Dec 15, 2015 - Sale 2402

Sale 2402 - Lot 16

Price Realized: $ 12,500
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 15,000 - $ 25,000
RICHMOND BARTHÉ (1901 - 1989)
Head of a Dancer.

Cast bronze, with a brown patina, mounted on a white stone base, 1937. Approximately 311 mm; 12 1/4 inches high (not including the base). Incised signature and numbered "18" along the upper edge, verso.

Provenance: private collection, Virginia.

This contemplative but powerful head by Richmond Barthé is his well known portrait of the Czech-born German dancer Harald Krueutzberg (1902 - 1968). Kreutzberg is an important figure in both German ballet and modern dance whom Richmond Barthé befriended when he performed in New York in the 1930s. Barthé made several sculptures of the expressive dancer - both bust and figures. Barthé himself had studied Martha Graham dance techniques in an effort to more fully understand the movement and form of dancing figures.

Other bronze casts of this head are in the collections of the Barnett Aden Collection, National Portrait Gallery, the David C. Driskell Collection, the Walter O. Evans Collection of African American Art, the Bernard and Shirley Kinsey Collection and the Savannah College of Art and Design Museum.