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Estimate: $ 4,000 - $ 6,000
TED JOANS (1928 - 2003) Untitled.
Collage, ink stamp, crayon and colored pencils on cream wove paper, 1992. 13 3/4x17 inches. Signed, dated "2 Mars 1992" and inscribed "NYC" in ink, lower right.
Provenance: private collection.
Joans was an avant-garde artist and a self-described Surrealist poet, painter, collagist and jazz musician. Born in Cairo, Illinois, as Theodore Jones, he played the trumpet and studied jazz. Growing up in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Louisville, Kentucky, he earned a degree in fine arts from Indiana University, before moving in 1951 to New York. He authored thirty art and poetry books, and exhibited extensively in both the United States and Europe, beginning in the 1950s. An expatriate artist in the early 1960s, Joans became a legendary figure in bohemian art and poetry circles across Europe. "Ted Joans' poetry is one paradigm of an era, soundings from one of the more colorful individuals who lit it up, whose voice still brightens the curious world he ceaselessly observes. […] Ted is still the world's most Bohemian Beat, Outside Brother."— Amiri Baraka.
Joans's 1958 painting Bird Lives! is currently on loan from the Fine Art Museums of San Francisco to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 2022, his art was featured in the exhibition Surrealism Beyond Borders organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and traveled to Tate Modern, London. Joans's collaborative work Exquisite Corpse, that the artist worked on for decades with colleagues, also was the subject of a 2001 film made by his friend David Hammons.
