Alberto Giacometti’s Portrait of James Lord

11/9/2015 

SINGLE LOT CATALOG 

Giacometti’s portrait flashes with intensity and vitality, the summation of his painting, and is offered in the Artist's Muse sale on 9 November in New York

The Portrait of James Lord, painted in 1964, marks the near final state of one side of his art, his great late work on canvas, and is a fitting culmination to his work in two dimensions.  Here is the point where Giacometti ended up, the sum of all that he had done before, or more precisely, of all that he wished to preserve. It is a record of the very moment he decided he could add no more to, nor take anything away from, this particular canvas on which he had been working. 

The result of this intense exchange between Giacometti and James Lord, the artist and his sitter, is a superb head whose eyes flash the penetrating gaze of a Byzantine icon, a seated figure that displays the assertive presence of an Egyptian pharaoh, and a lambent corona of silvery grey paint that projects the aura of a Christ en gloire, en majesté.

The portrait of James Lord that Giacometti painted in 1964 is among the best known of his works on canvas, having been widely exhibited.  Lord himself wrote a book dedicated entirely to the creation of this picture, A Giacometti Portrait, which The Museum of Modern Art, New York, published in 1965. For more on Alberto Giacometti’s portraits, read our interview with the curator of Giacometti: Pure Presence, currently showing at the National Portrait Gallery in London.

Taking his lead from the mass media comic books found at every supermarket and drug store, Lichtenstein set about applying Hoyt’s teaching to the realm of high art. This undercutting of illusionism is typical of American art of the 1960s, both abstract and Pop.

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Roy Lichtenstein's Nurse

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There is, however, another story at work in this picture. Its visual supremacy and technical superiority is matched by an equally distinguished provenance. It has been owned by some of the most important and influential collectors in the history of Pop. It was first acquired by Leon Kraushar, an advertising executive and legendary collector who — during an intense period in the early 1960s — amassed one of the greatest collections of Pop Art ever assembled. Kraushar and his wife acquired many early works by the likes of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. Among his early purchases were the now legendary Red Jackie, Green Liz and Orange Marilyn, all of which were displayed alongside Nurse in a bedroom of Kraushar’s suburban Long Island home.

The Kraushars were instrumental in helping to define and nurture this nascent art movement. In his typically brash style, Kraushar enthused that, ‘Pop art is the art of today, and tomorrow, and all the future. All that other stuff — it’s old, it’s antique. Renoir? I hate him. Bedroom pictures. It’s all same. It’s the same with the Abstract Expressionists, all of them. Decoration. There’s no satire, there’s no today, there’s no fun. That other art is for old ladies, all those people who go to auctions — it’s dead. There isn’t any art except right here. I got rid of all those second-raters. Somebody else can have them.’

Following Kraushar’s death in 1967, his widow put the entire collection of more than 60 works up for sale with a price tag of $600,000. Nurse was acquired by Karl Ströher, a German industrialist whose family owned the Wella hair-care brand. Ströher had begun his collection by focusing on 19th-century drawings that he had purchased before the war, but in the 1950s he began to concentrate his acquisitions more on contemporary art. In 1966 he made his first trip to the United States and met with artists such as Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg and Roy Lichtenstein. These meetings cemented his interest in Pop which remained his focus for the rest of his life.

After his death, Ströher left most of the Pop works in his collection to the city of Frankfurt where they became the core of the permanent collection of the Museum für Moderne Kunst. His enthusiasm for Pop, along with the American-style prosperity enjoyed by the western European nations after the Second World War, did much to enhance the movement’s appeal in Europe and thus ensure its dominance around the world.

Ultimately, Lichtenstein’s Nurse was not one of the works from Ströher’s collection that was destined for the museum in Frankfurt, instead it was acquired by another legendary Pop collector, the American collector Peter Brant in 1989. This painting’s storied history has mirrored the wider development of the history of art in the latter half of the twentieth century, and as such it has become an archetypal icon of its age.