This video is called Amsterdam, Netherlands: Van Gogh’s Life and Art.
This blog post is from last year, from Dear Kitty ModBlog, recovered through the Google cache.
Today Vincent van Gogh’s birthday. Art and money Linking: 40 Comments: 46
Date: 3/30/05 at 9:56AM
Mood: Looking Playing: Painter man, by Creation
Today is the birthday of famous Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh (see self-portrait picture).
Part of his life he lived among the miners of the Borinage region in Belgium. He was on their side in their fight against poverty.
He died poor himself. He managed to sell just one of his paintings during his life, for little money.
However, after his death, in a cruel twist of economical mechanisms, he became an artist off whom some people made very much money.
Van Gogh was not untypical in this.
Dutch daily NRC Handelsblad of 6 May 2004 published a Top 10 of most expensive works of art. Paintings, all of them.
The most expensive one of all, by Pablo Picasso, was sold for 104,1 million $.
In the Top 10 are 4 works by Pablo Picasso. An artist with far more luck than many others, in that appreciation already came during his lifetime.
So, compared to the overwhelming majority of artists, he was able to live well from his art. Still, he was much less of a millionaire than the speculators dealing in his work after his death. Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is widely seen as one of the most influential paintings, maybe even the most influential painting, of the twentieth century. Yet its maker got only 25,000 French francs for it, from a wealthy fashion designer. In 1937, The Museum of Modern Art in New York bought it for 28,000 dollars. While if some art dealer would sell the painting today, he woud sell it for tens of millions of dollars.
As a French communist party member, Picasso opposed capitalism.
And what would he have said, if he knew that the copy of his anti war painting Guernica, at the United Nations building in New York City as a warning, was covered up as “too realistic” during the 2003 speech by then United States Secretary of State Colin Powell?
The speech in which Powell preached war against Iraq, “because of Weapons of Mass Destruction” which did not exist (as Powell himself conceded later)?
One work by Rubens in the Top 10; sold for 76,7 million $. Also Rubens could live reasonably well from his art (and his job as a diplomat), but he certainly wasn’t a millionaire.
Also one painting by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Was poor during the first half of his life. Had some more luck later, though also not becoming a millionaire.
Also in the Top 10: three paintings by Vincent van Gogh, most after Picasso. We already discussed the cruel paradox of his life and work.
Last year, a distant relative of Vincent, Theo van Gogh, was killed in Amsterdam. See this article.
Completing the Top Ten of “rich” paintings, also 1 work by Paul Cézanne. Who, 56 years after his birth and 11 years before his death, could at last exhibit his paintings for the first time. Also he did not get rich by his art.
Others, who did not even contribute one drop of paint, did get rich off his art after his death.
One more example of the poor painters-”rich paintings” paradox.
And today, about a century after Cézanne and Van Gogh?
“Don’t give up your day job, a report released last November into the economic circumstances of professional artists in Australia, reveals that the overwhelming majority of artists are living in dire poverty.” See here.
More on art and economy and society:
John Berger interview: here.
See also here.
Julio Gonzalez and Picasso: here.
Mark Vallen: here.
On LA County Museum of Art: here.
On Judge Scalia: here.
On Andy Warhol: here. And here.
John Molyneux on Warhol: here.
The announcement by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts that it has sealed a deal with Christie’s to liquidate its remaining art holdings of reportedly 20,000 works has left many people scratching their heads. The foundation bearing the name of one of the most influential artist of our times intends to own none of his art? Here.
Rodin and Camille Claudel: here.
French impressionists: here.
Art, ads, and capitalism: here.
LONDON Jun 20, 2005 — Monkey business proved to be lucrative Monday when paintings by Congo the chimpanzee sold at auction for more than $25,000.
The three abstract, tempera paintings were auctioned at Bonhams in London alongside works by impressionist master Renoir and pop art provocateur Andy Warhol.
But while Warhol’s and Renoir’s work didn’t sell, bidders lavished attention on Congo’s paintings.
Source http://abcnews.go.com
Contemporary Chinese artist Yue Minjun and money: here.
Prices for early vs. late twentieth century art: here.
Damien Hirst, art, and money: here.
“My transcription of Francis D. Klingender’s pamphlet, Marxism and Modern Art: An approach to social realism is now available at the Marxist Internet Archive”: here.
Picasso Sets New Auction Record: here.
3/14/06 at 12:46PM
Playing: Money, money, money, by Abba
As this blog pointed out before, there are at least two ironies in the relationship between art and business.
First, traders and speculators who themselves did not contribute even a single drop of paint, making millions from the works of artists whose lives more often than not were a struggle economically.
Second, capitalists profiting from artists often critical of capitalism (Picasso, Dadaism, Chagall, and others from the article below).
Bloomberg reports:
Picasso, Warhol Top List of Actively Traded Art
By Linda Sandler
March 14 — Pablo Picasso, who painted the world’s most expensive picture, held his place as 2005′s most actively traded artist, and Andy Warhol bumped Claude Monet from No. 2, said Artprice.com, a data service.
Canaletto’s Venetian views propelled him to fourth place from 239th.
Picasso collectors raised $153.2 million last year from 1,409 works sold at auction, said Artprice, which is based in France.
Owners of Warhols realized $86.7 million from 660 images, while 22 Monets took $61.5 million and 18 Canalettos $55.5 million, it said.
… Three Chinese painters, including Zao Wou-Ki, born in 1921, jumped onto Artprice’s top 50 as Christie’s International and Sotheby’s Holdings Inc. expanded Asian auctions.
Henri Matisse fell to 13th from sixth as his best bright-patterned works became scarcer.
Artprice published its ranking of artists by auction volume on its Web site as part of a survey of market trends in 2005.
Prices came from 2,900 auction houses worldwide, it said.
Picasso’s `Garcon’
In May 2004, Picasso’s “Garcon a la Pipe” sold for $104.2 million at Sotheby’s in New York, becoming the most expensive artwork ever to sell at auction.
Fine-art auctions last year raised $4.2 billion, an increase of 15 percent from 2004, as the hammer came down on 477 lots priced at $1 million or more. …
New York, where the billionaire Eli Broad paid $23.8 million for David Smith’s “Cubi XXVIII” sculpture at Sotheby’s in November, was expensive in 2005.
Values swelled 35 percent in the biggest market. Art prices in London increased 4.8 percent.
New York Gains
The U.S. was catching up with an earlier surge in the No.2 market, Artprice said.
From 2002 to 2004, London auction prices shot up 87 percent, dwarfing New York’s gains of 28 percent.
Prices in Paris, the No. 3 market, were little changed last year.
For Hong Kong, which has overtaken Germany to become the fourth-largest market, Artprice said there’s insufficient monthly data to provide comparable numbers.
However, China’s economic boom sent indexes of the country’s contemporary artists and old masters about 80 percent higher at auctions worldwide, it said.
The hottest art movement in 2005 was Dada, an early-20th- century group whose best-known work is Marcel Duchamp’s urinal, “Fountain.”
An Artprice index of Dada works rose 137 percent.
Italian futurists including Gino Severini added 93 percent.
London Bombings
New York took a 44 percent share of fine-art auctions.
London’s auction totals swelled by one-fifth, giving the U.K. capital 28 percent of the pie.
A Canaletto painting of Venice fetched $32.6 million in a packed Sotheby’s London auction room after a day of bombings on July 7, making the 18th-century Italian artist the most expensive of the year.
Hong Kong, which contributed more of Christie’s 2005 auction totals than Paris, had a 3.7 percent market share, while Paris raised 6.6 percent.
Publicly traded Artprice has headquarters in Saint-Romain-au-Mont-d’Or, France.
Here are Artprice’s 10 most actively traded artists:
Pablo Picasso
Andy Warhol
Claude Monet
Canaletto
Mark Rothko
Marc Chagall
Willem de Kooning
Fernand Leger
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Lucian Freud
Warhol painting sells for $71-million
Associated Press
May 17, 2007 at 2:25 AM EDT
The Globe and Mail
NEW YORK — An Andy Warhol painting sold for more than $71-million (U.S.), more than quadrupling the previous top auction price for the pop artist’s work, Christie’s auction house said.
Wednesday’s auction of postwar and contemporary art took in a total of nearly $385-million, making it the second most lucrative art auction ever held, according to Christie’s.
The Warhol painting, Green Car Crash (Green Burning Car I), went for $71.7-million. The previous auction record for a Warhol work was $17.4-million, set when Mao sold at Christie’s in November, 2006, the auction house said.
Green Car Crash, painted in 1963, is part of a series of Warhol works that drew on photographs of fatal accidents. Silkscreened over a green background, the work makes use of a news photograph of a grisly crash in Seattle. It had been in a private collection for decades, the auction house said.
£15m for a Monet? The smart money’s on the new
Jennifer Cunningham
June 19 2007
This evening, those with more than £15m to spare could splash out on one of the world’s greatest impressionist paintings. Claude Monet’s Nympheas, painted in 1904, is among the earliest in the artist’s waterlily series to focus almost entirely on the surface of the water.
It is now regarded as a very influential work in the movement towards abstraction in the twentieth century – and is also, of course, luminously beautiful. The sale at Sotheby’s in London is generating enormous excitement, not least because the painting, one of the few Monets remaining in private collections, has not been seen in public since 1936.
In this case – as with the other big names in the sale, including Matisse, Renoir, Modigliani, Toulouse-Lautrec and Picasso – bidders are putting their money on entirely bankable commodities, but would they have been as keen on Nympheas in 1904?
The question arises in the wake of one of the contemporary art world’s cautionary tales. Damien Hirst, who hit the headlines as the new enfant terrible of British art in 1990, with A Thousand Years, a glass case containing maggots feeding on a dead cow’s head, went on to make hundreds of “spin paintings”, created by dribbling paint over a spinning canvas. The buyers who got out their chequebooks, emboldened by the knowledge that the collector Charles Saatchi was buying Hirst’s work, included the theatre director Sir Trevor Nunn, who reportedly paid £27,000 for one of the swirly paintings.
However, in his new autobiography, the actor Keith Allen claims the painting was in fact created by Hirst’s two-year-old son along with Allen’s son, then 10. Sir Trevor has since said he sold the painting for a profit of some £20,000.
The new owners may not see the joke. An art market with newly monied Chinese and Russian oligarchs out-bidding one another for trophy paintings is tempting old families that have been guarding their grand collections to sell choice pieces. The really smart thing to do, however, is to spot new talent and buy what may turn out to be iconic 21st-century works. The impoverished art-lover’s alternative to Sotheby’s and Christie’s summer sales is the degree show.
A tour of Glasgow School of Art’s show yesterday revealed the usual mix of the beautiful and the bizarre, the technically accomplished and the iconoclastic. Identifying the original mind amid the youthful take on the world’s ills is challenging. Is that still true of Monet?
http://www.theherald.co.uk/features/features/display.var.1480565.0.0.php
Warhol and the art of making millions
Lindsay Pollock, New York
November 2, 2007
THE exuberant New York art market enters an auction fray this month, when a record number of artworks will test its limits.
A 1963 Andy Warhol portrait of a red-lipped Elizabeth Taylor, Liz, bought by Hugh Grant for $US3.6 million at Sotheby’s New York in 2001, returns to Christie’s International on November 13, tagged to sell for as much as $US35 million.
Art trader Adam Lindemann’s shiny hot-pink Jeff Koons Hanging Heart (Magenta/Gold) is expected to reap up to $US20 million at Sotheby’s on November 14. Mr Lindemann hopes to sell the sculpture, completed just last year, for about five times what he paid Gagosian Gallery, two dealers said.
These and other sellers at 11 auctions are offering 1892 impressionist, modern and contemporary works, projected to tally as much as $US2 billion. In May, similar sales totalled a record $US1.4 billion from 1804 lots.
“There’s no restraint,” said Miami-based art adviser Lisa Austin. “In the financial market, you have analysts who hold things down based on earnings. Here it’s whatever the market will bear, without regard to who will be important in the long run.”
Auction house executives urged collectors to sell now or face an uncertain future for Wall Street and the US economy.
There are already signs of a pullback. At auctions held earlier this month in London, lesser works by Damien Hirst, Warhol and others went unsold.
“If it’s not A-plus or it’s slightly pricey, people don’t feel the urgency,” said Christie’s senior contemporary art expert Laura Paulson.
Naturally, most auction-house executives and dealers say they aren’t worried.
“There is a very consistent sense of confidence in the art market,” said David Norman, head of Sotheby’s impressionist and modern-art department.
As collectors hold increasing sway in an art market driven by conspicuous consumption rather than connoisseurship, artists seem to be courting billionaire collectors more than art critics.
Artist Richard Prince, who has three works in the November evening sales, gave Christie’s owner and French billionaire Francois Pinault a personal tour around the Guggenheim show as reporters and critics watched from afar.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/business/warhol-and-the-art-of-making-millions/2007/11/01/1193619060362.html
He’s spinning in his grave
Thursday 14 July 2011
I recently read in the Times Literary Supplement that at this year’s London Antiquarian Book Fair an autographed first edition of volume 1 of Das Kapital was on offer for £35,000.
Who says Karl couldn’t raise any Kapital?
Barry Baldwin
Calgary, Canada
http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/news/content/view/full/107049
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