Eight Extraordinary Stories from Modern New York

In June 1968, a gunshot victim was rushed into Columbus Hospital, where Dr. Giuseppe Rossi performed a 5.5-hour emergency surgery. Despite a consensus that the patient wouldn’t survive, Dr. Rossi persevered. Initially believed to be a homeless man, the victim was in fact Andy Warhol, shot earlier that day in his studio by Valerie Solanas. Warhol never forgot the doctor who saved his life. In the years that followed, he regularly sent gifts—especially at Christmas—and presented Rossi with artworks, including examples of his Marilyn prints, as shown above. ‘He never forgot us,’ recalls Rossi’s wife, Gemma, of the artist’s enduring gratitude.

As Georgia O’Keeffe’s architectural paintings — particularly her barn series — return to focus ahead of a major Detroit exhibition this coming September, Alfred Stieglitz’s portrait captures the artist at a defining moment. Taken in 1923 during the height of their love affair, a year before they wed, Stieglitz frames O’Keeffe in black, behind her a dramatic grey sky. The image is reverential in perspective, emphasising her power. Stieglitz captured numerous portraits of O’Keeffe throughout their nearly 30-year relationship, each punctuating a dialogue of intimacy, artistic identity and the evolving language of Modernism.

In 1950, Irving Penn planted a ginkgo tree at his Long Island home to commemorate his wedding to his wife, Lisa Fonssagrives. Although the photographer is best known for elevating commercial fashion photography into high art, Penn was also captivated by everyday ephemera. In the 1960s, Penn began photographing flowers, eventually creating an entire book of floral studies. In 1990, Penn returned to the ginkgo leaf. In this photograph of two ginkgo leaves he found at their Long Island home, each is at a different point in its life cycle, accentuating the beauty of their decay. This work is an extraordinary example of Penn’s printmaking skills, using a labour-intensive dye transfer technique that allows for precise control of colour and vibrancy. Ginkgo Leaves was chosen for the cover of Penn’s monograph Passage.

Executed in 1931, the year that Charles Sheeler produced many of his most renowned works, Tulips depicts a view into the artist’s photography studio in New York. It belongs to a series of the same subject matter — including Cactus (1931; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania) and View of New York (1931; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts) — which are often interpreted as artistic self-portraits. Executed in monochrome conté crayon with crisp lines that highlight geometric forms, Tulips is a prime example of the Precisionist movement which flourished after World War I. Precisionists celebrated industrialisation through stark light, minimal detail and geometric lines, and are often defined by the work of Sheeler, Ralston Crawford and Charles Demuth. Tulips also reflects Sheeler’s sensibilities as a photographer, a medium he worked in throughout his lifetime.

Originally executed in 1919, four hundred years after Leonardo da Vinci’s death, L.H.O.O.Q. is the ultimate act of iconoclasm by the Dadaist, desecrating Da Vinci’s 1503 masterpiece with a cartoonish pencil mustache and goatee drawn onto the Mona Lisa’s face. Marcel Duchamp made L.H.O.O.Q. at a pivotal moment, as the Mona Lisa had recently returned to the Louvre after a heist. The title, L.H.O.O.Q., is meant to mimic the phrase ‘Elle a chaud au cul,’ which translates to ‘she has a hot ass.’ Duchamp would go on to make several different iterations of L.H.O.O.Q. throughout his lifetime, including as a postcard. The Mona Lisa was a particularly favoured target for Dadaists, representing of the conservative aesthetic of the past they sought to reject. The artist will be celebrated with a major retrospective opening at MoMA this month.

“I find myself being drawn almost inexorably into a dream world,” Charles Burchfield once wrote — a sentiment that defines Sultry Moon. Among the most celebrated American watercolorists of the twentieth century, Burchfield transformed the nature he knew into something deeply psychological. Here, a glowing crescent moon casts an eerie light across the landscape, heightening its emotional charge. Rooted in close study yet guided by intuition, the composition is at once meditative and unsettling, capturing Burchfield’s lifelong effort to translate the never-ending wonders of the natural world.

Despite her incredibly short career, which ended in a tragic suicide at age 22, Francesca Woodman’s photographs left a lasting influence on contemporary American photography. Born and raised by a ceramist and an abstract painter, Woodman grew up in a household preoccupied with art and its creation. Woodman captured House #3, Providence, Rhode Island at age 18 while she was at the Rhode Island School of Design. As exemplified in this photograph, Woodman often made herself the subject, usually obscured by movement or objects — and manipulated through shutter speed and double exposure. Lifetime prints by Woodman are exceedingly rare, with this lot marking the second to ever come to auction. 

László Moholy-Nagy continuously challenged the confines of every medium he worked in, including photography, painting, collage, typography, sculpture and filmmaking. Although he produced prints for only a few years, Kestnermappe 6 (a single work comprising six prints) is the artist’s most significant print project and is included in the collections of major institutions like MoMA and the Art Institute of Chicago. The photograph Untitled is also a uniquely compelling work, one made without a camera or negative, instead by placing an object directly onto photographic paper and exposing it to light. Untitled emerges for the first time after thirty years in private hands. While the lithograph series Kestnermappe 6 was made the year Moholy-Nagy began teaching at the Bauhaus, the photograph was created the year he left the Bauhaus to work independently in Berlin, marking two pivotal moments in the Constructivist’s career.