Ingmars Lindbergs
Director
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Private Collection, Houston, Texas and Carmel, California, Lots 42-44
Lot 42W
An Allan Houser bronze, "Dawn," 1990
16 September 2019, 11:00 PDT
Los AngelesSold for US$6,325 inc. premium
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Alan Houser
Chiricahua Apache, (1914-1994), "Dawn," 1990, edition 6/10, signed and impressed with foundry mark near the base, raised on an integral pink granite base.
excluding base: height 18 3/4in, width 38in, depth 19 1/2in
excluding base: height 18 3/4in, width 38in, depth 19 1/2in
Footnotes
Literature
W.J. Rushing, Allan Houser: An American Master, Harry N. Abrams, New York, NY, 2004, p. 149, another example illustrated
Rushing, in his discussion of Houser's sculptural "conversation" with fellow modernist sculptor Henry Moore points out that: "not only did Houser share with Moore a deep, abiding affinity for the theme of the mother and child and a tendency to treat the female form as a literal and metaphoric landscape of sensuality, but he also moved back and forth between representation and (semi-)abstraction... Reductive yet expansive, the abstract works are more open-ended, and yet they are every bit as poetic and emotive as his representational works of art. AT times he used centrifugal forces in place of charging buffalo or thundering equestrians, but his abstract forms are often paradoxically dynamic and resolutely still" (p. 150).
Houser's "Dawn" echoes his many recumbent (mostly female) forms carved from stone, marble or cast in bronze. With "Dawn," the prominent absence of a figure beneath the hollow, fabric-like form illustrates the thin line Houser's works often walk between the physical reality and the imagined. Furthering the paradox, Houser has chosen to use a monumental, textured stone slab to serve as the work's base. This outsized naturalistic footprint lends a feeling of permanence to the organic, undulating form, and in turn, its suggested occupant.