Oct 08, 2019 - Sale 2518

Sale 2518 - Lot 53

Price Realized: $ 25,000
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 30,000 - $ 40,000
HAYWOOD "BILL" RIVERS (1922 - 2001)
Dance Around a Flower.

Oil on linen canvas, 1962. 647x762 mm; 25 1/2x30 inches. Signed and dated in oil, lower left.

Provenance: private collection, New York; private collection.

This densely colorful canvas by Haywood "Bill" Rivers is a wonderful and scarce example of the artist's mid-career abstraction from the early 1960s. It displays the continued influence of his North Carolina childhood quilt-making on his painting after his return from France to the U.S.

The geometric patterns and grid composition of the quilts became the subject of his abstract paintings in the 1960s. At the time, Rivers became closely associated with a group of artists living and working on the lower East Side of New York, including Emilio Cruz, Joe Overstreet, Bob Thompson and Jack Whitten. Rivers was included in the recent exhibition of expatriate artists Lost, Loose and Loved: Foreign Artists in Paris 1944–1968 at the Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid, November 22, 2018 - April 22, 2019.