Displaying items by tag: pop art

On February 21, 2013 Lichtenstein: A Retrospective will open at the Tate Modern in London. Part of the show, which features 125 paintings and sculptures, is pop artist Roy Lichtenstein’s (1923-1997) only film, a triptych titled Three Landscapes. This will be the first time the film will be viewed in Europe; since debuting at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in 1971, the film has been exhibited once in the United States at the Whitney Museum in New York in 2011.  

The little-known film was made in 1971 during Lichtenstein’s residency at LACMA. The residency program he attended paired artists with high-tech companies in Southern California. Lichtenstein, who employed a cinematic quality in his works, was paired with Universal Film. During his time at Universal, Lichtenstein was treated to a studio tour, a visit to the set of Alfred Hitchcock’s film Topaz, and lessons in film techniques such as editing and special effects. Three Landscapes was the first and last time Lichtenstein experimented with film as a medium.

Lichtenstein: A Retrospective will be on view through May 27, 2013. Three Landscapes will be shown in the Tate’s Tanks gallery from March 9-12 and 14-24.

On a recent visit to the Andy Warhol Foundation in New York, gallerist Daniel Blau was allowed a glimpse of rare, early drawings by Andy Warhol (1928-1987) that had remained out of public view for over 20 years. The 300 drawings, which were completed in the 1950s, will be published for the first time next week.

The drawings stand in sharp contrast to Warhol’s highly recognizable pop art works and reveal a lesser-known side of the artist as a talented draughtsman. The works will be published in a book edited by Blau and are currently being exhibited at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark (on view through February 21, 2013). After another exhibition in The Netherlands, the drawings will be put up for sale, surely a welcomed addition to the highly sought after Warhol works currently on the market.

Blau has a longstanding relationship with the Andy Warhol Foundation and organized his first show of the artist’s work in 1995. He has held a number of Warhol shows since then. From Silverpoint to Silver Screen, Warhol: The 1950s Drawings, which is being published by Hirmer, will be available on January 28, 2013.  

London’s Tate Modern announced that 5.3 million patrons visited the museum in 2012, a record for the institution. In fact, the number of visitors was up a considerable 9.5 percent from the previous year.

An exhibition devoted to the work of contemporary artist Damien Hirst (b. 1965), which ran from April 4 to September 9, 2012, contributed significantly to the Tate’s record attendance. The show, which featured some of the controversial artist’s best-known works, attracted 463,000 visitors making it the most popular solo show ever organized by the museum. The Tate’s recently opened performance space, The Tanks, also contributed to the increase in patrons. The Tanks, which opened in July, is a permanent space for not only performance, but installations and video art as well.

Tate Modern, which opened in 2000, is Britain’s national museum for modern and contemporary art. Located along the Thames River in the former Bankside Power Station, the museum expects another stellar year. Exhibitions planned for 2013 include a major retrospective of the pop artist Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997) and a show devoted to Swiss-born painter Paul Klee (1879-1940).

American pop artist Andy Warhol (1928-1987) brought $380.3 million in sales in 2012, exceeding Chinese ink painter Zhang Daqian (1899-1983) as the world’s highest seller at auction. Warhol also surpassed modern master Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and Gerhard Richter (b. 1932), who holds the record for top living artist at auction.

Warhol’s all-time sales reached $2.9 billion while Picasso, who is regarded as the world’s costliest artist at auction, hit $5 billion. Picasso’s total auction sales for 2012 were down to $334.7 million from $366 million. Officials blame lack of supply for the dip in Picasso sales; while works by Picasso remain in demand, there are currently fewer exceptional pieces on the market. Daqian took an even harder hit than Picasso, slipping from $782.4 million at auction to $241.6, most likely the result of the economic and political uncertainty that pervaded China in 2012, which affected the international demand for Chinese art.

The restructuring that occurred last year knocked Daqian from first to fourth place in terms of selling power, a reflection of the increased demand for western postwar and contemporary works in the art market. A testament to contemporary art’s dominance, auctions in that category raising a record $1.1 billion in November 2012 through sales at Sotheby’s, Christie’s, and Phillips de Pury & Co.

Two months ago, Hurricane Sandy battered New York City and caused severe flooding in many art galleries, especially those located in Chelsea. Initially, the prominent firm AXA Art Insurance estimated that the damage they would be paying out totaled around $40 million. Due to the severity of the destroyed gallery spaces and damaged artworks, that number is now closer to $500 million. The hard-hit area is slowly recovering but many galleries remain closed and under construction.

One of the main contributors to the growing price tag on Sandy-related art losses is Pop artist Peter Max (b. 1937) who lost an entire collection of works on paper that had been stored in a flooded warehouse. The claim for the lost Max works was set at $300 million.

The traveling exhibition, Andy Warhol: 15 Minutes Eternal, marks the 25^th anniversary of Andy Warhol’s (1928-1987) death. The tribute to the pioneering pop artist features over 300 works including paintings, photographs, screen-prints, sculptures, and films and presents Warhol’s famous Campbell’s soup cans as well as his iconic portraits of Jackie Kennedy, Elizabeth Taylor, Marilyn Monroe, and Mao Zedong.

15 Minutes Eternal, the largest traveling exhibition of Warhol’s work to date, has already been on display in Singapore and is currently on view at the Hong Kong Museum of Art through March 31, 2013. However, a few changes will have to be made before the works appear in Beijing next year as China’s Ministry of Culture has requested that the 10 Mao paintings be left out of the Beijing leg of the tour. Created in 1972 after Richard Nixon made his historic visit to China, the Mao portraits were made by applying acrylic and silkscreen-ink to canvas and went on to become some of Warhol’s best-known works.

The 26-month Asian tour has already been a success with 175,000 people visiting the exhibition in Singapore. Officials hope that the absence of the Mao paintings will not affect attendance in Beijing. The last stop on the tour is Tokyo, where the exhibition will be on view from February 1, 2014 to May 6, 2014.

In 1961, art dealer Leo Castelli bought a painting by Roy Lichtenstein for $750. One of the founding fathers of Pop Art, this particular piece was one of Lichtenstein’s first. In 1970, when Castelli sent the painting to be cleaned by art restorer, Daniel Goldreyer, he didn’t know it would be the last anyone would see of the work for a long time.

Goldreyer soon contacted Castelli to tell him that Electric Chord had gone missing from his office. Efforts to locate the painting went on for decades. The Roy Lichtenstein Foundation even put an image of the work on its holiday greeting card in 2006 to remind people of the ongoing search. This past July, Electric Chord turned up in a storage facility in New York. Goldreyer’s widow had found the painting in a locker belonging to a former employee after her husband’s death in 2009. Ms. Goldreyer tried to sell the painting to Quinta Galeria in Colombia using an assumed name. She claimed she was selling it on behalf of a friend. The gallery decided to send the work back to New York.

Leo Castelli’s widow, Barbara, picked up Electric Chord on Tuesday, October 16^th. Valued at $4 million, she plans to hang the painting in her home.

Roy Lichtenstein (1923–1997), a key figure in the 1960s Pop Art movement, is best known for his bright, comic book-esque images. The Tate Modern hopes to shed light on Lichtenstein’s less iconic works with a retrospective that will be opening February 21, 2013 in London.

Lichtenstein: Retrospective will feature 125 paintings, sculptures, and rarely seem drawings from the artist’s career that spanned more than fifty years. Organized by Tate Modern and the Art Institute of Chicago, the Tate’s is the largest Lichtenstein show since the Guggenheim’s 1993 retrospective when the artist was still alive.

Works on view will include Lichtenstein masterpieces such as Look Mickey (1961), Whaam! (1963), and Drowning Girl (1963). The Tate’s inclusion of Lichtenstein’s early and late works will offer patrons a glimpse of the artist’s entire oeuvre. Visitors might be surprised by Lichtenstein’s early abstract expressionist paintings or his later foray into art nouveau-inspired sculptures, Chinese landscapes, and female nudes. For an artist who is associated with a very particular style, Lichtenstein led a surprisingly wide and varied career.