Expo

Gisèle Freund (1908-2000),

 fotógrafa autodidacta, figura entre los retratistas y reporte- ros preponderantes de su tiempo. Tuvo una vida longeva cuya principal vicisitud fue el exilio, de su natal Alemania a París y Buenos Aires, pasando por Londres, Quebec y México. Nació en una familia judía de la burguesía berlinesa; su padre, coleccionista de arte, le regaló su primera cámara Leica que estrenó documentando la crisis de la Repúbli- ca de Weimar que allanó el camino al triunfo de Hitler. Antes de huir a Francia en 1933, estudió sociología en la Universidad de Frankfurt, disciplina que la orientó a la escritura teórica y la inclinó al foto-reportaje crítico (80 series realizó en total, difundidas en la prensa masiva internacional).

El encanto de la obra de Gisèle Freund radica en la delicadeza de su factura y en su dimensión literaria. Se le considera la mejor cronista visual de la vanguardia parisina de los años 1930, con retratos cuyo uso innovador del color supo aprovechar las películas Agfacolor y Kodachrome recién comercializadas. Lo que se sabe menos es que viajó varias veces a México, entre 1948 y 1978, y que tejió estrechos vínculos con América Latina. En 1941, sabiéndola escondida en la Francia ocupada, la intelectual Victoria Ocampo la invita a pasar una temporada en Argentina (adonde volverá en 1950 para un reportaje demoledor sobre Evita Perón). Pronto empiezan las visitas a México

México fue, entre todos los países de nuestro continente, aquel donde más activó su cámara y del que hablaba con mayor nostalgia. Hemos localizado archivos que conser- van las huellas de su paso por nuestras tierras y su relación con personalidades mexicanas, cercana en el caso de Alfonso Reyes, la pareja de pintores Diego Rivera-Frida Kahlo y el promotor-museógrafo Fernando Gamboa (ex director del MAM). No hay carta que le dirija a Reyes donde no externe su añoranza de México: “los numerosos amigos, su cálida amistad, la fraternidad y la comprensión que siempre experimenté entre ustedes y que me lleva irresisti- blemente a regresar.” El MAM no sólo evoca su periodo europeo y ahonda por primera vez en su experiencia mexi- cana; también amplía la interpretación de 90 obras suyas encontrando afinidades con la de 20 fotógrafos activos en México en el mismo periodo y pertenecientes a nuestro acervo (Cartier-Bresson, Manuel y Lola Álvarez Bravo, Kati Horna, Lewis Hine, Emilio Amero, Armando Salas Portugal, Héctor García, entre otros).

Esta exposición ha beneficiado de la colaboración de la Embajada de Francia en México en su programa “Mano a mano. Miradas fotográficas cruzadas. Francia-México”

CYDT

NY. La tela Las mujeres de Argel de Picasso y la escultura El hombre que apunta de Giacometti baten  récords mundiales en "la subasta del siglo" de arte este lunes por la noche en Christie's de Nueva York, con precios estimados en 140 y 130 millones de dólares respectivamente.

Las Mujeres de Argel (Les femmes d'Alger), que representa una escena en un harén, fue pintado por Picasso en 1955, inspirado en una obra de Eugène Delacroix, las Mujeres de Argel en su apartamento. Christie's ha estimado su precio en torno a los 140 millones de dólares.

Y se vende en 179,365,000

La inédita subasta "Explorando el futuro a través del pasado" incluye una selecta colección de obras que van desde fines del siglo XIX hasta la actualidad y se espera que ronde en total más de 970 millones de dólares, algo jamás visto en la historia de remates de arte.

" Es la subasta del siglo", dijo Thierry Ehrmann, presidente de Artprice, líder mundial de información del mercado, al referirse a la velada organizada de Christie's. El récord actual de la pintura más cara vendida en el mundo lo tiene el tríptico Tres estudios de Lucian Freud, del pintor británico Francis Bacon, con un precio de 142.4 millones de dólares en noviembre de 2013.

De su lado, Alberto Giacometti tiene el récord para una escultura con El hombre que camina I, vendida por 104.3 millones de dólares en 2010.

ALBERTO GIACOMETTI (1901-1966)

L'HOMME AU DOIGT

Price Realized

$141,285,000

Provenance

Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York.

Fred H. and Betty P. Olsen, Guilford, CT (acquired from the above, 1953).

Sidney Janis Gallery, New York.

Acquired from the above by the present owner, 1 May 1970.

CHAIM SOUTINE (1893-1943)

LE BŒUF

Price Realized

$28,165,000 Set Currency

Provenance

Paul Guillaume, Paris (acquired from the artist, circa 1923).

Jos. Hessel, Paris.

Duncan MacDonald, London.

Eardley Knollys, London (by 1945).

The Lefevre Gallery (Alex. Reid & Lefevre, Ltd.), London.

Georges Frédéric Keller, New York and Davos (by 1952).

Anon. sale, Palais Galliéra, Paris, 1 December 1973, lot 50.

Modarco Advisory Service, Geneva (acquired at the above sale).

Knoedler-Modarco, S.A., New York (acquired from the above, November 1978).

Cosmondia S.A., Geneva (acquired from the above, October 1979).

Galerie Heyraud Bresson, Paris.

Daniel and Lorette Shefner, Quebec (acquired from the above, 3 June 1981).

Maurice Tuchman, New York and Esti Dunow, New York (acquired from Lorette Shefner, May 2004).

National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (acquired from the above, November 2004).

Acquired from the above by the present owners, May 2009.

Christie's espera pulverizar esas cifras con dos obras que, según su vicepresidente Loic Gouzer, aparecen muy raramente en 

el mercado, por lo que "no hay otra posibilidad de conseguirlas".

La venta total de la subasta del dia de hoy

AUCTION RESULTS

Sale Total including Buyer’s Premium: 705,858,000 (USD)

La revista Rueca 1941 y 1952

La revista Rueca 1941 y 1952

Revista de Poesía

 En el numero de verano de 1943

La portada y contra portada corre a cargo de Raúl Anguiano

La primera poesía de ese número corre a cargo de Alfonso Reyes

Recordando que en los años 30 surgió en Mexico la liga revolucionaria de escritores y pintores

Entre ellos se encontraban  los pintores y grabadores , Anguiano , Guerrero Galván , Leopoldo Méndez  asi como Luis Cardoza y Aragón

Edición en tres volúmenes de esta revista literaria que circuló veinte números entre 1941 y 1952 de forma irregular. La fundó Carmen Toscano y en ella escribieron María del Carmen Millán, Margarita Paz Paredes, Emma Saro, Martha Medrano y Helena Beristáin, entre un selecto grupo de mujeres intelectuales que sostuvieron la revista durante 11 años.

Provenance

Louis Fort, Paris. Alexandre and Odile Loewy; Sotheby's, Paris, 24 March 2010, lot 4. The authenticity of this work has been confirmed by Claude Picasso. The authenticity of this work has been confirmed by Maya Widmaier Picasso. The present work, painted in 1932 on the day of Picasso's fifty-first birthday, is dedicated to Louis Fort, a master printer and close friend. Picasso first met Fort through Ambroise Vollard, probably when the latter commissioned him to print the 1914 edition of Picasso's landmark Saltimbanques suite. The three continued to collaborate on projects until the Chef d'oeuvre inconnu series in 1931, shortly before Fort retired. Picasso continued their friendship and often stayed in Fort's house in the South of France. He purchased his printing press and remarked to a friend with great reverence: 'It's beautiful isn't it? ...Almost a museum piece...It used to belong to Louis Fort, the printer...I loved this press, so I bought it.' (D. Wye, A Picasso Portfolio: Prints from the Museum of Modern Art, exhib. cat., New York, Museum of Modern Art, 2010, p. 14). This watercolor was subsequently in the collection of Alexandre and Odile Loewy. Loewy was a well known and highly respected bookdealer of Hungarian descent who opened a shop in Paris in the late 1920s and quickly established a reputation for specializing in illustrated books. He would have undoubtedly moved in the same circles as Fort who at the time was the printer of choice for a range of artist's books and portfolios. The Loewys were passionate and discerning collectors, primarily of works on paper and sculpture, focusing on contemporary artists many of whom they would have known personally. The subject of the present watercolor is immediately recognizable as Marie-Thérèse Walter,

 Picasso's young model and lover, who he met in January 1927. She was seventeen and he was forty-five. Picasso was mesmerized by her statuesque figure, her fair beauty and her 'Greek' profile, in distinct contrast to the fashionable flapper silhouette and particularly to Picasso's own wife Olga Khokhlova who was a slim, dark-haired Russian ballet dancer. The young woman was charmed by the artist she had never heard of and later professed: 'He told me that I had saved his life, but I had no idea what he meant.' (J. Richardson et al, Picasso and Marie-Thérèse: l'amour fou, exhib. cat., Gagosian Gallery, New York: 2011, p. 13). What followed was an extraordinary period of creativity which decisively steered Picasso's aesthetic in new directions, re-establishing his deep interest in sculpture and forging a new pictorial language which remains among his most popular and sought-after, as exemplified by the celebrated paintings Le Rêve of January 1932 (Private Collection) and Femme nue, feuille et buste, 1932 (Private Collection). Guggenheim curator Robert Rosenblum asserted, 'there is no doubt that 1932 marks the peak of fever-pitch intensity and achievement, a year of rapturous masterpieces that reach a new and unfamiliar summit in both his painting and his sculpture' (Picasso and Portraiture, exhib. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1996, p. 361). All this was precipitated by Picasso's obsessive artistic and sexual relationship with Marie-Thérèse. Françoise Gilot's remarks on meeting her in Vallauris in 1949 go some way towards helping us understand her influence on the master's life and work: 'I found her fascinating to look at. I could see that she was certainly the woman who had inspired Pablo plastically more than any other. She had a very arresting face with a Grecian profile... She was very athletic; she had that high-color look of glowing good health one often sees in Swedish women. Her form was very sculptural, with a fullness of volume and a purity of line that gave her body and her face an extraordinary perfection' (F. Gilot and C. Lake, Life with Picasso, London: Virago Press, 1964, p. 224). Her appearances in Picasso's work were initially coded so as to hide her existence from Olga. Marie-Thérèse's influence was instantly palpable however in the increasingly sculptural aspect of his paintings. It would eventually manifest itself fully in the proliferation of images either of luxuriant sleeping nudes or strong active figures: nymphs emerging from the water; Daphne appearing from a thicket (Femme au jardin, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia); or monumental athletic figures disporting themselves on a beach. Marie-Thérèse loved to be outdoors and was an enthusiastic athlete. In contrast with the more complex compositions of the large oils from late 1931 and early 1932, the present work retains a restrained and a meditative quality infused with tenderness. It focuses on the ethereal aura around the girl's head and highlights the 'Greek' profile the artist so admired. The series of drawings of Marie-Thérèse can be traced to the early years of their courtship. Some were clearly drawn from life while others are likely to have been inspired by the photographs Picasso took of his lover. The simplicity of both color and composition in this watercolor are very rare indeed. Picasso purchased the Château de Boisgeloup in 1931 as a refuge from the bourgeois surroundings of his Paris apartment. It gave him space to work on a larger scale and importantly a secret haven to meet with Marie-Thérèse. Boisgeloup had enough space for the artist to set up a sculpture studio in the large stables, as well as Louis Fort's printing press which was installed in the adjacent space. Interestingly, four months after he painted Marie-Thérèse de Profil and dedicated it to Louis Fort, Picasso created a series of drypoint etchings entitled Sculpture, Tête de Marie-Thérèse. Their composition is closely linked to the present lot. This body of work clearly shows the evolution of his compositions from drawing to sculpture to printmaking and emphasizes the central role the young woman played in the process. Boisgeloup saw the creation of Picasso's celebrated series of monumental sculptural plaster busts of Marie-Thérèse of 1931, which are closely related to the present work. They are marked by a remarkable sense of presence as well as sexual energy. The volumes of his lover's head are built up with forms derived from sexual organs, a device often used in Neolithic and Oceanic art and something Picasso continued to employ most overtly in his paintings, for example in Le Rêve of 1932. That summer saw his first retrospective at Galerie Georges Petit, co-curated by Paul Rosenberg and Georges Wildenstein.

The great canvases of his young lover were shown alongside earlier work, making it impossible for his wife to ignore the scale of his fascination and obsession with his new muse. Olga seemingly never found out Marie-Thérèse's identity and whereabouts and there is no evidence that the two women ever met. Picasso's apprehension about the two women encountering each other is however obvious in a series of works which clearly depict them. Olga is cast as the violent aggressor, attacking the pliable and innocent figure of Marie-Thérèse. These images betray the artist's anxiety while at the same time perversely fantasize about an imagined dramatic spectacle of confrontation between the two women. Marie-Thérèse became pregnant in December 1934, which precipitated the artist filing for divorce from Olga. Their daughter Maya was born in the autumn of 1935, at the same time that he met Dora Maar, a photographer of genius and an artist who moved in the Surrealist circle. By the late 1930s, he was dividing his time between the two women, unable or unwilling to choose one companion. The serene, loving and peaceful mother of his child provided a calm and steadying influence on him, while Maar, complex, creative and worldly, invigorated his imagination and spurred on different creative impulses. Marie-Thérèse's allure remained. As he wrote to her in the summer of 1939 when she was installed at Royan and he was with Dora Maar in Antibes, 'I love you more every day. You mean everything to me. And I will sacrifice everything to you...Our love will last forever.' (J. Richardson, op. cit., p. 55).

EXPO CHICAGO/2015

EXPO CHICAGO, The International Exposition of Contemporary & Modern Art, is pleased to announce programming that has developed from a yearlong curatorial exchange between France and the United States in partnership with the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States and the Institut français.
 
In 2014, Chicago-based curators Naomi Beckwith (Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago) and Megha Ralapati (Hyde Park Art Center) traveled to France, and French curators Guillaume Désanges(independent curator and art critic) and Matthieu Poirier (independent art historian, critic and curator) traveled to Chicago for initial exploratory research trips organized by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy with the Institut français and EXPO CHICAGO. These cultural exchanges led to the formation of special projects including a residency embedded in Chicago’s South Side and a focused panel discussion on the architectural extension of abstract art since the 1960s, coinciding with EXPO CHICAGO, September 17–20, 2015. 
 
Rebuild Foundation: French Pavilion
 
Working with Rebuild Foundation, a nonprofit organization founded by artist Theaster Gates in 2010, Guillaume Désanges conceived the idea of the French Pavilion, a collaborative project supported by Rebuild and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy and the Institut français, in the vibrant context of Chicago’s South Side. The aim of the Pavilion is to create an innovative platform based at Rebuild for short-term residencies of artists, curators, historians, cultural planners, critics, architects and others. Désanges will be in residence at Rebuild April 1–20. 
 
/Dialogues Panel: “Leaving the Canvas: Abstract Art and Architecture”
 
Returning as a core program of EXPO CHICAGO, /Dialogues—panel discussions presented in partnership with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago—will feature a keynote panel on the state of abstract art conceived and moderated by curator Matthieu Poirier as part of the French-American Curatorial Exchange. In anticipation of the first Chicago Architecture Biennial, this conversation will feature Daniel Buren and Felice Varini, whose works both straddle boundaries of radical abstraction by spreading the latter into the real time and space experience of architectural sites. They will be joined by Nicolas Cattelain, whose personal collection focuses on art since the 1960s, and includes works that initiated this "environmental" logic by expanding abstract art to the architectural dimension, by artists of the seminal Perceptual, Kinetic and Optical art trends: ZERO, GRAV or Light & Space. 
 
Jackman Goldwasser Residency at Hyde Park Art Center
 
Representing Chicago in Paris, Hyde Park Art Center Residency and Special Projects Manager Megha Ralapati has selected Paris-based curator Muriel Enjalran to participate as part of the Jackman Goldwasser Residency, a platform for five artists and curators each year to take creative risks within their practice and expand their professional networks while living and working in Chicago. Enjalran's curatorial residency will consist of two research visits, one April 21–29 and a second during EXPO CHICAGO, and will continue the mission of the curatorial exchange. During these visits, Enjalran will expand her current work on artists’ changing relationship to public space as well as participate in a series of studio visits with Chicago artists, supported by the Institut français. 
 
EXPO CHICAGO/2015
EXPO CHICAGO returns to Navy Pier’s Festival Hall, September 17–20, 2015. Entering its fourth edition in 2015, EXPO CHICAGO presents artwork from 140 leading galleries around the world, including EXPOSURE—a section that affords younger galleries the opportunity to participate in a major international art fair. Attracting more than 32,500 visitors in 2014, EXPO CHICAGO continues to showcase the city as an international cultural destination, while highlighting the region’s contemporary arts community and collector base.