?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 20,000 - $ 30,000
FRANK BOWLING (1936 - ) Dan to Beersheba.
Acrylic on cotton canvas, circa 1975. 2743x787 mm; 108x31 inches. Signed and titled in ink, verso.
Provenance: the artist; Leonard Bocour, New York (1975); gift to the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY (1976), with the labels on the frame back; de-accesioned and acquired at auction, private collection (2000).
Leonard Bocour was the pioneer manufacturer of acrylic artist paints, who, with fellow inventor Sam Golden, invented magna paints in the 1940s. Bocour was also a major collector of artworks by Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and other artists who were also his customers.
Exhibited: Director's Consideration, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, with the label on the frame back, 1975.
Dan to Beersheba is an Old Testament Biblical phrase that in modern times has been used to describe the boundaries of a future state of Palestine--during the peace negotiations following World War I, "from Dan to Beersheba" was the basis of the British proposal for the area of Palestine to be carved out of the Ottoman Empire as a League of Nations mandate.
Frank Bowling, born in British Guyana and a graduate of the Slade School of Art, splits his time between New York and London, and his career as a painter, writer and art instructor has thus been trans-Atlantic. While included in many exhibitions internationally over his long career, Bowling achieved acclaim in New York in the early 1970s when he was included in both the 1971 and 1973 Whitney Biennials, and had a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1971. The artist received Guggenheim fellowships in 1967 and 1973, and two Pollock-Krasner awards in 1992 and 1998. Bowling's work is found in many important institutional collections, including the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Menil Foundation, Houston, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Royal Academy of Arts, London. This is the largest canvas by the artist to come to auction to date.
