Joseph Binder

Answer the Call

1954

Punchy reds and zestful hot pinks convey a sense of intense motion and engine heat. The art is as much as color-field painting as a narrative work. It was a commissioned illustration for Sports Illustrated...

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...

Signed "E.B." in a cartouche panel in the upper center, which is repeated on the verso. Includes 19 on the left side and 62 on the right side. h: 33.2 x w: 19.5 in / h: 84.3 x w: 49...

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...

In Byron Brown's "The Night Journey", 1947, Picasso meets Jackson Pollock. Here Brown strikes a balance between fanciful representation and abstraction. ...

These series of paintings by Natalia Roman gather their inspiration from geometric, minimalist shapes and paintings from the beginning of Modernism, with a special emphasis on Art De...

"Architectural Delusion 1" Gouache on paper Measures: 68 x 53 cm, frame included (Signed on the back) Bauhaus style and geometric abstraction style. Geometric shapes in blue, gre...

"Architectural Delusion 3" Gouache on paper Measures: 68 x 53 cm, frame included (Signed on the back). Bauhaus style and geometric abstraction style. Geometric shapes in blue, gr...

Abstract, Figure of Woman, Safed Oil on Masonite. Signed. Moshé Raviv-Vorobeichic, known as Moi Ver, born Moses Vorobeichik (1904–1995) was an Israeli photographer and painter. Moi Ver (Moshe Raviv) was born in 1904 in Vilnius, Lithuania as Moshe Vorobeichic. Moshe Vorobeichic received his initial artistic training in the early 1920s in Vilnius, Lithuania, where he studied painting, architecture, and photography. Having become an important figure in the Yiddish avant-garde culture, he exhibited his first works. From October 1927, he studied at the Bauhaus school in Dessau (Germany), with photographer-visual artist Laszlo Moholy Nagy and painters Josef Albers, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and Hinnerk Scheper. In his book Moi Ver: Paris, he produced avant-garde photomontages. Originally published in 1931 by Editions Jeanne Walter with an introduction by futurist Fernand Leger. In 1932 Raviv was sent by the weekly La Vie Parisienne to British Mandate Palestine as photo reporter. Raviv illustrated many books. Raviv was a founder of the Artists' Colony in Safed. At the height of 20th Century modernism and one of the followers of Laszlo Moholy Nagy and his concept of New Vision, Moin Ver was one of the rising stars in European photography. Born in Lebedeva, in Belarus, he wandered through Europe until he immigrated to Palestine in 1934. His well known yet partly forgotten three photographic projects in 1931, The Ghetto Lane in Wilna, Paris: 80 Photographies de Moi Ver and Ci-Contre – 110 Photos de Moi Ver (that was not published at the time), have remained milestones in the art of the 1930s as he created and imposed a new visionary style in photography. As a contemporary of artists such as Man Ray, Ilse Bing...

This abstract geometric acrylic painting is a vibrant and playful composition that draws inspiration from vintage Italian parasols. With a focus on bold, bright colors and clean line...

Pastel on paper The German-born American Abstractionist Carl Robert Holty became known for his biomorphic abstract forms as well as his geometric abstractions that he painted with a ...