ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ | SELECTED MARIONETTE STUDIES
Auction Closed
April 5, 08:29 PM GMT
Estimate
10,000 - 15,000 USD
Lot Details
Description
ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ
1894-1985
SELECTED MARIONETTE STUDIES
a group of 4 photographs, comprising 'Comic End-Man and Lady'; Individual English Marionette; Group of Three Marionette; and Meyer Levin's 'Doll,' each signed and dated and the first titled in pencil, 3 with the photographer's '75, Bould. Montparnasse, Paris 6e' studio and reproduction rights stamps, and the fourth with a Meyer Levin address stamp on the reverse, 1929 (4)
Various sizes to 9 by 6⅝ in. (22.9 by 16.8 cm.)
The photographer to novelist Meyer Levin, New York
By descent to his son, Mikail Levin
Laurence Miller Gallery, New York
Private collection
Sandra S. Phillips, 'Marionette Photographs by André Kertész,' Performing Arts Journal, 1983, Vol. 7, No. 3, p. 117 (this print of Meyer Levin's 'Doll')
Sarah Greenough, André Kertész (Washington, D. C.: National Gallery of Art, 2005), p. 150 (another print of Comic End-Man and Lady)
The photographs offered here come originally from the collection of Meyer Levin, American author, playwright, and founder of the Marionette Studio in Chicago. In 1929, Meyer attended the Marionette Congress in Liège, an international conference of puppeteers, where he performed The Doll, his original marionette play inspired by Hasidic tales and his recent kibbutz stay. The notion of divine intervention is explored in this play, with the puppeteer's hands representing God.
Kertész photographed the Congress for Münchner Illustrierte Presse, and he subsequently included Comic End-Man and Lady and other marionette images in his first American exhibition in 1937 at the PM Gallery. Of Kertész’s puppet series, Sandra Phillips has written, 'These little figures are not only folk art, but artful imitations of human lives. Though they purport to document folk culture, they also reflect the surrealist fascination with the manikin, the shadow, and the mirror as metaphors of human reality' (Performing Arts Journal, Vol. 7, No. 3, 1983, pp. 117-20).