Various Artists - Editions & Works on Paper New York Thursday, February 15, 2024 | Phillips

Create your first list.

Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.

  • “I think all eleven artists are similar in their engagement with life, their interest in change, and their confidence in moving forward in their art without grand theories. Anything can happen now.”
    —Kathan Brown, Crown Point Press

    Each artist featured in the How to Draw a Landscape? portfolio has their own answer to the titular question: Jane Freilicher paints landscape because she appreciates it being there; she likes to look at it, whereas Ed Ruscha has adopted a premediated, matter-of-face style that is key to the emotionality of his work, often reducing landscape to a horizontal line. Plimack Mangold is a Realist who investigates landscape by painting outside in the air, while Bechtle is a Photorealist who paints indoors and imitates the way the camera sees. Pat Steir works from the inside out, producing meditative landscapes that are the result of dripping and flinging paint, and Tom Marioni’s work demonstrates his own processes and use of materials to explore ideas about our culture, his landscapes becoming suggestions to be interpreted by the viewer. 

     

    David Nash, Bryan Hunt, and April Gornik come together to represent the various artistic approaches of 1980s within the portfolio. Nash makes unwieldly artworks directly in the landscape, touching and changing it, then illustrating these works in portable drawings and photos. Hunt works primarily in sculpture, using bronze to explore movement, the changing natural and manmade world. In contrast, Gornik paints romantic and spiritualized landscapes from her own imagination as opposed to direct interactions with nature. Finally, Joan Nelson and Anne Appleby reflect different approaches of 1990s with their own landscapes: Nelson’s work, which often evokes another time through secondary sources, is realistic, while Appleby’s, which is from her direct experience with nature, is abstract. As Brown reiterates through the comparison of these two artists, “anything is possible now.”

     

    Brown identifies these eleven motivations – investigation, stylization, appreciation, meditation, imitation, demonstration, illustration, exploration, spiritualization, evocation, and abstraction – as crucial reasons for which artists engaging with postmodern issues continue to draw landscapes. The Why Draw a Landscape? portfolio proves that the subject of landscapes is not too old-fashioned for today’s artists and the philosophical dialogue of our time.

    “I’m not interested in style... I’m interested in looking.”
    —Robert Bechtle
    The collection of Robert Bechtle and Whitney Chadwick, assembled over their nearly forty-year marriage, reflects Bechtle’s legacy as a preeminent Photorealist along with Chadwick’s expertise as a historian and scholar. With works by Wayne Thiebaud, Ed Ruscha, and Leonora Carrington, among others, their extensive collection of editions and works on paper represents many of Bechtle’s fellow Bay Area artists, notable names in Pop, and female figureheads of Modernism and Surrealism whom Chadwick championed through her writings and teachings.   

     

    Known for his tightly detailed renderings of suburban landscapes and vintage cars, Bechtle is considered one of the founding Photorealists, a set of artists who used photographs as a point of departure for their hyperrealist art. Such interest in notions of realism permeate the works on offer, presenting a multitude of the artistic methodologies for interpreting the world: a visual interpretation of the musicality and movement of a ballet, postmodern representations of landscape, a surreal memory of a childhood home, and even different artists’ renditions of Bechtle himself. Following his passing at the age of 88 in 2020, Bechtle’s legacy persists through his collection, inspiring the continued search for unexpected beauty in the everyday. 

    • Catalogue Essay

      Including: Silvia Plimack Mangold, Pin Oak Detail; Jane Freilicher, Later Afternoon, Southampton; Pat Steir, Tiny Green; Robert Bechtle, House Near Stinson Beach; Tom Marioni, Process Landscape; David Nash, Ash Dome; Bryan Hunt, Small Cairn; April Gornik, Stepped Waterfall; Joan Nelson, Untitled (#2); and Anne Appleby, Winter

Property from the Robert Bechtle and Whitney Chadwick Trust, San Francisco, California

29

Why Draw a Landscape?

1999
The set of 10 etchings in colors and in black and white, on white and off-white wove papers, with full margins, with title page, all loose (as issued), all contained in the original green linen portfolio. Ed Ruscha, Van Ness, Santa Monica, Vine, Melrose is being offered as lot 71.
all I. various sizes
all S. 20 x 16 in. (50.8 x 40.6 cm)
portfolio 21 x 16 3/4 x 1 in. (53.3 x 42.5 x 2.5 cm)

All signed, dated and numbered 'AP 5/15' in pencil (an artist's proof set, 14 were in portfolios, the edition was 50, 20 were in portfolios), published by Crown Point Press, San Francisco (with their blindstamp).

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$3,000 - 5,000 

Sold for $6,096

Editions & Works on Paper

New York Auction 15 February 2024