We received an unusual e-mail about a raffle for art with the proceeds going to the medical care and hospital bills for the artist, Bhumika Bhatia, who was recently injured in a terrible car accident and temporarily lost use of her hands. Her gallery, Underline Gallery in New York, is selling $50 raffle tickets to win one of four prints in the show (an $850 value). The pieces average 19 x 13 inches, come mounted, and are only in editions of 3. For more information on this raffle, visit the gallery’s website here.
Below is one of Bhatia’s works, a photograph which, ironically, shows a pair of blue-painted hands. Best wishes, Bhumika, for a speedy recovery.
While last week had the stunning news of Edvard Munch’s Scream selling for $119 million, this week hasn’t been too shabby either, with the news of Mark Rothko’s 1961 painting Orange, Red, Yellow (below left) selling yesterday for $87 million and Yves Klein’s 1962 painting FC1 (Fire Color 1) (below right), going for $36.4 million. To give this some perspective, Mark Rothko had a one-man show at Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery in 1945, and it resulted in just a few sales, with prices ranging from $150 to $750. Can you imagine?
Maurice Sendak, the author and illustrator behind Where the Wild Things Are (among a huge collection of other books), passed away yesterday at the age of 83. While known for illustrating dark and scary scenes, Sendak once said in an interview with NPR that “children surviving childhood is my obsessive theme and my life’s concern.” While Sendak grew up living in Brooklyn, he had extensive family in Europe and was aware of their dying in the Holocaust during World War II, when he would have been a teenager. He knew from his own childhood that children experience grief, yearning, and anxiety just like adults do, and wanted to allow these feelings to be solved in the fantasy of his books. Below are two illustrations from a pair of his better-known works, including In the Night Kitchen at left and Where the Wild Things Are at right.
I happened upon this video by artist Jonathan Harris today, and found it quite remarkable for both the quantity and quality of the photographic images, but also for his commentary about the news and media and so many “moments” in a given day and our human need to step back and reflect.
The explanation of this project is that Harris turned 30, he began a simple ritual of taking one photo a day and posting it to his website before going to sleep, along with a short story. He called this project, “Today.” Be sure to watch the video below, but you can also see his full project one day at a time here.
I saw this picture in a magazine, and I’m not even sure if it’s a real chair or just something created in Photoshop … but as I looked at it longer, it started me wondering, could someone actually sit on this chair and not have it break?
I think the most-critical cut-out is the front left leg … but could the bottom brace connecting to the sturdy back leg and the other two be enough to hold it up? What do you think?
I was driving around running some errands and listening to my favorite station, WBGO, when I heard a blues song with a women singer just belting out the tune, and found out afterwards that it was Susan Tedeschi, her husband Derek Trucks on guitar, and their band. While I couldn’t find that exact song on YouTube, I did find this song which I also enjoyed … it starts off slow and quiet, but just wait until the 4 minute mark, when Trucks starts his solo … it builds and builds until he’s just tearing it up … great stuff!
Today is the birth date of Keith Haring, the American graffiti and pop artist who passed away in 1990. Google has honored him with a Haring-Google-Doodle, below, and we found an interesting (although at times somewhat blurry) video from the 1980’s which profiles Haring at the height of his fame and success. It’s somewhat long, at 8 minutes, but if you’re a fan of Haring’s work, they pile in a LOT of his art in those 8 minutes, as well as some interesting interviews, both with Haring but also Leo Castelli and Tony Shafrazi, two of his former art dealers. One of my favorite quotes from the video is when they call him “the Cezanne of the Subway.”
So, the deed is done … the Munch “Scream” up for auction yesterday at Sotheby’s sold for $119.9 Million to an unidentified buyer. One thing I find odd, however, is that the news coverage of this often refers to it as a “painting,” and even the auctioneer, Tobias Meyer, referred to it as a painting … but it’s a pastel drawing on cardboard.
The video below shows some of the intitial frenzied bidding (where it went from $40 million to $43 million in about 2 seconds), then jumps to the finish when Meyer slaps his hand down and says “sold.” Crazy stuff.
We posted a portrait earlier today that had composite pieces from 19 different Marvel Comics characters, and a lot of people seemed to have fun with it. So we decided to create our own composite portrait, with parts of paintings by ten different famous artists from throughout art history.
Can you name the ten artists represented here? If you send us your list and all ten answers are correct, then you will win a prize (what that prize will be has not yet been determined, since we’re making this up as we go along – but we’ll come up with something).
Reference this numbering in order to ID the parts with the correct artist names:
I’m having a lot of fun looking through Swann Galleries’ auction catalog for their upcoming May 10th auction of Modern Posters – it’s just full of surprises. Like this surprise below – when I think of the Belgian Surrealist artist Rene Magritte, I think of images such as the man with the bowler hat and the apple in front of his face, seen below at left. But Swann Galleries introduced me to the fact that Magritte also did graphic design for sheet music covers, including Lot #103, below right, which has the amusing title of Marche des Snobs, showcasing this fine trio of snobs with their top hats, monocles and long cigarette holders … love it!
Which one is a Magritte original? Both!
This led me to discover a trove of Magritte sheet music covers, which all have an art deco style, none of which strike me as relating to his surrealist work at all. A very interesting discovery which extends our knowledge of this great artist!
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