Victor Higgins (1884-1949) Pink and Black (Still Life) signed 'Victor Higgins' (lower right) oil on canvas 40 x 40in framed 49 x 49in Painted circa 1918. Footnotes: Provenance The artist. Grand Central Art Galleries, New York, New York, 1923. Rosenstock Arts, Denver, Colorado. A Midwestern Trust, from the above. Sale, Coeur D'Alene Art Auction, Reno, July 30, 2005, lot 131. Acquired by the present owner from the above. Exhibited (possibly) Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Twenty-second Annual Exhibition by Artists of Chicago and Vicinity, February 14 - March 17, 1918. Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Thirty-fifth Annual Exhibition of American Paintings and Sculpture, November 2 - December 10, 1922. New York, Grand Central Art Galleries, Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture Contributed by the Founders of the Galleries, Commencing June 27, 1923, June 27 - July 27, 1923. Salt Lake City, Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Bierstadt to Warhol: American Indians in the West, February 15 – August 11, 2013. Literature (possibly) The Art Institute of Chicago, Catalogue of the Twenty-second Annual Exhibition by Artists of Chicago and Vicinity, Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago, 1918, no. 157 (as 'Still Life'). The Art Institute of Chicago, Catalogue of the Thirty-fifth Annual Exhibition of American Paintings and Sculpture [exh. cat.], Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago, 1922, no. 101 (as 'Pink and Black'). Grand Central Art Galleries, Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture Contributed by the Founders of the Galleries, Commencing June 27, 1923 [exh. cat], New York, Grand Central Art Galleries, 1923, no. 242, illustrated (as 'Still Life'). D. A. Porter, Victor Higgins: An American Master, Salt Lake City, Peregrine Smith Books, 1991, no. 72, pp. 76-79, 302, 303, illustrated. Victor Higgins was born into humble circumstances and pursued an artistic life by his own imagination and initiative. He was one of nine siblings raised in a rural farming community just outside of Indianapolis, Indiana. From a young age, he sought to escape the drudgery of farm labor and aspired to live in the big city. At age 9, Higgins met an itinerant sign painter who serendipitously sparked his interest in art. He was largely self-taught until the age of 15, when his parents allowed him to leave home and pursue further artistic training. Higgins' parents had believed he was going to Indianapolis for school – instead, he surreptitiously went to Chicago where he had longed to attend The Art Institute since his fateful meeting with the sign painter. Higgins studied and worked in Chicago for ten years, and by the early 1910s, attracted the attention of the visionary Mayor of Chicago, Carter H. Harrison Jr. The Mayor's patronage proved to be life-changing – Harrison sponsored his travel to Europe for art school, and from 1910 to 1914, Higgins attended the bohemian Académie de la Grande Chaumiere in Paris and apprenticed in a studio in Munich. His time in Europe was formative for a few reasons – he fine-tuned his painting technique which was 'as bold and descriptive as that found in any of Whistler's oils' and 'painted for the sake of painting...moving beyond the need to imitate nature.' 1 With a practiced technique under his belt, Higgins was free to explore color as it related to the simplification of form. Understanding the European Realist and Modernist traditions offered him a framework for developing a uniquely American Modernist visual language. Europe was also where he first met two other Chicago-based artists – Walter Ufer and Ernest Martin Hennings – who were also sponsored by Mayor Harrison. When all three artists returned to the United States in 1914 at the outbreak of World War I, they took up the Mayor's offer to travel to the American Southwest and paint its natural beauty. This seminal trip to New Mexico greatly inspired Higgins – Taos became a 'panoramic theater of pictorial possibilities' and muse. 2 For Higgins, the mid- to late 1910s was a 'period of familiarization with New Mexico' where he explored 'the people of the Taos Pueblo and their environment.' On a deeper level, it was also a period where he strove 'for a truth found beneath the skin of physical appearance.' 3 The present work, in keeping with other work of this period, shows a 'basic simplicity to his subject' where he 'reduces his compositions to basic elements, eliminating non-essentials.' 4 By its very title, Pink and Black (Still Life) calls attention to itself as a painting about painting (or at the very least, a painting about a non-representational relationship) much in the same way that Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 by the groundbreaking American 'Modernist' James Abbott McNeill Whistler does. In the depiction of the shiny, Santa Clara blackware olla lower left, Higgins shows bravura brushwork in service of form and color. A still life is always about the relationship of objects to one another within a pictorial space, but through Higgins' gesture and color harmonies, the work becomes less about particulars and more about universals – less what is depicted than how. Pink and Black (Still Life) is arguably about the nature of seeing and the limits of evoking physicality in a two-dimensional space, which is a thoroughly modern view for Higgins to have held in this decade. Higgins uses broad and thick strokes to sculpt large planes of color, particularly in the fabric draped across the table and the satin tablecloth. The work also shows a sophisticated pairing of complementary and tonal color relationships bringing staccato contrast and legato harmonies to this otherwise quiet scene. Pink and Black (Still Life) is one of only a few known early still lifes dating to Higgins' 'First Taos Period' and the work may be considered an important studio painting before he turned his attention to capturing the Taos landscape.5 1 D.A. Porter, Victor Higgins: 1884-1949, Indianapolis, The Art Gallery of The University of Notre Dame, 1975, p. 8. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid, p. 10. 4 Ibid. 5 D. A. Porter, Victor Higgins: An American Master, Salt Lake City, Peregrine Smith Books, 1991, p. 77.