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Modern Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

MODERN STYLE

The first decades of the 20th century were a period of artistic upheaval, with modern art movements including Cubism, Surrealism, Futurism and Dadaism questioning centuries of traditional views of what art should be. Using abstraction, experimental forms and interdisciplinary techniques, painters, sculptors, photographers, printmakers and performance artists all pushed the boundaries of creative expression.

Major exhibitions, like the 1913 Armory Show in New York City — also known as the “International Exhibition of Modern Art,” in which works like the radically angular Nude Descending a Staircase by Marcel Duchamp caused a sensation — challenged the perspective of viewers and critics and heralded the arrival of modern art in the United States. But the movement’s revolutionary spirit took shape in the 19th century.

The Industrial Revolution, which ushered in new technology and cultural conditions across the world, transformed art from something mostly commissioned by the wealthy or the church to work that responded to personal experiences. The Impressionist style emerged in 1860s France with artists like Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne and Edgar Degas quickly painting works that captured moments of light and urban life. Around the same time in England, the Pre-Raphaelites, like Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, borrowed from late medieval and early Renaissance art to imbue their art with symbolism and modern ideas of beauty.

Emerging from this disruption of the artistic status quo, modern art went further in rejecting conventions and embracing innovation. The bold legacy of leading modern artists Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Frida Kahlo, Salvador Dalí, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Marc Chagall, Piet Mondrian and many others continues to inform visual culture today.

Find a collection of modern paintings, sculptures, prints and other fine art on 1stDibs.

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Style: Modern
Untitled #3
Located in San Francisco, CA
This artwork "Untitled #3" c.1970 is a colors pastel and crayon on thick paper by American artist Jerry Opper, 1924-2014. It is hand signed in pencil at the lower right corner by the artist. The image size is 21.75 x 16.75 inches, sheet size is 24 x 19 inches. It is in excellent condition, there are pastel marks on the margin all around the artwork and also on the back, see picture #1. About the artist: Jerry Opper was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on September 5, 1924. He moved to Los Angeles with his family in 1933. After graduating from Hollywood High School, he worked in movie studios and attended art classes at Chouinard Art Institute. In May 1942, Opper was drafted into the army and was then able to study at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center while his outfit was stationed in Colorado. Later he was sent to Guam and was discharged in December 1945. Opper returned to Chouinard and his work in movie studios until 1947, when he moved to San Francisco. He enrolled as a full-time student at the California School of Fine Arts (now SFAI) and received his diploma in June of 1950. In 1948, Opper met his wife Gertrud Ruth Friedmann, daughter of artist Gustav Friedmann, whose works are also in the Lost Art Salon collection. It was love at first sight and a few weeks after their first encounter at the Black Cat in San Francisco's North Beach, they got married and enjoyed a passionate, life-long romance. Shortly after he finished school, Opper worked briefly as a decorator’s assistant and then started his career as a commercial artist, working for several firms such as Fibreboard, Beatrix Food and Precision. Working full-time and dedicating himself to having a rich family life occupied most of Opper's time, but he continued to be creative. He was above all a family man with the pride of having raised two exceptional daughters, Erika and Jody. Year after year, Opper would painstakingly craft their Halloween costumes...
Category

Late 20th Century Modern Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Pastel

Figure - Drawing By Reynold Arnould - 1970
Located in Roma, IT
Figure is a Watercolour artwork realized by Reynold Arnould (Le Havre 1919 - Paris 1980). Good condition on white paper. No Signature. Reynold Arnould was born in Le Havre, Fra...
Category

1970s Modern Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Permanent Marker

Early Abstraction
Located in London, GB
This soft and inviting work is the first in a series of abstractions. Walkowitz utilises innovative drawing techniques, the side of the pencil becomes a valuable tool in creating a b...
Category

Early 20th Century Modern Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Photographic Film

Early Abstraction II
Located in London, GB
This soft and inviting work is the second in a series of abstractions by Walkowitz. Containing a central sequence of wavey lines and a singular circle, it evokes a feelings of joy in...
Category

Early 20th Century Modern Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Pencil

Abstract Composition - Drawing By Reynold Arnould - Mid-20th Century
Located in Roma, IT
Abstract Composition is a Charcoal Drawing realized by Reynold Arnould (Le Havre 1919 - Parigi 1980). Good condition on a yellowed paper, included a white cardboard passpartout (3...
Category

Mid-20th Century Modern Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Charcoal

Composition - Drawing By Reynold Arnould - 1970
Located in Roma, IT
Composition is a Black Marker Drawing realized by Reynold Arnould (Le Havre 1919 - Parigi 1980). Good condition on a sheet of a notebook. No signature. Reynold Arnould was born i...
Category

1970s Modern Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Permanent Marker

"Falaise d'Aval"
Located in Astoria, NY
Manfred Schwartz (American, b. Poland, 1909-1970), "Falaise d'Aval", Pastel on Paper, 1960, signed and dated in pencil lower right, giltwood frame. Image: 11.5" H x 9.5" W; frame: 23...
Category

1960s Modern Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Oil Pastel

Abstract Composition - Drawing By Reynold Arnould - 1970
Located in Roma, IT
Abstract Composition is a Color Marker Drawing realized by Reynold Arnould (Le Havre 1919 - Paris 1980). Good condition. No Signature. Reynold Arnould was born in Le Havre, Fran...
Category

1970s Modern Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Permanent Marker

Beach Seascape
Located in Astoria, NY
Manfred Schwartz (American, b. Poland, 1909-1970), Beach Seascape, Charcoal on Paper, with the artist's signature stamped lower right, unframed. 25.5" H x 20" W. Provenance: From a 3...
Category

Mid-20th Century Modern Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Charcoal

Geode, Modern Watercolor and Ink on Paper by G Sinclair
Located in Long Island City, NY
G Sinclair - Geode, Year: 1969, Medium: Watercolor and Ink on Paper, signed and dated in pencil, Size: 15.5 x 12 in. (39.37 x 30.48 cm)
Category

1960s Modern Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Ink, Watercolor

In the Countryside - Watercolor by Antonio Vangelli - 1944
Located in Roma, IT
In the Countryside is an original watercolor, realized by Antonio Vangelli in 1944. Fair conditions with repaired riping. The artwork is depicted skillfully through confident and s...
Category

1940s Modern Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Watercolor

Yellow, Red and Purple Square, Modern Gouache on Fabriano Cotton Paper
Located in Long Island City, NY
Peter Pinchbeck, English (1931 - 2000) - Yellow, Red and Purple Square, Year: 1981, Medium: Gouache on Fabriano Cotton Paper, signed, and dated in pencil, Image Size: 18 x 25.5 inc...
Category

1980s Modern Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Gouache

Leonard Baskin Watercolor Ink Illustration Painting Darkened Man, Nude with Bird
Located in Surfside, FL
Leonard Baskin (American, 1922-2000) ink and gouache drawing on paper titled "Darkened Man", signed lower right, circa 1957. Provenance: Grace Borgenicht gallery, Jeffrey M. Kaplan collection. bears label verso Art: 31" H x 22" W; Frame: 36" H x 27" W. Leonard Baskin was an American sculptor, illustrator, wood-engraver, printmaker, graphic artist, writer and teacher. Baskin was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey. While he was a student at Yale University, he founded Gehenna Press, a small private press specializing in fine book production. From 1953 until 1974, he taught printmaking and sculpture at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. Subsequently Baskin also taught at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. He lived most of his life in the U.S., but spent nine years in Devon at Lurley Manor, Lurley, near Tiverton, close to his friend Ted Hughes, for whom he illustrated Crow. Sylvia Plath dedicated Sculpto to Leonard Baskin in her famous work, The Colossus and Other Poems (1960). The Funeral Contege (1997) bronze, Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, Washington, D.C. His public commissions include a bas relief for the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial and a bronze statue of a seated figure, erected in 1994 for the Holocaust Memorial in Ann Arbor, Michigan. His works are owned by many major museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Boca Raton Museum of Art, the British Museum, the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Udinotti Museum of Figurative Art and the Vatican Museums. The archive of his work at the Gehenna Press was acquired by the Bodleian Library at Oxford, England, in 2009. The McMaster Museum of Art in Hamilton, Ontario owns over 200 of his works (some religious and biblical), most of which were donated by his brother Rabbi Bernard Baskin. He was included in the MoMA show, Summer Exhibition: New Acquisitions; Recent American Prints, 1947–1953; Katherine S. Dreier Bequest; Kuniyoshi and Spencer; Expressionism in Germany; Varieties of Realism along with Alexander Archipenko, Francis Bacon, Balthus, Will Barnet, Leonard Baskin, Eugene Berman, Reg Butler, Lovis Corinth, Andre Derain, Otto Dix, Raoul Dufy, Max Ernst, Lucian Freud, George Grosz, Alexei Jawlensky, Oskar Kokoschka, Roberto Matta, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp and more. In 1955, he was one of eleven New York artists featured in the opening exhibition at the Terrain Gallery, they showed many great artists, Chaim Koppelman, for many years, headed the gallery's Print Division; printmakers such as Will Barnet, Leonard Baskin, Robert Conover, Edmond Casarella, Vincent Longo, and Nicholas Krushenick were frequent exhibitors. the gallery has represented many well-known artists, including Richard Anuszkiewicz, Robert Blackburn, Lois Dodd, William King, Chaim and Dorothy Koppelman, Roy Lichtenstein, Harold Krisel...
Category

1950s Modern Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

India Ink, Watercolor

Modern Light Blue, Brown, and Black Geometric Abstract Circle Pattern Painting
Located in Houston, TX
Modern light blue, brown, and black geometric abstract circle pattern painting by textile designer John Little. The work was created as a proposed design for a wallpaper and features the original color codes in the front lower left corner. Currently hung in a solid black frame with a large white margin. Dimensions Without Frame: H 32.75 in. x W 35.63 in. Artist Biography: A painter and textile designer, John Little is best known for gestural works filled with boldly explosive color that reflect the influences of his teacher Hans Hofmann and for his involvement in the Abstract Expressionist movement in East Hampton, where he moved in the late 1940s. In East Hampton Little congregated with Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, and the other artists who were the leading innovators in the New York School. John Little was born in Sanford, Alabama. He left home at the age of fourteen to become an artist, and moved to Buffalo, New York, in 1923. After spending a year working as a stevedore on the docks to save money, he enrolled at the Buffalo Fine Arts Academy and developed an interest in singing. In 1927 he moved to New York City where he continued his vocal work and studied operatic literature. He also became involved in textile design, opening his own store in 1920, called John Little Studios: Fabric and Wallpaper Design. He ran the store until 1950. In 1933 John Little resumed his painting studies at the Art Students League in New York under the guidance of George Grosz (1893-1959). The following year he made his first visit to East Hampton, Long Island, which he would eventually call home. Later in the decade, he traveled to Paris where he became familiar with European modernism. On his return to America, he taught textile design at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. He hired Josephine Watkins to work for him; she later became his wife. Little's textile store and teaching job gave him a financial security that was rare during the Depression, and he never found it necessary to find employment with the Works Progress Administration. At the end of the decade, John Little studied with Hans Hofmann (1880-1966) in New York and Provincetown. Little was greatly influenced by Hofmann, particularly by his views on color theory. In 1942 John Little joined the Navy as an aerial photographer. In the late 1940s he purchased a rundown house on Three Mile Harbor...
Category

Early 20th Century Modern Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Gouache

Vue des Invalides
Located in PARIS, FR
Watercolor on charcoal lines Signed L.V lower right Provenance: - Belgium, Private collection.
Category

20th Century Modern Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Watercolor

Modernist Abstract Lithograph w/ Multicolor Looping Line Work signed Yaakov Agam
Located in New York, NY
This Lovely Modernist Lithograph Originates from the Israeli born artist Yaakov Agam (made in Paris, France Circa 1980). This Lithograph is an Artist's Proof and a member of Agam's "...
Category

1980s Modern Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Lithograph

Charles Ragland Bunnell “Quitting Time” 1941 Black and Blue Abstract Painting
Located in Denver, CO
This original vintage painting by Charles Ragland Bunnell (1897–1968), titled Quitting Time from his Black and Blue Series (1941), exemplifies the artist’s signature Abstract Structu...
Category

1940s Modern Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Ink, Watercolor, Charcoal

MODERNIST DRAWING New Hope Mid-Century WPA Abstract Non-Objective Jazz Modern
Located in New York, NY
MODERNIST DRAWING New Hope Mid-Century WPA Abstract Non-Objective Jazz Modern. Signed with a "Ramstonev" stamp lower right. RAMSTONEV Cooperative Art Project (1937-1939). In the late 1930s, Charles Ramsey became close friends with Charles Evans and Louis Stone. He persuaded them to join him teaching his New Hope summer classes in non-objective painting. Soon, a history-making collaboration began. In 1937, meeting in Evans' studio at the rear of Cryer's Hardware store on Main Street in New Hope, a decision was made to establish the Co-Operative Painting Project. They were intrigued by the cooperative ad-lib process by which jazz musicians created their music. Believing this to be the quintessential American contribution to music, they theorized that a similar result might be obtainable with art, a "visual jam session." This particlarly fascinated Ramsey, who was a jazz buff and had a large collection of jazz records. The objective was to jointly collaborate in the creation of a painting as well as applying collective criticism during its creation. By creating forward movement by general consent, they believed they could produce a higher level of beauty. By consensus it was decided that subject matter would be non-objective. Up to eight people would participate and stop when the painting "felt" finished by common agreement. These co-operative works were done in several different mediums- the majority in pastel, but some in watercolor, gouache, graphite or cut paper collage. On occasion, the group would create a series, as opposed to a single work, created in steps by three or four artists. One of the occasional participants was famed New Hope poet, Stanley Kunitz. These series could range in number from four to sixteen paintings in each. The first of a series would be very basic and the last a fully finished work. In the scope of importance among the New Hope Modernist...
Category

1930s Modern Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Watercolor, Gouache

Modern Orange, Brown, Yellow, and Black Geometric Abstract Pattern Painting
Located in Houston, TX
Modern orange, brown, yellow, and black geometric abstract composition by textile designer John Little. The work was created as a proposed design for a wallpaper and features the original color codes in the front lower left corner. Currently hung in a solid black frame with a large white margin. Dimensions Without Frame: H 35.5 in. x W 33.5 in. Artist Biography: A painter and textile designer, John Little is best known for gestural works filled with boldly explosive color that reflect the influences of his teacher Hans Hofmann and for his involvement in the Abstract Expressionist movement in East Hampton, where he moved in the late 1940s. In East Hampton Little congregated with Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, and the other artists who were the leading innovators in the New York School. John Little was born in Sanford, Alabama. He left home at the age of fourteen to become an artist, and moved to Buffalo, New York, in 1923. After spending a year working as a stevedore on the docks to save money, he enrolled at the Buffalo Fine Arts Academy and developed an interest in singing. In 1927 he moved to New York City where he continued his vocal work and studied operatic literature. He also became involved in textile design, opening his own store in 1920, called John Little Studios: Fabric and Wallpaper Design. He ran the store until 1950. In 1933 John Little resumed his painting studies at the Art Students League in New York under the guidance of George Grosz (1893-1959). The following year he made his first visit to East Hampton, Long Island, which he would eventually call home. Later in the decade, he traveled to Paris where he became familiar with European modernism. On his return to America, he taught textile design at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. He hired Josephine Watkins to work for him; she later became his wife. Little's textile store and teaching job gave him a financial security that was rare during the Depression, and he never found it necessary to find employment with the Works Progress Administration. At the end of the decade, John Little studied with Hans Hofmann (1880-1966) in New York and Provincetown. Little was greatly influenced by Hofmann, particularly by his views on color theory. In 1942 John Little joined the Navy as an aerial photographer. In the late 1940s he purchased a rundown house on Three Mile Harbor...
Category

Early 20th Century Modern Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Gouache

1930s American Modern Farm Landscape Watercolor with Barns, Windmill & Fields
By Samuel Bolton Colburn
Located in Denver, CO
This original watercolor painting by acclaimed American artist Samuel Bolton Colburn captures a quiet farmstead nestled in a mountain valley. Rendered with Colburn’s signature contro...
Category

1930s Modern Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Watercolor

Black and White Abstract Figurative Drawing of Nude Female
Located in Houston, TX
Black and white figurative drawing by Texas artist William Anzalone. The drawing depicts nude women dressing up. Signed by the artist at the bottom right. Framed in a beautiful black modern frame. Dimensions Without Frame: H 16.63 in. x W 21.5 in. Artist Biography: William Anzalone was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1935. He was educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology...
Category

Late 20th Century Modern Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Ink, Pen, Pencil

Abstraction
Located in Fairlawn, OH
Signed and dated in ink lower center Provenance: Charlotte Bergman, noted collector and patron of Walkowitz. See photo for additional information.
Category

1930s Modern Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Ink, Pen

Abstract Work on Paper Mid-Century Modernism Greek American Gouache Drawing
Located in New York, NY
Abstract Work on Paper Mid-Century Modernism Greek American Gouache Drawing. A modernist artist who emigrated to America from Greece in 1904, when he was fourteen years old, Jean Xceron is described as having a reputation as an artist that has mysteriously fallen into obscurity---especially since he was reportedly quite prominent during his lifetime. However, a partial explanation of that omission is the fact that many of his papers and early records have been lost. He was a painter of biomorphic abstractions and did collages, which were influenced by Dadaism. Xceron was active in New York City when modernism was gaining influence. Of him during this period, it was written that his artistic role was "a vital link between what is commonly termed as the first-generation (the Stieglitz group, the Synchromists, etc.) and second-generation, the American Abstract Artists, the Transcendental Painting...
Category

1940s Modern Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Gouache

Boogie Woogie II
Located in Missouri, MO
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...
Category

1990s Modern Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Charcoal

"Untitled I" Jane Freilicher, Hamptons Landscape Drawing, Mid-century Abstract
Located in New York, NY
Jane Freilicher Untitled I, 1958-59 Signed lower right Charcoal on paper 11 1/2 x 8 3/4 inches Provenance: Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York Private Collection, New York Jane Freilic...
Category

1950s Modern Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Charcoal

Abstract Landscape
Located in Buffalo, NY
An original watercolor painting by American artist Wes Olmsted depicting an abstract landscape view.
Category

1960s Modern Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Archival Paper, Watercolor

Beach Seascape
Located in Astoria, NY
Manfred Schwartz (American, b. Poland, 1909-1970), Beach Seascape, Charcoal on Paper, with the artist's signature stamped lower right, unframed. 19.75" H x 25.25" W. Provenance: From...
Category

Mid-20th Century Modern Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Charcoal

Sergey CHEKHONIN (1878 – 1936), theater poster project
Located in Paris, FR
Serge Tchekhonine was a Russian artist who studied applied drawing, ceramics, and pottery in St. Petersburg. He settled in France in 1928, gaining attention for his finely crafted ce...
Category

1930s Modern Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Ink, Watercolor, Gouache

Abstract Composition - Drawing By Reynold Arnould - 1970
Located in Roma, IT
Abstract Composition is a Black Marker Drawing realized by Reynold Arnould (Le Havre 1919 - Parigi 1980). Good condition on a sheet of a notebook. No signature. Reynold Arnould ...
Category

1970s Modern Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Permanent Marker

Composition - Drawing By Reynold Arnould - 1970
Located in Roma, IT
Composition is a China Ink Drawing realized by Reynold Arnould (Le Havre 1919 - Parigi 1980). Good condition on a white paper. No signature. Reynold Arnould was born in Le Havre...
Category

1970s Modern Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Ink

Study for Old Canal, Red and Blue (Rockaway, Morris Canal)
Located in New York, NY
Oscar Bluemner was a German and an American, a trained architect who read voraciously in art theory, color theory, and philosophy, a writer of art criticism both in German and English, and, above all, a practicing artist. Bluemner was an intense man, who sought to express and share, through drawing and painting, universal emotional experience. Undergirded by theory, Bluemner chose color and line for his vehicles; but color especially became the focus of his passion. He was neither abstract artist nor realist, but employed the “expressional use of real phenomena” to pursue his ends. (Oscar Bluemner, from unpublished typescript on “Modern Art” for Camera Work, in Bluemner papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, as cited and quoted in Jeffrey R. Hayes, Oscar Bluemner [1991], p. 60. The Bluemner papers in the Archives [hereafter abbreviated as AAA] are the primary source for Bluemner scholars. Jeffrey Hayes read them thoroughly and translated key passages for his doctoral dissertation, Oscar Bluemner: Life, Art, and Theory [University of Maryland, 1982; UMI reprint, 1982], which remains the most comprehensive source on Bluemner. In 1991, Hayes published a monographic study of Bluemner digested from his dissertation and, in 2005, contributed a brief essay to the gallery show at Barbara Mathes, op. cit.. The most recent, accessible, and comprehensive view of Bluemner is the richly illustrated, Barbara Haskell, Oscar Bluemner: A Passion for Color, exhib. cat. [New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2005.]) Bluemner was born in the industrial city of Prenzlau, Prussia, the son and grandson of builders and artisans. He followed the family predilection and studied architecture, receiving a traditional and thorough German training. He was a prize-winning student and appeared to be on his way to a successful career when he decided, in 1892, to emigrate to America, drawn perhaps by the prospect of immediate architectural opportunities at the Chicago World’s Fair, but, more importantly, seeking a freedom of expression and an expansiveness that he believed he would find in the New World. The course of Bluemner’s American career proved uneven. He did indeed work as an architect in Chicago, but left there distressed at the formulaic quality of what he was paid to do. Plagued by periods of unemployment, he lived variously in Chicago, New York, and Boston. At one especially low point, he pawned his coat and drafting tools and lived in a Bowery flophouse, selling calendars on the streets of New York and begging for stale bread. In Boston, he almost decided to return home to Germany, but was deterred partly because he could not afford the fare for passage. He changed plans and direction again, heading for Chicago, where he married Lina Schumm, a second-generation German-American from Wisconsin. Their first child, Paul Robert, was born in 1897. In 1899, Bluemner became an American citizen. They moved to New York City where, until 1912, Bluemner worked as an architect and draftsman to support his family, which also included a daughter, Ella Vera, born in 1903. All the while, Oscar Bluemner was attracted to the freer possibilities of art. He spent weekends roaming Manhattan’s rural margins, visiting the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, and New Jersey, sketching landscapes in hundreds of small conté crayon drawings. Unlike so many city-based artists, Bluemner did not venture out in search of pristine countryside or unspoiled nature. As he wrote in 1932, in an unsuccessful application for a Guggenheim Fellowship, “I prefer the intimate landscape of our common surroundings, where town and country mingle. For we are in the habit to carry into them our feelings of pain and pleasure, our moods” (as quoted by Joyce E. Brodsky in “Oscar Bluemner in Black and White,” p. 4, in Bulletin 1977, I, no. 5, The William Benton Museum of Art, Storrs, Connecticut). By 1911, Bluemner had found a powerful muse in a series of old industrial towns, mostly in New Jersey, strung along the route of the Morris Canal. While he educated himself at museums and art galleries, Bluemner entered numerous architectural competitions. In 1903, in partnership with Michael Garven, he designed a new courthouse for Bronx County. Garven, who had ties to Tammany Hall, attempted to exclude Bluemner from financial or artistic credit, but Bluemner promptly sued, and, finally, in 1911, after numerous appeals, won a $7,000 judgment. Barbara Haskell’s recent catalogue reveals more details of Bluemner’s architectural career than have previously been known. Bluemner the architect was also married with a wife and two children. He took what work he could get and had little pride in what he produced, a galling situation for a passionate idealist, and the undoubted explanation for why he later destroyed the bulk of his records for these years. Beginning in 1907, Bluemner maintained a diary, his “Own Principles of Painting,” where he refined his ideas and incorporated insights from his extensive reading in philosophy and criticism both in English and German to create a theoretical basis for his art. Sometime between 1908 and 1910, Bluemner’s life as an artist was transformed by his encounter with the German-educated Alfred Stieglitz, proprietor of the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession at 291 Fifth Avenue. The two men were kindred Teutonic souls. Bluemner met Stieglitz at about the time that Stieglitz was shifting his serious attention away from photography and toward contemporary art in a modernist idiom. Stieglitz encouraged and presided over Bluemner’s transition from architect to painter. During the same period elements of Bluemner’s study of art began to coalesce into a personal vision. A Van Gogh show in 1908 convinced Bluemner that color could be liberated from the constraints of naturalism. In 1911, Bluemner visited a Cézanne watercolor show at Stieglitz’s gallery and saw, in Cézanne’s formal experiments, a path for uniting Van Gogh’s expressionist use of color with a reality-based but non-objective language of form. A definitive change of course in Bluemner’s professional life came in 1912. Ironically, it was the proceeds from his successful suit to gain credit for his architectural work that enabled Bluemner to commit to painting as a profession. Dividing the judgment money to provide for the adequate support of his wife and two children, he took what remained and financed a trip to Europe. Bluemner traveled across the Continent and England, seeing as much art as possible along the way, and always working at a feverish pace. He took some of his already-completed work with him on his European trip, and arranged his first-ever solo exhibitions in Berlin, Leipzig, and Elberfeld, Germany. After Bluemner returned from his study trip, he was a painter, and would henceforth return to drafting only as a last-ditch expedient to support his family when his art failed to generate sufficient income. Bluemner became part of the circle of Stieglitz artists at “291,” a group which included Marsden Hartley, John Marin, and Arthur Dove. He returned to New York in time to show five paintings at the 1913 Armory Show and began, as well, to publish critical and theoretical essays in Stieglitz’s journal, Camera Work. In its pages he cogently defended the Armory Show against the onslaught of conservative attacks. In 1915, under Stieglitz’s auspices, Bluemner had his first American one-man show at “291.” Bluemner’s work offers an interesting contrast with that of another Stieglitz architect-turned-artist, John Marin, who also had New Jersey connections. The years after 1914 were increasingly uncomfortable. Bluemner remained, all of his life, proud of his German cultural legacy, contributing regularly to German language journals and newspapers in this country. The anti-German sentiment, indeed mania, before and during World War I, made life difficult for the artist and his family. It is impossible to escape the political agenda in Charles Caffin’s critique of Bluemner’s 1915 show. Caffin found in Bluemner’s precise and earnest explorations of form, “drilled, regimented, coerced . . . formations . . . utterly alien to the American idea of democracy” (New York American, reprinted in Camera Work, no. 48 [Oct. 1916], as quoted in Hayes, 1991, p. 71). In 1916, seeking a change of scene, more freedom to paint, and lower expenses, Bluemner moved his family to New Jersey, familiar terrain from his earlier sketching and painting. During the ten years they lived in New Jersey, the Bluemner family moved around the state, usually, but not always, one step ahead of the rent collector. In 1917, Stieglitz closed “291” and did not reestablish a Manhattan gallery until 1925. In the interim, Bluemner developed relationships with other dealers and with patrons. Throughout his career he drew support and encouragement from art cognoscenti who recognized his talent and the high quality of his work. Unfortunately, that did not pay the bills. Chronic shortfalls were aggravated by Bluemner’s inability to sustain supportive relationships. He was a difficult man, eternally bitter at the gap between the ideal and the real. Hard on himself and hard on those around him, he ultimately always found a reason to bite the hand that fed him. Bluemner never achieved financial stability. He left New Jersey in 1926, after the death of his beloved wife, and settled in South Braintree, Massachusetts, outside of Boston, where he continued to paint until his own death in 1938. As late as 1934 and again in 1936, he worked for New Deal art programs designed to support struggling artists. Bluemner held popular taste and mass culture in contempt, and there was certainly no room in his quasi-religious approach to art for accommodation to any perceived commercial advantage. His German background was also problematic, not only for its political disadvantages, but because, in a world where art is understood in terms of national styles, Bluemner was sui generis, and, to this day, lacks a comfortable context. In 1933, Bluemner adopted Florianus (definitively revising his birth names, Friedrich Julius Oskar) as his middle name and incorporated it into his signature, to present “a Latin version of his own surname that he believed reinforced his career-long effort to translate ordinary perceptions into the more timeless and universal languages of art” (Hayes 1982, p. 189 n. 1). In 1939, critic Paul Rosenfeld, a friend and member of the Stieglitz circle, responding to the difficulty in categorizing Bluemner, perceptively located him among “the ranks of the pre-Nazi German moderns” (Hayes 1991, p. 41). Bluemner was powerfully influenced in his career by the intellectual heritage of two towering figures of nineteenth-century German culture, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. A keen student of color theory, Bluemner gave pride of place to the formulations of Goethe, who equated specific colors with emotional properties. In a November 19, 1915, interview in the German-language newspaper, New Yorker Staats-Zeitung (Abendblatt), he stated: I comprehend the visible world . . . abstract the primary-artistic . . . and after these elements of realty are extracted and analyzed, I reconstruct a new free creation that still resembles the original, but also . . . becomes an objectification of the abstract idea of beauty. The first—and most conspicuous mark of this creation is . . . colors which accord with the character of things, the locality . . . [and which] like the colors of Cranach, van der Weyden, or Durer, are of absolute purity, breadth, and luminosity. . . . I proceed from the psychological use of color by the Old Masters . . . [in which] we immediately recognize colors as carriers of “sorrow and joy” in Goethe’s sense, or as signs of human relationship. . . . Upon this color symbolism rests the beauty as well as the expressiveness, of earlier sacred paintings. Above all, I recognize myself as a contributor to the new German theory of light and color, which expands Goethe’s law of color through modern scientific means (as quoted in Hayes 1991, p. 71). Hayes has traced the global extent of Bluemner’s intellectual indebtedness to Hegel (1991, pp. 36–37). More specifically, Bluemner made visual, in his art, the Hegelian world view, in the thesis and antithesis of the straight line and the curve, the red and the green, the vertical and the horizontal, the agitation and the calm. Bluemner respected all of these elements equally, painting and drawing the tension and dynamic of the dialectic and seeking ultimate reconciliation in a final visual synthesis. Bluemner was a keen student of art, past and present, looking, dissecting, and digesting all that he saw. He found precedents for his non-naturalist use of brilliant-hued color not only in the work Van Gogh and Cezanne, but also in Gauguin, the Nabis, and the Symbolists, as well as among his contemporaries, the young Germans of Der Blaue Reiter. Bluemner was accustomed to working to the absolute standard of precision required of the architectural draftsman, who adjusts a design many times until its reality incorporates both practical imperatives and aesthetic intentions. Hayes describes Bluemner’s working method, explaining how the artist produced multiple images playing on the same theme—in sketch form, in charcoal, and in watercolor, leading to the oil works that express the ultimate completion of his process (Hayes, 1982, pp. 156–61, including relevant footnotes). Because of Bluemner’s working method, driven not only by visual considerations but also by theoretical constructs, his watercolor and charcoal studies have a unique integrity. They are not, as is sometimes the case with other artists, rough preparatory sketches. They stand on their own, unfinished only in the sense of not finally achieving Bluemner’s carefully considered purpose. The present charcoal drawing is one of a series of images that take as their starting point the Morris Canal as it passed through Rockaway, New Jersey. The Morris Canal industrial towns that Bluemner chose as the points of departure for his early artistic explorations in oil included Paterson with its silk mills (which recalled the mills in the artist’s childhood home in Elberfeld), the port city of Hoboken, Newark, and, more curiously, a series of iron ore mining and refining towns, in the north central part of the state that pre-dated the Canal, harkening back to the era of the Revolutionary War. The Rockaway theme was among the original group of oil paintings that Bluemner painted in six productive months from July through December 1911 and took with him to Europe in 1912. In his painting journal, Bluemner called this work Morris Canal at Rockaway N.J. (AAA, reel 339, frames 150 and 667, Hayes, 1982, pp. 116–17), and exhibited it at the Galerie Fritz Gurlitt in Berlin in 1912 as Rockaway N. J. Alter Kanal. After his return, Bluemner scraped down and reworked these canvases. The Rockaway picture survives today, revised between 1914 and 1922, as Old Canal, Red and Blue (Rockaway River) in the collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D. C. (color illus. in Haskell, fig. 48, p. 65). For Bluemner, the charcoal expression of his artistic vision was a critical step in composition. It represented his own adaptation of Arthur Wesley’s Dow’s (1857–1922) description of a Japanese...
Category

20th Century Modern Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Charcoal

Landscape Abstraction
Located in Bryn Mawr, PA
Initialed lower left Framed dimensions: 16 x 18 7/8 inches Provenance The artist; Collection of Henry Dubin, Philadelphia until 2018 Exhibitions Avery Galleries, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, Living Color Modern Life: Hugh Henry Breckenridge and Arthur B. Carles, October 5-November 2, 2018. The Philadelphia modernist Arthur B. Carles was a brilliant colorist and an extraordinarily innovative painter. Though Carles trained initially at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, soaking up the more conservative teaching of William Merritt Chase and Thomas Anshutz, he was deeply influenced by the avant-garde art scene in Paris during his first trip there in 1905. In 1907, Carles won the prestigious Cresson Traveling Scholarship, which enabled him to return to Paris for several more years. This experience had a profound impact on Carles as an artist; he was extremely affected by modern French painting, especially the work of Cezanne and Matisse, and by the time Carles returned home to Philadelphia in 1912, he was a confirmed modernist. This small landscape sketch was probably painted early during Carles's career, and yet, it already reveals his strong interest in abstraction. Indeed, Landscape Abstraction demonstrates both his daring exploration of lyrical color harmonies as well as his interest in two-dimensional surface design. Painted loosely in the spontaneous medium of watercolor, Carles used thin washes and delicate pools of paint to suggest the foreground area and surrounding trees. His color palette is rich and expressive, ranging from pale greens and blues to deep red, yellow, and even purple. In addition to his remarkable career as an artist, Carles was also an incredibly gifted teacher. He taught at PAFA from 1917 to 1925 and had a very deep impact on a number of his students such as Morris Blackburn, Quita Brodhead, and Jane Piper...
Category

20th Century Modern Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Watercolor

UNTITLED
Located in New York, NY
felt tip pen on paper.
Category

Mid-20th Century Modern Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Crayon

Rivulet Pointillist Composition
Located in Astoria, NY
Manfred Schwartz (American, b. Poland, 1909-1970), Rivulet Pointillist Composition, Gouache on Paper, 1962, signed and dated lower left, wood frame. Image: 10.25" H x 8.5" W; frame: ...
Category

1960s Modern Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Gouache

Harbor Party, Modern Gouache by John von Wicht
Located in Long Island City, NY
Harbor Party by John von Wicht, German (1888–1970) Date: circa 1965 Gouache and Pastel on Japon, signed in pencil lower right Size: 15.5 x 23 in. (39.37 x 58.42 cm) Frame Size: 22 x ...
Category

1960s Modern Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Gouache, Oil Pastel

The Church - Drawing By Reynold Arnould - 1970
Located in Roma, IT
The Church is a Pencil Drawing realized by Reynold Arnould (Le Havre 1919 - Parigi 1980). Good condition on a white paper. No signature. Reynold Arnould was born in Le Havre, Fr...
Category

1970s Modern Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Pencil

"Ruffled Waters" Harmony Hammond, Striped, Black and White, Abstract, Feminist
Located in New York, NY
Harmony Hammond Ruffled Waters, 1980 Signed lower right Mixed media on paper 18 1/8 x 24 inches Provenance Private Collection, New York Heritage Auctions, Dallas, Contemporary Art W...
Category

1980s Modern Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Mixed Media

Untitled (Figurative Abstraction of Isadora Duncan #7)
Located in Myrtle Beach, SC
Abraham Walkowitz, Untitled (Figurative Abstraction of Isadora Duncan #7), pencil, 1918. Signed and dated in pencil, bottom center. A fine, spon...
Category

1910s Modern Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Pencil

Cityscape Reflections - Study No. 1
Located in Storrs, CT
Cityscape Reflections - Misty Morning. 1980. Lithograph with pastel coloring. Czestochowski 42. Edition 40. 14 x 10 3/16 (sheet 18 x 14). Tape stains in the margins, not affecting th...
Category

Late 20th Century Modern Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Pastel

Two Wood Ducks on a Flowering Branch
Located in New York, NY
Joseph Stella was a visionary artist who painted what he saw, an idiosyncratic and individual experience of his time and place. Stella arrived in New York in 1896, part of a wave of Italian immigrants from poverty-stricken Southern Italy. But Stella was not a child of poverty. His father was a notary and respected citizen in Muro Locano, a small town in the southern Appenines. The five Stella brothers were all properly educated in Naples. Stella’s older brother, Antonio, was the first of the family to come to America. Antonio Stella trained as a physician in Italy, and was a successful and respected doctor in the Italian community centered in Greenwich Village. He sponsored and supported his younger brother, Joseph, first sending him to medical school in New York, then to study pharmacology, and then sustaining him through the early days of his artistic career. Antonio Stella specialized in the treatment of tuberculosis and was active in social reform circles. His connections were instrumental in Joseph Stella’s early commissions for illustrations in reform journals. Joseph Stella, from the beginning, was an outsider. He was of the Italian-American community, but did not share its overwhelming poverty and general lack of education. He went back to Italy on several occasions, but was no longer an Italian. His art incorporated many influences. At various times his work echoed the concerns and techniques of the so-called Ashcan School, of New York Dada, of Futurism and, of Cubism, among others. These are all legitimate influences, but Stella never totally committed himself to any group. He was a convivial, but ultimately solitary figure, with a lifelong mistrust of any authority external to his own personal mandate. He was in Europe during the time that Alfred Stieglitz established his 291 Gallery. When Stella returned he joined the international coterie of artists who gathered at the West Side apartment of the art patron Conrad Arensberg. It was here that Stella became close friends with Marcel Duchamp. Stella was nineteen when he arrived in America and studied in the early years of the century at the Art Students League, and with William Merritt Chase, under whose tutelage he received rigorous training as a draftsman. His love of line, and his mastery of its techniques, is apparent early in his career in the illustrations he made for various social reform journals. Stella, whose later work as a colorist is breathtakingly lush, never felt obliged to choose between line and color. He drew throughout his career, and unlike other modernists, whose work evolved inexorably to more and more abstract form, Stella freely reverted to earlier realist modes of representation whenever it suited him. This was because, in fact, his “realist” work was not “true to nature,” but true to Stella’s own unique interpretation. Stella began to draw flowers, vegetables, butterflies, and birds in 1919, after he had finished the Brooklyn Bridge series of paintings, which are probably his best-known works. These drawings of flora and fauna were initially coincidental with his fantastical, nostalgic and spiritual vision of his native Italy which he called Tree of My Life (Mr. and Mrs. Barney A. Ebsworth Foundation and Windsor, Inc., St. Louis, illus. in Barbara Haskell, Joseph Stella, exh. cat. [New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994], p. 111 no. 133). Two Wood Ducks...
Category

20th Century Modern Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Color Pencil

Modernist Abstract Expressionist Watercolor Painting Bauhaus Weimar Pawel Kontny
Located in Surfside, FL
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 bears the influence of 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...
Category

20th Century Modern Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Watercolor, Archival Paper

Post Soviet Nonconformist Avant Garde Russian Israeli Gouache Painting Grobman
Located in Surfside, FL
MIchail Grobman Gouache and watercolor on paper Hand signed Lower Left and Dated 1964. Described inn Cyrillic Russian verso. Dimensions: L:13.25" W: 11.75". Michail Grobman (Russ...
Category

1960s Modern Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Watercolor, Gouache

Abstract Composition - Pastel by Giorgio Zennaro - 1969
Located in Roma, IT
Oil Pastel on paper realized in 1969. Hand signed and dated in pencil lower right. Hand dedicated, signed and dated (1971) on rear. Includes a wooden frame cm. 43.5x52.  Very goo...
Category

1960s Modern Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Pastel

Synchromist Abstraction watercolor by Jay Van Everen
Located in Hudson, NY
Jay Van Everen was a pioneering early American abstractionist known for his affiliation with the Synchromists. His abstract color studies would take him to the forefront of the Ameri...
Category

1920s Modern Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Ink, Watercolor

Surrealistic flower - Original Colour Pencil Drawing
Located in Paris, IDF
André Masson (1896-1987) Surrealistic flower Original colour pencil drawing Signed with the artist's stamp on the back (see photo) On 30.5 x 29 cm tracing paper (11.8 x 11.4 inche...
Category

Mid-20th Century Modern Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Pencil, Carbon Pencil

Modernist Abstract Expressionist Watercolor Painting Bauhaus Weimar Artist
Located in Surfside, FL
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. 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...
Category

Mid-20th Century Modern Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Watercolor, Archival Paper

"Ebb and Flow" original pastel drawing by Sylvia Spicuzza
Located in Milwaukee, WI
In this pastel drawing, Sylvia Spicuzza presents the viewer with a rhythmic view resembling waves and rolling hills. The colors of the repeating patterns and softness of the undulati...
Category

Mid-20th Century Modern Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Pastel

Sketch for 'The X & Its Tails'. 1967
Located in Palo Alto, CA
This work is registered as an authentic work by Alexander Calder (1898 – 1976) in the archives of the Calder Foundation (NY), under application number A.24492.  Created in 1967, this original pen and red ink drawing on paper is initialed ‘CA’ in blue ink in the lower right by Alexander Calder (1898 – 1976) with a handwritten dedication, also in blue ink, ‘To Alvin Lane’ along the lower center. The Sketch for ‘The X & Its Tails’ is an original study and preliminary drawing made by Calder preceding his large-scale sculpture for the Detroit Institute of Arts.  Sketches for models and sculptures are rare and this is no exception; according to Alvin S. Lane, collector and friend to Calder, “To the best of my knowledge there were very few, if any, preliminary drawings done by Calder that were on the market, but he was good enough when he did two for commissions to send the drawings to me as a present [including this Sketch for ‘The X & Its Tails’].  I included one of them here to show that although his drawings usually have a flowing steady line, his preliminary drawings are sloppy scribbles” (23). Provenance: ~       Gift of artist ~       Private Collection (Riverdale, NJ) Catalogue Raisonné and COA: Sketch for 'The X & Its Tails,' 1967 is fully documented and referenced in the below catalogue raisonnés and texts (copies will be enclosed as added documentation with the invoices that will accompany the final sale of the work). 1. Registered with the Calder Foundation, NY under application number A.24492. 2. Elvehjem Museum of Art. The Terese and Alvin S. Lane Collection...
Category

1960s Modern Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Ink, Pen

Untitled
Located in New York, NY
Charles Houghton Howard was born in Montclair, New Jersey, the third of five children in a cultured and educated family with roots going back to the Massachusetts Bay colony. His father, John Galen Howard, was an architect who had trained at M.I.T. and the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and apprenticed in Boston with Henry Hobson Richardson. In New York, the elder Howard worked for McKim, Mead and White before establishing a successful private practice. Mary Robertson Bradbury Howard, Charles’s mother, had studied art before her marriage. John Galen Howard moved his household to California in 1902 to assume the position of supervising architect of the new University of California campus at Berkeley and to serve as Professor of Architecture and the first Dean of the School of Architecture (established in 1903). The four Howard boys grew up to be artists and all married artists, leaving a combined family legacy of art making in the San Francisco Bay area that endures to this day, most notably in design, murals, and reliefs at the Coit Tower and in buildings on the Berkeley campus. Charles Howard graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1921 as a journalism major and pursued graduate studies in English at Harvard and Columbia Universities before embarking on a two-year trip to Europe. Howard went to Europe as a would-be writer. But a near-religious experience, seeing a picture by Giorgione in a remote town outside of Venice, proved a life-altering epiphany. In his own words, “I cut the tour at once and hurried immediately back to Paris, to begin painting. I have been painting whenever I could ever since” (Charles Howard, “What Concerns Me,” Magazine of Art 39 [February 1946], p. 63). Giorgione’s achievement, in utilizing a structured and rational visual language of art to convey high emotion on canvas, instantly convinced Howard that painting, and not literature, offered the best vehicle to express what he wanted to say. Howard returned to the United States in 1925, confirmed in his intent to become an artist. Howard settled in New York and supported himself as a painter in the decorating workshop of Louis Bouché and Rudolph Guertler, where he specialized in mural painting. Devoting spare time to his own work, he lived in Greenwich Village and immersed himself in the downtown avant-garde cultural milieu. The late 1920s and early 1930s were the years of Howard’s art apprenticeship. He never pursued formal art instruction, but his keen eye, depth of feeling, and intense commitment to the process of art making, allowed him to assimilate elements of painting intuitively from the wide variety of art that interested him. He found inspiration in the modernist movements of the day, both for their adherence to abstract formal qualities and for the cosmopolitan, international nature of the movements themselves. Influenced deeply by Surrealism, Howard was part of a group of American and European Surrealists clustered around Julien Levy. Levy opened his eponymously-named gallery in 1931, and rose to fame in January 1932, when he organized and hosted Surrealisme, the first ever exhibition of Surrealism in America, which included one work by Howard. Levy remained the preeminent force in advocating for Surrealism in America until he closed his gallery in 1949. Howard’s association with Levy in the early 1930s confirms the artist’s place among the avant-garde community in New York at that time. In 1933, Howard left New York for London. It is likely that among the factors that led to the move were Howard’s desire to be a part of an international art community, as well as his marriage to English artist, Madge Knight...
Category

20th Century Modern Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Gouache, Graphite

An Avant-Garde, Mid-Century Modern Abstract Female Figure Study by Harold Haydon
Located in Chicago, IL
A Dynamic, Avant-Garde, Mid-Century Modern Abstract Female Figure Study by Harold Haydon (Am. 1909-1994). A striking, black & white figural studio ink drawing on paper depicting an...
Category

Mid-20th Century Modern Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Ink

Modernist Abstract Expressionist Watercolor Painting Bauhaus Weimar Pawel Kontny
Located in Surfside, FL
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 bears the influence of 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...
Category

20th Century Modern Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Watercolor, Archival Paper

"Transition, Series 1, No. 4" - Watercolor Figurative Illustration
Located in Soquel, CA
Subtly shaded abstract figurative illustration by Elsa Warnick (American, 1942-2013). Two adult and three baby figures are rendered with subtle tan shading, against an abstract background with geometric shapes and swirling ribbons. One of the two adult figures is laying down, while the other appears to be jumping or dancing. Notable is the skillful use of negative space to balance the composition. Signed and dated "Warnick 1982" in the lower right corner. Signed, titled, and dated with materials information on verso. Presented in a silver aluminum frame. Frame size: 23.5"H x 31.25"W Paper size: 23.25"H x 31"W Elsa Warnick (American, 1942-2013) was born and raised in Tacoma, Washington. She moved to Portland to attend the Reed College/Museum Art School joint five year program. Warnick went on to create many works of art as well as teach art and illustration. She is mostly known for her watercolor paintings, including the illustration of several children's books. Some of her pieces are held in the Portland Art Museum’s collection. Selected Exhibitions: 1974: University Center Gallery, Willamette University - Salem, OR 1978: Mayer Gallery...
Category

1980s Modern Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Watercolor, Pencil

Rainstorm Sunset
Located in Buffalo, NY
You are viewing a modernist American watercolor painting by Robert Noel Blair. Robert Noel Blair (American, 1912-2003) was an American artist, painter, sculptor, printmaker and te...
Category

Modern Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Watercolor

Composition - Drawing By Reynold Arnould - 1970
Located in Roma, IT
Composition is a Black Marker Drawing realized by Reynold Arnould (Le Havre 1919 - Parigi 1980). Good condition on a sheet of a notebook. No signatur...
Category

1970s Modern Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Permanent Marker

1950s Geometric Pink and Yellow Textile Design by Artist Andre Delfau
Located in Chicago, IL
A 1950s geometric textile design in brown, yellow and pink tones by notable stage and set designer Andre Delfau. Born in Paris, France in 1914, Andre Delfau became an internationally acclaimed stage, set and costume designer who worked world-wide from the 1930s to the 1980s. Delfau was a life long artist and painted independently of his noted design career. His artwork is recognized for it’s vibrant color and form, and a particularly keen use of line. He was highly influenced by the French Modern trends of Cubism and Surrealism, and his artwork is often infused with a dramatic sense of architecture and perspective. Delfau created fashion designs for such major Paris couture houses as Balmain, Jean Patou and Balenciaga. He completed noteworthy set designs and costumes for numerous international operatic and ballet productions, including those at the Royal Danish Ballet, the Royal Ballet of Great Britain, the Paris Opera, the Dance Theater of Harlem, the Ruth Page International Ballet, the Civic Ballet of Chicago, the Chicago Opera Ballet and the Lyric Opera of Chicago, among others. Most notably, Delfau designed the elaborate stage sets and costumes for the 1986 PBS television production of the Viennese operetta, "Die Fledermaus...
Category

1950s Modern Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Gouache, Graphite, Paper

Abstract Composition in Red - Watercolor - 1970
Located in Roma, IT
Abstract Composition in Red is an drawing on paper realized by an Anonymous artist in the 1970s. Watercolor on paper. Good conditions. The artwork is represented through organic a...
Category

1970s Modern Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Watercolor

1950's Modernist Watercolor Painting Israeli Bezalel School Bauhaus Style
Located in Surfside, FL
Louise (McClure) Schatz (1916 – 1997) Born in Vancouver, Canada, Louise Schatz moved with her family at age three to Minnesota. Her father, a stage director, was part of the local Bohemian culture and traveled the theater circuit around the U.S. She earned a Master’s Degree in Fine Arts at the University of California, where she became a skilled water colorist. “My Japanese instructor showed me how to preserve several colors together on paper,” she noted. “Water colors can bleed into the paper, and the paper plays with the colors – some of which can even disappear. I have a great love of texture and what materials do to color. I was very excited to discover what happens to colors and how to achieve what I wanted.” Her interest in astronomy also led Louise to study science at the university. Louise joined the “California Seven” artists in 1945 and for the next three years created prints and textile patterns. During WWII, she earned her living as a sketch artist for ship builders in San Francisco Bay, and it was there she met her future husband, Bezalel. “Then, it was very avant-garde to hire women in ship-building,” she once recounted. “We used to take dimensions from engineers and make sketches. It was very trailblazing and exciting, and the ships were constructed very quickly and launched very quickly. Besides the fact that we contributed to the war effort, it was really beautiful art.” The Bohemian society developing in San Francisco at the time included the novelist Henry Miller, who was then married to Louise’s sister, Eve. “There was a group of artists in Big Sur, all of them poor,” according to Bezalel Schatz’s sister, Zohara. “They were a group of Beatniks before the hippy era of the 1960s. There were novelists, poets, and painters there who lived communally under primitive conditions and were close to nature.” Bezalel and Louise were married in 1948 and moved to Israel. There, together with Zohara, they founded the arts and crafts workshop, “Yad,” with the goal of creating and selling alternative art objects that differed in style from those of the Bezalel School of Art. The couple divided its time between the family home in Jerusalem and a residence in Ein Hod designed for them by the architect David Resnik. Despite her connection to the Schatz family and her active involvement in the Israeli art world at the time, Louise guarded her privacy and rarely granted interviews. As Henry Miller wrote, “Her paintings reflect and reveal the extent of her sensitivity, shyness, and gentleness…” Scenes of Israel were a source of inspiration for Louise, and, in addition to her abstract Bauhaus geometric works, she also painted landscapes, flowers, and other elements of the environment in which she worked. Louise worked mainly in water colors but also created collages, book illustrations, and applied art. Among her outstanding works are murals for Zim’s “Shalom” and “Theodore Herzl” ships (together with Bezalel), El Al’s London office, and Jerusalem’s tenth anniversary exhibition, as well as ceramic walls for Jerusalem’s Midreshet Amalia and Beit Ha’am Library. She was awarded the Silver Medal in 1954 at the tenth Triennale in Milan for her copper designs, and in 1952 she received the “Above Competition” prize for her textile designs at the Bezalel National Museum. She was also awarded the Shen Beit Haomanim Prize in 1970 and the Jerusalem Prize for painting in 1973. Louise took part in many art exhibitions in Israel and abroad. Her works are held by the Israel, Tel Aviv, and Haifa Museums, and in private collections in Israel, the U.S., England, Switzerland, France, and Italy. Following her husband’s death in 1978, Louise continued to live with her sister-in-law, Zohara, at the family home in Jerusalem on Schatz Street. Louise died in Jerusalem in 1997. She has been called in the pages of the Jerusalem Post " the greatest Schatz of all" and "Israel's finest watercolorist" Parts of her work summon up affinities with Paul Klee and Julius Bissier and occasionally even Joan Miro. But she never copied any of them. Her work also bears affinities for Lyonel Feininger and Wassily Kandinsky Between 1937 and 1951, Bezalel resided in the U.S. Near the end of WWII, he worked in a California shipyard, and it was there he met his future wife, Louise. He was also introduced to the novelist Henry Miller in California, and their friendship blossomed into a creative collaboration. The artist May Ray recorded his observations about the two, noting that “I have never encountered such smooth cooperation…” Bezalel produced silkscreen prints for Miller’s novel, Into the Night Life, an innovation for both the art and publishing worlds. In Florence, New Mexico, New York, San Francisco, and other locations, Bezalel exhibited his own work and participated in group shows with some of the greatest artists of his era – Picasso...
Category

1950s Modern Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Watercolor

Canadian Art Mixed Media Collage Assemblage Painting Hebrew Canada Stamp
Located in Surfside, FL
Canadian artist, designer, teacher and writer Stephen James Andrews was born in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan in 1922. Studied art at Winnipeg School of Art, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Camberwell...
Category

20th Century Modern Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paint, Paper, Ink, Mixed Media

Autograph Portraiir of Gérard Philipe und Lilli Palmer - b/w Postcard - 1960s
Located in Roma, IT
Autograph Portrait of Gérard Philipe und Lilli Palmer is a b/w postcard reproducing the photographic portrait of the above-mentioned actors, during the fi...
Category

1960s Modern Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Photographic Paper

Untitled Sheep Drawing
Located in New York, NY
Menashe Kadishman Untitled Sheep Drawing, ca. 1985 Unique Graphite Drawing Hand signed and inscribed on the front Frame Included Unique whimsical drawing...
Category

1980s Modern Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Pencil

Modern abstract drawings and watercolors for sale on 1stDibs.

Find a wide variety of authentic Modern abstract drawings and watercolors available for sale on 1stDibs. Works in this style were very popular during the 21st Century and Contemporary, but contemporary artists have continued to produce works inspired by this movement. If you’re looking to add abstract drawings and watercolors created in this style to introduce contrast in an otherwise neutral space in your home, the works available on 1stDibs include elements of orange, blue, purple, green and other colors. Many Pop art paintings were created by popular artists on 1stDibs, including Sylvia Spicuzza, Moses Bagel Bahelfer, Abraham Walkowitz, and Benoît Gilsoul. Frequently made by artists working with Paint, and Watercolor and other materials, all of these pieces for sale are unique and have attracted attention over the years. Not every interior allows for large Modern abstract drawings and watercolors, so small editions measuring 3.55 inches across are also available. Prices for abstract drawings and watercolors made by famous or emerging artists can differ depending on medium, time period and other attributes. On 1stDibs, the price for these items starts at $1 and tops out at $260,743, while the average work sells for $950.

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