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This watercolour by Martin Gale comes up at Morgan O’Driscoll’s current off the wall online art auction which runs until January 29. The auction of affordable art features work by a wide variety of practitioners including Peter Collis, Oisin Kelly, Elizabeth Magill, Markey Robinson, Alan Kenny, Thomas Rose Miles, Felim Egan, Cecil King, William Crozier, Peter Collis, Pauline Bewick and many more. The catalogue is online.
David Hockney’s California (1965) will be a highlight of Christie’s 20th / 21st Century evening sale in London on March 7. One of his first pool paintings and the first to include figures it has been Held in the same European private collection since 1968. It stands amonghis first great swimming pool paintings and has been unseen in public for more than 40 years. Christie’s estimate it in the region of £16 million.
California is the largest and finest in the extraordinary group of early pool paintings created in London after Hockney’s first visit to Los Angeles in 1964. The art historians Paul Melia and Ulrich Luckhardt have noted that ‘Hockney considers it to be one of his most important pool paintings’. The paintings that followed have come to be synonymous with his oeuvre, combining dazzling technical virtuosity with strains of fantasy, desire and longing.
Hockney incorporated a swimming pool in the 1964 painting California Art Collector but it was not until he returned to London for Christmas that year that he made his first full pool painting: a figureless composition entitled Picture of a Hollywood Swimming Pool (1964). California followed shortly afterwards, along with the closely related painting Two Boys in a Pool, Hollywood (1965). California anticipates many of the achievements that followed in Hockney’s subsequent masterpieces. Its kaleidoscopic depiction of moving water lays the foundations for the techniques explored in A Bigger Splash (1967, Tate, London) and Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (1972). Its naked figures foreshadow the sensuous male nudes of Sunbather (1966, Museum Ludwig, Cologne) and Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool (1966, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool). So essential did Hockney consider the painting to his oeuvre that, when unable to include it in his 1988 retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, he made his own copy, now held in the museum’s permanent collection.
With a major exhibition of Rubens, Rembrandt and Vermeer opening on February 24 the National Gallery of Ireland announced today that it welcomed over one million visitors in 2023. This is the highest attendance number since 2017. Major exhibitions including Lavinia Fontana: Trailblazer, Rule Breaker as well as It Took a Century: Women Artists and the RHA and Lavery. On Location helped visitor attendance at the Gallery increase by 29% compared to 2022. Vistiors found new acquisitions including La Vie des Champs (1876-77) by Paul Cézanne; Vase of Flowers with an Ear of Corn (1742) by Rachel Ruysch; Duft (1937) by Hannah Höch; and A Garden in France (1898) by Sir John Lavery. Exhibitions and displays included: Turner: The Henry Vaughan Bequest; James Coleman: Still Life (2013 – 2016); St Dymphna. The Tragedy of an Irish Princess; Pastel Revealed; Shelter; Zurich Portrait Prize & Zurich Young Portrait Prize; and Sarah Purser: Private Worlds.
Turning Heads: Rubens, Rembrandt and Vermeer will run from February 24 to May 26 and will feature works by Dutch and Flemish artists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries who were exponents of the tronie – an intriguing painting of a head. Paintings include Study of an Old Woman by Rubens, The Laughing Man, 1629-1630, by Rembrandt and The Man with the Golden Helmet, c. 1650 from the circle of Rembrandt. Vermeer’s most exquisitely detailed tronie, Girl with the Red Hat, c.1665-1667, is an exhibition highlight.
This Tiffany peony lamp is being shown by Macklowe Gallery, New York at the premier art, antiques and design fair in the United States, the New York Winter Show. Now in full swing there is a total of 70 internationally known dealers taking part. Museum quality works from antiquity to the present day are on display. This year the show is celebrating its 70th anniversary. It runs until January 28.
Where does Elton’s future lie? Let’s not go there. Suffice to say it is beyond Peachtree Road. The rock star is saying goodbye to his Atlanta condo at Park Place on Peachtree – acquired in 1992 – and Christie’s New York will sell the contents in a series of eight live and online sales beginning on February 21.He began collecting photographs in the 1990’s and there is work by pioneers like Andy Warhol, Helmut Newton, Robert Mapplethorpe, Peter Beard, Herb Ritts, Richard Avedon and more.Damien Hirst’s Your Song, signed and inscribed to Elton and David is estimated at $350,000-$450,000 (€319,850-€411,230) and a portrait of Elton John by Julian Schnabel is estimated at $200,000-$300,000 (€182,770-€274,150). There is fashion from his stage wardrobes including an ivory and gold piece designed by Annie Reavey c1971 and vintage Gianni Versace shirts and upholstery. The sale will offer tableware, decor, a grand piano, art glass, antiques and artefacts from his global travels. Live day sales will continue on February 22 and 23 and online sales open for bidding on February 9 and run to February 27 and 28.
This small untitled work by Felim Egan kicks off Morgan O’Driscoll’s Irish art online auction which runs until January 22. The estimate for the oil on board is just 400-600 but so far it has attracted 18 bids and will go higher. When he died in 2020 Egan was regarded as one of Ireland’s leading contemporary artists. He represented Ireland at the Paris Biennale in France in 1981 and the Sao Paulo Biennial in Brazil in 1985 and won the Unesco international prize for painting in Paris in its inaugural year of 1993. He exhibited widely in Europe and his work is held in many international collections including the European Parliament and the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The catalogue for the sale is online.
Ludovico Mazzolini’s 1521 painting of The Crossing of the Red Sea in the collection of the National Gallery of Ireland is to be restored thanks to a grant from TEFAF, The European Fine Art Foundation. TEFAF announced today that Ireland’s National Gallery and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art (Connecticut, USA) are the recipients of this year’s TEFAF Museum Restoration Fund (TMRF). This is an annual grant created in support of the international art community’s vital work to preserve artistic and cultural heritage.
Remarkable for its size and rarity Mazzolino’s biblical artwork departs from the conventional rules of perspective. It has been in the collection of the gallery for over a century but it cannot be displayed in its current fragile state. With severe delamination of the paint layer and soiling to the cracked surface The Crossing of the Red Sea requires extensive conservation efforts. With TEFAF’s funding, the National Gallery of Ireland will collaborate with experts in Mazzolino’s work to better understand his artistic practice so that this rare large-scale masterpiece can be sensitively restored and made accessible to the visiting public.
Dr Caroline Campbell, Director of the National Gallery of Ireland, commented, “Ludovico Mazzolino was a prominent painter in sixteenth-century Italy, where he worked for the Este court in Ferrara and later in Bologna. The Crossing of the Red Sea is recognized internationally as an important and rare large-scale example of his work. It has been part of the National Gallery of Ireland’s collection since 1914, acquired just 50 years after we opened our doors. Unfortunately, due to the fragility of the panel, we have been unable to put it on display for many decades. We are delighted to receive this grant from the TEFAF Museum Restoration Fund, which will enable us to undertake essential conservation treatment on this striking painting and make it possible to return it to our galleries for the enjoyment of our visitors.”
The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut, has received funding from TEFAF to restore Venus with a Nymph and Satyr (1600), a marble sculpture by Pietro Francavilla (1548 – 1615). The TEFAF Museum Restoration Fund was established in 2012 to support and promote professional restoration and related scholarly research of significant museum artworks. Championing art in all its forms, applications for its grants are open to museums from all over the world and artworks of any age. Each year, a maximum of €50,000 is allocated to projects. The committee of independent experts usually selects two winners to each receive up to €25,000 to support their restoration project.
Art mirrors life and the life it is currently mirroring is one of censorship and intolerable attacks on freedom of expression. The art world has not been immune as the Israeli-Hamas war has spawned a new wave of hidden and not so hidden persuaders who move to stifle anything other than total support for hardliners against humanity. Against this background of global uncertainty there is a pipeline of interesting international sales coming up in 2024. On offer already are a variety of covetable lots as diverse as the contents of a sumptuous Venetian palace on the Grand Canal to Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Archive to a Royal portrait by Velazquez and property from the life and career of Marilyn Monroe. We must assume that all this will be okay once there is nothing in these auctions – such as seeking a ceasefire in Gaza – that can be construed as anti-semitic.
Sotheby’s will offer 200 lots from Palazzo Volpi in Venice at an auction in Paris on February 28. The collection will include palatial Roman tables, ballroom banquettes, art panels in the style of Jacopo Sansovino, Wagner sofas and Venetian mirrors. Julien’s will offer contents from the Playboy archives and from Marilyn Monroe at a three day sale in Los Angeles on March 28, 29 and 30. Highlights will include a Playboy Bunny silkscreen by Andy Warhol and a black and cellophane effect evening gown worn by Monroe in The Seven Year Itch. The Velazquez portrait of Isabel de Borbon is at Sotheby’s in New York on February 1.
Elvis Presley’s Gretsch guitar from his Las Vegas residency is among the lots at Christie’s Exceptional Sale in New York on the same day along with a pair of c1800 tabourets or stools delivered to the Empress Josephine at Chateau de St. Cloud.
It has the potential to be an exciting year with many records being broken at home and abroad. Yet in 2024 there are well founded accusations of censorship in an art world that has never been noted for its lack of freedom of expression. In New York board members and many art writers withdrew in protest after the editor of the prestigious Artforum magazine, David Valasco, was abruptly fired when a letter supporting Palestinian liberation was published which omitted to mention the victims of the Hamas attack on October 7. Advertisers like gallerist David Zwirner and the Chanel culture fund threatened to withdraw.The Saarland Museum in Germany cancelled an exhibition by Candice Breitz, who is Jewish and has condemned Hamas, saying they would not show works by anyone who does not recognise Hamas terror as a rupture of civilisation. The entire selection panel for the next curator of Documenta, a global art exhibition in 2027, resigned after disputes with administrators about the war. This mirrors the wider environment. Think of resignations like that of Harvard President Claudine Gay in a campaign led by the Wall Street Jewish financier Bill Ackman whose wife is a former member of the IDF. You do not need to be a soothsayer to know there will be more resignations. UPDATE: The first American retrospective of Samia Halaby (87), regarded as one of the most important living Palestinian artists, has been cancelled by officials at Indiana University.
A 21st Century ghost ship is the inspiration for an exhibition which opens today at Uilinn, the West Cork Arts Centre in Skibbereen. Artist and Sherkin Islander Majella O’Neill Collins became fascinated with the story of the MV Alta, the merchant vessel abandoned at sea 1,400 miles south of Bermuda in 2018 after engine failure when en route from Greece to Haiti. It drifted for 496 days over 2,300 nautical miles until washed ashore at Ballycotton during Storm Dennis in February 2020. Re-named 14 times with owners who are impossible to trace the ship remains unclaimed, unsalvaged and on the rocks. The sense of this vessel sailing along on relatively untroubled water, entering uncharted waters and eventually hitting a rock inspired the artist and led ultimately to the exhibition Allegory of the MV Alta. It continues until February 24.
Iconic property from Elton John’s former Atlanta home is to be sold in a series of landmark sales at Christie’s in New York. Beginning with an evening sale on February 21 the series will comprise of eight sales both live and online. The city of Atlanta played a crucial role in John’s life, becoming the hub he would return to throughout his numerous tours within the United States. He solidified this connection to Atlanta in 1992 when he acquired the condominium in Park Place, on Peachtree Road. His unexpected choice of Atlanta as a residence was driven by personal reasons. After becoming sober in 1990, he found solace and support in the warm community and recovery facilities of the city, such as the Triangle Club, which played a critical part in his recovery.
Over the years, Elton John assembled a distinctive collection of works of art, objects and memorabilia, many of them crafted specifically for his home on Peachtree Road. Fans will discover an in-depth look at Elton John’s deep passion for photographs, which he began collecting avidly in the 1990s. Creating a gallery-like atmosphere, he adorned the walls of his Atlanta residence with pieces by pioneering artists, such as Andy Warhol, Helmut Newton, Robert Mapplethorpe, Peter Beard, Herb Ritts, Richard Avedon and more. Also included are highly intimate artworks crafted personally for Elton John and his husband David Furnish. Among them is Damien Hirst’s “Your Song” signed and inscribed ‘xxx for Elton + David love Damien Thank You,’ with an estimated value of $350,000-450,000; as well as a portrait of Elton John by Julian Schnabel. There are fashion pieces from the iconic performer’s dazzling stage wardrobe, including a noteworthy Ivory and Gold Ensemble designed by Annie Reavey in circa 1971. This ensemble (estimate $8,000 – 12,000) holds historical significance as one of the initial sets of stage attire crafted exclusively for Elton John.
A testament to Elton John’s eclectic tastes, his Atlanta apartment featured elaborate Versace upholstery—a nod to John’s longstanding friendship with the Versace family. Included in the sale is an incredible group of Versace items including a selection of vintage Gianni Versace shirts estimated at $4,000-6,000, in addition to tableware and home décor. The condo served as a personal sanctuary with a grand piano (estimate $30,000-50,000) art glass collections, antiques, and artifacts from his global travels.
