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Charles Green Shaw
By the Dawn's Early Light, mid-century abstract black, red, yellow oil painting

1955

About the Item

Charles Green Shaw (American, 1892-1974) By the Dawn's Early Light, 1955 Oil on masonite Signed lower left, dated and titled verso 35.5 x 23.75 inches 38 x 26.25 inches, framed Provenance: The estate of the artist to Charles H. Carpenter Charles Green Shaw, born into a wealthy New York family, began painting when he was in his mid-thirties. A 1914 graduate of Yale, Shaw also completed a year of architectural studies at Columbia University. During the 1920s Shaw enjoyed a successful career as a freelance writer for The New Yorker, Smart Set and Vanity Fair, chronicling the life of the theater and café society. In addition to penning insightful articles, Shaw was a poet, novelist and journalist. In 1927 he began to take a serious interest in art and attended Thomas Hart Benton's class at the Art Students League briefly in New York. He also studied privately with George Luks, who became a good friend. Once he had dedicated himself to non-traditional painting, Shaw's writing ability made him a potent defender of abstract art. After initial study with Benton and Luks, Shaw continued his artistic education in Paris by visiting numerous museums and galleries. From 1930 to 1932 Shaw's paintings evolved from a style imitative of Cubism to one directly inspired by it, though simplified and more purely geometric. Returning to the United States in 1933, Shaw began a series of abstracted cityscapes of skyscrapers he called Manhattan Motifs which evolved into his most famous works, the shaped canvases he called Plastic Polygons. The 1930s were productive years for Shaw. He showed his paintings in numerous group exhibitions, both in New York and abroad, and was also given several one-man exhibitions. Shaw had his first one-man exhibition at the Valentine Dudensing Gallery in New York in 1934, which included 25 Manhattan Motif paintings and 8 abstract works. In the spring of 1935 Shaw was introduced to Albert Gallatin and George L.K. Morris. Gallatin was so impressed with Shaw's work, he broke a policy against solo exhibitions at his museum, the Gallery of Living Art, and offered Shaw an exhibition there. In the summer of 1935 Shaw traveled to Paris with Gallatin and Morris who provided introductions to many great painters. Shaw regularly spent time with John Ferren and Jean Hélion. The following year Gallatin organized an exhibition called Five Contemporary American Concretionists at the Reinhardt Gallery that included Shaw, Ferren, and Morris, Alexander Calder, and Charles Biederman. The exhibition traveled to Paris at the Galerie Pierre and to London at the Mayor Gallery with A.E. Gallatin replacing Calder as the fifth artist. During the mid-1930s Charles Green Shaw became fascinated with wood relief paintings and was one of the first abstract artists to use this technique. Shaw was among an early group of American artists who wished to incorporate three dimensional elements into their abstract painting. Ferren did this by carving into his paintings, Biederman used Constructivist methodology to create geometric reliefs, Morris used juxtaposed colors to create vibrations, Pereira painted on glass, and Calder created abstract sculpture. Charles Green Shaw was the only artist to use a technique that resulted in an exploded view of biomorphic abstract shapes. Shaw created compositions of biomorphic forms cut from wood about ¾ inch thick which he sometimes painted and other times varnished and arranged atop another piece of wood to give the composition added depth. These reliefs were produced alongside Shaw's shaped canvas works, Plastic Polygons, from 1936 to 1938. In 1937 Shaw became a founding member of the American Abstract Artists and exhibited 6 works in the first annual exhibition at the Squibb Building in April. The 1938 American Abstract Artists' annual exhibition catalogue contained eleven essays by members with the opening essay by Shaw. His article, "A Word to the Objector," expressed his profound belief that abstract painting was "an appeal to one's…aesthetic emotion alone…." Shaw was very active within the group in the early years, editing the catalogues, seeking sponsors for exhibitions, and locating exhibition spaces. Shaw had two solo exhibitions at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting in 1940 and 1941 and served on the Advisory Board of the Museum of Modern Art from 1936 to 1941. In the later 1930s, Shaw became interested in photography and children's books. In 1938 Shaw had a series of photographs and trivia on New York published as the book New York- Oddly Enough. Shaw worked on similar photography projects on Paris and London. In 1939 Shaw started working with the publisher W.R. Scott, Inc. and with its editor, Margaret Wise Brown (author of The Runaway Bunny and Good Night Moon), Shaw wrote and illustrated several children's books, including The Giant of Central Park and a series called The Guess Book. Fellow AAA Member. Esphyr Slobodkina also published her children's books with W.R. Scott, Inc. Shaw developed a more expressive brushy style in the 1950s, which were often interpretations of the horizontality of Nantucket vistas. He returned to his roots with hard-edge painting in the 1960s, when his style grew bolder and showed a strong graphic sense. He died in 1974. Among the collections with works by Charles Green Shaw are the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Brooklyn Museum, NY; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA.
  • Creator:
    Charles Green Shaw (1892 - 1974, American)
  • Creation Year:
    1955
  • Dimensions:
    Height: 35.5 in (90.17 cm)Width: 23.75 in (60.33 cm)
  • Medium:
  • Movement & Style:
  • Period:
  • Condition:
  • Gallery Location:
    Beachwood, OH
  • Reference Number:
    1stDibs: LU1768210432252
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    By Richard Andres
    Located in Beachwood, OH
    Richard Andres (American, 1927-2013) Garden, 1972 acrylic on canvas signed, dated and titled verso 59.5 x 50 inches Richard Andres was born in Buffalo, New York in 1927. A graduate of the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1950, he was immediately drafted and served for two years in the army as a mural painter. He received his Master of Arts from Kent State in 1961. A frequent exhibitor at galleries and museums and winner of multiple May Show prizes, Andres taught art in the Cleveland Public Schools for 28 years, as well as teaching the University of Buffalo, the Cleveland Institute of Art and the Western Reserve University. Very little in Richard Andres’ childhood would have predicted his love of classical music, mid-century-modern architecture and certainly not his lifelong passion for art and in particular abstract art. Richard’s father, Raymond, had no more than a third-grade education, and his mother, Clara, was one of thirteen children – only three of whom lived into adulthood and none of whom attended high school. They lived, when Richard was a boy, in a dingy area of Buffalo, NY in a walk-up apartment situated above a tavern. Raymond and Clara supplemented the income from their factory jobs in the bar downstairs with Raymond playing ragtime on the piano and Clara serving drinks. This often left Richard and his two older brothers at home alone to fend for themselves. The two older boys, Raymond and Russell, were - unlike Richard- rather rough and tumble and entertained themselves with stickball, boxing and the like. Richard, on the other hand, from a very young age liked to draw, or better yet even, to paint with the small set of watercolors he received for Christmas one year. Paper, however, at the height of the depression, was hard to come by. Luckily, Clara used paper doilies as decoration for the apartment and Richard would contentedly paint and then cut up doilies, gluing the pieces together to create collages. At eight-years-old, he discovered the Albright-Knox Museum (then known as the Albright Art Gallery) and spent several hours a week there studying the paintings. He was particularly fond of Charles Burchfield‘s landscapes, enamored with their ‘messiness’ and thinking that they somehow captured more ‘feeling’ than works he was previously familiar with. For his tenth Christmas, he asked for and received a ‘how-to’ paint book by Elliot O’Hare. Through this self-teaching, he assembled the portfolio needed for acceptance to Buffalo Technical High School where he studied Advertising Arts. In his Junior year, he was encouraged to enter a watercolor painting, “Two Barns,” in the national 1944-45 Ingersoll Art Award Contest and was one of twelve grand prize winners – each one winning one hundred dollars. More importantly the painting was exhibited at the Carnegie Institute Galleries, which resulted in his winning a national scholarship to the Cleveland School of Art (The Cleveland Art Institute). He flourished at the art school under the tutelage of faculty members such as Carl Gaertner, as well as that of visiting artists such as William Sommer and Henry George Keller. He would say in later years that Gaertner, in particular, influenced his attitude toward life as well as art. “Gaertner,” Andres said, “believed that there was no need to be a ‘tortured artist’, that an artist should rather enjoy beauty, family, and life in general.” Free to spend his days as he chose, he wandered the Cleveland Art Museum for most of the hours he was not attending classes or painting; the remaining time was spent drinking coffee at a local hangout with art school friends – which is where he met fellow Henry Keller scholarship winner, Avis Johnson. Richard was immediately smitten with Avis, but being rather shy, it took him the entire summer of 1948 to build up his courage to ask her out. Over that summer he ‘thought about Avis’ and worked in a diner to save money. He also used the hundred-dollar prize money won in High School to visit the first Max Beckmann retrospective in the United States at the City Art Museum in St. Louis. Over a half century later he spoke of that exhibit with a reverence usually reserved for spiritual matters, “I walked in and it was like nothing I had ever seen before... the color...It just glowed.” Returning to campus in the Fall, the first thing he did was go to the coffee shop in hopes of finding Avis. He did, and she, upon seeing him, realized that she was also smitten with him. They quickly became known as ‘the couple’ on campus, and a year later, with Richard being drafted for the Korean war, they were quickly married by a Justice of the Peace, celebrating after with family at Avis’s Cleveland home. As a gift, faculty member John Paul Miller...
    Category

    1970s Abstract Expressionist Abstract Paintings

    Materials

    Acrylic

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