Dali House

This extraordinary bit of fancy — on the Sotheby’s block in Paris on May 21 — came from the sprawling Simone Collinet collection of books, manuscripts and photos. Nine notebooks that Andre Breton had scrawled and doodled all over were among the items up for auction, but this one from 1578 is what caught my eye.

It’s an illustration from a text entitled “Theatrum Instrumentorum et Machinarum” by the French scientist Jacques Besson. That’s “Theatre of Instruments and Machines”, but the entire book is in Latin. The auctioneers were expecting to pocket between 4,000 and 6,000 euros for it.

Brimming with notions, Besson was hired by Charles IX as “master of the King’s Engines”, and in that capacity he put this book together, with illustrations by Jacques Androuet du Cerceau. Wikipedia says it was probably a rush job — only brief captions are given — due to the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of Protestants, which soon sent Besson scurrying to England.

Sotheby’s sales pitch alluded to a mix of “extremely serious scientific inventions and of unusable imaginations”. Uselessness notwithstanding, the book “played a big role in the diffusion of certain ideas” by way of nine editions in five different languages over the course of 30 years.

A quick google found the whole book online thanks to the Smithsonian Institute Libraries, and the label on the above illustration is “Suspended horse-drawn carriage”. Demons seem to be the chief components in the suspension, so I’m afraid the science eludes me. See the rest.

“Portrait of Frau Isabel Styler-Tas”, sometimes called “Melancolia”, appears in the Dali Planet biography (here), but I didn’t realise that it pays homage to Giuseppe Arcimboldo (as well as Mrs Styler-Tas) until I read a Guardian review of the Arcimboldo exhibition that’s at Vienna’s Kunsthistoriches Museum until June 29.

Specifically, he’s alluding to “Winter”, shown above, from the 16th-century Milanese master’s series on the seasons, though I have no idea what he had in mind in making it a mirror image of the good frau, as seen here.

There’s an image of the full painting at the bottom of this post.

The surrealists’ shared affection for this 400-year-old precursor would have come naturally, to pun on Arcimboldo’s keen eye for nature (which isn’t as bad as the Guardian’s use of the term “family tree”). It said the 1937 exhibition “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism” at New York’s Museum of Modern Art actually featured works by the Italian antecedent, who was famous for his visual puns and double meanings. At right is “The Librarian” from 1566.

And, like Dali, Arcimboldo’s state of mind has been called into question on the basis of the gargoyles he came up with, which some find as scary as anything by Hieronymus Bosch. Even art historian Sylvio Leidi speaks of “nightmarish visions” in the catalogue for the current exhibition, and traces his ghoulishness back to early tapestries in which grimacing old men and ape-like faces vie for attention. See the rest.

Leeuwarden, the Netherlands: hometown of MC Escher and Mata Hari.

Henk Hofstra’s “Art Eggcident” — not an accident at all, of course, but a sunny-side-up sculpture installation — will be frying in the Zaailand, a public square in Friesland’s capital, all summer long. The puns have been cracking since the immense ova went on view earlier this month, with some advocating a side exhibition of Francis Bacon, but it’s no yolk!

Hofstra, who’s a witty 54, continues to be given extreme elbow room in Holland for some (probably humorous) reason. Last time it was the town of Drachten letting him paint 1,000 metres of roadway cerulean blue. From the air it looked like a river, but just in case Hofstra added the message in white “water is life”.

“Portrait of a Young Woman” by Pablo Picasso, 1903. Was this the same “Portrait of a Young Woman” that a New Yorker bought in 1922 for $550?

By 1922 America was already a feisty, industrial global power that had banged its stamp on world affairs, but there was still a lot of colonial thinking. The isolationist sentiment that had kept it out of the Great War for so long had come with a self-reliance that let its citizens scoff at other nationalities.

In New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art scoffed at the modern stuff trickling across the ocean from Europe. It would be another seven years before Abby Aldrich Rockefeller founded the Museum of Modern Art as a cradle on Yankee soil for the new ways of looking at things. There were by then, at least, already a lot of good pictures floating around stateside.

But in 1922 the New York Times was no doubt speaking for the majority when it surveyed a gaggle of European artworks being auctioned in Manhattan and allowed itself, while pandering to the more cosmopolitan elite, a Bronx cheer at the lot.

“That there is a demand in this country for the work of modern French artists known as extremists was shown at the opening sale of the collection of French pictures belonging to Dikran Khan Kelekian [*more on him in a bit], under the auspices of the American Art Association, at the Hotel Plaza last evening,” it reported on January 31 that year. [Download the article in PDF format here.]

“What the result of the sale would be every one had been in doubt. It was the first of its kind in this country. ‘You must make your bids,’ said Thomas E Kirby, from the auctioneer’s bench, putting up the first picture, ‘we have no previous records to go upon in this sale.’”

A portrait by Matisse, the paper said, “brought a burst of laughter when it was put up. It was a small picture, a little girl with red hair, a green and black frock, orange bow on her hair, painted against a brilliant green background. The portrait had many characteristics of the work of a child on a slate, but … “

– and now it’s our turn to laugh (or cry) –

“… it started at $100 and went up to $300.”

A Matisse painting for $300. When, oh, when are they going to invent that blasted time machine? Below are Renoir’s “Portrait of a Girl”, which seems to be the one at issue here, and “Roses”, which is coming up for sale in a few moments.

“There were many beautiful things in the sale and others which, while quite normal, seemed to bring prices out of proportion to their beauty. A watercolor, by Cazanne [sic], No 31, ‘Geranium’, was simply a flourishing geranium with green leaves, not even a blossom, as someone said, in a light-toned flowerpot against a buff background. It was a small picture, altogether about the size of of a small pot of geraniums … It brought $650.

“There is little intrinsic value to a picture — its value is in the skill of the artist and his appeal to the people. Six hundred and fifty dollars would have bought a large garden of geraniums, but the sale of the picture shows that the work of the French modern artists appeals to Americans.” Cezanne’s “Two Trees” managed to earn $500.

Flash forward to May 2008. “Geranium” — by Matisse, though, not “Cazanne” — delivers $9.5 million at auction, right here in New York. Christie’s was hoping for $2.5 million to $3.5 million. See the rest.

Salvador thoughtfully butchers a torso so the egg can be harvested from the womb in this dramatic late-period bronze called “Venus Spatiale”, yours for possibly 15,000 euros at Sotheby’s “Modern & Contemporary Art” sale in Milan on May 27.

The big selling point, of course, will be the clock melting down the goddess’ throat. It’s definitely a Dali motif package, absolutely made for the market.

MAY 27 UPDATE: Wrong again. NOT SOLD!

Something with a little more heft to it? One of Robert Indiana’s original “Love” paintings is up for bids at the same auction, and expected to bring only 4,000 to 6,000 euros.

Not for sale at the moment is another of Dali’s style statements, the 1981 oil-collage-felt-tip-pen-and-gouache-on-copper concoction below, “Ready-to-wear Fashion for Next Spring (Garlands, Nests and Flowers)”.