Larry Poons valuation
Moved from crisp optical dots in the early 1960s to thick, poured and thrown fields of paint, and never went back.
Larry Poons was born in Tokyo in 1937 to American parents and studied at the New England Conservatory of Music from 1955 to 1957, meaning to be a composer, until Barnett Newman's exhibition of 1959 sent him to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
What a work by Larry Poons is worth
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
Write to info@whitebankfineart.co.uk, or start below.
Bio
Larry Poons was born in Tokyo in 1937 to American parents and studied at the New England Conservatory of Music from 1955 to 1957, meaning to be a composer, until Barnett Newman's exhibition of 1959 sent him to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. His first paintings to be seen, shown at the Green Gallery in New York from 1963, were fields of a single flat colour scattered with small dots and ellipses in a contrasting colour, laid out on a hidden grid, which seem to flicker and jump across the canvas; they were included in The Responsive Eye at the Museum of Modern Art in 1965 and filed under Op Art. From the late 1960s he left them behind: first for looser, larger fields of colour, then, in the 1970s, for paintings made by pouring and throwing paint at canvas, building up thick, cracked, encrusted surfaces, and later for dense, rhythmic fields of brushed and layered colour. He has taught for many years at the Art Students League in New York.
The dot paintings of the 1960s are the best known; the poured and thrown paintings of the 1970s are heavy, with paint built up thickly enough to crack and lift, so the surface and any losses must be examined closely and the work moved with care; and the later paintings form the largest group. The date of a painting places it in one of these phases, and the phase is what a buyer considers first.
Tokyo, the Conservatory and the Green Gallery
His painting Brown Sound was on the cover of Artforum in 1968, and he appears in Emile de Antonio's documentary Painters Painting of 1972.
His work is in the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tate and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
