Sotheby's American Art Sale Features Museum Deaccessions
- May 20, 2013 23:01
Sotheby’s will offer a range of works deaccessioned from the collections of four museums in its May 22 sale of American art in New York.
Three works sold by the Art Institute of Chicago are led by Frederic Remington’s Call the Doctor
from 1889, an example of the artist and illustrator’s popular and romantic visions of the wild American West (est. $1/1.5 million). The painting seizes on a moment of dramatic action, when a heroic party of American soldiers must confront the extent of their wounded comrade’s injuries in
the midst of a remote and unfamiliar locale.
Property from the Museum of Modern Art, sold to benefit the acquisitions fund, features Trumpet Flowers from 1919, a rare work by Stanton Macdonald-Wright who, along with fellow American painter Morgan Russell, founded the aesthetic movement Synchromism (“with color”) in 1913 (est. $400/600,000). As exemplified by the present work, the Synchromist reverence for color proved profoundly influential on the development of modern art in the US.
The Nevada Museum will offer Stuart Davis’s Summer Landscape #2 to benefit future acquisitions (est.$300/400,000). Between 1930 and 1940, Davis produced a series of works based on a specific site in Rockport, Massachusetts, which he would visit during the summers. He produced the present example in 1940, in which the objective world is symbolized with abstracted
forms and overlapping clocks of bold color.
Two works from the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, sold to benefit the collection, include Norman Wilfred-Lewis’s Meeting Place (Shopping), dated 1941 (est. $70/100,000). Part of a large concentration of worksby Lewis acquired by George and the late Joyce Wein, the work depicts a group of eager women surrounding a store-front bin, in hopes of spotting a bargain during the Great Depression.
