Portfolio.com: Figure Painting

Farewell

cbair — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 16:05:34 GMT

This is Figure Painting's last post. The voice behind the blog is reclaiming her Southern roots and returning to Birmingham, Alabama for a spell before taking off for Greece and Spain and, ultimately, trading her auction catalogues and Gallery Guides for the life of a 1L (which is law school speak for a first year student).

Will she miss the New York art scene? Of course. Who wouldn't. But — and this seems to come as a surprise to many people — Alabama has a thriving community of artists, galleries, museums, and collectors. (It's no New York, but that may not be a bad thing.)

Today, Carol Vogel reports that the Birmingham Museum of Art has a secured a loan of Leonardo da Vinci drawings from the Biblioteca Reale in Turin, Italy, including a sketch of an angel the Renaissance master did in preparation for his first version of Madonna of the Rocks and Codex on the Flight of Birds, a notebook holding Leonardo's thoughts on how to replicate the movement of these winged creatures in a machine. (The drawings go on view in September.)

Last night at Sotheby's glitzy charity auction, Angus Fairhurst's bronze sculpture of a donkey with a bird perched atop its shoulder fetched $35,200. (It's one of the works featured in Fairhurst's forthcoming show at Sadie Coles HQ in London.) The piece is reminiscent of the work of Alabamian artist Frank Fleming, whose phantasmagorical sculptures in bronze and textured "bisque" porcelain — walking catfish, penguins carrying walking sticks, and so-called goat men — has been described as a synthesis of Beatrix Potter and Stephen King. Most people in Birmingham know Fleming for his fountain in the Five Points neighborhood that features a "ram-man" telling a story to a group of animals circled around him. Two of his works — Desert Landscape and Southern Catfish Plate — are in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. Fleming is represented by Monty Stabler Galleries.

Alabama is also home to myriad other artists, each unique. Murray "Muff" Johnston, who Figure Painting profiled in September 2004 for Portico Birmingham, makes "art quilts," images of forests and mountains and bodies of water that emerge from bits of fabric stitched together with exquisite artistry. Lonnie Holley, affectionately known as "The Sandman," carves sandstone and creates sculptures with found objects. By now, the whole country has heard of the quilters of Gee's Bend, a group of women from tiny, rural Gee's Bend, Alabama (just outside of Selma) whose bold, even modernist take on this traditional craft has been the subject of exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

And lest you think all of the major collectors are living in New York, London, and Switzerland, let me tell you that one of ARTnews' top 200 collectors of 2007 — Jack Warner, who has a taste for "19th-century American and European art, especially Impressionism" — resides in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

Thank you, everyone who has read Figure Painting. It's been an excellent venture into the "opaque and rarefied" art world, which is sometimes about truth and beauty, sometimes about money, and always good for a story.

Angus Fairhurst, Untitled, Courtesy Angus Fairhurst and Sadie Coles HQ, London

Frank Fleming

Watch Lonnie Holley talk about his work:

The (Red) Auction Topples High Estimate & Other Art World News

cbair — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 14:24:35 GMT

Christie's and Sotheby's both had an excellent Valentine's Day: Yesterday afternoon, a sale of Impressionist and modern art at the former topped the high end of its pre-sale estimate by more than a million dollars, demonstrating "that the market remains strong and buoyant," according to Guy Bennett, head of Impressionist and modern art at Christie's Americas. And last night, The (Red) Auction fetched a whopping $42.58 million at Sotheby's against a pre-sale estimate of $21 million - $29 million. (It even topped the original $40 million estimate that the auction house subsequently cut on fears that trouble in the financial markets would spill over into the art market.) Read more about the star-studded production here.

Nicolai Ouroussoff calls Renzo Piano's design for BCAM at LACMA "architecture without conviction." Roberta Smith refers to the art inside as a "display of pricey trophies, greatest hits of the present and recent past."

Carol Vogel reports that Glenn Lowry's contract at MoMA has been extended and that Damien Hirst is opening a shop that will sell everything from cheap T-shirts to the artist's own work.

The subprime mortgage mess levels plans for London's first permanent Zaha Hadid-designed building.

An $8 million Basquiat painting has been found in a Manhattan warehouse. It went missing after a Brazilian court ordered a bankrupt collector's art to be seized in 2005.

Roanoke, Virginia hopes for the Bilbao Effect.

The Art Institute of Chicago has "resolved its claims for restitution" for the fake Gauguin sculpture — The Faun — it unwittingly purchased for $290,000 in 1997.

An artist works in Ikea.

The Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne discovers it owns a fake Monet.

Private collections take a second look at their security after the theft of six paintings in five days.

Blogger Tyler Green compiles a list of art history mysteries.

Banksy (Defaced Hirst), Keep It Spotless, Estimate: $250,000 - $350,000, Fetched: $1.87 million, Record for the artist at auction

Flowers, Chocolates, Or Art This V-Day?

cbair — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 19:30:35 GMT

Flowers. Chocolates. Damien Hirst's All You Need is Love. These are just a few of the purchases that might be made on any number of Amex gold, platinum, and black cards this Valentine's Day.

Sotheby's heavily marketed and highly anticipated (Red) sale is tonight. After the red carpet and before the party featuring The Hours and Q-Tip, some 72 lots will be auctioned to benefit HIV/AIDS relief efforts in Africa. Among the highlights: Andreas Gursky's photograph of an annual festival held in North Korea to honor Kim Jong-il's predecessor; Marc Quinn's sculpture of Kate Moss (this version of his well-known fashion-muse-as-sphinx with red lips à la the cause); Damien Hirst's pill cabinet filled with replicas of antiretroviral drugs; Banksy's defacement of one of Hirst's iconic spot paintings; and Takashi Murakami's Red Flower Ball (3-D), which Sotheby's Oliver Barker says is hard to come by in the primary market right now.

The sale has caught some flak. In early February, Bloomberg's Linda Sandler reported that the auction house cut its pre-sale estimate from $40 million to $21 million - $29 million amid fears that the beleaguered economy would restrain bidders. To those who are expecting it to prophecy the future of the art market — something that's on everyone's minds as the financial markets take a beating — Alexandra Peers points out that the auction is exempt from state and local taxes because it's for charity and that Sotheby's isn't taking commission on any lots sold, meaning this is a sale subject to unusual conditions and not necessarily a market barometer. But Artnet.com's "Art Market Watch" essentially calls for a kibosh on the sniping: "In fact, the sale has plenty going for it: The good cause encourages bidders to step up...and the event adds a very high-profile contemporary sale to an empty spot on the New York auction calendar."

Check back tomorrow for an account of how much the auction raised and who bought what.

Damien Hirst, Where There's A Will, There's A Way, ©Damien Hirst, Photography by Prudence Cuming Associates, Estimate: $5 million - $7 million

Damien Hirst, All You Need Is Love, ©Damien Hirst, Photography by Prudence Cuming Associates, Estimate: $1 million - $1.5 million

Andreas Gursky, Pyongyang IV, ©Andreas Gursky/VG Bild-Kunst, Courtesy: Monika Sprüth/Philomene Magers, Cologne Munich London, Estimate: $300,000 - $400,000

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Today in the Art World...

cbair — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 14:17:04 GMT

At the London contemporary sales last October, it was Chinese art that really popped. Sotheby's is betting that this will hold true for its February contemporary sale in two weeks.

The Guerrilla Girls say that female and minority artists are underrepresented at BCAM.

With the hit the financial markets are taking, some art dealers are reporting "sluggish sales, hesitant clients and cancelled deals."

The Art Theft's Choice

cbair — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 21:23:58 GMT

What occurred to Figure Painting upon reading that $163 million worth of art — that translates to one painting each by Cézanne, Degas, van Gogh, and Monet — was stolen from the E. G. Bührle Collection in Zurich over the weekend was that it was the at least the third art theft we'd read about since December. Just before the holidays, some crooks broke into the São Paulo Museum of Art and lifted two paintings off the walls — one a Picasso — and last week, two paintings (also Picassos) were stolen from a Swiss gallery not far from the Bührle Collection. Who, we wondered, is the most popular artist among these capers?

That'd be, in fact, Picasso, according to the Art Loss Register. There are 572 of the artist's works registered as missing or stolen with the database. Three have even made the register's list of top 10 stolen treasures: Maya With Doll and Portrait of Jacqueline, worth a combined $66 million dollars, were swiped (from Picasso's granddaughter's home, no less) in Paris last year. While those have been recovered, Head of a Woman, worth $8 million, is still missing from the yacht from which it was taken in 1999. (Wouldn't you just love to have a Picasso on your yacht?)

Thai Antiquities, Tropical Houses

cbair — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 14:15:42 GMT

Museums search records of their Thai antiquities for links to the dealers facing charges of tax fraud.

Next stop for the Jean Prouvé Tropical House owned by Andre Balazs: Art Basel Miami Beach 2009. (via)

The rise of so-called street art.

Sonic Youth are working on their next ~~album~~ art exhibition.

Julian Schnabel will try to bring peace to the Middle East with his next film.

Eli Broad's Pet Project

cbair — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 18:28:44 GMT

The Broad Contemporary Art Museum at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, colloquially know as BCAM, officially opens to the public on Saturday with a free weekend sponsored by Target, the upscale big-box retailer that was similarly civic-spirited when the New Museum debuted on the Bowery in December. But LACMA members can sneak a peak at one of the most hotly anticipated unveilings of the year all this week, and there was a press preview last Thursday, so, naturally, there's already been a deluge of opinions directed towards Eli Broad's pet project. Bloomberg's architecture critic drew up an out-and-out manifesto against Renzo Piano, the architect of the BCAM building, last Wednesday. With Piano buildings from coast to coast, the architect "has ridden the U.S. museum-building boom," he says. "It's time for timid trustees to give Renzo a rest." The next day, the Los Angeles Times published a review of the building's contents. The art critic chides that "mostly the exhibition looks expensive. Really, really expensive." He continues:

Of 176 works on three floors, 139 are by artist who have shown with the same gallery — Gagosian, commonly considered today's leading commercial powerhouse. That's nearly 80%. BCAM turns out to be GCAM. Such a narrow vision feels insecure, more investment deal than adventure.

The New York Times took on the elephant in the room — Eli Broad's post-New Year's announcement that he wouldn't be donating his collection of more than 2,000 works of art to LACMA — in Sunday's edition. What we learn from this reporter is that Broad does not run the museum — " 'He has no more control than the other 45 people sitting around the table at the board meeting,'" according to Michael Govan, and that Govan, himself, is "holding his own." There was a benefit for BCAM on Saturday night, a "Page Six" item in the New York Post tells us. Jeff Koons' Cracked Egg, a sculpture of, yes, a cracked egg that is owned by Broad was the inspiration for the evening. Wolfgang Puck whipped up a dessert resembling the artwork, and the orchestra that entertained guests wore Cracked Egg masks. Lest you interpret a cracked egg as a dark omen, LACMA's website clarifies: "BCAM Born" it reads next to an image of Koons' piece.

Crimes of the Art World, An Interview & a Guest Blogger

cbair — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 13:50:16 GMT

Today in the art world...

Why would thieves steal four paintings so well-known they're "unsalable"? Is there a Thomas Crown involved? Maybe it's the work of an organized crime ring from the Balkans? Or collateral for a drug deal? The Wall Street Journal has a photo slideshow of the stolen artworks.

Stefan Sagmeister, a designer who currently has a show up at Deitch projects, is a guest blogger for "The Moment" this week.

Three people were arrested yesterday in connection with an alleged plot to kill one of the cartoonists who drew a controversial caricature of the Prophet Muhammad for a Danish newspaper in 2005.

A genetecist who supplied an artist with bacteria for an art project has been sentenced to one year of "unsupervised release" and fined $500. There's been a film made about this strange case.

The new director of the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. talks about her plans.

Banksy in Chelsea?

cbair — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 21:22:58 GMT

Figure Painting heard word that there is a Banksy tag in the vicinity of 21st Street and 11th Avenue in Chelsea. Does anyone have more details and/or photos?

Déjà Vu

cbair — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 17:52:32 GMT

One of the paintings stolen from Zurich's Emile Bührle Foundation on Sunday afternoon was Cézanne's Boy in the Red Waistcoat, which depicts an apathetic-looking dark-haired youth (thought to be a model named Michelangelo di Rosa) in a bright vest. The New York Times tells us that the artist painted three other versions his subject, all in U.S. collections. But Figure Painting wondered where, exactly?

As it turns out:

One belongs to the Barnes Foundation, the eccentric institution located just outside of Philadelphia that intends to relocate to the city.

Another is a fractional gift to the Museum of Modern Art in New York made by David Rockefeller.

A third was given to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. by Paul Mellon, who bought it for $220,000 at Sotheby's London in 1958. (At the time, that was considered a great deal of money for a work of post-Impressionist art.)

Paul Cézanne, Boy in a Red Waistcoat, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.