Art Basel Miami Beach

Alexander Calder. U.S. "Mobile with Five White Dots and One Red Dot"

and print  "Red, Yellow, Blue Circles" by Alexander Calder.

Art / Basel / Miami is the greatest art fair in the world.  Almost 300 of the best international

art galleries from all over the world come to Miami with their very best artwork to sell.

All of these pieces come from private collections, so they have never been seen in public

before and may never appear again.  It is an incredible opportunity to view a vast

variety of the best art from 1900-2016 all in one place.  I enjoyed it very much.

Alexei Jawlensky.  Russian/German.  "Portrait of Woman."

German Expressionism.  1912

Jeff Koons.  U.S.  "Blue Diamond Ring"  $15 M.

Koons has made five each of these rings, of mirror-polished stainless steel, in blue,

pink, yellow, white, and purple.  Larry Gagosian bought this ring at Christie's auction

in London last December for $11.8 M.  It is shown by Gagosian Gallery.

It is seven feet high.

Jeff Koons.  "Blue Diamond."

Andy Warhol.   U.S.  "Dolly Parton" silk screen prints.  Warhol took a photo with a

polaroid camera, then made the print into an enlarged silk screen stencil.  He could then

print as many colors as he wanted.  Normally he required a client to purchase four prints 

for a total of $10,000.  These two now are priced at $100,000.

Georgia O'Keeffe.  "Abstracton."  bronze

Georgia O'Keeffe came from a small town in Wisconsin and moved to

New York and then New Mexico.  She is most noted for her paintings.

This piece in bronze, although similar to some of her sinuous plant

forms, is a unique sculptural form. 

One corner of this gallery had "Rio Grande" by Helen Frankenthaler in Color Field Style.

In the center is English artist Anthony Caro's "Catalan Spur" and on the right side

is a small "Target" by Kenneth Noland of the Washington School of Ab. Expressionism.

Robert Henri.  U.S.  "Reclining Figure."  1919

Henri was leader of the School of Ashcan Painters in the U.S., artists who wanted to

portray the gritty city and real life with rough brush strokes, and not perfectly

 polished surfaces.  He influenced many young artists.

Marino Marini was an Italian artist who used the image of "Horse and Rider" in both

paintings and sculpture to represent the human spirit and soul.  The Second World War

wreaked havoc in Europe, and Marini's Horsemen frequently show the horror of the day.

Jean Dubuffet was a French artist who worked in abstraction and developed a style

from doodling with different colored ball point pens in drawing.  His paintings have the

strong outlines and crosshatching that you may see on your own phone pad as you wait.

He then translated those forms into 3d sculpture.  They were displayed superbly in a

rather dark space with strong spotlights at Landau Gallery.

"Reality" in art takes many forms.  Richard Estes, in his "Store with Pineapples," employs

super-realism or photo-realism to create a work that looks like a high definition photograph.

But it is really an oil on canvas painting.

"Reality" in sculpture could be seen in this piece by Duane Hanson entitled

"Cowboy and Bale of Hay."  The cowboy is made of polyester resin, but his clothes

are real and so is the bale of hay.   Sculpture no longer must be carved out of wood or
stone or cast in bronze.

Roy Lichtenstein's "Head of a Woman" is "real" = you can recognize it immediately and

it is definitely not a tree or a house.  But his "realism" was based on his love of comic

books and the type of reality comic artists created to make their stories work - strong

outlines, broad areas of flat color, hatching to represent shading.

David Bates.  "Bouquet of Flowers."  U.S.

Bates is a Black artist working in New Orleans.  He uses strong outlines, often

in black, and patterns of lines.

Ai Wei Wei is the most famous artist in China and a political dissident also.

In the center is his "Column,"  an example of Conceptual Art.

"Butterfly Heart" by Damien Hirst of Englad.  7 feet high.  Those are real butterflies

attached to a background, then covered with acrylic.  Hirst uses real butterflies in many of

his works. There are "butterfly farms" in several places around the world, and they raise

and sell exotic, beautifully colored butterflies to people for many reasons.

Fernand Leger of France painted "Still Life" using the new techniques of

Cubism and Abstraction to break down his subjects into geometric forms and

then rearrange them and flatten them out.

Another type of "realism" is seen in Colombian artist Fernando Botero's

"Seated Woman with Cat."  His swelling figures, whether of people, or fruit,

or animals, seem ready to burst.

Robert Motherwell.  U.S.  "Balkan Lute."  Collage.

Motherwell was interested in the relationship of art and music and created

many paintings about the juncture of the two.  This work is partially painted

and partially created by gluing pieces of construction paper to the canvas.

The "strings" of the lute have been painted on the paper.

Joel Shapiro.  U.S.  "Walking Figure"  wood

Joel Shapiro works in sizes from a few inches high to pieces 10 or 12 feet high;

they may be made of wood or bronze and placed outdoors.  They reduce a figure

to its simplest elements. 

Enrico Castellani. "Yellow."  Italian.  Shaped canvas.

Castellani places objects on his wooden frames, then stretches the canvas tightly

across them, making a work which is both painting and sculpture and making use of

light and shadow to create forms.

"El Gato" by the Oaxaca Cooperative.  Wool tapestry.  Mexico.

A lady in Oaxaca, Mexico, has organized a cooperative and taught the men

and women of Oaxaca how to weave tapestries in techniques similar to what 

their indigenous ancestors had done for centuries.  These tapestries

are now sold by a gallery in Los Angeles. 

Alma Thomas.  "Arrival of Spring."  U.S.

Ms Thomas was a Black school teacher in Washington, D.C. who developed

a style combining Pointillism and Byzantine mosaics to create paintings,

often based on nature, which expressed her feelings and often related to music.

Acrylic paint on canvas.

Fabian Marcaccio.  "Green Piece."  Argentina.

Marcaccio works with computers to create an image, and then uses

a 3D copier to actually produce the works.  This object was made by a

copier and then partially overpainted.

Bridget Riley.  "Two Tone Piece."  English.  Op Art

Some artists in the 20th century became interested in how our eyes react to lines and

colors. They created works based solely on lines and color and often meant to

convey movement.  This large piece, perhaps 12 feet long, undulates like

branches on a tree in a strong wind.

Gunther Gerszo.  "Ancient Walls."  Hungarian/Mexican.

We are fortunate in South Florida to have a strong Hispanic flavor to our

artistic life.  We have wonderful galleries specializing in Latin American art.

Mary-Anne Martin Gallery from New York is one of the very best

galleries to see Latin American art.

Leonora Carrington.  "Temple of the Word."  1937

Leonora Carrington was an Englsh born woman who took up residence in Mexico

and developed a style based on Surrealism, exploring the subconscious

and dreams.

Kenneth Noland.  "Pink Target." U.S.  6 ft x 6 ft.

Noland was one of the artists in Washington, D.C. who came to

soak and stain his canvases, rather than simply paint them,

and to create large simple figures that did not "mean" anything.

"What you see is what you see" was their famous motto.

no symbolism or deep meaning or subjective content.

Andy Warhol.  "Dollar Sign." U.S. silkscreen.

While other people were out "Making a buck," Andy took the advice

literally and made a dollar sign.  And he could make lots, because this was 

a silkscreen, where the stencil cold be used over and over.

The Fair provides a number of "green spaces" where visitors with tired feet can sit down and

rest.  The "hill" is made of plywood and astroturf, but provides a good place to sit and rest.

A visitor before Joan Mitchell's "La Grande Vallee XVIII."

Joan was from Chicago, moved to New York and then France, where she lived for many years.
She worked in Abstract Expressionism, often inspired by nature.  The price for this
diptych was $6.5 M.