Small Museum Profile: Berkeley Art Museum

Many years ago when I was just out of college, I worked in a start-up software company on Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley, CA. As a break from the action, I would often take a walk up the hill toward campus to see what was on view at the Berkeley Art Museum. The quiet of the museum was a welcome respite from the frenetic craziness of entrepreneurship.

Founded in 1963 as part of the University of California at Berkeley, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (website here) remains a vibrant location for art viewing in the Bay area. And like many museums, it is in the middle of its own transformations; a new building by Japanese architect Toyo Ito is scheduled to open in 2013 (background on the project here; take a virtual tour of the spectacular building here), the eerie poured concrete walls and ramps of the current galleries (installation shot at right, from the museum website) to become a distant memory.
Currently, the Berkeley Art Museum holds approximately 3600 photographs, with a solid mix of all periods of the medium (14% pre-1900, 70% 1900-1980, 16% post-1980). Much of the collection is up on the website and can be easily searched (here). Highlights include large bodies of work by Lewis Callaghan, W. Eugene Smith, Ant Farm, Bruce Connor (Mabuhay Gardens punk series) and Andy Warhol (part of the Photographic Legacy gift program). Jan Leonard and Jerrold Peil gave a major gift of photography to the museum in 2002 -a total of 848 vintage prints from across the medium’s history. Overall, the design of the collection is centered on Bay area photography, Conceptual art documentation, and 19th century travel and portrait photography. The museum does not have a full time photography curator, so photography is bundled under the larger collections department.
While portions of the permanent collection of photography are not always on view at BAM, the exhibitions calendar has always had a solid share of photography. Recent photography exhibitions have included:
  • Bruce Connor: Mabuhay Gardens (2008) (here)
  • David Goldblatt: Intersections (2007) (here)
  • Abbas Kiarostami: Image Maker (2007) (here)
  • Time’s Shadow (2004) (here)
  • Roger Ballen (2004) (here) (his first museum show in the US)
Approximately 100 photographs enter the collection each year, with more than 1600 coming in since 2001. This is quite an accomplishment given that there is no dedicated acquisitions budget for photography; all works are acquired via donation or through battling it out for the general acquisition funds.
Unfortunately, collectors can’t easily access the museum’s collections at this point (perhaps this will change in the new facility). Researchers/students with an academic project can contact the BAM/PFA Academic Liaison to arrange a viewing session, but there isn’t currently any viewing room or other space that can be reserved by appointment for the general public.
Overall, BAM remains a surprisingly good place to see photography given its broad mandate, and will likely become even more so with the construction of the elegant new space.
2626 Bancroft Way
Berkeley, CA 94720

Edgar Martins, Topologies

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2008 by Aperture. 136 pages, with 75 color prints. Includes an essay by John Beardsley and an artist conversation with David Campany. (Cover shot at right.)

Comments/Context: As our collector’s community grows, it seems more and more opportunities are arising to leverage the distributed knowledge of the crowd in the search for great photography. Based on a recommendation by one of our readers, we picked up this book by Portuguese photographer Edgar Martins, which must have sailed past unnoticed when it was released last year.

For an “emerging” photographer, Martins certainly has a large number of projects going on; this volume is a sampler of sorts, covering five different and wholly distinct series, all taken in a prolific three year time period. The common threads that appear to connect these disparate projects lie below the surface a bit: the use of a large format camera, a tendency to strip down the compositions to elemental forms, and an undercurrent of chance and drama that injects a sense of excitement.

The 2005 series Hidden focuses on the patterns made by roadside sound barriers. The rectangular blocks of color, repeated and mixed together, are displayed in a pared down, Minimalist landscape of unmarked road and and clear blue sky, recalling the sculptured boxes of Donald Judd and the color charts of Gerhard Richter.

The images from The Rehearsal of Space (2005 and 2006) chronicle the active devastation of Portuguese wild fires. While the scenes of leaping flames have an inherent theatricality, I actually prefer the landscapes which are engulfed in timeless smoke, the lingering haze adding mystery and uncertainty to what would otherwise be relatively straightforward forest studies.

The 2006 series Approaches finds Martins out on airport tarmacs and taxiways, taking pictures both during the day and in the depths of night. I especially liked the images which pick up the painted lines and patterns in bright white and yellow on the runways (reminiscent in some ways of Walker Evans’ late Polaroids of arrows and other street markings). Truth be told, I’d like to see a whole book of these particular works, especially those that highlight the geometric and graphic qualities of the paint against the deep black background; a very cool project indeed, and one worth further exploration in this collector’s opinion.

The series Landscapes Beyond, The Burden of Proof (2006 and 2007) captures the rugged terrain of Iceland. These landscapes have an “Olafur Eliasson meets Timothy O’Sullivan” feel, the harsh, rocky land and ice photographed with a very 19th century formalist approach to composition.

My favorite images from this volume come from the series The Accidental Theorist (2005-2007). In this project, Martins take long exposure night pictures of deserted beaches, each image a pairing of the deep rich black of the night sky with the soft tactile indentations of the sand, punctuated by seemingly random objects (a girl with balloons, an umbrella, trash bins, stacks of chaises, and an array of strange poles that reminded me of Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field, among many others). The careful bisection of the picture frame and the overall Minimalist approach recall Hiroshi Sugimoto’s night seascapes (with a side order of Harry Callahan’s Cape Cod beach pictures), but these images have a sprinkle of serendipity that makes them less overtly meditative and more pleasantly puzzling.

Overall, this book is evidence that Martins is clearly an accomplished photographer early in his career, who is pursuing his craft with intellectual rigor and abundant activity.

Collector’s POV: Edgar Martins is represented in New York by Betty Cunningham Gallery (here) and in Los Angeles by Kopeikin Gallery (here). The prints are made in two sizes (not sure of the exact dimensions), in editions of less than 10, with prices starting at $5000. There is no secondary market for Martins’ work at this point, so interested collectors should follow up with one of the retail galleries directly.

Transit Hub:

  • Artist site (here)
  • Saatchi Online (here)
  • More reviews: Shoot! The Blog (here), Conscientious (here)
  • Interview: ARTmostfierce (here)

Axel Hütte, After Midnight

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2006 by Schirmer/Mosel and Waddington Galleries. 56 pages, with 21 color images. Includes an essay by Martin Filler. (Cover shot at right.)

Comments/Context: Of the now famous group of Becher students, Axel Hütte has always been the least accessible for us, likely because he has focused much of his work on carefully composed people-less landscapes (jungles, caves, glaciers, fires etc. from exotic locales around the world), a subject matter genre that unfortunately doesn’t match well with our particular collecting activities and interests. In recent years, Hütte has also begun to make wall sized nighttime images of sprawling cities and towering skyscrapers, and so this collection of nocturnal views of American cities seemed like a better entry point for us.

In this volume, Hütte has taken images in ten cities across America, often making long panoramic views of the carpet of lights from his upper floor hotel room. In other pictures, he uses an adjacent building as an anchor in the foreground of the shot or simply captures a cluster of nearby highrises. All of the images have an atmosphere of emptiness and distance, with exterior building lights and reflections often painting the town in garish color.

In general, these images left me cold, and upon further reflection, I think that’s the point. Regardless of which city is depicted, there are virtually no unique identifiers; they all look generally the same (well lit tall boxes), empty of people and life. In our efforts to build cities that are “modern”, we seem to have left out any indicators of our culture or personality. It is not so much that these works are overtly negative; they’re not. But what I took away was that Hütte was holding up a mirror to how we are building our American urban environments and communities, and I didn’t particularly like what I saw.

Collector’s POV: Axel Hütte is represented in London by Waddington Galleries (here), but seems not to have any consistent New York representation. His works have become more available at auction in recent years, with mural sized prints in editions of 3, 4, or 5 selling in a range between $10000 and $35000, and smaller prints in larger editions (25, 30, 100) selling for under $1000.

Transit Hub:

  • Fog and Fire at Galerie Wilma Tolksdorf, Berlin, 2008 (here)
  • 2008 show at Patricia Low Contemporary, Gstaad (here)

Auction Preview: Photographie, June 8, 2009 @Van Ham

Next week in Cologne, the German photography season continues with a wide ranging sale at Van Ham. Most of the lots are in the lower priced range, the vast majority estimated under 2000€, so there may indeed be some bargains to be had here. There are a total of 376 lots on offer, with a total High estimate of 526750€. (Catalog cover at right.)

Here’s the breakdown:
Total Low lots (high estimate 7500€ or lower): 370
Total Low estimate (sum of high estimates of Low lots): 456750€
Total Mid lots (high estimate between 7500€ and 35000€): 6
Total Mid estimate: 70000€
Total High lots (high estimate over 35000€): 0
Total High estimate: NA
For our collection, we liked the following:
  • Lot 538 Max Baur, Chrysanthemen, 1930s
  • Lot 635 John Havinden, Steinzeugrohre, 1930s
  • Lot 642 Heinz Held, Empire State Building, 1960s
  • Lot 674 Peter Keetman, VW–Werk, 1953 (image at right)
  • Lot 755 Albert Renger–Patzsch, Der zehnstockige ROGO–Turm, 1936
  • Lot 774 Tata Ronkholz, Autoplatz Hurth Bonnstr. 379a, 1984
  • Lot 854 Ludwig Windstosser, Pintsch Bamag, Gas, 1950s
The lot by lot catalog can be found here.
June 8
Schönhauser Straße 10-16
50968 Köln

Auction Results: Photographs, May 21, 2009 @Bloomsbury London

The results of Bloomsbury’s recent photography sale in London were at the bottom end of this season’s general range: more than half bought-in and total proceeds less than half the total Low estimate.

This outcome makes me wonder about the layering of auction houses in the photography market, and whether a house that takes a lower price, higher volume strategy has different expectations about what the results should look like; perhaps all that matters if this strategy is employed is maximizing the total proceeds. The buy-in rate in this situation is interesting to specialists for tuning the mix of material and spotting changing trends/tastes, but not as much of a useful benchmark for collectors or other outsiders.

The summary statistics are below (all results include the buyer’s premium):

Total Lots: 269
Pre Sale Low Total Estimate: £293900
Pre Sale High Total Estimate: £443200

Total Lots Sold: 112
Total Lots Bought In: 157
Buy In %: 58.36%
Total Sale Proceeds: £135810

Here is the breakdown (using the Low, Mid, and High definitions from the preview post, here):

Low Total Lots: 254
Low Sold: 109
Low Bought In: 145
Buy In %: 57.09%
Total Low Estimate: £293200
Total Low Sold: £110610

Mid Total Lots: 14
Mid Sold: 3
Mid Bought In: 11
Buy In %: 78.57%
Total Mid Estimate: £100000
Total Mid Sold: £25200

High Total Lots: 1
High Sold: 0
High Bought In: 1
Buy In %: 100.00%
Total High Estimate: £50000
Total High Sold: £0

70.54% of the lots that sold had proceeds in or above the estimate range. There were a total of four surprises in this sale (defined as having proceeds of at least double the high estimate): lot 4, Alfred Stieglitz, Selected plates from Camera Work, at £7200, lot 124, Florence Henri, Portrait of Erica Brausen, 1931, at £3600, lot 151, Alberto Korda, Entrance of Fidel Castro & Camilo in Havana, 1959 at £5760, and lot 269, William Baker and John Burke, Black Mountain Campaign, 1891, at £4080.

Complete lot by lot results can be found here.

Bloomsbury Auctions
24 Maddox Street
Mayfair
London WS1 1PP

Auction Results: Photographs, May 19, 2009 @Bonhams

Bonhams was able to marginally improve on the now standard results for a photography sale this season, with a slightly lower buy in rate and total proceeds closer to the total Low estimate; overall, a solid performance, especially given its out of phase scheduling.

The summary statistics are below (all results include the buyer’s premium):

Total Lots: 166
Pre Sale Low Total Estimate: $642800
Pre Sale High Total Estimate: $938300

Total Lots Sold: 111
Total Lots Bought In: 55
Buy In %: 33.13%
Total Sale Proceeds: $608231

Here is the breakdown (using the Low, Mid, and High definitions from the preview post, here):

Low Total Lots: 149
Low Sold: 99
Low Bought In: 50
Buy In %: 33.56%
Total Low Estimate: $619300
Total Low Sold: $348981

Mid Total Lots: 17
Mid Sold: 12
Mid Bought In: 5
Buy In %: 29.41%
Total Mid Estimate: $319000
Total Mid Sold: $259250

High Total Lots: 0
High Sold: NA
High Bought In: NA
Buy In %: NA
Total High Estimate: $0
Total High Sold: NA

Only 62.12% of the lots that sold had proceeds in or above the estimate range, so more than a third of the lots sold below their range. Surprises (defined as having proceeds of at least double the high estimate) included: lot 52, Yousuf Karsh, Sir Winston Churchill, 1941/1980s, at $6710, lot 102, Ray Metzker, Kayak, Frankfurt, 1995 at $9760, and lot 129, Larry Clark, Untitled from Tulsa, 1972/Later, at $7320.

Complete lot by lot results can be found here.

Bonhams & Butterfields
580 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10022

Michael Eastman, Interiors @Friedman

JTF (just the facts): A total of 34 color images, spread across four different photographic projects, hung in all of the galleries on the second floor, and the main space on the third floor. The projects represented are: Italy (11 digital c-prints of varying sizes from 48×56 to 71×84, in editions of 3 and 7, from 2008), Cuba (4 digital c-prints, all approximately 89×74, in editions of 3, from 1999-2002), Urban Luminosity (9 digital c-prints, all 60×48 or reverse, in editions of 7, all from 2008), and Vanishing America (10 digital c-prints, 34×45 or reverse, in editions of 10, from 2000-2009). Most are framed in white, with no mats, except the Urban Luminosity series, which are not framed but mounted to Diebond/Plexiglas. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: For devotees of photographs of architectural interiors, Michael Eastman’s show of prints at Barry Friedman will seem satisfyingly familiar, so much so that I found myself wondering about echoes of other artists for almost the entire time I was in the galleries. This is a massive sprawling show that exposes viewers to a wide variety of Eastman’s most recent projects.
In the first gallery, images from the Italy series are displayed, combining Baroque grandeur from Milan and Venice with less obvious hints of underlying decay. There are ornate chandeliers, shiny marble floors and walls, elaborate mirrors and elegant statues, some well maintained, others worn and crumbling. Certain of the straight on rooms bear a striking resemblance to the deadpan interiors of Candida Höfer, empty of people but still ostentatious.
Adjacent to these works are a handful of large images from Eastman’s Cuba series, where the decomposition of the architecture is much more pronounced and romantic. Here we find peeling and stained walls, painted in bold colors, and neglected furniture in need of repair. These lush images have direct parallels to Robert Polidori’s images of similar Havana subject matter.

The back gallery houses the prints from the Urban Luminosity series, and these images clearly come from a more futuristic 21st century world. Eastman has captured a variety of sleek industrial spaces in this project; foyers, halls, and elevators covered in brushed stainless steel and shiny reflections from overhead lighting, establishing an altogether more crisp and soulless feel.

The exhibition continues on the upstairs floor, where images from the Vanishing America series are hung. These works chronicle the disappearance of small town America, full of straight on pictures of old cinemas and restaurants, hand lettered signs, bowling alleys and hat shops, all steeped in an aw shucks romantic patina. These vernacular images reminded me of Stephen Shore, Jeff Brouws, and to a lesser extent Walker Evans, but with less abstraction and a heavier handed dose of nostalgia.

Collector’s POV: Figuring out the pricing here was a bit tricky, mostly because the images all come in three different sizes, regardless of what happens to be hanging on the wall in any specific gallery. As such, I tried to collect the prices that match what is on view. The Italy series had prices between $8500 and $20000, depending on size. The Cuba images on display were priced between $24000 and $29000. The Urban Luminosity prints were $8500 and the Vanishing America images were $6500. Michael Eastman’s work has not appeared much at auction, so no particular secondary market pricing patterns can be discerned. Overall, these are well crafted works of conventional subjects, with plenty of connections to other artists who have traveled a similar road.

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)
Transit Hub:
  • Saint Louis University Museum of Art retrospective, 2007 (here)
  • LA Times review of DNJ Gallery show (here)
Michael Eastman, Interiors
Through June 30

515 West 26th Street
New York, NY 10001

Vera Lutter, Samar Hussein @Nitsch

JTF (just the facts): A total of 9 color giclee prints of hibiscus flowers, framed in white with no mat, and hung in one darkened room. The prints are 20×30, each made between 2003 and 2009, and the images are sold together as a portfolio in an edition of 12. There is also a single large video screen, with 500 additional hibiscus images displayed in an endless loop (made in edition of 3). (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Vera Lutter’s newest work, on display now at Carolina Nitsch, is a eulogy for the civilian deaths (more than 100000 since 2003) that have occurred during the Iraq War. Using the life cycle of a hibiscus blossom as her metaphor, she has lightly superimposed the names of individual dead across the bottom of these lush color florals, printing them as normal photographs or including them in a video loop that blankets a large wall in the gallery. In either format, each up close image is dense with pink and yellow, the flower often twisted or puckered as it begins to wither.

We first saw this new project from Lutter at the Armory show, and as flower collectors, we were immediately drawn to it. Given the passing of time and the chance to revisit the images again in a gallery setting, I have come around to seeing the message she is sending with more clarity, and now think of these images less as botanicals, but more as a carefully constructed political statement. Each blossom is impossibly beautiful and fragile, and the element of elapsed time (more obvious in the video roll call) shows the flowers slowly drying up and dying. As the images relentlessly flash on the screen, they become symbols of the people who are no longer alive, each so delicate and easily broken.

I have to admit that while there has been an endless stream of documentary photography of the Iraq War coming from embedded photojournalists, I don’t remember many other overtly political photography projects that have come out of the conflict (in fact, the only one I can name is Alec Soth’s broader portrayal of the Bush years, and that is not particularly Iraq focused). There clearly must be many more that I have missed or forgotten, so please give me a pointer to other Iraq related projects in the comments, as appropriate.

Collector’s POV: The Samar Hussein portfolio is priced at $10000; I didn’t get the price for the video loop DVD. Vera Lutter is represented in New York by Gagosian Gallery (here). Her more recognizable camera obscura work has become generally available at auction, ranging between $7000 and $85000, mostly dependent on size. We actually already own one of these city pieces (here) and are always looking for others that are small and well composed.

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

  • Bomb magazine interview, 2003 (here)
  • Kunsthaus Graz exhibition, 2004 (here)
  • MOCP collection (here)

Vera Lutter, Samar Hussein
Through June 20

Carolina Nitsch Project Room (artnet site here)
534 West 22nd Street
New York, NY 10011

Edwin Hale Lincoln, Wildflowers of New England @Klotz

JTF (just the facts): A total of 65 platinum prints, framed in black wood and unmatted, hung in the main gallery space and the smaller viewing alcove, against white and green walls. All of the images are 10×8 and were made in 1914, as part of the 6 volume, 400 image series Wildflowers of New England. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: For those collectors who focus outside the subculture of floral photography, the name of Edwin Hale Lincoln will be a complete unknown. His only claim to fame is his obsessive project to document the many species of wildflowers found in and around Lenox, Massachusetts in the early 1900s, before the ravages of industrialization and expansion drove them all to extinction.
While many of his images are pleasingly decorative, the real reason Lincoln is important is that he was a transitional figure in the history of floral photography. Going back to William Henry Fox Talbot, photographers from the very beginning of the medium have pointed their cameras at flowers and leaves, mostly because many early photographers were amateur scientists and naturalists in their spare time. Throughout most of the 19th century, most floral and botanical images were made in a quasi-scientific or documentary manner, starting with the stunning cyanotypes of Anna Atkins, and continuing on through the botanicals made in exotic lands by Scowen & Co, Fratelli Alinari and many others. (We’ll leave out some of the more decorative floral images made in France during this same period by the likes of Adolphe Braun and Charles Aubry for the sake of brevity.) At the turn of the century, the general approach was still mostly the same, as exemplified by the intimate cyanotypes of Bertha Jaques.
Edwin Hale Lincoln came out of this same naturalist tradition, working in complete isolation, following his own path. But his images however show the first traces of a more pared down, clean aesthetic, in contrast to the prevailing Pictorialism of the times. He placed all of his samples against flat uniform backgrounds, and took up close photographs of small carefully chosen and grouped sets of blossoms, often lined up. Using the platinum process, his images have remarkable tonal quality, subtle variations of grey rather than contrasty black and white. Along with the vegetable and fruit studies (some flowers as well) of Charles Jones, Lincoln’s work makes a bridge from the older approach to the 1920s and 1930s floral Modernism of Karl Blossfeldt, Albert Renger–Patzsch, and Ernst Fuhrmann in Germany and Imogen Cunningham in America, who pared the aesthetic down even further towards crisp objectivity and formal beauty.
So while at first glance it might seem easy to speed by this show as a musty bunch of simple flower pictures, placed in some historical context, Lincoln’s delicate works have surprising relevance to what came later.

Collector’s POV: The prints in this show are all priced at $1500, including the frame. Lincoln’s prints have come up for auction from time to time in the past few years, generally selling under $1000. Given our position as flower collectors, it shouldn’t be surprising that we already have two excellent Lincolns in our collection (here), which we purchased from the Lee Gallery (here) some years ago. If we were to select another print to add from this exhibit, it would be Lychnis Abla – White Campion, Evening Lychnis (shown at right), as its all-over composition has more visual interest than many of Lincoln’s usual straight up groupings.

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)
Transit Hub:
  • De Young Museum exhibit, 2008 (here)
  • NY Times review, 2002 (here)
Through July 2nd
Alan Klotz Gallery
511 West 25th Street
New York, NY 10001

Marco Breuer, Part _ of _ Parts @Von Lintel

JTF (just the facts): A total of 21 works, framed in white and unmatted, hung in the single room gallery. The unique prints come in various sizes, from 5×4 to 38×28, and were all made in 2008 or 2009. Several different papers and processes have been used, resulting in cyanotype, gelatin silver, Polaroid and chromogenic prints. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Likely due to its technological origins, of all the artistic mediums, photography is the one most deeply rooted in process. It seems we can hardly look at an image these days without immediately transitioning to questions about what kind/size of camera was used, which printing process was chosen and what type of manipulations might have gone on in the darkroom or computer. It’s often easy to get lost in the details of “how”, missing the more important questions of “what” and “why”.
Marco Breuer has been exploring the depths and edges of photography processes for over a decade, and his show of new work at Von Lintel continues this investigation with satisfying and elegant results. Breuer uses no camera; he takes various kinds of light sensitive papers and submits them to a wide array of unconventional treatments, generating abstract works that record the results of these experiments.
This type of approach has its roots back in the scientific cyanotypes of the 19th century, early 20th century X-rays, and the Surrealist/Dada photograms of Christian Schad, Man Ray, and Lazlo Moholy-Nagy of 1920s. The difference is that in all of those examples, the paper captured an image of an object (or group of objects), often carefully and artfully composed to create the compositional effect the artist desired. In Breuer’s case, his paper is capturing the remnants of a process or movement, not the shadow of a physical form; the papers are scraped, shot, spun, drilled, and exposed to light, leaving behind their reactions, scratches, abrasions, and fogs of color. As such, they seem more directly related to the ideas of random chance embedded in the works of John Cage or Merce Cunningham; Breuer’s prints examine the outcomes of processes that could have gone in any number of uncontrolled directions.
The works themselves are patterns of spots, waves, squiggles and circular spins, intermixed with heat generated fades and gradients of yellow, orange and black. Beyond the colors and designs on the surface, many of the prints are visibly punctured and scratched by gun shots, drills or the motion of a turntable, enhancing their object quality (and drawing parallels to a diverse set of other art, from Lucio Fontana’s slashed canvases to Damien Hirst’s spin paintings). Overall, I found most of these abstractions to be both thought-provoking as ideas and successful as variations of line and form.
Collector’s POV: The prints in this show are priced between $3900 and $14900, generally based on size. Breuer’s work has not appeared at auction with any regularity, so no pricing pattern can be readily discerned. Seeing these prints, I was most reminded of Harry Callahan’s light drawings from the 1940s, and Breuer’s new works would certainly complement a set of those photographs quite well. More generally, while Breuer’s images don’t fit into our collecting framework, I found these prints to have a unique voice and point of view, clearly working outside the well traveled roads of contemporary photography, but still finding novel ways to make original and exciting images.
Rating: ** (two stars) VERY GOOD (rating system described here)
Transit Hub:
  • Early Recordings, Aperture monograph (here)
  • Breuer holdings at MoMA (here)
  • Vince Aletti review, Village Voice 2000 (here)
Marco Breuer, Part _ of _ Parts
Through June 13th
520 West 23rd Street
New York, NY 10011

Auction Preview: Photographie, June 4, 2009 @Grisebach

Villa Grisebach is next up in the German season, with its photography sale in Berlin on June 4. In addition to the normal mix of vintage and contemporary material, there are sections of lots devoted to Bauhaus photography, the work of Albert Renger–Patzsch, and images of the architecture of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. There are a total of 192 lots on offer, with a total High estimate of 543100€. (Catalog cover at right.)

Here’s the breakdown:

Total Low lots (high estimate 7500€ or lower): 173
Total Low estimate (sum of high estimates of Low lots): 326100€

Total Mid lots (high estimate between 7500€ and 35000€): 19
Total Mid estimate: 217000€

Total High lots (high estimate over 35000€): 0
Total High estimate: NA

For our collection, we liked the following:

Lot 1265 Werner Mantz, Kuhlturme, Heerlen, Niederlande, 1937
Lot 1293 Albert Renger–Patzsch, Frauenschuh–Orchidee and Schmuck-Dahlie, 1928

The lot by lot catalog can be found here.

Photographie
May 27

Villa Grisebach
Fasanenstrasse 25
D-10719 Berlin

Auction Preview: Photo Atelier Stone, June 4, 2009 @Argenteuil

Next week, the archive of photographers Cami and Sasha Stone will be put up for auction in Argenteuil, France. Over 800 black and white works taken between the wars will be on offer (grouped into a total of 319 lots), most with estimates under 1000€.

The sale includes prints (mostly street scenes and architectural images) from their period in Berlin (1925-1930), as well as from later years in Belgium (1930-1938). There are also a group of photomontages and other miscellaneous documents/ephemera available. Overall, the sale has a Total High Estimate of 217100€. A superb hard backed catalog has been created, containing a detailed bibliography of books and exhibitions, images of all the various hand stamps they used, and several background essays. (Catalog cover at right.)

Here’s the breakdown:

Total Low lots (high estimate 7500€ or lower): 318
Total Low estimate (sum of high estimates of Low lots): 202100€

Total Mid lots (high estimate between 7500€ and 35000€): 1
Total Mid estimate: 15000€

Total High lots (high estimate over 35000€): 0
Total High estimate: NA

In general, for our particular collection, we continue to look for the right vintage Sasha Stone nude from the 1930s, but we still haven’t found one that is tuned just right to our tastes; unfortunately, none of the ones offered in this sale hits the target in the center either, although lot 312 is the closest.

The lot by lot catalog (PDF) can be found here.

Photo Atelier Stone
June 4th

Specialist for the auction
Christophe Goeury
christophegoeury@hotmail.com

Argenteuil Maison De Vente (no website)
19, Rue Denis-Roy
95100 Argenteuil
argenteuilauction@wanadoo.fr

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