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WALKER EVANS (American, 1903-1975) HAVANA kitchen signed “ Walker Evans” in pencil below image on...
Currency:USD
Category:Everything Else / Other
Start Price:NA
Estimated At:50,000.00 - 70,000.00 USD
NOT SOLD (BIDDING OVER)
0.00USD+ applicable fees & taxes.
This item WAS NOT SOLD. Auction date was 2003 Oct 17 @ 18:00UTC-05:00 : EST/CDT
WALKER EVANS
(American, 1903-1975)
HAVANA kitchen
signed “ Walker Evans” in pencil
below image on mount
“WALKER EVANS” stamp in black on mount verso with title and date written below in pencil “Havana 1932”
gelatin silver print mounted on board
53?4 x 71?2 in. (13.6 x 19.1 cm)
mount: 18 x 15 in. (45.7 x 38.1 cm)
1932
ESTIMATE: $50,000-70,000
PROVENANCE
Robert Schoelkopf Gallery, NEW YORK
Private Collection, Atlanta
LITERATURE
Walker Evans, et al., WALKER EVANS, AMERICA, NEW YORK, Rizzoli, 1991,
pl. 19 (illustrated as Corner of a Courtyard, Havana)
Gilles Mora and John T. Hill, WALKER EVANS: THE HUNGRY EYE, NEW YORK, Harry N. Abrams, 1993, p. 87 (illustrated)
The hardship of the Depression renewed interest in the connection between
art and the public good. When Carleton Beals decided to publish a scathing
political commentary indicting Cuba’s president Gerardo Machado, he logically decided to include the photographs of Walker Evans. Evans agreed
to contribute to The Crime of Cuba on the condition that he select the final prints for the publication. Traveling to Cuba for three weeks and working separately from Beals, Evans produced a body of work that shed light on the
plight of the nation while also maintaining sophisticated formal compositions. As Evans himself noted, he approached his photographs with “detachment” and “believe[d] in staying out, the way Flaubert does in his writing” (Walker Evans, WALKER EVANS SUBWAYS AND STREETS, WASHINGTON, D.C., National Gallery of Art, 1991, p.13). This detachment was founded, in part, on the model provided by the turn-of-the century French photographer, EugËne Atget (1857-1927), whose work Evans knew well, having written a review of the publication Atget: Photographe de Paris in 1930. Evans’s photographs likewise depict various urban inhabitants, details of modern life and the empty and solitary spaces of the city, as in Havana Kitchen. Andrei Codrescu, for one, has pointed out how the emptiness and desolation of many Evans photographs suggests a “vast siesta gripping the city” (Walker Evans: CUBA, LOS ANGELES, J. Paul Getty Museum, 2001,
p. 17). Small decorative details, such as the plants and flowers, point to the care with which someone has adorned the space, yet their presence ultimately heightens the kitchen’s austerity.
Charles Baudelaire’s intoxicated vision of Paris in “The Double Room,” which Evans translated nearly a decade before, captures the tenor of Havana Kitchen, for it too, is “a room which resembles a day-dream…[where] the soul bathes in laziness flavored with regret and desire – there is something of the fall of days, blueish, roselike; a dream of voluptuousness during an eclipse. The furnishings are lengthened forms, dejected, weakened. They seem to dream; one would say they were gifted with a somnambulistic life…” (Charles Baudelaire “La Chambre Double,” 1869, translated by Evans in Paris, August 1926. UNCLASSIFIED : A WALKER EVANS ANTHOLOGY : SELECTIONS FROM THE WALKER EVANS ARCHIVE, NEW YORK, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000, p. 28).
Auction Location:
United States
Previewing Details:
Friday Oct 10 - Wednesday Oct 15
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