?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 800 - $ 1,200
JOHN VON WICHT Marine.
Color lithograph, circa 1950. 230x312 mm; 9x12 1/4 inches, full margins. Signed, titled and numbered 1/20 in pencil, lower margin.
In 1923 John von Wicht (1888-1970) left behind post-war Berlin, where he had studied painting at the Royal School of Fine & Applied Arts, for the United States. He entered the Ardsley Art Academy in Brooklyn and worked for the U.S. Printing and Lithography Company. After a few years work, he became an independent contractor, exhibiting with the American Abstract Artists group and, in a breakthrough moment, his work was accepted for exhibit at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1941.
His work from the 1950s, as with the present lot, abstracts some Surrealist tendencies but ultimately derives much influence from Wassily Kandisnky. Harbor themes began to appear in these abstractions, with sensously colored, loose expressionist forms, such as the the sea. Von Wicht served as captain of a supply barge ferrying food to army transport ships in New York harbor.
