Turner Auctions + Appraisals is very pleased to present The Collection of Bohemian Artist Xavier Martinez and His Family on Saturday, February 25, 2023, at 10:30 am PST. Featuring over 200 lots, the auction spans about 110 years and five generations related to famed Northern California artist Xavier Martinez (1869-1943). Items include artworks created by and gifted to Martinez, art produced by members of subsequent generations, and a wide range of other family possessions saved through the years such as photos, correspondence, books, ephemera, and more. Never seen before by the public, this historical collection is sourced from the family’s multi-generational homes in Northern California – first in Piedmont and Carmel, then in Pebble Beach. Several pairs of Chinese vases from other collectors round out the sale.
Besides an array of artworks by Martinez, there are paintings, drawings, sketches, etchings, works on paper, photographs, and sculpture by Micaela Martinez DuCasse, Ralph DuCasse, Chiura Obata, Josephine Wood Colby, Albert Thomas DeRome, Leo Lentelli, Arnold Genthe, Benjamen Chin, Gardiner Hale, Evelyn Otheto Stoddard Weston, Eugene Delacroix, Del F. Lederle, and others. Other lots on paper include silhouettes, photos of Martinez, caricatures of his bohemian circle of friends, and his 1915 Gold Medal Panama-Pacific International Award. Among the Bohemian Club memorabilia are plays, photos, publications, and ephemera. There are numerous groupings of letters, albums, papers, and/or ephemera – including Martinez, both his wife Elsie and daughter Michaela, Ralph DuCasse, Harriet Dean, his father-in-law Herman Whitaker, Franklin Roosevelt, photographer Edward Weston, artist Magda Pach, and others. Groupings of publications feature art exhibit catalogs and the California College of Arts and Crafts. Also offered are a diverse selection of books from the family library, including México y Sus Alrededores, a signed edition by Jack London dedicated to Martinez with photograph, Inedited Works of Bakst, and several publications on Carmel.
About Xavier Martinez and His Family
Xavier Martinez, the most renowned of his family members, was an artist acclaimed for portraits and tonal landscapes. He was born in Guadalajara to a Mexican father and Spanish mother. After his mother died when Xavier was age 17, he was fostered by Rosalia LaBastida de Coney (1844–1897); when her husband Alexander Coney was appointed Consul-General of Mexico in San Francisco in 1886, Martinez followed them there, arriving in 1893. He enrolled in the California School of Design and graduated in 1897, when he also became a member of San Francisco’s storied Bohemian Club. Founded in 1872 and continuing today, this is a private club for “gentlemen who are connected professionally with Literature, Art, Music, or the Drama” and those whose love or appreciation of these objects “make them worthy companions in artistic fellowship.” This association with the Bohemian Club was to continue for many years. Also in 1897, Martinez – known to his friends as “Marty” – sailed to France and entered École des Beaux Arts, Atelier Gérome, in Paris. Graduating in 1899, he returned to San Francisco in 1901. There, connecting with friends old and new, he frequented Coppa’s Restaurant, a popular gathering spot of the Bay Area bohemian crowd, where Martinez painted the black cat frieze.
In 1906, Martinez moved across the San Francisco Bay to Piedmont due to the horrific 7.9-magnitude earthquake that ravaged the city, killing over 3,000 people and destroying some 28,000 buildings. Family lore, never confirmed but passed down through generations to great-grandson Bruce McCreary, has it that Martinez was saved from death by a trip to the bathroom: when the earthquake hit at 5:12 am, he had left his bed – just before the bedroom wall collapsed on it! With San Francisco on fire and in rubble, Martinez found refuge across the bay in Piedmont with Herman Whitaker, an English-born writer and fellow Bohemian Club member, and his family – and there in Piedmont he stayed.
Living in Piedmont at the Whitakers, he fell in love with and married their daughter Elsie, 16 years old, 20 years his junior, and known for her beauty. For five years, the couple’s summers were spent in Carmel so Martinez could teach art classes at the Hotel Del Monte, where he also was one of the artists invited to create an art gallery there.
In 1913, their daughter Micaela was born, known as “Kai.” In 1923, after a marriage of highs and lows, Elsie and Xavier Martínez amicably separated, and Elsie and Micaela moved in with Harriet Dean, Elsie’s partner until Harriet’s death decades later. Their house was just down the street from Martinez’s studio, and they were all devoted to each other through the years. (As Elsie said regarding her daughter’s divorce, no doubt mirroring her own relationship, “I don't believe artists should marry anyhow,” since artists work “so hard that family life couldn't be worked into it.”) In 1941, Martinez became ill, moving in the following year with Elsie, their daughter, and Harriet in Carmel, before passing away in early 1943.
During his life, Xavier Martinez was friends and colleagues with many of the arts’ leading lights of the time – Henri Matisse, Maynard Dixon, Jack London, Gottardo Piazzoni, poet George Sterling, and others. The exhibitions of Martinez’s art were numerous, including the Bohemian Club, Panama Pacific International Exhibition, Palace of Fine Arts, the San Francisco Museum of Art, the New York World’s Fair in 1940, and others. He was also an art teacher and professor for decades at leading Bay Area art schools, including the California School of Arts and Crafts (renamed the California College of the Arts in 2003), where he taught for over 30 years, retiring in 1942. Today, his paintings are held in permanent collections of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Monterey Museum of Art, Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, Oakland Museum of California, Mills College Art Museum, and Guadalajara Art Museum.
Following in her father’s footsteps, Micaela “Kai” Martinez (1913-1989) also became an artist, sculptor, and educator. Kai started drawing as a child with her father and developed an interest in religious/Catholic themes as a young girl, which led to her affinity for creating religious art. Following her studies at California School of Arts and Crafts, she painted the library murals for the Franciscans in San Francisco, produced fresco murals for the seminarians library at Mission San Luis Rey, and created Stations of the Cross paintings and sculptures for the cloisters of the Franciscan Sisters. From 1955 to 1978, she taught Liturgical Art classes at the San Francisco College for Women at Lone Mountain campus and was a lecturer at Holy Names University in Oakland.
In 1944 Kai married painter Ralph DuCasse; they had two daughters, Jeanne DuCasse and Monique Tomasovich. The DuCasses eventually divorced, and Kai remained in Piedmont, where she maintained her art studio to the end of her life.
Ralph DuCasse (1916-2003) was born in Kentucky. During World War II he worked in Intelligence, specializing in the Japanese language; he was stationed and trained at Fort Ord in Monterey, and was eventually sent to Asia. At Fort Ord, DuCasse met Micaela Martinez; they married in 1944. After his art studies in Ohio, California, and New York, he taught at various California fine art institutions, including U.C. Berkeley; in 1958, he joined the faculty at Mills College in Oakland, later becoming chairman of the Art Department. While helping to hang a student’s mobile at Mills in the late 1950s, DuCasse suffered a life-changing accident, falling 40 feet through the art gallery’s glass ceiling. Severely injured, he was hospitalized for many months and not expected to survive. After the many surgeries that followed, including on his shattered painting arm, his style changed and evolved. The first major one-man show of his work was held at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in 1961. Widely exhibited, DuCasse’s work is held at institutions that include the Oakland Museum of California and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Over time, the creative works and colorful history of multiple generations of the Martinez family accumulated in the Pebble Beach house of the DuCasses’ daughter, Jeanne DuCasse, which became a museum-like repository for family artworks and memorabilia. Today, filling the home’s attic and basement, the diverse and extensive collection has outgrown its available space. With that in mind, the current generation has decided to share these engaging visual and historical works instead of allowing them to deteriorate in boxes, unseen by those who would appreciate them. Aside from heirlooms kept by family members, this unique trove of art and possessions, accumulated over 110 years, now comes to auction.
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