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Sotheby’s Brings $30m Pollock to New York

March 29, 2018 by Marion Maneker

Sotheby’s will be selling a small but rare Jackson Pollock on May 16th in New York with a $30m estimate. Number 32, 1949has been owned by the same couple for the last 36 years and rarely shown. Despite its size, the work is a candidate to match Pollock’s auction (but not private sale) record of $58.4m which was achieved by Number 19 (1948) five years ago. The Art Newspaper has the announcement:

Number 32 was exhibited in Pollock’s breakthrough show at Betty Parsons Gallery in November 1949 and is in “remarkable” condition, says [Sotheby’s Lisa] Dennison, because it rarely travelled after the owners acquired it from the Robert Elkon Gallery. […]

The fact that the consignors, a New York couple, have decided to part with the work now, sans guarantee, is a vote of confidence in the market, Dennison says. Earlier this month, however, Pollock’s Number 21 (1950), a 22.2-inch square drip painting in enamel and aluminium paint on Masonite, fetched a slightly under-estimate £9.3m ($13m) at Christie’s London; Dennison says this one “had a very different surface quality”.

Sotheby’s press release goes into greater detail:

The production of the artist’s drip paintings of 1948-9 stands as one of the most radical events in 20th-century art, in which the boundaries of painting were pushed and a new aesthetic established. Number 32, 1949 comes from a critical year for the artist and epitomizes the chaotic vibrancy, heroic drama and thrilling vigor that have come to define Pollock’s prodigious legacy. Acquired in 1983 and held in the same esteemed private collection for over 35 years, the work will be unveiled in Hong Kong on 29 March before traveling to Los Angeles and London, with the New York exhibition opening on 4 May.

Jackson Pollock executed his first drip painting in 1947. Over the next two years he would hone this now instantly recognizable, signature technique, producing the monumental Autumn Rhythm (collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) and Number 1A, 1948 (collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York). Number 32 is one of a small number of more intimate 1949 paintings in which the artist more fully explored the subtleties of the drip technique. It was featured in the second of two shows that year at Betty Parsons Gallery about which Robert M. Coates wrote in the New Yorker “They seem to me the best painting he has yet done.”

Exceptionally rare, Number 32 is one of a very limited group of 16 drip paintings Pollock created on paper mounted on Masonite or canvas in 1949 and one of only eight that feature the aluminum paint that creates a lustrous shimmer around his elaborate gestural movements. Boasting a fully painted surface with intricate layers of dripped and poured oil, enamel, and aluminum paint, the work has one of the most complete and richly covered surfaces of the entire series; indeed the last time a painting of this composition was offered at auction was in May 2013, when it set a record price of $58.4 million. It is further distinguished by a dense composition of black and silver splatters offset by bursts of brick red, bright orange, sunflower gold, and vibrant sea green that extend to the very edges of the paper. Other examples from this limited group reside in prestigious collections including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and The Munson-Williams Proctor Art Institute, Utica, New York.

Sotheby’s to offer Jackson Pollock drip painting in May sale series (The Art Newspaper)

Waldemar Januszczak Takes You Through the Royal Academy’s Abstract Expressionism Show

November 11, 2016 by Marion Maneker

Waldemar Januszczak leads the viewer through the Royal Academy’s Abstract Expressionism show organized by David Anfam.

Joan of Art

August 5, 2010 by Marion Maneker

Jackie Wullschlager offers a pocket biography of Joan Mitchell in her Financial Times review of the artist’s show in Scotland this Summer:

Mitchell was born in 1925 in Chicago – her frequent broad expanses of cool, bluish whites evoke the city’s winter skies and glassy lakes – and died in 1992. Richly educated in literature by her mother, who with Harriet Monroe edited the modern verse journal Poetry, she was a natural lyric painter. From her grandfather, a bridge engineer, came the family fortune and an inheritance as important – an interest in structure, evident in the grand scaffolding of her compositions. From her father she learned iron discipline – he urged her on as champion figure skater, tennis player, diver, and an athlete’s physicality and intuition is sustained throughout her work.Continue Reading

Monet the Abstract Expressionist

February 22, 2010 by Marion Maneker

Reuters focuses on the Monet show that tries to show the connections between the Impressionists late paintings and the abstract artists of the post-war period:

More than 100 works to be shown from Monday in Madrid’s Thyssen-Bornemisza museum will draw attention to the link between Monet (Paris 1840 – Giverny 1926) and a stream of young, abstract, post-Second World War artists such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning.

“Never before has an exhibition put Monet and his successors face to face and compared just how much they were immersed in the same work,” said Guillermo Solana, the museum’s art director, who said the exhibition was three years in the making.Continue Reading

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