Harry Warner’s daughter Betty Sheinbaum was was a long-standing art collector. Forty of her works will be sold by Phillips over the next few months but the November Evening sale will contain works by Robert Motherwell, Richard Diebenkorn and Henri Matisse:
A Sculptor’s Picture, With Blue represents the culmination of a discrete group of three paintings completed during the joyous period in spring of 1958. As the only work to remain in private hands, its companions now reside in prestigious permanent collections. Unseen to the public in more than three decades, the work was acquired by Betty Sheinbaum directly from the artist’s 1959 solo exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York. Remaining in her collection since, Betty loaned the work to major exhibitions at the Pasadena Art Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Art and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution.
Also included in the November Evening Sale in New York is Richard Diebenkorn’s Driveway. Painted in 1956 during Richard Diebenkorn’s famed Berkeley years, Driveway epitomizes the early stages of the artist’s shift from abstraction to representation, which would cement him as one of the most significant American painters of the past century.
Henri Matisse’s bronze sculpture Le Tiaré will also be offered in the November Evening Sale. A remarkable example of Henri Matisse’s mature sculptural oeuvre, Le Tiaréis celebrated as the apex in his pursuit of organic simplicity. Conceived in Nice in 1930 and cast in the months before his passing in November 1954, the present bronze was purchased by Betty Sheinbaum from famed art dealer Erick Estorick in 1960. Inspired by the tiari flower worn by Tahitian women in their hair, this work is a testament to the radical turning point in Matisse’s mature career, prompted by his trip to Tahiti in 1930. The trip revitalized Matisse, who continuously sketched and drew the island’s lush tropical vegetation – ushering in a wholly new formulation of his art.
