Composition

We would like to thank Kinney Frelinghuysen for his assistance with cataloguing this lot.

Born into a prominent New Jersey family, Suzy Frelinghuysen would find success as both a painter and an opera singer. Her interest in abstract art blossomed in 1935 when she married renowned painter, collector and critic George L.K. Morris. By 1937, Frelinghuysen was elected a member of the American Abstract Artists, and she was regularly exhibiting her works in New York alongside her husband and the other so-called “Park Avenue Cubists,” Albert Gallatin and Charles Green Shaw, who were also working in the abstract idiom.

The present work, while at first appearing wholly abstract, actually relates to an image of a bullfighter. As Allison Unruh has written, the subject may have been inspired by Juan Gris’s Harlequin sculpture of 1917 (Philadelphia Museum of Art), which depicts a similar cubist exploration of a theatrical figure and was at the time in the collection of Frelinghuysen’s friend Gallatin. The figural depiction is more clearly seen in Frelinghuysen’s related work Man in Café (1944, Grey Art Gallery, New York University) as well as an earlier painting Composition—Toreador Drinking (1942, Philadelphia Museum of Art). Isabelle Dervaux writes of the development of the design, “Although [Composition] presents a higher degree of abstraction, its composition clearly derives from the earlier one. The broad white plane in the upper center corresponds to the head of the toreador, and the semicircles on either side, to his hat. The white, cone-shaped wine glass is also recognizable at the lower right. The substitution of the newspaper clippings and their fanciful typography with the regular horizontal stripes of corrugated cardboard gives the 1943 painting a more severe appearance. Yet the austerity of the rigorous geometric composition is relieved by the sensuousness of the paint handling and the soft shimmering effect of the white, feathery strokes on the blue-gray background. Although the composition is inspired by the flat, spare designs of synthetic cubism, the free handling of paint in short, visible brushstrokes and the narrow chromatic range of the painting are reminiscent of the high analytic cubism of Braque and Picasso in 1910-1912, examples of which were in Morris’ collection” (I. Dervaux, Twentieth-Century American Art: The Ebsworth Collection, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 2000, p. 99).

Composition is also significant for its incorporation of an unusual collage element into the dynamic Cubist arrangement. While collage was a common practice of the Cubists, here Frelinghuysen uniquely utilizes corrugated cardboard to further blur the lines between representation and abstraction, and two- and three-dimensional art. The manufactured material provides a key juxtaposition for the painterly brushwork in much of the composition. Yet, by painting lines on top of the striped grooves of the board, she confuses the distinction between artistic modeling and true spatial arrangement. As a result, Composition strikingly demonstrates how, “Frelinghuysen worked within the pre-established forms of Cubist visual vocabulary but deployed these elements in a unique way that asserted her own artistic identity” (A. Unruh, “Suzy Frelinghuysen: Works,” The Park Avenue Cubists: Gallatin, Morris, Frelinghuysen and Shaw, exh. cat., New York, 2002, p. 67).