NEW YORK PALM NEWPORTSANJACKSONDESERTHOLELOSANGELESLONDONBASELFRANCISCOMONTECITOBEACHPALMBEACHLAKECOMO
ABOUT US
Heather James Fine Art is a is a global network of galleries and consultancies with over 25 years of history building a network of clients around the globe, exhibiting blue-chip artwork across all genres. Our welcoming team is committed to sharing museum quality works and art investment opportunities with all kinds of collectors, from the well-established to the curious novice.
Heather James Fine Art presents some of the most important works spanning time periods and genres, including Contemporary, Modern, Impressionist, American, Latin American, Old Masters and more. We are proud to work with museums, placing artwork from our inventory in top institutions around the country, including the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., the Art Institute of Chicago, the Denver Art Museum, among others. We are dedicated to presenting exception artwork and to building lasting connections with our clients. Beyond a simple transactional relationship, we aim to share our knowledge and passion for visual art, assisting our clients however we can with a variety white glove of services. Our team includes experts in their fields across research, marketing, operations, and sales. We offer a variety of services including acquisitions, consignment, collections management, appraisals, estate and tax planning, logistics management and additional operational resources.
ABOUT US Co-founders Heather Sacre and Jim Carona reflect on the gallery's origins and growth.
CONSIGN WITH US Benefits of choosing Heather James Fine Art: • Curatorial and strategic services, and financial audits of collections of any size • Auction and art market comparable sales, valuations and analyses • Art historical research • Provenance, exhibition history, and literature • Expert framing and lighting designer referrals • Complimentary delivery and installation • Crating, shipping, and delivery insurance Research: • HJFA has a dedicated research team who perform in-depth research into the provenance, literature and history of our artwork. Marketing: • HJFA has an extensive in-house marketing and sales team dedicated to sharing your artwork with the appropriate collectors. • HJFA will feature your artwork on the HJFA website, as well as on a variety of our partnering websites, which HJFA subscribes to for their worldwide reach Sales: • HJFA has a very extensive and qualified database of national and international collectors, many of whom have purchased similar works from us in the past. • HJFA is dedicated to nurturing long-term relationships with our private and public clients around the world, as trusted advisors, offering white-glove curatorial, logistical and financial services. • Our Museum clients include the Norman Rockwell Museum, the Mint Museum, the Crocker Art Museum, the Seattle Art Museum, the National Gallery of Art, Currier Museum of Art and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art • Your artwork will be featured in our curated exhibitions that can travel to any of our galleries in Palm Desert, CA, or Jackson Hole, WY.
For over twenty five years, Heather James Fine Art has expanded from our original location in Palm Desert, California, to a global network with two galleries around the United States and eight consultancy offices internationally. In 2020, we celebrated the ten-year anniversary of our gallery in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, the second Heather James location to open its doors. Our Fine Art Consultants are dedicated to bringing exceptional artworks and services at our consultancy locations in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Montecito, Newport Beach, Palm Beach, London, Basel, and Lake Como.
GALLERIES CONSULTANCIESand
PALM DESERT 45188 Portola Avenue, Palm Desert, CA 92260 760-346-8926
JACKSON HOLE PO Box 3580 172 Center Street, Suite 101 Jackson Hole, WY 83001 307-200-6090
Our gallery in Palm Desert is centrally located in the Palm Springs area of California, adjacent to the popular shopping and dining area of El Paseo. The gorgeous weather during the winter months draws visitors from all over the world to see our beautiful desert, and stop by our gallery. The mountainous desert landscape outside provides the perfect scenic backdrop to the visual feast that awaits inside.
Situated in the wild beauty of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, with National Parks as a stunning backdrop, our Jackson Hole gallery has brought the highest caliber of artworks and services to the Intermountain West for over a decade.
CONSULTANCIES LAKEBASELLONDONCOMONEW YORK LOS ANGELES SAN FRANCISCO PALMNEWPORTMONTECITOBEACHBEACH MORE INFO MORE INFO
PALM DESERT
JACKSON HOLE
SERVICES ESTATE AND TAX PLANNING Art trusts: • Full documentation of the artwork or collection with digital records, photography, and condition reports for Fair Market Value estate planning • Facilitation of appraisals for insurance purposes and estate tax filing Museum gifting: • Interfacing with museums to facilitate donations, including assistance navigating the necessary tax documents and legal forms • Obtaining appraisal documents for donation purposes COLLECTIONS MANAGEMENT Collection documentation: • Cataloguing your collection with detailed inventory documentation including photography, condition reports, and certificates of insurance organized and maintained in our digital records Installation and security: • Full-service installation for all art types and sizes • Wall-to-wall art handling services: installation and de-installation; custom packing for transport or storage; specialized installation for earthquake mitigation and theft mitigation; consultation on security systems • Home curation: in-house installers and in-house curators to help place and design the collection; advising on lighting and custom display systems such as pedestals and vitrines • Facilitation of conservation, restoration, and preservation Strategic loans to museums globally: • In-house registrar department to oversee logistical planning, necessary paperwork, and documentation for museum loans Heather James Fine Art provides a wide range of client-based services catered to your specific art collecting needs. Our Operations team includes professional art handlers, a full registrar department and logistical team with extensive experience in art transportation, installation, and collection management. With white glove service and personalized care, our team goes the extra mile to ensure exceptional art services for our clients.
InterfaceACQUISITIONSwithauction houses, dealers and private clients: • Logistical coordination with auction houses, including packing, pick-up, transport, and installation • Relationships with dealers and private clients for sourcing artwork • Assessing artwork condition and quality for purchase consideration; assistance obtaining certificates of authentication from artist foundations or expert scholars UpdatedAPPRAISALSappraisals and real-time market updates: • Longstanding partnerships with appraisers for efficient and thorough •documentationAccesstomarket research tools for valuation, including market price index graphs and auction comparables • Complete documentation of artwork information, including provenance, exhibition history, and literature references Insurance advisory: • Certificates of insurance and appraisals for insurance purposes LOGISTICS MANAGEMENT Location tracking, packing, storing, delivery: • Climatized storage and transportation: secure storage on-site or at external facilities; coordination with trusted partners and fine art shipping companies • White glove handling to ensure the safety of the artwork at every step of transportation by air, ground, or sea, from crating and packing to unpacking and installation • Personalized solutions for multimodal art shipping nationally and internationally FINANCIAL SERVICES Lending for purchases and liquidity: • Assisting with loans for acquisition or against existing owned art ADDITIONAL RESOURCES Framing: • Re-framing, re-glazing, and advising on lighting and display Conservation and restoration: • Facilitating conservation and restoration treatments from beginning to end, through communication with conservators, treatment proposals, secure transport, and treatment documentation Home staging: • Consultation visits, artwork selection for key walls and spaces, and •installationExchange and installation of artwork that may sell while on display as all works provided for staging remain active gallery inventory • Negotiations with home buyer who also seeks to purchase the artwork on display SERVICES
NOTABLE SALES
A representingselectioncuratedofartournotablesales
Dr. Hans Wendland, Berlin (by 1916).
By his fellow painters Monet was regarded as a leader, not because he was the most intellectual or theoretically minded but because in his art he seemed to be more alert to the possibilities latent in their common ideas, which he then developed in his work in a more radical way than did his peers. Considering how all these painters developed their intensely personal styles with respect to new artistic ideas, we may observe that the new elements often appeared first in the work of Monet before being adopted by the other Impressionists, who then incorporated them in their own ways.
Paul Cassirer, Berlin (acquired from the above on March 20, 1916).
Paris,EXHIBITED:Galerie Durand-Ruel, Monet, Pissaro, Renoir et Sisley, 1899, no.12. Berlin, Galerie Paul Cassirer, Ausstellung VIII Jahrgang, 1905, no. 23. Weimar, Grossherzogliches Museum, Monet, 1905, no.10. (possibly) Frankfurt-am-Main, Kunstverein, Art français du XIXe siècle, 1912, no. 83.
Heather James Art & Antiquities, Palm Desert (private treaty sale from above).
D.LITERATURE:Wildenstein, Claude Monet, Bibliographie et catalogue raisonné, Paris, 1974, vol. I, no. 408 (illustrated, p. 291).
Le Repos dans le jardin, Argenteuil
Maria Newman, Hamburg and Berlin (by descent from the above from 1917 until her death in 1942; placed in a vault at the Deutsche Bank, Berlin, sometime between 1940 and 1943; allegedly stolen by the Soviet Army in 1945; the Newman family has relinquished all claims to this work pursuant to an agreement reached with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in August, 2001). (possibly) Mme Guy Lemm, Paris. A.&R. Ball, New York.
Baron Maurice de Herzog, Budapest (acquired from the above on August 8, 1911).
Mrs. Charles Wrightsman (by descent from the above, 1986). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (gift of the above, 1994).
Painted in Argenteuil in 1876 (possibly)PROVENANCE:Pelgrin, Paris (acquired from the artist in November, 1876). Durand-Ruel, Paris (acquired from the above on August 25, 1891).
D. Wildenstein, Claude Monet, catalogue raisonné, Cologne, 1996, vol. II, no. 408 (illustrated, p. 167).
Le Repos dans le jardin, Argenteuil depicts the artist’s wife Camille and an acquaintance at rest in the shade-dappled garden on an idyllic summer afternoon in 1876. It was likely painted around the same time as Monet’s Camille dans le jardin de la maison d’Argenteuil (Annenberg Collection), a view of the garden painted from a vantage point closer to the house and slightly to the left. As George Rivere wrote in his newsletter “L’Impressionniste” in the spring of 1877, concurrent with the Impressionists’ third group exhibition, “M. Monet not only depicts the imposing power and grandeur of nature, he also pictures it as being charming and pleasant, very much as a happy young man might see it. No gloomy thought ever grieves the spectator standing before the canvases of this powerful painter. After the pleasure of admiring them, our only regret is being unable to dwell forever in the luxuriant nature that blossoms in his pictures.”
Henry Percy Newman, Hamburg (acquired from the above April 26, 1916).
P. Hayes Tucker, Monet, vie et oeuvre, Lausanne and Paris, 1991, vol. V (illustrated, p. 31).
CLAUDE MONET (1840-1926)
signed lower right Claude Monet oil on canvas 31 7/8 x 23 5/8 in.
Mr. and Mrs. Charles Wrightsman, New York (acquired from the above, 1952).
Painted in PROVENANCE:1910 Leicester Galleries, London
Pierre-Auguste Renoir is regarded as one of the most renowned and well-respected Impressionist painters of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
signed lower left Renoir oil on canvas 13 x 16 1/8 in.
Born in Limoges, Haute-Vienne, France, Renoir was a working class prodigy who studied and gained inspiration from the French master painters Alfred Sisley, Frédéric Bazille, and Claude Monet.
Renoir gained initial acclaim when he displayed work in the first Impressionist exhibition in Paris in 1874. That same year two of his works were shown with the Durand-Ruel Gallery in London. His maturity as an artist heightened during the mid-1880s as he applied a more formal and disciplined technique to his painting. However his return to the use of thinly brushed color in 1890 changed his direction once again. Paintings from this later period, such as Pécheurs au bord d’un Lac, illustrate the airy appeal of dissolved outlines and implied imagery. A prolific artist, Renoir painted with a warm sensuality that has made his paintings some of the most well known works in the canon of Western art.
The Redfern Gallery, Ltd., London
Anon. sale, Sotheby’s New York, November 17,1983, lot 108 Pacific Heights Gallery, San Francisco Private Collection (acquired from above)
PIERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR (1841-1919) Pécheurs au bord d’un Lac
stamped lower left with signature Degas (Lugt 658) pastel on paper 25 3/4 x 25 3/4 in. Executed circa 1899
Executed in 1899, Trois danseuses is a study of posture, form and movement that epitomizes Degas’ mature exploration of his most iconic theme, the ballet. When he had begun producing pictures of the ballet and its dancers over two decades earlier, Degas was a sophisticated man about town. His purpose in depicting these images of dancers at rest was partly in line with his attempts to paint modern life, to capture the energy and entertainment of the city. Nowhere was this more evident than in the glamorous yet exploitative world of the dancers, often girls rather than women, whose movements were graceful enough to be considered art in their own right. As Degas matured as an artist his interest in the behind-the-scenes life of the ballet diminished, while his artistic appreciation of form and line grew. The dancers thus retained their central position in his work, but were less present as manifestations of modernity and entertainment than as a representation of art in their own right. Degas used photographs and models rather than first-hand observation to more precisely create compositions as they appeared in his mind. Thus in Trois danseuses, each of the figures is only a mildly adjusted version of the figures shown in three photographs of dancers taken by Degas in the 1890s. These three photographs came to form the basis for a group of works that includes En attendant l’entrée en scene, now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. This painting shares a close resemblance to Trois danseuses, though with the addition of a fourth girl. Trois danseuses is therefore a stepping-stone in the gradual evolution of this particular composition of a group of girls, and is made all the more rare for relating to such a significant late oil. At the same time, Trois danseuses bears witness to the painstaking preparation that lay behind Degas’ paintings.
ThePROVENANCE:artist’sstudio; first sale, Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, May 6-8, 1918, lot 227 (FFr 10,600, illustrated). Charles Vignier, Paris; his sale, May, 1931, lot 44 (illustrated).
EDGAR DEGAS Trois danseuses
P.A.LITERATURE:Lemoisne, Degas et son oeuvre, Peintures et Pastels 1883-1908, Paris, 1946, vol. III, no. 1345 (illustrated, p. 789).
Victor Spark, New York. Wildenstein & Co., New York. C. Michael Paul, Palm Beach. Raymonde I. Paul, New York. The Metropolitan Museum Of Art, New York (de-accessioned); sale, Sotheby’s, New York, May 13, 1986, lot 35. Private collection, 1987.
Tokyo,EXHIBITED:Isetan Museum of Art, Edgar Degas, October-November, 1988, no. 79 (illustrated, p. 145).
(1834-1917)
Paris, Cercle de la Renaissance, Portraits et figures de femmes: Ingres à Picasso, 1928, no. 139.
Jules Strauss, Paris (sale, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, December 15, 1932, lot 55). Thierry de La Noue, Paris (acquired from the above sale). Private Collection (by descent from the EXHIBITED:above).
J.J. Lévêque, Les Années Impressionnistes, Paris, 1990 (illustrated, p. 203).
This intimate portrait of a young woman with dark hair and dreamy expression, dressed in a diaphanous white gown patterned with blue sprigs is typical of the work of the quintessentially Impressionist painter Berthe Morisot. She was among the few female painters who emerged as a fringe group of Impressionist artists in Paris in the early 1870s. Morisot was particularly close to the great painter Édouard Manet, (closely associated with the Impressionists though never actually exhibiting with them) who painted several portraits of her. Morisot married Manet’s brother Eugène. The diary kept by their daughter Julie Manet is one of the most significant first-hand sources of information on the Impressionist movement.
The Art News, vol. XXXI, no. 9, New York, November 26, 1932 (illustrated, p. 4). M. Angeoulvent, Berthe Morisot, Paris, 1933, no. 20. L. Rouart, Berthe Morisot, Paris, 1941 (illustrated, p. 6).
A. Clairet, Delphine Montalant and Yves Rouart, Berthe Morisot, Catalogue Raisonné de l’Oeuvre peint, Paris, 1997, no. 22 (illustrated, p. 123).
Paris, Galerie Schmit, Cent ans de peinture française, 1969, no. 92.
Paris, Galerie Schmit, Portraits français, XIXe et XXe siècles, 1974, no. 39.
Paris, Galerie Schmit, 25 Ans d’Expositions: Maîtres Français XIXème-XXème siècles, 1990, no. LITERATURE:49.
M.L. Bataille and G. Wildenstein, Berthe Morisot, Catalogue des Peintures-Pastels & Aquarelles, Paris, 1961, no. 22 (illustrated, p. 115).
The sitter’s identity is unknown, but her features and facial expression, as well as her white muslin dress, bear a close resemblance to the left hand figure in Morisot’s 1869 painting, The Sisters (National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.). It may be that she is one of “the little Delaroches” whom the artist referred to in a letter at the time but about whom little is known. Morisot was above all a painter of the human figure and her subject were mostly women and children in her domestic circle. As an uppermiddle-class female artist in nineteenth-century France, her options were far more limited than those of her male colleagues. She could not, for example, wander freely about the streets and parks of Paris in search of subjects for her paintings. And the noisy, bohemian cafes where Manet, Cézanne, Degas, Renoir, Pissarro and others would gather to debate their latest artistic theories would have been completely off limits to her. Nevertheless, Morisot was highly respected by her male colleagues, particularly Manet. She not only exhibited in all of the Impressionist group exhibitions from 1874 to 1886 (with the exception of the fourth exhibition in 1879 when she was ill following the birth of her daughter) but she also played an active role in their organization. Her home was a regular meeting place for intellectuals and writers of the day, including the famed poet Stéphane Mallarmé, as well as the Impressionists.
signed upper left Berthe Morisot oil on canvas 21 1/2 x 18 1/8 in. Painted in Jos.PROVENANCE:1871Hessel,Paris.
Paris, Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Berthe Morisot, 1929, no. 6.
Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum, Van Gogh et ses contemporains, 1930, no. 236.
B. Bailey and M. Rosenthal, Masterpieces of Impressionist and Post-Impressionism: The Annenberg Collection, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1989, fig. 46 (illustrated,p.141).
BERTHE MORISOT (1841-1895) Jeune Femme
Paris, Galerie Schmit, Choix d’un Amateur, XIX-XXème siècles, 1977, no. 56.
The Picasso Project, Picasso’s Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculpture. Surrealism, 19301936, San Francisco, 1997, no. 32-046 (illustrated, p. 106).
dated and numbered on the reverse 2.6.65 oil on canvas 21 3/4 x 18 1/2 in. Painted on June 2, 1965
C.LITERATURE:Zervos,Pablo Picasso, oeuvres de 1965 et 1967, Paris, 1972, vol. XXV, no. 147 (illustrated, p. 82).
ClaudePROVENANCE:Picasso (the artist's son). Private Collection, New York. Michelle Rosenfeld Gallery, New York (acquired from the above, 1996). Anon. sale; Sotheby’s Parke-Bernet, May 4, 2005, Lot 307.
PABLO PICASSO (1881-1973) Tête de femme
Tête de Femme is a portrait of Jacqueline Roque, Picasso’s devoted second wife who remained with the artist until the time of his death in 1973. Picasso’s renderings of Jacqueline constitute the largest number of images of any of the women in his life. The artist first met Jacqueline in 1952 while he was still living with his mistress Françoise Gilot, and by 1954 the raven-haired beauty began to appear in his paintings. In 1961 Picasso married Jacqueline and they moved into a farmhouse in Mougins called “Nôtre Dame de Vie,” where they shared a peaceful and secluded lifestyle. Unlike Françoise, Jacqueline was ever accepting of the notoriously temperamental artist and his blind obsession with art, doting on him ceaselessly in his old age. Picasso experienced a calm and peace with Jacqueline that he had not felt since his days with Marie-Therèse, and like his golden mistress Jacqueline became his muse for some of his most imaginative compositions. The present work is an intimate rendering of Jacqueline, a portrayal of a self-confident muse who is both casual and in love. Her thick, black hair is released from its usual bun, and falls onto her shoulders and down her back. She engages the viewer with wide, open eyes and a playful smile. Jacqueline is framed by a dense background of blue and green, colors that reflect the sparkle of the highlights in her face and hair. Two powerful brushstrokes of dark red denote clothing, barely clinging to her shoulders and dominating the foreground, possibly hinting at the powerful presence of the artist himself.
Royal Academy of Arts, Chagall, London, 1985, (illustrated pp. 246 – 247).
Foundation Maeght, Marc Chagall Rétrospective de l’oeuvre peint, Paris, 1984, no. 82 and no. 85 (illustrated p. 153).
In the painting Dos à dos, Chagall has imagined himself perched on a stool in a magic pathway which is at the same time some wide river and sky of the street below: on the right, an official-looking figure offers a bouquet. The more one looks, the more remarkable the composition becomes, with the strange juxtaposition of the central pair on their stool and the landscape, like some optical illusion, changing from one shape to another according to the way it is seen. But the most amazing feature of the canvas is the web of color made up of a mosaic of brushstrokes on which are superimposed short black lines, which turn into houses or a bridge or a bird in the sky. Yet in some places the artist has spurned these details, and obliterated them with additional color for there seems to be a horse and cart on the roadway in the foreground now covered by white marks. In other places he has used only the brush to suggest some shadowy or angel, to be seen emerging from the welter of colored marks. The sheer enjoyment of painting and the complete freedom with which Chagall disposes the color expresses his joy. For while the great patch of red-colored light which surrounds his left hand brings the scene forward, when the eye travels downward and sees the street receding into the background, it is led to believe that all this is going on in a mysterious realm of the sky. The pictorial devices evocative of pointillism, which Chagall had used for his circus arena scenes of the years before, have here been freed into a conglomeration of color and brushwork. This is an act of bravado on the part of the old master, whose mind and hand preserve the freshness of the youths accompany him so poignantly on their pipes. Dos à dos
MARC CHAGALL (1887-1985)
Paris, Foundation Maeght, Marc Chagall Rétrospective de l’oeuvre peint, 1984. London, Royal Academy of Arts, Chagall, 1985. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Chagall, 1985. Tokyo, Mitsukoshi, Ltd., Chagall,LITERATURE:2006.
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Chagall, 1985, no. 125 (illustrated pp. 246 – 247).
signed lower right and reverse Chagall oil on canvas 51 1/2 x 35 in. Painted in PROVENANCE:1984 Estate of Chagall, Paris. Private Collection, Connecticut. Private Collection,EXHIBITED:Chicago.
of American Art, The Paintings of Joan Mitchell, 2002. Birmingham, Alabama, Museum of Art, The Paintings of Joan Mitchell, 2003. Fort Worth, Texas, Modern Art Museum, The Paintings of Joan Mitchell, 2003-04. Washington, D.C., The Phillips Collection, The Paintings of Joan Mitchell, 2004.
Joan Mitchell was born in Chicago in 1925 and attended Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts from 1942 until 1944, when she transferred to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. From 1943 to 1946 she spent her summers in Mexico, where she was greatly influenced by the work of Orozco. She traveled to France, Italy and Spain between 1948 and 1949 on a traveling fellowship. Upon her return, Mitchell settled in New York and abandoned her academic training. She turned her inspiration from the freer styles of Cézanne, van Gogh and Kandinsky, to the more abstracted work of Gorky, de Kooning, and most significantly, Franz Kline. She moved to Paris in the late 1950s and lived in France uninterrupted until her passing in Vetheuil in 1992.
oil on canvas 78 x 69 in. Painted in NewEXHIBITED:CheimTheTheThePROVENANCE:1960artistEstateofJoanMitchellJoanMitchellFoundation&Reid,NewYorkYork,TheWhitneyMuseum
J.LITERATURE:Livingston, The Paintings of Joan Mitchell, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2002 (illustrated in color, plate 22, and on cover). K. Kertes, Joan Mitchell, New York (illustrated in color, p. 27).
JOAN MITCHELL (1926-1992) Untitled
Mitchell held a celebrated position in the generation that succeeded the likes of Pollock and Rothko, quickly gaining recognition and exhibiting regularly, though always somewhat detached from the mainstream. Throughout her career she remained the empirical American, consistently declining the theoreticism of her European counterparts.
As an Abstract Expressionist Mitchell composed her paintings with long, curvilinear strokes and broad stains of color, often contrasting warm tones with cool against an unprimed canvas. She worked on multiple panels or large-scale canvases, striving to extract a natural rather than constructed rhythm from the composition. She painted to evoke the visual sentiments of nature. The objectivity of her painting, devoid of anecdote or theater, was in her own words, “to convey the feeling of the dying sunflower.”
Afterdesigner.his
ANDY WARHOL (1928-1987) Liz II.7
signed lower right Andy Warhol 67 offset lithograph on paper 23 1/8 x 23 1/8 in. Published in 1967 in an edition of 300 Andy Warhol, the controversial pop artist who rose to iconic status in the 1960s, challenged the definition of art with his silkscreen paintings of celebrities, advertisements and utilitarian objects such as his famous cans of Campbell’s soup. Warhol gained devoted fans and attracted vitriolic critics with his unique subject matter and unconventional artistic process. His role as notorious artist, turning the fabric of American consumer culture into the stuff of art, has sealed his position as one of the most popular artists of the twentieth century. Warhol was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1928. He was the son of immigrant parents who came to America from Czechoslovakia. A sickly child, Warhol often spent long periods of time home from school in bed, which he later described as the fundamental foundation in the development of his personality and interest in art. As a young adult Warhol studied commercial art at the School of Fine Arts in Pittsburgh before moving to New York City in 1949, where he worked as a magazine illustrator and advertisement artistic career took off during the 1960s, Warhol began to make paintings of famous American products and celebrities, artistically commercializing the products so comfortably as to implant them in the American household and media. His switch to serially produced silkscreen prints, helped Warhol re-emphasize his artistic goal to not only make art of mass-produced items, but to mass-produce the art itself. His intention of creating art like “a machine” was heightened by minimizing the role of his own hand in the production of his work. This truly sparked a revolution in art, and made his work both popular and controversial.
In 1964, Warhol confronted the New York public with his involvement in the exhibition, “The American Supermarket,” held at Paul Bianchini’s gallery on the Upper East Side. The show featured six pop artists who had created all the accoutrements of a supermarket, complete with produce, bread and meat products. Warhol sold his painting of a can of Campbell’s soup for only $1,500. Warhol enjoyed ongoing popularity throughout his career, continuing to cut a high-profile image across New York’s social scene. He shunned media attention and rarely commented on his art or popularity, sometimes issuing cryptic statements such as his prophetic phrase, “in the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.” Warhol died of complications stemming from gallbladder surgery in New York in 1987.
signed lower right Andrew Wyeth watercolor on paper 13 3/4 x 20 in.
Andrew Wyeth's Albinos Study depicts a casual grouping of white pumpkins on a rocky ledge near the artist’s house on Benner Island, Maine. He skillfully paints a single orange pumpkin in the center of the composition to anchor the scene and give an enhanced sense of unity to the arrangement. The sky and landscape are rendered loosely with broad brush work and cool colors suggesting a slight overcast day and furthering the impression of Autumn.
HighEXHIBITED:Point,North Carolina, Sechrest Gallery, Wyeth: Three Generations, 2006.
As an artist, Wyeth was deeply interested in the notion of survival in the face of hostile elements, historical change, and natural decay. Only his unique relationship with the environment, its vast natural beauty and introspective quietude could have given fruit to Christina’s World, considered to be America’s greatest mid-century representational painting. Another great achievement is the artist’s so-called "Helga pictures", a series depicting the model Helga Testorf, which Wyeth secretly executed over the course of 15 years. Dividing his time between Pennsylvania and Maine, Wyeth maintained a realist painting style for over fifty years. Wyeth's distinctive dry brush watercolor technique allowed for both executions of great detail and fluid abstraction. He typically created dozens of studies on a subject in pencil or loosely brushed watercolor before executing a finished painting and his determined use of light and shadow let the subjects illuminate the canvas.
Painted in
ANDREW WYETH (1917-2009) Albinos Study
PrivatePROVENANCE:2002Collection,Lexington, North Carolina
Signed lower left, "Hirst," verso, "Damien Hirst" on stretcher bar, "D Hirst" household gloss on canvas 48 x 36 in. Executed in
Damien Hirst (b. 1965)
Beautiful Untitled Seeing is Believing Doubting Thomas Don't Doubt Me Believe Me
Figures Don't Lie Always Be By My Side Painting
A leading figure in the Young British Artists movement in the late 1980s and 1990s, Hirst began experimenting with spin art in 1992 in his London studio. In 1994, while living in Berlin, he started this series of spin paintings distinguished by their long titles. Later that same year, the series was exhibited at Bruno Brunnet Contemporary Fine Arts in Berlin. The element chance of the spin paintings stands in stark contrast to his other work, such as his formulaic spot paintings, but both deal with the concept of mechanical intervention.
PROVENANCE:1994 White Cube Gallery, London Private Collection Private Collection, Illinois
THANK YOU
Please visit our forheatherjames.comwebsitemoreinformationaboutourcurrentexhibitionsandartofferings
heatherjames.com