Jan 25, 2024 - Sale 2657

Sale 2657 - Lot 153

Price Realized: $ 6,750
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,500 - $ 2,500

MABEL DWIGHT (1875-1955)


The Clinch (The Clinch, Movie Theatre; The Happy Ending).
Lithograph, 1928. 9¼x11⅝ inches, full margins. First state (of 2). Edition of 50. Signed, titled and dated in pencil, lower margins. Printed by by George C. Miller, New York.

Illustrated: on the cover of the catalog raissoné' on the artist, Mabel Dwight: A Catalogue Raisonné of the Lithographs, Susan Barnes Robinson & John Pirog, 1996. Additional impressions are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Musuem of Modern Art, New York, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania.

Mabel Dwight (1876-1955) was born in Cincinnati and travelled extensively as a child and young adult. She studied at the Hopkins School of Art in San Francisco in the late 1890s, though gave up her nascent reputation as an artist once she was married in 1906. In 1917, she separated from her husband and resumed painting, joining the Whitney Studio Club in New York. With the encouragement of Carl Zigrosser, who often urged American artists to make a pilgrimage to the Atelier Desjobert, she traveled to Paris in 1927 to learn lithography. He said of her, "Dwight did not just skim the surface of the comic and incongruous, but probed into the depths, ever imbued with pity and compassion, a sense of irony, and the understanding that comes of profound experience... There is detachment also, the sense of seeing life from afar, the long view of things." After returning to New York, her mature style blossomed, blending social realist subjects with her unique brand of satire. In 1928, she produced her first American lithographs and printed 17 works in collaboration with George Miller. She went on to produce lithographs for the Federal Arts Projects during the Great Depression. Robinson & Pirog 32.