1940s Figurative Paintings

Julio De Diego’s Atomic Series paintings made an extraordinary statement regarding the shock and fear that accompanied the dawn of the nuclear age. In the artist’s own words, “Scientists were working secretly to develop formidable powers taken from the mysterious depths of the earth - with the power to make the earth useless! Then, the EXPLOSION! . . . we entered the Atomic Age, and from there the neo-Atomic war begins. Explosions fell everywhere and man kept on fighting, discovering he could fight without flesh.” To execute these works, De Diego developed a technique of using tempera underpainting before applying layer upon layer of pigmented oil glazes. The result is paintings with surfaces which were described as “bonelike” in quality. The forms seem to float freely, creating a three-dimensional visual effect. In the 1954 book The Modern Renaissance in American Art, author Ralph Pearson summarizes the series as “a fantastic interpretation of a weighty theme. Perhaps it is well to let fantasy and irony appear to lighten the devastating impact. By inverse action, they may in fact increase its weight.” Bibliography Art in America, April 1951, p.78 About this artists: Julio De Diego crafted a formidable persona within the artistic developments and political struggles of his time. The artist characterized his own work as “lyrical,” explaining, “through the years, the surrealists, the social-conscious painters and the others tried to adopt me, but I went my own way, good, bad or indifferent.” [1] His independence manifested early in life when de Diego left his parent’s home in Madrid, Spain, in adolescence following his father’s attempts to curtail his artistic aspirations. At the age of fifteen he held his first exhibition, set up within a gambling casino. He managed to acquire an apprenticeship in a studio producing scenery for Madrid’s operas, but moved from behind the curtains to the stage, trying his hand at acting and performing as an extra in the Ballet Russes’ Petrouchka with Nijinsky. He spent several years in the Spanish army, including a six-month stretch in the Rif War of 1920 in Northern Africa. His artistic career pushed ahead as he set off for Paris and became familiar with modernism’s forays into abstraction, surrealism, and cubism. The artist arrived in the U.S. in 1924 and settled in Chicago two years later. He established himself with a commission for the decoration of two chapels in St. Gregory’s Church. He also worked in fashion illustration, designed magazine covers and developed a popular laundry bag for the Hotel Sherman. De Diego began exhibiting through the Art Institute of Chicago in 1929, and participated in the annual Chicago Artists Exhibitions, Annual American Exhibitions, and International Water Color Exhibitions. He held a solo exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago in the summer of 1935. Though the artist’s career was advancing, his family life had deteriorated. In 1932 his first marriage dissolved, and the couple’s young daughter Kiriki was sent to live with friend Paul Hoffman. De Diego continued to develop his artistic vocabulary with a growing interest in Mexican art. He traveled throughout the country acquainting himself with the works of muralists such as Carlos Merida, and also began a collection of small native artifacts...

Vicenç Ferrer Torradellas (1927) - Ibiza Market - Oil on canvas Oil measures 46x55 cm. Frameless. Reus 1927. He studied at the School of Work. He dedicated himself to easel painting...

Gouache on artist board Provenance: Estate of Sam Esses Never afraid of trying new styles, curious and opinionated, constantly engaged with the world around him, Rolph Scarlett mor...

Goauche Provenance: Estate of Sam Esses Never afraid of trying new styles, curious and opinionated, constantly engaged with the world around him, Rolph Scarlett more than once proved to be at the artistic zeitgeist in a career that stretched for more than 75 years. Born in 1889, Scarlett had his first retrospective by 1928. He subscribed fully to the modernist credo. Interviewed at the time, he said: "If a futuristic painting...

Wonderful signed figures in landscape oil on canvas circa 1940 by French post impressionist painter Lucien Adrion. The painting depicts families enjoying a sunny summer's day at the ...

Gouache on artist board Provenance: Collection of Sam Esses Never afraid of trying new styles, curious and opinionated, constantly engaged with the world around him, Rolph Scarlett...

Oil on canvas signed by artist Angelo Di Benedetto (1913-1992) featuring two young figures reading a book together while sitting from 1947. Painted in shades of green, orange, red, gray, and green. Image measures 28 x 38 inches, framed dimensions are 33 ¾ x 39 ¾ inches. Painting is in good condition - please contact us for a detailed condition report. About the Artist: Born New Jersey 1913 Died Central City, CO 1992 The son of Italian immigrants from the Salerno province in southern Italy, as a teenager Di Benedetto worked to study at the Cooper Union Art School in New York City (1930-34) from which he graduated with a certificate in freehand drawing. He won a scholarship to the Boston Museum Art School where he studied for three years, beginning in 1934. In 1937, he entered his first juried exhibition at the Montclair Museum in New Jersey, winning first prize and first honorable mention. In December 1938, the Royal Netherlands Steamship Line sent him on a two-month ethnological study trip to Haiti, his first exposure to a different environment outside the United States. In 1940, his Haitian paintings were exhibited at the Montross Gallery in New York – his first solo show. Before World War II, Di Benedetto traveled extensively around the United States doing regional paintings. During the war in 1941, Di Benedetto volunteered for a secret mission based in Eritrea, Africa before the Allied invasion. Following Africa, he served as an orientation officer and aerial photographic officer in the District of Columbia. In 1945 he was assigned to a mapping unit at Buckley Airfield in Denver where he served until his discharge in 1946. Like many other servicemen stationed at the time in Colorado, Di Benedetto chose to remain in Colorado, impressed by the state’s physical grandeur and healthful climate. He settled in the old mining town of Central City in 1947. In 1949 Di Benedetto and his wife, ceramist Lee Porzio, opened the Benpro Art School in his studio where he conducted summer art classes. In 1950, Di Benedetto teamed up with Frank Vavra...

In this work we find the image of the Buddha and several pomegranates, symbolizing fertility. The choice of combining objects and materials of different nature becomes an unmistakable feature of his style. A taste for the intrinsic qualities of different materials, specifically chosen for their characteristics of gloss transparency and sphericity, not least, the optical precision with which the different surfaces are rendered. Croatto creates images where reality is transformed into a magical and suspended atmosphere. Bruno Croatto...

This is a possible self portrait by the famed female surrealist artist. It is also strikingly similar in style with it's exaggerated eyes to her portrait of Jean Genet, ( Leonor F...

Six O-Clock, c. 1942, oil on canvas, 30 x 20 inches, signed and titled several times verso of frame and stretcher (perhaps by another hand), marked “Rehn” several times on frame (for the Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries in New York City, who represented Craig at the time); Exhibited: 1) 18th Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Oil Paintings from March 21 to May 2, 1943 at The Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. #87, original price $450 (per catalog) (exhibition label verso), 2) Craig’s one-man show at the Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries, New York City, from October 26 to November 14, 1942, #10 (original price listed as $350); and 3) Exhibition of thirty paintings sponsored by the Harrisburg Art Association at the State Museum of Pennsylvania in Harrisburg in March, 1944 (concerning this exhibit, Penelope Redd of The Evening News (Harrisburg, Pennsylvania) wrote: “Other paintings that have overtones of superrealism inherent in the subjects include Tom Craig’s California nocturne, ‘Six O’Clock,’ two figures moving through the twilight . . . .” March 6, 1944, p. 13); another label verso from The Museum of Art of Toledo (Ohio): original frame: Provenance includes George Stern Gallery, Los Angeles, CA About the Painting Long before Chris Burden’s iconic installation outside of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Urban Light, another artist, Tom Craig, made Southern California streetlights the subject of one of his early 1940s paintings. Consisting of dozens of recycled streetlights from the 1920s and 1930s forming a classical colonnade at the museum’s entrance, Burden’s Urban Light has become a symbol of Los Angeles. For Burden, the streetlights represent what constitutes an advanced society, something “safe after dark and beautiful to behold.” It seems that Craig is playing on the same theme in Six O-Clock. Although we see two hunched figures trudging along the sidewalk at the end of a long day, the real stars of this painting are the streetlights which brighten the twilight and silhouette another iconic symbol of Los Angeles, the palm trees in the distance. Mountains in the background and the distant view of a suburban neighborhood join the streetlights and palm trees as classic subject matter for a California Scene painting, but Craig gives us a twist by depicting the scene not as a sun-drenched natural expanse. Rather, Craig uses thin layers of oil paint, mimicking the watercolor technique for which he is most famous, to show us the twinkling beauty of manmade light and the safety it affords. Although Southern California is a land of natural wonders, the interventions of humanity are already everywhere in Los Angeles and as one critic noted, the resulting painting has an air of “superrealism.” About the Artist Thomas Theodore Craig was a well-known fixture in the Southern California art scene. He was born in Upland California. Craig graduated with a degree in botany from Pomona College and studied painting at Pamona and the Chouinard Art School with Stanton MacDonald-Wright and Barse Miller among others. He became close friends with fellow artist Milford Zornes...

Work on wood

Abel Warshawsky (American 1883-1962) Spring Fantasy, 1948 Oil on artist's board Signed lower right and verso 16 x 13 inches 20 x 17 inches, framed Impressionist painter A.G. Warshaw...

This is a highly stylized circus acrobat scene. Done “en grissille” or shades of grey, it portrays an acrobat on a trapeze high above the crowd, abstractly shown lower right. The stark composition, enhanced by the theatrical lighting...

Les Guilleries. Original acrylic painting Casimiro Martínez Tarrassó, a painter known simply as Tarrassó. He was trained at the La Llotja School in Barcelona. He completed his studies in Paris, where he got to know first-hand the Fauvist works that were shaking the Parisian art scene at the time. This Fauve influence will continue to be palpable in his work throughout his life in features such as the strong chromatic contrast, the elevated and somewhat exaggerated perspective, the absolute disinterest in the human figure, which appears only sketched as a complement to the landscape, and the representation of trees as electrified, subjected to tortuous inclinations. It is these formal features that give his works their own vitality and reduce their connection with the referential to a mere pretext. Tarrassó followed in the wake of the great Catalan landscape painters, paying particular attention to Joaquín Mir, although with a clearly differentiated personality due in part to the impact that Fauvism had on his artistic thinking. He cultivated still life and Catalan and Majorcan landscapes. He held his first exhibition in 1928 in Barcelona. Since then his shows have followed in Barcelona, Madrid, Palma de Mallorca and Bilbao. In 1935 he visited Mallorca for the first time, and from 1940 on he will have a studio there, specifically in Palma, where he lived for long periods and developed most of his artistic production. After the Civil War, during the 1940s, Tarrassó took part in several National Exhibitions of Fine Arts, in their editions of 1942, 1943 and 1950. Although the landscape was always the center of his production, Tarrassó also made works such as the mural decoration of the church of Santa María de Badalona. In Mallorca he also carried out a unique undertaking, planting his trestle in the Campanet caves to capture the stalactites and stalagmites from their stone cavities, developing a series of works that he presented in 1948. Throughout his career, Tarrassó was awarded the Pollença Prize of the I International Painting Contest, in 1962; the Santiago Rusiñol...

Tempera on board, 87cm x 60cm (framed 106cm x 78cm). Stuart Maxwell Armfield (1916-2000) was renowned for his use of the traditional egg tempera technique, a skilled process that us...

Beautiful Blue Eyed Boy Vintage Portrait California Impressionist Wonderful 1940s portrait of young boy on cusp of adulthood. His piercing blue eyes draw y...

Babies are falling from the sky and not bombs. British female artist and illustrator Noel Laura Nisbet makes a passionate twist to the reality of En...

Untitled (Portrait of Bessy Lyon, Artist Wife) is an oil on canvas painting by Hayes Lyon (1901-1987) from 1945. Presented in a wood frame, outer dimensions measure 35 ¼ x 29 ¼ x 1 ¾ inches. Image size is 30 x 24 inches. About the Artist: A native of Athol, Kansas, Lyon is primarily associated with Colorado. After several summer vacations at the Boulder Chautauqua and at Manitou near Colorado Springs, his family relocated in 1920 to Boulder where his father had a lumber business. Nine years later they settled in Denver where his father owned the Acme Lumber Company. To comply with his desire for his son’s financial self-reliance, Lyon graduated from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1931 with a B.A. degree in economics. But shortly thereafter he returned to his first love – art – that ultimately became his career. His interest in the arts was nurtured by his mother, herself a talented amateur artist, and by two of his aunts who served as role models. Beginning in 1932, he pursued a five-year course of study at the Chappell School of Art in Denver which by then had become part of the University of Denver. During his time at the school he studied with John E. Thompson and Santa Fe artist, Józef Bakoś. He also met two other Santa Fe-based artists, Willard Nash and B.J.O. Nordfeldt, when they exhibited at Chappell House, then the home of the Denver Art Museum. Lyon likewise attended the Cooke-Daniels Lecture Series there on the arts in the 1930s. Following graduation with a B.F.A. degree from the University of Denver in 1937, he studied privately for about a year with Andrew Dasburg in Taos, New Mexico, that redirected his attention to the rugged Rocky Mountain landscape, which he saw with directness and painted with an economy of means. His canvas, Winter Vista, done following his study with Dasburg, received the Edward J. Yetter Memorial Prize at the 45th Annual Exhibition of the Denver Art Museum in 1939. The painting was reproduced in the September 1939 issue of the Magazine of Art (Washington, DC). That same year his painting, Mount Evans, was included as one of Colorado’s entries in the American Art Today Pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. The money he received from the Yetter Prize financed his trip to Mexico City and Guadalajara in 1939 to see firsthand the frescoes of José Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera and the easel paintings of David Alfaro Siqueiros. Their work was admired by many Americans who participated in the WPA-era mural projects in the United States in the 1930s and early 1940s. The economic fallout from the Great Depression affecting many American artists at the time likewise resulted in Lyon’s participation in the Colorado Art Project, part of the WPA’s national program. Under its auspices he produced three murals in 1940 about the pioneer era of Fort Lupton, Colorado, which were installed in the auditorium of the local high school. Covering 367 square feet of wall space, one of the murals – Behold the West (the largest one) – incorporates the old fort for which the town is named. Before Lyon painted the murals, the students at Fort Lupton High School researched the history of their community and contributed to their cost, facilitating the murals’ allocation to their school under the Colorado Art Project. In the early 1940s Lyon shifted his focus to two new subjects – bathers, and canyons with conifers – reflecting his ongoing search for personal artistic growth. However, his reliance on structure to create form in his paintings and works on paper alienated some of his longtime followers. Nonetheless, his painting Conifers and Canyons won recognition at the 47th Annual Exhibition at the Denver Art Museum. The watercolor version of the piece was among three hundred works in that medium selected by John Marin, Charles Burchfield and Eliot O’Hara from a national competition held by the Section of Fine Arts (Federal Works Agency) and shown at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, in 1941. Later that year Lyon spent time in California where he saw Orozco’s Prometheus, influencing him to increase his range of originality and expression. In 1942 Lyon enlisted in the U.S. Army, spending almost three years in the Mediterranean Theater – Africa and Italy – preparing camouflage operations and scale models of proposed landing sites. He used his free time in Italy to expand his artistic vocabulary by seeing cultural masterpieces in Rome, Florence, Siena and Milan, and through his extensive contact with Giorgio de Chirico, founder of the scuola metafisica art movement, and Gino Severini, a leading member of the Futurist movement. Because of Lyon’s low army rank and pay, de Chirico did a small watercolor for him signing it, "For Mr. Lyon; G de Chirico, 1944." Lyon often visited de Chirico and his wife, Isa, at their apartment near the Spanish Steps in Rome. Following his Army discharge in 1945 fellow Kansas native, Ward Lockwood, invited him to join the Art Department at the University of Texas at Austin where he taught painting from 1946 to 1951. During this period some of Lyon’s work employed the palette of the School of Paris which he had seen while stationed in Europe, while other paintings had a certain flatness found in some of Lockwood’s work from the 1930s. From 1951 to 1953 he was affiliated with the Lower Colorado River Authority in Austin as an illustrator and editor of the employee magazine. In 1953, following time spent in Mexico, he returned to Denver, working as an illustrator at Lowry Air Force Base until retirement in 1961. During that time he did little of his own art because he also was designing and building a home in Arvada, Colorado, and re-establishing himself in the Denver art community after a decade-long absence. His painting, Autumn Aspens (1953-present location unknown) illustrates his experimentation with abstraction. In the early 1960s he began painting from memory that continued until the steadily degenerative effects of Alzheimer’s disease took their toll a decade later. He depicted scenes from his wartime European sojourn and from his early adulthood. The latter include Souvenir of Boulder (1962), a nostalgic return to his boyhood home in Boulder; and Holly Mayer and Friends, a painting of Glenn Miller and his musicians, inspired by Lyon’s first encounter with jazz in Boulder in the 1920s. His lifelong passion for vintage cars and automobile racing...

Industrial Railroad WPA Mid 20th Century American Scene Rural Modern Realism Large oil on canvas genre painting depicting laborers working on a railroad, with rural landscape in the...

Rabbit Hunters, egg tempera on Masonite, 12 x 9 inches, 1947, signed and dated lower left, signed, titled and dated verso “Rabbit Hunters Egg Tempera Roger Medearis 1947,” exhibited ...

We are proud to present outstanding original oil on canvas by American artist William Gropper (1897-1977.) William Gropper was an artist and illustrator, known for his exceptional a...

Antique American modernist abstract painting. Oil on canvas, circa 1940. Housed in a vintage frame. Image size, 18L x 24H.

Work on canvas

Fred E. Robertson (1878 - 1953) Swapping Horses, 1947 Signed and dated lower right Oil on masonite 12 5/8 x 24 inches Fred Robertson, like his more famous older sister, Anna Mary Ro...

Elaine de Kooning said of De Hirsh Margules that he was "[w]idely recognized as one of the most gifted and erudite watercolorists in the country", and New York Times critic Howard Devree stated in 1938 that "Margules uses color in a breath-taking manner. A keen observer, he eliminates scrupulously without distortion of his material." Devree later called Margules "one of our most daring experimentalists in the medium." In 1929, Margules attended an exhibition of John Marin’s paintings. While at the exhibition, he "launched into an eloquent explanation of Marin to two nearby women", and was overheard by an impressed Alfred Stieglitz. The famous photographer and art promoter invited Margules to dine with his wife, the artist Georgia O’Keeffe, and his assistant, painter Emil Zoler. Stieglitz thereafter became a friend and mentor to Margules, becoming for him "what Socrates was to his friends." Stieglitz introduced Margules to John Marin, who quickly became the most important painterly influence upon Margules. Elaine de Kooning later noted that Margules was "[i]ndebted to Marin and through Marin to Cezanne for his initial conceptual approach." His work can be found in the collections of the Whitney, MOMA, Boston Museum of Fine Art, the Brooklyn Museum and the Provincetown Art...

Work on canvas Golden wooden frame 63 x 55 x 5 cm

Fred E. Robertson (1878 - 1953) Neighborhood Shivaree, 1945 Signed and dated lower left Oil on masonite 16 x 20 inches Exhibited: Buffalo, The Buffalo Fine Arts Academy, Albright A...

Signed lower right: “Irwin D. Hoffman”.

Work on canvas Beige wooden frame 80.5 x 93.5 x 6 cm

From The British mandate Pre State of Israel Palestine Period. Eliahu Sigad (Eliyahu Sigard), painter, born 1901, Lithuania. Founder of Israeli Painters' Association. Educated in Europe. Prizes in Israel, Exhibitions in Israel and various countries of the world. Died 1975. Education Riga, architecture and drawing Colarossi Academy, Paris, France 1930 Grande Chaumiere, Paris, France Awards And Prizes 1938 Dizengoff Prize 1945-46, Dizengoff Prize 1945 Ramat Gan...

"Spring" is a 25 x 30 inches, oil on canvas painting by American modernist and surrealist, female artist Peter Miller. The work is signed and titled on verso, and painted in a vibran...

Outstanding and vibrant figurative oil on canvas painting by the well known American artist, Nahum Tschacbasov. Signed lower right and dated 1945. Partial Perl’s Gallery, New York label verso with partial title on same label verso. Title might be “Mountains and Horses” Condition is very good. The painting is housed in it”s original House...

"War Brides, Wash Sq NYC" American Scene WWII Modernism WPA Mid-Century Oil. 30 x 40 inches. Oil on canvas, c. 1942. Signed lower right. Titled on the stretcher. Housed in a sensational Heydenryk frame. Our gallery, Helicline Fine Art...

Work on wood Golden wooden frame 46 x 38 x 3 cm

Surreal Full Moon Hawaii Cliff House Nocturnal Hawaiian 1940s Landscape Symbolic and surreal mid century nocturnal landscape of a lone house on a s...

Na Kumuwaiwai Hohonu, Underwater Spirt - Hawaiian Symbolist Figurative Hawaiian symbolist nocturnal figurative of glowing whispy figure underwater with mountains and red coral garden by Marguerite Louis Blasingame (American; 1906-1947), circa 1940-45. Marguerite and her husband Frank Blasingame...

Provenance: Daughter of artist, Fletcher Gallery, Woodstock, NY De Diego was known for his "lyrical" works (his term), which combined elements of surrealism, cubism and the social commentary of the politically active Mexican painters. Born in Madrid in 1900, Julio De Diego left home at the age of 15 to apprentice as a scene painter for theaters. After service in the Spanish army...

"Femme Rousse Sur Fond Vert" is an original oil on canvas impressionistic portrait of a woman by Albert Bertalan. A red-headed lady in a purple and white striped collared coat sits in front of a green background daydreaming about something personal. The painting is framed with an ornate gold frame. From the late 19th century until World War Two, Paris was the center of the art world. Artists and intellectuals from around the globe descended on Paris, drawn by the atmosphere of creative freedom established by the French Impressionists. Because of the Impressionists’ innovations the direction of art had changed forever, the times were ripe for another Renaissance. The School of Paris, as this broad-based group of artists are referred to embodied the spirit of modernism. Albert Bertalan was born on September 21, 1899 in Jaszbereny, Hungary. He is known for painting compositions of figures in unique environments, including women by the sea, among other similar subject matters. He studied at the Nagybanyai Art School under some of the most important Hungarian artists, including Ivànyi Grünwald...

Bouquet of Flowers Louis Marchand des Raux was born 1902-2000 in Touraine in the tiny village of Tourettes in France, where he grew up in such pov...

Signed figures in landscape oil on canvas circa 1940 by sought after French post impressionist painter Marcel Dyf. The piece depicts people enjoying a sunny winter's day at the port ...

Basketball Player Gouache on card stock, c. 1940 Signed by the artist in ink lower center A study for the fresco mural in the Social Security Buildin...

Signed lower right, 'Lily Harmon' (American, 1912-1998) and painted circa 1945. Previously with: Associated American Artists Gallery (partial label verso) An exceptionally lyrical a...

Work on wood Beige wooden frame 50 x 53 x 3.5 cm

The setting reminds us of a Rear Window by Alfred Hickcock but Evergood did it 8 years before. It's most likely Greenwich Village since Evergood lived there. This is a very big and heavy to lift painting Signed lower left Framed 56 x 51 in a period very heavy rustic wood frame. Exhibited Center Gallery, Bucknell University, PA, among others venus. gallery label remnants on verso - The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis The Whitney Museum of American Art Annual 1949 - Label Provenance: Naomi and Walter Rosenblum Best Viewed with a top gallery light...

A beautiful oil painting by French artist Louis Valtat. Featuring a colorful display of a flower bouquet of dahlias.

Clarence Holbrook Carter (American, 1904-2000) Still Life with Apples, 1940 Oil on canvas Signed and dated upper right 18 x 24 inches Clarence Holbrook Carter achieved a level of national artistic success that was nearly unprecedented among Cleveland School artists of his day, with representation by major New York dealers...

A charming painting of a quaint lake at night with the moon reflecting on calm waters. Bearing an Albright Knox Art Gallery "Art Week" label from 1941 t...

Work on canvas Molded plaster frame and gilded wood 56 x 70 x 6 cm

Clarence Holbrook Carter (American, 1904-2000) Hospitalities Long Past, 1941 Oil on canvas Signed and dated lower right 37 x 27 inches "Looking into store front windows has always i...

Bungalow (fauvist painting of New York scene) 1940's. image is 10X 11.5 inches. Hand signed lower right Country Scene Samuel Grunvald was a Hungarian born American WPA artist known for abstract, landscape and seascape paintings. Arrived in the USA from Hungary in 1921 and settled in New York City where he studied at the Art Students League. Grunvald worked for the Federal Art Project, taught at Colony House in NYC. Member: Art Guild, Watercolor Society, New York Watercolor Club. exhibited at Montross Gallery, NYC, World House Galleries, NYC, Leonard Hutton Gallery, NYC, Associated American Artists Gallery and the A.C.A. Gallery. Gunvald's work spanned many modern American movements from the WPA to Abstract Expressionist painting. He was a member of the American Watercolor Society and the Brooklyn Society of Artists. He exhibited with both of these organizations and at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. He was involved the the WPA being a Federal Arts Project artist. A number of prominent Jewish artists participated in this New Deal program among them Ben Shahn, Joseph Solman, William Gropper, Philip Guston Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Rothko, Milton Avery, Ben Shahn, the Soyers (Isaac, Moses, and Raphael), and many others Grunwald exhibited alongside other popular artists such as Paul Klee, Jean Arp, Max Ernst and Charles Burchfield. He also taught and lectured on art and easel painting, Federal Art Project, NYC. His work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and The Jewish Museum, New York. Americana. The Catskills became a major resort destination for Jewish New Yorkers in the mid-20th century. Borscht Belt is an informal term for the summer resorts of the Catskill Mountains in Sullivan and Ulster counties in upstate New York which were frequented by Ashkenazi Jews. At its peak of popularity, about 500 resorts operated in the region. Later changes in vacationing patterns have led most of those travelers elsewhere, although there are still bungalow communities and summer camps in the towns of Liberty, Bethel, Monticello and Fallsburg catering to Orthodox Jewish populations. Borscht Belt, The term, which derives from the name of a beet soup popular with people of Eastern European origin, can also refer to the Catskill region itself. In August, 1969, the Catskills were the site of a music and art festival in the town of Bethel, which had originally been planned for Woodstock, New York. Thirty-three of the best-known musicians of the era appeared during a sometimes rainy weekend in front of nearly half a million concertgoers. The event, featuring liberal drug use and nudity, exemplified the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. Select Exhibitions A.C.A. Gallery Associated American Artists Gallery, 1936-1955 American Watercolor Society, 1932-1942 New York Watercolor Club, 1935-1937 Humanist Art...

Wonderful reclining nude in modern style, circa 1940. Faint illegible signature lower right edge. Condition: Good: Professionally cleaned; two tears professionally repaired/inpainted...

Antique American impressionist landscape painting. Very finely painted with an impressive palette. Oil on board. No signature found. Image size, 24L x 20H.

The Market, (fauvist painting of NYC scene) 1940's. image is 10X 11.5 inches. Hand signed lower right Lower East Side Tenements Pushcart Market Samuel Grunvald was a Hungarian born American WPA artist known for abstract, landscape and seascape paintings. Arrived in the USA from Hungary in 1921 and settled in New York City where he studied at the Art Students League. Grunvald worked for the Federal Art Project, taught at Colony House in NYC. Member: Art Guild, Watercolor Society, New York Watercolor Club. exhibited at Montross Gallery, NYC, World House Galleries, NYC, Leonard Hutton Gallery, NYC, Associated American Artists Gallery and the A.C.A. Gallery. Gunvald's work spanned many modern American movements from the WPA to Abstract Expressionist painting. He was a member of the American Watercolor Society and the Brooklyn Society of Artists. He exhibited with both of these organizations and at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. He was involved the the WPA being a Federal Arts Project artist. A number of prominent Jewish artists participated in this New Deal program among them Ben Shahn, Joseph Solman, William Gropper, Philip Guston Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Rothko, Milton Avery, Ben Shahn, the Soyers (Isaac, Moses, and Raphael), and many others Grunwald exhibited alongside other popular artists such as Paul Klee, Jean Arp, Max Ernst and Charles Burchfield. He also taught and lectured on art and easel painting, Federal Art Project, NYC. His work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and The Jewish Museum, New York. Americana. Select Exhibitions A.C.A. Gallery Associated American Artists Gallery, 1936-1955 American Watercolor Society, 1932-1942 New York Watercolor Club, 1935-1937 Humanist Art...

Original 1940s watercolor on paper painting by Charles Ragland Bunnell portraying a semi abstracted view of Golden Cycle Mill in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Painted in shades of black and gray. Presented in a custom black frame, outer dimensions measure 18 x 19 ½ x 1 ⅜ inches. Image sight size is 8 ⅛ x 9 ⅝ inches. Golden Cycle Mining and Reduction Company was a mining company in Colorado City (now Old Colorado City) in El Paso County, Colorado. Piece is clean and in excellent condition - please contact us for a detailed condition report. Expedited and international shipping is available - please contact us for a quote. About the artist: Artist and teacher, Charles (“Charlie”) Bunnell worked in a variety of styles throughout his career because as an artist he believed, “I’ve got to paint a thousand different ways. I don’t paint any one way.” At different times he did representational landscapes while concurrently involved with semi- or completely abstract imagery. He was one of a relatively small number of artists in Colorado successfully incorporating into their work the new trends emanating from New York and Europe after World War II. During his lifetime he generally did not attract a great deal of critical attention from museums, critics and academia. However, he personally experienced a highpoint in his career when Katherine Kuh, curator at the Art Institute of Chicago, personally chose one of his paintings – Why? - for its large exhibition of several hundred examples of abstract and surrealist art held in 1947-48, subsequently including it among the fifty pieces selected for a traveling show to ten other American museums. An only child, Bunnell developed his love of art at a young age through frequent drawing and political cartooning. In high school he was interested in baseball and golf and also was the tennis champion for Westport High School in Kansas City. Following graduation, his father moved the family to Denver, Colorado, in 1916 for a better-paying bookkeeping job, before relocating the following year to Colorado Springs to work for local businessman, Edmond C. van Diest, President of the Western Public Service Company and the Colorado Concrete Company. Bunnell would spend almost all of his adult life in Colorado Springs. In 1918 he enlisted in the United States Army, serving in the 62nd Infantry Regiment through the end of World War I. Returning home with a 10% disability, he joined the Zebulon Pike Post No. 1 of the Disabled American Veterans Association and in 1921 used the benefits from his disability to attend a class in commercial art design conducted under a government program in Colorado Springs. The following year he transferred to the Broadmoor Art Academy (founded in 1919) where he studied with William Potter and in 1923 with Birger Sandzén. Sandzén’s influence is reflected in Bunnell’s untitled Colorado landscape (1925) with a bright blue-rose palette. For several years thereafter Bunnell worked independently until returning to the Broadmoor Art Academy to study in 1927-28 with Ernest Lawson, who previously taught at the Kansas City Art Institute where Bunnell himself later taught in the summers of 1929-1930 and in 1940-41. Lawson, a landscapist and colorist, was known for his early twentieth-century connection with “The Eight” in New York, a group of forward-looking painters including Robert Henri and John Sloan whose subject matter combined a modernist style with urban-based realism. Bunnell, who won first-place awards in Lawson’s landscapes classes at the Academy, was promoted to his assistant instructor for the figure classes in the 1928-29 winter term. Lawson, who painted in what New York critic James Huneker termed a “crushed jewel” technique, enjoyed additional recognition as a member of the Committee on Foreign Exhibits that helped organize the landmark New York Armory Exhibition in 1913 in which Lawson showed and which introduced European avant-garde art to the American public. As noted in his 1964 interview for the Archives of American Art in Washington, DC, Bunnell learned the most about his teacher’s use of color by talking with him about it over Scotch as his assistant instructor. “Believe me,” Bunnell later said, “[Ernie] knew color, one of the few Americans that did.” His association with Lawson resulted in local scenes of Pikes Peak, Eleven Mile Canyon, the Gold Cycle Mine near Colorado City and other similar sites, employing built up pigments that allowed the surfaces of his canvases to shimmer with color and light. (Eleven Mile Canyon was shown in the annual juried show at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh in 1928, an early recognition of his talent outside of Colorado.) At the same time, he animated his scenes of Colorado Springs locales by defining the image shapes with color and line as demonstrated in Contrasts (1929). Included in the Midwestern Artists’ Exhibition in Kansas City in 1929, it earned him the gold medal of the Kansas City Art Institute, auguring his career as a professional artist. In the 1930s Bunnell used the oil, watercolor and lithography media to create a mini-genre of Colorado’s old mining towns and mills, subject matter spurned by many local artists at the time in favor of grand mountain scenery. In contrast to his earlier images, these newer ones – both daytime and nocturnal -- such as Blue Bird Mine essentially are form studies. The conical, square and rectangular shapes of the buildings and other structures are placed in the stark, undulating terrain of the mountains and valleys devoid of any vegetation or human presence. In the mid-1930s he also used the same approach in his monochromatic lithographs titled Evolution, Late Evening, K.C. (Kansas City) and The Mill, continuing it into the next decade with his oil painting, Pikes Peak (1942). During the early 1930s he studied for a time with Boardman Robinson, director of the Broadmoor Art Academy and its successor institution, the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center from 1930 to 1947. In 1934 Robinson gave him the mural commission under the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) for West Junior High School in Colorado Springs, his first involvement in one of several New Deal art...

Work on paper Beige wooden frame with glass pane 48 x 67.3 x 3.3 cm

Oil and encaustic on canvas. Russian-Jewish-American artist Nahum Tschacbasov (1899-1984) is known for his intriquing cubo-surrealistic-symbolist works which feature a strong psycho...

Vintage American modernist abstract piano painting. Oil on canvas, circa 1940. Signed. Framed. Image size, 24"L x 20"H.

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