Beyond new artworld developments and emerging trends, Art Basel Miami Beach also showcases exceptional works from the past century. Here, the stories behind some of the best.
Francis Picabia
Galerie 1900–2000
En agissant nous oublions (1946–47)
Scandal seemed to follow Francis Picabia wherever he went. Born in Paris in 1879, he was known as a troublemaker who, while embracing radical ideas, choreographed ballets, made paintings from dirty magazines to be sold abroad, penned erotic poetry, and had a brief fling with Surrealism before denouncing it in 1921. He was a major figure in the Dada movement and explored a range of styles in his work, from Cubist collages to mechanomorphic imagery. The dreamlike canvas En agissant nous oublions, the title of which translates to ‘by acting we forget’, was made in the postwar years after Picabia cast figuration aside. In it, a shadowy abstract form is surrounded by a mysterious violet aura.
Imogen Cunningham
Edwynn Houk Gallery
Side (John Bovingdon, Dancer) (1929)
In 1901, as an 18 year old in Seattle, Imogen Cunningham sent away for her first camera. Over the following seven decades, she displayed an extraordinary dedication to photography, conducting extensive research into the medium’s chemical processes and artistic possibilities. The images she made were ahead of their time; her photographs of botany, landscapes, and nudes are at once thoughtful, sensual, and smart. On view at Edwynn Houk Gallery’s booth, this intimately scaled gelatin silver print shows the folded torso of the dancer John Bovingdon, who, during the Second World War, was fired unceremoniously from his job as an economic analyst after superiors caught wind of rumors that he used to be a ballet dancer and once had Communist associations. The print was a gift to Cunningham’s photography dealer Lee Witkin; in the margin, Cunningham inscribed ‘For Lee forever / IC’.
Kenneth Young
Edward Tyler Nahem
Untitled (1970)
Looking at Kenneth Young’s work, it’s unsurprising to learn that the artist was once a scientist. In graduate school in Louisiana – with a degree in physics under his belt and another in chemical engineering on the horizon – he met the local Black artist’s group Gallery Enterprise and switched disciplines. After graduation, he moved to Washington, D.C., in the 1960s and worked for 35 years as an exhibition designer at the Smithsonian Institution, painting in his spare time. At Edward Tyler Nahem’s booth, Untitled (1970) comprises fluid washes of cloudy blue, lemon, turquoise, and olive paint, coursing toward the canvas’s center. It appears almost like a microscopic image of biological activity, a flurry of cellular motion.
Bob Thompson
Michael Rosenfeld Gallery
Nativity (1961)
Old meets new in Bob Thompson’s work. Inspired by jazz, the American artist infused the symbols, subject matter, and compositions of the Old Masters with new vitality by painting traditional scenes with expressive colors and irregular planes. Thompson had a prolific output during his short-lived career, making more than 1,000 paintings and drawings before his death in Rome aged 29. The influence of music is evident in the rhythmic repetition of figures and harmonious colors in the painting Nativity (1961), which depicts a gathering of faceless figures in an outdoor setting. Some nude and others draped in robes, the figures are rendered as flat blocks of color with visible brushstrokes. Like traditional nativity scenes, the group is gathered toward a young-looking figure in the center, while in the distance, a winding road leads back to the hills.
Georgia O’Keeffe
Schoelkopf Gallery
Hill, Stream and Moon (1916–17)
In 1916, the artist Georgia O’Keeffe joined the faculty of Texas A&M University in Amarillo and, inspired by the vast landscape of The Texas Panhandle, learned to see in a new way. In a letter from the autumn of that year, O’Keeffe writes: ‘Last night I loved the starlight – the dark – the wind and the miles and miles of the thin strip of dark that is land – it was wonderfully big – and dark and starlight and night moving.’ In the town of Canyon, 20 miles west, she made a series of colorful watercolors, which reveal her invigorated state and affinity for the Texan landscape. One such watercolor, Hill, Stream and Moon (1916–17), depicts an arced hill holden between a curving blue river, blotted trees, and a peach-hued sliver of the moon.
Alice Neel
Victoria Miro
Georgie Neel (1955)
One of the most iconic figurative painters of the 20th century, Alice Neel created portraits of her friends, family, neighbors, and acquaintances which are immediately recognizable for their observational mark-making. The passage of time and the artist’s empathetic consideration of her subjects is palpable in the immediacy of her brushstrokes. Georgie Neel (1955) is a portrait of the artist’s brother’s son. Angled away from the artist as she painted him, Georgie sits on a chair with an earnest expression and hands folded in his lap. This is one of Neel’s more rendered portraits; while the background is suggested in washes of blue and umber, careful highlights on Georgie’s forehead, nose, and ears reflect the quality of light in the room around them.
Kenneth Noland
Yares Art
Color Pane (1967)
A key figure in the Color-Field movement, Kenneth Noland used simple compositions and flattened shapes to explore the harmonic relationships between colors. His works acknowledged their base material components as pigment applied to canvas stretched over a support. Because Noland considered a painting’s edges to be just as important as its center, his works often expressly addressed the shape of their stretchers. Nearly 13 feet long, Color Pane (1967) is a vibrant, minimal stack of flat bands of lemon yellow, dusty pink, cream, and green acrylic paint stretching straight across the canvas. Arranged in such an orderly manner – each hue allotted its rightful space to shine – the colors seem to hum in chorus; perhaps the soundtrack to seeing a summer landscape speed past from the window of a fast car.
Sonja Sekula
Galerie Knoell
Private Totem (1947)
Private Totem (1947) is on view at Galerie Knoell’s booth as part of a joint survey of work by Sonja Sekula and Mark Tobey. Born in Lucerne, Sekula moved to New York in 1936 where she embraced the Abstract Expressionists’ affinity for action painting and graphic gesture. Embracing the city’s artistic energy and experimenting with many styles, she was also interested in Surrealism and Native American art. In 1943, Sekula met Peggy Guggenheim, who included her work in the group show ‘31 Women’, which launched her career. Private Totem was made four years later, during Sekula’s most fruitful period. In the painting, graphic lines divide the canvas into chalky, geometric planes. Although abstract, the effect conjures the sense of figures gathered in a snowy setting.
Louise Bourgeois
Galerie Karsten Greve
Black Flames (1947–49)
Louise Bourgeois’s bronze sculpture Black Flames resembles a burning candle and is part of the artist’s ‘Personnages’ (Characters) series, made between 1945 and 1955. Like much of Bourgeois’s oeuvre, the series was a way of working through inner turmoil and painful memories. Having moved from France to New York in 1938, Bourgeois was filled with longing for the people and places she had known back home. To process those feelings, Bourgeois made human-size sculptures from wood, plaster, steel, and cast rubber to represent people in her life. Showing her Surrealist influences, the totem-like Black Flames is slender and balanced, its gently curving peaks at the top resembling flames reaching skywards.
Dan Flavin
Cardi Gallery
Untitled (1995)
In the 1960s, as a young artist preoccupied with architecture, Dan Flavin began using light to redefine space. His minimalist installations (or ‘situations’, as he called them) are made from commercially available fluorescent lamps and emit colorful glows to augment the experience of space. His works have been permanently installed at sites including the Hudson River Museum, the United States Courthouse in Anchorage, and the church of Santa Maria Annunciata in Milan. The untitled work at Cardi Gallery’s booth was made the year before the artist died, and was first shown in one of the last solo exhibitions to take place during Flavin’s lifetime. Comprising a pair of horizontally arranged four-feet lamps with a two-feet lamp sandwiched between them, Untitled radiates a steady glow of blue, red, and green fluorescent light.
Robert Motherwell
Kasmin
Abstraction on Turquoise (1945)
As a child, Robert Motherwell spent much time on the Pacific Coast, where he was taken by the bright colors of the Californian terrain and ocean. Later, while studying at Stanford University, he became even more closely acquainted with the landscape. Although vivid, West Coast hues don’t appear in some of his iconic series, such as ‘Elegies to the Spanish Republic’ (1948–67), they make an exciting emergence in paintings like Abstraction on Turquoise (1945), in which black lines intersect planar forms. Made from oil, enamel, sand, and charcoal on canvas board, the painting is pared down to very few shades. Their contrast is striking; laid down next to a dusty mauve, blocks of azure blue look like clear ocean water.
