?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 3,000 - $ 5,000
JOHN LITTLE Untitled (Abstract Composition, Black and White Collage).
Mixed-media collage and ink on paper, 1963. 405x305 mm; 16x12 inches. Signed and dated in ink, lower right recto.
Provenance: Nancy McCaffrey, Wainscott, New York; Doyle Auctions, New York; private collection, New York.
Little (1907-1984) was born in Alabama and later attended the Buffalo Fine Arts Academy from 1924 to 1927. After school, he moved to New York, pursuing a career in the textile industry. In 1933, he began attending classes at the Art Students League with George Grosz. By the late 1930s, Little was working with Hans Hofmann in both New York and Provincetown, which pushed him towards abstraction and his first serious involvement as a painter. Through Hofmann he met artists such as Lee Krasner, George McNeil, Gerome Kamrowski, Giorgio Cavallon and Perle Fine. After serving as an aerial photographer in World War II, he moved into Hans Hofmann's 8th Street studio in New York where his neighbors were Krasner and Jackson Pollock. He had his first one-man show at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco with a follow-up solo show at Betty Parsons in 1948. Little remained close friends with Pollock through the early 1950s. He moved to East Hampton, near Pollock's Springs, New York studio, and created abstract collages, like the current work, and paintings that were Abstract Expressionist in style. He and Pollock had a joint exhibition in 1955, just a year before Pollock's death, at the Guild Hall, East Hampton. Little continued to actively exhibit through the next three decades, with an end-of-career retrospective of his work at the Guild Hall Museum in 1982.
