?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,000 - $ 1,500
PAUL PHILIPPE CRET Detail of Bronze Grills, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.
Pencil and color pencils on paper, 1940. 485x254 mm; 19 1/4x10 1/8 inches. With the studio ink stamp, lower left recto, and extensively annotated in pencil, recto.
Ex-collection the estate of Matthew Rutenberg, New York.
Cret (1876-1945), born in Lyon, France, was an architect who studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and Lyon and then was recruited by the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia to teach design. His students included notable architects such as Robert McGoodwin (1886-1967), Sydney E. Martin (1883-1970) and Louis I. Kahn (1901-1974). Some of his own important architectural designs in Philadelphia include the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, the Barnes Foundation Gallery and Rittenhouse Square. He also designed the memorial to Quentin Roosevelt, the son of Theodore Roosevelt who died in World War I (Cret was chosen by the Roosevelt family since he served in the French army during the war).
In 1931-35, the Federal Reserve Building in Philadelphia was built and Cret designed the building in the Classical Revival style. The ground floor features the bronze grills shown in Cret's design here along with sculptures by Alfred-Alphonse Bottiau (1889-1951) of Athena. Today the building is part of Thomas Jefferson University Hospital.
