Skip to main content

Donald Sultan Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

American, b. 1951

Donald Sultan is a distinguished painter, sculptor, and printmaker who rose to prominence in the late 1970s as part of the “New Image” movement in New York City.

Sultan has a unique artistic method and innovative approach to traditional subject matter. Known as Abstract Representation, Sultan’s paintings, prints and other art are characterized by the use of geometric black forms set against organic areas of bright color, thus bringing an abstract sensibility to his iconographic images of still life. Throughout his career he has revisited and reinvented still life, using images of lemons, poppies, playing cards, fruits, flowers, and other objects. Sultan’s lemons, a recurrent theme in his artworks, have in fact become an iconic image all over the world.

“All of the images of those dark pictures are really about the architecture in the paintings; they seem so massive and strong and permanent, but nothing is permanent,” Sultan has said. “The image in the front is very fragile, but it conveys the loaded meaning of everything that is contained in the painting.”

Sultan is considered to be at the forefront of contemporary art. Although his paintings are often classified as landscapes and still lifes, Sultan states that they are first and foremost abstracts. Besides paintings, drawings, and sculptures, he has created many editions. Sultan’s prints are unique: he uses specific materials like “flocking” to create expressive and powerful prints that are reminiscent of his forceful paintings. Since his first solo exhibition in 1977, Sultan’s artistic career has progressed rapidly; his works are part of the most prominent public and private collections to be found across the globe.

Find original Donald Sultan art on 1stDibs.

(Biography provided by Weng Contemporary — ArtXX AG)

to
2
2
2
1
1
Overall Height
to
Overall Width
to
1
1
2
1
1
229
136
125
78
71
2
2
1
Artist: Donald Sultan
"Black Lemon" original Charcoal Drawing - signed & dated 1988 - Iconic
By Donald Sultan
Located in Rancho Santa Fe, CA
Signed, titled & dated in pencil along the left edge of the paper. In excellent condition Provenance: McIntosh/Drysdale, Washington, D.C. 1988; Private Collection, Bethesda, Maryland; Private collection, San Diego, CA Exhibition History: The Corcoran Museum of Art, Washington, D.C. "Donald Sultan: In The Still Life Tradition" May 10-July 7...
Category

1980s Contemporary Donald Sultan Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Charcoal, Archival Paper

"Oranges July 4 1991" Modern Abstract Geometric Black and White Charcoal Drawing
By Donald Sultan
Located in Houston, TX
Modern black and white charcoal still life drawing by iconic abstract artist Donald Sultan. The work features a dynamic composition of circular forms set against a white background. The rich black tones, emblematic of Sultan's work, make this work pop. Titled, dated, and signed along top margin. Currently hung in a complementary black floating frame. Dimensions Without Frame: H 48 in. x W 60 in. Artist Biography: Born in 1951 in Asheville, North Carolina, Donald Sultan rose...
Category

1990s Abstract Geometric Donald Sultan Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Charcoal

Related Items
Untitled No. 26 (Modern Black & Grey Abstract Fruit Drawing in Black Frame)
By Ralph Stout
Located in Hudson, NY
Vertical charcoal drawing on Arches paper 18 x 13 inches unframed 25 x 20 inches in black metal frame with AR non-glare glass & 8-ply mat This contemporary, abstract charcoal drawin...
Category

Early 2000s Abstract Donald Sultan Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Charcoal

Five Morandi Bottles (Abstract Black-and-White Still Life Drawing in Graphite)
By David Dew Bruner
Located in Hudson, NY
Abstract black-and-white still life drawing of bottles on a surface by David Dew Bruner graphite on paper 19.5 x 38.5 x 1.75 inches Framed in vintage frame, hangs flush to the wall ...
Category

2010s Contemporary Donald Sultan Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Graphite

Recordando el gran artista Alberto Riano "Mangos" Marzo, Drawing
By Celso José Castro Daza
Located in Miami Beach, FL
Recordando el gran artista Alberto Riano Mangos Marzo, 2014 by Celso Castro Black paint, and pastel on archival paper Image size: 39.2 H in. x 28 in. W Unframed ____________ Undefin...
Category

1990s Contemporary Donald Sultan Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Pastel, Archival Paper, Acrylic

Unique signed pastel drawing by important British artist, Rowan Gallery UK 1973
Located in New York, NY
Jeremy Moon Drawing 73/13 (20/5/73), 1973 Pastel on paper Hand-signed by artist, Signed and dated 20/5/73 in graphite on the lower front; the back of the v...
Category

1970s Abstract Geometric Donald Sultan Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Charcoal, Pastel, Mixed Media

Summer Set 8, watercolor monoprint (unique) on Dieu Donne handmade paper, signed
By Arlene Shechet
Located in New York, NY
Arlene Shechet Summer Set 8, 2005 Watercolor monoprint on dieu donné hand made paper 21 × 27 1/2 inches Signed and dated in graphite on the front Exquisite watercolor monoprint on di...
Category

Early 2000s Contemporary Donald Sultan Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Watercolor, Handmade Paper, Monoprint, Mixed Media, Graphite

1950s Abstract Composition in Brown, Orange and Blue with Black Parallel Lines
By Herbert Bayer
Located in Denver, CO
Watercolor and ink on paper of an abstract composition of brown, orange and blue shapes between black parallel lines throughout the the piece by Herbert Bayer (1900-1985). Presented in a custom black frame with all archival materials. Framed dimensions measure 17 ⅞ x 22 ⅝ x 1 inches. Image size is 10 ¼ x 15 ½ inches. Painting is clean and in very 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: Herbert Bayer enjoyed a versatile sixty-year career spanning Europe and America that included abstract and surrealist painting, sculpture, environmental art, industrial design, architecture, murals, graphic design, lithography, photography and tapestry. He was one of the few “total artists” of the twentieth century, producing works that “expressed the needs of an industrial age as well as mirroring the advanced tendencies of the avant-garde.” One of four children of a tax revenue officer growing up in a village in the Austrian Salzkammergut Lake region, Bayer developed a love of nature and a life-long attachment to the mountains. A devotee of the Vienna Secession and the Vienna Workshops (Wiener Werkstätte) whose style influenced Bauhaus craftsmen in the 1920s, his dream of studying at the Academy of Art in Vienna was dashed at age seventeen by his father’s premature death. In 1919 Bayer began an apprenticeship with architect and designer, Georg Schmidthamer, where he produced his first typographic works. Later that same year he moved to Darmstadt, Germany, to work at the Mathildenhöhe Artists’ Colony with architect Emanuel Josef Margold of the Viennese School. As his working apprentice, Bayer first learned about the design of packages – something entirely new at the time – as well as the design of interiors and graphics of a decorative expressionist style, all of which later figured in his professional career. While at Darmstadt, he came across Wassily Kandinsky’s book, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, and learned of the new art school, the Weimar Bauhaus, in which he enrolled in 1921. He initially attended Johannes Itten’s preliminary course, followed by Wassily Kandinsky’s workshop on mural painting. Bayer later recalled, “The early years at the Bauhaus in Weimar became the formative experience of my subsequent work.” Following graduation in 1925, he was appointed head of the newly-created workshop for print and advertising at the Dessau Bauhaus that also produced the school’s own print works. During this time he designed the “Universal” typeface emphasizing legibility by removing the ornaments from letterforms (serifs). Three years later he left the Bauhaus to focus more on his own artwork, moving to Berlin where he worked as a graphic designer in advertising and as an artistic director of the Dorland Studio advertising agency. (Forty years later he designed a vast traveling exhibition, catalog and poster -- 50 Jahre Bauhaus -- shown in Germany, South America, Japan, Canada and the United States.) In pre-World War II Berlin he also pursued the design of exhibitions, painting, photography and photomontage, and was art director of Vogue magazine in Paris. On account of his previous association with the Bauhaus, the German Nazis removed his paintings from German museums and included him among the artists in a large exhibition entitled Degenerate Art (Entartete Kunst) that toured German and Austrian museums in 1937. His inclusion in that exhibition and the worsening political conditions in Nazi Germany prompted him to travel to New York that year with Marcel Breuer, meeting with former Bauhaus colleagues, Walter Gropius and László Moholy-Nagy to explore the possibilities of employment after immigration to the United States. In 1938 Bayer permanently relocated to the United States, settling in New York where he had a long and distinguished career in practically every aspect of the graphic arts, working for drug companies, magazines, department stores, and industrial corporations. In 1938 he arranged the exhibition, “Bauhaus 1919-1928” at the Museum of Modern Art, followed later by “Road to Victory” (1942, directed by Edward Steichen), “Airways to Peace” (1943) and “Art in Progress” (1944). Bayer’s designs for “Modern Art in Advertising” (1945), an exhibition of the Container Corporation of America (CAA) at the Art Institute of Chicago, earned him the support and friendship of Walter Paepcke, the corporation’s president and chairman of the board. Paepcke, whose embrace of modern currents and design changed the look of American advertising and industry, hired him to move to Aspen, Colorado, in 1946 as a design consultant transforming the moribund mountain town into a ski resort and a cultural center. Over the next twenty-eight years he became an influential catalyst in the community as a painter, graphic designer, architect and landscape designer, also serving as a design consultant for the Aspen Cultural Center. In the summer of 1949 Bayer promoted through poster design and other design work Paepcke’s Goethe Bicentennial Convocation attended by 2,000 visitors to Aspen and highlighted by the participation of Albert Schweitzer, Arthur Rubenstein, Jose Ortega y Gasset and Thornton Wilder. The celebration, held in a tent designed by Finnish architect Eero Saarinen, led to the establishment that same year of the world-famous Aspen Music Festival and School regarded as one of the top classical music venues in the United States, and the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies in (now the Aspen Institute), promoting in Paepcke’s words “the cross fertilization of men’s minds.” In 1946 Bayer completed his first architecture design project in Aspen, the Sundeck Ski Restaurant, at an elevation of 11,300 feet on Ajax Mountain. Three years later he built his first studio on Red Mountain, followed by a home which he sold in 1953 to Robert O. Anderson, founder of the Atlantic Richfield Company who became very active in the Aspen Institute. Bayer later designed Anderson’s terrace home in Aspen (1962) and a private chapel for the Anderson family in Valley Hondo, New Mexico (1963). Transplanting German Bauhaus design to the Colorado Rockies, Bayer created along with associate architect, Fredric Benedict, a series of buildings for the modern Aspen Institute complex: Koch Seminar Building (1952), Aspen Meadows guest chalets and Center Building (both 1954), Health Center and Aspen Meadows Restaurant (Copper Kettle, both 1955). For the grounds of the Aspen Institute in 1955 Bayer executed the Marble Garden and conceived the Grass Mound, the first recorded “earthwork” environment In 1973-74 he completed Anderson Park for the Institute, a continuation of his fascination with environmental earth art. In 1961 he designed the Walter Paepcke Auditorium and Memorial Building, completing three years later his most ambitious and original design project – the Musical Festival Tent for the Music Associates of Aspen. (In 2000 the tent was replaced with a design by Harry Teague.) One of Bayer’s ambitious plans from the 1950s, unrealized due to Paepcke’s death in 1960, was an architectural village on the outskirts of the Aspen Institute, featuring seventeen of the world’s most notable architects – Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, I.M. Pei, Minoru Yamasaki, Edward Durrell Stone and Phillip Johnson – who accepted his offer to design and build houses. Concurrent with Bayer’s design and consultant work while based in Aspen for almost thirty years, he continued painting, printmaking, and mural work. Shortly after relocating to Colorado, he further developed his “Mountains and Convolutions” series begun in Vermont in 1944, exploring nature’s fury and repose. Seeing mountains as “simplified forms reduced to sculptural surface in motion,” he executed in 1948 a series of seven two-color lithographs (edition of 90) for the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. Colorado’s multi-planal typography similarly inspired Verdure, a large mural commissioned by Walter Gropius for the Harkness Commons Building at Harvard University (1950), and a large exterior sgraffito mural for the Koch Seminar Building at the Aspen Institute (1953). Having exhausted by that time the subject matter of “Mountains and Convulsions,” Bayer returned to geometric abstractions which he pursued over the next three decades. In 1954 he started the “Linear Structure” series containing a richly-colored balance format with bands of sticks of continuously modulated colors. That same year he did a small group of paintings, “Forces of Time,” expressionist abstractions exploring the temporal dimension of nature’s seasonal molting. He also debuted a “Moon and Structure” series in which constructed, architectural form served as the underpinning for the elaboration of color variations and transformations. Geometric abstraction likewise appeared his free-standing metal sculpture, Kaleidoscreen (1957), a large experimental project for ALCOA (Aluminum Corporation of America) installed as an outdoor space divider on the Aspen Meadows in the Aspen Institute complex. Composed of seven prefabricated, multi-colored and textured panels, they could be turned ninety degrees to intersect and form a continuous plane in which the panels recomposed like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. He similarly used prefabricated elements for Articulated Wall, a very tall free-standing sculpture commissioned for the Olympic Games in Mexico...
Category

1950s Abstract Geometric Donald Sultan Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Ink, Mixed Media, Watercolor

He
By Mark Pomilio
Located in Phoenix, AZ
charcoal on paper, mounted to foam core and wood Mark Pomilio’s work focuses on the research of fractals, cloning, and single cell manipulation. His mathematics-based drawings serve...
Category

2010s Abstract Geometric Donald Sultan Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Wood, Paper, Charcoal, Foam Board

He
He
H 85 in W 31 in D 11.5 in
"PLENTY", watercolor, abstract, ice cream, landscape, patterns, textiles, fruit
By Fleur Thesmar
Located in Toronto, Ontario
PLENTY is a new watercolor on Fabriano paper by Fleur Thesmar. The artwork measures 22x30". Note the gentle complexity of the composition, the suggestion of dollops of ice cream and fruit, or piles of colorful clothes, or a fanciful landscape. The scale grows large and small, far away and right in your lap! From Fleur Thesmar – "My memory invents places and shapes, finding new games of mirrors thanks to mathematical models and theories. Shapes resembling bowls of fruit, balloons, landscapes and so on, actually fulfill a dream of mine to free the imagination and let the viewer invent as well." Having moved her family from France to America, artist Fleur Thesmar closely observed the changes in her world – from the seemingly obvious such as surrounding landscapes, the light of day and weather, the flowers, trees and shorelines – to the smaller less obvious shifts, such as how one behaves in a new world, in a new home, how one cherishes certain belongings and certain memories. Her artistic practice is borne out of that close observation and shift in perspective, and has led to a number of successful gallery shows in the U.S. and internationally. Fleur Thesmar has shown at Beacon Gallery in Boston MA, 440 Gallery, Brooklyn NY, Old West Museum, Cheyenne WY, Belmont Art Gallery, Belmont MA, and Salon Ile-de-France 2020, Bourg-La-Reine, France. Her work is on permanent display at the Tower Hill Botanic...
Category

21st Century and Contemporary Contemporary Donald Sultan Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Watercolor, Archival Paper

Accomplish (To Accomplish * Goals & Task)
By Cheryl R. Riley
Located in Jersey City, NJ
Accomplish (To Accomplish * Goals & Task) Gouache and metallic ink on 1957 Encyclopedia page Feminist Art and Contemporary Feminist / Geometric Abstraction / Gestural Abstraction /...
Category

2010s Abstract Geometric Donald Sultan Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Acrylic, Gouache, Magazine Paper

Early Catastrophe I
By Mark Pomilio
Located in Phoenix, AZ
charcoal on paper, mounted on curved wood Mark Pomilio’s work focuses on the research of fractals, cloning, and single cell manipulation. His mathematics-based drawings serve as ...
Category

2010s Abstract Geometric Donald Sultan Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Wood, Paper, Charcoal, Panel

Untitled
By Fernand Léger
Located in Palm Desert, CA
"Untitled" is a charcoal drawing by Fernand Léger. The drawing is signed lower right, "F.L. 30". The framed piece measures 17 1/4 x 21 1/4 x 7/8 in. A veteran of the battle of Verdu...
Category

1930s Cubist Donald Sultan Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Charcoal

Untitled
Untitled
H 8.25 in W 11.75 in
Birth (One of the Arts)
By Cheryl R. Riley
Located in Jersey City, NJ
Birth (One of the Arts) Gouache and metallic ink on 1957 Encyclopedia page Feminist Art and Contemporary Feminist / Geometric Abstraction / Gestural Abstracti...
Category

2010s Abstract Geometric Donald Sultan Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Gouache, Magazine Paper, Acrylic

Previously Available Items
Donald Sultan (Abstract Drawings) - Three Black Flowers, 23 August 1995
By Donald Sultan
Located in London, GB
Donald Sultan Born 1951 Three Black Flowers, 23 August 1995 Charcoal on paper 60 x 48 inches Donald Sultan is an acclaimed American painter know...
Category

1990s Contemporary Donald Sultan Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Charcoal

Donald Sultan abstract drawings and watercolors for sale on 1stDibs.

Find a wide variety of authentic Donald Sultan abstract drawings and watercolors available for sale on 1stDibs. You can also browse by medium to find art by Donald Sultan in charcoal, paper, archival paper and more. Much of the original work by this artist or collective was created during the 20th century and is mostly associated with the contemporary style. Not every interior allows for large Donald Sultan abstract drawings and watercolors, so small editions measuring 22 inches across are available. Customers who are interested in this artist might also find the work of James Siena, Erle Loran, and James Minden. Donald Sultan abstract drawings and watercolors prices can differ depending upon medium, time period and other attributes. On 1stDibs, the price for these items starts at $13,000 and tops out at $19,000, while the average work can sell for $16,000.

Recently Viewed

View All