A New York Skyline, 1921

Provenance

Mr. and Mrs. Sol Brody, New York

Vanderwoude Tananbaum Gallery, New York, New York

Angela Gross Folk, New Jersey, acquired from above

Estate of above

Sale, Sotheby’s, New York, New York, May 17, 2023, lot 426, from above

Exhibited

The Waldorf Astoria, New York, New York, Fifth Annual Exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists, February 26–March 24, 1921

Anderson Galleries, New York, New York, Our Choice of Independents, 1921

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York, George Ault: Nocturnes, December 7, 1973–January 6, 1974

George Ault, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York, April 8–June 8, 1988; Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis, Tennessee, November 13, 1988–January 1, 1989; Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska, February 4–April 2, 1989; New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, New Jersey, April 29–June 11, 1989

Literature

Fifth Annual Exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists (New York: The Society of Independent Artists, 1921), n.p., no. 19.

George Ault: Nocturnes (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1973), n.p., no. 10.

Karen Tsujimoto, Images of America: Precisionist Painting and Modern Photography (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1982), 180.

Gerrit Henry, “George Ault,” Art News 82, no. 2 (1983): 146.

Henry Adams, American Drawings and Watercolors in the Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985), 158.

Susan Lubowsky, George Ault (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1988), 9–11, no. 4.

Innis Howe Shoemaker, Adventures in Modern Art: The Charles K. Williams II Collection (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2009), 30.

Marie Walker and Donald Myers, George Ault’s Lower Broadway and His Traumatic Career (St. Peter, MN: Hillstrom Museum of Art, 2022), 4.

Related Works

New York Night, No. 2, 1921, oil on canvas, 20¼ x 14 inches; The Vilcek Foundation, New York, New York

Sullivan Street, Abstraction, 1924, oil on canvas, 24¼ x 20 inches; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota

Hoboken Factory, 1932, oil on canvas, 20 x 22 inches; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC

Note: George Ault’s A New York Skyline quickly garnered great recognition. The work was chosen by English art critic C. Lewis Hind from the annual exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in 1921 for an exhibition titled Our Choice of the Independents at the Anderson Galleries in New York. Curator Susan Lubowsky describes, “A New York Skyline dramatically illustrates Ault’s artistic awakening,” continuing, “in the distance at the center of the composition, the steel skeleton of a building under construction symbolizes the dramatic evolution of the urban skyline. A towering symbol of prosperity, the skyscraper heralded a new era of progress in a changing world, an era that artists were eager to embrace.”_[1]

_[1] Susan Lubowsky, George Ault (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1988), 9, 10.