Winold Reiss

Separated Spear Woman in Snake Headress

1936

Mixed media on Whatman board. Signed (at lower left): WINOLD/REISS

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...

Oil on canvas, 36 x 42 in. Signed, dated, and inscribed (at lower right): WILLIAM S. SCHWARTZ 1926; (on the back): “OLD COUNTRY BAZAAR” / BY / WILLIAM S. SCHWARTZ / 1926 RECORDED: C. H. Bonte, “122nd Annual opens at Pennsylvania Academy,” in The Philadelphia Inquirer, Jan. 30, 1927 EXHIBITED: The Art Institute of Chicago, 1926, The Thirty-Ninth Annual Exhibition of American Paintings and Sculpture, no. 174 // The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, 1927, The One-Hundred-and-Twenty Second Annual Exhibition, p. 37 no. 181 // The Chicago Culture Club...

Joseph Stella was a visionary artist who painted what he saw, an idiosyncratic and individual experience of his time and place. Stella arrived in New York in 1896, part of a wave of Italian immigrants from poverty-stricken Southern Italy. But Stella was not a child of poverty. His father was a notary and respected citizen in Muro Locano, a small town in the southern Appenines. The five Stella brothers were all properly educated in Naples. Stella’s older brother, Antonio, was the first of the family to come to America. Antonio Stella trained as a physician in Italy, and was a successful and respected doctor in the Italian community centered in Greenwich Village. He sponsored and supported his younger brother, Joseph, first sending him to medical school in New York, then to study pharmacology, and then sustaining him through the early days of his artistic career. Antonio Stella specialized in the treatment of tuberculosis and was active in social reform circles. His connections were instrumental in Joseph Stella’s early commissions for illustrations in reform journals. Joseph Stella, from the beginning, was an outsider. He was of the Italian-American community, but did not share its overwhelming poverty and general lack of education. He went back to Italy on several occasions, but was no longer an Italian. His art incorporated many influences. At various times his work echoed the concerns and techniques of the so-called Ashcan School, of New York Dada, of Futurism and, of Cubism, among others. These are all legitimate influences, but Stella never totally committed himself to any group. He was a convivial, but ultimately solitary figure, with a lifelong mistrust of any authority external to his own personal mandate. He was in Europe during the time that Alfred Stieglitz established his 291 Gallery. When Stella returned he joined the international coterie of artists who gathered at the West Side apartment of the art patron Conrad Arensberg. It was here that Stella became close friends with Marcel Duchamp. Stella was nineteen when he arrived in America and studied in the early years of the century at the Art Students League, and with William Merritt Chase, under whose tutelage he received rigorous training as a draftsman. His love of line, and his mastery of its techniques, is apparent early in his career in the illustrations he made for various social reform journals. Stella, whose later work as a colorist is breathtakingly lush, never felt obliged to choose between line and color. He drew throughout his career, and unlike other modernists, whose work evolved inexorably to more and more abstract form, Stella freely reverted to earlier realist modes of representation whenever it suited him. This was because, in fact, his “realist” work was not “true to nature,” but true to Stella’s own unique interpretation. Stella began to draw flowers, vegetables, butterflies, and birds in 1919, after he had finished the Brooklyn Bridge series of paintings, which are probably his best-known works. These drawings of flora and fauna were initially coincidental with his fantastical, nostalgic and spiritual vision of his native Italy which he called Tree of My Life (Mr. and Mrs. Barney A. Ebsworth Foundation and Windsor, Inc., St. Louis, illus. in Barbara Haskell, Joseph Stella, exh. cat. [New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994], p. 111 no. 133). Two Wood Ducks...

Signed (at lower right): Louisa Chase

Yours Truly is a work of 1927, a fertile year for Dove, capped by a solo exhibit at Stieglitz’s “The Intimate Gallery,” which included this picture. From 1924 through 1930, Dove produced a notable series of collages, interspersed with drawings, pastels, and oil paintings on a variety of supports. In 1927, the same year that Dove painted Yours Truly, he found inspiration in American popular music, often referring in his titles to works by George Gershwin and Irving Berlin. Yours Truly was the title of a Broadway musical that opened at the Shubert Theater on January 25, 1927. Gene Buck, the producer, had collaborated with Raymond Hubbell, the composer, on the Ziegfield Follies shows of 1923, 1924, and 1925. The production, which contained the title song, “Yours Truly,” ran for 127 performances, closing on May 14, 1927. Given the context of Dove paintings...

Entitled The Eagle Flies on Friday, this work on paper depicts a Bald eagle flying in the late afternoon on a Friday. The two guitars crossed in the upper left-hand corner and a French accordion hidden in the left bottom right corner give a celebratory feel to the image. A distant flock of purple swifts inhabit the right upper middle portion of the image. A purple indigo plant overlays the turquoise Spanish guar on the left. Undulating light blue lines depict water flowing overlay an emerging dark blue palmetto partially obscuring the accordion on the bottom right corner. A blue orb above the eagle symbolizes the New Blue moon signaling new beginnings. This is a unique multiple oil relief print on paper. Unique. because it's one of a kind. Although printmaking processes are used there are no multiples made. Only one. This work is made by printing with different relief blocks multiple times, brush painting, and airbrushing. The ink and paints used are oil-based. Because of the multiple printing techniques, the reverse contains notations in graphite pencil, and ink colors to be used on blocks. Also on the reverse, there is residual ink from the printing process. Signed and dated en verso ( on the Back). Writing on the back reads THe Eagle Flies on Friday (title) ©2014 Francis X Pavy...

Even though recognizable as trees, the artist considers the birch works to be process-oriented abstractions. "I am interested in the interplay between the abstract markings and the s...

These collages were created first in the presence of a model, working quickly, in charcoal and pastel, and again, later, alone, furiously tearing and pasting images from magazines, v...

Starting with observational drawings from life, these works evolve through a series of variations, modifying tonality and forest elements.Even though recognizable as trees, the artis...

These collages were created first in the presence of a model, working quickly, in charcoal and pastel, and again, later, alone, furiously tearing and pasting images from magazines, v...

SantaFe Bird is by Anne Embree who is known for her whimsical animal paintings . Santa Fe Bird focuses on the Bird and the surrounding objects Perched is...