273 Shadow Street (First Version)

Category Art
Auction Currency USD
Start Price 45,000.00 USD
Estimated at 90,000.00 - 120,000.00 USD
Shadow Street (First Version)
Artist: Higgins, VictorDate of Birth: 1884-1949
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 12 1/2 x 14 1/2 inches
Signed: Signed lower right
Verso:

On page 53 of Dean Porter’s monograph, Victor Higgins, an American Master, you will see a black and white image of a work entitled Shadow Street (whose current location is unknown), painted, according to Porter, circa 1916-17. Shadow Street (First Version), on offer here, shows the artist’s fascination not only with the famous Taos light but also with the intense shadows that light casts. In both paintings, the shapes of the shadows—of aspen trunks, a wall, perhaps another structure—coalesce into a single entity, a living being of sorts, whose single snail-shaped gastropodal shadow seems to pass from right to left along the ground and the adobe wall. Noting this, the hillside behind the adobe lined street takes on the biological aspect of a single organism. Higgins paints the interconnectedness of the place—as if Taos itself is a single lifeform—even as he paints his connection to it. Of this feeling of vitality, Higgins wrote, “The very air of the Taos country, its nearness to big works of nature, drives caution from a man’s brain. He ‘takes a chance.’” (Porter, p. 49)