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Yahoo
3 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
The incredible ceramics collection with a very surprising owner
Among the students of Oxford University, Sylvanus Sydney Denton was a name to be conjured with. For many years, he made his money selling bicycles to students, while simultaneously developing a passion for modern and contemporary ceramic art. He amassed a collection of over 220 examples which he kept in a specially built kitchen extension. Denton died last year at the age of 90 and his collection has gone on view at Sotheby's this week prior to being sold at the end of the month. It is estimated to fetch as much as £1.7 million. It is not known exactly when Denton caught the ceramic bug, but it was probably not until his late forties. Having done his National Service in Kenya he found work back home in Oxford fixing bikes and refurbishing caravans before investing in a bike and toy shop. By 1982 he had four shops and was displaying his ingenuity buying vintage 19th century bikes on which he posed for the local press. Sotheby's believes his journey to ceramics began with Modern British art (Henry Moore, LS Lowry and Barbara Hepworth) before he discovered more affordable ceramics by the likes of 1930s refugees from Nazi Germany, Hans Coper and Lucy Rie whose pots were beginning to be seen as fine art and superior to craft. According to the sale catalogue, one of Denton's earliest acquisitions was a work by Coper which he bought in 1988 at the trailblazing Oxford Gallery, which presented contemporary ceramics with avant-garde modern art by the likes of Terry Frost and Patrick Heron. Two works he bought there in the 1990s were by Edmund de Waal, the ceramicist and author of The Hare with Amber Eyes, long before he was swept up by the upmarket Gagosian contemporary art gallery. Denton also shopped at auction and in 1997 bought a Black Cycladic Form Arrow pot by Coper at Bonhams for about £9,000. To give an idea how Coper's prices have moved, another Cycladic Form Arrow pot bought by a different collector in the 1970s for £250 sold in 2018 for £381,000. Denton's example at Sotheby's is a comparatively tame £100,000 (check). Sotheby's describes Denton's collection as 'one of the finest collections of studio and contemporary ceramics in private hands'. Apart from Coper there are several delicate works by Rie in the £25,000-50,000 range, and a standout work by Elizabeth Fritsch, who is currently enjoying a high-profile exhibition at The Hepworth Wakefield museum near Leeds. Denton bought Fritsch's 20-inch, vividly coloured 'Spout' Pot (1998) for a double estimate record £10,160 at Bonhams in 2004, since when her record has risen to £51,400 last year. The estimate for Spout Pot has now doubled to £12,000-18,000. Another auction buy was a playfully twisted 'Monumental Body Pot', by Joanna Constantinidis which Denton bought for a record £1,600 at Bonhams in 2002, two years after she died. Posthumously, her prices have crept up to £15,000 for another Body Pot in 2021 so Denton's example, now estimated at £4,000-£6,000 should make more. His favoured method of acquisition, however, was to buy directly from the artists themselves; he was very popular with potters. One was Dame Magdalene Odundo, the British Nigerian who was the subject of an impressive exhibition at The Hepworth Wakefield in 2019. Three burnished terracotta pots by her in the sale all date from 1990/91, before she was famous. There is no record of their cost, but by this point art dealers were charging £5,000, compared to £250 in the 1970s. Since then, her prices have been multiplying. At auction in around 2010 they were selling for £10,000-£15,000, but after The Hepworth Wakefield show was announced and she was signed up by leading contemporary art dealer Thomas Dane, wealthy collectors like fashion designer Jonathan Anderson (who has been announced as the new head designer at Dior) began buying her work and at auction they soared to a record £533,400 for one of her pots in 2023. The estimate on that work was £100,000, a record for Odundo at the time. Now Sotheby's has gone a step further with two from Denton's collection estimated at £150,000 each. This is, though, a collection of value extremes. While most of the value is concentrated in just a handful of artists, the majority of lots are estimated at under £3,000 each, some with no reserve minimum price. Other artists include Janet and David Leach, the wife and son of the influential potter Bernard Leach, and Richard Batterham, a student of Leach who died in 2021 the same year that a pair of his pots hit a record £20,000 at auction. So, for fledgling ceramic collectors it's time to get on your bikes and bid. The sanctions that were imposed on Russian businesses after Putin's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 put an end to the regular art sales, worth millions of pounds, which London used to stage mainly for the benefit of Russian buyers. Russian art auctions in London went from being worth over £100 million a year to nothing. But last year, Sotheby's held a sale – unnoticed by the press – entitled Fabergé, Imperial & Revolutionary Works of Art, which included Russian paintings, and it exceeded its £2.9 million estimate to make £3.9 million. And this November they are planning a repeat. So what is going on? According to analysis conducted by advisory group Overstone Art Services, Russian art continues to appear, but in different sale categories – from Old Master and 19th century to Modern. Russian art can be bought and sold, so long as the client is not a Russian passport holder or on a sanctions list. This April, for instance, Sotheby's included two paintings by the 19th century artist Richard Zommer, who worked in Central Asia and would previously have been sold in a Russian art sale, in its sale of Orientalist art together with a variety of European artists. One of his paintings, a depiction of a chaikhana (or meeting place for travellers) on the Silk Road, was estimated at £20,000 and sold for a record £114,300. Trade sources believe the Russian art market is buoyant within Russia, better than property, and that Russian buyers are still active in the West but operate under a dual nationality, as Ukrainian, say, or Belarusian. In a statement released to the Telegraph last week, Sotheby's said: 'Today there is a significant diaspora of Russians who collect. As ever, we have worked to ensure that we are complying with sanctions and other restrictions placed on Russian clients and property of Russian origin. Where appropriate, we have also been offering Russian paintings in international sales across various selling locations. While the international auction market for Russian art remains significantly smaller than it was, we have seen areas of positive momentum.' The statement echoes Overstone's observation that while sale totals are down, average hammer prices for Russian artists have increased, indicating that 'growth is already beginning to occur. If this trend continues, it seems likely that the accessibility of the Russian paintings market will increase, thus allowing for the market to grow again when the situation is more settled.' Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
New York Times
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
How a High Line Curator Keeps Up With Art in Multiple Cities
Since joining the High Line as the director and chief curator of High Line Art in 2011, Cecilia Alemani has steered the elevated park's public-art program, commissioning works and performances and helping to foster civic engagement along its 1.45 miles. But her reach extends beyond the wildly popular greenway. Alemani curated the exhibit 'Willem de Kooning: Endless Painting' at Gagosian's West 24th Street gallery, which is open through June 14. Moving past the New York City limits, she was the artistic director of the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022, is curating the upcoming Site Santa Fe International and is working on a project for a new Paris institution slated to open in the fall of 2026. Alemani, 48, lives in the East Village with her husband, the New Museum artistic director Massimiliano Gioni, and their 9-year-old son, Giacomo. These are edited excerpts from phone interviews over seven days in late April that took her from downtown Manhattan to Chicago and back. Wednesday: Hitting the Lower East Side After dropping off my son at school, I went to the gym, then spent the morning at home doing office work. In the late afternoon, I went out to galleries on the Lower East Side, including Participant Inc, Magenta Plains and Bridget Donahue. We ended up at Perrotin for an exhibition by the Colombian artist Iván Argote, who has a major piece on the High Line, this giant pigeon called 'Dinosaur.' His show at Perrotin brings together more kind of guerrilla actions in the public space, including videos of him repairing sidewalks or dressing up existing statues. Thursday: Art Marathon in Chicago I woke up very early to catch a plane and go to the art fair Expo Chicago, where I was invited to give a talk. I don't go to Chicago that often, so I went a day earlier to catch a million shows in a very short time. I started with the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, where they had an exhibition by a collective from Uganda called Wakaliga Uganda. They produce action movies on incredibly low budgets, like, $200. Then I walked across to the Neubauer Collegium, where there was an exhibition by Betye Saar. It showcased drawings and archival materials and dresses from the 1970s, when she worked as a costume designer. I then took a cab to the Arts Club of Chicago for a very nice show of a Lebanese artist called Huguette Caland, and after that I went to an exhibition by the filmmaker Arthur Jafa at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. I ended my exhibition day at the Art Institute of Chicago. There was a very lovely exhibition of Frida Kahlo's time in Paris in the late 1930s. It brought together art and also lots of archival materials, documents and photographs. Walking around, I stumbled upon probably de Kooning's masterpiece, a painting called 'Excavation' that brings together abstraction and figuration in a very innovative way. As I do all this, I basically spend half of my time on the phone, answering emails or text messages and trying to coordinate with my teams. I can never let go, unfortunately, of digital communication. But it's also the exciting part of my job, to actually produce things and see them realized. Friday: Talking Art I spent the morning and afternoon just doing emails and working from my hotel room. My job involves very immediate communications, but I also have to write a lot, and review essays and texts. Then I went to Expo. It was quite refreshing to see many great presentations from Chicago galleries but also international ones. We had our talk, which was myself, Myriam Ben Salah, the chief curator and director of the Renaissance Society, and Julieta González, the head of exhibitions at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Ohio. We discussed the role of international curating — I'm Italian, Myriam is from Tunisia, and Julieta is from Venezuela, so thinking about what it means personally for us to work in America, but also what kind of perspective we can bring that is slightly different from other colleagues', or what are the main discrepancies or distinctions between curating in America and in the rest of the world. Afterward I went to the airport. Saturday: Artless, Almost The weekend is for time with our son, but unfortunately I had to do some work as well. Maurizio Cattelan, a dear friend, asked me to write a piece for the catalog of a show that he's doing in Portugal. Sunday: Wizardry on Broadway My son and I went to 'Harry Potter and the Cursed Child' on Broadway. It was refreshing to do something that was not a museum! He was eating all those weird Harry Potter jelly beans with flavors like vomit and booger. Since we were in Times Square, we visited my friends Marco Boggio Sella and Paololuca Barbieri Marchi, who are curating a show, 'R U Still Painting???,' in an abandoned office floor nearby. It's what I love about New York — you can see exhibitions in galleries and museums, but then there are always these pop-up shows, more grass-roots initiatives, often put together by artists. Monday: Pounding the High Line Pavement I had a very nice walk with Alvaro Barrington, whom we're going to show next year. We often show the High Line to artists by walking it and seeing how people interact. I checked on two major commissions, Mika Rottenberg and Tai Shani, we're installing at the High Line, then I went to Gagosian, where we had to do shots for the catalog. After that I went to the New Museum gala honoring the gallerist Paula Cooper, at Cipriani South Street. Tuesday: Inside Voices In the early afternoon I had a public conversation with Rosana Paulino, a Brazilian artist who made a beautiful mural on the High Line and also has a new show at Mendes Wood. Then I gave a tour of the de Kooning show for participants in the Hill Art Foundation's Teen Curators program. Hill Art is a nonprofit in Chelsea, so they are very much our neighbors. We often collaborate, and I often give them tours. The rest of the day is basically doing a million emails [laughs].
Time of India
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Time of India
Picasso's iconic works at Gagosian NY
Critic and Curator Uma Nair has been writing for the past 35 years on art and culture She has written as critic for Times of India and Economic Times. She believes that art is a progressive sojourn. She learnt by looking at the best shows in Washington D.C. and New York. As author her most important books are Reverie with Raza and Meditations on Trees by Ompal Sansanwal. LESS ... MORE Paris museums have plenty of Picassos, but Paloma Picasso's collections at Gagosian in NY are singular and gripping, reflecting a daughter's taste, love and experiences for her father. Pablo Picasso stands tall for his iconic portraits and groundbreaking contribution to modern art across the world. This collection is fascinatingly strong and brings back Pablo Picasso's words of 1945. Lifelong practice 'What do you think an artist is ? An imbecile who has only eyes ? On the contrary, he's a political being, constantly alive to heart-rending, fiery, or happy events . . . Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war for attack and defence against the enemy.' Gagosian says the essential element of Picasso's lifelong practice, precisely what keeps his work both relevant and timeless, is his ability to stay fluid, in contradiction, always in restless anxiety and flirting with making a failure of it all. Picasso: Tête-à-tête, presented in partnership with the artist's daughter Paloma Picasso presents the full span of the artist's career—1896 to 1972— including nearly a dozen works that have not been shown for decades. Drawn largely from Picasso's estate, Picasso: Tête-à-tête is the final exhibition to be held at Gagosian's flagship 980 Madison Avenue gallery in New York. Gagosian closes its doors in New York with a Picasso show that rings through its magnificent spaces in a never before unveiling by his daughter Paloma . The sculptures, drawings and the paintings all create a carnival of form and fervour and his words sing till eternity. ' You should constantly try to paint like someone else. But the thing is, you can't! You would like to. You try. But it turns out to be a botch. . . . And it's at the very moment you make a botch of it that you're yourself.' Founder and galleries Larry Gagosian says: ' I have been fortunate to present more than twenty exhibitions dedicated to Pablo Picasso throughout my career, and it seems only fitting that a blockbuster show of the artist's work should close out our time at 980 Madison. It is incredibly exciting to partner with Paloma on her first major international exhibition, and to bring to light so many works that have never been shown before. The finest portrait is Femme au béret bleu assise dans un fauteuil gris, manches rouges (Marie-Thérèse), 1937. Almond, watchful eyes glow , the eyelids, the mouth, the fragmented angular fingers — splay out as well as dominate in in this fluid, half-classical, half-Cubist profile. Marie is a gentle, graceful spirit. This portrait is an elegant cadence of colours and fragmented forms that become a singular whole. The cubist idioms, the colours in softened sensual hues, this portrait is perhaps the testimony to the fulcrum of his creative genius. His formal experimentation and emotional intensity is embodied in Femme au béret ( Marie Therese) shown in profile but with her features presented frontally in the style that he had pioneered in his earlier portraits . His employment of a bold, primary palette and an emphatic handling of colours tones mark this work out from the depictions of the early 1930s and chart Picasso's evolving relationship with his muse. Femme au vase de houx (Marie-Thérèse) The second portrait of Marie also from the same show is treated a little differently but ever so charismatic and enchanting. The still life and the portrait create an ensemble of elegance. Picasso's feminine portraits sing to us so many years hence. The crimson red lends this work an intensity that is only heightened by the colours of Marie's face as well as her clothing, the yellows, blues and greens, which are thrust into such bold relief through their contrast with the near-monochrome background. Meanwhile, the almost lavender-infused skin becomes like cool marble in contrast to these vivid colors. Picasso has filled the composition with jagged lines, peaks and striations, not least through the hatching of the hairnet of the title, bringing the sense of edginess and volatility that is often associated with his depictions of Dora. At the same time, the statuesque poise and the curves and swirls on her cheek bring out a sense of tenderness that is heightened by the skin tones, which themselves recall some of Picasso's earliest, less-stylised images of his lover. Stirring still lives and monochromatic magic Through the show, so ingenious in display we can gaze at monochromatic morsels that pull the human faces and bodies into geometric the few sculptures and the drawings and paintings we sense the passion and force of this artist who gave the world a new language. Sometimes it is brooding colour tones within contours of vitality, sometimes it is the lithe lines of a sculptural flat linearity. Corridors of the past The beauty of these unseen works is hinged on the words of Picasso himself that bring forward the corridors of conversations in the past. 'I shift about too much, I move too often,' Picasso told André Verdet in 1963. 'You see me here, and yet I've already changed, I'm already elsewhere. I never stay in one place and that's why I have no style.' This was evident in Picasso's very first exhibition, a show of sixty-four paintings and an unknown number of drawings at Ambroise Vollard's Paris gallery in 1901. In his review of that show, the critic Félicien Fagus wrote, 'One can easily discern . . . numerous probable influences. . . . Each is fleeting, no sooner caught than dropped. . . .The danger for him lies in this very impetuousness, which could so easily lead to facile virtuosity and easy success.' Run your eyes over the masterpieces from small to medium , and you are met with the sinuous, flowing lyricism that has been inspired by Marie-Thérèse Walter. At once we sense the atmospheric terms and fecund forms as well as pulsing colour and brilliance of an artist who still engages in mediums and materials. Picasso's daughter Paloma Picasso says: ' I was delighted when Larry suggested we work together on a significant exhibition. Showing my father's work as he wanted it to be seen—in conversation across subjects and periods—is a fitting tribute to his legacy. A number of the works we selected haven't been seen since my father had them in his studio and to have them reunited with important examples from other collections will be a very special event.' Images: Gagosian NY Facebook Twitter Linkedin Email Disclaimer Views expressed above are the author's own.
Times
10-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
‘My baby is ugly' — a candid warning about the horrors of motherhood
There has been a lot of brutally honest writing about motherhood in the 24 years since Rachel Cusk's memoir A Life's Work blew the whole maternal contentment racket wide open. The taboos on anxiety, depression, milk and gore are long gone. The only thing that might shock now would be a literary writer declaring her joy in having a baby. Even so, it's a surprise to read a woman admitting, as Sarah Hoover does in Motherload, to finding her baby 'ugly' and impossible to bond with. In her son, Guy, Hoover sees 'all my worst traits: weird eyes and big ears'. She writes that he 'meant as much to me as a stone-cold marble statue in the antiquities section of an art museum — aka something that I knew was valuable but not so much to me'. Hoover, 40, is a former director of the Gagosian gallery in New York, where she lives with her husband, the artist Tom Sachs. When they met in 2007 he was 41 and established, while she was a 23-year-old gallery assistant. For Hoover, anxious about her status, marriage represented 'my little power trip, a small corner I could control in the grand design of our relationship'. They married in 2012 and in 2017 Guy arrived. In retrospect the warning signs were clear. Hoover suffered from nausea during her pregnancy to the point that just thinking about lettuce could make her retch. Her labour was slow and agonising, the baby's spine pressing against hers with each contraction. Her husband was distracted by his work and emotionally unfaithful. On top of that the medical care she received was often not caring. When she asked a doctor about her relentless sickness, she was told to tolerate the 'discomfort' because 'you're nothing but a house for your baby for ten months'. The birth was even worse: the same doctor (a woman) manually broke Hoover's waters with little warning or explanation, causing 'pain so deep inside my body that I didn't even know it could hurt there'. For Hoover, this violation recalled every physical assault she had ever suffered, from groping to rape (Guy was born in the same week that Harvey Weinstein's abuses were exposed). 'I don't think I'll ever be able to reconcile that I'm supposed to allow medical instruments and penises inside this same cavity and just turn off the different emotions that each provokes,' she writes. A misandrist rage consumed her. She was angry all the time, especially at her husband. Instead of love for her son she felt terrible, overbearing fear: 'Every night, in my dreams, I watched the baby die … he'd be shot by snipers, thrown onto the train tracks, burnt up in a house fire.' Intrusive thoughts like these are relatively common among new mothers (I used to be haunted by the idea of dropping my baby down the stairs to my flat), but Hoover's were so ceaseless and vivid she came to think of them as a form of psychosis. • We need to tell the truth about what motherhood does to women Hoover is a great narrator of her descent, often funny and never self-exculpatory. 'My breakdown,' she writes, 'was embarrassing at times, especially considering how it exposed me as a puerile and spoiled little fool.' Without that caustic note it might indeed be hard to sympathise with a woman who could afford to hire a full-time, live-in nanny so she could escape into getting high as much of the time as possible. A particular low came when Hoover was dragged out to accompany her husband to a Guggenheim gala — she prepared for the art world's big night out by mixing mushrooms with the opioid Vicodin. Her post-pregnancy boobs broke the zip of her dress and her infuriated husband was left hissing: 'People are looking. Tracey Emin is looking. Your butt's out.' After this she rented a bungalow at the Chateau Marmont hotel in Los Angeles and took more drugs. The only point where Hoover lost me is when she got to the nub of her complaint, which is this: 'Birth and motherhood did not match up to the narrative I'd been fed and it felt like a nasty trick … I'd been misled.' Misled by whom, though? Where is the lie of motherly joy coming from? Certainly not from memoirs, which are dominated by unhappy domesticity. In the past couple of years alone, the poet Maggie Smith (You Could Make This Place Beautiful) and writer Leslie Jamison (Splinters) have taken on the Cusk mantle with their stories of maternal frustration and marital collapse. Surely no well-read young woman could come away with the idea that becoming a mother is a painless process. When Cusk published A Life's Work in 2001, one reviewer wrote, 'If everyone were to read this book, the propagation of the human race would virtually cease.' For what it's worth, I suspect there's a link between the rise of the motherhood misery memoir and the decline in fertility rates, but I think that it runs in the opposite direction. It's not that women are avoiding having children because they are reading these books. They are reading these books because they don't want to have children. Stories of lost selves, shattered relationships and wrung-out bodies are most appealing as a reminder of what you've avoided: this is some other poor cow's fate, not yours. Hoover writes that she had no interest in having a child until she and her husband decided to have one. Even if she did pay attention to what other women were saying about pregnancy, why would she — a person with no intention of getting pregnant — apply it to herself? All the warnings in the world mean little if you don't think they are addressed to you. • 'Negative tales of motherhood nearly put me off having a baby' For a quarter of a century the dominant mode of writing about motherhood has been negative. I have no ideological beef with the genre, 'but if its aim was to inform other women that a woman of Hoover's intelligence and education can still claim ignorance about the tough side of maternity, then that suggests it has failed.' please change to but if its aim was to warn the mothers to come, then you have to say that it's failed if a woman of Hoover's intelligence and education can still claim ignorance about the tough side of maternity. With the support of a therapist, Hoover was eventually able to confront her past and her not-so-loyal husband. 'Now I was glad to say I saw all men, all people, as unique entities capable of their own special brands of shitty and loving behaviours,' she writes. She also realises that her fears for Guy mean she probably always did love him through her crack-up. She feels, finally, like a mother — not just someone with a baby — and she finds purpose in being an advocate for better care for women. 'I will not stop talking about this until the end of time,' she writes. That's laudable, but my fear is if Hoover wasn't listening to Cusk et al for all those years, will anyone listen to Hoover now? The Motherload: Episodes from the Brink of Motherhood by Sarah Hoover (Simon & Schuster £20 pp352). To order a copy go to Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
Yahoo
06-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Paul McCartney's Rare Photos to Feature in Special L.A. Exhibition
Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what's in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience. Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what's in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience. Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what's in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience. Generate Key Takeaways Paul McCartney: Ringo rehearsing at the Deauville for our second live appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show (light leak), Miami Beach, 15 February 1964 - Credit: © Paul McCartney/ Courtesy the artist and Gagosian This spring, the art gallery Gagosian LA will exhibit 36 of Paul McCartney's recently rediscovered photos, including some that featured in the former Beatle's Eyes of the Storm book and many that have never been shown before. The photos were taken between December 1963 and February 1964. And the exhibition, titled 'Rearview Mirror: Photographs, December 1963–February 1964,' opens April 25 and runs through June 21. More from Rolling Stone One never-before-circulated shot (above) is an artistic view of Ringo Starr in a loose-fitting white shirt, drumming at Miami Beach's Hotel Deauville ahead of the the Beatles' second Ed Sullivan Show appearance. McCartney took the photo on Feb. 15, 1964. Poolside at the Pollaks', Miami, 15 February 1964 'The Beatles' manager Brian Epstein arranged for the band to play two live appearances on the popular Sunday television program, The Ed Sullivan Show: the first on Feb. 9 from the show's New York-based studio, and the second a week later, on Feb. 16, from Miami,' Joshua Chuang, director specializing in photography at Gagosian, tells Rolling Stone. 'The second performance was broadcast from the Deauville Hotel, the beachside resort in Miami Beach where the Beatles also stayed. At this point, Beatlemania was officially gaining steam in America and cheering fans were a constant; the press nicknamed the hotel 'Beatle Central,' as fans milled about the grounds and wrote the band messages in the sand below their balconies. 'The Beatles rehearsed for their performance in the hotel's 'cool room' near its outdoor pool, wearing hotel-issued toweling shirts,' Chuang continues. 'McCartney took photographs of his bandmates as they practiced their six-song set. Lennon, ever-so-cool, strums his guitar while wearing sunglasses, while Starr is framed in a psychedelic fog — an inadvertent interaction of light and chemistry that resulted in a one-of-kind image.' The exhibition includes other photos taken at the Deauville, as well as early selfies and images of Beatlemania. Prices for the photos, which are individually signed, will range from $15,000 to the high five figures. Proceeds from the sales of the photos will benefit recovery efforts for those affected by the recent southern California wildfires. An exclusive video from Gagosian shows McCartney reflecting on the photos and signing them, as well as sharing stories behind songs like 'Yesterday' and the Beatles' visit to the States. 'We didn't really know how important Ed Sullivan was,' he says. 'We hadn't heard of him. … By the time we got to America, that was the coolest thing. But when we went on this show, we didn't realize the significance. It's just another TV show, we thought.' Gagosian's exhibition complements the 'Paul McCartney Photographs 1963–64: Eyes of the Storm' exhibit, currently showing at San Francisco's de Young Museum. Chuang says the photos show McCartney's natural inclination toward visual art, citing the singer-songwriter's collaboration with artists like Peter Blake and Jann Haworth on the cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and Richard Hamilton on the cover of 'The White Album.' He also notes that McCartney came up with the cover image for Abbey Road. 'Of course Paul is very much associated with the medium of photography — I'm thinking of the well-known photographs of him taken by the likes of David Bailey, Harry Benson, and Richard Avedon, and the fact that his first wife Linda and daughter Mary were and are photographers,' Chuang says. 'What isn't as well known, however, is Paul's own engagement with photography. There are a number of images from the mid-1960s of him with a camera, but his photos were never made public; he even forgot about them for a while! Their rediscovery is a major event, and working with Paul and his team to bring them into the world has been a privilege.' In his opinion, Chuang believes the photos provide an 'indispensable perspective' of the Beatles. 'I can't think of another time when a figure of such importance — not just musical but also cultural and historical — captured the very moment their impact was first being made with such compelling photographs,' he says. Best of Rolling Stone Sign up for RollingStone's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
