Lot 18 email save

PAUL EVANS, 1931-1987

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Unique custom-made illuminated cabinet bar, ca. 1963
Painted sculpted and patchwork steel, perforated steel, painted and sculpted bronze, painted wood, gold leaf-covered wood, slate, painted tubular steel, electrical components, felt. 81 3/4 x 60 x 23 in. (207.6 x 152.4 x 58.4 cm.)

PROPERTY FROM THE ESTATE OF DR. ALFRED JONES, NEW YORK
LITERATURE Todd Merrill and Julie V. Iovine, Modern Americana: Studio Furniture from High Craft to High Glam, New York, 2008, front and back covers and p. 12 for similar examples

Wandering through Bucks County, Pennsylvania in the early 1960s, Dr. Alfred Jones (psychologist, collector) discovered the great studio furniture makers Paul Evans and Phillip Lloyd Powell. Close collaborators, the two designers shared a showroom in the small town of New Hope, halfway between New York and Philadelphia on Old York Road. Home to the Bucks County Playhouse, New Hope enjoyed a lively traffic of visitors, actors, and artists (George Nakashima maintained a studio in the nearby woods; Grace Kelly had debuted at the Playhouse in 1949).   Following his discharge from the Army Air Corps—he had flown B17s over Europe—Dr. Jones studied painting at the New School for Social Research, a progressive university in New York. Although he later earned a Ph.D. in psychology, Dr. Jones maintained a lifelong interest in the arts; he frequented galleries and was a devoted subscriber to the Metropolitan Opera and to New York City Ballet.   Among his many affections, Dr. Jones indulged two sweethearts: wine and song. An avid collector of rare vintages, Dr. Jones commissioned the present lot, a commanding cabinet bar built by Evans in 1963 with the assistance of studio foreman Dorsey Reading. As design critic Julie Iovine has elaborated in her recent book Modern Americana (Rizzoli, 2008), Evans would have sketched in chalk on a wood carcass the cabinet's many details—patchworks and perforations. Reading, a trained machinist, faithfully executed them in metal. In the present case, Evans's alternation of pierced panels with solid, polychrome ones adds counterpoint rhythm to the bar's folding doors. Punctures draw the eye, raised weld marks and color swatches push it back.    From chamber music to jazz, Dr. Jones amassed a broad selection of vinyl, which he listened to on a D44000 Paragon, the landmark speaker system then in vogue among enthusiasts. The stereo itself was housed in a unique wall-mounted cabinet built by Powell (Lot 19). The latter's generous use of 23-karat gold leaf corresponded to Evans's similar interior treatment of the bar, which stood across the living room in Dr. Jones's Central Park West apartment, where he had moved in 1962. As Reading has confirmed, the bar and stereo cabinet were designed by Evans and Powell respectively; they bear distinct authorship, although the commission was a joint one. Together Evans and Powell would have installed both works in Dr. Jones's living room, where they remained in close conversation, as the designers had been, until the present day.       Phillips de Pury & Company would like to thank Dorsey Reading for his assistance in cataloging this and the following lot.

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