Art Photos mixed

Scenic Trillium Lake in Oregon by
Michael O'Neal

Follow your path | Photo by Heathmedders

Post-Sunset Red
Photo by Erez Marom

If any collectors are feeling gorged after next week’s big New York auctions of Modern and contemporary art, which run 8 May through 12 May, Sotheby’s will offer two works at its American Art sale on 18 May that may serve as a compelling digestif.The sale of 65 works will be lead by a large painting by John Singer Sargent and a detail-packed one by Norman Rockwell, both estimated to sell for $4m to $6m, which is impressive in this market. (Last year’s sale was led by Georgia O’Keeffe’s 1927 White Calla Lily, which hammered just below its low estimate at $7.8m, or $8.99m with buyer’s premium.)

Sargent’s Poppies (1885-86), pops with lush English flora and is a study created at the same time he was working on Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose (1885-86), which has been in the collection of the Tate since 1887 and was part of the Royal Academy's recent exhibition Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse. Sargent made the works in the Cotswolds, having fled the US after the scandal caused by his racy—for the time—portrait Madame X. If the painting achieves its estimate, it would likely be in the top ten prices for Sargent’s work bought at auction.



Rockwell's Road Block is estimated at $4m-$6m


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Yum Yum !!! Starving Twins :-)
Photo by Europe Trotter

Dead City Dreaming...,
Photo by Zewar Fadhil
Iraq.

An exhibition, billed as a first, which pairs Alberto Giacometti with Yves Klein, opened this week at Gagosian Gallery's space in Mayfair, London.The 50 works in the exhibition—equally split between the two artists—are on loan from the Fondation Alberto Giacometti, the Yves Klein Archives, the Beyeler Foundation as well as private collections.

The exhibition's curator, Joachim Pissarro says that around “three or four” works by each artist are for sale. He adds that Alberto Giacometti, Yves Klein: in Search of the Absolute (until 11 June) could only be organised by Gagosian, which has previously worked with the Giacometti foundation and the Klein archives.

In the catalogue’s preface, the gallery’s director Larry Gagosian writes that although the artists lived within a mile of each other in Paris “their worlds could not have been farther part”. Pissarro admits that on the face of it they are “radically different”.

But after being approached by the gallery to pair the unlikely couple, Pissarro says he “grabbed the ball and ran with it”. As he began his research “it just opened one door after another”, he says. Both Giacometti and Klein “kept being obsessed or interested” by the same things, he says, such as Egyptian art or the “cave paintings of Lascaux”. And although there is no formal documentary evidence of them ever meeting, “Rotraut [Uecker], the widow of Yves Klein, did see them together—so we have that trace”, Pissarro says.

There is a neat instance when the artists come together in a drawing on show that was “totally unpublished until now”, Pissarro says. Giacometti made “incredible sketches in blue biro” on a piece of newsprint with an advertisement of an Yves Klein show.



Alberto Giacometti in his studio. Photo: © Ernest Scheidegger. © Alberto Giacometti Estate / Licensed in the UK by ACS and DACS, 2016


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Early morning colour
Photo by Jordan Herschel

Marilyn Monroe in The Asphalt Jungle John Huston 1950

A 17 year old Pele on a street of Sweden before the 1958 World Cup color.