Adolf Dehn Paintings

French Figures by Bernard Labbe (French mid 20th century) original gouache on card size: 19.5 x 13 inches condition: very good and ready to be enjoyed ...

Vintage 1930s - 1940s oil painting of an adobe church in New Mexico with a brilliant blue sky and clouds (likely Rancho de Taos), circa 1940. Painted by Denver modernist, Paul K...

"In Soquel (California)" is an original oil on board painting by Jon Blanchette (1908-1987) circa 1955. Farm landscape with figure hanging laundry and silo, painted in colors of blue...

Crying Clown Portrait in Oil on Canvas Portrait of a sad clown by San Francisco artist John Peers (American, 1922-2009). This portrait is closely fra...

Glassblowers WPA American Scene Mid- 20th Century Modern Figurative Workers. Dated and signed "32 Harry Gottlieb" lower right. Sight: 13 1/8" H x 18 1/4" W. Harry Gottlieb, painter, screenprinter, educator, and lithographer, was born in Bucharest, Rumania. He emigrated to America in 1907, and his family settled in Minneapolis. From 1915 to 1917, Gottlieb attended the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. After a short stint as an illustrator for the U.S. Navy, Gottlieb moved to New York City; he became a scenic and costume designer for Eugene O"Neill's Provincetown Theater Group. He also studied at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts and the National Academy of Design. He was one of America's first Social Realist painters, influenced by that Robert Henri-led movement in New York City where Gottlieb settled in 1918. He was also a pioneer in screen printing, which he learned while working for the WPA. He married Eugenie Gershoy, and the couple joined the artist colony at Woodstock, New York. He lectured widely on art education. In 1923, Gottlieb settled in Woodstock, New York and in 1931, spent a a year abroad studying under a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1935, he joined the Federal Art Project...

Untitled (Portrait of Bessy Lyon, Artist Wife) is an oil on canvas painting by Hayes Lyon (1901-1987) from 1945. Presented in a wood frame, outer dimensions measure 35 ¼ x 29 ¼ x 1 ¾ inches. Image size is 30 x 24 inches. About the Artist: A native of Athol, Kansas, Lyon is primarily associated with Colorado. After several summer vacations at the Boulder Chautauqua and at Manitou near Colorado Springs, his family relocated in 1920 to Boulder where his father had a lumber business. Nine years later they settled in Denver where his father owned the Acme Lumber Company. To comply with his desire for his son’s financial self-reliance, Lyon graduated from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1931 with a B.A. degree in economics. But shortly thereafter he returned to his first love – art – that ultimately became his career. His interest in the arts was nurtured by his mother, herself a talented amateur artist, and by two of his aunts who served as role models. Beginning in 1932, he pursued a five-year course of study at the Chappell School of Art in Denver which by then had become part of the University of Denver. During his time at the school he studied with John E. Thompson and Santa Fe artist, Józef Bakoś. He also met two other Santa Fe-based artists, Willard Nash and B.J.O. Nordfeldt, when they exhibited at Chappell House, then the home of the Denver Art Museum. Lyon likewise attended the Cooke-Daniels Lecture Series there on the arts in the 1930s. Following graduation with a B.F.A. degree from the University of Denver in 1937, he studied privately for about a year with Andrew Dasburg in Taos, New Mexico, that redirected his attention to the rugged Rocky Mountain landscape, which he saw with directness and painted with an economy of means. His canvas, Winter Vista, done following his study with Dasburg, received the Edward J. Yetter Memorial Prize at the 45th Annual Exhibition of the Denver Art Museum in 1939. The painting was reproduced in the September 1939 issue of the Magazine of Art (Washington, DC). That same year his painting, Mount Evans, was included as one of Colorado’s entries in the American Art Today Pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. The money he received from the Yetter Prize financed his trip to Mexico City and Guadalajara in 1939 to see firsthand the frescoes of José Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera and the easel paintings of David Alfaro Siqueiros. Their work was admired by many Americans who participated in the WPA-era mural projects in the United States in the 1930s and early 1940s. The economic fallout from the Great Depression affecting many American artists at the time likewise resulted in Lyon’s participation in the Colorado Art Project, part of the WPA’s national program. Under its auspices he produced three murals in 1940 about the pioneer era of Fort Lupton, Colorado, which were installed in the auditorium of the local high school. Covering 367 square feet of wall space, one of the murals – Behold the West (the largest one) – incorporates the old fort for which the town is named. Before Lyon painted the murals, the students at Fort Lupton High School researched the history of their community and contributed to their cost, facilitating the murals’ allocation to their school under the Colorado Art Project. In the early 1940s Lyon shifted his focus to two new subjects – bathers, and canyons with conifers – reflecting his ongoing search for personal artistic growth. However, his reliance on structure to create form in his paintings and works on paper alienated some of his longtime followers. Nonetheless, his painting Conifers and Canyons won recognition at the 47th Annual Exhibition at the Denver Art Museum. The watercolor version of the piece was among three hundred works in that medium selected by John Marin, Charles Burchfield and Eliot O’Hara from a national competition held by the Section of Fine Arts (Federal Works Agency) and shown at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, in 1941. Later that year Lyon spent time in California where he saw Orozco’s Prometheus, influencing him to increase his range of originality and expression. In 1942 Lyon enlisted in the U.S. Army, spending almost three years in the Mediterranean Theater – Africa and Italy – preparing camouflage operations and scale models of proposed landing sites. He used his free time in Italy to expand his artistic vocabulary by seeing cultural masterpieces in Rome, Florence, Siena and Milan, and through his extensive contact with Giorgio de Chirico, founder of the scuola metafisica art movement, and Gino Severini, a leading member of the Futurist movement. Because of Lyon’s low army rank and pay, de Chirico did a small watercolor for him signing it, "For Mr. Lyon; G de Chirico, 1944." Lyon often visited de Chirico and his wife, Isa, at their apartment near the Spanish Steps in Rome. Following his Army discharge in 1945 fellow Kansas native, Ward Lockwood, invited him to join the Art Department at the University of Texas at Austin where he taught painting from 1946 to 1951. During this period some of Lyon’s work employed the palette of the School of Paris which he had seen while stationed in Europe, while other paintings had a certain flatness found in some of Lockwood’s work from the 1930s. From 1951 to 1953 he was affiliated with the Lower Colorado River Authority in Austin as an illustrator and editor of the employee magazine. In 1953, following time spent in Mexico, he returned to Denver, working as an illustrator at Lowry Air Force Base until retirement in 1961. During that time he did little of his own art because he also was designing and building a home in Arvada, Colorado, and re-establishing himself in the Denver art community after a decade-long absence. His painting, Autumn Aspens (1953-present location unknown) illustrates his experimentation with abstraction. In the early 1960s he began painting from memory that continued until the steadily degenerative effects of Alzheimer’s disease took their toll a decade later. He depicted scenes from his wartime European sojourn and from his early adulthood. The latter include Souvenir of Boulder (1962), a nostalgic return to his boyhood home in Boulder; and Holly Mayer and Friends, a painting of Glenn Miller and his musicians, inspired by Lyon’s first encounter with jazz in Boulder in the 1920s. His lifelong passion for vintage cars and automobile racing...

Mario Larrinaga was born in Baja California in 1895 and moved with his brother to Los Angeles in 1909. He had no formal training in art, but had natural talent that was noticed by local movie studios. He was hired by Universal Studios as a designer, art director and creator of background scenes. He produced some of the background effects for King Kong in 1933. After a career in set design and illustration he focused on painting for pleasure in California, Mexico and Hawaii. He belonged to local art clubs and exhibited his works often. This stylized modernist work was likely created around 1960. It is oil on wood panel and of a horizontal format, 18” x 36”. It portrays a procession of seemingly Hawaiian natives...

This horizontal painting on canvas contains several layers of color, with textures and transparencies, representing a dreamlike scene where fantastic animals and humans in yellow and...

"History of US Postal Service" American Scene Social Realism WPA Modern Chicago Harold Haydon "History of the U.S. Postal Service" 21 x 25 1/2 inches O...

Original 1940s watercolor on paper painting by Charles Ragland Bunnell portraying a semi abstracted view of Golden Cycle Mill in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Painted in shades of black and gray. Presented in a custom black frame, outer dimensions measure 18 x 19 ½ x 1 ⅜ inches. Image sight size is 8 ⅛ x 9 ⅝ inches. Golden Cycle Mining and Reduction Company was a mining company in Colorado City (now Old Colorado City) in El Paso County, Colorado. Piece is clean and in excellent condition - please contact us for a detailed condition report. Expedited and international shipping is available - please contact us for a quote. About the artist: Artist and teacher, Charles (“Charlie”) Bunnell worked in a variety of styles throughout his career because as an artist he believed, “I’ve got to paint a thousand different ways. I don’t paint any one way.” At different times he did representational landscapes while concurrently involved with semi- or completely abstract imagery. He was one of a relatively small number of artists in Colorado successfully incorporating into their work the new trends emanating from New York and Europe after World War II. During his lifetime he generally did not attract a great deal of critical attention from museums, critics and academia. However, he personally experienced a highpoint in his career when Katherine Kuh, curator at the Art Institute of Chicago, personally chose one of his paintings – Why? - for its large exhibition of several hundred examples of abstract and surrealist art held in 1947-48, subsequently including it among the fifty pieces selected for a traveling show to ten other American museums. An only child, Bunnell developed his love of art at a young age through frequent drawing and political cartooning. In high school he was interested in baseball and golf and also was the tennis champion for Westport High School in Kansas City. Following graduation, his father moved the family to Denver, Colorado, in 1916 for a better-paying bookkeeping job, before relocating the following year to Colorado Springs to work for local businessman, Edmond C. van Diest, President of the Western Public Service Company and the Colorado Concrete Company. Bunnell would spend almost all of his adult life in Colorado Springs. In 1918 he enlisted in the United States Army, serving in the 62nd Infantry Regiment through the end of World War I. Returning home with a 10% disability, he joined the Zebulon Pike Post No. 1 of the Disabled American Veterans Association and in 1921 used the benefits from his disability to attend a class in commercial art design conducted under a government program in Colorado Springs. The following year he transferred to the Broadmoor Art Academy (founded in 1919) where he studied with William Potter and in 1923 with Birger Sandzén. Sandzén’s influence is reflected in Bunnell’s untitled Colorado landscape (1925) with a bright blue-rose palette. For several years thereafter Bunnell worked independently until returning to the Broadmoor Art Academy to study in 1927-28 with Ernest Lawson, who previously taught at the Kansas City Art Institute where Bunnell himself later taught in the summers of 1929-1930 and in 1940-41. Lawson, a landscapist and colorist, was known for his early twentieth-century connection with “The Eight” in New York, a group of forward-looking painters including Robert Henri and John Sloan whose subject matter combined a modernist style with urban-based realism. Bunnell, who won first-place awards in Lawson’s landscapes classes at the Academy, was promoted to his assistant instructor for the figure classes in the 1928-29 winter term. Lawson, who painted in what New York critic James Huneker termed a “crushed jewel” technique, enjoyed additional recognition as a member of the Committee on Foreign Exhibits that helped organize the landmark New York Armory Exhibition in 1913 in which Lawson showed and which introduced European avant-garde art to the American public. As noted in his 1964 interview for the Archives of American Art in Washington, DC, Bunnell learned the most about his teacher’s use of color by talking with him about it over Scotch as his assistant instructor. “Believe me,” Bunnell later said, “[Ernie] knew color, one of the few Americans that did.” His association with Lawson resulted in local scenes of Pikes Peak, Eleven Mile Canyon, the Gold Cycle Mine near Colorado City and other similar sites, employing built up pigments that allowed the surfaces of his canvases to shimmer with color and light. (Eleven Mile Canyon was shown in the annual juried show at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh in 1928, an early recognition of his talent outside of Colorado.) At the same time, he animated his scenes of Colorado Springs locales by defining the image shapes with color and line as demonstrated in Contrasts (1929). Included in the Midwestern Artists’ Exhibition in Kansas City in 1929, it earned him the gold medal of the Kansas City Art Institute, auguring his career as a professional artist. In the 1930s Bunnell used the oil, watercolor and lithography media to create a mini-genre of Colorado’s old mining towns and mills, subject matter spurned by many local artists at the time in favor of grand mountain scenery. In contrast to his earlier images, these newer ones – both daytime and nocturnal -- such as Blue Bird Mine essentially are form studies. The conical, square and rectangular shapes of the buildings and other structures are placed in the stark, undulating terrain of the mountains and valleys devoid of any vegetation or human presence. In the mid-1930s he also used the same approach in his monochromatic lithographs titled Evolution, Late Evening, K.C. (Kansas City) and The Mill, continuing it into the next decade with his oil painting, Pikes Peak (1942). During the early 1930s he studied for a time with Boardman Robinson, director of the Broadmoor Art Academy and its successor institution, the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center from 1930 to 1947. In 1934 Robinson gave him the mural commission under the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) for West Junior High School in Colorado Springs, his first involvement in one of several New Deal art...

"Acoma Pueble (New Mexico) is a gouache on paper painting by Wolfgang Pogzoba (1936-1982) from 1978 of a landscape and an adobe home over a cliff side in the town of Acoma Pueblo, NM. Presented in a custom frame, outer dimensions measure 22 ⅜ x 25 inches. Image size is 12 x 15 inches. The Acoma Pueblo is located approximately 60 miles west of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Painting is clean and in good condition - please contact us for a detailed condition report. Expedited and international shipping is available - please contact us for a quote. About the Artist: Wolfgang Pogzeba...

Portrait of Eugene Higgins, Age 80. 1954. Oil on canvas. 30 x 25 (framed 35 x 30). Signed and dated lower right. Cole and Higgins (1874-1958), both lived in Lyme, Connecticut. Higg...