Christie's sale update (2) - Postwar & Contemporary

Christie's window display reproduction of the 1982 Basquiat which achieved top price
at the Post-war and Contemporary Art Auction

The Peter Doig I saw at the Christie's exhibition came up at their Post-War and Contemporary Art auction held on 26 June. The painting, Jetty, sold above its estimate at £6.5m, and two other Doigs sold above estimate, so this painter's popularity with the market seems to be continuing. But the highest price was for a Basquiat: it was an oil stick on panel work in Basquiat's signature cartoon-cum-graffiti style, done in 1982 when he was 21 and just becoming a New York art superstar. The painting went for a whopping £16.7m, but this is half paid for another Basquiat sold by Christie's a month ago in New York. There were mixed results for works by Damian Hirst, no longer the market darling he was a few years ago, but a well known work by Roy Lichtenstein, Cup of Coffee,  sold for £2.8m, more than a third above estimate. Thirteen of the 64 pieces on sale did not sell (including a Warhol Campbell's soup can - the colour was deemed unattractive), but the auction overall yielded a record-breaking £70m. The Sotheby's Contemporary Art sale two days later also did well (the two Francis Bacon works which sold for £11.3m and £10.4 even made the national news, partly because one was originally sold across the road for £150), so it seems the high end art market continues to hold up.

Camberwell BA Degree Show 2013

 

 

Off to the Camberwell BA degree show for a quick look at what the students are showing. The photos below are a fairly random selection of things which caught my eye from the painting, sculpture and illustration shows.

 

BA Sculpture

 

 

 

Ingenious sculpture made from found (?) objects

 

 

 

Performance art in the sculpture show

 

 

BA Painting - there were a few relatively "traditional"
 paintings but no traditional 3D sculpture work

 

 

An attraactively decorative work
(and I don't mean that in a bad way)

 

 

BA Graphic Art

 

 

 

BA Illustration

 

BA Illustration graduate JunYoung-June-Oh from South Korea and her
paper cut outs based on Asian and European fairy tales

 

There was also of course video and digital art which I didn't have time to examine but the thought struck me that a lot of digital work - in video games and special effects for example - continues to use traditional European pespective and representational ideas in a way other forms rarely do nowadays, just as European classical music continues to flourish in the background music for films and video games.

 

PS: On a mid-July visit to the South Bank I came across people leaving the UAL degree ceremony, which had been held at the Royal Festival Hall - best wishes to all the Camberwell students who attended (I thought the black and magenta robes were very stylish!).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Christie's sale update (1) - Impressionist & Modern

Some of the items I saw at the Christie's exhibition were autioned at their Impressionist and Modern sale last week. The Kandinski went for $21.1.m/£13.5m (in 2008 it went for $16.8m in New York), a Modigliani portait went for $10.6m/£6.7m, and a Picasso slightly exceeded its estimate at $9.5m. However a Derain portrait of Madame Matisse in a kimono did not sell, while a Rodin piece quadrupled its estimate at £5.4m. All of which demonstrates that being an auctioneer may not be as easy as it looks. I also learned about something called an "irrevocable bid", which means a bidder makes a promise to bid at a certain price before the sale - this is usually kept confidential, but at this sale it was announced that such a bid for a Soutine ($16m) was not topped at the auction itself, which some see as this practice potentially setting a ceiling price as well as a floor price. (Is this a good thing or a bad thing? No idea.)

Apparently, as so many good quality pieces in this category are in public museums or private collections relatively little comes on to the market, so both Christie's and Sotheby's have relied on the Nahmad family of dealers for a good proportion of their sales this year, as they have a large inventory. Both the paintings which achieved the highest prices, the Kandinski and the Modigliani, were from this source. The Christie's auction was very successful, but not quite as much as rival Sotheby's sale held a few days later. Both sales demonstrated the strength of the market for this kind of work, bolstered in Christie's case by telephone buyers from the emerging Asian and Russian markets and an Indian buyer in the room (who also bid successfully at the Sotheby's sale).

Incidentally, the Christie auctioneer got a round of applause for his handling of the sale!

Triumph of willpower - Saloua Raouda Choucair at Tate Modern

 

 

It's always a pleasure to be introduced to an artist for the first time, but the surprise about the Lebanese painter and sculptor Saloua Raouda Choucair is not only that she turns out to be immensely talented but that she has been producing highly original work for five decades (she was born in 1916) without attractting much attention either in Europe or in her native country.

She spent a few years studying in Paris, including a stint in Leger's studio, and if she had stayed in Europe she would probably be much better known. But her main influence was Islamic art (which she studied in Cairo before going to Paris) and the mystical Islamic Sufi tradition (she is a member of the Druze minority), so it's not really a surprise she chose to return to Lebanon. Although her early works are figurative and show contemporary French influence, she is now thought of as the Middle East's first abstract artist (it seems odd that the connection had apparently not been made before, given Islam's rejection of representations of the human form).

The range of her work is remarkable, from figurative to abstract painting, to three dimensional work which varies from solid interlocking pieces to delicate works of apparent insubstantiality. None are particularly large, though she planned monumental public works which never saw the light of day. She clung fiecely to her own vision, and lived with the consequences, including not selling anything until the early 1960s. An easier route is suggested by a remark by the Lebanese ambassador at a 1952 show of her work in Paris: "Have you not done any Lebanese works for us?" But her vision was not personal or historical, it related to a depiction of the essence of spirituality, similar to the vision that drew Kandinsky to the abstract in early 20th century Europe.

As Choucair now has Alzheimer's disease she is not aware of her late recognition, which some have seen as "tragic": while there are certainly sad aspects to her life, it is difficult to see it as tragic, as she managed to do mostly what she wanted to in a situation where being a female Middle Eastern abstract artist, from a minority religious group which some see as heretical, was seriously disadvantageous. A triumph of the will I, for one, would never have been able to sustain.


What's it worth? - Christie's exhibition



I recently discovered - on the very last day - that famous auctioneers Christie's hold annual exhibitions of selected items from upcoming sales, so off I shot then and there. I found the premises had that "no expense spared" feel that you would expect, but I hadn't expected quite so many big names on show:

Drawings by: Goya, Lucien Freud, Picasso, Watteau, and a print by Kirchner

Paintings by: Picasso again, Poussin, Peter Doig (guide price £4/6 million, very high for a living artist), Miro, Reubens ("from a princely German collection"), Kandinsky (a 1909 painting and the highest guide price, probably because it showed showed a stage in his transition from figurative to abstract), de Stael, Canaletto, Boeschaert, Modigliano, Lichtenstein, Dali, a Titian "fragment", Lowry, Millais, Lawrence, Signac, Benjamin West (Milkmaids in St James Park - ah, those were the days!), a wonderful Jan de Steen called Easy come, easy go, depicting himself guzzling oysters in his own home, being fawned on by his household (difficult to imagine any but a Dutch artist sending himself up in that way).

Sculpture by: Rodin, Moore, Hepworth, Elizabeth Frink, a Leighton bronze (I didn't know he did sculpture) plus one or two ancient pieces

As well as examples of exceptional silverware, porcelain, Chinese art and furniture, and an amazing wall hanging by someone called El Anatsui, which looked like rippling multicoloured and gold cloth, but was actually made of aluminium bottle tops and copper wire.

As you will gather, Christie's managed to provoke exactly the kind of slack-jawed wonder that no doubt they aim for (well, they have been in the game a long time), and if I had a much larger bank balance I'm sure it would have been much smaller by the time the sales are over. The effect was enhanced by the calm, unhurried atmosphere that made all those noughts seem quite natural. Although anyone who goes to exhibitions in public galleries comes into close contact with very valuable works, they don't have price tags on them, so it feels quite odd to be standing within inches of something which has been valued in hundred of thousands, or even millions, of pounds. (There are plenty of large men hanging around by the way, quite apart from less obvious security, so don't get any ideas.) It was this that really distinguished this show from the RA summer exhibition (also a selling event of course, but the price tags are only in the catalogue) - no need to disguise the fact that art follows the money at this address.

Hello Kitty - Royal Academy Summer Exhibition

In recent years the RA Summer Exhibition has been more obviously "curated", which made for a more coherent (and higher quality) show than the exuberant chaos we had been used to, but which also felt less democratic than of old. This year it seemed there had been a compromise, since although most of the rooms displayed careful selection, two were deliberately more open and had the familiar feel of walls crowded with all sorts of styles and subjects. I felt this worked very well, as did the idea of including artworks with the architectural displays, instead of the usual rigid separation.

There was a lot of good work on display, and quite a few welcome flashes of humour which I don't remember before. I was pleased to see a sculpture by Ann Christopher, whose studio I visited a few years ago, as well as the usual Bill Jacklins, Elizabeth Blackadders and Alan Jonses, et al. But the biggest surprise was Tracy Emin's tiny metal sculpture of her cat, quite a change from the heavily sexual subject matter of her recent Hayward Gallery exhibition (although just as personal in its own way).

For me, though, the prints took pride of place this year. The range and quality was outstanding and many showed how this medium can really make use of vibrant colour, as well as all kinds of effects from precise lines to blurry atmospherics. I may be influenced because last week I visited the Royal Scoiety of Painter-Printmakers Annual Exhibition at Bankside gallery (next to Tate Modern) and was similarly expressed (though I think the ones at the RA were generally of a higher quality). Prints may lack some of the subtility of oil paint, but can be wonderful for delivering an initial knockout impression (and for a fraction of of price!)

PS Forgot to mention the roomful of huge Grayson Perry tapestries which attracted a lot of attention - an updating of Hogarth's The Rake's Progress - not entirely my cup of tea, but arresting and original.

Ice Age Art at the British Museum

A direct link with the past?

 

 

 

The British Museum's exhibition of objects discovered in Europe or Eurasia dating from 10,000 to 40,000 years ago was fascinating on a number of levels. These objects had never been brought together before (and probably will not be again), so there was a unique opportunity to compare items from a wide geographical and time framework. All the objects shown were made of bone or stone, but there would undoubtedly have been similar objects of wood or fibre which have not survived, and of course there is a strong element of chance in what has been discovered and found its way to museums. Perhaps not surprisingly, these caveats were not mentioned at the exhibition but they have to be borne in mind before leaping to any conclusions.

All the same, enough was presented to feel the curators were justified grouping some items, such as the naked (often obese) female figures, as being representative of some kind of common outlook. I hadn't considered until the exhibition pointed it out that being unclothed would not be a usual state in the bitter cold of the period in which they were produced. It was suggested they may have been made by women for women in connection with childbirth.

This latter point raises the issue that the exhibition is called Ice Age Art: arrival of the modern mind. The premise is that as those who made the objects on show had brains which were biologically identical to ours, then their motivations for making them and they way they were regarded by their communities were much the same as for contemporary human beings. Thus the curators link the female figures to supernatural forces around childbirth and fertility, on the assumption that those who made them had a concept of the supernatural. This is probably the most contentious aspect of the show - is it "art" as we think of it? - but the exhibition made a good case for accepting that this work is the direct ancestor of present-day art.

For me, this was because it was possible for me to visualise how they were made for the first time. Some of the three dimensional objects were tiny, such as the decorative beads, and none were more than about a foot long - this is not surprising given the time and effort that went into making them using the stone tools available. Many took hundreds of hours to make; this and the talent and time needed to acquire the necessary skills suggests there were specialist "artists" even then, and that such work and those who carried it out were valued within their community. Conversely, decorated javelin throwers showed less skill (but would have been just as time-consuming), which suggested the decoration was done by their users. This can plausibly be taken to show a general appreciation of decorative work, even if we do not its exact purpose. It does seem unlikely that these people would spend so much time and effort on this work unless they felt it met some kind of non-utilitarian purpose.

Some of the objects confirmed the mastery of animal representation we mainly know about from cave art. (There was very effective reference to cave art in the exhibition in the form of a video projection of a selection of examples in a darkened mock up of a cave, complete with sound effects like dripping water, which gave a very good impression of viewing the work by flickering torchlight.) Animal forms incised on bone were not only accurate and lively representations, but often made wonderful use of the limitations of the surface area. Clearly, those who made them had a prior mental image of what they wanted to convey, and the skill to bring it into being.

My final though was this was an exhibition which must have brought together an unusually large number of disciplines - archaeology, paleontology, art history, human biology - bringing together people who probably do not work together. With any luck, the result was as illuminating for them as it is for us.