“CAN WE QUICKEN this up?” It’s lunchtime in New York and Larry Gagosian is hungry. It’s time for supper—or at least aperitifs—in Europe, where he recently did a three-week working tour of France, England, Germany and Switzerland, and it’s breakfast in Los Angeles, where last week he hosted his annual pre-Oscars opening at his Beverly […]
SAN FRANCISCO — Viewed head-on, the newly-expanded San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA) presents an odd progression of landmark architectural styles in no chronological order. First up is SFMoMA’s original home, a 1995 postmodernist red-brick building by the Swiss architect Mario Botta. Behind Botta is San Francisco’s very first skyscraper, Timothy Pflueger’s 1925 Art […]
For Wendy Maitland, Town Residential’s president of sales, an Oscar-winning director client of hers was a typical real estate shopper with typical requests. He had a seven-figure budget and was keen to buy into one of the many new luxury condo complexes sprouting around Manhattan. The client was downsizing from a huge country house in Connecticut since his […]
As far as a painting’s hammer price is concerned, other, less noble considerations matter a great deal more than the picture’s intrinsic quality. Determining the market value of a picture can be a surprisingly heartless experience. There before you stands a fine portrait by a great artist, whose energy and creative genius you see emblazoned […]
A lawyer, a financier, an art advisor, and a journalist walk into a room… It sounds like the start to a bad gallery dinner joke. But at The Armory Show the topic of discussion was serious: “How to Optimize the Unpredictable Art Market.” In a testament to the topic’s immediacy, moderator and Financial Times columnist […]
Second careers are a chance to nurture primary passions Laing Brown decided to “retire” from his 30-plus-year career as a lawyer and partner at two of Canada’s largest law firms. But instead of carrying on as a consultant or spending his days playing golf, Mr. Brown and his wife, Kathleen Brown, also a lawyer, decided […]
Do words limit our experience of a given artwork? Gustave Flaubert believed that, “Explaining one artistic form by means of another is a monstrosity.” Art critic John Bergerwrote: “When words are applied to visual art, both lose precision.” And what if the words are in the art? Expressed by the artist herself? From Cubism to […]
Never has the phrase “Hindsight is 20/20″ held as much weight for anyone as it has for collectors and other art world observers in the wake of the recent high-profile Knoedler forgery trial. The case was settled a few days ago (February 10), but not without the art world experiencing a mountain of frequently cringe-worthy evidence and an earful […]
If a collector wanted to buy a Frank Stella at Art Basel Miami Beach last December, he could have walked up to the booth of New York’s Marianne Boesky Gallery, which represents Frank Stella. Or, he could have walked up to the booth of London and New York gallery Dominique Lévy, which also represents Frank Stella. […]
Florence Waters takes a closer look at the life and work of the woman behind the dots — the world’s most popular artist of 2015. Illustrated with works offered in our forthcoming Post-War and Contemporary Art auctions in London. 1. Painting became an act of rebellion for Kusama when she was just a child. Her […]
The first decades of the 20th century were among the most fruitful periods of artistic production of the modern era, especially for the still-fledgling art of photography. In New York, just after the turn of the century, a small circle of photographic visionaries revolved around the magnetic figure of Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946), whose influence as […]
Since its inception in the early 1800s, photography has been the site of immense change as it evolved from a scientific challenge to a world-shaking mass medium over the past 200 years. The digital revolution of the new millennium has brought on both never-before-seen capabilities and a new ubiquity of the photographed image, developments artists […]
We received the penned note from Miranda at the end of a punishing day. It was just two sentences long, but it raised a slew of legal issues and a few other concerns. “I am about to commission a sculpture of my husband, Carlo, for a 10-year anniversary,” she wrote. “Anything I should consider?” Oh, […]
In Vancouver this January, some important moments in contemporary art: A Canadian artist’s Turner Prize-nominated work has its North American premiere; collector/real estate guru Bob Rennie mounts his most complex show yet at his own gallery; and Brian Jungen returns to his seminal source material – sneakers. Western arts correspondent Marsha Lederman walks us through […]
America’s preëminent museum finally embraces contemporary art. Gertrude Stein’s famous remark that “you can be a museum or you can be modern, but you can’t be both” sounds archaic today. Every self-respecting urban center has its museum of modern art, and climate-change-denying business leaders will spend lavishly to get their name on its walls. The […]
What kind of person opens a private contemporary art museum? According to a new reportby the art collector database Larry’s List and the Chinese art market site Artron, he’s probably in his 60s or his 70s; he’s probably from South Korea, the US, or Germany; he probably founded his museum in the last 15 years; and he’s most […]
The maverick Scandinavian artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset focus on an art world staple—art fairs and their enduring popularity—in their latest show, The Well Fair, which opens at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) in Beijing on Sunday (24 January-17 April). The artists have transformed the main hall of UCCA into a fictional fair […]
It is easy to forget just how really good a painter Alex Katz can be. This is because he makes everything look so easy and natural. Coming of age during the early 1950s, at the height of Abstract Expressionism, the idea of showing struggle and existential angst became anathema to him. This is what he […]
Published on 23 Apr 2014 “The most intact world is the world of art. Nothing is better or more interesting to me than paintings.” Renowned German artist Georg Baselitz looks back on his life, his roots and inspirations, and considers where he is at today.
A towering figure of the postwar era, Ellsworth Kelly charted a singular and often solitary artistic path. He ventured to Europe twice—first as a camoufleur for the Ghost Army during World War II, then as a questing painter on the G.I. Bill—and brought back a bright and lively new style of American painting, seductive in […]