Since I know that, of course, you are riveted to the computer screen taking in my blog entries as though they were divine emanations, my dozen or so readers will doubtless remember a few weeks back the discussion of the May contemporary art sales in New York. This last sentence sounds more of the snotty variety than the humorously ironic. It might be because the weather in San Francisco as I write this is uncomfortably warm. My naturally buoyant mood, given that the inside of our galleries is like a baking oven, seems to have been affected. In any event, the entry will be a follow-on from an earlier one, discussing the late June impressionist and contemporary art sales in London. Record-breakers, there, too, with Monet’s 1919 Le Bassin aux Nympheas, consigned from an American collection, selling for £36.5million to a private collector. One of the sources I’ve consulted said the European-based buyer was invested in ‘natural resources’ (read ‘oil money’) as the source of his wealth. Since it is a combination of Russian oligarchs and oil sheiks that are driving the top end of the market, one wonders from which yacht off Cap Ferrat or Corfu the telephone bid was placed. Presumably they are in a more comfortable spot than I am right now.
What’s apparent, however, is that it is, as with all other material, the best of the best that’s making record prices. Mind you, at Christie’s and Sotheby’s not much went unsold.
It isn’t too surprising that the most prominent work was from an artist, Claude Monet, whose best work, for a couple of decades now, has sold into the 8 figures. Strong selling prices, as evidence of market demand, are arguably as large a component of what determines canonicity as intellectual criticism. Having said that, one wonders what place would have been made in the canon for the work of Monet had it not been for the critical framework established by Roger Fry when he mounted and curated the first exhibition outside France of impressionist and post-impressionist work.
The point is, even when it seems to be immutable, the canon is not unchanging. Witness a painting by Gino Severini, a central figure of Italian Futurism, that sold for £13.4million at Sotheby’s during the same spate of sales. Futurist, as Constructivist, as Vorticist, and as, frankly, analytical Cubism, have recently not been as commercially popular as some other works. Perhaps it is because, aesthetically, all of them have an overtly period look, with their angularity and flattened perspective, making them easy to place within the first quarter of the last century. As the Futurists celebrated modern machine age culture, it is not surprising that natural forms often have the appearance of machine parts. Of course, if it were not for the machine age, Futurism would not have become a movement at all. It was the technology of the high speed printing press and the publication in the mass circulation Le Figaro of what has come to be known as the Futurist Manifesto that brought adherents- writers as well as artists, together. They were able to read about and locate other like-minded souls in the cutting edge communication tool of the day- the newspaper. Unfortunately, the Futurist Manifesto also promoted warfare for its ‘cleansing’ effect of sweeping away the old order and also caught the attention of a then-nascent, ultra nationalistic political movement in Italy. From the get-go, Mussolini’s Fascist Party was strongly aligned with Futurism.
Interestingly, Gino Severini was not as highly political as his other colleagues, most notably Umberto Boccioni. In spite of his early embrace of Futurism, Severini seems through his career to have considered himself more closely aligned with Parisian schools, including Cubism and the Dadaists. As well, Severini, for whatever reason, tended to avoid representing overtly charged subjects that were Futurist favorites. As with his fairly tame Danseuse, the Severini lithograph in our inventory Arlequins will hardly evoke a strong, call to arms response in the way works by Boccioni were intended to. Although not so much fodder for art critics, it is possibly this easy on the eyes aesthetic that made for Severini’s good outing at Sotheby’s.