From Thiebaud to Manzoni, contemporary art at auction in New York (Sotheby's)

The auction presents 51 lots that have been on public display since November 1 in the galleries of Sotheby's York Avenue, along with the Contemporary Art Auction and November sales of Impressionist and Modern art.

Here are some works from the Contemporary Art auction:

Executed at a critical moment in the career of Willem de Kooning, Untitled XXII from 1977 represents the apex of the artist's mature production. Exhausted by the noise and strain of Manhattan life during the early part of his career, de Kooning spent summers in East Hampton beginning in 1959, and moved permanently to Springs in 1963 to immerse himself in the light-filled and tranquil environment. While Untitled XXII remains abstract, it evokes the essence, memories and experience of de Kooning's oceanic and peaceful surroundings that captivated the artist, reminding him of his childhood home in Holland. Marking the artist's return to painting after a hiatus focused on drawing and sculpture, Untitled XXII is part of an explosive burst of creativity that has produced an illustrious body of color-drenched large-scale canvases that rank among the most iconic of de Kooning's career.

Blue Over Red represents Mark Rothko's first critical year work of 1953 to be auctioned off in over a decade (estimate $25/35 million). The painting represents a critical period of development in the first half of the 50s, immediately following his move to a new studio at the back of MoMA, where he painted some of his most groundbreaking explorations of color. Blue Over Red was acquired directly from the artist in 1957 by legendary dealer and collector Harold Diamond, and subsequently spent decades with Baltimore collectors Israel and Selma Rosen, who offered the work for auction in 2005 when it sold for $5,6 million. It has remained in the same private collection since 2007.

The PH-399 demonstrates the radical innovation of Still's visionary work. Painted in 1946 – the same year as the artist's first solo exhibition in New York – the present work is an early milestone in Still's practice. PH-399 marks not only the realization of Still's signature style, but also the very inauguration of abstract expressionism – during 1946, Mark Rothko would receive his first solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, paintings by Jackson Pollock appear for the first time in the annual exhibition of the Whitney Museum in New York, and the art critic Robert Coates would formally coin the term "abstract expressionism" in
The New Yorker as a means of describing the new movement which, in the coming years, would emerge as the predominant art modality of the New York School and the wider art world.
As a testament to the significance of the present work, PH-399 was selected by Still himself for inclusion in his seminal 1959 exhibition, Paintings by Clyfford Still, organized by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo. Personally curated by the artist, this exhibition was Still's first large-scale investigation and remains among the most important exhibitions of his career. When asked to pose for a photograph within the exhibition, Still chose to stand in front of PH-399, solidifying its status as a singularly iconic representation not only of his celebrated output, but within the mythic narrative and of the development of post-war painting.

Emerging from a golden childhood memory, Wayne Thiebaud's beautifully colored desserts arranged in a classic restaurant or cafeteria style are a motif he famously invented in 1961 – and one he has revisited over the course of nearly seven decades. These lighthearted objects and hallmarks of middle-class consumption evoke a sense of 60s exuberance and prosperity. The evening auction will offer Thiebaud's cashed cakes his first cake counter which has been appearing at auction since 1997. Measuring an impressive 72 inches tall, the work is also exceptionally large within the artist's oeuvre, and has remained in the same distinguished private collection since being acquired directly by the artist in 2011, the year of the its completion.

"I am not able to understand painters who, while declaring themselves interested in modern problems, still today look at a painting as if it were a surface to be filled with color and shapes according to a taste that can be more or less appreciated and that is more or less trained […]. The painting is thus completed and a surface with limitless possibilities is finally reduced to a kind of vessel in which unnatural color and artificial meaning are forced and compressed. Why not empty this recipient instead? Why not clear the surface? Why not try to discover the limitless meaning of total space? Of pure and absolute light? ”(The artist mentioned in“ Free dimension “, Azimut 2, 1960)
“One of the two works has already been exhibited in many prestigious exhibitions, while the other [the present work] was hidden from view until not so long ago. Two canvases of such extraordinary strength, able to take my breath away the first time I saw them together in a room in Zurich…” (Rosalia Pasqualino di Marineo, ed., Piero Manzoni: The Twin Paintings, New York, 2017, p. 7)
Executed in 1959, the present work is among the most monumental and visually compelling examples of Piero Manzoni's groundbreaking acrome series. Representing the maximum expression of Manzoni's central philosophy, Achrome surprisingly embodies the artist's theoretical and technical research to free painting from the constraints of representation and forced gestures. As argued by the influential Italian art critic Germano Celant: “Manzoni's Achrome aspired to cut the umbilical cord between artifact and maker; it aimed to reduce the dependence of art on the artist… the Achromi do not represent any tonality, any chromatic memory. Nothing that could recall the nature of the artist's passion.” (Exh. Cat., London, The Serpentine Gallery, Piero Manzoni, 1998, p. 22) First conceived in 1957 as a conscious rejection of the machismo action of Abstract Expressionism in the United States and the pictorial gestures of Art Informel in Europe, the paintings of Achrome represent Manzoni's attempt to completely separate the painted surface from the active participation of the artist and to overcome the fetishism of the artistic gesture with a contemporary taste. As such, Achrome's paintings occupy a position of unassailable meaning: the unbound primacy of crystallized material form as pure signifier posits one of the most radical conceptual gestures in twentieth-century art history. At over 50 inches wide, the 1959 Achrome is a true masterpiece of this revered and ambitious corpus. Of the approximately three hundred works composed of kaolin on canvas, the present work is one of only nine pieces executed in such monumental proportions; others of this group reside in esteemed collections such as the Pompidou Center, Paris; the Civic Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art, Turin; the Museum Moderner Kunst, Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna; and the Rachofsky Collection in Dallas. Full of soft streaks and lyrical folds, Achrome immediately evokes a sense of sculptural solidity and an ethereal lightness; yet, devoid of signifiers or ties to representation, Achrome is nothing but its very existence, an emancipated tabula rasa emptied of allegory, allusion and narrative expression.
The present work belongs to an important pair of paintings which was recently honored with an ambitious project to examine it and its sister work; this project was undertaken by Rosalia Pasqualino di Marineo, director of the Piero Manzoni Foundation, and recently completed in 2017. This project sought to correct the first omission of Achrome in Germano Celant's first General Catalog (an oversight due to the painting's pristine provenance in a private collection while the original raisonné catalog – published in 1974 – was in progress). Of this project, the director Pasqualino di Marieno writes: "The project that characterizes these two achromes," heterozygous twins ", is decidedly out of the ordinary. In fact, for me it is probably a unique event and one that is unlikely to be repeated: two paintings so important, different and yet the same, that they could be placed side by side and studied once more and deepened this time. ” (Rosalia Pasqualino di Marineo, ed., Piero Manzoni: The Twin Paintings, New York, 2017, p. 7) Guided by the director of the Piero Manzoni Foundation, The Twin Paintings brings together important research that firmly consolidates the present work within Manzoni prodigious work, despite its flamboyance in recent decades. Pasqualino di Marineo writes: “One of the two works has already been exhibited in many prestigious exhibitions, while the other [the present work] was hidden from view until not long ago. Two canvases of such extraordinary force, able to take my breath away the first time I saw them together in one room in Zurich… ”(Ibid.)
To create the Achrome paintings, Manzoni first glued a raw, unpainted canvas into a seemingly organic arrangement of self-proliferating folds and creases, then applied kaolin – a chalky, colorless solution that is used in porcelain manufacture – to the surface of the canvas and allowed the chalk-like solution to dry. Ultimately it is through the self-defined drying process, without the intervention of the artist, that the work reaches its final form. Even whiter and purer than the original raw canvas, kaolin offered Manzoni the ideal medium with which to conceive his "unpainted" achromatic paintings. This technique not only removes the artist's hand, but also enhances the sculptural depth and solidity of the undulations of the surface. Indeed, the horizontal folds and ridges of Achrome appear to be preserved like a fossil, petrified in a state of material metamorphosis. No longer the fluid softness and liquidity of its primary state, but a positive and a negative suspended hardened in a double affirmation of both substance and emptiness: a true exemplification of Manzoni's metaphysical quest for "total space" and "pure absolute light". . artist quoted in “Dimensione libera”, Azimut 2, 1960, np) By displacing artistic agency and gestures from the surface of the canvas, Manzoni aimed to eliminate representation and in it obtain a completely self-produced metaphysical image of absolute purity.
While Manzoni experimented with a plethora of materials, including substances as disparate as straw, styrofoam, gravel, rolls, felt and wool, his iconic body of "achromatic" works on canvas composed of kaolin-saturated folds forms the apogee of the pioneering concept of the dialogue artist. Exceptional in scale and compositional complexity, Achrome stands as a paragon of this body of work: framed by two horizontal bands of tonally diaphanous, veil-like kaolin, the enveloping central field of taut folds saturated with heavy kaolin is utterly mesmeric. Though Manzoni specifically avoided referentiality, the exquisite formal harmony evident in Achrome suggests a sort of organic architecture, as if harnessing and releasing an innate beauty that lay dormant in the materials of the canvas and kaolin themselves. The beautifully rich and chromatically homogeneous surface evokes the dusty fragility of plaster and the cold solidity of marble. The absorption and reflection of natural light by the china clay folds, accentuated by their striated angular ridges, evoke the tactile folds of sculpted Renaissance drapery, while the intricate surface complexity creates a dramatic chiaroscuro to seduce our eye, as the dark and light are strikingly juxtaposed. Seemingly white, kaolin works by removing color and adding weight, giving these works a certain sense of monumentality that abstractly evokes classic marble statuary. However, if this work evokes the monumental art of the past, it is only a testament to the insularity of the art itself, a purely visual language of resplendent luminous materiality.
During a tragically short life cut short at the age of just thirty, Manzoni took a revolutionary conceptual approach to the creation and display of art, emphasizing the surface and materials as the true subject of the work. In creating the Achromi, Manzoni awakened an area of ​​creativity in which the subject of the painting was the self-generating form of himself; in 1960 he wrote: “The artist has achieved integral freedom; pure material becomes pure energy; all the problems of art criticism are overcome; everything is permitted". (Ibid.) Manzoni's prescient innovations anticipated both Conceptualism and Arte Povera, while his artistic legacy, sanctioned by iconic works such as the current Achrome, persists as a revolutionary presence in contemporary art today.