Further Images
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Signed | Signed lower right and titled lower left |
| Size | 12.00" × 12.00" (30.5cm × 30.5cm) |
| Framed Size | 18.00" × 18.00" (45.7cm × 45.7cm) |
| Dated | 1914 |
| Condition | Very good condition |
| Provenance | The collection of Francois Meyer (1953-2022) |
| About this Painting | André Salmon painted as an amateur, for himself. He never exhibited, never sold, and never wrote about his own work — he spent his life writing about other people's — and the paintings stayed in private hands, which is why they are so seldom seen. They were made at the height of his years at the Bateau-Lavoir, by a man who was in the room while modern painting was being invented and who went home and picked up a brush himself. This picture comes from the collection of François Meyer (d. 2021), the Swiss photographer who spent his career among the artists he photographed — Warhol, Lichtenstein, Hockney, Sonia Delaunay, Sam Francis — and who collected alongside his father Eric from the 1950s onward. The greater part of the collection was dispersed by Sotheby's Paris in September 2023 as Collection François Meyer: A Colorful Passion; this work was not included and remained outside that sale. It carries a documentation label from the Meyer collection recording the artist as Salmon and the title "Danse", and the date 1914. The dossier is headed "Léonard Foujita 1913–1931", the Meyer holdings having been catalogued as part of a Foujita research campaign — a real coincidence, since it was André Salmon who wrote the text for Foujita's first one-man exhibition, one hundred and ten watercolours shown at the Galerie Chéron in Paris in June 1917. The picture sits exactly where Salmon himself stood. He had lived at the Bateau-Lavoir from 1907, watched Picasso paint Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, and in 1912 published La Jeune Peinture française, the first history of Cubism. Futurism had reached Paris with the Bernheim-Jeune exhibition of February 1912, and speed and dance were its two governing subjects — the same subjects Gino Severini, resident in Paris and close to that circle, was painting at exactly this moment. Painted with real conviction in thick impasto, on a period canvas carrying a fine, even craquelure consistent with its age. |
£11,500.00
GBP
