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February 11th, 2008 admin
Originally posted at: nytimes.com
A mysterious three-part painting that is viewed as a Francis Bacon masterpiece sold for $46.1 million Wednesday night at a Christie’s auction here, countering expectations of a record price for his work.
Three bidders competed for the work, the “Triptych 1974-77,” which was offered by a private collector at a sale of postwar and Impressionist art. The buyer was not identified, but people in the packed salesroom said the winning bid had been submitted by a young man with long hair who was carrying a leather jacket and spoke English.
The hammer price was slightly below the auction’s presale estimate of $50 million to $70 million for the painting as well as Bacon’s previous record. In May his “Study From Innocent X” (1962) was sold for a record $52.6 million at Sotheby’s in New York.
The final price for this towering triptych, including Christie’s commission, was $51.6 million, the auction house said.
The last of a series of harrowing triptychs that Bacon painted after his companion George Dyer committed suicide in 1971, it is a dark work even for Bacon, who is known for his bleak subject matter. The three enormous canvases each depict Mr. Dyer writhing and struggling on a beach.
In the first and third panels he is shielded — or menaced, depending on the interpretation — by a black umbrella; in all three canvases there is a sense that he will be swallowed by a void.
The painting was the last that Bacon produced before a major retrospective of his work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1974. That was the first solo Bacon exhibition to be organized since 1971, when, on the eve of a landmark retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris, Dyer killed himself in the Paris hotel room where he and Bacon were staying. (Bacon died in Madrid in 1992.)
Each panel in the work measures 6 feet by more than 4 feet. At the bottom of the central canvas Bacon originally painted a prone figure who seemed to be crawling or sliding along the surface. But in 1977 he painted it out, saying he felt the figure interfered too much with the rest of the composition, which is why the triptych is dated 1974-1977.
The last of Bacon’s paintings to depict Dyer, the work includes several elements from three of the artist’s earlier “Black” triptychs. In each work there is also what he called the “grip and twist” of Mr. Dyer’s contorted naked body with a premonitory shadow hanging over it.
Wednesday night’s sale was the climax of a busy auction week after a sale of Impressionist and modern art at Christie’s on Monday and another at Sotheby’s on Tuesday.
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December 21st, 2007 admin
Originally posted at dailyreckoning.co.uk.
Six months ago, an Andy Warhol painting, “Green Car Crash,” sold for $72 million at Christie’s New York. The pre-auction price estimate was a mere $25 to $35 million.
As art consultant Sandy Heller told ABC News, “It’s hard to put an image of an impaled figure in a burning car in a home where you have little kids.”
The Warhol image (I don’t think we should really it a painting) was a photograph with a little bit of colour added afterwards. You could say he was ahead of his time, in that digital photography, one of the most wonderful new technologies of recent years, had not been invented in the 1960s. I like to play on Adobe Photoshop CS2 and fix family photos. Sitting at the desktop at home, it’s not too hard to turn out a fake “Andy Warhol” of my kids.
A neighbour admired a 1970’s painting on my wall called “Evening on Mount Olympus …” Not any old neighbour. She was a painter, someone whose work has been exhibited at the Tate, and whose husband is a Royal Academician.
“Evening on Mount Olympus” is a picture of unshakeable provenance. It’s even signed by the artist. How do I know the signature is genuine – let’s face it, signatures are the easiest thing of all to forge?
It says, “… by Jim Parton, form 12a,” you see. I did it, when I was 11. It was probably one of my very last paintings before the world of art lost me forever to football and, later on, girls.
My neighbour said she couldn’t believe I’d done it. I can’t believe she couldn’t believe, because, believe me, I’m being honest not modest when I say it’s not very good. (Well, quite good for an eleven year old, possibly. My late grandmother admired it greatly and hung it on her chintz wallpaper for a year or two).
A Warhol or a picture by me?
Aside from the madness of paying $72 million for a photoshop composition, art is a rigged market. Auctioneers like Sotheby’s and Christie’s (who were guilty of charges of market collusion in 2002) bear some responsibility.
But worse is the behaviour of museums. When a benefactor gives a chunk of money to a gallery, he quite often condemns the art it buys never to be seen again. Recently the Seattle Art Museum received $1 billion in gifts of art, helped by the U.S. tax regime, and the lure of “donor recognition”. Donor recognition means the donor gets to show off.
Such recognition doesn’t even last long. All the world’s major art museums have vast collections which no one sees, much of it from donors now long forgotten.
Exquisitely executed paintings from centuries past, if the artist, or period, is out of fashion, may spend fifty years in a vault, seen by no one other than a few crusty art scholars. The Public Catalogue Foundation, a charity, http://www.thepcf.org.uk estimates that 80% of UK collections of oil paintings are never seen by the public.
So art prices remain artificially high. The Metropolitan Museum, for example, has secret warehouses dotted around New York crammed high with stuff that has not been seen for years. Even the Met’s own scholars hardly know what’s there.
If the Met, the Louvre, the National Gallery in London, or The Royal Academy, for that matter, sold the undisplayed 80% of their collections forthwith, art prices would plunge.
The Mona Lisa - currently priceless, but let’s say $250 million - might turn out to be worth “only” $10 million in a market that wasn’t rigged. A $10 million Mona Lisa would be about the right ball park value in term of preserving the world’s cultural heritage.
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December 21st, 2007 admin
Originally posted on TheArtNewspaper.com.
The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts has published a 20th anniversary report on its finances and philanthropy. Warhol, who died at 58 in 1987, left all his possessions to the New York-based foundation “for the advancement of the visual arts”. The report states that sales of works of art, rights and licensing have built the foundation’s endowment to more than $240m. President Joel Wachs declined to disclose the number of paintings, sculptures, prints and drawings that remain with the foundation, stating that the holdings are “proprietary information because we are in the business of selling them”.
According to the foundation’s financial statement, net gain on sale of works of art for the year ended 30 April 2006 was $16.25m, with commissions on sales totalling $1.66m; the preceding year net sales were $12.6m with $1.39m in commissions. (Vincent Fremont, one of Warhol’s executors, is the exclusive agent for sales of paintings, sculptures and drawings, many of which are sold through various galleries; Timothy Hunt is the agent for prints and photographs.) “Our goal is to continue to sell to build the endowment to continue to give grants,” says Mr Wachs.
Since 1987 the foundation—which by law must give away 5% of its assets annually—has disbursed more than $200m in cash grants and art donations. This year grants will total more than $11m for exhibitions, artist residencies, publications, public programming and (through the New York-based non-profit Creative Capital) individual artists and writers. The primary focus is “to support the creation, presentation and documentation of contemporary visual art, particularly work that is experimental, under-recognised, or challenging in nature”.
The foundation recently announced that 28,543 vintage Warhol photographs would be given to 183 college and university art museums across the US. By the end of January 2008 each institution will receive around 100 colour Polaroids and 50 gelatin-silver prints selected by programme curator Jenny Moore. (The foundation has never produced posthumous prints and will never do so, says Mr Wachs.) The gift, which the foundation values in excess of $28m, represents “about half” of the foundation’s photography holdings. “We may give away prints in a couple of years,” says Mr Wachs, noting that in the 1990s the foundation sold at “about half price” some 103 works, mainly paintings, to 24 museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Whitney Museum.
The key act of the foundation was the opening in 1994 of the Warhol Museum in the artist’s hometown, Pittsburgh, to which the foundation contributed more than 3,000 works in all media as well as the artist’s source materials and archive.
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December 21st, 2007 admin
IT’S time we faced it: Andy Warhol is not the interesting figure he once was.
Originally posted on The Australian.
The edgy enigma he used to represent — deadpan social critic or innocent celebrant? — has, with the passage of time, turned into a rhetorical fizzer. Turning your mind to it is like trying to get excited again about fax machines, or the question of free will. In this age of Big Brother, American Idol, Paris Hilton, Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst, untangling irony from cynicism feels more and more like a fool’sgame.
This is not to say that Warhol is not important. He is. Nor is it to deny that much of his work can be giddily gorgeous, thrillingly cool. It can; and when it is, like everyone, I love it. It is just tosuggest — humbly and with no wish to be theparty-pooper — that it is time we grew up about Warhol.
The much-hyped Warhol retrospective at Queensland’s Gallery of Modern Art could have been an occasion to do just this. It could have been discriminating. It could have been smart. It could have asserted something new and intelligent and thought-provoking.
Instead, it is like a cult convention, with a shop and some gimmicks tacked on.
Perhaps it was a mistake to expect anything else. The Gallery of Modern Art, a new building at Brisbane’s South Bank dedicated to post-1970 art, opened a whole year ago, generating a buzz not seen in Brisbane since Charles Kingsford Smith touched down after crossing the Pacific. Since the opening, however, almost nothing has happened there. Given the goodwill and excitement garnered by the opening, the year has been hugely anti-climactic.
Obviously, the hope was that a Warhol show, slated to open exactly 12 months after the building’s inauguration, would generate enough electricity to shock the place out of its torpor. It may yet succeed, but to me the whole thing looks like a failure of institutional nerve.
The show was imported more or less wholesale from the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which sends Warhol exhibitions across the world all the time, especially to museums in need of a bit of shock treatment. And although it is, as advertised, “the first major Andy Warhol retrospective” mounted in Australia, covering almost every important stage of his career, it seriously lacks tang. Where it could have been cool and acute, it feels kitschy and nostalgic, and where it could have been taut it feels blowsy.
The show’s layout is a problem. From the very start, where, counter-intuitively, you turn right instead of left, it is unclear which way to proceed, though the organising principle is supposedly chronological. The walls of the central atrium are plastered with Warhol’s signature Cow Wallpaper. Atrociously, this wallpaper is used againinside as a backdrop for Warhol’s electric chair screen-prints.
These works — gorgeous, macabre, terrifyingly deadpan — deserve better. Warhol, it’s true, would have approved of the hang: he was always finding ways to deflate the aura of inviolability around high art. Tacky wallpaper was right up his alley. But this is a perfect example of where the gallery needed to stand back from the cult of Andy and make a judgment call; to ask, “do these images matter?”, and if they do, to hang them sensibly, not against clashing cow wallpaper.
Why, anyway, did Warhol matter? To some it’s self-evident. But if it’s not, it helps to understand the context from which he emerged. Beyond the abstract, esoteric pieties of the 1950s art world in America, commerce was rampant. Post-war affluence had created a new fascination with mass produced commodities. These products, made freshly desirable by the same advertising industry that employed Warhol at the outset of his career, were accessible in ways they never had been before.
So were wealth and fame. American society was being convulsed by a new kind of social mobility. Whole new classes of people — from show business, the art world, fashion, crime, the media and business — were fluted up into the higher brackets of society. Hierarchies were shuffled in ways we take for granted now but which were entirely new then.
Warhol, the son of an immigrant labourer, was one of the most conspicuous beneficiaries of thenew situation. He was also one of its keenestobservers.
The early works in the show illustrate Warhol’s shift — tentative, almost reluctant — from advertising illustration toward the burgeoning new pop art sensibility. He was no trailblazer here: Marcel Duchamp, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns had all done things in this field before Warhol came along, and they were generally more interesting.
But Warhol distinguished himself by choosing, in the words of art historian Robert Rosenblum, “the grittiest, tackiest and most commonplace facts of visual pollution in America that would make the aesthetes and mythmakers of the ’50s cringe in their ivory towers.” In this show, we find diagrammatic drawings of hardware items such as turpentine and spackling knives, as well as arbitrarily cropped drawings of tawdry newspaper headlines and vacuum cleaner ads.
Warhol’s eye was not just on the outside world. He had a keen eye, too, for art world dogma that was ripe for heresy or reinvention. Taking his cue from minimalism (think of Donald Judd’s immaculate rows of perfectly proportioned boxes), Warhol introduced some ofhis funniest, most inspired conceits: random piles of Brillo boxes, each one made by slapping silk-screen ink and paint on to plywood boxes sothey exactly resembled commercial cardboard packaging.
Again, Duchamp and others had long ago made art that was visually indistinguishable from objects that were not art. Nothing revolutionary there. But Warhol’s focus on products — his fascination with replication, mass production and the strange fizz of desire produced by attractive packaging — felt unique.
He thought about newspaper photographs and television news in similar ways. They weren’t just sources of information: they bubbled over into short-lived forms of yearning and fear. That, or they pooled into huge, glassy oceans of indifference. Either way, they reflected back on us, mediating the way we went through daily life.
So while one silk-screened image of a smiling Marilyn Monroe in the middle of a rectangular field of gold can suggest the sobriety of an icon, another work showing rows of images of Natalie Wood, some clumsily superimposed on one another, their outlines broken and blurred to suggest the imperfections of newsprint, affects us no more than peeling street posters. Something about the contrast between the two possibilities, technically and visually so similar, feels thrilling, and true to modern life.
As he explored this new world of production — the production not just of commercial products but of fame and notoriety — Warhol also became interested in boredom, dissatisfaction, internal emptiness. The way he thought about these things (and this is what I have always liked about Warhol) was not superior and scathing, like so many culture critics, but simply curious, amused, sad, bewildered.
And very insightful. In fact, Warhol became a real wit, perhaps the greatest in American art since James McNeill Whistler. He was a kind of Oscar Wilde for the jet set era. “Death can make you look like a star,” he said, “but the make-up has to be right.” Or: “An artist is somebody who produces things that people don’t need to have but that he — for some reason — thinks it would be a good idea to give them.”
Predictably, instead of grasping Warhol’s barbs and feeling their sting, the exhibition organisers use them to validate their own gleeful surrender to commercialism. Emblazoned across the cover of the pink media kit, for instance, is: “When you think about it, department stores are kind of like museums.” (Why, I wonder, did they choose that one? Go to the shop and see.)
In the mid-’60s, Warhol stopped painting, more or less, and began making films, which he liked, he said, for their atmosphere: everything was “three-dimensional physically and two-dimensional emotionally”.
Some people say he made some of his most important work in film. I am inclined to side with Warhol himself, who said the films were more interesting to talk about than to see. At any rate, you can decide for yourself, because every film Warhol made, and all his screen tests, are on show at GoMA, some part of the exhibition, others part of an ambitious though potentially mind-numbing film program in the cinemateque.
If understanding the context Warhol emerged from is crucial to grasping his importance, understanding how this context has changed may be the best way to understand why he matters less today.
It’s not that today’s social and aesthetic conditions deviate substantially from the ones Warhol pinpointed. In fact, the opposite is true: everything he turned his torch on grew and grew until it became amorphous and ubiquitous. Warhol’s fascination with glamour, his insistence on a democracy of images, and his taste for repetition, mechanisation and randomness have taken hold so firmly, in the art world and the world at large, that you can’t escape them.
But that is exactly why there is no longer much tension between his work and the heavily mediated world we all swim in. It’s why, as a consequence, so much of Warhol’s work has lost its edge.
On the occasion of a retrospective such as this, it becomes important to find that edge again and hone it. Curators need to resist the idea that Warhol’s achievement was just a general emanation from his personality and his various activities: the Factory crowd, Interview magazine, the Velvet Underground, the weirdos and superstars, the wallpaper. That way lies nostalgia, cultism and a dumbed-down, ultimately unsatisfying take on this remarkable man.
Instead, a taut, cogent show of Warhol’s most powerful images and sculptures (and a few films) should have been chosen, and it should have been carefully paced and intelligently spaced out. (As Warhol once told The New Yorker’s Calvin Tomkins: “It doesn’t really matter if you choose one picture or 50, and it would be so much more elegant to show just one.”)
It would have required the skills of Warhol experts capable of discriminating between his good days and his many bad days, and a resistance to the mood of bright, anything-goes, talk-it-up optimism that seems to have overtaken the Gallery of Modern Art since its opening.
Of course, such an approach would mean disavowing Warhol’s own attitude, which revelled precisely in not discriminating, in treating everything as equally important, or equally unimportant.
But Warhol was a provocateur and mischief-maker as much as an artist. Faced with such people, it’s occasionally worth calling their bluff and chewing things over, rather than swallowing everything whole.
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December 21st, 2007 admin
Originally posted here at nytimes.com.
The American Folk Art Museum in Manhattan gets a steady stream of unsolicited e-mail, messages from people claiming to have discovered a self-taught genius sculpturing away in an Appalachian trailer or a pile of masterpieces previously serving as barn insulation.
Brooke Davis Anderson, a curator at the museum, reads all such messages that come her way, even the more improbable ones. And in January, just as the museum was opening its critically praised exhibition of the rare, visionary drawings of Martín Ramírez, a Mexican immigrant who lived in a California mental hospital for more than 30 years, she received a two-paragraph letter that was one of the more incredible she had ever seen.
Sent to the museum’s general in-box, it came on behalf of a retired middle-school teacher named Peggy Dunievitz, the daughter-in-law of a doctor named Max Dunievitz. Dr. Dunievitz served in the early 1960s as medical director of DeWitt State Hospital in Auburn, Calif., where Mr. Ramírez lived for many years and died in 1963. The e-mail message, composed by Mrs. Dunievitz’s daughter-in-law, Julia, reported matter-of-factly: “Max is no longer with us, but for the years he worked there, he knew Martín and supplied him with colored pencils and things for his art, and as a consequence my mother-in-law has a collection of Martín’s drawings.”
Ms. Anderson said her heart skipped a beat, but she was conditioned by her years in the field to be highly skeptical of such finds. She asked the Dunievitz family to take pictures of some of the drawings and e-mail them, which they did.
She looked at the pictures. And then she immediately bought a plane ticket to California.
“I think first I actually leaped out of my chair,” she recalled.
What Ms. Anderson saw were Ramírez’s unmistakable subjects — horses and caballeros, trains, tunnels, ships, Madonnas — and the grand, repetitive lines that were his trademark. And what she found when she got to Mrs. Dunievitz’s house in Auburn was a cache of some 140 of the drawings, all from the last three years of Ramírez’s life, many of them dated and most in great shape, despite lying in a garage for almost two decades.
It was an astounding discovery for an artist whose known body of work had previously numbered about 300 drawings and collages, collected by a psychologist, Tarmo Pasto, who befriended Ramírez and championed his work beginning in the 1950s.
Mrs. Dunievitz, 73, had contacted the museum after reading a newspaper article about the Ramírez show in New York, and had been largely unaware of the artistic or monetary value of the drawings; some Ramírez works have sold for more than $100,000. She has now become the holder of an important, lucrative art collection, which she and her elder son, Phil, and Julia, his wife, are hoping to sell.
They said they are also planning to give at least three works as gifts to the Folk Art Museum and, along with a lawyer and a New York dealer they have chosen, are discussing plans to use some of the money to honor Ramírez and his surviving family members, who do not own any of his works and have never benefited from his rising profile in the art market. The Folk Art Museum is also planning an exhibition of many of the new drawings for next October that it hopes will show how Ramírez’s work matured, becoming more confident and abstract in its final years.
The survival of the drawings is all the more unlikely because, after Dr. Dunievitz’s death in 1988, they were thrown in a trash pile by his relatives as they sorted through the possessions in his basement.
“They basically made a blind assessment: ‘All this stuff needs to go in the trash,’” said Phil Dunievitz, 42, who had seen the artworks many times in his grandfather’s house when he was young. Instead, he gathered them all up, rolling them and putting them into several long-stem-flower boxes in his mother’s garage.
They were later transferred to an old box that sat atop her garage refrigerator for years, “with a sleeping bag on top of that,” Mrs. Dunievitz said. “And sometimes the cat slept out there on top of it all.”
“Somehow, anytime the garage was cleaned out,” she added, “they miraculously didn’t get thrown out.” In the 1990s she came across a Ramírez while visiting the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum in Williamsburg, Va., and talked to a curator there, telling her that she had some Ramírez drawings of her own. But after she left, she never followed up.
“I would have been elected procrastinator of the world if I ever got around to mailing the paperwork in,” Mrs. Dunievitz said.
Ms. Anderson, who had organized the Ramírez retrospective, first saw many of the drawings after they had been moved from the garage to a spare bedroom inside the house and displayed atop twin beds. She was more than ecstatic. “Brooke kept saying: ‘Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God,’” Mrs. Dunievitz said. “I thought she was praying.”
In a recent interview in a Brooklyn warehouse where the drawings have now been moved for safekeeping, Ms. Anderson, the director of the museum’s Contemporary Center and Henry Darger Study Center, said her reaction was probably a little bit over the top.
“This is huge for us,” she said, adding, “I was always convinced that there was work out there in basements and attics that had been collected by doctors or nurses or janitors.”
Ramírez left his small ranch in the Jalisco region of Mexico in 1925 to look for work in California. He became homeless, and in 1931, appearing to be confused and unable or unwilling to communicate in English, he was picked up and committed. He never returned to his wife and four children back home, spending his last three decades in psychiatric hospitals.
Frank Maresca, the art dealer whose gallery, Ricco/Maresca, was chosen over two other competitors by the Dunievitz family to represent the work, said the discovery of such a huge amount of new work by an artist of Ramírez’s stature “is really as rare as Tutankhamun.”
It is even more significant, he said, because it will allow people to see a clear arc to Ramírez’s output. “What you see in the later works is a stronger degree of stylization — everything becomes more abstracted and experimental,” he said.
Mr. Maresca, Mrs. Dunievitz and her son said they had only recently begun discussing what might be done for Ramírez’s surviving family, which includes a daughter and many granddaughters and great-granddaughters. The likely plan will be to create some kind of an education and arts foundation instead of giving works or money directly to the family.
“There are more than 50 of them,” Mrs. Dunievitz said of the family. “How do you slice a pie that thin?”
But her son, who runs a tree-removal business near Lake Tahoe, said he still held out some hope of donating some work. “The family doesn’t even have one piece of his art, and that kills me,” he said.
Contacted by phone, one of Ramírez’s great-granddaughters, Martha Bell, a financial coordinator at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, said she and her sisters were simply happy that more of the work had been found in good condition to add to Ramírez’s legacy.
“This is music to my ears,” she said. “We’re so proud and so excited.”
Asked how the money from the drawings might affect his life, Phil Dunievitz said he did not think it would change much. “We might be able to buy a house,” he said, “which would be nice.”
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November 11th, 2007 admin
Originally posted at the WashingtonPost.com.
Something strange is missing from LeRoy Neiman’s art studio. There’s an easel, of course, and a long table piled with pots of paints and brushes. Years of work have left a thick coat of multicolored droplets splattered across the floor.
What’s missing? In a word: Art.
Other than a few commissions stacked below the easel and two enormous paintings hanging on the walls, Neiman’s airy studio is remarkably spare _ a testament to his astounding selling prowess.
“I haven’t got anything left,” he says. “I’ve got a couple dozen decent paintings that I’ve kept. But everything else is taken.”
He says it without regret or hubris. It’s just a fact of life for the 86-year-old known for his expressive, vibrant portraits of sports figures and cultural life. For decades, Neiman has turned his art into a virtual one-man empire, creating a phalanx of fans and joining the ranks of artists whose works command prices over $100,000.
“I haven’t bought a cigar or a bottle of wine in 40 years,” he says with a laugh during an interview in the Upper West Side home and studio he has shared with his wife, Janet, for decades.
It’s here that Neiman has created his abstract, vivid and kinetic views of racetracks and bars, as well as portraits of such luminaries as Muhammad Ali, The Beatles, Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra and Mickey Mantle.
Along the way, he’s churned up more than paint. Neiman has often been dismissed by some as too commercial to take seriously.
“Many people would say that the very popularity of LeRoy’s work would speak against his being a great artist,” says Tony Jones, president of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. “I think it’s all a complete waste of time. He is who he is and he paints what he paints.”
His slicked-back hair and signature handlebar mustache may be gray these days, but Neiman hasn’t slowed down. He still cranks out paintings every few months and always has a stack of prints and posters to sign.
He’s just finished portraits of former Yankee great Reggie Jackson and the two Ryder Cup captains _ Nick Faldo and Paul Azinger _ and a painting for the popular East Harlem Italian restaurant Rao’s. He’s planning a 160-foot-long mural for the soon-to-open Sports Museum of America downtown and has been commissioned to climb into a helicopter and paint the Los Angeles skyline.
This month, his smallest works are up for sale. Franklin Bowles Galleries in San Francisco and New York are offering 300 of his drawings for Playboy magazine, ranging in price from $10 to $50,000.
The drawings of a 12-inch-tall voluptuous brunette _ nude except for high heels, stockings and gloves _ have graced the magazine’s Party Jokes Page since 1957.
“I think she’s as legitimate a thing I do as my paintings because she took as much out of me and I gave as much to do it as anything else I’ve ever done,” says Neiman, as he pages through an accompanying catalog.
There’s a sketch of Femlin relaxing in a champagne glass, another in a yoga pose, a third of her playing soccer. He draws a year worth of her at a time.
“I love this little creature. She’s part of me,” he says. “I don’t know if it’s important to society, but it’s important to me.”
He and publisher Hugh Hefner came up with the concept. Neiman offered an elegant design and Hefner added the name. “Hef said, ‘She’s a gremlin.’ I said, ‘And she’s feminine.’ Then he said, ‘Femlin.’”
Playboy was where Neiman really got his start. His work illustrated articles and a regular feature, “Man at His Leisure,” that offered him the chance to roam the globe painting bullfights, polo matches, bars and auto races.
He became the first New York Jets’ artist in residence and made art in front of millions at live televised boxing bouts, Super Bowls, Pan-Am Games and five Olympics.
His portrait of hockey star Bobby Hull graced the cover of Time magazine in 1968 and he created six postage stamps for the Centennial Olympic Games in Atlanta. He even had cameos as the ring announcer in several “Rocky” movies.
Dr. Louis A Zona, executive director and chief curator at The Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio, compares Neiman to the much-mourned Luciano Pavarotti, celebrated for bringing opera to the masses.
“LeRoy Neiman has done the same thing. He’s taken fine art techniques, he’s taken abstract expressionist techniques and he’s presented them to the average person,” Zona says. “He’s truly an American original.”
Some of Neiman’s biggest fans are those who dribble, rush or bat for a living. Athletes like Derek Jeter, Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods and Shaquille O’Neal have all been Neiman-ized.
He recalls a time when O’Neal came over while the artist was sketching the basketball star and began quizzing him about the drawing.
“He said, ‘I want to know how you did it and why you did it,’” Neiman recalls. “I said, ‘What is it that you like about it?’ He said, ‘You got me fast. I look fast.’”
That’s a talent athletes love. The Art Institute’s Jones recalls entering a bar with Neiman in Chicago and the place erupting with a roar of recognition. Inside were British boxer Ken Norton and his entourage, as well as defensive backs from the Chicago Bears.
“The bar is filled with these immensely huge men,” Jones says. “LeRoy, who is not small, and I are completely lost in this, surrounded by these huge men. And LeRoy is the star.”
Born into a working class family in St. Paul, Minn., Neiman was an art star early. He began by offering classmates pen tattoos of Popeye and Mickey Mouse. “I got so I could draw them upside down. At recess, the kids would stick their arms out,” he says.
While serving in World War II, Neiman made portraits of officers, did drawings to get out of detail and made memorable posters warning about venereal diseases. In Belgium, he learned that the GI Bill would put him through art school.
“I knew then I was going to be an artist,” he says.
He studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he would later teach for a decade. He gets frustrated when art schools don’t require more drawing.
“I draw all the time,” he says, pulling out an ever-present clump of scrap paper from his back pocket, should inspiration strike. “Drawing is my backbone. I don’t think a painter has to be able to draw, I just think that if you draw, you better draw well.”
Neiman was doing fashion drawings at a Chicago department store when he met Hefner, a copywriter. Neiman saw a bright, chain-smoking nervous wreck, “one of those kind of guys who was going to do something,” he says. “I knew he had something.”
A key breakthrough in his art came by accident: He was in his basement studio when a janitor passed by with a wheelbarrow full of half-full enamel paint cans used in bathrooms. “I said, ‘Drop them in front of my studio,’” Neiman recalls.
The new paint turned out to be a revelation, offering Neiman something that watercolors, pastels and oils couldn’t _ movement and texture.
“It works,” he says. “I haven’t grown since.”
Through a national network of galleries that sell his work, Neiman’s fortune has soared. He’s also given some of it away: In 1995, he donated $6 million to create the LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies at Columbia University and last year offered $3 million to his alma mater in Chicago.
He’s also passed his knowledge to a new generation. For three years, Neiman has taught intensive drawing to groups of Chicago public high school students. He invites football players, ballet dancers and cyclists for the children to draw and then takes them to a boxing gym, a race course or even Charlie Trotter’s restaurant for some sketching in the field.
“I think he’s never forgotten he came from a disadvantaged, difficult background himself,” says Jones. “And he says to me all the time, ‘I’m really lucky.’”
For Neiman, the chance to make a handsome living with art, to draw what he wishes and enjoy the admiration of fans, is all he needs.
“I’ve got the public. I don’t care about the critics,” he says. “I did at one time. I don’t any more. I did when I needed compliments. But if you get a lot of compliments, you don’t need a critic to tell you, ‘This should be done another way.’”
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November 6th, 2007 admin
I was right! Well, I’m sure millions of people were right… we’ve all thought these things. Oil futures are undervalued. Oil prices will be going up — way up.
The latest news. Crude oil rallies to new record high of $97 a barrel.
A lot of the stuff in the article I wrote last month is sort of ridiculous, but at the time it was written, oil futures were undervalued, or so I said. When Bush took office, gas was at around $1.25 per gallon, and is now around $3.00 per gallon.
You’ll read about oil futures in the coming paragraphs. In this paragraph however, I’d like to simply mention that Peak Oilers are correct so far. I’d also like to ask a few questions based upon this truth-so-far. Could the rest of Peak Oilers’ predictions be correct? Are we going to be competing for oil and entering multiple wars around the world year after year? Will we soon be competing for water? What about our entire infrastructure that is built by and for oil? Supplies, products and food? Will the industry of tourism disappear for a short time in our future? Will all those global warming consequences soon be coming true?
Anyway… the following is what I wrote about peak oil last month:
First, I don’t believe the world will end, but listed here are reasons that a friend of mine believes that it will. Knowing that he believes these things, another statistically-based number of people probably believe the same thing. I think that this can (and might) be used to control the masses and energy policy.
The date is October 3rd of 2007 (I’m posting this a few days later). While writing this, I am going to assume that if something very bad doesn’t happen in the near future, we are going to be sold on the idea that something bad will happen by 2013. I’m going to connect only two ideas, so this is a very minimalistic approach. Bear with me (or bare with me if you’re not into the whole restrictive clothing thing).
At the time of writing this, here are the prices of the last settled trades for Crude Oil futures:
Nov 2007 — 80.33
Dec 2007 — 79.25
Jan 2008 — 78.28
Feb 2008 — 77.73
Mar 2008 — 76.96
Apr 2008 — 76.55
If I’m correct, December futures (and beyond) are undervalued. If I’m correct, the cost of crude oil will be above $80, and closer to $90 per barrel in December or January. What proof do I have? None. But I have made a killing on the markets in the last three years. Take my comments with a grain of salt, but I think if you want to make around $14 per share, place some buy options for April.
My reason for deducing that we are experiencing Peak Oil is irrelevant. What is relevant is that if the price of oil sky-rockets as much as it has in the last five years, the oil companies will fear change in the energy markets. Or, at the very least, they will want to control the rollover to alternative energies. Also, their support for 90+% of our nation’s politicians will create an environment that is conducive to un-intelligent actions taken by our leaders. My next comment is ridiculously speculative, so I must apologize, but one way to control energy policy (something that reaches into everybody’s pocketbooks) is to shock the public. If it is perceived that the cause for a sharp rise in the cost of oil is a disaster, people are more likely to attribute the rise in crude oil prices only to that disaster. People are then less likely to pressure their elected representatives to move toward alternative energy investment. The oil companies will make more money and give more money to politicians.
My Claim
THE WORLD IS NOT GOING TO END! But, there are people out there who will sell you this idea.
I have a friend who recently sold his home, purchased a cheap home in the middle of nowhere, is making moves toward living off the grid, and is ready for a coming doomsday. I think he’s crazy because I have more faith in people than he does. But, here are some outlining facts that people are hearing and reading that is riling them up:
1. The magnetic pole shift. Some are predicting that around 2012, magnetic north will flip. The disasters that will happen, from airplanes crashing, to solar flares having a heavier impact on the planet, are fear number one.
2. The Mayan calendar doesn’t go past 2012. Many crazies are saying that this is another reason to suspect an end-of-the-world disaster.
3. The bible predicts the worlds demise in 2012. Yes, people are crazy. Get enough of these theories together and you can create a huge shock in the world. This shock could be used to manipulate oil prices (or blame the rise in oil prices on disaster), declare war, and push legislation that would otherwise never have been implemented. From Daniel to Revelations, people could easily be manipulated.
4. Nibiru falls from the sky and destroys earth.
5. Financial markets will melt down in 2012.
6. I haven’t been able to find any information about this, but my friend also thinks that somewhere in the bible it is predicted that Israel will push it’s enemy (Palestine) into the sea in the year of the end of the world. He talks about a golden cow that will fulfill the prophesy. It really sounds made-up to me, but if any part of it is true, it seems as though people in power could use this idea to instill fear and further manipulate markets and government.
7. I haven’t linked to any of the conspiracies here, but there is an undercurrent out there which aligns the conspiracies behind 9/11 with the possible disappearance of nukes from the Air Force base in Minot, ND. I agree, there does need to be a real investigation of 9/11, not one headed by a Bush political hack. And if a nuke does go off, conspiracy theories will fly with more fury than they ever did after 9/11. In any case, it’s another reason used behind my friend’s recent move.
8. Technological Singularity. This one pisses me off. The reason? I believe the world will be a better place when we have super intelligence out there. It would be the antithesis of the Bush administration. T2 had it wrong. The Matrix had it wrong. Everybody is predicting the future with fear in mind. Grow up and relax.
9. The prophecies of Nostradamus, Merlin, the I Ching, Millerites, and Oracles. The same stuff that was brought up in 1999. I called you all nuts then, I’ll call you all nuts now.
10. Global Warming. Yes, there is a huge problem here. There is also a huge problem with clean drinking water, pollution, food availability, unprecedented mass-extinction, and any number of world problems related to global over-population. I hope we can solve these problems. But the end of the world? It’s funny to me that number ten is probably the most pressing, but it is not one that most end-of-the-worlders use when talking about the end of the world.
What does any of this have to do with oil?
I do think we’ve very very recently hit peak oil. Oil prices will rise and fall, as they normally do, but they will continuously rise until an alternative energy infrastructure is readily available. That availability won’t exist until real money is invested in it. That money won’t be invested until YOU require it to happen. You won’t demand it unless you need to (hell, we’re all busy, right?). If you need to demand it, but, at the same time, disaster, the possibility of disaster, wars, world war and any other number of bad things might happen, you’re not likely to get upset when your demands are met with deaf ears.
What should you do?
Quite simply, be ready. When something does happen, we need to push back, hard. Get ready to contact the producers of your local news. Contact all media outlets with calm and reasonable conversation. The intelligent among us will keep the crazies at bay and keep this world on track.
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November 1st, 2007 admin
Originally posted here at bloomberg.com.
Oct. 29 (Bloomberg) — Sotheby’s sued embattled New York art dealer Lawrence Salander and his gallery, alleging that Salander-O’Reilly Galleries owes it more than $1.64 million. The auction house sought permission to sell artworks that it says were consigned to it by Salander.
An Oct. 19 court order forbids any auction house from moving artworks that are “connected to” the gallery or Salander himself, according to the Sotheby’s suit.
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November 1st, 2007 admin
Originally posted at time.com.
Yue Minjun is laughing all the way to the bank. The shaven-headed Beijing painter has turned his iconic guffawing self-portraits into one of China’s most lucrative exports. In June, a brightly hued canvas of Yue dressed as a merry Roman Catholic Pope sold for $4.28 million in London. That record was shattered last month when Execution, a work depicting maniacally grinning figures in a Tiananmen Square–like setting, netted nearly $6 million in another London sale. Riffing on Deng Xiaoping’s maxim “To get rich is glorious,” Yue’s paintings capture China’s exuberant love affair with consumerism. But even as he also satirizes his countrymen’s headlong race to make money, the native of Daqing, a grim oil town in China’s northeast, doesn’t view his shiny new millionaire status with much irony. “What’s wrong with laughing?” Yue demands with a serious face, digging into a Shanghai eatery’s rendition of braised pork shoulder, a quivering delicacy synonymous with nouveau riche fulfillment. “China isn’t all dark anymore. We should be happy.”
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