Global Coverage ~ Unique Analysis
Christie’s put nearly half a billion in art and other objects on display yesterday as part of the opening of its new Beverly Hills offices. LA Managing director said, ““This is Christie’s moment to shine in LA.”
Christie’s has significantly expanded its West Coast team in recent years with a dedicated team of specialists in Impressionist and Modern Art, Post-War and Contemporary Art, Asian Art, Jewelry, Wine, and Watches. But sales will remain in New York:Continue Reading
As collectors increasingly move toward finding lower-priced works by recognized name artists, they are also increasingly poking around regional auctions. Los Angeles Modern Art announces its March sale that includes a number of works owned by estates in the area. Among the 400 art and design lots there are number of highly sought after names like Bertoia, Haring, Ruscha, Sam Francis and Jean-Paul Riopelle.
Here’s a partial list the firm provided for the sale:
Top Design Lots Never Before Offered At Auction:Continue Reading
The New York Times profiles Michael Govan and LACMA’s transformational expansion project. The profile has the usual take on Govan’s personality but focuses on the question of whether he can raise the money necessary to build a new museum.
Adam Nagourney goes out of his way to point out that David Geffen has not pledged. Though Govan says he has $300m committed and is aiming to land another $150m this year:Continue Reading
If this New York Times story on the Marciano Brothers’ private museum is to be believed, the jeans magnates got back into art collecting in relative hurray amassing a trove of a thousand or so art works, the bulk of which seem to have been bought in five years since the Murakami show in Los Angeles which sparked something within the brothers:
Maurice and Paul began collecting art around 1990. They started with Impressionist pieces but soon moved to the contemporary art market and sold the older works.
“If we had collected only Impressionists, today we would have only a few pieces, instead of hundreds of pieces,” Maurice Marciano said.
[…] Paul Schimmel, the vice president of the Hauser & Wirth gallery here and the former chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, said Maurice Marciano’s interest in art was revived when he toured a Takashi Murakami show at the museum in 2008.Continue Reading
Jori Finkel gives the Getty Museum’s new director a quick once over in the Los Angeles Times:
A Sydney native who early on ran the National Gallery of Victoria in Australia, Potts, 53, is currently the director of the Fitzwilliam Museum at the University of Cambridge in England. He is best known in the U.S. for running the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, from 1998 to 2007, which compares to the Getty Museum in the size of its acquisition budget. During his tenure at the Kimbell, he made several high-profile acquisitions, including Donatello, Michelozzo and Bernini sculptures
Potts’ expertise is in ancient Near Eastern art, or works from what would now be considered the Middle East. He received his doctorate in that field from the University of Oxford.
Getty Museum Hires Timothy Potts as New Director (Los Angeles Times)
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Hunter Drohojowska-Philp was interviewed on NPR about Los Angeles’s role as a rival to New York in the 1960s. (Click on the audio player above to listen to the segment.)
The book was previously reviewed by Holland Cotter in the New York Times Book Review:
By the mid-1960s, art in Los Angeles was big time. More galleries had sprung up; a collecting base had coalesced. The Los Angeles County Museum of History, Science and Art had been transformed into two institutions, one of them an art-only museum. In Pasadena, Hopps was cooking up more curatorial coups, must-see events: Kurt Schwitters and Joseph Cornell surveys, and Marcel Duchamp’s first retrospective. Traffic back and forth between East Coast and West Coast, and Europe, grew heavy. Drohojowska-Philp, an art critic based in Los Angeles and a biographer of Georgia O’Keeffe, handles an increasingly crowded and complicated story deftly in a series of short chapters that center on specific players: individual artists, new dealers like Virginia Dwan and propulsive personalities like the actor-collector-painter Dennis Hopper.
When Art Happened to LA (New York Times)
Total sales realized $2.88 million with 74% of the 505 lots sold.
TOP LOTS:
Works that achieved strong prices locally included several pieces by Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari, and Julius Shulman, most of which exceeded their pre-sale estimates. Prints that exceeded pre-sale estimates included, Ed Ruscha’s Carp with Fly (Lot 164 est. $9,000 – 12,000), which realized $15,000; John Baldessari’s Stonehenge (Lot 65 est. 6,000 – 8,000) went above estimate bringing $12,500; and Julius Shulman’s Case Study House #22, (Lot 133 est. $3,000 – 5,000), saw fierce competition and brought $11,875
The firm that runs the Armory Show in New York has just completed their first Los Angeles fair called Art Platform. Here are some of the sales they want you to know about:
Los Angeles Modern Auctions is a regional auction house in LA (as the name would suggest.) They sent us their results from last weekend’s sale that included design objects as well as artworks. (You can download the release below)
The June 26, 2011 Modern Art & Design Auction reached sales of $1.5 million selling 70.2% by lot.
Jori Finkel draws the battlefield between the various art fairs competing to launch in Los Angeles. Though she points out in her Los Angeles Times story that real trick is getting European galleries and collectors to fly in for the event and make it world class. Otherwise, the struggle just becomes a regional battle between local players whom she describes:
There’s MMPI, a Chicago firm that hired Gross away from the Museum of Contemporary Art’s development team to serve as director of its new venture, Art Platform — Los Angeles. MMPI already organizes seven art fairs, including the Armory Show and Art Chicago, and 77 other trade shows. Gross says his fair will take place in the L.A. Mart, an MMPI property downtown, from Sept. 30 to Oct. 3, to coincide this year with the launch of the museum-wide extravaganza “Pacific Standard Time.”
There’s Kim Martindale, organizer of the Los Angeles Art Show. Founded in 1995 by the Fine Art Dealers Assn. with historic strengths such as California Impressionism, it has increasingly moved into the contemporary realm, but without landing the most prestigious art galleries in that sector. Martindale now calls the fair “encyclopedic.” It’s also the largest art fair in town, drawing 114 gallery exhibitors and an opening-night crowd of 5,000 to the Los Angeles Convention Center last week.
There’s Stephen Cohen, the photography dealer who has organized Photo L.A. for 20 years and launched Art L.A. in 2005 to focus on contemporary art, involving Chinatown and Culver City galleries. That show ran for five years, at which point Cohen’s director, Tim Fleming, started his own fair, now known as Art Los Angeles Contemporary. Cohen alleges that Fleming cost him “hundreds of thousands of dollars by giving away free or discounted booths” during his employ and afterward used his fair’s name and “stole proprietary information like a VIP list.” Cohen says “a lawsuit is imminent.”
Los Angeles Is Primed; Art Fair, Please Stand Up (Los Angeles Times)
