Photographs from the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Saturday, 30 July 2005 11:57

NEW YORK.-Sotheby's will offer approximately 130 works in a sale of Important Photographs from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, including works from the Gilman Paper Company Collection. The single-owner sale will focus on turn-of-the-last century and 20th century photographs and includes the work of seminal artists such as Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, Dora Maar, Paul Outerbridge, Margaret Bourke-White, Edward Weston, Walker Evans, Robert Frank and others. Discussing the sale, Denise Bethel, Senior Vice President and Director of Sotheby's Photographs department in New York, said: "The appearance of works from these collections at auction will be a landmark event in the field of photographs, providing collectors with a singular opportunity to acquire extraordinary works from what are widely regarded as two of the most important photography collections in the world." Highlighting the sale is the work of 19th and 20th century photographers Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz, the American masters who elevated photography to fine art and pioneered the legendary gallery '291' at 291 Fifth Avenue in New York. Edward Steichen's masterful multiple-process photograph The Pond-Moonlight (est. $700,000/1 million) is one of only three known prints of this image and is the best of Steichen's early landscapes. Made by Steichen in his mid-twenties, this photograph shows the young photographer working at the very peak of his aesthetic and technical abilities. As the other two prints of this image are in museum collections -- one retained in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the other in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art -- the appearance of this print for sale is a rare opportunity for collectors. Auguste Rodin met Steichen in 1901 and, impressed by the photographer's portfolio, invited him to make photographs of him and his work in his studio. While Steichen made a series of portraits of Rodin, he was limited by the fact that the studio was overcrowded with work. Later, in 1908, Rodin informed Steichen that he had moved his sculpture of Balzac out of his studio into the open air. Steichen set to work and made a series of exposures by moonlight creating Balzac-The Open Sky (est. $500/700,000). When Rodin saw Steichen's photographs he exclaimed, "You will make the world understand my Balzac through these pictures." Alfred Stieglitz's extensive series of pictures of Georgia O'Keeffe began soon after the two became lovers, in 1917. Over the next two decades, in dozens of sittings, this famous composite portrait of one woman recorded not only her face, her hands, and her torso, but also her moods and metamorphoses. Works from this series in the sale include Posed by Painting (est. $150/200,000), Hands (est. $300/500,000), and Nude (est. $300/500,000). Braque-Picasso Exhibition (est. $30/50,000) is a skillfully composed view of an exhibition at Stieglitz's '291' gallery and demonstrates his dual role as a photographer and as one of the foremost proponents of modern art in the early 20th century.

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