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20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale London, 27 June 2019
3. Harold Ancart
18. Marlene Dumas
8. David Hockney
14. Nicolas de StaĂŤl
12. Alberto Giacometti
9. Alexander Calder
19. Jean-Michel Basquiat
21. Jean-Michel Basquiat
20. Richard Prince
20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale London, 27 June 2019
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30 Berkeley Square, London W1J 6EX
27 June 2019, 7pm
Viewing 18-27 June 2019 Monday - Saturday 10am - 6pm Sunday 12pm - 6pm
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2. Lynette Yiadom-Boakye
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1. Tschabalala Self
Leda oil, acrylic, Flashe, linen and dry leaf on canvas 163 x 213.4 cm (64 1/8 x 84 in.) Executed in 2015. Estimate £40,000-60,000 $50,800-76,300 €45,100-67,700 ‡ plus Buyers Premium and VAT*
Provenance Thierry Goldberg Gallery, New York Acquired from the above by the present owner Exhibited Los Angeles, The Cabin, Tropicana, 30 August - 27 September 2015 New York, Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, VOLTA, New York, 2 - 6 March 2016 Literature ‘Tschabalala Self’, Arena for Contemporary African, African-American and Caribbean Art, Africanah.org, 11 August 2015, online (illustrated)
*The amount of Buyer’s Premium, VAT and, if applicable, Artist’s Resale Right payable is dependent on the sale outcome. For full details see Calculating the Purchase Price in the Buyer’s Guide online or in this catalogue. Buyer’s Premium is payable at a maximum of 25%. VAT, where applicable, is payable at 20% on the Buyer’s Premium.
‘A sudden blow: the great wings beating still Above the stagering girl, her thighs caressed By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill, He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
Challenging collective fantasies surrounding the black female body, Tschabalala Self’s artistic practice revolves around the seminal events and scenes that have punctuated history, mythology, and biblical narratives with strong female characters. In Leda, 2015, the artist reimagines the story of the eponymous Aetolian princess who, prior to becoming a Spartan queen, was seduced by Zeus in the guise of a swan. The canvas transforms into a dreamscape of unique visual codes: presenting the iconic scene in various colours, patterns and materials, it portrays the two protagonists in a polyvalent and experimental manner that is typical of Self’s creative process, developed during her MFA at Yale University, 2013-2015. With its multifarious adornments and textures, the composition exudes a tangible energy that matches the narrative content laid atop its surface; blown up to immense dimensions and set against an arresting carmine backdrop, it bears a sense of grandeur that only heightens the scene’s gravitas. First exhibited in the year of its execution at The Cabin in Los Angeles, Leda was subsequently shown at the Museum of Contemporary African Disaporan Arts in New York in 2016. Staged either as a passive, peaceful encounter between the princess and the winged animal, or as a vigorously violent attack, the meeting of Leda and Zeus as a swan has made for a pungent mix of sexuality and violence in the art historical canon. A renowned myth throughout the Middle Ages, Leda prominently arose as a classicising theme during the Italian Renaissance and has continued to be celebrated throughout art history by masters including Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Théodore Géricault, Albrecht Dürer and Paul Cézanne. In Géricault’s iconic rendering, the swan envelops Leda’s body in a commanding manner, whilst in Cézanne’s depiction, Leda’s sensual, lounging posture denotes complicity in act of seduction. In Self’s work, Leda is at once threatening and threatened: she exudes an ambivalent energy that betrays the vulnerability of her position. ‘My subjects are fully aware of their conspicuousness and are unmoved by their viewers’, the artist remarked. ‘Their role is not to show, explain, or perform but rather “to be.” In being, their presence is acknowledged and their signifcance felt ’ (Tschabalala Self, quoted in her website description).
How can those terrifed vague fngers push The feathered glory from her loosening thighs? And how can body, laid in that white rush, But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?’ William Butler Yeats, Leda and the Swan, 1923
Anonymous painting afer an original detruit by Michelangelo Buonarotti, afer 1530, National Gallery, London. Image: Bridgeman Images.
Paul Cézanne, Léda au cygne, circa 1880, oil on canvas, The Barnes Foundation, Philadephia. Image: Bridgeman Images.
2. Lynette Yiadom-Boakye
Leave A Brick Under The Maple signed with the artist’s initials, titled and dated ‘Leave A Brick Under The Maple LYB 2015’ on the reverse oil on canvas 200 x 130 cm (78 3/4 x 51 1/8 in.) Painted in 2015. Estimate £250,000-450,000 $318,000-572,000 €282,000-508,000 † ♠ plus Buyers Premium and VAT, ARR applies*
Provenance Jack Shainman Gallery, New York Acquired from the above by the present owner
*The amount of Buyer’s Premium, VAT and, if applicable, Artist’s Resale Right payable is dependent on the sale outcome. For full details see Calculating the Purchase Price in the Buyer’s Guide online or in this catalogue. Buyer’s Premium is payable at a maximum of 25%. VAT, where applicable, is payable at 20% on the Buyer’s Premium.
Stretching to a height that conveys the life-size stature of the painted protagonist, Leave A Brick Under The Maple, 2015, is a sumptuous painting that exemplifes Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s distinctively raw and poised style of portraiture. Created the same year as her signifcant solo show at the Serpentine Gallery, London, and on the heels of her contribution to the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013, Leave A Brick Under the Maple stands as a potent proclamation of the artist’s cornerstone status in today’s generation of fgurative painters. It delineates the elegant silhouette of a young man leaning against an indeterminate backdrop, spanning varying shades of terracotta and brown. The man’s relaxed limbs and averted eyes capture a liminal, peaceful state that place him between transitional sleep and conscious restfulness. The indistinct contours of the background absorb the model’s body into a vortex of abstraction, heightening the painting’s ethereal atmosphere. Simultaneously, the fgure’s phosphorescent white trousers enhance the contrasts of depth and light, allowing him to move forward, as though emerging from the surface of the canvas and into the real world.
while it is still fresh, conjuring a tangible, intuitive image that sometimes lets elements ‘happen in the painting itself’ (Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, quoted in ‘Lynette YiadomBoakye’s Fashionable Eye’, The New York Times Magazine, 15 November 2010, online). Continuing a dialogue with pioneering protagonists of portraiture, Yiadom-Boakye draws on traditional painterly methods ranging from the Old Masters’ sophisticated use of chiaroscuro to Paul Cézanne’s allusive forms of verisimilitude. However, the artist’s key refusal of named identities and sitters distinguishes her from those who preceded her; herein, the young man portrayed is deprived of a name and can only be individualised through the viewer’s sustained gaze.
Achieved with loose, expressive brushstrokes and defly painted felds of muted – yet opulent – colour, Leave A Brick Under The Maple exudes a sense of transience that echoes the feeting touch of the artist’s particular painting technique. Known to complete her canvases in a single day, Yiadom-Boakye optimises the malleability of the oil paint
Presenting a subject that is at once familiar and foreign, – a deeply literary collision – Leave A Brick Under The Maple engages the viewer’s imagination, acting as a generative source for narrative projection. Culled from a variety of sources both personal and academic, Yiadom-Boakye’s imagery spans art historical allusions, found images, her own experiences, and the unknowably graceful realm of dance. Her painterly renditions eschew the physical reality of her models’ bodies and instead introduce ‘suggestions of people [who] don’t share our concerns or anxieties’, as they are ‘somewhere else altogether’ (Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, quoted in ‘Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s Fashionable Eye’, The New York Times Magazine, 15 November 2010, online).
Lucian Freud, Red Haired Man on a Chair, 1962-1963, oil on canvas.
John Singer Sargent, Robert Louis Stevenson and His Wife, 1885, oil on canvas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
© The Lucian Freud Archive / Bridgeman Images.
Image: Bridgeman Images.
The man portrayed in Leave A Brick Under The Maple exemplifies this kind of commanding yet mystifying portraiture; he is both here and there, as if embodying an interiority rather than a physical body. Yiadom-Boakye writes: ‘Maybe I think more about black thought than black bodies’ (Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, in conversation with Antwaun Sargent, ‘Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s Fictive Figures’, Interview Magazine, May 2017, online). In this perspective, her portraits are akin to ‘character studies for people who don’t exist’; they are enthrallingly suggestive and irreducibly atmospheric (Zadie Smith, ‘Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s Imagined Portraits’, The New Yorker, 12 June 2017, online). Resonating with Yiadom-Boakye’s concurrent background as a writer, Leave A Brick Under The Maple demonstrates the artist’s claim that ‘I write about the things I can’t paint and paint the things I can’t write about’ (Lynette YiadomBoakye, quoted in Zadie Smith, ‘Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s Imagined Portraits’, The New Yorker, 12 June 2017, online). Clearly able to summon human sensibility with both a pen and a paintbrush, Yiadom-Boakye paints without the help or presence of real models, instead sourcing images from amalgamated thoughts and ideas – the same conglomerate hub that allows her to write. The present work exemplifes this beautifully: it presents a human fgure that brims with internal complexities despite physical immobility. ‘When I think of the fgure, I think of immortality or an otherness that is just out of this world, representing an endless possibility’ (Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, quoted in Antwaun Sargent, ‘Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s Fictive Figures’, Interview Magazine, 15 May 2017, online). While Leave A Brick Under The Maple conjures a number of evident painterly and literary associations, including the sizeable legacy of classical European portraiture, the work also more subtly alludes to the sculptural manifestations of posing bodies - as potently materialised by the character’s carved out physique, seemingly built from a larger compound of colour and light. Erected clearly amongst sturdy broad strokes, Yiadom-Boakye’s portrayed character is one of brazen beauty, redolent of the classical heroes sculpted by the likes of Auguste Rodin. Leave A Brick Under The Maple eschews the fatness of its picture plane and instead firts with three-dimensionality, providing riveting impressions of presence and movement, in turn exuding an arresting sense of boundlessness.
Auguste Rodin, The Age of Bronze, 1875-1876, bronze, Cleveland Museum of Art. Image: Bridgeman Images.
‘I suppose my interest was always the fgure. I wanted to do something that was fgurative that somehow involved people, the body’. Lynette Yiadom-Boakye
Property from an Important American Collection
3. Harold Ancart
Three works: (i) Untitled (Ultra Deep Fried 6); (ii) Untitled (Ultra Deep Fried 8); (iii) Untitled (Ultra Deep Fried 7) oilstick and pencil on paper mounted on panel, in artist’s frames each 197.5 x 131.1 cm (77 3/4 x 51 5/8 in.) Executed in 2014. Estimate £300,000-400,000 $381,000-507,000 €339,000-452,000 ‡ ♠ plus Buyers Premium and VAT, ARR applies*
Provenance Casey Kaplan, New York Acquired from the above by the present owner Exhibited New York, Casey Kaplan, HAROLD ANCART, KEVIN BEASLEY, MATEO LÓPEZ, 27 February - 26 April 2014 Literature Harold Ancart, Sof Places, Brussels, 2018, pp. 128 and 174 (Untitled (Ultra Deep Fried 8) illustrated, p. 128)
*The amount of Buyer’s Premium, VAT and, if applicable, Artist’s Resale Right payable is dependent on the sale outcome. For full details see Calculating the Purchase Price in the Buyer’s Guide online or in this catalogue. Buyer’s Premium is payable at a maximum of 25%. VAT, where applicable, is payable at 20% on the Buyer’s Premium.
Stretching two metres high and deployed across three separate supports, the three present works, Harold Ancart’s (i) Untitled (Ultra Deep Fried 6); (ii) Untitled (Ultra Deep Fried 8); (iii) Untitled (Ultra Deep Fried 7), 2014, convey a lyrical synthesis of the Belgian painter’s expansive visual language, replete with vivid foliage and colourful explosions. Herein, the artist’s treatment of form is redolent of the Minimalist commitment to strict horizontality and the gridded pattern, as the assemblage’s threefold backdrop is reduced to muted geometry, and defned by progressively enlarged stripes separated by growing intervals. As incongruous elements emerge into each of the set’s abstract surfaces, the stasis of the picture plane is irreverently interrupted, introducing kaleidoscopic colour to an otherwise meagre palette of black and white. Straddling vocabularies of landscape painting and abstraction, through the use of repeated bands and whimsical
foral shapes, Ancart materialises his belief that ‘we no longer make that silly separation between fgurative and abstraction. Artists from the previous generation prepared the ground for us, and you have the feeling now that everything is possible again’ (Harold Ancart, quoted in Dodie Kazanjian, ‘Smaller Art’, Vibrations, Issue 1, Autumn-Winter 2016, p. 24). A prodigious study in formal yet unbridled abstraction, each work presents what is located ‘between one sky and another sky, one world and another world’ (Harold Ancart, ‘Blue Fear’, Sof Places, Brussels, 2018, p. 3). Brimming with Ancart’s characteristic gestural fervour and presented in a striking threefold arrangement that summons the eye to move from sheet to sheet, each of the three compositions is an excellent example of the Belgian artist’s young opus, which has fown to international acclaim in recent years.
Clyford Still, Untitled, 1965, oil on canvas. © City & County of Denver, Courtesy Clyford Still Museum / DACS 2019. Image: Bridgeman Images.
‘I like the fact that this medium has the ability to open unthinkable universes by means that are really simple. An outline combined with some color and text is enough to make you travel far away’. Harold Ancart
Josef Albers, Homage to the Square: Precinct, 1951, oil on Masonite, in artist’s frame, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York and DACS, London 2019. Image: SCALA, Florence.
Magnifed to impressive dimensions, the trio additionally provides a resounding echo to Iona Whittaker’s claim that Ancart’s works are ‘large enough to slightly dwarf the viewer; at the same time, their subjects, though rendered abstract, appear to simulate things which, in nature, are small... Against black or almost-black backgrounds, these colours and the unruly shapes and fragments they fll ferment a lurid but apparently consistent realm that might be Lilliputian or giant. The disorientation caused by their abstract ruptures on a dark, non-perspectival plane breeds a near-uncanny or folkloric atmosphere’ (Iona Whittaker, ‘Harold Ancart’, Frieze, 21 October 2015, online). Striking riveting balance between pure creative impulsion and studied composition, Ancart conjures a myriad of visual references that are sourced both from art history and the artist’s natural surroundings. ‘Fauvist and Symbolist favors are joined by AbEx and Minimalist devices’, remarked Chinnie
Ding. ‘Discrete veins of color and encroaching edges recall Clyfford Still’s seismic fissures... This is the planet of painting, after all, and Ancart’s space exploration is the exploration of painted space: More than depicting petals and flames, how might a painting itself grow like a flower, ignite like fire, and bring about forms that thrive as life-forms in the otherworld it always is?’ (Chinnie Ding, ‘Critics’ Picks: Harold Ancart’, Artforum, 18 June 2015, online). Widely celebrated for his refreshing artistic output, Ancart has recently been commissioned an in-situ work by the prestigious Public Art Fund, each year inviting an artist to adorn the city of New York with a project of their choice. Ancart’s iteration follows that of more than seventy artists, including Félix González-Torres, David Hammons, Barbara Kruger and Rachel Whiteread, and consists in a painted concrete sculpture paying homage to the accidental abstract compositions that appear on New York’s ubiquitous freestanding handball walls.
Property from the Estate of Ryan Brant To most the Brant surname will be synonymous with contemporary culture. Many will be familiar with the Brant Foundation, or indeed with the long-standing family ownership of Interview Magazine, the title founded by Andy Warhol and John Wilcock in the late 1960s. The Brant dynasty has cemented their reputation as creative thinkers who have founded, backed and nurtured an extraordinary artistic legacy. Born in 1971, Ryan Brant graduated from the Wharton School of Business with a degree in Economics and subsequently followed his father’s footsteps into the family business of publishing. Afer a spell working for Interview Magazine, Ryan lef to apply his experience in the rapidly expanding games publishing sector. In 1993, aged 21, Ryan founded Take-Two, as an organisation looking to become the market leader in the games industry. A string of successful releases enabled the company to expand quickly and lead the charge on the market. Astute collaborations and strategic decision making proved Ryan’s vision to be both commercially lucrative and critically successful. As one might expect with such informed beginnings, Ryan’s passion for art was driven in an absolute belief of the talent
who created it. It was this commitment, combined with his natural creative foresight which led him to form a collection of artworks which was entirely reflective of his groundbreaking aptitude. To observers, the nature of any collection of works can vary greatly in their common thread. The genesis of assemblage could be a single work, or a survey of more general exploration, such as thematic or compositional concerns. The present work, as part of Ryan’s larger collection which has been collated through a personal aesthetic to be enjoyed daily, in the domesticity of his family home in Palm Beach. Many of the works in the collection are vibrant in their tone- ofen playful- and crisply contemporary. The sum of this collection refects an individual who revelled in creating an imaginative parallel to submerse into. Phillips is honoured to present to market this work by KAWS from the estate of Ryan Brant, on behalf of his family. In an all too short life, there was a long list of achievements in Ryan’s endeavours. It is a legacy which conveys personal tenacity with unrivalled vision. In equal measure, this unique group of works gives us a very personal insight into an extraordinary man, through the art of his own private reality.
Julian Schnabel, Portrait of Ryan Brant Holding a Copy of William Gaddis’s ‘JR’, 2011 plates and bondo on wood. © Julian Schnabel / ARS, New York / DACS 2019. Image: Phillips.
Property from the Estate of Ryan Brant
UNTITLED (MBFV5) signed ‘KAWS’ lower centre; further signed and dated ‘K.A.W.S..16’ on the reverse acrylic on canvas on wood panel 153.7 x 92.7 cm (60 1/2 x 36 1/2 in.) Painted in 2016. Estimate £300,000-500,000 $381,000-634,000 €339,000-565,000 ‡ plus Buyers Premium and VAT*
Provenance Private Collection, Palm Beach Thence by descent
Property from the Estate of Ryan Brant
Brimming with rich chromatic hues and illustrating one of KAWS’s most desirable cartoon-inspired iterations, UNTITLED (MBFVS), 2016, is a particularly dynamic example of the American artist’s now instantly recognisable visual lexicon. Presenting one of KAWS’s irreverent reinventions of Snoopy, Charlie Brown’s mischievous pet Beagle in the cartoon world of Peanuts, UNTITLED (MBFVS) fips the beloved American dog upside down, whimsically enhancing the sense of movement that is inherent to the work’s dynamic surface. Straddling aesthetics of traditional illustration and expressive abstraction, UNTITLED (MBFVS) yields a compelling, colourful image that revels in complexities of both form and content. In spotlighting a seminal protagonist of the cartoon canon, whilst employing a sleek aesthetic akin to the glossy surfaces of Pop Art canvases, UNTITLED (MBFVS) dismantles perceived boundaries between popular culture and fne art, and enables the formation of a fuid, lively dialogue between the past and the present. Beginning his career as a street artist in New Jersey, KAWS – Brian Donnelly’s chosen moniker – remained relatively unknown throughout the 1990s, until experiencing a meteoric ascent to the international contemporary art scene, culminating in the major survey slated to take place at the Brooklyn Museum in 2021. Following his production of limited edition toys in the late 1990s, mainly iterations of his own highly-graphic subjects, the artist began appropriating familiar television and cartoon icons such as the Simpsons, the Smurfs, and SpongeBob in the early 2000s. By the time the present work was made, he had already assembled his own idiosyncratic set of affable characters – dubbed his ‘Companions’ – and transformed their easily discernible appearance into mischievous, at times ominous, creatures. These new cartoonish fgures, rendered with a bold palette of energetic colours, together conjure a falsely innocent pictorial world, replete with signs of today’s world and society as it embraces the dominance of imagistic consumption. Though UNTITLED (MBFVS) picture plane contains no clear features able to spark immediate cognitive associations, the surface’s precise delineations carve out a silhouette that is well-known to all. Snoopy as a subject has proven to be a favourite from KAWS’s pantheon of iconic characters. Appearing in his work time and again, in full or fragmented, tonally rich or reduced renditions, the Peanuts protagonist additionally presents one of the oldest source images KAWS has based his irreverent art upon.
‘I’m into Schulz as an artist, a company, and an icon; I got into his stuf just because I liked the looseness of the line work, and I thought that it was just sort of a nice thing to bring into my paintings’. KAWS
Jef Koons, Pink Panther, 1988, porcelain, 1988, Museum of Modern Art, New York. © Jef Koons. Image: SCALA, Florence.
Andy Warhol, The Last Supper (Mr. Peanut), 1986, synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen ink on canvas. © 2019 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by DACS, London 2019. Image: Bridgeman Images.
Having been created in 1950 by Charles M. Schulz, Snoopy has become one of the most recognisable fgures in the comic strip world, associated to a mischievous, slothish character. ‘I’m into Schulz as an artist, a company, and an icon; I got into his stuf just because I liked the looseness of the line work, and I thought that it was just sort of a nice thing to bring into my paintings, even if it’s abstract and unidentifable’ (KAWS, quoted in Stef Yotka, ‘Inside KAWS’s Studio With The Artist’, Vogue, 27 April 2000, online). Propelled beyond the world of illustration, KAWS additionally draws kinship with seminal art historical movements. ‘While one expects KAWS’s work would be entirely indebted to Pop art, his process suggests an equal debt to Minimalism, in which abstract parts of materials are rearranged to create diferent types of wholes’ (Michael Auping, KAWS: WHERE
THE END STARTS, exh. cat., Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth, 2016, p. 68). KAWS’s use of a nonrectangular support in the present image, for instance, resonates with Frank Stella and Ellsworth Kelly’s key innovations in the 1960s. Whereas his predecessors’ nonfgurative works are based on combinations of geometric forms, UNTITLED (MBFVS) follows the contours of Snoopy himself, applying KAWS’s own logic and establishing the painting’s larger-than-life presence. As Auping notes, ‘American abstract painters employed the shaped canvas to objectify the canvas support, to give it the look of a self-contained painted object. KAWS uses it for just the opposite reason, as a form of physical animation, energizing the characters so that they appear to be moving across the landscape of the wall’ (Michael Auping, KAWS: WHERE THE END STARTS, exh. cat., Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth, 2016, p. 74).
5. Dana Schutz
Moonwalker signed and dated ‘Dana Schutz 2009’ on the reverse oil on canvas 182.9 x 193 cm (72 x 75 7/8 in.) Painted in 2009. Estimate £550,000-750,000 $698,000-952,000 €621,000-847,000 ‡ plus Buyers Premium and VAT*
Provenance Zach Feuer Gallery, New York Private Collection Acquired from the above by the present owner Exhibited Kansas City, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, America: Now and Here, 6 - 28 May 2011
‘I don’t like the idea of painting from a theme, but I like the idea of a framework that could provide information and a fctional space’. Dana Schutz
In Moonwalker, 2009, Dana Schutz paints a picture that is familiar in subject matter, yet deeply enigmatic in appearance. At the heart of the composition, a deconstructed astronaut stands next to a collapsing fag, referencing man’s historic endeavour to reach the surface of the Moon – a quest fnally realised on 13 September 1959, precisely ffy years before the work’s date of execution. Redolent of a kind of surreal apocalypse, Moonwalker is evocative more of chaos and waste than it is of a miraculous feat able to lif the spirits of American citizens in the raging depths of the Cold War. Subverting the common associations connected to this iconic and groundbreaking event, Schutz conveys a characteristically unsettling atmosphere that merges grotesque fguration with the uncanny, straddling formal iterations of Synthetic Cubism and postwar German painting that together conjure an entirely new aesthetic, vested with colourful explosions and beguiling amorphousness. Merging a conspicuous reference to American history as well as a stylistic afnity to European modernism, Moonwalker is indicative of Schutz’s resolve to bring traditional themes into the contemporary realm. An evident pattern is revealed upon observing Schutz’s now impressively prolifc opus. As noted by Calvin Tomkins, the artist’s paintings ‘carry veiled references to what’s going on in the world’, as if sourcing the foundational roots of news stories and upending them with seemingly innocuous, and explosively joyful imagery (Calvin Tomkins, ‘Why Dana Schutz Painted Emmett Till’, The New Yorker, 3 April 2017, online). Yet, the boisterous dynamism emanating from Schutz’s paintings very quickly takes a more complex, and ofen darker, turn, as their energy serves not to convey euphoria or ecstasy but rather notions of excess and overabundance; a visual materialisation of gluttony and
its paradoxically destructive and diminishing efects. ‘Is this a representation of some corroded human beings, or a corroded representation of some human beings?’ muses Barry Schwabsky. ‘Does the painting symbolize ambivalence toward its subjects’ heroic reputation?... Or is it about the art of painting itself and its diminished capacity to engage with history as subject matter?’ (Barry Schwabsky, Dana Schutz, New York, 2010, p. 8). Separating seminal events from their cocoons of fallacious praise, Dana Schutz reveals the difcult realities that lie behind every success, every great feat, every step forward. Caught within the spirit of its time, depicting the connection between the powerful emotion of mankind and the commercial portrayal of the events of the world around us, Moonwalker parallels Robert Rauschenberg’s distinct and crucial imagery from the 1960s. His Retroactive 1, deploying the immediately recognisable images of an American astronaut and John F. Kennedy – totems of 1960s popular culture – echoes the present work’s theme and pictorially fragmented rendition. Rauschenberg’s fascination with the space race pervades his oeuvre, the corporeal imagery of the Apollo launch experience featuring in a number of monumental canvases, as well as a series of thirty-four crisp lithographs – 29 held by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art – that juxtapose hand-drawn imagery with passages of the Florida landscape, as well as the industrial aesthetic of the quest into space. Mirroring the poignant image of the American astronaut that resonates throughout Rauschenberg’s celebrated compositions, the moonwalker within the present work strides through Schutz’s disquietingly abstract realm, eschewing literal references to the Cold War and presenting an uncannily vibrant scene.
Alan Shepard planting an American fag during the Apollo 14 mission, 1971. Image: SCALA, Florence.
Moonwalker is an excellent example of Schutz’s ability to materialise ambivalence. Within the composition, the remnants of a fragmented astronaut stand still on what seems to be the trunk of a tree, signifying the loss of two lives - one fragmented and one razed – as opposed to the celebration of two beacons of hope. Schutz’s morbid deterioration of the moonlanding kindles a multitude of interpretations, but perhaps most palpable is the weightless, dreamlike dimension of the work. ‘It’s as if there has been an unseen explosion that happened outside the painting… singeing [some of the subjects] on the lef or right side. [They] appeared like cutouts themselves—objects or props that could be rearranged...’ Schutz remarked. ‘I was looking at Magritte at the time. I liked the fake-out surfaces and patterns in his work… And there was this question of whether the painting you’re looking at is something that just happened, like a frozen event, or if it’s something that never really happened, but that you could reconstruct and put together however you wanted’ (Dana Schutz, quoted in Dana Schutz: If the Face Had Wheels, exh. cat., Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, 2011, p. 95). The Kafaesque aura of Moonwalker immerses contemporary life with apocalyptic fervour, summoning the darker, concealed folds of history. Touching on a theme that has, in its broader defnition, been used profusely in the art historical canon, Moonwalker is furthermore redolent of the moon imagery employed by the likes of Joan Miró, Alexander Calder, and Wassily Kandinsky in their highly poetic and ofen spiritual art. In his Circles on Black, 1921, Kandinsky assembles a variety of celestial elements: the rainbow-like burst of a comet, small colourful stars on a vast expanse of black sky, and a sizeable moon at the heart of the composition, gray and black in places, suggesting the viewer’s privileged position in its immediate vicinity. Where Kandinsky uses fragmentation as means of literal vitality, allusively transforming the moon and her neighbours into a single condensed image, Schutz employs the same method of putrefaction to convey the energy radiated by waste, and the possibilities located within gangrenous remains. As a result, the image is impenetrable rather than open: an enigmatic tableau waiting to be deciphered.
Robert Rauschenberg, Retroactive I, 1964, oil and silkscreen-ink on canvas, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford. Gif of Susan Mouse Hilles, 1964. © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation / VAGA at ARS, NY, and DACS, London 2019. Photo: Allen Phillips \ Wadsworth Atheneum.
Wassily Kandinsky, Circles on Black, 1921, oil on canvas, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Image: SCALA, Florence.
6. Rudolf Stingel
Untitled (Afer Sam) signed and dated ‘Stingel 2007’ on the reverse oil on canvas 38.1 x 52.1 cm (15 x 20 1/2 in.) Painted in 2007. Estimate £1,200,000-1,800,000 $1,520,000-2,280,000 €1,350,000-2,030,000 ‡ ♠ plus Buyers Premium and VAT, ARR applies*
Provenance Private Collection, New York (acquired directly from the artist) Phillips de Pury & Company, New York, 4 Mach 2011, lot 16 Acquired at the above sale by the present owner
Rudolf Stingel’s Untitled (Afer Sam), 2007, is a strikingly intimate work from the artist’s iconic series of self-portraits, forming a major component of his ongoing exploration of a process-oriented approach to painting that cuts to the very heart of the medium. In the present work, Stingel dances around an idea of painting that is as much about seeing as it is about making, taking on notions of fguration, representation, abstraction, process, pattern, performance and subjectivity. In the artist’s own words, his practice takes ‘on the subject of painting’ – that is to say, its codes and constraints, its history and responsibilities (Rudolf Stingel, quoted in ‘Art: Going on About Town,’ New Yorker, 19 May 2008). Currently the subject of a critically acclaimed retrospective at the Beyeler Foundation, Basel, further examples from this suite of self-portraits reside in esteemed public collections, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Crystal Bridges Museum, Bentonville, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Andrea Mantegna, Lamentation over the Dead Christ, c. 1480, tempera on canvas, Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan. Image: Bridgeman Images.
‘Photographs are always catalysts for, and forms of, that desire vested in looking, and thus connect directly with the “desiring machines” of the unconscious. Like the mirror, the self-portrait is a kind of theatre upon which the self is staged, a membrane through which the interior self and the gaze of the outside world are fltered.’ Chrissy Illes, “Surface Tension,” in Rudolf Stingel, exh. cat., Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and travelling, 2007, p. 24
Edward Steichen, Self portrait, 1902, Gum bichromate print, The Stapleton Collection. © 2019 The Estate of Edward Steichen/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Image: Bridgeman Images.
Testament to the artist’s profound expansion of the defnition of painting, over the course of his career Stingel has embarked on a number of artistic pursuits that blur the boundaries between artistic genres. He enveloped the foors of New York’s Grand Central Station with a foralpatterned carpet in 2004, repeated the same gesture over the entirety of the Palazzo Grassi’s rooms, Venice, nine years later, and cloaked the walls of Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art with silver-backed insulation boards that accumulated the etched grafti of visitors in 2007. In Untitled (Afer Sam), the artist visits processes of Photorealism as an exercise through which to negotiate the relationship between painting and photography.
As he approached his ffieth birthday in 2005, Stingel introduced portraiture into his artistic lexicon, using his own image as an arena for existential self-refection. This new theme aligned with a lineage of artists using the subject of self-portraiture as a means of facing their own mortality, including Albrecht Dürer, Vincent van Gogh and Edvard Munch. It also evokes the practice of 20th century masters such as Andy Warhol, Francis Bacon and Gerhard Richter, who incorporated photographs as source material in order to confront the inherent representational failure of both mediums’ relationship with reality and interiority. Notably, it was also on the year of his ffieth birthday that Richter painted his frst candle painting, a potent memento mori that became known as one of his most important subjects.
Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird, 1940, oil on canvas. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.
Edvard Munch, Self Portrait with Cigarette, 1895, oil on canvas, Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo. Image: Bridgeman Images.
© 2019 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museum Trust, Mexico, D.F. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Image: Bridgeman Images.
Untitled (Afer Sam) is based on a series of photographs that were taken in close collaboration with Stingel’s friend and fellow artist Sam Samore. Precisely and painstakingly rendered in tones of grey, black and white, the image has been transposed from its diminutive source to present dimensions using a gridded format and mirrored photographic projection. Whilst the present work is unique in its domestic scale, later works were enlarged to epic proportions reminiscent of billboards or cinema screens and, as in the constructed nature of the latter, would appear lifelike when viewed from afar, but break down into monochromatic daubs upon close inspection.
‘... the weight of art history, the weight of generations of painters asking the same question and never fnding the right answer, the responsibility to be in charge of painting, maybe for the last time, maybe and more tragically, forever’. Francesco Bonami ‘Paintings of Painting for Paintings’, in Rudolf Stingel, exh. cat., Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago, 2007, p. 20
Oscillating between the fgurative and the abstract, the intimate and the monumental, Stingel’s self portraits have been likened to the Photorealist canvases of Swiss artist Franz Gertsch, who in the 1960s began to paint epic, dramatically realist portraits and scenes of bohemian urban life, the infuence of which Stingel has said he found revelatory: ‘It was the way he painted it. When you get close to a Gertsch, it looks like an abstract painting by someone who doesn’t know how to paint. But if you walk away it becomes sharp and fantastic. This kind of painting triggered my decision to become a ‘contemporary artist’, and it always stayed in my mind’ (Rudolf Stingel, quoted in ‘1,000 Words: Rudolf Stingel Talks About His Latest Installation’, Artforum, May 2005, p. 221). World-weary, a crumpled Stingel lies on a hotel bed, still wearing a pinstripe suit jacket and gazing, listlessly, up at the ceiling and beyond the picture plane. Melancholic yet immobilised, the image exudes a sense of action immediately passed or just outside of the frame, tantalisingly close but
Francesca Woodman, Rome, 1978, Gelatin Silver Print, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. © Estate of Francesca Woodman / Charles Woodman / Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York / DACS, London 2019. Image: SCALA, Florence.
unavailable to the viewer. In its dramatic foreshortening and corporeal compression, his position recalls the perspective distortions of Andrea Mantegna’s enigmatic depiction of the supine body of Christ, The Lamentation over Dead Christ, circa 1483. Stingel appears worn out by the weight of his artistic forebears – and in the words of Francesco Bonami, curator of Stingel’s 2007 retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, ‘the weight of art history, the weight of generations of painters asking the same question and never fnding the right answer, the responsibility to be in charge of Painting, maybe for the last time, maybe and more tragically, forever’ (Francesco Bonami, ‘Paintings of Painting for Paintings,’ in Rudolf Stingel, exh. cat., Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago, 2007, p. 20). Notable here is how this exaggerated description of the exulted status of painting and by extension, that of painters themselves, functions in direct contradistinction to the rallying cries of the death of the medium that accompanied the beginning of Stingel’s career.
‘All work is autobiographical, so that’s why I decided to just paint myself ... there’s a big tradition of portraits, and lots of selfportraits too; each artist did it… I just want to go back to a more psychological platform, if you want; reconnecting because of my age and everything to my origins, somehow. It also seemed to me to be the bravest thing I could do’. Rudolf Stingel
Gerhard Richter, Kerze, 1982, oil on canvas, The Art Institute of Chicago. © Gerhard Richter 2019 (0144). Image: Bridgeman Images.
Mobilising photography’s innate ability to capture themes of memory, time and mortality as infltrator, his work exacerbates the underlying conceptual rigour of painting in the twenty-frst century. From the 1989 publication of his seminal Instructions, a limited edition art book that outlined the intricate method by which his early enamel works could be replicated, Stingel’s practice has routinely demystifed studio processes and subverted notions of authorial genius in favour of a sense of industrial manufacture and mechanised nature. A complex conceptual contortion, the present work’s title – Afer Sam – directly acknowledges the photographer, making evident that this self-portrait is the reworking of an existing portrait of Stingel, one made by another artist. In Stingel’s hands, historical reliance on the manual mastery of painting is deconstructed by its meticulous re-assemblance through photography. The ‘authenticity’ of the portrait recoils from both the subject matter of the painting (Stingel) and its creator (the artist’s
hand) towards its source photograph, creating a feedback loop between artist and image, painting and photography, the transience of life and the permanence of art that plays out as if a frozen flm still. A mode of investigation afer the impasse of fgurative painting, these works are, he has said, ‘something more psychological … the only activity in these paintings is self-doubt’ (Rudolf Stingel, ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Self-Portrait’, Parkett 77, 2006, p. 107). The tension between sameness and diference in Stingel’s serially produced self-portraiture is what provides their theoretical undergirding. Stripped of its quest for internal realisation, in Stingel’s hands the self-portrait becomes a tool by which to externalise the intrinsically performative nature of the artist’s subjectivity and creative labour. Rather than a self-portrait of the artist, then, the works are portraits of Rudolf Stingel as an artist – a deadpan send-up of the contemplative image of the painter as Romantic anti-hero.
Property from a Private Collection, Germany
7. Cindy Sherman
Untitled Film Still #25 signed, numbered and dated ‘Cindy Sherman 1978 5/10’ on the reverse gelatin silver print 20.4 x 25.4 cm (8 x 10 in.) Executed in 1978, this work is number 5 from an edition of 10. Estimate £150,000-200,000 $190,000-254,000 €169,000-225,000 plus Buyers Premium and VAT*
Provenance Galerie Monika Sprüth, Cologne Acquired from the above by the present owner in the 1980s Exhibited Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum, Cindy Sherman, December 1982, no. 19, n.p. (another example exhibited and illustrated) Los Angeles, The Museum of Contemporary Art; Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art; Prague, Galerie Rudolfnum; London, Barbican Art Gallery; CAPC, Musée d’art Contemporain de Bordeaux; Sydney, Museum of Contemporary Art; Toronto, Art Gallery of Ontario, Cindy Sherman Retrospective, 2 November 1997 - 2 January 2000, pl. 26, pp. 70 and 197 (another example exhibited and illustrated, p. 70) Paris, Jeu de Paume; Kunsthaus Bregenz; Humlebæk, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art; Berlin, Martin-GropiusBau, Cindy Sherman, 16 May 2006 - 10 September 2007, n.p., pp. 242 and 317 (another example exhibited and illustrated, n.p and 242)
New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Pictures Generation, 1974-1984, 21 April - 2 August 2009, pl. 94, pp. n.p, 327 and 347 (another example exhibited and illustrated, n.p.) New York, The Museum of Modern Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Minneapolis, Walker Art Center; Dallas Museum of Art, Cindy Sherman, 26 February 2012 9 June 2013, pl. 58, pp. 112, 241 and 262 (another example exhibited and illustrated, p. 112) Warsaw, Zachęta – National Gallery of Art, Cannibalism? On Appropriation in Art, 7 March - 31 May 2015 (another example exhibited) St. Louis, International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum, 2017 Award and Induction Exhibition, August 2017 (another example exhibited) Shanghai, Fosun Foundation, Cindy Sherman, 7 November 2018 - 13 January 2019 (another example exhibited)
Literature Peter Schjeldahl and Els Barents, Cindy Sherman, Munich, 1987, no. 19, n.p. (another example illustrated) Arthur C. Danto, ed., Cindy Sherman Untitled Film Stills, London, 1990, no. 17, n.p. (another example illustrated) Rosalind E. Krauss, Cindy Sherman, 1975-1993, New York, 1993, pp. 48 and 225 (another example illustrated, p. 48) David Frankel, ed., Cindy Sherman: The Complete Untitled Film Stills, New York, 2003, no. 25, pp. 72-3 (another example illustrated, p. 73)
Standing expressionless against the edge of a bridge, the protagonist from Untitled Film Still #25, 1978, is none other than the artist herself, disguised as a female character culled from the glamourised visions of 1950s cinema. Forming part of Cindy Sherman’s idiosyncratic suite of seventy Untitled Film Stills, this work marks the genesis of the photographer’s practice, which has since become synonymous with performative transformations and sardonic portraiture. In her black-and-white photographs from the present series, Sherman casts herself as a range of flm noir female stereotypes: the femme fatale, the lonely housewife, the ingénue and the city girl, all styled with outdated clothes and ofbeat makeup. The scenes that she captures are immediately familiar to the viewer, yet, like moments of déjà vu, immediately slip from cognitive reach. Like perfunctory copies with no sign of an original, they are at once relatable and eerily distant, refective of a world that is more cinematic than real. Unlike the pictorially embellished and emotionally charged promotional flm stills that Sherman’s series borrows from, the artist’s photographs capture anticlimactic lulls that shed light on the quiet inner lives of her portrayed characters. In line with her contemplative lens and distanced approach, Sherman deliberately refrains from featuring strong emotions in her work, instead endowing each female protagonist with bland and unreadable expressions. She explains, ‘In a lot of movie photos, the actors look cute, impish, alluring, distraught, frightened, tough, but what I was interested in was when they were almost expressionless’ (Cindy Sherman, quoted in The Complete Untitled Film Stills, New York, 2003, p. 8). The artist’s acute exploration of human behaviour and camera performance produces riveting scenes which keep the viewer guessing, prompting questions on what happened before the captured clichés and what will happen next, whilst taking on new pertinence in today’s social media age.
Her perceptive eye is particularly potent in Untitled Film Still #25, which straddles levity and irony, the academic and the saccharine, and thus prodigiously forebodes Sherman’s future artistic explorations vested with complex modalities of self-representation and self-expression. Refecting on the innovative power of the present series, Cindy Sherman’s former partner Robert Longo enthused specifcally over the present iteration, Untitled Film Still #25. ‘It looks like the end of a movie you know, like credits should be rolling, like her lover has driven of the pier and died… What’s so great is that [it is] not so much about what you look at but they’re also about what happens before and what happens afer’ (Robert Longo, quoted in The Museum of Modern Art, ‘Robert Longo on Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Still #25 (1978)’, Youtube, 19 January 2016, online). As mused by Longo, it is easy to become transfxed by Sherman’s mysterious appearance and enigmatic environment in the present image: her intent is uncertain, complicated by her disengaging body language and untraceable stare, and her surroundings lack any type of geographic indication, enveloped only by indeterminate waters. As such, Untitled Film Still #25 is characteristic of Sherman’s resistance to visual verisimilitude. Instead of emulating reality, she constructs a host of references which themselves quote from a multitude of amalgamated sources. Musing on the present series, Longo additionally reminisced times when Sherman would get in costume and makeup as both of them arrived at the shooting location. Familiar with the present work’s execution like no other, Longo wasn’t simply a passive observer but an active participant in its development, endowed with unique creative agency as he captured the decisive shot, perched on the roof of their shared van. The interplay of gazes carried by Untitled Film Still #25 thus reminds the viewer of the photograph’s complicated nature, transcending the strict principles of self-portraiture. Indeed, though the present work is by defnition a selfportrait, it relies on the participation of another subjective entity, and moreover boasts a conceptual conviction of ambiguity, as the portrayed character is, in fact, not the artist, but a girl without a name.
Still from Psycho by Alfred Hitchcock, starring Janet Leigh, 1960.
Installation view of Untitled Film Still #25 in the Museum of Modern Art New York, Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Stills, New York, 2012. © Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York. Image: SCALA, Florence.
A number of critics and art historians have aligned Sherman’s photographic gesture in the Untitled Film Still series to Laura Mulvey’s article ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, written just three years before the creation of the present work. Now widely recognised as a foundational document for contemporary feminism, Mulvey’s text posits that ‘In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive female’ (Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen 16, n. 3, 1975, pp. 6-18). Deliberately embodying Mulvey’s theory in Untitled Film Still #25, Sherman assigns herself the role of the passive female whose existence matters solely as an object of projection or desire. As such, ‘Sherman-the-artist has set up a machine for making the gaze materialise uncomfortably, in alliance with Sherman-the-model’ (Laura Mulvey, ‘A
Phantasmagoria of the Female Body: The Work of Cindy Sherman’, New Lef Review, vol. 188, July - August 1991, p. 141). Challenging clichés through enactment, or expressing inner-depths through impersonation, Sherman never ceases to delve deeper into the politics of representation. Refecting the conceptual brilliance of her landmark series as well as its unmatched position within art historical discourse, Untitled Film Still #25 was included in a number of the artist’s breakthrough exhibitions, including her two most signifcant retrospectives held in 1997-2000, and in 2012-2013. A further testament to the artist’s enduring legacy within the history of art, Sherman’s work will be at the centre of a major new retrospective coming to the National Gallery of Art, London, throughout the summer of 2019.
Property of a Private American Collector O♦
8. David Hockney
Studio Interior #2 signed, titled and dated ‘Studio Interior #2 David Hockney 2014’ on the reverse acrylic on canvas 121.9 x 182.9 cm (47 7/8 x 72 in.) Painted in 2014. Estimate £2,500,000-3,500,000 $3,170,000-4,440,000 €2,820,000-3,950,000 ‡ ♠ plus Buyers Premium and VAT, ARR applies*
Provenance L.A. Louver, Los Angeles Acquired from the above by the present owner Exhibited London, Annely Juda Fine Art; Los Angeles, L.A. Louver, David Hockney, Painting and Photography, 15 May - 19 September 2015, n.p. (illustrated) Literature ‘A new perspective on Hockney’s paintings’, BBC Arts, 2015, online (illustrated)
The second of four painterly iterations of David Hockney’s Pembroke studios in London, Studio Interior #2, 2014, employs the artist’s distinctively exuberant palette and omnifarious take on perspective to bring the viewer into one of his preferred habitats. By virtue of its inviting subject matter, Studio Interior #2 exudes a particularly intimate tone; it depicts the objects that populate Hockney’s interior world, and even more interestingly the artist’s arrangement of them, presumably disposed like chess pieces to best ft the formal and conceptual requirements of his particular vision. As a result, and as with the rest of Hockney’s paintings from this series, the furniture is portrayed as if foating in the room, with each object delineated as a self-contained study in its own right. The collection of objects, together, function like interdependent agents; they are not claustrophobically assembled to ft in the composition’s frame but instead dispersed to fll the space they inhabit.
David Hockney, Van Gogh Chair, 1988, acrylic on canvas. © David Hockney.
Exhibited at Hockney’s Painting and Photography show at Annely Juda Fine Art in 2015, Studio Interior #2 was displayed alongside a selection of forty works which demonstrated the artist’s novel approach to creation, heavily vested with confounding painterly rendition, straddling verisimilitude and allusive abstraction. According to Hockney, these new works provided ‘a 3D efect without the glasses’: a feat that Studio Interior #2 subtly and elegantly embodies, as elements are cut out from the frame, zoomed into, and endowed with pulsating colour so as to create an irrepressible impression of movement (David Hockney, ‘David Hockney Discusses Perspective at Annely Juda Fine Art’, Artlyst, 7 May 2015, online). Since the 1980s, Hockney has made works in series, relentlessly pursuing the same format until its aesthetic possibilities were exhausted. In the case of the present work, Study Interior #2 belongs to an eponymous series that spotlights the same furniture from diferent angles and in varying guises, with one armchair, two wooden chairs, two benches, a large table and a cofee table presented as a vivid assemblage, respectively coloured with acidic cyan, blood orange, carmine red, electric blue and leafy green. Yet, the painting also falls within a larger cycle of works that Hockney made in reference to the interior, and more specifcally the studio. Splitting his time between his studios in Pembroke, London, and Hollywood Hills, Los Angeles, the artist has portrayed both environments in numerous paintings since the 1980s, notably exemplifed by his Large Interior, Los Angeles, 1988, today residing in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. ‘Each project is conducted in a spirit of scientifc experimentation, as if a hypothesis were being subjected to the most rigorous testing’, wrote Tim Barringer (Tim Barringer, ‘Enigma Variations: Hockney and the Portrait’, David Hockney: 82 Portraits + 1 Still Life, exh. cat., Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2016, p. 42).
‘There is always a void between you and the photograph. I am taking this void away, to put you in the picture’. David Hockney
Study Interior #2 follows this diligent enterprise; it is one of four paintings attending to the same scene and protagonists, so as to best capture the reality of the image in all its varying possibilities. The most open of his Study Interiors from 2014, Study Interior #2 provides a privileged look into each of the object’s physicalities, as the viewer is placed as if within the scene – a supposed visitor able to sit down on the inviting benches or public-facing armchair. In a large portion of Hockney’s work, including the paintings that portray scenes drenched with human exposure and contact, it is not people who come to the fore but rather their surroundings, and the phenomenological power of places and objects as entities. Studio Interior #2 demonstrates this dynamic prodigiously, as it conjures a scene without a breath, resisting the typical blandness of still lifes and interior depictions, and instead suggesting the presence of a human hand, arranging and re-arranging the furniture within the room. As Hockney worked on this particular composition serially, making some pieces of furniture crop up again and again like motifs, there is the notion that Hockney is conveying the developments of a story, taking us through the physical meanderings of a visitor as he makes his way around the room, observing the diferent details and creases of each object with an overarching eye. Domesticity, familiarity and intimacy run through Hockney’s work, and it seems that he himself gets to know the places he represents better in the process of painting them. This is true of Study Interior #2, where the furniture is subjected to unfaltering scrutiny: Hockney paints them with not just with intimacy, but also with purpose.
David Hockney, Studio Interior No. 1, 2014, acrylic on canvas.
David Hockney, Studio Interior No. 4, 2014-2015, acrylic on canvas.
© David Hockney. Photo Credit: Richard Schmidt.
© David Hockney. Photo Credit: Richard Schmidt.
David Hockney, Studio Interior No. 3, 2014, acrylic on canvas. © David Hockney. Photo Credit: Richard Schmidt.
‘When you walk into a room, you don’t notice everything at once and, depending on your taste, there is a descending order in which you observe things. […] I deliberately ignored the walls, and I didn’t paint the foor or anything I didn’t consider important’. David Hockney
David Hockney with Interior No. 4, 2015. © David Hockney. Image: Shutterstock
‘A good painting has real ambiguities which you never get to grips with, and that’s what’s so tantalising’. David Hockney
Study Interior #2, in its chromatic vibrancy, is redolent of the dynamic tableaux imagined by the Fauvists in the early days of the 20th century. Deliberately toning down the hues that surround the room’s furniture to leave more countenance to each of the objects’ pulsating colours, Hockney employs a method akin to photography, vested with high contrasts and saturation. In a frontispiece dedicated to his solo show at Annely Juda Fine Art, 2015, where the present painting appeared, Hockney celebrated the stunning invention of digital photography as one able to free the artist ‘from a chemically imposed perspective that has lasted for 180 years’ (David Hockney, quoted in David Hockney: Painting and Photography, exh. cat., Annely Juda Fine Art, London, 2015, n.p.). With its truncated perspective and its overly exaggerated hues, Study Interior #2 aligns with artifcial imagery that is manipulated at one’s own guise and on one’s own terms. It is evocative of the artist’s own radical experimentation with photography, which he commenced in 1982 through an avid use of polaroids. Yet, still, Study Interior #2 recalls older movements, and notably André Derain’s Fauvist rendition of a natural scene in his 1906 La Danse. Depicting dancing women interlaced with trees and snakes in the most heated of colours, La Danse conveys an image that is more dreamlike than real, evoking the sublimed and almost surreal visions of Baudelaire’s Paradis Artifciels. With art historical quotes ranging from the past and methodical references turned towards the future, Study Interior #2 demonstrates its timeless relevance and pictorial impact.
Vincent van Gogh, La chambre de van Gogh à Arles, 1889, oil on canvas, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Image: SCALA, Florence.
Henri Matisse, The Pink Studio, 1911, oil on canvas, Pushkin Museum, Moscow. © Succession H. Matisse / DACS 2019. Image: Bridgeman Images.
Thomas Rowlandson, Students Learning to Paint, 1808, etching with watercolour. Image: Bridgeman Images.
Vilhelm Hammershøi, Interior, Stangrade 20, 1904, oil on canvas. Image: SCALA. Florence.
In addition to its art historical lineage relating to the use of colour, credited to colourists and continued colourexperiments of the present day, the portrayed interior evokes a myriad other visual sources that touch on the work’s profusely addressed theme. Straddling notions of domesticity and wilderness, Study Interior #2 indeed conjures Henri Rousseau’s feral natural settings as much as it does Vincent van Gogh’s room in Arles, iconically materialised in his 1889 painting now residing in the Musée d’Orsay, Paris. With the present work, Hockney masterfully creates an atmosphere of incredible openness, with unbridled hues and cut-of corners that suggest expansion beyond the picture frame. The artist’s studio arrangement, idiosyncratically neat and well-positioned, echoes Henri Matisse’s similarly idealised working space projected in both The Red Studio and The Pink Studio, respectively from 1911. He equally cites earlier manifestations of interiors, going back to the perspectival
concern that preoccupied late 18th and early 19th century painters. Thomas Rowlandson’s Students Learning How To Paint, 1808, for instance, focuses on the soaring heights of Pall Mall interiors, exploring the physical dispositions of the space at hand more so than the depicted scene. Later, painters like Vilhelm Hammershøi brought attention back to the poetry that may be found in space, and the human breath that continuously nourishes it despite physical absence. A result of all these art historical meanderings, David Hockney’s Studio Interior #2 is also fundamentally selfreferential. According to Chris Stephens, the artist’s imagery touching on the world of interiors stems from the lessons he learned from his work in the theatre, his photo collages from the 1980s and his cubist-inspired Los Angeles landscapes, all experiences that equally counted upon the sustained observation of topography as a subject matter.
André Derain, La Danse, 1906, oil on canvas. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2019. Image: Bridgeman Images.
Furthermore, the paintings Hockney conceived from the present series in 2014 seem to literally quote one another, as if to embed the artist’s past presence in new artistic manifestations. In Studio Interior #3 and Studio Interior #4, the current oil on canvas is shown hung on the wall, signifying its infuence on the subsequent iterations that were to fnalise his eponymous series. More so than receptacles of viewership and visitor projection, the paintings from Hockney’s opus thus also transform into mirrors that refect their kin, quoting sources and refecting them ad infnitum. ‘You begin to see how many choices you can make in even these simple things right in front of you. How exciting they are’ (David Hockney, quoted in Pierre de Jonge, ‘Interview with David Hockney’, David Hockney: Paintings and Photographs of Paintings, exh. cat., Museum Boymans-Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, 1995, p. 34). A brilliant example from Hockney’s sustained investigation of perspective as a subject matter, brimming with inimitably vibrant colour and strong conceptual vigour in association with its three sister paintings, Studio Interior #2 contains all the pictorial idiosyncrasies that have hailed the artist as Britain’s greatest living painter.
‘The reason we have perspective with a vanishing point, is that it came from optics. I am sure that that’s what Brunelleschi did. He used a fve inch diameter concave mirror to project the Baptistry onto his panel. This gives automatically a perspective picture, just like a camera would. I am taking this void away, to put you in the picture’. David Hockney
Andy Warhol, Miles Fiterman, 1975. © 2019 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Andy Warhol, Shirley Fiterman, 1976. © 2019 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Alexander Calder, Joan Miró, Jean Dubufet, Willem de Kooning – the list of esteemed names that constitute the Miles and Shirley Fiterman Collection reads like a crosscontinental survey of the 20th century’s most infuential artists. Born out of the seminal decade of the 1960s, the collection is not only a tribute to the dawning of a revolutionary era, but a witness to its making. To look at how Miles and Shirley Fiterman collected is to understand the importance of the collector at this crucial point in postwar history. Whilst few individuals have gathered artworks of such quality and importance, fewer still have done so across four decades, as new masterpieces were created by the same artists that they met and supported. A unique afnity with the zeitgeist and an ability to act ahead of the curve is what binds this collection to the industrial achievements of its proprietors. Intuitive, innovative and entrepreneurial, Miles Q. Fiterman was highly infuential in the construction boom following World War II, catering to the unprecedented demand for housing Miles Homes Inc., which he founded in 1946, grew to be the nation’s largest supplier of prefabricated housing prior to its sale in 1972. The Miles and Shirley Fiterman Collection astutely harnesses the common aesthetic impulses of the 20th century and allows us to investigate their variations. Bold yet elegant, expressing both formal balance and expressive abandon, the collection celebrates the ability of art to imagine the world anew.
Based in Minneapolis, Miles and Shirley Fiterman formed part of a conduit between the international contemporary art scene and their beloved home city. Their sustained eforts to bring great art to the region manifested in their lifelong support of the Walker Art Center and The Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Highly personal, astutely connoisseurial and indelibly philanthropic, the Fitermans’ model of collecting was built on several important foundations: the personal relationships that they built with trailblazing dealers and gallerists such as Gordon Locksley and Aimé Maeght; the acquisition of exemplary works by the revolutionary artists that they met and forged frienships with – including Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg; sustained patronage to museums that championed the causes of modern and contemporary art; and their proactive role in providing greater access to education in art. The couple were patrons of and enabled acquisitions at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, where the Fiterman name graces several of the museum’s buildings. Miles and Shirley Fiterman were also active patrons within the locale of their other residence in Palm Beach, Florida. Both sat on the board of the Norton Museum of Art, where Mrs. Fiterman went on to assume the role of board president. Outside of the United States, Miles and Shirley Fiterman were honored as Patrons of the Year in 2001 at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and the Tel Aviv Museum, where they also served as board members. As arbiters of taste, champions of groundbreaking artists, Miles and Shirley Fiterman did not simply collect – in essence, they defned what it was to be a collector in the 20th century.
9. Alexander Calder
Two Moons incised with the artist’s monogram and date ‘CA 69’ on the base sheet metal, wire and paint 76.2 x 121.9 x 45.7 cm (30 x 48 x 18 in.) Executed in 1969, this work is registered in the archives of the Calder Foundation, New York, under application number A00710. Estimate £500,000-700,000 $635,000-889,000 €564,000-789,000 ‡ plus Buyers Premium and VAT*
Provenance Estate of the Artist The Pace Gallery, New York Acquired from the above by the present owners in 1986 Exhibited New York, M. Knoedler & Co., Inc., Alexander Calder: Standing Mobiles, 4 December 1980 - 2 January 1981, p. 12 (illustrated) St. Louis, Greenberg Gallery and Missouri Botanical Garden, Calder in Retrospect, 1 September - 2 October 1983, p. 5 (illustrated, cover) New York, The Pace Gallery, Calder’s Calders: Selected Works from the Artist’s Collection, 3 May - 8 June 1985, pp. 42-43 (illustrated) Literature Mike Venezia, Getting to Know the World’s Greatest Artists: Alexander Calder, New York, 1998, p. 26 (illustrated)
Presenting Alexander Calder’s most celebrated innovations in a single elegant sculptural mass, Two Moons, 1969, stands halfway between a ‘mobile’ and a ‘stabile’, the artist’s two most important sculptural manifestations. Supported by a solid, swirling base, the sculpture extends its arms into thin girating rods and wires above, adopting the shape of an indistinct biomorphic creature able to energise its human surroundings. The construction’s multicoloured base is counterbalanced by a duality of black and yellow hues on either side of the sculpture’s upper half, lifed and suspended from the work’s serpentine skeleton. A study in spatial arrangements and chromatic multiplicity, Two Moons provides the viewer with an experience akin to star-gazing: the slow orbiting of the two upper elements and the chromatic vibrancy of the supporting structure evoke the mystifying appearance of stars as they travel through the inky depths of the cosmos. With idiosyncratic grace and delicacy, Calder’s abstractions propel their architectural shell into a celestial realm that removes them from perceived notions of space and time. Calder developed his exquisitely graceful artistic universe over the course of six prolifc decades. Having begun his career in the mid-1920s, he was the son of a well-known sculptor who himself came from a family of successful artists. Not long afer graduating with a degree in mechanical engineering, Calder served as a freman in the boiler room on the passenger ship H.F. Alexander - an experience during which he spent most of his nights on deck observing the sea and sky. With a new appreciation for the natural forces and shapes surrounding him, he contemplatively described his experience of observing the sun and moon with a renewed eye: ‘It was early one morning on a calm sea, of Guatemala, when over my couch—a coil of rope—I saw the beginning of a fery red sunrise on one side and the moon looking like a silver coin on the other’ (Alexander Calder, An Autobiography With Pictures, New York, 1966, pp. 54-55). By the time he executed the present work, Calder’s poetic vision was gaining increasing critical attention, with major retrospectives in such esteemed institutions as the Guggenheim Museum in New York, 1964, the Museum of Fine
Arts, in Houston, 1964, and the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris, 1965. These anticipated his solo exhibition at the Fondation Maeght in 1969, and his seminal retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in 1976. As expressed by Jean-Paul Sartre in a 1946 essay celebrating Calder’s prodigious artistic energy, ‘If it is true that in sculpture movement must be cut into the motionless, then it would be an error to relate Calder’s art to sculpture’ (JeanPaul Sartre, ‘Existentialist on Mobilist’, December 1947, online). Ceaselessly animating the space they occupy, Calder’s ‘mobiles’ and ‘stabiles’ resemble materialised levitations. They challenge the sculptural medium’s traditions of staticity and conventional presentation, and, - whether designed to hang from ceilings, stand on grounded supports, or remain static in natural settings - they echo Sartre’s claim that by defnition, they are in fact anything but sculptures. Two Moons is an excellent example of this phenomelogically-inclined – and fundamentally atypical – practice. Though its physical shell is composed of industrial materials such as metal sheets, rods, and wires, its overall appearance resists the outward aspect of man-made structures and instead comes closer to an assemblage of natural, cosmic elements. When asked by Katharine Kuh what infuenced him more between nature and modern machinery, Calder replied: ‘Nature. I haven’t really touched machinery except for a few elementary mechanisms like levers and balances. You see nature and then you try to emulate it’ (Alexander Calder, quoted in ‘Alexander Calder’, The Artist’s Voice: Talks with Seventeen Artists, New York, 1962, online). Candidly engaging the dynamic energies that populate the outside world, Calder creates works that are akin to crystallised poems, or drawings in space. Yet in order to execute his ethereal visions and project them in real space, the artist followed a meticulous method enacted through the careful use and manipulation of a particular set of materials. ‘Calder’s characteristic material is metal’, wrote James Johnson Sweeney. ‘He has always avoided modelling in favour of direct handling - cutting, shaping with a hammer,
Ô[CalderÕs] was an art not of isolated or singular objects but of a dialogue between objectsÑof disparate but linked elements and forcesÕ. Jed Perl, Calder: The Conquest of Time, The Early Years: 1898–1940, New York, 2017, p. 141
Joan Miró, Femmes, oiseau au clair de lune, 1949, oil on canvas, Tate Collection, London. © Successió Miró / ADAGP, Paris and DACS London 2019. Image: Tate, London.
or assembling piece by piece. Such an approach has fostered a simplicity of form and clarity of contour in his work. It allies him with [Constantin] Brâncuși, [Jean] Arp, [Henry] Moore and [Alberto] Giacometti in their repudiation of virtuosity’ (James Johnson Sweeney, Alexander Calder, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1951, n.p.). Standing within the ranks of such seminal modern fgures, who Sweeney contends are Calder’s conceptual kin, the artist furthermore shared close relationships with a number of artists who informed his own practice. Among close friends, the artist counted Arp, who came up with the linguistic contraction ‘stabile’ in 1932, and Marcel Duchamp, who coined the term ‘mobile’ the previous year. Like Arp, Calder shared the tendency to employ an organic language in his work. Straddling smooth abstraction and allusive fguration, both of the artists’ oeuvres ofer a visual language that appears incredibly simple yet conceals great labour and precision. A highly poetic trait equally loomed in Joan Miro’s work, who shared a lifelong friendship with Calder. Having met in 1928, Miró and Calder kept intense proximities until an old age, with continuous correspondence disrupted only by war. Both artists created independent ‘Constellation’ series in the early 1940s - in Calder’s case the name for his open compositions having been proposed by Sweeney and Duchamp. ‘Well, the archaeologists will tell you there’s a little bit of Miró in Calder and a little bit of Calder in Miró’ wrote Calder. Where Miró dotted his paintings with ideograms, including natural protagonists such as birds, moons, stars, and fowers, Calder invoked abstract elements in order to most potently echo the idea of lively embodiment with which he imparted his sculptural works. In Two Moons, the small yellow elements kinetically gyrating with the force of the wind, the conviction of a breath, or the swirl of a movement, aptly illustrate Calder’s belief that art emerges upon the convergence of myriad factors: ‘volumes, motion, spaces bounded by the great space, the universe’ (Alexander Calder, quoted in Abstraction-Création, Art Non Figuratif, no. 1, Paris, 1932).
10. Roy Lichtenstein
The Conductor signed and dated ‘rf Lichtenstein ‘75’ on the reverse oil and Magna on canvas 188 x 137.2 cm (74 x 54 in.) Painted in 1975, this work will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné being prepared by the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation. Estimate £4,000,000-6,000,000 $5,080,000-7,630,000 €4,510,000-6,770,000 ‡ plus Buyers Premium and VAT*
Provenance Leo Castelli, New York The Mayor Gallery, London (acquired from the above in early 1976) Acquired from the above by the present owners on 3 June 1976 Literature Jack Cowart, Roy Lichtenstein 1970-1980, New York, 1981, pp. 97 and 173
A virtuosic pop transformation of Italian Futurism, The Conductor, 1975, boasts Roy Lichtenstein’s characteristically delineated forms, his distinct red, blue and yellow colour palette, and his iconic Ben-Day dots. Taking Gino Severini’s monumental Mare = ballerina (Sea = Dancer), 1914, as a point of departure, Lichtenstein reinterprets the Futurist composition and places it within his iconic visual syntax, rooted in the nostalgia and commercialism of comic books and advertising materials. The present work is an unquestionable masterpiece of Lichtenstein’s widely celebrated oeuvre, and one that additionally holds singular academic importance. The Conductor, along with a panoply of works from the 1970s based on paintings by modern masters, demonstrates Lichtenstein’s renewed engagement with complex art historical themes that he had considered in early works such as Femme au Chapeau, 1962, and Woman With Flowered Hat, 1963, as well as other paintings based on works by Pablo Picasso, Paul Cézanne and Piet Mondrian. It was in 1974, however, one year before the execution of the present work, that Lichtenstein frst engaged with Futurism as his subject matter, painting a limited number of Futurist-inspired works between 1974-1976. Examples of Lichtenstein’s Futurist paintings are held in prominent collections: his monumental The Red Horseman, 1974, resides at the Ludwig Forum for International Art, Aachen (currently on loan to the Museum Moderner Kunst Stifung Ludwig, Vienna) and his Violin, 1976, at the Denver Art Museum. This cycle of works embodies Lichtenstein’s creative genius at the apex of his extraordinary career. Musing on the evolution of his artistic subject, Lichtenstein noted, ‘I also started to use the work of modern masters as subject matter… Instead of using subject matter that was considered vernacular, or everyday, I used subject matter that was celebrated as art’ (Roy Lichtenstein, quoted in ‘A Review of My Work Since 1961’, Bader, 2009, p. 69). Moving away from the comic-book aesthetic that had brought him to prominence in the 1960s, Lichtenstein’s abiding interest in questions of art’s meaning, form, content and style once again came to the fore in the early 1970s, as his practice became less narrative and more abstract. Examining higher artistic sources and the grandeur of artistic movements, he created compositions based on the avant-garde movements of 20th century art history, meditating on the nature of the creative enterprise itself.
ÔI also started to use the work of modern masters as subject matterÉ Instead of using subject matter that was considered vernacular, or everyday, I used subject matter that was celebrated as artÕ. Roy Lichtenstein
Roy Lichtenstein, Study for the Conductor, 1975, pencil and coloured pencils on paper. © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein/DACS 2019.
Gino Severini, Mare = ballerina, 1914, oil on canvas, in artist's frame, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2019. Image: Bridgeman Images.
In his seminal canvases responding to Cubism, Futurism, Surrealism and German Expressionism, the pristine lines and precise dots underline Lichtenstein’s self-consciously cultivated aura of industrial production, intrinsic to the Pop Art narrative and his response to the painterly nature of Abstract Expressionist painting. In the present work, however, the carefully traced lines and vivid arrangement of colour is far from automated; the preparatory drawing reveals how carefully the composition took form, the hand-painted surface animated with vigour despite its rigid delineation. Revisiting the act of quotation and the qualities it contributes to his new works, Lichtenstein’s ‘1970s quotations from within art should not mislead us into thinking that Lichtenstein’s interest is purely aesthetic. He is not setting up an art-for-art’s sake loop...On the contrary, Lichtenstein preserves historical diferences between source and variants...The disparity between
Georges Seurat, Le Chahut, 1889-90, oil on canvas, Rijksmuseum Kroller-Muller, Otterlo. Image: Bridgeman Images.
that which is quoted and the form in which the quotation is made builds distortion into the reference, any reference. The clarity of Lichtenstein’s composition is like a façade in front of crumbling rooms’ (Laurence Alloway, Lichtenstein, New York, 1983, p. 84). Reinterpreting Severini’s painting using his distinctively unmodulated colours, Ben-Day dots and a frm network of intersecting arcs and lines, Lichtenstein halted the image, suspending the futuristic sense of rapid motion. Instilling the work with renewed movement through the gradated Ben-Day dots, the artist placed the composition within his distinctly pop aesthetic. Lichtenstein’s monumental painting bridges the tense realm between originality, homage and imitation, moving beyond the pixelated ideals of his earlier comic book paintings, yet raising similar questions of legitimacy, parody, pastiche and transformation within artistic creation.
In his earlier examinations of modern art as a subject matter, Lichtenstein became particularly engaged with the work of Picasso, completing a number of paintings afer the Cubist master and noting that, ‘Picasso’s always been such a huge infuence… I don’t think that I’m over his infuence’ (Roy Lichtenstein, quoted in David Sylvester, Lichtenstein: All About Art, London, 2003, p. 58). The present work, with the musical undertone of the conductor, echoes Picasso’s Pierrot as Orchestra Conductor, 1920-1923, a fragmented stencil of overlapping planes that precedes the present fusion of Pop Art and Futurism. Here Lichtenstein’s vast repertoire of source material and multifarious infuences come to the fore. In The Conductor, Lichtenstein reframes Severini’s Sea = Dancer both literally and metaphorically. Evocative of the work, but not directly quoting Severini’s composition, The Conductor marks a progression from Lichtenstein’s early art history paintings which, though rendered in a pop aesthetic, remain intrinsically attached to their source paintings.
Luigi Russolo and his assistant Piatti with the Intonarumori (noise machines), 1914, ‘The Art of Noises Manifesto’, 1913. Image: Lebrecht Music Arts/Bridgman Images.
Taking the combined forms of Severini’s original canvas, Lichtenstein has fragmented, juxtaposed and recomposed the composition, as Jack Cowart astutely noted, Lichtenstein’s masterly paintings constitute ‘a rich dialogue of forms —all intuitively modifed and released from their nominal sources’ (Jack Cowart, Roy Lichtenstein 1970–1980, New York, 1981, p. 109). Portraying a conductor of machinery or a musical director, the lyrical yet fragmented nature of the composition alludes to both the musical and the technological, leaving the composition in a liminal state. Severini’s original canvas is thought to have a specifc source in George Seurat’s pointillist Le Chahut, 1889-1890, exposing the continued importance of pastiche within the canon of painting. Le Chahut depicts a feeting scene of Parisian nightlife in which women and men are dancing the risqué chahut, or can-can, legs and skirts whimsically aligned and thrown into the air.
Roy Lichtenstein in his Southampton studio, New York, 1977. Courtesy The Roy Lichtenstein Foundation Archives. Artwork: © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein/DACS 2019. Photograph: Unknown photographer.
‘After being conquered by Futurist eyes our multiplied sensibilities will at last hear with Futurist ears. In this way the motors and machines of our industrial cities will one day be consciously attuned, so that every factory will be transformed into an intoxicating orchestra of noises’. Luigi Russolo, L’Arte dei Rumori, Milan, 1913
In the present work, Lichtenstein’s conductor appears to mirror the graduated lines and calculated arrangement of Seurat’s canvas, as does Severini’s, Sea = Dancer. Each canvas progresses through the modernity of its own space and time, yet the common fundamental concern with the efects of light and colour and the compositional means of recreating these forces, remains. While Seurat employs his strict pointillist system of minute dots of paint, Severini applies larger divisionist brushstrokes, divided by the futuristic curvature of line. In Lichtenstein’s pop interpretation of the subject, the artist masterfully engages his characteristic Ben-Day dots to cast the illusion of motion as the conductor casts his signal, allowing the canvas to surge with the vivacity of a pointillist masterwork. Committed to the action of the present, Futurism paved the way for the avant-garde at the dawn of the 20th century. Like Pop, Futurism rejected tradition and sought inspiration from new technology.
Within this light, it seems distinctly ftting that Lichtenstein should select Futurism as a concern for a limited number of his art historical paintings, asking questions on concept, form and technique. At the time, in the catalogue for the 1961 Museum of Modern Art Futurist exhibition, which Lichtenstein most likely visited, Joshua Taylor observed the importance of Futurism, anticipating the impact that the movement would have on Lichtenstein. ‘The Futurists were not only the frst artists to take cognizance of the dynamism of a technological society, but they also produced works of art of extraordinary emotional impact. They translated the kinetic rhythms and the confused, intense sensations of modern life into potent visual form. The Futurists’ approach to art, their manifestos and demonstrations, set a pattern for many art movements which followed’ (Joshua Taylor, Futurism, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1961, p. 7).
Roy Lichtenstein, Femme au Chapeau, 1962, oil on canvas.
The intoxicating force of Filippo Marinetti’s ‘Futurist Manifesto’ radiates through the history of 20th century art and music. With colour as important as motion, artist and instrument builder Luigi Russolo looked to futuristic musical interventions to bolster his artistic repertoire. Russolo was the frst of many visual artists who sought to paint with sound; ‘I am not a musician,’ he penned, ‘I am a Futurist painter using a much loved art to project my determination to renew everything. And so... unconcerned by my apparent incompetence and convinced that all rights and possibilities open up to daring, I have been able to initiate the great renewal of music by means of the Art of Noises’ (Luigi Russolo, ‘L’Arte dei Rumori’, Milan, 1913). Anticipating the early percussion scores of Edgard Varèse and John Cage, Russolo as a ‘conductor’ of futuristic music brought on a progression that resonates into contemporary sound, from sound design in flm, to television and computer games. Referencing the Futurists in both composition and inspiration, the fragmented conductor within Lichtenstein’s abstract portrait nods to Russolo’s Manifesto ‘The Art of Noises’ where he asserts that ‘The limited circle of pure sounds must be broken, and the infnite variety of ‘noise-sound’ conquered’ (Luigi Russolo, ‘L’Arte dei Rumori’, Milan, 1913).
© Estate of Roy Lichtenstein/DACS/ Artimage 2019.
Echoing the Futurists’ concern with pace, praising a ‘new beauty: the beauty of speed’, materialised by ‘A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath ... a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fre, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace’, Lichtenstein demonstrated a dedication to motion and speed throughout his oeuvre, depicting cars and horses, dramatic explosions, pops and bangs (Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, ‘Manifesto of Futurism’, Le Figaro, Paris, 20 February 1909). In The Conductor, Lichtenstein transforms the futuristic manner of depicting speed, systematically portraying jagged, dissected planes. The artist nods towards the hallmark of futurism, yet he takes the canvas beyond the confnes of the earlier movement.
Roy Lichtenstein, The Violin, 1976, oil and Magna on canvas, Denver Art Museum. © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein/DACS/Artimage 2019.
‘All my art is, in some way, about other art’. Roy Lichtenstein
Severini’s radiating power of light is transformed into Lichtenstein’s faceted plane and sliced composition. Appropriating Severini’s complex and dynamic painterly division, initially used by the Futurist master to evoke the sense of movement in space, Lichtenstein transposes the arcs of the original composition into his simplifed forms allowing the intersecting black vectors to anchor the image to the canvas. Refning the already abstracted image, Lichtenstein questions the futuristic source image. Criticising the shortcomings of futuristic depiction of action whilst confrming the intrinsic link between high art and popular culture, the artist mused ‘Futurism does show motion, but it does not show motion very well, painting is not a time art. But I am interested in the quirky results of those derivatives of Cubism and like to push this quirkiness further toward the absurd. I am also interested in the relationship between depictions of movement in Futurism and in comic-strips’ (Roy Lichtenstein, quoted in ‘A Review of My Work Since 1961’, Bader, 2009, p. 69). The Conductor, a singular example of Lichtenstein’s musings on modern art, was painted shortly afer Diane Waldman published the frst retrospective monograph on Lichtenstein in 1972, suggesting that perhaps Lichtenstein himself had been compelled to refect on his previous work and his status as an artist within the established canon of 20th century art. Motivated by an absolute visual interest in the varying styles of his great artistic forebears, the artist noted, ‘I had no program; I always thought each one was the last. But then I’d see something like a way of doing a Monet through just dots that would look like a machine-made Impressionist painting’ (Roy Lichtenstein, quoted in Roy Lichtenstein: All About Art, exh. cat., Louisiana Museum of Art, Louisiana, 2004). A fawless union between Futurism and Pop Art, The Conductor is an eloquent example of Lichtenstein’s continued engagement with notions of creativity and authenticity, demonstrating his remarkable ability to celebrate the possibilities of popular imagery.
Property from the Miles and Shirley Fiterman Collection O
11. Pablo Picasso
Homme assis (Mardi gras) titled and dated ‘Mardi gras 15.2.72 II’ on the reverse oil on canvas 129.5 x 97.2 cm (51 x 38 1/4 in.) Painted on 15 February 1972. Estimate £2,500,000-3,500,000 $3,180,000-4,450,000 €2,820,000-3,950,000 ‡ ♠ plus Buyers Premium and VAT, ARR applies*
Provenance Amman Fine Art, Zurich The Mayor Gallery, London (acquired from the above in June 1983) Acquired from the above by the present owners on 16 September 1985 Exhibited Avignon, Palais des Papes, Picasso, 1970-1972, 201 Peintures, 23 May - 23 September 1973, no. 174, p. 235 (illustrated, p. 202) London, The Mayor Gallery, Picasso, 22 March - 29 April 1983, n.p. (illustrated) Literature Rafael Alberti, Picasso: Le rayon ininterrompu, Paris, 1974, p. 238, no. 192 (illustrated as no. 193) Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, Oeuvres de 1971 - 1972, vol. 33, Paris, 1978, no. 317, p. 111 (illustrated) Picasso: Mosqueteros, exh. cat., Gagosian Gallery, New York, 2009, fg. 73, pp. 165, 266 and back cover (Palais des Papes, Avignon 1973 installation view illustrated)
The last window of indulgence before the long fast of Lent, Mardi Gras is traditionally associated with notions of permissiveness and hedonism. Yet for Pablo Picasso, the carnival celebrations that took place on 15 February 1972 were limited to his studio: on that day, he completed three oil paintings, a formidable efort for a man who had turned ninety the previous year. Of these, Homme assis (Mardi gras) shows one of Picasso’s celebrated ‘Musketeers’, the dashing warriors who leapt from the courts of the 17th century into the works of the painter’s brilliantly-productive last decade. The painting was selected by Picasso for his famous exhibition held in the Palais des Papes in Avignon in 1973, yet as the artist sufered from heart failure on 8 April 1973, he regrettably never saw his work hung in the Palais’ grandiose setting. Picasso afectionately referred to the dapper warriors in his paintings of this period as his ‘Musketeers’. In doing so, he aligned them with a history of swagger and swashbuckling doubtlessly looking back to the precedents from his own native Spain, where the original mosqueteros were painted by celebrated 17th century artists. Picasso himself ascribed the source of this marauding gang of dashing cavaliers to a singularly British source, telling his biographer Pierre Daix that, ‘It’s all the fault of your old pal Shakespeare’ (Pablo Picasso, quoted in Pierre Daix, Picasso: Life and Art, New York, 1993, p. 355). This was a reference to some drawings that Picasso had created in 1964 at Daix’s request, marking the quatercentenary of the English playwright’s birth. By the time that Homme assis (Mardi gras) was painted, the ‘Musketeers’ had been strutting through Picasso’s paintings for over half a decade. In fact, they had emerged in the mid1960s, shortly after Shakespeare’s quatercentenary, and more importantly when he was recovering from an operation that took place in Paris in 1965. Jacqueline Roque, Picasso’s widow, would later tell the French politician and author André Malraux, himself a friend of the artist, that the musketeers ‘came to Pablo when he’d gone back to studying Rembrandt’ (Jacqueline Roque, quoted in André Malraux, Picasso’s Mask, New York, 1976, p. 4). This was during his recuperation, when he devoured all sorts of media, not least the newly-published six-volume set of Otto Benesch’s catalogue of Rembrandt’s
complete drawings. Picasso was even known to use a projector to show a slide of Rembrandt’s Night Watch, 1642, the celebrated masterpiece in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, against a wall, allowing the characters to become life-sized, immersing himself and his assembled company in their universe. Homme assis (Mardi gras) and its fellow paintings can be seen as parallel processes, with the 17th century characters strutting from the wall and into our worlds. ‘Every painter takes himself for Rembrandt,’ Picasso said (Pablo Picasso, quoted in Françoise Gilot and Carlton Lake, Life with Picasso, New York, 1964, p. 51). Nowhere is this more evident than in Picasso’s works from the 1960s and early 1970s. Only the day afer Picasso painted Homme assis (Mardi gras), he created another work showing a nude female fgure, based on Rembrandt’s etching Naked Woman Seated on a Mound of circa 1631. Sometimes, direct references to the fgures and compositions of Rembrandt’s pictures can be discerned through Picasso’s own works, whereas in other cases the similarities are more in the nature of allusion and atmosphere. In the case of Homme assis (Mardi gras), it is the entire era of the curls, beards and swords of the 17th century that is being conjured, with Rembrandt an important conduit for those visual references. This had been all the more the case from 1969 onwards: that year had seen the proliferation of a number of exhibitions and publications on Rembrandt, celebrating three hundred years since his death. By the time that Homme assis (Mardi gras) was painted, Rembrandt was everywhere. In a sense, Picasso was turning to history to fnd the yardsticks with which to measure his own achievements. This would see him looking at other fgures such as El Greco and Diego Velázquez. In one case, he would even sign a picture with the invented and elaborate pseudonym: ‘Domenico Theotocopulos van Riyn da Silva [sic].’ He was tracing a new imaginary genealogy, paying tribute to artists whom he had revered at diferent points throughout his career. ‘What is a painter after all?’ Picasso asked. ‘A collector who creates his collections by painting other people’s pictures that he admires’ (Pablo Picasso, quoted in Klaus Gallwitz, Picasso: The Heroic Years, New York, 1985, p. 114). Installation view of the present work in Palais des Papes, Picasso, 1970-1972, 201 Peintures, Avignon, 1973. © Succession Picasso/DACS, London 2019.
In the case of Homme assis (Mardi gras), another artistic precedent may be the French artist Philippe de Champaigne. Certainly, Picasso had used de Champaigne’s portrait of the famous Cardinal Richelieu as an inspiration for a number of pictures. Here, however, Picasso has created a picture whose composition echoes the portraits that de Champaigne painted of Richelieu’s ruler, King Louis XIII of France. Picasso would have known both versions: a larger one, with background drapery recalled in Homme assis (Mardi gras), is in the Louvre, Paris, a museum that he knew intimately. Meanwhile, another smaller portrait showing the king in the same position but in a composition more like that of Homme assis (Mardi gras) is in the Prado, Madrid, having been sent there as a gif from Louis’ wife, Anne of Austria, to her brother King Philip IV of Spain. Picasso had spent long hours in the Prado at several junctures of his life, not least when he had created his own variations upon the portraits by Velazquez and El Greco as a young artist. Later, during the Spanish Civil War, he had also been named the director of the Prado by the Republican government, although the conflict prevented him taking up that office in person. That Louis XIII was also the king in Alexandre Dumas’ tales of The Three Musketeers, which
Picasso knew so well, serves to strengthen this possible kinship. Certainly, there is a similarity in the pose, in the long nose and tumbling hair and in the treatment of the rufs and armour, as well as the drapery behind. While the knob shown next to the subject of Homme assis (Mardi gras) recalls those on the chairs of some of Picasso’s seated cavaliers, it may also be a balustrade of some sort, indicating that the subject may not be seated afer all, but instead shown standing like Louis. The great Old Masters were Picasso’s artistic companions and comrades—all the more so as he had outlived so many of his own contemporaries. By the time Homme assis (Mardi gras) was painted, his great friend and rival Henri Matisse had been dead for almost two decades. More recently, other friends such as Georges Braque, André Breton, Jean Cocteau and his old poet and secretary Jaime Sabartés had all died. Picasso, an artist with a notorious and even superstitious fear of death, was left fighting the rearguard action. It was this painful awareness of his own limitations and indeed his mortality that appears to have been the greatest spur to the creative drive that saw Picasso painting some of his most vivid paintings during this period. Looking at Homme assis (Mardi gras),
‘I enjoy myself to no end inventing these stories. I spend hour after hour while I draw, observing my creatures and thinking about the mad things they’re up to’. Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso, Musketeer with a Sword, 1972, oil on canvas, Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art, Hungary. ©Succession Picasso/DACS, London 2019. Image: Bridgeman Images.
Philippe de Champaigne Portrait of the King of France Louis XIII, 1655, oil on canvas, Prado Museum, Madrid.
Frans Hals, The Laughing Cavalier, 1624, oil on canvas, Wallace Collection, London. Image: Bridgeman Images.
Image: Bridgeman Images.
there is an intoxicating immediacy to the brushwork. Some of the texture of the picture is rendered through vigorous squiggles; the hair is a combination of curls and dots that appear to show the artist almost stabbing the canvas. Meanwhile, other lines have been rendered with a balletic grace that belied Picasso’s age. The picture sings of the sheer amount of energy that the artist channelled into the act of its creation. Picasso once said, in words that clearly apply here, that, ‘Each picture is a phial filled with my blood’ (Pablo Picasso, quoted in Marie-Laure Bernadac, ‘Picasso 1953-1972: Painting as Model’, pp. 49-94, Late Picasso: Paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints 1953-1972, exh. cat., London and Paris, 1988, p. 92). The extent to which Picasso has distilled himself into the composition of Homme assis (Mardi gras) is indeed clear to see. The painting is filled with brushwork that speaks of his effortless ability to conjure realities through paint.
The sheer dizzying range of visual effects that Picasso has achieved with only a deliberately-limited palette speak volumes of his capacity for invention. Some of the marks reveal the manner in which he could use what was almost a short-hand as an eloquently economical means of expression, conjuring the subject’s face and indeed character. Picasso had condensed almost a century’s knowledge into his skills, and this was refected in his pictures now, which saw him looking to his own past works as an inspiration, as well as those of his artistic forebears and contemporaries. Thus, in Homme assis (Mardi gras), one sees distortions in the face of the cavalier that recall the Cubism with which he changed the course of modern painting. At the same time, the band of purple that falls down the middle of the subject’s face recalls the famous raie verte, or ‘green stripe’ of his old friend and ardent colourist Matisse, from the celebrated 1905 portrait of his wife—a bold Fauve masterpiece that would serve as a springboard for the inspiration of many other artists. Meanwhile, emphasising the
incredible array of autobiographical strands that underpin the ‘Musketeers’, Picasso may also have been thinking of the frst artist he had known—his father, who was a painter and art teacher. ‘Every time I draw a man, I fnd myself thinking of my father’, Picasso confessed. ‘To me, a man means “Don José”, and it will always be so, all my life... He wore a beard... All the men I draw I see more or less with his features’ (Pablo Picasso, quoted in Marie-Laure Bernadac, ‘Picasso 1953-1972: Painting as Model’, Late Picasso: Paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints 1953-1972, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London, 1988, p. 94). John Richardson has speculated that Picasso’s own appreciation for Rembrandt during the 1960s and early 1970s was sharpened because he identifed with the fact that his artistic forebear’s late works were underappreciated at the time (John Richardson, Late Picasso: Paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints 1953-1972, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London, 1988, p. 36). Certainly, Picasso’s own efforts were not receiving the plaudits to which he had become accustomed. However, he had some supporters who saw the strides that he was making in his paintings during this period. A few years earlier, Roland Penrose had written to Sir Herbert Read of Picasso’s works of the time that, ‘I have a feeling that they are the great achievement of his life, and that they tackle with extraordinary freshness the problems of painting’ (Roland Penrose, quoted in Visiting Picasso: The Notebooks and Letters of Roland Penrose, London, 2006, p. 280). Picasso was still a pioneer, then, throwing caution to the wind in his attacks on the entire nature of the creative act, and it is this that underpins, or rather shines through, pictures such as Homme assis (Mardi gras). The entire mechanics of the making of an image are deconstructed and reassembled. Received concepts of taste are torn up while the canon of Western art is being reassembled. Picasso’s works of this period, then, can be seen in the context of the Art Informel that had swept across Europe, as a response to contemporary issues as well as a conversation with his artistic predecessors. Picasso himself clearly felt this, saying at the time, ‘If I’m painting better, it’s because I’ve had some success in liberating myself... And every so ofen, there is just that little something extra’ (Pablo Picasso, quoted in Pierre Daix, Picasso: Life and Art, New York, 1993, p. 365).
Paul Cézanne, Harlequin, 1888–89, oil on canvas, Rothschild Collection, Cambridge. Image: Bridgeman Images.
‘Every time I draw a man, I fnd myself thinking of my father... To me, a man means “Don José”, and it will always be so, all my life... He wore a beard... All the men I draw I see more or less with his features.’ Pablo Picasso
12. Alberto Giacometti
Diego [tête au col roulé] incised with the artist’s signature and number ‘Alberto Giacometti 4/8’ on the back of the base; further stamped with the foundry mark ‘Susse Fondeur Paris’ on the lef side of the base; further stamped with the foundry mark and incised ‘Susse Fondeur Cire Perdue’ on the inside of the base bronze with green-brown patina 33 x 12.9 x 14.4 cm (12 7/8 x 5 1/8 x 5 5/8 in.) Conceived circa 1954, cast in bronze in 1980 by Susse Fondeur, Paris, this work is cast number 4 from an edition of 8 casts. This work is recorded in the Alberto Giacometti Database under no. 1561, and is accompanied by a certifcate of authenticity from the Giacometti Committee. Estimate £600,000-800,000 $761,000-1,010,000 €678,000-904,000 ‡ plus Buyers Premium and VAT*
Provenance The Estate of Alberto Giacometti Galerie Maeght Lelong, Paris Hôtel des Ventes d’Enghien, Enghien-les-Bains, France, 22 March 22 1987, lot 71 Private Collection, France (acquired at the above sale) Private Collection, London (acquired from the above in 2001) Phillips, New York, 14 May 2015, lot 60 Acquired at the above sale by the present owner
Exhibited Edinburgh, Ingleby Gallery, Sean Scully & Alberto Giacometti: Walls of Aran Head of Diego, 14 July - 21 July 2007 (another example exhibited) Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou, L’atelier d’Alberto Giacometti: Collection de la Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti, 1 October 2007 11 February 2008, no. 200, p. 405 (another example exhibited and illustrated, titled Tête de Diego sur tige) Saint Paul de Vence, Foundation Maeght, Giacometti & Maeght 1946 - 1966, 21 June - 31 October 2010 (another example exhibited) Hong Kong, Gagosian Gallery, Giacometti Without End, 13 March - 21 April 2014, pp. 120-3 (another example exhibited and illustrated, p. 121-3) Landerneau, Fonds Hélène & Édouard Leclerc pour la culture, Giacometti, 14 June - 15 October 2015, pp. 104-5 (another example exhibited and illustrated) Shanghai, Yuz Museum, Alberto Giacometti Retrospective in China, 22 March - 31 July 2016, p. 183 (another example exhibited and illustrated) Basel, Fondation Beyeler, Bacon - Giacometti, 29 April - 2 September 2018, p. 119 and 198 (another example exhibited and illustrated, p. 119) New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Giacometti, 8 June - 12 September 2018 (another example exhibited) Paris, Musée Maillol, Giacometti Entre Tradition et AvantGarde, 14 September 2018 - 20 January 2019, pl. 58, p. 183 (plaster example exhibited and illustrated, p. 114) Literature Jacques Dupin, Alberto Giacometti, Paris, 1962, p. 276 (plaster example illustrated)
An elegant rendering of Diego, Alberto Giacometti’s younger brother and most prominent model, Tête de Diego au col roulé, conceived circa 1954 and later cast in 1980, belongs to a body of sculptural heads and busts that moved away from the artist’s weightlessly elongated figures of the late 1940s. Drawing attention to the rolled collar of his brother’s shirt, Tête de Diego au col roulé, is a sentimental variation on Giacometti’s favoured subject matter. Capturing the artist’s exceptional sculptural sensibility and the sitter’s emotional gravitas, Tête de Diego au col roulé presents the viewer with a scintillating refection of the brothers’ remarkably close relationship. Diego Giacometti, later celebrated as an artist and designer in his own right, lived and worked with his brother Alberto in Paris, assisting his creative enterprises by creating support structures, building plaster casts, and patinating bronze. Sitting regularly for Alberto’s studies, Diego was painstakingly committed to his brother’s craf throughout his lifetime, and it wasn’t until afer Alberto’s death in 1966 that he could turn his full efort and energy to furniture making, with his priorities no longer split. As Alberto’s primary model, Diego
fulflled the role of muse, and each of his brother’s intricate depictions, whether in plaster, oil or charcoal, emits the strength and reality of unfaltering love. In order to achieve the sense of presence and spirit in his heads and busts, Giacometti repeatedly formed and broke down his plaster model during the creation process, musing ‘I shall never succeed in putting into a portrait all the power a head contains’ (Alberto Giacometti, quoted in Reinhold Hohl, ed., Giacometti: A Biography in Pictures, Ostfildern-Ruit, 1998, p. 148). Drawing infuence from ancient Egyptian forms, Giacometti masterfully amalgamated the formal rigour of this ancient culture with the processes of artistic making and seeing. Absorbing reality and translating it into rich, complex forms was Giacometti’s prime creative impulse, and the artist considered Egyptian art to be the closest art form to the reality of nature. Having moved on from his surrealist subject matter of the early 1930s, inspired by and, equally, inspiring the monumental work of Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst and Joan Miró, Giacometti began forming his exceptionally dynamic stick-like fgures in 1935. ‘Giacometti had indeed chosen the
‘When he poses for me I don’t recognise him.’ Alberto Giacometti
Alberto Giacometti, Diego, 1954, oil on canvas. © The Estate of Alberto Giacometti (Fondation Giacometti, Paris and ADAGP, Paris), licensed in the UK by DACS, London 2019. Image: SCALA, Florence.
Diego and Alberto Giacometti in the studio, circa 1954. © The Estate of Alberto Giacometti. Photo: Eli Lotar.
existence of individuals, the here and now as the chief object of his new and future study…He instinctively realized that this object transcended all artistic signs and representations, since it was no less than life itself’ (Yves Bonnefoy, Alberto Giacometti: Biographie d’une oeuvre, Paris, 2012, p. 369). By 1950, with the impression that he had exhausted the potential of his elongated forms, the artist sought to form a more tangible conception of human presence within space. With Annette, his wife, serving as his female model, and Diego as the male sitter, the artist once again committed – and cemented – his younger brother to his sculptural creations. The motion, inherent within his tall, striding fgures, is here entirely removed, as his new subjects took on the form of heads or busts, never stretching farther than their torso. Stripped of active movement, instead teeming with the expressive character of his chief sitter’s face, Giacometti forged an exceptional model brimming with unique life and soul. ‘If the gaze, that is life, is the main thing,’ the artist mused ‘then the head becomes the main thing, without a doubt. The rest of the body is limited to functioning as antennae that make people’s life possible - the life that is housed in the skull’ (Alberto Giacometti, quoted in Yves
Bonnefoy, Alberto Giacometti: Biographie d’une oeuvre, Paris, 2012, p. 146). Further underlining the importance of the eyes as the window to the soul, and the focal point around which his busts are formed, the artist noted: ‘In these sculptures I tried to make an eye…I raised the head on a base until the eye is at eye-level. You see an eye... This is very important... just where the eye hits the sculpture’ (Alberto Giacometti, quoted in Thomas B. Hess, ‘Giacometti: The Uses of Adversity’, Art News, vol. 57, no. 3, May 1958, pp. 34-35). Celebrating a lifelong collaboration with Diego as Alberto’s studio assistant, model, muse, brother and collaborator, the exceptional bond between the two brothers instils the present work with a sense of inimitable intimacy. Extending the frame of the work through sentimental, art historical and mental structures, Tête de Diego au col roulé is an exceptionally multidimensional and emotional fgure, testament to Giacometti’s engaging vision of the human form. Musing on the gravitas and extreme dimensionality of the artist’s creations, Jean-Paul Sartre exclaimed: ‘What I see is teeming cohesion, contained dispersal…. For him, to sculpt is to take the fat of space’ (Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Situations’, George Braziller, The Words: Autobiography of Jean-Paul Sartre, United States, 1965, n.p.).
Property of an Important Private Collector, Europe O
13. Pablo Picasso
Vase de feurs signed ‘Picasso’ lower right oil on canvas 65 x 50.3 cm (25 5/8 x 19 3/4 in.) Painted in 1904. Estimate £2,500,000-3,500,000 $3,170,000-4,440,000 €2,820,000-3,940,000 ‡ ♠ plus Buyers Premium and VAT, ARR applies*
Provenance Olivier Sainsère, Paris Jacques Sainsère, Paris (by descent from the above) Galerie Durand-Ruel, Paris Baron Louis de Chollet, Fribourg (acquired circa 1964) Christie’s, New York, 15 May 1985, lot 31 Private Collection, Europe (acquired at the above sale) Christie’s, New York, 3 November 2004, lot 40 Acquired afersale from the above by the present owner Exhibited Paris, Musée de Orangerie des Tuileries, Chefs-d’oeuvre des collections suisses de Manet à Picasso, May 1967, no. 238, n.p. (illustrated, dated 1901) New York, Michael Werner Gallery, Flowers for Summer, 30 June - 10 September 2011 New York, Gagosian Gallery, Picasso & the Camera, 28 October 2014 - 3 January 2015, pp. 41 and 365 (illustrated) The Hague, Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, 2013-2015 (extended loan) Literature Pierre Daix, Georges Boudaille and Joan Rosselet, Picasso: The Blue and Rose Periods, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, 1900-1906, Neuchâtel, 1966, no. V. 27, p. 156 (illustrated, p. 169; dated 1901) Janet Flanner Genêt, ‘Letter from Paris’, The New Yorker, 10 June 1967, p. 138 Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso: Supplément aux années 1903-1906, vol. 22, Paris, 1970, no. 123, p. 41 (illustrated) Josep Palau i Fabre, Picasso: The Early Years 1881-1907, Oxford, 1981, no. 991, p. 382 (illustrated, titled Jug with Flowers)
In Vase de feurs, 1904, a rich blue background reminiscent of the lapis lazuli used as a pigment by the Old Masters is punctuated by starbursts of fowers, explosions of colour. The various blooms become a showcase in painterly technique, as befts an early picture by Pablo Picasso. This painting was originally considered to date from the very dawn of Picasso’s Blue Period, around 1901, when he was creating a number of similarly-themed still life compositions. Later, it was convincingly suggested that this was in fact a work from September 1904, when Picasso was in Paris, and when the chill and melancholy of the Blue Period were beginning to lif. In Vase de feurs, this is evident in the colours of the petals, which introduce a beguiling warmth and vitality. Many credit this shif in Picasso’s palette, which saw him ushering in the so-called Rose Period, to the beginning of his relationship with Fernande Olivier, who would be his partner for over half a decade, during some of the most important developments in his work. It is a tribute to the quality of Vase de feurs that its frst owner was Olivier Sainsère, one of the most important early patrons of Picasso and indeed a number of other artists, including Henri Matisse. Vase de feurs was later in the collection of Baron Louis de Chollet, a prominent Swiss collector and member of a notable Fribourg family who was depicted by Balthus in a portrait with his daughters. His collection included works by Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.
Regarding the date of Vase de feurs, it was originally seen to relate to a number of other floral still life compositions that Picasso had created during the incredible flurry of activity upon his return to Paris in 1901 and his preparation for his frst signifcant exhibition, at the gallery of Ambroise Vollard. On that occasion, Picasso was sharing the show with one of his compatriots, his better-established senior Francisco Iturrino. Picasso crammed a vast array of pictures into the exhibition, effectively trying to blast his fellow exhibitor out of the water. Picasso showed a range of works on themes as diverse as fowers, the races, seedy nightlife scenes and bullfghts. This show saw Picasso celebrated for his use of colour, taking place shortly before the death of his great friend Carles Casagemas, a traumatic event that is ofen seen to have been the catalyst for the Blue Period, when the new monochrome would dominate. In their catalogue raisonné of the Blue and Rose Periods, Pierre Daix and Georges Boudaille ascribed Vase de feurs a date of 1901, relating it to some of the other flower paintings of this period. However, even they pointed out that it was not stylistically in keeping with them. In 1970, when Vase de feurs was published in the catalogue raisonné of Picasso’s works compiled by the artist’s friend, the publisher Christian Zervos, its date was given as 1904.
‘If you’re stuck in a painting, then stop and draw something else. Draw a fower and put your love into that fower. Then your powers will come back again’. Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso, Garçon à la pipe, 1905, oil on canvas. © Succession Picasso / DACS, London 2019. Image: Bridgeman Images
Jamie Sabartés, Photo of Pablo Picasso, 1904, Musée de Monmarte, Paris. © Succession Picasso / DACS, London 2019. Image: Bridgeman Images
Later, Josep Palau i Fabre would narrow down the parameters by noting the clear similarities between this picture and a pair of gouaches created in Paris in September 1904, which themselves relate to another gouache, the Madonna of the Garland. Looking at one of these in particular, the gouache now owned by the Memorial Art Museum at the University of Rochester, it would be easy to conclude that it might even show some of the same fowers. Palau i Fabre dated Picasso and Fernande’s frst encounter to August 1904, only a month before he concluded Vase de feurs was painted. Certainly, her distinctive features are perceptible in a drawing of lovers Picasso signed and dated in August that year. Fernande’s status at the time was complex. Her real name was Amélie Lang. She had married young, but the relationship had been a disaster. Since then, she had had a string of lovers and worked as a professional model. Picasso himself was still involved with Madeleine, one of the great muses of the Blue Period, when he began to see Fernande. This led to a very gradual emergence of each into the life of the other, culminating with her moving into his studio in the so-called Bateau-Lavoir, the legendary ramshackle hive of artists’ dwellings on the rue Ravignan in Montmartre, in 1905, the year after Vase de fleurs was painted.
Fernande’s own memoirs contain telling details about the atmosphere at the time. Recalling Picasso’s studio, she described an altar he had made to her during the early stages of their relationship. This comprised, ‘a table with lighted candles, which are immediately replaced as soon as they burn out, as well as two deep blue Louis-Philippe vases with artificial flowers in them, like those Cézanne must have had... What inspired him to create this shrine dedicated to unrequited love? As well as nostalgia, a mocking self-irony and humour, I think it showed a kind of mysticism’ (Fernande Olivier, quoted in Marylin McCully, ed., Loving Picasso: The Private Journal of Fernande Olivier, New York, 2001, p. 162). Seen in the context of Vase de feurs, Fernande’s description suggests the flowers shown here may relate to Picasso’s altar. Certainly, that quasi-religious connection has been established between Picasso’s pictures of flowers and his Madonna of the Garland of the same period. Fernande claimed that Picasso had begun smoking opium shortly before she met him. This may provide an intriguing insight into the atmosphere in Vase de feurs. Certainly, the comparison between this picture and the gouache owned by the University of Rochester emphasises the new atmosphere that was beginning to seep into Picasso’s pictures. This may
Paul Gauguin, Lilacs, 1885, oil on canvas, Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection on loan at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid.
Paul Cézanne, Flowers in a Blue Vase, 1873-1875, oil on canvas, The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg.
Image: Bridgeman Images.
Image: SCALA, Florence.
David Hockney, Mt. Fuji and Flowers, 1972, acrylic on canvas. © David Hockney. Photo Credit: Metropolitan Museum of Art. Collection Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
have been due to the Fernande creeping into his life, step by step, to opium, or to the gradual lifting of the oppressive weight of the Blue Period. A new poetic sensibility was beginning to favour Picasso’s paintings at this time. This is exemplifed by the presence of the fowers in Vase de feurs, with their vivid beauty, their dramatic colours but their clear relationship to the memento mori message contained in so many traditional foral still life compositions by earlier artists. There is a deliberate fragility to some of the petals in Vase de fleurs that accentuates this notion of the vulnerability associated with life, a concept that was all too close to Picasso’s life afer the death of Casagemas. But the light and colours in Vase de feurs speak of this more positive aspect to that delicate lyricism. In this sense, the picture can be seen to pre-figure Rose Period masterpieces such as Picasso’s celebrated Garçon à la pipe, painted the following year. In that work, a slender youth is shown holding a pipe—perhaps tapping into the iconography of his dalliance with narcotics. In the background are flowers, and so too in the form of a wreath on the boy’s head.
As is the case with Garçon à la pipe, the almost narcotic atmosphere of Picasso’s fower paintings can be seen to recall the mystery, the dream-like quality, of the pictures of Odilon Redon. The end of the Blue Period and the beginning of the Rose are suffused with a similar oneiric poetry to that of Redon’s works, which were often marked by an almost subaqueous ambience. Perhaps it was in part this that drew Sainsère to Vase de fleurs—he was one of Redon’s great patrons in the early part of the 20th century, and indeed the artist drew his portrait, which is in the Ian Woodner Family Collection. Picasso begrudgingly admitted that Redon was an interesting painter, though he disputed Matisse’s claim that he was greater than Manet. There was another artist whose infuence Picasso was more willing to admit who had been creating fower paintings flled with a lyrical ambience: Paul Gauguin. In his biography of Picasso, the late John Richardson related that the artist had his own richly-annotated copy of Gauguin’s Noa Noa. During the early 1900s, Picasso would create a number of works that
openly referred to Gauguin’s images, and indeed in one of them, signed it ‘Paul Picasso’. Picasso painted Vase de feurs only a year afer Gauguin’s death, adding a vivid sense of its being a tribute to the older artist. The picture recalls some of Gauguin’s own flower paintings from throughout his career, from the more boldly Impressionistic works of the 1880s to the overtly-mystical visions created in Tahiti and the Marquesas, when he had become a legendary figure, immersed in the exotic atmosphere half the way around the world from his former home. By the time Picasso painted Vase de feurs, Sainsère had been a relatively long-standing collector of his work, especially considering the artist was still in his early twenties. Already listed as the owner of a few of the pictures in Vollard’s show in 1901, Sainsère would continue collecting Picasso’s works until the development of Cubism. While his financial support ceased then, the two clearly remained in contact. Sainsère was ‘Conseiller d’Etat.’ His powerful position allowed him to extend some protection to Picasso at various stages of his life, helping him to arrange his papers and indeed to be absolved of suspicion of involvement with the anarchists of the day. It was at around this period that Sainsère had also provided early support to Matisse, buying a number of his works from Vollard. Fernande herself recalled Sainsère’s visits to Picasso’s studio in the Bateau Lavoir: ‘We’ve had a windfall’, she wrote. ‘Picasso never answers the door in the mornings, and the concierge, who knows this (and about our ever-pressing need for money, among other things), came at ten o’clock this morning, knocking at the door herself and shrieking: “M’sieu Picasso, M’sieu Picasso, you’d better open up, this is a serious visit.”Picasso, who was fast asleep, leaped out of bed to open the door, while I took refuge in the little bedroom. It was Olivier Sainsère, and afer getting Picasso, who was never embarrassed by his state of undress, Sainsère bought some drawings for 300 francs’ (Fernande Olivier, quoted in Marylin McCully, ed., Loving Picasso: The Private Journal of Fernande Olivier, New York, 2001, p. 162). Fernande recalled that Sainsère would sometimes buy pictures, occasionally leaving hundred franc bills in the studio as much-appreciated—and speedily-spent—payment. It is no surprise to find that a number of the pictures owned by Sainsère are now in museum collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Louvre, Paris and the Musée d’Orsay, Paris. The works by Picasso that Sainsère owned included Woman with a Crow from the same period as Vase de fleurs, another work that has a Blue Period background shot through with warmer colours; it is now in the Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio.
‘Later in life he would make a point of exorcising the prettiness of foral arrangements. Bouquets from admirers would be put in a vase without water. “They don’t need it”, he used to say. “they’re going to day anyway!” and he would leave them around as a vanitas. This association of fowers with mortality could account for the menace of the late fower pieces.’ John Richardson, A life of Picasso, volume I, 1881–1906, London, 1991, p. 353
Property from an Important Collection
14. Nicolas de Staël
Bouteilles en brun, ocre et rose (Bouteilles: Nature morte) signed ‘Staël’ lower right oil on canvas 64.5 x 81 cm (25 3/8 x 31 7/8 in.) Painted in 1952. Estimate £1,200,000-1,800,000 $1,530,000-2,290,000 €1,350,000-2,030,000 ♠ plus Buyers Premium and VAT, ARR applies*
Provenance Theodore Schempp/Knoedler and Co., New York Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Norbert Schimmel, New York (acquired in 1953) The Museum of Modern Art, New York (donated by the above) Galerie Beyeler, Basel (1970) Galerie Marie-Louise Jeanneret, Geneva Private Collection, Switzerland Galerie Cazeau-Béraudière, Paris Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1998 Exhibited San Francisco Museum of Art, Art in the 20th Century, 17 June - 10 July 1955, p. 17 (titled Painting; dated 1947) Geneva, Galerie Daniel Malingue, Staël priorité peinture, 20 May - 25 July 1992, no. 5, n.p. (illustrated, titled Bouteilles) Parma, Fondazione Magnani Rocca, Nicolas de Staël, 10 April - 17 July 1994, no. 24, pp. 82 and 203 (illustrated, p. 82, titled Les Bouteilles) Martigny, Fondation Pierre Gianadda, Nicolas de Staël, 19 May - 5 November 1995, no. 14, pp. 61-62 and 189 (illustrated, p. 61, titled Bouteilles) New York, Mitchell-Innes & Nash, Nicolas de Staël Paintings, 1950 - 1955, 4 November - 13 December 1997, no. 7, pp. 22-3 (illustrated, p. 23) Paris, Centre Pompidou, Nicolas de Staël, 12 March 30 June 2003, no. 96, pp. 133 and 245 (illustrated, p. 134) Literature Jacques Dubourg and Françoise de Staël, Nicolas de Staël: Catalogue Raisonné des Peintures, Paris, 1968, no. 309, pp. 173-174 (illustrated, p. 173, titled Bouteilles) Françoise de Staël, Nicolas de Staël, Catalogue Raisonné de l’Oeuvre Peint. Lettres de Nicolas de Staël, Neuchâtel, 1997, no. 348, p. 326 (illustrated)
In Nicolas de Staël’s Bouteilles en brun, ocre et rose (Bouteilles: Nature morte), 1952, a collection of brown, ochre, light rose and ash-toned jugs emerges from a misty background of Prussian blue, like luminous, unknowable forces magically surfacing from a stratified mass of darkness. A study in allusive abstraction, this painting is one of de Staël’s earliest bottle paintings, a body of works which vigorously dotted his artistic practice from 1952 to 1953. The work’s composition, boasting sumptuous blends of light and shadow, contrasting hues and rough textures, was created at the dawn of the artist’s engagement with the boundaries of realism, informed by the Expressionist thrust that dominated American and European artistic landscapes following the war. Yet, it concurrently turns away from the corporeal action that defned much of these movements, and instead retains a form of quiet classicism that, in some aspects, resembles the intimate hues and quiet aura of Giorgio Morandi’s still lifes. Brimming with the
charisma of a man who was often referred to as Paris’s star-painter and ‘meteor’ in the early 1950s, the present work straddles urgent vibrancy and charming sensitivity, instinctive roughness and noble beauty. Bouteilles en brun, ocre et rose (Bouteilles: Nature morte)’s storied provenance and stellar exhibition history additionally lends it a distinguishing air that marks it as singular in de Staël’s oeuvre. Previously housed in both The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Galerie Beyeler’s collections, the present work was exhibited alongside seminal modern works from some of the world’s most revered institutions, including the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and the San Francisco Museum of Art. As such, it serves as a potent emblem of de Staël’s alluring mystery and poetic backbone; an enduring gem of which the idiosyncratic subject matter and energetic composition display some of the artist’s most spectacular skills and pictorial idiosyncrasies.
Nicolas de Staël Les Bouteilles, 1952, oil on canvas, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2019. Photographer: Studio Tromp, Rotterdam.
Nicolas de Staël in his studio, 1954. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2019. Image: Bridgeman Images. Photo: Denise Colomb.
Visually and compositionally, Bouteilles en brun, ocre et rose (Bouteilles: Nature morte) is a study in pictorial complexity. Resisting strict visual likeness, the painting nonetheless delineates the contours of its four eponymous protagonists clearly and recognisably, playing with codes of representation that oscillate between fguration and abstraction. The thick impasto and rough textures that coat its surface are striking and sensuous, veering away from the fatness and distant coolness that typically defne the genre of still life. ‘We must retire in the shadow of the sails, clinging to each barely perceptible plan’, wrote de Staël, ‘if we do not want to end in fresco of Pompei, in platitude’ (Nicolas de Staël, ‘Letter to Jacques Dubourg’, June 1952). As a means to heighten the tensions that lie beneath the composition’s tempered appearance, de Staël deploys a rich palette of blacks, navy blues, browns, and rose, at times punctuated by discreet strokes of red to further animate the work’s earthy palette. While the four bottles placed in the foreground of the painting are given easily decipherable silhouettes, an additional set of black bottles is discreetly carved out in the background, as though slowly looming towards the front of the composition from a distant expanse of dark pigments. These shadowy vessels’ layered presence suggests a sense of depth and analytic expressiveness that imparts de Staël’s stylistic gesture with impressionist conviction, appealing to sensation and instinct as opposed to conventional, straightforward perception.
Giorgio Morandi, Natura morta, 1916, oil on canvas, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © DACS 2019. Image: SCALA, Florence.
Departing from the dry conventions of painting, and breaking down the physical boundaries between the artist and the canvas, de Staël used palette knives to fnish the complex surfaces of his compositions. Letting sharp tools glide across the surfaces of his works, the artist frequently produced accidental cracks and fssures that became as much part of his paintings as the sof strokes applied with paintbrush. The cuts and imperfections yielded by the knife, as well as de Staël’s impetuous gestures, are, in Jorge Semprun’s words, ‘as much spaces through which the depths appear and contribute to the resulting forescence’; they impart the resulting image with an appearance akin to cross sections of crystalline minerals, ancient mosaics, or stratifed fossils (Jorge Semprun, Georges Raillard, Nicolas de Staël et al., Nicolas de Staël: Retrospective de l’oeuvre peint, exh. cat., Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul-deVence, July-September 1991, p. 116). With visual associations ofen belonging to the realms of biomorphic contents and the past, de Staël’s compositions boast a precious countenance
‘All my life I have needed to think about painting, to see paintings, to paint so that I could live, to free myself from all the emotions, from all the worries from which I have never found any other escape other than through painting’. Nicolas de Staël
George Braque, Verre, 1911, oil on canvas. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2019. Image: Bridgeman Images.
that is simultaneously tied to memory, rare materiality and symbolic value. The imperfections that run across Bouteilles en brun, ocre et rose (Bouteilles: Nature morte), redolent of the sof and delicate crevices that adorn ancient artifacts, endow the painting with an irreducible sense of life.
blocks and swathes of colour with cognitive conviction. Yet, despite its titular categorisation, the present work transcends the descriptive quality of its name, and instead transforms into a dreamscape onto which the viewer can project an infinity of scenes, surpassing the limits of the tabletop.
Created at one of the defining heights of de Staël’s artistic career, Bouteilles en brun, ocre et rose (Bouteilles: Nature morte) exudes the very real and familiar atmosphere that the artist increasingly deployed on canvas around the painting’s time of execution, coinciding with a departure from the titular elusiveness of previous works almost exclusively named ‘composition’. Marked by his decision to get out of his atelier and involve himself with the phenomenological, tangible matters of the world, the year 1952 is known to have been de Staël’s annus mirabilis, as it manifested a clear withdrawal from the total tenuousness of his previous artistic output and instead veered towards allusive fguration. The new works he produced in that period, such as Bouteilles en brun, ocre et rose (Bouteilles: Nature morte), took on descriptive titles such as ‘landscape’, ‘bottles’, ‘windows’ and ‘fowers’, and designed
Like fellow artist Georges Braque, who he counted as a dear friend and fervently admired for his artistic talent and integrity, de Staël actively shunned artistic etiquette and categorisation, and worked relentlessly and unmercifully towards the creation of immaculately accomplished works. This meant that the artist destroyed almost as many canvases as he produced, and his mood frequently oscillated between deep quietude and frantic energy. ‘In his frenetic impulse to paint, he keeps dangerously close to the abyss, finding chords that none before him had dared touch. Nervous, tense, and always on the brink of the blade, de Staël’s painting echoes both the tone and fatality of Vincent van Gogh’s late canvases’ (Bernard Heitz, ‘Nicolas de Staël, les couleurs du tourment’, Telerama, no. 2374, 12 July 1995, p. 13). Musing on his Bouteilles paintings, Mariette Lachaud, who had lived with
Marcelle and Georges Braque for thirty-three years, nonetheless enthused over their inherent positive energy and joyful nature. ‘So lively and gleeful were these bottles! They moved, vibrated… One must be a true poet in their soul to paint bottles that can spark joy’ (Mariette Lachaud, quoted in Staël: Priorité Peinture, exh. cat., Galerie Daniel Malingue, Geneva, 1992, n.p). This tension of opposed forces, straddling levity and solemnity, delicacy and violence, pervaded de Staël’s work increasingly as he advanced in his career. Held until his tragic, self-inficted passing in 1955, the formal tautness at the core of his compositions was the most potent in the canvases he worked on during the last decade of his life, including the present Bouteilles en brun, ocre et rose (Bouteilles: Nature morte). Tinged with notes of nostalgia, materialised through the ubiquitous presence of darker hues, the composition nonetheless exudes a paradoxical quality of peacefulness. A sublimation of, or a mirror to the complexities of melancholia, Bouteilles en brun, ocre et rose (Bouteilles: Nature morte) provides a potent echo to the psychological condition that permeated de Staël’s mind in his tumultuous last years.
‘de Staël established in these works his faith in a tangible work, nourished by light. He created “views” that exist in that light haze or semi-darkness that appears when reality and dream come together.’ Denys Sutton, Nicolas de Staël, exh. cat., Matthiessen Gallery, London, 1952, n.p.
Nicolas and Francoise de Staël, Rue de Parc Montsouris, Pâques, 1951. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2019. Photographer: Poune Ratel.
Property from a Private Collection, Rome O
15. Giorgio Morandi
Natura morta signed ‘Morandi’ lower lef oil on canvas 30.5 x 40.5 cm (12 x 15 7/8 in.) Painted in 1960. Estimate £800,000-1,200,000 $1,010,000-1,520,000 €904,000-1,360,000 ♠ plus Buyers Premium and VAT, ARR applies*
Provenance Galleria del Milione, Milan Paolo and Florence Marzotto Collection, Valdagno Acquired from the above the present owner Literature Lamberto Vitali, Morandi Catalogo generale 1948/1964, vol. II, Milan, 1977, no. 912, n.p. (illustrated, dated 1954, incorrect dimensions listed) Marilena Pasquali, Giorgio Morandi. Catalogo generale. Opere catalogate tra il 1985 e il 2016, Pontedera, 2016, n. 912, p. 304
‘One sensed the intense meditative and philosophical process through which these objects were arranged in Morandi’s paintings. One knew that the slightest shifts in scale, light, colour, balance and counterbalance were of the utmost importance to him’. James Thrall Soby, ‘A visit to Morandi’, Giorgio Morandi, The Arts Council London, 1970, pp. 5-6
Shedding a focused and scholastic light on long-necked bottles, majestic bowls, and various other vessels found in Bologna’s local flea-markets, Giorgio Morandi’s opus presents an enchanting and intimate view of the artist’s conjunct working and living environment. Despite the recurring protagonism of containers sourced from his immediate settings, Morandi’s intimate compositions are continuously able to spark astonishment through the creation of distinctive atmospheres, regenerated and particularised with each new canvas. Natura morta, 1960, is no exception to this rule. Whimsically orchestrating four variably sized vessels in front or next to one another, the painting presents the artist’s ability to transfer real spatial confgurations on canvas, through an exquisite command of light, form, and colour. Resisting strict mimesis and instead appealing to sensation, Morandi maintains expressive brushwork throughout the surface of the present work, conveying a result that is at once fguratively referential and allusively gestural. A muted yet incandescent image, Natura morta conveys the silent, vacant spaces that punctuate the everyday, paring down Morandi’s studio environment to its absolute essentials so as to create a poetic symphony of forms and hues. Eluding the radical stylistic novelties that pervaded the Italian art scene following the war, led by the likes of Alberto Burri, Salvatore Scarpitta, and a number of Arte Povera proponents, Morandi followed his own artistic inclinations, developed from an early age through his engagement with Impressionist reproductions and the aesthetics of Chardin. From his early forays at the Academia di Belle Arti di Bologna to his ensuing experimentation with Pittura Metafsica, Morandi subsequently kept close afliations to the still-life despite the genre’s waning popularity in the midst of the burgeoning modern movement. Lonesome and meditative
by character, Morandi infused his paintings with the peacefulness of his tranquil life in Bologna. Building an opus that resonated with the environmental silence he engulfed himself in, Morandi consistently celebrated and materialised the evocative power of the still life, through the rendition of a single scene deployed in diferent guises and arrangements. Through this sustained thematic practice, the artist singlehandedly proved the lasting and perennial impact of his preferred genre. Formerly in the collection of Paolo and Florence Marzotto, Natura morta is a prime example of Morandi’s career-long cycle of luminous still life compositions. With its sof, blue and green-toned palette as well its rare compositional verticality, the canvas displays a unique pairing of spatial control and colour coordination, that in turn conjures an overarching atmosphere of meditative contemplation and serenity. Through painterly balance, restraint and harmony, Morandi is able to harness an aesthetic of grandeur and gravity that breathes seamless, organic emotion into the overall composition. Fellow artist and friend Giorgio de Chirico expressed the artist’s unique ability to envelop mundane items in a cloth of familiarity and warmth as a kind of phenomenological empathy. He wrote, ‘These objects are dead for us because they are immobile. But [Morandi] looks at them with belief. He fnds comfort in their inner structure – their eternal aspect. In this way he has contributed to the lyricism of the last important movement in European art: the metaphysics of the common object’ (Giorgio de Chirico, exh. cat., Giorgio Morandi, Arts Council of Great Britain, London, 1960, p. 6). Imparting mere physical vessels with metaphysical properties, and thus allowing inanimate entities to become touching and moving to the viewer, Morandi painted a world that eschewed formulaic precision and rose to the realm of poetry.
Paul Cézanne Nature morte à la bouilloire, 1867–1869, oil on canvas, Musée d’Orsay Paris.
Sean Scully, Near Night, 2005, oil on canvas.
Image: SCALA, Florence.
© Sean Scully. Image: Bridgeman Images.
The use of light and dark greys, pale, muted blues, and a grizzled green backdrop in Natura morta makes Morandi’s subtle and poetic invocation of his real surroundings particularly potent, as it produces a sense of depth that dismantles traditional codes of verisimilitude. Boasting a clear contouring and delineation of the central containers, the painting is conversely swallowed into an unknowable vortex of abstraction in the background. This dual approach is characteristic of Morandi’s vernacular: the artist draws from a close observation of reality, yet tinges the world around him with nebulous hints of warmth, intimacy and delicacy. As a result, his compositions convey a beguiling ambiance that is at once ‘focused and exhilaratingly open’ (Roberta Smith, ‘Giorgio Morandi Creates a Universe on a Tabletop’, The New York Times, 19 November 2015, online). An exceptional variation on the artist’s preferred theme, the present canvas displays the brilliance and economy that characterises his best work. Straddling figuration and abstraction, Natura morta conjures a unique pictorial syntax that thoroughly encapsulates Morandi’s universe.
It furthermore demonstrates the artist’s unparalleled command of his craf, which not only vivifed the genre of still life within painterly tradition, but continues to inform the practice of eminent contemporary painters in the present day. Immediately celebrated by audiences in Bologna and wider Italy, Morandi’s oeuvre subsequently reached the ears and eyes of institutional authorities such as Alfred Barr and James Thrall Soby, who, upon visiting his studio on behalf of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1948, became enthralled by the artist’s work and showed him unprecedented exposure. ‘We began to realise that Morandi was not simply a painter of bottles and occasional landscapes but a man intent on exploring subtle equations of forms’, remarked Soby. ‘It was as though he, like Chardin, had found the external world helplessly convoluted and had preferred to stare endlessly at simple objects on a studio table, separating their volumes and colour and then interlocking them again through an alchemy he alone understood’ (James Thrall Soby, ‘A visit to Morandi’, Giorgio Morandi, exh. cat., The Arts Council London, London, 1970, p. 5).
Giorgio Morandi’s atelier on via Fondazza 36, Bologna, April 1950’s, photo Walter Mori/ Mondadori Portfolio. © DACS 2019. Image: Getty Images.
Profoundly admiring of the artist’s singular mind and inimitable craf, Soby expressed what soon thereafer became a widely accepted truth in the art historical canon: Morandi’s hand was unmatched in the creation of still lifes, merging light, form, and colour with an Impressionistic vein that nonetheless remained infused with his own particular tone, personal visions and fuxes of emotion. So sincere and raw was his gesture that his painting transcended the purely descriptive qualities of the still life genre. Over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries, a myriad of the artist’s contemporaries such as Vija Celmins, Sean Scully and Wayne Thiebaud, avidly championed the quiet stillness of Morandi’s canvases, which they rendered homage to in their own painterly creations. As he consistently celebrated and materialised the evocative power of still lifes, Morandi invoked a form of poetry, which, in works like Natura morta, continues to prompt marvel today.
‘Giorgio Morandi searches and creates in solitude… He looks at a collection of objects on a table with the same emotions that stirred the heart of the traveller in Ancient Greece when he gazed on the woods and valleys and mountains reputed to be the dwelling places of the most beautiful and marvellous deities’. Giorgio de Chirico, ‘Giorgio Morandi’, Giorgio Morandi, The Arts Council London, London, 1970, p. 6
16. Salvatore Scarpitta
Franz’s Ferrari signed, titled and dated ‘SCARPITTA 1961 - FRANZ’S FERRARI’ on the reverse bandages and mixed media 77.4 x 66.3 x 7.2 cm (30 1/2 x 26 1/8 x 2 7/8 in.) Executed in 1961. Estimate £300,000-400,000 $381,000-507,000 €338,000-451,000 ♠ plus Buyers Premium and VAT, ARR applies*
Provenance Galleria Ippolito Simonis, Turin Private Collection, Turin Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1995 Exhibited Milan, Galleria dell’Ariete, Scarpitta 1958-1963, 23 October 1964, no. 10 Turin, Galleria Ippolito Simonis, Salvatore Scarpitta, 1987, n.p. (illustrated) Bagheria, Civica Galleria Renato Guttuso, Scarpitta, 9 May - 31 August 1999, no. 55, p. 144 (illustrated, p. 95) Literature Il Giornale dell’Arte, November 1987, p. 45 (illustrated) La Repubblica delle Donne, 22 June 1999, p. 98 (illustrated) Stile, July 1999, p. 26 (illustrated) Luigi Sansone, Salvatore Scarpitta, Catalogue Raisonné, Milan, 2005, no, 303, p. 183 (illustrated, p. 338)
Executed in 1961, Franz’s Ferrari is a quintessential iteration of Salvatore Scarpitta’s series of bandaged canvases commenced in the late 1950s. Standing halfway between painting and sculpture, the present work epitomises the artist’s progression towards the latter medium in 1964, when he began building fully-functioning vehicles as artistic installations. Passionate about motor racing, Scarpitta was the owner of a sprint car team based in New Chester, Pennsylvania, and regularly attended and participated in races with the generous support of his crew sponsor – the Leo Castelli Gallery. In Franz’s Ferrari, the artist merges artistic gesture and automobile culture, through the work’s industrial appearance, but also through its evocative name, referring to the silver-gray Ferrari that the artist Franz Kline had extravagantly bought towards the end of his life. Kline’s newly purchased Ferrari signifed the advent of his success following years of relative obscurity; he and Scarpitta shared a friendship that derived from the fawlessly eclectic artistic roster Leo Castelli was continuing to build throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Throughout his career, Scarpitta ripped, twisted, and laid bare his canvases to create subversive works of which the method and aesthetic eschewed traditional principles of painting. He broke free from prevailing constrictions that had been held through centuries of painterly production, and instead produced complex assemblages comprising layered textures and striking three-dimensionality. Leo Castelli, Scarpitta’s gallerist and champion from 1958 to 1999, claimed that ‘Salvatore does not reach the waves, he swims on his own’ (Leo Castelli, quoted by Salvatore Scarpitta in Giacinto Di Pietrantonio, ‘In Primo Piano’, Flash Art, 21 July 2015, online). A resourceful, independent and iconoclastic spirit, Scarpitta likened his works to armors and shields, conjuring the syntax of wartime kits in ways that resembled Alberto Burri’s fraught constructions – or deconstructions – equally employing ingenious methods of stitching and burning, knotting and bandaging. Woven with webbed fabric and wrought with physical tension, Franz’s Ferrari is redolent of the medical clothes used in childbirth which Scarpitta found in army surplus stores.
Upon using these, the artist then coloured and textured the raw material by rubbing it with pure pigment and dipping it in resin. ‘Sometime between ‘54 and ‘58, afer the birth of his daughter Lola, Salvatore took the bands of cloth used to swath the baby to his studio, and afer having wrapped them around a wooden frame, he stiffened them with glue and painted them, monochrome, white or dark red, or blue, leaving gaps between the layers of the wrapping’, wrote Piero Dorazio. ‘These empty spaces were like open cuts, like wounds. These works impressed me for their originality and for their value as an extension of his experience as a painter: they represented the frst case of a step forward afer the provocation of Burri’ (Piero Dorazio, quoted in Luigi Sansone, Salvatore Scarpitta, Catalogue raisonné, Milan, 2005, p. 117). Scarpitta’s own experiences of war indeed doubtlessly influenced his subsequent output; his ripped bandage strips are suggestive of wounds but also speak to man’s potential for spiritual renewal, as suggested by the act of knotting which itself is referential to the act of mending. Like his fellow Italian artist Alberto Burri, Scarpitta had seen active service in World War II. However unlike Burri, – who was interned at an American prisoner of war camp in Texas – Scarpitta fought for the Allied forces as a Monuments Man in the Navy, charged with searching, preserving and cataloguing art stolen by the Nazis. With a common thematic and formal approach to their respective oeuvres, both Burri and Scarpitta, who settled in Rome in the late 1940s, dealt with the psychological remnants of the war using unorthodox, industrial materials. They turned to abstraction to create a visual language that could bring life to their disturbing yet profoundly human experiences. Though its whimsical title celebrates both Scarpitta’s passion for the automobile and his artistic kinship with Kline, Franz’s Ferrari eludes not the aesthetic of waste that he deployed in reference to history’s darker passages. It furthermore illustrates Piero Dorazio’s belief that Scarpitta stepped beyond Burri’s provocative iterations, through the transcendence of the two-dimensional plane and the physically engaging method of bandaging.
Salvatore Scarpitta with a racing car. Photo: Courtesy Archivio Salvatore Scarpitta under the direction of Luigi Sansone, Milan / Tornabuoni Art.
‘I admired the racing drivers and the races at the time. The frst time I painted it was the numbers that driver friends let me put on their shiny multi-coloured vehicles…’ Salvatore Scarpitta
Luc Tuymans in conversation with Marianne Hoet, Deputy Chairwoman, Europe.
Marianne Hoet: Luc, we are happy to be here with you and talk about your work – more specifically about Schwarzheide, 1986. Schwarzheide – essentially a line of sparse pine trees – would appear to be an innocuous subject, a landscape of sorts. However, the trees were planted along the border of a Nazi concentration camp to conceal it from view. The trauma behind the imagery is masked, like the trees masked the camp. What drew you to this scene specifcally? Luc Tuymans: Schwarzheide is an iconic painting that I painted very early on. It was made afer Our New Quarters, as a result of years of refection on the subject of the Second World War, and the psychological breakdown that it represented for Europe. The painting takes after the drawings that a number of detainees made in concentration camps, and its minimal appearance refects the atmosphere that all these drawings exuded – often created with a mixture of charcoal and other media that produced a blueish hue. The fact that these drawings conjured one same atmosphere shocked me deeply, because the sketches were made by diferent individuals. They came from different hands, and yet it seemed like they were created unanimously, conveying the singular image of a void. I tried to reproduce this impression in Schwarzheide. I took the canvas and put it in the sunlight so that it could yellow naturally, like those drawings did. I painted the pines trees in a very fast move to designate the urgency of the original sketch. This was all important to me because Schwarzheide is about representation and debt, and the agent object had to be incorporated directly in the work. I needed the yellowness and the understatement to be revealed in the painting not as a gimmick, but as a true assessment of reality and time.
Schwarzheide is an image of the naturalisation of death, an image that captures violence at its peak through the paradoxical depiction of understatement. In my opinion, true terror is what you don’t show. True terror reverberates from silence. MH: Your current exhibition at Palazzo Grassi is centred around a monumental mosaic based upon the present work. The title of this exhibition, La Pelle (‘the skin’) takes its name from Curzio Malaparte’s 1943 book describing the distress and turmoil of war. What motivated you to readdress this specifc painting now, and why did you engage marble as the medium? LT: There have been a few ways of exhibiting art at the Palazzo Grassi. I wanted to tweak the monumental approach that many of my predecessors had taken by employing the space diferently. I decided to alter the space through the use of an understated, innocent image, to demonstrate its inherent power. I also wanted to integrate the fabric of the Palazzo Grassi directly in my installation, so I used the same green marble that is embedded within the Palazzo throughout the borders of the work. I wanted to turn the Palazzo’s monumentality inside out – observe people’s behaviour as they walk on the mosaic, thinking perhaps it had always been part of the building throughout its history. With this installation, Schwarzheide is magnifed to epic dimensions, and yet its presence is easily concealed. MH: Your exhibition goes under the skin of the visitor. Are the subjects of your paintings ofen related to your own emotions or experiences in your own life? LT: As I draw from existing imagery, it is important for me to know what the source image is about. The starting point is crucial to justify the relevance of my work. So in that sense, how I see and perceive things is perhaps more important than emotion.
‘Schwarzheide is an image of the naturalisation of death, an image that captures violence at its peak through the paradoxical depiction of understatement. In my opinion, true terror is what you don’t show. True terror reverberates from silence.’ Luc Tuymans
Luc Tuymans in conversation with Marianne Hoet, 5 June 2019, Antwerp.
MH: Every work stands by itself and has its own title – the title being an important factor to you. However, there is always a dialogue between the works when we see an exhibition by Luc Tuymans. Could you expand on this independent and inter-dependent dynamic?
MH: You have ofen expressed the impact of other Belgian artists on your practice, in particular the work of Jan van Eyck, whom you have lauded as the ‘strongest painter in the Western Hemisphere’. Can you tell us more about what Van Eyck has meant to you and which other artists have infuenced your practice?
LT: When a show is installed, it is interesting to see the works interact with one another and create a kind of dialogue or discourse. Crucially, the connections made between paintings will be informed by the raw space that hosts the works, the architecture of that space, and other factors; but nevertheless the connection makes itself organically.
LT: I was completely blown away by van Eyck’s sense of detail when I frst came into contact with his work. I must have been 8 years old; it was the ardent realism of the image that struck me. Mondrian’s diamond-shaped painting in Den Haag, which I saw for the first time at the age of 12, also stayed with me. I remember not comprehending it really, but understanding that within its very small scale, there was something monumental.
It’s also interesting to see how old and new paintings interact with one another in a place that is old or new, factoring in the idea that oil paintings typically take 25 years to dry. The aging process forms part of the dialogue. Regarding titles, these can be a sheer description of what you see, or something completely different, opening up another layer removed from the painting itself. The title can be an additional image superimposed on the image itself. With Gaskamer, the title makes sense of the painting, which could otherwise be perceived as a vacant cell. Similarly with Schwarzheide, the location of the trees is crucial to understanding their sombre associations.
The Belgian region is an important source of inspiration for me as it holds signifcant painterly tradition, but it is also unique in that it has grappled with specifc social, political and geographic circumstances, positioning itself in terms of survival. This is why the region has opted for realism more than anything else. People think that Magritte is a surrealist but he is not. Belgium as a national entity is a tough one to navigate because it is so small. Yet when you think about its artistic accomplishments – its rich Baroque manifestations – especially in comparison to larger countries such as France, Germany, the United States… It is really quite amazing.
MH: Luc, you paint in one day. Can you explain us a bit more about the process that precedes the creation of your paintings, as I imagine the conception of your works takes much longer.
MH: The current work, Schwarzheide, was painted when you had just returned to painting from a period when you focused solely on filmmaking. Can you tell us more about how this transition informed your subsequent work?
LT: With Schwarzheide, everything was orchestrated. There was the research, the drawings… But when it came down to the moment of executing the painting, the process was extremely quick.
LT: I stopped painting for fve years from 1980 to 1985. Painting had become too existential for me, a sufocating practice that I didn’t have enough distance for. Film allowed a break from that, and taught me to look at things diferently. However, I eventually returned to painting.
When painting, you have to transfer the intelligence that you have amassed directly on canvas, put all the things that are in your mind into your hand. I made the process swift but tenacious, as I still had to balance the abstract image of nature that Schwarzheide visually represents, and the mark, the imprint of the source. To me what was important was the intensity of the picture: it had to be realised.
By having looked through the lens of flm, I then began envisaging imagery diferently. For example the idea of the close up, or of a disconnected narrative, does not exist in real life, yet it does exist in the flmic image. With flm I started looking into the enlargement of an image. Schwarzheide certainly exemplifes this, as the real image exceeds the frame of the painting.
Property from a Distinguished Private Collection
17. Luc Tuymans
Schwarzheide signed ‘TUYMANS. LUC’ on the reverse oil on canvas 60.6 x 70.5 cm (23 7/8 x 27 3/4 in.) Painted in 1986. Estimate £800,000-1,000,000 $1,020,000-1,270,000 €902,000-1,130,000 ♠ plus Buyers Premium and VAT, ARR applies*
Provenance Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner Exhibited Antwerp, Ruimte Morguen, Josefne c’est pas ma femme, 19 March - 30 April 1988 Cologne, Galerie Maerz, Wahrheit und Dichtung: Vier aus Antwerpen, Danny Devos, Marc Schepers, Luc Tuymans, Stefaan Vermuyten, 9 June - 7 July 1989 Ghent, Vereniging voor het Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, Luc Tuymans, 1990 Thiers, Le Creux de l’enfer - Centre d’art contemporain, Luc Tuymans, 14 December 1991 - 9 February 1992 Kunsthalle Bern, Luc Tuymans, 14 March 26 April 1992, pp. 13 and 43 (illustrated) Kassel, Aue Pavilions, Documenta IX, 13 June - 20 September 1992 (illustrated, p. 566; guidebook illustrated, p. 208) Toronto, Art Gallery of York; Chicago, Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago; London, Institute of Contemporary Arts, Philadelphia, Goldie Paley Gallery, Moore College of Art and Design, Luc Tuymans, 15 January - 23 April 1995, pp. 86, 88 and 90 (illustrated, p. 86) New York, David Zwirner, Francis Picabia and Luc Tuymans: Paintings, 3 May - 17 June 1995 Philadelphia, Goldie Paley Gallery, Luc Tuymans: Paintings, 1978 – 1993, 6 September - 22 October 1995 Dresden, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen – Albertinum, 4 x 1 im Albertinum, 15 December 1996 6 April 1997, p. 56 (illustrated) CAPC Musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, Premonition: Dessins, 6 February - 11 April 1998 Porto, Fundação de Serralves, Privacy Luc Tuymans/Mirosław Bałka 1958. 1998, 24 September - 22 November 1998, no. 25, pp. 104, 106 and 244 (illustrated, p. 106) Salzburg, Salzburger Kunstverein, Luc Tuymans, 29 July - 5 September 1999 Sydney, Museum of Contemporary Art, 12th Biennale of Sydney, 26 May - 30 July 2000, p. 116 (illustrated) Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, Luc Tuymans: Sincerely, 22 October - 28 December 2000, pp. 34 and 51 (illustrated) Berlin, Hamburger Bahnhof Museum für Gegenwart, Luc Tuymans: Signal, 4 April - 13 May 2001, p. 8 (illustrated) Kunstverien Hannover; Munich, Pinakothek der Moderne; Kunstverein St. Gallen Kunstmuseum, Luc Tuymans The Arena, 9 March - 16 November 2003, pp. 66 and 115 (illustrated, p. 66)
London, Tate Modern; Dusseldorf, K21, Luc Tuymans, 23 June 2004 – 16 January 2005, no. 26, pp. 20, 22 and 61 (illustrated, pp. 20 and 61) Columbus, Wexner Center for the Arts; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Dallas Museum of Art; Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art; Brussels, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Luc Tuymans, 17 September 2009 - 8 May 2011, pp. 74-5 and 208 (illustrated, p. 74) Berlin, Martin-Gropius-Bau, Tür an Tür. Polen – Deutschland, 1000 Jahre Kunst und Geschichte, 23 September 2011 - 9 January 2012, no. 19.27, p. 660 (illustrated) Villeneuve d’Ascq, LaM Lille Métropole Musée d’art modern, d’arte contemporain et d’art brut, Luc Tuymans. Prémonitions, 30 September 2016 – 8 January 2017 Literature Luc Tuymans, exh. cat., Provinciaal Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Ostend, 1990, p. 19 (illustrated) Robert Van Ruyssevelt, ‘Luc Tuymans’, Kunst Nu, February 1990 (illustrated, cover) Documenta IX Liste der Ausgestellten Arbeiten, Kassel, 1992, n.p. Anne Milkers, ‘Schilderijen die zichzelf verzegelen: Het werk van Luc Tuymans’, Ons Erfdeel, no. 4, 1993, p. 549 Positionen Beobachtungen zum Stand der Malerei in den 90er Jahren, exh. cat., Museum Folkwang, Essen, 1995, pp. 80 and 82 (illustrated, p. 82) Ulrich Loock, Juan Vicente Aliaga, Nandy Spector eds., Luc Tuymans, London, 1996, pp. 48, 50-51 and 117 (illustrated, p. 50) Francis Picabia: feurs de chair, feurs d’âme : nus, transparences, tableaux abstraits, exh. cat., Galerie Hauser & Wirth, Cologne, 1997, pp. 64, 66 and 129 (illustrated, p. 64) Luc Tuymans: Premonition, Zeichnungen/Drawings, exh. cat., Kunstmuseum Bern, 1997, p. 42 (illustrated, p. 19) Burkhard Riemschneider and Uta Grosenick, eds., Art Now, Cologne, 2001, p. 166 (illustrated) Norio Sugawara, Luc Tuymans: Beyond Schwarzheide, Tokyo, 2007, p. 33 and cover (illustrated, p. 33) Het onbewaakte moment: de gecontroleerde ongecontroleerdheid bij het tekenen, exh. cat., Raveel Museum, Brussels, 2011, pl. 3, p. 34 (illustrated) Tommy Simoens and Donna Wingate, eds., Luc Tuymans: Exhibitions at David Zwirner 1994-2012, Antwerp, 2013, pp. 37, 39 and 44 (illustrated, pp. 37 and 39; installation view Francis Picabia and Luc Tuymans: Paintings, 1995) Dora Osborne, ‘Archive and Memory in German Literature and Visual Culture’, Edinburgh German Yearbook, Woodbridge, 2015, pp. 95-96 (illustrated, p. 96) Eva Meyer-Hermann, ed., Luc Tuymans Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings Volume 1: 1972-1994, New York, 2017, pp. 84-6, 422-4, 426-7 and 489 (illustrated, pp. 85, 423-4 and 426) Nina, Siegal, ‘Luc Tuymans, Master of Moral Complexities, Tries Something New’, The New York Times, 21 March 2019, online (illustrated) Jackie Wullschläger, ‘The dark art of seduction: Luc Tuymans in Venice’, Financial Times, 22 March 2019, online Harriet Lloyd-Smith, ‘In Venice, artist Luc Tuymans is going against the current’, Wallpaper, 2 April 2019, online Catherine Milner, ‘The Venice Biennale comes into view’, Financial Times, 19 April 2019, online
Dominating Luc Tuymans’s monographic show La Pelle (‘The Skin’), currently on view at the Palazzo Grassi, Venice, Schwarzheide, 2019, is the magnified reproduction of a seminal work of the same name that the artist made in 1986. Extended to a monumental scale and constructed entirely out of marble, this sumptuous mosaic was made to traverse the full expanse of the Palazzo’s ground foor, serving as a literal foundation - or skin - to the rest of the show. It is one of this year’s most striking artistic manifestations concurrent to the Venice Biennale, and was based on the eponymous painting – more than twenty years its elder – by virtue of its crucial subject matter and delicately understated rendition. Having resided in the same private collection since its execution, the original Schwarzheide, 1986, revels in momentous conceptual and visual signifcance, and posits as one of Tuymans’s most prodigious masterpieces. Delineating the soaring silhouettes of diffident pine trees against an off-white, faded background, Schwarzheide presents the viewer with an image that is both compositionally soothing and atmospherically ominous. Though at frst glance the painting’s invocation of natural elements conjures a passively peaceful atmosphere, – steeped in a withdrawn landscape devoid of geographic indicators – the void and silence that envelop the scene exude a more unnerving aura that betrays the heaviness of the composition’s subject matter. Taking its name after a World War II concentration camp,
Schwarzheide belongs to a cycle of works that Tuymans commenced in the latter half of the 1980s, touching on themes of loss and violence in the context of the Holocaust. Among these paintings, Tuymans’s chilling Gaskamer (‘Gas Chamber’), illustrating the horrifically ordinary setting of a death room, was displayed alongside the present work at the artist’s major 2004 solo exhibition at Tate Modern, as well as during Documenta IX in Kassel in 1992, directed by Tuymans’s dear friend, Jan Hoet. More abstract and nondescript than the explicitly vicious Gaskamer, Schwarzheide is nonetheless replete with historic associations that compromise its seemingly simple and innocuous appearance. It presents the perspective of prisoners standing behind fences, looking outwards towards an unseeable, unreachable horizon, which itself provides a tragic echo to the similarly distant – if not entirely extinguished – realm of freedom situated beyond. While Schwarzheide’s discreet composition gives no precise indication of space and time, it nonetheless emanates a sense of familiarity that, through uncertain strokes and bilious tones, evokes the nostalgic aura of ancient documents. Culled from a contraband drawing made by Alfred Kantor – a concentration camp survivor whose published book of sketches has been a constant source of material for Tuymans – Schwarzheide lives as a reference to the drawings that captive Jews made in labour and concentration camps during the war.
‘I wanted to make my paintings look old from the start, which is important because they are about memory.’ Luc Tuymans
Luc Tuymans, Study for Schwarzheide, 1985, pencil on paper. © Luc Tuymans.
Alfred Kantor, Originial sketch done in Schwarzheide, 1945.
Installation view of the present work in Documenta IX, Kassel, 1992. ÂŠ Luc Tuymans.
Luc Tuymans, Schwarzheide, 2019, Fantini Mosaici Milan. Installation view at Palazzo Grassi, 2019. ÂŠ Luc Tuymans. Palazzo Grassi, Photography by Matteo De Fina.
Ofen, these secret drawings would be stripped and scattered to avoid confscation from guards, yet in Kantor’s case, a few sketches were kept safe, hidden under the foorboards of his barrack. 127 drawings – some originals and some reconstituted from memory upon liberation – were assembled in a book called The Book of Alfred Kantor, accompanied by short texts providing context for each image. While the few surviving originals Kantor made in camps are extremely simple, immediate and understated in appearance, made with a pencil and lined paper, the reflective drawings that followed his liberation brim with added colour, text, and narrative, conjuring a more explicitly violent appearance that nonetheless feel more distant in content. The two original sketches that most obviously served as models for Schwarzheide, – carrying the same trees and deafening sense of silence – are pictorially reduced, unremarkable and muted to the point of eeriness, as if essentially relaying lived experiences with no voice or flter. Schwarzheide was in fact the third and last camp that Kantor experienced during the war. Having first been sent to the Terezin ghetto in 1941, at the age of 18, he was then moved to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944, and later to the labour camp at Schwarzheide, north of Dresden, where he worked grueling 12-hour shifs to help rebuild a German synthetic-fuel plant. At the end of his imprisonment in Schwarzheide, Kantor participated in the death march to Theresienstadt, which eventually led him to freedom in May 1945. He was one of 175 prisoners out of 1,000 to survive this march. The sketches Kantor made across his three experiences illustrate the daily routine and environments of a Jew during the Holocaust, and, more specifcally, of a Jewish man held captive in Terezin, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Schwarzheide – three of twenty main concentration camps in countries occupied by Nazi Germany. Kantor had written: ‘My commitment to drawing came out of a deep instinct of self-preservation and undoubtedly helped me to deny the unimaginable horrors of that time’ (Alfred Kantor, quoted in ‘Depicted Life in Nazi Camps’, The New York Times, 26 January 2003, online). As such, the source image from the present work may be understood as a found document from a desperate moment in history; a shy witness to unfathomably cruel and threatening forces. The black lines puncturing the scene’s vista – the literal reproduction of the paper’s idiosyncratic lines – act as reminders to the oppression that weighed on the lives of insiders during their imprisonment. Their sof, unobtrusive rendition reminds the viewer of how easily this oppression went unseen. Crucially, Tuymans notes that the yellowish backdrop coating the surface of Schwarzheide drew from the similarly toned sketches he engaged with in the creation of his work.
Luc Tuymans, Gaskamer, 1986, oil on canvas. © Luc Tuymans.
Luc Tuymans, Our New Quarters, 1986, oil on canvas, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt. © Luc Tuymans.
Gerhard Richter, Birkenau, 2014, oil on canvas. © Gerhard Richter 2019 (0142). Photos: David Brandt.
‘There is a sort of indiference in my paintings which makes them more violent, because any objects in them are as if erased, cancelled. I am not into aesthetics; I am into meaning and necessity’. Luc Tuymans
‘Schwarzheide is about representation and debt, and the agent object had to be incorporated directly in the work’, the artist remarked. ‘I needed the yellowness and the understatement to be revealed in the painting not as a gimmick, but as a true assessment of reality and time’ (Luc Tuymans, in conversation with Marianne Hoet, 5 June 2019, Antwerp). Similarly, the blueish hue refected by the pine trees’ green colour serves as a reference to the available materials that were presumably added to the detainees’ drawings – such as charcoal – which Tuymans states produced a kind of glowing shimmer. Unfathomably raw and potently suggestive, Kantor’s drawings that Tuymans based the present painting on are able to convey a world of atrocities through unmediated gestures and pure self-expression. Their medium’s inherently imperfect mechanisms and the fallibility of the artist’s hand exude more reality than the moving images of flms ever could: they are drenched in the feelings and truth of the man who lived them. Schwarzheide refects this essential approach and equally conjures an eerily real image, despite its pared-down appearance. Eluding the depiction of crime and violence, the painting visually encapsulates what the German-American
philosopher Hannah Arendt called the ‘banality of evil’ – an expression she had used to describe the German-Austrian Nazi Adolf Eichmann. In Arendt’s terms, the banality of evil is ‘word-and-thought-defying’; it is the failure for evil to portray itself, its deeds and its enactors for what they truly are, through the demise of thought and reflection (Hannah Arendt, ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem, 5 parts’, The New Yorker, February-March 1963, online). Schwarzheide was painted 41 years afer Kantor’s liberation, 23 years following Arendt’s assertion of the ‘banality of evil’, and just a few years afer the frst airing of Sophie’s Choice and Shoah – two films which brought the Holocaust back to the forefront of the public’s collective unconscious in the 1980s. Schwarzheide additionally came on the heels of Tuymans’s fve-year hiatus from the practice of painting, which he had commenced around 1980 to focus on film. A number of flm fragments from this period of experimentation informed the artist’s paintings to come; thence, he spent no longer than a day on his painterly creations, and began using techniques of enlargement and cropping. As a result, his images mixed impression, memory, real documents, and imagination; an amalgamation of sources that in turn conjured
Hasegawa Tohaku, Pine Trees (lef screen), 16th century, ink on paper screen. Tokyo National Museum. Image: SCALA, Florence.
‘Violence is the only structure underlying my work. It is both physical and detached at the same time’. Luc Tuymans
a confounding aesthetic akin to ‘studies in a kind of monochrome in which colors are subjected to an excess of light, fading whatever intense hue might have once been present to leave behind an indeterminate gray-blue-green-brown, the colour of institutional hallways and old newspapers’ (Helen Molsworth, ‘Luc Tuymans: Painting the Banality of Evil’, Luc Tuymans, Germany, 2011, p. 18). Schwarzheide illustrates this shift prodigiously through the work’s grizzled, almost Impressionistic aesthetic, which reveals the quick but careful gestures of the artist’s hand.
The only option was to work from the real, and to look at a time period that was close to mine, historically, and which was decisive. With the idea of the Holocaust comes a psychological breakdown. Those elements were culminating, and had to culminate in a lot of imagery’ (Luc Tuymans, in conversation with Jason Farago, ‘An interview with Luc Tuymans’, Even Magazine, Summer 2015, online). The choice of Kantor’s drawing of Schwarzheide as a subject is thus laden with meaning and symbolism; it echoes Tuymans’s own meditations and meanderings on his past, and the tragic circularity of history.
A testament to the present work’s layered meaning, it is noteworthy that Tuymans shares a proximity with the subject at hand. Born in Antwerp in 1958, just over a decade afer the end of the war, his mother’s family had formed part of the Dutch resistance, while his Flemish father’s family counted a number of collaborators. Tuymans frequently mused on this historical period being a tough one to navigate psychologically, as it forced him to wrestle with a heavy dual heritage. He exclaimed: ‘It was lingering. A sort of phobia. I had a fascination with that time period, because I had clearly made a decision not to make art for art’s sake. I wasn’t interested in slotting into a tradition of modernism or postmodernism — to try to position myself in such a way was not an option.
An icon of painterly skill, conceptual complexity and historical importance, Schwarzheide is one of Tuymans’s most important works, epitomising his capacity to capture some of the most violent passages of history within a simple, understated image. Refecting the painting’s lasting impact on both Tuymans’s opus and art history itself, Schwarzheide has been included in Tuymans’s most signifcant exhibitions, including his very frst solo show at Ruimte Morguen, Antwerp, in 1988, and his major retrospectives held at Tate Modern, London, in 2004, and at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, San Francisco Museum of Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, between 2009 to 2011.
Property of a Private European Collector
18. Marlene Dumas
Losing (Her Meaning) signed and titled ‘Losing her meaning M Dumas’ on the reverse oil on canvas 50 x 70 cm (19 5/8 x 27 1/2 in.) Painted in 1988. Estimate £400,000-600,000 $507,000-761,000 €448,000-672,000 ♠ plus Buyers Premium and VAT, ARR applies*
Provenance Galerie Paul Andriesse, Amsterdam Erik Andriesse, Amsterdam Thence by descent to the present owner Exhibited Kunsthalle zu Kiel - Christian Albrechts Universität, Marlene Dumas Waiting (for meaning), 10 August - 28 September 1988, backcover (illustrated) Amsterdam, Galerie Paul Andriesse, Waiting (for meaning), 25 October – 19 November 1988 Edinburgh, The Fruitmarket Gallery, 6 Dutch Artists, 28 January - 12 March 1989, n.p. (illustrated) Kunsthalle Bern, The Question of Human Pink, 7 July – 20 August 1989, p. 37 (illustrated) Eindhoven, Van Abbemuseum, Marlene Dumas Miss Interpreted, 15 March – 3 May 1992, pp. 55, 115 (illustrated, p. 55) Kassel, Aue Pavilions, Documenta IX, 13 June - 20 September 1992 The Arts Club Chicago, Marlene Dumas, Work on Paper and Paintings, 1 February - 5 March 1994, n.p. Dublin, The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Chlorosis, 11 November - 17 December 1994 Malmö Konsthall; Castello di Rivoli, The Particularity of Being Human: Marlene Dumas - Francis Bacon, 18 March – 1 October, 1995, p. 121 (illustrated) Kunsthalle Emden, Der Akt in der Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts, 26 October 2002 – 26 January 2003, pp. 199, 267 (illustrated, p. 215) Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen (KMSKA), Gorge(l): Beklemming en verademing in de kunst / Oppression and Relief in Art (1840-2006), 7 October 2006 - 7 January 2007, p. 137 (illustrated, pl. 48) Cape Town, Iziko South African National Gallery Johannesburg, The Standard Bank Gallery, Marlene Dumas: Intimate Relations, 7 November 2007 – 29 March 2008, p. 134 (illustrated, p. 70) Los Angeles, The Museum of Contemporary Art; New York, The Museum of Modern Art; Houston, The Menil Collection, Marlene Dumas: Measuring Your Own Grave, 22 June 2008 – 21 June 2009, p. 265 (illustrated, p. 253) Dordrechts Museum, STOP MAKING SENSE: Nederlandse schilderkunst uit de jaren 80 - Nederlandse schilderkunst uit de jaren ‘80, 6 October 2013 – 19 January 2014, pp. 44 – 47 (illustrated, p. 45) Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum; London, Tate Modern; Basel, Fondation Beyeler; Marlene Dumas: The Image as Burden, 6 September 2014 – 13 September 2015, p. 186 (illustrated, p. 46) Literature Renée Steenbergen, ‘Dumas,’ NRC Handelsblad, 4 November 1988, n.p. (illustrated)
IS in de HAL, exh. cat., Rotterdam: Stichting fonds voor beeldende kunsten, vormgeving en bouwkunst, 1989, p. 76 (illustrated) Catherine van Houts, ‘Een plaatje van de atoomboom aan de muur,’ Het Parool, 10 February 1990, p. 49 Ella Reitsma, ‘Als je geen keuzes maakt, faal je ook nooit. Je kunt altijd zeggen dat het ding niet af is Beeld en betekenis in de kunst van Marlene Dumas,’ Vrij Nederland, 24 February 1990, pp. 18-22 Ingrid Schafner,’Erotische vertoningen van innerlijke verwarring. Marlene Dumas in het Van Abbemuseum/Erotic Displays of Mental Confusions: Marlene Dumas at the Van Abbemuseum,’ Kunst & Museumjournaal, vol. 3, no. 6, 1992, p. 29 (illustrated, cover) Marlene Dumas, ‘De muze is uitgeput,’ Ik geef mezelf de horizon: kunstenaarsteksten tussen theorie en flosofe, Amsterdam Rijksakademie/Uitgeverij Perdu, 1992, pp. 41-49 (illustrated, p. 123) Cornée Jacobs, ‘Marlene Dumas en de erotische blik van de kijker,’ Utrechts Nieuwsblad, 31 March 1992, n.p. (illustrated) Ed Wingen, ‘Dumas zet Sneeuwwitje in het verkeerde sprookje: Na het Van Abbemuseum naar de Documenta,’ De Telegraaf, 3 April 1992, p. 19 Bert Bauwelinck, ‘Wolfjzers voor psycho-analisten: Marlene Dumas in het Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven,’ Gazet van Antwerpen, 30 April 1992, n.p. Marina Warner, ‘Marlene Dumas: In the Charnel House of Love’ and ‘Im Beinhaus der Liebe’, Parkett, no. 38, December 1993, p. 77, 83, 92, 98, 114 and 118 (illustrated, p. 92). Marlene Dumas: Models, exh. cat., Salzburger Kunstverein, 1995, p. 10 (illustrated) Paul Depondt, ‘Verwantschap in een Turijns knekelhuis,’ de Volkskrant (Kunst & Cultuur), 23 June 1995, p. 1 Walter Barten, ‘Zowel de wanhoop om, als het geluk van het bestaan,’ Het Financieele Dagblad, 9 September 1995, n.p. Neal David Benezra and Mirosław Bałka, Distemper: Dissonant Themes in the Art of the 1990’s, exh. cat., Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C., 1996, p. 35 Leontien Wegman, ‘Chaos is mijn talent: Interview met de kunstenares Marlene Dumas,’ Elegance, November 1997, pp. 113-117 (illustrated, p. 114) Eight People from Europe: Marlene Dumas, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, Gunma, 1998, fg. no. 7 (illustrated, p. 25) Dominic van den Boogerd, Barbara Bloom, Mariuccia Casadio and Ilaria Bonacossa, Marlene Dumas, London, 1999, p. 32 and 238 (illustrated, p. 53) Marianne Theunissen, ‘Naakte modellen,’ The Dummy Speaks: tijdschrif voor jongeren over beeldende kunst, no. 2, 1999, n.p (illustrated) Eline van der Vlist, ‘Face Value,’Modern Painters, vol. 21, June 2008, pp. 82-87 (illustrated, p. 84) Hunter Drohojowska-Philp, ‘Biting and Bruised,’ Artnet News, 2008, online (illustrated) Annelie Pohlen, ‘Marlene Dumas: Schillernde Models und müde Müde Musen oder wie die Malerei den Blick in Verlegenheit bringt,’ Kunstforum International, no. 199, October/December 2009, pp. 234-245 (illustrated, p. 235) Victoria Sadler, ‘Dark, Haunting and Extraordinary: Marlene Dumas at Tate Modern,’ The Hufngton Post, 6 April 2015, online James Cahill, ‘Marlene Dumas Amsterdam, London and Basel,’ The Burlington Magazine, April 2015, p. 279
An early masterpiece by Marlene Dumas, Losing (Her Meaning), 1988, draws the viewer into an ethereal scene beautifully painted in a sumptuous palette of moody blues and greens. A nude female fgure foats in a pool of water, her luminescent body refracted in the dark waters as if illuminated by the moon. Painted in 1988, Dumas conceived of this work in tandem with Waiting (for Meaning) for her first international solo museum show at the Kunsthalle zu Kiel. Highlighted on back and front cover of the exhibition catalogue, respectively, these two paintings are widely celebrated as setting the conceptual and formal foundation for the discrete series of paintings of reclining female nudes that includes Snowwhite and the Next Generation, Centraal Museum, Utrecht, Snowwhite and the Broken Arm, Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, and The Ritual, Musées de la Ville de Strasbourg. While Waiting (for Meaning) entered the collection of the Kunsthalle zu Kiel, the present work was acquired by Dumas’s fellow artist and close friend Erik Andriesse. Remaining in the same family collection since his passing in 1993, Losing (Her Meaning) has been included in all major Dumas exhibitions in the past three decades – from Documenta 9 and her seminal Miss Interpreted solo show at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven in 1992, to, most recently, The Image as Burden, which travelled from the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, to Tate Modern, London, and The Beyeler Foundation, Basel, in 2014-2015.
When Dumas created the present work for her 1988 exhibition at the Kunsthalle zu Kiel, she had established herself as one of the leading post-conceptual painters in Europe alongside artists such as René Daniëls, Erik Andriesse and Luc Tuymans. It was in 1985 that Dumas triumphantly returned to painting afer a fve-year hiatus, developing a complex approach to fgurative painting that took as a starting point her visual archive of art historical reproductions, news clippings, and photographic imagery. While Dumas based Waiting (For Meaning) on a 1970s photograph by David Hamilton depicting a female nude outstretched languorously on a bed, for the present work she took as a point of departure an image of a woman snorkeling from a thrif store nudist magazine, which her gallerist Paul Andriesse had gifed to Dumas for her archive. Transformative rather than mimetic, Dumas’s process of painting exploits the physicality of paint to undermine the photographic source material. Like her predecessor Edvard Munch, Dumas relishes in the materiality of painting; here, she liberally layers paint to evoke the depth and darkness of the sea, while simultaneously covering the ground with loose brushstrokes, allowing for areas of the canvas to remain exposed. ‘I especially admire in Munch that each brushstroke can be traced,’ Dumas has written.
Marlene Dumas, Waiting (for Meaning), 1988, oil on canvas. © Marlene Dumas.
Edvard Munch, Mermaid, 1896, oil on canvas. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Image: Bridgeman Images
John Everett Millais, Ophelia, 1851-52, oil on canvas, Tate, London. Image: SCALA, Florence.
‘The canvas breathes anxiety, caused by the dynamic movements of his brushstrokes’ (Marlene Dumas, ‘Munch – And why I like him’, The Power of the Avant-Garde, Paris, 2016, p. 18). As with Munch, Dumas’s brushstrokes and moody colour palette infuse the canvas with an expressive immediacy and sensuality.
‘There is a crisis with regard to Representation. They are looking for Meaning as if it was a thing. As if it was a girl, required to take her panties of as if she would want to do so, as soon as the true interpreter comes along. As if there was something to take of.’ Marlene Dumas, The Artwork as Misunderstanding, 1991
Dumas has cited her encounter of Munch’s illustrated poem Alpha and Omega in 1981 as particularly formative. As she writes, ‘He paints modern love stories, not only between men and women, but also between us and nature. How we all struggle with afection, alienation and dying’ (Marlene Dumas, ‘Munch – And why I like him’, The Power of the AvantGarde, Paris, 2016, p. 18). A similar existentialism permeates Losing (Her Meaning). It is almost as if Dumas here presents us with an imagined vignette of the lone figure in Munch’s Mermaid, 1896, frozen in time as she swims moonlit waters. Equally calling to mind the motif of the floating woman in John Everett Millais’s Ophelia, 1851-1852, the present work exemplifes how Dumas’s has here transformed an innocuous leisure image into a more charged apparition imbued with sinister undertones. While Dumas had previously focused on frontal portraits, works such as the present one exemplify how she shifed towards the motif of reclining female nudes – a loaded subject matter in the context of the politicised art world of the 1980s. ‘The paintings Waiting (For Meaning) and Losing (Her Meaning)…’ curator Cornelia Butler stated, ‘are pivotal in terms of unpacking the problem of the female body’ (Cornelia Butler, Measuring Your Own Grave, exh. cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2008, p. 63).
Installation view of the present work in Van Abbemuseum, Marlene Dumas Miss Interpreted, Eindhoven 1992. © Marlene Dumas.
As Dumas explained of this series, ‘After having used confrontational and frontal compositions for a long time (the big eyes and faces), it was time to turn the gaze away. “The death of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world”, said E.A. Poe…and a naked one even more so Roger Vadim could add’ (Marlene Dumas, ‘Waiting for Meaning’, 1988, in Miss Interpreted, exh. cat., Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, 1992, p. 52). With Losing (Her Meaning), Dumas both plays into this tragic-romantic trope and challenges the male-dominated tradition of the female nude in art history at large. While challenging existing notions of beauty, this subject also served Dumas as the means to claim her status as a woman painter working within a largely male figurative tradition – evidenced at the time within the movement of Neoexpressionism. As Neal Benezra argued with regard to Waiting (For Meaning), ‘the combination of image and title suggests that the fgure lies awaiting inspiration. In the present work Dumas conversely, ‘replaces the bed with a pool of water and inverts the fgure as if to drown her. Dumas’s unmistakable point here is that the role of the female model throughout art history…may be likened to that of the woman generally’ (Neal Benezra, Distemper, Dissonant Themes in the Art of the 1990s, exh. cat., Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., 1996, p. 35). The female nude also serves Dumas as an analogy to interrogate the crisis of representation dominating the postmodern art discourse at the time. Refecting on the status of
painting, Dumas put forward: ‘…They are looking for Meaning as if it was a Thing. As if it was a girl, required to take her panty of. As if she would want to do so, as soon as the true interpreter comes along. As if there was something to take of’ (Marlene Dumas, ‘The Artwork as Misunderstanding’, 1999, Sweet Nothings, New York, 2015, p. 60). Dumas ingeniously delves into this desire for meaning with the present work. As James Cahill has indeed argued in relation to the fgure in this work, ‘Whether she is diving or drowning is pointedly unclear. Poised between agency and passivity, the anonymous woman can be read as an allegory of Dumas’s art’ (James Cahill, ‘Exhibitions, Marlene Dumas’, The Burlington Magazine, April 2015, p. 280). Indeed, the open-ended image perfectly conveys the notion of indeterminacy and duality that lie at the core of Dumas’s practice. Dumas probes the fraught relationship between representation and interpretation through her pointed combination of title and image: the title Losing (Her Meaning) conjures a number of associations, but immediately it would appear to suggest the futility of ‘waiting for meaning’ thematised in its companion piece. Meaning is crucially made and re-made within each new context and with each viewer. While Losing (Her Meaning) then powerfully encapsulates the core tenets of Dumas’s post-conceptual practice, it above all remains a beautiful ode to the sensuality and pleasure of painting – beautifully exemplifying the painterly virtuosity that has rightfully made Dumas one of the most preeminent fgurative painters of our time.
19. Jean-Michel Basquiat
Untitled signed, inscribed and dated ‘NYC 81 Jean-Michel Basquiat’ on the reverse acrylic, oilstick and xerox on wood 122 x 76.2 cm (48 x 30 in.) Executed in 1981. Estimate £3,000,000-5,000,000 $3,810,000-6,340,000 €3,390,000-5,650,000 ‡ plus Buyers Premium and VAT*
Provenance Stavros Merjos, Los Angeles Neal Meltzer Fine Art, New York Phillips, New York, 16 May 2013, lot 22 Acquired at the above sale by the present owner Exhibited Phillips, London, American African American, 8 - 25 November 2017 New York, Nahmad Contemporary, Jean-Michel Basquiat | Xerox, 12 March - 31 May 2019 Literature Jean-Louis Prat and Richard D. Marshall, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Paris, 1996, no. 4, p. 65 (illustrated, p. 64) Tony Shafrazi et al., Jean-Michel Basquiat, New York, 1999, p. 65 (illustrated) Jean-Louis Prat and Richard D. Marshall, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Paris, 2000, no. 5, p. 89 (illustrated, p. 88)
With its electric immediacy, radical aesthetic insurgency and complex symbolism, Untitled, 1981, was created in a year of unprecedented success for Jean-Michel Basquiat. Rising to public attention from underground obscurity, 1981 marks the artist’s breakthrough participation in the renowned New York/ New Wave exhibition at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, his introduction to the downtown Manhattan art dealer Annina Nosei, whose gallery basement would become Basquiat’s determinative studio, and the publication of ‘The Radiant Child’, Rene Ricard’s article for Artforum that first brought his work to wider critical attention. Executed with convulsive, gestural brushwork and a frenzied elegance that refects the spontaneity of grafti, Untitled is a def encapsulation of the artist’s transition from street to studio. Utilising the tripartite framing and devotional aspect of medieval and byzantine icons, Basquiat recasts the baseball player Jackie Robinson –
‘If Cy Twombly and Jean Dubufet had a baby, and gave it up for adoption, it would be Jean-Michel. The elegance of Twombly is there but from the same source (grafti) and so is the brut of the young Dubufet.’ Rene Ricard, ‘The Radiant Child’, Artforum, December 1981, p. 43
Cy Twombly, Untitled, 1961, oil, graphite and coloured crayons on canvas, © Cy Twombly Foundation. Image: Bridgeman Images.
Franz Kline, Untitled, circa 1959, oil on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C. © ARS, NY and DACS, London 2019. Image: SCALA, Florence.
the first African American to play professionally in Major League Baseball in the late 1940s and 1950s – as a modern day saint, in a painting as intrinsically autobiographical as it is an acutely aware portrayal of black male subjectivity. As Robert Storr has described the artist during this early critical period of his career: ‘Jumpy, angry, driven, Basquiat was in a terrible and terrifying hurry’ (Robert Storr, quoted in, Jean-Michel Basquiat: Drawings, exh. cat., Robert Miller Gallery, New York, 1990, n.p.). Contemporaneous sources, such as the now legendary flm Downtown 81, the screenplay written by Basquiat’s friend and art writer Glenn O’Brian - paint a picture of Basquiat as possessing an insatiable creative drive. The present work demonstrates this impassioned, almost compulsive intensity to his practice: the schematic oilstick fgure and voraciously applied swathes of
paint fuse street aesthetics with the artist’s own particular brand of unfltered, guttural symbolism. This is also one of the first paintings to introduce the quasi-heroic figure of Robinson, who broke the colour line to play for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, within Basquiat’s oeuvre, and predates the acclaimed Famous Black Athletes series that is widely recognised as part of his efforts to forge a body of work conscious of its contribution to art history. Brought up in Brooklyn, Basquiat was formatively nourished by childhood visits to the many art museums of New York City; an archaeological excavation of his visual lexicon reveals an outstanding absorption of, and criticality towards, these narratives. His incomparable symbolism is enmeshed in a complex matrix of signifers steeped in indigenous traditions of African tribal and myriad sources of art historical inspiration,
Jackie Robinson, 1945. Granger / Bridgeman Images.
‘The black person is the protagonist in most of my paintings … I realized that I didn’t see many paintings with black people in them’. Jean-Michel Basquiat
from the anatomical drawings of Leonardo da Vinci, Pablo Picasso’s primitivism, to Cy Twombly’s ciphers of text and line. The overtly Abstract Expressionist machismo of Franz Kline is exemplifed here by the vigorous yellow that tracks across the lower-right quadrant of the present work. A junior member of the Brooklyn Museum of Art from the age of six, Basquiat’s vast and varied output sort to redress visual culture’s myopic recitation of an exclusively white viewpoint. Profoundly conscious of the representational efects of racial segregation, as Basquiat later told a reporter for The New York Times: ‘The black person is the protagonist in most of my paintings … I realized that I didn’t see many paintings with black people in them’ (Jean-Michel Basquiat, quoted in Cathleen McGuigan, ‘New Art, New Money’, The New York Times, 10 February 1985, online).
Worshipped from below by a gridded chorus of winged and haloed, character Robinson is positioned within the ascribed compositional schema of Jesus’s ascension into heaven, and in so doing Basquiat boldly asserts his insertion within this canon: ‘The Christian artistic tradition was developed to chasten, instruct, and exult; we watch Basquiat rehearse, with an almost absurd potency, the instrumental inadequacy of such morally functional art from beyond the introverted rigors of modernism and the garrulous ironies of post-modernism. With the hybrid iconography that he developed from his complex heritage, he attempted to add [jazz luminary] Charlie Parker, Jackie Robinson, and [boxer] Joe Louis to a wobbly, generic pantheon of saints while such gestures might still have meaning’ (Marc Mayer, ‘Basquiat in History’, Basquiat, New York, 2005, p. 51).
Muhammad Ali Granger / Bridgeman Images.
Demonstrative of Basquiat’s encyclopaedic and absorptive relationship with visual culture, the angelic fgures have been repetitively printed by Xerox and attached directly to the work’s wooden support – a distinctive material marker of his early practice and referential echo of the sight of ad-hoc promotional billstickers common to city streets, the ground for his very first artworks. Their gridded form could also be read as an emblem of Manhattan’s labyrinthine street network, quivering with the dynamism of New York City. In this sense, the musicality of Basquiat’s canvases, his calculated weighting of primary colours and sense of vibration in the raw and intuitive mark-making, is the visual equivalent of his obsession with jazz, creating an score-like topography that is at once interruptive and complete. However, some of the artist’s greatest source material came from his own life experiences. At the age of eight, Basquiat was hit by a car whilst playing outside his home, sufering a broken arm, surgery to his spleen and a hospital stay to recuperate, during which time his mother gave him a copy of the medical textbook, Gray’s Anatomy. His resultant fascination with the human body and form has become a foundational trope within the almost-mythic production of Basquiat’s biography.
The present work’s skeletal silhouettes, and in particular the mask-like grimace placed atop the idiosyncratic face of its protagonist, are typical of this period, signalling Basquiat’s fatalistic conception of his own spectacularly rapid success that recalled the rise and fall of his heroes. Framed in inky black oilstick, Untitled’s combatant confronts the viewer with penetrating insistence and a fierce gladiatorial stance; with glazed eyes, brandished teeth and an oversized baseball bat-cum-weapon, it is only the all-American symbolic import of Robinson’s striped uniform that undercut the inherent violence and aggression of the image. Crudely delineated with a stark and prostrated fixity, Basquiat’s paroxysmal intensity of line takes on a specifc art historical and political efcacy, as recognised by art critic Rene Ricard in his aforementioned essay, ‘The Radiant Child’. ‘If Cy Twombly and Jean Dubufet had a baby, and gave it up for adoption, it would be JeanMichel. The elegance of Twombly is there but from the same source (graffiti) and so is the brut of the young Dubuffet. Except the politics of Dubuffet needed a lecture to show, needed a separate text, whereas in Jean-Michel they are integrated by the picture’s necessity (Rene Ricard, ‘The Radiant Child,’ Artforum, December 1981, p. 43).
Jean-Michel Basquiat wearing an American football helmet, 1981. © The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat / ADA GP, Paris and DACS, London 2019. Photo: Edo Bertoglio
‘...the crown sits securely on the head of Jean-Michel’s repertory so that it is of no importance where he got it bought it stole it; it’s his. He won that crown.’ (Rene Ricard, ‘The Radiant Child,’ Artforum, December 1981, p. 37).
It is here that the self-identifcation of the artist with the fgure of Jackie Robinson is most dramatically efected, and notably exaggerated by the proliferation of Basquiat’s trademark icon – the three-point crown – shown both in the top-left aspect of the composition but also a recurrent pattern within its gridded armature. Often interpreted as a declaration of the artist’s power and ambition, the crown marks the pinnacle of Basquiat’s culturally loaded pyrotechnics of sign and signifier, here weaponised within his graphic arsenal. Numerous interpretations of this symbol abound: from its precedence within New York grafti culture of the 1970s and 1980s and use as a visual sign of one artist’s appreciation for another’s work; the notion of kingship within jazz culture and the ‘crowning’ of especially talented performers such as Duke Ellington and Nat King Cole; to its assimilation by the world heavyweight boxing champion Mohammed Ali, – the selfproclaimed ‘Greatest’ – who took to theatrically adopting a crown for pubic appearances, including for the cover of Sports Illustrated in 1969. ‘The Radiant Child’ is also prescient for drawing attention to its resonance for Basquiat, with Ricard writing ‘the crown sits securely on the head of Jean-Michel’s repertory so that it is of no importance where he got it bought it stole it; it’s his. He won that crown.’ (Rene Ricard, ‘The Radiant Child,’ Artforum, December 1981, p. 37). An emblem of royal or saintly signifcance here applied to a black sporting icon, the gesture’s function is one of empowerment and liberating enfranchisement. In this way, Untitled revels in the referential power of Basquiat’s poetic and personal iconography, and his commanding and ferocious orchestration of artistic autonomy and cultural discourse as tools with which to challenge systems of power and representation.
Alex Rodriguez in conversation with Robert Manley, Worldwide Co-Head of 20th Century & Contemporary Art.
A dedicated collector of American contemporary art, Alex Rodriguez has built an incisive collection of works that boasts exquisite and cutting-edge creations by the likes of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Richard Prince, Keith Haring and Andy Warhol, as well as Nate Lowman, Lucien Smith, and Jonathan Horowitz. Considered one of the greatest baseball players of all time—setting numerous records, including his unbeaten 25 career grand slams playing for the Seattle Mariners, Texas Rangers, and New York Yankees—Rodriguez has employed his passionate spirit and acute eye to pursue new collecting ventures within the realm of art. This dedicated pursuit, forged in the last decade, has in turn allowed him to build an illustrious pantheon of artworks, of which a delectable selection coats the walls of his home in Coral Gables, Florida.
Property from the Collection of
Robert Manley: Your collection today brims with some of the contemporary art scene’s most coveted names. When did you start collecting? Alex Rodriguez: I have been collecting for a decade. A number of gallerists and advisors pointed me in the right direction, and I was fortunate to meet some rigorous artists such as Glenn Ligon and Dan Colen, who informed and forged my collector’s eye. In 2011, I got to know Nate Lowman and he created an installation inside my home batting cage. Since then, I have been in conversation with several artists, whose studio practice seem close to my own as an athlete. RM: What kinds of art works are you most drawn to?
For Rodriguez, collecting art is a highly personal afair. Drawn to the evocative, storytelling capacity of the artwork, he enthuses over the unique experience of living with the pieces he passionately assembles. Sharing his creative interests with his daughters, Rodriguez insists on the intimate tone of his collecting, perpetually vested with the practice and story that underlie the works he acquires. As a result, the artworks he has brought together form a narrative of their own, irreducibly connected to Rodriguez’s own character. It is no coincidence that Rodriguez’s collection is comprised of artists predominantly originating from New York. Having been born and raised in the city, Rodriguez has continued to work there during various stages of his life. More particularly, Rodriguez speaks of Richard Prince and Jean-Michel Basquiat, who were both heavily informed by the vibrancy of their city surroundings, as true icons of the artistic canon. Dubbed a ‘true urban cowboy’, Rodriguez has been an avid collector of Prince, whose body of work interrogates the construction of American identity through the appropriation of American mass media. Basquiat, an integral to the fourishing artistic culture of downtown Manhattan in the 1970s and 1980s, has lef an unimaginable impression on subsequent generations of artists, and is Rodriguez’s ‘favourite artist of all time’. Enjoying unique relationships with artists of his own generation, including Joe Bradley and Dan Colen, Rodriguez has found that a reciprocal respect naturally established itself between him and the artists he supports, spurring a desire to engage in a meaningful dialogue relating to their diferent areas of work. These artists’ devotion to their art echo Rodriguez’s very own dynamism and rigour in life. Deeply committed to following their craf, he frequently visits their studios and observes their artistic processes, in turn welcoming them to see him play at Yankee Stadium.
AR: I am drawn to a range of contemporary artists, from Warhol and Haring to my own contemporaries such as Joe Bradley and Alex Israel. I like works that tell a story, ofen related to my own personal experiences. Basquiat is one of my favourite artists of all time; each painting he created reads as a diary of his day. RM: For many people of your generation, there was a fascination with the car culture of the 1960s, as embodied by the Mustang GTO in Richard Prince’s Mustang Painting. Could you tell us more about your impression of this work? AR: The Mustang GTO is a true American icon. In fact, they still make versions of the famous ‘pony’ and ‘muscle’ cars today. Richard Prince is a true urban cowboy and one of America’s top artists. He is uniquely in touch with the Everyman and Pulp Fiction. RM: Do you continue to collect today? What are your plans for the future? AR: I am starting a fresh chapter in my personal life, and afer a decade of collecting on my own, I am excited to begin a new collecting journey with Jennifer. We are both committed to the arts, and will continue to be great patrons together.
Alex Rodriguez with Jean-Michel Basquiat’s, Pink Elephant with Fire Engine, 1984, 2019.
Property from the Collection of
20. Richard Prince
Mustang Painting signed, inscribed and dated ‘Richard Prince 2014-2016 #2’ on the reverse inkjet and acrylic on canvas 177.2 x 121.6 cm (69 3/4 x 47 7/8 in.) Executed in 2014-16. Estimate £700,000-1,000,000 $888,000-1,270,000 €791,000-1,130,000 ‡ plus Buyers Premium and VAT*
Provenance Private Collection (acquired directly from the artist) Acquired from the above by the present owner
Property from the Collection of
‘Those cars came out when I was teenager. I never owned one when I was a teenager. Too expensive. Anyway. When I started to focus on the contents of lifestyle magazines, hot-rod magazines were all over the newsstands.’ Richard Prince
Richard Prince, G.T. Source Image. © Richard Prince.
Aiming to capture diferent facets of the American Dream through the photographic or painterly renditions of quintessentially American objects and subjects, Richard Prince’s work draws from advertisement and mass media imagery to shed a light on what is most deeply steeped in the country’s collective unconscious. Falling within the iconographic feld of muscle-car culture, Mustang Painting, 2014-16, presents an iridescent mustang cruising amidst an abstract and indistinct mass of blue paint. Conjuring the aesthetic of a flm poster, Prince employs a striking combination of two primary colours punctuated by stabs of kaleidoscopic hues, and captures the defning shot from a foor angle, in order to amplify the efect of the car’s grandiloquent stature. A brilliant example of Prince’s thematically driven work, the present painting continues the artist’s sustained exploration of his series-oriented practice, the most celebrated of which focus on various diferent elements of the same fetishised culture: cars, nurses, cowboys and dry jokes. Having grown up between the suburbs of Colorado and the outskirts of Boston, Richard Prince was the son of two spies working for an organisation called the Ofce of Strategic Services – the equivalent of today’s CIA. Turning away from the political backdrop that pervaded his household in early years, Prince moved to New York City at the age of twenty-four, and began working for Time-Life Magazines four years later. There, he was a part-time staff in the employees’ bookstore, which he would frequently escape from to create art in a large storage room located three levels down in the basement. Prince transformed this space into a studio of his own; he began producing fake replicas of the ads that he saw in the magazines that populated the building – People, Fortune, Sports Illustrated, among others. ‘By rephotographing a magazine page and then developing the flm in a cheap lab, the photos came out very strange. They looked like they could be my photos, but they weren’t’ (Richard Prince, quoted in Eva Prinz, ‘Selected Interview: Richard Prince’, Index Magazine, 2005, online). Birthed from the same intuition to create a copy of a copy, a simulacrum of sorts, Mustang Painting is culled from the idealised visions of macho cinema, temporalised in film stills or movie posters. Fascinated by car culture, Prince passionately plunged into road flm iconography, where the likes of Dennis Wilson, James Taylor and Barry Newman drove hyper-masculine cars bravely and brazenly, at times even
Richard Prince, Untitled (Cowboy), 1989, photograph, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. © Richard Prince. Image: SCALA, Florence.
Richard Prince, Lake Resort Nurse, 2003, jet print and acrylic on canvas. © Richard Prince. Image: Bridgeman Images.
through the fames. ‘Vanishing Point. 1970 Dodge Challenger. Bullitt. ’68 Mustang and ’68 Dodge Charger. That’s it’, Prince exclaimed. ‘Those cars came out when I was teenager. I never owned one when I was a teenager. Too expensive. Anyway. When I started to focus on the contents of lifestyle magazines, hot-rod magazines were all over the newsstands’ (Richard Prince, quoted in Jef Rian, ‘I thought this was the end then it started over’, Purple Magazine, no. 28, online). Famed and idealised, Prince noted that these cars quickly integrated the average American’s reality as a dream that one could buy: the trophy that would liken the consumer to the movie star. ‘I used crazy car colors. Commotion Orange. Plum Purple. It was non-fction painting’, Prince remarked (Richard Prince, quoted in Jef Rian, ‘I thought this was the end then it started over’, Purple Magazine, no. 28, 2017, online). Transcending Prince’s consummate socio-cultural comment on car culture, Mustang Painting additionally illustrates the artist’s passion for the bombastic qualities associated with the act of driving, including speed, fortitude, and the escape, all characteristics exploited profusely by the Beat Generation
before him in ways more poetic than critical. Prince was no stranger to the literary fetishisation of roads, and at times unironically championed the well-deployed narrative of men taking command over feral nature, through the hyper-masculine use of the wheel. In this spirit of fascination, Prince had assembled frst editions of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, and later used a still from the movie Bullitt as the only advertising content for his key 1989 exhibition Spiritual America. Citing living environments that were frequently aligned with the stereotypical trappings of middle-class success, Prince additionally refers to his own background as a source of imagistic inspiration. ‘All of the houses were exactly the same, and everyone was so afuent, with brand new cars, television sets, and wall-to-wall carpeting’, he conceded (Richard Prince, quoted in Eva Prinz, ‘Selected Interview: Richard Prince’, Index Magazine, 2005, online). Parked outside neighbouring houses that were presumably as large and beautiful as those from the movie sets, the luxurious cars that dotted Prince’s privileged environment in the suburbs of Boston were like physical mirrors to the people that surrounded him but with
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whom he never interacted. As such, they served as a starting point from which to create. ‘It was the perfect thing to paint. Great size. Great subtext. Great reality. Great thing that actually got painted out there, out there in real life. I mean I didn’t have to make this shit up. It was there’, he remarked (Richard Prince, quoted in ‘In the Picture: Jef Rian in conversation with Richard Prince’, in Rosetta Brooks, Jefrey Rian and Luc Sante, Richard Prince, London, 2003, p. 23).
‘Great things that actually got painted on out there… I didn’t have to make this shit up. It was there… It got ‘teen-aged.’ Primed. Flaked. Strippped. Bondo-ed. Lacquered. Nine Coats. Sprayed. Numbered. Advertised on. Raced. Fucking Steve McQueened’. Richard Prince
Art-historically, the subject of cars and automobiles has nourished the creative production of many – predominantly male – artists, despite the relatively short existence of the vehicle as a fully-functioning object, having appeared for the frst time in the late 19th century. Artists like John Chamberlain, César, Andy Warhol and Salvatore Scarpitta among others, have all dedicated a large part of their artistic energy to creating works revolving around the theme. Yet perhaps the most potent link to Prince’s work exists with artist Ed Ruscha, who equally employed a painterly style that borrowed from the sleekness of advertising billboards, book covers and flm posters, straddling a tone of glamour and humour, and exploring the vernacular of urban landscapes and car culture. ‘The frst thing that comes to mind when I think about Ed Ruscha is Gas Station’, declared Prince. ‘I see him pulling into a Sunoco or Chevron… driving a ’56 Chevy … or a 1970 Dodge Challenger, the one that Barry Newman drove in the movie Vanishing Point’ (Richard Prince, quoted in Ed Ruscha: Road Tested, Modern Art Museum of Fort Woth, 2011, online). A pulsating example of Richard Prince’s muscle car paintings, Mustang Painting exudes an immaculately graphic surface that physically likens it to the ‘lacquered’ or ‘Steve McQueened’ cars the artist envisioned in his young days (Richard Prince, quoted in Jef Rian, ‘I thought this was the end then it started over’, Purple Magazine, no. 28, 2017, online).
Bullitt, movie poster, 1968, Solar Productions. Image: Bridgeman Images.
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21. Jean-Michel Basquiat
Pink Elephant with Fire Engine acrylic, oil and silkscreen on canvas 218.4 x 172.7 cm (86 x 68 in.) Executed in 1984. Estimate £3,000,000-4,000,000 $3,810,000-5,070,000 €3,390,000-4,520,000 ‡ plus Buyers Premium and VAT*
Provenance Mary Boone Gallery, New York and Bruno Bischoferger, Zurich Akira Ikeda Gallery, Tokyo Tony Shafrazi, New York Private Collection, London Private Collection Acquired from the above by the present owner Exhibited New York, Mary Boone Gallery and Michael Werner, Jean-Michel Basquiat, 5 - 26 May 1984 Tokyo, Akira Ikeda Gallery, Jean-Michel Basquiat: Paintings, 2 - 25 December 1985, no. 7, n.p. (illustrated) Miami, Quintana Gallery, Jean-Michel Basquiat: 1980-1988, 17 December 1996 - 21 February 1997, pp. 34, 66 (illustrated, p. 35) New York, Tony Shafrazi Gallery, Jean-Michel Basquiat, 25 April - 6 June 1998, pp. 232 and 330 (illustrated, p. 232; Mary Boone Gallery, New York, 1984 installation view illustrated, p. 330) Venice, Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Basquiat a Venezia, 9 June - 3 October 1999, pp. 94, 149 (illustrated, p. 95) Naples, Castel Nuovo, Jean-Michel Basquiat a Napoli, 19 December 1999 - 4 March 2000, p. 94-5 (illustrated, p. 95) Cuneo, Galeria d’Arte Il Prisma, Basquiat a Cuneo, 2001, p. 43 Paris, Fondation Dina Vierny-Musée Maillol, Jean-Michel Basquiat: Histoire d’une oeuvre, 27 June - 23 October 2003, p. 90 (illustrated, p. 91; Akira Ikeda Gallery, Tokyo, 1985 installation view illustrated, p. 159) Mexico City, Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, Jean-Michel Basquiat, 2004 (illustrated, p. 64; Akira Ikeda Gallery, Tokyo, 1985 installation view illustrated, p. 93) Bali, Darga Gallery, Jean-Michel Basquiat, 2004, p. 31 Museo d’Arte Moderna della Città di Lugano, Jean-Michel Basquiat, 20 March - 19 June 2005, no. 41, p. 84 (illustrated, p. 85) Fondazione La Triennale di Milano, The Jean-Michel Basquiat Show, 19 September 2006 - 28 January 2007, p. 266 Sao Paolo, CCBB; Brasilia, CCBB; Belo Horizonte, CCBB; Rio de Janeiro, CCBB, Jean-Michel Basquiat: Works from the Mugrabi Collection, 25 January 2018 - 7 January 2019, p. 122 (illustrated)
Literature Jean-Louis Prat and Richard D. Marshall, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Paris, 1996, pp. 240, 397-398 (illustrated, p. 241) Jean-Louis Prat and Richard D. Marshall, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Paris, 1996, no. 6, p. 127 (illustrated, p. 126) Tony Shafrazi et al., Jean-Michel Basquiat, New York, 1999 (illustrated, p. 232; Mary Boone Gallery, New York, 1984 installation view illustrated, p. 330) Jean-Louis Prat and Richard D. Marshall, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Paris, 2000, no. 6, p. 201 (illustrated, p. 200; Mary Boone Gallery, New York, 1984 installation view illustrated, p. 282; Akira Ikeda Gallery, Tokyo, 1985 installation view illustrated, p. 288) Jean-Louis Prat and Richard D. Marshall, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Paris, 2000, p. 230 (illustrated, p. 231) Jean-Louis Prat and Richard D. Marshall, Jean-Michel Basquiat: Appendix, Paris, 2000, p. 36 Hans Werner Holzwarth, ed., Jean-Michel Basquiat and the Art of Storytelling, Cologne, 2018, p. 496 (illustrated, p. 312)
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Dominated by a heated expanse of yellow pigment, Pink Elephant with Fire Engine, 1984, pulsates with Jean-Michel Basquiat’s characteristic energy, unapologetically deployed throughout his career alongside his famboyant, larger-thanlife character. Delineating the graphic lyricism and expressive rawness that have since become synonymous with his oeuvre, Pink Elephant with Fire Engine presents the viewer with an abstract expressionist vista disrupted by fashes of fguration – a pictorial tableau waiting to be deciphered. In the work, each symbol is placed impetuously, as if daring the viewer to follow Basquiat’s mental meanderings in real time. Reflecting its luminous presence within Basquiat’s body of paintings, the present work was exhibited at the artist’s very frst show at Mary Boone Gallery in 1984, and appeared in eminent public institutions on the occasion of important Basquiat surveys, such as the Museo d’Arte Moderna della Citta di Lugano, in 2005, and four distinct Brasilian cultural centres in Sao Paulo, Brasilia, Bela Horizonte and Rio de Janeiro throughout 2018.
True to Basquiat’s distinct vernacular, spanning drawings, writing, and an erratic painterly approach deployed with childlike candour, Pink Elephant with Fire Engine merges the visual languages of nature and the city, through the layering of three distinct chromatic tones. Commanded by its prevailing solar hue, the present work is additionally punctuated by interspersed pigments of arid red and fery pink, together animating the overall surface and conveying the heat of the environments suggested at the heart of the composition. As an ensemble, they summon the colours radiated under the sun of two jungles: one literal, populated by wild animals in faraway lands, and one fgurative, designated by New York City’s infamous epiteth, a jungle of its own. Notably, Pink Elephant with Fire Engine captures the impressions Basquiat is able to produce through the use of colour: irrepressible dynamism and infectious liveliness. As it stretches over two metres in height, the painting furthermore summons an arresting physical presence that only vivifes its pure, roaring energy.
Installation view of the present work in Mary Boone Gallery, Jean-Michel Basquiat, New York, 1984. © The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat / ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2019.
Pink Elephant with Fire Engine addresses a number of themes that have concerned Basquiat during his all-tooshort career. Most strikingly exposing the artist’s take on displacement and duality, the painting juxtaposes an essentially abstract background with loosely rendered figurative signs. On the one hand, the composition conveys the archetypical noise of New York City’s busy streets through one of its two titular protagonists: the fre engine, which, in conjunction with its constitutive sirens, bears immediate associations to the boisterous fervour of downtown Manhattan. At the same time, the artist mobilises references that are geographically distant, through the mystifying presence of a pink elephant in the top right quadrant of the present work. Smiling wide under its tubular trunk, Basquiat’s elephant bears cartoonish features that liken it to an enigmatically anthropomorphic figure. The thematic fragmentation contained within Pink Elephant with Fire Engine refects the duality that Basquiat continuously negotiated throughout his life, manifested in the twofold
Installation view of the present work in Akira Ikeda Gallery, Jean-Michel Basquiat: Paintings, Tokyo, 1985. © The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat / ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2019.
cultural legacy he inherited from his parents, and the amalgamation of his conflicting personas in later years: a subversive artist exploiting urban landscape on the one hand, and a successful painter attending to the lifestyle of New York’s creative elite on the other. Born to a Haitian father and a Brooklyn-based mother of Puerto Rican descent, Basquiat remained close to the city of New York throughout his life, with frequent travels to Los Angeles and Hawaii. In March 1984, Basquiat had just returned from the island of Mauii to organise his very first solo exhibition with the art dealer Mary Boone. During that year, Boone had become Basquiat’s new primary dealer alongside Bruno Bischoferger, and she had, in spring, selected Pink Elephant with Fire Engine as part of the artist’s inaugural show at her gallery. Open throughout the month of May in 1984, Basquiat’s show at Mary Boone collected an array of positive reviews, including Vivien Raynor’s prestigious celebration of the painter’s work in The New York Times.
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Alex Rodriguez Jean-Michel Basquiat, Area Nightclub, New York, 1985. © The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat / ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2019. Photo © Ben Buchanan / Bridgeman Images.
‘The young artist uses color well’, she wrote. ‘But more remarkable is the educated quality of his line and the stateliness of his compositions, both of which bespeak a formal training that, in fact, he never had’ (Vivien Raynor, ‘Art: Paintings by Jean-Michel Basquiat at Boone’, The New York Times, 11 May 1984, online). At the mere age of 24, Basquiat impressed contemporary art critics with his natural flair, and cemented his status as New York’s ‘Radiant Child’ – one that had been coined by Rene Ricard in the American poet’s seminal Artforum article of 1981. Just a few months following the creation of Pink Elephant with Fire Engine, Basquiat was notably bestowed his frst ever solo exhibition in a museum, at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh. Heavily influenced by his urban surroundings and his involvement with the culture of downtown Manhattan in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Basquiat ofen allowed external interests and elements to glide into his compositions. ‘The way he lived was all part of the work, and the work was part of his life’ (Fred Brathwaite, a.k.a Fab 5 Freddy, Interview, October 1992, reprinted in Jean-Michel Basquiat, exh. cat., Serpentine Gallery, London, 1996). As a result, Pink Elephant with Fire Engine not only mirrors the energy of New York’s bustling cultural scene, but also confates a number of the artist’s most revered artistic tropes and idiosyncrasies. Brimming with chromatic vigour and presenting a spontaneous, gestural style throughout, Pink Elephant with Fire Engine culls from a variety of imagistic sources that Basquiat instinctively
pulled from throughout his career. The reference to the practice of grafti that Basquiat lent himself to in his early years is evident in the thinly delineated black drawings at the centre of the composition, as well as the elephant and engine’s idiosyncratically simple appearance. The composition’s rhythm, ruled by a deliberate placement of incongruous elements on canvas, further forms a visual cadence akin to instinctive and visceral melodies; as such, it denotes the artist’s obsession with jazz music which he repeatedly included in his painterly compositions. Illustrating Glenn O’Brienn’s statement that, ‘[Basquiat] ate up every image, every word, every bit of data that appeared in front of him, and he processed it all into a bebop Cubist Pop Art cartoon gospel that synthesized the whole overload we lived under into something that made astonishing new sense’, Pink Elephant with Fire Engine displays an array of references that mirrors elements from both the outside world and Basquiat’s explosive imagination (Glenn O’Brien, ‘Greatest Hits’, Jean-Michel Basquiat: Now’s the Time, exh. cat., Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 2015, p. 177). Instead of emulating elements that surround him with a realist hand and clear narratorial conviction, Basquiat employs a youthful gesture that conveys a scene’s life through synaesthetic impression rather than visual verisimilitude. Following an irrepressibly instinctive beat that is typical of the dynamic environment he kept alive in his feverishly energetic studio, Basquiat organically reveals the varying stages of his painting’s completion, like a perpetually astonished child
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Alex Rodriguez documenting his discoveries. The result is a prodigiously raw canvas boasting uneven fillings, emblematic of the experimental methods that the artist introduced to the medium. ‘I start a picture and I fnish it’, declared the artist. ‘I don’t think about art while I work. I try to think about life’ (Jean-Michel Basquiat, quoted in Leonhard Emmerling, Basquiat, Berlin, 2006, p. 75). Revealing the painterly progression that constitutes the painting’s creation, the present work is a corporeal manifestation which invites the viewer to witness its multiple stages of gestation. A brilliant study in colour and symbolic ambiguity, Pink Elephant with Fire Engine exudes the thrilling vigour of pictorial chaos. It shares the same whimsical animalistic reference as Basquiat’s painting Pakiderm, 1984, and a number of other paintings where the artist included the symbol of the elephant in varying scales. Eponymously reinventing the spelling of the word pachyderm, which defnes an antiquated order of nonruminant mammals, the titular painting delineates the contour of a Dumbo-like elephant, echoing the childlike rendition of the wild animal crowning the present composition. Yet in Pink Elephant with Fire Engine, a multitude of additional elements eschew the realm of wilderness: a fre-engine, the letter M, and an enigmatic reference to Monopoly, striked through with a diaphanous wash of pink paint. ‘I cross out words so you will see them more’, the artist mused. ‘The fact that they are obscured makes you want to read them’ (Jean-Michel Basquiat, quoted in Richard
Marshall, ed., Jean-Michel Basquiat, New York, 1992, pp. 2843). Tentatively interrupting the background’s monochromatic expanse, these added characters and grafti-like compositions irreverently impose their presence on the painting’s surface. Adorning a number of Basquiat’s most important paintings and creative manifestations, the colour yellow proved to be a recurrent force in the artist’s opus. Pervading the surface of Hollywood Africans, 1983, residing in the Whitney Museum of Art, New York, the heliacal colour furthermore served as a stark chromatic ground for Tony Shafrazi and Bruno Bischoferger’s Collaborations Exhibition poster, 1985, starring Andy Warhol and Basquiat in their infamous boxing attire. Recurring objects and themes in Basquiat’s visual syntax include bananas, pollo fritto, and New York taxis – all common in tying their signs back to the same constitutive hue, here covering almost the entirety of the canvas. Unlike his works saturated with symbols and fgures in a manner akin to Jackson Pollock’s all-over compositions, Pink Elephant with Fire Engine exudes a composed aura deriving from its essential subject matter. It demonstrates the infuence that the American Abstract Expressionists and colourists had on his painterly approach, particularly with regards to his mastery of tonal contrast. With a diminished palette of yellow-pink-red that conjures temperature more than it does imagery, Pink Elephant with Fire Engine aligns with an abstract tradition of sentience over perception.
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Hollywood Africans, 1983, acrylic and oilstick on canvas, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. © The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat / ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2019. Image: SCALA, Florence.
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Pakiderm, 1984, acrylic and oilstick on canvas. © The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat / ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2019. Image: SCALA, Florence.
22. Mel Ramos
The Princess signed, titled, inscribed and dated ‘“THE PRINCESS” 1965 BY MEL RAMOS SACRAMENTO 2; CALIF’ on the reverse oil on canvas 153 x 127.6 cm (60 1/4 x 50 1/4 in.) Painted in 1965. Estimate £200,000-300,000 $254,000-381,000 €226,000-339,000 ‡ plus Buyers Premium and VAT*
Provenance Galerie Zwirner, Cologne Private Collection, New York George Condo Collection, New York Sotheby’s, New York, 13 November 2003, lot 216 Acquired at the above sale by present owner Exhibited Venice, Galleria del Leone, Pop Art, 1967 Literature Elizabeth Claridge, The Girls of Mel Ramos, Chicago, 1975, pp. 91 and 156 (illustrated, dated 1965-9) Donald Kuspit, Mel Ramos - POP ART FANTASIES: The Complete Paintings, New York, 2004, pp. 88 and 238 (illustrated, p. 88) Thomas Levy, ed, Mel Ramos, Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings 1953-2015, Bielefeld, 2016, no. 65-9, p. 192 (illustrated)
Rendered with chromatic energy and poster-like precision, The Princess, 1965, is a quintessential example of Mel Ramos’s technically commanding and thematically driven oeuvre which has, over the course of his almost six-decades career, built a delectable pantheon of glamourised female characters. At the heart of the present composition, a young woman is seen perched on an over-sized telephone, set against an unblemished background of luminous yellow. A brilliant iteration of Ramos’s larger-than-life advertisement-like paintings and sof erotica, The Princess firts with the conceptual limits of traditional portraiture whilst allowing a revealing peek into the artist’s distinctive take on Pop Art. In addition to achieving an immaculate appearance, the present image holds layers of conceptual and personal countenance, presumably depicting the artist’s wife Leta, recognisable for her stark-black hair and sensuous curves. Leta was Ramos’s favourite model over many years, dominating the list of female characters that populated his opus among famous stars and unknown beauties. It is further testament to the painting’s signifcance that it was formerly owned by the artist George Condo, whose own expressive manifestations explore the endless physical possibilities of the human form. Painted in 1965, The Princess followed Ramos’s comic book series commenced in 1962 and concluded in 1964, which principally centred on female heroines. Notably, it was in 1965 that the frst scandal relating to Ramos’s nudes arose: the museum director Paul Wember was forced to cancel the purchase of one of the artist’s works, due to the conservative climate dominating the German city of Krefeld preventing the public dissemination of pornographic content. Yet while The Princess indeed exudes Ramos’s characteristic erotic energy, it is far from attending to the vapidness of consumable erotics. Instead, Ramos’s work looks into a well-known motif that pervades the consumer-oriented culture of our times, and quotes from a wide array of visual and art historical references, tinged with irrepressible Pop fervour. ‘I was very fortunate when I was younger to have Wayne Thiebaud as my teacher, who had a profound infuence on the way I think about art’, the artist remarked (Mel Ramos, ‘Conversation between Mel Ramos and Belinda Grace Gardner’, 2002, in Thomas Levy, Mel Ramos: Heroines, Goddesses, Beauty Queens, Hamburg, 2002, p. 228). Building from an artistic point of departure laden with expressive and conceptual rigour, Ramos additionally cited the work of Roy Lichtenstein, Willem de Kooning, Salvador Dalí, and Joaquín Sorolla as irreducible infuences.
‘Some critics label me as being the last pop artist. None of those other guys would admit they were pop artists, but I have no problem with it. You can call me whatever you want, as long as you spell my name right!’ Mel Ramos
James Rosenquist, Zone, 1961, oil on canvas, Philadelphia Museum of Art. © James Rosenquist/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2019. Image: Bridgeman Images.
Tom Wesselmann, Nude No. 1, 1970, oil on canvas, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza. © Estate of Tom Wesselmann/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2019. Image: SCALA, Florence.
‘I’m a big voyeur. I think of myself as resembling the main character in the movie “Being There” with Peter Sellers, when he says “I like to watch TV”. In my case, the credo is simply: “I like to look”.’ Mel Ramos
The present image, along with Ramos’s distinct iterations drawing from the same theme, most potently conjures the painterly universe of Tom Wesselmann, equally vested with nude women blown-up to epic dimensions. Most ofen lying down in ecstatic postures, Wesselmann’s women belong to the same thematic realm as The Princess. The two pop artists equally share a kinship in their tendency to create impeccable surfaces, which, as a result, produce a potent impression of realism. On his exquisitely precise images, Ramos has remarked, ‘People have said, “how do you do that, it’s so perfect?” And the answer is: I spend a lot of time working at it’ (Mel Ramos, quoted in Thomas Levy, Mel Ramos: Heroines, Goddesses, Beauty Queens, Hamburg, 2002, p. 221). With her piercing gaze and seductive smile, The Princess seems like she is both in and out of canvas, transported to the viewer’s real surroundings.
Property from a Private Collection, New York
23. Carl Andre
48 Bar Rectangular Fugue on 4 Ancient Metals copper, steel, lead and zinc each 1 x 15 x 30 cm (3/8 x 5 7/8 x 11 3/4 in.) overall 1 x 180 x 120 cm (3/8 x 70 7/8 x 47 1/4 in.) Executed in 1988, this work is accompanied by a statement of authenticity signed by the artist. Estimate £200,000-300,000 $254,000-381,000 €226,000-339,000 ‡ plus Buyers Premium and VAT*
Provenance Konrad Fischer, Dusseldorf James Heather, London Paul Kasmin, New York Runkel-Hue-Williams, London Private Collection, Las Vegas Gagosian Gallery, New York Private Collection, New York Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1995 Exhibited Dusseldorf, Konrad Fischer, Carl Andre, July 1988 Literature Dorothee Fischer, ed., Galerie mit Bleistif Fischer: Austellungen bei Konrad Fischer, Düsseldorf Oktober 1967 - Oktober 1992, Bielefeld, 1993, p. 274 (Konrad Fischer, Dusseldorf, 1988 installation view illustrated) Carl Andre Sculptor: 1996, exh. cat., Museum Haus Lange and Museum Haus Esters, Krefeld, 1996, no. 1988-11, pp. 164 and 277
Reflecting Carl Andre’s unwavering engagement with minimalist principles, and demonstrating the artist’s use of real space as a medium, 48 Bar Rectangular Fugue on 4 Ancient Metals, 1988, deploys a set of 48 copper, zinc, lead, and steel tiles in a neat rectangular formation of 12 x 4. The work plays to varying degrees with physicality in direct response to perspective shifs, thus transforming into a diferent geometric entity with each new step taken by the viewer. As remarked by Andre, ‘what the idea of “minimal art” means to me is that the person has drained and rid himself of the burden, the cultural over-burden that stands shadowing and eclipsing art. I think you have to really rid yourself of those securities and certainties and assumptions and get down to something, which is closer and resembles some kind of blankness. Then one must construct again out of this reduced circumstance’ (Carl Andre, quoted in Alistair Rider, Carl Andre: Things in Their Elements, London, 2011, p. 249). Building from core elements and ‘some kind of blankness’, the artist departs from perceived conventions of minimal art and instead enters the realm of nature itself through pure reduction – an endeavour he continuously worked towards throughout his career.
Extending further in length than in width, 48 Bar Rectangular Fugue on 4 Ancient Metals bears a loose – yet potent – association to Andre’s pathworks, which are closer in appearance to elongated lines than they are to pervasive ‘metal rugs’. These rectangular plates additionally act as distinct organisms that profoundly alter the phenomenological nature of their environment. They form part of a subgroup to Andre’s series of metal foor plates, whereby the artist did not restrict his creative method to the use of hot-rolled steel but instead made use of additional industrial materials such as copper, zinc, and lead. This omnifarious combination of elements in turn afected the coloration of the plates over time, yielding a myriad of surface variations. Each tile presents a diferent type of refection, frmly matte on the surface or glowing like embers, thus echoing Andre’s ambition to creates works that are ‘in [a] constant state of change. I’m not interested in reaching an ideal state with my works. As people walk on them, as the steel rusts, as the brick crumbles, as the materials weather, the work becomes its own record of everything that’s happened to it’ (Carl Andre, quoted in David Bourdon, ‘A Redefnition of Sculpture,’ Carl Andre: Sculpture 1959-1977, New York, 1978, p. 32).
‘No more artifce. No more glue. Only material that he could handle himself. No monumentality, which does not mean no monuments. No more narrative unfolded through matter. Sculpture was moved to its material edge. Space and matter were the smallest common denominators of sculpture, the only necessary ones’. Philippe Vergne, in Carl Andre: Sculpture as Place, 1958-2010, exh. cat., Dia Art Foundation, New York, 2014, p. 231
Installation view of the present work in Konrad Fischer, Carl Andre, Dusseldorf, 1988. Â© Carl Andre/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2019.
24. Richard Serra
Sioux paintstick on paper 210.3 x 410 cm (82 3/4 x 161 3/8 in.) Executed in 1990. Estimate £700,000-900,000 $890,000-1,140,000 €790,000-1,020,000 ‡ ♠ plus Buyers Premium and VAT, ARR applies*
Provenance Galerie m Bochum, Bochum Galerie Tschudi, Glarus Private Collection, Germany Anthony Meier Fine Arts, San Francisco Acquired from the above by the present owner Exhibited Galerie m Bochum, Richard Serra: Vier neue Zeichnungen/Four New Drawings, 1 September 1– 28 November 28 1990 Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Eine Perspektive für die Zukunf: Die ständige Sammlung: Selten gezeigte Werke: Leihgaben aus Privatbesitz, 17 March - 19 May 1991 Luxembourg, Musée National d’Histoire et d’Art, Richard Serra: Exchange (Dessins), 12 December 1996 – 5 February 1997 Marl, Skulpturenmuseum Glaskasten, Ausgestellt—Vorgestellt IV: Richard Serra für Susan Hartnett, 12 September - 24 October 1999 Glarus, Galerie Tschudi, Richard Serra, 8 July - 26 August 2000 Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen, Richard Serra Prints Druckgrafk Drawings Zeichnung/Prints, Drawings, 17 February - 18 May 2008, p. 50 (illustrated, pp. 35-36; titled Sioux (No. 4)) Maastricht, Bonnefantenmuseum, Extended Drawing: Sol LeWitt, Robert Mangold, Bruce Nauman, Richard Serra, 8 September 2011 - 15 January 2012
Richard Serra’s work ofen elicits the sensation of standing beneath a tall, heavy wall that leans over one’s head like a breaking wave. His art, aesthetically pared-down yet continuously experimenting with unconventional heights and curvatures, achieves a prodigious balance between pure simplicity and arresting spectacle. Soaring over two metres in height and stretching more than double in width, Sioux, 1990, is an enthralling example of the artist’s practice, forming part of his exquisite body of paintstick drawings. Magnifed to gargantuan dimensions, Sioux reveals the graphic potential located at the intersection between fat surfaces, dense matter, and the colour black. ‘Since black is the densest colour material, it absorbs and dissipates light to a maximum and thereby changes the artifcial as well as the natural light in a given room’, Serra wrote. ‘A black shape can hold its space and place in relation to a larger volume and alter the mass of that volume readily’ (Richard Serra, ‘Notes on Drawing (1988)’, Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective, exh. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2011, n.p.). Capturing and swallowing any ray of light hitting its surface into an unknown void, the work is lifed from the total darkness of its dual jet-black surfaces by the emergence of a triangular section of white paper fragmenting the composition’s lower edge. The paper’s stark and incongruous presence heightens Sioux’s unfaltering abstraction, and endows it with a pure, almost spiritual quality that is typical of Serra’s best work.
Though he remains principally known and recognised for his monumental steel and lead sculptures, Serra has conceded that the medium of drawing remains the beating heart of his practice. ‘I’ve been drawing all my life’, Serra noted in 2011. ‘Drawing is another way of thinking’ (Richard Serra, in interview with Charlie Rose, 21 April 2011). Commenced in the mid-1970s, the artist’s paintstick drawings were achieved by melting down individual sticks and combining them into large ‘paintstick bricks’, which in turn allowed him to tackle the medium directly and with both hands, actively engaging with the picture plane. During this process, Serra would frequently press melted paintstick through a screen of wire mesh, leaving the paper covered with thick pigment protruding from areas of the picture plane’s surface. In this way he not only created new visual forms and textures but more importantly invented a whole new process, of which the present work is a seminal example.
Kasimir Malevich, Black Square, 1915, oil on canvas, Tretyakov State Gallery.
Franz Kline, Slate Cross, 1961, oil on canvas, Dallas Museum of Art.
Image: SCALA, Florence.
© ARS, NY and DACS, London 2019. Bridgeman Images.
In fact, it seems that the process matters almost as much to Serra as the fnished product. In 1967, the artist made his famous ‘verb list’ that he published in the journal Avalanche just four years later: a conceptual blueprint deployed over two sheets of blank paper, comprising a number of possible actions and contexts to act upon. Among these, rolling, folding, and casting appeared alongside a list of environmental and compositional ideals including gravity, entropy and nature.
Richard Serra carrying the copper plate for Vesturey I. Photo: Sidney B Felsen. © ARS, NY and DACS, London 2019. Photograph: 1984 Sidney B. Felsen.
Though fairly ordinary and straightforward at frst glance, Serra’s ‘linguistic drawing’ in fact serves as a rich premise from which to understand his complex artistic practice. The artist himself describes his verb list as ‘a series of actions to relate to oneself, material, place, and process’, signifying recurring gestures and impulses, as well as guiding elements of seriality and self-referentiality. The artist’s use of black similarly seems to posit as a rule laying beneath the foundations of his work. ‘In terms of weight’, he declared, ‘black is heavier, creates a larger volume, holds itself in a more compressed feld.’ (Richard Serra, quoted in From the Collection: 1960-69, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2016, n.p.). In other words, black does not act as a mere feature of Serra’s drawing; it becomes the drawing itself. With its grand dimensions and pure aura, Sioux emanates a numinous air that likens it to an altarpiece. Not unfamiliar with the spiritual quality of his work, Serra conceded that he felt art had more in common with religion than it did with philosophy or science – disciplines he dismissed as merely descriptive. His point was that, as opposed to ofering rational analyses or renditions of phenomenological experience, art and religion provided direct, unmediated experiences.
In this perspective, Liza Bear asked the artist whether any moral beliefs afected his work in a 1973 interview, to which Serra simply – and succinctly – answered yes. Shifing the discussion from Sioux’s material implications to its ontological manifestations and moral consequences, it is interesting to think of the alchemic pressure in Serra’s art which generates a tension between essence and condition. ‘In an advanced age of technical reproducibility, Richard Serra creates graphic works with an aura which one can hardly resist’, wrote Silke von Berswordt-Wallrabe (Silke von Berswordt-Wallrabe, Richard Serra: Prints Catalogue Raisonné, 1972-1999, Düsseldorf, 1999, n.p.). Transcending the solemn quality that his Minimalist forebears advocated in their work, Serra’s oeuvre furthermore takes a spectacular turn. Though the forms he deploys both in sculpture and on paper are biomorphic, the sheer scale with which they are realised ofen surpasses any conventional norms. ‘He works at the physical scale of architecture and at the intellectual scale of art history as a whole’ (Peter Schjeldahl, ‘Industrial Strength’, The New Yorker, 4 June 2007, online). Sioux aptly illustrates this kind of reverence Serra forces upon the viewer on frst encounter.
Richard Serra Studio, date unknown. © ARS, NY and DACS, London 2019. Photo: David Seidner.
‘Few artists have pushed drawing to such sculptural and even architectural extremes as Richard Serra. Using black oil paintstick, he has exagerated drawing’s physical surface, creating expanses of texture that have the rough tactility of bark, or massing dark, roiled spheres as thick as mud pies’. Roberta Smith, ‘Sketches From the Man of Steel’, The New York Times, 14 April 2011, online
Richard Serra, Band, 2006. Installed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. © ARS, NY and DACS, London 2019. Photo: Lorenz Kienzle.
It is as grand in size as it is replete with aesthetic associations culled from varied artistic movements and independent artistic practices. The penetrating nature of the paintstick’s black is redolent of Pierre Soulages’s outrenoir, and Kasimir Malevich at a time when aesthetic reduction was not just a conceptual choice but also a political necessity. The combination of the hand-worked texture in Sioux’s process of creation and its spiritual quality furthermore calls associations to artists like Yves Klein, whose similar dedication to a chrome’s textural capacities enabled pure inner force, as if radiating from the edges of the support it generously covered. Yet, despite their undeniable reference to numerous art historical contributions, Serra’s paintstick drawings are recognisable among any as his own: the sheer thickness that coats their surface, the handmade paper that imparts
the entire compositions with a certain sense of intimacy, and the careful dispositions of the sheets to create unique, unalterable apertures, have all become trademark to the artist’s work. Together, they orchestrate a choreography of sorts, which ofers an insight into Serra’s intimate interests and inspirations. Conceding his strong afection for avantgarde dance, notably that envisioned by the prodigious eyes of Yvonne Rainer, Serra endows his work with a sense of vitality that is akin to rhythmic movement. In this perspective, Sioux’s double sheets are reminiscent of tectonic plates able to make their underlying paper support and surroundings vibrate. Rendered alive through thick textures and visible gestures, the present work remains nonetheless profoundly meditative in essence. Its mysteriously ambivalent composition participates in shaking up the harmonic space it had established on frst encounter.
Property from a Private Collection, United States
25. Christopher Wool
Untitled signed and dated ‘WOOL ‘86’ on the reverse enamel on aluminium 182.9 x 121.9 cm (72 x 48 in.) Executed in 1986. Estimate £400,000-600,000 $508,000-762,000 €451,000-676,000 ‡ plus Buyers Premium and VAT*
Provenance Luhring Augustine & Hodes Gallery, New York Private Collection, Germany Christie’s, New York, 13 November 1998, lot 157 Art & Public, Geneva Private Collection (acquired from the above in 1999) Christie’s, London, 16 October 2015, lot 54 Acquired at the above sale by the present owner
Executed at the dawn of Christopher Wool’s artistic career, when the painter began blending the physical act of creation with automated processes, Untitled, 1986, presents the viewer with an exquisite net of dark dots mesmerically deployed across a vast aluminium surface. Wool’s tableaux from this period typically straddle majestic grandeur and an urban aesthetic, coalescing the arresting countenance of standard large-scale paintings with the daring visual syntax of punk and new wave iconography. They are held in seamless tension between the handmade and the readymade, attending to the gestural subjectivity of painting, whilst exuding the sleekness of mechanic iterations. Untitled eludes not this prodigious balance. Challenging his preferred medium’s demise, which had been declared by the art critic Douglas Crimp in his infuential article ‘The Death of Painting’ in 1981, Wool herein conjures its most celebrated characters from previous decades, invoking namely the repetitious aesthetic of Jackson Pollock’s all-over canvases, the frenetic dotting of Yayoi Kusama’s early Infnity Nets, and the glossy surfaces of Pop Art protagonists. Between 1986 and 1987, Christopher Wool introduced a new tool to his oeuvre which served not only as a novel painterly
technique, but also as a subject matter in itself. Culled from a moment’s observation when Wool saw workers painting the walls outside his lof with specialised rollers, the artist’s new technique employed the same tool to emulate the aesthetic of wall designs in New York City, typically manufactured with patterned blossoms, vines, or abstract geometries. He called the result ‘an interesting friction generated by putting forms that were supposed to be decorative in such severe terms’ (Katherine Brinson, ‘Trouble Is My Business,’ Christopher Wool, New York, 2013, p. 38). Using the rolling method to its full capacity, Wool exploited its ability to reproduce the same image repeatedly, maintaining the same form despite the artist’s wavering hand. In this way, he mechanised his own production process, which, despite its efcient automacy, remained prone to gestural fallibility, enabling subtle variations from print to print. Departing from the rollers’ strictly decorative aspect, Wool embraced the drips, smudges and misalignments that resulted from gauche handling — accidents that Katherine Brinson referred to as the ‘visual noise emitted by methods of mechanical reproduction’ (Katherine Brinson, ‘Trouble Is My Business’, Christopher Wool, New York, 2013, p. 39).
‘Undeniably the work is beautiful; for many observers it resembles stars in the night sky. Yet, especially because of the inevitable recall of Pollock’s work, there is no secure sense of what Wool’s paintings mean. They are uniform, deliberate, absolute, and masterful, […] entirely resistant to one’s natural search for meaning, which they seem to deny’. John Caldwell, ‘New Work: Christopher Wool’, Christopher Wool, exh. cat., San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1998, n.p.
Yayoi Kusama, No. C.A. 9, 1960, oil on canvas, Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Piet Mondrian, Composition in Line, Second State, 1916-17, oil on canvas, Collection of Kröller-Müller Museum.
© Yayoi Kusama. Image: SCALA, Florence.
Image: SCALA, Florence.
Soon afer beginning to work with the rollers, he expanded his practice by using rubber stamps, ofen layering various forms of all-over patterns to convey pictorial chaos. Untitled is an apt representation of Wool’s early pattern iterations. The subtle dots coating its surface are idiosyncratically arranged whilst retaining an intuitive and expressionist edge, materialised in their elusive imperfections. At frst glance, the composition’s dispersed design appears rigidly symmetrical, yet on further inspection, it becomes apparent that the dots expand into infnitesimally curving motifs. As these beautifed dots fll the entire composition, the incomplete forms spreading along the edges give the impression that the pattern continues beyond the confnes of the aluminium support.
transparent skin on the metallic support that disrupts the fatness of its initial application, conveying Wool’s characteristically raw and ragged energy. ‘From the beginning, Wool sought to make traditional paintings that did not look like traditional paintings’ contended Ann Goldstein. ‘He eliminated everything that seemed unnecessary, rejecting color, hierarchical composition, and internal form’ (Ann Goldstein, ‘How to Paint’, Hans Werner Holzwarth, ed., Christopher Wool, Cologne, 2008, p. 185).
Created in the most formative year of Christopher Wool’s practice, Untitled presaged a number of his subsequent artistic explorations. The artist’s use of punitive materials, for instance, is particularly foreboding. The alkyd drips’ transformative efect when placed in sustained contact with aluminium portends the physical act of transgression Wool imposed on later works through the use of heavy-duty raw materials such as enamel and turpentine. In Untitled, the alkyd indeed forms a warped,
Brazenly innovative and culled from a visual amalgamation of art historical references, Untitled stands as the ultimate collision of two seemingly irreconcilable artistic tendencies – Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. ‘It was at this point’, Katherine Brinson writes, ‘that a persistent critical formulation of Wool’s work as a détente between AbEx energy and the deadpan cool of Pop, fgured in particular by the polarity between Pollock and Warhol, began to gain purchase’ (Katherine Brinson, ‘Trouble is my business’, Christopher Wool, exh. cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2013, p. 38). A striking example of Wool’s patterned abstract paintings, Untitled is a supreme confation of the artist’s technical supremacy and conceptual vigour.
Property from an Important Private French Collection
26. Anselm Kiefer
Die Sefroth titled ‘Die Sefroth’ on the reverse emulsion, acrylic, charcoal and shellac on burlap 330 x 180 cm (129 7/8 x 70 7/8 in.) Executed in 1996. Estimate £400,000-600,000 $507,000-761,000 €452,000-678,000 ♠ plus Buyers Premium and VAT, ARR applies*
Provenance Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner Exhibited Buenos Aires, Fundación Proa, Anselm Kiefer, 25 July - 20 September 1998 Literature Daniel Arasse, Anselm Kiefer, New York & London, 2001, no. 204, p. 324 (illustrated, p. 204)
An expressive depiction of the symbol of life in Jewish mysticism, Die Sefroth, 1996, encapsulates Anselm Kiefer’s faculty for realising evocative, tactile representations of occult spirituality and destruction. Portraying a single tree trunk that appears scorched black against a sand dollarcoloured background, the painting features an impastoedand material-rich surface that reveals the violence inficted upon it. The singed, carved, and cracked recto of Die Sefroth is juxtaposed with a delicately-contoured silhouette of an unidentifed female fgure on the verso; a possible delineation of the demon Lilith, another character in Jewish folklore frequently employed in Kiefer’s visual syntax, as exemplifed by Lilith, 1987-1989, Tate London. A further investigation into the raw, brutal representation of these religious subjects that Kiefer began exploring in the mid-1980s, – notably in Emanation, 1984-1986, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis – Die Sefroth establishes a dimension that coalesces beauty with horror and gestural vigour with violence. Die Sefroth visualises the Tree of Life put forth by the Kabbalah, a mystical school of thought within Judaism that considers the creation of the universe and eternity of the divine. The Kabbalistic tree illustrates the sefrot, or ten emanations, the names of seven of which Kiefer scribbled as branches extending from the trunk of the tree. While some qualities are intellectual – such as chochmah (wisdom) and binah (understanding) – others are behavioural, including chesed (loving-kindness) or gevurah (mighty). Atop the tree is a separate sphere labelled Ain Soph Aur, or ‘endless light,’ referring to the metaphysical and non-physical God, reminiscent of a sun providing light for forestry. Albrecht Dürer, Melencolia, 1514, engraving, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Potentially interpreted as a two-dimensional rendering of his landmark work, Breaking of the Vessels, 1990, which depicts the Kabbalistic moment when God’s sefrot were so abundant that they burst through the vessels that contained them, launching the divine into a sinful world – Die Sefroth features similar thematic undercurrents of destruction and violence. Despite the niche Kabbalistic allusions contained within the present work, Kiefer’s oeuvre does not circle around a singular religious reference: the artist also alludes to Christian doctrines, denoting a greater investigation into the spiritual realm rather than a focused interest on a set of specifc tenets. Kiefer’s preoccupation with ethereality and the divine makes it no surprise that his work is ofen considered through the lens of theories of the ‘sublime’. In this way, Die Sefroth strikes a number of similitudes with Barnett Newman’s Onement I, 1948, on both a formal and conceptual level. However, while both works aim to transcend corporeality and materiality, they achieve this elevation in contrasting styles. Newman’s thin, unembellished surface stands in stark contrast to Kiefer’s work, which pulsates with an apocalyptic and brutal sense of the sublime. According to art critic Donald Kuspit, Kiefer’s works like Die Sefroth ‘become bankrupt, vacated, barren, the sublime turned inside out, showing the vacuum of feeling which it secretly is, the void given metaphysical status, preciousness, and dignity by reason of its apotheosis as art -- conveys a sense of insurmountable, inconsolable loss, depletion, absence and fnally lifelessness’ (Donald Kuspit, ‘The Spirit of Gray’, Artnet, 2002, online). Born seven weeks before the suicide of Adolf Hitler, Kiefer’s work frequently embodies the post-war destruction that he grew up surrounded by, providing a possible interpretation of the painterly trauma and violence inficted against the Jewish subject of Die Sefroth.
Image: Bridgeman Images.
In Die Sefroth, Kiefer captures a form of sublime that is spiritual yet violent. Though his unique ability to associate the destruction of the past with the timelessness of truth and trauma, the artist materialises the traditional German proverb that Kuspit has associated with his work, ‘What is new is not true and what is true is not new’ (Kuspit, ‘The Spirit of Gray’, Artnet, 2002, online). It is perhaps, though, Kiefer himself who best elucidated the enigmatic spirit of Die Sefroth by clarifying his interest in the Jewish mysticism at the heart of the picture: ‘“Kabbala[h]” means “knowledge that has been received”, a secret knowledge; but I think of it as images that have been received… The [k]abbalistic tradition is not one but many, forming a sophisticated spiritual discipline. It is a paradox of logic and mystical belief. It’s part scholarship, part religion, part magic. For me, it is a spiritual journey anchored by images’ (Anselm Kiefer, quoted in ‘Heaven and Earth’, Anselm Kiefer, exh. cat., Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, 2007, p. 339).
Property from the Collection of Konrad and Gisela Weis
27. Martin Kippenberger
Die Mutter von Horst spaziert im Spandauer Forst oil, lacquer and spray paint on canvas, in artist’s frame 135.9 x 163.5 cm (53 1/2 x 64 3/8 in.) Painted in 1983-84. Estimate £350,000-550,000 $444,000-698,000 €395,000-621,000 ‡ ♠ plus Buyers Premium and VAT, ARR applies*
Provenance Galerie Max Hetzler, Cologne Rudolf Zwirner, Cologne Acquired from the above by the present owner Exhibited Essen, Museum Folkwang, Wahrheit ist Arbeit. Büttner, Kippenberger, Oehlen, 4 February - 11 March 1984 Pittsburgh, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh Collects, 20 February - 25 April 1993, n.p.
Exemplary of Martin Kippenberger’s wry wit and painterly gravitas, Die Mutter von Horst spaziert im Spandauer Forst (Horst’s Mother Going for a Walk in the Spandau Woods), 1983-4, reinvents traditional processes of representation that transport the viewer into an alternate universe where efervescent ovals, angles and triangles confate to present Spandauer Forst, one of Berlin’s largest forests. Through the symbolic and idealised depiction of a bright blue horizon, fanked by the silhouettes of glowing emerald trees, Kippenberger presents the viewer with a surreal panorama, a utopian landscape, or an idyllic forest scene. Testament to the importance of the present work, the painting was included in one of Kippenberger’s most important early exhibitions, Wahrheit ist Arbeit, a collaboration with his friends and fellow artists Albert Oehlen and Werner Büttner that took place in 1984 in the Museum Folkwang, Essen. Straddling reality and fction, Kippenberger invites us into his work’s mystifying world through a port-hole: the window to his fabricated paradise. Punctuated by referenceable features from the Forst itself, such as the cloud-like aircraf hovering within the sky, the opaque pool of water and the three towering birch trees, we are, however, forced to reconsider the notion that the composition is born solely of Kippenberger’s imagination. Washes of grey, orange and blue merge to form a misty setting, the anchor from which the nature reserve is projected. The result is a surreal yet captivating work which radiates with the
Martin Kippenberger, Untitled, (from the series Self Portraits) 1988, oil on canvas, Kravis Collection. © Estate of Martin Kippenberger, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne. Image: SCALA, Florence.
intensity of the world in which it was created. Employing his favoured ovoid form as a portal into his dreamlike landscape, Kippenberger introduces the subject of his later Eierbilder (Egg paintings), a monumental cycle of paintings that would use the theme of the egg in its literal and symbolic reading. Musing on the importance of the ovoid form, the artist noted: ‘In painting you have to be on the lookout: what windfall is still lef for you to paint. Justice hasn’t been done to the egg, justice hasn’t been done to the fried egg, Warhol’s already had the banana. So you take a form, it’s always about sharp edges, a square, this and this format, the golden section. An egg is white and fat, how can that turn into a coloured picture? If you turn it around this way and that, you’ll come up with something. Maybe even social politics, or jokes; whatever the case it’s a beautiful form’ (Martin Kippenberger, quoted in Martin Kippenberger, exh. cat., Tate, London, 2006, p. 63). This ‘beautiful’ form, as noted by the artist, has an important art historical and symbolic legacy, potently signifying hope and fertility, the a cycle of new life. In the present work, Kippenberger’s egg form remains elusive, a mere suggestion towards what later became a fully formed symbol and pattern in his later canvases. Clearly returning to the same iconography throughout his oeuvre, Kippenberger allows the viewer to interpret each of his creations within the context of his career as a whole. As the artist celebrated the notion of confusion and ambiguity in meaning in his work, making subtle or obvious allusions to friends, acquaintances, architectural models, and art history, Kippenberger herein probes the question of who might be the fgure - real or imagined - behind the titular Horst. More context could indicate the artist’s peer Horst Gläsker, a fellow artist and acquaintance working amongst the Junge Wilden in Dusseldorf in the 1970s and 80s; or perhaps something else altogether, held in confdence within Kippenberger’s intimate realm.
Installation view of the present work in Museum Folkwang, Warheit ist Arbeit, Essen, 1984. © Estate of Martin Kippenberger, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne.
Against the Socialist, Communist and Utopian ideologies that fourished in the 1960s, Kippenberger transformed the diminished role of the artist into something fantastic, complex and theatrical. Consistently discarding the notion that an artist works to create a signature style, the artist forged a personality that worked across multiple directions and ofen eschewed easy comprehension. On the artist’s boundless vision, Jerry Saltz aptly noted, ‘Kippenberger instinctively grasped that ideologies and hierarchies were moribund, that formalism and technique are fexible and that one can be idealistic without being utopian’ (Jerry Saltz, ‘The Artist Who Did Everything, Artnet, March 2009, online). Commenting on his transcendence of the ‘painter’ status, the artist noted, ‘I’m rather like a travelling salesman. I deal in ideas. I am far more to people than someone who paints pictures’ (Martin Kippenberger, quoted in Martin Kippenberger, exh. cat., Tate, London, 2006, p. 31). The surreal landscape of the present work, along with its hazy background produced through a liberal application of paint, is characteristic of Kippenberger’s capricious style. Juxtaposing unruly passages of colour with decidedly measured and conscious tones,
the artist nods to the paintings of his peer, band-mate and close friend Albert Oehlen. Both Kippenberger and Oehlen, through their distinct styles, used the canvas as a platform to serve their vibrant cultural commentary, oscillating between playfulness and institutional critique. In the years directly preceding the present work, Kippenberger worked on his celebrated Lieber Maler, male mir (Dear Painter, paint for me) series. This cycle of paintings, the antecedent to the present work, was painted by Mr Werner, a sign painter based in Berlin whom Kippenberger hired to create canvases based on provided images. This rebellious act, a direct retort to the prevailing painterly style of the time and the gestural sensibility of Helmut Middendorf and Reiner Fetting, emphasised Kippenberger’s position as a conceptual master within the avant-garde. Die Mutter von Horst spaziert im Spandauer Forst , marrying the obscure and the reachable, imagination and truth, is a masterful return to painting by the rebellious artist, underscoring Kippenberger’s exceptional painterly skill whilst holding on to his conceptual genius.
28. Franz West
Untitled acrylic on papier-mâché on metal base 168 x 98 x 83 cm (66 1/8 x 38 5/8 x 32 5/8 in.) Executed in 2007. Estimate £300,000-500,000 $381,000-634,000 €338,000563,000 ‡ ♠ plus Buyers Premium and VAT, ARR applies*
Provenance Gagosian Gallery, London Acquired from the above by the present owner
A monumental work of rock-like stature, interspersed with varying tones of yellow and splashes of blue, Untitled, 2007, lies at the heart of Franz West’s radical oeuvre. Seeking discreet contemplation, the work’s mottled yellow papiermâché surface – akin to a geological formation or an archaeological specimen – resists simple visual comprehension and adroitly exemplifes West’s capacity to destabilise the alleged ‘untouchable and sacrosanct’ facets of artistic production (Daniel Birnbaum, ‘A thousand words: Franz West’, Artforum, New York, February 1999, p. 84). Consistently eschewing conventional notions of perception, and characterised by intense tactility, West’s opus raises questions on the relationship between how an object is seen, and how it is physically encountered. Coming of age in the 1960s, amidst the provocative and extreme interventions of the Viennese Actionists, West responded with a subtler, psychological artistic investigation. Departing from the Actionists’ oppressive narrative, the artist forged his own creative revolution, giving form and meaning to the crude and the trivial. Leaving behind the smooth, carefully proportioned and ofen geometric forms associated with modern sculpture, West initiated a new path for the artistic tradition.
He reversed the impulse of his earlier work, notably his impressionable Paßstücke (adaptives), and began creating unmovable objects of which the state of fragility and fux continued to reject the notion that sculpture was a fxed entity in its own artistic realm. Exemplary of this artistic impulse, the present work bridges the gap between West’s handheld Paßstücke and his large-scale, tubular, globular, and colourful aluminium sculptures. Combining high and low culture, and traversing the line between sculpture, performance and collage, West created works that were considered highly subversive and rebellious in the 1980s, until reaching international acclaim a decade later and being hailed as prime museum and gallery art. Heavily infuenced by Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and his theories about the insignifcance of language, West’s creative practice takes Wittgenstein’s example of meaninglessness and randomness and translates it to threedimensional space. Rejecting a singular reading, the present work encourages the active participation of the viewer, akin to Wittgenstein’s interpretation of the word and language as source for infnite meaning. Unlike West’s Paßstücke, Untitled cannot be picked up and manipulated to the human form, however, the immense volume, varying textural tones and irregular contours of its structure indeed demand renewed interaction.
Claes Oldenburg, Baked Potato from 7 objects in a Box, 1965-6, acrylic on cast resin on Shanango china dish, edition of 75. © 1966 Claes Oldenburg. Photo courtesy of the Oldenburg van Bruggen Studio.
‘As a body, you stand or walk around the sculpture. It is almost equivalent to your own corporeality, to taking up space in one’s own three-dimensionality in a defned art space. As far as sculpture is concerned, the viewer is more or less obliged to engage in movement’. Franz West
An anti-sculpture of sorts, Untitled’s contorted, rough form varies according to the viewer’s movements. As he positions the rock-like form atop a pedestal, West adroitly harnesses the object’s liminal status, hovering between geological nature and the realm of traditional sculpture. Exemplary of West’s sardonic humour, Untitled addresses the in-between nature of sculpture as static art. Contrary to the prevailing artistic tendency to deal with the sensibility of profound expression, West’s brash, humorous approach is reminiscent of Claes Oldenburg’s impetuous early constructions. Echoing the American sculptor’s concern that the meaning found within his work ‘will remain doubtful and inconsistent’, West’s Untitled equally resists immediate assimilation (Claes Oldenburg, quoted in Barbara Rose, Claes Oldenburg, New York, 1970, p. 198). Musing on West’s artistic limbo, situated between art and life, Darsie Alexander notes how the artist’s work ‘Fundamentally sculptural in construction, veers frequently towards the biomorphic and the prosthetic, mines the intellectualism of Sigmund Freud and Wittgenstein, and possesses an awkward beauty that speaks with equal fuency to the aesthetics of painterly abstraction and trash art... With its alternately crumbly or sleek surfaces, the work beckons human touch in an environment where such demonstrative reactions are strictly forbidden’ (Darsie Alexander, To Build a House You Start With the Roof: Work 1972-2008, exh. cat., The Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, 2008, p. 49). As such, West’s poignant opus draws on both classical and contemporary culture. Testament to the artist’s enduring legacy, the artist’s prolifc career culminated in his winning the lifetime achievement award at the 2011 Venice Biennale, and his work has been celebrated in recent major retrospective exhibitions at the Hepworth Museum, Wakefeld in 2014, the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, in 2018, and currently at Tate Modern, London. Emblematic of his characteristically textural practice, Untitled departs from any classical notion of canonical sculpture. Its ambiguous decipherability channels the gravitas of Wittgenstein’s theories whilst simultaneously conjuring whimsical apertures, positioning the artist within, and simultaneously far beyond, the monumental stature of 20th century sculpture.
Property of a Distinguished European Collector
29. Antony Gormley
Here and Here stamped with the artist’s initials and number on the underside cast iron 193 x 47.5 x 32 cm (75 7/8 x 18 3/4 x 12 in.) Executed in 2001, this work is number 1 from an edition of 5 plus 4 artist’s proofs. Estimate £260,000-350,000 $330,000-445,000 €292,000-393,000 ‡ ♠ plus Buyers Premium and VAT, ARR applies*
Provenance Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2003 Exhibited Salzburg, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Antony Gormley: Standing Matter, 12 April - 31 May 2003, p. 20 (illustrated) Literature Michael Mack, ed., Antony Gormley, Göttingen, 2007, p. 524 (another example illustrated)
Antony Gormley, HERE AND HERE, 2001, Cast iron 193 x 47.5 x 32 cm Edition of 5 plus 4 APS. Photograph by Stephen White, London © the artist.
The materialised trace of a body looking up to the sky, Here and Here, 2001, belongs to Antony Gormley’s early series of smooth anthropomorphic cast iron fgures exploring embodiment and disembodiment starting in the mid-1980s and completed in the late 2000s. Moulded on Gormley’s own body, they are all life size. Here and Here is not a representation but an indexical sign which re-negotiates the relationship between an event and its representation, using index rather than interpretation as its vehicle. It bears witness to and gives evidence of a lived moment of a particular body at a particular time, embedded in a particular location. A solid cast in iron weighing 630 kilogrammes, this work identifes the space that Gormley’s body occupied: the artist describes it as ‘proof’ of where a body once was and where any body could be. The title Here and Here suggests two parallel but simultaneous connections: between the work and the viewer, and the work and its place. It suggests a dynamic between viewer and object: the viewer is here and the sculpture is here separated by distance, a distance that the sculpture can reverse or annul. ‘Here and Here’ also suggests the connection between earth and sky: the body of the sculpture connecting to the body of the earth, but referring to the other place that is not here: the beyond, the infnity of space. All the body forms that Antony Gormley has produced since 1980 are an attempt to defne a body, not as an object but as a place, only having potency when inhabited empathetically by the viewer.
Gormley’s work – which has been celebrated in exhibitions in eminent institutions including the British Museum; MoMA in New York; the Ufzi Gallery in Florence; the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg; the Philadelphia Museum of Art and included in the Venice Biennale and Documenta – has ‘revitalised the human image in sculpture through a radical investigation of the body as a place of memory and transformation’ (Iwona Blazwick, Phaidon Press Monograph, 1995). Building from the radical artistic innovations brought forth by the Minimalists and process-driven sculpture of the 1960s, and merging sculpture with landscape and collective space, Gormley has brought an additional aperture to modern sculptural discourse: human breath held by lead membranes that were later transformed into the pure mass of cast iron and steel. Here and Here can be seen as a stepping stone to much of Gormley’s future sculptural investigations vested with corporeal fragmentation through variably-sized blocks, Here and Here is a naturalistic manifestation of ‘a human space in space’. A common thread tying together the sculptures of Antony Gormley across his fve-decade career has been their ability to straddle myriad conceptual contradictions. While accepting the particularity of his own existence, Gormley succeeds in expressing universal human experience. The artist likens the body to a place, an organism, a ‘thing-in-the-world’ but also as a vehicle for the boundlessness of mind. Gormley’s Here and Here expresses the tension held between presence and absence, abundance and void, life and death.
‘My work is to make bodies into vessels that contain and occupy space. Space exists outside the door and inside my head. My work is to make a human space in space’. Antony Gormley quoted in Antony Gormley: Five Works, exh. cat., Serpentine Gallery, London, 1987, np
Antony Gormley, HERE AND HERE, 2001, Cast iron 193 x 47.5 x 32 cm Edition of 5 plus 4 APS, Installation view, Corrour Estate, Loch Ossian, Scotland. Photograph by Tom Mannion © the artist.
30. Bridget Riley
Giocoso signed, titled and dated ‘GIOCOSO Riley 2017’ on the overlap; further signed, titled and dated ‘GIOCOSO Riley 2017’ on the stretcher; further signed and dated ‘Riley ‘17’ on the turnover edge oil on canvas 163 x 280 cm (64 1/8 x 110 1/4 in.) Painted in 2017. Estimate £800,000-1,200,000 $1,010,000-1,520,000 €904,000-1,360,000 ♠ plus Buyers Premium and VAT, ARR applies*
Provenance Galerie Max Hetzler, London Private Collection, London Literature Robert Kudielka, Alexandra Tommasini and Natalia Naish, eds., Bridget Riley The Complete Paintings, Volume 4: 20092017, London, 2018, no. BR 618, pp. 1600-1601 (illustrated)
At once whimsical and didactic, mischievous and academic, Bridget Riley’s Giocoso, 2017, combines all the defning features of the eponymous opera genre. While the former set of qualities is evident in the painting’s colourful hues and fanciful compositional arrangement, – thus providing a direct echo to the literal defnition of giocoso (‘playful’) – the latter characteristics become clear on further inspection, with the realisation that such a picture could only have been realised with extreme precision, skill and labour. ‘Each band has a clear identity’, Riley remarked. ‘Step back and the colours begin to interact, further away still a feld of closely modulated harmonies cut by strong contrasts opens up’ (Bridget Riley, quoted in ‘At the End of My Pencil’, London Review of Books, vol. 31, no. 19, 8 October 2009, online). An investigation into the mechanisms and efects of colour paired with repeated lines, Giocoso beautifully encapsulates Bridget Riley’s most celebrated painterly idiosyncrasies and thematic drive; it conveys her talent in achieving explosive rhythm whilst paradoxically enabling meditative contemplation. True to its charmingly revealing title, Giocoso straddles playfulness, levity, and the underlying seriousness of Riley’s sincere gesture and vision. A testament to her importance and enduring legacy within art historical discourse, an important selection of the artist’s work will be showcased at the Hayward Gallery, London on the occasion of a prodigious retrospective starting in October 2019.
Bridget Riley, Punjab, 1971, oil on canvas, Glasgow Museums Collection. © Bridget Riley 2019. All rights reserved.
In Riley’s recent work, including the present Giocoso, the artist’s exploration of form, colour and perception has become increasingly intricate and subtle. Weaving a complex tableau of tonal bands that visually transforms into a very simple image, the present work deftly encapsulates Riley’s stylistic progression, delving further into the possibilities of colour. ‘I saw that the basis of colour is its instability’, she remarked. ‘Instead of searching for a frm foundation, I realised I had one in the very opposite. That was solid ground again, so to speak, and by accepting this paradox I could begin to work with the feeting, the elusive, with those things which disappear when you actually apply your attention hard and fast – and so a whole new area of activity, of perception opened up for me’ (Bridget Riley, in conversation with Robert Kudielka, Bridget Riley, The Eye’s Mind, London, 2009, p. 85). Extending the spatial properties of colour, Riley simultaneously allows her paintings to become ‘a whole host of sensations’ (Bridget Riley, quoted in Robert Kudielka, Bridget Riley: Dialogues on Art, London, 1995, p. 70). While her early oeuvre had introduced a brazenly novel stance in the feld of painting and formal art, trailblazingly experimenting with subversive compositional approaches bordering on illusion, Riley’s subsequent output established her visual syntax as a category of its own.
‘In the straight line I had one of the most fundamental forms. The line has direction and length, it lends itself to simple repetition and by its regularity it simultaneously supports and counteracts the fugitive, feeting character of colour. Although Seurat’s dot is comparable in its simplicity, the line has fractionally more going for it’. Bridget Riley
Veering towards a formally taut and essential composition, Giocoso attends to the very structure of the picture plane, adroitly deploying its thinly coloured stripes through strict intervals of identical measurements. In contrast to Riley’s trademark curvilinear arrangements from the early 2000s, the painting, along with its illustrious sister works from the late 2010s, appears straightened and compositionally tame, as if mirroring the formal maturity that the artist gained in the prime of her career. Signifying the importance of this cycle of works within Riley’s opus, the stripe paintings have regularly punctuated her practice from as early as 1961, demonstrating her unwavering engagement with questions surrounding the interactive character of geometric forms.
Agnes Martin, Untitled No. 1, 1981, synthetic polymer paint and pencil on canvas, Museum of Modern Art, New York. © Agnes Martin / DACS 2019. Image: SCALA, Florence.
Though wholly unique and at times irreverently selfreferential, Riley’s painting conjures multifarious visual references that cement it frmly within art historical discourse. Giocoso’s replicated horizontality throughout the canvas’s surface is at once redolent of natural layers of stratifcation, and reminiscent of the practice of Agnes Martin and other Minimalist protagonists, who similarly explored the possibilities of parallel lines and chromatic duplication. Adamantly parting ways with expressionist fourish, the Minimalists used the essential codes of geometric shapes and colour to convey an aesthetic of formal purity. Yet Riley’s work surpasses this intent, as it is infused with a sense of eccentricity that eschews the radical nature of the Minimalist gesture, brimming instead with playful tonalities that have ofen been attributed to Riley’s irreducibly British spirit, having lived and worked in London uninterruptedly since birth.
Anni Albers, Pictographic, 1953, cotton and linen, Detroit Institute of Arts. © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York and DACS, London 2019. Image: Bridgeman Images.
Cultivating new techniques to hone her own abstract style, the artist continuously creates dizzying canvases where depth and visual stimuli emanate from a delicate positioning of lines. Though at frst disorienting, Riley’s striped planes quickly settle as the eye adjusts to their whimsical arrangements, like soothed waves afer tumultuous activity.
in 1967, pushed the limits of Riley’s visual vocabulary to reach new heights of visual dynamism. Colour, according to Riley, allowed her to convey more naturalistic sensations, as they ‘inevitably lead you to the world outside’ (Bridget Riley, ‘The Pleasures of Sight’, exh. cat., Bridget Riley, Tate Britain, London, 2003, p. 213).
The progression of Riley’s visual syntax from illusory structures, to chromatically explosive compositions, to formally complex and reduced works was incrementally designed, defned by myriad brilliant series which have since been seen to make sense both independently and as a collective oeuvre. Finding notoriety in the early 1960s, Riley immediately focused on simple geometric forms such as lines, circles, curves, and squares, arrayed across canvases, walls, or paper, recognising the infuence of painters like Georges Seurat who, early on, had explored the dialogue between repeated shapes and altered perception. Riley’s original creations, initially explored to great efect in a trademark palette of black-and-white paint, exuded powerful vibrations and motion, in ways that recalled the moving planes of Impressionist paintings. The introduction of colour,
Colour itself thus plays a quintessential part in Riley’s work. ‘It is as if, in the absence of depiction, colour and form have found a new, surprising synthesis and movement itself has been distilled to its pure, disembodied essence’ wrote Paul Moorhouse. ‘It is signifcant that these recent works should so vividly convey a sense of life, of élan, for at a fundamental level this is the underlying theme of her work’ (Paul Moorhouse, ‘A dialogue with Sensation: the Art of Bridget Riley’, Bridget Riley, Tate London, 2003, p. 26). Brimming with life and energy, Giocoso projects essential, pared-down geometric forms on a large scale, amplifying the efect of disembodiment Moorhouse elucidated. It moreover produces something that had previously lacked in English art: audaciously electric abstraction, rendered possible by Riley’s idiosyncratically subversive touch.
‘Contrast is a very basic principle of my work, but I use a mixture of colour harmonies and colour contrasts to activate efects. I like the paradox that my paintings are fat volumes but you can look at the way the canvas is divided as planes, and the groups of colours as movements’. Bridget Riley
Gerhard Richter, 1024 Farben [350-3], 1973, lacquer on canvas, Centre Pompidou, Paris. © Gerhard Richter 2019 (0142).
The study in colour is one that has been undertaken by a number of artists, including the German painter Gerhard Richter. Sharing a kinship in investigative processes, the painter’s 1024 Farben [350-3], 1973, carries out an almost documentative deployment of the colour chart, in ways that are redolent of Riley’s tonal progressions. Yet, where Richter clinically arranged squares of colour to analyse the properties of each hue as an individual entity, Riley seems to attend to the idea of continuity, recalling the free-fowingly poetic formations of a rainbow, and using colour as a form in its own right. Employing an enthralling palette of pink, green, blue, yellow and orange, she explores how visual impressions can fuctuate through subtle changes in chromaticity, and produces a sublime microcosm of light akin to the vivid rays of a kaleidoscope. Enveloping the viewer, the uninterrupted lines punctuating the painting’s surface stretch from end to end of the large-scale canvas and elongate its horizon. Through eliminating white, Riley allows each colour to blend and glow without the interruption of negative space, which in turn creates amplifed frequency and warmth.
Property from a Private New York Collection
31. Gilbert & George
b. 1943 and b. 1942
Bleed signed, titled and dated ‘BLEED 1988 Gilbert & George’ lower right; further consecutively numbered ‘1-16’ on the reverse of each part hand-dyed gelatin silver print, in artists’ metal frame, in 16 parts each 60.3 x 50.5 cm (23 3/4 x 19 7/8 in.) overall 241.2 x 202 cm (94 7/8 x 79 1/2 in.) Executed in 1988. Estimate £80,000-120,000 $101,000-152,000 €90,400-136,000 ‡ ♠ plus Buyers Premium and VAT, ARR applies*
Provenance Massimo Martino, Turin Luchino Visconti di Modrone, Italy, circa 1990 (thence by descent) Christie’s, London, 2 July 2014, lot 243 Acquired at the above sale by the present owner Exhibited Moscow, New Tretyakov Gallery, Gilbert & George Pictures 1983-1988, 27 April - 1 June 1990, no. 13, pp. 25 and 121 (illustrated, n.p.) Literature Rudi Fuchs, ed., Gilbert and George The Complete Pictures 1971-2005, vol. I, London, 2007, pp. 600 and 615 (illustrated, p. 600) Rudi Fuchs, ed., Gilbert and George The Complete Pictures 1971-2005, vol. II, London, 2007, pp. 640 and 1235 (installation view illustrated, p. 640)
‘We like it very much when the pictures take over. When they’re biger than the viewer. You go to a museum to look at a picture, but we like it when the picture looks at you... We want to dominate the viewer with the forces of art. Because art can change people. We believe that’. Gilbert & George
Presenting a tableau of visually arresting imagery in a striking combination of red and green, Bleed, 1988, from Gilbert & George’s Pictures series of the same year, powerfully captures the artists’ signature visual syntax of bold colours and uncensored imagination. Stretching over sixteen units and rendered in the richest hues, the present work documents Gilbert & George’s infamous provocative character, ofen transposed directly onto their materialised artistic manifestations. The two artists’ body of works of invokes the visual power of religious images - here suggested by the kneeling fgure seen in 3/4 profle from behind - whilst simultaneously exploring the possibilities of manipulated imagery, years before the availability of digital tools. In stark contrast to the more traditional School of London which fourished at the same time as their own artistic practice, Gilbert & George pushed the boundaries of representation
to extremes by infusing their art with hyperpersonal, and ofentimes political tropes. Conducting themselves as living sculptures, characterised by signature kaleidoscopic suits and considered mannerisms, Gilbert & George surpassed any kind of artistic categorisation or etiquette, instead straddling a variety of media such as performance, sculpture, and the pictorial vibrancy of the painterly pigment. In the early 1980s, the artistic duo mastered their distinctive technique of colouring and dramatically enlarged their subjects beyond the confnes of individual, gridded units. Through the use of symmetry, bold forms and vivid colour, Bleed forcefully mirrors the duality of Gilbert & George’s artistic persona encompassed throughout their oeuvre. An exceptional example from their celebrated Pictures series, this work is an impressive testament to the life and pioneering practice of the most infuential artistic duo in British art.
Gilbert & George, Sting Land, 1988, hand-dyed gelatin silver print, in artist’s metal frame, in 32 parts. © Gilbert & George.
Property from an Important Private Collector
32. Damien Hirst
Mercuric Thiocyanate signed, titled and dated ‘“Mercuric Thiocyanate” 2007 Damien Hirst’ on the reverse; further signed ‘D. Hirst’ on the stretcher household gloss on canvas 175.3 x 297.2 cm (69 x 117 in.) Painted in 2007. Estimate £400,000-600,000 $507,000-761,000 €452,000-678,000 ‡ ♠ plus Buyers Premium and VAT, ARR applies*
Provenance Haunch of Venison, London Private Collection, Geneva (acquired from the above) Sotheby’s, London, 15 February 2012, lot 26 Acquired at the above sale by the present owner Literature Jason Beard and Millicent Wilner, eds., The Complete Spot Paintings, 1986-2011, London, 2013, pp. 441 and 851 (incorrect orientation illustrated, p. 441)
‘You’ve got colour, pure colour on its own. And then you’ve got the meaning of objects. And with the Spot Paintings, that’s when you take the colour out, and you deal with it separately. You take all the colour out of a situation, ‘cause it’s getting in your way, and you bang it into the Spot Paintings’. Damien Hirst, quoted in Gordon Brun and Damien Hirst, Damien Hirst, On The Way to Work, London, 2001, p. 125
Damien Hirst, 8 pans, 1987, Household gloss on cooking pans. © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2019. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd.
A superb example of one of Damien Hirst’s most iconic series, Mercuric Thiocyanate, 2007, demonstrates the culmination of the artist’s career-long preoccupation with conceptions of mortality, analeptics, and the prescription drug industry. Mercuric Thiocyanate belongs to Hirst’s Pharmaceutical series, which inaugurated thirteen subseries within his larger Spot Paintings chapter, dating from 1986 to 2011, garnering the artist international acclaim. A monumental canvas comprised of two-hundred and forty uniformlysized kaleidoscopic roundels against an ivory background, the painting establishes a chromatic yet minimalist feld, disorienting the viewer with an inconceivable sense of depth. Through this formation of weightless dimension, Mercury Thiocyanate manifests the development of Hirst’s practice from Controlled Substance Key Painting, 1994, to a more abstract yet conceptual approach. The paintings included in the Pharmaceutical series, such as Mercuric Thiocyanate, acquired titles that Hirst selected from his personal copy of the Physicians’ Desk Reference – an annually-published compendium of trade intelligence of prescription drugs – afer their creation. Regarding the medicinal nature of the title, Hirst elucidated, ‘I started them as an endless series… A scientifc approach to painting in a similar way to the drug companies’ scientifc approach to life. Art doesn’t purport to have all the answers; the drug companies do. Hence the title of the series, The Pharmaceutical Paintings, and the individual titles of the paintings themselves’, such as Mercuric Thiocyanate (Damien Hirst, ‘On Dumb Painting’, I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now, London, 1997, p. 246). Ofen mistaken for candy, due to the dots’ vibrant and jovial palette, Hirst’s pills visually eschew the toxicity of their namesake, ‘Mercury(II) thiocyanate’, or Hg(SCN)2, a chemical compound which was banned in Germany afer the death of numerous children who had mistakenly consumed it in a solid state. A master of juxtaposing death with life and sickness with health, Hirst imbues Mercuric Thiocyanate with an ironic somberness, eliciting notions of ambivalence and confict. Mercury Thiocyanate suggests an illusory sense of repetition; despite the stylistic duplication of the spots, each colour hue is distinct. Though immediately most evocative of Gerhard Richter’s Colour Charts, such as 180 Colors, 1971, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Hirst has asserted that any similarities between his Spot Paintings, such as Mercury Thiocyanate, and other painterly experimentation with colour distinction and repetition are purely formal, declaring that ‘[t]hey have nothing to do with Richter or Poons or Bridget Riley or Albers or even Op.
They’re about the urge or the need to be a painter above and beyond the object of painting. I’ve ofen said that they are like sculptures of painting’ (Damien Hirst, ‘On Dumb Painting’, p. 246). Mercury Thiocyanate also references its medium through its composition and technique, as the work engenders an immediate response with its seemingly sleek, minimalist approach, while the laborious, painstaking precision entailed with the creation of the work becomes conspicuous upon closer inspection. In this way, Mercury Thiocyanate is reminiscent of Pop Art in its nearly mechanical reproduction of each circle, while retaining the manual, intimate quality championed by the major abstract art movements of the 20th century. The individual shades of each spot engage with perceptions of infnity and randomness, suggestive of the role of chance in works by Jean Arp and Jackson Pollock. Moreover, there
Damien Hirst, Row, 1988, Household gloss on wall © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2019. Photo: Edward Woodman.
appears to be an undeniable similitude to Joseph Cornell’s Pharmacies created between 1943-1953, which included spiritual and creative ‘medicine’, such as maps and sand, instead of the traditional pharmaceuticals which he was forbidden to consume as a Christian Scientist. Contrarily, however, Hirst’s work is simultaneously more clinical and abstract than his predecessor’s. According to Michael Bracewell, the Spot Paintings such as Mercury Thiocyanate ‘comprise “art” at its most intense – a concentrated and chemical version of itself, as clinical in its multiplicity as the drugs afer which they are titled… While appearing laden with meaning – linguistic, pictorial, scientifc – their power lies, paradoxically, in their very inscrutability’ (Michael Bracewell, ‘Art Without the Angst’, in Jason Beard and Millicent Wilner, Damien Hirst: The Complete Spot Paintings, 1986-2011, London, 2013, n.p.).
Property from a Private Collection, Switzerland
33. Anish Kapoor
Untitled signed and dated ‘Anish Kapoor 2005’ on the reverse stainless steel 140 x 140 x 31 cm (55 1/8 x 55 1/8 x 12 1/4 in.) Executed in 2005. Estimate £400,000-600,000 $507,000-761,000 €451,000-676,000 ♠ ‡ plus Buyers Premium and VAT, ARR applies*
Provenance Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner
Arrestingly intriguing and ever-fuctuating in appearance, Untitled, 2005, adroitly exemplifes Anish Kapoor’s continued exploration of refection and distortion within his series of circular concave mirrors. With a diameter of just under one and a half metres and a surface of polished stainless steel, the work invites the viewer to project their appearance into its refective façade and, through playing with notions of perspective, produces an impression of continuous space. The resulting image shifs with each new movement and is ceaselessly inverted, presenting an upturned world that is aggrandised, minimised or warped in places. Providing dizzyingly contorted visuals within a familiar yet remote reality, Untitled touches on metaphysical polarities such as presence and absence, being and nonbeing, solidity and intangibility. Other examples of refective mirrors have fourished in Kapoor’s practice in varying dimensions, the largest of which have been exposed in eminent public spaces
such as the Nottingham Playhouse, Nottingham, Rockefeller Center, New York, and the Museu Serralves, Porto. These iterations were not fxed against a wall but elevated from the ground and directed upwards, so as to refect the sky’s meandering moods. Kapoor commenced his elegant and eloquent series of concave mirrors in the mid-1990s, and rapidly gained international recognition henceforth. Defned by an incredible economy of means and combining layers of meaning within a deceptively simple façade, Untitled captures the crux of the artist’s mission. It invokes the visual language of Minimalism whilst conjuring the phenomenological qualities of experiential arts, namely the trailblazing photographs of Hungarian artist László Moholy-Nagy, who equally played on light and perspective to render his singular vision of space.
‘The space doesn’t recede – it comes out at you ... a new sublime that’s forward of the picture plane’. Anish Kapoor
Anish Kapoor, Sky Mirror, 2006, stainless steel, Kensington Gardens, London. © Anish Kapoor. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2019.
Through an adroit fusion of the work, the viewer and the environment, Kapoor creates a visceral image that is perpetually in fux. Here, rather than attending to the fatness of painting or photography, Kapoor opts for an ever-shifing vision of the world distorted through refections, and probing the nature of space itself. Oscillating between sensual beauty and otherworldly dematerialisation, Untitled demonstrates Kapoor’s capacity to invoke notions straddling the tangible and the spiritual. As expressed by the artist; ‘I have worked with concave mirror space for twenty years now because concave mirror space is in front of the picture plane and it is a new kind of space and a new sublime. A modern sublime, a “now” sublime, a “here” sublime’ (Anish Kapoor, quoted in Donna de Salvo, ‘Anish Kapoor in Conversation’, Anish Kapoor, London, 2012, p. 403). The uncanny sense of limitlessness produced by Untitled’s refection recalls Kapoor’s interest in the analogy between the idea of the sublime in the artistic tradition and the cosmic concept of a parallel universe. ‘The spatial questions [the mirrored object] seemed to ask were not about deep space but about present space, which I began to think about as a new sublime. If the traditional sublime is in deep space, then this is proposing that the contemporary sublime is in front of the picture plane, not beyond it’ (Anish Kapoor, quoted in Anish Kapoor: Past Present Future, exh. cat., The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 2008, p. 52). When the viewer peers into its dizzying surface, Untitled subsumes the material body into an illusion of immateriality – an answer to an unspoken question, the embodiment of spiritual selfperception realised. ‘A void object is not an empty object; its potential for generative possibility is ever present. It is pregnant. The void returns the gaze. Its blank face forces us to fll in content and meaning. Emptiness becomes fullness. Things are turned upside down…The art I love, the art I make, I hope, celebrates the sensual while always knowing that decay is close’ (Anish Kapoor, quoted in ‘Blood and Light. In Conversation with Julia Kristeva’, 2015, Anish Kapoor, online). Catalysing the surrounding environment in a refective vortex, Untitled symbolises the essence of sight and perception as plane, space and image. As art historian Victoria Turvey Sauron wrote on Kapoor’s mirrored works, ‘This all-surface is both fascinatingly beautiful and profoundly threatening, profoundly implicating the subject’s gaze while threatening its very coherence, by suggesting that both subject and gaze are being sucked inside an interior which cannot be known or imagined, the sense of surface is so overwhelming’ (Victoria Turvey Sauron, The Sacred and the Feminine, New York, 2009, p. 196).
Property of an Important Private Collector, Europe
34. Urs Fischer
Undigested Sunset cast aluminium, wax, wood, acrylic paint, pigments, fabric, silicone, wood glue and screws 77.5 x 183 x 72.5 cm (30 1/2 x 72 x 28 1/2 in.) Executed in 2001-2. Estimate £250,000-350,000 $318,000-445,000 €282,000-395,000 ‡ plus Buyers Premium and VAT*
Provenance Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich Ingvild Goetz Collection, Munich Acquired from the above by the present owner Exhibited New York, Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert Inc., Enduring Love, 23 February - 24 March 2001 New York, Swiss Institute, Lowland Lullaby: Ugo Rondinone with John Giorno and Urs Fischer, 26 March - 11 May 2002 Los Angeles, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Urs Fischer, 21 April - 19 August 2013, pp. 577 and 608 (illustrated, p. 577) The Hague, Museum Beelden aan Zee, Skeleton The armature of the body in contemporary sculpture, 30 October 2015 - 7 February 2016 Literature Urs Fischer: Shovel in a Hole, exh. cat., New Museum, New York, 2009, pp. 46, 111 and 462 (illustrated, p. 111)
Unifying Urs Fischer’s varied artistic output is the depiction and measurement of time as a medium. Ofen introduced through the incorporation of materials that have an expiration date, time for Fischer is expressed in the perishing remnants of food or the slow melting of wax. In the present work, it is manifested in the skeleton and seemingly burned hand, evoking imagery that has been used since the 17th century as motifs warning against the decadence found in vanitas and memento mori, where death, fear and horror are portrayed in contrast to the joy of living. Fischer’s knowledge of the historic use of wax in creating death masks and the plaster-casting technique developed by 19th Italian archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli, who used plaster of Paris to fll the cavities lef by bodies at Pompeii, is evident in Undigested Sunset, 2001-2002. The incorporation of wax and casting maintains these historic links to the representation and preservation of death, updated under Fischer’s hand they lose their moralising tenor. In the present work, only the right hand is cast in pre-skeletal form, harking to the truncated and fragmented forms Fischer explored in his other works such as The Grass Munchers, 2007. These fragmented forms have a clear sculptural lineage to Bruce Nauman’s and Alina Szapocznikow’s sculptures of the fractured body.
Crafed from cast aluminium, wax, wood and other varied media, Undigested Sunset highlights Fischer’s ingrained artistic philosophy to traditional sculptural techniques, generating excitingly unconventional sculpture and thinking. The chair and skeleton as signs are recurring visual devices within Fischer’s oeuvre, united in both the current example and in Skinny Sunrise, 2000, where a skeleton kneels face down onto a dirtied park bench. Commenting on his macabre subject matter, Fischer notes: ‘Basically, skeletons are pretty likeable fgures for me. They are simple, like prototypes; they are an easily workable form of fguration, and for me, they have a pleasurable, curious liveliness… To understand things nowadays as vanitas or memento mori motifs is too simple, and all other celebrations of death are even more vain than any homage to life. That said, homages to life can be the most morbid things. For me the skeleton is actually a light, even playful basic human fgure. My skeletons are pretty funny guys’ (Urs Fischer, quoted in Urs Fischer: Skinny Sunrise, exh. cat., Kunsthalle, Vienna, 2012, p. 15). Here, Fischer references the art historical notion that the chair is a surreal substitute for the human form, but also a symbolic portrayal of the artist. When lef empty, the absence invites the interaction of the
‘My works really smile. They’re not horrible ruins…but they fall apart sometimes, there’s nothing to be afraid of any more’. Urs Fischer
French School, Death, 16th century, wood, Musee des Arts Decoratifs, Paris.
Vincent van Gogh, Head of a Skeleton with a Burning Cigarette, 1885, oil on canvas, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.
Image: Bridgeman Images.
© 2019. Image: SCALA, Florence.
Installation view of the present work in The Museum of Contemporary Art, Urs Fischer, Los Angeles, 2013. © Urs Fischer. Courtesy of the artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London.
onlooker or takes on the role of the artist himself, as in Van Gogh’s famous Chair. In the present work, the sofa, scattered with rubbish and dirt from real life, forces the viewer to interact with the work on an immediate level. Amalgamating wit, cultural references and dark humour, Fischer explores the confnes of the art space whilst touching on universal truths. Splayed on a white covered sofa, surrounded by debris, the skeleton in Undigested Sunset reclines suggestively amongst everyday dirt and rubbish. ‘Maybe it’s an obvious choice, but those are the things I relate to. What if I did a Fabergé egg? Would that be better? Even if I have nothing to do with it? I just use the stuf that’s around me. And those
objects, those domestic objects as you call them, are made in human scale, so they can also be related to humans. They’re made by humans for humans. They speak about us’ (Urs Fischer, quoted in Massimiliano Gioni, ‘This is my Grandmother she Makes Really Genius Cakes’, Urs Fischer and Alex Zachery, eds., Urs Fischer: Shovel in a Hole, New York, 2009, p. 63). Undigested Sunset is appealing both in its dark oddity and whimsical energy, highlighting Fischer’s sustained contemplation of time, death and art history whilst incorporating the artist’s characteristic witty, playful and sardonic humour.
35. Jesús Rafael Soto
Azul con Rojo signed, titled and dated ‘“AZUL CON ROJO” Soto 1991’ on the reverse enamel on wood 202.8 x 151.8 x 17 cm (79 7/8 x 59 3/4 x 6 3/4 in.) Executed in 1991. Estimate £300,000-400,000 $381,000-508,000 €339,000-451,000 ‡ plus Buyers Premium and VAT*
Provenance Maxwell Davidson Gallery, New York Riva Yares Gallery, Scottsdale Private Collection, Texas
Azul con Rojo, 1991, is a sumptuous example of Jesús Rafael Soto’s texturally and chromatically vibrant oeuvre. One of the leading forces of the Kinetic art movement at the dawn of its development in South-America, the artist experimented with painting in unprecedented ways, notably departing from the medium’s reduction of the picture plane to a fat receptacle. Superimposing clear blocks of carmine red and electric blue atop a fragmented background, Azul con Rojo spans myriad subtly delineated shades of white and black enveloping the work’s striking dual chromaticity. Through the use of primary colours, varying scales, multifarious media, and kinetics, Soto conjures a vibrant organism that absorbs the viewer into its pervasive centre of gravity. While studying fne arts in Caracas in the mid-1940s, Soto was deeply impressed by the aesthetics of Impressionism. Yet, as the movement favoured a sof, unaggressive light that resembled the subtle rays of the south of France, the artist lacked a relatable reference that could conjure the warmth of his tropical sun. He thus turned away from Impressionist imagery and instead gravitated towards Cubism, which broke the world up into planes in a way that aligned with his perception of surrounding landscapes. Throughout his career, he explored the manifestations of the physical world around him: through an ingenious method of repetition, he created a fow of energies dictated by vertical and horizontal lines, ofen enhanced by antithetic colours and diferently textured media that transposed the dynamism he envisioned directly onto inanimate surfaces. ‘At that time I was looking for vibration through repetition. I was interested in the problem of vibration and the study of light, something that had fascinated me in the work of Velazquez, and that the impressionists, whom I have
always respected, studied very consciously’ (Jesús Rafael Soto, quoted in Ariel Jimenez, Conversaciones con Jesús Rafael Soto, Caracas, 2005, p. 154). These creations emerged with the intention of dynamising Piet Mondrian’s Neo-Plasticist compositions, which he had discovered on a decisive trip to Holland in 1951. Yet, soon, the artist transcended his own initiative, as he realised that Mondrian had already achieved vitality in art. His new intent was to make two-dimensional supports break into movement, so as to truly materialise motion. By making paintings focus on grids, dots, lines and squares, and limiting his palette to eight basic colours, – in the case of Azul con Rojo, a mere two – Soto was able to re-calibrate the viewer’s traditional understanding and apprehension of space. He could either trick the eye into perceiving movement where there was none, or create a composition that was impossible to grasp from a single viewpoint, thus forcing the viewer to move around it. In order to render his illusions more potent, Soto drew from the felds of mathematics and music. As the majority of his work is laden with elements of balance, harmony and vibrancy, through the arrangement of symmetrical shapes and dissonant hues, it seems only natural that these disciplines would inspire him and nourish his versatile approach. He used the mathematical concepts of progression in his paintings of geometric elements repeated across the picture plane, and then in the present series, based on the square. Conversely, music suggested the potential for infnite variation through the codifcation of basic colours into a serial system. The artist superimposed and distributed coloured elements in an efort to generate the optical impression of movement and rhythm and soon discovered that he could increase this impression by arranging the sheets at a distance from one another. Azul con Rojo, pulsating with vigorous energy, presents a kind of vibration that is not heard as sound but seen, materialised like ripples in water.
‘My purpose was not and has never been to fnd a beautiful harmony of colors, but to put them to work, to combine and blend them randomly, as if color were part of a magma in which man fnds or creates the harmonies that interest him’. Jesús Rafael Soto Piet Mondrian, Composition with Red and Blue, 1933, oil on canvas, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Image: SCALA, Florence.
36. Jean-Michel Basquiat
Untitled (From Leonardo) oilstick and acrylic on acetate, in 5 parts each 106.5 x 91.5 cm (41 7/8 x 36 in.) Executed in 1983. Estimate £500,000-700,000 $634,000-888,000 €563,000-789,000 ‡ plus Buyers Premium and VAT*
Provenance Joel Stearns/New City Editions, Los Angeles Dranof Fine Art, New York Private Collection, Bangkok (acquired from the above)
Striking a riveting balance between energy and sobriety, idealism and hyper-expression, past and present, Untitled (From Leonardo), 1983, exemplifes Jean-Michel Basquiat’s engagement with the art-historical canon as well as the development of his artistic vocabulary during a watershed moment in his career. The work, composed of fve sheets of acetate, is a conspicuous homage to the sketches of Leonardo da Vinci – a subject matter that Basquiat also deployed in Leonardo da Vinci’s Greatest Hits, 1982, residing in the Schorr Family Collection. It served as the original basis from which a subsequent set of prints were developed, editions of which are held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. First drawn on clear acetates, the images were then transferred to silkscreen and printed on Japanese rice paper, disrupting the traditional printing process. However, Basquiat intentionally allowed the surfaces to collect various detritus on his studio foor, such as cigarette butts, music cassettes, and sheets of drawing paper, an act that Fred Hofman elucidated as having endowed ‘the works [with] a ‘patina’ – as though they were as old as the sources they referenced’ (Fred Hofman, ‘From Leonardo’, Jean-Michel Basquiat Drawing, exh. cat., Acquavella Galleries, New York, 2014, p. 117). The quintessential 1980s ‘Renaissance Man’, Basquiat littered
the sheets of Untitled (From Leonardo) with da Vinci-esque depictions of dismembered body parts, Greco-Roman sculptures, and text, simultaneously referencing antiquity, the Old Masters, and contemporary grafti culture. Untitled (From Leonardo) epitomises the artist’s career-long preoccupation with corporeality and bodily fragility, which was instigated by an accident that saw seven-year-old Basquiat struck by a car while playing in the street. His mother gifed him a copy of Gray’s Anatomy while he was convalescing, enabling him to better grasp the enigmatic intricacies of human anatomy and physical pain; according to Hofman, it was thus no surprise that the agog and precocious painter was ‘drawn to Leonardo da Vinci’s investigative studies of the human being - from anatomical to physiological, from birth to death. In the work of Leonardo, Basquiat found a viable means of educating himself about human form and function’. Utilising both Leonardo’s sketches and texts as sources for physiological education, Basquiat furthermore ‘identifed a kindred spirit able to transform scientifc truth into artistic vision. Leonardo’s seemingly compulsive investigation of human anatomy and physiology would become a lifelong passion for Basquiat’ (Fred Hofman, ‘From Leonardo’, Jean-Michel Basquiat Drawing, exh. cat., Acquavella Galleries, New York, 2014, p. 124).
‘I think [Basquiat] loved the way in which Leonardo’s manuscripts had lots of diagrams and were heavily annotated and illustrated. That combination of image, symbols, and text was very important to him’. Eleanor Nairne, ‘Debunking Basquiat’s Myths’, Artnet, 18 September 2017, online
Jean Michel Basquiat, Leonardo da Vinci’s Greatest Hits, 1982, acrylic, oilstick and paper collage on canvas, The Art Museum, Princeton University (on loan, from the Schorr Family Collection). © The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat / ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2019. Image: adagp Images, Paris,/ SCALA, Florence
Leonardo da Vinci, Study of the human spine and vertebrae, circa 1510, black chalk and ink on paper. Windsor Royal Library.
Leonardo da Vinci, Six Figures, Study for an Epiphany, c.1510, pen and brown ink on paper, Musée du Louvre, Paris.
© 2019. White Images / SCALA, Florence.
Image: SCALA, Florence.
Untitled (From Leonardo) is thus illustrative not only of corporeality as Basquiat’s signature idée fxe – the work is even complete with a misspelled epitaph for 16-century physician Andreas Vesalius on the frst sheet – but also of his idiosyncratic aesthetic vernacular that was already well-employed by 1982.
of what is portrayed – either a confrontational encounter between two men or simply two angles of an anatomical representation – is lef unclear.
Evocative of sheets from da Vinci’s notebooks, Untitled (From Leonardo) can be viewed through an iconographic lens in which each fgure exists independently, embodying a symbolic – or perhaps hieroglyphic – presence that is similar to those of various disassociated sketches on a single page. Moreover, some of the drawings carry numerous connotations; for example, the skulls that pepper the present work simultaneously act as a nod to the rigorous diagrams of the Renaissance master and as a self-referential motif, pointing to the recurrent use of the momento mori symbol in his oeuvre, such as in Untitled, 1982, located in the Broad Museum, Los Angeles. In the frst sheet as well, two skulls face each other, but the nature
Despite the fractured nature of the present work, replete with severed spines and outlined bones, Untitled (From Leonardo) carries an ironic sense of totality. By vigorously crafing dismembered organs, Basquiat was, in essence, conceiving of how to physically reassemble himself. As art historian Olivier Berggruen has astutely noted, Basquiat’s anatomical works such as Untitled (From Leonardo) ‘[create] an aesthetic of the body as damaged, scarred, fragments, incomplete or torn apart, once the organic whole has disappeared. Paradoxically, it is the very act of creating these representations that conjures up a positive corporeal valence between the artist and his sense of self or identity. The creative act of representing a fragmented body probably helped Basquiat regain a temporary sense of wholeness’ (Olivier Berggruen, ‘The Prints of Jean-Michel Basquiat’, Print Quarterly 26, no. 1, pp. 21-32).
Sale Information 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale
20th Century & Contemporary Art Department
Auction and Viewing Location 30 Berkeley Square, London W1J 6EX
Head of Evening Sale Rosanna Widén +44 20 7318 4060 firstname.lastname@example.org
Auction 27 June 2019 at 7pm Viewing 18 - 27 June 2019 Monday – Saturday 10am – 6pm Sunday 12pm – 6pm Sale Designation When sending in written bids or making enquiries please refer to this sale as UK010419 or 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale. Absentee and Telephone Bids tel +44 20 7318 4045 fax +44 20 7318 4035 Susanna Brockman +44 20 7318 4041 Rebecca Gathercole +44 20 7901 7927 Anne Flick +44 20 7318 4089 email@example.com
Cataloguer Lisa Stevenson +44 20 7318 4093 firstname.lastname@example.org Senior Administrator Rachel Boddington +44 20 7318 4050 email@example.com Writer/Researcher Clara Krzentowski Senior Property Manager Ross Martin +44 20 7318 4057 firstname.lastname@example.org Photographers Jean Bourbon Alex Braun Matt Kroenig Kent Pell Charlie Sheldon
Auctioneer Henry Highley Catalogues New York +1 212 940 1240 London +44 20 7901 4024 email@example.com £22/€25/$35 at the gallery Client Accounting Richard Addington, Head of Client Accounting +44 20 7901 7914 Jason King, Client Accounting, Director +44 20 7318 4086 Buyer Accounts Carolyn Whitehead +44 20 7318 4020 Seller Accounts Surbjit Kaur +44 20 7318 4072 Client Services 30 Berkeley Square, London W1J 6EX +44 20 7318 4010 Shipping Andrew Kitt +44 20 7318 4047 Kyle Buchanan +44 20 7318 4081 Rita Matos +44 20 7901 7906 LucÍa Núñez +44 20 7901 7906 Creative Services Ben Marcus, Creative Services Manager Moira Gil, Graphic Designer Grace Neighbour, Graphic Designer
Wrap front cover Lot 8, David Hockney Studio Interior #2, 2014 (detail) © David Hockney.
Wrap back cover Lot 11, Pablo Picasso Homme assis (Mardi gras), 1972 (detail) © Succession Picasso/DACS, London 2019.
Wrap inside Lot 5, Dana Schutz Moonwalker, 2009 (detail) © Dana Schutz. Courtesy of the artist and Petzel, New York.
Lot 6, Rudolf Stingel Untitled (Afer Sam), 2007 (detail) © Rudolf Stingel, 2019.
Front cover Lot 17, Luc Tuymans Schwarzheide, 1986 © Luc Tuymans.
Back cover Lot 10, Roy Lichtenstein The Conductor, 1975 (detail) © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein/DACS 2019.
The 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening sale would like to thank: London Operations Team, Orlann Capazorio, Andrea Koronkiewicz, Anthony Brennan, Nathan Bendavid, Maria Vittoria Raiola, Emily Cosgrove, Francesca Carnovelli, Rui Cravo e Silva, Brittany Jones, Kathy Lin, Laurent Taevernier, Guillaume Gautrand, Brittany Jones, Samara Kaplan, Mathilde Heaton, Caroline Porter, Rebecca Titcombe, Rebecca Dabby, Judith Lamb, Adrien Couse, Just Stroeken, Andrew Galea Salomone, Lachlann Forbes, Nicola Leong, Oliver Noble.
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UK Auction Buyer’s Guide The following pages are designed to offer you information on how to buy at auction at Phillips. Our staff will be happy to assist you. The Conditions of Sale and Authorship Warranty published on our website at https://phillips.com also govern the auction. Bidders are strongly encouraged to read them as they outline the legal relationship between Phillips, the seller and the buyer and describe the terms upon which items are bought at auction. A) Before The Auction Catalogues & Catalogue Entries Our catalogues provide information on the lots for sale at the auction and are available on our website at www.phillips. com and in hard copy. Lot details can also be viewed on the Phillips App. If you would like to purchase a hard copy catalogue for a Phillips auction, please visit our website or contact us at firstname.lastname@example.org. Catalogue entries may include the history of ownership of a work of art, as well as the exhibition history of the property and references to the work in art publications. While we are careful in the cataloguing process, provenance, exhibition and literature references may not be exhaustive. In some cases we may not disclose the identity of previous owners where we are not authorised to do so. Please note that all dimensions of the property set out in the catalogue entry are approximate. Pre-auction viewings are open to the public and free of charge. The dates and times are published on our website at https://phillips.com. Our specialists are available to give advice and condition reports at viewings or by appointment. Estimates Pre-sale estimates are intended as a guide for prospective buyers. Any bid within the high and low estimate range should, in our opinion, offer a chance of success. However, many lots achieve prices below or above the pre-sale estimates. Pre-sale estimates do not include the buyer’s premium or VAT. Where ‘Estimate on Request’ appears, please contact the specialist department for further information. As estimates can be subject to revision we suggest contacting us closer to the time of the auction. Estimates in non-local currencies Although the sale is conducted in pounds sterling, the pre-sale estimates in the auction catalogues may also be printed in other currencies. These estimates are approximate and provided as a courtesy to our clients. The exchange rates used are those applying on the last practical date before printing the catalogue. The rates may have changed between the time of printing the catalogue and the auction. Condition Our catalogues include references to condition only in the descriptions of multiple works (e.g., prints). Such references, though, do not amount to a full description of condition. The absence of reference to the condition of a lot in the catalogue entry does not imply that the lot is free from faults or imperfections.
Solely as a convenience to clients, Phillips may provide condition reports. In preparing such reports, our specialists assess the condition in a manner appropriate to the estimated value of the property and the nature of the auction in which it is included. While condition reports are prepared honestly and carefully, our staff are not professional restorers or trained conservators. We therefore encourage all prospective buyers to inspect the property at the pre-sale exhibitions and recommend, particularly in the case of any lot of significant value, that you retain your own restorer or professional advisor to report to you on the property’s condition prior to bidding. Any prospective buyer of photographs or prints should always request a condition report because all such property is sold unframed, unless otherwise indicated in the condition report. If a lot is sold framed, Phillips accepts no liability for the condition of the frame. If we sell any lot unframed, we will be pleased to refer the purchaser to a professional framer. Symbols Used In The Catalogue You may see the following symbols referenced in the catalogue. O Guaranteed Property Lots designated with the symbol O are the subject of a minimum price guarantee. In such cases Phillips has guaranteed to the seller of the lot that regardless of the outcome of the sale the seller shall receive no less than a minimum sum. This guarantee may be provided solely by Phillips or jointly with a third party. ♦ Third Party Guarantee Where Phillips has agreed to a minimum price guarantee it assumes the financial risk of a lot failing to sell or selling for less than the minimum price guarantee. Because the sums involved can be significant Phillips may choose to share the burden of that financial risk with a third party. The third party shares the risk by committing in advance of the sale, usually by way of a written bid, to buy the lot for an agreed amount whether or not there are competing bidders for the lot. If there are competing bidders third party guarantors may also bid above any written bid. In this way the thirdparty guarantor assumes the risk of the bidding not reaching the amount of the minimum price guarantee. In return for underwriting or sharing this risk Phillips will usually compensate the third party. The compensation may be in the form of a fixed fee or an amount calculated by reference to the hammer price of the lot. If the thirdparty guarantor is the successful bidder Phillips will report the purchase price net of any fees paid to the third-party guarantor. ∆ Property in which Phillips has an Ownership Interest Lots with this symbol indicate that Phillips owns the lot in whole or in part or has an economic interest in the lot equivalent to an ownership interest. No Reserve •Unless indicated by a •, all lots in this catalogue are offered subject to a reserve. A reserve is the confidential value established between Phillips and the seller and below which a lot may not be sold. The reserve for each lot is generally set at a percentage of the low estimate and will not exceed the low pre-sale estimate.
∑ Endangered Species Lots with this symbol have been identified at the time of cataloguing as containing endangered or other protected species of wildlife which may be subject to restrictions regarding export or import and which may require permits for export as well as import.
Calculating the Total Purchase Price If you are the successful bidder on a Lot, the total purchase price you pay is made up of the following elements:
VAT on Buyer’s Premium and/or Hammer Price (If applicable)
Artist’s Resale Royalty (ARR) (If applicable)
The Hammer Price: This is the final, highest bid which the auctioneer accepts by bringing down the auctioneer’s hammer. Buyer’s Premium: This is the commission Phillips charges the successful highest bidder and buyer of the lot. The Buyer’s premium is calculated on the hammer price of the lot at the following rates on a cumulative basis: • 25% on the portion of the hammer price up to and including £300,000; and • 20% on the portion of the hammer price above £300,000 up to and including £3,000,000 and • 13.5% on the portion of the hammer price above £3,000,000. Where VAT is payable on the Buyer’s premium the VAT inclusive Buyer’s Premium rates are 30%, 24% and 16.2% respectively. VAT Most items we sell are sold under UK Auctioneer’s Margin Scheme rules. This means that VAT is charged at 20% on the buyer’s premium and will not be shown separately on the invoice. UK Auctioneer’s Margin Scheme lots have no VAT symbol. Where the lot has a †, ‡ or Ω symbol against it, VAT may be charged on a different basis. For full details, including how to claim VAT refunds, please see the VAT & Tax Guide in this Auction Buyer’s Guide and on our website ♠ Artist’s Resale Royalty (ARR) The laws in certain countries entitle qualifying artists or their estates to a royalty when the artist’s works are resold for a hammer price of EUR 1,000 or more. Lots subject to ARR are marked with the symbol ♠. The ARR is calculated as a percentage of the hammer price on a cumulative basis as follows and is payable as part of the purchase price: Portion of the Hammer Price (in EUROS) From 0 to 50,000 From 50,000.01 to 200,000 From 200,000.01 to 350,000 From 350,000.01 to 500,000 Exceeding 500,000
Royalty Rate 4% 3% 1% 0.5% 0.25%
The total charge for ARR on any single lot cannot exceed Euros 12,500. To calculate the ARR, we use the pounds
sterling/euro reference exchange rate quoted on the date of the auction by the European Central Bank. Example To illustrate how the purchase price is calculated, please see the below example: UK Auctioneer’s Margin Scheme lot Hammer Price: £350,000 Buyer’s Premium including VAT @20% £102,000: 25% of first £300,000 of the hammer price = £75,000 + 20% on the balance of £50,000 = £10,000 Total BP = £85,000 VAT @ 20% on the total BP of £85,000 = £17,000 B) At The Auction Bidding Bids may be executed during the auction in person, by paddle or by telephone or prior to the sale in writing by absentee bid. Proof of identity in the form of governmentissued identification will be required, as will an original signature and proof of address. We may also require that you furnish us with a bank reference. Undisclosed agreements between bidders to bid or abstain from bidding on lots are illegal. Please note that Phillips monitors its sales and bidding records to ensure that bidding is transparent and fair and will take appropriate action in the event of any suspected breach of this requirement. In Person To bid in person, you will need to register for and collect a paddle before the auction begins. New clients are encouraged to register at least 48 hours in advance of a sale to allow sufficient time for us to process your information. All lots sold will be invoiced to the name and address to which the paddle has been registered and invoices cannot be transferred to other names and addresses. Please do not misplace your paddle. In the event you lose it, inform a Phillips staff member immediately. At the end of the auction, please return your paddle to the registration desk. By Telephone If you cannot attend the auction, you may bid live on the telephone with one of our multilingual staff members. This service must be arranged at least 24 hours in advance of the sale and is available for lots whose low pre-sale estimate is at least £500. Telephone bids may be recorded. By bidding on the telephone, you consent to the recording of your conversation. We suggest that you leave a maximum bid, excluding the buyer’s premium and VAT, which we can execute on your behalf in the event we are unable to reach you by telephone. Online Bidding If you cannot attend the auction in person, you may bid online on our online live bidding platform available on our website at https://phillips.com. The digital saleroom is optimized to run on Google Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer browsers. Clients who wish to run the platform on Safari will need to install Adobe FlashPlayer. Follow the links to ‘Auctions’ and ‘Digital Saleroom’ and then pre-register by clicking on ‘Register to Bid Live.’ The
first time you register you will be required to create an account; thereafter you will only need to register for each sale. You must pre-register at least 24 hours before the start of the auction in order to be approved by our bid department. Please note that corporate firewalls may cause difficulties for online bidders. Absentee Bids If you are unable to attend the auction and cannot participate by telephone, Phillips will be happy to execute written bids on your behalf. A bidding form can be found at the back of this catalogue. This service is free and confidential. Bids must be placed in the currency of the sale. Our staff will attempt to execute an absentee bid at the lowest possible price taking into account the reserve and other bidders. Always indicate a maximum bid, excluding the buyer’s premium and VAT. Unlimited bids will not be accepted. Any absentee bid must be received at least 24 hours in advance of the sale. In the event of identical bids, the earliest bid received will take precedence. Bidding Increments Bidding generally opens below the low estimate and advances in increments of up to 10%, subject to the auctioneer’s discretion. Absentee bids that do not conform to the increments set below may be lowered to the next bidding increment. UK£50 to UK£1,000 UK£1,000 to UK£2,000 UK£2,000 to UK£3,000 UK£3,000 to UK£5,000
by UK£50s by UK£100s by UK£200s by UK£200s, 500, 800 (e.g. UK£4,200, 4,500, 4,800) UK£5,000 to UK£10,000 by UK£500s UK£10,000 to UK£20,000 by UK£1,000s UK£20,000 to UK£30,000 by UK£2,000s UK£30,000 to UK£50,000 by UK£2,000s, 5,000, 8,000 UK£50,000 to UK£100,000 by UK£5,000s UK£100,000 to UK£200,000 by UK£10,000s above UK£200,000 at the auctioneer’s discretion The auctioneer may vary the increments during the course of the auction at his or her own discretion. Conditions Of Sale The auction is governed by the Conditions of Sale and Authorship Warranty which are available on our website. All prospective bidders should read them carefully. They may be amended by saleroom addendum or auctioneer’s announcement. Interested Parties Announcement In situations where a person allowed to bid on a lot has a direct or indirect interest in such lot, such as the beneficiary or executor of an estate selling the lot, a joint owner of the lot or a party providing or participating in a guarantee on the lot, Phillips will make an announcement in the saleroom that interested parties may bid on the lot. Consecutive And Responsive Bidding; The auctioneer may open the bidding on any lot by placing a bid on behalf of the seller. The auctioneer may further bid on behalf of the seller up to the amount of the reserve by placing consecutive bids or bids in response to other bidders.
No Reserve Lots If a lot is offered without reserve, unless there are already competing absentee bids, the auctioneer will generally open the bidding at 50% of the lot’s low pre-sale estimate. In the absence of a bid at that level, the auctioneer will proceed backwards at his or her discretion until a bid is recognized and will then advance the bidding from that amount. Absentee bids on no reserve lots will, in the absence of a higher bid, be executed at approximately 50% of the low pre-sale estimate or at the amount of the bid if it is less than 50% of the low pre-sale estimate. If there is no bid whatsoever on a no reserve lot, the auctioneer may deem such lot unsold. C) After The Auction Payment Payment is due immediately following the auction, unless other arrangements have been agreed with Phillips in writing in advance of the sale. Interest will be charged on late payment at the rate of 12% per annum. Payments must be made by the invoiced party in pounds sterling and may be sent by wire transfer directly to: Bank of Scotland, Gordon Street, Glasgow G1 3RS For the account of Phillips Auctioneers Ltd Account no. 00440780 Sort code: 80-54-01 SWIFT BIC: LOYDGB2LXXX IBAN: GB36BOFS 8054 0100 4407 80 Please reference the relevant invoice number. Alternatively, payment can be made: • For invoices of £30,000 or less by credit card. We accept American Express, Visa, MasterCard and UnionPay (UnionPay for in person transactions only). • It is our corporate policy not to make or accept single or multiple payments in cash in excess of £5,000 for all purchases in any calendar year. Title to each lot will not pass until the buyer has made full payment of the Purchase Price plus any applicable Artist Resale Royalty and all applicable taxes. Collection Once Phillips has received full and cleared payment of the total purchase price for the lot and any other amounts the buyer owes to Phillips, lots will be released for collection. To collect paid for lots buyers (or their authorised representatives) must provide proof of identity. Authorised Representatives should also bring a copy of a letter signed by the buyer authorising them to collect. Smaller items may be collected from our London gallery on the day of the auction. Please check with our staff when making payment. After the auction, lots will be transferred to offsite fine art storage facilities. The buyer information pack you will receive after the auction will confirm details of the storage facility where your lot is held for collection. Please contact us to make arrangements for collection. Storage Charges Lots will be held for collection from our offsite storage facilities for thirty (30) days after the auction free of
Important Notices charge. Storage charges and property release fees will apply after this 30-day period for any lots which have not been collected. Details of the applicable storage charges will be confirmed to you in the buyer information pack you will receive after the auction. Loss or Damage Buyers are reminded that Phillips accepts liability for loss or damage to lots for a maximum of seven (7) days following the auction. Transport and Shipping We will coordinate with shipping agents instructed by you in order to facilitate the packing, handling and shipping of property purchased at Phillips. Please refer to Paragraph 7 of the Conditions of Sale for more information. As a free service for buyers, Phillips will wrap purchased lots which are for hand carry only. We do not provide packing, handling or shipping services directly. Export and Import Licenses Before bidding for any property, prospective bidders are advised to make independent enquiries as to whether a licence is required to export the property from the United Kingdom or to import it into another country. It is the buyer’s sole responsibility to comply with all import and export laws and to obtain any necessary licences or permits. The denial of any required licence or permit or any delay in obtaining such documentation will not justify the cancellation of the sale or any delay in making full payment for the lot. Endangered Species Items made of or incorporating plant or animal material, such as coral, crocodile, ivory, whalebone, Brazilian rosewood, rhinoceros horn or tortoiseshell, irrespective of age, percentage or value, may require a licence or certificate prior to exportation and additional licences or certificates upon importation to the US or to any country within or outside the European Union (EU). Please note that the ability to obtain an export licence or certificate does not ensure the ability to obtain an import licence or certificate in another country, and vice versa. We suggest that prospective bidders check with their own government regarding wildlife import requirements prior to placing a bid. It is the buyer’s sole responsibility to obtain any necessary export or import licences or certificates as well as any other required documentation. Please note that the US prohibits the importation of any item containing African elephant ivory. Asian elephant ivory may be imported in to the US only if accompanied by independent scientific analysis regarding continent of origin and confirmation the object is more than 100 years old. We have not obtained a scientific analysis on any lot prior to sale and cannot indicate whether elephant ivory in a particular lot is African or Asian elephant. Buyers purchase these lots at their own risk and will be responsible for the costs of obtaining any scientific analysis or other report required in connection with their proposed import of such property into the US. With regard to any item containing endangered species other than elephant ivory, an importer into the US must provide documented evidence of the species identification and age of an object in order to demonstrate that the object qualifies as an antique. This will require the buyer to
Identification of Business or Trade Buyers As of January 2010, Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs (“HMRC”) has made it an official requirement for auction houses to hold evidence of a buyer’s business status, due to the revised VAT rules regarding buyer’s premium for lots with symbols for businesses outside the UK. • Where the buyer is a non-EU business, Phillips requires evidence of the business status by means of the company identification, Certificate of Incorporation, Articles of Association or government-issued documents showing that the company exists. • Where the buyer is an EU VAT registered business, Phillips requires the business’s VAT registration number. These details can be scanned and emailed to us, or alternatively they can be faxed or mailed. If these requirements are not met, we will be unable to cancel/ refund any applicable VAT. Electrical and Mechanical Lots All lots with electrical and/or mechanical features are sold on the basis of their decorative value only and should not be assumed to be operative. It is essential that, prior to any intended use, the electrical system is verified and approved by a qualified electrician.
VAT & Tax Guide VAT Depending on the status of the lot, and your status as a buyer, VAT may be charged on the hammer price, the buyer’s premium or both. UK Auctioneer’s Margin Scheme Most items we sell are second-hand goods, so we sell them under UK Auctioneer’s Margin Scheme rules. Lots falling into this category have no VAT symbol and are treated as follows: No symbol
UK Auctioneer’s Margin Scheme sale
20% VAT charged on the buyer’s premium. (The invoiced buyer’s premium will include the VAT).
Special VAT Treatment If the Lot has one of the below symbols, the VAT treatment will be as follows: VAT Symbol
Standard UK VAT rules
20% VAT charged on both the hammer price and buyer’s premium
Imported lot under Temporary Admission (Low rate)
5% import VAT on the hammer price and 20% VAT on the buyer’s premium
Imported lot under Temporary Admission (High rate)
20% import VAT on the hammer price and 20% VAT on the buyer’s premium
Lots sold outside the Auctioneer’s Margin Scheme If the buyer is a relevant business person in the EU (nonUK) or is a relevant business person in a non-EU country then no VAT will be charged on the buyer’s premium. This is subject to Phillips receiving evidence of the buyer’s VAT registration number in the relevant Member State (non-UK) or the buyer’s business status in a non-EU country such as the buyer’s Tax Registration Certificate. Should this evidence not be provided VAT will be charged on the buyer’s premium. Exports from the European Union The following types of VAT may be cancelled or refunded by Phillips on exports made within three months of the sale date if strict conditions are met: • The amount in lieu of VAT charged on the buyer’s premium for property sold under the Auctioneer’s Margin Scheme (i.e., without a VAT symbol). • The VAT on the hammer price for property sold under normal VAT rules (i.e., with a † symbol). The following type of VAT may be cancelled or refunded by Phillips on exports made within 30 days of the payment date if strict conditions are met: • The import VAT charged on the hammer price and an amount in lieu of VAT on the buyer’s premium for property sold under temporary admission (i.e., with a ‡ or a Ω symbol) under the Auctioneer’s Margin Scheme. In each of the above examples, where the appropriate conditions are satisfied, no VAT will be charged if, at or
before the time of invoicing, the buyer instructs Phillips to export the property from the EU. This will require acceptance of an export quotation provided by Phillips. If such instruction is received after payment, a refund of the VAT amount will be made. Where the buyer carries purchases from the EU personally or uses the services of a third party, Phillips will charge the VAT amount due as a deposit and refund it if the lot has been exported within the timelines specified below and either of the following conditions are met: • For lots sold under the Auctioneer’s Margin Scheme or the normal VAT rules, Phillips is provided with appropriate original documentary proof of export from the EU within three months of the date of sale. Buyers carrying their own property must obtain hand-carry papers from the Shipping Department to facilitate this process. • For lots sold under temporary admission, Phillips is provided with the original correct paperwork duly completed and stamped by HMRC which shows the property has been exported from the EU via the UK within 30 days of the payment date. It is essential for shippers acting on behalf of buyers to collect copies of original import papers from our Shipping Department. HMRC insist that the correct customs procedures are followed and Phillips will not be able to issue any refunds where the export documents do not exactly comply with governmental regulations. Property subject to temporary admission must be transferred to another customs procedure immediately if any restoration or repair work is to be carried out. Buyers carrying their own property must obtain hand-carry papers from the Shipping Department, for which a charge of £20 (plus any applicable VAT) will be made. The VAT refund will be processed once the appropriate paperwork has been returned to Phillips. Phillips is not able to cancel or refund any VAT charged on sales made to UK or EU private residents unless the lot is subject to temporary admission and the property is exported from the EU within 30 days of the payment date. We can only process VAT refunds where the VAT to be refunded is £50 or more per shipment. There will be a processing fee of £20 (plus any applicable VAT). Buyers intending to export, repair, restore or alter lots under temporary admission should notify the Shipping Department before collection. Failure to do so may result in the import VAT becoming payable immediately and Phillips being unable to refund the VAT charged on deposit. VAT Refunds from HM Revenue & Customs Where VAT charged cannot be cancelled or refunded by Phillips, it may be possible to seek repayment from HMRC . Repayments in this manner are limited to businesses located outside the UK and may be considered for example for Import VAT charged on the hammer price for lots sold under temporary admission. If you are located in an EU member state other than the UK you will need to apply for a refund of UK VAT directly to your local tax authority. This is done via submission of an electronically based claim form which should be accessed through the website of your local tax authority. As a result,
your form may include VAT incurred in a number of member states. Time limits for claiming VAT refunds • If you are located in an EU member state other than the UK: Any claim must be made on a calendar year basis and submitted no later than 30 September in the following calendar year (e.g., for VAT incurred in the year 1 January to 31 December 2019 you should make a claim to your local tax authority no later than 30 September 2020). Once you have submitted the electronic form to your local tax authority it is their responsibility to ensure that payment is obtained from the relevant member states. This should be completed within four months. If this time limit is not adhered to you may receive interest on the unpaid amounts. • If you are located outside the EU you should apply for a refund of UK VAT directly to HMRC. Claim forms are available from the HMRC website. https://www.gov.uk. You should submit claims for VAT to HMRC no later than six months from the end of the 12-month period ending 30 June (e.g., claims for the period 1 July 2019 to 30 June 2020 should be made no later than 31 December 2020). Please note that refunds of VAT will only be made where VAT has been incurred for a business purpose. Any VAT incurred on articles bought for personal use will not be refunded. Sales and Use Taxes Buyers from outside the UK should note that local sales taxes or use taxes may become payable upon import of lots following purchase. Buyers should consult their own tax advisors.
Conditions of Sale The Conditions of Sale and Authorship Warranty set out below govern the relationship between bidders and buyers, on the one hand, and Phillips and sellers, on the other hand. All prospective buyers should read these Conditions of Sale, the UK Auction Buyer’s Guide, the Important Notices, VAT & Tax Guide and the Authorship Warranty carefully before bidding. 1 Introduction Each lot in this catalogue is offered for sale and sold subject to: (a) the Conditions of Sale and Authorship Warranty; (b) additional notices and terms printed in other places in this catalogue, including the Guide for Prospective Buyers and (c) supplements to this catalogue or other written material posted by Phillips in the saleroom, in each case as amended by any addendum or announcement by the auctioneer prior to the auction. By bidding at the auction, whether in person, through an agent, by written bid, by telephone bid or other means, bidders and buyers agree to be bound by these Conditions of Sale, as so changed or supplemented, and Authorship Warranty. These Conditions of Sale, as so changed or supplemented, and Authorship Warranty contain all the terms on which Phillips and the seller contract with the buyer. 2 Phillips as Agent Phillips acts as an agent for the seller, unless otherwise indicated in this catalogue or at the time of auction. On occasion, Phillips may own a lot directly, in which case we will act in a principal capacity as a consignor, or a company affiliated with Phillips may own a lot, in which case we will act as agent for that company, or Phillips or an affiliated company may have a legal, beneficial or financial interest in a lot as a secured creditor or otherwise. 3 Catalogue Descriptions and Condition of Property Lots are sold subject to the Authorship Warranty, as described in the catalogue (unless such description is changed or supplemented, as provided in Paragraph 1 above) and in the condition that they are in at the time of the sale on the following basis. (a) The knowledge of Phillips in relation to each lot is partially dependent on information provided to us by the seller and Phillips is not able to and does not carry out exhaustive due diligence on each lot. Prospective buyers acknowledge this fact and accept responsibility for carrying out inspections and investigations to satisfy themselves as to the lots in which they may be interested. Notwithstanding the foregoing, we shall exercise such reasonable care when making express statements in catalogue descriptions or condition reports as is consistent with our role as auctioneer of lots in this sale and in light of (i) the information provided to us by the seller; (ii) scholarship and technical knowledge and (iii) the generally accepted opinions of relevant experts, in each case at the time any such express statement is made. (b) Each lot offered for sale at Phillips is available for inspection by prospective buyers prior to the auction. Phillips accepts bids on lots on the basis that bidders (and independent experts on their behalf, to the extent appropriate given the nature and value of the lot and the bidder’s own expertise) have fully inspected the lot prior to
bidding and have satisfied themselves as to both the condition of the lot and the accuracy of its description. (c) Prospective buyers acknowledge that many lots are of an age and type which means that they are not in perfect condition. As a courtesy to clients, Phillips may prepare and provide condition reports to assist prospective buyers when they are inspecting lots. Catalogue descriptions and condition reports may make reference to particular imperfections of a lot, but bidders should note that lots may have other faults not expressly referred to in the catalogue or condition report. All dimensions are approximate. Illustrations are for identification purposes only and cannot be used as precise indications of size or to convey full information as to the actual condition of lots. (d) Information provided to prospective buyers in respect of any lot, including any pre-sale estimate, whether written or oral, and information in any catalogue, condition or other report, commentary or valuation, is not a representation of fact but rather a statement of opinion held by Phillips. Any pre-sale estimate may not be relied on as a prediction of the selling price or value of the lot and may be revised from time to time by Phillips at our absolute discretion. Neither Phillips nor any of our affiliated companies shall be liable for any difference between the pre-sale estimates for any lot and the actual price achieved at auction or upon resale. 4 Bidding at Auction (a) Phillips has absolute discretion to refuse admission to the auction or participation in the sale. All bidders must register for a paddle prior to bidding, supplying such information and references as required by Phillips.
(b) As a convenience to bidders who cannot attend the auction in person, Phillips may, if so instructed by the bidder, execute written absentee bids on a bidder’s behalf. Absentee bidders are required to submit bids on the Absentee Bid Form, a copy of which is printed in this catalogue or otherwise available from Phillips. Bids must be placed in the currency of the sale. The bidder must clearly indicate the maximum amount he or she intends to bid, excluding the buyer’s premium and value added tax (VAT). The auctioneer will not accept an instruction to execute an absentee bid which does not indicate such maximum bid. Our staff will attempt to execute an absentee bid at the lowest possible price taking into account the reserve and other bidders. Any absentee bid must be received at least 24 hours in advance of the sale. In the event of identical bids, the earliest bid received will take precedence. (c) Telephone bidders are required to submit bids on the Telephone Bid Form, a copy of which is printed in this catalogue or otherwise available from Phillips. Telephone bidding is available for lots whose low pre-sale estimate is at least £500. Phillips reserves the right to require written confirmation of a successful bid from a telephone bidder by fax or otherwise immediately after such bid is accepted by the auctioneer. Telephone bids may be recorded and, by bidding on the telephone, a bidder consents to the recording of the conversation.
(d) Bidders may participate in an auction by bidding online through Phillips’s online live bidding platform available on our website at www.phillips.com. To bid online, bidders
must register online at least 24 hours before the start of the auction. Online bidding is subject to approval by Phillips’s bid department in our sole discretion. As noted in Paragraph 3 above, Phillips encourages online bidders to inspect prior to the auction any lot(s) on which they may bid, and condition reports are available upon request. Bidding in a live auction can progress quickly. To ensure that online bidders are not placed at a disadvantage when bidding against bidders in the room or on the telephone, the procedure for placing bids through Phillips’s online bidding platform is a one-step process. By clicking the bid button on the computer screen, a bidder submits a bid. Online bidders acknowledge and agree that bids so submitted are final and may not under any circumstances be amended or retracted. During a live auction, when bids other than online bids are placed, they will be displayed on the online bidder’s computer screen as ‘floor’ bids. ‘Floor’ bids include bids made by the auctioneer to protect the reserve. In the event that an online bid and a ‘floor’ or ‘phone’ bid are identical, the ‘floor’ bid may take precedence at the auctioneer’s discretion. The next bidding increment is shown for the convenience of online bidders in the bid button. The bidding increment available to online bidders may vary from the next bid actually taken by the auctioneer, as the auctioneer may deviate from Phillips’s standard increments at any time at his or her discretion, but an online bidder may only place a bid in a whole bidding increment. Phillips’s bidding increments are published in the Guide for Prospective Buyers. (e) When making a bid, whether in person, by absentee bid, on the telephone or online, a bidder accepts personal liability to pay the purchase price, as described more fully in Paragraph 6 (a) below, plus all other applicable charges unless it has been explicitly agreed in writing with Phillips before the commencement of the auction that the bidder is acting as agent on behalf of an identified third party acceptable to Phillips and that we will only look to the principal for such payment. (f) By participating in the auction, whether in person, by absentee bid, on the telephone or online, each prospective buyer represents and warrants that any bids placed by such person, or on such person’s behalf, are not the product of any collusive or other anti-competitive agreement and are otherwise consistent with federal and state antitrust law. (g) Arranging absentee, telephone and online bids is a free service provided by Phillips to prospective buyers. While we undertake to exercise reasonable care in undertaking such activity, we cannot accept liability for failure to execute such bids except where such failure is caused by our willful misconduct. 5 Conduct of the Auction (a) Unless otherwise indicated by the symbol •, each lot is offered subject to a reserve, which is the confidential minimum selling price agreed by Phillips with the seller. The reserve will not exceed the low pre-sale estimate at the time of the auction. (b) The auctioneer has discretion at any time to refuse any bid, withdraw any lot, re-offer a lot for sale (including after the fall of the hammer) if he or she believes there may be error or dispute and take such other action as he or she deems reasonably appropriate. Phillips shall have no
liability whatsoever for any such action taken by the auctioneer. If any dispute arises after the sale, our sale record is conclusive. The auctioneer may accept bids made by a company affiliated with Phillips provided that the bidder does not know the reserve placed on the lot. (c) The auctioneer will commence and advance the bidding at levels and in increments he or she considers appropriate. In order to protect the reserve on any lot, the auctioneer may place one or more bids on behalf of the seller up to the reserve without indicating he or she is doing so, either by placing consecutive bids or bids in response to other bidders. If a lot is offered without reserve, unless there are already competing absentee bids, the auctioneer will generally open the bidding at 50% of the lot’s low pre-sale estimate. In the absence of a bid at that level, the auctioneer will proceed backwards at his or her discretion until a bid is recognized and will then advance the bidding from that amount. Absentee bids on no reserve lots will, in the absence of a higher bid, be executed at approximately 50% of the low pre-sale estimate or at the amount of the bid if it is less than 50% of the low pre-sale estimate. If there is no bid whatsoever on a no reserve lot, the auctioneer may deem such lot unsold. (d) The sale will be conducted in pounds sterling and payment is due in pounds sterling. For the benefit of international clients, pre-sale estimates in the auction catalogue may be shown in US dollars and/or euros and, if so, will reflect approximate exchange rates. Accordingly, estimates in US dollars or euros should be treated only as a guide. If a currency converter is operated during the sale, it is done so as a courtesy to bidders, but Phillips accepts no responsibility for any errors in currency conversion calculation. (e) Subject to the auctioneer’s reasonable discretion, the highest bidder accepted by the auctioneer will be the buyer and the striking of the hammer marks the acceptance of the highest bid and the conclusion of a contract for sale between the seller and the buyer. Risk and responsibility for the lot passes to the buyer as set forth in Paragraph 7 below. (f) If a lot is not sold, the auctioneer will announce that it has been ‘passed’, ‘withdrawn’, ‘returned to owner’ or ‘bought-in’. (g) Any post-auction sale of lots offered at auction shall incorporate these Conditions of Sale and Authorship Warranty as if sold in the auction. 6 Purchase Price and Payment (a) The buyer agrees to pay us, in addition to the hammer price of the lot, the buyer’s premium, plus any applicable value added tax (VAT) and any applicable resale royalty (the ‘Purchase Price’). The buyer’s premium is 25% of the hammer price up to and including £300,000, 20% of the portion of the hammer price above £300,000 up to and including £3,000,000 and 13.5% of the portion of the hammer price above £3,000,000. Phillips reserves the right to pay from our compensation an introductory commission to one or more third parties for assisting in the sale of property offered and sold at auction.
(b) VAT is payable in accordance with applicable law. All prices, fees, charges and expenses set out in these Conditions of Sale are quoted exclusive of VAT. (c) If the Artist’s Resale Right Regulations 2006 apply to the lot, the buyer agrees to pay to us an amount equal to the resale royalty provided for in those regulations and we undertake to the buyer to pay such amount to the artist’s collection agent. In circumstances where (i) we are on notice that the resale royalty is payable or (ii) we have not been able to ascertain the nationality of the artist, we will identify the lot with the symbol ♠ next to the lot number and will invoice the resale royalty to the buyer. If we subsequently determine that the nationality of the artist does not entitle him/her to the resale royalty on the lot, we will arrange a refund to the buyer of the amount of the royalty paid to us. If, after a sale in which we did not collect the resale royalty on a particular lot, we become aware that information provided to us prior to the auction concerning an artist’s nationality was incorrect and the artist is entitled to the resale royalty on the lot, the buyer shall pay the resale royalty to us upon receipt of an invoice. (d) Unless otherwise agreed, a buyer is required to pay for a purchased lot immediately following the auction regardless of any intention to obtain an export or import license or other permit for such lot. Payments must be made by the invoiced party in pounds sterling as follows:
4081 or +44 (0) 207 318 4082 to arrange for collection of purchased property. (b) The buyer must arrange for collection of a purchased lot within seven days of the date of the auction. After the auction, we will transfer all lots to our offsite fine art storage facilities. Details will be included in the buyer information packs sent to buyers after the auction. Purchased lots are at the buyer’s risk, including the responsibility for insurance, from (i) the date of collection or (ii) seven days after the auction, whichever is the earlier. Until risk passes, Phillips will compensate the buyer for any loss or damage to a purchased lot up to a maximum of the Purchase Price paid, subject to our usual exclusions for loss or damage to property.
(c) As a courtesy to clients, Phillips will, without charge, wrap purchased lots for hand carry only. We do not provide packing, handling, insurance or shipping services. We will coordinate with shipping agents instructed by the buyer, whether or not recommended by Phillips, in order to facilitate the packing, handling, insurance and shipping of property bought at Phillips. Any such instruction is entirely at the buyer’s risk and responsibility, and we will not be liable for acts or omissions of third party packers or shippers. (d) Phillips will require presentation of government-issued identification prior to release of a lot to the buyer or the buyer’s authorized representative.
(i) Payments may be made by wire transfer to: Bank of Scotland, Gordon Street, Glasgow G1 3RS For the account of Phillips Auctioneers Ltd Account no. 00440780 Sort code: 80-54-01 SWIFT BIC: LOYDGB2LXXX IBAN: GB36BOFS 8054 0100 4407 80 Please reference the relevant invoice number. Alternatively, payment can be made: • For invoices of £30,000 or less by credit card. We accept American Express, Visa, MasterCard and UnionPay (UnionPay for in person transactions only). • It is our corporate policy not to make or accept single or multiple payments in cash in excess of £5,000 for all purchases in any calendar year. (e) Title in a purchased lot will not pass until Phillips has received the Purchase Price for that lot in cleared funds. Phillips is not obliged to release a lot to the buyer until title in the lot has passed and appropriate identification has been provided, and any earlier release does not affect the passing of title or the buyer’s unconditional obligation to pay the Purchase Price. 7 Collection of Property (a) Phillips will not release a lot to the buyer until we have received payment of its Purchase Price in full in cleared funds, the buyer has paid all outstanding amounts due to Phillips or any of our affiliated companies, including any charges payable pursuant to Paragraph 8 (a) below, and the buyer has satisfied such other terms as we in our sole discretion shall require, including completing any antimoney laundering or anti-terrorism financing checks. As soon as a buyer has satisfied all of the foregoing conditions, he or she should contact us at +44 (0) 207 318
8 Failure to Collect Purchases (a) Lots will be held for collection from our offsite storage facilities for thirty (30) days after the auction free of charge. Storage charges and property release fees will apply after this 30-day period for any lots which have not been collected. Details of the applicable storage charges will be confirmed to buyers in the buyer information pack they will receive after the auction. Purchased lots will not be released to the buyer until the Purchase Price and all charges have been paid in full. (b) If a purchased lot is paid for but not collected within six months of the auction, the buyer authorizes Phillips, upon notice, to arrange a resale of the item by auction or private sale, with estimates and a reserve set at Phillips’s reasonable discretion. The proceeds of such sale will be applied to pay for storage charges and any other outstanding costs and expenses owed by the buyer to Phillips or our affiliated companies and the remainder will be forfeited unless collected by the buyer within two years of the original auction. 9 Remedies for Non-Payment (a) Without prejudice to any rights the seller may have, if the buyer without prior agreement fails to make payment of the Purchase Price for a lot in cleared funds within seven days of the auction, Phillips may in our sole discretion exercise one or more of the following remedies: (i) store the lot at Phillips‘s premises or elsewhere at the buyer’s sole risk and expense; (ii) cancel the sale of the lot, retaining any partial payment of the Purchase Price as liquidated damages; (iii) reject future bids from the buyer or render such bids subject to payment of a deposit; (iv) charge interest at 12% per annum from the date payment became due until the date the Purchase Price is received in cleared funds; (v) subject to notification of the buyer,
exercise a lien over any of the buyer’s property which is in the possession of Phillips and instruct our affiliated companies to exercise a lien over any of the buyer’s property which is in their possession and, in each case, no earlier than 30 days from the date of such notice arrange the sale of such property and apply the proceeds to the amount owed to Phillips or any of our affiliated companies after the deduction from sale proceeds of our standard vendor’s commission, all sale-related expenses and any applicable taxes thereon; (vi) resell the lot by auction or private sale, with estimates and a reserve set at Phillips’s reasonable discretion, it being understood that in the event such resale is for less than the original hammer price and buyer’s premium for that lot, the buyer will remain liable for the shortfall together with all costs incurred in such resale; (vii) commence legal proceedings to recover the hammer price and buyer’s premium for that lot, together with interest and the costs of such proceedings; (viii) set off the outstanding amount remaining unpaid by the buyer against any amounts which we or any of our affiliated companies may owe the buyer in any other transactions; (ix) release the name and address of the buyer to the seller to enable the seller to commence legal proceedings to recover the amounts due and legal costs; or (x) take such other action as we deem necessary or appropriate. (b) The buyer irrevocably authorizes Phillips to exercise a lien over the buyer’s property which is in our possession upon notification by any of our affiliated companies that the buyer is in default of payment. Phillips will notify the buyer of any such lien. The buyer also irrevocably authorizes Phillips, upon notification by any of our affiliated companies that the buyer is in default of payment, to pledge the buyer’s property in our possession by actual or constructive delivery to our affiliated company as security for the payment of any outstanding amount due. Phillips will notify the buyer if the buyer’s property has been delivered to an affiliated company by way of pledge.
(c) If the buyer is in default of payment, the buyer irrevocably authorizes Phillips to instruct any of our affiliated companies in possession of the buyer’s property to deliver the property by way of pledge as the buyer’s agent to a third party instructed by Phillips to hold the property on our behalf as security for the payment of the Purchase Price and any other amount due and, no earlier than 30 days from the date of written notice to the buyer, to sell the property in such manner and for such consideration as can reasonably be obtained on a forced sale basis and to apply the proceeds to any amount owed to Phillips or any of our affiliated companies after the deduction from sale proceeds of our standard vendor’s commission, all salerelated expenses and any applicable taxes thereon. 10 Rescission by Phillips Phillips shall have the right, but not the obligation, to rescind a sale without notice to the buyer if we reasonably believe that there is a material breach of the seller’s representations and warranties or the Authorship Warranty or an adverse claim is made by a third party. Upon notice of Phillips election to rescind the sale, the buyer will promptly return the lot to Phillips, and we will then refund the Purchase Price paid to us. As described more fully in Paragraph 13 below, the refund shall constitute the sole remedy and recourse of the buyer against Phillips and the seller with respect to such rescinded sale.
(b) Except as otherwise provided in this Paragraph 13, none of Phillips, any of our affiliated companies or the seller (i) is liable for any errors or omissions, whether orally or in writing, in information provided to prospective buyers by Phillips or any of our affiliated companies or (ii) accepts responsibility to any bidder in respect of acts or omissions, whether negligent or otherwise, by Phillips or any of our affiliated companies in connection with the conduct of the auction or for any other matter relating to the sale of any lot. (c) All warranties other than the Authorship Warranty, express or implied, including any warranty of satisfactory quality and fitness for purpose, are specifically excluded by Phillips, our affiliated companies and the seller to the fullest extent permitted by law. (d) Subject to sub-paragraph (e) below, none of Phillips, any of our affiliated companies or the seller shall be liable to the buyer for any loss or damage beyond the refund of the Purchase Price referred to in sub-paragraph (a) above, whether such loss or damage is characterised as direct, indirect, special, incidental or consequential, or for the payment of interest on the Purchase Price to the fullest extent permitted by law. (e) No provision in these Conditions of Sale shall be deemed to exclude or limit the liability of Phillips or any of our affiliated companies to the buyer in respect of any fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation made by any of us or in respect of death or personal injury caused by our negligent acts or omissions. 14 Copyright The copyright in all images, illustrations and written materials produced by or for Phillips relating to a lot, including the contents of this catalogue, is and shall remain at all times the property of Phillips and, subject to
Authorship Warranty the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, such images and materials may not be used by the buyer or any other party without our prior written consent. Phillips and the seller make no representations or warranties that the buyer of a lot will acquire any copyright or other reproduction rights in it. 15 General (a) These Conditions of Sale, as changed or supplemented as provided in Paragraph 1 above, and Authorship Warranty set out the entire agreement between the parties with respect to the transactions contemplated herein and supersede all prior and contemporaneous written, oral or implied understandings, representations and agreements.
(b) Notices to Phillips shall be in writing and addressed to the department in charge of the sale, quoting the reference number specified at the beginning of the sale catalogue. Notices to clients shall be addressed to the last address notified by them in writing to Phillips. (c) These Conditions of Sale are not assignable by any buyer without our prior written consent but are binding on the buyer’s successors, assigns and representatives. (d) Should any provision of these Conditions of Sale be held void, invalid or unenforceable for any reason, the remaining provisions shall remain in full force and effect. No failure by any party to exercise, nor any delay in exercising, any right or remedy under these Conditions of Sale shall act as a waiver or release thereof in whole or in part. (e) No term of these Conditions of Sale shall be enforceable under the Contracts (Rights of Third Parties) Act 1999 by anyone other than the buyer. 16 Law and Jurisdiction (a) The rights and obligations of the parties with respect to these Conditions of Sale and Authorship Warranty, the conduct of the auction and any matters related to any of the foregoing shall be governed by and interpreted in accordance with English law. (b) For the benefit of Phillips, all bidders and sellers agree that the Courts of England are to have exclusive jurisdiction to settle all disputes arising in connection with all aspects of all matters or transactions to which these Conditions of Sale and Authorship Warranty relate or apply. All parties agree that Phillips shall retain the right to bring proceedings in any court other than the Courts of England. (c) All bidders and sellers irrevocably consent to service of process or any other documents in connection with proceedings in any court by facsimile transmission, personal service, delivery by mail or in any other manner permitted by English law, the law of the place of service or the law of the jurisdiction where proceedings are instituted at the last address of the bidder or seller known to Phillips.
Phillips warrants the authorship of property in this auction catalogue described in headings in BOLD or CAPITALIZED type for a period of five years from date of sale by Phillips, subject to the exclusions and limitations set forth below. (a) Phillips gives this Authorship Warranty only to the original buyer of record (i.e., the registered successful bidder) of any lot. This Authorship Warranty does not extend to (i) subsequent owners of the property, including purchasers or recipients by way of gift from the original buyer, heirs, successors, beneficiaries and assigns; (ii) property where the description in the catalogue states that there is a conflict of opinion on the authorship of the property; (iii) property where our attribution of authorship was on the date of sale consistent with the generally accepted opinions of specialists, scholars or other experts; (iv) property whose description or dating is proved inaccurate by means of scientific methods or tests not generally accepted for use at the time of the publication of the catalogue or which were at such time deemed unreasonably expensive or impractical to use or likely in our reasonable opinion to have caused damage or loss in value to the lot or (v) property where there has been no material loss in value from the value of the lot had it been as described in the heading of the catalogue entry. (b) In any claim for breach of the Authorship Warranty, Phillips reserves the right, as a condition to rescinding any sale under this warranty, to require the buyer to provide to us at the buyer’s expense the written opinions of two recognized experts approved in advance by Phillips. We shall not be bound by any expert report produced by the buyer and reserve the right to consult our own experts at our expense. If Phillips agrees to rescind a sale under the Authorship Warranty, we shall refund to the buyer the reasonable costs charged by the experts commissioned by the buyer and approved in advance by us. (c) Subject to the exclusions set forth in subparagraph (a) above, the buyer may bring a claim for breach of the Authorship Warranty provided that (i) he or she has notified Phillips in writing within three months of receiving any information which causes the buyer to question the authorship of the lot, specifying the auction in which the property was included, the lot number in the auction catalogue and the reasons why the authorship of the lot is being questioned and (ii) the buyer returns the lot to Phillips to the saleroom in which it was purchased in the same condition as at the time of its auction and is able to transfer good and marketable title in the lot free from any third party claim arising after the date of the auction. Phillips has discretion to waive any of the foregoing requirements set forth in this subparagraph (c) or subparagraph (b) above. (d) The buyer understands and agrees that the exclusive remedy for any breach of the Authorship Warranty shall be rescission of the sale and refund of the original Purchase Price paid. This remedy shall constitute the sole remedy and recourse of the buyer against Phillips, any of our affiliated companies and the seller and is in lieu of any other remedy available as a matter of law or equity. This means that none of Phillips, any of our affiliated companies or the seller shall be liable for loss or damage beyond the remedy expressly provided in this Authorship Warranty, whether such loss or damage is characterized as direct, indirect, special, incidental or consequential, or for the payment of interest on the original Purchase Price.
30 Berkeley Square, London, W1J 6EX phillips.com +44 20 7318 4010 email@example.com Please return this form by email to firstname.lastname@example.org at least 24 hours before the sale. Please read carefully the information in the right column and note that it is important that you indicate whether you are applying to bid as an individual or on behalf of a company. Please select the type of bid you wish to make with this form (please select one):
In-person Absentee Bidding Telephone Bidding
As a private individual On behalf of a company
• If you cannot attend the sale, we can execute bids confdentially on your behalf.
Sale Number First Name
VAT number (if applicable)
• For absentee bids, indicate your maximum limit for each lot, excluding the buyer’s premium and any applicable VAT. Your bid will be executed at the lowest price taking into account the reserve and other bidders. On no reserve lots, in the absence of other bids, your bid will be executed at approximately 50% of the low pre-sale estimate or at the amount specifed, if less than 50% of the low estimate.
• Phillips charges the successful bidder a commission, or buyer’s premium, on the hammer price of each lot sold. The buyer’s premium is payable by the buyer as part of the total purchase price at the following rates: 25% of the hammer price up to and including £300,000, 20% of the portion of the hammer price above £300,000 up to and including £3,000,000 and 13.5% of the portion of the hammer price above £3,000,000. • “Buy” or unlimited bids will not be accepted. Alternative bids can be placed by using the word “OR” between lot numbers.
Company (if applicable)
• Your bid must be submitted in the currency of the sale and will be rounded down to the nearest amount consistent with the auctioneer’s bidding increments.
Post Code Phone
• If we receive identical bids, the frst bid received will take precedence.
• Arranging absentee and telephone bids is a free service provided by us to prospective buyers. While we will exercise reasonable care in undertaking such activity, we cannot accept liability for errors relating to execution of your bids except in cases of wilful misconduct. Agreement to bid by telephone must be confrmed by you promptly in writing or by fax. Telephone bid lines may be recorded.
Phone number to call at the time of sale (for Phone Bidding only) 1.
Please complete the following section for telephone and absentee bids only Lot number
• Company Purchases: We require a copy of government-issued identifcation (such as the certifcate of incorporation) to verify the status of the company. This should be accompanied by an ofcial document confrming the company’s EU VAT registration number, if applicable, which we are now required by HMRC to hold. • Conditions of Sale: All bids are placed and executed, and all lots are sold and purchased, subject to the Conditions of Sale available online at phillips.com,. Please read them carefully before placing a bid. Your attention is drawn to Paragraph 4 of the Conditions of Sale.
Please indicate in what capacity you will be bidding (please select one):
• Private Purchases: Proof of identity in the form of government-issued identification will be required.
In Consecutive Order
Maximum pound sterling price* Absentee Bids Only
* Excluding Buyer’s Premium and VAT
By ticking this box, you confrm your registration/bid(s) as above and accept the Conditions of Sale of Phillips as stated in our catalogues and on our website.
26. Anselm Kiefer
Nicolas Party Landscape pastel on canvas 78 3/4 x 47 1/4 in. (200 x 120 cm.) Executed in 2015. ÂŠ Nicolas Party
World Record: Sold for $608,000 16 May 2019, New York
20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening & Day Sales Fall 2019 Sell With Us Enquiries Amanda Lo Iacono email@example.com John McCord firstname.lastname@example.org Rebekah Bowling email@example.com Visit us at phillips.com
1. Tschabalala Self
36. Jean-Michel Basquiat
7. Cindy Sherman
6. Rudolf Stingel
Index Ancart, H. 3 Andre, C. 23 Basquiat, J-M. 19, 21, 36 Calder, A. 9 de StaĂŤl, N. 14 Dumas, M. 18 Fischer, U. 34 Giacometti, A. 12 Gilbert & George. 31 Gormley, A. 29 Hirst, D. 32 Hockney, D. 8 KAWS. 4 Kapoor, A. 33 Kiefer, A. 26 Kippenberger, M. 27 Lichtenstein, R. 10 Morandi, G. 15 Picasso, P. 11, 13 Prince, R. 20 Rafael Soto, J. 35 Ramos, M. 22 Riley, B. 30 Scarpitta, S. 16 Schutz, D. 5 Self, T. 1 Serra, R. 24 Sherman, C. 7 Stingel, R. 6 Tuymans, L. 17 West, F. 28 Wool, C. 25 Yiadom-Boakye, L. 2
Phillips presents the 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale in June 2019 in London.

domain: artistic