John Little

"Untitled"

1973

Mid century modern gouache on paper by the well known Canadian/American artist, Rolph Scarlett. Signed and dated in blue pen lower left, 1947. Condition: Good. Framed in thin black matte painted frame with acid free white mat. Not examined out of frame. Overall framed 14.25 by 17 inches. ROLPH SCARLETT (1889-1984) Rolph Scarlett was born 1889 in Guelph, Ontario. His long life as an artist began in his teens as a jewelry designer and fabricator. At the age of fourteen he began to design jewelry professionally, a craft which he continued off and on for the rest of his life. His desire to learn more about art took him to New York in 1908, when American artists were just beginning to experience strong influences from major modern European artists of the day such as Cezanne and Picasso. Throughout his long career he produced, oil paintings, many works on paper, unique sculptured jewelry, modernist style industrial and furniture designs. Currently there are over 800 of his designs at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts Design Collection. In 1928 he moved to Hollywood, California where he became a very successful stage and set designer. In the mid-1930s he met the director of the Museum of Non-objective Art in New York ( Hilla Rebay). He became her close associate and advisor in organizing and running the museum. He was Chief lecturer at the museum (1939 -1946) teaching the new modernism and abstraction to the new generation of artists in the New York art community. Hilla Rebay would introduce him as “Rolph Scarlett, my great find”. So considerable was her enthusiasm for Scarlett, that she and Solomon Guggenheim bought over sixty of his paintings and monotypes for the museum. After Kandinsky and Bauer, there was more of Scarlett’s work in the collection than any other artists. He participated in many of the museum exhibitions and galleries and was regularly exhibiting his work in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Art Museum, the Art Institute in Chicago, the Modern Age Gallery in N.Y., the Metropolitan Museum, the Whitney Museum and the Museum of Modern Art. He studied for a time at the Art Student League with William Merrit...

Here for your consideration is a well executed original watercolor and gouache abstract on archival paper by the New Hope, Pennsylvania artist, Lloyd Ney. Ney was considered to be a...

Abstract watercolor composition bearing the influence of the earlier color-block compositions of Paul Klee. Pawel August Kontny, (Polish-German-American artist) He was born in Laurahuette, Poland, in 1923, the son of a wealthy pastry shop owner. In 1939 he began studying architecture in Breslau where he was introduced to the European masters and to the work of some of the German Expressionists, soon afterward banned as "degenerate artists" and removed from museums throughout Germany by the Nazi regime. His studies were interrupted by World War II. Drafted into the German army, traveling in many countries as a soldier, he sketched various landscapes but in 1945, he was captured and held as a prisoner of war in Italy. After the war, he studied at the Union of Nuremberg Architects to help design buildings to replace ones destroyed in the war. He recorded his impressions of the local population and the landscapes through his watercolors and drawings. Pawel Kontny thereafter moved to Nuremberg, Germany, becoming a member of the Union of Nuremberg Architects and helping to rebuild the city's historic center. He soon decided to concentrate on his professional art career. He married Irmgard Laurer, a dancer with the Nuremberg Opera. Pavel Kontny 's career as an artist was launched with his participation in an all German exhibition, held at the Dusseldorf Museum in 1952. He held one-man shows in Germany, Switzerland and the United States. During his trip to the United States in 1960, Kontny became instantly enamored with Colorado, and decided to relocate to Cherry Hills with his wife and two children. He quickly established himself in the local art community, being affiliated for a time with Denver Art Galleries and Saks Galleries. His subject matter became the Southwest. During this time he received the Prestigious Gold Medal of the Art Academy of Rome. His extensive travel provided material for the paintings he did using his hallmark marble dust technique. he also worked equally in pastel, watercolor, charcoal and pencil-and-ink. in a style which merged abstraction and realist styles, influenced by Abstract Expressionist painting and South Western American landscapes. This one is influenced by California Abstract Expressionist artist Sam Francis. In the early 1960s he was one of only a few European-born professional artists in the state, a select group that included Herbert Bayer (1900-1985), a member of the prewar Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau, Germany, and Roland Detre (1903-2001), a Hungarian modernist painter. As a Denver, Colorado resident, Pavel Kontny exhibited at galleries and museums throughout the United States, Germany and Japan. There, he was inspired by frequent trips to Native American pueblos in the Southwest, as well as by the study of the Plains Indians of Montana and Wyoming. Over the years Kontny had a number of students and generously helped young artist by hosting exhibitions at his Cherry Hills home. For many years he generously donated his paintings to support charitable causes in Denver. Influences during his European years included German pastelist C.O. Muller, German Informel painter Karl Dahmen and Swiss artist, Hans Erni. In the early 1950s his painting style showed the influence of the Die Brücke (The Bridge), a group of German expressionist artists formed in Dresden in 1905 who had a major impact on the evolution of modern art in the twentieth century in Germany. By the middle of the decade his style incorporated more referential abstraction and total abstraction, resulting in part from his study of Hans Hartung, a German artist based in Paris who exhibited his gestural abstract work in Germany. The American moon landing in 1969 inspired Paul Kontny...

Lisa Fellerson’s paintings provoke an interplay and tension between line, shape, and color. With no preconceived idea in mind, she begins by dripping, scrapping, and gouging acrylic ...