Last Thursday's sale of Modernist Posters achieved several auction records, both for individual posters and for designers, and saw strong results across the board. The day's top lot, a poster designed in 1918 by Egon Schiele for the 49th Vienna Secession, sold for $28,800. Secession 49 featured Schiele's artwork prominently and launched him as an internationally important artist. This poster, which depicts Schiele at a table with several like-minded peers, marks both the height and the end of the artist's career, as he died later in 1918.
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| Egon Schiele, Secession 49. Ausstellung, 1918. |
Among the records achieved for individual posters were two designs by Gustav G. Klutsis, both from 1930. His [Building of Soviet Farms and Collective Farms is the Building of Socialism in Rural Areas] brought $22,800, and [We Will Turn the Five-year Plan into a Four-year Plan] sold for $18,000. Among the several prominent examples of typography in the sale, Walter Dexel's Verwende Stets Nur Gas, 1924, sold for a record $26,400.
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| Gustav G. Klutsis, [We Will Turn the Five-Year Plan into a Four-Year Plan], 1930. |
The sale also set several artist records, including one for Franco Barbaris, whose Candee, 1929, sold for $6,960. Two of Paul Rand's iconic IBM posters were offered in this sale, one from 1982 and the other from 1991, both signed. They each achieved $5,520, setting an auction record for the artist.
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| Paul Rand, IBM, 1982. |
Labels: Egon Schiele, Franco Barbaris, Gustav G. Klutsis, modernist posters, Nicholas Lowry, Paul Rand, Walter Dexel
