William Clutz

Tan Suit IV: Abstract Figurative Painting of Man in Beige Suit by William Clutz

1987

Abstract Figurative city landscape painting of Tompkins Square in Manhattan "Tompkins Square" painted by William Clutz in 1960 Oil on canvas, signed at bottom 30 x 25 inches, 30.5 x...

Abstract acrylic painting of a decorative fern motif with a patina of dark gold and bronze "Untitled (Hudson, NY)", painted by Frank Faulkner, c. 2007 60 x 48 x 1.5 inches, acrylic on wood panel Wire backing for secure installation Signed, verso This abstract painting was made by Frank Faulkner in 2007. This composition features a decorative leaf motif that radiates outwards from the center. The design is constructed with built up acrylic which creates an impasto surface, similar to a relief. The painting is unframed and the edges reveal drips from the layers of paint applied the surface. It's in excellent condition and ready to hang as is. More about the work: Revered artist and designer Frank Faulkner was well known among locals for his handsome restorations of prominent historic proprieties on Hudson’s Warren Street and beyond. It is apparent that the applied arts like classical architecture, Persian rugs, chinoiserie, and Samurai armor greatly influenced his own painting style. His technique employs a rich variety of texture and color evoking the qualities of mosaics and tapestry. According to the artist, the paintings on view experiment with representational imagery. Central designs are positioned in spaces suggestive of landscapes where the settings utilize horizon lines and natural, atmospheric light. Organic compositions take their cues from natural flora endowed with fantasy, which intentionally disorient the viewer. These works present the argument for the imaginary versus the empirical world. About the artist: Born in Sumter, South Carolina in 1946, Frank Faulkner received his B.F.A. from the University of North Carolina in 1968, Phi Beta Kappa, and his M.F.A. from the same institution in 1972. Faulkner’s work quickly won him numerous grants and awards, including an individual artist grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1974. He was selected for the Whitney Biennial in 1975, which prompted him to settle in New York. There, he came to the attention of Dorothy Miller, Curator Emeritus of the Museum of Modern Art with a legendary eye for new talent. Since then, Faulkner has continued to garner acclaim and awards. He has been featured in dozens of one-person exhibitions (not to mention group exhibitions) in this country, as well as in Japan, Switzerland, and Germany. Faulkner’s work is owned by leading museums (the Smith College museum in Northampton, Massachusetts, for example, the National Museum of American Art and the Hirshhorn in Washington, D.C.) and by renowned collectors such as Nelson Rockefeller, Baron Leon Lambert, Phillip Hanes and Abba Eban. What a viewer first notices is the sheer elegance of the pieces, no matter what materials Faulkner uses—metal, wood and fabric as well as canvas and paper. Obvious, too, is the artist’s originality. Faulkner belongs to no school. His work is patterned but is far too intellectual to qualify as so-called “pattern art,” which mainly strives to be merely pretty. Rather, he paints in his own highly organized way, filling the surface without being excessive or boring. Faulkner sets up a system, say, of dots or dashes, then subtly changes the visual rhythms in order to add life and surprise—what he calls “the gymnastics of seeing.” He works and reworks the surfaces of his canvases, often laying down one thin layer of slightly reflective gold, silver or bronze paint upon another until the final work seems to glow with inner light. John Ashbery, a leading critic and poet, has likened Faulkner’s art to minimalist music, which achieves both simplicity and beauty from its obsessive repetitions. The critic Carter Ratcliff describes it more simply as “brilliant artifice.” Faulkner’s current work, a series of paintings on paper, continues and deepens this exploration of the relationship between wrought surface and changing light. Another striking aspect of the work is the influence of the decorative arts. Faulkner has made some paintings on wood that stand independently and fold open like screens. Other pieces resemble large tapestries, and yet others take their inspiration from Art Nouveau inlays...

Figurative abstract style black and white acrylic and graphite painting of the Greek Goddess, Nike, "Winged Victory of Samothrace" "Nike Descending...

Figurative abstract style black, white, and blue acrylic painting of the Greek Goddess, Nike, "Winged Victory of Samothrace" with an antique wood f...

Tonalist style, abstract figurative watercolor by Susan Hope Fogel watercolor on Arches heavy-weight paper 30 x 44 inches, diptych of two sheets measuring 30 x 22 inches each 35.5 x...

Modern impressionist style figurative painting of a family in a colorful park landscape “Park Spring” painted by William Clutz in 1996 60 x 50 inches in a natural wood floater frame Wire backing, signed lower right This figurative oil on canvas painting was made in 1996 by William Clutz as part of a series of works called "Crossings". These paintings were a study of NYC dwellers engaging in the simple, daily activity of crossing the street. In this piece, Clutz captures a joyful moment of a mother and father walking in a sunlit park landscape with their young child. Bright sunlight radiates through lush fall foliage and fills the scene with a soft orange light. With broad, expressionistic brushstrokes, he discovers the extraordinary in the ordinary, by emphasizing the effects of sunlight on the human form. The painting is in excellent condition and is framed in a natural wood floater frame. More about the artist: In New York in the early 50's and 60's, abstract expressionism was the orthodox approach to art at the time. However, Clutz was committed to his personal style that focused on abstracted human figures within urban tableaux. Working in a context of artists who challenged abstract expressionism's popularity in New York, Clutz established himself as a significant proponent of abstract figuration. His paintings focus on human figures within the urban environment, often exposing the transfiguration of his subjects as they travel through the complex light of city streets or summer parks, as shown in two of his early works. Clutz's interest in working from direct observation of urban life was influenced by a long-standing interest in German Expressionism, as well as artists like Henri Matisse, Arshile Gorky, and Nicholas De Stael...

Louisa Lizbeth Chase was born in 1951 to Benjamin and Wilda Stengel Chase in Panama City, Panama, where her father, a West Point graduate, was stationed. The family moved to Pennsylv...

Genre: Modern Subject: Abstract Medium: Oil Surface: Canvas Country: United States Sabina Teichman: (1905-1983) Studied at Columbia Univ. (BA, MA), also with Charles J. Martin and A...

"Dusseldorf, Germany" 1993, oil on canvas, hand signed and dated lower left, Canvas (unframed):18 X 48. framed: 19.5 X 49.5 Provenance: directly from the artist. Exhibited at Phyllis Kind Gallery in NYC in 1987. Archie Rand (American, born 1949) is an artist from Brooklyn, New York. Rand's work as a painter and muralist is held in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris, and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. His graphic works and books are held by the Metropolitan Museum Of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute Of Chicago, The Brooklyn Museum, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institution, and The New York Public Library; and are owned by Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Brown, and Johns Hopkins universities. Born in Brooklyn, Rand received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in cinegraphics from the Pratt Institute, having studied previously at the Art Students League of New York. His first exhibition was in 1966, at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York. He has since had over 100 solo exhibitions, and his work has been included in over 200 group exhibitions. He is currently Presidential Professor of Art at Brooklyn College which granted him the Award for Excellence in Creative Achievement in 2016. Before joining Brooklyn College, Rand was the chair of the Department of Visual Arts at Columbia University. The Italian Academy For Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University presented him with The Siena Prize in 1995. He was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation Foundation Fellowship in 1999 and was made a Laureate of the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, which awarded him the Achievement Medal for Contributions in the Visual Arts. In 2002 he received the Presidential Award for Excellence in Teaching from Columbia University. In 2002 he became the artistic advisor to film director Ang Lee for his production of The Hulk, and was asked by Milestone Films to provide a commentary track for the DVD release of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s classic 1955 film The Mystery of Picasso. Archie Rand’s earliest major works are “The Letter Paintings” (or “The Jazz Paintings”) (1968–71), a radically positioned series of technically inventive, mural-sized canvases. The Letter Paintings, by incorporating the names of mainly male and female African-American musicians, undermined prevailing aesthetic categories by conflating many contemporary movements including Conceptual Art, Color Field, Pattern and Decoration, diary entry and social commentary. In 1974 Rand received a commission from Congregation B’nai Yosef in Brooklyn. Rand was asked to paint thematic murals on the complete 16,000-square-foot (1,500 m2) interior surfaces of the synagogue. The work took three years, and completing this commission made Rand the author of the only narratively painted synagogue in the world and the only one we know of since the 2nd Century Dura-Europos. The religious legal controversy raised by placing wall paintings in a traditionally iconoclastic space was resolved by the verdict of Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, then considered to be the world’s leading Talmudic scholar, who declared the paintings to be in conformity with the law. His subsequent turn to figuration may have been influenced by his friendship with Philip Guston, whose own work was transformed in the late 1960s. Like Guston, Rand "chafed at the limitations of purely abstract forms." A near-cult figure who started out as a child prodigy and whose admirers range from John Ashbery to Julian Schnabel. Rand’s paintings display a vast and savvy menu of inventive and finely executed approaches. He has completed many series after the works of Paul Celan, Moyshe-Leyb Halpern, Eugenio Montale, Yehuda Amichai, Rainer Maria Rilke, Samuel Beckett/Paul Eluard and Jack Spicer. Working often with poets, he has produced books and continues to engage in publishing collaborative projects. He maintained a correspondence with the American British Jewish painter R.B. Kitaj. In 2008, on a warehouse wall, Rand mounted the painting, “The 613”, which at 1700 square feet (17’ x 100’) is nearly twice the size of James Rosenquist’s F-111. It is one of the largest freestanding paintings ever made. Reminiscent of “The Segments” paintings it is intimidatingly enormous. Paradoxically, despite the raucous cartoony bytes that shoot colorful flashes from the manic surface, “The 613” glows warmly. Its overall effect is strangely calming and majestic. In an article on a 2011 exhibition of Rand's "Had Gadya" series, David Kaufmann wrote: Rand displayed his work in 15 solo exhibitions between 2008 and 2017, many of them showcasing paintings done after Scripture, or his workings with poets: Including “Had Gadya, 2005”, Borowsky Gallery, Philadelphia, PA (2011); “Gods Change, Prayers Are Here To Stay (after Yehuda Amichai), 2000", Katz Gallery, Atlanta, GA (2014); “Psalm 68, 1994”, Derfner Museum, Riverdale, NY (2014); “The Chapter Paintings”, Tribeca Gallery, NY (2015); “Men Who Turn Back (after Eugenio Montale), 1995", SRO Gallery, Brooklyn, NY (2016); “Sixty Paintings From the Bible” & “The Book of Judith, 2012”, Cleveland State University Galleries, Cleveland, OH (2016) & The American Jewish Museum, Pittsburgh, PA (2017); “Archie Rand: Early Works With Poetry: Jack Spicer, 1991 and Samuel Beckett/Paul Eluard, 1993”, St. Francis College, Brooklyn, NY (2017). "The 613" In 2015 Blue Rider/Penguin/Random House published The 613, allotting one color plate per page for each of the 614 units in the painting. The Wall Street Journal labeled The 613 as “dynamic…remarkable…thrilling” The New York Times selected the book as “Editors' Choice” and praised it in two separate reviews calling it “wonderfully garish” and declaring that “nothing prepared the art world for 'The 613.' Recent Activity In 2016 Rand showed two bodies of work that were done in Italy, “La Certosa Di Pontignano, 1995” and “Mount Etna, 2005,” at The Interchurch Center Galleries, New York. From 2016 to 2017 he served as the Curator and Juror for the Governor of Wyoming’s Capitol Arts Exhibition at The Wyoming State Museum, Cheyenne, WY. A 2017 exhibition, “Archie Rand: Early Works With Poetry”, featured two series of work from 1991 and 1993 after poems by Jack Spicer and Samuel Beckett/Paul Eluard. This painting was exhibited in the Phyllis Kind Gallery in NY in 1987. (Phyllis Kind was an American art dealer active in Chicago and New York. She promoted the work of the Chicago Imagists, The Monster Roster and The Hairy Who and outsider artists. Kind opened a gallery in Chicago in 1967. Called Pro Grafica Arte, the gallery dealt in master prints and drawings. In 1975, she opened a gallery on Spring Street in New York's SoHo district. She gave some of the artists in the movement their first solo shows: Jim Nutt and Gladys Nilsson...

Richard Marshall Merkin (American, 1938-2009) Gladys and Half-Pint Hand signed 'Merkin' (center right), Titled, inscribed, dated, and initialed 'GLADYS BENTLEY AND FRANKIE 'HALF-PINT' JAXON 1997/R.M.' verso. Oil on canvas 37 1/2 x 72 in. (95.3 x 182.9 cm) framed 39 1/4 x 74 x 2 in. Gladys Alberta Bentley (August 12, 1907 – January 18, 1960) was an American blues singer, pianist, and entertainer during the Harlem Renaissance. Her career skyrocketed when she appeared at Harry Hansberry's Clam House, a well-known gay speakeasy in New York in the 1920s, as a black, lesbian, cross-dressing performer. She headlined in the early 1930s at Harlem's Ubangi Club, where she was backed up by a chorus line of drag queens. She dressed in men's clothes (including a signature tailcoat and top hat), played piano, and sang her own raunchy lyrics to popular tunes of the day in a deep, growling voice while flirting with women in the audience. On the decline of the Harlem speakeasies with the repeal of Prohibition, she relocated to southern California, where she was billed as "America's Greatest Sepia Piano Player" and the "Brown Bomber of Sophisticated Songs". She was frequently harassed for wearing men's clothing. She tried to continue her musical career but did not achieve as much success as she had had in the past. Bentley was openly lesbian early in her career, but during the McCarthy Era she started wearing dresses and married, claiming to have been "cured" by taking female hormones. Frankie "Half-Pint" Jaxon, born Frank Devera Jackson was an African American vaudeville singer, stage designer and comedian, popular in the 1920s and 1930s. He was born in Montgomery, Alabama, orphaned, and raised in Kansas City, Missouri. His nickname of "Half Pint" referred to his 5'2" height. He started in show business around 1910 as a singer in Kansas City, before travelling extensively with medicine shows in Texas, and then touring the eastern seaboard. His feminine voice and outrageous manner, often as a female impersonator, established him as a crowd favorite. By 1917 he had begun working regularly in Atlantic City, New Jersey and in Chicago, often with such performers as Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters, whose staging he helped design. He served slightly less than a year in the United States Army in 1918–1919 and rose to the rank of sergeant. In the late 1920s he sang with top jazz bands when they passed through Chicago, working with Bennie Moten, King Oliver, Freddie Keppard and others. He performed and recorded with the pianists Cow Cow Davenport, Tampa Red and "Georgia Tom" Dorsey, recording with the latter pair under the name of The Black Hillbillies. He also recorded with the Harlem Hamfats. In the 1930s, he was often on radio in the Chicago area, and led his own band, titled Frankie "Half Pint" Jaxon and His Quarts of Joy. Jaxon appeared with Duke Ellington in a film short titled Black and Tan (1929), and with Bessie Smith in "St. Louis Blues" (1929). Cab Calloway's "Minnie the Moocher" (1931) is based both musically and lyrically on Jaxon's "Willie the Weeper" (1927). Richard Merkin, Sometimes described as Rhode Island’s most famous New York artist, Richard Merkin has led a dual life for nearly 40 years - teaching at RISD while enjoying a celebrated painting career based in New York City. He has exhibited in countless gallery and museum shows in the US and abroad and is represented in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian Institution, The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the RISD museum and many others. In addition to contributing drawings and paintings to The New Yorker (along with, Art Spiegelman, Saul Steinberg, Harper’s, The New York Times Sunday Magazine and several books on Erotica and Baseball, he is a contributing editor for Vanity Fair and a former style columnist for GQ. Merkin’s honors include a Tiffany Foundation Fellowship and the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Museums and Selected Collections : The American Federation of Arts, New York, NY Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA First city Bank, Chicago, Ill Fisk University Art Gallery, Nashville, TN Hallmark Collections, Kansas City, MO Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA Maimi-Dade Junior College, Miami, FL Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI Minnesota Museum of Art, Minneapolis, MN Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, RI McClung Museum, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN Pennsylvania Acadamy of the Arts, Philadelphia PA Prudential Insurance Company, Boston, Ma Prudential Insurance Company, Newark, NJ Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA Sara Robey Foundation, New York, NY Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC State University of Brockport, Brockport, NY Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY Selected Publications : 1986-Present Contributing Editor, Vanity Fair ..1988-Present, New Yorker... 1988-Present, style column, GQ...1997, Text and Illustration for The Tijuana Bibles, published by Simon & Shuster, 1995, Illustrated book, Leagues Apart: the Men and Times of the Negro Baseball Leagues published by Morrow. 1967 Cover of the Beatles “Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band” Album (Mr. Merkin appears in the back row, right of center) RISD: MFA in Painting, 1963; Professor, Department of Painting special skill: Merging his role as flaneur (connoisseur of city life) with his role as painter and social historian, Merkin retrieves lost cultural artifacts – a Turkish cigarette, a gangster, a bowler and generally “things most people don’t know about” – and reconstitutes their Jazz Age virtues on canvas in cubist, comic-laced landscapes of tropical color. (ala Robert Crumb and Ben Katchor) breaking in: Perpetually on the fly from his middle-class Brooklyn background, Merkin found the perfect escape in the mid ‘60s in George Frazier, a dapper Boston columnist who inspired the emerging New York painter’s overnight reinvention of himself. The elements of structure, stability and surprise he admired in this well-dressed dandy – a cool linen suit, a splash of suspender, a polka dot scarf and pearl-handled walking stick – soon surfaced in paintings peopled by impeccable underdogs of café society along with his personal pop heroes: William Burroughs, Bobby Short and Krazy Kat...

"Shattered" WPA Mid 20th Century Modernism American Scene Surrealism Figurative Estate stamp on the stretcher, verso. Provenance: Estate of the artist. 20 x 24 inches. BIO Leon Bibel continued painting through 1941 and resumed work in both painting and especially wood sculpture by 1960. He worked until his very last day in 1995. His last series of large wood sculptures were modeled on spice boxes, which were miniature buildings...

1950s abstract oil on canvas painting by Henriette "Yetti" Stolz from 1956. Completed in shades of brown, white, black, and gray. Signed by the artist in the lower right corner. Presented in a vintage frame measuring 42 ¾ x 16 ¾ inches. Image size measures 42 ¼ x 16 ¼ inches. Provenance: Estate of the Artist, Henriette "Yetti" Stolz Painting is in good condition - please contact us for a detailed condition report. About the Artist: Henriette “Yetti” Stolz was born in Serbia in 1935 ( and is still living ). Her family emigrated to Denver, Colorado, in the early 1950s after WWII and she attended East High School before studying art at Colorado College, in Colorado Springs in the mid to late 50s. While there studying she would have been exposed to modernist artists working both at the college ( ie. Mary...