Walker Evans - Photographs from the Collection of the Art Institute of Chicago New York Wednesday, October 1, 2014 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Gift of Arnold Crane, 1970

  • Literature

    The Art Institute of Chicago, The Intuitive Eye: Photographs from the David C. & Sarajean Ruttenberg Collection, pl. 16
    Keller, Walker Evans: The Getty Museum Collection, pls. 590 and 591 for a variant
    Metropolitan Museum of Art, Walker Evans, pl. 110 for a variant
    Mora and Hill, Walker Evans: The Hungry Eye, p. 223 for a variant

  • Catalogue Essay

    In the winter of 1938, at the height of his acclaim, Walker Evans began a three-year project to photograph riders on the New York subway. Wearing a hidden camera with a cable release running down his sleeve, Evans photographed without a viewfinder, the lens of his camera peaking out between his coat buttons. Evans’s great contribution to American Modernism was his insistence on eliminating all self-aggrandizing artistry from his pictures in order to present only that which was in front of him: the thing itself. His subway portraits, as seen in Lots 22 and 23, in which both the framing and the subjects’ “poses” contained a great element of chance, represent Evans’ culminating rejection of the high-art tradition of Alfred Stieglitz, whom he once referred to as ''a screaming aesthete.''

22

Untitled (Subway Portrait), New York

1938-1941
Gelatin silver print.
4 3/4 x 7 1/4 in. (12.1 x 18.4 cm)
'The Art Institute of Chicago' collection label affixed to the reverse of the mount.

Estimate
$10,000 - 15,000 

Sold for $40,000

Contact Specialist
Vanessa Kramer Hallett
Worldwide Head, Photographs
vhallett@phillips.com

Caroline Deck
Head of Sale
cdeck@phillips.com

General Enquiries:
+1 212 940 1245

Photographs from the Collection of the Art Institute of Chicago

New York Auction 1 October