Chaim Gross

Peace Mid-Century Modern Pop Art Enamel Painting Chaim Gross Modernist Ltd Ed

Circa 1950

Chaim Gross Three little girls, three Graces. 1981. Bronze sculptural relief plaque mounted to verdigris marble. signed and dated on marble Marble approx 7.5" x 7" x 1.5". Bronze: 5.25" x 4" x 1" Chaim Gross, born in Wolowa, Austria in 1904, was educated at the Beaux Arts Institute of Design and at the Art Student's League in New York. Chaim Gross's work was greatly influenced by his experiences during a period of international conflict, World War II. He had moved to Kolomyia from Wolowa to get a better education, but the Germans came to occupy, killing, raping, and looting. Gross and his family were chased from one village to the next. He wrote, "We were sleeping on roofs and in the fields, with the sound of cannon fire always in the distance,". Eventually, he ended up in Budapest with his two brothers, where Anti­ Semitism was not as severe, and that is where he began to sculpt and draw. He even had a few odd jobs there as a gold­ and silversmith. When he was seventeen, Gross immigrated to America where his older brother was. There he was a student and then a teacher at the Educational Alliance on the Lower East Side. Teaching became a big part of his philosophy, as he believed that an artist must pass on the knowledge which he had received from others in his artwork. He was part of an artist emigre community which included Raphael Soyer, Moses Soyer, Arnold Newman, Max Weber and David Burliuk. His daughter is the artist Mimi Grooms and his son in law was Red Grooms. Chaim Gross works reflect his Jewish and Austrian roots and his Hasidic Jewish upbringing. The figures in his art reflect the Hasidic spirit of being happy and making other people happy. This opiece has children playing and is perfect for a kids room. In his pieces, Jews sing and dance in celebration of the Jewish Sabbath and festivals. They are shown rejoicing in the great gifts of love and life. Chaim Gross was honored with a number of prestigious awards including: the Award of Merit Medal from the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1963, and the Gold Medal award from the National Academy of Design in 1985. He often used his creative abilities to explore and experiment with media. In his artwork he retains an optimistic philosophy, even when facing somber issues such as war, depression, and the Holocaust. Gross was born to a Jewish family in Austrian Galicia, in the village of Wolowa (now known as Mezhgorye, Ukraine), in the Carpathian Mountains. In 1911, his family moved to Kolomyia (which was annexed into the Ukrainian USSR in 1939 and became part of newly independent Ukraine in 1991). When World War I ended, Gross and brother Avrom-Leib went to Budapest to join their older siblings Sarah and Pinkas. Gross applied to and was accepted by the art academy in Budapest and studied under the painter Béla Uitz, though within a year a new regime under Miklos Horthy took over and attempted to expel all Jews and foreigners from the country. After being deported from Hungary, Gross began art studies at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Vienna, Austria shortly before immigrating to the United States in 1921. Gross's studies continued in the United States at the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design, where he studied with Elie Nadelman and others, and at the Art Students League of New York, with Robert Laurent. He also attended the Educational Alliance Art School, studying under Abbo Ostrowsky, at the same time as Moses Soyer and Peter Blume. In 1926 Gross began teaching at The Educational Alliance, and continued teaching there for the next 50 years. Louise Nevelson was among his students at the Alliance (in 1934), during the time she was transitioning from painting to sculpture. In the late 1920s and early 1930s he exhibited at the Salons of America exhibitions at the Anderson Galleries and, beginning in 1928, at the Whitney Studio Club. In 1929, Gross experimented with printmaking, and created an important group of 15 linocuts and lithographs of landscapes, New York City streets and parks, women in interiors, the circus, and vaudeville. The entire suite is now in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Gross returned to the medium of printmaking in the 1960s, and produced approximately 200 works in the medium over the next two decades. In March 1932 Gross had his first solo exhibition at Gallery 144 in New York City. For a short time they represented Gross, as well as his friends Milton Avery, Moses Soyer, Ahron Ben-Shmuel and others. Gross was primarily a practitioner of the direct carving method, with the majority of his work being carved from wood. Other direct carvers in early 20th-century American art include William Zorach, Jose de Creeft, and Robert Laurent. Works by Chaim Gross can be found in major museums and private collections throughout the United States, with substantial holdings (27 sculptures) at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. A key work from this era, now at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, is the 1932 birds-eye maple Acrobatic Performers, which is also only one and one quarter inch thick. In 1933 Gross joined the government's PWAP (Public Works of Art Project), which transitioned into the WPA (Works Progress Administration), which Gross worked for later in the 1930s. Under these programs Gross taught and demonstrated art, made sculptures that were placed in schools and public colleges, made work for Federal buildings including the Federal Trade Commission Building, and for the France Overseas and Finnish Buildings at the 1939 New York World's Fair. Gross was also recognized during these years with a silver medal at the Exposition universelle de 1937 in Paris, and in 1942, with a purchase prize at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's "Artists for Victory" exhibition for his wood sculpture of famed circus performer Lillian Leitzel. In 1949 Gross sketched Chaim Weizmann, President of Israel, at several functions in New York City where Weizmann was speaking, Gross completed the bust in bronze later that year. Gross returned to Israel for three months in 1951 (the second of many trips there in the postwar years) to paint a series of 40 watercolors of life in various cities. This series was exhibited at the Jewish Museum (Manhattan) in 1953. In the 1950s Gross began to make more bronze sculptures alongside his wood and stone pieces, and in 1957 and 1959 he traveled to Rome to work with famed bronze foundries including the Nicci foundry. At the end of the decade Gross was working primarily in bronze which allowed him to create open forms, large-scale works and of course, multiple casts. Gross's large-scale bronze The Family, donated to New York City in 1991 in honor of Mayor Ed Koch, and installed at the Bleecker Street Park at 11th street, is now a fixture of Greenwich Village. In 1959, a survey of Gross's sculpture in wood, stone, and bronze was featured in the exhibit Four American Expressionists curated by Lloyd Goodrich at the Whitney Museum of American Art, with work by Abraham Rattner, Doris Caesar, and Karl Knaths. In 1976, a selection from Gross's important collection of historic African sculpture, formed since the late 1930s, was exhibited at the Worcester Art Museum in the show The Sculptor's Eye: The African Art Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Chaim Gross. Gross was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate member, and became a full Academician in 1981. In 1984, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, with Jacob Lawrence and Lukas Foss. In the fall of 1991, Allen Ginsberg gave an important tribute to Gross at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which is published in their Proceedings. In 1994, Forum Gallery, which now represents the Chaim Gross estate, held a memorial exhibition featuring a sixty-year survey of Gross's work. Gross was a professor of printmaking and sculpture at both the Educational Alliance and the New School for Social Research in New York City, as well as at the Brooklyn Museum Art School, the MoMA art school, the Art Student's League and the New Art School (which Gross ran briefly with Alexander Dobkin, Raphael Soyer and Moses Soyer). Gross was a member of the New York Artists Equity Association and the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors. He was a founder and served as the first president of the Sculptors Guild. He is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel.He is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel. And the EIN HAROD Museum's Holdings: Israeli art is represented by the works of Reuven Rubin, Zaritzky, Nahum Gutman, Mordechai Ardon, Aharon Kahana, Arie Lubin, Yehiel Shemi, Yosl Bergner and others. The graphic arts collection contains drawings and graphic works by Pissaro, Amedeo Modigliani, Jules Pascin, Marc Chagall (almost all of his graphic work), and numerous other artists. The sculpture collection includes works by Jewish sculptors from all over the world including leading Israeli sculptors; Ben Zvi, Lishansky, David Palombo, Yehiel Shemi, Aharon Bezalel and Igael Tumarkin. Many Jewish sculptors from all parts of the world, beginning with Mark Antokolsky, are represented in the collection. In the sculpture courtyard there are works by Chana Orloff, Jacob Epstein (the works he bequeathed to the Museum), Enrico Glicenstein, Loutchansky, Joseph Constant and Leon Indenbaum from Western Europe; Glid from Yugoslavia; William Zorach, Chaim Gross and Minna Harkavy from the United States; and most of the outstanding sculptors of Israel : Zeev Ben-Zvi, Lishansky, Ziffer, Rudi Lehmann, Dov Feigin, Sternschuss, David Palombo ( who executed the iron...

This is being sold as a piece of (functional?) decorator table sculpture for a kitchen or restaurant. I do not know if or how it works. the wheel and gears turn. It might be missing ...

Measures about 4 X 3.75 inches. Box frame is 17 X 13 inches. Signed by artist verso. From the literature that I have seen I believe the edition size was limited to 10, I do not know ...

Measures about 4 X 3.75 inches. Box frame is 17 X 13 inches. Signed by artist verso. From the literature that I have seen I believe the edition size was limited to 10, I do not know ...

Apres Pablo Picasso (bears a pseudo signature recto) Hand signed David Stein, dated 1979 verso. Figural painted porcelain or ceramic serving dish, oval form. Dimensions: 18" X 14 David Stein (born Henri Haddad, 1935, Alexandria, Egypt – died 1999, Bordeaux, France) was an artist (notorious art forger) who, until 1966, had been frequently sentenced for theft by the French courts before becoming an art forger and art dealer with 15 aliases. Stein often copied paintings in the style of the masters. For example, he studied Marc Chagall, Matisse, Braque, Paul Klee, Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau and Rouault, in order to copy their color scheme and inspirations. In 1967 Marc Chagall notified authorities of forgeries of his work hanging in a New York gallery, and Stein was arrested. Art dealers refused to cooperate with the prosecution because it would have incriminated them and made their expertise in the art field questionable. Some art collectors refused to give up their paintings as evidence. Stein was convicted of six counts of art forgery and grand larceny. During his prison term, Joseph Stone, the judge who arrested him, brought him to his office to paint. He remained a good friend of the Stein family long after Stein completed his jail sentence. In 1989 he discovered that Stein never stopped making forgeries. After Stein had served his prison term in the United States, he was deported to France where he served another term. Prison authorities allowed him to make further paintings, although now using his own name. In 1969 a London gallery sold some of these paintings. After Stein was released, he returned to painting, this time selling his paintings under his own name to put a mask on his real activities. The book Three Picasso's Before Breakfast (Mémoirs of an Art Forger's Wife) by Anne Marie Stein as told to Georges Carpozi Jr (Hawthorn Book Inc) was written by David's life partner Anne-Marie about their experiences in the art world. In the mid 1980s director Gil Cates gave his agent Arthur Axelman at William Morris a copy of the book which had been written without Stein's involvement. Axelman set out to find Stein and after several years he located him in Manhattan. Stein became an Axelman client and friend. While deals at HBO and ABC did not lead to production of a film, Axelman introduced Stein to Keith Carradine and Alan Rudolph, director of the movie "The Moderns" with ultimately starred John Lone, Géraldine Chaplin, Keith Carradine and Linda Fiorentino. The film was set in the Paris of the '20s although filmed in Montreal. Stein appeared in the film as an art critic and provided all of the art. A minor concern was a scene where a painting in the style of Matisse and Modigliani was to be burned on camera and a Modigliani destroyed by knife. No one cared to destroy any of Stein's copies, "Just good for the camera" say Stein. but a William Morris assistant for agent Axelman suggested making large format copies of the works to be destroyed. Stein refused and during the scene actor John Lone destroyed the Paintings. Stein was living in France after his troubles with the US immigration who had told him to leave US territory in 1988. He met the French photo...

Measures about 4.25 X 2.25 inches. Box frame is 17 X 13 inches. Signed by artist verso. From the literature that I have seen I believe the edition size was limited to 10, I do not kn...

Brilliant color and twisted flames made of layers of precious metals and black acrylic. Burning House is a powerful image, equally impressive as a wearable or a framed art piece. ...

A rain-dropped Cadmium heart riveted together with an etched nickel spade. This image and jewelry object is one of Francis X. Pavy’s favorites. Only available in etched bronze. Cal...

D 142 x H 70cm - 42 kg. - 2021/2022 - Circular table vase. Stainless steel sheet laser cutting and then welded in one hole piece basically transparent beacuse of the beutiful reflect...

Console table with cast bronze structure, wooden top burnt with shou sugi ban technique and bronze details

Cast bronze Trays Ø 28, 35, 47 cm Ø 11", 13"7/8, 18"1/2 in.

Archaic stool in solid wood burnt with shou sugi ban technique with bronze details