Links:
Watership Down
Monkey Business
Christie’s

Christie’s is auctioning it off on behalf of the Andrew Lloyd Webber Foundation. Lot 8, Sale 7857.

I quite like it.

Sotheby’s notes that, “In the years that followed the completion of this compelling picture, Picasso’s relationship with Maar would become increasingly strained.” Rich.

Copy + Paste from Sotheby’s:

Picasso’s war-time depictions of Dora Maar are among the most famous of his oeuvre and have come to symbolize the collective emotions of that era. Daringly abstract, these pictures have a certain tragic beauty and power of presence that few other portraits in Picasso’s vast repertoire were able to achieve. The present work, completed in the early summer of 1940 at the artist’s studio in Royan, is one of his more powerful compositions.

Dora Maar’s relationship with Picasso is one of the most dramatic love stories in the history of 20th century art. Picasso met Maar, the Surrealist photographer, in the autumn of 1935 and became enchanted by the young woman’s powerful sense of self and commanding presence. In the eight years that followed, Maar was Picasso’s principal model and the subject of some of his most iconic portraits. For nearly a decade their partnership was one of intellectual exchange and intense passion, and Maar’s influence on Picasso over these years resulted in some of his most exciting portraits of his long career.

Picasso’s many portraits of Maar, including the present painting, were highly stylized and imaginative but did not entirely eliminate her identifiable features. Her flaring nostrils and dark eyes betray her fiery personality, yet the startling reorganization of her face evidences the great liberties the artist took in manipulating her image. In the years that followed the completion of this compelling picture, Picasso’s relationship with Maar would become increasingly strained. Maar’s strong-willed personality and her penchant for the dramatic, which had initially amused the artist, grew to infuriate him. The present work, painted at the height of this time, is a testament to the energy and emotion inspired by this extraordinary woman.

She writes…

My painting technique pushes the boundaries of perception, compressing 3D space into a 2D plane, effectively blurring the lines between art and life. The living paintings series is my spin on reality. By wrapping my subject in a mask of paint, I skew the way that the core of the subject is perceived.

Typically, when you look at a painting, you’re looking at an artist’s interpretation of the subject painted on canvas. In my artistic interpretation of the subject, I paint directly on top of the subject I am referencing rather than using canvas. Essentially, my art imitates life – on top of life.

Link: Alexa Meade

Copy + Paste:

CATALOGUE NOTE

An undisputed masterpiece of Giacometti’s sculpture, L’Homme qui marche I is also one of the most iconic images of Modern art. It represents the pinnacle of Giacometti’s experimentation with the human form, combining a monumental, imposing size with a rich rendering of the surface. Capturing a transient moment in the figure’s movement, Giacometti created both a humble image of an ordinary man, and a potent symbol of humanity.

The present work is the first of two versions of L’Homme qui marche, executed in 1960, at the highpoint of Giacometti’s mature period. By this time, the image of a standing or walking human figure was established as pivotal to the artist’s iconography. Between 1947 and 1950 Giacometti made several sculptures on the subject of the walking man, alone or in a small group positioned on a platform suggestive of a city square. Never before, however, had he tackled this image on a monumental scale. Giacometti’s lean, wiry figures reached their ultimate form during this period. No longer interested in recreating physical likenesses in his sculptures, the artist began working from memory, seeking to capture his figures beyond the physical reality of the human form. In the years after the Second World War his figures were reduced to their bare essential form, displaying an austerity that embodied the artist’s existentialist concerns, and reflecting the lonely and vulnerable human condition.

The sculpture originated as part of the public project that Giacometti was commissioned to do for the Chase Manhattan Plaza in New York, which, when completed, was to be the first modernist outdoor project in the city’s financial district. While the installation was never completed, L’Homme qui marche I became an iconic work in its own right. A committee consisting of curators and major figures from principal public museums in New York and Boston selected Giacometti over Alexander Calder and Isamu Noguchi for the project. Given Giacometti’s fascination with the theme of city squares, as well as his high international acclaim, he was perhaps the obvious choice for this commission. According to James Lord, the artist ‘was immediately responsive to the American proposal. It is true that he felt a keen nostalgia for the idea of executing a sculpture to be placed in a city square, and that the theme of people seen either singly or in groups in urban environments had long been important to him. [...] Alberto wrote to his mother of the project. It interested him passionately, he said’ (J. Lord, Giacometti. A Biography, New York, 1983, pp. 377-378).

Christian Klemm explained the genesis of this project: ‘In 1956 Gordon Bunshaft, the architect of the headquarters of the Chase Manhattan Bank, invited Giacometti to design a group of sculpted figures for the plaza on Pine Street in New York City. His suggestion that the Three Walking Men of 1949 could be enlarged to a height of nearly sixty feet was hardly likely to find favour with an artist for whom questions of dimension were a central issue. But after lengthy deliberations Giacometti proposed a group of larger-than-life-size sculptures: a standing woman, a walking man, and a head on a pedestal, representing the three major themes that almost exclusively occupied him in his mature sculptural work. He made tiny models and started, in his cramped studio, to work on a number of variants for the large figures. In 1960 a head, four different women, and two variants of the Walking Men were cast, albeit without ever arriving at their ultimate destination’ (C. Klemm in Alberto Giacometti (exhibition catalogue), The Museum of Modern Art, New York & Kunsthaus, Zurich, 2001-02, p. 232).

In preparation for the Chase Manhattan project, Giacometti executed a number of sculptures, among which, according to the sculptor, were at least forty versions of the walking man. However Giacometti destroyed most of them, and only seems to have been satisfied with the two versions that remain today – L’Homme qui marche I and II. He struggled with the project as a whole, claiming later: ‘I had practically no feelings about how they should be grouped’ (A. Giacometti in David Sylvester, Looking at Giacometti, London, 1994, p. 228). Realising that it would take him many years to complete, Giacometti eventually abandoned the project, however he was evidently satisfied with the individual figures, which he had cast in bronze and exhibited. A cast of L’Homme qui marche I was first exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1962.

Giacometti paid significant attention to the modelling of his works, and L’Homme qui marche I exhibits a vibrancy and vitality unique to his sculpture. The rich treatment of the bronze, its deep recesses and moulds, create a dynamic surface, and invite a play of light and shadow in such a way that they become a part of the work itself. As Valerie J. Fletcher observed: ‘Although the sculpture’s eyes are almost on the viewer’s level, the figure remains essentially remote, staring out at an unseen goal. With its gnarled, devastated surfaces, Walking Man I stands as a symbol of humanity always striving, ever seeking, never at peace. The roughly modeled surfaces shimmer under different light conditions, as if indicating the transient nature of reality, and the figure’s nervous energy activates the surrounding space’ (V. J. Fletcher, Alberto Giacometti (exhibition catalogue), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. & San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, 1988-89, p. 218).

Other casts of L’Homme qui marche I are now in major public collections, such as the Carnegie Institute Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Fondation Maeght, St. Paul-de-Vence and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo. Casts of L’Homme qui marche II are in the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo; Fondation Beyeler, Basel (fig. 2); the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, and Fondation Maeght, St. Paul-de-Vence.

Link:
Sotheby’s, Lot 8, Sale L10002.

THE story of Vincent van Gogh’s life is more heartbreaking, and heart-lifting, than the romantic myth that has enshrouded him for decades. It is told, in his own words and works, in the six-volume “Vincent van Gogh: The Letters”. His 819 surviving letters (and the 83 addressed to him) form the core. The first letter was written when Vincent, aged 19, was a trainee at The Hague branch of Goupil & Cie, a firm of international art dealers. Like most of the letters, it was sent to his brother, Theo, then 15. The two remained close. Theo became an art dealer and Vincent’s main source of financial and emotional support.

Van Gogh is irascible, engaging, intelligent, touchy, high-minded, well read, rebellious and pigheaded. When he started dressing like a tramp he claimed it was, in part, to advertise his refusal to join polite, ie, hypocritical society. (Equally, it may have been because polite society was refusing to accept him.) He was often miserable, occasionally love-struck, almost always fiercely committed to something or other and sometimes mad.

Art and literature were his constant companions. He wrote often about what he was reading and seeing. His concern was never a book’s place in the canon or a painting’s in art history. He judged a work on what it communicated, and how. From Antwerp he wrote that the religious paintings of Rubens are “theatrical…But what he can do is paint a queen, a statesman, well analysed, just as they are.” He wrote beautifully about landscapes and peasants. In time, he gave a vivid, perhaps unequalled, account of an artist making art.

He set off at 16, a seemingly conventional young man, to make his way as a dealer first in The Hague and then, via Paris, in London. There, a prickly instability, characteristic of his childhood, re-emerged, perhaps brought on by a rebuff from his landlady’s daughter. He lost the job he had had for seven years. Other failures followed, as a preacher and a teacher.

His religious fanaticism grew. Indeed, the letters offer a rare look at obsession from the inside. His pursuit of a young widow was so unrelenting he would be called a stalker today. But to him, her repetition of “No, nay, never!” was “a piece of ice that I press to my heart to thaw.”

When he was 26 his fixation became art. By then he was a penniless, eccentric loner. This coincides with a year-long break in the correspondence. He had fallen out with Theo following a “discussion” about his future. When the letters resume, Vincent refers to himself as a prisoner, a caged bird. “I know I could be quite a different man!” he writes. “There’s something within me, so what is it!” Two months later he bent himself to the study of drawing and painting as others would bend to the plough. It was as if he had to labour, and metaphorically sweat, before his genius could, or was allowed to, emerge. Five years later, in the spring of 1885, came “The Potato Eaters”. Movingly, triumphantly, van Gogh had broken through.

After two years in Paris, living with Theo (only nine letters; no images), Vincent moved to Arles in 1888. Colour now floods the pages. This was the beginning of the legendary period of prodigious, radiant creativity. Yes, he cut off his ear. He also painted nearly 200 pictures, among them “The Night Café” and “The Yellow House”.

In 1889, after a series of crack-ups (in reaction to Theo’s marriage or perhaps just too much absinthe?), he spent a year in the asylum at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. The work continued to pour out (about 150 paintings). Sunflowers and irises but also “Starry Night”, in which viewer and artist are pulled up over the rooftops, and tumble round and round across the dark sky.

The very last letter reproduced, addressed to Theo but unfinished, was written on July 23rd 1890. He was staying in Auvers-sur-Oise, not far from Paris where Theo lived with his wife and child. The note was found in Vincent’s pocket after he shot himself. He died, aged 37, on July 27th.

fteen years were devoted to this publication. The Dutch, English and French editions are the joint project of the Huygens Institute and Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum. Letters and illustrations fill five books; the sixth has commentaries, maps and indexes. It is all accessible, free, at www.vangoghletters.org (the site provides a valuable concordance). There is also a free iPod app, “Yours, Vincent”.

This is not the first attempt to publish the complete letters but it is the best. There were editions in 1914; an expanded version appeared in English in 1958; 20 newly discovered letters were added for the 1990 Dutch centenary edition. Now the letters have been retranslated, comprehensively annotated and there are 20 new items.

But what really sets this edition apart from, and above, all others are the illustrations. Sketches are embedded in many of van Gogh’s letters; the drawings and “scratches” he sometimes tucked into envelopes before posting are reproduced. So are thumbnail illustrations of every work the artist mentions (whether by himself or by others) plus larger reproductions of paintings based on these letter sketches.

The Van Gogh Museum is marking the publication of the letters by rehanging its permanent collection and displaying 100 letters. (“Van Gogh’s Letters: The Artist Speaks” closes on January 3rd.) On January 23rd a different exhibition opens at London’s Royal Academy: “The Real Van Gogh: The Artist and his Letters”. More than 60 paintings and 35 drawings will come from across the world, closely related to the 40 letters that will be shown.

The publication of the six volumes is cause for celebration. To have all the artist’s words together with all those images is like being given a pair of super-special 3D spectacles. The resulting self-portrait has a depth that would not exist were this a collection only of images or only of words. This could be the best autobiography of an artist yet to appear anywhere.

Link:
“An Artist Making Art,” The Economist. October 29, 2009.
The Van Gogh Letters

some close-up shots; it’s the brush-strokes that i find the most-appealing).

Copy + Paste from Sotheby’s:

MEASUREMENTS

measurements
146 by 114cm.

alternate measurements
57 1/2 by 44 7/8 in.

DESCRIPTION

Painted on 25th July 1969.

signed Picasso (lower right); dated 25.7.69. on the reverse

oil on board

PROVENANCE

Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris
Private Collection, Switzerland
Landau Fine Art, Montreal
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2000

EXHIBITED

Avignon, Palais des Papes, Pablo Picasso: 1969-1970, 1970, no. 67, illustrated in the catalogue

LITERATURE AND REFERENCES

Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso. Œuvres de 1969, Paris, 1976, vol. 31, no. 335, illustrated pl. 100
Rafael Alberti, Picasso en Avignon, Paris, 1971, no. 196, illustrated in colour p. 201
The Picasso Project, Picasso’s Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculpture. The Sixties III, 1968-1969, San Francisco, 2003, no. 69-340, illustrated p. 213

CATALOGUE NOTE

In July 1969 Picasso executed several large paintings on the theme of a musketeer holding a sword (fig. 1), of which the present work is a powerful example. One of the great subjects of the artist’s late oeuvre, the musketeer was one of a cast of psychological avatars that were a means of projecting different aspects of his own identity. These portraits of the various archetypes (fig. 2) that populated Picasso’s personal mythology were part of a late flowering, a final synthesis which merged the artist’s personal history with the cultural heritage of the Western artistic tradition, and developed a direct and spontaneous style that celebrated the act of artistic creation. In choosing the iconography shared by Old Master painters such as Rembrandt (fig. 4) and Velázquez, Picasso was, at the end of his career, consciously aligning himself with the greatest artists of the Western canon.

In Picasso’s late paintings the male subject ‘always plays a part, or wears a disguise: as a painter at work or as a matador-musketeer, laden with his male attributes, the long pipe, the sabre or the sword. One last new figure appears in Picasso’s iconography in 1966, and dominates the period to the point of becoming its emblem: this is a nobleman of the ‘Siglo de Oro’, half Spanish, half Dutch, gaudily dressed, sporting a ruff, a cloak, boots and a big plumed hat. ‘It happened when Picasso started to study Rembrandt,’ said Jacqueline to André Malraux. Other sources have been mentioned, but whether they come from Rembrandt, from Velázquez, from Shakespeare, from Piero Crommelynck’s goatee beard, or from that of Picasso’s father, all these musketeers are men in disguise, romantic lovers, soldiers who are arrogant, virile, vain and ultimately absurd, for all their panache. Costumed, armed, helmeted, man is always seen in action; and the musketeer sometimes takes up a brush and becomes the painter’ (Marie-Laure Bernadac, ‘Picasso 1953-1972: Painting as Model’, in Late Picasso (exhibition catalogue), The Tate Gallery, London, 1988, p. 81).

‘I have less and less time and I have more and more to say’ commented Picasso in his last decade (quoted in Klaus Gallwitz, Picasso Laureatus, Lausanne & Paris, 1971, p. 166), and the freedom and spontaneity of his late work, together with the recourse to archetypical figures and symbols, reflect both a growing awareness of his mortality, as the artist sought to ward off death through a final burst of creativity, as well as a conscious decision to allow himself total liberty with both style and subject matter. Having gone through so many phases of stylistic and technical experimentation, Picasso now pared down his style in order to paint monumental works in quick, spontaneous brush-strokes. Rather than ponder the details of human anatomy and perspective, the artist isolated those elements of his subject that fascinated and preoccupied him, and depicted them with a contemporary style and a sense of wit entirely of his own.

The recent exhibitions Picasso et les mîtres at the Grand Palais in Paris and Picasso: Challenging the Past at the National Gallery in London, are part of an ongoing reassessment of Picasso’s late oeuvre, and the works of his last twenty years are increasingly seen as a fitting culmination to the career of arguably the twentieth century’s greatest artist. These late portraits actually represent a psychological projection of a complex and multifaceted identity, illustrating the unruly amalgam of influences and contrary personas that made up the mental backdrop of this protean artist. As Simonetta Fraquelli commented in the exhibition catalogue, ‘In an era when non-figurative art prevailing over figurative art and a linear progression of ‘style’ was considered more relevant than emotion and subject, it was customary for many younger artists and art critics to think of late Picasso as lesser Picasso. However, the extensive re-evaluation of his late work since his death has highlighted its undiminished power and originality. His capacity for emotional depth and painterly freedom in his late painting, together with his wide-ranging engagement with the imagery of the great paintings of the past, was to have a lasting influence on the development of neo-expressionist art from the early 1980s onwards’ (S. Fraquelli, ‘Looking at the Past to Defy the Present: Picasso’s Painting 1946-1973′, in Picasso: Challenging the Past (exhibition catalogue), National Gallery, London, 2009, p. 146).

Fig. 1, Pablo Picasso, Mousquetaire assis avec épée, 19th July 1969, oil on canvas, Private Collection
Fig. 2, Pablo Picasso, Le Matador au cigare, 1970, oil on canvas, Musée Picasso, Paris
Fig. 3, Pablo Picasso. Photograph by Edward Quinn
Fig. 4, Rembrandt van Rijn, The Nightwatch (detail), 1642, oil on canvas, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Fig. 5, Poster for the exhibition Pablo Picasso: 1969-1970, 1970, Palais des Papes, Avignon, colour lithograph

Link: Sotheby’s Lot 08 from Sale L09606

Close-up of the details.

 From the Catalogue:

MEASUREMENTS

measurements 28 3/4 by 21 1/4 in.alternate measurements 73 by 54 cm

DESCRIPTION

Painted in 1938.Dated 5.2.38 (lower right)Oil on canvas

PROVENANCE Estate of the artist Marina Picasso, Paris (inherited from the above in 1973) Galerie Krugier, Geneva (on consignment from the above) Arnold Katzen, New York Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1986 EXHIBITED  Milan, Palazzo Reale, Pablo Picasso, 1953, no. 81, illustrated in the catalogueRome, Galleria nazionale d’arte moderna & Paris, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Pablo Picasso, 1953, no. 28, illustrated in the catalogueVenice, Centro di Cultura di Palazzo Grassi, Picasso: Opere dal 1895 al 1971 dalla Collezione Marina Picasso, 1981, no. 250, illustrated in the catalogueMunich, Haus der Kunst; Cologne, Josef-Haubrich-Kunsthalle; Frankfurt, Städtische Galerie im Städelschen Kunstinstitut & Zurich, Kunsthaus, Pablo Picasso: eine Ausstellung zum hundertsten Geburtstag, Werke aus der Sammlung Marina Picasso, 1981-82, no. 195, illustrated in the catalogueTokyo, National Museum of Modern Art & Kyoto, Kyoto Municipal Museum, Picasso: Masterpieces from the Marina Picasso Collection and Museums in U.S.A and U.S.S.R., 1983, no. 155, illustrated in the catalogueRoslyn Harbor, New York, Nassau County Museum of Art, Long Island Collects, 2002, illustrated in color in the catalogue Roslyn Harbor, New York, Nassau County Museum of Art, European Art Between the World Wars, 2004, illustrated in color in the catalogue Roslyn Harbor, New York, Nassau County Museum of Art, Master Artworks from Private Collections, 2005   LITERATURE AND REFERENCES   Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso: Oeuvres de 1937 à 1939, vol. IX, Paris, 1958, no. 98, illustrated pl. 44 (as dating from January 3, 1938) David Douglas Duncan, Picasso’s Picassos, New York, 1961, no. 81, illustrated p. 230 Helen Kay, Picasso’s World of Children, New York, 1965, illustrated p. 116 The Picasso Project, Picasso’s Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings, and Sculpture: Spanish Civil War 1937- 1939, San Francisco, 1997, no. 38-026, illustrated p. 132 (titled Maya au bateau)   CATALOGUE NOTE   A spirited Maya Picasso, aged two-and-a-half, is the subject of this vivid portrait from 1938. Painted only months after he had finished his harrowing Guernica, this picture clearly evidences that Maya was a great source of joy in Picasso’s life, even on the eve of the Second World War. Maya was the daughter of Picasso’s young mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter, born in secrecy in 1935 while Picasso was still married to Olga. The baby girl presented new and delightful artistic challenges for her father, as Maya once explained in a reminiscence: “I was to bring something new to his interpretation of a child: I was a girl. From one point of view it was marvelous – a child he had had with Marie-Thérèse, a daughter, the worst woman in a man’s life apart from his mother – the impossible mistress! He had to find a way of seducing this little goddess!” (quoted in Werner Spies, ed., Picasso’s World of Children, New York, 1991, p. 60). Picasso’s palette for this picture captures the liveliness and playfulness of Maya’s nursery. For the background he has chosen a robin’s egg blue, which he also uses for the highlights of her blonde hair. He depicts her holding a favorite toy boat, which features in other portraits from this time, and a colorful pinwheel in her chubby hand. Although her face is depicted with the Surrealist distortion that was common in Picasso’s pictures of Dora Maar and Marie-Thérèse from this era, her body is distinctly that of a child. “With a dab of color, a particular gesture, or the placing of a foot, he was able to capture the character of each of us” Maya remembers. “I, for example, am rather a fidget, and some portraits of me show me with arms and legs as if dislocated through such agitation. That’s how I was then. That’s how I am still.” (ibid., p. 65). The playful essence of Picasso’s daughter, who was a constant presence in his studio, has been captured in this bold composition. While her father worked on the large canvas for Guernica, Maya would innocently pat her hands on the surface, recognizing the distinguishable profile of her mother in the faces of the anguished victims of the massacre. Maya, in fact, bore many of the physical characteristics of Marie-Thérèse, and Picasso preserved those features in his portraits of the toddler. In the midst of painterly elements of abstraction and exaggeration, we can see the distinct, dimpled chin of the little girl, whose almond-shaped eyes and rigid bone-structure are clearly traits of her Tutonic provenance. Maya wrote that the portraits that her father painted of her were “unbelievably true to life. Everything’s here: my little girl’s clothes, my hair, even my toys, and yet…these are marvelous portraits” (ibid., p. 58). Portraiture captured Picasso’s imagination perhaps more than any other subject in his oeuvre. These canvases were a means for him to express any given emotion, be it his passion for Marie-Thérèse, his resentment towards Olga or his adoration for his children. In fact, it is in Picasso’s portraits of his children – Paulo, Maya, Paloma and Claude – that we see the artist at his most joyous and content, and his depictions of children at play are perhaps the most exuberant of all of his canvases. It was no secret that Picasso revered childhood, and in his art he attempted to capture the spirit and freedom that usually eludes adults. Playing with his children presented him with an opportunity to reclaim his lost youth, and his portraits of them were extensions of that cherished playtime. Maya remembers how her father would become engrossed in depicting his children, and how he approached the endeavor with all of his senses: “With his eyes he looked at us. With his hands he drew and modeled us. With his skin, his nostrils, his hear, his soul, even his guts, he felt what we were, what was concealed within us, our essence. This, I think, is why he had such enormous insights into human beings, however young they might be” (ibid., p. 57). As was the case for his favorite portraits of family members, this stunning picture remained in Picasso’s collection until his death in 1973. After that, it was inherited by Maya’s niece, Marina, the daughter of her half-brother Paulo.

Link: Sotheby’s, Sale N0. 8546, Lot 15.