Contemporary Art Rendez-Vous at the FIAC in Paris

PARIS -- Art aficionados have gathered in "The City of Light" this week for the 36th annual FIAC ("Foire internationale d'art contemporain"), the most prestigious contemporary art fair in France. Following on the heels of London's Frieze Art Fair last week, Paris' FIAC is hoping to capitalize on the momentum of this year's reported upswing in art sales achieved at the Frieze. Despite 28 dealers and more than 40 galleries from last year not returning, FIAC 2009 will present over 200 exhibitors representing thousands of artists.

At FIAC's VIP preview on Wednesday night, Femme Ecrivant, a $24 million painting by Pablo Picasso of his mistress, Marie-Therese Walter, was put on reserve. Fine art by other modern masters such as Francis Bacon, Piet Mondrian and Fernand Leger, will also be up for bid. More than 65,000 visitors are expected to stroll the picturesque locations around the Tuileries Gardens, Grand Palais and the Louvre Museum, where the FIAC will display some of the world's finest modern masterworks.

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FIAC (Oct. 22 - 25, 2009) | Website
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[Read more - $24 Million Picasso Reserved as Arnault Joins Browsers at FIAC | Bloomberg]

Contemporary Art Rendez-Vous at the FIAC in Paris

Top ART News: Week in Review | Oct. 11 - 18, 2009

■ Van Gogh Letter Exhibits a Method Behind the Madness | More >

■ Editions with Additions: Working Proofs by Jasper Johns at the National Gallery of Art | More >

■ Will the Frieze Heat Up London's Art Market | More >

■ Bailout Forces Royal Bank of Scotland to Share Art Stash with Public | More >

■ 19K Portrait Is a Leonardo da Vinci Worth Millions, Fingerprints Show | More >

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■ Tate Modern Replaces Indecent Brooke Shields Photo, Reopens Gallery | More >

■ The Painter of Black and Light: Soulages at the Pompidou | More >

■ The Art World's Most Influential Figures | The Power 100 List (2009) | More >

■ Human Art Experiment Ends After 100 Days | More >

■ 19K Portrait Is a Leonardo da Vinci Worth Millions, Fingerprints Show | More >

■ Art Collector Waives Insurance Policy for Stolen Andy Warhol Paintings | More >

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■ Archaeologists Crusade for Ancient Murals in Syria | More >

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Top ART News: Week in Review | Oct. 11 - 18, 2009

The Art World's Most Influential Figures | The Power 100 List (2009)

ArtReview magazine has published the eighth annual Power 100 - a comprehensive list of the most influential figures in the art world. This year's list includes artists, curators, art collectors, museum directors and critics. Swiss curator Hans Ulrich Obrist was named the most powerful figure in the contemporary art world for 2009.

LONDON /ArtReview/ -- Coming on the heels of 12 months of extraordinary financial stress, both in the art world and the real world, the 2009 edition of the Power 100 reflects fundamental changes in influence. Previous No. 1s, both artists and collectors, have plummeted, while only the most ambitious of museums have stayed near the top; meanwhile, percolating up from the middle ranks is a new generation of highly networked, flexible, globetrotting curators – men and women at the very center of a new way of working.

1. Hans Ulrich Obrist 2. Glenn D. Lowry 3. Sir Nicholas Serota 4. Daniel Birnbaum 5. Larry Gagosian 6. François Pinault 7. Eli Broad 8. Anton Vidokle, Julieta Aranda & Brian Kuan Wood 9. Iwona Blazwick 10. Bruce Nauman 11. Iwan Wirth 12. David Zwirner 13. Jeff Koons 14. Jay Jopling 15. Marian Goodman 16. Agnes Gund 17. Takashi Murakami 18. Alfred Pacquement 19. Peter Fischli & David Weiss 20. Mike Kelley 21. Barbara Gladstone 22. Steven A. Cohen 23. Dominique Lévy & Robert Mnuchin 24. Adam D. Weinberg 25. Marc Glimcher 26. Amy Cappellazzo & Brett Gorvy 27. Cheyenne Westphal & Tobias Meyer 28. Ann Philbin 29. Matthew Higgs 30. Matthew Marks 31. Tim Blum & Jeff Poe 32. Gavin Brown 33. Ralph Rugoff 34. Liam Gillick 35. Anne Pasternak 36. Dakis Joannou 37. John Baldessari 38. Isa Genzken 39. Paul McCarthy 40. Michael Govan 41. Eugenio López 42. Cindy Sherman 43. Ai Weiwei 44. Patricia Phelps de Cisneros 45. Annette Schönholzer & Marc Spiegler 46. Diedrich Diederichsen 47. Richard Prince 48. Damien Hirst 49. Bernard Arnault 50. Massimiliano Gioni

51. Amanda Sharp & Matthew Slotover 52. Joel Wachs 53. Victor Pinchuk 54. Udo Kittelmann 55. Marina Abramović 56. Michael Ringier 57. Gerhard Richter 58. Richard Serra 59. RoseLee Goldberg 60. Kasper König 61. Roberta Smith 62. Monika Sprüth & Philomene Magers 63. Germano Celant 64. Emmanuel Perrotin 65. Peter Schjeldahl 66. Beatrix Ruf 67. Okwui Enwezor 68. Nicolas Bourriaud 69. Karen & Christian Boros 70. Isabelle Graw 71. Maurizio Cattelan 72. Charles Saatchi 73. Jerry Saltz 74. Jasper Johns 75. Louise Bourgeois 76. Thaddaeus Ropac 77. Mera & Don Rubell 78. Thelma Golden 79. Sarah Morris 80. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev 81. Anita & Poju Zabludowicz 82. Paul Schimmel 83. Jose, Alberto & David Mugrabi 84. Sadie Coles 85. Daniel Buchholz 86. Victoria Miro 87. Maureen Paley 88. Johann König 89. Nicolai Wallner 90. Maria Lind 91. Massimo De Carlo 92. Mario Cristiani, Lorenzo Fiaschi & Maurizio Rigillo 93. Rirkrit Tiravanija 94. Toby Webster 95. Long March Space 96. Nicholas Logsdail 97. Harry Blain & Graham Southern 98. Claire Hsu 99. Peter Nagy 100. Glenn Beck

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The Art World's Most Influential Figures | The Power 100 List (2009)

Will the Frieze Heat Up London's Art Market?

LONDON -- This Thursday, the art world heads to London for the seventh annual Frieze Art Fair. Frieze will showcase new and established artists to an international audience of curators, artists, collectors, gallerists and critics, as well as the general public. The event will take place under a large temporary structure of approximately 21,000 square meters in beautiful Regent's Park.

Frieze is one of the only exhibits of its kind to focus solely on contemporary art and living artists. This year, 164 of the world’s most exciting contemporary art galleries, representing 30 countries, will present new work by over 1,000 of the world’s most innovative artists. 2009 will also introduce Frame, a new section within the fair dedicated to solo artist presentations.

The equivalent of Switzerland's Art Basel, Frieze is a barometer for how London's art market will fair in the coming months. Frieze welcomed 68,000 visitors in 2008. This week, all eyes will be on the UK to determine whether the numbers predict success for next year.

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Frieze Art Fair (Oct. 15-18, 2009) | Website
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Will the Frieze Heat Up London's Art Market?

Editions with Additions: Working Proofs by Jasper Johns at the National Gallery of Art

"An aspect always of interest to me is to develop an idea or an image and execute it in different ways to determine what its meaning could be." ~Jasper Johns

The National Gallery of Art has acquired the largest institutional repository, over 1,700 proofs, by American contemporary artist Jasper Johns. A new exhibit at the museum showcases a selection of this acquisition. 

Johns is known for incorporating pop culture icons and symbols such as the American flag into his paintings. Though simplistic and familiar, whether or not there is a significance to the artist's execution of the imagery  is subject to interpretation. “There may or may not be an idea, and the meaning may just be that the painting exists,” says Johns, who remains fairly elusive when asked to comment on his work.

WASHINGTON, DC /NGA/ — The prints of Jasper Johns (b. 1930) are heralded for their beauty as well as their conceptual and psychological complexity. A group of the artist's "working proofs" — prints pulled during the working process on which Johns made drawn and painted additions — will be showcased as independent works of art for the first time in an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art.  

Editions with Additions: Working Proofs by Jasper Johns includes approximately 45 proofs for lithographs, etchings, and screenprints that the artist expanded in a range of media, including pastel, ink, and paint. The works of art are installed in two galleries. The first features works from the 1960s and 1970s, highlighting motifs associated with Johns' art throughout his career, such as the alphabet, targets, and body parts. The second gallery introduces complex compositions from the 1980s and 1990s, among them autobiographical references such as family photographs and art objects owned by the artist

This extraordinary body of work, which incorporate a range of media that includes graphite, pastel, ink, and watercolor, has been created and carefully annotated by Johns over four decades.

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Editions with Additions: Working Proofs by Jasper Johns (Oct. 11, 2009 – April 4, 2010)

National Gallery of Art | Website

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Editions with Additions: Working Proofs by Jasper Johns at the National Gallery of Art

Top ART News: Week in Review | Oct. 4 - 11, 2009

■ Welcome to Top ART News! Blog launch and first posting! | More >

■ Obamas Choose Art for the White House: The Final List is Revealed | More >

■ Winner Chosen in the American Idol of Art Contests | More >

■ The Louvre Will Offer Mona Lisa...and McDonald's? Sacre Bleu! | More >

■ Met Museum Tells Visitors to Please Touch the Paintings | More >

■ Irving Penn, Celebrity Fashion Photographer (1917 - 2009) | More >

■ Egypt and the Louvre End Their Rift Over Relics | More >

Top ART News: Week in Review | Oct. 4 - 11, 2009