Blog
Origin of the contemporary art market
So far we have said that the origins of the market are very ancient, but in truth to speak of a free market , the one based on the system of private galleries, which corresponds to the current structure of the contemporary art market, we have to go back to the 19th century. It is therefore necessary to take a step back and examine the circumstances of its birth and development, which were built on the foundations of a new and radical transformation and revolution in the conceptions of art at the end of the 19th century. We are therefore referring again to the mid-seventeenth century, a period that saw the birth of a monopoly even more restrictive and rigidly structured, if you will, than the previous ones: that of the art academies . Founded with the aim of officially legitimizing the validity of artistic production, these institutions effectively controlled it until the second half of the nineteenth century. Let's examine the French model in particular. 1648 was the year in which the Académie Royale de Peinture et Sculpture was founded in Paris, the most influential body of institutional recognition. It organized annual exhibitions, the Salons , whose participation or exclusion determined the artists' entire careers, their chances of affirmation, and their commercial success. The judging panel consisted of academics, teachers from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and the director of the French Academy in Rome (the capital of ancient and classical art). Acceptance of works by this panel depended on their conformity to classical aesthetic theory, which the institution aimed to defend and preserve. Artists aligned with academic canons received prizes at the Salons and commissions to create public works, and their works were proposed to public institutions and museums for purchase. If we also keep in mind that the Academy's statute forbade official artists from directly marketing their own works, we realize the total control it exercised both over the content of the works and over their marketing. The market, therefore, which had incredibly developed in the 16th and 17th centuries, as mentioned earlier, was not a free market, but rather heavily constrained by these institutions, which, moreover, combined with the conformist approach of criticism and the dominant taste of the upper-middle-class public, left no room for the emergence of innovative artistic production. An officially regulated, regulated, and limited artistic production was inextricably linked to an equally regulated and consequently limited official market. This situation began to change in the second half of the nineteenth century , with the emergence of Romantic ideals over Classicist ones. And it was precisely France that was at the forefront of this transformation, which saw the birth and development of independent exhibitions organized by the artists themselves, on the one hand, and a new type of private gallery, on the other. Starting with exhibitions, let's briefly recall that 1855 was the year of the Universal Exhibition in Paris, which included works by artists from twenty-eight countries, as well as paintings rejected by the Salon jury. Meanwhile, 1863 saw the Salon des Réfusés, the first (and only) exhibition entirely dedicated to artists excluded from the official Salon. It should be kept in mind that among the innovative artists of the latest generation, mistreated and excluded from the official circuits, there were names like Cézanne (who tried every year to send his works to the Salon without ever being accepted!) and like the Impressionists, who were among the first to demand and pursue their independence from the academic supremacy, and thus constituted themselves as a revolutionary reaction movement to the dominant situation (just think that the term "impression" was used for the first time in 1874 [1] with an ironic and negative meaning to describe their works). After these first initiatives, more or less successful, a true alternative salon was born in 1884: the Salon des Artistes Indépendants, organized by the Société des Artistes Indépendants, which provided for neither prizes nor a jury. The Salon d'Atomne, founded in 1903, was this time equipped with a jury, with the specific aim of shaping the tastes of the public and collectors by directing them toward innovative trends in contemporary art. This particularly successful event hosted exhibitions of historic importance, such as those of the Fauves and Cubists, as well as a Cézanne retrospective. But let us return to the Impressionists , to underline how crucial their movement is, because it inaugurates the creation of an avant-garde art , that is, of modernism , an aesthetic revolution in pictorial language, but also the creation of an alternative market , made up of private galleries, which through new commercial and promotional strategies, had to invent a new market that corresponded to the new art. The partnership with Paul Durand Ruel (1870), marks the appearance of the first truly modern dealer, an innovator both in terms of artistic choices and in terms of commercial and critical strategies. Ruel's new commercial system, which would later become the model of the new international avant-garde market, consists of: in the valorization of a new art not yet requested by the market; · in the monopoly on artistic production, in order to control prices; · in the promotion of artists through the organization of personal exhibitions (including abroad to give them an international dimension) and through the founding of magazines for the dissemination of information. Finally, let's mention two more celebrated dealers who embraced Ruel's teachings and continued his legacy: Ambroise Vollard and Daniel Kahnweiler. One was the principal dealer of Gauguin and Cézanne, but also of Degas, Renoir, Van Gogh, Matisse, and Picasso, and the other was a Cubist dealer, credited with investing heavily in the critical appreciation of his artists through collaborations with renowned writers and poets (such as Apollinaire and Max Jacob), and generally expanding contacts between collectors, critics, and dealers. With these developments, we arrive at the 1910s, and the history of the Parisian market continues, reaching full maturity in the 1920s, and growing further in the 1930s and 1940s. These same years saw the formation and transformation of various market centers throughout Europe, such as London, Berlin, and Brussels. If we dwell on the history of the Parisian market , it is because it played a particularly significant role, first in breaking down certain frontiers and then in leading the world market. Paris at this stage was the home of art, the capital of modernism (most modern artists, as is well known, lived and worked in Paris: from Picasso to Matisse, from Braque to Léger, from Gris to Derain, etc.). So let's take a step back and point out that 1914 in particular marked a turning point in France: the resounding success of the auction of an avant-garde art collection testified to the interest of a vast, high-society audience (and no longer just a narrow circle of amateurs). Bourgeois society identified the value of avant-garde art with the dynamic spirit of modern times, which contrasted with what was past, outdated, and no longer relevant. The new social fact was that the ruling class recognized the values represented by the new art, and appropriated them. But at this point, history repeats itself, because the incredible social and market success of contemporary art triggered a new reaction from the new generation of postwar avant-garde artists: the Dadaists and the Surrealists . Their movements were characterized by a revolutionary political stance, a radical critique of the values of bourgeois society, and opposition to the commodification of art. It was precisely this need to revive the avant-garde spirit that drove them to seek an even more alternative, self-managed and self-promoted market. But, ironically, they themselves became successful artists in an even larger, more international market. Indeed, during the Second World War, due to their political stances, they were forced to flee, almost en masse, to the United States, where they were welcomed with great enthusiasm both by the gallery owners who made their fortune (especially Peggy Guggenheim) and by the younger generations of American artists who were profoundly influenced by them (and we're talking about artists like Pollock, Rothko, and their circle). We've discussed France so far for the reasons mentioned above, but we can't help but briefly touch on the German situation, which was particularly important in the context of European modernism. (We'll leave the analysis of the Italian side until later, because, being the one that concerns us most closely, it deserves a separate discussion to delve into it in more detail.) In Germany, avant-garde art developed, beginning in the 1910s, with its own characteristics and was essentially represented by the German Expressionism of artists such as Kirchner, Schmidt-Rottluff, Nolde, Macke, and Marc, and by the abstract art of Kandinsky and Klee, and by the Bauhaus. It was a vibrant scene until the rise of Nazism, which began to persecute avant-garde art, which it labeled "degenerate," and its creators. A emblematic example was the organization of a negative propaganda exhibition, which toured a dozen German cities from 1937 to 1941, presenting approximately six hundred works requisitioned by the Nazis. After the Second World War, New York (which until then had been essentially limited to reselling European art, having not yet developed an original indigenous art form) began to become the world center of contemporary art, replacing Paris as the world's leading art form. The gallery system developed alongside the emergence of avant-garde trends, marking the transition from modernism to contemporary art proper, such as Abstract Expressionism (1940s and 1950s), Minimalism, Pop Art (1960s), which achieved international success with the awarding of the Rauschenberg Prize at the 1964 Venice Biennale, and later Process and Conceptual art, in their various forms. The European avant-gardes of the 1950s at the centre of the Parisian market were essentially Informalism and Nouveaux Réalisme, which were also very important artistic phenomena but which, however, seem not to have held up to comparison with contemporary American trends, supported by a market that had become much more vital and supported by the government itself (!), which strategically used the new art to assert a cultural, as well as economic and military, supremacy over Europe. From the post-World War II era onward, the American art movement never stopped. To understand the scale of the phenomenon, consider that in the 1970s, there were more than two hundred galleries concentrated in just one New York neighborhood, Soho, and over seventy magazines dedicated to contemporary art! The 1980s and 1990s then witnessed the incredible phenomenon of the instant historicization of new stars, which saw young artists achieve immediate success and sky-high prices. Today, prices for living American artists reach dizzying figures, unattainable for European artists. The most important centers of the market worldwide: New York is currently the center of the contemporary art system, and the artists supported by the galleries of this market are the most valued. The second largest market is the English market, centered in London. The German market is also very strong in Europe. But it is fundamentally along the New York-London axis that the reference models impose themselves with a greater capacity for cultural and economic penetration. [1] Louis Leroy in Le Charivari , 25 April 1874
The contemporary art market in Italy
The contemporary art market At the end of the 19th century, Italy lacked commercial structures, which is why Italian artists were forced to turn to Paris to establish relationships with merchants. The dealer they turned to was essentially Goupil, who, unlike Ruel, was not an avant-garde dealer, just as Italian painting was not avant-garde. At this stage, Italian painting was still characterized as very moderate, still traditional compared to the French avant-garde, focusing as it did on genre scenes from the Neapolitan and Roman schools. A new and important development was the organization, in 1895, of the First International Art Exhibition of the city of Venice, known as the Venice Biennale (which we will discuss in more detail later). Let us emphasize that on paper, it was an operation aimed at creating a new (Italian) hub for the contemporary art market, capable of initiating an international dialogue with the research of other countries, with which it aimed to engage. In truth, however, it was initially managed in an official and traditional manner and thus remained effectively closed to new trends, so much so that it provoked polemical reactions from young artists. Thus, here too, as in France, an exhibition of the "rejected" artists from the Biennale was held, again in Venice, but it did not materialize in the development of an original, cohesive, and energetic movement like Impressionism. In Italy, the most important gallery, active since 1870, was that of Luigi Pisani in Florence, which modeled itself on Goupil and worked with the Tuscan Macchiaioli (Fattori, Signorini, Banti, Lega). With the exception of the artist Medardo Rosso, an innovative sculptor, modernism in Italy began to emerge in the 1890s, with the Milanese Divisionists (Segantini, Pellizza da Volpedo, Morbelli), who gravitated around the Grubicy brothers' gallery. However, it is Futurism that is considered the first true Italian avant-garde movement. Futurism, founded by Marinetti (which we analyze here from the perspective of its sociocultural impact rather than its aesthetic and poetic content), is particularly distinguished by its organizational, promotional, and commercial strategies. From its international launch, through the publication of its Manifesto in the Parisian newspaper “Le Figaro” (1909), to its publicity through posters, flyers and so on, to the programming of exhibitions in various European countries: 1912 saw the debut of the Futurist painters in a well-known gallery in Paris, followed by exhibitions in London, Berlin, Brussels, Amsterdam. The cultural success of the operation was total: the Futurists managed, through these strategic actions, to insert themselves in a very short time into the most vital circuits of the international avant-garde (even influencing them, as in the case of the Russian Futurists and the English Vorticasts). The Sprovieri Gallery in Rome became the center of Futurist activity, with a very dynamic program, which included, in addition to the exhibition, a series of activities, such as conferences and concerts. Although the market achieved a certain level of development between the 1920s and 1930s, it failed to take on an international dimension in the galleries' activities, and this is fundamentally the reason why Italy was destined, at least up to a certain point, to remain rather marginal in the international contemporary art system. It is no coincidence that there are many examples of artists who moved to Paris: from Modigliani to De Chirico, Savinio, De Pisis, Campigli. One of the causes of this situation is probably the Venice Biennale itself, which exercised a sort of monopolistic control over sales (in fact, until the 1960s it directly managed the sales activity). In 1931, it was joined by the Rome Quadriennale, another important institution still active today, dedicated entirely to contemporary Italian art, which also handled the sale of the works. In the post-World War II era, around the 1950s, the situation began to gradually change, and with the rise of Art Informel, we witnessed a phenomenon of openness to the international scene. And it was in the 1960s and 1970s that this process reached full fruition: a series of avant-garde galleries, initially in Milan, began to present exhibitions of the most important international artists and emerging artists of the Italian avant-garde, which this time proved truly competitive in terms of innovation. We are talking about research linked to Pop Art (with Schifano, Festa, Angeli, Ceroli) and Conceptual Art (with Paolini) and Povera Art (with Kounellis, Pascali, Zorio, Anselmo, Merz). It was a very happy period for Italy, perhaps we could say the happiest in the history of contemporary art, because it succeeded in fully establishing itself on the international scene. The historic Roman galleries of this period are the Tartaruga by Plinio De Martiis, the Galleria La Salita, the Attico gallery by Sargentini, the very famous Turin gallery of Gian Enzo Sperone (connected with Leo Castelli of New York) and some Milanese galleries such as the Galleria Toselli, etc. The 1980s were marked by another enormous international artistic phenomenon: the Transavanguardia (Cucchi, Clemente, Chia, Paladino, and De Maria), which represented a return to painting. This return to the materialization of artworks on a painted surface (which affected not only Italy, but also other countries, particularly Germany and the United States) coincided with an unprecedented market development. Currently in Italy, Milan is probably the liveliest center of the market, while Turin is the most important city in terms of the quality of its cultural offering, being home to the most important museum of contemporary art in Italy (the Castello di Rivoli), and to important foundations such as the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo.
Maurizio Cattelan stellar
Maurizio Cattelan is a star. His "Him," a mannequin depicting Hitler kneeling, fetched $17.2 million at auction in New York.
A €120 million Caravaggio painting was forgotten in a Toulouse attic.
It all started because of (or rather, thanks to) a water leak in the attic of a country house, not far from Toulouse. After rummaging through that forgotten place, they discovered an ancient painting: in Paris, they're certain it's a Caravaggio. The discovery was made in April 2014 and then kept secret. Experts from the Eric Turquin company subsequently analyzed the painting: they found it beyond doubt, authentic. They will present it to the press today. It depicts Judith and Holofernes and is similar to another Caravaggio canvas, displayed at the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica in Rome (Palazzo Barberini). This time, however, the woman, who manages to thwart the threat of an Assyrian invasion of the Holy Land by beheading the enemy general, is dressed in black (and not white, as in the previously known painting) and has a disturbing, frontal gaze. According to French experts, the newly discovered painting dates back to 1604-1605, while the previously known one was created in 1599. Further investigations are still ongoing, but its authenticity is confirmed by another piece: the copy of this painting (the version with Judith dressed in black) made by Louis Finson, a Flemish painter, in the early 17th century. This painting is now owned by Banca Intesa San Paolo and is displayed at Palazzo Zevallos in Naples. Lanson's will included a Caravaggio painting of Judith and Holofernes. But how did the painting end up in that attic in deepest France? An ancestor of the family that owned the house followed Napoleon to Italy as an officer. The painting would have remained there forever, completely forgotten. "And today it is in an exceptional state of preservation," assure Eric Turquin's experts. The French state is taking the matter seriously. It has declared the canvas a "national treasure," with a thirty-month ban on exporting it. The Louvre is already making arrangements to purchase it. Funds are lacking (its estimated value is €120 million), but the Parisian museum has begun seeking private sponsors.
Origin of the market and origin of collecting
The origins of the art market and the history of collecting date back centuries to classical antiquity. It is well known that ancient Greece was characterized by a great flourishing of the arts, but this was essentially linked to state commissions of works for the city, the polis . But since what interests us most is collecting in its private rather than public form, we must immediately leap forward and refer to classical Rome , because it is there that the taste for collecting and antiques originated. In particular, what we observe is the development, in late antiquity (around 200 BC), within the context of relations between Rome and Greece , of a significant demand for Greek statues by the Roman ruling classes. Thus, spurred by collectors' demand, the industry of replicas of Greek statuary masterpieces from the previous two centuries began to develop (which would create, in the centuries to come, no small number of problems for archaeologists who would find themselves having to distinguish between the small number of original pieces and the enormous quantity of copies discovered). This trade in art objects, of which we find evidence in some documents of Latin literature, such as the letters of Cicero, led to the birth of some infamous collections of which we have news, such as that of Caesar, Pompey, Sulla, Brutus, Lucullus and others. At the same time, the first figure of expert, intermediary and exporter appears, as well as the first price lists, which had the function of regulating this type of transaction. During the Middle Ages, with the advent of Christianity, artistic production was entirely managed by the Church's commissions, and artist-craftsmen, completely dependent on this monopoly, were active exclusively in monastic workshops, convent workshops, and on the construction sites of large churches. In this situation, it is obvious that the art trade declined enormously (although collecting did not disappear entirely) and flourished again only towards the second half of the 14th century , to fully reassert itself during the Renaissance. We will now focus on examining this period in more depth [1] , because it heralds one of the moments of greatest fertility in artistic production and the collecting connected to it. Therefore, let us try to understand roughly what were the conditions that determined this phenomenon. In the late Middle Ages, artistic production was linked to two new types of demand : on the one hand, that of the emerging urban bourgeoisie , and on the other, that of the manorial aristocracy. Let's analyze them one at a time. The resurgence of cities and the development of the monetary economy, combined with the purchasing power of the bourgeoisie, which established itself as a private clientele for artistic products, brought the secular element back into art. The emergence of this new demand allowed artists to break free from the ecclesiastical monopoly, which kept them tied to construction sites, and to establish themselves in the cities as independent masters, working in workshops . Around 1300, this concentration of artists in the cities saw the birth of guilds , autonomous organizations (which had already existed for centuries within other professions), which essentially served to combat the threat of competition. These guilds, in turn, evidently tended to assume a monopolistic character. The requests, which at a certain point arrived in the hundreds and thousands, from the nascent bourgeoisie and which corresponded, on the one hand, to their taste and purchasing power, and on the other, to the production capacity of these artisanal industries, the workshops. They also brought about a change in style, which became less solemn, lighter and more refined, more dynamic and lively, even in the use of different materials. Thus, the demand itself would lead to a conception of the painting as a wall ornament, and of the statue as a decorative object. It is important to note that the production of these guilds did not yet reach a high artistic level, but remained at the level of craftsmanship, that is, of trade. However, the important thing was that the artisans in question achieved a high level of autonomy , in this transition from the construction site to the workshop as an artisanal enterprise, which nevertheless represents a first step towards the future state of freedom of the modern artist. What purpose does it serve us to historically reconstruct the artist's conquest of freedom, and his progressive liberation from various types of monopolies? It is essential to us, and essential to our reflection on the relationship between art, economy, society, and culture that underpins collecting, the market, and art as a system. Let us therefore focus our attention on a fact inextricably linked to the origins of the developing contemporary art collecting movement, and that is the beginning of the social transformation of artists . Until this point, in fact, there was no distinction between artist and craftsman, and this was primarily because painting was included among the "mechanical arts," in which manual skill prevailed, considered opposite and inferior to the "liberal arts," based on thought. This distinction, which originated in Greek culture, was reiterated by medieval culture: while the "liberal arts," which included poetry, music, and philosophy, were immaterial activities, pure exercise of the mind, and were therefore considered "free," "material" activities, requiring a certain physical manipulation of this or that material, and therefore "mechanical" or "servile," were considered unworthy of free men. This is why artists occupied a low social status until the 14th century. It was with the rise of courts and lordships that artists began to occupy a different social position from that of artisans. At a certain point, artists began to be considered inventors and engineers , creators, unlike artisans who were instead executors (responding exclusively to market conditions). This recognition underpinned the phenomenon whereby artists were incorporated into the courts and, within the great families of the aristocracy and clergy, into a relationship of belonging to the family itself, which granted them unprecedented privileges. It should be noted that this was not a sudden and immediate change, but rather a long and gradual process. Many of these artists within the courts were still, in effect, treated on a par with specialized craftsmen, whose compensation depended largely on the quality and value of the materials used. What is interesting, however, is that some of them, instead, achieved a very different position, which represented evidence of the great change underway, and therefore it is to them that we are referring. Artists like Simone Martini and Giotto lived and worked at courts, which, in addition to guaranteeing them freedom from material needs (providing them with food, lodging, and a fixed annual salary), and the privilege of participating in court life, allowed them to acquire a high status within the noble hierarchy, granted by their patron (for example, Simone Martini was knighted at the Neapolitan court of Robert of Anjou). These privileged artists enjoyed the protection of the king or lord, to whom they owed, in exchange, sworn loyalty and the obligation to request specific authorization if they wished to work for another family. The bond between artists and their patrons was very strong, so emancipation was not yet complete, as there was still no autonomy from the court, which in effect constituted another type of monopoly, alternative to that of the contemporary city guilds (even though the latter were far more oppressive than the court, because they were conservative, while the court favored originality and innovation). However, the great change linked to courtly patronage was the social affirmation of the artist from a member of the "mechanical arts" to a representative of the "liberal arts." The great change was that manual art was recognized as a virtue, rewarded for quality rather than quantity (unlike artisans, who were paid for the quantity of work performed; we have already said that the salaries paid by kings and lords to artists were annual, and therefore independent of the quantity of work performed). The age of courts and lordships was the age of the triumph of patronage, and the fifteenth century was full of the names of artists who were well-known and appreciated by the societies in which they lived. The model of bonds changed and was gradually superseded with the general increase in wealth, which saw the artist's continued social ascent. This corresponded to an ever-increasing freedom during the Renaissance, when the concept of true "genius" matured. The artist thus definitively emancipated himself both from the status of a specialized craftsman in the guilds tied to the more commercial market, and from the condition of subservience to his lord and patron. Sixteenth-century artists were no longer drawn to court life. Artists like Michelangelo and Titian were no longer subject to the constraints of courtly bureaucracy. The sixteenth century marked the birth of modern collecting, in which everything was interconnected: the full recognition of artists brought with it the attribution of high value to their works, compared by critics to those of antiquity. It is no coincidence that this same period also saw the birth of art historiography, in Giorgio Vasari's famous work of 1550, which narrates the lives of the most important artists from Cimabue to Michelangelo. Among the most important collectors of the Renaissance we find Cosimo 'de Medici, his son Piero the Elder, his grandson Lorenzo the Magnificent, Cardinal Pietro Barbo (later Pope Paul II), the very famous Pope Julius II, Cardinal Piccolomini and others. I hope that at this point it is clear how the economic and political transformations (from a certain point onwards above all the formation of a mercantile and entrepreneurial class, and the affirmation of cities as commercial centres) go hand in hand with the social transformation of the artist, the transformation of the style and conception of art , as well as the development of collecting . To complete the discussion, let's add just a few details about the sixteenth-century market, such as the practice of selling through agents and brokers and the establishment of commercial enterprises with fixed locations for private transactions, a precursor to modern galleries (especially in Venice and Flanders). During the same period, we see the first exhibitions organized by artists' guilds, and we see the growth of the practice of reselling works, which in the seventeenth century would take the form of auctions (in England and then in France). It can therefore be said that between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the market took on all the characteristics of modernity. The Baroque age was the period of the triumph of patronage, and Rome, with the excessive power of the popes, was its capital. In the 18th century, the art market and collecting grew and consolidated further, becoming a phenomenon of enormous significance in the 19th century, with the rise of industrialization. This period saw a flourishing of antique galleries and auction houses throughout Europe and America, as well as the formation of public museums and frequent exhibitions, all of which contributed to the dissemination and popularization of art. The collector no longer coincides with the ancient figure of the aristocratic patron, but is replaced by the capitalist and businessperson of the modern bourgeoisie, who conceives the acquisition of works of art also as an investment and a possible source of speculation. [1] For this study we refer to A. HAUSER, Social History of Art , first volume, Einaudi, 1955 and W. SANTAGATA, Symbol and Commodity , Il Mulino, 1998
Modigliani world record
A painting by Amedeo Modigliani sold for $170.4 million (€158.4 million) at Christie's in New York. The work, a nude of a woman reclining on a bed, is titled "Nu Couche" (Reclining Nude with Open Arms or Red Nude), and was auctioned for the first time in a thrilling sale with continuous bidding that lasted for nine intense minutes. The painting is part of a series of large nudes created for Leopold Zborowski, a Polish artist active in Paris, one of the most important modern art dealers, who in turn was portrayed by Amedeo Modigliani himself. The work caused such a scandal in 1917 that the police had to intervene to disperse the crowd that had gathered behind the window of gallery owner Bertehe Weill to admire it when it was first exhibited in Paris.
Roy Lichtenstein - Records at Christie's
Christie's had a record-breaking night in New York, selling Augusto Modigliani's "Nu Coche" for $170.4 million. It also broke all previous records for Roy Lichtenstein, the king of pop art. His work, "The Nurse," with its distinctive comic-book-like features depicting a nurse, sold for $95.365 million.
Record-breaking Modigliani Nude
A $100 million Modigliani is coming to the auction market. The painting "Nu couché" (Reclining Nude), executed by the Livorno-born artist in 1917-18, will be sold on November 9th at Christie's in New York. The work will be the centerpiece of the "The Artist Muse" sale and is set to break the previous record of $70.725 million set in 2014 at Sotheby's in New York for a sculpture—a 73-centimeter-high stone "Tête"—which started at $30 million. "Nu couché" is part of a series of large nudes created by Amedeo Modigliani (1884–1920) for his magnate, Léopold Zboroswki. The work was exhibited almost a century ago in Modigliani's first and only solo exhibition—which included around thirty paintings, including a series of nudes—at the Berthe Weill Gallery in Paris. The exhibition caused a great scandal.
Diego Palpizi - Intimamente me - online onvenditaquadri.it
Diego Palpizi places his characters, mainly naked women's bodies, creating a stage with a completely imaginary background, the space for an event, confirming that every surrealism has a potential beyond contingencies, but that then the right iconographic tension is needed, an added value where art assumes the ethical responsibility of beauty.