The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles paid Sotheby’s in London GBP 29.7 million ($45 million) on Wednesday for a sweeping, hazy view of 19th-century Rome by British master J.M.W. Turner.

The sale broke the auction record for Turner four years after the artist’s Venetian seascape “Giudecca, La Donna della Salute and San Giorgio” sold for $35 million at Christie’s.

The Getty beat out five other bidders for “Modern Rome – Campo Vaccino.” The auction house had priced the painting sell for between $18 million and $27 million.

Turner, a Romantic artist known for painting wispy clouds and roiling waves, painted “Modern Rome” in 1839, a decade after he visited the city for a final time. Eschewing any telltale signs of modernization, Turner presents an ethereal view of the Italian capital as seen from atop Capitoline Hill. Women in blue and yellow skirts herd goats in the rocky foreground as the city’s ruins fan across the sun-drenched expanse below. The Coliseum, painted in cappuccino colors, even appears to glow. (more)

Previously on Skandalon

Artist’s statement: “In this series, Eric Rondepierre began to make systematic use of film archives. Working in American archives, the artist systematically viewed fragments of anonymous silent movies that had been corroded by the effects of time, damp and poor storage. He photographed the resulting anomalies (erasures, deformations, blotches). Scènes comprises 18 pieces and shows characters in action.” (Read more)

Previously on Skandalon.

Artist’s statement: “This series of thirty pieces continues the procedure of the Précis de décomposition. Again, these are images that have become corroded over time. The frames come from colorized films in the Montreal archives. The choice centres on the body and intimacy, and the “justified” titles relate directly to the image.”

Previously on Skandalon.

Artist’s statement: “Early-twentieth century Modernism greatly transformed our lives, liberating the human spirit from untold decoration. No longer needing to draw attention from God, all aristocratic attempts at ostentation have fallen away. At last we avail ourselves of mechanical aids far beyond our human powers, attaining the freedom to shape things at will.

I decided to trace the beginnings of our age via architecture. Pushing my old large-format camera’s focal length out to twice-infinity―with no stops on the bellows rail, the view through the lens was an utter blur―I discovered that superlative architecture survives, however dissolved, the onslaught of blurred photography. Thus I began erosion-testing architecture for durability, completely melting away many of the buildings in the process.” (Sugimoto’s official web site).

About Hiroshi Sugimoto: “Hiroshi Sugimoto (杉本博司, Sugimoto Hiroshi), born on February 23, 1948, is a Japanese photographer currently dividing his time between Tokyo, Japan and New York City, USA. His catalog is made up of a number of series, each having a distinct theme and similar attributes.” (Wikipedia).

ru_abandoned: Заброшенная библиотека

“Stages of Decay. Grand old movie palaces, ballrooms, school auditoriums, theaters in hotels, mental hospitals, and jails. No matter how glamorous or shabby, they have one thing in common. Before being darkened forever, they were the sites of entertainment, pleasure and contemplation – sometimes for audiences who had no other means of escaping from their world.”