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Cafés Were Central to Parisian Life Which Is Why a Picasso Briefly Hung in the Center of a Parisian Café

January 12, 2017 by David Norman

picasso-au-lapin-agile

David Norman was for more than 30 years a senior specialist at Sotheby’s in Impressionist and Modern art. Here he discusses the context of Parisian nightlife in the making of Picasso’s Au Lapin Agile (above) which is now in the collection of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

This essay is available to AMMpro subscribers only. Members receive a free month before their credit card is charged. Feel free to sign up to read the essay and cancel before your credit card is charged.

In 1875, the artist Andre Gill, painted a sign for a well known Montmartre tavern known as the Cabaret des Assasins. It took its name from the fact that its walls were lined with portraits of famous murderers. Homicide aside, Cabaret’s were exciting venues for performances and nightlife, decadent behavior, the mingling of the upper and lower classes and often the nexus where artists, writers and progressive thinkers gathered.

Around the turn of the last Century, Cabarets were the home to the avant-garde in Germany, Poland, Sweden, America, Holland and England, but none so popular and singular in the social history of emerging modernism as the famed Parisian night spots of the Belle Epoque and after. Some of the great early landmarks of Impressionism are the great cafe-concert scenes—Renoir ’s Bal de Moulin de la Galette (Musée d’Orsay), Manet’s Bar aux Folies-Bergère (Courtauld Institute of Art, London) and the many great paintings and graphics by Toulouse-Lautrec of rollicking nightclub scene.

This is the story of a very different kind of cabaret scene and the winding road that led Picasso to one particular establishment and to the painting he created for it: Au Lapin Agile.Continue Reading

Prices Followed Taste: Monet’s Market From Impressionism to the Late Series

November 9, 2016 by David Norman

monet_meule

David Norman was for more than 30 years a senior specialist at Sotheby’s in Impressionist and Modern art. Here he discusses the long transition in market preference from classic works of Impressionism by Monet to the late, series works like the grainstacks, an example of which (above) is on offer at Christie’s next week. In the members area you’ll get a detailed look at the trajectory of prices over more than a century.

This essay is available to AMMpro subscribers only. Members receive a free month before their credit card is charged. Feel free to sign up to read the essay and cancel before your credit card is charged.

An entry dated October 30, 1891 in the ledger book of Knoedler Gallery (a branch of the French dealers Goupil & Cie) lists that the once fabled gallery, seller to the great American collectors of the Gilded Age and several succeeding generations, bought for resale hot off Claude Monet’s easel a work titled in english, (Haystack) Last Ray of the Sun, a heavily encrusted painting depicting a monumental grainstack in the French countryside.   

The grainstack (commonly, yet erroneously, referred to in Monet’s oeuvre as a haystack), a symbol of agrarian france, is made massive by its position in the extreme foreground of the painting; the horizontal canvas cannot even contain its proper left edge. The hulking pyramidal form has been modelled by a molten array of lavender, pinks, and rust reds with glimpses of blue and green underlayers.  It’s crest wears a thin halo of lapis blue and the whole is backlit by the faint and fading peach-and-yellow glow of the setting sun over a progressively darkening ridge of  blue-green mountains.  Its is a study in closely arranged colors, so subtly varied that the edges of the grainstack softly meld into the ground upon which it sits.  

When many artists are typically searching for a new direction in their art, Monet in mid-career devised one of the greatest innovations in painting of his era. During the 1890s, he conceived multiple bodies of works built around a single subject: such as a field of Grainstacks viewed over several seasons, the facade of Rouen Cathedral viewed over successive times of day, and a row of Poplar Trees backed by changing skies, and some years later he created series of cityscapes of  the bridges of London and grand views of Venice under the envelope of different weather conditions and times of day. Of course, the notion of creating bodies of works conceived as a series reached its final peak with the great cycle of the Waterlillies.  These series transcended the Impressionist concept that our visual world is not fixed by, but rather the product of, transient perceptions with no visual permanence. In each case, Monet used a singular subject purely for its abstract, formal qualities and as a visual record of the passage of time and environment.

The French public first stood in front of this work and 14 other canvases from the series at Paul Durand-Ruel’s eponymous gallery in 1891. The single theme exhibition was a shrewd marketing tool; and Durand-Ruel was one of the first to curate single artist selling exhibitions.  Today, we can stand in front of it at Christie’s pre-sale exhibition for the Impressionist & Modern Art sale to be held on November 16th. (More available to AMMpro members.)

Continue Reading

The German Expressionist Market Rose Along with Its Collector Base

October 17, 2016 by David Norman

Jawlensky's Schokko which sold for $8m in 2003 and, again, in 2008 for $19m
Jawlensky’s Schokko which sold for $8m in 2003 and, again, in 2008 for $19m

David Norman was for more than 30 years a senior specialist at Sotheby’s in Impressionist and Modern art. Here he discusses the growth of the market for German Expressionism and the shift in collector base from Europe to the US and then back to a new group of collectors in Europe.

Currently on view at the Fondation Beyeler is an exhibition entitled, Kandinsky, Marc & Der Blaue Reiter (until January 22, 2017).  The show features the brilliantly chromatic and radically re-imagined compositions of a group of artists working in Munich just before the First World War.  The introduction on the Beyeler website refers to this group, The Blue Rider, as representing “…a key aspect of the development of modern art.”  This declaration of the art historical import of this movement, to which one can add that of Die Brucke and German Expressionism, took me back 25 years to the burgeoning recognition of this work in the international art market.

On the evening of May 30th, 1991, two colleagues of mine at Sotheby’s and I staged the first international auction to be held in the newly unified city of Berlin.  The sale took place in the glorious Palais am Festungsgraben, an 18th century palace situated along the famed boulevard, Unter der Linden. Continue Reading

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