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Read MoreUsing Microsoft Excel, Tatsuo Horiuchi, a Japanese artist, has depicted the intricate details of mountains, cherry blossoms, and dense forests.
San Francisco Fall Show 2023
An exquisite San Francisco Fall Show Opening Night Gala took place at the Festival Pavilion of the Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture on October 11th.
This year's show invites to celebrate La Dolce Vita, the epitome of the Italian "good life." It's a call to bask in the pure pleasure of appreciating and collecting art, antiques, and design. From luminaries like Botticelli to Bertoia, Fellini to Fornasetti, Schiaparelli to Sottsass, La Dolce Vita embodies poetic beauty, awe-inspiring art, groundbreaking design, vibrant colors, and refined materials. Andiamo!
The 41st edition of the Show shows over forty international dealers, each offering an extraordinary array of fine and decorative arts spanning diverse styles and eras, encompassing American, English, Continental, and Asian furniture, decorative objects, paintings, prints, photographs, books, gold, silver, precious metals, jewelry, rugs, textiles, and ceramics. Dealers present pieces ranging from antiquity to the present day. The Show will features a popular series of book signings and lectures, with confirmed speakers including luminaries like Nina Campbell, Newell Turner, Jean Liu, Miguel Flores-Vianna, Brigette Romanek, Michael Diaz-Griffith, Noz Nozawa, William Li, Alfredo Paredes, and many more.
The 2023 Show's Honorary Chair is none other than Lauren Santo Domingo, Co-Founder and Chief Brand Officer at Moda Operandi and Artistic Director of the Home Collection at Tiffany & Co.
October 14 – 17, 2021 10:30 a.m. – 7:00 p.m., Thursday – Saturday 12:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m., Sunday
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CHRISTOPHER WHEELDON’S CINDERELLA RETURNS TO SAN FRANCISCO BALLET
San Francisco Ballet's 90th Anniversary Season is featuring Christopher Wheeldon's adaptation of Cinderella©, with Sergei Prokofiev's score, opened on March 31st at the War Memorial Opera House and continuing until April 8th. Wheeldon's Cinderella takes a captivating twist on the well-known fairy tale, with the protagonist controlling her own fate after the loss of her mother, rather than relying on a fairy godmother or the stroke of midnight.
The production, inspired by the darker Brothers Grimm version of the story, boasts set and costume designs by Tony Award-winning designer Julian Crouch and San Francisco-native puppeteer Basil Twist. The dazzling end of Act I, which The New York Times describes as a "triumph of fantasy," is directed by Twist and features a tree growing from Cinderella's tears. With an enormous 197 roles and 370 costumes, including Cinderella's gold gown detailed with computer-printed feathers, the production is a co-production with Dutch National Ballet, and it premiered in the United States with SF Ballet in 2013 before touring the world.
Casting for Cinderella includes Soloist Isabella DeVivo in her role debut as Cinderella, while Principal Dancer Max Cauthorn also makes his role debut as Prince Guillaume. Additionally, Principal Dancer Isaac Hernández performs as Prince Guillaume for the first time with SF Ballet, having previously played the role at English National Ballet in 2019. Cinderella is Wheeldon's only full-length ballet for SF Ballet and one of the 15 ballets he has choreographed for the Company. The production was last performed at SF Ballet in 2020.
CALENDAR: Tuesday, April 4, 2023 at 7:30 pm Wednesday, April 5, 2023 at 7:30 pm Thursday, April 6, 2023 at 7:30 pm Friday, April 7, 2023 at 8 pm Saturday, April 8, 2023 at 2 and 8 pm
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A Classic Holiday Tradition In San Francisco - Helgi Tomasson's Nutcracker
Snow in San Francisco?! Twelve times a week as San Francisco Ballet began thirty-three performances of Helgi Tomasson’s Nutcracker. A Bay Area tradition of the past eighteen years. Across the cast are 110 SF Ballet School children slowly returning to pre-pandemic shows.
“This is a most joyous return to the stage for our students, many of whom have missed their favorite holiday tradition over the past three years,” says SF Ballet School Director Patrick Armand. “Nutcracker offers an invaluable opportunity to prepare a dancer for their career, to instill professional values and rigor in a supportive and fun environment—we are thrilled to be back.” This year Tomasson’s Nutcracker is set in San Francisco in 1915 during the Panama-Pacific International Exposition. Production features designs by Tony Award winners Michael Yeargan (scenic) and Martin Pakledinaz (costume), lighting designs by James F. Ingalls, and projection design by Wendall K. Harrington, and an iconic blizzard of 150 pounds of snow billowing from the fly space.
Fun Facts
Nutcracker features 83 Company dancers and 110 SF Ballet School students in 183 breathtaking costumes, the largest production in SF Ballet’s 90-year history.
150 pounds of “snow” are used for each performance, requiring at least 12 stagehands to deploy. The snow is also recycled from year to year, which means that some of it is from 2004, the year of the premiere.
Nutcracker uses 45 stagehands while a typical triple-bill performance uses approximately 20. The houses on the street drop in Act 1 are based on San Francisco’s iconic “Painted Ladies.”
San Francisco Ballet's Nutcracker continues through Tuesday, December 27th at the War Memorial Opera House, 301 Van Ness Avenue, San Francisco, CA. For tickets and additional information, visit www.sfballet.org or call (415) 865-2000, M-F 10am-4pm.
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Rare and Unique Christmas Ornaments by Artist Rena Leinov
A Hidden Self-Portrait of Van Gogh Was Found Behind The Artist's Other Work
Vincent Van Gogh often used both sides of the canvas because he was low in money and over the time the reversed works were discovered here and there. Recently the National Galleries of Scotland found the another of the gems.
"Moments like this are incredibly rare," Frances Fowle, senior curator of French art, said in a statement. "We have discovered an unknown work by Vincent van Gogh, one of the most important and popular artists in the world."
The discovery occured during an X-ray of an 1885 painting by Van Gogh, Head of a Peasant Woman.
"Hidden from view for over a century, the self-portrait is on the back of the canvas with Head of a Peasant Woman and is covered by layers of glue and cardboard," the museum said in a statement on Thursday.
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Mona Lisa Gets Caked
Mona Lisa gets caked. Yes, this Sunday, in a stumt that went viral. “There are people who are destroying the Earth,” the man says in the video, speaking in French. “All artists, think about the Earth. That’s why I did this. Think of the planet.” The Mona Lisa is one of the Louvre’s—and the world’s—most widely-seen artworks.
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Patrick Kelly: Runway of Love
Edward Tsokolakyan Art
Real -life Edward Scissorhands
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Meadows Museum and Museo del Traje Will Collaborate On Fashion Exhibition
Image: courtesy of Meadow Museum by Kevin Todora; Museo del Traje, Madrid by Munio Rodil Ares
The Meadows Museum in Dallas has announced a major exhibition. The exhibition will combine paintings of Spanish fashion, pairing it from its historic dress and accessories collection from the Museo del Traje in Madrid. The exhibition which plans to open up on September 19th,2022, will present how fashion trends in Spain have changed over five hundred years.
The pairings will include Ignacio Zuloaga’s The Bullfighter ‘El Segovianito’ (1912) accompanied by a traje de luces of the same colour, Zuloaga’s Portrait of the Duchess of Arión, Marchioness of Bay (1918) displayed alongside a mantón de Manila.
Image: courtesy of Meadow Museum by Michael Bodycomb; Museo del Traje, Madrid by Gonzalo Cases Ortega
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Alex Chinneck's Art
British sculptor Alex Chinneck’s surreal sculptures and public artworks playfully disrupt the world around us, igniting curiosity and sparking global interest. They challenge our understanding of familiar objects and materials, transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary.
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On Selling and Suffering: A Profile of Alfred Kubin
by Adam Heardman via MutualArt
The reclusive Austrian symbolist’s dark, Schopenhauer-inspired drawings continue to shatter estimates. Here’s what you should know about Alfred Kubin.
Among the final writings of Arthur Schopenhauer is a collection of essays and aphorisms, the first of which comprises his thoughts ‘On the Suffering of the World.’ In his signature manner of subjective, personality-inflected philosophy, Schopenhauer begins: “If the immediate and direct purpose of our life is not suffering then our existence is the most ill-adapted to its purpose in the world: for it is absurd to suppose that the endless affliction of which the world is everywhere full…should be entirely purposeless and accidental.”
“Each individual misfortune, to be sure, seems an exceptional occurrence,” Schopenhauer observes, his tongue half in cheek, half clenched agonizingly between his sharpest teeth; “but misfortune, in general, is the rule.”
The general misfortune of all mankind has been the concern of certain visual artists who have, through observation of suffering and strife, lent colors and symbols to our understanding of the unendurable depths of human experience, and in so doing have seared themselves into our cultural consciousness. Artists like Francisco de Goya, Hieronymus Bosch, and Edvard Munch have achieved a timeless reputation because of their contributions to our syntax of suffering, our lexicon of bad luck, our parlance of pain.
Strange then, to come across an accomplished artist concerned with such themes who has at times fallen into a kind of obscurity (though he enjoyed some reputation as an illustrator and lithograph-artist in his own lifetime). As Schopenhauer himself says, “Not the least of the torments which plague our existence is the constant pressure of time, which never lets us so much as draw breath but pursues us all like a taskmaster with a whip.” Compared with certain other artists, Time the Taskmaster has, by turns, not been particularly kind to Alfred Kubin.
But if the art market is any kind of barometer, summer of 2019 suddenly represents the highest peak of Kubin’s influence and popularity - at the very least since an exhibition of his oils, watercolors, and drawings graced New York’s Galerie St. Etienne back in 1957. The catalogue for that exhibition admitted that it “took many years until Kubin’s strange and unconventional style found full recognition”, though in that year, the year of his 80th birthday, Kubin was maybe already considered “one of the great graphic artists of this century and one of its foremost book illustrators.”
His tenebrous star perhaps hasn’t shone as brightly since, until June this year. The Impressionist and Modern Sales at Sotheby’s on June 19 and 20 saw market highs for Kubin works. All sixteen of his pieces which came to auction over the two days sold, some of them doubling, tripling, or even multiplying by a factor of 8, their pre-sale estimates.
Epidemic (1900-1901) sold for £963,000 against a high estimate of £200,000. The Fate of Mankind III (1902) and The Hour of Death (1900) each raised £855,000 against high estimates of £120,000 and £150,000 respectively. The top performer against estimate was The Plague (1903-1904), which came to the Day Sale with a high estimate of £70,000 and sold for £579,000.
Strange then, to come across an accomplished artist concerned with such themes who has at times fallen into a kind of obscurity (though he enjoyed some reputation as an illustrator and lithograph-artist in his own lifetime). As Schopenhauer himself says, “Not the least of the torments which plague our existence is the constant pressure of time, which never lets us so much as draw breath but pursues us all like a taskmaster with a whip.” Compared with certain other artists, Time the Taskmaster has, by turns, not been particularly kind to Alfred Kubin.
But if the art market is any kind of barometer, summer of 2019 suddenly represents the highest peak of Kubin’s influence and popularity - at the very least since an exhibition of his oils, watercolors, and drawings graced New York’s Galerie St. Etienne back in 1957. The catalogue for that exhibition admitted that it “took many years until Kubin’s strange and unconventional style found full recognition”, though in that year, the year of his 80th birthday, Kubin was maybe already considered “one of the great graphic artists of this century and one of its foremost book illustrators.”
His tenebrous star perhaps hasn’t shone as brightly since, until June this year. The Impressionist and Modern Sales at Sotheby’s on June 19 and 20 saw market highs for Kubin works. All sixteen of his pieces which came to auction over the two days sold, some of them doubling, tripling, or even multiplying by a factor of 8, their pre-sale estimates.
As an illustrator, he has an eye for the emblematic. His symbols say no more than is necessary. They’re bold without being cloying. He draws with brevity but manages to unfold, in the suggested but unseen moments before and after his particular chosen frame, rich narratives that are as historical as they are personal.
Alfred Kubin, The Hour of Death (1900)
Schopenhauer, one of Kubin’s great influences, indulges in a kind of faux-disbelief at the purposelessness of suffering, in order to flip it around into a positive cognitive experience. Kubin observes a similar split between incredulity and faith. He revels in the accidents of association which allow for a symbolic language to arise, but is strangely disbelieving in their existence as mere accidents. This is a kind of negative path to faith, to magic. He, like Schopenhauer, is a sweet darkness, like treacle or liquorice. An acquired taste, for sure, but generally rich as a rule.
Much like Schopenhauer’s late-career aphorisms, and also, weirdly, much like contemporary internet memes, Kubin’s drawings operate as self contained units of cultural consciousness, presenting a narrative as rich as a Goethe story all at once in a single frame, in one image. Like a comet with its tail of light, their immediate form trails energy, historical significance, and emotional depth.
The Fate of Mankind III shows exactly Shopenhauer’s “taskmaster,” sweeping the living towards the cliff of their deaths. Though ‘master’ is a misgendered term here - the figure is a faceless but all-powerful woman. There’s a psychosexual element at play.
The Hour of Death shows Kubin’s philosophic imagination at its most ingenious. The scything hand of the clock beheads men as it turns, the severed heads caught in a net below. Though it’s horrifying, it cannot comfortably be said to be pessimistic. We delight in its creativity and ingenuity, even as we recoil from the graphic imagery and stark invocation of mortality. By turns we are repulsed and compelled, like with all the best horror.
Schopenhauer the philosopher is often said to have had the mind of a poet or artist, but the overwhelming achievements of his predecessor, Goethe, meant that he (and his near-contemporaries in German metaphysics) turned to philosophy as their imaginative outlet. Certainly, he takes a sort of monochrome delight in conjuring images, correlatives and metaphors to elucidate his theory of the metaphysical ‘will’ of the world. In the compulsive picture-making of the Austrian Kubin, many of Schopenhauer’s rhetorical imagery find its visual form.
Alfred Kubin was born in 1877 in the town of Leitmeritz. His mother died when he was young, and at the age of 19, Kubin attempted suicide at the site of her grave. His preoccupation with death began early, and developed through his experiences in the Austrian army and in his artistic practice throughout two world wars. It’s now well known that Kubin spent his entire life in Austria, and from 1906 until his death led a reclusive existence in a 12th Century castle estate, Zwickledt, in upper Austria. From here, he drew the phantoms and spectres that haunted Europe through conflict, strife, and the rise of fascism.
Alfred Kubin, Head of a Sick Man (1921)
It’s tempting, though worrying, to read in his contemporary significance some intimation of similar dark forces beginning to rear up in the fractious politics of the West. Schopenhauer talks metaphorically of the “torments that plague our existence.” Kubin draws The Plague manifest and embodied, sweeping down in an exponential curve towards a pock-marked ground, like the trend of a collapsing economy, or the menace of fascistic impulses, or literal sickness itself.
But the clamour for his works in the market is of course also influenced by the feeling of revelation whenever they do appear. It’s significant that the 16 works which sold last month were “restituted to the heirs of Max and Hertha Morgenstern.” Max was Kubin’s friend and great patron during his lifetime. He was a great and renowned collector of literature and art but was forced to leave behind many possessions when, as an Austrian Jew, he was compelled to flee to England in 1938.
His collection was looted severally, mostly by advancing Russian forces. In their appearance at auction after being restituted, these Kubin works gain an extra layer of pain-inflected revelation. The excitement of their rediscovery and return nevertheless conjure the darkness inherent in their initial loss. This atmosphere chimes well with the weird wisdom of the pictures themselves.
Each gouache or drawing which emerges feels like some precious insight into the human psyche, or a dark slice of illustrated history wrested from the gothic seclusion of Zwickledt.
The performance of this most recent and most significant collection of Kubin works at auction confirms his strange power, and suggests a robustness to his reputation. He’s a divided figure - by some metrics almost wildly popular, but retaining an air of mystery, evasiveness, and intrigue. Through him, we can discover the compulsions of our darker zones. But maybe we find it difficult to look too long or too directly into such spaces. Perhaps we love and are horrified by Kubin because he knows what Edgar Allan Poe (whose works he famously illustrated) knew, and shows it to us unflinchingly: “The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?”
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Highlights from the Art Basel - Miami Beach 2019
A really expensive snack at Art Basel Saturday afternoon costing $120,000. But don’t worry, once eaten it can be replaced, according to the work of Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan and titled “Comedian.” The work comes with a Certificate of Authenticity.
Gallerist Emmanuel Perrotin shows off ‘Comedian,’ a work by Italian bad-boy artist Maurizio Cattelan that consists of a banana taped to the wall. The piece, one of three bananas on exhibit at the Art Basel Miami Beach fair, sold for $120,000
Lourdes Leon has appeared nearly nude in a simulated orgy at Art Basel in Miami - all in the name of art.
Madonna’s daughter Lourdes Leon has taken part in a simulated orgy for Desigual fashion show called “Love Different” . It’s “a representation in which the Catalan artist affects the most basic and universal act of love: the kiss”. The 23-year-old kissed and undressed another female model as the space transformed into an elaborate orgy. Models simulating sex acts on one another.
A Traffic Jam on the Oceanfront
The Argentine conceptual artist Leandro Erlich has turned one of Miami’s beaches into a traffic jam. Erlich’s work feature 66 life-size sand sculptures of vehicles, bumper-to-bumper along the beach.
Intersection of Fashion and Art
The Russian-born designer Harry Nuriev has collaborated with one of Paris’s most esteemed houses to create “Balenciaga Sofa”. The sofa which is covered in transparent vinyl and stuffed with fabric scraps is on view at Design Miami.
Fashion designer Thom Browne debuted his first public artwork at the Moore Building, named “Palm Tree I” (2019). The 21-foot-tall sculpture is made from pastel-hued seersucker, corduroy and gingham oxford fabrics also used in his clothes — is shaped like a palm tree.
Virgil Abloh X Baccarat
Virgil Abloh recently revealed his latest collaboration with French fine crystal purveyor Baccarat. Collection of ideas titled “Crystal Clear”. Abloh and Baccarat announced the “collection of ideas” in separate Instagram posts. It features sneak peeks of a Baccarat chain-link.
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Ed Hardy: Deeper than Skin
Art Is A Way Of Survival
ANDY WARHOL: THE 1950s
FROM A TO B AND BACK AGAIN
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Yves Saint Laurent’s home in the last decades of his life
Read MoreA New Museum Emerges From The Sand. A New Voice For Qatar and Its People.
Celebrities and large fashion crowd gets together for the opening of The National Museum of Qatar.
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