Victoria Kloch Art

"Untitled" by noted Chicago painter William Jacobs (1897 - 1973) is an abstract expressionist pastel on paper created in 1969. The artwor...

Mercedes Carles Matter (1913 - 2001) Untitled, circa 1937 Pastel on paper 16 x 13 1/2 inches Estate stamped on the reverse Provenance: Estate of the artist Spanierman Gallery, New York Private Collection, Pennsylvania circa 2013 Private Collection, New York, 2021 Mercedes Matter was born in New York in 1913. Her father, the American modernist Arthur B. Carles, had studied with Matisse. Her mother, Mercedes de Cordoba, was a model for Edward Steichen. Ms. Matter grew up in Philadelphia, New York and Europe. She began painting under her father's supervision at age 6, and studied art at Bennett College in Millbrook, N.Y., and then in New York City with Maurice Sterne, Alexander Archipenko and Hans Hofmann. In the late 1930's, she was an original member of the American Abstract Artists organization and worked for the federal Works Progress Administration, assisting Fernand Léger on his mural for the French Line passenger ship company. Léger introduced her to Herbert Matter, the Swiss graphic designer and photographer, whom she married in 1939. The Matters were active in the emerging New York art scene and also traveled frequently to Europe. Their closest friends included Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Franz Kline, Philip Guston, Alexander Calder and Willem de Kooning. They were also close to Alberto Giacometti, who was an important artistic role model for Mrs. Matter and a frequent photographic subject for her husband. Beginning in 1953, Mrs. Matter taught at the Philadelphia College of Art (now University of the Arts), Pratt Institute and New York University. Based on her teaching experiences she wrote an article for Art News in 1963 titled ''What's Wrong with U.S. Art Schools?'' In it, she lamented the phasing out of the extended studio classes required to initiate ''that painfully slow education of the senses,'' which she considered an artist's life work. The article prompted a group of Pratt students to ask her to form a school based on her ideas, which led, in 1964, to the founding of the New York Studio School. Originally in a loft on Broadway, the school gained almost immediate support from the Kaplan Fund, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Ford Foundation. It granted no degrees, had only studio classes and emphasized drawing from life. Its teachers, chosen by the students, included the artists Guston, Bradley Walker Tomlin, Charles Cajori, Louis Finkelstein...

"Talking Lines" This intuitive abstract drawing in chocolate tones is made with Chinese ink and pastel on thick kraft paper. It conveys an impulse born in the space of sensations. ...

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...

Abstract Artwork (drawing or rubbing) laid on a New Years card. Provenance: Virginia Field, Arts administrator; New York, N.Y. Assistant director for Asia House gallery. (she was friends with John von Wicht, Ben Zion and Andy Warhol) During the summer of 1948 in the Cape Cod Massachusetts artists’ colony of Provincetown, Stillman’s experiments with such techniques led to a unique drawing process. Using an inkless pen, or some such tool, the artist impressed the paper with invisible scribbles, which only emerged as white lines when he rubbed a flat stick of charcoal or pastel across the surface. These evocative, subtly modulated, works on paper are sophisticated, yet little known, examples of Abstract Expressionist art. He imbued his abstractions with a glowing atmospheric quality that derives from both impressionism and the Old Testament concept of divine light. He subsequently adapted this technique to the graphic arts, experimenting in the early 1950s with color lithograph and woodcut print techniques. Ary...

Sighthound, Greyhound, Whippet or Italian Greyhound, This stunning large black and white ink painting of a Sighthound dog, is a contemporary minimal portrait...

English Setter, This stunning large minimal black and white painting of a dog, is a contemporary portrait in acrylic on canvas. Ian Mason's portraits of dogs are very striking as he is able to capture the form of each dog breed with minimal brush strokes. His start as a sculptor is evident with his unique, minimal paintings of dogs. Viewers always exclaim that he captures each dog's personality perfectly for each breed. This English Setter dog...

"Adagio in Blue" 2023, 72" H x 96" W. Large Scale horizontal abstract painting consisting of acrylic, home paint, pencils and oil pastels on canvas by Argentine-born artist Karina G...

Francesco is the painter of music. Deep in the night where the painter is not sleeping, being a musician, instead of writing songs, he starts to capture the musical rhythm dancing i...

A Poodle Pair, this stunning large minimalist black and white painting of Poodle dogs, is a contemporary portrait in acrylic on canvas. Ian Mason's portrai...

This stunning large ink painting of a Dalmatian dog, is a contemporary minimal portrait in black ink on Fabriano 300gsm paper. Ian Mason's portrai...

Textured Abstract Expressionist Composition in Plaster and Acrylic on Canvas Brightly colored and deeply textured abstract composition by an unknown artist (20th century). Layers of...