?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 15,000 - $ 20,000
RICHARD AVEDON (1923-2004) George Harrison. Dye transfer print, the image measuring 19 7/8x15 3/8 inches (50.5x39 cm.), the sheet slightly larger, the mount 24 1/4x19 1/4 inches (61.6x48.9 cm.), with Avedon's signature and date in ink on recto. 1967
Provenance: Acquired directly from the Photographer by Richard Bergeron, who ran the marketing and advertising department for Abbott Labs. Bergeron is best known in science fiction circles for his fanzine titled Warhoon.
In August 1967, Avedon shot the Beatles in a studio at Thompson House, 200 Gray's Inn Road, London when the musicians were at the peak of their celebrities. Printed pictures from this session appeared first in the Jan. 9, 1968 issue of Look, and later in Europe's Stern magazine. Far from his conventional and purist style for portraits, Avedon embraced the western hippie cultural shift that the Beatles conveyed at this particular time of their career by personifying them as deities and rendering them in psychedelic colors, with each given his own visual identity through specific postures, colors, and symbolic attributes. Later, a portfolio of four dye transfer prints was produced and released as a limited set of 75 copies in 1990. This dye transfer depicts Harrison in red, not in the green tones originally chosen, but features the all-seeing eye on Harrison's hand, the solarization, and deep saturation which gave these compositions their innovative power. Presumably, this represents an experiment by Avedon signed and dated 1967, and is a rarity on the market.
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