10:46am
There are few artists whose death will merit extended slots on the television news and double-page obituaries in virtually every newspaper. It certainly didn’t happen to Robert Rauschenberg, but in the UK this week the accolade was extended to Beryl Cook, painter of fat ladies having a good time. Her death prompted the familiar discussion about why an artist so widely popular is not represented in British national collections. The Guardian quoted the critic Brian Sewell as saying that she was responsible for ‘a very successful formula which fools are prepared to buy’.
Whatever you may think about such a...
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12:45pm
Jake and Dinos Chapman are turning their collective hand from art to celluloid after announcing their intention to make a satirical comedy about the art world. Anyone familiar with the Chapmans’ output will know that it already contains a dark strain of humour but while Jake has previously made documentaries – at least one has been shown on British mainstream television – this is their directorial debut in the world of cinema fiction. No further details on plot or cast have been released so one can only speculate… a YBA version of Robert Altman’s ‘Prêt à Porter’ perhaps? Or maybe...
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1:38pm
A lecture at the Hay-on-Wye Guardian Festival this weekend focused on the role of the English landscape in Ben Nicholson’s work – a fitting theme given the festival’s idyllic setting, and one overshadowed by the artist’s international modernist style. The lecture, given by Tate Britain curator Chris Stephens, was not to plug a book – unusually so for a book fair event – but to promote a forthcoming touring exhibition on Nicholson that opens in Abbot Hall, Kendal, in July. The show, entitled ‘A Continuous Line’, explores the artist’s life and work in the British countryside from 1922-1958 to reveal...
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3:46pm
It is one of the curiosities of the art world that a profession entirely devoted to visual matters should be so oddly coy about party clothes. I am used to the fact that black is the default option, but does everyone have to be so corporate? There were two big parties in London last night, and thanks to sympathetic timings (the V&A decided to stay open late) it was possible to attend both the announcement of the winner of the Art Fund Prize for Museums and Galleries in the spacious Art Deco hall of the RIBA’s Portman Place headquarters and...
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2:03pm
Andre Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto, along with eight other of his manuscripts sold for €3.2m at Sotheby’s in Paris last night. Commentators have turned decidedly lyrical describing the ghost of Breton floating around the auction room and having the last laugh at the huge sum that his anti-bourgeois text fetched. Also noted was the relief that will be felt by critics of the sale who were concerned that the documents would be split up and headed out of France – in fact they have been acquired by Gérard Lhéritier, founder of the Museum of Letters and Manuscripts, a private institution in...
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1:43pm
The news that Roman Abramovich has bought Bacon’s Triptych, 1976, and Freud’s Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, 1995 – for just under a cool $120 million – rather makes the buyer the star of this three-part story. Both purchases smashed records at auction last week – Freud became the most expensive living artist ($33.6m), eclipsing the previous record-holder Jeff Koons, and the Bacon made the highest auction price ever for a post-war work of art ($86.3m). But it is Abramovich, apparently a new entrant to the art market, who has created the biggest stir. Commentators on the sales have remarked on the...
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10:08am
An interesting schism among art critics has revealed itself following news of Robert Rauschenberg’s death last week. Tributes abounded to the avant-garde Pop artist – The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones saluted Rauschenberg as the ‘man who first made him want to write about art’; The New York Times describes the artist as having ‘time and again reshaped art in the 20th century’; and the Wall Street Journal claimed Rauschenberg as ‘the biggest innovator in art after Jackson Pollock.’ High praise indeed – but not by any means unchallenged. The New Republic argued that Rauschenberg’s work has been protected ‘by a sort...
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1:05pm
‘Philosophy of the Overlooked: Collecting’ kicked off the summer talks at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London. The panel was made up of John Sellars, academic and book collector, art collector Anita Zabludowicz, and Mike Presdee, senior lecturer in Criminology at the University of Kent. A short film by Martin Hampton called ‘Possessed’ about four obsessive hoarders was screened first, presumably intended to prompt comparisons between their mental (ill) health and the sanity of serious art collectors. I’m not sure it convinced (Hampton’s moving film is nevertheless worth seeing as a piece on its own) but the speakers entertainingly...
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10:12am
At the opening of Philip Gurrey's first UK solo show at Madder 139 last night, he told me that the impressive collection of 20 paintings had been put together in just six months, with this gallery space in mind. Asked if there were any surplus paintings to allow for curatorial selection, the prolific 24 year-old said that he had painted an additional six that weren't on show. Three were in storage with the gallery, but the others had already been sold in America at NEXT, Chicago's art fair in April, and at PULSE art fair in New York in March.
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3:09pm
Agnew’s, one of the grandest commercial galleries in London, has sold its Grade II listed premises on London’s Bond Street after 131 years of business. The gallery at 43 Bond Street was purpose built in 1877 and has provided the setting for seven generations of the Agnew family to build up one of the most prestigious Old Master dealerships in the world. Among the masterpieces that the firm have handled are the Rokeby Venus by Velazquez – now in London’s National Gallery; The Annunciation by Rossetti – now with Tate; Ruben’s The Entombment, in the National Gallery of Canada; and...
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Enterprising gallerists are turning Edinburgh into a major city for collectors, and London gets ready for Frieze.
A new book and exhibition are celebrating the centenary of Osbert Lancaster – cartoonist, architectural writer and dandy.
Damien Hirst's decision to sell new works at Sotheby's last month was amply justified in financial terms, but artists and collectors will always need dealers.
