?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 5,000 - $ 8,000
JOHN GRAHAM (1886-1961)
Sketchbook with approximately 40 drawings. Spiral-bound sketchbook with approximately 40 pencil, crayon or pen and ink drawings. 270x210 mm; 10 1/2x8 1/4 inches. Signed, dated "1960" and inscribed in ink on the front cover. With a pen and ink and crayon portrait of the artist David Burliuk on the front cover and a color crayon portrait of the artist Paul Manship on the rear cover. Circa 1930s-40s.
The drawings in this sketchbook appear to date from the 1930s, when Graham was making work in the abstract, post-Cubist style of Pablo Picasso (1881-1973, see lot 176 and lot 177), to the 1940s, when his abstract style (there are several pencil drawings in the sketchbook of loosely rendered landscapes over which the artist has scrawled abstract color crayon lines) became a strong influence on Abstract Expressionist artists who he counted among his friends and acquaintances, such as Willem de Kooning (1904-1997), Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), Lee Krasner (1908-1984), Mark Rothko (1903-1970) and David Smith (1906-1965, see lot 187), in addition to stylized portraits of artists and other figures he sketched in New York and Paris during the 1930s-40s, including the portraits of David Burliuk (1882-1967) and Paul Manship (1885-1966, see lot 42) on the covers.
