, can be ranked among the great dealers, who give at least as much as they receive. Ten years ago, their Foundation inaugurated a custom-built museum to house an exceptional collection of about 200 paintings and sculpture from the modern period. They were the works retained by the Beyelers during their 60-year business partnership in Basel.
Renzo Piano was commissioned to design the museum in a secluded suburb. He excelled himself, deploying a quietly seductive combination of glass and red porphyry.
Although a panoramic conservatory on the west side provides beguiling views of parkland beyond, nothing is allowed to distract from the exhibits. We can focus on a parade of images, from Cézanne’s tense, haunted portrait of his wife, to Picasso’s startlingly aggressive 1907 “Woman”, to Rothko at his most warm and redemptive.
Now, for its 10th anniversary, the Fondation Beyeler has organised a special exhibition. Some of the most outstanding paintings and sculpture sold by the Beyelers from their premises in Basel’s Baumleingasse have been borrowed from museums and private collectors across the world.
Among the earliest is a poignant portrait of “The Artist’s Mother” by Gauguin. Although painted in about 1893, more than 25 years after her death, it shows the young woman he remembered from his childhood. His father had died soon after Gauguin’s birth, when the family embarked on a voyage to Peru. He looked back on his six years in South America with immense gratitude: they gave him the potent vision of paradise he would later pursue in Tahiti, and his half-Peruvian mother gazes out of this glowing canvas like a goddess from some tantalisingly irrecoverable realm.
No such precise geographical sources can be discovered for Kandinsky’s sublime “Painting with Three Spots”, lent by the Thyssen Museum in Madrid. By the time he executed this large canvas in 1914, Kandinsky had escaped from representation into a freewheeling alternative, inspired by the freedom of modern music and his own mystical convictions. As its uncompromising title suggests, he is now hovering on the very edge of abstraction. Even so, a strong feeling of intergalactic energy permeates the painting, along with Kandinsky’s prophetic awareness that the world was about to be engulfed by war.
Two years later, Fernand Léger managed to sum up the trauma of conflict in “Soldier with a Pipe”. Based on studies of a wounded man with a bandaged head at the Verdun front, this tough painting is largely confined to a combination of white, sepia and umber. The austerity is alleviated, just above the centre, by a slash of scarlet. But it inflames the soldier’s cheek, suggesting that blood is seeping through his bandage. His piston-like arms show how rigid he has become in his attempt to endure the appalling dangers of front-line duty.
It is a relief, after such a relentless vision, to come across Paul Klee’s “Rose Garden”. Painted in 1920, when the artist secured his influential teaching post at the Bauhaus, this sensuous picture shares Kandinsky’s fascination with musical rhythms. Although roses dominate the image, their surroundings cannot be pinned down. But we do know that more than 600 pictures by Klee passed through the Galerie Beyeler, many of them ending up at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf – the city from which Klee was forced to escape when the Nazis denounced him in 1933 as a “degenerate artist”.
At first glance, Pierre Bonnard’s two paintings of a young nude woman in a bathroom may seem far more straightforward than Klee’s work. But then we realise that they focus on Marthe, whom Bonnard had married 30 years before. Sequestered in their south of France hideaway, she never ages in her husband’s enraptured work. Bonnard was determined to make his art defy the passing of time; stretched out in the bathwater, her shimmering, elusive figure begins to look as if she is melting into the light. How, I wonder, could the Beyelers bear to sell these irresistible paintings, and do they regret their decision today?
Giacometti’s bronze women are far more openly vulnerable. Whether standing on a pedestal or clustered together like trees in a forest, they appear emaciated and suffering. Yet somehow,?these stricken figures are bent on survival. They remain upright, vigilant and stubborn, even though the surface of their bodies seems so pummelled and broken.
Matisse, by exuberant contrast, ended his long career by celebrating nature, light and vitality in colossal paper cut-outs. Too ill to make them himself, he knew precisely how to guide his assistants, who, with scissors, brushes and gouache, assembled these magisterial late distillations of everything he had learnt. I first felt astounded by “The Parakeet and the Siren” when it was displayed at the Tate many years ago. Although the gallery was hoping to buy it, this titanic cut-out ended up in the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. My disappointment at the time was intense. And seeing it now, I become captivated all over again. Here, in 1952, the octogenarian artist catches both parrot and siren in a whirlwind of brilliantly coloured leaves. Their dynamism extends far beyond the picture’s confines, and continues to pulse through us long after we leave this superlative, life-enhancing show.
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A kingly sport for men who played—and still play—with very hard, but real, balls
The Art Newspaper - 31 Oct 2007
Knowledge of real—or royal—tennis is the key to understanding Spada’s painting
Real tennis is not the opposite of unreal tennis.
Rather it is royal tennis (think Real Madrid), as Cees de Bondt’s title has it, the sport of kings, and the king of sports.
Massively popular until the invention of the lawn variety, even today almost all those who play it are hardened addicts, which should ensure this book a readership of about 7,000 worldwide, but that of itself is far from guaranteeing its interest for the unlucky many who do not know a hazard chase from a force for the dedans.It is therefore a pleasure to report that the story it has to tell is a fascinating one, and that—in spite of the odd lapse—it is well told.
It is above all concerned with architectural history, although there is some discussion of paintings.
Disputes rage over whether real tennis originated in the medieval cloister or street, but what is clear is that it was a huge success in Renaissance Italy, above all in courtly circles, where preposterous sums of money were spent building courts, hiring teams of professionals, and betting—not just on the results of matches, but even on the outcome of individual points.
When Caravaggio murdered his opponent Ranuccio Tomassoni—an action which makes the great John McEnroe’s tantrums look pretty puny—the row may well have been over a wager as opposed to a line call.
Real tennis could be played almost anywhere, and large interiors were often co-opted (it would appear that both the Sala del Pisanello in the Palazzo Ducale at Mantua and the Sala dei Paladini which Piero della Francesca frescoed in the ducal palace at Ferrara may have been occasional venues), but a custom-built court was naturally preferred.
Dr de Bondt’s detective work has tracked down many of these old courts, their identities often specified on old ground-plans, although it is their ghostly shapes rather than their interiors which survive.
The one at the Villa d’Este at Tivoli has morphed into the restaurant and bookshop, while others long ago became theatres, and the pallacorda (the Italian term) building that was transformed into the Teatro Coletti in Florence in the early 18th century is now the Cinema Alfieri.
Maybe some enterprising aficionado will put flesh back on the bones of one of these skeletons, and allow Italy to join the UK, the US, France, and Australia in having at least one operational court.Our knowledge of where and how the game was played in Italy in the 16th and 17th centuries is above all based upon Antonio Scaino’s Trattato del Giuoco della Palla, which was published in 1555.
It is particularly informative about the distinction between the steccato maggiore and the steccato minore, the larger and smaller types of court, which helps with their identification, and also allows one to judge the degree of dramatic licence which painters permitted themselves when showing people playing the game, which on occasion pops up in the background of subjects like David and Bathsheba.The most interesting real tennis images, however, are neither these, nor a handful of portraits of children armed with rackets, but instead a select group of representations of Apollo and Hyacinthus in which the latter’s death is updated so that the accidental blow with a discus thrown by his divine lover becomes a fatal hit from a tennis ball (real tennis balls are very hard, and being hit by one on the temple could prove fatal).
The textual source for this metamorphosis of the episode from the Metamorphoses was in translations of Ovid, to which both Giambattista Tiepolo and a Caravaggesque painter, possibly Cecco del Caravaggio, evidently had recourse, but not all readers will wish to follow Dr de Bondt in assuming the choice of subject was directly related to the murder of Tomassoni.
Admirers of Shakespeare’s Henry V will also be surprised to find it claimed here that the Dauphin’s gift of tennis balls arrives after as opposed to before the Battle of Agincourt.
No matter: Cees de Bondt lays fair claim to have written the most entertaining book about real tennis since Jeremy Potter’s excellent whodunnit, Hazard Chase (1964).
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