Martin Lewis, ‘Quarter of Nine, Saturday’s Children M.78)’, signed in pencil and on plate, 9.75×12.5 inches. Image courtesy Clark’s Fine Art Auctioneers Inc.
SHERMAN OAKS, Calif. – Clark’s Fine Art & Auctioneers’ next art auction, on Feb. 8, 2009, features an outstanding etching by Australian-born American printmaker Martin Lewis (1881-1962). Titled Quarter of Nine, Saturday’s Children, it is a strong impression, signed in pencil and on the plate, and measures 9¾ inches by 12½ inches.
Martin Lewis (1881-1962) left home at the age of 15, subsequently studying art under Julian Ashton at the art society’s school in Sydney. In 1900 he left Australia for the United States, settling in New York. There he found work in commercial illustration; his first job was painting stage decorations for William McKinley’s Presidential campaign of 1900.
Lewis’ earliest known etching is dated 1915, however the level of skill exhibited in the work suggests he had been working in the medium for some time previously.
In 1920 he decided to travel to Japan, where for eight months he learned oil and watercolor painting. In 1925, he returned to etching and produced most of his best-known works in the 10-year period to follow. Particularly noteworthy were his series on Japan and New York.
‘Dutch Interior (I)’ is Miró’s rendition of Hendrick Martensz Sorgh’s The Lute Player. Done in 1928, this oil on canvas measures 36 1/8 inches by 28 3/4 inches.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Department of Imaging Services. Copyright 2008 Successio Miró / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.
The 1918 wartime tune How ’Ya Gonna Keep ’Em Down on the Farm (After They’ve Seen Paree) was all about U.S. doughboys returning home from Europe, but it might well have applied to Spanish artist Joan Miro – minus the gaiety.
Miró’s series of paintings on unprimed canvas left broad areas of exposed surface as part of the composition of the works. Un Oiseau poursuit une abeille et la baisse, 1927, was done in oil, aqueous medium and feathers on canvas, 32 7/8 inches by 40 1/4 inches. Private collection. CNAC/MNAM/Dis. Reunion des Musees Nationaux/Art Resource, NY. Copyright 2008 Successio Miro / Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.
Born on April 20,1893 in Barcelona, the capital of Catalonia, Spain, Joan Miró studied art at a local academy. His ties to his native land and to the family farm at Montroig, a rural coastal village, became a source of inspiration.
In 1918, Miró and a few young artists founded Agrupació Courbet, a group opposed to the conservative traditions in Catalan art. His large painting titled Standing Nude, done in 1918 in Barcelona, showed strong influences of Fauvism and Cubism. In the summer of 1918, however, Miró began painting only landscapes in and around Montroig.
The Vegetable Garden with Donkey and The Wagon Tracks, both 1918 works, show the painstaking exactness of his so-called detailistic phase. The Farm, 58 3/4 inches by 52 3/4 inches, done in 1921-22, in which Miró chronicled minute details, has been described as the highest achievement in his poetic realism.
The biomorphic forms in Painting 1933 took shape after Miró created a corresponding collage composed of printed illustrations. The oblong figure eight extending from the center to the lower right was an airplane propeller in the collage. Graydon Wood. Copyright 2008 Successio Miró / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.
In early 1920, Joan Miró visited Paris for the first time. From that point on he ordinarily spent the first half of every year in Paris and the rest of the year in Montroig and Barcelona. In Paris, Miró met André Breton and other participants of the Surrealist group in 1924. Miró exhibited in the first showing of Surrealist art in 1926, although he did not become a member of the group.
As the decade progressed, Miró’s pictures became increasingly abstract, and his forms more organic. These paintings are constructed freely with schematic lines and opaque shapes on plain grounds. In these works Miró moved, as he later said, “beyond painting.”
Described as a deliberate artist who spent much time on his works, Joan Miró was highly productive. He began making it a practice to plan blocks of work into series of alternating styles.
Indicating he intended to ‘push this painting to the limit,’ Miró worked steadily on Still Life with Old Shoe for four months in 1937. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Department of Imaging Services. Copyright 2008 Successio Miró / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.
The Museum of Modern Art in New York examined this practice in an exhibition titled Joan Miró: Painting and Anti-Painting, 1927-1937. Unlike numerous Miró retrospectives, this exhibition examined his practices and strategies during a transformational period in which he attacked the conventions of painting.
Beginning with the notorious claim Miró made in 1927 that he wanted to “assassinate painting,” the exhibition explored 12 of artist’s series over the next 10 years.
The exhibition was an in-depth look at a decade’s worth of Joan Miró’s work, “created during a period of economic and political turmoil, illuminating the way his drive to assassinate painting led him to reinvigorate, reinvent and radicalize his art. The resulting body of work is at times willfully ugly and at others savagely beautiful,” said Anne Umland, curator of the Department of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA.
The Rope and People I, 41 1/4 inches by 29 3/8 inches, is one of a series from 1935-36 that Miró described as a critical self-review. The work is oil on cardboard with a coil of rope mounted on wood. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Department of Imaging Services. Copyright 2008 Successio Miró / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.
Opening with seven raw paintings on unprimed canvas from 1927, the exhibition moved to Miró’s collage-objects of 1928 collectively known as “the Spanish Dancers.” His Portrait of a Dancer is composed only of a feather, a small cork and a hatpin mounted on a large field of white.
The next series from 1928-1929 is called Dutch Interiors and Imaginary Portraits. One of the works is based on a postcard reproduction of a 17th-century of a lute player – gone electric. In it, Miró rejects the ambition of past artists to deceive viewers into believing that the painted images they see are real. The series of large pictures represented the last paintings Miró would create for about two years, as he moved on to making assembled objects.
“Often Miró’s art is seen to stand for all that is spontaneous, lyrical or poetic, improvisational within surrealism,” said Umland. “I think that when you go back and look at the process you realize that with all great artists the complexities involved and sort of the rigor and calculations that went into creating things that looked anything but preplanned is something that adds to our complicating the idea of who Miró was and what his ambitions were.”
Miró chose an old technique of painting on copper to create The Two Philosophers, which was a test of his technical virtuosity. It is one of a series of 12 small-format paintings on either Masonite or copper. The Art Institute of Chicago. Copyright 2008 Successio Miro / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.
Miró planned and created these series as the U.S. stock market crash of 1929 spread to an economic crisis across Europe. Miró had enjoyed a measure of success avant-garde circles in Paris, but when his dealer dropped him, he was forced to return to Barcelona. “He had to use the room he was born in – as he remarked with some irony – as his studio,” said Umland, noting Miró’s tenuous economic stability during this period.
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It might occur to some that Miró put together these wildly varying series to see what might stick in the art market, but Umland dismissed the notion.
“I think he was trying to undo himself and his talent constantly during these years. Sort of like, if I can do one thing well, I’m going to try to do the opposite in the next series,” said Umland. “There wasn’t a predictable, marketable, commodifying Miró style.” Unlike his contemporary and countryman Pablo Picasso, Miró was married to one woman his entire life, Pilar Juncosa. “There wasn’t constant change in that circumstance,” said Umland. “I do think with Miró there was always the sense that he needed routine and a firm foundation, as he would say, to leap higher for his art to go further.”
Portrait of a Dancer, 1928, was once described as ‘the barest picture imaginable.’ The austere work consists of a feather, cork and hatpin on a painted wood panel, 39 3/8 inches by 31 1/2 inches. CNAC/MNAM/Dis. Reunion des Musees Nationaux/Art Resource, NY. Copyright 2008 Successio Miro / Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.
With civil war breaking out in Spain in July 1936, Miró left Barcelona for Paris before the end of October. His wife and their daughter, Dolores, joined him in December. They would not return to Spain for four years.
In January 1927, Miró announced his departure from planning a series and thrust himself into work on a painting titled Still Life with Old Shoe. Described as an incandescent, hallucinatory painting, Miró’s masterpiece is often compared to Picasso’s Guernica, a painting protesting the bombing of that Basque town. While Miró’s painting is not based on history, the haunting landscape resonates with the impending doom associated with World War II.
Hoping to avoid the threat of war, Miró moved to the village of Varengeville on the coast of Normandy. When the Nazis bombed Normandy in May 1940, Miró and his family fled to Barcelona and Montroig. He took with him the first 10 gouaches collectively known as “the Constellations,” which represents the height his creativity. He completed the series of 23 paintings in Spain.
Miró’s Constellations were among the first works of art coming out of Europe at the close of the war and influenced a generation of American painters known as Abstract Expressionists.
The Pastels on Flocked Paper series reflects Miro’s reaction to political and civil strife in Spain in October 1934. Woman (The Opera Singer), 42 inches by 28 inches, illustrates what the artist described as aggressiveness through color. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Department of Imaging Services. Copyright 2008 Successio Miró / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.
After the war Miró directed his creative talents toward sculpture, ceramics and printmaking. He became involved with many public commissions and projects, including large murals and sculptures.
Having moved to Palma de Mallorca in Spain in 1956, Miró christened his new studio in 1961 by painting three large paintings: Blue I, Blue II and Blue III. The group represents a compression of Miró’s serial approach to making art.
Late in life Miró worked on a series of paintings that were freer and done with less planning than anything he had ever done before. Miró died at age 90 on Dec. 25, 1983.
Celebrating the centenary of the artist’s birth, the Museum of Modern Art mounted a retrospective that attempted to reveal Miró’s full range as an artist. The scope of MoMA’s recent Miró exhibition focused on only 10 years of his formative career, but Umland believes it was no less forceful.
“What it did reveal was the radical range of Miró’s experimentation … such variety in themes, of materials used, types of iconography (and) the relation of the politics to economic times,” said Umland. “Looking at Miró’s work with hallucinatory color, and then with the most stripped-down sort of bare abstract language imaginable; of works of great refined delicacy in contrast to those that were far more brute, I think that it’s that sore of constant pushing and undoing of his own talent, reinventing and risk-taking that was made evident in a way that hasn’t been done previously.”
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Twin Palms, designed for Frank Sinatra, is lean and spare. Built in 1947, it was the architect’s first residential commission.
Photo courtesy of the Palm Springs Bureau of Tourism.
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The architect was born and raised in the Midwest but became inexorably linked with Palm Springs, Calif., where his cool, modernist designs became the toast of mid-century style. Among his iconic visions are homes which pioneered open floor plans, a relationship with the outdoors and intimate socializing.
“They are party houses, built for entertaining,” said Michael Stern, curator of the Palm Springs Art Museum and a friend of Williams, who died in 2005 at age 95.
Stewart was only 38 in May, 1947, when ascendant crooner Frank Sinatra sauntered into his office. Fresh from filming On the Town, Sinatra wore a jaunty sailor’s cap. Between slurps from a ice cream cone, he asked the architect to build him a Georgian-style mansion—in time for a New Year’s Eve bash.
Williams presented Sinatra with two sets of drawings, one for the Georgian-style home and another for a long, low four-bedroom house in which every room has a view of a large swimming pool shaped like a piano.
Happily, the singer chose the modernist house, vacationing there first with his wife Nancy and three children, and later with his second wife, actress Ava Gardner. Sinatra and Gardner left behind a reminder of their tempestuous relationship, a crack in the bathroom sink made when Sinatra broke a bottle of whiskey on the porcelain during an argument.
Sinatra installed a two-story flagpole on the property, hoisting the Jolly Roger to signal the cocktail hour. As the sun began to set, a pergola over the patio cast shadows on the pool that mimicked piano keys.
“Stew always said the piano was never his intention, although it certainly looks like it,” Stern said.
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More residential commissions followed as Palm Springs became a haven for the hip—and for contemporary architects, including Don Wexler, Albert Frey and John Porter Clark, Williams’ closest friend.
The exterior of the Edris house is clad in wood and stone, with deep roof overhangs to cool the house beneath the desert sun. Photo courtesy of J.R. Roberts.
Perhaps his finest residential project is the gracious and graceful home he built in 1954 for Seattle hoteliers William and Marjorie Edris, recently designated a historic building by the Palm Springs City Council. The Edris house is lean and spare, in keeping with its stark desert surroundings.
“There is not a wasted movement in that house,” Stern said. “Everything flows like the perfect puzzle, each piece fitting together.” He designed his own home in 1956, in a northern enclave of Palm Springs where most of the neighbors were other modernist architects. Mostly wood and glass, the house was pure Williams, with a wide, V-shape roof that created shade for outdoor living and a garden that cascaded into the living room.
“It was a smaller house, beautifully situated, facing the mountains,” said Sidney Williams, assistant curator of the Palm Springs Art Museum and wife of the architect’s son, Erik. “Stew was incredibly sensitive to the outdoors.”
Williams’ clean, lean designs were naturalistic, integrating redwood and rock.
“He brought natural materials to modernism,” said Peter Moruzzi, an architectural historian and founder of the Palm Springs Modern Committee. “He built for the desert, with deep overhangs to shade the house from the sun.”
This cathedral in Norway, constructed from indigenous woods in the Scandinavian forests, was a major influence in Williams’ work. Photo Courtesy of Michael Stern.
Wood might have not been the first choice for homes in the desert, where trees are scarce. Williams’ inspiration sprang from the austere cathedrals of Scandinavia, where he studied as a young architect.
“Those churches are all about wood—and he loved them,” Stern said.
The architect’s Scandinavian sensibilities are reflected in the Mountain Station of the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway. Instead of the desert sand, the landscape is dusted with snow. The wood and stone of the exterior mirror the pines and boulders surrounding the site. In 1976, Williams designed the Palm Springs Art Museum, which the architect integrated the structure into a mountain, conjuring the image of the mouth of a pyramid.
E. Stewart Williams designed the iconic Palm Springs Art Museum in harmony with the mountain behind it. An illuminated fountain adds to the drama of the museum at night. Photo courtesy of the Palm Springs Art Museum.
“The rocks on the mountain have a beautiful patina they’ve acquired over the millennia,” Sidney Williams noted. “Inside, the galleries are incredibly friendly to people.”
By them, Palm Spring was evolving from a retreat into a full-fledged city. Building codes prohibited structures more than 35 feet in height. Williams’ creative solution was to place the museum’s outdoor sculpture gardens and theater below grade.
Twenty years later, Williams came out of retirement to draw plans for a third-story addition to the museum. He was 86.
“It was absolutely seamless,” Stern says, “like everything Stew designed.”
Blueprint of an Architect
E. Stewart Williams. Image courtesy Michael Stern.
Emerson Stewart Williams was born in 1909, an era dominated by ornate Victorian architecture. Before he reached his 40th birthday, he would design buildings that were sleek and pared down to their essence, as spare as the desert from which they sprang.
“I got to know him late in life, when he was well into his 90s,” recalled Michael Stern, curator of the Palm Springs Art Museum, who has written widely on the modernist movement. “He was a real sophisticate, Ivy League educated, from a very prosperous family.” After graduating from Cornell, Williams toured Scandinavia for six months. He fell in love with both the clean-lined, nature-oriented architecture and a young Swedish woman, Mari, who became his wife of 60 years.
His father, Harry Williams, was also a distinguished architect. In their native Dayton, Ohio, the elder Williams designed a house for the Wright brothers and the headquarters for National Cash Register Company.
In 1934, the wife of the comptroller of NCR invested in a commercial development in Palm Springs, where she enjoyed her winter vacations. She brought in Harry Williams to design the historic La Plaza Shopping Center. He stayed on and was soon joined by his sons, Stew and his younger brother, Roger, in the firm Williams, Williams & Williams.
Throughout a long and productive career, Williams created stunning, sophisticated homes for the social luminaries of Palm Springs, as well as buildings enjoyed by the man on the street, including the Oasis office building, Santa Fe Savings & Loan, Mountaintop Station of the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway, and the entire campus of Crafton Hills College in Yucaipa, California.
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Mid-15th century ring from French-Flanders in the Gothic International Style, probably made at the French court. Image courtesy Les Enluminures – Wartski.
LONDON – Roman to Renaissance, an exhibition devoted to a private collection of 35 rings dating from 300 to 1600 AD, will be staged by the Paris gallery Les Enluminures at the venue of London dealer Wartski, 14 Grafton St., May 12-22.
The collection comprises fine examples of rings from the Merovingian, Byzantine, Medieval and Renaissance periods including marriage rings, seal rings, stirrup rings, tart mould rings, iconographic rings, merchant rings and gemstone rings. This exhibition presents an extraordinary opportunity to acquire a fully documented collection.
The collection was formed over two decades by Sandra Hindman, professor emerita of art history at Northwestern University and owner of Les Enluminures, a gallery in Paris and Chicago specialising in illuminated manuscripts and works of art from the Middle Ages and Renaissance.
Starting with a small French private collection, Hindman has assembled a coherent group that represents the high points in the history of the ring from the Late Antique period to the end of the Renaissance, including key examples of museum quality.
The tradition of collecting rings dates to the 17th century when their significance was first appreciated in Europe. Rings shed light on vanished worlds and bring their former owners and the skilled craftsmen back to life. Some rings are intensely personal, particularly betrothal, wedding and mourning rings, while others denote the status of their owners: monarchs, nobles, those who held high office in the church, for example, and rich merchants.
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) – The U.S. Attorney’s Office and investigators with the Bureau of Land Management returned an ancient clay jar to its rightful owners Wednesday, nearly three years after two men tried to steal it from an archaeological site in western New Mexico.
Dignitaries of Acoma Pueblo accepted the jar, called an olla, during a brief ceremony.
“This pot that sits before us today has a lot of meaning behind it,” Acoma Pueblo Gov. Chandler Sanchez said. “It’s a part of our ancestors. It’s a part of who we are as Acoma people. We certainly with open arms accept it back.”
The jar was made sometime between 900 and 1250 A.D. Archeologists believe it may have originally served as a vessel for food left for travelers along the Zuni-Acoma trail.
An Acoma conservation officer, Norman Torivio, spotted a suspicious vehicle near the El Malpais area south of Grants in April 2006. After scanning the badlands with binoculars, he spotted two men walking in the distance. One carried something. Continue reading
LONDON (AP) – British police charged a book dealer Wednesday with stealing a rare First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays from a university library a decade ago.
Police in Durham in northeast England say the 1623 volume is worth about 3 million pounds ($4.2 million). It was among seven centuries-old books and manuscripts stolen from a display case at Durham University library in 1998.
The book was recovered after a man walked into the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C. last June and asked for its authenticity to be checked. Library staff contacted police, who traced the man who had brought in the book and arrested Raymond Scott, 51, a book and antiques dealer from the Durham area.
Scott has denied theft and told reporters that he bought the volume in Cuba.
He was charged with theft and handling stolen goods in relation to the folio, and with four other counts of theft and handling stolen goods relating to a driver’s license, credit cards and a personal organizer. Continue reading
