Frank London

"Sunflowers, " Frank London, Modernist Yellow Floral Still Life with Window

Edith Kramer (1916 - 2014) Still Life with Mask, n.d. Oil on canvas 26 x 20 inches Signed and titled on the stretcher Provenance: Estate of the artist Kramer was born in Vienna, Austria-Hungary in 1916. At age 13 Kramer began art lessons with Friedl Dicker. Dicker was graduate of the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany and was an artist and art teacher of note. Kramer studied drawing, sculpture and painting, and was influenced by the method for teaching art developed by Bauhaus artist Johannes Itten. It was in 1934 after Kramer graduated from Realgymnasium that she, then 18, followed Dicker to Prague to continue to study under her. During this time in Prague, Kramer witnessed the therapeutic impact of art when she assisted Dicker in teaching art to the children of political refugees. With the threat of Nazi invasion looming, Kramer took refuge in America in 1938. In New York City, she worked for three years teaching sculpture at a progressive school called the Little Red School House. During World War II Kramer worked as a machinist at a tool and die shop in the Soho district of New York City. She stayed after her shift to draw the other workers in their industrial setting. These works were rendered in the social realist style. In 1947 Kramer visited some of the earliest known artwork, in the caves at Lascaux. Kramer spoke of these cave paintings as an example of the universal language of art. At the age of 33 she returned to New York City, with hopes of making a living as an artist. Still in her 33rd year, Kramer was offered a job at Wiltwyck School for Boys, a school and residential treatment facility for children with behavioral and emotional needs. This job was arranged for her by psychoanalyst and board member at Wiltwyck, Dr. Viola Bernard. Dr. Bernard gave Kramer the title, "Art Therapist," noting that few teachers were willing to work with such challenging students. It was here that Kramer worked with disturbed boys, ages 8 through 13, for the following seven years. Raised in a family which was interested in psychoanalytic theory, Kramer herself became a follower of Sigmund Freud. Kramer especially believed in the concept of sublimation. Freudian theory describes sublimation as a process in which primitive urges coming from the id are transformed into socially productive activities that lead to gratification of the original urge. Kramer's training was in art, art education and psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy. Kramer believed sublimation to be one of the most vital goals of art therapy...

Albert Swinden (1901 - 1961) Still Life of Fruit, 1937 Oil on canvas 18 x 30 inches Provenance: Graham Gallery, New York Albert Swinden (1901–1961) was an English-born American abstract painter. He was one of the founders of the American Abstract Artists, and he created significant murals as part of the Federal Art Project. Albert Swinden was born in Birmingham, England in 1901. When he was seven, he moved with his family to Canada, and in 1919 he immigrated to the United States. He lived in Chicago, where he studied for about a year and a half at the Art Institute. He then relocated to New York City, where his art education continued briefly at the National Academy of Design. He soon changed schools again, to the Art Students League, which he attended from 1930 to 1934. He studied with Hans Hofmann and gained an appreciation for Synthetic Cubism and Neoplasticism. According to painter and printmaker George McNeil, Swinden "could have influenced Hofmann ... He was working with very, very simple planes, not in this sort of Cubistic manner. Swinden was working synthetically at this time." While still a student, Swinden began teaching at the Art Students League, in 1932. Swinden married Rebecca Palter (1912–1998), from New York. Their daughter, Alice Swinden Carter, also became an artist. Carter, who attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, received an award from the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston for her large sculptures. Swinden was hired for the Federal Art Project (FAP) of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and he is best known for the murals which he painted as part of that project. In 1935, New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia attended the opening of the inaugural exhibit at the Federal Art Project Gallery, accompanied by Audrey McMahon, New York regional director for the Works Progress Administration/Federal Art Project. Among the works on display was Abstraction, a sketch by Swinden; it was the design for a mural planned for the College of the City of New York. A newspaper account described it as consisting of "brightly colored T-squares, triangles and rulers in horizontal, vertical and diagonal positions". La Guardia asked what it was, and upon being told it was a mural design, he said he didn't know what it depicted. Someone joked that it could be a map of Manhattan. The displeased mayor stated that "if that's art, I belong to Tammany Hall." (Tammany Hall, which the Republican mayor referenced, was the New York Democratic Party political society.) Fearing that the mayor's negative attitude could jeopardize the future of abstract art within the Federal Art Project, McMahon dispatched an assistant to summon an artist who could speak to the mayor in defense of abstraction. The assistant returned with Arshile Gorky. Swinden played an important role in the founding of the American Abstract Artists. In 1935, he met with three friends, Rosalind Bengelsdorf, her future husband Byron Browne, and Ibram Lassaw, with the goal of exhibiting together. The group grew and started meeting in Swinden's studio, which adjoined those of Balcomb and Gertrude Greene...

Frederick Arthur Jessup Still Life Arrangement Signed lower left Oil on canvas 18 1/2 x 22 inches Provenance: Findlay Galleries, New York Private Collection, New York

Georgina Klitgaard Apples and Pears Still Life Signed lower right Oil on canvas 8 x 10 inches Georgina Klitgaard’s art has sometimes gotten lost in the critical propensity to assign artists to membership in one school or another. Unfortunately for her posthumous reputation, Klitgaard defied easy characterization. She was a U.S. modernist, working in both oil and watercolors, but never abandoned figurative painting. She made her reputation in landscape but also excelled in portraits, flower studies, and even cityscapes. Yet despite Klitgaard’s ambiguous status in art history, her paintings continue to fascinate viewers attracted to the unsteady ground between twentieth-century realism and expressionism. Georgina Klitgaard (née Berrian) was born in Spuyten Duyvil, New York (now part of the Bronx); the Berrians had lived in the area since at least the U.S. Revolution. After graduating from Barnard College, she studied art at the National Academy of Design. In 1919 she married Kay Klitgaard, a Danish artist and writer. The next year, her life took a decisive turn when the couple visited friends in Woodstock, NY—about 120 miles north of New York City--and fell in love with the area. In 1906, L. Birge Harrison helped found the Art Students League Summer School in Woodstock and the area became a magnet for landscape painters. The Klitgaards bought a house in 1922 on a steep ledge at the end of Cricket Ridge, high above Bearsville, which provided panoramic vistas overlooking the Catskill Mountains and the Hudson Valley. Klitgaard joined the artists’ colony in the area, which at the time included artists Ernest Fiene and Katherine Schmidt. Klitgaard exhibited widely and her career slowly developed momentum. She was a regular contributor at Whitney Museum shows from 1927 to 1944. In 1929, she exhibited a painting entitled “Carousel” in the Whitney Studio Club’s famous exhibition “Circus in Paint.” Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney acquired five paintings by Klitgaard in the early 1930s and served as a significant patron for the artist. Klitgaard s New York dealer, Frank Rehn...

Levi Wells Prentice (1851 - 1935) Gooseberries, circa 1899 Oil on canvas 6 1/4 x 12 1/4 inches Signed lower right Provenance: Donna Schlesak, Burlington, Wisconsin Self-taught ar...

Everett Lloyd Bryant (1864 - 1945) Floral Bouquet Still Life Oil on canvas 30 x 25 inches Signed lower right; signed on the reverse and on stretc...

William Meyerowitz (1887 - 1981) Oil painting on canvas Depicting a still life scene with fruit bowl, bananas, flowers and quilt. Post Impressionist oil painting. Hand signed low...

Betsy Podlach (American, born 1964.) Still life with Tin Cup, 1996 17.5 X 16.5 inches. Framed it measures 18.25 X 17.25 Betsy Podlach graduated from Harvard, cum laude, (she studied at Harvard with Alfred Decreido and William Reimann as well as Carlos Fuentes continuing her studies at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture, Ms. Podlach was awarded an art fellowship and residency at The International School of Art in Umbria, Italy. Betsy Podlach is an American painter who considers the Italian Venetians and the american abstract expressionist painters her mentors. The two painters she is most inspired by are Titian and Jackson Pollock, Both use the picture plane and abstraction and space, light, movement and form to communicate a physicality built entirely on the principals of painting, in the “classical” sense of a flat plane and lines, color, shape, space and light applied to that flat surface to create magic – light, space, form, emotion, force, movement, the physical and the spiritual. She describes her work as a figurative version of abstract expressionism. She was influenced by many of the abstract expressionists from the NY school...

framed: 23 x 19.75 image: 15.5 x 11.5 Nicolai S. (Nicola) Cikovsky (1894 - 1984) was active/lived in New York / Russian Federation. Nicolai Cikovsky is known for Shore landscape, figure, still life and portrait painting, printmaking. His mural "Irrigation," and "Gathering Dates" is at the Department of Interior, Washington, D.C. (WPA, GSA) Landscape and figure painter Nicolai S. Cikovsky, 1894-1984, was born in Russia, where he studied at the Vilna Art School, 1910-1914; the Penza Royal Art School, 1914-1918; and Moscow High Tech Art...

Joseph Raskin painted still lifes throughout his career, often using them for formal and technical experimentation. Here, the artist renders a bouquet of a wide variety of flowers in...

Blue Shutters and Still life with a bird and fruit by Charlie Baird [2021/22] original Oil on Canvas Image size: H:62 cm x W:67 cm Complete Size of Un...

Betsy Podlach (American, born 1964.) Still life with Fruit, a Bowl of Apples Framed 25 X 26 24 X 25 inches Betsy Podlach graduated from Harvard, cum laude, (she studied at Harvard with Alfred Decreido and William Reimann as well as Carlos Fuentes continuing her studies at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture, Ms. Podlach was awarded an art fellowship and residency at The International School of Art in Umbria, Italy. Betsy Podlach is an American painter who considers the Italian Venetians and the american abstract expressionist painters her mentors. The two painters she is most inspired by are Titian and Jackson Pollock, Both use the picture plane and abstraction and space, light, movement and form to communicate a physicality built entirely on the principals of painting, in the “classical” sense of a flat plane and lines, color, shape, space and light applied to that flat surface to create magic – light, space, form, emotion, force, movement, the physical and the spiritual. She describes her work as a figurative version of abstract expressionism. She was influenced by many of the abstract expressionists from the NY school...