Michelangelo Pistoletto, Gruppo di persone , 1962, graphite on tissue paper on mirror-polished stainless steel, mounted to canvas, 71 x 49 in. (180.3 x 124.5 cm). Signed and dated "Pistoletto 1962" on the reverse. Estimate $1 500 000 - 2 500 000
NEW YORK, NY.- Phillips sales of 20th Century & Contemporary Art in New York will be led by Willem de Kooning’s Untitled XXVIII, 1977. Rendered in creamy yellows, crisp whites and sky blues, the work perfectly captures the artist’s absorption in the natural world of Springs, East Hampton, New York. The painting is estimated to sell for $10 million to $15 million.
Other prominent works in the November 8, 2015, auction are Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Gruppo di persone, 1962, Robert Gober’s The Sad Sink, 1985, and Le Corbusier’s Femme Rouge et Pelote Verte, 1932. The 20TH Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale will offer 52 lots carrying a pre-sale estimate of $64.5 million to $93.8 million
Willem de Kooning spent his entire artistic career exploring the lustrous tactility of oil paint—pushing, pulling and scraping paint in search of the perfect moment, one of balanced tension and retention. The mid-1970s saw de Kooning produce a body of work that captured his absorption in the natural world of Springs, East Hampton, New York. Untitled XXVIII, 1977 seizes a glimpse of the landscape in an inspired attempt to hold onto the temporal chaos of the sand, wind, and sky. It fuses the anthropomorphic and the natural, the abstracted landscape containing incipient human shapes. The underpinning of every canvas, every visceral brush stroke, whether figural or natural, reveals de Kooning’s impulsive painterly actions. De Kooning’s life-long affair with his landscape is undeniable throughout the 1950’s and 60’s, culminating with this miraculous series of landscapes of 1977 in which the present lot is included.
Willem de Kooning, Untitled XXVIII , 1977, oil on canvas, 60 x 54 in. (152.4 x 137.2 cm). Signed "de Kooning" on the reverse. Estimate $10 000 000 - 15 000 000.
PROVENANCE: Xavier Fourcade, New York
Private Collection
Gagosian Gallery, New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner
EXHIBITED: Houston, Janie C. Lee Gallery, Major Pictures, October 1978
Seattle, Richard Hines Gallery, Willem de Kooning: Paintings, Sculpture, Drawings, January 23 – March 8, 1980
Lisbon, Embassy of the United States, 1981
Washington, D.C., Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Five Distinguished Alumni, The W.P.A. Federal Art Project: An Exhibition Honoring the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Centennial, January 21 - February 22, 1982, later traveled to East Hampton, Guild Hall (March 13 – April, 1982)
Notes: “Then there is a time in life when you just take a walk: And you walk in your own landscape.” Willem de Kooning
Willem de Kooning spent his entire artistic career exploring the lustrous tactility of oil paint--pushing, pulling and scraping paint in search of the perfect moment, one of balanced tension and retention. The mid-1970s saw de Kooning produce a body of work that captured his absorption in the natural world of Springs, East Hampton, New York.Untitled XXVIII, 1977, rendered in creamy yellows, crisp whites and sky blues, seizes a glimpse of the landscape in an inspired attempt to hold onto the temporal chaos of the sand, wind, and sky. Untitled XXVIII fuses the anthropomorphic and the natural, the abstracted landscape containing incipient human shapes. The underpinning of every canvas, every visceral brush stroke, whether figural or natural, reveals de Kooning’s impulsive painterly actions.
De Kooning’s life long affair with his landscape is undeniable throughout the 1950’s and 60’s, culminating with this miraculous series of landscapes of 1977 in which the present lot is included. The late paintings of the 1970s have broken free from the topographic and narrative contexts of other Hamptons inspired canvases that have titles such asClam Digger and Back Porch. Moving away from allusions to themes of summer vacation, his compositions tend to avoid the representational with a simple Untitled. At this point de Kooning has spent over 10 years in the Springs and his interest in his surrounds have vigorously reemerged, explaining “When I moved into this house, everything seemed self evident…The space, the light, the trees --- I just accepted it without thinking about it much. Now I look around with new eyes, I think it’s all a kind of miracle.”
The importance of landscape painting for de Kooning finds its roots in the sweeping seascapes of J.M. Turner. The luminosity of Turner’s salty scenes is echoed within the slippery consistency of de Kooning’s brush strokes while his admiration for vigorous and adept brush work is gleaned from the visceral paintings of Chaim Soutine, whose portraits, landscapes and still lives, particularly his depictions of butchered meat are defined by their electrically charged aesthetic. In order to fuse these two desired artistic effects de Kooning began with a layer of “lead white paint which he would sand down until the surface became almost translucence.” Within the supple, luminous white of de Kooning’s paintings, Turner’s vaporous snowstorms and sea storms come to mind, lost in a deluge of beautiful and temporal forms. Between the snow and the air, the wind and the sea, comes the natural sublime, which de Kooning was eager to return to in 1977. De Kooning explained to Harold Rosenberg in 1972, “I wanted to get back to a feeling of light in painting …I wanted to get in touch with nature. Not painting scenes from nature, but to get a feeling of that light that was very appealing to me.” To capture this sea side light de Kooning utilized an abundance of white paint saturated with sun filled colors. The present lot, Untitled XXVIII was painted in 1977, the year which David Sylvester described as the “annus mirabilis of de Kooning’s career.” De Kooning himself acknowledges this glorious time in his artistic career saying, “I could not put down the brush.” Of the 1975 paintings, Dore Ashton wrote, “De Kooning masterfully directs the viewer on a journey through many climates.” His canvaseshave been composed of water diluted oil paints applied with utilitarian house-painters’ brushes, he then dressed his exposed wet oil paintings with a cover of paper, vellum or cardboard, which would later be peeled away, leaving behind a unique impression. The surface would then be besieged with pigment-laden spatulas or knives. The image field emerges out of this dynamic, multi-layered process. Untitled XXVIII, springs to life, with textual buoyancy, swirling with activated momentum, the surface is animated with areas of tactile softness, bumping, crumpling, furrowing and flexure. The complicated stages of paint application and the amended surfaces of the canvas were meant to emulate, in immediate human terms, the variable intensity of nature.
Gladiateurs au Repos is a large-scale, historical painting by Giorgio de Chirico, dating from 1928-29, celebrating the gladiators who had become one of his key pictorial themes. This painting, with its armed figures looming larger than life and full of color, was one of three that dominated the celebrated Hall des gladiateurs in the home of de Chirico's dealer, Léonce Rosenberg, the founder of the famous avant-garde Galerie de l'Effort Moderne. The room featured a total of eleven canvases by the artist; of this group, several are now in museum collections. Gladiateurs au Repos has a distinguished history, featuring in a wide range of exhibitions and publications. The picture has seldom changed hands: it was acquired by the writer and diplomat Filippo Anfuso in the 1930s, and remained in the collection of his heirs until just over a decade ago. By the time de Chirico painted Gladiateurs au Repos, he was living in Paris, having returned there after a sojourn in Italy. De Chirico had returned to Paris in part because of the enthusiasm the Surrealists had shown his pictures. De Chirico's paintings tapped into a mysterious universe, in which the past appeared vivid and real, continuing to unfold parallel to our own existence.
Giorgio de Chirico, Gladiateurs au Repos, 1928-29. Oil on canvas, 62 1/2 x 78 1/4 in. (158.8 x 198.8 cm). Signed "G. de Chirico" upper right; further signed and titled "'Gladiatori' Giorgio de Chirico" on the reverse of the burlap cover. Estimate $4,000,000 - 6,000,000.
PROVENANCE: Léonce Rosenberg, Paris
Filippo Anfuso, Rome
Private Collection, Milan
Private Collection
EXHIBITED: Paris, Jeu de Paume des Tuileries, L’Art Italien des XIX et XX siècle, May - July, 1935, no. 45 (exhibited as L’école des gladiateurs)
Varese, Villa Panza, Giorgio De Chirico: Gladiatori 1927 - 1929, October 4 - December 14, 2003
Padua, Palazzo Zabarella, De Chirico, January 20 - May 27, 2007
Winterthur, Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Giorgio de Chirico: Werke 1909-1971 aus Schweizer Sammlungen, August 23 - November 23, 2008
Paris, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris,Giorgio de Chirico: La fabrique des rêves, February 13 - May 24, 2009
New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum,Chaos and Classicism: Art in France, Italy, and Germany 1918-1936, October 1, 2010 - January 9, 2011, then traveled to Bilbao, Museo Guggenheim (February 7 - May 15, 2011)
LITERATURE: "L'intelligence de deux époques", Vogue, Paris, 1929, p. 110
P. Courthion, A Bardi, "Giorgio de Chirico, chronique de la vie artistique", Sélection Vol. VIII, Antwerp, 1929, p. 75
W. George, "Appels du Bas – Empire. Giorgio de Chirico", Formes, no. 1, Paris, 1930, pp. 12-13
"Cubisme et tradition chez M. Léonce Rosenberg, à Paris", Art et industrie, no. 12, Paris, December, 1930, p. 16
W. George, "Vie et mort de Chirico", L’Amour de l’Art, Paris, 1932, p. 132, pl. 47 (illustrated)
W. George, "Le Sentiment de l’Antique dans l’Art Moderne", L’Amour de l’Art, no. 2, Paris, 1935, pp. 49, 50 (titled as L’école des gladiateurs)
C.E. Rava, "Funzionale antico e modern", Domus, Milan, 1943, p. 66
G.M. Lo Duca, Dipinti di Giorgio de Chirico (1912-1932), Milan: Hoepli Editore, 1945, pl. XXXII (illustrated)
C.B. Sakraischik, Catalogo generale Giorgio de Chirico: Opere dal 1908 al 1930, Vol. I, Milan: Electa, 1971, no. 82 (illustrated)
De Chirico par de Chirico, Paris: Jacques Damase Editeur, 1978, p. 45, (illustrated)
P. Baldacci, M.F. dell’Arco, Giorgio de Chirico: Parigi 1924-1929, dalla nascita del Surrealismo al crollo di Wall Street, Milan: Edizioni Philippe Daverio, 1982, pp. 129, 541, no. 217 (illustrated)
C. Derouet, Ein Fall von italienischem Spätbarock in Paris in Giorgio de Chirico, exh. cat., Haus der Kunst, Munich, , 1982, p. 115, no. 14 (illustrated)
M.V. Orlandini, "Hans von Marées: Appunti sui 'Tedeschi Romani' e l’Arte Metafisica di Giorgio de Chirico", Studi in onore di Giulio Carlo Argan, Vol. II, Rome, 1984, p. 347, no. 2 (illustrated)
M.F. dell’Arco, De Chirico: Gli Anni Venti, Milan: Mazzotta, 1986, pp. 154-155, 164 (illustrated)
P. Fossati, Storie di figure e di immagini: Da Boccioni a Licini, Turin: Giulio Einaudi Editori, 1995, pp. 227-228, no. 92 (illustrated)
F. Picabia, Lettres à Léonce Rosenberg 1929-1940, Les Cahiers du Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris, 2000, p. 97 (illustrated)
K.J. Jewell, The Art of Enigma: The De Chirico Brothers & the Politics of Modernism, University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004, p. IX
W. Schmied, "L'enigma di de Chirico", Il Giornale dell’Arte, no. 3, 2007, p. 6 (illustrated)
A. Inguscio, G. Rasario, "Giorgio de Chirico e Léonce Rosenberg: L’Arte al tempo della crisi",Metafisica 2010, no.9/10, Fondazione Giorgio e Isa de Chirico, Rome, 2010, pp. 102-105, 107, 114, 115
R. Smith, "Movements Expanded and Redefined",The New York Times, September 12, 2010, p. AR70 (illustrated)
C. Green, J. Daehner, Modern Antiquity: Picasso de Chirico, Léger, Picabia, Getty Publications, Los Angeles, 2011, p. 35 (illustrated)
Notes: Gladiators! There's an enigma in that word.
Gladiateurs au repos is a large-scale, historical painting by Giorgio de Chirico, dating from 1928-29 and celebrating the gladiators who had become one of his key pictorial themes. This painting, with its armed figures looming larger than life and full of color, was one of three that dominated the celebrated Hall des gladiateurs in the home of de Chirico's dealer, Léonce Rosenberg, the founder of the famous avant garde Galerie de l'Effort Moderne. The room featured a total of eleven canvases by the artist; of this group, several are now in museum collections. Since it was painted, Gladiateurs au repos had a distinguished history, featuring in a wide range of exhibitions and publications. The picture has seldom changed hands: it was acquired by the writer and diplomat Filippo Anfuso in the 1930s, and remained in the collection of his heirs until just over a decade ago.
Rosenberg's apartment was decorated by a number of artists with whom he had worked, alongside de Chirico. Others including Max Ernst, Fernand Léger, Francis Picabia, Gino Severini and de Chirico's own brother, Alberto Savinio, were all invited to create works for the interior, which became a showcase in its own right. In de Chirico's room, the theme of the gladiator dominated: the two other large-scale paintings showed a combat and a triumph, with Gladiateurs au repos placed between them. Elsewhere, other images included gladiators racing or training. In L'intelligence de deux époques, published in 1930, Waldemar George celebrated the way this modern take on a classical theme resonated with the Empire period furnishings in the room.
By the time de Chirico painted Gladiateurs au repos, he was living in Paris, having returned there after a sojourn in Italy. de Chirico had returned to Paris in part because of the enthusiasm the Surrealists had shown his pictures. de Chirico's paintings tapped into a mysterious universe, in which the past appeared vivid and real, continuing to unfold parallel to our own existence. These gladiators, which appeared in de Chirico's work at the end of the 1920s, tap into that theme: they are classical fighters, champions of battles enacted solely for the entertainment of their spectators. In de Chirico's novelHebdomeros, published in 1929, around the time that he painted Gladiateurs au repos, his eponymous alter ego viewed a tableau vivant featuring such gladiators, which he viewed in terms that relate to this painting:
"That evening, surrounded by his friends, he attended the performance and understood everything. The riddle of this ineffable composition of warriors, of pugilists, difficult to describe and forming in a corner of the drawing room a block, many-coloured and immobile in its gestures of attack and defence, was at bottom understood by himself alone." (Giorgio de Chirico, Hebdomeros, trans. J. Ashbery, Cambridge, 1992, p. 93)
The mystery of the gladiator lies in part in the fascination with violence, a pull that de Chirico himself discussed in Hebdomeros and in his memoirs. In a sense, it was a rebound from the near-puritanical atmosphere of his childhood, when references to violence were completely expunged: "In our house the words dagger, pistol, revolver, gun, etc., were never uttered. The only one which could be mentioned by name was the cannon, probably because it was not usual to keep cannons in the house" (de Chirico,The Memoirs of Giorgio de Chirico, trans. M. Crosland, Milan, 1994, p. 39). The gladiators, standing among their discarded weapons, helmets and shields, therefore have an aspect of the forbidden to them, a notion that is only heightened by the intense focus on the rippling flesh and musculature of these supreme athletes.
In Gladiateurs au repos, de Chirico has painted the different gladiators in various colors, using a polychrome scheme that adds a visual rhythm to the composition. They have been rendered with richly-feathered brushstrokes, with some of the details highlighted with bright ribbons of orange paint, as though the men are illuminated by an unseen fire, adding a phosphorescent, unreal quality to their looming figures. These stylistic devices heighten the visual drama of Gladiateurs au repos while also tapping into numerous layers of time: de Chirico has taken a wide range of influences, conflating and combining them, from Roman mosaics to Impressionism. In particular, Luca Signorelli's murals in the Cathedral at Orvieto, with their tumult of figures shown in various tints and colors, are echoed here. In this way, de Chirico has heightened the sense of synchronicity that underpins Gladiateurs au repos, revealing the importance of this monumental painting within the arc of his wider oeuvre.
Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret 1887-1965) is known, without a doubt, as one of the most influential and famous architects of the 20th century. What the general public knows very little about, however, is that in reality he was a painter and plastic artist in search of aesthetic perfection all his life. Between 1918 and 1927 Le Corbusier and the painter Amédée Ozenfant created Purism, a response to Cubism which forged a vital link between avant-garde practices in early 20th-century painting and architecture through its return to clear, ordered forms expressive of the modern machine age.
The Purist works set the stage for the exploration of the canvas as a space rather than a surface, and after this period Le Corbusier moved away from simplification and transparency towards more complex pictorial arrangements. This movement can be seen in his work beginning in 1927 with the loosening of the Purist syntax and the introduction of what he referred to as objets à réaction poétique. From this point onward he turned to both natural and mythic subjects in addition to machine-inspired iconography, and began incorporating the female figure into his paintings. Femme rouge et pelote verte reveals his interest not only in objets à réaction poétique, but also his fascination with the female form.
Le Corbusier, Femme rouge et pelote verte, 1932, oil on canvas, 51 1/8 x 38 1/4 in. (130 x 97 cm). Signed and dated "Le Corbusier 32" lower right. Estimate $4 000 000 - 6 000 000
PROVENANCE: Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner
EXHIBITED: Zurich, Centre Le Corbusier – Heidi Weber, Thema “Frauen," 12 Olbilder von Le Corbusier aus den Jahren 1928-33, October 1976 - January 1977
Neuchâtel, Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Le Corbusier, July 5 - September 14, 1980
Weimar, Apolda (European Capital of Culture Exhibiton), Le Corbusier - Painter, Designer, Sculptor, Poet, 1999
Geneva, Musée Rath, Le Corbusier ou la Synthèse des Arts, March 9 - August 6, 2006
Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Le Corbusier: Museum and Collection Heidi Weber, June 5 - September 3, 2007
Maldonado, Uruguay, Fundación Pablo Atchugarry, Le Corbusier, El Artista: Grandes Obras De La Colección Heidi Weber Zurich, January 2 - March 25, 2010
LITERATURE: Thema “Frauen," 12 Olbilder von Le Corbusier aus den Jahren 1928-33, exh. cat., Centre Le Corbusier – Heidi Weber, Zurich, 1977, n.p. (illustrated)
Le Corbusier, exh. cat., Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Neuchâtel, 1980, cat, n. 39
N. Jornod, J. Jornod, Le Corbusier (Charles Edouard Jenneret): Catalogue Raisonné de l'Oeuvre Peint. Vol. 1, Milan: Skira, 2005, p. 529 (illustrated)
J. Calatrava, En Los Alrededores del Poema del Angulo Recto: 7 Ensayos Entorno a Le Corbusier, Madrid: Circulo De Bellas Artes, 2006, p. 35 (illustrated)
Le Corbusier, El Artista: Grandes Obras de La Colección Heidi Weber Zurich, exh. cat., Fundación Pablo Atchugarry and Heidi Weber Museum Centre Le Corbusier, Maldonado, Uruguay, 2010, p. 100 (illustrated)
Notes: “There is no such thing as a ‘pure’ sculptor, a ‘pure’ painter, or a ‘pure’ architect. The three-dimensional event finds its fulfillment in an artistic whole at the service of poetry.” Le Corbusier, 1948
Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret 1887-1965) is known, without a doubt, as one of the most influential and famous architects of the 20th century. What the general public knows very little about, however, is that in reality he was a painter and plastic artist in search of aesthetic perfection all his life. In fact, he never drew an architectural plan himself in his entire life, but drew by hand with near perfect perspective, 3D drawings with his vision of the shapes and forms that made his architecture become world famous. But besides having first been a painter, sculptor, engraver (the only cra˛ he graduated with), furniture and lamp designer, he was also an avid writer who published an amazing opus of over 50 books during his lifetime. One of them, in fact his very first book Towards a new architecture (1923), was chosen as one of the 100 most influential and important books out of billions of books published in the 20th century, together with others like The Capital by Karl Marx and Relativity by Albert Einstein. All of this made him the universal artist, the genius of the last century—or as many of his disciples call him, the Leonardo of the 20th century—a reason why he has also been chosen together with Alberto Giacometti and Sophie Taeuber-Arp (the wife of Jean Arp and an artist in her own right) to be featured on the current Swiss banknotes since 1997. As Le Corbusier himself once wrote: “If you want to attribute any importance to my architecture you need to discover the sources in my painted work, my secret search for aesthetic perfection which I have pursued my entire life.”
Le Corbusier, the prolific Swiss-born French architect, painter, urbanist, writer and designer, embodied a spirit of interdisciplinary exploration through his experimentation across media. His graphic output was abundant, consisting of hundreds of paintings, thousands of drawings and watercolors, and scores of collages, lithographs, and murals. Between 1918 and 1927 Le Corbusier and the painter Amédée Ozenfant created Purism, a response to Cubism which forged a vital link between avant-garde practices in early 20th-century painting and architecture through its return to clear, ordered forms expressive of the modern machine age.
The Purist works set the stage for the exploration of the canvas as a space rather than a surface, and after this period Le Corbusier moved away from simplification and transparency towards more complex pictorial arrangements. This movement can be seen in his work beginning in 1927 with the loosening of the Purist syntax and the introduction of what he referred to as objets à réaction poétique. From this point onward he turned to both natural and mythic subjects in addition to machine-inspired iconography, and began incorporating the female figure into his paintings. Organic objects and textures emerge in the forms of rocks, roots, shells, and bones. Shadow-like figures appear in front of doors and windows, leading to secretive spaces, and recognizable elements such as hands, eyes, and women’s breasts are rendered with such sweeping dynamism that they nearly burst from their forms. His paintings begin to be, at the same time, suffused with an overt eroticism, which is also reminiscent of contemporaneous Surrealist concerns, especially the theme of desire as a central creative and regenerative principle.
Such concerns are readily apparent in Femme Rouge et Pelote Verte, a work that reveals his interest not only in objets à réaction poétique, but also his fascination with the female form. A protean figure dominates the left hand portion of the canvas. The anonymity of her masklike face and the stylization of her body combine eroticism, beauty, reverence and power. A comparison with a preparatory study shows his initial conception of her form, outlined in strong black lines, and his early idea of conflating her body with the rock-like object which has been displaced to the background in the completed work. In both the drawing and the painting, Le Corbusier accentuates the figure’s hands, suggesting touch, the hand of the artist, and contact, and also calls to mind proto-Surrealist artworks including Giorgio de Chirico’s inflated gloves and mannequins floating in metaphysical cityscapes which Le Corbusier would have been familiar with from the pages of La Révolution Surréaliste. In the foreground one sees objects from the post-Purist vocabulary – a thimble, a stick of chalk and a skein of yarn, whose figure-eight outline echoes the shape of the woman’s breasts above – placed alongside a typical Purist cube (alluding to both Le Corbusier’s fascination for geometric forms as well as to Cubism), revealing his strategies of juxtaposition and displacement.
This biomorphic ochre figure appears in an amorphous space which contains the allusion to architectural elements in the right-hand portion of the painting. The louvered shutter and wrought-iron balcony, whose shadow creates interplay between interior and exterior zones, recall the works of Henri Matisse. Matisse’s Interior with Violin evinces a similar interest in exploring planar disjunctions and shifting perspectives as witnessed through the oscillating viewpoints that create spatial ambiguities. Le Corbusier recorded seeing Matisse’s work in his journal as early as 1918, and the motif of the window, both revealing and concealing, would figure in several of his subsequent works. These elisions between inner and outer, organic and manmade, and objects and bodies speak to Le Corbusier’s myriad conceptions of form and space.
The painting was bought directly by Heidi Weber, Le Corbusier’s associate who produced and brought his furniture to the world market, as well as the most dedicated collector of his art. She also commissioned him, and was the builder of, his very last architectural masterpiece, the Maison de l’Homme (1967), better known as the Heidi Weber Museum-Center Le Corbusier in Zurich.
Alexander Calder, as both a painter and a sculptor, was rooted in the Abstraction-Création movement alongside Jean Arp and Piet Mondrian, and was truly a pioneer of kinetic art. As the artist recounts in 1920s Paris, responding to Mondrian’s geometric forms on canvas, “I suggested…that perhaps it would be fun to make these rectangles oscillate and he, with a very serious countenance, said: ‘No, it is not necessary, my painting is already very fast…’ This one visit gave me a shock that started things.” The shock resulted in the creation of the “Mobile,” a term coined by the father of Dada, Marcel Duchamp, turning Calder’s early sculptures into even more dynamic forms, central to the artist’s influence, one that extends well beyond early-20th century Paris. The present lot Untitled 1941 embraces the essential characteristics of Calder’s mobiles with biomorphic forms and kinetic presence in a sculpture that is both colorful and dynamic. This standing mobile is firmly rooted to the ground on a three-legged base, a common feature of Calder’s works from the early 1940s, which then extends upwards into two delicate sides of graceful, elemental movement.
Alexander Calder, Untitled , circa 1941, sheet metal, rod, wire, paint, 45 x 68 x 38 in. (114.3 x 172.7 x 96.5 cm).This work was inscribed "CA" at a later date on the largest red element. This work is registered in the archives of the Calder Foundation, New York, under application number A09590. Estimate $3 500 000 - 4 500 000
PROVENANCE: Dorothy Dudley and Harry Blodgett Harvey, New York
Jane and Jason Harvey, New York
Gallery Schlesinger, New York
Marc Blondeau, Paris
Private Collection, Paris
Christie's, New York, Post-War Evening Sale, November 15, 2000, lot 5
Guggenheim Asher Associates, New York
Private Collection, United States
EXHIBITED: Menlo Park, Pace Gallery, Alexander Calder: The Art of Invention, April 16 - May 10, 2014
Notes: "Just as one can compose colors, or forms, so one can compose motions." Alexander Calder
As both a painter and a sculptor rooted in the Abstraction-Création movement alongside Jean Arp and Piet Mondrian, Alexander Calder truly pioneered the notion of kinetic art that has transcended across decades. As the artist recounts in 1920s Paris, responding to Mondrian’s geometric forms on canvas, “I suggested…that perhaps it would be fun to make these rectangles oscillate and he, with a very serious countenance, said: ‘No, it is not necessary, my painting is already very fast…’ This one visit gave me a shock that started things.” (A. Calder and J. Davidson, Calder, an Autobiography with Pictures, 1966, New York, p. 113) The shock resulted in the creation of the “Mobile,” a term coined by the father of Dada, Marcel Duchamp, turning Calder’s early sculptures into even more dynamic forms, central to the artist’s influence, one that extends well beyond early-20th century Paris.
The present lot Untitled embraces the essential characteristics of Calder’s mobiles with biomorphic forms and kinetic presence in a sculpture that is both colorful and dynamic. This standing mobile is firmly rooted to the ground on a three-legged base, a common feature of Calder’s works from the early 1940’s, which then extends upwards into two delicate sides of graceful, elemental movement. Brought to life by a passing breeze, colorful, irregular discs float on arching branches that occupy different planes. In the backmost plane, a fiery red element beautifully oscillates, reminiscent of a mountain range. Floating opposite these parts are white, red, yellow and blue forms, resulting in a symphony of movement in primary colors. Each of these kinetic parts is anchored by a meticulously fashioned red conical form at the center of the sculpture, which serves as a foundation for the dual sided mobile top.
As with all of Calder’s mobiles, however, there are not two moments in time that are the same in the sculpture’s constantly shifting dynamic. In Untitled, mass, movement and form are in a constant state of flux by the energy which surrounds the work. It is the artist’s ability to make us look not just at the parts, but how they interact with the whole that is the genius of these works. Shifting our position can give a completely new variation on the same sculpture, and the longer we look at the work, the more it continues to change our impression of the piece itself. Whether in 1940 or today, this interplay of movement and form is timeless. As art historian Jed Perl notes, “…wheras Picasso, Braque, Matisse, Kandinsky, Klee and Mondrian reacted to nature and abstraction in terms of planar geometries, and Constantin Brancusi and Jean Arp considered geometry in three dimensions, Calder alone found a way to project this fascination with the movement of forms through time and space back into the real world as an artistic actuality. This is the miracle of the mobile.” (Ed. S. Barron and L. Gabrielle Mark, Calder and Abstraction: From Avant-Guard to Iconic, essay by Jed Perl, Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2013, p. 49)
Christopher Wool's Untitled (P271) presents visually arresting panoply of signifiers and found decorative motifs, realized on a large-scale aluminum panel in stark black and white. The work radiates with its layers of half-meditated, half-improvised patterning, including flowers, fleurs-de-lis, hatchings, and undulating lines. The painting's surface reveals the energetic process of its facture, riddled with white pentimenti and the inky remnants of Wool's screening process. The aluminum pane is roughly bisected across its middle, traced with the outline of the many frames used to create its composition.
Wool approximately replicated the patterns in either segment, creating a dizzying double image. Through this process, he invokes the multiple legacies of American Post-War painterly abstraction, Pop Art, and Minimalism, consciously addressing the challenges that face contemporary image making. Wool invokes - through overprinting, clogging and silkscreen slippage - a unique grittiness and intensity less prevalent in Warhol's paintings. In Untitled (P271), Wool also embraces pentimenti, engaging with erasure by using white semi-opaque paint. The work becomes a complex field of decorative elements partially obscured, yet rendered more intriguing.
Christopher Wool, Untitled (P271) , 1997, enamel on aluminum, 108 x 71 7/8 in. (274.3 x 182.6 cm). Signed, titled and dated "WOOL 1997 UNTITLED (P271)" on the reverse. Estimate $3 000 000 - 4 000 000
PROVENANCE: Luhring Augustine, New York
Phillips, London, Contemporary Art Evening Sale, February 14, 2013, lot 7
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner
Notes: Christopher Wool's Untitled (P271) presents a visually arresting panoply of signifiers and found decorative motifs, realized on a large-scale aluminum panel in stark black and white. The work radiates with its layers of half-meditated, half-improvised patterning, including flowers, fleurs-de-lis, hatchings, and undulating lines . The painting's surface reveals the energetic process of its facture, riddled with white pentimenti and the inky remnants of Wool's screening process. The aluminum pane is roughly bisected across its middle, traced with the outline of the many frames used to create its composition. Wool approximately replicated the patterns in either segment, creating a dizzying double image. Through this process, he invokes the multiple legacies of American Post-War painterly abstraction, Pop Art, and Minimalism, consciously addressing the challenges that face contemporary image making. As Bruce W. Ferguson has suggested, "Wool accepts that he is and that his paintings are, at any moment, within what Richard Prince calls 'wild history,' subject to the intertextual meeting of various discourses" (B. Ferguson, quoted in A. Goldstein, "What they're not: The Paintings of Christopher Wool" in A. Goldstein (ed.), Christopher Wool, exh. cat., Los Angeles, 1992, p. 256).
Wool invokes - through overprinting, clogging and silkscreen slippage - a unique grittiness and intensity less prevalent in Warhol's paintings. As Ann Goldstein has described, the rectilinear traces of the silkscreen frames act "like a disembodied picture of a picture, they frame a painting within a painting" (A. Goldstein, quoted in Ibid.). InUntitled (P271), Wool also embraces pentimenti, engaging with erasure by using white semi-opaque paint. The work becomes a complex field of decorative elements partially obscured, yet rendered more intriguing. Wool draws the spectator increasingly to the possibilities of what might be represented underneath, rather than on top of, the painterly smoke screen. Untitled (P271) appears - through myriad patterns, lines and shapes - to have developed its own vernacular or hieroglyphic system, drawing parallels with the word paintings Wool began in 1987. Both the text paintings and Untitled (P271) share an interest in layering, but for Untitled (P271) it is not a question of meaning but of process, successively building up and unbuilding its composition. In this way, it may be that his paintings have more in common with Jackson Pollock’s experiments with the drip than even Warhol’s screens. The very intentional removal of the artist’s hand, the complex layering leading to a myriad of interpretative possibilities, even the sparse monochromatic palette all draw distinct parallels between Untitled (P271) and Pollock’s works such as Number 23, 1948. Each is self-evident in its construction and, accordingly, in its own deconstruction; each artist working to re-legitimize the technique and medium of painting by radically subverting its traditional methodology and iconology.
In Untitled (P271), Wool boldly addresses the conflicts inherent to contemporary image-making, affirming his continued belief in the medium. Through specifically engaging with the history of Post-War American Art, he registers Pop Art's methods of mechanized production, Minimalism's emphatic denial of the author and painterly abstraction's privileging of form over content. In Untitled (P271), Wools embraces all of these paradigms - uniting the abstract and figurative, painting and print, picture and process - to explore the boundaries of contemporary painting.
An icon of 20th century American sculpture, John Chamberlain has utterly radicalized the way in which form, modeling, and composition are arranged in the sculptural canon. His metal works, produced from castoff automobile components and other industrial rubble, are archetypal of the power of sculpture to preserve organic composition and the immense painterly shapes. Chamberlain’s admittance to the lionized exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1961, aptly titled “The Art of Assemblage,” enabled his work to find context among heavy-hitters such as Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp.
The present lot was constructed the year of the show, and it is evident that 1961 was particularly significant to the formation of his oeuvre and the understanding of his materials. The genius of Bullwinkle lies not just in the sheer marvel of the metal, contorted and bound, almost weightlessly suspended, but in Chamberlain’s innate ability to transform an act of ruin into an act of creation. Bound to a wall, the present lot commands the room in which it is installed, exerting equal if not greater power as Chamberlain’s sculptures in the round.
John Chamberlain, Bullwinkle , 1961, painted and chromium-plated steel, 48 x 43 x 32 in. (121.9 x 109.2 x 81.3 cm).This work has been recorded in the archives of the John Chamberlain studio. Estimate $2 500 000 - 3 500 000
PROVENANCE: The artist
James Goodman Gallery, New York (1962)
Allan Stone Gallery, New York (1967)
Acquired from the above by the present owner
EXHIBITED: Philadelphia, Institute of Contemporary Art, The Atmosphere of Sixty-Four, April 17 - June 4, 1964
Southampton, The Parrish Art Museum, Forming, July 29 - September 23, 1984
New York, Allan Stone Gallery, John Chamberlain: Early Works, October 23, 2003 - January 15, 2004
New York, Gallery Valentine, Willem and John, August 16 - September 5, 2011
New York, Allan Stone Projects, Chamberlain, de Kooning & Others, January 8 - March 21, 2014
LITERATURE: Forming, exh. cat., The Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, 1984, p. (illustrated)
J. Sylvester, John Chamberlain: A Catalogue Raisonné of the Sculpture 1954 - 1985, New York, 1986, p. 60, no. 69
John Chamberlain: Early Works, exh. cat., Allan Stone Gallery, New York, 2003, no. 17 (illustrated)
Notes: “…One day something - some one thing - pops out at you, and you pick it up, and you take it over, and you put it somewhere else, and it fits. It's just the right thing at the right moment. You can do the same thing with words or with metal." John Chamberlain
An icon of 20th century American sculpture, John Chamberlain has utterly radicalized the way in which form, modeling, and composition are arranged in the sculptural canon. His metal works, produced from castoff automobile components and other industrial rubble, are archetypal of the power of sculpture to preserve organic composition and the immense painterly shapes. Chamberlain’s admittance to the lionized exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1961, aptly titled “The Art of Assemblage”, enabled his work to find context among heavy-hitters such as Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp. The present lot was constructed the year of the show, and it is evident that 1961 was particularly significant to the formation of his oeuvre and the understanding of his materials. The genius of Bullwinkle lies not just in the sheer marvel of the metal, contorted and bound, almost weightlessly suspended, but in Chamberlain’s innate ability to transform an act of ruin into an act of creation.
In the early 1960’s, Chamberlain frequented body shops and landfills, sometimes electing to work in junkyards, though more often than not he schlepped parts back to his studio to examine them closely. The criteria for chosen elements were fullness and color, as Klaus Kertess reflected of his exceptional capacity, “to make roundness into color and color into roundness.” Bullwinkle is quintessential of his talent for generating harmony from scrap, as the work’s dynamic interplay of rusted white cavorts with gold creases as red, yellow, and blue weave through the tangle. Paving the way for contemporary sculptors to elevate color to the same importance as form, Chamberlain treated each element of detritus that would become his sculptures with reverence and with comprehension, as he sought to uncover their potential for fit and compatibility. Elaborating on his deliberate choice of metal, he has stated, “I wasn't interested in car parts per se, I was interested in either the color or the shape or the amount... Just the sheet metal. It already had a coat of paint on it. And some of it was formed.... I believe that common materials are the best materials.” (Annette Grant, “In the Studio: John Chamberlain,” Art + Auction, no. 11, 2008, p. 43)
Bound to a wall, the present lot commands the room in which it is installed, exerting equal if not greater power as Chamberlain’s sculptures in the round. The wall pieces formed a hefty portion of the artist’s output in the early 1960s; as he began to understand the specifics of welding and experiment with the engineering of form, the physical framework to mount objects to a wall provided him the freedom to explore more bulbous and daring compositions. Despite the challenges posed by welding, Chamberlain described, “…all I knew in 1960-61 was that this kind of metal fit together in a certain way that was interesting to me.” (Julie Sylvester, “Conversations with John Chamberlain,” John Chamberlain: A Catalogue Raisonné of the Sculpture 1954-1985, p. 23) The elegant structure born of detritus and chance, magnificently executed inBullwinkle, reaffirmed the very basis of modernism’s working ideal that the purpose of art can be its own making.
Robert Gober’s early and seminal work from 1985, The Sad Sink, is a profound realization of the artist’s emotional, formal, and conceptual investigations within his nearly four decade long art practice. Through his depiction of seemingly mundane objects such as a sink, crib, chair, along with isolated body parts, Gober explores themes of family, religion, sexuality, alienation and memory, both collective and private. With painstaking and meticulous detail he renders these thought-provoking sculptures by hand to build a universe that investigates the psychological and symbolic power of the objects in our everyday lives.
Having grown up in a Catholic household, Gober was deeply involved in the proceedings of the Church, an experience which has heavily influenced the symbology throughout his oeuvre. Just as Gober may have felt cornered by the competing psychological draws of his familial history and religion against his own sexuality, the sink sits silently and remotely unto itself. With no faucets, no water, it is useless as a sink, and yet, in its silence, the power of the object and the artist’s intent reverberates stridently from the corner outward. The viewer cannot help but think of the young child, caught guilty and sent to contemplate and reflect on the transgression in the corner, back to the room, face to the wall.
Robert Gober, The Sad Sink , 1985, plaster, wood, wire lath, steel and semi-gloss enamel paint, 22 1/2 x 18 x 18 in. (57.2 x 45.7 x 45.7 cm). Signed, titled and dated "'The Sad Sink' 1985 Bob Gober" on the reverse. Estimate $2 000 000 - 3 000 000
PROVENANCE: Daniel Weinberg, Los Angeles
LITERATURE: R. Puvogel, "Monographie: Robert Gober",Kunstforum International, Cologne, January - February, 1991, p. 258
J. Simon, "Robert Gober and the Extra Ordinary",Robert Gober, exh. cat., Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris, 1991, p. 17
C. Henrick, "Robert Gober: Moment der Entblössung", Opening Exhibition Collection Ackermans, exh. cat., Museum Kurhaus Kleve, Kleve, 1997, p. 176
R. Flood, "The Law of Indirections", Robert Gober: Sculpture + Drawing, exh. cat., Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 1999, p. 11
H-K. Brun, "Robert Gober", Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art: Collection, exh. cat., Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, 2000, p. 58
A. M. Guasch, El Arte Último del Siglo XX: Del Posminimalismo a lo Multicultural, Madrid: Alianza Forma, 2000, p. 511
H. Molesworth, "Starts and Stops", October, Cambridge: MIT Press, No. 92, 2000, p. 157
R. Puvogel, "Robert Gober: Gefährdungen", Über Künstler unserer Zeit, Munich: Chorus-Verlag für Kunst und Wissenschaft, 2002, p. 136 (illustrated)
L. Nochlin, "The World According to Gober",Robert Gober: Displacements, exh. cat., Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, 2003, p. 89
Notes: “One of my earliest memories is of standing in front of the counter that held our kitchen sink. The top of my head was much lower than the height of the sink, where I would watch my mother for countless hours. I remember thinking that life would be different when I could see for myself the interior of the sink.” OR “Most of my sculptures have been memories remade, recombined, and filetered through my current experiences.”
Robert Gober’s early and seminal work from 1985, The Sad Sink, is a profound realization of the artist’s emotional, formal, and conceptual investigations within his nearly four decade long art practice. Through his depiction of seemingly mundane objects such as a sink, crib, chair, along with isolated body parts, Gober explores themes of family, religion, sexuality, alienation and memory, both collective and private. With painstaking and meticulous detail he renders these thought-provoking sculptures by hand to build a universe that investigates the psychological and symbolic power of the objects in our everyday lives.
The Sad Sink is one of Gober’s earliest Sinks and one of the few that he titled. Resting in the corner as it must, a function of its form, the work acts as a reference not only for the object which it literally represents but also the myriad art-historical and personal instances of the corner and its implicit psychological underpinnings. Having grown up in a Catholic household, Gober was deeply involved in the proceedings of the Church, an experience which has heavily influenced the symbology throughout his oeuvre. Just as Gober may have felt cornered by the competing psychological draws of his familial history and religion against his own sexuality, the sink sits silently and remotely unto itself. With no faucets, no water, it is useless as a sink, and yet, in its silence, the power of the object and the artist’s intent reverberates stridently from the corner outward. The viewer cannot help but think of the young child, caught guilty and sent to contemplate and reflect on the transgression in the corner, back to the room, face to the wall. And like when the child in the corner, everyone who enters the room of The Sad Sink cannot help but be drawn to its sadness, its sense of purposiveness without purpose.
Seen literally cornered, The Sad Sink has all the brooding, uncanny qualities of a dream made real. Though the purity of its form is almost minimalist in its reduction, the hand-made quality of The Sad Sink contradicts its formal austerity and minimal coolness. Meticulously crafted by the artist, this work is composed of the humblest materials—plaster, wire, wood and enamel paint—in striking contrast to its real-life porcelain counterpart. The smooth contours invite the viewer’s touch, and the sheen of all-white enamel perfectly mimics the cleanliness and rigor of porcelain. But the difference in encountering the warmth of plaster and wood versus the cold, unfeeling indifference of porcelain provides a striking contrast. The work exudes that particular frisson, the unexpected, chill-producing effect that two seemingly illogical objects could produce when combined. Although here, the two objects are not so much objects but the juxtaposition between the viewer’s expectations and the concocted reality of Gober’s sink. This object is resolutely handmade, carefully constructed with a human quality, reinforcing the artist’s search for meaning in form, objects, and content rather than the conceptual strategizing that is associated with Duchamp’s readymades.
The Sad Sink is a triumph of Gober’s oeuvre, perfectly blending his ability to create an object that is at once representational and abstract, physical and ethereal, referent and wholly self-contained. “To get what Gober wanted meant making it, piece by piece, from the bottom up. Only that activity would yield a specific, recognizable thing, related deeply to everyday life, yet uncannily possessing something unknown, perhaps unexpected, that would appear somehow in the activity of making. To make things meant bringing them to the precipitous brink between the real and the strange.” (E. Sussman, “Robert Gober: Installation and Sculpture,” in T. Vischer (ed.), Robert Gober: Sculpture and Installations 1979-2007, exh. cat., Schaulager Basel, 2007, p. 19)
Ever exploring the connotations within creating, John Currin's Birthday is replete with emblems notably absent from historically-rooted, narrative paintings. Portraiture serves as Currin’s primary vehicle to establish an array of symbols, taking shape in subtle transformations and dialogues between the minute and the monumental. Almost nowhere more so is this evident in his oeuvre than in the present lot, with the jarring curve of our subject’s smile, the dimples hugging its edge, the cheeky curl of her lip just beneath her nose.
Contemporary culture has directed our tendencies to search for meaning in narrative or in subject, and yet Currin asks us to revisit our strategy. In Birthday, we immediately appraise a woman in the throes of a celebratory toast, candle light dancing against the black of her festive attire. Her gaze is cast elsewhere, a frozen moment capture with an unbridled sense of joy that is almost off-putting in its candor. The restaurant in which she dines is draped in richly textured curtains, with a floral still-life arrangement atop a nearby table, as if plucked straight from Rococo tableaux. This pastiche of excess holds up a mirror to the decadence of the generation in which Currin grew as a painter—an America of gluttony, exorbitance, and overindulgence.
John Currin, Birthday , 1999,oil on canvas, 22 x 18 in. (55.9 x 45.7 cm). Signed and dated "John Currin 1999" along the overlap. Estimate $1 500 000 - 2 500 000
PROVENANCE: Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner
PROVENANCE: Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner
LITERATURE: R. Rosenblum, "John Currin", Bomb, Spring 2000, p. 76 (illustrated)
K. Vander Weg (ed.), John Currin, New York: Gagosian Gallery and Rizzoli, 2006, pp. 252-253 (illustrated)
Notes: “Instead of layered physical space, I kind of layered culture. You know, different languages battling on one painting.” John Currin, 2009
Ever exploring the connotations within creating, John Currin's Birthday is replete with emblems notably absent from historically-rooted, narrative paintings. Portraiture serves as Currin’s primary vehicle to establish an array of symbols, taking shape in subtle transformations and dialogues between the minute and the monumental. Almost nowhere more so is this evident in his oeuvre than in the present lot, with the jarring curve of our subject’s smile, the dimples hugging its edge, the cheeky curl of her lip just beneath her nose. As we peel away the layers of the surface, we divulge metaphors throughout the picture plane, her smile preserving the majority of implications for the composition as a whole. Coalescing insights from 17th century European art history, Currin’s fastidiously renders the present lot , with her protracted silhouette and caricatured face, with what has been described as a “vicious power” (Jennifer Higgie, “John Currin,” Frieze, no. 105, 2007).
Contemporary culture has directed our tendencies to search for meaning in narrative or in subject, and yet Currin asks us to revisit our strategy. In Birthday, we immediately appraise a woman in the throes of a celebratory toast, candle light dancing against the black of her festive attire. Her gaze is cast elsewhere, a frozen moment capture with an unbridled sense of joy that is almost off-putting in its candor. The restaurant in which she dines is draped in richly textured curtains, with a floral still-life arrangement atop a nearby table, as if plucked straight from Rococo tableaux. This pastiche of excess holds up a mirror to the decadence of the generation in which Currin grew as a painter—an America of gluttony, exorbitance, and overindulgence. Of this allusion, he has explained, “When I was trying to change myself into a figurative painter, I was more drawn to the rococo and the other damned souls of art history.” (Robert Rosenblum, “Artists in Conversation: John Currin,” BOMB, 2000) In the wanton, exponential rise of the dominance of technology, wealth, and media in the 1990s into the 2000s, contemporary culture confronted the history of art, which the artist delineates in his meticulously placed lexicon of kitsch and historical appropriation. This outright repudiation of common taste feels so calculated that it adopts the shape of defiance.
Cast in the porcelain skin of Cranach, our woman wearing the crooked smile in Birthdaymutates our expectations of the familiar, from art historical drapery to feminine partygoers, into the uncanny. At once ordinary and preposterous, the present lot is a dynamic study in portraiture and a vocabulary of buried denotations. In 17th century Europe, broad smiles were a violation of etiquette, inconsistent with decorum, plastered on the faces of only the lascivious, the drunk or the impoverished—in this contextualization, Birthday is radical and unusual, its sitter eclipsed by her own toothy grin.
In the late 1950s, Morris Louis forged a bold new direction for abstract painting by focusing on the unadulterated force of pure color on a truly epic scale. Acclaimed as a leader of the Color Field movement, Louis drenched his large-scale canvases in diaphanous veils of color that envelop the viewer. Turning away from the gesture-laden and heavily encrusted surfaces that characterized so much of Abstract Expressionist painting, Louis created compositions that allowed the color to flow and breathe across open expanses of white canvas. Para IV 1959 is a luminous example of this radical new direction, and is a masterpiece of Louis' mature style.
Louis' investigation of pure color and light places him in an art historical lineage that can be traced back to the experiments of the French Impressionists, and even further back to Turner. In the present work, he focuses on the contrasting force of plumes of brilliant colors, which seem to explode from within the core of the canvas. Using thin washes of Magna, a type of new acrylic resin paint, Louis imparted an extraordinary luminosity to his canvases. His paint, which soaked into the weave of the fabric, seems to become one with the surface and retains both the paint's original coloration and its fluid character. Rejecting the gestural painting style of the Abstract Expressionists, Louis is considered a profoundly intellectual painter, focused exclusively on color and texture.
Morris Louis, Para IV , 1959. Magna on canvas, 101 x 137 in. (256.5 x 348 cm). This work is registered in the estate of the artist under Morris Louis Estate Number 2-84. Estimate $2 000 000 - 3 000 000
PROVENANCE: Estate of the artist
Acquired from the above by the present owner
EXHIBITED: Los Angeles, Manny Silverman Gallery, Six Paintings from 1958 - 1962, January 13 - February 28, 2001
LITERATURE: D. Upright, Morris Louis: The Complete Paintings, New York, 1985, no. 232, pp. 154, 211 (illustrated)
Six Paintings from 1958 - 1962, exh. cat., Manny Silverman Gallery, Los Angeles, 2001, n.p. (illustrated)
Notes: In the late 1950s, Morris Louis forged a bold new direction for abstract painting by focusing on the unadulterated force of pure color on a truly epic scale. Acclaimed as a leader of the Color Field movement, Louis drenched his large-scale canvases in diaphanous veils of color that envelop the viewer. Turning away from the gesture-laden and heavily encrusted surfaces that characterized so much of Abstract Expressionist painting, Louis created compositions that allowed the color to flow and breathe across open expanses of white canvas. Para IV from 1959 is a luminous example of this radical new direction, and is a masterpiece of Louis' mature style.
Louis' investigation of pure color and light places him in an art historical lineage that can be traced back to the experiments of the French Impressionists, and even further back to Turner. In the present work, he focuses on the contrasting force of plumes of brilliant colors, which seem to explode from within the core of the canvas. Using thin washes of Magna, a type of new acrylic resin paint, Louis imparted an extraordinary luminosity to his canvases. His paint, which soaked into the weave of the fabric, seems to become one with the surface and retains both the paint's original coloration and its fluid character.
Rejecting the gestural painting style of the Abstract Expressionists, Louis is considered a profoundly intellectual painter, focused exclusively on color and texture. In Para IV, Louis nearly covers the entire canvas with pigment, abandoning the earlier form of a mass of pigment floating amidst a white background. The green, blue, yellow, black, and ochre swaths of color achieve an effect of radiant inner light that seems to emerge from the surface of the canvas while permeating throughout. In the present work Louis is able to achieve the appearance of a complex, modulated surface while maintaining a completely flattened picture plane. Much like Matisse’s découpage, Louis’ staining technique was radical and revolutionary. Works such as the Maquette for Nuit de Noël, in which Matisse has carefully arranged his cut and painted paper in order to fully account for the manner in which the light and space would be most beautifully rendered, both in the paper work and the final stained glass structure, clearly share a distinct lineage with Para IV. Both radiate with an inner light and incredible chromatic resonance in a flattened picture plane that still manages to be pregnant with meaning and import.
In 1959-60 Louis experimented with variations on his breakthrough Veil paintings of the mid-fifties. The present work is part of his series known as the Paras from the Greek prefix meaning “at or to one side of, beside, side by side.” Of the series, of which he only made six, Para IV is the superlative example. In this series, he returned to working from all four sides of the canvas, as in his first experiments with staining. The Paras had the new goal, however, of exploring color in discrete hues, as in the present work, where each color is possessed of its own energy, pulling in its own direction. This palimpsest of jewel-like tones conveys a mood of unrestrained ebullience. The virtuosity of Morris' painterly technique is demonstrated in full force in Para IV, in both the unprecedented clarity of color and the way it seems almost disembodied, not mitigated by brushwork or any other signs of the artist's hand.
Kazuo Shiraga is one of the leading artists in the Gutai Art Association, founded by the painter Jiro Yoshihara in 1954 in the area around Osaka and Hyogo prefectures in western Japan. Gutai enlisted approximately sixty painter-members during its 18 years of existence and led the postwar Japanese art scene to avant-garde innovations truly contemporaneous to the spirit of experimentation shared by artists around the world. Shiraga became the poster-child of this group with his sensational action painting using his bare feet, a method he had already begun to experiment with prior to joining the group in 1955.
Untitled BB64, which is being sold as part of Phillips’ Provenance: Japan selection, is an exemplary work from Shiraga's mature period, a time when he achieved capturing the balance between the beautiful and the grotesque. His long-time interest in classic hero stories such as the action-filled Suikoden (Water Margin), a fourteenth-century Chinese novel about 108 outlaws, formed his belief that painting must carry force and individualism as strong as those represented by the characters.
The thick impasto of his painting was then created by the artist boldly stepping onto blobs of oil paint on an un-stretched canvas laid flat on the floor; after depositing a large amount of paint directly from paint tubes onto the canvas. Shiraga, then, holding onto a rope hung from the ceiling, swung around in the paint as it oozed out from under his feet. As he slipped and turned, his feet created a swoosh of calligraphic lines, turning the colors’ entanglement and merging with little care for human intention. In Shiraga’s work, the paint as material became both the subject of the work and an agent of the artist's body reviving his presence in mind each time it is seen by the viewer.
Kazuo Shiraga, Untitled BB64 , 1962, oil on canvas, 31 7/8 x 45 5/8 in. (81 x 116 cm). Signed "白髪 一雄 [Shiraga Kazuo]" lower left. Estimate $2 000 000 - 3 000 000
PROVENANCE: Galerie Stadler, Paris
Gallery Georg Nothelfer, Berlin
Private Collection, Tokyo
LITERATURE: Kazuo Shiraga, exh. cat., Gallery Georg Nothelfer, Berlin, 1992, p. 64
Notes: In 1955 Kazuo Shiraga wrote in the Gutai journal:
In front of me lay an austere road to originality. Run forward, I thought, run and run, it won’t matter if I fall down… Let me do it with my hands, with my fingers. Then, as I ran, thinking that I was moving forward, it occurred to me: Why not feet? Why don’t I paint with my feet?
Kazuo Shiraga is one of the leading artists in the Gutai Art Association, founded by the painter Jiro Yoshihara (1905–1972) in 1954 in the area around Osaka and Hyogo prefectures in western Japan. Gutai enlisted approximately sixty painter-members during its 18 years of existence and led the postwar Japanese art scene to avant-garde innovations truly contemporaneous to the spirit of experimentation shared by artists around the world. Shiraga became the poster-child of this group with his sensational action painting using his bare feet, a method he had already begun to experiment with prior to joining the group in 1955. Famously in that year, for the first Gutai group exhibition in the Ohara Kaikan Hall in Tokyo, Shiraga performed a work entitledChallenging Mud in front of curious media and confused critics. Although considered to be one of the key moments in the history of postwar Japanese art, this performance of wrestling mud as an act of painting and the Gutai credo of doing what nobody has done before received a cold shoulder from the art critics of the time. Serious critical consideration of the group grew, instead, outside Japan through the eyes of those who found affinity in the Gutai artists' action-oriented expressions with postwar European and American art movements such as the French critic-dealer Michel Tapié.
Untitled BB64 is an exemplary work from Shiraga's mature period, a time when he achieved capturing the balance between the beautiful and the grotesque. His long-time interest in classic hero stories such as the action-filled Suikoden (Water Margin), a fourteenth-century Chinese novel about 108 outlaws, formed his belief that painting must carry force and individualism as strong as those represented by the characters. The thick impasto of his painting was then created by the artist boldly stepping onto blobs of oil paint on an un-stretched canvas laid flat on the floor; after depositing a large amount of paint directly from paint tubes onto the canvas. Shiraga, then, holding onto a rope hung from the ceiling, swung around in the paint as it oozed out from under his feet. As he slipped and turned, his feet created a swoosh of calligraphic lines, turning the colors’ entanglement and merging with little care for human intention. In Shiraga’s work, the paint as material became both the subject of the work and an agent of the artist's body reviving his presence in mind each time it is seen by the viewer. In 1958 art critic Harold Rosenberg observed that the emergence of postwar American abstraction was a rediscovery of the canvas “as an arena in which to act” by the artists. Shiraga’s audacious act of stepping literally onto the canvas began in 1954 and anticipated this expansion of the field of painting.
Along with Shiraga, many of the early Gutai artists during the late 1950s to early-1960s placed a strong emphasis on tracing physical movements in their work. The tendency relates to Tachisme and Art Informel in Europe, and Abstract Expressionism in the United States, and arose contemporaneously to the activities of Gutai in Japan. In all these artistic movements it was the postwar angst exposed in existentialist philosophy that urged artists to grasp the reality by corporal action, textual concentration, and tackling the subject of exploration of the human subconscious. Part of Gutai, and most significantly Shiraga's, uniqueness lies in an unfettered access to a playful approach to artistic mediums, which may have resulted fortuitously from Japan’s shorter history of engagement with the tradition of oil painting introduced to the country in the late 19th century.
