The founder, Laszlo von Vertes, conceived the gallery as an international platform for exhibitions, specialising in Expressionism, Surrealism, the École de Paris, Pop Art and contemporary art.
With a global presence at art fairs and offices in Zurich and Schwyz, the gallery serves prominent private and international collections, organises exhibitions and hosts talks on art and market-related topics. “With the von Vertes Gallery, I have sought to create a democratic space that promotes research and understanding of the diversity of art and its creators.”
László von Vertes founded his first gallery in Munich in 1981 and established branches in St. Moritz, Salzburg, Zurich and Schwyz. For the past 20 years, the gallery has participated annually in leading art fairs such as TEFAF Maastricht, Art Cologne, FAB Paris, PAD London and Cologne Fine Arts. As a lender, von Vertes has contributed to exhibitions such as “The Steins Collect” at SFMOMA, the Centre Pompidou and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The gallery has also supported, among others, “Matisse and the Fauves” at the Albertina in Vienna, “Expressionism in Germany and France. From Matisse to the Blue Rider” at the Kunsthaus Zürich, and “Horizont Jawlensky” at the Museum Wiesbaden.
For over 25 years, Laszlo von Vertes assisted the Swiss entrepreneur Gérard J. Corboud in building a significant collection of works from the Impressionist, Pointillist, Fauvist and German Expressionist movements. This collaboration resulted in one of the most important collections of Impressionist art in Europe. In March 2001, the Corboud couple donated over 170 paintings from this collection on “permanent loan” to the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne. In addition, the von Vertes Gallery manages the Würth Collection in Germany, the Batliner Collection in Vienna (on permanent loan to the Albertina), and the National Gallery in Washington and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.
Outstanding works by Albers, Calder, Chamberlain, Ernst, Francis, Jawlensky, Kusama, Klee, Macke, Moore, Münter, Picasso, Poliakoff, Richter, Soulages, Warhol and Wesselmann are displayed throughout the year in changing exhibitions.
Andy WARHOL
(Pittsburgh 1928 – 1987 New York)
Patty Raynes and son
Acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas
40.2 × 40.2 in., 102 × 102 cm
Verso signed and dated ‘Andy Warhol 85’
Provenance
· Patty Raynes, USA (1985 directly acquired from the artist)
· Private collection, USA (2022 acquired from the above)
In 1985, Patty Raynes commissioned two works, this one with a yellow background and a second one with a white background.
‘Patty Raynes and Son’ from 1985 is one of a series of portraits in which Warhol no longer exclusively depicted global celebrities, but increasingly portrayed members of his social environment – individuals whose social position exerted a symbolic aura, even if they remained outside the pop-cultural canon.
Patty Raynes came from a respected family of American industrialists, socialite and daughter of oil tycoon Marvin Davis, a fact that inevitably lends the work the character of a status portrait. Warhol, who was always concerned with the relationship between appearance and identity, addresses the portrait here as an expression of social affiliation.
The subject, the depiction of a mother and child, is immediately reminiscent of the archetypal motifof the Madonna and Child. Warhol adopts this traditional pictorial form but transforms it into a contemporary icon: the sacred content isdisrupted by the screen-printing technique, giving the scene a cool, distanced character.
‘Patty Haynes and son’ emerge from this mature period in Warhol’s oeuvre, when the artist extended his repertoire of subjects to include his panoply of famous friends, artists, actors, and socialites.
A collection idolizing the who’s who of New York, Warhol intended for the 40 by 40-inch series to be exhibited together in a “Portrait of Society,” a dream eventually realized at the artist’s retrospective Andy Warhol—From A to B and Back Again at the Whitney Museum in New York in 2018.
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