Fine Arts News

Simon de Pury has been called both the Mick Jagger and the Peter Pan of auctions. Dealer, collector, curator, schmoozer, his clients include billionaires, rock stars and royalty. He dishes plenty about the art market in his new book, The Auctioneer, and he explains the rise and fall of his own auction house, Phillips de Pury.


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Sunrise above the Elbe
Photo by Tobias Richter

The latest in African visual arts is now on display in Senegal's capital. Dakar is host to a month-long arts festival that's held every other year. NPR's Ofeibea Quist-Arcton is taking it all in and has this report.

OFEIBEA QUIST-ARCTON, BYLINE: The Senegalese capital is buzzing with a 12th edition of the Dak'Art Contemporary African Art Biennial and playing host to artists and art-lovers from across the continent and all over the world. Simon Njami from Cameroon is the artistic director of the Dak'Art festival titled Re-enchantments. He says Africa must learn to become re-enchanted with itself through art.




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Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, Marquise de Pompadour, may be best known as King Louis XV's Chief Mistress. But she was also a highly educated tastemaker, a patron of the arts, and an artist in her own right.

When Louis XV, King of France, first met the woman who would become his chief mistress, she was dressed as a domino, and he was dressed as a plant. It was 1745, and Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, Marquise de Pompadour, had been invited to a masked ball at Versailles. If this sounds like a chance meeting, it wasn't — her family had been strategizing to orchestrate this very moment for years.

"They envisioned her having this role when she was just a bourgeois young girl living in Paris, and they made it happen," explains Columbia University art historian Susan Wager.

Not long ago, Wager discovered a leather portfolio of etchings made by Pompadour. For over a century, the portfolio and the etchings inside had gone unrecognized. Wager discovered it at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Md., among a batch of items founder Henry Walters bought in 1895.
"I was so thrilled," she recalls. "When I pulled that out of the box in the manuscripts room, my heart started to pound. I could barely talk."



In this etching, circa 1758, Pompadour captures her pet spaniel, mid-trot.

Wager curated an exhibit of those etchings and other works by Pompadour, which is now on view at The Walters.
"She was one of the smartest women ever associated with the French crown," says University of Pennsylvania professor Joan deJean, author of The Age of Comfort.

A well-educated tastemaker, she hung out with Enlightenment intellectuals like Voltaire and Diderot and she lobbied for the publication of France's first encyclopedia.
"She's a real brand name in the world of style," says deJean (just think of the name of Elvis Presley's haircut!) "She was like a minister of the arts."
Pompadour was a patron of artists — their chief customer — says Wager: "She would give them money to make paintings and have them put in her houses so people could see them there."
And Pompadour herself made art. "She brings the most talented gem carver to live with her at Versailles," Wager explains. "She buys a drilling machine — which is the tool that you need — puts that in her apartments, and has him come and live there and make gems for her."



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Antique dealer Alvin Barr was surprised when a piece of pottery he owned was appraised at as much as $50,000 on Antiques Roadshow. So too was the pot's creator, Betsy Soule.



"The potter has used an impressive array of techniques to come up with this extraordinary texture," an Antiques Roadshow appraiser said of this piece — which turned out to be a high school art project.

It was the Antiques Roadshow dream: You show up with your weird-looking jug and explain that you paid $300 for it at an estate sale in Oregon. Then the expert announces ...

"It's bizarre and wonderful. You even see a little bit of, like, Pablo Picasso going on here. It's a little difficult to identify precisely when this was made, but I think it's probably late 19th or early 20th century. ...
"Probably its origin — it's coast of the United States, maybe Middle Atlantic states headed southward. Estimating its value is a little difficult. I think in a retail setting, somebody might well ask in the area of between $30,000 and $50,000 for this."

The owner, astonished, said, "What!?"
And also, "No!"
Which, as it turns out, was the right reaction. The "Grotesque Face Jug" wasn't a 100-year-old artifact, but the work of a creative high school student circa 1973.

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The artist Robert Cenedella, who is now 76 now, in his studio in the early in his career.

Robert Cenedella, the titular painter in the briskly entertaining new documentary Art Bastard, is a New York artist who has spent years battling the New York art establishment. To be clear, he is a bastard, in that he was born to parents who weren't married. But also in that he's an inveterate troublemaker — a mocker of other artists — who can be a thorn in the side of even people who are trying to help him.

A publisher, say, who once offered him an ad on an art magazine's back cover, only to have him submit an image of a faux Rothko with the word bulls*** scrawled across it. The publisher, who had thought he was doing Cenedella a kindness, suddenly found himself in a position of either censoring the ad or endorsing what amounted to an attack on another artist. He ended up publishing, but did so, he tells director Victor Kanefsky, with "annoyance."
Perhaps understandably, Cenedella has never been a fashionable artist. He says his heroes were 1920s and '30s activist painters like Ben Shahn and George Bellows, who painted bread lines and Depression scenes.

"They recorded history," he says admiringly. And they had "legitimacy" (a word that crops up a lot in this documentary) because their works were hanging in museums. But by the time Cenedella was hitting his stride, abstraction had taken over the art world — the poured and dripped paintings of Jackson Pollock, for instance, in which expressing a point of view was impossible. Quite apart from which, says Cenedella, "where people might say, 'well, that's a bad Hopper, or a bad El Greco,' I've never seen anyone say 'that's a bad Pollock.' Either they're all bad, or they're all good."

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The Oculus cake now being sold by the new caterer running the SFMOMA's upstairs cafe. The cake was inspired by the distinctive tower at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It is similar in design and spirit to a cake prepared by Caitlin Freeman and her baking team for a museum event several years ago. (See below.)

Connor Radnovich/ Courtesy of The San Francisco Chronicle

Where do you draw the line between inspiration and straight-up imitation when it comes to food?
A few years ago, we brought you the story of Caitlin Freeman, a pastry chef baking innovative, art-inspired cakes at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Using modern art as her muse, Freeman translated what she saw in the museum into edible form at the SFMOMA's upstairs café.



Caitlin Freeman's Oculus cake, which she and her team first created for a museum event several years ago.

Her creations eventually filled a cookbook, Modern Art Desserts, and her most well-known dish, a cake composed of small, primary-colored blocks delicately cemented together with chocolate icing, graced its cover. Inspired by the geometric art of Piet Mondrian, it brought both Freeman and the café fame – and inspired many a home cook to tackle this masterpiece at home.

The museum closed for renovations in 2013. When it re-opened last month, the upstairs café was under new management, with a new baking team – but the art-themed desserts for sale looked suspiciously familiar to Freeman. Call it a case of copycake.

Blue Bottle, the coffeehouse chain own by Freeman's husband, James Freeman, used to run the SFMOMA's upstairs café, but it failed to win its bid to return after the renovations. Freeman was disappointed, but, as a lifelong art lover, she nonetheless felt compelled to take her infant daughter to check out the refurbished museum. She even stopped for a few moments to take in the scene at the new café, now run by a catering company that had previously operated the museum's downstairs café.

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Pittsburgh Penguins goalie Matt Murray (30) defends against San Jose Sharks' Joe Thornton (19) during the second period of Game 4 of the NHL Stanley Cup final on Monday in San Jose, Calif.

Maybe art's fair in love and war.

While the San Jose Sharks and the Pittsburgh Penguins compete in the Stanley Cup Finals this week, museums from each city are wagering pieces from their collection that their hockey team will come out on top.

It all started on May 27, when the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh challenged the San Jose Museum of Art to a friendly bet on Twitter.

Hey @sjmusart, how about a friendly little wager over this Lord Stanley thing that's about to go down?
— CMOA (@cmoa) May 27, 2016

If the Sharks win, the CMOA will loan "Measurement: Plant (Palm)," a 1969 conceptual work by Pittsburgh-born artist Mel Bochner. If the Penguins win, SJMA will have to relinquish "Mom Posing by Green Wall and Dad Watching T.V.," a 1984 photograph from the "Pictures from Home" series by California artist Larry Sultan.

#museumcup stakes are set! @penguins / @SanJoseSharks - SF Bay's Larry Sultan / #Pgh Mel Bochner @sjmusart pic.twitter.com/ok84PtZDDy
— CMOA (@cmoa) June 5, 2016

It's a bit of an uneven playing field: not only does the CMOA's collection of 30,000 pieces far exceed the SJMA's 2,500, but the Penguins are currently leading the Sharks 3-1 in the series.

This is just the latest artistic fun around a sports event. The Seattle Seahawks and the New England Patriots inspired a similar bet during the 2015 Super Bowl, wagering a pair of seascape paintings. When the Patriots took home the Vince Lombardi Trophy, the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass., took home the 1870 Albert Bierstadt painting "Puget Sound on the Pacific Coast," which it won for three months from the Seattle Art Museum.


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Man (Dreaming), by June Leaf, 1972. Acrylic, and brush and ink on paper, 24 3/4 × 39 3/4 in.
Alice Attie/June Leaf



Mother/Ballroom, by June Leaf c. 1978. Pen and ink, fiber-tipped pen, graphite pencil, rubbing, and colored pencil on paper, 27 × 21 in. Collection of the artist.

June Leaf was trained in ballet, but she's been making visual art since she was a kid. That's a long time – she's 86 and the subject of a new retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.
Much of Leaf's work tells stories, often about relationships, and especially her relationship with her husband, the renowned photographer Robert Frank — who's far better known than his wife. Now, the Whitney retrospective is the museum's way of saying: It's time to pay attention to June Leaf.

The exhibition is meant to be funky — less like a sterile gallery show, and more like Leaf's crowded studio in downtown Manhattan. But that's not really possible.

Leaf's studio is a jumble of work. A metal sculpture of a recumbent woman with wheels is plopped on top of a radiator, paintings and drawings lean against one another on the floor, and the walls are covered with more drawings and paintings like the overlapping handbills on a construction site barrier. Thin sculptures of hands stick out anywhere they can take hold.


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Sky paintings