Also see
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Arthur G. Dove’s River Bottom, Silver, Ochre, Carmine, Green, circa 1923 (estimate: $3,000,000-5,000,000), is among the most important works by the artist to come to the market and reflects Dove’s deep connection to the American landscape and his fascination with water. In this view looking down onto a riverbed, Dove creates an amorphous exploration of color, line and form, pushing representation of nature to the edge of abstraction.
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Marsden Hartley’s Abstraction (estimate: $4,000,000-6,000,000) was created in 1912-13 during a pivotal period of his career in Europe and embodies one of the artist’s most experimental and boldest abstract statements of his oeuvre. Building upon his musical ‘intuitive’ works of late 1912, and anticipating the politically and personally entrenched wartime German Officer paintings, Abstraction veritably vibrates with the intellectual and spiritual energy of one of the greatest visionaries of early twentieth-century art.
The collection also features seminal artists of early abstraction including one of the first shaped canvases ever painted in America by Charles Green Shaw, Plastic Polygon, 1937 (estimate: $250,000-350,000). Other collection highlights include works by Oscar Bluemner, Max Weber and Konrad Cramer, among others.
The American Art sale on May 22 is comprised of 88 lots and distinguished by rare and fresh to the market paintings, many with important provenance. The American Art online auction opens for bidding May 15-22 and features works from some of the most noteworthy American artists of the 19th and 20th centuries, from Milton Avery, Edward Hopper, and Andrew Wyeth to Asher B. Durand and George Inness, with estimates starting under $5,000. All lots will be on view in Christie’s Rockefeller Center galleries from Saturday, May 18-21.
Another fine example from the group of American Illustration in the sale is N.C. Wyeth’s painting for the novel Deerslayer, titled "She foundChingachgook studying the shores of the lake, the mountains, and the heavens..." (estimate: $700,000-1,000,000).
Among the strong selection of American Modernist works is Shipyard Society by George Bellows (estimate: $4,000,000-6,000,000), which is offered by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts to support future acquisitions. Painted in Camden, Maine, in 1916, Shipyard Society shows two of the most famed themes of Bellows’ career; the struggle of man versus the sea along the coast of Maine, and a focus on a realistic depiction of all levels of society.
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Charles Sheeler (1883-1965), White Sentinels, 1942. Tempera on board. 15 x 22 in (38.1 x 55.9 cm). Estimate: $1,000,000-1,500,000.
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Headlining the sale is New York #3–Study, a 1950 gouache and pencil on paper by American modernist painter and photographer Charles Sheeler. The painting is characteristic of Sheeler’s work around 1950, which reduced objects and buildings to colorful, planar forms. New York #3–Study depicts an abstracted Rockefeller Center, with attention paid to the shadows on 30 Rockefeller Center and the International Building; it is estimated at $100,000 to $150,000.
Patent Cereals Company, Geneva, New York, a watercolor, circa 1938, by Sheeler’s fellow modernist Arthur Dove, is also part of the sale. It is estimated at $30,000 to $50,000.
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New Mexico also served as a point of inspiration for Marsden Hartley, who once wrote that New Mexico is “the perfect place to regain one’s body and soul”. Landscape, New Mexico is one of his most dramatic depictions of the region (estimate $800,000/1.2 million). This 1923 work belongs to Hartley’s deeply significant New Mexico Recollections series, a group of approximately two dozen works painted in Berlin that embodies the artist’s respect for and embrace of the American landscape as subject matter.
Works by Marsden Hartley, Henry F Farny and Robert Henri lead the American Art Sale, 24 May 2017 at Bonhams New York.
Landscape No. 39 (Little River, New Hampshire) by Marsden Hartley, estimated at US$ (400,000-600,000), appears at auction after 42 years in a private collection. Hartley's colorist work is one of approximately 26 paintings the artist produced during the summer and fall of 1930. Landscape No. 39 captures the long-anticipated changing of the seasons in the region surrounding Franconia, New Hampshire.
