Greatest Art Work Ever

Art Fairs
The 10 Best Artworks at Art Basel 2017
From one of the greatest photographic collections of the 20th century to Nelson Rockfeller's own Léger fireplace, there is great art to be found.
A visitor looks at the artwork by Darren Bader during the press preview for Art Basel. Photo: Harold Cunningham setty image

What does it say about the current moment that at this year’s Art Basel, the first floor—traditionally given over to the most patrician galleries and bluest-chip work—feels more urgent, interesting, and exciting than the young guns on the second floor? For whatever reason, the classics shine with exceptional brightness at the Messeplatz this time around, with old art-historical friends showing new sides of depth and exoticism. Here is a tour of some of the best works on offer at the fair.
NICOLAS DE STAËL
Syracuse (1954)
Galerie 1900-2000 – Paris
Around $3 million

Born in Russia in 1914 but orphaned by that country’s revolution, Nicolas de Staël spent his itinerant youth traveling Europe and beyond—including a two-year stint in the French Foreign Legion and a bit of art school—before settling in Nice, where he became aesthetically drawn to the circle of local Modernist mystics led by Jean Arp and the Delaunays. The style that emerged is one of joyful abstraction, where rudimentary blocks of color evoke landscapes glimpsed through a train window, or seen in memory. At the fair, the reliable connoisseurs at Galerie 1900-2000 displayed a painting from the beginning of de Staël’s peak years against a photo of his studio at the time. Is that a blue car in the foreground? “I do see a car,” said a patient gallery proprietor, “but there is no car.”
FRANCIS BACON
Study From the Human Body – Figure in Movement (1982)
Marlborough – New York
$25 million

“There’s never a bad time to sell a Bacon,” a dealer at Marlborough Gallery opined. That’s certainly true when you happen to have a stunning painting lying around like this one, which the gallery obtained from the artist directly before he died. Featuring all the elements of a major Bacon—the spooky transparent box (evoked
memorably in the new “Twin Peaks” ), vigorous coloration, and mutant figure in apparent agony—the painting advances Bacon’s interest in the body in movement, a subject he often painted from photos in sporting magazines. That, in fact, is what happened here: the figure at center is outfitted with cricket pads (which also feature in two other paintings from the same year, one now at the Hirshhorn, the other the Pompidou), and the red arrow suggesting a certain leftward torque that may have been lifted from an illustration on how to
AUGUST SANDER
“People of the 20th Century” (1876-1964)
Berinson Gallery – Berlin
$3.1 million

As a young man, to make money, the photographer August Sander would wander the villages outside Cologne on foot to offer his services as a formal portraitist for working-class locals. Gradually, he noticed that his subjects would arrive for their sessions dressed in highly encoded ways, communicating through their attire and posture the ways they saw themselves—or wanted to be seen—in society. This realization gave birth to one of the greatest artistic feats in the history of photography, a series of nearly 700 photos that Sander took over six decades, capturing the full sweep of the social order of his time, from the unemployed laborer to the baker and bricklayer to the banker to the celebrity thinker to the foppish aristocrat.

Establishing a typological approach to photography that was later widely promulgated by the Düsseldorf School, “People of the 20th Century” is represented at the fair in an extraordinary body of work: Sander’s personal collection of his 70 favorite photographs, including his most famous images, printed by his son in a large format at his request. Acquired from the family 15 years ago, the photos make for a powerful wall at the fair, where they are being offered as a set, on their original mounts. As for the timing of the sale? The fact that
Hauser & Wirth, which has a much smaller Sander print in its booth, recently took over the estate is a “complete coincidence,” according to the gallery.
ANDY WARHOL
Gun 1981-82
Mnuchin Gallery – New York
$12 million

Andy Warhol’s haunting “Death and Disaster” series of the early 1960s has found a place in collectors’ hearts for its lurid tabloid drama, but this painting—made two decades later—comes from a very different place. After all, Warhol had in the interim experienced firsthand the explosive power of a gun, when Valerie Solanas shot him in his studio in 1968, leaving him with a scarred body and shaken worldview. In making these stark yet oddly fetishistic paintings, Warhol invited his friends to bring their guns by his studio—which some might consider unusual considering the assassination attempt—so he could shoot them with his Polaroid camera and then monumentalize them on canvas. Chilly in aspect and made larger than life through a subtle doubling effect, this Sentinel revolver serves as an admonition of the extraordinary power of handguns (and might also serve as an uncomfortable reminder that the gallerist’s son, Steven Mnuchin, serves in the enthusiastically pro-gun Trump administration).

FERNAND LÉGER
Mural painting for fireplace of Nelson Rockefeller’s apartment – 1939
Galerie Gmurzynska – Zürich
Around $6 million

Nelson Rockefeller led a charmed life: born into his family’s Standard Oil wealth, he traveled the world, became governor of New York, and later served as Vice President of the United States under Gerald Ford. An energetic art collector, he also happened to be close, personal friends with some of the greatest artists of his time—so, when he bought himself a stately penthouse apartment atop 810 Fifth Avenue and asked a few of his artist friends to decorate it for him, they gladly did. One of these was Léger, who set up shop in the apartment for a time to paint one of Rockefeller’s two grand fireplaces (Matisse did the other), covering the wall in canvas and creating a markedly Surrealist-influenced autumnal landscape.
After Rockefeller’s death in 1979 (from a heart attack, at age 70, in his private townhouse, in the company of his 25-year-old secretary), the painting was donated to MoMA; it is now deaccessioning it to cover the costs of László Moholy-Nagy’s EM 1 (Telephone Picture), which the museum bought at Sotheby’s last November for $6 million. Galerie Gmurzynska, which is handling the sale, expects the Léger fireplace to go to a private collection—hopefully someone who, like Rockefeller, will leave the fireplace unused so as not to soot up the rather impractical backsplash.

URS FISCHER
Bruno & Yoyo (2015)
Gagosian – New York
$950,000

The Swiss art dealer Bruno Bischofberger has a few claims to legend status: he helped bring postwar American art to Europe in the 1970s and ‘80s, he was played by Dennis Hopper in Julian Schnabel’s Basquiat
movie, and since time immemorial he has graced the back cover of Artforum with kitschy photos of bucolic peasant life in the Swiss Alps. Now the dealer and his wife have been granted another dose of immortality by the artist Urs Fischer—with a catch. The sculpture, executed in tutti-frutti-colored paraffin wax, is meant to be burnt to the ground as a candle (you can attach the wicks anywhere) and then replenished from the artist’s studio with a refill. (One imagines a very fancy Amazon Dash button.) The edition of two sold immediately at the fair, though a third could be obtained, a gallery salesperson strongly hinted, if one prevailed upon Fischer to part with his artist’s proof.

Reference:
https://news.artnet.com/