Modigliani portrait fetches £16m

A portrait by Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani of his lover Jeanne Hebuterne has sold for £16.3m. The oil painting, Jeanne Hebuterne (au chapeau), dates from 1919 - a year before Modigliani died of tuberculosis. Ms Hebuterne, who was eight months pregnant, committed suicide a day after the artist's death. The painting was part of a sale of modern and impressionist art, which raised almost £89m at London auction house Sotheby's on Monday. An 1895 pastel of a woman bathing by French artist Edgar Degas sold for £6.7m in the same auction. The high prices come during a week of high-profile art sales in London at rival auction houses Sotheby's and Christie's. More than a dozen Picassos are on offer this week, as well as works by Monet, Renoir and Cezanne. One of the Picasso paintings, Le Peintre et Son Modele (The Painter and his Model) sold at Sotheby's for £7.4m on Monday.

“Joseph Havel sees art in everyday items that most of us rarely give a second thought,” said Peter C. Marzio, director of the MFAH. “In his hands, shirts, bed sheets, and drapes mutate from the ordinary into something otherworldly. The museum is pleased to present this survey of Havel’s work at this juncture in his critically acclaimed career.” Havel uses common materials in his art— white dress shirts, curtains, tablecloths—to reach out to a broader audience. He deftly addresses the technical and artistic challenge of translating limp fabric into flamboyant bronze sculptures and delicate constructions that quietly suggest movement. In a process that the artist has described as uncovering “the activity of still objects,” the meaning associated with the items is both amplified and changed, a psychological shift that challenges viewers to reassess what they know and what they feel.

The white dress shirt first appealed to Havel as medium through which he could address complex biological, historical, economical, and sociologic issues in his art. The shirts represented repression and the male middle-class masquerade, considerations to which he could personally relate. He began to buy shirts in quantities at thrift stores and used them to create such works as Spine (1996), a delicate, floating tower of buttoned-up white collars connected by monofilament. He also cast pairs of shirts in bronze, as in Laundered Pair (1996), in which the two garments are balanced, sleeves outstretched, in a kind of bodiless acrobatic pose. Through his work with shirts, Havel found the labels offered another avenue of artistic investigation, one also laden with multiple associations. He used the labels to construct modernist grids that reference color field painting. The first small composition, Fleece (1997), made from labels cut from used shirts evolved into large-scale wall and floor pieces constructed of labels Havel had printed with words of his choosing: “Lust,” “Lost,” “Present,” and “Enough.” The label pieces were in some ways a transition from Havel’s shirt sculptures to his curtain sculptures. When the meaning carried in the shirts started to seem too overtly political, Havel began looking for a medium in which he could address “less easily defined social and gender issues.” Drapes allowed him the freedom to work more abstractly, and he found their reference to Western European paintings appealing. Curtains and Drape (both 1999), two freestanding bronze sculptures included in the exhibition, were shown at the Whitney Biennial 2000. Fallen Reich and another work conceived for the exhibition, Torn and Twisted Curtain, respond specifically to the 20-foot sheer curtains that shroud the wall of windows in the Mies van der Rohe galleries of the Law Building. Torn and Twisted Curtain began as a pair of silk curtains that through manipulation and direct casting became a 16-foot bronze composition balanced on a knotted foot. With Fallen Reich, Havel imagined what would happen if a steel curtain rail fell and crashed 50 feet into the gallery, yards of fabric spilling onto the floor.

“Joseph Havel has investigated both the breadth of minimalist practice and the associative power of the object, delving into the concept of passage and drawing upon the history of art, literary conceits, and the mundane stuff of everyday life,” said the MFAH’s Alison de Lima Greene. “The exhibition galleries are arranged to encourage our visitors to have a series of encounters with Havel’s work. At once humbled and exuberant, his sculptures have a theatrical resonance unique in sculpture today.” A Minneapolis native, Havel has a BFA in Studio Arts from the University of Minnesota and an MFA from Penn State University. His sculptures and drawings have been exhibited extensively including recent exhibitions at Galerie Gabrielle Maubrie in Paris, Dietch Projects in New York, the Soros Center for Contemporary Art in Kiev, the Huntington Beach Art Center in California, and Devin Borden Hiram Butler Gallery in Houston. He has received numerous awards including a national Endowment for the Arts Artist Fellowship in 1987, a Tiffany Fellowship in 1995, and a 1998 Purchase Award from the French Ministry of Culture. His work is included in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the Contemporary Museum, Honolulu.

Beyond Graffiti: Fresh Visions from Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and NYC . Through May 5 . Opening reception: March 30, 7-9pm
Beyond Graffiti: Fresh Visions from Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and NYC is an eclectic and exuberant celebration of street art from the three cities. Featured artwork from Israel includes Rami Meiri's photorealistic wall creations, Nir Aharon's stylish designs on canvas, Leora Cheshin's intriguing photographs of Jerusalem stencil art, Anne Sassoon's haunting paintings, Daniel Sieradski's satirical graphics and Amitai Sandy's striking illustrations.  A series of events - ranging from innovative workshops to interactive presentations - will be offered in connection with the exhibit. Curated by Lois Stavsky. The Bronfman Center Gallery, 7 East 10th Street, between 5th Avenue and University Place. For more information please call: 212-998-4122 or visit: www.nyu.edu/bronfman/gallery

Tamy Ben-Tor at Neo Sincerity: The Difference Between the Comic and the Cosmic is a Single Letter. Through Apr. 8
From the Peloponnesian Wars to the Black Death and the war in Iraq, in dire times laughter has always been the best revenge. Laughter dislodges piety and short-circuits programmatic response, and some subjects are simply too big to approach in any other way. Curated by Art Critic Amei Wallach, Neo Sincerity: The Difference Between the Comic and the Cosmic is a Single Letter surveys three generations of visual artists who amuse and appall. Art Spiegelman, who coined the term ‘neo-sincerity’, Walid Raad, Tamy Ben-Tor, Paul Chan, Michael Combs, Thornton Dial, Matt Forderer, Regina Gilligan, David Hammons, Ilya & Emilia Kabakov, Melamid & William McClelland, Peter Land, Laura Nova, David Rees, Skart, Nancy Spero, Marie Watt, Olav Westphalen, Paul Zaloom present their expressions of comedy and irony in an age of anxiety and rage when irony itself has become the official language of power. APEXART, 291 Church Street, between Walker and White. For more information, please call: 212 431 5270 or visit: www.apexart.org

TWO BRUSHES WITH FLOWERS - Paintings by Liron Sissman and Kim Eng Yeo. Apr. 6 through May 14.
Meet the Artist Reception: Apr. 6, 6pm

Award winning Israeli artist Liron Sissman will be featured in a two person show along watercolors by Kim Eng Yeo. Sissman's flower paintings are visual metaphors as well as universal portraits. She strives to be subtle in her expression of the intense conveying emotions and many life cycles. Eng Yeo is a realist painter who draws inspiration from nature, seeks its essence in her watercolors to foster a keener appreciation of the subject - beyond decoration. The engaging and vivid works by the two artists dynamically complement each other in this new show opening on April 6th. The exhibit is also part of the Tribeca Open Artists' Studio Tour (Apr. 29- 30, and May 1) and Sissman will be available to discuss her work and for the monthly Tribeca Gallery Association night (May 10 6–8 pm).  Synagogue for the Arts Gallery Space, 49 White Street. For more information please call: (212) 966-7141 or visit: www.Liron.com
 

Reflections from the Heart: Photographs by David Seymour"
2006-03-18 until 2006-06-04
Corcoran Gallery of Art
Washington, DC, USA
 

The Corcoran Gallery of Art, in partnership with the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography, Rochester and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), presents Reflections from the Heart, a survey exhibition of 75 photographs taken by founding Magnum photographer David Seymour, also known as Chim. Organized by Tom Beck, UMBC curator and leading scholar of Seymour’s art, the exhibition will be on view at the Corcoran Gallery of Art from March 18 through June 4, 2006. This small retrospective is organized chronologically and showcases many of the photojournalistic black and white images for which Chim is best known. Also exhibited for the first time are several of Chim’s rare color images. A new publication, David Seymour (Chim) (Phaidon, Fall 2005), accompanies the exhibition and features text and captions by scholar and curator, Tom Beck. This is the first exhibition of Seymour’s work since the 1996 retrospective organized by the International Center of Photography, New York. “Chim aimed to tell the heart-breaking and heart-warming stories of life through his photographs,” said Tom Beck, Chief Curator, University of Maryland, Baltimore County. “His work was revolutionary at the time and still speaks today to those who encounter his images.” When the political and economic upheaval in Europe in the 1930s dashed Seymour’s dreams of completing a science curriculum at the Sorbonne, he borrowed a camera from a family friend and between 1933 and 1956 helped redefine photojournalism. Seymour had no formal photography training, but his work was marked by an acute sense of history and the humanistic ideals of his time. Born in Warsaw, Poland, Dawid Szymin grew up surrounded by art, music and literature. After he moved to Paris in 1931, he soon became a photojournalist and adopted the professional moniker “CHIM,” a French phonetic abbreviation of his surname.

All Places Are Distant from Heaven Alike - A group show. Apr. 16 through 30
Opening Reception: Apr. 20, 6pm