LOT Phillips de Pury & Company  /  PHOTOGRAPHS PART I  / 

30

ROBERT FRANK (American, b. Switzerland, 1924) LONG ISLAND titled, dated and signed

Currency:USD Category:Everything Else / Other Start Price:NA Estimated At:22,000.00 - 28,000.00 USD
ROBERT FRANK (American, b. Switzerland, 1924) LONG ISLAND titled, dated and signed
ROBERT FRANK (American, b. Switzerland, 1924) LONG ISLAND titled, dated and signed "LONG ISLAND 1954, Robert Frank" in ink below image photographer's signed copyright stamp and reproduction rights stamp in black ink on verso titled and dated "Archive" stamp in black ink on verso partial gallery label adhered on verso vintage gelatin silver print 8 7/16 x 12 1/8 in. (21.4 x 30.8 cm) 1954 PROVENANCE Sotheby's NEW YORK, October 2, 1996, Sale Number 6888, Lot 355 (incorrectly catalogued as "printed later") Bonni Benrubi Gallery, NEW YORK Private Collection, SWITZERLAND LITERATURE Kaspar Fleischmann, TWENTY YEARS: 1979-1999, Zürich, 1999, pl. 38 (illustrated) When the present work was created in 1954, Robert Frank also applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship, which he received in 1955 to begin work on his landmark collection of photographs, THE AMERICANS. Over the next few years, Frank traveled throughout the United States, chronicling the dark underbelly of his adopted homeland. By 1959, when THE AMERICANS was published to both acclaim and derision, Frank had created a powerful visual critique of American culture. "Frank's magnum opus is a telling document of its time, combining equal parts skepticism and solipsism in an attempt to counteract the conformity and conventionality of American life, which he found so oppressive" (Andy Grundberg, Robert Frank's Existential Refrain," CRISIS OF THE REAL: WRITINGS ON PHOTOGRAPHY SINCE 1974, New York: Aperture Foundation, Inc., 1999, p. 47). In light of this achievement, the present work appears strikingly anomalous. Here Frank seems to capture a scene of sheer joy, in which a woman and child, perhaps the artist's wife and their young son, wrestle in a grassy yard. Despite this buoyant subject, the photograph also strikes chords of ambivalence. Like many pictures from THE AMERICANS, the present work is printed in grainy, shadowy black and white, which lends a note of pessimism to the image. More notable, perhaps, is the white wooden fence that encircles the scene. Typically a symbol of domestic bliss, this particular fence also traps the photographer, and signals the restless existentialism that fueled Frank's subsequent work.
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