?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 30,000 - $ 50,000
SARGENT CLAUDE JOHNSON (1888 - 1967) Dancer.
Varnished terracotta, circa 1938-40. Approximately 254x152x178 mm; 10x6x7 inches (including base). Signed at rear edge, just above the wood base.
Provenance: private collection, Oakland, CA; private collection, San Francisco. With an old typed label, with the title, affixed to the underside of the base.
This striking terracotta is an extremely scarce modernist figure by Sargent Johnson. This experimental work demonstrates Johnson's increased interest in European modernism and the abstraction of the figure by the 1940s. This work is a radical departure from the naturalist heads that Johnson exhibited throughout the 1930s at the Harmon Foundation. It shows the continued influence of his work with San Francisco sculptor Beniamino Bufano through the late 1930s and the WPA, particularly with his use of simplified, curved shapes. This work, while figurative, is strikingly organic and abstracted, and has much in common with Johnson's graphic work from the period, like his 1938 cubist lithograph, White and Black, and WPA murals at the Aquatic Park Bathhouse Building in San Francisco. The massing of forms around a curvilinear base is also found in his painted terracotta, Mother and Child, 1947.
