?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 30,000 - $ 40,000
FELRATH HINES (1913 - 1993) Bouquet.
Oil on burlap canvas, 1957. 787x1187 mm; 31x46 3/4 inches. Signed in oil, lower right recto. Signed, titled and dated in oil, center verso.
Provenance: Park Avenue Gallery, Mount Kisco, NY; private collection, Connecticut (1960); private collection (2016), acquired from Swann Galleries, April 7, 2016.
Bouquet is a significant mid-century painting by Felrath Hines - a scarce large canvas from his first abstract period. Born in Indianapolis, Hines studied painting and design at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he befriended artist Charles Sebree. Inspired by Sebree, Hines moved from Chicago to New York in 1946. In the 1950s, he quietly developed an organic abstraction idiom while working in the shop of master framer Robert M. Kulicke. Through this close contact with the art world, Hines was both introduced to many other artists and his future career in art conservation.
Hines achieved critical recognition for these beautiful, painterly abstractions of nature with two solo exhibitions at Parma Gallery in 1957 and 1959, and his inclusion in group exhibitions at the John Heller Gallery and Parma Gallery in New York and the Barnett Aden Gallery in Washington, DC in the 1950s. In the late 1950s, Hines also met Romare Bearden, with whom he would later become a founding member of the Spiral Group in 1963. Several paintings from this breakthrough period of abstraction are now in institutional collections; including Transition, 1953, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Hanging Garden, 1954, SFMOMA, Untitled (Abstraction), circa 1960, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and Untitled, 1960, Indianapolis Museum of Art.
