Lot 28, "Yves-Marie in the rain," by David Hockney, oil on canvas, 48 1/8 by 60 1/8 inches, 1973

"Introspective and somber, his gaze cast down as if to shield himself from the incessant drizzle of rain, the solitary Yves-Marie strides over the Pont des Arts, his steps muffled by rainfall. Streaks of rain jog across the painted surface in quick, fleeting zigzags of blue and white brushstrokes that recall the vigorous scribbles of Cy Twombly’s blackboard paintings and obscure the narrative beneath. Beyond the sight line of the bridge, the city of Paris dissolves into a rainy abyss of blurred pinks, greens, and blues. Flattening form and simplifying figuration, Hockney renders Yves-Marie in his signature reductive draftsmanship, the artificiality of his figure establishing an emotional distance between the viewer and his subject which, coupled with the lack of clear narrative context, heightens the painting’s psychological intrigue. Rendered in muted reds and yellows, the warm hues of Yves-Marie’s clothing sharply contrast against the cool blues, whites, and greens that dominate the rest of the composition, further isolating and emphasizing the lone figure. In contrast to his soft rendering of Yves-Marie, Hockney meticulously hones in on each ornate detail of the Pont des Arts. The precise geometry of the bridge, coupled with the streaks of rain that traverse the canvas, imbue the composition as a whole with a sharp organizational structure and strong sense of geometric line; this pervading geometric abstraction is reinforced by the reflective surface of the wet bridge, which echoes the bridge’s sharp lines. 

"While Hockney had already received significant international acclaim by the early 1970s – he enjoyed his first well-received retrospective exhibition in London in 1969 – the young artist entered this second decade of his career mired in introspection and plagued with doubt regarding his artistic practice. Seeking clarity and resolution, Hockney fled the London art scene and moved to Paris in the fall of 1973. His time in France proved immensely restorative, providing Hockney with the space he needed to reevaluate his artistic intentions and reground himself. It was in Paris where Hockney, influenced and inspired by the rich culture and heritage of the city, established for himself a new pictorial vocabulary that fused art historical precedent with innovative creativity, informing the revolutionary artistic legacy that Hockney would continue to forge for decades to come. Reflecting on his time spent in Paris, Hockney recalls: 'What I was doing [in Paris] was looking back, reading and looking at pictures. I spent a lot of time in the Louvre and got to know it quite well. […] I lived quietly in Paris, drawing friends, sitting in cafes” (David Hockney, That’s the Way I See it, London 1993, p. 17). Drawing inspiration from his activities in Paris - often with Yves-Marie as a companion - Hockney approached his work at the time with a newly refined grasp of his art historical precedent; indeed, his immersion into French culture led Hockney into conversation with his artistic forebears, and his paintings from this period owe a great debt to such painterly masters as Georges Seurat, Vincent van Gogh, and Pablo Picasso. Hockney recalls that through his regular visits to the Louvre: 'I was, in a way, looking at art of the long past, and at early modern art, which of course was made in Paris. And then, of course, there was constantly the thought of Picasso.' (David Hockney, That's the Way I See It, London, 1993, pp. 19-20). In his biography of the artist, Peter Webb writes of present work 'of Yves-Marie walking across the Pont des Arts to the Louvre in the pouring rain shows a strong influence from Seurat.' (Peter Webb, Portrait of David Hockney, New York, 1988, pp. 38-39) Thematically and stylistically, Yves-Marie in the Rain is indebted to the post-Impressionists; Hockney’s concern with capturing the fleeting, momentary essence of rainfall as an emotive, atmospheric quality recalls his predecessors’ interest in conveying on canvas such ephemeral, transitory qualities as fog, steam, and rain to enhance the viewer’s impression of a specific moment and place; indeed, the setting of a Parisian bridge was adopted by numerous 19th century Parisian painters before him who were interested in capturing the modern zeitgeist of the city.

"Hockney’s paintings of people - especially those of his most intimate lovers and friends - form a crucial element of his practice, integrated into his shifting palettes, styles, and modes of production over the course of his decades-long career. Yves-Marie in the Rain is from arguably the most significant period of Hockney’s portraiture and was executed simultaneously with a suite of seven large-scale double portraits painted between 1968 and 1975 that have come to stand among the most iconic and significant paintings in the artist's oeuvre. Aside from being a portrait of Yves-Marie, the present composition also provides an extraordinary example of what is arguably Hockney’s most iconic motif, water. As was his standard practice in approaching his large-scale portrait paintings, Hockney methodically conceptualized and composed the present work, first by taking numerous photographs and then planning out the final composition through preliminary sketches. In Yves-Marie in the Rain, Hockney’s reliance on photographic source material anchors the narrative in the mimetic world. Yves-Marie recalled of the present work: “Hockney was planning a painting which would sum up the romance of Paris, and made [me] pose on the bridge in the rain for endless photographs.” (Peter Webb, Portrait of David Hockney, New York, 1988, pp. 38-39) Through a conflation of photographic source material and emotional experience, an acute awareness of perspective, and an attention to art historical precedent, Hockney creates a painting that is wholly mesmeric, saturated with a sense of nostalgic yearning and psychological depth that draws the viewer irresistibly into its web of sensorial and visual allusions. It is this genius in expertly translating the complexity of human emotion and place onto canvas, conceiving of landscape and narrative through the prism of memory, that distinguishes Hockney as one of the greatest artists of the Post War period."

The lot has an estimate of $8,000,000 to $12,000,000.  It was passed at $6,800,000.

Lot 33, "Dr. Waldmann," by Roy Lichtenstein, oil and magna on canvas, 60 by 50 inches, 1979

"In addition to reviving German Expressionism, a movement that sought to challenge society, and instead privilege the individual’s feelings and psychological interiority, Lichtenstein pays homage with Dr. Waldmann to a significant touchstone of modern European culture: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Although an English author, Mary Shelley sets a large part of her story in Germany, an environment that serves as the fountainhead for the titular character’s creativity. While studying in Germany, Dr. Frankenstein spends time with and becomes inspired by his professor Dr. Waldman, a name carefully chosen for its etymology; ‘Wald’ means forest or wood, and juxtaposed with man, evokes an individual tethered to nature. Themes of nature and creation permeate the story, just as they permeate the movement of German Expressionism, and are nodded to here in the subject matter and title, Dr. Waldmann.

"Articulated in a minimal palette of yellow, blue, black, and red, Lichtenstein brings together his iconic Benday dots and Pop sensibility with the technique and geometric angularity of the German Expressionist woodblocks. The head of Dr. Waldmann dominates the composition, unfurling in a collision of facets that reveals Lichtenstein’s foray into Cubism by suggesting multiple flattened points of view. Lichtenstein articulates his subject's face with his signature use of graphic black lines, here employed to delineate between the various planes that crash together to build up his subject. Diagonal lines of an Yves Klein-esque blue and rich red angle downward in sharply rendered striations, recalling the grain of wood inherent to the original German Expressionist prints. The passages of unmodulated color and slants of woodblock-like orthogonals bring to life the doctor’s craggy countenance of strong jaw, furrowed brow, and deep-set eyes; however, Lichtenstein denies any true perspective or depth by bringing his subject right to the fore. Aside from a hint of a window overlooking a calm seascape, the hermetic doctor’s surroundings are entirely illegible. Fundamental to portraiture of past centuries are the accoutrements and symbols that bring to life the sitter’s status or position; here, Lichtenstein adorns Dr. Waldmann with the head mirror so prototypical of an early twentieth-century audience’s understanding of the medical profession. The white band affixed to the mirror slants across Dr. Waldmann’s head, creating a sharp line that contrasts with the rounded form of the mirror itself, which recalls Lichtenstein’s earlier series of Mirror paintings. The abstracted mirror, which is the only passage featuring Lichtentein’s iconic Benday dots, refers to the canonical use of mirrors throughout art history as well as the artist’s own frequent inclusion of mirrors as compositional elements in his earlier paintings. Offering an updated articulation of the roles of vision and perception within art, here, Lichtenstein’s mirror serves as a signifier of the sitter’s profession, while simultaneously emphasizing the artist’s own backward glance at artistic precedent.

"German Expressionism exploded onto the scene of European Modernism early in the twentieth century; spearheaded by such masters as Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Franz Marc, and Emil Nolde, the movement initially represented a call to return to nature, with many of the movement’s best-known images featuring a reinterpretation of pastoral scenes and animal life. Following the atrocities of World War I, however, the bent of the movement shifted to a new, more psychologically charged artistic language that comprised distorted forms, harsh, jagged lines, and a bold use of color. As Lichtenstein looked to reinvigorate the past, so too the German Expressionists sought to bring life to the timeless subjects of portraiture and landscape through the use of the woodblock. Within this fascinating tableau of reimagined Modernism, however, Dr. Waldmann pays unique and reverential tribute to the celebrated oeuvre of Otto Dix, in particular the artist’s masterpiece from 1926, Dr. Mayer-Hermann, which resides in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Dix’s painting similarly offers an intense psychological portrait of a doctor lost in thought; Dr. Mayer-Hermann slouches forward, his environment slightly more descriptive, but ultimately dislocated in a room of unidentifiable machinery. His head mirror features prominently, signaling his profession and echoing the rounded orbs of machinery and the sitter’s rotund body. In stark contrast to the paunchy and softened expression of Dr. Mayer Hermann, Dr. Waldmann thrusts outward, forcing himself to the surface of the picture plane, and confronts the viewer with a violent collision of line, color, and jagged angles reminiscent of the German Expressionists woodblocks. Lichtenstein himself, however, denied any direct correspondences between his German Expressionist paintings and singular sources of inspiration; in his own words: 'I began to work on a series of paintings inspired by German Expressionism. I didn’t quote specific pieces as I had done with earlier works derived from Monet and Picasso; but I did keep in mind such artists as Karl Schmidt-Rotluf and Erich Heckel. In a certain sense, I have always tried to eliminate the meaning of the original. If I had actually kept in mind German Expressionism in my latest series of paintings, then my work would have seemed to be expressionist. But for my own subjects I make use of a style rather than a specific painting.' (The artist quoted in an interview with Philip Jodido in Connaissance des Arts 349, March 1981, n.p.)

"With Dr. Waldmann and his German Expressionist works, Lichtenstein engages art history as his subject matter with striking prowess, systematically reimagining this critical twentieth-century movement to compose his own, utterly original masterwork. Diane Waldman writes: '…it is German Expressionism that connects most directly with Lichtenstein’s interest in issues of painting and style. German Expressionist pictorial innovations led him to expand his ideas into sculpture and into a series of landscapes and figurative paintings that are arguably his answer to Abstract Expressionism, which was indebted in no small way to the pioneering movement in early twentieth-century Germany.' (Diane Waldman in Exh. Cat., New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (and travelling), Roy Lichtenstein, 1993, p. 253)

The lot has an estimate of $4,000,000 to $6,000,000.  It sold for $5,959,000.

Lot 13, "Untitled XXII," by Willem de Kooning, oil on canvas, 70 by 80 inches, 1977





Lot 36, "Sun Woman I," by Lee Krasner, oil on canvas, 97 1/4 by 70 1/4 inches, 1957

"Sun Woman I is one of the largest and most important paintings from this crucial series. Included in Krasner’s pivotal 1983-85 travelling retrospective and featured on the front cover of her solo presentation at Robert Miller in 1982, the work is positioned adjacent to Seasons, arguably the artist’s greatest work, in the catalogue raisonné. Leaving evident the circular movements of the arm that delineated the composition, the work nods to the action painting of Krasner’s late husband but has an explosive ebullience that sets it apart from the work of her contemporaries. The measured play of color and form, pigment and canvas, scumbled and opaque paint creates what Griselda Pollock has described as “a dancing space…not like the literal dance performed by Pollock around his canvas and mythicized in photo session and film by Hans Namuth…[but rather] a created effect, a produced illusion, made through the play of color, the energy of line, the ebullient fullness of the image on the canvas.” (Griselda Pollock, “Killing Men and Dying Women,” in Mieke Bal, ed., The Practice of Cultural Analysis: Exposing Interdisciplinary Interpretation, Stanford, 1999, p. 100)

"Indeed, Sun Woman I, to an even greater extent than the other works in the Earth Green series, can be read as a refutation of Pollock’s myth and the prevailing machismo of the age. After all, a huge part of Pollock’s appeal lay in his wild masculinity, and the fashion in which that was reflected in his painting. As Budd Hopper reputedly said, in a telling assessment following the artist's death: 'He was the great American painter. If you conceive of such a person… he had to be a real American, not a transplanted European. And he should have big Macho American virtues – he should be rough and tumble American…and he should be allowed the great American vice, the Hemingway vice, of being a drunk… Everything about him was right.' (Budd Hopper quoted in Ibid., p. 86) What does this piece of adulatory mythologizing tell us about the reception of Pollock’s art? Determinedly American to the point of mild xenophobia, ruled by ungovernable urges and forces to reveal an inherent genius (at this juncture the Drip Paintings were thought of as gestures of wild abandon rather than highly energized but nevertheless controlled compositions that they are now considered to be), and most importantly, powerfully and overwhelmingly masculine; indeed, Pollock embodied the American ideal of the muscle-bound cowboy. In this context, the insistent femininity of Sun Woman I appears defiant. Undulating curves delineate breasts, buttocks and lips before giving way to green shoots in the upper left corner representing new life. As Barbara Rose observes in her essay for the 1984-85 retrospective, stalk-like limbs draw the composition up the canvas, lining up vertically with the framing edges, and the “heads and arms suggest flowers in an even further hybridization of form.' (Exh. Cat, New York, The Museum of Modern Art (and travelling), Lee Krasner: A Retrospective, 1983, p. 108) This conjoining of the human realm and the plant kingdom leads Hobbs to conclude that these were “hybrids that were intended to be living forms in a state of metamorphosis.” (Robert Hobbs, Op. Cit., p. 70) Sun Woman I is a work dedicated to fecundity, growth and reproduction, inspired in part by Krasner’s enduring love for the Paleolithic Venus of Willendorf, with the very title signaling this opposition of male and female. Casting itself in binary opposition to Pollock’s Moon Women from the early 1940s, ominous totemic specters that positioned women as entities to be feared, Sun Woman I rejoices in its femininity. Just as the sun is reborn at winter solstice to initiate the new year, the present work represents Krasner’s rebirth as an artist, her declaration of independence.

"Pivotal to our understanding of this proclamation of artistic identity is the abrupt incorporation of calligraphic signatures in Krasner’s work. Starting with Listen (1957), she began to incorporate a steadily more abstracted signature in the bottom right corner of the composition, to the point that it would become “an armature for the entire painting.” (Robert Hobbs, 'Lee Krasner,' in, Exh. Cat. Los Angeles Museum of Art (and travelling), Lee Krasner, 1999, p. 130) This inclusion was in diametric opposition to the prevailing trend, which saw the Abstract Expressionists largely omit to sign their works, allowing their signature image – Gottlieb’s burst, Pollock’s drip, Newman’s zip – to speak for their artistic identity. Krasner’s inclusion of a signature can thus be read as both a rebellion and a parody of the idea of a signature image, especially in the context of an artist who was constantly reinventing her practice. However, it is also an invocation of self-hood, not, as Hobbs argues, 'a holistic sense of self,” but rather fragments of the artist's persona in the form of both the signature and the emergent forms. This reflects the other key undertone of the Earth Green series – as much as they are a declaration of artistic identity and a radical break both formally and conceptually, they were also cathartic works following the death of her husband. Speaking years later, the artist recalled: 'I can remember that when I was painting Listen which is so high keyed in color…it looks like such a happy painting… I almost didn’t see it, because tears were literally pouring down.' (Lee Krasner quoted in Ibid., pp. 130-37)

"Although the Earth Green series undeniably saw Krasner grapple with Pollock, making explicit reference to his earlier works, the other painter with whom she had to contend was Willem de Kooning, whose Women from the early 1950s were some of the defining images of the era. Retaining a powerful indexicality to the bodily intensity of de Kooning’s gesture and movement, the Women are monstrous creations replete with blood-red smiles and wide staring eyes, imbued with the sensation of both violence and sexuality. They could not be ignored, and as Griselda Pollock observes, presented a serious challenge: 'de Kooning was not only the other big name on the current New York scene to be dealt with. He was the painter of Woman…  For an artist of Krasner’s, namely his, generation, that dominance… could not be avoided.' (Griselda Pollock, Op. Cit., p. 100) Needless to say, the contrast between the two representations of women is pronounced. In place of de Kooning’s violent and jagged application of pigment come Krasner’s looping lines, and in place of any objectification comes adulation. The figure is not sexualized so much as she is sexual and fertile, a reclamation of the body from male representation. This is described as 'a joyful revelation of body schema on a canvas…a play around presence and absence that is pleasurable because it does not index an obsessive repetition of mastery (Pollock) or the need for violence (de Kooning).' (Ibid., p. 100)

"Epitomizing the pervasive sense of life and growth that characterizes the Earth Green series, Sun Woman I is one of Lee Krasner’s masterpieces. Providing the immediate foundation for The Seasons, where the figurative elements of the composition further abstract into an assortment of body parts, the present work is clearly of foundational importance to Krasner’s oeuvre, as evidenced by the extraordinary echo of its bulbous forms and lips in Gaea from 1966 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). Conceptually rigorous and aesthetically astounding, Sun Woman I rightly takes its place as one of the most influential, written about and accomplished paintings of Krasner’s career, and gives weight to her friend Edward Albee’s glowing review of her oeuvre in the catalogue for her show at Robert Miller Gallery: 'I will book no interference when I assert that Lee Krasner is not only the finest woman painter the U.S. has produced in this century but – since sex is not really the vital matter here – is right in the top of the pile of the great 20th century American artists, period.' (Edward Albee, "Considering Krasner," Exh. Cat., New York, Robert Miller Gallery, Lee Krasner Paintings 1965 to 1970, 1991, n.p.)"

The lot has an estimate of $6,000,000 to $8,000,000.  It sold for $7,382,750.

Lot 40, "Terpsichore," by Hans Hofmann, oil on canvas, 60 1/4 by 48 1/4 inches, 1958





Lot 9, "Number Two," by Brice Marden, oil on canvas in twelve parts, 84 1/4 by 108 3/4 inches, 1984





Lot 19, "Vignette 19," by Kerry James Marshall (b. circa 1955), acrylic on PVC, 71 3/4 by 60, 2014

"Playfully wedding masterful realism with painterly abandon, Vignette 19 captivates the viewer’s imagination with its unmatched visual delight. Symbols of springtime revelry frame the central narrative sequence of the present work: red robins whirl about, singing their cheery song; crisp white dogwood branches blossom into the fore; and cartoonishly large purple daisies with wildly verdant leaves embrace the figures within a fantastical space of romantic bliss. Further drawing the viewer inward, Marshall delicately encrusts the heart-shaped frame around the figures with golden glitter and borders the composition with bold slashes of bubblegum pink pigment. Nature overflows with passionate excess, enveloping the lovers in a hyperbolic terrain of resplendent beauty.

"Completely consumed by their love, the three couples who form the centerpiece of Vignette 19 exist separately of each other, each unique in their expression of care. The left-most couple hold hands in embrace, looking toward each other, faces nearly touching, as the man’s hand rests gently on the woman’s lower back. The woman of the central couple lies against a tree trunk, as her male lover looks out toward the viewer, acknowledging their presence, as he comes from behind her to greet his patiently waiting partner. The rightmost man beckons his companion, leaning forward against the bench upon which she sits. His intent pose and her elegant gesture recall Fragonard’s The Meeting, one of the four panels of The Progress of Love, which depicts a garden tryst with dramatic fancifulness. Marshall places a dog, a longtime symbol of faithfulness and devotion, between his two figures, which calls to mind the ultimate art historical wedding portrait, Jan van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Wedding. Though celebratory in nature, the present work’s emphasis on intimacy between black subjects carries a sociopolitical heft. As curator Abigail Winograd explains: 'The Vignettes are part of Marshall’s ongoing effort to create narrative paintings that eschew images of the black figure contending with violence or trauma in favor of an almost Rockwellian normalcy, defying expectations to create a new sense of black domesticity.' (Ibid, p. 192) Within the panoply of chromatic and textural excess, the deliberate and dramatic darkness of Marshall’s figures casts the abysmal exclusion of black bodies from canonical art history into radical relief. 

"Marshall showcases his complete mastery over his chosen medium through the present work’s deft combination of painterly abstraction and careful figurative rendering. With the triumphant gusto of an Abstract Expressionist, Marshall builds up his forest floor with a rich and complex layering of line and color: swaths of olive green lie atop strokes of lime green; tawny brown intermixes with shades of auburn and chocolate. Fast, cross-hatched strokes of burnt orange and crimson create a fiery band of dense surface in the foreground, while tones of cool blues blend together in the background to create an atmosphere of idyllic calm. In terms particularly evocative of the present work, art historian Kobena Mercer describes the impact of such variegation on Marshall’s compositions: 'Marshall’s enigmatic compositions, with their figures often in pairs or groups, suggest potential scenes of dramatic action, but any straightforward access to narrative content is intercepted by a rich ensemble of painterly effects in which various drips, dots, strokes and scumbles are scattered throughout the textured surfaces that are so distinctive to Marshall’s paintings.' (Kobena Mercer, 'Kerry James Marshall: The Painter of Afro-Modern Life,' Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry 24, 2010, p. 81)

"At once a critique of the history of painting and an embrace of the medium’s utmost possibilities, Vignette 19 embodies the radically transformative power of Marshall’s artistic project. Arresting in its graphic splendor and lavish ornamentation, the present work pulses with sensual tenor, basking its couples in a magical aura that befits their love. Speaking about the significance of depicting black beauty, the artist states: 'if I don’t do it, or if other people like me don’t do it, we will be condemned to celebrate European beauty and Europe’s artistic achievement in perpetuity.' (The artist quoted in Exh. Cat., Antwerp, Museum Van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen, Kerry James Marshall, Painting and Other Stuff, 2013, p. 28)

The lot has an ambitious estimate of $6,500,000 to $7,500,000.  It sold for $18,488,000, an absolutely incredible price!

 

Lot 2, "Small Pin-Up (Lens Flare)," by Kerry James Marshall, acrylic on PVC, 29 1/4 by 23 3/4 inches, 2013

"Meeting the viewer’s gaze over her bare shoulder with inscrutable intensity, the unnamed subject of Small Pin-Up (Lens Flare) is at once entirely anonymous and acutely specific: while much of her silhouette and face are veiled in partial shadow, Marshall renders the details of her playful headband of pink hearts, the crimson facets of her gemstone earrings, the iridescent green of her polished thumbnail with exceptional care. Evident in all of Marshall’s Pin-Up paintings, these particularized details evoke the 1950s and 60s tradition of the ‘Pin-Up’ girl, in which beautiful, scantily clad women engage in seemingly mundane—yet highly specific—everyday activities. Describing the impetus behind the series, Marshall reflects: 'This continues my over-arching project of representing aspects of Black Culture rarely made visible in contemporary picture making… I am also interested in foregrounding the black figure in popular genres of painting not usually associated with the socio-political frame in which much African American art is seen through. For example, in the big coffee table book survey, The Great American Pin-Up...not one of the sexy, dream girls is Black.' (the artist cited in Nicole J. Caruth, 'Kerry James Marshall in Southern California,' ART21 Magazine, September 2008, n.p.) Unable to find a single black or Asian woman in the various magazines and beauty pageants he looked at, Marshall’s Pin-Up paintings rectify this absence by painting exactly that which has been excluded. Unlike traditional pin-up girls however, whose frivolous endeavors and commercial trappings depict women as the vapid embodiments of a sexualized American ideal, Marshall’s Pin-Ups stand poised and erect, recognizing the viewer’s voyeuristic presence with their own unblinking gaze. Small Pin-Up (Lens Flare) harnesses in all its subtlety and elegance the power of a woman whose body, despite her revealed skin, is not that which first catches our eye.

"Achieving a fascinating interplay between color and form, light and shadow, figure and ground, Small Pin-Up (Lens Flare) emphatically testifies to the virtuosic technical abilities that have distinguished Marshall as amongst the most gifted figurative painters working today. Framed within a halo of light, the gleaming darkness of the central figure is all the more striking; invoking the work of great abstract painter Ad Reinhardt, the deep hues of Marshall’s ground and figure at once engage and offset each other to create a painting in which the subtlest highlight acts as crucial compositional element. Against the chromatic theatrics of the shimmering light flare, the deliberate and dramatic darkness of Marshall’s figure casts the artist’s extraordinary examination of the color black into exhilarating relief. In her essay for the 2016 Mastry catalogue, scholar Helen Molesworth remarks, 'Blackness is not presented by Marshall as an afterthought or as a form of special pleading; it is offered as a radical presence that shows how the very notions of beauty and truth that paintings and museums hold to be self-evident are premised on exclusions that are ethically, philosophically, and aesthetically untenable.' (John Keene, Exh. Cat., Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, Kerry James Marshall: Mastry, 2016, p. 37) When questioned about the uncompromising blackness of his figures, the artist himself remarked, 'Extreme blackness plus grace equals power. I see the figures as emblematic; I’m reducing complex variations of tone to rhetorical dimension: blackness.' (The artist quoted in Ibid., p. 59) Offset by the cascading shower of light and hue, there is indeed an indisputable grace to the inarguable darkness of Marshall’s figure; simultaneously, the flare of light emphasizes its own status as a captured image continually reiterating the painting's status within the very same rarefied visual culture it addresses."

The lot has an estimate of $2,500,000 to $2,500,000.  It sold for $5,503,400.

Lot 1, "Ye Shall Inherit The Earth," by Charles White, charcoal on illustration board, 39 by 26 inches, 1953

"Within White’s extraordinary output, Ye Shall Inherit the Earth is an exceptionally poignant embodiment of the artist’s championing of civil rights causes and, in particular, black feminist causes. Perhaps the ultimate embodiment of White’s dedication to these aims, Ye Shall Inherit the Earth represents the figure of Rosa Lee Ingram, an African-American woman who, in the late 1940s, became the subject of one of the most explosive capital punishment cases in American history – a key moment in the history of civil rights activism. In 1947, Ingram, a widowed mother of fourteen, and two of her sons were accused of killing their neighbor, a white sharecropper, after enduring years of his harassment and abuse. Although all three were initially sentenced to death, the public outcry was so immediate and vigorous that the three sentences were commuted to life imprisonment. The continued protest against the incarceration of the Ingrams became a central catalyst for African-American women across the political spectrum and served as a rallying cry and key cause for such groups as the Women’s Committee for Equal Justice and the Sojourners for Truth and Justice. In 1954, following years of continued widespread protest against the Ingrams’ imprisonment, the Women’s Committee for Equal Justice organized a letter writing campaign centered on the image of the present work. Timed to coincide with Mother’s Day, two sets of postcards were sent: one, featuring a photograph of Ingram and her sons, was sent to the Georgia governor to demand their release, while the other, illustrating Ye Shall Inherit the Earth, was sent to Ingram, assuring her of the continued efforts being made on her behalf. Selecting his title from the well-known Biblical verse, White chose these words to underscore Ingram as a potent symbol not only for marginalized African-Americans seeking civil reform, but also for the plight of women within a male-dominated society. Although it would be another five years of fervent campaigning before Ingram and her sons were released, Ye Shall Inherit the Earth is powerfully emblematic of White’s dedication to the civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth century.

"Underscoring the significance of the work, Ye Shall Inherit the Earth was featured as the main image in a portfolio White published in 1953 titled Six Drawings; at the time, this portfolio was moderately priced so as to be accessible to a wide audience. White's desire to make his art more attainable was a concern shared by other artists of the era and attests to their determination to have their art brought to those sidelined by steep gallery prices and exclusive museum exhibitions. Testament to the success of this portfolio, White later learned that a small group of workers in Alabama combined their savings to purchase Six Drawings, and agreed to share the pictures among themselves - a beautifully touching conclusion to the creation of this important portfolio.

"Gazing out at the audience with a quiet dignity, White’s totemic figure clutches her child to her breast, her left hand draped protectively over his head. While her pose suggests the statuesque solemnity of a Madonna, the figure is rendered in soft and tender shades of charcoal, allowing sinuous lines, gentle highlights, and the smooth grisaille palette to imbue the work with a quiet and restrained elegance. Her nondescript hat and clothing replace the Virgin Mary’s traditional lapis garb, positioning her in the contemporary agricultural setting of 1950s America. Half-swaddled, her cherubic infant leans against her breast, safely enclosed within her caring grasp. When the present work was exhibited in 1953 at ACA Galleries, Harold Zilberg wrote of its emotive power: '…a mother stands holding her child, and as she looks out of the picture with a determined steady gaze, seems plainly to be saying, ‘We are going to change this world and make it a better place for our children to live in.' (Harold Zilberg, “Charles White’s Exhibit: A Warm Tribute to Negro People’s Struggle,” Daily Worker, February 19, 1953, p. 7)

"Exemplified within the present work, White’s distinctive approach to portraiture communicates universal human themes while simultaneously exploring intensely personalized narratives, ultimately creating a body of work that continues to resonate deeply today. His contribution to the course of twentieth-century art history cannot be understated, not only as a supremely talented artist and social historian, but also as a mentor and teacher to some of today’s best-known artists. In the preface of the exhibition catalogue for Charles White: A Retrospective, former student Kerry James Marshall writes of his beloved teacher at the Otis Art Institute of Los Angeles County: 'The labor, the work, in Charlie’s drawings is palpable. One can follow the process through his technique and understand exactly how the image came to be on the page or the canvas. His most accomplished drawings achieve true perfection. The effect is dazzling, efficient, and never extravagant. An atmosphere of stillness and quietude envelops the space in and around the work. I can’t help remembering a Shaker motto I read somewhere that governs their sense of piety and discipline: ‘Hands to work, hearts to God.’ The terms art and work gain embodied meaning in the best of his pictures.' (Kerry James Marshall, “A Black Artist Named White,” in Exh. Cat., Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago (and travelling), Charles White: A Retrospective, 2018, p. 19)"

The lot has an estimate of $500,000 to $700,000.  It sold for $1,790,000.

Lot 22, "Brown Eggs," by Jean-Michel Basquiat, oil stick on paper, 24 1/4 by 18 inches, 1981

"Rendered with ferocious intensity, the searing figurehead of Brown Eggs is a riveting embodiment of the instinctive and unrivalled brilliance which distinguished Jean-Michel Basquiat from the earliest years of his career. Executed in 1981, Brown Eggs exemplifies a selection of drawings that, in their haunting and unique renderings of skull-like heads, powerfully embody the extraordinary intensity, focus, and drive which fueled Basquiat at this pivotal moment in his burgeoning career. Within this rarefied corpus, the present work is remarkable for its saturated surface and exceptional diversity of mark-making; rendered in layers of furiously scrawled hazel and orange pigment, overlaid with furious incisions of black, scarlet, yellow, and blue, the frenzied intensity of Basquiat’s variegated strokes is contained only by crisp boundary of the sheet itself. Scrawled below the glowering figure, the inscribed title is irresistibly enigmatic, suggesting loaded commentary while evading clear translation. Vibrantly and densely-layered, the frenetic collision of mark, color, word, and form is, within Basquiat’s drawing, somehow transformed into a singularly sizzling composition that exemplifies the young artist’s effortless creative genius.

"In its talismanic rendering of a skull, the present work is a paradigmatic example of the artist’s most iconic motif; compelling as both idiosyncratic self-portrait and shamanistic totem, the fierce character summoned in Brown Eggs would prevail as a primary graphic anchor for Basquiat throughout his career, appearing in and dominating the majority of his best-known masterworks. Rising wraithlike from the paper before us, the visage of Brown Eggs serves as an aesthetic premonition, invoking such later paintings as Untitled (Skull), in The Eli and Edythe L. Broad Collection in Los Angeles, and Untitled, in the collection of Yusuku Maezawa, both painted the following year. Part self-portrait and part racial allegory, Basquiat’s heads fuse an explosive new style of expressionistic portraiture with a charged, underlying current of socio-political symbolism; although subtly referenced in the present work, the nuanced racial commentary of Brown Eggs is specifically echoed in one of the artist’s later paintings, Eyes and Eggs from 1983, in The Eli and Edythe L. Broad Collection in Los Angeles. In that work, a black figure dressed in waiter’s garb holds a pan of sizzling eggs aloft, his eyes wide and searching as they fix the viewer’s own gaze. Here, emblazoned without narrative, the titular scribble of BROWN EGGS acquires the enigmatic significance of muttered prophecy, suggesting legibility while persistently evading the viewer’s attempts at comprehension. Describing the virtuosic manner in which Basquiat combined text and imagery in his drawings in terms highly reminiscent of the present work, art historian Robert Storr reflects: 'His earliest images on paper show the same authoritative handwriting of his pseudonymous street tags… Heads, often skulls, chant his words. Or rather inhale and exhale them through gritted teeth, as if sucking in the variously dense or diffuse atmosphere they create.' (Robert Storr in Exh. Cat., New York, Robert Miller Gallery, Jean Michel Basquiat: Drawings, 1981–1988, 1990, n.p.)

"The explosive mark-making and scrawls across the surface of Brown Eggs emphatically testify to the equally fierce artistic drive that propelled Basquiat’s meteoric rise to unprecedented success during his breakout year. Executed in 1981, Brown Eggs stands at a turning point in Basquiat’s short but prolific artistic career: in February of the same year, the artist was included in the multi-disciplinary show New York/New Wave at MoMA P.S.1 in Queens, marking beginning of the artist’s transition from the streets to galleries, to museums, and eventually, into the highest echelons of the international art world. In September, the gallerist Annina Nosei offered Basquiat the basement of her eponymous gallery in SoHo to use as a studio, granting him the funding and materials he needed to begin his critical and commercial ascent. In these landmark works from 1981, Basquiat's abundant talent and fluent command of paint, figure, and form are powerfully redolent. Despite his remarkably young age, Basquiat here displays his mature aesthetic vocabulary, emphatically demonstrating the signature figuration, Fauvist mastery of color, and unparalleled intensity of mark-making that would come to define his output. As he fixes the viewer with his multicolored gaze, the ferocious face demands recognition of Basquiat’s instinctive and lauded abilities as one of the greatest draughtsman of the twentieth century."

The lot has an estimate of $2,500,000 to $3,500,000.  It sold for $5,389,500.

Lot 5, "Famous Black Athletes," by Jean-Michel Basquiat, oil stick on paper, 23 1/8 by 35 inches, 1981





Lot 15, "Spinning Man," by Mark Bradford, mixed media collage on canvas, 72 by 84 inches, 2007






Lot 17, "Rise of the New Suprematists," by Julie Mehretu, ink and acrylic on canvas, 95 by 118 inches, 2001

"At once hypnotically tumultuous and exactingly constructed, Julie Mehretu’s monumental masterpiece Rise of the New Suprematists from 2001 is a provocative synthesis of abstract hieroglyphic symbolism and architectural visual vocabulary. Through a distinctively informed pictorial language, Mehretu superimposes incendiary emotive marks and calligraphic ciphers upon an intricately rendered blueprint of an imagined public space, with gesture and geometry clamoring for attention. Her explosive graphic explorations of space attempt to articulate the power structures and methods of mapping that define the contemporary urban landscape, as well as her own place within them. Honored as a recipient of the U.S. Department of State Medal of Arts in 2015, and currently the subject of a major retrospective co-organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and The Whitney Museum of American Art through 2020, Mehretu has garnered widespread acclaim as one of the most influential artists of her generation. Testifying to the caliber of the present work, Rise of the New Suprematists was one of two paintings by the artist included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial; the other, Empirical Construction, Istanbul (2003), is now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The gravitas of her conceptual ideology coupled with the skill and dexterity of her mark-making, as magnificently exemplified by the present work, have established Mehretu as a modern master and uniquely articulate voice of a socially, culturally, and politically wary generation.

"Rise of the New Suprematists, as a model of Mehretu’s unbridled visual and symbolic layering, requires excavation. Beneath the immediate explosion of free-form scrawls and kinetic vectors lies a subtly rendered architectonic assemblage, anchoring the composition in formal geometric terms, yet resisting any ready legibility. As esteemed critic and curator Franklin Sirmans noted of Mehretu’s work in a review for The New York Times: 'Her action-packed scenes of virtual cities incorporate classical examples of architecture with a psychogeography that collapses time – from the prehistoric to the present – to create a dreamy yet eerily grounded picture of contemporary life. In the painting Rise of the New Suprematists, groups of small marks identify a determined procession of people in an environment suggestive of urban development on a sprawling global scale.' (Franklin Sirmans, “Mapping a New, and Urgent, History of the World,” The New York Times, December 9, 2001, p. 41) In this sense, Mehretu’s markings capture the fragmented experiences and stimuli of a collective cityscape; at once universal and highly personal, her work not only maps an imagined world but also attempts to reconcile the artist’s own identity within it. Reflecting her view that constructed spaces serve as metaphors for complex power structures and political realities, each of her script-like strokes is informed by its interaction with the linear foundation underneath and the other symbols around it.

Lot 17 detail

"Similarly, Mehretu conceives her works in globalized terms, drawing from diverse historical movements as well as her own disparate heritage. Born in Ethiopia, raised in Michigan, educated in Senegal and Rhode Island, and now based between New York and Berlin, her paintings are built from the juxtaposition of different styles of marking, each with their own character, identity and history. In Rise of the New Suprematists, Mehretu underlines her canonical lineage to Kazimir Malevich and Lyubov Popova, referring to their manifesto declaring the supremacy of pure artistic feeling over the literal depiction of objects. The linear vectors that propel the eye outwards also reference the dynamic explorations of motion that characterize the Italian Futurists’ urban celebrations of modernity, while the overlapping streaks and smudges recall the schismatic personal expression of Cy Twombly, and, when viewed from a distance, the composition as a whole echoes the graphic power of Roy Lichtenstein’s comic Pop explosions. Evincing Mehretu’s artistic genius, these deeply discordant sources are filtered through her own cultural consciousness and meticulous approach, harmonizing into a uniquely resonant style of history painting, updated for the modern age.

"Demonstrating a singular conceptual clarity and technical virtuosity, Rise of the New Suprematists forcefully and stunningly describes the complex and multivalent experience of the contemporary urban landscape. As critic Christopher Knight noted in identifying the present work as a highlight of the 2004 Whitney Biennial: 'Incoherent chaos and excruciating control are balanced on a metaphorical knife-edge by the explosive linearity” of this cartographic canvas. (Christopher Knight, “Binary Days at the Biennial,' Los Angeles Times, April 11, 2004, p. 43) Indeed, Rise of the New Suprematists fuses the cartographic logic of architectural mapping with the expressiveness and apparent irrationality of the impulsively-made mark, their electrifying union displayed on a monumental scale. Engaging with art historical iconography while activating an intimate personal vocabulary, Mehretu’s painting offers a new language of abstraction as a way of articulating the inherent paradox of order and disorder that defines the complex nature of our shared experience."

The lot has an estimate of $3,500,000 to $4,500,000.  It sold for $4,820,000.

Lot 14, "Ritual," by Norman Lewis, oil on canvas, 51 1/4 by 63 3/4 inches, 1962

"A perpetual student at heart, Lewis participated heavily at the Harlem Community Art Center in the 1940s and 1950s, where he met writers, musicians, and artists, including Jack Whitten. Lewis’s ongoing self-education, which included this engagement within his Harlem community, was supplemented by trips to the Museum of Modern Art, where he viewed the European masters like Vincent van Gogh and Wassily Kandinsky, and a fierce commitment to African-American social causes. Files in Lewis’s studio included everything from color charts, books on art, philosophy, and race, to postcards from his travels, and clippings from TIME magazine, testifying to his broad interests, inexorable curiosity, and myriad inspirations. The 1960s, however, were a turning point for the artist, when he began to focus in profound way on the subjects of race and civil rights; the most powerful and provocative paintings from these years are the Ku Klux Klan paintings, which – both in image and title – refer to the white supremacist group gaining momentum throughout the 1960s in the United States. In response to the Ku Klux Klan, Lewis and other black artists formed Spiral, an activist group founded on a commitment to supporting the Civil Rights Movement and combatting the racism and threats posed by the Ku Klux Klan. Spiral held one group exhibition in 1965 at 147 Christopher Street in New York, the exhibition catalogue for which included a foreword that described the group’s goal: '…we hoped with our art to justify life… What is most important now, and what has great portent for the future, is that Negro artists, of divergent backgrounds and interest, have come together on terms of mutual respect…to fashion art works lit by beauty, and of such diversity.' (Exh. Cat., New York, Christopher Street Gallery, Spiral, May – June 1965, n.p.)

"Undeniably ‘lit by beauty,’ Ritual is a veritable feast for the eyes, engulfing the viewer in a stunning blue vista punctuated by complementary brushstrokes of yellow, red, and orange. Eddies of blue, teal, and navy pool together in watery swathes, building layer upon layer of deep color. The overwhelmingly royal blue composition reveals shadows of deep green, puddles of indigo, and lighter washes of a brighter hue, evoking a reflective body of water that recalls Monet’s waterlilies. Strokes of burnished orange hover at the top of the composition, balancing the arc of vibrantly dashed paint below. Staccato marks of red, orange, yellow, and pink collect to form a crescent shape stretching across the canvas. Although entirely abstract, these marks are intended, loosely, to represent figures, more specifically, members of the Ku Klux Klan. Ruth Fine writes: 'These Klan paintings are dominated by Lewis’s broad calligraphy, with the gestures signifying figures intermixed with field. Layered paint creates interactive color surfaces far more complex than that of a simple figure/ground relationship… Thematically related, Ritual is painted fluidly, suggestive of light and atmosphere, with figures in a fiery semi-circular procession, and a moon hovering in a centrally important position overhead.' (Ruth Fine, “The Spiritual in the Material,” Exh. Cat., Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (and travelling), Procession: The Art of Norman Lewis, 2015, p. 80) Upon closer inspection, certain red daubs can be read as faces, yellow rhomboid forms as cloaks, and strips of orange as arms; however, these suggested figurative elements never entirely cohere, their colors merely suggesting or evoking moods: blue signifying beauty, yellow embodying possibility, and red representing the spark of rebellion. Among these socially acute and politically critical paintings of the early 1960s, Ritual marks the apex of Lewis’s artistic practice. According to Jeffrey Stewart, the dashes and hatches comprising abstract figures “…are unrecognizable, except from a few obvious hints, but who distinguish themselves by being crowds, congregations of hate or love, change of resistance, that form powerful circles and enclosures designed to arrest the mind or liberate it.” (Jeffrey C. Stewart, “Beyond Category: Before Afrofuturism There was Norman Lewis,” Ibid., p. 180)

"Although politically motivated, Lewis adheres to a language of abstraction and beauty, which belies a quiet hum of energy. Lewis himself is quoted as saying: 'Art is a language in itself, embodying purely visual symbols which cannot properly be translated into words, musical notes or, in the case of painting, three-dimensional objects, and to attempt such is to be unable to admit the unique function of art or understand its language. The artist must have an idea with which to begin but it must be an aesthetic idea and it must be developed from the unconscious experience, through conscious associations and technical knowledge to become a complete, aesthetic experience for both the artist and the viewer.' (The artist quoted in Ruth Fine, “The Spiritual in the Material,” Ibid., p. 99) Nevertheless, this aesthetic experience reverberates with the soft yet powerful voice and vision of one of the twentieth-century’s most socially engaged artists."

Lot 42, "Black Monolith, VII Du Bois Legacy for W. E. Burghardt," by Jack Whitten, acrylic on canvas, 84 by 63 inches, 2014

"The present work pays homage to William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, an American sociologist, historian, and civil rights activist; best known for authoring The Souls of Black Folk and Black Reconstruction in America, Du Bois rose to prominence as the leader of the Niagara Movement and determinedly campaigned for equal rights for black people in America. Whitten not only idolized Du Bois for his political activism, but also felt a personal connection to the notion of ‘double consciousness’ that pervades many of the essays in The Souls of Black Folk and is best described in Du Bois’s own words: 'One ever feels his twoness – An American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.' (W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, reproduced in Exh. Cat., Baltimore, Baltimore Museum of Art (and travelling), Odyssey: Jack Whitten Sculpture 1963-2017, 2018, p. 31) Black Monolith, VII Du Bois Legacy: For W.E. Burghardt embodies this ‘twoness,’ embracing both painting and sculpture, harking to a European tradition while honoring an American one, and alluding to cultural heroes while insisting on its own materiality.

Lot 42 detail

"The process by which Whitten constructed his Black Monoliths is characteristically unique and shatters conventional boundaries between artistic media. Rather than ‘painting’ these works in the traditional sense, Whitten created them by pouring acrylic paint into molds made from found detritus, such as bottle caps, corrugated cardboard, bubble wrap, and discarded fragments of plastic. Once dry, he released the hardened acrylic chips, ribbons, and scraps and then affixed these tesserae onto the canvas in a kaleidoscopic mosaic that calls to mind practices as disparate as Mediterranean tile work and religious stained-glass windows. This method – part painting, part collage, part sculpture, part bricolage – reflects the tenuous, complex, and multi-layered nature of African-American identity. Richard Schiff notes: 'Because analogous units of acrylic constitute every discernible element, each acquires equivalent existential status, whether ‘representing’ the texture of an object, the quality of paint itself, or the immaterial essence of a human soul.' (Richard Schiff, “Off the Wire” in Ibid., p. 168) Disparate pieces accumulate into one unit, each fragment representative of a different cast object or facet to an individual, all coalescing to one dynamic but uniform whole. An ovoid bejeweled mass shudders across the matte black canvas in striations of black and white, bright tessellations of purple, bricks of teal and shards of electric yellow, bordered by trails of multicolored fragments. A gathering of ivory pieces, like abalone shells clustered in a tide pool, create a luminous halo-like effect at the top of this amorphous stele. Scholars have read the shape of this mass as a bird’s eye view of a Mediterranean island, an abstract silhouette of Du Bois’s bust, a prehistoric landscape, or, in the artist’s own words 'a loaf of ciabatta [referring to] the custom of breaking bread.' (The artist in conversation with Richard Shiff, September 8, 2017, Ibid., p. 172) Whitten viewed the present work as an abstract and theoretical means of engaging with his hero, as if breaking bread with Du Bois himself across his artistic medium. Light crashes against dark, black abuts white, positive space builds atop negative space, and the present collides with the past.

"In its exceptional presence – much like an ancient stele – Black Monolith, VII Du Bois Legacy: For W.E. Burghardt embodies the most crucial tenets of Whitten’s endlessly innovative practice and remains today a resounding testament to this inimitable artist. Of this momentous series, Whitten wrote: “I could spend the rest of my life adding to my series of Black Monolith paintings. There are so many Black Monoliths in the history of African-Americans. Our history of survival in America is defined both by the heroic deeds of the collective, and the independent activists working in a variety of disciplines.” (The artist in an unpublished note, Black Monolith X (The Birth of Muhammad Ali), November 2016, reproduced in Ibid., p. 112).

The lot has an estimate of $80,000 to $1,000,000.  It sold for $1,220,000.

See The City Review article on the Fall 2018 Contemporary Art evening auction at Christie's New York
See The City Review article on the Fall 2018 Contemporary Art evening auction at Sotheby's New York
See The City Review article on the Spring 2018 Contemporary Art evening auction at Christie's New York
See The City Review article on the Spring 2018 Contemporary Art evening auction at Sotheby's New York
See The City Review article on the Fall 2017 Contemporary Art evening auction at Christie's New York
See The City Review article on the Spring 2017 Contemporary Art evening auction at Christie's New York
See The City Review article on the Spring 2017 Contemporary Art evening auction at Sotheby's New York
See The City Review article on the Fall 2016 Contemporary Art evening auction at Christie's New York
See The City Review article on the Spring 2016 Contemporary Art evening auction at Christie's New York