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Walking Into History
It was a thrilling victory, but a narrow one. Once the currency conversions were worked out, it was clear that Alberto Giacometti’s L’homme qui marche I (Walking Man I), offered at Sotheby’s in London on Feb. 3, had made history, fetching £65 million, or $104.3 million, to claim the title of “most expensive artwork sold at auction” from Picasso’s Garçon à la pipe (Boy With a Pipe), a 1905 painting that fetched $104.1 million at Sotheby’s New York in 2004.
Read MoreFrom the Editor: Wings of Eagles
Take a look at the forbidding Aztec warrior at left, encased in an eagle suit, and then look at the Roman bronze eagle on page 70. Not exactly birds of a feather, art-historically and stylistically speaking. But according to the curators at the Getty Villa, they had a lot in common, at least in the minds of the 16th-century Aztecs and Spaniards who are the subjects of a fascinating exhibition that opens there late this month.
Read MorePassage to India
A long lunch is ending on a short autumn day, as late sun streaks the dining room of London’s Chelsea Arts Club, where two monuments of Indian art are catching up on a decade spent apart. Syed Haider Raza, 88, and Maqbool Fida Husain, 94, go back 60 years to 1940s Bombay, where they pioneered modern painting in India. Their most recent works are hanging together again, first at a preview at Art London and then at a major exhibition in December, and the occasion is worthy of a reunion.
Read MoreMarket: The State of the Fairs
By: Sallie Brady It’s a new year: Time to adjust the fair calendar. If you live in New York, you’ll find yourself making fewer trips to the Park Avenue Armory. A dramatic rent increase continues to claim the lives of smaller specialty fairs such as Sanford Smith’s Works on Paper, which usually runs in February,…
Read MoreMarket: Eastern Hospitality
By: Sheila Gibson Stoodley Last year at this time, New York’s Asian art community was scrambling to deal with the cancellation of the International Asian Art Fair, which had become an Asia Week draw to match the auctions at the major houses. But so much is happening during 2010’s Asia Week, which takes place March…
Read MoreMarket: Garden of Delights
By: Sheila Gibson Stoodley The European Fine Art Fair always opens in Maastricht, Netherlands, just weeks before the country’s famous tulips do. The 2010 edition, which takes place March 12–21, shows how the fair’s stewards are like master gardeners, always tending their creation to keep it fresh and vibrant. Hammer Galleries of New York, first-timers…
Read MoreRecord-Breaker: The Vivid Pink
By: Sheila Gibson Stoodley It’s known as The Vivid Pink, but this five-carat pink diamond, which was unearthed as a 10-carat rough stone in a South African mine in 2006 and was cut by the London jewelry firm Graff, is formally known as a Fancy Vivid Pink potentially flawless diamond. That’s jeweler-speak for “My, oh…
Read MoreBooks: My Type
Atypographical design is the ultimate “art that conceals itself.” That means you’re not supposed to notice the font you’re reading, or rather, that you’re supposed to appreciate it only subliminally, without being distracted from the substance of the text. Unless, of course, you’re a typography geek. In that case, you definitely notice.
Read MoreSymphonies of Color
Seminal advances in abstract art aren’t usually thought of as coming from Americans, especially in the early modernist period, when the avant-garde of Europe was busy revolutionizing the visual vocabulary that had held sway for hundreds of years. Nonetheless, in 1913 Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Morgan Russell, two young American expatriates in Paris, created a technique and style they called Synchromism, which represents a major step in the direction of nonobjective painting.
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