A painter, draughtsman, architect, archaeologist, and poet who
captured in his art the human and the divine, love, friendship,
learning, and power, who gave us quintessential images of community and
civilisation: Raphael’s life was short, his work prolific, and his legacy immortal.
In the year that marks the 500th anniversary of Raphael’s death, the
National Gallery will present one of the first-ever exhibitions to
explore the complete career of this giant of the Italian Renaissance.
In his brief career, spanning just two decades, Raffaello Santi
(1483–1520) shaped the course of Western culture like few artists before
or since.
This exhibition will examine not just his celebrated
paintings and drawings - but also his not so widely known work in
architecture, archaeology, poetry, and design for sculpture, tapestry,
prints, and the applied arts. The aim is to do something no previous
Raphael exhibition has ever done - explore every aspect of his
multimedia activity.
The Credit Suisse Exhibition: Raphael
will demonstrate why Raphael plays such a pivotal role in the history
of Western art, and seek to understand why his work remains relevant to
us today. There will be more than ninety exhibits, with focus on
autograph works and those in media he did not practice himself but for
which he provided designs.
Loans from across his entire career – many of them unprecedented –
will be travelling to London from around the world, to join 10 works
from the National Gallery’s outstanding collection of Raphaels. Lenders
will include the Louvre, Musei Vaticani, Galleria degli Uffizi, National
Gallery of Art (Washington DC), and the Museo Nacional del Prado.
Work and activities that cannot be represented by original exhibits –
such as the monumental frescoed rooms in the Vatican Palace, known as
the Stanze of Raphael – will be presented in other innovative ways.
For centuries Raphael has been recognised as the supreme High
Renaissance painter, capturing visually our idea and ideals of the
Renaissance.
Though he died at 37, Raphael's example as a paragon of Classicism
dominated the academic tradition of European painting until the mid-19th
century.
Raphael (Raffaello Santi) was born in Urbino where his father,
Giovanni Santi, was court painter. He almost certainly began his
training there and must have known works by Mantegna, Uccello, and Piero
della Francesca from an early age. His earliest paintings were also
greatly influenced by Perugino. From 1500 - when he was an independent
master - to 1508 he worked throughout central Italy, particularly
Florence, where he became a noted portraitist and painter of madonnas.
In 1508, at the age of 25, he was called to the court of Pope Julius
II to help with the redecoration of the papal apartments. In Rome he
evolved as a portraitist, and became one of the greatest of all history
painters. He remained in Rome for the rest of his life and in 1514, on
the death of Bramante, he was appointed architect in charge of St
Peter's.
September 29–December 15, 2019
Félix Buhot was one of the most original printmakers in France during
the last quarter of the nineteenth century. This exhibition, selected
entirely from a private collection, examines the full range of Buhot’s
graphic effort, from his highly imaginative intaglios to the more somber
lithographs, a medium to which he turned near the end of his career.
Also included are several drawings and paintings related to the prints.
Organized by the Palmer Museum of Art.
Félix
Buhot, Convoi funèbre au Boulevard de Clichy (Funeral Procession on the
Boulevard de Clichy), 1887, etching, drypoint, aquatint, roulette, soft
ground, lift ground, and stop-out over heliogravure, printed from two
plates, second state of three, plate: 11 13/16 x 15 3/4 inches. B/G 159.
Private collection.
Félix Buhot, L’Hiver à Paris (Winter in Paris),
1879, etching, aquatint, spitbite, soft ground, drypoint, and scraping, 9
5/16 x 13 9/16 inches. Purchased with funds provided by the Friends of
the Palmer Museum of Art, 2002.62.
Claude Monet’s Charing Cross Bridge from
1903 (estimate $20/30 million) was announced at Sotheby’s. The
collection—which also features works by Pierre Bonnard, Lyonel
Feininger, Jacques Lipchitz, Emil Nolde and Edgar Degas —was assembled
primarily in the 1970s and ‘80s by Andrea Klepetar-Fallek and her
then-husband, Fred Fallek. According to Sotheby’s, “her extraordinary
life story is one of incomparable resilience, independence and optimism –
including her flight from Nazi-occupied Vienna, escape from an Italian
concentration camp, and departure from Peronist Argentina.” Charing Cross Bridge was acquired in 1977 through Galerie
Beyeler and has remained in the Klepetar-Fallek collection for more than
40 years. Monet’s paintings of Charing Cross Bridge rarely appear at auction: the most recent example was offered in June 1992, and sold for $4.1 million.
Willem de Kooning, Untitled XXII. Photo courtesy of Sotheby’s New York.
Sotheby’s has revealed two of the major lots of the fall auction season in New York: an “extremely rare” Willem de Kooning painting offered by art dealer Robert Mnuchin, father of US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, on behalf of an undisclosed seller; and Claude Monet’s Charing Cross Bridge, which will lead the house’s Impressionist and Modern art evening sale.
The abstract de Kooning work, titled Untitled XXII, is estimated to sell for between $25 million and $35 million. Although that range lags behind the current de Kooning record, $66.3 million set three years ago for a painting from 1977, it would place the work among the artist’s top-five auction records, according to the artnet Price Database. There is a guarantee on the work, as well as an irrevocable bid from a third party, ensuring that the painting will sell.
In recent years, de Kooning collectors such as Ken Griffin—who paid $300 million for Interchange in
2016—and Steve Cohen have opted to conduct their major transactions
privately, suppressing the artist’s auction track record.
The de Kooning painting up for sale next month was purchased
by the current owner in 2004 from New York’s Mitchell-Innes and Nash
gallery. It was one of roughly 100 de Kooning paintings that the gallery
priced between $500,000 and $3 million, while representing the artist’s
estate for a few years after his death, in 1997.
Claude Monet, Charing Cross Bridge
(1899–1901), from the collection of Andrea Klepetar-Fallek, is expected
to fetch $20 million to $30 million at auction. Courtesy of Sotheby’s
New York.
Untitled XXII “was one of the best from that period,” gallery co-owner David Nash told Bloomberg. “Now, 15 years later, they are extremely rare. They’ve been dispersed to private collections and museums.”
The Monet estimate is also well below the artist’s auction
record, which has shot up in recent years. After holding steady at $80.3
million from 2008 to 2016, a new top price for the Impressionist has
been achieved three times in the past three years. A haystack canvas, Meule,sold for $81.4 million at Christie’s New York in November 2016 and Nymphéas en fleur went for $84.7 million at the Peggy and David Rockefeller auction at Christie’s New York in May 2018 before a different haystack painting, Meules, sold for $110.7 million at Sotheby’s New York this May.
Andrea Klepetar-Fallek. Photo courtesy of Sotheby’s.
But the Charing Cross Bridge remains one of Monet’s most
revisited subjects, with 37 paintings in the series completed between
1899 and 1905. Examples belong to institutions including the Art
Institute of Chicago, the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid, the
Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
The painting was purchased by Andrea Klepetar-Fallek and her
fourth husband, Fred Fallek, in 1977 through Basel’s Galerie Beyeler. Charing Cross Bridge
was among the gems of their collection, hanging over the living room
couch. Fallek died in 1983; Klepetar-Fallek died this past May.
Pierre Bonnard, Femme se déshabillant,
from the collection of Andrea Klepetar-Fallek, is expected to fetch
between $1.5 million and $2.5 million at auction. Courtesy of Sotheby’s
New York.
Born Andrea Samek in 1920, Klepetar-Fallek was a survivor of
the Holocaust who fled her native Vienna and escaped an Italian
concentration camp.
She moved to Israel in 1948 before settling in Argentina.
After the death of her third husband, Juan Klepetar, and the rise of the
Peronist government, Klepetar-Fallek moved to New York in 1972. There,
she met Fallek, a fellow Holocaust survivor who had lost his art
collection to his ex-wife in their divorce. The two then established a
tradition of giving each other works of art for each birthday and
anniversary.
The upcoming sale also includes other works from Klepetar-Fallek’s collection, such as Pierre Bonnard’s Femme se déshabillant, estimated at $1.5 million to $2.5 million; Lyonel Feininger’s Hästende Leute (Hurried People), estimated at $100,000 to $150,000; and Emile Nolde’s Rote Dahlien (Red Dahlias), estimated at $60,000 to $80,000.
Curators: Marilyn McCully, Michael Raeburn and Emilie Bouvard
Many of the paintings that Picasso did over a period of some four
years (summer 1926-spring 1930) form a cohesive group, which Christian
Zervos would later (1938) as “Tableaux magiques”. With these works
principally figure paintings – Picasso opened a new chapter in his
oeuvre, probing a deep emotional dimension, which anticipates the power
of Guernica a decade later.
This was accompanied by formal developments that are as radical as
anything he had done before, including experimentation with materials
and the realization of monumental sculptural ideas in paint.
The works in the show will set not only in terms of the artist’s own
development but, importantly, in the context of contemporary Surrealism
and psychology (Jung vs Freud) and especially the interest among writers
such as Leiris and Zervos on the magical powers ofs art.
In the summer of 1926, in Juan-les-Pins, Pablo Picasso began work on
a series of paintings that was continued into the first quarter of
1930. This group of some one hundred and fifty paintings, which use
similar means of expression and a common range of subjects, was first
recognised by the editor and critic Christian Zervos in a 1938 article
in his journal Cahiers d’art entitled “Picasso’s Magic Paintings”. These
paintings, mainly heads and figures, often set in the theatre of the
artist’s studio, are based on extreme formalisation and the use of a
system of signs. In time, constructions of flat planes and lines gave
way to monumental sculptural forms, creating an impression of constant
metamorphosis. The artist’s remarkable creative imagination led Zervos
to see him as a magician, who could invent new forms that would affect
the thinking of the spectator. These radical works provoked strong
opinions and interpretations both at the time they were done and ever
since.
"Picasso.Magic Paintings" is the first exhibition devoted
specifically to this period of Picasso’s activity, including a broad
selection of works.
SECRET SPELLS
Pablo Picasso's magic paintings have an expressive power that goes
beyond formal representation. The sinuous lines that create double
profiles or the substitutions of anatomical features seem to have the
character of repeated spells or magic formulae. These works appear in
series, and the spells seem to have been elaborated in sequences of
drawings in his sketchbooks. In several of the seated figures and heads,
the displacement of facial features, especially in the sleeping
figures, contributes to their disturbing quality.
Picasso's methods seem to parallel the characteristics of magic rites and ceremonies used to invoke invisible spiritual powers.
MAGIC OBJECTS
By the mid-1920s, Pablo Picasso owned a significant collection of
non-Western works, which he had started collecting early in the 20th
century. The creation of the magic paintings parallels a rise in the
taste for works of this kind in artistic circles. Between 1926 and 1930,
Picasso was in contact with a second generation of dealers in
non-Western art in Paris, including Louis Carré, André Level, Pierre
Loeb and Charles Ratton, and he added to his collection with their help.
There are eleven objects owned by Picasso or known to him by 1930 in
the Musée National Picasso-Paris. These works appeared in exhibitions
and in art journals, particularly in Cahiers d'art, where a mask from
the Torres Straits was reproduced (Christian Zervos, "L’Art nègre",
Cahiers d'Art, No. 7- 8, 1927), and they were an inspiration for
Picasso's work.
METAMORPHOSIS
The process of metamorphosis – or re-creation – is seen most clearly
in Picasso’s dislocation of facial and physical features. The large
compositions in this room, which were done in Cannes in the summer of
1927, show how the artist transformed his drawings of bathers on the
beach into what appear to be plans for sculptural figures with
exaggerated body parts and gestures. In Nude on a White Background
(1927, Musée national Picasso-Paris, MP102), a bather is gesturing
upwards with a long thin arm.
Picasso's preoccupation with sculpture was connected to his desire
to find a suitable form for a monument to the memory of the poet
Guillaume Apollinaire, his close friend who had died in 1918. The little
plaster maquette Métamorphose II (1928, Musée national Picasso-Paris,
MP202) was a model for a much larger sculpture, but it was rejected by
the Apollinaire Committee as far too shocking for a funeral monument,
and this was never realised.
TRANSMUTATIONS
Christian Zervos used the term "transmutation" to describe the
relationship of Pablo Picasso's magic paintings to objective reality. In
a series of paintings done in Cannes, Picasso developed his formulation
of a woman's head by reducing facial features to signs: straight lines
for hair, the nose (and nostrils) at the top, with the eyes appearing on
opposite cheeks; the vertical, tooth-lined mouth is placed between,
while the outline of the head itself becomes an irregular geometric
form. In one of these paintings, the incorporation of powdered chalk
into the paint surface at once suggests the misty atmosphere and also
the sand of the beach.
Among Picasso’s still lifes of the same period is a series of
schematic representations of guitars. In the painting Guitar (April 27,
1927, Musée national Picasso-Paris, MP1990-13) there is a floating sign
that combines the letters M and T, a reference to Picasso's young lover
Marie-Thérèse Walter.
MAGIC WRITINGS
The period that Christian Zervos identified in 1938 as that of Pablo
Picasso's "Magic Paintings" received immediate attention in
intellectual circles. Several of the writers who wrote about the
artist's new paintings were also his friends. Zervos, art critic and
founder of Cahiers d'art, had been a supporter of the Spaniard’s work
since 1926, and published it as it emerged. Influenced by the philosophy
of Hegel, Zervos committed himself to the defence of Picasso’s creative
freedom, and in 1938, one year after the creation of Guernica and in
the face of rising international threats, this vision of a free Picasso
took on a political dimension. The writer, critic and ethnologist Michel
Leiris became Picasso's friend in the 1920s. Carl Einstein, a leading
author on African and modern art with radical political views, was one
of his correspondents. Leiris and Einstein were active participants in
the activities of the journal Documents (19291930) together with Georges
Bataille. In contrast to André Breton’s Surrealist movement, which
considered Picasso to be one of its spiritual ancestors, the Documents
group defended a "realist" Picasso, attached to reality in all its
compelling monstrosity.
THE POWER OF INVENTION
Drawing played an essential role in Pablo Picasso's artistic
practice. His development of imagery in series reveals his constant
probing of visual ideas and changes of scale from drawings to paintings.
The group of drawings of the artist's studio refers to the large
Painter and Model in New York (MoMA). In this series Picasso achieves
different effects of texture and substance with Indian ink, and in all
of them emphasis is given to the figure of the painter at the right with
his palette, based on Picasso’s first welded iron sculpture made in
October 1928, Head (Musée National Picasso-Paris, MP263).
When Christian Zervos published his article on "Picasso's Magic
Paintings" (Cahiers d'art, no. 3-10, 1938), he included among the
reproductions of oil paintings a sequence of drawings of bathers from a
sketchbook that Picasso had with him in Cannes in 1927. While the
distortion of their bodies and the use of signs for facial features and
hair are similar to those in the paintings, the bathers in the drawings
are rendered volumetrically, like monumental sculptures, with shadows
and highlights revealing not only the massiveness of their forms but
also their movement.
THE STUDIO
The artist's studio can be compared to an alchemist’s laboratory,
where the Great Work – the transmutation of matter – is carried on in a
collaboration between the artist and his model. Several of Pablo
Picasso’s experiments in depicting heads and figures culminated in
atelier compositions. The vibrant colours of two versions of the model
in the studio (done in Cannes in 1927) provide a startling contrast to
the subdued palette of earlier works. In the more complex compositions
that followed, references to the now familiar formulae used for magic
paintings can be seen in the paintings of the studio. While the artist
is usually shown in the act of painting, his shadow-profile sometimes
intrudes into the studio scene, signifying a spiritual presence.
Throughout these years, Picasso was involved in the preparation of
an illustrated edition of Honoré de Balzac's Unknown Masterpiece, a
novella that explores the interconnected relationships of artist, model,
painting and spectator. Among the illustrations in the book are many
drawings related to magic heads.
EXHIBITING THE MAGIC PAINTINGS
In the aftermath of the first world war, Pablo Picasso showed at
Paul Rosenberg's gallery at 21, rue La Boétie in Paris. Rosenberg, who
also represented Georges Braque and Marie Laurencin, was one of the most
progressive art dealers of the 1920s. As a commercial strategy, he
sometimes gave Picasso solo exhibitions, sometimes included him with
other modern artists, as when he first exhibited some magic paintings in
1929 and 1930. Thanks to his contacts with American collectors and
dealers, Rosenberg ensured that Picasso's work became widely known in
the United States. These works (not yet referred to as magic paintings)
appeared in many individual and group exhibitions, facilitating their
entry into private and then public collections across the Atlantic.
Rosenberg also provided documentation of Picasso's art, photographing
his work and collecting it in a portfolio that could be shown to
admirers and collectors. These works were therefore already familiar in
certain circles when Christian Zervos wrote about them in 1938.
SIGNS-SYMBOLS
As the representation of faces and bodies became more formalised in
the series of Pablo Picasso’s paintings of 1927 and 1928, features and
body parts were increasingly reduced to signs. The positioning of the
almondshaped eyes, tooth-lined mouth or even the nostrils may seem
arbitrary, but the emotional power of these heads is undiminished. In
certain paintings Picasso replaced the predominantly curved, often
biomorphic, forms that had characterised his earlier work, with figures
composed of sharp angles. While two of these appear to cry out in
anguish, others hark back to the mysterious symbolic conventions of
non-western art, particularly from Africa or Oceania, as Picasso
understood them.
RHYTHM AND MONUMENTALITY
Pablo Picasso's engagement with sculpture, beginning in the autumn
of 1928, had repercussions in his paintings and drawings, many of which
reflected a move towards monumentality. Following the rejection of his
submissions to the Apollinaire Committee for a memorial to the poet, the
forms of the heads in his paintings become increasingly solid. A series
of heads and figures, sometimes featuring a red armchair, done between
January and May 1929, suggest possible new solutions for a monument, but
they remained unrealised in three-dimensional form.
However, Picasso did work on a number of sculptures at this time in
collaboration with Julio González, who initiated him in metal sculpture.
Head of a Man (1930, Musée National Picasso-Paris, MP269) combines
iron, brass, and bronze elements, and here the sharp contrasts of flat
planes with protruding elements, as well as the curved back of the head,
achieve a forceful expressiveness akin to the heads in Picasso’s magic
paintings.
MYTHIC REALISM
The German critic Carl Einstein wrote with great insight about Pablo
Picasso at this time, notably in the journal Documents, of which he was
an editor. He coined the label "mythic realism" to distinguish
Picasso's work of the late 1920s from that of the Surrealists. It was,
he considered, far more “grounded” and related to the fundamental
realities of mythical sources. While the unsettling quality of Picasso’s
magic paintings has often provoked comparison with Surrealism,
Picasso’s artistic undertaking was not concerned with revealing his own
fantasies but rather with producing a body of work with a more universal
significance.
Painted in Picasso’s Paris studio between December 1929 and March
1930, the final magic paintings were a group of works on wooden panels,
apparently from a dismantled wardrobe. The formulation of the heads in
these compositions varies between triangular-shaped faces to monumental
“creatures” whose bone structure defines their mass. These figures would
be introduced into the panel painted with a scene of the Crucifixion (7
February 1930, Musée National Picasso-Paris, MP122), in which the
elements of expressive transformation that had characterised the magic
paintings of the previous four years find their fullest expression.
Swann Galleries
opened the fall season on Thursday, September 19 with a marathon sale
of 19th & 20th Century Prints & Drawings earning more than $2M.
Works by Martin Lewis proved popular with collectors. Of the 16
works offered nearly all found buyers, and five works reached among the
top 20 overall.
Highlights included
Martin Lewis, Men Working on Elevated Train
Tracks, Looking at Airplane in Sky, circa 1919—the rare early etching
made its auction debut at $42,500;
Martin Lewis, Glow of the City, drypoint, 1929,
brought $40,000;
and Martin Lewis, Little Penthouse, drypoint, 1931, earned $23,750.
Further American artists featured Edward Hopper’s 1922 etching East Side
Interior, which reached $47,500;
George Bellows’s Dempsey and Firpo,
lithograph, 1923-24, acquired by an institution at $37,500;
and a 1951
complete set of 22 drypoints by Elie Nadelman which earned $22,500.
The
European Art Part II sale includes a strong selection of paintings and
sculptures which reflect the extraordinary diversity of this pivotal
period in art history. Leading the sale are beautiful examples of the
artists’ styles by Eugen von Blaas and Louis Marie de Schryver. Additional highlights include Émile Munier’s Un Sauvetage, a selection of three works by Orientalist painter Frederick Arthur Bridgman (American 1847-1928), and Edmund Blair Leighton’s My Lady Passeth By.
The sale also features works by the Barbizon painters including Leon
Lhermitte and Henri Joseph Harpignies, and a strong selection of
Scandinavian paintings led by three works by Frits Thaulow. A charming,
Impressionist view of Paris by Jean-François Raffaëlli and an impressive Symbolist canvas by Henri Le Sidander round out the sale.
Old Masters: Property from a Private Collection | October 29 at 10am
A
single owner collection of 40 remarkable Dutch and Flemish paintings,
this sale offers a broad survey of the artistic production of the 17th-century
Lowlands. Marked by their exceptional quality and condition, this group
presents striking examples by many of the leading artists in the
period, including David Teniers II, Jan Steen, Hendrick Goltzius and Jan Lievens. Every genre is represented, with particular emphasis on landscape paintings by such luminaries as Jan van Goyen, Simon de Vlieger and Salomon van Ruysdael.
Old Masters | October 29 at 11am and 2pm
Christie’s
Old Masters sale features a curated selection of paintings and
sculpture from the early Renaissance to the Baroque, the Dutch Golden
Age and the French Revolution.
Highlights include Agony in the Garden by Titian and his studio, an Annunciation by Jan de Beer, a beautiful tondo by Lorenzo di Credi, and a striking portrait of Lucien Bonaparte and his mistress by Guillaume Guillon-Lethière. A rare and significant rediscovery is Girodet’sLes Adieux de Coriolan à sa famille. Examples from the 15th-century include works by Neri di Bicci and the Workshop of Dieric Bouts. Sculpture highlights include a group of elegant busts - ranging from a powerful 16th-century Spanish gentleman in marble - to an incredibly rare survival of a pair of early 19th-century pair of classic plaster busts of Paris and Helen from Antonio Canova’s studio.
The Exceptional Sale | October 29 at 11am
Christie’s New York Exceptional Sale is a tightly curated selection of 25 masterworks led this year by
Cobham Hall Hadrian, a 7 foot tall Roman marble Statue of the Emperor Hadrian, sold to benefit the Mougins Museum of Classical Art.
