Blog
Carla Accardi
A leading figure in Italian abstract art and the post-World War II art scene, in 1947 Carla Accardi co-signed the Forma 1 group manifesto in Rome, calling for a language based on color and the drawing of abstract forms, in line with contemporary research developing in Europe. In the following years, the artist participated in numerous exhibitions in Italy and abroad; in 1964, a solo room was dedicated to her work in the Italian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, where she would exhibit again in 1976, 1978, and 1988. Carla Accardi's painting, rejecting any figurative or realist image, is a weave of rigorous geometric motifs that appear to be free creations dictated by the unconscious. Initially characterized by linear white marks on black backgrounds, in the 1960s the compositions adopted color, expressed in complex and vibrant two-tone designs with an intense emotional tone. During the 1970s, at the height of the economic boom, the artist replaced the traditional canvas support with sheets of sicofoil, a transparent plastic. Mounted in layers on the visible frame or even rolled up and placed directly on the floor, the sicofoil painted with characteristic geometric marks becomes a diaphragm in which the transparency of the support regulates the passage of beams of light, in a continuous overlapping of planes interacting with the surrounding environment, as in Rosso scuro (1974) and Punto con raggi (1972).
Enrico Castellani
Enrico Castellani's artistic research is the result of a profound and careful reflection on painting and the traditional meaning of painting. After attending courses in painting and sculpture at the Academie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels and architecture lessons at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, in 1956 he returned to Milan where, in 1959, together with Piero Manzoni and Vincenzo Agnetti, he founded the magazine "Azimuth", which promoted an experiment aimed at overcoming the concept traditional understanding of the work of art and its limitations. A protagonist at a time of great artistic ferment in Italy, in 1964 he was present at the Venice Biennale with a solo exhibition in the Italian Pavilion. In 1968 he participated in Documenta 4 in Kassel, and in the same year he was at the forefront of the protests at the Milan Triennale and the Venice Biennale. Black Surface is from 1959, his first monochrome painting obtained by shaping the surface in introflexions and extroflexions of the canvas, through a rear structure of nails fixed on a particular frame prepared by the artist according to a rigorous geometric design. The arrangement of the reliefs is determined from time to time in relation to the size of the canvas and the chosen color - always monochrome - and is functional to the movement of light that is desired; on what is no longer considered a two-dimensional surface, light, time and space come into play. Superficie bianca (1968) is in line with artistic research that considers the work as a single whole, the canvas and the frame, in which the environment and the surrounding light create ever-changing space-time rhythms.
Maurizio Cattelan
An artist of undisputed fame, who has sparked worldwide conversation about himself and his disconcerting, irritating, ironic, and unsettling works of art, Maurizio Cattelan, faced with this inestimable success, has repeatedly stated that he chose to be an artist because it's a profession where there's no need to work. The very theme of work, understood as the terror of personal failure in contemporary society and as a consequence of unemployment, is one of the topics the artist deals with in his works, for example when he represents the figure of the homeless man. Cattelan, therefore, alongside his playful, impertinent and irreverent streak towards the icons of art (he dismantles Joseph Beuys's credo on art as social regeneration; he mocks the readymade of Duchamp (destroys the artistic approach of Lucio Fontana) and the symbols of political power (his depictions of Kennedy, John Paul II, Hitler), Cattelan openly declares his reflection on the suffering, unhappiness, and dissatisfaction of the contemporary era, and on the condition of submission to the dogmas that oppress man today. It is Cattelan's melancholic side that emerges and is evident in Bidibidobidiboo (1995), a surreal self-portrait of the artist as a suicidal squirrel inside a miniaturized kitchen, a reproduction of the one he lived in as a child. The reference to childhood is also suggested by the fairy-tale title, which grotesquely connects the violence of the act of suicide with the power of magic formula, redeeming man from the condition of submission, towards an escape. In the second work presented in the exhibition (All, 2008), Cattelan addresses the theme of death in an even more overtly tragic way. Nine bodies lined up as in a grave are covered by a light sheet placed over the limbs perfectly outlined by the almost baroque workmanship of the Carrara marble. It is a reflection of the artist on various themes that have always recurred in the history of humanity, such as massacres, persecutions, unjustified deaths, the martyrs, who, like Cattelan's art, disorientate and disconcert the collective unconscious.
Gino De Dominicis
Mystery surrounds the life of Gino De Dominicis, both as a man and as an artist, and his very death is shrouded in obscurity. A larger-than-life character, he lived beyond all rules and order, isolated from any artistic movement, choosing to remain anchored only to himself. A lover of gambling, which led him to live more by night than by day, he created a sort of legend around himself, but never allowed any of his life to be documented in books or photographs, much like his works, which he bought back only to destroy. De Dominicis developed his poetics between the late 1960s and the late 1970s, focusing his philosophy on the temporality of events, the immortality of the body, invisible objects (the presence/absence dichotomy), and the mystery of creation and human existence (expressed in his interest in the Sumerian civilization). Since the 1980s, he has devoted himself more to painting, especially tempera and pencil on wood, making certain visual elements his signature features: men with long noses, women with trunks, deformed bodies with small hands and enormous skulls, majestic shadows, almost bordering on the grotesque. His message, often so indecipherable, aims to underscore the centrality of art, which, through the work, becomes creation and mystery. This enigmatic aura is also found in the chromatic and compositional tones of De Dominicis's first figurative painting, Io a Roma (1986), characterized by a figure on the right and the obelisk of Piazza del Popolo on the left, overlooked by a full moon. Rome is his adopted city, the eternal city par excellence, which, precisely because of its immortal uniqueness, the artist has loved above all else.
Selling paintings Highlights - Gustav Klimt - Hope II
A pregnant woman bows her head and closes her eyes as if praying for the safety of her child. A skull peeks out from behind her stomach, symbolizing the danger she faces. At her feet, three women with bowed heads raise their hands, presumably in prayer, though with such solemnity as to suggest mourning, as if foretelling the child's fate. Why then is the painting titled that? Klimt originally titled this work Vision, and another earlier depiction of a pregnant woman Hope; so by association with the previous one, this painting is known as Hope II. However, there is a richness here that compensates for the woman's gravity. Klimt's artistic inspiration, like that of other artists of his time, originated not only in Europe but also far beyond its borders. He lived in Vienna, a crossroads of East and West, and drew inspiration from Byzantine art, Mycenaean metalwork, Persian carpets and miniatures, Ravenna mosaics, and Japanese screens. In this painting, the woman's gold-patterned dress—drawn flat, like the garments of Russian icons, while her skin is expressed with roundness and three-dimensionality—is of extraordinary decorative beauty. Birth, death, and the sensuality of life are here suspended in balance.
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.
How to pack a painting
Packing a painting is a simple but very delicate operation. It's necessary to follow a few simple rules. Materials needed: Bubble wrap PVC adhesive tape Paper tape Sheets of cardboard Wrapping paper Phase 1: Protection Protect the delicate parts of the painting; the corners and the front of the work. Make corner protectors out of cardboard If the painting has glass, make an X with the masking tape, otherwise protect the painted part with a sheet of paper Step 2: Wrap the painting with bubble wrap Place a layer of bubble wrap on a flat surface and place the front of the painting, the most delicate part, on top. Wrap the painting with at least two layers of bubble wrap . It's important to provide plenty of protection, especially on the most fragile front part, so it can absorb any shock. Seal with several turns of tape . It's not necessary to use paper tape; plain, neutral PVC packing tape will work just fine. Phase 3: Finishing the packaging Wrap everything in brown paper to protect the confidentiality of the shipment and write FRAGILE / WARNING CONTAINS GLASS on all sides.
Unwary purchase of art objects
What is the reckless purchase of art and collectibles? This is the misdemeanor crime of "purchasing items of suspicious origin" if the object is art and/or collectibles. The penal code establishes that the following are liable for this crime: anyone who purchases or receives items that, for various reasons, may be suspected of being derived from a crime, without first having ascertained their legitimate provenance. anyone who arranges for the purchase or receipt of such things, without first verifying their origin. Before proceeding with the purchase, a buyer must check whether the art objects in question are equipped with all the necessary documentation. To be charged, the perpetrator must engage in negligent conduct: recklessness, negligence, or failure to take all necessary precautions can be punished with imprisonment for up to six months, plus a possible fine. Article 712 of the Criminal Code. Art. 712 - Purchase of things of suspicious origin which states: "Whoever, without first ascertaining their legitimate origin, purchases or receives, for any reason, items that, due to their quality, the status of the person offering them, or the amount of the price, give reason to suspect that they are the result of a crime, shall be punished by imprisonment of up to six months or a fine of not less than ten euros. Anyone who arranges to purchase or receive, for any reason, any of the above-mentioned items without first ascertaining their legitimate origin shall be subject to the same penalty." Imprudent purchase or receiving stolen goods (art. 648) are the crimes that antique dealers, and not only them, fear most. The number of stolen works still in circulation, as provided by the Carabinieri Command for the Protection of Artistic Heritage, exceeds 300,000. A huge number! The underground market changes shape and moves very quickly, but above all it causes works to move rapidly, often from one part of the globe to another. We can't stress this enough: you always need to check your documentation carefully. Happy shopping!