Elaine de Kooning & Wolf Kahn Oil Paintings
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GUEST:
In the 1950s, '60s, and '70s, my father had a parking garage in New York City, in Greenwich Village, and it was on 11th Street, and a block away was, uh, 10th Street, of course. And 10th Street in the, uh, '50s and '60s and '70s was a gathering place for some post-Impressionist artists, including the the de Koonings, Elaine and Willem, Wolf Kahn. They would park at my father's garage. The artists began to arrange things with him when they didn't have the cash. One of them was, uh, Wolf Kahn. This is Wolf Kahn as a much younger person than most of us knew him as. This is from his studio, up in Brattleboro, Vermont. This is by Elaine de Kooning. She apparently wanted to do a trade. They couldn't settle on anything and eventually said, "Well, I'll tell you what, I'll do one of you." And he said, "Sure!"
APPRAISER:
They're both more or less contemporaries, and best known for their work through the 20th century in abstraction.
GUEST:
Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER:
It's not exactly what we're seeing here. In Wolf Kahn's case, it's the abstraction of landscape and outdoors and natural things. In Elaine de Kooning's case, she worked in portraiture, mythological scenes, and pure abstraction of bulls and bullfighting. In 1962, she came to the limelight as an artist because she was commissioned by the Truman Library to paint JFK's portrait. She, of course, married de Kooning. Her maiden name was Elaine Fried.
GUEST:
Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER:
And she met him, he was 16 years her elder. She worked a lot with him. Her career was secondary, and eventually, she came to the forefront and is now being much more appreciated than she was years back. It looks to me like she's dated it right down here.
GUEST:
Oh, I see, I, I never looked.
APPRAISER:
'70... '73. And that looks absolutely right in terms of a dating.
GUEST:
That's 60 years old, and that's about what I recognize him to be, about 6... That's right.
APPRAISER:
That is an early work by Kahn, I would say from sometime in the mid-1960s. And it would be something very scarce to see on the market nowadays, and something you could only come to through a personal connection with the artist. It's a transitional work, as I see it for him, from this darker, grayer palette to the brighter palette. It's the artist in the studio, it's a large canvas. If this came up for auction, I would say an evaluation of somewhere around $30,000 to $50,000, perhaps $40,000 to $60,000, would be conservative for that.
GUEST:
Very good, excellent.
APPRAISER:
The de Kooning is a much more specific work, that's a portrait of your father.
GUEST:
Right.
APPRAISER:
It's less abstract. That being said, it's still wonderfully done. You do have some abstraction here in the background. At auction, I would put a value on this painting of between $7,000 and $10,000.
GUEST:
Mm-hmm. Well, it's a lot more than six months' worth of, uh, garage rent.
APPRAISER:
There you go.
GUEST:
Even today. (laughing)
APPRAISER:
Thanks for bringing them in.
GUEST:
Sure. Well, thank you very much, I appreciate it.
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