This evening auction of Contemporary Art at Christie’s November 10, 2004 is highlighted by two humorous and fine works by Maurizio Cattelan (b. 1960), a major work by Andy Warhol (1928-1987), two excellent works by Richard Diebenkorn (1922-1993), an important work by John Currin (b. 1962), an impressive "Elegy" painting by Robert Motherwell (1915-1991), and good works by Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) and Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997).
Maurizio Cattelan’s oeuvre is full of surprise, irony and great theatricality. Lot 34, “Not Afraid of Love,” depicts an elephant draped in a white sheet with holes punched out for the eyes. It is number two from an edition of two plus 1 artist’s proof that was executed in 2000. Made of polyester, styrene, resin, paint and fabric, it measures 81 by 123 by 54 inches. It has an modest estimate of $600,000 to $900,000. It sold for $2,751,50 including the buyer's premium as do all articles mentioned in this article. The previous Cattelan record was $2,080,000 set at Sotheby's May 12, 2004.
The catalogue entry provides the following insightful commentary:
“Maurizio Cattelan has a reputation in the art world of playing the clown, a trickster of sorts, juggling shamelessly with the traditions of art, literature and popular culture. It is true that much of his humor is reminiscent of the age old Italian tradition of comedy. Actors such as Toto and Alberto Sordi come to mind, figures who encapsulate the notion of Italian parody. In many ways, Cattelan himself uses similar techniques as his art embraces the absurd, using ironic wit to make critical commentary on the state of art and modern life. In the early 1990s, the artist began employing various taxidermied animals to represent a transformed sense of reality. Cattelan carefully manipulated the poses and environments in which these animals were situated, in so doing, projecting new meanings on to the works themselves. In one case, the viewer might find a miniature squirrel seemingly asleep on a kitchen table, but upon closer observatrion one sees a gun lying at the feet of the animal. One might come across three mice sitting in a single toy deckchair near a beach umbrella, or life-size ostrich with its head buried in the floor. At times these tableaus suggest a narrative, and other times there is no context to the situation at all, instead the animal is in complete isolation. Yet all of these animals appear like Surrealist constructs, odd and alienated, yet delightfully persuasive. They remind the viewer of the communion between life and death, the existence of multiple layers of reality. There is a very theatrical element in all of Cattelan’s work, and Not Afraid of Love, 2000 is no exception. The viewer is confronted by this huge creature, whose eyes, trunk and legs stick out from under an enormous white sheet. There is something at once frightening and funny about this elephant. The beast tries to hide its size, weight and presence and in so doing, renders himself completely absurd. Elephants by nature are adaptable creatures, animals that are at home in many different types of landscapes. The elephant is a powerful animal, but Cattelan has transformed this strength into vulnerability. The artist has subverted the generally acknowledged authority of the elephant as rule of its environment, as here it literally tries to hide itself from view. Not Afraid of Love plays with the popular expression of an elephant being in the room, in other words, a situation gone awry and yet on everyone’s mind, but nobody dares to speak about it. The situation though is impossible to ignore, very much like an elephant in the room. Furthermore, a white elephant implies that something is more trouble than it is worth. His use of a white sheet also brings to mind the Klu Klux Klan, who very well may be considered one of the nation’s first terrorist groups. Whether the white sheet refers to the official regalia of this group or to a ghostly Halloween costume is not clear, but Cattelan does toy with the inherent meanings of these various associations. Cattelan’s work is then a catalyst for opposing forces and deeds….”
The second Cattelan work in the auction, Lot 6, “Untitled,” is not as cuddly, but no less adorable. In it, a good, painted wax, hair and fabric figure of the artist peers from a hole in the floor at paintings on a wall. Is this the start of a 1960’s movie caper, or a revolutionary’s lament at finding a room empty of would-be victims and filled only with art.
Executed in 2001, this work is an edition of three plus one artist’s roof. It measures 59 inches and the hole from which he emerges is 23 5/8 by 15 ¾ inches.
This lot has an estimate of $700,000 to $900,000. It sold for $2,023,500.
The catalogue offers the following commentary:
“In service to the ever-changing concepts of the self, Cattelan seems to enjoy the challenge of capturing his own image over and over again in the most unlikely manifestations. Will he appear doll-like, many multiples smaller than life size on a bookshelf in the form of a Mimi-me? Or as a rubber mask repeated many times over, as if to negate his uniqueness in his Spermini works? Or might he appear decades younger, riding a tricycle down a city street? In Untited, Cattelan is at his best and most subversive. Out of a hole in the floor, the artist appears peeking his head up like an interloper in the viewer’s space. It appears as if he has tunneled himself in, like a gopher that rears his head, nearly always uninvited. The first installation of this work in 2001 at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Holland was wildly memorable as the artist forced an entry into a Nineteenth Century Dutch painting show by appearing up through the museum’s floor. There was the self-portrait of the artist, looking innocent enough, trying to find out where he was within this context of art history. While all of the elegant paintings behaved as they always had, Cattelan’s self portrait couldn’t contain itself – literally.”
Ideally, some enlightened, and bemused, collector will buy both Cattelan lots and exhibit them in the same space. Who would be more frightened/startled, the artist or the elephant?
The sale was extremely successful with 94 percent of the 63 offered lots selling for a total of $92,484,000 and almost half selling above their high estimates, a considerably stronger showing that Sotheby's the night before which realized just over $93 million but only sold a little over 80 percent of its lots. Individual auction records were set for 9 artists in addition to Cattelan.
Lot 12, “Mustard Race Riot,” is a large painting by Andy Warhol that was executed in May and June, 1963. An acrylic, silkscreen ink and graphite on canvas, it consists of two panels, one with images, on the left, that measures 113 1/4 by 82 inches, and the other, on the right, that is monochrome and measures 113 7/8 by 82 inches.
If good-natured humor permeates Cattelan’s work, it is largely absent from Warhol’s except in the reverse/perverse way.
Warhol, of course, most likely found much of his success hilarious but the content and intent of much of his oeuvre tends to be on the darker rather than lighter side.
This work is the largest of a series of four “race riot” works by Warhol. It consists of the repetitive use by Warhol of three photographs by Charles Moore that appeared in the May 17, 1963 issue of Life magazine in an article about the use of police dogs by Sheriff “Bull” O’Connor during a civil rights protest in Montgomery, Alabama.
The long catalogue entry argues that Warhol’s interest in the civil rights pictures was not primarily political:
“’It was just something that caught my eye,’ Warhol responded somewhat typically when asked about the seemingly contentious political subject matter of his Race Riot paintings. Of all of the subjects in Warhol’s vast and varied catalogue, the so-called Race Riot paintings with their manifest display of political violence and racial oppression are seemingly the least ambiguous and most partisan images in his oeuvre. Repeatedly showing the image of a black Civil Rights protester being savaged by the dogs of a group of white uniformed policemen, this memorable and extremely rare series of paintings seems to demonstrate the famously apolitical Warhol actively engaging in contemporary politics and making a rare, if not indeed unique, ‘liberal statement’ with his art. But, as Warhol himself was at pains to point out, engaging with 1960s politics was not really his intention. As he told fellow ‘Pop” artist Claes Oldenburg it was, largely ‘indifference’ that had characterized and determined his choice of this graphic and provocative subject matter. First executed in the spring of 1963, Warhol’s Race Riot paintings were created as part of a series of works based on the theme of Death in America that he was prepared for an exhibition to be hold under the same title at the Sonnabend Gallery in Paris in 1964. Consisting of what is now known more accurately as his Death and Disaster series of paintings, the Death in America exhibition was to consist of a number of large-scale works on the theme of various typically American ways to die. Foremost among these images were of course, Warhol’s graphic and shocking images of car crashes. These were accompanied by a select group of paintings of suicides, gangster funerals and electric chairs. The image of the Race Riot was, while not an image of death per se, a provocative and powerful image of a peculiarly American form of violence, segregation and political oppression. It fitted well into the context of an exhibition in which Warhol deliberately intended to present a grittier film-noir-like portrait of America. Anxious about the reception of his art in Paris for what would prove to be his first ever European one-man-show, Warhol feared an overly critical reaction to the seemingly overt celebration of mass-consumerism in his soup cans, coca-cola bottles, star-portraits and dollar-bills. In choosing a series of works on the subject of Death in America he hoped to court a favorable reaction from a French audience by presenting a series of works outlining the traumatic flip-side of the American Dream. Warhol’s choice of subject matter also a continuation of a theme that had first surfaced while he was painting the Marilyns. It was around this time that he first recognized how the constant repetition of imagery ultimately seems to mollify the shocking effect of even the most horrific of images. This was an element that Warhol was keen to both expose and explore. ‘When you see a gruesome picture over and over again it doesn’t really have any effect,’ he observed, constant repetition deconstructs the meaning of an image and reveals it true artificial nature as merely a banal abstract surface. The exploration and the desensitizing of the audience and the nullification of meaning through repeated imagery is what distinguishes Warhol’s Death and Disaster series most. It also primarily this feature of these still disturbing and justly famous works that lends them their troubling ambiguity.…A double canvas image, blank mustard color on one side and fully-saturated mustard-backed imagery on the other, it relates closely to Warhol’s other double-canvas paintings that incorporate a monochrome canvas alongside a silk-screened one. David Bourdon has pointed out that these ‘diptychs’ were first created at Warhol’s Firehouse studio after Warhol had asked his friends, ‘Wouldn’t it be a good idea to add a blank panel?’ adding, ‘It would make the painting twice as big and twice as expensive.’…Apart from any pleasure Warhol may have gained from being able to sell abstract monochrome canvases, it is clear from these works that the blank canvas also performs an added and important function. Contrasting the emptiness of one canvas with the fullness of the provocative and disturbing imagery on the other underscores Warhol’s intention of exposing the artifice of even the most horrific images and lends these ‘diptychs’ a powerful existential gravitas that is less evident in his single-canvas images. As both a design feature and as a reinforcement of Warhol’s conceptual concerns, the play between empty space and dense repetitive silk-screened imagery in these works, visually reiterates the sense of shallowness and artifice that underlies all Warhol’s work.”
These arguments are a bit disingenuous as Warhol was astute and sophisticated, perhaps as much as any New Yorker of his generation after he gained fame. Provocation was his sincerest form of flattery.
Repetition breeds boredom? Perhaps. But it does not follow necessarily that horrific images lose their impact in repetition and deconstructivist theory does not make multiple horrific images necessarily “banal abstract surface.” Clearly, Warhol did not choose his images randomly especially for the 1964 exhibit.
The double canvases may appear to some as “existential gravitas,” but to others they are not imbued with any deep aesthetic. The blanks do distract from the “horrific” images, but they do not add much besides imbalance, which is not to say that there is not historical interest in a “Pop” artist dealing with serious issues.
The lot has an “estimate on request” that was $12,000,000 to $15,000,000. It sold for $15,127,500, a bit short of the artist's auction record of $17,050,000.
The auction has two excellent works by Richard Diebenkorn (see The City Review article on the artist), Lots 25 and 28. The former is a lovely untitled oil, gouache and crayon on paper from his famous “Ocean Park” series. It measures 25 by 38 inches and was executed in 1981. It has a modest estimate $700,000 to $1,000,000. It sold for $1,407,500.
The latter is an oil on canvas entitled “Marin Landscape.” It measures 51 ½ by 70 inches and was painted in 1961-2. It has an ambitious estimate of $3,000,000 to $4,000,000. It sold for $3,367,500. "Evidence of his passion for landscape, as well as Matisse, it is one of the few major early Diebenkorns that remain in a private collection," the catalogue noted, adding that "Diebenkorn uses triangular shapes and diagonals to organize a myriad of details into a unified whole....Inspired by West Coast landscape, as opposed to the flat grid of New York, Marin Landscape's sweeping Baroque diagonals lead the eye from the edges into the heart of the painting. Diebenkorn's career simultantiously invstitaged figuration and abstraction....Marin Landscape...is a compositional tour de force, whose structures points the way to his Ocean Park series which he would realize six years later. These works were his first mature works....Its daring vantage point, looking down a valley bordered with low lying houses, opening up to a lush expanse of blue water, is an evocative and suprisingly acurate depiction of Marin County."
John Currin, the subject of a recent retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, is one of the more controversial contemporary artists as much of his oeuvre consists of rather unattractive portraits that appear clumsy and banal. Lot 31, however, is one of his finest works and is very painterly. Entitled "Homemade Pasta," it is an oil on canvas that measures 50 by 42 inches and was executed in 1999.
The catalogue provides the following commentary:
"Controversial and driven by his own unique vision, Currin is heralded as one of the most important artists of his generation and more specifically in the powerful position of re-directing art history back to discussions of painting's relevance and closing the gap in the disjointed lineage of genre painting. Homemade Pasta is a major work by the artist, complete with present-day complexities and multiple art historical precedents, and his most important work to come to auction....Norman Rockwell's obvious and pleasing narratives, as well as Maxfield Parish's glibly stylized works can be seen as precursors to Currin, particularly in their desire to tell a simple and innocent story. In effectively the same format as Rockwell and Parrish, Currin seeks to bring a truly contemporary message to his works and interweaves the social, the political and the humorous, at times with impunity....In Currin's matter-of-fact rendering, the couple of today is a gay male couple. They are exquisitely realized in perfect detail and Currin's painterly virtuosity is flexed. But contrary to historical imagery of gay male couples (if there is such a thing), they are the antithesis of sexual beings. Currin has been able to demonstrate that the two men share affection for another without actually showing it. ...The image is so powerful, not because a happy male couple is a politically correct emblem, but because in Currin's words, 'It is interesting to me that people feel automatically guilty, kind of uncomfortable, when they look at that painting. An image of two men has a strange authority, an ability to make liberal people cringe and get nervous about what they are going to say....'"
The lot has an estimate of $700,000 to $900,000. It sold for $847,500, almost doubling the artist's auction record.
Lot 59, "Untitled," is a bright acrylic and oilstrick on canvas with wood supports by Jean-Michel Basquiat that was executed in 1982. It measures 60 inches square and has an estimate of $1,000,000 to $1,500,000. It sold for $1,799,500.
Stating that this work "presents a cross-section of Basquiat's raw urban savvy," the catalogue provides the following commentary:
"One of a series of paintings that Basquiat made for what turned out to be a sell-out show at the Gagosian Gallery, Untitled is a flamboyant pictorial road-map of the soul outlining the earthly and spiritual dangers and pitfalls of the modern city. His friend the artist, Shenge Ka Pharoah, made his uniquely open-cornered stretchers on which Basquiat juxtaposed his imagery and words with a painterly style that mixed abstraction and air-can-sprayed graffiti. Littered with coded warnings, direction signs, and a wealth of information as well as advice, it advertises itself like some nightmarish surreal sign-post of the modern urban jungle....With its arrows, ladders and drips depicting a series of convoluted possible routes around and over the picture surface, the painting outlines a world of mobility and flux as well as the difficulties and intricacies of successfully navigating a path through an urban jungle fraught with danger."
Another excellent work by Basquiat is Lot 48 "Untitled (Head)," a 1981 acrylic on canvas that measures 50 by 119 inches. It has an estimate of $1,800,000 to $2,400,000. It sold for $1,463,500.
"During the 1970s, Basquiat gained notoriety under the graffiti tag SAMO....In some of his earlier canvases, SAMO haunts the artist not only in the graffiti-like assortment of figures, but also specifically in the house symbols with an 'S' in the square. This 'S' is often cited by critics as an abbreviated reference to SAMO, therefore appearing on the wall of the diagram houses in the left and the right and the painting, hinting at some nostalgia, the artist casting his mind back to his days as a street artist. The life of the street, and also the influence of the street itself on the artist, is reflected in the grid-like pattern in the lower right of Untitled (Head). This formal formation is a 'skelly court,' chalked or inscribed in pavements for use in a game played by children. (The idea of play may also be evident in the house sign, reminiscent of the home base in baseball). The skelly court is the sign and the evidence of a street in everyday use, as an inhabited, community area with its own readymade images and iconography. This element...is therefore an icon of play and of oneness. It was a seminal element in his art of the period, an adopted form like an iconography trouvé, a graffiti from outside the world of graffiti, a sign that kids, not just artists, occupied these streets. By taking this skelly court, Basquiat has appropriated the sign for his own use, but has also enshrined it in oil, celebrating this facet of life in the street. Basquiat does not merely celebrate this sign, but also imbues it with a mystique aura. Now, it mixes with his own personal, private iconography, developing its own opaque implications within his visual lexicon. In part it appears to recall the games of Basquiat's own youth, while in its pattern it resembles crossroads, central to the voodoo mysticism and imagery that so intrigued the painter."
Another artist with two good works in the auction is Roy Lichtenstein. Lot 50, "Brushstroke Group," is a huge painted aluminum sculpture that was executed in 1987. It measures 32 1/2 by 17 by 7 3/4 feet. It has an estimate of $2,500,000 to $3,500,000 and it sold for $3,367,500, an auction record for a sculpture by the artist.
"Brushstroke Group," the catalogue noted, "is a New York landmark. Executed in 1987 for the Monte-Carlo Sculpture 87 exhibition, it has subsequently become a fixture of New York's landscape. First installed at the entrance of Central Park in the Doris C. Freedman Plaza, the work has also been installed outside the Guggenheim Museum and most recently at City Hall where it was the centerpiece of Lichtenstein sculpture exhibition. Soaring into the area and realized in bold colors, Brushstroke Group is arguably one of the grandest sculptures ever completed by Lichtenstein bringing one of his defining themes to life in a monumental scale."
Lot 30, "The White Tree," is a 1980 oil on canvas by Lichtenstein that measures 105 by 210 inches. It has an estimate of $2,000,000 to $3,000,000.
"The White Tree brilliantly demonstrates Roy Lichtenstein's long ongoing and ironic aesthetic of appropriating and reinventing art history that most closely anticipated, influenced and informed much of the new direction of Postmodernist painting. Part of a rare and iportant series of paintings which Lichtenstein made on the theme of German Expressionism, The White Tree is a large, panoramic landscape painting that in its vista-like presentation of a pastoral idyll gently mocks both the style and inherent Romanticism of this early Twentieth Century art movement....Responding to a world where the great masterpieces of the past were now mass-printed regularly on calendars, posters and postcards, Lichtenstein highlighted the reproducible nature of the artwork though his reduction of these celebrated images to the codified and mass-producable pictorial language of the popular cartoon. This subsuming of a vital part of the work's uniqueness and originality to the generic bland stylelessness of the stripe, the benday dot and the black outlines both ironized the status of these works as 'masterpieces' and emphasized their existence as marketable commodities and traditional styles."
It sold for $3,367,500.
Lot 24 is a very strong work by Robert Motherwell, entitled "Elegy to the Spanish Republic, No. 71." An oil on canvas that measures 71 by 133 inches, it was executed in 1961 and has been consigned to the auction by the Yale University Art Gallery, which had received it as a gift from Mr. and Mrs. Gifford Miller of New York. It has a modest estimate of $600,000 to $800,000.
"Like Matisse," the catalogue noted, "Motherwell's work always has an underlying elegance and a delicate balance, no matter how raw and powerful the gesture. Like Franz Kline, Motherwell's signature works are large-scale black and white paintings, in which the artist will often paint the white passages last. Although seemingly spontaneous, Motherwell labored over the forms in Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 71 looking for just the proportions and color saturations, as can be most clearly seen in the heavily worked black ovoids. In extant photos of the work prior to completion, the ovoid at the right was more open and contained a hollow white component and throughout the painting were expressive black splatters. In the final state, Motherwell created a much more resolved composition, focusing more on the tension between the forms and less on painterliness."
It sold for $2,919,500, shattering the artist's previous auction record of $1,100,000 set for another work from the series at Sotheby's November 8, 1989.
Lot 22 is an large untitled "cross-hatch" oil on canvas by Jasper Johns (b. 1930) that was executed in 1981-2. It measures 30 by 90 inches and has an estimate of $3,500,000 to $4,500,000. It sold for $3,367,500.
"When Jasper Johns began painting the cross-hatch works," the catalogue observed, "critics and fans were confused by what they perceived as a change of tack. Before then, he had usually focused on a what-you-see-is-what-you-get approach to art, whereas the vast expanse of Untitled appears abstract, even geometrical. This abstraction was all the more unexpected in the art of a man considered to have shown painting the way after the hegemony of the Abstract Expressionists. However, the subject matter in these paintings was far from abstract, whatever the impression....Johns's initial exposure to this pattern was itself impressively random: 'I was driving on Long Island when a car came toward me painted in this way. I only saw it for a second, but knew immediately that I was going to use it. It had all the qualities that interest me - literalness, repetitiveness, an obsessive quality, order with dumbness, and the possibility of complete lack of meaning.'"
Lot 19, "Untitled (Rome)," is a large scribble or "blackboard" painting by Cy Twombly (b. 1928) that was executed in 1971. An oil, wax crayon and graphite on canvas, it measures 63 1/4 by 76 3/4 inches. It has an estimate of $5,000,000 to $7,000,000. It sold for $5,383,500.
"Using the graphic process of writing and translating its continuous flow of a single line into a painterly language," the catalogue entry maintained, "Twombly adopted a strict formulaic procedure in his looped-line paintings. It is a process that echoes the Palmer technique taught to children when they are first learning to write. Working the opposite manner to the children who learn to impose a rigid order and a rational discipline on their hand, Twombly adopts the technique of a perpetual repetition of a looped line as a means of increasing the fluid and graphic energy of his line while maintaining a contiuum throughout. In this work especially with its sequential magnifying of the height and scale of the loops as the horizontal progression of the line develops from the top to the bottom of the picture, the strength, innovation and power of Twombly's line seems to build like that of an oncoming wave."
Lot 4, "Julie-die Vrou," a large and very dramatic portrait of a woman's head by Marlene Dumas (b. 1953) set an auction record for the artist of $1,239,500.
Lot 9, "Untitled ('monument for V. Tatlin')," set a world auction record for Dan Flavin (1933-1996) of $735,500.
Lot 10, "Steel-Magnesium Plain," set a world auction record of $903,500 for Carl Andre (b. 1935).
Lot 14, "Untitled," set a world auction record of $847,500 for Lee Bontecou (b. 1931), who was the subject of a recent major museum retrospective. The fabric, copper wire and welded steel work, which was executed in 1960, was being sold to benefit the New School University Art Collection Acquisition Fund. It had been given to the university by Vera List.
Lot 1, "A Line to You," set a world auction record of $276,300 for Jim Hodges (b. 1957).
Lot 39, "One and Eight - A Description (Violet)," set an auction record for Joseph Kossuth (b. 1945).