Robert Frank
'Paris' (Tulip)
Auction Closed
February 22, 08:37 PM GMT
Estimate
40,000 - 60,000 USD
Lot Details
Description
Robert Frank
1924 - 2019
'Paris' (Tulip)
gelatin silver print, signed, titled, and dated '1950' in ink in the margin, numerical notations in pencil on the reverse, 1949, printed no later than 1978
image: 13 by 8⅜ in. (33 by 21.3 cm.)
Acquired from the photographer, 1978
'Robert Frank,' Aperture, Vol. 9, No. 1, 1961, p. 5
Robert Frank, The Lines of My Hand (New York, 1972), unpaginated
Robert Frank: Black White and Things (Washington, D. C.: National Gallery of Art, 1994), p. 22
Ute Eskildsen, ed. Robert Frank: Paris (Göttingen, 2008), unpaginated
Philip Brookman and Vicente Todolí, Robert Frank: Storylines (London: Tate Modern, 2004), p. 41
Robert Frank started assembling images and completed a maquette for Black White and Things as early as 1952. In 1994 the book was finally published in conjunction with the National Gallery of Art's exhibition, Robert Frank: Moving Out. The volume Black White and Things is a definitive statement of the young photographer's work in the late 1940s and early 1950s; his deft and deliberate sequencing of the images looks forward to The Americans, published later in the decade.
The publication was divided into the three sections suggested by the title, and the present image appears as the first plate in the book's Things section. Photographer Louis Stettner is the young man holding the tulip; it was destined for a woman he had met during a party at the Paris apartment of fellow photographer Todd Webb.
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