?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 70,000 - $ 100,000
JARED FRENCH Siren.
Egg tempera on gessoed linen over masonite, circa 1945. 650x380 mm; 25 1/2x15 inches.
Ex-collection the Estate of the artist, Rome; directly to the current owner, Rome.
Born in Ossining, New York, French (1905-1988) studied art at Amherst College and the Art Students League. A job on Wall Street, cut short by the stock market crash in 1929, was followed by full immersion into the study of art, world travel and creative summers at the beach with artist friends. His close relationships with Paul Cadmus, Margaret Hoening and George Tooker, among others, enhanced a lifelong pursuit of art influenced by the writings of C. G. Jung and the concept of the collective unconscious. Along with Cadmus and Hoening (whom he married in 1937), French was a founding member of the PaJaMa photographic collaboration, forming a creative bond which fostered many activities as they summered on the remote beaches of Fire Island, New York.
In this painting, a dockside businessman in a suit oversees the capture of a male nude ensnared in a net and pulled from the water while a Siren gazes on in dismay. Although the exact meaning of this image is unknown, it relates to French's use of archetypal symbolism to represent basic aspects of human experience. As an allegorical social commentary, the painting could be seen to depict man being torn from his idealized elemental state and possessed by worldly and materialistic demands. Alternatively, it may represent the struggle of the human mind to resist the particular realities of life and maintain a connection with C. G. Jung's collective unconscious.
Owing to its importance to the artist, having never left his collection, it is unlikely that this painting was ever published or exhibited. The male figure in the water, lower right, is probably a self portrait.
