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BRITAIN’S BEST-SELLING FINANCIAL MAGAZINE MONEYWEEK.COM Collectables 39 Spiritual modern Modernising modern art artists A key art movement is undergoing a revamp. Chris Carter reports. Modern art has its roots otheby’s held its third annual in the late 19th century, when spiritualism S“Modernités” sale in Paris was flourishing, on Wednesday, alongside the says Caroline International Contemporary Art Marciniak in Frieze Fair (FIAC). The sale included Masters Magazine. Medea (1929) by Francis It was also an era of Picabia. With a nod to Sandro profound technological Botticelli, Picabia depicts the and socio-economic semi-divine enchantress from change. “Railways were Greek mythology who goes on vastly extended, suburbs sprouted to marry Jason, the leader of the factories and cities Argonauts. It was valued at up towered upwards.” to €2m. But with There was also a large technological progress painting by Marc Chagall came disillusionment, entitled Le Cirque Mauve and “a sense of longing (1966) and valued at up to €5m, Rene Magritte’s L’Incorruptible (1940) and decay”. along with René Magritte’s ©Sotheby’s Impressionism was too L’Incorruptible (1940), showing the Museum of Modern Art globalism and African-American “formal, based on fleeting sensory the Belgian surrealist’s wife, (MOMA) in New York has been art added”. impressions and Georgette, as a statue before wrestling with for a long time. On Thursday a preview grounded in everyday a bleak landscape. It was on Now, after a $450m overhaul, of the museum’s new layout life”, says Marciniak. sale for €1.5m. The event was the gallery is reopening on 21 showcased the museum’s 47,000 concerned with “defining October as a “living, breathing square feet of new gallery modernity”, as Sotheby’s put it. 21st-century institution, rather space and the “radical ‘remix’” But that is easier said than done. than the monument to an of its permanent collection, obsolete history – white, male says Miranda Bryant in The Rebooting modern art and nationalist” – that it had Guardian. Now, for example, Modern art begin in the 1880s, become since it was founded Pablo Picasso’s 1907 painting more or less – some say ten, in 1929, according to Holland Les Demoiselles d’Avignon

20 years earlier. Either way, Cotter in The New York Times. can be found close to Faith ©The Gallery Everything of its concerns “now feel long (MOMA first opened just nine Ringgold’s 1967 work American “The renewed interest ago, forged in a time of rapid days after the Wall Street Crash. People Series #20: Die, depicting in occultism was driven industrial change”, says Jerry Let’s hope its October reopening a scene from a race riot. by a search for Saltz on New York Magazine’s this time is less eventful.) That’s because, in today’s alternatives and Vulture website. Time for a MOMA has long been known digital world, we consume a origins, for a world that reboot, then. Modernism shapes for the strict arrangement of wide variety of images that are holds both chaos and “the ways we see the world, its displays along the lines of out of context and outside of coherence... its rhythms and how the world sees itself”, an “ironclad view of modern traditional settings, as MOMA’s hinting at key truths.” he says. art as a succession of ‘isms’ director, Glenn Lowry, tells “At the turn of the But recently, “seismic shifts (Cubism, Surrealism, Abstract Bryant. “It reframes Picasso century, modern artists and Modernists were all have occurred” that have Expressionism)”, says Cotter, differently,” he says. “It doesn’t into versions of stretched the boundaries of But now it is attempting to diminish Picasso, it simply spiritualism,” The the art movement to its limits. reinvent itself without hurting means that there’s another Gallery of Everything’s Modernism needs to be made its appeal. The result is a sort conversation you can have James Brett told the modern again. That is something of “Modernism Plus, with around Picasso.” BBC’s Kelly Grovier. “So spiritual art had a huge impact on what became Auctions Modernism and therefore art today.” Going… Gone… The evidence is in the A letter written by Jane Austen, A cache of 65 letters written by diversity of visions on dated 16 September 1813, is to go Swedish-American Hollywood display at The Gallery’s up for auction at Bonhams in New actress Greta Garbo (pictured) The Medium’s Medium York next Wednesday. In the failed to sell at Swann Auction exhibition, says Grovier. letter to her sister, Cassandra, Galleries in New York last From the “haunting Austen reports on the latest Thursday. Expecting interest Surrealism” of Marian fashion: “Large full bows of very from film collectors, the bundle Spore Bush to the narrow ribbon… one over the of letters had been valued at portraits of the German right temple, perhaps, and $60,000. All of the letters had been artist Margarethe Held, another at the left ear”. She also written to Garbo’s close friend, who believed she was recounts a visit to the dentist with Austrian actress and writer Salka instructed by the Hindu her nieces, remarking that the Viertel, between 1932 and 1973. god Shiva, the artworks dentist “must be a Lover of Teeth The inscrutable and reclusive star demonstrate “just how & Money & Mischief... I would not of Queen Christina (1933) and far and wide the have had him look at mine for a Anna Karenina (1935) was known mystical impulse shilling a tooth & double it.” as the “Swedish Sphinx” , says pulsated”. (The Gallery Austen is thought to have written The Observer. In one of the of Everything, 4 around 3,000 letters, of which most were letters, Garbo writes: “I go nowhere, see no one… Chiltern Street, London destroyed in the 1840s. This surviving example is It is hard and sad to be alone, but sometimes it’s – until 24 November.)

expected to fetch up to $120,000. even more difficult to be with someone.” ©Getty Images moneyweek.com 18 October 2019 MoneyWeek