At a base level Umanets did a thing to another thing, and that other thing is worth a lot of money and hangs in a room and lots of people come to look at it and say ‘gosh, that’s a good thing’. Whether that thing is now a new thing or just the original thing ruined is a open to debate. However a main point of clarity that many commentators seem to be missing and which must be expressed is the unnecessary dichotomy of vandalism and creation. The two are by no means mutually exclusive, yet there exists a need to assign yourself to one of two schools of thought, either Umanets has vandalised the Rothko, and in doing so has committed a criminal act, or he has created something new and fresh, and in doing so may be defined as an artist. The best example of this comes courtesy of the BBC interview between George Alagiyah and Vladimir, in which George repeatedly accuses Vladimir of being a vandal, whereas Umanets several times denies defacing the Rothko, and claims to have created something else, albeit becoming tied up in the semantics of art and ‘anti-art’. This is a completely nonsense argument on both sides, as anyone who considers the act for any meaningful length of time can gather. Vladimir Umanets is a vandal in that he has defaced a piece of private property, that much is fairly obvious. He is also an artist. What we see now if we were to look at the defaced Black on Maroon is not the original Rothko but something new. It is aesthetically different, and as such carries different messages to the individual. It is, objectively, a new creation. Whether this creation is art or not is a very different matter. I am surprised that the argument of vandalism versus art still holds any credence, particularly in a post-Banksy era where the two are completely intertwined; nobody would dream of questioning Banksy’s artistic credentials because what he does is vandalism, yet this is accepted as being completely central to his art.

The issue of what is art is incredibly dense, vague and well reported, and at the same time not particularly interesting. My own personal checklist for ‘is it art?’ is straightforward; does it illicit a response from me, be it emotional, cerebral or physical? Admittedly this is a fairly liberal, all-encompassing approach, but by these parameters Vladimir Umanets has most definitely created art. (Maybe). What’s more interesting is to question the artistic merit of his creation, and for me this is where Umanets work falls down, in that it is neither particularly interesting (opinion) or original (fact). Artists have been defacing other artists’ work for so long now that has become cliched and wearisome, and it only took the BBC minutes to knock together an article of ruined art. As part of his 1959-62 performance piece ‘Zone de Sensibilité Picturale Immatérielle‘ Yves Klein threw gold into the Seine as a reflection on contemporary art; the Chapman brothers defaced prints by Goya in their powerful 2003 show, and Bill Drummond got in on the act when he  bought Richard Long’s work ‘A Smell of Sulphur in the Wind‘ for $20,000 and subsequently cut it up into 20,000 equal pieces. He sold each piece for $1, the resulting work being retitled ‘A Smell of Money Underground’. The reasons behind Bill’s destruction/creation are explored very thoughtfully and entertainingly in his book $20,000, as well as his plans for the work once the last piece has been sold. I own a segment of the Long/Drummond work, and it hangs happily above my bed, retitled ‘A Smell of Bullshit on my Wall’.

So in reference to Vladimir’s yellowism, it’s been done before, and in a more thoughtful and thought-provoking way. Hell, there was even that guy who tried to smash up the Duchamp urinal in the Pompidou Centre. The strongest emotional response Vlad will get from me is a cynical eye-roll – as Drummond says in $20,000, it is only the first person to paint the Mona Lisa that gets the credit.

Trampedach was born during the Second World War. He studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen from 1964-69, broke through as artist at the end of the 1960s and is still very popular today.

Trampedach earlier lived the hectic artist life in the hustle and bustle of Copenhagen but now lives and works in a self-built house at the top of the Pyrenees. Alone in the company of his wife and animals. Here the peace and quiet of his surroundings allows creativity to flow.

From the mid- 1980s Trampedach exhibited periodically in New York at the Allan Stone Gallery. And every time he took the American art collectors by surprise. New York is one of two places he travels to from his self-imposed exile. The other is Copenhagen, where he always stays in one of the city’s best hotels – Hotel D’Angleterre – just a stone’s throw from the royal academy where he unfurled as an artist.

Actually Trampedach is inspired by an artist whose life and career are far removed from his own in time and space – Rembrandt (1606-1669). When you hear this it makes sense, despite the gap  of almost 400-years. They both have the same dark tones and figurative approach. Not to mention the same themes?

In other words – Kurt Trampedach is a true artistic soul.

His works are found in the permanent collections of many Danish museums, including the National Gallery of Denmark. In 1984 he was awarded the Eckersberg’s Medal.

See whether we have any paintings by Kurt Trampedach at auction at Lauritz.com right now.

China Art Palace

Two vast public museums in Shanghai on the site of the 2010 World Expo : The China Art Palace and the Power Station.

Converted from the China Pavilion for Expo 2010, China Art Palace is one of the most ambitious museum with 64,000 sq of exhibition space. The China Art Museum currently brings together around 14,000 artworks acquired thanks to donations or purchases. The history and development of modern art in China is displayed over three floors.
Shanghai Daily quoted an anonymous government senior official, who claimed that China Art Palace “will be on a par with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.”

The Power Station of Art with 9, 000 sq of exhibition space, is the first museum dedicated to contemporary art. It will host the 2012 Shanghai Biennale (2 Octo­ber 2012-31 March 2013).

“Spirit du Mondrian”, oil pastel on sulfite paper, size A4

Anthony Gormley’s trademark metal man, this time in outline only, opens the exhibition in Silence; he floats in the air and is silhouetted against the wall, the rifle lodged in his stomach reaching up to his mouth. Ethereal and visceral at the same time, it’s a striking piece of sculpture, invoking torture and sacrifice, greed and death. Douglas Gordon’s installation, Sketch for an AK47 Samovar, placing the rifle on a grand piano with tea cups and the Russian teamaker, while powerful, doesn’t go far enough. I wanted to see the rifle’s muzzle transformed into a tea spout, the real thing rather than a sketch, really piercing the heart of Gordon’s nod to the high society where both tea and war culture reside.

Contrived and underwhelming (sorry Jake), the notorious Chapman Brothers, famous for the 2003 mannequin children with genitalia in place of facial features, produced – wait for it – mannequin children with genitalia for faces, with rifles. Damien Hirst obviously couldn’t be arsed and banged out a rifle spin-painted like all the other spin paintings he’s done, weakly entitled Spin AK47 for Peace One Day; he was the only artist who didn’t bother to make a comment about his work. I guess there really wasn’t anything to say. Sarah Lucas has wrapped some stuffed tights around the AK. Ditto, no comment needed.

Lalla Shawa’s Where Souls Dwell

The stand-out piece for me was Lalla Shawa’s intricately decorated Where Souls Dwell, closely followed by Solange Azagury-Partridge’s Petrified; both transform the weapon into a thing of beauty, transcendental memorials to the dead rather than indictments of the act of killing. Azagury-Partridge refashions the rifle out of petrified wood in deep, textured hues and Shawa decorates it intricately with flowers, butterflies and jewels, traditional – even cliched – metaphors for the soul, but so gloriously realised and unusually framed that you can’t fail to be moved.
For a more political slant, Bryan Symondson’s Commodities takes the biscuit. He wraps his AK in currency and his magazine is loaded with the spoils of war- blood, gold, coal, cocaine. Matt Collishaw plays it sonorous and makes his rifle into a spade, barely needing his own portentous by-line, ‘Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.’ Antony Micallif provides the only painting in the show, a huge and sinister behemoth that could easily be used as a poster for a horror movie. Which isn’t necessarily a criticism. It certainly outshines the only photograph, Marc Quinn’s sentimental shots of children playing with toy guns.

Bryan Symondson’s Commodities

Less heavy-handed than these but more satisfying is Gavin Turks’ Entropic AK47, a rifle ground into dust. As Seen On TV  is, at first glance, more understated than I expected from that loveable rogue Jeremy Deller. Deller mounts his AK and surrounds it with quotes about the assault rifle lifted from stuff on TV, from movies to interviews to shows. In typical Deller style, his touch is light but when he shoots, he hits the mark, finding the words that most underline the relevance of this thought-provoking exhibition and the atrocity of the AK47; ‘You get rich by giving the poorest people in the world the means to kill themselves…those nuclear weapons, they sit in their silos.Your Ak47, that’s the real weapon of mass destruction’ (Jack Valentine).

All works referred to were created in 2012.

Watch the video here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturevideo/artvideo/9574716/Deadly-AK-47-gets-a-makeover-in-art-project.html

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This is the note I received in the mail two days ago from my little brother. While his grammar clearly needs some work, I appreciated the sentiment. College, collage…close enough right? The kid cracks me up, and he’s also a lot wiser than I give him credit for. He’s one of those kids who just get life already. And so, keeping the wisdom of my little brother in mind, I decided to take his note literally and see where it went. Here’s what I got:

Collage. In grade school it was the perfect way to avoid real work and make an unnecessarily huge mess. Spending hours pouring through magazines looking for the perfect letters and pictures was the best form of homework I ever got. But when you look at the origins of collage, there’s so much more to be said.

Still Life with Chair Canning, 1912

Collage all started when Picasso got tired of square canvasses. At least, that’s the way I like to think of it. In many of Picasso’s cubist paintings, he had a hard time deciding what to do with the corners of the canvas when he painted a pyramidal composition. So, he got rid of the corners. Coupled with the fact that Picasso had taken Cubism to the outer limits, there was no where really left to go when it came to your standard oil-on-canvas art. This is why I love Picasso. The man simply never stopped trying. When he had mastered space, he turned it on its head about a million times over. And when he mastered this churning, undulating, reconfiguration of space, he invented collage. That’s right, ladies and gents, he invented it. Granted, some folk art incorporated common materials into crafts, but no one before Picasso had the audacity to hang it on a wall and call it a masterpiece. But that’s what Picasso did with Still Life with Chair Canning in 1912. This piece uses an oil cloth with a chair canning pattern pasted onto the canvas. With this one small act Picasso called into question what qualified as high art. Suddenly everything was fair game, and artists like Duchamp and Man Ray would take that idea and run with it in the coming years. Picasso’s still life, which depicts a glass, napkin, lemon and newspaper, appears to be resting on an actual coffee table. And the letters “JOU,” suggest the french verb “Jouer” which means “to play.” And boy did Picasso play. He even went so far as to wrap his canvas with a rope, almost mocking the elaborate gilded gold frames used for paintings of the past. Yes, Picasso knew exactly what he was doing when he pieced together this historical still life.

Collage is all about holding an object up to the light and asking, “Could this become art?” It’s about the possibility of taking something old and broken and turning it into something new and whole. So my brother’s misspelling is actually quite appropriate. Because isn’t that what we all do in life? We hold ourselves up to the light and observe all of the brokenness we find there. Then we piece ourselves back together again. We paste ourselves into new relationships, new towns, new friends, or new jobs, and we hope and pray that someone out there will think it’s a masterpiece.

So thanks, little brother, for your inspiring note. And don’t worry, I am having lots of fun at collage. Every morning I wake up knowing that this could be the day when someone picks me up, sees how old and broken I am, and turns me into something beautiful and whole. And what could be more fun than that?

–Bob Dylan

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Now you can own a print of this piece and many others, output on fine art paper or canvas. Visit my gallery at saatchionline.com/jeffrosenfield to find out more.

Let me know what you think.

-JRR

–Patti Smith

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Now you can own a print of this piece and many others, output on fine art paper or canvas. Visit my gallery at saatchionline.com/jeffrosenfield to find out more.

Let me know what you think.

-JRR

–Tom Petty

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This piece is not available in my gallery. If you would like to purchase a print, please contact me.

Let me know what you think.

-JRR

Not too long ago, the dear woman lost her father. And, as with all things, she handled it with transparent dignity and grace and flew home over the border to bid her father adieu.

This piece was in progress when I heard the sad news and I completed it with her in mind.

I dedicate it to her and to her father.

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Now you can own a print of this piece and many others, output on fine art paper or canvas. Visit my gallery at saatchionline.com/jeffrosenfield to find out more.

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-JRR

Apart from Russian icons – classic and perennially popular collectors’ objects – we’re not really crazy about having religious-themed art on the walls above our sofas. So what’s the great attraction with Niels Helledie?

Niels Helledie is self-taught and draws his inspiration from medieval symbolism. His sculptures, reliefs, crucifixes and other creations have a particularly rustic crudeness about them. Which today actually comes over as a bit retro, and is maybe precisely why his work has experienced a renaissance in recent years? He mainly works in ceramic, but also used driftwood and bronze.

Many Danish churches have the pleasure of housing art by Niels Helledie – including Holte Church, Hasseris Church in Aalborg, Hasle Church in Aarhus and the exceptionally beautiful Ellevang Church, also in Aarhus and designed by leading Danish architects Friis & Moltke. Niels Helledie’s crucifix particularly comes in to its own here, against the setting of Friis & Moltke’s stark, brutalist architecture. The completely naked rooms with Helledie’s crucifix together with the altar, font and pulpit by Erik Heide, another Danish sculptor, as the only focal points are an amazing sight.

Painters from the Danish island of Funen – artists like Johannes Larsen, Frits Syberg, Peter Hansen – are also among those working with religion as a motif in the 20th century. And here we see a definite difference when it comes to hammer price. The religious subjects achieve distinctly lower hammer prices than the lovely, soft, Funen landscapes, ploughed fields, hothouse flowers, children and all the other popular subjects these artists painted. We seem to shrink away from religious gravity.

The same is true with older paintings, with the exception of art that it is so old that it comes from a time when almost all motifs were religious. Naturally enough there are no such differences to discern here!

Niels Helledie’s sculptures only rarely turn up at auction at Lauritz.com, but it’s worth keeping an eye out for when they do. Take a look here and see whether we’ve any at auction right now. Or you could set up a search agent for “Niels Helledie” here, and automatically receive an email when anything by Niels Helledie is consigned.

“Museums are now reaching a scale at which they can be understood no longer as buildings but only as small cities,” Rem Koolhaas, cofounder of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture in Rotterdam, told Art in America magazine (April 2012, “Scaling Up”). Galleries, too. Perhaps in an effort to fill the available real estate, or simply because it always takes more to generate the same “WOW” response, contemporary art has been expanding at an astonishing rate, with no end in sight.

Damien Hirst’s 1991 stuffed shark comes to mind. Tristin Lowe’s 2009 52-foot felt whale, Mocha Dick, too. But it’s not just individual works. Hirst, who thrives on impact, recently took over all 11 branches of the Gagosian art empire – scattered over 3 continents and 8 cities (New York, Beverly Hills, Paris, London, Rome, Geneva, Athens and Hong Kong) – with “The Complete Spot Paintings 1986-2011” show. Some loved it, some hated it; no one could ignore it.

One New York Times article describes the big art phenomenon as the “we’re-doing-this-because-we-can decadence that has subsumed so much of the art world — yet another instance of money celebrating itself.” But is that all it is? Even the loudest works have redeemable qualities: exposing more people – and attracting art novices – to pieces that get the viewers to feel something, take something away and, if all goes well, become less intimidated by art. They might fail to please art critics, but gargantuan works do democratize the experience, making it more physically and emotionally accessible. And isn’t seeing some art, even if it’s not up to critics’ standards, better than seeing nothing at all?

Some, of course, refuse to see the big art trend as a trend at all. The two Scandinavian artists behind two large-scale installations (including a realistically scaled apartment building with actors inside) at the Danish and Nordic pavilions at the 2009 Venice Biennale – Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset – say that artists choose the scale that matches their vision and philosophy, not because of pressure to go bigger.

For Anish Kapoor, whose giant orb sculpture in Paris’ Grand Palais put people inside of art, scale is crucial. For Christian Marclay, too: “The Clock”(2010) – a 24-hour tribute to time and cinema made up of thousands of film fragments – defied normal opening hours, but wowed visitors and critics.

What’s the future? Can art expand forever? Will artists get overwhelmed by expectations? Or have audiences become so used to instant impact that subtlety fails to impress? For now, at least, size is as integral to contemporary art as speed to the Internet. We’ll watch for signs of protest.

Searching for your own piece of WOW-factor art? See what’s on offer today.

Anastasya Partan, a Boston-based freelance writer, is a guest blogger for Lauritz.com. She was born in Moscow, raised in the US, and has lived in New York, Washington, DC, London, Paris, and Copenhagen. With both a corporate and creative background, she writes for international brands and explores topics related to lifestyle, culture and the arts.

–John Lennon

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Now you can own a print of this piece and many others, output on fine art paper or canvas. Visit my gallery at saatchionline.com/jeffrosenfield to find out more.

Let me know what you think.

-JRR

Tile Art #4, 2012. Modern Tile Fine Art Collection. Copyright © 20012 by Mark Lawrence. All Rights Reserved.

The Tile Art technique is similar to the grid technique pioneered by modern artist Chuck Close. Each of the tiles in this work has been meticulously hand worked in a distinctive method created by the artist. Intricate geometric patterns and shapes swirl across these giant canvases and create a unique and memorable fine art composition.

Modern Tile Art #4, 2012. 81 x 54 inches. Copyright © 2012 by Mark Lawrence. All Rights Reserved.

Explore why Mark Lawrence’s unique abstract art and pioneering digital mixed-media techniques have made him an international art collectors favorite. His compelling VerseVisions® and contemporary fine art abstract paintings are displayed in homes, hotels, offices, and commercial buildings throughout the world.

Abstract Modern Art- Tile Art #4, 2012. Interior Designer Room Inspiration

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This piece is part of a Limited Edition series to benefit Humanitarian Art Project.
Details will be available soon.

Let me know what you think.

-JRR

Members of the artists’ group COBRA provide a really good example of this. And among these we find Corneille (1922-2010).

Corneille didn’t just like childlike art – he was also very fond of depicting the fairer sex in his art.

In fact, Corneille’s art uses a myriad of different symbols – you can make a sport out of spotting them all. Women, birds, suns, cats, fish, trees and other plants. His symbols evoke primitive folk art that too drew on easily recognizable symbols. This search back to origins is also typical of several other Cobra artists – childlike strokes or points of reference, African tribal art or, like here, folk art.

As a result stories always turn up in Corneille’s artworks. With just a little imagination you can get many hours to go making up stories about just one of Corneille’s works, in the same way as you can with, for instance, Danish artist Henry Heerup’s fabulous art – not surprisingly considering both were COBRA members, and despite their otherwise very different styles.

Corneille was born in Belgium and studied art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Holland. In 1948 he was one of the founding members of the Reflex movement and, in the year to follow, COBRA – an international collaboration that had a dramatic effect on art in post-war Europe. COBRA counted among its members such prominent names as the Danes Henry Heerup, Carl-Henning Pedersen and Mogens Balle as well as Dutch painters Karel Appel and Constant Nieuwenhuys.

Corneille died just a couple of years ago and was therefore artistically active for a very long time, resulting in a rich body of work. But as often happens when artists pass away – bringing their artistic production to an end – prices of existing artworks rise at auction.

If you are attracted by a colourful palette, by animal figures and female nudes and want to be cheered by the art on your walls, then maybe you should take a closer look at Corneille’s work? Terragraphs, sculptures and sculptures in metal are all to be found within a reasonable price range.

Bid on Corneille here.

—Paul Simon

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Now you can own the original of this piece (24” x 18” on canvas) as well as a print in various sizes, output on fine art paper or canvas. Visit my gallery at saatchionline.com/jeffrosenfield to find out more.

Let me know what you think.

-JRR

Please click on the image to enlarge it, or you won’t really see it.

Now you can own the original of this piece (24” x 18”) as well as a print in various sizes, output on fine art paper, photo paper or canvas. Visit my gallery at saatchionline.com/jeffrosenfield to find out more.

Let me know what you think.

-JRR

And on 2 May, as the suspenseful auction drew to a close the hammer fell at the record sum of 107 million dollars – which means that inclusive buyer’s premium the masterpiece sold for the unbelievable price of 119,922,500 US dollars. What an incredible sensation!

Sceptics could always argue that this sale was an absolute exception. Nevertheless, “The Scream” by Edward Munch is the second-most famous picture in the world after “Mona Lisa” by Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519). Furthermore, the image was fresh on the market, meaning it had never been traded before. And the probability that it will be traded again soon is very low too. The three other versions of “The Scream” that exist are currently state property of Norway. This makes it highly certain that these would never be sold, making the sale of the version of “The Scream” at auction at Sotheby’s something particularly special.

Nevertheless, just a few days later the art auction at Christie’s in New York was to prove any sceptics wrong. On a single evening, 14 works of art were sold at new record prices! For example, Mark Rothko‘s (1903-70) work “Orange, Red, Yellow” from 1961 came under the hammer for 86.9 million US dollars making it, according to Christie’s, the most expensive contemporary painting of all time. The painting “Abstraktes Bild (798-3)” by Gerhard Richter  b. 1932 sold for the sensational price of 21.8 million US dollars, and the painting “FC1″ by Yves Klein (1928-62) changed hands for 36.5 million US dollars, which ultimately exceeded the highest price of 23.5 million dollars ever paid for a work of art by this French artist.

In turn, Sotheby’s continued the trend and sold Roy Lichtenstein‘s (1923-97) small painting “Sleeping Girl” from 1964 for 45 million US dollars. Yet another record price, this time for a piece by this pop artist.

Experts are aware that there is a lot of money in the art market and that the market is completely detached from other economic developments, even in these times of financial instability. There are plenty of collectors who have the huge amounts of money involved and are content to sit and wait for a specific object or a favourable opportunity. Most “normal” people and average art lovers can only dream of owning objets d’art of this calibre and sums of money such as these. Or maybe not?

Art lovers should be aware of one thing – it is quite striking that many of the paintings sold for record prices were held in private hands and originate directly or indirectly from the artists themselves. “The Scream” was inherited by the seller from his family, who were the neighbours of Edvard Munch at the beginning of 20th century. The New York couple who just sold the Lichtenstein discovered the painting approximately 50 years ago in a small gallery and then hung it in their living room! With a little intuition, a lot of time and above all luck, an art lover could discover a record-bringing work of art by a young artist – anything is possible!

Take a look at modern art at auction on Lauritz.com.

Photos: Sotheby’s.

Beatrice de Francesco is guest blogging at Lauritzblog.

George Harrison

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Now you can own the original of this piece (36” x 48” on canvas) as well as a print in various sizes, output on fine art paper or canvas. Visit my gallery at saatchionline.com/jeffrosenfield to find out more.

Let me know what you think.

-JRR