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Frederick Edward McWilliam ANTHROPOMORPHIC BEAN
Lot 99
Price Realised: €15,000
Estimate: €15,000 - €25,000
Frederick Edward McWilliam RA, 1909 - 1992
ANTHROPOMORPHIC BEAN (1965)
Bronze, 30 1/2" high (77.5cm), signed with initials, ed 1/5,with attached plaque presented by 'H. Dieter Holterbosch'

Provenance: Ex collection Lehman Brothers, 3 World Fina... Read more
Lot 99 - ANTHROPOMORPHIC BEAN by Frederick Edward McWilliam Lot 99 Frederick Edward McWilliam ANTHROPOMORPHIC BEAN
Estimate: €15,000 - €25,000
Frederick Edward McWilliam RA, 1909 - 1992
ANTHROPOMORPHIC BEAN (1965)
Bronze, 30 1/2" high (77.5cm), signed with initials, ed 1/5,with attached plaque presented by 'H. Dieter Holterbosch'

Provenance: Ex collection Lehman Brothers, 3 World Financial Center, New York.  

In the early 1960s, an Australian friend gifted to FEMcWilliam, a Coco de Mer (Lodoicea), commonly known as a sea coconut or double coconut. This is a nut, from a rare species of the palm tree native to the Seychelles Archipeligo in the Indian Ocean, is a source of legends, mysteries and lore. The seed of the Coco de Mer is the largest in the plant kingdom, weighing up to 45 lbs. This exotic gift inspired a series of sculptures produced throughout 1965/66, encapsulating ideas and forms which McWilliam explored thirty years beforehand, firstly in early wood sculptures and subsequently in stone. These pre-war, abstract carvings sprang from the subconscious and from force embraced in magic powers, contained in African masks and fetishes of tribal art. McWilliam shared common ground with Henry Moore who, in his early career, had also allied himself to Surrealism. From these beginnings, McWilliam's characteristic adoption of a form of biomorphic abstraction, evolved. Early in 1965, he embarked on a sculpture project on the subject of peace, resulting in a bronze combining the shape and acceptable symbol of a dove and geometrical bars of a birdcage.

This combination of forms, became an obsessive interest and most works completed in 1965, emanated from this symbiosis. The bean series followed and McWilliam commented 'mid-year I found the bean and then of course the birthrate jumped.' His list of bean sculptures included Aegean Bean, Spanish Bean, Roman Bean, Duplex Bean, Nordic Bean and Bean with Sauerkraut and fig Leaf. The huge, two-lobed nut, ignited McWilliam's mischievous humour and allowed him optimize his fanciful and whimsical treatment of gender. This organic motif facilitated McWilliam's playful manipulation of subject matter: nature, culture, myth and eroticism. Most of the Bean sculptures were shown in the Arts Councils of Ireland's retrospective of 1981 and in the Tate Gallery Retrospective of 1989. Anthropomorphic Bean was shown in both exhibitions and in the 2008 inaugural exhibition of the FEMcWilliam Gallery and Studio at Banbridge. Its plaster maquette, is in the collection of the FEMcWilliam Gallery. Two casts, were made, 1/5, by the Galizia Foundry London and 2/5, by the Fiorini Foundry, London. On the base of this work, 1/5, in addition to McWilliam's signature, a plate records that the sculpture was presented to the Lehman Brothers, by H.Dieter Holterboch, a wealthy, industrialist, who died in 2016, aged 95. The work was located at the World Financial Center, New York, until the collapse of the Twin Towers in 2001. As the Financial Center suffered damage, the work was put in storage, where it remained until the auction of the work in Philadelphia in 2009.

Brian Ferran

October 2019
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