Tomorrow at Sotheby’s NY an auction that hardly will be forgotten

As art dealer and collector Fabrizio Moretti declares in the piercing video interview given to Edoardo Roberti, Sotheby’s Old Masters Paintings Vice-President, in occasion of the auction of Italian Renaissance artworks assembled by Moretti himself that will take place tomorrow in New York: « people of our age think that 15th century items are all in museums, but we have to show them that these things are also available on the market ». That must be the real reason why Moretti, who is at least 20 years younger than most of his colleagues, decided to set up a personal selling at Sotheby’s, a selling that will probably mark the history since it is going to be the very first of this kind for a main auction house. Never in recent times an art dealer has explicitly promoted a selling of artworks assembled by himself. The only similar cases are to be found in the so called “curated” auctions in the contemporary art realm – the next main one will be curated by art critic and writer Francesco Bonami, at Phillips, at the end of April. Nevertheless curators aren’t – or shouldn’t be – directly involved in the market as art dealers are and it makes a huge difference, especially if we consider how today traditional fine arts are undervalued if compared to Post War and Contemporary Art. At the moment it is not so risky to auction a Warhol, as opposed to a Pietro di Francesco Orioli or a Mino da Fiesole.

 

It follows that the 31 items gathered together by Moretti are of an extraordinary quality. The two Saints (Catherine and Sigismund of Burgundy) by Lorenzo Veneziano, for example, are not only one of the three top lots of the auction (together with a beautiful tondo from the Botticelli’s workshop, and a rare Madonna and Child by Jacopo di Cione), but also that sort of piece which proves how strong it still is the visual power of an old painting, made of color, form, gold and wood. Pictures of the side and the back of these two high boards are unfortunately not available to the public, but the thing one immediately realizes by seeing them in flesh is that the object is even more impressive than the image itself. To a public that is confident with contemporary artists stressing the expressive value of materials, such as Carol Bove or Karla Black, these are not only two extraordinary well preserved figures with sophisticated postures and extremely elegant features. They are also two architectural elements recalling phenomena from a place whose substance is equally made of information and imagination.

 

Similarly, the “Relief of an angel in prayer” by Andrea della Robbia, nephew of the great Luca della Robbia, is not only an evidence of della Robbia’s workshop’s mastery in making glazing terracotta objects. Probably part of a larger ensemble (Gentilini, 2013), this expressive angel looking like a teenager – but with the hand of an adult man and the hair dressing of a football player – is a presence that conveys a constellation of microscopic imperfections that wouldn’t be possible to reproduce in any way and which represents that specific value, the time value, that any modern artist will recognize as one of the crucial elements in the perception of an artwork. Edward Munch was used to expose his paintings to the elements before considering them as completed while Picasso was horrified by Raffaello’s perfectionism. Even if unconsciously, an object like the “Relief of an angel in prayer” dialogues directly with the tradition of the informal art produced in Europe after the Second World War, as it embeds the same “sign, gesture, matter” logic that characterized authors such as Hans Hartung, Antoni Tapies, or Emilio Vedova. Rewording Moretti: “who cares who is the author when a concept is so well explained”.

 

 

January 28, 2015