IMPORTANT PAINTINGS | SEPT 17, 2020
Front Cover: Lot 219: Ernest Lee Major, American,
1864-1950, The Gift, oil on canvas. Est. $6,000-8,000 Inside Front Cover: Lot 217: Harriet Frishmuth,
American, 1880-1980, Crest of the Wave, circa 1925, Bronze with a brown patina. Est. $7,000-9,000
IMPORTANT PAINTINGS
Auction Thursday, September 17, 2020 at 11am
TABLE OF CONTENTS
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A Memento For A Friend By Shani Toledano The Elegant Realism of Henri Fantin-Latour By Elaine Banks Stainton George McNeil: After Abstract Expressionism By Angelo Madrigale Science, Nature & Dance: Nancy Graves By Angelo Madrigale John Singer Sargent: A Portrait of a Friend by Elaine Banks Stainton Aaron Shikler: America’s Court Painter By Bill Fiddler Emile Bernard and Early Abstraction in Brittany By Milan Tessler Eugène Boudin & Impressionism by Elaine Banks Stainton Wolf Kahn and the Dynamics of Color by Elaine Banks Stainton Martin Wong: IMU UR2 by Angelo Madrigale
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A MEME
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ENTO FOR A FRIEND BY SHANI TOLEDANO
Born into an artistic family – his mother a painter and his father, Alexander Stirling Calder, a sculptor – Alexander Calder (1898-1976) was encouraged from an early age to create.
Although his initial studies were in mechanical engineering, after a short while in the industry Calder’s interest abruptly turned to painting and he enrolled himself at the Art Students
League in New York. His early training in realism did not hold his attention very long, however, and he left for Paris in 1926. There his circle of friends included artists Joan Miró, Fernand
Léger, Marcel Duchamp and James Johnson Sweeney, a curator, writer and devoted advocate of abstract Modern Art who went on to become curator for the Museum of Modern Art, as well as the Director of the Guggenheim Museum. After a visit to the studio of Piet Mondrian, Calder was inspired to pursue abstraction, a pivotal moment for his career.
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lthough Calder considered himself more sculptor than painter, his use of the two-dimensional medium to explore ideas of space, form, composition, color and movement were all integral to the creation of his sculptures. His desire was always to create movement; and although painting presented inherent limitations to that goal, he nevertheless continued to use the medium to explore new ideas and compositions throughout his career. Indeed, Untitled, 1946 is full of the whimsy and playfulness that we recognize in his three-dimensional works. Calder presented Untitled as a gift to his friend the architect and interior designer Benjamin Baldwin around 1946. At that time Baldwin was working at the renowned architectural firm of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill in New York and had been tasked with designing the interiors for the Terrace Plaza Hotel in Cincinnati. The hotel, commissioned by the real estate developer John J. Emery, was a Modernist masterpiece, not only in design, but in innovation. It was the first hotel to have a fully automated elevator and a television set in every room; it was also one of the first public buildings in America to commission site-specific works of contemporary art for its interiors.
The Terrace Plaza Hotel 6
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Baldwin attended the Cranbrook Academy of Art, the prestigious institution of creative design, during its Golden Age. His fellow Alumni and instructors included Charles and Ray Eames, Harry Bertoia, Florence Knoll, Marianne Strengell, Eliel and Eero Saarinen, Ralph Rapson and Harry Weese, each a titan of American Modernist design. Located in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, twenty-five miles north of Detroit, Cranbrook, a modern arts colony, was an experiment in education whose philosophy taught that each student should understand all aspects of design, from architecture to furniture to metalwork. The Academy encouraged experimentation in design and process, research and cross-disciplinary thought.
The “sky lobby� at Terrace Plaza Hotel. https://aeqai.com/main/2019/03/the-terrace-plaza-hotel-recognizing-greatness/ 8
The Gourmet Room featuring a mural by Joan Miro. https://aeqai.com/main/2019/03/the-terrace-plaza-hotel-recognizing-greatness/6-47/
For the Terrace Plaza Hotel, Baldwin commissioned Calder to create his mobile Twenty Leaves and an Apple to hang in the eighth-floor Sky Lobby opposite the elevator doors. Composed of piano wire and sheet metal and painted entirely in black save for its one red apple, the seventeen-foot sculpture greeted every guest who emerged from the elevators with its ever-changing, elegant form, constantly recreating itself with the slightest breeze. Baldwin also commissioned Saul Steinberg to create a mural for the main dining room; Jim Davis to design the long wall behind the back bar in The Terrace Garden restaurant and lounge; and Joan Miro to paint the mural for The Gourmet Room, whose thirty-foot curved wall faced the arched wall of glass offering its diners a stunning panoramic view of the city. Since Calder’s work during this period was very reminiscent of Miro’s, it was fitting that both artists’ works were chosen to complement the design of this new modern hotel.
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The hotel was eventually sold in 1956 to the Hilton Hotel Corporation. The one stipulation set forth by Emery ahead of the sale was that the artwork remain in the hotel until the new owners decided to redecorate. During the negotiations, however, Hilton did not wish the art to be a part of the purchase due to the high cost of insuring it. When Hilton decided to redecorate the hotel almost a decade later, Emery donated all four works to the Cincinnati Museum of Art.
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Untitled, 1946, stands as a memento of a warm friendship between two important Modernist artists, and a brilliant expression of Calder’s genius at a particularly creative moment in his career.
Lot 201 Alexander Calder American, 1898-1976 Untitled, circa 1946 Oil on canvas mounted to board 5 3/4 x 15 3/8 inches (14.6 x 39.05 cm) Provenance: Gift from the artist to Benjamin Baldwin, circa 1946 Private collection, Montgomery AL, 1993 Sale, Christie's, New York, Contemporary Art, Feb. 23, 1994, lot 4 Purchased from the above by the current owner
Literature: Benjamin Baldwin: An Autobiography in Design, W. W. Norton & Co., New York, 1995, llus. p. 29 This work is registered in the archives of the Calder Foundation, New York, under application number A11199. C The Collection of Dorothea Benton Frank $70,000-90,000
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The Elegant Realism of
Henri Fantin-Latour By Elaine Banks Stainton
Henri Fantin-Latour (1836-1904) studied painting as a boy with his father, an artist who had been a follower of the neoclassical master Jacques Louis David. In the early 1850s he continued his studies in Paris at the Ecole de Dessin and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Like most art students at this time he spent long hours in the Louvre copying the compositions and techniques of the old masters on view there. On these excursions he met Édouard Manet, Berthe Morisot and James McNeill Whistler, all of whom became personal friends. Whistler would later introduce Fantin-Latour’s still lifes to collectors in England, which became an important market for his work. Although Fantin-Latour’s coming of age as a painter took place during the heyday of French Realism, he had no interest in the
rough-hewn world of stone-breakers and ploughmen. Instead, his “realism” was one of polished urbanity – of porcelain tea cups, lavish fabrics, and cut flowers. He emphasized the tactile qualities of his exquisite still lifes and portraits by setting them against smooth, monochromatic backgrounds, the tonalities of which he balanced harmoniously with the colors of his subjects. Fantin-Latour’s fascination for detail grew out of the tradition of precise description of objects that had been a current in European art since the 15th century. His virtuosity in depicting the sparkling surfaces of glass and porcelain and the softer forms of flowers and fabric epitomized much of his work throughout his life. 13
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With his devotion to meticulous description, it is not surprising that Fantin-Latour was one of the first artists in Europe to use photographs in aid of his work. One example of this approach is his Homage to Delacroix, painted in 1864 – just one year after Delacroix’s death – based on a photograph taken 10 years earlier. In this painting he depicted a group of contemporary artists, including himself, Whistler, and Edouard Manet, gathered worshipfully around a portrait of the great Romantic master. Later he would create another such group portrait of Manet in his studio surrounded by a similar gathering of friends. As the artist grew older his brushwork became looser and more textural. With this new painterly vocabulary he
undertook a series of figural works, including such mythological subjects as Apollo and Daphne, Venus and Cupid, and Diana with her Nymphs. These gauzy visions form a striking contrast to the lucid precision of his earlier work. Painted the year before the artist’s death, Six Roses jaunes dans un Vase en Verre, 1903, is a superb example of his late style. Here the gestural brushwork used to describe the petals of the flowers is adroitly counterpointed on the one hand by the shimmering surface of the glass vase, and on the other by the rough, brown scumbling of the tabletop and the wall behind. It is pure poetry, an understated expression from the brush of one of the most gifted still life artists of the 19th century.
Property from the Collection of Dorothea Benton Frank Lot 203 Henri Fantin-Latour French, 1836-1904 Six Roses Jaunes dans un Vase en Verre, 1903 Signed Fantin (ll); inscribed 5032 and 5507 on the reverse Oil on canvas 13 1/8 x 14 3/4 inches (33.3 x 37.5 cm) Provenance: Gustave Tempelaere Paul Perrier E. J. van Wisselingh & Co., Amsterdam Anon. sale, Sotheby's, London, Jul. 4, 1962, lot 117 Marlborough Fine Art Ltd., London Edward Speelman, London Anon. sale, Christie's, New York, Nov. 15, 1989, lot 372 Sale, Christie's, London, Nov. 19, 1998, lot 150
Literature: Mme. Fantin-Latour, Catalogue de l'oeuvre complet de Fantin-Latour, Paris, 1911, p. 214, no. 2005 Galerie Brame & Lorenceau will include this painting in their forthcoming Fantin-Latour catalogue raisonne. C $200,000 - $400,000
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George McNeil: After Abstract Expressionism By Angelo Madrigale
Reviewing the 1984 Artist’s Choice Museum exhibition,
George McNeil: Expressionism – 1954-1984, Michael Brenson of The New York Times singled out McNeil’s Joey Loves Milly
for special praise. “In the 1977 Joey Loves Milly, the outrageous pinks, blues and greens – each of equal value – that are used to define the setting seem like the inner heat of a street scene in
which a man in striped pants and hat is embracing his adoring,
nestling woman. Everything in the painting is of a piece. In works like these, McNeil’s color and distortions of scale bring to mind the richly human exaggerations of the Comedia dell’Arte. If he avoids the coyness that can accompany his kind of popular imagery, there is every reason to believe that McNeil’s best work is still to come.”
Arriving at a laudatory review for this late period of McNeil’s work was a hard-fought, complicated road. George McNeil
began in the 1930s creating Cubist works while simultaneously also painting abstractions. At the Art Students’ League,
McNeil studied under Jan Matulka before moving onto a long
mentorship under Hans Hofmann. In 1936 and 1937, Hofmann was not only teaching McNeil, but employing him as assistant,
and as interpreter of Hofmann’s theories. McNeil would translate Hofmann’s decrees to his fellow students, who at this time
included Lee Krasner, Giorgio Cavallon, Ray Eames and others, some of whom asserted they were really getting McNeil’s slant on Hoffman’s thoughts more so than a direct translation.
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A first-generation Abstract Expressionist and
figural paintings of which Joey Loves Milly
a predilection for pushing back against the
endeavored to make his forms, as he
part of the New York School, McNeil showed status quo, sometimes to the detriment of his career. McNeil famously refused to be in the legendary 1951 “Irascibles” Life magazine
photo, rebelling even against the rebellious,
in a sense. And while art history has come to deify this group of eighteen artists; Rothko,
Pollock, de Kooning, and others, McNeil took himself out of that picture, both figuratively
is part. Building from a figural basis, McNeil described, “plastically and psychologically alive by having lines, shapes and colors
bounce with energy.” This was not necessarily a new concept for McNeil, as he had long wished to explore the figure in greater
depth, even going back to his formative time studying with Andre Lhote in France.
and literally.
This representational period, beginning
Similarly, as a founding member of the
through much of his remaining years until
American Abstract Artists group, McNeil was again a prominent force, until departing for
good in 1956 – he’d been slowly reducing his role there and eventually went his own way.
Much like his friend and peer Philip Guston, McNeil found himself frustrated by what he saw as the limits of Abstract Expressionism and pushed for change. And much like
Guston experienced when he debuted his own new body of representational work
in 1970 to scathing reviews, the art world pushed back. American abstraction at
mid-century, a movement McNeil was key in building, was violently opposed to the changes McNeil and Guston offered.
Throughout the 1960s, George McNeil’s work would grow more and more representational, though he largely retained the grand scale
that he and his AbEx peers would implement – giant canvases with bold gestures. McNeil
began a series of plein-air landscapes which
now serve as a mid-point between his abstract work of the 40s and 50s and the cartoonish,
roughly in the early 70s and continuing his passing in 1995 was dubbed Neo-
Expressionism. Considering this term was
simultaneously applied to the hottest young
artists on the New York art scene in the 1980s, figures like Sandro Chia, Julian Schnabel and Eric Fischl, McNeil was by far the veteran of
the movement. Yet to look at this period, it’s
easy to imagine McNeil’s late works standing alongside Basquiat, Salle and this youthful crew – there is a shared future/primitive
aesthetic; the works are reminiscent of de
Kooning’s abstracted “Women,” yet also show the influence of Dubuffet as well as CoBrA
artists such as Karel Appel and Asger Jorn.
McNeil was documenting NYC culture; disco,
punk, graffiti – loud traffic, grimy clubs, bizarre characters. And even with such seemingly crude, stylized figures, so removed from
AbEx, Hans Hoffman’s influence is still very
present – particularly the vibrancy of the color palette, the rawness of expression. McNeil’s
notoriously thick impasto providing depth and power to these toothy, contorted figures.
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Like the city of New York during this time, McNeil chronicled the inherent anxiety and tragedy, but the screaming yellows
and garish oranges add a comic strip pathos to the denizens of his world. Joey and Milly may be the wretched refuse of a
city President Ford told to “Drop Dead,” but they seem jubilant within the chaos. George McNeil evidently echoed this same exuberance, stating in the catalog for the “Expressionism”
exhibition in which Joey Loves Milly appears, that “I feel that
I am just beginning to get a grip on pictorial excitement and extending the power of my abstract figurations.”
Lot 214 George McNeil American, 1908-1995 Joey Loves Milly, 1977 Signed and dated McNeil '77 (lr); signed and dated George McNeil 1977 and inscribed as titled on the reverse Oil on canvas 75 x 60 inches (190.5 x 152.4 cm) Provenance: Gruenebaum Gallery, New York Purchased from the above by the current owner Exhibited: Fort Lauderdale, FL, Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art, George McNeil: The Past Twenty Years, Dec. 6-31, 1982 New York, Artist's Choice Museum, George McNeil: Expressionism 1954-1984, Sep. 22 - Nov. 10, 1984 C Estimate: $6,000 - $8,000
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SCIENCE, NATURE & DANCE NANCY GRAVES BY ANGELO MADRIGALE
The work of Nancy Graves (1939-1995) has always been idiosyncratic to its time. Although Graves was successful even early on – the youngest person, and only the fifth woman, to have a solo exhibition (in 1969) at the Whitney Museum – her work never fit into the prevailing trends of the time. Fearlessly combining mediums and aggressively exploring new materials, Graves was classified as a Post-Minimalist, which really says more about what her work is not and seems far too limiting a label in any case. Eschewing both Minimalism as well as Pop, the two major movements of the 1970s and 80s, Graves created abstract paintings and sculpture that took their cues from elements of science and nature, showcasing sometimes recognizable forms, but stripped of any context. “I think that science is the most significant aspect of our time, and far more so than art. Art, if it will endure on some level – does inspire wonder. The scientific discoveries with which we are bombarded surely do that too, and I think that art in some way has to acknowledge this.” – Nancy Graves, 1979.
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“I think that science is the most significant aspect of our time, and far more so than art. Art, if it will endure on some level – does inspire wonder. The scientific discoveries with which we are bombarded surely do that too, and I think that art in some way has to acknowledge this.”
Graves sourced much of her imagery from science and nature publications as well as her major artistic influences: David Smith, Alexander Calder and Henri Matisse. Created in 1979, Vertigo is a fantastic representation of Graves’ paintings of this period. Having received a post-graduate Fulbright scholarship to study Matisse’s work, Graves would go on to emulate both the high-key colors as well as the relationship of his abstracted forms. Vertigo showcases that influence here, as the bold red-orange curves mimic an outline of the figures in Matisse’s 1910 masterpiece Dance. Meanwhile, the large circles at left, resting among smaller patches of pointillist dots, are reminiscent of a constellation. Dance is a key theme of this work and Shift, a closely-related work of this same era. Vertigo was subsequently recreated as a print, employed as a fundraiser release for Graves’ close friend Trisha Brown’s dance company. Vertigo is an encapsulation, in a sense, of Graves’ unique approach: large, bold gestures that are not representational forms, as much as we may wish they were. Graves provides no narrative, nor an identifiable picture plane. What elements
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are in the foreground? In the background? Graves was intent on exploring perception, on the time we need to look at a work in order to truly see it. She provides no singular focal point. As with many of Graves’ works, Vertigo requires attention and focus, to look and look again, to approach from other angles and viewpoints. Throughout her career, Nancy Graves would continue to build a visual vocabulary in which she would repeat abstracted and representational forms in works across mediums, from sculptures to paintings, even delving into film. Busy and bright, Graves’ sculptures challenged even the notions of balance, often precarious and top-heavy. Even in the lack of a narrative, there is always drama – hot colors and sweeping, grand gestures, balanced with intricate patterns and brief breathing areas of negative space. Graves sadly passed away in 1995, far too young at 55. She left behind a body of work strangely beautiful and mysterious, much like those elements of nature and the cosmos which she often replicated.
Property of an Elegant Lady Lot 215 Nancy Graves American, 1939-1995 Vertigo, 1979 Signed and dated N. S. Graves '79 and inscribed as titled on the reverse Oil and encaustic on canvas 64 x 80 inches (162.56 x 203.2 cm) Provenance: M. Knoedler & Co. Gallery, New York Sale, Christie's, New York, Contemporary Art (Part II), May 5, 1993, lot 321 C Estimate: $10,000 - $20,000
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A Portrait of a Friend
John Singer Sargent by Elaine Banks Stainton John Singer Sargent was a consummate virtuoso; a more prodigiously gifted painter has seldom lived. Upon seeing one of his portraits at an exhibition, Auguste Rodin called him “the Van Dyck of our time“ – an apt observation, since Van Dyck’s bravura paint-handling was undoubtedly one of the sources of Sargent’s technique. Sargent was born in Florence in 1856 to American expatriate parents who led an itinerant, Bohemian life among the cultural centers of Europe. His family moved easily in a small but cosmopolitan circle of artists, musicians, and literati. As a result, Sargent learned to speak four languages well and developed a charming social manner that made him welcome in drawing rooms everywhere.
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Lot 220 John Singer Sargent American, 1856-1925 Portrait of Louis Alexander Fagan, 1893 Signed and dated John S. Sargent 1893 (ur) and dedicated To my friend Fagan (ul) Oil on canvas 30 1/4 x 25 1/8 inches (76.8 x 63.8 cm) Provenance: Formerly in the collection of Louis Alexander Fagan Arts Club, London, England Sale, Sotheby’s, London, July 20, 1966, lot 14 Julius Weitzer David David, Inc., Philadelphia Sloan & Roman, 1968 Hirschl & Adler, New York, New York International Business Machines, New York, acquired in 1968 Sale, Sotheby’s, New York, May 25, 1995, lot 61
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Exhibited: IBM traveling exhibition, Portraits by American, Sep. 1970 - Jun. 1972 San Jose, CA, San Jose Museum of Art, Portraits by Americans: Eighteen Portraits from the IBM Collection, Dec. 1976 - Jan. 1979 New York, IBM Gallery of Science and Art, American Images: Selections from the IBM Collection, Jun. - Jul. 1984 New York, IBM Gallery of Science and Art, Selected Works from the IBM Collection, Nov. 1985 - Jan.1986 Literature: Richard Ormond and Elaine Kilmurray, John Singer Sargent: Complete Paintings; Volume 2, Portraits of the 1890s, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002, no. 291, illus. p. 71 David McKibbin, Sargent’s Boston, Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, 1956, illus. p. 95 Charles Merril Mount, John Singer Sargent: A Biography, London, 1957, no. 9410, p. 343
His parents encouraged his interest in art, and as a young man he began to study in Paris with the portraitist Carolus-Duran. Carolus-Duran’s instruction was almost the antithesis of contemporary academic training. Rather than the lengthy process taught at the Royal Academy, which required making preliminary studies and laying down multiple layers of under-paint, he emphasized rapid execution directly on the canvas. Sargent enthusiastically embraced the expressive freedom of this approach. He also took time to travel to look carefully at the paintings of the old masters, developing a particular admiration for Velázquez, whose adroit brushwork and understated color harmonies became a lasting inspiration. Sargent learned quickly, and became a successful portrait painter in Paris while still in his 20s. In the mid-1880s he moved his studio to London, where, if anything, he enjoyed even greater success. He had a natural talent for the society portraitist’s most valuable asset: the ability to create likenesses that were instantly recognizable and at the same time graceful and stylish. Many of his best works are in the grand manner – which, as Rodin observed, owes much to Van Dyck – showing the sitter in elegant dress in opulent surroundings.
Sargent’s Portrait of Louis Alexander Fagan, 1893, which Doyle will offer on September 17, 2020, is an interesting example of an entirely different type of portrait: an informal image of a personal friend. Fagan was a curator of prints and drawings at the British Museum. He had been born in Naples to an Italian mother and an English attaché at the British consulate there. He spoke Italian as well as he did English, and his cosmopolitan childhood had much in common with Sargent’s, a similarity of background that may have formed part of the basis for their friendship. Sargent shows Fagan, who was 48 when this work was painted, in a gray daytime suit and black cravat, his right arm slung over the back of his chair. The general impression is one of relaxed, alert intelligence. The muted palette is articulated with broad strokes of the brush that suggest an oil sketch, in which we can also see an echo of the portraits of Velázquez. This is a rare glimpse into a friendship, an intimate, personal portrait not only of the sitter, but of the artist’s private world.
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Aaron Shikler: America’s Court Painter BY BILL FIDDLER Aaron Shikler was born in Brooklyn in 1922 and lived in New York for most of his life. He came of age in the city at a time when New York was becoming the center of the art world. And though the prevailing style of his time and of his peers turned towards abstraction, he remained devoted to representational art.
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Lot 221 Aaron Abraham Shikler American, 1922-2015 The Wedding Preparation, 1961 Signed Shikler and dated ’61 (ll) Oil on canvas 60 x 72 inches (154.2 x 182.9 cm) Provenance: Davis Galleries, New York Mr. and Mrs. William Y. Dear Jr. Sale, Sotheby’s New York, Dec. 1, 2004, lot 255 Exhibited: Brooklyn, NY, Brooklyn Museum, Paintings and Drawings by David Levine and Aaron Shikler, Apr. 24 - May 23, 1971, no. 75, illus. New York, NY, The Century Association, Century Masters: Aaron Shikler, Apr. 30 - Jun. 5, 2008 $30,000-50,000
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After attending the High School of Music and Art in New York Shikler enrolled at the Tyler School of the Arts at Temple University. His studies at Temple were interrupted by the war and in 1943 he was drafted into the Army Air Corps in Europe, where he served as a mapmaker. When his service in the war was completed Shikler returned to Temple to finish his studies, after which he moved back to New York and trained under Hans Hofmann for three years at his eponymous school. Shikler was close friends with David Levine, with whom he shared an educational history and a studio. In 1958 the two formed the Painting Group, a loose collective of artists that met weekly to paint from live models.
Shikler is best known for his work as a portraitist. His most recognizable image is the official White House portrait of John F. Kennedy. The painting depicts the president with his head bowed and his arms crossed, giving the impression of a man in deep thought. It is a somber work, reflecting the times in which it was created. The painting was done posthumously from photographs; Shikler said that its final pose was inspired by a photograph of Senator Edward M. Kennedy at the president’s grave site. Shikler also painted the official portraits of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Nancy Reagan. He did portraits of Hillary Clinton, Ladybird Johnson, and countless other Washington notables. His painting of President-elect Ronald Regan was published on the cover of Time Magazine. On September 17th Doyle will be offering The Wedding Preparation from 1961. The work was done shortly after the artist visited Spain and the Prado. Reflecting on the painting many years later, Shikler said that he was inspired by the works of Velasquez and had hoped to create something as dramatic and grand as the Spanish master’s works. The Wedding Preparation does recall elements from Las Meninas in its composition, scale, and subject matter, though the theme is wholly Shickler’s own. The painting depicts a young bride being attended upon by her bridesmaids. She is surrounded by generations of women, suggesting that Shikler intended to depict the stages of a bride’s life. Shikler’s affinity for Velazquez may have been born of more than an appreciation for the master’s craft. He may well have aspired to build a career as brilliant as that of Velazquez, who was the court painter of King Phillip the IV of Spain. And indeed when the Washington Post published its obituary for the artist, the headline described him as the “court painter of American nobility.”
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Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Émile Bernard, 1886
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EMILE BERNARD AND EARLY ABSTRACTION IN BRITTANY By Milan Tessler Emile Bernard was still in his teens when he joined Fernand Cormon’s renowned studio, where he studied alongside and befriended fellow artists Louis Anquetin, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Vincent van Gogh. Feeling detached from the dominant style of Impressionism and restricted by his formal instruction, Bernard began to express radical ideas on painting that were largely out of favor in the Parisian art world. In 1886 he set his sights on Brittany and traveled extensively along the northwestern coastline, a destination which would provide a major breakthrough for the artist and a turning point in the history of modern art. In many ways Brittany was antithetical to Paris, and it helped Bernard find the source of his visual language through which he would come to develop his theories on art and painting. He found little inspiration in the rapid industrialization of the French capital and its self-indulgent denizens, which contrasted sharply with what he saw in the remote region of northwestern France. Breton life and culture became an ideal subject matter for Bernard, who found sincerity in the rural sense of community and agrarian activity of the region’s inhabitants. Together with their spirituality, these constitute the essence of Emile Bernard’s subjects during the most notable period of his work from the late 1880s and early 1890s. In a rather Tolstoyan manner, Bernard’s high regard for his subjects runs through these works, pointing to an idealized, simpler past that is highly authentic and human. In Pont-Aven, Emile Bernard was introduced to Paul Gauguin. The two artists shared a highly productive, collaborative, but ultimately turbulent relationship that built the foundations of some of the first Post-Impressionist movements.
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Alongside Louis Anquetin, Bernard had already outlined the style of painting he aspired to— characterized by an emphasis on flatness and dark contours—which would later be termed Cloissonism. Gauguin was very much drawn to Bernard’s firm rejection of established principles in visual representation and the two artists worked together to expand on PostImpressionist tenets that would culminate in Synthetism, which combined simplified forms and purity of color while allowing space for the inner world of emotion. Bernard and his peers thus sought to break from the hegemony of pure technique pushed by Impressionism while elevating the value of feelings, memory and imagination over objective reality alone. In Eglise et Ferme Bretonne, the viewer can see the Cloissonist and Synthetist styles to full effect. Together with flat planes of uniform color, the artist has assembled boldly outlined geometric shapes to form a full composition. Solid greens and yellows are employed in the two structures, a house in the foreground and a church beyond. A central tree shares the color of the adjacent roof, dividing the composition vertically and helping to create a sense of depth. The tree’s spindly branches meet those of another plant that emerges from the extreme lower corner of the composition, further enhancing the unusual perspective and red outlines that exemplify Bernard’s technique. In the distance we see an unpretentious church, prompting the viewer to consider its simplicity as emblematic of the humility shared with those who frequent that space. If Impressionism is linked to capturing a moment in time, the viewer can sense something timeless about this scene. One has an underlying desire to embark
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on a voyage through Brittany and to come across this view, hopefully unchanged more than a century after it was painted. From the most important period of Emile Bernard’s work, Eglise et Ferme Bretonne projects the artist’s innovative approach to painting and the extent to which he was fundamentally subversive in pushing forward abstraction in the closing years of the 19th century.
Property from the Collection of Dr. Abraham & Carolyn Schlossman Lot 229 Emile Bernard French, 1868-1941 Eglise et Ferme Bretonne, 1892 Signed and dated Emile Bernard 1892 (ll) Oil on canvas 19 5/8 x 24 inches (49.8 x 61 cm) Provenance: Ambroise Vollard, Paris L. G. Baugin, Paris Literature: Jean-Jacques Luthi, Emile Bernard, Catalogue raisonne de l'oeuvre peint, Paris, 1982, no. 325, illus. p. 50 Béatrice Recchi Altarriba of the Archives Emile Bernard has kindly confirmed the authenticity of this work. This work is included in the archives. C $40,000-60,000
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Eugène Boudin & Impressionism by Elaine Banks Stainton
When we look at Eugène Boudin’s work, we instinctively associate him with the Impressionists. Here are the same delicious touches of the brush, the same plein-air atmosphere, the same feeling of capturing the “impression” of a passing moment. However, although Boudin took part in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1873, he never thought of himself as a rebel against the classic traditions of French painting. Boudin was something of a late bloomer. Born in Honfleur on the Norman coast in 1824, he only began to study painting formally in 1850, when he was already 26. This was in the Paris studio of the Romantic history painter Eugène Isabey, a thoroughly established artist who enjoyed the patronage of the French royal family. Ever convivial, Boudin also made friends with a number of other artists during the 1850s, and he learned from all of them. Among these was the Dutch landscape painter Johan Jongkind – a fellow student in Isabey’s atelier – who first encouraged him to paint outdoors, a practice that Boudin soon embraced with enthusiasm.
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To supplement his income, he began to make trips home to Normandy to paint the delightful beach scenes that became his stock in trade and remain his best known works today. On a trip to Le Harvre around 1856 he met Claude Monet, still a teenager, who had been studying drawing at a local art school. Sixteen years older than Monet, Boudin played an avuncular role in Monet’s life, introducing him to oil painting and persuading him to turn his hand to landscapes. The two remained lifelong friends.
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Boudin was fascinated by several themes to which he returned repeatedly throughout his life. These include not only his iconic beach scenes, but also views of ports, river landscapes and market scenes, one of which will be offered at Doyle on September 17, 2020.
Le MarchĂŠ, circa 1888-1895, is a striking example of its type. Although the exact setting is not certain, it bears a resemblance to a number of views that the artist painted of the fish market at Trouville over a period of years. As
with so many of Boudin’s paintings, the composition is essentially horizontal, but it is articulated and enlivened with emphatic vertical forms. On the left of this scene a massive building rises like a cliff on one side of the square while on the right a tall thicket of trees faces it across that open space, which is filled with people coming to market. As in almost all of Boudin’s depictions of crowds, the activity takes place at some distance from the viewer, and the people shown are turned away, oblivious to our observation of them. The setting and the figures are
laid out in small, rapid strokes, which create a scintillating feeling of movement. Is this Impressionism? Not quite. We can see so much here that prefigured that style. What we don’t see are the chromatic juxtapositions that ushered in the new world of Impressionist color. But we do see something marvelous. The people who fill this bustling market seem to be an emanation of the natural world, like the sea and the sky. They embody the restless movement, the ancient ebb and flow of the tides of human life.
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Property from the Collection of Dr. Abraham & Carolyn Schlossman
Lot 230 Eugene Louis Boudin French, 1824-1898 Le Marche, circa 1888-1895 Signed E. Boudin. (ll); inscribed 19 on the reverse Oil on panel 6 5/8 x 8 inches (16.8 x 20.3 cm) Provenance: Loeb collection, Albany, NY Hirschl & Adler Galleries, New York, acquired from the above on Feb. 2, 1963 Literature: Robert Schmit, Eugene Boudin, 1824-1898, Catalogue raisonne de l'oeuvre peint, Paris, 1973, Vol. II, no. 2412 Exhibited: Santa Barbara, CA, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Louis Eugene Boudin, Precursor of Impressionism, Oct. 8 - Nov. 27, 1976, no. 20, traveling exhibition: Corpus Christi, TX, Art Museum of South Texas, Dec. 2, 1976 - Jan. 9, 1977; St. Petersburg, FL, Museum of Fine Arts, Jan. 25 - Feb. 27, 1977; Columbus, OH, Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts, Mar. 11 - Apr. 24, 1977; San Diego, Fine Art Gallery, May 7 - Jun. 12, 1977 C Estimate: $18,000 - $25,000
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WOLF KAHN AND THE DYNAMICS OF COLOR BY E L A I N E B A N K S S TA I N TO N
Wolf Kahn’s brushwork is richly textured, whether his palette is monochromatic, as in most of his paintings from the 1960s, or vividly high-keyed, as in his late landscapes. The powerful feeling of physical presence in his work is one of the sources of its appeal. This tactile quality might lead one to suppose that his technique was essentially instinctual; but that impression would be mistaken.
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Some years ago it was my pleasure to work closely with Wolf Kahn on several books about his life and work, which gave me an opportunity to hear his thoughts about his art. I quickly learned that, as opulent as his paintings can be, his approach to composing them was fundamentally intellectual. He loved thinking about painting. Each of his works was an exercise in thoughtful composition, and he loved talking about that process.
Lot 240 Wolf Kahn American, 1927-2020 Sunny November, circa 1972 Signed W Kahn (lr); titled and dated Sunny November 1972 on the stretcher; inscribed # 5 and dated 1973 on the reverse Oil on canvas 50 x 66 inches (127 x 167.6) Provenance: Grace Borgenicht Gallery, Inc., New York $30,000-50,000
He was particularly fascinated by the forces that could be set in motion with color. He recalled his time studying with the Modernist master Hans Hofmann, and spoke with admiration of Hofmann’s “push-pull” theory – the idea that an artist can build visual space within a painting not only by carefully laying out its forms and but also by deploying blocks of warm and cool color. As the cool colors appear to recede and the warm colors come forward, their interacting “push” and “pull” create a visual impression of depth. Although Kahn’s lyrical representational images
look almost nothing like Hofmann’s hard-edged abstractions, the drama of that space-creating illusion is a force that their paintings share. The two landscapes by Wolf Kahn on offer at Doyle in the Important Paintings sale of September 17, 2020 were both painted in the early 1970s, not long after the artist’s palette had shifted from the monochromatic tonality of his early maturity to the brighter, more varied colors of his later work.
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Both are scenes near the farm in Vermont where Kahn and his wife, the abstract painter Emily Mason, customarily worked during the summer and autumn. In Sunny November, circa 1972, the landscape is dominated by the warm red-orange hulk of a barn, whose gray roof recedes and seems to fuse into a distant ridge of leafless trees— painted in the same gray as the roof. In the visual space between these two areas of cool gray there lies an orange meadow and farm buildings in the middle distance and, closer, a bright yellow meadow. These two emphatic, warm-hued areas seem to move toward us, checked only by a palisade of bare trees set between them. In the foreground, those same oranges and yellows appear again, blending into a variegated color field that underlies the barn. This is classic Wolf Kahn: carefully composed, brilliantly colored, and full of chromatic force.
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Lot 241 Wolf Kahn American, 1927-2020 Wet November, 1973 Signed and dated W Kahn 73 (lr); inscribed as titled on the stretcher Oil on canvas 42 3/8 x 44 1/8 inches (107.6 x 112.1cm) Provenance: Grace Borgenicht Gallery, Inc., New York $20,000-40,000
In Wet November, 1973, we see what appears to be the same landscape, now played in a different key. Here the viewpoint has been moved closer to the distant ridge; we seem to be standing near the slope of the orange meadow, which here surges forward into the foreground and dissolves into yellow. The architectural anchor of this picture is a pale gray shed in the left middle-ground, and the gray palisade of trees separating the two meadows that we saw in Sunny November is now only a short distance away. Whereas Sunny November seems to hold itself in reserve, with its dynamics contained within it, here the back-and-forth chromatic forces at work draw us in, as if we could walk into the landscape. The powerful feeling of space and movement that we saw in Sunny November is equally present here. These paintings offer two telling examples of Wolf Kahn’s use of color in his analytical approach to composition, which was an essential component of his art.
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MARTIN WONG IMU UR2 “Some places it will always be Eureka, and in Eureka it will always be Valentine’s day.”
— Martin Wong
BY ANGELO MADRIGALE One of two works by Martin Wong featured in Doyle’s September 17 Important Paintings auction, IMU UR2 is an important prototypical painting from Martin’s time in EUREKA in the mid-1970s, just before his arrival to New York. The canvas may represent the first instance in which “IMU UR2” was used by Martin. The phrase would pop up again throughout Martin’s work and life, even appearing on his artist stamps and business cards. He developed the “IMU UR2” phrase during his time in Eureka, likewise the term “Human Instamatic,” and both would follow Martin throughout his life, employed by Martin as a sort of credo or moniker. Set within a Valentine heart, two Calaveras embrace. Pages from Martin’s sketchbook of this same era give insight into the artist’s process, playing with the skeletal figures, conceiving the arrangement. The sketchbook and this framework would be an archetype for many works to come.
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DRAWINGS FROM MARTIN WONG’S SKETCHBOOK
A larger work, also entitled IMU UR2, depicts two calaveras embracing on a checkered background, both wearing top hats emblazoned with Martin’s famed phrase. This 1978 work was almost certainly created during this same time period while in Eureka, and shares the ruddy brown sepia tones of both works featured in the September 17 auction – as do many of Martin’s works of this period. Martin was intrigued by the Mexican traditional Day of the Dead, and the artist enclave at Chirimoya in Eureka would celebrate the holiday each year. Additionally, we see these embracing figures repeat again later in several of Martin’s best-known works, the
kissing firemen in both Big Heat from 1988 and, again surrounded by a Valentine heart, Sanja Cake from 1991. In 2012, artist Danh Vo would win a Hugo Boss prize for his exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, a tribute to the life and work of Martin Wong, in which he reinstalled an assortment of objects from Martin’s collection. The exhibition as well as the accompanying book entitled: IMU UR2. “Some places it will always be Eureka, and in Eureka it will always be Valentine’s day.” -Martin Wong
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DRAWINGS FROM MARTIN WONG’S SKETCHBOOK
Lot 248 Martin Wong American, 1946-1999 IMU UR2, circa 1976 Acrylic on canvas 8 x 10 inches (20.32 x 25.4 cm) Unframed Provenance: Acquired directly from the artist by the current owner C $6,000-9,000
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Meet the Specialists Our team of Specialists welcome the opportunity to share their vast expertise and experience with you. They are available by telephone, email and even videochat to provide free auction estimates in all categories. Discover the value of your collection!
Angelo Madrigale, SVP
Shani Toledano, VP
Bill Fiddler
Director, Paintings
Associate Director, Paintings
Director, American Art
Director, Contemporary Art
Director, Modern & Post-War Art
212-427-4141, ext 249
212-427-4141, ext 249
212-427-4141, ext 249
Paintings@Doyle.com
Paintings@Doyle.com
Paintings@Doyle.com
Elaine Banks Stainton
Milan Tessler
Senior Specialist, Paintings & Drawings
Cataloguer, Paintings
212-427-4141, ext 249
212-427-4141, ext 249
Paintings@Doyle.com
Paintings@Doyle.com
Right: Lot 247: Martin Wong, American, 1946-1999,
Eye of Providence, acrilic on canvas.
Est. $8,000-12,000
Back Cover: Lot 224: Alex Katz,
American, Portrait of Maxine Groffsky, oil on board. Est. $20,000-40,000
DOYLENEWYORK
