The Taittinger Champagne Art Collection Brut Millésimé

In 1983, Champagne Taittinger introduced the revolutionary naturally allied concept of the Taittinger Collection series, uniting art and champagne in the design of a series of special bottles.

The first of these, released with the superb 1978 vintage, was a striking gold bottle commissioned to Victor Vasarely; the second, with the 1981 vintage, Arman; the 1982 and 1983 bottles were created, respectively, by André Masson, master of the Surrealist movement; and Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, Portuguese artist of light and of the stained glass window.

The bottle created for the 1985 vintage was the first to be commissioned to an American artist, Roy Lichtenstein.

In the 1986 vintage by Hans Hartung and in the 1988 by the Japanese painter Imai.

Corneille was the next artist to decorate the 1990 collection followed by Matta, with the 1992 vintage.

The 10th collection, with the 1998 vintage, was created by Zao Wou-Ki. In 2007, the Taittinger Collection is rich of an eleventh Collection bottle, with the 2000 vintage, created by Rauschenberg, an American painter who came to prominence in the 1950s transition from abstract expressionism to Pop Art.

The Art of Vasarelly - Zebras...

TAITTINGER COLLECTION VASARELLY. Vintage 1978, released 1983

The first bottle design in the Taittinger Collection Series, for the 1978 vintage, was commissioned from Victor Vasarely (1906–1997), the Hungarian French Op Art (or Optical Art) master whose visual experiments informed the aesthetics of our digital age. Op art was a movement beginning in 1964 that involved mathematically precise optical illusions that often seem to be moving.

The Art of Arman - Chopin’s Waterloo, Arman, 1962, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France

TAITTINGER COLLECTION ARMAN. Vintage 1981, released 1985

Arman (November 17, 1928 – October 22, 2005) was a French-born American artist. Born Armand Pierre Fernandez in Nice, France, Arman is a painter who moved from using the objects as paintbrushes ("allures d'objet") to using them as the painting itself. He is best known for his "accumulations" and destruction/recomposition of objects.

Arman's father, Antonio Fernandez, an antiques dealer in Nice, was also an amateur artist, photographer, and cellist. From his father, Arman learned oil painting and photography. After receiving his bachelor's degree in philosophy and mathematics in 1946, Arman began studying at the école Nationale des Arts Décoratifs in Nice. He also started judo at a police school in Nice where he met Yves Klein and Claude Pascal. The trio bonded closely on a subsequent hitch-hiking tour around Europe.

Completing his studies in 1949, Arman enrolled as a student at the école du Louvre in Paris, where he concentrated on the study of archaeology and oriental art. In 1951, he became a teacher at the Bushido Kai Judo Club in Madrid. During this time he also served in the French military, completing his tour of duty as a medical orderly during the Indo-China War.

Inspired by an exhibition for the German Dadaist, Kurt Schwitters, in 1954, Arman began working on "Cachets," his first major artistic undertaking. At his third solo exhibition, held in Paris's Galerie Iris Clert in 1958, Arman showed some of his first 2D accumulations he called "cachets." These stamps on paper and fabric proved a success and provided an important change of course for the young artist's career.

At the time, he was signing with his first name as an homage to Van Gogh, who also signed his works with his first name, "Vincent." And, thus, in 1957, Arman chose to change his name from Armand to Arman. On January 31, 1973, upon becoming a citizen of the United States, he took the American civil name, Armand Pierre Arman.[2] Nevertheless, he continued to use "Arman" as his public persona.

From 1959 to 1962, Arman developed his most recognizable style, beginning with his two most renowned concepts: "Accumulation" and "Poubelle" (French for "trash bin"). Accumulations were collections of common and identical objects which he arranged in polyester castings or within Plexiglas cases. His first welded accumulations were created in 1962.

The "Poubelles" were collections of strewn refuse. In 1960, he filled the Galerie Iris Clert in Paris with garbage, creating "Le Plein" ("Full Up") as a counterpoint of the exhibition called "Le Vide" at the same gallery two years earlier by his friend Yves Klein. These works began to garner the attention of the European art community.

In October 1960, Arman, Yves Klein, Fran?ois Dufrêne, Raymond Hains, Martial Raysse, Daniel Spoerri, Jean Tinguely and Jacques Villeglé, and art critic and philosopher Pierre Restany founded the Nouveau réalisme group. Joined later by Cesar, Mimmo Rotella, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Christo, the group of young artists defined themselves as bearing in common their "new perspective approaches of reality." They were reassessing the concept of art and the artist for a 20th-century consumer society by reasserting the humanistic ideals in the face of industrial expansion.

In 1961, Arman made his debut in the United States, the country which was to become his second home. During this period, he explored creation via destruction. The "Coupes" and the "Colères" featured sliced, burned, or smashed objects arranged on canvas, often using objects with a strong "identity" such as musical instruments (mainly violins and saxophones) or bronze statues.

Arman can be seen in Andy Warhol's film Dinner at Daley's, a documentation of a dinner performance by the Fluxus artist Daniel Spoerri that Warhol filmed on March 5, 1964. Throughout the portrait-screen-test film, Arman sits in profile, looking down, appearing to be entranced in his reading, seemingly unaware of Warhol's camera, only making small gestures, rubbing his eyes, and licking the corner of his mouth. He remained silent, eyes gazing over the pages of what seemed to be a newspaper, in this four-minute, 16mm black-and-white reel. Warhol owned two of Arman's Poubelles and another accumulation called Amphetamines, which were sold at Sotheby's auction of the Andy Warhol Collection in May 1988.

Fascinated with the scene in New York, Arman took up part-time residency there, from his home in Nice, in 1961, after his first exhibition at the Cordier Warren Gallery. In the city, he met Marcel Duchamp at a dinner given by the artist and collector William Copley. First living at the Chelsea Hotel and later in Church street while keeping a studio in Bowery, then in TriBeCa, Arman began work on large public sculptures. There were varied expansions of the accumulations, their content included tools, watches, clocks, furniture, automobile parts, jewelry, and, of course, musical instruments in various stages of dismemberment. Musical instruments, specifically the strings and bronze, through his collaboration with a foundry in Normandy, France, became a major avenue in Arman's work.

Of Arman's accumulations, one of the largest is Long Term Parking, which is on permanent display at the Chateau de Montcel in Jouy-en-Josas, France. Completed in 1982, the sculpture is an 18-meter (60-ft.) high accumulation of 60 automobiles embedded in over 18,000 kg (40,000 lbs.) of concrete. Just as ambitious was the 1995 work Hope for Peace, which was specially commissioned by the Lebanese government to commemorate 50 years of the Lebanese military's service. Standing in once war-torn Beirut, the 32-meter (105-ft.) monument consists of 83 tanks and military vehicles.

n 1953, Arman married electronic music composer Eliane Radigue and had two daughters, Marion (1951) and Anne (1953) and one son, Yves Arman (1954–1989). In 1971, he married Corice Canton, with whom he had one daughter, Yasmine (1982) and one son, Philippe (1987). In 1989, he had his sixth and last child, Yves Cesar Arman, son of Carrole Cesar.

After Arman's death in New York in 2005, part of his ashes were buried at the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris in 2008.

The Art of André Masson - L’homme emblématique, 1939. Oil on canvas, 65 cm by 81 cm (25-5/8 in. by 31-7/8 in.), (C) 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris, courtesy Blain Di Donna

TAITTINGER COLLECTION ANDRé MASSON. Vintage 1982, released 1987

André-Aimé-René Masson (4 January 1896 – 28 October 1987) was a French artist, born in Balagny-sur-Thérain, Oise, but was brought up in Belgium. He began his study of art at the age of eleven in Brussels, at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts under the guidance of Constant Montald, and later he studied in Paris. He fought for France during World War I and was seriously injured. 

His early works display an interest in cubism. He later became associated with surrealism, and he was one of the most enthusiastic employers of automatic drawing, making a number of automatic works in pen and ink. Masson would often force himself to work under strict conditions, for example, after long periods of time without food or sleep, or under the influence of drugs. He believed forcing himself into a reduced state of consciousness would help his art be free from rational control, and hence get closer to the workings of his subconscious mind. Masson experimented with altered states of consciousness with artists such as Antonin Artaud, Michel Leiris, Joan Miró, Georges Bataille, Jean Dubuffet, and Georges Malkine, who were neighbors of his studio in Paris. From around 1926 he experimented by throwing sand and glue onto canvas and making oil paintings based around the shapes that formed. By the end of the 1920s, however, he was finding automatism rather restricting, and he left the surrealist movement and turned instead to a more structured style, often producing works with a violent or erotic theme, and making a number of paintings in reaction to the Spanish Civil War (he associated once more with the surrealists at the end of the 1930s).

Under the German occupation of France during World War II, his work was condemned by the Nazis as degenerate. With the assistance of Varian Fry in Marseille, Masson escaped the Nazi regime on a ship to the French island of Martinique from where he went on to the United States. Upon arrival in New York City, U.S. customs officials inspecting Masson's luggage found a cache of his erotic drawings. Denouncing them as pornographic, they ripped them up before the artist's eyes.[citation needed] Living in New Preston, Connecticut his work became an important influence on American abstract expressionists, such as Jackson Pollock. Following the war, he returned to France and settled in Aix-en-Provence where he painted a number of landscapes.

Masson drew the cover of the first issue of Georges Bataille's review, Acéphale, in 1936, and participated in all its issues until 1939. His stepbrother, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, was the last private owner of Gustave Courbet's provocative painting L'Origine du monde (The Origin of the World); Lacan asked Masson to paint a surrealist variant.

The art of Maria Helena Vieira da Silva - The Corridor, 1950. Oil on canvas. TATE.

TAITTINGER COLLECTION MARIA HELENA VIEIRA DA SILVA, Vintage 1983, released 1988

Maria Helena Vieira da Silva (June 13, 1908 – March 6, 1992) was a Portuguese-French abstractionist painter, born in Lisbon, Portugal. At the age of eleven she had begun seriously studying drawing and painting at that city's Academia de Belas-Artes. In her teen years she studied painting with Fernand Léger, sculpture with Antoine Bourdelle, and engraving with Stanley William Hayter, all masters in their respective fields. She also created textile designs.

By 1930 Vieira da Silva was exhibiting her paintings in Paris; that same year she married the Hungarian painter árpád Szenes. After a brief sojourn back in Lisbon and a period spent in Brazil during World War II (1940–1947), Vieira da Silva lived and worked in Paris the rest of her life. She adopted French citizenship in 1956. Vieira da Silva received the French government's Grand Prix National des Arts in 1966, the first woman so honored. She was named a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor in 1979. She died in Paris, France on March 6, 1992.

By the late 1950s Vieira da Silva was internationally known for her dense and complex compositions, influenced by the art of Paul Cézanne and the fragmented forms, spatial ambiguities, and restricted palette of cubism and abstract art. She is considered to be one of the most important Post-War abstract artists although she is not a "pure" abstract painter. Her work is related to French Tachisme, American Abstract expressionism, and Surrealism—as were many of her contemporaries who were painting in Post-War Paris during the mid to late 1940s and early 1950s. Her paintings often resemble mazes, cities seen in profile or from high above or even library shelves in what seems to be an allegory to a never-ending search for Knowledge or the Absolute.

She exhibited her work widely, winning a prize for painting at the S?o Paulo Art Biennial in S?o Paulo in 1961.

She decorated in 1988 the new Cidade Universitária subway station of Lisbon with azulejo panels.

In November 1994, the árpád Szenes-Vieira da Silva Foundation was inaugurated in Lisbon, a museum that displays a large collection of paintings by both artists.

Her name sometimes appears written as Maria Elena Vieira da Silva, but the correct version, in Portuguese, is Maria Helena Vieira da Silva.

The Art of Roy Lichenstein - Drowning Girl, 1963. Oil and synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 67 5/8 x 66 3/4" (171.6 x 169.5 cm). MoMA.

TAITTINGER COLLECTION ROY LICHENSTEIN. Vintage 1985, released 1990

Roy Lichtenstein (October 27, 1923 – September 29, 1997) was a prominent American pop artist. During the 1960s, his paintings were exhibited at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City and, along with Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, James Rosenquist, and others. He became a leading figure in the new art movement. His work definedthe basic premise of pop art better than any other through parody. Favoring the old-fashioned comic strip as subject matter, Lichtenstein produced hard-edged, precise compositions that documented while it parodied often in a tongue-in-cheek humorous manner. His work was heavily influenced by both popular advertising and the comic book style. He described Pop Art as, "not 'American' painting but actually industrial painting".

Lichtenstein then left New York to study at the Ohio State University, which offered studio courses and a degree in fine arts. His studies were interrupted by a three-year stint in the army during and after World War II between 1943 and 1946. After being in training programs for languages, engineering, and pilot training, all of which were cancelled, he served as an orderly, draftsman, and artist.

Lichtenstein returned home to visit his dying father and was discharged from the army with eligibility for the G.I. Bill. He returned to studies in Ohio under the supervision of one of his teachers, Hoyt L. Sherman, who is widely regarded to have had a significant impact on his future work (Lichtenstein would later name a new studio he funded at OSU as the Hoyt L. Sherman Studio Art Center).

Lichtenstein entered the graduate program at Ohio State and was hired as an art instructor, a post he held on and off for the next ten years. In 1949 Lichtenstein received an M.F.A. degree from the Ohio State University and in the same year married Isabel Wilson, who previously had been married to Ohio artist Michael Sarisky.

In 1951 Lichtenstein had his first solo exhibition at the Carlebach Gallery in New York. He moved to Cleveland in the same year, where he remained for six years, although he frequently traveled back to New York. During this time he undertook jobs as varied as a draftsman to a window decorator in between periods of painting. His work at this time fluctuated between Cubism and Expressionism. In 1954, his first son, David Hoyt Lichtenstein, now a songwriter, was born. His second son, Mitchell Lichtenstein was born in 1956.

In 1957, he moved back to upstate New York and began teaching again. It was at this time that he adopted the Abstract Expressionism style, being a late convert to this style of painting. Lichtenstein began teaching in upstate New York at the State University of New York at Oswego in 1958. However, the brutal upstate winters were taking a toll on his wife and him. They were divorced in 1965.

He married his second wife, Dorothy Herzka, in 1968. From 1970 until his death, Lichtenstein split his time between Manhattan and a house near the beach in Southampton, New York.

It was at this time, that Lichtenstein began to find fame not just in America but worldwide. He moved back to New York to be at the center of the art scene and resigned from Rutgers University in 1964 to concentrate on his painting. Lichtenstein used oil and Magna paint in his best known works, such as Drowning Girl (1963), which was appropriated from the lead story in DC Comics' Secret Hearts #83. (Drowning Girl now hangs in the Museum of Modern Art, New York.) Drowning Girl also features thick outlines, bold colors and Ben-Day dots, as if created by photographic reproduction. Of his own work Lichtenstein would say that Abstract Expressionists "put things down on the canvas and responded to what they had done, to the color positions and sizes. My style looks completely different, but the nature of putting down lines pretty much is the same; mine just don't come out looking calligraphic, like Pollock's or Kline's."

Rather than attempt to reproduce his subjects, his work tackled the way mass media portrays them. Lichtenstein would never take himself too seriously however: "I think my work is different from comic strips- but I wouldn't call it transformation; I don't think that whatever is meant by it is important to art". When his work was first released, many art critics of the time challenged its originality. His work was harshly criticized as vulgar and empty. The title of a Life magazine article in 1964 asked, “Is He the Worst Artist in the U.S.?” Lichtenstein responded to such claims by offering responses such as the following: "The closer my work is to the original, the more threatening and critical the content. However, my work is entirely transformed in that my purpose and perception are entirely different. I think my paintings are critically transformed, but it would be difficult to prove it by any rational line of argument". He discussed experiencing this heavy criticism in interview with April Bernard and Mimi Thompson in 1986. Suggesting that it was at times difficult to be criticized, Lichtenstein said, “I don’t doubt when I’m actually painting, it’s the criticism that makes you wonder, it does.

His most famous image is arguably Whaam! (1963, Tate Modern, London[27]), one of the earliest known examples of pop art, adapted a comic-book panel from a 1962 issue of DC Comics' All-American Men of War.[28] The painting depicts a fighter aircraft firing a rocket into an enemy plane, with a red-and-yellow explosion. The cartoon style is heightened by the use of the onomatopoeic lettering "Whaam!" and the boxed caption "I pressed the fire control... and ahead of me rockets blazed through the sky..." This diptych is large in scale, measuring 1.7 x 4.0 m (5 ft 7 in x 13 ft 4 in). Whaam is widely regarded as one of his finest and most notable works. It follows the comic strip-based themes of some of his previous paintings and is part of a body of war-themed work created between 1962 and 1964. It is one of his two notable large war-themed paintings. It was purchased by the Tate Modern in 1966, after being exhibited at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1963, and has remained in their collection since.

Lichtenstein began experimenting with sculpture around 1964, demonstrating a knack for the form that was at odds with the insistent flatness of his paintings. For Head of Girl (1964), and Head with Red Shadow (1965), he collaborated with a ceramicist who sculpted the form of the head out of clay. Lichtenstein then applied a glaze to create the same sort of graphic motifs that he used in his paintings; the application of black lines and Ben-day dots to three-dimensional objects resulted in a flattening of the form

Most of his best-known artworks are relatively close, but not exact, copies of comic book panels, a subject he largely abandoned in 1965. (He would occasionally incorporate comics into his work in different ways in later decades.) These panels were originally drawn by such comics artists as Jack Kirby and DC Comics artists Russ Heath, Tony Abruzzo, Irv Novick, and Jerry Grandenetti, who rarely received any credit. Jack Cowart, executive director of the Lichtenstein Foundation, contests the notion that Lichtenstein was a copyist, saying: "Roy's work was a wonderment of the graphic formulae and the codification of sentiment that had been worked out by others. The panels were changed in scale, color, treatment, and in their implications. There is no exact copy." However, some have been critical of Lichtenstein's use of comic-book imagery and art pieces, especially insofar as that use has been seen as endorsement of a patronizing view of comics by the art mainstream; noted comics author Art Spiegelman commented that "Lichtenstein did no more or less for comics than Andy Warhol did for soup."

In 1966, Lichtenstein moved on from his much-celebrated imagery of the early 1960s, and began his Modern Paintings series, including over 60 paintings and accompanying drawings. Using his characteristic Ben Day dots and geometric shapes and lines, he rendered incongruous, challenging images out of familiar architectural structures, patterns borrowed from Art Déco and other subtly evocative, often sequential, motifs.The Modern Sculpture series of 1967–8 made reference to motifs from Art Déco architecture.

In the early 1960s, Lichtenstein reproduced masterpieces by Cézanne, Mondrian and Picasso before embarking on the Brushstroke series in 1965.[34] Lichtenstein continued to revisit this theme later in his career with works such as Bedroom at Arles that derived from Vincent van Gogh's Bedroom in Arles.

In 1970, Lichtenstein was commissioned by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (within its Art and Technology program developed between 1967 and 1971) to make a film. With the help of Universal Film Studios, the artist conceived of, and produced, Three Landscapes, a film of marine landscapes, directly related to a series of collages with landscape themes he created between 1964 and 1966. Although Lichtenstein had planned on producing 15 short films, the three-screen installation — made with New York-based independent filmmaker Joel Freedman — turned out to be the artist's only venture into the medium.

Also in 1970, Lichtenstein purchased a former carriage house in Southampton, Long Island, built a studio on the property, and spent the rest of the 1970s in relative seclusion. In the 1970s and 1980s, his style began to loosen and he expanded on what he had done before. Lichtenstein began a series of Mirrors paintings in 1969. By 1970, while continuing on the Mirrors series, he started work on the subject of entablatures. The Entablatures consisted of a first series of paintings from 1971–72, followed by a second series in 1974-76, and the publication of a series of relief prints in 1976.[38] He produced a series of "Artists Studios" which incorporated elements of his previous work. A notable example being Artist's Studio, Look Mickey (1973, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis) which incorporates five other previous works, fitted into the scene.

In the late 1970s, this style was replaced with more surreal works such as Pow Wow (1979, Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen). A major series of Surrealist-Pop paintings from 1979–81 is based on Native American themes. These works range Amerind Figure (1981), a stylized life-size sculpture reminiscent of a streamlined totem pole in black-patinated bronze, to the monumental wool tapestry Amerind Landscape (1979). The "Indian" works took their themes, like the other parts of the Surrealist series, from contemporary art and other sources, including books on American Indian design from Lichtenstein's small library.

Lichtenstein's Still Life paintings, sculptures and drawings, which span from 1972 through the early 1980s, cover a variety of motifs and themes, including the most traditional such as fruit, flowers, and vases. In his Reflection series, produced between 1988 and 1990, Lichtenstein reused his own motifs from previous works. Interiors (1991–1992) is a series of works depicting banal domestic environments inspired by furniture ads the artist found in telephone books or on billboards.Having garnered inspiration from the monochromatic prints of Edgar Degas featured in a 1994 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the motifs of his Landscapes in the Chinese Style series are formed with simulated Benday dots and block contours, rendered in hard, vivid color, with all traces of the hand removed.[44] The nude is a recurring element in Lichtenstein's work of the 1990s, such as in Collage for Nude with Red Shirt (1995).

In addition to paintings and sculptures, Lichtenstein also made over 300 prints, mostly in screenprinting.

He died of pneumonia in 1997 at New York University Medical Center, where he had been hospitalized for several weeks. He was survived by his second wife, Dorothy Herzka, and by his sons, David and Mitchell, from his first marriage.

In 1969, Lichtenstein was commissioned by Gunter Sachs to create Composition and Leda and the Swan, for the collector's famous Pop Art bedroom suite at the Palace Hotel in St. Moritz. In the late 1970s and during the 1980s, Lichtenstein received major commissions for works in public places: the sculptures Lamp (1978) in St. Mary’s, Georgia; Mermaid (1979) in Miami Beach; the 26 feet tall Brushstrokes in Flight (1984, moved in 1998) at Port Columbus International Airport; the five-storey high Mural with Blue Brushstrokes (1984–85) at the Equitable Center, New York; and El Cap de Barcelona (1992) in Barcelona. In 1994, Lichtenstein created the 53-foot-long, enamel-on-metal Times Square Mural that now hovers over pedestrians in the Times Square subway station. In 1977, he was commissioned by BMW to paint a Group 5 Racing Version of the BMW 320i for the third installment in the BMW Art Car Project. The DreamWorks Records logo was his last completed project.[1] "I'm not in the business of doing anything like that (a corporate logo) and don't intend to do it again," allows Lichtenstein. "But I know Mo Ostin and David Geffen and it seemed interesting."

Pop art continues to influence the 21st century. Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol were used in U2's 1997, 1998 PopMart Tour and in an exhibition in 2007 at the British National Portrait Gallery.

Among many other works of art destroyed in the World Trade Center attacks on September 11, 2001, a painting from Lichtenstein’s The Entablature Series was destroyed in the subsequent fire.His work Crying Girl was one of the artworks brought to life in Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian.

The Art of Hans Hartung - Light painting.

TAITTINGER COLLECTION HARTUNG. Vintage 1986, released 1992

Hans Hartung (21 September 1904 – 7 December 1989) was a German-French painter, known for his gestural abstract style. He was also a decorated World War II veteran of the French Foreign Legion.

Hartung was born in Leipzig, Germany into an artistic family. He developed an early appreciation of Rembrandt, German painters such as Lovis Corinth, and the Expressionists Oskar Kokoschka and Emil Nolde. In 1924 he enrolled in Leipzig University, where he studied philosophy and art history. He subsequently studied at the Fine Arts academy of Dresden, where he copied the paintings of the masters. The modern French and Spanish works he saw in 1926 at the Internationale Kunstausstellung in Dresden were a revelation to him, and he decided that he would leave his native country to prevent succumbing to provincialism. Consequently, after a bicycle trip through Italy, he moved to Paris.

In Paris Hartung had little contact with other artists, and copied the works of old and modern masters. He visited the south of France, where the landscape inspired him to a close study of the works of Cézanne, and he developed a great interest in principles of harmony and proportion such as the golden section. In 1928 he visited Munich where he studied painting technique with Max Doerner. In 1929 he married the artist Anna-Eva Bergman and established himself in the French towns of Leucate, and then in the Spanish Balearic Islands, eventually settling in Minorca. He exhibited for the first time in 1931 in Dresden.

The death of his father in 1932 severed Hartung's last bonds with Germany. He was rejected from Nazi Germany on account of being a 'degenerate', because his painting style was associated with Cubism – an art movement incompatible with Nazi Germany's ideals. In 1935 when he attempted to sell paintings while visiting Berlin, the police tried to arrest him. He was able to flee the country with the help of his friend Christian Zervos.

After he returned to Paris as a refugee, Hartung and his wife divorced, and he became depressive. His paintings were becoming more abstract and did not sell well. His friends tried to help him with his financial difficulties, and the sculptor Julio González offered him the use of his studio. In 1939 Hartung married González’s daughter Roberta.

In December 1939, he became a member of the French Foreign Legion. He was closely followed by the Gestapo and arrested for seven months by the French police. After they learned he was a painter, he was put in a red cell in an attempt to disturb his vision. After being released he rejoined the Legion to fight in North Africa, losing a leg in a battle near Belfort. He earned French citizenship in 1945, and was awarded the Croix de Guerre.

In 1947 in Paris he had his first solo exhibition. By the late 1950s he had achieved recognition for his gestural paintings, which were nearly monochromatic and characterized by configurations of long rhythmical brushstrokes or scratches. In 1960 he was awarded the International Grand Prix for painting at the Venice Biennale.

Hartung's freewheeling abstract paintings set influential precedents for many younger American painters of the sixties, making him an important forerunner of American Lyrical Abstraction of the 1960s and 1970s. He was featured in the 1963 film documentary "School of Paris: (5 Artists at Work)" by American filmmaker Warren Forma.

In the 1970s, Hartung and Anna-Eva Bergman remarried. He died on 7 December 1989, in Antibes, France.

The Art of Imai - La Fête Printanière, 1973. Oil on canvas. Sotheby′s.

TAITTINGER COLLECTION IMAI. Vintage 1988, released 1994

Toshimitsu Imai was born in Kyoto in 1928. After finishing school in 1948, he trained at the Tokyo State Art Academy. Imai's early style of painting is reminiscent of the Fauves. Throughout Imai's career his work was distinguished by an acute sensitivity to colour. In 1951 Imai was awarded the Kansai-Shinseisaku Prize and in 1952 the prize for the best new artist at the 15th Shinseisaku Salon. After his first solo show in Japan, Imai moved to Paris in 1952. There he attended the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and the Sorbonne, where he completed a degree course in medieval history and philosophy.

Toshimitsu Imai showed paintings in 1953 and 1954 at the Salon de l'Art Sacré. Under the sway of new impressions and influenced by the critic Michel Tapié, Imai switched from representational to abstract art in March 1955. Imai's work can be classified as Informel. By organising a group show in Japan in 1956 and visiting his native country accompanied by Sam Francis and George Mathieu (1957), Toshimitsu Imai played a paramount role in introducing European Abstract art to Japan.

From 1956 Imai's own work was sold by Leo Castelli in New York and, from 1957, Galerie Stadler in Paris. The success Imai had with his work at the 1953 S?o Paulo Biennale and the 1960 Venice Biennale brought him international acclaim, followed by recognition at home in 1962: Toshimitsu Imai was awarded a prize at the 5th Exhibition of Japanese Contemporary Art in Tokyo and the Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo bought several of his paintings. However, Imai cannot be pigeon-holed as an abstract artist; he frequently experimented with figurative motifs.

After 1970 - Imai was commuting regularly between Paris and Japan by then - he integrated words into his paintings so that they became the support for poems. In 1982 Imai went to Paris while work of his was shown for two years at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and he began to integrate more Japanese elements into his pictures. In 1984 Imai was a co-founder of the Japanese Contemporary Artists' Association (JCAA). In 1988 and 1994 Imai designed labels with floral motifs for a champagne maker. 

Toshimitsu Imai was awarded numerous distinctions in France and elsewhere in Europe: in 1991 he was made an honorary citizen of Madrid, in 1992 of Lyon. In 1996 he was made a chevalier de la Légion d'honneur and in 1997 an Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. In his last work Imai turned to war as his theme, dealing with Japan's attacks on China in the 20th century and the destruction of Hiroshima and its inhabitants at the close of the second world war.

Toshimitsu Imai died after a long illness in 2002.

The Taittinger Art Collection Brut Millésimé

The Art of Corneille - L’oiseau. 1986. enamel on silver. 81/100 ex. 11x11x0,2 cm.

TAITTINGER COLLECTION CORNEILLE. Vintage 1990, released 1996

Guillaume Cornelis van Beverloo was born in 1922 in Liège, Belgium, to Dutch parents. After leaving school, he studied drawing at the Academy of Arts in Amsterdam from 1940 to 1943. As a painter, however, he was an autodidact.

His first exhibition was in 1946 in Groningen in the Netherlands, together with artists from the Dutch experimental group, Reflex.

Corneille first visited Paris in 1946 and felt immediately at home in the art metropolis. Together with Karel Appel, Asger Jorn, Dotremont and Constant, he founded the COBRA group in Paris 1948. Many other artists, poets and architects later joined the group, including the Swedish artists C-O Hultén, Max Walter Svanberg and Anders ?sterlin.

The works of Paul Klee and Joan Miró exerted a strong influence on Corneille and, like them, he too was inspired by African culture, with which he became well acquainted during several journeys to Africa. Initially his art was non-figurative, but he gradually turned to painting fantasy landscapes in warm tones, frequently characterised by symbiotic representations of female figures and birds. The woman represents beauty and voluptuousness, while the bird symbolises freedom and strength.

Since his debut in Groningen more than half a century ago, Corneille has taken part in hundreds of exhibitions at different galleries and is represented in museums all over the world.

Led by a fascination for Corneille and the joie de vivre of his paintings, our father, Siwert Bergstr?m, visited the artist in Paris in 1976, where the two of them met in a sidewalk café by the Rue de Clignancourt. Corneille promised to produce a sequence of engravings for Siwert’s gallery, then called Galleri K?nda M?lare and situated in J?nk?ping. This marked the beginning of a fruitful friendship and a close working relationship.

We were 14 and 12 years old respectively when Corneille first exhibited at the gallery on Bredgr?nd in J?nk?ping in 1978. Our memory of that first meeting with him is of a kindly man with a violet-coloured scarf and peering eyes whose penetrating gaze testified to the greatness of the human being behind them. In the years to come he would often visit us in our home and, as our proficiency in foreign languages improved, he was able to share with us his memories and his recollections of meetings with the great modern masters ? Picasso, Chagall and Miró to name but three. One anecdote that made a great impression on us dated from his years as a poor, hungry young artist in Amsterdam in the late 1940s, when the COBRA Group was just beginning to take shape. Karel Appel, with whom he shared a studio, had succeeded in selling a painting and had raced off to buy a huge chunk of steak which he subsequently cooked and ate up in front of Corneille – without offering him the tiniest morsel! He would never forget that story. And nor will we!

It was Corneille who encouraged our father to move the gallery to Stora Nygatan in Malm? in 1984. Together they produced a large number of graphic editions and art books together, which led to numerous visits and exhibitions over the course of the years. Corneille became one of the cornerstones on which the gallery’s success was built and is – metaphorically speaking, at least – part of the very fabric of our business and the building.

In accordance with his wishes, Corneille will be laid to rest beside his fellow countryman and predecessor, the great master, Vincent van Gogh: two artists from totally different eras, with different life histories behind them, who are nevertheless sure to discover that they share a great deal in common.

We will miss the slight, bearded gentleman with the peering gaze and the violet neck-scarf, but his spirit lives on in his brightly coloured and highly imaginative paintings.

Corneille played a big part in our upbringing and our education into the world of art. He is an important representative of his age, whose work still continues to spread joy and inspiration. We are convinced that he has earned his rightful place in the art history of our time – as an artist who truly knew how to celebrate womanhood, joy and all that is beautiful in life.

The Art of Roberto Matta - M’onde, 1989

TAITTINGER COLLECTION MATTA. Vintage 1992, released 1998

In the prevailing philosophy of the Orient, the immeasurable (i.e. that which cannot be named, described, or understood through any form of reason) is regarded as the primary reality. . . . To Western society, as it derives from the Greeks, measure, with all that this word implies, is the very essence of reality, or at least the key to this essence, in the East measure has now come to be regarded commonly as being in some way false and deceitful.

 . . . We proposed that a new notion of order is involved here, which we called the implicate order (from a Latin root meaning ‘to enfold’ or ‘to enfold inward’). In terms of the implicate order one can say that everything is enfolded in everything. This contrasts with the explicate order. . . in which things are unfolded in the sense that each thing lies only in its own region of space (and time) and outside the regions belonging to other things.

• David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order(1

In 1940, in a one-person show at the Julien Levy Gallery, “the most important commercial showcase for Surrealist art in New York,” as H. H. Arnason wrote, Roberto Matta’s unprecedently large canvases -- they were thought to be “oversized” at the time -- “had a momentous impact on American experimental artists,”(2) that is, the Abstract Expressionists, perhaps most noteworthily Jackson Pollock, who began to use similarly sized canvases four years later. Matta, along with Arshile Gorky, was the last painter “claimed for Surrealism by André Breton,” and continues to be thought of as a Surrealist, a sort of Abstract Surrealist. But whatever the “psychic automatism” involved in his paintings -- however profound and intense the feelings they express, however complex the unconscious fantasies invested in them, however bizarrely dream-like they may seem -- what seems more important today, from the viewpoint of painting, is their enormous size and grandeur. Their “cosmic” magnificence -- and, one might add, colorful munificence, that is, vitalizing fullness, in contrast, say, to the black emptiness of the Rothko Chapel -- remains a landmark in the modern urge to transcend the measurable world and engage the immeasurable that began with Kandinsky’s “mystical” abstractions. It was unconscious in them, and became self-conscious in Matta’s last abstractions. 

The “cosmic mysticism” that James Thrall Soby admired in Matta’s Disasters of Mysticism (1942) -- a relatively small painting (38? x 51? in.) compared to the enormous Architecture du temps (un point sait tout) (14 ft. 11 in. x 21 ft. 9? in.), painted in 1999, three years before his death -- has been misunderstood, as Soby did, as a kind of representation of “the ever-changing universe of outer space,” or, as has also been suggested, an attempt to articulate the hallucinatory architecture of inner space, reminding us that Matta had “one foot in architecture and one foot in dreams” (his words), suggesting the correlation of outer space and inner space in his abstractions.

But the importance of the exhibition of his last paintings at Pace Gallery -- it commemorates his 100th birthday -- makes it clear, at least to my mind, that his paintings have only secondarily to do with outer and inner space. The exhibition traces, with canny discrimination, the steady enlargement of his canvases, showing how they make manifest the intellectual intention latent in Matta’s early intention of expressing “important emotion” (1953). In my opinion, he did not fully become conscious of the intellectual intention implicit in his art until it became clearly evident in his last paintings, that is, until he had worked through his own important “surreal” emotions (and with that his self-importance), discarding and transcending them in the process, to gain an important insight into the cosmos. The cosmic grandeur of Matta’s late paintings convey the immeasurability of the cosmos -- the emotion this “mystical” or “numinous” experience of its immeasurability arouses attempts to take its subjective measure, but is not equal to its reality.

I am arguing that Matta’s last cosmic paintings are less emotional than they seem -- that an emotional reading of them sells their intellectuality short. They are not about the “mindless” feelings of a surreally deranged and delirious self, but a “mindful” contemplation of a cosmos in which there is no self. Their ingenious mix of fluidity and form, the intricate friction and tension between the definite and indefinite that is the intellectual substance of Matta’s last paintings, is an uncannily precise “rendering” of the “dialectical” intimacy -- interdependence, as it were -- of primary and secondary reality. The former is conveyed by the illimitable atmospheric flux that informs Matta’s surfaces, the latter symbolized by the geometrical architecture that crystallizes or precipitates out of the flux. Matta was less a Surrealist than he was thought to be -- and than he thought himself to be -- but rather an explorer of the terra incognita of the immeasurable.

Whether organically amorphous or inorganically architectural, the forms in such huge masterpieces as L’homme descend du signe (1975), The Fall (Autoritratto d’ognnuno) (1991), Comment une conscience se fait univers (peut etre) (1992), Morphologie de l’ame (1996) and Montre qui montre le montreur (1997), are not simply surreally magical but struggle to take the measure of the cosmic space they exist in and emerge from. They fail to do so adequately -- they are failed signs of secondary reality, hieroglyphs suggesting its possibility. They don’t “actualize” reality, but are a sort of hallucinatory halfway house between the real and the unreal, which is why they look irreal. They spontaneously crystallize or precipitate out of the immeasurable, the primary reality which is Matta’s subject matter, evoked by his enormous paintings, which seems to expand infinitely as one looks at them. The secondary organic growths continue to grow, but they can’t fill the cosmic space, only mark it like tokens of its immeasurability, which grows on one, as the secondary architecture does, propelling its way towards our eyes, as though to give us some perspective on it, creating the illusion that we can measure the immeasurable. Both create transient regions of space -- space is protean in Matta’s paintings, always changing form, and with that evoking the immeasurable within its measurability, always nominal rather than foundational. 

Roberto Matta - The Earth is a Man.

The word “measure” implies control, the triumph of human consciousness over cosmic matter -- the absolutization of consciousness as the measure of the universe (thus Pythagoras’ “Man is the measure of all things,” suggesting that consciousness is always able to take the measure of the universe, for measure is assumed to be imminent in all things rather than imposed on them from some intellectual outside) -- but in Matta’s last paintings man is not the measure of all things, and is not visible anywhere. What is visible is the endless enfolding and unfolding of forms, the endless enfolding and unfolding of the primary reality of the invisible immeasurable and the visible secondary reality of the measurable, comprised of complicated natural and simple geometrical forms, the former including human nature, the latter the basic building blocks of the cosmos, as the reasoning Greeks thought.

But, as Cosmos Mental (1991) suggests, the cosmos seems to be falling apart and coming together at once, disintegrating and integrating in an endless cycle. Undifferentiated and differentiated chaos is the measure and sign of the cosmos’ immeasurability. It has no basis, unless the mercurial dialectic of the implicate and explicate orders, evident in Matta’s last paintings, is one. It was generative of his inexhaustible creativity, as the fact that he continued to make great paintings until the end of his life indicates.  

“Matta: A Centennial Celebration,” Nov. 7, 2011-Jan. 28, 2012, Pace Gallery, 534 West 25th Street, New York, N.Y. 10011.

DONALD KUSPIT is distinguished professor emeritus of art history and philosophy at SUNY Stony Brook and A.D. White professor at large at Cornell University.

The Art of Zao Wou-ki - Composition.

TAITTINGER COLLECTION ZAO WOU KI. Vintage 1998, released 2003

Zao Wou-Ki (simplified Chinese: 赵无极; traditional Chinese: 趙無極; pinyin: Zhào Wú Jí; born 13 February 1921 in Beijing) is a Chinese-French painter.

He was born in a cultivated family and studied calligraphy in his childhood and from 1935 to 1941 painting at the school of Fine Arts in Hangzhou. In 1948, he went with his wife Lan-lan, a composer, to Paris to live on the same block in Montparnasse where the classes of émile Othon Friesz took place. His earliest exhibitions in France were met with praise from Miró and Picasso.

Husband and wife each pursued his/her own career, their son having stayed on in China with his paternal grandparents. In the mid-1950s, they were divorced, and in 1957, Zao Wou-ki decided to visit the US where his younger brother Chao Wu-Wai lived in Montclair, New Jersey, close to the art scene in New York City. His good friends, M. and Mme. Pierre Soulages, travelled with him. Zao wanted to learn more about Pop Art, which was then beginning to grab a lot of attention world-wide. He was not interested in their aesthetic and said that he had a difficult time understanding its raison d'être – not surprising since he was unfamiliar with American popular culture. He enjoyed meeting the artists at their watering holes, the Cedars and the Five Spot for long evenings of talk.

While in the US, he painted seven canvases at his brother’s house. There are relatively few items dating from that year (1957). Years later, the largest canvas was given by his brother, Chao Wu-Wai, to the Detroit Institute of Arts.[1] He left the US after a six week stay, travelling to Tokyo and then Hong Kong, where he met his future wife, actress Zhu Ying, a beautiful movie star with two young children. She later became a sculptor who received admiring and critical praise. She committed suicide at the height of her career.

His works, influenced by Paul Klee, are orientated to abstraction. He names them with the date in which he finishes them, and in them, masses of colours appear to materialise a creating world, like a big bang, where light structures the canvas. He works often big formats in triptychs and diptychs.

While his work is stylistically similar to the Abstract Expressionists whom he met while travelling in New York, he is also influenced by Impressionism. Zao Wou-ki himself has stated that he has been influenced by the works of Matisse, Picasso, and Cézanne.

His meeting with Henri Michaux pushed him to review his Indian ink techniques, always based in Chinese traditional drawings.[citation needed]

Zao Wou-ki is a member of the Académie des beaux-arts, and is considered one of the most successful Chinese painters alive. One of his paintings recently sold for a record price equivalent to 2 million USD at the Sotheby's in Hong Kong. Former French President Jacques Chirac was offered a painting by Zao Wu Ki by his ministers during their last meeting.The Taittinger Art Collection Vintage Brut by zao wou-ki, 2003.

Zao Wou-Ki (simplified Chinese: 赵无极; traditional Chinese: 趙無極; pinyin: Zhào Wú Jí; born 13 February 1921 in Beijing) is a Chinese-French painter.

He was born in a cultivated family and studied calligraphy in his childhood and from 1935 to 1941 painting at the school of Fine Arts in Hangzhou. In 1948, he went with his wife Lan-lan, a composer, to Paris to live on the same block in Montparnasse where the classes of émile Othon Friesz took place. His earliest exhibitions in France were met with praise from Miró and Picasso.

Husband and wife each pursued his/her own career, their son having stayed on in China with his paternal grandparents. In the mid-1950s, they were divorced, and in 1957, Zao Wou-ki decided to visit the US where his younger brother Chao Wu-Wai lived in Montclair, New Jersey, close to the art scene in New York City. His good friends, M. and Mme. Pierre Soulages, travelled with him. Zao wanted to learn more about Pop Art, which was then beginning to grab a lot of attention world-wide. He was not interested in their aesthetic and said that he had a difficult time understanding its raison d'être – not surprising since he was unfamiliar with American popular culture. He enjoyed meeting the artists at their watering holes, the Cedars and the Five Spot for long evenings of talk.

While in the US, he painted seven canvases at his brother’s house. There are relatively few items dating from that year (1957). Years later, the largest canvas was given by his brother, Chao Wu-Wai, to the Detroit Institute of Arts.[1] He left the US after a six week stay, travelling to Tokyo and then Hong Kong, where he met his future wife, actress Zhu Ying, a beautiful movie star with two young children. She later became a sculptor who received admiring and critical praise. She committed suicide at the height of her career.

His works, influenced by Paul Klee, are orientated to abstraction. He names them with the date in which he finishes them, and in them, masses of colours appear to materialise a creating world, like a big bang, where light structures the canvas. He works often big formats in triptychs and diptychs.

While his work is stylistically similar to the Abstract Expressionists whom he met while travelling in New York, he is also influenced by Impressionism. Zao Wou-ki himself has stated that he has been influenced by the works of Matisse, Picasso, and Cézanne.

His meeting with Henri Michaux pushed him to review his Indian ink techniques, always based in Chinese traditional drawings.[citation needed]

Zao Wou-ki is a member of the Académie des beaux-arts, and is considered one of the most successful Chinese painters alive. One of his paintings recently sold for a record price equivalent to 2 million USD at the Sotheby's in Hong Kong. Former French President Jacques Chirac was offered a painting by Zao Wu Ki by his ministers during their last meeting.

The Art of Robert Rauschenberg

TAITTINGER COLLECTION ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG. Vintage 2000, released 2007

Robert Rauschenberg (October 22, 1925 – May 12, 2008) was an American painter and graphic artist whose early works anticipated the pop art movement. Rauschenberg is well known for his "Combines" of the 1950s, in which non-traditional materials and objects were employed in innovative combinations. Rauschenberg was both a painterand a sculptor and the Combines are a combination of both, but he also worked with photography, printmaking, papermaking, and performance. He was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1993.

Rauschenberg's approach was sometimes called "Neo Dadaist," a label he shared with the painter Jasper Johns. Rauschenberg was quoted as saying that he wanted to work "in the gap between art and life" suggesting he questioned the distinction between art objects and everyday objects, reminiscent of the issues raised by the "Fountain", by Dada pioneer, Marcel Duchamp. At the same time, Johns' paintings of numerals, flags, and the like, were reprising Duchamp's message of the role of the observer in creating art's meaning.

Alternatively, in 1961, Rauschenberg took a step in what could be considered the opposite direction by championing the role of creator in creating art's meaning. Rauschenberg was invited to participate in an exhibition at the Galerie Iris Clert, where artists were to create and display a portrait of the owner, Iris Clert. Rauschenberg's submission consisted of a telegram sent to the gallery declaring "This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so."

From the fall of 1952 to the spring of 1953 Rauschenberg traveled through Europe and North Africa with his fellow artist and partner Cy Twombly. In Morocco, he created collages and boxes out of trash. He took them back to Italy and exhibited them at galleries in Rome and Florence. A lot of them sold; those that did not he threw into the river Arno. From his stay, 38 collages survived. In a famously cited incident of 1953, Rauschenberg erased a drawing by de Kooning, which he obtained from his colleague for the express purpose of erasing it as an artistic statement. The result is titled Erased de Kooning Drawing.

By 1962, Rauschenberg's paintings were beginning to incorporate not only found objects but found images as well - photographs transferred to the canvas by means of the silkscreen process. Previously used only in commercial applications, silkscreen allowed Rauschenberg to address the multiple reproducibility of images, and the consequent flattening of experience that implies. In this respect, his work is contemporaneous with that of Andy Warhol, and both Rauschenberg and Johns are frequently cited as important forerunners of American Pop Art.

In 1966, Billy Klüver and Rauschenberg officially launched Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) a non-profit organization established to promote collaborations between artists and engineers.

In 1969, NASA invited Rauschenberg to witness the launch of Apollo 11. In response to this landmark event, Rauschenberg created his Stoned Moon Series of lithographs. This involved combining diagrams and other images from NASA's archives with photographs from various media outlets, as well as with his own work.

As of 2003 he worked from his home and studio in Captiva, Florida. His first project on Captiva Island was a 16.5-meter-long silkscreen print called Currents (1970), made with newspapers from the first two months of the year, followed by Cardboards (1970–71) and Early Egyptians (1973–74), the latter of which is a series of wall reliefs and sculptures constructed from used boxes. He also printed on textiles using his solvent-transfer technique to make the Hoarfrosts (1974–76) and Spreads (1975–82), and in the Jammers (1975–76), created a series of colorful silk wall and floor works. Urban Bourbons (1988–95) focused on different methods of transferring images onto a variety of reflective metals, such as steel and aluminum. In addition, throughout the 1990s, Rauschenberg continued to utilize new materials while still working with more rudimentary techniques, such as wet fresco, as in the Arcadian Retreat (1996) series, and the transfer of images by hand, as in the Anagrams (1995–2000). As part of his engagement with the latest technological innovations, he began making digital Iris prints and using biodegradable vegetable dyes in his transfer processes, underscoring his commitment to caring for the environment.

Already in 1984, Rauschenberg announced his Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange (ROCI) at the United Nations. This would culminate in a seven-year, ten-country tour to encourage "world peace and understanding", through Mexico, Chile, Venezuela, Beijing, Lhasa (Tibet), Japan, Cuba, Soviet Union, Berlin, and Malaysia in which he left a piece of art, and was influenced by the cultures he visited. Paintings, often on reflective surfaces, as well as drawings, photographs, assemblages and other multimedia were produced, inspired by these surroundings, and this was considered some of his strongest works. The ROCI venture, supported by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., went on view in 1991.

In 1990, Rauschenberg created the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation (RFF) to promote awareness of the causes he cared about, such as world peace, the environment and humanitarian issues. He also set up Change, Inc., to award one-time grants of up to $1,000 to visual artists based on financial need. Rauschenberg's will, filed in Probate Court on October 9, 2008, named his charitable foundation as a major beneficiary, along with Darryl Pottorf, Christopher Rauschenberg, Begneaud, his nephew Byron Richard Begneaud, and Susan Weil Kirschenbaum. The amounts to be given to the beneficiaries were not named, but the estate is "worth millions", said Pottorf, who is also executor of the estate.

The RRF today owns many works by Rauschenberg from every period of his career. In 2011, the foundation, in collaboration with Gagosian Gallery, presented “The Private Collection of Robert Rauschenberg”, selections from Rauschenberg's personal art collection; proceeds from the collection helped fund the endowment established for the foundation’s philanthropic activities. Also in 2011, the foundation launched its “Artist as Activist” print project and invited Shepard Fairey to focus on an issue of his choice. The editioned work he made was sold to raise funds for the Coalition for the Homeless. The RRF artist residency takes place at the late artist’s property in Captiva Island, Florida. The foundation also maintains the 19th Street Project Space in New York.

The Taittinger Art Collection Brut Millésimé

Amadou Sow - Blue Sun.

TAITTINGER COLLECTION SOW. Vintage 2002, released 2011

Amadou Sow was born in 1951 in St. Louis, which at the time was the capital of the French Colony of Senegal. He spent most of his youth on the island of Goree in Dakar. Goree was one of the largest holding and transport facilities for the slave trade starting in the 16th Century, and now houses a museum in the House of Slaves. "Goree has no automobile traffic. The quiet of the island, coupled with the historical and spiritual presence of the slave trade- is a place where poets and artists can develop their craft and imagination," says Sow.

Sow decided at a young age to be an artist. After attending The National Institute of Fine Arts in Dakar, and the Arts Academy in Vienna, Sow went on to become an internationally acclaimed painter, with exhibits throughout Western Europe, Africa, Canada and the US, including and exhibit at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington DC. For the past 32 years Sow has lived and worked in Vienna, visiting his home/studio on the Pink Lake near Dakar several times a year.

His newest body of work, Sahel Blues, is a series of paintings reflecting his travels in the Sahel Region, which covers 2,400 miles South of the Sahara from the Atlantic Ocean to the Horn of Africa. Senegal, Mali, Sudan and Mauritania are all part of the Sahel. Home to the Fulani, the Dogon and many of Africa's most prominent civilizations, the Sahel is now in environmental and economic crisis.

But the paintings are more than documentary. They reflect Sow's deepest dreams and imagination. Living in Vienna, Sow says that the images and landscapes of his childhood are more intense in his dreams than if he were living full time in Senegal. Vivid blues of the ocean and ochres of the desert permeate the paintings along with painted or scgraffiti (scratched out) symbols which could be words, hieroglyphs or portraits. The landscapes are poetic in spirit yet are grounded in the land and the architecture of the region. Doorways of the clay buildings morph into images of people, while the black eye of the sun invites the viewer to travel through its center into a meditation on the universal. When asked why the sun is black, Sow responds that in every person, no matter what their race, skin color or eye color, the pupil is black. It is the universal connector of all of humankind.

Amadou Sow with Souwer micropainting - In addition to the gauche on paper works, Sow has brought a collection of his small souwer paintings. Souwer, (from French, under glass) -which we would call reverse painting on glass - is an important Senegalese folk and fine art tradition.

TAITTINGER COLLECTION. There is no 13th collection

The Art of master Sebasti?o Salgado - Genesis...

TAITTINGER COLLECTION SEBASTI?O SALGADO. Vintage 2008, released 2016

You will not have to wait years to enjoy the 14th edition of the Taittinger Collection Brut Millésimé 2008 that has recently been released and will soon be available in Vancouver. It is drinking beautifully now, and will for years to come. With beautiful aromas of brioche, nuts, and citrus fruits, which also present gloriously on the tongue, you can taste the effort and time spent on producing this limited edition wine as layers of complexity with a very long finish. It really is quite beautiful, as is the limited edition bottle, graced with a striking leopard by Brazilian artist Sebasti?o Salgado.

What happened to the 13th edition? I asked export director Mikael Falkman who was in Vancouver for its launch.

“There is no 13th edition,” he says, because of the superstitious back luck associated with the number 13...

Sebasti?o Salgado (born February 8, 1944) is a Brazilian social documentary photographer and photojournalist.

He has traveled in over 120 countries for his photographic projects. Most of these have appeared in numerous press publications and books. Touring exhibitions of this work have been presented throughout the world.

Salgado is a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador. He was awarded the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund Grant in 1982, Foreign Honorary Membership of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1992 and the Royal Photographic Society's Centenary Medal and Honorary Fellowship (HonFRPS) in 1993.

Salgado was born on February 8, 1944 in Aimorés, in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil. After a somewhat itinerant childhood, Salgado initially trained as an economist, earning a master’s degree in economics from the University of S?o Paulo in Brazil. He began work as an economist for the International Coffee Organization, often traveling to Africa on missions for the World Bank, when he first started seriously taking photographs. He chose to abandon a career as an economist and switched to photography in 1973, working initially on news assignments before veering more towards documentary-type work. Salgado initially worked with the photo agency Sygma and the Paris-based Gamma, but in 1979, he joined the international cooperative of photographers Magnum Photos. He left Magnum in 1994 and with his wife Lélia Wanick Salgado formed his own agency, Amazonas Images, in Paris, to represent his work. He is particularly noted for his social documentary photography of workers in less developed nations. They reside in Paris.

He has been a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador since 2001.

Salgado works on long term, self-assigned projects many of which have been published as books: The Other Americas, Sahel, Workers, Migrations and Genesis. The latter three are mammoth collections with hundreds of images each from all around the world. His most famous pictures are of a gold mine in Brazil called Serra Pelada.

Between 2004 and 2011, Salgado worked on "Genesis," aiming at the presentation of the unblemished faces of nature and humanity. It consists of a series of photographs of landscapes and wildlife, as well as of human communities that continue to live in accordance with their ancestral traditions and cultures. This body of work is conceived as a potential path to humanity’s rediscovery of itself in nature.

In September and October 2007, Salgado displayed his photographs of coffee workers from India, Guatemala, Ethiopia and Brazil at the Brazilian Embassy in London. The aim of the project was to raise public awareness of the origins of the popular drink.

Together, Lélia and Sebasti?o, have worked since the 1990s on the restoration of a small part of the Atlantic Forest in Brazil. In 1998, they succeeded in turning this land into a nature reserve and created the Instituto Terra. The Instituto is dedicated to a mission of reforestation, conservation and environmental education.

Salgado and his work are the focus of the film The Salt of the Earth (2014), directed by Wim Wenders and Salgado's son, Juliano Ribeiro Salgado. The film won a special award at Cannes Film Festivaland was nominated for the best Documentary Feature at the 2015 Academy Awards.

The Art of Sebasti?o Salgado - Genesis

The Taittinger Collection:

• Victor Vasarely Vintage 1978, released 1983
• Arman, Vintage 1981, released 1985
• André Masson, Vintage 1982, released 1987
• Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, Vintage 1983, released 1988
• Roy Lichtenstein, Vintage 1985, released 1990
• Hartung, Vintage 1986, released 1992
• Imai, Vintage 1988, released 1994
• Corneille, Vintage 1990, released 1996
• Matta, Vintage 1992, released 1998
• Zao Wou Ki, Vintage 1998, released 20
• Robert Rauschenberg, Vintage 2000, released 2007
• Sow, Vintage 2002, released 2011
• There is no 13th collection
• Sebasti?o Salgado,Vintage 2008, released 2016

The Taittinger Collection is made up of the 1978, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1985, 1986, 1988, 1990, 1992, 1998, 2000, 2002, and 2008 vintages.

Courtesy: