Important photograph collections to be offered for sale through Sotherby's

On the evening of February 14 and on the day of February 15, 2006, Sotheby’s will offer approximately 130 works in a sale of Important Photographs from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, including works from the Gilman Paper Company Collection. The single-owner sale will focus on turn-of-the-last century and 20th century photographs and includes the work of seminal artists such as Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, Dora Maar, Paul Outerbridge, Margaret Bourke-White, Edward Weston, Walker Evans, Robert Frank and others. Prior to the exhibition and sale, highlights will be on view in Cologne, Paris, San Francisco and Los Angeles in an international traveling exhibition, and the property will be on exhibition in Sotheby’s 10th floor galleries in New York from Wednesday, February 8 to Tuesday, February 14. The sale is expected to bring approximately $4/6 million.

Discussing the sale, Denise Bethel, Senior Vice President and Director of Sotheby’s Photographs department in New York, said: “The appearance of works from these collections at auction will be a landmark event in the field of photographs, providing collectors with a singular opportunity to acquire extraordinary works from what are widely regarded as two of the most important photography collections in the world.”

Malcolm Daniel, Curator in Charge of the Metropolitan’s Department of Photographs, commented: “The Museum’s acquisition of the world-renowned Gilman Collection has absolutely transformed the photography collection here in many areas, providing deep, rich holdings of work by many of the greatest artists of the medium, particularly in the nineteenth century. Among the 8,500 photographs in the Gilman Collection, however, are a number of exceptionally rare and beautiful twentieth-century photographs already represented in the Met’s collection. The sale of those duplicate treasures at Sotheby’s will help fund the Gilman acquisition, so essential to filling gaps and strengthening the key holdings here.”

The Sale
Highlighting the sale is the work of 19th and 20th century photographers Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz, the American masters who elevated photography to fine art and pioneered the legendary gallery ‘291’ at 291 Fifth Avenue in New York.

Edward Steichen’s masterful multiple-process photograph The Pond-Moonlight is one of only three known prints of this image and is the best of Steichen’s early landscapes. Made by Steichen in his mid-twenties, this photograph shows the young photographer working at the very peak of his aesthetic and technical abilities. As the other two prints of this image are in museum collections -- one retained in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the other in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art -- the appearance of this print for sale is a rare opportunity for collectors.

Auguste Rodin met Steichen in 1901 and, impressed by the photographer’s portfolio, invited him to make photographs of him and his work in his studio. While Steichen made a series of portraits of Rodin, he was limited by the fact that the studio was overcrowded with work. Later, in 1908, Rodin informed Steichen that he had moved his sculpture of Balzac out of his studio into the open air. Steichen set to work and made a series of exposures by moonlight creating Balzac-The Open Sky (est. $500/700,000). When Rodin saw Steichen’s photographs he exclaimed, “You will make the world understand my Balzac through these pictures.”

On his first trip to Europe in 1900, Steichen met the English photographer and bookseller, Frederick H. Evans. The carefully composed study he created, Frederick Evans (est. $25/35,000), captures a thoughtful Evans examining a self-portrait photograph by F. Holland Day as Christ.

Alfred Stieglitz’s extensive series of pictures of Georgia O’Keeffe began soon after the two became lovers, in 1917. Over the next two decades, in dozens of sittings, this famous composite portrait of one woman recorded not only her face, her hands, and her torso, but also her moods and metamorphoses. Works from this series in the sale include Posed by Painting (est. $150/200,000), Hands (est. $300/500,000), and Nude (est. $300/500,000).

Braque-Picasso Exhibition (est. $30/50,000) is a skillfully composed view of an exhibition at Stieglitz’s ‘291’ gallery and demonstrates his dual role as a photographer and as one of the foremost proponents of modern art in the early 20th century.

Dora Maar’s Portrait of Ubu (est. $100/150,000) was named for the title character of Alfred Jarry’s absurdist play, Ubu Roi. Maar’s image is a perfect example of Surrealist photography.

Paul Outerbridge was a successful advertising photographer who, like Edward Steichen, was able to seamlessly adapt elements of modern art into his tight, visually sophisticated compositions such as the work Crankshaft, (est. $100/150,000).

Alvin Langdon Coburn, in 1917, made a series of images using a complex arrangement of mirrors and objects. Dubbed “Vortographs” by Ezra Pound, for their relationship to the Vorticist movement in painting, they are notable for being among the first wholly abstract photographic images. The sale will include Vortograph (est. $100/150,000).

Other highlights of the sale include Edward Weston’s Bananas (est. $80/120,000) and Margaret Bourke-White’s New York from the Chrysler Building (est. $100/150,000), the latter a photograph made from the balcony of Bourke-White’s studio in the penthouse of the Chrysler Building.

EXHIBITION DATES

• Cologne Exhibition: Sotheby’s Cologne Office - St. Apern – Strasse 17-21 – 49 221 20 7170
• Paris Exhibition: Sotheby’s Paris Office – 76 rue du Fabourg St. Honoré – 33 1 5305 72 04
• San Francisco Exhibition: Contact Sotheby’s San Francisco Office –415 772 9028
• Los Angeles Exhibition: Sotheby’s Los Angeles Office – 9665 Wilshire Blvd. – 310 274 0340
• New York Exhibition: Sotheby’s York Avenue Headquarters, 1334 York Avenue – 212 606 7000