Jan 28, 2016 - Sale 2403

Sale 2403 - Lot 8

Price Realized: $ 4,000
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,200 - $ 1,800
WLADYSLAW THEODOR BENDA.
"The Villain." Mixed media on board. 630x600 mm; 25x23 1/2 inches. 5-mm puncture near lower left corner. Signed lower right. Matted and framed. Circa 1915.

Additional Details

W. T. Benda was an important Polish-American artist of the Golden Age of American Illustration who studied with Robert Henri. He illustrated Fu Manchu and Sherlock Holmes mysteries, but his most enduring pictures are those for the first edition of Willa Cather's My Antonia (1918). He was famous for a series of artistic masks he designed for the Greenwich Village Follies. (Marcel Duchamp was among their admirers.) The A to Z of American Theater (2009) calls Benda "the supreme mask-maker in New York."