Displaying items by tag: clyfford still

The Denver Art Museum (DAM) announced today that it will have a major exhibition about female Abstract Expressionists in summer 2016. Titled “Women of Abstract Expressionism,” the show will feature more than 50 works by 12 artists. Following its run at the DAM, the show will travel to the Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina, and the Palm Springs Art Museum in California.

Abstract Expressionism has long been defined by its male adherents—including Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, Franz Kline, and Barnett Newman, among others—whose fame greatly exceeds the women in the movement.

A century after his birth, on Jan. 24, 1915, Robert Motherwell occupies a middle rung on the reputation ladder of Abstract Expressionists. The names Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still and possibly others would now come sooner to many people’s minds on the topic.

But through the long arc and productive prime of his career, Motherwell was as important as anyone in shaping the transformative artistic mode of the mid-20th century.

The Asheville Art Museum will present “What You See Is What You See: American Abstraction After 1950,” on view Nov. 28-March 15. This vivid and dynamic exhibition considers the phases of color field painting from the 1950s through the 1980s.

Beginning in the late 1950s, art critic Clement Greenberg noted a tendency toward all-over color — or color field — in the works of several of the first generation abstract expressionists such as Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still.

Scratch an art dealer, and you’ll often find a curator. That’s the case with Craig Starr, who seems to operate in the secondary art market mainly to support his persistent curatorial itch. For nearly a decade, he has been mounting sharp-focus shows of historical works by prominent American postwar artists in his jewel-box gallery on the Upper East Side.

Mr. Starr’s latest effort — one of his best — is “Robert Rauschenberg: The Fulton Street Studio, 1953-54.” With 15 works borrowed from private collections, this exhibition delves into a formative period in the development of Rauschenberg (1925-2008), when he was in his late 20s and moving fast. It presents his sensibility in a nutshell, his broad aesthetic range, omnivorous curiosity, playfulness and intuitive elegance.

Disgraced gallery Knoedler & Co. is at the center of two new lawsuits. The first suit was filed by Los Angeles’ Manny Silverman Gallery and Richard Feigen’s gallery in New York. The two dealers are asking to be repaid $1,050,000 for a forged Clyfford Still painting that was sold in a three-way transaction with Knoedler in 2000. The second suit was filed by Los Angeles collectors Martin and Sharleen Cohen, who bought two works, one by Mark Rothko and another by Willem de Kooning, both of which turned out to be forgeries. The couple is demanding to be repaid $475,000 plus interest for the two paintings.

All of the works were part of a trove of fake paintings supplied to Knoedler & Co. by Long Island art dealer, Glafira Rosales. Knoedler & Co. has been involved in over a dozen lawsuits as a result of the forged artworks it received from Rosales.

Sotheby’s evening sale of Contemporary Art, which took place on Tuesday, May 14, 2013 in New York, saw a number of exceptional works sell for record-breaking prices. The night’s top lot was Barnett Newman’s (1905-1970) Onement VI, an iconic Abstract Expressionist painting, which garnered $43.8 million. The work exceeded its high estimate of $40 million and set an auction record for Newman. The dark blue canvas, which measures 8 ½ feet x 10 feet and is sliced down the middle by a pale blue streak, is a remarkable example of Newman’s association with abstract expressionism as well as color field painting.

Other highlights from the sale included Gerhard Richter’s (b. 1932) oil painting of Milan’s cathedral square, Domplatz, Mailand (estimate: $30 million-$40 million), which sold for $37.1 million and set a record for Richter as well as for any living artist at auction; a sculpture by Yves Klein (1928-1962), which sold for $22 million and broke the record for the artist at auction; and Clyfford Still’s (1904-1980) PH-12, which was estimated to sell for $16 million to $20 million and ended up going for $20.9 million.

Although there were a number of high-profile sales, the auction was not without some failures. Francis Bacon’s (1909-1992) Study for Portrait of P.L., which was expected to bring $30 million $40 million didn’t find a buyer. Two works by Jeff Koons (b. 1955) also failed to sell.

The auction happenings will continue in New York at Christie’s, where Post-War and Contemporary sales will be held through the afternoon of Thursday, May 16, 2013.

Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Evening Sale on May 14, 2013 in New York will include one of the most important paintings by Barnett Newman (1905-1970) ever to appear at auction. Onement VI (1953) is a seminal work by the American artist and one of the most significant pieces from the Abstract Expressionist movement. The painting, which measures 8 ½ feet x 10 feet, is expected to garner anywhere from $30 million to $40 million. The canvas will go on view at Sotheby’s on May 3, 2013 until it appears at auction later that month.

Newman, one of the foremost artists of the 20^th century, was a pioneer of color field painting as well as a key Abstract Expressionist. As an exhibitions organizer at the Manhattan-based Betty Parsons Gallery in the 1940s, Newman played a fundamental role in the careers of many of his friends including Mark Rothko (1903-1970), Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), and Clyfford Still (1904-1980).  

Onement VI, a massive canvas consumed by rich blue paint and sliced down the middle by a light blue streak, was a gift from the artist to his wife, Annalee. The painting remained in her collection for almost a decade and was acquired in 1961 by the well-known collectors Frederick and Marcia Weisman. That same year the painting appeared in an exhibition titled Abstract Expressionists Imagists at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum that helped define the modern art movement.

Onement VI is the final work in a series of six paintings by Newman. Four of the paintings are held in major art institutions including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, CT, and the Allen Memorial Art Museum in Oberlin, OH. Onement V currently resides in a private collection.

When was the last time an expert from a top auction house dispensed with longtime allegiances and joined forces with someone from the enemy camp? In the fiercely competitive world of Sotheby’s and Christie’s, such an occurrence is rarer than a prized Vermeer.

But for months now there have been rumors that a new powerhouse partnership was in the works, one that would replace Giraud, Pissarro, Ségalot, the superprivate superdealer that pulled off so many big transactions and whose business began winding down soon after Franck Giraud, one of its partners, announced that he was leaving to “explore options inside the art world and out.”

The players making up this new venture, however, had been something of a guessing game.