DALLAS – More than a dozen competitive bidders pursued a British portrait of a gentleman in Turkish dress, traditionally thought to be Edward Wortley Montagu (1713-1776) to $27,500 to claim top-lot honors in Heritage Auctions’ Fine & Decorative Arts Including Estates Auction Dec. 7-9. The strong return helped lift the total for the sale to $1.26 million. Absentee and Internet live bidding was available through LiveAuctioneers.
Carstens Galleries variety auction to feature jadeite, fine art Dec. 29
BOCA RATON, Fla. – Carstens Galleries is having its variety auction of art, antiques and a jadeite collection on Dec. 29 at 3 p.m. Eastern time. Live and absentee bidding is available through LiveAuctioneers.
Painting stolen in WWII is heading from US to Ukraine
RIDGEFIELD, Conn. (AP) – A painting that was stolen during World War II and later spent decades in a Connecticut home will be returned to an art museum in Ukraine, according to U.S. and Ukrainian officials.
Renaissance master: Tintoretto’s 500th spans 2 continents
VENICE, Italy (AP) – A Venetian cloth dyer’s son, Tintoretto spent his entire career in Venice, becoming widely considered the last great painter of the Renaissance.
Selling expendable Lincoln items won’t erase museum’s debt
SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (AP) – The acquisition of 1,500 documents and artifacts for the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum a decade ago firmly established Illinois as a leading repository of all things Lincoln, the prairie lawyer who led the U.S. through the Civil War.
Andy Warhol exhibit includes old favorites, new insights
NEW YORK (AP) – The 25-foot-long Camouflage Last Supper, one of Andy Warhol’s last and most personal works, floods a full wall of a room on the fifth floor of the Whitney Museum of American Art. The massive acrylic and silkscreen mural captures the artist’s seemingly contradictory piety and irreverence. It’s one of more than 350 works on display in the largest retrospective of Warhol’s prolific career in nearly 30 years.
While Warhol’s style has remained ubiquitous since his death in 1987, even the most devout pop-art connoisseurs can learn much from “Andy Warhol – From A to B and Back Again.” It includes famous works as well as material on view for the first time. Newly revealed information about the painfully private artist’s life adds new dimensions to our understanding of him and his work.
“There is something in his work that speaks to our contemporary culture,” said Donna De Salvo, the Whitney’s deputy director for international initiatives and senior curator, who organized the exhibition with Christie Mitchell and Mark Loiacono. “There is punch in Warhol’s work, there’s mystery, and it’s not easy to know what’s going on.”
Camouflage Last Supper combines an amplified photo print of Leonardo da Vinci’s iconic 15th-century mural with a green-and-brown camouflage pattern from a fabric swatch. Created in 1986 amid the AIDS crisis that devastated the New York City gay community and art world, Camouflage Last Supper lays bare the artist’s conflicted emotions as a gay man and a Byzantine Catholic.
Warhol’s deep faith was little-known outside of his tight-knit religious community. His parents were Ruthenians, born in a village in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains, at the northern border of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
On one hand, Warhol was a fixture at downtown Manhattan’s hottest nightclubs, flanked by glamorous models, actors, rock stars and drag queens. The same man visited the Church of St. Vincent Ferrer on the Upper East Side nearly daily. He would hide in the back of the church on Sundays for fear of being outed, and often slipped out before Holy Communion to retain his ghostlike presence. He slept near a crucifix shrine, wore a cross under his trademark black turtlenecks and carried a rosary in his pocket.
Warhol’s career start as a commercial illustrator of women’s footwear quickly evolved as he garnered attention for his flamboyance and representations of American commercialism, such as his famous depictions of Campbell’s Soup cans and portraits of celebrities and world leaders. The Warhol art that everyone knows encompasses the fifth floor of the Whitney, including Green Coca-Cola Bottles, Brillo Box sculptures and self-portraits, with a multi-room gallery installation of his colorful silk-screened flowers imposed on shocking pink cows.
The repetition of design and mixed cultural images in Warhol’s art feels familiar in a digital age, which he arguably anticipated and foreshadowed.
Along with his hidden faith, Warhol’s philanthropic side was overshadowed by his reputation as a proponent of Business Art. The real Warhol transcended and subverted his fortune and sweeping fame. He provided funding for a soup kitchen operated by the (Episcopal) Church of the Heavenly Rest on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and volunteered there. He paid seminary tuition for a nephew who wanted to become a priest.
One of Warhol’s most important collaborators was Jean-Michael Basquiat, with whom he began working in the 1980s. Basquiat died of a drug overdose in 1988 at age 27, about a year and a half after Warhol died at age 58 of a sudden, postoperative arrhythmia. While their time together was short, it produced hundreds of powerful works. On view side-by-side at the Whitney are Basquiat’s and Warhol’s acrylic-on-canvas collaborations Paramount (1984-85) and Third Eye (1985), both on loan from a private collector. Paramount” embodies both artists’ absorption in capitalism, politics and celebrity.
Also from a private collection, Warhol’s Superman (1961) is a harsh critique of the machismo of Abstract Expressionist “action” painting; it offers a suggestively queer version of the superhero.
Besides the artworks (which include some of Warhol’s films), the exhibition also includes ephemera and scholarship that uncovers new intricacies about the artist we think we understand, while launching a Warhol for the 21st century.
“For me, the most potent stuff is the later work,” De Salvo says. “Some of it is mystifying, but it’s still asking us questions. It feels as though it makes Warhol a live issue again.”
“Andy Warhol – From A to B and Back Again” runs through March 31, 2019, at the Whitney Museum of American Art. It travels to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (May 18-Sept. 2,) and the Art Institute of Chicago (Oct. 20, 2019-Jan. 26, 2020). Tickets are available online.
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By NATASHA GURAL, Associated Press
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Lustrous loose gemstones gathered for online auction Dec. 26
NEW YORK – Jasper52 will conduct a diverse loose gemstones auction on Wednesday, Dec. 26, showcasing a variety of cuts, stones, and colors. From intense sapphire to lustrous emeralds, certified diamonds and more, bidders are sure to find a unique treasure among this kaleidoscope of colors to fit into a setting of equal beauty. Bid absentee or live online through LiveAuctioneers.
Kaminski Auctions gets jump on New Year with big sale Dec. 29-30
BEVERLY, Mass. – Kaminski Auctions will hold their annual New Year’s Auction, Saturday and Sunday, Dec. 29-30, starting at 10 a.m. Eastern time. This year’s sale will feature Asian antiques at the beginning of Day 2, as well as the contents of the George Pollard Fanning estate at Otis Place, Boston. Pollard was a close friend of the artist Conger Metcalf. The auction will also feature the estate of the Blinn Family of Bedford, Mass. Bid absentee or live online through LiveAuctioneers.
Indiana drivers can support museum with Studebaker plate
SOUTH BEND, Ind. (AP) – Indiana is introducing a new license plate to honor Studebaker cars and trucks, starting Jan. 1.
Unique Auctions reveals Beatles slides for New Year’s Day sale
LINCOLN, UK – Unique Auctions’ New Year’s Day 2019 Auction promises to be an exciting event with an eclectic mix of desirable antiques and collectibles up for grabs. The company’s 9th annual auction, now a recognized event on the UK and international sales calendar, will include a piece of previously unearthed Beatles history in the form of a collection of unseen original images of the Beatles along with the signatures of Paul McCartney, George Harrison and John Lennon on a letter. Absentee and Internet live bidding is available through LiveAuctioneers.