Jasper Johns Painting Sells for $28.6 Million, Setting Impressive Record for the Artist

Last Tuesday one of Jasper Johns' "Flag" paintings from 1960-66, which had previously belonged to the late Michael Crichton, sold at a Christie's New York postwar and contemporary art auction for $28.5 million. The painting, which sold for nearly double its high estimate of $15 million, marks a very impressive accomplishment for Johns - his highest selling painting to date.

Richard Rossello, a Bryn Mawr, PA-based art dealer of American paintings, purchased the Johns' painting (although it is not known who he bought it on behalf).

Throughout the evening, (Christie's first week of postwar and contemporary art auctions) Americans dominated the buying, as Christie's officials estimate that 75% of the buyers were American. "Flag" was one of 31 works being sold from Crichton's estate. The famed author, who died in November 2008, had met Jasper Johns during the early 1970s and bought the painting directly from the artist in 1974. The fact that the painting had just one owner (and a big named-one at that) - contributed to its high selling price.

Crichton's collection got to know most of the artists whose work he collected - including David Hockney, Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Rauschenberg (image, left). Last week's sale featured works by all of them.

Click HERE to read the entire story from the New York Times (including details about the other works on sale from Crichton's estate as well as information about the auction's high sellers and stats about the sale)

Click HERE to see where Jasper Johns is exhibiting around the world

Alejandro Corujeira's New York Debut

Internationally acclaimed Argentine painter, Alejandro Corujeira, will debut his first New York show at Marlborough Gallery. The artist, who now lives in Madrid, creates abstract works that mix curvy lines, subdued colors, and layers of transparency. His paintings radiate a calming - almost trance like - effect on those who are drawn to the soothing nature of his creations.

The artist's use of earth tones and pale blue and green hues gives many of Corujeira's paintings in his new exhibit a unique essence, which is precisely what the artist strives for. As he states in a recent article from Art Daily,

“In this painting ["El comienzo" or The Beginning ... ] there is a sinuous plane, organic in nature, which is left suspended over the surface; with the colored lines, energies of tinted light, causing it to palpitate permanently in a respiratory rhythm.” "Melodías inventadas" (Invented Melodies) ... is invested with a similar vibrating energy. Here graphite circles move like cells over the surface of the painting, seemingly attempting to settle upon pale red and green lines and producing, in the artist’s words, a continual movement like an audible impression.

Check out Corujeira's first NY solo show - which promises to be a welcoming and calming display - from November 19th until December 19th.

Above Images ( "Álbum de los días" and "El comenzio," respectively) courtesy of Marlborough New York

Dennis Hopper and his new billboard paintings

From NYMag:

Before his self-directed performance in 1969's Easy Rider made him the Dennis Hopper you know, he was but a promising young photographer documenting the sixties in all its cinematic glory. On display at Shafrazi through October 24 is his new show, "Sign of the Times," a collection of Hopper's pre-'67 photos of Warhol, Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein, and other twentieth-century art-world luminaries, along with a dozen of his never-before-seen "billboard paintings." Vulture spoke with Hopper this week about the show, his career, and a job opening at the Vatican.

click here to read the interview

Painting her son's final images of Iraq

Typically, this site is devoted to posts about artists' first endeavors, or breakthrough moments in art history, but I was really moved by an article I recently read in the Los Angeles Times that may be more appropriately categorized as a "last".  Suzy Shealy, the mother of a soldier who lost his life in Iraq, is painting images of the last things her son saw in his short life.  An excerpt of the heart-wrenching story is below:

COLUMBIA, S.C. — Suzy Shealy was one of those preppy Southern moms whose artistic streak found expression in what she calls "crafty-type things": cross-stitched towels, Christmas ornaments, knitted scarves.

It was stuff to give away at school auctions or offer to neighbors, stuff with little hearts and frills, the comforting, precious visual language of mother-love.

Yet here she was on a balmy June afternoon, in a studio overlooking a yard full of petunias and marigolds, painting the kill-or-be-killed scowl of an American soldier patrolling on the streets of Iraq.

Whish-whish went her brush, and as if by magic, the planes and angles of the soldier's bones emerged from a light haze of grayish paint: gun-metal cheekbones and nostrils flared and fierce. She outlined the suggestion of a right arm, and a hand clutching an M-16 assault rifle.

The snapshot she painted from was attached to the canvas with a potato-chip clip from her kitchen. In the photo, a second soldier hovered in the background, his torso emerging from a Humvee turret.

But Shealy will not paint her dead son. She is not ready.

"I'm just not," she said. "I don't know why."

Some of Sgt. Joseph Derrick's personal belongings were returned to his family in boxes. Some of it came back in little velvet jewelry bags with "UNITED STATES ARMY" embossed in golden letters. His mother has kept nearly everything, no matter how trivial: the phone card he used to call her from Baghdad, his cellphone, his boot laces, his civilian clothes.

A mother learns that every one of her children has a signature scent. The old T-shirts and sweats still smell like her first child. She can still picture him the day he was born -- those perfect hands and perfect feet, those big blue eyes. How could she throw his things away?

Among the belongings that came back from Iraq was a tiny Flash drive she had sent to him as part of a care package. It returned to her filled with more than 500 photos. Some of them were taken by Joseph. Others were taken by his fellow soldiers. Before Sept. 23, 2005 -- before the insurgent sniper fired the bullets that pierced his neck -- Joseph had told her about the pictures. He couldn't wait, he had said, to come home and deliver the stories that the pictures promised. But without their narrator, Shealy found that the photos amounted to a chain of riddles. An eternally incomplete slide show.

Click here to keep reading the story

Agnes Denes

The artist Agnes Denes, known for her "Whatfield - A Confrontation" in Manhattan, created a piece entitled "Tree Mountain - A Living Time Capsule" between 1992 and 1996. The drawings and renderings were the beginning of a project that the Finnish government would make as their Earth Day contribution at the Earth Summit. Denes invited 11,000 people to each plant a tree on a mountain, using a mathematical pattern. This marked "the first time that an artist has been commissioned to restore environmental damage with an artwork that is global in scale, international in scope, and unsurpassed in duration."

keep reading

NASA's first (and maybe last) artist-in-residence

I recently wrote about our first "space artist", and so I was really excited to come across this NY Times article about Laurie Anderson's stint as NASA's first artist-in-residence...



Your new one-woman show, ''The End of the Moon,'' is based on your stint as an artist in residence at NASA. Why would a performance artist known for her iconoclasm want to visit mission control in Houston?

As sad as I am about being in the United States these days, NASA is genuinely exciting. I keep thinking what it would be like to be a kid in this country. I think it would be really depressing, except for NASA.

Did you want to be an astronaut when you were growing up?

No. Although I could definitely imagine myself floating in space, I didn't want to become an astronaut. Driving those golf carts around on the moon seems a little geeky. Also, astronauts are constantly busy, and I didn't want to have that much to do.

Most other people see astronauts as figures of smoldering romance who rank right up there with cowboys and other American pioneers. Did you get to spend any time with astronauts?

I met many astronauts, and they seemed so out of place. They were given jobs around mission control, but they were living to be in space, and all their conversations were about the next time maybe they were going to go.

Since you don't identify with astronauts, what moved you to spend a year at NASA?

I like the scale of space. I like thinking about human beings and what worms we are. We are really worms and specks. I find a certain comfort in that.

You were NASA's first artist in residence and perhaps its last.

I think there is a lot of animosity between Congress and NASA right now. I heard that someone in Congress was looking through the budget, and the artist-in-residence program got scratched out.

Michelangelo's first painting

Currently on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC is what experts believe to be Michelangelo Buonarroti's first painting, The Torment of Saint Anthony. The painting was made between 1487 and 1488, which would make Michelangelo only 12 years old. Michelangelo used to visit the studio and workshop of Ghirlandaio to visit his lifelong friend, Francesco Granacci, an apprentice for the painter. The shop is most likely where Michelangelo acquired his first materials and became fascinated with art. This painting of his is completely astonishing, and to think that he was only a child when it was created simply knocks me off my feet. I'm sure the images don't even do it justice, so I am definitely heading over there to see it soon.

From the Met:

Like many boys then and now, Michelangelo loved monsters. He loved them so much, he made them the stars of his first painting, “The Torment of Saint Anthony,” which he copied from an engraving by Martin Schongauer (1448-14910) the way kids today copy scenes from comic books.

Visit the Michelangelo show at the Met

or read the Examiner article about Michelangelo's first painting

Nam June Paik

Nam June Paik is considered to be the world's first video artist, as well as the first video artist to break many boundaries.

Born in South Korea in 1932, Paik was an American artist working from the 1960s until his death in 2006. A participant in Fluxus as well, Paik's contribution to the art world and to future generations is unparalleled.

Visit the official website here

A video about Paik:




Some images of his work: