Muriel Backman Art

'Paris Booksellers Along the River Seine', gouache on paper (circa 1930s), by Lucien Génin. The used-book sellers (bouquinistes) you see along the Seine a...

This appears to be dated 1927. It came in with a piece dated 1929. A very early, rare work. Framed 22.5 x 18. Image 14.5 x 9 A great New York city street scene with an El train (elevated subway line) and architectural renderings of buildings. This is a wonderful piece by one of America's most treasured artists, Chaim Gross. Throughout his lifetime Gross has gone through tragedy and a real test of faith however, he has the unique ability to focus and direct his expression to the most joyful and beautiful works of art, such as the present lot. For more than sixty years Chaim Gross's art has expressed optimistic, affirming themes. His acrobats, cyclists, and mothers and children convey joyfulness, exuberance, love, and intimacy. This aspect of his work remained consistent with his Hasidic heritage, which teaches that "only in his childlike happiness is man nearest to God." He often used his creative abilities to explore and experiment with media. In his artwork he retains an optimistic philosophy, even when facing somber issues such as war, depression, and the Holocaust. Chaim Gross (March 17, 1904 – May 5, 1991) was an American sculptor and educator. Gross was born to a Jewish family in Austrian Galicia, in the village of Wolowa (now known as Mezhgorye, Ukraine), in the Carpathian Mountains. In 1911, his family moved to Kolomyia (which was annexed into the Ukrainian USSR in 1939 and became part of newly independent Ukraine in 1991). When World War I ended, Gross and brother Avrom-Leib went to Budapest to join their older siblings Sarah and Pinkas. Gross applied to and was accepted by the art academy in Budapest and studied under the painter Béla Uitz, though within a year a new regime under Miklos Horthy took over and attempted to expel all Jews and foreigners from the country. After being deported from Hungary, Gross began art studies at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Vienna, Austria shortly before immigrating to the United States in 1921. Gross's studies continued in the United States at the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design, where he studied with Elie Nadelman and others, and at the Art Students League of New York, with Robert Laurent. He also attended the Educational Alliance Art School, studying under Abbo Ostrowsky, at the same time as Moses Soyer and Peter Blume. In 1926 Gross began teaching at The Educational Alliance, and continued teaching there for the next 50 years. Louise Nevelson was among his students at the Alliance (in 1934), during the time she was transitioning from painting to sculpture. In the late 1920s and early 1930s he exhibited at the Salons of America exhibitions at the Anderson Galleries and, beginning in 1928, at the Whitney Studio Club. In 1929, Gross experimented with printmaking, and created an important group of 15 linocuts and lithographs of landscapes, New York City streets and parks, women in interiors, the circus, and vaudeville. The entire suite is now in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Gross returned to the medium of printmaking in the 1960s, and produced approximately 200 works in the medium over the next two decades. In March 1932 Gross had his first solo exhibition at Gallery 144 in New York City. For a short time they represented Gross, as well as his friends Milton Avery, Moses Soyer, Ahron Ben-Shmuel and others. Gross was primarily a practitioner of the direct carving method, with the majority of his work being carved from wood. Other direct carvers in early 20th-century American art include William Zorach, Jose de Creeft, and Robert Laurent. Works by Chaim Gross can be found in major museums and private collections throughout the United States, with substantial holdings (27 sculptures) at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. A key work from this era, now at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, is the 1932 birds-eye maple Acrobatic Performers, which is also only one and one quarter inch thick. In 1933 Gross joined the government's PWAP (Public Works of Art Project), which transitioned into the WPA (Works Progress Administration), which Gross worked for later in the 1930s. Under these programs Gross taught and demonstrated art, made sculptures that were placed in schools and public colleges, made work for Federal buildings including the Federal Trade Commission Building, and for the France Overseas and Finnish Buildings at the 1939 New York World's Fair. Gross was also recognized during these years with a silver medal at the Exposition universelle de 1937 in Paris, and in 1942, with a purchase prize at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's "Artists for Victory" exhibition for his wood sculpture of famed circus performer Lillian Leitzel. In 1949 Gross sketched Chaim Weizmann, President of Israel, at several functions in New York City where Weizmann was speaking, Gross completed the bust in bronze later that year. Gross returned to Israel for three months in 1951 (the second of many trips there in the postwar years) to paint a series of 40 watercolors of life in various cities. This series was exhibited at the Jewish Museum (Manhattan) in 1953. In the 1950s Gross began to make more bronze sculptures alongside his wood and stone pieces, and in 1957 and 1959 he traveled to Rome to work with famed bronze foundries including the Nicci foundry. At the end of the decade Gross was working primarily in bronze which allowed him to create open forms, large-scale works and of course, multiple casts. Gross's large-scale bronze The Family, donated to New York City in 1991 in honor of Mayor Ed Koch, and installed at the Bleecker Street Park at 11th street, is now a fixture of Greenwich Village. In 1959, a survey of Gross's sculpture in wood, stone, and bronze was featured in the exhibit Four American Expressionists curated by Lloyd Goodrich at the Whitney Museum of American Art, with work by Abraham Rattner, Doris Caesar, and Karl Knaths. In 1976, a selection from Gross's important collection of historic African sculpture, formed since the late 1930s, was exhibited at the Worcester Art Museum in the show The Sculptor's Eye: The African Art Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Chaim Gross. Gross was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate member, and became a full Academician in 1981. In 1984, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, with Jacob Lawrence and Lukas Foss. In the fall of 1991, Allen Ginsberg gave an important tribute to Gross at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which is published in their Proceedings. In 1994, Forum Gallery, which now represents the Chaim Gross estate, held a memorial exhibition featuring a sixty-year survey of Gross's work. Gross was a professor of printmaking and sculpture at both the Educational Alliance and the New School for Social Research in New York City, as well as at the Brooklyn Museum Art School, the MoMA art school, the Art Student's League and the New Art School (which Gross ran briefly with Alexander Dobkin...

This is an exclusive handprinted limited edition cyanotype. "Misty Sailboat Journey" is a handmade cyanotype print portraying a daytime sailboat journey...

As Goldsmith Osman designed the Crown for the Investiture of the Prince of Wales in 1969, and as architect he commissioned Jacob Epstein's chef d'oeuvre, the Madonna and Child on the...

This delicate watercolor painting captures the serene beauty of springtime in Linda Clerget's garden. In the center of the composition sits Isis, her beloved cat, surrounded by vibra...

Into the Woods is an original modern artwork realized by the French artist Gabrielle Kayser in 1948. Original watercolored and china ink on paper. Hand-signed and dated by the ar...

One of my favorite French Fauvist painters, Henri Grenier (1882 - 1940), masterfully captures the energy of the turn-of-the-century Boulevard Saint-Germain in this exciting work on p...

A lovely vibrant watercolour capturing a shimmering English river John Newberry (born 1934) Stream at Wytham, Oxford Signed Watercolour 4¼ x 5¾ inches unframed 9 x 11 inches with fr...

Original watercolor and gouache on archival paper of birch trees in winter along a fenced roadway with a quaint home in the background. Signed lower right. Condition is excellent. Circa 1960. The watercolor is in a solid mahogany frame under UV glass in fine condition. Overall framed measurements are 14 by 11 inches. Provenance: A East Hampton, Long Island, New York collector. Born in Queens, Long Island, NY, Impressionist landscape and seascape painter Francis Dixon studied at the Art Students League in New York City under Impressionists Frank Vincent DuMond, Cape Cod, Massachusetts artist, Charles W. Hawthorne, and modernist Robert Henri. Having a good singing voice Dixon was an Army and Navy Song Leader for the War Department during World War I. From 1915 to 1917 was living and painting in Los Angeles, Carmel and Point Lobos, California. Dixon exhibited his California paintings at Folson Galleries New York City in 1917. Dixon continued to travel and paint, visiting Bermuda in 1923 and 1925, and Europe in the mid-1920s. In the 1930s he was living on West 55th Street in Manhattan with a number of other artists. He was a member of the Allied Artists of America (NY); Connecticut Academy of Fine Arts; and the Salmagundi Club, NY. He exhibited at The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (1916); Folson Gallery (NY, 1917, solo); Society of Independent Artists (NYC, 1917-18, 1920-22, 1924); Salmagundi Club (NYC, 1917-1940, 1943, 1945); National Academy of Design (NYC, 1925); Studio Guild Galleries (NYC, 1937); Barbizon-Plaza Galleries NYC, 1939); Allied Artists of America (NYC, 1940); and Salons of America (NYC). Dixon’s solo exhibitions included Babcock Galleries (NYC, 1926 and 1927); Women's University Club...

signed lower right. size includes frame. The French artist Claude Hemeret was born on May 23, 1929. After classical studies at the lycée du Parc Imperial in Nice, he started at the l...

Early 1960s work on paper of a group of trees at Buckfast Abbey in Devon, England, by Alban Atkins. Signed bottom left, titled and dated to the reverse. There is also a collection or accession number to the backboard. Atkins has captured the sculptural nature of the tree trunks as they have grown in the landscape giving the work a feeling of living, writhing things as well as an abstract feel in the composition. Atkins was one of the group of important artists chosen and commissioned by Sir Kenneth Clark...

Gorgeous mid century fauvist watercolor landscape with lush, vivid trees and distant houses by Emily Shotwell Goeller-Wood (American, 1887-1965). Presented in a rustic giltwood frame...