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Art | Savador Dalí’s ‘FruitDalí’ Series

Friday, May 17th, 2013

Impressionist and Modern Art
Bonhams
London, UK
Sale: 18th June, 2013

Fourteen Salvador Dalí originals, exhibited just once since they were commissioned in 1969 by publisher Jean-Paul Schneider, are expected to fetch £40,000-70,000 each at Bonhams Impressionist and Modern Art sale in June.

At first glance, the paintings could be mistaken for conventional decorative prints, but for the ‘FruitDalí’ series, Dali appropriates traditional nineteenth century botanical lithographs, painting over them and adding characteristically fantastic embellishments.

Anyone who has ever drawn a pair of spectacles on a face in a newspaper or magazine photograph will recognise the spirit in which Dalí subverts the every day original subject matter, sometimes, as in Erotic grapefruit, imbuing it with an overtly sexual charge, while elsewhere he creates a metamorphorsis of vegetable and human that brings to mind Edward Lear’s (1812-29) more bizarre work, or those of Swiss children’s book illustrator, Ernst Kreidolf (1863-1956).

Salvador Dalí images from top
Prunier hâtif (Hasty Plum), 1969
Gouache over 19th century botanical lithographs

Fruits troués (Pierced Fruit), 1969
Gouache over 19th century botanical lithographs

Pamplemousse érotique (Erotic Grapefruit), 1969
Watercolour, gouache and 19th Century stipple engraving


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Sculpture | Ruth Asawa: Line as Form

Friday, May 3rd, 2013

Ruth Asawa: Objects & Apparitions
Christie’s Private Sales
Rockefeller Center
New York City, USA
Exhibition 6th -31st May, 2013

Associated with the formulation of modernism, the concept of line as form is an ineffable paradox that was first explored at the Bauhaus in the 1920s and early 30s. Unlikely then, in 1947, for high-school graduate Ruth Asawa, to stumble upon a language that expressed the complex notion in the looped-wire baskets used for selling eggs in Mexico’s markets. But the promising and curious student, born in 1926 of Japanese immigrant parents, who had grown up during The Great Depression and began studying drawing and painting with professional Japanese artists in the internment camps, where she and her family were confined during World War II, had already travelled to Mexico two years earlier to study Spanish and Mexican Art, and by the time her return visit came around had come under the influence of former Bauhaus master Josef Albers and architect Buckminster Fuller, both teachers at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where she had enrolled. ‘The artist must discover the uniqueness and integrity of the material’, Albers had explained, and intrigued with the idea of experimenting with wire as a medium, Asawa began to loop and twist it in a similar fashion to the Mexican basket makers, producing 3D forms – essentially, drawings in space – made from a single continuous wire. ‘I was interested in wire sculpture because of the economy of a line,’ Asawa said, ‘making something in space, enclosing it without blocking it out. It’s still transparent.’ Many of these sculptures were designed to be hung from the ceiling, and later Asawa hit upon the idea of creating transparent forms within the transparent forms, increasing the complexity and playfulness of her creations.

It wasn’t until 1953 that Asawa began exhibiting her work – in the meantime having been married and given birth to two of the six children she would have by 1959 – in solo and group shows at the San Francisco Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum of Modern Art and at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. By this time she had met and formed a life-long friendship with legendary photographer Imogen Cunningham (1883 -1976). Cunningham, famed for her images of flowers, nudes and industrial landscapes, sensitively captured the sublime lightness and fluidity of Asawa’s work in still life compositions. She produced many pictures of the artist working, as well portraits in which Asawa becomes an element inextricably enmeshed with the sculptural forms of her creations.

In the 1960s, Asawa received major commissions to make public art and in 1970, her work was exhibited in the American Pavilion at the Osaka World’s Fair. So well-established as an artist was she by the early 70s that her sculpture and paintings began being shown in a string of retrospectives at important US venues – San Francisco Museum of Art (1973), Fresno Art Center (1978 and 2001). Asawa is reprented by the Rena Bransten Gallery in San Francisco. Virtually unknown in Europe, in New York, her work can be found in major collections including that of the Solomon R Guggenheim and Whitney Museum of American Art; Objects & Apparations is her first major solo show in the city in over 50 years. Forty-eight works, including sculpture and works on paper – for sale or for private loan – will be presented in a show that takes place in the elevated setting of the 20th floor of 1230 Avenue of the Americas, at Rockefeller Center. Christie’s will offer the sculpture Untitled, above, from the Ruth Asawa Family Collection at their May 15th Post-War and Contemporary Art evening sale.

Imogen Cunningham photographs from top
Ruth Asawa, Sculptor, 1956
(Ruth Holding a Form-Within-Form, 1952)

Untitled
Hanging, six-lobed, multi-layered continuous form within a form
Estimate $250-350,000 (£160-225,000)

Ruth Asawa 2, 1957

All photos: archive pictures ©Imogen Cunningham
Courtesy Christie’s New York

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Design | Christopher Farr’s Rug Editions

Friday, April 26th, 2013

Christopher Farr’s Editions:
Contemporary Rugs for Collectors
Somerset House, London, UK
May 2nd – 30 June, 2013

Christopher Farr’s collaborators are many, and they are as varied as the rugs the eponymously-named company produces. The current and ever-growing list includes some of the most famous and highly-respected names around in modern and contemporary British and international design, architecture and fine art, among them: Gillian Ayres, Ilse Crawford, Gary Hume, Rifat Ozbek, John Pawson and Andrée Putman.

Farr, having studied fine art at The Slade, set up shop with Matthew Bourne as a business partner in 1988. Early success came via a collaboration with the Royal College of Art in 1991, which led to a further collaboration with Romeo Gigli, whose collection was launched at the Milan Furniture Fair in 1993, earning the pair’s rugs international acclaim. ‘Up to that point, Farr says, ‘new rugs were a dirty word. People laughed at us.’ No one laughed in 1997, when Farr and Bourne, with Gunta Stöltzl’s family’s blessing, produced rugs that the Bauhaus designer had designed in the 1920s, nor when they opened their gallery in London’s Notting Hill the same year. The company has produced custom made rugs for The Wellcome Trust, and for Oxford and Cambridge universities. TheWall series was commissioned by architect Sir Michael Hopkins as part of a collection of handmade wall pieces for the UK’s parliamentary building, Portcullis House. Other custom wall pieces were made for the Bank of America building in London. Setting up a fabric division in 2000, the company took a natural step into cloth production, utilizing high quality fabrics, from combed Egyptian cottons and Belgian linens for upholstery, curtains and blinds, to acrylic dyed fabrics for outdoor use.

Following the success of their first show of rugs held in Somerset House last year, the Christopher Farr’s Editions: Contemporary Rugs for Collectors exhibition – previewed during the recent Milano Design Week 2013, where the company also showed a new collection of rugs by celebrated US designer David Weeks – marking the company’s 25th anniversary, unveils the first in a series of limited editions (50-200), in hand-tufted 100% wool, ranging in price from £650 to £1000. Designs by Sir Terry Frost RA (1915-2003), by Bauhaus master Josef Albers (1888-1976) and by his wife, Anni Albers (1899-1994) will be included. Penny Falls by Kate Blee, a London-based textile artist who has been collaborating with Farr since 1987, will also be shown. Renowned still-life artist, William Scott (1913-1989) – the centenary of whose birth is being celebrated in an exhibition running at Tate St Ives until 6th May, 2013 – will be represented by Permutation Brown, and Three Squares by leading British abstract colourist, Sandra Blow RA (1925-2006) – an adaptation from an etching printed in 2003 – will be exhibited. Jeweller, Lara Bohinc’s circular rug, Solar, will appear, alongside Sulspice, a flamboyant op-art design created by Farr, himself.

Rugs from top
Christopher Farr
Sulpice
1.22 x 1.83m
Edition of 150

Sir Terry Frost RA
Variations (Black on White)
Adapted from a 1973 print
2 x 2.13m
Produced in association with the Stoneman Gallery and the Terry Frost Estate

William Scott
Permutation Brown
Adapted from a 1977 Scott painting
1.4 x 2.3m
Produced in association with the Royal Academy of Arts and the William Scott Foundation
©Estate of William Scott 2013 supporting Alzheimer’s

Josef Albers
Homage to the Square, 1951
1.65 x 1.65m
Produced in association with the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation
©2013 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/ VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn and ARS, New York

All of those illustrated are in editions of 150


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Art | Duchamp Stripped Bare

Friday, April 19th, 2013

Des Gestes de la Pensée / Gesture, and Thought
La Verrière Hermès
Brussels, Belgium
20th April – 13th July, 2013

To think, to dream, to conceive fine works is a delightful occupation…’, wrote Honoré de Balzac, in his novel Cousin Bette, in the first half of the 19th century. Another famous Frenchman, Marcel Duchamp, who signed a urinal he’d picked up from a plumber’s yard and proclaimed it a work of art (Fountain) in 1917 , would at first glance, appear to have agreed with him. Renowned father of object art, from which conceptual art emerged, Duchamp said he liked living and breathing better than working, and that his art was that of living. But his words were never to be taken at face value and far from being a remote thinker and pure intellectual, who turned his back on the ‘artist’s enslavement to manual dexterity’, Duchamp, almost in secret, completed many finely crafted works.

This exhibition at La Verrière Hermès, assembled by the space’s new curator, Guillaume Désanges, who co-wrote and co-directed the play ‘Le Cerveau’ Master Duchamp’, presented at the Centre Pompidou in March, highlights one of the Foundation’s core commitments: the transmission of artistic and expert artisan skills. Taking Duchamp as a figurehead, Des Gestes de la Pensée / Gesture, and Thought brings together the work of 10 international contemporary artists: Elias Crespin, Hubert Duprat, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Michel François, Ann Veronica Janssens, Irene Kopelman, Anna Maria Maiolino, Benoît Maire, Corey McCorkle and Francisco Tropa, exploring this same fascination with ‘finish’ and craftsmanship as an extension of thought.

The innovative bookbinder Mary Reynolds (1891-1950) was Duchamp’s partner for thirty years. It was Reynolds who, in the 1930s, executed Duchamp’s binding design for Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi/Ubu the King, with cut-out U-shaped front and back covers that when fully opened, either side of the B on the spine, spell out UBU. It is not included in the exhibition, but his binding for Prière de Toucher / Pray Touch, an exhibition catalogue for Le Surréalisme en 1947 was a breast made from foam rubber, with pigment, velvet, and cardboard, adhered to removable cover, is. Also on display will be La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même [Boîte Verte], The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors Even [The Green Box] published by Duchamp in 1934, which is a collection of 94 documents – works on paper, photographs, lithographs and drawings – to explain some of his thinking and to show some of the preliminary works relating to The Large Glass.

Duchamp also produced Box in a Valise (From or by Marcel Duchamp or Rrose Sélavy, 1935-41), which is a leather case containing miniature replicas, photographs and colour reproductions of works by Duchamp, and one ‘original’ drawing. An earlier piece Standard Stoppages (1913-14), which he called ‘a joke about the meter’ – the originally French standard of measurement – is a wooden box 11 that house three threads each 100 cm in length, glued to three painted canvas strips, each mounted on a glass panel, and three wood slats , shaped along one edge to match the curves of the threads.

Images from top
Hans-Peter Feldmann
Handprint from Charlotte Wolff (Marcel Duchamp)
Courtesy Hans-Peter Feldmann et galerie Martine Aboucaya

Marcel Duchamp
La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même [Boîte Verte], 1934
Courtesy Association Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp
Prière de Toucher, 1947
Courtesy Galerie Ronny Van de Velde, Anvers

Elias Crespin
Circunconcentricos Inoxidable, 2012
Acier inoxydable, nylon, moteurs, ordinateur, interface électronique 100 cm Ø
©Elias Crespin. Photo Pascal Maillard

Ann Veronica Janssens
IPE 535, 2009
©P Lemmens. Courtesy Galerie M.Szwajcer


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Art | Richard Serra Draws

Friday, April 12th, 2013

Richard Serra: Double Rifts
Gagosian Gallery
Beverly Hills, California, USA
17th April – 1st June 1, 2013

Richard Serra draws. Richard Sera sculpts. He sees each as an autonomous activity. He doesn’t make drawings of the sculptures he intends to create – he makes models. Neither does he make drawings of his finished sculptures.

Serra, born in 1938 and probably the world’s best-known contemporary sculptor, who has produced large-scale, site specific pieces for clients around the globe, and whose work has been celebrated in two retrospectives at The Museum of Modern Art, twenty years apart, whose major recent drawing exhibitions include Richard Serra Drawings: Work Comes Out of Work, Kunsthaus Bregenz (2008); Richard Serra Drawings: A Retrospective, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2010 – travelled to San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Menil Collection, Houston in 2012) was drawing long before he became a sculptor. In San Francisco where he grew up, his proud mother would introduce her young son, who sketched on pink butchers’ roll paper, as Richard ‘The Artist’.

Richard Serra doesn’t paint. As a student at Yale – where he was accepted on the strength of 12 drawings – he painted, but he paints no more. Paintings, in his opinion, are produced with the viewer in mind, while drawings are for the artist. Drawing every day, Serra insists that the practice is primary to artists and gives them grounding. He would always rather look at someone’s drawings – Van Gogh’s, Rembrandt’s – than at their paintings. Indeed drawing to him, reveals far more than painting about the way an artist thinks and sees.

In his search for an individual way forward in his drawing, Serra says that there came a point quite early on in his career when, faced with the entire history of anyone else who had ever made a mark on a piece of paper, he realised that he needed to adopt a radical approach. Abandoning representation and any anecdotal references to other things, he discovered that by defining the form he was creating in relation to the space around it, relating it to the architecture, to the floor, the walls and to the ceiling, he could draw with space, thus ‘making space palpable’.

It’s only to be expected that Serra, who pushes the concept of drawing to its limits and whose drawings are often almost as monumental as his sculptures, uses unconventional methods to create them. Unwilling to ‘make art out of the art store’, as he puts it, he uses paint-stick – a cheap material made from paraffin with a little oil mixed in – that he has melted, stamped on and even put through a meat grinder, as his medium. Often he draws with a big brick of paint-stick on handmade paper, but has also created series drawings with ink and rollers at the print shop he uses in LA.

In interviews on YouTube Serra talks about how spatial differences have always interested him, about the idea of people ‘entering into the space of a drawing’, and how – citing Cézanne’s paintings of fruit, as an example – he tries to imply gravity within the structure of his drawings. For his installation drawings his object has become to ‘create a space within the space that differs from the architectural container.’ Consequently, as an exhibitor he is extremely hands on – when drawings intended to work in one gallery are transferred to another, he may even alter them to function to his satisfaction within the new context.

The Richard Serra: Double Rifts show at the Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills is an exhibition of Richard Serra’s recent drawings.

Drawings from top
Double Rift #5, 2012, Richard Serra
Paintstick on handmade paper
289.6 x 537.2 cm (114 x 211 1/2 ins)

Double Rift #9, 2013, Richard Serra
Paintstick on handmade paper
214 x 611.5 cm (84 1/4 x 240 3/4 ins)
Images ©Richard Serra. Courtesy the artist & Gagosian Gallery


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Sculpture | Early Oldenburg

Friday, April 5th, 2013

Claes Oldenburg: The Street and The Store
Claes Oldenburg: Mouse Museum/Ray Gun Wing
14th April – 5th August, 2013
Museum of Modern Art
New York City, USA

Claes Oldenburg
Typewriter Eraser
14th April – 5th August, 2013
Christie’s Sculpture Garden
New York City, USA

Claes Oldenburg’s early work, The Street (1960) – an installation that conjures the gritty and chaotic atmosphere of downtown New York City – and The Store (1961-64) – a large group of handmade, brightly painted sculptures depicting a myriad of commercial products and foodstuffs – redefined the concept of sculpture, putting him on the road to establishing himself as one of the 20th century’s most important artists. Both pieces, along with Mouse Museum and Ray Gun Wing, created in the 1970s as self-contained ‘museums’ to house careful arrangements of the artist’s personal archives of American popular culture, and tests and experiments from his studio, are being put on view, simultaneously, at the Museum of Modern Art.

Born in 1929, in Stockholm, Sweden, the infant Oldenburg was shuttled back and forth between Scandinavia and the US until his parents finally settled in Chicago in 1936. After studying literature at Yale he took art courses in Chicago. In 1953 he became a US citizen and moved to New York City three years later. He soon came into contact with Jim Dine and Tom Wesselman and found himself part of a new group of artists, who were challenging the might of abstract expressionism. The pop artists, as they were later christened, produced figurative and representational images, and used found objects, to create art that was a visual commentary on consumerism.

Produced in 1960, Oldenburg’s The Street is an installation made of bits of newspaper, scraps of sacking, cardboard objects and papier-mâché, cut, torn, crumpled then assembled to create a fragmented panorama of the contemporary metropolis, inspired by New York’s Lower East Side of the 1950s.

Shifting focus the following year, Oldenburg began creating The Store, an environment first presented in a group show at New York’s Martha Jackson Gallery, and afterwards in a real rented storefront on East Second Street, which was filled with sculptures – objects made from plaster soaked canvas painted in layers of enamel paint – representing the products on sale in shops throughout the neighborhood.

He continued to develop The Store up until 1964, creating further versions of it and producing a large selection of Store sculptures and drawing, many of which have been brought together for the Museum of Modern Art show. However, during 1962-63 – a time of experimentation for Oldenburg – he became interested in reinterpreting commonplace objects like light switches, hamburgers, lipsticks and typewriters. He transformed hard things to soft (and vice versa), radically changed scale, and played around with erotic analogies to body parts.

Following on from this, Oldenburg started his fantastic monument projects in 1965. Coinciding with MoMA’s exhibition, Christie’s Private Sales is exhibiting and offering Typewriter Eraser – the once-ubiquitous US office accessory wittily transformed into a large monumental sculpture – executed in 1976 in painted aluminum, stainless steel, ferroconcrete and bronze. In 2009 the same item was sold at Christie’s New York for the world auction record price of £1,460,000/$2,210,500.

Claes Oldenburg sculptures from top
7-Up, 1961
Enamel on plaster-soaked cloth on wire.
140.7 x 99.7 x 14cm (55 3/8 x 39 1/4 x 5 1/2ins)
Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution
Joseph H. Hirshhorn Purchase & Bequest Funds, 1994
©Claes Oldenburg, 1961
Photo Lee Stalsworth

Floor Cone, 1962
Photographed in front of Dwan Gallery, Los Angeles, 1963
Oldenburg van Bruggen Studio
©Claes Oldenburg

Floor Burger, 1962
Canvas filled with foam rubber and cardboard boxes,
painted with acrylic paint
132.1 x 213.4 x 213.4 cm (52 x 84 x 84ins)
Collection Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Purchase, 1967
©Claes Oldenburg, 1962
Photo Sean Weaver

Pastry Case, I, 1961-62
Painted plaster sculptures on ceramic plates, metal platter and
cups in glass and metal case
52.7 x 76.5 x 37.3 cm (20 3/4 x 30 1/8 x 14 3/4ins)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
The Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection
©Claes Oldenburg, 1961-62
Photo MoMA Imaging Services

Typewriter Eraser, 1976
Painted aluminum, stainless steel, ferroconcrete and bronze
227.3 x 203.2 x 177.8 cm (89 1/2 x 80 x 70 ins)
Number three from an edition of three
Photo Christie’s Image 2013

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Sculpture | Here, There and Somewhere In Between

Friday, March 22nd, 2013

Here, There and Somewhere In Between
The Royal Academy at Hatfield House
Hatfield, UK
30th March – 29th September, 2013

Figurative and abstract art can be as distant from one another as points at the opposite ends of a wide horizon, which doesn’t mean that what goes on in the middle ground is any less individual or less interesting. And, as with art exhibited in galleries, context and juxtaposition are just as important considerations for art shown in the open air, where, depending on the light, the materials, the structure and form, relative scale and surroundings, a sculpture can appear near, far off, or just a stroll away.

While the overall context of Here, There and Somewhere In Between, the forthcoming enigmatically titled sculpture exhibition at Hatfield House, was fixed, it fell on curator Bill Woodrow to establish an intuitive flow between the diverse works, all by fellow Royal Academicians and sited in a variety of locations within the neo-Jacobean formal gardens and in the woodland areas, that would feel right to the visitor.

The concept of showing art in the environs of grand country estates isn’t new – Chatsworth and the Yorkshire Sculpture Park are notable precedents – and in fact this is only the latest in a series of sculptural exhibitions at the 17th century house, but this event is significant in that it marks the first time works by Academicians have been exhibited en masse beyond the four walls and courtyard of the Royal Academy, itself founded in 1768.

The work of the selected artists: Ann Christopher, Michael Craig-Martin, Richard Deacon, Gary Hume, Alison Wilding and Bill Woodrow, ranges from figurative to abstract, while some of it occupies a position somewhere in between.

Images from top
Michael Craig Martin RA
Hammer (purple), 2011
Powder coated steel
Image ©the artist. Courtesy New Art Centre, Roche Court Sculpture Park
and Gagosian Gallery

Hatfield House
Image courtesy of Hatfield House

Richard Deacon RA
Congregate, 2011
Stainless steel
Image courtesy of the Lisson Gallery and the artist

Bill Woodrow RA
Endeavour [Cannon Dredged from the First Wreck of the Ship of Fools], 1994
Bronze
Image courtesy of the artist


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Books | Anya Gallaccio

Friday, February 15th, 2013

Anya Gallaccio
Texts by Norman Bryson, Briony Fer, Lucia Sanromán and Jan
van Adrichem, and an interview with Anya Gallaccio by Clarrie Wallis

Ridinghouse, 2013
Hardback, 266pp

The eponymously titled Anya Gallaccio is a lavish, heavily-illustrated and beautifully-produced, large-format picture book that comprehensively catalogues the first 20 years of the renowned contemporary artist’s work. No easy task due to its core aspects of transformation and change, and site specificity. Karsten Schubert at whose London Gallery, Gallaccio had her first solo exhibition in 1991, and to which she returned in 1994 to paint the interior walls with chocolate, has supplied an affectionate foreword.

Art books aren’t intended to be read from cover to cover in one sitting, but rather dipped in and out of, which in this case is just as well. Anyone reading the first essay first, might well be put off by Professor of Art History at the University of California, San Diego, Norman Bryson’s sentimental, rambling attempt to enlighten the reader about Gallaccio’s chrematis (1994) in which he explains: ‘The (abandoned swimming) pool can be a portal that leads to another world; or another time. It is an eruption into the present of a past long gone, wreckage which, cut adrift from its own time, has somehow washed up on the shores of the present as poverty and abandonment…’ and that ‘…To let the place begin to speak to us, we need a practice of observation of the kind Keats meant by ‘negative capability’… Take my advice and skip forward to the far more pragmatic and illuminating: Dust Bunnies and Coffee Stains: Anya Gallaccio in conversation with Clarrie Wallis, curator of contemporary art at Tate Britain – a far better point of entry, where one gets to know, first hand, what the work is really all about. Afterwards, peruse the other essays at your leisure.

A blurred Gallaccio appears in only a couple of the images in this book, yet from the amethyst-encrusted front cover, through the flowers and vegetable foliage on the end papers, via every corner of all of the 266 inside pages, and out again through the indigo-dyed chappa silk, back endpaper, to the gleaming bronze back cover, one is aware of her omnipresence. It’s clear that this very hands-on of hands-on artists, inhabits every aspect of her work in a similar and very personal manner.


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Sculpture | Alexander Calder: The Swedish Collection

Friday, February 8th, 2013

Contemporary Art Evening Auction
Sotheby’s
London, UK
Sale: 12th February, 2013
Exhibition: 9th-12th February, 2013

Red Skeleton, 1945
Painted metal and wire standing mobile
Estimate £150,000 – 200,000

Untitled, 1954
Painted metal and wire standing mobile
Estimate £150,000 – 200,000

Red Yellow and White, 1955
Painted metal and wire standing mobile
Estimate £150,000 – 200,000

The Red Base, 1969
Painted metal and wire standing mobile
Estimate £150,000 – 200,000


A large collection of modern and contemporary art assembled by an unnamed Swedish individual that includes works by Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Natalia Goncharova and Tom Wesselman will be sold at Sotheby’s over the coming months.

Four delightful Alexander Calder pieces from the Swede’s collection are the opening lots in Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Evening Auction, and are amongst a phenomenal list of prized items from a wide variety of other sources, alongside which – as with all items exhibited in the viewing galleries – they can be viewed, free of charge.

Calder (1898 – 1976) was immensely popular in Sweden during the 1960s and 70s, when this collection was being assembled, and interestingly – an indication of the country’s particularly receptive attitude to modernism during the post-war period – the first donation to the Moderna Museet, which opened in Stockholm in 1958, had been a Calder.

These four items, all of them miniatures – the largest 40.3 x 30.5 x 10.5cm/15 7/8 x 12 x 4 1/8 inches – have a red theme, and were produced at intervals between 1945 and 1969. Also in this sale is another and unrelated Alexander Calder piece, produced around 1927, and typical of his earlier work, a wire figure on a wooden base, representing John D Rockerfeller – a clever homage to one of the USA’s most recognisable businessmen, the great philanthropist is gently caricatured in a golfing pose. Following a visit to Mondrian’s studio in 1930, Calder made his first wholly abstract compositions and invented the moving kinetic sculptures, dubbed mobiles by Marcel Duchamp, in 1931. By 1943, following a major retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Calder had begun seeking a way of creating more complex sculptural forms. Red Skeleton, produced in 1945, and the earliest of the sale items, dates from this period of experimentation and exhibits Calder’s new technique of piercing alternating planes. The use of wire and coloured organic forms in this and the other three works, imbues them with irrepressible energy and demonstrates the sculptor’s vituoso technical prowess. Calder was an artist with an extraordinary zest for life: his bright, joyful colours were an invitation to everyone to enjoy his work as much as he enjoyed making it.

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Auction | René Gruau

Friday, January 25th, 2013

Christie’s Interiors – Style & Spirit
London, South Kensington, UK
Sale: 29th January, 2013
Viewing: January 26th-29th

If you missed the wonderful Dior Illustrated: René Gruau and the Line of Beauty show at London’s Somerset House in 2010, or, if you were fortunate enough to see it but came away aching to own one or more of Gruau’s chic and uncompromisingly graphic, highly collectible, original artworks, here’s your chance. Amongst a mixed bag of almost 400 lots that includes items as diverse as a very handsome pair of mid-20th century German, steel, 10 x 8 field binoculars by Busch (Estimate £2,000-4,000), and a pre-17th century composite elephant bird egg from Madagascar (Estimate £5,000 – 8,000), the catalogue for the forthcoming Christie’s Interiors – Style & Spirit sale, lists four Gruau’s, all at fairly affordable prices.

Images by René Gruau, from top
Point d’exclamation, circa 1950
Gouache on paper, signed
Estimate £2,000-3,000

Le masque, circa 1950
Gouache on paper, signed
Estimate £1,500-2,000

Lady in red, circa 1970
Ink and gouache on paper, signed
Estimate £4,000-6,000

Model for glove, circa 1950
Gouache and ink on paper, unsigned
Estimate £3,000-5,000

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The publishers of The Blog insist that all images supplied for publication in our posts are cleared for that use before being sent to us. Whether pictures are sent to us as email attachments or made available as downloadable files, any responsibility for fees which may, under any circumstances, fall due, must be borne by the source supplier

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