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Alain.R.Truong

Archives de Catégorie: Post-War and Contemporary Art

Pollock’s ‘Alchemy’ returns to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection after conservation

14 samedi Fév 2015

Posted by alaintruong2014 in Post-War and Contemporary Art

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Étiquettes

1947, Alchemy, Florence, Jackson Pollock, Opificio delle Pietre Dure, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice

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Jackson Pollock, Alchemy, 1947. Oil, aluminum (and enamel?) paint, and string on canvas, 114.6 x 221.3 cm. Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice 76.2553 PG 150.

‘[Pollock was] I think by far my most honorable achievement’. (Peggy Guggenheim, Art of This Century [1979])

VENICE – 4 September 1947. Jackson Pollock wrote to his mother Stella Pollock apologizing for not returning to her a large quilting frame: he was using it to stretch a canvas on which he was working, a painting that came to be titled Alchemy. In the same year, celebrated photographs by Herbert Matter portray Pollock at work in his Long Island studio, with Alchemy attached to the quilting frame on the floor. This method of painting, with the canvas flat on the ground would mark the beginning of Pollock’s dripped or poured paintings

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Jackson Pollock, Alchimia (Alchemy), 1947 (detail), olio, pittura d’alluminio (e smalto?) e spago su tela, 114,6 x 221,3 cm. Collezione Peggy Guggenheim, Venezia.

February 2015. After an absence of more than a year, and following examination, cleaning and conservation at the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, Florence, Alchemy returns to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection to be the focus of a documentary, scientific exhibition: Alchemy by Jackson Pollock. Discovering the Artist at Work (14 February – 6 April 2015), curated by Luciano Pensabene Buemi, Conservator of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and by Roberto Bellucci, a Conservator at the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, Florence.

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Alchemy at the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, Florence. Photo: Opificio delle Pietre Dure.

Alchemy by Jackson Pollock. Discovering the Artist at Work is the first of three exhibitions promoted by the Peggy Guggenheim Collection to celebrate both Jackson Pollock and his eldest brother Charles Pollock. From April 22 through September 14, the museum hosts Jackson Pollock’s Mural: Energy Made Visible and Charles Pollock: A Retrospective. All three exhibitions enjoy the patronage of the U.S. Mission to Italy and of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, New York.

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Alchemy at the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, Florence. Photo: Opificio delle Pietre Dure.

The exhibition will reveal to visitors an explosion of color unveiled by the long process of cleaning, which has made possible a dazzling rediscovery of this famous work. Exclusively and only for the duration of the exhibition, Alchemy will be viewable without glass or plexiglas, rendering vivid the astonishing relief-like surface of the densely worked image.

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Alchemy at the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, Florence. Photo: Opificio delle Pietre Dure.

The visitor will be guided through every technical aspect of the conservation project, as if moving inside the layers and materials of the painting itself, exploring Pollock’s working methods and the processes of conservation, with the aid of an enthralling multi-media installation. Video, 3D reproductions, touch-screens, interactive devices, as well as documentation and original items loaned from Pollock’s studio at the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, Long Island, will bring Pollock’s masterpiece to life, with its thickly encrusted paint surface and its palette of no fewer than 19 different pigments. Thanks to a protracted and detailed study of Alchemy, the exhibition will offer new insights into Pollock and his painting, furthering our understanding of the personality of this artist who combined traditional materials and methods with original and unconventional practices.

Until now, this masterpiece was assumed to have been executed without a plan on the part of the artist, with random spatters and drops. However, the long process of study and conservatiopn has revealed a precise conpositional order, a rational plan for the laying on of the colors a system of counterpoint and symmetries, in which straight lines play off against curved, brilliant against opaque colors, black with silver, blue with red. Delicate traces of white lay out the semblance of a grid, as if Pollock had a general framework in mind from the outset, proceeding then to direct the composition like an orchestra conductor. The team involved in this highly important project was unanimous in the conviction that the successfiul outcome of this large painting would have been impossible without a guiding hand of control. A further discovery was the sheer quantity of paint deployed by Pollock: 4.6 kg of painted material is huge compared to medieval and Renaissance paintings of similar dimensions, for which 200-300 grams is normal.

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Alchemy at the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, Florence. Photo: Opificio delle Pietre Dure.

The exhibition is the first major result of a far-reaching study and conservation project dedicated to 10 of Pollock’s paintings executed between 1942 and 1947, all of them belonging to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. They were acquired by Peggy Guggenheim herself, Pollock’s patron, who exhibited his work on many occasions in the 1940s at her New York gallery Art of This Century. Together they represent a crucial period in Pollock’s career, during which his painting developed from relatively orthodox figurative-abstract imagery to highly original works created by pouring, flicking and dripping paint onto canvas laid flat on the ground.

Alchemy traveled in December 2013 to the painting conservation laboratories of the Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Florence, for exhaustive scientific analysis and for conservation and cleaning. During 2014, a team of scholars, scientists and conservators, from a variety of Italian science organizations specialized in the conservation of cultural patrimony, examined all technical aspects of the masterpiece. The painting then underwent meticulous and painstaking cleaning, a process rendered highly complex by the rich and much stratified surface, combining enamels, alkyds, oil paint, sand and pebbles, in a dense impasto of clotted paint, splashes and drips. The primary objective of the cleaning was to remove a layer of dust and grime that had accumulated over many years which had seriously altered the appearance of the painting, dimming its colors and flattening the three-dimensional character of Pollock’s innovative painting technique.

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Alchemy at the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, Florence. Photo: Opificio delle Pietre Dure.

The research project, the first of its kind undertaken in Italy, was made possible thanks to a group of top scientific research institutes, coordinated by the conservation departments of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, and of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, together with the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, Florence, di Firenze. The group included CNR-ISTM and the Centro di Eccellenza SMAArt of the University of Perugia, CNR-INO and INFN of the University of Florence, the Visual Computing Lab of the CNR-ISTI of Pisa, and the Chemistry Department of the University of Turin.

The project has also benefitted from the involvement of American scientists, conservators and curators who have carried out research on Pollock’s techniques in the past. Conservation was carried out by Luciano Pensabene Buemi, with the assistance of Francesca Bettini, conservator in the paintings department of the Opificio delle Pietre Dure. Essential contributions were made by Carol Stringari, Deputy-Director and Chief Conservator, Guggenheim Foundation, and by Gillian McMillan, Associate Chief Conservator for the Collection, Guggenheim Museum, New York, as well as by the staff of the Laboratorio Dipinti dell’Opificio delle Pietre Dure of Florence.

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Alchemy at the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, Florence. Photo: Opificio delle Pietre Dure.

For first time at ISAW, ancient objects are joined by modern and contemporary art

13 vendredi Fév 2015

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

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Étiquettes

'Cup with Nude Hero, 'Seated Gudea: After a Sumerian Sculpture', 'The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist: Seated statue of Scribe Dudu', 1953-54, Alabaster, Alberto Giacometti, and Lions', Bitumen, Black Limestone, Bronze, Bulls, ca. 1935, ca. 2000 bce, ca. 2500-2350 bce, ca. 2500–2300 bce, ca. 2650-2550 BCE, ca. 2900–2600 bce, ca. 3000-2650 bce, Cylinder Seal, Eshnunna, Eshnunna (Tell Asmar), Gold, gypsum, Half Figure II, Henry Moore, Iraq Expedition House, Jananne al-Ani, Khafajah (Nintu Temple), Kish, Lapis Lazuli, Léon Legrain, Leonard Woolley, May 1991 [Gulf War Work], Michael Rakowitz, Mother Of Pearl, Ostrich Egg, Ostrich-Egg Vessel, Pencil on paper, Puabi's headdress and cloak, Shell, Standing Male Figure, Tell Agrab (Shara Temple), Tell Asmar, Ur, Willem de Kooning, Woman

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Standing Male Figure. Alabaster, Shell, Lapis Lazuli, H. 23 cm; W. 8 cm; D. 7 cm. Khafajah (Nintu Temple), ca. 2650-2550 BCE. Khafaje Expedition. Penn Museum: 37-15-28 © Bruce White.

NEW YORK, NY.– A major exhibition at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World examines the fascinating process through which archaeological objects are transformed from artifacts to artworks and, sometimes, to popular icons, as they move from the sites in which they were discovered, to mass media, to museum displays. From Ancient to Modern: Archaeology and Aesthetics includes some 50 outstanding ancient Mesopotamian objects and more than 100 illuminating documents, photographs, and drawings, with a focus on excavations from the 1920s and 30s, when many important finds were unearthed at sites in present-day Iraq. It reveals the role of archaeologists, art historians, journalists, museum curators, and conservators in constructing identities for ancient artifacts that not only resonated with Western popular and artistic culture, but that also positioned the finds as integral to the history of Western civilization.

In a first for ISAW, From Ancient to Modern includes ten works of modern and contemporary art, demonstrating the evolving influence that archaeological artifacts, and the way they were presented, had and continue to have on artists of our day.

The exhibition has been curated by Jennifer Chi, ISAW’s Director of Exhibitions and Chief Curator, and Pedro Azara, Professor of Aesthetics and the Theory of Art at Polytechnic University of Catalonia. It will remain on view through June 7, 2015.

Dr. Chi states, “From Ancient to Modern: Archaeology and Aesthetics proposes some provocative ideas about the way that archaeological artifacts have been presented to and perceived by the public. With ancient artifacts, related material, and a selection of modern and contemporary art, the exhibition creates an unprecedented and multi-layered view of some of the most famous sites in the history of archaeology, and, importantly, illustrates the ongoing life of ancient objects. ISAW is grateful to the Penn Museum for its extremely generous loans to the exhibition. We also owe many thanks to the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago for its ongoing support, which included opening the doors to its rich permanent collection and archive.”

From Ancient to Modern opens with a gallery devoted to a number of Mesopotamian archaeological sites. Concentrating on Ur, perhaps best known as the birthplace of the biblical figure of Abraham, and several sites in the Diyala River valley, the display includes many nowiconic objects. These are shown alongside documentation that opens a window onto day-to-day life at the excavations while illustrating the ways in which the finds they uncovered were carefully described and presented to the press and public in order to garner maximum appeal. Select objects are followed as they are strategically presented to an international audience, effecting their transformation from archaeological item to aesthetic object.

Ur
The most comprehensive archaeological exploration of Ur began in 1922, with a team led by British archaeologist Charles Leonard Woolley. As seen in a number of photographs that illuminate life at the site, Woolley was a dashing figure, sometimes sporting a fedora, a tight jacket, and even dress shoes amid the dust and dirt of an active dig. His team of international archaeologists included one woman, the widow Katharine Keeling, whom he would marry. (Another archaeologist there, Max Mallowan, would later marry Agatha Christie, whom he met on the site. Christie’s mystery Murder in Mesopotamia provides a rich picture of life at the dig.)

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Leonard Woolley brushing an artifact, Ur. Photograph, H. 11.5 cm; W. 15.3 cm, ca. 1925. Courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology Penn Museum © Courtesy of Penn Museum

The most spectacular of Woolley’s discoveries was the tomb of Queen Puabi, represented in the exhibition through exceptionally well preserved, 4,500-year-old artifacts on loan from the Penn Museum. The tomb contained a remarkably rich concentration of jewelry, found on and with the queen’s body. Much of this was discovered as masses of gold and semi-precious beads, pendants, and other individual components with which the expedition team worked to re-create the original jewelry. The exhibition includes Puabi’s richly beaded cloak and belt, re-created from extraordinary numbers of carnelian, lapis lazuli, and gold beads, and a dazzling headdress comprising lavish gold components that include a massive floral-shaped comb, fillets of pounded sheets of gold, and botanical wreaths.

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Jewelry in situ, Ur. Photograph, H. 13.3 cm; W. 15.5 cm, 1929. Courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Penn Museum: 1363 © Courtesy of Penn Museum

An especially interesting example of the ways in which Woolley and his team re-created Puabi’s jewels is the so-called Diadem of Puabi, which the excavation team assembled from a pile of thousands of lapis beads and gold pendants found in the tomb. In its original reconstruction, represented in the exhibition through photographs, the piece has striking similarities with headbands worn during the 1920s and 30s, including a contemporaneous example designed by Cartier, though Woolley indicates in his note cards that he was reconstructing it as he felt the archaeological evidence indicated. In fact, although the Woolleys’ version of the headdress was aesthetically pleasing, more recent research by the Penn Museum indicates that it was not in fact a single ornament but most likely a series of beaded strands with pendants.

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Léon Legrain adjusting Puabi’s headdress. Photograph, H. 11.5 cm; W. 15.3 cm, 1929. Courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology © Courtesy of Penn Museum

Presented to the public at an exhibition at the British Museum and via strategically cultivated, widespread media coverage, Puabi and her astounding dress assumed an aesthetic aura that radiated the apparent power of its original owner and ignited a frisson of identification with the onetime queen that helped gain visibility for the excavation at Ur. A selection of newspaper and magazine clippings document the overwhelming popular response to the reconstructed image, revealing that Queen Puabi soon became something of a fashion and lifestyle sensation, the subject of articles with such titles as “Ancient Queen Used Rouge and Lipstick.”

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Puabi’s headdress and cloak. Gold, Ur, ca. 2500–2300 bce. Joint Expedition of the British Museum and of the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania, 6th season, 1927-1928. Penn: B16992A (Hair Ring), B17709 (Wreath), B16693 (Decorative Comb), B17710 (Wreath), B17711 (Wreath), B17711A (Hair Ribbon), B17712A, B (Earrings), 98-9-9A, B (Hair Rings), B17708 (Frontlet), B16694 (Necklace), 83-7-1.1–83-7-1.89 (Cloak) © Bruce White

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“A Princess of 3000 bc”, St. Louis Post-Dispatch Sunday Magazine, September 28, 1930. H. 59.3 cm; W. 45.6 cm. Courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology © Courtesy of Penn Museum

Diyala River Valley
If the jewels from Ur largely existed for the public within the aesthetic of popular design and culture, the statuary found in the Diyala region, north of Ur, constituted the first early Mesopotamian artifacts to be studied and presented as works of art. Between 1930 and 1937, four expeditions on behalf of the Oriental Institute led by Henri Frankfort, a Dutch-born, London-educated archaeologist and historian of classical art, uncovered hundreds of Sumerian statues located in architectural contexts, many identified as temples. Dating from the mid-third millennium BCE, the statues included standing male and female figures with hands clasped in front, perhaps in worship, and seated cup-bearing males, all considered the paradigms of their types.

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Interior of the Iraq Expedition House, Tell Asmar. Photograph, H. 17.9 cm; W. 13 cm, January 29, 1934. Courtesy of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. OIM: As. 1098 (P. 24084) © Courtesy of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago

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Standing Male Figure. Gypsum, Alabaster, Shell, Black Limestone, Bitumen, H. 29.5 cm; W. 12.9 cm; D. 10 cm, Eshnunna (Tell Asmar), ca. 2900–2600 bce. Fletcher Fund, 1940. MMA: 40.156 © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY

Archaeology and Aesthetics contains ten of these exquisite statuettes, representing both the traditional types and variations within them. They are juxtaposed with articles, letters, field cards, notebooks, photographs, and other complementary material.

Viewed together, the archival material sheds light on the ways in which these artifacts were approached from an aesthetic perspective and placed within an art historical context. For example, Frankfort (who would become director of the Warburg Institute, in London) was among the first archaeologists to use the word “sculpture” to describe ancient statuary, and his descriptions frequently used the vocabulary of art historical formalism. In articles, letters, and books, he stated that the creators of the figures had “followed abstraction to its utmost limits,” and repeatedly described the statues with such terms as “form,” “mass,” and “space”—all associated with the description of early- and mid-twentieth-century art. In the introduction to his well-known book More Sculpture from the Diyala Region, for example, he stated that the statuary was marked by “a vigorous and inventive stylization with obvious traces of experiment.” The focus on form was also used to link these Sumerian objects to so-called “primitive” art, from which many contemporary artists had drawn inspiration, and to describe them as “universal,“ a term often used in association with fine art and one that helped to position the statues as the origin point of Western art.

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Cup with Nude Hero, Bulls, and Lions. Stone, H. 15.2 cm; W. 7.9 cm, Tell Agrab (Shara Temple), ca. 3000-2650 bce. Iraq Expedition of the Oriental Institute, 1930–1937. OIM: A17948 © Courtesy of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago

Like the written materials, the expedition’s visual documentation of the sculptures was meticulous, scholarly, and focused on the aesthetic. Images of the objects drawn on field cards, for example, were carefully placed vis-à-vis the white space of the card, with brief descriptions positioned so as to balance the image. Similarly, many expedition photographs isolate a single statue against a dark backdrop, with no indication of the temple, palace, or tomb in which it was found, giving the image the timeless quality that imbues so much art photography.

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Ostrich-Egg Vessel. Ostrich Egg, Bitumen, Mother-of-Pearl, H. 22.5 cm; W. 11 cm; D. 11 cm, Kish, ca. 2500-2350 bce. Lent by the Field Museum of Natural History. Field: 156986 © Photo: John Weinstein

The ramifications of Frankfort’s aesthetic perspective can hardly be overstated. It had lasting impact not only on ongoing scholarship on material from Ur, but also on the entire discourse on the origins of Western art, as well as on modern artists who were inspired by the objects displayed in European and North American museums, where they were generally installed in vitrines, without visual or didactic reference to their contexts.

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Cylinder Seal, with inscription to Bilalama and modern impression. Gold, Lapis Lazuli, Bronze, H. 4.3 cm; Diam. 1.5 cm, Eshnunna, ca. 2000 bce. Iraq Expedition of the Oriental Institute, 1930-1937. OIM: A7468 © Courtesy of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago

The Past as Present:
Modern and Contemporary Art From Ancient to Modern continues with a gallery devoted to twentieth- and twenty-first century artistic responses to ancient Mesopotamian objects. As the artifacts began to make their way into museums across pre-War Europe, Alberto Giacometti, Georges Bataille, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, and others drew inspiration from Sumerian figures, while later in the United States, artists including Willem de Kooning, David Smith, and the poet Charles Olson saw in Sumerian objects and poems a kind of energy and vision they believed had been lost.

For Giacometti, who strove in his work to express the human condition, the Sumerian heads he saw at the Louvre represented a time when humans were integrally related to, rather than alienated from, both the visible and spiritual worlds. Archaeology and Aesthetics includes four drawings (both ca.1935) in which the artist explores the image of the Sumerian ruler Gudea, emphasizing the geometric planes and patterns in ancient sculptural portrayals of the king, an example of which is on view in this gallery.

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Alberto Giacometti, ‘Seated Gudea: After a Sumerian Sculpture’. Pencil on paper, H. 26.9 cm; W. 21 cm, ca. 1935. Courtesy of the Alberto Giacometti Estate. GF: 1994-0704 © Alberto Giacometti Estate/Licensed by VAGA and ARS, New York, NY 2014

Moore, too, was inspired by Sumerian sculptures, which he saw at the British Museum. Like Giacometti, he felt that they contained something essential about the human condition. Moore was especially fascinated by the relationship between the head and clasped hands, as seen in the statuary unearthed by Frankfort, finding there, as he put it, “a wealth of meaning.” The exhibition includes Moore’s Seated Figure and Half Figure II (both 1929), each depicting, with simple, powerful forms, a female figure with clasped hands.

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Henry Moore, Half Figure II. Cast concrete, H. 39.4 cm, W. 23 cm; D. 17 cm, 1929. The Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Collection, SCVA: UEA 79 © Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Collection, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, University of East Anglia, UK

Later, the strongly frontal pose and staring, hypnotic eyes of de Kooning’s iconic “Woman” series, represented here by two oil-on-paper works (1953–54 and 1967), also evoke Sumerian sculpture. Indeed, the artist, who saw artifacts from the Diyala Valley site of Tell Asmar at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, noted that the grins on the faces of his “Woman” paintings are “rather like the Mesopotamian idols.” The examples here are shown next to an iconic Tell Asmar worshipper statue that de Kooning had surely seen at the Museum.

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Willem de Kooning, Woman. Oil on Paper Board, H. 90.8 cm; W. 61.9 cm, 1953-54. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Alastair B. Martin, the Guennol Collection. TBM: 57.124 © The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Reflecting contemporary viewpoints, many artists today return archaeological artifacts to their role as windows onto human history and cultures rather than as aesthetic objects. Archaeology and Aesthetics highlights this with work by Jananne al-Ani, who was born in Kirkuk, Iraq, and lives and works in London, and the Chicago-based Michael Rakowitz, who is of Iraqi-Jewish heritage. Both al-Ani and Rakowitz create art expressive of the traumatic loss of human heritage caused by wars and spreading conflict in the Near- and Middle East.

Al-Ani’s subtle and moving Untitled May 1991 [Gulf War Work] takes the form of a grid of photographs of subjects ranging from family members, to Sumerian artifacts, to news images of what has become known as “the first Gulf War.” The work mixes individual with collective histories, evoking the loss of the artist’s family history and cultural heritage while providing the personal perspective of inhabitants that is so often missing from media portrayals of war.

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Jananne al-Ani, Untitled, May 1991 [Gulf War Work]. Silver gelatin prints on paper, 20 units: H. 20 cm; W. 20 cm (each), 1991. Courtesy of the artist. IWM: ART 16417 © Courtesy of Jananne al-Ani Estate and the Imperial War Museums.

Rakowitz’s powerful, eloquent installation The Invisible Enemy Should not Exist (Recovered, Missing, Stolen) (2003) comprises lifesized reproductions of Mesopotamian artifacts that are missing (or were in 2003) from the collection of the National Museum of Iraq, in Baghdad. The work varies in size depending on where it is installed; at ISAW it comprises 25 reproductions. With each object made of a mass-produced, readily available Iraqi product, including packaging of Middle Eastern foodstuffs and Arab newspapers, The Invisible Enemy draws a parallel between their cheap disposability and the treatment of the priceless evidence of human heritage that was looted or treated as waste after the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

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Michael Rakowitz, ‘The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist: Seated statue of Scribe Dudu’ (IM55204), Middle Eastern Packaging and Newspapers, Glue, H. 54 cm; W. 24.5 cm; D. 34.5 cm, 2014. Courtesy of the artist and Lombard Freid Gallery: 12183 © Courtesy of the artist and Lombard Freid Gallery

Pace London presents a portrait of leading contemporary art dealer Robert Fraser

08 dimanche Fév 2015

Posted by alaintruong2014 in Post-War and Contemporary Art

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Étiquettes

1988, Francis Bacon, Jean Dubuffet, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Offres galantes, Portrait of John Edwards, Portrait of Robert Fraser

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Francis Bacon (British, 1909-1992), Portrait of John Edwards, 1988, Oil on canvas © 2014 The Estate of Francis Bacon / ARS, New York / DACS, London.

LONDON.- Pace London presents A Strong Sweet Smell of Incense, a momentous exhibition that takes as inspiration the character and career of celebrated art dealer and pioneer, Robert Fraser. Curated by Brian Clarke, the exhibition is staged at 6 Burlington Gardens from 6 February to 28 March 2015.

Pace will publish a major catalogue to accompany the exhibition, which will include both works shown and archival materials assembled by Clarke. The catalogue will be edited by Clarke and Harriet Vyner, author of Groovy Bob: The Life and Times of Robert Fraser (Faber and Faber, 1999). A second catalogue will accompany a parallel exhibition of recent works by Brian Clarke, presented concurrently at 6–10 Lexington Street (13 February – 21 March 2015).

The exhibition will present “a personal portrait” of Robert Fraser told in artworks and curated by artist Brian Clarke. Clarke was a close friend of Fraser and is also one of several Pace artists who were once represented by the Robert Fraser Gallery – including Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg and Jean Dubuffet. Rather than adopting an academic approach, Clarke’s selection of work will seek to capture the spirit and energy of his friend while also providing a historic context for Fraser’s flamboyance, dynamism and avant-garde gallery programme.

In looking at Fraser’s era-defining gallery, Pace’s exhibition will also evoke the artistically flourishing London of the 1960s, when popular culture, music and art collided with Robert at the epi-centre. Paul McCartney has referred to Fraser in Groovy Bob as “one of the most influential people of the London sixties scene”. Robert Fraser was instrumental in producing the Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover after he introduced Peter Blake to The Beatles.

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Jean Dubuffet, Offres galantes, January 27, 1967, vinyl on canvas, No. 27333, Photograph courtesy Pace Gallery. Artwork by Jean Dubuffet © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

In the 1960s and the 1980s, the Robert Fraser Gallery was London’s preeminent gallery showing both European and American emerging artists. Fraser opened his gallery in 1962 with an exhibition of works by Jean Dubuffet, and, over the years, fostered close relationships with luminaries of contemporary art. After leaving London to spend much of the 1970s in India, Fraser reopened in 1982 with an exhibition of works by Brian Clarke from the late 70s and early 80s, some of them on view in A Strong Sweet Smell of Incense. These works sparked the inspiration for Pace’s exhibition. “The art world at the time was really tired. Nothing was really happening. But the feeling was, if anything was going to happen, it would be at 21 Cork Street.” Brian Clarke, Groovy Bob.

In the years he operated his gallery, Fraser was a great supporter of Neo-Expressionism, Pop Art and Op Art, presenting work by Clive Barker, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Peter Blake, Brian Clarke, Jim Dine, Gilbert and George, Richard Hamilton, Jann Haworth, Ellsworth Kelly, Matta, Claes Oldenburg, Eduardo Paolozzi, Yves Klein, Bridget Riley, Andy Warhol and many others. His brilliant openings were attended by John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, William Burroughs, Marlon Brando, Marianne Faithfull, Michelangelo Antonioni and almost anyone else in the mainstream of the avant-garde.

Clarke’s selection of works in A Strong Sweet Smell of Incense represents the wide ranging influences and eclectic taste of a highly sophisticated aesthete. There are works that Fraser admired, that he owned, that were once on view at his iconic London gallery or passed through his hands or that reflect the cultural background in which the gallery flourished. The artists on view all once exhibited or had close personal relationships with Fraser. Hamilton immortalised his dealer in his Pop Art masterpiece Swingeing London 67, a screen print of a famous news image in which Fraser is handcuffed to Mick Jagger inside a police van, following their appearance in court on drugs charges. The title refers to the term Swinging London and mocks the judge’s decision on imposing what he literally called a swingeing penalty.

Other highlights in the exhibition include a portrait of Fraser by Basquiat, who the dealer represented in the 1980s. A Sweet Strong Smell of Incense will also include a selection of documentary photos of the dealer with artists and friends, and a recreation of Fraser’s desk based on an Ian MacMillan photograph.

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Portrait of Robert Fraser by Jean Michel Basquiat. Photograph courtesy Pace Gallery.

Walker Art Center celebrates three-year initiative with exhibition ’75 Gifts for 75 Years’

05 jeudi Fév 2015

Posted by alaintruong2014 in Post-War and Contemporary Art

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Étiquettes

1944, 1965, 1966–1998, 1998, 2005, Cut, Frank Stella, Isamu Noguchi, Kara Walker, LOVE, Luc Tuymans, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Remembrance, Robert Indiana, Timer, Troyanas, Uomo Alla Balconata (Man on a Balcony), Zilia Sánchez

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Isamu Noguchi, Remembrance, 1944. Gift of the Babe and Julie Davis Acquisition Fund, 2013.

MINNEAPOLIS, MN.- On the occasion of its 75th anniversary as a public art center, the Walker Art Center will present 75 Gifts for 75 Years, an exhibition on view February 5, 2015 through August 2, 2015 that showcases some of the newest works of art gifted to the Walker’s collection and underscores the tremendous impact that gifts of art have made on the institution’s collection throughout its history. The Walker, like many institutions, is indebted to the donors who have helped strengthen its holdings through significant gifts of art. While the Walker has made prescient purchases of works of art over the years through an endowment that supports acquisitions, often buying the work of artists early in their careers, this activity alone could not have built the museum into the preeminent repository of contemporary art that it is today.

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Frank Stella, Untitled, 1962. Metallic oil on canvas. 11-1/2 x 22-3/4 in. unframed. Gift of the Babe and Julie Davis Acquisition Fund, 2013.

The “75 Gifts” of the exhibition’s title refers to a selection of works that will celebrate the culmination of the Walker’s three-year initiative to solicit 75 donors to give generously from their personal or corporate collections on the occasion of this anniversary year. As a result of the initiative, more than 250 works of art from nearly 100 donors have been added through outright gift or promise, and 50 artists not previously in the Walker’s collection are now represented.

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Michelangelo Pistoletto, Uomo Alla Balconata (Man on a Balcony), 1965. Gift of Sage and John Cowles, 2014

75 Gifts for 75 Years will be on view concurrently with another anniversary exhibition, Art at the Center: 75 Years of Walker Collections, tracing the growth of the collection under the stewardship of Walker directors and curators since 1942. Curated by the Walker’s Executive Director Olga Viso and guest curator Joan Rothfuss, the exhibition looks at 75 years of collecting history distinguished not only by bold and often risk-taking purchases but also acquisitions that have consistently breached the boundaries of media or disciplines. Together, these exhibitions celebrate a milestone moment for an institution that is now one of the world’s leading centers for contemporary art.

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Zilia Sánchez, Troyanas, políptico (de la serie Módulos Infinitos) [Trojans, polyptych (of the Infinite Modules series)], 1967. Promised gift of Laura and John Taft ©Zilia Sánchez, Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York.

“The 75th Anniversary Gifts Initiative has made a transformative difference to the collection,” says Walker Executive Director Olga Viso. “It has brought to us a number of works by artists active in the 1960s and early 70s who were not previously represented in the collection, such as the African American painter Beauford Delaney, or early conceptual and minimal artists Joseph Kosuth and Barry Le Va, as well as more contemporary figures like Michaël Borremans, Marlene Dumas and Luc Tuymans whose works would be difficult to purchase given the prices of their works in the current art market.” Alongside the Art at the Center exhibition, 75 Gifts for 75 Years demonstrates the important relationship between gifts and purchases and how these different approaches to building the collection often work in tandem. As Viso points out, “Visitors who visit both shows can readily see how the institution’s more experimental risk-taking purchases in the Burnet gallery that often have a more decidedly global focus, are complemented by gifts of works by artists working nationally and locally.”

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Robert Indiana, LOVE, 1966–1998. Promised gift ©2014 Morgan Art Foundation, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

75 Gifts for 75 Years will include works across media, including gifts or promised gifts in the areas of painting, sculpture, drawing, photography, video, and prints made by artists active since the 1950s. This show will underscore the remarkable generosity of the Walker’s supporters from within the Twin Cities and around the globe, and will showcase the story of ongoing support that has helped the scope of the collection to broaden in important ways. Some of these more recent donations, including works by Robert Indiana, Joseph Kosuth, Claes Oldenburg, Ad Reinhardt, George Segal, Kara Walker, and Andy Warhol help to build on the Walker’s existing areas of strength; others, such as works by Beauford Delaney, Philip Guston, Franz Klein, and Gordon Matta-Clark fill historical gaps; while a range of works by established artists including Marlene Dumas, Barry Le Va, Steve McQueen, Lari Pitman and Luc Tuymans, are by artists new to the collection. Still other gifts have introduced younger artists to the Walker’s holdings who have received significant attention in recent years, such as Dianna Molzan, Tauba Auerbach, Walead Beshty, Sarah Crowner, Zak Prekop and many others. The gifts also include work by numerous artists from Minnesota, including Siah Armajani, Harriet Bart, Jay Heikes, Philip Larson, Scott Nedrelow, Ruben Nusz, David Rathman, Elizabeth Simonson, Alec Soth, and JoAnn Verburg.

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Kara Walker, Cut, 1998. Collection Walker Art Center, Minneapolis Gift of Donna MacMillian, 2013.

“We continue to be awed by the outpouring of support for the institution from donors committed to enhancing the depth and breadth of our holdings,” says Viso. “This effort has brought together individuals across generations, both within our community and around the globe who not only wish to gift us choice works they may have already collected but are also eager to help us acquire prospectively into the future to ensure that the Walker’s collection boldly reflects the art of our time. From artists and friends, to museum members, to new Board members and longtime trustees, the level of participation is unprecedented. It is truly a remarkable moment and indeed several individuals have promised significant bodies of work from their collections.”

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Luc Tuymans, Timer, 2005. Gift of Beth Swofford, 2013.

Los Angeles collectors Jane and Marc Nathanson give major artworks to LACMA

29 jeudi Jan 2015

Posted by alaintruong2014 in Old Master Paintings, Post-War and Contemporary Art

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Étiquettes

" 1860, "Leda and the Swan", "The Virgin with the Host, 'Christ Blessing', 'Interior with Three Hanging Lamps', 1480–1485, 1742, 1962, 1991, Andy Warhol, François Boucher, Hans Memling, Jane and Marc Nathanson, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Lynda and Stewart Resnick, Roy Lichtenstein, Two Marilyns

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Andy Warhol, ‘Two Marilyns‘, 1962, promised gift of Jane and Marc Nathanson in honor of the museum’s 50th anniversary © 2015 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, photo © Museum Associates/ LACMA, by Josh White

LOS ANGELES, CA.– The Los Angeles County Museum of Art announced eight promised gifts of art from Jane and Marc Nathanson. The Nathansons’ gift of eight works of contemporary art includes seminal pieces by Damien Hirst, Roy Lichtenstein, Frank Stella, Andy Warhol, and others.

The bequest is made in honor of LACMA’s 50th anniversary in 2015. The gifts kick off a campaign, chaired by LACMA trustees Jane Nathanson and Lynda Resnick, to encourage additional promised gifts of art for the museum’s anniversary. Gifts resulting from this campaign will be exhibited at LACMA April 26–September 7, 2015, in an exhibition, 50 for 50: Gifts on the Occasion of LACMA’s 50th Anniversary.

« What do you give a museum for its birthday? Art. As we reach the milestone of our 50th anniversary, it is truly inspiring to see generous patrons thinking about the future generations of visitors who will enjoy these great works of art for years and decades to come,” said Michael Govan, LACMA CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director. “Jane and Marc Nathanson have kicked off our anniversary year in grand fashion.”

Jane Nathanson added, “I hope these gifts will inspire others to make significant contributions in the form of artwork as we look forward not only to the 50th anniversary of the museum, but to the next 50 years. I can’t wait for this spring, when these and other gifts will be on view in a special anniversary exhibition at the museum, which we’ll celebrate in high style at the Anniversary Gala on April 18.”

Jane and Marc Nathanson are well-known philanthropic leaders in Los Angeles. Jane Nathanson is a psychologist and licensed clinical marriage and family therapist. A member of the board of trustees at LACMA since 2004, Mrs. Nathanson is a founder and former trustee of the board of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. In addition to their significant arts and culture support, Mr. and Mrs. Nathanson have supported many health-related causes including founding the Nathanson Resilience Center at the UCLA Neuro Psychiatric Institute and funding the creation of meditation rooms on every floor of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Mrs. Nathanson is a trustee at UCLA Medical Center and a former director of the American Foundation for AIDS Research. Marc Nathanson is chairman of Mapleton Investments, a diversified investment holding company, and Falcon Waterfree Technologies. He serves as a trustee of the board of the Aspen Institute, is on the board of directors at the Pacific Council on International Policy, and was founding chair of the Homeland Security Advisory Council (HSAC) for Los Angeles. Prior to his current role at Mapleton and Falcon Waterfree, Mr. Nathanson founded and served as chairman and CEO of Falcon Cable TV. Mr. Nathanson additionally served as chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors during the Clinton and Bush Administrations.

At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Jane and Marc Nathanson have contributed generously to build the museum’s collection, including supporting the acquisition of the complete print works by artist Ed Ruscha. The Nathansons were lead donors to LACMA’s Transformation campaign, and a major gallery in the Renzo Piano–designed BCAM building is named in their honor. Mrs. Nathanson chaired the gala opening for the building in 2008, guiding the single largest fundraising event in LACMA’s history, widely seen as marking a pivotal moment for the museum’s future.

Jane and Marc Nathanson promised an extraordinary grouping of eight works created over four decades by some of the most important artists of the last half century, including Gilbert & George, Damien Hirst, Roy Lichtenstein, Julian Schnabel, George Segal, Frank Stella, James Rosenquist, and Andy Warhol. Selections of the gift include Andy Warhol’s Two Marilyns, from 1962, created around the time Warhol began using the silkscreen process, a method that would soon become his signature. Along with Campbell’s Soup Can (1964) and Black and White Disaster (1962), two works already in LACMA’s collection, this triumvirate will allow the museum to present a full view of Warhol’s central concerns during the 1960s. James Rosenquist’s Portrait of the Scull Family (1962) illustrates the artist’s seemingly irrational juxtapositions in Surrealism combined with directed references to manufactured goods and mass media, all rendered in the artist’s signature dispassionate and seemingly anonymous sign-painter’s technique. Also included in the Nathansons’ gift is George Segal’s Laundromat (1966–67), Gilbert & George’s Falling (1972), Frank Stella’s La Columba Lady (1984), Julian Schnabel’s Fox Farm Painting X (1989), Roy Lichtenstein’s Interior with Three Hanging Lamps (1991), and Damien Hirst’s Death Will Have His Day (2006).

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Roy Lichtenstein, ‘Interior with Three Hanging Lamps‘, 1991, promised gift of Jane and Marc Nathanson in honor of the museum’s 50th anniversary © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein, photo © Museum Associates/ LACMA, by Josh White

50 for 50: Gifts on the Occasion of LACMA’s 50th Anniversary
LACMA announced an exhibition this spring that will include approximately 50 new works gifted in honor of the museum’s 50th anniversary, including selections from Jane and Marc Nathanson’s generous gift. Other promised gifts to be featured in the exhibition will be unveiled for the first time at an Anniversary Gala on April 18. The exhibition will be open to members April 20–25, and will open to the public during a free community day on April 26. Since 2007 LACMA has added more than 19,000 objects to its collection of over 120,000 works from ancient times to the present. This includes the Janice and Henri Lazarof collection of Modern art; the Marjorie and Leonard Vernon collection of photography, made possible by a gift from Wallis Annenberg; collections of European fashion; ancient American art; and art from the Pacific Islands; as well as individual masterpieces by the likes of Thomas Eakins, Maruyama Ōkyo, Henri Matisse, and others.

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Hans Memling, ‘Christ Blessing‘, 1480–1485, promised gift of Lynda and Stewart Resnick in honor of the museum’s 50th anniversary.

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Francois Boucher, « Leda and the Swan« , 1742. Oil on canvas, 23 1/2 x 29 1/4 in. Promised gift of Lynda Stewart Resnick in honor of he museum’s 50th anniversary.

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Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres, « The Virgin with the Host, » 1860, oil on canvas. A promised gift of Lynda and Stewart Resnick in honor of the museum’s 50th anniversary.

Agnolo Bronzino (Florence 1503-1572), Portrait of a young man with a book

28 mercredi Jan 2015

Posted by alaintruong2014 in Old Master Paintings, Post-War and Contemporary Art

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'Portrait of Guidobaldo della Rovere, Agnolo Bronzino, Andy Warhol, Duke of Urbino', Joseph Cornell, Lucian Freud, Mao, Medici Princess, Portrait of a young man with a book, Portrait of Lorenzo Lenzi, The Brigadier, The Dead Christ with the Virgin and St. Mary Magdalene, The Holy Family

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Agnolo Bronzino (Florence 1503-1572), Portrait of a young man with a book, oil on poplar panel, 37 x 30¾ in. (94 x 78 cm). Estimate $8,000,000 – $12,000,000. Photo Christie’s Image Ltd 2015

Provenance: Corsini Collection, Palazzo Corsini, Florence, by 1842.
Private collection.

Literature: F. Fantozzi, Nuova guida, ovvero descrizione storico-artistico-critica della citta e contorni di Firenze, Florence, 1842, p. 556: ‘Uomo che scrive. di A. del Sarto’.
G. François, Nuova guida della citta di Firenze ossia descrizione di tutte le cose che vi si trovano degne d’osservazione con pianta e vedute, Florence, 1853, p. 150: ‘Uomo che scrive, di A. Del Sarto’.
U. Medici, Catalogo della galleria dei Principi Corsini in Firenze, Florence, 1886, p. 17, no. 17: ‘CARRUCCI JACOPO (detto il Pontormo) – Ritratto di uomo in costume fiorentino del Secolo XVI. – mez. fig. gra. nat. Tav. al. m. 0,94, lar. m. 0,78’.
F.M. Clapp, Jacopo Carucci da Pontormo, New Haven and London, 1916, pp. 202-203, no. 17, as not by Pontormo.
C. Gamba, Il Pontormo. Piccola Collezione D’Arte N. 15, Florence, 1921, pl. 45, as Pontormo.
J. Alazard, Le portrait Florentin de Botticelli a Bronzino, Paris, 1924, p. 177, n. 2, as school of Pontormo.
C. Gamba, Contributo alla conoscenza del Pontormo, Florence, 1956, p. 16, as Pontormo.
Fifty Treasures of the Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, 1969, p. 70, under no. 21; p. 133, fig. 5, as not by Pontormo.
P. Costamagna, Pontormo, Milan, 1994, pp. 310, 311, no. A91.1 as a copy or replica of the ex-Lanfranconi picture.
C. Falciani, « Spigolature sul Bronzino (e sul Pontormo) », Paragone, CXI, September 2013.
The present portrait will be published in Dr. Elizabeth Pilliod’s forthcoming monograph with a catalogue raisonné of Bronzino’s drawings and paintings, as datable to c. 1525, possibly Bronzino’s earliest surviving portrait.
Dr. Janet-Cox Rearick has also confirmed the attribution to Bronzino on the basis of firsthand inspection.

Notes: Portraiture, especially prior to the advent of photography, served numerous functions, among them recording a likeness for posterity, conferring status and authority, celebrating events such as a betrothal, marriage or receipt of an honor. And of all the genres, perhaps no other is so aware of its own tradition. Portraiture flourished in Ancient Rome and, while never extinguished, was revisited with renewed enthusiasm in the Renaissance all over Europe. Indeed some of the most recognizable images of the Renaissance–most notably the Mona Lisa–are portraits. From Titian a sub-genre of ‘swagger’ portraiture developed, a torch which would be passed on from him to Van Dyck to Reynolds and on to Sargent and eventually to Lucien Freud whose Brigadier (fig. 2) subversively echoes the glamorous officers and imperial heroes painted by the earlier masters. From Tuscany a different thread emerged, based partially on an appreciation of the artist’s ability to render face and fabric alike with illusionistic realism, partly on the local penchant for grace in ‘disegno’ and partly as Florence evolved from a Republic to a Medicean Duchy to the use of portraiture as a way to establish immediately recognizable iconic images of the ruling class in all its manifestations: successful businessmen, intellectuals, powerful men and women. Artists like Pinturicchio, Botticelli and Raphael developed this tradition, but it reached its apogee in the crystalline perfection of Bronzino’s exquisitely finished portrayals of the Medici and their supporters.

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Fig. 2 Lucian Freud (1922-2011), The Brigadier, 2003-2004 (oil on canvas) / Private Collection / © The Lucian Freud Achive / Bridgeman Images

The reverberation of this golden age of portraiture haunts us even today in ways as varied as the original function of the older paintings. A celebrated artist who adapted the conventions and superficial appearance of Renaissance portraiture for her own ends is Cindy Sherman, whose History Portraits (1988-1990) ransack sources as readily identifiable as Raphael’s La Fornarina (Untitled 205) or as generic as Untitled 209, a portrait of a lady in an elaborate 16th-century costume who confronts the viewer with all the haughtiness of a Bronzino aristocrat. Naturally art using photography, or Sherman’s performance art version of it, lends itself to the appropriation of historical images, and with no post-war artist was this accomplished to greater effect than with Joseph Cornell, whose Medici Slot Machines were executed in the 1940s and 50s using printed reproductions of such paintings as the Portrait of Bia de Medici by Bronzino (Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence) (fig. 1), which gaze poignantly out at us from behind the glass, part devotional object, part arcade entertainment. In both Sherman and Cornell’s work, one of the preoccupations of the artist is the dialogue with their creative impulses and the history of art. Even if Sherman says “I never did terribly well in art history. I could never memorize the slides”, the History Portraits nevertheless were mainly executed in a studio in Trastevere in Rome and were surely on some level inspired by that environment.

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Fig. 1 Joseph Cornell, Medici Princess, Christie’s, New York, 13 May 2014, lot 10, Art © Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Bronzino’s fascination with power and fashion and his cool, impeccably enameled depiction of the powerful and the beautiful of 16th-century Florence made him a true cultural historian of his time. His portraits immediately conjure up a specific and glamorous moment, his sitters’ detachment rendering them more icon-like than humans with fully realized characterizations. Although there is no evidence of any knowledge of his work, there is a parallel between the portraiture of Bronzino and that of Andy Warhol, the most celebrated purveyor of ‘iconic’ images of the 20th century. Warhol, who became interested in Chairman Mao following Nixon’s visit to China, painted him (fig. 3) in part “since fashion is art now and Chinese is in fashion”. Of course his interest was fired by Mao’s power and celebrity, and his place in the select group of instantly recognizable people, like Jackie O and Liz Taylor, who defined his era and his culture.

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Fig. 3 Andy Warhol, Mao, Christie’s, New York, 15 May 2013, lot 39. © 2014 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

We are grateful to Dr. Carlo Falciani for having furnished the following essay on the picture, translated from the Italian.

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The Uffizi Tribuna Gallery, Florence.

This Portrait of a Young Man with a Book is mentioned in 19th-century guides to the Corsini Gallery in Florence, beginning with that of Federigo Fantozzi, who in 1842 listed it as by Andrea del Sarto, an attribution repeated by Giuseppe François in his 1853 guide to the city. Ulderico Medici was the first to ascribe the portrait to Pontormo in his catalogue of the Corsini Gallery of 1886. But apart from these brief references, intended for visitors to the only private art gallery in Florence capable of vying with the famed Medici Collections, the portrait enjoyed little critical acclaim, and art historians only heard of it again recently. All of this is confirmed by the fact that no critics, among the few who studied the work after Gamba in 1921, report having physically seen the painting. They only knew a black and white picture taken by Alinari at the beginning of the 20th century and used in a few ensuing publications. The only explanation for such oblivion is that maybe, some time after 1921, when Bernard Berenson discovered a second version of the painting, the original left the Galleria Corsini and disappeared into other private collections, where it was considered relatively unimportant.

Clapp was the first critic to study the painting. However, he rejected the traditional attribution to Pontormo and, in his 1916 monograph on the artist, it is « ascribed to Pontormo, but neither the colouring, nor the modelling, nor yet the morphology of the figure are his. A copy of this portrait, identical in size, passed from the Lanfranconi Collection, which was sold in Cologne in 1895, into the Sedelmeyer Collection ». In the catalogue entry there is a reference to Alinari picture no. 4198. According to Clapp, the second panel, which was previously in the Lanfranconi Collection, was « a late sixteenth century copy of the portrait erroneously ascribed to Pontormo in the Corsini Collection in Florence ». (Clapp,op. cit., pp. 202-203; for the ex-Lanfranconi painting, see the catalogue of the Dayton Art Institute, Fifty Treasures of The Dayton Art Institute, op. cit., p. 168).

As mentioned above, the Florentine panel was published by Carlo Gamba in 1921 in his brief monograph on Pontormo in Alinari’s Piccola collezione d’arte (illustration n. 45). However, Gamba does not mention the painting in his brief introductory essay, and the attribution is confirmed only by the presence of the picture in the plates; in addition, there are no notes explaining the reasons which led the critic to accept the traditional attribution to Pontormo. In the Alinari picture published by Gamba, we can see that the panel is split right down the middle: the crack, previously reported by Clapp, is clearly visible as it runs from top to bottom through the left cheekbone. This crack, along with certain formal differences, distinguishes this panel beyond all reasonable doubt from that of Lanfranconi version, where the man has a rounder face and the rendering of his eyes is softer.

Jean Alazard discussed the painting in the Corsini Collection in his book Le portrait Florentin de Botticelli à Bronzino, of 1924. He rejected the attribution to Pontormo and highlighted the fact that, in his opinion, the « faiblesse du modèle de la figure et des mains et le coloris disgracieux du visage semblent indiquer une oeuvre d’école » (Alazard, op. cit., p. 177. n. 2). By general consent, the painting was no longer attributed to Pontormo and art history seemed to forget about it until the 1950s, when Carlo Gamba wrote about it again, although he did not publish a new picture of the painting because he preferred the Lanfranconi version, which in the meantime had passed into an American collection. Gamba wrote:

in the Piccola collezione d’Arte I ascribed to Pontormo a portrait in the Corsini Collection generally not accepted as his by art critics. Many scholars say that it is in the tradition of the northern school: they mention different portraits relying on the same stylistic features as examples. Nevertheless, the rendering of the eyes, the mouth and the folds in the clothing are compatible with Jacopo’s style around 1535, and in particular with his style in the beautiful portrait of a young man that passed from Rinuccini to Trivulzio and which can be now admired in the Castello Sforzesco [the reference is to the Portrait of Lorenzo Lenzi, now attributed to Bronzino; fig. 4]. Here too, the uniform greenish background shows how Pontormo’s portraiture had been inspired by models from northern Europe. I reproduce here a second version of it, which is to be found in the Booth Tarkington Collection, Indianapolis. B. Berenson was so kind as to give me the picture of it. We should see the two paintings side by side in order to choose the best version (Gamba, 1956, op. cit., p.16).

Gamba emphatically uses the ‘past’ and ‘conditional’ tenses — ‘I ascribed’, ‘we should see them’ — as though the comparison he yearned to make was no longer possible owing to the fact that one of the paintings was nowhere to be found. (Costamagna, on p. 311 of his monograph on Pontormo, says that the painting under discussion was no longer in the Corsini Collection after the Second World War.) And sure enough, Gamba publishes only the picture of the (formerly Lanfranconi, subsequently) Tarkington panel. In addition, he does not say if the portrait is still to be found in the Corsini Collection; he only says that he published this work in 1921 when it was in the collection. This statement should be intrepreted also in the light of the absence of the painting or any mention of it in subsequent monographs and exhibitions devoted to Pontormo, particularly the exhibition, Pontormo o del primo manierismo fiorentino, curated by Luciano Berti in 1956, where numerous works from Florentine private collections were put on public display, but the Corsini painting was neither exhibited nor mentioned. Nor, indeed, was the painting among those chosen to represent the 16th-century Tuscan school in the famous exhibition held at the Palazzo Strozzi, Florence in 1940, Mostra del Cinquecento Toscano. We can only presume once again that the reasons underlying its obscurity are to be found in its fate at the hands of unknown collectors; the painting had lost its appeal and so it was assigned less importance and downgraded to the rank of a work by a member of Pontormo’s workshop. No other study on Pontormo mentions the portrait until the monograph by Philippe Costamagna in 1994. Like Gamba, he admits that he could not see the painting. The only trace we can find of it, and then only as a reminder of its troubled attribution, is in the catalogue of the collection of the Dayton Art Institute, which had acquired the other version of the painting (the Lanfranconi-Tarkington version). The author of the entry rejects the attribution of the Corsini painting to Pontormo, confining himself to reproducing the Alinari picture and the same information as that published by Gamba in 1921 (Fifty Treasures, op. cit., p. 70).

Philippe Costamagna chronicled the many different phases of the painting’s critical history in his study on Pontormo in 1994. He agreed with what Gamba had previously said and, once again, published only the Lanfranconi version as he considered it to be of higher quality than the Corsini painting. However, Costamagna rejected the attribution of both paintings to Pontormo and ascribed the Lanfranconi version to Bronzino, while writing that the Corsini panel is not only lost, but a copy of the Lanfranconi version (Costamagna, op. cit., pp. 310-311). In any event, Costamagna draws attention to the fact that he could not see the two paintings physically because all trace of them had been lost (the Lanfranconi version had entered the Dayton Art Institute in 1949 and had been downgraded in the meantime to the status of a work by an apprentice; it was auctioned by Christie’s on 18 January 1984).

Between 2010 and 2011, I had the opportunity to examine the painting under discussion on fully three separate occasions. I saw it in New York and again while it was being cleaned in a conservation laboratory in Figline Valdarno in December 2010. I also had the good fortune to compare it with other works by Pontormo and Bronzino while I was arranging the exhibition Bronzino. Artist and Poet at the Court of the Medici. This series of coincidences helped me to analyze the painting in some depth. It also led me to draw different conclusions from those of the critics who had only studied the painting in the old photograph, without having had a chance see it.

The painting depicts a young man dressed in black secular garb, sitting at a worktable covered with a green cloth. The fingers of his left hand are leafing through the pages of a hand-written book while he holds a quill in his right hand, his pose appearing to suggest that he has just finished writing. The pages of the book are written in ink as though it were a notebook of some kind, but they are quite unusual: some sentences seem to be crossed out while others appear to have been rewritten, and there are words written crossways on the page as though to suggest a gloss added as an afterthought. In portraits with books, the painter usually depicts printed books or headed writing paper but in this case, since we cannot read the individual words, the book probably hints at his profession: a man of letters or a civil servant versed in the use of coded writing. The short, reddish beard of his young face suggests that he is probably aged between 20 and 30, and even if it is not possible to establish his true identity, we may assume that he is a Florentine intellectual of the same period as the painter who portrayed him, a conjecture suggested both by the friendly tone of his pose and gaze, and by the rapid brushwork. The paintwork, still in perfect condition, was originally applied in a very thin layer with a firm and rapid hand. The only visible sign of deterioration is the vertical crack that caused the panel to divide into two pieces. The crack has been successfully restored by simply repairing the wood and making good the painted surface. The sitter’s eyes are truly alive and the painting is both of exceptionally high quality and, at the same time, surprisingly severe in its reduced palette. The artist’s choices are very clearly in evidence and the style is of such a high standard that the painting cannot be attributed to a mere follower of Pontormo. In fact, it is possible to identify its author with greater certainty.

The first obvious stylistic reference is to Pontormo, as we can see in the structure of the portrait, in the influence of the northern European school and in the ovoid silhouette of the face with the wide-open, sparkling, rounded eyes that are another of the characteristic features of Pontormo’s style. One has but to compare it with the faces in the fresco in Poggio a Caiano or with the tondi painted for the Capponi Chapel in Santa Felicita. The depiction of the soft, tapering hands with their small, oval nails also echoes Pontormo’s style, as does the manner in which the black tunic is rendered, the differences in the grain of the fabric being portrayed with small black-on-black brushstrokes with tiny variations of shade reminiscent of the coat worn by Alessandro de’ Medici in Pontormo’s portrait of him in the John G. Johnson Collection, Philadelphia Museum of Art. The elegantly tapering hands recur in such works as the Visitation in Carmignano, or again in the Philadelphia Portrait of Alessandro de’ Medici, where we can also detect a similar tendency to cause the figure to emerge from an almost monochrome black background, an expedient invented by Leonardo to which Pontormo resorted in many of his works, the most representative of which is the double portrait now in the Fondazione Cini in Venice.

Yet in this Portrait of a Young Man with a Book there are other elements which are unknown in Pontormo’s work and which point us in the direction of his most famous pupil, Agnolo Bronzino, whose style, Giorgio Vasari tells us, was not easy to distinguish from that of Jacopo Pontormo in the years when master and pupil were working together on theEvangelist tondi for the Capponi Chapel in Santa Felicità. Vasari was writing about the years between 1525 and 1528, before Bronzino’s departure for Pesaro in 1530. Sure enough, while it is difficult to tell the two artists’ styles apart in the Capponi Evangelists, Bronzino’s painting tended thereafter to become increasingly polished and compact, the artist focusing increasingly on rendering the tactile evidence of nature as revealed to the senses. The Portrait of Lorenzo Lenzi (fig. 4), a young poet who was a friend and pupil of Benedetto Varchi, is generally dated to shortly before Bronzino’s journey to Pesaro, although it has been attributed to Pontormo in the past, and even Gamba himself, believing it to be by Pontormo, compared it to the portrait under discussion here in 1956. In his Portrait of Lorenzo Lenzi, Bronzino embarks on a style of painting capable of rendering the tactile nature of the tunic’s fabric and a clarity in the modelling of the face, the most direct precedent for which is to be found in this Portrait of a Young Man with a Book.

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Fig. 4 Agnolo Bronzino, Portrait of Lorenzo Lenzi, Castello Sforzesco, Milan.

In this panel too, the face is defined, albeit more rapidly, with a style of painting that imparts solid and luminous volume to it — a feature that most readily distinguishes Bronzino’s painting from that of Pontormo. Also the tapering and supple hands with their soft, wavering, cylindrical fingers, while based on Pontormo’s style, are almost identical with the hands of the sitter in the Portrait of Guidobaldo della Rovere in the Galleria Palatina di Palazzo Pitti in Florence, which Bronzino painted at the end of his stay in Pesaro in 1532 (fig. 5).

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Fig. 5 Agnolo Bronzino, Portrait of Guidobaldo della Rovere, Duke of Urbino / Palazzo Pitti, Florence / The Bridgeman Art Library

Yet the comparison with two earlier works by Bronzino is necessary to approach the dating of this portrait. Specific similarities both in the rapid yet soft brushwork and in the way the faces are drawn are also to be found in the Holy Family with St. Elisabeth and the Infant St. John the Baptist of c.1526-1528 in the National Gallery of Art in Washington (fig. 6). In particular, the Infant St. John’s face is painted with the same confidence as we see in this portrait, with the same determination to impart fleshy brilliance to the surface of the eyelids and to the sitter’s lineaments. Also identical are the vibrant, liquid brushstrokes defining the pages of the book — as soft as wax — in this portrait and St. Elisabeth’s lined skin in the Washington Holy Family.

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Fig. 6 Agnolo Bronzino, The Holy Family, Samuel H. Kress Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Further comparisons may be made with the Lamentation over the Dead Christ in the Uffizi (fig. 7), which Bronzino painted around 1529, where the Magdalene’s oval face has the same polished surface over which the light flows with intense clarity, defining the purity and fullness of her cheeks and eyes.

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Fig. 6 Agnolo Bronzino, The Dead Christ with the Virgin and St. Mary Magdalene / Galleria degli Uffzi, Florence / The Bridgeman Art Library

In conclusion, all of the above features come together to suggest the attribution of this outstanding portrait, which has finally come to light again after decades of oblivion, to take up its rightful place at the heart of the study of Florentine 16th-century painting, to the hand of Agnolo Bronzino, who must have painted it in strict adherence to Pontormo’s style between 1525 and 1527.

Carlo Falciani, Firenze, 20 Maggio, 2012

Christie’s. RENAISSANCE, 28 January 2015, New York, Rockefeller Plaza

Swiss Lake by Richter and New York Blackboard by Twombly lead Post-War & Contemporary Art Evening Auction

24 samedi Jan 2015

Posted by alaintruong2014 in Post-War and Contemporary Art

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Étiquettes

Abstraktes Bild, Afro Red Web, Alighiero Boetti, Attese, Attese (il sole), Buscando la luz III (Looking for the light III), Chris Ofili, Concetto Spaziale, Cy Twombly, Damien Hirst, Death of Pompey (Rome), Domenico Gnoli, Donna nuda che avvita una lampadina (Nude woman affixing a light bulb), Eduardo Chillida, Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made, Francis Bacon, Georg Baselitz, Gerhard Richter, Howard Hodgkin, In the Green Room, Inside of Lady's Shoe, Jean Dubuffet, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Karmin (Carmine), L'heure de la hâte (The Hour of Anticipation), Lucio Fontana, Lullaby Winter, Malermund (Painter's Mouth), Mappa del mondo - L'insensata corsa della vita (Map of the World - The nonsensical course of Life), Michelangelo Pistoletto, Study for a Head, Three Delegates, Tracey Emin, Vierwaldstätter See (Lake Lucerne)

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Gerhard Richter (b. 1932), Vierwaldstätter See (Lake Lucerne) detail. Oil on canvas, 120 x 150 cm Executed in 1969 Estimate on Request © Christie’s Images Ltd. 2015.

LONDON.- In February 2015, Christie’s will offer another outstanding week of auctions led by Gerhard Richter’s Vierwaldstätter See (Lake Lucerne), 1969, a sublime photo-painting of the famous Swiss Lake, held in the same private collection since 1973, which is presented during the Evening Auction in London on 11 February. Following the world record price of $69.6million achieved for Cy Twombly’s Untitled in November, the Evening Auction also includes Untitled (New York City), 1970, a mesmerising large-scale work from the same seminal series of ‘blackboard’ paintings. The week will also feature a selection of art donated by former students of Goldsmiths, University of London to benefit the building of a new gallery to be offered during our Day sale on 12 February.

Second highest pre-sale low estimate in Europe
This season offers the second highest, pre-sale low estimate for any Post-War & Contemporary Art Evening Auction ever to take place in Europe at £95million (64 lots). The record Post War and Contemporary Art Evening auction in Europe was held by Christie’s in June 2012, and realised £132 million against a low pre-sale estimate of £102 million. Last year’s equivalent February season at Christies broke the record for any Post War and Contemporary Art week in Europe when it realised £176 million, including the benchmark sale of Arte Povera and Post-War Italian art, Eyes Wide Open: an Italian Vision, which realised a total of £38million.

GERHARD RICHTER’S SWISS LAKE
The Post-War and Contemporary Evening Auction is led by Gerhard Richter’s Vierwaldstätter See (Lake Lucerne) (estimate on request). The painting is the largest of a distinct series of four views of the famous Swiss lake painted by Richter in 1969. Purchased from the artist by the present owner in 1973 after its inclusion in the Grand Art Exhibition at the Haus der Kunst Munich, it stems from a landmark period in Richter’s early oeuvre. Three further works by Gerhard Richter are also included in the auction spanning three decades of his celebrated practice: Karmin (Carmine), 1994 (estimate: £9,000,000 – 14,000,000), Abstraktes Bild, 1986 (estimate: £1,000,000 – 1,500,000), Abstraktes Bild, 1990 (estimate: £3,500,000 – 4,500,000).

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Gerhard Richter (B. 1932), Vierwaldstätter See (Lake Lucerne), signed, numbered and dated ‘226/2 Richter 69’ (on the reverse), oil on canvas, 47¼ x 59¼in. (120 x 150cm.). Painted in 1969. Estimate Upon Request. © Christie’s Images Ltd. 2015.

Provenance: The Artist.
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1973.

Property from a Distinguished European Collection

Literature: XXXVI Biennale Internationale dell’Arte, German Pavilion, exh. cat., Venice 1972, p. 41 ( incorrectly referenced as no. 226-1; illustrated, p. 68).
J. Harten (ed.) and D. Elger, Gerhard Richter: Bilder 1962-1985, exh. cat., Dusseldorf, Städtische Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, 1986, p. 374 (incorrectly referenced as no. 226-1; illustrated, p. 102).
Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (ed.), Gerhard Richter, Werkübersicht/Catalogue Raisonné: 1962-1993, vol. III, Ostfildern-Ruit 1993, p. 158 (incorrectly referenced as no. 226-1; illustrated, unpaged).
H. Friedel (ed.), Gerhard Richter: Atlas, Cologne 2006, p. 853.
D. Elger (ed.), Gerhard Richter. Landschaften, Ostfildern-Ruit 2011, p. 174 (incorrectly referenced as no. 226-1; illustrated in colour, p. 40).

Exhibited: Munich, Haus der Kunst, Große Kunst Ausstellung, Landschaft. Figur und Objekt in der Landschaft, 1973, no. 884 (illustrated, p. 290).

This work will be included in the forthcoming 2nd volume of the Gerhard Richter. Catalogue raisonné, edited by Dietmar Elger, under cat. no. 226-2.

Notes: ‘Just because landscape is beautiful. It’s probably the most terrific thing there is… I felt like painting something beautiful’ (Richter, Interview with Rolf Gunther Dienst, 1970, quoted in Gerhard Richter: The Daily Practice of Painting. Writings and Interviews 1962-1993, ed. Hans-Ulrich Obrist, trans. David Britt, London, 1995, pp.63-64).

‘Of course, my landscapes are not only beautiful or nostalgic, with a Romantic or classical suggestion of lost Paradises, but above all “untruthful” (even if I did not always find a way of showing it); and by “untruthful” I mean the glorifying way we look at Nature – Nature, which in all its forms is always against us, because it knows no meaning, no pity, no sympathy, because it knows nothing and is absolutely mindless: the total antithesis of ourselves, absolutely inhuman. Every beauty that we see in landscape – every enchanting colour effect, or tranquil scene, or powerful atmosphere, every gentle linearity or magnificent spatial depth or whatever is a our projection; and we can switch it off at a moment’s notice’’ (G. Richter, 1986, quoted in H.-U. Obrist (ed.), Gerhard Richter: The Daily Practice of Painting. Writings and Interviews 1962-1993, trans. D. Britt, London, 1995, p. 124).

‘A painting by Caspar David Friedrich is not a thing of the past. What is past is only the set of circumstances that allowed it to be painted: specific ideologies, for example. Beyond that, if it is any “good”, it concerns us – transcending ideology – as art that we consider worth the trouble of defending (perceiving, showing, making). It is therefore quite possible to paint like Caspar David Friedrich today’ G. Richter, quoted in D. Elger (ed.), Gerhard Richter Landscapes, exh. cat., Sprengel Museum Hannover, 1998, p. 12).

‘Their significance lies, not in a critical mass but in the prominent position they occupy in the artist’s oeuvre, and in how he thrusts them into dialog with the other work. In several scenes- conceptual, aesthetic, and technical- they would serve as a bridge from the photo-paintings to the abstract paintings soon to come’ (D. Elger, Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting, Chicago 2009, p. 173).

‘I don’t mistrust reality of which I know next to nothing. I mistrust our model of reality conveyed to us by our senses, which is imperfect and circumscribed’ G. Richter in an interview with Rolf Schön, 1972, reprinted in: H.-U. Obrist (ed.), Gerhard Richter. The Daily Practice of Painting, London 1995, p.73).

A sublime vista at the confluence of two headlands in the middle of Lake Lucerne, Vierwaldstätter See is the largest of a distinct series of four views of the lake painted by Richter in 1969. Purchased by the present owner in 1973 from the artist after the work was included in the Grand Art Exhibition held in the Haus der Kunst Munich, the work represents a landmark period in Richter’s oeuvre. During the early to mid 1960s Richter had made his name with his black and white photo-paintings, which fell under the early aegis of German Pop Art, but it was in the years between 1967-1970 that the full expanse of his vision would be unveiled in an unprecedented period of creativity in which all forms of style in painting from Abstract to Figurative, Minimalist to Constructive were explored and amalgamated with equal technical virtuosity and aplomb. Balancing the composition on the knife-edge between figuration and abstraction,Vierwaldstätter See in many ways prefigures the seminal series of seascapes completed in 1969-70, and the two series together can be seen to represent the concepts which run throughout his oeuvre to today. Faced with the panorama, the viewer’s eye is carried along the passage of softened, almost smoky clouds, around the darkened headland onto a distant and illusive horizon, at once inviting the viewer into the landscape whilst at the same time rendering a view that is entirely unobtainable. As Robert Storr states ‘the viewer is thus left in a state of perpetual limbo bracketed by exigent pleasures and an understated but unshakable nihilism. Those who approach Richter’s landscapes with a yearning for the exotic or the pastoral are greeted by images that first intensify that desire and then deflect it’ (R. Storr (ed.),Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2002, pp. 65-66). Meticulously painted, with feathered brushstrokes deliberately visible as evidence of Richter’s process, Vierwaldstätter See acts as a precursor to the sweep of the squeegee which would later define his abstract works. Emerging through the delicate brushstrokes, layers of midnight blue deepen Richter’s grisaille palette and create an intense surface that radiates with enduring natural beauty.

One of the largest lakes in Switzerland, Lake Lucerne has an elusive set of contours that has continued to inspire painters through the ages most notably J.M.W. Turner paintings of the Rigi. For this painting Richter appears to have chosen a view from Vitznau, through the narrow strait at the centre of the lake, between the two rocky promontories called respectively Untere and Obere Nase. Within this apparently photo-real view Richter has conjured an extraordinary atmosphere that dissolves in and out of focus with an ambient haze that creates an almost ethereal environment, recognisably Lake Lucerne yet eluding any exact detail or location. Frequently returning to Switzerland throughout his life, Richter’s landscape is a poetic representation of a well-loved destination. Playing with the conventions of the romantic sublime, Richter in Vierwaldstätter See simultaneously and emphatically refutes the historicized associations of landscape painting, redefining humanity’s role within, and in relation to, nature.

1960S – REVOLUTIONARY YEARS
Painted in 1969, Vierwaldstätter See emerges from a deeply creative moment in the artist’s career and it was in this year that the sheer multiplicity of Richter’s practice became apparent to the public. In his first solo show in a public institution at the Gegenverkehr e.V. in Aachen in 1969, Richter displayed his new forays into abstraction alongside landscape and figurative works based on photographic sources. Included in this show were early photo paintings such as Falbarer Trockner (Folding Dryer) (1962), colour charts such as 192 Farben (192 colours) 1966 and abstracted townscapes such as Stadtbild Paris 1968. Deliberately hung without any sense of chronology or theme, in many respects mirroring his own indifference to the conventional matters of style and subject, this show demonstrated the multiplicity of Richter’s practice in these fertile years.

In 1969, Richter moved away from the straightforward photo paintings of his earlier years. Developing the way in which he initially obfuscated the photographic image, by 1969 Richter demonstrated a far more nuanced and skillful approach to his continued investigation of representation, figuration and abstraction. As part of this process Richter embarked on an experimental series of landscapes. Varying in scenery and painting techniques, the first were loose painterly explorations of aerial photographs of cities and townscapes and later, mountain landscapes and park scenes with their hard-edge textured paint surfaces. In the months leading up to the creation of Vierwaldstätter See Richter produced a series of Swiss Alpine landscapes. With their crisp detail these works are a radical counterpoint to his later interpretations of the alpine landscape visible in Vierwaldstätter See. In this respect Vierwaldstätter See with its more mature, almost luxurious surface, can be seen to resonate more closely with his romanticized, nearly abstract, seascapes that Richter went on to paint towards the end of 1969 and through to 1970.

THE LANDSCAPE EMBODIED IN A BRUSHSTROKE
The artist’s facility with his medium and his technical skill mark the Vierwaldstätter See series and the seascapes of this period as some of his most accomplished and conceptually innovative. The rich, almost velvet surface ofVierwaldstätter See and depth it provides to the composition, shows the development in Richter’s style away from the German pop photo paintings of the early 1960s. This technical ability meant that at the same time as evoking German Romanticism, Richter managed to create paintings that were entirely radical, standing as subtle and subversive responses to tradition. Vierwaldstätter See appears to have been brilliantly captured in movement, the artist visualising the image as if from the window of a passing car or airplane. The sense of transience, of a view captured in a fleeting moment, reiterates our own alienation from nature.

In carrying out the composition, Richter has manipulated the surface of the paint by dragging a dry brush across the canvas while the paint is still wet. This ultra-fne horizontal brushwork creates a hypnotic effect which becomes more apparent as you approach the canvas, with each individual brushstroke becoming visible as an individual element of a coherent whole. Stepping back from the work allows these elements to melt away revealing the softened edges of the lake’s surface. The edges are blurred to the point of abstraction such that the waterline and the dramatic mountainous shore blur in the delicate featherlike brushstrokes and subtle chromatic variation. Richter’s emphatic focus on the brushstroke renders a complex, almost luxurious surface. Areas of gloss mark the physical surface of the lake’s shoreline which has so often inspired painters throughout history.

Richter’s unique painting method strengthens the tension and ambivalence between painting and photography, abstraction and reality. The photographic source is skillfully recreated whilst at the same time brushstrokes marks remain visible, posing a constant question of the viewer as to the nature of the image they are faced with. The subtle blurring of the image is a deliberate strategy in Richter’s photo paintings as a means of creating distance between the viewer and the representation of nature, emphasizing that neither painting, nor photography, can bridge the gap between reality and experience.

THE ROMANTIC SUBLIME
For Richter, his early landscapes represented a determined departure from the politicized painting and the avant-gardism of the late 1960s. As he explained, ‘just because landscape is beautiful, it’s probably the most terrific thing there is…I felt like painting something beautiful’ (G. Richter quoted in R. Storr (ed.), Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2002, pp. 65-66). In this departure from the contemporary tides in painting, Richter was engaging with the legacy of eighteenth and nineteenth century German Romanticism and asserting his right to create art that addressed any subject matter or artistic tradition. Through this assertion works like Vierwaldstätter See demonstrate the artist’s continued efforts to salvage painting as a medium, skillfully depicting the sublime through delicate layers of paint. The subtle fusion between the painted image and the reality of the landscape ultimately mean that Richter’s landscape paintings possess the same conceptual nuances that unite much of the artist’s oeuvre.

We can particularly see the affinity between Vierwaldstätter See and the dramatic mountain landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich, and rightly a comparison is frequently made between the two artists. As Elger notes, when Richter was still an art student in the GDR, he used to travel to Dahlem to visit the museums and always took time to view the paintings by Friedrich. Richter has himself commented on this legacy, affirming the German romantic influence. As the artist explained, ‘a painting by Caspar David Friedrich is not a thing of the past. What is past is only the set of circumstances that allowed it to be painted: specific ideologies, for example. Beyond that, if it is any “good”, it concerns us – transcending ideology – as art that we consider worth the trouble of defending (perceiving, showing, making). It is therefore quite possible to paint like Caspar David Friedrich today’ (G. Richter, quoted in D. Elger (ed.), Gerhard Richter Landscapes, exh. cat., Sprengel Museum Hannover, 1998, p. 12).

Nevertheless, while Richter was clearly channeling the visual language of Friedrich’s paintings, his intentions were far more complex and subversive. Vierwaldstätter See is deliberately imbued with the Romantic connection through its sense of distance and expanse, yet with one key difference. Whereas Romantic paintings often meet the viewer halfway, usually by means of a surrogate figure in the landscape such as the turned figure in The Monk by the Sea, Richter’s landscapes in contrast remain uninhabited. In this way Richter dramatically redefines the historicized understanding of humanity’s role in nature. In Vierwaldstätter See Richter invites the viewer to gaze upon the unmediated beauty of the sublime landscape without ever making contact, remaining forever frustrated by its intangibility.

For Richter, all nature is fundamentally outside the human purview and beyond any religious claims. As Richter has said of his landscapes, ‘[they] are not only beautiful or nostalgic, with a Romantic or classical suggestion of lost Paradises, but above all ‘untruthful’… and by “untruthful” I mean the glorifying way we look at Nature – Nature, which in all its forms is always against us because it knows no meaning, no pity, no sympathy, because it knows nothing and is absolutely inhuman’. (G. Richter, quoted in J. Nestegrad (ed.), Gerhard Richter: The Art of the Impossible – Paintings 1964-1998, Oslo 1999). By this means Richter used his landscape paintings as ‘visual models of a lost truth’ and thus they can be seen directly to complement his abstract works which he has described as ‘fictive models’ (D. Elger, Gerhard Richter Landscapes, exh cat., Sprengel Museum, Hannover, 1998, p. 21). Richter himself has stated ‘For me there is no difference between a landscape and an abstract painting. In my opinion the term “realism” makes no sense’ (G. Richter, quoted in D. Elger, Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting, Chicago 2009, p. 273).

LAKE LUCERNE
In his efforts to salvage painting, examining the way in which it had become seemingly obsolete in the age of the photograph, it is of no coincidence that Richter was drawn to the vivid landscapes of the great Swiss lakes, in particular Lake Lucerne. The dramatic, awe inspiring mountains, combined with the lake’s placid surface gave rise to an inspirational moment for many artists, including Alexandre Calame, Albert Bierstadt, John Ruskin and most notably J.M.W. Turner. For Turner, the Swiss lakes inspired a series of works which embody the tradition of the romantic sublime. Like many artists before him, Turner initially headed south in search of light and in 1819 travelled to Italy, later visiting Switzerland in the 1840s where he was captivated by the sublime beauty of the mountain landscape. In many ways this can be seen to resonate with Richter’s own travels in 1969, beginning further south in Corsica where the study of light dominates his works, and then later to Switzerland where he seems to have encountered the same sense of awe and sublime as Turner did over a century before him.

ATLAS: THROUGH THE ARTIST’S LENS
It was also in 1969 that Richter first began to compile his photographic source material, known now as Atlas that would soon become a referential touchstone throughout his career. This ever-growing subjective anthology of photos, some found by and others taken by Richter, was first exhibited in 1970 under the title Studies 1965-1970 at the Museum Folkwang in Essen, and later would be formally exhibited under the Atlas title in 1972 in Utrecht. Since these early years Richter has added to and exhibited this shifting, swelling flow of source material, such that it stands as a fascinating counterpoint to his paintings.

Although Richter only began to compile Atlas in 1969, his use of photographs as his source material began in 1962 when no longer satisfied with his earlier abstract work he turned to paintings based on found photographs. In doing so, Richter was looking for a new means of painting, ‘free from “literary effect”, historical bias and the decorum of traditional composition’ (D. Elger, Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting, Chicago 2009, p. 49). Appearing initially as a European response to the American Pop Art movement, the artist began by mining images from newspapers, books and other published materials, rendering them in cool, painted monochrome. Richter surmised that working from a photo in this way was the perfect means of escape: ‘a photograph – unless the art photographers have ‘fashioned’ it is simply the best picture I can imagine… it is a perfect; it does not change; it is absolute, and therefore autonomous and unconditional… This is something that just has to be incorporated into painting’ (G. Richter, quoted in D. Elger,Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting, Chicago 2009, p. 49). It was not until 1968 that Richter began to use his own photographs, collecting colour pictures of his first holiday abroad with his family to Corsica.

Building on these earlier photopaintings, Richter’s first colour investigations of the natural landscape began in 1968, just one year before he created Vierwaldstätter See. Buoyed by his recent exhibition success, his recent appointment to professorship at Hamburg Art Academy and birth of his daughter Betty, Richter travelled to Corsica on his first real family vacation. Armed with his camera, he captured numerous rolls of film, which he later translated into paintings. These works contain the same wide, open horizon trailing into the distance and low, dramatic sky as is captured inVierwaldstätter See, simultaneously invoking and puncturing both abstraction and also Romanticism.

REALITY AND REPRESENTATION
Vierwaldstätter See is a masterful rendition of a Swiss alpine vista that vibrates with references to the Romantic tradition so beloved in Germany. Low clouds nestle between brooding headlands in a dramatic swirl of grey and midnight blue, with a hazy sense of the vast distance in the horizon which intentionally raises the romantic notion of the sublime. It is a masterful study of light and landscape, tone and form. Delicate feathered brushstrokes evoking a photographic source, create an intense illusion of reality, but one that is distant and elusive, that nature can never fulfill. Executed at the end of the 1960s, Vierwaldstätter See comes from an intensely creative moment in Richter’s career when he was investigating for the first time the unities between abstract and figurative painting. As the artist once said, ‘if the Abstract paintings show my reality, then the landscapes and still-lives show my yearning… though these pictures are motivated by the dream of classical order and a pristine world – by nostalgia in other words – the anachronism in them takes on a subversive and contemporary quality’ (G. Richter, quoted in A. Zweite (ed.), Gerhard Richter: Catalogue Raisonné 1993-2004, Dusseldorf 2005, p. 33).

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Gerhard Richter (b. 1932), Karmin (Carmine), signed, numbered and dated ‘Richter 1994 810-1’ (on the reverse), oil on canvas, 78¾ x 78¾in. (200 x 200cm.).Painted in 1994. Estimate £9,000,000 – £14,000,000 ($13,617,000 – $21,182,000). © Christie’s Images Ltd. 2015.

Provenance: Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London.
Lord Anthony Jacobs, London.
Gagosian Gallery, London.
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2010.

Property from a Distinguished European Collection

Literature: Gerhard Richter 1998, exh. cat., London, Anthony d’Offay Gallery, 1998, no. 810-1 (illustrated in colour, p. 89).
Gerhard Richter Werkverzeichnis 1993-2004, exh. cat., Dusseldorf, K20 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, 2005, p. 309, no. 810-1 (illustrated in colour, p. 271).

Exhibited: London, Anthony d’ Offay Gallery, Gerhard Richter: Painting in the Nineties, 1995, no. 19 (illustrated in colour, pp. 53 and 84).

Notes: ‘Almost all the abstract paintings show scenarios, surroundings and landscapes that don’t exist, but they create the impression that they could exist. As though they were photographs of scenarios and regions that had never yet been seen’ (G. Richter, quoted in ‘I Have Nothing to Say and I’m Saying It: Conversation between Gerhard Richter and Nicholas Serota ‘, in Gerhard Richter: Panorama, exh. cat., London, 2011, p. 19).

‘Richter has taken to faying the painted skin of his canvases with a spatula in broad strokes or long, wavering stripes leaving behind abraded, shimmering surfaces that at their sheerest and most luminous look like the Aurora Borealis suspended above various red, orange, yellow, green, blue or violet planets’ (R. Storr, Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2002, p. 81).

‘Abstract paintings are fictitious models because they visualize a reality, which we can neither see nor describe, but which we may nevertheless conclude exists. We attach negative names to this reality; the un-known, the un-graspable, the infinite, and for thousands of years we have depicted it in terms of substitute images live heaven and hell, gods and devils. With abstract painting we create a better means of approaching what can be neither seen nor understood’ (G. Richter, quoted in R. Nasgaard, ‘Gerhard Richter’, Gerhard Richter: Paintings, exh. cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 1988, p. 107).

‘[In this period] Richter attempted to take possession of his domestic happiness through a long and painterly process, as if only this would make the situation believable’ (D. Elger, Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting, Chicago 2009, p. 327).

Enshrouded in a luxurious velvety Carmine red veil, Karmin (Carmine) engulfs the viewer in its mysterious crimson glow. Like a luscious velvet curtain draped over a window, or rich cloth that cascades over the contours of a figure, this majestic painting tempts the viewer into its warm hearth with its enigmatic surface. In Karmin, Richter has become captivated by the rhythmic application and removal of paint in horizontal and vertical planes, each successive stroke of the squeegee drawing a veil across the previous layer of paint like a curtain, playing with the notion of presence and absence. Through addition and subtraction to the point of harmony, palimpsests of emerald green and azure blue emerge and dissolve through the apertures in the surface, offering glimpses of an imaginary landscape somewhere in the distance. Created in 1994, the painting reflects the supreme contentment of the artist. In 1991 Richter held his breakthrough exhibition at Tate Gallery, London and in 1993 he received a major touring retrospective Gerhard Richter: Malerei 1962-1993 curated by Kasper König accompanied by a three volume catalogue raisonné edited by Benjamin Buchloch. This latter exhibition containing 130 works carried out over the course of thirty years, was to entirely reinvent Richter’s career. As critic Doris von Drathen wrote shortly after, ‘there are exhibitions that, like great milestones, reset the standards in contemporary art. Richter’s retrospective, launching now at the ARC in Paris, is of this quality’ (D. von Drathen quoted in D. Elger, Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting, Chicago 2009, p. 323). The beauty and balance of Karmin can be understood as a reflection of this personal satisfaction. Indeed a sense of his enriched emotional life is evident in the confident gestures, radiance and majestic palette of the painting. In 1994, whilst he was completing Karmin, Richter was also engaged in a series of paintings depicting his new wife Sabine Moritz. In particular the photorealist masterpiece, Lesende demonstrates a beautiful tenderness towards its subject, light illuminating Sabine’s elegant profile. The following year, Richter was to begin a suite of paintings entitled S. mit Kind, now housed in Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg. Depicting Sabine cradling their young son Moritz in her arms, Richter has again removed vertical swathes of paint with the squeegee to in effect reveal the fgures from behind the front surface. As Dietmar Elger suggests, in this period ‘Richter attempted to take possession of his domestic happiness through a long and painterly process, as if only this would make the situation believable’ (G. Richter quoted in D. Elger,Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting, Chicago 2009, p. 327). It was in 1995 that Karmin was exhibited for the frst time in Gerhard Richter: Painting in the Nineties at Anthony d’Offay Gallery; an acclaimed show including works that now reside in major museum collections such as Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Tate Modern, London, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, La Caixa Foundation, Barcelona and The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.

Executed during the run of the touring retrospective described above, this intersection of horizontal and vertical strokes in a grid-like assembly, and the harmonious intermarriage of weton- wet oil paint, creates a near sublime effect that recalls Richter’s greatest cycle of abstracts, the Bach series (1992, Moderna Museet, Stockholm) which were premiered here for the first time. As Richter has described, In Karmin vast antecedent layers laid down in horizontal swathes are revealed and submerged in the artist’s subsequent painting. Through the horizontal strokes of paint, Richter has swept through the lustrous medium in vertical planes from top to bottom, in an act of creative destruction, partially obscuring and at the same time allowing jewel-like blues and greens to interact with velveteen reds at the centre of the composition. As Robert Storr has observed, ‘Richter has taken to faying the painted skin of his canvases with a spatula in broad strokes or long, wavering stripes leaving behind abraded, shimmering surfaces that at their sheerest and most luminous look like the Aurora Borealis suspended above various red, orange, yellow, green, blue or violet planets’ (R. Storr, Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2002, p. 81).

In Karmin, Richter creates a work that celebrates the sensual pleasures of freely applied paint and colour, just as he accomplished in the Bach series. In addition to the rich optical experience of the painting, Richter encourages the viewer to immerse him or herself in the imaginary space of the composition. He insists that ‘paintings are always illusionistic’ so that a line, form or colour ‘is only interesting when it releases an interesting association’ (G. Richter quoted in R. Nasgaard, ‘Gerhard Richter’, Gerhard Richter: Paintings, exh. cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago 1988, p. 107). In Karmin the cumulative layers of non-representational paint in hues of red, green and blue, cannot help but evoke the English rose garden or a Mediterranean sunset, offering a romantic window onto the world. Just as Claude Monet had done generations before him in his Nymphéas, Richter beautifully illuminates the shifting boundary between figuration and abstraction. Whilst Monet’s immersive, shimmering images of waterlilies and reflections on the quicksilver water of the pond at Giverny pushed figuration to the brink of abstraction, emphasising the illusory aspect of the lush, textured paint itself, in Karmin Richter has arrived at the same effect through different means.

For Richter, his free abstraction is the product of a long investigation into the possibilities of painting spanning more than five decades. Coming full-circle from his early Tisch (1962) in which he cancelled his photorealist image with haptic swirls of grey paint, Richter began in the 1980s to freely overlay his canvases with colourful streaks and drags of pigment using his signature squeegee. As Dietmar Elger has observed, ‘for Richter, the squeegee is the most important implement for integrating coincidence into his art. For years, he used it sparingly, but he came to appreciate how the structure of paint applied with a squeegee can never be completely controlled. It thus introduces a moment of surprise that often enables him to extricate himself from a creative dead-end, destroying a prior, unsatisfactory effort and opening the door to a fresh start’ (G. Richter quoted in D. Elger, Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting, Chicago 2009, p. 251). This method was to find its purest articulation between 1989 and 1994 with large-format paintings such asKarmin. Deconstructing the relationship between figure and ground, Richter was embracing the contingency of his medium, enjoying the effects of the spontaneous yet confident application of paint. As he once explained, ‘it is a good technique for switching off thinking consciously, I can’t calculate the result. But subconsciously, I can sense it. This is a nice ‘between’ state’ (G. Richter quoted in D. Elger, Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting, Chicago 2009, p. 251).

In his most definitive elucidation of his abstract method published in the Documenta 7 exhibition catalogue in 1979, Richter explained that for him, the abstract painting is no less a representation of reality than those photorealist figurative paintings of landscapes, people or places. Rather it represents the other end of the same spectrum, depicting the unseen, unspoken, intangible reality. As he elaborated, ‘every time we describe an event, add up a column of figures or take a photograph of a tree, we create a model; without models we would know nothing about reality and would be like animals. Abstract paintings are fictitious models because they visualize a reality, which we can neither see nor describe, but which may nevertheless conclude exists. We attach negative names to this reality; the un-known, the un-graspable, the infinite, and for thousands of years we have depicted it in terms of substitute images live heaven and hell, gods and devils. With abstract painting we create a better means of approaching what can be neither seen nor understood’ (G. Richter quoted in R. Nasgaard, ‘Gerhard Richter’, Gerhard Richter: Paintings, exh. cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago 1988, p. 107).

5

Gerhard Richter (b. 1932), Abstraktes Bild, signed, numbered and dated ‘Richter 1990, 720-3’ (on the reverse), oil on canvas, 48¼ x 40¼in. (122.5 x 102.3cm.). Painted in 1990. Estimate £3,500,000 – £4,500,000 ($5,295,500 – $6,808,500). © Christie’s Images Ltd. 2015.

Provenance: Private Collection, Cologne (acquired directly from the artist).
Schönewald Fine Arts, Xanten & Anthony Meier Fine Arts, San Francisco.
Barbara Mathes Gallery, New York.
Anon. sale, Sotheby’s New York, 9 November 2011, lot 35.
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner.

PROPERTY FROM A EUROPEAN PRIVATE COLLECTION

Literature: Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (ed.), Gerhard Richter, Werkübersicht/Catalogue Raisonné: 1962-1993, vol. III, Ostfildern-Ruit 1993, p. 189, no. 720-3 (illustrated, p. 124).

Exhibited: New York, Barbara Mathes Gallery, Gerhard Richter: Works on Paper and Selected Paintings, 2003.

Notes: ‘Abstract paintings are fictive models, because they make visible a reality that we can neither see nor describe, but whose existence we can postulate. We denote this reality in negative terms: the unknown, the incomprehensible, the infinite… Of course, pictures of objects also have this transcendental side to them’ (G. Richter, quoted in D. Elger,Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting, Chicago 2009, p. 314).

‘For Richter, the squeegee is the most important implement for integrating coincidence into his art. For years, he used it sparingly, but he came to appreciate how the structure of paint applied with a squeegee can never be completely controlled. It thus introduces a moment of surprise that often enables him to extricate himself from a creative dead-end, destroying a prior, unsatisfactory effort and opening the door to a fresh start’ (D. Elger, Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting, Chicago 2009, p. 251).

‘It is a good technique for switching off thinking. Consciously, I can’t calculate the result. But subconsciously, I can sense it. This is a nice “between” state’ (G. Richter, quoted in S. Koldehoff, ‘Gerhard Richter, Die Macht der Malerei’, inArt. Das Kunstmagazin, December 1999, p. 20).

Painted in 1990, at the height of Gerhard Richter’s abstract practice, Abstraktes Bild (720-3) is a mesmerising example of the artist’s over painting technique, representing the synthesis of lyrical abstraction and hyper-realism that have been key tenets of his practice throughout his career. Swept across the canvas in vivid kaleidoscopic striations, infinite shades of sapphire blue, emerald green and creamy, white-tempered orange, blend, intermingle and collide, forming a hypnotic panorama of shimmering chromatic strata punctuated by vibrant constellations of primary red and yellow. Textures emerge and dissolve, weaving deliquescent patterns across the densely layered surface. From beneath the polychromatic fabric of the paint, vertical bars painted in Richter’s signature photo realist style emerge, in juxtaposition with the horizontal streaks of marbled colour that surge across the canvas. With its rich palimpsest of prismatic pigment the present work exemplifies the collision of the abstract and concrete, and the balance between chance effects and careful orchestration in Richter’s work. Since 1986, when Richter first took a squeegee to his landscape portraits, the artist has systematically effaced pre-existing works in an act that is symbolic of the artist’s annihilation of the boundaries between the real and fictive, searching for new ways to present the truth in painting. From overpainting photo realist canvases to daubing oil paint on to photographs, the coincidence of abstraction and figuration in Richter’s work explores the tension between illusionistic space and material presence. Loading his canvas with layers of colour before dragging his paint across the canvas, Richter creates a rich continuum of colour that glistens with fluid tactility, the uppermost layer of paint disrupted, revealing the image not quite obliterated beneath. The present work exemplifies Richter’s eloquent command of his medium, cultivated over decades of experimentation in both abstract and figurative registers. His quest to carve a complex space between the two realms is elegantly showcased here: the deliberate over painting of a pre-existing canvas demonstrates the interplay of chance and preparation in the artist’s diverse oeuvre.

Within a body of work relentlessly dedicated to exploring the possibilities of painting, the Abstraktes Bilder were first conceived as a counterpoint to the artist’s already extensive body of figurative photo-paintings. Regarded as one of the finest periods within Richter’s abstract practice, the late 1980s and early 1990s saw the production of significant works including the celebrated Eis cycle of paintings (The Art Institute of Chicago), as well as important examples of hisAbstraktes Bilder series, now housed in important collections including Abstraktes Bild 726 (Tate, London), Abstraktes Bild 727 (Kunsthalle Hamburg) and Abstraktes Bild 734 (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art). The early 1990s was also a time of great professional triumph for Richter. His breakthrough retrospective was held at Tate Gallery, London, in 1991, while Documenta IX in 1992 saw the first major presentation of his work in Germany since the showing of 18 October 1977 in Krefeld in 1989. The influential touring retrospective Gerhard Richter: Malerei 1961-1993 opened in 1993, grouping together 130 works in a critically acclaimed exhibition that was to completely transform the artist’s career.

While in many of the artist’s Abstraktes Bilder the underlying illustration is completely sacrificed to Richter’s abstract composition, in the present work the painting that lies beneath is exposed by the skips, schisms and apertures produced by the squeegee as it cuts through gradations of paint, rupturing the diaphanous skeins of colour that proliferate the canvas. This act of erasure illuminates the artist’s manifesto of construction and destruction. Robert Storr writes: ‘Richter’s laconic explanation of this procedure does not emphasize the destruction of what is there for destruction’s sake so much as the erasing of something overly familiar and dissatisfying in the hope that erasure will open the way toward problematic painterly phenomena with unforeseen and unforeseeable consequences’ (R. Storr,Gerhard Richter: Doubt and Belief in Painting, New York 2003, p. 114). Glimpses of illusionistic tubes or bars recall his grayscale curtain and tube paintings from the mid-sixties, which presented his viewers with a structured representation of pictorial space, something that is echoed in the deliberate composition of Abstraktes Bild 720-3. Hinting at a grid-like structure, the loose fabric of the paint traversing the rigidly perpendicular tubes, Richter makes reference to the grid as an important feature that recurs throughout his work, from his 1968 work, Fenstergitter (Window Grid), to the neatly structured organisation of the colour chart paintings and anticipating the grate-like structure of the Cage paintings. Here, in the balance of the abstract and figurative, we see the literal enactment of Richter’s understanding of the two as equivalent: ‘Abstract paintings are fictive models, because they make visible a reality that we can neither see nor describe, but whose existence we can postulate. We denote this reality in negative terms: the unknown, the incomprehensible, the infinite… Of course, pictures of objects also have this transcendental side to them’ (G. Richter, quoted in D. Elger, Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting, Chicago 2009, p. 314).

Adopted by Richter in the second half of the 1980s, the squeegee has been instrumental in Richter’s explorations into the effects of chance in his work. As Dietmar Elger explains, ‘For Richter, the squeegee is the most important implement for integrating coincidence into his art. For years, he used it sparingly, but he came to appreciate how the structure of paint applied with a squeegee can never be completely controlled. It thus introduces a moment of surprise that often enables him to extricate himself from a creative dead-end, destroying a prior, unsatisfactory effort and opening the door to a fresh start’ (D. Elger, Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting, Chicago 2009, p. 251). Richter delights in the automatism of this technique, claiming ‘It is a good technique for switching off thinking. Consciously, I can’t calculate the result. But subconsciously, I can sense it. This is a nice “between” state’ (G. Richter, quoted in S. Koldehoff, ‘Gerhard Richter, Die Macht der Malerei’, in Art. Das Kunstmagazin, December 1999, p. 20). Richter’sAbstraktes Bild 720-3 develops this premise into a sophisticated painterly dialogue between chance and control, exploiting an arsenal of tools in order to blur all traces of the artist’s hand. Using palette knives and different-sized dry brushes alongside the squeegee, Richter scraped, smeared and redirected the random collision of pigments achieved in his initial application of paint. The linear sweep of the squeegee is thus interrupted by fissures, rivulets and faults that obscure the process of the work’s own making. By covering his tracks in this way, Richter creates works that appear before the viewer like naturally-occurring phenomena.

By exploiting the intrinsic properties of paint, Richter has likened his craft not only to natural evolutionary processes, but also to the Duchampian notion of the ‘readymade’. Speaking of his practice at the time of the present work, Richter claims, ‘I’m more concerned now to have [my paintings] evolve of their own accord. I don’t work at random but in a more planned way, in the sense that I let a thing happen by chance, then correct it, and so on. The actual work consists in taking what appears, looking at it then deciding whether it’s acceptable or not. Perhaps this way of working has something in common with the readymade: the artist lets someone else – it doesn’t matter who – do the work of making the object, and the real work lies in observing the thing and deciding whether it’s any good’ (G. Richter, quoted in ‘Interview with Jonas Storsve, 1991’, in D. Elgar and H-U. Obrist (eds.), Gerhard Richter – Text. Writings, Interviews and Letters 1961-2007, London 2009, p. 275). In this way, Richter introduces a conceptual element to his practice, treating paint as a fully-fledged subject in its own right. ‘I hope to achieve the same coherence and objectivity that a random slice of Nature (or a Readymade) always possesses. Of course, this is also a method of bringing in unconscious processes, as far as possible. I just want to get something more interesting out of it than those things that I can think out for myself’ (G. Richter, quoted in ‘Interview with Sabine Schütz, 1990’, in H-U. Obrist (ed.), Gerhard Richter. The Daily Practice of Painting. Writings and Interviews 1962-1993, London 1995, p. 216).

6

Gerhard Richter (b. 1932), Abstraktes Bild, signed, numbered and dated ‘607-2 Richter 1986’ (on the reverse), oil on canvas, 27¾ x 39 3/8in. (70.5 x 100.1cm.). Painted in 1986. Estimate £1,000,000 – £1,500,000 ($1,513,000 – $2,269,500). © Christie’s Images Ltd. 2015.

Provenance: Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.
Vivian Horan Fine Art, New York.
Private Collection.
Anon. sale, Sotheby’s, New York, 11 November 1993, lot 162.
Private Collection, Houston.
Anon. sale, Christie’s, New York, 17 May 2007, lot 181.
Private Collection.
Anon. sale, Christie’s New York, 11 May 2011, lot 66.
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner.

Literature: Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (ed.), Gerhard Richter, Werkübersicht/Catalogue Raisonné: 1962-1993, vol. III, Ostfildern-Ruit 1993, p. 180, no. 607-2, (illustrated in colour, p. 100).
D. Elger (ed.), Gerhard Richter, Catalogue Raisonné, vol. III, 1976-1987 (nos. 389-651-2), Ostfildern-Ruit, 2013, p. 525, no. 607-2 (illustrated in colour, p. 525).

Notes: ‘We only find paintings interesting because we always search for something that looks familiar to us. I see something and in my head I compare it and try to find out what it relates to. And usually we do find those similarities and name them: table, blanket, and so on. When we don’t find anything, we are frustrated and that keeps us excited and interested… That’s how abstract painting works’ (G. Richter, quoted in R. Storr, ‘Interview with Gerhard Richter’, inGerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2002, p. 304).

‘Almost all the abstract paintings show scenarios, surroundings and landscapes that don’t exist, but they create the impression that they could exist. As though they were photographs of scenarios and regions that had never yet been seen’ (G. Richter, quoted in ‘I Have Nothing to Say and I’m Saying It: Conversations between Gerhard Richter and Nicholas Serota’, in Gerhard Richter: Panorama, exh. cat., Tate, London, 2011, p. 19).

Rendered in a blazing, fiery palette, spiked with jeweled tones of green, blue and yellow, Gerhard Richter’s Abstraktes Bild (607-2) bears witness to the exuberant painterly freedom that defined the artist’s output of the mid-1980s. Dazzling in its optical complexity, the work confronts the viewer as a mesmerizing archaeological terrain of texture and colour, a richly layered palimpsest of fissures and collisions. Excavated using an arsenal of tools, the work’s tactile surface bears the marks of Richter’s interventions: scraping, smearing and dragging his paint across the canvas, the artist weaves a hypnotic panorama, using the end of his paintbrush to create linear interruptions in the layers of pigment. Painted in 1986, the work stems from one of Richter’s most experimental and fertile creative periods. After two decades of highly controlled, rigorous painterly investigations, exemplified in his Photo Paintings, Colour Charts and Grey monochromes, amongst others, the 1980s saw the artist embark upon a frenetic exploration of free abstraction. Without pictorial prompts or guidelines, Richter launched himself into a fervent celebration of painting’s contingency, embracing chance and rejecting structured pre-meditation. Painting, in and of itself, became his primary subject matter. The Abstraktes Bilder of this period precipitated an era of professional triumph: with his first major touring retrospectives in Germany and the United States of America, the international art world marvelled at his reassertion of painting’s autonomy. The forty paintings from 1986, many held in collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Albertina, Vienna, stand as a testament to this newfound liberation. With its sumptuous topography and near-geological strata of paint, the present work is a virtuosic example of Richter’s desire to ‘erase the pictorial object’s function as an illustration of reality and to replace it with the picture’s own reality’ (J. Nestegard,Gerhard Richter: Det Umuliges Kunst, Malerier 1964-1998, exh. cat., Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, 1999, p. 45).

Richter’s intense engagement with abstraction during the 1980s was to transform the face of twentieth-century painting. He had begun his series of Abstraktes Bilder in 1976, cementing the move towards abstraction that had been latent in his earlier body of figurative Photo Paintings. His initial abstract paintings struggled to move away from the supportive framework of photography, using magnified images and photographic sketches as the foundation for his abstract explorations. It was not until the early part of the 1980s that Richter made the seminal move towards free abstraction, allowing the natural evolution of paint across the canvas to dictate the appearance of his works. Yet, unlike the outpouring of energy espoused by his Neo-Expressionist contemporaries, Richter’s efforts retained the calculated nature of his earlier enquiries, and by the time of the present work, his abstract practice had evolved into sophisticated dialogue between chance and control. Though the squeegee, first exploited during this period, generated a certain amount of unpredictability, the end result was always highly mediated by the artist’s watchful eye. Speaking of Richter’s practice during this period, Roald Nasgaard explains how ‘Richter will begin a new group of paintings by placing a number of primed canvases around the walls of his studio, eventually working on several or all of them at the same time, like a chess player simultaneously playing several boards. He begins by applying a soft ground of red, yellow, blue or green… But then it must be altered, with a new move, a first form; a large brush stroke, a track of color drawn out with a squeegee, a geometric shape. Step by step the painting changes in appearance, sometimes sharply, with each new accretion, and goes through several states… They are finished “when there is no more I can do to them, when they exceed me, or they have something that I can no longer keep up with”’ (R. Nasgaard, ‘The Abstract Paintings’ in T. Neff (ed.), Gerhard Richter: Paintings, London 1988, p. 108).

The mid-1980s brought about a period of great personal contentment for Richter, who had married the artist Isa Genzken in 1982. Richter’s gallerist Rudolf Zwirner offered the couple a large studio space Cologne, and the two artists left Düsseldorf behind them – a move that propelled Richter’s rise to international acclaim. In 1986, the year of the present work, Richter was granted his first major touring retrospective at the Städtisches Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf, comprising 133 works and subsequently travelling to the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, the Kunsthalle Bern and the Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna. The critics’ reaction cemented his growing reputation as one of the leading artists of his generation: according to Dietmar Elger, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung named him ‘one of the most interesting skeptics and tacticians of doubt’, whilst Der Spiegel asserted that ‘No one else has explored the potential of painting in an age of mass photography in as coolly engaged and intelligent a manner as he has, or has been as tough and ready to experiment as he is’ (D. Elger, Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting, Chicago 2009, p. 264). The 1986 retrospective was swiftly followed by an extensive North American exhibition in 1988, touring prestigious locations including the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C., and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. By the end of the decade, Richter’s global reputation had soared, paving the way for the career-defining retrospectives of the 1990s.

BACON REFLECTS ON POPE PIUS XII
A deeply human portrayal of Francis Bacon’s most enduring subject, Study for a Head, 1955 (estimate on request), is one of only a handful of works depicting Pope Pius XII: the current, living incumbent at the time of the painting. One of the last paintings of Pope Pius XII held in private hands, the others are housed in major museum collections including Pope II, 1951 (Kunsthalle Mannheim, Mannheim), Figure Sitting, 1955 (Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent) and Study (Imaginary Portrait of Pope Pius XII), 1955 (Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich). Fascinated by men of power and authority, Bacon was attracted to the fundamentally tragic combination of violence and vulnerability latent in their status, and sought to capture this paradox in his Papal portraits. Whereas previous works had presented the Pope as a screaming, agonised phantom, Study for a Head presents a figure submerged in existential contemplation, riddled with the same quiet dignity and introspective tension that was to define Bacon’s first self-portrait the following year. Exhibited at Tate, London, in 1962, Study for a Head remained unseen by the public for over 40 years, resurfacing in major retrospectives at the Institut Valencià d’Art Modern, Valencia, in 2003 and at the Fondation Beyeler, Basel, the following year. Christie’s is pleased to be one of the sponsors of the current exhibition, Francis Bacon and the Art of the Past at the State Hermitage Museum in Russia, which will which showcase paintings from the Sainsbury Centre of Visual Art alongside masterpieces from the Hermitage. This exhibition will travel to Sainsbury Centre for Visual Art in Norwich in April 2015.

2

Francis Bacon (1909-1992), Study for a Head, oil on canvas, 40 x 30 1/8in. (101.7 x 76.5cm.). Painted in 1955. Estimate Upon Request © Christie’s Images Ltd. 2015.

Provenance: Hanover Gallery, London.
Mrs. Brenda Bomford, Aldbourne.
Marlborough Fine Art Ltd., London.
Lord and Lady Beaumont of Whitley.
Private Collection, Liege/ Zurich.
Lefevre Gallery (Alex Reed and Lefevre Ltd.), London.
Private Collection, London (acquired from the above circa 1970).
Lefevre Gallery (Alex Reed and Lefevre Ltd.), London (acquired from the above circa 1988).
Onishi Museum, Osaka (acquired from the above circa 1990).
Lefevre Gallery (Alex Reed and Lefevre Ltd.), London (acquired from the above in 1999).
Ernst Beyeler, Basel (acquired from the above circa 2000).
Acquired by the present owner in 2005.

Literature: R. Spira, ‘Londoner Ausstellungen: Francis Bacon in der Tate/Galerie’, in Weltkunst, XXXII, n. 13, Munich, 1 July 1962 (illustrated, p. 17).
R. Alley, Francis Bacon, London 1964, p. 95-96, no. 98 (illustrated, p. 199).

Exhibited: London, Hanover Gallery, Francis Bacon, 1959, no. 6 (incorrectly dated, titled Cardinal, illustrated on the cover).
Nottingham, Nottingham University, Francis Bacon, 1961, p. 1, no. 12 (titled Head of a Cardinal with Glasses).
London, Tate Gallery, Francis Bacon, 1962, p. 38, no. 39 (incorrectly dated, titled Pope). This exhibition later travelled to Mannheim, Städtische Kunsthalle; Turin, Galleria Civica d’ Arte Moderna; Zurich, Kunsthaus and Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum.
London, The Lefevre Gallery, British Paintings 1900-1999, 1999, no. 2 (illustrated in colour, unpaged).
Valencia, IVAM – Institut Valencià d’Art Modern, Francis Bacon. Lo Sagrado y lo Profano, 2003-2004 (titled Study for a Head or Cardinal with Glasses, illustrated in colour, p. 74). This exhibition later travelled to Paris, Fondation Dina Vierny, Musée Maillol.
Basel, Fondation Beyeler, Francis Bacon and the Tradition of Art, 2004, p. 360, no. 8A (titled Study for a Head or Cardinal with Glasses, illustrated in colour, p. 344).

Notes: ‘It is true, of course, the Pope is unique. He’s put in a unique position by being the Pope, and therefore, like in certain great tragedies, he’s as though raised onto a dais on which the grandeur of this image can be displayed to the world’(F. Bacon, quoted in D. Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon, London 1987, p. 26).

‘It was during those years [the 1950s], filled with rebuffs and reversals of fortune, but also with extraordinary invention and daring, that Bacon began to explore in depth all his great themes while trying out a number of others that he eventually discarded. It was, in my view, the most fertile single decade of his career. Never again would the Baconian world be so rich and diverse’ (M. Peppiatt, Francis Bacon in the 1950s, exh. cat., Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich, 2006, p. 14).

‘No other living painter has set forth with such pitiless clarity the tensions and paradoxes that surround all efforts to see, let alone to paint, the human figure in an age of photography’ (R. Hughes, ‘Singing with the Bloody Wood: A Second Celebration of Francis Bacon’, in Time, 1 July 1985, p. 54).

‘I would like my pictures to look as if a human being had passed between them … leaving a trail of the human presence and memory trace of past events’ (F. Bacon, 1955, quoted in Francis Bacon and the Tradition of Art, exh. cat., Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, Vienna, 2004, p. 233).

Shrouded in silence amidst a deep black void, Study for a Head, 1955, occupies an outstanding position within Francis Bacon’s celebrated series of Papal portraits. A deeply human portrayal of Bacon’s most enduring subject, it stands as one of only a handful of works depicting Pope Pius XII: the current, living incumbent at the time of the painting, who reigned from 1939 until 1958. Where Bacon’s previous Papal portraits had given birth to screaming, agonised phantoms, bordering on caricature in their formal contortions, Study for a Head presents a figure submerged in existential contemplation, riddled with the same quiet dignity and introspective tension that was to define Bacon’s first self-portrait the following year. Mute and alone, animated only by the rapid brushstrokes that chart his worn visage, the figure is isolated upon a vacant ground, engulfed within the dark, cavernous depths of his own psyche. Subsumed by the weight of his grand station, his only anchor within the empty black chasm is a lone corner of gold framing – a stark reduction of the opulent Papal throne upon which he is eternally bound. At a time when the efforts of the Church and the vastly-expanding media cast the Pope as deified patriarch and noble celebrity, upheld before the public on an infallible pedestal, Study for a Head erases the trappings of Papal grandeur, presenting a pale, illuminated face, whose lines, shadows and tensions betray a deep-seated humanity. Bacon was fascinated by processional photographs of Pius being carried through St. Peter’s upon the shoulders of other cardinals, and his rare depictions of this contemporary figurehead include Pope II, 1951 (Kunsthalle Mannheim, Mannheim), Figure Sitting, 1955 (Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent) and Study (Imaginary Portrait of Pope Pius XII), 1955 (Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich). By 1955, here was a man whose reign had witnessed the atrocities of the Second World War, and whose service would come to an end with his death just three years later. Solemnity and grace, terror and resignation, flicker in and out of focus behind his pale glasses, premeditating the mute, incarcerated Papal portraits of the 1960s. Exhibited at Tate, London, in 1962, Study for a Head remained unseen by the public for over 40 years, resurfacing in major retrospectives at the Institut Valencià d’Art Modern, Valencia, in 2003 and at the Fondation Beyeler, Basel, the following year.

Within the pantheon of Bacon’s oeuvre, the Papal portraits of the 1950s are widely regarded as the paragon of his artistic enquiries, and stand today among the foremost images of the whole of twentieth-century art. The Pope – a man tormented by his position as God’s messenger on Earth – was Bacon’s first and most significant subject, pursued over the course of 53 portraits during a period spanning almost twenty years. ‘It is true, of course, the Pope is unique’, Bacon explained. ‘He’s put in a unique position by being the Pope, and therefore, like in certain great tragedies, he’s as though raised onto a dais on which the grandeur of this image can be displayed to the world’ (F. Bacon, quoted in D. Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon, London 1975, p. 26). The photograph of Pius sat in the artist’s studio alongside images of dictators and henchmen, as well as a reproduction of Diego Velázquez’s immortalPortrait of Pope Innocent X, whose own profoundly human tensions were an important source of inspiration to the series. Fascinated by men of power and authority, Bacon was attracted to the fundamentally tragic combination of violence and vulnerability latent in their status, and sought to capture this paradox in his Papal portraits. His earliest manifestations took the form of screaming ghouls, tortured figures in cages wracked with pain and anxiety. From the inaugural Head VI of 1949, through the first major trio of Popes (I, II and III) in 1951, to the seminal Study after Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X of 1953 and the ensuing series of eight Studies for a Portrait, Bacon’s figures actively sought to escape their condition, depicted as writhing beings whose cries detonated the very structural integrity of the picture plane. By the early 1960s, these ethereal figures had denatured into deformed, demented creatures, incapacitated and silenced by their own paranoia: the Studies for a Pope of 1961 present tensile, muted figures, rooted to their chairs with fear and insanity.

Between these two extremes of hysteria, rarely was the Pope presented with the human compassion of Study for a Head. The work presents a masterful navigation between the twin poles of terror and madness: internalizing the tension of the tormented screaming Popes, the figure radiates a taciturn stillness that anticipates the later, silent half-beings. This is achieved through a subtle distillation of Bacon’s painterly technique. The artist allows liquefied swathes of black paint to soak into the very fibre of the canvas, creating an infinite, impenetrable abyss. On top of this, Bacon crafts his subject’s face with visceral immediacy, in such a way that the face appears to loom outwards like a spectre within the darkness. The rapid articulation of the Pope’s glasses, as well as his mouth, creates microcosmic arenas of tension that amplify the figure’s silence. Vertical striations of paint ram his lips shut, faintly echoing Bacon’s so-called ‘shuttering’ effect: the frenetic linear streaks that screech down the canvas in the earlier screaming portraits. The figure is bracketed by a simple fragment of gold framing. Unlike the gilded thrones represented in the earlier Papal works, the simple, reductive lines that enthrone the present work anticipate the clinical, diagrammatic chairs that subsume Bacon’s later, silent Popes. Bacon’s use of linear framing devices was a constant throughout his oeuvre: often compared to the Chinagraph marks used in photography to delineate areas for enlargement, Bacon construed these lines as formal, perceptual tools. ‘I cut down the scale of the canvas by drawing in these rectangles’, he said, in order to ‘concentrate the image down. Just to see it better’ (F. Bacon, quoted in D. Sylvester, Looking Back at Francis Bacon, London 2000, p. 40). Whilst Bacon’s earlier Popes had used these lines as compositional devices for imprisoning his screaming protagonists, Study for a Head transfers this aesthetic to the Papal throne itself: abstracted and devoid of all ornament, its presence is reduced to a simple geometric fragment. By the Papal works of the 1960s, the slippage between cage and throne was complete: the Pope’s grand seat of power was transformed into an inescapable prison – a straitjacket in which he silently descended into madness.

The use of secondary source imagery was to become definitive of Bacon’s practice, and the Papal portraits were among the first works in which the artist fully embraced this strategy. Working from photographs and reproductions allowed Bacon to access his unconscious, intuitive impulses – to paint from his nervous system, as he put it. ‘I think it’s the slight remove from the fact, which returns me onto the fact more violently’, he told David Sylvester. ‘Through the photographic image I find myself beginning to wander into the image and unlock what I think of its reality more than I can by looking at it’ (F. Bacon, quoted in D. Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact: Interview with Francis Bacon, London 1987, p. 30). In Study for a Head, this strategy allows the artist to transcend the objective, physical facts of his subject, creating a portrait not simply of a man, but rather of his existential condition. Though Pius is ostensibly the work’s subject, the figure’s appearance is heavily mediated by the visual properties of Velázquez’s portrait: the side-on angle, framed by the Papal throne, as well as the white collar and opulent purple robes – Bacon’s transmutation of Velázquez’s deep crimson. Across the breadth of the Papal works, individual features of Pius and Innocent oscillate and collide, shifting in and out of focus to produce a kind of hybrid archetype: a powerful Papal specimen filtered through the depths of Bacon’s own visual memory. Other visual sources enter the fray: indeed, the glasses that feature here and elsewhere are themselves a composite concoction, inspired as much by Pius himself as by the iconic film still of the screaming nurse in Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin. Bacon’s archive of source material, ranging from Poussin to contemporary newspaper clippings, provided a visual reservoir that allowed him to move beyond the simple act of representation, creating prototypes and paradigms of human emotion through multiple, serialised iterations. In 1955, the year of the present work, the artist described how ‘I would like my pictures to look as if a human being had passed between them … leaving a trail of the human presence and memory trace of past events’ (F. Bacon, 1955, quoted inFrancis Bacon and the Tradition of Art, exh. cat., Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, Vienna, 2004, p. 233).

Bacon’s desire to depict the Pope’s humanity in Study for a Head is coterminous with his expanding exploration of the human condition in its broadest sense, exemplified by the corpus of non-Papal portraits from the late 1940s and 1950s. Indeed, the Papal works themselves have their roots in Bacon’s earliest Head series, with Head VI standing as the first surviving example. Throughout the 1950s, the production of Papal works was matched by an equally prolific output of portraits that, like the present work, were isolated within thick black voids, brooding with existentialist tension. Portraits of friends and early patrons, including the collectors Robert and Lisa Sainsbury whom Bacon first met during this period, were set within the same deep, dark chasms, silently pensive and imbued with contemplative dignity. It was also at this time that Bacon began his seminal Man in Blue series: arguably the secular, capitalist counterpart to the Popes, these works cast their protagonist as a museum-like relic, framed and spotlit within the metaphorical display cabinets of Bacon’s own psyche. This vernacular, with its subtle overtones of memento mori, also lay at the heart of Bacon’s Studies after the Life Mask of William Blake which are contemporary with the present work. The series presents eerie incarcerations of the visionary poet’s once-living head, preserved for eternity as a sculptural mould and illuminated within the dark abyss of time. Study for a Head, with its compositional austerity and aura of clinical examination, must undoubtedly be seen within the context of Bacon’s 1950s portraiture. Stripped of his divinity, the Pope is reduced to a specimen of humanity, placed on trial before his public as an object of scrutiny and marvel.

Significantly, it was within this compositional mode that Bacon undertook to represent himself in paint for the first time, the year after the present work. It has often been posited that the Papal portraits masquerade as self-portraits of sorts, much in the same way that Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele painted themselves in the guises of prophets, priests and martyrs in order to interrogate the psychological anxieties of their time. The post-War era was marked by a fundamental questioning of humanity: its representations and systems of belief. The Existentialist philosophies of Jean-Paul Sartre, which rose to prominence during the 1940s, found their visual complement in ethereal figural sculptures of Giacometti: stark, elongated visions of the human form, reduced to their bare linear essentials. Imprisoned in the Cageworks of 1950, in a manner similar to Bacon’s own graphic framing devices, Giacometti’s sculptures contemplated the very substance of being precariously balanced on the brink of eclipse. For Bacon, the turmoil of the post-War era was matched by his own emotional turbulence. It was during the 1950s that his tempestuous relationship with Peter Lacy ran its course, reaching its denouement shortly after the present work. A former Spitfire pilot, Lacy’s persona embodied the same combination of brutality and vulnerability that drove Bacon’s fascination with figures of authority during this period. The artist’s troubled memories of his domineering father also loomed large in his memory at this time, and his portraits of the Pope – the ultimate Papa – were frequently strewn with the likeness of his own patriarch. In Study for a Head, Bacon presents a man whose identity is on the brink of dissolution. His tense lips strain to voice his predicament, yet silence prevails; trapped within the dark recesses of Bacon’s canvas, he stands as an illusory vestige of the artist’s own imagination.

TRACEY EMIN EXORCISM OF THE LAST PAINTING I EVER MADE
Following the success of Tracey Emin’s iconic My Bed, 1998, which achieved a world record price at auction quadrupling its pre-sale estimate to realise £2,546,500/ $4,351,969/ €3,178,032 (estimate: £800,000-1,200,000) in July 2014, Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made, 1996 (estimate: £600,000 – 800,000), documents a seminal moment of breakthrough within the artist’s oeuvre, witnessing an impassioned re-engagement with her painting and drawing practice after a six-year hiatus. Over a three week period Emin barricaded herself into a room at the Galleri Andreas Brändström, Stockholm, where, working completely naked, she launched herself into a frenetic artistic outpouring. Comprising 105 paintings, body paintings, drawings and letters, Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made lays bare Emin’s entire artistic make-up, paying homage to her influences including Edvard Munch, Egon Schiele and Yves Klein. Emin’s paintings and drawings have since come to represent one of the most significant strands of her oeuvre, culminating in her appointment as Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in 2011, and will be celebrated in the exhibition Tracey Emin – Egon Schiele: Where I Want to Go at the Leopold Museum, Vienna, in April this year.

7

Tracey Emin (b. 1963), Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made, installation including 12 paintings, 7 body paintings, 79 works on paper, 7 letters, numerous painted items, art supplies, personal items, 1 bed and mattress and various other items of furniture, 1 radio and CD player, 9 music CDs, various newspapers and magazines and numerous kitchen and food supplies; dimensions variable. Executed in 1996. Estimate £600,000 – £800,000 ($907,800 – $1,210,400). © Christie’s Images Ltd. 2015.

Provenance: Galleri Andreas Brändström, Stockholm.
Anon. sale, Christie’s, London, 8 February 2001, lot 30.
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner.

Literature: B. Riemschneider and U. Grosenick (eds.), Art at the Turn of the Millennium, Cologne 1999 (Cologne version of the installation illustrated in colour, p. 149).
T. Warr (ed.), The Artists’s Body, London 2000, p. 68 (installation view illustrated in colour, p. 69 and on the cover).
Saatchi Gallery (ed.), 100: The Work that Changed British Art, London 2003, p. 209, no. 43 (illustrated in colour, p. 99).
H. Luard and P. Miles, Tracey Emin, London 2006, p. 220 and 413 (installation view, ‘Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made 1996’ illustrated in colour, pp. 221-224).
N. Brown, TE Tracey Emin, London 2006, p. 88 (installation view, ‘Naked Photos: Life Model Goes Mad 1996’ (illustrated in colour, p. 89).
Love is What You Want, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London 2011, p. 248 (installation view, ‘Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made’ illustrated in colour, p. 248).

Exhibited: Stockholm, Galleri Andreas Brändström, Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made, 1996.
London, South London Gallery, I Need Art Like I Need God: Tracey Emin, 1997 (installation view, ‘Naked Photos: Life Model Goes Mad 1996’ illustrated in colour, pp. 38-39 and on the cover).
Cologne, Kölnsicher Kunstverein, Ca-Ca Poo-Poo, 1997-1998.
Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum, Ten Years, Tracey Emin, 2002.
Edinburgh, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Tracey Emin: 20 Years, 2008 (installation view, ‘Naked Photos: Life Model Goes Mad 1996’ illustrated in colour, nos. 23-25, installation view, ‘Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made 1996’ illustrated in colour, no. 26). This exhibition later travelled to Malaga, Centro de Arte Contemporáneo and Bern, Kunstmuseum.

Notes: ‘Many artists have used female nudes in their work. I’ve got a good female nude I can use whenever I like and its mine … I’m my own muse. And it’s so liberating to be naked. You have a better sense of your own being’ (T. Emin, quoted in C. Freedman (ed.), Tracey Emin: Works 1963-2006, New York 2006, p. 166).

‘You might think Klein was being sexist by using those models like that, but actually it was something remarkable. Those women were not “muses”, they were dancers, and he was like a choreographer and there was a fantastic skill involved’ (T. Emin, quoted in J. Wainwright, ‘Interview with Tracey Emin’, in M. Merck and C. Townsend (eds.), The Art of Tracey Emin, London 2002, p. 197).

‘I knew when I was doing the Yves Klein and they [the audience] didn’t know I was going to do it. I heard a stampede across the gallery and “she’s doing an Yves Klein!” – all these people fighting to get at the portholes’ (T. Emin, quoted in J. Wainwright, ‘Interview with Tracey Emin’, in M. Merck and C. Townsend (eds.), The Art of Tracey Emin, London 2002, p. 198).

‘It was about being stripped and it could have been about being vulnerable but actually it wasn’t, it became about the ego and about the strength of the ego. The strength of my failures are all amalgamated together. It was called Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made because it was for me to get rid of them, plus the fact that painting for me was completely moribund: it was completely bound up with failure. Failure – painting, painting – failure: two things joined together which I wanted to separate’ (T. Emin, quoted in J. Wainwright, ‘Interview with Tracey Emin’, in M. Merck and C. Townsend (eds.), The Art of Tracey Emin, London 2002, p. 198).

‘I have never not drawn, I have been drawing all my life’ (T. Emin, quoted in interview with A. Elkann, 11 December 2014, http://alainelkanninterviews. com/tracey-emin/ [accessed 5 January 2014]).

‘I am my own model. When you look at Picasso I am sure he used his own body as a model, all the women are square like he was. But then my favourite artists are Edvard Munch and Egon Schiele and they used themselves constantly in their work. So did Rembrandt and van Gogh’ (T. Emin, quoted in interview with A. Elkann, 11 December 2014, http://alainelkanninterviews.com/tracey-emin/ [accessed 5 January 2014]).

‘[Edvard Munch’s The Scream is] an incredible piece of work, and it needs to be championed for what it is, for its integrity. Someone painted the sound of a scream. People think it’s the figure screaming, but maybe it’s nature screaming at the figure’ (T. Emin, quoted in The Guardian Weekend, 12 October 2002, p. 32).

Documenting a seminal moment of breakthrough within Tracey Emin’s oeuvre, Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made is an outstanding exposition of the artist’s celebrated painting and drawing practice. Executed in 1996, on the brink of her rise to critical acclaim, the work witnesses an impassioned re-engagement with these media after the prolonged six-year blockade against painting that followed the completion of her MA at the Royal College of Art. Over a three week period, in a groundbreaking act of catharsis, Emin launched herself into a frenetic artistic outpouring, filling streams of canvas and paper as she sought to dispel the fear and anxiety she had come to associate with painting. Working completely naked, she laid bare her entire artistic make-up, reinvigorating the visceral connection between her body and her art. Amidst candid diaristic notations and raw, self-reflective imagery, Emin forged expressive tributes to the grand canon of painters and draughtsmen that had nourished her artistic development. Paying homage to artists including Edvard Munch, Egon Schiele and Yves Klein, the resulting assemblage constitutes atour de force of her aesthetic outlook. Comprising rich painterly abstractions, sketched charcoal nudes and textual declarations evocative of her fabric and neon works, it represents a deeply personal interrogation of her artistic orientation. Each paper and canvas records the traces of Emin’s hand and body as she attempted to cast off her artistic inhibitions, interweaving her own physicality with elegiac stories from her past and those drawn from the history of modern art. Emin’s paintings and drawings have since come to represent one of the most significant strands of heroeuvre, culminating in her appointment as Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in 2011. More recently, these media have witnessed a great resurgence in her practice, and in April this year, the Leopold Museum in Vienna will showcase a new body of her work in the major exhibition Tracey Emin – Egon Schiele: Where I Want To Go, placing her practice in dialogue with that of the great Expressionist master. In Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made, we witness the critical moment of renaissance that paved the way for Emin’s exceptional contribution to the medium, now spanning over nearly two decades.

Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made was originally conceived as an installation piece, created at the Galleri Andreas Brändström in Stockholm. Barricading herself in a room, visible only through a series of fish-eye lenses embedded in the walls, Emin invited viewers to watch her confront the medium that lay at the source of her six-year struggle. The installation, recorded in a series of photographs entitled Life Model Goes Mad, blurred the distinction between artist and muse: a poignant slippage for Emin, who had once earned a living as a life model. Now, at the dawn of her international career, Emin’s body became her artistic inspiration, forming the medium through which she would make her mark upon the blank surfaces around her. Harnessing every fibre of her being, both physical and mental, Emin’s ability to lay bare the facts of her own existence was ultimately to launch her work onto the global stage. She had recently completed her fabric tent Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995, which was shown alongside the present work at the South London Gallery in 1997, and subsequently included in Charles Saatchi’s groundbreaking exhibition Sensation at the Royal Academy of Arts that same year. It was shortly after this in 1998 that Emin would create My Bed, subsequently nominated for the Turner Prize. In the same vein as these two landmark works, Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made may be understood as a self-portrait of sorts: a retrospective coming-to-terms with her roots and a head-on engagement with her anxieties. Transcending its performative origins, the work stands today as a testament to the enduring power of painting and drawing as tools through which to confront the self in all its carnal and emotional complexity.

Following its exhibition at the South London Gallery – Emin’s first solo show in a public gallery space – Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made was shown at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, in 2002. Between 2008 and 2009, it formed part of the seminal retrospective Tracey Emin: 20 Years which travelled from the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, to the Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland, the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo, Málaga and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

EMIN AS PAINTER AND DRAUGHTSMAN
Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made takes its cue from the rich field of art-historical reference upon which Emin’s practice is founded. In the linear immediacy of her draughtsmanship and the rich, gestural vocabulary of her brushwork, she pays particular homage to the visual language of Expressionism, filtered through the narrative of her own experience. Advised by Carl Freedman to ‘paint something [she] would like to own’, Emin’s first creation in the Stockholm gallery was a self-portrait inspired by Munch’s The Scream – one of the artist’s favourite historical paintings. An image that spoke directly to the cathartic release at the heart of her project, The Scream has informed much of Emin’s subsequent practice: two years later she would create a live-action flm rendition of the painting at the edge of an Oslo Fjord, featuring the sound of her own piercing scream. Like Munch’s masterpiece, Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made is informed by a desire to detonate feelings of pain and fear, and the physical connection between hand and canvas created a channel through which to confront this psychological tension. ‘I like things which are touched by people’s hands, and I like to feel the transference of the energy through that’, Emin has explained. ‘Every artist that I really adore works with the self and their own emotions’ (T. Emin, quoted in ‘My Bed 1998: Tracey Emin In Conversation’, Christie’s London, May 2014). In two of the three further tributes to The Scream contained within Emin’s assemblage, the artist makes explicit the emotional content of the motif, emblazoning the words ‘I’m just so fucking wound up’ and, in deep crimson red, ‘Most of my life has been built on fear’.

In Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made, Emin’s attempt to dispel her longstanding blockade against painting saw her re-engage with her own corporeal form – a source of self-loathing for the artist at the time, in spite of the youthful beauty captured in the installation photographs. Emin’s exposed nudes paid homage to the drawings of Schiele, capturing his bold, schismatic linear style and overt presentation of the female form. Working completely naked, Emin fully embraced the connection between the body and the artwork, at times bringing about a re-evaluation of her male forbears. Covering herself in blue paint, she staged her own version of Yves Klein Anthropométries, imprinting her body and hands onto canvas in a demanding act of physical exertion. ‘You might think Klein was being sexist by using those models like that, but actually it was something remarkable’, Emin explains. ‘Those women were not “muses”, they were dancers, and he was like a choreographer and there was a fantastic skill involved’ (T. Emin, quoted in J. Wainwright, ‘Interview with Tracey Emin’, in M. Merck and C. Townsend (eds.), The Art of Tracey Emin, London 2002, p. 197). In recreating Klein’s immortalizing body prints, Emin performed her own intimate dance, experiencing the collision of fesh and canvas first-hand. To her unseen public, it was an instantly recognizable piece of theatre: ‘I knew when I was doing the Yves Klein and they [the audience] didn’t know I was going to do it’, she recalls. ‘I heard a stampede across the gallery and “she’s doing an Yves Klein!” – all these people fighting to get at the portholes’ (T. Emin, quoted in J. Wainwright, ‘Interview with Tracey Emin’, in M. Merck and C. Townsend (eds.), The Art of Tracey Emin, London 2002, p. 198).

Across the breadth of the work, further historical associations shift in and out of focus, documenting Emin’s determination to harness every aspect of her inner resources. Allusions to the figural works of Picasso and Matisse vie with richly-worked painterly surfaces, variously evoking the base tactility of Robert Rauschenberg, the gestural exuberance of Franz Kline and the sublime colour-field expanses of Abstract Expressionism. Her free-flowing application of paint, as well as the linear elegance of her graphic style, recalls the work of Cy Twombly, an artist whom Emin greatly admires. At the same time, Emin weaves a textual narrative through the work: a stream of consciousness laced with letters, slogans and diaristic outpourings. ‘I love you Sarah’ pays homage to her great friend and artistic partner at the time Sarah Lucas, with whom Emin had opened the renowned shop in Bethnal Green several years earlier. From invocations of hope and joy to those of resignation and fear, Emin’s unique brand of poetry reaches across multiple emotional registers. Indicative of her celebrated fair for contemporary story-telling, these written fragments recall the aesthetic of the early appliquéd blanket works that the artist had begun several years previously. Indeed, several of Emin’s paintings appear to mimic the format of her blankets, with their planar divisions of colour and superimposed text. Recreated in the medium of paint, however, Emin’s colour bands bleed across the picture plane in a manner almost reminiscent of Rothko.

INSTALLATION AND PERFORMANCE
The story of the work’s creation bears witness to the visionary nature of Emin’s early practice. It followed a prolonged period of artistic self-doubt brought about by her first abortion in May 1990. Looking back on this time, Emin recalls how ‘I gave up painting, I gave up art, I gave up believing, I gave up faith’ (T. Emin, ‘How it Feels’, 1996, in C. Freedman (ed.), Tracey Emin: Works 1963-2006, New York 2006, p. 67). Prior to her arrival in Stockholm, the ‘last painting’ Emin had made was an attempted version of The Deposition of Christ. ‘That was the last time I tried to make a painting as I understood a proper painting was supposed to be’, she recalls. ‘I painted it in 1990 after the Royal College when I had a small studio in Elephant and Castle. I went there every day and tried to be an artist, but it just wasn’t working’ (T. Emin, quoted in C. Freedman (ed.), Tracey Emin: Works 1963-2006, New York 2006, p. 255). By 1996, Emin’s blankets, sculptures and prints had attracted significant international attention, yet she was still unable to overcome her feelings towards painting. ‘I was possessed by fear and a feeling of guilt and loathing’, Emin explains. ‘I was still afraid of painting and that was tied to a fear of failure. I’d got to a certain point with my art where it was just becoming acceptable. Everything was going quite well except there were certain things that were blocked in terms of creativity. I wanted to break through that barrier’ (T. Emin, quoted in C. Freedman (ed.), Tracey Emin: Works 1963-2006, New York 2006, p. 255).

Emin’s fear of painting was amplified by a number of personal anxieties that she sought to address in her installation. As she later explained, ‘My Nan had just died as well, so I was very upset and I needed to sort out my head. I was afraid of the dark and I also detested my body, so there were quite a few things that I wanted to get out of the way’ (T. Emin, quoted in J. Wainwright, ‘Interview with Tracey Emin’, in M. Merck and C. Townsend (eds.), The Art of Tracey Emin, London 2002, p. 198). Within the secluded gallery space, isolated from everything except herself and her art, Emin had time to reflect. In choosing Sweden, rather than London or New York, the artist sought to avoid the sensationalism of the press. Her nudity was not an act of exhibitionism but rather an attempt to reconnect with her own physicality: a connection essential to the act of painting and drawing. All the paraphernalia of the outside world were removed: Emin lived alongside her ongoing work with little more than a bed, a radio, a kettle and a clothes line upon which, in the manner of Percy Shelley – whose work she had been reading – she hung out her stockings. Emin recalls ‘There was nothing but me filling the whole room’ (T. Emin, quoted in C. Freedman (ed.), Tracey Emin: Works 1963-2006, New York 2006, p. 255).

In charting Emin’s legendary breakthrough, Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made represents not only a reconciliation with painting, but a fundamental reclaiming of the female nude. Over the course of her installation, Emin played the roles of both artist and model, capturing her own body in paint and on paper, and documenting this process in the photographic series Life Model Goes Mad. Blurring the boundary between subject and agent, Emin subverts the traditional associations between life drawing and the dominance of the masculine gaze. Unlike Yoko Ono’s performance work Cut Piece (1964), to which the installation is frequently compared, Emin’s role was active, not passive: whilst Ono invited viewers to cut pieces of fabric away from her clothed body, Emin was consciously and deliberately naked. ‘Many artists have used female nudes in their work. I’ve got a good female nude I can use whenever I like and its mine’, Emin explained. ‘I’m my own muse. And it’s so liberating to be naked. You have a better sense of your own being’ (T. Emin, quoted in C. Freedman (ed.), Tracey Emin: Works 1963-2006, New York 2006, p. 166). Yet Emin was not simply modeling her body; rather, she was laying bare the very essence of her artistic being, from her influences to her methods to her own physical form. As the artist explains, ‘It was about being stripped and it could have been about being vulnerable but actually it wasn’t, it became about the ego and about the strength of the ego. The strength of my failures are all amalgamated together’ (T. Emin, quoted in J. Wainwright, ‘Interview with Tracey Emin’, in M. Merck and C. Townsend (eds.), The Art of Tracey Emin, London 2002, p. 198). In this regard, Emin’s nudes speak not simply of the corpulence of the human form, but of a re-empowering of the artist’s own body as a source of creativity.

DAMIEN HIRST LULLABY WINTER
Damien Hirst’s iconic pill cabinet Lullaby Winter, 2002 is to be offered at Christie’s in February (estimate: £2.5-4million). Another from the series of four cabinets named after the four seasons, Lullaby Spring, sold at auction in 2007 for £9.65million, breaking the record for a work by a European living artist at the time of sale. Just as Monet painted the four seasons, Hirst captures the winter atmosphere with his assembly of thousands of beautifully hand-crafted pills. Precisely positioned on razor-sharp shelving and enshrined within a perfect, mirrored surgical steel cabinet, these pills number the amount a single human might expect to consume in a lifetime.

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Damien Hirst (b. 1965), Lullaby Winter; glass, stainless steel, steel, aluminium, nickel, bismuth and cast resin, coloured plaster and painted pills with dry transfers; 72 x 108 x 4in. (182.9 x 274.3 x 10.2cm.). Executed in 2002. Estimate £2,500,000 – £4,000,000 ($3,782,500 – $6,052,000). © Christie’s Images Ltd. 2015.

Provenance: White Cube.
Ralph Burnet, Minnesota.

Notes: ‘Winter is the most beautiful of the seasons in some ways and it’s also the most truthful. Everything is laid bare, the end is fast approaching and there’s nowhere to hide. But ultimately it’s also a new beginning, a re-birth’ (D. Hirst in conversation with G. Burn, 2006).

‘Pills are the most phenomenal objects. It’s something to do with their minimal purity. Ultimately you just have no choice but to believe in them: these tiny, clean, brilliant Eucharistic forms set within nothingness, representing the infinite’ (D. Hirst in conversation with G. Burn, 2006).

‘It didn’t come from any of the things that I had, but it came from everything I had’ (D. Hirst cited in Damien Hirst and Gordon Burn, On the Way to Work, London 2001, p. 115).

‘I’ve always thought of the cabinet as being like a precipice or a void, it just consumes you, swallows you whole, and there’s obviously a huge irony in that because it’s really just a portrait of who we are, of these hopeful little things that we swallow to make ourselves feel more human, more alive, even immortal’ (D. Hirst, The Death of God, 2006, exh. cat., Galería Hilario Galguera, Mexico City, unpaged).

‘It’s like God should be, the way they sell you the pills, the forms, the utopia, the hope, the cure’ (D. Hirst, in an interview with H.-U. Obrist, In the darkest hour there may be light, exh. cat., Serpentine Gallery, London 2007).

In Damien Hirst’s Lullaby Winter, thousands of beautifully hand-crafted pills – numbering the amount a single human might expect to consume in a lifetime – are precisely positioned on razor-sharp shelving and enshrined within a perfect, mirrored surgical steel cabinet. In its stark yet colourful splendour, the cabinet stands as an exquisite monument to Hirst’s unremitting investigation of life, death, and the human condition.

Executed in 2002, Lullaby Winter is one of four stainless steel cabinets by Hirst that engage with the time-honoured allegorical motif of the changing seasons, following in the footsteps of masters such as Antonio Vivaldi, Nicolas Poussin, Claude Monet and Marc Chagall. Each of Hirst’s four iterations – Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter – are defined by a unique combination of pills whose colours and arrangement are used to evoke the metaphorical attributes of each season. In Lullaby Winter, we are confronted with a dazzling white palette spiked with hues of pale pink, blue and pastel green, like a wide and expansive landscape, the effect is of a sparkling painterly interplay of light and colour. The meticulous rows of pills are replicated in the mirrored backplate, creating a clinical portrait of time and space, absence and loss, and yet, the resulting feeling is one of hope. As the artist explains: “Winter is the most beautiful of the seasons in some ways and it’s also the most truthful. Everything is laid bare, the end is fast approaching and there’s nowhere to hide. But ultimately it’s also a new beginning, a re-birth.”

For Hirst, the pills appeared to him as a way of filling what Max Beckmann described in 1915 as an “unending void” whose foreground we are compelled to fill in order to distract from its unfathomable depth. (Max Beckmann cited in Megan Craig, ‘Levinas and James: toward a pragmatic phenomenology’ (Indiana, 2010) p. 189). Hirst more recently expanded: “I’ve always thought of the cabinet as being like a precipice or a void, it just consumes you, swallows you whole, and there’s obviously a huge irony in that because it’s really just a portrait of who we are, of these hopeful little things that we swallow to make ourselves feel more human, more alive, even immortal.”

Hirst’s art has long been concerned with the consequences of living in a world consumed by the pharmaceutical industry’s promise of immortality. Many of his most iconic works tackle these themes, most notably the Medicine Cabinets and the Pharmaceutical Paintings. Lullaby Winter’s roots can be discerned in both these seminal series. Confronting the viewer as a brilliant wall-mounted monument, it assumes the spiritual power of a religious shrine. An altarpiece to medical science, Hirst’s cabinet presents an alternative system of organized belief: a new church that adopts pharmaceutical research as its sacrament. As the artist explained in 1993 after the first exhibition of the installation work Pharmacy (1992), pharmaceuticals are “very religious, kind of hopeful. There’s a lot of relocation of meaning in art, art has to reinvent itself every day. You try to pin these things down but there’s constant movement.” (Flash Art no. 169, 1993, interview with Adrian Dannatt). Much of Hirst’s oeuvre seeks to expose the ways in which the scientific advances in modern medicine have, for many, replaced our faith in the restorative power of religion. Harnessing the allegorical power of the four seasons, Hirst contrasts the transient passage of time with the life-giving power of modern medicine. In this way, the pills function both as a eulogy to the new religion of science, as well as amemento mori. Standing as a sublime meditation on mortality, the cabinet invites us to question ourselves, to confront our reflections in the mirrored steel behind the pills, and question whether the objects displayed within its shining interior are the answers to our dreams or prayers, or anything other than the talismans, relics and charms espoused by other faiths.

In Lullaby Winter, Hirst engages one of the central tenets of his practice: the distinction between the traditionally demarcated felds of science and art. Casting each pill as a meticulous simulacrum of its original, he highlights the disparity between our blind faith in medicine and our mistrust of the realities proposed by art. Hirst recalls one particularly pertinent memory of this tendency to invest an unquestioning faith in science, when accompanying his mother to the chemist; ‘she was getting a prescription, and it was, like, complete trust on the one level in something she’s equally in the dark about. In the medicine cabinets there’s no actual medicine in the bottles. It’s just completely packaging and formal sculpture and organized shapes. My mum was looking at the same kind of stuff in the chemist’s and believing in it completely. And then, when looking at it in an art gallery, completely not believing in it. As far as I could see, it was the same thing’ (D. Hirst, quoted in D. Hirst & G. Burn, On the Way to Work, London 2001, p. 25). As with so much of the artist’s work, the pill cabinets are fundamentally about our sociological need to construct belief systems out of nothing, about our need to come to terms with the often-mysterious fabric of existence. Lullaby Winteraddresses this need and the aesthetic allure of the pills is rendered useless in the face of their unknown medical purpose, as Hirst reminds, ‘we have to simply believe that somehow our ills will be cured.’

Hirst has often stated his belief that art possesses its own uniquely curative powers. In this context, the use of medical equipment and pharmaceuticals as a subject, and indeed medium, within his art makes this credence wholly explicit. His deep enquiry into the nature and purpose of art relates to his continuing exploration of immortality in his work. As the artist explains, ‘I’ve always really loved this idea of art, maybe, you know, curing people. And I have this kind of obsession with the body. I like the way that you’ve got all these individual elements inside a cabinet related to organs inside a body’ (D. Hirst, quoted in D. Hirst & G. Burn, On the Way to Work, London 2001, p. 25). The meticulously arranged pills in Lullaby Winter can be seen to visually represent the ordered yet unintelligible chaos of the biological world. Like the coloured spots of the Pharmaceutical Paintings, the formal order of the pills is both harmonious and indecipherable. Through the rigour of their organisation, Hirst comments upon the human desire to classify and control in a bid to keep our deepest fears at bay. In Lullaby Winter, we witness Hirst at the height of his creative powers and at his most playful, deploying colour, form and precision-engineering in order to confront the fragile boundaries between art and science and, ultimately, life and death. As he himself has asserted, ‘Art is the closest you can get to immortality’ (D. Hirst, quoted in S. Kent, ‘Death Becomes Him’, Time Out, no. 1892, November 2006, p. 47).

HOWARD HODGKIN IN THE GREEN ROOM
Painted over a three year period of unprecedented success for Howard Hodgkin, during which he represented Britain at the XLI Venice Biennale in 1984 and was awarded the Turner Prize in 1985, In the Green Room, 1984-1986, (estimate: £550,000 – 750,000) is one of the largest paintings made by the artist in the first thirty-five years of his career. Fully expected to break the world-record for the artist at auction, In the Green Room is an outstanding expression of Hodgkin’s unique artistic language that treads the boundary between abstraction and representation. Referring to the pistachio green paint with which he decorated the walls of his partner Antony Peattie’s sitting room in Cornwall shortly after they first met, the work evokes the personal and professional happiness enjoyed by Hodgkin at this time. It was featured in the Royal Academy’s landmark exhibition British Art in the 20th Century: The Modern Movement in 1987.

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Howard Hodgkin (b. 1932), In the Green Room, oil on wood, 68 7/8 x 75 1/8in. (175.3 x 190.7cm.). Executed in 1984-1986. Estimate £550,000 – £750,000 ($832,150 – $1,134,750). © Christie’s Images Ltd. 2015.

Provenance: M. Knoedler & Co., Inc., New York.
P.C. Arts, Los Angeles.
Private Collection, Mexico.
Acquavella Galleries, New York.
Acquired from the above by the present owner.

Literature: A. Thorkildsen, ‘En samtale med Howard Hodgkin’, in Kunst og Kultur, Oslo, March 1987, p. 233.
M. Price (ed.), Howard Hodgkin Paintings with a catalogue raisonné. The Complete Paintings, Catalogue Raisonné, London 1995, pp. 186-187, no. 211 (illustrated, p. 186).
M. Price (ed.), Howard Hodgkin: The Complete Paintings, Catalogue Raisonné, London 2006, no. 211 (illustrated in colour, p. 226).

Exhibited: London, Royal Academy of Arts, British Art in the 20th Century: The Modern Movement, 1987, p. 382, no. 289 (illustrated in colour, p. 385).

Notes: ‘The surface of In the Green Room… seems to break out in large, freely applied brushmarks of scintillating orange paint and due to their joyful intensity, the resulting surface gives an impression of freedom. Yet Hodgkin has worked on the pictures for at least three years, adjusting the relationship of one section to another. The effect of spontaneity is achieved by controlled and painstaking effort which fnally results in a composition which combines logic and sensuality in a unique way’ (N. Rosenthal, ‘Three Painters of this Time: Hodgkin, Kitaj and Morley’, in British Art in the 20th Century: The Modern Movement, London, 1987, p. 382).

‘Hodgkin creates, through… spaces heavy with emotion, the texture of a dream – the way dreams are made of dangerous fragments of life slipping into and out of one another’ (D. Sylvester, quoted in Howard Hodgkin: Time and Place, exh. cat., Modern Art Oxford, Oxford, 2010, p. 83).

Executed over a three year period of unprecedented success for Howard Hodgkin during which he represented Britain at the XLI Venice Biennale in 1984 and was awarded the Turner Prize in 1985, In the Green Room is one of the largest paintings made by the artist in the first thirty-five years of his career. Rendered in a vibrant palette of forest green and royal blue, overlaid by a dappled pattern of brilliant, sunset orange brush marks, In the Green Room is a stunning, large scale example of Howard Hodgkin’s extraordinary commitment to painting and its emotive potential. Referring to the pistachio green paint with which he decorated the walls of his partner Antony Peattie’s sitting room in Cornwall shortly after they first met, the present work evokes the personal and professional happiness enjoyed by Hodgkin at this time. With thick, freely applied brushstrokes and bold use of pure colour and form Hodgkin evokes an intimate interior scene, constructing a fragmented reality that both reveals and conceals his subject. Through his complex use of colour, evocative, sweeping brush strokes and loosely geometric structures, Hodgkin addresses those elements of human experience whose expression is beyond the means of traditional representational painting. With its dynamic mark making and invigorating colour scheme, In the Green Room reflects the artist’s vivacity and self-assurance at this stimulating moment in his career. Contemplating the present work Norman Rosenthal has written: ‘The surface of In the Green Room…seems to break out in large, freely applied brushmarks of scintillating orange paint and due to their joyful intensity, the resulting surface gives an impression of freedom. Yet Hodgkin has worked on the pictures for at least three years, adjusting the relationship of one section to another. The effect of spontaneity is achieved by controlled and painstaking effort which finally results in a composition which combines logic and sensuality in a unique way’ (N. Rosenthal, ‘Three Painters of this Time: Hodgkin, Kitaj and Morley’, in British Art in the 20th Century: The Modern Movement, London, 1987, p. 382). Featured in the Royal Academy’s landmark exhibition, British Art in the 20thCentury: The Modern Movement in 1987, In the Green Room is an outstanding expression of Hodgkin’s unique artistic language that treads the boundary between abstraction and representation.

Hodgkin’s paintings are inspired by non-representational moments distilled through the artist’s mind’s eye, transforming the oneiric quality of memory into the tactile medium of painting. Eluding explicit figuration, the remarkable air of In the Green Room is articulated purely through Hodgkin’s extraordinary sensitivity to the effects of colour and his uncanny ability to stimulate an emotive response in the viewer. The result is a rich and complex series of painterly layers of colour and form that hints at representation without ever coming into focus. Hodgkin, in his own words, addresses the ‘evasiveness of reality’ (H. Hodgkin, quoted in ‘Howard Hodgkin interviewed by David Sylvester’ inHoward Hodgkin: Forty Paintings, 1973-84, exh. cat., Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1984, p. 97). David Sylvester has observed, ‘Hodgkin creates, through … spaces heavy with emotion, the texture of a dream – the way dreams are made of dangerous fragments of life slipping into and out of one another’ (D. Sylvester, quoted in Howard Hodgkin: Time and Place, exh. cat., Modern Art Oxford, Oxford, 2010, p. 83). The trace of the artist’s hand across the surface of the wooden board can be seen in the sweeps of rose pink and silvery grey superimposed over the network of orange impressions. It is through the artist’s intentional concealment and repetition of layered images that Hodgkin elicits a complex dialogue between artist and viewer.

In the Green Room presents us with a domestic interior, a recurring subject within Hodgkin’s work. From the combination of the environment depicted, the objects contained and the social interactions remembered, the artist creates paintings that reflect the psychological moment, using vivid colour and expansive form. From beneath the fanned out imprints of the artist’s brush emerges a blue vortex, directing the viewer’s gaze inwards towards a tantalising palimpsest: a green triangle is nestled in the underlying layers of paint, mirrored identically in the top left hand corner of the painting. This internalising gesture embroils the viewer in Hodgkin’s struggle between fatness and depth, drawing them into the composition as though entering a room, reminiscent of the spatial discontinuities of Matisse’s The Red Studio (1911), an artist that Hodgkin has long admired. The result is a total vision in which he concentrates the effects of the colours at the centre while also allowing the amplified Pointillist dots to add another layer of information to the picture. Hodgkin explains: ‘I would like to paint pictures where people didn’t care what anything was, because they were so enveloped by them’ (H. Hodgkin, quoted in A. Graham-Dixon, Howard Hodgkin, London 1994, p. 178). Hodgkin’s fascination with the domestic milieu, alongside his use of dense colour and irregular perspective has often drawn comparisons with French Intimist painters such as Édouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard for whom the artist has in the past professed admiration.

Despite the immediacy of his gestures, it often takes months of preparation for Hodgkin to execute a single brushstroke. Whilst the colours may be vivid and the brushstrokes energetic, the actual process of laying down the layers of paint may take a number of years and only end when the original inspiration finally appears in the artist’s mind. Painted over a period of several years, the vigorous brushwork and non-representational use of colour incorporates the scene from shifting viewpoints and with the changing perspectives caused by the passing of time. ‘My pictures are finished when the subject comes back,’ Hodgkin once told David Sylvester. ‘I start out with the subject and naturally I have to remember first of all what it looked like, but it would also perhaps contain a great deal of feeling and sentiment. All of that has got to be somehow transmuted, transformed or made into a physical object, and when that happens, when that’s finally been done, when the last physical marks have been put on and the subject comes back-which, after all, is usually the moment when the painting is at long last a physical coherent object-well, then the picture’s finished and the is no question of doing anything more to it. My pictures really finish themselves’ (H. Hodgkin, quoted in D. Sylvester, Howard Hodgkin: Forty Paintings, exh. cat., Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1984, p. 97).

TWOMBLY, DUBUFFET AND BASQUIAT
Following the world record price achieved for Cy Twombly’s blackboard painting in New York last November, Christie’s is delighted to offer a further outstanding example from the same year. A large, nearly two-metre-long expanse of painterly handwriting, Untitled (New York City), 1970 (estimate on request) is one of the last of Twombly’s final series of black board paintings. The work evolves from the distinctive ‘lasso-loop’ pictures that define the series, extending the artist’s free-flowing lines into a scrawl that borders on written notation. It is joined by Death of Pompey (Rome), 1962 (estimate: £4,000,000 – 6,000,000), one of the finest works from Twombly’s major series of paintings based on epoch-changing assassinations. As Twombly immersed himself in the ancient streets of Rome, his contemporary Jean Dubuffet sought to capture the joie de vivre of the 1960s Parisian heyday. Part of the artist’s landmark Paris Circus series, L’heure de la hâte (The Hour of Anticipation) (estimate: £1,800,000 – 2,500,000), captures the euphoria of New Year’s Eve. Painted on 28 December 1961, during the seminal year that Dubuffet returned to the city from the countryside, its rich painterly surface heralds the dawn of contemporary street art. In July 2014, Dubuffet’s Le gai savoir, 1963, a work from the same period, sold at Christie’s for £4,002,500, setting a new world record for the artist.

The critic Rene Ricard famously asserted that ‘If Cy Twombly and Jean Dubuffet had a baby and gave it up for adoption, it would be Jean-Michel. The elegance of Twombly is there … and so is the brut of the young Dubuffet’.[1] Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Three Delegates, 1982 (estimate: £5,000,000 – 7,000,000), is a superb demonstration of this lineage, painted during the critical year that cemented his rise from itinerant street artist to art-world superstar. Inspired by a childhood visit to the United Nations, it is one of only a handful of canvases featuring three of the artist’s dramatic skull-like heads. Rare for its deliberate rejection of text and slogans, the work showcases Basquiat’s raw painterly style at the height of its development.

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Cy Twombly (1928 – 2011), Untitled (New York City). Oil based house paint and wax crayon on canvas, 144.7 x 177.8 cm. Executed in 1970. Estimate on Request © Christie’s Images Ltd. 2015.

Provenance: Giorgio Franchetti, Rome.
Anina Nosei Gallery, New York.
Gagosian Gallery, New York.
Ira Young, Los Angeles.
Gagosian Gallery, New York.
Private Collection.
Anon. sale, Sotheby’s New York, 9 May 2012, lot 29.
Acquired from the above by the present owner.

PROPERTY FROM AN IMPORTANT PRIVATE COLLECTION

Literature: H. Bastian, Cy Twombly: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, Volume III 1966-1971, Munich 1994, p. 224, no. 107 (illustrated in colour, p. 225).

Notes: ‘After the capitulation of a vast style, Twombly has learned to write again’
(R. Pincus Witten, ‘Learning to Write’, 1968, quoted in N. del Roscio (ed.), Writings on Twombly, Munich, 2002, p. 57).

‘I never really separated painting and literature’ (C. Twombly, ‘History Behind the Thought’ Interview with Nicholas Serota, 2007,
Cy Twombly. Cycles and Seasons, exh. cat. Tate, London, 2008, p. 45).

Each line is the ‘actual experience with its own innate history. It does not illustrate – it is the sensation of its own realization’ (Documenti di una nuova figurazione: Toti Scialoja, Gastone Novelli, Pierre Alechinsky, Achille Perilli, Cy Twombly, L’Esperienza moderna, no. 2 (August-September 1957), p. 32.)

‘Here…the legacy of Abstract Expressionism is at issue: Twombly ventures into the area of an engulfing abstract sublime that Pollock had defined, and that had seemed off-limits to the art of the 1960s…(He)… replaces the coloured organicism of Pollock with colourless lines whose steady, progressive rise and fall insists on their attachment to the drier constraints of writing, will, and culture’ (K. Varnedoe, quoted in Cy Twombly: A Retrospective, exh. cat., MoMA, New York. 1994, p. 43).

Such ‘child-like’ quality to his line, Twombly once pointed out, is in fact, ‘very difficult to fake, to get that quality you need to project yourself into the child’s line. It has to be felt’ (C. Twombly, quoted in Hayden Herrera, ‘Cy Twombly, A Homecoming’, Harper’s Bazaar, no 3393, August, 1994, p. 147).

Painted in New York in 1970, this untitled work is one of the last of the famous series of ‘blackboard’ paintings that Cy Twombly made in a dramatic and distinctive burst of creativity between 1966 and 1971. A large, nearly two metre-long, shimmering, grey-ground spatial-field of elegantly lilting and layered scrawl ‘handwritten’ over a highly painterly surface, the picture is a hypnotic and mesmerizing work that intentionally breaks down the borders between painting and drawing. It is also a work that marks the final, climactic phase of this singular period in the artist’s career and its fusion into a unique style of painting which, between 1970 and 1971, was to characterize many of the grandest, most ambitious and monumental of all Twombly’s paintings.

Originating in 1966, Twombly’s ‘blackboards’ are a series of paintings that signified a radical new direction in the artist’s work. Distinguishable for their strict graphic regularity, severe formal restraint and often apparent emptiness, these, in some ways, Minimalist-looking pictures, were ones that marked a startling departure from the schismatic and often Baroque lyricism of the artist’s earlier, predominantly white-ground pictures, rooted in the history, mythology and emotion of the Mediterranean landscape. Instead, Twombly’s ‘blackboards’ appeared to demonstrate the artist’s return to and renewed interest in the primacy of drawing and in the use of line as a conveyer of the human imagination.

Made, more or less consistently between 1966 and 1971, Twombly’s ‘blackboard’ paintings are so-named because, when they were first exhibited, they appeared to the critics of American art magazines such as Artforum and ArtNEWS to have been inspired by the notion of the classroom blackboard or the child’s primer as a temporal and highly graphic carrier of information. As in this example from 1970, these paintings were also predominantly, though not always, made on a series of swiftly executed dark-grey oil-paint backgrounds that resembled the slate of a blackboard. In the case of Untitled (New York City), its ground has been made using broad sweeps of a large brush. Here, the dark grey paint has been allowed, even encouraged, to drip and splash in places so that it generates an organic, unformed and dynamic surface that contrasts openly with the linear logic, regularity and continuum of the ‘writing’ in oil crayon which, in the main, has been applied over the top of its irregular surface. In some places, both ground and ‘text’ have, however, been inter-layered into one another. Here, Twombly has obscured earlier writing by painting over it with a brush before subsequently adding further lines and layers of lines. In this way the painting becomes a kind of palimpsest where both the drawn and the painted elements of the picture appear interwoven and interdependent. As a consequence, Twombly’s ‘writing’ almost magically appears to be both emerging from and simultaneously dissolving into the picture’s dark, monochromatic ground.

Between 1966 and the climactic end of this distinctive series of works in 1971 when they effectively evolved into another epic series of paintings known as Nini’s Paintings, around three or four distinct types of ‘blackboard’ paintings can be identified. Each of these ‘types’ signified a different and developing exploration of the graphic language of representation using only the simplest, most reductive and restrained of pictorial means. Growing out of the very first of these works – paintings such as Problem now in the Moderne Museum für Kunst, Frankfurt and Nightwatch of 1966 – were a series of sparse and comparatively empty, grey-ground, paintings that centred on forms of the very simplest geometry, executed in the manner of chalk diagrams on a classroom blackboard and shown, as if moving, transforming or even evolving in space. Preoccupied with the linear depiction of measurement, geometry, form and space, these works were to evolve, under the influence of the Apollo moon-landings of July 1969 and all their talk about space-time calculation into paintings (the Bolsena and Treatise on the Veil pictures) that attempted to render the monochrome picture plane as if it were an Einsteinian field of space-time through which drawing and written notation moved. Along with his preoccupation with space and the graphic, hand-drawn line, the element of time is a central theme that runs through all of Twombly’s ‘blackboards’. Twombly’s languid, flowing line does not just articulate a division of form and space in these paintings but is also a rhythmic and graphic delineation of speed and duration and therefore also of time. Untitled (New York City), with its suggestion of half-formed letters and glyphs combining together to establish a uniform sense of an energized field of graphic activity, asserts itself in this context as if it were some kind of balanced but indecipherable equation that occupies just such a space-time realm. Its fluid linguistic lines magically seem to emerge, Belshazaaar-like, from the dark impenetrable surface of the painting as if they were some kind of seismographic recording in space and time of the passage of language through the history.

Belonging to the final ‘type’ of ‘blackboard’ paintings that Twombly made, Untitled (New York City) is a work that evolved out of perhaps the most distinctive and symptomatic of all the series – the so-called ‘lasso-loop’ pictures – in which, within the strict, rectangular format of the canvas, Twombly set out to push a simple and deliberately constrained system of mark-making to its limits, or even beyond them. For these works, Twombly repeatedly and methodically drew out in crayon a single, repetitive and seemingly endless flowing progression of loosely-scrawled, looping lines. Effectively the product of one continuous line that overlaps itself to the point where it almost dissolves into a single, holistic, energized spatial field of graphic activity, the lasso-loop paintings often appear to hover on the very borderlines of the formal logic and structure that has given rise to them. By pushing this logic to its limits, these are pictures that both explore the innate quality of line as an articulation of form and space and expose the precise point where line also becomes integrated into a wider, collective field of expression and meaning. Most importantly perhaps, with regards to Untitled (New York City) of 1970, these are works that begin to reveal the exact moment or place where the graphic art of writing and drawing starts to fuse into and become the more cohesive, plastic art of painting. For, it is exactly this aspect of these works that Twombly set out explore the similarly formatted ‘blackboards’, he began in New York in 1970, and of which Untitled (new York City) is one of the first examples.

Painted not in Italy, but in what Twombly himself described as the ‘relatively cooler’ (more restrained) atmosphere of New York in 1970, where the aesthetics of Minimalism and Conceptualism then prevailed, Untitled (New York City) is a work that follows the same formal logic of the early lasso-loop ‘blackboards’ but extends it away from their repetitive looping progression into the realm of written language and its use of line as a carrier of codified meaning. Instead of the repetitive, but essentially meaningless, progression of line in the lasso-loops, Twombly now attempted to translate the instinctive, unconscious, near-habitual and gestural impulses of the hand, when writing, into the creation of a single integrated field of form.

Marking a coming together therefore, between the reductive logic of his ‘blackboard’ paintings and the intuitive impulse of his earlier white-ground pictures, Twombly has in works such as Untitled (New York City), taken the Surrealist technique of automatic writing and the free-form gestural field of play that Jackson Pollock made out of it and turned it back on itself. Pollock’s open gesture here becomes a graphic form of self-inquiry. Writing in a freeform, impulsive and unconscious flow that makes use of the hand and the mind’s instinctive desire to express and to form, Twombly has here, using his whole body, gesturally written in such a way that it is the innately human, intellectual impulse towards writing that comes to be expressed. Taking care only that the painting remain wholly abstract – that such writing does not fall into habit, convention or recognisability, but remains indecipherable – that no clear letter, number or other interpretable symbol should, like a representational image come to disturb the apparently continuous flow of impulsively arrived-at abstract form – Twombly uses the restrictive format of the blackboard to create a uniform field of energy that stands also as a kind of illustrative landscape of the human mind. Seeming to be both embedded in and emerging from the painterly surface of the work, this energized ‘field’, with its powerful graphic suggestions of thought, gesture, expression and of the passage of time, appears, like a palimpsest, to entrap within itself something of the essence of the human intellectual impulse and of our inner need to externalize, formalize and materialize such thought.

It is in this respect that Untitled (New York City) marks Twombly’s return to and reinvestigation of a kind of handwritten mark that the artist had frst explored in the mid-1950s while sharing a studio with Robert Rauschenberg in Fulton Street, New York. There, inspired by the then dominant examples of Jackson Pollock and Jean Dubuffet but also by the work of John Cage whom, with Rauschenberg, he had encountered at Black Mountain College, Twombly had embarked on an ambitious series of large ‘handwritten’ black and white paintings. Throughout much of 1954 and 1955 Twombly had worked on these large-scale, free-form and highly ambitious paintings before ultimately abandoning and destroying them. Only one masterpiece – the three-and-a-half metre-long painting Panorama of 1954 now survives from this major series. Seeming, like Untitled (new York City) in fact, to be simultaneously expressive of both emptiness and fullness, these paintings reflected Twombly’s interest in the written fragment, the glyph, the cypher and the impulsive creative gesture as elementary forms or archetypes – things indicative and revealing of something both primordial and innately human.

Caught between what Nicholas Cullinan has described as ‘rebus and ruin’, these paintings were a startling combination of stasis and flux, of fixed sign and fluid gesture born out of a combination of the fragmented use of words, space and graphic form in the poetry of Stephane Mallarmé and Ezra Pound, as well as Twombly’s own experience of cryptography during his military service. (Nicholas Cullinan, quoted in Twombly and Poussin Arcadian Painters exh cat. London, 201, p. 94) These ‘black and white’ paintings evidently did not prove satisfactory to the artist however, and, after abandoning them – his first series of paintings on a dark ground – Twombly rarely returned to the themes they had addressed until the creation of the ‘blackboards’.

It appears that it was the re-evaluating experience of making the ‘blackboard’ paintings in the late 1960s and the pared down, restrictive logic of these works that ultimately encouraged Twombly, in 1970, to embark, in works such as Untitled (new York City), on a revisiting of the same territory he had abandoned in New York fifteen years earlier. As in 1955, Twombly’s re-embracing of such fluid and impulsive mark-making almost immediately gave rise to a creative explosion and a dramatic increase in the scale of his pictures until soon, he was making some of the largest and most ambitious paintings of his entire career. Once again venturing into what Kirk Varnedoe described as ‘the area of an engulfing abstract sublime that Pollock had defined,’ works like Untitled (New York City) led swiftly onto the creation of a sequence of truly monumental examples of this style in ‘handwritten’ paintings that measured between four and over six metres long. (Kirk Varnedoe quoted in Cy Twombly: A Retrospective. exh. cat. MoMA, New York. 1994. p. 43). These were works of which Varnedoe was to write: ‘Here, even more than in the earlier Panorama, the legacy of Abstract Expressionism is at issue: Twombly ventures into the area of an engulfing abstract sublime that Pollock had defined, and that had seemed off-limits to the art of the 1960s. The prospect of extending and remaking Pollock’s legacy by changing everything deemed essential to his art might appear as perverse as the notion of a grand subjective expression built on Minimalist reduction, and yet both are here, remarkably realized. Twombly replaces the coloured organicism of Pollock with colourless lines whose steady, progressive rise and fall insists on their attachment to the drier constraints of writing, will, and culture.’ (ibid, p. 43).

10

Cy Twombly (1928-2011), Death of Pompey (Rome), signed, titled, inscribed and dated ‘Cy Twombly Rome 1962 The Death of POMPEY’ (lower centre), oil and graphite on canvas, 57 ¼ x 69 ½ in. (145.3 x 176.5cm.). Executed in 1962. Estimate £4,000,000 – £6,000,000 ($6,052,000 – $9,078,000) © Christie’s Images Ltd. 2015.

Provenance: Galleria La Tartaruga, Rome.
Private Collection, Brussels.
Galleria Gian Enzo Sperone, Turin.
Acquired from the above by the present owner circa 1970.

Property of an Important Private European Collector

Literature: H. Bastian, Cy Twombly: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, Volume II, 1961-1965, Munich 1993, no. 129 (illustrated in colour, p. 195).

Exhibited: Brussels, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Cy Twombly, 1965, no. 26.

Notes: I like the idea of scratching and biting into the canvas. Certain things appeal to me more. Also prehistoric things, they do that scratching. But I don’t know why it started.’ (C. Twombly, ‘History Behind the Thought’, quoted inInterview with Nicholas Serota, 2007, Cy Twombly. Cycles and Seasons, exh. cat., Tate, London, 2008, p. 48).

‘Each line is now the actual experience with its own innate history. It does not illustrate – it is the sensation of its own realisation’ C. Twombly, ‘Documenti di una nuova figurazione: Toti Scialoja, Gastone Novelli, Pierre Alechinsky, Achille Perilli, Cy Twombly’, L’Esperienza moderna, no. 2, (August- September 1957, p. 32).

‘One of the prime guiding spirits behind (Twombly’s) combination of the decorative and the gruesome… was the painter Francis Bacon. Twombly’s admiration for the British artist – whom he considers ‘the last great European painter’ – has its grounding in his long-standing dialogue with the tradition of European expressionism. Bacon’s efforts to bring the meaty power of that kind of painting into the barer existential spaces of post-war experience, and to make a personal poetry by mixing lush painterly aesthetics with a sense of the gross materiality of the life of the flesh, were ready avenues of affinity’ (K. Varnedoe, ‘Inscriptions in Arcadia’, Cy Twombly, exh. cat., New York, 1994, p. 37).

Housed in the same private collection since the 1970s, Death of Pompey is one of the finest of a major series of paintings on the theme of epoch-changing murders and assassinations that the artist made in 1962. The paintings that comprise this ‘assassination’ series are a sequence of large pictures on the theme of the Death of Giuliano de Medici, two oil paintings of the Death of Pompey (the first, now in the Kunstpalast Museum, Dusseldorf – the second, larger and final version is the present work), The Vengeance of Achilles (Kunsthaus, Zurich) and two paintings of the assassination of Caesar entitled the Ides of March.

With its scrawled, smeared and seemingly bloodied, flesh-like surface, this final version of the Death of Pompey is a stark, graphic and highly visceral portrait of both the act and the consequences of such an historic assassination. The material product of a series of dramatic physical interactions with his paint, in which Twombly, using his bare hands, has scratched, clawed and twisted his fingers through the thick plastic medium of his paint, it is a highly visceral painterly emulation of a murderous assault upon the physical material of the human body.

Breaking down the borders between action-painting, portraiture, history painting and performance art, Death of Pompey is part of a series of works that followed on from the explosive and highly physical release of passion, eroticism and visceral energy that had defined Twombly’s Ferragosto paintings, made throughout the hot summer months of 1961. Like the majority of paintings made in the immediate aftermath of these seminal new works, Death of Pompey is also infused with the new and distinctly Baroque mix of eroticism and violence that came to dominate the artist’s work until 1966. As Kirk Varnedoe has pointed out, Twombly began the year 1962 with ‘a masterpiece’ in the form of Leda and the Swan now in the Museum of Modern Art, New York. And it was this tumultuous painting of the rape – which through its progeny, Helen of Sparta, was to give rise to the Trojan War – that was followed later in the year by the series of paintings on the not-unrelated theme of epoch-changing political assassinations to which Death of Pompey belongs. With the exception of The Vengeance of Achilles, which depicts an imposing phallic spearhead in the form of a giant letter ‘A’ dripping in blood, each of these 1962 ‘assassination paintings’ is not just thematically associated but also built upon a similarly simple format.

In each of these works Twombly has centred his painterly activity upon a loosely scrawled pencil drawing of a perspectival grid-like form that calls to mind either a chair, a plinth, an entrance door or a stage-set. Clearly indicative of a specific but also undefined space or locale, this rationally organized, grid-like structure functions in direct contrast to the freeform drip, splash and play of the paint above it. But it serves the purpose of pinpointing the arena within which all the wild, violent, drama and formless action and interaction with matter that Twombly ‘performs’ in the making of these works, is to take place. Literally setting the stage therefore, for the artist’s actions, this simple formal structure or graphic device acts as a focal point for the uniquely creative and destructive play with material that goes on above it. At the same time, like an armature, it also anchors the open and freeform nature of this play into a sense of its being rooted in a specific space and moment in time.

Each of the works in this series refers to a momentous and epoch-changing event in Italian history. Twombly’s Death of Giuliano de Medici paintings refer to the murder of Giuliano de Medici by an assassin working for the Pazzi family in 1478. This younger and famously beautiful brother of Lorenzo de Medici, was stabbed to death mercilessly and repeatedly as he tried to enter the large doors of the Duomo in Florence on April 26th of the year. An especially violent and public crime (Guiliano was stabbed over nineteen times) it was a politically motivated assassination that marked the beginning of a long period of brutal violence and political killing in Florentine politics. Twombly’s paintings entitledDeath of Pompey and the Ides of March similarly refer to two other historic betrayals and public assassinations – ones that, in these cases, marked both the end of the Roman Republic and the beginning of the Imperial Roman dynasty. The great Roman General and rival of Julius Caesar, Gaius Pompeius Magnus (Pompey), was stabbed to death by his entourage as he disembarked along the plank leading from a small boat to the shore on his landing in Egypt in 48 B.C. Caesar too was famously assassinated on the steps of the Roman senate four years later, dying from stab wounds, it was noted, at the feet of a statue of his former rival, Pompey.

Fusing the drama of the murderous moment of assault with a near representational depiction of its gruesome consequences on the body of the victim, in each of these ‘history’ paintings Twombly has gone through a kind of painterly reenactment of both the acts of wounding and of being wounded, in order to create the picture. Recording the material traces of the violent energy with which it has been splashed, thrown, dripped, gorged, squeezed and pulled onto the canvas, Twombly’s paint in these works simultaneously suggests both the violence of wounding another human being and the visceral nature of the wounds themselves. As Twombly once said of his graphic line – that it ‘doesn’t illustrate’, but is rather, ‘the actual experience with its own innate history… the sensation of its own realization’ – here, Twombly’s fleshy, hand-scrawled paint operates in just the same way. (C. Twombly, ‘Documenti di una nuova fgurazione: Toti Scialoja, Gastone Novelli, Pierre Alechinsky, Achille Perilli, Cy Twombly’, in L’Esperienza moderna, no. 2, August-September 1957, p. 32).

As the large lumps of paint thrown, splashed and smeared across the grid of Death of Pompey show, Twombly’s use of paint echoes in many respects the use to which it was sometimes put by painters that he admired such as Chaim Soutine and most especially, in this case, Francis Bacon. As Kirk Varnedoe pointed out in 1994, ‘One of the prime guiding spirits behind (Twombly’s) combination of the decorative and the gruesome…was the painter Francis Bacon. Twombly’s admiration for the British artist – whom he considers ‘the last great European painter’ – has its grounding in his long-standing dialogue with the tradition of European expressionism. Bacon’s efforts to bring the meaty power of that kind of painting into the barer existential spaces of post-war experience, and to make a personal poetry by mixing lush painterly aesthetics with a sense of the gross materiality of the life of the flesh, were ready avenues of affinity’ (K. Varnedoe, ‘Inscriptions in Arcadia’, Cy Twombly, exh. cat., New York, 1994, p. 37).

In 1962, Bacon himself was re-exploring historic themes of violence and torment in his Crucifixion triptych and a renewed series of Papal portraits. With its suggestion of an act of murder in a fixed rectangular space Death of Pompey is a work that in many ways recalls some of the tortured figures and broken bodies of Bacon’s screaming popes, crucifixions and blooded bodies pinned to a bed. Eschewing the manifest figuration of Bacon’s painting, but not the visceral and material play with paint that the British artist often brought to his work, a picture such as Death of Pompey displays a similarly tactile and material appreciation of oil paint as a highly evocative and corporeal substance. At the very centre of Death of Pompey, for instance, the suggestion of a stab wound oozing blood is clearly suggested by the thick crimson paint that has been squeezed directly from the tube and left to pour down the canvas. In other places Twombly’s hands have clawed through the thick paint leaving fnger marks in the surface as if to evoke a falling man desperately attempting to cling on to life. Several of these ‘assassination’ paintings are also accompanied, as here, by a crimson-stained hand-mark imprinted onto the raw canvas. Recalling the earliest, most primordial creative act of cave painters, this imprint also functions paradoxically as a kind of murderous signature – as if it were the physical trace of the assassin wiping clean his blood-stained hands.

By appearing, through painterly reenactment, to simultaneously exist both right in the moment of the murderous act and to be looking back on it from the vantage point of history, Twombly’s ‘assassination’ paintings assert themselves as epic visionary pictures that exist outside of time. They are paintings that assert a fascinating duality that is reflective of the artist’s own position as a relative newcomer to Rome, observing the Eternal City and the endless cycle of creation and violent destruction that so distinguishes Mediterranean culture, from a wholly independent viewpoint. The duality that Twombly establishes in these works however is not just one contrasting the raw, visceral and exciting drama of the crime with the tragic, long-term, even epoch-changing nature of the event, it is more than this. It is a duality that speaks powerfully, through a combination of the creative but often violent act of painting itself and the destructive but often desirous act of murdering a figure head, of the timeless and elemental relationship between Eros and Thanatos. At its heart, Death of Pompey is a work that speaks, both eloquently and disturbingly therefore, of the fundamental and integral connection that exists on a primordial level between the twin forces of creation and destruction themselves.

11

Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985), L’heure de la hâte (The Hour of Anticipation), signed and dated ‘J. Dubuffet 61’ (lower right); signed, titled and dated ‘L’heure de la hâte J.Dubuffet décembre 61’ (on the reverse); oil on canvas, 51½ x 38¼in. (129.5 x 97cm.). Painted on 28 December 1961. Estimate £1,800,000 – £2,500,000 ($2,723,400 – $3,782,500) © Christie’s Images Ltd. 2015.

Provenance: Galerie Daniel Cordier, Paris.
Stephen Hahn Gallery, New York.
William Beadleston Fine Art, New York.
Anon. sale, Christie’s Paris, 30 May 2011, lot 14.

Literature: Connaissance des Arts, no. 124, June 1962 (illustrated, p. 29).
M. Loreau (ed.), Catalogue des travaux de Jean Dubuffet, Paris Circus, vol. XIX, Paris 1965, p. 221, no. 251 (illustrated, p. 131).

Exhibited: Paris, Galerie Daniel Cordier, Dubuffet: Paris Circus, 1962, no. 22.

Notes: ‘My desire is to make the site evoked by the picture something phantasmagoric, and that can be achieved only by jumbling together more or less veristic elements with interventions of arbitrary character aiming at unreality. I want my street to be crazy, my broad avenues, shops and buildings to join in a crazy dance, and that is why I deform and denature their contours and colours’ (J. Dubuffet, quoted in A. Franzke, Dubuffet, New York 1981, p. 148).

‘Both Dubuffet and Basquiat were engaged in a methodical exploration of states of perception, knowing, and being. They used the means that best suited their purpose, arriving at remarkably similar artistic forms’ (L. Rinder, quoted in Dubuffet and Basquiat: Personal Histories, exh. cat., Pace Wildenstein, New York, 2006, http://www.pacegallery.com/newyork/exhibitions/11804/ dubuffet-and-basquiat-personal-histories [accessed 3 June 2014]).

‘Jean Dubuffet has shed his ground-worshipper tunic. The period of austerity is over. His ‘matériologue’ side sleeps; make way for the playful and theatrical Janus, the dancer and shouter’ (M. Loreau, in Catalogue des travaux, Fascicule XIX, Paris-Circus, Paris 1965, p. 7).

An electrifying outburst of wild, hallucinogenic ecstasy, Jean Dubuffet’s L’Heure de la hâte (The hour of anticipation) is an intoxicating phantasmagoria of psychedelic colour and form that captures the high-octane hedonism of the Parisian heyday. With its two personnages caught up in a frenetic rave, a hypnotic explosion of chalk-like scrawl and schismatic impasto creates a mesmerizing optical density. Part of the artist’s landmark series Paris Circus, it was painted in 1961, the seminal year that Dubuffet returned to the bright lights of the city and marvelled at its transformation. Gone was the gloom of post-War Paris, its scars and shadows replaced by a heady metropolis and cosmopolitan joie de vivre. Painted on 28 December, L’Heure de la hâte presents a heightened euphoria on the brink of the New Year: its title, suggestive of frenzy and expectation, evokes a carefree abandonment of the past and an unbridled celebration of future promise. Over the course of the festive period, Dubuffet painted a handful of similar works, including, L’instant propice (Propitious Moment) which, created just five days later, is held in the collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Embracing the spirit of the hour, Dubuffet ushers in an untamed visual language for a new urban culture, heralding the dawn of contemporary street art and prefiguring the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat in 1980s New York. Within this visionary rhapsody of colour, texture and noise, background and foreground fluctuate to an undulating beat, pulsing with raw vitality and drawing the viewer into a chaotic hyperreality. In the immediacy of Dubuffet’s brushstrokes, we feel the life-force of the festivities and the thrill of the dance. Against a deliberately fat backdrop of caustically-applied black, Dubuffet’s two primal figures are thrown into oscillating relief, powerful symbols of a new generation swept along by the freedom and joy of the 1960s. In Paris Circus, every day was a celebration: daily existence was fresh and exciting, with quotidian phenomena seen through tinted lenses of optimism and desire. ‘Over and done with the mystical jubilations of the physical world’, Dubuffet exclaimed‘… It is the unreal now that enchants me’ (J. Dubuffet, quoted in A. Franzke, Dubuffet, New York 1981, p. 147).

Dubuffet had returned to Paris from a six-year self-imposed retreat to the countryside at Vence. There, he had immersed himself in a dark, rural aesthetic of earthbound materiality, studying the textures of the soil and ground in minute detail. His fascination with organic matter, as expressed in his Texturologies, Topographies and Matériologiesof the late 1950s, allowed him to escape the sobriety of post-War Paris, bringing him into contact with sites of growth and life. In his absence, however, the city was born anew, transformed from a war-torn capital into a thriving social and cultural epicentre. Upon his return in 1961, Dubuffet lifted his eyes from the earth below his feet and was struck by the vibrant splendour of his new surroundings. The force of this revelation gave birth to Paris Circus, and brought with it the dawn of one of the very first truly urban aesthetics. The artist was swept up in the whirl of the city, captivated by the energy coursing through the Parisian shop windows and streets, bustling with cars, people, laughing, talking and dancing. Paris was a feast and Dubuffet became its entranced portraitist. ‘Jean Dubuffet has shed his ground-worshipper tunic’, wrote Max Loreau. ‘The period of austerity is over. His “matériologue” side sleeps; make way for the playful and theatrical Janus, the dancer and shouter’ (M. Loreau, in Catalogue des travaux, Fascicule XIX, Paris-Circus, Paris 1965, p. 7). The sombre tones of his previous output were replaced by a vibrant palette of reds, blues, yellows and pinks, whilst the primitivistic energy of art brut was channeled afresh into rich tactile surfaces and childlike representations laden with wonder and immediacy. Rough-hewn gestural markings, redolent of chalk pavement drawings, gave birth to surging, visceral terrains, quivering with sensory traces and radiating a palpable life-force. In Paris Circus, the viewer is invited to join the ecstatic dance of Dubuffet’s newly-discovered playground.

In Dubuffet’s raw painterly terrain and resolutely urban subject matter, we witness the birth of contemporary street art. Two decades later, this trajectory would be brought to a roaring climax in the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat, with bustling 1960s Parisian streets exchanged for those of post-Punk New York. Operating as the pre-eminent graffiti artist of his time, Dubuffet paves the way for Basquiat’s searing energy and wild graphic impulse. Just as Basquiat’s unique visual language was filtered through the highly-charged flow of contemporary music and images that flooded his consciousness, so too was Dubuffet’s painterly expression firmly rooted in the living, breathing dynamism of his milieu. Both sought to translate the sensory richness that surrounded them onto the canvas through a cacophony of colour, texture and form. Richly prophetic, L’Heure de la hâte might be seen to foreshadow what Diego Cortez has identified in Basquiat as ‘a polygraph report, a brain-to-hand “shake.” The figure is electronic-primitive-comic’ (D. Cortez, quoted in R. D. Marshall and J-L. Prat, Jean-Michel Basquiat, vol. 1, Paris 2000, p. 160). Like contemporary scribes, Dubuffet and Basquiat captured cities in their prime, daubing their impressions upon the canvas with a physical energy that emanates from every brushstroke. Operating in the same vein as a wall or pavement – the traditional locus of street art – the canvas becomes a means of transmitting the visceral impulses of the artist’s own lived experience. As Lawrence Rinder has written, ‘both Dubuffet and Basquiat were engaged in a methodical exploration of states of perception, knowing, and being. They used the means that best suited their purpose, arriving at remarkably similar artistic forms’ (L. Rinder, quoted in Dubuffet and Basquiat: Personal Histories, exh. cat., Pace Wildenstein, New York, 2006, http://www. pacegallery.com/newyork/exhibitions/11804/dubuffet-and-basquiat-personalhistories [accessed 20 December 2014]).

Throughout the 1960s, an intoxicating post-War energy swept the globe, in which everyday phenomena were seen through fresh, excited eyes. In America, Pop Art was born, investigating the unique auras surrounding quotidian objects and fearlessly appropriating the daily images that flooded our consciousness. In France, amidst the throes of New Wave cinema and sexual revolution, Dubuffet created a new liberated language that sought to convey the unbounded joy of daily living – of walking in the city, of riding a bicycle through the countryside, of simply being. As Dubuffet explained, ‘My art does not seek to include festivities as a distraction from everyday life, but to reveal that everyday life is a much more interesting celebration than the pseudo-celebrations created to distract from it’ (J. Dubuffet, quoted in Jean Dubuffet, exh. cat., Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, Paris, 2001). His stylistic fusion weaves a parallel universe in which the day-to-day is transformed into a bright, kaleidoscopic hyper-reality. With his unique collage of disparate painterly effects and twisted physical forms, Dubuffet constructs a unique visual script. His gestural vocabulary disables our spatial awareness to the point of psychedelic rapture: figures advance and recede within our vision, creating a richly kinetic optical effect. L’Heure de la hâte conjures a new artistic handwriting, equipped to translate sensory experience and, in doing so, to suggest new ways of comprehending our daily existence.

The immediacy of everyday experience was something that lay at the heart of Dubuffet’s fascination with art brut – the intuitive, unfettered and instinctive visual languages that Dubuffet has previously sought out in tribal cultures, mental institutions and children’s art. Indeed, the Paris Circus series imports a great deal of this vernacular into its grainy surfaces and purposefully fat application of paint. Dubuffet’s quixotic figures are indicative of this tendency: executed with childlike naivety, the two protagonists of L’Heure de la hâte confront the viewer with a strange familiarity, curiously alien yet evocative of an age of unpolluted innocence. Dubuffet’s Paris is populated with such beings, and their fluid, cellular forms would go on to inform the automatism and free spontaneity of the artist’s celebratedl’Hourloupe style, initiated two years later. ‘My desire is to make the site evoked by the picture something phantasmagoric, and that can be achieved only by jumbling together more or less veristic elements with interventions of arbitrary character aiming at unreality’, Dubuffet explained. ‘I want my street to be crazy, my broad avenues, shops and buildings to join in a crazy dance, and that is why I deform and denature their contours and colours’ (J. Dubuffet, quoted in A. Franzke, Dubuffet, New York 1981, p. 148).

12

Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988), Three Delegates; signed, titled and dated ‘3 DELEGATES J Michel Basquiat 1982’ (on the reverse); acrylic, oilstick and collage on canvas; 60 x 60in. (152.4 x 152.4cm.). Painted in 1982. Estimate £5,000,000 – £7,000,000 ($7,565,000 – $10,591,000). © Christie’s Images Ltd. 2015

Provenance: Bonlow Gallery, New York.
Jan Eric Lowenadler, New York/Stockholm.
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1986.

Literature: Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kenny Scharf, exh. cat., New York, Malca Fine Art, 1997, p. 45 (illustrated in colour).
Galerie Enrico Navarra (ed.), Jean-Michel Basquiat, Paris, 2000, p. 113 (illustrated in colour, p. 112).

Exhibited: Stockholm, Galleri V., Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1984.
New York, Tony Shafrazi, Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1999, p. 145 (illustrated in colour).
Orlando, Orlando Museum of Art, Co-conspirators: Artist and Collector, The collection of James Cottrell and Joseph Lovett, 2004, pp. 13, 19 and 57 (illustrated in colour, p. 33).

Notes: ‘Looking back on that important year of 1982, Basquiat remarked: ‘I had some money: I made the best paintings ever’’ (J.-M. Basquiat, quoted in C. McGuigan, ‘New Art New Money: The Marketing of an American Artist’, The New York Times Magazine, 10 February 1985, p. 74).

‘If Cy Twombly and Jean Dubuffet had a baby and gave it up for adoption, it would be Jean-Michel. The elegance of Twombly is there… and so is the brut of the young Dubuffet’ (R. Ricard, ‘The Radiant Child’, in Artforum, December 1981, p. 35).

‘A sophisticated and thoughtful artist with great resources of concentration, possessed of an unusual pictorial intelligence and an uncanny sense of unfolding history and of how to avoid its traps, Jean-Michel Basquiat was an articulate and prolific spokesman for youth: insatiably curious, tirelessly inventive, innocently self-deprecating because of youth’s inadequacies, jealously guarding his independence, typically disappointed by the inherited world he defensively mocked, yet filled with adulation for his heroes. His work is likely to remain for a long time as the modern picture of what it looks like to be brilliant, driven, and young’ (M. Mayer, ‘Basquiat in History’, in Basquiat, exh. cat., Brooklyn Museum of Art, 2005, p. 48).

‘Basquiat’s great strength is his ability to merge his absorption of imagery from the streets, the newspapers, and TV with the spiritualism of his Haitian heritage, injecting both into a marvelously intuitive understanding of the language of modern painting’ (J. Deitch, quoted in M. Franklin Sirmans, ‘Chronology,’ in Jean-Michel Basquiat, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1992, p. 239).

Exuding a raw, visceral energy from its richly-worked surface, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Three Delegates is one of only a handful of canvases which features three of the artist’s dramatic yet superbly accomplished heads. Painted in 1982, at the height of Basquiat’s meteoric rise to fame, its skillful technique and remarkable use of colour captures the exuberance with which Basquiat burst onto the New York art scene. Across its surface Basquiat weaves together multiple layers of animated brushstrokes, mysterious cyphers and symbols, together with Pollock-like expressive drips and explosive passages of colour to produce a painting that reverberates with vitality and energy. The title Three Delegates refers to a childhood visit made by Basquiat to the United Nations Headquarters building in New York, where the father of a friend was working at the time. The multicultural membership of the organization resonated with the artist’s own diverse ethnic heritage. 1982 represented a breakthrough period for the twenty-two-year-old African American artist, whose extraordinary succession of six solo shows that year propelled him to unprecedented global stardom in a predominantly white-dominated industry. Reveling in the creative freedom afforded by his newly-acquired studio in SoHo, Basquiat produced some of his most impressive works during this climactic period, includingLNAPRK (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York), Agony of the Feet (The Israel Museum, Jerusalem) and Six Crimee (Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles). Housed in the same private collection for the past 30 years,Three Delegates is situated at the pinnacle of Basquiat’s career, representing the zenith of one of the most exciting and gifted artists of the post-Punk generation.

This particular canvas is one of relatively few paintings from Basquiat’s critical period which relies entirely on pictorial means to convey its vision of ‘urban pressure and anguished, totemic visages’ (R. Rubenstein, ‘Independent and International’, in Co-Conspirators, exh. cat., Orlando Museum of Art, Orlando, 2004, p. 18). Rejecting the textual slogans, declarations and headlines that laceshis practice, Basquiat invests his entire visual energy in raw painterly expressions: swathes of white pentimenti, cascading rivulets of pigment and rich layers of colour and gesture. The almost theatrical trio of heads represents the extensive range of his technical vocabulary, from the liquescent sweeps of colour that comprise the features of the left-hand face, to the heavy impasto of the black-and-white mask-like faces dominating the right right-hand portion of the canvas. The large figure that dominates the left-hand portion of the canvas is one of Basquiat’s most intriguing and complex creations. Emerging out of numerous layers of paint and oil stick, the features begin as a seemingly disparate series of marks which then slowly coalesce into the distinguishable form of a human face. Sweeps of dark paint demarcate the strong jawline and deep sockets of the eyes and nose, while white highlights rendered in oil stick emphasize the subtle nuances of light falling across the skin. Basquiat produces the mottled effect of the skin by utilising a type of ‘wet-on-wet’ painting technique in which he applies consecutive layers of paint before the preceding layer is dry, resulting in a tantalising intertwining of diverse colours. As with Basquiat’s most accomplished figures, here the artist invests particular attention on the eyes and mouth as the figure’s grimace revels a regimented row of pure white teeth, while the bloodshot eyes that stare out from beneath the heavy lids are rendered in white and orange tones exquisitely capped with flashes of electric teal green. Opposite, the two mask-like faces are constructed in a more rudimentary fashion, remarkable for the depth and richness of its impasto. Using a thicker, coarser pigment, the artist reduces the number of colours, relying purely on the surface texture to generate the work’s inscrutable atmosphere.

Starting his career as a street artist in downtown Manhattan during the late 1970s, by 1982 Basquiat had secured an international reputation among dealers, critics and fellow artists, thus cementing his transition from an itinerant high school rebel to a leading figure of the contemporary art scene. Following his debut success in the 1981 group exhibitionNew York/New Wave at PS1, the artist was granted his first one-man show at Annina Nosei’s New York gallery in March 1982. After receiving rave reviews, further solo exhibitions followed in Los Angeles, Zurich, Rome and Rotterdam, as well as a prestigious invitation to Documenta 7 in West Germany, where Basquiat was the youngest exhibited artist within a line-up that included established contemporary masters such as Cy Twombly, Gerhard Richter and Joseph Beuys. Basquiat had moved out of Nosei’s basement studio into a liberating seven-story loft space at 151 Crosby Street, driving his work to new and ambitious heights. Amidst his growing fame and new-found financial independence, Basquiat retained close ties with the urban milieu of his earlier youth. Exhibiting his work at the Fun Gallery – an under-funded space in the East Village that supported the work of graffiti artists – Basquiat continued to express solidarity with his former comrades.

The artist’s oeuvre is rich with autobiographical references and he often mined his own childhood memories as subject matter for his paintings. In his depictions of the human figure he was able to combine many of his own personal concerns – namely his interest in art history, his multi-cultural heritage and his childhood growing up in New York. Beginning in 1982 he began moving away from the streetscapes and cars that populated his early paintings, replacing these subjects with his unique visions of the human form. As Marc Mayer pointed out in the catalogue for the 2005 retrospective of the artist’s work at the Brooklyn Museum, Basquiat’s paintings often incorporate two different categories of figures – icons and heroes. The deities that fall into the first category serve the same purpose as the West African statues and Christian iconography that would have been familiar to the artist through his Catholic, Hispanic and African lineage. This iconography of African masks, Vodoun figurines and Western religious symbols such as angels, devils, saints and martyrs all feature heavily in the artist’s work, whilst his ‘heroes’ are very much based on his own pantheon of idols, drawn from the worlds of music, art and street culture. Both of these streams of figural representation filter throughout his oeuvre, combining to create totemic tributes to the human form. As Jeffrey Deitch has asserted, ‘Basquiat’s great strength is his ability to merge his absorption of imagery from the streets, the newspapers, and TV with the spiritualism of his Haitian heritage, injecting both into a marvelously intuitive understanding of the language of modern painting’ (J. Deitch, quoted in M. Franklin Sirmans, ‘Chronology,’ in Jean-Michel Basquiat, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1992, p. 239).

The human head was one of Basquiat’s most distinctive recurring subjects, and represented a particular source of fascination for him during the crucial years of 1981-1982. As a child, the artist was entranced by a copy of Grey’s Anatomy given to him by his mother, and his obsession with the structure of the human skull was to become a key driving force behind much of his work. Other sources devoured by Basquiat included Paul Richer’s Artistic Anatomy, a 1966 volume entitled Leonardo da Vinci and Burchard Brentjes’ book African Rock Art, thus exposing the artist to a diverse array of anatomical representation – from ethnic cave painting to the Renaissance and beyond. This wide-ranging referential compass was complemented by Basquiat’s own efforts in the early 1980s to explore the work of artists he admired. In the present work, the quasi-Cubist arrangement of eyes, nose and mouth, as well as the almost tribal sense of patterning, recalls the work of Picasso, an artist to whom Basquiat is widely considered to be the contemporary heir. The influence of Jean Dubuffet’s art brut is also evident in the work’s caustic execution and its palpable primal energy. Twombly – another artist for whom graffiti has provided an essential source of inspiration – was equally admired by Basquiat for his exquisite handling of line, evinced by the rapid, schismatic linearity of the present work. As the critic Ren Ricard wrote in his now-famous appraisal, ‘if Cy Twombly and Jean Dubuffet had a baby and gave it up for adoption, it would be Jean-Michel. The elegance of Twombly is there… and so is the brut of the young Dubuffet’ (R. Ricard, ‘The Radiant Child’, in Artforum, December 1981, p. 35).

The frenetic pace at which Basquiat executed his paintings indicates that he wielded his paintbrush just as adeptly as a draughtsman handles his pencil. The rapid coalescing of energetic brushstrokes, drips of pigment directly from the container and even swipes of paint dragged by the artist’s own fngers are all visible in Three Delegates and demonstrate Basquiat’s rare ability to fuse a variety of techniques into one coherent image. Basquiat understood the significance of his expressive style was as much historical as it was aesthetic. Just as Picasso developed his own unique language of pictorial representation, frst with Cubism and later with his calligraphic alterations of the human figure, Basquiat’s style would also become a patented device, harnessing yet ultimately transcending the influence of his predecessors. ‘He papers over all other voices but his own’, Mayer claims, ‘hallucinating total control of his proprietary information as if he were the author of all he transcribed, every diagram, every formula, every cartoon character – even affixing the copyright symbol to countless artifacts of nature and civilization to stress the point – without making any allowances for the real-life look of the world outside his authorized universe’ (M. Mayer, ‘Basquiat in History’, inBasquiat, exh. cat., Brooklyn Museum of Art, 2005, p. 48). Like the great master draughtsmen of the twentieth century, Basquiat strove to reinvigorate the age-old traditions of his forbears in an era dominated by ideas of appropriation. As Mayer goes on to discuss, one of modern art’s greatest dramas is the spectacle of an ancient craft trying to reassert its relevance. Basquiat’s visceral power bears witness to this very phenomenon.

It was his ability to engage with tradition whilst crafting a radically new form of artistic expression that marked Basquiat out within his generation. Not only did his Neo-Expressionist style capture the Zeitgeist of 1980s New York, but it also reinvigorated the practice of painting at a time when its relevance was fundamentally called into question. His distinctive style and insuppressible energy resulted in a trailblazing output whose legacy still reverberates today. As Mayer concludes, ‘a sophisticated and thoughtful artist with great resources of concentration, possessed of an unusual pictorial intelligence and an uncanny sense of unfolding history and of how to avoid its traps, Jean-Michel Basquiat was an articulate and prolifc spokesman for youth: insatiably curious, tirelessly inventive, innocently self-deprecating because of youth’s inadequacies, jealously guarding his independence, typically disappointed by the inherited world he defensively mocked, yet filled with adulation for his heroes. His work is likely to remain for a long time as the modern picture of what it looks like to be brilliant, driven, and young’ (M. Mayer, ‘Basquiat in History’, in Basquiat, exh. cat., Brooklyn Museum of Art, 2005, p. 48).

MAJOR HIGHLIGHTS ALSO INCLUDE WORKS BY BASELITZ, CHILLIDA, RAUCH, WARREN
Neo Rauch Reaktionäre Situation (Reactionary Situation) (estimate: £600,000 – 800,000). Works by Georg Baselitz include Malermund (Painter’s Mouth), 1966 (estimate: £1,000,000 – 1,500,000), Kuh (Cow) (estimate: £500,000-700,000) and Elke 1965, 1996 (estimate: £350,000 – 450,000). Rebecca Warren 00, 2006 (estimate: £80,000 – 120,000, illustrated right), included in the artist’s Turner Prize exhibition. Eduardo Chillida Buscando la luz III (Looking for the Light III), 2000 (estimate: £2,000,000 – 3,000,000), available to view in St James’s Square, SW1. This follows Christie’s record-breaking sale of Buscando La Luz IV for £4,093,875 in June 2013, now placed at Qatar University, Doha, as part of Qatar Museums’ Public Art project.

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Georg Baselitz (b. 1938), Malermund (Painter’s Mouth), signed, titled and dated ‘G Baselitz 1966 Malermund’ (on the reverse); titled ‘Malermund’ (on the stretcher), oil on canvas, 63 7/8 x 51¼in. (162.3 x 130cm.). Painted in 1966. Estimate £1,000,000 – £1,500,000 ($1,513,000 – $2,269,500). © Christie’s Images Ltd. 2015.

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Eduardo Chillida (1924-2002), Buscando la luz III (Looking for the light III); corten steel, in three parts; (i) 50½ x 92 7/8 x 43 3/8in. (230 x 236 x 110cm.); (ii) 80¾ x 54 3/8 x 87 3/8in. (205 x 138 x 222cm.);(iii) 75 5/8 x 74 3/8 x 42 1/8in. (192 x 189 x 107cm.). Executed in 2000. Estimate £2,000,000 – £3,000,000 ($3,026,000 – $4,539,000). © Christie’s Images Ltd. 2015.

ITALIAN HIGHLIGHTS
Following on from the success of Eyes Wide Open: An Italian Vision in February 2014, which realised a total of £38,427,400 and established 13 artist records, the Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Auction features an exceptional array of works by the foremost masters of the period. As the market leader in Post-War Italian art, Christie’s holds records for Michelangelo Pistoletto, Domenico Gnoli, Lucio Fontana and Alighiero Boetti and is delighted to offer works by these artists. This season important Italian works include: Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Donna nuda che avvita una lampadina (Nude Women Affixing a Light Bulb) (estimate: £800,000 – £1,200,000), Gnoli’s Inside of Lady’s Shoe, 1969 (estimate: £1,500,000 – 2,000,000), Lucio Fontana’s Concetto spaziale, Attese (il sole), 1959 (estimate: £1,000,000 – 1,500,000), Alighiero Boetti’s Mappa del mundo – L’insensata corsa della vita (Map of the World – The Nonsensical Course of Life), 1988 (estimate: 800,000 – 1,200,000) and Lucio Fontana’s Concetto spaziale, Attese, 1965 (estimate: £1,000,000 – 1,500,000).

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Michelangelo Pistoletto (B. 1933), Donna nuda che avvita una lampadina (Nude woman affixing a light bulb),painted tissue paper on polished stainless steel, 47 ¼ x 90.5./8in. (120 x 230.2cm.). Executed in 1968. Estimate £800,000 – £1,200,000 ($1,210,400 – $1,815,600). © Christie’s Images Ltd. 2015.

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Domenico Gnoli (1933-1970), Inside of Lady’s Shoe, signed and dated twice and titled ‘D. Gnoli 1969 « Inside of lady shoe »‘(on the reverse), acrylic and sand on canvas, 71 x 47 3/8in. (180.4 x 120.5cm.). Executed in 1969. Estimate £1,500,000 – £2,000,000 ($2,269,500 – $3,026,000). © Christie’s Images Ltd. 2015.

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Lucio Fontana (1899-1968), Concetto spaziale, Attese (il sole), signed, titled, inscribed and dated ‘1959 l. Fontana, « Concetto spaziale » « il sole »‘ (on the reverse), waterpaint and oil on canvas, 39 5/8 x 49 3/8in. (100.5 x 125.3cm.). Executed in 1959. Estimate £1,500,000 – £2,000,000 ($2,269,500 – $3,026,000). © Christie’s Images Ltd. 2015.

Provenance: Michel Couturier & Cie., Paris.
Galerie Bleue, Stockholm.
Private Collection, Europe (acquired from the above in the 1970s).
Anon. sale, Christie’s London, 6 December 2000, lot 27.
Private Collection.
Anon. sale, Christie’s London, 30 June 2008, lot 45.
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner.

PROPERTY FROM A DISTINGUISHED PRIVATE EUROPEAN COLLECTION

Literature: E. Crispolti, Lucio Fontana, catalogue raisonné des peintures, sculptures et environnements spatiaux, vol. II, Brussels 1974, no. 59 T 60 (illustrated, p. 84).
E. Crispolti, Fontana. Catalogo generale, vol. I, Milan 1986, no. 59 T 60 (illustrated, p. 288).
E. Crispolti, Lucio Fontana. Catalogo ragionato di sculture, dipinti, ambientazioni, vol. I, Milan 2006, no. 59 T 60 (illustrated, p. 455; illustrated in colour, p. LVIII).

Exhibited: Nice, Musée d’art moderne et d’art contemporain, Zero International, 1998, p. 53 (illustrated in colour, p. 50).

Notes: Gold is as beautiful as the sun’ (L. Fontana, quoted in L. Massimo Barbero (ed.), Lucio Fontana: Venice/New York, exh. cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Venice & New York, 2006, p. 24).

‘By 1959 Fontana had arrived at the means to perfect the cut (the ideal weight of canvas and the device of the gauze), and from then on his method did not change in any significant way’ (S. Whitfield, ‘Handling Space’, in Lucio Fontana, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London, 1999, p. 34).

Erupting in a blaze of yellow and gold like a radiant burst of sunlight, Concetto spaziale, Attese, 1959, is a rare work situated at the dawn of Lucio Fontana’s series of tagli, or cuts, that would come to embody the very essence of his Spatialist theories. Entitled ‘il sole’ (‘sun’) on the reverse, the work is unique in its explicit invocation of the glowing light that burns at the centre of the cosmos: a light too brilliant and intense to be seen by the naked human eye. For Fontana, who, two years later, would capture the sun-drenched and moonlit splendour of Venice and New York in gleaming gold and silver metal, the sun presents a poetic analogue to his own developing artistic ambitions. In the same way that its mystical golden rays penetrate the uncharted depths of the universe, so too did Fontana’s pioneering slashing gesture seek to access an unknown dimension beyond the canvas. Distinguished from Fontana’s previous monochromatic output by its dual palette, articulated in three bands over a fiery vermillion ground, the work belongs to a small but distinct group of works created in 1959, examples of which are held in collections including the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Kunstmuseum, Winterthur and the Institut Valencià d’Art Modern. Following his exhibition at the 1958 Venice Biennale, Fontana sought new directions in his pursuit of an artistic language that adequately reflected the scientific advances of the space age. In Concetto spaziale, Attese, the conceptual grounding of the tagli is imbued with a new level of painterly poeticism, a programmatic attempt to give substance to the immaterial, non-dimensional quality of sunlight. With its five pristine cuts incised into a stretched support of heavy-grained burlap, the work suggests an opening in the luminous expanse of gold to the vast infinity of space beyond. Evocative of solar eclipse – that unearthly, disquieting phenomenon – the work embodies the sense of awe and wonder that accompanied man’s first tentative explorations of the universe.

Concetto spaziale, Attese occupies a unique position within the new artistic paradigm proposed by Fontana’s Spatialist theories. As an ode to the sun – the central life-giving source of light, energy and matter – the work is infused with a distinctly pictorial element, distinguishing it from the conceptual motivations of Fontana’s wider oeuvre. Through its subtitle and radiant palette, it invokes the magic and mysticism of the spatial exchange between the material substance of earth and the immaterial qualities of light. The heavy texture and surface of the burlap, with its five-fold incisions and deep yellow borders, conveys a sense of earthbound matter impregnated with colour, light and energy. Just as the sun itself unifies light and physical substance, so too does the work unite a sense of the intangible infinite with the unique properties of solid matter. The work prefigures the intense fascination with sunlight that the artist would cultivate in the luminous oil and metal works produced in response to his sojourns in Venice and New York in 1961. Though enraptured by the golden symbolism of Byzantium and St. Mark’s, as well the glimmering reflective surfaces of Venetian architecture, it was not until arriving in New York that Fontana experienced his true epiphany. ‘New York is a city made of glass colossi on which the Sun beats down, causing torrents of light’ (L. Fontana, quoted in G. Livi, ‘Incontro con Lucio Fontana’, in Vanità, vol. VI, no. 13, Autumn 1962, p. 53). Overwhelmed by the city’s futuristic dynamism, Fontana recounted with great excitement ‘yesterday I went to the top floor of the most famous of the skyscrapers … the one made of bronze and gilded glass … It seemed to contain the Sun’ (L. Fontana, quoted in L. Massimo Barbero, ‘Lucio Fontana: Venice/New York’ in Lucio Fontana: Venice/New York, exh. cat., Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 2006, p. 42). The present work, with its lyrical tribute to ‘il sole’, may be seen as an early manifestation of the artist’s poetic response to the universe’s mystical, light-giving source.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, theories of modern physics shook the very foundation of the way man perceived himself in the universe. Fontana was fascinated by recent technological advancements that showed space as an indeterminate cosmos without confines or external points of reference. He felt it essential to change art’s nature and form in order to match the spirit of the time, and in 1946, Fontana, along with other avant-garde artists in Buenos Aires, published the Manifesto Blanco. This document outlined a new ideology known as Spatialism, postulating that ‘we abandon the practice of known art forms and we approach the development of an art based on the unity of time and space’ (L. Fontana, Manifesto Blanco, 1946, reproduced in R. Fuchs, Lucio Fontana: La cultura dell’occhio, exh. cat., Castello di Rivoli, Rivoli, 1986, p. 80). By piercing the canvas, initially through his series of bucchi (‘holes’) and subsequently through his tagli, Fontana sought to unify spatial and temporal dimensions, the penetrating action leaving behind a gestural trace that opened up the unknown void beyond the canvas. As the artist explained, ‘the discovery of the cosmos is a new dimension, it is infinity, so I make a hole in this canvas, which was at the basis of all the arts, and I have created an infinite dimension… the idea is precisely that, it is a new dimension corresponding to the cosmos… Einstein’s discovery of the cosmos is the infinite dimension, without end… I make holes, infinity passes through them, light passes through them, there is no need to paint’ (L. Fontana, quoted in E. Crispolti, ‘Spatialism and Informel. The Fifties’, in Lucio Fontana, exh. cat., Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Milan, 1998, p. 146).

The present work is situated at the dawn of Fontana’s radical tagli, first initiated in 1958. In his simple, clean slashing gestures, Fontana gave birth to the most sophisticated material realisation of his long-standing conceptual aims. His stark cutting gesture united the invisible but fundamental elements of space, time and energy: like the rippling wake left by parting particles, Fontana’s cuts gave form to the very essence of movement. This, for Fontana, represented the final frontier in art: his incisions gave rise to multi-dimensional objects whose outer limits were unknown, scarred by the dynamism of their creation. As he once expounded, ‘what we want to do is to unchain art from matter, to unchain the sense of the eternal from the preoccupation with the immortal. And we don’t care if a gesture, once performed, lives a moment or a millennium, since we are truly convinced that once performed it is eternal’ (L. Fontana, First Spatialist Manifesto, 1947, reproduced in E. Crispolti et al. (eds.), Lucio Fontana, Milan 1998, pp. 117-18). For Fontana, the taglirepresented both a conceptual and a visual solution within his search for a new artistic language. Following his exhibition at the 1958 Venice Biennale, Fontana had sought to curb the indulgent proliferations of texture and gesture that had come to mark his work. He had witnessed the stark contrast between the vacuity of Yves Klein’s blue monochromes at the Galleria Apollinaire in Milan in 1957, and the surface extravagance of Jackson Pollock’s paintings celebrated at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome the following year. In his tagli, Fontana uncovered a middleground: a way of retaining the corporeality of human gesture whilst simultaneously evoking the vast emptiness of the cosmos and the unknown dimensions of space and time.

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Alighiero Boetti (1940-1994), Mappa del mondo – L’insensata corsa della vita (Map of the World – The nonsensical course of Life), signed ‘alighiero e boetti’ (on the overlap), embroidery on canvas, 45 3/8 x 86 5/8in. (115 x 220cm.). Executed in 1988. Estimate £800,000 – £1,200,000 ($1,210,400 – $1,815,600). © Christie’s Images Ltd. 2015

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Lucio Fontana (1899-1968), Concetto spaziale, Attese, signed, titled and inscribed ‘l. Fontana “concetto spaziale” ATTESE Società Transporti C.A.S.Z.I., in risposta alla vostra in data 7-7-2000 vi dico che avete…’ (on the reverse), waterpaint on canvas, 36 ½ x 25 5/8in. (92.7 x 65.1 cm.). Executed in 1965. Estimate £1,500,000 – £2,000,000 ($2,269,500 – $3,026,000). © Christie’s Images Ltd. 2015

Provenance: Galleria Angolare, Milan.
Studio Pescali, Milan.
Galleria d’Arte Medea, Milan.
Alberto Galimberti, Milan.
Shuller Collection, Rome.
Private Collection, Cologne.
Anon. sale, Sotheby’s London, 23 February 1989, lot 364.
Private Collection.
Anon. sale, Sotheby’s London, 26 June 1996, lot 43.
Jan Eric Lowenadler, New York/Stockholm.
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1996.

Property of a Distinguished European Private Collector

Literature: E. Crispolti, Fontana. Catalogo generale, vol. II, Milan 1986, no. 65 T 133 (illustrated p. 584).
E. Crispolti, Lucio Fontana: Catalogo ragionato di sculture, dipinti, ambientazioni, vol. I, Milan 2006, no. 65 T 133, pp. 767-768 (illustrated, p. 768).

Exhibited: Milan, Galleria d’Arte Medea, L’Avventura Spaziale di Lucio Fontana, 1974 (illustrated, p. 36).
Zurich, Galerie René Ziegler, Fontana Skulpturen, Reliefs, Bilder, Graphik, 1976, no. 90.
Madrid, Palacio de Velázquez, Lucio Fontana: El Espacio Como Exploracion, 1982, p. 141, no. 73 (illustrated, p. 85).
Frankfurt, Galerie Neuendorf, 1987, p. 20, no. 17 (illustrated in colour, p. 21).
Frankfurt, Galerie Neuendorf, Lucio Fontana, 1987-1988, no. 50 (illustrated in colour, unpaged).

Notes: ‘What we want to do is to unchain art from matter, to unchain the sense of the eternal from the preoccupation with the immortal. And we don’t care if a gesture, once performed, lives a moment or a millennium, since we are truly convinced that once performed it is eternal’ (First Spatialist Manifesto, 1947, reproduced in E. Crispolti et al. (eds.),Lucio Fontana, Milan 1998, pp. 117-118).

Standing at nearly a metre tall, Lucio Fontana’s Concetto Spaziale, Attese is an exquisite monochrome tagli, the pristine white canvas dramatically penetrated with three elegant vertical slashes. The three long gestural cuts that pierce the material surface of the canvas pin the work to the transformative act of its creation. Through this dramatic and revolutionary act the artist introduced a new spatial dimension to the canvas that paradoxically infused his work with a sense of the eternal. A pure and lyrical expression of the artist’s Spatialist theories, the minimal white canvas can be seen to inform the artist’s acclaimed installation the following year at the XXXIII Biennale di Venezia.

Writing in his Technical Manifesto of 1951 Lucio Fontana declared: ‘The discovery of new physical powers, the conquest of matter and space, gradually impose on man conditions which have never existed before the application of these discoveries to the various forms of life, brings about a substantial transformation in our way of thinking. The painted surface, the erected stone, no longer have a meaning’ (Technical Manifesto, J. van der Marck and E. Crispolti,Lucio Fontana, vol. I, Brussels 1974, p. 15). Fontana understood that the artist, like the scientist, had to compete with a vision of the world exclusively comprised of time, matter, energy and above all, the all-pervasive void of deep space. Faced with this reality Fontana reached for a dynamic solution, and in doing so employed his two most revolutionary innovations, the buchi and the tagli. Part painting, part sculpture, the buchi (‘holes’) and the tagli (‘cuts’) that came to define the artist’s career transformed the canvas into a three dimensional object that the artist considered eternal. For Fontana the buchi and the tagli that puncture the canvas, created a perpetual space that would continue to exist despite the passage of time, a tribute to the world of science post-Einstein. In this way, the mystical openings of thetagli visible in Concetto Spaziale, Attese invite the viewer to engage with the dark infinity beyond the picture plane, creating an almost transcendent experience.

In articulating this radical spatialist vision, Fontana found white to be the ‘purest, least complicated, most understandable colour [An embodiment of] ‘pure simplicity, ‘pure philosophy, ‘spatial philosophy, ‘cosmic philosophy (J. van der Marck and E. Crispolti, Lucio Fontana, vol. I, Brussels, 1974, p. 137). It is in this striking contrast, between the white of the surface and the darkness of the void, that Fontana’s Spatial concept finds its most lyrical expression. In Concetto Spaziale, Attese, we are entering the realm of the immaterial, that dimension whole-heartedly embraced by Yves Klein in his exhibition at the Iris Clert Gallery in April 1958. Klein conceived of an evacuated space, perfectly white in homage to the Void – a concept that resonated with Fontana’s minimalist language of the monochrome tagli.

The current work can be seen in some ways to prefigure Fontana’s Ambiente Spaziale, for which the artist was awarded the Grand Prize for Painting at the XXXIII Venice Biennale. This grand installation saw the artist taking his iconictagli gesture to a new level of ambition. Created in collaboration with the architect Carlo Scarpa, Fontana envisaged a white, luminous maze, filled with examples of his tagli. As Fontana explained to Pierre Restany: ‘I wanted to create a ‘spatial environment, by which I mean an environmental structure, a preliminary journey in which the twenty slits would be as if in a labyrinth containing blanks of the same shape and colour’ (L. Fontana, quoted in S. Whitfield, Lucio Fontana, exh. cat., London, 1999, p. 200).

Fontana’s desire to create an art that remained relevant to the era of scientific discoveries in which he lived is evident in the gestures with which he created Concetto spaziale, Attese. For Fontana, in an age of space travel and quantum physics, the future of painting rested on art that transcended both time and space. Speaking about his intentions the artist declared, ‘what we want to do is to unchain art from matter, to unchain the sense of the eternal from the preoccupation with the immortal. And we don’t care if a gesture, once performed, lives a moment or a millennium, since we are truly convinced that once performed it is eternal’ (First Spatialist Manifesto, 1947, reproduced in E. Crispolti et al. (eds.), Lucio Fontana, Milan 1998, pp. 117-118). The slashes and the movements of the arm and the knife are themselves an artwork that exists not only in space, but also in time. It is at the very moment that Fontana undergoes the destructive act of cutting the canvas in Concetto Spaziale, Attese that he initiates a creative transformation, opening up the canvas into infinite space and the eternal.

AFRO RED WEB: CHRIS OFILI IN VENICE
Initially realised as a monumental centrepiece for Chris Ofili’s acclaimed exhibition Within Reach at the British Pavilion for the Venice Biennale 2003, Afro Red Web, 2002-2003 (estimate: £500,000 – 700,000) is an intricately-rendered expression of Ofili’s most iconic image: the Afro couple. Clenched in a passionate embrace under the heady haze of an African paradise, Afro Red Web invokes the biblical Garden of Eden. One of only five large-scale canvases created for the Biennale, Afro Red Web was showcased to great effect within its own monochrome green room, adjacent to its partner work Afro Jezebel. Recently the subject of a highly acclaimed retrospective at the New Museum, New York, Ofili’s works assert his own cultural nomadism, presenting his African roots whilst projecting his own sense of hybrid British culture.

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Chris Ofili (b. 1968), Afro Red Web, signed twice, titled and dated twice ‘AFRO RED WEB 2002-2003 CHRIS OFILI 2002-2003’ (on the stretcher); oil, polyester resin, glitter, map pins and elephant dung on linen, 96 1/8 x 72 1/8in. (244 x 183cm.). Executed in 2002-2003. Estimate £500,000 – £700,000 ($756,500 – $1,059,100). © Christie’s Images Ltd. 2015.

DAY SALE HIGHLIGHTS
During the Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Auction on 12th February 2015, Christie’s will offer works in support of Goldsmiths, University of London £2.8 million project to build a new gallery, an extraordinary platform for art students to exhibit and engage with curators and artists from all over the world. Generous donations by some of the college’s most renowned alumni include works by Sarah Lucas, the next artist to represent Britain at the 56th Venice International Art Biennale has donated Nahuiolin (estimate: £120,000 – £180,000) and other illustrious alumni including Antony Gormley (Another Time XX, estimate: £120,000 – £180,000), Damien Hirst (Ipratropium Bromide, estimate: £250,000 – £350,000), Julian Opie, Sam Taylor-Johnson and Steve McQueen. A highlight of the Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Auction is Golden Shoe (Julie Andrews Shoe) by Andy Warhol (estimate: £200,000 – £300,000). Dedicated to Hollywood star Julie Andrews, best known for her role as Maria in the Sound of Music, the work is one from a series of forty golden shoes created by Warhol in honour of the most famous celebrities of the time, including Zsa Zsa Gabor, Elvis Presley and James Dean that were exhibited all together at the Bodley Gallery in December 1956 and featured in a spread by LIFE magazine one month later. Golden Shoe (Julie Andrews Shoe) was first owned by TV production designer and Warhol’s confidant, Charles Lisanby, who incidentally also knew Julie Andrews through My Fair Lady.

FIRST OPEN/LDN – SOUTH KENSINGTON
Christie’s and ArtStack announced a new and unique initiative this season: the first crowd-sourced auction initiative. The aim is to give emerging artists chosen by the public the opportunity to be included in an auction, using new technologies and influenced by the current trend for crowd sourcing. From Tuesday 20 January – Sunday 1 February, artists can submit their work via https://theartstack.com/exhibition/Christie’sFirstOpen/LDN for an online competition and the public can vote for their favourite artists. The most popular works of art will be reviewed for submission by a high-profile panel of art world, fashion and media figures who will select works for inclusion in the forthcoming First Open/LDN auction on Thursday 26 March at Christie’s South Kensington, with 25% of the proceeds to be donated to the Whitechapel Gallery in London. For more information, please click here for the full press release.

Christie’s Education is hosting a two-day course centred on the London Post-War & Contemporary Art February sales where Christie’s Education academics and Christie’s specialists will guide students through the exclusive sale preview exploring and discussing works of art presented for auction.

Career-spanning exhibition of Balthus’s paintings, drawings, and photographs opens at Gagosian Paris

15 jeudi Jan 2015

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1947, Balthus, Etude pour "La Partie de cartes"

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Balthus and his wife Setsuko, Rossinière, Switzerland, 1998. Photo: Raphael Gaillarde/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

From time to time, amidst all the trials and errors, it happens: I recognize what I was looking for. All of a sudden the vision that pre-existed incarnates itself, more or less intuitively and more or less precisely. The dream and the reality are superimposed and made one. —Balthus

PARIS.- Following the initial presentation of “Balthus: The Last Studies” at Gagosian New York at the time of the Metropolitan Museum’s retrospective “Balthus: Cats and Girls” in 2013, Gagosian Paris announces a career-spanning exhibition of Balthus’s paintings, drawings, and photographs. Prepared in collaboration with artist’s estate, this is the first exhibition of his work in Paris since the 1983–84 retrospective at the Centre Georges Pompidou.

Balthus was the reclusive painter of charged and disquieting narrative scenes, whose inspirative sources and embrace of exquisitely rigorous technique reach back to the early Renaissance, though with a subversive modern twist. Working independently of avant-garde movements such as Surrealism, he turned to antecedents including Piero della Francesca and Gustave Courbet, appropriating their techniques to depict the physical and psychic struggles of adolescence. Casting viewers as voyeurs of pubescent female subjects brooding with uneasy dreams, he scandalized Parisian audiences with his first gallery exhibition in 1934. In his interior portraits, street scenes, and landscapes of the next seventy years, Balthus cultivated a self-taught classicism as a framework for more enigmatic artistic investigations.

Early ink studies of Paris streets and passersby demonstrate the evolution of what Balthus described as his “timeless realism.” His signature dramatic lighting and muted palette are already evident in the oil paintings Portrait of Pierre Leyris(1932–33), a depiction of the young translator lighting a cigarette after dinner; and Young Girl in Amazonian Costume(1932), shown in his notorious debut at Galerie Pierre two years later. A 1947 study in oil on board for the key large-scale painting The Card Game (1948–50) portrays two girls in modern dress, but rendered with a geometrical order more typical of the Renaissance.

Balthus was appointed director of the French Academy in Rome in 1961, and acquired a medieval castle near Viterbo, an hour’s drive north of the city, in 1970. In watercolors produced over the next several years, he continuously depicted the nearby ruins of a watchtower situated on a steep cliff over a densely wooded ravine, adjusting his palette with the seasons. In the last decade of his life, when physical frailty made it all but impossible for him to draw, he discovered the Polaroid camera—a surprising turn for one who had remained so defiantly aloof from many of the technical innovations of his own time. With it he began making extensive instant photographic “sketches” for his paintings, which were often many years in the making. During this time, his artistic energies and attention were reserved largely for his last model Anna. She posed for him every Wednesday for eight years in the same room with the same curtain, the same chaise longue, the same window in changing light conditions, the same bucolic mountain scenery looming beyond; this enduring scene provided the subject for his final painting, Girl with a Mandolin (2000–01), which remained unfinished at the time of his death.

Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski de Rola) was born in Paris in 1908 and died in Rossinière, Switzerland in 2001. At the age of 13, he published Mitsou, a book of 40 ink drawings with a text by Rainer Maria Rilke, a close family friend. A self-taught artist, he held his first exhibition at Galerie Pierre, Paris in 1934. Following the ensuing scandal, he showed with Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York from 1938–77, although he never visited the U.S. His paintings and drawings are in the collections of key museum and private collections worldwide.

In 1961, Balthus became director of the French Academy in Rome. Over the next 16 years he restored the interior of the Villa Medici and its gardens to their former elegance. During his lifetime, he was also a noted stage designer for Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Shelley’s Cenci (as adapted by Antonin Artaud), Camus’s État de siège and Mozart’s Così fan tutte.

Balthus’s first major museum exhibition was at the Museum of Modern Art in 1956. Other museum exhibitions of note include Musée des Arts Decoratifs, Paris (1966); Tate Gallery, London (1968); La Biennale di Venezia (1980); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1980); Centre Georges Pompidou (1983–84, traveled to Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York); Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art (1984); Musée cantonal des beaux-arts de Lausanne (1993); Palazzo Grassi, Venice (2001); and Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum (2014, traveled to Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art). His work has been the subject of two major exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: “Balthus” (1984); and “Balthus: Cats and Girls” (2013–14).

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Balthus, Etude pour « La Partie de cartes », 1947. Oil on cardboard, 17 1/4 x 24 3/4 inches. © Harumi Klossowska. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery. Photography by Robert McKeever.

Parfois, parmi les essais et les erreurs : je reconnais ce que je cherchais. Tout à coup la vision qui préexistait s’incarne par elle-même, plus ou moins intuitivement et plus ou moins précisément. Le rêve et la réalité se superposent pour ne faire plus qu’un.
— Balthus

PARIS.- Après l’exposition inédite « Balthus : The Last Studies » à Gagosian New York au moment de la rétrospective du Metropolitan Museum « Balthus : Cats and Girls » en 2013, Gagosian Paris est heureuse d’annoncer une exposition retraçant la carrière de Balthus à travers une sélection de peintures, dessins et photographies. Préparée en collaboration avec la famille de l’artiste, cette exposition sera la première consacrée à son travail à Paris depuis la rétrospective du Centre Georges Pompidou en 1983-1984.

Balthus était le peintre solitaire de scènes narratives chargées et inquiétantes, dont les sources d’inspiration et le choix d’une technique rigoureuse et raffinée ne sont pas sans rappeler les prémices de la Renaissance, accompagnées d’une touche de modernité subversive. Ayant travaillé à l’écart des mouvements d’avant-garde tels que le Surréalisme, il préféra se tourner vers les maîtres anciens, comme Piero della Francesca ou Gustave Courbet, s’appropriant leurs techniques pour décrire les tourments physiques et psychiques de l’adolescence. En rendant les spectateurs voyeurs face à ces sujets féminins pubères couvant des rêves embarrassants, il scandalisa le public parisien lors de sa première exposition dans une galerie en 1934. Dans ses portraits d’intérieur, scènes de rue et paysages des soixante-dix années suivantes, Balthus cultiva un classicisme autodidacte comme cadre d’investigations artistiques plus énigmatiques.

Les premières études à l’encre des rues de Paris et de ses passants démontrent l’évolution de ce que Balthus décrivait comme son « réalisme intemporel ». Sa signature, un éclairage dramatique et une palette voilée, apparaissent déjà dans les peintures à l’huile Portrait de Pierre Leyris (1932-1933), représentant le jeune traducteur en train d’allumer une cigarette après avoir dîné ; et Portrait de jeune fille en costume d’amazone (1932), présentée lors de sa célèbre première exposition à la Galerie Pierre, deux ans plus tard. Une étude à l’huile sur carton de 1947 de la grande peinture majeure Le jeu de cartes (1948-1950) met en scène deux jeunes filles vêtues à la mode de l’époque, mais dont le rendu géométriquement ordonné est typique de la peinture de la Renaissance.

Balthus fut nommé Directeur de l’Académie de France à Rome en 1961, et fit l’acquisition d’un château datant du Moyen-âge à côté de Viterbe, à une heure de route au nord de la ville, en 1970. Dans ses aquarelles produites pendant les années qui suivirent, il n’a cessé de représenter les ruines environnantes d’une tour de guet située sur une falaise abrupte surplombant un ravin richement boisé, ajustant sa palette au gré des saisons. Au cours des dix dernières années de sa vie, alors que sa santé fragile ne lui permettait plus de dessiner, il découvrit le Polaroid —un virage surprenant pourcelui qui a gardé toute sa vie une distance avec la plupart des innovations techniques de son époque. A partir de ces polaroids, il commença à réaliser de nombreuses « esquisses » photographiques instantanées pour ses peintures, qui étaient souvent produites sur plusieurs années. A cette époque, son énergie artistique et son attention étaient largement portées sur Anna, son dernier modèle. Elle posa pour lui tous les mercredis durant huit ans, dans la même pièce avec le même rideau, la même chaise longue, la même fenêtre aux conditions de lumière changeantes, la même scène bucolique de montagne qui se profilait au loin ; cette scène inscrite dans la durée fut le sujet de sa dernière peinture, Jeune fille à la mandoline (2000-2001), inachevée à sa mort.

Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski de Rola) est né à Paris en 1908 et mort à Rossinière, Suisse, en 2001. A l’âge de 13 ans, il publiaMitsou, un livre constitué de 40 dessins à l’encre accompagnés d’un texte de Rainer Maria Rilke, un ami proche de sa famille. Artiste autodidacte, sa première exposition eut lieu à la Galerie Pierre en 1934. Après le scandale qui en résulta, il collabora avec la Pierre Matisse Gallery à New York de 1938 à 1977, alors même qu’il n’a jamais visité les Etats-Unis. Ses peintures et dessins font partie des collections muséales et privées les plus prestigieuses au monde.

La premiere exposition muséale majeure de Balthus eut lieu au Museum of Modern Art en 1956. Parmi les expositions muséales importantes, on compte le Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris (1966); la Tate Gallery, London (1968); La Biennale de Venise (1980); Musée d’Art Contemporain de Chicago (1980); Centre Georges Pompidou (1983-84, exposition itinérante au Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York); Musée Municipal d’Art de Kyoto (1984); Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne (1993), Palazzo Grassi, Venise (2001); Metropolitan Art Museum, Tokyo (2014, exposition itinérante au Musée Municipal d’Art de Kyoto). Son oeuvre a fait l’objet de deux expositions majeures au Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: « Balthus » (1984) ; et « Balthus » (1984) ; et « Balthus : Cats and Girls » (2013-2014).

GAGOSIAN GALLERY. 4 RUE DE PONTHIEU T. +33.1.75.00.05.92 75008 PARIS F. +33.1.70.24.87.10 HORAIRES D’OUVERTURE: Mar–Sam 11h00–19h00

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Balthus, Untitled , c. 1990 – 2000 : Color polaroid 4 x 4 inches 10.2 x 10.2 cm © Harumi Klossowska Courtesy Gagosian Gallery Photography by Robert McKeever

Zao Wou-Ki (1921 – 2013), 26.12.2001

13 mardi Jan 2015

Posted by alaintruong2014 in Post-War and Contemporary Art

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10th century, 26.12.2001, Casper David Friedrich, Dong Yuan, Morning Mist in the Mountains, Residents on the Outskirts of Dragon Abode, Zao Wou-Ki

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Zao Wou-Ki (1921 – 2013), 26.12.2001. Estimation: 1,500,000 — 2,000,000 HKD. Photo Sotheby’s.

This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity issued by Foundation Zao Wou-ki. signed in Pinyin and Chinese; signed and titled on the reverse. Executed in 2001. oil on canvas; 59.8 x 73 cm., 23 1/2  x 28 3/4  in.

Notes: In Zao Wou-ki’s definitive 26.12.2001, the elegant and subtle colours, rhythmic composition and warm spirituality inspired by ancient Chinese ink paintings fuse nature and abstraction into infinite depth of contemplation, propelling the artist to a new pinnacle late in his career. The early 2000s saw the artist’s visit to China accompanying then French President Jacque Chirac, his induction to the prestigious Académie des Beaux Arts society, and the bestowing of the Legion of Honour upon him… The present lot, painted at the onset of that lustrous decade by the 80-year-old Zao, is a resounding manifestation of the peak of his artistic achievement and a powerful rebuttal to certain prejudice that an artist’s late career output is a mere re-iteration of an earlier one.

By the end of 1957, having lived in Paris for a decade, Zao Wou-ki committed to abstraction in his art in ways which had from the beginning set him apart from his contemporaries – Vieira Da Silva, Pierre Soulages, Georges Mathieu, Jean-Paul Riopelle. He bore the burdens of two cultural heritages and his search for an artistic identity would always be accompanied by the thrills and anxieties in his quest for a cultural identity. The artist’s conciliation of the language of modern Western abstraction and a Chinese sensibility rooted in his memories of the distant past – an overwhelming consensus on Zao’s achievement to the point of becoming a myth – was therefore not born instantly or without a struggle. The process began with Zao’s determined renunciation of the ‘chinoiserie’ label, and the passionate outpouring of gestural abstraction and intensely atmospheric works throughout his early career. Paradoxically, befriending and exhibiting alongside the Parisian circle of artists rekindled a light into Zao’s memory of his cultural past. As the artist said in 1961, “If the influence of Paris is undeniable in the whole of my artistic development, I must also say that I have been rediscovering China as my personality has become consolidated… Paradoxically, it is to Paris that I owe my return to my deepest roots.” (Zao Wou-ki, cited by Martine Contensou, ‘Life Into Work’, in Zao Wou-ki, Polígrafa, Barcelona, 1989, p.24)

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Casper David Friedrich, Morning Mist in the Mountains, 1808.

The 1970s then marked Zao’s return to Chinese ink paintings, which in turn imbued his canvasses with renewed freedom. The artist started blending in copious amount of turpentine oil in order to form layering the sprinkling effects previously only achievable in the ink wash medium.  The technical innovation allowed the artist to achieve lighter, softer brushworks and subtler colours such as the ones shown in the present lot. Against a crepuscular sky, shrouded in misty, peachy clouds, a mountain-scape seems to burst forth and recede back at the same time. Swaths of slate gray gently envelope the rocky peak while blotches of dark olive green jostle vibrantly for attention, not unlike the unyielding Alpine spruces in the face of icy winds.

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Dong Yuan, Residents on the Outskirts of Dragon Abode, 10th century, National Palace Museum, Taiwan

Bidding farewell to the clashing contrasts in many of his earlier works, Zao increasingly steered towards subdued colours and balanced compositions imbued with the warm spirituality often found in ancient Chinese landscape paintings.  In the present work, the imposing central composition echoes the monumental mountains in Northern Song paintings, through which recluse painters at the time sought solace and moral guidance from nature. Yet – this is where Zao’s genius conciliation of the East and West lies – the texturing techniques (rubbing, blotching, staining) inspired by ink paintings, combined with the minutely varied colours in oil, generate a spatial depth in constant flux, endowing the painting with a sense of infinite extension, both into the picture plane and beyond the frame.  The volcanic outburst of the olive green at the mountaintop is one such sign of a landscape escaping into abstraction, of substance turning into void, of the tangible longing for the intangible. It conveys at once the Taoist idea of vital energies and Romantic contemplation of nature. It is then apt to draw a comparison between our present work and Morning Mist in the Mountains (1808) by Casper David Friedrich. At the onset of their respective centuries, both artists succeeded in re-generating their vision of nature to the brink of becoming something else: one drew inspiration from a devotion to religion, the other from an ancient tradition deep in the artist’s mind. Indeed, in the eyes of art historian Jonathan Hay, Zao’s return to his roots produced the best of his oeuvre, “out of this shift came a decade of work that attains a state of grace: a quality of gesture that is stripped of all hurriedness and creates a more powerful “bone-structure”, a luminosity extending from infinite softness to enveloping darkness, a topography of form that opens itself to stillness and silence.” (“Zao Wou-ki, Lately’, in Zao Wou-ki Recent Works, Marlborough Gallery, New York, 2003, p.6)  Zao’s contribution to art history extends beyond just abstraction. The ultimate reward of seeing his art lies precisely in the delicate, emotive and unrelenting confrontation with the inbetweenness of his dual cultural heritage, of nature and abstraction, of art and life.

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Zao Wou-Ki (1921 – 2013), 26.12.2001 (detail). Estimation: 1,500,000 — 2,000,000 HKD. Photo Sotheby’s.

Sotheby’s. Boundless: Contemporary Art. Hong Kong | 20 janv. 2015, 06:30 PM

Henry Moore’s maquette studio to be recreated at Gagosian Gallery in London

13 mardi Jan 2015

Posted by alaintruong2014 in Post-War and Contemporary Art

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Gagosian Gallery, Henry Moore

biog_1960c_0002922

Henry Moore working on a plaster in the Maquette Studio, Perry Green, c. 1960. Photo: John Hedgecoe. Reproduced by permission of The Henry Moore Foundation.

LONDON.- Henry Moore’s famous maquette studio will be recreated in a special exhibition curated by the Director of The Henry Moore Foundation, Richard Calvocoressi at Gagosian Gallery in Davies Street, London. Henry Moore: Wunderkammer – Origin of Forms, will run from 9 February – 2 April 2015.

Henry Moore is best known for his large-scale sculptures that occupy public spaces across the world, however the starting-point for these works often came from small pieces of stone, shells, bones, animal skulls and other found objects that the artist collected and displayed in his studio at Perry Green, which is now home to The Henry Moore Foundation. These natural objects inspired the organic shapes in Moore’s sculptures, and he frequently cast them into plaster without any further intervention as the first step in his creation of a new work.

Moore’s “Wunderkammer” of found natural ephemera will be exhibited alongside the drawings and sculptural maquettes that they inspired, highlighting the progression of his work from its very origin to his finished bronzes.

To complement the exhibition, two monumental works, Relief No. 1 (1959) and Upright Motive No. 9 (1979) will be installed in Berkeley Square, Mayfair, from February 9–May 29, 2015. Both works grew out of the maquettes Moore made in 1955 for his brick Wall Relief, commissioned by the Bouwcentrum in Rotterdam, four of which will be included in the Gagosian show.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with a new essay by Richard Calvocoressi, and his discussion about Moore’s Wunderkammer with artist Edmund de Waal.

Henry Moore was born in Yorkshire, England in 1898 and died in Hertfordshire, England in 1986. His first solo exhibition was held in London in 1928; by the late 1940s he had become one of Britain’s most celebrated artists with a diverse artistic output that encompassed drawings, graphics, textiles, and sculpture. In the following decades he continued to receive increasingly significant sculpture commissions, following a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1946 and after winning the International Sculpture Prize at the Venice Biennale in 1948. His heightened success and fame provided him with the means to work increasingly in bronze rather than direct carving, thus achieving the monumental scale and freedom of form invention that he had always desired for his work. His public commissions occupy university campuses, pastoral expanses, and major urban centers in 38 countries around the world. His sculpture and drawings have been the subject of many museum exhibitions and retrospectives, including Tate Gallery, London (1951, 1968); Whitechapel Gallery, London (1960); Forte di Belvedere, Florence (1972); Tate Gallery and Serpentine Gallery, London, on the occasion of Moore’s eightieth birthday (1978); Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1983); Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield (1987); Royal Academy of Arts (1988); Shanghai Art Museum (2001); National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (2001); Caixa Forum, Barcelona (2006); Kunsthal, Rotterdam (2006); Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew (2007–08); Didrichsen Museum, Helsinki (2008); Tate Britain, London (2010); and Kremlin Museums, Moscow (2012).

The Henry Moore Foundation was founded by Moore in 1977 to increase public enjoyment of the arts, especially sculpture. Today it opens his restored Hertfordshire home, studios, and sculpture grounds to the public, tours the world’s largest collection of his work, and maintains a center for the study of sculpture at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds. The Foundation also supports sculpture through an active grants program.

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From left to right: Emperors’ Head, 1961; Maquette for Reclining Figure: Cloak , 1966; Upright Motive D, 1968; Doll Head, 1967 and Column, 1973. Photo: Mike Bruce. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery. Reproduced by permission of The Henry Moore Foundation.

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