Jun 10, 2021 - Sale 2572

Sale 2572 - Lot 76

Price Realized: $ 6,250
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 2,000 - $ 3,000
ARNULF NEUWIRTH
Ohne titel.

Oil on canvas, circa 1950. 810x915 mm; 32x36 inches. Signed in oil, lower left recto and in ink on the stretcher bar verso.

Ex-collection private collection, New York.

Neuwirth (1912-2012) was an Austrian artist and founder in 1946 of the Viennese avant-garde artist group Der Kreis, as well as its president from 1950 to 1972. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna with the sculptor Karl Sterrer (1885-1972) and worked in Paris from 1937 to 1939. Neuwirth was a well-traveled artist. He lived on Gran Canaria, one of Spain's Canary Islands, off northwestern Africa, during the early 1940s, and also visited North Africa and South America, then resided the U.S. in 1950, where he came under the influence of Abstract Expressionism, evidenced by the current work. From the mid-1950s onward, until his retirement as an artist, Neuwirth taught at the Modeschule der Stadt Wien, and his style shifted away from abstract toward more representational work, imbued with influences from Surrealism. At a career-spanning, 70-year retrospective exhibition of his work, "In the Paradise of Pictures," 2002, at the Kunsthalle Krems, held on his 90th birthday, Neuwirth was honored with the Great Golden Decoration of Honor of the Federal State of Lower Austria.