The October 19, 2023, sale of African American Art will feature exceptional modern and contemporary works of abstract and figurative art.

The top lot in the auction is Moon Madness, an important 1959 processional painting by Norman Lewis. It is one of a significant series of nocturnal compositions made by the artist in the late fifties.

Other sale highlights are two paintings from 1954. Hughie Lee-Smith’s Untitled (Two Young Men on a Beach) is an evocative oil painting that epitomizes the artist’s career-defining body of work of surreal landscapes from Detroit. 

Left: Sam Gilliam, Untitled, acrylic and metallic paint on draped polypropylene fabric, 1979. Estimate $150,000 to $250,000.

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Another abstract highlight is a 1979 untitled draped canvas by Sam Gilliam, from the estate of his friend and collaborator Lou Stovall—this 90-inch-high expanse of saturated color is a stunning example of Gilliam’s innovative painting.

The auction also includes exceptional works on paper including Alma Thomas’s Trasendental, a large and colorful 1965 watercolor that was included in the artist’s first solo exhibition in a commercial gallery. Contemporary highlights include one of Simone Leigh’s signature cowrie shell forms with a dark gray glaze, and Samuel Levi Jones’s Construct of Colour Vision, 2018, an excellent example of his practice of assembling deconstructed books into grid-like compositions. The Levi Jones will be sold by the estate of George T. Wein to benefit the Newport Festivals Foundation, Inc.

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The fall Early Printed Books auction on October 12, 2023, will feature lots from three important collectors, including more from Ken Rapaport, as well as works on the history of psychiatry collected by Dr. Michael H. Stone, and literary high spots amassed by the Culpepper, Virginia, bibliophile Christopher Clark Geest.

Dr. Michael Stone’s Psychiatry Collection

Left: Lot 244: Johannes Gerson, De Pollutione Nocturna, Cologne, about 1467-1472. Estimate $3,000 to $5,000. From Dr. Michael Stone’s Psychiatry Collection.

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In addition to his clinical work, research, and publications in the field of forensic psychiatry, Dr. Stone’s persistence and passion as an avid book collector resulted in the assemblage of important writings on human thought, feeling, and emotion and our struggles to understand ourselves. The collection begins with incunabula and moves through the centuries, documenting the culture’s growth from belief in the occult and witchcraft into a more scientific understanding and approach to the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness and emotional disorders. His collection reflects this depth and breadth. Expect to see works by Freud & Darwin, but also early printed English books on psychology, eighteenth-century treatises on the interpretation of dreams, and nineteenth-century assessments of the way institutionalized patients were treated and mistreated.

Ex Libris Christopher Clark Geest

Geest had a great love for literary works in the English language and focused his collecting on some of the best-known and beloved verse and prose by Chaucer, Shakespeare, Burton, Swift, Burns, Johnson, and beyond. His special interest in the development of the novel in the early modern period is highlighted by number of earliest gothic novels, including first editions of Horace Walpole’s The Castle at Otranto and Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland. Other important books include first editions of Hobbe’s Leviathan, Johnson’s Dictionary, and Spenser’s Faerie Queen, as well as Coriolanus and Titus Andronicus, as extracted from Shakespeare’s First Folio.

Right: Lot 103: Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, second edition, London, 1778. Estimate $10,000 to $15,000.

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Other notable highlights from the sale include a group of important works in economics and a lovely run of illustrated seventeenth- and eighteenth-century continental imprints documenting and illustrating antiquities. These beautifully printed and illustrated books describe engraved Roman Gems and medals, oil lamps, signet rings, coins, ivory diptychs, and other treasures held in early modern European museums and collections.

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One of the best-known modern Romanian historians, Nicolae Iorga, has the distinction of being one of the few scholars of his day or before to document the lives of educated Romanian women [See “Ce carte invlitau odatli fcmeile le noi” (“Women’s Education in the Past”), Floarea Darurilor, An I, No. 3 (1907) 129-45, and Femeile în viaţa neamuluĭ nostru: chipurĭ, datine, fapte, mărturiĭ (Women in Romanian History—Portraits, Traditions, Testimonies), (Văleniĭ-de-Munte: Tipografia “Neamul Românesc,” 1911)], since the dominant view held that the role of a woman was to build a family rather than cultivate an intellectual life. A lesser-known iconoclastic Romanian was Melanie Serbu, born in 1909 in Tulgheş (near Brasov, Romania), who, as a young woman with only vocational education, struck up a 20-year correspondence with one of the most important intellects of the twentieth century: Albert Einstein. The 20 original letters from Einstein to Serbu, together with the over 80 manuscript pages of Serbu’s later reflections on each letter, are being offered at Swann’s October 26, 2023, auction of Fine Books & Manuscripts. The sale will mark one of the few occasions that a nearly-complete archive of correspondence by Einstein has come to auction.

Left: Melanie Serbu. Prague, 1936. Photographer unknown. Photo: Leo Baeck Institute, F 3153

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At the age of 19, Serbu worked as a bank clerk in Brasov. Inspired by a magazine article on Einstein’s theory of relativity, Serbu wrote the celebrated physicist for an explanation of his theory, mentioning that the topic had interested her since reading Poor Dionis, a novella by Romanian poet Mihai Eminescu (first published in 1872) about a daydreaming scholar who travels through time and space by inhabiting the bodies of reincarnated selves, touching on notions of spacetime and relativity long before the widespread association of such ideas with Einstein’s theories. Perhaps impressed by her boldness, Einstein replied by recommending a book introducing his theory: Die Idee der Relativitätstheorie (1921) by Hans Thirring:

“You have evidently got hold of one of those popularizations of the theory of relativity . . . . I took this from the fact that you believe that the quoted passage in the novel could have something to do with the theory. However, this cannot be understood without prior knowledge of physics. . . . I recommend reading a book on this subject that Prof. Thirring has published at the University of Vienna.” [Einstein to Serbu, 9 October 1928]

After repeatedly reading Thirring’s book over the course of months, Serbu again wrote to Einstein, hoping to demonstrate her understanding of his theory, gesturing toward recognition of the importance of the relationship between electromagnetic and gravitational effects:

“[T]he universe is flooded by two forces like a fog: gravitational and light waves. Basically the same electromagnetic forces, only under different names because they exert different effects. Shouldn’t the two stand in a certain relationship to each other?” [Serbu to Einstein, probably 26 November 1928]

Soon after, Einstein replied, so astonished that someone as young and untrained could have such insight into recent physics that he was moved to help her pursue study in theoretical physics. Before he committed, however, he wanted reassurance, because part of Einstein’s surprise lay in the fact that it was a woman who commanded this insight:

“[T]his study almost always takes its toll on women, because the great and constant mental effort is usually not good for them. . . . [T]ry to study a suitable work on mathematics privately alongside your job, in order to test yourself. If you let me know the status of your education in this regard, I will send you a suitable work.” [Einstein to Serbu, 9 January 1929]

In the same letter, Einstein mentions how Serbu’s insight happens to touch on his own work in theoretical physics:

“I was extraordinarily surprised that you immediately saw the point where the next progress must begin, namely the unity of the natural forces. I’ve been working on this problem for 13 years and I think I’ve found the solution right now.”

Later that month, on January 30, 1929, Einstein’s paper proposing a unified field theory (“Zur einheitlichen Feldtheorie”) was published [in Sitzungsberichte der Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, XXII, 1929]. Einstein believed he had found a single theory that models phenomena of both gravitation and electromagnetism, but by the summer of that year, the equations of the theory were shown to provide only an approximation of the phenomena [see G.C. McVittie’s “On Einstein’s Unified Field Theory” in Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 124, No. 794 (June 4 1929): 366-374]. Einstein continued to work on the problem, unsuccessfully, for the rest of his life.

Einstein seemed satisfied by Serbu’s continued expressions of interest and, as promised, Einstein sent books on mathematics and physics, which Serbu studied diligently in the evenings after her work at the bank.

On June 19, 1930, Einstein wrote to Nicolae Iorga—the historian mentioned above who had become Romania’s Minister of Education–requesting that Serbu be permitted to attend university after an appropriate examination despite legislation preventing anyone without a baccalaureate degree from doing so. In a move that permanently improved the educational opportunities for women in Romania, Iorga arranged for the relevant law to be changed, allowing students without a degree to audit university courses.

Serbu was not able to take advantage of a university education, however, even after having been given a study grant attached to Bucharest University by Romanian industrialist Nicolae Malaxa, because the date of the examination was set so early that it left insufficient time to prepare (her work at the bank occupied her for seven hours each weekday). Despite this setback, Serbu continued to study independently.

In January of 1935, Einstein wrote to his theoretical physicist friend Philipp Frank at the Deutsche Karl-Ferdinands-Universität in Prague, persuading him to allow Serbu to become his student there. Soon after, Malaxa agreed to transfer Serbu’s grant to the university in Prague.

At the end of 1935, Serbu had moved to Prague and begun her studies, but she was beset by difficulties Einstein had not anticipated, as she later recalled:

“The German-speaking students in Prague belonged to Henlein’s National Socialist party. Even those students who greeted me were forced by the others to refrain [from speaking to me]. When I sat down on a bench in the auditorium, the seats around me became empty. There were no Jewish colleagues in my semester at the time. I felt like a pariah . . . and asked myself what I might have done wrong.” [Serbu’s Remarks on Einstein’s letter of November 5, 1935]

Despite her initial troubles connecting with others in Prague, in the spring of 1937, a private tutor affiliated with the University had proposed marriage to Serbu; they considered the possibility of moving to America together. When Serbu wrote to Einstein to ask his advice, in his reply of May 7, 1937, Einstein delicately advised against marrying a non-Jew and dissuaded her from coming to America, since the employment opportunities were few, the mindset of the people was very different, and he had little free time to direct her education:

“With regard to the marriage proposal . . . , I cannot allow myself to judge. In and of itself, I believe that it is better for a woman to be married. If the man is not a Jew, marriage seems risky, especially under today’s conditions, since later on contradictions easily emerge that were originally concealed by the desire for a connection.” [Einstein to Serbu, 7 May 1937]

The primary reason Serbu wanted to travel to America was because of her increasingly uncomfortable encounters with anti-Semitism. Serbu nevertheless followed Einstein’s advice and concentrated upon her studies.

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In 1946, in what would become the last year of their brief marriage, Elizabeth Catlett and Charles White shared a career-changing experience living and working in Mexico City. They had each been awarded travel fellowships from the Rosenwald Foundation, and after World War II ended, they departed for Mexico in April of 1946. Catlett and White were both invited to work at the celebrated printmaking collaborative, the Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP) which championed socially and politically conscious graphic art. Our October 19, 2023, auction presents a wonderful opportunity to see two scarce and important prints from this pivotal moment reunited again. We are thrilled to be offering the first lithograph of each artist produced at the TGP: Charles White’s Waiting and Elizabeth Catlett’s Restaurant Patron (For Colored Only).

These lithographs reveal the developing expression of two great figurative artists in printmaking. Both artists enjoyed access to lithography and working alongside such Mexican artists as David Alfaro Siqueiros and Pablo O’Higgins. Their prints are imbued with the social realist consciousness and expression that the Mexican muralists took to great heights, providing a model for many African American artists.

Curiously, in both prints, the figures rest their heads on their elbows — each figure is depicted facing forward during a trying moment. They reveal the realities faced in the 1940s for African Americans — enduring the separation of wartime and segregation. In both prints, the artists elevated a black woman’s experience as a powerful form of expression.

Charles White depicts an African American woman seated under a banner of the Gold Star, a commemoration of a husband or son actively serving in the armed forces. She embodies the strength of those who waited for the return of their loved ones. The influence of the Mexican muralist school can be seen in White’s robust figuration — the figure is both stylized and heroic. As seen in his 1946 drawing, The Return of the Soldier, White also was aware how, despite their heroic achievements abroad, America largely did not celebrate its returning black soldiers — instead, they often found discrimination, disdain and violence awaiting them. In Waiting, White uses the expression of the woman figure to reveal the painful poignancy of the moment.

In her lithograph, Catlett depicts an African woman seated at a restaurant table under the sign “For Colored Only”. The dehumanizing experience of segregation was a staple of black American life in the Jim Crow era. The figure’s face stares out directly at the viewer with an awareness in her countenance and poise. Catlett also uses the figure’s eyes to suggest a determination and knowing sadness. The economy and starkness of the composition reinforce the directness of Catlett’s lithograph. A similar subject of women in segregated seating, this time on buses, also appears in Catlett’s 1946 linoleum cut I have special reservations… from her 1946-47 series I am the Negro Woman.

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Their experiences at the TGP had lasting effects on their practice despite their divorce that year. Charles White produced three more lithographs and at least one linoleum cut in Mexico before returning to New York. Upon his return, White continued his interest in lithography and began a productive collaboration with printer Bob Blackburn. Elizabeth Catlett finished the fifteen linoleum cuts of the I am the Negro Woman over the next year at the TGP. This series was a groundbreaking accomplishment of Black feminist art and a significant part of her first one-person exhibition “The Negro Woman” at the Barnett-Aden Gallery, in Washington, DC in 1947. Catlett stayed in Mexico — she soon joined the collective and worked at the TGP for the next twenty years.

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Post-war Japanese photography witnessed significant developments and innovations that reflected the changing social, cultural, and political landscape of Japan.

The devastation caused by World War II had a profound influence on Japanese society. Both the salon and the avant-garde photography of the prewar era would be dismissed by the post-war photographers who would focus their work on documenting the aftermath of the war and its devastating effects on their nation instead. As such, the era marks an allegiance to documentary photography, best conveyed through the photobook as media.

Documentary Photography

The traumas linked to the impact of the war helped shape a new aesthetic in which photography would be used to record and document the story of this post-war generation.

Photography, rather than being a meaning for defining the present, transformed itself into an “objective eye,” a “healing” tool for uncovering the past, but also recovering from it: images of the destruction, suffering, and rebirth of Japan were common themes during this period. Influenced by Western European photography, Japanese photographers like Ken Domon and Shomei Tomatsu explored humanist photography, capturing the everyday lives of ordinary people. Often built as documentary stories, as journalistic visual sequences, their work focused on social issues, such as poverty and the impact of the war on civilians. For instance, Shomei Tomatsu spent his early career capturing Japan’s economic and sociocultural recovery from the devastation of World War II. In his photobook Nagasaki (Shashin Dojinsha, 1966), Tomatsu used the place name as a metonym for the national trauma of the atomic bomb, while in Nippon (Japan) he addresses the post-war national identity with images shot between 1955 and 1967 in various parts of the country.

Personal Objectivity

This period also led to a new sphere of personal objectivity in which post-war photographers increasingly turned to personal expression and subjective storytelling, shifting away from the strict tradition that documentary photography encompassed.

Largely active between the late 1950s and the 1970s, they would eventually evolve into different esthetic movements and a diversity of styles under the influence, in particular, of the Japanese photobooks and monthly magazines, such as Asahi Camera and Camera Mainichii, or the hybrid Provoke. Not only did the magazines provide a vital venue for the photographer by publishing their work, but they also developed into an art form in and of themselves. Indeed, where photo reportage tried to capture a wholly ‘objective’ truth and reality, the new tendency called attention to the presence of the image maker himself who conveyed his own fragment of reality. Book works like Nobuyoshi Araki’s Sentimental Journey (self-published, 1971) and Yutaka Takanashi’s Toshi-e (Towards the City) (Izara Shobo, 1974) are celebrated examples that combined text and images to create powerful narratives.

Post-war Japanese photography is marked by a wide range of styles and approaches. From documentary and street photography promoted by artists such as Yutaka Takanashi with his atmospheric use of architectural spaces or Daido Moriyama, renowned for his gritty, abstract, and often emotionally charged images of urban life that attack traditional conventions of composition, focus and form; to the erotic narratives of Nobuyoshi Araki; to the metaphorical and experimental work of Eikoh Hosoe, to name but a few. This diversity reflects the rich and evolving nature of Japanese photography from the post-war period to the present.

Photographs no longer show us the reality of another place or time, only that of the photographer’s own world. The photograph now documents not larger social issues but the intimate realities of personal life.  This trend continues in Japanese photography today, as exemplified by an abundance of diaristic bodies of work, but also in its influence on the Contemporary photography scene where the work of photographers like Daido Moriyama and Nobuyoshi Araki continues to influence contemporary photographers worldwide.

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One of the best-known modern Romanian historians, Nicolae Iorga, has the distinction of being one of the few scholars of his day or before to document the lives of educated Romanian women [See “Ce carte invlitau odatli fcmeile le noi” (“Women’s Education in the Past”), Floarea Darurilor, An I, No. 3 (1907) 129-45, and Femeile în viaţa neamuluĭ nostru: chipurĭ, datine, fapte, mărturiĭ (Women in Romanian History—Portraits, Traditions, Testimonies), (Văleniĭ-de-Munte: Tipografia “Neamul Românesc,” 1911)], since the dominant view held that the role of a woman was to build a family rather than cultivate an intellectual life. A lesser-known iconoclastic Romanian was Melanie Serbu, born in 1909 in Tulgheş (near Brasov, Romania), who, as a young woman with only vocational education, struck up a 20-year correspondence with one of the most important intellects of the twentieth century: Albert Einstein. The 20 original letters from Einstein to Serbu, together with the over 80 manuscript pages of Serbu’s later reflections on each letter, are being offered at Swann’s October 26, 2023, auction of Fine Books & Manuscripts. The sale will mark one of the few occasions that a nearly-complete archive of correspondence by Einstein has come to auction.

Right: F. Schmutzer, Albert Einstein during a lecture in Vienna in 1921.

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Both Einstein and Melanie Serbu herself noticed a growing sense of confidence in Serbu’s grasp of physics since Einstein invited her in May of 1937 to submit technical questions to him and she immediately accepted the invitation. In her later reflections on the letter she wrote Einstein, Serbu described an insight she had while working at a laboratory as part of a physics internship: she saw the states of matter as differing only in the degree of their viscosity (that is, that matter exhibiting high viscosity is a solid; moderate viscosity, a liquid; and low viscosity, a gas):

I shared with Einstein . . . what I thought about the states of matter: solid, liquid and gaseous, the connecting bond of which could be the different degrees of viscosity. [Serbu’s Remarks on Einstein’s letter of May 25, 1937]

Einstein responded by criticizing her characterization of solid bodies, pointing out that elastic forces in bodies disappear during rapid deformation, so talk of viscosity could only make sense in bodies under slow deformation. In the letter, he proceeded by giving his own view on the nature of liquids, namely that they are solid bodies that have a low resistance to deformation, which has testable consequences:

The conception of liquids as easily flowing solid bodies would then lead to the expectation that there would be transverse waves of very high frequency in liquids, but not that they would not deform if the deformation limits were small enough. [Einstein to Serbu, 25 May 1937]

Einstein’s next letter to Serbu is extraordinary, elaborating the ideas in the previous letter by deploying equations that model the deformation of a volume of liquid and pointing out the consequent high frequency waves which do not appear in the models provided by viscosity theory. Einstein speculated that no one had yet attempted to generate and observe these waves, so the topic might make a good thesis topic for Serbu:

I am glad that you agree with me on the concept of liquids as quasi-solids. Don’t talk much about this matter with others; I believe that this could make a nice topic for your doctoral thesis later, and I am thinking primarily of the theoretical implementation of the idea. [Einstein to Serbu, 15 July 1937]

As helpful as Einstein’s suggestions might have been, Serbu nevertheless chose to develop her own thesis, which followed from the insight she had about the continuity between states of matter [when she had completed it years later, her dissertation bore the title “Einheitliche-Theorie der Aggregat-Zustaende, Viskositaet als Bindeglied genommen”—though she never completed a doctoral degree program].

By the spring of 1938, the rising pro-Nazi sentiment in the Sudetenland and elsewhere made life increasingly dangerous for Serbu, even in Prague. It was at this time that Serbu’s patron, Nicolae Malaxa, visited Prague on a business trip, where the two met. Serbu recalled the following of the meeting:

In response to my ideas about the political clouds gathering on the horizon, Mr. Malaxa was immediately willing to make my further studies in Switzerland . . . materially possible. He wrote to the Swiss embassy in Romania. [Serbu’s Remarks on Einstein’s letter of August 10, 1938]

The Munich Agreement, in which Nazi Germany annexed parts of Czechoslovakia, was signed at the end of September.

Serbu made the move to Switzerland, and before the middle of February of 1939, she had been enrolled at the University of Zürich. Tragically, Serbu began suffering from tuberculosis within two months of the start of classes. On hearing of this, Einstein extended his sympathetic hand by sending Serbu a letter of recommendation that she could take to his childhood friend, Heirich Zangger, Director of the Institute of Forensic Medicine at the University of Zürich, a specialist in tuberculosis. Zangger began treatment and sent Einstein regular reports of Serbu’s condition during her convalescence. Before she could recover completely, however, she was compelled to move again. In 1940, as Switzerland mobilized for a potential Nazi invasion, Malaxa advised Serbu to return home to Romania, even though it had come increasingly under Nazi influence. The Romanian Legation in Bern provided Serbu with a transit visa for non-Jews, allowing her to return home, just as the Nazis began occupying Romania. While her homeland was occupied by Nazis, Serbu cared for her ailing mother.

In August of 1944, the Soviet Army liberated Romania from the occupation, but imposed its own harsh conditions, including the social disruption caused by the change to communism and the poverty caused by war reparations. The years of hardship under both Nazis and Russians, illness, as well as familial and other responsibilities, made Serbu’s academic pursuits in Romania impossible. When her mother died in 1946, Serbu began working as a teacher in mathematics and physics in various middle schools. In 1949, she was hired at the new Institute for Mechanics at the University of Brasov, where she worked until 1954. In his last letter to Serbu, Einstein congratulates her on the teaching career, urging her not to be disappointed about having been unable to pursue an academic career in research:

You don’t have to be sad about not being able to work in your . . . subject. Teaching is always satisfying when you have an interest in young people. I would have liked to do it when I was young, but couldn’t find a job. [Einstein to Serbu, 21 April 1948]

Seven years after signing this letter, Einstein died. Despite corresponding for nearly 20 years, Serbu never had the opportunity to thank Einstein in person for having helped her to glimpse the world of theoretical physics, a domain overwhelmingly populated by men.

In 1958, Serbu moved to Israel to live out the final chapter of her life. During the 1970s, Serbu transcribed Einstein’s letters and began recording her recollections and mature reflections concerning her correspondence with the aim of publishing a book. She envisioned a sort of memoir that included copies of Einstein’s letters. When she wrote the trustees of the estate of Albert Einstein in 1972 to discuss her proposed book, they declined to grant her permission to reproduce the text of Einstein’s letters. Serbu nevertheless continued to distribute copies of Einstein’s letters to various institutions in order to preserve their correspondence, but she never published her book.

In a 1976 letter to Fred Grubel, Director of the Leo Baeck Institute where copies of the correspondence are housed, Serbu wrote:

To my great, still unresolved pain, I was forced to give up the Einstein letters; I didn’t get much for them–had to accept what was offered. Prof. Dr. E[rnst] Brüche, publisher of the “Physikalische Blätter,” comforted me with the words, “Einstein would have been happy if he had known that he could help you with this and the letters are in better hands with the buyer than with you.” [Serbu to Grubel, 14 September 1976]

Serbu died in Haifa in 1985.

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Autographs

The spirits of conflict and exploration are intertwined in the autographs on offer. Among the most respected explorers of the unknown are scientists, each of whom must contend with the antagonist in any scientific enterprise: ignorance. This auction contains items created by some of the best-known heroes to have enlightened the world, chief among them Albert Einstein, with a selection of autographs from the physicist.

The sale includes an extraordinary archive of 19 letters to Melanie Serbu, a Romanian bank clerk and aspiring physicist whom Einstein had hoped to bring into the fray of scientific research. Available in a separate lot is an extraordinary letter to Serbu, written in 1937 when Einstein was revisiting his ideas about gravitational waves, showing equations demonstrating his insight about high-frequency waves generated during the deformation of bodies, which Einstein believed might make a fruitful dissertation topic for her.

Left: Lot 21: Benjamin Franklin, Autograph Letter Signed, “BFranklin,” concerning the Massachusetts Governor’s conflict with the provincial legislature, 1773. Estimate $35,000 to $50,000.

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Another remarkable autograph is that by one of the foremost American scientists, Benjamin Franklin, who wrote an autograph letter signed to a diplomat in 1773 concerning the conflict between the legislature of Massachusetts and their Governor, who seemed to show more sympathy toward England than was appropriate for the time.

What more important American conflict can we name than that of the Civil War, and this auction contains several notable autographs written by both Union and Confederate soldiers during that period. Among them is an autograph letter signed by Stonewall Jackson in 1863, hoping to enlist General Edward Johnson as his commander. Also in this sale, an autograph letter signed in 1862 by George McClellan to General Ambrose Burnside, introducing a Russian officer visiting to observe the Union Army, as well as War-dated items by Edwin Stanton, William Seward, and others. Uncommon autographs by figures in other categories include those by writers, artists, world leaders, and entertainers.

19th & 20th Century Literature

The 19th & 20th Century Literature portion of the sale features a first edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, and a set of the five Christmas books by Charles Dickens, first editions handsomely bound by Morrell. Modern first edition highspots include a superb copy of Animal Farm by George Orwell, as well as the signed, limited American edition in the scare dust jacket of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince. A run of fine bindings will be offered, including an exceptional Cosway-style by Bayntun Riviere with an Abraham Lincoln portrait, and several French Art Deco examples.

Art, Press & Illustrated Books

Among the highlights found within the art, press and illustrated books section are two seldom-seen titles from the Limited Editions Club: one a unique copy of Robert Motherwell and Octavio Paz’s Three Poems, representing the sole ‘Position Proof’ that includes the verse; and the complete set of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s four signed photogravures, one of sixty produced. Finally, among many appealing fine press books on offer is one of the major works from Ashendene Press, The Noble and Joyous Book entitled Le Morte d’Arthur.

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Devon Eastland shares her picks for the October 12, 2023, sale of Early Printed books.

Gothic Novels

If you’ve read through our offerings for the October 12, 2023, sale, you know that the cataloguer loves gothic fiction. High spots in the sale include first editions Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, the first in the genre, and Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland, the first American contribution (not to mention Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly). If you listen to true crime podcasts and are pretty sure that eighteenth-century fiction is going to feel stilted and irrelevant, think again. Each story pulls from epic true crime and the authors aren’t shy about throwing in supernatural and psychological elements like sleepwalking, demonic possession, ventriloquism, and family annihilation. It’s all on the table. Get ready for the eighteenth century to feel modern. 

Forest Trees

We book lovers are not afraid to dig into the details, and one of my favorites has always been John Evelyn’s book on the woods and its leafy (and needled) denizens: Sylva, or a Discourse of Forest-Trees. Seventeenth-century Brits were bent on improving the land and maximizing the output of their gardens, forests, and streams, and Evelyn’s contribution is one of many venerated volumes from the period. Evelyn first taught me about coppicing (intentionally cutting down trees and shrubs to stimulate sucker growth thereby providing firewood), pollarding (pruning upper branches from trees to create fodder for livestock), the many forms of grafting (attaching the trunk and branches of one variety of tree shrub to a rootstock of another so that the desired fruit or flower has a hardier foundation), and creating espaliered fruit trees (specially pruned and shaped against garden walls for beauty and yield.) However, his description of the process of charcoal-making is the most interesting, in my opinion. Look it up, he even includes an illustration. (If looking it up isn’t for you, come to the exhibition and ask me about it.) 

Traveling Pastry Chef

Lot 146: Jean Fuchs, Handwritten Pastry Recipe Book and Passport, Honnef, Germany, 1831. Estimate $600 to $800.

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Manuscript material provides unparalleled access to the private lives of history’s forgotten people. Jean Fuchs flourished in the 1830s as a traveling pastry chef, but it seems that not much has survived of his personal history beyond the material in this lot. That may change, but that’s as much as we know at the moment. His recipes are written in the languages of Europe, and his passport tells us why. I’m not sure how much is known about itinerant workers in the food industry in early nineteenth-century Europe, but I know a treasure trove of raw information when I see it. 

A Doctor’s Circle

Czech Republic-born Arnaldo Cantani was a physician from an Italian family who contributed to our understanding of the importance of diet for people living with diabetes, but nothing tells the personal story of his lifetime of networking better than this album of signed carte-de-visites. Cantani’s doctor friends from all over Europe exchanged formal portraits, many leaving a signature and sometimes a short note. Bundled together in a contemporary album, the group serves as a snapshot of a very specific mid-nineteenth-century European medical social circle. 

Science over Superstition

Inquisition-era folks are usually painted with a broad brush, as though everyone from the period believed in witchcraft and sorcery. Dutch physician Johann Weyer took a clear-eyed and rational approach. He practiced medicine and published widely, never backing away from his position that witchcraft simply did not exist. In a time when the doctrine of the church trumped the scientific method in many arenas, Weyer advocated for an understanding of aberrant or inappropriate behavior in a medical context. He suggested that an imbalance of the humors, or an underlying mental illness, were the cause of people’s disturbing or irrational actions, not the work of the devil. 

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Old Master Prints

The November 2, 2023, auction begins with a selection of classic prints by old master artists from Albrecht Dürer to Rembrandt van Rijn and Giovanni B. Piranesi to Francisco José de Goya. Notable among these offerings are two of Dürer’s most coveted engravings, both in spectacular, early impressions: Adam and Eve, 1504, and St. Jerome in his Study, 1514. Among the more than fifty Rembrandt etchings to be offered are several of his most desirable self-portraits from each decade of his prolific career, along with genre and Biblical scenes that include lifetime impressions of The Pancake Woman, 1635, and Abraham Casting Out Hagar and Ishmael, 1637.

19th Century Prints

The standouts among the strong section of nineteenth-century prints are a group of Venetian etchings by James A. M. Whistler, a stunning color drypoint by Mary Cassatt, and additional works by Camille Pissarro, Paul Cézanne, Auguste Rodin and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec.

American Prints

In what is one of our most robust selections of American prints in the past several years, we have diverse highlights from artists including Winslow Homer, John Marin, Edward Hopper, Martin Lewis, Thomas Hart Benton, Blanche Lazzell and many others, including the companion lots Night Shadows, 1921, by Hopper and Relics (Speakeasy Corner), 1928, by Lewis, two similar, nocturnal, bird’s-eye view compositions by these artists who were also close friends.  Also of note is a group of lithographs by Benton created for the motion picture version of The Grapes of Wrath, 1939, and with a direct provenance to the film’s director, John Ford.

Latin American Prints

Sandwiched between the American and modern European prints is a solid group of Latin American prints that spans the twentieth century, from José Guadalupe Posada and José Clemente Orozco to David A. Siquieros and Rufino Tamayo.

Modern European Prints

The ultimate section of the sale consists of more than 150 modern European prints, ranging from Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse to Joan Miró and Alberto Giacometti.  Highlights include Picasso’s Fumeur, 1964, early color lithographs by Chagall inspired by Four Tales of the Arabian Nights, and a selection of modernist prints by Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Egon Schiele and Oscar Kokoschka among others.  Of special note is a private collection of prints by M. C. Escher, including examples of his early Italian lithographs alongside his later tessellation-inspired works.

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Swann’s autumn 2023 auction of Rare & Important Travel Posters on November 9 is another wonderful, geographic tour de force, with some of the most compelling and infrequently seen images.

The sale circles the globe: Australia, India, Georgia, Italy, Scotland, Canada, Poland, Norway, and Czechoslovakia—including Richard Teschner‘s early, rare image for travel to Prague via the Austrian Railway, circa 1910, and Milos Endler‘s poster for the Wagons-Lits featuring the Charles Bridge, 1929, and others.

Right: Lot 5: Rhys Williams, Qantas / A New Air Map From the Australian Viewpoint, circa 1939. Estimate $3,000 to $4,000.

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Also featured are exceptional depictions of means of transport like Elmer William Pirson‘s Curtiss School of Aviation, 1917; Rhys William‘s Qantas Empire Airways, circa 1938; an original painting featuring a locomotive from the Illinois Central Railroad painted by Bern Hill for General Motors Electro-Motive Division; and a dramatic rendering of the Java Night-Limited Railroad, circa 1930s.

Ocean Liner companies are well represented, with sea-going depictions of Cunard Liners by Odin Rosenvinge, The Red Star Line, by Henri Cassiers, and others.

There is an exceptional assortment of American cities on display, including Chicago and Cleveland (by Leslie Ragan for New York Central), Hollywood and San Francisco (by David Klein—each of these the rare, earlier printings), and New York (by Chesley Bonestell of the New York Central Building and New York / Fly TWA, by Klein).

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Yet you, LORD, are our Father. We are the clay, you are the potter; we are all the work of your hand.  
– Isaiah 64:8

Ceramicists are inherently connected to the earth through their manipulation of clay, a material composed of soil and water. This elemental relationship between ceramicists and clay dates to the rise of humanity and its need for functional objects and aesthetic choices. Until recently, ceramicists and other practitioners of the plastic arts have been ancillary to the world of fine art—but shifts in market and institutional interest have raised their value and prompted a reassessment.

When we think about the history of America, as told through objects and collectibles, the African American (and Indigenous peoples) is implicit in the recount. Craftsmanship, including working with wood, iron, and clay for utilitarian and decorative purposes, was labor for enslaved people. For this reason, when considering the weight of ceramics in the art market, specifically the American market, it is crucial to discuss African-American ceramicists. As such, contemporary African-American ceramicists now command attention and market recognition for their practices. Below are five ceramic artists we’ve brought to the market over the past few years whose practices vary in subjectivity, aesthetic manipulation, and objective thought. 

Yvonne Tucker 

Born in 1941 in Chicago, Yvonne Tucker has practiced art since her youth. Originally a painter, she studied at the South Side Community Art Center and the Art Institute of Chicago. Focusing on painting in college, she graduated from the University of Illinois at Urban-Champaign in 1962, where she met Curtis Tucker, whom she eventually married. He visited her studio, leading him to fall in love with the medium and become a ceramicist himself. They led individual and joint practices that influenced each other. Tucker attended graduate school at the University of California, Los Angeles and completed her MFA in ceramics at the Otis Art Institute in 1968. She studied under ceramists Helen Watson and Michael Frimkess, as well as with Charles White, Joseph Mugnaini, and Herman Kofi Bailey. “I fell in love with clay at Otis (Arts Institute) in Los Angeles,” she said. “There was a very strong ceramic culture out west in the middle ’60s. I went to a school that had several of the leading potters there.” 

After their gas kiln stopped working, Tucker and her husband combined Japanese and African traditional methods with contemporary techniques and African-American aesthetics, leading to a new form dubbed “Afro-Raku”. Raku is the Japanese ceramic practice of hand-modeled pottery that is fired at a low temperature and rapidly cooled, and used specifically for a tea ritual that began in the seventeenth century. While studying Raku, Tucker was also studying Congolese, Ghanian, and Nigerian pottery for the range of materiality used and their functions. The Tuckers’ travels throughout West and East Africa led them to find their identities and formulate new ideas on execution and design. 

Tucker executed sculptural forms based on the human body that featured functional design elements. In the Tuckers’ joint practice, they created story-telling pots that one would throw, and the other would carve sgraffito images. Inspired by Jazz, Blues, and the Texas Tall tale tradition, their pots would depict the narrative of their families, all without ever repeating a shape. Her pots did not have a prominent glaze, but she wanted them to shine as if light was emanating from an inner source, inspired by the works of Nigerian potter Ladi Kwali.  

Yvonne Tucker was an educator at Florida A&M University, Tallahassee, since 1973 and has received many honors and awards, including Anonymous Award for Ceramics, Otis Art Institute 50th Anniversary Exhibition, 1969, Blue Ribbon, Clay Glaze Miami, 1970, Best in Show Award, Florida International University First Annual Art Fair, 1973, Top Honors in Ceramics, North Florida Fair 1975, African American Institute and Howard University, Educators to Africa Grant, 1975, a National Endowment for the Humanities, Summer Seminar for College Teachers, 1978. She is profiled in Samella Lewis’s African American Art and Artists. Lewis p. 230. 

Related Reading

Walter Williams  

Untitled (Bowl) and Untitled (Baby’s Head) are two scarce ceramic works from Walter Williams due to the destruction of his studio in Denmark in 1980. Known as a painter, printmaker and ceramicist, Williams was awarded a John Hay Whitney Fellowship that he used to travel to Denmark in 1955. He chose the country because his maternal father was from the Danish West Indies, a former colony of Denmark, and had spoken to him about the country. He left for Denmark in 1956 and often visited its island of Bornholm, where he saw landscapes for the first time, his second wife Marlena, a ceramicist and Danish citizen. 

In 1968, David Driskell tapped him to become an artist-in-residence in Fisk University’s Art Department in Nashville, where Driskell was chair. Williams was among six artists that Driskell hired to help build the department and took ceramic classes with Earl Hooks. Williams’ wife Marlena accompanied him, and they set up a studio. He developed ceramic practice and taught at Fisk for the 1968–1969 school year. At the end of his residency at Fisk, he assembled a farewell exhibit of his paintings, color woodcuts and pottery at the school. In 1969, he and Marlena returned to Denmark, where he continued to work and taught in his studio in Frederiksberg. 

William E. Artis 

Born in Washington, NC, William E. Artis moved to New York during the Harlem Renaissance like fellow North Carolina native artists Charles Alston and Romare Bearden. Artis took private sculpture lessons with Augusta Savage and studied with Robert Laurent at the Art Students League with a Harmon Foundation scholarship. After service in the Air Force during World War II, Artis studied at the New York State College of Ceramics. He was awarded the Rosenwald Fund fellowship in 1946 and collaborated with the Croatian sculptor Ivan Mestrovic (1883- 1962). 

William Artis moved to the Midwest in the early 1950s to teach art and to study the Sioux Indian culture – he taught at the Holy Rosary (now Red Cloud) School on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota. He joined the Chadron State College faculty as an assistant instructor in 1954 – then named Nebraska State Teachers College. Artis was a professor of sculpture and ceramics at Chadron State College until 1965. Artis became an associate professor at Mankato State College in Mankato, Minnesota, until 1975. Artis received a retrospective at Fisk University in 1971. William Artis’s artwork today is in the collection of the Smithsonian American Museum of Art, the Museum of Nebraska Art, the Schein-Joseph International Museum of Ceramic Art, New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University and Chadron State College. Schulman p. 134, Nolting pp. 58-59, 89. 

William Artis continued to teach until his retirement in 1975, just two years before his death. Samella Lewis, the influential artist, scholar, and co-founder of , mourned his passing in the journal: “Earth . . . water . . . fire . . . air. From the dawn of his existence, man has used these elements to express his joys and sorrows and dreams. And so, we understand why clay was William Artis’s medium through which he expressed tenderness and hope. To the world of art, he left a rich legacy of sculpture and ceramics.” 

Myrtle Williams 

Myrtle Williams is a graduate of Beaver College with a degree in fine arts who also attended art classes at Montgomery County Community College, where she focused on ceramics. Williams’ hand-built sculptures depict black women as goddesses, where she pays tribute to women of the past, present and future. Her figurative busts of black women and vessels range in scale, reference, and finish. The mouths of her figures are always singing so they cannot be stripped of their voices. Inspired by black women singers, social figures, and leaders of change reflected in her different series. Her work has been exhibited in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Washington DC. Williams also worked as a studio assistant and taught classes as an adjunct instructor at Montgomery Community College after completing a residency program at the University of the Arts, Philadelphia. Recently Williams’ work has been exhibited with Salon 94 and Salon 94 Design.  

Related Reading:

Earl Hooks  

Earl Hooks was among the most significant Black ceramic artists of the 20th Century and the founder of Studio A, one of the country’s first Black-owned and operated fine arts galleries in Gary, Indiana. Born August 2, 1927, in Baltimore, Earl Hooks received a BA degree from Howard University in 1949, attended Catholic University in Washington, DC from 1949-51 and then received graduate certificates from both Rochester Institute of Technology in 1954 and the School of American Craftsman in New York in ceramics in 1955. He served as both professor and chair of the art department at Fisk University from 1961-67.

Hooks’ vessels featured astounding biomorphic shapes that epitomize his mid-career work in ceramics. It displays his commitment to exploring the relationships between design, balance, and form. Hooks rose to prominence due to his application of naturally occurring shapes to functional sculptures. His works take on bulbous shapes with intentional ceramic inclusions and a matte glaze that scatters reflected light in dispersed directions. 

Hooks gained recognition for his use of monochromatic forms that maximized the inherent properties of his materials – creating his quiet and somber sculptural works. Artist and art historian Amalia Amaki has described Hooks as “committed to portrayals related to the African American experience and creative techniques that emphasized his keen understanding of the relationships between balance, light, harmony and space.” 

The contemporary market value placed on twentieth-century African-American ceramicists reflects the recontextualization of a generation of artists that were overlooked. The practices of William E. Artis, Earl Hooks, Yvonne Tucker, Myrtle Williams, and Walter Williams are deeply rooted in their materialism, personal narrative, ancestry, and comprehension of the five fundamental elements of the earth. Influences that range from Women’s empowerment, naturalia, and craftsmanship are among some of the reasons why pots from ceramicists are sought after today.  

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Swann’s Contemporary Art auction on November 16 spans the last fifty-plus years of artistic creativity, encompassing mid-century Abstract Expressionism to the present day, with compelling examples in all media, including painting, sculpture, drawing and prints.

Abstract Expressionism

The auction begins with a strong selection of Abstract Expressionist works by artists including Adolph Gottlieb, Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner, Louise Nevelson and others.  

European Artists

Left: Lot 99: Stephen Antonakos, Untitled Construction, found metal and wood elements, dowels, paint and sewn fabric, 1961. Estimate $7,000 to $10,000.

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The sale continues with a wide variety of works by European artists such as Jean Dubuffet and Pierre Soulages, as well as American artists including Leon Golub and Philip Guston, and Op Art and color theory works by Bridget Riley, Josef Albers, and Yves Klein.  There is also a fine run of limited editions by Alexander Calder.

Pop Art

The ever-popular section of Pop Art and related works includes drawings by Andy Warhol, multiple editions by Roy Lichtenstein spanning the length of his storied career, and colorful works by James Rosenquist, Robert Indiana, Ed Ruscha, and Keith Haring.

Color Field Artists

A strong selection of abstract, minimalist and Color Field artists follows, including signature examples by Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly, Brice Marden, Agnes Martin and Kenneth Noland.

Works from the 1980s

Right: Lot 245: Richard Hambleton, Kaerhmu (Shadowman), acrylic on canvas, 1982. Estimate $30,000 to $50,000.

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Kippenberger, Barbara Kruger, Eric Fischl and Jennifer Bartlett, as well as an early Shadowman oil on canvas by Richard Hambleton.

The auction concludes with an array of paintings, sculpture and limited editions from the past two decades by a bevy of international artists including Cecily Brown, Peter Doig, Kehinde Wiley, Shepard Fairey, Damien Hirst and others.

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The fall Modern & Post-War Art auction will include work from the early twentieth century through post-World War II art movements such as Pop, Minimalism, and Abstract Expressionism.

Jack Tworkov & Wilfrid Zogbaum

Two mid-century artists whose works are featured in this sale are Jack Tworkov and Wilfrid Zogbaum.

In 1968, Jack Twokov met the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson and sat for several portraits. The two artists were introduced by Janice Biala, sister of Tworkov. Calendar Collage, which was once in the collection of Cartier-Bresson, dates from the summer of their introduction and is a great timepiece—aside from the fact that it is an assemblage of calendar pages.

Zogbaum, along with his contemporaries, Ibram Lassaw and Seymour Lipton, are amongst the short list of sculptors who created accomplished works in the 1930s and 40s as part of the biomorphic, new plastic, and non-objective abstract art genre, who then successfully transitioned into Abstract Expressionism of the post-war era. The steel weldment created in 1960 is very reminiscent of the works of David Smith, with the joining of random shapes such as scrap metal and utilitarian objects into his composition. Zogbaum often incorporated found objects into his compositions. Rocks, set into undulating braches of steel is a typical format in his nature-inspired creations.

Further Highlights

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Swann Galleries’ October 19 sale of African American Art proved consistent among new contemporary artists and auction house favorites. Regarding the auction, department director Nigel Freeman noted, “I’m very happy with the sale’s results, including high prices achieved across a broad spectrum of artists, from Edward Bannister to Simone Leigh.”

Abstract Art

Left: Lot 111: Sam Gilliam, Untitled, acrylic and metallic paint on draped polypropylene fabric, 1979. Sold for $197,000.

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The sale was led by a 1979 draped canvas painting by Sam Gilliam at $197,000. The work came to auction with a strong provenance, having once been in the ex-collection of noted printmaker Lou Stovall after being acquired directly from the artist.

Additional abstract highlights included Alma Thomas’ Etude, acrylic on paper, 1968, at $161,000 and Transcendental, watercolor, 1965, at $149,000; Alvin D. Loving, Jr.’s Janice, acrylic on canvas, 1970, brought $149,000; and Romare Bearden’s The River Merchant’s Wife, oil on canvas, 1954, earned $118,750.

Sculpture & 3D Objects

Specialist Corey Serrant remarked on the strong results for sculptures in the auction, “Robust bidding and consistent sales led to a strong hammer during a relaxed market. There was strong interest in 3D objects ranging from early twentieth-century sculpture, midcentury assemblage, and contemporary works. Early ceramics from Simone Leigh, assemblage from Noah Purifoy, and bronze sculptures from Richmond Barthé were consistent to their market sales.” Simone Leigh’s glazed terra cotta stoneware cowrie shell, circa 2011-12, earned $149,000, and Noah Purifoy’s 1995 assemblage of 30 oil cans reached $18,750.

Early Works

Early works proved to be popular with Edward M. Bannister’s At “Smiths Palace,” Narragansett Bay, oil on canvas, circa 1881, at $137,000; and Henry Ossawa Tanner’s study Untitled (Flight Into Egypt), oil on thick cardstock, circa 1923, at $112,500.

Figurative Works

The auction was rounded out by a selection of figurative works, including Hughie Lee-Smith’s Untitled (Two Young Men on a Beach), oil on board, 1954 ($106,250), and Man on a Bench Reading, oil on canvas, 1998-99 ($87,500). Additional standout works included John Bigger’s Cotton Picker, conté crayon with gouache, 1951 ($68,750); Bisa Butler’s La Quinceañera, quilted and appliquéd fabric with lace collage, 2007 ($55,000); and Charles White, Waiting (Awaiting His Return), lithograph, 1946 ($55,000).

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In Norman Wilkinson’s own words, his “whole interest was ships and the sea.” He was an illustrator and maritime painter of great renown (one of his paintings was commissioned to hang in the smoking room on the Titanic) and he even devised a camouflage system for the British Navy during World War I called “Dazzle Painting.”  

And yet, for all his fame, he is perhaps best known to the public for the 100+ posters he designed for the LMS railway in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s.  Most desirable of these are his vistas and landscapes, urban and rural, from the skyscape of London to the rolling hills of Scotland, but also including scenes of dry docks, ports and other industrial areas.  

The allure and skill of his work was best summed up in 1927, when John Harrison, reviewing the artist’s work in the pages of Commercial Art, Art & Industry, explained that “Norman Wilkinson is one of the best present day, realistic, poster designers. [His] work is English and atmospheric . . . When we say realism, of course, we use the word in the deliberate sense of poster realism. It does not mean that Wilkinson ‘puts everything in’ in a faithful and academic manner. Far from it. He illuminates and selects, but he illuminates and selects, with a sense of the poetry and amplitude of Nature. . . working in broad lines and leaving large blank spaces, he retains a great fidelity to the spirit of the actual scene he is depicting. He does not reduce a poster to a purely geometrical arrangement; he reduces it to the essence of the landscape (or the essence of the sea). For one with a considerable reputation as a painter, Wilkinson shows a remarkable attitude for poster technique. The excellent thing is that he presents a complete scene, characteristic and convincing as reality, it’s simple and vivid with the simplicity and vividness nowadays demanded from an advertisement” (p. 270). 

Norman Wilkinson began his career providing black-and-white illustrations for the Illustrated London News and other periodicals. He was a man of many talents, but anchoring all of them was his passion for maritime painting. 

A benchmark of his success and renown as a maritime painter was the commission he received to paint Plymouth Harbour, a painting that hung over the mantelpiece in the smoking room of the Titanic and a companion painting of New York Harbor, Approach to the New World, commissioned to hang in the S.S. Olympic, Titanic’s sister ship. 

Wilkinson’s greatest historical claim to fame is that he was the creator of a camouflage system for ships used by the British Navy during World War I, called “Dazzle Painting.” Specifically, it was more of a “disguise and confuse” system. As Wilkinson writes, “since it was impossible to paint a ship so that she could not be seen by a submarine, the extreme opposite was the answer – in other words, to paint her, not for low visibility, but in such a way as to break up her form and this confuse a submarine officer as to the course on which she was heading” (A Brush With Life, p. 79). 

English Railway Posters

Wilkinson designed his first poster, for the Booth shipping line, in 1903 and his next in 1905 for the London and North Western Railway Company. He commends his own design by explaining that “at this date the Railway poster was generally an uninspired jumble of small views of resorts, frequently arranged in little circular frames, with a good deal of meaningless decoration interwoven between each picture. The effect was a hotch potch (sic) which was quite unintelligible at a distance.” (A Brush With Life p. 19) 

The image he designed, as he continues in his autobiography, allowed him to “lay claim to being the father and mother of the ‘artistic’ poster on English railway stations” (A Brush With Life, p. 20).  

Left: Norman Wilkinson, White Star / Dominion / Montreal-Quebec-Liverpool, circa 1908. Sold November 2015 for $1,680.

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In addition to his work for the railways, Wilkinson also designed posters for shipping companies including White Star Line, Cunard Line, the Allan Line, the Blue Star Line and others. Wilkinson designed a number of posters for the Canadian Pacific Railway, all dealing with their sea-faring operations.

Wilkinson’s railway posters range from sublime, breathtaking landscapes to mundane, cultural tableaux and industrial scenes. One series he designed for the LMS consisted of buildings from Famous Public Schools on the LMS; “Each contains information on the history and customs of the school depicted and bears the crest of both the school and the LMS. Others in the series include Bedford, Berkhamsted, Fettes College, Mill Hill, Oundle, Rugby, St. Paul’s (London), Sedbergh, Shrewsbury, Stonyhurst, Stowe, Uppingham and Westminster” (Railway p. 122). Another series depicted several historical, interior scenes such as The Birthplace of Robert Burns – Alloway – Ayrshire, Dove Cottage Grasmere and Sulgrave Manor. 

“The LMS promoted trade custom as well as tourism. [Posters depicting] factories, railhead distribution and exceptional loads were encouraged” (Railway p. 106) and a number of Wilkinson’s posters depict industrial and commercial vistas: A Midland Coalfield, Ship Building on the Clyde, Grangemouth Docks, and Lanarkshire Steelworks, among many others. While these may not depict inviting, cheerful and alluring scenery, they remain popular among collectors. 

Norman Wilkinson’s Golf Poster Designs

Left: Norman Wilkinson, Golf in Northern Ireland, circa 1925. Sold November 2007 for $19,200.

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Although his posters generally do not depict people, by far the most popular and expensive of his posters are those that depict golf scenes. The highest price paid for a Wilkinson poster was $19,200, achieved in 2007 for Golf In Northern Ireland, 1925. The second highest price was for Sport on the LMS / Golf, circa 1930, which achieved $14,000 in 2010. 

The majority of his posters, however, are much more affordable, with average prices between $1,000-$4,000.  

Harrison, sums up the artist’s graphic oeuvre with the following “He remains always an Englishman with the broad technique and charm of manner, which characterized the painters of the 18th century. Like them also he employs a rather delicate and subdued color scheme and rarely seeks to gain an effect by strident notes of primary color or affective discords, such as many artists nowadays employ. Pale green and blue, with deep notes of brown and indigo are characteristic and distinguish his posters from the usual color schemes of the day” (Commercial art and Industry, 1927, page 270 and following). 

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Our Prints & Drawings department shares their picks for the November 16, 2023, sale of Contemporary Art.

Meagan Gandolfo, Specialist
Lot 119: Norman Ives, Untitled, 1977

In the Prints and Drawings Department, we are familiar with Norman Ives through his partnership with Sewell Sillman, and their founding of the print publishing company Ives-Sillman, Inc. Ives, however, was himself an artist and graphic designer. He began creating collages in the 1950s after graduating from Yale’s Graphic Design program. With painstaking precision, Ives cut, arranged, and glued down printed letter forms and designs from his own shop, resulting in a wonderful mosaic of subtle shifts in tonality.  While we have offered Ives-Sillman’s best-known screenprint portfolio, Josef Albers’ Interaction of Color every year, we rarely have the opportunity to offer work from the visionary artist “behind the screens” of some of the most iconic print publications of the twentieth century. 

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Left: Norman Ives, Untitled, printed paper collage on paper, 1977. Estimate $1,500 to $2,500.

Todd Weyman, Director
Lot 148: Roy Lichtenstein, Crying Girl, 1963

Roy Lichtenstein’s Crying Girl, 1963, is among the icons of early Pop Art printmaking. The artist designed the print as an announcement for his solo exhibition at Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, September 26–October 24, 1963. This was the inaugural collaboration of Lichtenstein and Castelli using such an exhibition announcement. A portion of the printings for the announcement were left unfolded, untrimmed (with white margins), and pencil signed by Lichtenstein, such as the current work, available for purchase at the gallery during the exhibition or given to prominent gallery patrons; a larger group of the announcements were trimmed, folded in quarters and mailed to Castelli’s list. Extant examples like this one, with its strong colors and superb state of preservation, are extremely scarce, given the more ephemeral nature of the announcement when it was originally produced, and predating Lichtenstein’s meteoric rise in artistic fame through the 1960s. According to Lichtenstein’s printing collaborator on the project, Marcus Ratliff at Colorcraft, New York, the artist had difficulty selecting the proper red pigment to use, but finally settled on the shade when, looking around his office, found it on a package of L & M cigarettes in the vending machine in the hall.

Alayna Ho, Department Administrator
Lot 197: Ellsworth Kelly, Colored Paper Image XV (Dark Gray and Blue), 1976.

Colored Paper Image XV (Dark Gray and Blue) is a rare detour from Kelly’s tight and pristine print works. In his first and only foray into the medium of papermaking, Kelly experiments with color and allows the unpredictability of paper pulp and pigments to dictate his work. With dye bleeding into the margins, pulp extending out from the edges, and texture left behind in the fields of color, he allows traces of the process to be left behind in the final result, giving the viewer a rare sighting of the artist’s hand. Despite being met with positive reviews, Kelly saw this work as unsuccessful and ultimately lost interest in the medium, however, it acted as inspiration to David Hockney who later went on to collaborate with the same papermakers Kelly worked with to create his well known Paper Pool series.  

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Right: Ellsworth Kelly, Colored Paper Image XV (Dark Gray and Blue), colored and pressed pulp paper, 1976. Estimate $20,000 to $30,000.

Tatiana Mezitis, Prints & Drawings Intern
Lot 108: Stephen Antonakos, Sky of Mani, 1987

Stephen Antonakos, master of neons and colorful geometric prints, blurs the frontier between minimalism and abstraction. His works traverse a wide variety of mediums including collages, sculptures, and lithographs. Part of what makes his art stand out is his ability to manipulate color and contrast. Sky of Mani is a striking example of Antonakos’ gestural capacity, particularly because of the three distinct planes of composition. The top section, a deeply glittering violet, evokes a nighttime sky, whereas the glittering white in the central section brings to mind the dazzling Greek sunshine. On the very bottom, a stripe of solid green provides a surprising contrast and adds an abstract dimension to this intriguing print. As a Greek-American with familial roots in Mani, I appreciate the setting that inspired this piece, and am drawn to Antonakos’ style in general.

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This December sale is set to include a wide assortment of maps and graphics chronicling the advancement of knowledge of the world from the sixteenth through the twentieth century. Featured themes will be maps of the American continent from its early colonial settlement, the Revolutionary War. The period of growth and expansion in the West, all the way to some of the earliest established commercial airline flight paths in 1929.

Highlights include a set of unassembled engraved gore segments which construct Vincenzo Coronelli’s enormous 42-inch terrestrial globe from 1688. Several unique manuscript maps will also be on offer, including a neatly detailed hand-drawn account of an extensive hike from New York City through New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania in the summers of 1860 and 1861 by a recent engineering graduate of the Brooklyn Collegiate Polytechnic Institute, only months before beginning his career as a Navy paymaster during the Civil War.

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Harold Porcher’s Illustrated Glossary of Modern & Post-War Movements

In early 2020 I joined Swann and created the Modern & Post-War Art department. This category goes against the grain slightly, as it is typical for auction houses to pair Modernism with Impressionism, and Post-War with Contemporary art. I believe movements that took place in the arts just prior to World War II are more aligned with modernist trends and not relative to what is generally trending in the current contemporary art scene. Occasionally I have conversations about the categorization of art with our clients and discover many people are unclear on the meaning of various terms. This is my attempt to offer a linear listing of terms with visual prompts to help define Modernism in some of its major iterations throughout its history.

The Beginning of Modern Art

The term, “Modern Art,” was first used in relation to Édouard Manet’s painting déjeuner sur l’herbe.” The year was 1863, the venue was the Salon des Refusés, Paris. I tend to narrow the bookends on the starting dates to Cezanne breaking away from the Impressionists and finding his own path. Cezanne left Paris in 1870.

Cubism

Inspired by Paul Cezanne’s unique patchwork style of painting representing shifts in light and color relating to his subject, younger artists, Pablo Picasso, and Georges Braque began fracturing the picture plane into multiple views of their subject. They limited the palette range to unify the composition. This was the beginning of Cubism. The early years of Cubism are referred to as Analytical Cubism. After 1912 emerged the second iteration, Synthetic Cubism.

Fauvism

In 1905 Pierre Matisse and Andre Derain spent nine weeks in Collioure France creating plein-air paintings while experimenting with color and brushstroke. The resulting artworks when presented in Paris were deemed by critics as the works of “fauves” (wild beasts). The term stuck and influenced many generations of painters.

Suprematism, Constructivism, & Futurism

Many artists were inspired by Cubism, throughout Europe and in the Americas. Eadweard Muybridge’s experiments with photography, advancing our understanding of motion, had an impact on sculptors and painters as well. In Russia, artists developed Suprematism, Constructivism, and Futurism. Italy also had a Futurist movement. In France, there was Orphism alongside the works of Americans in France who spawned Synchromism. And in England, there was the Vorticist.

Dadaism

The Dada art movement was born out of the horrors of World War I. The founding members shared a goal to produce anti-rational art. Amongst them, Francis Picabia, as a reaction to industrial America, created derisive machine drawings. These works held influence, in perhaps an adverse way, on Charles Sheeler and a group of artists deemed the Precisionists. Precisionism began as an American art form rendering the machine age in clean, simplified forms.

Surrealism

Modern psychology impacted the arts of many disciplines. The Surrealists created art that explored the power of the subconscious. This unconventional art form utilized chance and autonomy to free the individual from traditional methodology in painting and draftsmanship.

German Expressionism, Non-Objective Abstraction, & Biomorphic Abstraction

Wassily Kandinsky was an influential innovator and instructor whose involvement with German Expressionism, Non-Objective Abstraction, (using line, form, and color combinations to provoke emotional response), and Biomorphic Abstraction, (shapes inspired by microscopic organisms) shaped the direction of Modernist painting. In 1927 Baroness Hila von Rebay, encouraged by Rudolf Bauer, set sail for New York Harbor with a mission to promote the concept of Non-Objective Abstraction, and find a patron to purchase works by Kandinsky, Bauer, and other like-minded artists. Her efforts would lead to the creation of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, later renamed the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art.

Many historians conclude that Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings are the culmination of Modernism. I include Color Field, Pop, Minimalism, Op Art, Fluxus, and other post-war art movements as a continuation of modernist concepts. With these indicators noted, I frame Modernism from the 1870s to the 1970s. Part II will explore Modernism in the post-war era.

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The start of the fall 2023 season at Swann brought Skye Lacerte as a specialist for the Illustration Art department. We chatted with Lacerte to discuss all this illustration art.

Tell us a little bit about life before Swann. What brought you into the world of illustration art? 

I’ve spent the past 15 years in the Midwest as a Special Collections curator at Washington University in St. Louis where I helped build an archival collection dedicated to illustration art. At the time that I started, there was no collection like it at an academic institution in existence. So, in a sense, we were shaping the field of illustration and visual culture studies which has since developed into a popular area of interest for scholars, students, and practitioners. 

Before St. Louis, I lived in Southern California where I moved through various fields including the entertainment industry and civil engineering before returning to library school. My interest and education in art history led me to a position as processing archivist at The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. The combination of my experience with popular culture, art, and library science made my transition to Illustration Art natural. 

I was a fan of illustration art before I knew the term existed. As a child/young adult, I was an avid collector of many forms of visual communication including movie posters, picture books, pulp fiction novels, record album covers, and any antique with graphics that caught my eye. Studying Art History in college, I was drawn to contemporary artists who seemed to me to be influenced by popular visual culture such as Barbara Krueger, Carrie Mae Weems, Cindy Sherman, and Ed Ruscha. When the curator position opened at the Dowd Illustration Research Archive, I realized the role completely aligned with my skills and interests. 

What has been your favorite work you’ve had the opportunity to handle? Why? 

The two paintings by Ludwig Bemelmans for the Office of War Information (OWI) have been a real pleasure to handle and learn about. The Madeline creator was recruited to use his talent to help refugees and allies from other countries who were learning to speak English. I am especially drawn to the charming graphics in Still Life with Wine, Cheese, and Fruit. It’s a reminder to me of how much we all have in common. 

What about an all-time favorite work? 

I can’t possibly pick one favorite, but here is one that is significant to me. My favorite work from the collection at my previous job was Dick Stone’s illustration for the Kurt Vonnegut story, Next Door, published in Cosmopolitan in 1955. I’m a sucker for drama, and this work is full of it. The image uses a sequential series of images to tell the story of a little boy listening to a crime taking place next door. The work is laid out effectively and the use of a two-color palette adds to the artistry and emotional impact. I am thrilled to have more works by Stone offered in our 2023 auction!   

Do you have a favorite book? 

I’m a big fan of mystery and hard-boiled detective novels. My favorite of the genre is probably Raymond Chandler’s, The Lady in the Lake. I love stories from an outsider’s perspective, with a strong moral compass and a low tolerance for fools, set during a time when America was transitioning to a new, modern reality. Not to mention plot twists, snappy dialogue, and melodramatic characters. 

You recently moved to NYC, how have you been enjoying your time in the city? 

My partner and I have been enjoying getting to know our neighborhood in the Bronx. We’ve been exploring the streets, restaurants, and shops. There’s a beautiful community here: lively, artistic, and welcoming. I recommend making a trip to Mott Haven for a visit. 

Swann is an auction house by collectors, for collectors… do you collect anything? 

I have collected many types of objects over the years but have had to slow down due to space restrictions. Now I’ve turned my focus to our walls. I have a few works of illustration art in my home, as well as vintage prints and photographs. There’s always more wall space and I like the fact that I can look at my collection all the time and they’re not just packed away in boxes.  

What drew you to the auction world? 

Honestly, Swann drew me to the auction world. It was not something I necessarily saw in my future, although I wasn’t opposed to it. It wasn’t until I met the folks at Swann that I knew this field was for me. Everyone who works here is not only dedicated to their area of expertise, but to the success of all staff. It’s a welcoming environment full of hard-working, creative nerds like me.  

What is a common misconception about illustration art? 

I think one misconception (that has already started to change) is that illustrators are solely draftsmen, hired to replicate whatever the art director wants. But as one can see from the wide range of styles, media, and subject matter in our auctions, illustrators do put themselves into their work. They may be expressing someone else’s words, but they’re still interpreting them through their lens. All illustrators do this to varying degrees, of course. Some are hired to create very specific compositions to express a text they have no connection to. Others are hired to write visual essays for which they oversee the content, point of view, and approach. No matter where they are on that spectrum, they all have something to say. 

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After a brief hiatus, the auction solely devoted to Illustration Art is returning on December 14, 2023. The sale will feature artwork published in a wide variety of magazines and books, as well as work from calendars, posters, costume and fashion design, cartoons, and more. Highlights include poster art made for the Office of War Information by Ludwig Bemelmans, a museum-worthy oil painting by Dean Cornwell for Cosmopolitan, several stunning Art Deco watercolors, and the alluring glamour of pinup art by some of the genre’s most skillful artists.

Published anonymously in Fortune magazine, “To Heaven by Subway” provides a thorough and intriguing description of Coney Island near the end of the Great Depression. This illustration for the article by Robert Riggs helps provide a colorful picture of Coney’s many attractions and its visitors, including the games along the Bowery.

Book illustrations are represented by works by George Ziel, John Vassos, and Harry Barton.  Of particular note are Robert Shore’s illustration for the limited edition version of From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon by Jules Verne in 1970, oil on board, as well as Edward Gorey’s book jacket art for Fonthill, a Comedy by Aubrey Mennen.

Also featured are two rare pieces that have never been to auction or on exhibit created by Ludwig Bemelmans for the Office of War Information (OWI). Established in June 1942, the OWI was responsible for developing programs to inform the public and promote war efforts. The informational works were designed to encourage the Allies to keep fighting, support unliberated countries to maintain their struggle and weaken the will of the Axis powers.

Pinup art by artists such as Earl Moran, Fritz Willis, and Bill Randall are available at auction. The stunning burlesque Fan Dancer by Al Buell exhibits his masterful skills and dramatic style, and is a rare opportunity to own an original work by the artist.

On offer are illustrations for children’s books and magazines, as well as animation and cartoon art by artists such as Ludwig Bemelmans, Harrison Cady, Richard Erdoes, and Walt Disney Studios. Highlights include a large Disney Western-themed background concept painting and multi-cel setup by Walt Peregoy for The Saga of Windwagon Smith (1961), a small production from which very little material has survived. 

An illustration by Arthur Getz stands out among this auction’s offerings from the New Yorker. Getz’s cover art for February 26, 1955 depicts a charming view of a snowy and bustling Central Park. The sale also features New Yorker cartoons by Gluyas Williams, William Steig and Ed Fisher, among others.

The auction will also feature a number of fashion, theatre and costume designs, including this Camouflage sketch by 1980s fashion designer icon, Stephen Sprouse. This clothing line came out of a collaboration with artist Andy Warhol who agreed to let Sprouse use imagery from his series of camouflage paintings. The sketch is signed in two places by Warhol.

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The December 14, 2023 auction of Illustration Art at Swann Galleries features a selection of original animation cels from Walt Disney Studios’ iconic films.

Lot 15: Harry Reeves, Reflection in ice, circa 1940

This is an original Disney skating-themed animation storyboard/concept piece by Harry Reeves, likely for an unused gag in one of the studio’s 1940s “package features.” The humorous scene is skillfully drawn in pastel and charcoal on circa 1940s 5-hole punched Disney studios animation paper. The piece has the studio catalog number 11854 written in pencil at the bottom.

Possible candidates for the intended use of this drawing include the Once Upon a Wintertime sequence in Melody Time (1948), or Disney’s abandoned Currier and Ives feature (also late 1940s), which would have been a hybrid of animation and live action, along the lines of Song of The South.

Elaborate color storyboards like this would have been shot as part of a Leica reel (known as an animatic or story reel today), a film (often combined with a soundtrack) which gave the crew a sense of the story before proceeding with the animation phase of production.

Harry Reeves began his animation career in 1929 at the Pat Sullivan Cartoon Studios in New York City (working with Otto Messmer, creator of Felix the cat), but soon moved on to to work at Disney in 1930. The bulk of Harry Reeves’ work at Disney was in the story department, where he became was instrumental in the development of numerous classic shorts and features, including Saludos Amigos (1942), The Three Caballeros (1944), Make Mine Music (1945), Melody Time (1948), The Adventures of Ichabod and Mister Toad (1949), and Cinderella (1950).

Much of the surviving art for Disney Studios’ productions is without attribution, and it is very rare to find original art signed by Harry Reeves.

Lot 16: Walt Disney Studios, The Animals of the Forest, 1937.

This is an adorable hand-inked and painted animation cel of the forest creatures from the landmark Disney feature Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which premiered December 21st, 1937. The matching frame appears at the 16 minute 5 second mark, as Snow White enters the Dwarfs’ cottage for the first time, and her forest friends timidly accompany her.

The cel is an early example of a Courvoisier setup, which at the time consisted of a production cel presented over a wood veneer background. It is unusual to see this many characters in a Snow White forest animals cel setup.

Lot 17: Walt Disney Studios, Prince John, 1973.

This is a hand-painted Disney animation cel of the villainous Prince John from the classic animated feature Robin Hood, which was first released November 8, 1973. The matching shot appears 43 minutes 29 seconds into the film, after Robin Hood has been captured at the archery tournament and says to Maid Marian “Darling, I love you more than life itself.”—to which Prince John says in the matching scene: “Ah, young love. Your pleas have not fallen upon a heart of [this frame] stone”—only to sentence him to be executed. The cel bears the authenticity seal of the official Disney art program. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the beloved animated feature’s release.

Lot 18: Walt Disney Studios, The Wolf, 1946.

This is an original hand-inked and painted cel production of the vicious wolf from the Disney adaptation of Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, part of Disney’s classic 1946 musical “package feature” Make Mine Music. The matching scene appears at 11 min 54 sec during the film’s climax, as the wolf lunges for the feisty (but dazed) woodpecker Sacha, but is held back by the rope which Peter and Ivan the cat have tied to his tail.

Lot 19: Walt Disney Studios, Donald Duck sequence, circa 1950s.

The matching shot starts 1 minute 25 seconds into the short when Donald (acting the boorish tourist) spots a Native American doing a sand painting and says (as seen in these drawings) “Well, well—a sand painting!”—then eagerly rushes over to snap a flash photo, and nearly interferes with the painting before Ranger Woodlore ushers him away.

It is very unusual for this many sequential production drawings from this era to have remained together, and it is a strong possibility that these were kept in sequence for instructional purposes at the studio (i.e. to demonstrate a walk cycle).

Lot 20: Walt Peregoy, The Saga of Windwagon Smith, circa 1961.

Lot 22: Walt Disney Studios, The Colonel Twilight bark sequence, 1961.

This is a large image animation production cel of old sheepdog the Colonel from the classic Disney animated feature 101 Dalmations (1961). The cel was used in the memorable “Twilight Bark” sequence, with matching scene appearing at the 38 minute 54 second mark, when the Colonel learns that Towser the bloodhound is barking an “alert” and says “Well, I’ll see what he wants,” and barks his first reply.

This cel was apparently originally sold in the 1960s at the legendary Disneyland Art Corner store, as evidenced by the specific lithographic background used in the program’s 101 Dalmations setups and the gold Art Corner label which has been attached to the back of the modern frame.

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Swann held its first sale dedicated to the accomplishments of women on July 15, 2021. The sale, curated by senior specialist Devon Eastland, included materials that aimed to highlight the stories of all those in the community who identify as women in the fields of activism, art and design, community, education, entertainment, health and wellness, science and innovation, sport, and work. Notable highlights from this auction include an exhibition binding from 1902 created by the Guild of Women Binders which delivered $12,350—the Guild was established in 1898 to provide women training in the craft. An archive of letters written by Jane Russell also performed well in the sale. The letters, written by the wife of a Massachusetts ship captain, reveal a young woman’s experience aboard a whaling ship in the South Pacific in the 1840s and earned $30,000.

In the two sales that have followed, we’ve seen success with literary icons, including an autograph letter signed by Louisa May Alcott in which she describes the beloved heroine of Little Women, Jo March, universally identified as a thinly-veiled depiction of Alcott herself, as “a failure” that earned $23,750 over a $1,200 to $1,800 estimate, and an archive of photographs and letters descended directly from Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s family that brought $60,000; a family archive of photos and letters sent home by Robert Louis Stevenson’s wife Fanny Stevenson that documents her life with the author in Samoa, at $25,000, and Loretta Belle Tulian’s photo albums and travel diaries of life in the American West achieved $5,250.

As we move into the fourth iteration of the sale, we’re aiming to better define its scope.

Art or texts that directly represent feminist pursuits and ideology, like Mary Beth Edelson’s Some Living American Women Artists, Guerrilla Girls posters, and Suffrage materials. 

Art or texts made by women in fields in which women had (or have) been grossly underrepresented. Trailblazers: the literal first or members of the first generation of women to have success as illustrators, painters, writers, sculptors, etc. People like Amelia Earhart, Anna Vaughn Hyatt Huntington, Phillis Wheatley, political figures, scientists, even heretofore obscure figures are of interest.

Art or texts that illustrate the physical, personal, cultural, or emotional experience of being a woman. This would include art made by women that also portrays women, or artists in different media working together, self-portraits, portraits of other artists, writers, thinkers, activists, meditations on work, motherhood, the body, etc. 

Art that incorporates techniques or materials that is typically, or could be, considered craft. For example, Myrlande Constant’s beaded Haitian Vodou banners, or the silk apron by Diane Katsiaficas‘s printed with images of female silk workers. 

Material created by anyone who identifies as a woman, including work by and depictions of queer and trans women.

Focus on Women’s main goal is to exceed expectations, filling a gap in the market, and seeing material sell better and for higher prices because of its presence in the sale.

The spring sale is scheduled for May 23, 2024.

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Swann is pleased to present our fourth Artists of the WPA auction this winter, 2024. The auction has a wide range of objects including prints, posters, paintings, mural studies, dioramas, and New Deal work program signage. Many artists honed their craft while employed in government programs.

Dorothea Lange’s connection to her subject is inherent, but her mastery at capturing moving and thought-provoking compositions is a skill that she developed through practice. Migrant Mother is one of the most recognizable images from the Great Depression era. Joseph Solman and his like-minded contemporaries that would form The Ten benefited greatly from their time employed in work programs. These artists pushed the boundaries of subject and format with themes of social justice and modernist stylizations. The Excavation is a great example of Solman’s exploration into modernist styles.  Artworks such as these were not widely accepted in the American art market and without the New Deal projects, they would not have the freedoms to explore their range.

The New Deal created four specific programs employing artists and artisans:

Works of Art Project, PWAP, December 1933 – June 1934.

Section of Painting and Sculpture, October 1934 – 1943.

Treasury Relief Art Project, TRAP, July 1935 – 1939.

The Work Project Administration’s federal Art Project, WPA/FAP, August 1935 – June 1943.

The Artists of the WPA auction is a timed sale. This allows our clients ample time to view the works, ask our specialists questions, and place bids. We hope you will visit our website and witness this multidepartmental effort to bring fresh eyes to this important historical era in American art.

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Swann Galleries continued to offer exceptional auctions of quality material in 2023. The year featured several collections, including a special selection of 100 works from the Stephen White collection in the April sale of Fine Photographs, the collection of Norman Dolph in the June sale of Contemporary Art, and works from the estate of artist Will Barnet in the September auction of American Art. The house also welcomed two new specialists into the fold: Corey Serrant joined Swann as the associate director of LGBTQ+ Art, Material Culture & History, as well as serving as a specialist for the African American Art department; and Skye Lacerte has stepped into the role of specialist for the Illustration Art department.

Browse below for a look at some of the year’s highlights.

Books & Manuscripts

Autographs

19th & 20th Century Literature, and Art, Press & Illustrated Books

Americana

Early Printed Books

Maps & Atlases

Illustration Art

Specialty Sales

Focus on Women

LGBTQ+ Art, Material Culture & History

Fine Art

Prints & Drawings

American Art: Featuring Works From the Estate of Will Barnet

African American Art

Modern & Post-War Art

Fine Photographs

Vintage Posters

The post 2023: Year in Review appeared first on Swann Galleries News.

“The alternative current of expression that informed some before it became mainstream.”

The Subculture Sale will bring works from the fringe, the avant garde and the indie for a look at the material culture of Punk, Rock, Psych, Hip Hop, Jazz and more. An interdisciplinary sale, this auction will include posters, records, photographs, fine art, autographs, books and ephemera. Fans of Swann’s similar auctions (LGBTQ+, Focus on Women and African Americana) will enjoy its contents, as will longtime New Yorkers, music aficionados, and collectors of the contemporary.

While some of the material may be recognizable, much will be a pleasant surprise to collectors who find familiar items from their formative years—issues of Cheap Date magazine are offered alongside posters for Dr. Dre, Sonic Youth and The Velvet Underground alike, while artwork from music videos by New Order and Nas brings new dimension to the MTV generation. A letter from Patti Smith features drawings and namedrops Robert Mapplethorpe; Keith Haring roasts Ronald Reagan via little-known Xerox art; an early David Wojnarowicz stencil artwork poses a powerful anti-war message.

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This auction will be a combination of many of Swann’s most desirable poster-collecting categories, presenting an exceptional, curated selection of images relating to skiing, Art Deco, Art Nouveau, travel and advertising. New to the February lineup is a robust section of Graphic Design—posters and ephemera—covering movements such as the Vienna Secession, Constructivism, Bauhaus, Mid-Century Modernism, Futurism, Dada and other scintillating styles.

Headlining Art Nouveau is Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, with one of 100 signed copies of L’Estampe Original, 1895 (see the inside front cover of this issue of The Trumpet); as well as Alphonse Mucha, with a complete portfolio of his Documents Decoratifs, 1902; and posters by Pierre Bonnard, Ludwig Holhwein, Maxfield Parrish, and Leonetto Cappiello.

Pinnacles of our annual ski poster selection are the delightful and rare St. Anton / Arlberg by Berta Czegka, and several examples by Martin Peikert and Sascha Maurer. Among some of the other featured sections will be circus and magic, ocean liner, automobiles, Mather Work Incentive, and psychedelic rock posters.Rounding out the sale with Graphic Design masterpieces, we have the rare and exquisite Bil Bol, 1907, by Akseli Gallen-Kallela, Kleine Dada Soiree, 1922, by Kurt Schwitters & Theo van Doesburg, and Emperor Francis Joseph / 60 Years Jubilee, 1908, by Bertold Loffler, offered among alluring works by László Moholy-Nagy, Enrico Prampolini, Edward McKnight Kauffer, A.M. Cassandre, Otto Baumberger, and Erik Nitsche.

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The post Auction Highlights: Vintage Posters & Graphic Design — February 29, 2024 appeared first on Swann Galleries News.

We are pleased to offer a special auction of 100 lots from the Collection of Dr. James and Debra Pearl. Rich in American masterworks, the collection features the premier photographers of the 19th-century American landscape such as Carleton Watkins, Eadweard Muybridge, and William Henry Jackson, as well as the 20th-century masters, including Ansel Adams, Irving Penn, and Edward Weston. We are featuring Richard Avedon’s exceptional portrait of Georgia O’Keeffe, as well as 6 of Irving Penn’s portraits from his Small Trades series, his portraits of Igor Stravinsky and Truman Capote, as well as imagery from Cuzco, including his iconic Cuzco Children, Peru (1948). Other highlights include Carleton Watkins’ The Domes from Yosemite Valley (1865-66; printed 1870s) and Mirror Lake and Mount Watkins, Yosemite (1861; printed 1870s), Eadweard Muybridge’s Pi-Wi-Ack, Valley of the Yosemite, Shower of Stars, Vernal Falls and Temple Peak (both 1872), Ansel Adams’ Clearing Winter Storm (1938; printed 1959-60) and Monolith, the Face of Half Dome, Yosemite National Park (1927; printed 1973-77), and Edward Weston’s rare and vintage Civilian Defense (1942) and Dunes, Oceano (White Dunes) (1936). This collection is a testament to the Pearls’ love and appreciation for the medium’s history as well as their understanding of photography’s unique and indelible beauty. 

The auction also includes numerous works for a multi-owner section, including Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Rue Mouffetard, Paris (1952; printed 1980s); Peter Hujar’s New York: Sixth Avenue (1976); Helmut Newton’s Rue Aubriot (i), Yves St. Laurent, Haute Couture Collection, Paris (1975; printed 2000s); Andy Warhol’s Polaroid Self-portrait in Fright Wig (1986); Garry Winogrand’s eponymous portfolio (1960-74; printed 1978); and a stunning oversized Ruth Bernhard Nude in the Box – Horizontal (1962; printed 1992), among much more. 

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The post Auction Highlights: An American Century: The Collection of Dr. James & Debra Pearl & Fine Photographs — February 15, 2024 appeared first on Swann Galleries News.

Join Us Tuesday, February 6, 2024 at 6:00 PM ET
Panel to Begin at 6:30 PM ET

At Swann Galleries: 104 East 25th Street, 6th Floor, NYC

Join Swann President, and Vintage Poster Director, Nicholas D. Lowry, for a panel conversation on new directions unfolding in poster collecting with Johan Kugelberg, owner of Boo-Hooray Gallery, and Angelina Lippert, Chief Curator and Director of Content of Poster House.

On view: The Subculture Sale

About the Speakers

Johan Kugelberg

Johan Kugelberg runs Boo-Hooray, a Manhattan-based company specializing in subculture archiving. He is a prolific author and a long-standing professor at Rare Book School where he lectures on post-war book arts. 

Angelina Lippert

Angelina Lippert is the Chief Curator and Director of Content of Poster House in New York City, the first museum in the United States dedicated to the art and history of the poster. She is the author of The Art Deco Poster and has lectured at SVA, The Cooper Union, NYU, Pratt, The New York Times, the American Center Moscow, Columbia University, and The Sotheby’s Institute of Art. She was a recipient of the Emily Hall Tremaine Journalism Fellowship for Curator through Hyperallergic, and has written for The Muse by the Clio Awards as well as the New York Journal of Books. 

Nicholas D. Lowry

Nicholas D. Lowry is President and Principal Auctioneer of Swann Auction Galleries, and is also the Director of Swann’s Vintage Posters Department. Nicholas joined Swann—the family business—in 1995.

In 2001 Nicholas was named President of Swann. As one of the world’s foremost authorities on vintage posters, he has spent nearly 25 years serving regularly as poster appraiser on the PBS television show Antiques Roadshow.

He currently sits on the Board of Governors of The National Arts Club, in New York City, for whom he is also Chairman of the Fine Arts Committee and is a member of the Advisory Board of New York’s Poster House Museum where he was also a founding patron.

Learn About Future Events

Stay in touch: opt-in to Auction Updates for email reminders about auction dates, when new catalogues are posted, sale highlights and exhibition openings; sign up for our newsletter to get periodic auction news and highlights; or download our live bidding app to browse, bid and livestream sales on the go.

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Dr. James Pearl Reflects on Collecting American Photography

I first became interested in photography in high school when I was given an Instamatic camera. In college, where I majored in chemistry, one of my professors taught me the chemistry of black-and-white photography; soon, I was processing my own negatives and prints as a photographer for our college yearbook. I also studied art history and came to realize that photography was a greatly underappreciated, and undervalued, art form. Besides their historical value, vintage photos constitute an indelible artistic legacy.

Deb and I started collecting photography seriously in the 1980s, when we were newly married and raising a family in Salt Lake City. Having studied the photography of the f64 group, we initially concentrated on Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, and their circle. Within two or three years we branched out, learning about the origins of photography and acquiring photographs by Fox Talbot, Edouard Baldus, and other early masters. But we remained especially enchanted by the pioneer American photographers of the West, such as Watkins, Muybridge, and Jackson. As an amateur photographer, I was in awe of these artists’ ability to create negatives from mammoth glass plates that they somehow safely transported in their expeditionary wagons. When examined closely, the detail in the resulting mammoth plate albumen photographs is astonishing, and has only recently been surpassed by the most advanced digital technology. An example is the fisherman seen in the mammoth William Henry Jackson of Yellowstone Falls. He is likely Thomas Moran, the great luminist painter, and Jackson’s frequent travel companion.

These scenic images also reflected our love of the American West. It was a thrill to hang works on our walls that echoed the beauty we saw around us. We were not surprised to learn that Jackson’s photos were pivotal in convincing Congress to make Yellowstone the first national park in 1872.

In the mid 1980’s I wrangled an invitation to visit Cole Weston in Carmel, California, in what had been Edward’s home and darkroom, known as Wildcat Hill. It was a great visit; I even got to hold in my hands the negative of the iconic Nautilus #1, with Edward’s printing annotations on the sleeve. I purchased a number of Edward’s photos from Cole during the visit; some were vintage, others were Cole’s own master prints from his father’s negatives.

We also greatly admired Irving Penn. We developed a relationship with the Edwynn Houk Gallery (at the time, in Chicago) and purchased many of our favorites there. Although I never met Penn, I happened to see him in a restaurant in New York City one difficult evening, when my young children were being especially noisy. He was clearly irritated and told the children to be quiet! I regret I was too shy to introduce myself.

Another adventure was in Paris where we went to a flea market where a collector had some J.B. Greene photos on offer. They were beautiful early prints that were artistically way ahead of his contemporaries. Wonderful art!

Finally, Deb and I were privileged to meet Sebastião Salgado and have lunch with him. He shared incredible stories about his world travels and his quest to conserve a clean and safe Earth. He showed us his rangefinder Leica camera. While less technologically sophisticated than modern digital equipment, it enabled him to produce one perfect negative after another — no Photoshop needed.

In sum, we have enjoyed the beauty, the history, and the process of collecting photographs, and have learned a lot over the many decades that we have owned our collection. However, we are now getting to a time in our lives where we are ready to pass these works on to new owners who will hopefully appreciate them as much as we have. Deb and I are very pleased to have Swann Galleries represent us with this sale.

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Nicholas D. Lowry shares his picks for The Subculture Sale
Bidding open now through February 8

There are so many exciting and wonderful items in our upcoming Subculture auction that it is hard to choose favorites. Unlike with the majority of Swann’s auctions, the material we are selling largely comes from within our lifetimes, or at least certainly closer to our personal experiences than, say, a book or print from the sixteenth or seventeenth century. The material in this auction reverberates differently for collectors. When viewed through the lens of being  “the alternative current of expression that informed some before it became mainstream,” we can understand how this material ultimately helped drive and in some cases even dictate popular culture.

New York 1980s

Earliest known flyer for Madonna, announcing her performance at Danceteria, opening for the Manchester band “A Certain Ratio,” with a photograph of the band on the verso.

Left: Lot 90: David Wojnarowicz, Untitled (Burning House with Camouflage Plane), stencil and spray paint on newsprint, 1982. Estimate $10,000 to $15,000.

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During the 1980s, Wojnarowicz designed flyers for bands such as 3 Teens Kill 4 and posted them throughout the East Village. Once he realized that these paper posters were being torn down, he switched to stenciling, often accompanied by artist friends. Inspired by contemporary street artists, including Jean-Michel Basquiat and “SAMO” (Keith Haring), as well as international symbols, he created his first stenciled artwork in 1981. Wojnarowicz found that the bold, efficient medium suited him and he continued to work with stencils for the rest of his career. The iconography of his early stenciled works, including burning houses, soldiers, falling men and planes, laid the foundational visual vocabulary for his later works.

Haring created newspaper collages from New York Post headline clippings, and using the new medium of the Xerox machine, posted reproductions of these works around New York.

This early Xerox technique in retrieving material from mass media became a shared project for many downtown artists in the early 1980s. Artists such as Jenny Holzer, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kenny Scharf, and Haring himself, experimented with the collage form and continually influenced its potential in content and distribution. From this early experimentation in crossing pop culture with guerilla art, Haring developed and grew his unique iconography.

Punk Rock

Right: Lot 113: The Cramps / Human Fly, circa 1978. Estimate $800 to $1,200.

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Pioneers of psychobilly, one of the first American garage punk bands, and part of the CBGB punk rock scene in New York, The Cramps released their iconic, punk-grunge single “Human Fly” in 1978. Promoting the radical and rebellious single, the vibrant and saccharine pink ink on the high-contrast photograph of the band recalls trashy horror-movie typology highlighting the aggressive glamour characteristic of The Cramps’s music and image.

Bad Brains was a seminal hardcore punk band (referred to by Rolling Stone as “the mother of all black hard-rock bands”), considered by some to be the foundation of the American hardcore scene. Discharge was an equally influential British hardcore punk band touring the United States for the first time after the release of their first full-length album, “Hear Nothing, See Nothing, Say Nothing.”

Left: Lot 115: Slash / Germs (MIA), 1993. Estimate $500 to $750.

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Advertising the release of MIA, a complete anthology album of the seminal punk band, the Germs. The poster is a reproduction of the April, 1978, cover of Slash, the famed Los Angeles Punk fanzine that published between 1977 and 1980 and went on to become Slash Records. The image is of Darby Crash, the lead singer of the Germs who died by suicide in 1980.

Pettibon’s imagery helped define the punk aesthetic. Black Flag was founded by his brother as was the record label SST for whom Raymond did a lot of work.

Hip Hop

Founded as a graffiti gallery in 1981 by Patti Astor, the groundbreaking and influential Fun Gallery was provided its name by Kenny Scharf who christened it thus for an exhibition he held there. It was one of the first galleries in downtown New York, cementing the Lower East Side as hip and cutting edge. It helped introduce hip hop, breakdancing and graffiti to the wider world, with Keith Haring, Basquiat, and Fab 5 Freddy all exhibiting there. It closed in 1985. This poster is for the first gallery exhibition of hip hop photographs, curated by Mark Bussell, “presented in conjunction with the release of Hip Hop: The Illustrated History of Break Dancing, Rap Music and Graffiti by Steven Hager, published by St. Martin’s Press.

Dubbed by the New York Times as “the man who took hip hop’s baby pictures,” Joe Conzo here captures legendary hip hop originators The Cold Crush Brothers. Taken in 1980, the photograph appears in the opening sequence of Chris Rock’s film “CB4.”

Shabazz is best known for his posed street photographs of urban-styled young Black people in New York City. His work records self-determination and joy, and is positioned as collaborative with his subjects. Now considered an unparalleled archive of street culture in the 1980s and 90s, Shabazz’s imagery is intentional, exhuberatant, and proud.

Right: Lot 137: UTFO / Dana Dana / Boogie Down Prod, 1987. Estimate $4,000 to $6,000.

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UTFO, Spoonie G, Dana Dane, Boogie Down Productions and Steady B all released albums that year, and Cool C had his debut single. The exceptional line-up also featured Grand Wizard Johnny-O and the Sorcerer Crew and Sweet ‘N Low. In spite of being billed, accurately, as a super fall rap spectacular,” the concert was a matinee. The Toledo Sports Arena, a multi-purpose venue housing ice hockey, boxing, wrestling, concerts and more, was built in 1947 and demolished in 2007.

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Swann Galleries opened the winter 2024 season with the fourth iteration of The Artist of the WPA. The timed online auction closed Thursday, January 25, with an 89% sell-through rate by lot, earning $595,286 and delivering six auction records.

“I’m pleased with another successful auction dedicated to the artists of the WPA. The American artists who participated in the New Deal art programs not only benefited fiscally from the government funding. Under the structured easel painting exhibitions, print workshops, and juried competitions for federal building decoration projects, these artists put in their 10,000 hours, emerging as seasoned experts of their craft, and the Post-War era of art blossomed in America. Of the many printmakers, photographers, painters, and designers represented in our January timed auction, six achieved the highest value, world auction records,” noted Harold Porcher, director of Modern & Post-War Art at Swann and the specialist for the sale.

Auction Records

Records included artist records for James Russell Sherman with two mural studies for the Marion, Iowa, Post Office ($15,000); Isaac Friedlander’s Our Daily Bread, etching, 1935 ($15,000); Joseph de Martini’s Six Day Bicycle Race, Madison Square Garden, oil on board, circa 1941 ($12,500); and George Rodgers Barber with a circa 1938 painting created for a WPA mural competition funded by the Treasury Section of Fine Arts ($7,000). Print records included Steel Town Panorama, color screenprint, 1941, by Harry Gottlieb ($8,750); and Cement Finishers, wood engraving, 1939, by Leon Gilmour ($3,500).

Auction Highlights

Additional highlights featured Claude Clark’s circa 1940-41 oil-on-board painting Drafting, a scarce image of an African-American architect or architectural student, and the top lot of the auction ($17,500); Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California (Variant), silver print, 1936, printed circa 1990s ($16,250); Palmer Hayden’s On the Jersey Side, oil on canvas, circa late 1930s ($15,000); and Raphael Soyer’s Untitled (Portrait of a Student), oil on canvas, circa 1930 ($8,125).

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This auction will contain property from the Forbes Collection, reflecting a keen interest in American history, world leaders, American entertainers between the 1930s and 1960s, and writers. Among the presidential items is an extraordinary copy of As We Remember Joe, signed and inscribed by John F. Kennedy to the book’s publisher, together with the publisher’s mailing list for over 250 of the 500 copies that were printed, and related correspondence. Other presidential autographs include Eisenhower, Truman, and F.D.R. Autographs by leaders in other parts of the world include sizable archives of letters by prime ministers Georges Clemenceau and William Gladstone. 

Remarkable entertainer autographs from the collection include two lots by Elvis Presley: an agreement signed with Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation for the 1961 film Wild in the Country, and a photograph signed and inscribed in the 1960s. Possibly more striking still is the complete sheet music for “Rhapsody in Blue,” printed soon after the piece’s 1924 premiere, signed and inscribed by George Gershwin. There are also items signed by Cary Grant, Betty Grable, Katharine Hepburn, and others.

Among material from other consignors are business leaders, with an autograph letter signed by an elderly and reflective Alfred Nobel to his brother in which he explains that duty prevented an earlier reply: “I’m too much of a philosopher to consider anything to be really imposing, but . . . if you have a trace of . . . duty, you slave until you drop.” Historic American autographs include John Hancock, who, as Governor, signed a document shortly after the Revolution appointing a delegate to the Congress of the Confederation (the governing body that preceded the U.S. Congress); and George Washington, who, as President of the Potomac Company, approved a sheet of accounting for the Company by signing it in 1787. 

Other categories feature a business card signed by Marilyn Monroe; an autograph musical manuscript of Dixie signed by its author, Decatur Emmett; and a valentine signed by Andy Warhol.

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An array of fine art bridges the seasons and centuries alike. Among the top nineteenth-century offerings are an early Barbizon School drawing by Jean-François Millet, Femme sur l’âne, color pastels, circa 1855–60; a stunning Symbolist watercolor, Deux Femmes, circa 1890, by Auguste Rodin; and scarce etchings and lithographs by Whistler, Cassatt, Renoir, Pissarro, Cézanne, and Monet—including a kaleidoscopic proof made in collaboration with the printmaker George W. Thornley, Vue d’une côte avec des voiliers, circa 1894.

Highlights among the modern works include drawings and prints by European artists including Munch, Kollwitz, Léger, Delaunay, Chagall, Moore, and Giacometti. Two signature, mid-career works by of the pillars of European modernism lead the section: Pablo Picasso’s bold and colorful still life study, Fleurs, color crayons, 1959, and Henri Matisse’s Jeune Femme aux Poissons Rouges, pen and ink, circa 1930. There is also a significant group of American modernist works, including paintings, drawings and prints, and a section devoted to Latin American modernists.

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One of our largest African Americana auctions to date includes important documentation of the abolition movement, including a rare pamphlet by David Ruggles; catalogues and posters for exhibits by leading Black artists; previously unseen Black Panther material; material on Black-owned businesses; and the first auction appearance of a majestic poster for opera singer Sissieretta Jones.

From the Civil War, we have a badge made for a private in the famous 54th Massachusetts who was wounded at the Battle of Fort Wagner. 

“As we drew nearer the firing ceased. No more shells came howling over us. Quickly there came an aid riding a fleet horse, and shouting something as he rode. ‘Gen’l Lee has surrendered.’ Oh what a storm of cheering! I never expect to hear another like it. . . . Then a sudden impulse seemed to seize the whole line, and every musket was pointed toward the sky, and a perfect roar swept from right to left as all the pieces were discharged in the air. Officers grabbed one another by the hand. Soldiers struck up ‘Glory, Glory, Hallelujah.'”

— A letter from an officer in the 29th United States Colored Troops describes their final pursuit of Robert E. Lee’s Confederate Army.

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“The Subculture Sale was an exciting foray into relatively new territory for Swann Galleries, not focusing on works from previous centuries, but, on the personally memorable. Among the scores of people who came to preview and attend related events most were nearly giddy with the prospect of seeing things at auction from within their own lifetimes. It was an incredible combination of nostalgia and commerce.” – Nicholas D. Lowry, Swann President

First Time Auction Appearances

First-time auction appearances included a poster for Andy Warhol and The Velvet Underground and Nico’s performance at 23 St Marks Place in 1966 ($15,000); Ben Morea made his auction debut with 1965 acrylic-on-paper work ($5,250); Peter Christopherson’s Johnny Rotten in Straight Jacket, silver print, 1976—this image of Johnny Rotten is from the first Sex Pistols photo shoot, taken February 1976 ($2,500); and Josh Gosfield‘s Censorship is UnAmerican, 1990, which was commissioned by Virgin Records when an album by 2 Live Crew was outlawed for obscenity in parts of Florida in June 1990 ($1,375).

Auction Records

Auction records included Christian Marclay‘s Record Without a Cover, 1985, with an original press release from the Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center in Buffalo, New York, which supported the release of the album, the record’s reverse side bears black lettering stating, “DO NOT STORE IN A PROTECTIVE SLEEVE” ($4,000); the earliest known flyer for Madonna, announcing her performance at Danceteria, opening for Manchester band A Certain Ratio, with a photograph of the band on the verso, from 1982 ($875); and an oversized offset lithograph poster for Nirvana – In Utero, 1993, a record for this format ($2,125).

Additional Highlights

Additional highlights included an early pressing of the album Velvet Underground and Nico signed by the band ($7,000), a poster for Sun Ra at Carnegie Hall ($4,250), and works by Jamel Shabazz, Yoko Ono, Mark Gonzales, Ed Templeton, and others rounded off the successful offerings.

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Autographs provide the collector with a number of joys, one of which is their ability to bring you closer to people in another time and place. Of course, every autograph shows the trace of a person in handwriting, but the knowledge that an autograph was also later kept and cherished by someone we admire makes such items particularly special, and the value on the market for this kind of autograph is accordingly greater. The March 7, 2024, Autographs auction has an uncommonly rich vein of such association pieces, including both those that belonged to the signer and those given by the signer to another.

Presidential Autographs

Even people who become U.S. presidents sell, gift, or abandon some of their property at one time or another, and there are three books in the sale that can serve as examples. Lot 73, for instance, is a geometry textbook in which Dwight D. Eisenhower drew diagrams and wrote his name when he was an uncommonly gifted math student at Abilene High School in Kansas. When Millard Fillmore was a U.S. Senator, he wrote his name in the copy of the Congressional Directory for the Second Session of the Thirty-First Congress in lot 76, likely having used it to learn the committee assignment or congressional district of a fellow Congressman. Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was a collector himself (of books, stamps, maps, and other things), purchased a copy of Anthony Trollope’s The Warden and wrote in it both his name and a notation questioning whether the book is a first American edition (lot 107).

Material with Close Associations to Important Figures

The historical importance of presidents makes their autographs particularly desirable, but in some cases, an autograph that is not usually in great demand can be elevated by its association with another figure of great importance. Lot 4, for instance, contains an extraordinary letter from Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton in which he declines the suggestion to resign from office, written to his president—not Abraham Lincoln, who appointed Stanton, but Andrew Johnson, who succeeded Lincoln after his assassination. The author Oliver Wendell Holmes, whose Chief Justice son of the same name is perhaps better known today, wrote the letter in lot 155 to Frederick Douglass in which he remarks that “all the country knows your name,” as indeed it did.

Also desirable are autographs which are associated with someone closely connected to the item’s subject matter, even when that person is not of especially great historical importance. Sought out by book and autograph collectors alike are copies of the first edition of John F. Kennedy’s book, As We Remember Joe; the copy in lot 87 is not only desirable because it is signed and inscribed by JFK, the recipient named in the inscription is importantly the secretary of the book’s publisher, making it even more interesting. Warren G. Harding, writing as president about the possibility of appointing more women to government offices just two years after women won the vote, addressed the letter in lot 81 to suffragist Harriet Taylor Upton—not as well known as Susan B. Anthony, but an important contributor to the movement that realized women’s suffrage. Another example is the photocopy of an article in lot 50 inscribed by former Prime Minister of Israel David Ben-Gurion to former chair of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission in 1966—the same year Israel acquired nuclear weapons.

Material with Association to Family Members

The March 7 sale contains an unusual number of items which were inscribed to the signer’s close friends or family who otherwise had relatively little impact on the world and whose life and work was largely unrelated to the item’s subject matter. An example, one that is again of great interest to both book and autograph collectors, are the limited edition “Christmas books” that Franklin D. Roosevelt sent to close friends as a Christmas greeting in certain years; the copy in lot 99 was inscribed as president (in 1943) to his friend and fellow polio activist Basil O’Connor. FDR also inscribed the two books in lots 100 and 106, both to his daughter, Anna. Astonishingly, Roosevelt was not the only U.S. president to inscribe books to Anna: if you were to view lots 118 and 122, you would find two books inscribed to her by Harry S. Truman. While serving in the army during the War, years after the success of his Our Town play, Thornton Wilder wrote the letter in lot 169 to his former English teacher from Berkeley High School, recalling the old days and declaring, “I don’t care how many of the boys write on the pavement: Thornton loves his teacher.” In the letter in lot 48, Alfred Nobel writes to his brother about the Nobel family’s relation to vice and virtue, and the duty to “slave until you drop.” Lot 171 contains a copy of In the Winter of Cities signed by Tennessee Wiliams; although there is no inscription, the same of his agent, Audrey Wood, is stamped in ink inside, demonstrating that the book belonged to her.

Another Tennessee Williams lot 170, is perhaps the sale’s most intriguing instance of an item whose value is enhanced by association. The lot contains a letter by Williams written to his family as an 8-year old, but the more important portion of the lot is the archive of letters written to Williams and other members of the family by his sister, Rose. Most of the letters were written in the latter part of the 1920s, when Rose attended All Saints’ College, a boarding school where she began showing signs of what was later diagnosed as schizophrenia. In the letters, Rose makes occasional references to insanity: in one letter to Williams, she writes, “Bulah walked in her sleep . . . and carried her pillow into the bathroom . . . . I’m as afraid of a person who walks in their sleep as I am of one who’s crasy [sic]”; or in another, “One girl had a terrible case of hysterics. Of course the girls flocked around her, which made her all the worse. Her mother was dead and a dear friend of hers was dying. She screamed, laughed and yelled. Some of the girls who crowded around her were orphans and they began to wail. The doctor had to be called. It sounded like a holy roller meeting. At least twenty girls crying at once. . . . I never spent such a night”; or in another, “I have been down . . . . I cried so hard yesterday that I was sick all day. . . . [S]ome days I feel like giving up the goast [sic] and others . . . I feel fine. . . .”; or again, “There was a big fire near here the other day. The country club burned down and we were taken by Miss James . . . to see it. We had the time of our lives, climbing on the fire engines and acting like escaped lunatics.” Although Williams was either attending school himself or working for his father during much of this time, he remained close to Rose, and after she was lobotomized in 1943, Williams devoted part of the proceeds from his plays for her care.

Just as an artfully applied touch of gold leaf on an otherwise humdrum object can make the whole into something magical, an autograph with an association can make an otherwise minor collectible into an extraordinary find, and there are few better opportunities to find gold than the March 7 autographs auction.

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To look at the graphic design work of Edward McKnight Kauffer is to experience a master craftsman helping to propel modernism into the mainstream. He achieved the height of his creativity in the decades after World War I, bringing his creative, modern aesthetic to a fast-paced world that was eager to embrace his exciting new visual creations. 

The London Transport Museum posits that “Edward McKnight Kauffer was undoubtedly one of the most prolific and influential graphic designers of the 20th century. Cubism, [Vorticisim, Art Deco,] Futurism and Surrealism found expression in his posters, which translated the complicated language of the avant-garde into accessible commercial design” (www.ltmcolection.org). 

Kauffer was deftly able to weave fine art concepts into instantly agreeable and visually digestible forms. He bridged the gap between the refined, aloof world of art exhibitions and what the public would see every day as they went about their daily lives, successfully bringing art into the streets for the masses to enjoy. Enticing and pleasing even those who never thought they would enjoy stepping into an art gallery. 

Anthony Blunt, reviewing a show of Kauffer’s work in 1935 notes the following: “Apart from producing admirable posters, Mr. Kauffer has rendered another important service to modern art. By using the methods of more advanced schools and by putting them before the men in the street in such a way as to catch them off their guard, so that they are lured into liking the poster before they realize that it is just the kind of thing which they loath in the exhibition gallery, by this means he has familiarized a very wide public with the conventions of modern painting.” (Haworth-Booth p. 70). 

Early Life & Career

Born in Montana, to a poor family, Edward (Ted) Kauffer grew up in Evansville, Indiana, where he spent two years in an orphanage as his father had left and his mother sought employment. His precocious artistic talent led him to join a traveling theatre company as a set painter at age 12 or 13. His youthful journey then found him employed in a bookstore in San Francsico, a sojourn at the Art Institute in Chicago, sponsorship to study in Europe (from a man named Joseph E. McKnight, whose name Kauffer took in tribute and as thanks) followed by brief studies in Munich and then arriving in Paris in 1913. The following year, with the outbreak of World War I, Kauffer left Paris and settled in England. 

Kauffer’s first commission came from the legendary Frank Pick in 1915. Pick pioneered advertising in Britain. In his capacity as the publicity manager for the Underground Electric Railways Company of London (the London Underground and Transport System), Pick served as a great artistic patron to the graphic arts. He commissioned hundreds of young designers to promote the subways and buses of London. Over the next 20 years, Kauffer designed 141 posters for the company, redesigned subway stations, installed murals, and more.  

Commercial Success

On the strength of his design work Kauffer rapidly rose to prominence. Such was his fame that in addition to the London Underground he also worked for the Empire Marketing Board, the Post Office, Great Western Railway, Shell, BP, Imperial Airways, Eno’s Fruit Salt, W.A. Gilbey, and many others. One client, Eastman and Son, were very aware of the public’s thirst for new images by Kauffer and played to the anticipation of his latest designs by posting stickers reading “A New McKnight Kauffer Poster Will Appear Here Shortly” on empty sidings to mollify passersby who were eager to see his next creation. 

The years between 1915 and 1940, when Kauffer was forced to return to America due to the outbreak of World War II, were the most creative of his career and he produced a prodigious output of posters which were among the best designs of their era. 

In 1940 Kauffer returned to America where he did extensive design work for American Airlines, Pan American Airlines and the Museum of Modern Art  

Between 1946 and 1953, he designed more than 30 posters for American Airlines; some were landscapes and illustrative images, while others were photomontages and Modernist designs. And while he was never quite grounded or content in the United States as he was in Great Britain, his work continued and he created posters for a plethora of important companies and organizations such as Stetson, the Office of Inter-American Affairs, the New York Subways advertising company, the United Committee of South-Slavic Americans, the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway and Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey circus. 

Derry & Toms

Left: Edward McKnight Kauffer, Summer Sale at Derry & Toms, 1919. At auction February 29, 2024. Estimate $4,000 to $6,000.

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Kauffer designed five posters for the London Department store Derry & Toms. His first, from 1917, borrowed heavily from a design by Ludwig Hohlwein. Hohlwein’s influence can be seen here as well, in relation to the poster he designed in 1909 for a regatta on Munich’s Starnberger Lake.  

Right: Edward McKnight Kauffer, From Winters Gloom to Summers Joy, 1927. Sold May 2007 from $9,600.

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This poster, a pure example of Kauffer’s genius, is an extraordinary composition that is both extremely sophisticated and perfectly readable. Mixing supple lines with Cubist forms and employing a warm, vibrating palette of colors, Kauffer displays his mastery of sensitive Art Deco. This is in direct contrast to A.M. Cassandre, who was the master of mechanization, with a cold, geometric approach to design. One of Frank Pick’s ideas was to give his artists complete graphic freedom in their work for the underground. That practice bears fruit here, with Kauffer not mentioning the Underground anywhere, not even incorporating its logo into the design. Curiously, he doesn’t even include the apostrophes in “Winter’s” and “Summer’s.” 

Great Western Railway

Kauffer designed six different posters for the Great Western Railway in 1933 promoting travel to Cornwall. One features ships and a lighthouse seen from the interior of a dock-side shack [a visual precursor to his late 1940s image for American Airlines advertising travel to New England]; the other is a landscape with a stone wall, trees, the ocean, and a sandy path. This is by far the most modern, daring and evocative. It is a multiple masterpiece, combining excellence in composition, typography, balance, airbrush and overall design.  In another example from the GWR series, one can see his exceptional use of geometric patterns. 

Gilbey’s

In 1933, Kauffer designed seven point-of-purchase posters for Gilbey’s, a wine and liquor distributor. All but one were in this horizontal format, each achieved using Kauffer’s innate graphic genius, and representing the pinnacle of Art Deco design in the commercial field. They combined exceptional typography and imagery, some leaning more heavily one way than the other. 

For this striking, symbolic, graphic allegory, Kauffer combines photography and typography, organizing the image around an inclined rectangle, delineated by the brand name and its described qualities, against a black background. An electric flash of lightning cuts the poster in half, symbolizing the power the fluid has on engines, while a photo integrated on the right shows a statue of a rearing horse to literally evoke the “horsepower.” The photograph, which Kauffer took himself, is of the Parisian statue Cheval Retenu par un Palefrenier [Horse Restrained by Groom], by Guillaume Coustou, more commonly known as the Marly Horses. 

Move Back to America

American Airlines

One of Kauffer’s last advertising campaigns was for American Airlines. “In 1947 he was discovered by Bernard Waldman, a young New York advertising man who wanted to bring the European poster tradition to America. He commissioned Kauffer to do a series for American Airlines” (Steven Heller, The Essential Modernist). This image, arguably the rarest of Kauffer’s America-era posters, is an elegantly simple combination of photomontage and typography. From the two-toned lettering, to the larger-than-life beach ball and the suggestion of waves and shadows in the sand, this image clearly reflects Kauffer’s avant-garde design sensibility, and is one of his finest designs from this period. 

In 1948, Kauffer designed a poster for American Airlines travel to Washington D.C., which presented a straightforward view of the Capitol, beneath a starry sky, with red, white and blue typography. That popular, generic, image is readily available, as many copies have survived. The far more sophisticated design of this image suggests that it was designed earlier than 1948. Likely far too “European” (complex) for American sensibilities, it seems Kauffer was asked to design a different image for Washington which would be more accessible and comforting to the American public. Note here how the clouds evoke the stripes of the American flag. 

Left: Edward McKnight Kauffer, El Nuevo Orden, 1942. Sold August 2010 for $800.

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An astonishing image that is absolutely unexpected within the scope of Kauffer’s work. In an attempt to vilify Germans during World War II, he has incarnated an Axis officer in the image of a horrifying, slobbering, wild beast. Created for the Asuntos Interamericanas, an organization which generated propaganda for dissemination in Latin America, Kauffer’s vision of the “New Order of the Axis” is on a par with Karl Koehler’s This is the Enemy (see Swann Poster Auction 2612 – Lot 115) as one of the most effective anti-enemy images ever penned in the United States.  

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This civil rights rally was held in Columbus, OH, a few months after the March on Washington and just as the congressional fight for the Civil Rights Act approached the final dramatic months. According to Associated Press accounts the next day, “the audience was estimated as about two-thirds Negro.” About 5,000 spectators crammed into the Veterans Memorial Auditorium, and an additional 1,000 watched the proceedings from a closed-circuit television in a nearby room.

The tape on offer in our March 21, 2024, Printed & Manuscript African Americana auction includes 82 minutes of audio from the rally, apparently recorded from a WOSU radio broadcast, with generally clear sound quality. Five speakers are heard, starting with Herbert E. Evans of People’s Broadcasting Corporation; Ray Ross, president of the United Auto Workers of Ohio; the Rev. Arthur Alvin Zebbs of the Columbus Chapter of CORE; and NAACP lawyer John Bolt Culbertson of South Carolina.

Rev. Arthur Alvin Zebbs of the Columbus Chapter of CORE

Rev. Zebbs was the only Black speaker among these first four. A prominent local leader, he told the crowd: “This nation is now seeing an unprecedented struggle for freedom. People are praying for freedom. People are being bitten by dogs for freedom. People are facing fire hoses and electric prods for freedom.” He criticized certain white churchmen who “will flee in panic from their neighborhoods if a Negro looks at one of their houses.” He set out the parameters of legitimate integration: “Do not think that by hiring a few Negroes here and there, that we will be satisfied. . . . The watermelon tactics of tokenism will no longer satisfy. We are going to see Negroes integrated into every department of industry and business, across the board from top to bottom, and until then we will never cease our protests.” He concluded with a demand that “our city council pass a fair housing ordinance.”

Jackie Robinson

The final speaker heard on this tape was retired baseball great and integration pioneer Jackie Robinson, then serving as vice president of the coffee firm Chock Full o’ Nuts—the first Black man serving as the vice president of any white-owned corporation in America. Robinson had long been interested in politics and civil rights, although he was conservative by the standards of the era’s civil rights leaders. He had supported Richard Nixon for president in 1960, and though warmly supportive of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, he was later an appointee for New York’s moderate Republican governor, Nelson Rockefeller.

Robinson begins his talk with sincere admiration for the much less famous speakers who preceded him: “I don’t think it’s fair for an old broken-down ballplayer to be brought on . . . after listening to the previous speakers,” calling it “one of the most inspiring programs that I have ever attended. . . . Rev. Zebbs, for instance, is perhaps the symbol of the Negro protests.”

The day before this rally, Roy Wilkins, James Farmer, Martin Luther King and Whitney Young had accepted an invitation from President Johnson to discuss the Civil Rights Act at the White House (see the photograph of the meeting above, lot 137), and King had expressed optimism afterward. Robinson noted: “I am quite proud and pleased as I assure you all are at the wonderful sounds that are coming out of the White House. . . . All of our civil rights leaders have been before our president to hear what he’s going to do about civil rights. . . . I’m somewhat of a skeptic. I’m going to wait and see what [President Johnson] does, rather than what he says. . . . His southern friends, [Georgia Senator Richard] Russell and [North Carolina Senator Strom] Thurmond . . . are awfully quiet today about what civil rights is going to happen in a very short time.” The bill would pass the House on 10 February, the Senate in June, and receive Johnson’s signature on 2 July.

On the March on Washington:

Robinson spoke at length about his recent attendance at the March on Washington: “This was one of the greatest events in the history of the United States. . . . My young son David and I walked in that march. . . . The lady next to me was Daisy Bates . . . who did so much in Little Rock, Arkansas in helping the youngsters go to school. And the lady next to her was Rosa Parks. Had it perhaps not been for Rosa Parks, I bet we would not have a Dr. Martin Luther King today. . . . As the songs got louder, I looked over and saw these thousands of Negroes singing and holding their heads high and marching peacefully, and I said to myself, I have never been prouder of being a Negro than I am today. . . . There were thousands upon thousands of white Americans who believe in freedom, and they too were singing and enjoying the march as much as the rest of us, and I said I have never felt prouder of being an American. . . . To have it climax with Dr. Martin Luther King, and he talked about his dream.” Robinson then quotes from King’s famous speech.

Robinson made a case for voter participation, though as an independent deeply suspicious of southern Dixiecrats, he pointedly did not make any endorsements: “If you want freedom and if you want dignity and understanding, you get to those polls and register, and you get down there and vote for the man that’s going to do the best job. Our fight for freedom can only be won by the masses of the people.”

On Baseball, Celebrity & Equality:

Of course, Robinson brought baseball into the discussion: “A Miami newspaper man wrote an article stating that he couldn’t understand what Jackie Robinson was protesting. Of all the Negroes that he knows, I have less right to be on the firing line.” The crowd laughed heartily at this remark. “He went on to say it was the white man Branch Rickey who brought me into baseball and gave me the opportunity to play. . . . He says Jackie Robinson’s got it made, and therefore has no right to protest.” He recounts discrimination against other Black celebrities like Nat King Cole and Lena Horne, and then discusses “a guy in my own profession, Willie Mays. They say Willie Mays makes more money than anyone in baseball today. . . . Willie Mays wanted to buy a home [in San Francisco]. You remember what happened to Willie Mays. He ended up with all kinds of abuse.”

Robinson then recounts the segregated Pasadena swimming pools and YMCA and restaurants of his youth, concluding that “I intend to continue in this fight for freedom because there isn’t a Negro in this country that has it made until the most underprivileged Negro in the deepest south has it made. . . . In this democracy of ours, not one of us has it made, until all of us have it made. . . . We are somewhat like a cat that has been chased up in a corner by a dog, and the cat has nowhere else to run.” Here the recording cuts off 23 minutes into Robinson’s talk, which was apparently nearing its end. It is followed by the beginning of “John F. Kennedy: A Biography,” a television show narrated by Cliff Robertson and sponsored by Union Bank & Trust, which aired nationally circa 1 December 1965.

While many thousands of radio listeners must have heard this rally during its original broadcast, we have found no hint that any other recording of it survives today.

Related Reading:

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Our sale begins with a wonderful group of artworks from the Harlem Renaissance that epitomize the period: a scarce woodcut by Aaron Douglas and a plaster bust by Augusta Savage. Post-war painting is represented by significant abstraction by Norman Lewis and Sam Gilliam, along with a significant, mid-career oil painting by the great Hughie Lee-Smith—his Ball Player, 1970, a powerful painting, epitomizes the artist’s evocative depictions of African American youth in desolate urban settings. Ball Player has been widely exhibited and was in the personal collection of the artist before being acquired by the current owners. Contemporary highlights include a large Kermit Oliver painting, a pair of early Simone Leigh terra cotta vessels and Howardena Pindell’s punched paper assemblage.

The auction will close with a special evening session, Art For Life, featuring contemporary art to be sold to benefit the Rush Philanthropic Arts Foundation. Donated works by such artists as Derrick Adams, Hank Willis Thomas and Carrie Mae Weems are expected.

Harlem Renaissance

Post-War

We are also excited to bring to auction—for the first time since 2008—a complete set of Jacob Lawrence’s masterwork in printmaking, The Legend of John Brown. With this 1977 portfolio, Lawrence translated his series of John Brown paintings into 22 stunning color screenprints.

Contemporary

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The March 14 sale of 19th & 20th Century Art features a strong selection of original artworks, among them a run of those working in Eastern Europe in the first half of the twentieth century during a time disparity and turmoil. Below is a selection of five artists working during this period to note from the sale. 

Carl Grossberg

Justus Bier (1899-1990) was a German American art historian who championed the Bauhaus and contemporary German artists of the 1930s, including Paul Klee, Lionel Feininger, and Carl Grossberg, the latter of whom Bier befriended and profiled several times during the 1920s and 1930s. Grossberg (1894-1940) was trained at the Bauhaus and became a successful artist and interior designer during the 1930s, known for his meticulous portraits of new technology and machinery. Bier also found success during this time. He was curator of the Kestner Society and Museum in Hanover from 1930 until 1936, when the Society was closed by the Nazi government and Bier exiled. Alternatively, Grossberg remained in Germany and was drafted into military service in 1939. He died following an automobile accident in France a year later. After emigrating to the United States, Bier taught art history at the University of Kentucky, eventually chairing the department from 1946 to 1960. In 1960, Bier became the director of the North Carolina Museum of Art, and continued to lead the organization until his retirement in 1970.

^{Heinrich Tischler}

Tischler (1892-1938) moved to Breslau with his family in 1897 and studied art and architecture at the Breslau Academy. After World War I, Tischler returned to Breslau and became an instructor at the Academy. Though not as well-known today as some of his contemporaries from Breslau, Tischler was a close friend of Otto Mueller and one of many local artists to be championed by the esteemed collector Ismar Littmann. Tischler’s work was prohibited by the Nazis into the late 1930s, and, in 1938, he was sent to Buchenwald concentration camp where he died soon after.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

According to Hillary Reder, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Drawings and Prints, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, which holds numerous works by the artist, “In 1905, painter and printmaker Kirchner (1880-1938), along with Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff–all untrained in the visual arts–founded the artists’ group Die Brücke, or “The Bridge,” a moment that is now considered the birth of German Expressionism. Impelled, in Kirchner’s words, to express themselves ‘directly and authentically,’ they rejected academic art as stultifying and searched for means to make work that possessed a sense of immediacy and spontaneity. They culled inspiration from the emotionally expressive works of Vincent van Gogh and Edvard Munch; Oceanic and African art they encountered at ethnographic museums; and German Gothic and Renaissance art, which led them to enthusiastically embrace the woodcut, a print medium through which they pioneered their signature style, characterized by simplified forms, radical flattening, and vivid, non-naturalistic colors.

The Brücke artists craved to ‘bring life and art into harmony,’ upending conventions in both to cultivate what they considered a more instinctual and natural way of being–a reaction shared with a larger German youth movement against new realities of urbanization and conservative imperial German society. In their communal studio, decorated with non-Western art and erotic images, they made life-drawings from nude models in unselfconscious, informal poses. They spent summers together with their girlfriends on lakes near Dresden, allowing nudity and free love to reign, and conjuring this bohemian existence in their works. Kirchner’s woodcut of four nudes moving tranquilly in a rhythmic frieze, Bathers Throwing Reeds, 1909, typifies this period, embodying Brücke’s utopic vision of a world untouched by encroaching industrialization and other alienating forces of modern life.

Once Kirchner moved to Berlin, in 1911, and after Brücke disbanded, in 1913, he found a subject in Berlin itself, newly established as a cosmopolitan metropolis. He captured its hectic pace, chaotic intersections, and crowded sidewalks, focusing in particular on streetwalkers in his monumental series of 11 paintings known as Berlin Street Scenes. Among them is Street, Berlin, 1913, in which two finely dressed prostitutes with mask-like faces command the center of the street as indistinguishable men lurk in their wake. Kirchner found in prostitutes an apt symbol for Berlin, where anything could be bought and the potential for intrigue or danger was folded into the experience of moving with the ever growing, anonymous crowds pulsing through the city.

At the outbreak of World War I, Kirchner volunteered for service, but he soon experienced a physical and mental breakdown and was discharged. After convalescing in sanatoriums near Davos, he spent the rest of his life in the area, portraying its rural scenery, mountains, and villagers in his work. He also began to experiment with abstraction, reflecting his goal for ‘the participation of present-day German art in the international modern sense of style.’ But the Nazis deemed Kirchner’s art ‘un-German,’ and in 1937, as part of their Degenerate Art campaign–waged against works of modern art, which they seized by the thousands from museums and private collections–they removed more than 600 of his paintings from public collections. The following year, he took his own life.”

In its unflinching authenticity and directness, Kirchner’s intensely individual art upended traditional artistic traditions. He and his fellow Brücke artists were among the first of the 20th century to chart a course toward the myriad modern and contemporary art movements that followed and their art still resonates with the contemporary originality that it held in the 1910s-20s.

Leopold Gottlieb

Gottlieb (1883-1934) was born in Galicia, Poland, then occupied by Austria. Like his older brother Maurycy (Moritz), who died in 1879, Gottlieb aspired to become an artist. After studying at the Academy of Art in Krakow, Gottlieb settled in Paris at the turn of the century, among the tight knit community of Jewish artists in Montparnasse. He showed at the Salon d’Automne and Salon des Independants and became known for his portraits and scenes with pale, classicized figures, like the current work. Notably, Gottlieb forged a friendship with Diego Rivera, who accompanied Gottlieb when he was challenged to a duel by Moïse Kisling in 1914. Gottlieb returned to Poland during World War I to join the Polish Legion and returned to Paris in the 1920s to resume his career as an artist.

Hendrik Nicolaas Werkman

Werkman (1882-1945) was an experimental Dutch artist, typographer and printer. Born in Groningen, in the early 1900s he established a thriving printing and publishing business which was forced to close in 1923 due to financial setbacks. Thereafter, Werkman began working again as a self-taught experimental artist, printer and designer. He was a member of the artists’ group De Ploeg (“The Plough”), for whom he printed posters, invitations and catalogues, and through this group had contacts with other avant-garde artists including Theo van Doesburg, Kurt Schwitters, El Lissitzky and Michel Seuphor.

During the 1920s-30s, Werkman developed many experimental printing and design techniques. According to the Groninger Museum, which holds a significant collection of Werkman’s work, “The printing press became his artistic tool when he started experimenting with it in 1923 in the first of a long series of prints (druksels). He developed a unique technique using the printing material, the ink roller and the hand press. Later, he expanded his expressive capabilities with the use of templates and stamping techniques. Werkman’s total oeuvre comprises more than 2000 works, including paintings, watercolours, graphics, drawings and printed matter. But the prints constitute the core of his oeuvre. Werkman printed the earliest of these in small editions, but the vast majority are unique pieces, most of which, some four hundred, date from 1940-1945.” Another of his experimental techniques was the painstaking production of abstract designs using the typewriter, which he called tiksels. After 1929 he also began writing rhythmic sound poems.

In May 1940, soon after the German invasion of the Netherlands, Werkman started a clandestine publishing house, De Blauwe Schuit (“The Blue Barge”), which issued some forty different publications, each designed and illustrated by Werkman. These included a series of Hassidic stories from the legend of the Baal Shem Tov, for the publishing of which he ran afoul of the Nazis. On March 13, 1945, the Gestapo arrested Werkman, executing him by firing squad along with nine other prisoners in the forest near Bakkeveen on April 10th, three days before Groningen was liberated. Many of his paintings and prints, which the Gestapo had confiscated, were lost in the fire that broke out during the battle over the city.

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This special evening celebration of the Rush Philanthropic Arts Foundation will offer an opportunity to collect contemporary works while supporting Rush. Join us in person, online, or over the phone to bid. This evening session will begin on April 4th with registration and cocktails at 5 p.m. with the auction of African American Art beginning at 6 p.m. eastern with lot 194.

Highlights from the Auction:

About Rush

Rush Philanthropic Arts Foundation (Rush Arts) is dedicated to providing underserved youth with contemporary art education, and developing and supporting artists, curators and new audiences.

The Rush Philanthropic Arts Foundation, established in 1995 by Danny Simmons, Russell Simmons, and Joseph “Rev. Run” Simmons, aims to provide inner-city youth with access to the arts and exhibition opportunities for emerging and underrepresented artists, significantly impacting the landscape for artists of color and emerging talents. Since March is Women’s Month, Rush has also supported numerous prominent women artists of color. With support from a wide network, Rush Education programs annually serve 3,500 students, offering alternatives to high-risk behaviors and enhancing academic performance. Rush exhibits over 50 emerging artists yearly, attracting 12,000 visitors, and provides career opportunities in the arts for young people. Operating galleries in Manhattan and Brooklyn, along with programs in five NYC public schools, Rush fosters artistic inspiration and education in underserved communities.

Swann Salon Series: Herstory

a talk with Renee Cox & Halima Taha

March 28, 6-8 PM ET at Swann Galleries: 104 East 25th Street, 7th Floor, NYC

Our guests will share their impactful roles and the legacy of the Rush Foundation in supporting emerging women artists.

Meet our speakers:

Renee Cox

Renee Cox, born in Colgate, Jamaica in 1960 and now based in New York, is celebrated for her photography, collages, and installations blending influences from art history, fashion, and pop culture. She offers a critical view of female sexuality, power, and beauty, often using nudity and symbolism. Cox reexamines the black female figure within power structures, drawing inspiration from Renaissance to modern art and West African traditions. Her work challenges conventional perceptions of women across time and place. Cox’s accolades include exhibitions at Tate Liverpool, The New Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum, alongside awards like the New York Foundations for the Arts fellowship. She teaches at Columbia University and has lectured at Yale and NYU. Cox lives in Manhattan and Amagansett with her husband and dog, Dogon.

Halima Taha

Halima Taha gained recognition for her influential book, “Collecting African American Art: Works on Paper and Canvas,” which validated the significance of collecting fine art, printmaking, and photography by Americans of African descent. Her expertise played a crucial role in establishing the first international African American auction category in 2008. A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and New York University, holds degrees in Liberal Arts and Arts Management & Cultural Policy, along with a Certificate in Appraisal Studies. She is a member of ArtTable and the College Art Association. Halima’s interdisciplinary approach to art extends to her involvement as a keynote speaker and panelist for various museum and academic programs, along with serving as an adjunct professor and curator.

Learn About Future Events

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This spring’s newly minted sale will bring together a range of collecting areas, including early printed books, artist’s books, literature from the seventeenth century through to the twentieth, and more. Expect a burst of Don Quixote from Ken Rapaport’s collection, along with first edition high spots by Charles Dickens, James Baldwin, H.G. Wells, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott, Mark Twain, William Faulkner, George Orwell, Ernest Hemingway, and others.

A special section of books from legendary New York theater critic and dramaturge Michael Feingold’s estate will feature signed copies of works with a dramatic flair. Of special note is a signed copy of August Wilson’s Three Plays, dedicated to Feingold, who worked closely with Wilson while the playwright was developing Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom for the stage. Other highlights across the bibliophilic spectrum will include illustrated
books, and titles in science, medicine, and travel.

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A compelling selection of scarce and desirable prints includes woodcuts, engravings, etchings, lithographs, and screenprints and spans the late fifteenth century through the 1900s. Leading the sale are Old Master prints by the perennial quadrumvirate: Dürer, Rembrandt, Piranesi, and Goya, among which are Dürer’s much sought-after engravings Adam and Eve, 1504, and Knight, Death and the Devil, 1513; and an early, lifetime impression of Rembrandt’s The Pancake Woman, etching and drypoint, 1635, and others. Select Rembrandt etchings come from a private London collection, as well as etchings by Piranesi from his renowned Carceri and Vedute di Roma series, and first editions from Goya’s Los Caprichos.

The auction continues with a stellar group of nineteenth-century prints by the likes of James A. M. Whistler, the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists—including Renoir, Degas, Cassatt, Pissarro, Cézanne, Théophile Steinlen, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and others—as well as an important Winslow Homer etching, Perils of the Sea, 1888. Modern American and European prints round out the auction, with notable repre-sentation by Edward Hopper, Rockwell Kent, Gustave Baumann, Thomas Hart Benton, Stuart Davis, and Milton Avery, along with many others. Among myriad Martin Lewis etchings in this auction are his iconic Wet Night, Route 6, 1933, and The Passing Freight, Danbury, 1934. Leading the European modernists is Picasso’s groundbreaking, career-establishing Le Repas Frugal, etching and drypoint, 1904. Additional European modern high-lights include prints by Matisse, Miró, Paul Klee, Chagall, Käthe Kollwitz, Dalí and M. C. Escher.

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The landmark exhibition The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism at the Met here in New York has brought deserved new attention to the visual art achievements of Harlem Renaissance. Many of these great artists have not yet been incorporated into the canon of either modern or American Art. The African American Art department at Swann Galleries has been bringing significant artworks of the Harlem Renaissance to auction since our first sale in 2007 at Swann Galleries. Our auctions have included paintings, works on paper, prints, photographs and sculpture by many luminaries of the period, including Richmond Barthé, Aaron Douglas, Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, Palmer Hayden, Malvin Gray Johnson, Sargent Johnson, William H. Johnson, James A. Porter, Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, Augusta Savage, James VanDerZee, Laura Wheeler Waring and James Lesesne Wells. Many works of these works are now located in institutional collections. A small group of artworks in our April 4th sale highlight the printmaking of Aaron Douglas and James Lesesne Wells, and the sculpture of Augusta Savage.

Aaron Douglas

Aaron Douglas’s elegant drawings and prints epitomize the aesthetics of the Harlem Renaissance. Douglas incorporated modernist design with African and African American imagery—an approach of looking outside of academic European traditions espoused by the great philosopher Alain Locke. Another leading intellectual of the Harlem Renaissance, Charles Spurgeon Johnson, editor of the journal Opportunity, actively recruited the talented, young Douglas to leave his high school teaching position in Kansas to come to Harlem in 1925. Douglas soon began to receive many commissions for book covers and illustrations, including from the leading Black literary journals Opportunity and Crisis. He was commissioned by Theatre Arts Monthly in 1926 to design a series of woodblock to illustrate the play The Emporer Jones by Eugene O’Neill. The gouache study on the left was one of Douglas’s original designs for that series. The woodcut print on the right comes from a different series he produced to illustrate Emporer Jones—this was published in Plays of Negro Life: A Sourcebook of Native American Drama, edited by Alain Locke in 1927.

James Lesesne Wells

Left: James Lesesne Wells, African Fetish II (African Family), linoleum cut, circa 1929. Sold December 202 for $12,500.

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Another great printmaker from the Harlem Renaissance is James Lesesne Wells. As seen in African Fetish II, Wells, like Douglas, also interpreted African sculpture in his late 1920s prints. Wells’s early career as a printmaker is characterized by his mastery of linoleum block printing. In addition, many of Wells’s block prints portray the everyday experience of working African Americans in bold, graphic compositions. Steel Mill II, an image of the Lackawanna steel mills, shows the modernist side of Wells—popularizing subjects of workers well before the WPA era. Like Douglas, Wells’s artwork was also published in The Crisis and Opportunity, as well as in publications by writers Alain Locke, Marianne Moore, Willis Richardson and Carter Woodson.

Augusta Savage

Sculptor Augusta Savage’s Gamin is an iconic image of the Harlem Renaissance. Savage is acclaimed for her naturalist approach to portraiture, particularly of young people, which greatly elevated the representation of African Americans. This smaller painted plaster version was made after the original life-size plaster and bronze—featured in the Met exhibition. Gamin was a turning point in sculptor Savage’s career at the end of the 1920s. The sculpture helped Savage win the first Rosenwald Fund fellowship in May of 1929, and Gamin was illustrated on the cover of the June issue of the magazine Opportunity that year. The untitled beautiful bust of a young man on the right is very scarce – it is the only life-sized head in plaster by the Harlem Renaissance sculptor to come to auction. Few large works in plaster by Augusta Savage are known to survive today. The modeling and finish of this head suggest this was completed after Savage’s trip to Paris in the early 1930s in her Harlem studio school. This handsome head demonstrates her skill in portraiture and her classical training in figurative modeling. 

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Swann’s March 21, 2024 sale of Printed & Manuscript African Americana proved once again to be a success among institutions and collectors alike. The sale brought $967,061, closing well within the estimate range, and brought an 81% sell-through rate by lot with 281 registered bidders competing throughout the sale.

Rare Books

The top lot of the sale was a 1958 special promotional giveaway by the Esso Standard Oil Company issue of the always popular Green Book, which brought $35,000. Three notable book auction records were set: $4,750 for a first edition of Sarah Bradford’s Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman; $16,250 for an unsigned 1845 first edition of Frederick Douglass’s first book Narrative of the Life; and $10,000 for W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction.

Pop Culture

Left: The Greater Black Patti Troubadours. Black Patti, Greatest Singer of Her Race (Mme. Sissiereta Jones.), circa 1900. Sold for $18,750.

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The most visually striking piece in the sale, a large poster circa 1900 of opera singer Sissieretta Jones which had never been seen at auction, brought $18,750, and an 1840 theater broadside for English actor Ira Aldridge‘s performance of Shakespeare and Jim Crow, at $27,500. On the other end of the musical spectrum, a collection of disco club fliers from the early 1970s brought $8,750.

Additional Highlights

Further lots of notes included a badge issued to a soldier from the famous 54th Massachusetts, which brought $21,250; an album of carte-de-visite portraits of abolitionists including Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips and more earned $21,250; the papers of 1930s Marxist activist Simon Williamson, which brought $18,750; and Winifred Hall’s Portrait of a bride and groom, circa 1930s, at $15,000.

Right: Engraved portrait of James Armistead Lafayette, master spy for the Continental Army, circa 1820s or 1830s. Sold for $12,350.

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A large portion of the top lots were won by institutions and dealers. Private collectors did take away four of the top 25 lots, including an 1893 Frederick Douglass letter on the Chicago World’s Fair, which was sold at $12,500, and an engraved portrait of Revolutionary War spy James Armistead Lafayette, which earned $11,875. 

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After a few false starts, spring has finally sprung in New York City. The days are longer, the parks are in full bloom, and the streets are filled with pedestrians taking in the warmer temperatures.

In celebration of the changing of the seasons we’re sharing a selection of works coming up for auction this month at Swann that are sure to inspire.

African American Art on April 4

Left: Benny Andrews, Time for Church, mixed media, 1999. Estimate $50,000 to $75,000.

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This portrait of a seated woman in her Sunday best surrounded by colorful flowers is an excellent example of the painted collages of Benny Andrews.

Fine Books Closing April 11

Right: Beatrix Potter, The Story of a Fierce Bad Rabbit, first edition, London, 1906. Estimate $800 to $1,200.

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The tale of this thieving rabbit was written for publisher Harold Warne’s daughter Louie Warne after she requested from Potter a story about a bunny with less admirable qualities than those of Peter Rabbit. The manuscript subsequently given to Louie was bound by her father in wallet form to match the published copies as offered here.

Old Master Through Modern Prints April 18

Left: Mary Cassatt, Under the Horse Chestnut Tree, color aquatint and drypoint, 1896-97. Estimate $7,000 to $10,000.

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Born in Philadelphia into a well-to-do family, Cassatt spent most of her adult life in Europe and, along with Berthe Morisot, went on to become one of the most celebrated female Impressionist artists. Edgar Degas served as her artistic mentor for some time and in 1876 invited her to show in the next Impressionist exhibition.

While she relied on Degas for his technical printmaking expertise, Cassatt was deeply influenced by traditional Japanese Ukiyo-e color woodcuts when she began work on this and several other color aquatints in the 1890s which mark the pinnacle of her career. In 1890, she and Degas had visited an exhibition of Japanese art at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and thereafter she began collecting Ukiyo-e woodcuts and she determined to produce a series of prints based on these Japanese woodcuts. She wrote to the American collector Samuel P. Avery, “The set was done with the intention of attempting an imitation of the Japanese methods.” While she focused instead on producing these as color aquatints with etching, rather than woodcuts in the Japanese style, these mark a highpoint in Impressionist printmaking still today. 

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Collectors of Don Quixote have fastened on to the complex parameters of published editions like true bibliomaniacs. Tracking down each morsel of minutiae appeals to those of us with a certain book-loving bent. In this sale we have the fruits of Ken Rapaport’s efforts. If you as a collector are on the same page, you’re welcome. You will find a variety of firsts that tick a number of boxes, and hope that you rejoice, as we do, in the chase and in landing your quarry.

The publication history of Don Quixote, Cervantes’s two-part masterwork, is complicated. It’s complicated for a number of reasons. Firstly, the first part preceded the second part by a healthy nine-year interval. Part one came out in 1605, and part two was not printed until 1614. Cervantes had to write it first! The original Spanish language version (Castilian, really) drew readers from across the Iberian Peninsula, and so publishers in Spain and Portugal found ready audiences for this new picaresque comedy, coming up with multiple Spanish-language editions within the first few years of its first appearance in print.

As a result of the almost immediate bestseller status of part one, printers with no legal copyrights jumped right in, producing numerous pirated editions of part one, and cashing in on the novel’s great success. When the second part came out, pirates again took their piece. Then printers saw new opportunities, why not print both parts at the same time, issue two volume sets, or print two parts in one single volume, more permutations.

Have we talked about the large number of different languages spoken in Europe? We definitely need a French translation, and one in Dutch, German, Italian, and of course English! Just imagine, first part in Spanish: Madrid editions, Barcelona editions, Lisbon editions. First part in French, both parts in Italian, two different dates for the two parts in English. DQ’s publication history is a hot mess covering all of continental Europe and Britain.

Next consider the text’s great charm to illustrators. Who wouldn’t want to see an engraving of Quixote tilting at windmills, an image of the tall slender knight errant accompanied by his stout squire astride a comical donkey, Quixote fashioning a helmet from a shaving basin, and Dulcinella? Clearly, it’s time to publish illustrated editions in both parts in each, all, and every known language. It’s a lot.

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Swann’s May 9 poster auction offers the world’s most preeminent private tennis and sport collection. With more than 100 scarce and desirable tennis posters coming to auction, this will be the largest collection of tennis posters ever to hit the market, in addition to other sporting images.

This  singular  collection, spanning the 1890s through the 1950s, is the result of a family passion for tennis, fitness and art. The Schwartz family used posters to decorate their well-known clubs, resulting in an assemblage of rare and exciting images from all over the world.

Tennis poster enthusiasts will delight in seeing favorites, but they will have the unparalleled opportunity to view and acquire images that don’t appear in the pages of the prominent books written about tennis posters. Rarities include over half a dozen Wimbledon posters designed for the London Underground in the 1930s, and Roger Broders’s
Monte Carlo, alongside works by Alfred Runge, Eduard  Stiefel, Leon Dupin, Hans Rudi Erdt, and Frank Newbould.  

Tennis Highlights

Wimbledon

Mathers Section

Sports Highlights

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Swann Galleries’ April 4, 2024 sale of African American Art brought crowds back to the sale room with a selection of standout modernist works alongside a contemporary selection sold to benefit the Rush Philanthropic Arts Foundation. The auction earned $3.4 million with an 82% sell-through rate by lot. The sale established seven records and saw four market debuts.

“We are extremely pleased with the strong results of our spring sale. It is very satisfying to see a rising demand for the figurative modern and postwar masters whose auction market Swann developed; including Benny Andrews, Richmond Barthé, Aaron Douglas and Hughie Lee-Smith. The great interest we see in exceptional works by lesser artists like Paul Keene, Rose Piper and Renée Stout also demonstrates the breadth of our market.”

Nigel Freeman, Director of African American Art

Artist Records

Artist records from the top fifteen lots sold included Benny Andrews with Time for Church, oil on canvas, 1999, at $203,000; one of four surviving 1940s paintings by Rose Piper—Subway Nuns, oil on canvas, 1947—at $149,000; and Paul F. Keene, Jr. with a vibrant 1953 painting that combines modernism and the Afro-Caribbean imagery Keene encountered in Haiti, at $87,500. Additional artist records included those for Carrol Sockwell, Rene Stout, and Bernie Casey.

Auction Debuts

The sale boasted four auction debuts with Adebunmi Gbadebo, Joseph Lofton, Adama Delphine Fawundu, Dianne Smith.

Additional Highlights & Records

Additional sale highlights included print records a complete portfolio of Jacob Lawrence’s The Legend of John Brown, 1977, which brought $173,000; and Aaron Douglas’s extremely scarce proof impression woodcut of O, Lord!, circa 1926, at $100,000. Kermit Oliver’s Hay Rolls, acrylic on board, 1983, tied the previous record set by Swann at $112,000, and Hughie Lee-Smith’s Ball Player, oil on canvas, 1970, earned the second highest price at $341,000.

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