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OFF THE BEATEN TRACK
Collectors who follow their own paths
By Brett Gorvy
Andy Warhol's Dance Diagram - (Fox trot) is a celebrated image from the lexicon of Pop art, whose stark simplicity and playfulness belie its revolutionary character. Warhol stated that he wanted to be a machine and coolly distanced himself from the artistic process involved in the making of his pictures. Painted at the same time as his famous Campbell Soup-Cans and Do-It-Yourself series, Warhol based his Dance Diagram on an illustration found in a dance book, enlarging the image by hand and rendering it in an impersonal, seemingly mechanical graphic style. Often exhibited on the floor, Warhol is almost inviting one to follow the exotic dance, step by step. The viewer becomes a main participant in the conception of the painting, but his very progress is controlled by the instructions set before him.
The present owners bought this seminal painting over thirty years ago. How many collectors would like to feel that their journey into the world of collecting could be mapped out so eloquently and purposefully as the steps to the Fox trot? Certainly one can distinguish in this particular collection several overriding traits and tastes, strong preferences and obsessive focuses. But how do you equate in the same consignment the expressive gestural bravado of a major Franz Kline, the brilliant saturated colouration of a pivotal early Sam Francis and the detachment and humour of works by Pop artists like Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, David Hockney and Ed Ruscha?
'Museum quality' is certainly one criterion to measure the works in this collection. It is not surprising to note that many of the paintings and sculptures have been lent consistently to major exhibitions and retrospectives, and that they are immediately recognizable from the standard literature on the artists. The fact that the collectors are European is also an essential factor in the makeup of the collection. It explains the eclecticism and the focus on mainly American artists, who were often marginalized in their own country and whose impact in Europe during the 1950s and 1960s was sometimes even greater than in the United States.
The present owners acquired Sam Francis' masterpiece Big Orange in the late 1970s from the famous collection of Franz Meyer in Zurich. Francis had worked in Paris and Big Orange was painted there at the height of his creative powers between 1954-55. Francis stated that 'colour is light on fire' and his painting burns like glowing molten lava amidst a border of ashen coal. The monumentality of the huge canvas presents the orange shapes like inflamed blood corpuscles.
If Francis was a magician of pure space and colour, Kline was the master-builder of black and white. He literally constructed his paintings out of heavy beams of black which are swayed across the canvas with the kind of dramatic brushstrokes that gave Abstract Expressionism its name. But for all the apparent daring spontaneity, Kline based pictures like Zinc Door, 1961 on small oil studies on newspaper that he would magnify to imply objects of massive physical scale and strength. The yellow breaks through the white behind the black gate-like shape as though this was a literal door opening to the sublime.
While the collection is rich in abstraction, Pop art constitutes a main part. Artists like Warhol and Oldenburg found a devoted audience amongst key collectors in countries like Germany and Scandinavia during their heyday in the 1960s, where their brash celebration of consumer culture and low art imagery must have seemed wonderfully exotic to a Post-War European society. Oldenburg's Three-Way Plug, 1969, hangs from the ceiling like a Calder mobile, its mundane subject undermining the traditional notion of monumental public sculpture. Oldenburg liked to take everyday items and enlarge them so that they become positively surreal in their giant state. He made the familiar unfamiliar.
Other works from this collection to be sold in May include David Hockney's whimsical Snake ($250,000-300,000), Mel Ramos' Camilla No. 2, a sexy pin-up based on Marilyn Monroe ($100,000-150,000), Ed Ruscha's dreamy L.A. nightscape Era Ends ($100,000-150,000) and Edward Kienholz' horrific commentary on Hiroshima, The Future as an Afterthought ($70,000-90,000).
Brett Gorvy is International co-head of Post-War and Contemporary Art, New York.
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ANDY WARHOL (1928-1987)
Sale 1232, Lot 23
Dance Diagram [Fox Trot: 'The Lady Tuck-In Turn-Man']
Casein and graphite on canvas
Estimate: $2,000,000 - 3,000,000
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