Monthly Archive for December, 2010

From Julian Bell at London Review of Books…

The upright canvas, some 4’6’’ by 3’, stood on Salvator Rosa’s easel, prepared with a burnt umber ground. The painter first attacked it, as far as I can see, with a black-loaded brush, dragging a jagged stuttery line almost from top to bottom. That was to be the rock edge of Etna’s crater. Where the volcanic glow was to fall, Rosa slapped on a queasy mid-tone mix of sienna and smalt blue; capped it with brisk blurts of white; later, knocked the resulting rock planes back into readable order with red and yellow glazes. But that vertical divide of his, tumbling and forking in ever crazier lurches, still retains a lightning urgency. Here you meet the gestural painting of the 1660s, as vehement and imperious in its own way as the art of Clyfford Still.

There are not all that many ways in which you could call Rosa’s brushwork graceful. Slackening in pace as he dabbed in some clouds beyond the crater, it snarls up awkwardly over the canvas’s lone figure – that of the philosopher Empedocles, who is seen hurling himself, for some reason or other, from an inner ledge into the gulf of fire below. In fact one of the first things I noticed, as I went round the recent exhibition of Rosa’s work at Dulwich, was the painter’s own moth-to-the-flame impulse to tackle types of figure painting that lay beyond his grasp. More…

From John Richardson at Vanity Fair…

The announcement last week that Pierre Le Guennec, a 71-year-old French electrician, was the owner of 271 previously unknown or presumed missing works by Pablo Picasso, has created a furor on both sides of the Atlantic. For installing burglar alarms on Picasso’s homes, including the villas near Cannes on the French Riviera, Le Guennec claims that the artist and his second wife, Jacqueline, gave him the drawings, prints, and collages, dating from 1900 to 1932, which are estimated to be worth upward of $60 million. When shown the works, Picasso’s son Claude confirmed that they were authentic but suggested that they must have been stolen.

It is my belief that this treasure trove belonged to a massive group of some 70 portfolios of works on paper which the artist had been obliged to remove from his Paris apartment on the Rue la Boétie and his studio on the Rue des Grands Augustins after the French government enacted regulations preventing people from having multiple residencies. Picasso had tried and failed to fight this injunction, but since he had apparently forsaken his Paris properties to reside in the Villa La Californie at Cannes, he was unsuccessful. To his rage, he was forced to relinquish them and have their contents stored or sent down to Cannes. More…

From Susan Michals at Vanity Fair…

This year, artist Jean-Michel Basquiat would have turned 50 years old. And in half-century celebration, there are events all over the world: In Paris, you can see more than 100 of his works at the Museum of Modern Art through January 2011, as well as a special exhibition at Galerie Pascal Lansberg. In other cities, you can catch Tamra Davis’s new documentary, The Radiant Child, centered on an interview the director shot with Basquiat 20 years ago. And in New York, a Basquiat exhibition was on display for much of the fall at the Robert Miller Gallery, in Chelsea.

But in Los Angeles, there resides a much more personal collection. At LeadApron, a gallery on Melrose Place, gallerist Jonathan Brown has an unusual collection of ephemera: 112 pieces belonging to Basquiat, including self-portraits and even the signature bow tie he wore in his hair, all from the last year of his life.

Brown acquired this collection about five years ago from an old friend, Kelle Inman, Basquiat’s last girlfriend. “Kelle had a real mothering instinct; she wanted to care for you,” Brown says. “I think that may have been some of her connection to Jean-Michel, because she spent the last year of his life with him. She nursed him, cared for him, and tried to help him get off drugs.” More…