Author Archives: Lauren Della Monica

March Arts Events

Don’t miss the following art fairs and museum exhibits this month:

Art Fairs
Tefaf Maastricht, now through March 16 at Maastricht Exhibition & Congress Centre, The Netherlands

And in New York city…
Pulse, March 27-30, Pier 40 ( West Side Highway at West Houston Street )
Scope, March 26-30, Pavilion outside Lincoln Center at 62nd & Amsterdam
The Armory Show, March 27-30, Pier 94 ( 12th Ave at 55th Street )
Volta NY , March 27-30, 7 West 34th Street (34th & 5th)
Red Dot, March 27-30, South Hotel ( Park Ave South at 28th Street )

Museum Exhibitions
The Met is now showing three great shows at once including Jasper Johns: Gray, Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions and Gustave Courbet.

Whitney Museum of American Art, Biennial 2008

Children & Art

Fine art and children are related in many ways. Most children are visually stimulated from an early age, be it through finger painting projects at school, dressing up in costumes, or reading brightly colored picture books with their parents. Exposure to fine art is just another avenue for visual awareness, in a sense, but one that will carry these children into adulthood. The relationship between kids and art has come up four times for me this week alone.

I have recently been retained to conduct lecture tours at The Met for an organization called Metropolitan Moms where new mothers may bring their babies in strollers for museum tours as part of a fine art lecture series. I am really looking forward to participating and to giving new mothers some insight into artwork I love as well as a break from their daily routines.

Then, a good friend (who is also a new mother) contacted me to see if she and her child could accompany me on any upcoming gallery or art fair visits as she and her son have been joining me for such visits since he was just four weeks old. Though he is too young to appreciate what we are doing, it is a great way for his mother to learn about and enjoy art. We have also found that most people love to meet a well-behaved baby in an otherwise adult dominated setting. I look forward to bringing him to these same types of events and places as an older child as well.

Next, another friend asked me to help her locate the perfect work of art for her baby’s bedroom. My friend is interested in investing in a quality work of art that will grow with her child rather than simply purchasing a standard, unsophisticated piece of mass-produced “kids room art” from a catalogue. She hopes that her daughter will grow to appreciate being raised with a painting in her bedroom, and that she will then be comfortable around artwork as an older child and as an adult. Although we want to keep away from typical kids room artwork this project calls for something visually appealing and easy to live with as it is, after all, meant for a child’s room. Not alone in wanting to raise her daughter to be visually aware, I recall that another friend once told me that she and her husband would mark the occasion of their child’s birth by purchasing a work of art for themselves that they would later give to their daughter.

Third, I met an art world colleague whose twelve year old son’s art collection happened the subject of a September 14, 2007 Wall Street Journal article entitled “Small Collectors.” I remember this article well as it is a savvy piece on how some lucky children are learning to buy and live with art at a very young age. The artwork selection allows the children to express themselves and the process of collecting teaches them immeasurable business and interpersonal skills rarely learned by children of that age — but packaged in a fun way: as artwork.

The idea of a multi-generational approach to art appreciation is alive and well in these families. Whether for the good of the parent or the child, spending time around fine art and learning more about it will create a more culturally aware population of children who are at home in museums and around artwork.

Jasper Johns: Gray

johns_13_r.jpgNow at the Met is “Jasper Johns: Gray”, an exhibition of the artist’s work from the 1950s to the present in a variety of media, all of which are executed in tonal grays. Johns’ iconic symbols are all there: flags, targets, maps, numbers, and alphabets. In this show, however, the picture plane itself is the focus of the show; the color has been reduced to a minimal level so as not to interfere with the surface. One can look closely at the layers of collage and newsprint below the encaustic surfaces of the works on each of the works which for me created a new appreciation for the process of Johns’ art making. The show is comprised of more than 120 Johns works from paintings to sculpture. The exhibition runs through May 4, 2008 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Photo: Jamie M. Stukenberg/Professional Graphics Inc., Rockford, Illinois

Update: Swiss Art Theft

Vincent Van Gogh’s “Blooming Chestnut Branches”Two of the works stolen from the Swiss E.G. Buerhle Collection have been recovered. Police located Van Gogh’s “Blooming Chestnut Branches” and Claude Monet’s “Poppies Near Vetheuil” last Monday in a parked car outside a Swiss mental hospital, Zurich’s University Psychiatric Clinic. Unbelievably, the car doors were unlocked, prompting a hospital employee to take note of the vehicle during a routine check of the parking lot. The two works were not damaged and are expected to be returned to the museum in the coming days. The Degas and Cezanne paintings also taken in this robbery remain missing.

Photo: Keystone/Stadtpolizei Zuerich via Foundation E.G. Buehrle Collection/AP

Charity Art Auction Raises $42.58 Million

n08421-16-lr-1.jpgThe (Red) auction, organized by Bono’s RED organization, Sotheby’s auction house and Gagosian Gallery, raised $42.58 million at their contemporary art auction on Valentine’s Day in New York for the United Nations Foundation to support programs to fight HIV/AIDS run by The Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

U2’s Bono and artist Damien Hirst scored big with their efforts at fund raising and soliciting donations from artists for the auction which were then scooped up by celebrities at the sale; all but one work sold that evening. The auction included sixty works by artists such as Tracey Emin, Banksy, Takashi Murakami, Richard Prince, Anselm Keifer, Julian Schnabel, Jasper Johns, Damien Hirst, Georg Baselitz, Jeff Koons, Howard Hodgkin and Anish Kapoor and many others. Eighty one of the eighty three lots up for sale were donated directly by the artists. Hirst himself donated seven works of art to the sale which sold for a total of $19 million.

Photo: Sotheby’s