Brooklyn Bridge NYC American Scene Social Realism Mid 20th Century Modern WPA

Cecil C. Bell (American, 1906-1970)
Brookyn Bridge amid the NYC Waterfront
35 ½ x 23 ½ inches
Oil on Board, c. 1930s
Signed lower left
Framed 38 1/2 x 26 1/2

BIO
Cecil Crosley Bell was born in 1906, in Seattle, Washington. Cecil studied printmaking at the Chicago Art Institute prior to moving to New York to study at the Art Students League with John Sloan.

Cecil remained in New York, eventually settling in Staten Island with his wife. Most of his paintings depict famous locations around New York city.

Cecil Crosley Bell died in New York in 1970. Largely unknown during his lifetime, in 1973 a retrospective of his work was held at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Bemelmans "Coney Island" Brooklyn NYC Amusement Park Mid-century American Scene WPA

Bemelmans was primarily known for his “Madeline” series, which began in 1939. He was born in Austria and emigrated to New York in 1914 where he became an illustrator for The New Yorker, Vogue and Holiday magazines. He was also a painter and this work of “Coney Island” is born of his love for his adopted home. When the artist’s grandson saw the painting he immediately remarked about the frame as he knew it from many of Bemelmans works. Bemelmans used this same Coney Island inspiration for the July 3, 1948 New Yorker cover.

The size of the artwork is 35 x 27 inches and in the original frame it measures 42 x 34 inches.

Legendary Tony Bennett "NYC Traffic" Original Contemporary Drawing Cityscape

Tony Bennett (1926-2023)
"New York City Traffic"
11 x 12 ¼ inches
Scratchboard India Ink on Board
Signed “Benedetto” lower right
Framed 18 x 15 inches

Provenance: Tony Bennett Estate

BIO
Tony Bennett is known as a vocal musician, but he is also known as Anthony Dominick Benedetto, an American visual artist. Benedetto was born August 3, 1926. He is the son of Italian immigrants from the Astoria section of Queens, New York. At the age of five Anthony was drawing pictures. He attended public schools and The High School of Industrial Arts in Manhattan where he studied art and music. Art was his first passion. In the 19th century artists like Vincent van Gogh searched for an expressive balance in art and music, but Benedetto/Bennett makes an impressive balance in both forms of artistry.

The family name Benedetto means, "Blessed one", and Benedetto is how his art is signed. His paintings are impressions of the beauty throughout the world from his many music tours and travels. The development of Benedetto, the painter and the visual artist begins with James McWhinney, a junior high art teacher, who discovered Benedetto at 14 drawing Thanksgiving images with colored chalk in an Astoria gutter. Mr. McWhinney, told Benedetto,"I like what you are doing". McWhinney invited him to go painting on the weekend. This unforgettable event of the art teacher's beautiful watercolors created a lifelong impression, mentor and friend. Mr. and Mrs. McWhinney introduced him to the world of fine arts. Throughout Benedetto's life, daily drawing, painting and art are his passion.

In 1962 a friend, Johnny Brascia challenged him to quit dabbling in the art. Benedetto became committed to his painting by concentrating on discipline and development. He searched for other artists who could teach him a higher standard. He technically viewed art in museums filming with cameras to aid in his study and development of style. He continued art studies in private studios with instructors throughout the years.

Anthony Benedetto/Tony Bennett is a dedicated artist painting everyday, regardless of his touring or recording schedule. When traveling he paints in watercolor and at home he paints in oils. The Art Spirit by Robert Henri is his favorite book about the artist and the creative process. In 1996 the first catalogue of Benedetto's artwork was published titled Tony Bennett: What My Heart Has Seen.

Benedetto's art exhibits internationally. He was the official artist in 2001 for the Kentucky Derby, and created two paintings celebrating the Derby. The United Nations commissioned two paintings, one of which was on the occasion of their 50th Anniversary.

His original works are displayed at Butler Institute of American Art. Homage to Hockney is at the National Art Club of New York; as is Boy on Sailboat, Sydney Bay. The American Cancer Society's Christmas annual greeting card is a Benedetto original with the proceeds from the card benefiting cancer research. In October of 2004 at Union Square in San Francisco, a 5-foot heart shaped sculpture was unveiled with the image of the Golden Gate Bridge painted by Benedetto.

He is a self-proclaimed lover of art museums and galleries. He communicates with the world through his art, influenced by his travels, study of the masters and art history. His art and art career have been featured and reviewed in numerous art publications internationally.

Tony Bennett is one of the longest-performing artists in the music industry, having won 20 Grammy Awards and a Lifetime Achievement Award over the course of an extraordinary 70-year career. He retired from performing at Radio City Music Hall in August 2021. Bennett produced paintings and drawings throughout his career, with recurring images being the cityscape and skyline of his hometown New York City.

"Audience" Mid 20th Century American Figurative Theatre Performance Contemporary

Leon Bibel (1912 - 1995) "The Audience," 52 ½ x 41 ¼ inches. Oil on canvas, c. 1963. Signed lower right. Framed.

BIO
Painter, printmaker and sculptor, Leon Bibel was born in San Francisco in 1913. He trained at the California School of Fine Arts and received a scholarship to study under the German Impressionist Maria Riedelstein. He worked in collaboration with Bernard Zackheim, a student of Diego Rivera, to create frescoes for the San Francisco Jewish Community Center and the University of California Medical School.

In 1936 Bibel moved from California to join the Federal Art Project at Harlem Art Center in New York. He also taught at both P.S. 94 and Bronx House.

Bibel's program in the WPA ended in 1941, and he moved with his wife to South Brunswick, New Jersey. In 1942, Bibel ceased his artistic pursuits and, in order to support his family, worked as a chicken farmer for twenty years. Resuming his artistic work in the early 1960s, he continued to explore the mediums of painting and sculpture until his death.

Bibel's numerous exhibitions include: Newark Museum (1966, one-man); Jersey City Museum (1967); Hunterdon County Art Center, Clinton, NJ (1978); Monmouth College Art Festival (1978); Rutgers State University (1978); New Jersey State Museum (1978, one-man); Rider College, Lawrenceville, NJ (1983, one-man); Hillel Foundation of Rutgers (1985-86, one-man); Trenton State College (1985); Noyes Museum (1986); National Academy of Design (1987); Rutgers Labor Education Center (1988, one-man); Ellarslie Museum, Trenton, NJ (1990); Mercer County Community College, Trenton, NJ (1990); South Brunswick Public Library (1990-91, one-man); Hillel Foundation of Rutgers (1991); Trenton City Museum (1991); Noyes Museum (1991); Klutznick Museum, Washington, DC (1992); Joseph Gallery, Hebrew Union College (1992, one-man); National Jewish Museum (1992); and Hunterdon Art Center (1993, one-man).

His work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Newark Museum, the Zimmerli Art Museum of Rutgers, the Amon Carter Museum, the Dade County Museum, the Klutznick Museum, the Art Collection of the Federal Reserve Board, Rutgers State University, Rider College, Ohio University, George University, and the New Brunswick State Theater as well as many corporate and private collections.

"Jobless Men" American Scene Social Realism WPA Era Mid-20th Century Modern

Syd J. Browne
Jobless Men on a Winter Pier
24 1/2 x 36 inches
Oil on canvas. c. 1930s
Signed lower right

BIO
Syd J. Browne was born in Brooklyn, NY on August 21, 1907. His work mainly oil paintings and etchings includes streets, landscapes, townscapes, marine and harbors, and scenes of Spain. He was the husband of 20th-century artist Sandra James Browne.

Browne studied at the Art Students League in New York City; with Eric Pape (1870-1938); and DuMond. He was a member of the American Watercolor Society in New York City; Society of American Etchers in Brooklyn, NY; Southern Printmakers; Salmagundi Club in New York City; Philadelphia Watercolor Club; and the New York Watercolor Club. Browne exhibited at the Paris Exposition, 1937; World's Fair, New York, 1939; and the Art Institute of Chicago, 1939. His work is on display at the Library of Congress.

"Ice Sakting" American Scene Social Realism WPA Era Mid-20th Century Modern NYC

Syd J. Browne
Ice Skating on the Lake in Central Park
22 x 30 inches
Oil on canvas. c. 1930s
Signed lower right

BIO
Syd J. Browne was born in Brooklyn, NY on August 21, 1907. His work mainly oil paintings and etchings includes streets, landscapes, townscapes, marine and harbors, and scenes of Spain. He was the husband of 20th-century artist Sandra James Browne.

Browne studied at the Art Students League in New York City; with Eric Pape (1870-1938); and DuMond. He was a member of the American Watercolor Society in New York City; Society of American Etchers in Brooklyn, NY; Southern Printmakers; Salmagundi Club in New York City; Philadelphia Watercolor Club; and the New York Watercolor Club. Browne exhibited at the Paris Exposition, 1937; World's Fair, New York, 1939; and the Art Institute of Chicago, 1939. His work is on display at the Library of Congress.

"Lower Manhattan" American Scene Social Realism WPA Era Mid-20th Century Modern NYC

Syd J. Browne
Lower Manhattan Warehouse District
20 x 30 inches
Oil on canvas. c. 1930s
Signed lower left

BIO
Syd J. Browne was born in Brooklyn, NY on August 21, 1907. His work mainly oil paintings and etchings includes streets, landscapes, townscapes, marine and harbors, and scenes of Spain. He was the husband of 20th-century artist Sandra James Browne.

Browne studied at the Art Students League in New York City; with Eric Pape (1870-1938); and DuMond. He was a member of the American Watercolor Society in New York City; Society of American Etchers in Brooklyn, NY; Southern Printmakers; Salmagundi Club in New York City; Philadelphia Watercolor Club; and the New York Watercolor Club. Browne exhibited at the Paris Exposition, 1937; World's Fair, New York, 1939; and the Art Institute of Chicago, 1939. His work is on display at the Library of Congress.

WWII Aircraft Factory Workers Industrial 20th Century American Scene WPA Modern

Frederick Buchholz (1901-1983)
WW2 Aircraft Factory
18 x 24 inches
Oil on Canvas, c. 1940s
Signed lower right

During WW2, in 1942, Buchholz worked higher tail wing assembly at Republic Aviation of New Jersey.

BIO
Frederick H. Buchholz was born in 1901 in Springfield Mass. His work reflected the nation’s urban scene during the Great Depression, with emphasis on American industry, entertainment and genre scene paintings. Many of his works feature strong colors and angular industrial scenes.

Buchholz’s early life was like that of so many artists in the early 20th century: As funds ran out, he was forced to restrict his painting and work other jobs in order to survive after the crash of the stock market in 1929. His early days could be described as somewhat Bohemian.

In 1922 he married Elsie Miller, who used the name ede-else professionally, inasmuch as female artists did not receive as much recognition as male artists in those days. After both studied at the Art Students League, they continued in their own artistic directions, strongly supporting one another’s artwork.

In the Early 20’s, the couple opened a tea room, known as “The Tart,” in New York, which became the “in place” for the intellectual cognoscente to meet and share their opinions on matters relevant to the day. In addition, the Buchholz’s began publishing The Quill, a periodical that provided the New York art community with the current art and literary news, as well as directory schedules of upcoming art shows and exhibitions.

Their New York years saw both Buchholz’ elected to the Who’s Who in American Art.

Starting in the 1950’s, the couple divided their time between New York City and Lyme CT. With the outbreak of WWII, Frederick worked in an aircraft factory, which greatly influenced the subject matter of his paintings. These dynamic paintings continued to reflect his interpretation of industrial America.

After WWII his paintings began to reflect the landscape of Old Lyme. He continued to live a relatively quiet life in Lyme, painting and exhibiting in one-man and group shows for the rest of his life. He died in Lyme CT. in 1983.

Lower Manhattan American Modernism NYC Cityscape Social Realism WPA 20th Century

Jo Cain (1904 - 2003)
Lower Manhattan
34 1/4 x 42 ½ inches
Oil on canvas c. 1930s
Signed lower right
41 x 49 inches framed

Our gallery is pleased to present the exhibition, "Jo Cain: Echoes of an Era." a tribute to the enduring legacy of Joseph Lambert Cain and a celebration of his art that transcends time and remains relevant today. The exhibition features mural studies, works on paper and paintings from the 1930s and 40s, all are available on 1stDibs.

BIO
JOSEPH LAMBERT CAIN (1904–2003)
A painter, muralist, and art educator, Joseph Cain's work was consistently infused by the color and vibrancy of his native New Orleans, even as he pursued a career that took him far from home. Beginning at the age of sixteen, his educational journey led him first to the Art Institute of Chicago and then to the Art Students League in New York, where he was instructed by Kenneth Hayes Miller, Kimon Nicolaides and Vaclav Vytlacil. He later studied under the Abstract Expressionist Hans Hoffman. A 1929 Carnegie Fellowship funded a year's enrollment at the Sorbonne in Paris and travel throughout Europe; Cain also received multiple Tiffany Foundation Fellowships.

Using thickly applied paint, layered color planes, and multiple perspectives, Cain created paintings, including streetscapes, marine scenes, and landscapes, which were sometimes categorized as "decorative expressionism" beginning in the late 1930s.

In 1932, Cain's entry to the First Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting at the Whitney Museum of American Art hung in the exhibition's entry way; other works were shown at such prestigious venues as the Museum of Modern Art, American Art, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, National Academy of Design, and Carnegie Institute.

He also executed a monumental mural at New York State Training School where he was employed as a teacher. While living in New York during this period, Cain was an integral member of a contemporary art collective known as "The Group," whose participants included Milton Avery, George Biddle, Robert Gwathmey, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, and many other important modernists.

Jo’s work evolved continuously. Moving from realism in the ‘20’s, he developed a highly personal, cubism based, abstract style similar in spirit to that of Stuart Davis and clearly influenced by Leger, Matisse and Picasso. In 1944, Cain joined the faculty at the University of Rhode Island, establishing and chairing the art department for over two decades. He continued creating art until his death.

"Labor in a Diesel Plant" Machine Age American Scene Industrial Mid 20th Century

Letterio Calapai (American 1902-1993)
''Labor in A Diesel Plant''
Wood engraving, 1940
17 x 10 1/2' inches (sight)
Signed right,, titled center and numbered 9/50 left.

BIO
The outstanding printmaker Letterio Calapai (1902-1993) was born in Boston where he undertook basic art studies. In addition, he enrolled in the Art Students League in New York and named the following as his private teachers: Ben Shahn, Robert Laurent and Charles Hopkinson. Calapai became a member of the National Society of Mural Painters, the Atelier 17 Group of Northwest Printmakers, the Springfield, Massachusetts Art League and the Baltimore Watercolor Club, as well a the Society of American Graphic Artists.

In 1934 Calapai turned to printmaking almost exclusively and exhibited three works at Salons of America: Eleanora, Odalisque and Portrait. In the same year at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts he exhibited The Negress. Two years later his watercolor, Maine Islands No. 7 was on view at the Art Institute of Chicago's winter show. In 1977 the Workshop Gallery in Glencoe, Illinois held a retrospective exhibition of Calapai's woodcuts and wood engravings. The artist's works are to be found in the following museums: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Fogg Art Museum (Cambridge, MA), the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the New York Public Library, Columbia University, Princeton University, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Kunsthaus in Zurich, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, in addition to many more museums all over the world.

Calapai executed a mural in Brooklyn's 101st Battalion Armory and he illustrated books, for instance, Look Homeward, Angel, a portfolio of wood engravings inspired by Thomas Wolfe's novel. In 1959 he won a Tiffany Foundation grant and a year later he founded the Intaglio Workshop for Advanced Printmaking. Calapai was an instructor at numerous schools and colleges, including the Albright Art School, the Riverside Museum in New York City, Brandeis University, the New School for Social Research, and the University of Illinois Circle Campus in Chicago. Calapai published limited, memorial editions of classic wood engravings, such as Aesop's Fables, with illustrations by Thomas Bewick, first published in London in 1887. In such efforts, Calapai printed a limited number of copies from the original blocks.

SILOS American Scene WPA Depression industrial Mid Century Modern Social Realism

Vincent Campanella (1915 – 2001)
Silos at Night
22 1/2 x 31 inches
Watercolor on paper, 1937
Signed lower right

BIO
Born in New York in 1915, Campanella studied at the Leonardo Da Vinci Art School where the curriculum was based on the Naples Academy founded in the 1440s. He took this classical Renaissance training to the streets of New York, then-rural Astoria, Monhegan Island, and Wyoming.

As an easel artist for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the 1930s he painted and taught in Rock Springs, Wyoming. There his style became Abstract and works of Classical Abstraction were recognized in art reviews and exhibitions. He was represented by the Rehn Gallery in New York until the death of Frank Rehn in 1956.

His work has been shown at The Art Institute of Chicago, Carnegie Institute, Brooklyn Museum, Corcoran Art Gallery, Denver Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, San Diego Museum, San Francisco Museum, Seattle Museum, Toledo Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Universities of Nebraska, Tennessee and Wyoming. He was a Fellow at the MacDowell Colony in 1968.

Retrospective shows of his work have been held at Hunter College (1995) and the Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art (2007). Campanella taught at the University of Wyoming (1940), Columbia University (1946-49), the Kansas City Art Institute (1949-52) and Park College (1952-80). Notable students include Robert Morris, Wilbur Niewald and Dik Browne.

Campanella was Thomas Hart Benton's closest friend. When Benton died, Mr.s Benton asked Campanella to complete her late husband's final painting.

Abstract Cityscape Mid 20th Century Modern Cubist Work on Paper Drawing Ariel 11 x 4 1/2 inches. Framed by Heydenryk. Provenance: Gary Snyder Fine Art BIO Clarence Carter was born in Portsmouth, Ohio, and began painting at an early age. He studied at the Cleveland School of Art from 1923 to 1927, and as a result of patronage from local arts supporter William Millikin, Carter was able to travel to Europe. While in Italy, Carter felicitously met and was encouraged in his studies by Hans Hoffman. Back in the United States, Carter taught at the Cleveland Museum of Art from 1929 to 1937. He was also Director of the Federal Art Project for Northeastern Ohio, and taught at the Carnegie Institute. He served as guest instructor at various institutions including the Minneapolis School of Art (1949), Lehigh University (1954), Ohio University (1955), Atlanta Art Institute (1957), Lafayette College (1961), and the University of Iowa (1970). Carter was a member of the American Water Color Society, and in 1962, served as Vice President. He used a watercolor technique that involved precise use of form, quick color washes and little retouching. From the beginning of his career, Carter painted in a modernist idiom characterized by a precise, realist line and strong psychological component. His work from the 1930s can be considered part of American Scene painting, and he was much concerned with the complex realities of American rural life. There is a rich emotional quality to Carter's work, and he once said "For me no great art has ever existed without some mystery and some awe. That is the vast intangible, which can never be defined but only felt in an elusive way, that stirs the spirit." (Frank Anderson Trapp, Clarence Holbrook Carter, (New York: Rizzoli Books, 1989, p. 7)

"NYC St. Corner" American Scene Social Realism Mid-20th Century Modern Cityscape

Max Arthur Cohn (1903-1998)
New York City Street Corner
15 x 20 3/4 inches
Watercolor on paper
Signed and dated 1934 lower right
Framed 23 x 28 1/4 inches

BIO
Max Arthur Cohn Born in London, England, Cohn became an artist primarily known for scenes of New York City, rural views, and abstract figural compositions. His style has ranged from realism in the 1920s to 1940s to abstraction from the 1950s to 1990s, with some reintroduction in the later years of realism and re-working of earlier subject matter. His primary studio was in New York, where he had became a US citizen, having emigrated to America when he was age two.

From 1925 to 1927, he studied at the Art Students League in New York with John Sloan, and in 1927, he attended the Academy Colarossi in Paris. Spending most of his career in New York City, he was a Life Member of the Art Students League. He has written books on silk screen techniques.

"6th Avenue El" American Scene Social Realism Mid-20th Century Cityscape Modern

Max Arthur Cohn (1903-1998)
6th Avenue Elevated
19 1/4 x 13 3/4 inches
Watercolor on paper
Signed and dated 1929 lower right
Framed 27 1/4 x 21 1/4 inches

BIO
Max Arthur Cohn Born in London, England, Cohn became an artist primarily known for scenes of New York City, rural views, and abstract figural compositions. His style has ranged from realism in the 1920s to 1940s to abstraction from the 1950s to 1990s, with some reintroduction in the later years of realism and re-working of earlier subject matter. His primary studio was in New York, where he had became a US citizen, having emigrated to America when he was age two.

From 1925 to 1927, he studied at the Art Students League in New York with John Sloan, and in 1927, he attended the Academy Colarossi in Paris. Spending most of his career in New York City, he was a Life Member of the Art Students League. He has written books on silk screen techniques.

Mid 20th Century American Abstract Large. Comprised of Four Canvases Color Field

James Daugherty (1887 - 1974)
The Sun is but a Morning Star
Acrylic on canvas, c. 1965.
100 x 100 inches
Comprised of four canvases measuring 50x50 inches each
Each canvas is signed, J. Daugherty, on verso.
The upper left canvas is inscribed as titled on verso

Provenance: Estate of the Artist.

Exhibited: Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ, "James H. Daugherty Retrospective," January 28 - March 25, 1973.

BIO
Among the early American modernists, James Daugherty was one of the first exponents of abstract color painting. Throughout his career, whether he was working in an abstract or a representational mode, Daugherty felt pure color to be the most effective means of creating powerful and evocative works of art.

Daugherty was born in Asheville, North Carolina, near the Great Smoky Mountains. He received his formal training at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C. and at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia during the early years of the last century. Although he was in Europe from 1905 until 1907, he remained unaffected by avant-garde art until the groundbreaking Armory Show of 1913.

Daugherty worked in a futurist manner until late 1914 or early 1915, when he came into contact with Arthur B. Frost, Jr., who had recently returned from Paris, where he had worked closely with Robert and Sonia Delaunay, the inventors of Orphic Cubism. Inspired by Frost's example, Daugherty began to explore the use of pure color in conjunction with abstract design. He soon developed a style consisting of highly complex arrangements of strips, segments, and circles of color. Daugherty quickly became one of the foremost proponents of color painting and in turn, influenced other young American painters, including Jay Van Everen. During these years, Daugherty exhibited his work at the Society of Independent Artists in New York and later with the Société Anonyme, Inc.

In the 1920s, Daugherty responded to the call for indigenous subject matter by adopting a more figurative style while retaining his former emphasis on vibrant color. He subsequently produced numerous easel paintings and murals, most notably his Spirit of Cinema America (1920; Loew's State Theatre, Cleveland). He continued his mural work in to the 1930s, but eventually devoted much of his time to illustrating children's books.

In 1953 Daugherty once again began to create abstract paintings. The first of these works, small images with relatively stable compositions and subdued palettes, suggest the influence of the work of Piet Mondrian. By the end to the decade, Daugherty had expanded to larger formats and had broken from the grid to create increasingly complex designs. In the years that followed, he alternated modes, often joining his old rectilinear format of vertical and horizontal with circles and frequently using a lighter, more refined painterly touch and layered, almost transparent color planes that recall the color veils of Mark Rothko's art.

By the mid-1960s Daugherty's work reached a peak of size, complexity, and color intensity. The explosive energies of these paintings put into physical form what Daugherty called the "out rushing forces of the cosmos" in an "ever expanding infinitude." Fusing the old and the contemporary, Daughterty referred both to early modernism and to the abstract illusionism developed by younger artists in the 1960s such as Frank Stella, Al Held, and Ron Davis. Daugherty continued to paint until the end of his life, never ceasing to experiment and find ways that abstraction could "restore meaning to life and announce its beauty and capacity."

Examples of Daugherty's paintings can be found in many important public collections, including the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Ackland Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas; Asheville Art Museum, North Carolina; The Columbus Museum, Georgia; The Detroit Institute of Arts, Michigan; Flint Institute of Arts, Michigan; Heckscher Museum, Huntington, New York; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire; Hoover Institution, Stanford University, California; The Marion Koogler McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas; The Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; New Britain Museum of American Art, Connecticut; Portland Museum of Art, Maine; Sheldon Swope Art Museum, Terre Haute, Indiana; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; Société Anonyme Collection, Yale University Art Museum, New Haven, Connecticut; The Spencer Collection, The New York Public Library, New York; Stanford University, California; Telfair Academy of Arts and Sciences, Savannah, Georgia; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

"NY Street Signs" Mid-20th Century WPA 1938 Modernist Abstract Realism Pop Art

Stuart Davis (American, 1892-1964) "Street Signs" Modernist gouache and traces of pencil on paper in the proto-pop art style Davis is celebrated for, 1938, signed to lower right, framed. Image: 11 1/4 x 15 1/4 inches. Frame by Bark: 18 1/2 x 22 inches.

LITERATURE: A, Boyajian, M. Rutkowski, Stuart Davis, A Catalogue Raisonne, Vol. 2, New Haven, Connecticut, 2007, vol. II, p. 632, no. 1232, illustrated.

EXHIBITIONS: ACA Galleries, New York American Artists' Congress: Group Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture, Dec. 3-16, 1939 (SDAB I, 12/3/39, p. 129). Outlines Gallery, Pittsburgh, Stuart Davis, Mar. 3-16, 1946. Coleman Art Gallery, Philadelphia, 5 Prodigal Sons: Former Philadelphia Artists: Ralston Crawford, Stuart Davis, Charles Demuth, Julian Levi, Charles Sheeler, Oct 4 - 30, 1947 (pamphlet), no. 12.

PROVENANCE: The artist; Mr. and Mrs. Frank Bowles, New York, Apr. 3, 1956; thence by descent, Private Collection, New York.

NOTES: According to the Catalogue Raissonne, "the title 'Street Signs' is recorded in the artist's account books (SDAB I, 12/3/39, p. 129; SDAB III. No. 89, 4/3/56, pp. 252-253), and in the Downtown Gallery's ca. 1946-56 stocklists and 4/3/56 purchase slip. Davis documents the completion of this work in his calendar entry, SDC 6.5.38, where he refers to this gouache with the working title: 'N.Y. Street Signs.'"

BIO
Admired for his artistic independence, brilliant use of color, and wit, Stuart Davis is regarded as one of the finest interwar modernists. The son of artist parents who met as students at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, he found his place amid the currents of twentieth-century American art earlier than some of his peers. Among his first art-world mentors were the artists known as The Eight and, later, the Ashcan School. At the time of his son's birth, Davis's father, an art editor, employed some of these artists at the Philadelphia Press and the family connection endured over subsequent years.

As a teenager, Davis left high school in New Jersey for New York City, where he received formal art training from 1910 to 1913 at the school founded by Robert Henri, artistic father of The Eight. Although Henri worked in a realist vein, he rejected academic idealism and urged his students to observe and sketch city life as experienced on streets and in music halls, taverns, and other locations. Davis lived in Newark during his art studies; in the dive bars he frequented, he developed an abiding passion for the technical precision and expressive spontaneity of jazz.

With his contribution of five watercolors, Davis was among the youngest participants in the seminal Armory Show (International Exhibition of Modern Art) in 1913, organized by a group of artists in order to introduce Americans to new developments in art across the Atlantic and at home. Excited by the formal innovations and bold use of color displayed by the European modernists, particularly Matisse, van Gogh, and Gauguin, Davis dedicated the next several years to becoming a modern artist.

By the early 1920s, Davis had left behind the representational realism of his early career. No matter how abstract his work became—and the degree of abstraction varied throughout his career—he always considered himself an observer of the world around him. In 1951, he expressed regret "that I have long been 'type-cast' as 'Abstract' because my interest in Abstractions is practically zero."(1) Instead, he identified his paintings as "Color-Space Compositions," in which areas of color define spatial relationships. Davis applied his formal concepts to subject matter ranging from still lifes, to landscapes, to commercial imagery and other aspects of urban life.

Just as a jazz musician riffs on snippets borrowed from popular music or explores all the permutations of a single phrase, so Davis drew from a personal well of reference points, remaking them into new images. In 1942 he remarked in his notebook: "I can work from Nature, from old sketches and paintings of my own, from photographs, and from other works of art. In each case the process consists of transposition of the forms of the subject into a coherent, objective color-space continuum, which evokes a direct sensate response to structure."

During Davis's own lifetime, his work was the subject of retrospectives at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1945) and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1957), and included in a wide variety of group exhibitions focusing on modern or abstract art. Sometimes identified as a forerunner of the next generation's Pop artists, Davis shared their engagement with American mass culture, if not their tendency to treat fragments of everyday life to iconic status. Instead Davis turned the stuff—objects, imagery, and language—of modernity into grace notes within his vivid impressions of urban experience. Keenly aware of his position as both participant in and chronicler of his cultural moment, he noted, "An artist who has traveled on a steam train, driven an automobile, or flown in an airplane doesn't feel the same way about form and space as one who has not."

Guy Pene du Bois' "Two Figures in Courtroom" is a WPA era American scene oil painting created in a realistic style. Modernism at its best The work is framed by Heydenryk.

Pène du Bois descended from French immigrants who settled in Louisiana in 1738 and was raised in a Creole household. He was born in 1984 in Brooklyn, NY and first studied with William Merritt Chase at the New York School of Art and later continued his training with Robert Henri. Pène du Bois was greatly impressed with Henri's credo that "real life" was subject matter for art and throughout his life a realist philosophy informed his art as well as his parallel career, art criticism. In 1905, Pène du Bois made his first visit to Paris where he painted scenes of fashionable people in cafes rendered in the dark tonalities and impasto associated with the Ashcan School. By 1920, he had achieved his mature style, which was characterized by stylized, rounded, almost sculptural figures painted with invisible brushstrokes. The subjects of his paintings were often members of society whom he gently satirized.

In 1924, Pène du Bois and his wife, Floy, left for France where they would remain until 1930. Returning to America showcases pictures the artist produced after this very productive period abroad. After five years of living in France, Pène du Bois was able to observe American life with fresh eyes. His work becomes more psychologically intense and less satirical. In Girl at Table a slender, blond is shown gazing at a small statue that she holds at arm's distance. The meaning is elusive, but a powerful sense of longing is evoked. Similarly, paintings such as Dramatic Moment and Jane are taut with unresolved dialogue. Both pictures depict mysterious interiors in which a lone woman anxiously awaits the denouement of a suspenseful scene. Other pictures, for example, Chess Tables, Washington Square and Bar, New Orleans, recall Pene du Bois's Ashcan origins in their depiction of urban entertainment.

During this period, landscape becomes an important subject for Pène du Bois. Girl Sketching and Girl in Deck Chair both situate the female subject in bucolic outdoor settings. Deserted Garden and Road under Hurricane Tree are pure landscapes.

A lesser known aspect of Pène du Bois's career is his involvement with the WPA projects. In 1937 Pène du Bois received a WPA mural commission to depict John Jay at His Home for the post office in Rye, N.Y. John Jay Study, which features Chief Justice John Jay's homestead, is a study for this series of still extant murals. In the 1950s, Pène du Bois's declining health substantially limited the number of pictures produced.

The artwork measures 16 x 22 inches and the framed work is 25x 31 inches.

Outsider Folk Art American Mid-Century Naive WWII Self Taught "Victory for Now"

Ralph Fasanella (1914-_1997) "Victory and After,” gouache on paper. Signed, titled and dated 1945 lower left. Sight Size: 27 x 37 inches.

This work was painted in 1945, the year Fasanella began working as an artist. It’s a powerful work that depicts American sentiments just after WW2.

Fasanella was a self-taught painter who created large, colorful and intricate paintings of working-class culture and American politics. A child of Italian immigrants, he spent his youth delivering ice with his father and enduring the harsh regimen of a Catholic reform school. During the Great Depression, Fasanella worked in garment factories and as a truck driver.

Fasanella acquired a social conscience from his mother. He became active in antifascist and trade union causes. His political beliefs were radicalized by the Depression and he became an organizer for various unions with whom he achieved some major organizing successes.

Fasanella's paintings are in the Museum of American Immigration at Ellis Island, the American Folk Art Museum, and the Smithsonian. He has been the subject of several books and major retrospective exhibitions.

The painting is been authenticated by the artist's son.

WPA Mural Study American Scene Social Realism Mid 20th Century Modern Workers

Seymour Fogel (1911-1984)
Mural Study, untitled
11 x 49 1/4 inches (sight)
Tempera on board
Provenance: Graham Modern label verso
Framed 25 x 62 inches

BIO
Seymour Fogel was born in New York City on August 24, 1911. He studied at the Art Students League and at the National Academy of Design under George Bridgeman and Leon Kroll. When his formal studies were concluded in the early 1930s he served as an assistant to Diego Rivera who was then at work on his controversial Rockefeller Center mural. It was from Rivera that he learned the art of mural painting.

Fogel was awarded several mural commissions during the 1930s by both the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Treasury Section of Fine Arts, among them his earliest murals at the Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn, New York in 1936, a mural in the WPA Building at the 1939-1940 New York World's Fair, a highly controversial mural at the U.S. Post Office in Safford, Arizona (due to his focus on Apache culture) in 1941 and two murals in what was then the Social Security Building in Washington, D.C., also in 1941. Fogel's artistic circle at this time included Phillip Guston, Ben Shahn, Franz Kline, Rockwell Kent and Willem de Kooning.

In 1946 Fogel accepted a teaching position at the University of Texas at Austin and became one of the founding artists of the Texas Modernist Movement. At this time he began to devote himself solely to abstract, non-representational art and executed what many consider to be the very first abstract mural in the State of Texas at the American National Bank in Austin in 1953. He pioneered the use of Ethyl Silicate as a mural medium. Other murals and public works of art done during this time (the late 1940s and 1950s) include the Baptist Student Center at the University of Texas (1949), the Petroleum Club in Houston (1951) and the First Christian Church, also in Houston (1956), whose innovative use of stained glass panels incorporated into the mural won Fogel a Silver Medal from the Architectural League of New York in 1958.

Fogel relocated to the Connecticut-New York area in 1959. He continued the Abstract Expressionism he had begun exploring in Texas, and began experimenting with various texturing media for his paintings, the most enduring of which was sand. In 1966 he was awarded a mural at the U.S. Federal Building in Fort Worth, Texas. The work, entitled "The Challenge of Space", was a milestone in his artistic career and ushered in what has been termed the Transcendental/Atavistic period of his art, a style he pursued up to his death in 1984. Painted and raw wood sculpture was also reflective of this style. Another mural done during this period was the U.S. Customs Building at Foley Square in New York City that was entirely executed in mosaic tiles, a mural medium he preferred in the last decades of his career.

Fogel's work is well represented in the collections of major museums, among them the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, the Dallas Museum of Fine Art in Texas, the National Portrait Gallery and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., The State Museum of Louisiana in New Orleans, and the Telfair Museum in Savannah, Georgia.

During his life Fogel authored numerous articles on the interrelationship of art and architecture, served as a Vice President of the Architectural League of New York (1960) and has had his work imaged and/or discussed in some thirty books, including Nathanial Pousette-Dart's seminal work "American Painting Today" (1956) where Fogel was included along with the likes of Milton Avery, Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, Edward Hopper, Yasuo Kuniyoshi and Stuart Davis as important American artists.

"Pay Day" American Scene Social Realism WPA Era Mid 20th Century Modern Workers

Don Freeman (1908-1978)
Pay Day
20 x 30 inches
Oil on board, c. 1940s
Signed lower right

BIO
Illustrator, painter and lithographer, Don Freeman was born in San Diego, CA on Aug. 11, 1908. He studied at the San Diego School of Fine Arts and continued in 1928 at the Art Students League in New York City under John Sloan and Harry Wickey.

Remaining in New York, he did drawings of the theater, which were published in the Herald Tribune, New York Times, and Theater Magazine. Most of his career was spent in New York city where he captured the spirit and essence of everyday life during the 1930s and 1940s.

He illustrated the works, Human Comedy (Saroyan), White Deer (Thurber() and Once Around the Sun (Atkinson). He was the author of Come One, Come All, and in 1951 he began illustrating a total of 33 children's books, which he co-authored with his wife, Lydia.

During his last 20 years he maintained a home in Santa Barbara, CA. He died on Feb. 1, 1978 while in New York City to meet his editor at Viking Press. Three years before his demise Mayor Lindsey presented him with the keys to the city and dubbed him the "Daumier of New York City."

Buffalo, NY Steel Mill American Scene Modernism WPA Era Industrial 20th Century

Ruth A. Haven Gay (1911-1992)
“Buffalo, NY Steel Mill”, c. 1935
23 x 28 inches
Oil on canvas
Signed Gay lower left

BIO
Ruth Gay (1911 – 1992)
A Painter, sculptor and educator, Ruth Gay (aka: Ruth A. Gay; aka: Ruth Haven; aka: Mrs. Harry Haven) was born in St. Thomas, Ontario, Canada and died in Newfane, New York, U.S.A. She was a teacher and art department head at MacMurray College, Jacksonville, Illinois. Her works were exhibited widely in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s at various major American venues including at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She appears to have lived much of her later life in Niagara Falls, New York. An example of her work is in the permanent collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center, Buffalo, New York.

She graduated from the Syracuse University College of Fine Arts, New York in 1934; and later studied at the Art students League of New York*; and, under Alexander Brook, Henry Varnum Poor and Charles Cutler. Gay was a teacher and art department head at MacMurray College, Jacksonville, Illinois from 1938 to 1946; and, also taught painting and sculpture privately in Illinois, New Mexico and New York.

She was a member of the Patteran Society* (Buffalo, New York). She also exhibited with the American Federation of Arts* in 1940 and at the annual Western New York exhibitions at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo in 1948, 1949 and 1951.

Her works were included in other group exhibitions at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (1937, 1938, 1939); the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1938); the Worcester Museum of Art, Massachusetts (1938); the Syracuse Museum of Fine Arts, New York; the Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester, New York; the Riverside Museum, New York City; the Harwood Museum of Art, Taos, New Mexico; and, at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque.

Figurative Cubist Surrealist Abstraction Mid 20th Century American Modern Large

O. Louis Guglielmi (1906 - 1956)
OBSESSIVE THEME
44 x 33 inches
Oil on canvas
Signed and dated '48 lower left
Titled verso
Framed 46 1/2 x 35 1/2 inches

The painting is featured in the book "O. Louis Guglielmi, A Retrospective Exhibition," published in 1980 by Rutgers University. The exhibition was seen in four museums including the Whitney Museum of American Art, May 6 - July 5, 1981.

BIO
Painter O. Louis Guglielmi moved stylistically from a symbolic Social Realism, Precisionism, and Surrealism, ultimately to abstraction, but his subject matter, when it existed, dealt with society's underdogs. He had experienced slum living as a youth, moving from place to place because of his violinist father's need to find employment. Though Guglielmi was born in 1906 in Cairo, Egypt, his Italian parents moved the family to Italy. In 1914, they were living in New York City in Harlem's Italian slum.

Guglielmi was involved in the political and artistic protests of the trial, conviction as anarchist bombers, and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927. He painted a picture that excoriated the tenement living conditions of many Americans, "One Third of a Nation." It was such a strong statement that the State Department cancelled an international tour of American modern art.

He was a teenage art student at the National Academy of Design in New York City and the Beaux Arts Institute from 1920 to 1925. During this time, he worked as a commercial artist, painted murals and was awarded a Tiffany Foundation fellowship.

Guglielmi painted Precisionist stylized architectural motifs through 1933. He then moved toward a moody Magic Realism and Surrealism under the influence of Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico. During the Depression years of 1934 to 1939, Guglielmi found employment with the Federal government's artist relief programs, the WPA and Public Works Administration.

His social and political awareness impelled him, in 1938, to warn that the Spanish Civil War might lead to greater destruction. His painting, "Mental Geography," depicted the Brooklyn Bridge destroyed, prophetically symbolizing, in its way, United States involvement and casualties in the coming war.

In 1945, after serving three years in the army in World War II, Guglielmi turned toward more formal, Stuart Davis-like abstractions. This is particularly interesting, considering that his experience in the War might have sent him in any of several artistic and philosophical directions. Guglielmi might have emerged from widespread wartime suffering with an enhanced concern for the plight of humanity he had already evidenced in his earlier work. But what he actually did, stylistically speaking, was avoid humanity and the world through his decision to paint abstractly, perhaps overwhelmed by his experiences, immersing himself solely in the safer, less troubling realm of aesthetic manipulation.

At the end, Guglielmi was painting completely abstract works.

He was a prize-winning artist who exhibited his paintings in many major exhibitions. Before his death in 1956 at age fifty, Louis Guglielmi taught at Louisiana State University and the New School for Social Research in New York City. His work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, as well as the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. and the Newark Museum in New Jersey.

42nd Street Library NYC American Scene Ashcan WPA Modern 20th Century Realism

Bernard Gussow
42nd Street Library
25 x 30 inches
Oil on canvas
Signed lower left
Framed 28 1/2 x 33 3/4 inches

BIO
Russian-born Gussow trained at the Art Students League and the National Academy of Design. He also studied under Bonnat at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. His first claim to fame was exhibiting two works at the Armory Show in 1913. Gussow exhibited at the Society of Independent Artists between 1917 and 1934 and at Salons of America in the 1930s.

The Whitney Museum of American Art, for example, has his Subway Stairs. The Barnes Foundation and the Museum of Modern Art also have his paintings. Gussow even participated in the Federal Art Project, contributing a post office mural (Recreation Hours) in East Rochester, NY.

Family Carved Sculpture American Scene Modernism Mid 20th Century WPA Realism

Milton Hebald (American, 1917-2015),
Family of Three
13 1/2 x 5 1/4 x 4 1/4 inches
Carved wood, c. 1945
Signed and dated to lower right
Mounted atop a rectangular base.

BIO
A sculptor working primarily in bronze but also in plaster, terracotta, and wood, Milton Hebald was known for his figural compositions. He was interested in the roots of sculpture from the eastern Mediterranean tradition through the Renaissance and Baroque periods, especially Bernini of Rome.

Of his many large scale commissioned works throughout New York City is perhaps his most famous work of the Zodiac Group, a 220-foot-long bronze in the Pan American Terminal at John F. Kennedy Airport. Hebald was born and raised in New York City, and studied there at the Art Students League (enrolled at the young age of ten), the National Academy of Design, and the Beaux-Arts Institute. During the Depression, he worked for the WPA, and his first one-person show was in 1937 at the American Artists Congress Gallery. He also exhibited regularly at the Whitney Museum, where two of his works are included in their permanent collection.

After 1955, he was active in Rome, Italy, when he was awarded the Prix-de-Rome to the American Academy in Rome. Later he moved to Lago di Bracciano until 2004, when he returned to the United States.

Mary Tyler Moore Dick Van Dyke Mid 20th Century Hollywood Emmy Award TV Legends

Al Hirschfeld (1903 – 2003)
Mary Tyler Moore and Dick Van Dyke
Sight Size: 15 1/4 x 11 1/2 inches
Etching with aquatint
Signed lower right and numbered
21/200 lower left
Framed 23 3/4 x 19 1/2 inches

Our gallery offers many original drawings and lithographs by Al Hirschfeld.

BIO
Al Hirschfeld’s (1903-2003) drawings stand as one of the most innovative efforts in establishing the visual language of modern art through caricature in the 20th century. A self described “characterist,” his signature work, defined by a linear calligraphic style, appeared in virtually every major publication of the last nine (including a 75 year relationship with The New York Times) as well as numerous book and record covers and 15 postage stamps. He is represented in many public collections, including the Metropolitan, the Whitney, the National Portrait Gallery, and Harvard’s Theater Collection. Hirschfeld authored several books including Manhattan Oases and Show Business is No Business in addition to 10 collections of his work. He was declared a Living Landmark by the New York City Landmarks Commission in 1996 and a Living Legend by the Library of Congress in 2000. Just before his death in January 2003, he learned he was to be awarded the Medal of Arts from the National Endowment of the Arts and inducted into the Academy of Arts and Letters. The winner of two Tony Awards, he was be given the ultimate Broadway accolade on what would have been his 100th birthday in June 2003. The Martin Beck Theater was renamed the Al Hirschfeld Theater. A database of all of his works can be found on the Al Hirschfeld Foundation's website.

"The Defiant Ones" Tony Curtis Sidney Poitier Oscar Winning 1958 film Caricature. Two escaped convicts chained together, one white and one black, must learn to get along in order to elude capture.

Al Hirschfeld (1903 – 2003)
The Defiant Ones
Starring Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier
18 x 20 (sight) Inches, board measures 30 x 22 inches
Ink on board, 1958

Starring Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier, directed by Stanley Kramer, the 1958 adventure drama film won a fistful of Oscars, Golden Globe and BAFTA Awards.

Al Hirschfeld’s (1903-2003) drawings stand as one of the most innovative efforts in establishing the visual language of modern art through caricature in the 20th century. A self described “characterist,” his signature work, defined by a linear calligraphic style, appeared in virtually every major publication of the last nine (including a 75 year relationship with The New York Times) as well as numerous book and record covers and 15 postage stamps.

He is represented in many public collections, including the Metropolitan, the Whitney, the National Portrait Gallery, and Harvard’s Theater Collection. Hirschfeld authored several books including Manhattan Oases and Show Business is No Business in addition to 10 collections of his work. He was declared a Living Landmark by the New York City Landmarks Commission in 1996 and a Living Legend by the Library of Congress in 2000.

Just before his death in January 2003, he learned he was to be awarded the Medal of Arts from the National Endowment of the Arts and inducted into the Academy of Arts and Letters. The winner of two Tony Awards, he was be given the ultimate Broadway accolade on what would have been his 100th birthday in June 2003. The Martin Beck Theater was renamed the Al Hirschfeld Theater. A database of all of his works can be found on the Al Hirschfeld Foundation's website.

The work comes directly from the Al Hirschfeld Foundation.

The board measures 22 x 30 inches.

Mae West Legendary Sex Symbol Movie Star Mid 20th Century Hollywood Celebrity

Al Hirschfeld (1903 – 2003)
Mae West
Sight 15 1/2 x 19 1/2
Etching with aquatint
Signed lower right and numbered
36/150 lower left

Al Hirschfeld, caricature print of Mae West, signed, framed 23" x 27".

Our gallery offers many original drawings and lithographs by Al Hirschfeld.

BIO
Al Hirschfeld’s (1903-2003) drawings stand as one of the most innovative efforts in establishing the visual language of modern art through caricature in the 20th century. A self described “characterist,” his signature work, defined by a linear calligraphic style, appeared in virtually every major publication of the last nine (including a 75 year relationship with The New York Times) as well as numerous book and record covers and 15 postage stamps.

He is represented in many public collections, including the Metropolitan, the Whitney, the National Portrait Gallery, and Harvard’s Theater Collection. Hirschfeld authored several books including Manhattan Oases and Show Business is No Business in addition to 10 collections of his work. He was declared a Living Landmark by the New York City Landmarks Commission in 1996 and a Living Legend by the Library of Congress in 2000.

Just before his death in January 2003, he learned he was to be awarded the Medal of Arts from the National Endowment of the Arts and inducted into the Academy of Arts and Letters.

The winner of two Tony Awards, he was be given the ultimate Broadway accolade on what would have been his 100th birthday in June 2003. The Martin Beck Theater was renamed the Al Hirschfeld Theater. A database of all of his works can be found on the Al Hirschfeld Foundation's website.

"Let's Make an Opera" Original Drawing NYT Published, Norman Del Mar Conducts

Al Hirschfeld (1903-2003)
"Let's Make An Opera"
Ink on board
13 1/2 x 18 1/2, sight
Framed: 22 1/2 x 27 1/2
Signed lower right under the mat. A photo is included.
Published in The New York Times, December 3, 1950

The drawing is featured on the Al Hirschfeld Foundation's web site.

NORMAN DEL MAR CONDUCTS AN AUDIENCE REHERSAL IN LET'S MAKE AN OPERA
Norman René Del Mar CBE (31 July 1919 – 6 February 1994) was an English conductor, horn player, and biographer. As a conductor, he specialised in the music of late romantic composers; including Edward Elgar, Gustav Mahler, and Richard Strauss. He left a great legacy of recordings of British music, in particular Elgar, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Frederick Delius, and Benjamin Britten. He notably conducted the premiere recording of Britten's children's opera Noye's Fludde.

Our gallery offers many original drawings and lithographs by Al Hirschfeld.

BIO
Al Hirschfeld’s (1903-2003) drawings stand as one of the most innovative efforts in establishing the visual language of modern art through caricature in the 20th century.

A self described “characterist,” his signature work, defined by a linear calligraphic style, appeared in virtually every major publication of the last nine (including a 75 year relationship with The New York Times) as well as numerous book and record covers and 15 postage stamps.

He is represented in many public collections, including the Metropolitan, the Whitney, the National Portrait Gallery, and Harvard’s Theater Collection. Hirschfeld authored several books including Manhattan Oases and Show Business is No Business in addition to 10 collections of his work. He was declared a Living Landmark by the New York City Landmarks Commission in 1996 and a Living Legend by the Library of Congress in 2000.

Just before his death in January 2003, he learned he was to be awarded the Medal of Arts from the National Endowment of the Arts and inducted into the Academy of Arts and Letters. The winner of two Tony Awards, he was be given the ultimate Broadway accolade on what would have been his 100th birthday in June 2003. The Martin Beck Theater was renamed the Al Hirschfeld Theater.

A database of all of his works can be found on the Al Hirschfeld Foundation's website.

Breton Wrestlers Plaster Figurative Modern Male Sculpture Female Artist LGBT '29

Malvina Hoffman (American, 1885 - 1966)
BRETON WRESTLERS
20 inches h
Plaster
Signed and titled BRETON WRESTLERS, PARIS, 1929. It is stamped "MPI on the back of the base, likely a museum reproduction of the bronze.

The Sculpture is recorded in the Smithsonian American Art Museum's Inventories of American Painting and Sculpture database under the Control Number: IAS 9E260042.

Artist's quote about the subject:
"The wrestlers were done from actual Breton athletes, at St. Guenole – the tip end of Finistere in Brittany, France. After I saw them on the beach there I persuaded them to come to Paris where I could finish the details of the three positions and have them authenticated. This form of wrestling, I am told, is no longer permitted, as there were too many serious accidents, and sometimes broken necks."
-M. Hoffman
April 27, 1962

BIO
Born in New York City, Malvina Hoffman was a portrait sculptor of pieces that expressed the fluid movement of dancers and lofty human values. She became especially noted for her hall-of-fame portraits including Paderewski, Pavlova, Wendell Wilkie and Katharine Cornell.

Many of her pieces she carved in stone, and some of them were enormous in scale including war monuments. Her masterpiece is considered to be The Races of Man, done in 1933, commissioned by the Marshall Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. It had one-hundred five separate pieces, cast in bronze, depicting people from diverse cultures.

She grew up in an art-oriented environment in Manhattan where her father was a pianist and music filled the house. She attended the Brearley School and took private art classes, first studying painting with John White Alexander.

Changing to sculpture, she did her first work in 1909, a portrait bust of her father who died that year leaving the family in financial straits. However, his portrait was accepted for the National Academy of Design's annual exhibition and launched her career.

She studied with Herbert Adams and Gutzon Borglum in New York and in Paris in 1910 with Auguste Rodin from whom she learned naturalism and whose doorstep she sat on until he agreed to see her. In Paris, she associated with numerous leading intellectuals including Gertrude Stein, Henri Matisse, and Anna Pavlova, and her bronze sculptures of Pavlova, Russian ballet star, won her much attention and many commissions.

Depression Era Mid 20th Century Social Realism Modern WPA American Scene NYC

Saul Kovner (1904-1981)
Facing the East River
20 x 24 inches
Oil on canvas
Signed lower right Saul, inscribed with artist's name Saul to reverse and dated 1945
Framed 27 x 31 inches

BIO
Saul Kovner (1904-1982) was born in Russia on January 14, 1904. He settled in New York City in the 1920s. He studied at the Pratt Institute and National Academy of Design.

He then maintained a studio near Central Park, taught classes, and created paintings, prints, and drawings of the city streets and their denizens.

During the 1930s, he worked for the WPA project. He died in North Hollywood, CA on March 13, 1981.

His works are signed only with his first name, “Saul” and are held at the Metropolitan Museum, Library of Congress, Detroit Institute of Fine Arts, and Baltimore Museum of Art.

Brooklyn Bridge NYC American Scene Ashcan 20th Century Social Realism Modern

John Marin (1870-1953)
Brooklyn Bridge
7 1/2 x 9 7/8 inches
Graphite on paper
Signed lower right, c. 1925
Framed 12 1/2 x 15 inches
Labels verso Kennedy Galleries,
Los Angeles County Museum

Bio
ohn Marin was born in Rutherford, New Jersey in 1870. His father was a public accountant; his mother died only nine days after his birth. He was taken to his maternal grandparents with whom he lived in Weehawken, New Jersey. His grandparents, with their son and two daughters were the only parents Marin was to know; it has been suggested that his father seems to have ignored him. As a child of seven or eight Marin began to sketch and when he was a teenager he had completed his earliest watercolors. His education in the schools of New Jersey was interspersed with summers of hunting, fishing and sketching; he traveled in the Catskills, and as far away as Wisconsin and Minnesota. But formal training was almost incidental to his development as an artist.

He is to America what Paul Cezanne was to France - an innovator who helped to oppose the influence of the narrative painters, the illustrators who were more interested in subject than form, in surface than substance. Marin brought to his work a combination of values which, at the turn of the century, was unique in this country: an aliveness of touch, colors that have both sparkle and solidity, and forms that are vibrant with an energy characteristic of our age.

Marin established himself as a practicing architect. In the early 1890s, he worked for four architects and by 1893 had designed six houses in Union Hill, New Jersey. At the age of twenty-eight, he decided to become a professional artist and studied briefly at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia and the Art Students League in New York City.

As a watercolorist he had no equal. He used this fluid, spontaneous medium to abstract from objects - skyscrapers, boats, mountains and seas - a simplified anatomy of color and form and to define the pulsation of stresses and movements in the relationship of objects. It was a great disappointment, all his life, that his oil paintings did not achieve the popularity that his watercolors did.

From 1905 to 1910 he worked in Europe, where he was influenced by Whistler's watercolors. It was Alfred Stieglitz, Marin's lifetime friend and dealer, whose firm faith in his genius made his position in the art world possible. He developed a distinctive style that he used most characteristically in powerful watercolors of the Maine coast. During the 1920s he provided the dominant force in the movement away from naturalistic representation towards an art of expressive semi-abstraction.

He married Marie Jane Hughes after he returned to New York. They had one son, who grew up to run his father's considerable affairs. Marin continued to work at the same steady fast pace as long as he lived. Since 1908 he had produced 1700 paintings, an average of forty a year. He had made the frames for them as well. At the age of seventy-nine, he began to taper off from the days when he painted one hundred watercolors in a summer. He died in 1953.

"Sock Hop" Mid-Century American Modernism WPA Female Artist 20th Century Realism. 30 x 24 inches. Oil on canvas. Signed on stretcher, c. 1940s. Frame is likely original to the painting.

Realist painter-printmaker Kyra Markham had significant experience as an actress from 1909 into the 1920s with the Chicago Little Theater, in movies in Los Angeles, and from 1916 with the Provincetown Players in Massachusetts.

Born Elaine Hyman in Chicago in 1891, Markham studied art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1907-1909, when, discovered by Maurice Brown, she left school to act. Though she supplemented her income from acting with work as a muralist and illustrator, it was not until 1930 that she returned to the study of art with Alexander Abels at the Art Students League in New York City. In 1934, she studied printmaking, including lithography, and took part in the WPA artists' program from 1935-1937. She was awarded the Mary S. Collins Prize at the Philadelphia Print Club annual exhibition in 1935.

Her paintings and lithographs are primarily realist in style and run the gamut from poetic landscapes to Social-Realist commentaries such as ("Penny, Lady?," 1936, a poor, aged couple playing the hurdy-gurdy on the street, and "Lockout," 1937, with laborers prevented from going back to work. There are also everyday urban scenes such as "Bleecker Street Fire Hydrant," 1942, where kids dance in arching swathes of water that are charged with an element of magic and transcendence. "Night and Morn," 1937, with two nude figures, a dark male and light female, becomes a yin-yang swirl of forms.

Markham reprises her theatrical career in the lithograph "Twelfth Night," 1934, creating a complex design of architectural elements backstage at a theater with two carpenters at work on two levels of the stage set for Shakespeare's play.

Prior to 1916, Markham was emotionally involved over a period of time with the novelist Theodore Dreiser, author of "An American Tragedy."

Her work is in the collections of the Smithsonian Institution and Georgetown University (Lady MacBeth, A Self-Portrait," 1935, and "Winter Twilight"), both in Washington, D.C.; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Whitney Museum of American Art, both in New York City.

Markham was a member of the National Association of Women Artists, Southern Vermont Artists and Deerfield Valley Artists.

Kyra Markham died in 1967.

"Manhattan Bridge" American Modernism NYC Cityscape WPA Mid-Century 20th Century. 20 x 14 inches. Watercolor and pencil on paper. Titled, signed and dated 1938 lower right.

Reginald Marsh (American, 1898-1954) Brooklyn Bridge, 1940, Signed and dated Reginald Marsh May 1940 (lr), Watercolor over traces of pencil on paper , 15 x 22 inches sight.

Reginald Marsh was born in Paris, France in 1898, the child of artist parents. He was born over a small cafe on Paris' Left Bank. He was brought to the United States in 1900 and was drawing before he was three. He studied art at Yale University and the Art Students League, during which time he worked primarily as an illustrator for New York newspapers and magazines. After studying in Paris in 1925 and 1926, he turned seriously to painting. In 1929 he was introduced to the egg-tempera medium, which he used extensively the rest of his life.

Marsh's gusto for painting the bottom crust of society contrasted curiously with his background. His parents, both well-known artists, were steeped in academic traditions. He attended Lawrenceville Academy and Yale; perhaps this elite background made it possible to paint the earthy people he did with a journalist's objectivity.

An admirer of Rubens and Delacroix, he disliked modernist art; indeed, his lifelong preoccupation was with people - enjoying themselves at beaches, at amusement parks, or on crowded city streets. Marsh was a second-generation Ash Can School painter and printmaker, best known as an urban regionalist. He spent his days sketching in small notebooks with a pen.

Industrial Machine Age American Scene WPA Mid 20th Century 1939 San Francisco World's Fair

HAIG PATIGIAN (American/Armenian, 1876-1950)
Aeronautics Pediments
Two Plaster Casts, c. 1930s
Each 13.25 x 14.75 x 6 inches

It's possible these moquettes were created for the 1939 World's Fair, the Golden Gate International Exhibition in San Francisco.

Provenance: Private Collection of Lois M. Wright, Author of "A Catalogue of the Life Works of Haig Patigian, San Francisco Sculptor, 1876-1950),” 1967 Loan to Oakland Museum of California (Oakland, CA)

BIO
Haig Patigian is noted for his classical works, which are especially numerous in public venues in San Francisco, California. Patigian was born in Van, Armenia, which at that time was under Turkish rule. Haig was the son of Avedis and Marine Patigian, both teachers in the American Mission School there. He and his older brother showed an aptitude for art early on and were encouraged by their parents. Their father himself had taken up the new hobby of photography. The 1880s were harsh times, however, for many Armenians under an oppressive rule by the Turkish government. Many people were fleeing to the safety of the United States. Suspicious Turkish authorities accused his father of photographing city structures for the Russian government, and in 1888 he fled for his life to America.

Haigs father made his way to Fresno, California, and began life anew as a ranch hand. Within two years he sent for his wife, as well as Haig, his three sisters and brother, and in 1891 the Patigians made the journey from Armenia. Haigs father, an industrious man, worked on various farms, and eventually bought his own ranch and vineyard. It was among fertile farmland of Fresno that Haig grew up.

Young Haigs education consisted of teachings by his parents and by intermittent attendance in public schools. Although he had dreams of becoming an artist, he did not have the opportunity for formal study of art, and began working long days in the vineyards around Fresno.

At age seventeen, Haig made a step towards his dreams and apprenticed himself to learn the trade of sign painting. In his spare time he nurtured his interest in art by painting nature and life scenes with watercolors and oil paints. When his sign-painting mentor left Fresno, Haig opened his own shop and made a name for himself in the town. San Francisco, in the meantime, had been attracting artists since the Gold Rush and had become a thriving art center. Within a few years, Haig had put aside several hundred dollars to move to San Francisco, joining his brother who was already working there as an illustrator.

In 1899, when he was twenty-three, Haig had saved enough money to enroll at the Mark Hopkins Art Institute in San Francisco. Like many aspiring artists of his time, Patigian supported himself by working as a staff artist in the art department of a local newspaper, and in the winter of 1900, nearing his 24th birthday, Haig began work for the San Francisco Bulletin, producing cartoons, black and white illustrations, as well as watercolors.

In 1902 tragedy struck Haig and his family. His 29-year-old brother died of pneumonia, and then his frail mother died a short time later. Five months more saw his youngest sister, just out of high school, die too. Saddened and depressed, Haig moved out of the studio he had shared with his brother, and into a dilapidated studio in a poor section of town. During this time of sadness, Haig fed a growing interest in sculpture.

In 1904 Haig created what he later called his "first finished piece in sculpture". The work, called "The Unquiet Soul", depicted a man thrown back against a rock while waves lash at his feet. The body was tense and twisted, with one hand, in Haig's own words, "searchingly leaning and clutching the rock, while the other masks his troubled head".

The Press Club of San Francisco, which Haig had joined in 1901, put "The Unquiet Soul" on exhibition and local headlines proclaimed "Local Newspaper Artist Embraces Sculptor's Art", and "First Work Predicts Brilliant Future". With the support of friends and community acclaim, the young illustrator left his newspaper job and became a professional sculptor.

The path of his new career was not easy though. Haig had never made much money working for the newspaper and his father needed help with growing debt from funeral expenses and business problems. From time to time Haig sold some artwork, but also occasionally borrowed from friends to pay the rent. He was the classic 'starving artist'.

In the spring of 1905 a white-bearded 81-year-old stranger knocked on Haig's door. It was George Zehndner, from Arcata, California. Zehndner had been born in Bavaria, Germany in 1824, the son of a farmer. In 1849 he had come to America looking for prosperity, settling in Indiana, where he worked on a farm and learned English. He found his way to the West Coast in 1852. Penniless, he worked in various jobs from San Francisco to Sacramento, then found some luck working in the gold fields of Weaverville in Trinity County, and eventually moving to a farm on 188 acres near Arcata. In his 77th year in May of 1901, Zahndner had taken a trip to San Jose, where he stood in a crowd to see a man he thought much of, President William McKinley. McKinley was popular as 'the first modern president' partially because he realized going out to meet the common person increased his support. In September of that year, however, an anarchist assassinated the president while he stood in a receiving line at the Pan-American Exhibition in Buffalo, New York. Soon after, the city of San Jose erected a statue of the slain president in St. James Park. Zehndner took a second trip to San Jose where he visited the McKinley monument. Touched, Zehndner decided that, no matter the cost, his town of Arcata too would memorialize McKinley.

George Zehndner had read about Haig in a newspaper article and asked if Patigian would create a heroic statue of the late President McKinley for Arcata. When asked how much it would cost, Haig responded, despite his borderline poverty, with the fabulous sum of $15,000. Zehndner agreed. The President was to be portrayed standing, wearing an overcoat, with his feet planted squarely on the ground. In the finished statue, one hand is held out before him in a typical posture of speaking, with the other hand holding the speech as his side. The 9-foot statue's plaster cast was completed in January 1906. Zehndner arrived in San Francisco by steamboat to approve of the work. The next day Haig had the cast transported to a bronze foundry near the waterfront south of Market Street in San Francisco. McKinley was to be completed and shipped to Arcata and erected in time for an unveiling in May, 1906. Haig came to Arcata to supervise placement of the statue's granite base, which consisted of forty pieces of granite, altogether weighing twenty-six tons.

On Tuesday, April 17, 1906 Haig was back in San Francisco to supervise McKinley's voyage north to Arcata. At a quarter past five the next morning Haig was awakened from his bed by the rocking, twisting and tumbling of the Great San Francisco Earthquake. He walked through the destruction several miles to the foundry, and later wrote, "The first thing I noticed reaching this street was the great pile of City Hall, with its masonry shaken down into a confused mass of rubbish. The great dome was stripped bare of its architectural adornments and stones rose skyward in a skeleton of rusty structural steel. I continued my walk towards the waterfront, miles away. Here and there on either side of the street were the fearful marks of the quake. Some buildings seemed to be sliced in two by some gigantic ax in a superhuman hand, exposing the interior of the lodgings, offices, etc. As I walked along seeing these awful results of the earthquake my sense of value gradually became numbed, and somehow I felt less concerned about the fate of my statue." Upon reaching the foundry, he found the statue lying face-up on the foundry floor. The quake had knocked it down, but a large plaster model nearby braced its fall.

Much of the city was beginning to burn, with the city's water systems having been rendered inoperative. The statue was too big for him to move. He left it there, hoping city fires would not melt it. That night Haig slept on the lawn of a hospital across from his studio, but by morning fire was only two blocks away. He moved some of his sculpture casts onto the hospital lawn. The casts were consumed by the fire, along with the hospital and his studio and about 28,000 other buildings.

A week passed before Haig could venture into the devastated district. He met up with the foundry owner, who told him the foundry had succumbed to the blaze and the statue was destroyed. Saddened, Haig eventually made his way back to the foundry where he found a group of men standing in the center of the street. They were standing around none other than the blackened bronze William McKinley, lying prone in the roadway, with one hand held up to the sky. McKinley was sooty, but unharmed. Haig learned an employee of an adjoining machine shop had saved the statue. After the earthquake the man noticed the back of the foundry was burning. He and several passersby got a truck, managed to get McKinley onto it, and wheeled it out into the street. One of the good Samaritans had reportedly said, "Boys, it would be a shame to let McKinley melt, let's move it out." McKinley survived, but the truck was reduced to charred wood and its metal wheels.

Meanwhile, back in Arcata the earthquake had toppled nearly 30 chimneys, many windows were broken, and some telephones were put out of commission. Arcatans knew the San Francisco foundry was within the zone destroyed by fire, and when the steamship from there arrived without the statue, they assumed the worst. The Arcata Union newspaper ran the headline, "A Pedestal, But No Statue." Patigian wired a surprised Mr. Zehndner, however, with a message that he would arrive soon with McKinley. The Arcata Union broadcast the news with the headline, "Not Melted After All."

McKinley arrived in nearby Eureka by steamboat on May 1, 1906. A gathered crowd cheered as the statue was hoisted ashore. Two thousand people were present for the statue's grand unveiling on July 4th, more visitors than the town had ever seen. Houses and businesses were decorated in patriotic bunting. The Arcata Park Band and George Zehndner presented the statue to the people of Arcata. Zehndner said, "This is the happiest moment of my life. I am more than recompensed for the expense of the statue of our dear President, and for the great worry about its safe arrival and placement where we see it now." As for Haig Patigian, the commission from the city of Arcata had earned him public recognition, and countless commissions were to follow.

Following the 1906 destruction of San Francisco by the Great Quake, Patigian departed first to the East, and then to Paris where he spent the next two years studying and sculpting under Alix Marquet. He exhibited his classical work, Ancient History, at the Salon des Artistes Francais, and made a successful international debut.

Returning to San Francisco in 1908, Patigian opened on Webster Street a studio, which he maintained for the rest of his life, creating his works in the grand classical tradition. He married Blanche Hollister of Courtland, California, and they established a home on Francisco Street. Patigian also became an active member of several clubs that were supportive of his creativity. He served as President of the Bohemian Club for some years, and also maintained memberships in the Societe des Artistes Francais, the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the National Sculpture Society, and the California Historical Society, among others.

Haig Patigians greatest period of productivity took place between 1908 and World War II, and he had many opportunities for the creation of public sculpture. One commission was for the pediment over the entrance of what is now the Ritz Carlton Hotel, on Stockton Street in San Francisco, a building that at the time he created the triangular work was home to the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. He also created works for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, statues of James Rolph and Frederick Funston in City Hall, a seated Abraham Lincoln facing the Civic Center, John Pershing in Golden Gate Park, tennis star Helen Wills for the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, among countless private commissions in the city, throughout California, and across the country.

A well-beloved example of his work is located in the private garden of Elios and Virginia Anderlini, who built a home in 1941, on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco, at 400 Filbert and Montgomery, where they began renowned gardening efforts. Over the years they gifted their neighborhood with a glorious flowering garden and a dramatic magenta bougainvillea that adorns their Capri pink home. In the winter months when the roses have been pruned back, a golden sculpture titled Creation can be seen in the center of the garden. It is the studio model of Haig Patigian's thirty-five foot sculpture of four figures representing the four stages of life, which once stood at the end of the Avenue of Nations at the World's Fair on Treasure Island.

Patigian, having trained in the classic tradition of representational sculpture, had a distaste for the avant-garde and the abstract. His opposition to modernism alienated him from many of the major movements of his era, but his popularity, especially in San Francisco, was not diminished. He also opposed what he saw as a growing use of art for propaganda purposes and subversive social statement during the 1930s, and served at one time as president of the Society for Sanity in Art, an organization dedicated to opposing such use.

His last public contributions were in 1939-1940, when he created a number of statues for the Golden Gate International Exhibition. His creations are still enjoyed by many throughout the country, especially in San Francisco where sculpture walk tours continue to keep his name in the forefront.

Original Painting. New Yorker Magazine Published 1935 American Scene Modern WPA

Antonio Petruccelli (1907 - 1994)
Movers
New Yorker published, September 20, 1935
18 X 11 1/2 inches (sight)
Framed 25 X 18 1/2 inches
Gouache on board
Signed lower right

BIOGRAPHY:
Antonio Petruccelli (1907-1994) began his career as a textile designer. He became a freelance illustrator in 1932 after winning several House Beautiful cover illustration contests.

In addition to 24 Fortune magazine covers, four New Yorker covers, several for House Beautiful, Collier’s, and other magazines he did numerous illustrations for Life magazine from the 1930s – 60s.

‘Tony was Mr. Versatility for Fortune. He could do anything, from charts and diagrams to maps, illustrations, covers, and caricatures,’ said Francis Brennan, the former art director for Fortune.

Over the course of his career, Antonio won several important design awards, designing a U.S. Postage Stamp Commemorating the Steel Industry and designing the Bicentennial Medal for the Franklin Mint for the State of New Jersey.

Poker Players NYC Mid 20th Century Modern WPA American Scene Social Realism

Philip Reisman (1904-1992)
Poker Players
12 x 16 oil on board
Signed and dated 1949 lower right

BIO
Philip Reisman was born July 18, 1904 in Warsaw, Poland. In 1908 his family moved to New York, where he would come to expressively interpret scenes of various daily labor, seedy nightclubs and reflective moments within the city.

Reisman studied at the Art Students League of New York under Wallace Morgan, George Bridgeman, George Luks and Frank Du Mond. He studied privately as well with Harry Wickes from 1927-1928.

The Works Project Administration (WPA) and the Public Works Art Project (PWAP) provided Resiman with opportunities for commission and travel during the 1930's.

Exhibitions include several one-person shows at the ACA Gallery in New York between 1943 and 1963, and numerous group exhibitions with the National Academy of Design, Hudson Guild and Whitney Annual in New York.

Reisman also illustrated short stories for "Colliers" magazine and an edition of "Anna Karenina" for Random House and created a mural for the Bellevue Hospital, New York in 1937.

Reisman received awards from the Carnegie Institute, Nicholas Roerich Museum, National Academy of Design, American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and the American Society of Contemporary Artists.

He taught at the American Artists' School, Educational Alliance, South Shore Arts Workshop, Workshop School of Advertising Art and the Young Men's Hebrew Association.

His works have been included in the public collections of the New York Public Library; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the National Academy of Design, New York and the Hirschorn Museum and Sculpture Garden of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.

Coney Island Fire Eaters American Scene Modernism WPA Social Realism Mid-Century

Frederick "Fritz" Frey Rockwell (1917-1977)
Coney Island Fire Eaters
25 x 30 inches
Oil on Canvas
Signed and dated 1939 lower right

Housed in a period gilt Newcomb Macklin frame and is freshly restored. Very good condition.

BIO
Rockwell, Fritz Fritz Rockwell (1917-1997)
A sculptor and painter, Rockwell worked in both New York City and East Boothbay, Maine. Rockwell studied art at Columbia University, the National Academy of Design and with artists George Grosz and William Zorach, and exhibited extensively, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, the Portland Museum of Art, the Farnsworth Museum, Bowdoin College and the Ogunquit Arts Center.

American Scene Mid Century Modern Social Realism Men Working Industrial Waterway

Iver Rose 1899 - 1972
The Return
18 3/4 x 25 3/4 inches
Oil on paper, c. 1940s
Signed upper right, titled verso
Framed 26 x 33 inches

BIO
Iver Rose was born in Chicago at the turn of the 19th century. His introduction to art was through a drawing class at Hull-House, one of this country's best known social settlements, which was established in 1889 in the heart of Chicago's densely populated Near West Side neighborhood. Rose received additional instruction at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Cincinnati Academy of Art.

During the early 1920s, Rose moved to New York, where he found work as a commercial artist. When the Depression hit, he returned to Chicago and was employed for a time as an easel painter under the auspices of the WPA. Many of Rose's works dating from the 1930s and '40s have a social realism flavor about them, a concern for the plight of the working man.

In the paintings Rose did here on Cape Ann (and particularly in Rockport), this shows up in his depictions of men laboring in the granite quarries and working in the fishing industry. Rose would later turn his focus to lighter subjects, most notably clowns and children.

Iver Rose began summering in Rockport in the early 1930s. On his first visits to the area he found lodgings in a Main Street boarding house run by Jennie Savage, affectionately known as "the jungle."

American Art Deco 20th Century Modernism Social Realism WPA Era Scene Pin-Up

Arthur Rosenman Ross (1913 - 1981)
'Edward, This Man Insulted Me. Do Something"
Sight: 20 x 15 inches
Watercolor on Illustration Board
Signed , titled and dated 1933 lower right

Provenance: Estate of the artist.

BIO
Arthur Rosenman Ross was a key figure in automotive design at General Motors during America's "Golden Age" of auto design, the 1930's through the 1950s.

He attended the Art Institute of Chicago from age 17, exhibiting a special interest for automotive renderings and the female figure.

In 1934, he changed his name from Rosenman to Ross, fearing his Jewish ancestry could prejudice his career prospects. At age 20, he turned down job offers from MGM Studios in Hollywood
and Duesenberg to work at General Motors alongside the Legendary Harley Earl in 1935.

He was hand picked by Mr. Earl and assigned to GM's War and Camouflage Division in 1937 through WW2.

It was during this pivotal period in which he executed some extraordinary military aircraft artworks, likely used between GM and America's military aeronautics companies in design preparation for WW2. General Motors played an important role in helping America's aircraft manufacturers preceding and during the war.

Just after the war in 1945, Mr. Ross was rewarded by GM, being made Chief Designer of Cadillac, then two years later becoming Chief at Oldsmobile until his retirement in 1959.

He was in large part responsible for some of GM's classic Cadillac designs such as the Cadillac Sixty Special, Fleetwood, LaSalle and GM's first concept car, the extraordinary Buick Y-Job.

Mr. Ross was an exceptionally charismatic and vivacious man who quite by chance, befriended His idol, Salvador Dali at GM in 1955.
They talked about art, cars and girls late into the evening, according to his son, Carter Ross.

He had a gift in rendering the erotic arts as well, much to the pleasure of many a GM executive who cloistered these gifts by the artist away, from their wives and girlfriends.

His highly futuristic cutting edge Art Deco artworks are notably extraordinary both in their execution and prescience.

Art Deco Buick Car 1937 Design Mid-20th Century American Modern Illustration

Arthur Rosenman Ross (1913 - 1981)
1937 Buick
Image, 10.5 x 19 inches
Sheet size is 11 5/8 x 23 inches
Gouache on black paper
Signed and dated 10-14-37 lower right

Very good condition.

Provenance: Estate of the artist.

BIO
Arthur Rosenman Ross was a key figure in automotive design at General Motors during America's "Golden Age" of auto design, the 1930's through the 1950s.

He attended the Art Institute of Chicago from age 17, exhibiting a special interest for automotive renderings and the female figure.

In 1934, he changed his name from Rosenman to Ross, fearing his Jewish ancestry could prejudice his career prospects. At age 20, he turned down job offers from MGM Studios in Hollywood
and Duesenberg to work at General Motors alongside the Legendary Harley Earl in 1935.

He was hand picked by Mr. Earl and assigned to GM's War and Camouflage Division in 1937 through WW2.

It was during this pivotal period in which he executed some extraordinary military aircraft artworks, likely used between GM and America's military aeronautics companies in design preparation for WW2. General Motors played an important role in helping America's aircraft manufacturers preceding and during the war.

Just after the war in 1945, Mr. Ross was rewarded by GM, being made Chief Designer of Cadillac, then two years later becoming Chief at Oldsmobile until his retirement in 1959.

He was in large part responsible for some of GM's classic Cadillac designs such as the Cadillac Sixty Special, Fleetwood, LaSalle and GM's first concept car, the extraordinary Buick Y-Job.

Mr. Ross was an exceptionally charismatic and vivacious man who quite by chance, befriended His idol, Salvador Dali at GM in 1955.
They talked about art, cars and girls late into the evening, according to his son, Carter Ross.

He had a gift in rendering the erotic arts as well, much to the pleasure of many a GM executive who cloistered these gifts by the artist away, from their wives and girlfriends.

His highly futuristic cutting edge Art Deco artworks are notably extraordinary both in their execution and prescience.

Till the Clouds Roll By 1945 Frank Sinatra Mid Century Modern Hollywood Film WPA

TILL THE COULDS ROLL BY (Film Set), oil on canvas, 20 x 24 inches signed “Richard Whorf” lower right and signed and dated on the verso “R. Whorf/ Dec. 21, 1945. Frame by Hendenryk.

ABOUT THE PAINTING
This painting is from the collection of Barbara and Frank Sinatra, dated December 21, 1945 (just nine days after Frank Sinatra’s 30th birthday), and depicts the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Culver City backlot during the filming of Till the Clouds Roll By, the direction of the film having been taking over by Richard Whorf in December 1945. It is not presently clear if Whorf gave the Sinatras this painting as a gift, as the presence of the Dalzell Hatfield Galleries label on the verso indicates the painting may have been sourced there. Frank and Nancy Sinatra acquired a number of works from Dalzell Hatfield Galleries during the 1940’s, or perhaps they framed it for the couple.

Sinatra performed “Old Man River’ in the film. Sinatra and June Allyson are depicted in the center of the painting.

PROVENANCE From the Estate of Mrs. Nancy Sinatra; Dalzell Hatfield Galleries, Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles.

An image of the Dalzell Hatfield label and the back of the original frame (which we replaced with a stunning Heydenrk frame) are attached.

Nancy Sinatra was Fran's first wife. Nancy Rose Barbato was 17 years old when she met Frank Sinatra, an 18-year-old singer from Hoboken, on the Jersey Shore in the summer of 1934. They married in 1939 at Our Lady of Sorrows Church in Jersey City where Frank gave Nancy a recording of a song dedicated to her titled "Our Love" as a wedding present. The young newlyweds lived and worked in New Jersey, where Frank worked as an unknown singing waiter and master of ceremonies at the Rustic Cabin while Nancy worked as a secretary at the American Type Founders.

His musical career took off after singing with big band leaders Harry James and Tommy Dorsey, and Nancy went on tour with Frank and his band which she recalled were the happiest times of their married life. Frank and Nancy Sinatra were the proud parents of three children: Nancy Jr. (born in 1940), Frank Jr. (born in 1944) and Christina (born in 1948). In 1951, Nancy and Frank’s marriage ended in divorce, but the couple remained friends throughout their lives until Frank’s death in 1998 at the age of 82.

Mrs. Sinatra devoted her life to her family, friends and philanthropic causes and died at the age of 101 on July 13, 2018. “In Nancy, I found beauty, warmth and understanding; being with her was my only escape from what seemed to be a grim world,” Frank Sinatra said in a 1952 interview.

BIO
Richard Whorf (June 4, 1906 December 14, 1966) was an American actor, film producer and director, and visual artist. He started his acting career at an early age in Boston, MA and was performing on Broadway by the age of 21. In the 1930s he moved to Hollywood where he became a contract player. He began directing in 1944 with his first film Blonde Fever starring Philip Dorn and Mary Astor. In 1946 and 1947 two films were released in which he directed Frank Sinatra: Till the Clouds Roll By (1946) featuring Sinatra performing “Old Man River” and the musical comedy It Happened in Brooklyn (1947) starring Sinatra in the lead role.

During the 1950s and 60s, Whorf directed multiple television shows including Gunsmoke, My Three Sons, and 67 episodes of The Beverly Hillbillies. He appeared on screen during that time as well, most notably in an episode of The Rifleman as The Illustrator, a painter with a drinking problem. In addition to his involvement in the entertainment industry, Whorf was an artist, having sold his first painting for $100 at the age of 15. Whorf’s artistic endeavors were profiled and his studio photographed for the March 17, 1963 issue of the syndicated newspaper magazine TV Channels. In the article, Whorf is quoted by the reporter, “Who says that a man has to do one thing?”

RCA Design Art Deco Streamline Mid Century Modern American Scene Architectural

John Vassos (1898-1985)
RCA 50 D Transmitter and Control Desk
12 x 19 1/2 (sight)
Mixed media on board
Signed lower right by Vassos and Lynn Brodton
inscribed RCA Eng. Styling Dept., Ben Grim 2-7-39
Mounted in original Art Deco frame, 19 1/4 x 26 3/4 inches

Depicting the original design for RCA 50 D Transmitter and Control Desk in 1939, designed by Vassos along with industrial designer Lynn Brodton

BIO
John Vassos was an original. It's hard to say that about too many artists as one can usually trace a stylistic path back to an earlier influence. I'm not sure he had one. The only source I can imagine is the technique of display cards that were ubiquitous during his youth and to which he applied his skills soon after he reached New York.

Born in Greece in 1898, he spent his youth in Constantinople where he was artistically active from an early age. He was the editorial cartoonist for a liberal newspaper in his early teens and when one of these cartoons featured a less-than-flattering view of the Turkish senate (he was Greek after all), he was forced to flee (supposedly for his life) on a British ship. He was 16.

World War I had just begun. Vassos saw action in the North Sea, at Gallipoli and on a mine sweeper. He ended up in America in 1919 in Boston. He soon was lettering placards and price tags and going to Fenway Art School at night. One of his instructors was John Singer Sargent. He spent some time as an assistant to Joseph Urban, the man who designed the famous Ziegfeld Follies. Vassos assisted on stage designs for the Boston Opera Company and designed promotional material for Columbia Records in the early Twenties.

He moved to New York in 1924 and opened his own studio, accepting any and all assignments. In his free time he attended the Art Students League and studied under George Bridgman, John Sloan and others. His modern and unique style was put to use on window displays for Macy's and murals for two large movie palaces. This led to advertising work for New York firms like Cammeyer shoes and Bonwit Teller specialties. A preliminary study for a 1924 General Tires ad is at right. A restrained palette and a strong sense of design made his work stand out from the other commercial artists who were trying to synthesize a new, modern style to replace the staid Victorian approach of the previous 25 years. This was, after all, the nineteen twenties!

It was in designs for the theatre that Vassos' style was finalized. The typical overly-ornate, rococo elements of the turn-of-the-century stage and theatre were overlaid with the modern, Art Deco sensibilities of the Twenties. (Art Deco is an abbreviation of Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes, the 1925 French exposition in Paris that celebrated the new, bold, streamlined style in art and appliances.) The shape was important! Whether it was the tall, rectilinear silhouette of a skyscraper or the simple arc from an artist's French curve, the details were muted and the outline carried the pertinent information to the viewer. An unused Vassos design for a theatre curtain (above right) for a 1926 Billy Rose musical is a perfect example. Vassos took the b&w opaque watercolors that he'd used for price placards a few years earlier and developed his startling and powerful approach that was unlike anything being done. It was an immediate (to use another modern word) hit.

More advertising work followed - this time for national firms like Packard Automobiles and French Line cruise ships. The next step for this most "modern" of artists was simple - Industrial Design. After all, the concept of Art Deco was an offshoot of the William Morris notion of a marriage of art with industry. If wallpaper and drapes and windows could be art, why not cars and radios? And, since these were the most modern of times, why not juke boxes and fountain pens? He designed a face-lotion bottle that had one of the very first screwtop caps, just in time for Prohibition. Sales jumped. As the nation grew more crowded, he designed the ubiquitous turnstile to keep some semblance of order in our public lives.

In 1926, he was asked to create a cover illustration for a stage production of Oscar Wilde's Salome. It was seen by an editor at the publishing house of E.P. Dutton and he commissioned a book from Vassos utilizing his distinct style. Salome was published in 1927 using a special printing technique called the Knudson Process. [I won't go into detail about it as there is an excellent contemporary article from a 1928 Penrose Annual available from Peter D. Verheyen on his Vassos site - see References below.] The difference between modern reproductive capabilities and this earlier patented technique are demonstrated below in a portion of an image (at left) from the first limited edition of Salome and the same portion from the 1976 Dover book, Contempo, Phobia and other Graphic Interpretations. This latter book (from which most of the images and information in this page are taken) reproduced Vassos' original paintings using photo-offset printing. You decide which is the most apropos.

"Cars, Buildings People" Contemporary Outsider Folk Art African American Urban

The painting measures 65 x 48 inches. We love that in the middle of the painting is a grocery store sticker that says $3.93.9 (not a typo).

BIO
Purvis Young (February 4, 1943 – April 20, 2010) was an American artist from the Overtown neighborhood of Miami, Florida. Young's work, often a blend of collage and painting, utilizes found objects and the experience of African Americans in the south. Young gained recognition as a cult contemporary artist, with a collectors' following that included Jane Fonda, Damon Wayans, Jim Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, and others. In 2006 a feature documentary titled Purvis of Overtown was produced about his life and work. His work is found in the collections of the American Folk Art Museum, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the High Museum of Art, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and others. In 2018, he was inducted into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame.