Warhol’s Liz
Painted at the pinnacle of Elizabeth Taylor’s fame, Liz is a unique variation from a group of thirteen colourful portraits of the actress produced in the fall of 1963. Rarely viewed in public, the present Liz is an outstanding example of Warhol’s genius for colour and is closely related to his Marilyn ‘flavours’ paintings executed in the previous year – which were named after their vibrant candy colours. Full article >

 Family Album
Lucian Freud paints those with whom he is familiar, with whom he has relationships -- lovers, friends and family -- and this fills his pictures with their unique, heady atmosphere, their meaty existentialism, their searing insights into the lives and emotions of the subjects and the artist himself. Lucian Freud’s portrait of his daughter Ib and her husband is one of intimacy and familial insight. Full article >

War on Taste
Jeff Koons is a great paradox, using humorous means for serious ends, trying to improve the quality of life of his viewers. This is edification through entertainment. Koons is waging a one-man war on taste; on the restrictions that he feels it imposes upon our lives. And Fait d’hiver, executed in 1988, and Diamond (Blue), from 2005-06, are clearly weapons used in this assault. Full article >

Tragedy, Ecstasy, Doom: The Art of Mark Rothko
In the early 1950s Rothko first made his great breakthrough to this way of painting and first established this Dionysian/Apollonian dialogue of grid-like coloured rectangles. ‘This kind of design may look simple,’ he said, ‘but it usually takes me many hours to get the proportions and colours just right. Everything has to lock together. I guess I am pretty much a plumber at heart’. Full article >
 Royalty, heroes and the streets
These were the themes that Basquiat stated lay at the centre of his art, and they are all clearly present in Untitled (Black Figure) and Sugar Ray Robinson. Painted in 1982, the year that Basquiat claimed he created his ‘best paintings ever’, these pictures combine the artist’s expressive, expressionistic brushwork, a legacy from his days as one half of the graffiti partnership SAMO only a couple of years earlier. Full article >

The Water Gazer
In 1977, the year in which de Kooning created Untitled XXIII, the artist’s favourite pastime was to cycle from his house in the Springs, Long Island, out to Louse Point. There, he would spend an hour or so silently contemplating the surface of the sea. ‘There is something about being in touch with the sea that makes me feel good, he told his friend Harold Rosenberg. 'That's where most my paintings come from even when I made them in New York.’ Full article >

The vivacious & the violent
At certain key moments in an artist’s career, a confluence of forces can come together to breathe special life into their art. Such salient moments of artistic vitality are aptly illustrated in three important Abstract Expressionist paintings: Thaw by Lee Krasner; Atlantic Side by Joan Mitchell; and Untitled XVII by Willem de Kooning. Full article >

The light of day
A diverse array of masterworks created in a variety of media are the highlights in the Post-War & Contemporary Art morning and afternoon sales. Featured are A Figure 4 on an Elegy by Robert Motherwell; Late September by Philip Guston; Woman in Landscape by Willem de Kooning; and Self-portrait (Fright Wig) by Andy Warhol. Full article >
 


Family Album

Lucian Freud's portrait of his daughter Ib and her husband is one of intimacy and familial insight

Lucian Freud paints those with whom he is familiar, with whom he has relationships -- lovers, friends and family -- and this fills his pictures with their unique, heady atmosphere, their meaty existentialism, their searing insights into the lives and emotions of the subjects and the artist himself.

As Freud himself has explained, 'If you don't know them, it can only be like a travel book' (Freud, quoted in L. Gowing, Lucian Freud, London, 1982, p. 56). His paintings feed on a sense of physical and emotional presence. The relationship is alive, and captured in thick oils before us, his painterly abandon resulting in a material manifestation, lending emotions an impastoed physicality.

Intimacy and insight are clearly present in Ib and her Husband, painted in 1992, a portrait of Freud's daughter Isobel Boyt. She is shown in her husband's arms, sprawled on a grim bed in a paint-spattered corner of the studio. The couple appear to be asleep.

The viewer is intruding upon a scene of the utmost privacy. Looking down from above, the viewer is placed in Ib's father's shoes, conferring upon us a strange perspective as we are brought into the family group. While the couple appear restful and content, there is nonetheless a mysterious tension to the painting. Three, after all, is a crowd-there is some voyeuristic and proprietary aspect that adds a dimension of mild discomfort, making Ib and her Husband all the more unconventional and fascinating.

The rigours and strain of sitting for Freud - as well as the benefits that outweigh them - have been hinted at by Ib herself: 'Each time I did a picture with him I swore I'd never do it again, but I then do because it is a way of having a relationship with my dad' (quoted in R. Brooks,'Naked portrait of life as daughter of Lucian Freud', The Sunday Times, 21 March 2004).

Freud gives his all to his paintings, and despite the emotional intensity that sometimes accompanies sitting with him for members of his immediate family, their presence in the inner sanctum of the artist, the spoiling attentions that he often lavishes upon his subjects and the chance to be with him all provide ample compensation.

It is for this reason that members of his family are repeatedly subjects in his paintings - Ib has featured in a large number of her father's paintings over the past four decades. She was already shown as a child in Large Interior, Paddington, painted in 1968-69, where she was shown lying on the floor by a plant.

Close-up views that give a sense of intense proximity have also featured, as well as a later oil showing her while she is reading. Freud has painted many members of his family, including Ib's daughters - indeed, the fact that Alice, her second daughter, was born around the time that Ib and her Husband was painted perhaps adds a new context to both the possessive perspective of the painter, and the protective hold of the husband on the bed, making this all the more personal a glimpse into the world of Freud himself.

Article provided by Christie's Post-War & Contemporary Art Department, New York.