In the second installment of our series of the world’s most expensive living artists, we focus on the Germans. Artists from the country have seen unprecedented success in recent years. And high-flying auction results have been spread relatively evenly across media, if not between the sexes. Perhaps most interestingly, however, all of the Germans in […]
A Sigmar Polke Retrospective Opens at MoMA. Get confused is the first and last message of “Alibis: Sigmar Polke 1963-2010” at the Museum of Modern Art. And if you think, as I do, that some degree of continuing bafflement is a healthy reaction to art, this disorienting contact high of a show is for you. Polke, who […]
It’s official, the art market is picking up after years spent in a post-crash lull. According to TEFAF’s much discussed annual art market report, 2013 was the second best year on record, grossing €47.42 billion ($65.45). It was topped only by 2007, the vintage year of the last bubble. In this new series, artnet News […]
If the market for contemporary art is in danger of overheating, the first canary in the coal mine will surely be those fashionable young artists whose prices have been driven up by speculators over the past few years. Midseason auctions of affordable works by emerging names are telling temperature gauges for the contemporary market. Phillips’s […]
In the landmark June 2011 sale at Sotheby’s London, 34 works in the collection of German industrialist Count Christian Duerckheim went up for auction, among them seven paintings by the postwar German artist Sigmar Polke (who had died the year before). Of those paintings, one,Dschungel (Jungle) (1967), brought in $9,245,139, sailing past its high estimate of $6.4 million and […]
Monstrous as the Wall was, it offered artists like Noir – and musicians like Bowie – a dark subject matter that is lacking in safe consumerist societies. Has culture ever recovered from the fall of the Berlin Wall? Seriously. The division of Berlin and state surveillance endured by people trapped in the eastern half of the […]
If you bring up the name Stefan Simchowitz in the company of art dealers, collectors, advisors, or other professionals, you are bound to get a vigorous reaction. A producer of Hollywood movies like “Requiem for a Dream” and a co-founder of MediaVast, the photo-licensing site that was sold to Getty Images in 2007 for $200 million, Simchowitz is one of […]
He’s one of Britain’s greatest painters – and he rarely flings open his studio doors. David Levene swooshes in to glimpse the great man at work. Take a look!
He may be in his 80s and in need of a wheelchair to get about, but Howard Hodgkin still paints with staggering power. Jonathan Jones meets a ‘living master’. Howard Hodgkin sits in a wheelchair in his studio. Light falls through the glass roof on to big boards propped against white-washed brick walls. One by one, […]
From mysterious 30,000-year-old cave paintings to a ‘cathedral of the mind’ by Jackson Pollock, art critic Jonathan Jonesnames his favourite artworks of all time – and where in the world you can see them. What would make your top 10?
In laying bare his first pieces, the British painter reveals how he bubbled over with excitement in his student days – and teaches a valuable lesson in how artists can find their signature style. It takes a special kind of courage for a famous artist to drag 40-year-old apprentice pieces out of the attic and […]
LONDON — Before a standing-room crowd at Christie’s here last month, the bidding opened on an abstract painting filled with black scratching, “Burrito” scrawled across the top in bright yellow. The auctioneer announced that there were already 17 telephone and absentee buyers vying for the canvas, made three years ago by Oscar Murillo, who just […]
MAASTRICHT, the Netherlands — TEFAF Maastricht (The European Fine Art Fair) is in full swing, and during its 12-day run the fair will show off works from 275 of the world’s premier art and antiques dealers. Art+Auction Magazine editor-at-large and ARTINFO market reporter Judd Tully traveled to Maastricht to find out how much you can expect to pay for […]
Georg Baselitz, the veteran German artist who likes to bait, provoke and raise hackles, most recently with an interview in Der Spiegel in which he said women artists couldn’t paint (he mentioned the few exceptions, which was generous of him), is enjoying a triple billing in London. His new paintings at the Gagosian Gallery adopt the Abstract […]
The Britannia Street Gagosian gallery is currently showing the works of Georg Baselitz in Farewell Bill. The new Baselitz paintings are self-portraits that pay reverence to the great artist Willem de Kooning. Baselitz encountered Kooning’s gestural paintings, Woman I and Woman II, as a student in Germany in 1958. A traditional portrait depicts a realistic […]
Snow Day!
Did American painting exist before Abstract Expressionism? Not such a daft question if we don’t get to see any of it. Many will still argue that American painting before mid-century, with just a few exceptions, is really too derivative, too backward-looking to get excited about, and that it was photography that American artists really excelled […]
From his sculpture of a Hitler salute to his comments on women artists, Georg Baselitz has always been a provocative figure. After 50 years exploring the state of Germany, he tells Nicholas Wroe why he turned to America for his new show. In 1958 Georg Baselitz, then a 20-year-old art student recently arrived in West Berlin […]
We’ve been debating painting’s death for centuries now, and it seems we can’t quit. In 1839 the late French painter Paul Delaroche first dared to say those fateful words “painting is dead.” But even now nobody can agree if it’s dead; painting’s been reborn more times than we can count, thanks to critics who declare […]
Instead of catering to carefully selected museums and collectors, auction houses sell to the highest bidder. They find two people who want the same work and get them to bid as high as possible; often those who buy work will only sell it again in two years.