Amedeo Modigliani, Nu Assis Sur un Divan (La Belle Romaine), 1917 (est. $40 million), via Sothebys.com

Sotheby’s and Christie’s will both hold Impressionist and Modern sales in New York during the first week of November. Sotheby’s will offer 61 lots during the Evening Sale on November 2nd, with Christie’s Evening Sale following on the 3rd. The latter is comprised of 85 lots, and is expected to bring at least $200 million.

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Nate Lowman, Stay in School, 2010, photo by Art Observed

AO was onsite at Nate Lowman’s installation “Stay in School” at 80WSE Windows. Located on the east side of Washington Square park, “Stay in School” features three windows each with paired images either mounted on or exposed from within sheetrock walls that Lowman contructed. As the title indicates, the exhibition addresses issues of youth and education, appropriate for an area that receives among the highest student foot traffic in New York City.

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Grand Palais FIAC 2010, all photos by Tiphaine Popesco for Art Observed

Events at the Grand Palais and Cour Caree du Louvre concluded Sunday afternoon as FIAC 2010 came to a close in Paris. Looking back on what happened in the city’s biggest week for contemporary art, the fair seems to capture many of the same trends that marked the hesitant atmosphere of the Frieze art fair in London. The fair unofficially opened last Tuesday, October 19th, to an ever growing VIP preview audience that this year numbered over 20,000.

Robust early sales at well established galleries suggested that dealers would enjoy even greater success than was seen in London in the same week, several high price tagged items, including Anish Kapoor’s $2.4 million Slug and Takashi Murakami’s $1.6 million Kiki, remained unclaimed well into this weekend. Even the French government toned down its own purchasing, as the cultural ministry spent $280,000 on eight works this year, down from 24 works for roughly twice as much last year. The market certainly isn’t dead but lavish spending akin to the 2007 boom hasn’t made an aggressive comeback.

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At Gagosian, photo by Tiphaine Popesco

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Gregory Crewdson, Untitled (08), 2009. © Gregory Crewdson. All images of courtesy of Gagosian Gallery.

Sanctuary, the Gregory Crewdson exhibition currently on view at Gagosian Gallery’s Madison Avenue branch, further develops the artist’s on-going investigation into the realm of staged photography. With this new body of work, Crewdson addresses questions of format and color, presenting a series of black and white images that offer an intimate entry point into his visual journey through Italy.

Gregory Crewdson, Untitled (06), 2009. © Gregory Crewdson.

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Matthew Day Jackson, The Way We Were, 2010. All photos by Tiphaine Popesco for Art Observed unless otherwise noted

While pension strikes increasingly paralyze all other aspects of life in Paris, the activities at FIAC have seemingly managed to go on unbothered. Two days into the fair, visitors have already lauded this year’s success. According to ArtInfo, a new physical layout of the venue  has dramatically improved the experience. Surly other changes, namely the headlining debuts of Gagosian and the Rosenblum Collection, as well as healthy sales at such galleries as Hauser & Wirth, Thaddeus Ropac, Blum and Poe, and David Zwirner have fueled this sentiment. Details on sales and the first in a series of two comprehensive photo sets follow the jump.

Jean Michel Othoniel and Emmanuel Perrotin

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Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe, Bright White Underground, 2010. Installation view. All images via Country Club Projects.

Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe’s Bright White Underground weaves myth, history and experience into a compelling and memorable site-specific installation at an iconic Los Angeles residence.  The Buck House itself, an achievement of American Modernism, participates in the installation’s nod to sixties psychedelia in what might be more appropriately labeled an experiential and temporal collage.  Traveling through Bright White Underground, the “real” history of the house and the fabricated history of a fictitious Dr. Arthur Cook and his psychedelic vision become obscured and intertwined, questioning social norms, truth, and the erosive process of memory.

Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe, Bright White Underground, 2010. Installation view.

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Less than a week after the Frieze Art Fair ended in London, the Foire d’art contemporain, or FIAC, prepares to open to the public later this week in Paris. In its 37th year, the fair will feature nearly 200 dealers with work from over 3,500 artists, and expects to see an estimated 80,000 visitors to its two locations, the Cour Carrée and the Grand Palais–opening Tuesday and Wednesday, respectively.

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Grand Palais during FIAC 2007, photo via Grand Palais

Running through Sunday the 24th, FIAC annually provides an arena for a wide variety of contemporary art, from blue chip galleries–the likes of Barbara Gladstone, Gagosian Gallery, David Zwirner, Blum and Poe, Cheim and Reid, Contemporary Fine Arts, Yvonne Lambert, Emmanuel Perrotin, Thaddaeus Ropac, Sprüth Magers, and Hauser and Wirth to name a few — peddling million dollar pieces to the lesser known emerging talents in the field. In a tandem move with the week’s events, industry powerhouse Larry Gagosian opened the latest installment in his global network of galleries off of Champs Elysees, noting the resurgence of modern art in France.

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An early picture from the FIAC preview: Victor Man, Untitled, 2008, photo via Art Observed

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NYAA’s “Take Home a Nude” benefit, hosted by Sotheby’s, October 18, 2010. All photos by Deborah Heuberger for Art Observed.

For the 19th installment of the New York Academy of Art‘s annual Take Home a Nude benefit, the organization honored Eric Fischl for his outstanding contribution to contemporary art, scholarship, and the mission of the Academy. The representational style and enduring interest in the human form which characterize Fischl’s body of work are consistent with the Academy’s reputation as “The first and most significant graduate school in the United States to focus on the human body.”

What began in 1991 as a modest fundraiser held at the Academy’s Tribeca headquarters has evolved into one the most prestigious arts events of the season. This year’s venue was generously provided by Sotheby’s, where works were installed throughout five gallery spaces, hosting cocktail hour, silent and live auctions, and a post-auction dinner.

Andres Serrano, Taylor Mead, 2010.

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Damien Hirst, I am Become Death, Shatterer of Worlds, 2006 (est. 2.5-3.5 million GBP, realized 2.2 million GBP), via Christies.com

Thursday’s Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening auction brought in a total of 19,585,400 GBP, within the presale estimate of 15.9-22.7 million GBP. The auction had a sell through rate of 86% by lot and 92% by value, with 7 of the 51 lots bought in. While 40% of the lots exceeded their high presale estimates, the featured lot did not reach its low presale estimate. Damien Hirst‘s I am Become Death, Shatterer of Worlds carried a presale estimate of 2.5-3.5 million GBP and sold for 2.2 million GBP.  All sale totals stated in this article include buyer’s premiums and come directly from Christie’s official website or courtesy of The Baer Faxt.

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Damien Hirst, I am Become Death, Shatterer of Worlds, 2006 (est. 2.5-3.5 million GBP), via Christies.com

The Frieze Art Fair begins this week in London and is accompanied by Contemporary Art sales at the three major auction houses. This year, Phillips de Pury will kick things off with a 56 lot evening sale on October 13th, followed by a 51 lot sale at Christie’s on the 14th and a 40 lot sale at Sotheby’s on the 15th. After the dismal results of last year’s equivalent sales and the lackluster results of the summer sales, the art world is hoping that these auctions will give a stronger indication that the market for contemporary Western art is in fact recovering.

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Installation View of “Al Qaeda is the CIA” at 303 Gallery, 2010. Image courtesy of 303 Gallery.

Currently on view at 303 Gallery is a retrospective of work by Sue Williams, spanning the last twenty years of the artist’s career, curated by Nate Lowman. Lowman’s curatorial objective was not to chronologically organize the objects on view, but to contextualize her experimentation with different mediums and socio-political themes within the trajectory of her stylistic development. Together, the two artists revisited Williams’ work and selected a small representative body of pieces produced between 1989 and the present, which comment and reflect upon her current practice and conceptual goals.

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Jeff Koons, Violet Ice (Kama Sutra), 1991. Photo by Patrick Meagher.

The most recent museum-grade show at Luxembourg & Dayan gathers 9 pieces of Jeff Koons‘ seminal sex-infused series “Made in Heaven” in a multi-story love and sexuality tour-de-force of human(istic) nature. Eight life-sized silkscreen and early-inkjet paintings, based on photographs, and a cast-glass sculptural tableau were conceived and produced in a life-meets-art process spanning approximately ten years from the mid-eighties to the mid-nineties.

It is worth mentioning that it has now been nearly twenty years since these hardcore and soft-core-looking works were first presented by the late, great Ileana Sonnabend, and yet they still manage to really irritate, shock or bother some people for one reason or another. The re-presentation of this formerly scandalous, yet newly exciting and loaded work comes at an interesting time, with regard to the unabashed state of popular reality-media today, as well as the neo-sex-drugs-and-rock n’ rollish art of late in lower Manhattan.

La Ciccolina, Taschen Poster Book, 1992.

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Angela de la Cruz, Super Clutter XXL, 2008. All images via Tate Britain.

On October 5, Tate Britain unveiled its Finalist Exhibition for the 2010 Turner Prize. Painter Dexter Dalwood, installation artist and painter Angela de la Cruz, sound artist Susan Philipsz, and film collaborative Otolith (comprised of Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun) represent the shortlist for the coveted annual award. The winner selected from among this group will be announced at the museum on December 6, 2010.

Dexter Dalwood, Death of David Kelly, 2008.

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Zhang Xiaogang, Chapter of a New Century – Birth of the People’s Republic of China II, 1992 (est. 21—23 million HKD, realized 52,180,000 HKD), via Sothebys.com

This week’s auctions at Sotheby’s Hong Kong indicated that the Chinese art market continues to show signs of growth, as both Contemporary Art sales easily passed the earnings of the equivalent sales in 2008 and 2009. Monday featured back to back auctions. First, the 20th Century Chinese Art sale realized 137,313,750HKD (est. 130 million HKD) with 29 of 38 lots sold. The afternoon Contemporary Asian sale realized 205,896,250  HKD, well above the presale estimate of 150 million HKD.

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Roy Lichtenstein, Ivan Karp, 1961. Image copyright Estate of Roy Lichtenstein.

As Roberta Smith recently described in the New York Times, “Autumn in New York is the perfect time for an accidental festival of the work of Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein.” Leo Castelli Gallery‘s contribution to this apparently serendipitous trilogy of current exhibitions is “Mostly Men;” an exploration of the artist’s representations of both males and maleness. Paintings, drawings, and sculpture spanning Lichtenstein’s entire working career are brought together in a show which both underscores and confronts the iconic status of women and girls in his body of work.

Roy Lichtenstein, Alan Kaprow, 1961. Image copyright Estate of Roy Lichtenstein.

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Joan Miró, Dutch Interior I, 1928. Image via The Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice.

Currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is “Miró: The Dutch Interiors,” an exhibition featuring three surrealist works and the two seventeenth-century Dutch genre paintings that inspired them. Joan Miró first encountered the domestic scenes of Jan Steen and Hendrick Sorgh when he visited the Rijksmuseum during a 1928 trip to Amsterdam. The impact of these works on the Catalan artist resulted in The Dutch Interiors: a series of three paintings in which Miró re-envisions the Old Master works as abstract compositions, nearly four-hundred years after their original production. The exhibition, which debuted at the Rijksmuseum earlier this year, is the first occasion on which Miró’s reinterpretations of these scenes have been displayed with the works upon which they are based.

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Hendrick Sorgh, The Lute Player, 1660. Image via the Rijksmuseum.

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Flower Matango, Takashi Murakami (2010) via Chateau de Versailles–>

Despite reports that the palace would not feature contemporary art in the royal apartments in future years, directors at Versailles have denied this and other rumors that the decision was a response to controversy over the current Takashi Murakami exhibition in that space. Initially, an article in The Art Newspaper indicated that Jean-Jacques Aillagon, President of Château de Versailles, had elected to use other venues on the palace grounds in the future. Spokesmen from Versailles shortly after responded to correct the story, noting that while contemporary works will be shown in the palace gardens in 2011, nothing else has been decided beyond that time. The source added that there is not reason to believe that shows by living artists will not return to the indoor space again.

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Exterior View of Sperone Westwater, 257 Bowery, NYC, image courtesy of Dezeen.

Sperone Westwater opened the doors of its new gallery space on Wednesday, September 22nd, 2010. A retrospective of Guillermo Kuitca’s work was chosen as the Bowery location’s inaugural show. The gallery has a longstanding relationship with the Argentinean artist, whose work is inspired by the study of architecture, theater, and cartography. This is his eighth solo show at Sperone Westwater. “Guillermo Kuitca: Paintings 2008-2010 & Le Sacre 1992” consists of recent paintings, which developed from his famous 2007 series with which he represented Argentina at the Venice Biennale, and the important 1992 installation Le Sacre.

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John McCracken, New Works in Bronze and Steel, image courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner

David Zwirner is currently presenting a new body of work by Californian artist John McCracken. McCracken first gained international recognition with his monochromatic geometries placed between flat surfaces and three-dimensional objects. In the present exhibition, he addresses the gallery space as a whole, allowing its architecture and light to participate fully in the installation. In the first room, three bronze planks lean against the wall, in an apparent departure from the materiality of his previous works in fiberglass and resin, while continuing to work in his signature format – the narrow, rectangular, monochromatic panel. Their shiny, reflective surfaces introduce the exhibition’s key motifs, inserting them into a dialogue, both formally and conceptually, with the four free-standing stainless-steel sculptures in the adjacent room: Star, Infinite, Dimension and Electron.

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Collective Show opening reception at Participant, Inc., September 19, 2010.

In the 1960’s and 1970’s, New York witnessed a group of particularly daring and passionate artists, institutions, and commercial galleries emerge as sites of discourse about the production and exhibition of art, film, music, performance, and theater. Exit Art, the Filmmaker’s Cinématèque and Jonas Mekas, Paula Cooper Gallery, P.S.1 and Alana Heiss, Barbara Gladstone Gallery, Marian Goodman Gallery, George Maciunas and the Fluxus group, the Wooster Group, and many others, devised brilliant strategies for funding, producing, and displaying art in a difficult moment in New York’s history, when the real estate climate was arguably even more hostile than it is today. The contributions of these innovators were profound and historic, and deserve to be acknowledged in the context of our current cultural predicament.

Over the subsequent forty years, a divide has developed between the heirs of these original non-profit spaces, those organizations who are able to exist and exhibit work based solely on donations, and the commercial gallery sector; corporate entities which, in theory, fund their operations through sales of the artworks they show. Any group that hopes to be successfully established within this economic system must adhere by its basic tenant: that one chooses to be either an institution or a gallery.

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Jean Nouvel’s 2010 Serpentine Pavilion. Image via Serpentine Gallery.–>

Earlier this week, Bloomberg News reported that an agreement has been reached in favor of Serpentine Gallery regarding its ongoing competition with Damien Hirst for the space formerly occupied by a munitions store, The Magazine, in Hyde Park, London. According to an “anonymous inside source,” award winning architect Zaha Hadid will oversee the transformation of the Kensington Gardens venue, which is currently being used as a kennel for stray dogs. Under the direction of Julia Peyton-Jones, the gallery will feature modern and contemporary artwork, and will be open to the public free of charge. An official public announcement of the decision is expected in the coming weeks.

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The Lehman Brothers corporate sign enters Christie’s, London. Image via the NY Times.

Two years after Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, the art that once decorated its offices is continuing to be sold off as part of their effort to repay creditors. Today, “artwork and ephemera” which once hung in the defunct bank’s European headquarters fetched £1,631,238 ($2,573,685) in a mammoth 6-hour sale at Christie’s in London. Today’s auction follows the September 25th sale at Sotheby’s in New York that raised $12.3 million.

The auction attracted over 1,100 registered bidders from around the world, including a record 330 clients who registered to bid via the internet using Christie’s LIVE. Many former Lehman employees were present for the bidding, one former staffer told AFP before the sale “It’s a memory I want. It was a sad end to it all but I had a lot of good times there, it was where I started off my career.”

Atomists – Jump over, Gabriel Orozco. Estimate: £60,000 to £80,000. Price Realized: £99,560 ($157,305)

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The Wine of Saint Martin’s Day, a Bruegel painting recently discovered by the Prado Museum. Image courtesy of the New York Times.–>

The Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid, Spain has discovered a painting by sixteenth-century Flemish master Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The painting, The Wine of Saint Martin’s Day, is dated between 1565 and 1568. Belonging to private collectors, the painting was brought to the Prado to have it studied and cleaned before the owners planned its sale. During the restoration, scholars of Flemish painting were invited to share their expertise. After an x-ray on the 4.8 x 8.9 foot canvas revealed the artist’s signature, its authorship was confirmed. The painting had previously been attributed to Bruegel’s less illustrious son.

Bruegel’s signature on the back of the canvas. Image courtesy of the AFP.

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