Tag Archives: miró

All hail the comeback kid: surrealism

MoMA is doing things first, as usual.

This month, the Museum of Modern Art, New York opens the first major museum exhibition to explore the early years of René Magritte’s unique brand of Surrealism. Salvador Dalí has also been granted his own one-man show at the Pompidou Center, Paris, opening in November. The institutional bustle makes it seem as though Surrealism’s stars are aligning.

"Les Amants", an early work by Magritte showing his interest in the hidden truth

“René Magritte 1926-1938” certainly reflects a wider trend in the art market. With a dwindling amount of high-quality Impressionist and modern artworks up for sale, auction totals in these areas – at one point astronomical – are leveling off. Surrealism – the erotically charged, awkward step brother of Impressionism – is finally having its day as top collectors search for the next big thing.

And works by Joan Miró, Magritte and Dalí are selling like hotcakes. Buyers have even started showing an interest in early Magrittes, traditionally overlooked in favor of his mature works.

Impressive records have been set in the past 18 months.  Dalí’s 1929 portrait of Paul Eluard, which was bought for a one-time record $2.3 million in 1989 at Christie’s New York, sold last February at Sotheby’s London for £13.5 million ($21.7 million). That landmark price for a Surrealist work sold at auction was toppled at the same auction house in June 2012, when Miró’s Peinture (Etoile bleue), 1927, went for a cool £23.5 million ($36.9 million).

The $37 million painting: “Peinture (Etoile bleue)”

Impactful yet demure, the works of Magritte seem but distant cousins of Dalí’s super-erotic dreamscapes. The connection is the intersection between waking life and dreams that both artists explore, and the unsettling effect created thereby. Specifically rendered detail in these impossible images betrays a mutual desire to depict an imagined world with enough precision as to make it real.

Writing for Artinfo, Judd Tully queries, “Given the recent spike in prices for all these sometimes nightmarish explorations of the 20th-century psyche, one naturally wonders: What is it about Surrealism that speaks to today’s collectors?”

The allure is surely based in the opportunity to own a small part of the fantasies and dreams of a most eventful century. Seeing an artist from your collection awarded a major retrospective can’t hurt, either.

STOP! news time

Eye on the market

B-levels are the new A-levels, if not in the realm of United Kingdom academic tests, than at least in the art world. That’s to say, gone are the days when February auctions of Impressionist, modern and contemporary art evoke nothing more than a wrinkled nose of interest. As Jessica Mizrachi writes for artnet, last week’s London sales for Christie’s and Sotheby’s were evenly matched. Both houses brought their A game with these Impressionist and modern sales. Including three lots leftover from the estate of Elizabeth Taylor, which contributed $21.8 million to the sale’s total, the February 7th evening sale at Christie’s closed with $213,299,052; 86 percent of lots sold. Coming in not far behind the next day, Sotheby’s totaled $125,504,018, with 77 percent of lots bought up.

Henry Moore “Reclining Figure: Festival”

Artists inspiring the highest bidding at Christie’s included Edgar Degas, Vincent van Gogh and Robert Delaunay. Not to be forgotten is Henry Moore, whose monumental bronze    Reclining Figure: Festival caused many jaws to drop when the hammer dropped only at $30.3 million. The “Art of the Surreal” sale, set apart from the house’s regular auction, saw $59  million in sales – a record for a Surrealist auction buoyed by pieces by René Magritte and Max Ernst. Joan Miró starred in the event, and his Painting-Poem closed at $26.8  million, nearly double the $14 million presale estimate. Word on the street is that 2012 may very well belong to the beloved Spanish artist.

The signature that wasn’t. Or, that may or may not be while having – possibly – once been

The dreadlock-bedecked darling of the 1980’s art world, Jean-Michel Basquiat, was not the type to sign his works. While preparing the painting “Orange Sports Figure” for sale, writes Jill Lawless, the head of contemporary art at Sotheby’s Europe discovered a signature beneath layers of paint. The signature, written in invisible ink, was actually doubly hidden; it showed up while the work was being examined under ultraviolet light. “Nobody else probably ever knew about this invisible inscription,” said Cheyenne Westphal of Sotheby’s, “and the prospect that he might have left other invisible writings on his canvasses that are only visible under ultraviolet light is very exciting.” Although the artist regularly used text and doodling in his work, in addition to signing a few pieces with a crown or his graffiti persona SAMO, only a few works bear his full signature.

Basquiat photographed by Roland Hagenberg

Developing an energetic and personal lexicon, Basquiat died suddenly from an overdose in 1988. Aged 27, he left behind a body of work influenced by Abstract Expressionism and street artists, painted on such surfaces as found windows and football helmets. His popularity only continues to rise and on Wednesday “Orange Sports Figure” sold for over £4 million, a new record.

Child’s Play

An artist’s friendship with another artist is often a sacred bond of admiration, influence, and inspiration. Despite the distances and visual mediums that may that separate them, each relationship leaves a lasting impact on the involved artists. One particular individual’s relationships with other artists has frequently been the topic of many exhibitions and books, and that is Alexander Calder.  Alexander “Sandy” Calder is the most acclaimed and influential sculptor of our time, and developed meaningful relationships with his fellow artists Fernand Léger and Joan Miró.

Calder was influenced by Léger, and Léger admired Calder’s work. Their paths crossed multiple times as Léger was often in the audience of Calder’s circus performances and Calder invited him to write the preface to his catalogue for the exhibition at Galerie Percier in 1931. The two artists had a close relationship and were often seen walking around New York or Paris together searching for visual inspiration. In their art, although they tended to resolve their depictions of the modern world in different manners, we can see the ideological thread between their work and similar integration of figuration and abstraction.

Calder and Miró lived in Paris at the same time and became close friends. Their artistic parallels have been well documented and exhibited. Both artists have an impish quality, a sense of play, and a love of adventure in their works. In describing the similarities in his work with that of Miró, Calder is quoted as saying, “Well, the archeologists will tell you there’s a little bit of Miró in Calder and little bit of Calder in Miró.” That could certainly be said of many artists relationships.

Joan Miró: A Creative Life

To most art lovers, a painting by Joan Miró is immediately recognizable. It displays botanical, geometric or abstract lines or shapes floating against celestial blue, sandy yellow or earth brown backgrounds. It also probably exudes a mystical yet reassuring dreamy quality. However interestingly enough, his personality was nothing like his work.

Miró was a highly disciplined hard working man. He spoke little and looked like the perfect bourgeois. He was orderly, reliable and punctilious. He was astonishingly versatile, willing to try almost anything. Nothing of him had any touch of a free spirited bohemian that he seemed to exhibit in his works.

In 1927, when Miró was 34 he was already a successful artist but he had a restless temperament and lived in provoking times. Surrealism, he discovered, had limitations. He was ready for a radical change in art, but he realized that he would have to create it himself. With his famous words, “I want to assassinate painting,” Miró did just that.  He took the elements out of art and stuck to the essentials. Whether he used a limited color palate or sparse geometric designs or different material he deified the essence of painting being on a canvas.

”I personally don’t know where we are heading,” Miró told a Spanish journalist in 1931. ”The only thing that’s clear to me is that I intend to destroy, destroy everything that exists in painting. I have utter contempt for painting. The only thing that interests me is the spirit itself, and I only use the customary artists’ tools — brushes, canvas and paint — in order to get the best effects. I’m only interested in anonymous art, the kind that springs from the collective unconscious.”

By the end of his long life, Miró had executed paintings and sculptures that prefigured Abstract Expressionism, Pop art, Color Field painting, process art, appropriation, and even conceptualism. Ultimately he succeeded in his goal of “assassinating painting”, and left us with a canvas of brilliant colors combined with simplified forms that allow us to embrace our inner child.