Theme: Artists

It was obvious from my very first day that Sotheby’s would be exactly as I had come to imagine it. As the elevator reached each floor, archetypes spilled forth. Read more

In 1943, Peggy Guggenheim came to visit Jackson Pollock’s studio on East 8th Street in Greenwich Village. In the small, poor, ferociously competitive world of downtown artists, a visit from Guggenheim was like a visit from Santa ClausRead more

Shortly before his death, Marlon Brando was working on a series of instructional videos about acting, to be called “Lying for a Living”. Read more

Young artists are hungry for company, for confirmation of their talent and a sense of four walls around them, and they’re hungry for partners in their rebellion against the world.Read more

According to his dealer, Joseph Durand-Ruel, Degas created sculptures for more than 40 years. Yet the artist rarely mentioned these works in his notebooks or correspondenceRead more

Unlike the previous macho AbEx generation, which also counted female artists like Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Louise Nevelson, Helen Frankenthaler, and Elaine de Kooning, the Pop movement, strictly speaking, did not have high-profile female participation. Marisol, Strider, and Sturtevant were sometimes included in Pop group shows in New York, but they never wholly fit. Pop art was about banality, disaffection, and detachment, and the ideas of the women artists diametrically opposed these themes. Philosophically liberated, they thought for themselves, radicalized their art, and imploded the meaning of Pop. Read more