The spring auction season is warming up and with it some new opportunities to see art that would not normally be in the mix out here. This week, it is photographs in the Phillips auction house's spring sale on view in its Southampton galleries.
Prime examples of work by Gerhard Richter, Vik Muniz, Diane Arbus, Irving Penn, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Sally Mann, Robert Mapplethorpe, Ruud van Empel, Desiree Dolron, William Eggleston, Alec Soth, Helmut Newton, Matthew Brandt, Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and others serve as an introduction to the full sale of scores of work from the 20th and 21st centuries.
It's a striking installation that features some iconic images, a few executed in rare scale. The late Montauk part-timer Richard Avedon's "Dovima With Elephants," from 1955, is from a generous 23 1/8 by 18 3/4-inch edition, large enough to see the chains that anchor the elephants' legs in the Parisian circus setting and sharp enough to capture all the detail and simple beauty in the Dior evening dress the subject wears. Its presale estimate is $150,000 to $250,000.
Another Montauk denizen, Andy Warhol, is represented by a meaningful and fine example of a photobooth strip of portraits of Holly Solomon, who was an aspiring actress at the time of the sitting, around 1963 or 1964. She
was also an art collector who became one of the pioneers of the 1970s SoHo art scene, with a performance space and then a gallery in her name. She was instrumental in promoting the careers of artists associated with the Pattern and Decoration movement, among others.
In an essay on the piece, the auction house notes that Warhol produced nine canvases from the sessions, in which he left Solomon alone to "perform for the camera as she saw fit." Given her training, she produced some of his most expressive and interesting portraits in this medium. Always respectful of the process of contemporary artists, she noted later that Warhol had a favorite photobooth in an arcade on 47th and Broadway, chosen because "he wanted the dark and light to be quite clear." The gelatin silver print strip has an estimate of $15,000 to $20,000.
A portrait of Warhol in his Montauk house taken by his neighbor Peter Beard in 1972 is not in the Southampton show but has layers of local interest. Its presale estimate is $20,000 to $25,000. Warhol is also featured in a print that accompanies a limited-edition book of Avedon portraits, signed and numbered, with an estimate of $10,000 to $15,000.
Some lots of note without a local connection include a number of Robert Frank prints from his book "The Americans," including the book's first and last images. Both are from a larger collection of Frank's work assembled by Robert Richardson and Monona Wali beginning in the late 1980s to early 1990s. Mr. Richardson, a cinematographer who has worked with Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, Oliver Stone, and Errol Morris and has won three Oscars, said in an essay that Frank's "precise vision" of an America many could not or did not want to see taught him "in so many ways."
At the book's opening in Hoboken, N.J., parade spectators at their windows are obscured by the shadows in their apartments, one by an American flag (estimate $80,000 to $120,000). The book sets in the West with a cropped image of Frank's family, who joined him for part of his cross-country journey (financed by a Guggenheim Fellowship) on a highway between Houston and Del Rio, Tex. The photograph (estimate $100,000 to $150,000) serves as a reminder of the roads covered by Frank and adds a hint of autobiography to the project, a precursor to more personal themes to come in his work.
Candida Hofer's monumental C-print of an empty "Palais Garnier, Paris XXX," from 2005, is a showstopper in its breathtaking detail and visual harmony, despite the stark modern treatment of a very froufrou antique setting. Its approximate dimensions of 7 by 9 feet feel practically life-size. The estimate is $30,000 to $50,000.
Another lot remarkable for its scale is Todd Webb's eight-print panorama of Sixth Avenue just north of Bryant Park, taken in 1948. With an estimate of $25,000 to $35,000, the entire piece measures 2 feet by 11 feet and is one of three known panoramas to exist in its size.
The last lot in the sale also has a local tie but is not in the Southampton show. It is a portrait of Willem de Kooning taken in New York City in 1962 by Dan Budnik, a chronicler of the midcentury art scene in New York who died last year. It has an estimate of $3,000 to $5,000.
The auction is April 8 in New York, and the last day of the Southampton show is Sunday. The lots will then go on view at Phillips's Park Avenue showrooms from March 31 to April 7. A sampling from Phillips's upcoming Editions and Works on Paper sale beginning April 20 is also on view and includes a rare complete set of six Jackson Pollock screenprints from 1951 from an edition of 25. Works by Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein are also included in the sale exhibition.
