Picasso: Trading on Le Reve

The sands of art world time and money are shifting again. SAC’s (hedge fund) founder Steven A. Cohen has just bought a Picasso. Still enmeshed in a legal battle with the Securities and Exchange Commission over insider trading – offering a $616 million settlement so long as there is no admission of guilt – Cohen purchased a $60 million home in East Hampton in which he will presumably hang “Le Réve” (The Dream) (above) by Pablo Picasso.

Cohen purchased it in 2013 from Stephen A. Wynn (casino entrepreneur) for $155 million and it is now the most expensive piece of paint and canvas ever. In 2007, Wynn notoriously pushed his elbow through the painting during an animated conversation in his office in Las Vegas. Now repaired, and the gash Wynn made in the art work (mostly) invisible, the painting has been sold to Cohen for a record price six years later.

“La Réve” was in Mr. Wynn’s collection since 2001, so he may have thought it was about time he moved it. He’d looked at it long enough, perhaps. Or he wanted to make room for another work of art in his “vast”  art collection, as it was described in The New York Times. Or, as a gambling man - a superstitious lot - , he may have seen the whole elbow-through-the-painting incident as a harbinger of bad luck, cutting into his pleasure of ownership.

Cohen is not known as an insightful art collector, although now he may have a claim to that reputation. But no matter how he's called, he’ll always be better known as a profiteer. We conceive of him as a flamboyant money maniac. But that’s a preconception. Surely not all multi-billionaires who own the most expensive  duplex apartment in Manhattan - now up for sale at $115 million - can be objects of ridicule and even disdain. They must be at least part human, and therefore subject to some of the same joys and sadnesses as other members of our species. Yet, they manage to keep it to themselves, no doubt comforted by the beauty of their vast art collections.

Picasso, also a very wealthy man, was  a man of strong emotions, from cool to sentimental. This may be what Cohen and Wynn have in common with the modern master, but lacking his creative talent and instead having in abundance a talent for extracting crumbs from the cake, like Gordon Gekko.

As to “Le Réve”(51 x 38 inches)  (1932), it is an excellent example of the artist’s late synthetic style, with a clearly erotic theme.  It will look fine hanging on a wall in one of Mr. Cohen's homes.Stephen Wynn and Le Reve

Damien Hirst: Metaphysical Artist for Our Times

 

A few years ago, in 2007, British artist Damien Hirst exhibited a diamond-encrusted platinum cast of the skull of a 19th century man. 8,601 stones cover every external surface, the largest over 50 carets. The work (shown above), which cost $23 million to make, was sold for about $100 million. Its title is For the Love Of God.

 It is estimated that 47 year-old Hirst (born 1965) is the richest artist in the world. He lives on a large estate in the English countryside. He keeps a studio staff of dozens of trained artists that churns out works on order. Yet, despite his assembly-line methods, his work is in great demand.

 Hirst's wealth aside, the question is often posed: "Why so morbid? Why so much talk of death?", because he does seem fascinated with the greased sled we're inevitably all riding.

 Some critics assert that this is because he is a sensitive man living in difficult times. Economic decline, global warming, terrorism. By this argument, Hirst's near-obsession with death becomes a commentary, and not at all as morbid and lunatic as it first appears.

 Other critics assert that he's a sensationalist who would do anything to provoke the public because of his perverse need for recognition. He needs to be noticed. But that itch must have been scratched by now - after over two decades in the limelight, internationally lauded and placed into the pantheon of other break-through artists, such as Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp.

 A third, less well known critical theory is that Hirst is a metaphysician who looks at basic things and makes art from his observations. This theory may have seemed ridiculous when first proposed, but it is gaining traction as time goes by. Not so long ago Hirst showed us pickled dead animals and gave the results thoughtful titles, such as The Physical Impossibility of Life In the Mind Of Someone Living (1992). A provocative title for a disquieting exhibit of a shark in a tank of formaldehyde. And now, a worthless dead man's skull made priceless by a London jeweler.

 But is it art?

Surely Hirst is an artist who helps the world by revealing mystic truths. Or at least by alluding to mystic truths about life, death, and money. What are these mystic truths he is revealing? With the shark it may be in the form of a question: in what sense is a dead animal, preserved from decay, an intimation of immortality? And it may be that to bring an actual dead animal into an art gallery is to comment on the notion that once a work of art goes on public display, it is dead.

But that is for the artist to know, and the rest of us to find out.

 Hirst should be lauded for taking on the subject of death and dying. It is an uncomfortable discussion and it is one most of us would prefer to avoid, until absolutely necessary.

As Dylan Thomas wrote, "After the first death, there is no other". Let Damien Hirst prove him wrong.

 

 

Wassily Kandinsky: Father of Abstract Painting

Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) was the son of a Russian merchant who becamse a lawyer and academic, and one of a small circle of artists who so influenced the direction of art in the twentieth century that it can be said he changed painting forever.. He was a devout Russian Orthodox believer and a follower of Madame Blavatsky, who was as proponent of Theosophy, spiritualism and the occult. Kandinsky was author of a seminal manifesto, “Concerning the Spiritual In Art” (1910), a work that lays out  his conception of the language of the soul in form and color, and establishes a foundation for abstract art.  It is influential to this day.

The artist is credited with making some of the earliest advances in modern abstract painting that reverberate to the present, over 100 years since he painted them. Now in the collection of the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, many of these oil on canvas paintings, made between 1911 and 1914, are regarded as the earliest pure abstractions, consisting of striking color, lines and shapes that allude to a real-world narrative of mythical horsemen and mountain valleys, in what Kandinsky hoped would be the painterly equivalent of the music of Richard Wagner (1813-1883).

These paintings show Kandinsky exploring the essence of time, place and appearances. At this point, Kandinsky was an artist in search of something ethereal, something spiritual, manifest in the natural world. As his career progressed, the artist abandoned the references to the visible world characteristic of his lyrical expression for a more formal, geometric style, typical of the Bauhaus, where he taught. Some art historians trace this transformation to the experience of World War I, which so devastated Europe and forever altered its cultures and societal structures. As a consequence of their alientation from the past, many artists turned to the esoteric, embracing obscurity and secrecy.

I offer two examples of Kandinsky’s work. Composition VII, 1913 (79 inches X 118 inches) (above) is from his early abstract work, when the ideas were fresh. The other is Composition VIII, 1923 (55 inches X 79 inches) (below) from the Bauhaus period, when the artist had turned to more restricted, some would say refined, forms. Kandinsky’s work was well known to young artists of the 30s and 40s, including Arshile Gorky, Joan Miro and Jackson Pollock.