• À propos

Alain.R.Truong

Alain.R.Truong

Archives Journalières: 8 novembre 2014

Mark Rothko (1903 – 1970), Untitled

08 samedi Nov 2014

Posted by alaintruong2014 in Auctions, Post-War and Contemporary Art

≈ 1 Commentaire

Étiquettes

Barnett Newman, Cathedra, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, French Window at Collioure, Henri Matisse, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Mark Rothko, Nocturne in Blue and Gold: 
Old Battersea Bridge

1

Mark Rothko (1903 – 1970), Untitled, oil on canvas, 68 by 54 in., 172.7 by 137.2 cm. Executed in 1970. Estimation 15,000,000 — 20,000,000 USD. Photo Sotheby’s.

PROVENANCE: Estate of the Artist (Estate no. B2-70)
Marlborough A.G., Liechtenstein/Marlborough Gallery, Inc., New York (acquired from the above in 1970-71)
Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon (acquired from the above in May 1971)

LITTERATURE: David Anfam, Mark Rothko: The Works on Canvas: Catalogue Raisonné, New Haven and London, 1998, cat. no. 833, p. 671, illustrated in color

An intoxicating and enigmatic electricity galvanizes every pore of Mark Rothko’s Untitled of 1970, classified as the penultimate painting of the artist’s prodigious oeuvre. Three inky, crepuscular green regions of color shiver bewitchingly atop a groundwork of brilliant indigo, encapsulating at the very last moments of his life the formal essence of Rothko’s entire body of work. According to David Anfam’s authoritative 1998 catalogue raisonné of Rothko’s work, the artist started and finished only three paintings in the first fifty-five days of 1970 before his death; bar one painting currently hanging in the National Gallery of Art, the present work is perhaps Rothko’s final expression of all. As the three viridian planes hover hypnotically against one another, conjuring an image of a vast ocean expanse at dusk separated by the vivid blue horizon lines, the viewer is transported into a deeply contemplative state archetypal of Rothko’s most accomplished chromatic compositions.

10

Consuelo Kanaga, Untitled (Mark Rothko), 
Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, USA / Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of the Artist / The Bridgeman Art Library

Prior to the 1970 completion of Untitled, Rothko painted eighteen works in 1969 with a nearly identical composition—these paintings bear two adjoining color zones, all possessing a generally black on gray superstructure, though some are tinted in a sepia or hazy bluish tone. This last cohesive body of paintings, referred to by Anfam as the “Black on Grays,” evoke an overwhelming sense of tragedy—meditations on finality, mortality, and closure. The dark always sits atop the light, as if a shade is being lowered in a window to obscure the remains of the day. It is as though Rothko sensed the foreboding onset of his own death, and these paintings were his one final rumination on humanity. What is most striking in this context, then, is the artist’s triumphant return to full color in the last three canvases of his life—a triumverate of rich luminescence that includes the present work. Within this chronological narrative, the sheer vibrancy and vividness of Untitled becomes an uplifting paean to the vigor and sheer brio of the painter’s soul, following a prolonged period of darkness.

2

Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1970
 National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
 © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Until his death in 1970, the trajectory of Rothko’s later years proved to expose the artist’s rawest and most pronounced sensitivities, a magnified introspection that provided the emotional catalyst for his palette progressing towards hauntingly darker hues. While the works from this period are famously characterized by their ominous darkness, Untitled from 1970 demonstrates the complexities of Rothko’s colors: the chromatic interplay of intense blues and verdant greens tinted by ominous blacks shift before the eye like the ocean and sky at night, the twilight glimmering from within the stacked bands like the irridescent moon peering in through Henri Matisse’s 1913 French Window at Collioure. Pushing the bounds of painting using his distinctive economy of forms, Rothko’s abstract fields of pigment here evolve before the eye into a partial seascape; content and form merge seamlessly through the temporal experience that is the deep spatial immersion of the viewer. Rothko once stated to David Sylvester, “Often towards nightfall, there’s a feeling in the air of mystery, threat, frustration—all of these at once. I would like my painting to have the quality of such moments.” (the artist cited in David Anfam, Mark Rothko: The Works on Canvas: Catalogue Raisonné, New Haven and London, 1998, p. 73) The bars of rich sumptuous blues concurrently imply a cavernous abyss while surging forward, a dynamic optical experience resulting in a brooding majesty that places the work at the pinnacle of the artist’s late oeuvre.

3

Henri Matisse, French Window at Collioure, 1914 
Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris
 © CNAC/MNAM/Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY
 © 2014 Succession H. Matisse, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

The upper right corner of the irridescent Untitled is punctuated by a downward vertical drip stain, freezing the moment in time at which Rothko painted the canvas forever in the present. This drip functions as a pentimenti, recording a history of the painting’s making and imbuing the canvas with a distinct temporality. The vivid blues and greens conjure the effulgent moonlight illuminating the dark roaming surface of the night sea. However, in this spectacularly subtle zone of the painting, the metaphysical is replaced for material quiddity, as the painting reasserts its own presence as a corporeal object.

4

James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Nocturne in Blue and Gold: 
Old Battersea Bridge, circa 1872-75, Tate, London / Art Resource, NY

Rothko’s renowned late paintings of 1969-70 are most frequently interpreted as being inseparable from his deteriorating psychological and physical state that eventually culminated with his suicide in February 1970. The increasingly somber palette and unrelenting employment of black in these late works has inevitably been integrated into a narrative about the final two years of his life. Rothko himself reportedly regarded these works—ultimately his culminating series—as his “most profound,” an opinion shared by critics such as Brian O’Doherty who referred to this period as harboring some of Rothko’s “most remarkable” paintings in his essay for the 1993 exhibition of Rothko’s Last Paintings in New York. Diane Waldman assessed Rothko’s last paintings as the ultimate realization of the painter’s goals, declaring the works from the end of his life as positioned firmly at the summit of his entire oeuvre. Waldman further noted, “By the end of his life Rothko had moved beyond such concepts in his painting. No longer is his art earthbound, sensual, corporeal. He had attained a harmony, an equilibrium, a wholeness, in the Jungian sense, that enabled him to express universal truths in his breakthrough works, fusing the conscious and the unconscious, the finite and the infinite, the equivocal and the unequivocal, the sensuous and the spiritual. Now he had left behind all that spoke of the carnate, the concrete. He had reached the farther shore of art.” (Diane Waldman in Exh. Cat., New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Mark Rothko, 1903-1970: A Retrospective, 1978, p. 69)

5

Barnett Newman, Cathedra, 1951 
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam 
© 2014 Barnett Newman Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

A sensation of rich, somatic absorption that is unparalleled by any other artist’s work, Untitled causes us to sink deeper into our own minds. As Dore Ashton eloquently wrote, “The interior realm was where Rothko wished to or perhaps could only live, and what he hoped to express. The ‘theater of the mind,’ as Mallarmé called it, was immensely dramatic for Rothko. His darkness at the end did allude to the light of the theater in which, when the lights are gradually dimmed, expectation mounts urgently.” (Dore Ashton, About Rothko, New York, 1983, p. 189) Through his technique of layering thin washes of paint one over the other, often allowing colors from initial layers to show through the subsequent coats of pigment, Rothko’s painting seems to conceal a hidden light source emanating from its very core. Twinkling through and around the elegant planes of color, the present work achieves an incandescent dimensionality that is reminiscent of Rembrandt or Caravaggio’s divine virtuosity for rendering natural light in flat oil paint. Michael Butor wrote of this series of Rothko’s works that “one of the most remarkable of Rothko’s triumphs is to have made a kind of black light shine.” (Ibid., p. 189) Indeed, it is almost as if this extraordinary painting is brilliantly illuminated from within: a translucent vessel of pure color and light.

6

Mark Rothko, 1964
 Photo: Hans Namuth, courtesy Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona © 1991 Hans Namuth Estate, Artwork © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

A stunning paradigm of Rothko’s determination to elicit human emotional response in each of his paintings, Untitled emits a serene aura that stirs the viewer into trance-like contemplation, a wholly pure and directly unique effect for each individual but one that mirrors Rothko’s immense introspection at the time of execution. Ineffably elegant and devastatingly theatrical,Untitled lures the viewer into its seductive world and captures our gaze in its irresistible chromatic aura. The present work is a quintessential example of the deeply metaphysical experience that Rothko asked of the highest forms of abstraction—a simultaneously expansive yet intimate theater of the sublime. We do not purely look at this painting; we are actively engulfed in its waves, situated as actors within its epic expanse.

Sotheby’s. Property from the Collection of Mrs. Paul Mellon: Masterworks, New York | 10 nov. 2014, 07:00 PM

Mark Rothko (1903 – 1970), Untitled (Yellow, Orange, Yellow, Light Orange)

08 samedi Nov 2014

Posted by alaintruong2014 in Auctions, Post-War and Contemporary Art

≈ 1 Commentaire

Étiquettes


Typhoon Coming On), blue, Blue 
on Orange), Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, Green, Gustav Klimt, Harvest Time, Henri Matisse, J.M.W. Turner, Le Bonheur de Vivre, Light Orange), Mark Rothko, No. 14 (untitled), No. 36 (Light Red over Dark Red), Orange, Red, Red Band (Untitled), The Green Stripe, The Kiss, The Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying, Untitled (Yellow, Vincent van Gogh, Yellow, Yellow and Blue (Yellow

1

Mark Rothko (1903 – 1970), Untitled (Yellow, Orange, Yellow, Light Orange), signed and dated 1955 on the reverse, oil on canvas, 81 1/2 by 60 in., 207 by 152.5 cm. Estimation 20,000,000 — 30,000,000 USD. Photo Sotheby’s.

PROVENANCE: Estate of the Artist (Estate no. 5016.55)
Marlborough A.G., Liechtenstein/Marlborough Gallery, Inc., New York (acquired from the above in 1970)
Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon (acquired from the above in October 1970)

LITTERATURE: Exh. Cat., New Haven, Yale University Art Gallery, Salute to Mark Rothko, 1971, cat. no. 9 (checklist)
David Anfam, Mark Rothko: The Works on Canvas: Catalogue Raisonné, New Haven and London, 1998, cat. no. 525, p. 404, illustrated in color

Mark Rothko’s capacity to arrest the immeasurable forces of the cosmos remains the painter’s greatest triumph. InUntitled (Yellow, Orange, Yellow, Light Orange), painted in 1955, Rothko forever immortalized the spellbinding and ephemeral magic of daybreak in paint. By the breathtaking ingenuity and absolute genius of his brush, the artist seized the immaterial and offers us the gift of slowed time. Captivating and mesmeric through the sheer exuberance of Mark Rothko’s most celebrated palette and a deeply enriching pictorial architecture, Untitled (Yellow, Orange, Yellow, Light Orange) belongs to the most pivotal moment of the artist’s career. Rothko painted only twenty-two works in the pinnacle year of 1955, thirteen of which reside in prestigious museum collections, including the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Museum Ludwig, Cologne.

2

Mark Rothko in his West 53rd Street studio, circa 1953 
Photo: Henry Elkan 
Artwork © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), 
New York

Rothko’s challenge, to both himself and his audience, was to engage not only the eye, but also the mind and the spirit;Untitled (Yellow, Orange, Yellow, Light Orange) is a particularly moving exemplar of this ambition. The composition is compartmentalized in two principal rectangular fields of lustrous orange, each surmounted by a pale yellow band and stacked in Rothko’s archetypal formation on a field of glowing saffron gold. Each zone is indeterminately bordered by feathered edges that forge an exceptionally vibrant occupation of the pictorial space. While the overtly optimistic connotations of this ebullient palette immediately instigate a positive and even inspirational response, as with all great paintings by the artist there is no single aspect to this work’s character and the viewer may concurrently sense a deeper, more portentous tone, the duality of which invests this work with a supreme sophistication. In a 1959 Life magazine article, Dorothy Seiberling described one of the artist’s paintings and touched on his mystifying method: “Just as the hues of a sunset prompt feelings of elation mingled with sadness or unease as the dark shapes of night close in, so Rothko’s colors stir mixed feelings of joy, gloom, anxiety or peace. Though the forms in the painting seem simple at first glance, they are in fact subtly complex. Edges fade in and out like memories; horizontal bands of ‘cheerful’ brightness have ‘ominous’ overtones of dark colors.” (Dorothy Seiberling, ‘Abstract Expressionism, Part II,’ Life, November 16, 1959, p. 82) Untitled (Yellow, Orange, Yellow, Light Orange) reverberates both optically and intellectually, engaging us with the artist’s desire to create an aesthetic language that exceeds the very boundaries of painting, encompassing a transcendent, deeply affecting relationship between the viewer and the canvas.

3

J.M.W. Turner, The Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying, 
Typhoon Coming On), 1840 
The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

What is particularly exceptional about the present work are the articulate areas of defined brushstrokes that punctuate the surface of the color fields. Different varieties of orange are interspersed atop the primary zones of color, exposing the application of paint and imbuing the work with a heightened tactility revealing the artist’s process. David Anfam wrote specifically of Untitled (Yellow, Orange, Yellow, Light Orange) in the Catalogue Raisonné of the artist’s work, devoting in-depth analysis to this undeniably unique masterpiece of Rothko’s oeuvre: “Catching or absorbing the light, the polyphony of texture abets the disparate, rather small-scale rhythms of the brushwork. For although the size and sweep of Rothko’s canvases might lead to the supposition that they were realized with a concomitant breadth of touch, the reality is otherwise. Unified as the yellow-oranges of a 1955 Untitled (cat. no. 525) may aspire to remain, their almost monochromatic consistency is belied by the ubiquitous errant strokes, marks and incidents (witness those bordering the second field from the top) that disclose the artisanal, edgy manner in which they must have been applied. Dan Rice’s memory that Rothko wielded a ‘very busy brush’—though spoken with the Seagram murals period in mind—remains the canny final word in this regard… Rothko chose to brandish a comparatively small brush… By turns dulled or luminescent, silken or granular, still and firm or pulsating and mottled, the surfaces approximate a membrane—inherently unpredictable insofar as it is a layer or integument and prey to the tension, malleability and transience that affect any sheer covering.” (David Anfam, Mark Rothko: The Works on Canvas: Catalogue Raisonné, New Haven and London, 1998, p. 84)

XAM601

Gustav Klimt, The Kiss, 1907-08
 Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna, Austria / The Bridgeman Art Library

Rothko’s revolutionary abstract paintings are deeply seeded in a profound art historical appreciation, as he both looked to the past for inspiration and forged ahead into an uncharted future. The artist’s profoundly sophisticated understanding of the possibilities of color was shaped in part by the influence of the work of Henri Matisse. Indeed, it is apparent from the articulate modules of incandescent color in Matisse’s radical Le Bonheur de Vivre from 1905 that the painter was pivotal in encouraging Rothko to explore the possibility of creating paintings from powerful hues alone. Rothko also deeply admired the French painter Pierre Bonnard, and no doubt would have attended the artist’s 1948 memorial show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Bonnard’s paintings have a rich painterly effect that is in sympathy with the optical importance of Rothko’s own brushstrokes that illuminate his canvases, and he drew on both Bonnard’s rich palette and his treatment of light. His fascination with the effects and nature of light can also be traced to the Luminists – a tradition in American painting that dominated the third quarter of the Nineteenth Century. The principal tenets of Luminism were centered on the authority of light – works by artists belonging to the movement, such as John Kensett, confront the viewer with an empty vista that is focused more on colored light itself, rather than more concrete attributes of landscape. The blinding gold sunlight in Kensett’s 1872 Sunset on the Sea, for example, is a potent metaphor for the unseen world or spirit. Light in these paintings became a primal source of energy, an idea that was central to the art of Mark Rothko and is encapsulated absolutely in the present work.

5

Henri Matisse, Le Bonheur de Vivre, 1905-06
 The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA / The Bridgeman Art Library
 © 2014 Succession H. Matisse, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

As conclusively demonstrated by Untitled (Yellow, Orange, Yellow, Light Orange), Rothko’s contribution to Art History readily overwhelms categorization to any singular dogma or style, including that of the colorist tradition. Following his retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1961, Rothko greatly appreciated Robert Goldwater’s essay in reviewing the show, which provides compelling insight to the role of color within the artist’s work: “Rothko means that the enjoyment of color for its own sake, the heightened realization of its purely sensuous dimension, is not the purpose of his painting. If Matisse was one point of departure… Rothko has since moved far in an opposite direction. Yet over the years he has handled his color so that one must pay ever closer attention to it, examine the unexpectedly joined hues, the slight, and continually slighter, modulations within the large area of any single surface, and the softness and the sequence of the colored shapes. Thus these pictures compel careful scrutiny of their physical existence… all the while suggesting that these details are means, not ends.” (Robert Goldwater, ‘Reflections of the Rothko Exhibition,’ Arts, March 1961, pp. 43-44) Eventually Rothko’s remarkable achievement was to create paintings that announce their own unique materiality and create an exalted viewing experience: Rothko’s feat, as defined by Robert Rosenblum, was “to provide a transcendental image that would take us beyond history.” (Robert Rosenblum, « Notes on Rothko and Tradition, » in Exh. Cat., London, The Tate Gallery, Mark Rothko, 1903-1970, 1987, p. 21) Untitled (Yellow, Orange, Yellow, Light Orange) summons the full and unreserved vigor of the painter’s mind, wrenching the viewer from our corporeal environment and unearthing universal truths about humanity.

6

Vincent van Gogh, Harvest Time, 1889
 Folkwang Museum, Essen
 Bridgeman-Giraudon / Art Resource, NY

7

Mark Rothko, The Green Stripe, 1955
 The Menil Collection, Houston
 © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

8

Mark Rothko, No. 36 (Light Red over Dark Red), 1955-57 
Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires
 © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

9

Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1955
 Philadelphia Museum of Art
 © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

10

Mark Rothko, Yellow and Blue (Yellow, Blue 
on Orange), 1955
 Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh 
© 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

11

Mark Rothko, No. 14 (untitled), 1955
 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
 © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

12

Mark Rothko, Red Band (Untitled), 1955
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
 © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

13

Mark Rothko, Green, Red, Blue, 1955 
Milwaukee Art Museum
 © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

14

Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1955
 The Israel Museum, Jerusalem
 © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Sotheby’s. Property from the Collection of Mrs. Paul Mellon: Masterworks, New York | 10 nov. 2014, 07:00 PM

Mark Rothko (1903 – 1970), 21 (Red, Brown, Black and Orange)

08 samedi Nov 2014

Posted by alaintruong2014 in Auctions, Post-War and Contemporary Art

≈ Poster un commentaire

Étiquettes

.M.W. Turner, 1950, Assumption of the Virgin, Autumn Rhythm 
(Number 30), Barnett Newman, Black, Black and Orange), Brown, Clyfford Still, Edvard Munch, Emil Nolde, Francis Bacon, Gray, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Mount Vesuvius in Eruption, N°21 (Red, No. 10, No. 25 
(Red, Number 28, Onement I, Orange, PH-177 (1949-A-No. 2), Titian, Tropensonne, Two figures with a monkey, Untitled (Violet, Vampire, White on Yellow), Yellow on White and Red)

1

Mark Rothko (1903 – 1970), N°21 (Red, Brown, Black and Orange), signed and dated 1953 on the reverse, oil on canvas, 95 x 64 in. 241.5 x 162.5 cm. Executed in 1951. Estimation sur demande. Photo Sotheby’s.

PROVENANCE: Estate of the Artist (Estate No. 5142.53)
Marlborough A.G., Liechtenstein/Marlborough Gallery Inc., New York (acquired from the above in 1970)
Pierre and São Schlumberger (acquired from the above in 1972)
Acquired from the Estate of the above by the present owner in 1988.

EXPOSITION: New York, Museum of Modern Art, 15 Americans, April – July 1952 (as Number 21, 1951)
Venice, Museo d’Arte Moderna di Ca’Pesaro; New York, Marlborough Gallery, Mark Rothko Paintings 1947–1970, June – December 1970, cat. no. 10, illustrated in color in reverse orientation (as Red, Brown, Black and Orange and dated 1953)
Zurich, Kunsthaus Zürich; Berlin, Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Neue Nationalgalerie; Düsseldorf, Städtische Kunsthalle; Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans-van Beuningen, March 1971 – January 1972, cat. no. 29, p. 49, illustrated in color in reverse orientation (as Red, Brown, Black and Orange and dated 1953)
Paris, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Mark Rothko, March – May 1972 (as Red, Brown, Black and Orange and dated 1953)

LITTERATURE: Henry McBride, ‘Half Century or Whole Cycle?’, Art News 51, Summer 1952, p. 72, illustrated (as Number 21, 1951)
Violettes Walbern, Der Spiegel 23, May 31, 1971, p. 150, illustrated in color in reverse orientation
Karl Dhemer, ‘Am Ende nur nich Sang in Moll,’ Stuttgarter Nachrichten, August 25, 1971, p. 8, illustrated in reverse orientation
William C.Seitz, Abstract Expressionist Painting in America, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, 1983, pl. 224, illustrated in color (as Number 21, 1951)
David Anfam, Mark Rothko: The Works on Canvas: Catalogue Raisonné, New Haven and London, 1998, cat. no. 465, p. 352, illustrated in color and fig. 77, p. 72, illustrated (in installation at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1952)
Exh. Cat., Rome, Palazzo delle Espozioni, Mark Rothko, 2007, fig. 28, p. 43, illustrated (in installation in reverse orientation at Museo d’Arte Moderna Ca’Pesaro, Venice, 1970)

“These are the edgings and inchings of final form” – Wallace Stevens (Wallace Stevens, “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, London, 1984, p. 488)

To encounter the majestic No. 21 is to be embraced by the full force of Mark Rothko’s evocation of the sublime. As privileged viewers of this indisputable, inimitable masterwork we are afforded a visual and somatic experience that is beyond compare and bespeaks the absolute mastery of the artist’s abstract vernacular. Executed in 1951 at the very incipit of what David Anfam, the editor of the artist’s catalogue raisonné, refers to as the anni mirabilis of Rothko’s oeuvre, the present work is a paragon of this halcyon era in which his mature mode of artistic expression pioneered truly unprecedented territory. Last seen in public during the major European travelling retrospective of Rothko’s art organized by the Kunsthaus Zürich in 1971-72, this superb painting has remained in the same highly distinguished private collection for over 40 years and its appearance here at auction marks an historic moment. A veritable treatise on the absolute limits of abstraction, No. 21 transmits an aura of the ethereal that is entirely enthralling and immersive. In accordance with the most authentic experience of Rothko’s vision, we cease to perceive this work as a dialogue between medium and support, and instead become wholly submerged within its utterly captivating compositional dynamism, chromatic intensity, and sheer scale.

2

Mark Rothko. The artist in his studio on West 53rd Street in New York, 1952
. Kay Bell Reynal, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 
Artwork © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Soaring to 95 inches in height, No. 21 projects itself into our space on a greater than human scale, engulfing us entirely within its epic expanse. Dominated by simultaneously distinct and inextricably intertwined radiant zones of sumptuous color, the canvas pulsates with a tangible energetic intensity, pulling us ever inward. A concentrated field of gloriously vibrant orange surges forth from the sheer profundity of fierce black that surrounds it, the subtly perceptible strokes of Rothko’s brush in this area encouraging a sense of inexorable ascent towards the upper limits of the canvas. The captivating depth of the black band at the center, seemingly inhaling the areas of impossible illumination that surround it, pulls us in and takes absolute hold of our vision, encouraging us to travel through the subtle variants of tone and contour that comprise the intricate landscape of its surface. In a stunning feat of compositional and coloristic genius, this fiery ground is counterbalanced by the diaphanous layers of blush pink that seem to float amongst a sea of sunset orange in the lower register, bestowing upon No. 21 an otherworldly glow. Acting as a portal to the sublime, the limitless realm of sumptuous color in the present work envelops the viewer and brings life to Rothko’s assertion that his monumental canvases be experienced up close rather than from a distance. In its utter brilliance of palette, compositional dynamism, monumental scale, and indelible gravitas, this painting exists as an empyreal manifestation of the very apex of Mark Rothko’s painterly prowess.

3

The present work installed in the exhibition 15 Americans at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, April – July 1952. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. Artwork © 1998  Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

No. 21 was first shown in the year immediately following its creation in the iconic 1952 exhibition 15 Americans held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Organized by legendary curator Dorothy C. Miller, this seminal show included masterpieces such as Jackson Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm (Number 30), now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and Clyfford Still’s PH-371 (1947-S), in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In characteristic fashion, Rothko was deeply involved in the curatorial planning and installation of the gallery devoted entirely to his paintings. Of the nine works originally chosen for the exhibition, five were eventually included in the show, among themNo. 10, now housed permanently in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. This final group of canvases was carefully and deliberately selected with an eye to variety. A diverse interplay of hues and forms, at once remaining distinct to their individual supports whilst communing directly with one another across the gallery, relayed an odyssey of progress towards an ultimate artistic truth. For its installation, Rothko demanded “blazing light” be shed on his paintings, thus intensifying the magnitude of his looming symphonies of color and contour, and conferring upon them a supremacy and majesty commensurate with their undeniable status as his first mature masterpieces.

5

Titian, Assumption of the Virgin, 1516-18
S. Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice, Italy
. Cameraphoto Arte, Venice / Art Resource, NY

The paintings in this seminal exhibition, all executed between the years 1949-1951, are monuments to a crucial turning point in Rothko’s aesthetic evolution, when he resolved an abstract archetype out of the preceding multiform paintings. Begun in 1947, and emerging from an exploration of biomorphic forms drawn from Miró, Picasso, Dalì, and his other Surrealist predecessors, Rothko’s multiform paintings reduced all figurative remnants to brightly tinted patchworks of irregular floating shapes that seem to variously coalesce and disintegrate as if fluidly and organically moving of their own accord. As Rothko wrote at the time, “I think of my pictures as dramas; the shapes in the pictures are the performers… They are organisms with volition and a passion for self-assertion.” (Mark Rothko, “The Romantics Were Prompted,” first published in Possibilities, no. 1, 1947) By 1950, however, Rothko had abandoned these multiform compositions to contemplate what he called “an unknown space.” David Anfam, in his definitive text on the artist, deems this crucial moment the onset of the “classical period,” a time he delimits as beginning in 1950 and spanning the remainder of Rothko’s lifetime. He draws particular attention to 1951, the year of No. 21’s execution, as being decisive: “From 1951 onward, Rothko’s artistic self-confidence was everywhere visible – from the meticulousness, authority and range of the paintings to his very attitude toward them.” (David Anfam, Mark Rothko: The Works on Canvas: Catalogue Raisonné, New Haven and London, 1998, p. 71) No. 21 is a paean to the newfound aplomb with which Rothko approached his towering theses on abstraction, reflecting across its luscious, vigorous surface the artist’s desire, as elucidated by Stanley Kunitz, “to become his paintings.” (Stanley Kunitz, interview with Avis Berman, December 8, 1983, Archives of American Art) Indeed, in the same year as this painting’s execution, Rothko declared the apparent paradox that distinguishes his oeuvre: “I paint very large pictures…precisely because I want to be very intimate and human. To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience…However you paint the larger picture, you are in it. It isn’t something you command.” (the artist cited in Exh. Cat., London, The Tate Gallery, Mark Rothko: 1903-1970, 1987, p. 85).

4

Francis Bacon,
 Two figures with a monkey, 1973, Private Collection. 
Bridgeman Images
 © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved. / DACS, London / ARS, NY 2014

When Rothko asked Katherine Kuh, The Art Institute of Chicago’s visionary first curator of modern painting and sculpture, to describe her reactions to his paintings, she wrote of the ones she had seen: « for me they have a kind of ecstasy of color which induces different but always intense moods. I am not a spectator – I am a participant. » (letter July 18, 1954) Like the artist himself becoming one with his canvas, physically entering into the incandescent environments as he created them, we too, as viewers, come to relate to his towering fields of luminosity as if engaging in a personal exchange. Our experience of No. 21,as participants in its stunning drama, brings it to life and may in turn give new dimensions to our life. We do not look at this painting; we are absorbed into it. Indeed, being in its presence parallels a line of Nietzsche that had inspired Rothko since he had been a young man: “There is a need for a whole world of torment in order for the individual to sit quietly in his rocking row-boat in mid-sea, absorbed in contemplation.” (Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, translation by Francis Golffing, New York, 1956, pp. 33-34).

6

Edvard Munch, Vampire, 1893, 
National Gallery, Oslo, Norway
. Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY
 © 2014 The Munch Museum / The Munch-Ellingsen Group / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Rothko’s arrival at his mature style, which in retrospect reads as the sole, inevitable, and predetermined conclusion of his quest for a reimagined abstraction, was in fact the supreme result of a calculated and concentrated purge, the product of an overwhelmingly radical and profoundly effective stripping away of compositional superfluity in order to arrive at the pure elemental state of the image. The distinct zones of color in the earlier multiform canvases coalesced into an impenetrable totality in works such as No. 21, wherein all elements engage in a choreography of endlessly pulsating flux and fusion so that the composition seems to shed the confines of its support, existing instead as a shimmering, energy-laden entity that fully surpasses the inadequacies of mere written description. Thus, the present work stands as the crowning evocation of Rothko’s declaration of 1948, delineating his ultimate goal a full three years before it was achieved: “The progression of a painter’s work, as it travels in time from point to point, will be toward clarity: toward the elimination of all obstacles between the painter and the idea, and between the idea and the observer … To achieve this clarity is, ultimately, to be understood.” (the artist cited in Exh. Cat., New York, Museum of Modern Art, 15 Americans, 1952, p. 18).

7

.M.W. Turner, Mount Vesuvius in Eruption, 1817, 
Yale Center for British Art
. Bridgeman Images

The theoretical foundations of Rothko’s aesthetic revolution conform to the predominating rhetoric of Abstract Expressionism in the mid-Twentieth Century. Absolutism, themes of purging and beginning art anew, and other extremes of theory and practice were similarly espoused by Rothko’s now-heroic compatriots of the New York School such as Clyfford Still and Barnett Newman. In response to a pervasive general malaise and loss of faith in the external realities of modern life in the wake of the Second World War, an impassioned, quasi-sacred belief in the transcendental power of art rose to prominence. Donning the philosophical mantle of his great Romanticist forebears – pioneering giants such as J.M.W. Turner, Caspar David Friedrich and Théodore Gericault – Rothko devoted himself to the pursuit of art as a portal to an enhanced realm of physical and spiritual experience.

8

Emil Nolde, Tropensonne, 1914, 
Ada and Emil Nolde Stiftung, Seebüll, Germany. 
Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY
 © Nolde Stiftung Seebüll, Germany

In an impassioned reaction against the prevailing social norms that arose as a result of the Industrial Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment, the Romantics emphasized and validated the emotional intensity that results from confronting the transcendence of an uninhibited aesthetic experience. J.M.W. Turner, in his 1817 masterwork Mt. Vesuvius in Eruption, realized the unquantifiable power of the sublime when he culled an utterly affecting narrative out of pure color and light. As we bear witness to the immeasurable devastation of the depicted scene, conveyed through the impossibly precise yet ethereally light stroke of Turner’s brush, we nonetheless cease to understand it in terms of our corporeal reality. Instead, we are willingly transported at once to the very core of Turner’s masterful surface and inwards, towards the depths of our own subconscious. Developing on the same fundamental principles espoused by the Romantics a century earlier, the late-nineteenth century Symbolists – Odilon Redon, Gustav Klimt, and Edvard Munch among the most influential – eschewed naturalism and realism in art, proclaiming instead the sovereignty of spirituality, the imagination, and the unconscious.  Munch in particular, in stirring canvases such as The Vampire painted in 1893, gained prestige for his intensely redolent translations of the human psyche into art. This image, a collection of darkened hues punctuated by an electrifying mass of red that swirls and churns into a staggeringly affective depiction of two intertwined human forms, immediately and aggressively wrests us from reality, ferrying us into a world of dreamlike fantasy.

9

The present work installed in the entrance hall of the exhibition Mark Rothko, Museo d’Arte Moderna Ca’Pesaro, Venice, 1970. The present work was hung in accordance with the orientation of the signature on the reverse, which dated from the 1968-69 inventory of Rothko’s studio. Photo Cameraphoto. Artwork © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Like the Romantics who preceded them, the Symbolists considered Art as a contemplative escape from a world of strife, achieving this liberation through themes of mysticism and otherworldliness grounded always by an incisive sense of mortality. With the advent of Abstract Expressionism, this remarkable philosophical lineage was given an ever grander and more evocative visual form. As early as 1943, Rothko published a joint statement with fellow pioneers of the new Abstraction, Barnett Newman and Adolph Gottlieb: “To us art is an adventure into an unknown world, which can be explored only by those willing to take the risks. … It is our function as artists to make the spectator see the world our way – not his way.” (Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Adolph Gottlieb, “Statement” in Edward Alden Jewell’s column, The New York Times, June 13, 1943) Thus, while delivering the tenets of Romanticism and Symbolism to the modern era, via a revolutionary compositional clarity and monumentality of viewing experience, Rothko conclusively asserted the paramount equation between his artwork and its beholder, whereby the true potential of his painting could not exist without the presence of the viewer. Four years later, he developed this integral relationship even further: “A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer. It dies by the same token.” (Mark Rothko, “Statement,” Tiger’s Eye, New York, vol. 1, no. 2, December 1947, p. 44).

10

Consuelo Kanaga, Untitled (Mark Rothko), 
Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, USA / Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of the Artist / The Bridgeman Art Library

Through form, surface, texture, and color Rothko struck a perennial balance that lures the viewer’s constant attention. Yet, as we are beckoned into the glowing lustrous embrace of the devastatingly beautiful and complex No. 21 there is a profound tension struck between the uplifting emotions evoked by our perception of Rothko’s vibrant hues and something implicitly more tragic. Such elemental colors as the vibrant red-orange and dazzling rose of the present work harbor primal connotations of light, warmth, and the Sun, but inasmuch as they invoke the Sun they also implicate the inevitable cycle of dawn and dusk, of rise and set, and their own continual demise and rebirth. Indeed, the near violent encroachment of the depthless black upon the shining orange expanse, though entirely and adamantly abstract, nonetheless communicates a narrative of perpetual contest between the primal forces of light and darkness. The environment that is created in No. 21 ubiquitously encompasses us yet, in its immateriality also eludes our grasp, projecting a sense of space that is at once material and metaphysical, encapsulating Rothko’s proclaimed goal to “paint both the finite and the infinite.” (Dore Ashton,About Rothko, New York, 1983, p. 179) Rothko once stated to David Sylvester, “Often, towards nightfall, there’s a feeling in the air of mystery, threat, frustration – all of these at once. I would like my painting to have the quality of such moments.” (the artist cited in David Anfam, Mark Rothko: The Works on Canvas, Catalogue Raisonné, New Haven and London, 1998, p. 88), and with its suggestion of an infinite depth in the darkest areas of the black shape, this enigmatic work harbors something that is indescribably portentous.

11

The present work sketched in Dorothy C. Miller’s handwritten notes regarding the work of Mark Rothko, 1951. 
Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY

Excepting a letter to Art News in 1957, from 1949 onwards Rothko ceased publishing statements about his work, anxious that his writings might be interpreted as instructive or didactic and could thereby interfere with the pure import of the paintings themselves. However, in 1958 he gave a talk at the Pratt Institute to repudiate his critics and to deny any perceived association between his art and self-expression. He insisted instead that his corpus was not concerned with notions of self but rather with the entire human drama. While he drew a distinction between figurative and abstract art, he nevertheless outlined an underlying adherence to the portrayal of human experience. Discussing the “artist’s eternal interest in the human figure,” Rothko examined the common bond of figurative painters throughout Art History: “they have painted one character in all their work. What is indicated here is that the artist’s real model is an ideal which embraces all of human drama rather than the appearance of a particular individual. Today the artist is no longer constrained by the limitation that all of man’s experience is expressed by his outward appearance. Freed from the need of describing a particular person, the possibilities are endless. The whole of man’s experience becomes his model, and in that sense it can be said that all of art is a portrait of an idea.” (lecture given at the Pratt Institute 1958, cited in Exh. Cat., London, The Tate Gallery, Op. Cit., p. 87) Paintings such as No. 21, in truth, involve both spirit and nature, and Rothko sought to instill in the viewer a profound sense of the spiritual whilst evincing his abject faith in the role of the artist in attaining the highest realm to which a man could aspire. For Rothko, art was capable of provoking in the viewer an existential sense of awe and wonderment for the sublime miracle of existence, and in this truly spectacular painting that capacity is wholly and perfectly achieved.

barnett_newmanonementa1324148019441

Barnett Newman, Onement I, 1948, 
The Museum of Modern Art,
 New York
. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / 
Art Resource, NY
 © 2014 Barnett Newman Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

12

Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1949, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Gift of the Mark Rothko Foundation, Inc. © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Untitled (Voilet, Black, Orange, Yellow on White and Red)

Mark Rothko, Untitled (Violet, Black, Orange, Yellow on White and Red), 1949, 
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
 © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

14

Jackson Pollock, Autumn Rhythm 
(Number 30), 1950, 
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
. Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY 
© 2014 Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

15

Jackson Pollock, 
Number 28, 1950, 
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 
Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY 
© 2014 Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

16

Mark Rothko, No. 10, 1950, 
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. 
Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. 
Artwork © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

17

Mark Rothko, No. 25 
(Red, Gray, White on Yellow), 1951 
Private Collection. 
Artwork © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

18

Clyfford Still, PH-177 (1949-A-No. 2), 1949
, Private collection 
© City and County of Denver, courtesy the Clyfford Still Museum
 © Estate of Clyfford Still

Sotheby’s. Contemporary Art Evening Auction. New York | 11 nov. 2014, 06:30 PM

A rectangular-cut 41.20 carats diamond ring

08 samedi Nov 2014

Posted by alaintruong2014 in Jewelry

≈ Poster un commentaire

Étiquettes

rectangular-cut diamond ring

11

A rectangular-cut 41.20 carats diamond ring. Estimate: CHF1,150,000 – CHF1,450,000 (1,187,533 – $1,497,324). Photo: Christie’s Images Ltd 2014

et with a rectangular-cut diamond, weighing approximately 41.20 carats, to the tapered and triangular-cut diamond shoulders, mounted in platinum, ring size 6

Accompanied by report no. 5161357802 dated 9 July 2014 from the GIA Gemological Institute of America stating that the diamond is L colour, SI1 clarity

Sotheby’s. Magnificent Jewels and Noble Jewels. Genève | 12 nov. 2014, 10:30 AM

A blue and white bottle vase, Chongzhen

08 samedi Nov 2014

Posted by alaintruong2014 in Chinese Porcelains

≈ Poster un commentaire

Étiquettes

Blue-and-White, bottle vase, Chongzhen

10

A blue and white bottle vase, Chongzhen. Sold for £10,000 (€12,764). Photo: Bonhams.

The compressed globular body painted with a garden scene depicting seven scholars accompanied by boys and attendants, seated and gathered in two groups variously at leisure or engaged in scholarly pursuits, surrounded by trees and scattered with bamboos and rocks, all between a band of flowers on scrolling foliage to the shoulder and lappets to the foot, the slender neck with two bands of upright tulip-like flowers borne on leafy stems separated by a bulbous lotus band. 37.4cm (14 3/4in) high

Provenance: a distinguished European private collection

Notes: The present lot illustrates aspects of the cross-cultural influences prevalent in the 17th century, as well as the demand for Chinese blue and white porcelain overseas. The distinctive form, with its bulbous section along the slender neck, is based on 16th century Turkish pottery, and the tulip-like flowers on the neck are thought to have been designed for the Dutch market. For similar examples, see a vase illustrated by Sir M.Butler, M.Medley and S.Little, Seventeenth Century Chinese Porcelain from the Butler Family Collection, Alexandria, 1990, no.38, and a pair illustrated by J.Harrison-Hall,Ming Ceramics in the British Museum, London, 2001, nos.12:80 and 12:81.

Two similar vases were sold in these Rooms on 8 November 2012, lots 34 and 35.

Bonhams. FINE CHINESE ART, 6 Nov 2014 13:30 GMT – LONDON, NEW BOND STREET

An important pair of Type IA and Type IIA detachable 12.05 and 11.12 carats pear-shaped diamond ear pendants

08 samedi Nov 2014

Posted by alaintruong2014 in Jewelry

≈ Poster un commentaire

Étiquettes

diamond ear pendants, pear-shaped diamond, Type IA

9

An important pair of Type IA and Type IIA detachable 12.05 and 11.12 carats pear-shaped diamond ear pendants. Estimate: CHF1,700,000 – CHF2,400,000 ($1,755,483 – $2,478,329) . Photo: Christie’s Images Ltd 2014

Each suspending a detachable pear-shaped diamond, weighing approximately 12.05 and 11.12 carats, from a brilliant-cut and pear-shaped diamond cluster top, mounted in platinum and gold, 4.1 cm

Accompanied by report no. 5161068038 dated 23 April 2014 from the GIA Gemological Institute of America stating that the 12.05 carat diamond is D colour, VVS1 clarity, a working diagram indicating that the clarity of the diamond is potentially Internally Flawless, and a diamond type classification letter stating that the diamond is Type IA

Report no. 1162068036 dated 22 April 2014 from the GIA Gemological Institute of America stating that the 11.12 carat diamond is D colour, VVS1 clarity, a working diagram indicating that the clarity of the diamond is potentially Internally Flawless, and a diamond type classification letter stating that the diamond is Type IIA

Sotheby’s. Magnificent Jewels and Noble Jewels. Genève | 12 nov. 2014, 10:30 AM

A blue and white baluster vase, meiping, Tianqi-Chongzhen

08 samedi Nov 2014

Posted by alaintruong2014 in Chinese Porcelains

≈ Poster un commentaire

Étiquettes

baluster vase, Blue-and-White, Tianqi-Chongzhen

8

A blue and white baluster vase, meiping, Tianqi-Chongzhen. Sold for £12,500 (€15,956). Photo: Bonhams.

Finely painted with a continuous scene of a horseman leaping across a flowing river and looking back towards two soldiers left on the far bank pointing with their swords as another cavalry officer approaches, all within a delicate landscape of misty mountains and pines, the foot with a border of floral meander and the shoulder with lobes pointing towards the narrow cylindrical neck with key-fret bands. 29cm (11 3/8in) high

Provenance: a distinguished European private collection

Bonhams. FINE CHINESE ART, 6 Nov 2014 13:30 GMT – LONDON, NEW BOND STREET

An important diamond riviere necklace, retailed by Harry Winston 

08 samedi Nov 2014

Posted by alaintruong2014 in Jewelry

≈ Poster un commentaire

Étiquettes

diamond riviere necklace, Harry Winston

7

An important diamond riviere necklace, retailed by Harry Winston. Estimate: CHF1,900,000 – CHF2,900,000 ($1,962,010 – $2,994,648) . Photo: Christie’s Images Ltd 2014

Composed of forty-five graduated circular-cut diamonds, the five principal stones weighing approximately 8.07, 6.34, 6.33, 5.35, 4.88 and 4.04 carats, to a concealed clasp, 37.6 cm. Unsigned, no. 5512

The six principal diamonds accompanied by report nos. 5151838478, 1152838447, 1152838450, 1152838468, 2155838453 and 2155838463 respectively, each dated 6 January 2014, from the GIA Gemological Institute of America stating that the 8.07 carat diamond is G colour, VVS2 clarity, the 6.34 carat diamond is F colour, VVS2 clarity, the 6.33 carat diamond is G colour, VVS1 clarity, the 5.35 carat diamond is H colour, VVS2 clarity, the 4.88 carat diamond is I colour, VVS2 clarity and the 4.04 carat diamond is J colour, VVS2 clarity.

Provenance: Formerly the Property of Miss Zsa Zsa Gabor
Christie’s New York, 24 April 1985, lot 330

Sotheby’s. Magnificent Jewels and Noble Jewels. Genève | 12 nov. 2014, 10:30 AM

A blue and white beaker vase, gu, Shunzhi

08 samedi Nov 2014

Posted by alaintruong2014 in Chinese Porcelains

≈ Poster un commentaire

Étiquettes

beaker vase, Blue-and-White, gu, Shunzhi

6

A blue and white beaker vase, gu, Shunzhi. Sold for £10,000 (€12,764). Photo: Bonhams.

Vividly painted in shades of cobalt blue to the flaring neck with swallows variously perching on branches in flight and hovering beside a group of craggy rocks issuing flowering sprays and scattered with lingzhi fungus, flowers and bush, above a band of stiff leaves beneath a further floral band with scattered flower sprigs. 43.8cm (17 1/4in) high

Provenance: a distinguished European private collection

Notes: Two related but smaller gu vases (38cm and 22.5cm high) are in the Palace Museum, Beijing, illustrated by Chen Runmin, Qing Shunzhi Kangxi Chao Qinghuaci, Beijing, 2005, nos.55 and 56. Another example with related pendent lappets and details such as the moon beneath the rim is illustrated by J.Harrison-Hall, Ming Ceramics in the British Museum, London, 2001, no.12:85.

Bonhams. FINE CHINESE ART, 6 Nov 2014 13:30 GMT – LONDON, NEW BOND STREET

An important Type IIA diamond necklace

08 samedi Nov 2014

Posted by alaintruong2014 in Jewelry

≈ Poster un commentaire

Étiquettes

Diamond Necklace, Type IIa

5

An important Type IIA diamond necklace. Estimate: CHF2,850,000 – CHF4,800,000 ($2,943,016 – $4,956,658). . Photo: Christie’s Images Ltd 2014

The pear-shaped and brilliant-cut diamond line suspending a fringe of vari-cut diamond clusters with pear-shaped diamond terminals, the largest detachable one weighing approximately 20.20 carats, mounted in platinum, 40.0 cm

Accompanied by report no. 2165068037 dated 22 April 2014 from the GIA Gemological Institute of America stating that the 20.20 carat diamond is D colour, Internally Flawless clarity, and a diamond type classification letter stating that the diamond is Type IIA

Also accompanied by six reports, all dated 2014, from the GIA Gemological Institute of America stating that the pear-shaped diamonds weighing approximately 7.16, 6.52, 5.48, 5.47, 4.75 and 4.68 carats are all D colour, VVS1 clarity, with working diagrams indicating that the clarity of the diamonds is potentially Internally Flawless, and diamond type classification letters stating that the diamonds are all Type IIA

Sotheby’s. Magnificent Jewels and Noble Jewels. Genève | 12 nov. 2014, 10:30 AM

← Articles Précédents

Alain R. Truong

Alain R. Truong
novembre 2014
L M M J V S D
 12
3456789
10111213141516
17181920212223
24252627282930
« Oct   Déc »

Articles récents

  • Message du blogueur
  • ‘Waiting To Fade’ by Mehran Naghshbandi
  • A fancy deep greyish yellowish green « Chameleon » diamond and coloured diamond ring
  • A light blue diamond and diamond ring
  • A fancy vivid yellow diamond and diamond ring

Catégories

  • 19th Century European Drawings (7)
  • 19th Century European Paintings (45)
  • 19th Century Furniture & Sculpture (18)
  • 20th Century Design (25)
  • African & Oceanic Art (1)
  • American Art (11)
  • American Furniture (1)
  • Ancient Egypt (12)
  • Antiquities (50)
  • Archéologie (2)
  • Architecture (5)
  • Auctions (57)
  • Automobiles de collection (44)
  • Birds (38)
  • Books & Manuscripts (11)
  • Buddhist Works of Art (71)
  • Cabinet de curiosités (17)
  • Chinese antique rhinoceros horn (45)
  • Chinese Bronze (77)
  • Chinese Ceramics (571)
  • Chinese Coins & Medals (1)
  • Chinese Furniture (40)
  • Chinese Glass (45)
  • Chinese Jade (94)
  • Chinese Lacquer (57)
  • Chinese Paintings (57)
  • Chinese Porcelains (1 129)
  • Chinese Textile (75)
  • Chinese works of Art (195)
  • Chinoiserie (112)
  • Contemporary Art (86)
  • Contemporary Asian Art (10)
  • Contemporary Ceramics (22)
  • Contemporary Glass (1)
  • Costume and Textiles (21)
  • Decoration (5)
  • Decorative Art & Folk Art (2)
  • Design (19)
  • English Furniture (7)
  • European Ceramics (87)
  • European Prints & Multiples (30)
  • European Sculpture & Works of Art (141)
  • Exhibitions (91)
  • Fairs (7)
  • Fashion (110)
  • Félidés (15)
  • Fish (2)
  • Flowers (31)
  • French & Continental furniture (62)
  • Gems (71)
  • Gems, Minerals & Natural History (52)
  • Gold Boxes & Objects of Vertu (18)
  • Himalayan & Southeast Asian Art (25)
  • Humour (3)
  • Impressionist & Modern Art (25)
  • Indian Art (23)
  • Interiors (12)
  • Islamic Art (85)
  • Japanese works of Art (48)
  • Jewelry (1 139)
  • Korean Art (3)
  • Minerals & Natural History (75)
  • Modern & Contemporary Art (7)
  • Modern Art (32)
  • Non classé (42)
  • Old Master Drawings (31)
  • Old Master Paintings (251)
  • Photography (103)
  • Post-War and Contemporary Art (45)
  • Pre-Columbian Art (12)
  • Qing dynasty (1)
  • Quote (3)
  • Russian Art (7)
  • Silver (40)
  • Silver & Gold Boxes (3)
  • Silver, Gold Boxes & Objects of Vertu (17)
  • Tauromachie (2)
  • Tribal Art (1)
  • Urban Art (3)
  • Vanitas & Memento mori (20)
  • Vietnamese Art (36)

Archives

Follow Alain.R.Truong on WordPress.com

Entrez votre adresse mail pour suivre ce blog et être notifié par email des nouvelles publications.

Rejoignez 1 085 autres abonnés

Commentaires récents

felipe gazmuri dans Message du blogueur
Andrew Degian dans A rare early Ming copper-red v…
alaintruong2014 dans Top 12 Most Expensive Chinese…
J.Mäkinen dans Top 12 Most Expensive Chinese…
Marci dans Theodoros Savopoulos Jewelry

Méta

  • Inscription
  • Connexion
  • Flux des publications
  • Flux des commentaires
  • WordPress.com

Stats du Site

  • 1 215 781 visites

  • alaintruong2014

Propulsé par WordPress.com.

Annuler
Confidentialité & Cookies : Ce site utilise des cookies. En continuant à utiliser ce site, vous acceptez leur utilisation.
Pour en savoir davantage, y compris comment contrôler les cookies, voir : Politique relative aux cookies