Land of Canaan

Details

O. Louis Guglielmi (1906-1956)
Land of Canaan
signed 'Guglielmi' (lower left)
oil on canvas
30 x 36 in. (76.2 x 91.4 cm.)
Painted in 1934.

Provenance

George S. Kaufman, New York.
The Edith Gregor Halpert Collection, New York.
Sotheby Parke-Bernet, New York, 20th Century American Paintings, Drawings, Watercolors and Sculpture: The Edith Gregor Halpert Collection (The Downtown Gallery), 14 March 1973, lot 86, sold by the above.
Acquired by the late owner from the above.

Literature

Archives of American Art, Downtown Gallery Papers, Reel ND 44, Frames 58, 59.
R. Scott Harnsberger, Ten Precisionist Artists: Annotated Bibliographies, Westport, Connecticut, 1992, p. 177.
B. Robertson, "Yankee Modernism," Picturing Old New England: Image and Memory, exhibition catalogue, Washington, D.C., 1999, pp. 197-98n50.

Exhibited

New York, The Downtown Gallery, American Art 1800-1936: Tenth Anniversary Exhibition, October 28-November 26, 1936.
Lynchburg, Virginia, Randolph Macon Women's College, The Maier Museum of Art, 47th Annual Exhibition: The Painter as Social Commentator, March 2-30, 1958, no. 3.
New York, The Downtown Gallery, A Gallery Survey of American Art, September 8-October 2, 1965.
Fort Worth, Texas, Amon Carter Museum, American Art, 20th Century: Image to Abstraction, September 14-November 19, 1967, n.p.
Washington, D.C., The National Collection of Fine Arts, Edith Gregor Halpert Collection, April 1972, n.p., no. 7.
New Brunswick, New Jersey, Rutgers University, Rutgers University Art Gallery; Providence, Rhode Island, Brown University, Bell Gallery; Albany, New York, State University of New York, University Art Gallery; New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, O. Louis Guglielmi: A Retrospective Exhibition, November 2, 1980-July 5, 1981, pp. vii, 9, 14, 77, no. 17, pl. 1, illustrated.
St. Louis, Missouri, St. Louis Art Museum; Honolulu, Hawaii, Honolulu Academy of Arts; Boston, Massachusetts, Museum of Fine Arts, The Ebsworth Collection: American Modernism 1911-1947, November 20, 1987-June 5, 1988, pp. 14, 102-03, 206, no. 29, illustrated.
Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art; Seattle, Washington, Seattle Art Museum, Twentieth-Century American Art: The Ebsworth Collection, March 5-November 12, 2000, pp. 23, 33, 117-19, 284, no. 25, illustrated.

Brought to you by

William Haydock

whaydock@christies.com 212-636-2140

Lot Essay

Land of Canaan depicts the textile mills of Peterborough, New Hampshire, where O. Louis Guglielmi lived as a summer fellow at the MacDowell Colony. Representing one of the artist’s earliest forays into his mature aesthetic, Land of Canaan is emblematic of the struggle of rural Americans during the Great Depression. John Baker writes, "in 1934 Guglielmi achieved a new level of artistic strength and distinction in Land of Canaan. The title is bluntly ironic; this bleak industrial environment is hardly a promised land. [Through] concentration on the essentials of posture and facial expression, Guglielmi communicates the human significance of the scene...By combining de Chirico's poetic isolation of props, such as the smoke stack, with precisionism's geometrical and compositional order in Land of Canaan Guglielmi broke through to a lucid form for his social vision." (O. Louis Guglielmi: A Retrospective Exhibition, exhibition catalogue, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1980, p. 9)

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