Amalia Polleri

Untitled (Children Sleeping)

1943

Robert Philipp, 'Self-Portrait with Black Hat', ink and color pastel, c. 1945. Signed in ink, lower right. A fine, spontaneous drawing, on heavy, buff wove paper; the artist's tack holes in the top and bottom left sheet corners, minor rippling in the bottom sheet edge; otherwise in good condition. Image size 16 1/4 x 11 1/4 inches; sheet size 19 1/4 x 12 3/4 inches. Matted to museum standards, unframed. Provenance: Art Students League, from the artist’s personal portfolio. ABOUT THE ARTIST Robert Philipp (1895–1981) was a celebrated American Post-Impressionist painter known for his nudes, still lifes, and portraits. Noted art critic Henry McBride named Philipp one of America's top six painters of his generation. Philipp was an instructor of painting at the Art Students League, New York, for 33 years. Philipp was Secretary of the National Academy of Design, a National Academician, and a Benjamin Franklin Fellow at the Royal Society of Arts in London. His composition and painting style has been compared to the art of Edgar Degas and Pierre Auguste Renoir. In 1940, Philipp was invited to Los Angeles by Hollywood producer Louis B. Mayer to paint portraits of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer movie stars. The same year, Walter Wanger, producer of ‘The Long Voyage Home’, directed by John Ford and based on plays by Eugene O'Neill, contracted with Reeves Lewenthal, head of the Associated American Artists gallery in Manhattan, to bring nine well-known artists to the set and paint scenes from the movie and portraits of the actors in character. The artists included Robert Philipp, Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood, Ernest Fiene, George Schreiber, Luis...

Robert Philipp, 'Portrait of a Young Man', color pastel and wet brush, c. 1967. Signed in pencil, lower right. A fine, painterly drawing, on cream laid Michallet drawing paper. The artist's tack holes in the four sheet corners, in very good condition. Image size 19 x 11 1/2 inches (483 x 292 mm); sheet size 19 x 12 3/8 inches (483 x 314 mm). Archivally matted to museum standards, unframed. Provenance: Art Students League, from the artist’s personal portfolio. ABOUT THE ARTIST Robert Philipp (1895–1981) was a celebrated American Post-Impressionist painter known for his nudes, still lifes, and portraits. Noted art critic Henry McBride named Philipp one of America's top six painters of his generation. Philipp was an instructor of painting at the Art Students League, New York, for 33 years. Philipp was Secretary of the National Academy of Design, a National Academician, and a Benjamin Franklin Fellow at the Royal Society of Arts in London. His composition and painting style has been compared to the art of Edgar Degas and Pierre Auguste Renoir. In 1940, Philipp was invited to Los Angeles by Hollywood producer Louis B. Mayer to paint portraits of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer movie stars. The same year, Walter Wanger, producer of ‘The Long Voyage Home’, directed by John Ford and based on plays by Eugene O'Neill, contracted with Reeves Lewenthal, head of the Associated American Artists gallery in Manhattan, to bring nine well-known artists to the set and paint scenes from the movie and portraits of the actors in character. The artists included Robert Philipp, Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood, Ernest Fiene, George Schreiber, Luis...

Leonard Nowak, 'Tourists', conté crayon and India ink, c. 1940s. Signed in ink, lower left. Original cartoon drawing, on textured, off-white wove drawing...

Leonard Nowak, 'The Thinker?', conté crayon and India ink, c. 1940s. Signed in ink, lower left. Original cartoon drawing, on textured, off-white wove dra...

Leonard Nowak, 'Hairdresser', conté crayon and India ink, c. 1940s. Signed in ink, lower left. Original cartoon drawing, on textured, off-white wove draw...

Leonard Nowak, 'Grand Canyon', conté crayon and India ink, c. 1940s. Signed in ink, lower left. Original cartoon drawing, on textured, off-white wove dra...

Superb original drawing in coloured conté pencils, heightened with white on oatmeal coloured vergé paper by Claudio Bravo. The work was created during the artist's Moroccan period, a...

Stately portrait of George Arliss by Ivan Opffer (Danish, 1897-1980). Mr. Arliss is depicted wearing his signature monocle, looking directly at the viewer. Although this piece appears to be done rapidly, there is a clear confidence in Opffer's work - he was an accomplished portrait artist - and the resemblance to the subject is unmistakable. George Arliss (born Augustus George Andrews; 10 April 1868 – 5 February 1946) was an English actor, author, playwright, and filmmaker who found success in the United States. He was the first British actor to win an Academy Award – which he won for his performance as Victorian-era British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli in Disraeli (1929) – as well as the earliest-born actor to win the honour. He specialized in successful biopics, such as Disraeli, Voltaire (1933), and Cardinal Richelieu (1935), as well as light comedies, which included The Millionaire (1931) and A Successful Calamity (1932). Signed and dated "Ivan Opffer 1934" in the lower right. Titled "Mr. Arliss" in the lower left. Presented in a new off-white mat with foamcore backing. Mat size: 22"H x 16"W Art size: 17.5"H x 12"W Ivan Opffer (Danish, 1897-1980) was born in Nyborg, Denmark, on June 4, 1897, to a family of Danish scholars and journalists. His brother was Emil Opffer, a Danish merchant seaman and journalist who was known for his relationship with American writer Hart Crane. Ivan was raised in Mexico City and New York, where his anarchist father was the editor of a radical Danish-language newspaper. His involvement in painting and drawing began at an early age. At a summer workshop, he met and studied drawing with Winslow Homer, then went on to study at the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League of New York. When the US entered World War I, Opffer was one of the members of the American Army Camouflage Corps, headed by Homer Saint-Gaudens (whose mother was a relative of Winslow Homer), the son of Augustus Saint-Gaudens. As a camoufleur, Opffer served with other artists and architects, some of whom became well-known, including Barry Faulkner, Sherry Edmundson Fry, Kimon Nicolaides, Robert Lawson, Abraham Rattner, Kerr Eby, and others. It was this same unit, while still in training in at Camp American University in Washington DC, that launched a camp newspaper called The Camoufleur. Only three issues were published before the unit’s deployment to France in late 1917. In the October 31 issue, a satirical portrait by Opffer of Homer Saint-Gaudens (titled “Our Boss”) was published on page 5. After the war, Opffer returned to New York, where he became known for his caricatures of leading Modern writers, among them James Joyce, Edgar Lee Masters, Siegfried Sassoon, George Bernard Shaw, Carl Sandburg, G.K. Chesterton, and Thomas Mann. In the years between the wars, Opffer married Betty à Beckett Chomley, and settled in Paris, where he was a student at the Academie Julliard. He also lived in London and Copenhagen, where his drawings were frequently published in newspapers and magazines. With the outbreak of World War II, he and his family returned to New York and lived in Greenwich Village. Among his friends in that era were William Butler Yeats, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald...

Brightly colored portrait by Michael William Eggleston (American, 20th Century). A cubist-style portrait depicts an abstracted person wearing an orange mask over their eyes. This pie...

A pair of original red conte crayon drawings in their original frames featuring two young women in period clothing.

Richard MacDonald is an artist of unusual depth and complexity. Sculpture has become his primary means of expression, yet this ability was built upon the foundation of a rigorous tra...

Portrait of a semi-attired young woman titled "Regarding Agnes" by Duncan Hannah. Conte pencil on paper. Signed front lower right. Offered framed. Frame size: 10.75 x 8.75 inches ...