Sold for: $73,250

PROVENANCE
Kootz Gallery, New York
Acquired from the above by a Private Collection, Ontario, 1962
Sold sale of Post-War & Contemporary Art, Heffel Fine Art Auction House, May 24, 2017, lot 33

LITERATURE
Iris Nowell, Painters Eleven: The Wild Ones of Canadian Art, 2011, page 70

William Ronald’s Vision continues the evolution of his paintings with central forms, which began when he moved to New York in 1955. By the end of the 1950s, Ronald had begun experimenting with circular imagery and amorphous shapes, and he would come back to these forms in subsequent decades. Discussing this change in Ronald’s “powerful compositions,” Iris Nowell notes that Ronald felt compelled to be unique in an era in which Willem de Kooning was “the greatest man…that all the other artists were copying.” Beginning in 1957, the renowned Kootz Gallery in New York had Ronald on a retainer, requiring him to paint 18 canvases per year, which he easily completed. His exhibitions with Kootz and other galleries were widely and favourably reviewed, and his works were purchased by the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo. Vision is an excellent example from Ronald’s important New York years.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars