Page 80 - CHRISTIE'S Himalayan and SOutheast Asian Works of Art 09/13/17

PROPERTY FROM THE COLLECTION OF KLAUS KERTESS, NEW YORK
(LOTS 645-649)

Klaus Kertess was one of the most infuential voices in the feld of
contemporary art over the past ffty years. As a gallerist and curator
he helped launch the careers of the some of the most respected
artists associated with the Minimalism, Post-Minimalism, and Process
Art movements of the 1960s and 1970s, including Brice Marden, Chuck
Close, Dorothea Rockburne, Joe Zucker, David Novros, Barry Le Va, Ralph
Humphrey, and Lynda Benglis. With business partner and former Yale
classmate Jefrey Byers, Kertess opened the Bykert Gallery in 1966 and soon
developed an enviable reputation for identifying a generation of talented
artists on the verge of a breakthrough. On one occasion, Kertess visited the
studio of a young painter working as a guard at the Jewish Museum—Brice
Marden—which led to his frst solo show, at Bykert. Marden then introduced
Kertess to his friend Chuck Close.

After nearly a decade as a gallery owner, Kertess closed Bykert in 1975 to
focus on writing fction. He joined the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton,
New York in 1983 as curator, and was appointed adjunct curator of drawings
at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1989, where he organized the
1995 Whitney Biennial. Kertess contributed to such infuential publications
as Art in America and Artforum, and was the author of numerous catalogue
essays and well-received monographs on artists such as Brice Marden,
Joan Mitchell, Jane Freilicher, and Peter Hujar. A selection of Kertess’s art
writing, Seen, Written, was published by Gregory R. Miller & Co. in 2011,
and a collection of his short stories, South Brooklyn Casket Company, was
published in 1997.

Kertess became friends with Paul Walter during the Bykert years.
Walter collected many of the gallery’s artists, and later purchased and
commissioned works by Kertess’s husband, Billy Sullivan. Walter and
Kertess shared a passion for Indian art, and Walter often promised to take
him to India—a promise fnally fulflled in 1991 as a 50th birthday present
for Kertess, with Sullivan in tow. The following lots of Indian court paintings
(644-649) as well as a Thai sculpture (lot 634) come from The Collection of
Klaus Kertess.

645
DURGA KILLING A DEMON

INDIA, PAHARI REGION, MANDI, CIRCA 1775
Opaque pigments and gold on paper
9æ x 8¿ in. (24.8 x 20.7 cm.)

$4,000-6,000

印度 旁遮普 马恩迪 約1775 难近母殺怪物繪畫

The present work, a quintessential example of the bold, folkish devotional
images from Mandi, depicts Durga atop a demon, brandishing her weapons
and accompanied by her tiger. For a similar example of a slightly earlier work,
see the Varaha from Christie’s Mumbai, 18 December 2016, lot 41.

Klaus Kertess with Paul Walter, 1997, New York.

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