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To receive updates regarding our sales, please set up an account here.
\n
\nViewing
\n6–17 November 2021
\nMonday-Saturday 10am-6pm
\nSunday 12pm-6pm

\n\n

Admission to this Auction Sale on November 17th is by ticket only with valid proof of vaccination. Due to restricted capacity, tickets are limited. Please direct all reservation inquires to: tickets@phillips.com
\n

\n","auctionDetailsSmall","New York Auction 17 November 2021","extraInfo","

Amanda Lo Iacono
\nNew York Head of Department & Head of Auctions
\n+1 212 940 1278
\naloiacono@phillips.com

\n","enableHighlightsView","enableOnlineCatalogue","endSale",true,"hideSoldLots","isChineseTranslate","isExhibition","isLiveAuction","isMixedAuction","makeLive","showAdvanceBidButton","showArtCollector","showBuyButton","showCatalogueDownloadLink","showInquireButton","showPrintCatalogueSection","showRegistrationLink","showSaleOffers","showSoldPrice","lots",[249,250,251,252,253,254,255,256,257,258,259,260,261,262,263,264,265,266,267,268,269,270,271,272,273,274,275,276,277,278,279,280,281,282,283,284,285,286,287,288,289,290,291,292,293,294],"viewing",{"_48":248},"articles",[179,180,181,182,183],"departments",[172],"auctionCurrency",{"_169":72,"_170":171},{"_158":159,"_160":161,"_162":163,"_164":49,"_165":166,"_167":168},"totalLotCount",46,"auctionMobilityAuctionRowId","1-4ZWTY2","auctionUrl","https://www.phillips.com/auction/NY010721","countryName","United States","countryCode","US","line1","432 Park Avenue","city","postCode","10022","province","NY","currencyCode","currencySign","$",{"_173":174,"_175":176,"_177":178},"departmentId",1,"departmentName","Contemporary","departmentDisplayName","Modern & Contemporary Art",{"_184":239,"_186":178,"_187":240,"_16":241,"_190":242,"_192":243,"_213":214,"_194":195,"_196":197,"_198":244,"_200":197,"_202":245,"_204":246,"_206":247},{"_184":230,"_186":178,"_187":231,"_16":232,"_190":233,"_192":234,"_213":214,"_194":195,"_196":197,"_198":235,"_200":174,"_202":236,"_204":237,"_206":238},{"_184":220,"_186":178,"_187":221,"_16":222,"_190":223,"_192":224,"_213":214,"_194":195,"_196":197,"_198":225,"_200":226,"_202":227,"_204":228,"_206":229},{"_184":208,"_186":178,"_187":209,"_16":210,"_190":211,"_192":212,"_213":214,"_194":195,"_196":197,"_198":215,"_200":216,"_202":217,"_204":218,"_206":219},{"_184":185,"_186":178,"_187":188,"_16":189,"_190":191,"_192":193,"_194":195,"_196":197,"_198":199,"_200":201,"_202":203,"_204":205,"_206":207},"coverUrl","https://flockler.com/thumbs/sites/889/16-vr-8d91923a-ea29-4fcb-8dc6-a91f43b073cb_s600x0.jpg","section","summary","Join us for a virtual walkthrough of our 20th Century & Contemporary Art auction previews. On view: Francis Bacon, Georgia O'Keeffe, Joan Mitchell, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and more.","VR Walkthrough: 20th Century & Contemporary Art | Auction, 17-18 November","body","

Travel through our new state-of-the-art galleries at 432 Park Avenue and browse our 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening and Day Sales.

\n\n

Featuring leading works from the most sought-after artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, our Evening Sale is comprised of an exceptional group of works from Francis Bacon, Georgia O'Keeffe, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, and more.

\n\n

Our Day Sale, Morning Session features masterworks from Frank Stella, Marcel Duchamp, Robert Indiana, Anne Truitt, and more. Additionally, our Day Sale, Afternoon Session includes works by George Condo, Richard Prince, Damien Hirst, Raymond Pettibon, Cindy Sherman, and more.

\n\n

Visit our 432 Park Avenue galleries through 16 November to preview our New York 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening and Day Sales ahead of the 17-18 November auctions.

\n\n

Recommended Reading

\n\n

Max Ernst Among the Stars >

\n\n

Nine Artists to Rediscover >

\n\n

\n","publishDate","2021-11-09T15:29:03.000000Z","coverPosX",50,"coverPosY",0,"articleUrl","https://www.phillips.com/article/86526393/vr-walkthrough-20th-century-and-contemporary-art-auction-17-18-november","displayOrder",4,"auctionEditorialID",1398,"editorialID",3704,"flocklerID",86526393,"https://flockler.com/thumbs/sites/889/max-ernst-paintings-phillips-auction-house-354c8d9f-cc13-4034-b790-1d45a37b5523_s600x0.jpg","Astrophysicist Ravit Helled examines 20th century breakthroughs in planetary science alongside contemporary works by Max Ernst. ","Max Ernst Among the Stars ","

Max Ernst, Delicate Arch (Zion National Park), 1936. 20th Century & Contemporary Art, New York.

\n\n

The practice of art and the science of the cosmos combined in the surreal works of Max Ernst through his creative fascination with German astronomer Wilhelm Tempel. In 1861, Tempel discovered a planetoid and named it after Maximillian II, King of Bavaria. Ernst, in turn, would become engrossed in Tempel's unique approaches to astronomy, finding a kindred spirit in the relationship between science and the surreal; in the exploration of the limits of human perception of the universe. The stars continued to align when Ernst and director Peter Schamoni collaborated for a 1967 documentary on the life and work of Tempel, The Unlawful Practice of Astronomy, which began an artistic relationship betwen the director and the artist. Through his close friendship with Max Ernst, Peter Schamoni assembled an exceptional collection that serves as a lasting memento and retrospective of one of the most significant artists of the 20th century.

\n\n

Written by Ravit Helled

\n\n

We are part of the cosmos, but we are small and the universe is huge. It is important to open our eyes and hearts to better understand our place in the the grand picture, how insignificant, fragile and short-lived we are, how fascinating space is, and how we can be inspired by it. Perhaps astronomers and artists are not that different after all — they both aim to see beyond the visible and find a meaning to what’s around us.

\n\n

\n\n

Max Ernst, Ohne Titel (les hommes ne le sauront jamais), circa 1921. 20th Century & Contemporary Art, New York.

\n\n

1926: A Breakthrough

\n\n

Although the Sun is just one of billions of similar stars in our galaxy, it is special to us because it provides the energy for nearly all living things on Earth. Our Sun has shone for four and half billion years and will continue for another seven billion. Its main source of energy was a mystery until Albert Einstein showed that matter itself is pure energy and Arthur Eddington demonstrated how atoms could fuse together in stars, liberating this energy. In 1926, Eddington published calculations that revolutionized our understanding of the structure of stars and how they evolve in time. He showed that there is an intricate balance between gravity that holds stars together and nuclear energy that prevents them from collapsing. This work led to the relation between the masses of stars and their brightness, allowing astronomers to estimate their ages. This in turn led to the first limits on the age of our universe, which had to be older than the oldest stars that are 13 billion years old. The leap in our understanding of the workings of stars was a crucial milestone for astrophysics and our investigation of the cosmos.

\n\n

\n\n

Max Ernst, Kachina, le chien de Peggy Guggenheim, circa 1942. 20th Century & Contemporary Art, New York.

\n\n

1930: Planet X

\n\n

At the beginning of the 20th century, astronomer Percival Lowell thought that the irregular movements of the outer planets Uranus and Neptune could be due to a more distant, hypothetical planet X. In 1930, 14 years after his death, Pluto was discovered at the Lowell Observatory and officially added as the ninth planet of the Solar System. Its status as a planet lasted over seventy years, until the 2005 discovery of a larger object beyond the orbit of Neptune known as Eris, which initiated discussions on how planets in the solar system should be defined. After vivid and emotional debates culminating in a vote among professional astronomers, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) announced in 2006 that Pluto was no longer a planet, and classified it instead as a “dwarf planet.” One of the criteria for an object to be a planet is that it has to have cleared its planetary environment — in other words, it must be the dominant object in its orbital region. This is not the case for Pluto, which is part of the Kuiper belt, a region full of large rocky, icy objects beyond Neptune’s orbit. It was only in 2015 that we had our first close-up images of Pluto’s surface, showing that it is active with a liquid ocean that could even host life.

\n\n

\n\n

Max Ernst, Hawaï, 1952. 20th Century & Contemporary Art, New York.

\n\n

1957-58: The Age of Exploration Begins

\n\n

1957 represents the dawn of the Space Age. That year, the Soviet space program launched Sputnik 1, the world’s first artificial satellite, triggering the space race. The following year, the United States launched its first satellites into space, including Vanguard 1, which still orbits the Earth today. Political dimensions aside, the space race triggered important technological and scientific developments, from communication and Earth monitoring satellites to landing humans on the moon and the remote exploration of our solar system. Today there is a new space race, as many nations plan return trips to the moon and beyond. We also have private companies and the beginnings of space tourism. These breakthroughs raise their own important questions, such as who owns space? What are we capable of achieving in terms of space exploration? Will we colonize space? How are we going to be affected by these efforts? Are there limits we should not cross?

\n\n

\n\n

Max Ernst, Déchets d'oeuvres, 1968. 20th Century & Contemporary Art, New York.

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1969: To the Moon and Beyond

\n\n

Our planetary system is the remnant of the formation of the Sun. While today we know that planetary systems are common in the galaxy, just about two decades ago, the Solar System was the only known planetary system. Already in the late 1700s it was suggested that our planetary system was formed as a result of the collapse of a gaseous cloud. The collapse of this cloud was thought to lead to the formation of the young Sun, which was surrounded by a disk, from where the planets formed. Only in 1969 did the Russian astronomer Victor Safronov publish his theory on the “Evolution of the protoplanetary cloud and formation of the earth and the planets” in Russian. This work, which introduces key questions linked to the origin of planets, was been translated into English three years later. This theory represents the beginning of extensive research on the origin of the Solar System and planetary systems around other stars.

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\n\n

Max Ernst, Portrait de Ernst Wilhelm Leberecht Tempel, 1965. 20th Century & Contemporary Art, New York.

\n\n

1974: A Message to the Stars

\n\n

The question of whether extraterrestrial life exists has been keeping scientists and philosophers busy well before we detected the first extra-solar planet. Only recently we have learned that small planets are common in the galaxy, suggesting that life in the universe is not a rare phenomenon, at least statistically speaking.

\n\n

In 1974, a message to space, known as the Arecibo message, was sent to the star cluster M13, near the edge of the Milky Way galaxy. The Arecibo message included 1,679 binary digits, and was sent from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico. The message included basic information about human race, such as the fundamental chemicals of life, the formula for DNA, and graphics of the Solar System and the Arecibo telescope. The search for intelligent extraterrestrial communications in the universe and Earth-like planets are ongoing, and we seem to be closer than ever to finally answer the question: “Are we alone?”

\n\n

Ravit Helled is a Professor of Theoretical Astrophysics at the Institute for Computational Science, Center for Theoretical Astrophysics & Cosmology, University of Zurich. Helled’s scientific work concentrates on planet formation and evolution, planetary interiors, and extrasolar planets. She is an international expert in planetary modeling, and uniquely addressing the link between planetary formation, evolution, and internal structure, as well as linking exoplanetary studies with solar system science. Professor Helled is strongly involved in space exploration and is a key member in several ESA and NASA space missions.

\n\n

Discover More from 20th Century & Contemporary Art >

\n\n

Recommended Reading

\n\n

Maximiliana: Max Ernst from the Collection of Peter Schamoni >

\n\n

The Art Lover's Guide to Porto >

\n\n

\n","2021-09-29T15:25:24.000000Z","authorCredit","Arian Murati","https://www.phillips.com/article/84427892/max-ernst-stars-art-phillips-auction",3,1394,3661,84427892,"https://flockler.com/thumbs/sites/889/anne-truitt-sculpture-sale-auction-phillips-a467f9fc-8f45-473f-86dc-fcf70f4bbe08_s600x0.jpg","A selection of 20th century and contemporary artists finally getting their moment. ","Nine Artists to Rediscover","

Anne Truitt, Spring Dryad, 1975. 20th Century & Contemporary Art.

\n\n

Ahead of Phillips' 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day and Evening Sales, we look at a group of artists whose visionary works have slipped through the cracks of mainstream art history. Whether they've been recently reexamined or are currently on the rise, the joy of discovery and new perspectives inform each work in the below selection.

\n\n

Anne Truitt

\n\n

Spring Dryad (1975) is the concluding work of a series of four sculptures that began with 1971's Summer Dryad, each titled after a season. Spring Dryad’s pillar-like shape had become a hallmark of Truitt’s work by the 1970s. She painstakingly painted, sanded, and repainted layers of acrylic onto the surfaces of her wooden pillars by hand to achieve a uniform sheen and precise hue. It is this interplay between form and feeling — between the apparently Minimalist abstraction of Truitt’s sculptures and their decidedly un-Minimalist materials and explorations of interiority — that sets her apart from her milieu. Spring Dryad embodies the raw, gentle beauty of its associated season and magnificently illustrates Anne Truitt’s sculptural practice.

\n\n

Why Now: After a 2017-18 retrospective at the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., interest in Truitt's timeless sculptures revived, culminating with a long-term exhibition of works in Dia Art Foundation’s in Beacon, and is posed to set an auction record for one of the artist's works.

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\n\n

Jo Baer, Untitled, 1964-68. 20th Century & Contemporary Art.

\n\n

Jo Baer

\n\n

Jo Baer has been a leading figure in American Minimalist painting for over fifty years. Her practice of non-objective painting in the 1960s led to a series of white canvases with starkly colored edges, of which Untitled (1964-68) serves as a prime example. A highly discursive painter, Baer engaged with notions of minimalism as defined by contemporary critics, drawing upon her scientific training and literary works by Samuel Beckett to form a view of the style as being rooted in a liberating resilience. Baer further developed her practice through "radical figuration," a concept employing fragmented images to maintain the openness of discourse.

\n\n

Why Now: Despite a 1975 retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Baer's work has often been overlooked. However, in 2019, Pace Gallery announced its representation of the artist. Recently, Pace Gallery hosted two successful solo shows of the artist at the end of 2020, and is planning further exhibitions for 2022 in Geneva and New York. Untitled is the first painting by Baer to come to auction in six years.

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Leonor Fini, Girl with Shells, 1947. 20th Century & Contemporary Art.

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Leonor Fini

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Most closely associated with Surrealism, though fiercely independent, Leonor Fini's portrayals of women pushed conventional boundaries. The list of Fini's collaborators, contemporaries, and artists she influenced include Jean Cocteau, Man Ray, Salvador Dalí, Albert Camus, Jean Genet, and Federico Fellini. Girl with Shells (1947) comes to auction from the collection of another exemplary modern woman, former Harper’s Bazaar as editor-in-chief Carmel Snow, who commissioned the piece for the November 1947 edition of the magazine.

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Why Now: Fini was the focus of a blockbuster exhibition at the Museum of Sex, New York, in 2018, along with a New York Times profile that same year. An auction record was set in May of this year at $2,319,000 for Autoportrait au scorpion (1938), cementing Fini's turn from forgotten artist to headline figure.

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Reggie Burrows Hodges, On the Verge: Green, 2020. 20th Century & Contemporary Art.

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Reggie Burrows Hodges

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Reggie Borrows Hodges excavates themes of identity and memory, often drawing from his childhood experiences in Compton. Straddling abstraction and figuration, his portraits depict faceless figures emerging from hazy narrative scenes that address the relativity of perception and the human relationship to one’s environment. By employing a black ground for his paintings, Hodges looks to Color Field masters including Milton Avery, Helen Frankenthaler, and Mark Rothko, while “dealing with blackness’s totality.”

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Why Now: His highly acclaimed debut solo show at Karma, New York earlier this year has fueled interest in the artist’s work, leading to Hodges’ auction debut with Phillips London in October when his For the Greater Good achieved £441,000 — soaring over 15 times its low estimate. Building on this momentum, the Centre for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland will host Hodges’ first institutional solo exhibition in 2022.

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Peter Saul, Icebox #3, 1961-62. 20th Century & Contemporary Art.

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Peter Saul

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Though widely known as one of Pop Art’s founding fathers, Peter Saul has always evaded easy categorization in the art world. At once humorous and macabre, Saul’s visual approach to issues of consumer madness, crime and punishment, and political corruption is as shocking as it is wildly inventive. Fusing Abstract Expressionism, Pop, and Surrealism, his singular aesthetic has long been commended by those who share his maverick sensibility, such as KAWS, and his precocious oeuvre is now gaining the appreciation of wider audiences.

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Why Now: Saul received his long overdue first New York museum survey at the New Museum from 2020 to 2021, marking a renewed critical interest in his work. This past July, the artist was also the subject of an extensive profile in the New York Times Style Magazine, entitled “Peter Saul Doesn’t Want Any Advice.”

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Richmond Barthé, Stevedore, 1986. 20th Century & Contemporary Art.

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Richmond Barthé

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A leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance, Richmond Barthé's works showcase a quality of workmanship that is only recently becoming a major focus point for critics. A devout Catholic, the artist imbued his sculptures with what he called a "spiritual quality I see and feel in people..." The artist's use of sculpture borrowed from classical forms in a manner art historian Margaret Rose Vendryes describes as "part of his expressive camouflage in that male nudes based on classical models or themes made the articulation of his homosexuality possible." Barthé retreated from his fame in 1947, leaving New York for Jamaica, where he continued to make work. By the time he returned to the United States in 1977, he was impoverished, and unable to collect benefits, despite being commissioned to sculpt the eagle statue which stood in front of the Social Security Building in Washington, D.C. Such injustice would prohibit the artist from receiving the recognition he deserved, making him one of the most under-appreciated African American artists of his generation.

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Why Now: A major traveling retrospective beginning in 2010 and culminating earlier this year in March 2021 has recently shed light on the artist’s most celebrated sculptural works. In June 2020, a new auction record of $629,000 was achieved for Barthé's Feral Benga (1935-6). Stevedore is one of his most iconic forms, exemplifying the full spectrum of the artist's attention to form, essence, and spirit.

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Lee Lozano, No Title, 1969. 20th Century & Contemporary Art.

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Lee Lozano

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In 1969, Lee Lozano gradually withdrew from galleries and agents "in order to pursue investigations of total personal and public revolution." Prior to her disengagement, Lozano had been a fixture in the New York art scene, and from then on, she only exhibited works in public forums. She continued to push the boundaries of conceptual art with a 27-year-long project Decide to Boycott Women (1971), in which she refrained from speaking to other women. Lozano's simultaneous rejections of capitalism, patriarchy, and their intertwined relationships with the art world give her conceptual works a heightened degree of intensity.

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Why Now: Lozano's radical measures were undoubtedly why her work was quickly forgotten after the 1970s, making the revived interest in her practice a welcome turn. Jo Applin's 2018 Not Working was the first in-depth study of Lozano's work, and the artist has been the subject of critically acclaimed solo exhibitions at Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, and Hauser & Wirth, Somerset over the past few years. Earlier in 2021, Karma published a comprehensive monograph to coincide with the exhibition Lee Lozano: Drawings 1959–64.

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Martin Wong, WACO Studio Loft, circa 1975-78. 20th Century & Contemporary Art.

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Martin Wong

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Martin Wong's gritty style illustrates a keen attention to the urban landscape of 1980s New York City. Works like WACO Studio Loft (circa 1975-78) demonstrate Wong's use of abstract and representational forms to striking effect demonstrate Wong's combination of ambiguity and representational forms to striking effect. Wong was diagnosed with AIDS in 1994, after which he moved back to his home city of San Francisco before his untimely passing in 1999. His paintings have become nostalgic glimpses of the romance and desire of a downtown New York that is no longer.

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Why Now: A 2017 solo exhibition at the Bronx Museum of the Arts and a publication by the K11 Art Foundation in Hong Kong have brought Wong's work to new, international audiences. The artist’s auction record was achieved in 2021 for Persuit (El Que Gane Pierde - He Who Wins Looses) (1984), which achieved $1.1 million in September, following a sold-out exhibition at P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York, that amplified and renewed public and market interest in the painter's work.

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Tom of Finland, Eleven works: (i-xi) Untitled (Motorcycle Series), 1959-60. 20th Century & Contemporary Art.

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Tom of Finland

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Tom of Finland's subjects, or “Tom’s Men”— all bulging pectorals, washboard abs, and chiseled jawlines, scantily clad in uniforms or tight leather and jeans — formed the archetypal images of gay culture in the latter half of the 20th century. From their origins as pictures passed between friends and lovers to their status today as a homoerotic lingua franca, the artist's drawings portray a radical vision for their time: a world not simply normalizing but celebrating the trappings of gay desire and masculine fantasy.

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Why Now: The artist has been honored in a series of international exhibitions this year, celebrating what would have been the artist’s 100th birthday. His influence on generations of artists was discussed in a feature in The New York Times last year. The 11 drawings that comprise the Motorcycle Series, some of the finest examples of the artist’s work, form a complete narrative that could potentially achieve over double the current record price for the artist and marks the first time a serial story by the artist has ever been offered at auction.

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Discover More from 20th Century & Contemporary Art >

\n\n

Global Gallery Tour 20th Century & Contemporary Art

\n\n

Join us on a virtual global gallery tour of Phillips’ upcoming 20th Century and Contemporary Art auction being held in our brand new, state-of-the-art gallery at 432 Park Avenue in the heart of New York City.

\n\n

Recommended Reading

\n\n

Max Ernst Among the Stars >

\n\n

Georgia O'Keeffe: Hawaii and Beyond >

\n","2021-11-09T15:17:43.000000Z","https://www.phillips.com/article/86525879/nine-artists-to-rediscover-phillips-auction",2,1406,3705,86525879,"https://flockler.com/thumbs/sites/889/basquiat-paintings-sale-phillips-auction-efc9f237-3973-4a64-a008-47d57bc03b50_s600x0.jpg","Kai Eric speaks with Phillips about the emergence of Jean-Michel Basquiat in the unique creative environment of 1980s New York City. ","Basquiat's New York","

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled, (from Famous Negro Athletes), 1981. 20th Century & Contemporary Art.

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Ahead of Phillips’ November 17 auction in New York, Kai Eric discusses his fortuitous meeting with Jean-Michel Basquiat that bloomed into a close friendship. Basquiat lived with Eric for about eight months in the latter’s Canal Street apartment and gave Eric Untitled (from Famous Negro Athlete Series) (1981). Eric shares his insights with Phillips on his relationship with Basquiat, the flourishing creative scene of 1980s downtown New York, and Untitled (from Famous Negro Athlete Series).

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PHILLIPS: Tell us a bit about how you and Basquiat came to know each other — you’ve mentioned that he lived in your space for a time. How was it to know him in that pre-fame era?

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KAI ERIC: I met Jean-Michel at the cusp of the 80s. Each day, I would go for a wander downtown. And one pre-winter morning, I was approaching the Hudson River in an area that's now called Tribeca. The streets then were generally empty, but this street was completely empty. There was a figure backlit by a waning sun at the end of the block. That figure was Jean-Michel. He was standing there in an overcoat and I had caught him with a spray paint can, in mid tag. I walked up and introduced myself. Jean-Michel Basquiat had a perpetual smile on his face, at least during the time I knew him, and he projected warmth and optimism. He had a great sparkle in his eye.

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Jean was a nomad and he had many doors that he could knock on. I offered him a space in my primitive bohemian love cave in Chinatown, at the foot of the Manhattan Bridge. He spent a significant amount of time there. Jean arrived with Suzanne Mallouk and I believe they stayed with me for about eight months. He used the apartment as a studio and meeting place. I recall that he once arrived with Henry Geldzahler, who was the art commissioner for New York City at the time. Henry inspected his work and bought a canvas for $2,000, which was a significant sale for Jean-Michel. Until that point, he had been selling pieces for 10 to 50 dollars here and there. So that sale was a turning point both financially and career-wise.

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Basquiat on the set of Downtown 81, 1980-1981.

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P: It seems that there was a prevailing attitude in the early 80s New York art scene of being young, broke, and open to anything — what do you think drew artists to those creative circles, and how did Basquiat emerge in that environment?

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KE: At that time, New York was dark, destitute, and generally populated by an odd collection of junkies, drag queens, runaways, and worst of all, art students. They were the crème de la crumbs. I think New York was omnipresent in the general subconscious. It was a place of dark romance and mysterious futures. However, Jean was a city boy from Brooklyn, so his entree into the downtown scene was from a different angle. It seemed to me that he came in from Brooklyn fresh out of high school. He was youthful, kinetic and a true prince of the city. He was born from the city and it was his natural stomping ground.

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As poor as we all were, when he got $2,000 from Geldzahler, he Immediately handed it to me and asked me to organize a dinner for all his friends. I had to tell him to just budget $500 to $800 and put the rest in his pocket. However Jean didn’t think like that. His first instinct was to share the windfall with those who had supported him. When he had money, he was incredibly generous. When he didn't have it, he was uniquely humbled.

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P: You have this incredible story about him showing up at Club 57 one night while you were working the bar and you buying four of his works for $25. Did you display them as well?

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KE: Well one evening, Jean came to visit me at Club 57. He came with Suzanne Mallouk. Jean-Michel stood at the bar and had under his arm a roll of papers. He told me that he was trying to sell a piece of work, so he started laying out primal crayon drawings on beautiful cream-colored paper. Jean said that he would sell one for $10 as he unfurled them. He laid out one and I was immediately struck, because it was a rendering of the Marlboro Man. It was the most primitive essence of a Marlboro ad. He took out the next one, and that was a version of Famous Negro Athletes. He took out another one and then another. I was taking my time mulling over the options. Jean started to look more and more vulnerable with each passing moment. After the dramatic pause, I suddenly I looked up at him and said through downturned lips, “You know what, Jean? I'm not gonna give you $10 for this and nobody in their right mind would give you $10 for this.” He frowned a bit and he looked a little crestfallen. I then said to him, “I'm gonna give you $25.” The immediate smile that came across his face filled the whole room. I think at that point, we became best friends; bonded by the spirit of that moment. Jean immediately took the $25 and turned back to me and asked me to pick out three more drawings of my choice. I received four drawings in that encounter; two of the four were a Famous Negro Athletes piece and a Marlboro Man.

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Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled, 1981. Private collection.

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P: Can you speak a bit about the present work and the story behind it? What were your thoughts about the piece when it was gifted to you, and has your interpretation evolved over the years?

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KE: Well, I sold the piece to Mary Boone gallery over 30 years ago and so my engagement with it has been minimal. The version that is up for auction is one of many pieces that he either gifted to me or that I purchased on the fly from Jean in exchange for a little walking around money. There were pieces large and small on canvases, papers, doors and notebooks. I lived in the middle of his paint splatter. I generally took his pieces at face value, but it was clear that he was often provoking deeper thought on themes of race and violence in society. The Famous Negro Athlete pieces are definitely a sarcastic comment on his feelings as a black man in America. It's a very early piece and it coincided with the emergence of Xerox machines, which inspired a period of a new art form called Xerox art. Jean-Michel also experimented with Xerox and he would take the copies and paste them into mixed media collages on canvas. Seeing this piece again reminded me of that distinct period and of his evolution.

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\nP: The nostalgic eye tends to see the era, and Basquiat in particular, as lightning in a bottle event. As a creative yourself, and as someone who was a firsthand witness to a critical moment in his life, how do you look back at the time?

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I've often described that time period in downtown New York as being a punk renaissance. Lost and searching poetic souls were drawn together for a unique moment to the creative energies of downtown Manhattan. However, there is a tendency to look back on any time period with a certain gauzy nostalgia and favor the good that happened, but there was plenty of bad then, too. AIDS also manifested at the time; many good friends were suddenly lost. So the AIDS epidemic and the Reagan era served as the backdrop and counterpoint to the relentless creativity of the time. When I look back, it seemed to me that the creativity overwhelmed—if just for a moment—the negativity. In fact, all of the art actions that were happening downtown were a push back against a larger negativity that was attempting to encroach. One must be ever vigilant.

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Jean-Michel was a reflection of his time and the perpetual media bombardment. His conscious and subconscious met on the field of canvas as he channeled his frustrations on civilizations failed promises.

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Jean-Michel Basquiat, Six Crimee, 1982. Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

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Discover More from 20th Century & Contemporary Art >

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Recommended Reading

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Max Ernst Among the Stars >

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The Art Lover's Guide to Porto >

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\n","2021-10-27T17:57:08.000000Z","https://www.phillips.com/article/85889058/basquiats-new-york-phillips-auction",1408,3687,85889058,"https://flockler.com/thumbs/sites/889/crab-claw-ginger-o-keeffe-phillips-sale-fa0b6a66-6bd0-4fb5-aaec-5ae33893a06b_s600x0.jpg","A look at the artist's life and works through travel and place.","Georgia O'Keeffe: Hawaii and Beyond","

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Georgia O'Keeffe, Crab's Claw Ginger Hawaii, 1939. 20th Century & Contemporary Art.

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中文閱讀

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On January 30, 1939, Georgia O’Keeffe embarked on a nine-week sojourn to Hawaii, a transformative experience that inspired some of the most visually alluring paintings of her career. Marking a pivotal moment in the legendary artist’s pioneering practice, Crab’s Claw Ginger Hawaii is one the most iconic works among the 22 paintings she created based on her time in the Aloha State. Of these, 14 reside in museum collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe; the Brooklyn Museum of Art; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., among others.

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Georgia O'Keeffe, Waterfall—End of Road—'Iao Valley, 1939. Honolulu Academy of Arts.

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\n
Many things are so beautiful that they don’t seem real. My idea of the world — nature — things that grow... has not been beautiful enough.
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– Georgia O’Keeffe to Alfred Stieglitz, February-March 1939
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Georgia O'Keeffe, Lake George Autumn, 1927. Collection of Milwaukee Art Museum.

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O’Keeffe strove to capture “the wideness and wonder of the world as I live in it,” as evidenced by her continuous delight in the diverse environments she encountered. In her early career, she traveled from New York City to Lake George before permanently settling in New Mexico in 1949. O’Keeffe distilled each landscape to its most essential elements — this can be seen in the calm of Lake George, the sharp edge of a skyscraper, or the hollow of a bone.

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Georgia O’Keeffe, Pelvis with Distance, 1943. Indianapolis Museum of Art.

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O’Keeffe’s relentless thirst for exploration and beauty only heightened with age, as she travelled to Mexico, Peru, India and Japan whereafter she produced some of the purest abstractions of her career. She absorbed her surroundings with great ardor, continuing to challenge her own visual vocabulary with which she worked.

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Georgia O'Keeffe, Untitled (Mt. Fuji), 1960. The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe.

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Despite the brevity of her stay in Hawaii, vestiges of O’Keeffe’s experience can be traced through her mature work. On February 26, 1939, she recounts, “I flew — and I was afraid but I did it anyway—We could see it all marked out like a map—these great clouds—great big white ones — dark blue water below — blue sky above — it was particularly good coming back —" (p. 99). The same vitality and awe with which she describes flying over the clouds of Hawaii are echoed in later paintings like Sky Above Clouds IV.

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Georgia O'Keeffe, Sky Above Clouds IV, 1965. The Art Institute of Chicago.

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Such things I have seen out the window I have never dreamed — this is more like my dreams than anything I have ever seen. I really can’t tell of it but it makes me believe in my dreams more than I ever have.
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– Georgia O’Keeffe in a letter to Anita Young, 1959
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Discover More from 20th Century & Contemporary Art >

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Recommended Reading

\n\n

Max Ernst Among the Stars >

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The Art Lover's Guide to Porto >

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Collector’s Digest

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"Saul’s Ice Box paintings were ahead of their time and undisputedly established the artist’s role as a trailblazer in the 20th century avant-garde. Their widely acclaimed stature in his oeuvre, limited quantity, and precocious character make them among the most desirable to both modern and contemporary art collectors today."
\n—Robert Manley, Deputy Chairman and Worldwide Co-Head of 20th Century & Contemporary Art

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• Ice Box #3 is making its auction debut on the heels of renewed institutional interest in Saul’s work, marked by the artist’s critically acclaimed New York retrospective, Peter Saul: Crime and Punishment.

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\n• A rare-to-market opportunity, the present work is the first work from Saul’s famous Ice Box series to come to auction in over half a decade.

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• The New York Times recently published a profile on the artist, “Peter Saul Doesn’t Want Any Advice”, in July 2021.

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ⁱ Peter Saul, quoted in Paul Laster, “Peter Saul and the Importance of Having a Salary (An Interview),” Conceptual Fine Arts, April 20, 2020, online.

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ⁱⁱ Norman L. Kleeblatt, “Greenberg, Rosenberg, and Postwar American Art,” in Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940-1976, exh. cat., Jewish Museum, New York, 2008, p. 176.

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ⁱⁱⁱ Peter Saul, quoted in Dan Nadel, “Wrong Rivers and Wrong Halls,” in Peter Saul: Crime and Punishment, exh. cat., New Museum, New York, 2020, p. 10.

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^iv Peter Saul, quoted in Robert Storr, “I’m a Perfectly Norman Person,’” in Peter Saul, exh. cat., Orange County Museum of Fine Art, Newport Beach, 2008, p. 51.

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^v Brian Donnelly (KAWS), quoted in Linda Yablonsky, “The Collections of Artists,” The New York Times, December 5, 2013.

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^vi Brian Donnelly (KAWS), quoted in A.M. Homes, “Peter Saul, Curmudgeonly Father of Pop Art, Has a New Exhibit,” Vanity Fair, October 23, 2015, online.

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"I liked the icebox best because the door could open and stuff could fall out."
\n—Peter Saul

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From dense abstract masses to sweeping strokes, rough outlines to drips and splatters, the present work is a virtuosic manifestation of the artist’s early intuitive exploration of his painterly language. As Norman L. Kleeblatt explained, “The painting Ice Box #3 uses an array of popular imagery that is radically different in its freewheeling stream-of-consciousness arrangement from the more precise and premeditated compositions of Pop Art. Cartoon imagery and old-fashioned advertisements are juxtaposed in odd combinations. Saul even deployed representations of drips based on the intellectual memory of action rather than on the actual result of painterly process.”ⁱⁱ At once visceral and cerebral, his style was as transgressive as his imagery, his conscious application of the blood drops from the axe in direct contrast to the trickles of paint bleeding down the canvas.

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\"[left] — \n[left] Olive Oyl with a can of spinach, from the American cartoon *Popeye the Sailor Man* [right] Willem de Kooning, *Composition*, 1955. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Image: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation / Art Resource, NY, Artwork: © 2021 The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

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"Saul’s Ice Box series treats the titular appliance as a container of consciousness: it is by turns a stage for character actors, an erotic setting, and nearly always, like Bacon’s linear cubes, a frame and a prison, standing in for modernity as a whole."
\n—Dan Nadel

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Slaying open the point of departure for Saul’s widely acclaimed oeuvre, Ice Box #3 also captures the deep influence of Francis Bacon’s work on the artist’s sensibility. In his words, “All my work, 1961-72, can be professionally seen as the artistic contribution that should, and did come after + stem from Francis Bacon.”ⁱⁱⁱ Indeed, Saul’s Ice Box paintings lie more in the vein of Bacon’s psychologically charged compositions than, for example, Warhol’s Icebox, in its social commentary and allusions—here, conjuring the Irish artist even further in the screaming figure.

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\"\" — \n[left] Francis Bacon, *Painting*, 1946. Museum of Modern Art, New York, Artwork: © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved. / DACS, London / ARS, NY 2021 [right] Andy Warhol, *Icebox*, 1961. The Menil Collection, Houston, Artwork: © 2021 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

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Coalescing the technical tenets of Abstract Expressionism with the absurdist sensibility of Surrealism and the anticipation of Pop Art into a single composition, Ice Box #3 showcases an ambitious display of Saul’s maverick practice. As Saul once conveyed to Robert Storr, “I think I’ll paint anything that will help my pictures to be interesting, powerful, romantic, shocking, thrilling—all that stuff.”^iv It is perhaps these qualities among others that so appeal to the artist KAWS, an avid collector of Saul’s work. “I have Sauls everywhere,” he claimed.^v “Peter has elbowed out his own place in the contemporary-art world. He’s never been an artist you could put a label on or add to a group. He’s created his own lane on the highway, and he’s not looking back.”^vi

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\n","RichTextCarousel",5914,"A Selection of Saul’s Ice Box Paintings in Notable Collections",[426,427,428,429],{"_402":125,"_411":436,"_413":437,"_415":-7},{"_402":125,"_411":434,"_413":435,"_415":-7},{"_402":125,"_411":432,"_413":433,"_415":-7},{"_402":125,"_411":430,"_413":431,"_415":-7},8826,"

\"Ice — \nIce Box #9, 1963. Museum of Modern Art, New York, Image: © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY, Artwork: © 2021 Peter Saul / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

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\"Ice — \nIce Box #8, 1963. Hall Art Foundation, Reading, Vermont, Artwork: © 2021 Peter Saul / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

\n",8828,"

\"Ice — \nIce Box #5, 1961. Collection of the Artist, Artwork: © 2021 Peter Saul / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

\n",8825,"

\"Ice — \nIce Box #4, 1961. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Artwork: © 2021 Peter Saul / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

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"It simply came to me as an idea...I started to put together, quite consciously what I thought was an art style."
\n—Peter Saul on his Ice Box paintings

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Painted between 1961 and 1962, Ice Box #3 belongs to Peter Saul’s highly coveted eponymous series comprising just ten works created from 1960 to 1963. Presenting an action-packed composition within the seemingly banal subject of a refrigerator, the present work derives from a groundbreaking chapter in the artist’s acclaimed oeuvre that marked his singular aesthetic of fusing Pop, Surrealism, and Abstract Expressionism to pioneer his unique visual language. Testifying to its iconic stature, the present work featured in the 2005 documentary, Imagining America: Icons of 20^th Century American Art, and was most recently exhibited in the major retrospective Peter Saul: Crime and Punishment, the artist’s museum survey debut in New York at the New Museum from February 2020 and January 2021.

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\"\" — \nThe present work installed at *Peter Saul: Crime and Punishment*, New Museum, New York, February 11, 2020 – January 3, 2021. Image: Dario Lasagni, Artwork: © 2021 Peter Saul / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

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Saul’s renowned body of Ice Box paintings bore out of a remarkably fertile period that notably shaped his artistic development. After graduating with his BFA from Washington University, St. Louis in 1956, the artist moved to Europe, living in Amsterdam (1956-1958), Paris (1958-1962), and Rome (1962-1964) until his return to the United States in 1964. The present work was painted during Saul’s formative time in Paris, where he would meet the Surrealist painter Roberto Matta and American art dealer Allan Frumkin, the former who would influence the artist’s own Surrealist style and the latter who would give Saul his very first solo exhibition in 1961. The artist’s distance from American culture allowed him to critically examine it as subject matter in itself (see below). Deriving inspiration from American comic books and magazines such as Mad and Life, he ultimately found his wildly inventive idiom in the icebox, incorporating symbols of American consumer culture such as mass-produced goods into explosive scenes containing at once the humorous and macabre.

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In the Artist’s Words

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On the occasion of his 2017 exhibition at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, Saul discussed his Ice Boxes and the journey of his artistic practice.

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"Fortunately, Abstract Expressionism turned out to be easy to do…[but] to be successful with a viewer, to be actually looked at with interest, my picture would need to have some potential for being right or wrong, better or worse, in someone’s opinion, than some other picture."
\n—Peter Saul

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Whilst embodying the endless proliferation of consumer madness, the icebox, for Saul ultimately represented the creative freedom to express his artistic imagination—a painterly container through which he could compact divergent images and styles into one picture. Anticipating the cartoon-like figuration of Philip Guston later that decade, the series embodied Saul’s pioneering of “hand-painted Pop” and his epithet as one of Pop Art’s founding fathers. “But the idea of what you call Pop Art just came to me because I wanted something to put into my Abstract Expressionist pictures...I sat in the Dome Café, smoked Gauloise cigarettes and came up with these ideas, with most of it coming from memory,” Saul explained. “I never paid any attention to what was going on in New York. I had a fear of flying due to just missing going on a plane that crashed in 1956—the first mid-air collision.”ⁱ Ice Box #3 materializes the artist’s words in a kind of outlandish self-portrait, depicting a figure afflicted by the arms of a plane and a box of cigarettes in the center of the composition.

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Peter Saul on his Ice Box #3

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I was living in Bures sur Yvette, south of Paris, and was very isolated, hadn’t met any artists since leaving the states in 1956, but I kept in close contact by letter with my art dealer, Allan Frumkin, in New York, who I had met a year or so before as a result of phoning the artist [Roberto] Matta. So, I knew my icebox pictures were my most popular image. I don’t remember exactly but I was probably painting this picture during my first NY show, at Frumkin Gallery which was January 1962.

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This is the picture where it suddenly occurred to me to combine the icebox image and the “crime and punishment” imagery. You see a salad, or at least something in a bowl with a dog on it—that’s the remnants of Ice Box 1 and 2: food and cigarettes misbehaving in an overall icebox shape. But fresher in my mind—it was a big deal for me for me then—is all the crime stuff, bloody axe, whizzing bullet, screaming woman and so on. This was in my mind at the moment, from remembering “Crime Does Not Pay” comics when I was a kid. My thought at the end of the picture was probably—oh, oh, lot more crime than food, can I still call it icebox?...It’s just stream of conscience actually, like now, sometimes it’s refreshing to not know what you’re doing—I like painting that way a lot even now.

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—Yerz, Peter Saul

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October 20-21, 2021

\n\n

Introduction

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Max Ernst, Ohne Titel (les hommes ne le sauront jamais), circa 1921. 20th Century & Contemporary Art, New York.

1926: A Breakthrough

Max Ernst, Kachina, le chien de Peggy Guggenheim, circa 1942. 20th Century & Contemporary Art, New York.

1930: Planet X

Max Ernst, Hawaï, 1952. 20th Century & Contemporary Art, New York.

1957-58: The Age of Exploration Begins

Max Ernst, Déchets d'oeuvres, 1968. 20th Century & Contemporary Art, New York.

1969: To the Moon and Beyond

Max Ernst, Portrait de Ernst Wilhelm Leberecht Tempel, 1965. 20th Century & Contemporary Art, New York.

1974: A Message to the Stars

Anne Truitt

Jo Baer, Untitled, 1964-68. 20th Century & Contemporary Art.

Jo Baer

Leonor Fini, Girl with Shells, 1947. 20th Century & Contemporary Art.

Leonor Fini

Reggie Burrows Hodges, On the Verge: Green, 2020. 20th Century & Contemporary Art.

Reggie Burrows Hodges

Peter Saul, Icebox #3, 1961-62. 20th Century & Contemporary Art.

Peter Saul

Richmond Barthé, Stevedore, 1986. 20th Century & Contemporary Art.

Richmond Barthé

Lee Lozano, No Title, 1969. 20th Century & Contemporary Art.

Lee Lozano

Martin Wong, WACO Studio Loft, circa 1975-78. 20th Century & Contemporary Art.

Martin Wong

Tom of Finland, Eleven works: (i-xi) Untitled (Motorcycle Series), 1959-60. 20th Century & Contemporary Art.

Tom of Finland

Global Gallery Tour 20th Century & Contemporary Art

PHILLIPS: Tell us a bit about how you and Basquiat came to know each other — you’ve mentioned that he lived in your space for a time. How was it to know him in that pre-fame era?

Basquiat on the set of Downtown 81, 1980-1981.

P: It seems that there was a prevailing attitude in the early 80s New York art scene of being young, broke, and open to anything — what do you think drew artists to those creative circles, and how did Basquiat emerge in that environment?

P: You have this incredible story about him showing up at Club 57 one night while you were working the bar and you buying four of his works for $25. Did you display them as well?

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled, 1981. Private collection.

P: Can you speak a bit about the present work and the story behind it? What were your thoughts about the piece when it was gifted to you, and has your interpretation evolved over the years?

\nP: The nostalgic eye tends to see the era, and Basquiat in particular, as lightning in a bottle event. As a creative yourself, and as someone who was a firsthand witness to a critical moment in his life, how do you look back at the time?

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Six Crimee, 1982. Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Georgia O'Keeffe, Waterfall—End of Road—'Iao Valley, 1939. Honolulu Academy of Arts.

Georgia O'Keeffe, Lake George Autumn, 1927. Collection of Milwaukee Art Museum.

Georgia O’Keeffe, Pelvis with Distance, 1943. Indianapolis Museum of Art.

Georgia O'Keeffe, Untitled (Mt. Fuji), 1960. The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe.

Georgia O'Keeffe, Sky Above Clouds IV, 1965. The Art Institute of Chicago.

Collector’s Digest

​In the Artist’s Words

Peter Saul on his Ice Box #3

Introduction

In the Artist’s Words

26

Peter Saul

Ice Box #3

Further Details

Full-Cataloguing

Peter Saul