American Modern Interior Drawings and Watercolors

A ca. 1931 delightful watercolor still life at a table; a study in yellow by artist Harold Haydon. Harold Emerson Haydon was born in Fort William, Ont...

A ca. 1931 charming watercolor interior scene; a study in yellow by artist Harold Haydon. Harold Emerson Haydon was born in Fort William, Ontario, Can...

A colorful, period mural study of an interior by artist Edgar Ewing.

Fortune Magazine cover, Depression-Era Illustration, WPA industrial Modernist. Signed lower left. The drawing measures 13. x 11 inches. Framed by Bark...

Bendiner and his wife were seasoned travelers. Right away in this Greek airport scene so many things are amiss: The heavy coat? The argument? Poor Mrs. Bendiner wishing they would ju...

This very early original drawing in blue ink is signed bt Jackson Lee Nesbitt. Jack was a student of Thomas Hart Benton at the Kansas City Art Institute during this period. The drawing shows three men working to replace a wheel on a piece of industrial equipment. The sketch is drawn on the back of a lithograph called Pastry Pups. Jack often drew on anything that was handy when an idea came to him.. Jackson Lee Nesbitt, a noted printmaker and painter of the American Scene, dedicated his artistic career to the portrayal of ordinary people going about the business of their lives. A native of Oklahoma, Nesbitt created scenes from the Midwest during the 1930s and 1940s, but in the 1950s, when interest in his work diminished, he moved to Atlanta and established a second career in advertising. Thirty years later, Nesbitt sold his business and resumed his artistic career from Atlanta. He was born in McAlester, Oklahoma, on June 16, 1913, the only child of LuCena Grant and Howard Nesbitt. The family resided in Muskogee, Oklahoma, where his father owned a commercial printing business. Jack, as Nesbitt was known, helped out in the family business until 1931, when he enrolled at the University of Oklahoma in Norman. Two years later Nesbitt enrolled at the Kansas City Art Institute in Missouri. As a first-year student, he learned etching from John deMartelly, attended Ross Braught's painting class, and met his future wife, Elaine Thompson, who was a costume design student. Thomas Hart Benton, who joined the faculty in the fall of 1935, quickly became a close friend and mentor to the younger artist. In 1937 the management of the Sheffield Steel Corporation contacted deMartelly concerning an etching commission. Because Nesbitt was an outstanding student, his teacher suggested him for the job. When Nesbitt arrived at the plant one afternoon, he was taken to the open-hearth furnace area, where he diligently sketched anonymous workers in that dramatic setting until five o'clock the following morning. On the strength of his sketches, he was commissioned to create a series of etchings illustrating different phases of the steel industry. The commission launched Nesbitt's career as a professional artist. The commission with Sheffield Steel Corporation provided the financial security that enabled Jack and Elaine Nesbitt to marry on June 1, 1938. He graduated from the Kansas City Art Institute about the same time. Working as a freelance artist, Nesbitt augmented his commissioned work with genre scenes of the Midwest, and he routinely went with Benton on sketching trips to rural Arkansas. Beginning in 1939 Nesbitt's work gained widespread recognition. Open Hearth Door, a Sheffield Steel Corporation painting, was chosen to represent Missouri in the American Art Today exhibition at the New York World's Fair. Associated American Artists selected one of his etchings, Watering Place, for an edition of 250 prints that were sold through subscription. Having a print published by the association ensured national distribution, and four more of Nesbitt's works, all of rural southern genre scenes, were later selected by the print publisher. Over the next decade Nesbitt's work was exhibited in California, Colorado, Illinois, Missouri, New York, and Oklahoma. He was awarded the Eames Prize by the Society of American Etchers in 1946, and his work was included in the book American Prize Prints of the Twentieth Century, by Albert Reese. Major corporations with operations in the Midwest, including Brown and Bigelow, Butler Manufacturing Company, Humble Oil and Refining Company, Omaha Steel Works, Pratt and Whitney...

This drawing could also be titled "Foundry." Two men, in work clothes, are on other side of a trough of molten metal. In the distance, a third man, in heavy-duty protective gear, lea...

Mastery is a word seldom heard today in the hallowed halls of the arts. Striving for technical excellence, a life-time self-teaching quest, the great game which once represented the sole qualification by which an inspiring artist could first qualify for recognition in the noble craft of painting, this long apprenticeship dedicated to a hand-eye coordination guided by the inspiration of the mind has lost the prestige it once held. The craft of which we are speaking is, similar to the life-rendition to which novelists once aspired, the arcane knowledge of how to apply wet pigment to a dry surface in order to celebrate the world. TONY GREEN has resisted the temptation to take the easy way, the glib fashionable conformity of the post-1968 caravan which for more than forty years has offered the quick itinerary for climbing the slopes of Parnassus. TONY GREEN has stuck to his guns. The easy option of jumping on the band-wagon of the avantgarde was beneath consideration. Art in our time has become the exclusive realm of ideology, and whoever requests a membership card in this essentially politically (correct) movement with all its conformities, will thus qualify as participant in the exclusivity of the "contemporary." This gambit had already grown stale by the year 1920, when Raymond Radiguet memorably provoked the already accepted rebels of Paris by saying, "Don't shock the bourgeoisie: shock the avantgarde." A lesson which only the chosen few since then, from Paul Derain to Giorgio de Chirco, have heeded. TONY GREEN stands among those who, coming from across the Atlantic, have followed in the footsteps of masters such as James McNeill Whistler and John Singer Sargent. The concert violinist after endless years of practice suddenly has the awareness during a particularly difficult passage in a concert performance that the angel has touched his shoulder -- the moment when excellence becomes effortless: this is mastery. Likewise the painter, especially those who take on the challenge of the seemingly simple manuality of painting in oils, much less the tricky elusive craft of watercolour --a club to which all but a very few aspiring practicioners qualify-- who after years dedicated to the perfection of his art, knows for a fleeting instant while at work that he too has felt the brush of the angelic plumes. "Painting is a glimpse," Willem de Kooning said, that small eternity to which Henry James often made reference. Those who look at paintings live in the Before and in the After; it is the privilege of the artist alone to live in the During. It is strange that the rules of visual art have in recent decades been so modified by "intellectual" fashion while the synthax of every best selling novel of today has continued to be expressed in the "conventional" prose of a hundred years ago. In his native New Orleans on the Golf of Mexico, as in his adopted Adriatic gateway of Venice, TONY GREEN looks, perceives, observes the pageant of life as it is, and as it has always been. But to capture it, in our photo-saturated times, how many now can render it in paint? ALAN JONES...

"Riviters" WPA modernism Mid-Century Workers Modern American Industrial Drawing Daniel Celentano (American 1902 – 1980) "Riveters," 10 x 10 ink on paper. Circa 1940s. WPA modern A...

"Relief Station Benches", a very touching, WPA period watercolour with a lot of humanity by Saul Kovner (1904-1981). The painting is signed at the lower ri...

A beautiful watercolor in pale colors of old tools on a barn wall that tell a story of an American who makes his living off the land. This is a piece of Americana that invokes the n...

Reclining Nude.Early modernist line drawing, by American artist William S. Schwartz, c. 1940, gouache painting, signed with initials, framed. (size includes frame). Work is reminisce...