Eugene Berman

"Three Medusas, " Eugene Berman, Surrealism, Greek Still Life

1968

Chiura Obata Nasturtiums, circa 1940 Signed and stamped lower left Watercolor on paper 15 x 9 5/8 inches Born in the Okayama prefecture of Japan, Chiura Obata was adopted by his uncle, an artist. As a child he was trained in ink painting, and at 14 he was apprenticed to the painter Murata Tanryo in Tokyo. He also studied with Kogyo Terasaki and Goho Hasimoto. In 1903, Obata moved to San Francisco and began working as an illustrator for The New World and The Japanese American, two of the city's Japanese newspapers. He also did work as a commercial designer. Obata helped establish the East West Art Society in San Francisco in 1921, which sought to promote cross-cultural understanding through art. This goal was reflected in his embrace of the Nihonga style, which fused traditional Japanese sumi-e ink painting with the conventions of western naturalism. He spent much of the 1920s painting landscapes throughout California, and among his favorite subjects were mountain landscapes. In 1927, he visited Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada, creating over a hundred paintings and sketches of the high country. Obata stayed in the USA until the death of his father in 1928. Between 1928 and 1932, he worked in Tokyo as a painter and transformed his California landscape watercolors...

Allan Rohan Crite Animal Illustrations Signed lower left Pen and ink on paper 23 1/2 x 16 inches Brought up in Boston, Crite received his art training al the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree at the Harvard University Extension School in 1968. He worked for most of his life as an illustrator in the Planning Department of the Boston Naval Shipyards, retiring in 1976, but continued to paint at the same time. His work has been widely exhibited and well received in Boston, where a square is named after him. Crite's early paintings depict the daily life of Boston's African-American community, a community that was to be transformed in the following decade by urban renewal and housing projects. In his later paintings, magic-realist visions in which a black Virgin and Child ride on public transportation or float above the city streets, Crite used a bright palette rather than the more somber tones of his "neighborhood paintings...

'Desert Flower', gouache on coloured paper, by Pierre Roy (circa 1930s). The artist has skilfully captured the beautiful white flowers extending from the ma...

Signed lower center, 'Leo Kenney' (American, 1925-2001) and dated 1947. A seminal figure in the second generation of Northwest School artists, Leo Kenney was, like many of his conte...