Robin Rosenberg Fine Art, Author at Robin Rosenberg Fine Art

Auction Records: Artists who Live to See their Success

Does the pervasive image of the impoverished and struggling artist endure in today’s hot contemporary art market?

Anyone who has studied or discussed Art History is familiar with the starving artist trope – the idea of the artist who is rejected by his or her contemporaries, only to rise to fame posthumously. Vincent Van Gogh is a prime example, as he is one of the world’s most revered artists, yet only sold one painting during his lifetime.

The dismal image of the struggling and tortured artist quickly dissolves when surveying auction records for living artists. In fact, there is buzz that a new record will be established this week on November 15^th during Christie’s evening sale in New York. David Hockney’s monumental canvas, “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)” (1972) is poised to become the most valuable work by a living artist ever sold at auction, with an estimated hammer price of $80 million. The current record is held by Jeff Koons, whose ten foot high stainless steel Orange Balloon Dog sold for $58.4 million in 2013. Gerard Richter, Ed Ruscha, Jasper Johns, Christopher Wool and Damien Hirst are only a handful of the many other artists who have achieved great success and managed to live to see it.

Whether or not Hockney smashes Koons’ already impressive record, it is still exciting to witness the astronomical numbers living contemporary artists can fetch at auction. Click here to view the other lots in Christie’s upcoming Post-War and Contemporary Evening Sale.

Jeff Koons, Balloon Dog (Orange), 1994-2000, Mirror-polished stainless steel with transparent color coating, 121 x 143 x 45 inches. Auction price realized: USD $58,405,000

Gerard Richter, Abstraktes Bild, 1986, Oil on canvas, 118 x 98 inches. Auction price realized: GBP £30,389,000

Jasper Johns, FLAG, 1983, Encaustic on silk flag canvas, 11.5 x 17.5 inches, Auction price realized: USD $36,005,000

Alexander Calder: Radical Inventor

Calder Mobiles - Robin Rosenberg Fine Art

Alexander Calder, known as the artist who “made sculpture move,” revolutionized sculpture by suspending objects, creating mesmerizing shadows and changing perspectives.

Walking into the Montreal Museum of Fine Art’s Exhibition, ‘Alexander Calder: Radical Inventor’, viewers are immediately confronted with a slowly rotating circular couch with a large Calder mobile sculpture hanging above it. I sat down, laid on my back and gazed above to view the artwork. The moving couch offered continuously changing perspectives of the piece above, aptly setting the tone for the retrospective celebrating an artist who famously “made sculpture move.”

The exhibition features many of Calder’s mobiles – the artist’s unique artform consisting of delicately suspended forms that gently shift in response to air currents. Calder’s invention of the mobile completely revolutionized sculpture by renouncing stable heavy objects with mass and weight in favour of light, airy constructions that flow and cast magnificent shadows on walls that, in a way, become sculptures in their own right.

The mobiles, stabiles, paintings and jewellery displayed throughout the exhibition showcase the artist’s innovative multidisciplinary practice. My favourite part of the exhibition, however, was the video of Calder’s circus performance displayed early on in the show. Performed in the avant-garde circles of Paris from 1926-31, Calder’s circus comprised of hundreds of miniature figurines made of wire and cloth that he manipulated into action. The video captures Calder vigorously pulling levers and strings and turning cranks to animate his characters and their props in a way that emulates various acts that occur at the circus. Trapeze artists fly through the air, latch arms and fall into a net. A lion roars before placing its handler’s head into its mouth. Act after act, it is truly a delight to watch and demonstrates the artist’s distinctive ability to imbue static objects with a strong performative presence. The circus performance captures the essence of the artist’s entire oeuvre that is, at once, playful and sophisticated.

The exhibition runs through until February 24^th and I strongly encourage you to visit if you are in Montreal. Visit the museum’s website for more information.

Paintings of Pooches: National Dog Day 2018

Above image: David Hockney and his two dogs

Dogs are not only a man’s bestfriend, they’re also the favorite subject of numerous artists throughout the course of art history.

As an art lover and a self-proclaimed dog fanatic, I found it fitting to celebrate national dog day, coming up on August 26^th, by highlighting artworks featuring this furry four-legged subject. From appearing in primitive cave paintings and in Renaissance aristocratic portraiture, to being immortalized as balloons, dogs have been portrayed in various different ways throughout the course of art history.

Living embodiments of loyalty, love and protection, dogs have played noteworthy roles in the careers and oeuvres of many renowned artists. In 1995, famed British artist David Hockney dedicated an entire exhibition exclusively to paintings of his two dachshunds, Stanley and Boodgie. He captured his beloved companions in a seemingly endless array of positions and scenarios including sleeping, cuddling, eating, drinking and playing.

Keith Haring is another artist who frequently employed dogs in his artistry. In his typical graffiti aesthetic characterized by simplistic geometric forms and solid vibrant hues, he fashioned a unique, anthropomorphic representation of the animal depicted either dancing, laughing, barking or even DJing.

If you have any particular favourite artworks featuring canines, please click here to send us an email with images– we would love to see!

Jeff Koons, Magenta Balloon Dog, 2015, Metallized Porcelain, 10.5 inches diameter, Edition of 2300

Keith Haring, DJ, 1998, Lithograph, 31 x 23.5 inches

John Baldessari, Double Play: Feelings, 2012, Screenprint, 14 x 13.5 inches, Edition of 150

Alex Katz, Dog at Duck Trap, 1973-1975, Lithograph, 29 x 43 inches, Edition of 90

Armory Show 2018: Highlights

Our visit to The Armory Show this year offered a glimpse into the multifarious and truly varied nature of the art world today.

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Milton Avery

Though remaining relatively unknown during the majority of his lifetime, today American painter Milton Avery is considered a master colourist. His oeuvre is often compared to the vibrant and expressive work of Fauvist Henri Matisse in his expressive gestures and vibrant colours. Combining aspects of figuration and abstraction, Avery is considered to have prefigured elements of Color Field Painting. Born in 1885 in Altmar, New York, Avery studied at the Connecticut League of Art Students in Hartford where he received a conservative art education. Due to his family’s precarious financial situation, Avery contributed to the family’s income by taking on night jobs, leaving him limited time during the day to paint.

After moving to New York in 1925, Avery was able to fully dedicate time to his art practice. Though he exhibited his work throughout the 1930s, his career only gained momentum in 1943 when he joined the Paul Rosenberg Gallery. Associated with the European avant-garde movement, the gallery also represented notable artists such as Max Weber and Marsden Hartley. One year later, The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. granted him his first solo exhibition.

Avery only emerged as a major figure in the American art scene during the 1960s. His relatively delayed recognition was most likely due to the unbreakable commitment he held to his vision. During the early days of his career, critics were perplexed by his lack of concern for labels and movements; he believed his obligation was to be true to his art.

His work is currently held in the collections of numerous institutions across the United States and the United Kingdom including the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the MoMA in New York, NY, the Tate Modern in London, England, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art in Philadelphia, PA, among others. His innovative use of colour paved the way for later colourists such as Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, and Barnett Newman – to name a few. Many such artists have acknowledged their debt to Avery and his body of work, a recognition that was first made public with a retrospective exhibition on the artist at the Whitney Museum of American Art, curated by Barbara Haskell in 1982.

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Donald Baechler

Donald Baechler is an American painter and sculptor born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1956. He studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art from 1974-1977 and the Cooper Union in New York City from 1977-1978. Dissatisfied with what he thought was an uninspiring educational environment, Baechler transferred to an art school in Frankfurt, Germany to complete his studies.

In 1980, he returned to New York City and quickly became entrenched in the Lower Manhattan art scene, rapidly involving himself with the East Village artists, where the line between social life and artistic life was said to blur. During this period, he was represented by the Shafrazi Art Gallery, which focused on graffiti-oriented art and represented artists such as Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Although he was grouped amongst artists such as these, Baechler felt his work was more concerned with exploring formalism rather than specific subject matter or politics. Despite the fact that Baechler often used clichéd motifs such as skulls, roses, etc., he remains adamant in stating that he is an abstract artist and that line, colour, and form are of the utmost importance in his practice.

In his painting-collage-drawings, Baechler draws inspiration from a plethora of sources including art history, contemporary art, folk art, pop culture, and his childhood. His paintings and sculptures are also heavily drawn from images and objects that he has collected over the years in an accumulative process he calls ‘illusions of history’. His childlike imagery reflects pop culture references, echoing the work of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, and is sometimes interpreted as a critique of innocence, sincerity, and nostalgia.

Today, Baechler lives and works in New York City. His artwork has been exhibited at numerous institutions worldwide including The Whitney Museum of American Art, the MoMA, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, NY, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, CA as well as the Centre Pompidou and the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris, France.

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John Baldessari

John Baldessari was born in National City, California in 1931. He studied at San Diego State University and completed his post-graduate education at the Otis Art Institute, the Chouinard Art Institute, and the University of California, Berkeley. In addition to being recognized as one of the most renowned Californian conceptual artists of his time, Baldessari also gained a reputation as an influential teacher. He taught at the California Institute of the Arts from 1970-1988 and the University of California in Los Angeles from 1996-2007.

Originally a gestural painter, Baldessari began incorporating text and photography in his practice during the 1960s. In 1970, as a part of his controversial oeuvre entitled, The Cremation Project, he burned all of his paintings produced between 1953 and 1966. The artworks’ ashes were baked into cookies, placed in an urn, and were paired with a bronze plaque inscribed with the destroyed artworks’ birth and death dates.

His more recent conceptual work combines painting, printmaking, performance, video, sculpture, installation, and photography techniques. Baldessari’s frequent use of appropriated images, found photography, and text combines Pop Art motifs to create a narrative using the associative power of language.

His work has been shown in more than two hundred solo exhibitions and over one thousand group exhibitions. He received honorary degrees from San Diego State University, the Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design, California College of the Arts, as well as the National University of Ireland. His work has been featured in artist books, films, billboards, videos, and public works. He is currently held in a number of public and private collections including the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, NY, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in California, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and the Broad Collection. Baldessari continues to work in Venice, California.

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Mel Bochner

Mel Bochner is a leading American Conceptual artist best-known for his signature text-based paintings and prints.

Born in 1940 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Bochner earned his Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from the Carnegie Institution of Technology in 1962. Shortly after graduating, he settled in New York City where he worked as a guard at the Jewish Museum. At this time, he began experimenting with artistic ideas that strayed away from the dominant art form of Abstract Expressionism. Bochner is recognized as one of the leading figures of artists who departed from this traditional compositional mode of painting and forayed into Conceptual art. He drafted influential critical and theoretical essays on art that have figured as a central components to Conceptualism and to his own artistic oeuvre.

Throughout his career, Bochner has been particularly fascinated with the intersection of linguistic and visual representation. He has received international attention and accolades for pioneering the introduction of the use of language within the visual arts. His popular thesaurus painting series consists of lists of synonyms displayed in rainbow colored palettes, often featuring a single word repeated in painterly capital letters, the most common words being ‘Ha’ and ‘Blah’.

In addition to painting, Bochner frequently employs the monotype printing technique, as he admires the embossing possibilities the medium offers.

Bochner’s artwork has been widely exhibited throughout his career. In 1995, the Yale University Art Gallery initiated a retrospective of his work, which was later turned into a book. His works are included in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Courtauld Institute of Art in London, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., among many others around the globe. He continues to live and work in New York City.

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Paul-Émile Borduas

Painter Paul-Émile Borduas was born in Sainte-Hilaire, Quebec in 1905. He gained an international reputation as a painter and is considered a renowned and celebrated figure of great influence in Quebec. During his youth, Borduas served as an apprentice for the Quebecois decorative church painter, Ozias Leduc, who convinced Borduas to enroll in the École des beaux-arts in Montreal and sent him to Paris to study at the Ateliers d’art sacré. After his studies, Borduas taught drawing and painting in primary schools in Montreal and served as a professor at the École du Meuble.

Influenced by the work of Surrealist André Breton, he created his first automatist work, Abstraction verte, in 1941. The following year, he showed forty-five Surrealist works painted in gouache at the Théâtre de l’Érmitage, Montreal that were very well received.

Borduas became the leader of the Automatistes, a group of likeminded painters who exhibited together from 1943-1947 inspired by the Surrealist movement’s interest in the subconscious. He was the main author of the group’s manifesto, Refus global (1948), which denounced old ideologies and aimed instead to open Quebec to new cultural and intellectual developments.

From 1953-1955, Borduas lived in New York where his painting practice evolved as a result of his experience with American Abstract Expressionists. At this time, he began to apply paint solely with a spatula to create more texture.

Today, his work is on display at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the Vancouver Art Gallery in British Columbia, and the Musée d’art contemporain and the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Quebec. Borduas’ work helped shape a distinctly Canadian artistic visual identity that is remembered to this day.

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Sam Borenstein

Sam Borenstein was a Lithuanian-born Canadian Expressionist painter who immigrated with his family to Montreal, Canada in 1921. His work has been compared that of Marc Chagall and Vincent Van Gogh, though Borenstein’s oeuvre is distinct in his Surrealist flavour. Borenstein created hundreds of works over the course of his career and, although he did not find much success during his lifetime, his work has become quite desirable in the contemporary Canadian market.

During his youth, Borenstein taught himself to paint by capturing the people and places surrounding him with exaggerated brushstrokes and vivid colours, working directly on his canvas with a palette knife. He aimed to paint the essence of things such as responses to the weather as well as emotions associated with people and places. His work is at once personal and expressive of universal human experience.

His work can be found in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, the Winnipeg Art Gallery in Manitoba, the Art Gallery of Hamilton in Ontario, the National Portrait Gallery in England, as well as the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec and the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal in Quebec, the last of which held a retrospective of his work in 2005. His daughter, Joyce Borenstein, a filmmaker and artist herself, created a short film of his life titled, Colours of My Father: A Portrait of Sam Borenstein (1991), which won nine international awards.

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