Lenore Tawney Paintings & Artwork for Sale | Lenore Tawney Art Value Price Guide

Mar. 21, 2024
Textile, Lenore Tawney
Est: $8,000 - $12,000
Lenore Tawney (American, 1907-2007), "Blue Moon," warp-faced weft-ribbed plain weave with collage and paint, weaving: 13"h x 10"w, overall (with shadowbox): 17"h x 14.75"w. Provenance: Florence Duhl Gallery, New York, NY
Clars Auctions
Feb. 15, 2023
Lenore Tawney American, 1907-2007 Untitled (The Blue-Necked Tanager), 1980
Est: $800 - $1,200
Lenore Tawney American, 1907-2007 Untitled (The Blue-Necked Tanager), 1980 Signed and dated L. Tawney 1980 (ll) Ink and collage on found postcard 5 1/2 x 3 1/2 inches (14 x 8.89 cm) Unframed C
DOYLE Auctioneers & Appraisers
Jul. 27, 2022
Lenore Tawney 1907-2007 Abstract Lucite Sculpture
Est: $100 - $1,000
Lenore Tawney (American, 1907-2007). An original mixed media fiber art, papier mache and lucite sculpture. Titled, "Shrine XIV," with black and white threading supporting a papier mache goddess figure. Encased in a lucite cube. Enhanced with a wrapped amethyst gemstone crystal on top. Comes complete with lucite display stand. Signed and dated on lower corner of cube. Work Size: 8 x 8 x 8 in. Dimensions: 59.5 X 8 X 8 in. Condition: Fair condition with loose strings. Will require restoration. Estate fresh to the market. Shipping: Hill Auction Gallery does not offer in-house shipping for this item. Gallery will refer third party shippers for all domestic and international buyers. Purchaser pick up available upon request. Got something to sell? Contact us at HillAuctionGallery.com
Hill Auction Gallery
May. 11, 2022
Lenore Tawney American, 1907-2007 Entrances, 1969
Est: $8,000 - $12,000
Lenore Tawney American, 1907-2007 Entrances, 1969 Watercolor, feathers, mixed media and paper collage on paper Overall in Plexiglass frame 11 3/4 x 9 3/4 inches (29.8 x 24.8 cm), image size 8 1/2 x 7 inches (21.6 x 17.8 cm) Provenance: Willard Gallery, New York •
DOYLE Auctioneers & Appraisers
Sep. 28, 2021
Lenore Tawney (American, 1907-2007) The Radiant White Dove, 1967
Est: $8,000 - $12,000
Lenore Tawney (American, 1907-2007) The Radiant White Dove, 1967 paper, paint, and egg initialed LT and dated (lower right) 7 x 9 inches. Property from the Collection of Daniel Weinberg, Highland Park, Illinois Provenance: Willard Gallery, New York The Artist Dr. & Mrs. Jack Weinberg, Glencoe, Illinois, 1976 (possibly) Thence by descent to the present owner Lot note: Lenore Tawney's pioneering fiber work redefined the traditional craft of weaving, helping to create the genre of fiber art. Born as Leonora Agnes Gallagher in Lorain, Ohio in 1907, she forged her own path by leaving home at the age of 20 to work in Chicago as a proofreader while taking night courses at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1941, she married George Tawney, who unfortunately died eighteen months later. Tawney went on in 1946 to study sculpture with Alexander Archipenko and drawing with LÃ¡szlÃ³ Moholy-Nagy at the Chicago Institute of Design. Her work with textile art began in 1949, when she studied weaving with Marli Ehrman and then in 1954 with the distinguished Finnish weaver Martta Taipale at the Penland School of Crafts. At the age of 50, in 1957 Tawney left her comfortable life in Chicago to live in a derelict loft on the southern tip of Manhattan. Wanting to live "a barer life, closer to reality," her move brought her into contact with artists Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, James Rosenquist, and Agnes Martin. Before her relocation, Tawney was already creating gauzy tapestries in which areas of plain weave were juxtaposed with laid-in designs and large, transparent sections of loose weaving. Exposure to the avant-garde art world of her neighbors, Tawney began to experiment with open-warp techniques that went beyond the traditional rectilinear format and moved the fiber art into three-dimensional space. When suspended from a ceiling, away from walls, the resultant complex shapes invite physical interaction not normally associated with weaving. In addition to her weaving, in 1964 Tawney began to produce mixed media collages and assemblages that include feathers, twigs, pebbles, string, and bones. She would also collect rare books, often in foreign languages, and use their pages to cover boxes and place these found items within. She seemed to revel in not knowing what the pages signified and the serendipity of the words often meaning what she intended, once translated. The same year, she commenced studies of the Jacquard loom and to create mesmerizing, precise ink drawings that explore the density of the mechanized weaving process. From these drawings, Tawney began to integrate thread into her paper-covered boxes. Both coming from one of the largest private collections of Tawney's work, Untitled (String Box), 1966, and The Radiant White Dove, 1967, represent this shift in the her oeuvre. Composed of an open container swathed in book pages, Untitled (String Box) is a combination of assemblage and Tawney's work with the Jacquard loom. Thin strips of paper drift from the upper portion of the box and quiver with the slightest breath of air. They are anchored by the strong diagonals of overlapping threads that create a twisting vortex from top to bottom to create a vibrating form. Radiant White Dove equally possesses a sense of intransience. Dense strips of yellow-hued manuscript pages open to create a "nest" for a hidden egg. Tawney created a series of egg collages in 1967, including That Other Sea and One, Two, Three (locations unknown). The title is a direct reference to Carl Jung, for whom the dove was a potent dream symbol. Tawney studied Jung quite seriously, an interest she shared with her friend, psychiatrist Dr. Jack Weinberg, who was the original owner of this work. Long attracted by philosophies of both the East and West, these delicate, poetic pieces are imbued with intangible messages about inner peace and the fragility of life. Tawney continued to work and travel for the remainder of her long life, going on extended visits to India in the 1970s as her interest in Eastern philosophies grew. Her dedication to spirituality greatly influenced her work and choice of subject matter. She saw her repetitive and labor-intensive work as a form of mediation and her ethereal weaving and assemblages can be viewed as acts of devotion in an ongoing spiritual quest. Throughout her vibrant career, Tawney was a "devoted artist of contemplation, vitality, daring, and vision who, out of thousands of threads, words, feathers, and knots, brought forth a profound and dancing unity." (Donna Seaman, Identity Unknown: Rediscovering Seven American Women Artists, New York, 2017, p. 411)
Hindman
Sep. 28, 2021
Lenore Tawney (American, 1907-2007) Untitled (String Box), 1966
Est: $15,000 - $25,000
Lenore Tawney (American, 1907-2007) Untitled (String Box), 1966 wood, paper, and linen initialed LT and dated (lower right) 8 1/2 x 4 3/4 x 2 1/2 inches. Property from the Collection of Daniel Weinberg, Highland Park, Illinois Provenance: The Artist Dr. & Mrs. Jack Weinberg, Glencoe, Illinois Thence by descent to the present owner Lot note: Lenore Tawney's pioneering fiber work redefined the traditional craft of weaving, helping to create the genre of fiber art. Born as Leonora Agnes Gallagher in Lorain, Ohio in 1907, she forged her own path by leaving home at the age of 20 to work in Chicago as a proofreader while taking night courses at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1941, she married George Tawney, who unfortunately died eighteen months later. Tawney went on in 1946 to study sculpture with Alexander Archipenko and drawing with LÃ¡szlÃ³ Moholy-Nagy at the Chicago Institute of Design. Her work with textile art began in 1949, when she studied weaving with Marli Ehrman and then in 1954 with the distinguished Finnish weaver Martta Taipale at the Penland School of Crafts. At the age of 50, in 1957 Tawney left her comfortable life in Chicago to live in a derelict loft on the southern tip of Manhattan. Wanting to live "a barer life, closer to reality," her move brought her into contact with artists Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, James Rosenquist, and Agnes Martin. Before her relocation, Tawney was already creating gauzy tapestries in which areas of plain weave were juxtaposed with laid-in designs and large, transparent sections of loose weaving. Exposure to the avant-garde art world of her neighbors, Tawney began to experiment with open-warp techniques that went beyond the traditional rectilinear format and moved the fiber art into three-dimensional space. When suspended from a ceiling, away from walls, the resultant complex shapes invite physical interaction not normally associated with weaving. In addition to her weaving, in 1964 Tawney began to produce mixed media collages and assemblages that include feathers, twigs, pebbles, string, and bones. She would also collect rare books, often in foreign languages, and use their pages to cover boxes and place these found items within. She seemed to revel in not knowing what the pages signified and the serendipity of the words often meaning what she intended, once translated. The same year, she commenced studies of the Jacquard loom and to create mesmerizing, precise ink drawings that explore the density of the mechanized weaving process. From these drawings, Tawney began to integrate thread into her paper-covered boxes. Both coming from one of the largest private collections of Tawney's work, Untitled (String Box), 1966, and The Radiant White Dove, 1967, represent this shift in the her oeuvre. Composed of an open container swathed in book pages, Untitled (String Box) is a combination of assemblage and Tawney's work with the Jacquard loom. Thin strips of paper drift from the upper portion of the box and quiver with the slightest breath of air. They are anchored by the strong diagonals of overlapping threads that create a twisting vortex from top to bottom to create a vibrating form. Radiant White Dove equally possesses a sense of intransience. Dense strips of yellow-hued manuscript pages open to create a "nest" for a hidden egg. Tawney created a series of egg collages in 1967, including That Other Sea and One, Two, Three (locations unknown). The title is a direct reference to Carl Jung, for whom the dove was a potent dream symbol. Tawney studied Jung quite seriously, an interest she shared with her friend, psychiatrist Dr. Jack Weinberg, who was the original owner of this work. Long attracted by philosophies of both the East and West, these delicate, poetic pieces are imbued with intangible messages about inner peace and the fragility of life. Tawney continued to work and travel for the remainder of her long life, going on extended visits to India in the 1970s as her interest in Eastern philosophies grew. Her dedication to spirituality greatly influenced her work and choice of subject matter. She saw her repetitive and labor-intensive work as a form of mediation and her ethereal weaving and assemblages can be viewed as acts of devotion in an ongoing spiritual quest. Throughout her vibrant career, Tawney was a "devoted artist of contemplation, vitality, daring, and vision who, out of thousands of threads, words, feathers, and knots, brought forth a profound and dancing unity." (Donna Seaman, Identity Unknown: Rediscovering Seven American Women Artists, New York, 2017, p. 411)
Hindman
Nov. 07, 2020
Lenore Tawney, (American, 1907-2007), Untitled, (For Sally Fairweather), 1983, collage on rice paper, 5 1/2"H x 4 3/4"W (image) 6 1/2" H x 8 3/8" W (frame)
Est: $3,000 - $5,000
Lenore Tawney (American, 1907-2007) Untitled, (For Sally Fairweather), 1983 collage on rice paper signed and dated lower right. Provenance: From a private collection, Indianapolis, IN. Biography from the archives of AskArt: Fiber artist Lenore Tawney, born in Lorain, Ohio, became an influential figure in the development of woven sculpture as an art medium. Her introduction to the tenets of the German Bauhaus* school and the artistic avant-garde came in 1946 with her attendance at Lazlo Moholy-Nagy's Chicago Institute of Design, and study with Moholy-Nagy, cubist sculptor Alexander Archipenko and abstract-expressionist painter Emerson Woelffer. In 1949, she studied weaving with Marli Ehrmann. Destroying her clay sculpture, she moved tentatively to fiber, receiving a huge career "break" when the first pieces she made, black and white table mats, were selected by the Museum of Modern Art, in New York City, for a "Good Design" exhibition. Tawney lived in North Africa, Spain and France for a year and a half, before returning to America in 1954 to study tapestry weaving at the Penland School of Crafts, in North Carolina, with Martta Taipale, a Finnish weaver. But, like Archipenko before her, Taipale wanted Tawney to weave Taipale's designs instead of her own. Refusing to do this, as she had rejected "turning out Archipenkos," Tawney left Taipale after six weeks of study. Tawney fell seriously ill shortly thereafter, nearly dying, in what the artist describes as like a rebirth. This experience, the weaving and the illness, would mark the turning point in Tawney's career toward her major focus on fiber art. Tawney left Chicago in 1957 for New York City, where her studio was in the same building with artists Agnes Martin, Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly and Jack Youngerman, her landlord. Her one-person exhibition at the Staten Island Museum, in New York City, in 1961, was an innovation in terms of revealing the possibilities of weaving as a non-utilitarian artwork. Tawney was one of the first fiber artists to take her weavings from the wall and hang them in space. In 1978, she began her "Cloud Series," with hundreds of separate white "cloud" threads of linen of different lengths hanging from a blue canvas "sky." In that same year, Tawney had exhibitions at the Hadler Gallery, New York City, and the Brookfield Craft Center, in Connecticut. Lenore Tawney is also known for small assemblages* and collages, often in Joseph Cornell-like boxes, using eggs, feathers, bones and other materials, and influenced by Jungian and Eastern philosophies. The artist traveled, in 1969, to the Far East to Japan and Thailand, with an extended stay in India; visited India again in 1976-1977; and traveled to Taiwan and India in1982. Tawney was an Artist-in-residence, University of Notre Dame, South Bend, Indiana, in 1978; Artist-in-residence, Fabric Workshop, Philadelphia, 1982; a guest lecturer on Visual Arts and Fiber at the Banff Center for the Arts, Alberta, Canada, 1983; and a Distinguished Lecturer, University of Arizona, Tucson, 1987. She was elected a Fellow of the inaugural group of the American Craftsmen's Council in 1975; received a National Endowment for the Arts Craftsman's Fellowship Grant in 1979; an Honor Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Visual Arts, Women's Caucus for Art, 1983; and the American Craft Council's Gold Medal, 1987. Maryette Charlton has made a film about Tawney and her work. Writings about Lenore Tawney include Margo Hoff's "Lenore Tawney: The Warp is Her Canvas," in the November-December 1957 Craft Horizons; an article in the Spring 1962 issue of Handweaver and Craftsman, "Lenore Tawney: Her Designs Show Imaginative Departure from Traditional Tapestry Techniques;" Richard Howard's "Tawney," in the February 1975 Craft Horizons; Gerrit Henry's "Cloudworks and Collage," in Art in America, June 1986; and a 1990 exhibition catalogue published by Rizzoli, Lenore Tawney: A Retrospective, edited by Kathleen Nugent Magnan. She was commissioned by the United States government to create a large-scale thread sculpture for a federal building in Santa Rosa, California. Her work is in the collections of Western Connecticut State University, Danbury; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City; and Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois. 5 1/2"H x 4 3/4"W (image) 6 1/2" H x 8 3/8" W (frame)
Ripley Auctions
Aug. 02, 2015
Lenore Tawney. "Waterfall", Fiber
Est: $5,000 - $7,000
(American, 1907-2007). 1975, black and natural colored linen wall hanging with hanging rod at top, 36 x 17 in.
Alex Cooper
Mar. 12, 2015
Tawney, Lenore, 1907-2007, New York/ Illinois/ Ohio, "Polished by Silence" Collage.
Est: $1,000 - $2,000
Tawney, Lenore, 1907-2007, New York/ Illinois/ Ohio, "Polished by Silence" Collage. Benson Gallery label displays title and Kulicke Frames label on reverse. h:11.75 w:9.75 d:2 in.
Alderfer Auction
Mar. 12, 2015
Tawney, Lenore, 1907-2007, New York/ Illinois/ Ohio, "In Flesh & Bone" Collage.
Est: $1,000 - $2,000
Tawney, Lenore, 1907-2007, New York/ Illinois/ Ohio, "In Flesh & Bone" Collage. Willard Gallery label on reverse displays title and date (1968). h:7.50 w:2.50 d:5.75 in.
Alderfer Auction
Dec. 11, 2014
Tawney, Lenore, 1907-2007, New York/ Illinois/ Ohio/ India, "Sound of Thorn Fires" Collage.
Est: $800 - $1,200
Tawney, Lenore, 1907-2007, New York/ Illinois/ Ohio/ India, "Sound of Thorn Fires" Collage. Willard Gallery, New York, NY label on reverse gives artist, title, and date (1969). h:7.50 w:9.50 d:3.50 in.
Alderfer Auction
Oct. 04, 2011
Lenore Tawney (AMERICAN, 1907-2007)
Est: $1,000 - $1,500
Lenore Tawney (AMERICAN, 1907-2007) Untitled wicker basket and egg shells mounted on wood 9½ x 12½ x 12½ in. (24.1 x 31.8 x 31.8 cm.) Executed circa 1967-70.
Christie's
May. 12, 2011
Lenore Tawney (1907-2007)
Est: $60,000 - $80,000
Lenore Tawney (1907-2007) Inside the Earth, a Mountain hanging sculpture--linen 103 x 16½ x 2¾ in. (261.6 x 41.9 x 6.9 cm.) Executed circa 1965.
Christie's