Mapplethorpe Prices Rising

Above: Self-portrait in drag, approx $52,000. USD


Robert Mapplethorpe – Beauty and the devil are one and the same [Jun 07]

The work of Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989) has something of a scandalous reputation, the photographer shocking puritanic Americans by putting sexuality at the heart of his artistic universe. He became a photographer in the 1970s, an era of sexual liberation soon to be brought to a halt by the rise of the AIDS epidemic. Mapplethorpe never ceased extolling the human body in meticulous compositions often evoking the cool and strict aesthetic of neoclassical painting.


Above: Another Self-portrait by Mapplethorpe

In addition to his photographs celebrating nudity, he took portraits of individuals in his circle, some of them anonymous and some celebrities (Andy Warhol, Richard Gere, Grace Jones, Patti Smith, etc), self portraits and photographs of flowers which assume an erotic dimension under his lens. The subject is often crude but the setting always ‘clean’, head-on, refined, even sterile. The artist favoured black and white and an aesthetic close to fashion photography, which is proving increasingly popular with collectors.


Above: Self-portrait with knife


Above: Mapplethorpe's portrait of Lisa Lyon with Snake

After a moribund period, Robert Mapplethorpe’s prices have risen by more than 102% since 2004, the year in which he achieved, for the first time, a price at auction in excess of $100,000. The work in question? A photograph of a Zantedeschia or arum lily measuring 61 x 50.8 cm, unique in this format, sold for $210,000 by Christie’s NY (title: Calla Lily, 15 Oct. 2004), making this flower portrait one of the most sought-after of the artist’s subjects. Sought after to the point that a Calla Lily print of a series of ten, made more attractive by the Margaret W. Weston provenance, exploded its estimated range of $40,000 - 60,000, selling for $140,000 on 25 April (1988, 48.7 x 49.1 cm, Sotheby’s NY)!


Above: One of Mapplethorpe's Most Famous Subjects; The Calla Lily


Above: Mapplethorpe's portrait of Warhol which sold at Christie's for $643,200.00 USD


This 2004 result was to be the first of a successful series: since then his photographs have seen 8 sales in excess of $100,000, including an outright record of more than $500,000 for a portrait of Andy Warhol! The auction of this monumental portrait of the King of Pop Art for $560,000 (106.7 x 106.7 cm, Christie’s NY) in October 2006 has contributed to firmer Mapplethorpe’s prices. Five months earlier in the same auction house, a large Warhol portrait in a 10-print series changed hands for only a tenth of this amount at $50,000 (103.5 x 103.5 cm).



Above chart from Art Price

The price of a work on the same subject varies according to the type of print (gelatin silver, dye-transfer, photo-engraving, etc), the date it was printed, its quality and size. Generally a work is printed in various numbered formats and the shorter the print series, the more auction prices are likely to rise given the rarity value. Certain formats are limited to one print and are thus all the more sought after. For example, the Leaf photograph, a very pure work, achieved its highest price at auction with a unique, large format print (94x78.5 cm) selling for $35,000 (€28,900) on 10 October 2005 at Christie's NY. During the same auction, the same subject in a smaller format, one of a 7-print series, sold for $5,000 less than its larger-scale version.


Above: One of Mapplethorpe's polaroids of Paul Mogensen

For a budget below $10,000, the market offers a wide range of works: nearly 70% of lots do not exceed this threshold. Numerous Polaroids and gelatin silver prints (more modestly priced than the Dye-transfers) are affordable at around $1,000 to $10,000. The Polaroids mark the origins of the Mapplethorpe photographic adventure before the acquisition of his first wide-angle camera during the 1970s. Despite the small dimensions (approximately 9.5 x 7 cm in most cases) the Polaroid has one quality which is sought after by collectors: it is a unique work. Mapplethorpe took numerous Polaroid self portraits during the 1970s for which you'll need between $2,000 and $4,000 on average such as the one sold on 8 September last at Christie’s NY for $2,800. As for larger-sized prints priced at less than $10,000, we could mention, for example, the Poppy photograph taken in 1982 (38.5 x 38.5 cm, Gelatin silver print) on which the hammer came down at £4,000 (under $8,000) on 31 May last at the Christie’s London auction. Another possible acquisition, the rare portfolios: on 26 April last, Season in Hell comprising 8 test-prints (each edited as a series of 40 prints) was sold for $6,500, an average acquisition cost of $812.5 per photograph (26 April 2007, Sotheby’s NY).

Can't afford a Mapplethorpe print? Perhaps some of the newer items on the market with his images will appeal to you.

Below: These limited edition plates & cups are available right now at Colette.





You can read more and see more Robert Mapplethorpe by clicking here.

“Comic Abstraction: Image-Breaking, Image-Making”

Art Review | 'Comic Abstraction'
Visions That Flaunt Cartoon Pedigrees By Roberta Smith
(reprinted from the NY Times with some additional images)

The trouble with too many museum theme shows is that they begin with a viable idea and, through lack of institutional commitment, curatorial imagination or old-fashioned connoisseurship, fail to fulfill their promise.

This untitled 1990 painting below by Michel Majerus is among the works in MoMA's new exhibition:


So it is with “Comic Abstraction: Image-Breaking, Image-Making,” a sometimes perky but inoffensive and ultimately dispiriting exhibition of recent artistic endeavor at the Museum of Modern Art. Organized by Roxana Marcoci, curator of the department of photography, it brings together nearly 30 works in drawing, painting, sculpture, video and installation made over the last 16 years by 13 artists who borrow one way or another from comic strips, cartoons and animation.

The motor behind this show is a big idea: the lively and essential contamination of abstract art by popular culture that began with the Surrealists but has greatly expanded during the last 30 years. It could be argued that most new abstract art since the late 1970s has had comic aspects. After all, ironic self-awareness is one way that abstraction has dealt with the resurgence of representation and the splintering of the modernist trajectory.

A wall text outside the show’s first gallery lies in wait. It announces that the works on hand use the conventions of comics “not to withdraw from reality but to address perplexing questions about war and global conflicts, the loss of innocence and racial stereotyping.”


But in the end the works here are mostly cute, neat and perfectly pleasant, implying a view of contemporary art as mildly titillating but basically toothless entertainment. Thankfully there are some exceptions. For example, “Crazy Conductor,” a 1993 drawing on chalkboard by Gary Simmons, conveys the nasty racial caricature implicit in many animated cartoons. (Mr. Simmons’s 1996 “boom,” however, is simply a big, beautiful explosion — too close to its source, merely lifted without comment.)



Four paintings by Ellen Gallagher skewer Minimalism in general and Agnes Martin in particular with expanses of bug eyes and blubbery lips. At once gorgeous and barbed, these works are the most sustained and substantial efforts here, but their motifs are most potent in the smallest and earliest canvas; the others are elegant dilutions.



Sue Williams’s all-over paintings look similarly benign from a distance. Draw near, and you discover that her attenuated Pollock-like patterns roil with suggestions of body parts, bodily fluids and sexual couplings. Whether this payoff compensates for the emaciated effect of the work as a whole is debatable; it certainly lacks the punch of Ms. Williams’s nonabstract, savagely comical early feminist paintings, one of which appears in the catalog.

But otherwise too much here operates in some kind of vacuum, far from the madding crowd of ambition, recent art history, life or a deep engagement with the primary vehicle of visual experience, which is form. In little of it can you sense the force of a first-rate, profoundly engaged, here-for-the-duration artistic sensibility. This is because too many of the selections are early, sometimes promising work that never amounted to much, or are transitional, anomalous, derivative or tangential to the show’s theme.

In the case of Inka Essenhigh, Arturo Herrera and Julie Mehretu you have early works of limited promise that has so far not been fulfilled. In the case of Franz West and Polly Apfelbaum you have works that are charmingly whimsical but irrelevant to the show’s focus. Mr. West’s four small plaster and iron sculptures, called adaptives, are available for handling. Fun. “Blossom,” Ms. Apfelbaum’s stained-velvet Process Art floor piece, is named for one of the superheroic cartoon Powerpuff Girls and can therefore be construed as feminist. So what?



Like Ms. Gallagher, Philippe Parreno excerpts and repeats, but uncompellingly. His helium-filled Mylar “Speech Bubbles” from 1997 hover overhead, a dour, derivative meld of Claes Oldenburg and Yayoi Kusama plus Andy Warhol’s silver pillows. The caption rationalizes: They were once used as signs by protesters who wrote slogans on them.



Speech balloons also figure in Rivane Neuenschwander’s altered comic book pages, where they are blanked out with white (or occasionally blue) and the rest of the panels are bright monochrome colors. They provide some welcome if relatively pure visual intensity, regardless of what the label says about the cultural significance of the comics used. They might be better bigger, but then that would invite comparisons with Roy Lichtenstein, early Warhol and John Wesley.



Which is the problem with the efforts of Michel Majerus, a German artist who died in a plane crash at the age of 35 in 2002, especially if you factor in early Peter Saul and Albert Oehlen. A series of small canvases from 1996 have their comic moments, the best being a strange cross between an eye and an explosion. But the painterly fragments of images, words and letters of “Eggsplosion,” from 2006, could have been made in the 1950s or early ’60s. Best known for large, scrappy painted installations, Mr. Majerus clearly had talent, but not the time to find himself.



The megastar Takashi Murakami is represented by two paintings that feel like excerpts of his own work. “Cream” and “Milk” (seen below) are sparse, mural-size cartoon renderings of flung liquids that function best as backdrops to anime-inspired male and female figures that are present only in the catalog. Their markedly unabstract bodies are shown expelling the liquids implied by the paintings’ titles.


More comic installation than comic abstraction, Juan Muñoz’s “Waiting for Jerry” consists of the soundtrack of a “Tom and Jerry” animated cartoon: a cacophony of inferred chases, sneaks, skids, crashes, plops and general hysteria. Emanating from a lighted mouse hole cut in the old-fashioned molding of a small, dark room, it echoes throughout the show. The work is a refreshing anomaly, given the usual heavy-handed humanism of Mr. Muñoz’s figurative sculpture, but notice what engages you. I’ll bet it’s the appropriated soundtrack. Wonderfully complex, it bounces back and forth between descriptive and abstract, and represents the kind of concentrated thought and work that is missing from too much of this show.



“Comic Abstraction” would have benefited from more space, nerve and historical awareness. The catalog establishes no context for the origins of the comic in art, which gained speed with Pop Art. Also worth mentioning if not including in the show itself are artists like Mr. Oehlen and Carroll Dunham, both of whom are younger than Mr. West.

Especially pertinent is Mr. Dunham, whose automatist, Disneyesque excursions into the hormonal sublime, made in the 1980s and early ’90s, may be our moment’s richest, most disturbing, most perplexingly real works of comic abstraction. The efforts of several artists in this exhibition are nearly unimaginable without Mr. Dunham’s precedent.

Below is an example of Carroll Dunham's work:


Other artists whose work would have vitalized this show include Lucy McKenzie, Pipilotti Rist, Amy Sillman, Gary Hume, Josh Smith, Thomas Nozkowski, Chris Ofili, Monique Prieto, Joanne Greenbaum and, finally, Udomsak Krisanamis, whose work from the mid-’90s has a stand-alone power, even if it has yet to develop.

Beyond the big solo retrospectives that MoMA handles with expert aplomb, too many of the museum’s recent exhibitions have a veneer of political piousness that limits and shortchanges everything: art, artists, the public and the institution itself. In MoMA’s efforts to go beyond a formalist, linear view of modernism, the museum often seems to confuse sincere political intent with genuine, groundbreaking artistic quality.

No wonder it ends up showing shallow, label-dependent art rather than work that offers deeper, more contradictory encounters. Art becomes a kind of one-liner. The viewer looks a little, reads a label, says “I get it” and shuffles on. If you are new to art, you don’t know what you are missing. If you aren’t, you feel had.

“Comic Abstraction: Image-Breaking, Image-Making” continues through June 11 at the Museum of Modern Art, (212) 708-9400.

The "Eyes" Have It. Paintings by Sas Christian Compared To The Keane's Big Eyed Paintings

I know that like fashion, art trends tend to repeat every few decades.
There's certainly no better example than the recent and growing resurgence of interest in Big-Eyed Waif paintings. In the 60s and 70s Margaret D.H. Keane's paintings were all the rage. In case you think I meant Walter Keane's paintings, I didn't. You see, although they were signed as Walter, and sold as his, the paintings were actually done by his wife Margaret. Not wanting to relinquish the rights to the artwork, Walter and Margaret's divorce proceeding went all the way to Federal court. At the hearing, Margaret painted in front of the judge to prove her point. In 1965, the courts sided with her, enabling her to paint under her own name.

You may think of these big-eyed paintings as 'retro' or 'kitsch' but considering original oil paintings of Keane's go for upwards of $25,000, that's a pretty penny to pay for "novelty" art. But what caught my attention, in addition to the publication of an art book celebrating this genre called Big-Eyed Masters, is another newly published book of works by contemporary artist Sas Christian.


   
 cover of Sas Christian's Looking In

 Christian's paintings are uncannily similar in both subject matter and composition to Keane's but she insists that her paintings are not inspired this artist. Instead she says- and I quote from her own biography, "She was never inspired by one person in particular, however now the artists she most admires would be Bouguereau, Tamara De Lempicka, Mark Ryden... Sas draws inspiration from everyday occurrences, movies and music." It's hard to believe Christian is not aware of her works' likeness to Keane's. Perhaps her more macabre treatment of the subject matter is why she likens herself to Ryden.

Some of her paintings incorporate blood or slightly sadist sexual imagery that was absent from Keane's sad and teary paintings. It is also possible that because of Christian's youth and venue (she was born in London) she's not aware of Keane's work. But even more odd to me is the lack of parallels drawn between the two by her publishers and other art critics. Both artists work is very soulful with the subject directly confronting the viewer. Neither paints 'happy' portraits and both paint youthful subjects, often with pets. There's even an asian flavor to some of each artists works. Granted Christian's work is less painterly and more illustrative as well as more 'realistic' if I can use that term loosely. Clearly both artists are talented and prolific and their work has a certain eerie appeal. But it's hard to deny the similarities.

Below are some examples of Keane's work from over 30 years ago side by side with Christian's present work.

  
Above: More of Margaret Keane's work  
Above: More of Sas Christian's work 

As much as I enjoy Christian's work, it looks pretty derivative to me.
All those in favor say "eye".

Lowbrow Artists do Highbrow Charity

Thanks to Corey Helford Gallery of Culver City, today's most respected and popular "Lowbrow" Artists (see previous article on lowbrow art here) have culled together a fabulous show benefiting The Alliance For Children's Rights that takes vintage paint-by-number art and transforms it into unique pieces of low brow art.

Granted, this is not the first gallery to promote and exhibit the idea of paintng over vintage art. To be fair, The Wurst Gallery did this years ago, only not restricted to paint by number art.

With fun original creations by such well known popular artists as Mark Ryden, Shepard Fairey, Joe Ledbetter, Jeff Soto, Camille Rose Garcia and Gary Basemen, just to name a few, these paintings are available for auction on ebay with 100% of the proceeds benefiting The Alliance For Children's rights (see their mission statement below).

Available for purchase on ebay, the auctions ending on Friday, Feb 16th and prices are already rising rapidly, so you'd better get your bids in now.

Here are just a few wonderful examples of the original vintage PBN and the finished pieces. Click on images to enlarge:

Mark Ryden:

Gary Baseman:

Ana Bagoyen:

Shepard Fairey:

Jeff Soto:


The bids are moving up quickly on these works already, so if you'd like to see many more (and you should) be sure to visit Corey Helford Gallery of Culver City or check out the auctions on ebay.


above: Corey Helford Gallery

Nonprofit's Mission Statement
The Alliance for Children's Rights is protecting the rights and futures of abused and impoverished children throughout Los Angeles County, in hopes of creating a world in which all children are able to have a safe and permanent family, access to quality health care, a quality education, and all of the support and services they so rightfully deserve.

Meet David Tomb. His Artwork Is The Bomb.

above: Still Lives in Living Color, 59" x 58.75" Oil paint, alkyd glaze, pastel on canvas, 1988

Looking to collect work from the next great artist? Here's one.
A California native and resident, Tomb (which DOES rhyme with Bomb) has mounted solo exhibitions at the Fresno Art Museum, and the Artists’ Forum, among others. He has participated in group shows throughout the United States. His work is included in the collections of the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, the Fresno Art Museum, and the Oakland Museum.

Is LowBrow Art Just A Fad?

Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, defines lowbrow art as follows:

Lowbrow, or lowbrow art, describes an underground visual art movement that arose in the Los Angeles, California, area in the late 1970s. Lowbrow is a widespread populist art movement with origins in the underground comix world, punk music, hot-rod street culture, and other California subcultures. It is also often known by the name pop surrealism.

The majority of lowbrow artworks are paintings; there are also toys (vinyl and plush), and sculptures.

The definition goes on to discuss the first artists to create what came to be known as 'lowbrow' art, magazines in the genre (the most famous being Juxtapoz, whose editor, Robert Williams, claims to have coined the name "lowbrow"), and 'alternative' galleries that carry these types of works.

Just so you know to whose work I am referring, some of the most well-known of these artists are: SHAG (Josh Agle), Mark Ryden, Marion Peck, Todd Schorr, Elizabeth McGrath, Tim Biskup, Gary Baseman, Gary Taxali, Anthony Ausgang, Camille Rose Garcia, Joe Sorren, Tara McPherson and Raymond Pettibon.

The Wikipedia definition goes on to historically compare the Lowbrow artists to the Dadaists.

This is where they lose me.

Now, I really enjoy looking at their works, even own a few of their books. I am entertained by their not so subtle interpretation of pop culture and their 'jabs' at historic art. I even enjoy seeing how 'creepy and offensive' some of them can get.

But since when are illustrations, comic books, tattoos and graffiti considered an art movement?

Art, yes. Movement? Nah.

Comparing Shag to Marcel Duchamp makes me cringe.


Okay, so the first time Marcel Duchamp penned R. Mutt on a urinal and called it a "Fountain", the art world was aghast at what he considered art. But he was the first (the first) to take an everyday object and ascribe some ironic meaning to it.

Jeff Koons, a well respected contemporary artist, merely did the same years later and his work has recently been rapidly declining in value. You may recall the white porcelain puppy planters or blue balloon dogs on plates that appear in online auctions weekly.



Even Nara and Murakami (two asian artists whose work treads the fine line between 'fine art' and lowbrow' art and are referred to as Neo-Pop Japanese art) have also declined in value.



Just take a look at the chart below. It is January 2007 data from artprice on auction and sales values in the art world.



So, as I was saying before I got off on an art tangent there, Did Shag have the same impact on society that Marcel Duchamp did?

To compare some fun retro cocktail party scenes or cute tiki illustrations and altoid tins to Man Ray's Photographs or Duchamp's urinal is not only a stretch, it's a disservice to the fine art world.

Nowhere in the Wikipedia definition do the words goth, creepy, alien, retro or macabre appear, yet you can ascribe most of these adjectives to the work in this genre.

Yes, I'd pay a lot of money for an original Francis Bacon or Lucien Freud painting (similarly described as macabre, goth, creepy...even disturbing) but probably not for an original Mark Ryden. And that's not because Mr. Bacon is dead and Mr. Ryden is alive and kicking, but because, to me, Francis Bacon is an artist and Mark Ryden is an illustrator. Albeit an excellent illustrator. The difference between their work however is not merely because of the style or medium in which they work, but it's because of their originality, conceptuality and the emotion evoked by their works. Bacon's work is open to interpretation, multiple manifestations of theory and conjecture, whereas what you see is what you get with Ryden's work. One can look at Bacon's paintings and see something different every time, not so much with Ryden's.



Please understand me, I believe the aforementioned lowbrow artists are talented. I think their works are amusing at the very least and valid expressions of culture and society at the very most. I'd happily buy Shag's cocktail party invites to mail out or wear a Nara T-shirt. I hope these artists make money. I believe they work hard and have great talent. But is it art or a fad?

Over 15 years ago, I hired Gary Baseman to do some illustrations for a piece for Dayrunner (the organizational agenda company) and he did an excellent job. I picked him after looking through what was then the bible for art directors to find illustrators (the blackbook). But would I have considered going to a show of his works? Probably not.

I do believe that those people who plopped down 2500$ for a Shag lithograph 5 years ago, couldn't sell it on ebay for even half that today.

To whom exactly does low-brow art appeal? It's not like you can equate lowbrow with low cost anymore. Many of these artists sell pieces of their work for thousands of dollars. But will the value of these pieces increase?

According to market indeces and art world trends, the answer is no. I am not privy to Juxtapoz Magazines' circulation numbers or Shag's personal income, but I bet it's not climbing steadily.

So, before you 'invest' in a piece of lowbrow art, I have two words for you: Patrick Nagel.