Displaying items by tag: Cy Twombly

A painting from Cy Twombly’s celebrated “blackboard” series could set a record for the artist at auction. “Untitled” (1970) is expected to fetch between $35 million and $55 million on November 12 at Christie’s in New York. Before being offered to buyers at the auction house’s Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale, the work will be exhibited in London and San Francisco.

Twombly, who is best known for his calligraphic, graffiti-like paintings, executed his “blackboard” series  between 1966 and 1971. Using contrasting lines against a light or dark background, these rhythmic works feature geometric shapes, words, letters, and numbers, calling to mind a classroom blackboard or a pupil’s notebook. With its swirling landscape of loops drawn in white crayon against a dark gray background, “Untitled” is hypnotic, entrancing the viewer with its formulaic loops.

Christie’s has announced that it will offer eleven works from Cy Twombly’s personal collection during its upcoming sale of Post-War and Contemporary Art in New York. The works, which are being offered by the Cy Twombly Foundation,  were all created between 1961 and 1967 by artists represented by the legendary Leo Castelli Gallery -- Twombly’s dealer for over four decades. The collection is expected to fetch around $15 million.

Twombly, who is best known for his calligraphic, graffiti-like paintings, collected works by his friends and contemporaries, including Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Bruce Nauman, and Claes Oldenburg.

Whitney Museum of American Art Director Adam Weinberg spoke with The Chronicle while visiting the Bay Area for the opening of "Legacy: The Emily Fisher Landau Collection," a major show at the San Jose Museum of Art of contemporary works on loan from the New York museum.

Like the Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Collection sampled in "Modernism from the National Gallery of Art" at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, the Landau Collection includes works by many names considered safe, if not already canonical: Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly, James Rosenquist, Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns and Agnes Martin.

London’s Tate Modern has received one of its “most generous gifts ever” thanks to a donation from the late American artist Cy Twombly. Twombly, who is best known for his calligraphic, graffiti-like paintings, expressed his wish to make the donation to the Tate following a major retrospective at the museum in 2008. The gift includes three large paintings, all titled “Untitled (Bacchus),” created between 2006 and 2008, and five bronze sculptures dating from the period 1979-91. The trove is worth around £50 million.

Twombly’s “Bacchus” paintings are an extension of a series of eight works created in 2005 and inspired by Homer’s “The Iliad.” The sculptures, all bronze casts of everyday objects collected by Twombly, are meant to represent classical artifacts. The bronze lends a permanence reminiscent of ancient sculpture to otherwise ephemeral objects. All of the paintings and sculptures are currently on view at the Tate Modern.

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.

The Louvre’s new outpost in Abu Dhabi, which is slated to open in December 2015, will showcase highlights from its collection during an exhibition in France in May. “Birth of a Museum” will include over 160 objects and will give visitors a glimpse of the museum’s impressive collection as well as demonstrate the project’s cultural and architectural significance.

Louvre Abu Dhabi’s collection, which includes everything from ancient to contemporary artworks, has been gradually growing since 2009. “Birth of a Museum” will present a rare Greek archaic sphinx, an Italian brooch from the 5th century AD, and paintings by Edouard Manet, Rene Magritte, Paul Gauguin, Pablo Picasso, and Cy Twombly. A similar exhibition was held in Abu Dhabi from April 22 through July 20, 2013, at a gallery on the island of Saadiyat, close to where construction for the new museum is underway.

Louvre Abu Dhabi, which was designed by the French architect Jean Nouvel, aims to be  a place of conversation between civilizations and cultures. Works on view will be drawn from French collections as well as the museum’s own holdings.

“Birth of a Museum” will be on view at the Louvre in Paris from May 2 through July 28.

The Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City is currently presenting the exhibition “Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein -- Walls.” The show includes paintings, drawings, and collages dating from the early 1970s to the 1990s, some of which have never been exhibited before.

All of the works on view feature walls as the main subject matter. The exhibition illustrates how Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein both explored space and the notion of reality versus illusion in their work. Pieces such as Johns’ “Untitled,” which features a well-known Picasso image hanging on a wooden wall, and Lichtenstein’s “Trompe L’oeil with Léger Head and Paintbrush,” which includes an image from Fernand Léger, show how both artists also played with appropriation and referentiality in their wall works.

The Castelli Gallery was founded by the pioneering art dealer Leo Castelli in 1957. The gallery quickly became the international epicenter for Pop, Minimal, and Conceptual art and exhibited works by Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Frank Stella, Andy Warhol, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Lichtenstein, and Johns. Castelli passed away in 1999 and the gallery is now directed by his wife, Barbara Bertozzi Castelli. The Castelli Gallery maintains a commitment to exhibiting the best of postwar American art.

“Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein -- Walls” will be on view at the Leo Castelli Gallery through June 27. 

The Roy Lichtenstein Foundation has announced that it will donate its remarkable Harry Shunk and Shunk-Kender Photography Collection to five major institutions -- the Getty Research Institute, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Centre Pompidou, and the Tate. The collection includes approximately 200,000 black-and-white prints, color prints, negatives, contact sheets, color transparencies, and slides.

The Foundation’s donation is unique in that it will establish a consortium among the institutions that will both receive and share the materials. The collection of photographic material was shot by the late Harry Shunk and Janos Kender, and dates from approximately 1958 to 1973. Many of the images capture notable artists such as Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Robert Rauschenberg, Joan Miro, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol, Man Ray, Barnett Newman, and Alexander Calder.

The photographs were acquired by the Foundation between 2008 and 2012, several years after Shunk’s death. The Foundation went on to preserve, catalogue and digitize the works, eventually creating a free online archive.

On January 28, 2014, the Hill Collection of Renaissance and Baroque bronzes will go on view at the Frick Collection in New York. The Frick will be the only venue for the first public exhibition of the figurative statuettes, which span the 15th through the 18th century. The Hill Collection is exceptional in that it contains a number of rare, autograph masterpieces by Italian sculptors such as Andrea Riccio, Giambologna, and Giuseppe Piamontini.

In an unexpected twist, the show will juxtapose the bronzes alongside modern masterpieces from the Hill’s collection including works by contemporary artists such as Cy Twombly and Ed Ruscha. Collectors Janine and J. Tomilson Hill have spent around 20 years amassing their holdings -- a mix of Renaissance sculptures and works by postwar artists, specifically Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Francis Bacon, Willem de Kooning, Lucio Fontana, Brice Marden, Ruscha, and Twombly.

The Hill Collection will be on view at the Frick through June 15, 2014.