Freemans has unveiled a Jackson Pollock landscape painting once thought to be lost to sell at auction this fall. The work will be offered in a single-owner sale of works from the collection of Philadelphia’s Dr. Henry and Mrs. Fannie Levine. The Pollock will go up for sale on October 5 at Freeman’s Philadelphia location alongside works by modern artists like Karel Appel, Paul Jenkins, and Bernard Buffet. Pollock’s Pennsylvania Landscape (1936) is expected to achieve a price between $60,000-$100,000.
The small-scale 1936 farmhouse scene is an example from Pollock’s early career. He completed the series of landscapes while employed by the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project. This was around the time he studied under American painter Thomas Hart Benton, whose images of rural America, painted during the 1930s Depression Era art movement, influenced Pollock’s early style. Benton was an early collector of his student’s work. He acquired Red Barn and Rolling Hills during his mentorship of the emerging painter.
Principally known for this gestural drip paintings, Pollock’s early landscapes do not come to the market often. A comparable work, Untitled (Landscape with Tree to Right), also completed in 1936, features a similar scene of rolling hills. It was sold at Sotheby’s during a contemporary day sale in May 2013 for $281,000, beating its high estimate of $150,000. Prior to the 2013 sale, it sold at Christie’s in 1986 for $22,000. The present work on offer at Freemans last sold at Sotheby’s New York in 1974.
A black-ground abstract work titled Big Boy Blue (1962) by Karel Appel, a leading figure in the mid-century CoBrA art movement will go up for sale at an estimate of $50,000–$80,000. Another Appel canvas from 1967, Untitled (Two Heads), will be sold an estimate of $40,000–$60,000. American artist Paul Jenkins’s Phenomena Saracen Shadows (1966) is among the other leading lots in the sale. It is valued at $12,000–$18,000.