Sandpaper, nails, wire, cardboard and rope aren’t just useful for carpenters and thieves. Such materials amounted to brush and paint for Joan Miro, who at age 34 announced his intention to “assassinate painting.”
During the decade that followed, however, what the onetime Spanish Surrealist did was give his own work a new lease on life.
With “Joan Miro: Painting and Anti-Painting, 1927-1937,” New York’s increasingly straitlaced Museum of Modern Art has become a font of early-20th-century radicalism.
MoMA regulars accustomed to seeing Miro’s dreamlike abstractions in the museum’s permanent collection will discover a more physical side to this artist, who died in 1983 at age 90, after a lifetime of tireless experimentalism.
The show homes in on a dozen groups of unpredictable works that include assemblage, collage and drawing as well as painting that begins with a group of seven spare works on rough, unprimed canvas that Miro made after moving from Barcelona to Paris in 1920.
This early, rather whimsical series has little of Miro’s familiar color but still radiates the energy of his brush. Most of the paintings here float patches of white on the dour brown canvas, with spidery penciled lines describing a head or a sun and an occasional spray of red or green dots. (Bloomberg)

  The city of Nuoro is preparing to host 300 works by Man Ray (Philadelphia 1890-Paris 1976), one of the most prominent figures of avant-garde art, that apparently will give the event a new imprint. Focusing also on the exhibition of unseen and rare masterpieces by the artist, for the first time examined in such a thorough way in Italy, the exhibition entitled “Unconcerned but not indifferent” – which draws on the sentence engraved on Man Ray’s tombstone by wish of his life partner Juliet, buried with him – is an invitation to consider his figure as an artist and man, in a fusion of art and life perceived in an “unconcerned but not indifferent” way.

The first semester for the art market is about to come to an end and before its conclusion Christie’s auction house is going to try itself out with an auction completely dedicated to author prints. Indeed, on 31st July Christie’s New York is going to propose a very interesting sale that will attract many neo-collectors, thanks to the very low estimates that vary from 300 to 18 thousand dollars. “Prints & Multiples” will auction 357 lots, including 29 works by Pablo Picasso, 23 by Joan Mirò and 5 by Marc Chagall. If we look through the catalogue we will see many interesting works that could give an excellent result to this sale dedicated to prints and multiples, a sector considered as one the minor sectors of the art market.

translated by Giorgina Arcuri

On 25th June, Sotheby’s London auction house will open the “Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale”, an extraordinary event for collectors of masterpieces by the most famous names of the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. The success of this auction seems to be anticipated by the artistic figures that will be presented. In a period when we keep on waiting for the signs of the art market crisis to surface, Sotheby’s makes the right choice, that is to auction 56 pieces of undoubted quality executed by the greatest names of the history of art. A very wise strategy that even collectors should pursue, as important works are not affected by devaluations and even if the market may slow down due to the latter, it will certainly never fail.

The first New York session dedicated to impressionists left Christe’s with a turnover of 277,276,000 dollars. Two new important records were broken for Monet and Rodin, however many of their paintings remained unsold.

The 6th May auction brought about some confirmations, but also gave rise to creeping fears that have been circulating on the art market for a while. The top lot of the evening was the splendid painting by Claude Monet “Le Pont du chemin de fer à Argenteuil” which went under the hammer for 41,481,000 dollars. With this sale Monet exceeded the previous record at auction, realised last June during the Sotheby’s auction in London; on that occasion, “Ninphéas” from 1904 went under the hammer for 36.7 million dollars.