Displaying items by tag: New York

While Sotheby's did report record breaking sales during their second quarter and first half that ended June 30, 2012, their overall revenues have decreased from the previous year. "Our operating results reflect some tremendous successes, but also reflect the challenging global economy, a tough comparison to the best quarter in Sotheby's history a year ago," said Bill Ruprecht, Sotheby's President and Chief Executive Officer.

Sotheby's report stated that their second quarter net income was $85.4 million, a 33% decrease from 2011 and total revenues hit $303.9 million, down 18% from last year. For the six months that ended June 30th, Sotheby's reported a net income of $74.8 million, a decrease of 42%, and total revenues came in at $408.9 million, down 16% from 2011. Although there has been a slowdown in the Asian market, Ruprecht says, "art appears to remain an attracting asset for collectors and out consignment pipeline for the Autumn season is very active at the moment."

A testament to that hunch is the world record-breaking sale of Edvard Munch's The Scream. Sold for $119.9 million at the Impressionist and Modern Evening Sale in New York in May, the Evening Sale totaled $330.6 million, Sotheby's highest ever total for an Impressionist and Modern Art Worldwide Sale. It was the second highest total for a Sotheby's auction in any category.

Other big sales included one of Andy Warhol's last self-portraits and Flowers, both of which sold from the collection of the late photographer, Gunter Sachs, for $8.5 million and $5.9 million, respectively, in a May auction London. Joan Miro's Peinture (Etoile Bleue) sold for $36.9 million, a record for the artist at auction, at Sotheby's June London sale. Also highlighting the Impressionist and Modern Art sales was Pablo Picasso's late portrait, Homme Assis, which brought in $9.7 million. The June London Contemporary Art series also fared well, bringing in a total of $129.7 million. The top lot was Jean-Michel Basquiat's Warrior which sold for $8.7 million, nearly double the amount it acheived at auction five years ago.

Roy Lichtenstein painting that disappeared 42 years ago has re-emerged in a Manhattan warehouse -- and its owner is trying to make sure it doesn't pull another disappearing act.

The estimated $4 million painting by the late pop art prince, called "Electric Cord," was last seen in 1970, when owner Leo Castelli sent it out to be professionally cleaned.

Robert Henri (1865–1929) (Fig. 1) is best known as the leader of a rebellious group of artists working in New York City in the early twentieth century who came to be known as the Ashcan School, and as an important teacher who influenced the careers of an entire generation of American artists. He and his colleagues—a group that included George Luks, Maurice Prendergast, Everett Shinn, and John Sloan—championed artistic freedom from the day’s academic standards. They painted scenes from contemporary life in highly personal styles that eschewed the constraints of the popular preference for tightly detailed, highly finished works of art. Yet despite his enthusiastic support for these ideas, Henri himself painted relatively few scenes of urban life.

Contemporary art fairs have in the last decade become so routine that they must work to give visitors unexpected or memorable experiences. Think food from a trendy Brooklyn pizzeria, a talk by French philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman on Andre Malraux’s “imaginary museum,” and car rides home in BMWs playing audio works created by artists and writers such as Rick Moody.

The first New York edition of the London-based art fair Frieze, which opened Thursday and runs through Monday, offered all of the above in an unusual location: a 250,000-square-foot white tent designed by the Brooklyn firm SO-IL set up on Randall’s Island, a small land mass east of Manhattan that is home to a track and field stadium and various athletic fields.

Inside the tent, the event worked against expectations in other ways. Many of the galleries’ booths — there were about 180 — seemed less congested than the one-stop-shopping mini-emporiums of other big fairs. The buzzword for this approach is “curated,” suggesting (if not always delivering) a museum-like emphasis on quality over quantity.

Yes there were the familiar, high-impact sort of attention-getters that work so well in fairs: a bright sun of a yellow disk sculpture by Anish Kapoor that plays an optical trick, receding before your eyes, or a jacked-up and radically rebuilt low-rider (a mix of a 1987 Trabant and a 1973 Chevrolet El Camino) that artist Liz Cohen rigged to give passengers a very bumpy ride.

Other galleries resisted the art-fair overload by giving over their booths to a single artist.  David Kordansky Gallery in L.A., for instance, dedicated its main walls to a handful of abstract oil paintings by artist Jon Pestoni, whose richly layered surfaces work the territory between the aggressive markings of Gerhard Richter and the imperfect geometries of Mary Heilmann.

Gallery director Stuart Krimko said they could have squeezed in more work by more artists but decided to focus on Pestoni instead as a prologue to Pestoni's first solo show in his hometown of L.A., at the gallery in November. “There is a typical art fair experience the bling people expect,” said Krimko. “But part of doing the art fair now is challenging expectations. So we wanted to do something more serious.”

At the very least, the booth isn’t just about making sales off the wall. Krimko said the gallery sold the nine available paintings by the artist for $14,000 to $22,000, based mainly on jpegs, after announcing its representation but before the fair even opened.

The solo show idea also won over New York gallery owner Andrea Rosen, who devoted the lion’s share of her booth to new work by L.A. artist Elliott Hundley, with a sampler of other gallery artists around the corner. “Doing a one-person show as opposed to having a piece here and there, you have a chance to make a real impression,” she said.

NEW YORK, N.Y. – New York switches into high gear on Sunday, January 15, the official start of Americana Week.  Before things get too hectic, make a point of visiting “The World of Duncan Phyfe: The Arts of New York, 1800-1847,”at Hirschl & Adler Galleries through February 17.
 
Gallery president Stuart P. Feld, a longtime enthusiast of American neoclassical design, and his daughter, Elizabeth, managing director of the firm’s decorative arts department, organized this selling exhibition of more than one hundred pieces of furniture, silver, lighting, timepieces, porcelain, painting, prints and sculpture made or used in fashionable New York residences in the first decades of the nineteenth century.  Twenty more pieces once sold by Hirschl & Adler have been loaned to the display.
 
Accompanied by a 150-page illustrated catalogue, the exhibition contrasts furniture made by Duncan Phyfe (1770–1854), New York’s best known cabinetmaker, with examples by or attributed to his contemporaries, notably Charles-Honoré Lannuier, Michael Allison, Thomas Seymour, Joseph Brauwers, Thomas Constantine, J. & J.W. Meeks, Alexander Roux and Charles A. Baudoine.
 
Hirschl & Adler’s presentation serves as a pendant to “Duncan Phyfe: Master Cabinetmaker in New York,” the landmark exhibition jointly organized by Peter Kenny of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Michael Brown of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, on view in New York through May 6. Both shows illuminate Phyfe’s underappreciated middle and late periods as never before.
 
This is the fourth collaboration for Feld and Feld, who are celebrating Hirschl & Adler Galleries’ 60th anniversary.  Filling five galleries and two hallways, “The World of Duncan Phyfe” is also the first comprehensive display of decorative arts in Hirschl & Adler’s newly renovated, 13,000 square foot quarters in midtown Manhattan, on the fourth floor of the Crown Building. For that reason and many others, a visit is well worthwhile.
 
For more, visit  www.hirschlandadler.com.
 
Write to Laura Beach at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

NEW YORK, N.Y. – New York switches into high gear on Sunday, January 15, the official start of Americana Week.  Before things get too hectic, make a point of visiting “The World of Duncan Phyfe: The Arts of New York, 1800-1847,”at Hirschl & Adler Galleries through February 17.
 
Gallery president Stuart P. Feld, a longtime enthusiast of American neoclassical design, and his daughter, Elizabeth, managing director of the firm’s decorative arts department, organized this selling exhibition of more than one hundred pieces of furniture, silver, lighting, timepieces, porcelain, painting, prints and sculpture made or used in fashionable New York residences in the first decades of the nineteenth century.  Twenty more pieces once sold by Hirschl & Adler have been loaned to the display.
 
Accompanied by a 150-page illustrated catalogue, the exhibition contrasts furniture made by Duncan Phyfe (1770–1854), New York’s best known cabinetmaker, with examples by or attributed to his contemporaries, notably Charles-Honoré Lannuier, Michael Allison, Thomas Seymour, Joseph Brauwers, Thomas Constantine, J. & J.W. Meeks, Alexander Roux and Charles A. Baudoine.
 
Hirschl & Adler’s presentation serves as a pendant to “Duncan Phyfe: Master Cabinetmaker in New York,” the landmark exhibition jointly organized by Peter Kenny of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Michael Brown of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, on view in New York through May 6. Both shows illuminate Phyfe’s underappreciated middle and late periods as never before.
 
This is the fourth collaboration for Feld and Feld, who are celebrating Hirschl & Adler Galleries’ 60th anniversary.  Filling five galleries and two hallways, “The World of Duncan Phyfe” is also the first comprehensive display of decorative arts in Hirschl & Adler’s newly renovated, 13,000 square foot quarters in midtown Manhattan, on the fourth floor of the Crown Building. For that reason and many others, a visit is well worthwhile.
 
For more, visit  www.hirschlandadler.com.
 
Write to Laura Beach at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

March or May or both?

That is the key question facing galleries that want to participate in art fairs in New York next year, as a breathtaking—some might say absurd—number of art fairs vie for the attention of collectors and art dealers.

Frieze New York Comes Out Swinging

After 10 years in London, the Frieze Art Fair announced earlier this year that it was planning to start a New York edition in May 2012 on Randall’s Island—the square-mile piece of land across the East River from Spanish Harlem, which was once the headquarters of Robert Moses.

Shortly before Thanksgiving, Frieze released a formidable exhibitor list, with about 170 names, including more than 30 top-flight galleries from New York, like 303, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, David Zwirner, Friedrich Petzel, Metro Pictures and Green Naftali. High Line curator Cecilia Alemani has been hired to organize its projects and public programs.

Since some dealers had been grumbling about the fair’s ostensibly far-flung location, director Amanda Sharp and company must have been very persuasive. For one thing, they have emphasized that the island, which will be home to a “bespoke” tent designed by Brooklyn architecture firm SO-IL, is a mere 15-minute car ride from downtown Manhattan.

Armory Show Readies List, Hires Winkleman

The Armory Show—New York’s biggest contemporary art fair—is set to arrive in March, on Hudson River Piers 92 and 94. It has not yet released its list of galleries (it typically waits until January, though Lisson, Sean Kelly, Massimo de Carlo, Boesky and Victoria Miro are rumored to be on board), but it has already said it will trim last year’s total of 274 participants by about 50.

Many galleries that participated in last year’s Armory Show—among them Andrew Kreps, Marianne Boesky and Lehmann Maupin—have signed on for Frieze’s inaugural edition. How many dealers will be willing to do two New York fairs in as many months? That may depend on the prices they are offered for booths.

Meanwhile, the Armory has tapped Chelsea gallerist Edward Winkleman to curate a new section called Armory Films, which will bring a variety of filmic art to a media lounge at the fair. Mr. Winkleman has been a visible video booster for years, and last year launched a video-only art fair called Moving Image during the week of the Armory.

Is Mr. Winkleman worried about being co-opted by the larger fair? “Believe it or not,” he told us on the phone from Miami, “I think Armory and Moving Image are complementary. Last year, about half our galleries did another fair. Moving Image is an opportunity to show your video work at the same time as another fair. You do not have to darken your whole booth. You as the gallery can focus on doing the other fair.”

New York Magazine's art critic Jerry Saltz loves Gerhard Richter's paintings. A lot. So much so that on his Facebook page, the three-time Pulitzer nominee offered either $1,000 or a sex act (plus the cost of materials) to any artist who can make me a Richter that looks EXACTLY like an abstract Richter - more or less indistinguishable from the real thing. (You can sign your own name on the back of the damn thing; I just love these and want one.)...Offer: $1000.00 plus materials. I'd like a biggish one.

After several hundred comments and offers responding to his Facebook posting, Saltz further clarified his immodest proposal:

1. We agree that you will make me a Richter. 2. We agree on size and cost. 3. You make it. 4. A curator from a MAJOR NY Museum inspects it. 5. IF he/she cannot distinguish it (more or less) from real thing, then I

A. I pay you the amount of money we agreed on previously.
B. You get a bj or female equivalent.

Saltz, a judge on the Bravo television program Work of Art: The Next Great Artist, is married to New York Times senior art critic Roberta Smith, and has a reputation for being -- as behooves a critic -- outspoken, irreverent and pranksterish. He relishes discourse and uses his Facebook page as a forum for discussion, bantering and repartee.

So is this offer Saltz's way of provoking, of trolling to see what kind of a response/reaction a call for a Richter manqué will get, to subversively question and explore the value of art? Is a painting worth $18 million solely because of the artist's name and reputation? Can a $1,000 version of an artist's work by another artist inspire the same awe as an original? And wouldn't you rather spend that cash on one or two emerging artists' originals that you love, rather than ordering up a replica much like lunch delivery from the local deli?

She’s almost 90 and still living very much in the present, quietly painting every day in her West Side studio. Yet Françoise Gilot — Picasso’s muse and lover and the mother of two of his children — is about to revisit her past.

In May, John Richardson, Picasso’s biographer, together with Valentina Castellani, a director of the Gagosian Gallery, will present an exhibition that chronicles the years when Ms. Gilot and Picasso were together — from roughly 1943 through 1952 — living in Vallauris, a small hillside town near Cannes in the south of France. It will be the gallery’s fourth Picasso exhibition and will include paintings, sculptures, drawings, pottery and prints.

Ms. Gilot doesn’t mind dredging up what must seem like many lifetimes ago. “When you are old your life has different chapters,” she said the other day, standing near a colorful abstract painting perched on an easel.

“I was an artist before I ever met Picasso,” she emphatically explained. Yet those years “are very much a part of my life.”

Like other blockbuster shows that are proliferating among some of today’s most prosperous galleries, Mr. Richardson believes the exhibition will be an eye-opener because “nobody realizes the tremendous importance of Françoise to Picasso during that whole period.”

The show, which will open at Gagosian’s newly renovated Madison Avenue gallery, is poised to generate as much excitement as the other Picasso shows that Mr. Richardson has masterminded. (The first, “Picasso: Mosqueteros,” in 2009 drew more than 100,000 visitors, a figure more normally associated with a museum exhibition.)

And the show, like all the others, will be a costly undertaking that involves getting loans from museums, publishing a lavish catalog with scholarly essays and bringing in an architect to redesign the gallery. It’s a lot of work and expense. Often dealers say nothing is for sale; generally, however, one or two works are available — at the right price — making these shows profitable after all.

Larry Gagosian says he believes that either way, the headaches were worth it. “Now we get offered all kinds of Picassos,” he said. “Everything from a print worth $4,000 to, well, the sky’s the limit.”

With his network of 11 galleries around the world, Mr. Gagosian is by far the most visible of all the dealers presenting these kinds of crowd-pleasing shows. But other blue-chip galleries including Acquavella and Pace have been presenting them on and off for decades. “I’ll never forget in the early ’70s when we had a Matisse show,” William Acquavella recalled. “We had people waiting on line in the pouring rain.”

His gallery, just two blocks north of Gagosian’s Madison Avenue headquarters, is attracting crowds right now with “Georges Braque: Pioneer of Modernism,” which opened on Oct. 12. The show, which was organized by Dieter Buchhart, an Austrian curator, includes 42 paintings, many on loan from museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Tate in London. “It’s good advertising,” Mr. Acquavella said. “Braque is an amazing artist and hasn’t really gotten his due.”

Five weeks after protesters occupied a Lower Manhattan plaza to press for economic and political change, they’ve turned their attention to what they call “temples of cultural elitism,” New York’s museums.

Members of an offshoot of Occupy Wall Street calling itself Occupy Museums yesterday targeted the Museum of Modern Art and the New Museum of Contemporary Art.

They took turns reading from a statement, with the crowd repeating each line in a call-and-response system used at their Wall Street base in Zuccotti Park and in many protests.

“The Occupy Wall Street Movement will bring forth an era of new art, true experimentation outside the narrow parameters set by the market,” was the chant at one point, voiced by a crowd comprising a few dozen artists, students and passers-by outside MoMA.

Artist Dave Kearns complained about MoMA’s regular admission fee, calling $25 “an obscene amount of money,” and adding, “There should be more nights when it’s free.”

A person in a gorilla mask said he or she -- the gender wasn’t clear from the voice -- worked in a New York museum and didn’t care for its exclusionist curatorial choices.

A 34-year-old artist named Blithe Riley proposed that the group skip the Frick Collection, which was to be temple No. 2, and go directly to No. 3, the New Museum.

“Three museums might be a lot for one day,” she said.

Show of Hands

With a show of hands, the group indicated a consensus for her proposal.

“We’re going to occupy the New Museum now,” Riley said.

A couple exiting MoMA looked perplexed.

“I don’t know what they mean, ‘Occupy the New Museum?’” said Ruth Geisenheimer, 82, from Chicago.

“What do they intend to do with this museum?” asked her husband, Ed, 87.

Noah Fischer, a 34-year-old Brooklyn-based artist who devised Occupy Museums, said the group makes no demands.

“We want to use the democratic process to bring people together and learn what a society that is not about money is like,” he said in an interview.

Outside the New Museum, Fischer called it a “pyramid scheme of the 1 percent.”

“These artists are conflated with capital,” he said.