Sotheby’s (June 16, 2023) – Morning Crescent and J.Y.M. Seated II are two seminal paintings by Frank Auerbach that represent the artist’s celebrated investigation into the genres of portraiture and the cityscape.
Executed eighteen years apart, both works exemplify Auerbach’s expressive use and colour and a faultless display of decisive and heavily impasto brushwork. Mornington Crescent is an incredibly rare and large-scale example from Auerbach’s 1960s output, and belongs to his ambitious and highly acclaimed body of landscapes.
This work ranks among the largest paintings in Auerbach’s catalogue raisonné and possesses a chromatic register that is unsurpassed. J.Y.M. Seated II is an important portrait of one of Frank Auerbach’s most celebrated sitters, Juliet Yardley Mills.
Frank Helmut Auerbach is a German-British painter. Born in Germany, he has been a naturalised British subject since 1947. He is considered one of the leading names in the School of London, with fellow artists Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud.
Sotheby’s (June 12, 2023) – Hélène Leloup is one of the art world’s true pioneers, bringing together a spirit of adventure, a detailed anthropological approach and deep knowledge to become one of the foremost specialists in African and Oceanic art in Paris and New York.
Now aged 96, Hélène is regarded as France’s most important and passionate dealer of sub-Saharan and Oceanic art, an adventurer and explorer, ground-breaking gallerist and collector, and eminent specialist in Mbembe and Dogon art, ever since her first foray to Dakar in 1952.
Sotheby’s (June 5, 2023) – Trained in the school of Art Deco decorators and sculptors, Diego Giacometti was equally attached to the discipline of pre-WWII production standards as to the classical artistic vocabulary deriving from ancient Greece, Egypt and Etruscan decorative arts .
The eminent history and personal connection of these tables and lamps to the artist and one of his dearest friends echo the oeuvre of Diego Giacometti itself— a sumptuous and timeless universe in bronze filled with the unique character and artistic prolificity of a true poet.
The featured ”Racine” Guéridon in particular figures as one of Diego’s most rare and original creations in bronze. The piece shows the sculptor’s prowess at skillfully adapting an organic motif into a strikingly abstract and perfectly balanced composition, which is simultaneously sculptural in its intent and highly functional.
Sotheby’s (May 16, 2023) – Vice Chairman of Global Fine Arts, Simon Shaw, discusses a few extraordinary works coming to Sotheby’s this May from the Ambroise Vollard Collection, including Paul Gauguin’s Nature morte avec pivoines de chine et mandoline.
An exquisite example of Gauguin’s unbound creative spirit, Nature morte avec pivoines de chine et mandoline is filled with the sort of rich, jewel-like hues and striking tonal and textural contrasts that characterize the artist’s greatest works. The present painting was executed in 1885 at a watershed moment in Gauguin’s career, during which time he began to move away from the Impressionist aesthetic that had previously influenced his painting toward a new and more expressive stylistic idiom.
Expanding upon the bold coloration and defiant brushwork pioneered in works like Nature morte avec pivoines de chine et mandoline, Gauguin soon became a leading figure in the Post-Impressionist movement.
Sotheby’s (May 6, 2023) – Fraught with chilling grandeur, Spider from 1996 is the ultimate embodiment of Louise Bourgeois’ singular contribution to the history of Modern Art.
Among the earliest monumental iterations of Bourgeois’ Spiders, the present work represents the absolute zenith of her artistic practice and the most ambitious embodiment of her signature motif; decades later, her towering Spiders stand among the most iconic sculptures of the twentieth century.
In its elegant yet otherworldly presence, Bourgeois’ spellbinding Spider speaks to the conceptual concerns at the very heart of her oeuvre: an unflinching confrontation of her own emotions and psyche, translated into sculptural form.
Sotheby’s (May 3, 2023) – ‘Jardin devant le Mas Debray’ captures this pivotal moment in summer of 1887 where color, subject and paint handling crystallized into Van Gogh’s mature style, one that would flourish in the three years remaining of his life in Paris, Arles, Saint-Rémy-de-Provence and Auvers-sur-Oise.
It was during this period of time, from 1887 to 1890, that Van Gogh’s greatest masterpieces were created, forever changing in the history of modern art. Surrounded by artists, dancers, musicians, actors and writers in Montmartre, Van Gogh abandoned the dark palette that dominated many of his early paintings in Holland and replaced it with a newfound love of color.
Sotheby’s (May 1, 2023) – Returning each season to live and paint in Truro elevated Hopper’s art, allowing him to concentrate on the simplification of forms and the depth of both light and color woven into the surrounding landscape.
Both his technical approach to painting and his perception of the world from 1930 onwards are greatly informed by the Cape. Cobb’s Barns, South Truro derives its bright palette and topographical features from Hopper’s immediate environment, and is emblematic of the profound influence that life in South Truro had on his manner of painting.
Group of Houses, dated 1923-24, stems from a pivotal stage in the development of Edward Hopper’s career. Residential homes occupy much of Hopper’s subject matter in these early watercolors, and Group of Houses is no exception. These charming saltbox houses are typical for the Cape Ann region, whose architectural style reflects its coastal New England atmosphere.
The Battery, Charleston, S.C., dated 1929, is the result of Hopper’s three-week stay in the charming southern city, which is renowned for its Georgian-style architecture and cobblestone streets lined with lush palm trees. His Charlestown pictures possess an inherently tropical feeling, which sets them apart from his otherwise New England-focused oeuvre.
Red Barn in Autumn Landscape is among the limited number of watercolors that Hopper completed during the fall of 1927 in Vermont, and embodies the rustic quality of the New England scenery that drew Hopper to this region in the first place. Hopper routinely sketched his surroundings in coastal towns on the Cape or along the Maine shore, but Red Barn in Autumn Landscape is quite unique in that it captures a specific fall moment as the leaves gradually fade from green to burnt orange and red. The present work is emblematic of the simplicity and charm that characterize Hopper’s New England watercolors.
BERRY CAMPBELL GALLERY (April 30, 2023): An exhibition of Abstract Expressionist Ethel Schwabacher (1903-1984). Schwabacher joins the gallery’s stable of women artists whose ambitious, independent, and insightful art is essential to a complete historical understanding of the ‘downtown’ art scene in the 1950s.
Many of the thirteen works have not been on view since they were shown at one of her five solo exhibitions at Betty Parsons Gallery, including the large-scale center piece to the show entitled, Prometheus (1959). Ethel Schwabacher: Woman in Nature(Paintings from the 1950s) focuses on Schwabacher’s unique brand of abstraction, which is characterized by both automatic drawing and sweeping brushstrokes that swirl across the surface of the canvas and which explores themes of motherhood, landscape, and creativity.
As part of the resurgence of women artists, Ethel Schwabacher was one of the twelve women artists included in the landmark traveling exhibition Women of Abstract Expressionism organized by the Denver Art Museum in 2016. Concurrently with the Berry Campbell exhibition, Action! Gesture! Paint! is on view at the Whitechapel Gallery in London featuring 91 international women artists, including a major Ethel Schwabacher painting from the 1950s.
Sotheby’s (April 28, 2023) –Looking for some inspiration for your next museum visit? This month, we’re taking a tour of six of the world’s most exciting and innovative museum exhibitions with Tim Marlow, Director of the Design Museum, London.
Doris Salcedo – Fondation Beyeler, Riehen, 21 May–17 September 2023 – Salcedo is a Colombian-born artist, whose central subject is human trauma and tragedy. Though much of her work emanates from the violent conflict over the last three decades in her native land, its resonance is universal. Doris Salcedo presents eight major series of works from across her career – from untitled pieces of wooden furniture filled with concrete to the remarkable Palimpsest in which the names of over 300 refugees and migrants who died at sea quite literally weep before our eyes.
Vincent van Gogh 2023 marks the 170th anniversary of Vincent van Gogh. Three exhibitions opening this month look set to enhance our understanding of the great Dutch painter:
Van Gogh and the Avant Garde The Art Institute of Chicago 14 May–4 September 2023 – Van Gogh and the Avant Garde takes the modern landscape as its central subject and looks at how the artist – along with Seurat, Signac and others – turned his attention from urban Parisian life to wrestling with the surrounding countryside with a formal inventiveness that set the tone for the development of Modernism.
Van Gogh’s Cypresses The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 22 May–27 August 2023 – From the religious connotation of trees in graveyards to their role as the backdrop of his incarceration at the asylum in Saint-Remy, the artist’s flame-like evergreens will be presented with all their evocative resonance in Van Gogh’s Cypresses,
Van Gogh in Auvers. His Final Months Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam 12 May–3 September 2023 – The unsurpassable Van Gogh Museum will celebrate its own 50th anniversary with Van Gogh in Auvers. His Final Months – an exhibition delving into the tremendously productive final period of his life, in which he made several of his most renowned masterpieces.
Sotheby’s (April 11, 2023) – This collection was put together by a couple of passionate collectors who favored avant-garde works from the 1930s and 1940s, thus creating an extremely harmonious whole that perfectly reflects the taste of an era and the artistic revolutions that went through it.
The works have remained preserved in a Parisian apartment for almost sixty years, and their appearance on the market constitutes an unprecedented opportunity for collectors today”. Says Aurélie Vandevoorde, Director of the Impressionist and Modern Art Department.
Unveiling an unprecedented group of 12 works by some of the greatest masters of the 20th century, which include artists such as Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger, Nicolas de Staël & Georges Braque, “Le Souffle Moderne” Collections presents an exceptional ensemble embodying the artistic avant-gardes of the 1930s and 1940s.
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