The elegant entrance to Hong Kong Auction Gallery at the Lefcourt Colonial Building, 295 Madison Ave., in New York City. Image courtesy of Hong Kong Auction Gallery.
NEW YORK (ACNI) – The Year of the Dragon will sweep into Manhattan with an energetic roar in 2012, as LiveAuctioneers begins its marketing association with a prominent name in Asian art – Hong Kong Auction Gallery. As of Jan. 1, the New York auction house with deeply rooted ties to both Hong Kong and Mainland China will be joining the roster of 1,200+ clients who choose LiveAuctioneers for their Internet live-bidding services. The company’s auction debut on LiveAuctioneers is set for Sunday, March 18.
In 2012, Hong Kong Auction Gallery will celebrate its 10th anniversary, and with this milestone comes a name change. As of the New Year, Hong Kong Auction Gallery will be operating under the name “Gianguan Auctions.” While ownership and soft use of the original Hong Kong Auction Gallery name will be retained during the transition period, the “d/b/a” of Gianguan Auctions will be introduced as the firm’s primary identity.
As gallery associate Mary Ann Lum explained, the name “Hong Kong Auction Gallery” had caused confusion with some of their bidders in the past. “There have been winning bidders in Hong Kong who thought they could come over to the gallery to pick up their purchases,” she said. “We had to tell them that we are located on Madison Avenue in New York and that we would have to ship their purchases to them.” Eventually the decision was made to change the company’s name to prevent any further misunderstanding.
The name “Gianguan” refers to the reign of Emperor Taizong of Tang (Chinese Jan. 23, 599 – July 10, 649) – the Golden Period in Chinese history. It is a fitting new name for an auction house whose performance over the past decade has been “golden,” with many world record prices to its credit.
Hong Kong Auction Gallery/Gianguan Auctions operates under the direction of Chinese-born Kwong Lum, who recently was named Chief Consultant to Beijing’s National Museum. This appointment is an acknowledgement of Lum’s reputation as one of the foremost experts in traditional and modern Chinese art and antiques.
In his own right, Lum is a renowned scholar and accomplished artist, calligrapher and poet. To honor his achievements in art and literature, and in recognition of his success in implementing cultural exchange between the East and West, the Chinese Government recently built a 5,500-square-meter art museum for Kwong Lum. Lum asked that the museum be built in his hometown of Jiangmen, in Guangdong Province, rather than in Beijing, where it would have assumed a higher public profile. The Kwong Lum Museum of Art is the first art institution ever built by the Chinese Government for a living artist.
As a boy, Kwong Lum was a painting prodigy. At the age of nine, under the guidance of his art teacher, he began collecting ancient Chinese artwork. His early Sai Yang Tang collection included a dozen 3,300-year-old jade and animal-bone seals of the Shang Dynasty’s King Wuding, a hand scroll of calligraphy by the Northern Song master Huang Tingjian, and paintings and albums of the early Qing Dynasty (1645-1911) artists Shi Tao and Ba Da Shan Ren. In 1957, he took his entire collection of priceless art treasures with him to Canada, where he studied at the Ontario College of Art.
In 1964, Kwong Lum moved to the United States. He has spent more than four decades in New York City, working, painting, writing, collecting and studying traditional artwork, as well as organizing cultural activities to present China’s traditional art legacy to a Western audience.
In 2001, Lum and a group of noted American art connoisseurs launched Hong Kong International Auction House in Hong Kong, conducting auctions of traditional Chinese art in Asia and America on a seasonal basis.
“We consider our auctions an inseparable part of our longterm goal of promoting the cultural and economic exchanges between China and the outside world,” Lum told interviewers from New York Chinese-Language Television and China’s CCTV.
In 2004, Lum opened a New York office in the Lefcourt Building on Madison Avenue and initiated a schedule of quarterly auctions. Now those auctions of premier-quality Chinese and Asian art and antiques will be accessible to art buyers worldwide via Internet live bidding through LiveAuctioneers.com, commencing March 18.
To contact Hong Kong Auction Gallery/Gianguan Auctions, call 212-867-7288. Visit the company’s website at www.gianguanauctions.com.
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Copyright 2011 Auction Central News International. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
ADDITIONAL IMAGES OF NOTE
The elegant entrance to Hong Kong Auction Gallery at the Lefcourt Colonial Building, 295 Madison Ave., in New York City. Image courtesy of Hong Kong Auction Gallery.Kwong Lum is not only Hong Kong Auction Gallery’s auctioneer, he is also an artist, calligrapher, poet and advisor to the National Museum of China. He is the first living artist to be honored with a museum in his name in that country. Image courtesy of Hong Kong Auction Gallery.A view of the serene interior of Kong Kong Auction Gallery. Image courtesy of Hong Kong Auction Gallery.
A highlight from one of Hong Kong Auction Gallery’s past sales. Image courtesy of Hong Kong Auction Gallery.A highlight from one of Hong Kong Auction Gallery’s past sales. Image courtesy of Hong Kong Auction Gallery.A highlight from one of Hong Kong Auction Gallery’s past sales. Image courtesy of Hong Kong Auction Gallery.A highlight from one of Hong Kong Auction Gallery’s past sales. Image courtesy of Hong Kong Auction Gallery.A highlight from one of Hong Kong Auction Gallery’s past sales. Image courtesy of Hong Kong Auction Gallery.
Leigh Keno is one of the most immediately recognizable figures in the antiques and fine art trade. He presides at the podium at all sales conducted by Keno Auctions. Image courtesy of Keno Auctions.
NEW YORK (ACNI) – Antiques were always an accepted part of life for Leigh Keno, the American fine and decorative arts expert who is president of Keno Auctions in New York City.
As a toddler, Leigh went everywhere with his antiques-dealing parents Norma and Ronald Keno – shows, flea markets, tag sales, garage sales – and by the time he was a pre-schooler, he, too, had the antiques “bug.”
Living on an idyllic 100-acre property in Mohawk, New York, Leigh spent much of his free time with his twin brother, Leslie, combing the area around the family home to see what “treasures” the earth might offer. “We even picked up dead bees to study and categorize for our insect collection,” Leigh recalled.
In time, the siblings would receive bicycles, which they used in their search for riverbed bottle dumps and dilapidated barns, from whose boards they would pull the old hinges and hardware that formed one of their first meaningful collections. But it was at shows that the enfants terribles of the antiques business learned their best lessons, by observing the experts and even testing the waters as fledgling dealers.
“By the time we were 11 or 12, we had our own blanket we would lay out at shows to sell our joint inventory of merchandise,” Leigh recalled. “That was our part of the booth. Sometimes we paid our parents part of the booth rent, and we kept records of every purchase and sale and always issued receipts.” In the diary of transactions kept by Leigh and his brother was written the prophetic notation “We are antique dealers.”
“I can remember us pulling on our L.L. Bean boots to comb the muddy turf at Brimfield after a rain,” Leigh said. “During the very early hours we’d walk around with our flashlights, shining them into vehicles to look for ‘sleepers.’ On plenty of occasions that’s just what we’d find – dealers trying to get some sleep. I remember one time seeing an arm raise up from inside a vehicle and someone saying, ‘Who the heck is that?’”
Not surprisingly, Leigh developed an early interest in folk art and Americana, since those were his parents’ specialties. His favorite category was stoneware, and while still a preteen, Leigh and his brother precociously amassed a collection of the distinctive pottery, including many rare examples. The boys’ collection remained in the Keno home until it was sold – with reluctance – to pay college expenses.
Leigh earned his stripes the proper way. He graduated with a B.A. in art history from Hamilton College and went on to become a graduate fellow at Historic Deerfield and visiting scholar at Wintherthur Museum.
He later worked as the Director of American Furniture Department at Doyle Galleries in New York City, and was Vice President of Appraisals and Specialist in the American Furniture Department at Christie’s New York.
In 1986, Leigh opened a gallery specializing in 18th to 20th-century American furniture and decorative arts, which he continued to operate until founding Keno Auctions in 2009.
Leigh is a popular speaker on the lecture circuit and appears regularly on the PBS Television’s Antiques Roadshow. In 2000, Leigh co-authored Hidden Treasures: Searching for Masterpieces of American Furniture, which recounts some of his most memorable furniture discoveries. Since 2001, Leigh has written monthly furniture and design columns for House Beautiful and This Old House magazines and is currently editor-at-large for Traditional Home magazine. Leigh was the co-host of Buried Treasure, a primetime television series on the Fox Network.
Even Washington has taken notice of Keno’s accomplishments. In 2005, President George W. Bush awarded Leigh the prestigious National Humanities Medal, a distinction bestowed upon individuals or groups whose work has “deepened the nation’s understanding of the humanities, broadened American citizens’ engagement with the humanities, or helped preserve and expand Americans’ access to important resources in the humanities.” That description from the National Endowment for the Humanities might very well have been written expressly with the founder and hands-on president of Keno Auctions in mind.
Keno describes his Manhattan-based operation as “a modern auction house that knows the importance of legacy,” adding, “We are dynamic and creative, and have assembled a brilliant network of specialists involved in paintings, furniture, decorative arts and jewelry. We love luxury and inspiration, and offer all of the excitement and thrill associated with the auction process.” And as of the New Year, that excitement will include Internet live bidding through LiveAuctioneers.com.
The gallery’s next high-profile event – and the first to have an association with LiveAuctioneers – is a Jan. 17 auction of Americana, paintings and decorative arts, with an afternoon session featuring the Peter Brams Collection of Important Woodlands Indian Art.
Among the many extraordinary early American pieces in the auction is the Drake Family carved and painted joined chest attributed to the Deacon John Moore Shop (1614-1677, Windsor, Conn.) tradition. A quintessential New England production, it may sell in the vicinity of $80,000-$120,000.
Keno Auctions’ gallery is located at 127 E. 69th St., New York, NY 10021. Their contact telephone is 212-734-2381, and their e-mail address is info@kenoauctions.com. Visit them online at http://www.kenoauctions.com.
To view the fully illustrated catalogs for both sessions of the Jan. 17 sale at Keno Auctions and to sign up to bid absentee or live via the Internet, log on to www.LiveAuctioneers.com.
Copyright 2011 Auction Central News International. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
ADDITIONAL IMAGES OF NOTE
Leigh Keno is one of the most immediately recognizable figures in the antiques and fine art trade. He presides at the podium at all sales conducted by Keno Auctions. Image courtesy of Keno Auctions.The stylish entrance to Keno Auctions’ Upper East Side gallery at 127 E. 69th St. in Manhattan. Image courtesy of Keno Auctions.Keno Auctions will present the Peter Brams Collection of Important Woodlands Indian Art on Jan. 17, 2012, with Internet live bidding through LiveAuctioneers.com. Image courtesy of Keno Auctions.Keno Auctions will present Important Americana, Paintings, Furniture and Decorative Arts on Jan. 17, 2012, with Internet live bidding through LiveAuctioneers.com. Image courtesy of Keno Auctions.The Drake Family carved and painted joined chest with drawer, foliated vine group attributed to the Deacon John Moore (1614-1677, Windsor, Conn.) Shop tradition. Est. $80,000-$120,000. Image courtesy of Keno Auctions.Fancy painted and gilt card table, attributed to Homas Seymour (1771-1848) with decoration attributed to the school of John Ritto Penniman (1782-1841) probably executed by Joshua Holden, Boston, circa 1808-1812. Est. $40,000-$80,000. Image courtesy of Keno Auctions.Prior-Hamblin school, ‘Baby in a Rocking Basket with Cherries,’ circa 1835, oil on canvas, 27 x 22 in. Est. $25,000-$35,000. Image courtesy of Keno Auctions.Chippendale spiral and fluted and C-scrolled carved and inlaid candle stand with octagonal top, eastern New England, circa 1780. Est. $10,000-$20,000. Image courtesy of Keno Auctions.Frederick Childe Hassam (American, 1859-1935), ‘Smelt Fishers, Cos Cob, 1902,’ signed and dated lower right ‘Childe Hassam/1902,’ pastel and charcoal over pencil on paper board, 9 5/8 x 10¾ in. Est. $30,000-$50,000. Image courtesy of Keno Auctions.The Thompson Family Lenni Lenape Seated Human Effigy Feast Ladle, 18th century, probably first half. From the Peter Brams Collection of Important Woodland Indians Art. Est. $40,000-$60,000. Image courtesy of Keno Auctions.
I.M. Chait displayed this giant saber-toothed cat skull at their New York showroom in 2011. Image courtesy of I.M. Chait.
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. (ACNI) – Among the distinguished auction houses that will be joining the LiveAuctioneers.com family in the New Year is a Beverly Hills-based firm that consistently represents the gold standard in Asian art, natural history specimens, gemology and several other fields of expertise: I.M. Chait.
As is the case with most highly successful auction houses, the Chait family’s tight-knit operation is driven by passion. It all began back in the decade of peace, love and protest.
When a draft notice interrupted Isadore M. Chait’s college education in the early 1960s he didn’t flee to Canada to avoid the war in Vietnam. Instead he signed up with the U.S. Marine Corps to serve his country and get out and on his way in two years’ time. It’s this innate “get it done” attitude that has guided Chait to the top of the field in Asian art.
Today I.M. Chait Gallery/Auctioneers is a family-owned and operated company with more than 40 years of experience.
While many American veterans stationed in Southeast Asia might have preferred to forget their time there, Isadore Chait embraced the experience.
“I fell in love with the people, the culture, the food, the music and the art,” he said.
Especially the art.
Returning to college, Chait completed course requirements in 2 1/2 years, graduating cum laude from the University of California at Los Angeles with a bachelor’s degree in anthropology.
Selling several pieces that he had brought back from Asia—for a nice profit—made Chait realize a career as a teacher wasn’t his true calling.
“I was having fun buying and selling,” said Chait. “More fun than being back in school.”
Two years after he started selling Chinese antiques from his living room in 1967, Chait opened his first gallery specializing in Asian art.
Developing an eye for quality and authenticity, Chait became an expert in the field.
“I had the common sense to discern truth from fiction,” said Chait, who acknowledged making a few mistakes along the way but always learning from them.
Today, I.M. Chait Gallery/Auctioneers guarantees everything they sell as authentic.
As a member of the Appraisers Association of America, Isadore Chait has served as a panel member regarding fakes and forgeries in Asian art and as a consultant specializing in Asian Art. He has also served as president of the Appraisers Association of America’s Southern California region.
Working with Isadore Chait are his wife, Mary Ann; and their sons Joshua, Joey and Jake.
The Chaits have expanded their scope to natural history, jewelry, European and American furniture, and fine art.
Their fifth annual New York Asia Week auction in March grossed $2 million.
I.M. Chait’s next big auction will be Jan. 15 in Beverly Hills, consisting of Asian and other collectibles, antiques and furnishings from a West Los Angeles Estate. I.M. Chait’s next major specialty auction will be Jan. 29, an Asian and International Fine Arts Auction, also at their Beverly Hills gallery, 9330 Civic Center Drive. These sales will feature Internet live bidding through LiveAuctioneers.com.
In his spare time Izzy Chait still enjoys his second calling as a jazz vocalist, which he has been doing since his college days. On a recent Friday evening when Auction Central News interviewed Chait he was on his way to a singing appearance at the Hollywood Studio Bar and Grill. That’s what we call a passion for life.
To contact I.M. Chait phone toll-free 800-775-5020 or e-mail chait@chait.com. Visit the I.M. Chait website at www.chait.com.
Watch for the fully illustrated online catalog for I.M. Chait’s Jan. 15 sale, which will publish on LiveAuctioneers.com in the New Year.
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Copyright 2011 Auction Central News International. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
ADDITIONAL IMAGES OF NOTE
I.M. Chait displayed this giant saber-toothed cat skull at their New York showroom in 2011. Image courtesy of I.M. Chait.The I.M. Chait family consists of (from left) Joshua, Mary Ann, Isadore ‘Izzy,’ Joey and Jake. Image courtesy of I.M. Chait.Twelve-flanged Ming dynasty porcelain palace vase, 34 inches high, which sold for $183,000 during New York Asia Week in March 2011. Image courtesy of I.M. Chait.Pair of carved rhinoceros horn vessels, each 19 1/4 inches high, sold well above estimate in 2011 for $271,000. Image courtesy of I.M. Chait.Antique Chinese porcelain tile with mountainous landscape scene, 19th century, with inscription and seal mark, 15 inches tall, estimated at $600-$800, sold for $67,000 in 2011. Image courtesy of I.M. Chait.Carved rhinoceros horn figure of Guanyin atop a lotus base, 6 3/4 inches, estimated at $30,000-$50,000, sold for $232,000 in 2011. Image courtesy of I.M. Chait.
An FBI mugshot of Chicago Outfit mobster Anthony ‘the Ant’ Spilotro, who In 1971, succeeded Marshall Caifano as the mob’s representative in Las Vegas. He was murdered in 1986. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
LAS VEGAS (AP) – Think of it as Las Vegas’ version of Santa Claus’ list. It shows if you’ve been naughty or nice.
It’s the “black book,” a gallery of rogue characters with nicknames like “Icepick Willie” and “The Ant,” who are barred from setting foot in a Nevada casino.
From 1960 to the 1980s, landing on Nevada’s List of Excluded Persons, as the black book is officially known, was like being added to a directory of accomplished criminal figures, such as Sam Giancana or Marshall Caifano.
Modern entries are more likely to feature slot cheats than mobsters and can be viewed on a website instead of a yellowed page.
Those notorious early listings, however, and the pithy code name long ago enshrined the black book’s place in Nevada lore.
It’s also earned an edition from 1981 a spot in the National Museum of Organized Crime & Law Enforcement, also known as the Mob Museum, scheduled to open Feb. 14 in downtown Las Vegas.
“It is romanticized early on with the idea that it is the Old West, the white hats and the black hats,” said Michael Green, College of Southern Nevada historian and Mob Museum adviser, about the book’s appeal. “It is also a sign, and an important sign, of the state trying to crack down and showing that Nevada did not want to be known simply as a mob playground.”
The book was the brainchild of RJ Abbaticchio, who as chairman of the Nevada Gaming Control Board in 1960 pitched it to Gov. Grant Sawyer as a tool to keep mobsters out of casinos.
Sawyer was skeptical at first, believing a state mandate to bar people from private businesses might run afoul of the U.S. Constitution.
“You are innocent until proven guilty, in theory, yet the black book kind of works against that theory,” Green said.
Despite doubts, Sawyer endorsed the idea on the grounds it was worth the risk of a court challenge to drive out increasingly high-profile mobsters who made it tough to sell outsiders on the legitimacy of legalized gambling in Nevada.
“You don’t get the name ‘Icepick Willie’ because you are renowned for ice sculpture,” Green said, citing men such as Israel Alderman, who was added to the book in 1965 and then removed when charges against him were dropped.
Just because Alderman was removed when his charges were dropped doesn’t mean regulators needed a conviction to add someone to the excluded list.
Although convictions for violating gambling laws or crimes of “moral turpitude” could land someone on the list, so could having a “notorious or unsavory reputation” as determined by state and federal investigators.
Two copies of the 1981 edition of the black book are set to go on display at the Mob Museum.
An earlier edition of a black book recently sold at auction in Reno to an unknown buyer for $5,250.
Many other black books remain in existence. The bound copies were printed by the state over the years and distributed to casinos, law enforcement and others and would have been available to the public, Green said.
Both Mob Museum copies will be encased, with one copy closed so visitors can see the simple black binder that led to the nickname, although not all editions were black.
The other will be opened to the page featuring Tony “The Ant” Spilotro, a mob enforcer and associate of former Stardust boss Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal. Rosenthal was the inspiration for the 1995 film Casino, by Martin Scorsese.
The movie was credited with creating an explosion of interest in Las Vegas’ mobbed-up roots.
“Because of the movie Casino, which is great movie-making and not such great history, a lot of people became more conscious of what these guys were up to,” Green said of the screen depiction of the “skim,” the process by which mobsters shipped unreported casino earnings to their bosses in Chicago, Kansas City and other locales.
The black books are among 500 to 600 artifacts expected to be on display when the museum opens in the former U.S. post office and courthouse building at Third Street and Stewart Avenue.
Although the museum isn’t yet open to the public, the artifacts have piqued the interest of people who have been fortunate enough to see them.
They provide a tangible reminder that, despite the dizzying evolution of Las Vegas, the community is not far removed from its underworld past.
Crystal Van Dee, a Nevada State Museum worker who is helping to prepare artifacts for display, has handled a diary, court documents detailing sensational stories, mob lawyers’ briefcases, a false-bottomed suitcase and the black books featuring Spilotro.
Van Dee said she was struck by how the artifacts highlight stories that are close to home for Las Vegas residents, such as the inclusion of Spilotro’s home address at 4675 Balfour Drive, east of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas between Tropicana and Harmon avenues.
“If you drive by it, please let me know,” Van Dee joked. “I want to check out all these guys’ old houses.”
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Information from: Las Vegas Review-Journal, http://www.lvrj.com
Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
AP-WF-12-28-11 2217GMT
ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE
An FBI mugshot of Chicago Outfit mobster Anthony ‘the Ant’ Spilotro, who In 1971, succeeded Marshall Caifano as the mob’s representative in Las Vegas. He was murdered in 1986. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Renowned Indian artist Jamini Roy (1887-1972) painted this gouache on card, which is signed in Bengali lower right. The work, 26 1/2 inches x 15 1/2 inches, was acquired in India by an American collector. It sold at auction in 2010 for $17,000 plus the buyer’s premium. Image courtesy of LiveAuctioneers.com Archive and Jackson’s International Auctioneers & Appraisers.
NEW DELHI (AFP) – It’s late in the evening and the Indian capital’s moneyed art crowd is spilling out of congested galleries into a narrow maze of streets, sipping glasses of wine as they peer at catalogs.
Lado Sarai, a warren of bylanes and haphazardly constructed buildings in New Delhi’s hinterland, has become a thriving new art district where Mercedes and BMWs jostle with bullock carts for space to pass.
“With this uncertain economic climate, I’m only making investments in ‘real’ assets like gold, real estate—and art,” said banking executive Suresh Basu, 34, as he flipped through a catalog with a female companion.
Just as China’s economic boom helped develop an important domestic art scene, fast-expanding India has been experiencing its own vogue for art buying among the upwardly mobile middle class.
Lado Sarai, one of many villages that the mushrooming capital has engulfed, sprang up as an art district when gallery owners were looking for a space to open their galleries.
The attraction of Lado Sarai is its status as an autonomous village, which means it is not subject to the restrictive planning policies of the municipal authorities.
And rents are far lower than in central Delhi.
“Gallery owners can get much larger spaces here,” said Neha Kirpal, director of the annual India Art Fair.
The bustling area was pioneered as an art district by businesswoman Mamta Singhania who needed a new space after municipal planners said she could no longer operate her gallery in a residential neighborhood.
Singhania came across Lado Sarai—close by the posh enclaves of south Delhi—and gave the nondescript neighborhood, crowded with small retail outlets selling food, clothing and other items, its first gallery in 2009.
“I couldn’t find any place in my budget so I started up here and other galleries followed—there are a lot of people now,” Singhania told AFP. “The neighborhood has become a vibrant, humming place.”
India’s local media has dubbed the area the capital’s new “high street of art.”
Some owners schedule their show openings on the same night so the art crowd can go from one gallery to another.
“It’s a good place to exhibit,” said Bose Krishnamachari, an artist from the southern state of Kerala, whose contemporary works were on display at a sleek, well-lit gallery called Latitude.
India’s art market is still in its infancy, with sales accounting for an estimated 1 percent of the global art market, which is valued at around $40 billion, but experts expect it to grow sharply.
Most buyers are from the growing middle class or the wealthy Indian diaspora.
“We’re still at the tip of the iceberg in India with the number of artwork owners,” said art fair organiser Kirpal. “But the Indian art market can look forward to a long growth period.”
The galleries in Lado Sarai cater for a wide range of clients, with works on offer ranging from a modest $100 or $200 to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
“There’s still a lot of learning to be done among buyers about Indian artists. Sometimes buyers just come and ask me which artists they should buy,” said Lado Sarai Must Art Gallery owner Tulika Kedia.
“But many are still only comfortable with known artists so it’s harder to sell the works of artists who aren’t big names.”
For many years, conventional wisdom had it that Indian collectors only bought Indian art, but overseas dealers believe India’s growing economy is minting a sizeable pool of wealthy buyers interested in international art.
“The Western galleries now are looking at India as an important market for selling their art,” said Latitude Gallery’s Kakar.
In 2008, when Kirpal launched her art fair, just 34 galleries from four countries exhibited. Ninety galleries from 19 countries will be at the Jan. 25-29 event, says Kirpal.
“Sooner or later, all the big international galleries will set up shop in India because this is where the money is,” she says.
ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE
Renowned Indian artist Jamini Roy (1887-1972) painted this gouache on card, which is signed in Bengali lower right. The work, 26 1/2 inches x 15 1/2 inches, was acquired in India by an American collector. It sold at auction in 2010 for $17,000 plus the buyer’s premium. Image courtesy of LiveAuctioneers.com Archive and Jackson’s International Auctioneers & Appraisers.
Noel Rockmore (American/New Orleans, 1928-1995), ‘Percy Humphrey,’ oil on canvas, signed and dated ‘March 24, ’63,’ 50 inches x 30 inches in a period frame. Neal Auction Co. in New Orleans sold this portrait for $9,200 in 2004. Image courtesy of LiveAuctioneers.com Archive and Neal Auction Co.
NEW ORLEANS (AP) – In the four-block radius where he painted and drank himself into frightening stupors, Noel Rockmore was known by the denizens of the French Quarter as an outrageous Pablo Picasso-like figure who combined the mythological and the real. He produced some 15,000 oil paintings, temperas, collages and sketches over his career and then died in obscurity.
His life was that of an American outsider and a throwback to Europe’s great expressionistic and hedonistic masters.
In the 1950s, when he was still in his 20s, his paintings hung in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Hirshhorn Museum. He was a bright young American artist who had a taste for Rembrandt and figurative paintings, with the outlook of an American social realist.
Then, the art world changed: Abstract expressionism—typified by the paint throwing of Jackson Pollock—became the rave. Rockmore, who admired draftsmanship in painting, detested it.
Rockmore changed: He left his wife and three children, changed his last name and headed to New Orleans in 1959, where he would eventually get lost to the New York art world.
The story of Noel Montgomery Davis (his real name) is getting a long-overdue audience outside New Orleans, a city that is enjoying something of an art renaissance itself six years after Hurricane Katrina. From now until the end of January, his works are on view at the LaGrange Art Museum in Georgia. The retrospective is called “Creative Obscurity: The Genius Noel Rockmore.”
“He was kind of an art hobo,” said Ethyl Ault, interim director of the LaGrange Art Museum.
She said Rockmore was an overlooked genius. “Was it politics? Did he offend people? Why was he so popular in New York when he was younger, and then he leaves, changes his name and then goes on into his fairy tale land?”
The show is based on nearly 1,500 Rockmore artworks retrieved from storage units in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. For 25 years, Shirley Marvin, an octogenarian Baton Rouge patron, had been saving Rockmore artworks and memorabilia with the intention of making him famous one day.
But she had forgotten about the collection due to short-term memory loss, her family said. Marvin was one of Rockmore’s most devoted fans. She saw genius in him—like many others in New Orleans. The extraordinary collection was gathering dust when her son, Rich Marvin, took her down to New Orleans in October 2006, a year after Katrina, to get “a few paintings,” as her mother described it. Instead, they found the units packed with remnants of Rockmore’s life.
In the wake of the collection’s discovery, Rich and his wife, Tee Marvin, have become Rockmore’s biggest impresarios—the agents Rockmore famously refused to have throughout his life as he willfully lived on the edge of the art world. He was notorious among art galleries for his temper and fits of outrage. His friends say he suffered emotional problems for much of his life.
The Marvins—working with Rockmore’s family and art dealers, collectors and museum curators—have begun cataloging his works and promoting him. They estimate he produced about 15,000 pieces of art and conservatively 750 to 1,000 of those are masterpieces.
“At first we thought my mom was crazy,” Rich Marvin said. “When a museum or gallery lines up his top 200 exquisite works, people will be as stunned as we are.”
Rockmore was born in 1928 in New York to a family of artists. He was super talented. A child prodigy, he played the violin well by age 8. After suffering polio at age 10, he turned to painting. He studied briefly at the Juilliard School and had a studio at the Cooper Union. Family friends included Ernest Hemingway, George Gershwin and Thomas Mann.
His 20s were prolific as he painted the bums of the Bowery district, monkeys and elephants in the backstage of the Ringling Brothers Circus and parables of Central Park and Coney Island. He was a social realist, akin to Depression-era American painters such as John Steuart Curry, but these early works contained themes and artistic styles that would stay with him: death, violence, sex, the surreal and the allegorical.
In retrospect, it was the ghoulish and morbid in Rockmore that defined him, making him a kind of American Hieronymus Bosch.
In the 1950s, Rockmore became fed up with the wave of abstract expressionists then taking hold of New York—the flat tones and humanless canvases of Willem De Kooning, Pollock, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. During this period he drank heavily and his wife kicked him out because of his wildness, his daughter, Emilie Heller-Rhys, said.
At age 31, he moved down to New Orleans and began working with Larry Borenstein, an art collector, and Allan Jaffe, a business school graduate and tuba player. In the 1960s, Borenstein employed Rockmore as a kind of resident painter for a new society he’d formed with Jaffe to preserve traditional New Orleans jazz music. The society would become Preservation Hall.
Rockmore was commissioned to paint the old-time musicians. He captured the mood, scent, touch and smoke of New Orleans jazz and its musicians—Punch Miller, Percy Humphrey, Louis Nelson, Sweet Emma and Billie and DeDe Pierce, and scores of others.
His output was staggering. He’d become fixated by a subject—New Orleans’ Carnival traditions, the frenetic Port of New Orleans, the characters of the French Quarter, alien beings, ancient Egypt, voodoo—and mined it artistically.
Some of his most cherished and memorable pieces are of the Quarter’s Bohemians, fellow outsiders: Ruthie the Duck Girl; Gypsy Lou; O.M. (standing for “Old Man”); Mike Stark; Johnny White; and Sister Gertrude Morgan.
Yet, his life was pierced by that dark side.
“He was a brilliant artist, and I don’t use those words lightly,” said Stephen Clayton, a New Orleans art collector who did not know Rockmore and does not own any of his works. “He chose to come here, came to the Quarter, climbed in a bottle and never got out.”
From his morning vodka, Rockmore kept going all day, muscling his way through sketches, wall-sized oils, nudes in charcoal, sculptures and mixed media and calling it quits at one of his favorite bars, often The Alpine, within shouting distance of the St. Louis cathedral and his bed.
There are stories of him trashing art galleries and studios. Handcuffing a woman to his stove. Sticking a mummified cat in one of his works. Going on lithium and alcohol binges that left him a wreck. Cursing at tourists viciously. Sitting in streets with his muddy tennis shoes and rumpled clothing, looking like a bum. Drawing on napkins, grocery bags and just about anything else he liked. Sitting in bars, drinking and trying to get women to go to bed with him.
One of Rockmore’s closest friends, Andy Antippas, a former Tulane University poetry professor and art gallery owner, recalled going into Rockmore’s apartment during one of his lithium binges and finding his studio in a state that resembled the home of Charles Manson.
“It was trashed,” said Antippas, who found pages from Playboy magazine littering the floor and feces from his two dogs in the middle of his bed. “He’d obviously been sitting in one place and drinking and painting for hours.”
“Noel was an autodidact of the highest order,” Antippas said. “There was probably no artist more prolific than Noel—except perhaps Picasso.”
Antippas is like many Rockmore fans. He believes he was a genius, a master who ranks among the greatest.
In his home on St. Claude Avenue—cluttered with books, paintings, decorated human skulls, African masks and paintings galore—Antippas stood in front of a large subdued painting hanging on the wall near his desk. He looked at it and said he owned what he believed to be “one of the finest paintings, if not the best, painting in Western civilization, a nude portrait of his father. It’s the only such painting ever done.”
“He couldn’t relate to the real world. He lived in his own world; he was driven by his own work,” said Rita Posselt, a 59-year-old fine art photographer who lived with Rockmore between 1978 and 1984 and frequently posed for him. “He would wake up in the morning and go to bed at night, and in between those hours there was a lot of torment for him.”
“He wanted somebody to recognize his talent, and he wanted important people in the art world, museums and such, to do so, but he didn’t want to jump through hoops and parties to make it happen.”
During his life, and still today, Rockmore was a kind of New Orleans project.
He is woven into the city. Anyone who has stepped into the gloom of Preservation Hall has seen Rockmores—they’re the haunting oil paintings of jazz greats on the walls. A Rockmore hangs in Johnny White’s bar. It’s a football scene, a token of appreciation for the bar owner, Johnny White, and typically Rockmore: There are three teams on the field. His paintings hang in the Old Mint, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, and on the walls of galleries and homes throughout New Orleans. And who knows where else.
“My feeling was that Noel was the most democratic painter,” Antippas said. “Every waiter, bartender, in the Quarter has a Rockmore. God knows how many Rockmores are hanging on walls throughout the city.”
Rockmore died in 1995 at age 66 of an untreated infection. When he was taken to the hospital, according to friends, he was admitted as a “street person.” According to his friends, he sat up on the gurney and declared, “I’m not a street person, I’m a great artist.”
“I always say that he is America’s Picasso,” said Heller-Rhys, his daughter and an accomplished artist herself, as she stood during a recent visit outside the Skyscraper building, an 18th-century apartment building where Rockmore—and many other artists, including Charles Bukowski—stayed in the 1970s. “And America has to come to terms with that.”
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ADDITIONAL IMAGES OF NOTE
Noel Rockmore (American/New Orleans, 1928-1995), ‘Percy Humphrey,’ oil on canvas, signed and dated ‘March 24, ’63,’ 50 inches x 30 inches in a period frame. Neal Auction Co. in New Orleans sold this portrait for $9,200 in 2004. Image courtesy of LiveAuctioneers.com Archive and Neal Auction Co.Noel Rockmore, ‘The Last Supper,’ 1974, oil and mixed media on canvas, signed and dated lower right ‘Rockmore 74,’ 36 1/4 inches x 36 1/4 inches, in a giltwood frame, sold at auction for $8,500 in 2009. Image courtesy of LiveAuctioneers.com Archive and New Orleans Auction Galleries Inc.Noel Rockmore, ‘Mardi Gras Street Scene, New Orleans,’ 1980, oil on canvas, dated, inscribed and signed ‘Rockmore ’80, New Orleans,’ 24 inches x 48 inches, unframed, sold at auction for $8,500 in 2010. Image courtesy of LiveAuctioneers.com Archive and New Orleans Auction Galleries Inc.
A late 17th- or early 18th-century unsigned Continental portrait of a bearded man shown knitting, with red wax seals on verso, sold for $384,000 at an auction held Nov. 18-20 by Millea Brothers in Morristown, N.J. Also, a Portuguese colonial period tortoise and ivory chest on stand breezed to $38,400; a large pair of Sevres cobalt blue urn or lamp bases with bronze mounts realized $37,200; and a Chinese eight-panel hardwood screen with blue and white porcelain plaques depicting landscapes went for $12,000. Prices include a 20 percent buyer’s premium.
