Posts filed under 'Art & Music'
London’s Old Master paintings sales have often been forced to survive on starvation rations of good pictures, but last week’s auctions were a feast for buyers.
The main course was the finest array of Italian view pictures seen on the international market for many years, with seven Guardis and five Canalettos, the record for the latter being broken twice in a breathless 24-hour period. This windfall was partly the result of the deaths of two major collectors but also reflected the greater willingness of owners to sell in a strong market.
The week got off to a lively start when Sotheby’s sold the collection of the late Bobby Wills, an eccentric English gentleman farmer and heir to a tobacco fortune, who had bought the pictures during the 1950s and ’60s. The appearance of a sensibly estimated country house collection, fresh to the market, ensured a packed room and furious bidding, with only two of the 50 lots remaining unsold and the sale totalling more than 8.8 million and breaking six artists’ records. Dealer Richard Green paid the highest price of the night when he bought Turner’s watercolour Lake of Lucerne for more than 1.8 million.
However, most of the top lots were bought by private collectors and this pattern continued at Christie’s when paintings, furniture and antiques collected by the late Antonio Champalimaud, Portugal’s richest man, fetched almost 39 million in a two-day sale.
A long telephone battle between two private bidders pushed the price of Canaletto’s The Bucintoro at the Molo, Venice, on Ascension Day to 11.4 million. This comfortably beat both the picture’s modest 4 million to 6 million estimate and the existing 10.2 million record for Canaletto paid by the composer Andrew Lloyd Webber for The Old Horse Guards, London, from St James’s Park in 1992.
Champalimaud had bought this spectacular painting for 280,000 in 1973. But the new record lasted only until the following evening, when Sotheby’s staged one of the most extraordinary Old Masters sales ever seen in London, and in the hardest circumstances. Ten hours after terrorist atrocities in the capital, Sotheby’s saleroom was almost full for the auction, and three quarters of the pictures were sold amid fiercely competitive bidding.
Once again, Canaletto provided the most dramatic moment of the evening as five people tried to buy Venice, the Grand Canal Looking North-East from the Palazzo Balbi to the Rialto Bridge. This was a more subtle Canaletto, with a wonderful provenance, having belonged to Sir Robert Walpole, Britain’s first prime minister, and recorded as having hung in 10 Downing Street.
Bidding narrowed to two contenders, one on the telephone to Alex Bell, Sotheby’s London head of Old Master paintings, while the other was dealer Luca Baroni taking whispered instructions from his colleague Stephen Ongpin, speaking on a mobile phone to a client. Baroni’s bidder made a last-ditch bid of 16.5 million before admitting defeat as Bell’s client raised the stakes by another 100,000. By the time Sotheby’s added commission, the Canaletto cost its anonymous new owner 18.6 million, beating the Christie’s picture by more than 7 million and becoming the sixth most expensive Old Master ever sold.
Although the evening ended on a subdued note, with another Canaletto and a Bellotto that was once thought to be a Canaletto both failing to sell, this did not reflect a remarkable auction which totalled almost 44.3 million, breaking 12 records. This was Sotheby’s second highest score ever for an Old Masters sale, beaten only by the 2002 auction in which Rubens’s The Massacre of the Innocents fetched 49.5 million.
Christie’s had a tough act to follow, but 76 per cent of the pictures sold, for a respectable total of 20.7 million. An anonymous telephone bidder paid almost 3.6 million for Jan Van de Capelle’s wonderful maritime painting A kaag and a smak in a calm, while the Getty Museum in California bought Guardi’s The Grand Canal, Venice, with the Palazzo Bembo for almost 4.4 million and a private buyer paid 3.7 million for Jan Van Huysum’s still life Green grapes on the vine. The London Old Masters market has rarely seen a week like it.
Price: $32.6 million
Date Of Sale: July 7, 2005
House: Sotheby’s London
March 10th, 2006
Throughout its history, The Museum of Modern Art has used architecture as a vehicle for self-renewal and regeneration. The recently completed building project represents MoMA’s most extensive redefinition since its founding seventy-five years ago. The Museum combines new spaces with MoMA’s original architecture to dramatically enhance its dynamic collection of modern and contemporary art.
MoMA conducted an extensive worldwide search for an architect who would not simply add on to the Museum’s existing architecture, but would be able to transform MoMA’s various buildings and additions into a unified whole. Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi won the commission with a design that would, in his own words, “transform MoMA into a bold new museum while maintaining its historical, cultural, and social context.”
The 630,000-square-foot Museum has nearly twice the capacity of the former facility. The new six-story David and Peggy Rockefeller Building houses the main collection and temporary exhibition galleries. Taniguchi worked closely with curators to refine his concept into a design that would expertly accommodate the type and scale of works displayed. Spacious galleries for contemporary art are located on the second floor, with more intimately scaled galleries for the collection on the levels above. Expansive, skylit galleries for temporary exhibitions are located on the top floor. MoMA’s Film and Media program resumes in the two refurbished Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters, located below the lobby level.
Masterworks of modern sculpture, seasonal plantings, and reflecting pools once again welcome visitors to the beloved Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, which Taniguchi identified as “perhaps the most distinctive single element of the Museum today.” The architect preserved Philip Johnson’s original 1953 design and re-established the garden’s southern terrace to create an elegant outdoor patio for The Modern, the Museum’s new fine-dining restaurant.
March 9th, 2006
The word howdah is an Anglo-Indian term for the seat used for riding an elephant. Symbols of status in the princely courts, they were ridden in hunts, battles, and ceremonial processions.
The profuse detailing of this howdah recalls the opulence manifested in the princely courts after Queen Victoria was proclaimed empress of India in 1877. The Indian rajas, formerly heads of independent Indian states, became vassals of the British empire. Prevented from exercising any real power, they could only demonstrate their strength through lavish displays of pomp and ceremony. Their impressive appearance at official British governmental functions ironically lent greater authority to the British control of India.
The ornamentation of this howdah provides evidence of the great influence exerted by European taste upon decorative objects made for the Indian courts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The work was probably carried out by Indian artisans who proved quite adept at copying and altering Victorian designs. Some of the decorative motifs are clearly hybrid forms. For instance, the motif of the fish spewing either a horse or a winged female combines elements found independently in Indian and European art. The floral and border decorations are also alterations and recombinations of motifs from these different traditions.
The motifs embossed on the front, sides, and back of the howdah are not genuine coats of arms but pseudo-heraldic decorations inspired by the English (sides and back) and Scottish (front) royal arms. While these have been deliberately altered - most noticeably in the substitution of a rayed pattern for the central shield - certain details, such as the scrolling foliage beneath the shields and supporters, suggest that the chaser was working from an engraved source, such as that reproduced in contemporary editions of Burke’s Peerage and Baronetage. The appropriation of these emblems as major decorative elements and the appearance of two Indian attendants dressed in European military costumes on the front suggest a conscious effort to display regal authority in European terms.
Details on
March 5th, 2006
This oval snuffbox is made from chrysoprase, a green variety of quartz that was used extensively in Europe until the middle of the last century. The box and cover are carved from single pieces of chrysoprase and are set with diamond, gold and hardstone scrolls, vines and flowers. The diamonds are set over pink, green and yellow foil. The sides and the base are similarly applied with relief hardstones and gems. Chrysoprase was a particular favourite of Frederick II, the Great of Prussia. It used to be mined in Silesia, then a part of Prussia, but fell out of favour once the Silesian deposits were exhausted. Today, most of the world’s supply of chrysoprase comes from Australia.
It is recorded that Frederick owned eight chrysoprase snuffboxes and that this one was presented by Frederick to his brother Augustus Wilhelm. The design is probably by Jean Guillaume George Kruger, a London-trained designer who moved to Berlin in 1753 and designed a series of snuffboxes in the Prussian royal collection. This particular box dates from around 1755.
March 5th, 2006
In Innerlight, the vitality of a vision that transcends time immortal a vision of the future is celebrated in a monumental sculpture that contrasts the solidity of earthly elements with a brilliant play of light. The sculpture is symbolic of Steuben’s melding of its past and present in formulating an inspired vision for its future, and of the continuous creation of the Steuben material itself. It is the embodiment of the process through which, out of the fire, from base ingredients, is born a material so pure, it captures the very essence of light.
Innerlight, with its 16 separate glass forms emerging from a double-sided bronze form, stands an imposing 7′9″ tall and measures 2′3″ X 6′6″ at the base. The entire sculpture weighs approximately 1500 pounds. The glass forms, each of which has five highly-polished edges and one rough textured surface, were individually hand cast, cut and finished with great precision to meld seamlessly into the side edges of the bronze form. It took Steuben’s master craftspeople almost a year to create this landmark work.
Price: $260,000
March 4th, 2006
Since Richard M. Daley became mayor of Chicago in 1989, the city has planted 400,000 trees and begun an effort to attract renewable energy companies and create a sustainable landscaping industry. He built the first municipal rooftop garden on City Hall and one of only five U.S. buildings to receive the Platinum rating from Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED).
Mayor Daley also commissioned the construction of Millennium Park, the acclaimed showplace of architecture and the arts which features monuments and public spaces designed by Frank Gehry, Anish Kapoor, Jaume Plensa, and Kathryn Gustafson. “Richard Daley embodies the type of design champion that all cities should be fortunate enough to have,” said Cooper-Hewitt director Paul Warwick Thompson. “His leadership addresses the present needs of Chicago without neglecting future environmental concerns.”
February 23rd, 2006
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