The reclusive blacksmith William W. Scagel lived off the grid in the woods near Muskegon, Mich. From the 1920s to the ’60s, he manufactured luxury knives there, with ergonomically curved horn and antler handles, powering his home and workshop with a windmill, old submarine batteries and a Cadillac engine.
He sold his products through a few urban outlets, including Abercrombie & Fitch. Customers also stopped by, but warily, partly because of dark rumors about what had happened to Scagel’s two ex-wives.
Area residents gossiped that one or the other woman had been killed: that she was gored by an animal while on safari with Scagel, or that he stabbed or shot her or shoved her over Niagara Falls. Dr. James R. Lucie, a retired physician in Fruitport, Mich., has published a new biography, “Scagel Handmade,” explaining that the knife maker was simply twice divorced from incompatible spouses.
Dr. Lucie spent hours as a young doctor interviewing Scagel, who died in 1963 at 88. Dr. Lucie has acquired dozens of Scagel knives and axes, including table cutlery and Marine weaponry, and has consigned them for a March 12 auction at James D. Julia in Fairfield, Me.
Dr. Lucie, 83, said in a recent phone interview that selling the collection made sense once the book came out. He is widowed, with four daughters. “I don’t want to leave a mess on their hands,” he said.
The blades are expected to bring up to $30,000 each. Scagel weathervanes, cooking pots and workshop tools have estimates up to a few thousand dollars apiece. Dr. Lucie has defaced Scagel’s hallmarking dies with deep scrapes, so they cannot be used to create fakes.
The book describes Scagel’s daily life, tempering and sharpening steel over coal flames and wooden wheels. Once a week he relaxed for an evening at a local tavern, drinking beer alone. He would often rant about crooked politicians and unions. “He was an extreme right-wing conservative,” Dr. Lucie said.
Paperwork from Scagel’s divorces in 1902 and 1917 has turned up. The first wife, Rosetta, ran off with her married lover. The second, Alice, called her husband “sullen and morose” and accused him of scaring away visitors with a pet wolf in the yard. Scagel retorted that Alice was “exceedingly distrustful and jealous,” and that the wolf was “tame and harmless.”
Scagel had a little-known warm and fuzzy side. He made free leg braces for children who needed them because of polio, and gave knives to people who helped him. For a Democratic Party official who drove him home on a winter night, Scagel created a knife with a handle plated in ivory on one side and pink mother of pearl on the other. The different materials, he later admitted, represented his conviction that “Democrats are two-faced.”
In the Julia sale the “Democrat knife” is expected to bring up to $5,000.
The American Museum of Natural History often poses dinosaur skeletons in attack mode, based on the latest paleontological research. But some nearby vintage paintings have an anachronistic trace of pulp fiction and Art Deco.
Amid the bones, the museum displays dozens of tableaus of prehistory by the artist Charles R. Knight. Starting in the 1890s, he freelanced for museums around the country from his studios in Manhattan and Mount Vernon, N.Y.
“He just knocked out one painting after another after another,” even as his astigmatic and cataract-impaired eyes deteriorated into blindness, said Richard Milner, the author of a new monograph, “Charles R. Knight: The Artist Who Saw Through Time” .
Mr. Milner has tracked down scattered Knight works, including elephant sculptures on Bronx Zoo buildings, sloth portraits at the Field Museum in Chicago and a scene of a rhinoceros fending off wolves at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. He pored through Knight’s correspondence and an image archive that belongs to his granddaughter, Rhoda Knight Kalt.
The letters are so eloquent that Mr. Milner suspects that Knight, who died in 1953, and his friends expected future historians to appreciate the prose. “They knew one day we’d be picking over their bones, like the vultures in the dioramas,” he said during a recent tour of the New York museum’s galleries.
The painter’s handwriting deteriorated as his vision failed. He also constantly battled with clients who delayed payments and tried to edit his mural proposals.
“My own ideas from an artistic standpoint are the only ones to which I can subscribe,” Knight sternly wrote to Henry Fairfield Osborn, the museum’s president.
Knight was disciplined about refusing to collaborate, but hopeless with money. Unless his wife, Annie, and daughter, Lucy, watched over him, he would forget to ask for change at grocery stores. “You are a very good painter but a very bad mathematician,” a magazine editor wrote when Knight undercharged for an illustration.
In a stairwell at the museum, a Knight mural shows cavemen painting woolly mammoths by torchlight. Mr. Milner believes that one craggy face in the scene was a self-portrait. “The central figure is Knight,” he said. “There’s no question in my mind.”
Another caveman in the tableau wears an elegant collared robe and stands back skeptically to watch the work; he may represent forebears of Knight’s more difficult patrons. In prehistoric times, Mr. Milner said slyly, “The first occupation was artist, and the second was art critic.”
2012年3月1日星期四
2012年2月23日星期四
Installation Artist Picked for Venice 2013
Sarah Sze, the installation artist known for creating site-specific environments out of everyday objects like toothpicks, sponges, light bulbs and plastic bottles, has been chosen to represent the United States at the 2013 Venice Biennale.
Ms. Sze，43, was selected by the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, which promotes cultural exchanges worldwide. Holly Block, director of the Bronx Museum of the Arts, and Carey Lovelace, a critic and independent curator, proposed Ms. Sze for the Biennale, and those two women will organize the exhibition together, with the Bronx Museum acting as the commissioning institution.
Ms. Sze’s work has been visible in New York for a while. A show of her works on paper is at the Asia Society through March 25. And those strolling the High Line can see her modern avian habitat — fake-wood-covered birdhouses with parallelogram sides built into grids of shiny metal rods that converge to single points.
“Her work is so sensitive to its surroundings I will be fascinated to see how she transforms the American pavilion without physically changing the architecture,” said Ms. Lovelace, who explained that she and Ms. Block have watched Ms. Sze’s work evolve for years.
Ms. Sze said she would create a sequence of environments inside the pavilion, a 1930s Palladian-style structure designed by Delano & Aldrich, and in the courtyard in front of it. The installation, called “Triple Point,” will be about “orientation and disorientation,” Ms. Sze said in a telephone interview.
“I plan to create a new commission in the courtyard that brings the inside out,” she added. “Wandering around Venice without a map, you find the most incredible things. And I’m hoping to create an immersive environment that deals with that abstract experience of discovery.”
Ms. Sze’s work has been shown at the Venice Biennale before. She showed in an exhibition there in 1998. This time around, she said, she will probably spend about two months in Venice, creating her installation with help from Italian university students. “My work is always a mix of stuff collected over time and all over the place,” she explained. Venice is an especially rich hunting ground, she said, adding that she expects to use local materials and local craftspeople.
Ms. Lovelace and Ms. Block said that the project would be documented as it unfolded, with live streaming on a Web site that would be accessible through the Bronx Museum.
Those sexy blondes Roy Lichtenstein depicted in the 1960s never seem to age. Whenever one of the paintings comes up for sale, a bevy of rich suitors tend to fight over it.
That’s what Sotheby’s is hoping will happen on May 9 when it auctions “Sleeping Girl,” one of Lichtenstein’s seminal comic-book images, which he painted in 1964. Because its owners, the Los Angeles collectors Beatrice and Phil Gersh, were said to have loved the painting so much they didn’t want to part with it, the couple only lent it once, to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, in 1989-90.
Mr. Gersh, a philanthropist and founder of a talent agency, died in 2004, and his wife, Beatrice, a life trustee of the Museum of Contemporary Art and a noted collector, died in October. Now the painting, which the couple bought for $1,000 from the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles the year it was made, is expected to sell for $30 million to $40 million.
“All of Lichtenstein’s other girls have been traded over the years,” said Tobias Meyer, director of Sotheby’s contemporary art department worldwide. “This is one of the last Pop icons that has remained in the same collection, and collectors have been waiting for it.”
The image of a classic American beauty with flowing blond hair, sensuous red lips, her eyes closed, is from one of Lichtenstein’s comic-book series, although experts are not sure of the exact source of this woman. “It has such a cinematic quality to it,” Mr. Meyer said, “that it looks like a film still.”
Whether “Sleeping Girl” will break the record price for the artist at auction is anyone’s guess. The sales price would have to top $43.2 million, the record set at Christie’s in November for “I Can See the Whole Room! ... and There’s Nobody in It!,” a black canvas from 1961 with a man’s face peering through a peephole.
Video- and audio-based artworks have been kicking around since the 1960s, which makes them virtually archaic to many of today’s young artists. But these relics are an important a part of art history. A new initiative at the Museum of Modern Art — which has been collecting and preserving these works since they were made — will eventually allow its holdings of more than 1,400 works by 400 artists to be available to the public.
This week the museum began the first phase of what it is calling its Media Lounge. Designed by the New York artist Renée Green, the space consists of flexible environments for individual or group viewings. The museum’s second floor has three viewing stations, where a selection of videos can be seen on the kind of monitors originally meant to show them. By May or June, MoMA officials said, they hope to add six more viewing structures and additional newer videos, including some intended for display on flat-screen monitors. There will also be listening stations for audio works. By August or September the museum hopes to expand the project to 14 viewing stations.
Ms. Sze，43, was selected by the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, which promotes cultural exchanges worldwide. Holly Block, director of the Bronx Museum of the Arts, and Carey Lovelace, a critic and independent curator, proposed Ms. Sze for the Biennale, and those two women will organize the exhibition together, with the Bronx Museum acting as the commissioning institution.
Ms. Sze’s work has been visible in New York for a while. A show of her works on paper is at the Asia Society through March 25. And those strolling the High Line can see her modern avian habitat — fake-wood-covered birdhouses with parallelogram sides built into grids of shiny metal rods that converge to single points.
“Her work is so sensitive to its surroundings I will be fascinated to see how she transforms the American pavilion without physically changing the architecture,” said Ms. Lovelace, who explained that she and Ms. Block have watched Ms. Sze’s work evolve for years.
Ms. Sze said she would create a sequence of environments inside the pavilion, a 1930s Palladian-style structure designed by Delano & Aldrich, and in the courtyard in front of it. The installation, called “Triple Point,” will be about “orientation and disorientation,” Ms. Sze said in a telephone interview.
“I plan to create a new commission in the courtyard that brings the inside out,” she added. “Wandering around Venice without a map, you find the most incredible things. And I’m hoping to create an immersive environment that deals with that abstract experience of discovery.”
Ms. Sze’s work has been shown at the Venice Biennale before. She showed in an exhibition there in 1998. This time around, she said, she will probably spend about two months in Venice, creating her installation with help from Italian university students. “My work is always a mix of stuff collected over time and all over the place,” she explained. Venice is an especially rich hunting ground, she said, adding that she expects to use local materials and local craftspeople.
Ms. Lovelace and Ms. Block said that the project would be documented as it unfolded, with live streaming on a Web site that would be accessible through the Bronx Museum.
Those sexy blondes Roy Lichtenstein depicted in the 1960s never seem to age. Whenever one of the paintings comes up for sale, a bevy of rich suitors tend to fight over it.
That’s what Sotheby’s is hoping will happen on May 9 when it auctions “Sleeping Girl,” one of Lichtenstein’s seminal comic-book images, which he painted in 1964. Because its owners, the Los Angeles collectors Beatrice and Phil Gersh, were said to have loved the painting so much they didn’t want to part with it, the couple only lent it once, to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, in 1989-90.
Mr. Gersh, a philanthropist and founder of a talent agency, died in 2004, and his wife, Beatrice, a life trustee of the Museum of Contemporary Art and a noted collector, died in October. Now the painting, which the couple bought for $1,000 from the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles the year it was made, is expected to sell for $30 million to $40 million.
“All of Lichtenstein’s other girls have been traded over the years,” said Tobias Meyer, director of Sotheby’s contemporary art department worldwide. “This is one of the last Pop icons that has remained in the same collection, and collectors have been waiting for it.”
The image of a classic American beauty with flowing blond hair, sensuous red lips, her eyes closed, is from one of Lichtenstein’s comic-book series, although experts are not sure of the exact source of this woman. “It has such a cinematic quality to it,” Mr. Meyer said, “that it looks like a film still.”
Whether “Sleeping Girl” will break the record price for the artist at auction is anyone’s guess. The sales price would have to top $43.2 million, the record set at Christie’s in November for “I Can See the Whole Room! ... and There’s Nobody in It!,” a black canvas from 1961 with a man’s face peering through a peephole.
Video- and audio-based artworks have been kicking around since the 1960s, which makes them virtually archaic to many of today’s young artists. But these relics are an important a part of art history. A new initiative at the Museum of Modern Art — which has been collecting and preserving these works since they were made — will eventually allow its holdings of more than 1,400 works by 400 artists to be available to the public.
This week the museum began the first phase of what it is calling its Media Lounge. Designed by the New York artist Renée Green, the space consists of flexible environments for individual or group viewings. The museum’s second floor has three viewing stations, where a selection of videos can be seen on the kind of monitors originally meant to show them. By May or June, MoMA officials said, they hope to add six more viewing structures and additional newer videos, including some intended for display on flat-screen monitors. There will also be listening stations for audio works. By August or September the museum hopes to expand the project to 14 viewing stations.
2012年2月6日星期一
Record purchase causes seismic shift in art world
It is a painting of startling simplicity. Two farm labourers contemplate their cards above an empty table, their expressions as blank as the austere background against which they are posed, little more than objects in a human still life created by the artist Paul Cezanne.
Yet in the crazy 21st-century world of billionaire plutocrats and sovereign wealth funds fighting over the world's few remaining true masterpieces, this stripped-down image - measuring little more than a metre square - has nearly doubled the previous record for the highest price paid for an art work.
It has emerged that The Card Players has been bought for 158 million ($300 million) by the Qatari royal family.
The sale, from the collection of the late Greek shipping magnate George Embiricos, heralds the arrival of the tiny oil-rich Gulf state as the pre-eminent force in the international art market.
As details of the purchase leaked out in Vanity Fair, experts hailed it as a watershed moment in a market which found itself uncharacteristically subdued last year as the Western economy faltered in the grip of the eurozone crisis and new buyers from Asia, Russia and the Middle East preferred to do deals in private.
Fine-art appraiser Victor Wiener said the art world had been watching and waiting for news of the Cezanne since the death of its previous owner last year. "For months, its sale has been rumoured. Now, everyone will use this price as a point of departure: it changes the whole art-market structure," he said.
The Card Players is the last of five studies painted by Cezanne between 1890 and 1895 in and around the family estate in Provence which paved the way for the Cubist revolution on their first public showing after the artist's death. The others are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Musee d'Orsay in Paris, the Courtauld Institute in London and the Barnes Foundation in Pennsylvania.
The amount paid by the Qatari royals dwarfs that of the world's previous most expensive artwork. Jackson Pollock's No 5, 1948 was sold to an unknown buyer for 88.7 million in 2006 at the peak of the pre-recession art-buying boom.
Under its previous ownership The Card Players was rarely lent out; however, speculation is mounting that it could take pride of place on permanent display at the Qatar National Museum, which is due to reopen in 2014.
There it will hang alongside a treasure-trove of works snapped up in recent years including pieces by Damien Hirst, Mark Rothko and Andy Warhol.
One of the driving forces behind the desert kingdom's expansion in the international art market is Sheikha Al-Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, the daughter of Qatar's Emir.
The 28-year-old began her career as intern for the Tribeca Film Festival but now heads the Qatar Museums Authority. She has helped to lure some of the brightest stars in the art world to Doha.
According to research carried out by the Art Newspaper, cultural exports from the United States to Qatar between 2005 and 2011 totalled 270 million, including the purchase of the "Rockefeller Rothko", White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose), for 46 million. In the same period, the country imported 128 million of paintings and antiques from Britain including Damien Hirst's Lullaby Spring, 2002, for which it paid 9.2 million in 2007.
"The small but energy-rich Gulf state of Qatar is the world's biggest buyer in the art market - by value, at any rate - and is behind most of the major modern and contemporary art deals over the past six years," the newspaper said.
Yet in the crazy 21st-century world of billionaire plutocrats and sovereign wealth funds fighting over the world's few remaining true masterpieces, this stripped-down image - measuring little more than a metre square - has nearly doubled the previous record for the highest price paid for an art work.
It has emerged that The Card Players has been bought for 158 million ($300 million) by the Qatari royal family.
The sale, from the collection of the late Greek shipping magnate George Embiricos, heralds the arrival of the tiny oil-rich Gulf state as the pre-eminent force in the international art market.
As details of the purchase leaked out in Vanity Fair, experts hailed it as a watershed moment in a market which found itself uncharacteristically subdued last year as the Western economy faltered in the grip of the eurozone crisis and new buyers from Asia, Russia and the Middle East preferred to do deals in private.
Fine-art appraiser Victor Wiener said the art world had been watching and waiting for news of the Cezanne since the death of its previous owner last year. "For months, its sale has been rumoured. Now, everyone will use this price as a point of departure: it changes the whole art-market structure," he said.
The Card Players is the last of five studies painted by Cezanne between 1890 and 1895 in and around the family estate in Provence which paved the way for the Cubist revolution on their first public showing after the artist's death. The others are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Musee d'Orsay in Paris, the Courtauld Institute in London and the Barnes Foundation in Pennsylvania.
The amount paid by the Qatari royals dwarfs that of the world's previous most expensive artwork. Jackson Pollock's No 5, 1948 was sold to an unknown buyer for 88.7 million in 2006 at the peak of the pre-recession art-buying boom.
Under its previous ownership The Card Players was rarely lent out; however, speculation is mounting that it could take pride of place on permanent display at the Qatar National Museum, which is due to reopen in 2014.
There it will hang alongside a treasure-trove of works snapped up in recent years including pieces by Damien Hirst, Mark Rothko and Andy Warhol.
One of the driving forces behind the desert kingdom's expansion in the international art market is Sheikha Al-Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, the daughter of Qatar's Emir.
The 28-year-old began her career as intern for the Tribeca Film Festival but now heads the Qatar Museums Authority. She has helped to lure some of the brightest stars in the art world to Doha.
According to research carried out by the Art Newspaper, cultural exports from the United States to Qatar between 2005 and 2011 totalled 270 million, including the purchase of the "Rockefeller Rothko", White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose), for 46 million. In the same period, the country imported 128 million of paintings and antiques from Britain including Damien Hirst's Lullaby Spring, 2002, for which it paid 9.2 million in 2007.
"The small but energy-rich Gulf state of Qatar is the world's biggest buyer in the art market - by value, at any rate - and is behind most of the major modern and contemporary art deals over the past six years," the newspaper said.
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.
2011年12月28日星期三
Employee purchases retail legacy in Downtown Truckee
Brooke Bentley, Truckee resident and longtime employee of La Galleria recently purchased the 30-year-old retail store in historic Downtown Truckee with her husband Chad Bentley. La Galleria is a community staple providing products globally featuring art, home décor, fashionable clothing and jewelry.
Originally from Chico, Brooke Bentley has lived in Truckee for 12 years. “Like many of us who move to the Truckee-Lake Tahoe area, I had the intention of living here for just one season to be a ski bum. One season quickly became two seasons, five seasons and then in a blink of an eye, 12 years. I now have a beautiful family with my husband Chad, two children Cortez and Pearl, our dog Leo and a business I have always wanted,” she said.
Bentley's love for traveling, meeting new people, exploring different cultures of art, jewelry and clothing, made her admire La Galleria's products from around the world. Her passion for the store began early as a customer and then shortly after, she applied for a part-time position as a sales associate. As time went on, Bentley was promoted to store manager and recently, she was presented the amazing opportunity of purchasing the store for herself.
Bentley's experience at La Galleria during the past 10 years as a sales associate, store manager and now owner has earned her a following of local customers, frequent visitors and credible designers for the unique and knowledgeable shopping experience she and her staff provides.
Bentley and her husband Chad travel to Bali, Mexico and South America to discover different artists and bring affordable one-of-a-kind gifts for any occasion, any age group, of all prices.
Bentley also employs an expert staff who are artists specializing in jewelry design, paintings and glass. She values her employees and encourages their artistic growth by displaying the staff's art for sale in the store. Brooke's employees are also able to conduct jewelry repairs and travel to customer's homes to consult in interior design.
Originally from Chico, Brooke Bentley has lived in Truckee for 12 years. “Like many of us who move to the Truckee-Lake Tahoe area, I had the intention of living here for just one season to be a ski bum. One season quickly became two seasons, five seasons and then in a blink of an eye, 12 years. I now have a beautiful family with my husband Chad, two children Cortez and Pearl, our dog Leo and a business I have always wanted,” she said.
Bentley's love for traveling, meeting new people, exploring different cultures of art, jewelry and clothing, made her admire La Galleria's products from around the world. Her passion for the store began early as a customer and then shortly after, she applied for a part-time position as a sales associate. As time went on, Bentley was promoted to store manager and recently, she was presented the amazing opportunity of purchasing the store for herself.
Bentley's experience at La Galleria during the past 10 years as a sales associate, store manager and now owner has earned her a following of local customers, frequent visitors and credible designers for the unique and knowledgeable shopping experience she and her staff provides.
Bentley and her husband Chad travel to Bali, Mexico and South America to discover different artists and bring affordable one-of-a-kind gifts for any occasion, any age group, of all prices.
Bentley also employs an expert staff who are artists specializing in jewelry design, paintings and glass. She values her employees and encourages their artistic growth by displaying the staff's art for sale in the store. Brooke's employees are also able to conduct jewelry repairs and travel to customer's homes to consult in interior design.
2011年12月26日星期一
After 80 Years, Women's Market Still A Bethesda Staple
The Montgomery Farm Women’s Farm Cooperative Market will celebrate its 80th anniversary next June. But as far as its remarkable staying power, President Barbara Johnson is as baffled as the next.
“I don’t know why it’s so popular,” she said. “It just is.”
It could be that the market has 77 vendors — 27 inside displaying everything from cheese, spices and meats to seafood, baked goods and tea, and 50 more outside, flaunting flea-market fare. Or it could be the ideal location in the heart of downtown Bethesda on bustling Wisconsin Avenue.
But Johnson said in the end, it probably comes down to customer satisfaction — year after year, decade after decade.
“We have everything they want,” she said. “It’s the only market around here like this.”
It’s certainly not the usual stands-on-the-street setup. The market fills an entire parking lot, plus a low, white building standing in the backdrop. And while some of the usual foods and trinkets line the tables, much of it ranges from the exotic to the stuff of your grandparents’ attic.
There’s vintage furniture, hand-knit hats, antique silverware, oriental rugs, scarves, boxes of silver rings and even a table full of men’s button-downs wrapped in plastic.
Reshma Ali, who has sold her wares at the market for about 15 years, lands on the exotic side. She and her colorful display of beads and all the fixings of jewelry-making hail from India.
Her supplies may be for the hobby-minded, but not for Ali.
“This is my living,” she said.
Eric Perine of Frederick has also been at the market for about 15 years. He does his own framing of various prints -- photos, paintings, deco and art nouveau -- from handheld to full-poster-sized and sold for anywhere from $18 to $300.
The local stuff sells the best, Perine said -- like bird’s-eye views and maps of Washington, D.C.
Also popular is what he calls “guy art” -- skiing images in the winter and golf in the summer.
His customers range from the amateur to the collectors, who are always coming back for more.
“The only reason I lose them is if their house is full,” he said.
Joe and Linda Cicero of Potomac are two of those customers. On a Saturday morning, Joe Cicero paused in front of a particular print, trying to remember.
“I think we already have that one,” he said. His wife paused, then agreed.
And then there are the first-timers, like Brian Hopkins of Alexandria, who stopped by with children Jake, 6, and Kaylee, 3, after lunch at Mongolian Barbecue across the street.
Jake and Kaylee were pleased, running around in knit hats with renderings of fuzzy zoo animals and pompoms dangling from the ear flaps.
“I figured, what the heck,” Hopkins said of making the trip.
Mainstays like Mary Ann Sheffler have helped keep the market alive for so long.
Sheffler has come every Sunday for 32 years now, selling antiques she picks up from various auctioneers back in Waynesboro, Pa. There’s a series of plates painted with “Gone With The Wind” images, a redheaded doll next to an old typewriter, glass and silver tureens.
To the untrained eye, it looks like garage-sale junk. But the occasional expert knows what treasures are to be found there.
“Every once in a while, you’ll get someone who knows what things are,” she said.
The Montgomery Farm Women’s Cooperative Market is located at 7155 Wisconsin Ave. between Willow and Leland Streets. The indoor market is open 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays. The outside market is open 7 a.m. to 5 p.m., weather permitting, on Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays.
“I don’t know why it’s so popular,” she said. “It just is.”
It could be that the market has 77 vendors — 27 inside displaying everything from cheese, spices and meats to seafood, baked goods and tea, and 50 more outside, flaunting flea-market fare. Or it could be the ideal location in the heart of downtown Bethesda on bustling Wisconsin Avenue.
But Johnson said in the end, it probably comes down to customer satisfaction — year after year, decade after decade.
“We have everything they want,” she said. “It’s the only market around here like this.”
It’s certainly not the usual stands-on-the-street setup. The market fills an entire parking lot, plus a low, white building standing in the backdrop. And while some of the usual foods and trinkets line the tables, much of it ranges from the exotic to the stuff of your grandparents’ attic.
There’s vintage furniture, hand-knit hats, antique silverware, oriental rugs, scarves, boxes of silver rings and even a table full of men’s button-downs wrapped in plastic.
Reshma Ali, who has sold her wares at the market for about 15 years, lands on the exotic side. She and her colorful display of beads and all the fixings of jewelry-making hail from India.
Her supplies may be for the hobby-minded, but not for Ali.
“This is my living,” she said.
Eric Perine of Frederick has also been at the market for about 15 years. He does his own framing of various prints -- photos, paintings, deco and art nouveau -- from handheld to full-poster-sized and sold for anywhere from $18 to $300.
The local stuff sells the best, Perine said -- like bird’s-eye views and maps of Washington, D.C.
Also popular is what he calls “guy art” -- skiing images in the winter and golf in the summer.
His customers range from the amateur to the collectors, who are always coming back for more.
“The only reason I lose them is if their house is full,” he said.
Joe and Linda Cicero of Potomac are two of those customers. On a Saturday morning, Joe Cicero paused in front of a particular print, trying to remember.
“I think we already have that one,” he said. His wife paused, then agreed.
And then there are the first-timers, like Brian Hopkins of Alexandria, who stopped by with children Jake, 6, and Kaylee, 3, after lunch at Mongolian Barbecue across the street.
Jake and Kaylee were pleased, running around in knit hats with renderings of fuzzy zoo animals and pompoms dangling from the ear flaps.
“I figured, what the heck,” Hopkins said of making the trip.
Mainstays like Mary Ann Sheffler have helped keep the market alive for so long.
Sheffler has come every Sunday for 32 years now, selling antiques she picks up from various auctioneers back in Waynesboro, Pa. There’s a series of plates painted with “Gone With The Wind” images, a redheaded doll next to an old typewriter, glass and silver tureens.
To the untrained eye, it looks like garage-sale junk. But the occasional expert knows what treasures are to be found there.
“Every once in a while, you’ll get someone who knows what things are,” she said.
The Montgomery Farm Women’s Cooperative Market is located at 7155 Wisconsin Ave. between Willow and Leland Streets. The indoor market is open 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays. The outside market is open 7 a.m. to 5 p.m., weather permitting, on Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays.
2011年12月15日星期四
Art show revels in Narragansett Bay's revival
A soggy, gray December day turned for the better inside the Save The Bay Center at Fields Point, where hundreds of images in a range of media showcased the drama and personality of Rhode Island's signature landscape.
Visible just a few feet away, the water of Narragansett Bay rippled in the wind, pockmarked by rain, while on the walls and shelves of the Save The Bay Center it presented all of its moods and colors in photographs, paintings, sculptures, even jewelry, showcasing the beauty and diversity of the state's most precious resource. The show is haphazardly presented, but there is a sense of meandering joy in finding surprises amid seascape clichés. The bay is depicted in all seasons and times of day and night. Familiar landmarks, including many of the state's lighthouses and points, are commonly represented. (The Newport Bridge, in particular, seems to have emerged as Rhode Island's Motif No. 1, our artistic answer to Rockport's red fishing shack and San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge.)
The show spotlights the usual suspects - osprey and geese, herons and stripers, the odd gull, the odd quahog. The horseshoe crab, one of the world's oldest creatures, possessed with a graphically distinctive armored shape, and observed more frequently in recent years as a sign of the bay's revitalized health, appears as one of the more popular characters in this year's show. There are waves rendered in all of their variety, boats of all kinds, surfers and solitary fishermen, sails and saltboxes, and images both familiar and enticing to the everyday Rhode Island beachcomber.
Mary Chatowsky Jameson, a native Rhode Islander who splits her time between Middletown and Jamaica Plain, Mass., contributes exquisite images of sea flora, the seaweeds and other plants strewn across Rhode Island shores, pressed and dried into pleasing designs of delicate shapes with subtle colors. Her Porphyra and Chordaria flagelliformis (back whip weed) are particularly striking. A hand-printed serigraph, titled "Seaweed," by Ashley Van Etten, offers a similarly engaging variant.
North Kingstown free diver and photographer Mike Laptew includes a stunning photograph of an osprey in flight, yellow-eyed, clutching a herring in its talons, depicting one of the daily dramas of the Rhode Island coast at the time of the osprey's return - and the herring's - each spring.
Evocative coastal scenes include "Winter Harbor," an oil by Saunderstown painter Jonathan McPhillips, reminding us how every New England season offers its own visual charm, and two appealing photographs by Wickford's Cindy Horovitz Wilson. One, "Red Pelican Reflections," is an abstract of rippling red streaking across the water, while the other, "Clear Reflections," is a tranquil harbor scene of early morning mist and mast.
Carl Peter Mayer's seemingly impossible balanced rock sculptures, made up of columns of large beach stones topped by heart-shaped rocks, which graced the sea wall near Narragansett Town Beach a couple of years ago until weather and physics took over, make a welcome return to the Save The Bay show.
While the exhibition overall captures the exuberance of the bay, and all who enjoy its company, one wishes for a bit more daring, a grittier edge. Most works take aim at scenery, or natural diversity, but few tackle the issue of bay preservation - the underlying theme of the show - in ways that are cognitively challenging or emotionally wrenching.
But, of course, the purpose of the annual Save The Bay art show is to sell images, to support the artists and the organization's marine science education program. So we are given more pretty scenes than provocative ones. Which is fine, especially on a day when parking lots turn to puddles, all of the color has been washed out of sea and sky, and the prevailing atmosphere is so raw, damp and cold that a squid might be tempted to volunteer for the calamari skillet. On days like these, there are advantages to enjoying the bay indoors.
Visible just a few feet away, the water of Narragansett Bay rippled in the wind, pockmarked by rain, while on the walls and shelves of the Save The Bay Center it presented all of its moods and colors in photographs, paintings, sculptures, even jewelry, showcasing the beauty and diversity of the state's most precious resource. The show is haphazardly presented, but there is a sense of meandering joy in finding surprises amid seascape clichés. The bay is depicted in all seasons and times of day and night. Familiar landmarks, including many of the state's lighthouses and points, are commonly represented. (The Newport Bridge, in particular, seems to have emerged as Rhode Island's Motif No. 1, our artistic answer to Rockport's red fishing shack and San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge.)
The show spotlights the usual suspects - osprey and geese, herons and stripers, the odd gull, the odd quahog. The horseshoe crab, one of the world's oldest creatures, possessed with a graphically distinctive armored shape, and observed more frequently in recent years as a sign of the bay's revitalized health, appears as one of the more popular characters in this year's show. There are waves rendered in all of their variety, boats of all kinds, surfers and solitary fishermen, sails and saltboxes, and images both familiar and enticing to the everyday Rhode Island beachcomber.
Mary Chatowsky Jameson, a native Rhode Islander who splits her time between Middletown and Jamaica Plain, Mass., contributes exquisite images of sea flora, the seaweeds and other plants strewn across Rhode Island shores, pressed and dried into pleasing designs of delicate shapes with subtle colors. Her Porphyra and Chordaria flagelliformis (back whip weed) are particularly striking. A hand-printed serigraph, titled "Seaweed," by Ashley Van Etten, offers a similarly engaging variant.
North Kingstown free diver and photographer Mike Laptew includes a stunning photograph of an osprey in flight, yellow-eyed, clutching a herring in its talons, depicting one of the daily dramas of the Rhode Island coast at the time of the osprey's return - and the herring's - each spring.
Evocative coastal scenes include "Winter Harbor," an oil by Saunderstown painter Jonathan McPhillips, reminding us how every New England season offers its own visual charm, and two appealing photographs by Wickford's Cindy Horovitz Wilson. One, "Red Pelican Reflections," is an abstract of rippling red streaking across the water, while the other, "Clear Reflections," is a tranquil harbor scene of early morning mist and mast.
Carl Peter Mayer's seemingly impossible balanced rock sculptures, made up of columns of large beach stones topped by heart-shaped rocks, which graced the sea wall near Narragansett Town Beach a couple of years ago until weather and physics took over, make a welcome return to the Save The Bay show.
While the exhibition overall captures the exuberance of the bay, and all who enjoy its company, one wishes for a bit more daring, a grittier edge. Most works take aim at scenery, or natural diversity, but few tackle the issue of bay preservation - the underlying theme of the show - in ways that are cognitively challenging or emotionally wrenching.
But, of course, the purpose of the annual Save The Bay art show is to sell images, to support the artists and the organization's marine science education program. So we are given more pretty scenes than provocative ones. Which is fine, especially on a day when parking lots turn to puddles, all of the color has been washed out of sea and sky, and the prevailing atmosphere is so raw, damp and cold that a squid might be tempted to volunteer for the calamari skillet. On days like these, there are advantages to enjoying the bay indoors.
2011年11月16日星期三
Yard sale not the venue for selling art
There are two missing pieces of information I need in order to accurately evaluate these two paintings. The first is the size: This is important because art is often essentially sold by the square inch. The second is whether or not these images are actually signed by Roger Etienne.
The phrase in today's letter, " that I have finally figured out were painted by Roger Etienne," either means that these are not signed (I cannot see a signature in the photograph) or they are signed "Etienne" and it took N. L.-P. a while to discover to whom that referred.
I have found some genuine examples of Etienne's work that are unsigned so the lack of a signature is not all that disturbing. The pieces in today's question with their big eyed children painted on French newspaper is in Etienne's style, and I think there is very little doubt that these two pieces are by that artist.
Etienne is really very famous, but little has been printed about him that I could find. He was born in 1922, and since I can find no date of death, I have to assume that he is probably still alive or perhaps recently deceased.
Although he worked at the Pablo Picasso Workshop for four years, Etienne is considered to be a French Impressionist. It has been reported that Marc Chagall commissioned Etienne to do work for the Paris Opera House, and Etienne supposedly has work in museums in Paris, Zurich and Brussels.
All that sounds very impressive, but does this translate into money in the art market? Currently, I think the answer is no, and his work often fails to sell when it comes up for auction. Unfortunately, when it does sell, images of his children usually bring less than $500.
Etienne also did some nudes, which bring a little more money when they come up for sale (but still less than $1,000 as a general rule), and he also did some landscapes. In addition, there are some Etienne lithographs on the market, but these usually sell for less than $100 at auction.
If N. L.-P.'s two examples are signed, in good condition and a good size, the current insurance replacement value for the pair is probably in the $400 to $600 range. But the question is, should the current owner keep them or sell them. That, of course, is strictly up to her, but let me point out that the main reason to keep any work of art is because the owner likes it and appreciates the image.
So, if N. L.-P. likes these two paintings, she should keep them. But, whether she likes them or not she should not sell them at a garage sale. In this kind of downscale venue in East Tennessee, these painting would probably bring next to nothing.
I think she should keep them for the time being and see if the price goes up in the short term. If she should decide to sell, consigning them to a reputable auction house would be the thing to do.
The phrase in today's letter, " that I have finally figured out were painted by Roger Etienne," either means that these are not signed (I cannot see a signature in the photograph) or they are signed "Etienne" and it took N. L.-P. a while to discover to whom that referred.
I have found some genuine examples of Etienne's work that are unsigned so the lack of a signature is not all that disturbing. The pieces in today's question with their big eyed children painted on French newspaper is in Etienne's style, and I think there is very little doubt that these two pieces are by that artist.
Etienne is really very famous, but little has been printed about him that I could find. He was born in 1922, and since I can find no date of death, I have to assume that he is probably still alive or perhaps recently deceased.
Although he worked at the Pablo Picasso Workshop for four years, Etienne is considered to be a French Impressionist. It has been reported that Marc Chagall commissioned Etienne to do work for the Paris Opera House, and Etienne supposedly has work in museums in Paris, Zurich and Brussels.
All that sounds very impressive, but does this translate into money in the art market? Currently, I think the answer is no, and his work often fails to sell when it comes up for auction. Unfortunately, when it does sell, images of his children usually bring less than $500.
Etienne also did some nudes, which bring a little more money when they come up for sale (but still less than $1,000 as a general rule), and he also did some landscapes. In addition, there are some Etienne lithographs on the market, but these usually sell for less than $100 at auction.
If N. L.-P.'s two examples are signed, in good condition and a good size, the current insurance replacement value for the pair is probably in the $400 to $600 range. But the question is, should the current owner keep them or sell them. That, of course, is strictly up to her, but let me point out that the main reason to keep any work of art is because the owner likes it and appreciates the image.
So, if N. L.-P. likes these two paintings, she should keep them. But, whether she likes them or not she should not sell them at a garage sale. In this kind of downscale venue in East Tennessee, these painting would probably bring next to nothing.
I think she should keep them for the time being and see if the price goes up in the short term. If she should decide to sell, consigning them to a reputable auction house would be the thing to do.
2011年11月15日星期二
Early version of famous Victorian 'Derby Day' painting found hanging
An early version of 'The Derby Day,' a panoramic painting by famed Victorian artist William Powell Frith, was found in a New England beach house.
It is one of the era's most famous pictures.
The picaresque image shows crowds at an 1850s horse race, from a rich family in their carriage to gamblers, acrobats, and prostitutes.
The finished painting hangs in the Tate Britain gallery in London.
Peter Brown, Christie's director of Victorian pictures, said the rediscovery of the oil sketch was 'immensely exciting.'
It had been hanging in a modest New England beach house for decades before a friend of the owner suggested it might be worth something.
Christie's won't be more specific about the location because the owner wants to remain anonymous.
Mr Brown said the vendor, who is in his 60s, believes his parents bought the painting some time before World War II, when Victorian art was often dismissed as garish and sentimental.
'It's a testament to the change in fortunes of Victorian pictures over the last century that these things could have been acquired very cheaply indeed in the '30s, '40s and '50s,' said Mr Brown.
Since the 1970s, critical opinion has changed, and works by the best Victorian artists are coveted by collectors.
'It's really a novel in paint and would have been read as such by the Victorian picture-going public,' Mr Brown said.
The painting goes on sale December 15 in London, with an estimate of $477,000 to $800,000.
Mr Frith, one of the era's most successful painters, specialized in busy scenes of daily life, and his subjects ranged from beach-goers to railway stations to royal weddings.
He rose to fame by way of his meticulously painted scenes, which often depicted both the very rich and the very poor.
In 1853, the painter was appointed a full member of the Royal Academy.
By this time, Mr Frith had made plenty of high-profile friendships. He was familiar with fellow painter William Turner, as well as Charles Dickens, who he immortalized in a portrait in 1859.
He was also a favourite of the Royal Family.
'The Derby Day' was so popular when first exhibited in 1858 that a special rail was installed at the Royal Academy in London to hold back the crowds.
In fact, rails had to be installed at no less than six of his paintings.
'The Derby Day' depicts three main scenes.
In the first, on the far left, men in top hats focus on the 'thimble-rigger.'
An acrobat and his son are in the center of 'The Derby Day,' greedily eying a lavish picnic laid out by a footman.
Racegoers on the right hang about their carriages and flirt and also prepare picnics, while a ragged, hungry-looking girl begs for food.
It is one of the era's most famous pictures.
The picaresque image shows crowds at an 1850s horse race, from a rich family in their carriage to gamblers, acrobats, and prostitutes.
The finished painting hangs in the Tate Britain gallery in London.
Peter Brown, Christie's director of Victorian pictures, said the rediscovery of the oil sketch was 'immensely exciting.'
It had been hanging in a modest New England beach house for decades before a friend of the owner suggested it might be worth something.
Christie's won't be more specific about the location because the owner wants to remain anonymous.
Mr Brown said the vendor, who is in his 60s, believes his parents bought the painting some time before World War II, when Victorian art was often dismissed as garish and sentimental.
'It's a testament to the change in fortunes of Victorian pictures over the last century that these things could have been acquired very cheaply indeed in the '30s, '40s and '50s,' said Mr Brown.
Since the 1970s, critical opinion has changed, and works by the best Victorian artists are coveted by collectors.
'It's really a novel in paint and would have been read as such by the Victorian picture-going public,' Mr Brown said.
The painting goes on sale December 15 in London, with an estimate of $477,000 to $800,000.
Mr Frith, one of the era's most successful painters, specialized in busy scenes of daily life, and his subjects ranged from beach-goers to railway stations to royal weddings.
He rose to fame by way of his meticulously painted scenes, which often depicted both the very rich and the very poor.
In 1853, the painter was appointed a full member of the Royal Academy.
By this time, Mr Frith had made plenty of high-profile friendships. He was familiar with fellow painter William Turner, as well as Charles Dickens, who he immortalized in a portrait in 1859.
He was also a favourite of the Royal Family.
'The Derby Day' was so popular when first exhibited in 1858 that a special rail was installed at the Royal Academy in London to hold back the crowds.
In fact, rails had to be installed at no less than six of his paintings.
'The Derby Day' depicts three main scenes.
In the first, on the far left, men in top hats focus on the 'thimble-rigger.'
An acrobat and his son are in the center of 'The Derby Day,' greedily eying a lavish picnic laid out by a footman.
Racegoers on the right hang about their carriages and flirt and also prepare picnics, while a ragged, hungry-looking girl begs for food.
2011年11月13日星期日
Tihar masala to spice up your food
Soon, food items and condiments made by Tihar inmates will occupy your kitchen shelves. What's more: you can buy detergents, biscuits, namkeen and even jute bags made by the inmates. The largest prison complex in south Asia is also set to become a competing brand in grocery shops across the city. And, when you visit the trade fair at Pragati Maidan this time around, you can even spot brand TJ's (Tihar Jail's) stall at the fair. With 15 new distributors appointed by the Tihar authorities for the National Capital Region (NCR), soon the TJ's products will be available in every nook and cranny, say Tihar officials.
"In the last fiscal year, our turnover was Rs 14 crore. This year, we have expanded our range of products and aim to have a turnover of Rs 20 crore. The products made by our inmates are of good quality and competitively priced. It gladdens the heart of the inmates to know their products are in demand outside the jail premises," said Sunil Gupta, Tihar law officer and PRO.
Tihar has recently launched its own spice manufacturing unit. Now, they also plan to open a blanket manufacturing factory in jail 8 and 9. "Each year, we float tenders in Panipat to provide us with blankets for our inmates. Each of the 12,500 prisoners is entitled to four blankets. We plan to save government money by starting this unit. We will first meet our own requirements and then put the extra blankets up on sale. We are also launching TJ's soap and detergent powder," said a senior Tihar official.
Presently, Tihar Jail products can be found in all court complexes in Delhi including high court. Around 20 branches of Kendriya Bhandaar and Khaadi Bhandaar also stock TJ's products.
With the new distributors in the fray, these products will soon be available at grocery shops as well.
The products include handloom and textile, apparel, furniture, pure mustard oil, recycled hand-made paper products, paintings, designer candles and lamps, jute bags, herbal products.
"TJ's is a brand developed with a non-commercial and non-profit objective. Tihar jail factory provides an opportunity to reform and rehabilitate the inmates by channelizing their energy in a positive direction," said a senior jail official.
"In the last fiscal year, our turnover was Rs 14 crore. This year, we have expanded our range of products and aim to have a turnover of Rs 20 crore. The products made by our inmates are of good quality and competitively priced. It gladdens the heart of the inmates to know their products are in demand outside the jail premises," said Sunil Gupta, Tihar law officer and PRO.
Tihar has recently launched its own spice manufacturing unit. Now, they also plan to open a blanket manufacturing factory in jail 8 and 9. "Each year, we float tenders in Panipat to provide us with blankets for our inmates. Each of the 12,500 prisoners is entitled to four blankets. We plan to save government money by starting this unit. We will first meet our own requirements and then put the extra blankets up on sale. We are also launching TJ's soap and detergent powder," said a senior Tihar official.
Presently, Tihar Jail products can be found in all court complexes in Delhi including high court. Around 20 branches of Kendriya Bhandaar and Khaadi Bhandaar also stock TJ's products.
With the new distributors in the fray, these products will soon be available at grocery shops as well.
The products include handloom and textile, apparel, furniture, pure mustard oil, recycled hand-made paper products, paintings, designer candles and lamps, jute bags, herbal products.
"TJ's is a brand developed with a non-commercial and non-profit objective. Tihar jail factory provides an opportunity to reform and rehabilitate the inmates by channelizing their energy in a positive direction," said a senior jail official.
2011年9月13日星期二
Artist's burning-bank paintings are hot commodities
An oil painting of a burning bank that sparked a pair of Los Angeles police investigations also ignited an international auction frenzy.
Artist Alex Schaefer has sold the 22-by-28-inch canvas depicting a Chase Bank branch in Van Nuys going up in flames to a German collector for $25,200.
The Internet sale on EBay attracted 70 bids. Surprised by the selling price, Schaefer quickly put a 6-by-8-inch painting of a burning Bank of America branch up for sale and sold it for $3,600 to a collector in Britain.
Schaefer's choice of subjects first drew police attention on July 30, when he set up his easel in front of the Chase branch at Van Nuys Boulevard and Sylvan Street.
"They told me that somebody had called and said they felt threatened by my painting," said Schaefer, 41, of Eagle Rock.
"They said they had to find out my intention. They asked if I was a terrorist and was I going to follow through and do what I was painting."
Schaefer said he explained that the artwork was intended to be a visual metaphor for the havoc that banking practices have caused to the economy. The two officers filled out a field report and departed.
"I figured that when they left, they probably decided the episode was stupid and they'd just wad up the form and throw it away," Schaefer said.
But on Aug. 23, two plainclothes detectives showed up at his house with more questions. "One of them asked me, 'Do you hate banks? Do you plan to do that to the bank?'" Schaefer once more explained what the painting symbolized.
Chase Bank officials were puzzled by the painting. "Hopefully, this is not what his actions are — it's kind of scary," bank spokesman Gary Kishner said last month.
Schaefer said a series of burning bank images he is painting will be displayed at a February show called "Disaster Capitalism" — a fitting title in light of his $25,200 sale.
The buyers of the paintings have invited Schaefer to visit them at their European homes. If he goes, he might paint some burning German and British banks, he said.
But first, Schaefer quickly added, he will research freedom-of-expression laws in both countries.
Artist Alex Schaefer has sold the 22-by-28-inch canvas depicting a Chase Bank branch in Van Nuys going up in flames to a German collector for $25,200.
The Internet sale on EBay attracted 70 bids. Surprised by the selling price, Schaefer quickly put a 6-by-8-inch painting of a burning Bank of America branch up for sale and sold it for $3,600 to a collector in Britain.
Schaefer's choice of subjects first drew police attention on July 30, when he set up his easel in front of the Chase branch at Van Nuys Boulevard and Sylvan Street.
"They told me that somebody had called and said they felt threatened by my painting," said Schaefer, 41, of Eagle Rock.
"They said they had to find out my intention. They asked if I was a terrorist and was I going to follow through and do what I was painting."
Schaefer said he explained that the artwork was intended to be a visual metaphor for the havoc that banking practices have caused to the economy. The two officers filled out a field report and departed.
"I figured that when they left, they probably decided the episode was stupid and they'd just wad up the form and throw it away," Schaefer said.
But on Aug. 23, two plainclothes detectives showed up at his house with more questions. "One of them asked me, 'Do you hate banks? Do you plan to do that to the bank?'" Schaefer once more explained what the painting symbolized.
Chase Bank officials were puzzled by the painting. "Hopefully, this is not what his actions are — it's kind of scary," bank spokesman Gary Kishner said last month.
Schaefer said a series of burning bank images he is painting will be displayed at a February show called "Disaster Capitalism" — a fitting title in light of his $25,200 sale.
The buyers of the paintings have invited Schaefer to visit them at their European homes. If he goes, he might paint some burning German and British banks, he said.
But first, Schaefer quickly added, he will research freedom-of-expression laws in both countries.
2011年6月8日星期三
Business Profile: Springsteel Gallery
Springsteel Art Gallery in Greenport exhibits original paintings and sculptures by owner Bernard Springsteel, with a guest artist or photographer featured every month.
“My watercolor and oil paintings reflect somewhat different themes, but nevertheless reflect the world as it is and particularly the way it was before us,” Mr. Springsteel said. “I particularly like to find old homes and watercraft that have seen the test of time and now make a statement of their antiquity. The light and shadow of these old structures really whet my appetite for their beauty of form. I have found that painting places I have traveled to has added a rich addition to my work and makes me part of a tradition of artists who traveled and painted.”
With a bachelor’s of fine arts degree from Pratt Institute and 30 years’ experience as an art director in magazine and book publishing, Mr. Springsteel began a fine arts career after many years of working with other artists and photographers. “This had given me a rich background in the arts, and I now devote my time to watercolors, oils and sculpture,” he said. “Having all this time to concentrate on these crafts is a gift of life, after so many years of working for publishing houses.”
The techniques of figurative sculpture and bas relief are thousands of years old, and are little changed except for the introduction of synthetics. “This and the fact that artists continue to pursue this form speaks for its reason to always be a legitimate art form,” said Mr. Springsteel. “Mankind does not become modern. He perpetuates as did early man. So too, figurative art is not an abstraction but a real mirror of the generations.
“The best description of my sculptural work is contemporary figurative and classical in scope, dealing with mythological and thematic figures, sometimes with humor,” he added. “The classical human form and the relationships between humans intrigue me. Having been to many museums in the world, I have always been struck with the figure and how it has come down chronicled by art through the ages.”
“My watercolor and oil paintings reflect somewhat different themes, but nevertheless reflect the world as it is and particularly the way it was before us,” Mr. Springsteel said. “I particularly like to find old homes and watercraft that have seen the test of time and now make a statement of their antiquity. The light and shadow of these old structures really whet my appetite for their beauty of form. I have found that painting places I have traveled to has added a rich addition to my work and makes me part of a tradition of artists who traveled and painted.”
With a bachelor’s of fine arts degree from Pratt Institute and 30 years’ experience as an art director in magazine and book publishing, Mr. Springsteel began a fine arts career after many years of working with other artists and photographers. “This had given me a rich background in the arts, and I now devote my time to watercolors, oils and sculpture,” he said. “Having all this time to concentrate on these crafts is a gift of life, after so many years of working for publishing houses.”
The techniques of figurative sculpture and bas relief are thousands of years old, and are little changed except for the introduction of synthetics. “This and the fact that artists continue to pursue this form speaks for its reason to always be a legitimate art form,” said Mr. Springsteel. “Mankind does not become modern. He perpetuates as did early man. So too, figurative art is not an abstraction but a real mirror of the generations.
“The best description of my sculptural work is contemporary figurative and classical in scope, dealing with mythological and thematic figures, sometimes with humor,” he added. “The classical human form and the relationships between humans intrigue me. Having been to many museums in the world, I have always been struck with the figure and how it has come down chronicled by art through the ages.”
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