A Word from the Owner

There is a new page on our Signet Art website.  The page includes some candid information from the heart of our owner, Brenda Simonson-Mohle, and can be summed up in three words; Love, Truth and Conviction. There are some things in life more important than business, and this new page is an honest expression from the woman who built our business from the ground up 25 years ago.  We hope the information you find will give you a true glimpse into the heart and mind behind Signet Art. Please check it out, we look forward to hearing from you.

Report from the Road: Whitehall Seminar was stupendous!

Today is the last day of the six-day Whitehall Antiques seminar in Chapel Hill, NC.  David Lindquist has been hosting these wonderfully intense and informative seminars on decorative arts for 31 years.   This year’s seminar started last Sunday with Dr. Ron Swaab’s incredible presentation on silver identification.   Ron brought a presentation that was developed with his mother Shirley who was renowned as an incredible source of information on silver as well as many other areas of decorative art.  Ron also packed in several bags of marked silver objects for practice.  We spent the morning learning to decipher silver and sterling marks from various countries and the afternoon testing our skills.   This kind of hands-on practice is irreplaceable in solidifying one’s knowledge of the area.  And the bags of practice pieces had many of the common British and American pieces that are seen regularly as well as some objects from far-flung countries that most appraisers do not see on a regular basis.

Monday, day two, was a day for discovering furniture.   This seminar day was held at the showrooms of Whitehall Antiques, a sprawling villa that has been the home of Whitehall Antiques since the late 1980’s.  David Lindquist and his daughter Elizabeth Lindquist were the hosts and teachers for the day.

The class divided into two groups and systematically worked our way from room to room, enjoying and analyzing the various markers of quality and collectability for French, English and American furniture.  At each new piece, we discussed the finer details of quality…conformation, construction, materials, finish, age, etc., along with re-fittings and changes that might have been done to a piece over the years.    We discussed repairs and changes that are necessary upkeep due to the small damages inflicted with hundreds of years of use versus the re-fittings that occur due to changes in taste and architectural details.   For connoisseurs and appraisers of fine furniture, this point-by-point comparison of pieces while you are in the room with them is a quite rare privilege.   Most furniture and decorative arts lectures are done with slides or powerpoint images and so much is lost in the translation.   Better yet, David and Elizabeth repeatedly pulled out drawers, pulled chests out from the wall for inspection of the backs or flipped commodes upside down for inspection of the bottom.   There was none of the museum visit’s fussiness of ‘don’t sit in that chair or touch that finish.’   The Lindquists made sure that the participants got to see the secondary woods and construction methodology used in drawers and on backs and bottoms of furniture.  Even for a fine art appraiser such as myself, this day of looking and learning was a great joy!

Days three and four were taught by yours truly.   The subjects were the essentials of appraising prints and paintings.   In keeping with the hands-on approach favored, I tried to provide enough prints in various media and learning activities to spice up the powerpoint presentations that I brought along.  My own approach to enjoying, collecting and valuing artwork is to build your connoisseurship of the items that catch your eye.   One cannot deeply appreciate valuation considerations of a painting or a print until he understands the artist’s working methods.  We attempted to identify various printmaking media and we learned about how to determine the age of a canvas and some of the quality markers by examining the canvas itself and the support.  We also talked about condition and its relationship to value.  We ended the fine art section by examining several canvases in black light in order to look at the restoration history of each.

Days five and six featured Dr. Daphne Rosenzweig and her insightful take on what’s hot in the Asian art market.   Daphne is a much-sought-after speaker and is always entertaining as well as informative.   First, we focused on some identification cues to help separate out Chinese from Japanese from Korean items.   We looked at various screen painting styles that are typical of each country.  Then, we looked at scholar’s items, snuff bottles, netsuke, inro and military paraphernalia and examined the market for each of these.   Daphne brought lots of small collectibles that drove home the collectible points in each of various types of items.   Again, hands-on learning is hard to replace for building one’s knowledge base.

It has been six days of mind-expanding fun with some of the nicest hosts in the South.  This seminar has been a must-do on the lists of art and decorative arts addicts for years.  In addition to the seminar, there was a pork barbeque one night, trips to Crooks, a great local nouvelle Southern food restaurant and an evening of good Thai food.   Many of us made lunch-time trips to A Southern Season, which was best described to me as a cross between Whole Foods and William Sonoma on steroids.  What could beat all this great art combined with gourmet food served up with grand southern hospitality?  Not much in my book!  You should definitely visit the Whitehall Antiques website http://www.whitehallantiques.com and make sure they have you on the mailing list for NEXT year’s event.   Best advice though….sign up early.   In order to keep the crowd manageable, the number of participants is limited.   You snooze, you might lose on this one!

Signet Art at Whitehall

 Whitehall's 31st Annual Summer Seminar Series begins this Sunday July 17th, and will run until Friday the 22nd. This year our appraiser, Brenda Simonson-Mohle, ISA/CAPP, will be teaching a two day class on the basics of appraising prints and paintings at Whitehall Antiques in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.  The course, "Prints & Paintings - Essential Knowledge", which will be taught on the 19th and 20th, will take "the class through two days, one on prints, and one on paintings. Day one is a comprehensive study of paper making and identification, printing techniques and identification of those techniques, water marks, condition and conservation issues. Day two explores the world of paint on canvas, wood, etc with an eye to sharpening our ability to discern restoration, suspect signatures, etc. Learn when to call for help instead of relying on your own judgment. . ."

This Annual Summer Seminar Series is an ideal learning opportunity for beginning collectors, seasoned appraisers and veteran dealers alike. You’ll learn insider tips and trade secrets from nationally known experts in all-day sessions featuring hands-on, object oriented instruction coupled with illustrated lectures and stimulating Q&A discussions.

You can get a sneak peak of Brenda's presentation by visiting our YouTube page, there you will be able to preview two new videos going over print technique; one on Screenprint instruction and the other on Lithography.

The other courses being taught include "Essential Silver Research" presented by Dr. Ron Swaab & David Lindquist on the 17th,  "Intensive Study: Furniture Authentication" presented by Elizabeth Lindquist & David Lindquist on the 18th, and "Hot and Cold in the Asian Market - On and Off the Wall!" presented by Dr. Daphne Lange Rosenzweig on the 21st and 22nd.

So, if you are looking for a vacation and a great art and antique learning opportunity, this is the seminar to attend!

Picasso and Braque at the Kimbell Art Museum.

The Exhibition began May 29^th and will run until August 21^st.www.kimbellart.org

The Kimbell’s current exhibition, Picasso and Braque: The Cubist Experiment, 1910-1912, is a look at an interesting time in two very well known artist’s careers, as well as a fascinating look into art history.  It is a snapshot of two masters who decided to toy with the basics of traditional European art and aesthetics, to throw out the idea of art as a faithful representation of the world and take a wholly new approach to the picture surface.

The show includes sixteen paintings and twenty etching and drypoint prints.  Eik Kahng of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art conceived and organized the exhibition in partnership with the Kimbell Museum, including two great examples from the Kimbell's own permanent collection, Braque’s Girl with a Cross and Picasso’s Man with a Pipe. 

One might initially be underwhelmed with the idea of yet another show of Cubist art, however, this group of work is intriguing.  By putting Braque and Picasso’s works in conversation with one another, literally side by side throughout the exhibition, the show examines a small moment in time- no more than two years- but it brings back to life the real and exciting dialogue between the two artists one-hundred years later.  As the director of the Kimbell, Eric M. Lee, aptly put it, “This small-scale exhibition examines a brief moment with huge implications for the history of art. . .”

Analytic Cubism, the term born from Braque and Picasso’s experimentation, was to be a simplification of painting.  An attempt to break down and exclude the irrelevant, leaving only the formal elements of art: line, shape, and color.  Getting their inspiration from Cezanne, the Cubists invented a new way of portraying and representing space which involved several diverse perspectives.  The model, ground, background and objects in their works were each given equal significance and broken into geometric components.  This led to abstraction as forms were bifurcated and simplified, broken down, taken apart and rearranged.  This radical new approach to imagery necessitated a whole new way of looking at art.

The earliest phase, Analytical Cubism, is featured in the show.  The more decorative second phase, Synthetic Cubism, was only hinted at in a few of the later pieces; most notably Braque’s ‘Still life with bottle and glass’.

The show was arranged with the etching and drypoint prints at the beginning and the twenty paintings following.  This worked very well for the overall pedagogy of Braque and Picasso’s artistic exchange of ideas as the prints set up the viewer to look at the brainstorming conversations between the masters.  After the prints, the viewer is taken to the paintings.  It is here the interaction between the artists is solidified, here the audience can see the intellectual playground Picasso and Braque were roaming as they jointly invented Analytical Cubism.

In the paintings the audience is given a glimpse of the object being represented, only shown an impression of reality.  Not everything seems to add up, there are holes in these picture puzzles, but as one lets his eyes relax and look upon the canvases, images appear.  The thick lines, muted colors and text blur and mesh into an image, but only for a moment.  If the viewer focuses closely on an object or shape, if their attention is drawn to a detail or brushstroke, the image that surfaced is lost; disappearing into the maze of competing line and shapes.  The Cubists had decided the invention of photography made realistic representation passé, and they were exploring new ways of perceiving reality.  Picasso and Braque wanted a still-life to be more than a bunch of gathered objects, they wanted portraiture to be more than a faithful likeness of the sitter.

The Kimbell offered an innovative gallery guide on a iPad, free of charge; a very cool tool.  This helped the audience study pieces in the show with extreme detail.  This app allowed one to manipulate and view the Cubist's paintings in ultraviolent and infrared light and play with a composition as if it were a puzzle- trying to take apart and rebuild the various elements of a painting.  The iPad also included an illustrated timeline of the artists.  This component of the exhibition literally put Analytical Cubism into the hands of the viewers.  By implementing this new technology, the Kimbell has allowed their audience to learn and develop an understanding of what Braque and Picasso were trying to do.  This new use of the iPad is a smart and intimate way to put the learning process into the hands of the audience.

A couple of exemplary pieces within the show- the pieces which were able to portray and communicate what Picasso and Braque were doing with their analytic experiment- were Braque’s ‘Female Nude’ and Picasso’s ‘Portrait of a Woman’.  With these two images the subjects were simultaneously visible and invisible, as if there were two canvases competing; the first layer being the image of a woman, and the second being a broken space of shapes, lines and color.

Be sure to catch this great summer show at the Kimbell running until August 21^st, we here at Signet Art give it two thumbs up.

M.P.Callender Signet Art

Great Article By Andrew M. Goldstein with ARTINFO

We thought you would be interested in this article, it is a milestone for the Latin American market.Thanks for reading! Signet Art.

Original article can be found here: http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/37764/botero-and-tamayo-power-sothebys-to-a-record-268-million-for-latin-american-art/

Botero and Tamayo Power Sotheby's to a Record $26.8 Million for Latin American Art

By Andrew M. Goldstein with www.ArtInfo.com

NEW YORK— Charged by an ascendant market for modern and contemporary work from Mexico, Cuba, and South America, Sotheby'sheld the most successful Latin American art sale in its history this week, bringing in a record $21,672,625 in its evening auction last night and $5,157,900 in today's morning session, making for a combined total of $26,830,525.

A single-artist section of the evening sale titled "Fernando Botero: A Celebration" —  a lineup of zaftig pieces by the Columbian artist consigned mainly from two private collections — made for the bulk of the market fireworks. Botero's 1972 painting "A Family" selling for $1.4 million and "Man on a Horse," a 1992 bronze of a chubby bowler-hatted businessman astride a rolly-poly steed, sold for $1,172,500, a record for the artist in the medium. The spree brought in a total of $7.5 million, confirming the easy-on-the-eyes artist's dominance of the contemporary Latin American art market.

Rufino Tamayo, meanwhile, led the evening's other section, titled "A Discerning Eye: Latin American Masterpieces From a Private Collection." A large oil-on-canvas of a mother and child rendered in flat planes of earthen colors, "Madre Divirtiendo a Su Hijo," helpfully dated "O-46" by Mexican artist, sold for $1.4 million, coming toward the top of its $1 million-$1.5 million pre-sale estimate. Two other Tamayo works fetched high sums: the 1973 "Mujer en Éxtasis," a strikingly pink woman gripped by seeming erotic bliss, which sold for $962,500, while a cheerful 1941 painting of apples and two luscious slices of melon, "Sandías," fetched $602,500.

Wilfredo Lam also had a strong showing with his 1945 painting "Les Oiseaux Voilés," an abstract and ominous oil-on-canvas that the Cuban artist first showed with Pierre Matisse, the son of the French master. The raw work sold for just over $1 million. (Last November, another, more fleshed-out Lam, the 1970 "Les Abalouchas Dansent Pour Dhambala, Dieu de l'Unité," had been the standout lot at Sotheby's Latin American sales, selling for $2.2 million.)

Another high-scoring lot was Sergio Camargo's 1965 "Relief," a white, space-invading sculptural canvas with a cluster of cylinders protruding from its center, which sold for $842,500. The impressive, if somewhat disconcerting, work was sold from a private Swiss collection. Cildo Meireles's surrealistic table-and-chairs-setting "In-Mensa," a wooded sculpture from 1982, achieved auction record for the Brazilian conceptualist, selling for $518,500 — more than quadrupling its pre-sale high estimate of $120,000.

Latin American art icons Joaquín Torres-García and Jesús Rafael Soto also proved golden. "La Guitarra," a boldly colored 1935 painting that Torres-García executed with plenty of graphic verve, fetched $374,500, while the artist's vintage 1920 New York street scene, "Fourteenth Street (Business Town)," sold for $362,500. Soto, who is currently the subject of a show at the Christie's-owned Haunch of Venison gallery, was represented in the auction by "Gran Azul," a late wall piece from 1999 that exemplifies the artist's signature perceptual experiments — with painted metal sticks dangling in front by nylon strings — but with an added market-friendly blast of Yves Klein-esque blue acrylic blaring from its wooden backboard, evoking a top-of-the line television set on standby.

The Latin American market action continues this evening and tomorrow morning at Christie's.