Displaying items by tag: Modern Art

Now that the first week of the big spring auctions is over, Sotheby’s is wasting no time touting its sales in London next month, hanging highlights in its York Avenue galleries for collectors to peruse during the contemporary-art previews this weekend.

Knowing that today’s appetite for prime abstract paintings appears boundless, Sotheby’s expects a 1927 Mondrian that has not been on the market since the 1950s to be a star of its June 23 auction. This stark canvas, “Composition With Red, Blue and Grey,” was first owned by Harry Holtzman, an artist who helped found the American Abstract Artists Group, an influential organization that espoused the principles of European Modernism, and who was a friend of Mondrian’s and an expert on his work.

Simon Shaw, Co-Head of Sotheby’s Worldwide Impressionist & Modern Art Department, commented: “A key factor in tonight’s successes was our longstanding relationships with top collectors, and our partnership with them throughout the sale process – the three works from the Private American Collection that led our sale, Monet’s Le Pont japonais, and more were non-competitive consignments. It was a privilege to offer Picasso’s spectacular Le Sauvetage exactly a decade after we last auctioned it in New York, and we are thrilled to see its price double in that time. We are pleased to once again deliver exceptional results on behalf of a great American institution, with Monet’s Sur la Falaise à Pourville selling for well over its high estimate to benefit the Acquisitions Fund of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.”

The Association of Art Museum Curators (AAMC) announced today its annual Awards for Excellence in the categories of museum Catalogues, Articles/Essays, and Exhibitions. All AAMC members are eligible for nomination. The AAMC Prize Committee and member juror groups determine awards prior to the AAMC’s Annual Conference and Meeting in May. New to this year’s vetting process, the categories of Awards for Exhibitions and Catalogues were subdivided based on the operating budgets of the members’ museums.

"We were impressed by the quality and depth of the nominations,” says Judith Pineiro, Executive Director of the Association of Art Museum Curators, "It is wonderful that our new selection process allowed for celebrating the outstanding work of so many curators.”

Beyond the fields of lavender and honey-colored farmhouses, the land that launched a thousand fantasies is also home to another kind of delight: dazzling works of art and architecture by some of the great masters of modernism, from Picasso to Le Corbusier. Gully Wells goes on a treasure hunt.

One summer when I was a young and indolent teenager, I was packed off by my mother to stay for a week or so with some old family friends who lived in a farmhouse in the hills above Antibes on the French Riviera. Monsieur, tall with a wild bush of white hair, was a painter, and Madame, petite with olive-black eyes, was a sculptor.

n a piece for the New Yorker in 2000, the art critic Peter Schjeldahl asked: “Why does everybody love Sol LeWitt?” It’s a question that’s also at the heart of a new documentary about the artist that’s opening at Film Forum on May 7. LeWitt may be the chilliest member of a group of ice-cold artists associated with the male dominated first wave of minimalism, who rejected strict interpretation of their work and whose contradictions were expertly critiqued in Rachel Kushner’s latest novel, “The Flamethrowers”:

“Minimalism is a language, and even having gone to art school, I barely spoke it myself,” the main character says of her boyfriend’s work. “I knew the basic idea, that the objects were not meant to refer to anything but what they were, there in the room. Except that this was not really true, because they referred to a discourse […] and if you didn’t know the discourse, you couldn’t take them for what they were, or were meant to be. You were simply confused.”

Christie’s Evening Sale of Impressionist and Modern Art on Tuesday, May 6, realized $285,879,000 (£168,668,610/€205,832,880), selling 89% by lot and 96% by value. This marks the highest total for Christie’s New York in this category since May 2010. Of the 53 works offered, 9 lots sold for over $10 million, 18 for over $5 million, and 43 for over $1 million. The sale was led by works from distinguished private collections, including Monet’s Nymphéas from The Clark Family Treasures and Picasso’s Portrait de femme (Dora Maar) from the Viktor and Marianne Langen Collection. Two additional sales, Works on Paper and the Day sale, will complete the series on Wednesday, May 7.

Brooke Lampley, Head of Department, Impressionist & Modern Art, Christie’s New York, commented, “Our strong performance tonight, the highest since May of 2010, is a testament to the continued strength of the global market for Impressionist and Modern works of art. Bidders from 36 countries competed in our sale tonight for a wide variety of works, from Monet’s classic Nymphéas and Modigliani’s engaging portrait of a red-haired man, to bold, modern works by Picasso and Kandinsky. Our global team has worked tirelessly to source the best works available this season, many of which had never been offered at auction, including star lots from the leading collections of the season: the Clark Family Treasures, the Estate of Edgar M. Bronfman and the Viktor and Marianne Langen Collection.”

Winslow Homers in the shadow of a defunct Beech-Nut baby food plant. A Rembrandt, Picasso, Rubens and Renoir up the hill from a paper mill. The founder of the Hudson River School vying for attention amid baseball memorabilia and old farm machinery.

There are plenty of treasures to be found among the collections of lesser-known, off-the-beaten-path art museums dotting upstate New York. But they're well worth the trek for anyone looking for great art in unexpected places, whether it's the rolling, bucolic countryside typical of many areas or the industrial grittiness of riverside mill towns.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), which stood by Steven A. Cohen last year as his SAC Capital Advisors LP bore the brunt of a massive insider trading probe, has come to the billionaire’s aid again.

The top prime broker to the former hedge-fund firm, Goldman Sachs is making a personal loan to Cohen for the first time, according to a regulatory filing, joining the list of banks that have provided SAC’s founder with credit lines backed by his $1 billion art collection. Like Citigroup Inc. (C), JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Bank of America Corp., New York-based Goldman Sachs is making the loan through its private bank as part of an effort to expand its business catering to ultra-wealthy individuals.

"Degenerate Art" is the term Adolf Hitler and his henchmen used to describe works they simply did not like. The Nazis are long gone. Much of the art they denounced has survived, and is now on view. Here's Erin Moriarty of "48 Hours":

In the cultural capital that was Berlin in the early 1930s, art and politics often clashed, with modern artists like George Grosz leading the charge.

"Grosz was fearless, and whether it was his art or politics, he spoke his mind," said Jonathan Petropoulos, a history professor at Claremont McKenna College in California. "He was probably the most famous Communist artist in Germany at the time, and he used his art as a weapon."

Auction houses expect to sell as much as $2.3 billion of art in New York this month as billionaires from China to Brazil compete for trophy works by Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso and Jeff Koons in a surging market.

Two weeks of semiannual sales of Impressionist, modern, postwar and contemporary art at Christie’s, Sotheby’s (BID) and Phillips begin May 6, with online bidding as early as today. Their combined sales target represents a 77 percent increase from estimates for a similar round of auctions a year ago.