NEW ORLEANS — A silver coffee set by the Hungarian-American silversmith Maria Regnier (1901-1994) makes a rare appearance on the market this month. The three-piece hand-wrought coffee pot, covered sugar and creamer has a guide of $5,000-$7,000 at Neal Auction Company’s Mid-Century Modern and Contemporary Auction on July 18.
Regnier’s silver objects in the modernist style have been described as “hand-crafted Machine Age.” While well represented in institutional collections such as the St. Louis Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, they make only very occasional visits to the auction block.
This 62oz coffee set dates to the 1950s and was made in either Brentwood, MO (where Regnier was active from 1935-1957) or Savannah, GA, where she had a workshop from 1957 to 1961. A similar coffee pot with the same rectilinear form and hammered surface is shown in the background of the 1957 portrait of the silversmith by the artist Siegfried Reinhardt at the St. Louis Art Museum.
Born in Budapest, Maria Regnier immigrated to St. Louis with her family in 1921 and studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and the William Dixon School in New York to learn silversmithing.
The sale is led by some textbook works by Louisiana contemporary artists. Estimated at $7,000-$10,000 is the oil Stanley K as Oedipus by George Valentine Dureau (1930-2014). This monumental 6ft 4in x 4ft canvas is offered together with a 1977 gelatin silver print by Sarah Benham (b. 1941-) titled George Dureau, Painter, Photographer, New Orleans in which the artist is pictured alongside a drawing of the same work.
Coin du Lestin by George Bauer Dunbar (1927-2024) is estimated at $20,000-$30,000. The New Orleans artist, who died in June, trained at the Tyler School of Art under Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline and first exhibited in Philadelphia in 1953. A one-man show of his work titled George Dunbar: Elements of Chance was at the New Orleans Museum of Art in 2016. Coin du Lestin, measuring 4ft by 3ft 6in, is a typical late work with its geometric design fashioned in palladium leaf on black clay.
