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To Diversify Collection, Syracuse’s Everson Museum Will Sell $12 M. Pollock at Auction

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Jackson Pollock, Red Composition (1946). Courtesy Christie’s.

The Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse New York will deaccession a 1946 Jackson Pollock painting titled Red Composition in an effort to diversify its collection. The museum has consigned the work to Christie’s, which will sell the painting  in the first evening sale staged by its newly merged modern and contemporary department on October 6. The work is valued at an estimated $12 million–$18 million.

At 19¼ inches by 23¼ inches, Red Composition features the Abstract Expressionist’s signature drip technique, and was painted just after Pollock completed his formative “Sounds in Grass,” series another example of which resides in the Solomon R. Guggenheim collection. First acquired by dealer-collector Peggy Guggenheim, the work changed hands several times, going next to James Ernst, the son of Surrealist painter Max Ernst and Guggenheim’s ex-husband, in 1947. From there the work resided in the collection of Syracuse-based collectors Marshall and Dorothy Reisman, who then gifted it to the Everson Museum in 1991.

“The last painting the artist completed in 1946, Red Composition is an exceedingly rare opportunity to acquire a museum quality work by Pollock that marks the breakthrough of his fabled ‘drip’ technique,” said Barrett White, Christie’s Executive Deputy Chairman, in a statement.Continue Reading

Sotheby’s Brings $30m Pollock to New York

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Sotheby’s will be selling a small but rare Jackson Pollock on May 16th in New York with a $30m estimate. Number 32, 1949has been owned by the same couple for the last 36 years and rarely shown. Despite its size, the work is a candidate to match Pollock’s auction (but not private sale) record of $58.4m which was achieved by Number 19 (1948) five years ago. The Art Newspaper has the announcement:

Number 32 was exhibited in Pollock’s breakthrough show at Betty Parsons Gallery in November 1949 and is in “remarkable” condition, says [Sotheby’s Lisa] Dennison, because it rarely travelled after the owners acquired it from the Robert Elkon Gallery. […]

The fact that the consignors, a New York couple, have decided to part with the work now, sans guarantee, is a vote of confidence in the market, Dennison says. Earlier this month, however, Pollock’s Number 21 (1950), a 22.2-inch square drip painting in enamel and aluminium paint on Masonite, fetched a slightly under-estimate £9.3m ($13m) at Christie’s London; Dennison says this one “had a very different surface quality”.

Sotheby’s press release goes into greater detail:

The production of the artist’s drip paintings of 1948-9 stands as one of the most radical events in 20th-century art, in which the boundaries of painting were pushed and a new aesthetic established. Number 32, 1949 comes from a critical year for the artist and epitomizes the chaotic vibrancy, heroic drama and thrilling vigor that have come to define Pollock’s prodigious legacy. Acquired in 1983 and held in the same esteemed private collection for over 35 years, the work will be unveiled in Hong Kong on 29 March before traveling to Los Angeles and London, with the New York exhibition opening on 4 May.

Jackson Pollock executed his first drip painting in 1947. Over the next two years he would hone this now instantly recognizable, signature technique, producing the monumental Autumn Rhythm (collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) and Number 1A, 1948 (collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York). Number 32 is one of a small number of more intimate 1949 paintings in which the artist more fully explored the subtleties of the drip technique. It was featured in the second of two shows that year at Betty Parsons Gallery about which Robert M. Coates wrote in the New Yorker “They seem to me the best painting he has yet done.”

Exceptionally rare, Number 32 is one of a very limited group of 16 drip paintings Pollock created on paper mounted on Masonite or canvas in 1949 and one of only eight that feature the aluminum paint that creates a lustrous shimmer around his elaborate gestural movements. Boasting a fully painted surface with intricate layers of dripped and poured oil, enamel, and aluminum paint, the work has one of the most complete and richly covered surfaces of the entire series; indeed the last time a painting of this composition was offered at auction was in May 2013, when it set a record price of $58.4 million. It is further distinguished by a dense composition of black and silver splatters offset by bursts of brick red, bright orange, sunflower gold, and vibrant sea green that extend to the very edges of the paper. Other examples from this limited group reside in prestigious collections including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and The Munson-Williams Proctor Art Institute, Utica, New York.

Sotheby’s to offer Jackson Pollock drip painting in May sale series (The Art Newspaper)

Jackson Pollock Drip Painting at Christie’s in March

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Jackson Pollock, Number 21, 1950 (£10-15m)

Over the weekend, Francis Outred announced over Instagram that Christie’s would be selling a small Jackson Pollock drip painting in its London sale of Contemporary art. The work carries an estimate in line with the sale in New York two and a half years ago of Number 12, 1950 for $18.2m. One of the unanswered questions in this somewhat quiet launch is why the work is being sold in London instead of New York where it would be expected to do well. Is this an indication of interest from Europe and Asia or a signal that Christie’s has fair amount of traffic in May or simply a feather in Francis Outred’s cap.

Only time will answer those questions. Until then, we have Christie’s catalogue information:

Jackson Pollock – Number 21, 1950 (1950), Estimate: £10,000,000-15,000,000

With its opulent, marbled galaxy of dripped, splashed and spattered paint, Number 21, 1950 is a beautiful and important work from the peak of Jackson Pollock’s iconic ‘drip period’. It was included in the artist’s seminal third solo show at the Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, which opened on 28 November 1950. Now recognised as the crowning moment of Pollock’s career, this exhibition contained several of his greatest large-scale masterpieces, all of which were painted that year: Number One, 1950 (Lavender Mist) (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.); Number 27, 1950 (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York); Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York); One: Number 31, 1950 (Museum of Modern Art, New York); and Number 32, 1950 (Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf). Number 21,1950 was among thirteen square-format works in the exhibition. Each roughly 22 x 22 inches in size, these were painted on the reverse sides of Masonite boards given to Pollock by his elder brother Sande McCoy, a commercial screen printer who had a stock of panels left over from the manufacture of a baseball board game in 1948. Other examples of this singular, jewel-like series are held in major museum collections worldwide, including Number 15, 1950 (Los Angeles County Museum of Art), Number 16, 1950 (Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro), Number 17, 1950 (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York), Number 18, 1950 (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York), Number 20, 1950 (University of Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson), and Number 22, 1950 (Philadelphia Museum of Art).

Jackson Pollock Was a Sharecropper

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Daniel Grant describes the relationship between Jackson Pollock and his dealer in terms that bring to mind sharecropping where, if the farmer fell behind in the value of his output, he built up debts that bound him to the land. Here, if Pollock did not cover the cost of his stipend in sales he had to make up the rest in work:

When Jackson Pollock signed his first contract with collector and dealer Peggy Guggenheim in 1943, he was able to quit his job decorating ties to concentrate on painting. That first contract paid him a stipend of $150 per month, with guaranteed sales of $2,700 annually (if there were less than $2,700 in sales, Guggenheim would be paid the difference in paintings). Continue Reading

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