Ronald Shap

Original Ronald Shap figure drawing

circa 1980

Original oil pastel and gouache figure drawing by celebrated, twentieth-century California landscape painter, Ronald Shap. Sketch of a shirtless man in sun...

Original oil pastel and gouache figure drawing by celebrated, twentieth-century California landscape painter, Ronald Shap. Sketch of a nude male torso with washes of light aqua/sage green and accents of neon pink oil pastel. This is a part of Shap's '80s Interiors...

Ronald Brooks Kitaj RA 1932 – 2007 was an American artist with Jewish roots who spent much of his life in England. He became a merchant seaman with a Norwegian freighter when he was 17. He studied at the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Vienna and the Cooper Union in New York City. After serving in the United States Army for two years, in France and Germany, he moved to England to study at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford (1958–59) under the G.I. Bill, where he developed a love of Cézanne, and then at the Royal College of Art in London (1959–61), alongside David Hockney, Derek Boshier, Peter Phillips, Allen Jones and Patrick Caulfield. Richard Wollheim, the philosopher and David Hockney remained lifelong friends. "Through an earlier pre-occupation with turn-of-the-century intellectual life in Vienna (where he had started his art studies in the early 1950s), as well as an admiration for the Warburg Institute approach to the history of art-in-its-intellectual-context (since after Vienna he had moved to Oxford to study with the art historian Edgar Wind, before going on to the Royal College of Art) Kitaj has come to identify most strongly with the central European Jewish writer Franz Kafka, and with his sense of estrangement and of hidden mysteries. Illustrations to Kafka's aphorisms, imaginary portraits of his fiancée Felice and Count West-West who owned The Castle, appear in the Little Pictures, as do rapidly sketched portraits of Karl Kraus, Paul Celan, Leon Trotsky and Ludwig Wittgenstein, representations of Judeo-Christian mysteries of the hidden face of God. Kitaj settled in England, and through the 1960s taught at the Ealing Art...

Portrait of a Man with White Hair and Mustache in Pastel on Cardstock Portrait of a man by Honora Berg (American, 1897-1985). The man is looking directly at the viewer, with a neutral expression. He has white hair and a mustache, and is wearing a brown suit with a red tie. Signed "Honora Berg" in the bottom right corner. Stamp from Miller Fine Art on verso Acquired with a collection of the artist's work. Initialed and numbered "HB 117" on verso Unframed. Board size: 20"H x 15"W Honora Berg (American, 1897-1985) was an Abstract Expressionist and Bay Area Figurative School artist who studied at the San Francisco Art Institute with David Park, Elmer Bischoff and James Budd Dixon. Berg's friend Edith Truesdell — David Park's aunt — suggested a move to California in 1951 to study under Park. She exhibited at the 25th Annual Drawing, Print and Sculpture Exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1961. Provenance, Estate of Honora Berg - David Carlson Gallery, Larry Miller...