Post-War & Contemporary Art

Provenance:

The Artist

Gifted directly by the above to the present owner in 1968

Lot Note:

Owned by the same Chicago family since being gifted by the artist in 1968, this work by Joseph Yoakum is fresh to the market, and its provenance is one of simple, neighborly kindness.

Joseph E. Yoakum (American, 1891–1972) was a self-taught artist who lived and worked out of his South Side Chicago storefront. Using an array of humble materials — usually ballpoint pen, pastel, and colored pencil — on inexpensive paper, he created upwards of two thousand works within the last decade of his life, encompassing what art critic Jeremy Lybarger cleverly described as the "atlas of his psychic geography." His landscapes in particular have earned Yoakum a devoted following and a place in various major institutional collections.

It was on Chicago's South Side that Yoakum became acquainted with the present owner's father, a Yugoslav immigrant whose dry-cleaning business occupied the area. The two developed a friendly rapport, and in 1968 Yoakum presented him with this drawing — a depiction of a seaside peasant home in Yugoslavia at once serene and psychedelically unsettling, made especially for a man who once called that land home, and accompanied by Yoakum's characteristic hand-inscribed titling: "the home of a Montenegro peasant family at the time Yugoslavia took control of Montenegro on the Adriatic Sea," lending a nostalgic air to the idyllic scene while also hinting at the tense geopolitical history that the owner had left behind.

The work has remained in the family ever since, never publicly exhibited nor offered for sale, passing from father to children as a memento of an unlikely friendship and a newly recovered page in the atlas of the artist's inner world.