See Rare Art by Renowned American Artist Georgia O'Keeffe at The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.

New exhibit highlights rarely seen abstractions by Georgia O'Keeffe: February 6 - May 9, 2010

Thought I'd share this good news article and video with you from VOA News.

Be sure to watch the video ... plenty of good images of O'Keefe's abstractions ... click on the <> symbol to copy the video onto your clipboard or to paste the HTML code to your site or to share. Enjoy!

Source: VOA News (30 April 2010, Julie Taboh | Washington, DC) - "Rare Art by Renowned American Artist Goes on Display"

Georgia O'Keeffe is one of the most distinguished American artists of the 20th century. She is best known for her vibrant paintings of flowers, leaves, landscapes and other images in nature.

Now, a new exhibit at The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., features more than 100 paintings, drawings and watercolors by O'Keeffe and 12 photographic portraits of her taken by her late husband, famed photographer Alfred Stieglitz.

But the highlight of the collection - which includes items dating from 1915 to the late 1970s - includes a rare selection of O'Keeffe's less familiar abstract art.

Georgia O'Keeffe as abstract artist

Georgia O'Keeffe is best known for her sensuous paintings of flowers and desert landscapes of the American southwest. But many people may not know that she was also a gifted abstract artist.

The new exhibit features abstractions that O'Keeffe herself didn't exhibit in her own lifetime, says Elsa Smithgall, associate curator at The Phillips Collection.

According to Smithgall, O'Keeffe broke into abstraction with a set of charcoal drawings that she created in 1915.

"They are exquisite gestural drawings, very organic in form, and no recognizable reference to a known subject," she says.

Water colors and oils

By the 1920s, O'Keeffe had moved on from pure abstract drawings to water colors and oil paintings of subjects that seem more familiar.

But according to Smithgall, O'Keeffe continued to use abstraction as the foundation in all her artwork.

"You're going to find in her work this constant back and forth between very purely abstract form and perhaps a flower or a leaf or a landscape," she says.



Sexual overtones

It was also during this period when critics described O'Keeffe's oil paintings as being sexually suggestive.

While Smithgall acknowledges that some of O'Keeffe's forms do evoke sexual connotations, she emphasizes that the exhibition "is not about that."

She adds that O'Keeffe herself passionately resisted the notion that her art was sexually suggestive and, in fact, made a concerted effort "to shift her focus in her work towards more recognizable subject matter as a way to try to steer the critics towards another kind of reading of her work."

New Mexico - a new chapter

Beginning in 1929, O'Keeffe started spending time in New Mexico where she felt more at home than she had in New York where her career had taken root. Her experiences in the vast open spaces of the New Mexico desert inspired her to move there permanently in 1949.

According to Smithgall, it was a new chapter in her career:

"She's very much responding to that ocean of space in New Mexico where they have this amazing clarity of light and very wonderful, breathtaking kind of exhilarating sensation that she feels there that is extremely inspiring to her, and it brings up a whole new body of subject matter," she says.

It was during these transformative years when her paintings took on a different feel as well, says Smithgall.

O'Keeffe started depicting flowers "increasingly large in format and increasingly greater in magnification and so you start to see a major change in her scale, in her viewpoint taking these unusual birds and bees-eye perspectives," she says.

According to Smithgall, O'Keeffe created magnified images of her subject matter as a way of "inviting the viewer in." She wasn't copying an object so much as expressing how she felt about painting it, she says.

Coming full circle

By the late '50s and '60s, O'Keeffe's art turned once again to the pure abstractions of her earlier years.

"This is not a work that you probably would see on the wall and say, 'Oh, yes, an O'Keeffe,'" says Smithgall, "so there's that surprising aspect to them."

"What's so exquisite about them is that she has - with very spare compositions - created these exquisite forms that are extremely expressive and that do recall those earliest charcoal drawings in that respect," she says.

From those early charcoal drawings to the huge, bold canvases of her later years, few would argue that the work of Georgia O'Keeffe has had a far-reaching influence on American art and culture, and continues to impress and inspire art lovers throughout the world.

Source: VOA News (30 April 2010, Julie Taboh | Washington, DC) - "Rare Art by Renowned American Artist Goes on Display"

Alberto Giacometti statue " L'homme qui marche I (Walking Man I)" sets new art auction record

What a way to start 2010! A Giacometti statue, L'homme qui marche I (Walking Man I), set a world record for a work of art at auction ... fetching $104.3 million ($104,327,006 /£65,001,250) after just eight minutes of intense bidding for about ten bidders at Sotheby's in London on Wednesday evening, February 3, 2010. The bidding had opened at 12 million pounds, and the statue was sold to an anonymous bidder by telephone. The life-sized 72- inch (183 cm) bronze sculpture depicts a lone man in mid-stride with his arms hanging at his side.

Video of Giacometti's L'homme qui marche I (Walking Man I) sculpture sold at world record auction price at Sotheby's. An anonymous phone bidder bought the work for £58m. The £65m price tag includes the buyer's premium. - video from mickeydroog


Not only establishing new record prices for a Giacometti work and for any piece of sculpture ever sold at auction, L'homme qui marche I also beat the previous top auction price set by Pablo Picasso’s painting Garçon à la Pipe, which sold for $104.2 million ($104,168,000 / £58,052,830) at Sotheby’s New York in May 2004.

The February 3 sale of L'homme qui marche I (Walking Man I) marked the first time a Giacometti figure of a walking man of this size has come to auction in over 20 years, said Sotheby's.

Sotheby's described the Giacometti L'homme qui marche I (Walking Man I) as executed in 1960 and cast in bronze in a numbered edition of 6 plus 4 artist's proofs. The present work was cast in 1961 and is a life-time cast. Previously, the record for a Giacometti bronze was set at $27.4 million in May 2008 for a life-sized sculpture of a woman entitled "Grande femme debout II (Large Standing Woman II)."

Alberto Giacometti (10 October 1901 – 11 January 1966) was a Swiss sculptor, painter, draughtsman, and printmaker. This sculpture by the 20th century Swiss artist is considered an iconic Giacometti work as well as being one of the most recognizable images of modern art. The life-sized bronze statue was being sold by the German banking firm Commerzbank AG, which acquired it when it took over Dresdner Bank AG and its corporate art collection in 2009. Dresdner acquired the sculpture in 1980.

L'homme qui marche I (Walking Man I) was executed at the high point of Giacometti's mature period. According to Sotheby's catalogue note: "The sculpture originated as part of the public project that Giacometti was commissioned to do for the Chase Manhattan Plaza in New York, which, when completed, was to be the first modernist outdoor project in the city's financial district. While the installation was never completed, L'Homme qui marche I became an iconic work in its own right." [... ] "In preparation for the Chase Manhattan project, Giacometti executed a number of sculptures, among which, according to the sculptor, were at least forty versions of the walking man. However Giacometti destroyed most of them, and only seems to have been satisfied with the two versions that remain today – L'Homme qui marche I and II. "


Here's a video I enjoyed watching, showing examples of Giacometti's unique sculpture, paintings and drawings.
Alberto GIACOMETTI 1901 1966 - video from SAPH075



More from Sotheby's Catalogue Note on L'homme qui marche I (Walking Man I) :

"An undisputed masterpiece of Giacometti's sculpture, L'Homme qui marche I is also one of the most iconic images of Modern art. It represents the pinnacle of Giacometti's experimentation with the human form, combining a monumental, imposing size with a rich rendering of the surface. Capturing a transient moment in the figure's movement, Giacometti created both a humble image of an ordinary man, and a potent symbol of humanity.

The present work is the first of two versions of L'Homme qui marche, executed in 1960, at the highpoint of Giacometti's mature period. By this time, the image of a standing or walking human figure was established as pivotal to the artist's iconography. Between 1947 and 1950 Giacometti made several sculptures on the subject of the walking man, alone or in a small group positioned on a platform suggestive of a city square. Never before, however, had he tackled this image on a monumental scale. Giacometti's lean, wiry figures reached their ultimate form during this period. No longer interested in recreating physical likenesses in his sculptures, the artist began working from memory, seeking to capture his figures beyond the physical reality of the human form. In the years after the Second World War his figures were reduced to their bare essential form, displaying an austerity that embodied the artist's existentialist concerns, and reflecting the lonely and vulnerable human condition. ..."