Word: artistes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Critics called it the garage sale of the century. Tongue-in-cheek comparisons were made with the opening of King Tut's tomb. But the auction of more than 10,000 items owned by America's most infamous artist, which ran throughout last week and had two more days to go this week, turned out to be a fitting tribute to the huckster of hype. "If he's sitting up there watching, he's probably having a ball," said Diana Brooks, president of Sotheby's North America, which conducted the sale in its Manhattan showrooms...
...Queen of Sweden to Bianca Jagger and Dick Cavett. By week's end more than 45,000 collectors and curiosity seekers had milled through Sotheby's showrooms, 10,000 of them on a single day. For some, Warhol's vast collection was a monument to the materialism that the artist enshrined in his Campbell Soup can and Brillo pad artworks. For others, it was a microcosm of one man's obsessive greed. Either way, marveled Writer Fran Lebowitz, wandering around in the nearly two acres of memorabilia was "like being in a theme park...
Until the artist's death last year, after gallbladder surgery, the extent of his hoard had largely been a secret. As compulsive consumers go, he was inconspicuous. An old pal, Collector Suzie Frankfurt, once noticed a slight bulge under his shirt at a Studio 54 bash: it was a dazzling emerald necklace. Yet Warhol's opulent town house on Manhattan's Upper East Side was so cluttered with the fruits of his shopping binges that only two or three rooms were habitable. Picassos were stuffed in closets. Jewels were squirreled away in the canopy of his antique four-poster...
This laborious process favors contour and flatness, light-and-dark contrast rather than color, and the single iconic shape. Sultan does decoratively what an older American artist like Robert Moskowitz does grandly: by taking a familiar shape and rescaling it, mainly as profile -- one still life of an egg and three lemons on a plate is also 8 ft. square -- he slows up recognition and provokes, in the more successful paintings, a sense of strangeness...
Sultan's instinct for pattern could have degenerated into a formula by now, especially given the market demand for his drawings, but it shows no sign of doing so -- though the small still-life paintings are perhaps another matter. Within his limitations, he is certainly an artist to watch...