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Jail for Spanish Forger Who Attempted Sale of 15 Fake Works

February 21st, 2023

A Spanish court has sentenced an art collector to prison for selling a set of fake works, including a series of forged works attributed to Edvard Munch and Roy Lichtenstein.
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The Guardian Interviews Former Subjects of Painter Alice Neel

February 21st, 2023

The Guardian has a piece this week on what it was like to be painted by Alice Neel. “One day Alice said she wanted to paint me and to bring some things I could wear, so I packed a little suitcase and had various costumes,” says artist and sex activist Annie Sprinkle. “I’d just had my labia pierced and I was showing it off, and she really wanted to see that. She picked a leather outfit and I put a feather in my hair.”
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Alice Walton’s Art Bridges Foundation Behind $4.5 Million Robert Colescott Buy

February 21st, 2023

Alice Walton’s Art Bridges Foundation is apparently behind the $4.5 million purchase of a Robert Colescott at Bonhams this month. “This work in particular presents a hopeful and powerful message, and we are pleased that it resonated so strongly with individuals and institutions alike,” says Ralph Taylor, Bonhams’s global head for postwar and contemporary art.
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REFERENCE LIBRARY

Andy Warhol

Biography

“Andy Warhol began as a commercial illustrator, and a very successful one, doing jobs like shoe ads for I. Miller in a stylish blotty line that derived from Ben Shahn. He first exhibited in an art gallery in 1962, when the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles showed his 32 Campbell’s Soup Cans, 1961-62. From then on, most of Warhol’s best work was done over a span of about six years, finishing in 1968, when he was shot. And it all flowed from one central insight: that in a culture glutted with information, where most people experience most things at second or third hand through TV and print, through images that become banal and disassociated by repeated again and again and again, there is role for affectless art. You no longer need to be hot and full of feeling. You can be supercool, like a slightly frosted mirror. Not that Warhol worked this out; he didn’t have to. He felt it and embodied it. He was a conduit for a sort of collective American state of mind in which celebrity – the famous image of a person, the famous brand name – had completely replaced both sacredness and solidity.

Earlier artists, like Monet, had painted the same motif in series in order to display minute discriminations of perception, the shift of light and color form hour to hour on a haystack, and how these could be recorded by the subtlety of eye and hand. Warhol’s thirty-two soup cans are about nothing of the kind. They are about sameness (though with different labels): same brand, same size, same paint surface, same fame as product. They mimic the condition of mass advertising, out of which his sensibility had grown. They are much more deadpan than the object which may have partly inspired them, Jasper Johns’s pair of bronze Ballantine ale cans. This affectlessness, this fascinated and yet indifferent take on the object, became the key to Warhol’s work; it is there in the repetition of stars’ faces (Liz, Jackie, Marilyn, Marlon, and the rest), and as a record of the condition of being an uninvolved spectator it speaks eloquently about the condition of image overload in a media saturated culture. Warhol extended it by using silk screen, and not bothering to clean up the imperfections of the print: those slips of the screen, uneven inkings of the roller, and general graininess. What they suggested was not the humanizing touch of the hand but the pervasiveness of routine error and of entropy…”

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