?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 2,000 - $ 3,000
JOSEPH JICHA (1901 - ?) KOKOON / ELEVENTH ANNUAL BAL - MASQUE. 1924. 391/2x253/4 inches. Otis Lithograph Co. Condition B+: vertical and horizontal folds; minor restoration in margins. The Kokoon Club was founded in 1911 by Carl Moellman and William Sommer, young American artists inspired by the dadaist movement and similar avant-garde organizations in Europe. "For artists who spent their days making advertisements and posters, the Kokoon Club provided a venue for subverting the traditional expectations of pictorial art. Their clubhouse became the epicenter of the true Bohemian lifestyle in Cleveland, and the name of the club soon became known for radical art" (Cleveland Artists Foundation Newsletter 2/1 February 2004). According to papers kept in the Kent State University Library Special Collections, amounting to an archive of the club's activities from 1922-1935, the name Kokoon derives from "the lowly cocoon . . . forerunner of the beautiful butterfly in hopes that from this small beginning something of beauty should develop and emerge." Among the club members were Carl Moellmann, Morris Grossman, Elmer Brubeck, Henry Keller, August Biehle, Joseph Jicha and Rolf Stoll. The yearly costume balls, begun in 1913, were originally intended as fundraisers, but turned into rather notorious events. "The event was a complete arts ball; everything was a work of art: the elaborate hall decorations, the tickets, the costumes, and above all the invitations. The invitations were poster-mailers designed every year as a hotly contested art competition. Kokoon Club posters were the ultimate blending of the commercial and the aesthetic. They were advertisements that were also cutting-edge fine art." (ibid). Here, for the eleventh Kokoon Club Ball, a poem by Hart Crane sets the tone, with the image of a mysterious woman pulling aside a curtain to let revelers into the sybartic melee, fueled by potions from her bubbling caldron.
