David Salle - New Now New York Wednesday, March 8, 2023 | Phillips

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  • The Trucks Bring Things dates to a critical point in David Salle’s career, the early 1980s, when he established his visual idiom, enlarged it to the billboard scale of the present work, and achieved international fame. This 1984 work, made the year after the artist’s first international  show in Rotterdam, is a quintessential example of the painted juxtapositions that distinguished Salle’s work from that of his peers. 


    At left, an orange portrait of a woman in a beret is painted over a nude woman who seems to be performing a headstand in a living room interior. At right, a man at a café table gestures towards unseen waitstaff, and points at a lightbulb that juts out of the green background. A patch of plaid fabric loops under his elbow. The seeming disjointedness of these compositional elements encourages extended looking, and contemplation of the ways in which our visual arts fall short of capturing the world around us.i 


    Coming up in New York in the 1980s as part of the Pictures Generation, Salle’s compositions appropriate freely from pop culture. The figure in the beret, at right, recalls the popularity of berets among 1980s fashion icons such as Princess Diana and Madonna. 1980s prep is referenced again in the patch of plaid fabric at bottom right, in a shape reminiscent of the head of a driver golf club. The man at the café table is rendered in a retro, linear style; his fedora, squat legs, and exaggerated arm motions take on the visual idiom of midcentury newspaper comics and how-to cartoon books. The visual references of The Trucks Bring Things are both current and nostalgic at once.


    The left portion of the painting, with the photorealistic, grisaille painting of the upside-down nude woman, brings the painting out of pop culture and into Salle’s personal visual language. The nude woman, whose head and extremities extend beyond the painted plane, is a visual trope of the artist’s work of the early 1980s. This nude torso motif reappears in works such as Gericault’s Arm, 1985, and Sextant in Dogtown, 1987, and the photographic level of detail adds an eerie, voyeuristic element to Salle’s work.ii  

     

    John Baldessari, Looking While Catching and Holding (Frog and Butterfly) from the series Fairy Tale, 1984.  Artwork: © John Baldessari 1984. Courtesy Estate of John Baldessari © 2023

    The combination of a bright line drawing over a painted photograph recalls the work of John Baldessari, Salle’s teacher at CalArts, who remained a lifelong mentor and friend of the artist.iii But where, in Baldessari’s work, the colored drawing exists in the same visual world as the photograph underneath (he colors inside the butterfly’s wings in Looking While Catching and Holding (Frog and Butterfly) (from Fairy Tale Series), 1984, for instance), with Salle, there’s a disconnect between the two layers. In terms of scale, perspective, and even painterly style, the relationship between the woman in the beret and the grey woman beneath her—not to mention the man at the café table—is unknown. As David Pagel writes, Salle’s 1980s paintings are “far more interested in getting started than in wrapping things up, nailing them down, or coming to conclusions—even provisional ones.”iv


    i David Pagel, “Getting Started,” Unfinished Business, Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York, 2016, p. 24.
    ii Peter Schedldjahl, ”The Joy of Eighties Art,” The New Yorker, February 6, 2017, online.
    iii David Salle, “'He taught by example’—a tribute to John Baldessari (1931-2020),” Apollo, January 21, 2020, online.
    iv Pagel, ibid.

    • Provenance

      Saatchi Collection, London
      Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1992

    • Exhibited

      New York, BlumHelman Gallery, Francesco Clemente, Bryan Hunt, David Salle, June–August 3, 1984
      Edinburgh, The Fruitmarket Gallery, David Salle, August 8–September 20, 1987, pp. 24, 25 (illustrated, p. 25)
      Water Mill, Parrish Art Museum, Unfinished Business: Paintings from the 1970s and 1980s by Ross Bleckner, Eric Fischl, and David Salle, July 31–October 16, 2016, pp. 25, 56–57 (illustrated, pp. 56–57)

    • Literature

      Peter Schjeldahl et al., Art of Our Time: The Saatchi Collection 4, London, 1984, no. 62, pp. 7, 105 (illustrated, p. 105)
      Vivien Raynor, "Art: 3 Friends Who Share Attitudes and a Show," The New York Times, July 20, 1984, Section C, p. 20
      Marc Vaudey, "De l'ironie rhétorique neutre inquietante et familière: David Salle," Artstudio: La peinture américaine des années 80, Winter 1988, p. 32 (illustrated)
      American art of the 80's, exh. cat., Palazzo delle Albere, Trento, 1991, p. 169 (illustrated)

Property from a Distinguished Collection

26

The Trucks Bring Things

oil, acrylic, fabric collage and light bulb on canvas, in 2 parts
overall 102 x 173 1/2 x 5 7/8 in. (259.1 x 440.7 x 14.9 cm)
Executed in 1984.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$200,000 - 300,000 

Sold for $76,200

Contact Specialist

Avery Semjen
Head of Sale, New Now
212 940 1207
asemjen@phillips.com

New Now

New York Auction 8 March 2023