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JESÚS RAFAEL SOTO | Double écriture noir et vert
Estimate
800,000 - 1,200,000 USD
bidding is closed
Description
- JESÚS RAFAEL SOTO
- Double écriture noir et vert
- signed, titled and dated 1966 on the reverse
- painted wood, metal and nylon string
- 43 by 68 by 12 in. 109.2 by 172.7 by 30.5 cm.
Provenance
Galería Conkright, Caracas
Collection of Rafael Tudela, Caracas (acquired from the above circa 1975)
Private Collection, Miami (acquired from the above)
Acquired from the above by the present owner
Collection of Rafael Tudela, Caracas (acquired from the above circa 1975)
Private Collection, Miami (acquired from the above)
Acquired from the above by the present owner
Exhibited
New York, Kootz Gallery, Soto, March 1966
New York, Martha Jackson Gallery, Jesus Raphael Soto, 1971
New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Rotterdam, Museum Boymans-van-Beuningen; Washington, D.C. and The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Soto: Retrospective Exhibition, November 1974 - November, 1975, n.p., no. 52, illustrated
New York, Martha Jackson Gallery, Jesus Raphael Soto, 1971
New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Rotterdam, Museum Boymans-van-Beuningen; Washington, D.C. and The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Soto: Retrospective Exhibition, November 1974 - November, 1975, n.p., no. 52, illustrated
Condition
The panel is in very good condition for its age. The pinstripe panels exhibit a few very faint, minor surface scuffs, specifically in the extreme lower edge of the back panel, from the metal elements coming in contact with the surface . This is typical of the artist’s work. An isolated area of in-painting to 4 black pinstripe lines, measuring approx.. ½ inch in length, is observed on the left side of the top panel. In the upper left corner of the upper panel, 3 isolated 1-inch lines of in-painting is observed. The suspended black painted metal elements on top and the suspended green metal elements on the bottom are all accounted for. The white painted frame shows gentle wear in the form of worn edges and minor dimensional cracking along the vertical seams on the side of the frame, which is consistent with the age of the work and the materials selected by the artist. Minor handling marks are visible on the extreme top and bottom white frame. The artwork is structurally sound and is ready to hang.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.
Catalogue Note
Double écriture noir et vert is one of the earliest and most complex examples from Jesús Rafael Soto’s heralded Écriture series to appear at auction. Executed in 1966, Double écriture represents the most definitive and triumphant example of Soto’s fully-formed kinetic vocabulary; for him, the Écriture series was the apex of expressive perfection. Exhibited by the Guggenheim Museum, New York in 1974—Soto’s first major museum retrospective organized in the United States— Double écriture solidified Soto as the father of Kineticism. Jean Clay not only placed him on the cover of ROBHO, he proclaimed him as the artist who magnificently put “painting into extinction” (Susan Green, et. al, Kinesthesia: Latin American Kinetic Art, 1954-1969, 2017, p. 123). Having surpassed the confines of Neo-Plasticism, which Soto conceded as the only valid point of inception for significant and historical painting, he reaches a personal and original language with Double écriture noir et vert, one influenced by music’s relational structure, its codification of sound and temporality to create a phenomena of illusion.
Soto began as a painter and out of painting developed kinetic relief constructions which gradually grew into autonomous environments. As a student at the revered Escuela de Artes Plásticas in Caracas, his first serious creative revelation came from a Cubist still-life by Georges Braque, from which he began absorbing the lessons of geometric simplification. Upon his arrival in Paris in 1950 at the age of 27, he next encountered the works of Kazimir Malevich (White on White, 1918) and Piet Mondrian (Broadway Boogie Woogie, 1942-43). Although he found inspiration in them, Soto identified unresolved problems in these two paintings. This question would become the central focus and inspiration of his entire artistic production: what is an object’s position in time and space? Soto’s ultimate solution was and still is the brilliant and essential coup of Kinetic art. Deftly described by his biographer and lauded art historian, Alfredo Boulton: “In Soto’s works, the visual and tangible elements of Mondrian’s paintings were physically materialized by means of structural elements which made space visible, tangible, mobile, active, and at the same time, immaterial or incorporeal. Soto had to construct an artistic vocabulary which permitted him to articulate that which others had not envisioned, to enter into the life of space itself by means of new expressive materials. Departing from the mechanical mobility of Moholy-Nagy, who rotated his form by electrical means, from Calder, who discovered how a slight breeze could be converted into art and how a puff of air could become color, harmony and delight, Soto opened up new territories which none had thought to explore.” (Alfredo Boulton, Soto, Space in Art, Milan, 1985, pp. 15-6) More important, Soto would employ the same mechanisms as the great masters of Western Baroque musical composition, in which each melodic and harmonic line is painstakingly written to form a rational and perfect Gesamtkunstwerk, a complete work of art. In this series, the influence of Johannes Sebastian Bach is clearly evidenced in Soto’s disciplined structure of synchronized repetition, which reveals a severe precision that borders the illusion of impulsion and improvisation.
The Écritures (Writings) were the definitive turning point for Soto. It is in these works where “he invents an instrumental methodology, a vocabulary which served to make his message more understandable[…] Consisting of a separation of spaces between the several planes, the distance which separated them, and ultimately, the distance which separated the object from the viewer […] The work captured both the viewer and his imagination, because as he moved about, his movement caused him to be incorporated into the movement of the work.” (ibid, p. 22). In Double écriture noir et vert , a corpus of wires and seemingly levitating metal elements form graphic structures of elegant lineal expression, letters floating in space that appear and recede in an intimate, coded message from the artist to the viewer. Here, Soto draws from his origins as a painter, here specifically returning to the curved lines of his abstract canvases from 1950-1951 while also evoking solemn references to the musically derived Composition paintings of Wassily Kandinsky, where groupings of colors and geometric shapes form a visual digest of melodic chords. On the eve of his November 1974 Guggenheim retrospective, Soto best described his Écritures, “for me, they are a way of drawing in space […] had I been a painter in the 18th Century, it’s perfectly possible that instinctively, my hand would have drawn the same lines, but even with this freedom, I still continue to retain a structure to control the elements within…” (Claude-Luis Renard, “Excerpts from an Interview with Soto, Paris, 1974” in Soto: A Retrospective Exhibition, New York, 1974, p. 17)
Soto began as a painter and out of painting developed kinetic relief constructions which gradually grew into autonomous environments. As a student at the revered Escuela de Artes Plásticas in Caracas, his first serious creative revelation came from a Cubist still-life by Georges Braque, from which he began absorbing the lessons of geometric simplification. Upon his arrival in Paris in 1950 at the age of 27, he next encountered the works of Kazimir Malevich (White on White, 1918) and Piet Mondrian (Broadway Boogie Woogie, 1942-43). Although he found inspiration in them, Soto identified unresolved problems in these two paintings. This question would become the central focus and inspiration of his entire artistic production: what is an object’s position in time and space? Soto’s ultimate solution was and still is the brilliant and essential coup of Kinetic art. Deftly described by his biographer and lauded art historian, Alfredo Boulton: “In Soto’s works, the visual and tangible elements of Mondrian’s paintings were physically materialized by means of structural elements which made space visible, tangible, mobile, active, and at the same time, immaterial or incorporeal. Soto had to construct an artistic vocabulary which permitted him to articulate that which others had not envisioned, to enter into the life of space itself by means of new expressive materials. Departing from the mechanical mobility of Moholy-Nagy, who rotated his form by electrical means, from Calder, who discovered how a slight breeze could be converted into art and how a puff of air could become color, harmony and delight, Soto opened up new territories which none had thought to explore.” (Alfredo Boulton, Soto, Space in Art, Milan, 1985, pp. 15-6) More important, Soto would employ the same mechanisms as the great masters of Western Baroque musical composition, in which each melodic and harmonic line is painstakingly written to form a rational and perfect Gesamtkunstwerk, a complete work of art. In this series, the influence of Johannes Sebastian Bach is clearly evidenced in Soto’s disciplined structure of synchronized repetition, which reveals a severe precision that borders the illusion of impulsion and improvisation.
The Écritures (Writings) were the definitive turning point for Soto. It is in these works where “he invents an instrumental methodology, a vocabulary which served to make his message more understandable[…] Consisting of a separation of spaces between the several planes, the distance which separated them, and ultimately, the distance which separated the object from the viewer […] The work captured both the viewer and his imagination, because as he moved about, his movement caused him to be incorporated into the movement of the work.” (ibid, p. 22). In Double écriture noir et vert , a corpus of wires and seemingly levitating metal elements form graphic structures of elegant lineal expression, letters floating in space that appear and recede in an intimate, coded message from the artist to the viewer. Here, Soto draws from his origins as a painter, here specifically returning to the curved lines of his abstract canvases from 1950-1951 while also evoking solemn references to the musically derived Composition paintings of Wassily Kandinsky, where groupings of colors and geometric shapes form a visual digest of melodic chords. On the eve of his November 1974 Guggenheim retrospective, Soto best described his Écritures, “for me, they are a way of drawing in space […] had I been a painter in the 18th Century, it’s perfectly possible that instinctively, my hand would have drawn the same lines, but even with this freedom, I still continue to retain a structure to control the elements within…” (Claude-Luis Renard, “Excerpts from an Interview with Soto, Paris, 1974” in Soto: A Retrospective Exhibition, New York, 1974, p. 17)