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Van Gogh and the construction of genius: narration as the final brushstroke of the work.
Van Gogh's genius was already on the canvas, but the world didn't see it. Only thanks to those who told and shared his work, the genius became visible. When talent and storytelling meet, a legend is born.
A Year in the Name of Klimt: When Art Makes More Noise Than Bitcoin (And Costs More, Too)
A Year in the Name of Klimt: When Art Makes More Noise Than Bitcoin (And Costs More, Too) Art Market 2025 · Safe Haven · Selling Paintings Blog If you thought real investment in 2025 was all about cryptocurrency, AI, and suburban housing… spoiler alert: art was once again the star of the show . And the star? Obviously, Gustav Klimt , the artist who can drive up prices more than the cost of sandwiches at the service station. At international auctions – especially in New York – the market hasn't just come alive: it's shifted gears . And it's done so with a record that reads like this: 💥 Record 2025 A Klimt work sold for $236,400,000 . Yes: two hundred and thirty-six million. No: that's not a typo. 📌 New York: capital of art (and of mind-blowing prices) The article makes one thing clear: New York confirms its position as the beating heart of the market . The major events (Sotheby's, Christie's & co.) aren't just events: they are true "money festivals." And the beauty is that it's not just the buyer who wins: the market wins too, because when art changes, everything changes : prestige, investments, collecting, narrative… and yes, even a little ego. 🎯 Not just paintings: he also wins a watch (one of those that hurt) In the midst of this wonderful chaos, here comes the twist: among the collectibles, a steel Patek Philippe appears, sold in Geneva for $17,600,000 . 📉 So is art always a “safe haven”? It depends. Because if there's one thing 2025 reminded everyone, it's this: Not everything that is art increases in value The name matters, but the history of the work also matters The market is a mix of quality, storytelling and timing In practice: Klimt flies… but the rest of the world isn't automatically "Klimt." However, this doesn't mean that emerging art has no value: it just means that strategy is needed . ✨ Pro tip Selling paintings If you want to sell well (and truly grow in the market), it's not enough to be good: you also have to position yourself . And today, positioning is the real currency. What does all this have to do with Selling Paintings? It certainly does. Because while big names are breaking records, contemporary art and emerging artists are entering a new phase: more digital, more international, more transparent. And yes: the market isn't just for the "usual suspects." But to make a work saleable and desirable, it takes: Impeccable presentation (images, work description, coherence) Correct price (neither dream nor sale) Distribution (people need to see it, not just your mom) ✅ Conclusion: Klimt is not for everyone, but it sells well. 2025 reminded us that art is still a realm where numbers make your head spin. But the real lesson is this: value is built . And those who do well, sooner or later enter the right market. 📩 Do you want to sell your works professionally? On Venderequadri you can publish your works, position yourself correctly and manage negotiations seriously (but without sacrificing style).
Selling Paintings Highlights - Edvard Munch - The Thunderstorm
Munch painted the storm in Aasgaardstrand, a small Norwegian seaside town where he often stayed. That summer, a severe storm had indeed struck, but this doesn't seem to be the subject of the painting, nor even its after-effects, but rather an internal storm, a mental anguish. Standing by the water, in the mysterious midnight blue of a Scandinavian summer, a mixture of light and shadow, a young woman clutches her head. Other women stand at a distance and repeat her same anguished gesture, the reason for which is unclear. Their arrangement in a circle and the protagonist's white dress suggest some ancient pagan ritual, although the solid house in the background with its illuminated windows suggests a normal life from which women are excluded, or perhaps they themselves cannot tolerate Munch's ancient expression. It reveals the transformation of personal memories or emotions into a dreamlike, mythical, and enigmatic dimension. His contact with French Symbolist poetry during his time in Paris convinced him of the urgent need for a more subjective art: no more paintings of "people reading and women knitting" were needed. A participant in the international Symbolist movement in the 1990s, he would become a precursor to Expressionism.
Selling Paintings Highlights - Auguste Rodin - Monument to Balzac
Rodin, who had been commissioned to create a commemorative work for the greatest French novelist, devoted himself for seven years to studying the writer's biography and works, had models pose that resembled him and made clothes to his measurements. In essence, however, Rodin did not intend to celebrate the physical appearance of "Honoré de Balzac" so much as the idea and spirit of the man, his creative energy: "I think of his industriousness, his difficult existence, his perennial battles and his immense courage. This is what I would like to express." Many of the studies for this work are nudes, but Rodin dressed the figure inspired by the dressing gown often worn by the writer who loved to work at night. The result is a monolithic, free-standing, phallic figure that rises upwards, dominated by the rough relief and the cavities that define the face and head. The monument to Balzac is a visual metaphor for the author's energy and genius, but when the cast in The plaster model was first exhibited in Paris in 1898 and was harshly criticized; accused of resembling a sack of coal, a snowman, or a seal, the literary society that had commissioned the work called it "a crude sketch." Rodin kept the plaster model in his home on the outskirts of Paris, and it was only cast in bronze years after his death.
Selling Paintings Highlights - Paul Cézanne - The Bather
The Bather is one of Cézanne's most evocative figure paintings, although the slender muscles of the torso and arms reveal no heroic aspirations and the drawing, in accordance with traditional 21st-century canons, is crude and imprecise. The bather's left leg is forward and firmly resting on the ground, while the right, drawn back, bears no weight. The right side of the body is raised compared to the left, the chin asymmetrically lowered, the right arm oblong and oblique. The landscape is as barren as a desert, but the colors green, purple, and pink belie this definition. The dreamy vastness is well suited to the pensive bather. Likewise, the shadows of the body do not tend towards black, but take on the tones of air, earth, and water, and the brushstrokes create a network of impetuous yet extremely refined hatchings and stains. The figure comes towards us but does not meet our gaze. It is a typically modern restlessness, revealing the fact that, despite Cézanne's profound respect for traditional art, he did not represent the male nude like classical or Renaissance artists. "He wanted an art that was solid and lasting, like the art of museums," but which also reflected modern sensibilities and the new way of conceiving visual impressions and light. of the Impressionists. He wanted an art of his time that challenged the tradition of the past.
The art market and the Internet
There are clear signs that the art market is entering the online world. In 2019, modern and contemporary art revenues exceeded $70 billion, confirming their position as an excellent source of investment. A particularly interesting finding is the growing demand for both established and emerging artists. Traditional channels, however, are difficult for newcomers and sometimes intimidating; hence the enormous growth of online sales, which, according to some authoritative analysts, with estimated revenues reaching $10 billion by 2023, will significantly increase to become the dominant market. Galleries (aside from a few that have gotten ready) have failed to adapt and are suffering from a likely fatal crisis. Auction houses, on the other hand, have gotten organized and are achieving satisfactory results. Artists of all categories will also have to adapt to the new scenario and rely on certified platforms to promote their works. As often happens, in Italy the delay of galleries and artists is even more accentuated and the risk is that of seeing the disappearance of authoritative protagonists of our art.
Why are art exhibitions held?
Exhibitions are held because artists are there. This could easily be a response, albeit directly and somewhat bluntly. There are producers of artefacts (belonging to a very particular species of artefacts) who need to identify a place (which may be suitable to host them, but not necessarily) where they can display them. Why on earth do they want to show these particular artifacts? At best, because they are thought to captivate the imagination of an observer; in the vast majority, to sell. It is an "exchange value", commonly a commodity, albeit of a particular type, which, as happens with every commodity, has a value if it allows its producer to obtain a compensation that satisfies him. But this artifact also has, under certain conditions, historical and cultural value. And who defines this value, which cannot be measured simply in the hours of labor required to transform material components into an artistic artifact? Where, that is, does the performer's creativity, his instinct or his "gift," that is, his talent combined with his skill, acquire that unique, ineradicable, and inimitable aura that transforms him into a work of art? Here, we are quite close to the core problem underlying the initial question. Marcel Duchamp , questioned by Pierre Cabanne about the duration of a work of art, responded in a curious way: "A work of art lasts roughly as long as an artist's creative life—30, 40 years. Afterward, it either fades away, dies, disappears from view, or enters the history of art." In the latter case, it undergoes a kind of transmutation; if "the work of art is created by the one who looks at it," now that gaze is mediated by other historical subjects, critics, curators, who to some extent decree its centrality: a centrality that is attested by the texts and, in the case in which "technical reproducibility" is not a sufficient vehicle, by the display through exhibitions. As early as the seventeenth century, the Bolognese nobles began to display the masterpieces of their collections under the city's porticoes on the occasion of the decennial anniversaries of the parishes, against the backdrop of richly draped panels; the Romans did the same (living artists came to organize exhibitions in the Pantheon), especially on the annual celebrations of San Salvatore in Lauro, and the Neapolitans did the same on the occasion of particular religious festivals. The first Salon burst into Paris in 1667 , when for the first time a real exhibition of "modern" works opened its doors, accepted by a jury under the patronage of the King. The people of spectators were born, bourgeois collectors, the feared family of critics, the hostility between official and "rejected", the interest of travellers. England values these immense exhibitions even more highly for the part they play in educating the public and forming taste, not to mention their remarkable sales, as the enormous success of the London exhibitions of Reynolds, Hogarth, Gainsborough, Rembrandt, and Italian and Spanish artists testifies. Exhibitions, from the very beginning, create problems, both because those singular historical ready-mades temporarily deprive a collection of the cultural hinges that attest to the quality of a historically established path, and because moving works of art can be very dangerous. In 1930, a group of absolute masterpieces of Italian art, en route to London, nearly sank in the Bay of Biscay due to a storm. In 1936, when Alfred Barr was preparing to organize one of the first major exhibitions at the recently inaugurated MoMA, "Cubism and Abstract Art", customs seized a series of works from Europe (Arp, Boccioni, Picasso, Delaunay, Mondrian), which for some time remained unattended and without any protection in a warehouse. We thus enter the twentieth century where , right from the start, the exhibition takes on a different character, which paradoxically is still a legacy of the previous century. One of the first scandals to accompany an art exhibition is Gustave Courbet's "Pavillon du Realisme" (1855): a silent protest against judges who rejected the two vast canvases of The Painter's Studio and Burial at Ornans. Inside an old shack the author sets up an exhibition, prints a small catalogue, adds forty paintings "for sale" and the dissident exhibition is open. And it is from here that an art exhibition, as will be seen for decades, also acquires a political value. In the immediate post-war period, the theme of art exhibitions was the order of the day. If Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti is convinced of the need to activate a relationship that allows for the comparison of the most relevant results of international artistic studies, and at the same time also bring this action abroad, influencing an active exchange, and also contributing to the knowledge of Italian culture and art there", Roberto Longhi is annoyed to say the least: "The exhibitions" , he wrote in 1949, "had clearly reached their saturation point; the paintings that were requested (from museums, of course) were almost always the same ones". But the foreign ministries and embassies put pressure on the education ministries, who immediately gave in, in homage to the motto 'politique d'abord. Exhibitions and Museums, published in "Paragone" , adds: "Italy has become, willingly or unwillingly, the most 'showy' nation in Europe, and perhaps in the world [...]" After the great upheaval of the war, with empty pockets and the material impossibility of quickly getting the museums back on their feet, it was only natural that the most unfortunate nations, the most deprived of means, would try to obtain some hard currency through some exhibition abroad". Italy had immediately opened grandiose exhibitions, which had no other meaning than to reaffirm the intact supremacy, at least artistic, of the nation: the Tuscans in 1922, the Ferrarese in 1933, the Rimini people in 1935, and then Correggio, Titian, Giotto, the Romagna. Catalogue introductions often clearly express the intent to bring attention back to the "old masters," as Francis Haskell says, just as the greatest initiatives of modern Italy, the Biennale and the Quadriennale, were beginning to flourish. Of course, all this happens if you're dealing with works that "have entered the history of art"; but between the 1950s and 1960s, the so-called "art system" was defined in completely unpredictable terms, and became more complicated with impressive vehemence. The subjects keep the same names, or almost: artist, critic, gallery owner, collector, museum. But the functions change, they twist, they integrate. How then to answer the initial question? Why is art "displayed"? Why do we organize its exhibition? Let's say there are some rules that justify exhibitions, and they start from a seemingly very limiting assumption: they are held because they are inevitable, because they are necessary—that is, because they produce knowledge, are tools that enable the advancement of research, both historical and contemporary, and cannot be replaced by a magazine article or a book. The exhibitions are therefore the result of prior research, not improvisation ; they reconstruct the complexity of a historical period or explore the intricacies of contemporary "feelings," highlighting its suggestions and critical issues. An exhibition's authority is only as great as that of its curators, provided they are able to avoid the influence of the works' owners (be they artists, museums, or collectors) and the organizations that sponsor it. [caption id="attachment_65803" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Palazzo dei Capitani Exhibition - Selling Paintings[/caption] Once these conditions are met, then an exposition is welcome and can avoid the risk of falling back into the aphorism that hovers in the Treatise of Human Knowledge , published by the philosopher and theologian George Berkeley in 1710: "Esse est percipi." This means that extended matter, objects (in our case, art), appear real to us because we perceive them through the senses; but perceptions do not certify the existence of anything; they are the worldly reflection of divine ideas. The inevitable, necessary exhibitions, those that "shock the world," are those that challenge the radical nominalism of the Irish theologian.
Authentication and Archives - Law in the Art World
What is it about? An authentication is a written certificate of attribution of a work of art, available for sale on the market. Typically, in addition to a precise description of the work, it also contains a photograph or some representation of it. The signature of the person issuing it is mandatory. In this regard, it should be noted that the authentication may come, depending on the chosen interpretative option, from the artist, his heirs, archives, foundations, committees of experts and associations dedicated to the artist, or from any other agent appointed by the author's heirs to catalog the entire corpus of his works. Archives are private law entities that pursue the purpose of registering, upon request by interested parties, the authentic works of a (deceased) artist, rejecting false works, and denouncing forgeries. Their existence is therefore one with the problem of authenticity. There is often some confusion in this area, which can be partly dispelled by starting by distinguishing between classical works of art and contemporary works of art; and, again, between contemporary works of art by living artists and contemporary works of art by deceased artists. For classical works of art, we are partly outside the scope of the issue that concerns us here: in the case of ancient art and antiques, in fact, and especially for those pieces dating back to before the first decades of the 19th century (given that until the end of the 18th century, authors did not normally sign their works), the term expertis is correctly used. This means a detailed description of the work, accompanied by an expert's reasoned opinion regarding its originality and provenance (without indicating its value), to which a photo is attached. The person who is interested in authentication is generally the seller, in order to fulfill the obligation to issue and deliver to the buyer a certificate of authenticity and provenance (imposed by Article 64 of the Code of Cultural Heritage and Landscape). Therefore, in these cases, the seller will turn to university professors, art historians, or other experts, chosen based on their experience accumulated over the years, academic recognition, and studies conducted on this or that artistic movement in a specific historical period. The activity of these "consultants" is in fact free, it is not regulated by any law, and their competence and reliability lies entirely in their CVs. For contemporary works of art, the term "authenticated" is more frequently used. As already mentioned, the entities (potentially) authorized to issue them are extremely diverse: from the artist to archives, through various committees, foundations, and so on. Further distinguishing, it should be noted that anyone buying or selling contemporary works of art by living artists must request or issue a certificate of authentication from the artist. Who in this case is certainly the most suitable person to judge the authenticity of the works. Anyone who buys or sells contemporary works of art by deceased artists must always obtain or issue a certificate of authentication (even when the work is signed). In this case, the range of possibilities permitted by the regulations, and by the case law interpretation thereof, regarding the person in some way "authorized" to issue the authentication tends to be infinite: practically anyone, or almost anyone, can claim certification authority. With all the consequences, complications, disputes, even in court, and above all, the bizarre situations this inevitably creates. However, it is sufficient to point out that in the case of the sale of contemporary works of art (by living or deceased artists), the seller is obliged, as established by Article 64 of the Cultural Heritage Code, to provide the buyer with documentation certifying the authenticity or at least the probable attribution and provenance of the work. Or, failing that, a self-certification containing all the information available to you regarding the authenticity or probable attribution and provenance. This must be duly signed and, if possible, affixed to the back of a photographic copy of the work. The consequences of non-compliance are multiple. On a civil level, the implications are mainly on the interpretation of the contract of sale of the work of art and its validity. From a criminal perspective, failure to issue or issuing false authenticity documentation will undoubtedly have consequences for the detection of certain crimes such as counterfeiting, alteration, etc.
Massimo Fagioli has left us
Massimo Fagioli, the psychiatrist of Collective Analysis, who passed away this morning at the age of 85, dedicated his entire life to researching the birth and origins of human thought. Human life has a beginning and an end, he said. Massimo Fagioli, the psychiatrist of Collective Analysis, who passed away this morning at the age of 85 in Rome, dedicated his entire life to researching the birth and origins of human thought. Fagioli was born in Monte Giberto in 1931, in the province of Ascoli Piceno. The author of 23 books, he is best known for "Death Instinct and Knowledge," his theoretical masterpiece, written in 1970. Tens of thousands of copies of his work have been published and translated into many languages. It encompasses the fundamental discoveries of the Theory of Birth, with which the psychiatrist fundamentally revolutionized knowledge of the human mind, beginning with the discovery of the biological origin of the unconscious. On Saturday, February 18, starting at 10:00 a.m., a tribute to Massimo Fagioli will be held at Via Roma Libera 23 in Trastevere, where for forty-one years he held his Analisi collettiva seminars, highly original, one-of-a-kind group psychotherapy sessions, offered free of charge and without distinction to thousands of people. The Left website, the magazine for which the psychiatrist has edited the "Transformation" column since 2006, also dedicates a lengthy tribute to Fagioli. A physician specializing in neuropsychiatry in Modena, Fagioli graduated from the University of Rome with a degree in Medicine and Surgery. He pursued this study out of a need to understand the human psyche, a pursuit he began in his teens, after serving as a boy in the Marche region alongside partisans in the Resistance War, and his father, a field doctor. He arrives in Venice, at the ancient asylum on the island of San Clemente, where he has his first contact with the chronically ill, the white wards, and the electroshock treatments. In the library's old medical records, he discovers that two words prevail in descriptions of the mentally ill: "stulid, emotionless." From the anguished practices of nineteenth-century psychiatry, which sought answers in slides of brain sections, Fagioli then moved to the psychiatric hospital in Padua. Here, the practice of a sophisticated clinic and the approach to serious illnesses using methods that were cutting-edge for the time, including insulin therapy, provided the opportunity to conduct his first experiences of active psychiatry with groups of patients, whom the young doctor was able to take out for walks in the city, "breaking down" the walls of the asylum. In the early 1960s, Fagioli's research into the causes of mental illness shifted to the unconscious, taking him to Binswanger's Bellevue Clinic in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland, where he ran the Italian-speaking therapeutic community, living day and night with the patients without mediation. Only after a long personal analysis and about ten years as an analyst with a medical practice of individual therapy, in 1971 he proposed to scientific circles the results of his experiences and his training in the book Death Instinct and Knowledge, written in 1970, published in a new edition by L'asino d'oro in 2010 and subsequently also in German, forty years later, in 2011, by the publisher Stroemfeld (Todestrieb und Erkenntnis). The book contains the foundations of the Theory of Birth, according to which human thought begins at birth with the reaction to light, through the retina, of the newborn's body: discoveries later developed in The Marionette and the Burattino and Theory of Birth and Human Castration, of 1974, published between the end of the same year and 1975. Since 1975 Fagioli has responded to the demand for psychotherapy from hundreds of people and has trained, first at the Institute of Psychiatry of the University of Rome La Sapienza and then in a very large private practice in Trastevere (1980), the seminars of Collective Analysis, a treatment practice for the healing of mental illness, based on the interpretation of dreams, which continues as research on human reality and its evolution. His fourth volume of interviews, Bambino donna e trasformazione dell'uomo, was published in 1979. Fagioli continued to develop and deepen the theoretical foundations of 1970-74 in a series of other writings on psychiatry and through free expressions in the artistic field. In 1997 he directed Il cielo della luna (The Moonlight), followed by Me'lange (1999) and La psichiatria, esiste? (Does Psychiatry Exist?) (2002). The psychiatry and psychotherapy journal Il sogno della farfalla (The Butterfly's Dream), which celebrated its twentieth anniversary in 2012, refers to his theoretical work and practice. In addition to the fundamental volumes on the Theory of Birth (Death Instinct and Knowledge, The Marionette and the Puppet, The Theory of Birth and Human Castration, Child, Woman and the Transformation of Man), his other titles are: Storia di una ricerca (Lezioni 2002), Una vita irrazionale (Lezioni 2006), Das Unbewusste. The Unknowable (Lectures 2003), Disappearance Fantasy (Lectures 2007), Left 2006, Left 2007, New Thought (Lectures 2004), Left 2008, The Man in the Courtyard (Lectures 2005), Left 2009, Seventh Year (Lectures 2008), Left 2010, Religion, Reason and Freedom (Lectures 2009), Left 2011, The Idea of Human Birth (Lectures 2010) and Left 2012