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Christie’s Has $35m Rothko + 4 Cornell Boxes from de Menils

October 16, 2018 by Marion Maneker

Christie’s has a dark Rothko from the de Menil family estimated at between $35 and $45m. The work was displayed in Rothko’s own home, shown alongside Piet Mondrian, Phillip Guston, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock in an exhibit curated by Dominique de Menil in the 1960s. It was later a featured work in the 1978 Guggenheim retrospective held the same year it was bought by François de Menil. Along with the Rothko, four boxes by Joseph Cornell will also be sold:

On 15 November, Christie’s Evening Sale of Post-War and Contemporary Art will be highlighted by Works from the Collection of François and Susan de Menil. Encompassing five lots, this grouping encapsulates the impeccable tastes of architect and filmmaker François de Menil, and his wife and business colleague Susan. Leading the selection is a consummate painting by post-war master, Mark Rothko, who is represented by Untitled (Rust, Blacks on Plum) (estimate: $35-45 million). Painted in a period of creative ferment between his two greatest series, the present work was executed shortly after the completion of the Seagram Murals in 1960. During this time, he began to contemplate the shimmering dark plums, blacks, and purples that became the predominant palette in the panels at the Rothko Chapel commission that was soon to follow. Completing the selection, is an exemplary group of four works by Joseph Cornell, made between the 1930’s and 1948.

Ana Maria Celis, Senior Specialist and Head of the Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale, remarked: “It is a privilege to offer five exquisite examples from the distinguished collection of François and Susan de Menil. This group presents a wonderful opportunity to juxtapose the brilliant work of two markedly different artists, Mark Rothko and Joseph Cornell. Although their styles varied dramatically, through the eyes of farsighted collectors, one can see the interconnectedness of two visionary artists who not only worked at the same time, but were inspired by one another’s passions.”

The painting first came into the possession of its current owner in 1978, the same year as Rothko’s stunningly successful retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. However, the history between the de Menil family and Untitled (Rust, Blacks on Plum) dates back much further. Dominique and John de Menil, the legendary collectors who founded the Menil Collection and the Rothko Chapel, both located in Houston, Texas, had first visited Rothko in his studio in 1960, where the painter showed them the Seagram Murals. The series had originally been commissioned for the Seagram Building on Park Avenue, designed by Mies Van der Rohe, but when Rothko discovered that they had been slated to hang not in the lobby but in the building’s Four Seasons restaurant, he returned the commission and kept the paintings himself. This notorious fit of pique did not deter the de Menils from returning in 1964 and offering him a commission of their own, to paint a series of his own devising that would hang in a chapel in Houston. During the frequent visits that ensued as the couple consulted with the artist and followed his progress, Untitled (Rust, Blacks on Plum) caught the eye of Dominique.

As the construction of the chapel neared completion, Dominique de Menil, then Chairman of the Art History Department of the University of St. Thomas in Houston, proposed arranging an exhibition, “Six Painters,” at the University, which was near the site of the forthcoming Chapel. She requested five works by Rothko, including Untitled (Rust, Blacks on Plum), which she had seen on the walls of the artist’s personal sitting room in his 69th street studio.

The paintings were exhibited with works by the five other midcentury masters, Piet Mondrian, Phillip Guston, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock. When the show concluded at the end of the year, the painting returned to Rothko, who possessed it until his death.

Growing up in the environment that he did, François formed a natural affinity for the mysterious and mystical qualities of Rothko’s darker canvases. Some months before the Guggenheim Exhibition, François de Menil approached Arne Glimcher, founder of the Pace gallery who represented the Rothko estate, to express interest in purchasing a painting featuring Rothko’s darker palette. Glimcher offered de Menil, Untitled (Rust, Blacks on Plum), which would grace the Guggenheim retrospective later that year.

In his review of the Rothko retrospective, the art critic for the New York Times, Hilton Kramer, took the unusual step of describing the museum goers attending the show before turning to the works on display: the crowds were “hushed” “awestruck,” “transfixed,” and they tended to linger, “often turning away from the paintings in front of them to look across the great open space of the Guggenheim spiral at paintings in the distance.”

The Christie’s sale on November 11th will present the second instance that Untitled (Rust, Blacks on Plum) has ever changed hands.

Accompanying the Rothko offering from the collection of François and Susan de Menil, is a quartet of examples by Joseph Cornell. The works are exquisite, speaking fluently in an imagistic language that feels just beyond grasp. The intangible mystery possessed by Cornell’s work runs parallel to a similar quality inhabited by the enigmatic paintings of his close friend Mark Rothko. The two were born just three months apart in 1903, Rothko in Dvinsk, Russia and Cornell in Nyack, New York. They first met by chance in 1949, at the Horn & Hardart automat on 57th Street, where they struck up a friendship that seems to have lasted throughout their lives. In 1957, Cornell sent Rothko’s daughter Kate a book on Fra Angelico, and Rothko’s wife sent back a thank you note with a hand-colored angel that Kate had made for the family Christmas tree. Rothko, despite a reputation as a formidable and imperious figure, was notably gregarious. Nevertheless, he envied the ease and generosity that Cornell displayed around other artists. “I wish I could approach your genius for expressing to people how you think about them and what they do,” he wrote to Cornell in 1959. Then, he gave a wonderful example of his own brand of artistic appraisal: “I do want to tell you that I think of you and the uncanny magic of the things you make.”

Leading the selection of examples by Cornell is Untitled (Medici Slot Machine), 1942. Executed in 1942, Untitled (Medici Slot Machine) comes from
the celebrated eponymous series and emerges as an archaeology of poetry. In this body of works, Cornell adapts three different Renaissance portraits as their
sources. Here Cornell reproduces a painting by Sofonisba Anguissola, titled Portrait of Marquess Massimiliano Stampa in the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.
Although Cornell was known to have almost never traveled beyond the bounds of New York, he was an inveterate traveler of the mind. He was enchanted and obsessed by ideas of the travel of bygone years, in the same way that he was obsessed by the ballerinas of prior centuries. In this sense, his accumulation of materials for his boxes
resembled the souvenir-gathering of the Grand Tour. Here in the present work, Cornell himself brings the magpie tendency of the romantic imaginary traveler of yesteryear to his box, filling it with snippets of different works and maps, subliminal and seemingly random scatterings of thought, interrelation, memory and association. This is a very personal museum of the mind.

$10m Kerry James Marshall Work Announced by Christie’s to Benefit Chicago Libraries

October 1, 2018 by Marion Maneker

Christie’s announced today that they will have a $10m Kerry James Marshall work for the Contemporary art sales in New York. The work has been in hanging in a Chicago public library for the last 23 years.

On October 1, Rahm Emanuel, Mayor of Chicago, announced that Kerry James Marshall’s tour de force, Knowledge and Wonder, 1995 (estimate: $10,000,000-15,000,000) will be sold to benefit the City of Chicago’s public art fund and libraries program. One of the largest and most expansive paintings in the artist’s oeuvre, this work will be a centerpiece of the Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale at Christie’s in November in New York.

Commissioned by the City of Chicago in 1995, Knowledge and Wonder has been exhibited at Chicago’s Legler Branch Library ever since and, with its sale, this extraordinary work will enrich the future of its original home for generations to come. The auction proceeds will be used to expand the Legler Library from a branch location to a West Side regional library with major upgrades in capabilities akin to current regional libraries. Additionally, proceeds will be used to augment the public art fund for the acquisition and development of new work.

“Kerry James Marshall’s iconic works are part and parcel of Chicago’s public art portfolio, and we will always honor the home Knowledge & Wonder had on the West Side,” said Mayor Rahm Emanuel. “I want to thank Christie’s Auction House for handling the sale of this remarkable piece of contemporary art, which will in turn help transform the lives of residents across Chicago for generations to come.”

Knowledge and Wonder is from a key period of Marshall’s widely celebrated body of work including the Garden Project series of 1994-1995. This exemplary painting speaks to the artist’s cultural and art historical narrative, which has made him one of the leading American artists working today. His figurative paintings have become some of the most powerful images in a generation. Measuring nearly 10 feet in height by over 23 feet in length, Knowledge and Wonder is a monumental achievement from a prime moment in the artist’s career. Marshall depicts a community of people not normally represented in art history as more than a dozen African American children and adults are shown looking up in awe at the universe, its elements and the world beyond.

Alexis Klein, Senior Specialist, Post-War and Contemporary Art, Christie’s: “It is an honor for us to share in this uniquely Chicago story and to have the opportunity to offer Knowledge and Wonder, a stunning painting by Kerry James Marshall, to benefit the people of the City of Chicago. In Knowledge and Wonder, Kerry James Marshall realizes an iconic modern-day history painting rife with layered meaning and symbols of inspiration. In this seminal masterpiece, the artist opens up the art historical canon to a new generation, promoting knowledge and learning as the tools necessary for social change. It is truly a painting for our time.”

Working on such a significant scale, Marshall places Knowledge and Wonder in a tradition of history painting and in the process, gives a voice to those who have often gone unheard. “I think it’s important for a black artist to create black figure paintings in the grand tradition,” the artist has said. “Artworks you encounter in museums by black people are often modest in scale. They don’t immediately call attention to themselves. I started out using history painting as a model because I wanted to claim the right to operate at that level.” Marshall’s skillful execution of Knowledge and Wonder in ambitious proportions immediately brings to mind the large scale figurative work of French Post-Impressionist masters such as Paul Gauguin and Henri Matisse or the revered oversized murals of Diego Rivera.

The City of Chicago has a long-standing history of deep engagement in education and the arts. Christie’s sale of Knowledge and Wonder represents the City’s commitment to future generations of Chicago citizens by ensuring their access to lifelong learning and the art of their time. This sentiment is paralleled by Kerry James Marshall’s longtime dedication to Chicago, his chosen city of over three decades. Marshall’s influence can be seen throughout Chicago. This is perhaps most notable at the Chicago Cultural Center, where in 2017 Marshall unveiled his 132 by 100-foot mural, Rushmore, which honors 20 women who have shaped the city’s cultural landscape.

Works by Kerry James Marshall are in the collections of major institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Picasso’s Guitar Leads Christie’s Avant-Garde Sale for FIAC

October 1, 2018 by Marion Maneker

Christie’s wants to remind us all that they’ve got a special FIAC auction coming up in mid-October. We’re all used to the international auctions in London to take advantage of the art collector presence around the Frieze fairs. Christie’s wants to see if something similar can happen around FIAC even though it is so close to Frieze. Featured in the Avant-Garde sale is a work by Pablo Picasso, Guitar (above) offered with a €2m low estimate:

Christie’s is pleased to present an exceptional work of art by Picasso in the upcoming Avant-Garde auction which will be organised on 17 October. Guitare, bouteille et compotier (€2,000,000-3,000,000) realised by the Spanish master in 1922 represents the peak of Picasso’s pursuit of purity and modernity which characterised his own contribution to the prevailing movement of the time: the Rappel à l’ordre.

Adrien Meyer, Co-Chairman, Impressionist and Modern art department: “Formerly in the personal collection of Marina Picasso, this monumental painting, the largest of the series, is a statement in Picasso’s oeuvre, re-exploring cubism and flirting with abstraction. It will be presented at auction for the very first time alongside the International Contemporary Art Fair (FIAC)”.

This movement was born at the end of First World War when most of the major artists, affected by the chaos of the war, returned to reason and order resulting in very modern compositions. This painting represents the new form of cubism Picasso reached after his long period of search for modernity.

The composition possesses a syncopated energy, delivered through a highly-sophisticated sense of order and rhythm, with two dimensional forms and colours overlapping to create a geometrically constructed image. At the center of the composition lies a guitar, a recurrent motif throughout Picasso’s work of the 1910s and 1920s; the guitar for Picasso was an emblematic symbol employed to recall his Spanish homeland.

Christie’s Middle Eastern Art Comes to London with El Gazzar

September 28, 2018 by Marion Maneker

Abdel Hadi El Gazzar, An Ear of Mud, an Ear of Paste (£350450k)

Christie’s is getting more bullish on Middle Eastern Modern and Contemporary art since they moved the sales to London.  The firm is gearing up for its October 24th sale where the lead work will be Abdel Hadi El Gazzar’s An Ear of Mud, an Ear of Paste from 1951.

Christie’s release has details of the several artists like Parviz Tanavoli, Sohrab Sepehri, Monir Farmanfarmaian and Mohammed Ehsai from Iran or Hamed Ewais from Egypt and Syrian artist Marwan:Continue Reading

Van Dyck’s Portrait of Princess Mary Stars at Christie’s

September 18, 2018 by Marion Maneker

In a rather unexpected turn, Christie’s announced this morning that they too have a van Dyck portrait as their featured lot for the December Old Master Evening sales in London. More than that, the work comes from the same final year as the pair of portraits announced last week for Sotheby’s. Christie’s brighter, more opulent work is priced well above either or both of Sotheby’s van Dyck portraits of the princess and the Prince of Wales.

To recap from yesterday’s post, the van Dyck market has been in something of a holding pattern for the better part of a decade. This painting aspires to sell among the top works by the artist. If the low estimate of £5m is achieved as a premium price, the work would become the third highest auction price for the artist.

Here’s Christie’s press release:

Portrait of Princess Mary (1631–1660), daughter of King Charles I of England, full-length, in a pink dress decorated with silver embroidery and ribbons by Sir Anthony van Dyck, 1641, will be offered from a Distinguished Private Collection in Christie’s Old Masters Evening Sale on 6 December, duringChristie’s Classic Week (estimate: £5,000,000-8,000,000). Commissioned to celebrate the crucial alliance between the British crown and the House of Orange, this intimatead vivum (from life) portrait of Princess Mary, the finest portrait of the type, is remarkable for its royal provenance, the superb quality of its draughtsmanship and its exceptional condition. It is one of the most important European Royal Portraits to come to auction for a generation. The painting will go on public view for the first time, ahead of the auction, at Christie’s Shanghai on 19 until 21 September, later touring to New York where it will be on public view from 25 to 30 October and to Hong Kong between 23 and 26 November, ahead of the pre-sale public exhibition in London from 1 to 6 December.

John Stainton, Deputy Chairman, Old Master Paintings, Christie’s EMERI:“This beautifully-preserved full-length portrait of Princess Mary, eldest daughter of King Charles I of England, and future mother of King William III of England, was one of the last commissions executed by van Dyck, in the summer of 1641, only months before the artist’s premature death at the age of forty-two. It bears many of the hallmarks of his remarkable genius – in the subtle rendering of the sitter’s physiognomy, the masterful depiction of the shimmering drapery, the brilliance of the palette, and the assured draughtsmanship and deft handling of the paint. A work of the finest quality, it represents the culmination of all that van Dyck had learnt from his master, Peter Paul Rubens, and from his Venetian predecessors, notably Titian. By developing his own distinctive style of portraiture, characterised by a calm authority and supreme elegance, van Dyck both revolutionised portraiture in Europe and left a legacy for future generations of artists from Gainsborough and Lawrence, to Sargent and Freud.”

ROYAL PROVENANCE: Identified by Sir Oliver Millar as one of two portraits commissioned from van Dyck for the court at The Hague, this painting would originally have formed part of the prestigious collection of the Princes of Orange, Stadtholders of the United Provenances of the Netherlands. It would likely have been displayed in one of their principal palaces, possibly at Binnenhof Palace in The Hague, where Princess Mary lived with her husband William, alongside works by many of the principal Dutch and Flemish painters of the seventeenth century.

VAN DYCK IN ENGLAND: In July 1632, van Dyck was appointed ‘Principal Painter in Ordinary to their Majesties’ by King Charles I of England. A passionate collector and patron, the King had long hoped to attract a painter of such exceptional status and renown to his service, and found in van Dyck an artist not only capable of fulfilling his desire for magnificent portraits and paintings, but also one who shared his tastes, especially for Venetian pictures. The style, refinement and brilliance of van Dyck’s portraits was unprecedented in England; the artist instilled in his sitters a new sense of vitality and movement and his bravura technique allowed him to enliven the entire surface of his works with light, assured dashes of paint, as exemplified in the present portrait.

PRINCESS MARY AS SITTER: Van Dyck first painted the sitter in the weeks immediately following his arrival in London in 1632, when the young Princess Royal was shown with her parents, King Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria, and elder brother, the future King Charles II. The monumental group portrait, known as ‘The Greate Peece’, dominated the King’s Long Gallery in the Palace of Whitehall (The Royal Collection). The earliest single portraits of Princess Mary, which show her full-length in a blue dress, with her hands linked together across her stomach – a pose that echoes van Dyck’s earlier portraits of her mother – were painted in or before 1637, and are now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and at Hampton Court. Four years later, she sat again to van Dyck with her fifteen-year-old husband, Prince William of Orange, for the double portrait now in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, as well as for the present work.

JEWELS AND ATTIRE: In both the present work and in the Rijksmuseum double portrait, Mary is shown wearing her wedding ring and the large diamond brooch given to her by her husband on 3 May 1641, the day after their marriage. Her spectacular coral gown, decorated with silver thread trim along its border, is thought to be similar to that worn for her wedding, rather than the cloth of silver-gold she wears in the Rijksmuseum picture. The apparent weight of the fabric, falling in broad, heavy folds, along with the bright highlights along the creases, suggest the fabric may have been cloth of silver. Shimmering highlights, applied in swift, cross-hatched strokes, were used as a form of shorthand by artists, mimicking the lustre of metallic threads as the textile caught the light. In accordance with the fashion of the period, her gown is open down the front, revealing a stiffened stomacher across the chest and a matching skirt beneath. The ribbons, which would at one time have been functional, lacing the skirt and stomacher to the bodice, were applied purely as adornment. One ribbon, however has been pinned or stitched flat to disguise the seam between the bodice and skirt. Details such as the Princess’s brooch, the string of pearls and ribbons on her shimmering dress are rendered with remarkable precision and delicacy, characteristics that defined the artist’s finest late works.

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