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Estimate: $ 2,000 - $ 3,000
HANS BURKHARDT Figure in a Landscape.
Color pastels on paper, 1939. 800x648 mm; 31 1/2x25 1/2 inches. Signed and dated in pencil, lower right recto. With the artist's blind stamp, lower right recto.
Exhibited in "Hans Burkhardt Pastels: 50 Years of Figurative Expressionism," Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, Los Angeles, 1984, catalogue illustration plate 10.
Arshile Gorky, who shared his New York studio with Hans Burkhardt (1904-1994) from 1928 to 1937, posited that "painting is not more than drawing with paint." Burkhardt seems to have understood this and applied such an underpinning in his paintings that, eventhough they abstract figures or scenes, such as Figure in a Landscape, exhibit a strong sense of order, balance and design. Only a trained draftsman, which Burkhardt was, would be so insistent on creating sketches in pencil, pastel or ink before undertaking a painting.
When Burkhardt left New York for Los Angeles in the late 1930s, he brought with him the largest holding of Gorky's work outside of the artist's own collection and was largely influential in increasing Gorky's popularity with numerous West Coast curators and collectors. In 1947, the year before Gorky's suicide, Burkhardt donated Self Portrait, oil, 1928, by Gorky to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
