Picasso often finds himself at the top of record lists: In 2004, the Spanish painter's 'Boy With a Pipe' broke the world record price for an artwork at auction when it sold for $104.2 million at Sotheby's in New York.
The Picasso sale blew past an auction record set a few months earlier for the Alberto Giacometti sculpture, 'Walking Man I,' which sold for $104.3 million at Sotheby's in London in February 2010. Geneva-based billionaire Lily Safra is believed to be the purchaser of that skinny…
Norwegian painter Edvard Munch became the most expensive artist at auction when his 1895 pastel of a terrified man clutching his cheeks along an Oslo fjord, 'The Scream,' sold for $119.9 million at Sotheby's—the most ever paid for a work of art at auction. The previous world record price for an artwork at auction is Picasso's 'Nude, Green Leaves, and Bust,' which fetched $106.5 million at Christie's in 2010. Here's a look at some record and noteworthy sales -- Ellen Gamerman
Picasso's "Nude, Green Leaves, and Bust" sold at Christie's in New York for a record $106.5 million—fetching the highest price for any artwork at auction in 2010. The 1932 portrait of the painter's mistress went to an anonymous bidder.
Another notable Picasso sale: 'Dora Maar With a Cat,' a portrait of the artist's lover and muse gripping a chair's armrests with talon-like fingers while a black cat crawls near her shoulder. The work sold at Sotheby's in New York in 2006.
Published: May 31, 2012
Greene Naftali
508 West 26th Street
Chelsea
Through June 16
508 West 26th Street
Chelsea
Through June 16
Rachel Harrison’s traveling survey that originated at Bard College in 2009 was outstandingly good, and this gallery show makes a worthy, change-of-pace follow-up. As always, her sculptures combine the handmade and the ready-made, with the handmade predominating this time.
The main element in several new pieces is a lumpy, faceted column of Styrofoam and cement painted, somewhat haphazardly, in rainbow colors. In a laconically sardonic way that Ms. Harrison has made her own, these forms seem to acknowledge the reascendancy of abstraction on the art market, while suggesting that a once-vital Modernist mode is badly in need of cleaning and pepping up. This is where ready-made components come in. Several columns are supplemented by the addition of housecleaning hardware (a bucket, a carpet sweeper, a Hoover vacuum cleaner) and one has a large poison-pink plastic container of the protein supplement Syntha-6 perched on top.
Will any of this really help the Modernist enterprise? A set of 20 colored pencil drawings leaves the matter in doubt. Most quote familiar images painted by long-gone masters like de Kooning and Picasso, who were power generators in their day. But in Ms. Harrison’s drawing these old stars are dwarfed by a new one: Amy Winehouse, with her messy, anarchic energies, beyond-help passions and sculptural coiffure. To knock art with wit and persistence, as Ms. Harrison does, is to in some way be hooked on it. Such was the spirit that motivated certain artists she seems to admire, like Marcel Duchamp and Paul Thek, and that propels the seriously funny sculpture in this show. Constructive criticism is one term for it; tough love is another.
On June 19 three sculptures by Ellsworth Kelly — one in bronze, another in mahogany and a third in redwood — will occupy the soaring glass atrium of the Morgan Library & Museum, where they will be on view through Sept. 9.
“They are totems,” Mr. Kelly, who turned 89 on Thursday, said in a telephone interview. “Each one is heavy at the top and smaller on the bottom.” He explained that when he was choosing the sculptures from his studio in Spencertown, N.Y., only works that could stand on their own were eligible; none of his much-loved wall pieces would work in the Morgan’s atrium. And, “I wanted each to be of a different material,” he said.
This is the third summer for contemporary art in the atrium. Last year “The Living Word,” a floating, iridescent cloud of Chinese calligraphy by the Conceptual artist Xu Bing, was on view. Before that were three steel sculptures by Mark di Suvero.
In addition to Mr. Kelly’s sculptures there will be studies, models and drawings that illustrate his working methods and his thinking. “This is an institution dedicated to the creative process,” said William M. Griswold, director of the Morgan.
Courtesy the artists and Friends of the High Line
A rendering of the High Line billboard by Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari.
By CAROL VOGEL
Published: May 31, 2012
After his blockbuster retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York last fall, Maurizio Cattelan, who is just 51, said he was officially retiring from making art. What did that mean, exactly, coming from a jokester like Mr. Cattelan?
One answer comes in the form of a billboard, 75 by 25 feet, at 10th Avenue and West 18th Street in Chelsea, next to the High Line. It is a giant image of a woman’s 10 perfectly manicured and jeweled fingers, detached from their hands, emerging from a vibrant blue velvet background. It was unveiled on Thursday and can be seen from both the elevated pathway and the street.
The billboard is part of a High Line series that began last December with “The First $100,000 I Ever Made,” a blown-up photograph of a real $100,000 bill, the largest denomination the United States government ever printed, by the Los Angeles artist John Baldessari. This new billboard — the fourth — will be on view through June 30.
Mr. Cattelan created the image with the photographer Pierpaolo Ferrari as part of Toilet Paper, a two-year-old art magazine founded by the two men.
But what about Mr. Cattelan’s supposed retirement? “It’s not like it’s my own,” he said, laughing, about the billboard. “We worked together.” He explained that he is “in between moments,” adding, “I’m missing it, but it’s good to have distance.”
The billboard’s photograph was taken in Milan, and while Mr. Cattelan and Mr. Pierpaolo held casting sessions to find just the pair of hands to shoot, Mr. Cattelan said they happened on an old woman in a bar near the sessions and asked her to pose.
“It’s like a magic trick,” said Cecilia Alemani, director of the public art program at Friends of the High Line. “It’s almost cinematic in its format.”
Mr. Cattelan called the image “Surreal but verging on Pop,” adding that “it’s a bit gory but without the blood.”
But why show just those fingers and not the rest of the hand? “Fingers are something sexual, like penises,” he explained. “It doesn’t always have to be a cigar.”
By CAROL VOGELThe Tate in London has received a gift of nine artworks by major 20th-century British artists, including a David Hockney, a Lucian Freud and a Rachel Whiteread.
The banker and philanthropist Ian Stoutzker and his wife, Mercedes, of Salzburg, Austria, who have been generous supporters of the arts in Britain, selected the artworks from their holdings because they fill gaps in the Tate’s collection, the couple said.
“The gift was an initiative from the Stoutzkers,’’ Nicholas Serota, the director of the Tate, said at a news conference on Tuesday. “They don’t receive any tax benefit from this gift but in the current climate they were very keen to make it public because they wanted to encourage others to give works to the national collection.’’
The works will go on display together at Tate Britain in October.
May 22, 2012, 4:47 PM
By THE NEW YORK TIMESThe Museum of Fine Arts, Boston has received a bonanza from one of its longtime trustees, according to a report in The Boston Globe.
Saundra Lane has given the museum 6,000 photographs, 100 works-on-paper and 25 paintings. Included in the donation is the entire photographic estate of Charles Sheeler, which amounts to some 2,500 photographs, along with the same number of images by Edward Weston. There are also 500 photographs by Ansel Adams.
The works-on-paper are primarily by American masters, including 20 drawings and watercolors by Arthur Dove, 20 by Sheeler and seven by Stuart Davis.
The gift comes more than 20 years after Ms. Lane and her husband, William, who died in 1995, gave the institution 90 American paintings and works-on-paper by artists like Georgia O’Keeffe, Marsden Hartley and Jacob Lawrence. Many of these canvases hang in galleries named after the couple in the museum’s American wing.
Cloud City, this summer’s commission for the roof garden of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
By ROBERTA SMITH
Published: May 25, 2012
Participatory art is all the rage these days, an ever-expanding category and, increasingly, a means for museums to signal their hipness to the younger, broader audiences they so desperately want to attract. Nothing says accessible like something you interact with physically.Such art comes in many guises. It can range from relatively domestic tasks, like cooking a meal, to intricate trompe l’oeil environments that replicate or exaggerate huge chunks of reality. Somewhere in between are essentially abstract structures that sometimes involve the use of lights or mirrors, or sometimes jungle-gym-like arrangements that you navigate one way or another, walking under or through, or climbing over, perhaps pausing to sit or lie down.
Often borrowing from science, design or architecture, they might be described as fun-house formalism. It’s not all bad, but a lot of it is fairly mindless.
You could probably trace its origins partly to Richard Serra’s disorienting torqued ellipses of steel of the ’90s. Among the most extreme and certainly the least time-consuming recent iterations are Carsten Höller’s slide-through tubes. One of the most successful is Anish Kapoor’s giant, extravagantly reflective, biomorphic stainless-steel sculpture, nicknamed “The Bean,” in Millennium Park in Chicago.
Tomás Saraceno’s “Cloud City” is a particularly prominent example of fun-house formalism by virtue of its being the latest summertime commission for the roof garden of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It consists of a 28-foot-high aggregate of 16 interconnected 12- and 14-sided polyhedrons the size of small rooms that are made of polished steel and clear plexiglass. By being reflective or see-through, they greatly complicate and even discombobulate the experience of the structure and everything around it.
The Met is calling the piece site-specific, and it certainly benefits from having great views to reflect, but really it is just a big, climbable piece of plop art, amenable to most any rooftop or plaza. Clearly the museum was hoping to repeat the triumph of Mike and Doug Starn’s “Big Bambú,” a looming, walk-on, bamboo-and-bungee-cord scaffoldinglike structure that enveloped the roof two summers ago like an architectural growth.
The Saraceno lacks such an organic feel, even though it resembles an enlarged model of molecules or a cluster of shiny if quite heavy soap bubbles. Walk up and through it (15 visitors at a time, with timed tickets), and it becomes adamantly Piranesian. You find yourself sorting through the elaborate, often dizzying, interpenetrating reflections of its structure, the sky, the Met, the city, Central Park. Up becomes down; the towers and facades of Central Park West seem to change places with Fifth Avenue’s.
You see yourself, or your fellow visitors, everywhere. Sometimes the modules close in on you, like little boat cabins; sometimes they resemble open cockpits, like the one Stuart Little strapped to the back of his trusty pigeon.
It is fun up to a point, like a perception-testing science experiment or a bit of walk-in Cubism expanded to the scale of an architectural folly, but it’s not very original. Futuristic architectural complexity has been better conjured by a host of other artists, including Franz Ackermann and Sarah Sze. Olafur Eliasson has orchestrated far more effective perception-twisting, walk-in environments.
But from certain points, especially in a prowlike dead-end module near the top, you’ll also enjoy some of the best views of Central Park’s green ocean of treetops ever, or at least since “Big Bambú.” They come as an immense, calming relief from the forced and busy artifice of the piece.
Richard Perry/The New York Times
Tomás Saraceno's sculpture is open to the public on the roof of the Met.Mr. Saraceno, 39, who was born in Argentina and lives in Frankfurt, has an exhibition career barely a decade long, and a résumé that bristles with interdisciplinary collaborations. Perhaps with reason, he is widely admired as a visionary. On paper, at least, much of his work optimistically predicts a future when people will live above the earth in mutating, cloudlike cities, free of the tensions of nationalism.
In exhibitions, he often gives viewers a further taste of this vision with a variety of immense, ingeniously engineered, suspended spheres. Made of clear plastic, anchored by black elastic cords or flexible geodesic networks of cables, they can often be (gingerly) inhabited — walked through, sat in or lain on. They look astounding, hovering above the big halls that museums increasingly design to house such spectacles, and suggest a playful generosity of spirit, but they also resemble big, pillowy, transparent trampolines.
Even so, his best efforts may fit more easily into the realm of scientific or technical feats than into that of art. In 2010, with the help of a sizable team of scientists, specialized photographers and computer programmers, he built “14 Billions,” supposedly the first three-dimensional model of a black widow spider’s web — a greatly enlarged, walk-in version made with black elastic cord that was exhibited in Sweden and Britain. In photographs it looks for all the world like a crazed piece of fiber art; learning its inspiration makes it seem more appropriate to a natural history museum.
The previous year Mr. Saraceno filled the premier gallery of the 2009 Venice Biennale with an immersive installation of lacy, tethered polygonal orbs of black elastic that suggested transparent brains, exploding stars and dandelion puffballs. Its very title — “Galaxy Forming Along Filaments, Like Droplets Along the Strands of a Spider’s Web” — pinpoints the seamless slide from macro- to microcosmic that characterizes many of Mr. Saraceno’s efforts. It also evokes the view among some physicists that the structures of spider webs hold clues to the origins of the universe, further evidence of the interdisciplinary usefulness of his pieces.
It can be interesting to read about Mr. Saraceno’s art, especially the incredible effort involved in realizing it, but as you read quotations from his highly knowledgeable, skilled, enthusiastic collaborators, the works also assume a too-big-to-fail aspect. Too many people enjoy working on, bouncing on and navigating these things. They must be good.
But the cloud of admiring discussion is largely tangential to the congenial, rather ordinary structure on the Met’s roof, which is there to be considered as a work of environmental sculpture, not a hypothesis about the future or the nature of the universe.
Buzzy, kaleidoscopic effects aside, “Cloud City” is weak in the here and now: slightly creaky, devoid of any feeling for materials or sense of craft. To be fair, it departs from Mr. Saraceno’s prevailing use of pliable plastic and the cocoonlike softness this material permits; he doesn’t seem as adept, yet, with rigidity and metal.
He has tried to soften the brittleness of “Cloud City” and to complicate its optics by stringing some of the modules with black-cord polygons similar to those that figured in his Venice piece. But these seem little more than decorative afterthoughts, Darth Vader versions of the big white snowflake that hangs every Christmas above Fifth Avenue and 57th Street.
The recurring mantra about Mr. Saraceno’s work is that it combines architecture, art and science. It does, but unequally: Art is the loser, the part he has thought through and connected to the least.
The natural world is implicitly, elaborately, endlessly interesting as is, without one iota of human intervention. Nature and the built environment affect and shape everyday life in myriad, unavoidable ways. His work underscores these truisms: nature as an endless source of inspiration, human need as a constant prod to innovation. But on the roof of the Met, at least, it largely skirts the challenges of transformation and originality that might make it of more lasting interest as art.
“Tomás Saraceno on the Roof: Cloud City” is on view through Nov. 4 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org.
via nytimes.com