?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 2,000 - $ 3,000
GEORGE AULT A Country House.
Pencil on wove paper, 1921. 200x230 mm; 8x9 1/4 inches. Signed and dated in pencil, lower right recto.
Provenance: Suzanne and Maurice Vanderwoude, New York; private collection, Chicago.
Ault (1891-1948) was a talented though troubled American artist. Born in Cleveland, he spent his youth in London and studied art there before returning to New York in 1911. During the 1920s, following the death of his mother, Ault became an alcoholic, each of his three brothers committed suicide, and his family fortune was lost following the 1929 stock market crash. He moved with his second wife to Woodstock, New York, in 1937, and worked there the remainder of his career. He and his wife lived in a small rented cottage that had no electricity or indoor plumbing. Though he created many of his finest works during this challenging period in Woodstock, he had difficulty selling them and failed to gain critical success until after his untimely death in December 1948.
Ault is often grouped with Precisionist painters such as Charles Sheeler (1883-1965) and Ralston Crawford (1906-1978) because of his unadorned representations of architecture and urban landscapes. However, the ideological aspects of Precisionism are not so apparent in his work. Much like Edward Hopper (1882-1967), Ault was more of a solitary artist. He painted what he saw around him, simplifying detail slightly into flat shapes and planes, and portraying the underlying geometric patterns of structures, in this way developing an individual modernist style that prefigured Ellsworth Kelly on other Minimalist artists of the later 20th century.
