From the post-war period to the present day, American art has flourished. Various movements took root in the country and were pioneered by an array of American artists. Their successes cemented them as influential forces within their multiple styles and movements over the years, and their work continues to be prized by collectors today.
On 27 February, Christie’s New York held their Post-War to Present sale featuring various American artists from coast to coast whose work has been considered influential and groundbreaking for their specific movement or region where they worked in. Names such as Ed Ruscha, Helen Frankenthaler, Richard Estes, and Richard Diebenkorn were just some of those whose paintings graced the top-selling lots.
Frankenthaler's painting Concerto, by far the strongest seller, led the auction. After an extremely intense bidding session, the painting sold for US$2.1 million, including fees, more than quadrupling its original estimate of US$500,000.
Lot 119 | Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011) | Concerto, Acrylic on canvas
Painted in 1982
134.6 x 99.7 cm
Provenance:
- John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco
- Acquired from the above by the present owner, 1983
Estimate: US$500,000-700,000
Hammer Price: US$1,700,000
Sold: US$2,107,000
Without a doubt, the most intense and exciting bidding session took place for Concerto. While ranked third within the hierarchy of most highly estimated paintings, Concerto by Helen Frankenthaler soared to the top over several minutes.
The auctioneer opened bidding at an unassuming US$420,000, but within seconds a flurry of successive bids drove up the price in ever-changing increments. At some point when the lot crossed around a dozen bids and entered the million-dollar range, the bids slowed down and began moving at a steadier US$50,000 per increase.
Bids were made in the room, online, and on the phone with at least four Christie’s specialists calling out bids for their clients. Closer to the end, the main bidders were a client in the room and Julian Ehrlich, Specialist and Head of Post-War to Present Sale, representing his client on the phone.
Eventually, after a total of 28 bids for the lot were made, Ehrlich’s client, with the paddle number 1680, won the lot. The hammer price was US$1.7 million, but after fees they will pay a total of US$2.1 million.
Helen Frankenthaler
Born in New York City in 1928, her family’s wealth, power, and prestige afforded her a privileged upbringing and education, especially in the fine arts. She attended the Dalton School, where one of her teachers was the famous Mexican Modernist painter Rufino Tamayo. This was followed by a stay in Vermont and other periods of private education, where she continued her education with various other famous painters of her era, which influenced her style of painting.
A way to think of Frankenthaler’s work and her approach to artistic movements is as being “amorphous.” Because of her various influences, she continued to shift her artistic practices and styles. She originally started primarily with abstract expressionism, due to her early focus on nature and the geometry and shapes one could naturally find in it, but by the time of Concerto, her style had once again changed.
The black dot in Concerto
In Concerto, Frankenthaler’s style was described as color field painting. Color field painting was directly inspired by Modernism and can be seen as an outgrowth of abstract expressionism, with the name of the style directly referencing the usage of large fields of color with similar hues and simplistic shapes. What Frankenthaler brought to this movement was this idea of stain paintings, which used various oil colors on a raw canvas.
In Concerto this style is best exemplified, along with Franenthaler’s style of using various bright and warm blue hues, which when tied into her earlier interest in nature resembles the sky. Additionally, how Frankenthaler sought to paint by treating the painting like poetry, the flow of the brush is the rhythm of the piece. The strategically placed dots across the painting are meant to be breaks or caesura, in the overall art piece that serve to divide up the rhythm and serve as a core that the rest of the painting orbits around.
She achieved this through her soak-stain method, where using diluted paint on a canvas, she could achieve effects similar to those of watercolor. Additionally, by using different tools such as sponges and buckets, more unique interactions between color and canvas could be achieved.
Lot 123 | Ed Ruscha (b.1937) | Pressures, oil on canvas
Painted in 1967
50.8 x 64 cm
Provenance:
- Alexander Iolas Gallery, New York
- Acquired from the above by the present owner, 1972
Estimate: US$1,000,000 - 1,500,000
Hammer Price: US$1,600,000
Sold: US$1,986,000
For the top estimated lot of the sale, the bidding was opened at US$850,000. The Ruscha work attracted immediate attention, with a total of 14 bids being made. The price of the lot went up by US$50,000 each increment as the bidding progressed.
At least two Christie’s specialists were involved in the bidding for the lot, representing their clients on the phone. The two specialists were Taylor Nemetz, the Junior Specialist for the Post-War and Contemporary department, and Sara Friedlander, the Deputy Chairman for the Post-War and Contemporary department.
Taylor’s client would end up winning the bidding war for Pressures with a hammer price of US$1.6 million. After including fees, the final price the buyer will pay is US$1.9 million.
Ed Ruscha in 2024
Born in 1937, in Omaha, Nebraska, Ed Ruscha is one of the most recognizable names in the Pop Art movement. He is arguably its largest figure in the movement, in the Western United States, contrasted by Andy Warhol in the East. Ruscha was originally in the commercial side of art and print media before being inspired by pop art artists that he had read about to make the shift to painting.
Ruscha’s early work was defined by his interest in Southern California, somewhere he frequently traveled to and later lived in, its landscapes, and its major residents like 20th Century Fox and Paramount Pictures. All of this was done in a Pop Art style, which had expanded as an artistic force in the US during the 1950s.
Ruscha’s work also kept up with the general trends in Pop Art, including the use of words in art, as seen in the work of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. While partially inspired by his background in the commercial side of art, Ruscha was influenced to use words while on a vacation in Europe.
While in France and Spain during the summer of 1961, Ruscha saw street signs in foreign languages that presumably he didn’t understand; they gave him this idea about the aesthetic properties of text once removed from their literal meaning. As such, Ruscha’s earliest word paintings incorporated only one-syllable words, such as HONK or OOF, all in uppercase and displayed across solid backgrounds.
Edward Ruscha | OOF (1962/Reworked in 1963) | Museum of Modern Art, New York City
Important to the story of Pressures is that it originates from this seminal era of Ruscha’s work. The 1960s were the era where Ruscha began the usage of words and mass experimentation in his work. Some of Ruscha’s other most famous works, including the Standard Oil Station series of paintings and OOF, come from this decade of innovation for Ruscha, especially in this field of visual language.
When tying Pressures in with Ruscha’s vision for his word paintings and their aesthetic possibilities, Ruscha takes the idea of separating the words from the meaning to the extreme. He separates every letter from one another, presenting a large gap between each character. This decision is meant to impact the audience, as it makes them not see the characters as components of a single word, but as separate characters distilled onto a painting dissociated from the meaning of the word.
For Ruscha, the characters from the words configured in this artistic fashion revealed the idea that once the purely symbolic nature of the characters is paired with art, the whole aesthetic is elevated as viewers dissect not just the meaning of the characters being assembled into a word, but also the appreciation for how every single letter is painted onto the canvas as that assembling of the characters occurs in the viewer’s mind.
Lot 110 | Richard Diebenkorn (1922-1993) | Untitled (Ocean Park), Acrylic, gouache, charcoal, ink and paper collage on paper
Painted in 1979
64.8 x 49.5 cm
Provenance:
- M. Knoedler & Co., New York
- Acquired from the above by the late owner, 1979
Estimate: US$400,000 - 600,000
Hammer Price: US$620,000
Sold: US$781,200
Born in the Pacific Northwestern city of Portland in 1922, Richard Diebenkorn moved, when he was very young, to San Francisco. He would spend much of his youth studying art across America, entering Stanford in 1940, where he had many mentors, including the muralist Victor Arnautoff.
The Second World War wouldn’t even be able to interrupt his study of art, as when he enlisted in the Marine Corps, he was briefly at Berkeley, where he was trained further in fine arts by Worth Ryder and Erle Loran, two American painters who had been trained in Europe and taught Modernism to Diebenkorn. When Diebenkorn was shipped off to Virginia, he often spent his free time in art museums along the East Coast to study paintings by Picasso and Henri Matisse, who influenced his Ocean Park paintings.
Richard Diebenkorn | Ocean Park #40 (1971) | Sold by Sotheby’s New York for over US$27.2 million in 2021
Regarding Matisse’s impact on Diebenkorn, according to art historian Jane Livingston, upon seeing Matisse’s work in a 1966 exhibition in Los Angeles, Diebenkorn sought to “reverberate” what he saw in his Ocean Park series of paintings, which began in 1967.
His most famous series of works, Diebenkorn painted 135 different Ocean Park paintings for the next 18 years. They were based on aerial photographs and the view of Santa Monica from his house. They sought to bridge Diebenkorn’s earliest expressionist works with color field painting and lyrical abstraction, a postmodernist technique that emphasizes emotions and free compositions in art.
The Ocean Park series has been so well received that between 2018 and 2021, Ocean Park #40 held the artist’s most expensive painting sold at auction when it was sold by Sotheby’s New York for over US$27.2 million.
Other Highlighted Lots:
Lot 114 | Richard Estes (b.1932) | East River, Oil on canvas
Painted in 1994
109.2 x 188 cm
Provenance:
- Marlborough Galerie AG, Zürich
- Acquired from the above by the present owner, 1995
Estimate: US$500,000 - 700,000
Hammer Price: US$550,000
Sold: US$693,000
Lot 121 | Diane Arbus (1923-1971) | Identical twins, Roselle, N.J., 1966, Gelatin silver print
Printed between 1966-1969
Image: 39.1 x 37.1 cm
Sheet: 50.5 x 40.3 cm
Provenance:
- Gifted from the artist to Ruth Ansel, 1970
Estimate: US$500,000-700,000
Hammer Price: US$500,000
Sold: US$630,000
Auction Details:
Auction House: Christie's New York
Sale: Post-War to Present
Date: 27 February 2025 | 10:00 & 14:00 (New York Local Time)
Number of Lots: 212
Lots Sold: 157
Lots Unsold: 55
Sell Rate: 74.06%
Sale Total: US$21,334,714