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67

Property of a New York collector GEORGIA O'KEEFFE (1887-1986 ) Indian Beads, 1934 charcoal o...

Currency:USD Category:Everything Else / Other Start Price:NA Estimated At:100,000.00 - 150,000.00 USD
Property of a New York collector GEORGIA O'KEEFFE (1887-1986 ) Indian Beads, 1934 charcoal o...
Property of a New York collector
GEORGIA O'KEEFFE
(1887-1986 )
Indian Beads, 1934
charcoal on paper
24 3/4 x 18 3/4 in. (62.9 x 47.6 cm) <p>Estimate: $100,000-150,000 <p> Provenance
The Downtown Gallery, New York Dr. J. Dewey Bisgard, Omaha, 1954 (The Downtown Gallery, New York) Edith G. Halpert, New York, 1954 Estate of Edith Halpert, 1970 Sotheby Parke Bernet, Inc., New York, May 16, 1973, lot 152 Andrew Crispo Gallery, New York Private Collection, New York <p> Exhibited
Lincoln, NEbraska, University of Nebraska Art Galleries, Nebraska Art Association Sixty-Fourth Annual Exhibition, February 28-March 28, 1954 New York, The Downtown Gallery, Forty-First Anniversary Exhibition, September 1966 New York, American Academy of Arts and Letters, 1967 <p> Literature
Barbara Buhler Lynes, Georgia O'Keeffe, Catalogue Raisonné, Washington, D.C., 1999, vol. I, p. 515, no. 828, (illustrated, p. 515) <p> For Georgia O'Keeffe, nature was the catalyst that inspired nearly all of her paintings for more than seventy years. Whether she was painting desert scenes or a single flower or animal skull, her love of natural objects and forms was always evident. From the moment she began spending summers in New Mexico in 1929, O'Keeffe felt a deep connection with her new-found surroundings and painted studies of the area's native flowers, cactuses, and trees. But she was equally drawn to inanimate objects - skulls, bones, feathers, shells - even once noting: "to me they [the bones] are strangely more living than the animals walking around." <p> One can see in her depiction of the claws and beans in Indian Beads that O'Keeffe saw life and beauty in many objects and forms she found in nature. It may even have been the anthropomorphic quality of the necklace that first appealed to her. In her drawing, the eagle claws have a crisp, sharp quality that she contrasts with the soft, round forms of the beans randomly jumbled in the center. Her careful building up of the charcoal lends a soft velvety quality to the work. In 1988 (in her notes "Some Memories of Drawings"), O'Keeffe recalled the circumstances surrounding her purchase of this necklace: "The spring I drove to New Mexico [1934] I went through a part of Colorado...I got this black necklace there. For the front the eagle claws were graduated in size from a very large one to very small ones where the beans began for the back of the necklace. It is very different from any necklace that one would find in New Mexico." A second charcoal of this same necklace drawn in profile is in the Museum of Modern Art Collection (acquisition #19.36). <p>We are grateful to Beth Venn for cataloguing this lot.
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