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Women and art - Frida Kahlo
Frida Kahlo 1907 - 1954 in Coyocán, Mexico Frida Kahlo succeeded in creating a universally understandable visual language that combines naive art, realism, and surrealism. The oeuvre of this internationally renowned Mexican artist, born in 1907, includes over 200 paintings, mostly small-format self-portraits. These, like her still lifes and animal portraits, reveal remarkable expressive power and scrupulous attention to detail. Her works are often a harrowing testimony to her physical and mental suffering and reveal a disconcerting immediacy that makes them unforgettable. As a child, Frida Kahlo was bedridden for nine months due to polio, which left her with a severe foot deformity. At 18, she was involved in a car accident. The bus she was riding on collided with a tram, and Kahlo was impaled by a metal pole, fracturing her spine, pelvis, and legs. She remained hospitalized for a month and was then forced to wear a cast for another nine months. During her time in the hospital, Kahlo began to draw and paint—first the accident, then herself. Her first self-portrait, dating back to 1926, depicts her in a heroic pose. Many others followed, of which she later said she painted herself because, spending so much time alone, it was the subject she knew best. Her life was a constant struggle against death, a cruel fate to which she never resigned herself, but which was a hard test for her. Although Frida Kahlo was in contact with the Parisian surrealists (especially André Breton ) and although many critics considered her a surrealist, she stated, "I didn't know I was a surrealist until André Breton came to Mexico and told me." However, she never accepted this definition. "I never painted dreams. What I portrayed was my reality." Her paintings are internal images of external reality. Although her art is based on elements of her biography, the viewer can understand and interpret its themes, forms, patterns, and symbols. The irreducible candor and immediacy with which she faces her destiny in works that manage to make her anguish tangible move the viewer. And, despite the difference she speaks of, her images are always linked to broader, more universal motifs. (Ulrike Lehmann)
Women and art - Louise Bourgeois
1911 in Paris – New York, May 31, 2010: she was a French sculptor and artist, she lived in New York A narrow corridor leads to a polygonal room whose pattern-like walls are made of doors. Inside is a dense conglomeration of large red and light blue spools on stands, spiraling objects and colorless glass body fragments, two small suitcases, a kerosene lamp, and two bottles filled with coins; a red ladder leans against the wall, and a teardrop-shaped object dangles from one of the spool holders. In one of the doors is a window behind which the word " private " is written in worn letters. The dense atmosphere of Louise Bourgeois's Red Room ( Child ), 1994, is created by the hauntingly enigmatic logic of found objects and artifacts and the informally intangible structures of the luminous red glass spools. Red Room contains many of the motifs and metaphors explored by Louise Bourgeois for decades: the claustrophobic room evoking a hiding place or the inside of the body, parts of Surrealist objects resembling organs, a ladder too short to allow escape from the room, and spools of thread recalling the artist's childhood. The sign reading " private " suggests that it is a place of personal reminiscence and that working with autobiographical elements represents a central process in the artist's creative work. Louise Bourgeois's work, in which the mastery of a formal sculptural vocabulary is inextricably linked to a complex and codified content, has remained open to the projections of her critics, while simultaneously fostering biographical interpretation through numerous verbal and written statements. Thus, the construction of memory becomes a central motif in her work. Louise Bourgeois's family ran a workshop restoring antique tapestries in the French town of Choisy-le-Roi. Recognizing her talent, her parents entrusted her with drawing missing sections in tapestries and creating repair cartoons. Bourgeois then studied mathematics at the Sorbonne. From the mid-1930s, she attended various art schools, eventually landing at Fernand Léger . She married the American art historian Robert Goldwater and in 1938 moved to New York, where she continued her art studies until 1940 at the Art Students League, after which she began painting. One of her first groups of works was Femmes Maison , female figures whose bodies were partly made of a house, a reference to women's social status and their assignment to the domestic territory. Bourgeois explored the same theme in sculpture. From the mid-1940s, she created the so-called Personages , stele-like figures evoking totemic artifacts from tribal cultures, while in the 1950s she created a series of anthropomorphic sculptures consisting of similar elements mounted on a rod, depicting not only objects reminiscent of Brancusi's sculpture, but also minimalist serial principles like those found in the early works of Carl Andre. In the following years, Louise Bourgeois experimented with unusual materials such as latex, rubber, plaster, and concrete. In the early 1960s, she further developed her domestic theme with Lairs - forms fluid , spiral or labyrinthine that typically open onto an empty interior space. Like Lairs , also Her delicate landscapes follow the principles of an organic, anti-formalist approach. An almost fleshy materiality makes latex works like Double Negative , 1963, resemble visceral landscapes in which the interior seems to have been turned inside out. Mushroom-like spherical forms sprout from fluid bases, making unambiguous identification impossible and suggesting instead the multiple breasts of the Artemis of Ephesus, or phallic forms. Like many of Louise Bourgeois's sexually suggestive forms, these are not clearly "male" or "female." Even Filette (Child), 1968—a large phallus made of tin cans with which Louise Bourgeois was photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe in 1982 in a charmingly provocative pose—hypertrophies the phallic shape in addition to the rotund one.
Marina Abramovic, «The Space in Between»
Marina Abramovic, «The Space in Between» Spiritual Journey to Brazil The Images The Serbian artist traveled to the South American country to explore the relationship between creativity and spirituality, an emotional journey filled with surprising encounters and revelations. I'm in Abadiânia. This is my room. This is the bed where I'll sleep for a while. I came to Brazil in search of "places of power" and people with a certain kind of energy. By "places of power," I mean waterfalls, trees, landscapes, rivers, plants, birds, insects. Where the sky is vast and full of clouds. Where when the rain suddenly comes, it immediately stops. Where you can breathe deeply. And when I say people with a certain kind of energy, I'm referring to those who have actually learned to draw energy from both within and without, to transform that energy and develop it in those who cannot do so. During her trip to Brazil, Marina Abramovic kept a diary in which she detailed her experiences. The artist's impressions of Abadiânia, where she met the medium João de Deus, reveal a profound process of discovery.
Women and Art - Vanessa Beecroft
Vanessa Beecroft 1969 Genoa, Italy: lives and works in New York (NY), USA Vanessa Beecroft "paints" three-dimensional group and individual portraits, featuring real girls and women. They occupy a specific space for a specific period of time; they are dressed, usually scantily, by the artist; they often wear wigs and never come into contact with the audience. The result is a strangely cold, mysterious atmosphere, which makes the viewer feel as out of place as the girls themselves, who barely move and seem simply waiting for something. "I'm interested in the relationship between human figures as real women and their function as artworks and images," the artist explains. Vanessa Beecroft 's art is difficult to classify. Are they performances or " living sculptures ," like those of the English Gilbert & George, or a modern form of portraiture, or psychological still lifes composed with living subjects? The question remains open. In one of her first exhibitions, in Cologne in 1994, Vanessa Beecroft presented 30 girls in a showroom to which the public had no access. The event was visible only through a rectangular window that gave the impression of peering through a peephole. The girls all had similar, non-athletic figures and wore black shoes and knee-highs, gray underwear, and black or gray T-shirts. Their uniform clothing created a striking visual composition in the space and was complemented by yellow wigs, some with braids, some without. Some girls were seated, seemingly sulking, others were leaning against the walls, still others were pacing slowly back and forth. None of them seemed to really expect anything to happen—instead of an action-packed lapse of time, there was only a dull duration. The title of the work was telling: A Blonde Dream . The event, conceived to be held in a gallery in Germany, explicitly alluded to the cliché of "Aryan beauty" widespread during the Third Reich.
Women and Art - Ghada Amer
Ghada Amer 1963 in Cairo, Egypt; lives in Paris, France and New York (NY) USA Ghada Amer doesn't create her paintings with paintbrushes and colors, but with needle and thread, which she uses to create dense surfaces reminiscent of the paintings of Brice Marden , Alberto Giacometti , and Cy Twombly . Yet despite their superficial material similarity, the images actually depict lascivious, perhaps even pornographic, female figures, which gradually reveal themselves as the viewer studies the intricate, carefully constructed, and powerfully dramatic surface. An immaterial phenomenon that suddenly takes on a physical presence. The figures multiply on the canvas, doubling, tripling, quadrupling; legs spread, the triangles of their pubic hair depicted in rainbow colors, as if a "typically feminine" pastime were literally playing with itself. An endless chain of women masturbating, veiled in a mass of cotton and long dangling threads, attempting to avoid the viewer's prying and curious gaze. Born in Egypt, Amer studied painting and sculpture in France and chose to settle in Paris. Her work denounces the Western vision of women, reduced to sexual objects. Gradually, subtly, and insidiously, the artist challenges conventional images of men and women. The effectiveness of her works depends in part on their ambivalence: looking at them, one wonders whether they are intended for voyeuristic pleasure or simply to frustrate the viewer's expectations. The artist's first works, created in the early 1990s, were inspired by the dress patterns included in women's magazines. Her interest lay in their a priori role model, the stereotype we unconsciously take for granted. The unconscious is notoriously obscure: how can we represent its workings? This is a question to which the Arab-French artist provides a striking answer, producing serial pornographic scenes that challenge the dominant male logic by opposing it with his own reflection. Her imagery (artistic repertoire) satisfies the criteria of transparency and immediacy achieved through effective psychoanalysis.
Women and Art - Marina Abramovic
Marina Abramovic 1946 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia: lives and works in Amsterdam, Netherlands When Marina Abramovic and her partner Ulay arrived in the Chinese city of Er Lag Shan on June 27, 1988, they had traveled 2,000 kilometers—the entire length of the Great Wall —in 90 days for this meeting at the edge of the world. It was also their last collaborative work as artists and as a couple. With this performance, titled The Lovers , Abramovic and Ulay transformed the personal experience of the end of their shared journey into a simple performance staged in a real geographical location. They had walked toward each other from opposite ends of the Great Wall only to separate again, forever. Interpreted as a geometry of love, the painful separation of their biographies appears as an inevitable result of a law of life. Since 1976, Abramovic and Ulay had collaborated on works in which their symbolic relationship was assumed as the basis of existential experiences: in the performance Breaking In/Breaking Out (1977), with their nostrils blocked by cigarette butts, they exchanged breath until they ran out of oxygen; in Interruption Space (1977), they took a run-up to repeatedly crash into a wall until they were exhausted; in Light/Dark (1977), they slapped each other until one of them stopped. The aim of these exercises was to subject the body to extreme physical states and test its limits. The audience's reaction was a key component of this physical self-experience, whether in the form of mental attention or concrete intervention, as in the case of the performance Incision (1978), during which Abramovic was attacked by a spectator. For the Nightsea Crossing performance series, 1981–86, however, the participants were carefully selected. Marina Abramovic was primarily interested in the intersection of political and individual history, so she and Ulay used their shared birthday as the occasion for a performance— Communist Body—Fascist Body . On November 30, 1979, they invited some friends to their apartment to celebrate; the guests found Abramovic and Ulay lying on a mattress, sleeping or pretending to be asleep, with two tables set beside them, set with dishes, champagne, and caviar from their respective countries of origin. The performance illustrated the details of two biographies unwittingly marked by a dictatorship: Marina's birth certificate bore an official stamp with a red star, Ulay's with a swastika.
INVESTING IN CONTEMPORARY ART - How to orient yourself when purchasing
How to orient yourself in purchasing To purchase a work of art it is essential to follow a few simple rules: Knowing the history of art ; Visit the most significant contemporary art museums and exhibitions; Visiting trendy galleries Read specialized magazines; Follow the auction catalogues proposed periodically carefully While these are general guidelines, it's clear that before venturing into the art market, you need to carefully establish a budget and base your choices on it. The amount allocated to art should never exceed 20% of your assets, and it's not necessarily necessary to have huge sums of money; contrary to popular belief, you can make excellent purchases starting from €2,000-3,000. A very common mistake is to be drawn solely to the artist's name. Every purchase must take quality into account and be fully aware of the artist's creative journey, since each painter expressed their best talents in a relatively limited period of their life. If they were successful, they behaved like replicants, endlessly repeating the same work. It's also important to understand that the same artist has a virtually limitless range of prices. In short, to make a good purchase, you need to be familiar with prices, have specific knowledge of the artist you're interested in, and, above all, buy from reputable sources. In summary, to make a good purchase you need to: Ensure the authenticity of the works ; Choose the artist based on your budget ; Know, at least in broad terms, the history of art ; Carefully analyze the artist's creative process ; Attend exhibitions, museums and specialized galleries ; Be careful with the subjects; Check auction prices carefully; Don't be fooled by the artist's high-sounding name ; Don't overlook artists who are considered minor or emerging young artists.
INVESTING IN CONTEMPORARY ART - The factors that determine prices
The factors that determine prices In pure theory, there should be a close relationship between an artist's historical value and their market price. The higher the price paid, the more significant the artist's role in art history. In reality, the factors that determine the prices of works are multiple and extremely complex. One answer could be that an artist's market takes off when their cultural value finds confirmation within the art system. In short, prices should be considered as the sum of a set of elements that the collector must always keep in mind when purchasing a work. These elements can be summarized in nine points: The quality of the work (the artist's technique): The market values oil on canvas or acrylics most. These are works that are not at risk of deterioration and are relatively easy to transport and install. Tempera, watercolor, pastels, and finally drawings are immediately added. It's safe to say that, for the same size, a tempera is valued at half the price of an oil, a watercolor at about a quarter, and a drawing at less than a tenth. the degree of marketability and attractiveness (size and subject). The value of the painting within certain dimensions; the larger it is, the higher its value. the artistic moment in which an author has created his work within his career (creative-innovative phase and repetitive-manneristic phase) the critic of reference and the interest of the critics The rarity of the works. Overproduction, especially if the artist is not internationally renowned, hinders the increase in their prices, as supply exceeds demand. national or international diffusion. Publications, awards won, and exhibition history. Works exhibited in major exhibitions and published in monographs, important journals, and art history books are more valuable. key collectors. The value of works increases if they belonged to important collectors. role of museums and public institutions.
Origin of the contemporary art market
So far we have said that the origins of the market are very ancient, but in truth to speak of a free market , the one based on the system of private galleries, which corresponds to the current structure of the contemporary art market, we have to go back to the 19th century. It is therefore necessary to take a step back and examine the circumstances of its birth and development, which were built on the foundations of a new and radical transformation and revolution in the conceptions of art at the end of the 19th century. We are therefore referring again to the mid-seventeenth century, a period that saw the birth of a monopoly even more restrictive and rigidly structured, if you will, than the previous ones: that of the art academies . Founded with the aim of officially legitimizing the validity of artistic production, these institutions effectively controlled it until the second half of the nineteenth century. Let's examine the French model in particular. 1648 was the year in which the Académie Royale de Peinture et Sculpture was founded in Paris, the most influential body of institutional recognition. It organized annual exhibitions, the Salons , whose participation or exclusion determined the artists' entire careers, their chances of affirmation, and their commercial success. The judging panel consisted of academics, teachers from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and the director of the French Academy in Rome (the capital of ancient and classical art). Acceptance of works by this panel depended on their conformity to classical aesthetic theory, which the institution aimed to defend and preserve. Artists aligned with academic canons received prizes at the Salons and commissions to create public works, and their works were proposed to public institutions and museums for purchase. If we also keep in mind that the Academy's statute forbade official artists from directly marketing their own works, we realize the total control it exercised both over the content of the works and over their marketing. The market, therefore, which had incredibly developed in the 16th and 17th centuries, as mentioned earlier, was not a free market, but rather heavily constrained by these institutions, which, moreover, combined with the conformist approach of criticism and the dominant taste of the upper-middle-class public, left no room for the emergence of innovative artistic production. An officially regulated, regulated, and limited artistic production was inextricably linked to an equally regulated and consequently limited official market. This situation began to change in the second half of the nineteenth century , with the emergence of Romantic ideals over Classicist ones. And it was precisely France that was at the forefront of this transformation, which saw the birth and development of independent exhibitions organized by the artists themselves, on the one hand, and a new type of private gallery, on the other. Starting with exhibitions, let's briefly recall that 1855 was the year of the Universal Exhibition in Paris, which included works by artists from twenty-eight countries, as well as paintings rejected by the Salon jury. Meanwhile, 1863 saw the Salon des Réfusés, the first (and only) exhibition entirely dedicated to artists excluded from the official Salon. It should be kept in mind that among the innovative artists of the latest generation, mistreated and excluded from the official circuits, there were names like Cézanne (who tried every year to send his works to the Salon without ever being accepted!) and like the Impressionists, who were among the first to demand and pursue their independence from the academic supremacy, and thus constituted themselves as a revolutionary reaction movement to the dominant situation (just think that the term "impression" was used for the first time in 1874 [1] with an ironic and negative meaning to describe their works). After these first initiatives, more or less successful, a true alternative salon was born in 1884: the Salon des Artistes Indépendants, organized by the Société des Artistes Indépendants, which provided for neither prizes nor a jury. The Salon d'Atomne, founded in 1903, was this time equipped with a jury, with the specific aim of shaping the tastes of the public and collectors by directing them toward innovative trends in contemporary art. This particularly successful event hosted exhibitions of historic importance, such as those of the Fauves and Cubists, as well as a Cézanne retrospective. But let us return to the Impressionists , to underline how crucial their movement is, because it inaugurates the creation of an avant-garde art , that is, of modernism , an aesthetic revolution in pictorial language, but also the creation of an alternative market , made up of private galleries, which through new commercial and promotional strategies, had to invent a new market that corresponded to the new art. The partnership with Paul Durand Ruel (1870), marks the appearance of the first truly modern dealer, an innovator both in terms of artistic choices and in terms of commercial and critical strategies. Ruel's new commercial system, which would later become the model of the new international avant-garde market, consists of: in the valorization of a new art not yet requested by the market; · in the monopoly on artistic production, in order to control prices; · in the promotion of artists through the organization of personal exhibitions (including abroad to give them an international dimension) and through the founding of magazines for the dissemination of information. Finally, let's mention two more celebrated dealers who embraced Ruel's teachings and continued his legacy: Ambroise Vollard and Daniel Kahnweiler. One was the principal dealer of Gauguin and Cézanne, but also of Degas, Renoir, Van Gogh, Matisse, and Picasso, and the other was a Cubist dealer, credited with investing heavily in the critical appreciation of his artists through collaborations with renowned writers and poets (such as Apollinaire and Max Jacob), and generally expanding contacts between collectors, critics, and dealers. With these developments, we arrive at the 1910s, and the history of the Parisian market continues, reaching full maturity in the 1920s, and growing further in the 1930s and 1940s. These same years saw the formation and transformation of various market centers throughout Europe, such as London, Berlin, and Brussels. If we dwell on the history of the Parisian market , it is because it played a particularly significant role, first in breaking down certain frontiers and then in leading the world market. Paris at this stage was the home of art, the capital of modernism (most modern artists, as is well known, lived and worked in Paris: from Picasso to Matisse, from Braque to Léger, from Gris to Derain, etc.). So let's take a step back and point out that 1914 in particular marked a turning point in France: the resounding success of the auction of an avant-garde art collection testified to the interest of a vast, high-society audience (and no longer just a narrow circle of amateurs). Bourgeois society identified the value of avant-garde art with the dynamic spirit of modern times, which contrasted with what was past, outdated, and no longer relevant. The new social fact was that the ruling class recognized the values represented by the new art, and appropriated them. But at this point, history repeats itself, because the incredible social and market success of contemporary art triggered a new reaction from the new generation of postwar avant-garde artists: the Dadaists and the Surrealists . Their movements were characterized by a revolutionary political stance, a radical critique of the values of bourgeois society, and opposition to the commodification of art. It was precisely this need to revive the avant-garde spirit that drove them to seek an even more alternative, self-managed and self-promoted market. But, ironically, they themselves became successful artists in an even larger, more international market. Indeed, during the Second World War, due to their political stances, they were forced to flee, almost en masse, to the United States, where they were welcomed with great enthusiasm both by the gallery owners who made their fortune (especially Peggy Guggenheim) and by the younger generations of American artists who were profoundly influenced by them (and we're talking about artists like Pollock, Rothko, and their circle). We've discussed France so far for the reasons mentioned above, but we can't help but briefly touch on the German situation, which was particularly important in the context of European modernism. (We'll leave the analysis of the Italian side until later, because, being the one that concerns us most closely, it deserves a separate discussion to delve into it in more detail.) In Germany, avant-garde art developed, beginning in the 1910s, with its own characteristics and was essentially represented by the German Expressionism of artists such as Kirchner, Schmidt-Rottluff, Nolde, Macke, and Marc, and by the abstract art of Kandinsky and Klee, and by the Bauhaus. It was a vibrant scene until the rise of Nazism, which began to persecute avant-garde art, which it labeled "degenerate," and its creators. A emblematic example was the organization of a negative propaganda exhibition, which toured a dozen German cities from 1937 to 1941, presenting approximately six hundred works requisitioned by the Nazis. After the Second World War, New York (which until then had been essentially limited to reselling European art, having not yet developed an original indigenous art form) began to become the world center of contemporary art, replacing Paris as the world's leading art form. The gallery system developed alongside the emergence of avant-garde trends, marking the transition from modernism to contemporary art proper, such as Abstract Expressionism (1940s and 1950s), Minimalism, Pop Art (1960s), which achieved international success with the awarding of the Rauschenberg Prize at the 1964 Venice Biennale, and later Process and Conceptual art, in their various forms. The European avant-gardes of the 1950s at the centre of the Parisian market were essentially Informalism and Nouveaux Réalisme, which were also very important artistic phenomena but which, however, seem not to have held up to comparison with contemporary American trends, supported by a market that had become much more vital and supported by the government itself (!), which strategically used the new art to assert a cultural, as well as economic and military, supremacy over Europe. From the post-World War II era onward, the American art movement never stopped. To understand the scale of the phenomenon, consider that in the 1970s, there were more than two hundred galleries concentrated in just one New York neighborhood, Soho, and over seventy magazines dedicated to contemporary art! The 1980s and 1990s then witnessed the incredible phenomenon of the instant historicization of new stars, which saw young artists achieve immediate success and sky-high prices. Today, prices for living American artists reach dizzying figures, unattainable for European artists. The most important centers of the market worldwide: New York is currently the center of the contemporary art system, and the artists supported by the galleries of this market are the most valued. The second largest market is the English market, centered in London. The German market is also very strong in Europe. But it is fundamentally along the New York-London axis that the reference models impose themselves with a greater capacity for cultural and economic penetration. [1] Louis Leroy in Le Charivari , 25 April 1874