Old Masters were in the spotlight last week as the first major auctions of the year were held in New York, accompanied by some spectacular dealer exhibitions. International dealer Fabrizio Moretti presented a sumptuous display of Italian gold-ground paintings that seemed to touch a nerve.
Normally, gold-ground paintings are scarce at auction, but this year there was a bumper crop, most of which sold, led by a rare and only recently fully attributed painting of the Annunciation by the 14th-century Sienese artist Simone Martini, which sold for a record $4.1 million. The price, said Moretti, was to be expected for an example of Martini’s work in good condition, and not expensive compared with some contemporary art.
The sales included some choice Renaissance works. A drawing of a young man attributed to the Florentine Pietro Pollaiulo, which was being sold by the heirs of the British scholar and art magazine editor Denys Sutton, was snapped up by the J Paul Getty Museum for $1.4 million, double the estimate.
Private collectors seized the other two Italian Renaissance prizes – Fra Bartolommeo’s painting St Jerome in the Wilderness for $4.9 million, and a Madonna and Child tondo, which, since cleaning, is now thought to be partly by the hand of Botticelli. Cautiously estimated at $1 million, it sold for $4.6 million.
Early Northern-school masterpieces met with a more mixed reception. Lucas Cranach is riding a wave of popularity, and one of his more seductive portraits of Lucretia sold comfortably for $5.1 million. But one of the last paintings by Hans Memling in private hands was just too highly estimated at $6 million to find a buyer. A similar fate met a rare painting by the 16th-century mannerist Arcimboldo. Depending on which way up you hang it, it is either a still life of fruit, or a portrait. It sold 10 years ago for $1.4 million, and no one was prepared to meet the new $3 million estimate.
In some cases, sellers who were simply trying to get their money back were disappointed, perhaps because they had paid too much. In 2006, one had paid a record 825,000 – 10 times the estimate – for a still life by the 17th-century Dutch painter Simon Luttichuys. The next year, it appeared at the Maastricht art fair with a $4 million price tag; last week it went unsold with a $1.8 million estimate.
In what is now a very choosy market, one third of the works offered in New York were unsold, dragging the total for the week below expectations to $122 million. However, more sensibly priced masterpieces found buyers. A young lady playing a clavichord, by Dutch Golden Age painter Gerrit Dou, was covered with years of grime, but sold above estimate to dealer Johnny van Haeften for $3.3 million.
Staying with Holland, a charming family interior by Pieter de Hooch from Lady Forte’s estate doubled estimates to fetch $3.7 million; a portrait by Frans Hals from Elizabeth Taylor’s estate doubled estimates to sell for $2.1 million; and a jewel of a small portrait by the lesser known Thomas de Keyser was chased by dealers Jonathan Green and Otto Naumann before selling to the National Gallery of Art in Washington for a treble-estimate $1.5 million.
Both Sotheby’s and Christie’s heralded the success of French Rococo, a style epitomised by Fragonard and Watteau and popularised by Wildenstein in the last century. The stand-out example was an elaborately camp theatrical design for a tapestry commissioned by Louis XV from Charles-Antoine Coypel, which quadrupled estimates to sell for $3.5 million. “Most people haven’t heard of Coypel, but it’s a fantastic example of French Rococo,” said Christopher Apostle of Sotheby’s.
Similar in appeal, though less over the top, was a large decorative oil sketch, pulsating with grandeur, made by the late-Baroque artist Giambattista Tiepolo for a fresco commemorating the arrival in Venice of the French King Henry III in 1574. It says something about shifts in taste that, when this was last offered for sale in 1984, it was unsold at $1.5 million. Last week, it sold for $5.9 million.
Finally, 18th-century Italian view paintings proved their staying power. A Venetian view by Vanvitelli at Christie’s, which had been bought from London’s Richard Green gallery in 1979 for 45,000 was bought back by Green for $1.5 million (989,000), while at Sotheby’s, Lady Forte’s slightly later Venetian view by Canaletto, which she had bought at auction in 1986 for $360,000, sold for $5.7 million.
2012年1月31日星期二
2012年1月30日星期一
Art straight from the heart
The day-long exhibition-cum-sale of artworks organised for the ninth consecutive year by the Chitrakala Parishat was so big that it was impossible for any visitor to stop at each stall.
The entire stretch was transformed into an exhibition ground and nearly 1200 artists from across the country displayed their works in watercolour, acrylic, oil, pastel, charcoal and pencil arts. Budding artists, students of fine arts and amateur painters who could not afford art gallery exhibitions, utilised this one-of-its-kind opportunity to market their work.
For art-lovers, this turned out to be the best occasion to buy some beautiful art at an affordable price. So people came in large numbers to pick the best works within their budget.The event also facilitated an exchange of ideas among the artists.
A drawing and face painting competition was also organised by Deccan Herald/Prajavani for students, who competed in sub junior, junior, senior and adult categories. They drew paintings on various themes like nature, village scene, school and college campus and contemporary cities. Nearly 300 students took part and showcased their prowess on canvas.
Sindhur, a student from Chennai, had taken part in the Santhe two years back and made a brisk business. This year, he had come with a new series —‘Life Study in Watercolour’. “As the stalls are given to us free of cost, we are able to sell our works at a reasonable price. Being a student, I also get a chance to see the works of others and their design principles,” he said.
Komala Madhusoodhan, a housewife and an art-lover, had come with her family to buy some artwork for her newly-built home. “I came here to do some serious shopping while my son took part in the drawing competition. There is something for people of all age groups over here. As I wandered around the stalls with my sister, my husband and younger daughter enjoyed a live demonstration by eminent painter B K S Varma. They also learnt how to make bags, hats and pens out of waste paper at one of the stalls. My parents who cannot walk long distances took a buggy which took them around the exhibition. Later, we all tasted varied food items which were available at the venue. It was a very nice experience,” she said.
City-based professionals-cum-artists like Mohit Varma and Roopa were glad about the facilities offered to the exhibitors. “I am inspired by the works of Ravi Varma and S M Pandit. Today, I have displayed realistic works done in water colour, oil and acrylic. I have been participating in this event for the last four years. I have given a lot of emphasise on facial expressions in my paintings,” said Mohit Varma whose works were priced between Rs 3000 and Rs 50,000.
The on-the-spot portrait and caricature making was a huge hit. A lot of people were seen getting their portraits done by the artists. “We have also organised a book exhibition on Tagore’s works, which were related to art. And we have given a lot of stalls for physically disabled artists to help them. This year, around four lakh people visited the Santhe,” said C M Rudrappa, chief administrative officer, Chitrakala Parishat.
The entire stretch was transformed into an exhibition ground and nearly 1200 artists from across the country displayed their works in watercolour, acrylic, oil, pastel, charcoal and pencil arts. Budding artists, students of fine arts and amateur painters who could not afford art gallery exhibitions, utilised this one-of-its-kind opportunity to market their work.
For art-lovers, this turned out to be the best occasion to buy some beautiful art at an affordable price. So people came in large numbers to pick the best works within their budget.The event also facilitated an exchange of ideas among the artists.
A drawing and face painting competition was also organised by Deccan Herald/Prajavani for students, who competed in sub junior, junior, senior and adult categories. They drew paintings on various themes like nature, village scene, school and college campus and contemporary cities. Nearly 300 students took part and showcased their prowess on canvas.
Sindhur, a student from Chennai, had taken part in the Santhe two years back and made a brisk business. This year, he had come with a new series —‘Life Study in Watercolour’. “As the stalls are given to us free of cost, we are able to sell our works at a reasonable price. Being a student, I also get a chance to see the works of others and their design principles,” he said.
Komala Madhusoodhan, a housewife and an art-lover, had come with her family to buy some artwork for her newly-built home. “I came here to do some serious shopping while my son took part in the drawing competition. There is something for people of all age groups over here. As I wandered around the stalls with my sister, my husband and younger daughter enjoyed a live demonstration by eminent painter B K S Varma. They also learnt how to make bags, hats and pens out of waste paper at one of the stalls. My parents who cannot walk long distances took a buggy which took them around the exhibition. Later, we all tasted varied food items which were available at the venue. It was a very nice experience,” she said.
City-based professionals-cum-artists like Mohit Varma and Roopa were glad about the facilities offered to the exhibitors. “I am inspired by the works of Ravi Varma and S M Pandit. Today, I have displayed realistic works done in water colour, oil and acrylic. I have been participating in this event for the last four years. I have given a lot of emphasise on facial expressions in my paintings,” said Mohit Varma whose works were priced between Rs 3000 and Rs 50,000.
The on-the-spot portrait and caricature making was a huge hit. A lot of people were seen getting their portraits done by the artists. “We have also organised a book exhibition on Tagore’s works, which were related to art. And we have given a lot of stalls for physically disabled artists to help them. This year, around four lakh people visited the Santhe,” said C M Rudrappa, chief administrative officer, Chitrakala Parishat.
2012年1月29日星期日
Three exhibits that made me go huh
Maybe I visited the art fair too close on the heels of the Jaipur Rushdie Summit, but I seem to have culturally decomposed over the last week. The India Art Fair, which has been demoted from the status of a Summit for some reason, is wrapping up today in Delhi. I’d been there last year as well and been stunned by the sheer presence of so many art works under one roof and also by the sure scale and precision with which the art summit had been put together. This year, the scale and precision has only improved and number of art works only increased, and after the maddening crowds and massive queues at the Lit Fest, I couldn’t but be impressed by the skill with which the Fair has been organised.
But on to the art. Now I’m not a connoisseur of art, and I’m old school and prefer the masters like Raza and Souza and Gade. And I just loved the Jamini Roys and Husains at the DAG booth and the Souzas and Gades at the DMG booth, and of course Ketaki Sheth’s black and white photographs. There were some beautiful sculptures and installations by new contemporary artists.
Now while I understand that I might not have got the finer nuances of some of the art works on display, I do believe that an art work even if it is multi-layered, must appeal at least at one level to anyone viewing it. Everyone doesn’t need to get the subliminal meaning. But if you need a detailed primer or ready reckoner to explain what a book or painting or film is trying to say, for it to appeal to you at any level, I feel it somehow misses the mark.
So people who watch Apocalypse Now, appreciate it or don’t like it as a well-made war film even if they don’t get the Heart of Darkness or TS Eliot references. Or you can enjoy Animal Farm as an entertaining fantastical story and not realise the commentary on Stalin. Of course, Orwell might be turning in his grave as a result, but at least everyone gets something out of what he’s created. Or even if you didn’t get Dali’s surrealism, the sure fantastical nature of his paintings catches your eye.
But what do you make of a massive steel plate around 12 feet in diameter with strange white phallic-shaped white items each a foot in length piled onto half the plate? Now I didn’t realise my faux pas when I asked someone what it was, only to be greeted by disdain and told that it was the avant-garde Subodh Gupta’s work. That I didn’t get kicked out of the Fair for my show of ignorance is a miracle. A friend did take pity on me and explain that the white phallic pieces were magnified grains of rice. Aah, a commentary on hunger in India. Or so I hope. Anyway, it matters not because there were enough people ooh-ing and aah-ing over the piece. I seemed to be the only one who’d missed the boat.
The second piece was at Chatterjee and Lal which I might have been drawn to because of the Bengali name. On display was a slightly tattered Victorian lady’s dress which was reminiscent of Dangerous Minds with John Malkovich and Michelle Pfeiffer. And behind the gown was a small photograph of a man wearing the same gown. A little unnerving. The picture, it was written, was of the artist wearing the gown, which he had worn while creating his work. The ‘work’ itself was not clear. Now, in an attempt to widen my horizons, I did some reading up when I came home and learnt that the artist, Nikhil Chopra is a performance artist and wears guises and places himself in theatrical settings. For example, in an earlier performance abroad, Chopra would sit in front of backdrops for four hours at a stretch in various guises. In one scene, he sat at a table eating chocolate cake while wearing white boxers, as a commentary on colonialism and identity. Now if someone had explained all this to me, while displaying a Victorian dress to me even with no Nikhil Chopra inside it, it might have all made a lot of sense to me. Or however much sense it could make. But just a Victorian gown with a picture of a man wearing it, simply made me feel like I’d walked into a seamstress shop.
The most bizarre and the one which made me most uncomfortable was the sight of six people walking around in t-shirts emblazoned with “Talk to me! Living work of art.” These poor dears were part of Mumbai-based artist, Preeti Chandrakant’s exhibit. She’s supposedly spent 6 years ‘molding’ these people and the exhibit was supposed to be a commentary on the fact that everything is for sale. According to news reports (Daily Pioneer), she has said that she has, “made their thinking more precise, their seeing more aware, their hearing more sharpened, their touch had been trained to respond to the subtlest of stimuli, whose tasting has been refined, whose smelling has been heightened, whose sensing has been awaken, whose very materiality has become aware of itself”. A veritable Lady Svengali.
The poor ‘molded’ sextet looked quite out of sorts and seemed to spend at least the hour that I was in the vicinity, speaking just to each other in a huddle. One of them was on his mobile, most probably telling a friend that life had seriously dealt him some cruel cards. Some curious people did take their pictures and chat them up a bit. Or maybe they were testing out the attributes of the sextet, because as a sign of how serious Preeti is in her artistic vision, people can buy any of the ‘living works of art’ from the ‘molder’, and they can take the person or ‘work of art’ home according to the terms of the contract. That I thought negated the entire point Preeti was claiming to make as both the artist and her gallery would be making money of contracting out a person to some slightly warped buyer.
But on to the art. Now I’m not a connoisseur of art, and I’m old school and prefer the masters like Raza and Souza and Gade. And I just loved the Jamini Roys and Husains at the DAG booth and the Souzas and Gades at the DMG booth, and of course Ketaki Sheth’s black and white photographs. There were some beautiful sculptures and installations by new contemporary artists.
Now while I understand that I might not have got the finer nuances of some of the art works on display, I do believe that an art work even if it is multi-layered, must appeal at least at one level to anyone viewing it. Everyone doesn’t need to get the subliminal meaning. But if you need a detailed primer or ready reckoner to explain what a book or painting or film is trying to say, for it to appeal to you at any level, I feel it somehow misses the mark.
So people who watch Apocalypse Now, appreciate it or don’t like it as a well-made war film even if they don’t get the Heart of Darkness or TS Eliot references. Or you can enjoy Animal Farm as an entertaining fantastical story and not realise the commentary on Stalin. Of course, Orwell might be turning in his grave as a result, but at least everyone gets something out of what he’s created. Or even if you didn’t get Dali’s surrealism, the sure fantastical nature of his paintings catches your eye.
But what do you make of a massive steel plate around 12 feet in diameter with strange white phallic-shaped white items each a foot in length piled onto half the plate? Now I didn’t realise my faux pas when I asked someone what it was, only to be greeted by disdain and told that it was the avant-garde Subodh Gupta’s work. That I didn’t get kicked out of the Fair for my show of ignorance is a miracle. A friend did take pity on me and explain that the white phallic pieces were magnified grains of rice. Aah, a commentary on hunger in India. Or so I hope. Anyway, it matters not because there were enough people ooh-ing and aah-ing over the piece. I seemed to be the only one who’d missed the boat.
The second piece was at Chatterjee and Lal which I might have been drawn to because of the Bengali name. On display was a slightly tattered Victorian lady’s dress which was reminiscent of Dangerous Minds with John Malkovich and Michelle Pfeiffer. And behind the gown was a small photograph of a man wearing the same gown. A little unnerving. The picture, it was written, was of the artist wearing the gown, which he had worn while creating his work. The ‘work’ itself was not clear. Now, in an attempt to widen my horizons, I did some reading up when I came home and learnt that the artist, Nikhil Chopra is a performance artist and wears guises and places himself in theatrical settings. For example, in an earlier performance abroad, Chopra would sit in front of backdrops for four hours at a stretch in various guises. In one scene, he sat at a table eating chocolate cake while wearing white boxers, as a commentary on colonialism and identity. Now if someone had explained all this to me, while displaying a Victorian dress to me even with no Nikhil Chopra inside it, it might have all made a lot of sense to me. Or however much sense it could make. But just a Victorian gown with a picture of a man wearing it, simply made me feel like I’d walked into a seamstress shop.
The most bizarre and the one which made me most uncomfortable was the sight of six people walking around in t-shirts emblazoned with “Talk to me! Living work of art.” These poor dears were part of Mumbai-based artist, Preeti Chandrakant’s exhibit. She’s supposedly spent 6 years ‘molding’ these people and the exhibit was supposed to be a commentary on the fact that everything is for sale. According to news reports (Daily Pioneer), she has said that she has, “made their thinking more precise, their seeing more aware, their hearing more sharpened, their touch had been trained to respond to the subtlest of stimuli, whose tasting has been refined, whose smelling has been heightened, whose sensing has been awaken, whose very materiality has become aware of itself”. A veritable Lady Svengali.
The poor ‘molded’ sextet looked quite out of sorts and seemed to spend at least the hour that I was in the vicinity, speaking just to each other in a huddle. One of them was on his mobile, most probably telling a friend that life had seriously dealt him some cruel cards. Some curious people did take their pictures and chat them up a bit. Or maybe they were testing out the attributes of the sextet, because as a sign of how serious Preeti is in her artistic vision, people can buy any of the ‘living works of art’ from the ‘molder’, and they can take the person or ‘work of art’ home according to the terms of the contract. That I thought negated the entire point Preeti was claiming to make as both the artist and her gallery would be making money of contracting out a person to some slightly warped buyer.
2012年1月19日星期四
A Lilac-Hued Bacon at Christie’s
Have a Francis Bacon to sell? London is where many auction house experts are advising collectors to try their luck. “We’ve seen extraordinary prices paid for Bacons in London in recent years,” said Brett Gorvy, international chairman of Christie’s postwar and contemporary art department. “Americans have competed as aggressively as buyers from emerging markets.” And with so many rich Russians and Middle Easterners putting down roots in London, it’s the obvious place to sell.
That explains the image on the catalog cover for Christie’s Feb. 14 London sale of postwar and contemporary art. It’s a 1963 portrait of Henrietta Moraes, the model and friend of Bacon’s, reclining naked on a white bed in a room with a deeply saturated lilac wall and a bright red floor.
Bacon generally painted his subjects from photographs rather than from life, and for this picture he commissioned his friend John Deakin to shoot Ms. Morales in 1961. Christie’s estimates the painting will sell for about $23 million to $30 million.
The record price for a Bacon painting at auction is $86.3 million, achieved in May 2008 when Sotheby’s in New York sold a 1976 triptych, supposedly to Roman Abramovich, the Russian oligarch. Christie’s in London sold “Triptych 1974-77” that same year for a robust $51.6 million and a year later auctioned “Three Studies for a Self-Portrait” (1975) for $34.4 million. And in June Christie’s London sold “Study for a Portrait” (1953) for $28.7 million.
Mr. Gorvy isn’t saying who is selling “Portrait of Henrietta Moraes,” but art experts familiar with Bacon’s work said it was Sheldon Solow, the New York real estate developer and a well-known collector who bought the painting from Ernst Beyeler, the Swiss dealer, in 1983.
Mr. Solow is not known as an auction seller but at 83 is re-evaluating his collection.
The Bacon portrait is not all Mr. Solow is said to be selling at Christie’s next month. Two other works from his collection are coming to auction on the evening of Feb. 7: a 1925 Miró painting, “Painting-Poem,” which is expected to fetch $9.2 million to $13.8 million; and “Reclining Figure: Festival,” a 1951 sculpture by Henry Moore, expected to bring about $5.3 million to $8.5 million.
It may seem as if the art world is in the winter doldrums, but organizers of New York City’s contemporary art fairs are gearing up for the onslaught of events in March and May.
Those putting together the 14th edition of the “Armory Show — Contemporary,” which runs from March 8 to 11 on Pier 94, are eager to make a better impression than they did last year. “Our aim is for comfort and hospitality,” said Paul Morris, the fair’s founding director. They hired the Brooklyn architects Bade Stageberg Cox to open up the space, giving it two aisles rather than three.
This year’s fair will feature 113 international exhibitors representing 31 countries, fewer participants than last year in an attempt to improve quality and give the dealers more space. Gallery Hyundai, which has not participated in the show since 2004, will be back with works by Ai Weiwei and Lee Ufan. Sprüth Magers from Berlin will be back, as will Greene Naftali from New York. There will also be a new section, Solo Projects, dedicated to single artist exhibitions.
Because the fair’s location — 55th Street and 12th Avenue in Clinton — isn’t the easiest to get to, the organizers have met with the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission and will use a text service to alert cabdrivers when they are needed. They will also offer free shuttle busses to neighborhoods in Manhattan.
Also in March is the Art Dealers Association of America’s annual Art Fair at the Park Avenue Armory, on 67th Street . Then come more fairs in May around the time of the big spring auctions.
Frieze, the London fair, will have its first iteration in New York, May 4 through 7, on Randalls Island. Those same days the New Art Dealers Alliance, otherwise known as NADA, has decided to test the New York City waters too.
“We’ve never done anything like this on our home turf,” said Heather Hubbs, director of NADA’s fair, which will occupy three floors of the former Dia Center for the Arts building at 548 West 22nd Street in Chelsea and include about 50 primarily younger dealers dedicated to new art.
That explains the image on the catalog cover for Christie’s Feb. 14 London sale of postwar and contemporary art. It’s a 1963 portrait of Henrietta Moraes, the model and friend of Bacon’s, reclining naked on a white bed in a room with a deeply saturated lilac wall and a bright red floor.
Bacon generally painted his subjects from photographs rather than from life, and for this picture he commissioned his friend John Deakin to shoot Ms. Morales in 1961. Christie’s estimates the painting will sell for about $23 million to $30 million.
The record price for a Bacon painting at auction is $86.3 million, achieved in May 2008 when Sotheby’s in New York sold a 1976 triptych, supposedly to Roman Abramovich, the Russian oligarch. Christie’s in London sold “Triptych 1974-77” that same year for a robust $51.6 million and a year later auctioned “Three Studies for a Self-Portrait” (1975) for $34.4 million. And in June Christie’s London sold “Study for a Portrait” (1953) for $28.7 million.
Mr. Gorvy isn’t saying who is selling “Portrait of Henrietta Moraes,” but art experts familiar with Bacon’s work said it was Sheldon Solow, the New York real estate developer and a well-known collector who bought the painting from Ernst Beyeler, the Swiss dealer, in 1983.
Mr. Solow is not known as an auction seller but at 83 is re-evaluating his collection.
The Bacon portrait is not all Mr. Solow is said to be selling at Christie’s next month. Two other works from his collection are coming to auction on the evening of Feb. 7: a 1925 Miró painting, “Painting-Poem,” which is expected to fetch $9.2 million to $13.8 million; and “Reclining Figure: Festival,” a 1951 sculpture by Henry Moore, expected to bring about $5.3 million to $8.5 million.
It may seem as if the art world is in the winter doldrums, but organizers of New York City’s contemporary art fairs are gearing up for the onslaught of events in March and May.
Those putting together the 14th edition of the “Armory Show — Contemporary,” which runs from March 8 to 11 on Pier 94, are eager to make a better impression than they did last year. “Our aim is for comfort and hospitality,” said Paul Morris, the fair’s founding director. They hired the Brooklyn architects Bade Stageberg Cox to open up the space, giving it two aisles rather than three.
This year’s fair will feature 113 international exhibitors representing 31 countries, fewer participants than last year in an attempt to improve quality and give the dealers more space. Gallery Hyundai, which has not participated in the show since 2004, will be back with works by Ai Weiwei and Lee Ufan. Sprüth Magers from Berlin will be back, as will Greene Naftali from New York. There will also be a new section, Solo Projects, dedicated to single artist exhibitions.
Because the fair’s location — 55th Street and 12th Avenue in Clinton — isn’t the easiest to get to, the organizers have met with the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission and will use a text service to alert cabdrivers when they are needed. They will also offer free shuttle busses to neighborhoods in Manhattan.
Also in March is the Art Dealers Association of America’s annual Art Fair at the Park Avenue Armory, on 67th Street . Then come more fairs in May around the time of the big spring auctions.
Frieze, the London fair, will have its first iteration in New York, May 4 through 7, on Randalls Island. Those same days the New Art Dealers Alliance, otherwise known as NADA, has decided to test the New York City waters too.
“We’ve never done anything like this on our home turf,” said Heather Hubbs, director of NADA’s fair, which will occupy three floors of the former Dia Center for the Arts building at 548 West 22nd Street in Chelsea and include about 50 primarily younger dealers dedicated to new art.
2012年1月18日星期三
Is Asia's Red-Hot Art Market Heading for a Slowdown?
The abandoned buffet table spoke to the allure of the art falling under the hammer next door. Drawn by paintings by modern Indonesian masters from art auctioneers Borobudur and Larasati, few bidders were distracted by glazed shrimp or sautéed beef. The Jan. 12 sale notched up a record $11.5 million in revenue, a new high for both Southeast Asian auction houses. Further evidence of the Asian art market's resilience could be found at a government-sponsored art fair held at the same time as the auction. 'Art Stage Singapore,' which attracted hundreds of high-end art galleries from across the world, sold signature works like a $1.52 million abstract painting by German artist Gerhard Richter.
The buoyancy of both events is but another example of the resiliency of the Asian art market. It has been rising steadily over the last decade, barely slowed by the 2008-09 global financial crisis and, more recently, appears to be ignoring a two-year-old European debt crisis that has otherwise stalled stock and property markets across most of Asia. In 2004, for instance, global auction house Christie's grossed $179 million from its Asia-based sales. By 2011, the auction house had grossed $904 million from sales in the region
Even so, experts say, the explosive growth of the last six to seven years appears to be slowing somewhat. "The market is not as strong as it was a year ago," says Jasdeep Sandhu, owner of Gajah Gallery in Singapore, which represents auction market darlings like Indonesian artist I. Nyoman Masriadi. At the Borobudur/Larasati auction, for example, very large paintings like Indonesian master Affandi's "Barong and Rangda," a 1960 work depicting the shadow dance between the Balinese spirits of good and evil, generated enthusiastic bidding and finally fetched $500,000 (excluding the buyer's commission), roughly double its high estimate. Yet a striking 1974 nude entitled "Nude and the Snake" by Sudjojono, a contemporary of Affandi and a pillar of Indonesian modernism, sold for far less, $107,000 (excluding commission), below the upper end of its estimated range.
"The bidding isn't as crazy as it used to be," says Dexter How, a Southeast Asian specialist with Singapore-based auctioneer 33Auction. The relatively tepid autumn sales of Sotheby's and Christie's in Hong Kong last year prove his point. For both auction houses, the 2011 autumn sales generated roughly 10 to 25 per cent less than their preceding spring sales. And though the Borobudur/Larasati sale was considered a surprise success, some experts point out that the idea of pooling buyers together and shaving marketing costs by holding a joint sale is itself a sign of lowered expectations. Plus, says How, "some of the works were priced reasonably."
So is a sudden drop around the corner? Experts say no, pointing to the broadening of the Asian art world over the last decade as a stabilizing force. Asian collectors, for example, are increasingly diversifying their collections, branching out into works from other countries. Taiwanese collectors, for instance, are buying more Indonesian art. A recent surge in new museums and galleries, particularly in China, where an average of one hundred new museums opens each year, as well as more academic art scholarship about Asian art, has also underpinned the market. All of which makes a precipitous collapse, according to Jehan Chu, director of Hong Kong-based art consultancy Vermillion Art Collections, "hard to imagine."
The buoyancy of both events is but another example of the resiliency of the Asian art market. It has been rising steadily over the last decade, barely slowed by the 2008-09 global financial crisis and, more recently, appears to be ignoring a two-year-old European debt crisis that has otherwise stalled stock and property markets across most of Asia. In 2004, for instance, global auction house Christie's grossed $179 million from its Asia-based sales. By 2011, the auction house had grossed $904 million from sales in the region
Even so, experts say, the explosive growth of the last six to seven years appears to be slowing somewhat. "The market is not as strong as it was a year ago," says Jasdeep Sandhu, owner of Gajah Gallery in Singapore, which represents auction market darlings like Indonesian artist I. Nyoman Masriadi. At the Borobudur/Larasati auction, for example, very large paintings like Indonesian master Affandi's "Barong and Rangda," a 1960 work depicting the shadow dance between the Balinese spirits of good and evil, generated enthusiastic bidding and finally fetched $500,000 (excluding the buyer's commission), roughly double its high estimate. Yet a striking 1974 nude entitled "Nude and the Snake" by Sudjojono, a contemporary of Affandi and a pillar of Indonesian modernism, sold for far less, $107,000 (excluding commission), below the upper end of its estimated range.
"The bidding isn't as crazy as it used to be," says Dexter How, a Southeast Asian specialist with Singapore-based auctioneer 33Auction. The relatively tepid autumn sales of Sotheby's and Christie's in Hong Kong last year prove his point. For both auction houses, the 2011 autumn sales generated roughly 10 to 25 per cent less than their preceding spring sales. And though the Borobudur/Larasati sale was considered a surprise success, some experts point out that the idea of pooling buyers together and shaving marketing costs by holding a joint sale is itself a sign of lowered expectations. Plus, says How, "some of the works were priced reasonably."
So is a sudden drop around the corner? Experts say no, pointing to the broadening of the Asian art world over the last decade as a stabilizing force. Asian collectors, for example, are increasingly diversifying their collections, branching out into works from other countries. Taiwanese collectors, for instance, are buying more Indonesian art. A recent surge in new museums and galleries, particularly in China, where an average of one hundred new museums opens each year, as well as more academic art scholarship about Asian art, has also underpinned the market. All of which makes a precipitous collapse, according to Jehan Chu, director of Hong Kong-based art consultancy Vermillion Art Collections, "hard to imagine."
2012年1月17日星期二
Lucian Freud drawings to go under the hammer
Many of the articles that are now coming out in anticipation of the National Portrait Gallery’s Lucian Freud exhibition next month mention the record 17.2 million that Roman Abramovich paid for the fleshy life-size portrait Benefits Supervisor Sleeping. That painting, which will be in the exhibition, made Freud the most expensive living artist in the world.
But what about his coloured chalk drawing Beach Scene with a Boat? An early work from 1945, less than 2ft square, it sold last June from the Evill Frost collection, a month before the artist’s death, for 2.6 million. This was not only a record for a work on paper by Freud, but probably a record for a drawing by a living artist. I can’t think of many modern artists other than Picasso, Matisse, or Schiele, whose drawings have sold for more.
The thought is all the more remarkable considering that Freud virtually gave up drawing in the Fifties to build his reputation as an oil painter using thicker brushes and brush strokes. His early paintings – meticulously neat, linear, and a cross between surreal neo-Romanticism and the decadent realism of George Grosz or Otto Dix – were too reliant on his drawings for his liking. And they were outnumbered. “I would have thought that I did 200 drawings to every painting in those early days,” he said of his teenage years. But still, he added, “I very much prided myself on my drawing.”
As an adjunct to the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition, with its emphasis on the post-Fifties oil paintings, there will be an exhibition entirely devoted to Freud’s drawings at the Blain/Southern gallery in Dering Street. Here, more than 100 drawings curated by Freud’s biographer, William Feaver, will show the full range of his activity, from sketch-book doodles to fully worked colour drawings dating from the Thirties, through the Sixties when he flirted briefly with watercolour washes, to the Eighties when he was concentrating mostly on etching as a form of drawing.
Arranged with Freud’s dealer since the Nineties, Acquavella of New York, the drawings are not officially for sale, though works recently on the market in the show will give an idea of current values. From the Evill Frost sale comes Boy on a Sofa, 1944, which sold for 1.5 million. Two equally early works from Kay Saatchi’s collection that were sold last summer are included – Dead Bird, which was bought by Acquavella for 481,250, and Sleeping Cat, sold to master drawings dealer Stephen Ongpin for 193,250. It is a measure of the change in the Freud drawings market that when this drawing was offered at auction in 1997, with a 15,000 estimate, it was unsold.
However, it often happens that, after high prices at auction, lesser work by an artist, in spite of its historical interest, tends to be overvalued. Four slight Freud drawings from the Forties were offered by Christie’s in November, but the 25,000 to 60,000 estimates were considered too inflated and they were unsold.
So it will be interesting to see if Sotheby’s and Christie’s have got their estimates right when they offer Freud drawings in their contemporary art sales next month. Christie’s has a previously unrecorded Irish landscape from 1948 (200,000 to 300,000), while Sotheby’s has five works from a single collection, thought to be that of Freud’s former dealer, James Kirkman.
But what about his coloured chalk drawing Beach Scene with a Boat? An early work from 1945, less than 2ft square, it sold last June from the Evill Frost collection, a month before the artist’s death, for 2.6 million. This was not only a record for a work on paper by Freud, but probably a record for a drawing by a living artist. I can’t think of many modern artists other than Picasso, Matisse, or Schiele, whose drawings have sold for more.
The thought is all the more remarkable considering that Freud virtually gave up drawing in the Fifties to build his reputation as an oil painter using thicker brushes and brush strokes. His early paintings – meticulously neat, linear, and a cross between surreal neo-Romanticism and the decadent realism of George Grosz or Otto Dix – were too reliant on his drawings for his liking. And they were outnumbered. “I would have thought that I did 200 drawings to every painting in those early days,” he said of his teenage years. But still, he added, “I very much prided myself on my drawing.”
As an adjunct to the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition, with its emphasis on the post-Fifties oil paintings, there will be an exhibition entirely devoted to Freud’s drawings at the Blain/Southern gallery in Dering Street. Here, more than 100 drawings curated by Freud’s biographer, William Feaver, will show the full range of his activity, from sketch-book doodles to fully worked colour drawings dating from the Thirties, through the Sixties when he flirted briefly with watercolour washes, to the Eighties when he was concentrating mostly on etching as a form of drawing.
Arranged with Freud’s dealer since the Nineties, Acquavella of New York, the drawings are not officially for sale, though works recently on the market in the show will give an idea of current values. From the Evill Frost sale comes Boy on a Sofa, 1944, which sold for 1.5 million. Two equally early works from Kay Saatchi’s collection that were sold last summer are included – Dead Bird, which was bought by Acquavella for 481,250, and Sleeping Cat, sold to master drawings dealer Stephen Ongpin for 193,250. It is a measure of the change in the Freud drawings market that when this drawing was offered at auction in 1997, with a 15,000 estimate, it was unsold.
However, it often happens that, after high prices at auction, lesser work by an artist, in spite of its historical interest, tends to be overvalued. Four slight Freud drawings from the Forties were offered by Christie’s in November, but the 25,000 to 60,000 estimates were considered too inflated and they were unsold.
So it will be interesting to see if Sotheby’s and Christie’s have got their estimates right when they offer Freud drawings in their contemporary art sales next month. Christie’s has a previously unrecorded Irish landscape from 1948 (200,000 to 300,000), while Sotheby’s has five works from a single collection, thought to be that of Freud’s former dealer, James Kirkman.
2012年1月16日星期一
Art's new Peking order
"Sit down and get ready," Mr Yang recently told a few friends visiting from Taiwan. Grabbing a remote control, he turned to a set of wall panels that, with a click, began to slide apart. Each panel revealed a few of his recent acquisitions, from Chairman Mao-era portraits of revolutionaries to brightly colored abstracts by China's rising stars. As his friends applauded the slide-show, Mr Yang grinned and lit a cigar.
The art market is being transformed by Chinese collectors willing to pay top dollar for everything from Ming vases to contemporary Chinese abstracts. In some cases, these works are outstripping prices paid for blue-chip Western artists like Rene Magritte and Clyfford Still.
Three of the 10 most expensive art works sold at auction last year were by Chinese artists, according to art-market analyst Artprice. Last year's priciest painting: Eagle Standing on Pine Tree by self-taught painter Qi Baishi. This delicate scroll rocketed ahead of colorful canvases by Pablo Picasso, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol when it sold for $US65 million ($63.3m) at auction house China Guardian in May. Overall, purchases by Chinese collectors accounted for roughly a fifth of Christie's global sales during the first half of last year; Sotheby's says mainland buyers also lifted its sales in Asia to nearly $US960 million last year, up 47 per cent from 2010.
Welcome to China's rollicking art world, a marketplace flush with wealthy entrepreneurs who are amassing art at a clip to rival any Russian oligarch. From Beijing to Chongqing, collectors are building private museums, opening galleries and embracing an exuberant art scene, even as China's economy shows early signs of a slowdown and many collectors elsewhere are buying more cautiously.
Mr Yang, 54, one of Beijing's biggest car dealers, is emblematic of the new wave of Chinese collectors: Over the past decade, he has collected nearly 1000 artworks by contemporary heavyweights like Chen Yifei, who paints women in romantic interiors, and Zhang Xiaogang, known for haunting family portraits. Mr Yang's art choices are closely tracked by the region's top collectors and dealers. He has financed the opening of a pair of edgy art galleries in Beijing, one of which is managed by his wife, Yan Qing. Last year he began importing and reselling collectible wines like Bordeaux.
The collectors in his broader circle include Qiao Zhibing, a nightclub owner based in Shanghai. Mr Qiao is outfitting his four-story karaoke bar, Shanghai Night, with conceptual sculptures by Ai Weiwei, sleek photographs of Champagne-drinking partygoers by Yang Fudong and paintings of men in suits and smiling face masks by Zeng Fanzhi. Behind Mr Qiao's cashier's desk looms Beijing artist Ji Dachun's large painting of an eyeball.
Another friend, Beijing hotelier Zhang Rui, has started decorating every room in his new Gallery Hotel with pieces borrowed from a gallery called Tang. He also has an 800-piece collection of his own. The hotel hasn't opened yet, in part because Mr Zhang recently spent 18 months in detention for allegedly bribing a Party secretary. Mr Zhang denies making any bribe but says he did pay a fine as a condition of his release last June, and he's now seeking the remaining building permits.
"It's not enough in China to be wildly wealthy," says Meg Maggio, director of Pekin Fine Arts, a Beijing gallery specialising in contemporary art. "For all these guys, it's about building a beautiful way of life - they want the nice objects, the good wine, the whole package."
Alan Lee, who runs Beijing gallery Asia Art Centre, says one of his clients, a fitness-equipment manufacturer named Chang Chiu Dun, calls himself the "Cover Killer" because he "likes to buy artworks that have been on the covers of auction catalogues."
The downside, Mr Lee says, is that this influx of newly wealthy collectors is fueling risky speculation on art, leading to price swings and heavy trading volumes for younger artists like the eyeball painter, Ji Dachun, whose lasting significance is still uncertain. Art advisory firm Artvest says Chinese investors have recently started at least eight art funds, which buy artworks with the aim of reselling them at a profit later. There are only about 20 similar funds elsewhere in the world.
China's gallery scene is similarly freewheeling, with collectors such as Mr Yang sometimes serving as stakeholders or co-owners of galleries where they also shop. Such arrangements can spark potential conflicts of interest because the stakeholders might be able to leverage their position to claim the gallery's choicest pieces. Seven years ago Mr Yang paid to help his wife open her contemporary art gallery, Aye, but he says he doesn't manage her artists or get first dibs on any work she shows there. He recently stepped back as a financing partner in another contemporary art gallery he founded three years ago, Eastation, in order to focus on his wine venture. He continues to buy art from both galleries.
Dealers and artists say it's unclear whether Mr Yang is trying to build a museum-worthy collection or angling for the right moment to cash out. "China's market is still so new - it's hard for us to tell who's a collector and who's a speculator," says artist Zhang Xiaogang.
Mr Yang isn't troubled by such ambiguity. "I can't say if investing in art is good or bad," he says, "but I know that without money, you can't make a market grow."
Within China's contemporary art circles, Mr Yang is hard to miss. He's tall, with a square face and thick head of black hair. He shows acquaintances cellphone images of his art the way others pull up snapshots of their children. More often than not, he turns up at black-tie dinners dressed in a polo shirt, black corduroys, and sneakers.
In Hong Kong, he socializes with collectors like Credit Suisse banker Tony Chiu and BNP Paribas banker Daisy Cheng. Both say they've sought his advice about artists to collect. In Beijing, his penthouse apartment doubles as a lunch spot for a growing crop of young entrepreneurs and investment bankers, some of whom half-jokingly call him "President Yang."
Mr Yang has rapidly built up his collection in part by maintaining a breathless pace - he sometimes buys dozens of works at a single auction or hundreds of works from a gallery or artist he likes, he says. When he's not working in one of his six car dealerships in Beijing, he and his entourage are regulars at art fairs and auctions throughout Asia and Europe.
This year, Mr Yang's favorite prospect is Liu Wei, a Beijing artist who grew up painting portraits of Chairman Mao and later experimented with abstraction and themes like decay. Two months ago, Mr Yang flew to Hong Kong and paid boutique auctioneer Ravenel around $US123,000 for Mr Liu's 1999 canine portrait, Dog No. 2. A few days later, several works by the same artist sold for twice as much at an auction back in Beijing.
Mr Yang says the artist remains undervalued: "Liu Wei isn't a pop star" like Zeng Fanzhi, a painter represented by New York dealer Larry Gagosian, he says, "but I think he's as important."
Mr Yang has also started offloading a few older pieces by Chinese realist artists like Chen Yanning as demand for their works has climbed. Last month, Mr Yang arrived at a Beijing luxury hotel and made his way into the packed salesroom of Poly, China's biggest auction house. He stood in the back, his usual spot. Halfway through the sale, he pointed to a large painting of a boatful of people hanging on the far wall. "That's mine," he said. He had paid roughly $US60,000 for the 1984 work, New Wave, by Chen Yanning seven years earlier, and was ready to sell. Poly priced the work to sell for at least $US629,000. When the bidding began, at least five collectors took the bait and the winner paid $US1 million, a new price record for the artist.
Minutes before the bidding began, Mr Yang slipped downstairs so he could smoke while watching a live broadcast of the sale on a television in the hotel bar. After the gavel fell, he slapped the shoulder of the man beside him and laughed. Later, he heard that the winner was a "coal boss" from Shanxi province.
At the same sale, Mr Yang did some potentially strategic bidding of his own - on an artist represented by his wife's Aye Gallery. Mr Yang enlisted a taller friend to stand in front of him and bid for one of Chen Wenji's photorealistic paintings from 1990, A Piece of Glass Leaning on Wall. Mr Yang and his friend bowed out after other bidders pushed the price to more than double the work's $US125,800 high estimate. It ultimately sold to a telephone bidder for $US361,663, the artist's second-highest auction price.
Two days later, What, a show of Mr Chen's new works, opened at Aye. Mr Yang says he bid on the work in part because early works by Mr Chen are rare, and he doesn't own any, despite his wife's affiliation with the artist now. In addition, if he could help his wife's gallery by "keeping prices in a reasonable range, this would be good for the artist," he says.
Ms Maggio, the Beijing dealer, says she doesn't think Mr Yang follows any pattern intended to boost his works' values. More often, she says, he seems to bid on a whim, cajoling his friends to join in and reveling in the competition. "He'll nudge some guy with him and say, 'Buy it! You just made a lot of money!' and they'll put up their paddles," she says. "It's done in a spirit of fun - it's not calculated."
The grandson of a Shandong farmer and the son of a Beijing factory worker, Mr Yang grew up in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution. In 1978, he joined one of the first waves of students allowed into the country's reopened colleges. He studied political economics.
After college, he got a job at the Ministry of Machinery, where he formed ties with foreign banks and car manufacturers so he could help the government import cars for state use. There, he met his wife, who worked as a machinery designer in an office down the block from his communal dorm; they married in 1988.
When the government began allowing individuals to start their own companies a few years later, the couple leveraged their contacts and won a contract with General Motors to sell Buicks, Chevrolets and Cadillacs in China. In 1999, they opened Shanghai's first GM dealership, Da Shi Hang Auto. In the first year alone, they sold 1000 Buicks. Ms Yan began organising regional auto shows, and the couple bought a big empty house in Shanghai.
"That's when we realised we needed something for the walls," says Mr Yang, who sold around 11,000 cars last year through his seven showrooms in Shanghai and Beijing. He drives a black Cadillac Escalade.
In 2000, he paid a local gallery around $US120,000 to fill their home with suitable paintings, but over time he grew curious about the artists themselves. A year or two later, he spotted a roughly $US84,000 painting of a starkly lit human figure by contemporary artist Shi Chong, and something clicked: He wanted to own artworks that felt new.
By 2004, he and Ms Yan had moved back to Beijing and his compulsion had reached a point where he decided to sell his newer Toyota franchise so he could use the cash to buy art. Within weeks of closing that deal, he had spent the entire $US3.6 million in profits buying art. "When we see something we like, we can't help ourselves," said Ms Yan.
Last month in Beijing, Mr Yang threw a wine-tasting dinner for more than 100 guests at his friend Mr Rui's new hotel. Artworks were tucked into niches throughout the hotel's white lobby - including an Anne-Julie video of a horse walking on a treadmill - and the upper hallways were dotted with showstoppers like the Yangjiang Group's drippy candle wax tree. Young men and women clustered around the restaurant's tables, dining on lamb chops and vigorously swirling glasses of Chateau Beau-Sejour Becot.
Mr Yang's latest pastime is fine wine. He tried it for the first time shortly after he opened his first car dealership, and he now drinks a glass or two every day. He keeps his best 2000 bottles, including Bordeaux from Chateau Latour, in Hong Kong so that he can drink it during business trips there and avoid paying taxes to import it home. Last year, he imported 20,000 bottles of less-expensive vintages so he could try selling them to mainland friends. So far, his wine sales have topped $US3 million, which he says he uses to pay his personal wine-drinking bills.
In May, Mr Yang and Ms Yan moved into a new apartment, an 18th-floor penthouse in a Beijing neighbourhood known as the Embassy District. Throughout their home, artworks are arranged to mix East with West. In the dining room, American artist Roxy Paine's linen canvas drips with white paint near a life-size sculpture of an obese Asian man belly-flopping onto a waist-high block of faux ice. Embedded in the man's back are a group of upturned Champagne flutes, one of which accidentally snapped off during a recent party there. The work's sculptor, Mu Boyan, sent over a replacement flute straight away. He shows at Ms Yan's gallery.
The art market is being transformed by Chinese collectors willing to pay top dollar for everything from Ming vases to contemporary Chinese abstracts. In some cases, these works are outstripping prices paid for blue-chip Western artists like Rene Magritte and Clyfford Still.
Three of the 10 most expensive art works sold at auction last year were by Chinese artists, according to art-market analyst Artprice. Last year's priciest painting: Eagle Standing on Pine Tree by self-taught painter Qi Baishi. This delicate scroll rocketed ahead of colorful canvases by Pablo Picasso, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol when it sold for $US65 million ($63.3m) at auction house China Guardian in May. Overall, purchases by Chinese collectors accounted for roughly a fifth of Christie's global sales during the first half of last year; Sotheby's says mainland buyers also lifted its sales in Asia to nearly $US960 million last year, up 47 per cent from 2010.
Welcome to China's rollicking art world, a marketplace flush with wealthy entrepreneurs who are amassing art at a clip to rival any Russian oligarch. From Beijing to Chongqing, collectors are building private museums, opening galleries and embracing an exuberant art scene, even as China's economy shows early signs of a slowdown and many collectors elsewhere are buying more cautiously.
Mr Yang, 54, one of Beijing's biggest car dealers, is emblematic of the new wave of Chinese collectors: Over the past decade, he has collected nearly 1000 artworks by contemporary heavyweights like Chen Yifei, who paints women in romantic interiors, and Zhang Xiaogang, known for haunting family portraits. Mr Yang's art choices are closely tracked by the region's top collectors and dealers. He has financed the opening of a pair of edgy art galleries in Beijing, one of which is managed by his wife, Yan Qing. Last year he began importing and reselling collectible wines like Bordeaux.
The collectors in his broader circle include Qiao Zhibing, a nightclub owner based in Shanghai. Mr Qiao is outfitting his four-story karaoke bar, Shanghai Night, with conceptual sculptures by Ai Weiwei, sleek photographs of Champagne-drinking partygoers by Yang Fudong and paintings of men in suits and smiling face masks by Zeng Fanzhi. Behind Mr Qiao's cashier's desk looms Beijing artist Ji Dachun's large painting of an eyeball.
Another friend, Beijing hotelier Zhang Rui, has started decorating every room in his new Gallery Hotel with pieces borrowed from a gallery called Tang. He also has an 800-piece collection of his own. The hotel hasn't opened yet, in part because Mr Zhang recently spent 18 months in detention for allegedly bribing a Party secretary. Mr Zhang denies making any bribe but says he did pay a fine as a condition of his release last June, and he's now seeking the remaining building permits.
"It's not enough in China to be wildly wealthy," says Meg Maggio, director of Pekin Fine Arts, a Beijing gallery specialising in contemporary art. "For all these guys, it's about building a beautiful way of life - they want the nice objects, the good wine, the whole package."
Alan Lee, who runs Beijing gallery Asia Art Centre, says one of his clients, a fitness-equipment manufacturer named Chang Chiu Dun, calls himself the "Cover Killer" because he "likes to buy artworks that have been on the covers of auction catalogues."
The downside, Mr Lee says, is that this influx of newly wealthy collectors is fueling risky speculation on art, leading to price swings and heavy trading volumes for younger artists like the eyeball painter, Ji Dachun, whose lasting significance is still uncertain. Art advisory firm Artvest says Chinese investors have recently started at least eight art funds, which buy artworks with the aim of reselling them at a profit later. There are only about 20 similar funds elsewhere in the world.
China's gallery scene is similarly freewheeling, with collectors such as Mr Yang sometimes serving as stakeholders or co-owners of galleries where they also shop. Such arrangements can spark potential conflicts of interest because the stakeholders might be able to leverage their position to claim the gallery's choicest pieces. Seven years ago Mr Yang paid to help his wife open her contemporary art gallery, Aye, but he says he doesn't manage her artists or get first dibs on any work she shows there. He recently stepped back as a financing partner in another contemporary art gallery he founded three years ago, Eastation, in order to focus on his wine venture. He continues to buy art from both galleries.
Dealers and artists say it's unclear whether Mr Yang is trying to build a museum-worthy collection or angling for the right moment to cash out. "China's market is still so new - it's hard for us to tell who's a collector and who's a speculator," says artist Zhang Xiaogang.
Mr Yang isn't troubled by such ambiguity. "I can't say if investing in art is good or bad," he says, "but I know that without money, you can't make a market grow."
Within China's contemporary art circles, Mr Yang is hard to miss. He's tall, with a square face and thick head of black hair. He shows acquaintances cellphone images of his art the way others pull up snapshots of their children. More often than not, he turns up at black-tie dinners dressed in a polo shirt, black corduroys, and sneakers.
In Hong Kong, he socializes with collectors like Credit Suisse banker Tony Chiu and BNP Paribas banker Daisy Cheng. Both say they've sought his advice about artists to collect. In Beijing, his penthouse apartment doubles as a lunch spot for a growing crop of young entrepreneurs and investment bankers, some of whom half-jokingly call him "President Yang."
Mr Yang has rapidly built up his collection in part by maintaining a breathless pace - he sometimes buys dozens of works at a single auction or hundreds of works from a gallery or artist he likes, he says. When he's not working in one of his six car dealerships in Beijing, he and his entourage are regulars at art fairs and auctions throughout Asia and Europe.
This year, Mr Yang's favorite prospect is Liu Wei, a Beijing artist who grew up painting portraits of Chairman Mao and later experimented with abstraction and themes like decay. Two months ago, Mr Yang flew to Hong Kong and paid boutique auctioneer Ravenel around $US123,000 for Mr Liu's 1999 canine portrait, Dog No. 2. A few days later, several works by the same artist sold for twice as much at an auction back in Beijing.
Mr Yang says the artist remains undervalued: "Liu Wei isn't a pop star" like Zeng Fanzhi, a painter represented by New York dealer Larry Gagosian, he says, "but I think he's as important."
Mr Yang has also started offloading a few older pieces by Chinese realist artists like Chen Yanning as demand for their works has climbed. Last month, Mr Yang arrived at a Beijing luxury hotel and made his way into the packed salesroom of Poly, China's biggest auction house. He stood in the back, his usual spot. Halfway through the sale, he pointed to a large painting of a boatful of people hanging on the far wall. "That's mine," he said. He had paid roughly $US60,000 for the 1984 work, New Wave, by Chen Yanning seven years earlier, and was ready to sell. Poly priced the work to sell for at least $US629,000. When the bidding began, at least five collectors took the bait and the winner paid $US1 million, a new price record for the artist.
Minutes before the bidding began, Mr Yang slipped downstairs so he could smoke while watching a live broadcast of the sale on a television in the hotel bar. After the gavel fell, he slapped the shoulder of the man beside him and laughed. Later, he heard that the winner was a "coal boss" from Shanxi province.
At the same sale, Mr Yang did some potentially strategic bidding of his own - on an artist represented by his wife's Aye Gallery. Mr Yang enlisted a taller friend to stand in front of him and bid for one of Chen Wenji's photorealistic paintings from 1990, A Piece of Glass Leaning on Wall. Mr Yang and his friend bowed out after other bidders pushed the price to more than double the work's $US125,800 high estimate. It ultimately sold to a telephone bidder for $US361,663, the artist's second-highest auction price.
Two days later, What, a show of Mr Chen's new works, opened at Aye. Mr Yang says he bid on the work in part because early works by Mr Chen are rare, and he doesn't own any, despite his wife's affiliation with the artist now. In addition, if he could help his wife's gallery by "keeping prices in a reasonable range, this would be good for the artist," he says.
Ms Maggio, the Beijing dealer, says she doesn't think Mr Yang follows any pattern intended to boost his works' values. More often, she says, he seems to bid on a whim, cajoling his friends to join in and reveling in the competition. "He'll nudge some guy with him and say, 'Buy it! You just made a lot of money!' and they'll put up their paddles," she says. "It's done in a spirit of fun - it's not calculated."
The grandson of a Shandong farmer and the son of a Beijing factory worker, Mr Yang grew up in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution. In 1978, he joined one of the first waves of students allowed into the country's reopened colleges. He studied political economics.
After college, he got a job at the Ministry of Machinery, where he formed ties with foreign banks and car manufacturers so he could help the government import cars for state use. There, he met his wife, who worked as a machinery designer in an office down the block from his communal dorm; they married in 1988.
When the government began allowing individuals to start their own companies a few years later, the couple leveraged their contacts and won a contract with General Motors to sell Buicks, Chevrolets and Cadillacs in China. In 1999, they opened Shanghai's first GM dealership, Da Shi Hang Auto. In the first year alone, they sold 1000 Buicks. Ms Yan began organising regional auto shows, and the couple bought a big empty house in Shanghai.
"That's when we realised we needed something for the walls," says Mr Yang, who sold around 11,000 cars last year through his seven showrooms in Shanghai and Beijing. He drives a black Cadillac Escalade.
In 2000, he paid a local gallery around $US120,000 to fill their home with suitable paintings, but over time he grew curious about the artists themselves. A year or two later, he spotted a roughly $US84,000 painting of a starkly lit human figure by contemporary artist Shi Chong, and something clicked: He wanted to own artworks that felt new.
By 2004, he and Ms Yan had moved back to Beijing and his compulsion had reached a point where he decided to sell his newer Toyota franchise so he could use the cash to buy art. Within weeks of closing that deal, he had spent the entire $US3.6 million in profits buying art. "When we see something we like, we can't help ourselves," said Ms Yan.
Last month in Beijing, Mr Yang threw a wine-tasting dinner for more than 100 guests at his friend Mr Rui's new hotel. Artworks were tucked into niches throughout the hotel's white lobby - including an Anne-Julie video of a horse walking on a treadmill - and the upper hallways were dotted with showstoppers like the Yangjiang Group's drippy candle wax tree. Young men and women clustered around the restaurant's tables, dining on lamb chops and vigorously swirling glasses of Chateau Beau-Sejour Becot.
Mr Yang's latest pastime is fine wine. He tried it for the first time shortly after he opened his first car dealership, and he now drinks a glass or two every day. He keeps his best 2000 bottles, including Bordeaux from Chateau Latour, in Hong Kong so that he can drink it during business trips there and avoid paying taxes to import it home. Last year, he imported 20,000 bottles of less-expensive vintages so he could try selling them to mainland friends. So far, his wine sales have topped $US3 million, which he says he uses to pay his personal wine-drinking bills.
In May, Mr Yang and Ms Yan moved into a new apartment, an 18th-floor penthouse in a Beijing neighbourhood known as the Embassy District. Throughout their home, artworks are arranged to mix East with West. In the dining room, American artist Roxy Paine's linen canvas drips with white paint near a life-size sculpture of an obese Asian man belly-flopping onto a waist-high block of faux ice. Embedded in the man's back are a group of upturned Champagne flutes, one of which accidentally snapped off during a recent party there. The work's sculptor, Mu Boyan, sent over a replacement flute straight away. He shows at Ms Yan's gallery.
2012年1月15日星期日
Inmates Creativity Fair reveals creative side of jail
“I’m improving my painting, and it’s helping me make improvements in my life. It’s now an interest.”
Adam Arif is four years into a 25-year sentence at Maafushi jail. Participating at the 2012 Inmates Creativity Fair, held in the National Art Gallery from January 12 to 14, he said the arts program has improved daily life at Maafushi, and that the fair was a good chance to see the Male‘ community.
“The art projects allow them to gain valuable skills and hold a normal routine while in prison,” said Mohamed Asif, Assistant Superintendent of the Department of Penitentiary and Rehabilitation Services (DPRS). Inmates who choose to participate in the government-sponsored program work from 9 am to 12 pm, break for lunch, and then again from 1 pm to 3 pm. “It’s like a full job,” he explained. “Otherwise they’d just be sitting behind bars.”
Organised by DPRS, the fair was hosted by inmates and DPRS staff wearing orange tee-shirts sporting the logo “Accept Me”. Paintings, jewelry, handbags, model ships, plant arrangements and even vegetables available for sale were produced by the 80 to 100 male and female participants from Maafushi and Asseyri, most of whom were not formerly artists. They receive Rf900 (US$360) per month.
“We’ve had a lot of positive comments from people, requesting us to open a shop because they want to buy more. We plan to launch a website to sell the prisoners’ artwork at the end of next month”, Asif said.
With most objects sold by 8:30 pm on the last evening of the fair, Asif estimated that the fair earned Rf1 million (US$64,850). However, he was careful to point out that the earnings are not a profit.
“The money goes back to the government, and is incorporated back into the budget and used to provide more tools for art projects,” he said. “The problem is, actually, we want a revolving fund. We’d like to sell and make a profit and then be able buy more materials and repeat the process. But at the moment, because of legislating governing financial procedures, we aren’t authorised.”
Although the inmate arts program is funded by the government, Asif believes financial autonomy would improve the program. “We are going to introduce a prison club, like the police club, so we can have our own budget to buy and sell,” he explained.
While Asif pushes for independence within the practice of prison reform, he acknowledges that significant improvements have been made in the past few years.
“There is renovation being done at Maafushi, Asseyri, and how they are going to build a new prison at Nanaykurandhoo,” he pointed out. Although the parole system is far from strong, Asif noted that the 2011 Second Chance Program had released 337 inmates since its inception in September, only 30 of whom had returned to prison, mostly from drug relapse.
Maldivian prisons currently house approximately 1000 inmates–0.3 percent of the national population. Nearly three-quarters of the prison population has been incarcerated for drug offences.
According to a 2011 report released by the United Nations Development Program, however, the prison system is poorly equipped.
“The problem in the Maldives is that there aren’t proper prisons,” co-author and UNDP program specialist Naaz Aminath told Minivan News in a previous article. “There is no structure to support the prisoners who are there.”
Inmates surveyed complained about a lack of structure in prison life, listing torture, inhumane treatment, drug availability and false hope from politicians as key factors.
“Plus, there isn’t much to read there,” Aminath explained. Only Asseyri and Maafushi prisons have ‘libraries’–rooms with a few books located outside the gated complex. “It’s risky to go there because it’s not within a protected area, and there simply aren’t enough staff to organise daily library trips. Really, I wouldn’t even call it a library.”
Adam Arif is four years into a 25-year sentence at Maafushi jail. Participating at the 2012 Inmates Creativity Fair, held in the National Art Gallery from January 12 to 14, he said the arts program has improved daily life at Maafushi, and that the fair was a good chance to see the Male‘ community.
“The art projects allow them to gain valuable skills and hold a normal routine while in prison,” said Mohamed Asif, Assistant Superintendent of the Department of Penitentiary and Rehabilitation Services (DPRS). Inmates who choose to participate in the government-sponsored program work from 9 am to 12 pm, break for lunch, and then again from 1 pm to 3 pm. “It’s like a full job,” he explained. “Otherwise they’d just be sitting behind bars.”
Organised by DPRS, the fair was hosted by inmates and DPRS staff wearing orange tee-shirts sporting the logo “Accept Me”. Paintings, jewelry, handbags, model ships, plant arrangements and even vegetables available for sale were produced by the 80 to 100 male and female participants from Maafushi and Asseyri, most of whom were not formerly artists. They receive Rf900 (US$360) per month.
“We’ve had a lot of positive comments from people, requesting us to open a shop because they want to buy more. We plan to launch a website to sell the prisoners’ artwork at the end of next month”, Asif said.
With most objects sold by 8:30 pm on the last evening of the fair, Asif estimated that the fair earned Rf1 million (US$64,850). However, he was careful to point out that the earnings are not a profit.
“The money goes back to the government, and is incorporated back into the budget and used to provide more tools for art projects,” he said. “The problem is, actually, we want a revolving fund. We’d like to sell and make a profit and then be able buy more materials and repeat the process. But at the moment, because of legislating governing financial procedures, we aren’t authorised.”
Although the inmate arts program is funded by the government, Asif believes financial autonomy would improve the program. “We are going to introduce a prison club, like the police club, so we can have our own budget to buy and sell,” he explained.
While Asif pushes for independence within the practice of prison reform, he acknowledges that significant improvements have been made in the past few years.
“There is renovation being done at Maafushi, Asseyri, and how they are going to build a new prison at Nanaykurandhoo,” he pointed out. Although the parole system is far from strong, Asif noted that the 2011 Second Chance Program had released 337 inmates since its inception in September, only 30 of whom had returned to prison, mostly from drug relapse.
Maldivian prisons currently house approximately 1000 inmates–0.3 percent of the national population. Nearly three-quarters of the prison population has been incarcerated for drug offences.
According to a 2011 report released by the United Nations Development Program, however, the prison system is poorly equipped.
“The problem in the Maldives is that there aren’t proper prisons,” co-author and UNDP program specialist Naaz Aminath told Minivan News in a previous article. “There is no structure to support the prisoners who are there.”
Inmates surveyed complained about a lack of structure in prison life, listing torture, inhumane treatment, drug availability and false hope from politicians as key factors.
“Plus, there isn’t much to read there,” Aminath explained. Only Asseyri and Maafushi prisons have ‘libraries’–rooms with a few books located outside the gated complex. “It’s risky to go there because it’s not within a protected area, and there simply aren’t enough staff to organise daily library trips. Really, I wouldn’t even call it a library.”
2012年1月12日星期四
Art's New Pecking Order
On the outskirts of Beijing in a private club house called Paradise, there is a large, windowless room where Yang Bin displays his collection of modern and contemporary art.
"Sit down and get ready," Mr. Yang recently told a few friends visiting from Taiwan. Grabbing a remote control, he turned to a set of wall panels that, with a click, began to slide apart. Each panel revealed a few of his recent acquisitions, from Chairman Mao-era portraits of revolutionaries to brightly colored abstracts by China's rising stars. As his friends applauded the slide-show, Mr. Yang grinned and lit a cigar.
The art market is being transformed by Chinese collectors willing to pay top dollar for everything from Ming vases to contemporary Chinese abstracts. In some cases, these works are outstripping prices paid for blue-chip Western artists like Ren Magritte and Clyfford Still.
Three of the 10 most expensive art works sold at auction last year were by Chinese artists, according to art-market analyst Artprice. Last year's priciest painting: "Eagle Standing on Pine Tree" by self-taught painter Qi Baishi. This delicate scroll rocketed ahead of colorful canvases by Pablo Picasso, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol when it sold for $65 million at auction house China Guardian in May. Overall, purchases by Chinese collectors accounted for roughly a fifth of Christie's global sales during the first half of last year; Sotheby's says mainland buyers also lifted its sales in Asia to nearly $960 million last year, up 47% from 2010.
Welcome to China's rollicking art world, a marketplace flush with wealthy entrepreneurs who are amassing art at a clip to rival any Russian oligarch. From Beijing to Chongqing, collectors are building private museums, opening galleries and embracing an exuberant art scene, even as China's economy shows early signs of a slowdown and many collectors elsewhere are buying more cautiously.
Mr. Yang, age 54 and one of Beijing's biggest car dealers, is emblematic of the new wave of Chinese collectors: Over the past decade, he has collected nearly 1,000 artworks by contemporary heavyweights like Chen Yifei, who paints women in romantic interiors, and Zhang Xiaogang, known for haunting family portraits. Mr. Yang's art choices are closely tracked by the region's top collectors and dealers. He has financed the opening of a pair of edgy art galleries in Beijing, one of which is managed by his wife, Yan Qing. Last year he began importing and reselling collectible wines like Bordeaux.
The collectors in his broader circle include Qiao Zhibing, a nightclub owner based in Shanghai. Mr. Qiao is outfitting his four-story karaoke bar, Shanghai Night, with conceptual sculptures by Ai Weiwei, sleek photographs of Champagne-drinking partygoers by Yang Fudong and paintings of men in suits and smiling face masks by Zeng Fanzhi. Behind Mr. Qiao's cashier's desk looms Beijing artist Ji Dachun's large painting of an eyeball.
Another friend, Beijing hotelier Zhang Rui, has started decorating every room in his new Gallery Hotel with pieces borrowed from a gallery called Tang. He also has an 800-piece collection of his own. The hotel hasn't opened yet, in part because Mr. Zhang recently spent 18 months in detention for allegedly bribing a Party secretary. Mr. Zhang denies making any bribe but says he did pay a fine as a condition of his release last June, and he's now seeking the remaining building permits.
"It's not enough in China to be wildly wealthy," says Meg Maggio, director of Pkin Fine Arts, a Beijing gallery specializing in contemporary art. "For all these guys, it's about building a beautiful way of life—they want the nice objects, the good wine, the whole package."
Alan Lee, who runs Beijing gallery Asia Art Center, says one of his clients, a fitness-equipment manufacturer named Chang Chiu Dun, calls himself the "Cover Killer" because he "likes to buy artworks that have been on the covers of auction catalogs."
The downside, Mr. Lee says, is that this influx of newly wealthy collectors is fueling risky speculation on art, leading to price swings and heavy trading volumes for younger artists like the eyeball painter, Ji Dachun, whose lasting significance is still uncertain. Art advisory firm Artvest says Chinese investors have recently started at least eight art funds, which buy artworks with the aim of reselling them at a profit later. There are only about 20 similar funds elsewhere in the world.
China's gallery scene is similarly freewheeling, with collectors such as Mr. Yang sometimes serving as stakeholders or co-owners of galleries where they also shop. Such arrangements can spark potential conflicts of interest because the stakeholders might be able to leverage their position to claim the gallery's choicest pieces. Seven years ago Mr. Yang paid to help his wife open her contemporary art gallery, Aye, but he says he doesn't manage her artists or get first dibs on any work she shows there. He recently stepped back as a financing partner in another contemporary art gallery he founded three years ago, Eastation, in order to focus on his wine venture. He continues to buy art from both galleries.
Dealers and artists say it's unclear whether Mr. Yang is trying to build a museum-worthy collection or angling for the right moment to cash out. "China's market is still so new—it's hard for us to tell who's a collector and who's a speculator," says artist Zhang Xiaogang.
Mr. Yang isn't troubled by such ambiguity. "I can't say if investing in art is good or bad," he says, "but I know that without money, you can't make a market grow."
Within China's contemporary art circles, Mr. Yang is hard to miss. He's tall, with a square face and thick head of black hair. He shows acquaintances cellphone images of his art the way others pull up snapshots of their children. More often than not, he turns up at black-tie dinners dressed in a polo shirt, black corduroys, and sneakers.
In Hong Kong, he socializes with collectors like Credit Suisse banker Tony Chiu and BNP Paribas banker Daisy Cheng. Both say they've sought his advice about artists to collect. In Beijing, his penthouse apartment doubles as a lunch spot for a growing crop of young entrepreneurs and investment bankers, some of whom half-jokingly call him "President Yang."
Mr. Yang has rapidly built up his collection in part by maintaining a breathless pace—he sometimes buys dozens of works at a single auction or hundreds of works from a gallery or artist he likes, he says. When he's not working in one of his six car dealerships in Beijing, he and his entourage are regulars at art fairs and auctions throughout Asia and Europe.
This year, Mr. Yang's favorite prospect is Liu Wei, a Beijing artist best known for using leathery dog chews to build a miniature city. Two months ago, Mr. Yang flew to Hong Kong and paid boutique auctioneer Ravenel around $123,000 for Mr. Liu's 1999 canine portrait, "Dog No. 2." A few days later, several works by the same artist sold for twice as much at an auction back in Beijing.
Mr. Yang says the artist remains undervalued, despite investment by prominent Western collectors like Mr. Saatchi: "Liu Wei isn't a pop star" like Zeng Fanzhi, a painter represented by New York dealer Larry Gagosian, he says, "but I think he's as important."
Mr. Yang has also started offloading a few older pieces by Chinese realist artists like Chen Yanning as demand for their works has climbed. Last month, Mr. Yang arrived at a Beijing luxury hotel and made his way into the packed salesroom of Poly, China's biggest auction house. He stood in the back, his usual spot. Halfway through the sale, he pointed to a large painting of a boatful of people hanging on the far wall. "That's mine," he said. He had paid roughly $60,000 for the 1984 work, "New Wave," by Chen Yanning seven years earlier, and was ready to sell. Poly priced the work to sell for at least $629,000. When the bidding began, at least five collectors took the bait and the winner paid $1 million, a new price record for the artist.
Minutes before the bidding began, Mr. Yang slipped downstairs so he could smoke while watching a live broadcast of the sale on a television in the hotel bar. After the gavel fell, he slapped the shoulder of the man beside him and laughed. Later, he heard that the winner was a "coal boss" from Shanxi province.
At the same sale, Mr. Yang did some potentially strategic bidding of his own—on an artist represented by his wife's Aye Gallery. Mr. Yang enlisted a taller friend to stand in front of him and bid for one of Chen Wenji's photorealistic paintings from 1990, "A Piece of Glass Leaning on Wall." Mr. Yang and his friend bowed out after other bidders pushed the price to more than double the work's $125,800 high estimate. It ultimately sold to a telephone bidder for $361,663, the artist's second-highest auction price.
Two days later, "What," a show of Mr. Chen's new works, opened at Aye. Mr. Yang says he bid on the work in part because early works by Mr. Chen are rare, and he doesn't own any, despite his wife's affiliation with the artist now. In addition, if he could help his wife's gallery by "keeping prices in a reasonable range, this would be good for the artist," he says.
Ms. Maggio, the Beijing dealer, says she doesn't think Mr. Yang follows any pattern intended to boost his works' values. More often, she says, he seems to bid on a whim, cajoling his friends to join in and reveling in the competition. "He'll nudge some guy with him and say, 'Buy it! You just made a lot of money!' and they'll put up their paddles," she says. "It's done in a spirit of fun—it's not calculated."
The grandson of a Shandong farmer and the son of a Beijing factory worker, Mr. Yang grew up in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution. In 1978, he joined one of the first waves of students allowed into the country's reopened colleges. He studied political economics.
After college, he got a job at the Ministry of Machinery, where he formed ties with foreign banks and car manufacturers so he could help the government import cars for state use. There, he met his wife, who worked as a machinery designer in an office down the block from his communal dorm; they married in 1988.
When the government began allowing individuals to start their own companies a few years later, the couple leveraged their contacts and won a contract with General Motors to sell Buicks, Chevrolets and Cadillacs in China. In 1999, they opened Shanghai's first GM dealership, Da Shi Hang Auto. In the first year alone, they sold 1,000 Buicks. Ms. Yan began organizing regional auto shows, and the couple bought a big empty house in Shanghai.
"That's when we realized we needed something for the walls," says Mr. Yang, who sold around 11,000 cars last year through his seven showrooms in Shanghai and Beijing. He drives a black Cadillac Escalade.
In 2000, he paid a local gallery around $120,000 to fill their home with suitable paintings, but over time he grew curious about the artists themselves. A year or two later, he spotted a roughly $84,000 painting of a starkly lit human figure by contemporary artist Shi Chong, and something clicked: He wanted to own artworks that felt new.
By 2004, he and Ms. Yan had moved back to Beijing and his compulsion had reached a point where he decided to sell his newer Toyota franchise so he could use the cash to buy art. Within weeks of closing that deal, he had spent the entire $3.6 million in profits buying art. "When we see something we like, we can't help ourselves," said Ms. Yan.
Last month in Beijing, Mr. Yang threw a wine-tasting dinner for more than 100 guests at his friend Mr. Rui's new hotel. Artworks were tucked into niches throughout the hotel's white lobby—including an Anne-Julie video of a horse walking on a treadmill—and the upper hallways were dotted with showstoppers like the Yangjiang Group's drippy candle wax tree. Young men and women clustered around the restaurant's tables, dining on lamb chops and vigorously swirling glasses of Chteau Beau-Sjour Bcot.
Mr. Yang's latest pastime is fine wine. He tried it for the first time shortly after he opened his first car dealership, and he now drinks a glass or two every day. He keeps his best 2,000 bottles, including Bordeaux from Chteau Latour, in Hong Kong so that he can drink it during business trips there and avoid paying taxes to import it home. Last year, he imported 20,000 bottles of less-expensive vintages so he could try selling them to mainland friends. So far, his wine sales have topped $3 million, which he says he uses to pay his personal wine-drinking bills.
In May, Mr. Yang and Ms. Yan moved into a new apartment, an 18th-floor penthouse in a Beijing neighborhood known as the Embassy District. Throughout their home, artworks are arranged to mix East with West. In the dining room, American artist Roxy Paine's linen canvas drips with white paint near a life-size sculpture of an obese Asian man belly-flopping onto a waist-high block of faux ice. Embedded in the man's back are a group of upturned Champagne flutes, one of which accidentally snapped off during a recent party there. The work's sculptor, Mu Boyan, sent over a replacement flute straight away. He shows at Ms. Yan's gallery.
"Sit down and get ready," Mr. Yang recently told a few friends visiting from Taiwan. Grabbing a remote control, he turned to a set of wall panels that, with a click, began to slide apart. Each panel revealed a few of his recent acquisitions, from Chairman Mao-era portraits of revolutionaries to brightly colored abstracts by China's rising stars. As his friends applauded the slide-show, Mr. Yang grinned and lit a cigar.
The art market is being transformed by Chinese collectors willing to pay top dollar for everything from Ming vases to contemporary Chinese abstracts. In some cases, these works are outstripping prices paid for blue-chip Western artists like Ren Magritte and Clyfford Still.
Three of the 10 most expensive art works sold at auction last year were by Chinese artists, according to art-market analyst Artprice. Last year's priciest painting: "Eagle Standing on Pine Tree" by self-taught painter Qi Baishi. This delicate scroll rocketed ahead of colorful canvases by Pablo Picasso, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol when it sold for $65 million at auction house China Guardian in May. Overall, purchases by Chinese collectors accounted for roughly a fifth of Christie's global sales during the first half of last year; Sotheby's says mainland buyers also lifted its sales in Asia to nearly $960 million last year, up 47% from 2010.
Welcome to China's rollicking art world, a marketplace flush with wealthy entrepreneurs who are amassing art at a clip to rival any Russian oligarch. From Beijing to Chongqing, collectors are building private museums, opening galleries and embracing an exuberant art scene, even as China's economy shows early signs of a slowdown and many collectors elsewhere are buying more cautiously.
Mr. Yang, age 54 and one of Beijing's biggest car dealers, is emblematic of the new wave of Chinese collectors: Over the past decade, he has collected nearly 1,000 artworks by contemporary heavyweights like Chen Yifei, who paints women in romantic interiors, and Zhang Xiaogang, known for haunting family portraits. Mr. Yang's art choices are closely tracked by the region's top collectors and dealers. He has financed the opening of a pair of edgy art galleries in Beijing, one of which is managed by his wife, Yan Qing. Last year he began importing and reselling collectible wines like Bordeaux.
The collectors in his broader circle include Qiao Zhibing, a nightclub owner based in Shanghai. Mr. Qiao is outfitting his four-story karaoke bar, Shanghai Night, with conceptual sculptures by Ai Weiwei, sleek photographs of Champagne-drinking partygoers by Yang Fudong and paintings of men in suits and smiling face masks by Zeng Fanzhi. Behind Mr. Qiao's cashier's desk looms Beijing artist Ji Dachun's large painting of an eyeball.
Another friend, Beijing hotelier Zhang Rui, has started decorating every room in his new Gallery Hotel with pieces borrowed from a gallery called Tang. He also has an 800-piece collection of his own. The hotel hasn't opened yet, in part because Mr. Zhang recently spent 18 months in detention for allegedly bribing a Party secretary. Mr. Zhang denies making any bribe but says he did pay a fine as a condition of his release last June, and he's now seeking the remaining building permits.
"It's not enough in China to be wildly wealthy," says Meg Maggio, director of Pkin Fine Arts, a Beijing gallery specializing in contemporary art. "For all these guys, it's about building a beautiful way of life—they want the nice objects, the good wine, the whole package."
Alan Lee, who runs Beijing gallery Asia Art Center, says one of his clients, a fitness-equipment manufacturer named Chang Chiu Dun, calls himself the "Cover Killer" because he "likes to buy artworks that have been on the covers of auction catalogs."
The downside, Mr. Lee says, is that this influx of newly wealthy collectors is fueling risky speculation on art, leading to price swings and heavy trading volumes for younger artists like the eyeball painter, Ji Dachun, whose lasting significance is still uncertain. Art advisory firm Artvest says Chinese investors have recently started at least eight art funds, which buy artworks with the aim of reselling them at a profit later. There are only about 20 similar funds elsewhere in the world.
China's gallery scene is similarly freewheeling, with collectors such as Mr. Yang sometimes serving as stakeholders or co-owners of galleries where they also shop. Such arrangements can spark potential conflicts of interest because the stakeholders might be able to leverage their position to claim the gallery's choicest pieces. Seven years ago Mr. Yang paid to help his wife open her contemporary art gallery, Aye, but he says he doesn't manage her artists or get first dibs on any work she shows there. He recently stepped back as a financing partner in another contemporary art gallery he founded three years ago, Eastation, in order to focus on his wine venture. He continues to buy art from both galleries.
Dealers and artists say it's unclear whether Mr. Yang is trying to build a museum-worthy collection or angling for the right moment to cash out. "China's market is still so new—it's hard for us to tell who's a collector and who's a speculator," says artist Zhang Xiaogang.
Mr. Yang isn't troubled by such ambiguity. "I can't say if investing in art is good or bad," he says, "but I know that without money, you can't make a market grow."
Within China's contemporary art circles, Mr. Yang is hard to miss. He's tall, with a square face and thick head of black hair. He shows acquaintances cellphone images of his art the way others pull up snapshots of their children. More often than not, he turns up at black-tie dinners dressed in a polo shirt, black corduroys, and sneakers.
In Hong Kong, he socializes with collectors like Credit Suisse banker Tony Chiu and BNP Paribas banker Daisy Cheng. Both say they've sought his advice about artists to collect. In Beijing, his penthouse apartment doubles as a lunch spot for a growing crop of young entrepreneurs and investment bankers, some of whom half-jokingly call him "President Yang."
Mr. Yang has rapidly built up his collection in part by maintaining a breathless pace—he sometimes buys dozens of works at a single auction or hundreds of works from a gallery or artist he likes, he says. When he's not working in one of his six car dealerships in Beijing, he and his entourage are regulars at art fairs and auctions throughout Asia and Europe.
This year, Mr. Yang's favorite prospect is Liu Wei, a Beijing artist best known for using leathery dog chews to build a miniature city. Two months ago, Mr. Yang flew to Hong Kong and paid boutique auctioneer Ravenel around $123,000 for Mr. Liu's 1999 canine portrait, "Dog No. 2." A few days later, several works by the same artist sold for twice as much at an auction back in Beijing.
Mr. Yang says the artist remains undervalued, despite investment by prominent Western collectors like Mr. Saatchi: "Liu Wei isn't a pop star" like Zeng Fanzhi, a painter represented by New York dealer Larry Gagosian, he says, "but I think he's as important."
Mr. Yang has also started offloading a few older pieces by Chinese realist artists like Chen Yanning as demand for their works has climbed. Last month, Mr. Yang arrived at a Beijing luxury hotel and made his way into the packed salesroom of Poly, China's biggest auction house. He stood in the back, his usual spot. Halfway through the sale, he pointed to a large painting of a boatful of people hanging on the far wall. "That's mine," he said. He had paid roughly $60,000 for the 1984 work, "New Wave," by Chen Yanning seven years earlier, and was ready to sell. Poly priced the work to sell for at least $629,000. When the bidding began, at least five collectors took the bait and the winner paid $1 million, a new price record for the artist.
Minutes before the bidding began, Mr. Yang slipped downstairs so he could smoke while watching a live broadcast of the sale on a television in the hotel bar. After the gavel fell, he slapped the shoulder of the man beside him and laughed. Later, he heard that the winner was a "coal boss" from Shanxi province.
At the same sale, Mr. Yang did some potentially strategic bidding of his own—on an artist represented by his wife's Aye Gallery. Mr. Yang enlisted a taller friend to stand in front of him and bid for one of Chen Wenji's photorealistic paintings from 1990, "A Piece of Glass Leaning on Wall." Mr. Yang and his friend bowed out after other bidders pushed the price to more than double the work's $125,800 high estimate. It ultimately sold to a telephone bidder for $361,663, the artist's second-highest auction price.
Two days later, "What," a show of Mr. Chen's new works, opened at Aye. Mr. Yang says he bid on the work in part because early works by Mr. Chen are rare, and he doesn't own any, despite his wife's affiliation with the artist now. In addition, if he could help his wife's gallery by "keeping prices in a reasonable range, this would be good for the artist," he says.
Ms. Maggio, the Beijing dealer, says she doesn't think Mr. Yang follows any pattern intended to boost his works' values. More often, she says, he seems to bid on a whim, cajoling his friends to join in and reveling in the competition. "He'll nudge some guy with him and say, 'Buy it! You just made a lot of money!' and they'll put up their paddles," she says. "It's done in a spirit of fun—it's not calculated."
The grandson of a Shandong farmer and the son of a Beijing factory worker, Mr. Yang grew up in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution. In 1978, he joined one of the first waves of students allowed into the country's reopened colleges. He studied political economics.
After college, he got a job at the Ministry of Machinery, where he formed ties with foreign banks and car manufacturers so he could help the government import cars for state use. There, he met his wife, who worked as a machinery designer in an office down the block from his communal dorm; they married in 1988.
When the government began allowing individuals to start their own companies a few years later, the couple leveraged their contacts and won a contract with General Motors to sell Buicks, Chevrolets and Cadillacs in China. In 1999, they opened Shanghai's first GM dealership, Da Shi Hang Auto. In the first year alone, they sold 1,000 Buicks. Ms. Yan began organizing regional auto shows, and the couple bought a big empty house in Shanghai.
"That's when we realized we needed something for the walls," says Mr. Yang, who sold around 11,000 cars last year through his seven showrooms in Shanghai and Beijing. He drives a black Cadillac Escalade.
In 2000, he paid a local gallery around $120,000 to fill their home with suitable paintings, but over time he grew curious about the artists themselves. A year or two later, he spotted a roughly $84,000 painting of a starkly lit human figure by contemporary artist Shi Chong, and something clicked: He wanted to own artworks that felt new.
By 2004, he and Ms. Yan had moved back to Beijing and his compulsion had reached a point where he decided to sell his newer Toyota franchise so he could use the cash to buy art. Within weeks of closing that deal, he had spent the entire $3.6 million in profits buying art. "When we see something we like, we can't help ourselves," said Ms. Yan.
Last month in Beijing, Mr. Yang threw a wine-tasting dinner for more than 100 guests at his friend Mr. Rui's new hotel. Artworks were tucked into niches throughout the hotel's white lobby—including an Anne-Julie video of a horse walking on a treadmill—and the upper hallways were dotted with showstoppers like the Yangjiang Group's drippy candle wax tree. Young men and women clustered around the restaurant's tables, dining on lamb chops and vigorously swirling glasses of Chteau Beau-Sjour Bcot.
Mr. Yang's latest pastime is fine wine. He tried it for the first time shortly after he opened his first car dealership, and he now drinks a glass or two every day. He keeps his best 2,000 bottles, including Bordeaux from Chteau Latour, in Hong Kong so that he can drink it during business trips there and avoid paying taxes to import it home. Last year, he imported 20,000 bottles of less-expensive vintages so he could try selling them to mainland friends. So far, his wine sales have topped $3 million, which he says he uses to pay his personal wine-drinking bills.
In May, Mr. Yang and Ms. Yan moved into a new apartment, an 18th-floor penthouse in a Beijing neighborhood known as the Embassy District. Throughout their home, artworks are arranged to mix East with West. In the dining room, American artist Roxy Paine's linen canvas drips with white paint near a life-size sculpture of an obese Asian man belly-flopping onto a waist-high block of faux ice. Embedded in the man's back are a group of upturned Champagne flutes, one of which accidentally snapped off during a recent party there. The work's sculptor, Mu Boyan, sent over a replacement flute straight away. He shows at Ms. Yan's gallery.
2012年1月11日星期三
Sotheby’s selects Raza’s ‘Village With Church’ painting for New York sale
A painting entitled ‘Village With Church’ by renowned artist Sayed Haider Raza will appear at Sotheby’s March 2012 Asia Week sales in New York. It will be one amongst rare lots to highlight the sale and is estimated to sell for $1.5/2.5 million. It will feature in Sotheby’s sale of Modern and Contemporary South Asian Art on 19 March 2012 and will be on view beginning 16 March.
The painting was purchased by Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller III from the landmark 1958-59 exhibition Trends in Contemporary Painting In India and remained in their historic collection until 1994. It represents the apex of Raza’s early period. Having spent a considerable portion of his career in France, he was deeply moved by the works of the European modernist masters, particularly Cezanne and van Gogh. He is the receipt of the prestigious Prix de la Critique (Critic's award) in 1956. Village with Church exudes a dynamic, tempestuous energy which is characteristic of the artist; a hybrid of the lyrical abstraction redolent of the postwar ecole de Paris, and the vibrancy and direct color treatment of a Rajput miniature. Village With Church is one of the seminal paintings from this period and stands as an enduring legacy of one of the pioneers of Indian Modern Art.
Priyanka Mathew, Head of the Modern and Contemporary South Asian Art Sale at Sotheby’s said: “We are delighted to bring this important and historic painting to auction. John D. and Blanchette Rockefeller were two of the most important early champions of modern Indian painting in the United States. Their patronage and support was key in introducing the work of the Progressive Artists’ Group in America, of which Village With Church is such a significant example.”
The painting was purchased by Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller III from the landmark 1958-59 exhibition Trends in Contemporary Painting In India and remained in their historic collection until 1994. It represents the apex of Raza’s early period. Having spent a considerable portion of his career in France, he was deeply moved by the works of the European modernist masters, particularly Cezanne and van Gogh. He is the receipt of the prestigious Prix de la Critique (Critic's award) in 1956. Village with Church exudes a dynamic, tempestuous energy which is characteristic of the artist; a hybrid of the lyrical abstraction redolent of the postwar ecole de Paris, and the vibrancy and direct color treatment of a Rajput miniature. Village With Church is one of the seminal paintings from this period and stands as an enduring legacy of one of the pioneers of Indian Modern Art.
Priyanka Mathew, Head of the Modern and Contemporary South Asian Art Sale at Sotheby’s said: “We are delighted to bring this important and historic painting to auction. John D. and Blanchette Rockefeller were two of the most important early champions of modern Indian painting in the United States. Their patronage and support was key in introducing the work of the Progressive Artists’ Group in America, of which Village With Church is such a significant example.”
2012年1月10日星期二
Sotheby's New York to sell 'The Rockefeller Raza' during Asia Week sales in March
NEW YORK, N.Y.- Among the highlights of Sotheby’s March 2012 Asia Week sales in New York is one of the most significant paintings by Sayed Haider Raza ever to appear on the market - Village With Church from 1958. The painting was purchased by Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller III from the landmark 1958-59 exhibition Trends in Contemporary Painting In India and remained in their historic collection until 1994. Village With Church represents the apex of Raza’s early period and is estimated to sell for $1.5/2.5 million. The painting will be included in Sotheby’s sale of Modern and Contemporary South Asian Art on 19 March 2012 and will be on view beginning 16 March.
Priyanka Mathew, Head of the Modern and Contemporary South Asian Art Sale at Sotheby’s said: “We are delighted to bring this important and historic painting to auction. John D. and Blanchette Rockefeller were two of the most important early champions of modern Indian painting in the United States. Their patronage and support was key in introducing the work of the Progressive Artists’ Group in America, of which Village With Church is such a significant example.”
John D. Rockefeller III, the eldest son of John D. Rockefeller Jr., devoted his life to the promotion of Asian-American relations. Along with his wife he made several visits to India, meeting numerous artists, businessmen and politicians, including Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and his daughter Indira Gandhi.
Perhaps his most notable achievement was the establishment of the Asia Society in New York - an organization that continues today with the goal of bringing ‘the peoples of the United States and Asia closer together in their knowledge of each other and each other’s way of life.’ Central to this mission was promoting cultural exchange and addressing the lack of exhibitions of Asian art in the US.
In addition to the Asia Society, John D. Rockefeller III founded both the Indian Cooperative Union and the American Association for Economic and Social Development, for which Thomas Keehn was the representative of the Rockefeller Foundation. Keehn lived in India and befriended many of the artists who became known as the Progressive Artists’ Group. He went on to organize 8 Painters, an exhibition of their work held in Delhi in 1956 that included Village With Church. This exhibition would later expand and transfer to the U.S. as Trends In Contemporary Painting In India, the first such exhibition ever mounted in America. It was shown in numerous museums and galleries throughout the U.S. and was received as both a critical and popular success. Among the stops was a show at Graham Gallery in New York where the painting caught the eye of the Rockefellers.
Raza spent a considerable portion of his career in France, first arriving in 1950 and still today maintaining a studio in the south of France. He was deeply moved by the works of the European modernist masters, particularly CEzanne and van Gogh, and his works from this period echo the structure and formalism of both of these artists. Receipt of the prestigious Prix de la Critique (Critic's award) in 1956 afforded Raza both international recognition and the freedom to leave Paris and travel throughout his beloved adopted homeland. Throughout the 1950s in France, Raza painted the landscapes of Europe in semi-abstracted forms, but with identifiable architectural elements that provide a constant link to human activity. Heavy with impasto and punctuated with staccato gestural strokes, Village with Church exudes a dynamic, tempestuous energy so characteristic of the artist; a hybrid of the lyrical abstraction redolent of the postwar Ecole de Paris, and the vibrancy and direct color treatment of a Rajput miniature. Village With Church is one of the seminal paintings from this period and stands as an enduring legacy of one of the pioneers of Indian Modern Art.
Priyanka Mathew, Head of the Modern and Contemporary South Asian Art Sale at Sotheby’s said: “We are delighted to bring this important and historic painting to auction. John D. and Blanchette Rockefeller were two of the most important early champions of modern Indian painting in the United States. Their patronage and support was key in introducing the work of the Progressive Artists’ Group in America, of which Village With Church is such a significant example.”
John D. Rockefeller III, the eldest son of John D. Rockefeller Jr., devoted his life to the promotion of Asian-American relations. Along with his wife he made several visits to India, meeting numerous artists, businessmen and politicians, including Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and his daughter Indira Gandhi.
Perhaps his most notable achievement was the establishment of the Asia Society in New York - an organization that continues today with the goal of bringing ‘the peoples of the United States and Asia closer together in their knowledge of each other and each other’s way of life.’ Central to this mission was promoting cultural exchange and addressing the lack of exhibitions of Asian art in the US.
In addition to the Asia Society, John D. Rockefeller III founded both the Indian Cooperative Union and the American Association for Economic and Social Development, for which Thomas Keehn was the representative of the Rockefeller Foundation. Keehn lived in India and befriended many of the artists who became known as the Progressive Artists’ Group. He went on to organize 8 Painters, an exhibition of their work held in Delhi in 1956 that included Village With Church. This exhibition would later expand and transfer to the U.S. as Trends In Contemporary Painting In India, the first such exhibition ever mounted in America. It was shown in numerous museums and galleries throughout the U.S. and was received as both a critical and popular success. Among the stops was a show at Graham Gallery in New York where the painting caught the eye of the Rockefellers.
Raza spent a considerable portion of his career in France, first arriving in 1950 and still today maintaining a studio in the south of France. He was deeply moved by the works of the European modernist masters, particularly CEzanne and van Gogh, and his works from this period echo the structure and formalism of both of these artists. Receipt of the prestigious Prix de la Critique (Critic's award) in 1956 afforded Raza both international recognition and the freedom to leave Paris and travel throughout his beloved adopted homeland. Throughout the 1950s in France, Raza painted the landscapes of Europe in semi-abstracted forms, but with identifiable architectural elements that provide a constant link to human activity. Heavy with impasto and punctuated with staccato gestural strokes, Village with Church exudes a dynamic, tempestuous energy so characteristic of the artist; a hybrid of the lyrical abstraction redolent of the postwar Ecole de Paris, and the vibrancy and direct color treatment of a Rajput miniature. Village With Church is one of the seminal paintings from this period and stands as an enduring legacy of one of the pioneers of Indian Modern Art.
2012年1月9日星期一
IMPORTANT SALE OF ESTATE ANTIQUES FEATURING AMERICANA AT CRN AUCTIONS
CRN Auctions of Cambridge, MA., announces a major winter Americana sale to be held at their gallery on Sunday, January 29th at 10:00 a.m. The auction is primarily comprised of material from a northern New Jersey estate as well as items from a Boxford, MA collector. Most of the items have not been on the market for years. The auction itself is made up of fine American antique furniture, American and European paintings, a fine collection of clocks, silver, decorative accessories, antique English furniture and accessories, and Oriental rugs.
Furniture is highlighted by an 18th century New England Chippendale cherry bonnet-top highboy with carved rosettes, fluted columns, shell caved knees and unusual webbed ball and claw feet. The original flamed finials are intact, as well as the large batwing original brasses. A choice set of six Salem Chippendale mahogany ball and claw foot chairs, originally from the Bradlee family of Boston, are in wonderful old surface. There is a fine Newport Chippendale stop-fluted leg card table with its original pierced corner brackets. Another featured item is a highly inlaid serpentine sideboard in old color from the Baltimore or Charleston South Carolina area.
A group of English furniture includes a magnificent Regency hexagonal library table, attributed to Thomas Hope with a large scale inlaid star to the top. Tea caddies and early porcelains are among the English accessories offered.
Paintings consist of both American and European 18th, 19th and 20th century oil paintings by well known and listed artists. There is also a collection of 19th century folk paintings of children, adults and various scenes. Decorative accessories are plentiful throughout the sale, and consist of lots of silver, samplers, Nantucket baskets, Native American baskets, folk art, Chinese Export and domestic porcelains, bronzes, and a private collection of Chinese snuff bottles. Particularly noteworthy is an important large full-bodied fish weathervane with the original gilding, in untouched condition. It is first time offered from a local family.
A collection of American clocks comes from our New Jersey collector. A very fine Simon Willard banjo clock with its original glass tablets and T-bridge movement fitted in an inlaid mahogany case should inspire much interest. A Daniel Monroe, of Concord, Massachusetts, tall clock with 8-day brass works is another feature of the clock section. A Federal Massachusetts shelf clock with a kidney shaped dial is worthy of attention. There are several other tall, wall and shelf clocks that make up this powerful sale.
Buyers will have several decorative antique roomsize oriental rugs to chose from as well as a selection of scatters.
This sale offers an eclectic array of furniture and accessories, a fine mix as found in the homes of these collectors whose tastes were diverse and discriminating.
Furniture is highlighted by an 18th century New England Chippendale cherry bonnet-top highboy with carved rosettes, fluted columns, shell caved knees and unusual webbed ball and claw feet. The original flamed finials are intact, as well as the large batwing original brasses. A choice set of six Salem Chippendale mahogany ball and claw foot chairs, originally from the Bradlee family of Boston, are in wonderful old surface. There is a fine Newport Chippendale stop-fluted leg card table with its original pierced corner brackets. Another featured item is a highly inlaid serpentine sideboard in old color from the Baltimore or Charleston South Carolina area.
A group of English furniture includes a magnificent Regency hexagonal library table, attributed to Thomas Hope with a large scale inlaid star to the top. Tea caddies and early porcelains are among the English accessories offered.
Paintings consist of both American and European 18th, 19th and 20th century oil paintings by well known and listed artists. There is also a collection of 19th century folk paintings of children, adults and various scenes. Decorative accessories are plentiful throughout the sale, and consist of lots of silver, samplers, Nantucket baskets, Native American baskets, folk art, Chinese Export and domestic porcelains, bronzes, and a private collection of Chinese snuff bottles. Particularly noteworthy is an important large full-bodied fish weathervane with the original gilding, in untouched condition. It is first time offered from a local family.
A collection of American clocks comes from our New Jersey collector. A very fine Simon Willard banjo clock with its original glass tablets and T-bridge movement fitted in an inlaid mahogany case should inspire much interest. A Daniel Monroe, of Concord, Massachusetts, tall clock with 8-day brass works is another feature of the clock section. A Federal Massachusetts shelf clock with a kidney shaped dial is worthy of attention. There are several other tall, wall and shelf clocks that make up this powerful sale.
Buyers will have several decorative antique roomsize oriental rugs to chose from as well as a selection of scatters.
This sale offers an eclectic array of furniture and accessories, a fine mix as found in the homes of these collectors whose tastes were diverse and discriminating.
2012年1月8日星期日
After Radeon HD7970 'Tahiti', GPU Compute becomes mainstream
Being among the first to get a hold of the new GPU - and multiples of them at that, in this case AMD Radeon HD7970 'Tahiti' has its advantages, one of them running a lot of tests for the first time for the public to see. In our case, benchmonkey Lennard ran quite a few such benchmark tests on one, two, three and, of course, four cards in parallel. You'd have noticed that the results from the compute tests scaled just as well, if not even better, than the 3-D graphics ones, which on their own did a wonderful scaling job as well - notice even the 3Dmark and Heaven test scaling gains between one and four cards!
Putting aside the numbers, which you can see on our site and widely across the Net now as well, the impact is interesting. The AMD GCN new GPU architecture, which basically looks a lot like a vector FP processor surrounded by graphics acceleration hardware, did provide for much higher usable vs peak FP rate, especially for double precision FP critical for mainstream PC and HPC applications. On top of it, the OpenCL programming model has now matured well to handle single and multiple tasks with many threads being well balanced and spread across multiple GPUs, which the benchmark performance gains when running on up to four GPUs have shown.
One important thing here is that the GPU compute is not limited by CrossFire - or SLI, on Nvidia - four-GPU barrier. If your application, or multiple tasks, can handle it, and the underlying board has enough PCIe slots to support it, there's nothing to stop you from having, say, eight or more GPUs in a single system, all running GPU compute and/or graphics at the same time. For instance, the upcoming Xeon E5 4600 quad-socket LGA 2011 platform, slated for release mid year, will have a whopping 160 PCIe v3 lanes available direct from the CPUs, enabling 8 or more GPU cards in the system. If each of these is a, say, 1.1 GHz pre overclocked 6 GB RAM HD7970, it would mean a 9 TFLOPs DP FP capability in a single box, yet with 48 GB dedicated RAM on these GPUs for large local dataset processing without having to go to the over an order of magnitude slower PCIe link - keep this in mind, as having to often go to PCIe for slow data movement was one of key limitations in wider GPGPU spread.
In those apps where you can tolerate even higher PCIe latency induced by PCIe bridges present on dual-GPU cards, in return for higher total performance, that same Quad Xeon E5 box could take eight dual-GPU, say 975 MHz pre overclocked AMD HD7990, cards, and have 16 TFLOPs peak DP FP performance in a single box. Whether one can fit 2 x 6 GB RAM on a single dual-GPU card right now, remains to be seen, but it would help keep all those data away from having to shuffle over comparatively slower bridged PCIe.
Why do I mention pre-overclocked here? Well, it seems AMD was really conservative with clocking the new parts, as so many of them run comfortably even at 1.1 GHz without any voltage changes or such. The yields seem to be good, and there's nothing wrong in producing higher-end binned parts, combined with more memory, to breach the 1 TFLOP peak DP FP limit, which for these cards would be at 980 MHz GPU, or let's just round it up to 1 GHz, frequency. The extra performance helps get a few more FPS in gaming, but it means real, monetizable, compute performance in supercomputing, workstation and multimedia use.
Let's see what Nvidia answers in with the GK100 chips in the next few months, then followed by Intel's 'Knights Corner' compute version of the Larrabee project. Either way, with the new 'Tahiti' chips, GPU accelerated computing seems to be more efficient and meaningful.
Putting aside the numbers, which you can see on our site and widely across the Net now as well, the impact is interesting. The AMD GCN new GPU architecture, which basically looks a lot like a vector FP processor surrounded by graphics acceleration hardware, did provide for much higher usable vs peak FP rate, especially for double precision FP critical for mainstream PC and HPC applications. On top of it, the OpenCL programming model has now matured well to handle single and multiple tasks with many threads being well balanced and spread across multiple GPUs, which the benchmark performance gains when running on up to four GPUs have shown.
One important thing here is that the GPU compute is not limited by CrossFire - or SLI, on Nvidia - four-GPU barrier. If your application, or multiple tasks, can handle it, and the underlying board has enough PCIe slots to support it, there's nothing to stop you from having, say, eight or more GPUs in a single system, all running GPU compute and/or graphics at the same time. For instance, the upcoming Xeon E5 4600 quad-socket LGA 2011 platform, slated for release mid year, will have a whopping 160 PCIe v3 lanes available direct from the CPUs, enabling 8 or more GPU cards in the system. If each of these is a, say, 1.1 GHz pre overclocked 6 GB RAM HD7970, it would mean a 9 TFLOPs DP FP capability in a single box, yet with 48 GB dedicated RAM on these GPUs for large local dataset processing without having to go to the over an order of magnitude slower PCIe link - keep this in mind, as having to often go to PCIe for slow data movement was one of key limitations in wider GPGPU spread.
In those apps where you can tolerate even higher PCIe latency induced by PCIe bridges present on dual-GPU cards, in return for higher total performance, that same Quad Xeon E5 box could take eight dual-GPU, say 975 MHz pre overclocked AMD HD7990, cards, and have 16 TFLOPs peak DP FP performance in a single box. Whether one can fit 2 x 6 GB RAM on a single dual-GPU card right now, remains to be seen, but it would help keep all those data away from having to shuffle over comparatively slower bridged PCIe.
Why do I mention pre-overclocked here? Well, it seems AMD was really conservative with clocking the new parts, as so many of them run comfortably even at 1.1 GHz without any voltage changes or such. The yields seem to be good, and there's nothing wrong in producing higher-end binned parts, combined with more memory, to breach the 1 TFLOP peak DP FP limit, which for these cards would be at 980 MHz GPU, or let's just round it up to 1 GHz, frequency. The extra performance helps get a few more FPS in gaming, but it means real, monetizable, compute performance in supercomputing, workstation and multimedia use.
Let's see what Nvidia answers in with the GK100 chips in the next few months, then followed by Intel's 'Knights Corner' compute version of the Larrabee project. Either way, with the new 'Tahiti' chips, GPU accelerated computing seems to be more efficient and meaningful.
2012年1月5日星期四
Schiffer antiques lead off Pook & Pook auction
Friday night will have a selection of pieces from three collections including Margaret Schiffer of West Chester, Pa., the Studdiford family of Point Pleasant, N.J., and a southeastern Pennsylvania collection.
Margaret B. Schiffer is a well-known Chester County, Pa., author and expert in the antique field and a specialist in historical needlework, toys and Christmas ornaments. The volume Historical Needlework of Pennsylvania, written in 1958, was a definitive reference book for the time, recording the origins and progression of the art in the 18th and 19th centuries primarily in southeastern Pennsylvania. With her husband, Herbert, and son Peter, Schiffer Publications, printed numerous books on antique furniture and accessories.
The Saturday session will begin at 9 a.m. with a variety of pieces from Charlene Sussel of Garrett Park, Md. Her father-in-law was the pioneer collector Arthur Sussel. This group of 236 lots will be the beginning of several sales with items from the same collection. This selection includes paintings, furniture, silver, fine porcelain, Asian objects, textiles and accessories.
Furniture highlights include a Chester County, Pa., mahogany tall-case clock by Benjamin Garrett of Goshen Township, Pa.; a William and Mary armchair, circa 1735, early Chester County or southeastern Pennsylvania example with a baluster back and old black painted surface with punched star decorations; a Philadelphia William and Mary mahogany spice or valuables box on frame from the William E. and Johanna Studdiford collection. of Point Pleasant, N.J.; a rare Delaware Valley walnut armchair, circa 1715; and an important Pennsylvania or Maryland lowback Windsor bench.
Also selling in Friday’s session is a Chester County sampler wrought by Mary Graves under the tutelage of Hannah G. Carpenter. It is pictured in Historical Needlework of Pennsylvania by Margaret Schiffer, page 61.
The Kriebel name is well known in the field of Schwenkfelder fraktur drawings. These bright colorful pictures were executed in Montgomery County, Pa., in the mid-19th century. The fraktur in the auction was probably executed by Sarah Kriebel for a family member, Regina Kriebel. This is one of a number of fraktur by various artists in the collection including works by Brechall, Peterman, Krebs, Faber and others.
Paintings will include an oil on zinc scene of the Berks County Almshouse by John Rasmussen, a Pennsylvania itinerant painter; a painting titled Boy with Sheep by John Edward Costigan that was exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts 118th annual exhibition; a Ghent, Belgium, street scene by Pierre Francois de Noter; an industrial illustration done for the Speakman Co. of Wilmington, Del., by Stanley Massey Arthurs; and the painting of the American side wheeler J.B. Schuyler by James Edward Buttersworth.
Other artists represented include Fern Coppedge, Antonio Martino, Arthur Meltzer, Samuel Phillips, John Barnes, Hans Bebie, Bruce Crane, Bela De Tirefort, Alfred Bricher and many more.
Miscellaneous lots include a selection of English pearlware; Chinese carved jade; Boston silk on linen needlework memorial by Louisa Nouvse; and a fine group of turned woodenware by the maker Joseph Lehn working in Lancaster County, Pa., in the 19th century.
The sale will continue with items from the estate of Thelma Bennett of Toms River, N.J.; James and Sally Sorber of Chester County, Pa.,; as well as the estates of William Guyton and Richard Cloney.
A vibrantly painted Rhode Island sleigh, circa 1840, the decoration attributed to Thomas Frederick Hoppin will be sold. It was exhibited at the Rhode Island School of Design 1988.
Margaret B. Schiffer is a well-known Chester County, Pa., author and expert in the antique field and a specialist in historical needlework, toys and Christmas ornaments. The volume Historical Needlework of Pennsylvania, written in 1958, was a definitive reference book for the time, recording the origins and progression of the art in the 18th and 19th centuries primarily in southeastern Pennsylvania. With her husband, Herbert, and son Peter, Schiffer Publications, printed numerous books on antique furniture and accessories.
The Saturday session will begin at 9 a.m. with a variety of pieces from Charlene Sussel of Garrett Park, Md. Her father-in-law was the pioneer collector Arthur Sussel. This group of 236 lots will be the beginning of several sales with items from the same collection. This selection includes paintings, furniture, silver, fine porcelain, Asian objects, textiles and accessories.
Furniture highlights include a Chester County, Pa., mahogany tall-case clock by Benjamin Garrett of Goshen Township, Pa.; a William and Mary armchair, circa 1735, early Chester County or southeastern Pennsylvania example with a baluster back and old black painted surface with punched star decorations; a Philadelphia William and Mary mahogany spice or valuables box on frame from the William E. and Johanna Studdiford collection. of Point Pleasant, N.J.; a rare Delaware Valley walnut armchair, circa 1715; and an important Pennsylvania or Maryland lowback Windsor bench.
Also selling in Friday’s session is a Chester County sampler wrought by Mary Graves under the tutelage of Hannah G. Carpenter. It is pictured in Historical Needlework of Pennsylvania by Margaret Schiffer, page 61.
The Kriebel name is well known in the field of Schwenkfelder fraktur drawings. These bright colorful pictures were executed in Montgomery County, Pa., in the mid-19th century. The fraktur in the auction was probably executed by Sarah Kriebel for a family member, Regina Kriebel. This is one of a number of fraktur by various artists in the collection including works by Brechall, Peterman, Krebs, Faber and others.
Paintings will include an oil on zinc scene of the Berks County Almshouse by John Rasmussen, a Pennsylvania itinerant painter; a painting titled Boy with Sheep by John Edward Costigan that was exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts 118th annual exhibition; a Ghent, Belgium, street scene by Pierre Francois de Noter; an industrial illustration done for the Speakman Co. of Wilmington, Del., by Stanley Massey Arthurs; and the painting of the American side wheeler J.B. Schuyler by James Edward Buttersworth.
Other artists represented include Fern Coppedge, Antonio Martino, Arthur Meltzer, Samuel Phillips, John Barnes, Hans Bebie, Bruce Crane, Bela De Tirefort, Alfred Bricher and many more.
Miscellaneous lots include a selection of English pearlware; Chinese carved jade; Boston silk on linen needlework memorial by Louisa Nouvse; and a fine group of turned woodenware by the maker Joseph Lehn working in Lancaster County, Pa., in the 19th century.
The sale will continue with items from the estate of Thelma Bennett of Toms River, N.J.; James and Sally Sorber of Chester County, Pa.,; as well as the estates of William Guyton and Richard Cloney.
A vibrantly painted Rhode Island sleigh, circa 1840, the decoration attributed to Thomas Frederick Hoppin will be sold. It was exhibited at the Rhode Island School of Design 1988.
2012年1月3日星期二
N.O. man gets prison for role in art forgery plot
A man was sentenced Tuesday to more than two years in prison for his role in a plot to sell forged paintings that he claimed to be the work of a renowned Louisiana folk artist.
U.S. District Judge Dee Drell in Alexandria sentenced Robert E. Lucky Jr., 64, of New Orleans, to 25 months in prison and ordered him to perform 200 hours of community service and pay nearly $327,000 in restitution.
Lucky pleaded guilty in August to one count of mail fraud. He was charged with conspiring with a Baton Rouge couple, William and Beryl Ann Toye, to sell fake Clementine Hunter paintings to unsuspecting art collectors.
The Toyes were sentenced in October to two years of probation.
Lucky’s attorney didn’t immediately return a call seeking comment.
Prosecutors said Lucky sold many of the forgeries that William Toye, 80, painted. Toye and his wife, who is 70, also allegedly sold some of the paintings themselves.
Hunter, a black folk artist who died in 1988 at age 101, taught herself to paint while living in rural Natchitoches Parish. Her paintings depict cotton picking, baptisms, funerals and other scenes of plantation life and can sell for thousands of dollars apiece.
Prosecutors described Lucky as a well-known figure in the antique and art community who owned a shop in Natchitoches before he worked for a New Orleans antiques and art dealer. He allegedly used the dealer’s letterhead to promote his sale of forged paintings, which he claimed to have acquired from Hunter collectors and investors.
The FBI said in a 2009 court filing that Lucky learned from experts that the Toyes’ paintings were forgeries but continued to sell them.
"There is no doubt that Ms. Hunter was a gem of the State of Louisiana and our nation. Her artwork was her legacy to all of us. Robert Lucky and the Toyes not only committed fraud as it related to her paintings, but they also diminished her legacy, all for greed."
U.S. District Judge Dee Drell in Alexandria sentenced Robert E. Lucky Jr., 64, of New Orleans, to 25 months in prison and ordered him to perform 200 hours of community service and pay nearly $327,000 in restitution.
Lucky pleaded guilty in August to one count of mail fraud. He was charged with conspiring with a Baton Rouge couple, William and Beryl Ann Toye, to sell fake Clementine Hunter paintings to unsuspecting art collectors.
The Toyes were sentenced in October to two years of probation.
Lucky’s attorney didn’t immediately return a call seeking comment.
Prosecutors said Lucky sold many of the forgeries that William Toye, 80, painted. Toye and his wife, who is 70, also allegedly sold some of the paintings themselves.
Hunter, a black folk artist who died in 1988 at age 101, taught herself to paint while living in rural Natchitoches Parish. Her paintings depict cotton picking, baptisms, funerals and other scenes of plantation life and can sell for thousands of dollars apiece.
Prosecutors described Lucky as a well-known figure in the antique and art community who owned a shop in Natchitoches before he worked for a New Orleans antiques and art dealer. He allegedly used the dealer’s letterhead to promote his sale of forged paintings, which he claimed to have acquired from Hunter collectors and investors.
The FBI said in a 2009 court filing that Lucky learned from experts that the Toyes’ paintings were forgeries but continued to sell them.
"There is no doubt that Ms. Hunter was a gem of the State of Louisiana and our nation. Her artwork was her legacy to all of us. Robert Lucky and the Toyes not only committed fraud as it related to her paintings, but they also diminished her legacy, all for greed."
2012年1月2日星期一
ART WORLD ACCOUNTS
Artists and collectors say they fell victim to St. Armands art gallery owner Robert Preiss, even as Preiss was facing prison time on an art theft charge. They say they are now missing payments or valuable high-end original paintings and sculptures. Here is a look at what they say happened:
In January, Rut agreed to send Preiss a group of original paintings for a two-day art show in Key Biscayne. "After the event, the paintings - whatever did not sell - was supposed to be brought back to my studio," Rut said.
Rut kept asking Preiss to return the artwork. "I said Robert, I want my paintings back, you're keeping them."
"The next thing I know is he gets arrested," Rut said of Preiss' conviction and jailing in October. "Out of all my consigned artwork, I recovered 5 out of 10."
Rut later went to the home of a Venice dentist who previously had purchased Rut's art. As the dentist gave him a tour of the house, Rut saw one of his missing paintings in the bedroom, a red monochrome of a woman fanning herself. He asked the dentist and his wife where they got it, and they told him Preiss had sold it to them; Rut said he was never paid.
In late 2010, Zhao agreed to send Preiss a few originals and a few limited editions for a new gallery in Tampa called Bugatti Fine Art.
Months went by and Zhao contacted Preiss. "We'd like you to send all the pieces back because we haven't heard anything from you that you had sold anything," said Jessie Zhao, Zhao's daughter.
They were missing three originals and two limited editions. Then, they heard from the manager of Bugatti that Preiss was convicted and in jail.
Later, a customer called to say he had purchased one of Zhao's paintings, "Riders of the Dawn," at an estate sale. It was one of the pieces Preiss had never returned or paid for. "We don't know how that piece got to an estate sale," Jessie Zhao said.
Preiss approached Zimmerman, a renowned portrait artist, with an impressive offer: Paint a portrait of Carlos Slim, the world's richest man, as a gift from Preiss, and Zimmerman would receive a $300,000 commission.
Preiss told Zimmerman it would be in appreciation for the 10-year relationship he shared with Slim as his best client, to be presented to him in Slim's home in Mexico.
Zimmerman created what he considers to be one of his most detailed and meaningful portraits. He incorporated examples of works by Dali and Rodin into the background. During the unveiling at Preiss' gallery, Preiss declared the painting a masterpiece that would soon be hanging in Somaya Museum in Mexico City.
Then, in July, Zimmerman said Preiss came up with one excuse after another as to why the presentation to Slim was not happening. Then, Zimmerman heard about Preiss' conviction for fraud.
Zimmerman now has reason to believe that Slim and Preiss were not as close as represented, and that the portrait was just a tool that Preiss was using to get closer to Slim. Zimmerman said he was never paid.
Ginzberg knew Preiss from years ago when he sold art through Preiss' ex-wife's gallery in Miami. So when Preiss called in late 2009 with stories of people owing him hundreds of thousands of dollars, Ginzberg gave him art to sell.
Preiss guaranteed sales right away, and "to show good faith" gave Ginzberg a check and five postdated checks for the full amount. Only the first one was good, Ginzberg said.
Preiss came up with excuses, including sending a photo of himself in the hospital, and always said payment was just around the corner, Ginzberg said.
"We subsequently found out the artwork was already sold, and there was no way to trace it," Ginzberg said. "He was selling the art and not telling us, but he was taking any price. He sold paintings valued at $40,000 for $10,000."
"Somebody told me they walked into a restaurant on St. Armands, and there was a painting of mine hanging that was retailed at $40,000."
"They said they got it from Preiss," Ginzberg said. "He never paid me for that."
Cloud's husband was a private collector of Salvador Dali sculptures and other fine art, much of it purchased from Preiss. The two became close friends before Cloud's husband died in 2008 and left the artwork to his 6-year-old daughter.
"Robert sent me many emails, beautiful, wise, showing great compassion and how he felt so sorry," Cloud said. "If at any time the storage costs got too much or he needed funds for my daughter, he'd be happy to assist."
In 2010, with the costs of London storage space costing thousands, Cloud decided to sell the pieces and put the money in a trust. She said she called Preiss, who had sold most of the art to her late husband.
Five months later, Cloud started asking about the art or the money. Preiss had neither. In October, someone anonymously sent her a link to a Herald-Tribune news story about Preiss' conviction and prison sentence. "You can imagine, I almost fell out of my chair," Cloud said.
In January, Rut agreed to send Preiss a group of original paintings for a two-day art show in Key Biscayne. "After the event, the paintings - whatever did not sell - was supposed to be brought back to my studio," Rut said.
Rut kept asking Preiss to return the artwork. "I said Robert, I want my paintings back, you're keeping them."
"The next thing I know is he gets arrested," Rut said of Preiss' conviction and jailing in October. "Out of all my consigned artwork, I recovered 5 out of 10."
Rut later went to the home of a Venice dentist who previously had purchased Rut's art. As the dentist gave him a tour of the house, Rut saw one of his missing paintings in the bedroom, a red monochrome of a woman fanning herself. He asked the dentist and his wife where they got it, and they told him Preiss had sold it to them; Rut said he was never paid.
In late 2010, Zhao agreed to send Preiss a few originals and a few limited editions for a new gallery in Tampa called Bugatti Fine Art.
Months went by and Zhao contacted Preiss. "We'd like you to send all the pieces back because we haven't heard anything from you that you had sold anything," said Jessie Zhao, Zhao's daughter.
They were missing three originals and two limited editions. Then, they heard from the manager of Bugatti that Preiss was convicted and in jail.
Later, a customer called to say he had purchased one of Zhao's paintings, "Riders of the Dawn," at an estate sale. It was one of the pieces Preiss had never returned or paid for. "We don't know how that piece got to an estate sale," Jessie Zhao said.
Preiss approached Zimmerman, a renowned portrait artist, with an impressive offer: Paint a portrait of Carlos Slim, the world's richest man, as a gift from Preiss, and Zimmerman would receive a $300,000 commission.
Preiss told Zimmerman it would be in appreciation for the 10-year relationship he shared with Slim as his best client, to be presented to him in Slim's home in Mexico.
Zimmerman created what he considers to be one of his most detailed and meaningful portraits. He incorporated examples of works by Dali and Rodin into the background. During the unveiling at Preiss' gallery, Preiss declared the painting a masterpiece that would soon be hanging in Somaya Museum in Mexico City.
Then, in July, Zimmerman said Preiss came up with one excuse after another as to why the presentation to Slim was not happening. Then, Zimmerman heard about Preiss' conviction for fraud.
Zimmerman now has reason to believe that Slim and Preiss were not as close as represented, and that the portrait was just a tool that Preiss was using to get closer to Slim. Zimmerman said he was never paid.
Ginzberg knew Preiss from years ago when he sold art through Preiss' ex-wife's gallery in Miami. So when Preiss called in late 2009 with stories of people owing him hundreds of thousands of dollars, Ginzberg gave him art to sell.
Preiss guaranteed sales right away, and "to show good faith" gave Ginzberg a check and five postdated checks for the full amount. Only the first one was good, Ginzberg said.
Preiss came up with excuses, including sending a photo of himself in the hospital, and always said payment was just around the corner, Ginzberg said.
"We subsequently found out the artwork was already sold, and there was no way to trace it," Ginzberg said. "He was selling the art and not telling us, but he was taking any price. He sold paintings valued at $40,000 for $10,000."
"Somebody told me they walked into a restaurant on St. Armands, and there was a painting of mine hanging that was retailed at $40,000."
"They said they got it from Preiss," Ginzberg said. "He never paid me for that."
Cloud's husband was a private collector of Salvador Dali sculptures and other fine art, much of it purchased from Preiss. The two became close friends before Cloud's husband died in 2008 and left the artwork to his 6-year-old daughter.
"Robert sent me many emails, beautiful, wise, showing great compassion and how he felt so sorry," Cloud said. "If at any time the storage costs got too much or he needed funds for my daughter, he'd be happy to assist."
In 2010, with the costs of London storage space costing thousands, Cloud decided to sell the pieces and put the money in a trust. She said she called Preiss, who had sold most of the art to her late husband.
Five months later, Cloud started asking about the art or the money. Preiss had neither. In October, someone anonymously sent her a link to a Herald-Tribune news story about Preiss' conviction and prison sentence. "You can imagine, I almost fell out of my chair," Cloud said.
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