Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II

Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II
The portrait was painted in year of 1912 by Gustav Klimt. Klimt regularly worked on several cases at once, often painting his models in the nude before clothing them.

He was an Austrian painter at the end of nineteenth century. Gustav Klimt was born in Baumgarten near Vienna on 14th July 1862 and second of the seven children of the engraver Ernest Klimt and his wife Anna. In 1876 Klimt enters, the Kunstgewerbeschule in Vienna, where he studies under Ferdinand Laufberger and Julius Victor Berger until 1883.

Klimt’s portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer was one of several that he painted of wealthy members of the Viennese Jewish community.

Who is the girl? Adele Bloch-Bauer was the wife of Jewish sugar industrialist Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, who was a wealthy industrialist who sponsored the arts and supported Gustav Klimt. Adele Bloch-Bauer was the only model to be painted twice by Klimt; she also appeared in the much more famous Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I. She was the only model to be painted twice by Gustav Klimt.

Adele Bloch-Bauer was died at the young age of 43 and she requested that the painting to be given to the Austrian government. It then was looted by German’s Nazi during the war before considered as Austrian national treasures for many years.
The painting was old for almost $88 million in November 2006 at Christie’s.
Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II

Jackson Pollock: No.5, 1948

Jackson Pollock: No.5, 1948
Paul Jackson Pollock was born on January 28, 1912, in the small town of Cody, Wyoming. He was youngest of five sons, and the domestic circumstances of the Pollock family were anything but simple.

The boy’s personality was decisively shaped by a series of moves, his father’s increasingly long absences and his mother’s dominant character.

In 1928, the family moved to Los Angeles, where Jackson attended Manual Arts High School.

The same period saw Pollock’s incipient interest in the world of the Mexican muralist. Joe Clemente Orozco (1883 -1949), Diego Rivera (1886 – 1957) and David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896 - 1974), all of whom emphasized the importance of the political function of art.

At Manual Arts the following years, Pollock took instruction in drawing and sculpture from Schwankovsky and the sculpture Harold Lehmann – but apparently without the lightest success.

Pollock's name is also associated with the introduction of the All-over style of painting which avoids any points of emphasis or identifiable parts within the whole canvas and therefore abandons the traditional idea of composition in terms of relations among parts.

The design of his painting had no relation to the shape or size of the canvas -- indeed in the finished work the canvas was sometimes docked or trimmed to suit the image. All these characteristics were important for the new American painting which matured in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

His painting no.5 1948 was sold with the price 140 million dollar in 2006.

That price would be the highest sum ever known to have been paid for a painting, exceeding the $135 million for Gustav Klimt’s “Adele Bloch-Bauer I.”
Jackson Pollock: No.5, 1948

One of the Most Expensive Paintings: False Start

One of the Most Expensive Paintings: False Start
The False Start is one of the popular oil paintings of Jasper Johns and was made on canvas 170.8 centimeters long and 137.2 centimeters wide. The colorful painting has always impressed the people since the time it was released. The magnificent use of varied kinds of colors in painting is most impressive. Jasper Johns completed the painting in 1959.

Who is Jasper Johns? Born in Augusta, Georgia in 1930, Jasper Johns grew up in Allendale, South Carolina. He studied at the University of South Carolina for three semesters before moved Parson School of Design.

Together with Robert Rauschenberg, Johns is widely acknowledged as one of the most important American painters in the postwar era.

In 1960 John’s dealer, Leo Castelli, had sold False Start for $3,150 to collector Robert Scull, who had made his money in the taxicab business. He then sold False Start in the six figure range to François de Menil, the son of John and Dominique de Menil, heirs to the Schlumberger oil fortune. Castelli figured giving the booming market that the painting might sell for as much as $10 million, although had been estimated to fetch only $8 million tom $9 million.

SI Newhouse bought Jasper John’s painting False Start for $17 million in 1988, at the top of an overhead art market.

In early 1990s, at the bottom of the market, SI Newhouse started to sell what Castelli calls “some very good paintings.”

In Oct 12, 2006, the painting was sold to the Kenneth C. Griffin, for $80 million, making it the most expensive painting by a living artist.

False Start manages to be both clotted and expansive, a field of interlocking patches and passages of red, yellow, and blue with orange and gray, each of which is named throughout the compositions. Such as it is, this composition is an allover affair with no hierarchy of parts, in good, second generation abstract expressionist.
One of the Most Expensive Paintings: False Start