Andrew Graham-Dixon’s ‘Rembrandt to Richter’ Exhibition Tour

hello and welcome to rembrandt to richter here at sotheby's london an exhibition and sales spanning some 500 years of history the experience is a little bit like looking at the entire history of art through the jumbled lens of a kaleidoscope now i hope you'll join me on a walking tour through the show which is on until the day of the sale itself which is the 28th of july and i'll be talking to some of sotheby's experts about some of the most compelling objects in the sale hi george hello welcome shake hands exactly what an extraordinary thing this is a self-portrait by rembrandt now the very fact of such a thing coming to market strikes me as as a bit of an event yes i think it is there are only three self-portraits by rembrandt left in private hands and in fact as we speak all three of them are in the united kingdom it is a great rarity and a great privilege to have have this one it's a rather extraordinary image i have the feeling that it's at once public and a bit private the scale suggests private but the way in which he's dressed in the sober finery of a dutch burger he puts in my mind the thought that he you know he's trying to impress somebody who's he trying to impress well he's certainly trying to impress all of us he's also impressing himself he's showing himself to be a wealthy successful young he's 26 years old young man about to embark on a career as the greatest portrait painter of the 17th century he was about to move to amsterdam he really partly made the move to become a portrait painter to meet the huge demand for portraiture which arrived relatively suddenly um in the early 1630s i think he's a little unsure of himself i think there is a there's a certain caution in in his eyes and of course up until this point he had painted self portraits but he'd been a history painter so he was painting himself in different poses moods expressions surprise of course famously in both paintings and etchings and he suddenly now has to become a sober highly successful but sober man but he says in a way he's playing the part of an artist who was the right kind of artist to paint these rich burgers but he's not quite sure if he fits the suit if he if his face matches isn't it i i think there's an enough confidence in his expression yeah um i think he's coming to terms probably a little overawed with what's about to happen but coming to terms with it this is one of only two self portraits that he painted where he's he's formally dressed and both of them are from this year the other one that slightly earlier is only two and then of course later on he paints portraits of himself in in in fantasy dress for for for sale but this is i think a manifesto and a declaration of who he is and who you'd better reckon with so do you think this would have been on the wall of his studio slash workshop so that the rich people he wanted to be his customers would look at it and feel well he's obviously a very good painter but he's also one of us he's wearing the right gear yes i i think that's quite possible although that theory has been advanced for one or two of his later self-portraits as well even though they weren't formal there's of course another possibility which is that he painted it to be sent to his to be betrothed saskia uh who was the cousin of hendrik allenbach who was the man with whom he was going to business in amsterdam this big move from leiden to to amsterdam so possibly to impress not just his future fiance but certainly to impress her family and his future business partners a lot of impressive but i i very much like the idea it could have been almost a sort of hand-painted valentine's card for saskia yes it's lucky lucky saskia i say it's a it's a lovely idea and he painted it's very sketch like he painted this incredibly quickly yeah it has that has that feeling of immediacy to it yes and the signature is wet and wet well he is so he's he's in he's doing everything in a hurry absolutely but not only that he painted the background first he always did this with his portraits and self-portraits leaving a reserve for the figure in this case himself and only when he'd finished the painting would he then sign it in this case wet it wet so he must have painted it really quickly i mean could it have been done in as little as a day i think it could yeah a day 36 hours something like that exactly gosh what a thing and another another portrait over here by i suppose the the the other candidate you called rembrandt the greatest portrait painter of the 17th century and you know the other dutch candidate for that well it accolade would be frank's heart in case i'm wrong we we've we've got another and of course um franz howells who was um from harlem and a great harlem patriot holland was it was a very uh patriotic city was also summoned by henrikh mkhit to amsterdam to paint portraits at the same time uh more at the same time as rembrandt although he didn't he painted one and went straight back to harlem where he felt more at home and i think we see here a man the subject the sitter who's full of confidence um and no sense of anxiety about himself or his position but more than that we feel this in in the way it's painted there is there is um a complete match between painter and sitter and look at the way he's painted this he he's painted it this is always a predominant diagonal in in franz howell's mature portraits he was 20 years older than rembrandt so he was really established by then but look he didn't he didn't bother with curves he's painted in a series of slashing laps slashing straight lines i mean it's he's incredibly energetic he leaves the brush strokes visible i think partly so that you can enjoy his virtuosity i had a painful friend who's no longer with us sadly howard hodgkin modern painter who said um what i love most about france health is is see me dance the pulker brushwork exactly exactly when he'd first completed this picture this portrait it didn't have this hand in it the the black robe the black cloak goes behind the hand but you can imagine that it wouldn't quite work without that hand so having finished it he then also very quickly painted in this hand which i think makes the brings the picture fully into balance he then actually had to repair the little the painted roughly painted over it which also all to balance the composition exactly and he's he's bursting out of this painted frame i like i like the way that so he uses this convention almost i think in order to flout it you place the sitter within the stone circle so that in fact he doesn't fit he's so lifelike that he seems to burst out you almost think you could well um social distancing allowing you almost think that you could shake his hand i think i think that franz house was so successful partly because he did consistently throughout his life like convention yeah i think that's why he was so much appreciated until he was old at least but but um why we love him so much now well thank you so much for for chatting about these two things with me and i'll catch up with you later alex oh i see i i keep i keep thinking i should do that but um not today from one kind of portrait to a profoundly different kind of portrait this is francis bacon and the sitter if you can call him that's john edwards that's right and when i first saw this picture i thought immediately oh how much i admire francis bacon's work from the 1970s and i was thinking of the george dyer pictures and the triptychs and so on and then i looked at the actual data and i realized it's 1986 it was much later than i'd initially thought i think that's what stands out about this painting it is from 1986 it's a study for portrait of john edwards but as you rightly point out a lot of the motifs that we see in the painting actually look back to those famous black triptychs that he made in the early 70s following the death of his other great love george dyer who famously took his own life on the eve of francis's exhibition in the grand palais so here you have this you know this big black aperture the doorway which is a step into the beyond you have the light switch you have the sort of the the the pull of the blinds coming down this incredible sort of michelangelo-esque form of the shadow painted in fleshy pink which bacon described as the soul seeping away and even the profile of edwards which is you know definitely edwards nonetheless reminds me of some of those great profiles of george dyer sitting on the bathroom toilet absolutely in front of that event yeah absolutely and there's i find also what's very strong about this picture um and unusual for a picture from the 80s by bacon is is this strong connection with the idea of the theater of the absurd you know decide that life is a stage but it's a bare stage it's the stage of samuel beckett we're all waiting for godot we live in a in a kind of existential void that that sense is of sort of alienated theater almost i think that there's a lot to be said about the two irishmen and how they place the the figure the human condition if you like within these confined quite foreboding spaces and it's definitely that is why i think bacon is such a singular artist of the 20th century and really analyzing the human condition at that time for me the other great thing that stands out about this is this petrol green background which is a completely unique occurrence in bacon's earth and all together for me it just becomes the definitive portrait of edwards who really was the great sitter for the for the last period of his life i actually met john edwards just once just once i went to the moscow opening of francis bacon's big retrospective in russia and and uh bacon didn't want to go so he sent john edwards as his special envoy and john edwards i was keen to meet him because i wanted to hear the stories but he had a fear of going to bed on his end so he decided he was just going to stay up all night drinking and tried to yoke me into it i didn't stay up all night but i stayed up long enough to hear some of his tails and he drank champagne all night and i said isn't that terribly expensive and he said francis his paintings are very expensive you can see why the two men got on so well yeah absolutely well i'll see you a little bit later great but thank you for now i must move on into a a distinctly i think unalienated world the very polar opposite to francis bacon's universe here we are helena hi with matisse with mattis so so tell tell me a little bit about this this picture it's it's relatively late painting isn't it it's 1942. so at this point he's in um absolutely ensconced in the world of the mediterranean so this sort of incredible moment of uh southern light uh rich colors all comes you know to fruition in this marvelous composition i mean really quite quite wonderfully balanced and harmonious i love this eau de nil in half of the checkerboards of the floor i don't know what the other color is is it aubergine but the colors are like really vibrant on there yes so i think that it's the vibrancy of the palette is incredibly distinctive and what's brilliant about this painting is that combination of the intensity of color and then the kind of graphic spontaneity so what i love is the way he's he's almost drawn the figure i mean it's painted but it's like him handling a charcoal or something if you think of those great charcoal stomp drawings it's got that kind of spontaneity and fluidity of line of a great draftsman but combined here with this amazing jewel-like color that is so um typical of matisse's work and you know it in a way heralds what's going to come with the cutouts you can see that already yeah yeah there with these blocks of color that orange line that sort of arabesque of the of the chez long or whatever it is that she's sitting in i mean that that that that could almost be a a cut out absolutely i mean she's sitting in this kind of italian baroque armchair that became a kind of prop in his studio apartment in east but you can see that he's kind of fantasized about the color and brought it out into this very very intense red to complement this aquamarine on the checkable floor and to create this kind of juxtapositions and energy which is just fantastic here yeah marvelous example and of course you've got this interesting juxtaposition of the two chairs with the figure that looks back to the other lists of the twenties and then a kind of still live element on the other chair yeah it's it's as if he's drawing together motifs from his past the the you know the the collapsed space of the red studio is is vestigially here and then there are there's the figure of from all the other leaks but then there's a still life as well and uh it's almost as if he's bringing different things together from his memory and combining them in one picture absolutely it's the world of matis encapsulated here so what else have we got okay well i'd love to as we're talking matisse we should move to the other great giant of 20th century figure figure painting which is of course picasso and that kind of dialogue of matisse the colorist and picasso the great uh graphic and draftsman is played out in a very interesting way with this completely mesmerizing portrait of marie terres executed yeah it's 1931 so it's just 11 years before the matisse we just looked at it's just i might say it's my complete favorite in the wholesale i find it as such an amazing beautiful work it is a very remarkable thing and it's it's done it looks like a drawing but it's actually done on canvas it's quite an unusual picture in picasso's exactly exactly because it's charcoal but if you look close you see it's actually on a prepared primed canvas like a very fine canvas and it's interesting you know why why did he do that why didn't he just take a sheet of wove paper which would have also been a standard format size like that but i think it gives it a kind of depth and even greater significance warmth and uh you know it gives it almost like a sort of velvety feel well the way the charcoal catches on on on the structure of the linen waves creates a different roof it's almost like it's almost pointless it's almost like sura but it's um i i'm very struck by this i'm very very struck by this it's such a strange and obviously for picasso profound relationship that he could have been driven to something so totally you know in the eyes of more or less everybody outrageous 55 year old picasso 17 year old mario therese i mean you know he but he you know he's lived through the war he's the streets of paris have been filled with young men with broken bodies he wants health and youth vitality and life yes he's returned to the figure he's abandoned cubism with its broken shapes and he's found this wonder to him this wonder of a woman she's a kind of golden wonder i mean here obviously in the monochrome form but she's almost like a goddess in a way you know it definitely it makes me think of a sort of beautiful renaissance idealized drawing but it's also incredibly immediate and personal and intimate you're right she is a bit like a botticelli but but i think um to me she's a sphynx and she's she's a drawing on canvas but she has the feeling of a sculpture yes it's all that it's all there the three-dimensional and the and the and the two-dimensional combined in this sort of masterful ingenious and also incredibly touching and moving work so absolutely stunning and it's 31 so it's it's it's it's still secret yes yeah but it's also the time of surrealism yeah with all its interest and dreams and sleep yes and what what goes on in the mind when we sleep and there's something of that in it as well that picasso he's awake worrying away working away as usual but she's asleep and she's a mystery to him she's a mystery to him anyway but when she's asleep she's even more she's a double mystery what's she dreaming of so you've got these kind of layers of overlapping meaning absolutely extraordinary sort of moment of him dreaming of her and she's streaming and it's all kind of coming together it's very intimate moment yeah very beautiful very very unusual as well so and and i have the idea that these objects are actually from the same one uh private collection is that correct so these are the kind of lead top works in a group of about 40 from one private european collection that we was we're selling as a the avant-garde collection over the course of the evening and uh the day sale and um each in their own way are really masterpieces of their kind and the giacometti is incredible this is 1956-57 so exactly the period when giacometti was doing his fam de venise series the the famous sort of iconic larger single female forms and here uh reduced to their essence i mean it's interesting your conversation with alex about the bacon and existentialism so giacometti another artist obsessed with this in this immediately it feels very much in the same it's in the same moral universe if not the same visual universe exactly in the sense that the the the focus on the the figure the figure in space the figure throughout time you know drawing on the ancient but also incredibly modern and innovative it all comes together in this reduced human essence you know we give birth astride the grave and all that but it does i mean i think it literally looks back in time because when giacometti was involved in the in the war i think at a certain point he he spent some time recuperating from injuries in in a hospital in the italian town of volterra which has the world's greatest collection of etruscan art and and and this really is a sort of um excavation in formal terms of the language of etruscan sculpture well that's clearly where the roots come from and then you know with that inspiration he's created something quite quite a unique language of these very very distinctive uh reduced figures and of course the molding is incredible here it's got a crispness and tension which is just extraordinary they sort of seem almost to tremble in space they they look surprisingly good in huge spaces with nothing else on display you could put this in a a in a paint warehouse with nothing else in it and it would still actually fill the space with its with its energy and what about what about this this ledger this is um this is a 1914 legend cubist work also with quite an interesting support because it's all on burlap which is that very very thick raw canvas and this is from the height of legey's cubist moment i mean this is the pinnacle in a way of his particular unique innovation uh so picasso and brock had their their version of cubism and leges brings in color this very strong reds and blues and greens and also it brings in kind of elements of um kind of mechanical forms these cylinder cylindrical forms that appear to be turning in a sort of almost like a sort of uh turbocharged dynamic movement they are very much going to become legey's iconography even after the first world war it makes me think i don't know because i know the dates 1914 i can't help thinking first world war thoughts and like i can't help thinking things like silos full of missiles explosions but but i i i suppose it you know in his mind it is a still life but if the flowers are flowers they they feel to me very much as if they're made from rolled steel they're not they're not made from biological material exactly i mean that play of the mechanical and the human is very key trilogy and you see it here working through in in in this in the use of form and also the dynamic the sense of movement is very strong here that's great work and very very it's very bold in its lack of finish in certain places you know the way that he's just left that you know and use so much better canvas it has has the effect of making the forms that are there it's almost as if they explode out of it all the more yeah great well i i've i've now actually got so engrossed in talking to that i've forgotten where i'm supposed to go next but oh yes i've been reminded so it's this way come with me from well from one world to another again i mean i suppose auction sales are always oh hang on i've gone wrong auction sales are inherently events that bring together unaccustomed bedfellows but that's all the more true in the case of this one because it crosses so many different categories that are normally kept apart you know given their own different sales so here we've got old master we've got impressionist and modern we've got contemporary and we've got modern british which is why i'm here to talk to you francis hello um barbara hepworth this is this is barbara hepworth it was conceived actually as a maquette for quite a large-scale commission she had in the mid-1950s from an electronics company but what's so interesting about it is that it marks quite a radical shift from her carving that she was well known for at the time and it's actually made out of rolled sheets of metal laboriously hand cold rolled and then this wonderful stringing which really brings quite a melodic quality to it so it's effectively constructed or constructivist even though exactly rather than modeled exactly big shift and it's called cold rolling where by hand you've got to roll the metal so it then becomes malleable she called the series orpheus which is quite evocative he was the legendary sort through musician greek mythology well i suppose it is quite literally lyrical in the sense that it looks like a liar orpheus's signature instrument um it's almost a cross between a work of sculpture and a stringed instrument quiet and i think the beauty of the string is that it does carve out the space and it does create quite a different effect from her more well-known carvings at the time and it has a personal side because the orpheus story is of course one of tragedy of loss love and loss love and loss and at the time in the early 50s her marriage to ben nicholson had broken down she lost her son and so shortly before this commission she went on a journey to greece it was her first visit to greece and she was completely inspired by the color the landscape and of course its ancient history so i think we see all of that in it it's interesting because yeah as you say although it's a public commission originally it it feels perhaps because it is a maquette it feels very personal it i i certainly think you were right given the dates you know how could she not have been thinking about the collapse of her marriage and the death of her you know her son terrible but i mean the other the other work of art that we have here is looking back to the beginning of that marriage isn't it is that a is that a portrait of her by ben it is um so it's it was drawn in 1933 it's quite a special moment because in 1932 ben and mark barbara moved into the same studio in hampstead and that became kind of the epicenter of modernism in britain at the time they were wildly in love and i think you can see from the beautiful portrait her silhouette her face these wondrous eyes that ben was clearly totally in awe of her both her beauty but also her talent as a sculptor and their work during that year is really interwoven with exchange of ideas and so i think this drawing it really marks something very important to the rest of sort of modern british history really yeah and it's very interesting with with the collision of her face seen in profile and her face seemed more full on in the mirror that's a device that the surrealists quite liked and in fact it's a device that picasso liked a great deal makes me think a little bit of you know the picasso image of mary therese that i was looking at just a short while ago and they're created very very close in time and although obviously there's a world of difference between these two images there's there's nonetheless a kind of correspondence you can feel perhaps that there's that spirit of surrealism in the air with its unusual juxtapositions and unusual ways of framing and making images that look almost as if they've been dreamed rather than seen i also think both both picasso and the ben nicholson they're looking at portraiture in a very different way from the traditional sort of formal sitting that you would normally think of as portraiture but both of them are unique portraits in their own right they're almost like soulmate portraits aren't they they're not they're not you know there's not a portrait of what somebody looks like it's a portrait of what somebody feels like to you and they've got this personal depth to them which makes both of them so compelling something different yes stanley spencer this is stanley spencer sort of the grand old master if you like of modern british art this is an iconic kind of example by him he's sort of known as painting the absolutely most ordinary subjects this is just a front garden in a little village in gloucestershire but he spots in that ordinary subject something truly extraordinary something visionary that makes us look at the front garden in an altogether different way it's as if we're a little sort of bee hovering over the garden and suddenly the daisies spring out all these colors every single blade of grass is sort of seen in a very acute detail i think it's well yeah it's interesting you say that about bee i think it's for me it's the toddler's eye view yeah it's like the tiny child who's really well it's the ground is so much closer to them than it is to us but they're looking and they can see the daisies um i think that's you know the daffodils and the the what are these uh i've gone blank these little primroses yeah primroses um and it's a sort of vision of spring and i wonder did you say it was done in 1941 it's 1940 1940 so again it's it's you know it's the second world war is upon us and and i i know it's not a subject picture but to me it feels like spencer's way of reminding himself and perhaps us that no matter how dark things become you know there will be a resurrection of sorts that spring will come new life will come this will all come to an end it's almost his antidote to looking up to see all the warplanes you look down see the flowers it's his vision of this is the green and pleasant land that the devastation is to save i suppose yeah yeah it has that feeling to me it's it's a vision rather than a a representation it's not just a cottage garden is it let's face it absolutely it's not it's not just a like a patch of of ground being used to grow flowers it's almost as if it's teeming with life it's something seething about it you get that in spencer i know you mentioned surrealism earlier there's also an air of yeah surrealism within it even though it's sort of acutely painted but i think it's the surrealism of a religious vision because i mean maybe to to be religious is to be a little bit surrealist because you're believing in your visions but it has that feeling to me and there's it's i it's it's a picture full of hope lovely i i should move on i could stay in front of it but i'll move on and um i'm actually going to jump into my time machine again and this time i'm going to go back 200 1941 1941 to 1750 so yeah i'm going back nearly 200 years to the world of bernardo belotto great venetian view painter but he's painting dresden exactly he's uh he's canaletta's nephew caneletta the man who immortalized venice but belotto makes his own way it moves to the north of europe and celebrates fraternity these these wonderful cities dresden warsaw vienna and some other cities but this is there's something particularly special about this picture i think in part because the condition is so wonderful what we see is um dresden as it was in 1758 this is one of the main buildings one of the most famous buildings in dresden but here it's seen from a different angle this is not a glorification of this baroque masterpiece it's it's a different sort of picture the this great building is set to the side and i think this is so sophisticated because this is really a celebration of light this is not about glorifying the city this is about showing how light hits these wonderful buildings how it hits the water how it creates ripples of course using water means that the the light effect is doubled because there's only two sources of light it's about how the everyday and the ordinary is just as beautiful perhaps even more beautiful let's whisper it than the royal palace absolutely here's the wonderful zwinger but then look at these cascading flowing pieces of vegetation i mean i do love his work and these these broken reflections are just fabulous i mean they're almost completely without form i mean you i i don't mean to pay any disrespect to canaletto but to me belotto is on a different level and you'd accept perhaps for the stone breakers yard in the national gallery by candlelight there's he never comes close to belotto i i think blotto is just amazing belotto had the great advantages that he could learn from and through canada and then he was able to develop it there but there's that you know but i love him i love his mind you know the way that he thinks the way that he depicts it's very modern this it's almost as if he's learnt something from the camera but the camera doesn't exist you know the idea that you you you might pay attention to this thing that you're not supposed to look at instead of the thing that you are supposed to look at caleto throughout his pictures included figures going about their day but they they're put into the action they're not the action itself and i think here we see something very different yeah the anecdotal detail the anecdotal figures they're key he's even thought about the swans you know one swan has an elevated neck and the other one and they're not there just to fill the space they heard their central balance it's almost like the little piece of um sunlight in that famous watercolor by gertin the white house and it's like it's just it's nothing but it's there in the middle and it draws your eye and it it's i think it's an absolutely lovely picture i love the sky as well to be the court painter and to paint dresden but to really set focus and concentrate on the moat in front of the main building shows you that this is an artist quite apart from his extraordinary level of skill as an artist you can see beyond his his era and his his moment yeah i was in dresden um fairly which is a wonderful city by the way i recommend a trip to dresden and i met a local architectural historian who told me that after the terrible carpet bombing and destruction of dresden during the second world war by the allies when they went to rebuild the city they found far more useful than any photographs was the series of paintings topographical paintings made of dresden by belotto they rebuilt the city from the paintings so yes the paintings are coming to life yeah something with pygmalion yeah well you think that the the city is is represented in the paintings but the the city that we now can visit is actually based on these quiet lovely full circles great yeah lovely to see you and um yeah thanks for yeah just a pleasure to look at that it is so where am i next where am i going where am i going louise bourgeois i am looking i know what i'm looking for from the cityscape i'm looking for the dreamscape and here we are oh there's something wonderful about coming into this room and seeing this picture it's it's a picture by mirror juan miro and it's one of a series of paintings that i think of as a sort of collective homage to catalonia and um well you know far more about miro than i do tell us a little bit about about this particular work 1927 it's a 1927 painting it belongs to a series of pictures which partly because of this amazing deep ozone blue which does seem to represent the kind of catalan sky of his homeland it's it stands at the very kind of height of his surrealist career but moves towards his mastery of abstraction and actually it belongs to a series of paintings which are known as dream paintings and this is because there is a wonderful canvas in the metropolitan museum of art in new york which has got um a single great splotch of this blue paint on it and others there's an inscription underneath which it says this is the color of my dreams this blue my dreams don't have a particular color but but i think for mirror they did i mean he was um a a relatively struggling artist in paris he was working um alongside the cyrillus and actually was so hungry at times that he said he had hallucinated and even this color made him salivate and it was a memory of his homeland a memory of catalonia and in these pictures that he draws on a variety of different lyric references they're not direct representation this painting is known as the woman with a red hat and of course we can we can see in those forms certain figurative elements but they're really just a subjective um uh almost um prose poem of um of abstraction in a subconscious and um very freeing style yeah i mean 1927 i i think you're i think you're right when you say that he's between surrealism and abstraction that he's pushed because in a way if i look at this work of art and i think about what suggestions does it make to the future that the future will accept and take on i i really see a lot of american art coming out of the color field painting yeah colorful paintings or indeed um the mobiles of alexander calder i mean you know those wonderful mobiles this could almost be a kind of template for one of those things well it's extraordinary you say that because this this picture actually belonged to alexander um yeah yeah he he bought it in in the 1960s and had it for the remainder of his life in fact we understand it it hung in this house in sort of pride of place and um it's it has that it's amazing because i actually i i saw the picture and i thought of colder but the id the idea that he actually bought his that's um yeah that's pretty strong evidence of influence it is i mean we know they were very great friends they were very um great friends from the 1930s onwards and as calder became you know a great international artist of acclaim and um some wealth as well he he actually chose to acquire the works of his contemporaries and in particular um i suppose for him this would be the ultimate trophy to buy a great dream painting by his friend and indeed actually i would say a great influence on him um it's very interesting i think that's a good case of where the provenance of a painting actually changes or enhances one's perception of it but it definitely is it's a different thing because it was owned by colder and and in a way it sort of pins down and mira's importance in the history of art yes you know in a very very direct way no fascinating well thank you thank you we must move on um yes we're on our way well from one blue to another blue and i suppose in a way from one dream to another dream um but the dreamer on this occasion is not mirror and the blue is not the color of his dreams the dreamer is david hockney and the blue is the color of his friend's swimming pool absolutely emma tell us about this sure unusual unusual picture so this is from a series of hockneys paper pools that he came to do in the late 1970s and we all know hockney's amazing paintings from the 1960s the wonderful images he did of swimming pools starting around 1960 through 1964 through to the bigger splash which is in the tate's collection and so he has a break from that and then he comes back to america on his way to california in the late 1970s and he stops off with a friend on his way to california ken ken tyler and he experiments with this new medium this um this new way of painting that that can introduce this to him which is using paper pulp um so he's again inspired by the pool once again in kentucky's back garden and this wonderful wonderful with swimming pool you have what's the what's the paint medium if it's paper pulp cut into or looks almost torn into rectangles what what's the actual paint medium is it is it watercolor it's it's actually paper itself that's been dyed so he would use these big wire meshes and put the paper pole pin it in sort of in the composition and then apply dye on top so he's almost painting with water so he's sort of yeah like spreading it exactly spreading it around and you get these really abstract passages which do speak to a whole history of 20th century abstraction especially it's almost as if he's sort of playing a little hockney joke on on the idea of abstract art i think david doesn't actually believe any any art is abstract if you just took that panel out and looked at it on its own you'd see an abstraction absolutely it looks like a rosco so it looks like a cake or a demon corn maybe or something like that but then this unequivocal diving board is is there to remind you no it's a picture of a swimming pool and you can jump in it puts you right in the picture as well so you're like front and center about to dive into the swimming pool and the color of this work and the size of it as well is just so vibrant and compelling and it just draws you in holds your attention yeah well it's nice to have a little swim it's a hot day it's a hot day here in london yeah so also thinking about color and light brigitte riley was another artist that was doing a similar thing but thinking about different colors and how they react against each other and you can see that as well in this painting we have from 1982 which is from her series of egyptian striped paintings that she was creating in the early 1980s this is cool edge goodness it's it does begin to vibrate quite soon after you fix your eyes on it absolutely and it's um a series of work she was doing after a period of time when she traveled across the globe so she'd been to many different countries and been impressed upon the different sites and the scenes that she saw there but it was particularly the colours of egypt that she saw that really ignited a new passion for using colour in her painting the colors of the tomb exactly yeah the colors of the tomb paintings the effect of the river nile and the architecture you have in egypt and that was something she was really inspired by and it just kind of launched her into this whole new direction in her painting it's interesting with as i've met her a few times and and um she's she's quite often spoken about her ambition to do by other means in a sense what what the impressionists and the post-impressionists were attempting to do um namely to capture the sparkle of light on water in her case um the sparkle of sunshine on the cornish sea that she used to swim in as a child yeah that that is the experience that she she wishes to to to evoke i also find that they have um if you think about them slightly differently they almost become evocations of a person's turbulent mood and energy so they're not necessarily just about the exterior world they're perhaps about an interior world that is totally constantly moving and vibrating and shifting and changing and in that respect they're not entirely idyllic to me they they can be almost challenging or yes or jarring or or dizzy making or totally i think you get that sense when you first see these pictures and often when you don't see them in person if you see them in reproduction that sense does come across quite strongly but the longer you spend with these paintings the more you get used to the composition the more you see and the more time you can spend to it with it she really does sort of paint like how your eye sees and the way it moves across shapes and colors the way that colors interact with other colors and make new colors and that's definitely something that the eye the human eye really does itself well i've noticed that she's um you know spent some time with her leading up to the uh retrospective she had in edinburgh not that long ago and uh she's always very pleased when somebody settles in front of a painting for five minutes that's what she thinks is like minimum time you don't look at them as if they're images you give yourself to them as if they're experiences absolutely and they give more back to you if you do that totally great well thank you very much thank you i am yeah i remember bridget riley saying to me once we were in the national gallery and we were looking at rafael's wonderful painting of saint catherine with these astonishing colors of the drapery that seemed almost to carry the whole meaning of the painting the whole of its transcendent effect was in these draperies and bridget riley said to me do you know i think that drapery is the abstraction of figurative art and it's been like that since the renaissance and that remarks always stuck with me and and i just thought well this image this amazing drapery study it's the abstract quality of this work makes it absolutely timeless you know it's one of the 16 drawing of this type which are just drawing of light shapes volumes and it's very interesting you were talking about the piazza being on canvas and this is a fine finissima taylor dillino how vasari described this type of the finest piece of linen when it does credited to the invention to leonardo da vinci so just to put just to be absolutely precise about what an amazingly extraordinary thing this is it's one of 16 only only 16 drapery studies exactly that survive from the source workshop of andrea del verrocchio in which leonardo da vinci was a student exactly and that these drapery studies are thought all of them to have been made as um well preparatory either paintings but in this case we know for sculpture because the sculpture still exists exactly this is obviously the monumental sculpture by andre del berocchio one of the most important renaissance culture really of the renaissance which is in the facade of ursa michele and obviously the doubting incredulity of saint thomas and this inner niche which was designed by donatello so that is extraordinary because in fact this culture of donatello moves to santa croce and the rocky when donatello dies in 1466 is given this commission which most probably it lasts almost 20 years of work if you get given a commission that donatello had i think you're quite nervous and you want to do your well he had to perform because he became the most important artist for the medicine and the medicine court and that's the moment of lorenzo magnifico yeah so it's the greatest yes too and he lives up to it actually i absolutely agree it's underrated but may i ask as well the when it comes to this drapery how does vasari say that they actually did it yes that's very interesting in fact it is filarete which start giving us so in the 60s early 60s villarrete already describes this technique so they were dipping a sort of cloth into a plaster wetted plaster or some solution of glue and then make it dry when they were draping um this on mannequin wooden mannequin so it's a very difficult process i don't know how they did really really keep it basically it's like trying to make a piece of water still like trying to stop time because what what they want to do is they want their piece of drapery which is abstract and figurative at the same time they want it to be exactly the same so that they can recreate it either in bronze or impact this is the only way what is important is that painter sculpture architect were all active in this bottega so in a way the common language of all of them is the drawing and that is exceptional so the drawing is really the most ultimate way to how would you say profess all your discipline well i think some people may look at this and think it's it's a drawing of a piece of drapery but does it have any meaning does it and he said i would say yes because this is the drapery of the risen christ exactly and this is the drapery it survives in the actual sculpture one of the most important sculptures in the world on the facade of osama cage and what does the drapery say to me the drapery says to thomas and to all of us it says yes christ is alive he has come back from the dead and he's real and he's volumes and he's in fact he's got more mass than the rest of us i i think if if if that was actually a person he'd weigh a million tons i mean it's got this weight and then i mean we we've seen it in the louvre exhibition you know well all around all this drapery started it was absolutely fabulous it's one of the most beautiful sculpture with this deep deep deep folds and you have to imagine that the christ is actually seen frontally so he actually took the fatigue to study in every sort of shapes because obviously as we know the back of the crisis completely yeah yes but he studied the drapery enough so that he wants us to believe that it goes all the way around exactly very important and that's why it takes such a trouble i have to say one of the most beautiful work in the world really yes to survive and i think um well i'm just so pleased to have seen this because they're very very very unusual and i have to say this is only one of two still in private hand the others are only major museums yeah so it's amazing that they even survive at all it's a it's it's a a a leaf out of history it's amazing i think it's wonderful thank you very much cheers so i think we we've just about not quite but we've come very close to the end of our virtual tour our grand tour um rembrandt to richter is the title and it wouldn't be complete without the richter alex hello again tell me a little bit about this richter it's from 1970 1970. that's right it's called vulcan fenster vulcan of the clouds that you see and fences german for windows it is one of the largest cloud paintings that he made um and when you see it on this cinematic scale it's very hard not to think about you know the great tradition of german romantic painting and casper david friedrich in particular we speak about a lot when it comes to richter because both men came from dresden um but at the same time the prosecutors of the title and these these square window frames actually prevent us having that sort of full sense of the sublime um and obviously this is a painting from a photograph this is not a painting of nature but nonetheless we feel like we're on the edge of something yeah no very much so i mean my my feeling about i very much like richter's work from the photo realist phase and and and but i i feel about him in his relationship to the romantics that there's something problematic about it that you know because the romantics had been so distorted and twisted and brandished by the third reich and of course that's what richter's generation wants to distance themselves from so yes he loves friedrich himself but what's been done to friedrich has made him have an uneasy relationship with that past and so it's it's almost as if he's saying to us well i might love the idea of romanticism but it's an idea from which i am now separated by history or by literally in the painting but by by glass but there's something sort of slightly or not not even slightly to me it's the alienated sublime if there's such a phrase i think there's definitely a dealing with the past and i think also just of the present what it means to be a painter in the 20th century in the age of photography and on into the 21st century and i think here he's also looking forwards he'd become famous throughout the 1960s for his greyscale photorealistic paintings always taken from photographs by the end of the 60s he was really looking to evolve his style to become something different and he was experimenting with different ways to abstraction and actually the fenster paintings are these grayscale geometric forms of windows which we see an echo of here but i think even this even though in some ways it is inevitably a photorealistic painting and painting of the sky which shows incredible skill as a painter at the same time it is a study in abstraction clouds by their very nature are the most abstract form and here he is studying them and this really is a bridge for him to move into abstraction which becomes from this point on a key parallel mode to his photo realistically so for you it's um it's the beginning of a new beginning it's not it's not just it's not the end so i i i'm imagining that you when you look at it you see um you see dawn rather than twilight it's definitely i feel like we're on the edge of something both you know metaphorically in terms of his his own painting style thank you very much thank you andrew well that's it thank you very much for for joining me on um on this virtual tour of rembrandt to richter i'm going to leave you now and here are some closing words from ollie barker the chairman of sotheby's europe thank you very much indeed thank you very much indeed i really enjoyed following all of those mini interviews around the pictures and you filled them with such incredible sort of incisive information thank you so much and i hope you've enjoyed it at home i hope this has been a very informative and educational tour of our exhibition rembrandt to richter here at sotheby's in newborn street um the galleries are very much open and we very much hope that we'll have the opportunity of welcoming you here in person our experts are here on the ground if you would like to come to sotheby's we are open daily before the sale next tuesday the 28th of july between 10 o'clock in the morning and three o'clock in the afternoon alternatively if you want to come in outside of those hours please book by appointment please look at the website for details specifically on how to do that but obviously for those of you who are unable to come in physically there is still the opportunity to look online where the catalog is listed directly uh as well as also um the the the virtual tour in fact which is going to be online as well which gives viewers our clients the best opportunity of walking around and seeing some of these incredible treasures now in addition to this we also have four online sales as well um the idea of this sale is actually to be very much kind of cross categories so we are doing online sales devoted to old master painting to impressions to modern art also to contemporary art and of course modern british art as well there is even the opportunity to use augmented reality on our sotheby's app please try it out to actually uh superimpose one of the objects here in the galleries onto a wall in your living space as well and uh i look forward to doing that maybe even with this savile painting behind me which i've got my arm very much i think it's an extraordinary extraordinary object um so on that note we are delighted to be closing off sotheby's summer series of sales which have really been extraordinarily global we started in paris we've been to geneva we've been to hong kong and new york and of course now finally rounding off the season here in london the auction is taking place at 5 p.m british time on tuesday the 28th of july i'll be manning the rostrum there next week we very much hope that you can join us as well and we look forward to selling this wonderful extraordinary range of great objects rembrandt to richter next tuesday thank you for joining us and please look at all the details at www.sothebees.com thank you so much you

Channel: Sotheby's

Views: 129,297

Keywords: sotheby's, rembrandt, richter, francis bacon, franz hals, barbara hepworth, bridget riley, david hockney, bellotto, verrocchio, da vinci, picasso, leger, giacometti, avant-garde, andrew graham-dixon, art history

Id: RnUG5hlCDQo

Length: 57min 25sec (3445 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 22 2020