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NYU Acquires 200 Works by Prominent Downtown Artists
Two hundred artworks, predominantly by downtown New York artists including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Robert Mapplethorpe, Keith Haring, and Donald Baechler, have been acquired by the Grey Art Gallery at New York University (NYU). Donated by collecting couple Dr. James Cottrell and Mr. Joseph Lovett, the works will be accompanied by a new named gallery and study center. The couple has lived in lower Manhattan for over four decades and built personal relationships with artists whose work they acquire.
NYU, which has campuses in Greenwich Village and Brooklyn, is an important research center for scholars of New York City’s downtown art scene. For example, the university’s Fales Library has the largest archive dedicated to the artistic milieu in SoHo and the Lower East Side from the 1970s into the 1990s. The Grey Art Gallery — which was founded in those critical years, in 1974 — has partnered with the library in the past, for example on the exhibition The Downtown Show: The New York Art Scene 1974-1984, held in 2006.
“A notable work in the acquisition is Deborah Kass’s “Parisien Gertrude Stein” (1998), a blue and black silkscreen featuring a repeated image of expat writer and luminary Gertrude Stein. Kass was already established as a painter when she embarked upon the “Warhol Project” (1992-2000), in which she unapologetically appropriated the Pop artist’s aesthetic but replaced the celebrities with her own icons, who were often Jewish or lesbian. Barbra Streisand prominently featured in the project, along with Stein, who was also the subject of Kass’s 1993 “Chairman Ma” series, a riff on Warhol’s portraits of Chairman Mao. The same year, Kass gave donors Cottrell and Lovett the Warhol treatment in “Jim and Joe” (1993). The silkscreen, which is also included in the gift to NYU, depicts a black and white image of the pair that recurs across a series of brightly colored panels. An essay by Sue Scott reports that Kass and the couple met through mutual
friends, and “a rocky start caused by reciprocal dislike of one another’s dog transformed into a close friendship and eventually into a collector/artist relationship.” A pick of works from the donation
Deborah Kass, Jim and Joe, 1993. Silkscreen on canvas, 40 x 55 in. Cottrell-Lovett Collection. Promised gift, NYU Art Collection (courtesy of Grey Art Gallery, NYU)
will be on view in spring 2022 as part of Grey Art Gallery’s exhibition Mostly New: Selections from the NYU Art Collection.
NFT Art Sales Reach $3.5B in a Volatile Market
The American hotel chain MGM NFT sales have so far hit around $3.5B in the first three quarters of this year, according to the Hiscox Online Art Trade Report 2021, produced in partnership with ArtTactic. The report found that total online art sales reached $6.8B in the first half of 2021—and could hit $13.5B by the end of this year. The NFT market saw a surge in late summer—in August, the report estimates $1.8Bin NFT sales which makes the previous high, in March when Beeple’s Everydays— The First 5000 Days sold for $356M—pale in significance. But this is a hugely volatile market. In September, NFT sales dropped by 69%. Hiscox and ArtTactic identify a discernible shift in buying focus— the first NFT boom earlier this year tended to be focused on works by single artists (Beeple) but now the appetite is for “code-generated art” by collectives such as such as Crypto Punks and Bored Apes Yacht Club (BAYC). “Although the
art itself might be perceived by critics as trivial, the combination of uniqueness, ownership, gamification, and storytelling is fueling sales and speculation among a new generation of collectors and investors,” the report says. It adds: “Art and NFTs are here to stay”.
The swift adoption of NFTs by the big traditional auction houses (Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Phillips) has been mutually beneficial. Indeed, four of the top ten NFT prices to date have been achieved through these traditional auction houses, showing that even in this most progressive of markets, oldschool credibility still counts for a lot.
Online art platforms are also piling in: 14% said they already offer NFTs through their site, with another 38% planning to do so soon. Artnet and 1stdibs both announced in August the launch of proprietary NFT platforms—1stdibs’s is based on an auction model, with semimonthly sales of NFTs.
What have quickly sprung up this year are physical NFT galleries, dedicated to crypto art. But, the report cautions, “as more traditional galleries move into NFTs, it is questionable whether more physical NFT galleries will open, or whether the NFT and traditional art world will gradually merge.”
National Gallery of Art Acquires Faith Ringgold Flag Painting
The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. has acquired a painting from the artist’s famed “American People Series.” Titled The American People Series #18: The Flag is Bleeding (1967), the painting was gifted to the museum by the Glenstone Foundation, which was formed by Collectors Emily and Mitchell Rales. It is the
first painting by Ringgold to enter the museum’s collection.
In The Flag is Bleeding, a white woman is shown interlocking arms with two men, one of them white, the other Black. Each of their forms is partially obscured by an
American flag with stripes that ooze blood. It seems as though the source of some of that blood comes from the Black man’s chest with a wound. He covers the wound with hand, reminiscent of the position that recalls one takes while reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. In the hand not held to the wound, the man holds a knife.
National Gallery curator Harry Cooper said in an interview that staff at the museum initially thought that Ringgold’s work may prove too expensive to acquire. But with director Kaywin Feldman’s encouragement, “We aimed high in really going after artists who were underrepresented in the collection,” he said.
When they reached out to Ringgold’s dealer they were presented with a selection of works that Ringgold had kept in her personal collection for years. Among them was The Flag is Bleeding. “We at the National Gallery are trying more and more to represent the paintings that have something important to say about the nation,” Cooper said.
Ringgold has previously made use of the American flag in works the deal head-on with racism in the U.S. “The flag is the only truly subversive and revolutionary abstraction one can paint,” she once said. Similar works to The Flag is Bleeding appeared in a recent Ringgold survey held by the Raleses’ Glenstone museum in collaboration with the Serpentine Galleries in London. The painting is due to appear in Ringgold’s New Museum show.
Faith Ringgold, The American People Series #18: The Flag is Bleeding, 1976.
Modern Art Now Represents René Daniëls
Modern Art gallery in London now represents Dutch painter René
Daniëls. Based in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, Daniëls often makes use of allegories and ambiguity. In one of his best-known series, a three-walled structure is sometime shown floating above an abstracted landscape amid bow ties. This fall, the gallery presented a group of paintings that were made by the artist between 1980 and 1987, the same year he experienced a brain hemorrhage that left him unable to paint or draw for decades. Daniëls has been the subject of solo exhibitions at venues including WIELS Contemporary Art Center in Brussels, the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, and MAMCO in Geneva.
In Memoriam: Manuel Neri
Manuel Neri, whose offbeat sculptures of figures missing limbs and heads count among the most significant works of the Bay Area Figuration Movement, died of natural causes on Monday at 91. San Francisco’s Hackett Mill gallery, which represents Neri, announced the news in an email blast earlier this week.
“Neri’s highly evocative, lyrical work with the female form, chiefly in plaster, bronze, and marble, represents a vivid link between modernist sculpture and the fullness of the Western figural tradition,” the gallery said in its obituary.
When Neri began producing his strange painted sculptures during the postwar era, he was associated with a rising crop of Bay Area artists whose work tended toward figuration at a time when critics still preferred an Abstract Expressionist aesthetic. Along with painters such as Richard Diebenkorn and David Park, Neri is considered a part of a generation of artists that also includes Joan Brown (to whom Neri was briefly married) and Robert Qualters. Unlike some of his better-known colleagues, however, Neri gravitated toward sculpture, not painting.
By the mid-1950s, Neri had already become an integral member of
an avant-garde San Francisco art scene. He served as a director of Six Gallery, which famously presented Beat poet Allen Ginsburg’s reading of Howl in 1955, and was a member of the Rat Bastard Protective Association, a group that also included artists Bruce Conner and Jay DeFeo. In a similar spirit to those artists, Neri produced works early on that made use of cheap materials, such as cardboard, wire, cloth, and newspaper. In using such banal matter for his work, Neri was among the many American artists at the time who were working to bring the everyday into the field of sculpture, imploding the boundary between art and life.
vendors to showcase their works. Later works would come to take on a more elegant, though no less mystifying, aesthetic. He would go on to create his human forms using plaster, bronze, and metal—materials that have been used by sculptors for ages, even though what Neri did with them could hardly be called traditional. Many of the figures Neri crafted feature barely defined faces or with see-through portions that expose the sculpture’s innards. These sculptures are neither portraits in the conventional sense nor effective figurative studies intended to display a knack for depicting human anatomy. Instead, they aspire to something more conceptual.
“I love the body language that people have, the way they move, the way they position themselves,” Neri said in a 2008 Smithsonian
Banksy, A Great British Spraycation (2021). Courtesy of the artThe artist Manuel Neri pictured in 1982 with some of his painted statues.
Archives of American Art oral history. “That says so much of the person for me, and this has almost nothing to do with the face. That’s my interest there. In fact, a lot of times, I’ll even leave the head off because I don’t want to deal with that.”
Born in 1930 in Sanger, California, to Mexican immigrants, Neri went on to attend the San Francisco City College, where he initially planned to study to become an electrical engineer. A course with sculptor Peter Voulkos was among the factors that pushed him toward becoming an artist, however. He began as a painter, and later translated the Abstract Expressionist–like techniques he used to his sculptures, which are sometimes slathered with various hues of paint. Starting in the late ’50s, Neri also began teaching art, first at the California School of Fine Arts, then at the University of California, Berkeley, and finally at the University of California, Davis, where he was a professor for 25 years.
In the 2008 oral history, Neri said he was a rare non-white artist among an almost entirely white cohort, and that he was made keenly aware of his status as a Latino. But, he asserted, “What is referred to as Latino art, I don’t connect with.”
Neri’s art has been considered hugely important to the Bay Area art scene, though it has not received quite as much recognition beyond that part of California. It wasn’t until 1981, for instance, that Neri had a solo show in New York. Reviewing that show at Cowles Gallery, New York Times critic Hilton Kramer praised the artist for synthesizing Abstract Expressionism and Bay Area Figuration, writing, “No one else has carried this complex heritage into sculpture with quite the energy or originality that Mr. Neri has brought to it.” .
