FULL SPECTRUM 2012 | AUCTION LOT 10

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Nathan Oliveira
Untitled (Man at Desk), 1959
Graphite on paper
Sheet: 15 × 12 inches
Framed: 22 1/4 × 19 ½ inches 
Courtesy of Hackett Mill

Retail value: $15,000

As with other American artists coming of age in the mid-20th century, when Nathan Oliviera began working, abstraction was the widely dominant artistic mode. Although Oliveira was in the Bay Area at the time of the Bay Area Figurative Movement, his practice is better understood within an international context. Unlike his American contemporaries who looked for inspiration to Miro, Picasso, or Matisse Oliveira turned to the Northern Expressioniststo Beckmann, Kokoschka, and Munch. The formal elements of form, light, and color, while effectively considered, were secondary to Oliveira’s existential interest in the meaning of human experience. Despite his masterful use of color and the exquisite way he renders the figure in space, in Untitled, 1959, it is the psychological essence of man that is uppermost. 

The year 1959 was extremely significant for Oliveira: he was included in the seminal exhibition New Images of Man, curated by Peter Selz at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, that launched his career. Moreover, Oliveira made this drawing soon after seeing Willem de Kooning’s iconic painting Woman I in Time magazine; he was deeply affected by its expressive energy. 

In this important drawing, Oliveira’s figure is not completely estranged from its surroundings: the rare inclusion of an object—here, a desk—evokes an interpretative reading. The rapid, scratchy brushwork overlaying and surrounding the figure establishes a field of energy and imbues the work with a sense of artistic and existential angst. Considering Oliveira’s lifelong themes of struggle and isolation, we might see this as a self-portrait of the artist, hard at work at his drawing table. Or, perhaps, given Oliveira’s admiration for Edgar Allen Poe, we might see the famous American author struggling with his own poetic treatment of tortured states of mind. The image is elusive and universal. This is an extraordinary opportunity to collect a museum-quality drawing by a recognized 20th-century master. 

Nathan Oliveira was born in 1928 in Oakland, California, to a family of Portuguese immigrants. He studied painting and printmaking at the California College of Arts and Crafts (CCAC) in Oakland, California, and in the summer of 1950 with Max Beckmann at Mills College in Oakland. Beckmann—Oliveira’s creative idol—forever influenced the young artist’s approach to figuration. After two years in the US Army as a cartographic draftsman, he began teaching painting in 1955 at CCAC and drawing and printmaking at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute). He held a tenured teaching position at Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, from 1964 until he retired in 1995. In 1959, Oliveira was the youngest painter included in the important exhibition New Images of Man at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1994 and received many other awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, two honorary doctorates, and, in 2000, membership in a distinguished order conferred by the government of Portugal. Oliveira passed away in Palo Alto in 2010. His work is in the collections of many museums, among them The Art Institute of Chicago, the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and The Museum of Modern Art in New York.

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