Considered one of the premier colorists of the twentieth century, Sam Francis is best known for dramatic, lushly painted works comprised of vivid pools of color, thinly applied. Drips, gestures, and splatters of paint in his work have led many critics to identify him as a second-generation Abstract Expressionist, but Francis has also been compared to Color Field artists on the basis of large, fluid sections of paint that seem to extend beyond the confines of the pictorial surface. In 1964, the influential art critic Clement Greenberg included Francis in his celebrated exhibition Post-Painterly Abstraction at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In the catalogue, Greenberg described Post-Painterly Abstraction as both being related to and distinct from Abstract Expressionism. Greenberg wrote, “By contrast with the interweaving of light and dark gradations in the typical Abstract Expressionist picture, all the artists in this show move towards a physical openness of design, or towards linear clarity, or towards both.”
Francis was born in San Mateo, California, in 1923. He originally studied medicine and psychology at the University of California at Berkeley, before serving in the U.S. Air Force. During a lengthy hospital confinement as a result of spinal tuberculosis, Francis began painting. After his release, he continued to study painting, first with David Park at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco and then at U.C. Berkeley, where he majored in art and eventually earned both a B.A. and an M.A. During the late 1940s, he began producing and exhibiting his earliest abstract paintings. Francis was initially influenced by the work of the Abstract Expressionists, and he incorporated many of their techniques and ideas in his work. Despite this influence, Francis’s art was also in close dialogue with modern and contemporary French art.
Launching what would turn out to be a decade of travel abroad, Francis left California for Paris in 1950 and studied briefly at the Académie Fernand Léger. While there, he became friendly with the Canadian artist Jean-Paul Riopelle and several American artists, including Joan Mitchell, as well as more established European artists including Alberto Giacometti. Francis quickly began exhibiting his work—he participated in the 1950 Salon de Mai in Paris and as well as several group shows, including the critic Michel Tapié’s celebrated 1951 exhibition, Un Art Autre , which was shown in both Paris and London. By 1952, Francis was showing his work in several solo exhibitions and high-profile group exhibitions, such as “12 Americans” at the Museum of Modern Art (1956) and “New American Painting” (1958), both of which were curated by Dorothy Miller, and 1959 exhibitions Documenta II and the Bienal de São Paulo.
While in Paris, Francis became associated with the tâchistes (from the French word, tâche , meaning a splash or stain). Artists in this group developed a style of gestural action painting that reflected an expressive, painterly aesthetic and the artists’ desire to highlight the beauty of their materials, as opposed to portraying psychological or philosophical concerns.
In works made after the mid-1950s, Francis investigated perceptions of light and color by contrasting glowing jewel tones with large areas of white. Francis described his career-long interest in light as being “not just the play of light, but the substance of which light is made.” In the artist’s later works, he incorporated the light and colors of Southern California, where he lived almost exclusively after 1961. Indeed, one of the most remarkable aspects of his work is his ability to convey complete emotions through his use of color. The way he blends, drips and splatters paint creates a palpable sense of energy and emotion.
Sam Francis’s contributions to the Abstract Expressionist movement and his unique style have left an indelible mark on the art world. His works can be found in major museums around the world and his influence felt by so many Contemporary artists.

Paul Jenkins’s intuitive, chance-based painting techniques helped pioneer new approaches to Abstract Expressionism. Jenkins made his vibrant compositions by pouring paint directly onto the canvas, then tilting it so the paint dripped, bled, and pooled into fluid, diaphanous washes that resembled ceramic glazes. His palettes and methodologies can evoke the experiments of fellow abstract titan Helen Frankenthaler. Jenkins has been the subject of retrospectives at the Musée Picasso in Antibes, the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Charleroi, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. His works belong in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Guggenheim Museum, the Tate, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Stanley Boxer's work may be found in noted private and public collections in the United States and in other countries, including the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Center, Washington, D.C.; Houston Museum of Art, Texas; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; the Museum of the Twentieth Century, Vienna; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Tate Gallery, London; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Julian Stanczak, an artist synonymous with Optical Art, left an indelible mark on the world of Contemporary Art through his mesmerizing and groundbreaking optical illusions. Born in Poland, Stanczak’s life journey was testament to the power of perseverance and creativity. Overcoming significant personal challenges, he became a pioneer of a unique and captivating art movement.

As a child, Stanczak suffered a debilitating bout of Tuberculosis which left him with impaired vision. During his recovery, he discovered a profound connection with his art. Stanczak’s fascination with the interplay of colors and shape was comma in part comma a response to his altered vision period his experiences with visual distortions and the merging of colors laid the foundation for the leader explorations in op art.

After immigrating to the United States in 1941, Stanczak pursued his passion for art relentlessly. He enrolled at the Cleveland institute of art and later earned his BA degree from Yale. Under the guidance of renowned artist Joseph Albers, Stanczak's understanding of color theory and perception deepened significantly. Albers’ guidance was pivotal in Stanczak’s development.

The 1960s witnessed the emergence of Op Art, a movement characterized by geometric abstraction, optical illusions, and a focus on the viewer's perception. Stanczak was at the forefront of this movement, alongside Bridget Riley and Victor Vasarely. His meticulous paintings, often composed of arranged lines, squares and circles, had an hypnotic effect on viewers; his work seems to vibrate, shift and pulsate as if in constant motion.

Stanczak’s influence on the Op Art movement and his ability to challenge the way we perceive the world are testament to his enduring legacy. His work can be found at MoMA, the Whitney and the Guggenheim, where they continue to intrigue and inspire.

Emerson S Woelffer
1914 – active in California and Illinois – 2003

untitled
1988

Collage, spray paint, and oil stick on board
40 ½ x 35 ½ inches (103 x 90 cm)
Framed: 41 x 36 inches (104 x 91.5 cm)
Signed, and dated lower right: Woelffer 88

Provenance:
Estate of the artist

Once dubbed “the Grandfather of L.A. Modernism,” the Chicago-born Emerson Seville Woelffer was active as an innovative painter, collagist, and educator throughout his long and prolific career. A pioneering Abstract Expressionist, Woelffer’s brightly colored work with jagged forms reveals Cubist and Surrealist influences.

Coming of age in Chicago during the Great Depression, Woelffer appreciated the improvisational nature of jazz music, a sensibility he would later apply to painting through gestural variation, energetic strokes, and a rhythmic use of line. From 1935 to 1938, Woelffer, a high school dropout, studied at the Art Institute of Chicago while employed as a janitor, early evidence of his enduring work ethic.

He joined the Works Progress Administration arts program in 1938 as an easel painter, followed by a two-year stint as a topographical draftsman for the United States Air Force. The director of the Chicago Institute of Design, László Moholy-Nagy, invited Woelffer to join the faculty in 1942. His experiences there brought him into contact with the modernist idiom of the day, and his interactions with students caused him to re-examine his own practice.

He also exhibited in group shows at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, participated in the Whitney Museum Annual (1949) and won the Pauline Palmer Prize for painting at the Art Institute of Chicago (1948).

In 1949 Emerson Woelffer and his wife Dina, a fine art photographer, were invited by Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner to New York before they headed to Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. Exposure to Pre-Columbian art led Woelffer to incorporate totemic figures and vibrant colors into his abstract paintings.

The Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center extended a job offer in 1950, which the Woelffers accepted. While there, Woelffer established lifelong friendships with artists-in-residence Ynez Johnston and Robert Motherwell. The Colorado period marked a critical development in Woelffer’s oeuvre as he began to embrace the accidental and the absurd through the Surrealist technique of automatic writing, or automatism. The mountain environs inspired Woelffer to shift to a cooler-toned palette as he addressed the vast openness of the landscape.

In 1959 Woelffer joined the faculty at the Chouinard Art Institute (later the California Institute of the Arts) in Los Angeles, where he instructed notable emerging artists until 1973 and where he was instrumental in bringing Modernism to LA. Ed Ruscha was one of his students. In 1974, Woelffer was named chair of the art department at the Otis Art Institute (now the Otis School of Art and Design). His tenure lasted until his retirement in 1989, and he was widely admired for his interdisciplinary approach in the classroom. An endowed scholarship fund in his name provides support for promising young artists and designers. Suffering from macular degeneration, Woelffer switched to drawing with white crayon on black paper in his final years of artistic activity.

Emerson won a prestigious Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 1967 and then went to wprk in Europe. Woelffer’s work is represented in the collections of such distinguished institutions as the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Gallery of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art, among others.

Julian Schnabel was born in 1951 in Brooklyn, New York, to a father of Czechoslovakian descent and a mother from New York. After graduating from the University of Houston with a BFA, he began his artistic career in New York City. He was provided an artist’s studio through the Whitney Independent Study Program. He moved bak to Houston for a year, where he created his “first adult painting,” composed of oil, wax, and paste shaped on a canvas. This was the beginining of his signature artistic style, using pre-existing and unconventional materials to create his large scale paintings.

His first solo exhibition was at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, Texas, in 1976. He moved back to New York City working as a cook, then spent time travelled in Europe, where he was fascinated by Caravaggio and Fra Angelico; these influences led lead to Schnabel’s creation of ten wax paintings in Milan. After another trip to Europe a few years later, he was inspired to create his now-famous plate paintings. The plate paintings incoporated smashed plates and later glass and porcelain to adhere onto a canvas, painting on top of them and thereby mixing objects with flat surfaces. Schnabel’s paintings often use unconventional materials, like velvet or putty. His work is featured in various US and intermational museums and galleries in New York City, including Switzerland, London, Los Angeles, Paris, Munich, and more.

In 1990, Schnabel directed and wrote his first film, Basquiat, a biopic following the life of friend and fellow artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. He continued to create other films such as The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, At Eternity’s Gate, Julian Schnabel: A Private Portrait, and Miral, which was featured at the United Nations and won the UNESCO and UNICEF awards at the 2010 Venice Film Festival. Schnabel is a filmaker and a painter, an artist who expresses himself via different tools, be it a camera or a paintbursh.

Our painting captivates the eye through the use of a bold red color, layered with a more subtle orange and light green. The canvas background is incorporated into the painting’s composition, highlighting the artist’s use of mixed media.

Caio Fonseca
1959 active New York City

Pietrasanta Painting (P.95.122)
1995

Goauche and ink on paper
12 x 16 inches (30.5 x 40.6 cm)
Framed dimensions: 18 x 22 inches (45.7 x 56 cm)
Signed: Caio lower right; Titled and dated verso

Provenance:
Knoedler & Company, NY
Douglas Udell Gallery, Vancouver
Private Collection, Canada
Caio Fonseca was born in New York City in 1959. He comes from an artistic family in which his father, Gonzalo, is a renowned Uruguyan sculptor and his late brother, Bruno was also an accomplished painter. Always having been drawn to art, Fonseca left his formal education at Brown University for an artistic education in Europe. From 1978 to 1983, he studied in Barcelona, Spain under Augusto Torres, where he focused on the study of figurative painting. He then moved to Pietrasanta, Italy in 1985, where he developed his signature abstract style. After spending two years in Paris, France, he moved back to New York City in 1993. His first solo exhibition was that same year in Soho, Manhattan, at the Charles Cowles Gallery, leading to the purchase of two of his paintings by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He now divides his time between his two studios in Pietrasanta and Manhattan.
Fonseca’s style is known for its lyricism and abstractness. Inspired by classical music, he often uses bold colors that contrast with an off-white or neutral-colored background. His works have been showcased in exhibitions in every region of the United States as well as various areas of Europe. His art has been acquired by prestigious institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum, the Modern Museum of Art in New York, the Smithsonian Institution, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, and others.
This piece highlights an off-white background with freeform shapes and lines of bright pink, linked together by light brown lines. These blocks of color showcase Fonseca’s classic style of contrasting bright colors against a neutral background. It represents a signature Pietrasanta composition by the artist.

Painter Robert Natkin was known for his lyrical abstract forms, applied in vivid, Post-Impressionist-inspired colors. He used both a paintbrush and palette knife to apply his bright acrylic paints to his canvas, sometimes also using cloths or netting as stencils. Though he made a number of series based on popular culture, like Hitchcock’s films and jazz, he declined to think of his work as deliberately narrative. “I sew together fragments of cloth unaware of the dress I’m sewing, unaware of its final look and function,” he once said. On occasion, his subjects were figural; a late series featured abstract heads and busts. Natkin was also famously mischievous. Among his other antics, his daughter recounted an instance in which Natkin licked a Vermeer painting at the Frick Collection when no one was looking.

Judith Lindbloom, a young openly gay woman,was one of the many artists who streamed to New York in the post-war years, drawn by the heady atmosphere and freedom to be found. It was not an easy life, especially for a woman, because women then were not taken as seriously as their male counterparts. Yet Lindbloom threw herself into the life. Pictures show her with cigarette in mouth, intently painting. At night she would hang out at the famed Cedar Bar, where she became especially close to Franz Kline.
There was a downside to this Bohemian life with drink and drugs and Lindbloom indulged too much and too frequently. In 1964, her partner committed suicide and right before she was to be included in a group show at the Whitney, Lindbloom had a breakdown. She would not resume painting for sixteen years.
Judith was a devoted fan of jazz and a muse to many of the greats of the era, including Gil Evans, Sony Rolllins and Steve Lacy. She designed and painted numerous album covers for some of their greatest work.
Her work is included in a new compendium entitled The Art of Feminism: Images the Shaped the Fight for Equality, 1857-2017.
The art market, including collectors, curators and museums, is in the early stages of a broad reappraisal of the contribution of previously overlooked groups to the development of post-war modernism. Artists who were regarded on the periphery, because they were women, gay, black or brown, are getting a much-deserved new look as old prejudices crumble.

John Little
1907 – active in New York - 1984

Whigmarleerie
1966

Oil on canvas
33 x 27 inches (84 x 69 cm)
Framed dimensions: 35 x 29 inches (89 x 73.6 cm)
Signed, titled and dated verso: Whigmaleerie 1966 John Little

Provenance:
Private Collection, NJ

In the late 1940s John Little moved to East Hampton, where he became involved with the Abstract Expressionist movement; his teacher was Hans Hofmann . Little ran in the same circles as Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, and the other artists who were the leading innovators in the New York School.

John Little left his home in Alabama at the age of 14 to become an artist, and moved to Buffalo, NY in 1923. After spending a year working as a stevedore on the docks to save money, he enrolled at the Buffalo Fine Arts Academy and developed an interest in singing. In 1927 he moved to New York City where he continued his vocal work and studied operatic literature. He also became involved in textile design, opening his own store in 1920, called John Little Studios. He ran the store until 1950.

In 1933 John Little resumed his painting studies at the Art Students League in New York under the guidance of George Grosz (1893-1959). The following year he made his first visit to East Hampton which he would eventually call home. Later in the decade, he traveled to Paris where he became familiar with European modernism. On his return to America, he taught textile design at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. He hired Josephine Watkins to work for him; she later became his wife. Little's textile store and teaching job gave him a financial security that was rare during the Depression, and he never found it necessary to find employment with the Works Progress Administration. At the end of the decade, John Little studied with Hans Hofmann (1880-1966) in New York and Provincetown. Little was greatly influenced by Hofmann, particularly by his views on color theory.

In 1942 John Little joined the Navy as an aerial photographer. In the late 1940s he purchased a rundown house on Three Mile Harbor Road in East Hampton, near where he had been frequently visiting Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner. In 1948 he had his first one-man show in New York at the Betty Parsons Gallery, where he would continue to exhibit frequently in the years ahead. He closed his textile business in 1950 and become a permanent resident of East Hampton, although he still maintained a studio in the city. In 1957 Little made an important contribution to the East Hampton scene when he opened the first commercial art gallery, the Signa Gallery, with his artist friends Alfonso Ossorio (1916-1990) and Elizabeth Parker (1893-1975).

John Little continued to exhibit widely, travel and painted until he died in 1984. Examples of his work can be found in many important private and public collections including the Ball State University Museum of Art, Muncie, Indiana; Bruce Museum, Greenwich, Connecticut; Dillard University, New Orleans; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, California; Guild Hall Museum, East Hampton; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the University Art Museum, Berkeley, California.