Heritage Auctions Modern & Contemporary Art Signature Auction, May 22, 2017, Sale #5300

MODERN & CONTEMPORARY ART
MAY 22, 2017 ❘ NEW YORK

Front Cover Lot 77027 (Motherwell)
Inside Front Cover Lot 77046 (Warhol)
Inside Back Cover Lot 77064 (Ryman)
Back Cover Lot 77123 (Israel)

45136
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Modern & Contemporary Art
May 22, 2017 | New York
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Modern &
Contemporary Art
Lot 77038 (Wesselmann) Detail

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77001
George Grosz (1893-1959)
Sitting Nude with Summer Hat, 1940
Oil and mixed media on paper
20-3/8 x 25-5/8 inches (51.8 x 65.1 cm) (sheet)
Stamped with the artist’s estate stamp and numbered ‘1-A13-5’ verso
PROVENANCE:
Private collection, Berlin.
This work will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of works on paper by George Grosz.
Estimate: $6,000-$8,000
An Important Selection of
Works by George Grosz

Auction #5300 | Monday, May 22, 2017 | 2:00 PM ET 11
77002
Standing Female Nude in Two Poses, 1940
25 x 19 inches (63.5 x 48.3 cm) (sheet)
PROVENANCE:
This work will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné
of works on paper by George Grosz.
Estimate: $6,000-$8,000
77003
Woman Undressing, 1940
PROVENANCE:
Estimate: $5,000-$7,000

77004
Orgy, 1929/39
Watercolor, oil and mixed media on paper
19 x 26-1/4 inches (48.3 x 66.7 cm) (sheet)
Stamped with the artist’s estate stamp and numbered ‘UC-333-12’ verso
PROVENANCE:
Grosz painted the watercolor in 1929 when he was living in Berlin and took
the watercolor with him when he left Germany in 1933. He overpainted portions
of the work in 1939 after he moved to Douglaston on Long Island.
Estimate: $7,000-$9,000
77005
Lovers and Sitting Female Nude (a double-sided work), 1940
Oil and mixed media on paper; watercolor on paper
PROVENANCE:
Estimate: $6,000-$8,000

77006
Lovers, 1939
23-1/4 x 18-1/8 inches (59.1 x 46 cm) (sheet)
A pencil sketch of a female nude is on the reverse of this work.
PROVENANCE:
This work will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of
works on paper by George Grosz.
Estimate: $6,000-$8,000
77007
Lovers, 1939
22-1/2 x 14-3/4 inches (57.2 x 37.5 cm)
PROVENANCE:
Estimate: $5,000-$7,000

77008
Hermaphrodit, 1937
Signed and dated lower right: Grosz /1937
Stamped with the artist’s estate stamp and numbered ‘UC-331-31’
verso
PROVENANCE:
Estimate: $5,000-$7,000
77009
Lovers, 1939
Stamped with the artist’s estate stamp and number ‘UC-331-16’
verso
PROVENANCE:
Estimate: $4,000-$6,000

77010
The Wanderer, 1936
Watercolor, gouache, reed pen, and pen and ink on paper
Signed and dated lower right: Grosz 36
Inscribed lower center: No. 9
PROVENANCE:
Studio of the artist, Douglaston, New York, 1936;
Collection of Bernard and Rebecca Reis, New York;
Collection of Barbara Poe Levee, Los Angeles, California, by descent;
Private collection, Denver, Colorado, by descent.
We wish to thank Ralph Jentsch for his gracious assistance in cataloguing this
work, which will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of works
on paper by George Grosz. A photo-certificate accompanies this lot.
Estimate: $15,000-$20,000
77011 ●
Alexander Calder (1898-1976)
Portrait of George Seldes, 1926
Pencil on paper
Signed and dated lower center: October 19, 1926 / Sander Calder
PROVENANCE:
Estate of Gilbert Seldes (Timothy).
Estimate: $6,000-$8,000

77012
Joan Miró (1893-1983)
Untitled, 1934
Pastel and India ink on paper laid down on Japan paper
12-1/4 x 18-1/2 inches (31 x 47 cm) (sheet)
PROVENANCE:
The artist;
Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York, acquired from the above, circa 1934 (inventory book: Pierre Matisse Gallery Archives:
51.ST 225, Box 171, Folder 34), with the title in English: Drawing on Rose Paper Three Figures;
A. Everett Austin, Jr., Hartford, Connecticut, possibly gifted from the above, 1935;
Private collection, Canada, acquired circa 1960;
Private collection, acquired circa 2007.
EXHIBITED:
Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut, “Paintings in Hartford Collections,” 1936, no. 295 (catalogued as Three
Figures on Rose);
Mirada Maestras, Galería René Metras, April 25-July 7, 2008 (in the brochure as Trois Personnages).
LITERATURE:
Eugene R. Gaddis, Magician of the Modern: Chick Austin and the Transformation of the Arts in America, Alfred A. Knopf,
New York, 2000, p. 297;
Jacques Dupin & Ariane Lelong-Mainaud, Joan Miro, Catalogue raisonné. Drawings, 1901-1937, vol. 1, Paris, 2008, no. 417,
p. 203, illustrated.
This lot is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity by ADOM, signed by Jaques Dupin, Paris, dated May 2, 2007.
Estimate: $40,000-$60,000
A. Everett (‘Chick’) Austin was director of the Wadsworth
Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut from 1927 until
1942. Harvard University educated, he was one of the
most innovative and imaginative museum directors in
twentieth-century America and among the very first to
embrace modern art. His groundbreaking Newer Super-
Realism (held at the Wadsworth Antheneum, 1931)
was the first American museum exhibition to present
Surrealism to a general public.
During the 1930s, Austin acquired numerous important
Surrealist works for the museum by Picasso, de Chirico,
Dalí, Tanguy and Miró. In 1934, he organized a
groundbreaking Picasso exhibition for the museum, the
first American museum exhibition of Picasso’s paintings.
Amongst the most important works in the collection by
Joan Miró was the large-scale canvas Composition (1933),
bought from the Pierre Matisse Gallery in 1934, a work
which Austin was so proud of that he displayed it in his
office at the museum following the acquisition.
Pierre Matisse, son of Henri Matisse, was Miró’s
representative in New York. In 1936, Austin organized
another ambitious exhibition, Paintings in Hartford
Collections, which combined the museum’s substantial
holdings of European, Modern and Surrealist art with
those of private Hartford collections, including his
own, from which he generously lent ten pieces. As
Eugene Gaddis (archivist at Wadsworth Atehneum and
biographer of Austin) notes, “The European pictures in
Hartford Collections show included a fifteenth-century
portrait by Hans Memling and a drawing by Albrecht
Dürer as well as oils by Magnasco, Bronzino, Constable,
Gainsborough, Turner, Degas, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec,
de Chirico, Dalí, Miró, Berman, Tchelitchew, and
Picasso. Setting an example, Chick and Helen [Austin]
had lent ten works: drawings by Jan Breughel the
Elder, Renoir, Miró, and Charles Despiau... The show
demonstrated that there were, after all, paintings of
surprising quality in private hands in the region.”
The present lot, Trois Personages, or Three Figures, is
listed in the inventory of the Pierre Matisse Gallery (with
the English description “Drawing on Rose Paper Three
Figures”) as having been acquired by Austin in January
1935 as a “gift.” Perhaps Pierre Matisse wanted to thank
Austin personally for the other acquisitions on the behalf
of the Wadsworth Atheneum. The catalogue for the
1936 Paintings in Hartford Collections listed Miró’s Three
Figures on Rose (1934) as one of the loans from Austin
and his wife’s private collection.

77013 ●
Carlos Orozco Romero (1898-1984)
Paisaje
Oil on canvas
18-1/2 x 29-1/8 inches (47 x 74 cm)
Signed lower left: C. Orozco Romero
Estimate: $6,000-$8,000

77014 ●
Jean Dufy (1888-1964)
Nature morte aux fleurs et au compotier
Oil on paper laid on board
14-1/8 x 17-3/4 inches (35.9 x 45 cm)
Stamped lower right: Jean Dufy
PROVENANCE:
Sale: Versailles, February 26, 1978, no. 37;
Sale: Biarritz, August 9, 1998, no. 12;
Frances Aronson Fine Art, Atlanta, Georgia;
Private collection, Pacific Palisades, California.
This lot is accompanied by a photo-certificate of authenticity from Claude Marumo (#95345) dated September 30, 1998.
We would like to thank Mr. Jacques Bailly for confirming the authenticity of this work. This lot is also accompanied by a
letter of authenticity by Mr. Bailly.
Estimate: $15,000-$25,000
77015 No Lot.

77016
Victor Brauner (1903-1966)
Denombrement III, 1938-39
Oil on canvas
25-1/2 x 21 inches (64.8 x 53.3 cm)
Signed and dated lower left: Victor Brauner / 1939
Inscribed on the stretcher: 1938 Victor Brauner “Denombrement 3”
PROVENANCE:
Henriette and André Gomès, Paris;
Galerie Marwan Hoss, Paris (label verso);
Sotheby’s, Tel Aviv, October 23, 1997, lot 46;
Private collection.
EXHIBITED:
Musée Picasso Château Grimaldi, Antibes, France, Le Regard d’Henriette: Collection Henriette et André Gomès, July 1-September 30, 1994,
no. 10, illustrated in the catalogue;
Galerie Marwan Hoss, Paris, André Gomès: Côte Cour Côte Jardin, 1995.
We wish to thank Samy Kinge for providing invaluable catalogue information and for confirming the authenticity of this work.
Estimate: $80,000-$120,000
A strange painting for strange times, Romanian-born artist Victor Brauner completed this work in 1939, around the
same time a fight had cost him vision in one eye. Working alongside Surrealists in Paris, Brauner was facing the
encroachment of Nazi forces in France. Viewed in the context of such fraught historical times, the images is even more
unnerving. Brauner had a malleable style, and he tended to wear his influences on his sleeve, with compositions that
owed a heavy debt to Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, and others. Yet he was more than capable of striking out on his
own; Painted from Nature, 1937, depicting an unfortunate man completing a work with paintbrushes growing from his
nose and eyes, is a delightful idiosyncratic absurdity that predates Magritte’s so-called vache period. Denombrement III,
while far more somber, has the same sense of freedom, looseness, and experimentation. While its title in English may
allude to an enumeration, this is ironic considering how little the composition explains of itself: a bird-beaked figure, its
interior a jumble of sculptural bones, flailing or dancing against an ominous black cloud.
Each painting that I make is projected
from the deepest sources of my anxiety...
Victor Brauner

77017
Eduardo Kingman (1913-1997)
Untitled
Oil on canvas
47 x 23 inches (119.4 x 58.4 cm)
Signed and inscribed lower left: E. Kingman / Quito
Estimate: $6,000-$8,000

77018
Jean (Hans) Arp (1886-1966)
Sposi (Bride and Groom), 1966
Glass and metal
21-1/4 inches (54 cm) high (each)
Ed. 3/3
Inscribed with signature, edition number, date, and foundry mark ‘F.A’ along the base of the red figure
Conceived in 1964 and execute in Murano in an edition of 3; the present pair executed in 1966.
PROVENANCE:
Christie’s New York, November 14, 1989, lot 133;
Holly Solomon Gallery, New York, acquired from the above;
Acquired by the present owner from the above.
LITERATURE:
Sculpture in Glass, exhibition catalogue, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1965-66;
Vince Gagliardi et. al., Sculpture in Glass of the Fucina degli angeli, Venice, 1967, n.p., another example
illustrated.
Estimate: $20,000-$30,000

77019
Marc Chagall (1887-1985)
Moïse et les tables de la Loi, 1950
Painted and incised ceramic plate
13-1/4 x 11 x 0-5/8 inches (33.7 x 27.9 x 1.5 cm)
Signed and dated on the reverse: Chagall / 1950
PROVENANCE:
Collection of Bernard and Rebecca Reis, New York;
Collection of Barbara Poe Levee, Los Angeles, California, by descent;
Private collection, Denver, Colorado, by descent.
We wish to thank the Comité Marc Chagall for confirming the authenticity of this work. The lot is
accompanied by a certificate of authenticity, dated December 13, 2016, from Jean-Louis Prat of the Comité.
Estimate: $100,000-$150,000
When Matisse dies, Chagall will be
the only painter left who understands
what colour really is.
Pablo Picasso
At the time he created Moïse et les tables de la Loi,
Chagall had recently returned from his war-time exile in
the United States and was living in the Cote d’Azur - not
far from Picasso, Matisse and Léger – who were all in the
throes of rediscovering the ancient local ceramic tradition.
Between 1950-1952, Chagall created 41 ceramics, using
biblical themes. Many of these would be included in the
encyclopedic exhibition Homage to Chagall (1969-1970)
at the Grand Palais in Paris.
Moïse et les tables de la Loi is an incredibly introspective
example from this series. The subject matter of this plate
can be said to be the namesake of the artist, born Moishe
Segal, if not in fact a metaphorical self-portrait. Much
different from Chagall’s depictions of the same character
on both canvas and paper, this plate evokes a vastly more
intimate encounter. Created not long after the demise
of his late beloved bride Bella, the tablets in Moïse et
les tables de la Loi, appear the object of both Moses’
affections – whether lover or code of tradition.
Ceramics held a special primal symbolism for Chagall, in
its transformation of earth through fire, and in Chagall’s
statement that he saw the Old Testament ‘as a human
story, replete not with the creation of the cosmos, but
with the creation of man’. Chagall is remembered for his
incredible acuity in marrying fauvist coloring with surreal
and symbolist imagery, and so Moses’ skin is green,
perhaps as a proxy for verdant landscapes – a wishful
alternative to the Sinai wilderness.
Chagall was exhibited and collected during his lifetime
by significant institutions, such as the Museum of Modern
Art, Guggenheim, Philadelphia Museum of Art and Art
Institute of Chicago, as well as commissioned for large
scale public works such as the stained glass windows
of New York City’s Metropolitan Opera House. In 1977
Chagall received the Grand Medal of the Legion of
Honor. Chagall was one of a very few artists to have a
retrospective exhibition at the Louvre during his lifetime.

77020
Pinot Gallizio (1902-2002)
L’Arcangelo Michele dopo la Biennale, 1958
Mixed media on canvas
38 x 51 inches (96.5 x 129.5 cm)
Signed, dated, and inscribed on the reverse: Pinot l’oro 1958 Angelo Michele dopo alba la biennale
PROVENANCE:
Collection of Alberto Ulrich, Milan;
Private collection, Texas.
We want to thank Liliana Dematteis of the Archivio Gallizio for confirming the authenticity of this
lot, which is recorded in the Archivio Gallizio as 58 DT 21.
Estimate: $6,000-$8,000

77021 ●
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)
Drawing for Milton Fox, 1966
Crayon on paper
Signed, dated, and inscribed along the top edge: Pour Milton Fox / Picasso 13.5.66
Property from The Estate of Milton S. Fox
PROVENANCE:
Gift of the artist to the current owner.
This work has been executed across the frontispiece of the book Notre Dame de Vie, Secrets d’alcôve d’un atelier
by Hélèn Parmelin, Éditions Cercle d’Art, Paris, 1966. We wish to thank Claude Ruiz-Picasso for kindly providing a
certificate of authenticity for this drawing.
Estimate: $20,000-$30,000
Milton S. Fox and Ruby Canfield met in Paris in the 1920s while both there to study
art. He came from Cleveland, Ohio, she came from Seattle, Washington. He was
enrolled at the Academie Julian then at the Ecole des Beaux-Artes, and she at the
Academie Delecluse.
When they returned to the United States, they married and settled in Cleveland,
Ohio. Milton joined the Cleveland Museum of Art as a lecturer in the Education
Department while also pursuing a career as a portrait painter. Ruby taught puppetry
while continuing to paint. They had two children, Robin and Michael Allen.
In 1944, the family moved to Hollywood, California, where Milton worked as a
screen writer. Then in 1950 the family moved to New York when Milton joined
the newly-formed art book publishing firm, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers.
Abrams was the first American publishing house to specialize in fine art books.
Milton remained Editor-in-Chief until his death in 1971, overseeing the texts and
production of books. Ruby died four years later.
During the last decades of their lives, Milton and Ruby were able to travel widely
in Europe and Japan. During their travels, they created a collection of paintings,
scrolls, pottery, and sculpture.
Letter to Milton S. Fox
from Marcel Duchamp, 1965
Photograph to Milton S. Fox
from Salvador Dali, 1968

77022
Hans Hofmann (1880-1966)
The Heinzelman, 1946
Oil on plywood
20 x 16 inches (50.8 x 40.6 cm)
Signed and dated lower right: 46 / hans hofmann
PROVENANCE:
Estate of the artist, 1966-1993;
André Emmerich Gallery, New York, 1993;
Crane Kalman Gallery, London, 1993;
Private collection, 1993-1997;
Sotheby’s Arcade, New York, November 7, 1997, lot 348;
Private collection, Fayetteville, Arkansas.
EXHIBITED:
American Contemporary Gallery, Hollywood, California, 1946;
Crane Gallery, London, 1990, cat. no. 18.
LITERATURE:
S. Villiger et al., Hans Hofmann Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, Volume II, London, 2014, p. 375, no. P617, illustrated.
Estimate: $50,000-$70,000
The German Abstract-Expressionist is best known for his fields of balanced, vibrant color: intense squares and
rectangles expertly layered atop one another, full of restful energy. Throughout the 1930s, Hans Hofmann
made a journey through figuration, beginning with a series of bold landscapes, portraits, and still lifes. These
compositions gradually edged closer to pure abstraction, often with only a single element -- a table, a
hand -- anchoring them in the realm of the real. The Heinzelman, 1946, catches Hofmann at an intriguing
midpoint: clearly consumed by the primacy and interplay of color, yet still holding on to the barest outlines of
representation. Reds, yellows, and greens are ecstatically mixed and splashed, blending and bleeding into each
other, but out of this swirling cauldron of pigments arises a child-simple outline of a figure. At the upper-right
edge of the canvas the titular protagonist, plucked from Germanic folklore, comes into focus--but whether it’s
benevolent or demonic is anyone’s guess. This is an uncommonly personal, viscerally expressive gesture from an
artist who would soon settle into a more restrained, almost academic mode.
The ability to simplify means to eliminate the
unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.
Hans Hofmann

77023
Pink Phantasie, 1950
Oil on panel
14-1/4 x 20-1/4 inches (36.2 x 51.4 cm)
Signed lower right: hans hofmann
Inscribed verso: Cat. 1091 / 1090
PROVENANCE:
Estate of the artist, 1966-1974, (Estate no. M-0051);
André Emmerich Gallery, New York, 1974;
Private collection, acquired from the above, 1974.
EXHIBITED:
Kootz Gallery, New York, “Hans Hofmann: New Paintings,” October 24-November 13, 1950;
Fine Arts Committee of the Great Neck Education Association, Great Neck, New York, “Art in America: 20th Century,” March 1-14, 1953;
H.C. Gallery, Provincetown, Massachusetts, “Hans Hofmann,” July 26-August 8, 1955;
Naples Museum of Art, Naples, Florida, “Hans Hofmann: A Retrospective,” November 1, 2003-March 21, 2004;
The Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts, “Hans Hofmann: Circa 1950,” January 2009-October 17, 2010.
LITERATURE:
Kootz Gallery, Hans Hofmann: New Paintings, New York, 1950, cat. no. 1 (as Pink Fantasy);
Fine Arts Committee of the Great Neck Education Association, Art in America: 20th Century, 1953, cat. no. 22 (as Pink Fantasy);
Cynthia Goodman, Hans Hofmann, Modern Masters Series 10, Abbeville Press, New York, 1986, p. 65;
Naples Museum of Art, Hans Hofmann: A Retrospective, 2003, cat. no. 24, illustrated in color (as Pink Fantasy);
The Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Hans Hofmann: Circa 1950, 2009, pp. 107 & 142, illustrated in color;
Boulanger, Art New England, 2009, p. 55;
Suzi Villiger, Hans Hofmann Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, Volume II: Catalogue Entries P1-P846 (1901-1951), Lund Humphries,
Burlington, Vermont, 2014, cat. no. P771, p. 472.
Estimate: $40,000-$60,000
Hofmann painted Pink Phantasie in 1950 at age seventy, a critical moment for him in terms of
artistic development and gallery promotion. Impressed by Hofmann’s new boldly hued, vigorously
painted abstractions, the New York gallerist Samuel L. Kootz, famous for representing Picasso,
scandalously wooed Hofmann away from his dealer, Betty Parsons, and organized for him a
successful one-man show in 1947, an exhibition at the Galerie Maeght in Paris in 1949, and annual
New York shows from 1949-66.
After teaching at New York’s Art Students League, he founded his own Hofmann School of Fine
Arts in New York, as well as a summer academy in Provincetown, Massachusetts, both meccas
for Abstract Expressionism during the 1940s and ‘50s. During this period, as he embraced pure
abstraction, Hofmann was writing his treatise on painting technique for his texts Search for
the Real: And Other Essays (1948) and The Painter and His Problems (updated 1948). His most
impactful theoretical concept was that of “push-pull,” the dynamic relationship of pictorial elements
that simultaneously asserted the flatness of the canvas and the illusion of space. For Hofmann,
counterbalanced colors, values, and textures, as well as overlapping shapes, were the major agents
in achieving this push-pull tension. Such pictorial opposites effect a vibrating optical sensation
forcing a shift between surface and depth, containment and openness.
In its celebration of push-pull, Pink Phantasie points to one of the greatest influences on Hofmann,
the Russian-born “father of abstraction,” Wassily Kandinsky. Both men were brilliant theoreticians
and teachers, as well as pioneers of abstraction. Upon meeting Kandinsky in Munich in 1914,
Hofmann was immediately taken with his literary magnum opus, On the Spiritual in Art, in which
Kandinsky posited that it is the goal of the artist to juxtapose colors and forms stemming from a
unique “internal necessity,” or “vibration of the soul”; paradoxically, only then can a harmonious
composition emerge. Like Kandinsky, Hofmann taught that form and color were inter-dependent
and that they were manifestations not of an objective reality, but of the artist’s subjective vision, or
spirituality. The art historian Karen Wilkin points out that “it is plain from the swirling, loose-edged
abstract images that recur throughout Hofmann’s oeuvre, some overlaid with swirling whiplash
lines, that he was thoroughly familiar with Kandinsksy’s dynamic, lyrical abstractions of the period
between 1910 and 1914. Hofmann, in fact, owned several Kandinskys of this type including
Untitled Improvisation III (1914, Los Angeles County Museum of Art), intimate works on paper and
cardboard notable for their exuberant gestures, fluid strokes of paint and calligraphic drawing, all
of which have clear echoes in Hofmann’s own works on paper and in many of his canvases” (K.
Wilkin, Hans Hofmann: A Retrospective, New York, 2003, pp. 33-4).
With its exhilarating, expressive color and frenzied brushwork, all held within dynamic
equilibrium, Pink Phantasie is the ultimate fantasia.
Wassily Kandinsky,
Untitled Improvisation III, 1914
©2017ArtistsRightsSociety(ARS),NewYork

77024
Robert Motherwell (1915-1991)
Cor Anglais, 1976
Acrylic and pasted papers on paper
22 x 15 inches (55.9 x 38.1 cm)
Initialed and dated lower left: RM / 11 Feb 76
This collage takes its title from the sheet music fragment, which reads “Cor Anglais” (English Horn). The sheet music is from Beethoven’s Trio
for two oboes and English horn, op. 87.
PROVENANCE:
Private collection, New York;
Private collection, New York.
EXHIBITED:
Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, New Jersey, “Robert Motherwell: The Music Collages,” November 19, 1989-January 7, 1990.
LITERATURE:
Montclair Art Museum, Robert Motherwell: The Music Collages, Montclair, New Jersey, 1989, cover, illustrated in color;
Jack Flam, Katy Rogers, and Tim Clifford, Robert Motherwell Paintings and Collages, A Catalogue Raisonné, 1941-1991, Volume Three: Collages
and Paintings on Paper and Paperboard, The Dedalus Foundation, Inc., and Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2012, cat. no.
C556, p. 265, illustrated in color.
Estimate: $100,000-$150,000
Collages are a modern substitute for still life.
Robert Motherwell

Motherwell’s singlehanded revitalization and advancement of collage
through the uncompromising excellence of his work is among the
most significant achievements in modernist art. History is a long
continuum, with frame or effect depending upon one’s entrance point
into any given sequence: genius is the ability not only to maintain
what had come, but to change and shape one’s own time, and to offer
a succeeding spirit of both (E.A. Carmean, The Collages of Robert
Motherwell: A Retrospective Exhibition, 1973, p. 39).
In 1943 the incomparable modernist art dealer Peggy Guggenheim
invited three young Abstract Expressionists, Robert Motherwell,
Jackson Pollock, and William Baziotes, to contribute collages to her
upcoming Exhibition on Collage. Motherwell had never experimented
with the medium, yet sparked by the challenge, he met at Pollock’s
studio. This day in Pollock’s studio, what at first seemed like “act[ing]
as though we were in kindergarten,” became a watershed moment
for Motherwell (J. Flam, Robert Motherwell: A Catalogue Raisonne,
1941-1991, Volume I, New Haven, 2012, p. 39). Indeed, more than
any other of his peers, he utilized collage throughout his life, both as a
medium in and of itself and as a catalyst for his painting, printmaking,
writing, and editing.
Variously sensuous, painterly, cerebral, edgy, the sophisticated
present work, Cor Anglais, belongs to a series from the mid-1970s,
in which he coupled fragments of sheet music with pieces of paper
painted with a solid acrylic color. In its composition and particular
choice of materials, Cor Anglais not merely acknowledges the artistic
influences on Motherwell as a collagist, but also celebrates his own
contribution to the medium, which he deemed one of “the greatest of
our discoveries” in twentieth-century art (Flam, p. 41).
Steeped in this tradition of European modernism, Cor Anglais
immediately evokes the classical, early Cubist collages of Braque and
Picasso. Motherwell has pasted a fragment of sheet music, layered
with a black-painted rectangle of paper superimposed with white
vertical lines, a green-painted torn piece of paper, and a smaller
fragment of sheet music; thin bands of black and green paper in the
lower right corner echo the colors and shapes in the central collage.
Cor Anglais recalls Braque’s Black and White Collage from 1913 and
Picasso’s Violin and Sheet Music from 1912, with its overlapping
rectilinear papers and sheet music and its dominant blue color. All of
these works emphasize the interplay between the two-dimensionality
and three-dimensionality of the picture plane, as the pasted papers
simultaneously flatten space and, through their overlapping, move
space forward and backward. Motherwell described the whimsy of
his Cubist-inspired papiers collé: “[T]he papers in my collages are
usually things that are familiar to me, part of my life. . . . Collages
are a modern substitute for still life. . . . In collage there [are] a lot
of ready-made details. . . . I do feel more joyful with collage, less
austere. A form of play. Which painting, in general, is not for me, at
least” (Carmean, p. 93).
Cor anglais is French for the English horn, a double-reed woodwind
instrument with a tenor sound. Long, skinny, and black, the cor
anglais looks similar to the oboe, its soprano counterpart. In Cor
Anglais, Motherwell narrows the black rectangle from Braque’s Black
and White Collage, transforming it into the shape of a cor anglais.
He also purposefully selects for the accompanying piece of sheet
music Beethoven’s Trio for two oboes and English horn in C major,
Op. 87, from 1795. Melodic and energetic, Trio, Op. 87 is one of
Beethoven’s most popular woodwind ensemble pieces; however, it is
simultaneously vanguard in that it features an uncommon combination
of instruments, and it was written not for the Austrian court, but
for amateur performers in Vienna. This dual “accessible but cutting
edge” spirit permeates Cor Anglais as well, a cheerful composition
Robert Motherwell, Pierrot’s Hat, 1943
Art©DedalusFoundation,Inc./LicensedbyVAGA,NewYork,NY
Pablo Picasso, Violin and Sheet Music, 1912
©2017EstateofPabloPicasso/ArtistsRightsSociety(ARS),NewYork

that pushes boundaries in the medium of collage by accentuating
broad color fields. Motherwell also hints at Beethoven’s technique
here through the black-and-green shapes in the lower right which
repeat the colors and shapes in the central composition, much
like the exposition repeat of the sonata first movement in Trio,
Op. 87. While Motherwell frequently used sheet music from
Mozart and Stravinsky scores in his roughly 50 music collages
from the 1970s, he highlighted Beethoven’s music in only three
collages, making Cor Anglais that much more unusual.
Motherwell’s collages from this period are indebted to Henri
Matisse’s cutouts, as much as to Cubism. Motherwell became
more attuned to Matisse’s masterful colorful sensibility after
viewing the 1961 exhibition of his cutouts at MoMA, The Last
Works of Henri Matisse: Large Cut Gouaches. He even underlined
a Matisse quote from the exhibition catalogue: “I have arrived at
the distillation of form. . . of this or that object which I used to
present in all its complexity in space, I now keep only the sign
which suffices, necessary for its existence in its own form, for the
composition as I conceive it.” Matisse’s small circa 1949 cutout La
Danseuse—the body of a dancer suggested by a white floriform
shape on a ground of blue, red, and black papers - was purchased
by Motherwell and used as inspiration for his collages after 1975.
Where Matisse’s color-blocked forms suggest island water and
vegetation, Motherwell’s fragmented color-forms conjure up
musical instruments, scores, notes, and even the fragmentary or
jazz-like quality of music.
Motherwell’s genius in collage lay in his ability to appropriate
from the past and push the medium to a new level through the
practice of “seriality.” Around 1970, after renovating a new studio
in Greenwich, Connecticut, Motherwell began “us[ing]the same
papers in similar kinds of compositions, creating large groups
of collages that were essentially variations on a single theme.
In order to highlight the serial, theme-and-variation qualities of
his collages, [he] often showed them together in groups” (Flam,
p. 145). This “deep dive” into an aesthetic subject had already
shaped several of his print series and his most famous painting
series, Elegy to the Spanish Republic (1948-58) and the Opens
(1967-74). In fact, much like the Opens, which explored the
relationship between a rectangle bordering the edge of the canvas
and its ground, Motherwell’s collages from 1970 accentuate the
dynamism between collaged papers and painted ground. In one
of his earliest series, Scarlet with Gauloises, he made 24 collages
with a torn light blue Gauloises cigarette packet surrounded by
red acrylic paint and demarcated by thin white vertical lines.
In 1974 Motherwell started concentrating on the theme of music
in his collages. Cor Anglais belongs to the more general group
of over 70 music collages that he created between 1974-87.
Motherwell did not read music and treated the musical scores
as abstract calligraphic forms balanced with the solid-colored
torn papers. In these collages, “[he] introduces variations in
what can be easily equated to pitch and rhythm, as well as
the ornamentation found in the deft improvisations that define
musical works that employ figured bass” (Flam, p. 147). Robert
Koenig, the former director of the Montclair Art Museum, which
spotlighted Cor Anglais in a 1989 exhibition, poetically summed
up the impact of Motherwell’s music collages: “[These works],
lush, yet austere in the very discrete relationship between notes
written on music staves and their architectural settings, are
Motherwell’s definitive statement to date. Clearly coming from the
hand of a master in full control of his medium, they are private,
even reticent, but public statements which are eminently suited to
grace the walls of many museums and private collections” (Robert
Motherwell: The Music Collages, exhibition catalogue, Montclair,
New Jersey, 1989, n.p.).
Various collages in progress seen in Robert Motherwell’s Greenwich, Connecticut studio, spring 1984

77025
Harry Bertoia (1915-1978)
Sound Sculpture, 1972-1978
Bronze tops silvered to beryllium-copper rods silvered to brass base plate
40-3/4 x 10 x 10 inches (103.5 x 25.4 x 25.4 cm)
PROVENANCE:
Benjamin Mangel Gallery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania;
The Estate of Harriet Fingerote;
Fuller’s LLC, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, December 1, 2007, lot 105;
Private collection, New York, acquired from the above.
Estimate: $40,000-$60,000
Harry Bertoia, Sound Sculptures, Chicago
©SharonMollerus/CC-BY-2.0
The urge for good design is the same as the urge
to go on living. The assumption is that somewhere,
hidden, is a better way of doing things.
Harry Bertoia

77026 ●
Harry Bertoia (1915-1978)
Untitled (36 Square-Leaf Tree sculpture), late 1950s
Brass melt-coated steel
21 x 9 x 4-1/4 inches (53.3 x 22.9 x 10.8 cm)
PROVENANCE:
The artist;
Private collection, Pennsylvania, acquired from the above.
This lot is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity signed by Val Bertoia, dated December 22, 2003.
Estimate: $20,000-$30,000
Italian-born artist and designer Harry Bertoia enjoyed a sprawling career, leaving behind legacy achievements in a
number of complementary fields. He was an adventurous maker of metal jewelry; a sculptor given to geometric and
biomorphic forms, many of which later exploited a natural ability to create sound; an aficionado of monoprints and
other works on paper; and an engineering genius who contributed pivotal mid-century furniture-design advancements
for both Eames and Knoll.
The natural world was often a starting point for Bertoia, be it the spiked orb of a dandelion, the protective tangle of
a cactus, or the manicured exterior of a shrub. This untitled, domestically scaled bronze and steel piece shares the
abstract forms of one of Bertoia’s most iconic public commissions as a sculptor: the massive, 10-part Sculpture Screens
from the First National Bank of Miami, which Bertoia completed in 1959. Incidentally, the person who commissioned
that signature work was Florence Knoll, whom Bertoia first encountered as a peer at the creatively fertile Cranbook
Academy of Art in the late 1930s.
Both the Miami work and this unique iteration of a similar design take the basic outline of a tree as their catalyst,
shaping and pruning the unpredictability of nature into the confines of a semi-orderly grid -- but still allowing for a sense
of play and whimsy. Rather than a flat, polished finish, each of the piece’s thirty-six “leaves” has a unique, unpredictable
surface texture, conjuring distinct effects depending on from what angle the sculpture is viewed. Whereas the hulking
screens designed for the Miami bank act as an imposing barrier of a sort, the manageable scale of Untitled (36 Square-
Leaf Tree Sculpture) invites a more intimate contemplation. It’s a chance to intently admire Bertoia’s masterful hand, and
his facility for translating the effortless beauty of nature into its most refined, almost Platonic essence.
Harry Bertoia’s Textured Screen at the J. Erik Jonsson Central Library in Dallas, TX
©User:Dfwcrea8tive/WikimediaCommons/CC-BY-3.0

77027
Robert Motherwell (1915-1991)
Nemesis, 1981-82
Acrylic on canvas
60 x 44 inches (152.4 x 111.8 cm)
Signed and dated on the reverse: R. Motherwell / 1982
The artist’s studio number: P81-2666
PROVENANCE:
Private collection, New York, 1984;
Private collection, New York;
M. Knoedler & Co., New York (label verso).
EXHIBITED:
Phoenix II Gallery, Washington, D.C., “Twenty-Five Artists,” December 22, 1982-January 1983;
Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen, Germany, “Motherwell,” October 17, 2004-January 30, 2005.
LITERATURE:
Alene Bujesi,Twenty-Five Artists, University Publications of America, 1982, p. 86, illustrated in color;
Museum Morsbroich, Motherwell, Leverkusen, Germany, 2004, p. 115, illustrated in color;
Ralf Stiftel, “Stürmisches Schwarz,” Westfälischer Anzeiger, December 21, 2004, p. 298, illustrated;
Jack Flam, Katy Rogers, and Tim Clifford, Robert Motherwell Paintings and Collages, A Catalogue
Raisonné, 1941-1991, Volume Two: Paintings on Canvas and Panel, The Dedalus Foundation, Inc., and
Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2012, cat. no. P1039, p. 504, illustrated in color.
Estimate: $500,000-$700,000
Black is in the artist’s mind. If he thinks of it as tone with
his whole body, it comes out as tone. If he thinks of it as
a color with his whole body, it comes out as color.
Robert Motherwell

Installation shot of works in studio, Fall 1975

“I think as painter. In paint.” Robert Motherwell
wrote in 1974. “When I use black, I don’t use it
the way most people think of it, as the ultimate
tone of darkness, but as much a color as white or
vermillion, or lemon yellow or purple.”
Motherwell’s striking, confrontational canvas,
Nemesis, 1981-82, bears witness to his long
relationship with both the color black and gestural
drawing while, at the same time, revealing how
complex that relationship was. If we associate a
recurring use of black with reticence or sobriety,
Nemesis makes it plain that we must think again.
The explosive, over-scaled, but controlled gesture
that serves as the protagonist of the painting’s visual
drama is neither reticent nor sober. If anything, the
expansive configuration could be read as a direct
equivalent for the sensual, perhaps an embodiment
of the Dionysian side of Motherwell, a man who
reveled in fine wine and food, and whose collages
were constructed with the detritus of parcels
of books sent from France or the wrappers of
imported cigarettes. The brash, irregular, nameless
shape that faces us in Nemesis provokes numerous
associations but remains resolutely abstract. Yet it
can also seem to have an overtone of menace - a
quality that probably provoked the picture’s title,
which was certainly attached after the fact. For all
the seductive beauty and economy of its image,
Nemesis threatens to resolve itself as something
possibly dangerous, something we might recognize,
but never do; it’s like a name that we struggle to
remember but fail to call up.
Black, not as the absence of color, but as a
significant hue in its own right, was always part
of Motherwell’s expressive arsenal, from the late
1940s until the end of his life. (The youngest of the
Abstract Expressionists, with whom he was closely
associated, he was born in Aberdeen, Washington,
in 1915, and died in Provincetown, Massachusetts,
in 1991.) An entire exhibition, “Robert Motherwell
& Black,” organized in 1979 by the William Benton
Museum of Art, University of Connecticut, was
devoted to his continuing preoccupation with
the hue. Motherwell’s black is as varied as any
chromatic color. It can be matte and opaque,
brushy and transparent, or velvety and inflected.
It conjures up everything from the rich, somber
garments of Diego Velázquez’s nobles to the way
Henri Matisse evoked dazzling light in his sun
filled interiors, reminding us of Motherwell’s deep
Robert Motherwell, Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 128, 1974-75
Continued next page

knowledge of the history of art and of his life-long
enthusiasm for Spanish art and French culture. The
use of black often seems inextricably connected with
drawing and here, too, that association resonates within
Motherwell’s oeuvre; generously scaled calligraphy,
usually in emphatic black, recurs as an important
element throughout his work in a seamless fusion of
gesture and what the artist makes us regard not as a
function of a particular medium, such as ink or charcoal,
but as an independent, richly allusive hue. A wide
range of types of drawing at various scales, unignorable
evidence of Motherwell’s hand, of his distinctive touch
in manipulating his materials, is manifest not only in his
works on paper and in his prints, but also in his collages,
and, perhaps most strikingly, in his canvases.
Yet even though the unbridled Dionysian energy of the
freely painted shape that dominates Nemesis is palpable,
we cannot ignore the coexisting, contradictory sense
of restraint that results in clearly defined edges and
a refined surface. Self-imposed discipline announces
itself, too, in Motherwell’s palette of black, the pale tone
of canvas, and a few notes of rusty brown that seem
to have escaped from underneath the looming, dark,
gestural mass. It’s a deliberately restricted range of what
might be termed non-chromatic, earthy colors, yet at the
same time, that very restriction is enriched by powerful
associations with precedents in Spanish painting; we
think of Velázquez’s early bodegon paintings of kitchen
scenes or Francisco Goya’s late portraits of his fellow
exiles in France, among many other examples. This
suave, held-back aspect of Nemesis could be read as
revealing Motherwell’s high-minded Apollonian side, as
an immensely cultivated, widely read individual with an
appreciation of sophisticated elegance, an intellectual
who majored in philosophy before dedicating himself
to painting. This paradoxical double reading of an
abstract image as both passionate and cool has cognates
within the artist’s own history, perhaps most notably in
his most familiar configuration, the well-known chain
of ovals and bars in his Elegy to the Spanish Republic
paintings and their many variants. It’s worth noting, in
this context, that at just about the same time as he was
working on Nemesis, Motherwell was producing a series
of black and white prints that ring changes on the Elegy
configuration; in these, a thick, cursive stroke that is part
of the “chain,” has ends projecting upward like the two
unequal thrusts of the Nemesis image; it seems related,
albeit peripherally, to the bold gestural shape in the
painting.
Yet ultimately, it is Motherwell’s masterly deployment
of his materials that makes Nemesis so compelling, the
unphotographable nuances of surface, the evidence of
both vigorous and delicate paint application, subtleties
of color, and more. The longer we spend with the
Detail of the present lot, Robert Motherwell, Nemesis, 1981-1982.

painting, the more the large shape begins to reveal the history of its making, as a
series of full-arm strokes, applied to the canvas with enough force to spatter and
sufficiently individual to create a shape with incidents of relative transparency. We are
increasingly aware that the dark configuration before us, handsomely adjusted to the
rectangle of the canvas, is not a single mass, but rather an accumulation of sweeps
and swipes that all-but obliterate the almost congruent rusty brown shape beneath it.
Instead of reading as drawing on a flat surface, the image in Nemesis becomes slightly
unstable, contingent, and animated. Motherwell encouraged this reading by “haloing”
parts of the shape with a pale tone that almost matches the color of the canvas but
is noticeably smoother. The result is to suggest that the thrusting shape floats free
of its support, seeming to hover an infinitesimal distance above the literal surface of
the canvas, before taking its place, once again, as a declarative but extremely subtle
graphic image - a burst of black delicately shifting black.
Karen Wilkin
Robert Motherwell, Beside the Sea No. 26, 1962

77028 ●
Untitled, 1962
Gouache and oil on paper laid on canvas
23-3/4 x 18 inches (60.3 x 45.7 cm)
Signed and dated lower right: Hans Hofmann 62
Numbered in pencil lower right: 14
PROVENANCE:
Estate of Kathleen Gallant Stuart.
Estimate: $15,000-$25,000
It is not the form that dictates the color,
but the color that brings out the form.
Hans Hofmann

77029 ●
Friedel Dzubas (1915-1994)
Ozona, 1964
Oil on canvas
33 x 33 inches (83.8 x 83.8 cm)
Signed, titled, dated, and inscribed on the reverse: Dzubas / “Ozona” 64 / Oil on canvas / 33” x 33”
PROVENANCE:
Robert Elkon Gallery, New York (label verso);
Private collection, Massachusetts.
Estimate: $10,000-$15,000

Early Modernist works from the collection of
Dr. and Mrs. Henry and May Ann Gans
(Lots 77030-77038)

Born in Zevenaar, Netherlands in 1925, Dr. Gans survived the Holocaust by hiding for almost three years on a
remote farm. After the German defeat, he studied medicine in Holland, investigating the anatomy and patholo-
gy of the liver. Dr. Gans later trained in surgery and biochemistry at the University of Minnesota, where he also
obtained his PhD degree. During his training he met his wife, Mary Ann, a student nurse from Fargo, North
Dakota, in the operating room. They were married in 1958 shortly after she graduated from nursing school.
As a Fellow of the American Board of Surgeons, Dr. Gans served on the faculties of the Surgery Departments
of the University of Minnesota, Cornell University Medical College, and the University of Illinois. As a professor
of surgery, pathology and biochemistry, Dr. Gans helped start the new medical school at the latter institution
on its main campus that admitted in 1979 its first 24 medical students, and where he created a new research
establishment in an old VA Building
Dr. Gans’ involvement in medical research resulted in a study of the anatomy of the liver that served as a foun-
dation for contemporary liver surgery, and in 1969 as an early liver transplant surgeon, he performed the first
two clinical split-liver transplantations at New York Hospital-Cornell University Medical Center.
While residing in New York in the 1960s and 1970s, Henry and Mary Ann became avid collectors of rare
books, Art Glass, Americana, Federal furniture, and Pre-Columbian Artifacts, and most notably, American Art.
While living at the Payson House on the Upper East Side, Dr. and Mrs. Gans would spend their limited free
time immersing themselves into the world of Early American Modernism and Abstract Expressionism. With a
keen, and sophisticated collective eye, they immersed themselves into the world of auctions and galleries,
keenly buying and amassing an impressive art collection.
To Dr. and Mrs. Gans, their art is in many ways their children, and they consider themselves stewards for their
collection, now to be passed on to their next lucky owners. In the consignors’ own words:
“We became personally acquainted with Sally Avery, Milton Avery’s wife, whom we got to know during
our gallery visits, and who invited my wife and me one afternoon in June 1976 to her apartment for tea and
scones. During our animated visit she took the time to vet our Avery pictures we had brought along and explain
to us the background of each one.
“We became very close to Seymour Boardman, a WW II veteran who right after the war had shared a studio
with Sam Francis in Paris. Martha Jackson was his dealer in those early days. Seymour had sustained a bra-
chial plexus injury of the right arm during the war and could only paint with his left hand.
“He consulted me during one of his visits to his studio on West 26th Street when he developed a femoral her-
nia that he asked me to repair. Instead of charging him a fee, I selected one of his paintings that he had just
shown in Ithaca at Cornell University’s new Herbert Fisk Johnson Museum of Art (the name of the picture: Dark
Green and Purple, from 1969) and that we donated to the Walker Art Museum in Minneapolis for which we
received a nice acknowledgement from its Director, thanking us. (June 29, 1974).
“We became also very close friends with two wonderful art dealers, Irving Levitt (and his wife Shirley), (a close
friend and associate of Larry Fleischman, the owner of Kennedy Gallery), and with Antoinette Kraushaar, who
took over the gallery in 1942 after the death of her uncle Charles. We visited their galleries and apartments
regularly and have many wonderful memories of those unique occasions.
“These are just a few of the many good memories we have of our collecting days. We thought we share them
with you.”
Proceeds from the sale of this marvelous group of works will go to support the research fellowship at the Ameri-
can College of Surgeons—a foundation that is dear to the Gans’ hearts.

77030
Theodoros Stamos (1922-1997)
Ancestral Offerings, 1947
Watercolor and ink on paper
24 x 30 inches (61 x 76.2 cm) (sheet)
Signed and dated lower left and titled lower right: T. Stamos ‘47 “Ancestral Offerings”
Property from the Collection of Mary Ann and Henry Gans
PROVENANCE:
Art Fair, New York;
Harris B. Steinberg Collection;
Sotheby Parke-Bernet, New York, April 8-9, 1970, lot 190;
Estimate: $5,000-$7,000

77031
Jack Tworkov (1900-1982)
House of Sun, 1952
Oil and charcoal on canvas
14-1/8 x 12 inches (35.9 x 30.5 cm)
Signed lower right: Tworkov
PROVENANCE:
The artist;
Charles Egan Gallery, New York;
Howard Karoll, Chicago, Illinois, acquired from the above;
Mr. Harris B. Steinberg;
Sotheby Parke-Bernet, New York, April 8-9, 1970;
LITERATURE:
Maine Antique Digest, “A Certain Ambiance” advertisement, July 1998, illustrated.
This work is No.586 in the catalogue raisonné project currently being compiled by Jason Andrew for the Estate
of Jack Tworkov.
Estimate: $5,000-$7,000

77032
Larry Rivers (1925-2002)
Seated Figures, circa 1957
Mixed media collage on paper
13-5/8 x 11 inches (34.6 x 27.9 cm) (sheet)
PROVENANCE:
Mr. and Mrs. Guy Weill, New York;
UJA-Federation of New York, gift from the above;
Sotheby Parke Bernet, New York, June 1, 1977, lot 24;
Estimate: $12,000-$18,000

77033
Mark Tobey (1890-1976)
Traffic, 1959
Oil on paper
6-3/8 x 6-1/4 inches (16.2 x 15.9 cm)
Signed and dated lower right: Tobey 59
PROVENANCE:
Otto Seligman Gallery, Seattle, Washington;
Joyce and Arthur L. Dahl, California;
Sotheby Parke-Bernet, New York, December 13-14, 1973, lot 74;
EXHIBITED:
Stanford University, Stanford Art Gallery, Stanford, California, “Mark Tobey: Paintings from the Collection of
Joyce and Arthur L. Dahl,” June 1967-January, 1968;
[The above exhibition also travelled to]University of California at Santa Barbara, The Art Gallery, Santa
Barbara, California; University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Nebraska; Roosevelt University, Chicago, Illinois;
Honolulu Academy of Art, Honolulu, “Mark Tobey: Paintings from the Collection of Joyce and Arthur L.
Dahl,” February-March 1970.
LITERATURE:
Stanford University, Paintings from the Collection of Joyce and Arthur L. Dahl, Stanford, 1967, p. 41, no. 38,
pl. 22, illustrated.
Achim Moeller, Managing Principal of the Mark Tobey Project LLC, has confirmed the authenticity. The work
is registered in the Mark Tobey archive with the number MT [217-3-28-17].
Estimate: $10,000-$15,000

77034
Adolph Gottlieb (1903-1974)
Opaque White, 1960
Oil on paper
31-1/2 x 22-1/2 inches (80.0 x 57.2 cm)
Signed and dated lower left: Adolph Gottlieb / 1960
PROVENANCE:
Galerie Neufville, Paris;
Sotheby Parke-Bernet Galleries, December 15, 1971, lot 8, (as Composition);
EXHIBITED:
Galerie Neufville, Paris, Gottlieb, November 18, 1960-December 3, 1960.
We wish to thank the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation for verifying the authenticity of this work,
which is listed in the Foundation records as catalogue number 6024. Gottlieb completed approximately
23 oil on paper works in 1960. This work’s palette of solely black, gray and white does not appear in the
other oil on paper works in 1960.
Estimate: $60,000-$80,000
In 1962, Abstract Expressionist Adolph Gottlieb spoke
of “an emotional quality that color offers us -- a vehicle
for the expression of feeling.” The painter, whose mature
works were almost calligraphic, continued: “Since I
eliminated almost everything from my painting except
a few colors and perhaps two or three shapes, I feel a
necessity for making the particular colors that I use, or the
particular shapes, carry the burden of everything I want
to express...” In general, that meant a great deal of heavy
lifting for Gottlieb’s signature, oft-repeated elements: a sun-
like circle or circles hovering over a lower mass of pigment
that could appear tangled, like a blot of ink (or a “burst,”
to borrow the artist’s own verbiage). Often, the painter
allowed himself a range of palette choices: muddy ochres
and browns; cool blues and angry cadmium reds.
The significance of Opaque White, 1960, lies in how
Gottlieb was able to constrain himself even more
dramatically, using little more than black, white, and grey
to convey the same tenor and “expression of feeling”
evident in other works from the same decade. This oil
painting on paper is one of about only 20 or so that
Gottlieb completed during the time period, and is the
sole example with such a purposefully limited palette.
Mist, 1961, a larger-scale painting on canvas, may at first
to be similarly pared-down, but even here we’re offered
the reprieve of a bluish-grey ground. Opaque White is
aggressively brutal in its denial of other tones, and also
in its compressed, almost claustrophobic composition.
Whereas a typical Gottlieb allows ample breathing room
-- that simmering sun shape pulsing against a quieter
backdrop -- Opaque White is notable for the muscular way
the foreground elements attempt to efface any evidence of
a background whatsoever.
The work’s sense of uneasy tension is also notable.
Whereas many Gottlieb works present a precarious
harmony -- or at least a temporary truce among the
warring compositional elements -- here the viewer is
thrust, en media res, into an ongoing dispute between the
titular color and an opposing tangle of black. The white
is indeed devoutly opaque, struggling to blossom out and
fully obscure the field of the painting (as if the end goal
might indeed be a snow-still Robert Ryman monochrome).
What we are witness to in Opaque White is an abstracted
dispute between opposing forces; the black-and-white
balance of Taoist harmony redrafted as conflict, aggression,
and pent-up energy.

77035
Dan Christensen (1942-2007)
Herman, 1968
Acrylic on canvas
50 x 60 inches (127 x 152.4 cm)
Signed, titled, and dated on the reverse: D. Christensen / “Herman” / August 1968
Property from The Collection of Mary Ann and Henry Gans
PROVENANCE:
The artist;
Philip Johnson;
Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio;
Sotheby Parke-Bernet, New York, April 9, 1975, lot 36;
Estimate: $8,000-$12,000

77036
Norman Bluhm (1921-1999)
Untitled, 1964
Acrylic on paper
Signed and dated lower right: Bluhm / 64
Signed and inscribed verso: Bluhm / 64 / #20
Property from The Collection of Mary Ann and Henry Gans
PROVENANCE:
Ms. T. Williams;
Acquired by the present owner from the above, 1980.
Estimate: $20,000-$30,000

77037
Willem de Kooning (1904-1997)
Untitled (Figures in a Landscape), 1968
Charcoal on tracing paper laid on paper
Signed lower right: de Kooning
PROVENANCE:
M. Knoedler & Co. Inc., New York;
Lester Avnet Collection;
Sotheby Parke-Bernet, New York, March 18, 1976, lot 53;
EXHIBITED:
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, “Willem de Kooning in East Hampton,”
February 10-April 23, 1978.
LITERATURE:
Thomas Hess, William de Kooning Drawings, 1972, pl.124, p. 268, illustrated;
Harold Rosenberg, Willem de Kooning, Harry N. Abrams, New York, pl. 160, illustrated;
Harry F. Gaugh, De Kooning, Abbeville Press, New York, 1983, pl. 80, p. 91, illustrated;
Dianne Waldman, Williem de Kooning in East Hampton, exhibition catalogue, fig. 69, illustrated.
Estimate: $60,000-$80,000
Willem de Kooning used expressive marks in both painting and drawing that responded not only to a non-objective
relevance but also to a narrative sensibility. Such is the case with Untitled (Figures in a Landscape) from 1968. The
charcoal drawing carries a particular energy that is all his own. Throughout his career, but specifically in the early
years, de Kooning was more direct with giving hints towards representational leanings. Rather than work exclusively
in a recognizable manor, he allowed his hand to delve into the enigmatic movement evident in his own body and
those of the figures in the drawing. A true master at merging these dynamic aesthetics, de Kooning’s oeuvre is best
appreciated over time, revealing more the longer one is able to look. In Untitled (Figures in a Landscape) we imagine
three figures in a tree-filled park: two sit on a bench watching the world as it passes by while the other lounges in
the sun. The magic of abstraction is that it can be as simple or as complicated as the viewer wishes it to be, however,
de Kooning took his drawing practice to another level, tapping into the nuances of life both real and imagined.
The artist fills space with an attitude.
The attitude never comes from himself alone.
Willem de Kooning

77038
Tom Wesselmann (1931-2004)
Bedroom Tit with Lamp, 1979
Thinned liquitex and pencil on rag paper collage
Signed and dated lower right: Wesselmann 79
PROVENANCE:
Sidney Janis Gallery, New York;
Hokin Gallery, Chicago, Illinois;
We wish to thank the Tom Wesselmann Studio for help in cataloguing this work, which is listed in their archives.
Estimate: $80,000-$120,000
In Bedroom Tit with Lamp the artist flattens all proposed space by using bold, brightly-colored shapes. Never one
to shy away from provocation, he often made references to the female breast, seen here, yet not necessarily in a
sexualized way. All of the shapes he worked with could be considered objects of obsession: cigarettes, flowers,
women, food and color. Wesselman delved into the exploration of space through very specific compositional
choices. His work reinvented the pictorial plane by cropping recognizable forms, erasing bodies and compressing
three-dimensional volume. Were it not for the title Bedroom Tit with Lamp, the environment supposed in the
work may have forever remained indiscernable. Instead, the title functions didactically revealing an interior space
that will forever remain just out of reach. Harmony and mystery go hand in hand and the domesticity suggested,
has always been meant, as one might imagine, to exist in the home.

77039 ●
George Segal (1924-2000)
Untitled, 1957
Pastel on paper laid on paper
24 x 18 inches (61 x 45.7 cm) (sheet)
Signed and dated lower right: G Segal 57
PROVENANCE:
Sidney Janis Gallery, New York (label verso);
Private collection.
Estimate: $1,000-$1,500

77040
Bob Thompson (1937-1966)
Untitled, 1958
Watercolor on paper
Signed and dated lower right: RThompson / 58
PROVENANCE:
The artist;
Private collection, New York, gift from the above.
Estimate: $2,000-$4,000
77041
Bob Thompson (1937-1966)
Untitled, 1958
Watercolor on paper
Initialled and dated lower right: RLT 58
PROVENANCE:
The artist;
Private collection, New York, gift from the above.
Estimate: $2,000-$4,000

77042 ●
Tom Wesselmann (1931-2004)
Study for Proposed Seascape Reclining Nude, 1963
Acrylic and pencil on board
Signed and dated lower right: Wesselmann 63
Titled, dated, and inscribed verso: D-132 - Study for Proposed Seascape Reclining Nude, ca. 1963 6-3/4 x 11-
7/16” pencil & Liquitex on bristol board
PROVENANCE:
Jack Glenn Gallery, Laguna Beach, California;
Mr. Frank Thomas;
Estate of Kathleen Gallant Stuart.
We wish to thank the Tom Wesselmann Studio for help in cataloguing this work, which is listed in their archives.
Estimate: $30,000-$50,000

77043
Wayne Thiebaud (b. 1920)
Untitled - Landscape, 1965
Pastel and pencil on paper
6-3/4 x 12-3/4 inches (17.1 x 32.4 cm)
Signed and dated upper left: Thiebaud 1965
PROVENANCE:
Charles Campbell Gallery, San Francisco, California;
Private collection, Northern California.
Estimate: $80,000-$120,000

If we don’t have a sense of humor,
we lack a sense of perspective.
Wayne Thiebaud

77044
Ed Ruscha (b. 1937)
Evolution/Revolution, 2013
Acrylic on Museum Board paper
24 x 36 inches (61 x 91.4 cm)
Signed and dated lower right: Ed Ruscha 2013
The artist’s studio number: D2013.03
PROVENANCE:
Private collection, Albany, New York.
This drawing with be included in a forthcoming volume of Edward Ruscha: Catalogue Raisonné of the
Works on Paper, edited by Lisa Turvey.
Estimate: $300,000-$500,000

[The paintings are] not really
mountains in the sense that a
naturalist would paint a picture of a
mountain, he has said. They’re ideas
of mountains, picturing some kind of
unobtainable bliss or glory.
Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha has always been known as an artist of
language, albeit one who explores and exploits
the ways in which text can be visualized and
aestheticized. In his hands, words are more than an
opportunity to communicate, but rather a means
to provoke, amuse, and delight. The 2013 work on
paper Evolution/Revolution is a prime example from
Ruscha’s practice, combining a slippery and poetic
wordplay and the artist’s ongoing fascination with
landscape--in this case, a rather abstracted silhouette
of an epic mountain range.
It took some time for those mountains to arrive in
Ruscha’s studio. The artist had long experimented with
urban or manmade landscapes, primarily focused on
his home in Southern California. (Born in Nebraska
in 1937, he relocated to Los Angeles in the mid-
1950s). Early in his career he thrilled to the mundane
topography of America, publishing conceptual
photography books like Every Building On The Sunset
Strip, which cast a deadpan, almost anthropological
eye on ordinary architecture. The sharp angles of the
ubiquitous Standard gas station birthed a motif that
Ruscha would make iconic, periodically revisiting and
recalibrating over the years.
Later, Ruscha’s attention was captivated by natural
beauty, rather than the workaday contours of L.A.
The gradient backdrops of his text paintings had
already conjured the feeling of hyper saturated, almost
chemically charged skies, but later canvases directly
imported figurative and landscape elements. Works
like 1984’s oil on canvas Not A Bad World, Is It? laid
the titular phrase over a bucolic lakeside scene. The
Ed Ruscha, August 18, 1980
©GaryFriedman/LosAngelesTimes/GettyImages

series begun in that decade paid tribute to the rugged
contours of snowcapped mountain peaks.
Despite these works’ photorealistic attention to detail,
it’s not as if Ruscha had suddenly taken up as an en
plein air painter. Many critics have noted a decidedly
pop, commercial antecedent to the mountains he
favored-- the famous Paramount Pictures logo -- and
Ruscha himself has alluded to the fact that the imagery
he depicts is from found, rather than directly observed,
sources. Paintings like The Mountain, 1998, encapsulate
the serial form that Ruscha had settled on: closely
cropped details of jagged peaks, combined with text
that jarringly disrupts the scene’s realism. The words
and the landscape share equal billing, in many cases.
It’s as if Ruscha had decided to squeeze the sublime
power of Caspar David Friedrich and the 19th-century
Romantics into the form of a billboard or television
advertisement. But instead of a human protagonist
having scaled the rugged peaks, we instead get a
landscape devoid of people, but alive with language
-- someone unseen is shouting out phrases by turns
profound and ludicrous, letting them echo against
the terrain. The artist has explained his fixation on
mountains in a way that stresses their importance
as generic, mutable objects, open to warped,
malleable interpretation. “[The paintings are] not really
mountains in the sense that a naturalist would paint
a picture of a mountain,” he has said. “They’re ideas
of mountains, picturing some kind of unobtainable
bliss or glory.” Explaining his methods with refreshing
candor to Calvin Tomkins in 2013, Ruscha admits to
the simple, gut-level delight of the scenery (“Maybe I
faltered and started thinking it was acceptable to do a
postcard-pretty picture”). Tompkins himself sees the
landscape as a backdrop for what Ruscha does best:
cheeky linguistic pyrotechnics, a coy juxtaposition of
text and image. “We can assume that at some level
he is also sending up the nineteenth-century tradition
of nature as the American Sublime,” Tompkins wrote
in the New Yorker. “His mountains are scenarios
for word frolics, like “Tulsa Slut,’ ‘Uh Oh,’ and ‘Pay
Nothing Until April.’”
All of which brings us back to Evolution/Revolution
which, while in line with Ruscha’s serialized mountain
imagery, also intriguingly diverts from that well-worn
path. The small painting’s landscape orientation
alludes even more pointedly to the shape of a
billboard or a widescreen film still. And whereas other
Ruscha mountain paintings, as well as a later series
of prints, are intricately detailed -- with each ripple
and shadow of the terrain elucidated -- Evolution/
Revolution foregoes that strict verisimilitude for
something even closer to the “idea of a mountain.”
Beneath the gentle, almost hushed orange-pink
gradient of sky, we see the stark outline of the
mountain’s top edge. The bulk of the mountain itself
is an unnatural mass of light grey. In this abstraction
of the contours of a mountain, Ruscha presents what
might, out of context, seem like the jagged line of a
graph. Whereas the text here seems a bit more serious
than a typical Ruscha riff, it’s still based on a trick;
EVOLUTION, of course, is just REVOLUTION with
a missing ‘r.’ But if one views the mountain here as a
graph -- a chart of human achievement, a tracking of
the stock market’s fluctuations, or anything in between
-- we can’t help but notice the left-to-right motion of
peak and decline. It’s as if Ruscha, always the subtle
trickster, is suggesting that progress is never as simple,
or straightforward, as it seems.

77045
Andy Warhol (1928-1987)
Campbell’s Soup Box (Chicken Noodle), 1986
Synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen inks on canvas
14 x 14 inches (35.6 x 35.6 cm)
Signed and dated on the overlap: Andy Warhol 86
PROVENANCE:
Martin Lawrence Galleries, New York;
LITERATURE:
Warhol Campbell’s Soup Boxes, exhibition catalogue, Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles, 1986, p. 31,
no. 140, illustrated in color.
Estimate: $200,000-$300,000
In Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Box (Chicken
Noodle) and Campbell’s Soup Box (Chicken Rice),
we find an interesting variation on the artist’s all-too
familiar Campbell’s Soup cans. Warhol produced these
works in 1985, late in his career, as a commission by
the brand to create a series of paintings of their dry-
mix soups. It is somewhat ironic given that Campbell’s
originally attacked Warhol in 1962 when he first began
accurately replicating images of their brand. This
commission effectively brought Warhol full circle, back
to his beginnings in advertising where he worked as a
commercial illustrator.
In several respects, these small-format canvases
represent a quiet culmination of Warhol’s career. They
constitute a return to his start as a commercial illustrator
as well as adopt the iconic “Campbell’s Soup”, a
signature theme found throughout his career. In terms of
technique, these works combine silkscreen ink with paint
on canvas, thus lending them a sense of being both a
print multiple and a unique painting.
The look and feel of Campbell’s Soup Box (Chicken
Noodle) and Campbell’s Soup Box (Chicken Rice),
convey a strong vintage quality tipping us over into
feelings of nostalgia. Perhaps because these are literally
“things of the past”, remnants of merchandise that did
not stand the test of time, or perhaps our eyes are simply
not accustomed to seeing something as rare. After all,
Warhol’s proliferation of the cans elevated their banal
status as ordinary, everyday objects to one of the most
iconic symbols in the history of art, on par today with
even the Mona Lisa.
These artworks have many interesting formal details. The
classic Campbell’s red extends well into the lower half of
the box and rather than portraying them frontally, which
would create a flattening effect, the boxes are depicted
at a slight angle to convey a sense of volume and weight.
Extensive textual content in the lower halves defy the
clean simplicity of the traditional soup-can imagery,
which consistently include four defined lines of text
running vertically down the front of the can: Campbell’s
– CONDENSED – (FLAVOR NAME) – SOUP. In these
works, however, Warhol includes text both at the bottom
of the box and on their side panels. At the center of the
image, Warhol reveals a bowl of the soup itself, offering
up a spoonful to the viewer’s eyes.
The inspiration behind the prevalent Campbell’s Soup
theme can be traced back to Robert Rauschenberg and
Jasper Johns. Warhol learned from Rauschenberg that
anything could be used as art and through Johns, that
items could stand alone, like portraits. Warhol had seen
Johns’ bronze Beer Cans and his Savarin Coffee Can,
leading many to consider these works as precedents for
his Campbell’s Soup motif.
Reflecting on his career, Warhol claimed that the
Soup Can series was his favorite work; he was an avid
consumer of Campbell’s Soup.

77046
Campbell’s Soup Box (Chicken Rice), 1986
Synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen inks on canvas
14 x 14 inches (35.6 x 35.6 cm)
Signed and dated on the overlap: Andy Warhol 86
PROVENANCE:
Martin Lawrence Galleries, New York;
Estimate: $200,000-$300,000
They always say time changes things,
but you actually have to change them yourself.
Andy Warhol

77047
Ed Ruscha (b. 1937)
Hollywood, 1981
Ink on paper
Signed, dated, and dedicated in pencil along the lower edge: For Beverly of course / Ed Ruscha 1981
PROVENANCE:
The artist;
Beverly Field, Dallas, Texas, gift from the above.
NOTE:
This drawing with be included in a forthcoming volume of Edward Ruscha: Catalogue Raisonné of the Works on Paper, edited by Lisa Turvey.
Estimate: $80,000-$120,000
The Hollywood sign was mounted in Griffith Park in
1923. It has since become so wildly omnipresent, a
backdrop to countless films and photographs, that even
those who’ve never visited Los Angeles feel like they
know it intimately. As such, it’s a perfect raw material
for Ed Ruscha, an artist whose career has been spent
upending both cliched language, advertising tropes, and
the visual landscape of California. Ruscha has addressed
the larger notion of Hollywood in a variety of works
(“Hollywood is a verb,” to quote one of his painted
maxims), and he has also depicted the physical sign
itself in various configurations: outlined monumentally
against brown-orange skies; seen backwards, from
behind; barely visible, hidden behind a smog-like spume
of pigment.
While the sign to many is a symbol of striving and
success -- making it in Lala Land -- Ruscha has always
had a more nuanced relationship to the icon, diverging
from its romantic roots. He “used to use the Hollywood
sign, he has said, as a smog-indicator,” wrote Martin
Gayford in the Telegraph. “‘If I could read it, the weather
was OK.’ As that remark suggests, despite having lived a
great deal of his life in Los Angeles, he is not altogether
in love with the place.”
Ruscha’s 1981 rendition of the sign and its attendant
landscape, completed in ink, is striking for its almost
logo-like simplicity. Ruscha creates a seamless
connection between the letters (each, in reality, standing
around 45 feet tall) and the contours of the Griffith Park
hillside. Whereas Hollywood in other Ruscha works is a
blaring movie marquee, here it is pointedly understated:
an almost yearning whisper rather than a cinematic
shout. The horizontal sliver of hilltop becomes a Barnett
Newman zip slicing across the blankness. And the
emptiness of the paper itself becomes a void, interrupted
almost violently by the drawing, which slices directly
through its midpoint like an arrow.
It’s interesting to compare this particular drawing to a
related lithograph that Ruscha completed in 1969 at the
Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles. In that
composition, the Hollywood sign rests atop a hill that
is rendered in a much more naturalistic manner. There,
as in other paintings and silkscreens Ruscha completed
of the same scenery, there is room for the actual world:
shadows, sunsets. This unique 1981 ink on paper
example finds Ruscha leveling the peaks and dips of the
actual terrain into something more stark and abstract: a
partially whittled toothpick supporting all the weight of
Hollywood’s vaunted hopes and dreams.
Lloyd Ziff, Edward Ruscha’s “The Back of Hollywood” Billboard, Wilshire Blvd.,
The Miracle Mile, Los Angeles, CA 1978. Purchased with funds provided by
Lynda and Robert Shapiro, Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
DigitalImage©2017MuseumAssociates/LACMA/License
byArtResources,NY©EdRuscha©LloydZiff

77048
Dollar Sign ($) (Orange and Red), 1982
Screenprint on paperboard
40 x 22 inches (101.6 x 55.9 cm)
Unique
Stamp signed and dated, with the Andy Warhol Art Authentication and numbered ‘A178.984’ in pencil on the reverse
PROVENANCE:
Private collection, Germany;
Private collection, Italy;
This lot is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board, dated May 8, 1998.
Estimate: $60,000-$80,000
…Making money is art and working is
art and good business is the best art.
Andy Warhol

77049 ●
Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008)
Azure Reef (Renault Paper Work), 1984
Solvent transfer and acrylic on fabric laminated paper with aluminum mat
72 x 45-1/4 inches (182.9 x 114.9 cm)
Signed and dated lower center: Rauschenberg 84
PROVENANCE:
Leo Castelli Gallery, New York (D-584);
Private collection, Japan, acquired from the above;
Sotheby’s, New York, May 16, 2007, lot 333;
Private collection, acquired from the above;
Heritage Auctions, Dallas, Texas, May 31, 2014, lot 72108;
Private collection, California, acquired from the above.
EXHIBITED:
Saint Paul de Vance, France, Foundation Maeght, “Robert Rauschenberg: Recent Works,” May-June 1984,
cat. no. 20, p.14, illustrated;
Galerie Nichido, Tokyo and Nagoya, “Leo Castelli’s Artists,” February-March 1990, cat. no. 3, n.p., illustrated.
Estimate: $80,000-$120,000
Robert Rauschenberg used whatever medium he deemed
necessary to satisfy a particular visual need. Delving into
sculpture, painting, drawing and print-making, he sought
out picture-making by whatever means were required.
Originally from Texas, he studied at the University of
Texas, Kansas City Art Institute, and Académie Julian in
Paris. However, it was during his time at the infamous
Black Mountain College in North Carolina where he fully
realized his strength as an artist. Unafraid of any trends
happening in the early 1950s, Rauschenberg struck out
on his own, finding ways to navigate painting and life. A
renegade of his time, the artist used everything from oil
paint to found objects to create what we now know to
be some of the most important works in American art.
In Azure Reef (Renault Paper Work), from 1984, he used
solvent transfer and acrylic on fabric laminated paper,
merging abstraction and photographic transfer within the
same frame. This work could fall under the description
of painting or drawing as it exhibits the artist’s hand,
while also combining techniques and interests both
personal and somewhat obscure. His work had an
instructional quality at times, yet instructions without
the purpose or end result beyond art making. He made
Azure Reef (Renault Paper Work), while a resident of
Captiva Island off the coast of Florida in a home facing
the ocean, where he remained until his death. Merging
the language of painting and silk screen with collage,
he examined and worked through the guise of Abstract
Expressionism with a goal of creating a language all his
own. Even in the quiet environment of the island, the
artist sought materials not necessarily equated with art
making. Here, the color story reflects the environment
where he was living, translating the blues of the
Southern sky and ocean. He has also used photographic
representation of a car and car parts, a symbol of
masculinity. His choice of material was not accidental
and his purposeful decisions as well as forward thinking
action led him to become the world famous artist we
know today.
Robert Rauschenberg is featured in many prestigious
permanent collections and has been exhibited in
institutions worldwide including the Guggenheim
Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Menial
Collection, British Museum, and Museum of Modern Art.

77050
Jasper Johns (b. 1930)
Untitled (Red, Yellow, Blue), 1998
Acrylic and pencil over intaglio on paper
Signed and dated lower right: J. Johns / ‘98
Signed, dated, and inscribed verso: Acrylic paint / over etching / J. Johns ‘98
PROVENANCE:
The artist;
Bill T. Jones, New York;
Matthew Marks Gallery, New York;
EXHIBITED:
Max Protech Gallery, New York, “Bring Home a Dancer,” May 5, 1998—?.
LITERATURE:
P. Karmel, Jasper Johns: Drawing Over, exhibition catalogue, Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, 2010, p. 67.
Estimate: $150,000-$250,000
Take an object
Do something to it
Do something else to it.
(inscription in the artist’s
sketchbook of the 1960s)

Jasper Johns established his reputation early on with his
remarkable encaustic paintings of flags, targets, numbers
and maps. In 1960, Johns radically changed the direction
of his art, developing new techniques and motifs that he
would incorporate into his work for the rest of his career.
One of his most creative processes was drawing or painting
over his own prints. Curator Nan Rosenthal explained that
Johns’s obsessive refashioning of an image offered him “a
method of ‘rereading’ his own work” (Ibid., p. 6). Indeed,
while “painting over” is a tradition in art history, Johns gave
it new meaning.
The work we are proud to offer, Untitled (Red, Yellow,
Blue), is a particularly unique variation on the painted-
over theme. Here, what started out as an etching with
aquatint becomes a lush, intimate acrylic painting that
defies its own dimensions and challenges the strict
line. Reveling in contradiction, Johns chose a very fluid
medium, acrylic, to cover, smudge, and paint over the
original intaglio print. More gestural and expressive than
the print, the transformed painting is evidence of Johns’s
celebrated touch in the active brushstrokes and irregular
dots of overlapping “flagstones.” Most notably is the artist’s
fingerprint, visible in the center “blue” frame, effectively
submerging a print beneath a unique piece of work.
The imagery of Untitled (Red, Yellow, Blue) harkens back
to Johns’s experimentation during the early 1960s. In
particular, Land’s End and Periscope (Hart Crane), which,
like the present lot, consists of complex and multiple
shades of gray in understated tones. The works also
demonstrate his fascination with not just the tonalities of
gray, but with the primary colors—red, yellow, and blue,
which are stenciled across the tryptic, rarely corresponding
to the color beneath.
Johns is well known for his use of the grisaille palette,
which became the subject of an exhibition in 2007 at
the Art Institute of Chicago and at The Metropolitan
Museum of Art the following year. However, critics have
variously interpreted the artist’s preoccupation with gray
and primary colors since the 1960s. The novelist Michael
Crichton, Johns’s good friend and biographer, explained the
gray paintings as paralleling Johns’s state of mind, “more
self-referential, more difficult, more disturbing” (B. Hess,
Jasper Johns, Cologne, 2007, p. 39). Critic John Yau added,
“[The artist’s] decision to work with a palette of primary
colors . . . , as well as the tonal range from black to white,
downplays a personal color range. . . . [His] boldly distilled,
fiercely anti-illusionistic colors are a central thesis in his
lifelong argument with the realm of appearances, which
tends to offer false impressions that will lure us into the
trap of looking rather than encouraging us to see” (J. Yau,
A Thing Among Things: The Art of Jasper Johns, New York,
2008, p. 96).
Untitled (Red, Yellow, Blue) is an extraordinary
metamorphosis of a print into an intimate painting that
attests to Johns’s versatility in multiple media and his
methodical probing of a particular theme. The “obscuring”
paint also reminds the viewer that one must look hard at a
Johns work to decipher its language. John Yau writes how
interaction with a Johns work like Untitled (Red, Yellow,
Blue) sharpens the mind: “Looking at [the painted-over
print] involves noting which areas are repeated [from the
original print], while trying to distinguish where replication
ends and divergence begins. . . . The great lengths to which
Johns went to conceal the repetition forces us into a highly
conscious state of looking. . . . We must harness distinct
modes of comprehension in order to engage fully with the
painting” (Yau, p. 100).
The 60 year career of Jasper Johns, one of the greatest
artist’s of the Post-War era, will be the subject of an
unprecedented, simultaneous retrospective exhibition in
the Fall of 2020 at the Whitney Museum of American Art
and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

77051
Raimonds Staprans (b. 1926)
Boats
Oil on canvas
20 x 24 inches (50.8 x 61 cm)
Signed upper right: R Staprans
Estimate: $4,000-$6,000

77052
Friedel Dzubas (1915-1994)
Morning Crow, 1979
Acrylic on canvas
72 x 72 inches (182.9 x 182.9 cm)
Signed, titled, dated, and inscribed on the reverse: Dzubas / 1979 / “Morning Crow” / 72” x 72” / (Acrylic on canvas) (Magna)
PROVENANCE:
John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco, California;
Private collection, San Rafael, California, acquired from the above, August 21, 1979.
EXHIBITED:
John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco, California, “Friedel Dzubas: Recent Paintings,” May 23-June 23, 1979.
This work was advertised on the poster for the exhibition noted above.
Estimate: $40,000-$60,000
A famed Color Field painter, Friedel Dzubas was part of a group of artists that included Jules Olitski, Kenneth
Noland, and Helen Frankenthaler. Dzubas used classic Color Field techniques, as seen in Morning Crow, to
create bright and dynamic shapes that both complimented and contrasted each other with varying tones.
Pouring paint onto the canvas, he used sponges or squeegies to move the paint around, and turpentine or water
to thin the pigments.
Dzubas was born in Berlin, Germany in 1915 and moved to New York City in the late 1940s, befriending
Jackson Pollock and sharing a studio with Helen Frankenthaler. He was awarded consecutive Guggenheim
Fellowships from 1966-1968, a National Endowment for the Arts Painting Fellowship, and Artist-in-Residence
appointments at Cornell University, Dartmouth College, and the Institute for Humanistic Studies. Dzubas taught
at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston from 1976 to 1993, during which he created Morning Crow.
In 1983, he had a retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.

77053
Frank Stella (b. 1936)
Untitled, 1966
Watercolor, marker, and pencil on paper
Initialed and dated lower right: F.S. 66
PROVENANCE:
Dart Gallery, Chicago, Illinois;
Private collection, Chicago, Illinois, acquired from the above.
Estimate: $18,000-$20,000
I don’t like to say I have given my life to art.
I prefer to say art has given me my life.
Frank Stella

77054
Sewell Sillman (1924-1992)
Late Entry Yellow, 1964
Oil on Masonite
26-5/8 x 39-3/4 inches (67.6 x 101.0 cm)
PROVENANCE:
Peyton Wright Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico;
Estimate: $5,000-$7,000

Heritage Auctions Modern & Contemporary Art Signature Auction, May 22, 2017, Sale #5300

Heritage Auctions Modern & Contemporary Art Signature Auction, May 22, 2017, Sale #5300

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Heritage Auctions Modern & Contemporary Art Signature Auction, May 22, 2017, Sale #5300