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

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  • Provenance

    Gift of Noah Goldowsky, 1956

  • Literature

    powerHouse Books, Aaron Siskind 100, n.p. there dated 1955

  • Catalogue Essay

    Aaron Siskind was born in New York City and graduated from City College of New York in 1926, initially teaching English in the city’s public schools. In 1932, he took up photography as a means of critical social documentation upon joining the Film and Photo League, a vanguard association that was also nearly the only place to study and discuss photographs in the States in the 1930s and ‘40s. Having honed his technical skills with the Photo League, Siskind abruptly changed course in the summer of 1943. He turned from social documentary, probing truths and depths in contemporary society, to the seemingly timeless truths of flatness and abstraction—but he did not for all that move his camera into the studio. Instead he began on the beach of Martha’s Vineyard (lot 108), creating simple alphabetical images of single strands of seaweed curled and flattened in the sand. The following summer, in Gloucester, Massachusetts (lot 104), Siskind developed images of debris into a mature formal language, creating some of the earliest works of Abstract Expressionism.

    Siskind, at the request of his friend Harry Callahan, moved to Chicago in 1951 to teach at the Institute of Design. In the winter of 1955-1956, Siskind had his first one-man exhibition at The Art Institute of Chicago. During that period Noah Goldowsky, a legendary New York art dealer and early supporter of the Abstract Expressionist painters, donated several images by Siskind to the Art Institute, including this poetic Midwest abstraction, St. Louis 9, in which scraps of letters appear to tumble down the boarded edge of a construction site. Goldowsky’s gifts became the first of more than 250 photographs by Siskind to enter the Art Institute’s collection over the subsequent decades.

48

St. Louis 9

1953
Gelatin silver print.
13 1/2 x 16 3/8 in. (34.3 x 41.6 cm)
Signed, titled 'St L. 9' and dated '53' in pencil on the reverse of the mount; 'The Art Institute of Chicago' acquisition notations in an unidentified hand in pencil on the mount.

Estimate
$12,000 - 18,000 

Sold for $27,500

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