Gunther Gerzso

Gunther Gerzso (1915-2000) Untitled signed and dated 'GERZSO August 1949' (lower right); inscribed '"Museum of Modern Art" Rio de Janeiro Brazil' (along the lower edge); inscribed 'Painted this picture in Sept. 1953 size: 1.00 x 0.73 on canvas' (along the upper edge) graphite on paper 10 7/8 x 8 3/8in. (27½ x 21.2cm.) Executed in 1949 A gift from the artist to the present owner. This work is a prepatory drawing for a larger painting acquired by the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro.

Lot Description Gunther Gerzso (Mexican 1915-2000) Gulf of Corinth signed and dated 'GERZSO 59' (lower right) signed and dated again and titled 'GULF OF CORINTH, GERZSO, 59' and dedicated 'PARA MI AMIGO JOHN, CON EL AFECTO DE SIEMPRE!' (on the reverse) oil and sand on board 15 x 20 in. (38.1 x 50.8 cm.) Painted in 1959. Provenance Gift from the artist. Pre-Lot Text PROPERTY FROM THE COLLECTION OF THE LATE PROFESSOR JOHN GOLDING

Gunther Gerzso, "Untitled Abstract" gouache on paper, signed and dated lower right "Gerzso 73". This lot is accompanied by a letter dated October 2006 from the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, Instituto de Investigaciones Esteticas, confirming the authenticity of this work. Sheet: 21.5"H x 16.5"W. Frame: 25"H x 20.5"W. Gunther Gerzso (Mexican, 1915-2000) was a painter, set designer and filmmaker. His paintings developed into a more abstract geometric language as he grew more attracted to Cubism and Pre-Columbian art. There have been several important retrospective exhibitions of Gerzso's work at the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, Mexico City; Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City; University of Texas, Austin (1976); and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (2004). He received a Guggenheim scholarship in 1973.

Description Gunther Gerzso, Mexican (German descent), 1915-2000, Untitled, silkscreen, signed Gerzco 82 lower right and numbered 31/75 lower left. (MENG915) NOTE: Gunther Gerzso was a well know set designer who received many awards over the course of his career. He worked with Luis Bunuel and John Huston among others. He started painting, first interested in surrealism, later turning to abstraction for which he is know. He is considered to be one of the greatest Latin American painters. Property Title Property from the Estate of Marjorie Engel, 10 West 66th St., NYC Paper: 26" H x 21 3/4" W Framed: 30" H x 25" W Paper has toned and slipped from matting.

Lot Description Gunther Gerzso (Mexican 1915-2000) El nacimiento de los pájaros signed and dated 'GERZSO 44' (lower right) signed and dated again and titled 'EL NACIMIENTO DE LOS PAJAROS' (on the reverse) oil on canvas 12 1/8 x 16 in. (30.8 x 40.6 cm.) Painted in 1944. Provenance Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner. Literature Exhibition catalogue, Gunther Gerzso: Exposición Retrospectiva, Mexico City, Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, Museo Nacional de Arte Moderno, 1963, no. 6 (illustrated). Exhibited Mexico City, Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, Museo Nacional de Arte Moderno, Gunther Gerzso: Exposición Retrospectiva, August- September 1963, no. 6. View Lot Notes › Considered one of the "Nuevos Tres Grandes," along with Carlos Mérida and Rufino Tamayo, Gerzso pioneered abstraction in postwar Mexico, recasting the indigenismo of the Muralists into a universal reflection on cultural and personal identity. Born to European parents in Mexico City, Gerzso spent his adolescence abroad under the tutelage of his uncle, a noted art collector and connoisseur who introduced him to works by modern masters from Paul Cézanne to Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky. Following a successful five-year apprenticeship in stage design at the Cleveland Play House, Gerzso returned to Mexico in January 1941, quickly earning plaudits for his work in film scenography during the famed Golden Age of Mexican cinema. Notwithstanding his commercial success, Gerzso began gradually to commit himself to painting, though he kept his early work mostly to himself. "I only know that my true vocation ended up gaining ground day by day," he later recalled. "I began to paint, paint, and paint. Something deeply restrained came pouring out. It was like suddenly opening the floodgates of a reservoir at the point of overflowing."[1] The trajectory of Gerzso's paintings from the early 1940s shows the growing influence of Surrealism, drawn first from the Magic Realism of Julio Castellanos and Carlos Orozco Romero and soon after from the circle of European Surrealists who escaped to Mexico during the Second World War. By 1944, Gerzso had made the acquaintance of the French poet Benjamin Péret and his wife, the artist Remedios Varo, and he was warmly welcomed into an expatriate group that included Wolfgang Paalen, Leonora Carrington, and Kati Horna. Drawn together by their common European heritage, in which Gerzso shared, the artists congregated in the calle Gabino Barreda, playing the parlor game exquisite corpse and discussing the continued relevance of Surrealist practice. Gerzso's work from 1944 and 1945 ranges widely across Surrealism's expressive modes, channeling its wartime thematics of violence and cataclysm into illusionistic and oneiric landscapes and biomorphic abstractions. A concatenation of suggestively organic and geometrical parts, El nacimiento de los pájaros is characteristic of Gerzso's practice as he first delved into the Surrealist imaginary. Similar in feeling and composition to the earlier Personaje (1942), El nacimiento de los pájaros contrasts a discordant assemblage of disembodied, preternatural forms against a clouded and ominous landscape. Awash in a sense of foreboding and agitation, the painting describes the cosmic turmoil issuing from an allegorical moment of genesis, imaged viscerally here in bright, primary colors of red, yellow, and blue. "In Personaje and Nacimiento de los pájaros, Gerzso uses visual resources introduced into the Surrealist reservoir of images by Yves Tanguy," art historian Luis-Martín Lozano has remarked, noting in Gerzso's paintings "bio-organisms that unfurl into free and capricious forms, as if they were part of the uncontrollable self-revelation of a universe that is the spontaneous projection of the painter's obsessions in a mysterious atmosphere projected over distant, interminable backgrounds. The scenes are permeated with the existential anxieties of the artist, who expressed his emotions and inner conflicts yet retained a hermetic sense."[2] A rare and haunting example from his brief Surrealist period, El nacimiento de los pájaros gives visual form to both the apprehensions of a war-torn age and the metamorphosis of new life, its pregnant forms already anticipating the poetics of Gerzso's mature abstractions. Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park. 1) Gunther Gerzso, quoted in Luis-Martín Lozano, "Gerzso: His Formative and Learning Years," Risking the Abstract: Mexican Modernism and the Art of Gunther Gerzso (Santa Barbara: Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 2003), 38. 2) Lozano, "Gerzso: His Formative and Learning Years," 47.