Lot 67026: OTTO BOTTO (Swiss/American, 1903-1967) Still life

OTTO BOTTO (Swiss/American, 1903-1967) Still life with fruit on a table, c. 1940-50s Oil on canvas 23-1/2 x 29 inches (59.7 x 73.7 cm) Signed in lower right corner: OBotto PROVENANCE: Private collection. The first artist whom the influential dealer Charles Egan showed in a New York gallery all his own on 57th Street (after leaving his job with J. B. Neumann's New Art Circle Gallery) was Swiss transplant Otto Botto. Artist Milton Resnick recalled that Egan's gallery was a tiny hole in the wall, and he had been able to fix it up only with the help of his artist friends Isamu Noguchi, Giorgio Cavallon, Milton Resnick, Willem de Kooning, and Franz Kline. In that inaugural show, Egan showed what Resnick called Botto's "watercolors a la Picasso." Certainly the present work, painted in oil, possesses a marked influence of Picasso, though owing a small pastedown label with a price in French francs on the back provides a clue that it could date from roughly a decade earlier. In 1934 Botto had a one-man show at the Gallery Secession in Paris where he exhibited oils. Within two years of his show of Botto's work, Egan gave Willem de Kooning his first solo exhibition (1948). Two years later he mounted the first one-man show of work by Franz Kline.