A work by Jackson Pollock will be the highlight of the evening sale of 21th and 6st century art, announced at Christie's NY for October 2020, XNUMX.
“Red Composition” is estimated at 12-18 million dollars and is an important early work by the celebrated American artist whose drip painting technique would revolutionize XNUMXth century art. Painted directly after his seminal Sounds in Grass series, this intricate and multifaceted work is among the first paintings in which Pollock freed paint from the interference of his brush, allowing it to take its own form and in the process become a manifestation of true abstraction .
The painting is offered for sale by the Everson Museum in Syracuse, New York, as part of a larger museum effort to refine and diversify its collection and establish a fund for future acquisitions of artwork by artists of color, women artists and other under-represented emerging and mid-career artists. A portion of the proceeds will go to a fund for the direct care of the rest of the collection. The decision to sell is in line with guidelines established by the American Alliance of Museums and has the support of the museum's Board of Trustees, as well as the foundation established by Dorothy and Marshall M. Reisman who donated the work in 1991. See print from the Everson Museum.
Robert Falter, Trustee of the Dorothy and Marshall M. Reisman Foundation, said, “As a longtime board member and benefactor of the Everson, Marshall would have been extremely happy to see his gift used for the greater good of the Museum, its future sustainability and its impact on the community.”
The red composition first belonged to the legendary dealer and gallery owner Peggy Guggenheim, one of Jackson Pollock's earliest and most ardent patrons. Guggenheim then gave the painting to James [Jimmy] Ernst, son of surrealist painter Max Ernst in 1947. Ernst Senior was one of the most influential voices in the European avant-garde, and after a tumultuous courtship married Guggenheim between 1941 and 1941. 1946. In the early 50s, the painting was then acquired by the man of New York businessman Marshall Reisman and his wife, Dorothy, originally from Syracuse. It remained in their personal collection for over forty years until it was donated in 1991 to the Everson Museum of Art.
This work, together with Willem de Kooning's paintings of women, Mark Rothko's transcendental color fields and Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans, Jackson Pollock's “drip” paintings have become some of the most important paintings of the latter part from the twentieth century. The red composition was painted at a pivotal moment when the artist was shifting his focus away from the more figurative elements of his earlier practice. It represents the period during which paint freed itself from its brush, a development that would forever revolutionize the practice of painting. With Red Composition, Pollock had taken an important step in freeing himself from the influences of his interest in Surrealism, and in becoming, in the words of Peggy Guggenheim, “the greatest painter since Picasso”.
As well as playing an important part within his own artistic development, Red Composition also embodies some of the important relationships in Pollock's personal life, having been owned by his great friend and mentor, Peggy Guggenheim. Executed at the beginning of a period of intense creativity for the artist, no part of the canvas is untouched by Pollock's tumbles and swirls of thick impasto, making it a remarkably prescient painting that foretold the seismic changes to come.
The origins of Pollock's unmistakable style emerged in 1946, in what has been considered the artist's most important year. This was the year that, together with Red Composition, Pollock produced his seminal Sounds in Grass series; these seven paintings mark the first time Pollock abandoned the application of his colors solely with the aid of a brush and instead began spreading pigment directly from the tube. This important series of paintings includes Eyes in the Heat (Solomon R. Guggenheim Collection, New York), considered one of the artist's most important early paintings, as it heralds the “poured” paintings Pollock began in the winter of 1946-47.
Directly after the Sounds in the Grass paintings are two related paintings; the first is Free Form (Museum of Modern Art, New York), a lyrical painting with flowing black-and-white trails of liquid paint crossing a familiar red ground that the museum claims is “most likely Pollock's first 'drip painting' . Directly following Free Form is Red Composition, making him even more instrumental in the trajectory that propelled Pollock to become one of the most innovative and important artists of his and subsequent generations.
