JOHN REGISTER (1936-1996) Vacancy signed 'Register' (lower right) oil on canvas 40 x 50 in (101.6 x 127 cm) Painted in 1994 Footnotes: Provenance Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner. Literature Barnaby Conrad III, John Register: Persistent Observer, San Francisco: San Jose Museum of Art / Woodford Press, 1998, p.162-3 (illustrated). Exhibited San Francisco, Modernism Inc., John Register: New Paintings, September 14-October 28, 1995. Painted in 1994, Vacancy belongs to the final period of John Register's career and reflects the visual language he had developed over more than two decades. Register repeatedly returned to empty cafés, waiting rooms, hotel interiors and roadside architecture, focusing on spaces typically associated with human activity but conspicuously devoid of figures. Vacancy brings together many of the defining elements of Register's mature work. The sharply receding planes of the empty swimming pool lead the eye toward the low motel buildings on the horizon, while the telephone booth at right provides a strong vertical counterpoint. Register's reduction of architectural forms and incidental detail gives the composition an almost abstract structure. Against this precision, the gathering storm introduces a sense of tension and anticipation. Register himself offered a revealing account of the painting in a letter to his mother written in 1994: 'There was a large new painting on the wall behind me at the dining room table. I saw Leila trying to focus on it. 'Is that a swimming pool? she asked. 'It's an empty pool with rocks in it.' 'What is that building back there?' 'It's an abandoned motel and you can see in the sky a storm is coming.' 'And that's a pay phone?' 'Yes, but it's a special phone; it only takes money. It doesn't give it back, and there are no buttons so you can't make calls; you can only receive them, but you might have to wait awhile before you get called.' 'How dreadful. Where did you find something like that?' 'In my mind.' Register's final response is particularly telling. Although his paintings drew upon the architecture of postwar America, he distilled and recombined observed details rather than simply recording specific places. In Vacancy, the drained pool, abandoned motel and unusable telephone form an imagined landscape in which familiar elements take on a more psychological character. Executed only two years before Register's death in 1996, Vacancy carries an added poignancy within the context of his late work. The abandoned motel, empty pool and approaching storm suggest a landscape in transition, while Register's imagined telephone, capable only of receiving a call whose arrival cannot be predicted, introduces an almost existential dimension. His remark that 'you might have to wait awhile before you get called' is particularly resonant in retrospect, inviting a reading of Vacancy as a meditation not only on isolation and absence, but also on waiting, uncertainty and his own mortality. For further information on this lot please visit Bonhams.com For further information about this lot please visit the lot listing