?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 2,000 - $ 3,000
LOUIS SIEGRIEST Yellow Glow.
Mixed-media on Masonite, 1961. 915x1220 mm; 36x48 inches. Signed and dated in oil, lower left recto, and signed, dated and titled, verso.
Ex-collection private collection, Florida.
Siegriest (1899-1989) was born in Oakland, California. He began studying art at the California School of Arts and Crafts at night while also attending high school, and later attended the California School of Fine Arts. In 1917, he joined the Society of the Six, a group of Californian plein air painters who exhibited together around Oakland in the 1910s and 1920s. They were inspired by Post-Impressionist trends, particularly Fauvism, and explored vibrant colors and freedom of style in their landscapes.
While the beginning of his career was defined by Fauvist style landscapes, during the late 1950s Siegriest moved towards abstraction. Starting in the 1940s and into the 1950s, Abstract-Expressionism had taken hold in San Francisco, with artists such as Richard Diebenkorn (see lots 53-55) and Edward Corbett embracing the style. Grace L. McCann Morley, the director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, opened the museum up to Abstract Expressionist painters. The San Francisco artists were tied to, but not immediately inspired by their New York counterparts. In an oral history with the Archives of American Art, Siegriest recounted meeting Willem de Kooning and Conrad Marca-Relli while in New York, but while he admired their work, noted that it was not a direct reflection on his.
Siegriest viewed himself as a landscape artist first and foremost and traveled regularly to Nevada, New Mexico and Utah. Throughout his career he was inspired by the western landscape. In the later abstract works, such as the current lot, the artist was still inspired by the land; he often chose a palette of dry, earthy colors and experimented with new materials like polyvinyl, glue and gypsums as well as natural materials such as sand or dirt mixed onto his canvases.
