1940 & 1941 Alexandre Hogue Lithographs
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GUEST:
Well, these are a couple of lithographs by Alexandre Hogue, and my mother inherited them from a cousin. And then she gave them to me, and said, "These would be good in your office."
APPRAISER:
Do you know what's, uh, going on in the scenes?
GUEST:
Well, in this one, this guy is hooking his pump jacks to the power source. And in this picture, his land man and geologist and scalawags all making deals for oil and gas leases around the Spindletop well, which was a big blowout.
APPRAISER:
So the artist is Alexandre Hogue, and he was one of the Dallas Nine.
GUEST:
Yep.
APPRAISER:
Artists who grouped together in the 1930s making representational art-- regionalist art-- very much like these. They're both titled in pencil, and both of them are an edition of 50. I love this scene closest to me, the "Spindletop," which was an oil field just outside of Beaumont. And my understanding is that the Spindletop was such a, a large oil field that it gushed approximately 100,000 barrels of oil a day for nine days straight, and it led to the formation of Gulf Oil and Texaco oil companies.
GUEST:
My understanding, that out of the 50 editions, he signed five of them "swindletop." (chuckles): Because these guys are out here...
APPRAISER:
Each, each one of the businessmen is trying to swindle the other...
GUEST:
Yeah, they're out to swindle the other guy.
APPRAISER:
Yeah, and I know, from reading some on Hogue, that he was also somewhat of a preservationist, and didn't completely agree with a lot of things happening to the natural landscape in the West. I love the detail on this one and all the different scenes that play, where you have the flames from the oil well itself, and you have surveyors marking out plots here, and you can see all the derricks in the background, with that shadowy figure, that horseback rider. Uh, just kind of wonderful abstraction in, in all the smoke billowing forth from the well there. And there's just such a nice Precisionist quality to that, and the mechanical nature of that work-- it's wonderful to me. Have you ever had these evaluated?
GUEST:
Never had them evaluated-- like I said, my mom gave them to me, and they've just, something I've always had.
APPRAISER:
Hogue is primarily, like, like the rest of the, the Dallas Nine group they're known as painters. He wasn't much of a printmaker, but he did make a handful of lithographs-- Western scenes, primarily, not so specific, like these oil scenes. I have only ever seen one impression of one of these prints at auction in the past 30 years, and that's another one of these. I've never, I've never seen another one of the "Spindletop" ever offer on the market before. At auction, for the, uh, the one closest to you, I would put an estimate of $5,000 to $8,000 on that. And on the "Spindletop," which is the larger, more detailed image, I would say, at auction, $10,000 to $15,000.
GUEST:
Hm, pretty good number.
APPRAISER:
Yeah, they're great images, and just super-scarce, and just so evocative of the oil industry and Texas, and a great Texas artist, too.
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