Renoir, Matisse & Tiffany featured in Gray’s March 15 Auction. Fine Art, Antiques, Decorative Arts & Books will be sold at Gray's March 15 auction. With over 600 lots, more than 200 are Books Box Lots to be sold with No Reserve.
News-Antique.com - Mar 08,2012 - Cleveland, OH - Gray’s Auctioneers’ Fine Furniture, Paintings and Decorations auction takes place on March 15 at 11am in Cleveland, Ohio. Live online bidding for this auction is provided by Live Auctioneers. Offering two sessions, the first for Fine Art, Furniture and Decorative Arts at 11am and the second for Fine Books, Autographs and No Reserve Books starting at 3pm.
With over 600 lots the auction highlights include lot 31, Tête de Femme, a charming, oil on canvas by Pierre-August Renoir which is catalogued in G.-P. and M. Dauberville’s Renoir, Catalogue Raisonné des Tableaux, Pastels, Dessins et Aquarelles, Paris, 2010, vol. III, p. 349, no. 2298 (illustrated) and also in A. Vollard’s Tableaux, Pastels et Dessins de Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paris, 1918, vol. II, pl. 78 (illustrated). This portrait was sold at auction at Christie's, in New York, in their November 11, 1997 auction, at lot 339; from thence to a private Northeast Ohio collector via Atlas Galleries, Chicago. Gray’s is also delighted to offer lot 32, Henri Matisse’s Danseuse au Divan from the "Dix Danseuses" series, a lithograph on arches paper from the set of ten. Signed in pencil and numbered 29/130 lower right and elegantly framed, this lithograph is also from the collection of the aforementioned private Northeast Ohio collector.
In addition to the Renoir and Matisse on offer in the paintings section of the auction, a wonderful, large, oil on canvas by Vasily Shulzhenko, titled, Bacchanal (Night of the Generals), is at lot 43. This is a striking painting with recognizable Soviet-era Communist Party figureheads cavorting drunkenly across the canvas. It is an intensely passionate critique of a party in chaos. Dated 1993 this painting was originally exhibited at the Maya Polsky Gallery in Chicago who currently still represents the artist.
1994 saw the loss of ceramicist Claude Conover, the Cleveland Art’s Prize winner who was awarded the visual arts prize in 1983 for his bold and unique ceramic pieces, which reflect a strength of form and endurance unusual in the fragile field of ceramics. Lot 246 is one of Conover’s impressively large pots. His work is described by the prize judges as follows, “Using his own clay “bodies” (basic forms), usually of stoneware and mostly monochromatic, Conover decorated the surfaces with cryptic scratches, stripes and hatchings. Although decorative in intent, the indecipherable incised lines on his ceramics suggest some prehistoric unreadable script. The resultant works evoke a timeless monumentality reminiscent of ancient vessels whose utilitarian purpose is now lost to us. Within this limited repertoire, he produced beautiful, eternal works of art….Conover’s large impressive pots are his best work”
In the decorative arts section of the auction notable highlights include lot 239 a candelabrum by Jessie M. Preston, the early 20th century, Arts & Crafts, Chicago-based metalsmith. With a hint of Art Nouveau, Preston has designed a lotus flower and lily pad motif elegantly arranged on three varying planes at the end of three, sinuously intertwined arms, which rise from a circular base, encircled with a stylized,
