Christie's New York
10 AM, November 16, 2016
Sale 12157 and 12159
Lot 439, "Die Grosse Fracht (the Heavy Cargo," by Anselm Kiefer, oil, emulsion, metal, mesh, steel and lead on canvas, 110 1/4 by 150 by 27 1/8 inches, 2005
By Carter B. Horsley
The
morning and afternoon auctions of Post-War & Contemporary Art at
Christie's New York November 16, 2016 are highlighted by two excellent
works by Anselm Kiefer and good examples by Helen Frankenthalter,
Robert Gottlieb, Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Motherwell.
The
star attraction is Lot 439, a large oil, emulsion, metal mesh, steel
and lead on canvas by Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945). It is entitled
"Die Grosse Fracht (The Heavy Cargo)" and measures 110 1/4 by 150 by 27
5/8 inches. It was created in 2005.
It has an estimate of $700,000 to $1,000,000. It sold for $787,500 including the buyer's premium as do all results mentioned in this article.
The total for the day and afternoon auctions was $61,462,250.
The catalogue entry for this lot provides the following commentary:
It has an estimate of $700,000 to $1,000,000. It sold for $787,500 including the buyer's premium as do all results mentioned in this article.
The total for the day and afternoon auctions was $61,462,250.
The catalogue entry for this lot provides the following commentary:
Executed
in 2005, Anselm Kiefer’s Die
Grosse Fracht (The
Heavy Cargo) embodies the visceral materiality inherent to the artist’s
mature work, displaying his singular and masterful blend of the
painterly and sculptural conception. Die
Grosse Fracht,
among the most ambitious in a group of sea- and landscape-based
compositions created between 2004 and 2006, offers a meditation on the
fundamental angst of the human journey.
Enshrouded in a riot of paint, mesh and gritty materials, the abstract texture of Die Grosse Fracht echoes nature in the raw. Unseen currents of the deep sea are projected through heaped layers of grey and a burst of sunlight is rendered with golden streaks. A solitary ship stands against this open ocean, punctuating the otherwise empty panorama with its leaden furrows.
Enshrouded in a riot of paint, mesh and gritty materials, the abstract texture of Die Grosse Fracht echoes nature in the raw. Unseen currents of the deep sea are projected through heaped layers of grey and a burst of sunlight is rendered with golden streaks. A solitary ship stands against this open ocean, punctuating the otherwise empty panorama with its leaden furrows.
The
catalogue entry also provides several pertinent quotations:
"I
see all the layers. In my paintings, I tell stories in order to show
what lies behind history. I make a hole and pass through."
– Anselm Kiefer
Die Grosse Fracht, with its boat adrift and alone, incorporates a sense of existential isolation that builds upon the celebrated writings of 20th-century Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann. Keifer, brought up in Germany during the aftermath of the Second World War, strongly related to Bachmann’s claims that all human beings travel on an often lonely, solo path. The persuasive imagery of a lone vessel adrift on the open ocean is borne from a rigorously personal connection to the isolation in Bachmann’s poetry. "The images of Anselm Kiefer are inhabited, haunted by words, be they visible words, readable in his painting, or those that are invisible, either because they're buried under newer layers, or because, accompanying Kiefer throughout his work, they've been deposited, displaced, transformed until what is left to be seen are only those that will give their name, finally, to the work. This active presence of a verbal thought, at work in the work, manifests itself also by the themes (literary, historical or mythical) that Kiefer treats, and by the impressive dimension of his iconography, in the most classic meaning of the term, but made rigorously personal and up-to-date by his appropriation"
(D. Arasse, Anselm Kiefer: Cette obscure clarté qui tombe des étoiles, exh. cat., Galerie Yvon Lambert, Paris, 1996, n.p.).
The intrepid vessel in Die Grosse Fracht is rendered in sheets of shaped lead, an obstinate material that reinforces the weighty and complex history of 20th-century Germany. This ‘heavy cargo’ warrants a material with equal heft. “Lead affects me more than all other metals,” he says, “…It is in flux. It’s changeable and has potential to achieve a higher state” (J. Wullschlager, “Interview with Anselm Kiefer, ahead of his Royal Academy show”, Financial Times, 2014). The “higher state” to which Kiefer refers resonates within the glimpses of golden flecks imprinted on Die Grosse Fracht’s rich surface. Lead also provides an opportunity to both maintain valuable memories and heal fragile wounds. "Lead is for Kiefer, in keeping with alchemical tradition, the magic metal which preserves memory; which, with its own soft weight, creates a reduced, weary representation of the world in order to absorb the wounds in its wrinkled skin"
(D. Eccher, ‘Anselm Kiefer: A Dark Soul’, in Anselm Kiefer: Stelle Cadenti, exh. cat., Galleria d'Arte Moderna di Bologna, 1999, p. 87).
While rooted in serious underpinnings of cultural memory and human experience, Die Grosse Fracht is undoubtedly a visually compelling piece with its stratified painterly layers. “You cannot avoid beauty in a work of art. …You can take the most terrible subject and automatically it becomes beautiful”
(J. Wullschlager, “Interview with Anselm Kiefer, ahead of his Royal Academy show”, Financial Times, 2014).
– Anselm Kiefer
Die Grosse Fracht, with its boat adrift and alone, incorporates a sense of existential isolation that builds upon the celebrated writings of 20th-century Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann. Keifer, brought up in Germany during the aftermath of the Second World War, strongly related to Bachmann’s claims that all human beings travel on an often lonely, solo path. The persuasive imagery of a lone vessel adrift on the open ocean is borne from a rigorously personal connection to the isolation in Bachmann’s poetry. "The images of Anselm Kiefer are inhabited, haunted by words, be they visible words, readable in his painting, or those that are invisible, either because they're buried under newer layers, or because, accompanying Kiefer throughout his work, they've been deposited, displaced, transformed until what is left to be seen are only those that will give their name, finally, to the work. This active presence of a verbal thought, at work in the work, manifests itself also by the themes (literary, historical or mythical) that Kiefer treats, and by the impressive dimension of his iconography, in the most classic meaning of the term, but made rigorously personal and up-to-date by his appropriation"
(D. Arasse, Anselm Kiefer: Cette obscure clarté qui tombe des étoiles, exh. cat., Galerie Yvon Lambert, Paris, 1996, n.p.).
The intrepid vessel in Die Grosse Fracht is rendered in sheets of shaped lead, an obstinate material that reinforces the weighty and complex history of 20th-century Germany. This ‘heavy cargo’ warrants a material with equal heft. “Lead affects me more than all other metals,” he says, “…It is in flux. It’s changeable and has potential to achieve a higher state” (J. Wullschlager, “Interview with Anselm Kiefer, ahead of his Royal Academy show”, Financial Times, 2014). The “higher state” to which Kiefer refers resonates within the glimpses of golden flecks imprinted on Die Grosse Fracht’s rich surface. Lead also provides an opportunity to both maintain valuable memories and heal fragile wounds. "Lead is for Kiefer, in keeping with alchemical tradition, the magic metal which preserves memory; which, with its own soft weight, creates a reduced, weary representation of the world in order to absorb the wounds in its wrinkled skin"
(D. Eccher, ‘Anselm Kiefer: A Dark Soul’, in Anselm Kiefer: Stelle Cadenti, exh. cat., Galleria d'Arte Moderna di Bologna, 1999, p. 87).
While rooted in serious underpinnings of cultural memory and human experience, Die Grosse Fracht is undoubtedly a visually compelling piece with its stratified painterly layers. “You cannot avoid beauty in a work of art. …You can take the most terrible subject and automatically it becomes beautiful”
(J. Wullschlager, “Interview with Anselm Kiefer, ahead of his Royal Academy show”, Financial Times, 2014).
An
enduring timelessness–the endless horizon and expansive sea–infuses Die
Grosse Fracht with
an unavoidable, automatic beauty as it conjures ancient and romantic
notions of exploration and the sea. “Within the tradition of landscape
painting we see clearly Kiefer’s associations with the nineteenth
century German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich and with notions
of the Sublime in nature, whose grandeur inspires awe and wonder”
[R. Davie and K. Soriano, Anselm Kiefer, exh. cat., Royal Academy, 2015).
[R. Davie and K. Soriano, Anselm Kiefer, exh. cat., Royal Academy, 2015).
Lot 436, "Fahrt Durchs Land IV Die Weichsel (Journey Through The Country IV: The Vistula)," by Anselm Kiefer, photographs and acrylic on mat board, book open measures 23 1/4 by 34 1/2 inches, 26 pages, 1981-2
Anselm Kiefer’s Fahrt Durchs Land
series is part of the artist’s ever-evolving practice of reworking
imagery using his signature mix of acrylic, sand, burlap and
photographic imagery to ultimately produce a unique book, according to
the catalogue entry. As part of Kiefer’s overall practice, Lot 436, Fahrt Durchs Land IV: Die Weichsel, speaks to his landscapes which are
often direct configurations of post-Nazi “scorched earth” Germany, it
continued.
The entry quotes D. Arasse from "Acts of Mourning" from his 2001 book on the artist as stating that "Fahrt Durchs Land IV: Die Weichsel specifically focuses its imagery around the depiction of a river. In the artist’s typical fractured logic, the river is shown several times through multiple media: a photographic image and through his own hand-drawn flowing water. The work is dispersed with an abandoned railroad and a rocky riverbed. The other images are wrought with frenzied black strokes across several ominous horizons."
The entry also notes that art historian Daniel Arasse has commented, “these ‘landscapes’ go against the whole great tradition of German landscape painting – a tradition that the Nazis appropriated and tried to make into the embodiment of the ‘German vision,’ the ‘self-portrait of the German soul’ and the ‘organic extension of its genius.'”
As resonates in the present work, Lot 436, Kiefer’s view of the great German tradition implicates denial as a source of inspiration and anguish.
Kiefer’s work purports to be a travelogue through the country. Fahrt Durchs Land IV: Die Weichsel shows how, despite the ever-changing scenery, the artist’s conceptions remain aligned to solid meditation on and the mourning of Germany’s complex post-war heritage, the entry maintained.
The lot has an estimate of $100,000 to $150,000. It sold for $211,500.
The entry quotes D. Arasse from "Acts of Mourning" from his 2001 book on the artist as stating that "Fahrt Durchs Land IV: Die Weichsel specifically focuses its imagery around the depiction of a river. In the artist’s typical fractured logic, the river is shown several times through multiple media: a photographic image and through his own hand-drawn flowing water. The work is dispersed with an abandoned railroad and a rocky riverbed. The other images are wrought with frenzied black strokes across several ominous horizons."
The entry also notes that art historian Daniel Arasse has commented, “these ‘landscapes’ go against the whole great tradition of German landscape painting – a tradition that the Nazis appropriated and tried to make into the embodiment of the ‘German vision,’ the ‘self-portrait of the German soul’ and the ‘organic extension of its genius.'”
As resonates in the present work, Lot 436, Kiefer’s view of the great German tradition implicates denial as a source of inspiration and anguish.
Kiefer’s work purports to be a travelogue through the country. Fahrt Durchs Land IV: Die Weichsel shows how, despite the ever-changing scenery, the artist’s conceptions remain aligned to solid meditation on and the mourning of Germany’s complex post-war heritage, the entry maintained.
The lot has an estimate of $100,000 to $150,000. It sold for $211,500.
Lot 178, "In Black and White, No. 3," by Robert Motherwell, acrylic on canvas, 66 by 50 inches, 1966
Lot
178, "In Black and White, No. 3," is a powerful abstraction by Robert
Motherwell (1915-1991). An acrylic on canvas, it measures 66 by
50 inches and was painted in 1966.
The catalogue entry provides the following commentary:
The catalogue entry provides the following commentary:
Robert
Motherwell is among the masters of modernist Abstract Expressionism and
one of its most erudite and articulate spokespeople. So it is with a
sly wink that he recalls Barnett’s Newman’s statement that “when he
reads Motherwell’s writing, he learns what he has been reading, but
when he wants to know what he is really concerned with at a given
moment, he looks at the artist’s pictures” (F. O’Hara, Robert
Motherwell,
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1966, n.p.). The key phrase here is “at a
given moment,” for Motherwell’s range of artistic achievement is vast,
extending from drawing, printmaking, collage, and painting and his
imagery as varied as it is layered with meaning. That meaning, as
Newman had averred, is often hidden. The exquisite Black
and White No. 3 carries
a boldly expressive gestural motif of a number four which, together
with the crossing orthogonal vectors that bear it, is emblematic of
modernism’s spiritual, nearly mythic symbols and signs that artists
such as Jackson Pollock, Adolf Gottlieb, Mark Rothko, and Newman fused
with gestural painterly markings. Black
and White No. 3 affects
us first by its formal qualities - branch-like arms, the coloristic
positive-negative effect created by the red-orange number four embedded
in the intensely black “trunk,” and its cut into the lateral horizontal
ochre ribbon that seem to describe literal terrain from which the form
rises. Motherwell also relies on his characteristically limited palette
that most often features black and white as the principal actors in his
dramatic visual essays. Black and white become “protagonists,” while
the natural earth pigment ochre, represents the earth: “Mainly I use
each color as simply symbolic: ocher for the earth, green for the
grass, blue for the sea and sky. I guess black and white, which I use
most often, tend to be the protagonists” (R. Motherwell, “A
Conversation at Lunch,” in An
Exhibition of the Work of Robert Motherwell,
Northampton, Mass, 1963, n.p.). The polarity between light and dark
reinforces the contrast, but also structure pictorial organization even
as they comprise its content: “Black is death, anxiety; white is life,
éclat” (R. Motherwell quoted in J. Flam, Robert
Motherwell,
New York, 1991, p. 9). These non-colors function as the “bedrock of
[Motherwell’s] image making” (J. Flam
ibid.,
p. 8).
Motherwell started using the number four in 1942 in a painting entitled Recuerdo de Coyoacn El Miedo de la Obsurida. It is neatly incised on a rectilinear canvas, its meaning hermetic; he again deploys it in 1960, on the work, The Figure 4 on an Elegy. Speculation on its meaning runs from references to the four members of his family, the four elements, the four seasons, the four humors, the four corners of the earth—and to Carl Gustav Jung’s “quaternity, the fourfold nature of the psyche, and its relationship to mandalas and to the notion of ‘squaring the circle’” (J. Flam, K. Rogers, T. Clifford, Robert Motherwell Paintings and Collages: A Catalogue Raisonné, 1941-1991, Volume Two, cf. In Black and Pink with the Number Four, “Commentary,” New Haven, 2012, p. 200). The possible “answers” to this conundrum are all very esoteric and none of them particularly relevant. Motherwell was no more enlightening on the subject when he wrote, “The figure 4, which appears as early as 1942 - i.e., during the first several years of my painting - has baffled curious iconographyers. There is a long discussion of 4’s significance by Jung, but whether his notions are relevant to me or not, I do not know” (R. Motherwell quoted in H. H. Arnason, Robert Motherwell, New York, 1982, p. 12).
In several works around this time, Motherwell fancifully excises the upper pyramidal shape of the number four, floating it freely in open fields in the series of works of which the present work is the third. Departing from In Black and Pink with the Number Four from the same year, and In Black and Pink (Museum of Modern Art, New York), Motherwell elaborated the pictorial disposition of this shape in several iterations, whereby it finally come to rest in the last of the series with an enlarged, upturned v-shape, grounded by the literal number four - as if coming full circle to its source in the Arabic. Leaving aside any numerological significance, Motherwell’s formal elements are in themselves fascinating and engaging. The impenetrable blackness of the central form brings one close to a similar density in one of the artist’s Elegies, in this case, the Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 10 (The Barcelona Elegy) in which a horizontal band, in this case three tiered, is a reference to the flag of Catalonia, Barcelona’s capital, where the year before a student uprising was brutally suppressed. That the colors red and yellow in Black and White No. 3, in particular the ochre band incised in the anchoring black pedestal brings us back to Newman’s remark, is no surprise. For it is in such formal considerations that discover “what Motherwell is really concerned with at a given moment” (B. Newman, op. cit.).
It has an estimate of $80,000 to $1,200,000. It sold for $1,207,500.
Motherwell started using the number four in 1942 in a painting entitled Recuerdo de Coyoacn El Miedo de la Obsurida. It is neatly incised on a rectilinear canvas, its meaning hermetic; he again deploys it in 1960, on the work, The Figure 4 on an Elegy. Speculation on its meaning runs from references to the four members of his family, the four elements, the four seasons, the four humors, the four corners of the earth—and to Carl Gustav Jung’s “quaternity, the fourfold nature of the psyche, and its relationship to mandalas and to the notion of ‘squaring the circle’” (J. Flam, K. Rogers, T. Clifford, Robert Motherwell Paintings and Collages: A Catalogue Raisonné, 1941-1991, Volume Two, cf. In Black and Pink with the Number Four, “Commentary,” New Haven, 2012, p. 200). The possible “answers” to this conundrum are all very esoteric and none of them particularly relevant. Motherwell was no more enlightening on the subject when he wrote, “The figure 4, which appears as early as 1942 - i.e., during the first several years of my painting - has baffled curious iconographyers. There is a long discussion of 4’s significance by Jung, but whether his notions are relevant to me or not, I do not know” (R. Motherwell quoted in H. H. Arnason, Robert Motherwell, New York, 1982, p. 12).
In several works around this time, Motherwell fancifully excises the upper pyramidal shape of the number four, floating it freely in open fields in the series of works of which the present work is the third. Departing from In Black and Pink with the Number Four from the same year, and In Black and Pink (Museum of Modern Art, New York), Motherwell elaborated the pictorial disposition of this shape in several iterations, whereby it finally come to rest in the last of the series with an enlarged, upturned v-shape, grounded by the literal number four - as if coming full circle to its source in the Arabic. Leaving aside any numerological significance, Motherwell’s formal elements are in themselves fascinating and engaging. The impenetrable blackness of the central form brings one close to a similar density in one of the artist’s Elegies, in this case, the Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 10 (The Barcelona Elegy) in which a horizontal band, in this case three tiered, is a reference to the flag of Catalonia, Barcelona’s capital, where the year before a student uprising was brutally suppressed. That the colors red and yellow in Black and White No. 3, in particular the ochre band incised in the anchoring black pedestal brings us back to Newman’s remark, is no surprise. For it is in such formal considerations that discover “what Motherwell is really concerned with at a given moment” (B. Newman, op. cit.).
It has an estimate of $80,000 to $1,200,000. It sold for $1,207,500.
Lot 429, "Excerpt (Citadel)," by Julie Mehretu, acrylic and ink on canvas, 32 1/8 by 54 1/8 inches, 2003
Lot
429 is a superb acrylic and ink on canvas by Julie Mehretu (b. 1970)
entitled "Excerpt (Citadel)." It measures 32 1/8 by 54 1/8 inches
and was painted in 2003. The catalogue entry describes this lot
as "a catatonic panorama of rich optical splendor." It has an
estimate of $1,000,000 to $1,500,000. It sold for $1,567,500.
The catalogue entry provides the following commentary:
The catalogue entry provides the following commentary:
“My
aim is to have a picture that appears one way from a distance–almost
like a cosmology, city or universe from afar–but then when you approach
the work, the overall image shatters into numerous other pictures
stories and events.” – J. Mehretu
A catatonic panorama of rich optical splendor, Julie Mehretu’s 2003 Excerpt (Citadel) engulfs the viewer like a surging visual mind-map. Part urban planning, part biblical apocalypse, with its title in fact suggesting a spiritual force, this work demonstrates an extensive and heavily-worked fusion of painting and drawing. At once, it seems to unify the mathematical rigor and constructivist logic of a Le Corbusier-like vision with the graphic onslaught and apparent chaos of Leonardo's studies of the Deluge. As the artist has noted in her own words: “My initial impulse and investigation was to try and develop, through drawing, a language that could communicate different types of narratives and build a cityscape, each mark having a character, a modus operandi of social behavior. As they continued to grow and develop in the drawing I wanted to see them layered; to build a different kind of dimension of space and time into the narratives.” (Julie Mehretu, “Interview with David Binkley and Kinsey Katchka”, 28 March 2003, reproduced at Africa.si.edu/exhibits/passages/mehretu-conversation.html)
A rare example of Mehretu’s output from her series of forms drawn and later painted on an immaculate gesso ground, this work is the formal result of a meticulous and painstaking process of the consecutive layering of imagery, map and graphic mark. A combination of architectural drawing, improvised expression and compulsive doodling, Excerpt (Citadel) is a seemingly multidimensional panorama held together by the artist's disciplined and unerring sense of structural logic, into a complex, dramatic but, ultimately holistic sense of epic landscape. Like improvised maps of the contemporary mind, Mehretu's paintings seem, in this respect to also describe the complex and multivalent nature of contemporary urban experience. Fusing the graphic logic of architectural space with the energy and apparent irrationality of the spontaneously made mark, Mehretu has imbued the present composition with a sumptuous pyrotechnic eruption of line, color and form. Upon an intricate grid of clamoring, cartographic markings, bold geometric forms and linear patterns combine and collide, producing a kaleidoscopic optical effect that draws the viewer into its unchartered depths.
On account of their overt ambiguity, Mehretu’s paintings have also been described as “psychogeographies” exploring ideas about location and identity. Mehretu, who was born in Addis Ababa and grew up in East Lansing, Michigan, and sees her work in this respect as being partly “a self-ethnographic” project cutting through her “lineage and ancestry in an effort to further understand the formation of [her] own identity.” (Julie Mehretu, cited in Catherine de Zegher, Julie Mehretu: Drawings, New York, 2007, p. 23)
Upon an underlay of precise architectonic markings, Mehretu constructs an explosive cartography, evocative of atlas illustrations, weather maps and ordinance survey contours. Since the late 1990s, Mehretu has deftly combined multiple graphic languages with her own intricate vocabulary of symbols and gestures in an attempt to visualize the social and geographic networks that underpin contemporary global development. Building upon studies of army terrain maps, NFL game plans, airport diagrams and construction blueprints, Mehretu’s interest in the manmade world is tied to a concern with the power structures that have determined our existence since the dawn of civilization. The individual marks that efface the diagrammatic backdrops of her works are imbued with identity and social agency, conceived as characters in narratives of struggle, rebellion and uprising. Like a densely layered snapshot or sound bite the present painting offers a quasi-apocalyptic vision in which we are invited to glimpse the collision of entire histories and universes.
Mehretu’s teeming pictorial surfaces also represent a tour de force of art historical reference. As opulent as Baroque ceilings and as virtuosic as Sigmar Polke’s wild alchemical experiments, her works fuse the geometries of Piet Mondrian and Kazimir Malevich with the schismatic linearity of Cy Twombly and the automatism of Surrealist drawing and writing. Influences from Le Corbusier to Jackson Pollock jostle alongside allusions to graphic systems spanning Chinese calligraphy, graffiti, comic book illustration and tattoo design. As Douglas Fogle has observed, Mehretu’s ability to entwine real and imaginary topographies ultimately casts her work as a new kind of history painting. “Her paintings ... do not rely on the recognizable but on evocative shards of graphic iconography,” he writes. “She shows us a vision of history as though told through the fractured prism of a Robbe-Grillet novel or projected into a painterly version of the computer game Sim City.” (D. Fogle, ‘Putting the World into the World’, in Julie Mehretu: Drawing into Painting, exh. cat., Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2003, p. 5)
As Mehretu explains, again in her own apt language: “I am also interested in what Kandinsky referred to in ‘The Great Utopia’ when he talked about the inevitable implosion and/or explosion of our constructed spaces out of the sheer necessity of agency ... it is in these same spaces that you can feel the undercurrents of complete chaos, violence, and disorder.” (J. Mehretu, quoted in “Looking Back: Email Interview Between Julie Mehretu and Olukemi Ilesanmi, April 2003”, in Julie Mehretu: Drawing into Painting , exh. cat., Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2003, pp. 13-14) “Like going to see fireworks–you feel the crowd at the same time as you feel the explosions.”
A catatonic panorama of rich optical splendor, Julie Mehretu’s 2003 Excerpt (Citadel) engulfs the viewer like a surging visual mind-map. Part urban planning, part biblical apocalypse, with its title in fact suggesting a spiritual force, this work demonstrates an extensive and heavily-worked fusion of painting and drawing. At once, it seems to unify the mathematical rigor and constructivist logic of a Le Corbusier-like vision with the graphic onslaught and apparent chaos of Leonardo's studies of the Deluge. As the artist has noted in her own words: “My initial impulse and investigation was to try and develop, through drawing, a language that could communicate different types of narratives and build a cityscape, each mark having a character, a modus operandi of social behavior. As they continued to grow and develop in the drawing I wanted to see them layered; to build a different kind of dimension of space and time into the narratives.” (Julie Mehretu, “Interview with David Binkley and Kinsey Katchka”, 28 March 2003, reproduced at Africa.si.edu/exhibits/passages/mehretu-conversation.html)
A rare example of Mehretu’s output from her series of forms drawn and later painted on an immaculate gesso ground, this work is the formal result of a meticulous and painstaking process of the consecutive layering of imagery, map and graphic mark. A combination of architectural drawing, improvised expression and compulsive doodling, Excerpt (Citadel) is a seemingly multidimensional panorama held together by the artist's disciplined and unerring sense of structural logic, into a complex, dramatic but, ultimately holistic sense of epic landscape. Like improvised maps of the contemporary mind, Mehretu's paintings seem, in this respect to also describe the complex and multivalent nature of contemporary urban experience. Fusing the graphic logic of architectural space with the energy and apparent irrationality of the spontaneously made mark, Mehretu has imbued the present composition with a sumptuous pyrotechnic eruption of line, color and form. Upon an intricate grid of clamoring, cartographic markings, bold geometric forms and linear patterns combine and collide, producing a kaleidoscopic optical effect that draws the viewer into its unchartered depths.
On account of their overt ambiguity, Mehretu’s paintings have also been described as “psychogeographies” exploring ideas about location and identity. Mehretu, who was born in Addis Ababa and grew up in East Lansing, Michigan, and sees her work in this respect as being partly “a self-ethnographic” project cutting through her “lineage and ancestry in an effort to further understand the formation of [her] own identity.” (Julie Mehretu, cited in Catherine de Zegher, Julie Mehretu: Drawings, New York, 2007, p. 23)
Upon an underlay of precise architectonic markings, Mehretu constructs an explosive cartography, evocative of atlas illustrations, weather maps and ordinance survey contours. Since the late 1990s, Mehretu has deftly combined multiple graphic languages with her own intricate vocabulary of symbols and gestures in an attempt to visualize the social and geographic networks that underpin contemporary global development. Building upon studies of army terrain maps, NFL game plans, airport diagrams and construction blueprints, Mehretu’s interest in the manmade world is tied to a concern with the power structures that have determined our existence since the dawn of civilization. The individual marks that efface the diagrammatic backdrops of her works are imbued with identity and social agency, conceived as characters in narratives of struggle, rebellion and uprising. Like a densely layered snapshot or sound bite the present painting offers a quasi-apocalyptic vision in which we are invited to glimpse the collision of entire histories and universes.
Mehretu’s teeming pictorial surfaces also represent a tour de force of art historical reference. As opulent as Baroque ceilings and as virtuosic as Sigmar Polke’s wild alchemical experiments, her works fuse the geometries of Piet Mondrian and Kazimir Malevich with the schismatic linearity of Cy Twombly and the automatism of Surrealist drawing and writing. Influences from Le Corbusier to Jackson Pollock jostle alongside allusions to graphic systems spanning Chinese calligraphy, graffiti, comic book illustration and tattoo design. As Douglas Fogle has observed, Mehretu’s ability to entwine real and imaginary topographies ultimately casts her work as a new kind of history painting. “Her paintings ... do not rely on the recognizable but on evocative shards of graphic iconography,” he writes. “She shows us a vision of history as though told through the fractured prism of a Robbe-Grillet novel or projected into a painterly version of the computer game Sim City.” (D. Fogle, ‘Putting the World into the World’, in Julie Mehretu: Drawing into Painting, exh. cat., Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2003, p. 5)
As Mehretu explains, again in her own apt language: “I am also interested in what Kandinsky referred to in ‘The Great Utopia’ when he talked about the inevitable implosion and/or explosion of our constructed spaces out of the sheer necessity of agency ... it is in these same spaces that you can feel the undercurrents of complete chaos, violence, and disorder.” (J. Mehretu, quoted in “Looking Back: Email Interview Between Julie Mehretu and Olukemi Ilesanmi, April 2003”, in Julie Mehretu: Drawing into Painting , exh. cat., Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2003, pp. 13-14) “Like going to see fireworks–you feel the crowd at the same time as you feel the explosions.”
Lot 254, "Untitled," by Adolph Gottlieb, gouache on paper mounted on cardboard, 26 by 20 inches, circa 1944
Lot 254
is a good early, untiled work by Adolph Gottlieb (1903-1974). It
is a gouache on paper mounted on cardboard that measures 26 by 20
inches and was painted circa 1944. It has an estimate of $40,000
to $60,000. It sold for $40,000.
Lot 119, "Portrait of Margereth Trip," by Helen Frankenthaler, acrylic on canvas, 90 1/4 by 57 1/2 inches, 1980
Lot 119 is a large acrylic on canvas by Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011) entitled "Portrait of Margareth Trip." It measures 90 1/4 by 57 1/2 inches and was painted in 1980.
The catalogue provides the following commentary:
By
the end of the 1970s, Helen Frankenthaler had amassed a repertoire of
techniques and markings that established her as among the most
brilliant and inventive painters of the period. At the end of the
decade, she began to innovate further with near monochromatic works in
which sponges move paint across the surface, overlapping and folding it
in broad sweeps of atmospheric, gesture-like passages. She also
recaptures an earlier impulse in the close paraphrasing of Old Masters.
In 1960, for example, she drew to astonishing affect in oil on paper, a
likeness of Carel Fabritius’s Linnet
(Goldfinch) of
1654. Other works from that time include iterations of her own works
from which she elaborates a more abstract image from one that is nearly
representational. Pink
Bird Figure and Pink
Bird Figure II are
strong examples. What we observe here is the strong role paint
application plays, an application that foregrounds pigment in and of
itself over the scaffolding on which drawing is built. Drawing is line,
line bounds area - principally color areas. What Frankenthaler does with
both these works is create color - the whiteness of the opaque as it
diffuses into transparency streaming down the canvas; smokey ghosts of
brush strokes; smears, drips of dense black, rose, green, and violet
that dissolve in an ethereality that is almost uncanny. This is color
that is in a sense freed from bounding contour.
Two decades on, Frankenthaler is freer and looser with her color, which is to say, she is painting extraordinary veils of transparent color that for all intents and purposes mime the general color disposition of her paraphrase models. Margeretha Trip is just such an example. Comparing this ethereal work to its real world example – Rembrandt van Rijn’s portrait of Portrait of Margaretha de Geer, Wife of Jacob Trip made approximately three hundred years earlier – Frankenthaler focuses on the essential manner in which light attracts the eye in the model. It is the likeness of Rembrandt’s Margeretha Trip only in the master’s handling of light and dark, of what was then called chiaroscuro, which was a tool artist’s used for creating illusionistic volumes. The collar of the original is its dominant feature, with the cuffs and hands following close on it. Luminescence is the theme here.
In like manner, Frankenthaler mimes the white of Rembrandt’s canvas, layering it over broad swatches of black to create transparent veils of graded densities. A work like Morris Louis’s Lamed Beth, 1958, currently in the Museum Reina Sofía comes to mind, in which a soft pyramidal shape is washed by transparent pigment. As the scholar and curator John Elderfield avers, “The [painting] refers not, or not only, to the look or appearance of its source but to its nature, to the manner that painted it, and to the form of its pictorial existence. Representation, certainly, was not trusted to tell whatever it was about the source that Frankenthaler wanted to tell.…To tell us what it is she sees, the artist will tell us how that thing is composed, will discover its working in her working, and will view her subject not distancedly–finished, separate, and apart – but as something to which she has access and within which she can immerse herself continuously” (J. Elderfield, Frankenthaler, New York, 1989, p. 310). What Frankenthaler sees is what she paints. And what she paints here is a full realization of her own technical and conceptual mastery.
The painting has an estimate of $500,000 to $700,000. It sold for $547,500.
Two decades on, Frankenthaler is freer and looser with her color, which is to say, she is painting extraordinary veils of transparent color that for all intents and purposes mime the general color disposition of her paraphrase models. Margeretha Trip is just such an example. Comparing this ethereal work to its real world example – Rembrandt van Rijn’s portrait of Portrait of Margaretha de Geer, Wife of Jacob Trip made approximately three hundred years earlier – Frankenthaler focuses on the essential manner in which light attracts the eye in the model. It is the likeness of Rembrandt’s Margeretha Trip only in the master’s handling of light and dark, of what was then called chiaroscuro, which was a tool artist’s used for creating illusionistic volumes. The collar of the original is its dominant feature, with the cuffs and hands following close on it. Luminescence is the theme here.
In like manner, Frankenthaler mimes the white of Rembrandt’s canvas, layering it over broad swatches of black to create transparent veils of graded densities. A work like Morris Louis’s Lamed Beth, 1958, currently in the Museum Reina Sofía comes to mind, in which a soft pyramidal shape is washed by transparent pigment. As the scholar and curator John Elderfield avers, “The [painting] refers not, or not only, to the look or appearance of its source but to its nature, to the manner that painted it, and to the form of its pictorial existence. Representation, certainly, was not trusted to tell whatever it was about the source that Frankenthaler wanted to tell.…To tell us what it is she sees, the artist will tell us how that thing is composed, will discover its working in her working, and will view her subject not distancedly–finished, separate, and apart – but as something to which she has access and within which she can immerse herself continuously” (J. Elderfield, Frankenthaler, New York, 1989, p. 310). What Frankenthaler sees is what she paints. And what she paints here is a full realization of her own technical and conceptual mastery.
The painting has an estimate of $500,000 to $700,000. It sold for $547,500.
Lot 262, "Untitled," by Helen Frankenthaler, acrylic on canvas, 19 3/4 by 54 1/2 inches, 1977
Lot 262 is an untitled acrylic on canvas by Frankenthaler that measures 19 3/4 by 54 1/2 inches. It was painted in 1977.
The catalogue entry quotes John Elderfield from his 1989 book on the artist:
"The
staining of the paint, however, tends to distance and to disembody the
images it creates so that, irrespective of their brightness, they seem
strangely to be removed from the sharply practical world of real
objects and events. Not as much objects as the shadows and echoes of
objects, the images have onely the most precarious of identities as
instruments of depiction. They are continually being returned, as we
look at them, to the pigmented wetness from which they were created,
whose own, independent beauty holds our attention certainly as much as
what they seem to describe... Color beyond ordinary; an unconstructed
freedom of composition; an open, breathing surface; absolute candor in
its making and in its address to the spectator: all combine to tell of
a benign and idyllic, if fragile, domain of innocence and pleasure."
The lot has an estimate of $120,000 to $180,000. It sold for $100,000.
The lot has an estimate of $120,000 to $180,000. It sold for $100,000.
Lot 153, "Untitled (Hoarfrost)," by Robert Rauschenberg, solvent transfer, cardboard, newsprint and fabric collage on silk, 78 1/4 by 72 1/2 inches, 1974
Lot
153, "Untitled (Hoarfrost)," is an excellent collage on silk with
solvent transfer, cardboard and newsprint by Robert Rauschenberg
(1925-2008). It measures 78 1/4 by 72 1/2 inches and was painted
in 1974. It has an estimate of $120,000 to $180,000. It sold for $125,000.
See The City Review article on the Fall 2016 Contemporary Art evening auction at Sotheby's New York
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