Extremely important pair of bronzes by Helen Elizabeth Phillips Hayter, one of the first female abstract sculptors of the 20th century.18 inches high each.//////////////////////////////////////Born in Fresno California in 1913, she attended the California School of Fine Arts, and studied with Ralph Stackpole.(From Wiki)In 1936, Phillips won the school's Phelan Travelling Fellowship, a competitive scholarship with which she funded a year of study in Paris.From 1936, Phillips joined Atelier 17, an experimental and collaborative intaglio printmaking workshop operating in the heart of Montparnasse.(end Wiki).It is her time in Paris that is particularly significant.She marries Stanley William Hayter, who founded Atelier 17.Both Stanley William Hayter, a major force in abstraction and printmaking in Paris at the time, and Atelier 17, which was an important studio that was attended by artists such as Phillip Evergood, Miro,Max Ernst, Le Corbusier, Louise Bourgeois, Giacometti, and hundreds of other important figures of the between the wars period who passed through the studio doors, were to have an extraordinary influence on Helen Phillips.After WW2, Helen returns with her husband Stephen Hayter to NYC, and continues her sculpture and printmaking output, while associating herself with the artists of the New School.The bronzes are cast from the cire perdue(lost wax) method, meaning they are one of a kind each, there are no other legitimate copies of these two works anywhere in the world.To understand the cire perdue method, when the wax melts after the liquid bronze is poured in, the original wax sculpture no longer exists to make additional examples.The foundry in Paris that casts the works, Valsuani Foundry, was known for their expertise is the cire perdue method.The Valsuani Foundry was founded in 1899 and continued in Paris until 1975.The Foundry cast sculptures for Picasso, Troubetzkoy, Gaugin, Renoir and Matisse.Helen Phillips sculptures are extremely rare.The few examples in existence are part of the modern art collections of MoMa, the San Francisco Museum of Modern art, and the Albright Knox Museum of Buffalo.CONDITION IS VERY GOOD.One is signed H Phillips and Cire Perdue and Valsuani and the other is stamped Cire Perdue and Valsuani, indicating that they were always intended to be a pair.//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////Only a small handful of bronzes by Phillips have come up for auction in the last 20 years, and most were under 7 inches, and/or unsigned and lacking foundry marks, and not cire perdue.

Good condition overall