Paper Landscape Drawings and Watercolors

'Place Pigalle', oil and gouache on art paper, by Lucien Génin (circa 1930s). Pigalle is well known to tourists who want to experience "Paris by night". It is home to some of Paris' most famous cabarets such as the Moulin Rouge which was immortalised by artist Toulouse-Lautrec. Lautrec's studio was here as was Picasso's, Vincent Van Gogh's and that of Andre Breton. In 1928 Josephine Baker opened her first nightclub next door to Breton's apartment. It is certainly a historical landmark of Paris and well known to so many visitors of this beautiful city. Génin painted Paris and Parisians and this is another one of his charming works among many held by this gallery. Please feel free to peruse them all on this platform. In good overall condition. Newly framed and glazed with anti-reflective glass. Upon request a video may be provided. About the Artist: After the devastation of the First World War, Lucien Génin (1894 - 1953) left his provincial home in the autumn of 1919 to find his fortune among the lively Parisians in the heart of Montmartre. Génin befriended the painters Frank Will, Gen Paul, Émile Boyer...

Original abstract landscape artwork by Italian contemporary artist Marilina Marchica. Titled “Abstract Earth Landscape”, this unique piece is created using natural pigment on fine a...

This is an exclusive handprinted limited edition cyanotype. Contemporary linear cyanotype showing a 3D mountain terrain. Details: + Title: 3D Render Mountain + Year: 2021 + Edition ...

RUSS HAVARD Artist Statement I'm drawn towards nature imagery that depicts isolated elements in their continual struggle to flourish under desolate circumstances. The seemingly bleak...

Le Pont du Vey by Paulémile Pissarro (1884-1972) Charcoal on paper 24.5 x 31.5 cm (9 ⁵/₈ x 12 ³/₈ inches) Signed with Estate stamp lower centre and upper right Executed circa 1940s ...

Original watercolor painting "Mountain Landscape" portrays a serene winter scene inspired by the majestic Nordic mountains. The composition features a prominent snow-covered mountain...

20th Century French School; Signed indistinctly lower left, 'Mini?' and dated 1993. A bright and breezy, spring-time view of Montmartre wi...

NYC Park Scene American Scene Social Realism WPA Woman Artist Ashcan Realism Isabel Bishop (American, 1902-1988) "NYC Park Scene" Pencil on paper Sight: 5 x 7-1/8 inches Signed l...

Dreamy watercolor of a small row boat adrift in a calm lake surrounded by bright sunny skies by artist Monique Tachdjian, 2009. Original one-of-a-kind artwork on paper displayed on...

Pencil and watercolour on paper Paper size: 10 x 14 inches Framed size: 20 x 23.75 inches Initialled lower right

Signed lower right, 'Michel Kady' and dated 1948. A substantial watercolor on Arches paper showing a coastal scene with figures walking beside the Pacific Ocean beneath imposing cli...

Four outrigger proa’s on the beach of Kusambe, Bali, 1937 Signed with initials, dated and described with location bottom left Pencil and ink on paper, 29.7 x 35 cm In ebonized frame with white mount WILLEM OTTO WIJNAND NIEUWENKAMP (1874-1950) Nieuwenkamp was born on July 27th 1874 in Amsterdam. His father owned sailing ships sailing to Indonesia and hearing the stories of the returning captains evoked in the young Nieuwenkamp an obsession for distant lands and adventure. After a failed attempt by his father to have his son make a career in his business, Nieuwenkamp attended the Academy for Decorative Art in Amsterdam. However, he left within one year to go his own way. He was an autodidact and a great experimenter with new techniques, particularly in the art of etching. Nieuwenkamp was a very focused man with the discipline of a scientist tempered by the sensitivity of an artist, a lust for adventure, a natural appreciation for ethnic arts and an enormous ambition to tread new paths. In 1898 he visited Indonesia for the first time and on his second visit in 1903-1904 he went on to Bali and became the first foreign artist to love Bali and the Balinese with a passion. Having secured agreements with several museums in the Netherlands to obtain Balinese art and objects for their collections, Nieuwenkamp immediately started to purchase and order a wide range of ethnographic art and objects from local artists and craftsmen. Through his drawings and books, he gave an excellent impression of Balinese art and culture at that time. Since 1854 Northern Bali was under Dutch...

Sunday on the Wye [2021] SOLD UNFRAMED Please note that insitu images are purely an indication of how a piece may look The artist comments "I painted 'Sunday on the Wye' after a day on the river canoeing with the family. It was a wonderful day meandering down stream near Symonds Yat. We turned the bend to see other boats congregated on the pebbles for a Sunday picnic. We beached our boat to take in the surroundings. The day was a great experience with sparkling light on the water and the sounds of the water over rocks. A few quick sketches and many photographs allowed me to then work at a large scale in the studio. It was painted with large brushes with watercolour. The chosen colours are blue and green. The painterly brush marks hold an energy and excitement of the days paddling." This work is sold unframed Artwork by artist Leigh Glover...

Harvest Moon 12:32pm is a watercolor work on paper by Cynthia MacCollum. This original artwork is 12x9 on archival paper. It is currently framed to 14 x 11. It was part of a 2020 ...

Playful pen and ink line drawing of a small garden courtyard by artist Jean Charles Lauthe, circa 1930. Original artwork on paper displayed o...

Pair of early 20th Century French watercolours of a Mediterranean garden. The paintings are signed bottom right, Songa, and are presented under a hand coloured custom mount in a plain wood frame under glass. A pair of charming representations of a garden in spring and early summer. The first shows a line of majestic Cyprus trees...

Oil Tanks, Alameda Street, Los Angeles, c. 1930-33, watercolor on paper, 14 ¼ x 21 ¼ inches (image), inscribed verso: “watercolor by Ruth Zimmerman 1912 – 1968 / Practice work for sc...

Featuring a vast country field dotted by cottages, this vintage French watercolor depicts the farming town of Bruyères, France by M. Kesseler, 1945. Bruyères, located in northeastern...

A Unique, Mid-Century Modern 1960s Chicago Harbor Scene Watercolor by Noted Artist, Rudolph T. Pen. Artwork is formatted in a trapezoid shape, an innovative compositional device for...

Entanglement VII, 6 points in space is a unique oil on paper painting by contemporary artist Joachim van der Vlugt, dimensions are 58.5 × 41.5 cm (23 × 16.3 in). The artwork is signe...

A beautiful and rare double-sided watercolor by the prolific contemporary Italian painter Marco Sassone (Italian, b.1942). In this early work, created in 1969, Sassone depicts two different sunset harbor scenes on each side of the paper. On the front, the artist uses a warm color palette of orange and yellow hues to depict a glowing sunset illuminating boats in a harbor. A second view of the harbor with small boats in the foreground on verso. Sassone's signature painterly impressionistic brushstrokes can be seen in the way the artist depicts the water in both watercolors. Signed and dated on verso, "M. Sassone 69". Displayed in a dark wood frame with mat. Image size: 10.5"H x 17"W. “One of the foremost colorists working in America today, Sassone is an artist who developed his own personal, expressive vision early in his career, and who has steadfastly remained faithful to it while refining and developing it to the full power and maturity that is seen in his works today.”Janet Dominik, Bernheim-Jeune, Paris, 1988. Marco Sassone was born in Campi Bisenzio, a Tuscan village, in 1942. The family moved to Florence in 1954, and there he met painters Ottone Rosai and Ugo Maturo, who encouraged him to follow his interest in art. In 1959 he enrolled at the Istituto Galileo Galilei, where he studied architectural drafting for several years. In 1963 he studied with painter Silvio Loffredo, a professor of art at the Accademia in Florence, himself a pupil of the Austrian master Oskar Kokoschka. Loffredo encouraged him to develop his own style and vision. For inspiration, Sassone studied the works of the 19th century Italian impressionists, the Macchiaioli – Giovanni Fattori, Vito D’Ancona and Silvestro Lega. He began exhibiting his first works at Lo Sprone Cultural Center in Florence. In November 1967, soon after the flood had devastated his city, Sassone moved to California. He exhibited for the first time in the United States at the Dalzell-Hatfield Galleries in Los Angeles and became a regular exhibitor at the annual Festival of the Arts in Laguna Beach. Throughout the seventies, he exhibited extensively in the U.S. and abroad. In 1976 he collaborated with director John Wilson to produce an autobiographical documentary. The following year his work was exhibited at the National Academy of Design in New York. Marco Sassone received a gold medal in 1978 from the Italian Academy of Arts, Literature and Science. In 1979 the monograph Sassone by art historian Donelson Hoopes was published in concurrence with the artist’s exhibition at the Laguna Art Museum. With prescience, Hoopes had observed: “Sassone’s art has evolved from within, and such an organic, psychological and spiritual process may take his work along new and unforeseen paths.” In 1981 Sassone moved his studio to San Francisco. During the 80’s his exhibition schedule continued along with his numerous lectures. In 1982 Marco Sassone was knighted by the president of Italy, Sandro Pertini, into the “Order of the Merit of the Italian Republic”. In 1987 Sassone received a commendation from Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley for his “contribution to the community through his art.” In March 1988, the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery mounted his solo exhibition titled Sassone with the publication of a catalogue authored by Janet Dominik. The show travelled to Paris and was installed at the historic Bernheim-Jeune Gallery for the month of April. By the late eighties, the artist had become increasingly concerned with social themes. He began extensive and personal research on the homeless and painted a series of large canvasses and charcoal drawings portraying the life he observed on the streets of San Francisco. A number of these works were exhibited at the Chicago International Art Exposition, the Basel Art Fair in Switzerland, Body Politic at the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery and Issue of Choice at the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibition (LACE). In March of 1994, his exhibition “Home on the Streets” opened at the Museo ItaloAmericano in San Francisco. Kenneth Baker, art critic for the San Francisco Chronicle wrote about his work: “There is true technical brilliance here…In the drawings, his technique seems to discover fresh descriptive possibilities each time out.” The exhibition traveled to Los Angeles in 1996 and Florence, Italy in 1997, where it was installed in the Cloisters of the Santa Croce Church. Paola Bortolotti, art critic for La Nazione, wrote: “The persistent theme however does not carry a denunciation of a social problem, but it is rather the pretext to pour forth onto canvas the urgency of the brush strokes loaded with pigment and light.” In 1997 Marco Sassone received a commission to create a 200 square foot mural in downtown San Francisco. The finished work comprised five canvasses dedicated to the theme of Il Palio...

A wonderfully evocative scene of a passenger looking out to sea on the deck of an ocean liner - from the golden age of cruising. Sir David Muirhead Bone On a P & O, Mediterranean ev...

paesaggio di Menerbes dove Picasso le regalò una casa e lei visse per alcuni anni L'opera è firmata e Timbrata MD Dora MAAR (Parigi 1907 – 1997) Nata Henrietta Theodora Markovitc...

Wonderful minimalist mid-1970's landscape watercolor of a simple barn on a hilltop by Gretchen Guard (American, 20th Century). The artist used clean lines and decisive areas of color to render the barn in crisp detail and make it pop from the soft landscape around it. Signed "Gretchen Guard" and dated "76" lower left. Displayed in a new cream mat and rustic wood frame. Frame size: 17"H x 21"W Image size: 12"H x 16"W Gretchen Guard lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico and Cape Cod, Mass. She majored in studio art at Stanford University under Nathan Oliveira, Frank Lobdell and Mat Kahn. And at Santa Fe Art Institute with Wolf Khan...

A captivating Mid-Century watercolor of an old Chicago house (with a female figure standing in the window) by Chicago artist George Yelich. The watercolor bears its original frame. ...

Yellow Sky, Southern Island Watercolor on paper, 4 x 12 inches (10.2 x 30.5 cm) Framed dimensions: 11 x 18 1/2 inches Susan Van Campen’s plein-air oi...

Mixed media drawing on paper Dated and signed on the back In the plastic work of Geneviève Seillé, the word, like a sign, reigns supreme. An object of fascination, only its visual a...

Landscape is a China Ink Drawing and Watercolour realized by Reynold Arnould (Le Havre 1919 - Parigi 1980). Good condition on a cream colored paper. ...

A Large, 1950s Mid-Century Modern Ink Drawing of Quebec City by Rudolph Pen. Artwork is formatted in a trapezoid shape, an innovative composition device for which the artist's work ...

The artwork is in simple white frames behind plexi. The full signature is on the back of the drawing Hanna Banaszczyk is a graduate of the Faculty of Painting and Drawing at the Un...

Sunday Drive, Original Impressionist Landscape Painting 8" x 10" (HxW) Pastel on Paper Hand-signed by the artist. Journey down a desolate road amongst a beautiful green landscape of...

This drawing by Frank Girard is created with pigments and ink, on 300g/m2 neutral white paper. It is not framed. Through drawings, the masterful French a...

Autumn-hued watercolor of a forest landscape by French artist M. Guillaumey, 2002. Signed in pencil lower right. Original one-of-a-kind artwork on pa...

At over 11 feet in length, Broadbent’s “Andromeda” galaxy watercolor painting captures the spectacle and wonder one feels when looking at the stars in the night sky. In this large sc...

'Sal y Cicatrices' Original Artwork Low winter sun dancing on shingles and salt crisped fronds; the tidal dance of the Mediterranean. A drawing scratched and scarred by the caress ...

This watercolor painting is distinguished by the special atmosphere of the pre-spring forest, the glare of the sun and the dense shadows of the pine needles. The watercolor landscap...

Janusz Kokot was born in Kalisz in 1960. He studied at the Pedagogical University in Częstochowa at the Art Institute. He practices painting and drawing. In the years 1988 - 2020 he ...

Brian Cobble’s landscapes tend to particularly focus on the interplay of man and his surroundings, whether natural or built. A signature attention to the liminal aspects of a scene, ...

The painting shows a typical Scandinavian style house. Timber buildings are monuments in Norway. This building is typical for middle part of Norway. Time destroys these houses, but t...

Olive trees and olive groves are often the main subject of Tzannes paintings. An American painter of Greek origins, Tzannes visited the Greek island of Kythera in his twenties. Since that time, the island has become the major reference of his creativity. The choice of using black and white to represent this landscape gives the mighty hundred-years old olive trees a monumental presence. The viewer is drawn into the timeless, spiritual quality of the Greek landscape. Despite the absence of color, Tzannes' mastery of drawing creates a tangible effect of the Greek light...

Four Balinese, 1910 Signed and dated bottom left Pencil and ink on paper, 15.6 x 23 cm In ebonized frame with white mount. Literature: W.O.J. Nieuwenkamp, Zwerftochten op Bali, Amsterdam, 1910, p. 36 WILLEM OTTO WIJNAND NIEUWENKAMP (1874-1950) Nieuwenkamp was born on July 27th 1874 in Amsterdam. His father owned sailing ships sailing to Indonesia and hearing the stories of the returning captains evoked in the young Nieuwenkamp an obsession for distant lands and adventure. After a failed attempt by his father to have his son make a career in his business, Nieuwenkamp attended the Academy for Decorative Art in Amsterdam. However, he left within one year to go his own way. He was an autodidact and a great experimenter with new techniques, particularly in the art of etching. Nieuwenkamp was a very focused man with the discipline of a scientist tempered by the sensitivity of an artist, a lust for adventure, a natural appreciation for ethnic arts and an enormous ambition to tread new paths. In 1898 he visited Indonesia for the first time and on his second visit in 1903-1904 he went on to Bali and became the first foreign artist to love Bali and the Balinese with a passion. Having secured agreements with several museums in the Netherlands to obtain Balinese art...

A Unique, 1960s Mid-Century Modern, European City View Watercolor by Noted Chicago Artist, Rudolph T. Pen. Artwork is formatted in a trapezoid shape, an innovative compositional dev...

"Domicile II" Watercolor Painting 13" x 18.5" inch (1980) by Zaccaria Zeini Medium: watercolor on paper Signed and dated Zaccaria El Zeini (1932 - 1993) was raised in the popular ...

"Aswan" Landscape Watercolor Painting 6" x 11" in (1990) by Zaccaria Zeini Medium: watercolor on paper Signed and dated Zaccaria El Zeini (1932 - 1993) was raised in the popular d...

Mary M. Johnsen Four Paintings, c. 1950s Watercolor Dimensions: 1. Mat: 18 x 21 1/4 in., page: 8 x 12 1/4 in. 2. Page: 14 7/8 x 22 in. 3. Mat: 15 x 19 in., page: 10 1/2 x 14 1/2 in....

“Anne Weary, who grew up as a Texas cowgirl, is at home in the outdoors and knows its ways and its language. There is a sort of very quiet but very powerful mysticism in her work, a ...

BENOIS ALBERT NIKOLAEVICH (1852 – 1936) The greatest master of watercolor painting of the second half of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. In his work, he continued the a...

A French watercolour on paper landscape by Roger Decaux. The work is signed and dated (as yet undeciphered) bottom right. Presented in a wood frame with cut card mount. A fresh and charming view of trees in a landscape. Decaux has used simple, fluid but strong strokes for this composition. One can feel the influence of 'abstraction of form' that was a part of his later work. The eye is drawn from the trees to the surrounding fields, the touches of colour to the right and then to the silhouette of the hills beyond. The use of watercolour at its best. Roger DECAUX was born in 1919 in Dombasle sur Meurthe in the Lorraine. He studied art in Paris with Gino Severini and Jan Brusselmans...

French Barbizon School watercolour on paper view of a rural French farm and country scene in a valley by Henri Clamen. The painting is not signed but was acquired from the artist's a...

Statue of Vishnu Garuda, Bali, 1904 Signed with initials Pencil and ink on paper, 21.4 x 21.3 cm Literature: Bruce W. Carpenter, W.O.J. Nieuwenkamp. First European Artist in Bali,...

'The Olive Tree Behind the Stone Wall', ink on art paper, by Pierre Dionisi (circa 1930s). Sepia-toned, original drawing in a compelling style depicts a...

'Las Ramblas Barcelona', watercolour on art paper, by Spanish artist, Josè Goday (1984). A wonderful snippet of the magical street in Barcelona called Las ...

This is a beautiful expressionist style drawing by Juanjo Saez. Juanjo's pictorial work is an exploration of color, texture, and movement, creating vibrant compositions that capture ...

Oscar Bluemner was a German and an American, a trained architect who read voraciously in art theory, color theory, and philosophy, a writer of art criticism both in German and English, and, above all, a practicing artist. Bluemner was an intense man, who sought to express and share, through drawing and painting, universal emotional experience. Undergirded by theory, Bluemner chose color and line for his vehicles; but color especially became the focus of his passion. He was neither abstract artist nor realist, but employed the “expressional use of real phenomena” to pursue his ends. (Oscar Bluemner, from unpublished typescript on “Modern Art” for Camera Work, in Bluemner papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, as cited and quoted in Jeffrey R. Hayes, Oscar Bluemner [1991], p. 60. The Bluemner papers in the Archives [hereafter abbreviated as AAA] are the primary source for Bluemner scholars. Jeffrey Hayes read them thoroughly and translated key passages for his doctoral dissertation, Oscar Bluemner: Life, Art, and Theory [University of Maryland, 1982; UMI reprint, 1982], which remains the most comprehensive source on Bluemner. In 1991, Hayes published a monographic study of Bluemner digested from his dissertation and, in 2005, contributed a brief essay to the gallery show at Barbara Mathes, op. cit.. The most recent, accessible, and comprehensive view of Bluemner is the richly illustrated, Barbara Haskell, Oscar Bluemner: A Passion for Color, exhib. cat. [New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2005.]) Bluemner was born in the industrial city of Prenzlau, Prussia, the son and grandson of builders and artisans. He followed the family predilection and studied architecture, receiving a traditional and thorough German training. He was a prize-winning student and appeared to be on his way to a successful career when he decided, in 1892, to emigrate to America, drawn perhaps by the prospect of immediate architectural opportunities at the Chicago World’s Fair, but, more importantly, seeking a freedom of expression and an expansiveness that he believed he would find in the New World. The course of Bluemner’s American career proved uneven. He did indeed work as an architect in Chicago, but left there distressed at the formulaic quality of what he was paid to do. Plagued by periods of unemployment, he lived variously in Chicago, New York, and Boston. At one especially low point, he pawned his coat and drafting tools and lived in a Bowery flophouse, selling calendars on the streets of New York and begging for stale bread. In Boston, he almost decided to return home to Germany, but was deterred partly because he could not afford the fare for passage. He changed plans and direction again, heading for Chicago, where he married Lina Schumm, a second-generation German-American from Wisconsin. Their first child, Paul Robert, was born in 1897. In 1899, Bluemner became an American citizen. They moved to New York City where, until 1912, Bluemner worked as an architect and draftsman to support his family, which also included a daughter, Ella Vera, born in 1903. All the while, Oscar Bluemner was attracted to the freer possibilities of art. He spent weekends roaming Manhattan’s rural margins, visiting the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, and New Jersey, sketching landscapes in hundreds of small conté crayon drawings. Unlike so many city-based artists, Bluemner did not venture out in search of pristine countryside or unspoiled nature. As he wrote in 1932, in an unsuccessful application for a Guggenheim Fellowship, “I prefer the intimate landscape of our common surroundings, where town and country mingle. For we are in the habit to carry into them our feelings of pain and pleasure, our moods” (as quoted by Joyce E. Brodsky in “Oscar Bluemner in Black and White,” p. 4, in Bulletin 1977, I, no. 5, The William Benton Museum of Art, Storrs, Connecticut). By 1911, Bluemner had found a powerful muse in a series of old industrial towns, mostly in New Jersey, strung along the route of the Morris Canal. While he educated himself at museums and art galleries, Bluemner entered numerous architectural competitions. In 1903, in partnership with Michael Garven, he designed a new courthouse for Bronx County. Garven, who had ties to Tammany Hall, attempted to exclude Bluemner from financial or artistic credit, but Bluemner promptly sued, and, finally, in 1911, after numerous appeals, won a $7,000 judgment. Barbara Haskell’s recent catalogue reveals more details of Bluemner’s architectural career than have previously been known. Bluemner the architect was also married with a wife and two children. He took what work he could get and had little pride in what he produced, a galling situation for a passionate idealist, and the undoubted explanation for why he later destroyed the bulk of his records for these years. Beginning in 1907, Bluemner maintained a diary, his “Own Principles of Painting,” where he refined his ideas and incorporated insights from his extensive reading in philosophy and criticism both in English and German to create a theoretical basis for his art. Sometime between 1908 and 1910, Bluemner’s life as an artist was transformed by his encounter with the German-educated Alfred Stieglitz, proprietor of the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession at 291 Fifth Avenue. The two men were kindred Teutonic souls. Bluemner met Stieglitz at about the time that Stieglitz was shifting his serious attention away from photography and toward contemporary art in a modernist idiom. Stieglitz encouraged and presided over Bluemner’s transition from architect to painter. During the same period elements of Bluemner’s study of art began to coalesce into a personal vision. A Van Gogh show in 1908 convinced Bluemner that color could be liberated from the constraints of naturalism. In 1911, Bluemner visited a Cézanne watercolor show at Stieglitz’s gallery and saw, in Cézanne’s formal experiments, a path for uniting Van Gogh’s expressionist use of color with a reality-based but non-objective language of form. A definitive change of course in Bluemner’s professional life came in 1912. Ironically, it was the proceeds from his successful suit to gain credit for his architectural work that enabled Bluemner to commit to painting as a profession. Dividing the judgment money to provide for the adequate support of his wife and two children, he took what remained and financed a trip to Europe. Bluemner traveled across the Continent and England, seeing as much art as possible along the way, and always working at a feverish pace. He took some of his already-completed work with him on his European trip, and arranged his first-ever solo exhibitions in Berlin, Leipzig, and Elberfeld, Germany. After Bluemner returned from his study trip, he was a painter, and would henceforth return to drafting only as a last-ditch expedient to support his family when his art failed to generate sufficient income. Bluemner became part of the circle of Stieglitz artists at “291,” a group which included Marsden Hartley, John Marin, and Arthur Dove. He returned to New York in time to show five paintings at the 1913 Armory Show and began, as well, to publish critical and theoretical essays in Stieglitz’s journal, Camera Work. In its pages he cogently defended the Armory Show against the onslaught of conservative attacks. In 1915, under Stieglitz’s auspices, Bluemner had his first American one-man show at “291.” Bluemner’s work offers an interesting contrast with that of another Stieglitz architect-turned-artist, John Marin, who also had New Jersey connections. The years after 1914 were increasingly uncomfortable. Bluemner remained, all of his life, proud of his German cultural legacy, contributing regularly to German language journals and newspapers in this country. The anti-German sentiment, indeed mania, before and during World War I, made life difficult for the artist and his family. It is impossible to escape the political agenda in Charles Caffin’s critique of Bluemner’s 1915 show. Caffin found in Bluemner’s precise and earnest explorations of form, “drilled, regimented, coerced . . . formations . . . utterly alien to the American idea of democracy” (New York American, reprinted in Camera Work, no. 48 [Oct. 1916], as quoted in Hayes, 1991, p. 71). In 1916, seeking a change of scene, more freedom to paint, and lower expenses, Bluemner moved his family to New Jersey, familiar terrain from his earlier sketching and painting. During the ten years they lived in New Jersey, the Bluemner family moved around the state, usually, but not always, one step ahead of the rent collector. In 1917, Stieglitz closed “291” and did not reestablish a Manhattan gallery until 1925. In the interim, Bluemner developed relationships with other dealers and with patrons. Throughout his career he drew support and encouragement from art cognoscenti who recognized his talent and the high quality of his work. Unfortunately, that did not pay the bills. Chronic shortfalls were aggravated by Bluemner’s inability to sustain supportive relationships. He was a difficult man, eternally bitter at the gap between the ideal and the real. Hard on himself and hard on those around him, he ultimately always found a reason to bite the hand that fed him. Bluemner never achieved financial stability. He left New Jersey in 1926, after the death of his beloved wife, and settled in South Braintree, Massachusetts, outside of Boston, where he continued to paint until his own death in 1938. As late as 1934 and again in 1936, he worked for New Deal art programs designed to support struggling artists. Bluemner held popular taste and mass culture in contempt, and there was certainly no room in his quasi-religious approach to art for accommodation to any perceived commercial advantage. His German background was also problematic, not only for its political disadvantages, but because, in a world where art is understood in terms of national styles, Bluemner was sui generis, and, to this day, lacks a comfortable context. In 1933, Bluemner adopted Florianus (definitively revising his birth names, Friedrich Julius Oskar) as his middle name and incorporated it into his signature, to present “a Latin version of his own surname that he believed reinforced his career-long effort to translate ordinary perceptions into the more timeless and universal languages of art” (Hayes 1982, p. 189 n. 1). In 1939, critic Paul Rosenfeld, a friend and member of the Stieglitz circle, responding to the difficulty in categorizing Bluemner, perceptively located him among “the ranks of the pre-Nazi German moderns” (Hayes 1991, p. 41). Bluemner was powerfully influenced in his career by the intellectual heritage of two towering figures of nineteenth-century German culture, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. A keen student of color theory, Bluemner gave pride of place to the formulations of Goethe, who equated specific colors with emotional properties. In a November 19, 1915, interview in the German-language newspaper, New Yorker Staats-Zeitung (Abendblatt), he stated: I comprehend the visible world . . . abstract the primary-artistic . . . and after these elements of realty are extracted and analyzed, I reconstruct a new free creation that still resembles the original, but also . . . becomes an objectification of the abstract idea of beauty. The first—and most conspicuous mark of this creation is . . . colors which accord with the character of things, the locality . . . [and which] like the colors of Cranach, van der Weyden, or Durer, are of absolute purity, breadth, and luminosity. . . . I proceed from the psychological use of color by the Old Masters . . . [in which] we immediately recognize colors as carriers of “sorrow and joy” in Goethe’s sense, or as signs of human relationship. . . . Upon this color symbolism rests the beauty as well as the expressiveness, of earlier sacred paintings. Above all, I recognize myself as a contributor to the new German theory of light and color, which expands Goethe’s law of color through modern scientific means (as quoted in Hayes 1991, p. 71). Hayes has traced the global extent of Bluemner’s intellectual indebtedness to Hegel (1991, pp. 36–37). More specifically, Bluemner made visual, in his art, the Hegelian world view, in the thesis and antithesis of the straight line and the curve, the red and the green, the vertical and the horizontal, the agitation and the calm. Bluemner respected all of these elements equally, painting and drawing the tension and dynamic of the dialectic and seeking ultimate reconciliation in a final visual synthesis. Bluemner was a keen student of art, past and present, looking, dissecting, and digesting all that he saw. He found precedents for his non-naturalist use of brilliant-hued color not only in the work Van Gogh and Cezanne, but also in Gauguin, the Nabis, and the Symbolists, as well as among his contemporaries, the young Germans of Der Blaue Reiter. Bluemner was accustomed to working to the absolute standard of precision required of the architectural draftsman, who adjusts a design many times until its reality incorporates both practical imperatives and aesthetic intentions. Hayes describes Bluemner’s working method, explaining how the artist produced multiple images playing on the same theme—in sketch form, in charcoal, and in watercolor, leading to the oil works that express the ultimate completion of his process (Hayes, 1982, pp. 156–61, including relevant footnotes). Because of Bluemner’s working method, driven not only by visual considerations but also by theoretical constructs, his watercolor and charcoal studies have a unique integrity. They are not, as is sometimes the case with other artists, rough preparatory sketches. They stand on their own, unfinished only in the sense of not finally achieving Bluemner’s carefully considered purpose. The present charcoal drawing is one of a series of images that take as their starting point the Morris Canal as it passed through Rockaway, New Jersey. The Morris Canal industrial towns that Bluemner chose as the points of departure for his early artistic explorations in oil included Paterson with its silk mills (which recalled the mills in the artist’s childhood home in Elberfeld), the port city of Hoboken, Newark, and, more curiously, a series of iron ore mining and refining towns, in the north central part of the state that pre-dated the Canal, harkening back to the era of the Revolutionary War. The Rockaway theme was among the original group of oil paintings that Bluemner painted in six productive months from July through December 1911 and took with him to Europe in 1912. In his painting journal, Bluemner called this work Morris Canal at Rockaway N.J. (AAA, reel 339, frames 150 and 667, Hayes, 1982, pp. 116–17), and exhibited it at the Galerie Fritz Gurlitt in Berlin in 1912 as Rockaway N. J. Alter Kanal. After his return, Bluemner scraped down and reworked these canvases. The Rockaway picture survives today, revised between 1914 and 1922, as Old Canal, Red and Blue (Rockaway River) in the collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D. C. (color illus. in Haskell, fig. 48, p. 65). For Bluemner, the charcoal expression of his artistic vision was a critical step in composition. It represented his own adaptation of Arthur Wesley’s Dow’s (1857–1922) description of a Japanese...

Provenance: Frédérique Tison, Château de Chassy (Burgundy-Franche Comté - France) Bibliography: J. Clair, V. Monnier Balthus, catalogue raisonné of the complete works, Gallimard, Pa...

The subject illustrated here is one of the moments that mark the centuries-long history of Genoa's glorious Maritime Republic, when the ashes of St. John the Baptist, one of the city...

The artwork is in simple black wood frames behind glass. The full signature is on the back of the drawing. Hanna Banaszczyk is a graduate of the Faculty of Painting and Drawing at ...

Delicate Vintage Winter Watercolor Landscape Simple and beautifully rendered landscape depicting a field with trees in the wintertime. A few evergreens are visible while the rest o...

Executed in 1911, this ink and crayon drawing by Oscar Lycke captures the quiet clarity of early summer in northern Sweden. A hillside meadow, dotted with loosely gathered hay, unfol...

Signed lower left, 'Marshall Thomas' for Marshall F. Thomas, (American, 1916-2011), and painted circa 1945. An elegantly composed and atmospheric view of a California Main Street sh...