Banksy Not For Sale

Banksy: The $20 Million Graffiti Artist 

(Who Doesn't Want His Art To Be Worth Anything)

On February 22, 2007, the day after Sotheby's London sold three Banksy works, all of which soared above their auction estimates & into the six figures, the elusive & anonymous British graffiti artist updated his website with an image of an auction house, the people in the room bidding on picture with the written words:

I can’t believe you morons buy this shit”

In the years since, Banksy has continued to make his feeling on the commercialism of his art exceedingly clear. He calls galleries that sell his work "unauthorized", and is represented instead by The Pest Control Office, which is, in effect, another extension of the artist's darkly humorous manifesto. The simple website informs owners, anxious to authenticate and sell their freshly excavated and exceedingly valuable Banksy treasures, that the authentication process is "lengthy and challenging", as many pieces "are created in an advanced state of intoxication." As for legitimately buying a work from the artist - forget about it. Pest Control states that there is currently "something/nothing available."

Jean-Michel Basquiat Hmmmmm

THE MOST EXPENSIVE WORK OF ART by an American artist ever sold at auction was painted by a black man. A large-scale canvas by Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) was the top lot at Sotheby’s contemporary art auction last week. It shattered expectations, selling for an astronomic $110.5 million (including fees), an artist record and a groundbreaking auction moment. 

Basquiat’s “Untitled” image of a skull on a turquoise blue background was the headliner at the May 18 Contemporary Art Evening Auction at Sotheby’s New York. 

The painting achieved the highest auction price in history for a work by an American artist and reached a number of other milestones:

• Most expensive work by an American artist sold at auction
• Most expensive work by an artist of African descent sold at auction
• Most expensive work made since 1980 sold at auction
• Sixth most expensive work ever sold at auction
• One of only 10 paintings in auction history to surpass $100 million

Only 21-years-old when he made the painting, Basquiat is also the youngest artist to eclipse the $100 million mark. (In 1905, Picasso was 24 when he painted “Garçon à la Pipe” (Boy With a Pipe),” which sold for $104.1 million at Sotheby’s in 2004.) 

“Tonight, Jean-Michel Basquiat entered the pantheon of artists whose works have commanded prices over $100 million, including Picasso, Giacometti, Bacon, and Warhol,” said Grégoire Billault, head of the Contemporary Art Department at Sotheby’s New York. “This extraordinary canvas from 1982 has broken so many benchmarks …but those of us lucky enough to have been in its presence will only remember it’s awesome power. To think that it was created by a virtually-unknown 21-year old is humbling.”

Aleah Chapin

Listening in the Dark 

Oil on Board

Born in 1986, Aleah Chapin grew up on an island north of Seattle, Washington. She received her BFA from Cornish College of the Arts in 2009 and her MFA from the New York Academy of Art in 2012. Aleah has attended residencies at the Leipzig International Art Programme in Germany and the McDowell Colony in New Hampshire. Recent exhibitions have included the 2016 Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts, American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York; The Ingram Collection: Bodies, Woking, UK and a solo show, Within Wilds at Flowers Gallery, London. She has been a recipient of the Willard L. Metcalf Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Posey Foundation Scholarship, the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant, a Postgraduate Fellowship from the New York Academy of Art, and won the BP Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery in London in 2012. 

Aleah now lives and paints in the Pacific Northwest, where the people and place of her home are the foundation of her work. 

Louise Crow

Louise Crow (1890-1968) Born in Seattle,Washington
Crow traveled and studied in Santa Fe, New Mexico from 1918-1921. From a prominent Seattle family, Crow began exhibiting in California and Seattle as early as 1915, however, when she opened a studio in Santa Fe in 1918, her career began to soar. The harshly critical modernist painter, poet, and essayist, Marsden Hartley, reviewed her 1919 exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe with a positive comment: "The indication in her works is as clear as a clearly sounding bell, it has the  feel of warm metal.’ 

By.1938 Crow’s circumstances had changed. Her family’s fortune had been lost during the Depression. Although she had experienced significant success early in life, her painting career had become stifled by mental illness in later years, As her mental health deteriorated, she felt compelled to destroy many of the paintings that were once so high acclaimed. Fewer that twenty of her works are known to exist today. Louise Crow died destitute in 1968 in San Mateo, California. 

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Add cEagle Dance, San Ildenfonso, 1919, oil on canvas, 6 X 8 feetaption

Peggy Guggenheim ART ADDICT

Add

Artist	Giacomo Balla
Year	1913–14
Type	oil paint on millboard

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Giacomo Balla

1913–14

oil paint on millboard

Following World War II Peggy closed The Art of This Century Gallery, Chicago, in 1947, & returned to Europe; deciding to live in Venice, Italy. In 1948, she was invited to exhibit her collection in the disused Greek Pavilion of the Venice Biennaleand in 1949 & established herself in the Palazzo Venier dei Leone on the Grand Canal.^[4]

Her collection became one of the few European collections of modern art to promote a significant number of works by Americans. In the 1950s she promoted the art of two local painters, Edmondo Bacci & Tancredi Parmeggiani. By the early 1960s, Guggenheim had almost stopped collecting art & began to concentrate on presenting what she already owned. She loaned out her collection to museums in Europe & in 1969 to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City, which was named after her uncle. Eventually, she decided to donate her home & collection in Venice to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, a gift which was concluded inter vivos in 1976, before her death in 1979.

Grave of Peggy Guggenheim, next to a plaque remembering her Lhasa Apsos (dogs).

Stanislaw Szukalski

This documentary film looks at the life of the Polish artist Stanislaw Szukalski, an obscure figure whose work was subject to persecution by the Nazis. As a young man, he split time between Poland and Chicago and earned a reputation as his native country’s greatest living artist. There was even a museum dedicated to his work. But when the Germans invaded in 1939, much of his art was destroyed, and he then feld back to the United States and settled in Los Angeles. It was in America that he eventually met George DiCaprio (father of Leonardo), who, along with his son, financed this film. Available on Netflix.