Nellie Mae Rowe

A Beautiful Day

1978

Boogie Woogie II, 1993 Peter Ambrose (American, b. 1953) Charcoal on Paper Signed and Dated Lower Right Titled Lower Left 41 x 29 inches 46.25 x 34.25 inches with frame BORN 1953 New York, NY EDUCATION 1977 MFA, The School of Art Institute of Chicago 1975 BFA, Carnegie Mellon University 1974 Yale University, Summer School of Art and Music TEACHING EXPERIENCE 1983 Visiting Artist, 2-D, 3-D Design and Graduate Advisor, Carnegie Mellon University 1995-96 Independent Study in Exhibition installation, art handling, restoration, Saint Louis University 1998 Adjunct faculty, Sculpture, Saint Louis University SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS 1999 Elliott Smith...

A Stroll Through the Village, Two Figures By. Theo Tobiasse (Israeli, French, 1927-2012) Signed Lower Left Unframed: 40" x 27.5" Framed: 55.5" x 42.25" Théo Tobiasse came from a Lithuanian-Jewish immigrant family who moved to Paris in 1931 for economic reasons. Here Tobiasse completed an apprenticeship at the École des Arts Décoratifs, which was interrupted by the outbreak of World War II. The family lived hidden in the French metropolis for over two years without ever leaving the small apartment or even lighting it up. The time was spent reading, drawing and playing chess, and Tobiasse built up a huge pool of drawings from which he could later draw. After the end of the war, he worked as a graphic designer for the Hermès company...

Gisella Loeffler "Going for a Stroll" c. 1919 Gouache on Paper Initialed Framed Size: approx 17 x 13 inches In a village filled with colorful characters, few Taos artists were as colorful as Gisella Loeffler [1900-1977]. From her handmade Austrian clothing and hand-painted furniture to whimsical paintings and letters written in multicolored crayon, joyful color defined the artist, who early on chose to use simply Gisella as her professional name and was known as such to everyone in Taos. 

In spite of her fame there—the Taos News once labeled her a Taos legend—Gisella is rarely included in scholarly discussions of the Taos Art Colony. This oversight is likely due to the naive quality of her work, in which children or childlike adults inhabit a simple, brightly colored world filled with happiness. The macabre, the sad, the tortured, the offensive—all have no place in Gisella’s paintings. Her naive style of work looks very different from that of the better-known early Taos artists. Yet both Gisella’s artwork and her interesting life command attention. Born in Austria, Gisella came to the United States with her family in 1908, settling in St. Louis, MO. After studying art at Washington University in St. Louis, she became a prominent member of the local art community, joining the St. Louis Art Guild as well as the Boston Society of Arts and Crafts. In addition to creating posters for the St. Louis Post Dispatch, Gisella won prizes from the Artists Guild of the Author’s League of America in 1919 and 1920 and from the Kansas City Art Institute in 1923. She also began working in textiles, including batik, to which she would return later in her career.  In the early 1920s Gisella married writer and music critic Edgar Lacher. A difficult character, Lacher may have chafed under Gisella’s success, for the couple divorced in the 1930s. Having seen a local exhibition of paintings by Taos artists Oscar Berninghaus (who was from St. Louis) and Ernest Blumenschein, Gisella felt drawn to Taos, which reminded her of the villages of her native Austria. In 1933 the single mother with two daughters, Undine and Aithra, moved to Taos, where she lived off and on for the rest of her life. She traveled frequently, spending extended periods in Mexico, South America, and California, but always returned to New Mexico. Gisella initially applied an Austro-Hungarian folk-art style to the Indian and Hispanic subjects that she found in New Mexico. In her early work she covered her surfaces with decorative floral and faunal motifs, and her images were flat with no attempt at rendering traditional one-point perspective. Eventually, though, Gisella developed her own style, often using children or childlike figures as subjects. Still, the influence of her native country’s folk art remained evident in her New Mexican, Mexican, and South American images. In 1938 Gisella moved briefly to Los Griegos, north of Albuquerque, to be closer to medical facilities for her eldest daughter, who was suffering from rheumatic fever. Two years later, she moved to California to participate in the war effort, painting camouflage and decals on airplanes for Lockheed. In California, Gisella broadened her range of artistic pursuits. She taught art privately, created illustrations for Scripts Magazine, and did interior design for private homes. She also designed greeting cards, a practice she continued after her return to New Mexico, where she created a series of Christmas cards.  Gisella began illustrating children’s books in 1941 when she collaborated on Franzi and Gizi with author Margery Bianco. Eventually she wrote and illustrated her own book, El Ekeko, in 1964. She also designed ceramics—her Happy Time Dinnerware, marketed by Poppy Trail...

Abstract (Edition 95/100) By Bram Van Velde (1895-1981) Numbered Lower Left Signed Lower Center Unframed: 37" x 24" Framed: 37.5" x 25.25" Bram (Abraham Gerardus) van Velde was a Dutch painter known for an intensely colored and geometric semi-representational painting style related to Tachisme*, and Lyrical Abstraction*. He is often seen as member of the School of Paris* but his work resides somewhere between expressionism* and surrealism*, and evolved in the 1960s into an expressive abstract art. His paintings from the 1950s are similar to the contemporary work of Matisse, Picasso and the abstract expressionist Adolph Gottlieb. He was championed by a number of French-speaking writers, including Samuel Beckett and the poet André du...

Mixed media drawing on paper Dated and signed on the back In the plastic work of Geneviève Seillé, the word, like a sign, reigns supreme. An object o...

Self taught outsider art by African American artist from New Orleans with work in major museum and private collections. White created a bold c...

Mixed media drawing on paper Dated and signed on the back In the plastic work of Geneviève Seillé, the word, like a sign, reigns supreme. An object o...

Mixed media drawing on paper Dated and signed on the back In the plastic work of Geneviève Seillé, the word, like a sign, reigns supreme. An object of fascination, only its visual a...