Displaying items by tag: flowers

By way of Instagram and a showing in Hong Kong, Sotheby's unveiled yet another blockbuster consignment for the upcoming fall contemporary season, Andy Warhol's massive Mao, an 82-by-57-inch silkscreen executed in 1972.

The work, which is expected to realize $40 million at Sotheby's evening contemporary sale on November 11, is the earliest iteration of the cycle that marked Warhol's return to painting after a seven-year hiatus following his "Flowers" series.

The colorful, stained-glass effect decor items produced by Tiffany Studios represent some of the most beautiful and quintessential specimens of pre-war design such as the Oriental Poppy lamp, which sold for $1.1 million at Sotheby’s in New York this past May. As a painter, Louis Comfort Tiffany was fascinated with the interplay of light and color, and using opalescent glass as his canvas, created masterful renderings of nature — such as flowers or landscape scenes — and decorative geometric patterns in lampshades and leaded-glass windows that popped with color and texture.

Almost 125 years ago, after bouts of self-mutilation and hospitalization, Vincent van Gogh announced to his brother Theo his plans to embark on a series of floral paintings. The iconic Post-Impressionist painter completed almost 130 of these works in this last phase of life. But following his death, the depictions of wildly spinning flora, left behind at the Saint-Rémy asylum where van Gogh was living, were eventually split up.

This May, the Metropolitan Museum of Art will exhibit four of the riveting depictions, side by side, for the very first time. The show, titled "Van Gogh: Irises and Roses," will feature just what it states.

It has been several years since I have seen a more beautiful exhibition than “Bouquets: French Still Life From Chardin to Matisse” at the Dallas Museum of Art. Although not as packed with famous masterpieces as the Kimbell Art Museum’s current, exemplary “Faces of Impressionism,” “Bouquets” operates at the same consistently high level of quality, with major and minor artists represented in top form.

Initially, I was afraid that so many paintings of flowers in vases — nearly 70 — would overwhelm a delicate subgenre of French paintings. But the exhibition proves so interesting and the galleries build on one another so confidently that one feels refreshed by each room.

A painting by Post-Impressionist artist Henri Rousseau was stolen from Germany’s Museum Charlotte Zander on October 3rd, according to reports by the dpa. The Museum Charlotte Zander is located in the Schloss Bönningheim, in the same-named town around 40 kilometers north of Stuttgart.

The unnamed work was slipped from its frame during normal opening hours on the national holiday (German Unity Day). It is said to be worth in the realm of €50,000 ($63,500). The painting reportedly depicts a vase holding a large bouquet of flowers and was hanging in a gallery along with other works by Rousseau.

Fifty years ago, during the summer of 1964, Andy Warhol began working on silkscreen paintings of flowers, a subject that would preoccupy him for the rest of his life. When Warhol had his first solo exhibition at the prestigious Leo Castelli Gallery in New York in November 1964 it consisted entirely of Flowers. Best known for his vibrant pop imagery and searing commentary on art and popular culture, Warhol’s flower imagery reveals a softer, more intimate side of the artist. In retrospect, it is also a provocative series, appropriating a powerful symbol later identified with flower-power counterculture of the 1960s, the age of peace, love, and anti-war protest. The Flowers are the only subject that Warhol revisited throughout his entire career and in almost every medium. The artist’s floral imagery is among the quietest, most beautiful, and least studied. The Cheekwood exhibition is a rare occasion when Warhol’s artificial flower images meet the floral abundance of an actual garden. 

This exhibition traces Warhol’s engagement with floral images throughout his career, beginning with a group of his earliest commercial illustrations, drawn in the 1950s, and his creation of the Flowers series in 1964, to photographs, paintings, and screen prints through 1986 before his untimely death the following year. The development of Warhol’s career can be seen in the progression from the delicacy of the early illustrations to the boldness of the 1964 series to the tension between the beauty and banality of the photographs and prints late in his career.

The Hyde Collection in Glens Falls, NY, in association with the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, NM, has organized the first exhibition to explore Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings of Lake George. Between 1918 and the mid-1930s, O’Keeffe would spend months at her husband Alfred Stieglitz’s family estate slightly north of Lake George village. O’Keeffe’s paintings of the wooded, bucolic setting differ greatly from her well-known renderings of the sparse New Mexican landscape.

Modern Nature: Georgia O’Keeffe and Lake George presents the artist’s full swath of works created during her time at Lake George. The exhibition features 58 paintings from public and private collections and includes botanical compositions of flowers and vegetables as well as still lifes. O’Keeffe also painted a series of arboreal portraits that highlighted the variety of trees such a birches and poplars that grew in abundance around Lake George. In addition, the exhibition includes paintings of weathered barns and other structures as well as panoramic landscapes of the lake.

Modern Nature will be on view at the Hyde Collection through September 15, 2013. It will then travel to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum (October 4, 2013 – January 6, 2014) and then to San Francisco’s de Young Museum (February 8, 2014 – May 11, 2014).

The German startup, Auctionata, sold Egon Schiele’s (1890-1918) Reclining Woman (1916) for $2.3 million, breaking the record for any artwork sold as part of an online auction. The company, which is less than a year old, auctioned the watercolor on Friday, June 21, 2013 via webcast. The online auction record was previously help by Andy Warhol (1928-1987) whose Flowers series garnered $1.3 million in 2011.

Auctionata, which is helmed by Alexander Zacke, a former Ebay advisor, is planning to expand its online auction offerings to include various categories such as jewels, classic cars, wine and fine art. Along with holding weekly auctions, the company is hoping to establish an online showroom in New York City.

Auctionata currently employs around 250 people including specialists, curators and appraisers. Besides its online auction platform, the website boasts an online store where visitors can purchase antique or special items at their leisure.

After a whirlwind of auctions last week in New York, which included a historic $495 million post-war sale at Christie’s, Phillips’ Contemporary Art Evening Sale on May 16, 2013 seemed quite subdued. The boutique auction house’s sale garnered $78.6 million and sold 81% by lot and 88% by value.

The highlight of the night was Andy Warhol’s (1928-1987) Pop Art masterpiece, Four Marilyns (1962), which sold for $38.2 million. The sale confirmed that Warhol remains a powerful presence in the art market. During the auction two other Warhol works were sold -- Flowers (1964), which brought $2.4 million and Marilyn Monroe (Marilyn) (1967), which sold for upward of $2 million. Other major sales that night included Jean-Michel Basquiat’s (1960-1988) Untitled (1961), which garnered over $4 million and Roy Lichtenstein’s (1923-1997) Still Life (1972), which also sold for upward of $4 million.

Phillips has undergone a number of changes in the past year. Following the departure of Chairman Simon de Pury in December 2012, the company changed its name from Phillips de Pury & Co. to Phillips. In February 2013, the auction house revealed 10,000-square-feet of new gallery space at the company’s headquarters on Park Avenue in Manhattan. The expansion was an attempt to compete with the major auction houses such as Sotheby’s and Christie’s.