Robert Frank, Parade—Hoboken, New Jersey (1955)
Photographs, Bonhams, New York, 2 April
Estimate: $60,000 to $80,000
While on a cross-country trip paid for by a Guggenheim Foundation grant, the Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank made this image in Hoboken, New Jersey, during a parade to celebrate the city’s centennial. It went on to serve as the cover image for Frank’s book The Americans, first published in France in 1958 to some backlash abroad for being “anti-American”. The gloomy atmosphere of the photograph and the obscured faces reflect the mood of 1950s America, the decade in which McCarthyism—the persecution of left-wing citizens in the name of investigating alleged Communist ties—took hold in the country, along with racial tensions over the Civil Rights Movement. Frank called Parade “a threatening picture”. Despite controversy at the time it was published, The Americans is seen today as a pioneering work of post-war US photography. Other prints of Parade are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.
Albrecht Dürer, Nemesis (around 1501)
The Passionate Collector: Prints, Posters, and Curiosities from the Eddi Van Auken Collection, Bonhams, Los Angeles, 31 March to 9 April
Estimate: $60,000 to $90,000
More than 200 lots of historical prints, posters and other works are coming to auction in an online sale at Bonhams from the collection of Eddi Van Auken, a California collector and philanthropist. Top highlights of the collection are a selection of Old Master prints—most notably Nemesis (around 1501), Albrecht Dürer’s second-largest engraving. Dürer depicted the Ancient Greek goddess of retribution with some identifying characteristics of Fortuna, Ancient Rome’s goddess of fortune. Scholars say the work was influenced by a poem written in Latin by the Italian Renaissance poet Angelo Poliziano (1454-94). The landscape below the goddess’s feet has been identified as Chiusi in northern Italy, an area Dürer travelled through. Similar Nemesis engravings are part of the permanent collections of the British Museum in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh. The Van Auken collection also includes Dürer’s Adam and Eve (1504), one of his most recognisable engravings.
Salvador Dalí, Tronc—Homo suberis (1956)
20th/21st Century Art Day Sale, Bonhams, London, 3 April
Estimate: £50,000 to £70,000
One of six gouaches created by Salvador Dalí for a calendar, Tronc—Homo suberis shows the end of a narrative in which a tree takes on a human form and ages through the year amid changing seasons. This painting is from the latter part of the calendar, with the tree shown with symbols of death and decay such as the image of a skull in the trunk, bones and haunting figures in the distance. The work reflects Dalí’s lifelong obsession with death, sparked from seeing a dead animal being consumed by ants in childhood. The ant would become a leading symbol of death in his work, also appearing in his best-known painting The Persistence of Memory (1931). Tronc—Homo suberis previously sold in 2016 for £47,500, also at Bonhams London, and returns to auction from a British collection.
Zao Wou-Ki, Zitterlein (1956)
20th/21st Century Evening Sale, Christie’s, Shanghai, 3 April
Estimate: CNY20,000,000 to 30,000,000 ($2.8m to $4.1m)
Zao Wou-Ki is one of China’s greatest Modern artists, as well as one of the most successful at auction. Born in Beijing and trained in China and France, his work shows influence from traditional Chinese art, most prominently calligraphy, and Western Impressionism. Zitterlein is from a period of Zao’s career referred to as the “oracle-bone period”, named for the inspiration he drew from the earliest known form of systematic writing in China. This period marked a watershed moment for Zao during which he turned from figuration and shifted ever more towards the abstraction he is most remembered for today. Works from this time are rare, especially paintings featuring Zitterlein’s vivid red-orange colour—according to the artist’s catalogue raisonné, it is one of only 17. A similar painting is held in the Harvard Art Museums in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
