Displaying items by tag: Abstract

Between 2010 and 2013, 100 American masterworks from the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. traveled to museums in Italy, Spain, Japan, Tennessee, Texas, and Florida. The exhibition earned rave reviews and was seen by more than 30,000 people. The Phillips Collection is currently hosting an expanded version of this hit show, titled “Made in the USA: American Masters from the Phillips Collection, 1850-1970.”

The exhibition is the most comprehensive presentation of the museum’s American art collection undertaken in nearly 40 years. “Made in the USA” presents over 200 works from the museum’s holdings including seascapes, city scenes, abstract canvases, and portraits. The exhibition is organized chronologically, beginning with American art from the late 19th century and ending with works from the postwar years. “Made in the USA” includes paintings, drawings, and etchings by Thomas Eakins, Rockwell Kent, Edward Hopper, John Marin, Arthur Dove, and Willem de Kooning.

The Phillips Collection, which was founded in 1921 by Duncan Phillips, was the first museum in the United States dedicated to American art. Over the course of 50 years, Phillips built a collection of nearly 2,000 pieces of modern art of which 1,400 were American.

“Made in the USA” will be on view at the Phillips Collection through August 31.

Francis Bacon’s ‘Portrait of George Dyer Talking’ sold for $70 million at Christie’s evening auction of Post-War and Contemporary Art on February 13 in London. The painting, which was the sale’s top lot and achieved the highest price ever paid at auction for a single panel by the artist, was expected to fetch around $49 million. Bacon’s triptych of Lucian Freud, which sold for $142 million at Christie’s in New York in November 2013, remains the most expensive work by the artist ever sold at auction.

The 6’ by 6’ canvas depicting Bacon’s lover, George Dyer, was featured in the artist’s monumental retrospective at Paris’ Grand Palais in 1971. The exhibition opened just two days after Dyer was found dead in a French hotel room due to an alcohol and drug overdose. Despite their famously tumultuous relationship, Bacon painted portraits of Dyer almost obsessively both before and after his death.

The sale at Christie’s garnered $206,158,720 -- the second highest total for a European auction of Post-War and Contemporary art in history -- and sold 83% by lot and 95% by value. Other highlights included Gerhard Richter’s ‘Abstraktes Bild,’ one of the artist’s finest abstract works to appear at auction, which sold for $32.5 million; a sculpture by Jeff Koons titled ‘Cracked Egg (Magenta),’ which fetched $23.4 million; and Damien Hirst’s spot painting of Mickey Mouse titled ‘Mickey,’ which sold for $1.5 million.     

The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, MA will unveil its updated, 140-acre campus on July 4, 2014. The museum’s decade-long expansion plan is the most significant transformation the institution has undergone since opening in 1955.

The renovations were spearheaded by three different architects -- Japan’s Tadao Ando Architects designed the new, 44,000-square-foot Visitor Center; New York’s Selldorf Architects transformed the original Museum Building as well as the Manton Research Center; and Massachusetts-based firm, Reed Hilderband, updated the Clark’s landscape and added a dramatic, one-acre reflecting pool. The renovation added over 16,000-square-feet of gallery space to the museum, allowing the Clark to exhibit more of its remarkable collection, which includes Old Master paintings, Impressionist masterpieces, and fine British and American silver.

When the Clark reopens this summer, the museum will present four inaugural exhibitions and the reinstallation of its collections. The exhibitions include ‘Make It New: Abstract Paintings from the National Gallery of Art, 1950–1975,’ ‘Cast for Eternity: Ancient Ritual Bronzes from the Shanghai Museum,’ ‘Raw Color: The Circles of David Smith,’ and ‘Photography and Discovery.’

In June 2013, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice launched a multi-phase conservation study of paintings by Jackson Pollock. The works, which date from 1942 to 1947, had been acquired directly by art dealer Peggy Guggenheim through her representation of Pollock at her New York gallery, Art of this Century.

During the first phase of the project, ten paintings underwent non-invasive scientific analysis that identified pigments, paint chemistry and changes in composition. The results of this study were presented in October 2013 during a symposium organized by Italy’s Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei and the U.S. Academy of Sciences at the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in New York.

For the second phase of the endeavor, conservators will focus on ‘Alchemy,’ one of Pollock’s most celebrated paintings and one of the artist’s first all-over abstractions created in his Long Island studio. Starting this month, the canvas will undergo analytical study and treatment at the Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Florence. The painting’s surface, which is comprised of various layers of enamel, alkyd, oil paint, twine, sand and pebbles, has been dulled by dirt and grime that has accumulated over the years. The conservation efforts will help brighten the painting’s bold colors and restore its sculptural surface.

The historic Pollock project is the first ever undertaken in Italy.

On November 13, Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Evening Sale in New York realized an impressive $380,642,000 – the highest price achieved for any sale session in the auction house’s history. The 61-lot auction carried an estimate of $280.7 million to $394.1 million and saw records set for seven artists including Andy Warhol.

Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster), the last of four in a series of the artist’s paintings depicting car crashes, sold for $105.4 million, shattering Warhol’s auction record of $71.7 million. The work, which is believed to have come from a private Swiss collection, has belonged to a number of important collectors including Bruno Bischofberger, Gian Enzo Sperone, the Saatchi Collection and Thomas Ammann.

Other highlights from the auction included Gerhard Richter’s large-scale A.B. Courbet, which sold to a telephone bidder for $26.5 million; Cy Twombly’s 24-piece Poems of the Sea, which garnered $21.7 million; Willem de Kooning’s Abstract Expressionist canvas Untitled V, which realized $24.8 million; and Barnett Newman’s abstract By Twos, which sold to dealer David Zwirner for $20.6 million.

Millions of dollars worth of art was sold in London last week thanks to the Frieze art fairs. Frieze Masters, which is in its second year and presents works created before 2000, included the sale of Pablo Picasso’s Femme assise au chapeau (Acquavella Galleries) for $7 million, an abstract painting by Willem de Kooning for $8 million and two Jean-Michel Basquiat works for a combined $9.3 million.

Frieze London, which features established contemporary artists as well as promising newcomers, saw fewer big-ticket items. As the event drew to a close, Gagosian Gallery, which presented five highly anticipated works by Jeff Koons, had no confirmed sales. A sculpture by Takashi Murakami being offered by Hauser & Wirth was also still available as the fair winded down.

Frieze week also includes a number of contemporary art auctions and a number of satellite events, which added to the week’s hefty art sales.

On November 12, 2013, Christie’s New York will offer a monumental abstract painting by Mark Rothko during its Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening sale. The last time a Rothko of this magnitude was offered at auction was May 2012 when Orange, Red, Yellow sold for a record $86.6 million at Christie’s.

Untitled (No. 11) has resided in the same collection for two decades. Prior to its acquisition in 1992, the work was featured in a number of retrospectives including exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, the Neue National-Galerie in Dusseldorf, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Untitled (No. 11) is expected to garner between $25 million and $35 million.

Brett Gorvy, Chairman and International Head of Post-War & Contemporary Art at Christie’s, said, “After the auction record set in May 2012 for Orange, Red, Yellow, from the Pincus Collection, we are delighted to present Untitled (No. 11) as one of the highlights of Christie’s November evening sale. The demand for masterworks by Rothko is probably the most international amongst all the artists we sell, with strong bidding consistently from the Americas, Europe, Asia, Russia and the Middle-East. Untitled (No. 11) is remarkable for its incredible beauty, intensity of color and inner light - the very hallmarks of Rothko’s prime period. The monumental scale allows viewers to be completely enveloped by the colors and its sensations.”

Untitled (No. 11) will go on view in London before traveling to New York in November.

Colby College in Waterville, Maine will unveil its 26,000-square foot Alfond-Lunder Family Pavilion on Saturday, July 13, 2013 at an opening event for friends of the institution followed by an open house on Sunday. One of the inaugural exhibitions, The Lunder Collection: A Gift of Art to Colby College, will present over 280 works gifted to the Colby College Museum of Art by major supporters, Peter and Paula Lunder. Mr. Lunder is a life overseer of the institution while Mrs. Lunder is a life trustee of the board.

The other exhibitions that will be on view include a selection of Chinese art from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Lunder-Colville Collection; a presentation of American folk art weathervanes; paintings from the Alex Katz Foundation; a survey of abstract works by John Marin; and an exhibition exploring the design of the new pavilion, which adds 10,000 square feet of gallery space to the museum.

The Lunder Collection: A Gift of Art to Colby College, which includes works by John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt, Winslow Homer, Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keeffe, Alexander Calder and Romare Bearden will be the highlight of the museum’s opening festivities.

The Portland Museum of Art in Maine presents Shangaa: Art of Tanzania. The first major exhibition in the United States to focus on the traditional arts of Tanzania, Shangaa includes 165 objects on loan from private and public collections throughout the U.S. and Europe. While most of the works are sculptural in nature, styles range from expressionistic to abstract to refined.

“Shangaa” means “to amaze” in Swahili and that is the intent of the exhibition. Curated by Tanzanian art specialist Dr. Gary van Wyk, Shangaa includes works ranging in date from the 19^th century through today. The exhibition illustrates how Tanzanian culture uses art to channel energy, mark the passage into adulthood, and celebrate life among many other things.

Shangaa: Art of Tanzania will be on view through August 25, 2013.

A monumental mural by Ellsworth Kelly (b. 1923), an American painter and sculptor often associated with color field painting and the Minimalist movement has found a temporary home at the Barnes Foundation just outside of Philadelphia.

The Barnes, an educational art institution, is currently hosting the exhibition Sculpture on the Wall, which includes Kelly’s Sculpture for a Large Wall. Created between 1956 and 1957, the work was commissioned for the Philadelphia Transportation Building and it was the first public abstract sculpture in Philadelphia. The work was removed from the Transportation Building after it closed in 1993 and was later acquired by Ronald S. Lauder, the former chairman of the Museum of Modern Art. Lauder and his wife promptly donated the work to MoMA where it has only been exhibited twice.

Sculpture for a Large Wall, which measures over 65 feet long and 11 feet high, is accompanied by four other works from later in Kelly’s career including the geometric Red Curve (1986) and the minimalist Two Curves (2012). The sculptures will be on view at the Barnes Foundation through September 2, 2013.