Randall Exon

South Chimney

2014

Unframed

Charles Houghton Howard was born in Montclair, New Jersey, the third of five children in a cultured and educated family with roots going back to the Massachusetts Bay colony. His fat...

Singed (at lower left): Jane Peterson

Charles Houghton Howard was born in Montclair, New Jersey, the third of five children in a cultured and educated family with roots going back to the Massachusetts Bay colony. His fat...

Gouache on paper, 18 7/8 x 14 3/4 in. Signed (at lower right): Morris; (with monogram, on the back): GLKM [monogram] / 1932 [sic] Executed circa late 1940s A passionate advocate of abstract art during the 1930s and 1940s, George L. K. Morris was active as a painter, sculptor, editor, and critic. An erudite man with an internationalist point of view, Morris eschewed the social, political, and figural concerns that preoccupied so many artists of Depression-era America, believing that painters should focus their attention on the beauty, refinement, and simplicity of pure form instead. His goal, he said, was “to wedge the expression further and further into the confines of the canvas until every shape takes on a spatial meaning” (as quoted in Ward Jackson, “George L. K. Morris: Forty Years of Abstract Art,” Art Journal 32 [Winter 1972–73], p. 150). Born into an affluent family in New York City, Morris was a descendent of General Lewis Morris, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. From 1918 until 1924, he attended the Groton School in Connecticut, studying classics and art. He continued to focus on literature and art while attending Yale University (1924–28), an experience that prepared him well for his future activity as an artist-critic. After graduating in 1928, Morris studied at the Art Students League of New York, working under the realist painters John Sloan and Kenneth Hayes Miller, as well as Jan Matulka, the only modernist on the faculty. In the spring of 1929, Morris traveled to Paris with Albert E. Gallatin, a family friend and fellow painter who introduced him to leading members of the Parisian avant-garde, including Jean Arp, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Jean Hélion, and Piet Mondrian. Morris also took classes at the Académie Moderne, studying under Fernand Léger and Amédée Ozenfant, important exponents of Synthetic Cubism who influenced his aesthetic development. Indeed, after experimenting with the simplified forms of Modernism for a few years, Morris moved on to abstraction by 1934, adopting a hard-edged, geometric approach inspired by Leger’s cubist style and the biomorphic shapes of Arp and Joan Miró. Following his return to New York in 1930, Morris built a white-walled, open-spaced studio (inspired by that of Ozenfant, which had been designed by Le Corbusier) on the grounds of Brockhurst, his parents’ 46-acre estate in Lenox, Massachusetts. In 1935, he married the painter and collagist Estelle “Suzy...

Signed (lower right): ELEANOR PARKE CUSTIS

An iconic female Frohsin figure with red and white stripes and heavy hand coloring. Monotype EV Ed 4/4. Signed front in pencil by Frohsin, who is strongly associated with the Bay Are...

Monotype ev edition 2/4 with hand coloring. the plate is 12 x 12 inches and the overall paper size is 21 x 20 inches. Kim Frohsin spend 12 years working on monotype ev's, and works f...

Girl's shoes, heels or tap shoes in bronze, black and gold, featured in this Monotype ev edition 8/8 with hand coloring. Kim Frohsin spent 12 years working o...

Monotype ev edition 5/6 with hand coloring. the overall paper size is 23 1/2 x 23 inches. Kim Frohsin spend 12 years making monotype ev's, and works from this series are included in ...

Monotype ev edition 3/4 with heavy hand coloring. The plate is 28 x 28 inches and the overall paper size is 33 1/2 x 32 inches. Signed, titled and dated. Kim Frohsin spend 12 years w...

Woman with red hair in a hat with feather, in green, black and white, Monotype ev edition 5/6 with hand coloring and mixed media work. Kim Frohsin spent 12 years working on monotype ...