Franz Lenk

"Hölzerne Hängebrücke über einen Fluss" ( Plank Bridge Across The River ), 1925

1925

SOLD UNFRAMED Moulin Vardon près Gournay, Graphite on Paper by Paulémile Pissarro, 1934 Graphite on paper 32 x 23.5 cm (12 ⁵/₈ x 9 ¹/₄ inches) Signed lower right, Paulémile-Pissarr...

John Francis Murphy (1853 - 1921) Saratoga, 1876 Graphite on paper Sight 8 3/4 x 10 1/2 inches Titled and dated to lower right Provenance: Babcock Galleries, New York Spanierman Gallery, New York In his lifetime, John Francis Murphy (1853-1921) was known as “the American Corot.” He was renowned for his small, intimate views of nature, especially barren fields and farms, bare trees, and lonely marshland. More than a century later, the power of Murphy’s landscapes has not waned. One contemporary critic wrote, “It was Murphy’s unique accomplishment to achieve an absolute realism without a loss of that mystic, indefinable quality which transfigures realism.” John Francis Murphy was born at Oswego, NY in 1853 but his family moved to Chicago in 1868 where he worked painting theater sets. Murphy was basically a self-taught artist; his only formal training was a few weeks of instruction at the Chicago Academy of Design. In 1875, Murphy moved from Chicago to New York, eventually rooming with the painters Dennis Bunker and Bruce Crane above a bakery shop. Murphy’s early work was typical of the Hudson River school but he soon fell under the sway of the loose brushwork and moody style of French Barbizon painting...

Poland (Glider) by Andrea Moreau colored pencil and postage stamp on paper 22 x 30 inches 25.25 x 32.5 inches framed To create her mixed-media artworks, Andrea Moreau selects a postage stamp to serve as the starting point for a piece on paper, then “completes” the image with colored pencil. This artwork, "Poland (Glider)," centers on a stamp that depicts an aircraft flying above a glacial horizon. Building on the style and environment established by the stamp art, Moreau extended this scene across land and sea in vibrant blue pencil. A statement by the artist: My drawings function as personal interpretations of political or commercial propaganda. I begin with imagery found on postage stamps or printed advertisements and, using the visual logic and graphic language of the image, I attempt to tease out a larger framework from which to consider it. Finished pieces often incorporate printed matter and cultural detritus, which gives them an immediate and tactile connection to the world of objects. I am particularly interested in the postage stamp as a geographical artifact, and through my drawing process I attempt to learn something about a place by studying its official imagery and then creating a world beyond the borders of its fragmentary scenes. The finished drawings and paintings are a record of this study; they are a dialogue between the printed and the drawn, the official and the personal, the real and the imaginary. They are a metaphor for the way in which we conjure the places we hear about on the news and read about in books, using the tiniest pieces of information to construct a reality that most likely bears little resemblance to any actual place. Andrea Moreau’s mixed-media works, on the other hand, walk a tightrope between context and isolation. Moreau selects a postage stamp to serve as the starting point for a piece on paper, then “completes” the image with colored pencil. These stamps may become lost in a frenzy of Moreau’s mark-making, as with “Mexico (Flowers) #15,” or left comically obvious, like in “USA (Barbershop...

The Modernist painter Oscar Bluemner was born in Hanover, Germany, in 1867. As a young man, he followed in the architectural careers of his father and grandfather. In the early 1880s...