Property from the Collection of Alice M. Kaplan

Alice Manheim Kaplan was born in Budapest in 1903. She moved with her family to New York two years later. She attended the Teachers College at Columbia University but left in 1925 to marry New York businessman and philanthropist Jacob M. Kaplan. She raised four children. It was not until Mrs. Kaplan resumed her education three decades later, however, that she embarked upon a calling that would place her among the leading collectors and supporters of the fine arts in New York. Within a few years of receiving her master's degree in art history in 1963, Mrs. Kaplan became president of the American Federation of Arts, where she served for ten years, actively developing many exhibitions that traveled the length and breadth of the United States. She also produced the important educational film The Art of Seeing. She became a member of the boards of the Museum of American Folk Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. She headed the advisory council for the department of art and architecture at Columbia University and was a member of the visiting committees of the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, the Museum of Modern Art and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. She helped to save the Cooper Union Museum (now the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum) and Carnegie Hall when it was threatened with demolition in 1960. Mrs. Kaplan was not a systematic collector. Instead, she used her education and extraordinary eye to take advantage of situations in which she encountered art works of exceptional quality. In 1980 she wrote in the forward to her collection catalogue: "I was inspired to acquire objects related to what I was studying. But it was the hunt that excited me: the discoveries were my victories; the missed opportunities, also, remain my regrets. In this pursuit, chance often played a large part." Her fascination with the work of Egon Schiele began as one such "discovery." In 1959, her first year of serious collecting, Mrs. Kaplan found herself on the wrong floor at the wrong exhibition in the Fuller Building on East 57th Street, which as it does today housed many art galleries. As she was about to leave, she noticed a row of drawings in the distance. It was the first major exhibition of works by Egon Schiele in New York. She left the gallery an hour later with her first acquisition of a Schiele drawing. The following four lots represent a selection from her collection in the field of 20th century European painting. She also collected notable paintings by the American artists Ammi Phillips, William Harnett and Maurice Prendergast, Old Master drawings, and sculptures from such diverse cultures as 13th century Burgundy, Benin, pre-Columbian America and the Far East. What interests Alice Kaplan primarily is line. This is obvious in the gentle outline of a weathervane or the angry scribbled line of a Schiele drawing, but it is also true of the Harnett, of the folk paintings, and even of the Indian sculpture. She is drawn to line that, in the hands of a master, creates a nervous consciousness, a special awareness. Each of her objects, whatever the culture or period, has a primitive, direct power. (T.E. Stebbins, Jr., "Alice Kaplan, Collector," Portfolio, May-June, 1982, p. 85) Property from the Collection of ALICE M. KAPLAN

Details

Property from the Collection of Alice M. Kaplan

Gustav Klimt (1862-1918)

Auf Ruhebett sitzende Frau, die Hände aufgestützt

signed lower right 'GUSTAV KLIMT'--pencil on paper
21 x 13 7/8 in. (53.4 x 45.5 cm.)
Drawn in 1908

Provenance

Michael Tollemache, London
Simon Sainsbury, London
James Kirkman, London
Alice M. Kaplan, New York (acquired from the above in 1978)

Literature

A. Strobl, Gustav Klimt: Die Zeichungen 1904-1912, Salzburg, 1982, vol. II, p. 154, no. 1697 (illustrated, p. 155)

Exhibited

Vienna, Galerie Ariadne, Lagerkatalog Sommer-Herbst, summer-fall, 1972, no. 109 (illustrated)

Lot Essay

Alice Strobl (op. cit.) relates this drawing to the series of sketches which precedes the oil painting Judith II (Salome), 1909
(Novotny and Dobai no. 160; coll. Galleria d'Arte Moderna, Venice). In Klimt's conception of this theme, the moralistic purpose of the Old Testament story of the woman who seduced and slew Holofernes to save her people is largely set aside in favor of a more general fascination, common among many fin de siècle artists and writers, with the theme of the femme fatale. In the painting Klimt contrasts the partial nudity of his model with numerous and complex decorative motives. While the drawings contain none of these abstract shapes, Klimt evinces here a growing interest in the expressive possibilities of clothing and drapery, with the result that it contributes as much to the sensuality of his subject as his depiction of her semi-clad form.