ARTS
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ARTS
Picasso portrait fetches $95.2m A Picasso portrait of his lover Dora Maar has been sold for $95.2m (£51.8m), the second highest amount ever paid for a painting at auction.
The 1941 masterpiece Dora Maar With Cat was sold to an anonymous buyer at Sotheby's in New York on Wednesday. Sotheby's said Dora's "sculptural presence" and the "gorgeous palette of colors" made it worth so much. Its value ranked it behind another Picasso piece, Boy with a Pipe, which fetched a record $104m in 2004. Sotheby's co-chair of Impressionist and modern art David Norman said he was "surprised, thrilled and grateful" at the sale's result. "Besides just being Dora - who was one of his most famed lovers and subjects of his work - it's really just the presence and the execution of the picture that makes it so valuable," he said. Dora Maar, who was also an artist, is said to have helped with the execution of Picasso's Guernica, his masterpiece depicting the horror of the Spanish Civil War. The couple's relationship lasted a decade in the 1930s and '40s. Her influence on the artist is thought to have resulted in the most daring portraits of his career. Other auction highlights included a new record for a Matisse work, which sold for $18.5m . Several other Picassos were also sold, including Harlequin with Baton, fetching $10m. "The energy in the room was incredible," auctioneer Tobias Meyer said. "There's just a very clear, strong demand for the kind of intense painting with an emotional pull that the Picasso represents - things that are made for our times. Art, Politics, and the Life Sciences On May 10th, Joseph Nechvatal will be participating in a workshop at Lancaster University on the subject of Art, Politics, and the Life Sciences Art, the Life Sciences and Institutions is the third and last workshop in their series and it will draw together the proceeding of the first two, aiming to focus attention on the question of critique itself. On 10 May 2004, art, the life sciences and politics were brought into a strange conjunction. Steve Kurtz, a member of the Critical Art Ensemble, was arrested by American authorities on suspicion of bioterrorism. Although this involved a misunderstanding of the uses to which the biological materials and laboratory equipment found in Kurtz's home were put, it can also be understood as a symptom of a new relationship between art, science and politics.
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New Yorker Daniel Iliescu on the rise
Art can wait, but artists cannot. Who said so? Everybody except those who create masterpieces. It took Daniel Iliescu 4 years to be finally be noticed by critics. Now he is on the rise and his recent work is capturing the attention of critics and galleries owners. Iliescu came up with a genius artistic formula. He combined his previous illustrative autonomous free forms with "dark" installation escapade. A mixture of "mondo macabre" and elegant black and white synthesized ink. And it worked! Now, this puzzling and magnificent creation of Iliescu needs a name! What shall we call it? Nobody knows! It is elegant, delicate and intelligent. Elegant, because the structural form is sensitively free on the edge of revolt. Delicate, because it is lighter than your thoughts. Intelligent because it escapes definition. Confused? Do not pretend to solve the equation. For when art becomes easy to define, art looses its secret and beauty. One thing is almost certain. Iliescu's innovative and unorthodox work is worth reflection and pursuit. In other words, abundance of esthetic beauty and charming vagabond revolt inhabit the canvases and the "carbonic" templates of this revolutionary artist.- By Arlette Lagrange. Continues next |
At a time when the life
sciences are enjoying extraordinary public visibility, artists are using
biological materials in the most unexpected and unorthodox ways, but the
very notion of artistic, critical engagement is changing. Some would even
maintain that art can no longer be a critical enterprise. To better
understand these changes, the Institute of Advanced Studies is hosting
three workshops, on 