?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 600 - $ 900
JOAN JUNYER. 3 Costume designs (Minotaur and 2 others). Mixed media on board. Average size 750x553 mm; 29 1/2x21 3/4 inches, board. Signed and dated (1947) in pencil, lower margin. Edges variously chipped, one design with numerous repairs to recto and verso, pencil notations on verso.
Designs include Minotaur dancer, trio of dancers in grey and yellow, and female in costume. Junyer was a highly talented and prolific Catalan costume and theater designer of the 20th century. Studying in Majorca before the Spanish Civil War, he became interested in folk dances linked with the island's agricultural festivals. He was deaf by birth but expressed the movement of the dancers through color and abstract forms here and later in Cuba. Over the years he became very interested in design theory, producing a large body of work , most successfully designing sets and costumes in 1943 for The Cuckolds' Fair for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. In 1945 the Museum of Modern Art mounted an exhibition of his drawings, and maquettes concerning the function of painting and sculpture in relation to theater design. Two years later, he created Cretan sets and costumes for John Taras's ballet The Minotaur for Ballet Society which were highly praised but the turgid choreography and scoring closed the ballet after only two performances. It broke Junyer who returned to Spain to paint, leaving theater behind him--Spangenberg; editor. The Golden Age of Costume and Set design for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo 1938-1944. The Art Institute of Chicago holds several similar designs in their permanent collection donated by Lincoln Kirstein.
