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Auction Report
The Impressionist and Modern Sales
By Nicollette Ramirez
The sales at New York City’s major auction houses for
Impressionist and Modern Art, Sotheby’s and Christie’s,
were characterized by a few common factors; a range of quality,
collectible work, without having any particularly stellar
pieces; vigorous bidding with prices almost double that of
six months to a year ago (except for a few surprise slumps);
and major telephone bidding from international collectors
that outpaced local bids..
With the euro and the pound far outpacing the American dollar
it was no surprise that some of the most expensive works at
auction went to telephone bidders in London. Asians, Russians
and other Europeans all seemed to be shopping with gusto,
while the Americans in the room let things pass. Take for
example Sotheby’s Lyonel Feininger’s Jesuiten
III, an oil painting with cubist influences, which showed
three heavily robed priests and one woman of uncertain identity.
Relatively under-represented in the auction world, the Feininger
sold for $23, 280, 000 to a London buyer with paddle number
L0058, which suggested he or she was paying almost half the
price in pounds!
Overall, Christie’s sale totaled less than Sotheby’s,
$236.4 million to $278.5 million, but there were some similarities
in the work being offered and the prices for which they sold,
or didn’t sell. One surprise for both houses was the
failure of Amedeo Modigliani. Recently this artist has been
selling well, and both houses estimated his works far above
what they sold for; for example, Christie’s estimated
La femme au collier vert (Madame Menier) between $12 million
and $16 million and it slipped well under this, as did Sotheby’s
Portrait de Jeanne Hébuterne, estimated between $8
million and $10 million. Granted, these were not the most
attractive representations of women that has Modigliani painted,
but they were nevertheless great representations of the work
of a great artist.
As always, there were a lot of Picassos for sale and, for
the newly minted Russian collectors, Chagalls. Works of lesser
importance in Picasso’s oeuvre sold for reasonable prices.
Tête de Femme, a bronze sculpture that was modeled on
Françoise Gilot, sold for $420, 000 at Sothebys. In
contrast, Paul Gauguin’s Tête de femme tahitienne,
carved out of wood, sold for $1, 384, 000 at Christie’s.
Some rare Egon Schiele’s sold well for Christie’s
(Rufer at $3, 064, 000 and Sitzender weiblicher Halbakt in
grüner Bluse at $5, 080, 000) though some that seemed
particularly desirable, such as Schiele’s self portrait,
Selbstbidnis, didn’t sell. A dealer in impressionist
and modern art said one had to be careful as sometimes Schiele’s
work was colored in by others after his death.
Both houses had Giacommettis that sold well; Sotheby’s
Homme travesant une place par un matin du soleil sold for
$7, 432, 000 and Christie’s L’homme qui chavire
sold for $18, 520, 000. Kees Van Dongen, a perennial favorite,
was featured at both auction houses too. One of the most beautiful
works, La Cavalière, showing a woman in equestrian
garb standing with a whip in her hands against a stand of
trees with horses in the background, sold at Sotheby’s
day sale for $768, 000.
Two outstanding works that made records were Paul Cézanne’s
Nature morte au melon vert, a watercolor and pencil on paper
that sold at Sotheby’s for $25, 520, 000, and Juan Gris’s
oil on canvas Le pot de geranium at Christie’s, which
sold for $18, 520, 000. (All final prices include the auction
houses’ commission; 20% of the first $500, 000 and 12%
of the rest.) The Neumann Family Collection offered up some
treats at Sotheby’s like Giacomo Balla’s Velocità
d’automobile + luci (sold for $3, 960, 000) and Theo
Van Doesburg’s Contra-Composition VII (which sold for
$4, 184, 000). The family’s commitment to collecting
spans more than half a century and continues toda, with their
support of young and emerging artists. A show entitled Incomplete,
co-curated by Herbert Neumann and Manon Slome, is scheduled
to open in September at the Chelsea Art Museum. Undoubtedly
the upcoming contemporary sales will feature the work of some
of the hot artists in the show, like Jeff Koons and Karen
Kilimnik.
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Margaret Gonzalez
Leonard Tachmes Gallery
By Aimee Sinclair
In The Goncourt Journal, 1867, Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
proclaim that “The painter who does not paint the woman
of his time will not endure.” Margarate Gonzalez’
portraits of contemporary women share traits that are prevalent
in odalisques painted by male painters of the 17th century.
Her work does not stray too far from those produced by and
for a male gaze. Consistent with odalisque tradition, she
utilizes models of Turkish and European heritage. The women
in Odalisque Number One and Six-Fours les Plages are not gazing
at the viewer but instead look off to the side, disengaging
from the viewer. Like the women in the earlier odalisques,
these women are eluding control of the viewer, electing a
passive stance.
Although there are no harems or veils present, Gonzalez’
images are embedded in traditional notions of feminine fantasy.
Odalisques were generally characterized by women who don’t
look directly at the viewer. In the painting, A Beautifully
Arranged Basket- Odalisque, the subject is a woman with a
long presumably blonde mane that is transformed into a bouquet
of flowers. Her make-up and features are vaguely reminiscent
of Patrick Nagel’s women; she gazes out vacuously, lips
slightly parted not unlike a fashion model. Gonzalez paints
in a flowery and illustrative style. At times, the paint appears
as if poured onto the surface in lace like patterns. Although
she references Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, whose subjects
are often semi-nude women stretched on pillows or huddled
together in a harem to titillate a mostly male viewer, Gonzalez’
female subjects are portrayed as independent women who are
not only beautiful but intelligent.In response to the observation
made by the brothers de Goncourt, in their famous 19th century
arts journal, one may indeed find that Gonzalez challenges
the notion in which artistic validation is acquired by painting
a nude portrait. She has, after all, clothed or covered her
subjects’ bodies; but does really she succeed in freeing
the work of sexual representation? The question remains as
to whether a female painter who paints women can disencumber
herself of the patriarchal nineteenth-century belief systems
that are a mainstay of our visual diet. On the other hand,
is mere appropriation enough today, where image is simultaneously
everything and nothing?
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Unlikely Materials
Alpan Gallery
By Elle Can
With “unlikely materials” as their point of departure,
the nine artists in this exhibition experiment with mundane
objects, such as plastic tubes and bottles, plumbing supplies,
fragmented tools, office miscellany and used tea bags, to
rewarding visual ends. Beyond their common interest in unconventional
materials as an art medium, these artists share a poetic sensibility
that evokes unexpected associations with their base materials.
Curated by Nese Karakaplan, the show concentrates on meticulously
executed work that fuses art and the everyday in mocking traditional
distinctions between high and low art.
Karyn Cernera's installation, Homecoming II, enlists an unwitting
“doormat” in dark associations. With a locked
door mounted to the gallery wall, and an intimidating doormat
that spells “welcome” (modified with up-ended
pushpins, points ready to prick), her work is a witty juxtaposition
of materials and meaning. The welcome mat, like a yogi's bed
of nails, offers a needle-like platform that is impossible
to step on. A playful irony underlines the work, leaving one
to wonder about the sincerity of ever-present welcome signs.
In similar fashion, Katie Seiden fuses disparate components
from various industrial sources, creating one-of-a-kind items
of manufactured whimsy.
Pliers, metal files and drills are embellished with lengths
of colorful wire, nails or fragments of tools. Altered into
fictitious use, each hand-sized piece becomes an abstraction,
lined up on the gallery wall item-by-item, paralleling a hardware
store's display. Titled The Fou Collection, this compilation
of hybrid items embodies an illogical utility. Their initial
industrial use muted by the transformation, the pieces work
on their own terms as objects of art. Form replaces function,
literally, in Seiden's quirky manipulation.
Hyungsub Shin’s two wall sculptures, both titled Uprooted,
consist of clusters of electrical wire knotted into shapes
that suggest organic growth. Utilizing brightly colored wires
in one, and monochromatic grays, whites and blacks in the
other, the nodules of wire attach to the wall like tendrils,
wrapping around corners and reaching out. While the title
“Uprooted” directly evokes the unearthed and uncovered;
it also resonates with displacement; possibly hinting at an
autobiographical reference in that the artist comes from Korean.
Elizabeth Knowles’ Night Vision also borrows from nature.
In an eye-catching installation of botanical shapes cut out
of X-ray film, Knowles’ “flowers” cling
to the wall like ivy. Acquiring instant drama through the
use of diagnostic prints, the work is underpinned by suggestions
of physical ailment.
Tensile, an airy sculpture, by T. M. Roche Kelly uses rows
of paper clips crocheted together with silver wire to create
a biomorphic form that hangs from the ceiling. Her other work
in the show, Quilt, is a tapestry of interwoven paper lunch
bags, with overlapping triangular and rectangular patterns
outlined by machine-sewn lines of white thread. Repetitions
of red, blue and green industrial markings printed on the
bags are employed as compositional phrasing, and interact
with the geometry inherent to the work. That the bags are
remnants of lunches consumed by the artist over a six-month
period adds a humorous footnote to the work.
Gulsen Calik also uses recycled materials; specifically,
one hundred tea bags in her installation, Voyage to Chai.
Utilizing watercolors, tea and ink, Calik depicts a cryptic
narrative of phantasmagorical landscapes that she discovers
in the Rorschach-like stains left on the bags by the dried
tea leaves inside. Her installation vacillates between abstraction
and representation; the images are whimsical and intimate,
akin to a visual diary that records glimpses into an alternate
world. Miwa Koizumi, an artist from Japan, recycles plastic
soda bottles in a delightful manner, heating and melting transparent
and green bottles into imaginative objects that look like
underwater creatures. Fun to behold, Koizumi’s objects
are de-constructions of consumer products, displayed under
a bell jar to heighten and preserve their specimen-like quality.
Hyo-Jeong Nam and Jae Hi Ahn both concentrate purely on abstract
forms. Hyo-Jeong Nam explores undefined terrain between linear
and fragmented abstraction, staying always in alignment with
the color harmonies found in nature. Her earlier, loosely
geometric canvases, held in place by thread and collaged in
swaths of muted colored burlap, contrast with two recent canvases,
also in the show. In her new work, she concentrates on minutely
stitched, meandering lines, hand-sewn across the canvas in
swirling patterns. Jae Hi Ahn’s hanging sculpture is
sumptuous and airy. Using lengths of clear plumbing tubes
and green, circular acetate joints, she creates a pendulous
tangle of shimmering loops. The form, like a mysterious and
enchanting cloud, hovers only a foot above the floor, gently
reflecting light and subtly twirling.
In the first decades of the twentieth century, art criticism
began to embrace the idea that anything could be considered
art if it were contextualized as such. The artists in this
show extend their gaze beyond that caveat, bridging the distance
between art and daily experience while uncovering hidden uses
for the most mundane of materials. Setting aside paint and
brush, these nine artists uncover formal qualities in the
most ordinary of things, transforming the prosaic into art.
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Richard Butler
Kevin Bruk Gallery
By Rachel Hoffman
In these portraits, adorned with mystical flesh and fur,
Butler employs many of the same symbols and narrative devices
that Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (the nineteenth century author
from whose name the word masochism is derived) used in his
writings, particularly Venus in Furs.
The androgynous subject of a portrait titled Mer Noir peers
shyly towards the bottom of the canvas, as if aware of the
spectator's glances. There is the aura of something unattainable.
The face and head are covered with a shiny black mask; the
top of which has absurd mouse ears, like a plastic toy or
a fetish object. Much like Leopold von Sacher-Masoch veiled
his Venus in ermine furs, Butler allows sensuality to radiate
from under Mer Noir’s dark, dense cocoon-armor.
As with Masoch, Butler’s scenes are frozen. The characters
look cold, like statues, with pale ivory skin. In Venus in
Furs, the hero falls in love with a cold marble statue of
Venus and later becomes excited by a woman who is indistinguishable
from a statue, when seen under the moonlight. Butler manipulates
his characters into a plastic state for the performance of
a role he has assigned, and although these portraits capture
qualities of his subjects, there is a sense that he is externalizing
and projecting mostly aspects of himself into the figures.
In a nod to the Italian Mannerists of the Sixteenth Century,
Butler distorts and lengthens bodies in formulaic abstraction.
There is an air of decadence and sophistication.The painting
Geisha I possesses qualities similar to Madonna with the Long
Neck by the Italian Mannerist, Parmigianino; the most obvious
of these qualities is the Geisha’s elongated and languorous
neck. Yet unlike Parmigianino’s Madonna, Butler’s
subject seems to travel through space and time, elastically
broadening into the clouds in a gesture of anticipation. The
body appears monumental and pod-like. Once again he neatly
drapes his muse in thick black fur. The head and neck sweep
forward longingly towards the clouds in a painfully erect,
phallic shape, seeming to hatch from its hairy womb-like clothing.
The Geisha is not masked, but is nonetheless mysterious and
object-like with her back turned from her audience. The viewer
looks in the same direction as the subject, into a vast open
sky. In this gesture, the Geisha seems to disclaim knowledge
of or association with the gaze of the viewer.
The foundation of imagination builds in suspense and disavowal.
Similarly, these devices are used in the writings of Masoch,
but it is not clear if the element of mystery is used for
the exact same idealistic purposes. Masoch was so idealistic,
he almost never unwrapped his muses from their fur because
he needed the covering in order to imagine perfection. The
fur was not merely a luxurious and aristocratic source of
warmth, sexual electricity or symbol of cruelty. Animal furs
served as cover for possible flaws, however minute they may
have been. Masoch wanted to imagine perfection. In contrast,
Butler’s Geisha is distorted and malformed. She could
be viewed as a reaction against the ideal. Yet, in keeping
with the comparison to the Mannerists, Butler’s Geisha
could be thought to embody ideal beauty, as something remote
from nature.
He expands on his vision in Geisha II. The figure’s
neck becomes more elastic, the head becomes smaller and more
distant. Two thin trails of opaque black smoke seep from the
place where the Geisha’s lips would be, and then blossom
into thick and sinister tornados that rise towards the upper
corners of the canvas. There is a sense of release, both in
the idea that this could be the smoke of a sweet and powerfully
toxic opiate, delicately released from the lungs against buttery
clouds. The dark gaseous explosion suspended in a frozen ejaculation
adds to the phallic quality of the Geisha’s neck and
head.
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