Sotheby’s
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X A B I A L O N S O PA R A E L C O R T E I N G L É S
Content WINTER
2013/14
ART
Director Jesús Tablate Miquis Editorial Director Joaquín Lledó Editorial Staff: Ana Rimblas Joaquín Arnáiz Carlos G. Olalla Carlos Villarrubia Federico Echevarría Deputy Advertising Director: Beatriz García-Jimenez Digital Edition Director: Ricardo Serra Segura Design: Julio Molina © Images by VEGAP Prepress Preimdegradé Printing Artes Gráficas Palermo S.L. Distribution SGEL Legal Deposit: M-42261-1985 ISSN: 1131-6411 Edited by Album Letras Artes, S.L. C/ Juan Álvarez Mendizabal, 58 Tel. 91 547 97 42 Tel. 91 559 90 27 E-mail: album@albumletrasartes.com
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Exhibitions Sotheby’s Picasso in the Workshop New Horizon Cézanne Emilio González Sáinz Cámara oscura Erotic Nature The Elizabethan Garden Mariano Fortuny
Magazine 77 79 80
Six Names of Beauty Antonio Colinas The Placenta of the Universe
Cover: Jamie Baldridge (detail)
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Encounter (night), 2011, Galerie Werner Märkisch Wilmersdorf, Köln and New York
MARKUS LÜPERTZ Bilbao Museum of Fine Arts
P
ainter, sculptor and writer, Markus Lüpertz, a key member of the group originally known as the Neue Wilden, (the New Savages), is one of the most rebellious and individualist members of the New German Neo-expressionism. Close to abstract Expressionism, he has sometimes been associated to painters like Antonio Saura or Willem de Kooning, although soon, in the decade of the seventies, his work became more and more figurative, drawing inspiration from landscape and the human body, which he re-reads in a personal and spontaneous way. His works are strongly expressive, thus giving more emphasis to the magnificence of his formats and the fascinating colors. The exhibition showcases 91 works, dating from the early sixties to the present day, divided into five sections: the first stage (1963-1973) shows the “German motif” paintings, through which he condemned the barbarity of the III Reich and once again critiqued, this time
implicitly, the superficial vision of US Pop Art. Throughout the second stage (1975-1985) he explored the human figure, in an idiom forged between figuration and abstraction. Between 1985 and 1993 his paintings and sculptures reflected his interest for mythology and classical tradition. During this period he worked on one of his signature figures, based on the figure of Nicolas Poussin. During the following seven years (1993-2000) he painted landscapes, still-life paintings and a series on trees. Finally, in the last decade Lüpertz turned back to his own early works. These are nude torsos or landscapes that reflect his primordial interest in recovering the transcendental nature of classical art through a contemporary idiom. As a writer, Lüpertz edited his own magazine called Frau und Hund, in German and translated into other two languages: Signora e cane, in Italian and Femme et Chien, in French. From February, 18 to May 19, 2014 4
MARKUS LÜPERTZ 1963-2013 18 02 14 - 19 05 14
Ixion, Giovanni Battista Langetti, Museo de Arte de Ponce, Puerto Rico
THE FURIES Political Allegories and Artistic Defiance Museo Nacional del Prado
Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them. Albert Camus The Myth of Sisyphus
A
t the beginning of this story, like many others, is Homer, to whom we owe the first description of Hades in the eleventh book of the Odyssey (576-600) and in it, the appearance of three of the four main characters of this exceptional exhibition: Tityos, whose liver was constantly pecked at by a vulture for attempting to rape Leto, Zeus’s lover and mother of Apollo; Tantalus, condemned to vainly try to obtain food and drink for serving up his son Pelops at a feast of the gods; and Sisyphus, who had to endlessly roll an enormous rock for revealing Zeus’s love for Aegina. The three were later joined by Ixion, obliged to turn forever on a wheel for attempting to seduce Hera.
Of course we should clarify that strictly speaking, the Furies, also called Erinyes or Eumenides were female figures (three according to Virgil: Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone) who personified punishment and vengeance. With a terrible look, with snakes coiled in the hair and blood streaming from his eyes, carrying whips and torches, tools with which they ensured that those in Hades underwent their punishments. From the late sixteenth century, however, the gallery where the paintings by Titian are housed in the old Alcázar of Madrid was given the name of The Room of the Furies. Mary of Hungary ordered Titian four large canvases in Augsburg in 1548 to decorate the great hall of her castle of Binche. The stories of 6
Sisyphus, 1549, Titian, National Prado Museum, Madrid
Tityos, Sisyphus, Tantalus and Ixion were part of a wider mythological context: that of rebellion of the giants against the authority of Jupiter and came here to represent the victories of Emperor Charles V over his enemies. But the clash between gods and giants had already symbolized the conflict between chaos and order. And this interpretation also led to a political reading, already in the Antiquity, both in literature and in art. Then, the political background of the myth, sometimes presented as a critique of princes and tyrants, would be perpetuated in the Middle Ages through the moralized editions of Ovid's Metamorphoses. In any case, Bocaccio had already assimilated Giants and Furies in his (Genealogia Deorum Gentilium I, 14). Also originating from the Antiquity, from Lucretius, is the identification of the Furies with torment produced by love and the consequent association of the lyrical self of
the poet and his impossible relationship with the beloved one, with the punishments undergone by the ill-fate Titans. Finally, to split hairs, Michelangelo also painted Tityos chained onto a rock. But, on the other side of the leaf he used to represent him, Michelangelo portrayed Tityos again as a suffering figure, but rotating him ninety degrees, and transforming him into the Risen Christ. The drawings have a different degree of finish touch, Christ is barely outlined, but what's fascinating is the fact that the artist uses the figure of the sinner burning out in what is the equivalent of the heathen hell to draw the figure of the Saviour. Pag. 17 - Chained Prometheus (detail) 1611, Rubens and F. Snyders Philadelphia Museum of Art
From January 21, to May 4, 2014 8