Lot 29

WORKS FROM THE DR. ROBERT AND HELEN MANDELBAUM COLLECTION The collection of Dr. Robert and Helen Mandelbaum was built on a deeply shared affinity for intellectual discovery and pure visual delight. From the vibrant, eye-catching sculptures of Joan Miró and Alexander Calder to the undulating forms of Henry Moore, and carved African masks, each work in the collection was meant to rouse the mind and stimulate the eye. It was a profoundly personal assemblage, one that reflected the Mandelbaums’ desire to live with the best in creative expression. Robert and Helen Mandelbaum met on board a European ocean liner in the 1940s, when Mrs. Mandelbaum was drawn to the sound of a young man playing American standards on the ship’s piano. This fortuitous meeting led to a decades-long partnership in music, theatre, and fine art, passions that were integral components of life for the Mandelbaums and their children, Beth and Ken. Dr. Mandelbaum, a humanities graduate of Wesleyan University, was a respected New York internist who loved Broadway, jazz, classical, and twentieth-century avant-garde music. The keenly intelligent Helen Mandelbaum was raised surrounded by her family’s collection of antiques and Art Deco objects, and possessed a connoisseurial eye that was sharpened through the study of art history and anthropology at Mount Holyoke College. Robert and Helen Mandelbaum’s mutual interest in the human experience, and their dedication to lifelong learning, would come to form the lifeblood of their collection. The collectors first began to purchase works of art in the 1950s, visiting the New York studios of young, aspiring artists while concurrently purchasing German Expressionist and Modern American prints. In the 1960s, they began to devote themselves to serious collecting: early acquisitions of works by American masters such as Georgia O’Keeffe, Charles Burchfield, and Stuart Davis–artists first introduced to Helen Mandelbaum as a student–led to prominent Post-War figures such as Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman, Frank Stella, and Anthony Caro. “My husband and I had complementary taste in paintings, sculpture, architecture, and archaeology,” Mrs. Mandelbaum said. “Therefore it was easy, and pleasurable, to visit museums, artists’ studios, and galleries at home and abroad.” Collecting was, from the outset, a collaborative pursuit. The couple began their day at six o’clock in the morning at Dr. Mandelbaum’s medical practice; several days a week, they spent the afternoon eagerly browsing their favorite art galleries and exhibition venues. Through scholarship and interaction with art historians, curators, and gallerists, the Mandelbaums became known as passionate, erudite collectors. Their connoisseurship extended to a large archive devoted to artists in the collection, incorporating press clippings, exhibition catalogues, art publications, and photographs that reflected the collectors’ ongoing commitment to the trajectory of art history and their own innate appetite for learning. Helen Mandelbaum would later donate some two thousand slides and several hundred art books to the City University of New York, while continuing to expand her vast personal library. From Social Realism and Abstract Expressionism to Color Field painting and British art, the collection of Robert and Helen Mandelbaum grew and evolved as they encountered new areas of intellectual possibility. As the scope of the couple’s interests expanded, collecting became, according to Beth Mandelbaum, “one of the key aspects of their lives.” From visits to artists’ studios–in family lore, Dr. Mandelbaum convinced Mark Rothko to quit smoking–to travels throughout Europe, the United States, Africa, and the Middle East, the Mandelbaums assumed a life occupied by art and exploration. The collectors’ Brooklyn residence–a period home “with great wall space just waiting for our collection,” according to Mrs. Mandelbaum–was filled with the painting and sculpture that served as daily inspiration. Alexander Calder’s 1959 standing mobile Multicolore with Two Black Anvils featured prominently at the top of the Mandelbaums’ staircase, while Beth Mandelbaum was given the honor of maintaining Hans Arp’s bronze Chapeau-forêt to a brilliant polish. Robert and Helen Mandelbaum believed in the power of art to stir debate and discussion. The couple regularly entertained friends, family, and fellow art enthusiasts at their residence in Brooklyn, spending hours analyzing the intricacies of works that had recently entered the collection. During travels abroad, the Mandelbaums brought their children to some of the Continent’s most treasured museums, churches, and architectural sites. On one particularly memorable visit to Belgium, Dr. Mandelbaum shared in exquisite detail a description of each panel of the Ghent Altarpiece with his children; it was this signature enthusiasm and intellectual curiosity that allowed Ken and Beth Mandelbaum to see art through their parents’ eyes. Polymaths of the art historical canon, the couple held the kind of passion for fine art that transcends geography, period, and style. When the collection was exhibited at Mount Holyoke College in 1973, professor of art Jean Harris wrote: “There is no greater excitement for me than to share the aesthetic experience of art lovers like the Mandelbaums, whose taste and admiration allows them to appreciate equally African sculptures, nineteenth-century English watercolors, and twentieth-century paintings, drawings, and prints.” The Mandelbaums recognized the importance of sharing the fruits of their collecting in the public sphere. Indeed, it was the presence of artistic opportunities in cities such as New York that had allowed the collectors’ vision to flourish throughout the latter half of the twentieth century. They became loyal benefactors of institutions such as the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, donating works in addition to providing financial support. The couple also generously lent works from their collection to exhibitions such as the Guggenheim Museum’s 1969 David Smith retrospective. Helen Mandelbaum was a highly respected and admired proponent of sharing art and culture: in the 1950s, she co-organized an exhibition for the National Council of Jewish Women, and had the honor of being invited by the curatorial staff of the Brooklyn Museum to utilize her great enthusiasm as a museum volunteer. Following Robert Mandelbaum’s death in 1983, Helen Mandelbaum continued to follow the path of collecting she had forged across the decades–“It’s very difficult to stop!” she admitted in the catalogue to an exhibition at Mount Holyoke. Even in her later years, the collector continued to acquire new works and could be found keeping abreast of the latest developments in Contemporary art, visiting galleries and museums with friends while musing on her ongoing wish list: “Brancusi, Matisse, Picasso, Noguchi, Giacometti, Miró, Clyfford Still, and on and on.” It was this “overwhelming love of all art” that had come to define Helen Mandelbaum’s life, a passion evidenced in the collection she assembled alongside her husband. Today, the Mandelbaums are celebrated as models of the curious, intensely engaged collector, proponents of the ongoing role of fine art in illuminating the world. WORKS FROM THE COLLECTION OF DR. ROBERT AND HELEN MANDELBAUM

Joan Miró (1893-1983)

Femme et oiseau

Details

Joan Miró (1893-1983)
Femme et oiseau
signed, numbered and stamped with foundry mark ‘Miró N.1 CLEMENTI’ (on the back)
painted bronze
Height: 47½ in. (120.7 cm.)
Conceived and cast in 1967

Provenance

Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York.
Acquired from the above by the present owners, 22 July 1976.

Literature

J.J. Sweeney, Joan Miró, Barcelona, 1970, p. 228 (another cast illustrated in color).
M. Tapié, Joan Miró, Milan, 1970, p. 24, no. 168 (another cast illustrated, pl. 168; dated 1968).
A. Jouffroy and J. Teixidor, Miró Sculpture, Paris, 1973, p. 198, no. 89 (another cast illustrated in color).
Fundació Joan Miró, ed., Obra de Joan Miró, Barcelona, 1979, p. 157, no. 229 (another cast illustrated).
A. Jouffroy and J. Teixidor, Miró Sculptures, Paris, 1980, p. 26, no. 89 (another cast illustrated in color).
R.M. Malet, Joan Miró, Barcelona, 1983, p. 128, no. 126 (another cast illustrated in color).
J. Brihuega, Miró y Dalí: los grandes surrealistas, Madrid, 1993, p. 48, no. 3 (another cast illustrated in color).
P. Gimferrer, The Roots of Miró, Barcelona, 1993, p. 403, no. 1207 (another cast illustrated in color, p. 300, no. 583).
J. Mink, Joan Miró, Cologne, 1993, p. 96, no. 83 (another cast illustrated in color, pl. 83).
J.M. Faerna García-Bermejo, Joan Miró, Barcelona, 1994, no. 67 (another cast illustrated in color).
E.F. Miró and P.O. Chapel, Joan Miró, Sculptures, Catalogue Raisonné, 1928-1982, Paris, 2006, p. 111, no. 100 (another cast illustrated in color).

Exhibited

Minneapolis, Walker Art Center; The Cleveland Museum of Art and The Art Institute of Chicago, Miró Sculptures, October 1971-May 1972, no. 16 (illustrated).
New York, Pierre Matisse Gallery, Miró: Painted Sculpture and Ceramics, May-June 1980, no. 5 (illustrated in color, pl. 5).
Brooklyn Museum of Art, A Family Album: Brooklyn Collects, March-July 2001.

Sale Room Notice

Please note this work was conceived and cast in 1967.

Brought to you by

Brooke Lampley

blampley@christies.com +1 212 636 2091

Lot Essay

Miró found his bearings as a sculptor in the solitary years of the Second World War, embracing the culture of peasant craft in rural Catalunya and Mallorca as a source for a new and vital approach to sculpture rooted in the world of objects. In notebooks from this time, Miró anticipated a new engagement with sculpture, writing: “When sculpting, I start from the objects I collect, just as I make use of the stains on paper and imperfections in a canvas–do this here in the country in a way that is really alive, in touch with the elements of nature...do it like a collage of various elements...that is the only thing–this magic spark–that counts in art” (in M. Rowell, ed., Joan Miró: Selected Writings and Interviews, Boston, 1986, pp. 175, 191). By the late 1960s, his sculptures had become fully three-dimensional collages: “My collages, today, are my sculptures,” Miró declared in 1977–and in these colorfully painted bronzes first conceived a decade earlier he raises his gift of metamorphosis to new heights (quoted in W. Jeffett, The Shape of Color: Joan Miró’s Painted Sculpture, exh. cat., Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 2002, p. 33).
These later sculptures reflect retrospectively on Miró’s oeuvre, invoking both the playful, risk-taking attitude of the Surrealist 1930s and the nationalism more characteristic of his work upon his return to Spain. “To paint, to sculpt, to etch, is maybe to give form to a myth,” Miró reflected in 1974. “If I frequently integrate the objects as they are, with raw materials, it is not to obtain a plastic effect but by necessity...I need to walk on my earth, to live among my own, because everything that is popular is necessary for my work” (quoted in ibid., p. 21).
The black patent leather tricornio hat of Spain’s guardia civil, a symbol of authority in Franco’s republic, is transformed in the present work by Miró’s imagination into the body of his favorite surrogate, the bird. Among the other elements of Femme et oiseau are regular habitués of the studio built for Miró near Palma by his friend, Joseph Lluis Sert, in 1956. A four-legged stool, here painted pitch black, was a familiar presence in the Sert studio; the sawn-off end of a cylindrical container, here in rich blue, also played various roles. These forms had undergone a long gestation in his creative imagination. “This character is neither male nor female,” William Jeffett has explained, commenting on Miró’s painted bronzes of this time. “It is more of a fantastic apparition of a mythic creature” (ibid., p. 36).
"All the sculptures, in one way or another, seem to express the fantasy of matter becoming animate...But they do it in such a way that not even the most timid child would be frightened. These monsters are friendly, or at the most burlesquely frightening like the Meanies in the Beatles cartoon film, something to giggle about rather than cry over, an attempt, perhaps, on Miró’s part to laugh us out of our bad dreams" (quoted in L. Coyle, "The Monsters in America: The Presentation and Reception of Miró’s Sculpture in the United States," in op. cit., exh. cat., 2002, p. 80).
Miro at work outside his studio near Palma, circa 1970.
The present sculpture at Brooklyn Museum of Art, A Family Album: Brooklyn Collects, 2001.
Spanish Guardia Civil wearing the tricornio, 1950, photographed by W. Eugene Smith.

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