?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 2,000 - $ 3,000
PAUL WONNER (1920 - 2008)
Saul Blinded. Acrylic and pencil on paper. 419x349 mm; 16½x13¾ inches. Signed in pencil, lower right. 1971.
Provenance: Felix Landau Gallery, Los Angeles, California; collection of Bernard and Rebecca Reis, New York; thence by descent the collection of Barbara Poe Levee, Los Angeles, CA; thence by descent private Collection, Denver, Colorado; private collection, New York.
A queering of biblical narrative, Saul Blinded is a depiction of Saul's interaction with the Lord. A blinding, revelatory, and ecstatic experience for Saul, he is blinded by the light and led by the hand to Damascus where Christ instructs him to wait.
A member of the Bay Area Figurative Movement, Paul Wonner painted in a loose, painterly manner similar to his peers until the 1970s, when he transitioned to a crisp style focusing on bright light and sharp shadows. His final stylistic era focused exclusively on still-lifes in a hyperrealist manner.
Wonner moved to the Bay Area to study at California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland (now California College of the Arts), where he earned a Bachelor's degree in 1941. After military service in Texas, Wonner moved to New York, where he worked as a package designer and briefly continued his training at the Art Students League. He returned to the Bay Area in 1950, where he completed his BFA, MFA and MLS by1955, all from UC Berkeley. Wonner then worked as a librarian at UC Davis in the late 1950s, until his move to Southern California, where he taught at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles and UC Santa Barbara during the 1960s.
