Luca Carlevarijs’s “View of the Molo, Venice, Looking West” is one of the highlights of Christie’s first major auction of 2011
OLD MASTER & 19th CENTURY PAINTINGS, DRAWINGS & WATERCOLORS
Christie’s
20 Rockefeller Plaza
Free viewing: January 22-26, 10:00 am – 5:00 pm (Sunday 1:00 – 5:00)
Auction: Wednesday, January 26, 10:00 am, 2:00 & 4:30 pm
212-636-2126
www.christies.com
It’s European Masters Week in New York, and the centerpiece is a major two-part auction at Christie’s on January 26, with more than three hundred works dating from the fourteenth to nineteenth centuries on the block. The museum-quality exhibition, free and open to the public, goes on view today, featuring a number of extremely exciting paintings, from private collections, that were initially acquired during the Grand Tour in Italy during the eighteenth century. Highlights include Luca Carlevarijs’s lush, dramatic “View of the Molo, Venice, Looking West” ($3.5-$4.5 million), Giovanni Antonio Canal’s (il Canaletto) “View of Mestre” ($2.5-$3.5 million), Jean-François Millet’s “La fin de la journée; effet du soir” (“L’Homme à la veste”) ($800,000-$1.2 million), William Adolphe Bouguereau’s “Portrait of Eva and Frances Johnston” ($800,000-$1.2 million), Jean-Leon Gérôme’s “Master of the hounds” ($700,000-$1 million), and Giovanni Paolo Panini’s “An architectural capriccio with figures among Roman ruins” ($600,000-$800,000). The auction also includes more affordable paintings, drawings, and studies by Fragonard, Boucher, Lhermitte, Corot, Tiepolo, Gericault, and Rubens, ranging from $5,000 to $150,000 (for the latter’s exquisite “An écorché study of a male nude, with a subsidiary study of the right leg”). European Masters Week continues all over the city, with such exhibitions as “Master Paintings” at Jack Kilgore & Co., “From Gallery Canesso, Paris — The Master of the Blue Jeans and a Selection of Paintings” at Didier Aaron, “Past Reflections, Old Master Paintings from the 17th and 19th Century” at Lawrence Steigrad Fine Arts, and more Master Drawings shows at Shepherd and Derom Galleries, French and Company, Robert Simon Fine Art, and other locations.
In 1999, L.A.-based French shopkeeper and amateur videographer Thierry Guetta discovered that he was related to street artist Invader and began filming his cousin putting up his tile works. Guetta, who did not know much about art, soon found himself immersed in the underground graffiti scene. On adventures with such famed street artists as Shepard Fairey, Swoon, Ron English, and Borf, Guetta took thousands of hours of much-sought-after video. The amateur videographer was determined to meet Banksy, the anarchic satirist who has been confounding authorities around the world with his striking, politically sensitive works perpetrated right under their noses, from England to New Orleans to the West Bank. Guetta finally gets his wish and begins filming the seemingly unfilmable as Banksy, whose identity has been a source of controversy for more than a decade, allows Guetta to follow him on the streets and invites him into his studio. But as he states at the beginning of his brilliant documentary, EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP, Banksy—who hides his face from the camera in new interviews and blurs it in older footage—turns the tables on Guetta, making him the subject of this wildly entertaining film.
There’s something inherently creepy about THE WOODMANS, C. Scott Willis’s documentary about a family of artists that opens tonight at Film Forum for a two-week run. For the first half of his debut theatrical release, Willis, an eleven-time Emmy winner who has spent most of his career working for television news organizations, speaks with successful ceramic sculptor Betty Woodman, who had a 
