Neal Auction Company
Lot 199
George Bauer Dunbar (American/New Orleans, b. 1927), "Untitled", 1960, clay, silver leaf and mixed media on board, signed and dated en verso, 11 in. x 11 in., original frame. Note: After World War II, while studying in art in Philadelphia during the week, George Bauer Dunbar would spend his weekends in New York surrounded and influenced by the likes of Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, and Willem de Kooning. “He wanted his art to possess a sense of tactility and manifest a reverence for organic materials that he did not see in the art of the New York School. Dunbar discovered that through natural materials like metal and clay, he could take Pollock’s drips and dribbles of paint and Kline’s stark calligraphic abstractions, and give them their own sentience.”
Dunbar took what he learned in Philadelphia and New York and brought it back to New Orleans, where he joined forces with other like-minded local artists such as Lin Emery and Robert Helmer to form the Orleans Gallery, which is credited with introducing abstract and contemporary art to the region. Dunbar, in particular, excelled in melding local aesthetics with what was at the time a national art movement. “His gilded abstractions brought unfamiliar art terms into the fold of New Orleans art, and did so in a way that blended seamlessly with New Orleans’ stately historical homes and heavily patinated local portraiture.”
It is his focus on texture and the idea of chance throughout his artistic career that has driven an interesting evolutionary arc in his works: starting out with the gilded layered clay pieces from the 1950s and 60s, then moving on to his highly improvised rag series and clay torso reliefs, all the while punctuated by his perfectly smooth and technical geometric clay surfaces. In the lots offered here, we are treated to a veritable mini-retrospective highlighting several milestone eras in Dunbar’s long and prolific oeuvre.
Ref.: George Dunbar: Elements of Chance, New Orleans Museum of Art, Nov. 3, 2016 – Feb. 19, 2017, pp. 8-26.
