NEW YORK, NY.- Christie’s presents eleven works from the Cy Twombly Foundation to be sold in the November 2014 Evening and Day sales of Post-War and Contemporary Art in New York. Acquired by Twombly in the 1960s, these works—all by artists represented by the legendary Leo Castelli Gallery—represents two generations of artists all who became established during the 1960s. Highlighting this group are three important drawings by Roy Lichtenstein - all quintessentially Pop – using imagery of everyday objects and advertising from the 1960s. Widely exhibited and documented, all three were most recently shown together at the Morgan Library in Roy Lichtenstein: The Black and White Drawings, 1961-1968 in 2010. The group includes Hot Dog, 1964 one of his largest works on paper, the bold 10₵, 1961 – 1962, and Like New, 1962. Also included is Andy Warhol’s Little Electric Chair, 1964 that Twombly traded directly with the artist, a cerulean blue in stark contrast with the dark silkscreen inks. Also of great importance are two rare early works by Bruce Nauman, including one of only three Light Trap photographs, William T. Wiley or Ray Johnson Trap, 1967 and the sly and conceptual resin sculpture, Device to Hold a Box at a Slight Angle, 1966. Both were included in artist’s first debut solo exhibition in New York at Leo Castelli Gallery, curated by David Whitney.
Laura Paulson, Chairman and International Director for Post-War and Contemporary Art, declared: This extraordinary group of works by Lichtenstein, Nauman, Warhol and Oldenburg represents one of the most creative and rich periods in Post-War American art which emerged in the 1960s. From the haunting and powerful Electric Chair to the beautiful black and white rendering of objects and signs modern life by Roy Lichtenstein, along with the rare conceptual photograph and early sculpture by Bruce Nauman, these works represent friendship and the personal vision of one of the greatest artists of the 20th century.”
Roy Lichtenstein, Hot Dog, 1964
Distinguished by its crisp, clean lines and the visual purity of the Ben-Day dots, Roy Lichtenstein’s master drawing Hot Dog is one of the most impressive works of the artist’s early career. Executed in 1964, this large-scale work is a superlative example of Lichtenstein’s ability to distill the visual cacophony of Post-War popular culture into his own iconic Pop language. Measuring over four feet across Hot Dog is among Lichtenstein’s largest works on paper.
Drawn entirely by hand, Hot Dog celebrates an American icon; ubiquitous and consumed by millions of Americans. The instantly recognizable form of the iconic foodstuff proved to be the perfect subject matter for Lichtenstein’s new language of art. Lichtenstein took the archetypal silhouette of this familiar product, and using the signs and symbols of mass communication, turned the humble hot dog into high art, thus celebrating not only the commonality of the object itself, but also how the nature of the image retains its importance in the age of mechanical reproduction.
For Roy Lichtenstein, the art of drawing was as important to his artistic output as his painting practice was. His perfectly rendered black-and-white drawings and exquisite studies were the places where he first expressed his unique visual language—a language that rewrote the rules of representation and became the foundation for one of the most important artistic movements of the twentieth century.
Andy Warhol, Little Electric Chair, 1964
Andy Warhol’s hauntingly powerful portrait of one of America’s most notorious icons is amongst the artist’s finest and most complex pieces of social commentary. The pinnacle of his famed Death and Disaster series, Little Electric Chair follows in the tradition of his portrayals of American culture, with its celebration of Campbell’s Soup and Coca-Cola, but this time substituting the aspirational championing of consumerism with a more subversive view of Americana. Warhol was the master exploiter of the modern image, and in this work he displays all his skills and insight to produce a work of tremendous power and emotion, which questions values at the very heart of a civilized society.
Located in the center of a 22 x 28 inch canvas, the eponymous electric chair is almost overwhelmed by the starkness and darkness of the room in which it stands. Completely void of unnecessary adornments, the concrete space houses only the implements necessary to its function. Thus the chair, its restraints and even the pipes of the sprinkler system that hangs from the ceiling all take on an ominously enhanced status in this evocative staging. Warhol’s restrained aesthetic masterfully heightens the portentous sense of emptiness as well as enabling key minute details to be visible, a characteristic which makes this particular example of Little Electric Chair stand out as one of the most evocative from this series.
Following on from his adoration of American celebrity in his portraits of Liz Taylor, Marilyn Monroe and Elvis, Warhol’s Little Electric Chair’s must have come as a shock to a public who thought they knew what to expect from the master of Pop. But with these works he succeeded in distancing himself from the other artists of his generation who, for the most part, continued to occupy themselves with the mechanics of mass-market image-making. His Death and Disaster paintings and his Little Electric Chair in particular, helped to define Warhol as an artist who was still at a truly ambitious stage in his career and willing to take on the biggest challenges of human life – mortality and the randomness of life and death.
Bruce Nauman, Device to Hold a Box at a Slight Angle, 1966
One of Bruce Nauman’s earliest sculptural works, Device to Hold Box at Slight Angle contains the first traces of the vigorous formal and artistic investigation that would dominate the rest of the artist’s career. Working from his studio in San Francisco, Nauman was using non-art material such as resin, casting shapes and sculpture, using plywood and paint, he created a series of works, which slightly suggest a utilitarian purpose, when in actuality are without formal function.
The works have much in common with the Minimalist sculpture of Donald Judd and Carl Andre. But, as would become evident in the rest of Nauman’s career, his work contains direct references to the human body, and its relationship to the world which it inhabits. In 1966, the year he left University of California, Davis Device to Hold Box at Slight Angle is one of the artist’s earliest accomplished works and was exhibited in his first one-man show which was held at the Nicholas Wilder Gallery in Los Angeles, before been shown in his first New York exhibition at the Leo Catelli Gallery in 1968, curated by then gallery director, David Whitney.
Also exhibited at the Leo Castelli Gallery is a rare example of Nauman’s Light Trap photograph reflecting his early experiments in photography. Nauman was one of the first artists of the 1960s to integrate photography and film into his work. The Light Trap photographs resulted from an ingenious method of drawing with light in a dark room, while a movie camera recorded the movement.
The works will preview in London, San Francisco before being offered in New York in November.
