Emil Bisttram

Untitled, Still Life of Shell

1945-1951

Still Life with Tromp L'Oeil Graphite and watercolor on a book page. Signed in ink by the artist lower right corner (see photo) Provenance: Estate of the artist (Estate No. 00916 verso) Ray Sommer (the artist's son) Joseph M. Erdelac (No. 18 JME verso) Book page verso is an illustration of a Durer woodcut...

Plum Branches and Flowers watercolor on wove paper, 1985 Signed and dated in pencil lower right corner From the artist's 1985 sketchbook Inspired by O'Sickey's love of Japanese and Chinese art and calligraphy. Provenance: Estate of the artist Condition: Excellent Image/Sheet size: 13 5/8 x 17 inches Joseph B. O’Sickey, Painter 1974 CLEVELAND ARTS PRIZE FOR VISUAL ARTS The title conferred on him by Plain Dealer art critic Steve Litt in a 1994 article, “the dean of painting in northeast Ohio,” must have pleased Joseph O'Sickey. It was more than 30 years since he had burst onto the local (and national) art scene. O’Sickey was already in his 40s in that spring of 1962 when he had his first one-man show at the Akron Art Museum and was signed by New York’s prestigious Seligmann Galleries, founded in 1888. In the decade and a half that followed, he would have seven one-man shows at Seligmann, which had showed the work of such trailblazing figures as Seurat, Vuilliard, Bonnard, Leger and Picasso, and appear in all of the group shows. O’Sickey took the Best Painting award in the 1962 May Show at the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA). He and would capture the same honor in back-to-back May Shows in 1964 and ’65, and again in 1967. The remarkable thing, noted the Plain Dealer’s Helen Borsick, was that he accomplished this sweep in a variety of painterly styles, even using that most hackneyed of subjects, flowers. “The subject doesn’t matter,” he told her, “what the artist brings to it is the important thing.” O’Sickey’s garden and landscape paintings were big and bold, eschewing delicate detail in favor of vitality and impact. The great art collector and CMA benefactor Katherine C. White, standing before one of O’Sickey’s vivid garden paintings, compared the sensation to “being pelted with flowers.” Though he might represent an entire blossom with one or two smudged brush strokes or a stem with a simple sweep of green, O’Sickey rejected the moniker of Impressionist—or Pointillist or Abstract painter or Expressionist. “My work,” he said, “is a direct response to the subject. I believe in fervor and poetic metaphor. I try to make each color and shape visible and identifiable within the context of surrounding colors and shapes. A yellow must hold its unique quality from any another yellow or surrounding color, and yet read as a lemon or an object, by inference. It does not require shading or modeling—the poetic evocation is part of the whole.” “The subject,” O’Sickey used to tell his students at Kent State University, where he taught painting from 1964 to 1989, “has to be seen as a whole and the painting has to be structured to be seen as a whole.” He liked to think of it as “a process of controlled rapture.” When, in the 1960s, fond childhood memories drew him to the zoo, he found himself responding to the caged animals in their lonely dignity (or indignity) with sharp-edged, almost silhouette-like forms that evoked Matisse’s paintings and cut-paper assemblages. One observer was left with the impression that the artist had “looked at these animals, past daylight and into dusk when they lose their details in shadow and become pure shapes, with eyes that are seeing the viewer rather than the other way around. This is a world of shape and essence,” wrote Helen Borsick. “All is simplification.” O’Sickey attributed his ability to capture his subjects with just a few strokes—in an almost iconographic way—to a rigorous exercise he had imposed upon himself over a period of several months. Limiting his tools to a large No. 6 bristle brush and black ink, he set himself the task of drawing his pet parakeet and the other small objects in its cage (cuttlebone, feeding dish, tinkling bell) hundreds of times. The exercise gave him “invaluable insights into painting. . . . Because of the crudity of the medium, every part of these drawings had to be an invention and every mark had to have its room and clarity.” Then he began adding one color at a time—“still with the same brush and striving for the same clarity”—and headed off to the zoo where “the world opened up to me. I learned how little it took to express the subject.” Born in Detroit at the close of the First World War, O’Sickey grew up in St. Stanislaus parish near East 65th and Fleet on Cleveland’s southeast side. (The apostrophe was inserted into the family’s proud Polish name by a clerk at Ellis Island.) An early interest in drawing and painting may have been kindled by the presence on the walls of Charles Dickens Elementary School, one of only three grade schools in the district with a special focus on the arts, of masterful watercolors by such Cleveland masters as Paul Travis, Frank N. Wilcox and Bill Coombes. As a youngster O’Sickey took drawing classes at the Cleveland Museum of Art, and he and his brother spent hours copying famous paintings; while a student at East Tech High School in the mid-’30s, he attended free evening classes in life drawing with Travis and Ralph Stoll at the John Huntington Art and Polytechnic Institute, and Saturday classes at the Cleveland School (later the Cleveland Institute) of Art, where he earned his degree in 1940 under the tutelage of Travis, Stoll and such other legendary figures as Henry Keller, Carl Gaertner, William Eastman, Kenneth Bates...

Hannah Reeves Eastern Bluebird 2024 13 x 11 framed

Joseph Stella was a visionary artist who painted what he saw, an idiosyncratic and individual experience of his time and place. Stella arrived in New York in 1896, part of a wave of Italian immigrants from poverty-stricken Southern Italy. But Stella was not a child of poverty. His father was a notary and respected citizen in Muro Locano, a small town in the southern Appenines. The five Stella brothers were all properly educated in Naples. Stella’s older brother, Antonio, was the first of the family to come to America. Antonio Stella trained as a physician in Italy, and was a successful and respected doctor in the Italian community centered in Greenwich Village. He sponsored and supported his younger brother, Joseph, first sending him to medical school in New York, then to study pharmacology, and then sustaining him through the early days of his artistic career. Antonio Stella specialized in the treatment of tuberculosis and was active in social reform circles. His connections were instrumental in Joseph Stella’s early commissions for illustrations in reform journals. Joseph Stella, from the beginning, was an outsider. He was of the Italian-American community, but did not share its overwhelming poverty and general lack of education. He went back to Italy on several occasions, but was no longer an Italian. His art incorporated many influences. At various times his work echoed the concerns and techniques of the so-called Ashcan School, of New York Dada, of Futurism and, of Cubism, among others. These are all legitimate influences, but Stella never totally committed himself to any group. He was a convivial, but ultimately solitary figure, with a lifelong mistrust of any authority external to his own personal mandate. He was in Europe during the time that Alfred Stieglitz established his 291 Gallery. When Stella returned he joined the international coterie of artists who gathered at the West Side apartment of the art patron Conrad Arensberg. It was here that Stella became close friends with Marcel Duchamp. Stella was nineteen when he arrived in America and studied in the early years of the century at the Art Students League, and with William Merritt Chase, under whose tutelage he received rigorous training as a draftsman. His love of line, and his mastery of its techniques, is apparent early in his career in the illustrations he made for various social reform journals. Stella, whose later work as a colorist is breathtakingly lush, never felt obliged to choose between line and color. He drew throughout his career, and unlike other modernists, whose work evolved inexorably to more and more abstract form, Stella freely reverted to earlier realist modes of representation whenever it suited him. This was because, in fact, his “realist” work was not “true to nature,” but true to Stella’s own unique interpretation. Stella began to draw flowers, vegetables, butterflies, and birds in 1919, after he had finished the Brooklyn Bridge series of paintings, which are probably his best-known works. These drawings of flora and fauna were initially coincidental with his fantastical, nostalgic and spiritual vision of his native Italy which he called Tree of My Life (Mr. and Mrs. Barney A. Ebsworth Foundation and Windsor, Inc., St. Louis, illus. in Barbara Haskell, Joseph Stella, exh. cat. [New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994], p. 111 no. 133). Two Wood Ducks...