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Contemporary Art

Exceptional Highlights of Contemporary Works on Paper

19 SEPTEMBER 2019 - 02 OCTOBER 2019 | NEW YORK
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S otheby's Contemporary Art Online features sensational works on paper by renowned artists including Lee Bontecou, Saul Steinberg, Alexander Calder and others. A selection of highlights will be on view in our New York galleries from 20 September–2 October 2019.

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Contemporary Art Online | New York
19 September–2 October 2019 | 12:00 PM EDT | New York

Exceptional Highlights of Contemporary Works on Paper

  • Ed Ruscha, Crenshaw, Adams, 1998
    Estimate $15,000–20,000

    “[Ruscha] adapts the Jefferson grid of American city-planning to the conceptual grid of European modernist painting and acknowledges the dissonance between them.”

    (Dave Hickey, Ed Ruscha: Metro Plots, Gagosian Beverly Hills 1998, n.p.)
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  • Lee Bontecou, Untitled, 1961
    Estimate $50,000–70,000

    “Since my early years until now, the natural world and its visual wonders and horrors – man-made devices with their mind-boggling engineering feats and destructive abominations, elusive human nature and its multiple ramifications from the sublime to unbelievable abhorrences – to me are all one. It is in the spirit of this feeling that the primary influences on my work have occurred.”

    (Lee Bontecou, “Artist’s Statement”, Lee Bontecou: A Retrospective, New York 2003, p. 12)
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  • Raymond Pettibon, Untitled (Old Facefull), 1992
    Estimate $20,000–30,000

    Raymond Pettibon’s work explores a wide spectrum of American high and low culture, from the deviations of marginal youth to art history, literature, sports, religion, politics and sexuality. His work was first used in advertisements, zines and record covers in the burgeoning Los Angeles punk scene of the 1980s. Pettibon’s work resembles comics, promoting anti-authoritarian ideals. The artist came from humble origins as a zine creator in his youth, and his long career has always been marked by edginess unique to his practice. His work has been exhibited widely throughout the United States and abroad and is held in the permanent collections of major galleries worldwide.
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  • Peter Saul, Please Excuse My Lack of Talent, 2012
    Estimate $20,000–30,000

    “Peter Saul… is a classic artist’s artist, one of our few important practicing history painters and a serial offender in violations of good taste. His career, while long, steady and admired, has never exceeded cult status. It’s an example of can’t-see-the-tree-for-the-forest visibility. The influence of Mr. Saul’s paintings, with their cartoony figures, lurid-lush colors, splatter-film expressionism and contrarian take on topical subjects, pervades recent art. It has contributed mightily to major careers, like those of Carroll Dunham and Elizabeth Murray. And it has paved the way for the neo-Surrealist noodlings of countless student painters spilling out of art schools… ”

    (Hollad Cotter, “Provocateur: The Peter Saul Manifesto”, The New York Times, 15 August 2008)
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  • H.C. Westermann, See America First, 1968
    Estimate $7,000–9,000

    “[Westermann’s] love of country was genuine and deep, and it was renewed by transcontinental car trips taken in the 1960s, when the ‘United’ States was on the brink of coming unstuck. Those migrations were documented in letter drawings and his See America First [drawings and] prints, whose principal motifs are not big-city sights but the empty spaces between – two-lane blacktop cutting through the desert past vintage signs, roadkill and roadside attractions, car wrecks and bleached bones, all of them metaphors of pioneer solitude in the age of V-8 engines. These scarred wastelands were also the nation’s blasted heartland, and if Westermann’s iconography was bleak, his rendering was vigorous and often gleefully obscene. His patriotism was for a place with room enough to get away from the air-conditioned nightmare of modernity… Westermann cut his own zigzag course across the landscape of American culture. To the extent that it resembles anyone else’s, it is Jack Kerouac’s... ”

    (Robert Storr, “The Devil’s Handyman”, H.C. Westermann: Exhibition Catalogue and Catalogue Raisonné of Objects, p. 19-23)
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  • Saul Steinberg, Untitled, 1951
    Estimate $10,000–15,000

    “While retaining the cartoon as the nucleus of his art, Steinberg has vastly enlarged its scope with ideas, techniques, approaches derived from the history of art and from twentieth-century art in particular: automatic drawing, …drawings by children and the mentally disturbed, naïve art, scrawls on walls and latrines, facsimiles, transferred images, parodies of modern old masters… The Steinbergian metapmorphosis of the cartoon into a vehicle for mediating on a seemingly limitless range of issues, including the central ones in art – illusion, self and reality – constitutes an expansion of the intellectual resources of flat-surface composition comparable to that of collage. In his hands the cartoon is made to serve as a major medium.”

    (“Harold Rosenberg, Saul Steinberg, New York 1978, p. 34)
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  • David Hockney, Untitled, 1968
    Estimate $20,000–30,000

    “But if that early self portrait is unusual in its hesitancy, it may provide a clue to the passion that has been at the core of Hockney’s success: that to understand that world he needed to understand himself and those closest to him – family, friends and lovers. And his way to achieve this has been through portraiture. Portraits are not only central to his investigation of the world, they have also been a crucial part of his many creative endeavors, including in the spheres of perspective, colour theory and aesthetics.”

    (Howgate & Shapiro, David Hockey Portraits, New Haven 2006, p. 7)
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  • Arshile Gorky, Study for Agony, circa 1946-47
    Estimate $15,000–20,000

    "Drawing is the basis of art. A bad painter cannot draw. But one who draws well can always paint. Drawing gives the artist the ability to control his line and hand. It develops in him the precision of line and touch. This is the path towards a masterwork"

    (Arshile Gorky quoted in Karen Mooradian, Arshile Gorky Adoian, Chicago, 1978, p. 276)
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  • Sam Francis, Sketch for Chase Bank Manhattan Mural, 1959
    Estimate $15,000–25,000

    “Francis's distinctive way of building a picture with an accretion of rhythmic touches, at once deliberate and loose, seems equally indebted to the legacy of Abstract Expressionism, the slashing 'automatic' gestures of Riopelle and his colleagues, and the most spontaneous, inspired Japanese brushwork, with an admixture of reverent homage to the planar strokes of Paul Cézanne's late watercolors.”

    – Carl Belz in Karen Wilkin
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  • Roni Horn, Double 2.24 A and B, 1989
    Estimate $12,000–18,000

    “[Horn’s] works on paper from the 1980s… tend to contain uneven, enclosed shapes in glowing color… When two very similar shapes are combined it would be reasonable to think they might be in a symmetrical relation with each other. It is all the more striking, then, that a pair of shapes… fail to have the effect of symmetry… Instead one functions as the double of the other and has the reverse effect: disequilibrium. Two drawings may be in some respects nearly identical, but the drift of the colored vertical further to the right in the right-hand work becomes all the more dramatic as a consequence. As the poet Paul Celan succinctly lamented: ‘Unreadable this/world. All doubles’…The effect is cumulative and greater than its parts”

    (Briony Fer, “Complete with Missing Parts,” Roni Horn aka Roni Horn, p.28, catalogue for exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art)
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  • Alexander Calder, Black Structure with Discs, 1961
    Estimate $25,000–35,000

    Among the leading artists of the 20th century, Alexander Calder achieved inimitable playfulness, wit and grace across a variety of media. He continues to be best known for his ‘mobiles,' innovative sculptures to which he introduced the element of time. More recently, however, Calder’s works on paper have undergone a reexamination in relation to his oeuvre. Some of his drawings were sketches for his ‘mobiles,' as in the case of Black Structure with Discs.
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  • Mario Carreño, Sin Título, 1955
    Estimate $10,000–15,000

    This charming 1955 work in oil on paper by Cuban Modern master Mario Carreño is a striking and representative example of the artist’s brief but fruitful period of abstract production (approximately 1951-1960). The dual influences of Synthetic Cubism and Arte Madí on Carreño’s abstraction are both visible in Sin título; rendered in rich tones of crimson, teal, and ochre, it has the kaleidoscopic, rhythmic quality that characterizes the artist’s most accomplished works.
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  • Romare Bearden, Odysseus Warrior, circa 1977
    Estimate $20,000–30,000

    “Romare Bearden’s Odyssey series is not literature but painting, of course, and his technique is that talismanic twentieth century one, collage… An act of necromancy, requiring cunning, grace, nerve, intelligence and luck… It is a rash nature that invokes ‘The Odyssey’ in one department of its activity and Henri Matisse in another. But this is what Romare Bearden does in the series of collages on the subject of Odysseus… says much for the quality of his imagination.”

    (Calvin Tomkins and John Russell on Romare Bearden for 1977 exhibition at Cordier & Ekstrom, New York, as quoted in Abdul Goler, “A Refracted Image”, The Art of Romare Bearden, p. 207)
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