© 2015 Georgia O'Keeffe Museum / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York (Stieglitz)
© 2015 Georgia O'Keeffe Museum / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
20/21 Photographs
Auction:
Tue 31 Mar 14:00
Christie's New York
20 Rockefeller Plaza
NY 10020 New York
+1-212-6362000
info@christies.com
www.christies.com
Mon-Fri 9:30-17:30
VIEWING TIMES & LOCATION
NEW YORK, ROCKEFELLER CENTER
MAR 27 10AM - 5PM
MAR 28 10AM - 5PM
MAR 29 1PM - 5PM
MAR 30 10AM - 2PM
New York – On March 31, Christie’s will present 20/21 Photographs. With over 140 lots, this sale is comprised of an extensive selection of classic works by artists such as Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston, Richard Avedon and William Eggleston among others. The sale will follow on the single-owner sale of Leaves Of Light And Shadow: Photographs Gathered By William T. Hillman. Please see dedicated release here. Leading the sale is Alfred Stieglitz’s Georgia O'Keeffe, 1918 (pictured above). Over a period of roughly twenty years, Stieglitz produced a group of over 300 portraits of Georgia O’Keeffe. Relaively early in their relationship, Stieglitz made this stunning image, printed in platinum. Posed in front of one of her charcoal drawings, there is an obvious sensuousness—evidence of the shared passion between the two artist. The present lot is the only known print of this image to come to market from the Estate of Georgia O'Keeffe.
© 2015 Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
• This print is from the period when Weston was at the height of his creative powers. The tonal range extends from a deep black in a foreground dune to a bright white in the background sky.
• Weston used the whole frame; he includes not only a horizon line, but a sky with clouds that compliment and interact with the shadows and sand below.
• Vol du Goéland was reproduced in the December 5, 1887 issue of La Nature
• The print was originally given by Marey to Gaston Tissandier, editor of La Nature from 1873-1945.
• The two pencil strokes that can be seen on the image delineated the area to be reproduced in the magazine and annotations 'Use only four birds and reduce to fit into the wood’ on the reverse of the mount are believed to be in Tissandier’s hand.
• The photograph remained in the Tissandier family until 2006.
• Photographing from high atop a building perched near the Pacific Ocean, the beach below Misrach is peopled with a range of figures.
• This large scale print is 48 inches tall by 86 inches wide, and is sold framed.
• Misrach’s On The Beach exhibition premiered at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007 and travelled extensively the following two years.
• Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is a pristine and unique print and is in a broader cropping than the album cover showing much 'behind-the-scenes’ activity.
• In keeping with the lyrics of the title track, Paul’s idea was that the group should be depicted as the kind of band that would play in a park bandstand.
• This is the only known dye-transfer print of the image.
Mediola Arginica (Bangor, US), 1852–1854
cyanotype photogram
$15,000–25,000
Atkins was a friend of British scholar, scientist and aristocrat Sir John Herschel, who invented the cyanotype photographic process in 1842. By the next year, Atkins was utilizing the process to produce a study of algae and seaweed, which she then later applied to a variety of flowering plants and ferns. This particular piece is on the cover of the Hillman catalogue for its graphic clarity and exquisiteness.
Falls 26, 2005
chromogenic print
$25,000–35,000
© Alec Soth, 2005
Alec Soth burst onto the contemporary art scene in 2004 with the critically acclaimed book and project, Sleeping by the Mississippi, and as the posterartist for that year’s Whitney Biennial. NIAGARA was the hard-hitting follow-up, a body of work that is neither straight documentary nor completely fiction. As Philip Brookman writes, ‘Soth’s NIAGARA feels like soaring over the falls in a barrel. Once airborne, our senses are given over to other forces. The journey starts out like a love story about youth, hope and adventure … But it quickly tumbles out of control as nature takes over, breaking into fragments of crushed spirit, raw emotion, and remorse.