Maurice Marinot

Philip L. Goodwin, New York, 1929

Frederic Rhinelander King, New York

Thence by descent to The Reverend Canon Jonathan Leroy King, New Jersey, 1973

Félix Marcilhac, Maurice Marinot (1882-1960) artisan verrier: Catalogue raisonné de l'oeuvre de verre, Paris, 2013, p. 516, no. 1531 (for the present lot illustrated)

Maurice Marinot (1882–1960) occupies a singular position in the history of decorative arts. Trained as a Fauvist painter, he turned to glass around 1911 — working the molten material himself at the furnace rather than directing craftsmen, setting him apart from every other artist of his generation in the medium. His technique evolved toward the deeply acid-etched, thick-walled vessels for which he is best known: forms in which bubbles, striations, and trapped color become the subject of the work rather than its decoration. Roger Fry compared his relationship to glass to that of a sculptor to stone, and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, the Virigina & Albert Museum in London, the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, all acquired his work during his lifetime. 

The works offered here represent a collection of singular provenance, assembled in Paris by Frederic Rhinelander King, an American architect who studied at the École des Beaux-Arts between 1912 and 1914 — the very years Maurice Marinot was developing his revolutionary approach to glass as a medium of fine art. King's immersion in the Parisian avant-garde placed him at the heart of a world in which Marinot's work was first gaining recognition, and his acquisitions reflect a connoisseur's eye shaped by that environment. The collection passed to The Reverend Canon Jonathan Leroy King and has remained in the family ever since.

Two of the pieces come by way of a second remarkable figure: Philip Lippincott Goodwin (1885–1958), co-designer of the Museum of Modern Art with Edward Durell Stone in 1939, a MoMA Trustee, and a devoted collector. Goodwin studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1914 to 1915, sharing with Frederic Rhinelander King both a Beaux-Arts formation and deep ties to the world of modern art. He was godfather to the twin sons of The Reverend Canon Jonathan Leroy King and a cherished family friend whose connection to the Kings spanned decades.

As Marinot worked alone and destroyed pieces that did not satisfy him, his total output is estimated at no more than two thousand pieces, making the present group a rare opportunity to acquire exceptional works with outstanding provenance.