Lesley Vance "Untitled," Courtesy FLAG Art Foundation

By Mackie Healy, Art Market Views, Contributor

New York’s FLAG Art Foundation has announced what sounds like a plush artist perk: an inaugural summertime Hamptons art residency program (assigned the catchy acronym SHARP) for 2011. Lucky Los Angeles-based painter Lesley Vance has been named the first SHARP recipient.

The program supports emerging artists by providing a studio and living space for six weeks in a private farmhouse in seaside Sagaponack, Long Island.

The Hamptons have long been a refuge for New York artists. Back in the pre-air conditioning days,  when land was cheap, Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner’s Springs home and painted splattered studio in was part of a larger East Hampton artists colony, which included fellow Ab-Exers Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell and others. Andy Warhol also owned a waterfront estate in the surfers’ enclave, Montauk.

Represented by L.A.’s David Kordansky Gallery, Lesley Vance’s has been featured in the 2010 Whitney Biennial, as well as at the Vancouver Contemporary Art Gallery, the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis, and The Suburban, Chicago. Inspired by 17th century Spanish still-lives, Vance dramatically stages objects and…

Florian Schmidt "Untitled(Community)10," 2010 Lacquer, vinyl, oil, cardboard, wood 12.99 x 9.45 inches, via Zach Feuer website

A shipping snafu caused Florian Schmidt’s artworks to arrive after his Chelsea opening last evening.

As a consolation, his dealer, Zach Feuer, held a pizza party the following day to usher in the show.

Hiroyuki Doi standing beside his "The Transmutation of the Soul, HD 2819" at Ricco/Maresca. © Photo: Lindsay Pollock

Japanese artist Hiroyuki Doi, 64, sporting Jackie O sunglasses and a mischievous smile, spoke this past Saturday afternoon about the death of his brother, the wonders of washi paper and his desire to draw the smallest circles on earth. He addressed a group of fans, including collector Audrey Heckler, who had gathered on a brisk Chelsea afternoon at Ricco/Maresca Gallery.

“My challenge, precisely, is how small circles I can draw,” said Doi, speaking through a translator. Doi’s drawings contain thousands of pulsating, clustered orbs, inked with a trusty Pilot pen. His drawings are at once microscopic and while paradoxically appearing to contain the infinite vastness of the universe, or a star-filled sky, observed Doi’s dealer Frank Maresca. They are simultaneously minimal and maximal, noted Maresca.

Doi is a chef by training. He continues to teach elderly Japanese men to cook as a sideline.

The death of a younger brother 37-years-ago triggered his artistic impulse, first represented by landscapes and floral images. His 20-year-old brother died of a brain tumor. “That was very shocking,” said Doi. “It was a big loss for me.”

He found his metier in corn…

John D'Agostino's 2008 "Empire of Glass" series, based on Louis Comfort Tiffany glass fragments.

Rebecca Senf, a photography curator at the Center for Creative Photography and the Phoenix Art Museum, made her 13 top picks earlier this year.

Here is her list accompanied by links to artist websites:

Jane Fulton Alt – The Burn

John D’Agostino – Empire of Glass

Desiree Edkins – Lishui

Cheryl Hanna-Truscott – Protective Custody

Dave Kennedy - The Twelve

Benjamin Lowy – Iraq – Perspectives

Rita Maas – Reality TV

Adam Magyar – Urban Flow

Andrew Freeman – (Manzanar) Architectural Double

Robert Weingarten – The Portrait Unbound

Melvin Sokolsky – Bubble Spring Collection

Evan Baden – Illuminati

Richard Misrach – New Work at Pace/MacGill Gallery

Sam Messenger "Untitled" 2010, pen, white ink and watercolor on paper, $4,000. Photo: Davidson Contemporary

Looking back over my notes and photos from Art Basel week, I am reminded of Sam Messenger, a young London artist whose delicate web-like pen and ink drawings were among my favorite discoveries.

Several drawings were on view at Davidson Contemporary at the Pulse fair.

By Mackie Healy, Art Market Views Contributor

There’s no question Modigliani is having a moment, especially where auctions are concerned. On Nov. 2 a lush nude sold for a record-smashing $68.9 million at Sotheby’s in New York.

Coming this March: a new artist biography. Seasoned biographer Meryle Secrest has penned Modigliani: A Life.

She previously published books on Salvador Dali, Frank Lloyd Wright, Joseph Duveen, Stephen Sondheim and others. She was a finalist for the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for book about Renaissance art historian Bernard Berenson and a 2006 recipient of the National Humanities Medal.

Modigliani, who died at 35, has been mythologized as a free-wheeling, hard-drinking bohemian artist.  Secrest’s book will present a new interpretation, shattering Modigliani’s hard-core, hashish puffing party-boy image.

The artist hailed from a small Italian town outside of Tuscany. He moved to Paris in 1906 and joined a heady modernist circle including Pablo Picasso, Diego Rivera and Juan Gris. Secrest’s book chronicles his artistic training, his impoverished upbringing, and fatal battle with tuberculosis.

The book is available from Knopf in March.

Jacob Kassay painting sold at Kitchen benefit on Nov. 16 for $94,000

The recession is not stifling Jacob Kassay. Prices for his elegant, minimal, silver paintings, have spiked ten-fold this month.

At his rather startling auction debut at a Phillips de Pury Nov. 9 day sale,  a 2009 acrylic and silver deposit canvas, tagged to sell for up to $8,000 went bananas, selling for $86,500.

Last week, at a Kitchen benefit auction, a silvered 2010 work zoomed above the $12,000 “retail value,” selling for $94,000 according to two sources who attended the sale.

The last time I came face to face with a few smaller Kassays, in a group show earlier this year, the work was attractively priced $2,200. They were, not surprisingly, sold.

Kassay has met plenty of critical and market acclaim in the past few years. He has participated in dozens of shows, including recent solo presentations at Art: Concept in Paris and the 8th Gwangju Biennale in South Korea.

What’s the deal? A few in-the-know dealers told me Pace Gallery is making a play for Kassay. I emailed the gallery last week, but got no response.

A dealer told me he suspected Pace may have…

Richard Woods scarf, for sale at Moss. Photo: Courtesy Moss

Mackie Healy, Art Market Views Contributor

Jeffrey Deitch has commissioned British artist Richard Woods to bedeck his Los Angeles pad with a Tudor style flourish. (Click here to see what he concocted for Adam Lindemann in the Catskills).

Thanks to Moss, the Soho design mecca, we can all have a little piece of Woods.

Moss is retailing a primary-hued  faux-wood paneling Logo No. 73 scarf, in an edition of 100. The 43-inch square silk scarf is priced $345.

Installation artist Richard Woods is best known for the homes, sites and even Lever House lobby he transforms with his bold, ironic, often historically derived patterns.

Woods cloaked the guard house at Manhattan’s City Hall Park with painted red-brick fibreboard during the summer of 2009, and the former Deitch Project’s storefront in 2002. He is represented by Perry Rubenstein Gallery.

Thomas Gentille, wearing a brooch of his own design, at Gallery Loupe. Photo: Courtesy Gallery Loupe

Thomas Gentille is undoubtedly a master of the brooch. New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art owns four. His creations can also be found in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, Munich’s Pinakothek der Moderne and Houston’s Museum of Fine Art.

An eminence grise in the art jewelry field, 74-year-old Gentille is little known in art circles, despite his work’s obvious connections to painting and sculpture, albeit on a small, wearable scale.

He studied painting and sculpture at the Cleveland Institute of Art in the 1950s. His work is spiritually bound to Minimalists like Agnes Martin and Donald Judd and Fred Sandback.

His astoundingly inventive show, Thomas Gentille Twenty First Century, is on view until Nov. 20 at the excellent Gallery Loupe in Montclair, New Jersey. I’ve included a selection of images below, priced about $3,000-$10,000.

The Ohio-born artist lives and works on the Upper East Side. He is a brilliant colorist, fastidious craftsman and wildly inventive with his materials, using pumice, bone, aircraft plywood, woods and eggshell.

Gallery Loupe has produced a 120-page catalog, designed by Gentille, available through the gallery. Click here for images.

Father Duffy, Times Square, New York City, 1974 by Lee Friedlander Gelatin Silver Print Image: 21.8 x 32.6 cm Via: Yale University Art Gallery eCatalogue

By Mackie Healy, Art Market Views Contributor

Lee Friedlander’s survey of vehicular bound compositions, America by Car, is on view at the Whitney Museum until Nov. 28. Fans can also get a Friedlander fix in New Haven.

The Yale University Art Gallery and Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library have acquired the complete Friedlander archive along with 2,000 prints.

The archive includes all of the photographer’s negatives, contact sheets, over thirty monographs, journals, correspondence, and preliminary work prints, along with books featuring his images. Over forty thousand rolls of film chronicle his creative process since the 1950s. The gallery will display 1,800 prints taken with his hallmark Hasselblad Superwide camera.

Friedlander, born 1934, studied photography at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. He moved to New York in mid-1950s, and began his career snapping portraits of jazz musicians for album covers. Recognized as one of the leading American social landscape photographers of the era, Friedlander’s signature black and white shots were featured in a 2005 retrospective at the MoMA. He represented by San Francisco’s Fraenkel Gallery.

Yale University’s Art Gallery…