Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art announced Thursday the acquisition of works by the French-American painter and sculptor Louise Bourgeois and a landmark piece by octogenarian Jasper Johns. All told, the five pieces are worth an estimated $71 million to $76 million.
The Bentonville museum bought the Johns piece -- one of the artist's red, white and blue seminal Flag works from 1983 -- for $36 million at a Sotheby's auction in November. It was the highest price ever paid for a work by Johns, trumping the projected $15 million to $20 million selling price. The encaustic on silk flag on canvas was sold by Mark Lancaster, a British artist who had worked for Johns.
"Records are being set and broken at every auction," noted Gregg Shienbaum of Gregg Shienbaum Fine Art in Miami, a dealer of Johns' work. "It might be a record for Johns -- even though I think it's low. I consider him to be the most important American living artist today."
Shienbaum said Johns changed the face of the art world with his American flags, beginning in the 1950s. The flags were the first pop art pieces, even though Johns would not like to think so, he said. They served as a transition from abstract expressionism into pop art. The 12-inch by 18-inch, rough encaustic surface created from pigment suspended in wax and the brush strokes Johns used "were very much abstract impressionism, but the image is still pop," Shienbaum said. Johns did more for the pop art movement than even Andy Warhol, he said.
"Jasper Johns didn't make a painting of an American flag. He made the American flag a painting," he said.
"I think a lot of people who understand the movement would agree. He elevated it to a whole other level," Shienbaum added. He still has four of Johns' pieces for sale in Miami.
Margi Conrads, director of curatorial affairs at Crystal Bridges, noted the work's meaning to Crystal Bridges from a fundamental standpoint.
"It has so many layers of both paint and meaning, but particularly because we are Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art -- and we are about both art and America and the many complicated stories that lie within -- it's a very special acquisition," Conrads said.
The works by Bourgeois consist of two sculptures: Maman (1999), a more-than 30-foot-high by 33-foot-wide spider of bronze, stainless steel and marble, and Quarantania (1947-1953), fashioned of bronze and painted white with blue and black plus stainless steel. The acquisitions also include two paintings: the oil on wood Connecticutiana (1944-1945) and Untitled (1947) of oil on canvas.
The museum bought the four pieces from Cheim & Read art gallery in New York.
Quarantania was on loan from the gallery for Crystal Bridges' opening in November 2011 -- a rarity since most of what was displayed was assumed to have been purchased. Gallery co-founder Howard Read described Quarantania as "an early, iconic work of Bourgeois with an elaborate exhibition and publication history."
He said the gallery had been talking to Crystal Bridges about the museum buying the unique sculpture since then, but it didn't happen until the four works were sold together recently.
Neither the museum nor Read would divulge the selling price, but a figure of $35 million to $40 million quoted in Wednesday's New York Times was "a reasonable figure," said one source.
Bourgeois didn't begin work on spiders until the early 1990s, Read said.
Around 2000, the British-Dutch multinational consumer-goods company Unilever awarded Bourgeois a $1 million grant as part of a program that doled out $5 million to five artists over as many years. Bourgeois created the monumental Maman (which means "mother" in French) for an exhibition of hers that was the first show in Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in London.
She cast six editions of Maman, with the other five on display in prominent public collections and museums around the world, in places including the National Gallery of Canada; Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain; the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo; and Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art in South Korea."Since then, Maman has been shown almost anywhere you can think of around the world," Read said.
Crystal Bridges is the first American museum to have it. It's not yet known where the sculpture will be placed at Crystal Bridges, but it is expected to be installed by the end of the summer, said Conrads.
There is talk of a larger exhibition of Bourgeois' works at Crystal Bridges in the future, Read said.
Business on 06/05/2015