Jewels Jewels

Recently I interviewed Prince Dimitri, who is descendant from generations of royalty where jewelry was an integral part of life. These next few posts are about his fabulous jewelry quite different to anything else you see today.

We started off talking about his love of hard stones

 

“My New Cool Jewelry is about the wonders of earth and the stones and crystals in its crust. I grew up surrounded by beautiful stones objects. The three ashtrays above are on the mantelpiece of my mother’s home in Paris and inspired pebbles that have ruby in their matrix.”

 

“Lapis Lazuli is one of my favourite stones and has always been man’s most sought after stone. It is a symbol of royalty, wisdom and truth.”

 

“Whatever new rock finds I come across become a new series of stones cut to maximize their beauty. My bracelets are not just to be worn but to inspire celebration of the wonders of nature. Those who wear them become collectors of hard stones. These are ocean Jasper.”

Gold and Silver are forever the richest stones yielded from earth’s face and for me they are the mark of elegance for men and women. My crest is engraved into these stone jewels.

 

“My pebble bracelets here in a black and white story with rock crystal , tahitian pearl, hematite, and silver.”

 

 

“Here are stones waiting to be made up into orders. Each is from a rock I have personally selected and is available in limited editions.”

 

See Prince Dimitri upcoming web soon to order.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Dreams that Live in our Clothes

Feminism in the 1960’s into the 70’s called on women to step from the demure suburban post war housewife in her tight waisted dress and flared skirt into a new ideal of Beauty.  Around the world women starting seeing themselves differently. They dreamed of a new reality where they would have much more freedom and took on positions in professions, corporations and in their own businesses that demanded attire that was clean cut without whimsy or frills.  In the early 1970’s America brought to Europe a new look with interchangeable separates that could carry a woman from the office to the evening cocktail party.

However as early as 1960 the design house Céline in Paris catering to an elegant clientele had started making well cut skirts, trousers, jackets and blouses in ready to wear clothing that stressed fabric and cut. The dream of an upper middle class post war society was for far away places, a world made smaller because of easier air travel.  Women lived out of suitcases but arriving in Paris, London or Milan they wanted to look chic and elegant.

 I just found this skirt by Celine in Johanneburg, looking as fresh and timeless as when it was first made .

This fashion house was born of the dream of Parisian Céline Vipiana who believed a new society would emerge after the 2nd world war who would want luxury goods.

With help from her husband Robert, she opened a boutique in Paris,focusing on handbags and shoes. The Céline handbag into the present remains unique for its elegance, distinct classical look and craftsmanship.  And women yearn for handbags – the handbag is like a jewel. It carries the dream of every woman of what she aspires to, who she would like to be , the image of an icon embedded in her mind. These are dreams that last forever.

The brand of Celine caters to an association of distinction and history.  Recently the fashion house moved to a Neoclassical Mansion Hôtel Colbert de Torcy in Rue Vivienne in Paris.

It is also close to the Palais Royal where the French Royalty lived four hundred years ago.

When you step into the showrooms of this fashion house today its marble floors and staircase  cant help but carry your mind to another era of grandeur.

Anyone who walks up those stairs today will think of how they are in the heart of a city that has breathed fashion as far back as the days of Louis XIV who revived all the luxury trades in France making Versailles a showcase for all that Paris could offer.  It was Parisian designers who turned women into icons of their era, making their inner dreams of royalty be true in appearance even if they had failed in reality such as the Duchess of Windsor.

This is what clothes do to us. They transform us from who we think we are to someone else that the brand identity carries with it.  The choice of showroom in an age where so many fashion designers fight to keep names is essential to weaving dreams into our clothes.

Clothes are an art just as much as any other art form, and just as art has the ability to show us a reality we do not know, clothes too can take us from the present into a different era. Perhaps that is why Vintage clothes have such an allure.

I bought the 70s skirt I found in Johannesburg because it made me think of Paris. It made me feel as I put it on that I was on Rue Vivienne.  That I was standing in the entrance way of the famous covered boulevard on that street which is one of the secret shopping passageways of Paris.

I thought of being inside standing on the mosaic floor designed in the 19th Century in what was then the location for the most celebrated and desired boutiques of Paris.

All of that has changed and the boutiques and grand fashion houses have moved elsewhere because after 1871 Paris changed to a city of wide streets and boulevards. However it still has is secrets and whether you dream of them when you put on its fashions or when you take them off, it holds a picture of being someone other than who you are.

Peter Clarke – Explore

I have met many great artists over the years, in fact some of the names that light up the 20th Century. Few however have affected me as deeply as the South African artist Peter Clarke. On Sunday I heard he had died and my sadness was not only for a whole generation of artists for whom he was a mentor and guide, but for my own loss in someone  who taught me about Contemporary Art in South Africa. What I remember most is a discussion that hardship had not changed for an artist even if power had. There is no government support for art in South Africa. There are few Foundations. It is hard for artists to survive between exhibitions and there is little acknowledgment for the daily reality of a young artist’s life.

“You know,” he said “for many young artists at the end of the day they turn round and say ‘why  even bother’.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Peter was a man whose life had been about exploring.  During his life he explored the world around him chronicling the whole era of apartheid and the movement of people forcibly from one place to another. He explored the world outside traveling to London and Europe, absorbing other artistic styles. He was a writer, a poet, a painter and a humanist. His belief reflected in his work is the dignity of man. His canvasses show his interest in expressionism but also the impact of artists such as Diego Rivera who commented on his own social environment in Mexico.  The people and the landscapes that inhabit Peter Clarke’s work could be anywhere and everywhere. The broad planes, the two dimensional flattened images and people could as easily be of Mexico, South America, Haiti or South Africa.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

They are stories of people who suffer but the paintings nevertheless still sing. The vivid colors, the broad landscapes are filled with hope. The figures are always upright, or in a quirky pose such as in the painting that hung on his wall of a boy walking with his mother and grandmother.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Most likely this is Peter. The polka dots on his mother’s dress dance with gaiety. The grandmother is a solid flattened piece of blue – something that can’t bend no matter the wind. That is exactly how I found Peter. He had climbed over all the obstacles of his life and the little books he showed me when I visited were about the new ideas that came daily to him. Chasing the ideas, putting them down, capturing his thoughts and commenting on his world had been what his life was about and if fame had found him that was just something else to bring glee to his face.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The current has changed. Unlike Peter’s time, now Africa is hot. The interest in a new richly fertile art carries its own dangers. Artists eager to exhibit overseas do not know the shark tank. They do not know that art is not just a thing of beauty but it is a commodity and the artist himself worth little outside the ability of his works to perform. And performance is not always about great art, it is the hype that may go along with it. I think there is much more to a Peter Clarke painting than a Jeff Koons inflated puppy dog but Peter hails from Africa and Koons from America and there is a wide ocean in between. 

Pop Goes The Soda

artstolife

Shake the bottle hard enough before you drink and its guaranteed that when you flip the lid,  soda will explode like surf swept by wind as sea lashes sand. The fact is –  a woman cannot be suppressed.

Queen Victoria’s frowning face and her black dress after she lost her Albert stamped the 19th Century.

A harsh morality reached from her throne and tiny shore, all round the world, whispering that sex was evil – and if you did it outside the marriage bed you were surely damned.

Poor women, already in the 18th Century they were plagued with fear, “Does he Love me? Does he not?”

But how could they know? No one dared touch. And so for a hundred years they married men they had not really tried, and then  sewed their passion into tight right fabric rings, each prick of the finger a dart of quiet remorse.

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Pop Goes The Soda

Shake the bottle hard enough before you drink and its guaranteed that when you flip the lid,  soda will explode like surf swept by wind as sea lashes sand. The fact is –  a woman cannot be suppressed.

Queen Victoria’s frowning face and her black dress after she lost her Albert stamped the 19th Century.

A harsh morality reached from her throne and tiny shore, all round the world, whispering that sex was evil – and if you did it outside the marriage bed you were surely damned.

Poor women, already in the 18th Century they were plagued with fear, “Does he Love me? Does he not?”

But how could they know? No one dared touch. And so for a hundred years they married men they had not really tried, and then  sewed their passion into tight right fabric rings, each prick of the finger a dart of quiet remorse.

At Art Basel Miami 2013 – Isolation

 

In a globalized world there are no longer discussions relating to place, time and culture. What art works relate to in one way or another pertain to the human condition. One of the most dominant realities of out time is that of isolation. This work is by the multi media London based artist Isaac Julien  This photograph is about a housekeeper in Dubai who is trapped in an immaculate apartment in the middle of the desert. It is based on the true story of Julien’s real-life housekeeper, a Filipino woman who went to Dubai in search of work, became suffocated by her isolation, and escaped to London where she found a job with the artist.

 

Alicja Kwade uses mixed-media in her works to manipulate mental perceptions and physical experiences of how the body inhabits space and time. In her sculpture for Art Basel a lone figure encased in a block with empty blocks all around it. I read this as a piece also exploring the idea of isolation and entrapment.

The idea of isolation can also be that of the artist himself who may persist in pursuing a vision despite public rejection. I read Marilyn Minter’s piece “Stranded” at Art Basel as relating to her own journey.  For decades her work was branded as pornographic and she was rejected for overtly sexual imagery. Although she turned to fashion and glamour and fused this into her paintings – her work remains charged with sexuality. She writes “But now I am communicating, and people are hearing me. I’m in a really unique position. I’m getting all this success, but I’m notgoing to go crazy, because I don’t really care. What does it really change? Ifeel really lucky. I lived through it. But I know the way the world works—I’ve got a couple of years and then I’ll get criticized again.

 

The fact is that although many artists deny it, the idea of isolation exists in one way or another.

 

Contemporary African Art

 

 

 

Jane Alexander’s Invisible Reality on the Auction Floor at Strauss and Co. in Johannesburg, South Africa

I have not lived in South Africa for 40 years though I grew up here. I wrote this piece after seeing the work in a press release. When I received the catalogue the interpretation from a South Africa perspective was very different. I had not linked the hybridity of her creatures with the complex ethnic mix of South Africa or tension between racial groups. It is true there are layers of meanings in these works I have not addressed. My interpretation is based on viewing Jane Alexander outside of her time and place. This is how I see her works.

Jane Alexander ranks with other great 20^th Century artists who set out to show the duality of life in which the official perception of everyday reality is independent of the reality of the imagination.  It is the reality of the imagination, of a higher reality, that penetrates far beyond what the eye can or wants to see. Under oppressive regimes; in response to atrocity; or social decadence art plays a vital role in society in challenging the status quo. Jane Alexander ‘s two works coming to auction  at Straus and Co. in Johannesburg–“Untitled” and “West Coast African Angel” – present themselves as part of a 20^th century artistic dialogue where the viewer is not invited to read recognizable art forms or imagery, but to cross over to a reality otherwise invisible.   Anselm Kieffer’s abstract canvasses filled with his own indigenous set of subjects and symbols explore the unseen reality of the fraught territory of German history.

 

 

 Russian Non-Conformist art starting in the 1960s in Soviet Russia was doubly real because it had no relation to reality and it challenged the status of official artistic reality.

 

Dmitry Krasnopevtsev, Still life, stones and skulls (1962).

 When in became accepted in the 1970s it was the beginning of the end of the Soviet Regime. Franics Bacon invited experience of inhumanity through his portraiture of some of the most iconic images of wounded and traumatized humanity in  post-war art. His subjects were always portrayed as violently distorted, presented not as sociable and charismatic types but as isolated souls imprisoned and tormented by existential dilemma. Jane Alexander makes possible, through her sculptures, intense experience of inhumanity and the bestial in man.

Working in the 80’s in South Africa Jane Alexander observed and experienced the increasing conflict and violence between Afrikaans oppressor and the black oppressed. Apartheid, which had segregated white from black since 1948, had by the 1980s reached a crises point. Refusal to accept the degradation of the previous generation, black youth formed subversive groups and with increased protest challenged a system that was intolerable in modern society. Reacting against this threat to the existing establishment, the Afrikaner government became more ruthless, more brutal.   

 

In  Untitled, due to be auctioned on November 11^th, Alexander places a life-size burly figure in a wooden armchair. His decaying flesh is splattered with discoloration. At the rear, his skin is broken open to reveal his brain and spinal column. Draped over his neck is a leather and rubber strap – originally used in the Witwatersrand mines to secure a damaged body to a stretcher to hoist from a shaft. Deprived of a mouth, his face without expression, the figure can merely bear witness to the events in his view, unable to comment, protest, or condone. His eyes do not return one’s gaze but seem to drift off in view of something further, beyond his immediate reach. The placement of the figure on a chair resembles a man strapped to an electric chair, about to be obliterated. The work reaches beyond the gold mines of Johannesburg and its inhuman working conditions; beyond the pain of being black in an Apartheid regime; beyond the daily threat of harm. The work is universal in depicting human suffering.  It reaches back to ancient Roman times. It addresses the ruler and the ruled. For the latter, savaged and broken, life is of no consequence.  For the onlooker this work demands a crossing over from a reality that has seemingly been acceptable to a reality that exits and has been ignored. It is an invisible reality of the depths of inhumanity. In South Africa in the 1980s, this was particularly potent.

Not at auctions at Strauss and Co. but necessary to consider as the counterpart to Untitled is Jane Alexander’s Butcher Boys in the collection of Iziko South African National Gallery. The piece is composed of three life-size sculptures of eerily deformed men with animal horns sitting on a bench as if they are in deep thought. The experience for the viewer is one of discomfort and repugnance. But the work is not limited to its perceived intent of presenting the brutal dehumanizing forces of Apartheid. It could exist in any context addressing the bestial, naked animal forces in man.

The 2^nd piece to be auctioned by at Strauss and Co. is Jane Alexander’s West Coast African Angel. Here a strange creature half bird, half man is frantically riding a bicycle. The creature which most closely resembles a flamingo, a bird normally serene – appears to be both transmuted and coming apart as the thin layer of feathers on its wings cannot support its ability to fly. The bicycle, on which it now relies, is so vital to its existence that the creature has allowed the ascending front bar to penetrate its neck, and the rod is what keeps its head upright. Its fragility encompasses us as we cross from the safe to the unsafe, and acknowledge our own angst in the real reality of our existence

Jane Alexander’s body of work adheres to the 20^th century philosophy of art as an experience. The idea of art as an experience began with the breakdown of religious belief that accompanied 19^th century industrialization and scientific innovations. Reacting against perceived crises with the emergence of a new modern society, some artists looked back to a pre-modern way of experiencing the world and explored immaterial experiences.  However others, as the century progressed, adopted Symbolism, Surrealism, Abstraction, and later Pop as they prioritized the invisible, the unconscious, the irrational and the visionary. The mission of art became one of requiring the viewer to step from the known to the unknown. It requires a mental decision to see things differently. Crossing from the perceived real to what one can not see on one’s own allows for an inner enlightenment, a religious conversion.

Jane Alexander’s work cannot be described as art from the Continent of Africa. It is mainstream Contemporary Art. Whatever the price it achieves at Strauss and Co. on Nov 11^th will be miniscule against its greater destiny.

 

 

 

 

 

 

1920 Dutch Expressionism discovered in South Africa

In every painting there is a story that extends beyond its maker; its time period or the movement in art it represents.  Its story is about the interaction between artists; the social and political environment of the time when it was executed; and the circumstances surrounding its acquisition. Where a painting’s provenance is of continuous ownership over a period of more than half a century its history is bound up with the vision of its collector and the changing times of the collector’s own environment.

Two expressionist paintings by the Dutch artist Jan Wiegers, executed in the early 1920’s in Frauenkirch, Davos are to be auctioned in November in Johannesburg, South Africa. The current owner, himself a collector, inherited the paintings from his father, a Bloemfontein doctor Dr. F.P. Scott.  Dr. Scott bought the paintings in 1940 in Groningen, Holland where he was studying medicine. His purchase was remarkable because despite exposure while in Groningen to the avant-garde in Europe, his visual repertoire since childhood had been influenced by Calvinist puritanism where Dutch Reformed churches are devoid of any decoration.

Art in South Africa was likewise conservative and devoid of human emotion. Yet he acquired deeply emotive works and at a time when Expressionism was no longer fashionable and in fact politically incorrect in Europe.

The two paintings by Jan Wiegers are: “Haus in den Lärchen” and “Still Life with Sculptures”  They are pivotal works because in their style and content they confirm Wiegers’ relationship with Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, founder of the group “Die Bruke”, in Dresden, who adopted a new form of art called Expressionism. The impact of Kirchener on Wiegers would result in German Expressionism making its way to Groningen and impacting members of Wiegers own group “Die Ploeg.”

The acquisition of Wiegers’ work twenty years later would, with the return of the doctor to South Africa after the Second World War, be inspirational to a new generation of artists working in the Orange Free State who challenged existing norms in South Africa and introduced personal innovative ways to create art with distinct artistic styles and philosophy pushing South African towards the avant garde.

The aesthetics of South Africa in the formative years of Dr. Scott’s education was one where the most pleasing art was that which depicted the changing moods of the land; of mountains, valleys and seascapes devoid of human beings. A leading artist was Jacobus Pierneef known for his formalized and ordered view of the landscape.

The only other forms of art deemed acceptable were Edwardian portraits and sporting paintings, which were favored by the new millionaires in Johannesburg. These “Rand Lords” had made their money on the diamond fields and in the gold mines and sought to announce their social ascendancy by mimicking British taste in architecture, interior design, and art collecting.

The frictions that had led to the Boer War were still in the air in these early years of the South African Union.  British and Afrikaner clung to their own distinct social identities and art making was acceptable only if it was “safe” – that nothing in it challenged the status quo.  Some artists had gone abroad to study and absorbed Cubism, Fauvism, Expressionism and Surrealism such as Maggie Laubser and Irma Stern but their art was regarded as crude and insulting.  It is a long leap from this ordered unemotional visual canvas to Expressionism.

What would lead Jan Wiegers, who having trained in Groningen where he excelled as a sculptor, painter and printmaker, to adopt a new unique style of painting in 1920 started in Dresden in 1905.  Inspired by the brilliant colors and distorted forms of the Post-Impressionists and then the Fauves as well as by peasant art and primitive art, artists in Dresden led by Kirchner; broke from the classical and mythological painting meant to uphold the majesty of the Kaieserrreich. Influenced also by German woodcut painting they used jagged lines for their forms and adopted a colour palette of harsh brightly coloured pigmentation – meant to evoke deep inner emotion to the viewer. But expressionism and emotive feeling had always been part of the German psyche.

Its embryonic forms can be recognized in the physical and spiritual suffering depicted in Grünewald’s’Crucifixion’.

All that differed with the Expressionists was that they sought to evoke this heightened emotion through a new art language and subject matter. Dresden like other German cities had become crowded with city dwellers. It presented a 20th century reality of new modern life and pulsated with the movement of peoples, trolley cars and atomized machinery.

Artists peered into the ugly underbelly of city life where decadence emanated from nightclubs and surrounding streets inhabited by prostitutes and dancers. Breaking from the old social order allowed for a new freedom if lifestyle, one distinctly bohemian. Artists lived openly with their girlfriends and the nudes in their pictures were their lovers who they captured in casual poses and expressed with blatant sexuality.

It was this stylistic convention of emotive feeling, harsh colors, jagged lines, sharp juxtaposition of colors and fragmentation of form that Kirchner took with him to Davos in 1920 when he retreated to a sanatorium to recover from the horrors he had seen as a soldier in World War One. Plagued by bronchial inflammation Wiegers, with money raised by his artistic colleagues, arrived at the same sanatorium and the two men struck up a friendship that would last until Kirchner’s death in 1938. Wiegers was immediately attracted to Kirchner’s expressionism as is demonstrated below.

This is very close in style and subject matter to the work of Wiegers in 1921. Wiegers rented a house in Frauenkirch close to Kirchner. His landscape would be the first painting Dr. Scott would acquire in 1940 – “Haus in den Lärchen”.

The landscape painting is most likely a view from the side of the Kirchner’s house capturing the stable and to the right, part of the roof of the “Haus in den Lärchen” where Kirchner lived, with what appears to be the Seehorn Mountain in the background. With is sharp ascending and descending lines and bold juxtaposition of bright green yellows pinks and reds the painting appears dangerous and confrontational.

The second purchase made by Scott in 1940 is “Still Life with Sculptures” painted in 1921.

In retrospective analysis of the work the interpretation given is that this was most likely painted by Wiegers in Kirchner’s house, as the three wooden sculptures depicted are works carved by Kirchner depicting his girlfriend Erna Schilling^. Further evidence that the nude sculpture was with Kirchner at the time when Wiegers painted the present work is evident in the photograph of the dancer Nina Hard who was Kirchner’s guest during the summer of 1921.

In a personal communication Wiegers confirmed that this painting was painted during 1921 and that he mixed his oil paints with paraffin to execute the work. The picture again is very close to Kirchner’s own depiction of nudes and to his colour palette.

Scott recounts that he found this painting in Galis coal shed after returning one day from work. There is no doubt Galis knew the work was important and one has to look at the social and political climate of Holland at the time to understand why Galis was about to burn it.

The Nazis invaded Holland on May 10^th 1940.  The goal of the Nazis as a totalitarian regime was a populace that did not think for itself and was therefore easy to control. Any expression of a person of his existence as a particular individual with particular traits, rather than as a member of a group was seen as a threat to the power and security of the state. It is not surprising therefore that they mounted an attack on modern art, which they banned, firing its practitioners from their jobs and sometimes forbidding them to work.  Almost all members of Die Bruke  as well as other leader of the avant garde to include Otto Dix in 1933, Max Beckmann in 1937; Erich Heckle and  Emil Nolde had their works confiscated and destroyed and were forbidden to practice art. A five-man commission toured German museums, confiscating modern works; more than 16,000 were seized, some to be put in storage, some sold abroad, and many thousands burned. In 1937 about 650 such works were presented in an exhibit in Munich titled “Degenerate Art”.  Kirchner was included in the exhibition. Kirchner’s suicide in 1938 could only have been occasioned by the attack against his art and inability to carry on painting.

When the Nazis invade Holland the presence of Wiegers nude bodies in his studio endangered Galis’ own career as an artist.  News of what had happened to artists in Germany would have traveled to Holland and Galis could not chance owning a nude expressionist painting – he had to destroy it. It must have come as a relief that Scott found it and approached him to purchase it

Dr Scott returned to South Africa after the war and eventually settling in Bloemfontein he supported an encouraged artists of the Orange Free State to form The Bloemfontein Group in 1958. and their work eventually led to his forming the F.P. Scott Trust and this became the basis for the development of an Art Museum for Bloemfontein.

Marianne Podlashuc

All good art presents some point of view, a vision of the world or an alternative world. But not all art is, in the narrow sense of the word, political.  Great art is expressive of the individual artist at his best, when he is seeing deeply and uniquely into the nature of things. To a collector whose mind is attuned to such thinking, and whose eye takes him beyond the ordinary and familiar –great art encourages him to rediscover the depths of his own soul. Art makes possible, through the deep encounter with the vision of another, a genuine expansion of the viewer’s consciousness. This is what makes lovers of art respond to a painting. it is the reason they buy it, it is what turns them into a collector as each acquisition takes them further down the road, deeper into the chase. The further one goes down to road of discovery, the quicker one spots those works created not from the aim to please, but to challenge the mind, break new ground, present new ideas as to the nature of art making or the human condition. Scott’s collection as it grew did just that. His ability to discern made for art patronage of evolving art expression in South Africa. Work that is unique at the time of its creation remains unique. Its value only climbs over time. Whatever other movements may follow great painting becomes greater. The work of Wiegers stuns the viewer still today.  How often other than in museums, can the public, especially a South African public encounter it?  The exhibition of the works starting Tuesday at Stephan Weltz in Johannesburg is probably better than anything one can presently experience in any gallery or museum in the country.  I greatly thank Fred Scott who brings these paintings back from their long time seclusion to the art stage, and for igniting my interest in their story.

The Reality Beyond the Reality we see -Contemporary Russian Art from St Petersburg

In the ten years that I lived in London I went back and forth to Russia working with the new very rich on recreating the splendor of the past in their interiors, most of which looked to the revival styles of the 19th Century, rich with decoration and rarely classical. During this time I also starting following Contemporary Russian Art, which I found very different to the West, in particular the art coming out of St Petersburg. When I was hired by a Russian Contemporary Art Museum to market this art to the West, I explored what had happened in Russia following the Revolution in 1917 which had marked the end to the avant garde movement. The program after 1917 was for an art that upheld the principles of the Bolshevik Revolution.

Boris Kustodiev ‘The Bolshevik’ (1920), The Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

 

 

 

 

 

 

Soviet Realism which came to be the State program was one of hyper- realism. Artists such as in order to convey an impression of the physical and martial prowess of its society. Soviet Realism happening through a great part of the 20th Century was both an alternative to contemporary art and a break with the past to create a new art while looking in the mirror of classic arts.

Aleksandr Denieka

 

 

 

 

 

For those artists who wanted to reference what had happened in Europe in the early 20th Century there was almost no opportunity to access the paintings of this period as they were removed from museum walls. It was only in the 1950’s that Matisse’s The Dance (1910) wa reinstalled in the Hermitage Museum. It was originally commissioned in 1910 by one of the leading Russian collectors of French late 19th and early 20th-century art, Sergey Shchukin. Until the Revolution of 1917, it had hung on the staircase of his Moscow mansion.

I took the art critic Ronald Jones with me to St Petersburg in 2011 to analyse Contemporary Russian Art emanating from this city. The older generation of artists spoke to us of what a profound effect The Dance had had on them and how many took jobs as cleaners or guards in the Hermitage in order to study the work. It gave impetus to an already existing movement of “non conformist art” which had in fact always continued underground since 1917, keeping the tenants of modernism alive.

Artists such as Oscar Rabin (b.1928), Oleg Tselkov (b.1934) and Vladimir Yankilevsky (b.1938). are among those who pursued their own artistic integrity under a hostile regime in USSR .

Oleg Tselkov

 

 

 

 

 

We found St. Petersburg to be a city dusted and faded, relics of its glorious past still beautiful and magnificent but the streets empty, cracks between walls, paint peeling, ,no high fashion boutiques – the rich having departed for Moscow to build a new city of glory each new oligarch wanting his diamonds or slice of cake as reflected in the work of Contemporary Moscow artist Serge Shutov from Moscow.

 

 

 

 

 

What we were to discover in St Petersburg was an artmaking very different to the West because artists had missed an entire century of discursion about the nature of art. Artists of the present in St Petersburg, look back at their own past, to icon making and to a culture of folkloric legend. They paint a reality of their own minds, which exist beyond the reality one can see.

In Russia reality has always been subject to ideological manipulation. It goes back to Icon Painting

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This idea of a reality beyond the reality that exists – which may in fact be the true reality goes very far back in Russia’s history. It is a reality on which city of St Peterburg is founded. St Petersburg was from the beginning a glorious façade built on rotten soil – on a swamp not meant to support an Imperial City. It is the realization of a vision –the vision of its maker Peter I who saw beyond what was to something more real in his imagination.

 

 

 

 

 

“St. Petersburg, the most abstract and premeditated /umyshlennyi/ city in the whole world,” wrote Dostoevsky sensing that this was a city composed of fabrication lifted up from a reality of swamp and oil unfit for building to a vision that was grand and imperial

Dostoevsky wrote:
A hundred times, amidst this fog, I’ve been struck with a strange but importunate reverie: ‘And what if this fog were to scatter and leave for above, wouldn’t this entire rotten, slimy city take off with it, wouldn’t it rise up with the fog and disappear like smoke, and the prior Finnish swamp would remain, and, in the middle of it, for beauty, I think, the bronze horseman on his hotly breathing, exhausted horse?’

These photo/paintings by Contemporary St Petersburg artists Yaroslav Gerzhedovich illustrates this kind of visionary reality –totally different where the mind dares the viewer to go beyond a reality he knows to see what could be called “the edge of nightmare”.

 

 

 

 

 

This Is a contemporary statement of this reality of the mind. Something ominous and all encompassing is rising from the sea or swamp , a lone sailboat making its way towards it. This goulish appartition could be the reality of Russia after 1994 where the ruthless who grabbed opportunity made millions, where a new Russia came into being which for many was more restrictive than the one that existed previously, and which as it evolved created a present what for many was dangerous and foreboding.

 

 

 

 

Here one might say is a statement of how an ill wind, mindless and powerful is blowing across Russia which the single lone man tries helplessly to escape.

The bold Russian tradition of poking fun at political leaders extends to the country’s contemporary artists, who use both humour and controversy to express their discontent with the political system.

Viktor Kuznetsov

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Andrey Zakirzyanov Is  another artist who uses allegory to express dissatisfaction with a new regime that has marched through Russia, overturning its traditional values .

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Russia is a country rich in folkloric legends because of the thousands of people who have crossed its soil leaving behind a legacy of other worldly places and narratives of imaginary places and people. One finds also charming whimsical creations of childlike fantasies inhabited by playful souls. It was these kind of legends that for centuries sustained peasants subject to harsh living conditions, poverty and long cold winters.

Nikolay Stoev

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As we explored the city we found artmaking to be diverse – a new generation – emerging with high training from long established institutions each intent on looking into themselves, their present environment, and their heritage, and not at the world outside or the current international discourse going on in the West.

art law

What Every Artist Should Know

Artists fresh to the art marketplace are often so eager and so pleased to find a gallery to exhibit their work that they gladly hand over paintings they have spent months preparing along with an inventory list, not even requesting a receipt. All they see before them are the walls of the gallery where shortly their works will hang and at last they will have recognition.
One subject sadly missing from art schools is art law and the right and necessity of an artist to be protected by a contract. Good galleries, if they really believe in the artist will themselves want a contract because they will want exclusivity over the artist for a period of time so that they can grow the artist, and they want the right to extend that contract if they have met their obligations to the artist so they can derive benefit from his jumping prices.
This is the way it works in most of the world regarding artist/dealer or gallery relationships. Before an artist hands over work he is presented with a contract and advised to take independent legal advice before signing it.

The contract states the obligations of the gallery to artist as to the number of exhibitions they will hold yearly, the amount of works they will aim to sell, their obligation to return unsold works ( usually after 90 days of exhibition close), fairs they will take artists to , press they will chase, information they will publish, how they will represent the artist’s public face and presence on the internet. The gallery states to mount not only solo shows but also a group exhibtion.
The artists agrees he will not sell any works except through the gallery, he will refer all enquiries back to them, that he accepts they take a commission if loaning him out to another gallery, the number of works to be delivered for each show and a set date before the show when the works will arrive.
It is always the artists obligation to get the work to the gallery ready to hang and it is the gallery’s obligation to bear the costs of return.
This contract prevents any other gallery trying to entice the artist while the gallery is growing them.
A good gallery or dealer works hard to raise the artists profile and prices and push him to the secondary market.
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A gallery protects the artist, cares about its reputation, pays on time, sometimes even advances money to the artist – they nurture the artist. They protect the artist’s copyright and will take action if the copyright is breached. International law and the Berne Convention to which just about every country is a signatory states that the copyright resides with the artist for life. No multiples can be made of his work without his permission and a royalty fee. Unfortunately I had the experience in St Petersburg of observing that a Contemporary Art Museum, marketing its artists to the west, forced them to surrender copyright before taking them on. In the museum’s shop were multiples of the artist’s work mounted on canvas, given a special name. To me they were fakes.
The contract also states the division of fees between artist and dealer, when artist must be paid, and if there is any any shared responsibility for exhibition invitations or materials (sometimes this does occur in young galleries).

If another gallery tries to lure an artist away it is called interference with contract and there are heavy penalties for the encroaching gallery.

I have found the above to be the system whereby art is traded world wide. It is not the case in third world or undeveloped countries.

I came to South Africa recently and found that the above contractual relationship is rarely concluded. A prominent artist Malcolm Payne told me he no longer exhibits in galleries after the experience of having his paintings unreturned for nine months until he drove a thousand miles to pick them up and load them into a car. Most recently I heard from Peter Clark, whose prices have soared in the last two years, that a gallery in Sandton Square Johannesburg has held his works since 2011 and does not return his phone calls. He had never heard about the kind of contract I discuss above and said he doubted whether most artists, especially emerging ones had ever heard of the concept.
What makes a gallery holding artworks even more alarming is the artist has no way of knowing if the works have been sold. Even more disturbing is that galleries often go to banks for loans based on their inventory and so of course they will not release paintings- it affects their bank loan.
How many artists can afford legal fees to enforce their contracts? Few. When I ran a pop up gallery in London my contracts stated that disputes has to be settled by arbitration or mediation under the English law as regards legal dispute. This made for fast track inexpensive settlement. I do not know if the system provides for that in South Africa.
I have written a great deal on my blog about Nazi looting, about the fight of families to regain stolen property. I see no difference in these stories as between those of artists deprived of their property and sole source of income. I intend to help Peter Clark get back his paintings and have already found a lawyer to do the work pro bono. But I hope the information in this blog will pass around between artists and they will protect themselves. And I hope too that young grass root galleries that are vital to the growth of the art market will also draft contracts to protect themselves. It is a two way game – artists must appreciate their protection and in return respect the gallery that promotes them. That is what art law is about because otherwise you have a jealous cut throat environment where everyone, including the clients who has fallen in love with a painting suffers. Unfortunately he walks out the door and knowing nothing about aesthetics, or that one piece of art by the same artist differs greatly from the next, is told by a rival gallery he is overpaying. Perhaps he then buys a much cheaper work – but it will never have the same magic and the dealer with the acute eye and knowledge will never become a guide on what should be the adventure of collecting.
Art is not as simple as it may seem .

What Every Artist Should Know