?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 20,000 - $ 30,000
DIEGO RIVERA Portrait of Ralph Stackpole.
Pencil on light tan wove paper, 1932. 500x404 mm; 19 3/4x16 inches. Initialed and dated in pencil, lower left recto, and inscribed "dibujo de American R Stackpole" and dated in pencil, lower verso.
Rivera (1886-1957) and the California artist Ralph Stackpole (1885-1973) were first acquainted in Paris during the early 1920s. Stackpole worked closely with the architect Timothy Pflueger on numerous commissions in San Francisco during the 1930s, and was responsible for bringing Rivera in to work on murals for the staircase wall and ceiling of the San Francisco Stock Exchange (1931). While Rivera made this drawing, during the early 1930s (likely from an earlier photograph portrait of Stackpole) he and his wife Frida Kahlo were living and working at Stackpole's San Francisco studio. Only a handful of these graceful, Ingresque portraits are known to exist. They reflect Rivera's early academic training and his moving away from Cubism that began around 1915. The artists became lifelong friends as Rivera completed his then controversial murals to decorate the stock exchange and Stackpole worked on the external sculptural design scheme.
