abstract nude by Bob Dylan, mid-1960s, via Julien’s Auctions

Julien’s Auctions has listed for sale, in November, a very early painting by Bob Dylan, formerly the property of Albert and Sally Grossman.

The painting, an abstract nude primarily in yellows, in oil on canvas, was done some time in the mid to late 1960s, when Dylan and his family lived in Bearsville and Woodstock, New York. It’s about 5 x 3.5 feet, mounted on a wood panel and framed in plexiglass. For most of the past forty years, the painting was in the Grossmans’ Bearsville home off Striebel Road. Sally loved it, and happily allowed a photograph of herself and the Dylan to grace the cover of ISIS Magazine 118.

Years after Albert’s death, Sally sold the house to Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer and moved into the far smaller streamside farmhouse that had been Albert’s office. The painting hung there briefly, in the company of Marc Chagall and other Modernist superstars, until Sally brought the painting to New York for valuation. Instead of schlepping it back up the Hudson in her trusty Range Rover, she left it in a friend’s apartment on the Upper East Side for a couple of years. Now it is heading out into the world, for the first time. Given that Bob Dylan’s recent canvases have sold for as much as $700,000 — and that this is the earliest oil painting of his, of which I am aware, that’s ever come on the market — the presale estimate of $100,000-$200,000 seems like a bargain. The auction in which it’s available, Icons & Idols: Rock’n’Roll, happens November 19 and 20 in New York City at the Hard Rock Cafe — just as Dylan and his band will have rolled into town for three shows at the Beacon Theatre.

Images via Julien’s Auctions