Maxfield Parrish Humpty Dumpty, 1921. Estimate: $400,000-600,000.
20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale, 2 July.
An indisputable icon of American art, Maxfield Parrish is celebrated as one of the most influential painters of the 20th century due to his impact on, and formal association with, Surrealism and post-modernism. Presaging Pop Art’s interest in iconic figures and commercial culture, Maxfield Parrish portrayed Lewis Carroll’s famous character Humpty Dumpty at least twice over the course of his acclaimed career, the first depiction of which was in 1897 for Mother Goose in Prose, his first illustrated book. The subject clearly appealed to the artist, who revisited the character in the present work, which was reproduced on the cover of LIFE magazine’s Easter issue on March 17, 1921. Humpty Dumpty was acquired directly from the artist by the du Pont family, close friends of Parrish’s, and has remained in the same collection since.
Salvador Dalí Metamorphosis of Narcissus, 1937. Tate Gallery, London.
Parrish’s work is marked by its use of saturated color, which Parrish achieved through a glazing process he developed while recovering from tuberculosis, and for its lifelike recreations of three-dimensional space, created using an innovative photographic technique to accurately render texture and his signature “Parrish blue.” The impact of Parrish’s work on pop culture has proven long-lasting, influencing artists across disciplines from Norman Rockwell to Elton John and Michael Jackson.
Parrish’s images were ubiquitous during the period of Humpty Dumpty’s creation, and approximately one in four American households owned a Parrish print in 1925. Later, the pervasiveness of Parrish’s images would appeal to Pop Art’s predilection for seriality and blurred divisions between fine art and commercial culture: his dreamscapes especially fascinated Andy Warhol, who was an avid collector of his pictures. In 1964, Lawrence Alloway—the critic and curator who coined the term “Pop Art”—curated a Parrish retrospective at Bennington College that traveled to New York’s Gallery of Modern Art, reintroducing the artist to the post-war art world and contextualizing his work as a precursor to Pop Art, which led Time to dub him “Grand-Pop.”
After the rediscovery of Parrish’s work during the height of Pop Art’s relevance, his aesthetic was further introduced to the general public in subsequent decades through advertisers’ appropriation of his imagery. Examples of this include a 1970s campaign for the Rainier Brewing Company which directly employed Parrish’s Humpty Dumpty and a Kinder Chocolate commercial from the 1980s that featured a character uncannily like the one in the present work.
Parrish’s pop culture relevance persisted through the 1990s, reaching the film and music sectors as well. Madonna and George Lucas both own iconic paintings by the artist, and the artist’s imagery was appropriated for album cover imagery by Elton John and Enya, among many others during the period. Michael Jackson, an avid admirer of Parrish, even emulated the artist’s Daybreak in his hit music video for “You Are Not Alone” in 1995, and the poster for the 2000 cult classic film The Princess Bride featured a Parrish-esque landscape. By the end of the century, Parrish’s aesthetic had penetrated nearly every area of American pop culture: even a major international fashion brand was named Maxfield Parrish.
The blur of distinctions between high and low art that Parrish’s art embodies is still a chief theme in contemporary visual culture. While George Lucas has acknowledged that Parrish’s uncanny aesthetic directly influenced the look of the Star Wars epics, renowned artists such as Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami and Paul McCarthy produce work exploring consumerism and commercialism’s complicated relationship with art. This perennial dialogue, which Parrish was a significant contributor to, has had an incomparably profound effect on the art of the last century.
Inquiries
Amanda Lo Iacono, Head of Evening Sale
aloiacono@phillips.com