May 12, 2022 - Sale 2604

Sale 2604 - Lot 5

Price Realized: $ 6,000
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,500 - $ 2,500
JACKSON POLLOCK
Parsons Gallery Poster.

Offset lithograph on cream wove paper, 1951. 435x558 mm; 17 1/8x22 inches (sheet), full margins. Printed by Acme Press, New York. A very good impression of this scarce, early poster.

Provenance: Gifted by Lee Krasner (1908-1984) to Francis V. O'Connor (1937-2017), New York-based art historian, poet, artist and co-editor of the Jackson Pollock catalogue raisonné (published in 1978); gifted by bequest to the current owner.

Published: Francis V. O'Connor and Eugene Victor Thaw, Jackson Pollock: a Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, Drawings, and Other Works, 1978, volume 4, number 1089.

By 1950, Pollock (1912-1956) was lionized by many, including the gallerist Betty Parsons and art critic Clement Greenberg, as the leader of the Abstract Expressionists. An exhibition in the same year at the Betty Parsons Gallery proved such: featuring his renowned "drip" paintings Autumn Rhythm and One, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Museum of Modern Art, New York, respectively. But in 1951, Parsons exhibited Pollock's newest work, a series of paintings devoid of color, completed exclusively in black enamel on untreated canvas. His seeming turn from abstract to figurative and "drip" painting to hands-on drawing baffled many in the art world and to some signaled his decline. Pollock reproduced designs for six of the black enamel paintings in screenprint to coincide with the exhibition. O'Connor/Thaw P 26.

With—JACKSON POLLOCK (after), Untitled, screenprint, circa 1983. 720x1510 mm; 28 3/8x59 1/2 inches (sheet), full margins. After Pollock's enamel painting on paper, circa 1950 (see O'Connor 797, now at the Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart).

This lot accompanied by ephemera collected by Francis V. O'Connor, including 16 exhibition posters, 1967-1990, including POLLOCK, STEINBERG, ARNOLD BELKIN, JACOB LAWRENCE, the latter two signed by the artists, and RABINOVITCH, with an original screenprint signed and numbered by the artist; 8 miscellaneous posters for various book announcements, speaking engagements, symposia, and events, including some signed by MARTIN CHARLOT, and MIRIAM and JOSÉ ARGUELLES; 2 color proofing sheets for O'Connor's publication on Pollock; and 9 works on paper by various artists, including JACOB KAINEN.