?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 800 - $ 1,200
FURTH THEREMIN. Circa 1936. 33x23 inches. Marci, Brussels. Condition B+: tape stain in bottom margin; plastic strip affixed to top margin; minor creases and abrasions in image. Paper. Created in 1918 by soviet scientist Leon Theremin, the eponymous instrument has enjoyed a history that has brought it to the edge of great popular approval but never quite made it. A clear forerunner of all contemporary electronic music, the Theremin (also known as an Aetherphone) was unlike any other instrument; in that there was nothing at all to touch. A Theremin "player" merely moves their hands in the air around two antennae extending from the instrument, from which high-frequency electromagnetic fields emanate, one of which controls tone the other volume. An absolute phenomenon when Theremin (originally Lev Sergeivitch Termen) brought it to America in 1928 concerts were performed for Ford, Rachmaninoff and Toscanini. On his way to America he had played at the Paris Opera, where the crowds were so large the police were called in and for the first time in history standing room tickets were sold in the boxes. Lucie Bigelow Rosen (whom the New York Times had dubbed "Theremin's High Priestess") was his benefactor and a performer on his instrument. This modernist image captures the mystic and surprising nature of the instrument itself, in which waving hands ascribe a "clef" in the air above one of the apparatus and a disconnected head looks on, perfectly capturing in a non-traditional manner this non traditional instrument! The Theremin went on to "great" fame as the instrument which created most of the spooky sounds from 1950s "B" Science Fiction movies (the Day the Earth Stood Still), but was also used most memorably in the Beach Boys song "Good Vibrations" and in the soundtrack for Spellbound (for which the composer won an Oscar). It was also featured in Lost in Space, the Green Hornet, The Ten Commandments, Ed Wood and Mars Attacks.
