It has been a superlative auction season in New York with sales of Impressionist, modern, and contemporary art totaling more than $2 billion. Christie’s reported a decline from last November with sales of $968 million, and Sotheby’s increased to $978 million notwithstanding a poor third quarter and concern about the margins on its $500 million guarantee for the Taubman collection.

The bigger news is the November 9 evening sale of Amedeo Modigliani’s Nu Couché (Reclining Nude). Christie’s sold the work for $170.4 million, setting a record for Modigliani and making it the second most expensive painting ever sold at auction. The painting came from a private collection in Switzerland and has only been on public exhibition twice during the last 45 years. Unfortunately, it may be some time again before it is exhibited.

Nu Couché was likely first shown at Galerie Berthe Weill in Paris in 1917. That was Modigliani’s only solo exhibition, and it was brief. The nudes were censored and the show was closed by the police. Nu Couché reappeared at Galerie Bing & Cie in Paris in 1925 and at the Venice Biennale in 1930, and was acquired by Gianni Mattioli in 1949. Mattioli loaned the work to museums frequently through the 1950s. His daughter, the art historian Laura Mattioli, inherited his collection in 1977 and is rumored to be the anonymous consigner of Nu Couché.

The painting, with an estimate of $100 million, was acquired last week with a phone bid by Liu Yiqian for $170.4 million. The Chinese billionaire and his wife, Wang Wei, have built a collection of more than 2,300 works for the Long Museum in Shanghai. The couple founded the Long Museum and Wei is its director. With locations in Pudong and West Bund, it is the largest private museum in China.

Yiqian is best (or worst) known for drinking from a 500-year-old Ming dynasty cup that he acquired at auction for $36 million and charged to his AmEx (the rewards points!) last year. He is also known to take advantage of free trade zones. Importing art to mainland China incurs VAT and customs duties from 17 to 34 percent, so collectors and dealers store works in freeports, which are not subject to import or transaction taxes. Yiqian and a museum spokesperson have stated that Nu Couché will be shown at the Long Museum in 2017, but a vault in Le Freeport West Bund is almost certainly its next destination.

If Nu Couché arrives at the Long Museum, a public exhibition is uncertain. It was censored by French police in 1917 and by American media in 2015. Bloomberg, CBS, CNBC, and CNN blurred images of the painting, and Financial Times covered it with black rectangles. Censorship is very likely in China where authorities regularly remove works or close exhibitions that they deem “pornographic” or politically sensitive, even in private museums and galleries.

Perhaps the Long Museum, now with increased international attention, will extend its cultural influence to ensure that Nu Couché returns to public exhibition after so long in private collections.

The post Amedeo Modigliani’s Nu Couché appeared first on .

Art Basel Hong Kong concluded its third edition this week with impressive sales reports. The fair was launched in 2013 as a satellite to Art Basel, the 45-year old fair in Switzerland that is the most significant annual event in the contemporary art world, and Art Basel in Miami Beach, which was launched in 2002.

The VIP Private View and Vernissage opened on Friday and Saturday, and the fair was open to the public from Sunday through Tuesday. Attendance was expected to reach 65,000 but was reported to be about 60,000. The more established editions in Miami Beach and Basel attract 75,000 and 86,000 visitors, respectively.

This was the first year that Art Basel Hong Kong was hosted in March, which may explain attendance. It followed the Armory Show in New York, was concurrent with TEFAF Maastricht, and preceded Art Fair Tokyo and Art Dubai. The March art fair schedule is challenging, but this repositioned date for Art Basel Hong Kong avoids splitting attendance with Frieze New York and the Venice Biennale in May.

Many notable sales came from the Galleries sector and quickly after the Friday preview. David Zwirner (New York and London) sold Chris Ofili’s Dead Monkey–Sex, Money and Drugs for $2 million on Friday evening. (The work sold at Christie’s in 2010 for less than $1 million). Zwirner also sold two new Neo Rauch paintings for $1 million each, and two recent Yayoi Kusama infinity net paintings for over $300,000 each.

Galerie Gmurzynska (Zurich, St. Moritz, and Zug) sold a work by Fernando Botero for $1.2 million. White Cube (London, Hong Kong, and São Paulo) sold Damien Hirst’s Shanghai for $1.2 million. Liang Gallery (Taipei) sold two works by Chen Cheng-po for $1.3 million each. Sprüth Magers (London and Berlin) sold Andreas Gursky’s SH IV for €400,000.

Art Basel Hong Kong included 233 galleries from 37 countries. 26 were from Hong Kong and 29 were new to the fair.

As in Miami Beach and Basel, the fair was divided into sectors: Galleries had 179 exhibitors, with half from Asia. Insights included single artist exhibitions from Asian and Asia-Pacific galleries. Discoveries presented emerging artists, Encounters featured large-scale sculptures and installations, and Film presented moving images. Magazines exhibited printed art publications, and there was a Salon series of lectures and panels.

While Art Basel in Miami Beach has some 20 satellite art fairs, Hong Kong has only one—Art Central—which launched this year. Its founders had previously organized ART HK since 2008, which became Art Basel Hong Kong in 2013. The Art Central co-founders are responsible for other fairs including PULSE, Sydney Contemporary, and Art13London. In its inaugural year, Art Central counted 77 galleries and nearly 30,000 visitors.

Art Basel commissioned, with the International Commerce Centre (ICC), a public work by the Chinese artist Cao Fei. Same Old, Brand New was a light show of images from 1980s video games projected onto the 118-story ICC building, which is the tallest building in Hong Kong. Visible from all over the city, Same Old, Brand New expanded Art Basel beyond the convention center and across the harbor to West Kowloon where the forthcoming M+, the 645,000-square-foot museum of contemporary art designed by Herzog & de Meuron, will open in 2018.

Coincidentally, Herzog & de Meuron are the architects who designed the Messeplatz exhibition halls for Art Basel in Basel and the Pérez Art Museum Miami.

The post Art Basel Hong Kong appeared first on .

At the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, My Generation: Young Chinese Artists presents works by artists born in mainland China after 1976. They are products of China’s one-child policy and have grown up during a time of rapid urbanization, globalization, and cultural transition.

By the end of Mao’s Cultural Revolution in 1976, China’s economy had been ruined, its historical and visual culture had been destroyed, and the arts had been restricted to propaganda. New party leadership and reformed economic policies of 1978 opened the country to foreign investment and private industry that have led to unprecedented economic growth and social change.

In 1976, China was agricultural and its population was rural. Since 1978, its economy has expanded annually by 10 percent and surpassed the U.S. as the world’s largest economy in 2014. China has over 160 cities with a population above 1 million, and more than half of its 1.4 billion people live in urban areas. About two-thirds are under age 35.

China’s cultural expansion has been as momentous. It became the world’s largest art market with recorded sales in 2013 exceeding $8.5 billion. The government’s policy to develop culture resulted in the construction of over 450 new museums last year, and China now counts over 3,800 museums. The artists in this exhibition, and the 900 million Chinese of their generation, experience incredible and ever-increasing urbanization and cultural transformation.

Three of our favorite works are by artists based in Beijing.

Chi Peng’s self-portrait contrasts a corporeal nude figure with a monumental, reflective, and cold skyscraper.  The urban environment is unyielding, and the figure exemplifies China’s one-child policy.

Liu Chuang’s filmed performance shows two cars side-by-side on busy streets and freeways. They disrupt traffic by maintaining the minimum speed limit, indicating the speed of urban life, disconnected from humanity, while committing a careful act of subversion.

Liu Di’s images of gigantic animals towering over drab housing structures could seem monstrous, but their assertion in urban landscapes is a visual reversal of the loss of natural habitat to urban development.

My Generation: Young Chinese Artists was organized by the Tampa Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, and curated by Barbara Pollack. The exhibition at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art closes on January 18, 2015.

The post My Generation: Young Chinese Artists appeared first on .