Walker Evans - Photographs from the Collection of the Art Institute of Chicago New York Wednesday, October 1, 2014 | Phillips

Photographs from the Collection of the Art...

New York Auction 1 October

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  • Provenance

    Purchased from the photographer, 1962

  • Literature

    Harper and Row, Walker Evans: First and Last, p. 122
    Keller, Walker Evans: The Getty Museum Collection, pl. 459
    Metropolitan Museum of Art, Walker Evans, cover and pl. 44
    Mora and Hill, Walker Evans: The Hungry Eye, pl. 76
    The Museum of Modern Art, Walker Evans: American Photographs, pl. 5

  • Catalogue Essay

    Walker Evans, one of the most influential photographers of the 20th century, began taking photographs in the late 1920s. After being introduced to Eugene Atget’s heartfelt documentation of Paris, Evans work moved from being consciously artful to apparently straightforward—what Evans later called a “documentary style.” With the encouragement of his close friend and writer Lincoln Kirstein, Evans began in the early 1930s to record the indigenous architecture of New England, as seen in Gothic Gate Cottage Near Poughkeepsie (lot 49). His new direction within photography was well received and in 1932 he had an exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery, followed by a showing of his photographs of Gothic architecture at The Museum of Modern Art. As a staff photographer for the Farm Security Administration between 1935 and 1937, Evans’s style of straight photography came to full fruition and in 1938, MoMA mounted a major exhibition of Evans work accompanied by one of the most influential photo books of all time: American Photographs.

    First illustrated in that classic book, Sidewalk and Shopfront, New Orleans, 1935 (lot 19) has become a celebrated example of the uncanny hold conveyed by Evans’ seemingly simple images. Kirstein aptly described this deceptive simplicity in his introduction: “The power of Evans’s work lies in the effect of circumstances of familiar specimens so that the single face, the single house, the single street, strikes with the strength of overwhelming numbers, the terrible cumulative force of thousands of faces, houses and streets.” In Sidewalk and Shopfront the photographer frames a building and the woman standing in front of it. In complete contrast to classical art proportions, the building and the woman both appear as works of American “folk” art in their homemade individualism.

    Photographs by Walker Evans: Recent photographs of Chicago (14 November 1947 – 4 January 1948) was the first of five exhibitions of Evans’s work held at the Art Institute of Chicago between then and 1987. Several of the pictures on view in that exhibition were taken on assignment for Fortune magazine and are similar to those offered in lot 26. In 1962, Hugh Edwards, already an Art Institute curator at the time of the first Evans show and now the museum’s first officially designated curator of photographs, wrote Evans asking to purchase a survey of his life’s work: “For a long time I have been concerned that we have an adequate representation of your photographs in this museum. You have always had many admirers in the Middle West and your exhibition here in 1947 brought one of the largest, most sincere and honest responses we have ever had to an exhibition of photography.” Quite fascinatingly, the group of 30 pictures that Evans assembled in response to Edwards’ request became a “key set” of sorts, as Evans featured them in his 1971 MoMA retrospective and, more importantly for the photography market, in his selection of pictures to print for his two portfolios, published by Ives-Sillman (1971) and Double Elephant Press (1974). Sidewalk and Storefront appears (under the title Barber Shop, New Orleans) in the first of these portfolios, the prospectus for which boldly stated: “The[se] images were chosen to define the originative quality of the artist’s vision.”

    The 1962 purchase, initiated by Edwards, was supported by Mrs. James Ward Thorne, whose philanthropy also made possible the Art Institute’s wonderful collection of miniature rooms showing period American architectural interiors. Further gifts by Arnold Crane, Alan and Sherry Koppel and, especially, David C. and Sarajean Ruttenberg, brought the Art Institute’s holdings of Evans into the hundreds of works. Lots 20, 22, 23, 26, 46, 47, 49 and 50 are drawn from these gifts.

19

Walker Evans

Sidewalk and Shopfront, New Orleans

1935
Gelatin silver print, printed no later than 1962.
7 7/8 x 6 3/4 in. (20 x 17.1 cm)
'The Art Institute of Chicago' collection label affixed to the reverse of the mount.

Estimate
$18,000 - 22,000 

Sold for $37,500

Contact Specialist
Vanessa Kramer Hallett
Worldwide Head, Photographs
vhallett@phillips.com

Caroline Deck
Head of Sale
cdeck@phillips.com

General Enquiries:
+1 212 940 1245

Photographs from the Collection of the Art Institute of Chicago

New York Auction 1 October