American Realist Drawings and Watercolor Paintings

Standing Female Nude Colored chalks on tan Strathmore paper, c. 1975 Signed in chalk upper right (see photo) Condition: Excellent Housed in an 8 play acid free rag matting S...

"Good Health Week" American Scene Modern Social Realism Mid- 20th Century WPA Era Jo Cain (1904 – 2003) Good Health Week – b/w 10 ½ x 15 1/2 inches I...

Industrial Man Working Mid 20th Century American Scene Social Realism Modern WPA Jo Cain (1904 - 2003) Hammering Nails 39 x 50 ½ inches Gouache on paper c. 19...

Winold Reiss The Red Silo Signed lower left Watercolor on paper 20 x 29 inches Winold Reiss (1886-1953) was an artist and designer who emigrated to the United States from Germany in 1913. Probably best known as a portraitist, Reiss was a pioneer of modernism and well known for his brilliant work in graphic and interior design. A compassionate man who greatly respected all people as human beings, he believed that his art could help break down racial prejudices. Like his father Fritz Reiss (1857-1915), who was also an artist and who was his son's first teacher, Winold Reiss was artistically moved by diverse cultures. The elder Reiss focused on folk life in Germany while Winold drew substantial inspiration from a range of cultures, particularly Native American, Mexican, and African-American. As did many young aspiring artists, Winold Reiss studied with the esteemed painter and teacher Franz von Stuck at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, which was at that time a center of the decorative and fine-arts movement. It is not known whether Reiss met E. Martin Hennings...

Jerry Berneche (1932 - 2016) was a painter and draftsman of representational scenes and portraits featuring extraordinary color work and extremely detailed mark-making. Locally he is...

Jerry Berneche (1932 - 2016) was a painter and draftsman of representational scenes and portraits featuring extraordinary color work and extremely detailed mark-making. Locally he is...

Jerry Berneche (1932 - 2016) was a painter and draftsman of representational scenes and portraits featuring extraordinary color work and extremely detailed mark-making. Locally he is...

Jerry Berneche (1932 - 2016) was a painter and draftsman of representational scenes and portraits featuring extraordinary color work and extremely detailed mark-making. Locally he is...

Jerry Berneche (1932 - 2016) was a painter and draftsman of representational scenes and portraits featuring extraordinary color work and extremely detailed mark-making. Locally he is...

Jerry Berneche (1932 - 2016) was a painter and draftsman of representational scenes and portraits featuring extraordinary color work and extremely detailed mark-making. Locally he is...

Jerry Berneche (1932 - 2016) was a painter and draftsman of representational scenes and portraits featuring extraordinary color work and extremely detailed mark-making. Locally he is...

Jerry Berneche (1932 - 2016) was a painter and draftsman of representational scenes and portraits featuring extraordinary color work and extremely detailed mark-making. Locally he is...

Jerry Berneche (1932 - 2016) was a painter and draftsman of representational scenes and portraits featuring extraordinary color work and extremely detailed mark-making. Locally he is...

Jerry Berneche (1932 - 2016) was a painter and draftsman of representational scenes and portraits featuring extraordinary color work and extremely detailed mark-making. Locally he is...

Jerry Berneche (1932 - 2016) was a painter and draftsman of representational scenes and portraits featuring extraordinary color work and extremely detailed mark-making. Locally he is...

Jerry Berneche (1932 - 2016) was a painter and draftsman of representational scenes and portraits featuring extraordinary color work and extremely detailed mark-making. Locally he is...

Jerry Berneche (1932 - 2016) was a painter and draftsman of representational scenes and portraits featuring extraordinary color work and extremely detailed mark-making. Locally he is...

Jerry Berneche (1932 - 2016) was a painter and draftsman of representational scenes and portraits featuring extraordinary color work and extremely detailed mark-making. Locally he is...

Jerry Berneche (1932 - 2016) was a painter and draftsman of representational scenes and portraits featuring extraordinary color work and extremely detailed mark-making. Locally he is...

Jerry Berneche (1932 - 2016) was a painter and draftsman of representational scenes and portraits featuring extraordinary color work and extremely detailed mark-making. Locally he is...

Jerry Berneche (1932 - 2016) was a painter and draftsman of representational scenes and portraits featuring extraordinary color work and extremely detailed mark-making. Locally he is...

Jerry Berneche (1932 - 2016) was a painter and draftsman of representational scenes and portraits featuring extraordinary color work and extremely detailed mark-making. Locally he is...

Untitled (Two Workhorses), c. 20th Century Ink on paper Sight: 4 x 4 3/4 in. Framed: 7 5/8 x 8 3/8 x 1/2 in. Initialed lower left: W.H.H.S. This ink drawing masterfully captures to ...

Study of a sultry and seductive reclining platinum blond Pin Up with a wide-brimmed sun hat. Most likely done for Playboy. This work is very finely rendered and looks better the ...

Horses Leaving the Barn Watercolor on paper, 1940 Signed and dated lower left corner (see photo) Condition: Excellent Image: 14 1/2 x 21” Frame: 25” x 31” Provenance; Associated American Artists, New York (see photo of label) Mamdouha and Elmer Holmes Bobst Displayed in an original wormy chestnut frame with OP3 Acrylic. Most probably from the AAA Dehn watercolor exhibition of 1940. Vintage original framing chosen by the artist. Note: Elmer Holmes Bobst (1884–1978) was an American businessman and philanthropist who worked in the pharmaceutical industry. His wife, Mamdouha, was also well known philanthropist. Bobst was born in Lititz, Pennsylvania. He aspired to become a doctor, but instead, he taught himself pharmacology. After his wife Ethel composed his interview letter, he became manager and treasurer of the Hoffman-LaRoche Chemical Works by 1920. When Bobst retired from the company in 1944, he was one of the nation's highest paid corporate executives. In 1945 he took charge of the ailing William Warner Company (later Warner–Lambert) and he remained board chairman until his retirement. Bobst had close connections to President Dwight Eisenhower, but was also a close friend of President Richard Nixon. Note: In 1940, the year of this watercolor, Dehn and Elizabeth Timmerman visited Waterville, MN on their way to Colorado Sprint, Colorado where Dehn was to teach lithography and watercolor. This watercolor is obviously a view of the area around Waterville. Adolf Dehn, American Watercolorist and Printmaker, 1895-1968 Adolf Dehn was an artist who achieved extraordinary artistic heights, but in a very particular artistic sphere—not so much in oil painting as in watercolor and lithography. Long recognized as a master by serious print collectors, he is gradually gaining recognition as a notable and influential figure in the overall history of American art. In the 19th century, with the invention of the rotary press, which made possible enormous print runs, and the development of the popular, mass-market magazines, newspaper and magazine illustration developed into an artistic realm of its own, often surprisingly divorced from the world of museums and art exhibitions, and today remains surprisingly overlooked by most art historians. Dehn in many regards was an outgrowth of this world, although in an unusual way, since as a young man he produced most of his illustrative work not for popular magazines, such as The Saturday Evening Post, but rather for radical journals, such as The Masses or The Liberator, or artistic “little magazines” such as The Dial. This background established the foundation of his outlook, and led later to his unique and distinctive contribution to American graphic art. If there’s a distinctive quality to his work, it was his skill in introducing unusual tonal and textural effects into his work, particularly in printmaking but also in watercolor. Jackson Pollock seems to have been one of many notable artists who were influenced by his techniques. Early Years, 1895-1922 For an artist largely remembered for scenes of Vienna and Paris, Adolf Dehn’s background was a surprising one. Born in Waterville, Minnesota, on November 22, 1895, Dehn was the descendent of farmers who had emigrated from Germany and homesteaded in the region, initially in a one-room log cabin with a dirt floor. Adolf’s father, Arthur Clark Dehn, was a hunter and trapper who took pride that he had no boss but himself, and who had little use for art. Indeed, during Adolf’s boyhood the walls of his bedroom and the space under his bed were filled with the pelts of mink, muskrats and skunks that his father had killed, skinned and stretched on drying boards. It was Adolf’s mother, Emilie Haas Dehn, a faithful member of the German Lutheran Evangelical Church, who encouraged his interest in art, which became apparent early in childhood. Both parents were ardent socialists, and supporters of Eugene Debs. In many ways Dehn’s later artistic achievement was clearly a reaction against the grinding rural poverty of his childhood. After graduating from high school in 1914 at the age of 19—an age not unusual in farming communities at the time, where school attendance was often irregular—Dehn attended the Minneapolis School of Art from 1914 to 1917, whose character followed strongly reflected that of its director, Munich-trained Robert Kohler, an artistic conservative but a social radical. There Dehn joined a group of students who went on to nationally significant careers, including Wanda Gag (later author of best-selling children’s books); John Flanagan (a sculptor notable for his use of direct carving) Harry Gottlieb (a notable social realist and member of the Woodstock Art Colony), Elizabeth Olds (a printmaker and administrator for the WPA), Arnold Blanch (landscape, still-life and figure painter, and member of the Woodstock group), Lucille Lunquist, later Lucille Blanch (also a gifted painter and founder of the Woodstock art colony), and Johan Egilrud (who stayed in Minneapolis and became a journalist and poet). Adolf became particularly close to Wanda Gag (1893-1946), with whom he established an intense but platonic relationship. Two years older than he, Gag was the daughter of a Bohemian artist and decorator, Anton Gag, who had died in 1908. After her husband died, Wanda’s mother, Lizzi Gag, became a helpless invalid, so Wanda was entrusted with the task of raising and financially supporting her six younger siblings. This endowed her with toughness and an independent streak, but nonetheless, when she met Dehn, Wanda was Victorian and conventional in her artistic taste and social values. Dehn was more socially radical, and introduced her to radical ideas about politics and free love, as well as to socialist publications such as The Masses and The Appeal to Reason. Never very interested in oil painting, in Minneapolis Dehn focused on caricature and illustration--often of a humorous or politically radical character. In 1917 both Dehn and Wanda won scholarships to attend the Art Students League, and consequently, in the fall of that year both moved to New York. Dehn’s art education, however, ended in the summer of 1918, shortly after the United States entered World War I, when he was drafted to serve in the U. S. Army. Unwilling to fight, he applied for status as a conscientious objector, but was first imprisoned, then segregated in semi-imprisonment with other Pacifists, until the war ended. The abuse he suffered at this time may well explain his later withdrawal from taking political stands or making art of an overtly political nature. After his release from the army, Dehn returned to New York where he fell under the spell of the radical cartoonist Boardman Robinson and produced his first lithographs. He also finally consummated his sexual relationship with Wanda Gag. The Years in Europe: 1922-1929 In September of 1921, however, he abruptly departed for Europe, arriving in Paris and then moving on to Vienna. There in the winter of 1922 he fell in love with a Russian dancer, Mura Zipperovitch, ending his seven-year relationship with Wanda Gag. He and Mura were married in 1926. It was also in Vienna that he produced his first notable artistic work. Influenced by European artists such as Jules Pascin and Georg Grosz, Dehn began producing drawings of people in cafes, streets, and parks, which while mostly executed in his studio, were based on spontaneous life studies and have an expressive, sometimes almost childishly wandering quality of line. The mixture of sophistication and naiveté in these drawings was new to American audiences, as was the raciness of their subject matter, which often featured pleasure-seekers, prostitutes or scenes of sexual dalliance, presented with a strong element of caricature. Some of these drawings contain an element of social criticism, reminiscent of that found in the work of George Grosz, although Dehn’s work tended to focus on humorous commentary rather than savagely attacking his subjects or making a partisan political statement. Many Americans, including some who had originally been supporters of Dehn such as Boardman Robinson, were shocked by these European drawings, although George Grocz (who became a friend of the artist in this period) admired them, and recognized that Dehn could also bring a new vision to America subject matter. As he told Dehn: “You will do things in America which haven’t been done, which need to be done, which only you can do—as far at least as I know America.” A key factor in Dehn’s artistic evolution at this time was his association with Scofield Thayer...

Peter Hurd (1904 - 1984) New Mexico Artist Image Size: 11 x 20 Frame Size: 25 x 33 Medium: Ink Wash Circa 1950s-60s "New Mexico Landscape" Biography P...

Charles Kinghan: 1895-1984. Unlisted American artist with auction results over $2100. That’s fantastic watercolor of a beach in Corona Del Mar California was probably done mid 20th c...

John Pellew: 1903-1993. listed English and American artist with auction results for watercolors over $1100. He was born in England but painted in Connecticut where this charming wate...

"Catching A Fish" is an original gouache and watercolor painting on illustration board. It is signed in the lower left by the artist Tom Rost. 25" x 20 5/8" art 30 5/8" x 24 3/4" framed with museum glass Tom Rost spent most of his life in Wisconsin, graduating from the Milwaukee State Teacher's College (now the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee). He began his artistic career as an illustrator for the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Works Progress Administration, and the Treasury Department. Later, he began illustrating for the Milwaukee Journal and then left to work in New York with the Field...

Pen and black ink on watermarked Ingres laid paper, 9 1/4 x 12 1/4 inches (234 x 310 mm), signed, dated and titled in brown ink, and initialed and titled in black ink in the lower right corner. Light to moderate age tone and mat tone, and with the signature and notations in brown ink having become quite attenuated, although legible. Presented in a basic black wood frame with a label from the Country Art...

This watercolor painting from 1940 depicts a scene of sharecroppers working in a cotton field. This piece represents a blend of American Realism and a more figurative, impressionisti...

NYC Subway Riders Mid 20th Century American Scene Social Realism WPA Modern 1930s Daniel Celentano (1902 - 1980) Subway Scene, 1930s 8 x 9 inches Ink and wash on paper Singed lower ...

Irish Sea Watercolor, 1947 Signed and dated by the artist lower right Condition: Excellent Image/Sheet size: 12 x 18 inches Provenance: Estate of the Artist ...

Robert Kipniss (American, b. 1931) At Dawn, 1975 Pencil on paper 10 1/2 x 7 1/4 in. Framed: 14 2/3 x 11 1/3 in. Signed upper right: Kipniss '75 Verso bears Hirschl & Adler Galleries Label Robert Kipniss, painter and printmaker, was born in New York City in 1931. He creates essentially monochromatic*, stylized vistas with natural and architectural elements intended to evoke an elegiac, nearly surrealistic mood in haunting, silent landscapes; the melancholy of nostalgia. Trees, in mid and far-distance, form clusters or act as misty individuals containing a haunted, indefinable presence, witnesses to the foreground drama of more specific shape, form and detail, often a close-up tree. Kipniss studied at the Art Students League* in 1947; Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio, 1948-50; and the University of Iowa, receiving a BA degree in English literature in 1952, and an MFA in painting and art history in 1954. The artist employs a meticulous technique combining a multiplicity of specific strokes, whether with brush, pencil or print-maker's needle and burin*, to create the essence of his generalized, non-specific forms. Light and darkness are clearly Kipniss' compositionally constructive elements. They also exist as contestants in the emotional drama at the heart of each work of art. The contrast, and sometimes combat, between these two opposites, symbolically represent with blackness -- ideas of threat, fear, trouble, evil; with whiteness safety, redemption, fulfillment and good. In Kipniss' 1995 mezzotint*, Clear Vase and Landscape, with a foreground image of precisely leafy stalks, the vase holding them, nearly invisible in its transparency, suggests an almost Salvador Dali-like surrealist device. This central image dominates but seems to invite association with, and commentary from, the surrounding clumps and individual round-topped, yet cedar-like trees. His mezzzotint, For Stella," 1997, depicts a gently twisting, curving, pale and smoothly-barked foreground, leafless tree limb or trunk, like a female human body, suggesting weakness, fatigue, an inability to deal with the staccato background screen of textured bush that seems to uncomfortably impinge upon it. This print is arguably a metaphor for a delicate soul struggling to overcome the prickly difficulties of domineering life. The classic mezzotint process, invented in the middle of the 17th Century, is the reverse of most of the other print-making media, since the artist works from a black ground to increasingly lighter areas. The copper plate is first roughened by a "rocker," creating a burr over the entire surface (the more burr left intact, the more ink it holds, the darker the final finished print). The artist, Robert Kipniss, in this instance, gradually burnishes, smoothes down the burr in varying degrees to produce the gradations of lights and darks of the final design. The deepest darks in the final picture are those areas on the plate that have been little touched after the initial roughening. Mezzotint relies on shade and tone rather than outline for its effect, which fits the Kipniss style of atmospheric* masses of value. A recent oil painting by Robert Kipniss, Hillside Silhouettes, 2001, 40 x 29, is somewhat more complex in composition than many, with four cubically-constructed houses each set in their own zones, seemingly unrelated to one another, with receding hills and similarly isolated, increasingly misty trees beyond. In his career, Robert Kipniss has had over 40 one-man shows since the first in New York in 1951, including an important retrospective exhibition at the Associated American Artist Gallery, New York in 1977. Many of these one-man exhibitions have been mounted by over 50 museums in the United States, South America and Europe, including the Chicago Art Institute, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modem Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Library of Congress and British Museum in London. Robert Kipniss is represented in the permanent collections of the institutions above, among many others, as well as the Philadelphia Museum of Art; New York Public Library; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Detroit Art Institute; Yale University Museum; National Collection of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institution; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Portland Art Museum; and the New Orleans Museum of Art. He was elected to the National Academy of Design* in 1980, and to the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers, London in 1998 Robert Kipniss can be referenced in numerous publications, including Who's Who in American Art from the 1950s to the present, and multiple reviews in periodicals like Art News, Art in America and Art Forum. There are also three important catalogues raisonne published on his work. Robert Kipniss has received many awards: 1965 - Ohio University National Drawing Show, Purchase Prize 1976 - National Academy of Design, New York City, The Ralph Fabri Prize 1978 - The Print Club of Philadelphia, Charles M Lea Prize 1979 - Charlotte Printmakers Society, Purchase Award 1979 - Society of American Graphic Artists, Printmaking Award 1979 - Wittenberg University, Springfield, OH, Honorary Doctorate 1980 - Elected to the National Academy of Design, New York City 1980 - Audubon Artists, New York City, Silver Medal 1980 - National Academy of Design, New York City, The Leo Meissner...

Coral Reef Painting Life Mag Published 1953. Mid Century Modern American Scene Antonio Petruccelli (1907 – 1994) The World We Live In Coral Reef ...

Original Painting Cathedral Interior New Yorker Cover Proposal 1939 Jesus Church Antonio Petruccelli (1907 – 1994) Cathedral New Yorker cover proposa...

Untitled (Female Nude) Graphite and sgrafitto on yellow paper, 1987 Signed lower right Note: Steven Assael is represented by Forum Gallery in New York. In 1977 he won the Charles Ro...

Original Painting. Colliers Magazine Cover Published 1933 Wedding Illustration Antonio Petruccelli (1907 - 1994) The Wedding Colliers published, June 17, 1933 17 1/4 X 11 1/2 inches (sight) Framed 23 1/4 X 17 1/2 inches Gouache on board Signed lower right BIOGRAPHY: Antonio Petruccelli (1907-1994) began his career as a textile designer. He became a freelance illustrator in 1932 after winning several House Beautiful cover illustration contests. In addition to 24 Fortune magazine covers, four New Yorker covers, several for House Beautiful, Collier’s, and other magazines he did numerous illustrations for Life magazine from the 1930s – 60s. ‘Tony was Mr. Versatility for Fortune. He could do anything, from charts and diagrams to maps, illustrations, covers, and caricatures,’ said Francis Brennan, the former art director for Fortune. Over the course of his career, Antonio won several important design awards, designing a U.S. Postage Stamp Commemorating the Steel Industry and designing the Bicentennial Medal...

Set of four (4) watercolors by Leonard Reedy. Each identically famed and each measuring approximately 8 in x 10 in. All are in excellent condition.

"Thomaston, Maine" is a 15 x 13.5 inches, watercolor townscape, signed in the lower left, and framed behind glass. Ranulph Bye was born in 1916 in Princet...

Original Painting Undersea Whale Life Mag Published 1953 Illustration Ocean Sea Antonio Petruccelli (1907 – 1994) Underwater Whale Life Illustration published, c. November 7, 1953 1...

Original Painting New Yorker Mag Cover proposal. Army Wedding American Scene WPA Antonio Petruccelli (1907 – 1994) Army Wedding New Yorker cover proposal, c. 1939 11 1/2 X 8 inches ...

Original Painting Life Mag Published 1953 Birds Animals Illustration Mid Century Antonio Petruccelli (1907 - 1994) The World We Live In Birds of Paradise Life Magazine Illustration ...

The Skull-and-Crossbones flag flies atop this illustration of a Pirate Ship. Two palm trees flank it, and it floats in a cropped stylized sea. A single hatted figure is seen looking ...

Nude on a Stool Ink on paper, c. 1970-80 Signed in red ink lower right Illustrated: Elliott & Wooden, page 232 A copy of this hardbound books accompanies purchase Condition: Excell...

Miriam Story Hurford was a prolific and major American female illustrator in the 1930s to the 1950s. Her work was for cover art for women's magazines and home magazines and religious magazines. This work depicts t the wise men being guided by the star of Bethleham to the birth of the Christ child for a Christmas magazine...

East meets West in this charming illustration where a female American Illustrator paints a scene of two jovial Japanese youths in a semi-Japanese style. Clara Miller Burd was a brilliant female illustrator trained in the academic tradition. This work shows her deep mastery of how to render form properly. The way she captures the expression the two children is spot on. Signed lower right. Burd was an American stained glass designer, and children's book, and magazine cover illustrator. She was a resident of Montclair, NJ and there is a gallery sticker on the back for a gallery in Montclair. Framed under glass 17 x 22 1/2". After returning from France, Burd worked as a stained glass designer at the Tiffany Glass and Decorating Company...

Nude in a Mirror Ink and wash on paper, n.d. Signed in red ink lower right (see photo) Illustrated: Elliott & Wooden, page 153, a monograph on the artist's drawings Note: a cop...

Nude Reclining on a Mat Ink on paper, n.d. Signed in red ink lower right Same model used in Elliott & Wooden pages 198 and 199 Condition: Excellent Provenance: Estate of the Artist Warren Shaull, Dodge City, KS (collector's stamp verso) Aaron Bohrod (21 November 1907 – 3 April 1992) was an American artist best known for his trompe-l'œil still-life paintings. Education Bohrod was born in Chicago in 1907, the son of an emigree Bessarabian-Jewish grocer. Bohrod studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League of New York between 1926 and 1930. While at the Art Students League, Bohrod was influenced by John Sloan and chose themes that involved his own surroundings. Career He returned to Chicago in 1930 where he painted views of the city and its working class. He eventually earned Guggenheim Fellowships which permitted him to travel throughout the country, painting and recording the American scene. His early work won him widespread praise as an important social realist and regional painter and printmaker and his work was marketed through Associated American Artists in New York. Bohrod completed three commissioned murals for the Treasury Departments Section of Fine Arts in Illinois; Vandalia in 1935, Galesburg in 1938 and Clinton in 1939. During World War II, Bohrod worked as an artist; first in the Pacific for the United States Army Corps of Engineers' Army War Art Unit...

American Impressionist

American Impressionist

American Impressionist

Original watercolor and gouache on archival Molvin arches paper by the well known American illustrator Fred Sweney. The scene depicts Central Park in New York City in a winter landscape with figures in conversation under an illuminated lamp post. Signed lower right. Titled verso in pencil with American Scene magazine #32 and page 30...

Study of an Italian Town with Women in a Doorway Graphite on cream wove paper, c. 1960 Signed by the artist in pencil lower right (see photo) A master of ...

John Aldrich Ruthven American Painter Bison in a Snow Blizzard Watercolor and Gouache on Paper signed lower left

Stunning use of cross-hatching. Close up this is an abstract drawing. Ink on Strathmore Bristol Board - Perfect Condition and looks better in person. Elegantly matted but not framed

American Impressionist

Delicate watercolor, pen and ink floral study of a purple iris by California artist Deborah Eddy (American, b. 1943). Signed lower center. Attributed to De...