Engineer's Daughter

the rothschild butterfly collection

Talk about a Wunderkammer.  An amazing collection of butterflies assembled by brothers Walter and Charles Rothschild and donated to England's Harrow school are being auctioned off at a sale at Bonhams in May.  Numbering in the thousands, the winged critters had been stashed away in a room used by the Harrow's IT department where few visited.  Walter Rothschild had a severe addiction to collecting to the point where he almost ruined himself financially, but he was able to found London's Natural History Museum with his vast holdings as a result.  Mark Brown summarized parts of a recent article by filmmaker Hannah Rothschild about her great-great uncle Walter that she wrote for the Bonhams quarterly:

Between 1899 and his death in 1937, butterflies became the main focus of his attention. According to Hannah: "Nothing man-made - no painting by Ingres or Velázquez, none of the jewels of Catherine the Great nor the intricacies of Mughal art - can come to the shocking beauty of these creatures ... My great-aunt Miriam used to send out a Christmas card and got great pleasure from correcting those who assumed that the image of swirling colours could be a lesser known work of some famous Impressionist painter. 
'You are looking at the greatly magnified reproductive organ of a butterfly,' she would tell princes and statesmen with glee."

Even though I feel sorry for all the poor dead butterflies in the Rothschild collection, it's also impossible not to marvel at the sheer variety of their iridescent and unusually-shaped wings that were gathered from around the world and pinned so carefully in place.  Here's hoping the whole lot stays together and ideally ends up in a museum.

christie's art sale: right on the monet?

While it seemed maybe six months ago that the art market was holding up despite the global economic downturn, proof that things are continuing to get a little squishy for artists and dealers alike came in the form of a sale of major paintings by the likes of Monet, Modigliani and Matisse at Christie's earlier this month.  The gorgeous painting pictured here by Monet of his wife Camille fetched several million less than was estimated, while a striking Matisse work of a woman on a balcony found no buyer at all.  That said, a dual Modigliani portrait went for more than was expected, and other paintings met their expected asking prices.  You can see some of the artworks that were in the sale here.  I think the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists are so popular that we would have to slide much further into recession before a sale like this would be a complete bust, but the major auction houses have definitely been seeing the writing on the wall.  And I worry about the up-and-coming artists, especially my local favorites, trying to break into the market.

everything must go: the yves saint laurent and pierre bergé art auction

It's the most glamorous kind of fairy tale.  Boy meets boy, they fall in love and then together they spend the next 50 years amassing one hell of an amazing art collection.  When Yves Saint Laurent died last June his longtime companion Pierre Bergé decided fairly quickly that he would put most of their art up for auction and split the proceeds between the Saint Laurent foundation and AIDS research.  Christie's will be conducting the sale in Paris next week, and Anthony Haden-Guest cataloged just a few of the highlights in his article for the Observer:

These will include paintings by Géricault, David and Ingres - but not the Goya of the boy in the red sash, which Bergé has donated to the Louvre. There are also works by Cézanne, Gauguin, Munch, Brancusi, Mondrian, Giacometti, Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Vuillard, Léger, Gris and Paul Klee, and terrific pieces of art deco by Jean Dunand, Eileen Gray and Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann. Then there are the Greek vases, the Qing dynasty bronzes, the icons, the Renaissance bronzes, the mirrors - without which Saint Laurent said a room was "dead" - and rock crystal pieces of a quality which he said was becoming hard to find because they were being used for rocketry.

No wonder the collection is expected to fetch a cool €300m even in these dire economic times.  You can see some of the pieces that will be featured in the auction here, including an obscenely desirable perfume bottle by Marcel Duchamp.

the art market bubble bursts?

I'm not really surprised the economic downturn finally hit the previously insatiable art market, with some major sales recently reporting far less than stellar results.  I do find myself morbidly curious about what sold and what didn't.  At an auction at Christie's last month, for example, the rare Lucian Freud painting of Francis Bacon pictured at right sold for over a million pounds under its estimated price, and a beautiful abstract work by Gerhard Richter didn't sell at all.  To see more pieces from that sale at Christie's and another similar one at Sotheby's that sold well under expectations or never even left the wall please click through to the gallery here.  And as long as no one else wants it, if someone was to snap up that Richter for me...