Blog
Top Ten Artists
Here are the artists who had the best performances in 2013 1 Andy Warhol $585,288,283 USD 2 Pablo Picasso $558,573,721 USD 3 Gerhard Richter $166,587,189 USD 4 Claude Monet $155,882,401 USD 5 Roy Lichtenstein $132,774,752 USD 6 Henri Matisse $130,778,869 USD 7 Francis Bacon $128,852,003 USD 8 Amedeo Modigliani $111,096,945 USD 9 Jean-Michel Basquiat $106,321,559 USD 10Mark Rothko $105,954,786 USD
Salvatore Emblema on display in New York
Dear Friends and Collectors, Below is the press release for the upcoming exhibition at the Bosi Contemporary Gallery in New York. This is a gallery that has been operating successfully for several years in Manhattan's Lower East Side, the Big Apple's most vibrant cultural neighborhood. Its collaboration with gallerist Sandro Bosi is not recent. My family's and my appreciation for his work began with a strange but significant anecdote. I'd like to tell you about it briefly... It was 2007 and I was touring galleries in Rome. I came across two splendid works by Emblema in a window on Via Margutta. I entered, without revealing my identity, and asked the price. The gallery owner, after stating that he cared about those two works as if they were his own, told me: "It's a high price." I told him that that price seemed excessive, given the artist's current market situation. I objected that Emblema was selling for much less on TV and at auctions, and I didn't consider it a good investment (...actually, I was playing Devil's advocate). The gallery owner replied that he was giving those paintings the price he felt was fair, for an artist of undisputed historical value and with great prospects for appreciation. Therefore, he wouldn't go lower than a standard courtesy discount. He also added—but very tactfully—that if I didn't understand how important Emblema was, perhaps I'd be better off buying elsewhere, or elsewhere. I looked at him perplexed (and he was telling me that?). I left without another word and wished him good luck. That Roman gallery owner was Sandro Bosi, and soon he would open a new exhibition space in New York, adding to his existing bases in Rome, London, and Belgrade. But honestly, at the time, I never imagined we'd meet again. Instead, today, after officially introducing ourselves at the 2009 Biennale and collaborating on the restoration of those two magnificent canvases, which later went into his private collection, we are working together in New York. To inaugurate an exhibition of Emblema, which marks, after Los Angeles, the artist's definitive entry into the US market. Life is strange... but as my grandmother says, in the end, things that are meant to happen, happen. They're already talking about the exhibition on Wall Street International: http://www.wsimagazine.com/uk/diaries/agenda/arti/salvatore-emblema-transparency_20131031143949.html#.UnkEwXAyLDU .
The state of the art today? Guttuso explained it 50 years ago.
In the Sicilian master's articles, the portrait of intellectual conformism: taking sides for convenience, the aversion towards the figurative, the obtuse xenophilia And it wasn't just homework, but a mature text, the one on the Futurist Pippo Rizzo. During the twenty years of the Futurist movement, the young Guttuso contributed to important publications such as Primato, a creation of Minister Bottai, with prominent contributions delivered with an incredible self-assurance that led him to engage in polemics even with friends and teachers. He didn't pay for his immodesty with scorched earth, as would happen today in the touchy, mafia-like world of art, but rather grew increasingly in general esteem. In the articles collected by Bompiani in this small monument (almost two thousand pages, €50) simply titled Scritti, the level of cultural debate, which we can only dream of today, and the great freedom of judgment, are astonishing. But weren't these the times of the ferocious regime? Probably in the 1930s it was enough to declare oneself a fascist, just as in the 1950s it was enough to declare oneself a communist, and then one could say and do what one wanted. Of course, the toll of flattery was heavy: "Our greatest joy is realizing every moment that we are in too good agreement with Mussolini," Guttuso declared in 1934. Later, changing colors but not attitude, he wrote with a thousand reverences: "Comrade Tortorella" (culture director of Berlinguer's PCI), "Comrade Sciaurov" (who was he?), "Comrade Napolitano" (this one, however, I seem to recognize)... With the cunning of a successful artist, he paid homage to the tyranny of the moment to guarantee his own freedom. During the dark years of Togliatti's reign, Guttuso managed to circumvent Soviet-derived socialist realism with specious, yet effective, arguments. Thus, in Moscow, he was able to win the Lenin Prize, in Rome, the countesses, participate in communist congresses in Poland, and in high society life in Italy. Today's painters are not as flexible, as cunning, or even as literate, and therefore their works will remain, but not a single line (in half a century, I'm a ready prophet, no Bompiani will collect their emails, posts, and tweets in an anthology). Yet, if you look closely, almost nothing has changed. For starters, relationships still matter, and the reserved artist who lives in seclusion today, as then, can cling to the tram. Political parties matter less, undeniably, but a left-wing stance is always beneficial. If he had remained a fascist after the war, Guttuso would have struggled to become a city councilor, while unwavering communist orthodoxy guaranteed him a seat in the Senate, which added prestige to prestige and certainly didn't lower his standing. Even in the 1970s, it wasn't healthy to appear conservative, much less reactionary. On the occasion of a "return to painting" (a constant in the Italian art scene, where painting returns every decade because no one pays attention to the fact that it never left), a couple of critics with zealous progressive conformism accused the figurative genre of being, as such, right-wing. In the pages of L'Espresso, Guttuso reacted like a lion to defend his own history and the autonomy of art: "Painting human figures with a brush is, in itself, neither regressive nor progressive." Decades pass and not even the Biennale has changed: in 1953, the prince of Italian painters complained about the lack of space given to Italian artists, an article that could have appeared unchanged in 2003 or early 2013. And given the perennial xenophilia of the institutions responsible, I'm certain it could be published, with minimal changes, in 2023. Also timeless is the reasonable proposal to abolish the provinces, useless since the days of Berta, and a denunciation of the rampant overbuilding of Sicily that could appear tomorrow in the same newspaper, the Corriere della Sera, perhaps signed by Gian Antonio Stella. More than Guttuso, in the pages of the third part of the book, entitled "Civil Commitment and Defense of Artistic Heritage," one seems to hear Ecclesiastes speaking: "Nihil sub sole novi." Reading the articles opposing the loans of delicate paintings and priceless statues, I had to rub my eyes and check the signature: they seem to be written by Tomaso Montanari, the anti-Renzi art historian who, however, was little more than a child when the transportability of the Riace Bronzes was first being discussed. I also rub my brain, and it occurs to me that during the years of Guttuso's righteous indignation over the ruin of landscapes and museums, Berlusconi wasn't even around, much less his minister Bondi, who at a certain point seemed to be responsible for every collapse, every trade, every insensitivity. Guttuso unwittingly reminds us that the attack on Italy's artistic heritage is at least as old a history as the Italian Republic itself.
Here are the top Italian galleries, according to Modern Painters
The top international galleries in Italy? There are eight. We're more or less there, and Italian participation in major global art fairs generally falls around this level. The question, if any, is "which" these eight supergalleries are, and here we abandon numerological certainties and enter the minefield of choice. This is being done, in these final summer days preceding the September resumption, by the English magazine Modern Painters, one of the firebrands of the Blouin group, which publishes the Artinfo portal, so to speak: and if you peruse the list, you'll find some great ones. Granted, in the summer the media give free rein to lighthearted writing, where relativism trumps objectivity and adherence to reality. Indeed, sometimes "exploding big stories" almost seems like an editorial choice, aimed at sparking debates that would otherwise remain confined to umbrellas dominated by gossip, at best political. But the options proposed for the Italian art scene seem curious, to say the least: even Artribune, by vocation, is always close to the work of young and enterprising galleries, but here they exclude recognized giants like Continua, Franco Noero, Alfonso Artiaco, or Massimo Minini... Exactly, the San Gimignano-based multinational doesn't even deserve consideration in the English list: and don't think it's been "recovered" among the French galleries, thanks to its location in Le Moulin. We checked, and it's not there (perhaps it will be cited as Chinese because of its Beijing location, but we couldn't find the Asian ranking). So, who are the top galleries according to the magazine? Brand New Gallery, Cardi Black Box, Monitor, Francesca Minini, Massimo De Carlo, Giò Marconi, Lia Rumma, Prometeo... Francesca Minini is there, but not her even more powerful father; Lia Rumma is there in Naples, but not Artiaco. In short, something to discuss in the final moments of summer. Do you agree with Modern Painters? Do you also think these are the eight best Italian galleries?