Sure Bets: Blog Spotlight #5: "Salvador Dalí: Surrealist Spring"

Salvador Dalí Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

 

ARTIST Salvador Dalí

TITLE 'Printemps Nécrophilique'

AUCTION HOUSE Sotheby's

ESTIMATE $8 million to $12 million

Timing is everything in the auction business. So it’s no accident that this Surrealist canvas — once owned by Elsa Schiaparelli, a Paris couturier closely associated with the Surrealist movement and who collaborated with Dalí on designs — is being offered for sale just days before the opening of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute exhibition “Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations.”

From 1936, “Printemps Nécrophilique” is an eerie dreamscape with two figures that is also coming up for sale as the interest in Surrealism continues to escalate. “It’s one of the last great isms of art history to be fully appreciated,” said Simon Shaw, who runs Sotheby’s Impressionist and modern art department in New York. “The roots of more recent art can be found in some of these Surrealist paintings, so it crosses over successfully, appealing to contemporary collectors too.”

The last time “Printemps Nécrophilique” was at auction, in London at Christie’s in 1998, it fetched $2.2 million.

 

Sure Bets: Blog Spotlight #4: "Gerhard Richter: Eye Candy"

Christie's

 

ARTIST Gerhard Richter

TITLE 'Abstraktes Bild (798-3)'

AUCTION HOUSE Christie's

ESTIMATE $14 million to $18 million

This dreamy 1993 canvas is sure to be a winner when it comes up for sale on May 8. Prices for the 80-year-old Mr. Richter have been steadily rising, helped in large part by a highly praised retrospective at the Tate Modern in London this winter, which is now at the National Gallery in Berlin and will be heading to the Pompidou Center in Paris in June. Last year alone some $200 million worth of works by Mr. Richter sold at auction. “It’s eye candy for the emerging buyer,” Mr. Gorvy said. The size of the canvas — it is nearly eight feet square — make it particularly impressive as does the masterly layering of colors, which is at once romantic and modern. It is being sold by Lyn Ross, the widow of George Ross, a financier from Bryn Mawr, Pa., who died in July.

 

 

Sure Bets: Blog Spotlight #3: "Francis Bacon: Double Take"

The Estate of Francis Bacon/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, DACS, London

 

ARTIST Francis Bacon

TITLE 'Figure Writing Reflected in Mirror'

AUCTION HOUSE Sotheby's

ESTIMATE $30 million to $40 million

THE market hasn’t seen a record-breaking price for Bacon since the Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich bought his 1976 “Triptych” for $86.3 million at Sotheby’s in May 2008. Since then prices have not come anywhere near that sum, but neither have the offerings. Now, on May 9, Sotheby’s is selling a 1976 canvas depicting a male figure who is thought to be the artist’s lover, George Dyer, who committed suicide in 1971.

The painting was the star of a 1977 exhibition of Bacon’s work at the Galerie Claude Bernard in Paris. It was the cover image of the show’s catalog and hung alongside the record-breaking “Triptych.” “It was such a popular show they had to close off the street,” said Mr. Meyer, who added that this painting is creating considerable buzz. One reason is that it has not been on the market for 35 years. Another is the painting itself, with the hypnotic reflections of the man in the mirror and on the floor.

Mr. Forstmann bought the painting in 2001 from the Acquavella Galleries in New York.

 

"Dallas Museum Simmers in a Neighbor’s Glare" in @nytimes via Notes from the Bass Museum - George Lindemann Jr,

Brandon Thibodeaux for The New York Times
At the Nasher museum in Dallas, Rodin’s “Age of Bronze” sits in dappled light as glare streams through a patterned screen.
May 1, 2012
By 

DALLAS — Two things were supposed to happen when the Nasher Sculpture Center opened here in 2003. Famous works like Rodin’s “Age of Bronze” and Matisse’s “Madeleine I” were to be bathed in copious sunlight streaming through a glass roof. And new vigor was to come to the surrounding neighborhood.

The results exceeded expectations. And Dallas has a mess on its hands.

The center, designed by Renzo Piano and Peter Walker, was considered so appealing that a 42-story condominium called Museum Tower sprouted across the street. But the glass skin of the condo tower, still under construction, now reflects so much light that it is threatening artworks in the galleries, burning the plants in the center’s garden and blinding visitors with its glare.

No one quite knows what to do. The condo developer and museum officials are at loggerheads. Fingers are being pointed. Mr. Piano is furious. The developer’s architect is aggrieved. The mayor is involved. A former official in the George W. Bush administration has been asked to mediate.

Brandon Thibodeaux for The New York Times

Glare from a condo tower is a problem for a nearby museum.

The situation has been characterized by some here as a David-and-Goliath battle between a beloved nonprofit and commercial interests. But the dispute has also raised the broader question of what can happen when, as is currently the rage, cultural institutions are cast as engines of economic development.

The Nasher was seen as an important spur to the renaissance of downtown Dallas, much the way Lincoln Center was viewed as something of a cure for urban blight on the West Side of Manhattan. But the forces unleashed in these situations can prompt a distinctly uneasy relationship between cultural organizations and the neighborhood changes they attract.

“These things start to bump into each other,” said the mayor of Dallas, Mike Rawlings. “How we as a civic society power through this is an important moment for us. You’ve got a high-growth engine that is trying to do right by Giacometti.”

Dallas’s interest in raising its cultural profile is palpable here: the city has been building its arts district over the last 20 years; Saturday Cowboys Stadium hosted a simulcast of Mozart’s “Magic Flute” by the Dallas Opera. The Nasher problem has the whole city concerned and watching.

“Typically, neighborhood disputes are not this dramatic — an offending sign or a barking dog,” said Veletta Forsythe Lill, the executive director of the Dallas Arts District. “This is a cultural, civic and commercial tragedy. The Nasher is a kind of a masterpiece, and the building and the garden were perfectly designed.”

Mr. Piano said he designed the Nasher with natural light in mind. The museum has an arched glass roof with a perforated aluminum screen in an egg-crate pattern that directs the sun into the galleries, which were laid out in anticipation of the sun’s daily arc from southeast to southwest.

Now, sun, magnified by reflection, shines into the galleries from the north and raises the temperature in the sculpture garden — designed by Mr. Walker — to levels that jeopardize the specially planted live oak trees and grass.

“By doing this, they destroy completely the logic of the building,” Mr. Piano said in an interview.

For the museumgoer, the sculptures in the galleries and the garden can be obscured or distorted by distracting light patterns or glare. The museum was forced to install light-blocking panels inside the roof for a recent exhibition of works by Elliott Hundley because the reflections from the tower exceeded the acceptable light levels for the art.

Scott Johnson, the Los Angeles architect who designed Museum Tower, said he was willing to consider remedies but that the Nasher also had to be open-minded. “My responsibility is to fully vet solutions vis-à-vis Museum Tower — that’s my building,” he said. “But I can’t say sitting here now that the Nasher may not need to do something on their end.”

Museum Tower’s owners said in a statement, “All parties desire resolution to these issues as quickly as possible.”

Glare problems, of course, can cut both ways. In Los Angeles a few years ago, the architect Frank Gehry had to sandblast portions of his stainless-steel-clad Disney Concert Hall because the reflected sunlight was creating problems for residents in a nearby apartment building.

Mr. Piano, for his part, said it would be “impossible” for the museum building to make adjustments to offset the glare.

“What do you do — put a roof on the garden? You destroy everything,” he said. “They must solve the problem because they created the problem.”

Architecture experts say the owners of Museum Tower could cover its glass facade with a solar shading system that cuts the glare, at potentially considerable expense.

A regulation that set a strict limit on the reflectivity of buildings on the site expired in 2008 and was revised with more lenient restrictions, though the tower’s opponents say the building still exceeds them. Mr. Johnson said that he learned of such rules only recently through the local news media and that he hoped the conflict “ignites a larger conversation about urban communities and neighbors.”

Not everyone here, of course, views the dispute as a cataclysm. Writing in The Dallas Observer last month, the columnist Jim Schutze made light of it.

“Nothing takes our minds off this misery we call middle-class survival in America like a rich kids art fight,” he wrote. “It’s like our own little hometown Brangelina.”

Since the building that overlooks the sculpture center and its garden is using the Nasher as a selling point — prices stretch into the millions — those involved say its owners should want to keep the Nasher healthy.

“By doing this, they kill what they use to sell it,” Mr. Piano said.

The Dallas Arts District — which now includes the AT&T , Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center and the Dallas Museum of Art — always also hoped to attract commercial projects.

“I want Museum Tower to be very successful — I want people living in that building and loving to live in that building,” said Deedie Rose, a Dallas arts philanthropist who was active in establishing the arts district. “But the Nasher has to be protected.”

The sculpture center was created by Raymond D. Nasher, a real estate developer and banker who, along with his wife, Patsy, amassed one of the world’s leading collections of Modern and contemporary sculpture. Although several cities courted the collection, Mr. Nasher, who died in 2007, decided to build and personally finance the $70 million center in Dallas, where he made his fortune.

“He gave a tremendous gift to the city,” Mayor Rawlings said, “a gift we’ve got to be good stewards of.”

Complicating matters is that the $200 million Museum Tower is owned by the Dallas Police & Fire Pension System, on whose board sit four members of the City Council.

Mayor Rawlings stepped in after the two sides failed to come to terms on their own. He appointed a “facilitator,” Tom Luce, a prominent local lawyer who served under President George W. Bush as an assistant secretary of education. The first meeting with Mr. Luce is this month.

Construction of the tower continues. And the Nasher had to remove Picasso’s “Nude Man and Woman,” an oil on canvas, to get it out of dangerous direct sunlight. (The artist James Turrell also insisted that the Nasher shut down his installation “Tending, (Blue)” because its roof aperture was meant to reveal open sky, not a skyscraper.)

Vel Hawes, a Dallas architect who served as Mr. Nasher’s representative for the design and construction of the museum, said the founder would not be happy. “I assure you,” Mr. Hawes said, “he’s not resting easy in his grave right now.”

"Becoming Jackson Pollock: Men of Fire" @ Hood Museum By Lee Rosenbaum - WSJ.com

"Mural" (1943) by Jackson Pollock

Men of Fire: José Clemente Orozco and Jackson Pollock
Hood Museum of Art

Through Jun 17

Then travels to the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center.

Hanover, N.H.

The late Kirk Varnedoe, chief curator at the Museum of Modern Art, was a tough act to follow. Probably because no one can top his definitive 1998 Jackson Pollock retrospective, we have no major show in the U.S. this year to commemorate the centenary of that towering Abstract Expressionist's birth.

But there are aspects of Pollock's work from the years preceding the famous "drip" paintings that remain underexplored. Dartmouth College's Hood Museum of Art, under its new director, Michael Taylor (former curator of modern art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art), has seized the moment by hastily assembling an absorbing dossier exhibition focusing on a crucial period in Pollock's trajectory from representational landscapes, heavily influenced by his teacher Thomas Hart Benton, to his signature abstract masterpieces that, according to popular and Hollywood legend, seemed to spring out of nowhere.

The Hood's "Men of Fire: José Clemente Orozco and Jackson Pollock," organized by Sarah Powers of the Hood with Pollock expert Helen Harrison, reveals that many of the pictorial strategies employed by Pollock in his celebrated monumental canvases of the late 1940s to early 1950s can be traced to his intensely charged easel-size paintings from the brief period, 1938-41, when this quintessentially American artist was haunted by Orozco's macabre visions of skeletons and ritual sacrifice. Pollock had seen the Mexican's murals in 1930 at Pomona College in California and, six years later, at Dartmouth. While there are plenty of pyrotechnics in the works of both artists, "Men of Fire" might have been more aptly (if less appealingly) titled "Men of Skulls and Bones."

Pollock owed his enthusiasm for the visceral impact of monumentality to Mexican muralists Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros and, above all, Orozco. In his first oversize horizontal canvas, a 20-foot-wide 1943 composition, "Mural," commissioned by his patron Peggy Guggenheim (on view at the Des Moines Art Center through July 15), Pollock was influenced not only by Orozco's larger-than-life scale but also by the swirling energy of his brushstrokes and dramatic use of black to define curving contours. Orozco's archetypal images of snakes, skulls and flames, which must have resonated with the American's Jungian sensibility, are abundantly present in Pollock's works at the Hood.

Gallery: 'Men of Fire'

2012 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. .

'Untitled (Bald Woman and Skeleton)' by Jackson Pollock

To appreciate "Men of Fire," you need to start not in Dartmouth's art museum but in its Baker Library. That's where the 24-year-old Pollock made pilgrimage in 1936 to see Orozco's 24-panel mural "The Epic of American Civilization" (1932-34), a sweeping history of the Mexican people. Its darkly symbolic and ritualistic content made a strong impression on the younger artist. Dartmouth also owns Orozco's studies for the mural, included in the Hood's show.

Nowhere is the connection between Dartmouth's mural and Pollock's work clearer than in his "Untitled (Bald Woman with Skeleton)" (c. 1938-41), acquired by the Hood six years ago. With a lumpish, crouched female at its center, it quotes the image of a skeletal ribcage and extended limb from Orozco's fiercely satiric panel "Gods of the Modern World." That work had stirred an uproar at Dartmouth over its depiction of a ghoulish cadre of skeletal professors in caps and gowns, overseeing a female skeleton as she gives birth to a skeletal baby with a mortarboard on its head (representing "stillborn knowledge").

Like many of the Pollocks in the show, "Bald Woman" is densely composed and difficult to read. Only close scrutiny can unpack the contorted anatomy of the drooping woman and the many images derived from Orozco's mural—winding serpents, orange flames and the jumble of tiny, sickly green skulls surrounding the central figure. Pollock had transmuted Orozco's politically charged imagery into psychological totems. The morbid scene is redolent with death and despair.

Pollock's use of semiabstraction and his partial concealment of representational images point ahead to the layered complexities of the drip paintings, where representation seems to disappear. The Museum of Modern Art's "Flame" (c. 1934-38), for example, is a precursor to all-over abstraction, with its jagged orange, black and white slashes that represent a raging fire. Without help from the label text, you might miss the ribcage—parallel light and dark lines. Lying near the bottom of the canvas, amid the conflagration, the bones suggest that this is a sacrificial pyre.

Pollock's use of disguised and obscured representation, although later difficult to detect, persisted into his abstract masterpieces of the late '40s and early '50s. As noted in the catalog for MoMA's show, close analysis of Pollock's signature "drip" paintings (informed by Hans Namuth's famous images of Pollock at work) reveals their structural underpinnings of veiled and hidden figures.

The link between the proto-Pollocks seen at Dartmouth and the mature abstract masterpieces is the groundbreaking, ex-Peggy Guggenheim "Mural" of 1943. Designed for her apartment's entrance hall, that dazzling achievement, said to have been largely executed in one day, is not only the first but also the biggest of the mural-size Pollocks.

A frenzy of black verticals and whorls, enlivened with touches of pink, yellow and turquoise, "Mural," under sustained scrutiny, comes into focus as a cross-canvas parade of upright, abstracted figures, with outlines strongly reminiscent of the black-defined curves of the marching Aztecs' muscled flesh in the "Migration" panel that begins Dartmouth's Orozco mural. Tightly focused on the brief period when Pollock was most strongly influenced by Orozco, the show doesn't include (or illustrate) works like "Mural" that marked the next step toward Pollocks signature style. But the black swirls that animate Orozco's and Pollock's murals also figure prominently in a painting displayed at the entrance to the Hood's show, the Tate Gallery's powerful "Naked Man with Knife" (c. 1938-1940), a chaotic jumble of three fiercely grappling nudes.

Comparing the little-known Pollocks at the Hood with the paintings that later became touchstones of international veneration reveals that we might not have had the latter without the foundation laid by the former. Contradicting the myth of the sudden epiphany, Pollock's wife, Lee Krasner, once noted that there were "no sharp breaks" from the works of the pre-"drip" period to the mature masterpieces, "but rather a continuing development of the same themes and obsessions."

You can see the truth of that in Hanover.

 

New Tour at Museum Reveals All in @nytimes via Notes from the Bass Museum - George Lindemann Jr

Christo Crocker

Tour participants displaying their tan lines at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, in Sydney, as they view Robert Owens’s “Sunrise #3.”

By MARK WHITTAKER
Published: May 1, 2012

SYDNEY, Australia — The people gathering for a tour of the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia on Friday evening smiled awkwardly in the way of strangers who had to undress in front of one another. Which is what they were about to do.

Christo Crocker

Stuart Ringholt

The artist leading the tour, Stuart Ringholt, wearing scruffy black clothes and a misshapen porkpie hat, stepped forward.

“Who’s from the naturist community?” he asked.

A bunch of older, rounder men put up their hands.

“Who’s nervous?”

A dozen or so others, including this reporter, barely managed to raise their hands to half-mast. The Museum of Contemporary Art has enjoyed a surge in attendance since it reopened on March 29 after being closed for an 18-month, $56 million refurbishment, but these particular visitors would have the place all to themselves. They were here, after hours, for a tour of museum works that was itself billed as an artwork and had this as its title: “Preceded by a tour of the show by artist Stuart Ringholt, 6-8pm (the artist will be naked. Those who wish to join the tour must also be naked. Adults only).”

Mr. Ringholt, 40, is a Conceptual and performance artist who was recently named one of Australia’s 10 “artists who matter” in the Australian newspaper The Age. He has led tours of this kind in three other Australian cities in the last year, and was able to offer some insight about the experience to come.

“It’s very beautiful,” he told his audience. “We are sexualized with our clothes on — with them off, we are not.”

Not everyone, he explained, was going to be naked. “A couple of M.C.A. staff members will come with us for security reasons, but they will be clothed,” he said. But many employees, he added, “if they have to do the tour two days in a row, often take off their clothes on the second day because they feel very uncomfortable being clothed around so much flesh.” He apologized that security cameras would be recording the group, joking that “the footage will be kept for three months, for the enjoyment of the security staff.”

Mr. Ringholt then led the 32 men and 16 women into a brightly lighted conference room, where the clothes just seemed to fall away.

“Everybody seemed to concentrate very much on what they were doing,” Lance Barton, a 57-year-old Sydney office worker making his debut as a nudist, recalled later. (“I have fantasized about it, but never done it,” he added. “Only a bit of midnight streaking by myself in the parklands around where I live.”)

The first stop on the tour was a 2007 work by the Scottish artist Katie Paterson, “Earth-Moon-Earth”: a player piano doing a version of Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata, complete with glitches picked up in the course of converting the music to Morse code, bouncing the signals off the Moon, then reconverting them to musical notes. Against this ghostly backdrop, Mr. Ringholt noted that modern museums strip back architecture, floor coverings, windows and adornments for the sake of foregrounding art, and that in the same way contemporary artists have since the 1980s taken to wearing black.

“There’s this process of reduction going on,” he said. “I asked the question of why the contemporary art community stopped at wearing black. Why didn’t they reduce further and strip back the clothing from the visitor?”

The next stop was an untitled Stephen Birch work from 2005, an installation in which Spider-Man faces off with a primitive, phallic figure. Mr. Ringholt spoke about fear, and most of the visitors agreed that their anxiety had subsided. He said that in his 20s, he was profoundly affected by experiences of extreme embarrassment, a subject now at the center of much of his work. One of these involved toilet paper hanging out of his pants as he walked on the field at an Australian football game with hundreds of people looking on.

“I was wrecked — I went home and explained it to my girlfriend, and she was killing herself laughing,” he said. “I was distraught for a whole week.”

Being a dabbler in performance, Mr. Ringholt turned shame into art. He went to Palazzo Vecchio in Florence and stood in front of a marble fountain for 20 minutes with toilet paper trailing from his trousers. He walked around for a day in Basel, Switzerland, wearing a prosthetic nose with a “gob” of fake mucus hanging from it.

“I tried to understand how fear manifests in the body and how it debilitates you,” he said. Knowing these acts of abjection were performances didn’t make them easier, he added: “It was just as bad. You get a panic attack. You get cold sweats. I realized it was the same fear I got when I rang up a woman to ask her on a date.”

Eventually, he said, he learned to conquer his fear by understanding it. He called the woman and got the date, and he took his fear workshops on the road. That led to the nude museum tours.

This tour finished with a glass of sparkling wine on an open terrace overlooking the Sydney Opera House. Asked if he had any plans to take his nude museum tours overseas, to the Metropolitan in New York, perhaps, Mr. Ringholt became animated.

“Imagine walking in there with all that armor” in that museum, he said. He loves the symbolism of masks, and a whole suit of medieval armor offered wonderful new metaphors.

As for the visitors, they seemed to be divided on the question of whether art was enhanced by viewing it naked.

“Not really,” Mr. Barton said.

But another participant, Tracey, who wouldn’t give her last name because she works for “a Christian organization,” said that “there was more focus on the art.”

“You’d think you’d turn up with all these other people without clothes and you’d be checking them out,” she said, “but I wasn’t looking at anyone.”

Afterward, as the visitors walked back to the changing room, glowing from the wine, a crowd on the street outside looked up at the parade of nakedness coming down the glassed-in stairs. But nobody in the group seemed to mind.

BRITISH INVADE NEW YORK - Randall's Island Park, New York Friday through May 7

ICON-DontMiss2

Lehmann Maupin, New York

Tony Oursler's video projection on fiberglass 'Soft 79.'

  

London's largest contemporary art fair, Frieze, has its inaugural New York edition on little Randall's Island. 182 galleries will participate; New York's Lehmann Maupin will offer Tony Oursler's video projection on fiberglass "Soft 79."

"Stealing Headlines for Art's Sake: Gilbert & George: London Pictures at Lehmann Maupin and Sonnabend Galleries" in @wsjonline

By KELLY CROW

[ICONS-GANDG]Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York

Gilbert & George's 'Dead' (2001) is at New York's Lehmann Maupin gallery.

The London-based art duo known as Gilbert & George first rose to fame in the late 1960s by donning dapper suits and treating themselves like living sculptures. It turns out that they're also petty thieves.

About seven years ago, the pair began stealing the sandwich-board-style posters that London's newspapers often use to hail their latest headlines, typically tabloid fare like "Man Dies in Human Fireball Horror." On Thursday, the artists opened a new show of their work at New York's Lehmann Maupin and Sonnabend galleries featuring headlines from all 3,712 posters they amassed. Unlike the actual newspapers, these black-and-white posters aren't for sale, but "the images and stories they conjure are amazing," said one of the artists, Gilbert Proesch.

The pair said that they would usually wait until dinnertime before canvassing the newsstands in their East London neighborhood. Then one of the artists would try to distract the shopkeeper by buying a candy bar or chewing gum while the other slipped the poster out of its wire casing. A few times they would have to wait until the owner "went to the lavatory," said George Passmore. "Then we'd tuck the poster into our coats and try to walk away, looking normal."

To transform the posters into art, the artists grouped headlines by common terms—say, murder—and arranged them into grids that sit atop eerie photographs of brick walls, tilted windows and alleyways. The artist's faces also pop up throughout the images, Big Brother-style. The portrait of society that emerges from the posters is accordingly grim. "We found very few happy terms," Mr. Proesch said. "That's the invisible part of our lives, the happy part."

"Gilbert & George: London Pictures" will be on view at the galleries through June 23.

An Extended Q&A with Gilbert & George

On Thursday, the London art duo Gilbert & George opened a new show of their work at New York's Lehmann Maupin and Sonnabend galleries featuring headlines from 3,712 newspaper posters they collected in London over a six-year period.

Recently, the artists agreed to discuss the project that became "Gilbert & George: London Pictures," up at the galleries through June 23. Here's an edited excerpt.

George: Ten years ago we took our first images of some newspaper posters for a group of pictures called the Bomb pictures, which were based on bomb attacks in Mumbai and London and around the world. Those were shown at the Tate Modern. We didn't think of them as "poster" pictures, but after a while, we realized there were so many subjects we could address—hangings, hate—in a way that could feel very different from simply using a pencil or a brush. With the posters, we could also do that.

Gilbert: All these extraordinary modern subject matters, we don't have to make them up. They were all there, and they began to create in our minds an amazing, modern, Western townscape."

George: In some pockets of the world, there's no free press, and in those areas you won't see sex stories wind up as newspaper headlines. Maybe these posters are actually a celebration of the freedoms of the press in the West.

Gilbert: We worked on it for six years. Every day we had to steal roughly three posters, and finally we had 3,712.

George: We'd steal them on the way to dinner. We always walk through East and North London to go to dinner, and it's very difficult because we didn't want to get caught.

Gilbert: The shopkeepers will stop you if they can.

George: Gil can be pretty devious. He would usually go into the shop to buy some chewing gum or a Mars bar, and then I'd use that time to steal the poster. We became very professional. We were both very good. If it was a difficult shop, we'd wait and wait until the shopkeeper went to the lavatory. Then we'd tuck them into our coats and try to walk away, looking normal. When it was raining, we'd steal the posters wet.

Gilbert: Then after six years, we said, "That's it. We have enough." So we began to divide up the pile into categories based on the words in the headlines, like "murder," "sex" or "money."

George: Those were the three words that popped up most often, and you don't have to go to university to understand why. But we were still really fascinated by our collective fascination with dying and killing. It's extraordinary. We also saw very early on the two levels these posters work on: Obviously they're used to sell newspapers, but they also dwell so heavily on shame and human disaster.

Gilbert:The images and stories these words conjure are amazing: "Man Found Hanging in Graveyard," "Pal Dies in Copycat Hanging." What a story is caught up in that combination of words.

George: They're like haikus.

Gilbert:The relentless mantra of messiness. We wound up making 292 pictures using all the posters.

George: We like that we're celebrating something – the newspaper poster – that might not exist at the end of our lifetimes. People are finding different ways of selling papers now. Online. But when we first moved to London, we had trouble losing our country backgrounds. Reading the local papers was one of the first ways we became citified. The London Evening Standard for many years employed a man who drew the poster headlines on tin every day, and then a new owner came in and they started printing them with a standard typeface. But when we started stealing these posters, we could tell whenever he went on holiday, because those days were the only ones that used a standard typeface instead of his own hand-drawn versions. Just once a year he went away.

Gilbert:Besides the shopkeepers, we might have been the only people to notice that man's holiday. Most people don't notice much. In that way, life always seems invisible—unless you slap people and make them look. That's why art stops time. It makes them stop and look. That's why we want powerful imagery in our art—we want them to remember it.

George: It's a freezing moment.

Gilbert: That's what the posters want to do too, which is why arresting words like "sex" and "death" pop up so often. We found very few happy terms. That's the invisible part of our lives, the happy part. Maybe that part can also feel fake, no?

George: Just look at the countries that only produce happy art—most of those places are totalitarian, like North Korea. The art there feels artificially happy.

A version of this article appeared April 28, 2012, on page C14 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Stealing Headlines for Art's Sake.

"Other Big-Ticket Items" - Blog #5

[COVER_INSIDE2]Sotheby's

 

Francis Bacon, 'Figure Writing Reflected in Mirror'

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Francis Bacon

'Figure Writing Reflected in Mirror'

Est: $30 million to $40 million

The work was included in the same 1977 show that featured Bacon's "Triptych, 1976," which sold in 2008 for $86.2 million at Sotheby's and currently holds the record price for a contemporary artwork at auction. The piece combines a self-portrait with an image of Bacon's ultimately suicidal muse George Dyer. Sotheby's contemporary evening sale on May 9 marks the first time the painting has been on the market in 35 years.

"Door Between Galleries Lets In an Artist's Vision - Pier Paolo Calzolari’s Art to Be Shown at Boesky and Pace" in @nytimes

Josh Haner/The New York Times

Pier Paolo Calzolari, for whom two New York galleries will be as one, in front of "Untitled."

The big-money contemporary art world has grown so large that it often seems to have achieved nation-state status, while the galleries it comprises operate like feuding medieval principalities, constantly jousting for turf (Chelsea real estate), prestige (A-list artists) and money (from collectors’ pockets).So when Marianne Boesky, who owns a gallery on West 24th Street, approached the Pace Gallery, her much more powerful back-door neighbors on West 25th Street, with a proposal for a kind of concordat, she admits that she didn’t do so with great affection.

Her ambivalence turned out to be justified: not long after, she said, Pace “poached” one of her most prominent artists, Yoshitomo Nara. “There are some very interesting and, I guess, difficult dynamics between us,” Ms. Boesky said.

But beginning on Saturday, the two galleries will breach the walls between them not only metaphorically, but physically as well, cutting a doorway through the abutting bricks to join their warehouselike spaces for the sake of a single artist who has not shown in the United States for more than 20 years.

For a month the two galleries will join forces to show a large selection of work by Pier Paolo Calzolari, a semi-reclusive 69-year-old Italian who is something of a revered mythical figure, even in Europe.

Among the original members of the Arte Povera movement of the 1960s — literally translated as “poor art,” partly because the work sometimes employed humble, even ephemeral materials — Mr. Calzolari, who trained as a painter, distinguished himself through his deep suspicion of the avant-garde’s reflexive rejection of the past.

While his work shared many similarities with that of his fellow so-called poveristi, it veered in a much more eccentric direction, bringing in elements of Renaissance painting, of the quasi-animism of St. Francis and of the Romantic movement, in pieces that looked positively florid beside much postmodern art of the era.

He has used materials like salt, running water, open flame, moss, roses, feathers, eggs and tobacco leaves. His calling card, a kind of visual obsession, is frost, which he makes by connecting small, humming refrigeration units to some of his works with a thin copper tube, causing the art to turn bright white as it freezes on the wall.

The fascination is not with ice, he has explained, but with a kind of pure whiteness he saw as a young man in Venice, when sunlight washed over marble walls along the Riva degli Schiavoni, a color he felt it would be wrong to try to replicate in paint.

“Calzolari, it seems to me, is always searching for the absolute, expressed through natural elements, like moss and lead, or natural phenomena, like fire and ice,” said James Rondeau, chairman of contemporary art at the Art Institute of Chicago, which has one of the rare Calzolari works in an American public collection. “His works so often engage in a kind of alchemy, linking him to older, European traditions.”

Mr. Calzolari exhibited actively in Europe and in the United States for more than two decades, but in the late 1980s he retreated to Fossombrone, a small town in the Marche region of central Italy, and he has spent much of the last 25 years working there, mostly out of the public eye, in what he calls a process of “getting to know myself better.”

Ms. Boesky knew of his work only slightly. But a few years ago a young artist she represents, Jay Heikes, who had seen several Calzolari pieces while working as an art handler at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, sang Mr. Calzolari’s praises. And after delving into his career, Ms. Boesky set out to track him down. Instead of sending an e-mail, she wrote him an old-fashioned letter, saying that she was determined to show his work in America again.

“A month or two later,” she recalled, “I got a letter back that said, ‘Why?’ Not ‘Do you want to talk?’ or anything like that, but just ‘Why?’ ”

Eventually, like a coy lover, he invited her to Italy. But when she and an assistant arrived at his rural studio in Fossombrone after a day and half of traveling, a studio employee came to the door to say that Mr. Calzolari was ill and would not be able to keep the appointment after all. They were about to leave when Mr. Calzolari himself, looking grave beneath a thick white beard and a shock of white hair, emerged, grudgingly let them in and spent the next nine hours talking about his work.