On November 18, Christie’s will offer a masterwork by Jack Tworkov. Jason Andrew, Director of the Estate of Jack Tworkov lends insight to this remarkable painting. Direct link to auction here.

by Jason Andrew for the Estate of Jack Tworkov

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Jack Tworkov’s painting Queen III, last exhibited over 50 years ago, is a prime example of the artist’s abstract expressionist period. As a first-generation figure within this movement, Tworkov was admired and celebrated for his signature flame-like gesture. Guided by his aptitude for draftsmanship, Tworkov’s mark was unique in its short and staccato pulse—a movement, as if arrested at the height of a breath; shapes made visible as though they were flayed.

Painted in his New York studio at 342 Bowery, Queen III is the final painting in a series portraying a ghost of a throned figure. While his once studio-mate, Willem de Kooning approached the figure with “almost every manner of plastic homicide in an attempt to do away with her, Tworkov hands her a scepter and crowns her Queen,” reported Art News in 1959 when the painting was first exhibited in the Tworkov’s solo show at the Stable Gallery [1]

The painting was later featured in Tworkov’s career survey organized at Holland-Goldowsky Gallery in Chicago in 1960.

Queen III is imbued with ritual implied through rich colors of red, blue, green and white—a coordinated palette Tworkov returned to again and again through until the early 1960s. “The poetic element here,” wrote Martica Swain of the painting, “is as understated as the painting process, stirring the imagination with insinuated forms and situations, but giving precedence to visual pleasure.” [2]

“Tworkov’s paintings are achievements that suggest sequence after sequence of verbal equivalents,” wrote the historian Thomas B. Hess on the occasion of the artist’s survey of paintings at the Holland-Goldowsky Gallery in 1960 which included Queen III, “[his] pictures have the scholar’s rectitude and moral pressure […] In New York or Provincetown, Jack Tworkov is thousands of miles away from his [childhood] village Biala, and he engages in ghosts of his past with the magic at his command: a high elegance of draftsmanship, and a majestic sense of justice in the case between that appearance of a stroke of pigment, moving under the paintbrush.” [3]

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{1} H. Crehan, "Reviews and Previews: Jack Tworkov at Stable Gallery", Art News 58, April 1959, p. 11

[2] M. Sawin, "In the Galleries: Jack Tworkov (Stable Gallery)", Arts Magazine 33, April 1959, p. 54

[3] T. B. Hess, “Tworkov 1950/60: a survey”, exh. cat., Holland-Goldowsky Gallery, Chicago, 1960