NEW YORK, NY.- Doyle’s auction on Wednesday, November 6 offers a wide array of works by American, European, Asian and Latin American artists of the late 19th century to the present day.
Session I at 11am presents Impressionist & Modern Art spanning Academic and Barbizon art through Impressionism and Post-Impressionism to German Expressionism and early Modernism. Session II at 2pm presents Post-War & Contemporary Art with examples of Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art and Minimalism, moving through Fluxus and Mail Art to Street Art and works by emerging artists.
Featured in the sale is property from The Marian Sulzberger Heiskell & Andrew Heiskell Collection, comprising works by Helen Frankenthaler, Carl Frederick Frieseke, Pierre Eugene Montezin, Arnoldo Pomodoro and Auguste Rodin.
Frederick Carl Frieseke (1874-1939) trained at the Art Institute of Chicago, The Arts Students League in New York, and with James Abbott McNeill Whistler at the Academie Carmen. One can see the influences of Whistler in Portrait of the Artist’s Wife, Sarah Frieseke, circa 1905. The clever composition draws the viewer into the work as our own gaze mimics that of the painting’s subject (est. $40,000-60,000).
Frieseke was a member of the third wave of American artists to work in Giverny. One of the properties that he rented in Giverny was next door to Claude Monet, and it had once been occupied by Theodore Robinson. Spring Blossoms, circa 1921, was probably completed at Le Mesnil-sur-Blangy after he had left the region, but the influences of these great Impressionists can be seen in the dappled pinks and whites of the blossoms (est. $80,000-120,000).
Pierre Eugene Montezin (1874-1946) was part of a second wave of artists painting in the Impressionist style, strongly influenced by Monet’s themes and brushwork. Montezin achieved success in his lifetime for his vivid and colorful paintings. Les Joutes a Saint-Mammes depicts Saint-Mammes, a commune roughly 37 miles southeast of Paris, situated on the Seine and Loing river confluence. Every Sunday, from May to September, there is river jousting, typical of the city, which is keen to preserve the folklore of the region. This work shows the crowds, reflections in the water, and the two protagonists, one in red and the other with blue sashes, which lends itself to perfection to the Impressionistic brushwork and luminous color of the artist (est. $10,000-20,000).
In 1953, on the encouragement of art critic Clement Greenberg, Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis made their way from Washington, DC where they both had studios to New York City to see the works of Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011). Frankenthaler, like most artists of her generation, were following the well-beaten path of the Action Painters. But Frankenthaler did not stop at imitation, rather she was an innovator. Using newly developed acrylic paints, she thinned and saturated raw canvas with these pigments resulting in rich translucent fields of color. Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland were invigorated by what they saw, and the trajectory of both men’s careers altered. The power of Frankenthaler’s work has altered the perceptions of viewers globally. The three featured works from The Marian Sulzberger Heiskell & Andrew Heiskell Collection, though intimate, hold the same strength of composition and depth that we see in Helen Frankenthaler’s monumental canvases (est. range $20,000-120,000).
The visual language of Arnaldo Pomodoro (b. 1926) is recognized by a large audience. Pomodoro sculpture of monumental scale graces the grounds of the Vatican, UNESCO headquarters, and The United Nations to name only a few. Pomodoro’s oeuvre primarily realized in bronze vary in texture and form. His surfaces are both rough and dark, contrasted by smooth and high polish. His main formats are discs, spheres, columns, cubes, and pyramids. His genius lies in the discovery of a recognizable visual limitation that contains within a lifetime of variation and discovery. The Collection offers two tabletop scale Pomodoro sculpture in his Disc form (est. range $25,000-50,000).
Both sessions of the sale are rich in property from other prominent estates and distinguished collections across the country.
French artist Jean Béraud (1849-1935) specialized in delightful Paris street scenes featuring stylish gentlemen and ladies of the Belle Epoque strolling the city’s grand boulevards and public squares. A masterful painting from 1887 shows the Carrefour Drouot, a square formed by the crossing of five streets on the Right Bank, with all the sparkle and vitality of the artist’s best work (est. $400,000-600,000).
Born in Brooklyn, George Tooker (1920-2011) studied at Harvard University and at the Arts Students League, where he was taught for a short time by Reginald Marsh and became friends with Paul Cadmus. Property from a Prominent Philadelphia Collector, Laundress from 1952 is a rare example of the artist’s work in oil. It is an intimate scene of a woman and her three children on a rooftop in the city (est. $100,000-150,000).
Ad Reinhardt (1913-1967) was always an abstract painter. Though he moved freely from biomorphic to geometric forms, his dedication to a purely aesthetic art making process never ceased. In the late 1940s Reinhardt shifted from a hard-edged style toward an expressionist brush stroke, aligning him with Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and the Action Painters. Number Twelve, a gouache on paper created in 1949, is a strong example of this period (est. $70,000-90,000).
Manipulating digital technology to create powerful abstract paintings, Wade Guyton (b. 1972) challenges the viewer’s concepts of mechanical reproduction and re-appropriation. From the Estate of Contemporary art dealer Frederieke Sanders Taylor is the 2009 work, Untitled Printer Drawing, which displays Guyton’s unique ability to craft a bold image using new mediums and innovative methods (est. $7,000-10,000).
