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拍品专文
In November 1927, while the artist was in the city for a few months, the Arts Club in Chicago held a retrospective of Bernard Boutet de Monvel’s paintings and reliefs. Shortly thereafter, the artist received a commission for an important decorative painting from the director of A.G. Becker & Co., one of the city’s investment banks. Looking to focus his work on the industrial and urban modernity of triumphant, Jazz Age America, Boutet de Monvel, at the suggestion of the architect Samuel A. Marx (1885-1964), visited South Works, a steelworks one hour from Chicago.
On the 28th January 1928, the painter, full of enthusiasm, wrote to his wife: ‘I have just spent half a day in an unimaginably cold but bright sunshine, visiting a steel mill one hour away from the city. I needed it for one of my backdrops. It is truly, admirably picturesque: such is the life of a painter!’
Whilst there, with the help of his Kodak Brownie, the artist took astonishing photographs showing skips, gas pipes, support structures, walkways, cyclone filters, casting halls, cowper batteries, all emerging from dramatic smoke in close-up and low-angled shots. Using these images of objectivity as a starting point, he painted with astounding photorealist precision, and for his own pleasure, two paintings which would serve as a foundation for his Precisionist works. Today, the first of these is in the collection of the National Museum of Modern Art – Centre Georges Pompidou; the second one, the most important in terms of size and the modernity of the composition, is presented here.
This major work is the foremost of Boutet de Monvel’s Precisionist canvases to be presented at auction. Its significance lays not only in the date of its execution, 1928 – the artist made all his Precisionist works between 1928 and 1932 – but also in the dehumanising modernity of the industrial landscape it depicts. The present lot is a work of paramount importance, essential to American Art History as for example, Charles Sheeler’s American Landscape (1930), at the MoMA, and Charles Demuth’s My Egypt (1929), in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. This work, still in its original stretcher, carries the inscription ‘garder’, ‘to save’, a note written by the artist to stress the importance of the painting.
We would like to thank Stéphane-Jacques Addade for his assistance in writing this catalogue note.
On the 28th January 1928, the painter, full of enthusiasm, wrote to his wife: ‘I have just spent half a day in an unimaginably cold but bright sunshine, visiting a steel mill one hour away from the city. I needed it for one of my backdrops. It is truly, admirably picturesque: such is the life of a painter!’
Whilst there, with the help of his Kodak Brownie, the artist took astonishing photographs showing skips, gas pipes, support structures, walkways, cyclone filters, casting halls, cowper batteries, all emerging from dramatic smoke in close-up and low-angled shots. Using these images of objectivity as a starting point, he painted with astounding photorealist precision, and for his own pleasure, two paintings which would serve as a foundation for his Precisionist works. Today, the first of these is in the collection of the National Museum of Modern Art – Centre Georges Pompidou; the second one, the most important in terms of size and the modernity of the composition, is presented here.
This major work is the foremost of Boutet de Monvel’s Precisionist canvases to be presented at auction. Its significance lays not only in the date of its execution, 1928 – the artist made all his Precisionist works between 1928 and 1932 – but also in the dehumanising modernity of the industrial landscape it depicts. The present lot is a work of paramount importance, essential to American Art History as for example, Charles Sheeler’s American Landscape (1930), at the MoMA, and Charles Demuth’s My Egypt (1929), in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. This work, still in its original stretcher, carries the inscription ‘garder’, ‘to save’, a note written by the artist to stress the importance of the painting.
We would like to thank Stéphane-Jacques Addade for his assistance in writing this catalogue note.