Tuesday, May 8, 2018

VANTAG's been there!!! VANTAG's done that... AND MORE!




PHOTOGRAPHY ON A POSTCARD

Art on a Postcard and Photo London are delighted to announce their partnership for this year’s Fair. Art on a Postcard’s “Photography on a Postcard” will offer fairgoers the unique opportunity to own a one-off edition by a world-renowned photographer for just £55. But there’s a twist – the images will be anonymous. Fairgoers are able to choose which of the 350 postcard sized photographs they would like buy but the photographer will only be revealed at the end of the Fair.
Priority will be given to those pre-registered online and all money raised goes to The Hepatitis C Trust’s campaign to eliminate hepatitis C from the UK by the year 2025.
Photographers taking part this year so far include Bruce Gilden, Mark Power, Homer Sykes, Maggie Taylor, Lottie Davies, Nick Brandt, David Titlow and, Alma Hasar Karine Lavan, Scarlett Hooft Graafland. A full list of the photographers taking part in this year’s Photography on a Postcard will be available before the event.
Register your interest to be first in the queue.



With thanks to

                








How did the Rockefellers shape the modern art market?


How did the Rockefellers shape the modern art market?

Ahead of the sale of the David and Peggy Rockefeller collection at Christie’s this week, the family's archivist examines their approach




David and Peggy Rockefeller in 1973 Courtesy of the Rockefeller Archive Centre
The name Rockefeller is inextricably linked with

How did the Rockefellers shape the modern art market?

Ahead of the sale of the David and Peggy Rockefeller collection at Christie’s this week, the family's archivist examines their approach


The name Rockefeller is inextricably linked with an astute understanding of markets. In 1870, aged barely 30, John D. Rockefeller, Senior created Standard Oil, and by the early 20th century, he was worth at least a billion dollars. His descendants displayed similar market savvy in investing their considerable inheritance, notably in art.
an astute understanding of markets. In 1870, aged barely 30, John D. Rockefeller, Senior created Standard Oil, and by the early 20th century, he was worth at least a billion dollars. His descendants displayed similar market savvy in investing their considerable inheritance, notably in art.
The Rockefellers entered the Modern art market in its earliest days, and the manner in which they collected reflects, perhaps influenced, its dramatic growth through the 20th century. Alongside Henry Clay Frick, J.P. Morgan and Andrew Mellon, John D. Rockefeller, Junior was a client of the British art dealer Joseph Duveen. Duveen built a business out of selling the collections of European aristocrats to American millionaires and once said: “Europe has a great deal of art, and America has a great deal of money.”
Junior was traditional in his collecting tastes, and in 1915, through Duveen, spent $1.8m on a portion of J.P. Morgan’s vast collection of Ming and Kangxi porcelain. But his wife, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, had a much greater impact on Modern museum collections and the art market as we know it.
Despite modest financial resources and her husband’s loathing for contemporary art, Abby began collecting the work of living artists in the 1920s. More importantly, she joined with like-minded collectors to create a space where this art could be displayed, what would become the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). This group sought to stimulate a market demand for Modern art by legitimising what were, to many, disturbing forms of art. They fought to expand the accepted canon of art to include Monet, Cézanne, Picasso, Braque, Klee, Kirchner and their contemporaries—and eventually succeeded.

In good taste

Abby’s tastes had a powerful impact on her children, David Rockefeller in particular. When he and his wife, Peggy, began collecting in the late 1940s, Alfred Barr was their principal mentor, as he had been for Abby in the 1920s and 30s. He honed their knowledge of the Impressionists, Post-Impressionists, Fauves and their successors, and introduced the couple to dealers he thought reputable–Dalzell Hatfield, Georges and Daniel Wildenstein, Sam Salz, Justin Thannhauser and Paul Rosenberg.
In 1955, Rosenberg and Barr played a role in the Rockefellers’ acquisition of Manet’s La Brioche (1870), Seurat’s the Roadstead at Grandcamp (1885) and Cézanne’s Boy in a Red Waistcoat (1893-95) for a total of $500,000 from the mining magnate A. Chester Beatty. In return for the Rockefellers’ agreement to leave the Cézanne to MoMA, Barr convinced Rosenberg to allow them the first choice of the 80-odd Impressionist paintings in Beatty’s collection. As David later said: “Had I been able to afford them, I would have been very tempted to buy them all.”
A decade later, William S. Lieberman, MoMA’s curator of paintings and sculpture, negotiated the $6m sale of 47 paintings by Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris from Gertrude Stein’s estate to a syndicate headed by David and his brother, Nelson Rockefeller. Among the works was Picasso’s Girl with a Basket of Flowers (then valued at $845,000) and Reservoir: Horta de Ebro (valued at $325,000), which was later donated to MoMA.
The library at East 65th Street, where Picasso’s Fillette Ã¥ la corbeille fleurie (est in the region of $90m) was displayed Courtesy of Christie’s

Hefty returns

MoMA’s curators (including Dorothy Miller, William Rubin, Kirk Varnedoe, Christophe Cherix, and its current director, Glenn Lowry) continued to advise the Rockefellers, alongside dealers, particularly the late Eugene Thaw. But inevitably, there were a few misjudged buys: an Albert Bierstadt landscape that turned out to be a much less valuable Hermann Herzog, and a Thomas Sully portrait of a young gentleman actually painted by an unidentified artist. Most intriguing is a small Diego Rivera watercolour, bought by David from a Maine lobsterman, who had inherited it from his wealthy employer. More than 40 years later, it was found to be a well-done fake.
The post-war works of the Abstract Expressionists were, for the most part, not to the Rockefellers’ tastes. However, they did buy an early Rothko in 1960 for $9,000, which David hung in his office. He sold it at auction in 2007 for $72.8m, a then-record price, and remarked to me at the time that it “might have been the best investment I ever made”.
However, in general the Rockefellers bought art because it appealed to them, not because they expected a hefty return on their investment. Neither would have anticipated the value of their collection today, nor would Abby have foreseen the impact her own avant-garde leanings would have on the museum collections and the art market of today.
• The Peggy and David Rockefeller Collection, 8-10 May, Christie’s New York. All proceeds will be donated to charity

Appeared in The Art Newspaper, 301 May 2018

The masterpieces that got away: Noah Charney presents the Museum of Lost Art




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The masterpieces that got away: Noah Charney presents the Museum of Lost Art

Featured in The Museum of Lost Art: a tapestry copy of The Justice of Trajan and Herkinbald now in the Historical Museum of Bern Phaidon
Imagine a museum of lost art crammed with masterpieces that have, over the centuries, been looted, destroyed in war, accidentally demolished or attacked. This is the fascinating premise of a new book by the US scholar Noah Charney, published by Phaidon. The tome begins with an analysis of famous thefts including the notorious Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist of 1990 when 13 works, including Vermeer’s The Concert, were stolen from the Boston museum. Consider also Russborough House, a country house in Ireland that has been plundered on four separate occasions. Other sections are just as riveting, from “accident” (covering the Momart warehouse fire in London in 2004 which ravaged works owned by Charles Saatchi) to “acts of god” (the 1966 flood of Florence when the swelling River Arno ruined works such as Paolo Uccello’s Creation and Fall, 1443-46). There are also intriguing tales of works deliberately annihilated by artists—think of Gerhard Richter who burned around 60 works in the early 1960s (he was displeased apparently with the blurred paintings based on photographs). Charney also throws up some art world mysteries—what happened to Van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr Gachet (1890), sold in 1990 to the Japanese businessman Ryoei Saito who wanted to have the work cremated with him when he died (Saito died in 1996; the painting’s whereabouts remain unknown). Crucially, Charney points out that “the works selected also offer an alternative history of art. Most art history today uses a core of some 200 or so extant historic works, illustrated and discussed over and over again.”
The Museum of Lost Art by Noah Charney (Phaidon) Gareth Harris
More BlogTopicsVincent Van GoghNoah CharneyPhaidonIsabella Stewart Gardner Museum