Sale 2454 - 19th & 20th Century Prints & Drawings, September 19, 2017

281 c DIEGO RIVERA Portrait of Ralph Stackpole . Pencil on light tan wove paper, 1932. 500x404 mm; 19 3 / 4 x16 inches. Initialed and dated in pencil, lower left recto, and inscribed “dibujo de American R Stackpole” and dated in pencil, lower verso. Rivera (1886-1957) and the California artist Ralph Stackpole (1886-1957) were first acquainted in Paris during the early 1920s. Stackpole worked closely with the architect Timothy Pf lueger on numerous commissions in San Francisco during the 1930s, and was responsible for bringing Rivera in to work on murals for the staircase wall and ceiling of the San Francisco Stock Exchange (1931). While Rivera made this drawing, during the early 1930s (likely from an earlier photograph portrait of Stackpole) he and his wife Frida Kahlo were living and working at Stackpole’s San Francisco studio. The artists became lifelong friends as Rivera completed his then controversial murals to decorate the stock exchange and Stackpole worked on the external sculptural design scheme. Only a handful of these graceful, Ingresque portraits are known to exist. They ref lect Rivera’s early academic training and his moving away from Cubism starting around 1915. [20,000/30,000]