Betye Saar - New Now New York Wednesday, September 28, 2022 | Phillips

New Now

New York Auction 28 September 2022

  • "This whole place is something to do. I’m still inventing my language—like using a mask to symbolize Africa or Indigenous cultures, using a bird to symbolize Jim Crow, which would mean racism or prejudice. I use a heart for love, or a star and a moon and the sun for astrology, for things that are unknown. I had a friend who gave me three little beads that were from a meteorite. He said, when you’re wearing this, you’re wearing a star, a piece of a star. That’s so cool to think about. But if you’re on earth, you’re part of a star, right?"
    —Betye Saar

    • Provenance

      Harvey La Tourette
      Acquired from the above by the present owner

    • Artist Biography

      Betye Saar

      American • 1926

      Betye Saar’s work coalesces the “personal” with the “political”, utilizing the intimacy of nostalgia and assemblage to address social inequalities and cultural issues. An instrumental participant in many 20th century artistic moments – including the Black Arts Movement of the 1970s and feminist art – Saar began creating politically-charged collages and assemblages after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. Since then, her art has tackled the realities of racism and sexism and has been a mode of processing outrage. 

      Her technique of salvaging objects at yard and estate sales and transmuting them into three-dimensional contained spaces was influenced by the small-scale intimate box works of Joseph Cornell, an exhibition of which Saar visited at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1967. Cornell’s impact on Saar’s oeuvre is particularly conspicuous in Domestic Life, 2007, which is composed of miniature figures confined by a bird-cage; however, while her predecessor experimented with the fantastical world of Surrealism, Saar’s assemblage addressed the current reality of oppressed identities. “Cages were about incarceration,” she asserted. “Racism is a cage that still prevails.” The exaggerated features of the trapped figures evoke racist stereotypes and depictions of African Americans and their captivity might allude to Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem Sympathy, in which a caged bird symbolizes a chained slave. The metal structure of Domestic Life may also reference one of Saar’s favorite architectural sculptures, the Watts Towers – the landmark of a working class African-American neighborhood famous for the 1965 Watts riots.

      To Saar, the artist is an active resuscitator as opposed to simply a passive recorder of death. “I work with dead objects, with things that people have thrown away: old photographs, and so on,” Saar has said. “But my work is at the crossroads between death and rebirth. Discarded materials have been recycled, so they’re born anew, because the artist has the power to do that.”

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Betye Saar

Reflection

signed and dated "Betye Saar 79" lower right
mixed media assemblage
10 1/2 x 10 1/2 in. (26.7 x 26.7 cm)
Executed in 1979.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$7,000 - 10,000 

Sold for $8,820

Contact Specialist

Avery Semjen
Head of Sale, New Now
212 940 1207
asemjen@phillips.com

New Now

New York Auction 28 September 2022