World's Biggest Art Collector Sheikh Saud bin Mohammed Al-Thani Dies at Age 48 →

Sheikh Saud Al-Thani, 2002.

Once widely regarded as the world's richest and most powerful art collector, Sheikh Saud bin Mohammed Al-Thani of Qatar died suddenly at his home in London on November 9, age 48. Details of his death have not been announced, although initial reports say it was from natural causes. A cousin of the Qatar's current Emir, Sheikh Al-Thani served as the country's president of the National Council for Culture, Arts and Heritage, from 1997 to 2005. During his tenure, he oversaw the development of the oil-rich nation's ambitious plans to build an extensive network of new schools, libraries, and museums. He also spent well over $1 billion on art purchases during that period, more than any other individual, according to many art-market observers.

Qatar's royal family is known for its prodigious collecting habits, ranging from ancient manuscripts to contemporary art. Over the past two decades, Sheikh Al-Thani acquired a vast collection of art and artifacts, with a special concentration on historical pieces, including Islamic ceramics, textiles, scientific instruments and jewelry (see "Sheikh Al-Thani's Watch Sells for $24 Million After His Mysterious Death"). His collection makes up the bulk of holdings in five existing and planned museums: the Museum of Islamic Art, the National Library, the Natural History Museum, a Photography Museum, and a museum for traditional textiles and clothing.

Sheikh Al-Thani was also a major collector of vintage cars, bicycles, antique furniture, and Chinese antiquities. In 2005, he was dismissed from his post and circumstances surrounding his purchases and holdings were investigated. Relatives accused him of embezzling millions from family members and misappropriating public funds. He was cleared of wrong-doing shortly after, however, and returned to his position as a major player in the international blue-chip art market.

Minimalism Movement →

"A shape, a volume, a color, a surface is something itself. It shouldn't be concealed as part of a fairly different whole." - Donald Judd 

The term "Minimalism" has evolved over the last half-century to include a vast number of artistic media, and its precedents in the visual arts can be found in Mondrian, van Doesburg, Reinhardt, and in Malevich's monochromes. But it was born as a self-conscious movement in New York in the early 1960s. Its leading figures - Donald Judd, Frank Stella, Robert Morris, and Carl Andre - created objects which often blurred the boundaries between painting and sculpture, and were characterized by unitary, geometric forms and industrial materials. Emphasising cool anonymity over the hot expressivism of the previous generation of painters, the Minimalists attempted to avoid metaphorical associations, symbolism, and suggestions of spiritual transcendence. 

• The revival of interest in Russian Constructivism and Marcel Duchamp's readymades provided important inspiration for the Minimalists. The Russian's example suggested an approach to sculpture that emphasised modular fabrication and industrial materials over the craft techniques of most modern sculpture. And Duchamp's readymades pointed to ways in which sculpture might make use of a variety of pre-fabricated materials, or aspire to the appearance of factory-built commodities.
• Much of Minimalist aesthetics was shaped by a reaction against Abstract Expressionism. Minimalists wanted to remove suggestions of self-expressionism from the art work, as well as evocations of illusion or transcendence - or, indeed, metaphors of any kind, though as some critics have pointed out, that proved difficult. Unhappy with the modernist emphasis on medium-specificity, the Minimalists also sought to erase distinctions between paintings and sculptures, and to make instead, as Donald Judd said: "specific objects." 
• In seeking to make objects which avoided the appearance of fine art objects, the Minimalists attempted to remove the appearance of composition from their work. To that end, they tried to expunge all signs of the artists guiding hand or thought processes - all aesthetic decisions - from the fabrication of the object. For Donald Judd, this was part of Minimalism's attack on the tradition of "relational composition" in European art, one which he saw as part of an out-moded rationalism. Rather than the parts of an artwork being carefully, hierarchically ordered and balanced, he said they should be "just one thing after another."

In New York City in the late 1950s, young artists like Donald Judd, Robert Morris and Dan Flavin were painting in then dominant Abstract Expressionist vein, and beginning to show at smaller galleries throughout the city. By the early 1960s, many of these artists had abandoned painting altogether in favour of objects which seemed neither painting nor sculpture in the conventional sense. For example, Frank Stella's Black Paintings (a series of hugely influential, concentrically striped pictures from 1959-60), were much thicker than conventional canvases, and this emphasised their materiality and object-ness, in contrast to the thin, window-like quality of ordinary canvases. Other early Minimalist works employed non-art materials such as plywood, scrap metal, and fluorescent light bulbs. 

Many names were floated to characterise this new art, from "ABC art" and "Reductive Art" to "literalism" and "systemic painting." "Minimalism" was the term that eventually stuck, perhaps because it best described the way the artists reduced art to the minimum number of colors, shapes, lines and textures. Yet the term was rejected by many of the artists commonly associated with the movement - Judd, for example, felt the title was derogatory. He preferred the term "primary structures," which came to be the title of a landmark group show at the Jewish Museum in New York in 1966: it brought together many of those who were important to the movement, including Sol LeWitt, Dan Flavin, Robert Morris, Carl Andre, and Donald Judd, though it also included some who were barely on its fringes, such as Ellsworth Kelly and Anthony Caro.

The Minimalists' emphasis on eradicating signs of authorship from the artwork (by using simple, geometric forms, and courting the appearance of industrial objects) led, inevitably, to the sense that the meaning of the object lay not "inside" it, but rather on its surface - it arose from the viewer's interaction with the object. This led to a new emphasis on the physical space in which the artwork resided. In part, this development was inspired by Maurice Merleau-Ponty's writings on phenomenology, in particular, The Phenomenology of Perception (1945).  

Aside from sculptors, Minimalism is also associated with a few key abstract painters, such as Frank Stella and, retrospectively, Barnett Newman. These artists painted very simple canvases that were considered minimal due to their bare-bones composition. Using only line, solid color and, in Stella's case, geometric forms and shaped canvas, these artists combined paint and canvas in such a way that the two became inseparable. 

By the late 1960s, Minimalism was beginning to show signs of breaking apart as a movement, as various artists who had been important to its early development began to move in different directions. By this time the movement was also drawing powerful attacks. The most important of these would be Michael Fried's essay "Art and Objecthood," published in Artforum in 1967. Although it seemed to confirm the importance of the movement as a turning point in the history of modern art, Fried was uncomfortable with what it heralded. Referring to the movement as "literalism," and those who made it as "literalists," he accused artists like Judd and Morris of intentionally confusing the categories of art and ordinary object. According to Fried, what these artists were creating was not art, but a political and/or ideological statement about the nature of art. Fried maintained that just because Judd and Morris arranged identical non-art objects in a three-dimensional field and proclaimed it "art", didn't necessarily make it so. Art is art and an object is an object, Fried asserted. 

As the 1960s progressed, different offshoots of Minimalism began to take shape. In California, the "Light and Space" movement was led by Robert Irwin, while in vast ranges of unspoiled land throughout the U.S., Land artists like Robert Smithson and Walter de Maria completely removed art from the studio altogether, and turned the earth itself into a work of art. This achievement not only further blurred the boundaries between "art" and "object," but reinvented the more conventional definitions of sculpture. 

The significance of Michael Fried's attack on the movement continues to be discussed, and, to the extent that, as critic Hal Foster has put it, Minimalism forms a "crux" or turning point in the history of modernism, the movement remains hugely influential today. However, some critics have challenged the reputations of some leading figures such as Donald Judd: in particular, feminists have criticized what they see as a rhetoric of power in the style's austerity and intellectualism. Indeed, it is the legacy of the movements that followed in Minimalism's wake, and that are often canopied under the term "Post-Minimalism" (Land Art, Eccentric Abstraction, and other developments) that is more important. 

The Great Divide in the Art Market →

Bridget Riley’s 2013 print “After Rajasthan” was one of the works on sale at the London Original Print Fair. Credit Courtesy of Karsten Schubert        

LONDON — The art market tends to be written and talked about as a singular thing. The headline-grabbing millions spent on postwar and contemporary trophies dominate perceptions of how art is bought and sold, leaving more earth-bound collecting short of attention.

The cultured professional classes of the United States and Europe have always spent money on art and continue to do so. However, the latest market report issued by the European Fine Art Foundation indicates that average fine art auction prices increased by 82 percent and 100 percent, respectively, in Britain and the United States from 2009 to 2013, far outpacing the growth rate of many professional salaries since the 2008 financial crash.

“The market has shifted,” said Anders Petterson, managing director of the London-based art analysis firm ArtTactic. “People who in the 1990s would buy paintings are now having to look at prints and works on paper.”

The tale of these two markets could be seen last week in London. On Thursday, Christie’s previewed an exhibition of 65 works by Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter at its private sales gallery. Both of these influential German artists, who became friends in the 1960s, regularly feature in the Top 10 price lists of contemporary art sales in London and New York, and both are the subjects of one-man retrospectives at major museums this year. Eager to cash in on the bounce in interest that will follow the Polke show currently at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Richter opening at the Fondation Beyeler, in Basel, Switzerland, on May 18, collectors have released 35 works for sale at Christie’s Mayfair gallery space on New Bond Street.

            The experimental paintings that the artists made in the 1980s are priced as high as $3 million, typifying what wealthy international collectors are buying at the upper end of the market.

The previous evening, just down the road but seemingly a world away, a crowd of 700 less well-heeled collectors turned up at the Royal Academy of Arts for the private view of the 29th annual London Original Print Fair. The Soho dealer Karsten Schubert sold several versions of the vibrant 2013 Bridget Riley screenprint “After Rajasthan” for 4,000 pounds, or $6,720, each. The Oxfordshire-based gallery Elizabeth Harvey-Lee was asking the same price for a version, albeit damaged, of Hendrik Goltzius’s 1588 chiaroscuro woodcut “Hercules and Cacus,” one of the stars of the current “Renaissance Impressions” show at the Royal Academy through June 8.

Prints, regardless of period, have a reputation for being affordable and pleasurable, but not something that will earn a speculator a fast buck. These are the sort of things discerning buyers of art with a limited budget enjoy on their walls.

“The prices don’t change much, but there’s always somebody who wants one,” said Gordon Cooke, acting managing director of the Bond Street-based Fine Art Society, one of 48 dealers exhibiting in the print fair, which ran through Sunday. “Things find a niche.”

But as Mr. Cooke, who co-founded the London fair, points out, buying and selling prints hasn’t always been considered the poor relation of the art market as it is by many today.

In the 1920s, American speculators awash with cash from a soaring stock market were flipping limited-edition prints by D.Y. Cameron and other all-but-forgotten British artists for enormous sums of money. “Like to see my etchings?” supposedly became a well-worn chat-up line. The etching boom reached its zenith at Sotheby’s in London in May 1929, when Cameron’s print of medieval cathedral windows, “The Five Sisters, York Minster,” sold for £640. That sum would have bought a three-bedroom house in the suburbs of London, equivalent to between $1 million and $1.5 million today. At the time, no painting by Picasso or Modigliani, whose auction markets were in their infancy, had ever sold for that kind of money. Six months later, the American stock market crashed and with it the market for contemporary British etchings.

That Cameron print is now worth about £2,000.

James McNeill Whister’s 1889 etching “The Embroidered Curtain.” Credit The Fine Art Society

Other more famous printmakers still command high prices. One who has stood the test of time is the American-born, British-based artist James McNeill Whistler. The Fine Art Society was showing Whistler’s 1889 etching “The Embroidered Curtain,” priced at £120,000.

Whistler is widely acknowledged as one of the few first-rate artists to be a first-rate printmaker. Even so, his critically lauded monochromatic etchings are now less sought-after than the larger color prints by Edvard Munch and Picasso and portfolios by Andy Warhol, which routinely fetch top prices at Sotheby’s and Christie’s specialist print sales. A complete set of 10 of Warhol’s 1972 “Mao” prints, aside from the official published edition of 300, sold for £506,500 at Sotheby’s on March 18.

“These days people want big colorful pictures,” said Anthony McNerney, director of contemporary art at the London-based art adviser Gurr Johns. Mr. McNerney, along with many professionals in the art market, acknowledges that Mr. Richter’s abstracts are the commercial ne plus ultra of that category. “I saw one recently that had been bought for £1.5 million in 2000,” he said. “It’s now worth about £20 million. You can’t get that kind of return if you’re spending just a few thousand pounds.”

Mr. McNerney could have added that mainstream auction houses charge owners of lots priced at less than £10,000 about 30 percent in seller’s fees, while owners of works priced much higher, for example at £20 million, are charged nothing.

Where does that leave a lower-level art investor?

“People look too much at auction results,” Mr. McNerney said. “Rich collectors compete in auctions to prove how much money they have. The rest of us should just have a discussion about the art we like.”

And so with “investment grade” works beyond the reach of most wallets, buyers at the lower end of the market are having to fall back in love with the idea that art is a commodity that generates something more than mere financial returns.

“Art gives you something every day,” said Pilar Ordovas, a London-based dealer and former European head of Christie’s contemporary art department. “There are several art markets, and it is possible to buy good things that are prints and works on paper. It’s all about developing an eye and not ticking boxes and thinking about stocks and shares.”

Jean Arp: 1886 – 1966 →

plastron et fourchette shirtfront and fork

Born on September 16, 1886 in Strasbourg (then part of Germany), Jean (Hans) Arp was a pioneer of abstract art and a founding member of the Dada movement.  After studying at the Kunstschule, Weimar from 1905 to 1907, Arp attended the Académie Julian in Paris.

In 1909, Arp moved to Switzerland where in 1911 he was a founder of and exhibited with the Moderne Bund group. One year later, he began creating collages using paper and fabric and influenced by Cubist and Futurist art. Arp then traveled to Paris and Munich where he became aquainted with Robert and Sonia Delaunay Vasily Kandinsky, Amadeo Modigliani, Pablo Picasso, and others.

In 1915, with the onset of World War I, Arp moved to Zurich, feigning mental instability to avoid military service. It is here where he met and collaborated with Sophie Taeuber, creating tapestries and collages, and whom he married in 1922.

In 1916, Arp became part of the founding group of the Zurich Dada artists. Their aim was to encourage spontaneous and chaotic creation, free from prejudice and the academic conventions that many believed were the root causes of war. For Arp, Dada represented the “reconciliation of man with nature and the integration of art into life.” At the end of the war, Arp continued his involvement with Dada promoting it in Cologne, Berlin, Hannover, and Paris.

Although Arp was committed to Dada, he also aligned himself somewhat with the Surrealists, exhibiting with the group in Paris exhibitions in the mid 1920′s. He shared their notion of unfettered creativity, spontaneity, and anti-rational position.

Arp and his wife also had close ties to Constructivist groups such as De Stijl, Cercle et carré, Art Concret and Abstraction–Création, all of which aimed to create a counterbalance to Surrealism as well as to change society for a better future.

In the early 1930′s, Arp developed the principle of the “constellation,” and used it in both his writings and artworks. While creating his reliefs, Arp would identify a theme, such as five white shapes and two smaller black ones on a white ground, and then reassemble these shapes into different configurations.

In the 1930′s, Arp began creating free-standing sculpture. Just as his reliefs were unframed, Arp’s sculptures were not mounted on a base, enabling them to simply take their place in nature. Instead of the term abstract art, he and other artists, referred to their work as Concrete Art, stating that their aim was not to reproduce, but simply to produce more directly. Arp’s goal was to concentrate on form to increase the sculpture’s domination of space and its impact on the viewer.

From the 1930′s onward, Arp also wrote and published poetry and essays. As well, he was a pioneer of  automatic writing and drawing that were important to the Surrealist movement.

With the fall of Paris in 1942, Arp fled the war for Zurich where he remained, returning to Paris in 1946. In 1949, he traveled to New York where he had a solo show at Curt Valentin’s Buchholz Gallery. In 1950, Harvard University in Cambridge, MA invited him to create a relief for their Graduate Center. In 1954, Arp was awarded the Grand Prize for Sculpture at the Venice Biennale. Retrospectives of his work were held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, in 1958 and at the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris, in 1962.

Jean Arp died June 7, 1966, in Basel, Switzerland at the age of 80. His works are in major museums around the world including a large collection at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Strasbourg.

How to Speed up Oil Paint Drying Time

Oil paint straight from the tubes may take days, sometimes weeks, to completely dry. Many artists, myself included, do not like working wet on wet. For busy artists who are producing lots of commissions, or have a time limit to finish a series for an upcoming show, a faster oil paint drying time is imperative.

The main difference between oils and water based paints is the drying time. The water in water based paints evaporates, causing the paint to harden.

Oil paint, on the other hand, oxidizes, which is a much slower process. It is important to realize that oil paintings take months to fully dry before varnishing.

What we are referring to here is the oil paint hardening enough to touch or be painted over.

There are many things an artist can do to ensure their oil paintings dry in hours, rather than days. Please realize though that no matter what an artist does to speed up drying of oil paintings, they should allow at least a few hours before even testing the paint or painting over layers. With thin washes, it may even be possible to do several layers in one day. There is no way to make oil paint harden instantly during a painting session, but by using the following tips, you can significantly lessen the duration they take to dry.

1. Use drying mediums

There are many drying mediums available for painting with oil paint. There are a variety of products available, and it is advisable to research which ones work best for you.

Also pay particular attention to the directions, and amounts to use for each product. Some are obviously very hazardous, and should be handled with great care.

Alkyd mediums – such as Liquin, Galkyd and Neo-Meglip 
Lead Dryers
Cobalt Dryers
Turpentine – to thin the paint and make it dry faster, especially for base coats      

2. Environment

Let the painting dry in a non-humid larger room with well circulated air. Try using a dehumidifier and a fan.  Placing it in a well heated, well lit room has been proven to significantly reduce the time for drying of oil paints.  

3. Paint in washes or thin layers.

The drying time will be significantly decreased if you work in layers rather than thick impastos. For those artists who primarily create paintings by impasto, your drying time still can be lessened by using a combination of some of the other methods listed here.

Always abide by the thick over thin rule for oil painting, though – to avoid cracking. Thank-you Art of Cheryl O for pointing that out.      

4. Different pigments and brands of oil paint having innate drying times.

Ivory black and titanium white tends to dry very slowly, whereas pigments such as lead white and burnt umber harden at a faster rate.

5. Linseed oil.

Combine thickened linseed oil with the oil paint on your palette, which will speed up the drying process. (This does not work for all brands of oil paint)      

6. Use a fast drying paint.

The very nature of oil paint requires a much slower drying duration. For art commissions and works with stringent time limits, you may do better by using a faster drying medium, such as acrylics, watercolor, gouache and even digital painting. Anyone who has tried oils and a variety of other mediums will realize oil colors are much more vibrant. Colors are easier to mix and blend together on the canvas. If you do not want to sacrifice this vibrancy and blending for a quicker drying medium, you may do better by working with oil paint instead of against it – realizing that paint drying time is a part of the medium.      

7. Use acrylic paint for the background.

To cut down on the whole procedure for a painting, some artists first paint the background with acrylic – quick drying paint, then the main elements of the composition in oils. This gives an interesting contrasting effect between the acrylic and oil paint.      

8. Paint on flat surfaces.

Oil paint on textured canvas tends to dry more slowly, as thicker globs of paint fill the crevices of the canvas. A flat surface such as board ensures the paint is evenly dispersed and dried.

As you can see, there are many methods of speeding up drying time for oil paintings. To quicken the process even faster, use a combination of these techniques. With a little experimentation, I think you will find that drying duration is no longer a problem, and oil paintings are created at a much faster pace.

How do you decrease oil paint drying times? Please share your experiences with us below.