George Rogers

'Sculpturegraph' — Modernist Abstraction, Contemporary African American Artist

1984

Harry Bertoia, Untitled (Abstraction), monotype, c. 1960, a unique impression. Signed 'HB' in pencil, lower right sheet corner, verso. Inscribed '1852' (the artist’s inventory number) in pencil, lower right sheet corner, recto. A superb, painterly impression, on cream wove Japan paper, the full sheet, in excellent condition. Unmatted, unframed. Sheet size 12 x 39 inches (300 x 990 mm). Provenance: Val Bertoia; Private Collection; Rago Auctions, Lambertville, NJ. Literature: 'Harry Bertoia: Monoprints,' Nancy N. Schiffer, Schiffer Publishing LTD, 2011; pg. 253. This work is included in the Harry Bertoia Foundation digital resource, Harry Bertoia Catalogue Raisonné, number TD.MO.1584. ABOUT THE ARTIST Harry Bertoia (1915-1978) was a visionary Italian-American artist, sculptor, and designer. Born in San Lorenzo, Italy, Bertoia immigrated to the United States with his family at fifteen, settling in Detroit, Michigan. From an early age, Bertoia demonstrated a keen interest in art and design, studying painting and drawing at the Cass Technical High School in Detroit. Later, he attended the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, where he studied under renowned designers Eliel Saarinen and Charles Eames. At Cranbrook, Bertoia first began to explore the possibilities of working with metal, a medium that would come to define his artistic career. In the 1940s, Bertoia moved to California to work for Charles and Ray Eames, contributing to the development of innovative molded plywood furniture. However, his experimentation with metal wire sculpture would ultimately catapult him to international acclaim. Bertoia's iconic "Sonambient" sculptures, consisting of delicate metal rods arranged in various configurations, created ethereal sounds when touched or moved, transforming the act of sculpture into a multisensory experience. Bertoia's talent and innovation caught the attention of Florence Knoll, the founder of Knoll Associates, a leading furniture design company. In 1950, Bertoia began collaborating with Knoll, producing a series of iconic wire chairs that became emblematic of mid-century modern design. His "Diamond Chair," with its geometric form and airy construction, remains a classic of modern furniture design. Bertoia continued to explore sculpture as a means of artistic expression, experimenting with new forms and materials. His work was characterized by organicism and fluidity, with forms that evoked natural phenomena such as waves, leaves, and clouds. A decade before Harry Bertoia began creating three-dimensional sculpture, he dedicated his creative efforts to producing experimental prints at the Cranbrook Academy in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, pursuing a passion that would continue for the rest of his life. With these spontaneous works, he worked intuitively, testing different tools and techniques to achieve his desired effects. Rather than using a traditional mechanical pressing process, he would apply ink to a glass or smooth Masonite plate with a sheet of paper laid directly on top. Then, tools such as brayers, dog hair brushes, styluses, and different parts of his hands were employed to draw or “press” the images on the back of the sheet. Rice paper was typically used due to its semi-translucent nature, offering Bertoia limited visibility of the effects of his experimentation, but ultimately, the unpredictable nature of the process was an integral aspect of the results, which never ceased to delight him. Each work was a singular composition with abstract imagery ranging from linear, structural compositions to fantastic surrealistic forms to poetic tonal landscapes. He received little input from other artists, developing his unique vision with rare purity and a deep personal resonance. From his first year of printmaking in 1940, Bertoia quickly amassed an extensive collection of unique works. The compositions were strongly tied to the non-objective movement, which, while popular in Europe, was still in its nascent stages in the US. There were few proponents of this new art form to be found in the 1940s, and it was Hilla Rebay, then Director of the Guggenheim Museum of Non-Objective Art, who gave Bertoia the encouragement and promotion he needed. In 1943, Bertoia sent approximately 100 monotypes to Rebay for review. After receiving the prints, she responded with a surprising offer to buy them all. Rebay then began including them in the museum’s exhibitions. The Guggenheim shows succeeded in putting Bertoia’s name out into the world. He began exhibiting his works regularly at the Neierndorf Gallery in New York and was provided a stipend to ensure a steady supply of prints until Karl Neierndorf died in 1947. By the 1950s...

Robert Vale Faro, untitled (African Idol), serigraph, c. 1940, edition 6. Signed in pencil. A fine impression, with fresh colors, on buff wove paper; the full sheet with margins(5/8 to 1 3/8 inches), in excellent condition. Very rare. Matted to museum standards, unframed. Image size 8 3/4 x 6 inches (222 x 152 mm); sheet size 11 x 7 1/2 inches (279 x 192 mm). ABOUT THE ARTIST Robert Vale Faro (1902-1988) was a well-known modernist architect and artist associated with the Chicago Bauhaus. He received his degree in architecture and design from the Armour Institute in Chicago and worked at L'Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, from 1924-27, where he was influenced by Harry Kurt Bieg and Le Corbusier. Upon his return to Chicago, Faro worked with the important modernist Chicago architects George and William Keck under Louis Sullivan. Faro founded the avant-garde printmaking group Vanguard in 1945. The group counted Atelier 17 artists Stanley William Hayter, Sue Fuller, and Anne Ryan as New York members and Francine...

James Houston McConnell, 'Equus Uirumpu' (The Man's Horse), color serigraph, c. 1945, edition not stated but small. Signed and titled in pencil. Initialed in the image, lower right. ...

Edward Landon 'River View, color serigraph, 1942, edition 50, Ryan 159. Signed in pencil in the image, lower right. Titled, dated, and annotated '9 COLORS – 50 PRINTS' in the screen,...

Charles Quest, 'Work Bench', 1949, wood engraving, edition 40. Signed, dated and numbered 9/40 in pencil. Titled and annotated 'wood engraving 1949' in pencil, in the artist’s hand, lower right margin. A fine, richly-inked impression, on off-white wove Japan, with full margins (1 3/4 to 2 inches), in excellent condition. Matted to museum standards, unframed. ABOUT THE ARTIST Charles Quest, a successful artist, and fine art instructor, worked in a variety of mediums including mosaic, stained glass, mural painting, and sculpture, but remains best known as a printmaker. Quest grew up in St. Louis, his talent evident as a teenager when he began copying the works of masters such as Michelangelo on his bedroom walls. He studied at the Washington University School of Fine Arts where he later taught from 1944 to 1971. He traveled to Europe after his graduation in 1929, and studied at La Grande Chaumière and Academie Colarossi, Paris, continuing to draw inspiration from the works of the Old Masters. After returning to St. Louis, Quest received several commissions to paint murals in public buildings, schools, and churches, including one from Joseph Cardinal Ritter to paint a replica of Velasquez's Crucifixion over the main altar of the Old Cathedral in St. Louis. Quest soon became interested in the woodcut medium which he apparently learned through his study of J. J. Lankes' A Woodcut Manual (1932) and Paul Landacre's articles in American Artist magazine ‘since no artists in St. Louis were working in wood’ at that time. Quest also revealed that for him, wood cutting and engraving were ‘more enjoyable than any other means of expression.’ In the late 1940s, his graphic works began attracting a lot of critical attention—several of his woodcuts won prizes and were acquired by major American and European museums. His wood engraving entitled ‘Lovers’ was included in the American Federation of Art's traveling print exhibition in 1947. Two years later Quest's two prize-winning prints, ‘Still Life with Grindstone’ and ‘Break Forth into Singing’ were exhibited in major American museums in a traveling show organized by the Philadelphia Print Club. His work was included in the Chicago Art Institute's exhibition, ‘Woodcut Through Six Centuries’ and the print ‘Still Life with Vise’, was purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1951 he was invited by artist-Curator Jacob Kainen to exhibit thirty wood engravings and color woodcuts in the Graphic Arts Division of the Smithsonian's National Museum (now known as the American History Museum). This one-man exhibition was a remarkable achievement for Quest, who had been working in the medium for only about ten years. In the press release for the show, Kainen praised the ‘technical refinement’ of Quest's work: ‘He obtains a great variety of textural effects through the use of the graver, and these dense or transparent grays are set off against whites or blacks to achieve sparkling results. His work has the handsome qualities characteristic of the craftsman and designer.’ At the time of the Smithsonian exhibition, Quest's work was represented by three New York galleries in addition to one in his home town. He had also won 38 prizes, and his prints were in the collections of the Library of Congress, the Chicago Art Institute, the Metropolitan Museum and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In cooperation with the Art in Embassies program, his color woodcuts were displayed at the American Embassy in Paris in 1951. Recognition at home came in 1955 with his first solo exhibition in St. Louis. Press coverage of the show heralded the ‘growth of graphic arts toward rivaling painting and sculpture as a major independent medium’. Charles Quest retired from teaching in 1971 and made relatively few prints in his later years, as the rigors of the medium were too demanding. He moved to Tryon, North Carolina, with his wife Dorothy, an artist and portrait painter, and remained active as a painter until his death in 1993. An exhibition of his prints at the Bethesda Art Gallery in 1983 attracted the interest of Curator Emeritus Joseph A. Haller, S.J., who began purchasing his work for the University's collection. In 1990 Georgetown University Library's Special Collections Division became the grateful recipient of a large body of Quest's work including prints, drawings, paintings, sculpture, and stained glass, as well as his archive of correspondence and professional memorabilia. These extensive holdings, including some 260 of his fine prints, provide a rich opportunity for further study and appreciation of this versatile and not-to-be-forgotten mid-Western American artist...

'The Orange Point', color serigraph, edition 54, c. 1940. Signed, titled, and annotated 'Ed/54' in pencil. A fine impression, with fresh colors, on buff wove paper; the full sheet wi...

Gregory Amenoff (Contemporary American abstract painter, b. 1948), Monotype Monoprint (1990) Hand signed in pencil lower right plate: 16 x 16 inches frame dimensions: 35 1/8 x 29 1/8 x 1 5/8 inches, wood frame with glazing Provenance: Corporate Collection of Bank BNP Paribas Gregory Amenoff is a painter who lives in New York City and Ulster County, New York. He is the recipient of numerous awards from organizations including the American Academy of Arts and Letters, National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts and the Tiffany Foundation. He has had over fifty one-person painting exhibitions in museums and galleries throughout the United States and Europe. His work is in the permanent collections of more than thirty museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His work has the influence of both Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art in it, biomorphic forms in rich hues and thick textures with heightened colors and abstracted, organic forms, late American Modernism. He moved to New York in 1979, the artist rose to critical acclaim in the 1980s alongside Terry Winters, Bill Jensen, and Katherine Porter. The artist lives and works between New York, NY and his Hudson Valley residence. He was a collaborating artist illustrating Bradford Morrow, Bestiary along with Joe Andoe, James Brown, Vija Celmins, Louisa Chase, Eric Fischl, Jan Hashey, Michael Hurson, Mel Kendrick, James Nares, Ellen Phelan, Joel Shapiro, Kiki Smith, David Storey, Michelle Stuart, Richard Tuttle, Trevor Winkfield, Robin Winters. Linoleum cuts with pochoir and woodcuts for the Grenfell Press, New York. Amenoff served as President of the National Academy of Design from 2001-2005. He is a founding board member of the CUE Art Foundation in New York City and serves as the CUE Art Foundation's Curator Governor. Amenoff has taught at Columbia for the last eighteen years, where he holds the Eve and Herman Gelman Chair of Visual Arts and is currently the Chair of the Visual Arts Division in the School of the Arts. He is currently the Vice-President of the National Academy. In 2011 he received the John Solomon Guggenheim Fellowship. Museum Collections Albright-Knox Art Gallery; Buffalo, NY Art Institute of Chicago; IL Baltimore Museum of Art; Brooklyn Museum of Art; Brooklyn, NY Butler Institute of American Art; Youngstown, OH Cleveland Museum of Art; Cleveland, OH Currier Gallery of Art; Manchester, NH Frances and Sidney Lewis Foundation; Richmond, VA Hood Museum of Art; Hanover, NH Honolulu Academy of Art; Honolulu, HW Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art; Kansas City, MO Maier Museum of Art; Lynchburg, VA Metropolitan Museum of Art; New York, NY Milwaukee Museum of Art; Milwaukee, WI Minneapolis Institute of Art; MN Muscarelle Museum of Art, College of William and Mary; Williamsburg, VA Museum of Fine Arts; Boston, MA Museum of Modern Art; New York, NY National Museum of American Art; Washington, DC Neuberger Museum, State University of New York at Purchase; NY New York Public Library, Spencer Collection...

Gregory Amenoff (Contemporary American abstract painter, b. 1948), Monotype Monoprint (1990) Hand signed in pencil lower right plate: 16 x 16 inches frame dimensions: 35 1/8 x 29 1/8 x 1 5/8 inches, wood frame with glazing Provenance: Corporate Collection of Bank BNP Paribas Gregory Amenoff is a painter who lives in New York City and Ulster County, New York. He is the recipient of numerous awards from organizations including the American Academy of Arts and Letters, National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts and the Tiffany Foundation. He has had over fifty one-person painting exhibitions in museums and galleries throughout the United States and Europe. His work is in the permanent collections of more than thirty museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His work has the influence of both Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art in it, biomorphic forms in rich hues and thick textures with heightened colors and abstracted, organic forms, late American Modernism. He moved to New York in 1979, the artist rose to critical acclaim in the 1980s alongside Terry Winters, Bill Jensen, and Katherine Porter. The artist lives and works between New York, NY and his Hudson Valley residence. He works in woodcut, lithograph and monoprint techniques. He was a collaborating artist illustrating Bradford Morrow, Bestiary along with Joe Andoe, James Brown, Vija Celmins, Louisa Chase, Eric Fischl, Jan Hashey, Michael Hurson, Mel Kendrick, James Nares, Ellen Phelan, Joel Shapiro, Kiki Smith, David Storey, Michelle Stuart, Richard Tuttle, Trevor Winkfield, Robin Winters. Linoleum cuts with pochoir and woodcuts for the Grenfell Press, New York. Amenoff served as President of the National Academy of Design from 2001-2005. He is a founding board member of the CUE Art Foundation in New York City and serves as the CUE Art Foundation's Curator Governor. Amenoff has taught at Columbia for the last eighteen years, where he holds the Eve and Herman Gelman Chair of Visual Arts and is currently the Chair of the Visual Arts Division in the School of the Arts. He is currently the Vice-President of the National Academy. In 2011 he received the John Solomon Guggenheim Fellowship. Museum Collections Albright-Knox Art Gallery; Buffalo, NY Art Institute of Chicago; IL Baltimore Museum of Art; Brooklyn Museum of Art; Brooklyn, NY Butler Institute of American Art; Youngstown, OH Cleveland Museum of Art; Cleveland, OH Currier Gallery of Art; Manchester, NH Frances and Sidney Lewis Foundation; Richmond, VA Hood Museum of Art; Hanover, NH Honolulu Academy of Art; Honolulu, HW Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art; Kansas City, MO Maier Museum of Art; Lynchburg, VA Metropolitan Museum of Art; New York, NY Milwaukee Museum of Art; Milwaukee, WI Minneapolis Institute of Art; MN Muscarelle Museum of Art, College of William and Mary; Williamsburg, VA Museum of Fine Arts; Boston, MA Museum of Modern Art; New York, NY National Museum of American Art; Washington, DC Neuberger Museum, State University of New York at Purchase; NY New York Public Library, Spencer Collection...

Naum Gabo was a major constructivist sculptor and highly influential member of the European avant-garde art movement. Gabo signaled a rejection of conventional sculptural modes by em...

Glowing Tree Etching, engraving & lift ground, 1958 Signed, titled and annotated in pencil (see photos) Edition: Artist Proof (there was a published addition of 30 with five stencil ...

This is a modernist view of a New York City park. It's interesting because we're given so much detail and yet it's drawing style also keep things hidden. Really I think it's about Cu...

"Henry S. Miller" Lithograph in Ink on Paper, #3 of 8 Surrealist lithograph by Stephen Tracy White (American, 1947-2005). A figure in the lower right corner is partially enclosed by a red rectangle. Biomorphic shapes are flowing out of the rectangle, stretching across the composition. The shapes are rendered with intricate linework and soft green shading. Numbered, titled, signed, and dated along the bottom: 3/8 Henry S. Miller S. Tracy White 1969/April Tag on verso from Lee Nordness Galleries, New York Presented in a silver aluminum frame. Shipped without glass. Frame size: 26.5"H x 36.25"W Image size: 23.5"H x 34.25"W Stephen Tracy White (American, 1947-2005) was born in Bronwood, Georgia. They studied at the University of New Mexico, earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Art in 1969. They worked at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop, printing pieces by William Crutchfield...