Desmond McLean

Untitled (abstract expressionist Rorschach paintings)

1959

Esteban Vicente (1903-2001). Untitled, #36, 1955. Gouache on paper, image measures 8 x 11 inches, 16.5 x 19.5 inches framed. Signed, dated and numbered on verso. Excellent condition....

Constance Clark Lewis (1911-2004). Untitled, ca. 1950s. Gouache on paper, sheet measures 12 x 18 inches. Signed on verso at center. Crease in sheet upper right. Otherwise excellent condition. Unframed. This Louisville, Kentucky painter, graphic artist and educator was born in East Hampton, Long Island, New York, into a Louisville family who had summered there since the early 1900s. She spent 30 years of her life in Amagansett, New York. Her early art studies in Rome, Italy, led her to the Art Students League in New York City and then to the University of Louisville, where she studied with Ulfert Wilke. Other artists she studied with included Carlos Merida, Worden Day...

Murray Hantman (1904-1999). Composition, 1951. Watercolor on paper, 14 x 21 inches. Unframed. Signed lower left. Signed, dated and titled en verso. Provenance: estate of Murray Hantman. Biography: Shaped by his life experiences and a commitment to the practice of making art, the work of Murray Hantman represents a career of personal exploration and aesthetic refinement that took him from New York, to Los Angeles, back to New York and eventually to the serene, yet dramatic, coast of Maine where he worked as part of the artists’ colony on Monhegan Island. Born in Pennsylvania in 1904, Hantman’s family moved many times to follow his father’s business opportunities, eventually settling in New York. A childhood of economic instability and dislocation formed Hantman’s early years, making him independent and self-reliant from a very early age. Hantman’s father owned movie theatres and photography studios and, recognizing his son’s artistic ability, employed him to print and hand-color photographs as a child. When he was eleven and living in Michigan, a public school teacher arranged for Hantman to receive a scholarship to the Detroit Museum of Art School where after a year he was awarded another scholarship to study at the Detroit School of Design. He studied in Detroit for a year until his family abruptly moved to Alabama, interrupting his artistic and academic studies until the family moved to New York at the end of the first World War. As a young man, Hantman supported himself by working many different jobs in New York and New Jersey. Steady work with his brother at the Hartford and New Haven Railroad...

Douglas M. Olsen (b. 1960). #38, After the Rains, 1980. Watercolor on rag paper, 22 x 22 inches. Signed lower margin and on verso.

Douglas M. Olsen (b. 1960). #135, 1982. Watercolor on rag paper, 22 x 30 inches. Signed lower margin and on verso.

Felipe Orlando (Cuban-Mexican, 1911-2001). Coronel Retirado y su Amante Esposa, ca. 1970. Ink and gouache on paper with heavily built up layers of textured ground. Measures 13 1/4 x 18 3/8 inches. Signed lower left. Original label affixed on verso. Excellent condition. Unframed. An anthropologist as well as a painter and engraver, Orlando, whose full name was Felipe Orlando Garcia Murciano, studied at the University of Havana and at the painting workshop of Jorge Arche and Víctor Manuel. He was a founding member of the Asociación de Pintores y Escultores de Cuba (APEC) and a professor at the Universidad de las Américas and the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, both in Mexico City. His style is influenced by the Afro-Cuban movement and pre-columbian art...

Signed and dated lower left

"Pretending Glitter" is an abstract painting diptych by Spanish artist Natalia Roman. It is a beautiful series of rhythmic brushstrokes combined with subtle tones and unique shapes t...

"Deep in the Forest" is an abstract painting diptych by Spanish artist Natalia Roman. It is a beautiful series of rhythmic brushstrokes combined with subtle tones and unique shapes t...

Lyrical abstract expressionist gouache on paper by French artist Michel Loiseau. Signed bottom right. Michel Loiseau-Rizzo, born in 1937 is an illust...

This came from the collection of the Horace Richter Gallery, Old jaffa, Israel These were done in the 1990's Hand signed and dated. titled Old Jaffa. Jay Milder (born 1934) is an American artist and a figurative expressionist painter of the second generation New York School. Old Testament themes such as Jacob's Ladder and Noah’s Ark, and the Jewish mystical beliefs of the Kabbalah, are recurring themes in Milder’s paintings which are presented as archetypal images that recur in the basic karma, make-up and need of human nature. Internationally exhibited, Milder is included in the collections of many national and international museums. He has been the subject of two, recent retrospectives in Brazil in 2007 at the National Museum Brasilia and, in 2006, at the Museum of Modern Art, in Rio de Janeiro. He is renowned in Sao Paulo, one of the major international centers for street and public art, as a seminal influence on graffiti artists. Jay Milder was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1934. His grandparents, who came from the Ukraine, were descendants of the Hasidic mystic, Rabbi Nachman. As he listened to family stories his interest in spiritualism and mysticism increased, and became an important influence on his philosophy of life and art. Later, when he arrived in New York, he was drawn to the Theosophical Society and the teaching of Helena Blavatsky. In 1954 Milder visited Europe where he studied painting with André L’Hote, and sculpture with Ossip Zadkine. He spent much time studying at the Louvre Museum, and at the studio of Stanley Hayter. During his Paris years the paintings of the Jewish painter Chaim Soutine, primarily influenced him. Milder returned to the United States in 1956, and he began studying painting at the Chicago Art Institute. He exhibited with the Momentum Group, an alliance of artists who were particularly dedicated to the progression of figurative art and its global origins. In 1957, Milder spent the summer in Mexico for a summer where he exhibited in Puebla. That year he received the Mexican Government’s Honor Award for artists. In the summer of 1958, Milder studied with Hans Hofmann in Provincetown, Massachusetts. He exhibited his work at the Sun Gallery, with his contemporaries, including Mary Frank, Red Grooms, Bob Thompson...

This came from the collection of the Horace Richter Gallery These were done in the 1990's This does not appear to be hand signed. It is signed and dated verso perhaps by gallerist. Jay Milder (born 1934) is an American artist and a figurative expressionist painter of the second generation New York School. Old Testament themes such as Jacob's Ladder and Noah’s Ark, and the Jewish mystical beliefs of the Kabbalah, are recurring themes in Milder’s paintings which are presented as archetypal images that recur in the basic karma, make-up and need of human nature. Internationally exhibited, Milder is included in the collections of many national and international museums. He has been the subject of two, recent retrospectives in Brazil in 2007 at the National Museum Brasilia and, in 2006, at the Museum of Modern Art, in Rio de Janeiro. He is renowned in Sao Paulo, one of the major international centers for street and public art, as a seminal influence on graffiti artists. Jay Milder was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1934. His grandparents, who came from the Ukraine, were descendants of the Hasidic mystic, Rabbi Nachman. As he listened to family stories his interest in spiritualism and mysticism increased, and became an important influence on his philosophy of life and art. Later, when he arrived in New York, he was drawn to the Theosophical Society and the teaching of Helena Blavatsky. In 1954 Milder visited Europe where he studied painting with André L’Hote, and sculpture with Ossip Zadkine. He spent much time studying at the Louvre Museum, and at the studio of Stanley Hayter. During his Paris years the paintings of the Jewish painter Chaim Soutine, primarily influenced him. Milder returned to the United States in 1956, and he began studying painting at the Chicago Art Institute. He exhibited with the Momentum Group, an alliance of artists who were particularly dedicated to the progression of figurative art and its global origins. In 1957, Milder spent the summer in Mexico for a summer where he exhibited in Puebla. That year he received the Mexican Government’s Honor Award for artists. In the summer of 1958, Milder studied with Hans Hofmann in Provincetown, Massachusetts. He exhibited his work at the Sun Gallery, with his contemporaries, including Mary Frank, Red Grooms, Bob Thompson, Lester Johnson, Emilio Cruz and Alex Katz, among others. During this period his painting began to incorporate iconography of birds, animals, humans and animal/human hybrids. In 1958, Milder, Bob Thompson and Red Grooms, founded the City Gallery in the Chelsea section of New York City. The gallery moved downtown and became the Delancey Street Museum and an early site for ‘Happenings’,which Milder participated in. He showed his first major series called Subway Runners in 1960 at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York City. Milder began a group of smaller paintings, entitled “Messiah Series”, in the late 1960s. These were fully expressionistic earth toned pictures, and he completed around 250 paintings in the series, based on biblical themes from the Old Testament. When 40 of these paintings were shown in a traveling exhibition premiering at the Richard Green Gallery in New York City, in 1987, art critic Donald Kuspit wrote in ArtForum Magazine: “after Nolde’s biblical pictures, these are the best and most integral group of biblical pictures in the 20th century.” During the 1970s, Milder co-founded a collective group called Rhino Horn with Peter Passuntino, Peter Dean, Benny Andrews, Nicholas Sperakis, Michael Fauerbach, Ken Bowman, Leonel Gongora, and Bill Barrell...