?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,000 - $ 1,500
GEORGINA KLITGAARD Woodstock.
Oil on canvas, circa 1935. 205x255 mm; 8x10 inches. Signed in oil, lower right recto.
Provenance: Acquired at Frank Leonard Gallery, Los Angeles by Lee D. Witkin, New York, circa 1980; Evelyne Z. Daitz, New York; thence to the Estate of Evelyne Z. Daitz, New York.
Klitgaard (1893-1977) was born in Spuyten Duyvil, New York and studied at Barnard College and the National Academy of Design. In 1933, she traveled to Europe on a Guggenheim Fellowship. Upon her return, she was employed by the Federal Arts Project and worked as a mural painter based in Bearsville, New York, near Woodstock. She became a part of the artists' colony in the area, which included artists Ernest Fiene and Katherine Schmidt, among others. Also a member of the Whitney Studio Club, Klitgaard received a solo exhibition there in March 1927, followed by appearances at successive Whitney Biennial exhibitions.
Klitgaard was known for capturing the seasonal changes in local landscapes and natural phenomena such as mountain mists, sunrises, and budding fruit trees. Aside from what was described as "a woman's interpretation of the earth," by Art Digest in 1941, Klitgaard was also an accomplished painter of cityscapes and portraits. During her heyday in the late 1930s and 1940s, her œuvre appeared to draw influences from Peter Bruegel as well as Chinese scroll paintings and was greatly admired by critics who reviewed her several exhibitions at Rehn Galleries, New York. Lloyd Goodrich wrote that, "her details are all living, and the whole picture is pulled together by a lively sense of movement and a feeling for light and air... with a sort of cool detached lyricism, a feeling for the sharpness of autumn air... mobile, graceful, spirited."
During her career, Klitgaard received numerous awards for her work, including the Jennie Sesnan Gold Medal in the 128th Annual Exhibition of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1933, honorable mention for landscape in the 49th Annual American Exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1938, and she was included in the New York World's Fair Exhibition, "American Art Today," presenting her "immaculately painted landscape," In the Winter Sun.
