Daily Art Fixx

visual arts blog, painting, drawing, sculpture, illustration and more!

The Art Market: Patrons

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Part three of Artsy.net‘s great Art Market series. This short, four-minute video covers the motivation of patrons to fund artists and how the concept of art patronage has changed over time.

The Art Market (in Four Parts): Patrons from Artsy on Vimeo.

Patrons is the third installment of a four-part documentary series, preceded by Auctions and Galleries and followed by Art Fairs, released weekly through mid-June. Together, the four segments tell a comprehensive story about the art market’s history and cultural influence. Visit Artsy.net/art-market-series to watch all the films.

This series is directed by Oscar Boyson and produced in collaboration with UBS.

Director – Oscar Boyson
Editor – Nate DeYoung
Producer – Sean Barth
Producer By – Neighborhood Watch Films
Assistant Editor – Erin DeWitt
Sound – Colin Alexander
Music – Jay Wadley of Found Objects Music Production
Color – Irving Harvey

Paul Gauguin: 1848-1903

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Nevermore Paul Gauguin 1897Born on June 7, 1848 in Paris, France, Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin was a leading French Post-Impressionist artist. Gauguin’s father was a French journalist and his mother was Peruvian. The family left Paris in 1851 for Peru, however Gauguin’s father Clovis, died on the voyage over. Gauguin’s early life experiences in Peru would later have a great influence on the imagery in his paintings. At the age of seven, the family returned to Orléans, France to live with Gauguin’s grandfather.

Though Gauguin had been interested in art since childhood, he held several jobs before turning to painting full-time, including fulfilling his required military service as a pilot’s assistant in the merchant marine. Gauguin also joined the navy, held a job as a stock broker, a sales representative for a canvas manufacturer, and other odd jobs that sustained his painting career.

In 1873, Gauguin married Mette Sophie Gad, a Danish woman with whom he had five children. In his free time, he began painting and became friends with Camille Pissarro and met other artists including Paul Cézanne and Vincent van Gogh. Gauguin received little formal artistic training, though he was tutored by some of the professionals in his community.

As he became more involved with his art, Gauguin rented a studio, and showed paintings in Impressionist exhibitions in 1881 and 1882. In 1885, with a growing desire to paint full-time, Gauguin left both his job as a stock broker, and his wife and children in Copenhagen,  and returned to Paris.

In 1886, Gauguin began his lifelong migration between regions of French Polynesia and Paris often surviving on little or no money. Disappointed with Impressionism and influenced by folk art and Japanese prints, Gauguin evolved towards Cloisonnism and then Synthetism and Primitavism.  Gauguin is considered to be the first artist to achieve broad success using the Primitive technique.

In the autumn of 1888, Gauguin traveled to Arles France where he stayed with Vincent van Gogh for two months, working together and discussing artistic theories. The tension between the artists grew and they quarreled often. Van Gogh was vulnerable and hyper-sensitive, and a bullying and egocentric Gauguin often threatened to leave. It was during this time that van Gogh lost a portion of his left ear though whether Gauguin was directly involved in this incident in still debated to this day.

From 1891-93, Gauguin lived in Tahiti where he spent considerable time working on his sculpture and woodcuts. In 1893, he returned to France where he prepared for his exhibition at Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris which was not considered to be a success.

Gauguin returned to Tahiti in 1895 : “it was a period of intense creativity, during which he painted and sculpted a great deal and seemed to go further in his metaphysical questioning, obsessed by the thought of death”. In April of 1897, he learned of the death of his daughter Aline, to whom he was deeply attached. “Gauguin tried unsuccessfully to kill himself by taking arsenic. Physically and morally shaken, he took an office job in Papeete, which allowed him to earn a living for a while. He seemed to become detached from his own work. When Maurice Denis wrote to him asking if he would participate in an exhibition of the Nabis in Paris, he replied in June 1899 ‘I no longer paint except on Sundays and holidays’.”

Gauguin’s paintings significantly influenced Modern art movements including Fauvism, Cubism and Orphism, and such artists as Matisse, Picasso, and Braque. Gauguin also created two- and three-dimensional sculptures and functional objects ranging from portrait busts and architectural reliefs to objects such as vases, knife handles, and wine casks. He was also an influential supporter of wood engraving and woodcuts as art forms.

In the last years of his life, Gauguin succumbed to various illnesses, including syphilis. He died on May 8, 1903 and remains buried at Calvary Cemetery – Marquesas Islands, French Polynesia.

Sources: PaulGauguin.net, Wikipedia, NGA-Washington, MoMA, Artchive (images)

DAF Group Feature: Vol. 158

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Your Weekly Mixx – Enjoy! DAF’s Weekly Mixx is a selection of nine contemporary artworks and/or art related videos chosen from artist and gallery submissions and from our own search for new and interesting works. Visit the Submissions page for information on how to have your art featured in the Weekly Mixx.

The Art Market: Art Auctions

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If you’ve got four minutes to spare, check out this great video—part one (Auctions) of a four-part series on Artsy.net.  How did the art auction business become a multi-billion-dollar industry?  This video is a quick review of the complex history of auctions, with specific attention to the last 20 years. It features record-breaking sales, like Jean-Michel Basquiat’s painting Untitled (1982), selling at $51 million, and anomalies such as Ai Weiwei’s Kui Hua Zi (Sunflower Seeds) (2010), which pop up at auction in countless different quantities, making the connection between the auction price and the market value of art.

The series is produced in collaboration with UBS and directed by Oscar Boyson.

Director: Oscar Boyson
Editor: Nate DeYoung
Producer: Sean Barth
Produced By: Neighborhood Watch Films
Assistant Editor: Erin DeWitt
Sound: Colin Alexander
Music: Jay Wadley of Found Objects Music Production
Colour: Irving Harvey

DAF Group Feature: Vol. 157

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Your Weekly Mixx – Enjoy! DAF’s Weekly Mixx is a selection of nine contemporary artworks and/or art related videos chosen from artist and gallery submissions and from our own search for new and interesting works. Visit the Submissions page for information on how to have your art featured in the Weekly Mixx.

In the Studio with Flameworker Brad Jesson

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DAF recently had the opportunity to visit flameworker Brad Jesson at his studio in Stratford, Ontario.  Watch the video below to see Brad’s work in glass marble and pendant making.

Brad began working with flameworked glass in January of 2008, and has practiced his art on a full-time basis since February of 2010.  A self-taught artist, Brad learned flameworking techiques through books, videos, internet glass forums, and at the Art Glass Invitational (an annual week-long conference held in Pennsylvania, with daily seminars for flameworkers).

Brad creates a wide variety of both functional and non-functional glass art objects, including marbles, vases, pendants, and sculptures.  He is especially passionate about marbles; of interest is the juxtaposition of organic forms and patterns with the perfect geometry of a sphere, and the overall challenge, both physical and mental, of mastering the wide array of known techniques that can be used to create them in conjunction with the development of new techniques and designs.  A large part of Brad’s attraction to borosilicate flameworking is the fact that this type of glass, and therefore the medium in general, is still very much in its’ infancy, leaving considerable room for growth and exploration.

To see more of Brad Jesson’s work, visit bradjessonglassart.com. His beautiful pendants can be purchased online at the DAF Shop and at select festivals, markets, and shows in Ontario.

Video: How to Recognize Baroque Art

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An excellent short video from SmartHistory on how to recognize Baroque art with comparisons to Renaissance art. Hosted by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker.

Artists featured in this video include Michaelangelo, Bernini, Carravagio, Raphael and Vermeer.

Baroque Art vs Renaissance-ArtSmarthistory is a non profit organization and a collaboration of more than 200 art historians, archaeologists, curators and other specialists who want to make the highest-quality art history learning content freely available to a global audience.

Dr. Beth Harris is co-founder and executive editor for Smarthistory and faculty emeritus at Khan Academy.
Dr. Steven Zucker is co-founder and executive editor for Smarthistory and faculty emeritus at Khan Academy.

DAF Group Feature: Vol. 155

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Your Weekly Mixx – Enjoy! DAF’s Weekly Mixx is a selection of nine contemporary artworks and/or art related videos chosen from artist and gallery submissions and from our own search for new and interesting works. Visit the Submissions page for information on how to have your art featured in the Weekly Mixx.

DAF Group Feature: Vol. 154

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Your Weekly Mixx – Enjoy! DAF’s Weekly Mixx is a selection of nine contemporary artworks and/or art related videos chosen from artist and gallery submissions and from our own search for new and interesting works. Visit the Submissions page for information on how to have your art featured in the Weekly Mixx.

Yves Klein: 1928 – 1962

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Yves Klein was born on April 28, 1928 in Nice, France. He had no formal art training though both of his parents were artists. Between 1948 and 1952, he traveled to Italy, Great Britain, Spain, and Japan where he became a master at judo, achieving a 4th degree black belt. In 1954, Klein settled in Paris and began his career as an artist.

A student of Eastern religions and Rosicrucianism, Klein’s quest for pure color led him to paint in monochrome. He worked with a chemist to develop his “International Klein Blue” which was made from pure colour pigment and a binding medium.  Klein considered monochrome painting to be an “open window to freedom, and the possibility of being immersed in the immeasurable existence of color.”

Klein’s artistic breakthrough occurred in 1956 when he aroused public debate with the exhibition Yves: Propositions Monochromes at the Galerie Colette Allendy in Paris. The exhibition consisted of 20 monochrome surfaces, each a different shade of red, purple, orange, yellow and blue. The French critic Pierre Restany, in his speech at the opening of the exhibition, described Klein’s paintings as ‘single-colour proposals’.

“Klein presented his work in forms that were recognized as art but would then take away the expected content of that form (paintings without pictures, a book without words, a musical composition without in fact composition) leaving only a shell. He wanted his subjects to be represented by their imprint: the image of their absence.” (wiki)

In 1960, Klein, along with art critic Pierre Restany, and other artists founded the Nouveau Réalisme art movement. Restany wrote the original manifesto for the group, titled the “Constitutive Declaration of New Realism,”  proclaiming, “Nouveau Réalisme – new ways of perceiving the real.”

Klein was a showman and one of his most famous events was the imprinting of paper with naked models smeared with blue paint, as he directed their performance to music. As well as his monochrome works, Klein created sculptures using sea sponges, paintings made with fire, and is well known for his exhibit called The Void, in which he chose to exhibit an empty gallery room, void of everything but a large cabinet.

Klein used two other colours before and after his Blue Period,  yellow/gold and red. These colours represented his ideas of the immaterial. “Gold is the colour of the Absolute, the infinity of (divine) space. Red stands for life, fire and warmth.”

During his brief career, Klein’s body of work was an important precursor to art movements including minimal, conceptual, land and performance art.  Yves Klein died of a heart attack on June 6, 1962 at the height of his career.  He was 34 years old.

Sources: MoMA, Centre Pompidou, Wikipedia, Coskun Fine Art, Hirshorn (images)