False start
False Start is a painting by the American artist Jasper Johns from 1959, which is considered to be the forerunner of Pop Art . The painting fetched $ 80 million, the highest price ever paid for a Jasper Johns painting.
| False start |
|---|
| Jasper Johns , 1959 |
| Oil on canvas |
| 170.8 x 137.2 cm |
| Private collection
Link to the picture |
history
In 1960 Jasper Johns' gallery owner Leo Castelli , who had organized the first solo exhibition in his New York gallery for Johns, sold the picture for $ 3,150 to taxi tycoon and art collector Robert Scull († 1986) and his wife Ethel Redner Scull (1921-2001 ), who were among the first to collect works of Pop Art and Abstract Expressionism . In the 1960s, the Sculls sold the painting to the architect François de Ménil, a son of John and Dominique de Ménil , heirs to Schlumberger oil technology company . In 1988 the picture was auctioned at Sotheby’s by the American businessman and philanthropist Samuel Irving Newhouse (* 1927) for 17 million dollars. In the early 1990s, Newhouse gradually began to part with its excellent collection of American art, False Start went to media mogul David Geffen . Geffen sold the painting to hedge fund manager Kenneth C. Griffin in 2006 for $ 80 million, the highest price ever for a work by a living artist at the time. False Start is one of the most popular pictures by Jasper Johns and is offered in countless prints or as hand-painted copies in online shops.
description
The abstract and expressive picture is painted in the triad of the basic colors red, yellow and blue as well as with white and a little gray. The colors light blue and orange are created by inserting the saturated paintbrush into the still wet blue and red color fields, each with white and yellow. The color names BLUE, RED, YELLOW, ORANGE, GREEN, WHITE and GRAY are applied with stencils, either at an angle or parallel to the image, whereby the color name and color field are at most partially congruent or parts of the color name are painted over with loose and dynamic brushstrokes. The canvas is irregularly but completely covered by the garish, non-demarcated fields of color, which are placed next to each other as if by chance and whose dynamics resemble the explosion of a firework.
Web links
- False Start, 1959 by Jasper Johns
- Carol Vogel: Works by Johns and de Kooning Sell for $ 143.5 million The New York Times, October 12, 2006
- Jasper Johns, Gray. The Art Institute of Chicago
Individual evidence
- ^ Castelli, 1958
- ^ Obituary for Robert Scull in the New York Times, January 3, 1986. Retrieved May 2, 2015.
- ^ History of painting: One of the Most Expensive Paintings: False Start. September 12, 2008. Retrieved May 2, 2015.