The Art Of Paul Jenkins

Paul Jenkins, aged 82 and now working with acrylic on very large canvasses, has outlived many of his close friends, including De Kooning, Rothko and Pollock. All treated Jenkins as a peer and equal, yet he has not so far achieved comparable fame or market status. It may be because his work makes fewer references than that of his friends to the history of European painting. He is not so much a rebel artist as a foreign one. And this could mean that institutional acceptance takes longer. In any case, the proletarian city of Lille is currently offering him a magnificent exhibition in its Palais des Beaux Arts. The Redfern Gallery in London is also holding a show.

In the immense entrance hall to the Palais, four 10-metre high canvases are hanging. They are as tall and vertical as the architectural columns. Each one is an articulated presence, twisting upon itself, rising up as if it had limbs although its limbs are neither human nor animal. Impossible to think of them as abstract - a European art-historical term. These presences are totemic. You look up at each one and feel how in that thin hanging strip a specific place is towering above you. The places are silent, knowing that their colours are strident and can speak for themselves. Paul Jenkins: Major Works is at the Palais des Beaux Arts, Lille until Nov 20, and the Redfern Gallery, London W1 from Oct 25 until Nov 24.
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Irish Art

Las Vegas Hides Nude Art

Artists are upset in "Sin City" after Las Vegas officials removed two nude paintings from City Hall, hanging as winners of an art contest. The City Manager said he took the art down to protect the city against a lawsuit for violating a federal law that ensures employees from "a hostile work environment". The art contest was sponsored by the Las Vegas Arts Commission and the city's Department of Leisure Services. The paintings in question are each of a nude female that the artists say is nothing close to pornographic or sexual.
Irish Art

Christie's Art In China

Christie's has signed a deal to become the first Western auction house in China. Under the agreement, settled this week, Christie's will license its name, provide experts and oversee the entire art auction process, from the acquisition of art works for sale to the printing and design of the catalog. Its first sale - 45 examples of modern and contemporary Chinese art - is scheduled for Nov. 3 at the Great Wall Sheraton Hotel in Beijing and is expected to bring $10 million.
Irish Art

NY Art Photo Frenzy

Photographs totalling £16.6 million were sold last week in New York - the highest total for any series of photographs at auction. New York's Pace/MacGill Gallery broke the record for a single photograph at auction, paying £467,000 at Sotheby's for a 1920s vintage print by Edward Weston.
Woman in a Moroccan Palace by Irving Penn (1951) fetched £175,000
At Christie's, records tumbled for Henri Cartier-Bresson, Brassaï, Irving Penn, Richard Avedon and Robert Mapplethorpe. Experts attributed the expanding market to a new wave of buyers, including US hedge-fund managers. "Some of the buying lacked connoisseurship," commented one dealer.
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Irish Art

Michaelangelo For Auction

Christie’s, New York will sell a study of a male torso by Michelangelo in New York in January. One of only a handful of Michelangelo drawings still in private ownership, this masterful art work offers collectors around the globe an extremely rare opportunity to own a masterpiece by one of the towering geniuses of Western Art.
Expected to realize in the region of $4 million, this black chalk drawing has appeared on the open market only once before. On the death of its previous owner, part of the art collection was bought by the British Museum, but this drawing remained with the family. It reappeared for sale only in 1976, when it was bought by the current owner, a private art collector, for £178,200, setting a new world auction record for an Old Master Drawing.
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Irish Art

Tracey Emin Autobiography

Write an autobiography? With her wild art and her even wilder life, Tracey Emin is the perfect subject. She has been alone for nearly three years — she is planning a party for the anniversary — since her relationship with her fellow YBA Mat Collishaw broke up. She makes a joke out of it, then her head drops and she stares at her fingers. The worst moment comes when I ask about having a baby. A dose of gonorrhoea years ago had led to her doctor telling her she would never conceive. Then she did, and she had an abortion. I ask her if she can have a baby now. “No,” she says impatiently, “I can’t, because I don’t f*** anyone. How could I have a baby?” Once, she appeared on television so drunk, she knew nothing about it the next morning, until her friends started ringing and she saw the papers. She had staggered off the set muttering something about having to call her mum. But she has given up spirits, chocolate, cigarettes, coffee. She says she has hardly had a drink since she passed her driving test six weeks ago: “It’s all part of the big change.” She goes to bed at 9pm and is wide awake at 3am. Tracey is clean, responsible.
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Irish Art

Bum Painter Makes Turner

The Turner Art Prize has again managed to be controversial - this time by picking a painter among the shortlisted finalists. Gillian Carnegie is the first artist who exclusively uses paint to be nominated for the £25,000 first prize in the last five years of the competition. However, Ms Carnegie's work is not entirely traditional - her entries include a series of paintings of a naked bottom. The judges say Ms Carnegie "interrogates" and celebrates the medium of painting using oils within the traditional genres of landscape, still life, the nude and portraiture. She has already been installed by bookmakers as the favourite for the art prize, which is awarded to a British artist under the age of 50 for an outstanding exhibition or other presentation in the previous year. This year's shortlist, open to the public at the Tate Britain art gallery in London from October 18, includes Darren Almond, chosen for his sculptures of bus stops outside the Auschwitz Museum in Poland. Also on the list is Glasgow-born Jim Lambie, for his psychedelic floor pieces. The fourth entrant is environmentally friendly artist Simon Starling, from Epsom, Surrey, nominated for a piece in which he rode a moped across the desert in Andalucia.
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Irish Art

Two New Da Vinci's Shown

Two previously unseen paintings by Leonardo have gone on show in Italy. One is an alternative version of Da Vinci's famous painting known as Virgin of the Rocks, with the infant Jesus and the infant John the Baptist. The other shows a semi-naked Mary Magdalene, thought to have been completed by Leonardo with the help of one of his pupils about 1515, shortly before his death.
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Irish Art

Archer's Van Gogh Thriller

Jeffrey Archer's writing comeback begins with a thriller inspired by his passion for art. The latest work by the Tory peer, released from jail in 2003 after serving a sentence for perjury, is based on Vincent van Gogh’s Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear. False Impression - published next March -marks the latest stage in Archer’s rehabilitation. Last week he was invited back into the heart of the Establishment when he attended Baroness Thatcher’s 80th birthday party in the presence of the Queen. Archer's own collection includes works by some of the greatest artists of the late 19th and 20th centuries, including Picasso, Pissarro, Sisley, Hockney and Bonnard as well as seven paintings by Vuillard and 20 by Lowry - but no Van Goghs.
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Irish Art

Exorcist's Dali Sculpture

A sculpture of Christ that Salvador Dali gave to his exorcist has been found among the belongings of a deceased Italian priest. Father Gabriele Maria Berardi, the founder of a charitable order, said before he died that Dali had given him the sculpture of Christ on a wooden cross after the artist had been exorcised by him. The Italian priest emigrated to France in the 1940s and carried out exorcisms there. The sculpture was found among his belongings in the cellar of a house in Rome. Father Gabriele's order said it planned to sell the statue to raise money for its charity work.
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Irish Art