?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 250 - $ 350
(CONTEMPORARY ART / EPHEMERA.) Celender, Don. ArtBall Playing Cards. Football Series. 53 playing cards, each with a portrait photo of a major 20th century artist superimposed over the bodies of football players with surname and position printed along bottom. 3 1/2x2 1/2 inches, in original color pictorial box, a bit rubbed and soiled, with small archival reinforcements to flap versos. Ex-collection Arthur and Elaine Lustig Cohen (Ex-Libris). [New York]; Celender, 1972
a fun art ephemera collectible. In the early 1970s, Celender created two packs of playing cards with amusing juxtapositions of artists and sports players. Both titled "ArtBall," the first pack centered on baseball and this, the second, on football. The cards featured mostly 1960s contemporary artists like Stella, Greenberg, Bacon, Motherwell, Kelly, Serra, Rose, Nevelson, Fischbach, Arman, and others, and displayed their heads in a photomontage over action poses, often humorously, and with amusing captions to match (Geldzahler--Tight End; Nevelson--Linebacker; Bacon--Running Back). A third, later deck, Holy Cards, worked artists' portraits into paintings of religious figures with religious prose passages on the backs.
