The Argonaut
Spring Two-Day Auction May 6-7, 2023
SANTA MONICA AUCTIONS at Bergamot Station Arts Center, will be holding a two-day auction
beginning on Saturday, May 6 and Sunday, May 7 starting at 1pm. On Saturday, we will be
featuring Photography; Sunday will be Contemporary and Modern Art in all mediums, including
paintings, drawings, sculpture, and multiples.
One of the featured highlights of the Saturday, May 6 Photography Auction will be four framed
Andy Warhol Polaroid Collages, consisting of 66 photographs, 15 collages +1 individual
Polaroid, commissioned by Hugh Hefner and first published in Playboy, August 1974. Likely the
first Fine Art Polaroid Collages ever made. The works remained in the collection of Playboy and
were de-accessed throughout a 20 year period. Three of the four framed works were featured
and exhibited at the Andy Warhol Museum, October 3, 2008 - February 13, 2009 (at the time
three sets were insured by the Andy Warhol Museum at a value of $300,000).
The four framed collages were acquired by our consignors over several decades and this is the
first time they have been auctioned as a set of four. These works are currently on display and
available for preview at our Bergamot Station location.
ANDY WARHOL, 1974, Published as INSTANT WARHOL in the June, 1974 Playboy.
Four (4) part Set of Separately Framed Polaroid Photo Collages; along with copies of the 1974 Playboy to
Warhol Photo Assignment, a copy of the 1974 Playboy Check to Andy Warhol and an original letter from
Playboy explaining the Warhol photographs. Also included with the provenance are other receipts, the
Original Playboy Magazines (1974 and 1990) that featured the photographs and a copy of the 1974
Embossed Self Portrait of Andy Warhol in a mirror, that Warhol shot for Playboy of himself with a Polaroid
Camera, published in both 1974 and again in 1990.
The auction estimate is $400,000 - $500,000.
Robert Berman Has a World to Sell to You →
Robert Berman: Integrity is the Most Important Quality in the Art world →
Originally published in the Chinese edition of Chip Foto Video magazine Oct. Issue, 2021
Interviewed and written by Yiwei Lu
Read MorePast Fall November 7th, 2021 Outdoor Auction Highlights
Video by Yiwei Lu
Robert Berman’s Santa Monica Auctions has been in business for decades, a twice-yearly weekend event offering rare fine art and ephemera gems with an above-average rate of interesting provenances. But even by his standards, Lot 110 at the Sunday, May 6, auction takes the cake. And the cats. And dogs. And clown suits. It’s everything.
Lot 110 is a painting by the legendary Margaret Keane, of Big Eyesfame. At almost 4 x 6 feet, it is her largest canvas, and something of a crown jewel in her career. Commissioned by Jerry Lewis in 1961 as a portrait of the comedian and his family with his first wife, Patti Lewis, it originally features their five children (plus three cats and four dogs). Two years later, the couple had a sixth child, a son, and Keane came back and added him to the painting. You can see him as the small child on Patti’s lap, in the white onesie with the blue collar.
Keane herself wrote of the experience, “Until such an unlikely time as I paint the Ride of the Valkyries, this shall remain my most gymnastic work. I had to use hitherto unsuspected muscles to tether this herd. There are 14 subjects and guess which one was the most difficult to keep in focus.” And she also addressed the situation with the Harlequin costumes. “Here the clownish part of him is seen only in the motley he wears. The rest is Jerry Lewis, the intense creative personality, devoted family man….”
Devoted or not, the Lewises divorced, but Patti had the painting and it was willed to the estate when she died. One of their sons, who was managing the family estate, sold the painting to a buyer who was a friend of the family, for an undisclosed sum, with the stipulation that he could not sell the painting for at least five years. In fact, that buyer held on to it until Jerry Lewis died in 2017. Since then, this trusted but unnamed person inquired with a private dealer as to its sale. And that brings us to May 6. Not only will the sale proceed as perhaps the biggest draw to this year’s event but its display at Bergamot Station (currently on view through auction day) marks the first time it has been exhibited in public at all.
With a minimum estimate of $100,000, none of us are going to be bringing it home, so this may also be the only time it’s seen in public. Good thing it’s free to look.
Santa Monica Auctions at Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave, #B7, Santa Monica; (310) 315-1937. Gallery hours: Tue.-Sat., 11 a.m.-6 p.m.
LA WEEKLY NEWS
Huffington Post by Shayna Nys Dambrot
The next Santa Monica Auctions is around the corner, November 18 - 19 (6pm Saturday and 1pm Sunday), at Robert Berman Gallery in Bergamot Station. This time around, amid the expected salon of true museum pieces, surprises, quirky gems, and holy-grail ephemera, instead of fretting about the uncertain future of the franchise, the holdings celebrate a more recent kind of art history, with a rather sweeping mini-survey of the last two decades in LA. With the rise of street and lowbrow movements, it has been a period given over to storytelling, edgy narrative, and the elevated urban postures of the new contemporary styles that LA has given the world. There is a proliferation of early major works by luminaries of the Lowbrow and Pop Surrealism canon, with a lot of humor and experiment in both material and stylistic idioms from tattoo flash to neon and even black velvet.
Important and monumental drawings by Laurie Lipton, an absolutely joyful sculpture by Ron English, several key paintings from the first days of Faile, a charming work by real-life back-in-the-day Ed Hardy, a raw and emotional early painting by Camille Rose Garcia, a four-panel work by the Clayton Brothers, and a classic urban surf genre painting by Sandow Birk. All of these pieces are a treat to encounter again, and in realizing how many years have gone by since that universe of style stormed the art-world castle, to note how fresh and solid these pieces still are — and how far these artists have come in developing their own individual voices and shaping the voice of their whole generation
A neon-lit and gold-encrusted, lavishly heroic car painting by Frank Romero, an emblematic neon work by MONA founder Lili Lakich, an operatic, amoebic velvet and fabric collage mixed media painting by Peter Alexander, and a radically hot pink glowing wall-size sculptural megastar work by Arman 1970. It’s a total joy to be reminded that these masters of their modern mediums also had a zanier side, as each infuses the splendor or their own genre — be it Chicanismo, post-Pop, or Light & Space — with an obvious willingness to experiment with the properties of materials, with humor and zeal while also being attentive to their core formal interests of surface, texture, illumination, and movement.
But just in case we risk forgetting, the old guard demands some respect. As you scan the room you’ll see them — Warhol, Almaraz, Valadez, Longo, Held — but there’s one Ed Kienholz in particular that has one of the best origin stories around. The full detailed account is available on the site, and Alex at the gallery knows all the details, but the nutshell version is this: A couple commissioned a work from Kienholz. The artist agreed but he had strict conditions and specific instructions. He made the work and delivered it covered in a stiff tarp shell, under which it was to remain covered for a period of ten years, and it was to be paid in installments, each of which represented a chance for the deal to be revoked should they be discovered peeking. After ten years, they threw a grand unveiling party — and found a rather gruesome, if evocative, twist on a hunting trophy. Like other work of the Kienholz pair, a performative element in which the privileged position of the viewer is deconstructed with a dark wit that issues a challenge — in this case perhaps a dare to laugh at mortality. Somehow perfect.
