July 2012

On July 25th, 2012, at 10am and 2pm, at  Rockefeller Plaza in New York, Christie’s Inc will be auctioning off a collection of Prints & Multiples that I am very excited about. There will be amazing pieces going up for sale, including etchings by none other than Rembrandt (4 pieces that are AMAZING), Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Henry Moore, Henri Matisse, and the one I’m most excited about, Albrecht Durer.  The reason why I am excited about the Durer piece is because of the fact his work, like Rembrandt’s work, is BEAUTIFUL. Durer is a very special artist. He IS the print maker of the Northern Renaissance.  Amazing, just everything he has done that I have seen is just BEAUTIFUL.  Yes his work were “mass produced” as prints, even during his time (Heck, he was a print maker, what else is the work supposed to be there for in that time? There was no “commercial market” at that time like there is today), but really, if you as a reader have the chance to buy a piece of his work, I would say yes.  If you have a chance to see his work, do it.  Remember Durer lived from 1471-1528, during the Protestant Reformation which was initiated by Martin Luther, the time that the Protestants broke away from the Catholic church and outlawed art works depicting people in all religious settings as they thought it was worshiping false idols (Please note, art work was still allowed outside of church which is why Durer was still able to do his craft, is they were not Protestant, but it just it was just SO much more different than what there was in the south or Italian Renaissance).  SO with all of this going around him religiously and everything that was going on in the art world around him, his ability to create works like this one and that they are still in good condition today, just wow, look for yourself. And remember, this was all hand done or hand chiseled.

Albrecht Durer’s “Ecce homo from the large Passion”

The craftsmanship that Durer put into this is just beautiful.  The details are perfect and it is everything that basically the 1400s-1500s art work was supposed to be about, the subject manner, the characters, the perspective, everthing just works here, as it does with all of Durer’s work.  The estimated sales price for this work from Christie’s is $2,000-$3,000, which I think is EXTREMELY low, no matter how many works are still available of Durer is still out there or not.  I would at least double if not triple that price, if not just for the artist creativity of the work but also the historical stand point, knowing the time in which it was created, this is a must buy.

To view this and all of the works in this sale, please visit the Christie’s Website.

May 2012

In the month of June, there will be several good auctions.  Sotheby’s will have a Fine Books and Manuscripts auction that will be happening on June 15th in New York City to their Impressionist and Modern Art action happening on June 20th in London.  This will be an interesting sale that I will look forward to.  I am not going to lie and say I know a lot about Fine Books and Manuscripts.  I LOVE to read, and I know which books that I would consider a good book and which ones I would not…like right now I’m reading Emile Zola’s Nana, which I’ve just started reading, and I know a few things to look for in a book to see if it is at least considered an okay or good book…but until further notice, I will say that I know nothing in regards to having the ability to say what a book is worth and what it is not.

Yet another sale that Sotherby’s will be doing on Wednesday, June 20th in London will be their Impressionist and Modern Art Day Sale (34-35 New Bond Street London W1A 2AA) at 10:30am and 2:30pm. This sale includes work by Jean Arp (from 1960 to ’65) and surrealist Joan Miro (later works, 1970, 1978 and others) to Henri Matisse, Max Ernst and Salvador Dali.

The one constant in the works that Sotheby’s is auctioning off is that the works are by the artist in their later life, not when they were in their prime.  These works seem to be, for the most part (excluding works like Dali’s La Maison Surrealiste c. 1949) as the artist are on their way out or right before they pass. Yes, there is a market for these works, a grim look on life, seeing an artist’s last grasp at something that they were at one point in time renowned for, however when Joan Miro, a surrealist (which had their day from the mid 1920s (some say as early as 1922 with ManRay others when the first Surrealist Manifesto of either 1924 and yet others in the year 1929, that is why I say the Mid 1920s), having his work from 1970 (the work I’m referring to is Tete [Sale Lot #116] which was executed on the 31st of March, 1970), almost 50 years since the Surrealist movement had had it’s day and only 13 years before Miro died, can be appealing to some people, to own the last bit of history of an artist.

However, I remember watching a documentary, I don’t know if it was from the Tate Modern or had a retired curator from the Tate that stated even Andy Warhol, who most consider one of two of the greatest artist of the 20th century, if not the greatest, as well as one of the five artist that changed art forever, couldn’t get an exhibition in the last years of his life, that actually when Warhol passed on, the Tate had been taking steps and scheduled an exhibition of his work, his first one in over five years (and if I am wrong on this, either way far off or if there was another exhibition that came closer to his death than this one that was in the works, please let me know and comment) or longer as he had been all but forgotten about outside of the work that he had done in the late 1950s to the early 1960s.

That is the way that it happens with art.  As the artist grow older and their work no longer fits into the world around it (as Miro’s work Tete was done in the Pop Art era, when screen printing and BenDay Dots were all of the rave), the work can be seen as the artist doing what he/she loves the most, which is art for art’s sake.  For the most part, their work is not being sold for what it was (Example that Tete has an estimated value of $243,000-324,000 and Salvador Dali’s Deesse De La Pluie [Sale Lot #119] is estimated at $40,500-57,000, a price fare less than work created in their prime) can bring the buy to sure that they might be buying a beautiful piece of work, but the price is there namely for the sake of the the artist who created it, and nothing more.

To see the works up for sale, including the catalogue notes and the provenance on the auction, please go to the Sotheby’s Auction Website or to see the exact works that I reference in this article, please visit the following:

Joan Miro’s Tete

Salvador Dali’s Deesse De La Pluie