Picasso set to make a splash in Hong Kong

Picasso is set to make a splash in Hong Kong this autumn, with not one, but three sales in the city.  Two of the city’s top galleries and auctioneer Sotheby’s are hosting exhibitions of the Spanish artist’s work that will also offer fans the chance to buy pieces from across Picasso’s career.

Picasso’s ‘Jeune fille aux cheveux noirs (Dora Maar)’

Gallery owner Ben Brown says that while the market for Picassos in Asia is small right now, he is optimistic that it is set to grow. The Hong Kong branch of Mr. Brown’s eponymous London-based gallery will hold a Picasso sale and show from the middle of November to Chinese New Year.

“I’d be pleasantly surprised if I sold anything from my show to an Asian buyer, though it’s an opportunity to educate people about Picasso, to see his paintings in person,” said Mr. Brown. He plans to offer about 15 Picasso paintings for sale in Hong Kong, priced from US$2 million to US$15 million. They will mostly be works from the 1960s and 1970s.

“The type of people who can afford a Picasso, (many) of them come through Hong Kong at least once a year, so Hong Kong is a good catchment (area),” Mr. Brown said.

There are only a handful of serious collectors of Picasso paintings in Asia, primarily in South Korea, Taiwan and Japan, according to art-market experts in the region. However, many dealers say they believe China in particular is emerging as an important market for a wide range of blue-chip Western art. Earlier this month, an Asian buyer paid 18.1 million Hong Kong dollars ($2.4 million) for “Le Modèle dans l’Atelier,” a 1965 Picasso, at Seoul Auction in Hong Kong.

Mr. Brown’s exhibition will follow closely on the heels of a Picasso event at Edouard Malingue’s new, 150-square-meter Rem Koolhaas-designed space in the heart of Hong Kong’s financial district. Since Sept. 27, the Malingue gallery has housed an all-Picasso show, which runs to Dec. 4. Works on display include a watercolor study for “Deux Femmes Nues” — the painting itself, created between 1906 and 1907, hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in New York — and a 1962 portrait of the last Mrs. Picasso, Jacqueline Roque.

Mr. Malingue, the eldest son of a top Parisian art dealer, was based in London before he relocated to Hong Kong last year to set up the Edouard Malingue Gallery.

Hong Kong’s run of Picasso-themed events is rounded out by Sotheby’s. The auction house has announced a late November exhibition and sale of works by Impressionist and Modern painters, ranging in price from US$2 million to US$25 million. The sale will include pieces by Renoir, Chagall, Degas and Monet, though seven works by Picasso are expected to steal the spotlight. The sale showcases works from across much of Picasso’s life, including his early Blue Period, Cubism from the 1920s, and his post-1960 Expressionist paintings. The star of the exhibition is “Jeune Fille aux Cheveux Noirs (Dora Maar),” a 1939 portrait of the artist’s lover, Dora Maar.

“The most exciting and active growth in collecting today is occurring in China and other countries in Asia,” said David Norman, co-chairman of Sotheby’s department of Impressionist and Modern Art. “We wanted to bring great works of art directly and exclusively to that audience.”

The sale takes place in Hong Kong between Nov. 26 and 28, and the exhibition will be previewed in Beijing from Oct. 22 to 25.

Barnes Foundation

Address:

300 North Latch's Lane,
Merion, Pennsylvania

The Barnes Foundation is an educational art institution in a suburb of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was founded in 1922 by an American physician Dr. Albert C. Barnes, who collected art after making a fortune by co-developing an early antimicrobial drug marketed as Argyrol.

With the enormous profits from the sale of the drug, Barnes accumulated a large collection of mainly French Impressionist art works, which today form the holdings of the Barnes Foundation, an educational art institution established by his will. The paintings were valued in March, 2010, at $25 billion.

Today, the Foundation possesses more than 2500 objects, including 800 paintings. Among its collection are

• 181 works by Pierre-Auguste Renoir,
• 69 by Paul Cézanne,
• 59 by Henri Matisse,
• 46 by Pablo Picasso,
• 21 by Chaim Soutine,
• 18 by Henri Rousseau,
• 16 by Amedeo Modigliani,
• 11 by Edgar Degas,
• 7 by Vincent Van Gogh,
• 6 by Georges Seurat,
• as well as numerous other masters, including Giorgio de Chirico, Paul Gauguin, El Greco, Francisco Goya, Edouard Manet, Jean Hugo, Claude Monet

Website http://www.barnesfoundation.org

more info http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnes_Foundation

More facts about Albert C. Barnes:

• The son of a poverty-stricken Civil War veteran, he grew up in the verminous, squatter slums of Philadelphia, with a burning determination to get rich.
• Argyrol was an instant and worldwide success, and Barnes was a millionaire before he was 35. In 1928, with superb timing, Barnes sold out Argyrol for an estimated $4,000,000, not long before the discovery of antibiotics, which largely replaced it.
• Guided by his lifelong friend, Artist William Glackens, Barnes began to buy up French impressionist paintings by the boatload.
• Although many of his early purchases were mistakes, he showed taste and a fine instinct for good investment. He was one of the discoverers of Modigliani. In one moment of sound judgment he bought 60 Soutines for $50 apiece—long before Soutine was well known.
• In time Barnes assembled the world's greatest collection of Matisses, the largest group of Cezannes outside the Louvre, and over $50 million worth of art by Picasso, Braque, Gauguin, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, John Marin, Georgia O'Keeffe and Ben Shahn.
• When his collection outgrew his home and factory, Barnes built a marble temple to house it in suburban Merion, surrounded the place with ferocious police dogs and a ten-foot "spite wall."

Book - Art Held Hostage: The Battle over the Barnes Collection

Picasso Swaps Lovers, Seeks Sun, Ditches Skulls: Martin Gayford

"Paloma Debout" by Pablo Picasso. The picture is on display in "Picasso: The Mediterranean Years" at the Gagosian Gallery, 6-24 Britannia Street, London through August 28. Photographer: Eric Baudouin/Gagosian Gallery via Bloomberg

''La Femme Enceinte I'' (''The Pregnant Woman I'') by Pablo Picasso. The work is at the Gagosian Gallery in London for the exhibition ''Picasso: The Mediterranean Years (1945-1962)'' through August 28. Photographer: Rob McKeever/Gagosian Gallery via Bloomberg

''Femme et Enfants: Le Dessin'' (''Women and Children: The Drawing'') by Pablo Picasso. The work is at the Gagosian Gallery in London for the exhibition ''Picasso: The Mediterranean Years (1945-1962)'' through August 28. Photographer: Eric Baudouin/Gagosian Gallery via Bloomberg

"Musicien Assis" (1956) by Pablo Picasso. The work is on display in "Picasso: The Mediterranean Years" at the Gagosian Gallery, 6-22 Britannia Street, London through August 28. Photographer: Patrick Goetelen/Gagosian Gallery via Bloomberg

"Tete a la Coiffe" by Pablo Picasso. The work is on view in "Picasso: The Mediterranean Years" at the Gagosian Gallery, 6-24 Britannia Street, London through August 28. Photographer: Patrick Goetelen/Gagosian Gallery via Bloomberg

This is an undated handout photo of John Richardson, author of ``A Life of Picasso: Volume III, The Triumphant Years, 1917- 1932''. Source: Knopf via Bloomberg News

(Bloomberg News) Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) had an epic life. He lived to be almost 92 years old, enjoyed almost uninterrupted health and success, and worked virtually every day for more than seven decades.
He remains the dominant artist of modern times -- his only possible rival for that title being Henri Matisse. A remarkable and beautifully selected exhibition at the Gagosian in Britannia Street, London, presents him in the ripely productive autumn of his career.
At its opening point, the artist was already 64. He still had almost three decades to go during which he explored new media, created an abundance of masterpieces and experienced the last two great loves of his life. He had also just come out of one of his darkest periods: the wartime occupation of Paris.
During the war Picasso kept low, holed up in his left-bank studio, producing work that is characterized, as the curator John Richardson puts it, by its ‘cell-like settings and fear- filled grayness”. There is still a touch of monochrome drabness about the earlier works in this show. But Picasso’s life rapidly opened out.
From 1946 he spent much of his time in the sunshine of the South of France, eventually settling there permanently. It was a return to the Mediterranean world of his upbringing and youth, and brought out a vein of pastoral fantasy in the great man. In place of the grim skulls of the early 1940s, piping, garlanded shepherds and their goats appear.
Fired Clay
In 1946 on impulse Picasso took up ceramics, a medium he had not worked in since the early 1900s. In the following years, he produced plates, vases and sculptures in fired clay by the hundred. There is a light, relaxed feel to many of these pieces. Indeed, much of Picasso’s work at this time has a playful quality.
On show are some of the little masks, animals, birds, hats and items such as neck-ties he made from cardboard and paper for his children, guests and friends.
This interest in childish things was connected to the fact that there were young children in Picasso’s world. He started a relationship with Francoise Gilot, a student 40 years his junior, in 1944. In the late 1940s and early 1950s it was the family he had with Gilot -- a son, Claude, born in 1947 and daughter Paloma in 1949 -- that seemed to spark his imagination more than Gilot herself.
Baboon Head
There are portraits of both infants in the show, and their toys got into his work, most memorably in the case of “Baboon and Young” (1951). This sculpture is an example of Picasso the magician, transforming one thing, abracadabra, into another. Its head is made of two of young Claude’s toy cars, cast in bronze and metamorphosed with complete conviction into the animal’s eyes and snout.
With Picasso, his private life was his subject matter. When his mistress changed, everything changed. Gilot’s successor was Jacqueline Roque, whom he eventually married in 1961. Her grave, sad beauty came to dominate his art. Before she was installed as reigning mistress, a number of young women were, so to speak, auditioned for the role.
One of these, a redhead perhaps from Eastern Europe, was the subject of “Femme a la robe verte” (1954). Even Richardson -- who is also Picasso’s biographer and friend -- has failed so far to establish her identity. There is still a good deal to discover about the life and work of this hugely prolific artist. From beyond the grave, he continues to astonish.
“Picasso: The Mediterranean Years 1945-1962” runs through Aug. 28 at the Gagosian, 6-24 Britannia Street, London WC1X 9JD. Information: +44-207-841-9960 or http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/2010-06-04_picasso/
(Martin Gayford is chief art critic for Muse, the arts and leisure section of Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)
original article at: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-07-11/picasso-swaps-lovers-seeks-sun-ditches-skulls-martin-gayford.html