From the Collection of John Wheelock Freeman

Ruth Asawa (American/Japanese, 1926-2013)
Hanging Five-Lobed Continuous Form with Spheres Inside Four of the Lobes, Two of the Inside Spheres Containing Spheres within Them, c. 1954
Iron and brass wire
H. 103 in.; Diameter at base 21 in.

$100,000 – 200,000

Provenance:
Purchased by John W. Freeman at Ruth Asawa’s first solo exhibition, Peridot Gallery, Madison Ave., New York, NY, December 1954

Today, the Japanese-American Ruth Asawa (1926-2013) is one of America’s most celebrated educators and artists. Asawa’s constructionist wire creations celebrate negative and positive space and the relationships between open and closed forms. They are sculptures, they seen to be drawn in space. Asawa’s frequent use of contrasting types wire adds drama by interweaving contrasting texture and color within a unified design.

Asawa’s time as a student at Black Mountain College in North Carolina during the late 1940s had a profound effect on her. Her biggest mentor was the famous Bauhaus-trained German painter Josef Albers, from whom she not only learned color theory and design, but also the importance of experimenting with different materials to the fullest until the desired effect is achieved. Her other professors included Merce Cunningham, Ilya Bolotowsky and Buckminster Fuller. While she was a student the college had visiting professors such as Willem de Kooning, and her classmates included Kenneth Noland and Robert Rauschenberg.

Importantly, she learned from Albers the importance of negative verses positive space and explored the relationship of two-dimensional to three-dimensional designs, realizing that she could, in fact, ‘draw in space’. For Asawa, wire would be the medium with which she would draw. As Daniel Cornell has pointed out, several of Alber’s exercises for his students at Black Mountain College involved folding paper into three-dimensional shapes. (Please see The Sculptures of Ruth Asawa, contours in the air Daniel Cornell, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, University of California Press, 2006, p. 143) Asawa developed her unique style of wire weaving in part from the techniques and patterns of village basket weavers that she encountered on a trip to Mexico in the summer of 1947. She began manipulating wire in an “e-loop motif” which could be woven flat, and then shaped into a plethora of forms. Each wire pattern was like a drawing on paper which Asawa visualized as “sheet of wire lines” which could be made into a sculptural three dimensional form. Asawa said, “I was interested in making something in space, enclosing it without blocking it out, It’s still transparent. I realized that if I was going to make these forms, interlock and interweave, it can be done with a line because a line can go anywhere.” (Cornell, p. 138)

John and his first wife, Sally A. Bennett, met at Yale while he was finishing his B.A. in English and she her BFA in Sculpture. The two became friends with Sewell Sillman (1924-1992) who had come to the University to follow his professor Joseph Albers after Alber’s departure from Black Mountain College. It was Sillman, who joined the Faculty of Yale in 1954, who introduced to the work of Ruth Asawa to the Freemans. Six years earlier, as a student at Black Mountain College, Sillman had studied with Albert Lanier where they –and a small group of “student architects”– had built “Minimum House”. Asawa, Lanier, Sillman and a few other students also spent part of their 1948 Semester at Black Mountain College generously painting a nursery in Asheville together. All three shared a deep admiration for their professor, Josef Albers. Albert Lanier would soon move to San Francisco and marry Ruth Asawa eventually raising six children. (footnote: please see Black Mountain College Bulletin, , Vol 6, No. 2, March 1948 Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center and the University of North Carolina Asheville, Special Collections (Also, please see Cornell, pp. 15-18)

In December of 1954, Asawa was invited to exhibit at her first solo exhibition at the Peridot Gallery on Madison Avenue in New York, the same gallery which had given Louise Bourgeois her first solo sculpture show in 1949 and Phillip Guston his first solo show in 1952. With Sillman’s recommendation, John visited and purchased what he recalls was one of the largest works in the show, (lot 18) hanging 103 inches tall. Fortunately, the ceilings in the Bowling Alley, at Wave Hill were nearly 13 feet tall.

It was in the so-called Bowling Alley, built into the hillside behind the Glyndor house at Wave Hill that Alexander Calder attended John’s 27th birthday party in late June, 1955. Shortly after handing John the cufflinks (lot 17), Calder, possibly for the first time, saw the work of Asawa. John recalls Calder’s immediate impression of the present work and the fact that the artist was intrigued and extremely curious.

It is a distinct honor for Keno Auctions to offer, on behalf of its original owner, Ruth Asawa’s monumental iron and brass work, Hanging Five-Lobed Continuous Form with Spheres Inside Four of the Lobes, Two of the Inside Spheres Containing Spheres Within Them.

It is not an accident that the John Freeman, the buyer of this important work by Asawa, was friends with Louise Nevelson, another famous female sculptor who struggled in the midcentury against some of the same gender biases as did Asawa. She visited John at Wave Hill in the Mid-1950’s and they occasionally shared an airplane to Maine together, where each had family connections. As already noted, his first wife, Sally A. Bennett, received her MFA in Sculpture from Yale and his second wife, Donna Byars, is a very well-regarded sculptor who works from her studio in Accord, New York.

THE COLLECTION OF JOHN WHEELOCK FREEMAN

John W. Freeman grew up at Wave Hill, now a public garden and cultural center in Riverdale, West Bronx. His grandfather, George W. Perkins, was a financier, a Morgan partner and advisor to Theodore Roosevelt. In 1909, the Perkins family, accompanied by a small group of friends and relatives, chartered a steamer for an exploratory voyage to the Northwest Coast, following the lead of the Harriman Expedition of 1899. Their photographer, William Carlin, took along the latest “autochrome A” technology. The trip yielded souvenirs (lot 20 among them) from Northwest Coast Native Americans.

During the period 1909–12, Perkins undertook extensive landscaping work at his Riverdale estate, notably adding the Bowling Alley, an underground recreation room in the hillside overlooking the Hudson, which now serves Wave Hill as an environmental study space. In 1950, following his first marriage, John Freeman began a decade of occupancy of this space as a home. One of the family’s early additions was a woven wire sculpture (lot 18)by the newcomer Ruth Asawa.

After 1950, as a graduate of Andover and Yale, Freeman started a freelance writing career by researching the vintage motorcar scene. While creating two books, both entitled Sports Cars(published by Fawcett and Random House), he and his collaborator, the architectural photographer Alexandre Georges, also ventured on an unpublished book project about artists in their studios. Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the first director of MoMA, offered help by writing letters of introduction to many artists working abroad, including Alexander Calder, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró and Fernand Léger.

In 1955, Calder was invited to Freeman’s 27th birthday party at the Bowling Alley in Riverdale. On arrival, Calder gave Freeman a present of a pair of silver cufflinks that he had made. In addition to offering these cufflinks (lot 17), Keno Auctions is the first to publish Freeman’s own photographs of Calder, taken at the artist’s home in Roxbury, CT, and at his studio at Saché, near Azay-le-Rideau, in the Indre-et-Loire District of France.

John and his first wife, Sally A. Bennett, met at Yale while he was finishing his B.A. in English and she her BFA in Sculpture. Also at Yale, the couple made friends with Sewell (“Si”) Sillman, who had recently left Black Mountain College in the footsteps of his professor, Joseph Albers. It was Sillman, himself eventually a professor at Yale Art School, who introduced the newlyweds to the woven-wire sculpture of his Black Mountain classmate Ruth Asawa. Once settled in New York, the couple saw Asawa’s work in December 1954 at the Peridot Gallery, her first solo exhibition, and bought one of her largest pieces.

The 103-inch form fit comfortably in the large recreation room at Wave Hill. It was there that Calder, possibly for the first time, was exposed to the work of Asawa. John recalled Calder’s immediate impression, interest and curiosity in the hanging sculpture and its origins.

Please note: A treatment report from metal conservator Steve Tatti will accompany this lot. This includes photographs of the piece pre-conservation. The piece had been exposed to moisture while in storage in the attic of a building on the Freeman property. This caused rust to form on the surface of the steel and also oxidized the brass spheres within the lobes. This surface has not been treated; it has been left as is so that the surface is left un-molested. There were some losses to a small area of steel wire in the passage (the narrow neck) between the first and second lobes from the bottom, which have been patched with a pattern matching what was used on the work overall. The double-shpere within the second lobe had come dis-attached (please see pre-treatment photographs) and have been re-secured to the upper part of the second lobe from the bottom. A narrow passage of approximately four inches of woven brass wire is missing – which had been inside of the narrow neck of woven steel between the second and third lobes from the bottom. Minor dents and small losses.
Please note that in order to maintain the integrity of the piece, the steel was not cut to repair the small section missing between the second and third lobes from the bottom. The small opening from looses in the steel wire between the bottom two lobes allowed the conservator to reach inside of the second lobe from the bottom to reattach the hanging brass double-sphere. Wire woven by Steve Tatti Conservation matching the missing section was then used to close the hole.