Edward Landon

Untitled (Hard Edge minimalist abstraction)

ca. 1960

Murray Hantman (1904-1999). Industrial Composition, c.1948-50. Oil on canvas measures 18 x 24 inches, 19 x 25 inches in original simple wood strip frame. Signed lower right. Excellent condition with no conservation. Exhibition label affixed en verso. Provenance: estate of Murray Hantman. This piece was included in the exhibition Murray Hantman: From Image to Abstraction, Portland Museum of Art, 2005. Anonymous lender. Biography: Shaped by his life experiences and a commitment to the practice of making art, the work of Murray Hantman represents a career of personal exploration and aesthetic refinement that took him from New York, to Los Angeles, back to New York and eventually to the serene, yet dramatic, coast of Maine where he worked as part of the artists’ colony on Monhegan Island. Born in Pennsylvania in 1904, Hantman’s family moved many times to follow his father’s business opportunities, eventually settling in New York. A childhood of economic instability and dislocation formed Hantman’s early years, making him independent and self-reliant from a very early age. Hantman’s father owned movie theatres and photography studios and, recognizing his son’s artistic ability, employed him to print and hand-color photographs as a child. When he was eleven and living in Michigan, a public school teacher arranged for Hantman to receive a scholarship to the Detroit Museum of Art School where after a year he was awarded another scholarship to study at the Detroit School of Design. He studied in Detroit for a year until his family abruptly moved to Alabama, interrupting his artistic and academic studies until the family moved to New York at the end of the first World War. As a young man, Hantman supported himself by working many different jobs in New York and New Jersey. Steady work with his brother at the Hartford and New Haven Railroad office in New York City finally allowed Hantman to pursue his artistic studies in a formal way. In 1928, he enrolled in the Art Students League and became part of a social circle of artists and activists. While at the Art Students League, Hantman worked with faculty members Boardman Robinson and Thomas Hart Benton on two mural projects. During the years around the Great Depression, Hantman worked in Los Angeles with a group of artists known as the Bloc of Painters. Recruited through an advertisement to attend a course on fresco painting, the Bloc group was headed by Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros who had recently been exiled from Mexico for political activism. Through his work with Siqueiros, Hantman became motivated by social and political issues and their creative expression. In 1934, Hantman returned to New York and found the community of artists there equally engaged in social justice issues. While enrolling at the newly-formed Artists’ Union to advocate for the labor rights of creative workers, Hantman met sculptor Jo Levy who would become his wife. Like many artists at the time, Hantman found work through the Federal Art Project as a member of the Easel Painting Division which strove to create “works of art for the public which have a definite social value to the community”. (1) Along with the work he exhibited as a member of the WPA group, Hantman’s personal work from this period was in the style of Social Realism he learned from Siqueiros. Hantman and his wife, Jo Levy, believed in creating art for the public good. Their Artists’ Union friends and colleagues from the Federal Art Project formed the nucleus of their social circle and would become the community of artists who worked together during summers on Monhegan Island off the coast of Maine. In 1945, Hantman had his first solo painting show at Marquie Gallery in New York, and visits Monhegan Island for the first time. The following summer, he and Levy spend the summer in Maine, and would continue to do so for the next thirty years. The landscapes and seascapes of Maine would become a central subject in his work after 1946. The dramatic coastline of Monhegan Island had been inspiration for other New York artists before Hantman, including George Bellows and Rockwell Kent. As Hantman matured as an artist he began to reject academic narrative in his work, moving towards a more expressionistic and abstract style. During this shift into abstraction, nature remained central to his work and the seascape and Maine light provided continual inspiration. In the late 1940s, Hantman begins to reduce the landscape into elemental forms of color and shape. As he pursues this mode of painting his work moves further into abstraction, juxtaposing large blocks of saturated color to convey the drama of sea and sky. Always a student and teacher, Hantman distilled the ideologies of Abstract Expressionism and synthesized its concepts into his own work. Throughout the 1950s, he experimented with Action Painting, color, form and expression. By the late 1950s, Hantman’s mature style had developed into abstract works of pure color masses in simple geometric forms. His mastery of color and form continued into his late work, always reflecting the beauty of the natural world around him. Dedicated to the idea of exploration in his art, Hantman made hundreds of small color and form studies that hint at the large-scale works that would follow in the late 1960s and beyond. Hantman’s work from the ‘70s and ‘80s shows even more intensity of color and distillation of composition. The landscape of the Maine coast remained his muse throughout, the stark lines suggesting the flat plane of sea and horizon line beyond. Hantman and Jo Levy lived in New York and summered on Monhegan Island until 1975, followed by summers in Owls Head and New Harbor...

Stunning Synchromist abstract by Danish/American artist, Benny Collin (1896-1980). Symphonic Forms, 1955. Oil on wood panel measures 22 x 29 inches. Measures 24 x 31 inches in custo...

Werner Drewes (1899-1985). Composition 209, 1939. oil on canvas, 20 x 24 inches; 28 x 32 inches in original frame. Signed and dated with artist monogram lower left and again on verso...

Bertha G. Davis (1911-1997) Untitled, ca. 1960's Oil on cradled masonite panel. 16 x 20 inches; 24 x 28 inches framed. Signed lower left. Artist estate stamp on verso. Vintage custom wormy chestnut frame. A painter of cityscapes, landscapes, and abstracts in Texas, Bertha G Davis was primarily a self-taught artist whose style was influenced by her early life experiences in pre-World War II Lithuania and later Mexico. Her style is expressionistic*, relying on color to denote her profound feelings. She works primarily in watercolor and acrylic with some mixed media*. She is the daughter of Abraham and Dvora Germaize of Vilna, Lithuania and grew up in Jewish ghettos in Vilna, Alita, and Kovno. Davis was influenced by her father who was a decorative wood-worker and carpenter in Lithuania. The family of five daughters and a son escaped to Mexico City in the late 1920’s because of Jewish oppression. The images and emotions she experienced had no outlet. She was known as a beauty, and at age 17 was named Jewish Miss Mexico, barely able to speak Spanish having just emigrated from Eastern Europe. Irving Davis, a merchant from Texas who had also come from Eastern Europe via Cuba, saw her at this event where she was crowned Jewish Miss Mexico, and three days later asked for her hand in marriage. They moved to a small town in Texas, raising a family. Her daughter, Sylvia, was born when Davis was 20 and they were inseparable. As Sylvia became an actress, painter, and sculptor, Davis was amazed at the capacity for creativity. Davis didn’t begin her own artistic journey until she was 47, when her daughter Sylvia Caplan encouraged her to try. She was inspired by this daughter who gave her a drugstore palette of watercolors, paper and brushes and told her to “just try.” Davis did not put down her palette and brushes until her death in 1997. Bertha G Davis was primarily self-taught but maintained a style oriented toward color and texture that reflected her strong feelings. Most of her early work was done while she lived in McAllen, Texas where she was known for her contribution to art and showed her work and the work of other artists at the Bertha Davis Gallery. She studied with Stewart Van Orden, at Pan American College in 1960-61; and was a student at the Art Institute San Miguel Allende, Mexico, 1965. She was also a student of Harold Phenix...

Andre Elbaz (b.1934). Landscape, ca. 1980 . Oil on card panel, image measures 14 x 20 inches; 18.5 x 24.5 inches framed. Signed lower right. Excellent condition. André Elbaz (born April 26, 1934, El Jadida, Morocco) is a famous Moroccan painter and filmmaker. Elbaz studied art and theatre in Rabat and Paris from 1950 to 1961. He started painting only at the age of 21, until which age he had been interested mainly in theatre. A few years later, he managed to combine his two passions into a new approach in art-therapy, inventing together with his wife, a psychiatrist, the Pictodrame, which brought him world recognition. His first exhibition, which was very successful, took place in Casablanca in 1961 and earned him an appointment as Professor at the Beaux-Arts school in Casablanca. Years later, in 1976, he exhibited his paintings at the Tel-Aviv Museum. In parallel to his career as a painter, Elbaz is also known as a filmmaker. He produced several short films in France, Canada and the United States. One of them, La nuit n'est jamais complète (The night is never complete), won a prize at the "5th Biennale de Paris in 1967" .[citation needed] Among the themes chosen for the many films he produced, there was a short one about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, as well as a series of drawings entitled Seuls (Alone), with texts written by both Elie Wiesel...

Beautiful abstract expressionist landscape by American artist, Morris Shulman (1912-1978). Untitled Landscape, 1958. Oil on masonite panel measures 24 x 36 inches. Signed and dated l...

Oil on 3-D stretched canvas, dimensions listed for piece as shown. Dimensions are variable depending on hanging formation. Wall sculpture, white, orange, and gray.

Oil on 3-D stretched canvas, dimensions listed for piece as shown. Dimensions are variable depending on hanging formation. Wall sculpture, white, red, and gray.

This is an abstract painting in oil-on-canvas technique by an unknown artist. The painting features geometric shapes and dynamic lines reminiscent of the Futurist school, an art mov...

Artist: Warren Wolf, American (1924 - 2003) Title: Yachal & 'Aniyah #2 Year: 1996 Medium: Oil and Marble Dust on Shaped Masonite, signed, titled and dated verso Size: 32 in. x 34 in....

Artist: Warren Wolf, American (1924 - 2003) Title: Zebuwl 2 Year: 1990 Medium: Oil and Marble Dust on Shaped Masonite, signed, titled and dated verso Size: 34 in. x 31 in. (86.36 cm...

Fenêtre transparente is a unique contemporary modern sculpture painting panel by French-Dutch artist Olivier Julia. The panel effectively is a flat woode...