The George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

"Looking Out for No. 1" @wsj

By KELLY CROW

After a summer marked by uneven sales, Sotheby's in New York plans to anchor its major November auctions with a pair of brand-name stalwarts: Mark Rothko and Pablo Picasso.

In a season of art-market uncertainty, Sotheby's plans to anchor its big fall auction series in New York this November with a pair of brand-name stalwarts: Mark Rothko and Pablo Picasso. Kelly Crow has details on Lunch Break.

John Marion, a former Sotheby's president, and his wife, Anne, a Texas oil heiress and major collector of modern art, have enlisted the auction house to help them sell Mark Rothko's "No. 1 (Royal Red and Blue)," a 1954 abstract that depicts a trio of fuzzy-edged red, pink and blue rectangles stacked atop a rose background.

Sotheby's
Rothko's 'No. 1' will kick off Sotheby's November auctions in New York

Sotheby's didn't name the sellers but dealers say the work is widely known to belong to the Marions. The house expects to sell it Nov. 13 for $35 million to $50 million.

Rothko is a master of Abstract Expressionism, and his midcentury meditations on color and modernism have sold well in good times and bad: At the market's last peak in 2007, one of his 1950 abstracts sold at Sotheby's for $72.8 million. Four months ago, Christie's in New York topped that record-setting price by getting $86.8 million for a 1961 Rothko, "Orange, Red, Yellow." That work was only priced to sell for up to $45 million.

Rothko created more than 800 paintings before he died in 1970. Today, the size and color of these pieces play a big role in his asking prices—the bigger and more sunset-colored the painting, the better, dealers say. The example Sotheby's is offering stands 9½ feet tall, eclipsing the current record holder by nearly 2 feet. The jewel-toned hues in "No. 1" are also saturated rather than pale. From a distance, it evokes a distilled seascape.

Sotheby's
Picasso's 'Woman at the Window (Marie-Thérèse)'

In a realm where museum appearances can also alter a work's value, "No. 1" can claim to be one of eight pieces created for "Recent Paintings by Mark Rothko," a major solo show at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1954. Other examples from that same exhibit have since changed hands at auction for as much as $17.3 million apiece. Several more now belong to museums, such as the Phillips Collection in Washington and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

Abstract Expressionists like Rothko and Clyfford Still are seeing higher prices now in part because of renewed bidding from U.S. collectors, said Sotheby's specialist Tobias Meyer. Before the recession, Mr. Meyer said, these collectors mostly sat on the sidelines, unable to compete with bidders from Russia and the Middle East. But in the past year, Americans have returned. "The sticker shock is gone," he said.

Sotheby's said a highlight of its Nov. 5 sale of Impressionist and modern art will be Picasso's rainbow-hued portrait of the artist's mistress, "Woman at the Window (Marie-Thérèse)." The 1936 work, which is priced to sell for $15 million to $20 million, remained with the artist until his death in 1973. Its current seller, who remains anonymous, has owned it for the past three decades, Sotheby's said.

Write to Kelly Crow at kelly.crow@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared September 21, 2012, on page D5 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Looking Out for 'No. 1'.

via online.wsj.com

"The Seductive Lure of Abstraction" in @wsj

By TERRY TEACHOUT
June 7, 2012, 5:52 p.m. ET

One of the most satisfying museum retrospectives ever devoted to an American artist is now traveling from coast to coast. "Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series," which closed at California's Orange County Museum of Art two weeks ago and will reopen on June 30 at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, consists of about 75 abstract paintings and works on paper made by Mr. Diebenkorn between 1967 and 1987, the years when he worked out of a studio in the Ocean Park neighborhood of Santa Monica, Calif. While the works in this series mostly conform to the same general pattern—they appear to suggest aerial views of the California landscape, seen through the fracturing prism of cubism—they are so richly and resourcefully varied that no two could be mistaken for one another.

Colin Young-Wolff

Visitors take in 'Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series' at the Orange County Museum of Art.

Part of what makes this series so fascinating is that Mr. Diebenkorn, who died in 1993, waged a lifelong "battle" with abstraction. He started out as a gifted Abstract Expressionist painter. In 1955 he suddenly embraced representation, turning out dozens of figurative paintings that translate the language of Matisse into a wholly personal, semiabstract style. Then, in the Ocean Park series, he made a decisive return to total abstraction, in the process creating the most original works of his career.

To chart Mr. Diebenkorn's stylistic development is to be reminded of the near-overwhelming power of the idea of abstraction in the 20th century. It was even felt by artists who, like Pierre Bonnard and Fairfield Porter, never produced an abstract painting in their lives, but were nonetheless influenced by the way in which practitioners of abstraction created what Mr. Diebenkorn called "invented landscapes," nonobjective images that evoked the world of tangible reality while steering clear of literal representation.

The idea of abstraction is so central to the history of modern art that it left its mark on the work of nonvisual artists as well. George Balanchine, for example, is best remembered for the many "plotless" ballets that he made to the music of Igor Stravinsky. The Russian-born choreographer never used the word "abstract" to describe them. "Dancer is not a color," he said. "Dancer is a person." But to look at a dance like "Stravinsky Violin Concerto," in which still-recognizable human relationships are stripped of all literal meaning, is to suspect that Balanchine saw in his youth at least some of the innovative canvases in which Vasily Kandinsky, his fellow countryman, dispensed with the pictorial restrictions of figurative art to become the first abstract painter.

Just as Kandinsky turned his back on figuration, so did the atonal composers of the early 20th century, led by Arnold Schoenberg, abandon tonal harmony, the fundamental ordering principle on which all Western classical music had previously been based. In a tonal composition, harmonic movement is the "plot" that propels the listener through time. Schoenberg, by contrast, sought to express his inmost feelings in a raw, unmediated way instead of using large-scale tonal architecture to shape them into conventionally coherent structures. "One must express oneself!" he told Kandinsky in 1911. "Express oneself directly! Not one's taste, or one's upbringing, or one's intelligence, knowledge or skill. Not all these acquired characteristics, but that which is inborn, instinctive."

You can also see the mark of abstraction on a fair amount of 20th-century literature—and not just the avowedly experimental writings of James Joyce or Gertrude Stein, either. Countless modern writers have been influenced by Anton Chekhov's short stories and plays, which renounce plot-based structure, concentrating instead on the quasiabstract sketching of character and mood. This approach long ago became the basis for the vast majority of short stories published in the New Yorker. Somerset Maugham, a staunch traditionalist who believed in the iron necessity of plot, liked to tease younger writers who embraced the magazine's famously ambiguous house style: "Ah, yes, those wonderful New Yorker stories which always end when the hero goes away, but he doesn't really go away, does he?"

But Maugham's sly quip also reminds us that nonvisual "abstraction," for all its historical significance, has never become truly popular with mass audiences—and neither, for that matter, has visual abstraction. Though it has no shortage of devotees, most people are still more comfortable looking at paintings with a subject, just as they prefer novels and plays with complicated plots and four-movement symphonies with familiar harmonies, and my guess is that they probably always will.

Yet despite what seems to be an innate preference for more or less literal representation of the visible world, the abstract idea remains to this day both seductive and perennially relevant. Why? Because the best abstract art has the power to cut through the rigid conventions of direct representation and externalize interior essences—to show us things not as they look, but as they are. Balanchine may have understood this better than anybody. "We choreographers get our fingertips on that world everyone else is afraid of, where there are no words for things," he told Jerome Robbins. He knew that a wordless glance across a near-empty stage, or a splash of color in the right place on a canvas, can sometimes say more than…well, a thousand words.

—Mr. Teachout, the Journal's drama critic, writes "Sightings" every other Friday. He is the author of "Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong." Write to him at tteachout@wsj.com.

Great artist passes away - "Helen Frankenthaler, Abstract Painter, Dies at 83" @nytimes #art #frankenthaler

Helen Frankenthaler, the lyrically abstract painter whose technique of staining pigment into raw canvas helped shape an influential art movement in the mid-20th century and who became one of the most admired artists of her generation, died on Tuesday at her home in Darien, Conn. She was 83.

Her longtime assistant, Maureen St. Onge, said Ms. Frankenthaler died after a long illness but gave no other details.

via nytimes.com

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"Looking Out for No. 1" @wsj

By KELLY CROW

"The Seductive Lure of Abstraction" in @wsj

Great artist passes away - "Helen Frankenthaler, Abstract Painter, Dies at 83" @nytimes #art #frankenthaler