Pablo Picasso - Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Morning Session New York Wednesday, May 15, 2024 | Phillips

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  • Dorothy and Eugene Prakapas, Prakapas Gallery, 1970s.

    Phillips is honored to present a selection of artwork from the collection of pioneering gallerists Eugene and Dorothy Prakapas. Proceeds from their outstanding collection will benefit the Eugene and Dorothy Prakapas Scholarship Fund at Yale University in memory of Thomas C. Mendenhall. Gene’s attendance at Yale in 1949 was made possible by a scholarship, and it was his and Dorothy’s intent that the sale of artwork from their estate would support scholars of the future. 

     

    Gene (1932-2011) and Dorothy (1928-2022) founded Prakapas Gallery at 19 East 71st Street, New York City, in 1976. The gallery quickly became known for its adventurous curatorial approach and for showing a diverse range of artists and media. The couple set a demanding pace for themselves, mounting a new exhibition every four weeks, and keeping an ever-changing array of painting, photography, and works-on-paper on the gallery walls. Photography, especially work connected to the Bauhaus, was a particular interest of the Prakapases, and the broad theme of European Modernism threaded its way through many of their shows. Operating on a shoestring budget, the couple sought out little-known artists and underrepresented aspects of well-known artists’ oeuvres for their exhibitions. Gallery favorites included László Moholy-Nagy, Fernand Léger, Willi Baumeister, Albert Renger-Patzsch, and Werner Mantz, among many others.

     

    [Left] Dorothy Prakapas, Prakapas Gallery, 1970s.
    [Right] Eugene Prakapas with photographer Arthur Rothstein, Prakapas Gallery, 1978.

    Both Gene and Dorothy came to the art world after having pursued successful careers in other arenas. Gene worked in publishing after graduating Yale, served in the Navy, and later pursued graduate studies at Oxford, which he attended on a Fulbright scholarship. Dorothy was educated at City University of New York and the Fashion Institute of Technology and worked in the fashion industry. Together, they made Prakapas Gallery into a mecca for collectors on the hunt for material that could not be found elsewhere, the esoteric and the avant-garde across all media, selected and contextualized with intelligence and warmth. 

    “Galleries that are powered by a completely idiosyncratic taste and with no regard for current fashion do not always live long. So it is good to see from their 10th anniversary miscellany that Eugene and Dorothy Prakapas are just as quirky as ever they were.”
     —John Russell

    A rare example of Pablo Picasso’s early painterly practice, Tasse et bananes, 1908, sits at the precipice of Cubism. Experimenting with still lifes at various stages throughout his practice, Picasso here relies on simple geometric shapes to inform his composition, which anticipate the artist’s more abstracted later works. Using a neutral color palette of golden browns, terracotta and pops of green to render the cup, banana and background, the shapes and forms blend into one another, creating a harmonious, geometric scene that blurs the lines between objects and space, ideas which foreshadow his later Cubist output.

    “The still life was the genre which Picasso would eventually explore more exhaustively and develop more imaginatively than any other artist in history.”
    —John Richardson

    The present work was created just as Picasso was experimenting with Georges Braque to find a new form of representation – an experiment which would lead to Cubism. Though not yet fully developed, there are hints of the movement in the present work. Relying solely on geometric shapes to build the composition, Picasso pares down the banana and cup to their most basic forms . By removing any sense of depth, Picasso developed a new way of rendering objects and still lifes that directly contrast with the naturalistic renderings of his predecessors. Such an early work thus provides a rare glimpse into Picasso’s first explorations of composition which would come to inform his heavily abstracted and patterned compositions later in his oeuvre.

    • Condition Report

    • Description

      View our Conditions of Sale.

    • Provenance

      Galerie Kahnweiler, Paris
      Roger Dutilleul, Paris
      Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris
      Eugene and Dorothy Prakapas, New York (acquired from the above in November 2000)
      Thence by descent to the present owner

    • Literature

      Françoise Cachin, Tout l'œuvre peint de Picasso, 1907–1916, Milan, 1972, no. 169, pp. 95–96 (illustrated, p. 95)
      Pierre Daix and Joan Rosselet, Picasso: The Cubist Years 1907–1916, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings and Related Works, London, 1979, no. 208, p. 229 (illustrated; titled Cup and Fruit)
      Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso. Œuvres de 1906 a 1912, vol. 2, Paris, 1986, no. 100, pp. 48, 175 (illustrated, p. 48)
      Josep Palau i Fabre, Picasso Cubism (1907–1917), New York, 1990, no. 295, pp. 107, 499 (illustrated, p. 107; titled Cup and Tuber; dated 1909)

    • Artist Biography

      Pablo Picasso

      Spanish • 1881 - 1973

      One of the most dominant and influential artists of the 20th century, Pablo Picasso was a master of endless reinvention. While significantly contributing to the movements of Surrealism, Neoclassicism and Expressionism, he is best known for pioneering the groundbreaking movement of Cubism alongside fellow artist Georges Braque in the 1910s. In his practice, he drew on African and Iberian visual culture as well as the developments in the fast-changing world around him.

      Throughout his long and prolific career, the Spanish-born artist consistently pushed the boundaries of art to new extremes. Picasso's oeuvre is famously characterized by a radical diversity of styles, ranging from his early forays in Cubism to his Classical Period and his later more gestural expressionist work, and a diverse array of media including printmaking, drawing, ceramics and sculpture as well as theater sets and costumes designs. 

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Property from the Estate of Eugene and Dorothy Prakapas

123

Tasse et bananes

signed "Picasso" on the reverse
oil on panel
10 5/8 x 8 3/8 in. (27 x 21.3 cm)
Painted in 1908.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$200,000 - 300,000 

Place Advance Bid
Contact Specialist

Annie Dolan
NY Head of Auctions and Specialist, Head of Sale, Morning Session
212 940 1288
adolan@phillips.com

Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Morning Session

New York Auction 15 May 2024