Christie's Photo AuctionNEW YORK - Iconic images by some of the 20th century’s most notable photographers, including Ansel Adams, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Diane Arbuswere offered in a series of auctions in April. The sale devoted entirely to Adams’ photographs, 122 lots from a California collection represented works from throughout the artist’s career, including “Clearing Winter Storm, Yosemite, 1944.” The entire collection went for $4,726,000. That same day, the auction house offered a range of 20th-century photographs by such artists as Edward Weston, Irving Penn, Dorthea Lange and Robert Mapplethorpe. They went for a total of $4,715,400.
Warhol and CopyrightWarhol is turning in his grave A recent exhibition at London's National Portrait Gallery had a lot to say about the pictures hanging on the walls and the diverse source material the artists used to produce their provocative works. Apparently they cut up magazines, copied comic books, drew trademarked cartoon characters like Minnie Mouse, reproduced covers from Time magazine, made ironic use of a cartoon Charles Atlas, painted over iconic photos of James Dean and Elvis Presley - and that's just in the first of seven rooms. The program describes the aesthetic experience conjured up by these transmogrified icons of high and low culture. Celebrated pop artists including Larry Poons, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol created these images by nicking the work of others, without permission, and transforming it to make statements and evoke emotions never countenanced by the original creators. Despite this, the program does not say a word about copyright. Can you blame the authors? A treatise on the way that copyright and trademarks were - had to be - trammelled to make these works could fill volumes. You can only assume that the curators' message about copyright is that where free expression is concerned, the rights of the creators of the original source material must take a back seat to those of the pop artists. There is, however, another message about copyright in the National Portrait Gallery: it is implicit in the "No Photography" signs prominently displayed throughout its rooms, including one by the entrance to the Pop Art Portraits exhibition. These signs are not intended to protect the works from the depredations of camera flashes (otherwise they would read "No Flash Photography"). No, the ban on pictures is meant to safeguard the copyright of the works hung on the walls - a fact that every member of staff confirmed. So what's the message of the show? Is it a celebration of remix culture, revelling in the endless possibilities opened up by appropriating and reusing images without permission? Or is it the epitaph on the tombstone of the sweet days before the UN set up the World Intellectual Property Organization and the ensuing mania for turning everything that can be sensed and recorded into someone's property? Perhaps, just perhaps, this is actually a Dadaist show masquerading as a pop art show. Perhaps the point is to titillate us with the delicious irony of celebrating copyright infringement while simultaneously taking the view that even the "No Photography" sign is a form of property not to be reproduced without the permission that can never be had.
Diane Arbus ArchiveArchive of U.S. photographer Diane Arbus goes to Met. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has acquired the complete archives of influential American photographer Diane Arbus. Arbus is known for her portaits of people on the fringes of society, including transvestites, dwarves and prostitutes. Although she began work as a fashion photographer with her husband Allan Arbus, she became known in the 1960s for her photos of ordinary people, including her famous 1967 photo of identical twin girls from Roselle, N.J. The twin sisters are seen side by side in corduroy dresses, but while one is smiling, the other frowns, giving an uncanny cast to an ordinary subject. Other famous photos from the Arbus collection include Jewish giant at home with his parents in New York and Child with toy hand grenade in Central Park. The archive contains hundreds of photographs, negatives and prints, pages from her diaries and books from her home and studio. A Museum of Modern Art retrospective of her work travelled throughout North America from 1972-1975 and was seen by seven million people and the Met mounted a more recent Arbus retrospective in 2005. |
Lee Friedlander. (American, born 1934). Galax, Virginia. 1962. Gelatin silver print Sotheby's photo auction to include rare Weston, daguerreotypes to classic images$8.9M Sotheby's Photo Auction Kicks Off Big Auction Week Big-spending bidders set several auction records in April at Sotheby's, where a collection of 19th and 20th century photography raked in a total of $8.9 million. Photo auctions the very next day brought in another $8.4 million in bids. Sotheby's sold 63 of the 68 prints offered from The Quillan Collection, a photography collection assembled over the last 20 years for the Quillan Company, an investment firm. Ten lots sold for more than a quarter million dollars and bidders set record prices for Richard Avedon, Hans Bellmer, Bill Brandt, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (for a photograph), August Sander, Paul Strand and Edward Weston. One potential blockbuster was withdrawn from the auction ahead of time. An undated photogenic drawing of a leaf by an unknown artist sparked a debate among experts after it was published in the Sotheby's catalog. A researcher writing in the catalog wondered if the print could be a rare experiment dating to the 1790s, which would make it an extraordinarily early example of a photographic process. After this claim drew attention, Sotheby's withdrew the print from the auction until more research could be conducted. This made the highlight of the show a Weston nude from 1925. The print was significant because of its rarity (Sotheby's says it has identified only two other prints of this photo) and because it came at a pivotal time in Weston's career, as he moved toward minimalism and abstraction. Two dealers sitting in the audience, cell phones to their ears, bid the price of the Weston above the high estimate of $900,000. The audience murmured when the price topped $1 million. The two lobbed the bid back and forth, upping the price $50,000 at a time. Peter MacGill of Pace/MacGill Gallery was the ultimate winner, with a bid of $1.4 million – a record total of $1,609,000 including the buyer's premium. The audience applauded as the hammer fell on the sale. MacGill set a Weston record last year when he bid $1,105,000 for another print at Sotheby's. MacGill also set a record for a work by Paul Strand, bidding $645,800 for a 1923 portrait titled "Rebecca" (including the buyer's premium). Sotheby's estimate for the print had been $600,000 to $900,000. Three record-setters were something of a surprise, greatly exceeding the auction house estimate. A print of Sander's "Werkstudenten, 1926," a portrait of four young Communist radicals (including Sander's son), sold for $493,000 to a phone bidder, well above its high estimate of $250,000. An Avedon portrait of Marilyn Monroe, "Marilyn Monroe, May 6, 1957, New York City," sold for $457,000, above its high estimate of $100,000. A print of Brandt's "Van Gogh's Room in the Asylum of St. Paul-de-Mausole (St. Rémy), 1950," sold for $265,000, exceeding the high estimate of $70,000. Also attracting surprisingly high bids were prints of Cindy Sherman's "Untitled Film Still #53, 1980" ($313,000) and Dorothea Lange's "San Francisco Waterfront, 1933" ($289,000). The next auction featured "Edward Weston's Gifts to His Sister and Other Photographs." The priciest print in that auction was Weston's "Nude on Sand, Oceano," which sold for $325,000. A print of Diane Arbus's "A Family on the Lawn One Sunday in Westchester, N.Y." sold for $554,000. A daguerreotype by Abert Sands Southworth and Josiah Johnson Hawes sold for $409,000, above the high estimate of $90,000. A platinum print of Karl Struss's "Metropolitan Tower–Twilight" sold for $313,000, greatly exceeding the high estimate of $50,000. And another Weston, "Leeks," sold for $229,000, above its high estimate of $120,000.
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