art

The Art Collection At The Soho Beach House

Soho Beach House, the third North American property from the Soho House brand, opened in Miami this fall with over 150 original works of art hanging in the lobby and the halls. With Art Basel Miami Beach happening every December, Miami has become a hot spot for contemporary art. The artists gave original work to the club in exchange for membership and credit, the same approach used to curate the work in Soho House Berlin, Dean Street Townhouse in London and Soho House West Hollywood. The result is a collection of artworks given by artists who invest in the creative nature of the club itself.

A number of the artists in Soho Beach House are based in or originally from Miami, including Hernan Bas, Jose Parla, Aaron Young and Jim Drain. The collection also includes respected American artists such as Elizabeth Peyton, Glenn Ligon, Jack Pierson, John Baldessari and Shepherd Fairey as well as British artists including Douglas Gordon, Noble and Webster, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Liam Gillick, and Jonathan Monk. New generation American artists include Rashid Johnson, Slater Bradley, Ryan McGinley, KAWS, Aurel Schmidt and Rosson Crow).Francesca Gavin, the curator of the Soho House Group, works with Jonathan Yeo who art directs the Soho House collection.

The Soho Beach House is both a hotel to the public and members-only club. It is the ninth Soho House and the third in North America. The Soho Beach House is located on the site of the historic art deco Sovereign Hotel, which has been redesigned and expanded to include a 16-story oceanfront tower. The property now includes the club bar, 49 bedrooms, a penthouse, two pools, a full service beach, garden with Tiki bar, a roof deck,Cowshed Spa and Cecconi's restaurant.

Gallery: Soho Beach House Art Collection

Tags: art, miami, miami beach, soho beach house, soho house

Rene Ricard Print Goes On Sale Monday at Exhibition A

by Deidre Woollard (RSS feed) —

Filed under: Art

You've no doubt heard of 1980s art stars like Jean Michel Basquiat and Julian Schnabel but Rene Ricard may have passed you by. I first learned about Ricard in Schnabel's movie "Basquiat." Ricard has been called unsung hero of the New York art world, a poet/artist who has done more to further the work of others including Schnabel and Basquiat than to create his own career. In 2009, Vice magazine called him "a semi-secret hero of American art and culture." He is, a survivor, an artist, an original.

These days much of Ricard's poetry is in the form of paintings, poignant words scrawled across images in his sweeping cursive. Starting Monday, Ricard's work Boat, shown above, will be available at ExhibitionA.com as a special limited edition print of 100, signed and numbered by the artist, framed or unframed. It's perhaps not the most cheerful of holiday gifts but it's on my wish list just the same. As I mentioned recently Exhibition A is new online platform for buying and collecting contemporary art started in part by the husband-and-wife team of Bill Powers, Half Gallery owner and judge on Bravo's Work of Art, and designer Cynthia Rowley. Pieces are available for purchase for $100 to $500 and I predict Ricard's work will sell fast.

Tags: art, art prints, exhibition a, rene ricard

New Record Set For George Stubbs Art

by Deidre Woollard (RSS feed) —

Filed under: Auctions, Art

Another big night for Sotheby's. The Evening Sale of Old Master & British Paintings at Sotheby's in London saw a new auction record set for British artist George Stubbs. His Brood Mares and Foals, a large 39 ¼ by 74 ¼ inch painting sold for £10.1 million ($15.9 million) setting a new record for the artist at auction. The previous record was for his Portrait of The Royal Tiger which sold in 1995 for £3,191,500 ($5,079,579). This was the first time the painting had ever appeared on the open market. It passed from Colonel George Lane Parker (1724-1791) of Woodbury, Cambridgeshire, second son of George Parker, 2nd Earl of Macclesfield, of Shirburn Castle, Oxfordshire down through the generations to the most recent owner.

The sale brought in a total of £23,577,600 ($37,054,556) setting six new auction record prices for works by: George Stubbs, Luis de Morales, Goswijn Van Der Weyden, Giovanni Battista Piazzetta, Lorenzo Pasinelli and Emanuel de Witte.

George Stubbs is famous for his horse paintings. The painting shows Stubbs' handiwork with both horses and landscapes. It was likely commissioned by Colonel George Lane Parker. Stubbs produced the distinctive group of compositions of mares and foals exclusively for his most important patrons during the 1760s.

Tags: art, auction, equestrian art, george stubbs, sothebys

The Classicist: Paradise Lost - 40 Years of Cafe Society

by Jared Paul Stern (RSS feed) —

Filed under: Art, Books, The Classicist, Wealth

In the 1920s, '30s, '40s and '50s the so-called Café Society in Europe drew together aristocrats, millionaires, artists, authors, couturiers, choreographers and musicians in a "glittering world of fashion and frivolity, opulence and ostentation", notes Thierry Coudert in his ultra-stylish new book, Café Society: Socialites, Patrons and Artists 1920 to 1960 from Flammarion. Those decades were the "apotheosis of an era that was to have a profound influence on the history of taste" Coudert writes, with the likes of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Lady Diana Cooper, Diana Vreeland, Cole Porter, Noel Coward and Cecil Beaton setting the tone and deciding which artists, designers, and musicians were in vogue. The cover of the book (above) depicts heiress Barbara Hutton, then the Countess von Reventlow, at a tennis match in 1940, while Yves Saint Laurent, Orson Welles, Salvador Dali, Jean Cocteau and many more make cameos in the impressive volume.

Gallery: Cafe Society

Tags: Aristocrats, art, artists, books, Café Society, Cafe Society, coffee table books, Diana Vreeland, Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Duke of Windsor, Europe, fashion, France, Noel Coward, socialites, society, style, wealth, Yves Saint Laurent

Continue reading “The Classicist: Paradise Lost - 40 Years of Cafe Society”

Taittinger to Unveil New Artist Collectors Edition Bottle at The Setai

by Jared Paul Stern (RSS feed) —

Filed under: Spirits, Wine, Events, Art

Famed French champagne house Taittinger will unveil the newest limited edition bottle in its coveted Taittinger Collection series at an event toasting the kick-off of Miami Art Basel on Saturday at the luxurious Setai in South Beach. Since 1985 Taittinger has commissioned an artist to create a special bottle for its glorious bubbly every year. For this, the 12th edition in the Collection, Taittinger selected artist Amadou Sow for the quality and originality of his work, along with his cultural artistic identity. The artist's design (above) graces a bottle of the 2002 vintage of Taittinger Brut Millésimé, which is produced only in the best years from select Chardonnay and Pinot Noir grapes grown in vineyards in several of the finest microclimates of France's Champagne region. Meanwhile the Setai also recently celebrated the reopening of its eatery The Grill with newly appointed Executive Chef David Werly, who brings his take on the space offering a fresh menu and alternative to the Asian cuisine of The Restaurant with European inspired menu items.

Tags: art, Art Basel, champagne, Florida, Miami, Setai, South Beach, Taittinger

Abramovich Buys $400 Million Private Island in Russia

by Jared Paul Stern (RSS feed) —

Filed under: Art, Wealth

Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich is splashing out around $400 million to buy a private island in the heart of historic Saint Petersburg with plans to build an art museum there housing his incredible collection, the London Daily Telegraph reports. Abramovich, one of the richest men in the world, has quietly established himself as the world's leading collector of modern and contemporary art thanks to the influence of his beautiful young girlfriend Dasha Zhukova, the paper notes. New Holland island, which he has just acquired, is a crumbling 300-year-old former military base which belonged to the Russian admiralty. Abramovich plans to transform the 18th century warehouses into a cultural and commercial center in Russia's old imperial capital, including space for his amazing art collection, starring the record-breaking $86.3 million Francis Bacon triptych he bought in 2008, monumental works by Lucien Freud, Pablo Picasso and more.

Tags: art, contemporary art, Dasha Zhukova, Francis Bacon, island, Lucien Freud, museum, private museum, Roman Abramovich, Russian billionaire, St. Petersburg

O'Keeffe Museum Deaccessions Painting To Raise Funds

by Deidre Woollard (RSS feed) —

Filed under: Auctions, Art

The seller of a 1926 flower painting by artist Georgia O'Keeffe that goes up for sale Wednesday at Christie's in New York is none other than the O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Canna Red and Orange is expected to bring between $1.2 million and $1.8 million and will benefit the museum's acquisition fund.

Museum director Robert Kret told the New Mexican that the decision to deaccession the painting was made after "long deliberations and thoughtful conversations." It was decided that the work could be sold to buy other O'Keeffe artworks that would flesh out the collection. Canna Red and Orange is smaller than O'Keeffe's large-scale canvases of flowers. O'Keeffe began painting flower pictures in 1918 and they were shown for the first time by Alfred Stieglitz in 1923. By 1924, she was painting large-scale flower paintings, which were exhibited the following year at Anderson Galleries. This 20-inch by 16-inch oil-on-canvas has been on exhibit in New York in 1927 and in Santa Fe in 1997.

Tags: art, christies, georgia okeeffe, okeeffe

Exhibition A, A New Way To Buy Contemporary Art

by Deidre Woollard (RSS feed) —

Filed under: Art

The world of fast sales has come to contemporary art with Exhibition A, a new online platform for buying and collecting contemporary art. launches later this month and will feature open edition, limited release works by artists including Terence Koh, David LaChapelle, Richard Phillips, Nate Lowman, Rene Ricard, Josephine Meckseper, Mark Borthwick, and Hanna Liden. Pieces will be available for purchase for $100 to $500 and all works will be exclusive to Exhibition A with select editions available for purchase also at the Gagosian shop on Madison Avenue. Each piece will be available only for two weeks and then never offered again. The Exhibition A website will also feature editorial content, including commentary and interviews. The company was started in part by the husband-and-wife team of Bill Powers, Half Gallery owner and judge on Bravo's Work of Art, and designer Cynthia Rowley.

Tags: art, artwork, bill powers, cynthia rowley, exhibition, fast sales

The Case of The Electrician and Pablo Picasso

by Deidre Woollard (RSS feed) —

Filed under: Art

Tags: art, Pablo Picasso, picasso, pierre le guennec

Continue reading “The Case of The Electrician and Pablo Picasso”

Avedon's Dovima Goes To Dior

by Deidre Woollard (RSS feed) —

Filed under: Auctions, Art

That massive image of model Dovima posing with an elephant that sold at the Richard Avedon auction at Christie's Paris last weekend found a fitting home. Avedon's 1955 photo "Dovima With Elephants" was bought by the Christian Dior fashion house. Dovima is wearing a Dior evening gown in the fashionable photo. The seven-foot tall print was made for the tour of Avedon's 1978 Metropolitan Museum of Art fashion retrospective. After the tour it stood near the entrance to Avedon's New York studio for 25 years. Since 2005, it has been installed inside the entrance to the offices of The Richard Avedon Foundation. The print sold for 841,000 euros, approximately $1.1 million, in the sale which made a total of $7.5 million.

http://www.elleuk.com/news/fashion-news/dovima-finds-a-new-home-at-dior/(gid)/698788

Tags: art, christian dior, christies, photography, richard avedon

Herbert Katzman: Skyscapes Painter

by Bobbie Leigh (RSS feed) —

Filed under: Art

Glorious Sky: Herbert Katzman's New York at the Museum of the City of New York is the first major museum retrospective of this American artist. Who's Katzman? Never heard of him --- not surprising as he is hardly a household name. Yet in the 1950s Katzman was considered one of America's best artists. He was the one to watch exhibiting along with Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Mark Rothko. But like Edward Hopper a generation earlier, Katzman was a figurative painter at a time when artistic diversity was on the wane. Katzman peaked in terms of public awareness in the 1950s. After that, he was in effect doomed to semi-obscurity by the overwhelming preference of art critics, notably Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, for Abstract Expressionism. And collectors followed suit chasing after the big names favored by critics. Although he was once considered one of the most promising painters of his time, Katzman (1923-2004) by the 1960s was deemed unfashionable.

Tags: art, Clement Greenberg, figurative art, Harold Rosenberg, new york city, NYC paintings

Continue reading “Herbert Katzman: Skyscapes Painter”

Denver Museum Plans To Sell Namesake's Art

by Deidre Woollard (RSS feed) —

Filed under: Art

The issue of when and just how much of its artwork a museum can sell is one we keep seeing in the news. A planned Denver museum's plan to sell four paintings done by its namesake is causing a bit of controversy. The Clyfford Still Museum has announced a plan to sell four of the 825 paintings mean to be housed in the new Clyfford Still Museum.

The sale could raise $25 million for the museum because Still's work rarely comes up for sale. The museum will be a Clyfford Still treasure trove housing 94% of the artist's work. The Denver Post reports that the sale doesn't technically violate the American Association of Museums and Association of Art Museum Directors terms for "deaccessioning" artworks. The privately funded museum hasn't opened yet and therefore hasn't taken possession of the pieces which were bequeathed to the city of Denver when Still's widow, Patricia, died in 2005.

According to the Denver Post article the museum petitioned a Maryland county court to permit the estate to release the four works early before the formal transfer of ownership so it isn't so much deaccessioning as pre-deaccessioning. The works would be sold as a group to other museums. Once the museum owns the paintings the rules are clear that it can't sell art to boost its coffers. Although Still wanted his work to remain intact in a single collection, his wife had donated or sold several works after her husband's death, a precedent that the museum is using to justify the potential sale.

The museum ethics rules are in place to make sure that museum leaders do not sell artworks to balance budgets during crises but we've seen several university-related museums test the boundaries of these rules. The Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University threatened to close and sell off its $350 million art trove but ended up with a plan to rent them instead. More recently Fisk University in Nashville received approval to sell off a share in its Stieglitz art collection to the Crystal Bridges Museum in Arkansas.

Tags: art, clyfford still, deaccessioned art, DeaccessionedArt, denver, museum

The Stunning Photographs of Stan Shaffer

by Jared Paul Stern (RSS feed) —

Filed under: Art, Books

If you've never heard of photographer Stan Shaffer, who captured the cream of cultural bohemia in the golden age of the '60s and '70s, now's the time to rectify that courtesy of über-luxe German publisher teNeues. You Should Have Been With Me is a massive scrapbook culled from Shaffer's stunning archive, with intimate portraits of celebs of the day including Gloria Vanderbilt, Angelica Huston, Andy Warhol, Halston, Calvin Klein, Peter Beard, Cheryl Tiegs, Grace Jones, Jerry Hall, Brooke Shields and Mariel Hemingway. These are interspersed with sexy fashion snaps and outtakes of sessions with supermodels on yachts and in Porsches once the "work" was done. In diary form Shaffer shares extracts from his extraordinary life at the nexus of New York's art, fashion and cinema worlds, at glitzy parties "where everyone is somebody and they're all dressed to kill!" Shaffer's journey was that of a "voyeur, participant, invited guest and documentarian" wrapped into one; sadly he died during the final stages of production on this book, which now serves as a fitting legacy for an artist who deserves more recognition.

Tags: 1960s, 1970s, Andy Warhol, art, books, Calvin Klein, celebrity, coffee table books, fashion, Jerry Hall, New York, Peter Beard, photographer, photography, Stan Shaffer, style, teNeues

"Finding of Moses" Sells for Seven Times Estimate, Sets New Record

by Bobbie Leigh (RSS feed) —

Filed under: Auctions, Art

Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema's 19th-century painting, "The Finding Of Moses," had a pre-sale estimate of $3 million to $5 million. At Sotheby's 19th Century European Art Sale November 4, it sold for a remarkable $35,922,500 to an undisclosed bidder. Three people raised their bids consistently during a battle for ownership of this masterpiece that lasted nearly eight minutes. Once the bidding started, it rose quickly to more than $20 million in a battle between two clients on the phone. Then a new bidder in the room raised a paddle for a $23 million bid. After several more minutes, the painting was sold to one of the the original phone bidders. The whopping price sets a new record for the artist at auction. His previous record set for this same painting was $2.8 million in 1995.

The painting depicts the pharoah's daughter carried aloft by bare-chested slaves while her handmaidens hoist the baby Moses in his basket so that his new "mother" can gaze down at him. Although not too biblically correct, it's still a meticulously painted version of an Old Testament scene. Alma-Tadema possibly became infatuated with Egyptian themes on a visit to the British Museum in 1862 where the main attraction was the newly acquired Elgin Marbles.

Tags: art, art market, sothebys

Matisse Bronze Tops Christie's Sale

by Deidre Woollard (RSS feed) —

Filed under: Auctions, Art

Last night, November 3, was Christie's turn to host an Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale. The night before, rival Sotheby's brought in $227.5 million. Christie's had a similarly strong evening with a total of $231.4 million. The 84-lot sale was 80 percent sold by lot and 88 percent sold by value.

Henri Matisse's monumental sculpture Nu de dos, 4 état (Back IV) was the night's top lot, setting a record for the artist at $48,8 million nicely above the top estimate of $35 million. This was the first time that a work from the artist's Back series has ever come to auction. Other leading lots included Alberto Giacometti's Femme de Venise V, conceived in 1956 and cast in 1958, which sold for $10.27 million, three works by Fernand Léger from Property from the Collection of Max Palevsky, including La Tasse de Thé, 1921, which realized $8.16 million and Egon Schiele's Mann und Frau (Umarmung), 1917, which sold for $7.36 million.

As at Sotheby's the previous night, this sale too had an unsold Picasso. The 1921 "Maternite," was estimated to sell for as much as $10 million but failed to find a buyer.

Tags: art, art market, art results, christies, matisse, sculpture

← Previous Page|Next Page →

art

Featured Galleries

HuffPost AOL Social News Most Popular

Also on AOL