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Virtual Viewing

\n\n

7-11 April 2021

\n\n

Public Viewing

\n\n

12-15 April 2021

\n\n

Monday - Wednesday, 10am-9pm

\n\n

Thursday, 10am-6pm

\n\n

Friday, 9am-5pm

\n\n

Exhibition Info
\nThis spring across Paris, Antwerp and Zurich, we present highlights from our 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening & Day Sales in London.

\n\n

Paris
\n1–7 March, 10am-6pm
\nweekend by appointment
\nRaphaël Laval

\n\n

+33 1 53 71 77 87
\nrlaval@phillips.com

\n\n

Antwerp
\n10–16 March, 10am-6pm
\n11 March until 9pm
\nCharlotte van der Vorst

\n\n

+32 472 671 911
\nCVanDerVorst@phillips.com

\n\n

Zurich
\n20-25 March, 10am-5:30pm
\nPatricia Kurath

\n\n

+41 44 300 30 30
\nzurich@phillips.com

\n","auctionDetailsSmall","London Auction 15 April 2021","extraInfo","

\n\n

Rosanna Widén
\nSenior Specialist, Head of Evening Sale

\n\n

+ 44 20 7318 4060
\nrwiden@phillips.com

\n\n

Olivia Thornton
\nHead of 20th Century & Contemporary Art, Europe

\n\n

+ 44 20 7318 4099
\nothornton@phillips.com

\n\n

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Tracey Emin, Our Angels (detail), 2007. Estimate £200,000 — 300,000. 20th Century & Contemporary Art London.

\n\n

Written by Katy Hessel

\n\n

Raw, brutal, confessional, and confrontational. Although they are not typically considered as a group, it could be said that the work of British artist Tracey Emin is intrinsically bound up with the heroic, undefeatable painting of Baroque artist Artemisia Gentileschi and the agonizingly expressive prints of early-twentieth-century German artist, Käthe Kollwitz. Working in different centuries, countries, mediums—and worlds—the emotional power exposed in their work transcends time and place. Speaking truthfully to universal experiences, each artist strikes you when confronted with their paintings, prints to neons, as is the case with Emin's 2007 work, Our Angels. Self-evidently autobiographical, their oeuvres evidence how they pored their life into their art.

\n\n

Artemisia Gentileschi was raised in her father’s studio in Rome at the turn of the seventeenth century, where she witnessed the rough underbelly of Roman culture, as well as passing figures like Caravaggio. After her mother died, she was tasked with raising three brothers. Despite her difficult circumstances, by age seventeen, she had defied convention for women in the 1600s and was painting large-scale masterpieces. (It should also be added that recently, Gentileschi was the subject of a major exhibition at London’s National Gallery, making her the first historic female artist to do so in the museum’s history.)

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Artemisia Gentileschi, Susanna and the Elders, 1610. Schloss Weißenstein, Pommersfelden, Germany. Private collection of the Schönborn Family.

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Gentileschi’s first known work is Susanna and the Elders, a technically dazzling but harrowing painting. Capturing the moment when two lecherous men try to seduce the young virtuous Susanna, Gentileschi uses a Biblical story to dramatize a woman’s perspective. One could suggest Gentileschi’s Susanna (evidently naked as she turns her body and face from the intruders), alludes to the reality of life as a seventeen-year-old woman in Rome. Never documenting women as victims, but rather striking heroines in charge of their image (at times even violently attacking cruel men), Gentileschi portrayed women who retained their power and vulnerability. Like Emin, Gentileschi focused on an outer strength and an inner spirit, which authentically, and compellingly, resides deep inside her charged fleshy figures.

\n\n

Working at the cusp of the twentieth century and actively producing during the throes of World War I, Käthe Kollwitz is a precursor to Emin on different grounds from Gentileschi. Working in prints, it is the immediacy of Kollwitz’s often grief-stricken, haunting, and psychologically intense compositions that feel at one with Emin (who works across a multitude of mediums, including prints, paintings, film, drawing, sculpture, embroidery, installation, and neons). Pained by death and filled with anguish, Kollwitz’s socially engaged images reveal the horrors and rawness of reality from a deeply sensitive lens.

\n\n

\n\n

Käthe Kollwitz, Mutter, zwei Kinder an sich pressend, 1932. Sold for $56,700. 20th Century & Contemporary Art New York.

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Never afraid to honestly address life’s brutal realities, in 1907 Kollwitz created Raped (Vergewaltigt). An incredibly harrowing, emotional print that captures a disheveled, lying body swept up amidst the lush and overgrowing flora and fauna. Exposed, vulnerable, in pain (or perhaps even numb), the intensity of this work (although made one hundred years apart from Emin), seem as though it could be made today. The elasticity of the line, raw emotion, and frantic energy found in the textures recall the fragile, fragmented (and at times messy) bodies in Emin’s recent acrylic on canvases, shown alongside works by Edvard Munch at the Royal Academy of Arts.

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The same could be said for the mother-child relationship in Woman with Dead Child, 1903, as the parent clenches on to the almost angelic, sculptural, yet deceased, child. (During the War, Kollwitz lost her eldest son to battle.) Although dealing with subjects of pain, similarly to Emin, it seems Kollwitz’s works are ultimately about love: the love her protagonists have for each other, and the love that she has for them.

\n\n

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Tracey Emin, Our Angels, 2007. Estimate £200,000 — 300,000. 20th Century & Contemporary Art London.

\n\n

Tracey Emin grew up in Margate, a seaside town where she was seduced by the glamor of the town’s neon lights. It was the post-War 1960s, a time of renewal, excitement, and liberation compared to the brutality of seventeenth century Rome or circa 1900 Germany with the imminence of World War I. Experiencing an “unhappy childhood in a happy place,” she would later go on to channel these emotional, traumatic experiences, into her raw, personal, and political work.

\n\n

Leaving school at 13 (and returning for two months when she was 15 without any qualifications), Emin enrolled at Maidstone College of Art in the early 1980s, a “hotbed of political activism” where she turned to questioning how making art could relate to real life. Empowered by the experiences of people who would come to visit (the local miners, the women of Greenham Common), Emin dealt not only with the core of her emotional state, but the truth of what was happening to women. Continuing to explore personal subjects in an almost diaristic form, Emin spoke the language of the everyday person in a poetic, yet powerfully simple and immediate way. In turn, she became, and remains, one of the most successful, and wide-reaching, artists of her generation.

\n\n

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Tracey Emin's Our Angels installed at the entrance of the Venice Biennale's British Pavilion, on the occasion of the artist's solo presentation, Borrowed Light, 2007. Image: © Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2021.

\n\n

Our Angels adorned the exterior of the British Pavilion as part of Emin’s solo exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 2007 (as the second female artist in history). An exhibition filled with intimate, expressive, raw paintings, sculptures, watercolors and drawings that reveal the very essence of Emin’s persona. Guarding the trove of delicate objects, before we step inside, we are met with a pair of luminous blue, free-floating neons. At once imbuing fragility and vulnerability, with the thin blue lines that make up an image of a small bird resting in its nest (or perhaps about to be set free), and Emin’s iconic Romantic handwriting inscribing “Foundlings and Fledglings our Angels of this Earth.” Like the examples by Gentileschi and Kollwitz, the work is steeped in strength and vigor.

\n\n

Through paint, prints, drawings, and neons, the honest stories these women told through their art remain timeless. At once capturing the moments of vulnerability and strength, love and suffering, captivity and freedom, the truthful approaches to making translate to ground-breaking works of art.

\n\n

Katy Hessel is London-based art historian, curator and broadcaster. She runs @thegreatwomenartists, and hosts The Great Women Artists Podcast.

\n\n

Contact a Specialist
\nRosanna Widén
\nSenior Specialist, Head of Evening Sale
\nrwiden@phillips.com
\n+44 20 7318 4060

\n\n

Discover More from 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale >

\n\n

\n\n

Recommended Reading

\n\n

Banksy, Duchamp, Warhol, and the Readymade >

\n\n

Moving a National Treasure >

\n\n

\n","publishDate","2021-03-24T20:15:56.000000Z","authorCredit","Sarah Bochicchio","coverPosX",50,"coverPosY",0,"articleUrl","https://www.phillips.com/article/72354704/kathe-kollwitz-artemisia-gentileschi-tracey-emin-twentieth-century-and-contemporary-art","displayOrder",8,"auctionEditorialID",1158,"editorialID",3423,"flocklerID",72354704,"https://flockler.com/thumbs/sites/889/rego-phillips-a8fb2e64-f49c-4e53-9376-422b26ced306_s600x0_c800x467_l0x17.jpg","In this installment of The Prompt, Juli Delgado Lopera takes Paula Rego's 'The Aunt (Nada)' back to its literary origins. ","The Prompt: Paula Rego","

Paula Rego, The Aunt (Nada) (detail), 2006. Estimate £800,000 — 1,200,000.

\n\n

Paula Rego has frequently revisited the literary and cultural past, fusing her aesthetic vision with rich memories. Her work, The Aunt (Nada), draws on a scene from Nada, an acclaimed 1945 novel by Carmen Laforet that Rego read in the 2000s. In this installment of our ongoing series, The Prompt, Juli Delgado Lopera takes Rego's The Aunt (Nada) back to its literary origins. Delgado Lopera considers both the artwork and Nada, in a haunting fiction response to two masterpieces, created decades apart.

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Tía Pelos

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Written by Juli Delgado Lopera

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Mira niña—the baldness really took on when the second carajito kid died and by then people were already calling her La Pelona a.k.a Tía Pelos. She wouldn’t eat, not even the rosconcitos y arepitas she so much loved. Every day I’d cook the huevitos and chocolate like clockwork, arriving right at onces time, ready for tea. Tía venga, I’d say, but she wouldn’t move from the window. Mummified. Playing the same Chavela Vargas CD on a loop. Only two yellowing fingers trembling, forever holding a stick of Marlboro ashes that never dropped. Draped in her sadness. A little too much that darkness. A layer of grey film imposing itself on the entire apartment. The sofa, the blue carpet we brought from Cartagena, even the painting of abuela all seem to crumble every time Tía Pelos exhaled. Pues eventually I found a drawer in her closet bursting with ants and roaches and when I opened it what do you think I found? Stale arepas now fungi. Eggs oozing green. A feast for the cockroaches I tried so hard to kill every day. A whole ecosystem of tristeza growing there. She hid it in the bottom drawer exactly like she hid her pain. Closed shut tight and stinky. A pain that reeked. A sadness that emanated an odor of puss soil gasoline. A sadness that had crawled parasitic into her bones, making it impossible for her to stand up. When I confronted her about it you know what she said? Ay mija, let the roaches be. Imagínate tú. This is the same woman who sprayed Lysol on her shoes upon entering the house, stacking Fabuloso and Pine Sol like bread. Pero—óyeme—it doesn’t end there. Homegirl didn’t want the room cleaned. Her exact words: No cleaning, stop with the pendejada. Waving me off. The layering grime comforting. The maggots a newly found company. The dust and spiders her new BFFs.

\n\n

I would have very much appreciated some wailing, some screaming, some crucifix waving. Like she used to. When the husband died Tía Pelos broke an entire room in the apartment. Her very own furniture massacre. She sent me to fetch a couple of matronas, paid them a few pesos, handed them a hammer and machete and with those thin lips pointed to the husband’s room clapping twice. Off the women went to destroy the remnants of Tío. I will forever remember the disconcerting look in their eyes like who is this bitch? But, also, the opportunity. Who doesn’t want to machete a room of old chairs, books, and liquor? Who doesn’t want all the rage of life to spill and destroy? I was jealous of the women. I wanted to join them, but Tía stopped me short. You’re too young move aside, she said. As if. When the banging wasn’t enough, she too joined the violent pachanga of destruction. See here: Big-boned Tía in full black grief realness remangándose, pulling up her black lace skirt, lifting the full-body mirror smashing it against the wall. Bam! bam! Shimmering silver raining. A cascade of sharp glitter leaving thin traces of blood on her ankles. And always a cigarette dangling off her lips, stained dark red at the edges.

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Paula Rego, The Aunt (Nada) (detail), 2006. Estimate £800,000 — 1,200,000.

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Y es que you did not know Tía Pelos. Before The Darkness entered our lives the son y ton that was that ass meaneándolo, shimming shoulders to the latest merengue de moda. The matrona and head bitch of our household. Directing the maids and the rest of the matriarchy crew. Pointing with the finger, with the mouth. Everyone forced to bow to the power of her tongue and sass. A real mother of the house that cut every mosquita muerta with a stare. Tía didn’t even need to say a word to make shit happen around here: it was all in her eyes. Bam! The caterpillar eyebrows. Bam! The glaring. Bam! The soft closing of the lids when she just about had it with you, you lazy sinvergüenza. The impeccable casita de cristal that was this apartment. This was all before everyone died— the husband, the first kid, the second kid— before the sadness started clinging to her like a second skin making everyone around us disappear and now it is Tía Pelos and yours truly perched on this miserable corner apartment like forgotten porcelain dolls. The real marking of time is her hair. The only marking of time is her hair. We’re in a circular loop of pelos.

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In her youth Tía Pelos wore a mane of curls braided to the side. Most of the photographs have been burned by her fury, teared apart by the roaring darkness that every few years explodes with yet another tragedy that pushes Tía into a deeper abysm of grief, but I managed to save one or two. In black and white she parades herself down a busy street, leather gloves in each hand, purple heels, a puff of hair surely soaked in hairspray overtaking half of the picture frame. A true señorita.

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When the morgue called about the first kid she almost swallowed her tongue. After a few months small moons appeared on her head. When the second kid died, I fed her a punta de Ensure for an entire year. Vanilla Ensure, Chocolate Ensure. Never strawberry. It was in the cans of Ensure that I first found clumps of hair tangled in the cap. Mi Dios. By then Tía was a bird, hair falling off her like feathers. See here: a large dark wingless pájaro making no attempt to fly.

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So here we are Tía y yo, yo y Tía. Here we are dragging the mano peluda that is the past, swallowed in its unforgiving baldness. A past that grows nothing, a past shinny and empty like the moon. From time to time I hear a loud thump! Thump! and when I run there she is fainted on the floor, a small dark halo of hair like a saint. So with the usual dread I pull the cotton balls and alcohol I carry with me and after she comes to herself the first thing she says is, oh it’s you como tienes ese pelo de seco y feo. And what I want to do is swing the bottle of Lysol at her. Yes my own hair is dry and ugly. We are both dry and ugly. We are plucked from a story. We’ve never existed. We are part of someone’s imagination. Conjured by a dark pen. I write so we may not be forgotten. I write so the NADA, the terrifying white space that salutes my every morning, doesn’t swallow me whole.

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Juli Delgado Lopera is the author of The New York Times acclaimed novel Fiebre Tropical (Feminist Press 2020), a finalist of the 2020 Kirkus Prize in Fiction and the 2021 Aspen Literary Prize. They are also the recipient of numerous fellowships and residencies, and the author of Quiéreme (Nomadic Press 2017) and ¡Cuéntamelo! (Aunt Lute 2017) an illustrated bilingual collection of oral histories by LGBT Latinx immigrants which won a 2018 Lambda Literary Award and a 2018 Independent Publisher Book Award.

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Discover More from 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale >

\n\n

Paula Rego ‘The Aunt (Nada)’ | London | Spring 2021

\n\n

In ‘The Aunt (Nada)’ from 2006, Paula Rego expresses her propensity to utilise fiction to unveil personal truths in this most disquieting of images. Painted from life but using mannequins instead of life models, Rego’s work and process make the perfect meeting place for the real and the uncanny.

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Recommended Reading

\n\n

The Prompt: A Short Fiction Series for Authors Inspired by Artists >

\n\n

A Tale of Three Artists: Gentileschi, Kollwitz, Emin >

\n\n

\n","2021-04-01T17:30:38.000000Z",36,94,"https://www.phillips.com/article/72807457/the-prompt-tia-pelos-by-juli-delgado-lopera-paula-rego",7,1157,3430,72807457,"https://flockler.com/thumbs/sites/889/warhol-marilyn-phillips-b475d69a-72b2-4a5c-be2b-0654daa59e5e_s600x0.jpg","How three troublemakers-turned-titans transformed how we look at popular culture. ","Banksy, Duchamp, Warhol, and the Readymade ","

Andy Warhol, Marilyn (Reversal), 1979/86. Estimate £700,000 — 900,000. 20th Century & Contemporary Art London.

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In 1917, during the midst of the First World War, Marcel Duchamp pulled off one of art history’s most brilliant provocations. Under the pseudonym “R. Mutt,” he submitted his seminal work, Fountain, to the Society of Independent Artists’ salon. For the uninitiated: Fountain was a signed-and-dated upside-down urinal.

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Although the Society of Independent Artists’ salon was jury-free, the board rejected the artwork, claiming “The Fountain may be a very useful object in its place, but its place is not in an art exhibition and it is, by no definition, a work of art.” Some even went so far as to call the object immoral.

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Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1950. porcelain urinal, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia. © 2021. Photo: The Philadelphia Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala, Florence

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Artists and intellectuals expounded on both sides. An anonymous editorial—later determined to be written by artist Beatrice Wood—articulated the importance of Duchamp’s so-called “readymade.” She wrote, “Mr. Mutt’s fountain is not immoral, that is absurd, no more than a bathtub is immoral…Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view—created a new thought for that object.”

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Although the Fountain-incident occurred over a century ago, the debates around Duchamp’s approach to art-making maintain relevance, both within the context of his own oeuvre and the artists who have taken up his mantle. Artists that followed in his footsteps, like Andy Warhol and, more recently, Banksy, have become almost as divisive, leading to a string of art criticism that employs ample name-calling (popular terms include “overrated” and “hack,” some writers even like to implicate the artists’ fans; you are uncomplicatedly “bad” just for liking them).

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But to dismiss Duchamp, Warhol, or Banksy is to sorely miss the point. These troublemakers-turned-titans have all transformed how we engage with art and popular culture, through simultaneously sophisticated and blunt wielding of the readymade. Each artist led/leads in the institutional critiques of their eras, using found objects to articulate and undermine greed, stuffiness, and inauthenticity masquerading as their opposites.

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Marcel Duchamp, L.H.O.O.Q., 1964. Estimate £200,000 - 300,000. 20th Century & Contemporary Art London.

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We continue with another important Duchamp example, L.H.O.O.Q, the artist’s embellishment of Mona Lisa. A celebrity in her own right, Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece represents not only a Renaissance treasure but the culture that upholds her as such. In his tableau dada, as inscribed below one rendition of the portrait, he added a mustache, goatee, and the salacious L.H.O.O.Q label (in French, the letters read phonetically as “Elle a chaud au cul,” or, as Duchamp put it, “There is a fire down below”).

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Duchamp’s embellishments, it is worth adding, are not particularly novel—they are the vandalizations to which so many children resort when mocking a magazine cover or historical figure. Their power, as with Fountain, resides in his choice, which evocatively projects the sixteenth-century painting as an emblem of a kind of crowd-sourced secular saint. The work, of course, also questions representations of gender, peeling apart another convention that is often unquestioned in its familiarity.

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Andy Warhol, Marilyn (Reversal), 1979/86. Estimate £700,000 — 900,000. 20th Century & Contemporary Art London.

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Scholars like Stephen Goldsmith have argued that without Duchamp’s experiments, “it is likely that the Pop Art celebration of everyday objects…might never have occurred.” Warhol, like Duchamp, played with the relationship between fine art and its more democratized/commercial/popular cousins, as he imbued commercial objects with new meaning. As Warhol claimed, “Everything repeats itself. It’s amazing that everyone thinks that everything is new, but it’s all repeat.”

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In his portrayals of Marilyn Monroe, Warhol took these ideas beyond literal objecthood and translated them to a woman whose celebrity rendered her fatally objectified. The ethereal, One Grey / Black Marilyn (Reversal Series) II-50-160, explores her absence through its subtle reversal. Like Mona Lisa (which Warhol—and Banksy—also treated), Marilyn Monroe’s celebrity became so unwieldy that collective obsession with her life outpaced her actual personhood. Exploring both the polished veneer of celebrity and its inherent darkness, Warhol thus differs slightly from Duchamp. Warhol’s target is much larger than his predecessor’s: it is the collective psychological complexity (or simplicity?) that makes these objectifications possible.

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Banksy, Gas Mask Boy, 2009. Estimate £1,600,000 - 2,000,000. 20th Century & Contemporary Art London.

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In our own moment, we have Banksy, the street artist, painter, and activist who approaches the readymade with still more purpose—not just tackling our hypocrisies and the reasons we perpetuate them but wielding his own celebrity for common good. For Banksy, the world itself is a readymade, requiring a spotlight because our familiarity has rendered us willfully oblivious to its failings.

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In Gas Mask Boy, a crouching child in a respirator mask turns away from what he is spray-painting: a peace-sign, a simple flower, all in greyscale. The panel of his mask has been replaced with the platonic ideal of a flower field, daisies arrayed like a screensaver or a scene in a feel-good family musical. The gasmask has associations with the First World War—its total, chemical, biological warfare—as well as with protests—activists who wear masks as protection against undue police force. Here, Banksy addresses the paradoxes of what actions are policed and what the state sanctions, contrasted against the optimism and ideals portrayed on the boy’s mask.

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From Duchamp, Warhol, and Banksy, we can—not without some irony—also pull out essential cultural figures from their periods. The visuals they weaponize as readymades are ultimately proof of the objects’ cultural value. Each example—Mona Lisa, Marilyn Monroe, the street—is just as relevant now as the time in which it was made, and so we understand the artists’ meanings with more than just hindsight; we understand empathically. In this, we also see that while “its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view,” its old significance lives on elsewhere. The significance multiplies, which is, perhaps, why we need the repeat exposure—and why Banksy’s open-air, high-visibility artworks may be the most important articulation of these ideas yet.

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Discover More from 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale >

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Banksy ‘Gas Mask Boy’ | London | Spring 2021
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Dark humour, satire and political commentary are more present than ever in this one-off work by the anonymous street artist, painter and social activist Banksy. Displaying trademark conceptual paradoxes, the respirator mask of a graffiti artist reflects an ethereal vision of a blooming field, adding an explosion of colour to an otherwise grittily monochrome urban scene.

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Recommended Reading

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Moving a National Treasure >

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Elvis, Eggleston, and the Sounds of the City >

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\n","2021-03-17T23:44:44.000000Z","https://www.phillips.com/article/71933868/banksy-duchamp-warhol-and-the-readymade-twentieth-century-art-london-auction",6,1156,3418,71933868,"https://flockler.com/thumbs/sites/889/tamara-de-lempicka-phillips-auction-3c892b0e-7659-4735-b30c-db5c454af097_s600x0_c800x467_l0x122.jpg","Specialist Kimberly Sørensen and Senior International Specialist and Regional Director, Zürich Lori Spector discuss two twentieth century women—one artist, one patron—who changed the Art Deco landscape. ","Visionaries: Tamara de Lempicka and Colette Aboucaya","

Tamara de Lempicka, Figure esquissée sur fond doré (detail), circa 1930. Estimate On Request. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale London.

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中文閱讀

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On the occasion of offering Figure esquissée sur fond doré by Tamara de Lempicka in the April 15 London Evening Sale of 20^th Century and Contemporary Art and Jean Dunand’s art deco masterpiece Les Palmiers, commissioned by Colette Aboucaya, in the June 30 Design sale in London, design Specialist Kimberly Sørensen and Senior International Specialist and Regional Director, Zürich Lori Spector discuss the lives of these two remarkable women.

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Kimberly Sørensen: Lori, what is the relationship between the world that Tamara de Lempicka depicted in her work and her own life?

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Lori Spector: Kim, this is such an important question, as I think it is so integral to Lempicka’s practice. Tamara was absolutely, 100% a creature of her time and of her own self-invention. She arrived in Paris in 1918, a refugee of the Russian Revolution – she and her husband (and their small daughter Kizette) fled St. Petersburg where they had lived a fairly privileged and decadent lifestyle and basically needed to start from scratch in Europe. She needed to sell all of her possessions in order to make ends meet. Her husband, a lawyer by training, was in such a state of depression that he could not work. And Tamara made the decision that she was not going to sit idly by and wait for life to happen to her – she was going to make things happen for herself. Up until that point, Lempicka had been a self-taught artist, but upon her arrival in Paris, she took courses with leading artists of the time: Maurice Denis at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, and a bit later with André Lhote at the Académie Ranson. She was determined to make a living as an artist. Lhote seemed to have the most influence on how her paintings developed, as she integrated Cubist characteristics and forms into her compositions. She clearly absorbed the lessons of the Mannerist painters of the Italian Renaissance as well, such as Pontormo and Bronzino, whose works she first encountered as a 13-year-old girl on a tour through Italy with her grandmother and must have revisited on numerous trips to the Louvre, where she spent a tremendous amount of time upon her arrival in Paris. There, she also discovered the work of Ingres whose depictions of the female nude surely made an impression.

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Tamara de Lempicka, Figure esquissée sur fond doré, circa 1930. Estimate On Request. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale London.

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By 1922, it is clear that Tamara had become fully integrated into Parisian society and the avant-garde. She capitalized on her social connections and moved between painting portraits of the European elite and voluminous nudes of her friends and lovers. Lempicka once said that, “My goal was never to copy, but to create a new style.” She also famously said: “There are no miracles. There is only what you make.” And she went about cultivating an image of herself as a woman who rebelled against the roles of traditional female domesticity and fashion. She represented the apotheosis of a modern, ostensibly liberated woman – la garçonne – another emblem of the era. She captured women in a way that had not been done before – her paintings showed female rather than male desires and depicted female desires as both normal and acceptable, upending the canonical understanding of Western art history in the process. Her paintings from this period placed women in charge of their own pleasure and gave them empowerment to satisfy their own desires. So her practice and her life were so inextricably linked in that sense.

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KS: That’s fascinating. So she was truly a self-made woman. It occurs to me that there’s a parallel here with Andy Warhol (also, coincidentally of Eastern European background!) who came to New York as an outsider, but who found commercial success through his portraiture of elite, avant-garde patrons. My understanding is that Colette Aboucaya, on the other hand, came from a more comfortable background. Her father, Léon Aboucaya, had in 1928 acquired the coachbuilding firm Henry Binder, which made ultra-luxury vehicles. In fact, this is how Aboucaya first came in contact with Jean Dunand, because he had designed and exhibited lacquered panels for Henry Binder automobile interiors at the landmark 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes. In the same exhibition Dunand included his famous smoking room for the French Embassy Pavilion, which is what served as the inspiration for the commission of Les Palmiers. Colette Aboucaya was widowed at a very young age, but whereas Tamara de Lempicka was notably extroverted with her feminine independence, by all accounts Colette Aboucaya was extremely introverted.

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Jean Dunand, Les Palmiers smoking room, from the residence of Mademoiselle Colette Aboucaya, Paris, 1930-1936. Design London.

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This is the reason that Les Palmiers has been so exquisitely preserved. She rarely accepted visitors and hardly even lived in or used the opulent interior that Dunand created for her. When she passed away at the age of 101, her nephew and heir had never visited the residence, which remained like a time capsule of a bygone era. When he entered he found that the rooms designed by Dunand and the decorator, Gérard Mille, had been practically untouched and that his aunt lived at the other end of the apartment, in what appeared to be a converted maid’s quarters near the kitchen. On the other hand, Tamara de Lempicka’s residence was like a stage. In 1929, right around the time the work on Les Palmiers began, Robert Mallet-Stevens designed a nine story apartment building on rue Méchain in the Left Bank, in which de Lempicka was one of the fourteen residents. Her atelier was well documented in a Mobilier et Décoration article from January 1931. The article’s author, G. Rémon, described the space as a “climat d’idées,” and interior views show that Madame de Lempicka lived in an environment unified by Mallet-Stevens’s vision, yet filled with the voices of other cutting-edge modernist talents such as René Herbst, Djo-Bourgeois, and her sister Adrienne Gorska. The gleaming metal surfaces of this interior are a stark contrast to the opulent lacquerwork of Les Palmiers and show the modernist direction the decorative arts were beginning to take at that time, particularly under the influence of the Union des Artistes Modernes (to which Gorska belonged). Lori, what do you think this interior tells us about Tamara de Lempicka?

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LS: That’s how fully engrossed in the Art Deco moment she was, that she chose to live and work in this completely modernist space. She had a flood of commissions from all over the world from the 1920s until the early 1930s, the Great Depression pushed her somewhat into obscurity. But the gleaming surfaces of her portraits from this period are tributes to and symbols for the decadence and glamour of the era. Lempicka consciously built an image of herself as the extravagant protagonist of the European high life. She cultivated her artistic talent and in the process constructed her biography.

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Interior of Tamara de Lempicka’s residence designed by Robert Mallet-Stevens, 7 rue Méchain Paris. © 2021 Estate of Robert Mallet-Stevens/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

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Katsu Hamanaka, Daybed, from the residence of Mademoiselle Colette Aboucaya, Paris circa 1935. Design London.

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KS: How does Figure esquissée sur fond doré figure into her career?

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LS: The work that we have coming up next week in London in our Evening Sale of 20th Century and Contemporary Art, Figure esquissée sur fond doré, circa 1930, is such a beautiful and iconic example from this prime moment in her career. Here this woman’s head is modeled with such tenderness, devotion, and economy of means against this glimmering gold ground, we believe it to be the only painting Lempicka ever made using gold leaf. There is an almost religious aspect to the work – I immediately think of Bernini’s magnificent 17th century sculpture Santa Teresa in estasi in the Cornaro Chapel of Rome’s Santa Maria della Vittoria, which Lempicka must have visited during her Italian voyage as a teen. The positioning of the sitter’s head, whose identity is unknown to us, is so remarkably similar to that of Teresa in the sculpture. Lempicka frequently depicted her female lovers, so perhaps one of them is the model here. But religion was another constant theme in her oeuvre, so it might also be an imagined Santa Teresa.

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Gian Lorenzo Bernini, L'Estasi di Santa Teresa (detail), 1647–1652, white marble, Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome. Image: Getty Images.

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KS: Again, this reminds me of Andy Warhol, who must have been inspired on some level by the icons he encountered through his upbringing in the Byzantine Catholic church. But with Lempicka, you have a woman depicting another woman. This was an era when women were not only empowered, they were leading the way. In the world of design, you have Eileen Gray and Charlotte Perriand; in fashion, Coco Chanel, Elsa Schiaparelli, and Jeanne Lanvin, among others. These women were creative powerhouses but also major patrons of the arts. This is the world that both Colette Aboucaya and Tamara de Lempicka inhabited, though they navigated it in very different ways.

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LS: Lempicka revolutionized the role of subject as a liberated and independent woman, thereby challenging the limitations imposed on the art and life of a woman. Here, woman is challenger of the male gaze not passive object. The current work could almost be categorized as an example of egalitarian voyeurism. The linchpin of her art is this bold, uninhibited female sexuality, which even in the context of contemplating religion or religious subject matter cannot be overlooked.

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Discover More from 20th Century & Contemporary Art >

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Recommended Reading
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\nMoving a National Treasure >

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Théâtres de Mémoire: Jean Dubuffet’s Last Decades >

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\n","2021-04-09T14:01:25.000000Z",72,51,"https://www.phillips.com/article/73271623/tamara-de-lempicka-colette-aboucaya-twentieth-century-art-design-london-auction",5,1174,3444,73271623,"https://flockler.com/thumbs/sites/889/dubuffet-phillips-6d534e53-15e3-4de8-af8e-3645854b9767_s600x0.jpg","Senior Advisor Hugues Joffre explores how Jean Dubuffet's long, dramatically evolving career was like a rhythmic cycle, constantly reintroducing themes from earlier chapters in his life. ","Théâtres de Mémoire: Jean Dubuffet’s Last Decades","

Jean Dubuffet, La féconde journée, 1976. Estimate £1,500,000 — 2,000,000.

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Written by Hugues Joffre

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Jean Dubuffet had a long career, dotted with sometimes subtle, sometimes dramatic stylistic progressions. Yet, as he gestured towards each new aesthetic development, he would at the same time reintroduce themes or aesthetics that had defined his earlier work. In this sense, his oeuvre as a whole became like a rhythmic cycle, where each renewal was marked by a consideration of former artistic explorations. This self-referential quality in Dubuffet’s oeuvre, can equally be found in the work of Pablo Picasso, whose extended artistic practice and life similarly allowed him to reconsider multiple chapters of his own production. One may think, for example, of the Spanish artist’s venture into sculpture and ceramics, which saw him looking at classical subjects again—Greek themes and subjects which he had outgrown in painting. Dubuffet did this too — he would move forward and look back, look back and move forward. In doing so, he built a dialogue between past and future, creating an entirely novel sense of temporality—ultimately very self-referential.

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Like Henri Matisse before him, Dubuffet would ambitiously reassess his core artistic principles.
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In 1961, Dubuffet returned to Paris after having spent several years in the countryside. Upon returning to the city, he began to experience a joie de vivre that had perhaps withered during his time away, and initiated his breakthrough Paris Circus series, which largely explored the idea of micro-organisms in the form of minuscule, multiplying personnages. Until the end of his life, he continually engaged with this theme, yet it was with the Théâtres de mémoire series—one of his last, begun in September 1975—in which he would truly invigorate his now widely recognizable and iconic aesthetic, propelling it to unprecedented grandeur. With the Théâtres de mémoire works, Dubuffet used his same microscopic vision of figuration-meets-abstraction, yet did so with collage—a method that was more manageable to him at the age of seventy. These late collages differed from those he had produced in the mid-to-late 1950s, as Dubuffet veered away from the use of paper and towards the use of canvas. In this sense, the Théâtres de mémoire series represented a more mature formulation of something he had already explored; a desire to look back and take note of the past, as a sort of testament to his accomplished and nearly finalized oeuvre.

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Dubuffet’s 'Théâtres de mémoire' have become tokens of his visionary and resilient mind: in essence, monumental gems to behold.
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\nBetween the mid-1970s and the early 1960s thus exists a dialogue of sorts: between a newly revitalized Dubuffet, whose return to Paris at the outset of the 1960s had spurred an artistic revelation, and a more mature Dubuffet, considering earlier artistic formulations and building upon them with a honed, ever-more enterprising eye. The act of modernizing his own artistic precedent with his Théâtres de mémoire represented a discreet if powerful apotheosis. Like Henri Matisse before him, Dubuffet would ambitiously reassess his core artistic principles with a technique that was manageable to him, at a time when his body was becoming increasingly frail. Extremely rare on the market, Dubuffet’s Théâtres de mémoire have become tokens of his visionary and resilient mind: in essence, monumental gems to behold.

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Discover More from 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale >

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First Reveal: Dubuffet’s ‘La féconde journée’ | London | April 2021

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David Norman, Chairman of the Americas, guides us through his first encounter with the raw expression of Jean Dubuffet’s 1976 work ‘La féconde journée.’ Conjuring a dizzying frenzy of metropolitan intensity, ‘La féconde journée’ combines astute composition with visceral impulse to create an uncompromising controlled explosion.

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Recommended Reading

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A Tale of Three Artists: Gentileschi, Kollwitz, Emin >

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Banksy, Duchamp, Warhol, and the Readymade >

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\n","2021-04-01T19:41:11.000000Z","https://www.phillips.com/article/72815762/jean-dubuffets-theatres-de-memoire-twentieth-century-and-contemporary-art-london-evening-auction",4,1155,3432,72815762,"https://flockler.com/thumbs/sites/889/7-casteel-d177c9f1-e79b-4d40-9824-45cf560518f2_s600x0_c800x467_l0x98.jpg","A round-up of the artists who are posed to shine at this season's 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale.","Who to Watch: This Season's New and Emerging Artists ","

Jordan Casteel, Quinn (detail), 2015. Estimate £150,000 - 200,000. 20th Century & Contemporary Art London Evening Sale.

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Joy Labinjo

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Joy Labinjo, Untitled, 2018. Estimate £20,000 - 30,000. 20th Century & Contemporary Art London Evening Sale.

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Featured in exhibitions at the Royal Academy, BALTIC Centre, and The Breeder in Athens, Joy Labinjo’s oeuvre refracts a life lived through multiple identities. Her paintings expand on her heritage—growing up Black, British, and Nigerian—and reference the distinct domesticity and material memories she associates with the 1990s and early 2000s.

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Labinjo’s style emerged from discovering an old family album when she was studying in Newcastle, and she said that she strived towards “just painting Black people doing everyday things,” people talking, living, in the moments in-between. Untitled, for example, shows the artist as a young girl, walking beside her aunt, experiencing an ordinary, family moment. It is the kind of work that highlights Labinjo's belief in the power of storytelling, "It would be amazing," she has said, "for little Black kids to go to a gallery and think: I can do this."

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Lot 1 >

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Jordan Casteel

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Jordan Casteel, Quinn, 2015. Estimate £150,000 - 200,000. 20th Century & Contemporary Art London Evening Sale.

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In Quinn, an unblinking man looks at the viewer with a restful gaze. The man is known through the painting’s title as Quinn, yet nothing other than the few elements that surround him — the brick wall, the books — further elucidate his identity. This is typical of Jordan Casteel’s paintings, whose subjects are often portrayed in environments where they are most comfortable — introduced to the viewer in the energy of a moment, which itself was captured in a single click.

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By painting subjects from her everyday life, Casteel re-contextualizes a realm of canonical portraiture which so often favored white subjects throughout history. In doing so, she inscribes herself in a specific lineage of artists like Kerry James Marshall and Henry Taylor, who have similarly introduced a glimpse of their own everyday lives and reality in the age-old medium of painting, establishing themselves as contrasting voices to a painterly legacy of almost-exclusively white representation. “I’m interested in pushing the dialogue of Blackness. Within my own family, the scope of what Blackness looks like is really vast…you literally have a whole scope and range of literal color,” Casteel said. “I just allow myself to play, as it relates to each painting individually.”

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Lot 7 >

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Lina Iris Viktor

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Lina Iris Viktor, Constellations III, 2016. Estimate £30,000 - 50,000. 20th Century & Contemporary Art London Evening Sale.

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Lina Iris Viktor’s dreamy, maze-like signature style is laborious to produce, but triumphant to behold. Composed with 24k gold, her works feel like intricate universes, celestial experiences that unite her expansive visual lexicon. Although Constellations III marks her auction debut, the artist has been making headlines for years, and her work is in several important institutional collections, such as the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art.

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Viktor’s works address the global, cultural importance of gold, particularly within the context of the African diaspora. But she also highlights the significance of the blackness that encircles it. Confronting and unpacking the cultural associations—including the ominousness—associated with blackness, she asks, “What does it mean for Black people to be aligned with this idea? And can you make it beautiful and arresting?”

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Lot 2 >

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Toyin Ojih Odutola

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Toyin Ojih Odutola, LTS IV, 2014. Estimate £100,000 - 150,000. 20th Century & Contemporary Art London Evening Sale.

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Toyin Ojih Odutola’s LTS IV takes its name from Zora Neale Hurston’s influential 1937 novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. The novel explores a woman’s search for love, meaning, and self, torn between her own desires and the pull of her communities; at the end, its protagonist, Janie, reflects, “Love is lak de sea. It’s uh movin’ thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets, and it’s different with every shore.”

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LTS IV depicts the artist’s brother asleep, silhouetted against what may be a traditional Nigerian tapestry. Ojih Odutola has described her work as focusing on the malleability of identity, something she and her family relate to, having adjusted to the places where they lived. “It's something I have carried with me into adulthood—this application of compromising oneself to fit my surroundings—and my brothers as well.”

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Lot 5 >

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Tunji Adeniyi-Jones

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Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, Love Ritual, 2019. Estimate £30,000 - 40,000. 20th Century & Contemporary Art London Evening Sale.

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After studying fine art at Oxford and Yale, Adeniyi-Jones has forged a name with his figurative paintings that draw on his Yoruba heritage. Adeniyi-Jones approaches his figures with great physicality, energizing bodies like dancers, in all their fluidity and power (which has, perhaps unsurprisingly, generated a fair share of Matisse comparisons). Love Ritual attests to the artist's command of color and form, navigating intense and emotional hues.

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For Adeniyi-Jones, these figures are a correction, as much as an aesthetic force, “I’m interested in how cross-cultural aesthetics and cultural hybridity relate to the history of painting,” he explains. Although the relationship is often discredited, he reminds us that “European modernist movements like Cubism and Expressionism simply would not exist without the influence of West African sculpture.”

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Lot 6 >

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Discover More from 20th Century & Contemporary Art >

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Recommended Reading

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Théâtres de Mémoire: Jean Dubuffet’s Last Decades >

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The Prompt: Tía Pelos by Juli Delgado Lopera >

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\n","2021-04-05T14:55:02.000000Z","https://www.phillips.com/article/73017761/emerging-artists-london-tunji-adeniyi-jones-joy-labinjo-lina-iris-viktor-toyin-ojih-odutola-auction",3,1166,3435,73017761,"https://flockler.com/thumbs/sites/889/210406-phillips-46_mgl2742-51d18a7a-a233-46e6-89e0-25420f0d512c_s600x0.jpg","Join us for a virtual walkthrough of our 20th Century & Contemporary Art Sales from 30 Berkeley Square. On view: Mark Rothko, Jean Dubuffet, Frank Stella, Paula Rego, Mickalene Thomas, and more.","VR Walkthrough | 20th Century & Contemporary Art","

Travel through our galleries at 30 Berkeley Square in London and browse our 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening and Day Sales.

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Featuring leading works from the most sought-after artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, our Evening Sale is comprised of an exceptional group of works from Mark Rothko, Jean Dubuffet, Andy Warhol, Jordan Casteel, El Anatsui, Marcel Duchamp, and more.

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Our Day Sale features masterworks from Claire Tabouret, Pablo Picasso, Stanley Whitney, George Condo, Alexander Calder, and more, alongside Out of the Blue: The Enea Righi Collection.

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Visit our 30 Berkeley Square galleries 12-15 April to preview our London 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening and Day Sales ahead of the 15-16 April auctions.

\n","2021-04-08T14:30:34.000000Z","https://www.phillips.com/article/73206651/vr-walkthrough-20th-century-and-contemporary-art-12",2,1169,3440,73206651,"https://flockler.com/thumbs/sites/889/stella-207d0d67-c1cb-450c-9b74-4aafda227d54_s600x0.jpg","A round-up from our upcoming 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening and Day Sales. ","Highlight Reel: Favorites From London","

Frank Stella, Scramble: Ascending Spectrum / Ascending Green Values, 1977. Estimate £2,000,000 - 3,000,000. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale London.

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中文閱讀

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1. Frank Stella

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Frank Stella, Scramble: Ascending Spectrum / Ascending Green Values, 1977. Estimate £2,000,000 - 3,000,000. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale London.

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Scramble: Ascending Spectrum / Ascending Green Values is energetic, rigorous, and, of course, colorful. This large-scale work is magnetic, drawing the viewer in via its repetitive, schematic rainbow gradation. Scramble: Ascending Spectrum / Ascending Green Values is a luminous example of Stella’s exploration of the square, a shape that the artist praised for its unpretentiousness and power. Of his Concentric Squares, the artist has said “Their simple, rather humbling effect—almost a numbing power—became a sort of ‘control’ against which my increasing tendency in the seventies to be extravagant could be measured.”

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2. John Chamberlain

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John Chamberlain, Gris Gris Gumbo Ya Ya, 1990. Estimate £400,000 - 600,000. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale London.

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“In finding your place in sculpture, you need to find the material that offers you just the right resistance,” advised Chamberlain. “As it turns out, car metal offers me the correct resistance so that I can make a form—not overform it or underform it.” An example of the artists’ crumpled metallic sculptures, Gris Gris Gumbo Ya Ya was born from tossed-away car part and transformed by Chamberlain’s elaborate regenerative and destructive process. The works represents a kind of new life, simultaneously vibrant and tinged with a deleterious edge.

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3. Mark Tansey

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Mark Tansey, Study for Nocturne, 1998. Estimate £600,000 - 800,000. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale London.

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Partly inspired by the work of René Magritte, Study for Nocturne dreamily and brilliantly challenges time and space. Endlessly enamoured with the power of words and images, Tansey frequently intertwines the two, in the present painting poring over the possibilities enabled by the word "Nocturne," both a sign of the time of day, and a musical quip echoing the composition’s oceanic harmony. Study for Nocturne’s reads like a sheet of music, with the hovering beam of light, nestled at the top, slowly trickling down and making sense of the composition. “Pictures should be able to function across the fullest range of content,” he said, “The conceptual should be able to mingle with the formal and subject matter should enjoy intimate relations with both.”

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4. El Anatsui

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El Anatsui, Plot a Plan IV, 2007. Estimate £650,000 - 850,000. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale London.

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Recently the subject the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s first-ever virtual exhibition, El Anatsui has represented Ghana at the Venice Biennale and been the subject of several important exhibitions. With its copious metaphorical associations, Plot a Plan IV is a symbolic treasure imparted with spectacular physicality, telling the story of contemporary consumers and the tale of a people simultaneously.

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5. George Condo

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George Condo, Operatic Abstraction, 2017. Estimate £80,000 - 120,000. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale London.

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“Picasso painted a violin from four different perspectives at one moment. I do the same with psychological states. Four of them can occur simultaneously… hysteria, joy, sadness, and desperation,” explained George Condo. Operatic Abstraction explores this multiverse, in which recognizable elements collide and captivate. True to life, if not visual realism, Operatic Abstraction conveys multifaceted, often-changing, constantly adapting and reinventing human personalities.

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Discover More from 20th Century & Contemporary Art London >

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Recommended Reading

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The Rothko Effect: Why Does Art Move Us? >

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Who to Watch: This Season's New and Emerging Artists >

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\n","2021-04-09T22:54:11.000000Z","https://www.phillips.com/article/73298545/highlight-reel-favorites-from-london",1177,3449,73298545,"https://flockler.com/thumbs/sites/889/15-mark-rothko-phillips-db83129e-4a59-4b3e-a5e3-659dbec2ac99_s600x0.jpg","The emotive, religious aura associated with Mark Rothko has been documented for decades—but what is actually happening to us when we are moved by a work of art? ","The Rothko Effect: Why Does Art Move Us? ","

Mark Rothko, Untitled (Black Blue Painting), 1968. Sold for £2,866,000. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale London.

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Written by Sarah Bochicchio

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In Untitled (Black Blue Painting), two fields, each layered in inky, bluish hues, float in parallel, broken up with a wavering brownish line. Its variegated textures, composition, and disembodying effect are typical of Mark Rothko’s 1960s paintings—which is to say, it is also very intense. When recalling her first encounters with Untitled (Black Blue Painting), Phillips’ Deputy Chairwoman, Europe, and Senior Specialist Marianne Hoet, shared that the work “brings you closer to yourself.” Senior International Specialist and Regional Director, Zürich Lori Spector noted that the work possessed “almost a religious aspect that can’t be denied or dismissed even for the non-denominational.”

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This emotive, religious aura associated with Rothko has been documented for decades. In Pictures & Tears: A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings, 2001, James Elkins’ first chapter focuses on Rothko, using responses left in the visitor’s book at the Rothko Chapel, as well as anecdotal encounters with the artist himself. It is in this section that Elkins proposes, “There is no survey to prove it, but it is likely that the majority of people who have wept over twentieth-century paintings have done so in front of Rothko’s paintings.”

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Although the suggestion may initially seem sweeping, it is difficult to deny the emotional effects—and psychological power—of Rothko’s oeuvre. Rothko is not the only artist of the twentieth century to have created work with an experiential intention, but for those who are moved by his paintings, its intensity can be uniquely overwhelming. Rothko’s work has frequently been described as transcendent, miraculous, or sublime—whether Elkins is correct or not, what makes Rothko’s paintings so moving?

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“What I'll say is almost trite and obvious: it's complicated,” shares Dr. Anjan Chatterjee, a neurology professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine. It is tempting to praise Rothko’s genius on the altar of originality, but, as Chatterjee stresses, “we don't know the answers to most of these questions.” However powerful the Rothko Effect, it is difficult to discern what exactly happens to us, even if we can intuit where we start and where we end.
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The Basic Emotions

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Mark Rothko exalted emotions and repeatedly stated their importance in appreciating his work as he intended it to be experienced—as he experienced it. “I’m not interested in relationships of color or form or anything else,” he famously declared. “I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on—and the fact that lots of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I communicate those basic human emotions.”

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“Rothko calls those basic emotions, but actually in psychology, those are not the basic emotions,” notes Dr. Ellen Winner, a psychology professor at Boston College and author of How Art Works, with a touch of amusement. Most psychologists would consider happiness, sadness, disgust, fear, anger to be the five basic emotions, she clarifies. "The emotions Rothko says he wants to convey are more extreme than these basic emotions. One would never say Rothkos paintings are sad. Tragic, perhaps, but not sad.”

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Abstractly, there is an exchange between Rothko’s conception of the art as something tragic, ecstatic, or doom-ridden—and the way the viewer interprets the work. There are three elements to this: the artist’s emotions, the artwork, and what emotions are being conveyed. If the viewer can intellectually understand what is conveyed about the artwork, they may not necessarily feel it. If they do, it is a connective moment between artist and viewer, by way of a deeply felt emotion.

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It seems to be describing a rather transformative experience, something self-changing, insightful, where you are forced back into yourself – Dr. Matthew Pelowski
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With Rothko specifically, studies have demonstrated a combination of feeling bad, then feeling good that seems to lend itself to that feeling of “being moved." Dr. Matthew Pelowski, a professor at the University of Vienna who has conducted extensive research on Rothko’s emotional effects, has posited that when we look at a Rothko, it is not one instantaneous reception, but a process in which we are confronted with the work and need to re-classify it intellectually, question ourselves, and readjust. The “epiphany” moment may come when our expectations, sense of control, and self-consciousness are reconciled. As Pelowski explains, “It seems to be describing a rather transformative experience, something self-changing, insightful, where you are forced back into yourself.”

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Even if we cry in front of an artwork, the experience remains pleasurable due to an aesthetic distance, which allows us to feel a negative emotion with a level of separation. If we are moved by a tragic response or reflection, "It's not as horrible as if the tragedy were happening to you," adds Winner. Winner connects this concept to “benign masochism,” the idea that realizing that there is no danger, no threat caused by the negative experience is a pleasure in itself. The beauty of the art also softens the tragic feelings it evokes.

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In these moments, when we are moved by an artwork, a collection of brain areas called the Default Mode Network is activated. These areas are turned off when we are stimulated by the outside world but are turned on during periods of daydreaming or introspection. That this introspective network is “on” during emotional encounters with art would imply that the artwork may prompt us to think about our own lives—and perhaps it is during this period of reflection, whether conscious or not, that we are emotionally affected. However interesting the suggestion may be, it is not conclusive, Winner cautions, “We just don't have direct evidence for that.”

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"The other piece around that," adds Chatterjee, "is something that is called the Executive Control Network, which is almost the command and control center of the brain that is directing things." This area ends up decreasing in activity when we are absorbed in a work of art, meaning "our mind is not being controlling." Chatterjee suggests there may be a link between this absorbtion and the feeling of transcendence associated with being moved by a work of art, whether that work is a painting by Rembrandt or Rothko.

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Caspar David Friedrich, Monk by the Sea, 1808/1810. Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany.

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The Sublime

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Although we may not have direct scientific evidence yet, the discourse around Rothko accounts for an introspective, meditative quality. The dialogues around the artist often use the word "sublime," which is a notion closely associated with Romantic-era paintings and nature's vastness. Dr. Hans Maes, a senior philosophy lecturer at the University of Kent, points to David Caspar Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea, in which a far-away figure, cloaked in dark fabrics, stands at the edge of the shore. The blackened sea laps the sky; the sky suspends in ribbons of grey-blue. In this painting, the figure is invited to reflect on their life, the moment they are in, and, as a result, the passage of time. But Rothko “takes out the figure in the painting so that you are the one who is confronted with something that is infinite, vast, or impressive.” The viewer, in a way, becomes the monk looking out to sea.

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Rothko’s works, Maes notes, share many qualities with a vast seascape—not just in their horizontal bands in luminous colors, but in their formlessness. In a Rothko painting, there are no hard lines, they represent an endless depth, in which you may feel yourself dizzily disintegrate. They seem to almost blur out the world, blocking anything sharp or recognizable in your periphery. “There’s nothing determinant, and there's no object in it, there's absence, there's infinity, there's formlessness,” explains Maes.

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For Maes, the term “sublime” may not be the most accurate—because what we are feeling in this moment is not the vastness of nature. What we feel when looking at Rothko may be melancholy, which he says, “is elicited when we contemplate harsh or difficult existential truths in such a way that something we value comes into sharp relief.” For example, standing before a Rothko may disorient you from the present, prompting reflections on time's flight—how quickly and slowly your moments with the work will pass.

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The artwork makes available an emotion through which our thoughts, absorption, or even curiosity transform.
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In this way, Rothko’s paintings are more like tools that allow us to experience a level of self-reflection—or the transcendence that is so often described in relation to his work. Philosopher and writer Dr. Federico Campagna explains that for Rothko, paintings were “instruments to serve a function. What was this function served by the paintings? He always speaks about the fact that a painting has to be a miraculous object.”

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“The miracle is the moment in which you're capable of seeing inside an object, something that is in no way detectable,” Campagna elaborates. “In that object, you see something beyond words, beyond language and beyond understanding.” This “being moved,” as Maes and Campagna describe it, does ultimately feel akin to moving from one mode of being to another. The artwork makes available an emotion through which our thoughts, absorption, or even curiosity transform.

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In a work like Untitled (Black Blue Painting), the transformation exists in the movement from darkness to light. Campagna argues that “Because the painting already performs the darkness, the tears are already in the painting. To maintain the balance of the room, the viewer has to laugh.” Untitled (Black Blue Painting) can be an all-encompassing world, calling upon the balance between darkness and light, hidden in its unfinished depths. “You paint it for what it is, but don't forget that just behind the edges, there is something lighter.”

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Like the process described by Pelowski, “being moved” unfolds as we try to understand, are frustrated, and arrive in a new, abstract space, driven by the artwork and the emotions it activates. In other words—and in Rothko’s words—“you are in it. It isn’t something you command.”

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Discover More from 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale >

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Mark Rothko: Black Blue & Elsewhere

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Philosopher Federico Campagna finds light and optimism behind the dark colour fields of this 1968 work by Mark Rothko, ‘Untitled (Black Blue Painting)’. Referencing Rothko’s writing and his claim that ‘Paintings should be miraculous’ Campagna delves into the artist’s work through the lens of the sacred.

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Recommended Reading

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Who to Watch: This Season's New and Emerging Artists >

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Théâtres de Mémoire: Jean Dubuffet’s Last Decades >

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Overview

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'I wanted to work with materials that people had put their hands on. After they have interacted with humans, materials have something else to offer. When working with materials that have such history, the process has some kind of connective energy: the energy of all the people who have interacted with them.' —El AnatsuiA wonderful example of El Anatsui's Plot a Plan series carried out in 2007, Plot a Plan IV belongs to a wider body of work that the artist has been devoted to since the late 1990s: wide, shimmering curtains made of metallic bottle caps, stringed together with copper wire. Overarching his visual and conceptual artistic intention, Anatsui's ongoing suite of wall-mounted installations began in 1999, after he had found a bag full of discarded seals from African liquor bottles. He then began working on impressive assemblages made of these same elements, crushing them into circles or cutting them into strips, finally stitching them together to form vast tapestries, ever-evolving in shape. Boasting myriad shiny lids — flattened, crumpled or otherwise manipulated — Plot a Plan IV glistens resplendently, and invites the viewer into a horizon of haptic abstraction.

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\"El — El Anatsui at his Nsukka studio on August 8, 2013. Image: PIUS UTOMI EKPEI/AFP via Getty Images. Courtesy of El Anatsui Studio.

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In the Spotlight

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Throughout his career, El Anatsui has been promoting the idea that art-making knows no borders. Currently the recipient of significant critical and curatorial attention, the artist was selected to represent the Ghanaian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, 2019, and was recently the subject of an important survey — the most ambitious to date, and the first-ever in Europe — curated by the late Okwui Enwezor at Haus der Kunst, Munich. The exhibition, tracing Anatsui's artistic practice from the outset to his more contemporary creations, then travelled to Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, the Kunstmuseum Bern and the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, in 2020. In January 2021, Anatsui participated in the Metropolitan Museum's first fully virtual exhibition, The Met Unframed.

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\"\" — El Anatsui's *Plot a Plan, IV*, 2007, aluminium (liquor bottle caps) and copper wire, hung at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for their first fully virtual exhibition, *The Met Unframed*. Imnage: Courtesy Susan Vogel. Courtesy of El Anatsui Studio.

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From the outset of his career in Kumasi, Ghana, Anatsui had been interested in adinkra — motifs expressing the connection between the verbal and the visual in Akan culture. Though he was not particularly interested in the cloth on which these motifs were printed, he was profoundly vested with the symbolic meaning and history they contained. Struck by a remark he had heard in the United States: 'Cloth is to the African what monuments are to Westerners', Anatsui later quoted this observation in an interview with Atta Kwami, and added that cloths bear the capacity 'to commemorate events, issues, persons, and objectives outside of themselves is so immense and fluid it even rubs off on other practices'.¹ In Plot a Plan IV, the sculpture's fabric-like constitution allows it freedom of movement and a multitude of possible forms and modulations. In emulating the malleability of fabric — the work could technically be placed on a wall, just as it could drape the floor or be rolled into a ball — Plot a Plan IV conveys the emotional possibilities enabled by cloth, specifically linked to ideas of commemoration and memorabilia.

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\"Wrapper — *Wrapper (Adinkra)*, c. 1960, cotton and dye, Collection of the Lowe Art Museum, Miami. Image: Gift of Professor and Mrs. Robert R. Ferens / Bridgeman Images.

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Playing with this idea of memory, cultural weavings and a collaborative approach — Anatsui's installations are put together by crews of young assistants working across Nigeria — Plot a Plan IV and its sister works are reminiscent of Alighiero Boetti's Mappa works, which, made by Afghani artisans from the early 1970s to the mid-1990s, weave the shape of the world in its most recognisable topographic form, surrounded by a frame of European letters and Persian calligraphy. Anatsui, much like Boetti before him, alludes to cross-continental connections through a multitude of artistic layers, overall conveying a poetic terrain which harmoniously melds form, content, and meaning. A wealth of symbolism that in Plot a Plan IV, shines most brightly, and literally, through the sculpture's myriad constitutive lids.

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\"Alighiero — Alighiero Boetti, *Map of the World*, 1989, embroidery on fabric, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Image: The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence.
\nAnatsui's Preferred Material. © DACS 2021.

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Highly attentive to the materials he uses, as well as the technique with which he binds them together, Anatsui said, "My father wove and many of my brothers wove. But eventually what got me into textiles was thinking about what textiles mean"'.² It is in reference to the specific use of bottle caps that the artist elucidated the meaning of his preferred material, the bottle cap: 'When I first found the bag of bottle tops, I thought of the objects as links between Africa and Europe. European traders introduced the bottle tops, and alcohol was used in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Europeans made rum in the West Indies, took it to Liverpool, and then sent it back to Africa. For me, the bottle caps have a strong reference to the history of Africa'.³ With its copious metaphorical associations, Plot a Plan IV is a symbolic treasure imparted with spectacular physicality, telling the story of contemporary consumers, and the tale of a people simultaneously.

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The Shape of a People

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'You've touched it, and I've touched it. There is now a kind of bond between you and me, and this is an idea which is very much related to religious practice, spiritual practice, in many parts of Africa and, I believe, in many cultures of the world.' —El Anatsui

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Collecting a wealth of symbolism, the liquor bottle caps atop Plot a Plan IV look at the history of Africa's colonialism whilst simultaneously casting a gaze forward, into a future of intermingling cultures. In transforming his hypercontemporary latticework into a topographic map of sorts, Anatsui incorporates seminal cultural, historical and philosophical elements of his origins, and suggests an organic, fluid formation of contemporary culture, people and souls. In doing so, he creates a language that transcends temporal barriers, able to speak to a global audience. A spectacular example of this, Plot a Plan IV captures the crux of Anatsui's sculptural practice, engaging with complex flows of history, memory and time, and adroitly seizing the ways in which these forces shape human society.

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Julian Lucas' New Yorker Profile on El Anatsui

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Click below to read Julian Lucas' latest profile on El Anatsui, published 11 January 2021.

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$\"https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/01/18/how-el-anatsui-broke-the-seal-on-contemporary-art \"$

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¹ El Anatsui, quoted in 'El Anatsui: Material Wonder', Hali, 15 February 2019, online.

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² El Anatsui, quoted in Ming Lin, 'Material World: Interview with El Anatsui', Art Asia Pacific, 6 January
\n2014, online.
\n³ El Anatsui, quoted in Erika Gee, El Anatsui: When I Last Wrote to You About Africa, exh. cat., Museum of
\nAfrican Art, New York, 2010, pp. 33-34.

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Artemisia Gentileschi, Susanna and the Elders, 1610. Schloss Weißenstein, Pommersfelden, Germany. Private collection of the Schönborn Family.

Käthe Kollwitz, Mutter, zwei Kinder an sich pressend, 1932. Sold for $56,700. 20th Century & Contemporary Art New York.

Tracey Emin, Our Angels, 2007. Estimate £200,000 — 300,000. 20th Century & Contemporary Art London.

Tracey Emin's Our Angels installed at the entrance of the Venice Biennale's British Pavilion, on the occasion of the artist's solo presentation, Borrowed Light, 2007. Image: © Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2021.

Tía Pelos

Paula Rego, The Aunt (Nada) (detail), 2006. Estimate £800,000 — 1,200,000.

Paula Rego ‘The Aunt (Nada)’ | London | Spring 2021

Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1950. porcelain urinal, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia. © 2021. Photo: The Philadelphia Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala, Florence

Marcel Duchamp, L.H.O.O.Q., 1964. Estimate £200,000 - 300,000. 20th Century & Contemporary Art London.

Andy Warhol, Marilyn (Reversal), 1979/86. Estimate £700,000 — 900,000. 20th Century & Contemporary Art London.

Banksy, Gas Mask Boy, 2009. Estimate £1,600,000 - 2,000,000. 20th Century & Contemporary Art London.

Banksy ‘Gas Mask Boy’ | London | Spring 2021\n

Tamara de Lempicka, Figure esquissée sur fond doré, circa 1930. Estimate On Request. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale London.

Jean Dunand, Les Palmiers smoking room, from the residence of Mademoiselle Colette Aboucaya, Paris, 1930-1936. Design London.

Interior of Tamara de Lempicka’s residence designed by Robert Mallet-Stevens, 7 rue Méchain Paris. © 2021 Estate of Robert Mallet-Stevens/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

Katsu Hamanaka, Daybed, from the residence of Mademoiselle Colette Aboucaya, Paris circa 1935. Design London.

Gian Lorenzo Bernini, L'Estasi di Santa Teresa (detail), 1647–1652, white marble, Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome. Image: Getty Images.

First Reveal: Dubuffet’s ‘La féconde journée’ | London | April 2021

Joy Labinjo

Joy Labinjo, Untitled, 2018. Estimate £20,000 - 30,000. 20th Century & Contemporary Art London Evening Sale.

Jordan Casteel

Jordan Casteel, Quinn, 2015. Estimate £150,000 - 200,000. 20th Century & Contemporary Art London Evening Sale.

Lina Iris Viktor

Lina Iris Viktor, Constellations III, 2016. Estimate £30,000 - 50,000. 20th Century & Contemporary Art London Evening Sale.

Toyin Ojih Odutola

Toyin Ojih Odutola, LTS IV, 2014. Estimate £100,000 - 150,000. 20th Century & Contemporary Art London Evening Sale.

Tunji Adeniyi-Jones

Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, Love Ritual, 2019. Estimate £30,000 - 40,000. 20th Century & Contemporary Art London Evening Sale.

1. Frank Stella

Frank Stella, Scramble: Ascending Spectrum / Ascending Green Values, 1977. Estimate £2,000,000 - 3,000,000. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale London.

2. John Chamberlain

John Chamberlain, Gris Gris Gumbo Ya Ya, 1990. Estimate £400,000 - 600,000. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale London.

3. Mark Tansey

Mark Tansey, Study for Nocturne, 1998. Estimate £600,000 - 800,000. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale London.

4. El Anatsui

El Anatsui, Plot a Plan IV, 2007. Estimate £650,000 - 850,000. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale London.

5. George Condo

George Condo, Operatic Abstraction, 2017. Estimate £80,000 - 120,000. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale London.

The Basic Emotions

Caspar David Friedrich, Monk by the Sea, 1808/1810. Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany.

The Sublime

Mark Rothko: Black Blue & Elsewhere

Overview

In the Spotlight

The Shape of a People

Julian Lucas' New Yorker Profile on El Anatsui

Banksy ‘Gas Mask Boy’ | London | Spring 2021
\n

14

El Anatsui

Plot a Plan IV

Further Details

Full-Cataloguing

El Anatsui