?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 5,000 - $ 8,000
BEN SHAHN Harlequinade.
Watercolor and ink on cream wove paper, circa 1950. 641x961 mm; 25¼x37⅞ inches. Signed in ink, lower right recto.
With—Deserted Fairground, color screenprint, circa 1948. 300x378 mm; 11⅞x14⅞ inches, full margins. Prescott 9.
Provenance: (Harlequinade) Acquired from the artist by choreographer Jerome Robbins; sold with his estate, Doyle, New York, November 17, 1999, lot 35; Grete Meilman Fine Art, New York; private collection, New York; thence by descent.
Exhibited: (Harlequinade) "Ben Shahn," Leicester Galleries, London, November 1959, number 20, with the label; Martha Parrish & James Reinish, Inc., New York, with the label; D.C. Moore Gallery, New York, with the label.
Published: Kenneth W. Prescott, The Complete Graphic Works of Ben Shahn, New York , 1973, page 11.
Shahn (1898-1969) collaborated with ballet and theatrical production companies to produce scenery and costume designs, and became close associates with choreographer Jerome Robbins, to whom the artist gave the present lot. Shahn worked on Robbins' "ballet in sneakers" NY Export: Opus Jazz, in 1958, which became so successful that it was broadcast on the Ed Sullivan Show. Shahn also worked on Robbins' Ballets: USA and his presentation at the 1961 The Festival of Two Worlds, in Spoleto, Italy. Correspondence between Shahn and Robbins, from circa 1957 to 1968, can be found in the Ben Shahn papers in the collection of the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.
The subject of Harlequinade would have made the present work a suitable gift from Shahn to Robbins. Harlequinade refers to the theatre genre following in the tradition, including the stock characters, of commedia dell'arte. Inspired by the commedia dell'arte and Marius Petipa's ballet, Les Millions d'Harlequin, George Balanchine choreographed the ballet Harlequinade, performed by the New York City Ballet, which premiered in New York in 1965. The ballet enjoyed a revival for its fifty year anniversary in 2015.
