?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,000 - $ 1,500
(CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA) A dissembled album from South Africa with 23 photographs. Includes views of Cape Town from above, the surrounding landscape, architectural studies, vineyards, mining scenes, and more. Albumen prints, the images measuring approximately 5 3/4x7 3/4 to 8 1/2x11 inches (14.6x19.7 to 21.6x27.9 cm.), and the reverse, the mounts 12x15 inches (30.5x38.1 cm.), cornered in recto only, nearly all with a typed caption on mount recto and two with captions in the negative. Circa 1890s
Provenance: Sotheby's auction, May 4, 1976; to the Estate of Pierre Apraxine, New York
Born in Estonia as a member of an exiled noble Russian family and educated in Belgium, Pierre Apraxine came to the United States in 1970 as a Fulbright Scholar to work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He was educated in classical draftsmanship and was largely self-taught as a student of photography. From 1976 to 2007 Mr. Apraxine was the art curator for the Gilman Paper Company headed by the late Howard Gilman. There he assembled several collections of contemporary paintings and sculptures, visionary architectural drawings (now at the Museum of Modern Art), and photographs.
The photography was acquired as the market was forming, a time of heady newness and excitement. The more than 8,500 works in the collection came to tell the history of the medium as well as the history of industrialization and modernization, a remarkable alchemy of timing and a unique way of looking that remains unparalleled.
In 1993 the collection of photographs was shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in a landmark exhibition: "The Waking Dream: Photography's First Century" (the museum then acquired the collection in 2005). In 1994 he was the recipient with Maria Morris Hambourg of the International Center of Photography Writing Award for the catalogue.
Apraxine curated several exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum, authored additional important titles, and was the curator in charge of the installation of Gustave Le Gray at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris.
