- 120
Angus McBean
Description
- Angus McBean
- Darling, I Think We Must Be In Battersea Park, 1948
- Silver prints
Provenance
Literature
Angus McBean, Art and Artists, July 1976, illustrated p.30;
Angus McBean, Creative Camera, February 1980 illustrated p.65;
Angus McBean, Adrian Woodhouse, Quartet Books, November 1982, illustrated pl.66;
Full of McBeans, Tatler, February 1983, illustrated p.45;
Angus McBean, Zoom no. 101, 1983, illustrated p.25;
Cambridge Darkroom review, Sunday Times, 8th January 1984;
Angus McBean Portraits, Terence Pepper, National Portrait Gallery, London, 2006, illustrated p.120;
Adrian Woodhouse, Angus McBean Facemaker, Alma Books, Richmond, 2006, illustrated p.230.
Condition
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."
Catalogue Note
He took great pains to produce them and, in an age before digital photography and computers made anything in camera seem possible, he used all the optical tricks of which he was such a master to create the surreal images for his seasonal greetings. Indeed, so greatly did McBean become identified by these calling cards for his craft that one wag opined in the 1950s: “Oh, Angus only sends out those cards to annoy the other photographers”.
Of all those Christmas cards the one for 1948, which McBean in his unpublished autobiography Look Back In Angus declared was his own favourite, is surely the most remarkable. For the photographer’s unparalleled labour in making the image has now been matched by its extraordinary after-life.
In the summer of 1948 there took place in Battersea Park in London a hugely popular open-air sculpture exhibition featuring 43 works from the greatest names of the previous half-century like Rodin, Malliol, Epstein, Moore and Hepworth. Shortly after the show closed McBean spotted an impressive bearded classical bust in an antique shop in the then collectors’ paradise, Cecil Court, off the Charing Cross Road. The shop owner had dubbed the bust Homer but McBean thought its face had more than a passing resemblance to his own and formed an idea for his next Christmas card. So the bust was hired and borne back to his studio in Endell Street, Covent Garden.
The photographer was determined to create a surreal image with half his own face superimposed onto the white marble of “Homer”. (In later years McBean learnt to identify the bust as Zeus or Aesculapius but when he first wrote about the making of the card only a few years after the event he was still giving the sculpture the name of the author of The Iliad.) Accordingly, on 17th November 1948, as he recorded in his studio sessions book under the serial number H435, he set to work.
“First I set the bust up on a table top covered with a rough textured wall board which I bent up at the back to give the illusion of a distant horizon, added some small bronze models of ruined columns, a little sand, and two tiny figures cut from an old photograph of mine.” Though no one who would receive the card could actually tell, the figures were his mother, Cherry, and his former brother-in-law and long-time friend, Paul Jones.
“Then came the somewhat difficult job of lighting the set-up so that one half of the face of the sculpture was completely unlit – tricky when you consider it was made of white marble. This area was then most carefully drawn onto the ground glass [of a negative] the features being exactly shown and an exposure was made. Then all that remained to do was to photograph half my face into the small space left.”
Quickly McBean and his assistants discovered that this was far more difficult than they had imagined. Lighting, angling, size and exposure were wrong time after time and it took 57 attempts before the photographer was eventually satisfied that he had matched his features perfectly into the Homeric frame.
The card, with McBean’s handwritten greetings invoking the Battersea exhibition, won immediate acclaim and has been endlessly reproduced in publications about his work since. Moreover, having recognised the bust’s importance not just to his reputation but also his self-image, the photographer – a keen collector all his life - could not bear to return it to the shop. He bought it for £50 and the bust became one of his most prized possessions travelling with him from Covent Garden first to Islington and then to his two successive 16th century houses in Suffolk. After his death it featured prominently in the 2006 major McBean retrospective at London’s National Portrait Gallery in which the 1948 Christmas card was alongside as exhibit 85.
By that date Homer/Zeus/Aesculapius had been sold by McBean’s estate to a long-time friend and in May-July 2014 the bust was once more exhibited at Galerie Chenel, Paris - this time with the title Jupiter Otricoli and an accompanying assertion that it dated from the 2nd century AD and had been restored by the late 18th c. Roman sculptor, Bartolomeo Cavaceppi. The McBean Christmas card and provenance were accorded a full page illustration.
Apparently sold from this exhibition, the bust reappeared after extensive restoration at Sotheby’s New York as Lot 34 in the antiquities sale of 3rd June 2015 with the old repairs to “Zeus or Asklepios” now attributed to a second Roman antiquarian, Vicenzo Pacetti, in the 1780s. The accompanying literature, while again illustrating the 1948 Christmas card, also referenced two 1940s surreal paintings by Giorgio de Chirico which feature just the head.
The price achieved on the hammer was more than double even the top estimate to make a total of $3,130,000 including buyer’s premium – a breath-taking distance in every sense of the word from McBean’s transaction 67 years earlier.
The photographer would assuredly have loved such an outcome - and dreamt up an appropriate card to commemorate the making of his three million dollar face.