Dali House

On the eve of Salvador Dalí’s 104th birthday on Sunday, a buyer in disguise handed Sotheby’s a cheque for $802,600 this week in return for the painting above, “Portrait of Madame Schlumberger”, begun in 1963 and signed in ‘65. The auction house was expecting about half a million dollars, so many happy returns all round.

Carstairs Gallery in New York bought the oil painting when the paint was barely dry, and Sotheby’s was flogging it in the same city for an “important” private collector but didn’t say who, so it’s not clear whether his model ever actually owned the thing.

“I don’t really like it,” São Schlumberger told Women’s Wear Daily in 1987. “I was expecting a fantasy … but he did a classic.”

Of Portuguese and German descent, Madame Schlumberger and her husband, the French-American oil tycoon Pierre Schlumberger, were keen on art.

She favoured Rothko, Rauschenberg and Lichtenstein, they hung out with Warhol, kept the Museum of Modern Art and Lincoln Center happy and fed Mondrian and Calder to Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts.

Dalí was pulled in to do her portrait two years after their wedding. São put on the same Givenchy gown for his several visits to their place on Sutton Place in Manhattan, and at the same time he made her a necklace, though perhaps not the one she’s holding in the painting. He was indeed in his neo-classicist era with the formal pose and fine details, so São, hankering for surrealism, had to make do with a dreamy background landscape. See the rest.

Vincent has rented four rooms along one side of the big yellow house on Place Lamartine at 15 francs a month. He’d had a falling-out with the landlord at the Carrel, who was charging five francs a week for just his one room. Vincent was so incensed that he took the matter to an arbitrator, and ended up paying one franc a week less!

Meanwhile he’s moved into Joseph Ginoux’s Café de la Gare just along the way and is waiting for the yellow house to be furnished, though he can begin using it as a studio. This is where he wants to open his “Studio of the South”, an artists’ co-operative that will explore new ways of doing things, what he calls, none too modestly, the “art of the future”.

He signed the lease on May 1 for two large rooms on the ground floor and two smaller ones above, facing Place Lamartine. The other half of the building houses a grocery, and just across from it is the restaurant that his landlady, the widow Venissac, operates, where Vincent takes his meals.

He’s started a series of paintings with which to decorate his future home, mostly sunflowers, and has made a large picture of the house itself, which he calls “La Maison et son entourage”, but he’s thinking of retitling it “La Rue” after Raffaëlli’s new paintings of the streets in Paris.

You can see Vincent’s main street along the right of the picture, Avenue Montmajour, which leads to the railway bridges, one going across the river to Lunel, the other linking Paris and Lyon to Marseille. On the left in the painting, shaded by a tree, is the restaurant, and just beyond that, not visible, is the night café, which Vincent is also painting. He’s sent a sketch of “La Maison” to his brother Théo and proudly pointed out how everything is transformed by the “sulphur sun under a pure cobalt sky”. See the rest.

I’ve just signed up for online notices from Sotheby’s, which may turn out to have been a huge mistake. Right off the bat I’ve had email alerts about three upcoming shows in New York at which the jaw-dropping collection of Texas property magnate Raymond Nasher and his wife Patsy is being sold off. Not only are the pieces stunning, Sotheby’s terrific presentation suggests to me that I’ll have to use considerable restraint to avoid reproducing everything here.

But what the hell. With amiable thanks to Sotheby’s and a respectful nod to Mr Nasher, who died in March 2007 (and his wife, who predeceased him by 19 years), here are two of the items up for bids. Above, Paul Signac’s “Clipper (Opus 155)” from 1887, and here, Rene Magritte’s “l’Okapi” from 1958.

The Nasher collection is going on the block in three segments — an “Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale” on May 7, “Property from the Raymond and Patsy Nasher Collection” on May 9 and “Contemporary Art Evening Auction” on May 14. Included are Morisot, Monet, Braque, Picasso, Miro, Leger, Munch, Giacometti and many others. The catalogue alone is a droolfest.

Nasher, who built Texas’ biggest shopping mall before he established the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University in North Carolina and founded the Nasher Sculpture Centre on Flora Street in Dallas in 2003 (pictured below from Google Earth), started collecting art by buying a Ben Shahn (Dali House post) painting in 1954. He and Patsy invested in pre-Columbian art, then Arp and Moore, and just kept on going.

Signac’s “Clipper”, expected to bring between $5 million and $7 million, was painted in the same vicinity as the considerably more famous “Bathers at Asnières” by the considerably more famous pointillist Georges Seurat, a work that will coincidentally be popping up again in a forthcoming post here.

As Sotheby’s notes, the northwestern Paris suburb was popular with avant-garde landscape painters in the 1880s. In 1887 both Van Gogh and Emile Bernard portrayed the same parallel bridges, but Signac had been there before them, and returned twice more afterward to capture the scene. Like Seurat, he was struck by the mingling of industry and leisure, sailboats sharing the frame with factories.

Magritte’s “l’Okapi”? Yours, perhaps, for $3 million or $4 million. Stay tuned.

Wangechi Mutu’s “Untitled”, 2003

History’s parade finds its way to cut-up specialist Wangechi Mutu by way of dada, of course, with Hannah Höch pointing out the path ahead and warning that it’s not always downhill. The course is littered with exquisite corpses.

Collage has always struck me as the poor country cousin in the art tribe, still at school and with no hope of ever actually graduating and joining the family business. I think that’s why the dadaists embraced it: It was a geeky, clumsy sort of art, more Anyman artisanship in fact, so it suited their anti-art ambitions. Plus, it involved piecing together bits of newspapers, snapshots and mementoes — putting the mundane on a pedestal — and left room for subconscious selection. And it could be done fast.

Hannah Höch’s “Grotesque”

Everyone keeps scrapbooks at some time or another, and In Europe at the time, collage was something your mother might do with her favourite pictures from the weekend magazine. Like the surrealists’ rounds of exquisite corpse, collage was something to be “played” in the parlour after supper.

But I still love collage, the big lug, and both of these women are very interesting, especially side by side — a German who, like Picasso, borrowed African art’s backwardness to push Western art forward; and an African native who cadges urban Americana to leap oceans and kick down social borders.

Back in Nairobi where Mutu was born, and in the other big African centres, contemporary artists like Bill Bidjocka, Odhiambo Siangla and Lubaina Himid have found a measure of fame, but Westerners keep asking their agents if they can get some tribal antiquities instead. These new fellows, the buyers presume, are just copying Modigliani, aren’t they?

Below, “Complete Prolapsus of the Uterus” from 2004, chiding the typical gender bias of yesteryear’s medical diagrams.

No wonder Mutu shifted to the West ASAP, albeit to study anthropology along with art at Yale. It worked out fine: Now about 36, she’s great at bending minds with her collages of women made from Mylar, flourishes of deco paint and a lot of thoughtfully chosen magazine clippings (National Geographic being an obvious source). From a distance it looks like you’re in for some eye candy, but up close Mutu’s exotic beauties turn out to be gargoyles on a feminist mission, some armoured, some haemorrhaging body parts or dragging around prosthetics.

“Mask”, 2006, archaic sculpture and modern tease.

Goddesses and glamour models there are, but they’ve clearly just been released from hospital following a horrendous accident. Their skin is inhuman and they’re at least partially bionic, not in a good way.

They are very much science fiction, but as we always discover once we get there, the future isn’t clean and stable — it’s a junkyard of the past. Our robots aren’t going to be young, curvy, soft-skinned Japanese handmaidens; they’ll be brides of Frankenstein, with serious issues that, like the glitches in Windows software, refuse to be resolved. See the rest.

As published by Britain’s Daily Express newspaper, photos taken over the years by American storm chasers Mike Hollingshead and Eric Nguyen.