John Atherton

Shotgun Hunting Abstract with Shooting Bullseye

1949

This colorful painting by Eleanor Parke Custis is in the spirit of Louis Valtat and the Fauves. The subject of flowers in the foreground is repeated in the backdrop. It straddles the line between abstraction and representation. Signed lower right - Work is framed. Eleanor Parke Custis studied in Corcoran School of the Arts and Design under Edmund C. Tarbell and Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts with Henry B. Snell. Initially, she began her art career as a painter, creating watercolors. Custis created illustrations for Scribner's Magazine, Harper's, Doubleday, Harcourt. She started to take photographs in her youth, using a Brownie camera...

An intriguing and complex composition composed of guns, rifles, ammo and a bullseye. Work is housed in a rustic Heydenryk frame.

Acrylic on masonite. This is a pivotal work in deep and radiant cobalt blue from 1950. It dipicts calligraphic and hieroglyph structures over a grid and pyramidal base by the first generation abstract expressionist. Provenance: Skinner: November 13, 1992 [Lot 00219}, The entry in the Skinner catalog indicates that the painting came directly from the artist to the family of the consignor to Skinner. Kaminsky Auctions. There is an unbroken paper trail that traces the ownership of the painting from the current owner, through two auction houses to the artist. Perfect unbroken provenance. Pousette-Dart was among the most inventive of the Abstract Expressionist generation, His uncanny talent was to expand the nature of abstraction and still make each mark each element very much his own; a reflection of what he called   "the concealed power of the spirit," he said, “not of the brute physical form."   His was not aiming for a singular, realized aesthetic formula but to expand the possibilities of painting; the transcendental in painting. Typical of such invention and exploration is this  painting  Untitled 1950 when the artist was only 34 years old and represented by one of the champions of the new American painting, Betty Parsons.  
A banner year for Pousette-Dart, the Museum of Modern Art acquired their first painting by the Minnesota born artist.  He worked on easel size works such as this painting an oil on masonite. At the same time Pousette-Dart was also working on larger scale works such as Path of the Hero, running over ten feet in length now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Both contain fields of color articulated by a highly sophisticated white hieroglyphic vocabulary. Rather than demonstrate an expressionist sensibility, Pousette-Dart harnesses his more cerebral ideas transforming thick areas of paint into a more refined composition of geometric forms akin to the pattern and forms of say a stained glass window. In a way he is looking back at Fugue, 1940 a black and white composition which makes use of a similar format of painting albeit smaller. Color and form are minimal, but what Pousette-Dart has maximized is the rhythmic and syncopated character of painting casting his ideas into purely symbolic terms that one might link to the pictograms of Adolph Gottlieb. Nonetheless, nature is always at the core of Pousette-Dart’s thinking and dreaming. Here he has transformed the local Ramapo Mountains—where he will eventually move with his family to live and work— into a complex series of articulated fragments linked by style, scale and color.  The painting’s imagery built on two large triangles and reduced to just two colors, cobalt blue and white all outlined in black.  Pousette-Dart symbols stacked in horizontal and vertical rows:  blue is ground, white is language, symbolic of light, consciousness and awareness . The painting maintains a mystical character images compounded that formulate a secret code and linked to the series of white paintings Pousette-Dart authored in the first half of the 1950s. Get up close to the picture and you discover images within images a kind of picture puzzle...

The artist has painted the work in matte black and gloss black. It a sense this is also an optical art “Op Art” in that it changes as the light changes. Jimmy Ernst was a major figure of the New York School of abstract painting and part of The Irascibles, and son of Max Ernst: Provenance: Grace Borgenicht Gallery, New York, New York; Joseph H. Hirshhorn, New York and Washington, D.C. (acquired from the above in 1966); Joseph H. Hirshhorn bequest, Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C., 1981; Sotheby's Arcade, New York, New York, February 24, 1995, lot 331; The Jeanne and Carroll Berry...

The work is executed at the heyday of abstract expressionsim in the mid-50s. Colors are saturated and bright. Goldfield (of Goldfield Gallery). Written on the stretcher. Goldfield G...

Enroll For Service, American Junior Red Cross, poster illustration, 1951 Gouache on board 22 x 14 1/2 in. Not signed From the Collection of the American Red Cross...

A stunning Art Deco cubist gouache on cardboard painting from a Russian Artist in Paris (20th Century). The artwork shows no visible signature. This is a typical example of the Russi...

Bold, colorful abstract cityscape of Tel Aviv 15 X 19 inches including mat (needs new mat). painting is 10.5 X 14.5 Provenance: prominent South Florida art...

One of the most confounding paintings in this exhibition is “The Painting, As Seen by the Wall”. Mastromatteo depicts a bare canvas, framed in reverse, turned-around. He presents the...

"White Picket Fence (Aspirational Memoir)" is inspired by Toni Morison's The Bluest Eye. The focal point is a bright green square, encased with a picket- fence made of white tape. I...

"Lovely Mary Jane" is a Post-Modern painting inspired by The Bluest Eye by Toni Morison. Lovely Mary Jane is a candy wrapper, taped to a blue wall. It’s trash, glorified. But this is not a political statement about commercialism or recycling. This painting was inspired by one of the top 10 banned books across the country, Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” which is about a young black girl who wishes she had blue eyes, an envy shaped from her love of her favorite candy, Mary Jane. It’s a heartbreaking notion caused by an ideal of beauty perpetuated by a marketing campaign for a sweet treat. Classical painting also hails a certain ideal of beauty… and one wouldn’t usually find something as insignificant as a candy wrapper as the focal point of their pièce de résistance. However, Mastromatteo is asking us to see that here is power in idealization, especially in something so seemingly throwaway. He’s prodding us to be more aware…to make people aware of the significance of the seemingly insignificant. The one power an artist possesses is that of forcing the viewer to look at something of his choosing…and in this case he’s asking us to look at something that may be garbage. Consider Maurizio Cattelan, whom in 2019 taped a banana to the wall with duct tape, and it later sold for $120,000…art forces the viewer to consider something that everyone is telling you to look at. Mastromatteo’s candy wrapper is taped up to the wall in a similar fashion as Cattelan’s banana…if we look long enough at the tape, we’ll notice it’s resemblance to the “not-equal” sign...

Is NOT is a present day vanitas still life. A meditation on the ephemerality of life and the things we hold dear. The fragility of the statement "time is not money" is represented in...