Pablo Picasso, Girl with a Basket of Flower, 1905
What a weekend we have had, from the Frieze extravaganza on Randall's Island to TEFAF at the Park Avenue Armory at 67th Street and The Moniker Art Fair in Greenpoint,Warehouse in Brooklyn. A veritable tsunami of art opportunities, wall-to-wall, in each venue. If you missed any or all of the May Art Fairs this week, click on this article in Hyperallergic that summarizes the best in Manhattan and Brooklyn.
Paul Gauguin, La Vague (Wave), 1888
However, the most powerful gush of art force has to be the Collection of Peggy and David Rockefeller sale at Christie's, slated for auction on Tuesday evening, May 8th at 7 pm and Thursday morning, May 10 at 10 am. The expectations already have hearts pounding like the surf in Paul Gauguin's dizzying bird's-eye view of the Le Pouldu. tersely entitled Wave. This paintings alone will surely fetch buckets of money that Gauguin could have used way back in 1888. (Click on the auction catalog essay for the details surrounding this painting, executed during one of the artist's lengthy sojourns in Pont-Aven, Brittany - January through October, preceding his famous roommate kerfuffle with Vincent van Gogh that ended abruptly just before Christmas.)
Claude Monet, Nyphéas en fleur (Waterlilies in Flower), c. 1914-17
Another tidal wave of cash will definitely come from the late Monet Waterlilies in Flower, completed before he started the ambitious waterlily murals on view at the Musée de l'Orangerie, virtually on view right here. No doubt this WWI period piece shows off this Impressionist's evergreen range while in his 70s. His youthful exuberance teeters on the cusp of abstraction.
Pablo Picasso's Girl with Basket of Flowers (once called La Fille au Pavé) at
Christie's, May 2018
Still - my bets are on Picasso's Girl with a Basket of Flowers, painted during the autumn of 1905, as the all-out top seller for the whole auction. This work belongs to the year Fernande Olivier moved into Pablo's pad in the squalid Bateau Lavoir. Similar in sobriety to Boy with a Pipe, 1905, wherein a serious young man dressed in a worker's blue outfit is crowned with roses (a gesture that turned the mundane into the otherworldly), this careworn young lady also wears her professional attire - nothing. Clutching her straw basket brimming with red smudges of some sexually suggestive blooms (poppies, roses, anemones - the tears of Venus as she mourned the death of Adonis), we note all the obvious absences: clothes, context and individual identity. Who is she in the painting? She is a model, pure and simple, and one who probably beds the artist between poses. She is young, she is pretty, but she is not happy. Rather, she seems bored or just dog tired. She is tired of holding the basket and she is tired of the life she is forced to live. Picasso knew Manet's famous painting of a prostitute Olympia, wherein the flowers were handed to her maid by the one who entered her chamber (you). Picasso's poor street urchin, identified in Jean-Paul Crespell's book Picasso and His Women (1967) as Linda La Bouquetière, can't afford this luxury. She was a local flower seller who seems to be no more than 16 years old. Picasso's choice of expression inspires sympathy. Like Olympia and all of her sisters, this child, who anticipates womanhood in full flower, will age quickly, like the rosy red petals in her basket. Her oddly aged face seems to predict this outcome.
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Henri Matisse, Odalisque Couchée aux Magnolias, 1923
In contradistinction, Henri Matisse celebrates sensuality and sexuality in his Odalisque Reclining Among the Magnolias though the addition of flowers that suggest an erotic perfume in the midst of seductive surrender. Here lies languid pleasures in sultry climes, a feast for the artist who shares his delight in the female body.
So - have your picked your favorite? Virtual paddles ready for the BIG NIGHT.
Turn in online to witness this inevitable historic occasion.
And may the best bidder win!
Cheers,
Beth
Beth S. Gersh-Nesic, Ph.D.
Director and owner
New York Arts Exchange, LLC
