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On September 6, our contemporary art auction returns with a careful and varied selection of Victor Mira’s production, through which we will be able to discover the richness and depth of his creation.

Considered by international critics as one of the great creators of Spanish art in the last decades of the 20th century, Víctor Mira reflected in his different artistic facets the existential torment that accompanied him throughout his life . Qualified as a transgressor, eccentric, visionary, weird, mystic and enlightened, Mira was above all an artist who delved through his art into the depths of the human being. His work, as heartbreaking as it is poetic, acquires a violent spirituality whose feeling is reflected in this revealing statement:“as a man happiness is desired, as an artist I am not interested and I am dominated by the artist. Under this premise, Victor Mira transformed pain into a philosophy of life that would undoubtedly become his everlasting source of inspiration. And it is precisely this aspect that moves us in his work, the brutal and sincere contemplation of a soul, that of the artist, in which loneliness, inner ordeal and death are revealed to us as the only and unappealable certainties of life.

The “golden Twenties” or happy twenties were a time of prosperity and progress so vertiginous that it filled society with optimism, prompting extremely ambitious projects to be carried out.

In New York this furor could be appreciated better than anywhere else, as the best example of success was manifested by its skyline, the skyscrapers. One of the most obvious megalomaniac ideas came from the prestigious Rockefeller family. His goal was to create a city of his own within the heart of Manhattan. Several buildings connected by squares would house theaters, offices and stores under the emblem of this dynasty.

The crash of 1929 meant bankruptcy for a significant part of the population and led to the period we know as the Great Depression. This adverse scenario did not intimidate the Rockefellers; on the contrary, it was an incentive to offer an echo of hope and revitalization of the city’s economy with a discourse based on American values and the progress recently experienced.

How does a museum come to build its collection? Museums are institutions designed to expand the knowledge and history of each place and its society, a beacon of knowledge that evolves over time and, therefore, must move forward. Take, for example, the most important museum in Spain and, arguably, one of the richest in the world: the Prado Museum.

At the beginning of the 19th century, during the reign of Ferdinand VII, it was decided to transfer some of the masterpieces of the royal collection to a public gallery. Let’s think that since the time of the Habsburgs, many of the treasures were, relatively, within the reach of the public in, for example, the Alcazar of Madrid or the Escorial. But it was the Prado that definitively brought art closer to the people in Spain, becoming a source of pride for them.

The institution was expanding its holdings thanks to additions such as the Museum of the Trinity, with goods from the ecclesiastical disentailments or from important donations, as is the case even today (see the legacy of Plácido Arango or Óscar Alzaga). These great patrons, as well as other anonymous ones, have considerably expanded the catalog with respect to the original one. However, curators have an essential job, not only to guard and research the existing pieces, but also to find the “missing” pieces of the puzzle that represents history. Their deep knowledge makes them always alert to the works that appear on the market or in private collections. His quick action and good eye allow the state or the museum itself to acquire that crucial gear that will allow us to continue writing our past in order to understand it better.

Setdart is deeply proud to be part of this process. During the last year, several Spanish institutions have found in our auctions fundamental pieces for their collections.

Richard Avedon, internationally known for his work in fashion magazines such as Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, lands at Setdart with one of the greatest icons in the history of fashion: Dorian Leigh.

Few photographers in the 20th century have been as decisive as the American Richard Avedon, who not only revolutionized the world of fashion by creating a new aesthetic, but also became one of the most prestigious portraitists in the history of photography. Both as a fashion photographer and as a portraitist, Avedon managed to break with certain myths or pre-established standards, freeing his protagonists from the rigidity and distance that until then had been projected especially from the world of fashion.

The ode to pictorial values proclaimed by post-pictorial abstraction finds in the monochrome paintings of Joseph Marioni a magnificent heir.

Among the painters that the American artist Joseph Marioni admits to admire are Matisse, Bonnard, Van Gogh, O’Keeffe or Marc Rothko… Although at first glance it may seem that there is no point of union between the disparity of their styles, the reality is that all of them vertebrated their work under a particular treatment of light and color. This is also the case of our protagonist, whose career, linked to the Radical painting group in New York, reveals a deep reflection on the interaction of light and color.

Throughout all times, something that defines us as humans is our ambition to know and explain the reason for what surrounds us: the flight of birds, rain or death. Science, philosophy and even religion have tried to offer explanations for these questions, the case of Egyptian cosmology being one of the most interesting.

In the Egyptian civilization, the nature that surrounded them was a manifestation of the superior and divine forces that ordered the world. For example, the solar disk Aton was the physical appearance of deity Ra who, in turn, was responsible for all the good that light provides. This explanation advances to the point of identifying their gods with part of nature, the animals.

Anubis, god protector of the dead and their guide in the underworld, was personified in the form of a jackal. Why assign this animal to the god? Jackals prowled among the cliffs and boulders surrounding the necropolises in search of carrion to feed on. The Egyptians, seeing these animals in arid and unpopulated areas, considered them to act as guardians of their deceased and, therefore, the assimilation between one and the other is evident.

The 15th century is perhaps one of the most important periods in history and the turning point on the road to the modern world. This time of change is the scenario in which the Middle Ages are gradually abandoned until the arrival of the Renaissance. It is a time of economic prosperity and the rise of a bourgeoisie that, like the Church and the aristocracy, will become patrons of art. The Spanish case is especially rich due to the fact that it is a peninsula with different kingdoms and their corresponding influences from abroad. The noblemen of Castile, for example, obtained lucrative profits from the export of merino wool throughout Europe, especially in the Flemish territories, such as Bruges or Antwerp. This fruitful commercial relationship allowed the arrival of masterpieces of the so-called International Gothic and later of the Flemish Primitives. Its impact on local artists was crucial to the point that they began to imitate not only the iconography, but also the way of treating the fabrics, the landscape or the gestures of the characters that came closer to reality offering an unprecedented realism.

Jorge Oteiza’s sculpture and thought find their origin and roots in the deepest and most primitive identity and culture of his native land. In fact, his work cannot be understood in all its complexity without taking into account his relationship with the Basque Country and the delicate historical context in which it developed. After some years dominated by a kind of cultural lethargy, the Basque country urgently needed to find a revulsive that would bring back the splendor of past times. Such a long-awaited reaction came in the second half of the 20th century with the confluence of a group of artists who came together in various movements such as GAUR, EMEN ORAIN and DANOK.

However, the definitive impulse that raised the Basque artistic practice to the top came from the hands of two names of their own: Oteiza and Chillida, who with their innovations would mark a turning point in the history of Basque art that went beyond our borders and echoed around the world.

From his beginnings in the 1960s to the present, Valdés’ work has evolved with absolute coherence, exploring and conquering new artistic territories from a deep knowledge of the history of art and the deepest admiration for his great masters. However, far from contemplating them from afar, Valdés rescues and takes from them those aspects of his art that he considers more appropriate to carry out a an apotheosis exercise of reinterpretation and recontextualization of the very history of art with which, decade after decade, he has forged his unmistakable creative universe.

The tragicomic sense with which Celso Lagar represented the circus world reveals one of the most applauded aspects of his career.

There are few places in our country that are more surrounded by attraction and mystery as the Palace of San Telmo and its dwellers, the Dukes of Montpensier. These two names have always gone hand in hand with endless gossip and rumors related to power, luxury and art.

The transgressive, anti-canonical and deeply emotional character of Ángela de la cruz has made her one of the most influential and suggestive artists that the art of these first decades of the century has given us.

The creative freedom that has characterized small-format production, allowing artists to deploy a level of technical precision and stylistic experimentation, has given birth to their most intimate and personal creations, whose evocative power manages to move the viewer. In the set of paintings on auction on May 8, there is an outstanding representation of Catalan landscape painting concentrated in a few centimeters of talent and creativity.

An example of this is Claudio Lorenzale’s canvas in tender, whose aesthetics and intentionality follow the purist artistic ideology of his master, Friedrich Overbeck.

The piece, inspired by a past that is represented in a bucolic way, introduces us to a scene where the presence of a group of highborn young people, who are enjoying the arts, brings us closer to the Italian aesthetics of the early Renaissance, evoking, to a large extent, the story of The Decameron by Boccaccio in which he narrates the stay of a group of young people in a villa on the outskirts of Florence, where fleeing from the black plague that struck the city, they will live their days devoted exclusively to the arts and leisure. Lorenzale turns here to one of the greatest works of European literature to relive the splendorous past of the humanist ideals initiated by Petrarch in the 14th century.

The purist aesthetic ideals of medieval inspiration are reflected in a scholastic and eclectic composition based on the preponderance of the drawing that determines the forms with a hardness in the outline. Likewise, and as our work illustrates, depth and volume were not part of his plastic concerns, and we can observe in it a minimal use of chiaroscuro, which despite the perspective of the scene, shows us a clear inclination towards flat colors. This uniform luminosity expresses the timelessness that they intended to give to their work as a manifestation of the triumph of the sacred over time.

The fascination with gold has been present in all ages and cultures throughout history. For six millennia, gold has been considered one of the most precious and valuable materials. Its scarcity, its difficult oxidation and, of course, its characteristic luster and color make it the perfect coin of exchange, a must in jewelry and watchmaking, as well as being considered the highest element in sculpture. Its physical properties were understood as a reflection of the mystical character that surrounds it. The ancient Egyptians represented their gods made of this material and the Greeks and Romans applied the same canon in their great sculptures, such as the monumental Athena of the Parthenon.

What was one of the last figurative paintings by Josep Guinovart stars in our next contemporary art auction, becoming one of the rare occasions in which his earliest creative period bursts into the market with an important work.

The most classical aspect of the sculpture produced between the late nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century finds a valuable and exclusive representation in our next auction on April 12.

In bronzes such as “Guitare portuguese”, Arman captured the result of his research into the decomposition and fragmentation of the object by means of cuts from which a new perspective of reality emerges.

The prominent role of Arman’s work in the latest artistic avant-gardes is undeniable thanks to his contributions regarding the reformulation of the link between the object and its artistic representation, which is still today a matter of debate and a vital aspect in plastic experimentation.

“Valencia Beach, illustrates Joaquín Sorolla’s mastery in sketching, concentrating in a reduced space the purest and most vivid vibration of light and color of the Valencian beaches.

The technical virtuosity that Joaquín Sorolla achieved with his pictorial work consecrated him as the painter of light par excellence. However, the scope of his artistic corpus goes far beyond his well-known canvases in which he captured like few others the light effects of the Mediterranean.

Setdart wanted to collaborate once again with the organization of the charity auction of the iconic Meninas, whose image invades the streets of Madrid every year as a public museum, becoming a symbol and icon of the city.

The museum quality of “Danza de odaliscas” reveals the best version of Francisco Pradilla’s orientalist production.

The European colonial expansion in North Africa during the 19th century was decisive in the desire of many artists to travel and explore an unknown world. The representation of its landscapes, customs and conflicts gave rise to the so-called orientalist painting, a genre with its own personality within nineteenth-century art that was passionately cultivated by the great masters of the time.

Jean Prouvé, who earned an irreplaceable place in modern design for having devised avant-garde solutions for disadvantaged groups in the impoverished post-war context, has paradoxically become one of the most sought-after names in the world of design.

In the figure of Jean Prouvé, avant-garde and commitment went hand in hand. The French architect and designer succeeded in making social utopia a reality, at least within his margins of action, when after World War II the bombed cities needed rapid reconstruction.

On March 9, Setdart will hold one of its longest-running auctions in terms of the dating of the pieces. Its wide range includes a careful selection of weapons dating from the Lower Paleolithic (whose beginning dates back to 300,000 BC) to the Neolithic and the Age of Metals, as well as Egyptian idols from the Nagada II period.

Number 18 Fontanella Street, a discreet street in Barcelona’s Eixample, was home to a small frame and gilding workshop in the early twentieth century that over the decades would become an unavoidable enclave for any lover of furniture and decoration.

Pere Cosp was barely twenty years old when, taking the reins of the family workshop, he began to be sought after by personalities of the high bourgeoisie who wanted to redecorate their homes. By then, he was already redirecting the company towards interior design and integral decoration. The restless young man, who had grown up among marble carvings and baroque mirrors, among moldings and gilding, had learned his trade well. But that was not enough for the artist’s soul that was beginning to awaken in him.

The name of the city of Florence directly evokes the cradle of the Renaissance, the cultural splendor under the rule of the Medici family. The names of Donatello, Michelangelo, da Vinci, Boticelli, just to mention a few, are equal to the fame of the city of the Arno. We have settled in the collective imagination the Florence of the quattrocento and cinquecento, but what was it like during the Baroque period?

The Medici family continued to prosper generation after generation until it embraced power beyond the borders of Florence. Around the 14th century, a few petty bourgeois became the bankers of half of Europe and governed an important part of the Italian peninsula. In the middle of the fifteenth century, Cosimo I received from the pope the title of Grand Duke of Tuscany. From then on the dynasty will be equated with the ancient monarchies of Europe.

Setdart’s March 8 auction gives us the opportunity to make a comparative study between key pieces of both figures. Let’s take two lamps that are currently out to tender, two landmark lamps in the history of design, and “intertwine their bulbs”. This will result in a stimulating play of light. We refer to the pair of lamps with wrought iron feet by Pere Cosp, from a summer house located in Sant Andreu de Llavaneras with an interior designed entirely by the author in 1948-1949) and the iconic “Potence” lamp by Jean Prouvé, one of his most renowned pieces for the confluence of austerity and elegance.

On March 2, a notorious collection of oriental pieces will be auctioned at Setdart, where Ming and Qing porcelain will take center stage. Tradition and renovation go hand in hand to offer us a privileged vision of the artistic versatility that was achieved in these periods.

The tender of the 4 charcoal portraits of Luis Fernandez sheds light on one of the most brilliant, yet unknown stages of the artist.

What must a piece have to make a collector fall in love with it? Beauty, rarity and state of conservation are the main qualities.

The private collection presented by Setdart is a perfect example of dedication to the search for treasures from all over the world, covering different periods, materials and authors. Half a century of research, traveling the world, served to create an extraordinary collection based in London. The eclectic taste reflects an overflowing interest in a multitude of disciplines, from decorative arts to contemporary painting.

Interest could not be enough to find these pieces. The precise knowledge of each subject indicates the collector’s good eye, knowing how to recognize in a neoclassical biscuit, one of the last examples of the Buen Retiro, or in a wine decanter from the Royal Factory of Martinez, the coat of arms of a viceroy in America.

Jordi Pintó: between utopia and reality

Jordi Pintó’s utopian geometries come to Setdart with one of his characteristic urban views.

Habitual for decades of the national art scene, the painter born in Cardona is now also an international attraction thanks to its growing presence in contemporary art fairs such as Turin, Singapore and Hong Kong. Its success in the recent exhibition Viva Arte Seoul, held at the Hyundai Museum ALT1, confirms once again that Spanish art has launched its conquest of the powerful Asian market.