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 >
 


War on Taste

Jeff Koons' surreal imagination allows us to enjoy the world of whimsy, fun and 'bad 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.

One only has to look at Fait d'hiver to see that it clearly does not conform to received notions of good taste. This work formed part of Koons''Banality' series, with which he had his first major breakthrough, bursting onto the international stage with exquisitely made works including an array of sculptures showing teddy bears, pigs, London bobbies, angels, Michael Jackson and Bubbles. Fait d'hiver fits well with these bedfellows: this is a surreal and enlarged variant of the kind of thrift-store ornaments at which many people would usually turn up their noses. The sweet figures of the garlanded pig and the penguins are approaching the prostrated figure of a woman wearing a conspicuously provocative net top: the worlds of childhood whimsy and pornography appear to be colliding in a strange new way. There is some strange, unspoken narrative - these creatures from some alternative Wonderland appear to want to help the woman - the pig even has a cask around his neck, like a St. Bernard.

However, there is something emphatically static about the woman, who appears like a mannequin in this strange snow-strewn setting, adding to the sense of the sinister which the strange progression of animals already invokes.

The combination of the childish and the sexual in this sculpture is perfectly judged, perfectly aimed. Koons is hoping to release us from the burden of imposed notions of taste, to allow us to indulge our against-our-better-judgment notions of what art should and should not be: 'I was telling the Bourgeois to embrace the things that it likes, the things it responds to. For example, when you were a young child and you went to your grandmother's place and she had this little knickknack, that's inside you, and that's part of you. Embrace that' (Koons, quoted in Jeff Koons, exh.cat., San Francisco, 1992, p. 89).

Koons wants to bring his viewers to a state of pre-Lapsarian innocence and acceptance. We should not be ashamed of fun, we should not be limited in our ideas of taste, and most of all we should not be ashamed of sex. After all, it is sex that leads to reproduction. Koons' works are explicitly or implicitly concerned with this: 'Sexuality is the principal object of art. It's about the preservation of the species. Procreation is a priority. But this also has a spiritual aspect for me. It's about the way that we have children' (Koons, quoted in H. Bellet, 'Jeff Koons: "La sexualité, c'est l'objet principal de l'art"', in Le Monde, 30 August 2005, reproduced at www.lemonde.fr, trans. C.T. Downey.).

This would become an increasing concern partly because of Fait d'hiver. When he had been researching ideas for his sculptures, Koons had found an image of a woman in a net top in Der Stern magazine. This became the inspiration for the figure of the woman in Fait d'hiver. Later, Koons discovered that this woman was the European porn star Ilona Staller, also known as La Cicciolina. He collaborated with her on a later work, and the pair gradually became a couple, as was so famously demonstrated and documented in the subsequent Made in Heaven.

Sexuality would remain a central theme in Koons' works, whether overtly or discreetly. This is evident even in his comments about Diamond (Blue). Koons explained that it forms a part of the 'Celebration' series: 'It's a group based on the calendar of holidays: vacations, birthdays, Valentine's Day, Easter. The diamond is seven feet wide. The stone is attached to a ring by four prongs. For me, the prongs are like sperm attacking an ovum. The facets of the diamond are the egg in the process of being fertilized' (Koons, quoted in ibid.). This, then, is a giant, Disney-scaled engagement ring, and deliberately evokes human sexuality in form as well as its context.

Diamond (Blue) takes bling-bling to fun, ecstatic new levels. Its sparkle, though, is only skin deep. The highly polished chromium surface of this steel object reflects light, but does not refract it in the same way as a real diamond. Instead, this is what an imaginary blue diamond should be - it is an almost comic-strip archetype, a stereotype, a cliché that has burst into monumental existence in our world, speaking of wealth and luxury and awe in an open, sincere and deliberately uncritical manner.

This deliberately child-like re-imagining of the diamond reflects some autobiographical content: when the 'Celebration' series began, Koons was embroiled in a high-profile custody battle over his son Ludwig with La Cicciolina, by then his ex-wife. Discussing the 'Celebration' series, with its Tigger-like bounding optimism, Koons explained that the works were intended, 'to communicate with my son… to tell him I was thinking about him all the time' (Koons, quoted in A. Gingeras, 'The Comeback of Sincerity: Jeff Koons 1995-2001', pp. 79-88, Jeff Koons, exh. cat., Bregenz, 2001, p. 86).

Diamond (Blue), though dating from over a decade after the 'Celebration' series' inception is still characterised by Koons' love, his ceaseless optimism, and his desire to present the world to his viewers - and his son - with childish enthusiasm. This vision, bringing a child's perspective to the world of grown-ups, was achieved only through a very adult single-mindedness: Koons' well-documented perfectionism resulted in his dropping almost entirely off art-world maps while, with an ever-increasing legion of assistants and fabricators, he sought out new technologies and techniques in order to gain the perfect finish he desired for the 'Celebration' sculptures.

It is in part for this reason that, over ten years later, the series continues. Diamond (Blue) is part of the finished result: Koons pushed the capabilities of his medium to new extremes - and was rumoured to have pushed himself towards financial ruin - in order to capture to perfection not a glimpse or fragment of reality, but of the ideal, of a world of dreams and exuberant supernatural perfection.