Parrish Art Museum: Herzog & de Meuron's new gallery opens

Designed by Herzog & de Meuron, the new Parrish Art Museum is an appropriately sleek and low-key addition to the Hamptons cultural landscape. The exterior of the Herzog de Meuron-designed Parrish Art Museum Although

New York state's Parrish Art Museum dates from 1898, it was given a new lease of life this month with the opening of its new site in the small village of Water Mill. The relocation means the gallery now has 12,200 square feet of exhibition space at its disposal - three times the space that was available to it at its former home iin Jobs Lane in Southampton.
This time round, however, the buidling itself is as much a draw as the artworks within it. Designed by Herzog & de Meuron, the 615ft-long single-storey building is a sweeping, simple barn-like structure far more restrained in style than many of the architects' previous undertakings (including Beijing's Bird's Nest Olympics Stadium).

Initial plans for the museum were more architecturally extravagant but had to be scaled back when sufficient funding couldn't be raised. Now open to the public, the building's ten separate gallery spaces will house works from the Parrish Art Museum's collection of 2,600 paintings, sculptures and works on paper by many of America's most influential artists, as well as a series of temporary exhibitions. Running until January 13, the main current exhibition is dedicated to the London-born, US-based artist Malcolm Morley. More generally, the gallery devotes part of its permanent collection to showcasing the story of America's influential artists' colony Eastern Long Island.

The Hamptons has this month enhanced its cultural appeal with the opening of the new Parrish Art Museum. Although the museum was founded in 1898, it has relocated from its former home in Southampton in New York to the small village of Water Mill, also in New York. It is now housed in a 34,400sq-foot, Herzog & de Meuron-designed building. Resembling an extended barn, it contains seven galleries and its permanent collection is dedicated to telling the story of the artists’ colony at Eastern Long Island.

The BSP’s New Art Collections

The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) has partnered with the Metropolitan Museum of Manila in showcasing its latest collection of newly acquired artworks.

Its latest exhibit, “Enduring Commitment: New Acquisitions (2009-2012), the BSP Art Collection,” presents 38 of its new paintings and works of sculpture.

“Representing established and emerging local artists, the exhibition is an engaging visual feast of the various expressions that may have come out in the last decade of the 20th century, and in recent years,” the Metropolitan Museum (MET) explained.

The exhibit will run until December 15, 2012 at the MET’s Galeriya Bangko Sentral.

“Enduring Commitment” showcases some of the works of Filipino National Artists, including Arturo Luz, Jerry Elizalde Navarro and Benedicto Cabrera.

The exhibit also presents the winners of the first Tanaw BSP Art Competition held in 2010 — Gary Custodio (“The Rebuilders”), Melvin Culaba (“Unresolved”), and Brave Singh (“Pagsabay sa Paghakbang ng Ating Mga Pangarap”).

Women artists are likewise represented in the exhibit through the works of Phyllis Zaballero, Yasmin Sison, Geraldine Javier, Isa Lorenzo and Maxine Syjuco.

Zaballero’s “Handaan” (2011) elaborates on fellow artist Nunelucio Alvarado’s take on the Filipino eating culture. While Alvarado’s “Carinderia” (2009) features an intensely vibrant scene at a local eatery, Zaballero’s work shows a sumptuous display of festive treats and local celebratory dishes such as pancit and lechon.

An artwork by Rodel Tapaya, CCP Artist Awardee for 2012, is likewise included in the exhibit. Tapaya’s painting, “The Miracles of Lumawig,” is an earth-toned interpretation of the works of Lumawig of Bontoc, one of the more enduring characters in indigenous creation myths.

According to the BSP’s monthly newsletter, The Central Banker: “Comprising of conceptual, figurative, abstract, and hyper-realist art, (the paintings) are a fascinating exposition of the mental workings and motivation of the Filipino artist.”

The BSP art collection is a rich source of inspiration and pride for present and future generations of Filipinos, according to the Metropolitan Museum.

“Consisting of over a thousand artworks, the collection remains one of the most significant institutional collections of Philippine art today,” the Museum added.

Here are some more facts about the BSP art collection that enthusiasts may be interested to know:
* Some of the first groups of paintings acquired by the Bangko Sentral in the late 1950s to be displayed in its offices were of the so-called “Mabini art.” These paintings were bought along Mabini Street in the Ermita district, where many of Manila’s art galleries were concentrated during that time.

* The biggest painting in the BSP art collection is “Pagdiriwang” (oil, 1956) by National Artist Jose Joya. It measures 515 X 700 centimeters and currently hangs at the main lobby of the Philippine International Convention Center.

* The BSP Painting Collection is among a few public collections in the country that hold representative works of all the National Artists of the Philippines in the field of painting.

* The BSP holds a number of 19th century religious paintings in its art collection. For example, the works of a master painter from Bohol is well represented in the collection, with “14 Stations of the Cross” and other portraits of saints such as those of “Saint Anthony Abbot” (circa 1840) and “St. Joseph” (1830). It would be interesting to know that despite his anonymity (being only referred to as the “Bohol Master”), the master painter from the Visayan province is indeed very prolific. His “14 Stations of the Cross” is presently on display at the 4th Floor of the Bangko Sentral’s 5-Story Building.

America's art cities

Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum is an artwork in itself.

 

Pay a visit to Washington DC's Smithsonian American Art Museum, and you can gaze at the bright splendour of 'Cape Cod Morning', a watercolour of light and hope crafted in 1950 by the iconic New York painter Edward Hopper. In some ways, this happy vision where a woman peers through her window at the arrival of a New England day is a neat encapsulation of the USA as a whole: prone to optimism, ever looking for the next dawn.

But it is also a reminder that, though it is rarely the first of its facets to be celebrated, America has long produced great artists and glorious art. True, these titans of the canvas are often lost behind a crowd scene of other US legends gleam-toothed actors; hoop-holing sportsmen and podium-posing politicians. But they are there all the same: Georgia O'Keeffe with her floral close-ups, Big Apple vistas and New Mexico landscapes; Jackson Pollock with his intense swirls; Andy Warhol and his celebrity-inflected pop art.
And with them comes a whispered secret: should you choose, you can indulge a passion for painting and sculpture for the staunchly traditional or the belligerently modern; for home-spun works or international masterpieces in just about every city in the country.

You can do this in the cultural temples of Washington DC, New York and Chicago - or in less-known galleries from Seattle to Birmingham via Boise and Wichita. You will find high concepts and bluntly provocative daubings, sharp slices of insight and bleak, impenetrable nightmares. But if visual culture is your thing, America has much to offer. The only question, perhaps, is where to start

HIDDEN GEMS
The idea of America as a country infused with art is brought home by the numerous kernels of culture located in cities that do not sit immediately in the holidaymaker's path.

Providence, for example, has the Museum of Art at the Rhode Island School of Design. Here the latest exhibition, America in View: Landscape Photography 1865 to Now (work above until 13 January) throws out myriad raw vistas and tree-swathed snapshots.

A few states south along the East Coast, the Delaware Art Museum in Wilmington pins itself to another fine cache of American art, including Edward Hopper's soft Summertime (1943).

Hopper is present in darker form via his 1921 etching 'Night Shadows' at the excellent Des Moines Art Center in Iowa, as is Georgia O'Keeffe, whose superb 'From The Lake No 1' (1924) has waves rising in layers of paint.

The Boise Art Museum in Idaho's capital, gazes out at the American north-west that surrounds it. Next up is Left Unsaid (24 November-3 March), examining stark creations by local artist Troy Passey.

And America's geographical heartland has its artistic exclamation marks. The Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha surveys the fields of Nebraska from a pristine 1931 Art Deco structure, combining Renoir and Monet with Native American painting and sculpture.

Elsewhere, the Wichita Art Museum, the largest gallery in Kansas, has 7000 works, including pieces by "cowboy artist'' Charles Russell all dusty plains and open horizons.

GRAND EASTERN ESTABLISHMENTS
America's north-east is home to a cluster of what might be deemed some of the planet's finest galleries. New York alone is an art aficionado's dream. The Metropolitan Museum of Art ranks as the largest art museum in the country, home to two million works. It runs the gamut of European masters, but also has space for American moments such as Pollock's 'Autumn Rhythm (Number 30)' (1950).

Similarly revered, the Museum of Modern Art does outbursts of dashing and daring, covering architecture, design and film as well as art. Warhol's seismic 'Campbell's Soup Cans' (1962) the canvas equivalent of an arched eyebrow is one of the venue's main attractions.

You'll find further dabs of the modern at the Guggenheim Museum, which parades the best of the 20th century including Picasso's 'Landscape At Cret' (1911) in a cylindrical Frank Lloyd Wright building that's an artwork in itself.

Boston's Museum of Fine Arts has a strong domestic emphasis. Its Art of the Americas Wing focuses on North, South and Central America, which takes in everything from Mayan ceramics to striking works of Native American genius.

A weighty rival to the Met, the Art Institute of Chicago is the second-largest art museum in the USA. Particularly good on Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, offerings include Van Gogh's melancholy 'Self Portrait' (1887).

Washington DC also has its say. Part of the Smithsonian Institution, the American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery co-exist as two galleries in one building. The former dispenses US brushstrokes such as O'Keeffe's 'Manhattan' (1932) while the latter is noted for presidential portraits.The National Gallery of Art reverts to Europe via Rembrandt, Da Vinci and Matisse.

At the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven the Socit Anonyme exhibition opens on 12 December to celebrate early 20th-century European and American art.

SPECIAL SUBJECTS
If you want to look at the artist as much as the art, you can also find institutions that are dedicated solely to the name above the door. The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum eulogises this female art pioneer in Santa Fe - the dry contours of New Mexico having hugely informed her work. And the blondest art star of the 1960s is remembered at the Andy Warhol Museum in his native Pittsburgh - a treasure trove of photos, film, paintings and sculptures including 'Self Portrait In Drag' (1981).

Tucked away in Nyack, New York State, the Edward Hopper House Art Center treads a rather more traditional line, showing examples of Hopper's oeuvre in his childhood home.

Jackson Pollock is similarly recalled at the Pollock-Krasner House, the property in East Hampton on Long Island, east of New York City, that he shared with his artist wife Lee Krasner.

WEST COAST WONDERS
As a city renowned for glitz and glamour, it should be no great shock that Los Angeles embraces art with relish. The J Paul Getty Museum proffers two sites, one in Malibu, one in Brentwood with the latter, the Getty Center, splitting its attention between European stalwarts (Turner, Manet, Renoir, Titian) and a outdoor sculpture area that features Henry Moore's 1985 human study 'Bronze Form'.

The Museum of Contemporary Art, meanwhile, serves up three cutting-edge LA locations. At the main Grand Center location, a feast of post-war creativity is on display includes Roy Lichtenstein's 'Navajo, Seated' (1957).

The age-old competition between California's two largest cities ensures fertile art turf in San Francisco.

The de Young Museum delivers a glut of American art from the 17th century onwards, with spotlights directed at Bay Area artists.

The Asian Art Museum of San Francisco was formerly part of the de Young Museum. But it has proved so successful that it now operates from its own premises. Across some 17,000 exhibits, the museum takes in inspired and inspiration pieces from Iran, Korea, China and Japan.

A defiantly creative city, Seattle is also a west coast art hotspot. The Seattle Art Museum covers many bases, its main building playing host to early American watercolours, while the attached Olympic Sculpture Park is home to giant al fresco works, including Alexander Calder's metal 'Eagle' (1971).

SOUTHERN SOPHISTICATION
The sheer size of Houston demands an art institution of suitable stature. So it proves with the Museum of Fine Arts, which tempers the urban sprawl of the Texas metropolis with 63,000 exhibits. A wealth of Impressionism includes one of Monet's timeless 1907 'Water Lilies'.

Smaller of scale, but no less intriguing, the Birmingham Museum of Art fits in with the jazz and civil rights history of this burgeoning Alabama city. Current exhibition Norman Rockwell's America (to 6 January) holds a mirror to the New York illustrator whose populist portrayals captured the US of the 20th century.

To see one of Rockwell's classics, the wartime heroine 'Rosie the Riveter' (1943), head to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. Here, the story of the USA is also told via pieces like Charles Willson Peale's 1780 portrait of George Washington.

Further glimpses of the American soul are available at West Virginia's Huntington Museum of Art, which includes John Singer Sargent's 'Near June Street, Worcester, Massachusetts' (1890).

The Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, Virginia sees Rubens and Czanne rub shoulders with Hopper's 'New York Pavements' (1924).

Art exhibition to foster unity in NE

GUWAHATI: To foster a spirit of brotherhood and integrity among artists and people of the northeast, four artists have come together to organize an art exhibition at the State Art Gallery here.

Artists R K Somorjit Singh, H Kependra Singh and Debendra Singh from Manipur and Siva Prasad Marar from Assam have come together to display their works on canvas and wood at the exhibition titled "Unity" that was inaugurated by noted sculptor and artist Benu Mishra.

About 19 paintings and some sculptures were put on display at the State Art Gallery. The paintings were mostly abstract.

"Most of the paintings are new and are based on nature and landscape made in an abstract form. The aim of the exhibition is to foster and spread a spirit of unity not only amongst the artist fraternity but also amongst the people. Art and culture are the two aspects that can usher this spirit," said Manipur artist Somorjit Singh.
When asked what the artists would like to say to the people of the region, they said, "The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things but their inward significance as well, and art makes life more enjoyable. Life without art is valueless. Through 'Unity' we want to usher the sense of peace and integrity and our desire is to bring emotional integrity amongst the people in the northeast."

"Unity" will be open for public till November 24.

Art market news: exhibition for surrealist artist Catherine Yarrow attracts collectors

Half the works have already sold at an exhibition in London for the neglected British surrealist artist, Catherine Yarrow, writes Colin Gleadell.

Long Eared Creature (1935) by surrealist artist Catherine Yarrow.

Charles Saatchi has chosen to open his twin Russian art exhibitions (non-conformist art from the 1960s and 1970s, and 21st-century contemporary art) this week to coincide with London’s major Russian art sales. However, there is little crossover in content between the two events. Apart from a few non-conformists, the auctions have steered clear of contemporary art because it has not been performing well. Significantly, Sotheby’s, which used to end its main evening sale with contemporary art, now has early examples of Soviet Socialist Realism, glorifying the communist worker, in its place. Clearly an area of the market to watch.

Sotheby’s and Bonhams held sales of modern British art last week which fetched a respectable £9.7 million in all. Perhaps the most interesting aspect was the sale of works from the collection of architect Colin St John Wilson, the best of which have been left to the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester. The sale achieved a record price for a work on paper by Richard Hamilton, who died before his impressive retrospective exhibition, currently at the National Gallery. Hommage à Chrysler Corp, 1957, sold for a treble-estimate £325,250. Another collage, the art work for an insert to the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper album by Peter Blake, did not attract pop collectors and sold to Blake’s dealer, Leslie Waddington, below estimate for £55,250.

Waddington is opening a retrospective exhibition of Blake’s works on paper this week. More noteworthy results were achieved for small sculptures by Sir Anthony Caro, which regularly exceeded estimates. The top lot, a small, early amber-lacquered Table Piece from 1970, was estimated at £10,000 but sold to the London dealer Daniel Katz for £73,250.


An exhibition for the neglected and almost entirely forgotten British surrealist artist, Catherine Yarrow, who died in 1990, is at the Austin Desmond Gallery, close to the British Museum. Mostly drawings, watercolours and prints from the artist’s estate above), it has attracted serious interest from collectors, and at least two major British institutions, and half the works have sold, priced reasonably at between £1,000 and £5,000 each.


British collector David Roberts had a sneak preview last week of an exhibition by the young Swedish Somali artist, Ayan Farah, which opens at the Vigo gallery off Bond Street today, and bought the lot. Farah graduated from the Royal College of Art this year, and makes ephemeral, translucent, abstract paintings on fabrics – clothing and bedding bleached by sunlight or an old UV light from a sunbed the artist bought on eBay. Priced at between £800 and £2,900 plus VAT each, further works not in the exhibition were also bought by the collector Richard Devereux, who chairs the African Art Acquisitions Committee at Tate. They will be shown in a forthcoming exhibition of African art from his collection at Pallant House.

Art foundations offer monetary aid following Hurricane Sandy

A dumpster outside New York's Dia Art Foundation is filled with flood-damaged items. Like many arts organizations in the Chelsea section of the city, Dia was hard hit by Hurricane Sandy.

Arts organizations in New York that have sustained damage from Hurricane Sandy are getting a helping hand from foundations and other groups that have agreed to donate money to the relief effort.

The Andy Warhol Foundation recently announced that it has allocated $2 million that will go to help artists and nonprofit arts organizations that have experienced serious damage from the storm. The foundation said the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation and the Lambent Foundation will add to the money.

All three foundations said they will pool their assets to assist individual artists through the New York Foundation for the Arts. The NYFA Relief Fund is scheduled to launch Wednesday. Artists can seek assistance via a formal application that will be posted soon on the fund's website.

Nonprofit arts organizations may apply for assistance by sending an email, including a detailed description of damage sustained from the storm as well as a description of the organization, to info@emergencygrants.org. The inquiry should also mention if the organization has applied for other grants to cover losses.

Separately, the Art Dealers Assn. of America has said that it has raised $500,000 to help aid galleries and nonprofit groups. The association is a nonprofit group made up of gallery owners and art dealers across the country.

Groups interested in seeking aid from the ADAA Relief Fund can fill out an online application.
Many galleries in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York sustained damage from flooding following the hurricane in late October.

Art’s perfect theft: Flemish Renaissance masterpiece missing for 7 decades

GHENT, Belgium — The main suspect in the legendary art heist is said to have whispered with his dying breath: “Only I know where the ‘Adoration’ is...”

More than seven decades later, the whereabouts of a panel belonging to one of Western art’s defining works, the “Adoration of the Mystic Lamb,” also known as the “Ghent Altarpiece,” remains a mystery.

If the stunning heist of Picasso, Monet and Matisse paintings in Rotterdam, Netherlands, last month focused attention on the murky world of art theft, the gothic Saint Bavo cathedral in Ghent has been at the center of a crime that has bedeviled the art world for decades.

“The Just Judges” panel of the Van Eyck brothers’ multi-panel Gothic masterpiece hasn’t been seen since 1934, when chief suspect Arsene Goedertier suffered a stroke at a political rally and died after murmuring those fateful words to a confidant.

The theft has kept the country enthralled ever since, with its heady mix of priceless art and scintillating detective story.
  Ghent was hit by two thefts on the night of April 10, 1934: “One was a wheel of cheese,” said detective Jan De Kesel. “The other was the panel.”
That slowed up the investigation of the art theft, in which a minor panel of the “Adoration of the Mystic Lamb” representing St. John the Baptist, was also lifted.

“Don’t laugh,” said De Kesel, one of a long line of detectives searching for the lost work: “It was 1934, there was an economic depression — and the wheel of cheese had priority.”

The probe went nowhere until the St. John the Baptist panel was found that year in the luggage claim of a Brussels train station wrapped in brown paper. It wasn’t the sign of a guilty criminal conscience — just an extortion ploy proving that the thief, or thieves, had “The Just Judges.” A note demanded a million Belgian francs, a massive sum at the time, for the panel’s return.

The local bishop produced only a fraction of the ransom demand and more extortion letters followed.
Then Goedertier died, yielding another clue in his apparent confession: “In my office ... drawer ... closet.” There, copies of the old extortion letters and the draft of a new one were found.

Adding to the theft’s mystique, this last one read: “’The Just Judges’ are in a place where neither I nor anyone else can take it without drawing the public’s attention.” Police also found indecipherable drawings possibly pointing to a hiding place.

Ever since, Belgium has been in the grip of a decades-long treasure hunt, one that has drawn detectives of every ilk: cab drivers, computer scientists, lawyers, retired police inspectors, among others.

From divining rods to endoscopes to SS Nazi search parties, it has all been to no avail. Overanxious amateur sleuths have even drilled holes in important monuments on the hunch the panel might be there.

One of the more popular theories is that Goedertier, a stockbroker, may never have taken the panel out of the cathedral, but hidden it somewhere inside. But lifting every pane or tile in the massive St. Bavo would carry a prohibitive cost and risk damaging the historic edifice.

“There are not even indications as to what part of the church it might be in,” said De Kesel. “And I tell you, there are an awful lot of nooks and crannies.”

Perhaps closest to the mystery these days is art restorer Bart Devolder, at Ghent’s Museum of Fine Arts. He is working on the most ambitious restoration yet of the 15th-century painting. Devolder hopes the five-year restoration will raise interest in the theft of “The Just Judges,” which was replaced in 1941 by a much-lauded copy by art restorer Jozef Vander Veken.

The ongoing restoration “offers the opportunity for a new boost to look for it,” Devolder said in an interview while taking a break from work. “It really bothers me that the work is not complete.”

“The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb” was finished in 1432 as medieval times gave way to the Renaissance, and the work’s stunning detail and sense of light were at the time unsurpassed.

Much as the restoration of Rome’s Sistine Chapel a dozen years ago wiped the grime off Michelangelo’s multicolored glories, there is hope the same will happen to the “Ghent Altarpiece” under Devolder’s efforts.
“If we remove the yellowing varnish, people will see the genius of Van Eyck even more,” Devolder said.

He maintains hope that he will one day get his hands on “The Just Judges”— for restoration only of course. “I am sure it will take a great deal of work,” he said, “depending where it was kept.”

He made an appeal to whoever might have possession of the panel.

“We have an extra easel here,” said Devolder. “They can quietly bring it in here. “No questions asked.”

Art sales

Art sales: a billion dollar bonanza for post-war and contemporary art 

A series of post-war and contemporary art auctions featuring work by Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko fetched over one billion dollars in New York last week, writes Colin Gleadell.

Roy Lichtenstein’s 'Nude with Red Shirt’ fetched $28.1m. 

History was made in New York last week when, against a gloomy economic backdrop, a series of post-war and contemporary art auctions fetched over one billion dollars ($1.079 billion or £680 million to be precise) for the first time. Who would have guessed that, when the equivalent sales in the spring of 2009 plunged to $213 million, such a peak would have been reached within three and a half years? As the economist Clare McAndrew told The Daily Telegraph, the world’s super-rich may have decided to put their excess cash into art because they have nowhere else to invest it. But this doesn’t explain last week on its own.

With prices for the world’s top living artist, Gerhard Richter, finally levelling out, it was the earlier generations of post-war American artists that were in the driving seat. Abstract Expressionist and Pop have always been the rock on which the New York contemporary sales are based, but this time there was a greater supply than usual – much straight from collections that had been formed 40 or 50 years ago.

This could be described as the generation factor, as collectors with foresight reach a certain age and decide to sell. A small drip painting by Jackson Pollock, which sold for a record $40.4 million, was part of a collection of works by Abstract Expressionist artists that were bought in the early Seventies by Sidney and Dorothy Kohl, American collectors who are now in their eighties. The collection realised more than $100 million bringing further records for Hans Hoffman ($4.6 million) and Arshile Gorky ($6.8 million).

Over the long term, works by major post-war artists have seen huge increases in value – the enticement-to-sell factor. Mark Rothko’s No1 (Royal Red and Blue) had reportedly been bought for less than $500,000 in 1982 and sold last week for $75 million. A small wire sculpture of a policeman, made in 1928 by Alexander Calder, had been bought in 1995 for $107,000 and sold for $4.2 million.

As prices have gone up for some artists, others have followed in their slipstream. Until last week, the black-and-white, gestural calligraphic paintings by the Abstract Expressionist Franz Kline had lagged behind his peers with a top price of $6.4 million. But that benchmark has now been surpassed twice, reaching $40.4 million for a sprawling 10ft canvas.

Although there were fewer record prices for Pop art, the Warhol market was in rude health. His somewhat morbid photographic silkscreen, Suicide, which had been acquired 20 years ago when considered of marginal importance for $132,000, set a record for a Warhol work on paper by selling for $16.3 million.
And then there was the sheer unexpected. Paintings by Roy Lichtenstein after his classic Sixties period had never sold for more than $11 million before, but one buyer defied all logic by paying $28.1 million for a 1995 painting, Nude with Red Shirt.

Time and again, the auctioneers fielded multiple bids on lots. They came from Europe, South America, Asia and the Middle East, say the auctioneers, to illustrate global involvement, but the market was driven by American demand. “Here, there has been a new shift in taste,” says Sotheby’s head of contemporary art, Tobias Meyer. “Wealthy American collectors who used to buy more traditional American painting have moved into post-war American art. In addition, the old contemporary art buyers have been priced out and replaced by new money. It has come in over the last four years unhampered by the memory of old price structures and wishing to be associated with cultural genius.”

And it’s the proven genius of yesterday that is proving the main attraction. Of the 45 artists’ records set last week, the majority were for American artists who are no longer alive. “There was less hunger for the younger generation,” says Meyer.

Notwithstanding, there was a string of record prices for living artists – Jeff Koons, Mark Grotjahn, and Wade Guyton among them – all, with one or two exceptions, like the Brazilian, Beatriz Milhazes, North American.

But the show belonged ultimately to the post-war Americans, seen not, as McAndrew suggests, as “the Old Masters of the future” (as this might imply a far more selective market in waiting for them) but as contemporary art, now.