Clyde I. Seavey Jr.

"Inferno Figures" Expressionist Abstract in Red Ink, 1960s

1960s

Miniature Abstract Totem. Signed with initials. Provenance: Virginia Field, Arts administrator; New York, N.Y. Assistant director for Asia House gallery. (she was friends with John v...

This Harry Beckhoff illustration is masterfully rendered and intricately designed in line and wash. It's as abstract as it's representational with its graphic style, clean lines, and flat patterning. Every element in the composition works in harmony without a line out of place. The flat and abstract nature of the work rivals that of the great modernist painters of the 1930s. Perhaps this was done for a major newsstand magazine like Collier's. Although he studied with Dean Cornwell and Harvey Dunn, he didn't pursue the style of painterly brushstrokes and impastos. Instead, he defined his forms with flat shapes, whose internal forms are defined by thin lines. The emphasis is more on silhouette and line than it is on texture and lighting. Beckhoff also described his work as having been influenced by illustrators like Pierre Brissaud...

Mid-century lyrical surrealist abstract watercolour on paper by French artist Jean Clerté, signed and dated bottom right. Presented in mid-century frame. Jean Clerté , born in 1930 in Saint-Savin-sur-Gartempe in Vienne, is a French painter, engraver, draftsman, watercolourist and sculptor . This work is a great example of his more humorous and expressive work influenced by Alechinsky from the late 1960s onwards. There is a light playfulness and yet the watercolours are more vivid than his previous palette. Jean Clerté works in series. His sequential narrations testify both to a youthful spontaneity and to a perfect mastery in the distribution of forms and images on the painted surface. The narration is not only an accumulation of juxtaposed fragments and symbols, it forms a whole, it takes on and gives meaning. In general, we can say of Clerté that he practices an “eco-art” that feeds on primary hungers: the feeling of being united with nature, the vegetable, the mineral, the aquatic. In his colourful canvases, his inks, his boxes, his objects, like a shaman on the path of his dreams, the painter Clerté mounts an assault on beasts and demons, elves and gnomes. From the Poitevin marshes to the tropical forests emerges a fauna caught in the meanders of a design that marvels at the appearance of these grotesque idols. Jean Clerté began to draw and paint at a very young age, and at the age of 15 he enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts in Poitiers. Then in 1949, curious about the capital, he moved to Paris. Having very few financial resources, he could not continue his studies at first, worked as a model to survive, and met other artists; he was then admitted to the studio of Ossip Zadkine and, from 1952, he was also able to study engraving at Atelier 17 of Stanley William Hayter, an English engraver and printer living in Paris associated in the 1930s with surrealism. At the end of the 1960s, he worked alongside Pierre Alechinsky, founding member of the Cobra movement, engraving Alechinsky's originals, benefiting from his advice, and discovering acrylic as a medium. From 1976, Jean Clerté became associate professor at Hayter. Clerté had taught previously, in 1971 at the Salzburg Summer University and in 1972 he gave courses at the Paris-Sorbonne University . In 1981, he was appointed professor at the School of Decorative Arts , where he had Maïlys Seydoux-Dumas as a student and, from 1983 to 1988, he was Alechinsky's assistant professor at the Paris School of Fine Arts. His first works are part of the current of lyrical abstraction, and are nourished by impressions of nature (landscape motifs, e.g. forest fires, waterscapes), then around 1968, encouraged by Alechinsky, he rejects abstraction, and his work becomes more figurative with expressive and humorous elements. From this period his colours are more subdued, often with pastel tones, he works on series. Jean Clerté has created a world in a space where drawing, painting, objects participate in a playful figuration. From his drawings were born sculptures and sometimes mobiles (Le Moulin à dessin). If it is the artist who makes astonishing, polychrome, whimsical “toys”, it is the painter who appeals to adults through his caustic and satirical humour. His first exhibitions in France took place at the Galerie Massol , then at the Galerie Pascal...

Frame measures 13.5 X 11.5 Paper measures 6.5 X 4 inches Hand signed lower right Watercolor painting of prophet or Rabbi, Judaica artwork Born in 1897, Ben-Zion Weinman celebrated h...