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View full screen - View 1 of Lot 413. CONRAD MARCA-RELLI | THE STRUGGLE.

CONRAD MARCA-RELLI | THE STRUGGLE

Lot Closed

March 7, 05:21 PM GMT

Estimate

50,000 - 70,000 USD

Lot Details

Description

CONRAD MARCA-RELLI

1913 - 2000

THE STRUGGLE


signed; signed and dated 55 on the stretcher

oil and canvas collage on linen

Canvas: 38¾ by 72 in. (98.5 by 183 cm.)

Framed: 40¼ by 74¾ in. (102.3 by 189.8 cm.) ​


This work is registered with the Archivio Marca-Relli, Parma, as archive number MARE-6217 / © Archivio Marca-Relli, Parma

Private Collection, Connecticut

Thence by descent to the present owner

New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Waltham, Massachusetts, Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Marca-Relli, October 1967 - January 1968

In his 1963 monograph on Conrad Marca-Relli, H.H. Arnason describes the moment in the artist’s career when, in the early 1950s, Marca-Relli abandoned his de Chirico influenced cityscapes, full of dust, melancholy, and noonday ghosts, for his signature paint-and-canvas collages. These works, for which the artist is justly celebrated, rank amongst the finest achievements of the New York School Abstract Expressionists. His works from the period are evenly filled with incident, but with individual forms rigorously subordinate to the composition of the whole. Marca-Relli’s The Struggle is such a painting.


Unlike some of his peers in the New York school, Marca-Relli’s mode of painting and collage was not necessarily expressive. His surfaces are built by fragment and increment in such a manner that it is easy to compare Marca-Relli’s palate of brown and pepper-grey to that of Cubism.