Dali House

“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.

A few days after Henri Matisse came teetering into Gertrude Stein’s apartment in Paris in that 1907 spring with the great lump of a sculpted African torso he’d just bought, making Picasso’s eyes bug out even more than usual, Pablo dragged his pal André Derain over to the Trocadéro Museum of Ethnology, as the Museum of Man at the Palais de Chaillot was then known. It had a 30-year-old collection of the African stuff. It still has (along with René Descartes’ brain, for some reason), but back then the knickknacks of colonialism were all mouldy and neglected, and the Spaniard was miffed in the must.

“I was so depressed that I would have chosen to leave immediately,” Picasso recalled, “but I forced myself to stay.” And stay he did, elevating the centuries-old tribal “objects that people had created with a sacred, magical purpose” into the most modern of all European art forms. Matisse, Braque and Modigliani kept pace with him, re-moulding the rough-hewn angularity into a new way of seeing the world … but what happened to Derain?

André Derain was 27 when Pablo pulled him into the dusty Trocadéro archives. He hailed from Chatou on the Île-de-France, and was going to be an engineer, but then veered into the less reasonable side of design. He took painting classes at the Académie Carrière and sketched up and down the Parisian Seine and at the Louvre, where in 1899 he met an old classmate, Georges Florentin Linaret, who was by then studying under Gustave Moreau, as was Matisse.

To their extraordinary experiments, Derain brought his admiration for Cézanne and, following the 1901 tribute exhibition at Bernheim-Jeune, of Van Gogh. At this show Derain introduced Matisse to Maurice de Vlaminck, with whom he was by then sharing a studio in Chatou in the western suburbs, where the impressionists once conspired at the Maison Fournaise (it’s on the same street as Dali House).

Derain was drafted for a three-year stint with the army, and painted little during that time. Only two of his works have been ascribed to 1903: “The Soldiers’ Ball of Suresnes” (detail here), done while he was on leave, and “Self-portrait in the Studio”, now at the National Gallery of Australia.

The latter was a fast look in the mirror between bugle calls, but thoughtfully composed around flashes of bright hue. Compare that with “Portrait of the Artist” (Minneapolis Institute of Arts) from about a decade later, on the right, and you’ll see where this post is heading.

When Derain was through with marching, Matisse — who found him delightfully open-minded and a solid, quick worker — was ready to talk his parents out of the engineering nonsense altogether and got him into the Académie Julian. Things proceeded apace, a career blossomed, and by 1905 Derain was able to sell everything in his studio to Ambroise Vollard, and he and Matisse spent the summer in Collioure on the overbright southern coast, where they went completely bonkers with the colours. See the rest.

At risk of becoming “the fake-art blog”, Dali House would now like to pay tribute to the late, great Elmyr de Hory, who was so good at copying the masters that collectors started lining up for his own work just so they could say they owned a painting by the world’s greatest forger. And, in the greatest homage any citizen of this world could ever hope for, Hollywood made a movie about him. Actually, it was a documentary written and directed by my fellow Georgetowner Orson Welles.

Also, Clifford Irving, another venerated name in fakedom, wrote a book about Elmyr. Struggling for a title, he decided to call it “Fake!” Now Irving is getting a movie of his own, based on that little practical joke of a Howard Hughes “autobiography” for which he did 14 months in the slammer. Richard Gere is playing Irving in “The Hoax”, due out any day now.

Elmyr de Hory kept art connoisseurs and the cops guessing for three decades with his renditions of Picasso, Vlaminck, Chagall, Toulouse-Lautrec, Dufy, Derain, Matisse, Degas, Bonnard, Laurencin and Modigliani. Interpol and the FBI were always looking for him. See the rest.

A little joie de vivre with “Happy Quartet” and “The Football Players”, both from 1908.

Second of three parts, continued from here.

This is “View of the Ile de la Cite, Paris”, painted sometime in the 1890s, an extraordinary scene from Rousseau’s imagination concocted in crimson paint and contrasts. It seems to suggest the destruction of the old city to make way for the new, but has also been interpreted as a representation of the mystery he always found in the City of Light.

Rousseau finally retired from the Octroi in 1893 to paint full-time. Just 49, he supplemented his small pension with part-time jobs and busking in the streets with his violin. Soon after he met the iconoclastic writer Alfred Jarry, who coincidentally also hailed from Laval (and would be buried in the same cemetery as Rousseau).

It was in fact Jarry, soon to be the infamous playwright of “Ubu Roi”, who gave him the nickname Le Douanier. In the avant-garde review Mercure de France, he praised Rousseau’s “War”, from 1894, seen above: “The black leaves that populate the purple clouds; the ruins, tumbling like pine cones among the corpses, translucent with lack of oxygen, littered with pale-beaked crows.”

With its striking use of allegory, the work, alluding to the Franco-Prussian conflict of 25 years earlier, almost prophetically broke from Romantic tradition and showed only the horror of battle – and it convinced many that Rousseau was much more than a minor landscapist. It marked the beginning of his recognition as a serious painter. See the rest.