Dorothy Iannone valuation
Made explicit, ecstatic, autobiographical work for fifty years and was censored for most of them.
Dorothy Iannone was born in Boston in 1933, sued the United States government in 1961 to overturn the ban on Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, and won.
What a work by Dorothy Iannone is worth
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Bio
Dorothy Iannone was born in Boston in 1933, sued the United States government in 1961 to overturn the ban on Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, and won. In 1967 she met Dieter Roth in Iceland, left her husband, and made him the subject of a decade of work chronicling their relationship in flat, patterned, brilliantly coloured pictures full of text, in which genitals are drawn as plainly as faces. Her work was censored at Kunsthalle Bern in 1969 — Harald Szeemann resigned over it — and she was not given a substantial retrospective until she was in her seventies. She died in Berlin in 2022.
The market has developed almost entirely since 2009 and remains comparatively young, with strong institutional interest driving it. Unique works on paper and on board in gouache, acrylic and collage are the core, alongside painted objects, boxes and the artist's books, of which there are many. Iannone's surfaces are matt and heavily worked in water-based media and are light-sensitive. Editions and prints exist in modest numbers, mostly recent. The Air de Paris and Peres Projects exhibition record is the usual reference point for provenance.
At a glance
- Born
- 9 August 1933, Boston
- Died
- 26 December 2022, Berlin
- Movement
- Feminist art
More on Wikipedia.
Boston, Reykjavík and Lioness
Iannone took a BA in American literature at Boston University in 1957 and studied English at Brandeis, married the painter James Upham in 1958, and taught herself to paint the following year. She met Dieter Roth in Reykjavík in 1967, left her husband a week later, and lived with Roth in Düsseldorf, Reykjavík, Basel and London until 1974.
When Kunsthalle Bern asked her in 1969 to cover the genitals of her figures in its exhibition of the artists' friends, Roth withdrew in protest; she told the story in the Fluxus publication The Story of Bern or Showing Colors in 1970. Her first solo exhibition in the United States, Lioness, was at the New Museum in New York in 2009.
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