World War II-era Poster, in Hebrew, Recruiting Jewish Women to Join the British Army, $7,800

TEL AVIV – Second World War posters recruiting British and American women to the war effort are a familiar sight at auction. Less well known, and much harder to find, are the posters that encouraged thousands of Jewish women to serve in variety of combat support roles in the Middle East.

The idea of Jewish women serving in the British army was not without its opponents, both in Britain and in the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine prior to the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. However, after representatives of local women’s organizations formally requested that the British Army open the ATS (Auxiliary Territorial Service) to volunteers from Mandatory Palestine, permission to draft up to 5,000 women was granted in October 1941. The first class of 60 women designated to become officers and NCOs appeared for duty at the British Army camp at Sarafand in January 1942.

Due to religious objections, not all of the eligible women were actually enlisted in the ATS. However, an estimated 3,500 Hebrew women were recruited to the ATS and 700 to the WAAF (the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force) during the course of the war. Arguably, their finest hour was the Second Battle of El Alamein (October 23-November 4, 1942), when ATS drivers trucked in Allied troops and weapons to the front lines, helping secure the victory that was the beginning of the end of the Western Desert Campaign.

Numerous recruitment posters were made at the time encouraging women to volunteer, many of them designed by the Latvian-born brothers Gabriel and Maxim Shamir, who had opened a graphic design studio in Tel Aviv in 1935. Typical of their work is the rare 2ft 2in by 19in (65 by 48cm) 1943 poster offered at Ishtar Auctions on March 7. In the foreground is a woman driver dressed in the ATS uniform while written in Hebrew the slogan reads: You can Shorten the Road to Victory, Join the ATS. 

The Shamir Brothers Collection at the National Library of Israel – the subject of an exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in 1999 – holds a huge archive of similar works, but this example hammered at $6,000, tripling its high estimate of $1,500-$2,000, and it sold for $7,800 with buyer’s premium.

Lute and Molecule 1’, $20,480

SUNRISE, Fla. – The artist Ben Shahn (1898-1969) worked primarily as an academic in the last two decades of his life, joining Harvard University as a professor in 1956 and publishing both The Biography of Painting (1956) and The Shape of Content (1960). However, he continued to paint. Hill Auction Gallery’s February 28 Hidden Gems sale included Shahn’s original gouache titled Lute and Molecule 1 and dated circa 1958.

The composition, depicting a stringed musical instrument with molecular pattern designs in shades of gray, brown, blue, black, and yellow formed the basis for two of the artist’s most popular screenprints, Lute and Molecule, No. 1 and Lute and Molecule, No. 2, published in 1958. It came for sale from a private collection with an estimate of $500-$1,500, but hammered for $16,000 and sold for $20,480 with buyer’s premium.

Zun-form Cloisonné Enamel Vase Attributed to the Xuande Period, $70,170

SELBORNE, UK – This 8in (19cm) high vase, offered for sale at Hannam’s Auctioneers on February 27, may belong to a select group of Ming cloisonné enamel vases dating to the Xuande period (1426-1435). All are approximately the same size, follow the zun form inspired by ancient Shang and Western Zhou bronzes, and are decorated with similar peony blossom and lotus-scroll decoration. More specifically, they share heavy bronze bodies, feature strong colors, and are set within fine, accurately bent wires. The best known of these vessels is in the Palace Museum, Beijing, where it is dated to the Xuande period and attributed the Yuyongjian workshop, a division of the department responsible for providing furnishings to the Imperial household. Other examples were sold at Christie’s in London in May 2010 for £210,000 (roughly $267,645) and at Christie’s New York in September 2021 for $300,000 ($382,375).

Hannam’s zun-form vase, described as ‘probably imperial and Xuande period’, appeared without a published provenance and a modest estimate of £800-£1,200 ($1,020-$1,530). However, showing some confidence in its pedigree, several potential buyers competed for it, prompting the lot to hammer for £43,000 and sell for £55,040 ($70,170) with buyer’s premium.

Krishen Khanna, ‘Aftermath’, $142,680

FAIR LAWN, N.J. – A relatively early work by the contemporary Indian painter Krishen Khanna (b. 1925-) hammered for $116,000 and sold for $142,680 against an estimate of $4,000-$8,000 at Taurus Auctions on February 29. Aftermath, a circa-1960s meditation on the Partition, was consigned from the collection of Lewis and Leanne Goodfriend of Westchester, New York.

The work of the nonagenarian today resides in many museum collections both in India and abroad, but when this picture was painted, Khanna had only recently committed to a career as a painter. He had been awarded the Rockefeller Fellowship in 1962 (the year he represented India at the Venice Biennial) and was an artist-in-residence at American University in Washington, D.C. in 1963 and 1964.

Painted in the Expressionist style, Aftermath (which is titled on the verso alongside the fragment of an exhibition label) depicts a somber figure seated at a table with a chicken waiting to be carved. Measuring 2ft 10in by 2ft 9in and in its original frame, is thought to be one of many works from this period to explore the aftermath of the partition of the Indian subcontinent. In August 1947, Khanna and his family had been forced to flee south from the newly created state of Pakistan with thousands of other Hindus.

The estimate for the painting was certainly modest for an artist whose work has made more than $200,000 on several occasions, with Khanna’s auction record (set in India, where most of his paintings appear for sale) now close to $500,000.

Six Mythological Oils on Copper by Luca Giordano, $70,400

ASHEVILLE, N.C. – Brunk’s March 7 auction included a group of six small oil-on-copper mythological scenes by Neapolitan painter Luca Giordano (1634-1705). Known as Fa Presto (which translates as ‘does it quickly’) because of his speed of painting, his dramatic religious and mythological subjects were in demand in Rome, Venice (where he traveled in 1667), Florence (1680-1682) and Madrid (1692-1702), as well as in Naples.

Giordano painted many large-scale canvases, but here, the artist worked on a more intimate scale. Similar sets of copper panels were incorporated into late 17th-century furniture – a good example being the cabinet on stand dated circa 1670 in the collection of the Dubrovnik Cultural History Museum. The subjects of these six 6 by 6in (15 by 15cm) paintings at Brunk are: Mars and Venus; The Death of Lucretia; Pan and Syrinx; Olindo and Sophronia; Hercules, Nessus, and Deianira; and Diana and Endymion. The Italian-style stippled and giltwood frames were made by Lowy of New York.

With an earlier provenance to the Suida-Manning collection (most of which is now in the Blanton Museum of Art in Texas), the set had been bought from Robert Simon Fine Art in New York in 2007 for $300,000. They were offered by Brunk with a far more modest estimate of $25,000-$35,000, hammering for $55,000 and selling for $70,400 with buyer’s premium as 62 people watched on LiveAuctioneers.