Harry Leslie Hoffman

The Bermuda Coast,

c. 1929

CHARLES HENRY GIFFORD (1839-1904) Frenchman Bay, Mount Desert Island, Maine, 1874 Oil on canvas 12 x 20 inches Signed and dated at lower right:...

BENJAMIN HARTLEY (1838-1912) On the Marmaton River, Kansas, 1880 Oil on board on canvas 6 x 9 ¾ inches Signed and dated at lower right: B. Hartley / 1880 Titled and dated in artist’s...

BUDD HOPKINS (1931-2011) Untitled Abstract, 1964 Oil on paper on canvas 14 x 11 inches Signed and dated at lower right: Hopkins ‘64 Budd Hopkins was born in Wheeling, West Vi...

RAY DONARSKI (1935-1996) Swing, 1966 Oil on canvas 17 ½ x 17 ½ inches Signed, dated and inscribed verso: ‘Swing’ / Ray Donarski / 2/66 / 17 ½ x 17 ½ / For Mr. & Mrs. Passerman / New York 1966 Original frame Ray Donarski was one of a group of artists in New York known as the Bowery Boys during the early sixties. The group included Eva Hesse, Robert Mangold, Jack Youngerman, and Robert Rauschenberg among others. He is mentioned in several of art critic Lucy Lippard's articles on New York conceptual artists and Bowery Boy artists of that period. Donarski was a close friend of artist James Rosenquist. They had studied together at the Art Students League in New York. In January of 1962 Donarski helped Rosenquist set up his first solo exhibition at the Green Gallery in New York. In his book, Painting Below Zero: Notes on a Life in Art, Rosenquist recalls sitting on the floor with Donarski before opening night wondering if anyone would show up. The show sold out before it opened. When Rosenquist was broke and homeless in 1955 his friend Donarski told him he knew of a great job as a chauffeur and bartender for some very wealthy people. They went up to see them and split the job. Rosenquist took it for a year, and after a year, he gave it to Donarski. In an interview with Rosenquist he said “I lived in the lap of luxury with very little money, and was a chauffeur bopping around in a ’56 Lincoln town car and a ’56 Lincoln convertible with big fins on the car (laughs), great big fins. I did that for a year and then transferred into the International Sign Painters.” Donarski married Mary Lou Storm and had two children. He became known as the “American in Luxembourg”, dividing his time between New York and summers in Luxembourg, where he was represented by Galerie Paul Bruck and Galerie Horn. He also exhibited at the Westport Gallery...

HENRY BOTKIN (1896-1983) Untitled, c. 1954 Oil on board 40 x 30 inches Signed at lower right: Botkin Signed verso

HENRY BOTKIN (1896-1983) Medley, 1958 Oil on paperboard on board 44 x 34 inches Signed at lower left: Botkin Signed, titled and dated verso

Signed "Nell Blaine" upper left in pencil. Signed, titled, dated verso on sheet. Signed, titled, dated verso on backing panel. The artist. Exhibited at Fischbach Gallery, NYC, in 1994 (Gallery label verso, and wall label affixed verso). Purchased by private collectors c.1994. By descent. Tibor de Nagy Gallery, NYC (the artist's estate representative), exhibited 2020 (label verso). Exhibited at Fischbach Gallery, NYC, in 1994 (Gallery label verso, and wall label affixed verso). Tibor de Nagy Gallery, NYC (the artist's estate representative), exhibited 2020 (label verso). From her November 15, 1996 NYT obituary: Nell Blaine, a widely respected New York landscape painter and watercolorist, died yesterday at Mount Sinai Hospital. She was 74 and had homes in Manhattan and Gloucester, Mass. Ms. Blaine, who had been hospitalized since July, had been confined to a wheelchair since 1959, when she contracted polio. Ms. Blaine was born in Richmond, Va., in 1922, and first studied at the Richmond School of Art, now part of Virginia Commonwealth University. She moved to New York in 1942 to study painting with Hans Hofmann and later studied etching and engraving at Atelier 17 with Stanley William Hayter. During her first years in New York, her work, which had previously been tightly realist, turned abstract, inspired by Mondrian, Leger and Jean Helion. At one time she was the youngest member of the American Abstract Artists. She was also a founding member of the Jane Street Gallery, one of Manhattan's earliest artists' cooperatives, and had her first solo show there in 1945. Just as Ms. Blaine was becoming known as a promising abstract painter, and gaining the admiration of such critics as Clement Greenberg, she started to shift back to representation. Inspired in part by a trip with Larry Rivers in 1950 to Paris, where she was especially impressed by the work of Vuillard and Bonnard, she immersed herself in the tradition of 19th-century European painting. From the mid-1950's, she cultivated an increasingly painterly and colorful style, usually working directly from nature, or still life, with particular emphasis on the forms and hues of flowers. Her work retained a sense of all-over structure and pulsating energy that she nonetheless credited to abstract art. ''It all goes back to Mondrian,'' she would say. In the 1950's, Ms. Blaine was prominent among a circle of New York artists and poets that included John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, Mr. Rivers, Jane Freilicher, Leland Bell, Louisa Matthiasdottir, Robert De Niro Sr. and Rudy Burckhardt. She had her first solo show of representational work at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in 1953 and was represented by the Poindexter Gallery until it closed in 1978, and, in recent years, by the Fischbach Gallery. During the 1950's she supported herself as a commercial artist, designing brochures for art galleries. In 1955, she designed the original logo, column heads and layout for The Village Voice. In 1957, Ms. Blaine was featured in Life magazine as one of five leading young female artists in America. In 1959, after several months of traveling and painting in Greece, she contracted severe bulbar polio on the island of Mykonos. ''To Nell Blaine,'' an exhibition organized at Poindexter to raise money for her hospital bills, included the work of 79 artists, including Saul Steinberg, Robert Motherwell, Elaine and Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, Mr. Rivers, Ms. Freilicher and Robert Rauschenberg. After eight months in a New York hospital, including five months in an iron lung...

A colorful, expressive fauvist watercolor landscape of a pond in the forest (Pan Pacific Exposition Palace Ruins) by Charles Henry Harmon(American, 1895-1936). Presented in a giltwoo...

Farm in Autumn with Pumpkins in Watercolor on Heavy Paper Colorful landscape of a farm in autumn with pumpkins by Les (Leslie Luverne) Anderson (Americ...

Farm in Autumn with Corn and Pumpkins in Watercolor on Heavy Paper Colorful landscape of a farm in autumn with pumpkins by Les (Leslie Luverne) Anderso...

Abstracted Bay Area skyline against a pink sunset creates beautiful and soft geometries in this small pastel urban landscape by San Francisco artist Chris Cacciotti (American, 20th C...

Russell Shoemaker Title: Untitled Year: 2018 Medium: Gouache on Yupo Paper Size: 12 x 9 inches Signed, dated and inscribed by the artist Russell Shoemaker received his BFA from the ...