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. 

"

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

caption

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.

Anna Schuleit Installation Artist

Anna Schuleit

Artist

New York, New York

Anna Schuleit is a young artist who brings back to life historic sites & structures through her original interpretations.  In much of her work to date, she has honored the lives lived within mental health institutions by transforming abandoned facilities into moving, site-specific memorials. Employing such ephemeral elements as choral pieces & seas of flowers, her powerful public works are designed to endure not as objects, but as vivid memories for those who experience the multisensory events she orchestrates.  For Habeas Corpus (2000), Schuleit filled Massachusetts’ historic Northampton State Hospital with music; from speakers installed throughout the dilapidated building, a recording of J. S. Bach’s Magnificat poured through windows & doors, stirring a rapt audience of former patients, caregivers & hundreds of others assembled below. 

MACARTHUR FELLOWSHIP CITATION

Aleksandra Ekstar

Aleksandra Aleksandrovna Ekster (Russian: Александра Александровна) 18 January 1882 – 17 March 1949), also known as Alexandra Exter, was a Russian painter:
(Cubo Futurist, Suprematist, Constructivist) and stage designer of 
international stature.

Nicholas Roerich

Petersburg, Russia, to a well-to-do notary public father of Baltic German ancestry and a Russian mother,^[3] he lived in various places around the world until his death in Naggar,^[4] Himachal Pradesh, India. Trained as an artist and a lawyer, his main interests were literature, philosophy, archaeology, and especially art. Roerich was a dedicated activist for the cause of preserving art and architecture during times of war. He earned several nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize long list.^[5] The so-called Roerich Pact was signed into law by the United States and most nations of the Pan-American Union in April 1935. Roerich, also known as Nikolai Konstantinovich Rerikh (Russian: Никола́й КNicholas Roerich, also known as Nikolai Konstantinovich Rerikh (Russian: Никола́й Константи́нович Рéрих; October 9 [O.S. September 27] 1874 – December 13, 1947), was a Russian mystic, painter, philosopher, scientist, writer, traveler, and public figure.

A prolific artist, he created thousands of painting

s (many of them are exhibited in well-known museums of the world) and about 30 literary works. Roerich was an author and initiator of an international pact for the protection of artistic and academic institutions and historical sites (Roerich’s Pact) and a founder of an international movement for the defence of culture. Roerich earned several nominations for the Nobel Prize.онстанти́нович Рéрих; October 9 [O.S. September 27] 1874 – December 13, 1947), was a A prolific artist, he created thousands of paintings (many of them are exhibited in well-known museums of the world) and about 30 literary works. Roerich was an author and initiator of an international pact for the protection of artistic and academic institutions and historical sites (Roerich’s Pact) and a founder of an the defence of culture. Roerich earned several nominations for the Nobe

Nick Cave Soundsuits

Cave's first soundsuit was created in 1992, as a reaction to the beating of Rodney King. Cave collected a large number of sticks and twigs from the ground and fashioned them into a suit that made sounds when worn. His suits are most often presented for public viewing as static sculptures, but they are also observed through live performance, video, and photography. Bringing his interactive creations to life, "Cave regularly performs in the sculptures himself, dancing either before the public or for the camera, activating their full potential as costume, musical instrument and living icon. Cave has produced over 500 soundsuits, since the creation of his first in 1992. 

Serious About Your Art?

There is an interesting juxtaposition between this 63M Cezanne & the Ukrainian police guarding it with assault weapons. It had been stolen & recovered from the ceiling lining of a car, while Cezanne was belittled & ostracized in his lifetime. 

Message: Keep doing your art & remember that your ultimate support comes through YOU. 

Félix Edouard Vallotton (December 28, 1865 – December 29, 1925) was a Swiss French painter and print maker associated with Les Nabise. Les Nabis (pronounced nah-BEE) were a group of Post Impressionist- Avante Gard artists who set the pace for fine arts and graphic arts in France in the 1890s. Initially a group of friends interested in contemporary art and literature, most of them studied at the private art school Academie Julian in Paris in the late 1880s. He was an important figure in the development of the modern woodcut.
He painted, wrote art criticism and made a number of prints. In 1891 he executed his first woodcut, a portrait of  Paul Verlaine. The many woodcuts he produced during the 1890s were recognized as innovative & established Vallotton as a leader in the revival of true woodcut as an artistic medium^. In the western world, the relief print, in the form of commercial wood graving , had long been utilized mainly as a means to accurately reproduce drawn or painted images & photographs. Vallotton's woodcut style was novel in its starkly reductive opposition of large masses of undifferentiated black and areas of unmodulated white. Vallotton emphasized outline and flat patterns & generally eliminated the gradations and modeling traditionally produced by hatching. He was influenced by Post Impressionist Painting,  Symbolism & especially by the Japanese woodcut^.
 

La raison probante (The Cogent Reason), a woodcut from the series Intimités, 1898

 His woodcut subjects included domestic scenes, bathing women, portrait heads, and several images of street crowds and demonstrations—notably, several scenes of police attacking anarchists. He usually depicted types rather than individuals, eschewed the expression of strong emotion, and "fuse[d] a graphic wit with an acerbic if not ironic humor". Vallotton's graphic art reached its highest development in Intimités (Intimacies),  a series of ten interiors published in 1898 by the Revue Blanche, which deal with tension between men and women.^[5] Vallotton's woodcuts were widely disseminated in periodicals and books in Europe as well as in the United States, and have been suggested as a significant influence on the graphic art of Edvard Munch & Aubrey Beardsle^. 
 
During the 1890s, when Vallotton was closely allied with the avant-garde, his paintings reflected the style of his woodcuts, with flat areas of color, hard edges, and simplification of detail. His subjects included genre scenes, portraits and nudes. Examples of his Nabi style are the deliberately awkward Bathers on a Summer Evening (1892–93),  and the symbolist Moonlight (1895), in the Musse D Orsay . 

                 

Dead Horse Bay Assemblage Playground

"In 1926, much of the salt marsh surrounding Dead Horse Bay and the rest of Barren Island were pumped with sand from Jamaica Bay. This raised the land to 16 feet above the high tide mark and connected the islands to each other, and the mainland of Brooklyn, in order to create Floyd Bennett Field as New York City's first municipal airport. The entire area, including the historic airfield, are now managed by the National Park Service as part of the Jamaica Bay Unit of the Gateway National Recreation Area
Today, school groups are taken to Dead Horse Bay on a regular basis to walk the Millstone trail, seine for a variety of fishes, and learn about the natural and cultural history of the area. Its shores are also a popular sport fishing spot, and home to a marina operating in Deep Creek as a National Park Service concession. Today one can find a large array of glass bottles and pieces of broken glass on the beach, along with old shoes and construction materials, many from the landfill which is now leaking. It is a popular place to collect strange decorative materials for artists and crafters." Wikipedia

Doris Lessing: Reluctant Heroine

"Doris Lessing was out shopping for groceries when the Nobel Prize announcement came. Arriving home to a gathering of reporters, she exclaimed, "Oh Christ! "I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one, so I'm delighted to win them all. It's a royal flush."She titled her Nobel Lecture On Not Winning the Nobel Prize and used it to draw attention to global inequality of opportunity and to explore changing attitudes to storytelling and literature. The lecture was later published in a limited edition to raise money for children made vulnerable by HIV/AIDS. Her final book, Alfred & Emily appeared in 2008.

Epic of Everest 1924 Silent Film

'Filming in brutally harsh conditions with a hand-cranked camera, Captain John Noel captured images of breathtaking beauty & considerable historic significance. The film is also among the earliest filmed records of life in Tibet & features sequences at Phari Dzong (Pagri), Shekar Dzong (Xegar) & Rongbuk monastery. But what resonates so deeply is Noel’s ability to frame the vulnerability, isolation & courage of people persevering in one of the world’s harshest landscapes.'

The restoration by the BFI National Archive has transformed the quality of the surviving elements of the film & reintroduced the original color tints & tones. Revealed by the restoration, few images in cinema are as epic, or moving, as the final shots of a blood red sunset over the Himalayas.'

For me, this film is an amazing meditation & should elicit profound gratitude to Noel for his courage to follow as far as possible the ultimately doomed Hillary/Irvine assent, but more importantly, early footage of the indigenous Tibetan people. This is an early British film & may not be the most politically correct, but it does speak to a population of Sherpa's & their families who have made Everest their home for centuries.

The Lost Generation

The term stems from a remark made by Gertrude Stein to Ernest Hemingway, “You are all a lost generation.” Hemingway used it as an epigraph to The Sun Also Rises (1926), a novel that captures the attitudes of a hard-drinking, fast-living set of disillusioned young expatriates in postwar Paris.

'As the publication of Joyce’s Ulysses suggested in 1922, the Parisian cultural scene was more permissive of literature which confronted established mores & codes of behavior. Culturally as well as morally, Paris in the 1920s remained one of the most exciting, sophisticated cities in the world. Capital of the avant-garde in all its forms including, Modernists, Cubists, Dadaists, Futurists, Expressionists & Surrealists. These were the years of Picasso & Modigliani, Braque & Duchamp, Stravinski, Satie, Diaghilev & Cocteau. Radical developments in the visual & performing arts were mirrored in the Continental literature of the time, from the surrealist shock tactics of André Bréton & Guillaume Apollinaire, to the textual experimentation of Joyce and Beckett. It was into this vibrant, inspiring foment of idea & innovation that the self-imposed exiles of America’s “Lost Generation” flung themselves. Young radicals like Ernest Hemingway, Hart Crane & Ezra Pound & a little later on, Henry Miller & Anais Nin, published some of their most powerful & controversial works in the city.
On the face of it the sobriquet of “Lost Generation” seems an odd collective description for a group of writers & artists who were among the brightest flowering of American literary talent yet to emerge on the international stage, yet depicted this generation as characterised by doomed youth, hedonism, uncompromising creativity & wounded—both literally & metaphorically—by the experience of war. To varying degrees, these virtues and vices were to be found in the life-story of nearly every member of the Lost Generation. Aside from their wild lifestyles, though, what is most striking is the astonishing range, depth & influence of work produced by this community of American expatriates in Paris'

'Midnight in Paris' is a modern day retrospective on The Lost Generation as Woody Allen perceives it. Worth the watch.

Beatrice Wood, Potter, Died at 105 years!

"Beatrice Wood was an important contemporary artist, craft person and writer. Her life ran the course of the 20th century and included many of the figures that shaped it. Ultimately, her genius was in the marriage of wide-ranging influences in her work. The spirit of Dadaism, impact of Modernism, embrace of Eastern philosophy, influence of folk art and even the ornament of ethnic jewelry were all combined in her ceramics. Her work reveals a mastery of form, combined with a preference for the naïveté of folk art. Ultimately, it is impossible to separate her life experiences from the work she created, as she truly mastered the art of a life."    http://www.beatricewood.com/biography.html

Hats Off! to Mimi Weddell

 Marion Rogers "Mimi' Weddell (February 15, 1915 – September 24th 2009) was an American Actress. She is best known for portraying Stanford's grandmother on Sex & the City and for being featured in a documentary film, Hat's Off about her life and her collection of some 150 hats.

Weddell only began her acting career in earnest once she was 65, following the death of her husband in 1981, which had left her with a stack of unpaid bills.

http://www.hatsoffthemovie.com/