TWO MAJOR WORKS BY HAROLD GARDE GO TO AUCTION AGAINST THE BACKDROP OF A CAREER RETROSPECTIVE
Lot 87 Harold Garde (1923 - 1922) At Pasture 2006 acrylic on canvas 43 ½ x 55 1/2 in
Lot 86 Harold Garde (1923-2022) Visionary 1973 acrylic on board 36 x 48 in frame 39 x 50 1/4 x 2
“I want people to understand Harold’s body of work and how prolific he was,” says the auction house’s managing director and partner, Kevin Doyle. “He was always willing to grow and change with the times. Aside from developing and revolutionizing the Strappo print technique, he experimented with contemporary styles he observed around him like the New York School, and he contributed so much to abstraction and surrealism in American art. These are the first major works by Garde to come up at auction and I’m thrilled to be the first auction house to do so, and with two paintings that have exceptional provenance and museum history.
Doyle, who worked for years at Sotheby’s in New York, sees the inclusion of Garde’s works in the 18th Annual Auction as an important strategic departure for the auction house, one that begins to rethink the mission of Jackson Hole Art Auction for a new generation of collectors whose interests go beyond what has been understood heretofore as the genre of Western art. “[Garde’s works] fall outside the traditional Western art realm you might expect in Jackson Hole,” Doyle says. “I’m looking to expand the offerings, and Garde’s connection with Wyoming is fantastic.” Garde, he notes, began his formal art education at the University of Wyoming on a GI Bill after returning from World War II.
The auction comes at a time when Garde’s body of work is enjoying renewed interest and scholarship. In February of this year, the University of Wyoming Art Museum opened the first part of a major career retrospective, titled “Harold Garde at 100: The Unseen Works in Two Acts.” This past June, the museum expanded the retrospective by adding a second part. The show, which features paintings and works on paper, is on exhibit thru February of 2025.
Prior to that, many Garde works drew interest and buyers at the 22nd edition of SCOPE Miami Beach in December 2023. “The number of art movements you see in just his own career is incredible,” said Bill Hohns, a prominent Garde collector. He and his wife, Kathie, own over 100 Garde pieces, including multiple works from all nine decades of Garde’s career, and plan to place their works in the collection of a major institution. “He played with everything he saw. He didn’t allow himself to be typecast. He was constantly expanding his envelope, always digging deeper.”
Both paintings have figurative elements. "At Pasture" pushes the vibrancy of Garde’s palette and also packs the frame with references to horses and cows rendered from various angles, creating a slightly surreal mood that transforms what might have been a simple bucolic scene into a much more complex and layered work. It also includes areas of geometric abstraction that seem to echo Garde’s studies in Wyoming with Ilya Bolotowsky.
"Visionary" is a more enigmatic painting and exhibits Garde’s early fluidity with and strength of line. It is an earlier work, exhibited in galleries in the 1970s, when he was just starting to attract public attention. It is an early indicator of Garde’s adventurous practice as a colorist, and also, says Doyle, of “a great composition painter.” The paintings come with excellent provenance, each having been exhibited in three museum exhibitions. Additionally, "Visionary" graced the cover of the catalog for “Harold Garde: Mid-Century to This Century” at the Orlando Museum of Art in 2015, and is featured in the 2008 publication, “Harold Garde: Painting in the Fullness of Time” a fifty year survey by Susette McAvoy.
Bidding has already begun through jacksonholeartauction.com, invaluable.com and liveauctioneers.com. Live bidding will be held at noon MST.
FOR PRESS INQUIRES, INTERVIEWS, OR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION, please contact: Kevin Doyle, Managing Director and Partner
Jackson Hole Art Auction
Tel. 866-549-9278 cell 917-622-5612
kevin@jacksonholeartauction.com
About Harold Garde:
Harold Garde was an influential American artist who made many contributions to the world of contemporary art as an artist, innovator, instructor and mentor for younger artists. Born in New York, he attended University of Wyoming on the GI Bill after returning from military duty in World War II. There he studied with, among others, Ilya Bolotowsky, George McNeil, and Leon Kelly. On his return to New York, he received a Masters degree in fine art and art education from Columbia University, then taught art at Nassau Community College in Long Island and, later, in secondary school in Port Washington, NY. His first solo exhibition was in 1970. Throughout a career spanning almost seven decades, Garde's work has been exhibited globally and is currently in many institutional collections, including those of The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Thomas J. Watson Library (New York), the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Paris), the Portland Museum of Art and the Farnsworth Museum (Maine), Fine Arts Museum of New Mexico (Santa Fe), the University of Wyoming Art Museum (Laramie) and the Orlando Museum of Art (Florida). His work is also part of the private collections of Sheryl Sandberg (onetime COO of Meta Platforms Inc., formerly known as Facebook) and former NBC News producer Thomas Bernthal; Aerosmith drummer Joey Kramer; and independent curator Edward Robinson (formerly of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art). Until his death in 2022, Garde split his time between Belfast, ME, and New Smyrna, FL, exhibiting regularly in both states and, during his lifetime, produced a prolific body of work
Carol L Chenkin
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