Fine Art and Photography Results at PBA Galleries
Detail from Chez Panisse Second Birthday poster by David Lance Goines. Sold for $1,062.50.
Berkeley, CA – PBA Galleries' Fine Art and Photography Sale 753 held on January 27th was a very successful auction with lot of activity. It aroused a deep interest on lots of great diversity; the prints and lithographs did particularly well.
The sale consisted of over 325 lots featuring paintings, prints, original photographs, photobooks, artists’ books, posters, decorative arts, and more. Major collections included early works by Ed Ruscha from his friend Marilyn McCorkle’s collection, a large collection of Chez Panisse posters signed by David Lance Goines that had a very good sell-through rate, and a collection of signed prints by Salvador Dali. Outstanding individual lots included a Thanksgiving Day mail art broadside sent from Ed Ruscha and Mason Williams to model Marilyn McCorkle that performed greatly. Highlights also included a signed Käthe Kollwitz lithograph, Le Corbusier’s Série Panurge, lovely original photographs from Nick Brandt and Peter Stackpole, and an original oil painting from Bauhaus participant Iwao Yamawaki.
The bids were particularly vivid for the Ed Ruscha and Mason Williams’ Thanksgiving Day 1965, an original multicolor holograph mail art broadside on orchestral score. In the words of Ruscha and Williams, a "cultural endeavour care package" sent to model and friend Marilyn McCorkle. Written in the hands of the authors and signed by them as Masie Bunny and Eddie P, this piece of art was sold for $3,750.
An original gelatin silver print of Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau aroused a lot of interest. It represents Cocteau playing an African xylophone type instrument, and Picasso joyfully looking on. This print of the photo, likely part of a 1958 exhibition of Duncan's Picasso photographs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, went for $4,062.50. This is not the only photograph that bidders fought over; two animal photographs by Nick Brandt each went for $3,125.
Among the remarkable lots that were proposed in Sale 753, PBA offered many Chez Panisse posters, designed by quintessentially Berkeley artist David Lance Goines. These were all signed by the author and sold at very good prices. The Chez Panisse Second Birthday, second of nearly 50 posters in the decades-long collaboration between David Lance Goines and Alice Waters, fetched a record of $1,062.50. Other Chez Panisse posters will be on the blocks in next PBA Galleries’ Art and Photography sale.
From Sandow Birk’s series In Smog and Thunder, Overview of the Carnage South of Market (The Battle of San Francisco) led to numerous bids. One of the battles between Northern and Southern California as envisioned by California artist Sandow Birk, whose paintings and prints enter a dialogue with canonical works of art history offering an often-caustic critique of contemporary America. Signed by the author, it was sold for $1,625.
