Lê Phổ Flower Painting and Modern Design on Offer With Brunk Auctions This April
Nearly 500 lots will cross the block in Brunk Auctions’ dedicated Modern + Design Auction this April. The event features a variety of fine artworks, sculpture, modern furniture, and other items from the 20th and 21st centuries. A major piece by Lê Phổ headlines the event, which will begin on April 21, 2022 at 9:00 AM EDT.Large Le Pho Floral Still Life PaintingLeading the listings is Les Pivoines, an oil painting by Vietnamese Impressionist artist Lê Phổ. Like many emerging Vietnamese artists of the 1920s, Lê Phổ received formal training from the Paris-sponsored École des Beaux-Arts in Hanoi. Education and travel influenced his style. Lê Phổ built a strong connection to European Impressionism while nurturing his Vietnamese roots. Exuberant flower paintings comprise the bulk of his oeuvre. Les Pivoines is a strong example of Lê Phổ’s favored still lifes (lot #259). Peonies crowd together in the composition, sprouting from a blue-and-white porcelain vase. In the background, puffy white clouds dot the pale blue sky. This work comes to auction with an estimate of USD 60,000 to $90,000. A figural painting by Lê Phổ is also on offer (lot #260; estimate: $20,000 – $30,000). It shows a mother and child in a blooming garden.Le Pho Figural PaintingAdditional artists represented in the catalog include Maud Gatewood and Milton Avery. From Gatewood comes two quiet paintings of the North Carolina countryside. Gatewood believed that order does exist in wild nature, and she emphasized this logic in her work. Her 1980 painting titled Second Snow Starting offers a dizzying view of stacked hay bales under a tin roof (lot #99; estimate: $20,000 – $30,000). Old Cornfield Winter from the same year shows countless rows of shorn corn stalks under a thin blanket of snow; the effect resembles a dizzying optical illusion (lot #100; estimate: