Estimated Price:

   £   

Realised Price:

   £   

What is this symbol? This symbol indicates that this auction hose has verified this price result.

Log in or subscribe to view price data

'CHEZ MONDRIAN'

measurements note
4 1/4 by 3 1/8 in. (10.8 by 8 cm.)

on carte-postale, on the original full vellum mount, signed and inscribed 'Paris' by the photographer in pencil on the mount, framed, 1926

PROVENANCE

The Estate of André Kertész

Private collection

Christie's New York, An Important Collection of André Kertész Vintage Photographs, Paris and Hungary, 1919-1927, 17 April 1997, Sale 8624, Lot 176

LITERATURE

Robert Enright, Stranger to Paris (Toronto: Jane Corkin Gallery, 1992), cover and p. 63 (this print)

Other prints of this image:

Sarah Greenough, Robert Gurbo, and Sarah Kennel, André Kertész (National Gallery of Art, 2005), pl. 50

Sandra S. Phillips, David Travis, and Weston J. Naef, André Kertész: Of Paris and New York (New York, 1985), cat. no. 22

Nicolas Ducrot, ed., André Kertész: Sixty Years of Photography, 1912-1972 (New York, 1972), p. 119

Susan Harder and Hiroji Kubota, eds., André Kertész: Diary of Light (Aperture, 1987), cover and pl. 69

Pierre Borhan, André Kertész, His Life and Work (Boston, 1994), p. 155

Jane Corkin, André Kertész, A Lifetime of Perception (New York, 1993), p. 130

In Focus: André Kertész (The J. Paul Getty Museum, 1994), pl. 17

Stephen Daiter, ed., André Kertész: Observations, Thoughts, Reflections (Chicago, 2005), pl. 28

André Kertész (Paris: Centre National d'Art et de Culture Georges-Pompidou, 1977), unpaginated

Sarah Greenough, et al, On the Art of Fixing a Shadow, One Hundred and Fifty years of Photography (National Gallery of Art and The Art Institute of Chicago, 1989), pl. 240

Robert A. Sobieszek, Masterpieces of Photography From the George Eastman House Collections (New York, 1985), p. 342

Weston Naef, Photographers of Genius at the Getty (The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2004), pl. 69

NOTE

It is believed that this print of Chez Mondrian is the only vintage carte-postale print, on a vellum exhibition mount, in private hands.

This print of Chez Mondrian, arguably Kertesz's most famous image, was part of a group of 21 vintage photographs from the 1920s discovered in a portfolio among the photographer's effects three years after his death. Each of these photographs was printed on Kertesz's preferred carte-postale paper and carefully mounted by Kertesz to a heavy vellum paper stock. Also in the portfolio was the announcement for Kertesz's first exhibition in Paris, in 1927, at the Au Sacre Printemps gallery, as well as an envelope printed with Kertesz's Boulevard du Montparnasse studio address. With its contents of perfect exhibition-quality prints and related material, the portfolio served as a time-capsule from the seminal decade of Kertesz's career. The present print of Chez Mondrian was the prize of that group.

Using the contents of the Au Sacre Printemps exhibition as a template, 16 photographs were added to the original portfolio by Toronto photographs dealer Jane Corkin, who had been Kertesz's friend and became a representative of his estate after his death. Through Corkin, the newly-enlarged group of photographs went as a whole to private collectors. In April 1997, the collection was dispersed at auction, and this print was purchased by Joseph and LaVerne Schieszler at that time.

With its meticulous rendering of the painter Piet Mondrian's immaculate Paris apartment, Chez Mondrian has become a justly celebrated image. It is reproduced in nearly every monograph on Kertesz's work, as well as countless anthologies of photography. And while there are many prints of the image in existence, the majority of them made after 1970, there are relatively few vintage prints. It is believed that there is only one other print of Chez Mondrian that is, like the print offered here, both on carte-postale and mounted to vellum: in the Julien Levy Collection at the Art Institute of Chicago. Unmounted carte-postale prints of the image are in the following institutional collections: the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (formerly in the collection of Piet Mondrian); and The Museum of Modern Art (formerly in the collection of Thomas Walther). Additionally, two unmounted carte-postale prints are believed to be in private collections, one of them sold by G. Ray Hawkins Gallery, Los Angeles, in 1991.