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 >
 


The vivacious & the violent

Three important Abstract Expressionist works from key points in the artists' oeuvres

By Allison Unruh

At certain key moments in an artist's career, a confluence of forces - dramatic personal change or upheaval, a thirst for fearless experimentation, a desire to outdo oneself or others - can come together to breathe special life into their art. Such salient moments of artistic vitality are aptly illustrated in a trio of important Abstract Expressionist paintings in November's sale in New York.

The title of Lee Krasner's 1957 composition, Thaw, refers to early spring, when the clutch of winter's icy chill loses its hold, making growth possible. Its painterly rhythms suggest the process of burgeoning, and its imagery evokes themes of fertility through oval forms that variously suggest seeds, eggs and feminine curves. Krasner executed the painting in the year following her husband Jackson Pollock's death in a car crash.

In the wake of this tragic loss, anguish gave way to a surge of creative energy. As Krasner recalled of another painting of this period, 'It looks like such a happy painting - I can remember that when I was painting it I almost didn't see it, because tears were literally pouring down.'

The theme of growth was especially pertinent to Krasner, since she was now able to channel new vigour into her own art. During her fifteen years with Pollock, she had put much of her own work aside to devote enormous energy to forwarding his career. Here, on an ambitiously large scale, Krasner painted in her signature style with sweeping strokes of paint that engaged her entire body in their confidently broad gestures. Krasner repeatedly insisted in interviews that her most powerful and personally expressive works were made following the sudden loss of her husband. Thaw exemplifies this moment of creative intensity and achievement in Krasner's life.

Joan Mitchell's monumental Atlantic Side of 1960 is more like a force of nature than simply a painting. Approaching the canvas with violent energy, Mitchell layered an array of agitated painterly marks upon each other. Over an expanse of her signature cerulean blue she spread dark jabs of thick impasto that project out dramatically from the canvas, skeins of paint that splash across the surface, and delicate tendrils of dripping pigment. The center of the composition seems to exert an elemental power, like storm clouds gathering at sea. Growing up near the water influenced her throughout her life - 'I carry it around with me," she wrote remembering Lake Michigan. Atlantic Side was executed a year after Mitchell moved across the Atlantic. After visiting France intermittently for five years, she moved from New York to Paris in 1959, and for the rest of her life she would paint almost exclusively while in France. The rich palette of Atlantic Side hints at her admiration for painters, such as Van Gogh, Cezanne and Matisse. Included in an important 1961 exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Atlantic Side conveyed Mitchell's fiercely independent virtuosity, embodied in this work as an abstract tempest of paint.

Executed in 1977, Untitled XVII sprang from a moment of heightened artistic acuity and productivity in Willem de Kooning's life. Having spent part of the early 1970s focusing on sculpture, in 1975 he returned to painting with a renewed sense of confidence. His wife Elaine, from whom he had been separated for years, moved back in with him in 1977, helping him to bring order back to his work and diminishing his dependency on alcohol.

The year before painting XVII, de Kooning acknowledged his new perspective in life, declaring, 'Now I look around with new eyes.' De Kooning painted Untitled XVII with powerful brushwork that extends all the way to the frame, suggesting that this painterly space continues beyond its borders.

Together with the expansive strokes of colour, this makes it seem as if he were zooming in on one of his earlier compositions. The painting is firmly abstract, although flesh tones faintly suggest that a figural element might have been a starting point of the composition, now obscured through the autonomy of the painter's virtuosic gestures. Broad swatches of paint are heightened by narrower strokes that define their contours, creating a faceted effect of interlocking brushwork that might resemble how Rubens would have painted if he were a Cubist. Untitled XVII channels all the power of de Kooning's visceral approach to painting in his signature style that is both lyrical and vivacious, but also violent and tumultuous.

Allison Unruh is a researcher in the Post-War & Contemporary Art Department, New York