Kevin Elston

'Still Life with Orchids and Persimmon', California School of Fine Arts

Circa 1985

Signed lower right, 'Olga' for Her Imperial Highness, Olga Alexandrovna, Grand Duchess of Russia and painted circa 1925. Provenance: Formerly in the ...

Signed lower right, 'C.A. Bartels' for Cornelius Anton Bartels (Dutch, born 1890) and painted circa 1945. A still-life with a sculpture of the Daoist immortal, Liu Haichan...

Stamped, verso, with estate stamp for Victor Di Gesu (American, 1914-1988) and painted circa 1955. Winner of the Prix Othon Friesz, Victor di Gesu first attended the Los Angeles Art...

Stamped, verso, with estate stamp for Victor Di Gesu (American, 1914-1988) and created circa 1955. Winner of the Prix Othon Friesz, Victor di Gesu first attended the Los Angeles Art...

Stamped, verso, with estate stamp for Victor Di Gesu (American, 1914-1988) and created circa 1950. Winner of the Prix Othon Friesz, Victor di Gesu first attended the Los Angeles Art...

Certification of authenticity stamped, verso, for Victor Di Gesu (American, 1914-1988) and painted circa 1955. Winner of the Prix Othon Friesz, Victor di Gesu first attended the Los...

A ca. 1931 delightful watercolor still life at a table; a study in yellow by artist Harold Haydon. Harold Emerson Haydon was born in Fort William, Ont...

Mid Century Italian watercolour on paper of a tablescape, signed and dated (1956) bottom right. The artist is currently unknown. This painting forms part of a pair with another tab...

Original painting on archival paper, circa 1963. Paper Size: 29.5 x 21 inches. Provenance: Estate of Ian Hornak, East Hampton, New York. Notes: Created during Hornak’s undergraduate...

Original painting on archival paper, circa 1963. Paper Size: 29.5 x 21 inches. Provenance: Estate of Ian Hornak, East Hampton, New York. Notes: Created during Hornak’s undergraduate...

A unique four panel still-life depicting a snap-shot of the artist's 1970's studio by Noel Howard (American, 20th Century). A drawing within the drawing with colored pencils, some cl...

Abstract Composition, Kitchen Utensils. Ink and watercolor of kitchen implements. Hand signed in Hebrew upper left. Dimensions: (Frame) H 25" x 18" (Sight) H 18.5" x W 11.75" Bergner, Yosl (Vladimir Jossif) (b Vienna, 13 Oct 1920). surrealist, surrealism. belongs to the generation of people uprooted from childhood landscapes and forced by circumstance to build a life elsewhere. Uniquely, he became an Israeli without shedding his Jewish cosmopolitan-refugee identity, an identity he zealously guarded in the melting pot of Israel of the "fifties" and "sixties". In the years that have passed since he acquired his art education at the Melbourne National Gallery Art School in Australia, concepts in the art world have changed many times over. from the Jewish paintings and the depictions of Australian Aborigines through the children of safed, the wall paintings, the masks, the angels and kings, the still lifes, the "Surrealistic" paintings, the toys and flowers, the paintings inspired by the Bird-head Haggadah, the Kafka paintings, the Pioneers, the Kimberley fantasy (about his father's excursion in 1933 to northern Australia, in search of a "territory for the Jews"), Brighton Beach and the seascapes inspired by Eugene Boudin, through the chairs in the "Kings of Nissim Aloni" episode to the "Zionists" and the recent "Tahies". "During the six years that Bergner has lived in Israel," wrote Eugene KoIb, Direct. or of the Tel Aviv Museum, in the catalog of the Bergner exhibit in 1957, "he has established himself among Israeli artists." Bergner was indeed one of the artists who represented Israel in the Venice Biennial (1956; 1958) and in the Sao Paulo Biennial in 1957; this, in spite of the fact that Yosl Bergner did not harness his art to serve the Zionist ethos, that being, at the time, the order of the day (his paintings were in fact rejected at first as being those of a "Diaspora Jew"); he didn't "naturalize" himself by alliance to the country's landscape or its special light, nor did he turn to abstract painting. Painter of "the Jewish condition". the painter involved in Nissim Aloni's theater and the popular illustrator of poetry books and literary texts, he stuck to the narrative which drew its images from his childhood world, from Yiddish and from the Jewish culture of Poland in whose bosom he grew, with its literature, theater and fantasy. From this point of view his position as an "outsider", first in Australia and later in Israel, like that of the European Jew on the periphery of the dominant culture, afforded him a special dialectic vantage point from which to view his human and cultural surroundings. He was and remains a figurative painter even when he verges on the abstract. Israeli painter of Austrian birth, active in Australia. He grew up in Warsaw. His father, the pseudonymous Jewish writer Melech Ravitch, owned books on German Expressionism, which were an early influence. Conscious of rising anti-Semitism in Poland, Ravitch visited Australia in 1934 and later arranged for his family to settle there. Bergner arrived in Melbourne in 1937. Poor, and with little English, his struggle to paint went hand-in-hand with a struggle to survive. In 1939 he attended the National Gallery of Victoria’s art school and came into contact with a group of young artists including Victor O’Connor (b 1918) and Noel Counihan...