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Annie Dolan
\nSpecialist, Head of Day Sale, Morning Session
\n+1 212 940 1288
\nadolan@phillips.com

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Barbara Hepworth, Three Forms (Winter Rocks), 1965. 20th Century & Contemporary Art New York Day Sale, Morning Session.

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NOTES FROM A PERIPATETIC COLLECTOR

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When, after years of focused work, gifted young women and men begin medical school. They are often told by thoughtful deans and mentors that a wondrous big new world awaits them. But what I learned is: “not yet!” It became axiomatic that the initial two years of basic science would require grueling hours of concentrated effort. What I soon wished for was an expanded sense of freedom.

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Fortunate at the time to be studying at Columbia College of Physicians & Surgeons in New York City, I found my corner of freedom by visiting the museums and galleries close by, where creativity lived and thrived. I of course quickly realized how disciplined and determined these artists were. But for me, the reaction was often awe and a hope that one day I would be free and creative as well. With honesty, my outreach was to become a form of psychotherapy. So began what was to be a sixty-year love affair with the visual arts.

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Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College. © 2022 Trustees of Dartmouth College.

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The present works differ in composition, and in execution; they are united by a materiality and presence which together embodies a freedom of movement found, of all places, in sculpture. Substance, quality, and place – tenets of the peripatetic school of thought – are each explored in different ways by these artists, and yet they each arrive, brilliantly, in motion. As part of our 20th Century & Contemporary Art New York Day Auction, the sale of these works will benefit the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College.

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Sir Anthony Caro

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Sir Anthony Caro, O.M, R.A., Table Piece CCCXXXVI, 1976-1977. 20th Century & Contemporary Art New York Day Sale, Morning Session.

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Sir Anthony Caro. Image: © David Farrell. All rights reserved 2022 / Bridgeman Images.

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At the core of Sir Anthony Caro’s practice is a diagnostic engagement with the human body. Through his found materials like rusted steel, we observe objects destined for purpose, specific shapes, functions and dimensions, relieved of their prescribed roles as organic forms. As Caro’s table pieces are freed from their plinths, we are able to take them in from all angles – we rust and bend out of shape; things appear and disappear from their resting state; and we connect through a relationship with space.

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As with so many of his works, Table Piece CCCXXXVI has a reflective quality – its elongated shape is bookended by staves, drawing the eye from end to twisting end in the manner of musical notation. Caro’s spatial rendering invites a contemplative tour around the work for the viewer to find new perspectives and interpret their relationship with the piece; the process is one of the sculpture revealing itself. Executed around the time of Caro’s retrospective at The Musem of Modern Art, New York, in 1975, Table Piece CCCXXXVI is a standout, elegant work from a fruitful period in Caro’s practice.

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Barbara Hepworth

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Barbara Hepworth, Three Forms (Winter Rocks), 1965. 20th Century & Contemporary Art New York Day Sale, Morning Session.

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Barbara Hepworth. Image: © Brooklyn Museum of Art / Gift of Wayne and Stephanie Mones at the request of their father, Arthur Mones / Bridgeman Images.

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Executed in 1965 at the peak of Barbara Hepworth’s career, Three Forms (Winter Rocks), is a prime example of the artist’s unique experimentations with material and space. One of the first of approximately sixty sculptures carved in slate Hepworth made between the 1960s and 1970s, the work is characterized by its smoothness, richness in color, and polished finish. The work’s title also emphasizes the use of three separate elements. The importance of three in Hepworth’s practice began as early as the 1930s. She made her first three-part sculpture in 1935, after giving birth to triplets the previous year, and she continued making variations of three-part compositions throughout the years. While the three forms in the present work are differently sized and imperfect in shape, the space between them is proportional to each other, demonstrating the artist’s always harmonious arrangements of form.

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Hepworth’s commitment to space and material is enacted through figuration. In her own words, she was “absorbed in the relationships in space, in size and texture and weight, as well as the tensions between forms,” which allowed Hepworth to find naturalistic form in an otherwise abstract vernacular. Three Forms (Winter Rocks) takes reference from the rock formations at St. Ives, Cornwall, connecting the work to one of the main themes in Barbara Hepworth’s practice — forms in landscape. The sculpture is shaped by its environment just as a rock formation alters the movement of a breeze through it.

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Dorothy Dehner

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Dorothy Dehner, Untitled, 1967. 20th Century & Contemporary Art New York Day Sale, Morning Session.

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$\"Click$

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Dorothy Dehner. Image: Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo.

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It was not until she was in her late 40s, and after separating from her husband, the Modernist artist David Smith, that Dorothy Dehner became a sculptor in her own right. Trained as a performance artist and dancer, Dehner approached sculpture through its physicality, interpreting form and movement the way a dancer alters their figure in fluid gestures across a space. In Untitled, oblong and circular discs weave along a straightened axis, its individual elements meeting only where they create a layering effect.

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Dehner’s choice of bronze is also noteworthy, especially in relation to the other two pieces in the present collection. Traditionally a casting alloy, here the artist instead embraces the material’s shape by hand, showcasing her formation through imperfect shapes. It is also a triumphant metal, one which signals victory and internal resolve even as its sheen tends to oxidize. Perhaps this was a consideration and symbol of Dehner’s tumultuous past and her reinvigoration as a sculptor – an emotional landscape rendered physical in three dimensions; a small, inconspicuous monument to liberation. As the artist notes: “I was never taught sculpture at all; nobody told me anything. I didn’t need it. The minute I had (the wax) in my hands, I knew what to do.” Recently, Dehner’s output has received a renewed spotlight with its inclusion in shows around the United States, including an auction record in 2020 and inclusion in a 2021 group exhibition at Rosenberg & Co., New York, entitled A Future We Begin to Feel: Women Artists 1921-1971.

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Discover More from 20th Century & Contemporary Art >

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Recommended Reading

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A Glimpse at Two Rare, Early Andy Warhol Paintings >

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Cy Twombly's Monumental 'Bacchus' Painting Comes to Phillips New York >

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\n","publishDate","2022-10-31T19:43:30.000000Z","authorCredit","Arian Murati","coverPosX",50,"coverPosY",0,"articleUrl","https://www.phillips.com/article/107563958/figuration-and-the-freedom-of-sculpture","displayOrder",2,"auctionEditorialID",1665,"editorialID",4009,"flocklerID",107563958,"https://flockler.com/thumbs/sites/889/frankenthaller3-70ea89c8-31ad-426f-aa01-ee8370d0b15e_s600x0.png","Spotlighting the contributions of female abstractionists to their historical and contemporary landscapes.","Women in Abstraction","

Helen Frankenthaler, Saturday Night, 1985. 20th Century & Contemporary Art New York Day Sale, Morning Session.

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This November, Phillips’ 20th Century & Contemporary Art Sales highlight the contributions of over 20 women artists whose practices engage and question the canon of abstraction. Alongside exceptional works by Joan Mitchell and Yayoi Kusama in the Evening Sale, the Morning and Afternoon sessions of the Day Sale feature early pioneers in abstraction such as Helen Frankenthaler and Emily Mason, whose contributions are finally being addressed in retrospect, as well as artists like Amy Sillman and Lucy Bull, who continue to challenge conventions today. The works presented here communicate the range and scope with which these artists expand the domain of abstraction.

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Marginalized Visionaries

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Although Abstract Expressionism has been historically tied to the names of its male practitioners, including Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning, female artists also played a central role in shaping the movement. Emily Mason and Helen Frankenthaler, now understood as masters of abstraction, made important, early contributions, though the scant history of their critical reception stands in stark contrast to the overwhelming acceptance of their male peers’ work.

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Helen Frankenthaler, Brown Bird, 1959. 20th Century & Contemporary Art New York Day Sale, Morning Session.

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Recognized as one of the most important female American artists of the 20th century, Frankenthaler is considered a leader in the transition from Abstract Expressionism to Color Field painting. She first entered the New York scene in 1950, when Adolph Gottlieb selected one of her paintings to be included in Fifteen Unknowns: Selected by Artists of the Kootz Gallery. By 1959, the year she painted Brown Bird, her paintings had a regular presence in exhibitions around the world alongside some of the most important mid-century artists. Mason had her first solo show in 1960, after having spent time in Venice on a Fulbright grant, a move that allowed her to develop her practice away from the spotlight of her more well-known contemporaries — including her husband, Wolf Kahn. While many other Abstract Expressionists were grappling with existential intensity and raw affect, Mason probed the realms of memory and nature, themes which would come to the fore over subsequent decades and have received renewed critical attention in recent years.

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The painter Hans Hoffmann once said, “This is so good, you wouldn’t know it was done by a woman,” ostensibly to compliment the work of his female peer, Lee Krasner. His famous line encapsulates the barbed tension of the term “female artist” in the mid-20^th century. On the one hand, in a male-dominated field, being told one’s painting was so good, “you wouldn’t know it was done by a woman,” was a compliment. But at the same time, the statement implies that women in general are incapable of creating art at the same scale or intellectual level of their male peers. To be a “female artist” is thus to be both a remarkable exception and a liability in the historical moment of Abstract Expressionism.

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Carried over into the present, the term is similarly problematic in its reliance on narrow definitions of gender identity, as this limits the interpretive scope of an artist’s work. As Elaine de Kooning argued: “To be put in any category not defined by one’s work is to be falsified.” Frankenthaler and Mason stand as models here, their contributions to a history of Abstract Expressionism obscured and somewhat complicated by the caveat “woman artist.” Following de Kooning’s suggestion, we can approach the work of these artists on its own terms, even while we address the limitations and challenges faced by women working in a man’s world in the post-war period.

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Frankenthaler’s Brown Bird showcases her prowess in the gestural improvisation central to definitions of Abstract Expressionism, predating her signature soak-stain technique and her transition into a more subtle and calligraphic style of painting. In Saturday Night, Frankenthaler’s deep purple pigment forms the backdrop to the minimal brushstrokes that make up the foreground. The marks swing backwards and forwards, their densities varying to make them appear as if they’re fading in and out. Within the canvas’ geography, her marks defy recognition while demanding interrogation. As with most of Frankenthaler’s works, Saturday Night functions on ambiguity – a quality that the artist herself attributes to any painting’s success. Likewise, Mason’s practice made use of improvisation and ambiguity in original ways. Her decades-long exploration of spatial relations, the fluidity of color and ethereal lyricism are on full display in Like Frost Upon a Glass. In a 2005 interview with The Brattleboro Reformer, she compared her method of working on a canvas to playing chess: “Pick it up, make a move, wait, let time go in between,” she said. “Then I know what to do.”

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Emily Mason, Like Frost Upon a Glass, 1985. 20th Century & Contemporary Art New York Day Sale, Morning Session.

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Contemporary Interpretations

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In the decades following the mid-century heyday of Abstract Expressionism and Color Field Painting, approaches to abstraction have remained as numerous and diverse as the artists working in this vein. Alongside these pioneering works, we look to a contemporary generation of women working in abstraction – each artist pushing against prevailing trends in exciting ways whether well-established, or just beginning to make waves at auction and exhibition.

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Amy Sillman, Cart, 2001. 20th Century & Contemporary Art New York Day Sale, Afternoon Session.

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Painted in 2001, Amy Sillman’s Cart showcases her signature mode of process-based paintings that move between abstraction and figuration, combining sweeping gestural strokes with a palette gone rogue and hovering at the boundaries of figuration and abstraction. Given the range of the artist’s scope, color itself serves as an “engine,” or a form of movement that adapts to the many layers Sillman imbues to a single work, from humor and doubt, to informality and approaches to conventional modes. The New York-based painter came of age in the 1970s, a time when the medium was largely repudiated by critics, and developed her practice through the 1990s with subversive acid and pastel hues, cartoon-like lines, and conceptual engagement with liminal space and discovery through the unknown in her compositions. Sillman champions "the relevance of painting" with what critic Phyllis Tuchman describes as "messy, multivalent, lively" art, which "reframes long-held notions regarding the look and emotional character of abstraction." Cart exemplifies this notion perfectly: Sillman is an artist fluent in the language of Abstract Expressionism to the level of infraction; she demystifies the movement while pushing its boundaries into the 21st century. Sillman’s work was featured as part of The Milk of Dreams exhibition at the 2022 Venice Biennale, and her contemporaneous influence on younger artists is a testament to her ability to continually innovate her practice.

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Michaela Yearwood-Dan, Muddlin on through, 2020. 20th Century & Contemporary Art New York Day Sale, Afternoon Session.

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Born in 1994, Michaela Yearwood-Dan is among the generation of young painters reflecting on questions of subjectivity and identity, as well as themes of class, culture, race, and gender through abstraction. Replete with a host of cultural and personal references, her lush works exemplify an artist whose approach explores collective experience through a deeply personal lens, often incorporating song lyrics, drafted notes of text messages never sent, and her conversations with Apple’s virtual assistant, Siri, exploring the realms of human and non-human experience. Yearwood-Dan avoids trite stereotype or reductive cliché by inflecting this visual language with her own, lived experience. Text written in Yearwood-Dan's expressive gold script further relates to past emotional experiences – a breakup, the global solitude of 2020 – drawing viewers into a two-way mirror of emotional and physical abstraction as Yearwood-Dan creates the space in which to engage. More than reflection on her technological present, Yearwood-Dan also responds to the socio-cultural experience of being a Black British woman, borrowing cultural signifiers including carnival culture, acrylic nails, and hooped earrings for her lexicon. In Muddlin on through, we catch snippets such as “I know that it’s hard, I know that it’s hard to be in this position,” or “Run away whilst you still can,” mixing lyrical elegance with a defamiliarizing landscape to great effect.

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Left: Lucy Bull, Untitled (Green Dot), 2019. 20th Century & Contemporary Art New York Day Sale, Afternoon Session. Right: Lucy Bull, Untitled (Green), 2017. 20th Century & Contemporary Art New York Day Sale, Afternoon Session.

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Heralded by W Magazine as “The Painter Bringing Back Abstraction,” American Artist Lucy Bull (b.1990) is among the standout artists in the new generation of women in abstraction. Known for her surreal and psychedelic compositions, Bull's practice prompts a visceral sensory experience in what the artist describes as a “timed release”: “The layers start to shift and unravel, and the more you look, the more you start to see," Bull notes. This interplay between subjectivity and distinction creates a friction Bull considers relational in her approach to abstraction. Such is the defamiliarizing effect of Untitled (Green Dot), wherein Bull employs an array of colors and textures in a way that balances density and lightness, silence and sonic overload, all in a deceptively inviting composition. Beautiful but also unsettling, Untitled (Green) engulfs the viewer in its imagined geometry. Bull encourages viewers to make peace with her work’s concord and discord through her use of repeated forms, establishing a sense of movement that allows the viewer to find order within the chaos. After a breakout solo show at David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles last year, exceptional auction results have followed: Phillips’ sale of Bull's 2020 painting 8:50 in June 2022 achieved over seven times its high estimate. Her work is in the permanent collections of MAMCO Geneva, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, and more. In view of this contemporary resurgence, Phillips is commited to elevating the present artists and many more, for their contributions to be celebrated in their time, and also for those who emerge in the generations to come to embrace the rich and continually evolving history of women in abstraction.

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Discover More from 20th Century & Contemporary Art >

\n\n

Recommended Reading

\n\n

A Glimpse at Two Rare, Early Andy Warhol Paintings >

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Artists to Watch: New York >

\n","2022-10-27T22:52:54.000000Z","https://www.phillips.com/article/107260962/women-in-abstraction",1672,4002,107260962,"https://flockler.com/thumbs/sites/889/edclark-c9b198df-d9df-403b-a30b-563dacf1a3df_s600x0.png","How Black artists forged identities and conscious practices in the periphery of 20th century art. ","Paths Along the Margins ","

Ed Clark, Black Daylight, 1966. 20th Century & Contemporary Art New York Day Sale, Morning Session.

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Written by Folasade Ologundudu

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Spiral art collective exhibition flyer. Courtesy National Gallery of Art, 2003.

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Black artists of the 20th century often addressed the social and political issues of their time. But those who forged new paths from the 1950s through the 1980s, and even into the present day, sought to break free from the clutches of the overtly figurative discourse on race by developing abstract practices. Abstraction offered infinite possibilities, where the process and application of radical ideas that unearthed the Black experience through visual art could be explored through rigorous experimentation.

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[…] If possible, in these times, we hoped with our art to justify life… to use the black and white and eschew other coloration. […] This consideration, or limitation, was conceived from technical concerns, although deeper motivations may have been involved.
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- Spiral Group statement
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Norman Lewis

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Norman Lewis, Untitled, 1967. 20th Century & Contemporary Art New York Day Sale, Morning Session.

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WATCH: Norman Lewis, Fleshy Phase, 1973-1974. 20th Century & Contemporary Art New York Day Sale, Morning Session.

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History remembers Norman Lewis as the first African American Abstract Expressionist painter and the only African American member of the New York School of Abstract Expressionism whose other members included Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko. During his remarkable career, Lewis engaged with realism, abstraction, and minimalism, testing the limits of each movement through experimentation. Similar to much of the work made during the last two decades of his life, Untitled (1967), a vibrant painting of yellow, orange, and slivers of pink, moves through abstraction and figuration blending the two contrasting styles with fluid gestural marks. Working to combat racial injustice through art, as a co-founding member of Spiral, which included Charles Alston, Emma Amos, Romare Bearden, and Hale Woodruff, Lewis devoted himself to the Civil Rights Movement while uncovering art’s ability to engage questions of racial inequality. Fleshy Phase (1973-1974), marks an incredibly important time in the artist's career, during which his interest in the color black provided meditations on his experiences not only as an artist but as a Black painter working in abstraction at a time when it was unpopular. Among his peers, many believed that Black artists had a responsibility to make work that confronted the conditions Black people faced through segregation, poverty, and extreme violence. And while he was passionate about the plight of Black America as an artist, activist, and educator, he also believed his work needed to exist outside the confines of race. “I wanted to be above criticism, so that my work didn’t have to be discussed in terms of the fact that I’m black,” he once revealed.

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Sam Gilliam

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Sam Gilliam, Untitled, 1976. 20th Century & Contemporary Art New York Day Sale, Morning Session.

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Sam Gilliam, 1966. Photo: Geoffrey Clements. Courtesy Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. and New York.

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Sam Gillam’s draped paintings, which bring canvases off white walls and into three-dimensional space, continue to push our understanding of what a painting can be. Through his own abstract mode of artmaking, Gillam observed and at times referenced artists such as Jackson Pollock and Josef Albers, but resolved himself to chart a path all his own through his inventions. As the first Black artist to represent the United States in the Venice Biennale in 1972, Gilliam solidified his place in history as a radical thinker whose inquiries in painting birthed new forms of abstraction. Over nearly six decades, Gillam devoted himself to the practice, which offered a space for endless creativity, expansive thoughts, meditations on the world, and improvisation through rigorous analysis. Affixing canvas strips to large swathes of material, staining, squeezing, folding, draping, and assembling canvases in infinite arrangements, Gillam freed himself of the confinements of liminal spaces. Untitled (1976) represents a period in Gillam’s oeuvre where his experiments with color, texture, and materiality allowed him to approach the canvas in new ways through additive methods.

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Jack Whitten

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Jack Whitten, Dutch Treat III, 1985. 20th Century & Contemporary Art New York Day Sale, Morning Session.

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Following a fire in 1980 that ruined his studio, Jack Whitten took a three year hiatus from his practice before returning to the medium of abstraction as a means of experimentation. Dutch Treat III (1985) features small squares in a haphazard pattern of black, white and primary colors. Using self-made tools to garnish the painting’s with color and texture through a series of nuanced processes, Whitten explored notions of geometry while developing radically new techniques. His work, like some of his peers, transcends time and place, moving into a realm of infinite possibilities, as expansive as the cosmos. At a time when most Black artists were concerned with the struggles of Black life in America and their response to it through visual arts, Whitten was fascinated with the experimental nature of abstraction and its limitless potential. The 1970s and 80s marked a period of exponential artistic growth for Whitten where his ingenious use and application of materiality blossomed. Deeply impacted by the brief time spent studying medicine at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama under the tutelage of scientist George Washington Carver, Whitten’s innovative practice is made all the more magnificent through his constant desire to build upon his experiments. In his own words: “I’m convinced today that a lot of my attitudes toward painting and making, and experimentation came from George Washington Carver. He made his own pigments, his own paints, from his inventions with peanuts. The obsession with invention and discovery impressed me.”

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Richard Mayhew

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Richard Mayhew, Guardian, 1999. 20th Century & Contemporary Art New York Day Sale, Morning Session.

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Richard Mayhew’s majestic landscapes are filled with piercing colors that unearth the mysteries of time and the complexities of emotion, drawing upon a well of ancestral knowledge through his African American and Native American heritage. Guardian (1999) depicts a large violet tree dominating the center of the canvas. The background’s calming peach and rich magenta sky illustrates the vibrance of a setting sun amid a small patch of grass in the foreground. Traditionally, American landscape painters have been overwhelmingly white, and their depictions of the country’s vast outlooks and sweeping vistas are tied to the colonization of land and its peoples. During the Civil Rights era of the 1960s – a time in American history when virtually no Black artists were making landscapes – Mayhew’s work, then, and to this day, offers a respite from the archaic lens through which landscape painting has been articulated. At 98, Mayhew still paints every day; his lifelong career informed by the spiritual connection he holds to the land that was forcibly taken from his forebearers, the Shinnecock Indian Nation of Long Island. A member of Spiral, he, along with Norman Lewis and Romare Bearden, engaged in the kind of rigorous discourse that questioned the role of artists both politically and socially.

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Ed Clark

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Ed Clark, Black Daylight, 1966. 20th Century & Contemporary Art New York Day Sale, Morning Session.

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Ed Clark in Paris, 1952. Photo: artistedclark.com.

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Many Black artists during the years leading up to the Civil Rights Movement fled America in search of the freedom Europe provided. Ed Clark, whose originality in Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism have played an important role in modern and contemporary art, lived and studied in Paris for a time before returning to the U.S. in the late 1950s. His years in France deeply impacted a practice in which unconventional forms made by gestural marks were influenced by artists such as Monet and Matisse; for Clark, close proximity to the artistic and cultural production of Paris influenced his never-before-seen techniques in abstraction. A pioneer in his own right, Clark changed abstraction forever when he picked up a broomstick, saturating canvases with expansive strokes of color and making his first painting on a shaped canvas. With a career spanning seven decades, Ed Clark produced monumental paintings that addressed nature and the human condition through his ruminations on color, form, and process. Black Daylight (1966) features large swathes of black, green, and orange paint and like much of Clark's work, the use of vibrant colors and the process of brushing oils onto canvases with large brushes brought vitality, immediacy, and a sense of movement to his work that became easily recognizable in the zeitgeist of Black abstract painters.

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\n
[Paris] was the most famous city for an artist in the 1950s. I mean New York in that moment was not considered the capital of the art world—it was Paris. They were all alive, man! Picasso, Braque, both of them. Everybody was there! [...] That was a big thing. The history was second to none.
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- Ed Clark
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Beauford Delaney

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Beauford Delaney, Yellow Abstraction, 1957. 20th Century & Contemporary Art New York Day Sale, Morning Session.

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Beauford Delaney’s Yellow Abstraction (1957), like much of his work created during his early years in France, employs the vibrant hue in thick brush strokes of oil paint applied to canvas. In Paris, Delaney began to paint the abstractions that would soon become integral to his oeuvre as an artist. Prior to this, while living in New York’s Greenwich Village from 1936 to 1952, Delaney created what are today known as the “Delaney Greene Street” paintings, which included portraits, still lifes, and street scenes. The sheer well of creativity in the streets of New York City during those illustrious decades meant Delaney mixed and mingled with some of the era’s most important artists and creative thinkers. Friends and peers included Norman Lewis, Jacob Lawrence, Augusta Savage, Romare Bearden, Richard Wright, Robert Blackburn, Countee Cullen, Ralph Ellison, and Gwendolyn Knight, as well as Henry Miller and Georgia O’Keeffe. Dissimilar to many of his peers, Delaney’s work was not centered on race, or the struggles Black Americans faced; instead, his foray into portraiture displayed an uncanny universality and timelessness capturing the essence and spirit of his subjects with deep reverence.

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Bob Thompson

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Bob Thompson, The Family, 1961. 20th Century & Contemporary Art New York Day Sale, Morning Session.

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Bob Thompson in the garden of the Martha Jackson Gallery, New York, 1965. © Dorothy Beskind, Bob Thompson papers, 1949-2005. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

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In the same vein as Ed Clark and Beauford Delaney, Bob Thompson traveled throughout Europe during his lifetime, spending time in London, Paris, Ibiza, and Rome, where he died following complications from gallbladder surgery. His brief career is marked by exceptional skills in academic drawing and his expressive use of color. Depicting rich scenes often with communal groups, Thompson's work explores the relationship between man and nature. Originally from Louisville, Kentucky, Thompson settled in New York City in the 1950s and quickly joined a group of like-minded artists who were challenging the mediums of figuration and Abstract Expressionism. Inspired by artists such as Piero della Francesca and Francisco de Goya, Thompson recreated his own scenes with mythical flair, and his richly detailed imagery seemed to challenge notions of good and evil. The Family (1961), made during his time in Europe, depicts a family amidst a pastoral landscape of green mountains as a lush tree stands tall in foreground. While his career was tragically short, Thompson achieved phenomenal success in his lifetime. At a time when many Black artists struggled to show their work in galleries, Thompson enjoyed gallery representation and critical acclaim.

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\nRobert Colescott

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Robert Colescott, Love Hate Relationship, 1989. 20th Century & Contemporary Art New York Day Sale, Morning Session.

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The satirical work of Robert Colescott is often disturbing, depicting the repulsive sides of American culture, most notably its racist past and present. As a genre, satire holds human nature to criticism where political, social, religious, and cultural structures take center stage. The complexity of the genre itself implies that one may laugh, cry, be repulsed, enticed, and experience a well of conflicting emotions. Colescott’s work elicits these feelings and more. Reformulating the Western art historical canon by depicting Black figures in settings that challenged both Black and white stereotypes, Colescott forced viewers to take a closer look at the subversive narratives of American culture. Love Hate Relationship (1989) depicts a red-headed white male figure clutching the neck of a black person as the Black figure stares up into its assailants’ eyes, which are cast down and looking away. One immediately wonders where's the love in a relationship like this, and can the scene depicted even be called a relationship, when in truth it depicts violent bondage.

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Melvin Edwards

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Melvin Edwards, Makatini, 1992. 20th Century & Contemporary Art New York Day Sale, Morning Session.

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Melvin Edwards with Curtain for William and Peter (1969) at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1970. Photo © Frank Lerner, from Time, April 6, 1970, 84. Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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The weight of Melvin Edwards’ metal sculptures is heavy, laborious, and ripe with brute force. Materiality echoes the violent history of America’s deep South. The energy behind his sculptures is palpable; intense and withering. Connecting objects rooted in our collective memory, metal chains, nails, spikes, and utilitarian tools are melded, fused, and affixed together hauntingly recalling a dark past. Edwards’ process-based approach starts with observations that consider every life through personal stories and political histories. After more than a half century of making art, Edward’s extensive oeuvre incorporates symbols that address issues of race and labor through the lens of the African diaspora. Makatini (1992) made of welded steel garners a visceral power that is undeniable, commanding, and absolute. Edwards began welding in 1960 while studying at the University of Southern California. His well known Lynch Fragments series (1960-Present), highlights social injustice and political awareness by investigating African American history and culture through slavery and beyond.

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Folasade Ologundudu is a writer, podcast host/creator, and multidisciplinary artist whose work explores issues of identity, race, and culture as it pertains to art, fashion, and design. She is the founder of Light Work, a creative platform rooted at the intersection of art, education, and culture.

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(154.9 x 126.4 x 11.4 cm)","medium","painted wood","sigEdtMan","Executed in 1975.","provenance","The Pace Gallery, New York \r\nMakler Gallery, Philadelphia\r\nAcquired from the above by the present owner in 1976","preface","The Estate of Jack R. Bershad","mainImagePath","https://dist.phillips.com/auction-assets/NY010822/173277_001.jpg","additionalImagePaths",[601,602,603],"enhancedLotComponents",[579,580],"conditionReport","The work is in very good condition. The work is structurally sound and all elements are present. There is some rubbing to the extreme edges of the forms and frame in places. There are some handling marks in places to the turnover edges. There is adhesive residue to the upper right vertical turnover edge, visible upon close inspection. There are some pale brown spots in places, consistent with the artist's chosen materials and age. There are scattered cracks, nicks and losses, most of which are inherent to the artist's choice of materials and intent. 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Property from the Estate of Jack R. Bershad

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Over nearly six decades, Philadelphia lawyer Jack R. Bershad and his wife, artist Helen Bershad, amassed an impressive collection of art and ceramics. Phillips is thrilled to be offering a selection of the American and Post-War masterworks in our 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale this season. Most of these works were acquired soon after they were made, making this a rare chance to acquire works that have remained in the same collection for more than 30 years. An artist in her own right, Helen Bershad was inspired by many of the artists in hers and Jack’s collection, citing Helen Frankenthaler as one of her heroes. Of choosing the painting Brown Bird from 1959, she said, “I had to have something that she did. It was very important to me. A lot of people didn’t like her work at that time, but I did, and I was right...” Such persistence defines the collection, as Jack and Helen went searching in galleries and auctions throughout the 1970s and 1980s for the best examples of 20th century art. This included one of Louise Nevelson’s Dawn’s Landscape works from 1975, which Helen considered “a part of our marriage, of how we talk, how we discuss things.” Two impressive sculptures by Anthony Caro and exceptional American works on paper by John Marin and Max Weber fill out the collection, alongside one of Helen’s own large-scale paintings from 1980—a beautiful and expressive field of blues and pinks coalescing on canvas. Together, this selection of works acquired by Helen and Jack demonstrates their passion for collecting, and for each other. As Helen aptly states, “[they just] wanted to be surrounded by good music and good art.”

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\nⁱ Louise Nevelson, quoted in Harriet Janis and Rudi Blesh, Collage: Personalities, Concepts and Techniques, Boston, 1967.

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"When you put things together, things that other people have thrown out, you’re really bringing them to life – a spiritual life that surpasses the life for which they were originally created."
\n—Louise NevelsonExecuted in 1975, Dawn’s Landscape XXIX illustrates Louise Nevelson’s career-long exploration of light, dimension, and geometry as a means of transcending a sculpture’s planar form. The present work is from the renowned Dawn series of white wooden sculptures including three-dimensional “landscapes.” These "environments” evolved from the artist’s practice of reworking older pieces and extracting entire elements from past works to resurrect new structures. By the late 1950s, Nevelson was an established artist in her own right, having had several successful exhibitions with Grand Central Moderns and Martha Jackson Gallery leading to her longstanding representation by the Pace Gallery. However, it wasn’t until 1958 that she received her first invitation to contribute to a museum exhibition, to which she responded, “we ’ll do a white show; keep it secret, I want it to be a surprise.”ⁱ

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"What was I going to do anywhere but New York?”
\n—Louise NevelsonThe success of Louise Nevelson’s oeuvre in the New York art scene is due to the artist’s groundbreaking practice of limiting material and color in her abstracted structures. Nevelson sourced materials found outside of her Spring Street studio to create free-standing and wall-mounted sculptures painted in monochromatic black and white paint. Made entirely of wood, the present work consists of square units fitted together to create an off-kilter yet harmonious composition. Layers of geometric configurations function as textural evocations of the artist’s personal “landscape.” Inspired by the Cubism of Pablo Picasso, particularly in his works which engage angular form with light and shade such as Landscape: Ceret, 1911, Nevelson introduced this Modern painterly language into a sculptural resolution. By utilizing her signature monochrome palettes to flatten space, we are left with just the reflection of light and shadow to create the space. As such, the planar form of the present work acts as both a blank white canvas and three-dimensional sculpture transcending visual perception. Though called a landscape, Dawn’s Landscape XXIX, has no interest in realistically illustrating an environment, so much as capturing the essence of one. There is no distinct allusion to a certain time or place, yet the foundation of the structure fits into a grid in which abstracted architecture is revealed. The enigmatic clusters of rectangles, circles, and squares, which protrude from the sculpture’s surface, suggest the idea of a cityscape—apartment buildings, sidewalks, and parks. Though shrouded in ambiguity, the visual clues of Dawn’s Landscape XXIX are certainly a reference to the artist’s eternal inspiration: the irregular, expansive, and varied landscape of New York City.

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\"\" — Pablo Picasso, *Landscape: Ceret*, 1911, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Image: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation / Art Resource, NY, Artwork: © 2022 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

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The Dawn series

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Perhaps thought to be a departure from the artist’s acclaimed black painted sculptures, the first work in the Dawn series, Dawn’s Wedding Feast, was executed in 1959 on the occasion of an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Signifying Nevelson’s transition from dark to light and night to day, Dawn’s Wedding Feast, the artist’s first white sculpture, was executed in celebration of Nevelson’s career-defining inclusion in the exhibition. The multi-part structure, which filled a room, was later dismantled, its elements reused in subsequent works such as Dawn’s Wedding Pillow, 1959. A procession of reincarnated wedding sculptures would follow until Nevelson revived the formal idea of horizontal, wall-bound landscapes. Painted in the same stark white as Dawn’s Wedding Feast, the reductive form of Dawn’s Landscape XXIX, made more than a decade later, emphasizes what was at once Nevelson’s evolving and consistent aesthetic.

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134

Louise Nevelson

Dawn's Landscape XXIX

Further Details

Full-Cataloguing

Louise Nevelson