Sale 2455 - Printed & Manuscript Americana, September 28, 2017

189 c   (NEW YORK—BROOKLYN.) Van Veen, Stuyvesant. Group of preliminary studies for his murals at the Ebbets Field Apartments. 33 items, various sizes, all under 14 inches in length; condition varies but generally strong, 1947 drawing with closed tear through image. NewYork, circa 1962 [800/1,200] The NewYork muralist Stuyvesant Van Veen (1910-1988) did work for the 1939World’s Fair and taught for many years at the City College of NewYork, but may have been best known for his series of murals at the Ebbets Field Apartments. The housing complex went up in 1962 in place of the much-beloved Ebbets Field baseball stadium, which had been abandoned after the Brooklyn Dodgers left for Los Angeles in 1957.The murals depict stylized scenes from seven important years in Dodgers history: 1916, 1920, 1941, 1947, 1953, and 1955. For each mural, this lot includes a pencil drawing on tracing paper, a smaller rough color sketch on tracing paper mounted to a fragment of the building’s blueprint, and other copies and mock-ups. The murals were still in place at the apartments at the time of VanVeen’s death in 1988, but a 2007 article notes that “murals featuring famous Dodger moments faded away and were never replaced.”