?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 7,000 - $ 10,000
ROGER BRODERS (1883-1953)
LA PLAGE DE CALVI CORSE. 1928.
42 1/4x30 1/2 inches, 107 1/4x77 1/2 cm. Lucien Serre & Cie., Paris. Condition A-: replaced loss in lower right margin; small repaired tears at edges; minor creases in image.
One of Roger Broders' most recognizable graphic devices was the sweeping curve of the shorelines he depicted in his myriad of travel posters for the French Railways. Broders' brightly-colored, Art Deco image design for Calvi Beach, on the northwest coast of the island of Corsica, not only exemplifies this element, but is considered by many to be the finest beach poster Broders created. Although Calvi is known as the alleged birthplace of Christopher Columbus, and the location where Admiral Horatio Nelson lost his eye, Broders instead depicts an elegantly-attired bathing beauty on the 4 mile long stretch of sand, which spreads out at the foot of the 13th century Citadel. A ship in the background indicates how travelers would make the final leg of their journey on the PLM railway to this island. If the image seems oddly familiar, comfortable and appealing, it may be due to a previously unrecognized subliminal suggestion. Broders has modeled his central figure after Botticelli's famous painting The Birth of Venus. Broders' beach goddess' Contrapposto stance is identical to that of Venus, and further similarities can be read throughout the image's composition. This is the French version. Broders p. 99, Perry / Broders p. 28, Voyage p. 80, La Mer p. 11, Tourism 95, Furness vol. 8, 158 (var).
