Art Of The Day Weekly
#120 - from 12 February 2009 to 18 February 2009
IN THE AIR
Impressionism against the crisis
LONDON – The sales of Impressionist and Modern art works on 5 and 6 February 2009 confirmed the belief that in a time of crisis records can be broken. It suffices that the lots put up for sale be undisputable masterpieces and that the estimates not be too excessive. This was proven at Sotheby’s with Degas’s The little 14 year-old dancer. Estimated at 9 million £, it was sold for 11.8 million £ (13.2 million €), following a war of bids which an Asian collector won. At Christie’s, a painting by Monet, In the prairie, well dated (1876), had the highest result at 10 million £ (11 million €). Impressionism is definitely a solution that never gets rusty. And the more enticing paintings, those that are capable of lifting one’s morale, seem to benefit from a substantial bonus. The day in which Toulouse-Lautrec sold well (at Christie’s) with an erotic composition, Abandonment - The two friends, Louis Anquetin (at Sotheby’s) broke his own record (410 000 £ compared to 360 000 £ last June) with a more traditional scene of a somewhat mischievous aspect of Paris Au Moulin-Rouge…
EXHIBITIONS
Van Gogh at night
AMSTERDAM-The Night with stars is one of his bestsellers, reproduced to infinity in postcards. But Van Gogh reproduced the night world in many other ways. That is what the current exhibition wishes to show with its 32 paintings (among them, of course, the above mentioned motive, in the two versions from the MoMA and the musée d’Orsay), 19 works on paper and a few sketches found in his letters. While Nature was obviously at the center of Van Gogh’s concerns, with the wheat fields in Provence, his vision of the night also includes, in a less expected manner, peasant interiors. To show Van Gogh was not alone in this choice, the exhibit also presents works from the school of Barbizon and some of his contemporaries such as Anquetin or Seurat. The Van Gogh Museum, which attracted 1.5 million visitors in 2008, intends to reach a pretty score with this exhibition that will have no other stop in Europe.
A Constructivist couple
LONDON – He lived a full life, while she died too young. Alexandre Rodchenko (1891-1956) and Lioubov Popova (1889-1924) are two soul mates of constructivism. The movement tried, in post-revolutionary Russia, to make a synthesis between technology and modern materials and art, the art that was only meant to serve concrete, social objectives. This utopia, embodied in particular in design (Rodchenko produced the poster for the Eisenstein’s Cuirassé Potemkine) and in fashion, later found its most accomplished expression in photography and cinema. Only Rodchenko would have the opportunity to dedicate himself to the role of «technician of vision», in the last years of the NEP, as Popova died when she was still faithful to the easel, the traditional support – therefore not sufficiently revolutionary.
The two faces of Giorgio de Chirico
PARIS - His beginnings were resounding and now belong to the history of art of the XXth century. Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978), together with a few associates, of which Carlo Carrà is the best known, invented right before WW I, when he was just 20 years old, metaphysical painting. Human-less spaces peopled by statues and giant shadows, disconnected accumulations of objects in green and blue interiors. Though he fascinated the future Surrealists, de Chirico quickly fell out of grace. As of 1926 André Breton disavowed him, as did the avant-gardes. Yet he lived and produced for another 50 years: among the 170 works grouped together by the musée d’Art moderne, a certain number exhibit in detail this long ending parenthesis, peopled with glossy horses, wrinkled self-portraits and kitsch gladiators, which the self-proclaimed pictor optimus painter never wished to deny.
AUCTIONS
Teapot time
PARIS- Teapots in all shapes and from all parts of the world. Chinese from the XVIIIth century with a double spout, Japanese with a kakiemon decoration, German with brown marbled glace, from Worcester with a reticulated decoration, from Delft with a flat belly, from Alcora with large polychrome bouquets, from Copenhagen with the top to be held by a rose bud… But there are also teapots from Tournai, from Paris, Marseille, Vienna or Mennecy, spherical, globular or ovoid. Amateurs of Earl grey will only need to pay a few hundred euros to become the happy owners of these instruments of the art of tea. There are a few exceptions such as this piece from Saint-Cloud with flowered branches (6 000 euros) or this other one from Meillonnas painted in 1765 by Protais Pidoux (15 000 euros). The highest prices in the sale will be paid for the plates from the Forestier de Sèvres set (1835, 7000 euros each) and by a surprising statuette of a rooster in soft-paste porcelain from Chantilly from1735 (estimated at 120 000 euros).
ARTIST OF THE WEEK
Marie Orensanz, Nada mas que ... (Only...), 2007, woop bridge and mirror, 70 x 140 x 230 cm, vue de l’exposition au musée d’Art Moderne de Buenos Aires courtesy School Gallery Paris © Marie Orensanz
Marie Orensanz: aesthetics of the fragment
Marie Orensanz spent her creative existence half-way between Argentina, her country, and France, her refuge during the years of the military dictatorship. Her deeply conceptual universe looks into matters of the sense of things, of language, of the infinite through installations that present fragments (of marble, of phrases, of plants). In 1999, she won the contest for a monument to the victims State terrorism (made in 2004), with this simple phrase cut out in a cement bloc «Pensar es un hecho revolucionario» (To think is a revolutionary act). Her work was presented in an retrospective in 2007 at the museum of modern art of Buenos Aires, where the public once again was able to see her marble books lightly drawn with pastels, her pedestals awaiting statues, her suspended lamps symbolizing the light of the spirit.
BOOKS
Portrait of Proust as an exhibition curator
For those who have always been reticent to read In Search of Lost Time, this is the moment to do it! It is possible to read it diagonally, to the rhythm of the paintings that form the history of art. The author of this book, Eric Karpeles, who is also a painter, concocted this method, and to do so he did not rely on his own imagination but rather on the sometimes very precise notes of Proust himself. From Giotto’s Virtues to Bellini’s musician-angels, from Watteau’s study sheets to Manet’s women, all Western art accompanies Albertine and Swann (a great specialist of Vermeer) in their torments. Of course the Italians are very present – Giotto, Carpaccio, Tiziano – but Whistler stands up to them and a few society painters of the Third Republic – Winterhalter, Jules Machard, Pierre-Auguste Cot or Gustave Jacquet –accompany the more established glories.
IN BRIEF
ALBI-The Ministry of Culture announced it will present the city of Albi to be a candidate to the world heritage of the UNESCO.
BEIJING- One of the buildings of Chinese television, a symbol of the new Beijing and designed by architect Rem Koolhaas, was destroyed by fire on 9 February 2009.
BOSTON – Street artist Shepard Fairey, author of the Hope image starring Barack Obama, has been briefly arrested in Boston on graffiti-related charges on February 6.
DUBAI-The second edition of Art Antiques Desing Dubai will be held from 18 to 22 February 2009 with the participation of some thirty international antique dealers.
LONDON – Veronese's Petrobelli altarpiece has been completely recreated at the Dulwich Museum. This is the first time all the components are assembled since the XVIIIth century.
MILANO-Taking advantage of the exhibition at Palazzo delle Stelline, the largest painting of free words ("parolibera")made by Marinetti Bombing over Andrinople in 1912-13, will be shown.
PARIS – « The funerals of Mona Lisa », an installation by artist Yan Pei-Ming, which is exhibited from February 12, confirms the interest of the Louvre towards contemporary art.
PARIS – A letter from Napoléon to empress Josephine about a storm in Boulogne on July 1804 is put on sale at Piasa on 13 February 2009 with an estimate of € 100,000.