The gathering of works in Chelsea reconfigures the general sense of Twombly (1928-2011) as a lanky, slow-moving, ever-relaxed Southerner who worked in fits and starts and soaked up the good life on Italy’s Amalfi Coast or in Lexington, Va. — his birthplace, to which he returned in his later years. In its stead is a […]
The first time I saw Cy Twombly’s aphrodisiacal paintings, I felt the way Patti Smith felt when first hearing the Rolling Stones: “I was doing all my thinking between my legs.” Something unrecognizable and distorted within me quivered. Twombly’s fevered phosphorescent blooms of runny jellyfish chrysanthemums with elongated, pulpy, tentacle-like sacks dripping down; his iridescent […]
Rosalind Krauss misreads Twombly in more ways than I can enumerate. In her essay, “Cy was here: Cy’s up” (ArtForum, September 1994), Rosalind Krauss made this observation about Cy Twombly: Twombly “misreads” Pollock’s mark as graffiti, as violent, as a type of antiform. And this misreading becomes the basis of all of Twombly’s work. Thus […]
The innovative, iconoclastic curator Walter Hopps (1932-2005) was one of the most influential figures in mid-to-late-twentieth-century American art. He founded his first gallery in L.A. at the age of twenty-one and, at twenty-four, opened the Ferus Gallery with the artist Ed Kienholz, where they turned the spotlight on a new generation of West Coast artists. […]
What is like to live with a work by post-war master Cy Twombly? According to legendary filmmaker John Waters, it’s “great because every day when you pass it you think of his nerve. The audacity of him doing this.” Watch this video to find out more about John Waters’ longstanding admiration for the artist (it is […]
The dazzling, haunting ‘combines’ at the heart of Tate Modern’s forthcoming retrospective were part of a private game between Rauschenberg and his peers and sometime lovers, Cy Twombly and Jasper Johns. Robert Rauschenberg’s 1954 work Untitled is an upright wooden box supported by a white, colonial-era table leg over an open stage-like enclosure in which […]
“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 […]
The contemporary art market settled down to a steadier pace at Sotheby’s New York Wednesday evening, turning in a solid and respectable $294,850,000 sale for the 44 lots that sold. Ten of the 54 lots offered failed to sell for a trim buy-in rate by lot of 18.5 percent. Five works sold for more than $15 […]
You can’t fault art dealer Larry Gagosian’s taste. Not only has he commissioned a spacious and elegant new art gallery in London’s Mayfair, but it opens with a Cy Twombly exhibition. By the time Twombly died in 2011, he had become a figure of unique mystery and authority in modern art – an American who […]
The wait is over. After a 15-month delay, ballooning costs, and lawsuits, the Broad Museum is finally set to open this Sunday in downtown Los Angeles. The new 120,000 square foot institution houses the postwar and contemporary art collection of Eli and Edythe Broad. For the past four decades, the couple has had an outsized […]
It was a visibly emotional event for veteran art dealer Yvon Lambert. On July 10, Lambert celebrated the long-awaited inauguration of the newly-expanded space of the Collection Lambert in Avignon with high-profile guests and politicians in attendance, including French culture minister Fleur Pellerin. The permanent hanging of Lambert’s contemporary art collection in the newly-acquired Hôtel de […]
JOHN NEWSOM: So, how did you discover art? What was your ‘eureka’ moment? PATRICK PAINTER: Well, when I was 28, I was living in Paris, and I was working for an insurance company, Metropolitan Life. One day I said to myself, “I don’t know anything about art, so I’m gonna start looking at art.” It’s […]
Art dealer Larry Gagosian pushes the best work – Richard Serra, Cy Twombly, Richard Wright, Urs Fischer – and fills the gap in our public galleries with real taste and belief.Is the Gagosian empire like the Starbucks of contemporary art? A megalomaniac attempt to corner the art market? It may seem so, but this chain store of […]
At the Gagosian Gallery in King’s Cross, one Hans-Georg Bruno Kern, who changed his name to Baselitz after the Saxon village of Deutschbaselitz where he was born in 1938, also presents Farewell Bill, a suite of impressively large and loose self-portraits in honour of the great Abstract Expressionist painter Willem de Kooning. If Baselitz is […]
The truth of the art market is that art sells better at auction than it does in the galleries. This is primarily due to the “new buyer” phenomenon, which for the time being is what rules the day. All hail the rule of the auction season! Here’s my take on the recent sales in London. […]
London—The contemporary art market continued its steady climb at Sotheby’s on Wednesday night, with a sale dominated by a strong grouping of paintings by international blue chip artists that brought in £87,915,500 ($144,550,665). Ten of the 57 lots offered went unsold, for a trim buy-in rate by lot of 17.5 percent and seven percent by value. Twenty […]
Tomilson Hill and his wife, Janine, have been outfitting? their Upper East Side home with the best of the best that has come to market for decades. The Wall Street financier has an extensive network of dealers and auction-house specialists on the lookout for pieces that might appeal to the couple. The Hill’s collecting strategy: choreographing works […]