Sotheby’s Sales: Fuego Flores

via artdaily.org

LONDON.- Today, Sotheby’s Sales of 20th Century Italian Art and Contemporary Art, Including Arab and Iranian Art, brought a combined total of £20,157,550/$32,799,234 (Est. £15.6-21.6 million) and saw a total of seven new artist records established.

The auction was highlighted by the sale of “Fuego Flores” in acrylic and oilstick on canvas by Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988), which saw competition from five bidders – four on the telephone and one in the saleroom – and sold within estimate for £959,650 (Est. £800,000-1,200,000). The work, signed, titled and dated 1983, has remained off the market for over 20 years and was last exhibited publicly in the 1984 exhibition Jean-Michel Basquiat at the Gallery V in Stockholm. This sensational canvas was executed at the very height of Basquiat’s brief and brilliant artistic career.

Sotheby’s Sales of 20th Century Italian Art and Contemporary Art Realize $32,799,234

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James Baldwin and Allen Ginsberg

James Baldwin & Allen Ginsberg, Albion Bookstore Amherst, MA. March 22, 1986.(photographer unknown)

via Allen Ginsberg Project

 

Dear Andy Love Allen

In this photo taken on Aug. 13, 2009, books and a note by Allen Ginsberg found in one of Andy Warhol’s time capsules wait to be catalogued at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)

January 6 1978

Dear Andy —

Here’s another big book Gordon & I manufactured — with odd snapshots & Diary notes. See p 153 for Subliminal CIA-Iran story Oct 1960 — No need to read this thru Just glance at it when you’re too busy to remember what you’re supposed to be doing.

Love Allen Ginsberg

via The Allen Ginsberg Project:  Warhol’s Junk

+ The Huffington Post:  Naked Onassis Photo Found with Warhol’s Junk

 

The Beat Hotel

via thebeathotelmovie.com

The Beat Hotel, a new film by Documentary Arts, goes deep into the legacy of the American Beats in Paris during the heady years between 1957 and 1963, when Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky and Gregory Corso fled the obscenity trials in the United States surrounding the publication of Ginsberg’s poem Howl. They took refuge in a cheap no-name hotel they had heard about at 9, Rue Git le Coeur and were soon joined by William Burroughs, Ian Somerville, Brion Gysin, and others from England and elsewhere in Europe, seeking out the “freedom” that the Latin Quarter of Paris might provide.

The Beat Hotel, as it came to be called, was a sanctuary of creativity, but was also, as British photographer Harold Chapman recalls, “an entire community of complete oddballs, bizarre, strange people, poets, writers, artists, musicians, pimps, prostitutes, policemen, and everybody you could imagine.” And in this environment, Burroughs finished his controversial book Naked Lunch; Ian Somerville and Brion Gysin invented the Dream Machine; Corso wrote some of his greatest poems; and Harold Norse, in his own cut-up experiments, wrote the novella, aptly called The Beat Hotel.

The film tracks down Harold Chapman in the small seaside town of Deal in Kent England. Chapman’s photographs are iconic of a time and place when Ginsberg, Orlovsky, Corso, Burroughs, Gysin, Somerville and Norse were just beginning to establish themselves on the international scene. Chapman lived in the attic of the hotel, and according to Ginsberg “didn’t say a word for two years” because he wanted to be “invisible” and to document the scene as it actually happened.

The Beat Hotel – a forthcoming documentary film

Documentary Arts

Plaque at the Beat Hotel

via flickr.com

Naked Lunch @ 50, Paris, July 2009

Photo by Jan Herman

via Naked Lunch @50 on Flickr