Michael Crichton Collection at Christie's Auction House LA

In the cultural landscape of Los Angeles, an uncommon pleasure is available at Christie’s Auction house headquarters in Beverly Hills where for only seven days 42 works of art from the private collection of polymath Michael Crichton are on view before they make their way to the NY auction of post war and contemporary art in May.

The pleasures are many. The quality of the individual pieces is exquisite. The exhibition is thoughtfully installed with the reverence and erudition of a museum exhibition. But perhaps the greatest delight on display is the eye of the collector. 

Collections reflect their owners. And great collections are built through the conscious and unconscious intuition of passionate consumers of visual art. Crichton wielded narrative tension in his literary output and a fascination for tension, implied and overt, metaphoric and literal, can be felt throughout the works on display. These synaptic leaps pull together Picasso and Johns, Mark Tansey and Agnes Martin, Rauschenberg and Ruscha in ways that illuminate and expand not only each artist’s artistic paradigm but also visual concerns of post-war art history.

Mark Tansey, Push/Pull, 2003, 84 x 109 inches

Christie's Images Limited 2010

The large Mark Tansey painting Push/Pull, 2003 is executed in Tansey’s signature grisaille, this time pale blue. It depicts adventurers on a cold watery landscape divided approximately midway on the horizontal picture plane. The reflection in the water is of Egyptian pyramids and the Sphinx while the landscape that hovers above is a windswept arctic glacier. Upon further examination these snowy mountains reveal themselves to be an anamorphic image of a walking female figure. This latter image can only be seen if one views the painting from about a 10-degree angle. With each answer the picture provides four questions. 

Robert Raushenberg, Studo Painting, 1960-61, 72x 72 inches

Christie's Images Limited, 2010

The tensions continue with a marvelous Rauschenberg combine diptych. Studio Painting, 1960 is filled with bold colorful brushstrokes mimicking abstract expressionist tropes. The two panels are hung about four inches apart and are pulled together by a rope fastened to the center of the left panel. This rope extends to the right and is looped through a pulley and weighted by a filled canvas bag, which hangs beyond the plane of the bottom right section. Pop art’s dialogue with Abstract Expressionism is made manifest further by a silk-screened image of telephone poles in the upper left hand corner.
 

Jasper Johns, Study for a Painting, 2002, Encaustic on Linen, 63 x 78 inches

Christie's Images Limited, 2010

Tension can whisper as well. Jasper Johns’ Cantenary painting is just such a stage whisper. The encaustic painting Study for a Painting, 2002 bears the luscious tactility of sheet lead. It’s the same metallic grey that his sculptmetal objects bear and it both absorbs and reflects light. Two wooden slates are attached vertically with hinges, one to the left and right. The slates recall the rulers used for Device Circle, 1960 or Good Time Charley, 1962. A single cotton twine creates an arc descending from the top left to the top right in graceful gravitational collaboration.

  Roy Lichtenstein, Girl in Water, 1965

Christie's Images Limited, 2010

 
Similar visual oppositions can be witnessed in the pale blue and pink stripes of an Agnes Martin Painting (Untitled #14); The locks of hair and the reflected water in Lichtenstein’s Girl in Water, 1965 a sensational collage and drawing; and the sexual male/female innuendo bravado of Oldenberg’s Hanging Three Way Plug, 1970.

Crichton’s aesthetic fascination also held an interesting pendulum swing of scale. While the major pieces in this collection are significant in scale, there are gems of intimate scale as well. Hung almost with nonchalance over a phone in the hallway of the Beverley Hills exhibition space is a 5-inch square Tansey pencil drawing Eve, 1982.

There are several other epiphany instances but suffice it to say that the quality of each work does not rest with this curatorial red thread. It’s simply marvelous however to pursue viewing the collection with this in mind.

-Mario M. Muller, Los Angeles, March 2010

Monday March 5th through March 12th, 2010
Christie’s Beverley Hills
360 North Camden Drive, CA 90210

Christie’s Press Release

Postscript:

My awareness and delight of Michael Crichton’s writings was inverted to many who became fans of this prolific and imaginative author. Long before Jurassic Park and ER became touchstones to American pop culture, I read and reread his smart monograph on Jasper Johns. Published in 1977 in conjunction with an exhibition at the Whitney Museum that same year, it was, I suspect, the first monograph that I owned and read cover to cover. Probably a couple of decades passed till I made the blinding connection that the Michael Crichton whose writing I so admired and whose conversational and humble prose introduced me to Jasper Johns was the same author of bestseller fiction, groundbreaking tent pole movie blockbusters and sweeping television series.

-MMM, LA, 2010

Jeff Koons, Paintings, Gagosian, Beverly Hills through Jan 9th, 2010

While Jeff Koons has certainly etched his reputation with bombastic, ambitious and extremely witty sculpture he's proving to be a consumate painter as well. The exhibition at Gagosian in Beverly Hills fills the cavernous space with several large scale canvases. On a field of ben day dots, or rather, slightly off registration color half tone dots, are either gestural "paint" strokes or a centered silver doodle. Because of the scale, neither the photographic ground nor the representational nature of the doodle are immediately descernable. Landscape, the sole vertical image in the exhibition, gives the epiphany of recognition. The Silver Doodle is a reductionist gesture of a woman's vulva with thighs spread from right to left. The gestured silver strokes are clearly based on Courbet's Origin of the World but could just as easily be a reduction of any Penthouse centerfold. The photographic sources are also salacious in nature but their scale distorts and obfuscates to such a degree that one tends to loose oneself in the color and rythm of the plane.

That these canvases are executed by a highly skilled team of assistants shouldn't bother anyone for nothing of this scale and ambition could conceivably be brought into existance by a lone artist. The singular voice of the artist is in tact however. Koons continues to embrace high and low culture to stunning effect.
Two weeks after seeing the show I stumbled upon a magnificent description of a woman's body by Micheal Chabon who, in a passage recounting the loss of his virginity described his utter wonder of first hand experience as discovering "...the astonishing evolutionary feat of origami between a woman's legs." The sense of awe is evoked handily with these sensational paintings.

As I previewed this blog post I was amazed at how readily the photographic ground was read in this thumbnail scale. It bears mentioning that each colored dot in the actual painting is roughly 2 inches in diameter and the paintings are mostly larger than 14 feet in width. Again an ocular sensation in person not to be missed.
It's a terrific show and a rare opportunity to see so many works in one place at one time.
Gagosian Gallery
Beverly Hills