Beschreibung:

Victor Higgins (1884-1949)Pink and Black (Still Life) signed 'Victor Higgins' (lower right) oil on canvas 40 x 40 in. framed 49 x 49 in. Painted circa 1918.FootnotesProvenance The artist. Grand Central Art Galleries, New York, New York, 1923. Rosenstock Arts, Denver, Colorado. A Midwestern Trust, from the above. Coeur D'Alene Art Auction, Reno, July 30, 2005, lot 131. Private collection, Utah, from the above. Exhibited Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Twenty-second Annual Exhibition by Artists of Chicago and Vicinity, February 14 - March 17, 1918, possibly. Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Thirty-fifth Annual Exhibition of American Paintings and Sculpture, November 2 - December 10, 1922. New York, Grand Central Art Galleries, Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture Contributed by the Founders of the Galleries, Commencing June 27, 1923, June 27 - July 27, 1923. Salt Lake City, Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Bierstadt to Warhol: American Indians in the West, February 15 – August 11, 2013. Literature The Art Institute of Chicago, Catalogue of the Twenty-second Annual Exhibition by Artists of Chicago and Vicinity, Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago, 1918, no. 157 (as 'Still Life'), possibly. The Art Institute of Chicago, Catalogue of the Thirty-fifth Annual Exhibition of American Paintings and Sculpture [exh. cat.], Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago, 1922, no. 101 (as 'Pink and Black'). Grand Central Art Galleries, Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture Contributed by the Founders of the Galleries, Commencing June 27, 1923 [exh. cat], New York, Grand Central Art Galleries, 1923, no. 242, illustrated (as 'Still Life'). Dean A. Porter, Victor Higgins An American Master, Salt Lake City, Peregrine Smith Books, 1991, no. 72, pp. 76-79, 302, 303, illustrated. Victor Higgins was born into humble circumstances and pursued an artistic life by his own imagination and initiative. He was one of nine siblings raised in a rural farming community just outside of Indianapolis, Indiana. From a young age, he sought to escape the drudgery of farm labor and aspired to live in the big city. At age 9, Higgins met an itinerant sign painter who serendipitously sparked his interest in art. He was largely self-taught until the age of 15, when his parents allowed him to leave home and pursue further artistic training. Higgins' parents had believed he was going to Indianapolis for school – instead, he surreptitiously went to Chicago where he had longed to attend The Art Institute since his fateful meeting with the sign painter. Higgins studied and worked in Chicago for ten years, and by the early 1910s, attracted the attention of the visionary Mayor of Chicago, Carter H. Harrison Jr. The Mayor's patronage proved to be life-changing – Harrison sponsored his travel to Europe for art school, and from 1910 to 1914, Higgins attended the bohemian Académie de la Grande Chaumiere in Paris and apprenticed in a studio in Munich. His time in Europe was formative for a few reasons – he fine-tuned his painting technique which was 'as bold and descriptive as that found in any of Whistler's oils' and 'painted for the sake of painting...moving beyond the need to imitate nature.' 1 With a practiced technique under his belt, Higgins was free to explore color as it related to the simplification of form. Understanding the European Realist and Modernist traditions offered him a framework for developing a uniquely American Modernist visual language. Europe was also where he first met two other Chicago-based artists – Walter Ufer and Ernest Martin Hennings – who were also sponsored by Mayor Harrison. When all three artists returned to the United States in 1914 at the outbreak of World War I, they took up the Mayor's offer to travel to the American Southwest and paint its natural beauty. This seminal trip to New Mexico greatly inspired Higgins – Taos became a 'panoramic theater of pictorial possibilities' and muse. 2 For Higgins, the mid- to late 1910s was a 'pe