269 The Red Door

SOLD
Winning Bid Undisclosed
This item SOLD at 2016 Apr 02 @ 15:08UTC-7 : PDT/MST
Category Art
Auction Currency USD
Start Price 100,000.00 USD
Estimated at 200,000.00 - 300,000.00 USD
The Red Door
Artist: Higgins, VictorDate of Birth: 1884-1949
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 20 x 24 inches
Signed: Signed lower left
Verso:

Two things—among many—leap out of The Red Door. First, that rectangular cloud maybe ten degrees off horizontal that weaves through (look at it, not behind, but through) the tree just left of center. That is a great cloud, a wonderful cloud. It almost seems to jut out at us, into the third and possibly the fourth dimension, breaking the fourth wall of the picture plane. Unlikely as it seems, that cloud ties the whole composition together: foreground and background; horizontals and verticals; near and far. It’s the deliberate mistake, the error in the Persian rug, Amish quilt, Navajo rug, the asymmetry of Japanese wabi-sabi ceramics—the imperfection that concedes that perfection only belongs to God, heaven, nature. Then, second, the shadow at the bottom of the painting, creeping up or falling away. Only the shadow knows that the door is red. In full sun, it is barely pink. “What the eye does!” Higgins seems to say. “How it makes sense of the world!” Unaware of all this, the bent and shrouded figure trudges past, representing us, all of us, most of the time, missing the wonder, the vision, that is life.
Victor Higgins was the most restless and stylistically venturesome of the Taos Founders. He was well aware of the many currents of Modernism that took art of the Western World by storm after 1900 and adapted them to suit his compositions. You can see strands of Cezanne’s Cubism, Jay Hambidge’s Dynamic Symmetry, even moments of Russian Constructivism. The layering of watery, rectangular strokes that characterize the style of John Marin—who visited Taos and fished with Higgins—appear in Higgins’s landscapes, both in the watercolors and the “Little Gem” oils. Style aside, Higgins’s paintings are always tethered, however tenuously, to the Taos he saw through his eyes and in his visionary imagination.