The Halsey Minor Collection 13 May 2010 New York
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THE HALSEY MINOR COLLECTION 13 MAY 2010 NEW YORK THE HALSEY MINOR COLLECTION 13 MAY 2010 7pm NEW YORK LOTS 1-22 Viewing Saturday 1 May, 10am – 6pm Sunday 2 May, 12pm – 6pm Monday 3 May, 10am – 6pm Tuesday 4 May, 10am – 6pm Wednesday 5 May, 10am – 6pm Thursday 6 May, 10am – 6pm Friday 7 May, 10am – 6pm Saturday 8 May, 10am – 6pm Sunday 9 May, 12pm – 6pm Monday 10 May, 10am – 6pm Tuesday 11 May, 10am – 6pm Wednesday 12 May, 10am – 6pm Front Cover Richard Prince, Nurse in Hollywood #4, 2004, Lot 8 (detail) Thursday 13 May, 10am – 12pm Back Cover Marc Newson, Prototype “Lockheed Lounge,” 1988, Lot 4 COLLECTING IS ABOUT LEARNING AND IT IS DEVELOPING CONNOISSEURSHIP. IT IS AN INTENSE ONGOING PROCESS OF EDUCATION, AND IT IS MY MISSION TO COLLECT ONLY THE BEST. HALSEY MINOR The boldness of Halsey Minor’s collecting vision lies in its identification of energy, of a constant flow of ideas emanating from the questions art asks of its viewers and of their place in the wider world. ‘Collecting is about learning and it is developing connoisseurship,’ Minor has stated. ‘It is an intense ongoing process of education, and it is my mission to collect only the best.’ Why people collect art is as straightforward and as complex as why people fall in love. There are infinite reasons. For Halsey Minor, collecting Contemporary Art and Design is a hunger that cannot be satisfied, a thirst that cannot be quenched. It is the addiction to this nectar, to put together one of the most formidable collections of Marc Newson and Ed Ruscha, for instance that drives him. It is this story, narrated via 22 voices both daring and subtle, that is being told this evening. It is a story whose themes are written by many of the Postwar and Contemporary period’s iconic artists: Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari, Takashi Murakami and designer Marc Newson, but especially Richard Prince, the artist whose body of work is represented here by three pieces headed by one of the collection’s indubitable stars – the arresting Nurse in Hollywood #4, 2004. The 96 total works owned by Minor constitute a collection of singular importance and one which Phillips de Pury & Company is privileged to present this evening, as well as in our forthcoming auctions of Contemporary Art Part II and Design. The collecting life of Halsey Minor, founder of CNET and CEO of Minor Ventures, has wholeheartedly embraced and passed through a number of chapters – to date, American Modernism, Pop Art, cutting-edge Contemporary Art and 20th-century design – and all have presented themselves as discernible, even disparate, themes. However, there is very little discontinuity present in Minor’s eye: the individual works are all linked by the passionate focus that the collector has brought to his activity. Art is an intangible asset of immense importance for it is the stimulus of an intense and intimate conversation between its viewer and its maker, not something simply of monetary value. Minor once spoke about his passion – art – in these terms: ‘Whatever I do, I have to feel I rounded out the story – the collection – about the artist. If I lose a piece, I lose the collection.’ Many of the works here this evening depict a fascination with the properties of the world. Not simply an approximation of the world’s overt appearance – as seen, perhaps in Ruscha’s mountain range of Higher Standards/Lower Prices, 2007 – but what isn’t. And so we have (Ruscha again) an iconic painting, Angry Because It’s Plaster, Not Milk, 1965, depicting the trompe l’oeil of a bird tricked into thinking that a glass on its side is still filled with something other than the solid form of its plaster milk; Marc Newson’s 1988 prototype Lockheed Lounge, a riveted piece of design that references not only the classical divan, but hints, in a sleight of artistic alchemy, at the sheer fluidity of mercury. Like Charlotte Perriand’s Bibliothèque Asymetrique, ca 1958, or George Nakashima’s free-form Minguren I table, 1964, the lynchpin joining the entire Minor collection is a dialogue of what is and what isn’t. It is a dialogue that – like the shelves of Perriand’s Bibliothèque – is eternally dynamic. And while this evening’s sale marks the end of one single-owner collection, Halsey Minor’s vision nevertheless continues. Louise Gray, April 2010 1 RICHARD PRINCE b. 1949 Untitled (Almost Original), 2006 Gouache and graphite on board and book cover in artist’s metal frame. 37 x 33 in. (94 x 83.8 cm). Signed and dated “R. Prince 06” on board; Signed and dated “R. Prince 2006” on the reverse. Estimate $60,000-80,000 prOVENANCE Gladstone Gallery, New York It is hard not to be attracted to a work by Richard Prince but explaining why In works that can be considered Nurses or more broadly grouped as works can prove more difficult. Fundamentally, the immediate attraction is about dealing with “nurses” that underlying sexiness is everywhere. The pretty seeing something easily recognizable whether it’s an old ad for liquor or nurses are always partly obscured, by uniforms, hats, masks or blood, while furniture, cigarette pushing cowboys, or other people’s girlfriends they are the titles are straight from book covers that are meant to get a housewife all images we can decipher, but few are ones that have any recognizable to make a quick supermarket decision to buy Nurse in Love or in this case emotion invested in them. They are fundamentally mundane. Celebrity Suite Nurse (what could be more commercial? Celebrity—we all want to be one or sleep with one, Suite—fancy private clinic, Nurse—she has Like Duchamp and Warhol before him Prince is often playing a game in it all). Yet they are not overt enough to be embarrassing, again the sexiness which the artist is able to take that which is not “art” and make it so simply is obscured and who knows how racy the stories are inside. Certainly the by changing the intention. Prince makes an ordinary ad into an artwork by imagery implies that this nurse is doing more for her patients and doctors photographing it and re-contextualizing it, subverting its original intention for than setting out cups of aspirin. his own purpose. He carries on a continual taunting dialogue with an empty, consumer driven society by taking images from advertising, low brow special Richard Prince conscripts us over and over because he plays with language interest magazines, or disposable romance novels and recasting them as his and images that are so basic and straightforward that we cannot help but own. Through this action we are made to confront the meaningless of our get the message. He then plays with that message and it takes on another own production; as though he is saying “we cannot even make things that are meaning or multiple meanings and becomes other. We become part of his our own, everything can be reproduced as another’s’ and become theirs” or discourse, we are engaged with deciphering a deeper meaning within the even at an extreme “authorship is dead.” simplicity, within the mundane, we cannot help it we are engaged. Alongside this dialogue is the other important element to Prince’s work, underlying teenage boy prurience. So much of his work is imbued with this particular sexuality, one that seems adolescent in nature, not necessarily connected with sex acts but with the wink-wink-nudge-nudge of looking at a stolen dirty magazine, where the excitement is that the possibility exists or the inference of the possibility. It is not hard core porn or detailed sex acts; it is a “dirty” joke that alludes to sex or a cartoonish biker babe mooning at a rally. 2 MARK GROTJAHN b. 1968 Untitled (Black Butterfly over Lime), 2004 Oil on linen. 36 x 29 in. (91.4 x 73.7 cm). Signed and dated “M.Grotjahn 04” twice on the overlap. Estimate $300,000-400,000 prOVENANCE Blum & Poe, Los Angeles; Private Collection It’s something of a cliché to say that paintings conceal as much as they reveal but so much in Grotjahn’s work seems buried under the skin, and so little is ever really given away, that one bestows unusual significance upon the painterly glitches and hiccups that occur. Apparently evidencing trial and error, the smears of ink and pencil that litter the surfaces of his drawings lend them a work-a-day honesty that, ironically, seems quite underhand – as if the artist was calling our bluff. Revealed beneath the thick surfaces of his paintings are flashes of other colours and traces of earlier activity in stark contrast to the chromatic sobriety and measured pace of the ‘finished’ article – loosely applied acid yellow beneath green, purple beneath black, for example. Where a second colour peeks through at a vanishing point, celestial connotations are brought to the fore. M.Coomer, “The Butterfly Effect”, ArtReview, Issue 03, September, 2006, p.76 3 FLORIAN MAIER-AICHEN b. 1973 Untitled (Mount Wilson), 2002 C-print. 63 1/2 x 81 3/8 in. (161.3 x 206.7 cm). Signed, dated “Florian Maier-Aichen 2002” and numbered of six on the reverse. Estimate $100,000-150,000 prOVENANCE Blum & Poe, Los Angeles; Private collection, London LITERATURE J. Tumler, “Outside the Frame: Florian Maier-Aichen,” Aperture, New York, Summer 2007, p. 46 To place Florian Maier-Aichen, rather, inside the photograph is to place him just about anywhere, as we are no longer dealing with a strictly delimited field of operation.