There are 14 oversized murals here, slowly coming into focus in the dim light, each playing off the other, drenched in colors and shapes that seem to vibrate.
The effect is powerful but not troubling.
For the first time, Mark Rothko’s ‘Seagram’ murals are on display together at a Tate Modern exhibit of his dark, brooding later works.
The murals – usually scattered in museums in London, Washington D.C., and Sakura, Japan – were originally part of a series commissioned for display at New York’s Four Seasons restaurant in New York’s landmark Seagram building.
NEW YORK (AP) – Edvard Munch’s Vampire, a dark, brooding painting of a woman with cascading red hair kissing a man’s neck, may set a new record for the Norwegian artist when it goes on the auction block this fall.
The 1894 work, which has been in private hands for more than 70 years, is expected to bring $35 million at Sotheby’s on Nov. 3. In May, Munch’s Girls on the Bridge sold for $30.8 million, setting a record for the artist.
The Vampire painting, also known as Love and Pain, caused a stir when it was first exhibited in Berlin in 1902. It was part of a 20-work project called Frieze of Life that explored themes of love, betrayal, death and sex and included his masterpiece, The Scream.
“Like ‘The Scream,’ it distills extraordinarily intense feelings,” Simon Shaw, head of Sotheby’s impressionist and modern art, said Tuesday. “The lovers, locked in their dark embrace, evoke love’s paradox as a source of tenderness and pain.”
An avid Munch collector bought Vampire in 1903. In 1934, it was purchased by a private collector, who has owned it since. It was on loan at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for about 10 years.
Vampire will be the highlight of Sotheby’s sale of impressionist and modern art.
Copyright 2008 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
NEW YORK (AP) – Relatives of one of the world’s most famous portrait photographers have sued a Manhattan gallery, saying it lost valuable photographs created with Spanish surrealist master Salvador Dalí.
A daughter and two grandchildren of the late Philippe Halsman say in a lawsuitthat 41 of the works created by Halsman and Dalí were reported stolen in April 2007.
The works were among dozens delivered to the Howard Greenberg Gallery in 2003 and 2004.
LONDON (AP) – No artist captured the horror of the 20th century quite the way Francis Bacon did.
Bacon spent a lifetime painting the human body in a world ripped apart by the slaughter of two world wars and the Holocaust. More than 15 years after his death, a major new retrospective bound for London, Madrid and New York shows that his twisted forms, mottled flesh and screaming mouths have lost none of their power to shock.
PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) – Authorities say they’ve recovered two Picasso etchings stolen from a Palm Beach art gallery in May.
Police arrested 37-year-old Marcus Patmon at his Miami home on Friday. Authorities say he tried to sell Le Repas Frugel, valued at $395,000, to a California art dealer in July. But the dealer checked the Art Loss Registry and discovered that it had been reported stolen.
Authorities tracked Patmon to his home, where they found the other piece, the Jacqueline Lisant etching, valued at $145,000.
Patmon was charged with dealing in stolen property. He also had an outstanding warrant for driving with a suspended license. Authorities say charges of burglary and grand theft are pending. He was released on $10,500 bail.
Copyright 2008 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Fernand Leger’s 1921 oil on canvas titled Woman and Child, missing from the Wellesley College Collection. A reward of $100,000 has been offered for its return. Copyright Wellesley College. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
WELLESLEY, Mass. (AP) – Wellesley College has lost a 1921 painting by French cubist Fernand Leger that was likely worth millions of dollars, officials said.
Woman and Child had been in the collection of the college’s Davis Museum and Cultural Center since 1954. It vanished last year after it was one of 32 works borrowed for an exhibit at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, The Boston Globe reported on Aug. 27.
“We’ve all wondered about it,” Jacqueline Marie Musacchio, associate professor of art at Wellesley, told the newspaper. “It’s a tremendous loss for the college, but, beyond that, we just don’t have a lot of information.”
Police were told, and the museum’s insurer, Travelers Insurance, has paid a claim. Last year, Leger’s paintings sold for an average of $2.8 million, and the newspaper quoted an unidentified Travelers official as saying the payout was “in that area.”
Travelers is offering a $100,000 reward for the painting, the Globe said.
The painting was a 1954 gift to Wellesley from Professor and Mrs. John McAndrew, given in honor of Alfred H. Barr Jr. Professor McAndrew was not only a faculty member but also director of Wellesley College’s museum.
Along with 31 other works from Wellesley’s collection, Woman and Child was lent to the Oklahoma City Museum of Art for exhibition and returned in April 2007.
LONDON (AP) – Mick Jagger’s pout is officially fit for a museum.
London’s Victoria and Albert Museum announced Tuesday that it bought the original artwork for The Rolling Stones’ famous “lips” logo, inspired by the singer’s mouth. The museum said it bought the work at an auction in the United States for $92,500.
The lips-and-tongue logo was designed by London art student John Pasche in 1970, and first used on the band’s Sticky Fingers album the next year.
Robert Rauschenberg (American, 1925-2008), a master of Abstract Expressionism and pop art. Photo courtesy of Morris Museum of Art.
AUGUSTA, Ga. – On Sept. 21, in celebration of Augusta’s inaugural Westobou Festival, the Morris Museum of Art will unveil Robert Rauschenberg’s August Allegory (Anagrams) in its new location in the auditorium lobby on the museum’s first floor.
“Rauschenberg was undeniably one of the great figures in American art,” said Louise Keith Claussen, Director of Fine Arts at Morris Communications Co. and former director of the Morris Museum of Art, “and we are very fortunate to have some of his works in the collection of the Morris Museum, particularly fortunate to have a major work that is specific to Augusta, Georgia.”
Commissioned in 1996 and completed in 1997, Rauschenberg’s August Allegory is an extremely large – roughly 5 by 12 feet – work on paper, a montage, printed in vegetable dyes, created from the artist’s original photographs. Rauschenberg, working in collaboration with his partner Darryl Pottorf and assisted by the Morris’s former deputy director Rick Gruber, conducted the original shoot during a three-day visit to Augusta. Details of the work-in-progress appeared in the September 1996 issue of Vogue magazine in an article on the artist and his career.
Claussen, director of the museum when the Rauschenberg was commissioned, wrote recently that “the work reflects his response to both the details and spirit of Augusta as he saw it, and elements include several church steeples, Springfield Church, Sacred Heart Cultural Center, a 19th-century textile mill, the Confederate monument, a railroad bridge, an antebellum home, Augusta bricks, the ‘haunted pillar,’ and the feet of the bronze sculpture of Arnold Palmer.”
This image of the port of Marseille was produced in 1929 by Roger Broders. Image courtesy Poster Connection.
They look chic with spare, contemporary interiors. They complement Mid-century industrial styles. And they fit beautifully, of course, with furnishings from the 1920s and ’30s.
Art Deco posters make a 20th-century statement that has resonated ever since their creation.
They are also in great demand among collectors, and their values have soared since the 1990s. In spite of this upsurge, there are still relatively affordable Deco posters that cover a range of themes and subjects in striking, brilliant designs.
Joerg and Joern Weigelt are father and son poster dealers who have shops on either side of the Western world. Both have a strong appreciation for the Deco style.
The family penchant for posters began in 1978 at a flea market, Joerg Weigelt explained, where he found a postcard, dated 1910, of a Ludwig Hohlwein poster. “This was our first contact with posters – a small poster reproduced on a postcard. After that, we started looking for posters in their full sizes.”
In 1982 he opened Galerie fur Gebrauchsgraphik (Gallery for Commercial Art) in Hannover, Germany. Back then, “people wanted artists like Franz von Stuck and Alphonse Mucha, and any really old posters. But there were some forward-looking collectors and dealers who were already turning their attention to the late 1910s, 1920s and 1930s,” according to Joerg.
By the early 1990s, historism, which imitated styles from older periods, and Art Nouveau posters were out of reach for most collectors. “So people had no choice but to look for new areas of interest,” and they turned to the 1920s, Joerg said.
Peter Max in his studio in the 1960s. Courtesy The Art of Peter Max, Abrams, New York.
From the cosmic imagery that first brought him to national attention in the 1960s to his more abstract “neo-Fauvist” paintings of today, his work is filled with dynamic color and buoyant expectation. More than just feel-good vibes, his art lifts the spirit to a plane above the everyday.
Max’s art is rooted in a variety of influences that began with an unconventional childhood. Born in Berlin in 1937, he traveled shortly thereafter with his parents to pre-Maoist Shanghai, where he spent the first 10 years of his life. In a June interview, the artist recalled, “We lived in a pagoda house, and across the street was a Sikh temple. Living in the Orient put me in touch visually with lots of colors – red and gold everywhere.”
A slightly older child who babysat for the family supplied art materials to amuse the young boy. Max said, “Every day she pulled out sheets of paper; I started drawing and painting with brushes. I fell in love with the juxtaposition of certain colors. I learned how to combine and pair them. But I never thought that art was something you do when you grow up. You ride a bicycle but you don’t become a professional bike rider.”
Peter Max, Love, 1968, acrylic and silkscreen on canvas; image courtesy The Art of Peter Max, Abrams, New York.
A chance trip with his parents to a region near Tibet brought him closer to the stars, both physically and spiritually. “I’m now living on top of this huge mountain and painting and drawing there,” explained Max. “Another guest in the hotel – an old white-haired man – said he was making an antenna for his radio. He was an astronomer.”
“We talked about the planets, the stars, the universe every day. Years later, it’s still an enormous passion of mine. When I got older, I wanted to become an astronomer.” Twenty years after those conversations, the artist would combine his love of color and fascination with the cosmos into successful graphics that secured his reputation.
After an odyssey of travel – Africa, Italy, Israel, France – the family arrived in New York in 1953, where Max still considered becoming an astronomer because as he put it, “I wanted to know everything about the universe. Why was the universe created, how did the Big Bang happen, how far is really far?”
Peter Max, Tip Toe Floating, 1972, serigraph; courtesy The Art of Peter Max, Abrams, New York.
His career took a different direction when a summer session at the Art Students League led to years of intense study at the institution. His early focus was grounded in reality rather than fantasy. He said, “I just wanted to become the best realist that ever was. I was going to be an artist, but I didn’t even know how I was going to make a living. But I was good at it and I loved doing it.”
The Art of Peter Max (Abrams 2002), with text by CUNY professor Charles A. Riley II, includes several pictures from the artist’s realist period. Life Study of Old Man and Cowboy, both muted oil paintings from 1959, demonstrate what an excellent realist Max could be in his early twenties. But the young artist found that – with the dominance of photography – art directors were not buying his realism.
During an interview, one potential buyer spotted some “astronomical doodles of the planets” that had ended up with more serious work in Max’s portfolio. Interest in the artist’s more casual alternative work led to a proliferation of projects that drew Max into the pop poster business. The mature style – romantic, playful, and often psychedelic – that Max had fully developed by around 1966 was perfectly in sync with the spirit of the times. To quote him, “Everybody thought these posters were the backdrop of the Sixties.”
Author Charles Riley in his biographical text to The Art of Peter Max wrote:
“Max understood that art reproductions were rising to the status of the original artwork and began to incorporate this notion into his art. The medium of the moment was the poster, owing in no small part to the work of Max himself. He became a pioneer in the printing techniques by which inexpensive yet high-quality posters could be produced in an unprecedented range and intensity of colors, utilizing state-of-the art commercial presses that expanded the spectrum of available hues.”
Riley concluded, “Just as Toulouse-Lautrec captured the imagination of late 19-century Paris with his posters, Max led the international youth movement of the Sixties into a new visual culture.” Classic images that nurtured the Baby Boom Generation include Max’s 1967 Bob Dylan poster, the singer’s photographic image surrounded by a floral aura; the single word Love with a flowing head above from 1968, and the 1968 image of A Different Drummer, surrounded by stars.
Peter Max, Knowledge Bliss Absolute, 1971, serigraph; image courtesy The Art of Peter Max, Abrams, New York.
Commercial success brought the genial Peter Max fame in a Johnny Carson/Life magazine sense. An association with Swami Satchidananda, which began in 1966, brought the artist greater inner peace and led to some sublime images of that state, such as the 1971 serigraphs Experiencing Nothing and Knowledge Bliss Absolute.
Max can tell some great stories. One of the best involves an encounter with Jimi Hendrix that occurred when Max was renting a house in Woodstock to give his family some time away from the city. Max said, “One morning my little daughter was wearing a blue jean jacket, the waist dragging on the floor, because she was tiny. Suddenly somebody knocks on the door and it was Jimi Hendrix.”
The jacket, of course, turned out to be one that Hendrix had left on a previous visit – he let the artist’s daughter keep her treasure. And Max recalled, “He hung around for a hour talking. I told him about art; he told me about music. He was a sweet guy, a nice guy with lots of enthusiasm.”
Peter Max, Sailing New Worlds, 1976, Lithograph; image courtesy The Art of Peter Max, Abrams, New York.
Peter Max’s bold early works from the 1960s and ’70s remain popular with collectors, who are in a very real sense buying back part of their youth. Robert Rogal, Director of the Ro Gallery in Long Island City, N.Y., and a Boomer himself, told Style Century Magazine, “We’ve been handling his work for the last 30 years. I think the older work is more important and more popular than the current work. It’s probably a moment in time – that’s why I prefer the vintage work. It’s not only true with him; it’s true with all artists. Even with recording artists, you always remember their first song.”
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Since first achieving recognition, Peter Max has never lost touch with his creativity. On the one hand, he has expressed an inner artistic vision through a long series of vibrant abstract acrylics that are just as colorful as his early work. Riley explained in his text, “Max calls himself a neo-Fauvist, identifying himself with the French painters of the turn of the 20th century who were called fauves (wild beasts) for their dramatic use of color.”
On many occasions, Max has created art in support of favorite causes. For the 1974 International Exposition on the Environment in Spokane, Washington, he designed this memorable “running man” stamp for the United States Postal Service. Image courtesy The Art of Peter Max, Abrams, New York.
On the other, Max continues to produce art connected with pop culture phenomena and posters for projects dear to his heart, such as global ecology, equal rights, animal protection, and peace. His ongoing interest in space led to a series of images commemorating the Apollo moon landings. His “Preserve the Environment” postage stamp of 1974 anticipated today’s concern for global climate conditions.
In 1986, Max began a continuing series of studies of the Statue of Liberty, with a special set of six in 2001 to benefit 9/11 organizations. He has designed images for musical events from Woodstock to the Grammys. And he has found time to work with a long list of American Presidents and world leaders on positive initiatives that support the values that took root in his consciousness back in the Sixties.
At the conclusion of the interview, Peter Max said, “It was nice to belong to something so colossal. There was an enormous change happening to us here in this country, and it felt like it was the whole planet. It’s still going on.”
More of Max’s biography and an online shop of vintage and new works can be found at www.petermax.com.
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Karla Klein Albertson focuses on the decorative arts, from excavated antiquities to contemporary pop-culture icons. She currently writes the Ceramics Collector column and exhibition features for Auction Central News, covers shows and auctions for the Maine Antique Digest, and authors the Antiques column in The Philadelphia Inquirer. She holds a master’s degree in classical archaeology from Bryn Mawr College.
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