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On Tuesday, May 20, 2008, Doyle New York will hold an auction
of Modern and Contemporary Art, including Latin American Art.
The sale will showcase paintings, drawings and sculpture by
important European, American, Latin American and Asian artists
of the 20th and 21st centuries. Featured in the Latin American
section of the sale will be works by Roberto Matta, José
Guerrero, Wifredo Lam, Francisco Toledo, Florencio Molina
Campos, Manolo (Manuel Hugue), Angel Botello and Armando Morales.
Highlighting the Modern and Contemporary Art section of the
sale are two early works by Piet Mondrian.
A special section of the auction will be devoted to The John
B.L. Goodwin Collection, from the Estate of Anthony P. Russo.
John Blair Linn Goodwin (1912-1994) was a novelist, poet,
and painter, as well as a discerning collector of Modern art.
The son of Walter L. Goodwin and Elizabeth Sage Goodwin, he
was born in Manhattan, and grew up in Hartford, Connecticut.
Later he maintained homes in Manhattan, West Palm Beach, Florida,
and the Netherlands Antilles and socialized with a wide and
interesting circle of friends that included the novelists
Paul Bowles, Christopher Isherwood, and Truman Capote, the
playwright Tennessee Williams, the artist and poet Jean Cocteau,
and the painters Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, and Roberto Matta.
Goodwin was born into a distinguished family of artists, collectors,
and art patrons. The Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford, Connecticut,
preserves a 19th-century reception room from the home of one
of his forebears, and other members of the family have been
generous donors both to the Athenaeum Collection and to its
library. His uncle, Philip L. Goodwin, was one of the architects
of the Museum of Modern Art in New York as well as a member
of its board of directors, and his older brother, Henry Sage
Goodwin, was a highly regarded architect and painter. The
Surrealist artist, patron, and collector Kay Sage was also
a member of the family. This cultivated background informed
and enriched his entire life and was a formative influence
on his collecting.
In the 1970s the Museum of New Mexico in Santa Fe, where John
Goodwin had lived for many years, exhibited a selection of
works from his collection, some of which are included in this
sale. Upon Goodwin’s death in 1994, his collection was
inherited by Anthony P. Russo.
Latin American works in the Goodwin Collection include five
examples by Roberto Matta (Chilean, 1911-2002). Roberto Antonio
Sebastián Matta Echaurren, usually known as Matta,
was born in Santiago, Chile, where he studied architecture.
Intellectually curious and restless, in 1933 he moved to Paris,
where he met a number of important artists, including Pablo
Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, René Magritte, Salvador Dalí,
and Le Corbusier. The poet and theorist André Breton
took a particular interest in him, encouraging him to join
the Surrealist movement.
During the 1930s Matta developed an art of diffuse films of
color, biomorphic forms, and bold lines. During this period
he produced his “inscape,” series, works that
were intended as visual expressions of the “landscape”
of his inner life. In 1938 he moved to the United States,
where he remained for ten years. Here he began to work principally
in oil on canvas as he continued to develop his expressive,
semi-abstract works to depict the horrors of the Second World
War. It was during this period that he produced the two “War
Cartoons” in the present sale. During the 1950s and
1960s he divided his time between Europe and South America,
becoming deeply involved in the political and social movements
of the time. The superb oil painting and pastel offered here
are classic works of the post-war period. Matta greatly enjoyed
socializing of other creative people. He and John B. L. Goodwin
became personal friends soon after Matta came to America.
Goodwin posed for the drawing “Hand and Foot”
offered in the May 20 auction during a meeting at Pidgeon
Hill, the home of the artist David Hare in Huntington, New
York.
Also featured in the Goodwin Collection are two works by Piet
Mondrian (Dutch, 1872-1944). Piet Mondrian (Pieter Cornelis
Mondriaan) was intensely interested in the natural world and
in rendering both its beauty and its intricacies. During his
boyhood he made drawings after illustrations in scientific
texts and studied painting in the realist manner with his
uncle, who had been a pupil of the Hague School landscape
painter Willem Maris. After qualifying as a teacher of drawing
in 1889, Mondrian worked as a schoolmaster until 1892, when
he moved to Amsterdam to enter the Academy of Fine Arts.
The young artist’s earliest paintings were impressionistic
views of the forests, fields and rivers of his native Holland.
Gradually his style evolved, sometimes reflecting the technique
of pointillism, at other times the vivid palette of the Fauvist
experiments of Matisse and Derain. Even at these early stages,
his art exhibited a tendency toward the geometric forms and
primary colors that would mark his abstract style, which emerged
after his move to Paris in 1912.
Mondrian painted flowers intermittently during his career.
His first exhibition of floral subjects took place in 1898
and in 1901 he presented one of these works to Queen Wilhelmina
on the occasion of her marriage. In the succeeding years,
especially between 1906 to 1910, he produced a variety of
floral pieces in charcoal, watercolor, and oil, a group that
comprises a particularly lyrical and evocative portion of
his oeuvre. Later, during the 1920s, he returned to flowers,
producing another group of drawings and watercolors in a polished
style characteristic of that period. He felt some ambivalence
about these works, for he was by this time committed to abstraction;
yet he found it hard to resist the wishes of collectors, many
of whom loved and enthusiastically bought his floral subjects.
The two works by Mondrian in the Goodwin collection, Foxtail
Lily -- an exquisite evocation of this flower in oil
and a related study of the same subject in charcoal -- are
thought to have been created some time between 1907 and 1910.
They belong to a series of drawings of this subject produced
by the artist during that period. Two similar examples in
charcoal, also from the Slijper Collection, now belong to
the Gemeentemuseum in the Hague.
For information on the May 20 auction, bidders may contact
Harold E. Porcher, Doyle New York’s Director of Modern
and Contemporary Art, at 212-427-4141, ext. 249, or email
paintings@DoyleNewYork.com.
The free, fully illustrated Internet version of the catalogue
may be viewed at DoyleNewYork.com.
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Click on images
to enlarge
Wifredo
Lam
(Cuban/French,
1902-1982)
Untitled [Figure],
1962
Signed and dated;
inscribed Wilfredo Lam
and dated 1962 on a label
affixed to the backing
Pastel on paperboard
24 1/2 x 18 1/2 inches.
$15,000-20,000
One of two works
by Lam to be offered.
Angel Botello
(Puerto Rican,
1913-1986)
Reclining Woman
Signed Botello and numbered 504 on
the reverse
Oil on canvas laid to masonite and backed
by plywood in a
hand-carved frame
34 7/8 x 30 3/4 inches.
$20,000-30,000
One of two works by
Botello to be offered.
Florencio Molina
Campos
(Argentine, 1891-1959)
Horse and Rider
Signed F. Molina Campos
Gouache on paper
15 1/2 x 22 inches.
$8,000-12,000
Armando Morales
(Nicaraguan, b. 1927)
Mujeres,
1974
Signed Morales and dated
'74; inscribed on the
stretcher Four Nudes,
1974
Oil on canvas
63 3/4 x 51 1/4 inches.
$80,000-120,000
Roberto Matta
(Chilean, 1911-2002)
War Cartoon,
1945
Crayon and graphite on
Roberson's Bristol board
16 3/4 x 21 inches.
Property from the
Collection of John B.L.
Goodwin.
$50,000-70,000
One of five works by
Matta to be offered.
Piet Mondrian
(Dutch, 1872-1944)
Foxtail Lily
Signed Piet Mondriaan
Oil on paperboard
laid to masonite
29 1/8 x 39 inches.
Property from the
Collection of John B.L. Goodwin.
$300,000-500,000
Also offered will be
Foxtail Lily, Study V.
$40,000-60,000
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