NEW YORK.- On the evening of October 22nd and on October 23rd, 2002 Sotheby’s will offer for sale approximately 212 lots of photographs from The Museum of Modern Art. This sale follows Sotheby’s successful offering of photographs from the Museum in April 2001, which totaled over $4 million and set a record for a single-owner sale of photographs in the United States. Among the strongest groups of work in the upcoming auction are photographs by Man Ray, Walker Evans, Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, Charles Sheeler, and Harry Callahan. Prior to their exhibition and sale in New York, highlights of the sale will be exhibited in Los Angeles from September 25th to September 27th, and in San Francisco from October 1st to October 3rd. The offering is estimated to bring $2.2/3.2 million.
Denise Bethel, Senior Vice President and Director of Sotheby’s Photographs Department, said, “Like the sale in April 2001, the upcoming offering will present today’s collector with an irresistible combination of quality and provenance. Many of the artists included in the sale had ties to the Museum, where early exhibitions of their work helped to establish their reputations, and in some cases, the photographs offered in the sale are works that have hung on the Museum’s walls and appeared in its publications. Founded in 1929, The Museum of Modern Art began collecting photographs in the early 1930s and in 1940, became the first art museum in the United States to establish a Department of Photography alongside the more traditional museum departments. The early institutional entry into the world of photographs, and a succession of sharp-eyed curators, have given the Museum one of the outstanding international collections of the medium in all of its aspects, with a particular emphasis on modern and contemporary work.”
As with the April 2001 sale, highlights from the present offering include works by Man Ray, Walker Evans, Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, Charles Sheeler, and Harry Callahan, photographers whose careers are intertwined with The Museum of Modern Art. The October auction also includes, however, a variety of fresh photographic perspectives. Included are works by a number of Europeans, among these a stunning nude by Frantisek Drtikol from 1929, The Bow; several photographs by Maurice Tabard, Ilse Bing, and the sculptor Constantin Brancusi; and images shown in such well-known MoMA exhibitions as The Exact Instant: 100 Years of News Photography (1949), Post-War European Photography (1953), and The Family of Man (1955).
Peter Galassi, Chief Curator of the Department of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art, said, “Over the past ten years, the Museum has been conducting a systematic review of the photography collection. This ongoing program has prompted a series of ambitious collecting initiatives. It has also identified a number of photographs, most of them duplicate prints, that, despite their quality and importance, no longer have an active role to play at the Museum. Sale or exchange of these works in turn will enable the Museum to further strengthen the collection.”
The October auction features eleven photographs by Man Ray, including nine originally from the collection of James Thrall Soby, the adventurous young scholar and collector who in 1934 published one of the earliest monographs on the photographer, Photographs by Man Ray, 1920 Paris 1934. In 1940, Soby gave to The Museum of Modern Art a significant group of Man Ray images, including Rayographs, nude studies, and portraits, many of which had been reproduced in his 1934 Man Ray volume. Among the Soby Man Rays included in the auction, and reproduced in the 1934 book, are Untitled (Rayograph with Flowers and Ferns), 1922, which is estimated to sell for $150/250,000, a haunting face of a woman, Study of a Woman’s Face, estimated at $25/35,000, and a study of a Nude, estimated to bring $50/70,000. Other Soby Man Ray photographs in the sale include a well-known portrait of Pablo Picasso (est. $20/30,000) and study of a ‘Can Can Dancer’ (est. $30/50,000). One of the two Man Ray photographs that does not come from the Soby Collection is a very early Rayograph with Lock of Hair from 1935, important as one of the earliest Man Ray works purchased by the Museum, and estimated to sell for $100/150,000.
In the April 2001 sale a new world auction record was established for Walker Evans which his Penny Picture Display, Savannah, 1936, sold for $181,750. Among the Evans highlights to be offered in the October sale are three photographs that---at the time of the April 2001 sale----were traveling with the important Evans Retrospective organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. These images, the famous Alabama Cotton Tenant Farmer Family (est. $30/50,000); the Negro Barber Shop Interior, Atlanta (est. $70/100,000); and the Country Store and Gas Station, Alabama (est. $50/80,000), are drawn from Evans’s definitive picture of the American South taken during his work with the Farm Security Administration in the 1930s. The cover lot is also a Walker Evans photograph, a rare and very beautiful print of an empty room in an abandoned Louisiana plantation, which is estimated to sell for $150/250,000.
Edward Steichen is represented in the sale by a range of photographs - the most important of which are examples of his early Pictorialist career. The top Steichen lot is platinum print nude study, Dolor, from 1901, on Steichen’s early gray paper mount with his stylized signature which is estimated at $70/100,000. In the early 1900s, during his residency in Paris, Steichen made a series of nude studies, including the present print. These studies, each bearing their own unique composition, all share several characteristics. Typically the figure is shown from behind – with the head invisible or indistinct—surrounded by darkness. In this series, Dolor is notable for the model’s overtly sensuous pose, as well for the lack of props.
Other early Steichen images are a platinum print of The Lady and the Lamp, 1899, made before Steichen left Milwaukee for Paris and included in the 1961 MoMA exhibition entitled Steichen the Photographer (est. $10/15,000), and one study from his series on sunflowers, the Backbone and Ribs of a Sunflower, early 1920s (est. $15/25,000).
Alfred Stieglitz is represented by a number of photographs, the most important, perhaps, his well-known, iconic image from Lake George, Apples and Gable, estimated to sell for $100/150,000. Also included are two of his sky-and-cloud studies, Equivalent, Set C2, No. 5, from 1929 (est. $20/30,000) and one of the Songs of the Sky, 1924 (est. $30/50,000), one of two images remaining in private hands.
Following the success of the two River Rouge studies by Charles Sheeler in the April 2001 sale, Sotheby’s will offer Sheeler’s Pulverizer Building, Ford Plant, Detroit, from the same series, estimated to sell for $70/100,000. In 1927, Sheeler was asked by Vaughn Flannery, the art director of N.W. Ayer & Son Advertising to produce a series of documentary photographs for the firm’s client, the Ford Motor Company. Flannery suggested that Sheeler concentrate on Ford’s River Rouge plant, which had been conceived of by Henry Ford as a facility capable of the total autonomous production of automobiles. The result was a series of photographs that are perhaps Sheeler’s most important.
The sale is also strong in work by Photo-Secessionists Alvin Langdon Coburn, including his majestic Colorado River from Hermit Point which is estimated to sell for $70/100,000. In early 1911, Coburn traveled to California, where he spent several months hiking and photographing in Yosemite Valley. He then went to the Grand Canyon, staying there through January 1912. Coburn found much to inspire him in the Canyon and, near the end of his stay he wrote to his friend, the photographer Karl Struss, “There is a wealth of fine material out here, and I feel that I have struck an entirely new note in the things that I have done.”
The sale also includes a very interesting group of rare portrait photographs of Pictorialist photographers or their children. These include four photographs by the Photo-Secessionist Getrude Kaesebier, including studies of the English photographer and bookseller Frederick H. Evans, F. Holland Day, and studies of Clarence White and his family, as well as an individual portrait of White’s son Maynard. Also featured in the sale is a group of four self-portrait photographs at home of the West Coast Pictorialist photographer Anne W. Brigman.
