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 >
 


Royalty, heroes and the streets

Two major paintings embody Basquiat's central themes

'Royalty, heroes and the streets' (Basquiat, quoted in H. Geldzahler, 'Art: from Subways to Soho: Jean Michel Basquiat', pp. 18-26, Jean Michel Basquiat: Gemälde und Arbeiten auf Papier, exh.cat.,Vienna, 1999, p. 23).

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. Both 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, with vividly scrawled figures from his unique pantheon of black heroes.

These black heroes, be they named or anonymous, always feature a degree of self-portraiture; they are substitutes for Basquiat who is elated by their successes and shares their trials and turmoils. In Untitled (Black Figure), the man is a stand-in for the artist as he looks over a scene of strange urban chaos. The raw and pulsing energy of Basquiat's paintings, derived from the street and from his street paintings, is brought to the fore in this picture: its scale resembles that of a ramshackle wall.

Basquiat has scrawled innumerable arcane symbols across this textured, highly-worked surface, giving the sense of a wall transposed directly from some gritty urban environment. This 'wall' is filled with ominous writings, like the product of a madman. Numbers, words, games, shapes, scales, all combine to create an atmosphere that is made all the more unfamiliar by being so close to the familiar, as though written out in some frantic code.

The black figure watches over this scene, which is spread before him, and above his head is a vast encircling halo, marking him out as a hero looking out upon the chaos of contemporary city existence.

Sugar Ray Robinson shows the eponymous boxer presented as a vividly scrawled totem, a new god for a more secular, urban age, filled with his own energy as well as the energy of the painter's own exertions.

Robinson was a hero, an idol for a young African-American struggling in a white-dominated world, admired as the greatest boxer even by Muhammad Ali. And yet, in a reflection of Basquiat's own anxieties about the precariousness of his success as an artist in the conservative art world and prefiguring his own eventual demise, Sugar Ray Robinson is also presented as a martyr - he would become the victim of his own success, spending far too much, seduced by the highlife, frittering away millions of dollars on a fabled thousand suits and a constant entourage of beautiful female admirers.

Sugar Ray Robinson captures the artist's admiration - and his anxiety. The electric, hunched figure of the boxer is defiant yet embattled, looming, yet with the weight of the world on his shoulders like a modern-day Atlas.

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