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Lot Essay
Emily and Burton Tremaine Sr. formed a collection that stands in equal stature alongside the great American twentieth century collections of Victor and Sally Ganz, Robert and Ethel Scull, and David Rockefeller. Emily, who grew up in Los Angeles, drew inspiration from her friends, the early LA collectors Walter and Louise Arensberg and Edward G. Robinson. She was cool, analytic and deliberate, a perfect complement to her husband's decisive yet whimsical sensibility. Emily played an ideal Plato to Burton's joyous Bacchus. Together they assembled a totemic summation of twentieth-century art, worthy of a stand-alone museum by today's standards. The highlight of their collection was Piet Mondrian's Victory Boogie Woogie, 1942-1944, which they purchased for $8,000, and became the lynchpin that was the bridge between their works from the first and second half of the twentieth century. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s the couple loaned the picture to the Museum of Modern Art in order for it to be accessible to younger artists and they were rewarded by seeing its influence appear in the works of Mark Rothko and Ad Reinhardt. Emily contended years later that the Mondrian had actually been the prime mover behind Abstract Expressionism, saying: "Ad Reinhardt told me that he, Pollock, and others saw that painting in the Museum of Modern Art all those years. He said 'As Abstract Expressonists, we got our courage toward the unfinished, toward the Japanese unintentional theory of the drip from this" (E. Tremaine, quoted in K. L. Housley, Emily Hall Tremaine: Collector on the Cusp, Meriden, 2001, p. 87).
The connoisseur's eye that led them to Mondrian's painting also led the Tremaines to John Chamberlain's exquisite sculpture Gram, one of the earliest wall mounted sculptures that the artist ever produced. By reclaiming the space traditionally reserved for painting and using it as the site for his three- dimensional works, Chamberlain reassessed the obsession with planarity that was contained in much of the art being produced at the time. His sculpture was a dynamic extension of Abstract Expressionism, combining David Smith's welded technique with the explosive quality of Willem de Kooning's gestural brushstroke. The delicate scale of early Chamberlain's sculptures such as Gram adds a degree of intimacy to this piece, which contrasts markedly to the larger, more imposing pieces that he progressed to. His ability to convey the same sense of power and gravitas to his smaller works, while retaining a degree of delicacy once was of the defining features of his early work, as his dealer Allan Stone commented: "Perhaps John's most amazing talent is his ability to play with scale. In his early work, the small pieces are as exciting as the larger works. They have terrific scale. If you saw a photograph you couldn't tell if a piece was 6 feet or 6 inches tall; they're perfectly done. Very few artists can achieve this transposition of scale, among the ones who can are Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning" (A. Stone, "John Chamberlain," John Chamberlain, exh. cat., Allan Stone Gallery, New York, 2003, n.p).
The connoisseur's eye that led them to Mondrian's painting also led the Tremaines to John Chamberlain's exquisite sculpture Gram, one of the earliest wall mounted sculptures that the artist ever produced. By reclaiming the space traditionally reserved for painting and using it as the site for his three- dimensional works, Chamberlain reassessed the obsession with planarity that was contained in much of the art being produced at the time. His sculpture was a dynamic extension of Abstract Expressionism, combining David Smith's welded technique with the explosive quality of Willem de Kooning's gestural brushstroke. The delicate scale of early Chamberlain's sculptures such as Gram adds a degree of intimacy to this piece, which contrasts markedly to the larger, more imposing pieces that he progressed to. His ability to convey the same sense of power and gravitas to his smaller works, while retaining a degree of delicacy once was of the defining features of his early work, as his dealer Allan Stone commented: "Perhaps John's most amazing talent is his ability to play with scale. In his early work, the small pieces are as exciting as the larger works. They have terrific scale. If you saw a photograph you couldn't tell if a piece was 6 feet or 6 inches tall; they're perfectly done. Very few artists can achieve this transposition of scale, among the ones who can are Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning" (A. Stone, "John Chamberlain," John Chamberlain, exh. cat., Allan Stone Gallery, New York, 2003, n.p).