Agnes Hart

Abstract

Signed lower left. About the artist: Rolph Scarlett was a painter of geometric abstraction during the American avant-garde movement of the 1930s and 1940s. Born in Guelph, Ontario,...

Signed & dated Verso. 1965 Paul Reed in 1970. He favored “staining” untreated canvas. Paul Reed, the last surviving member of the Washington Color School, who explored the complexities of color and form in vibrant bio-morphic and hard-edge abstract paintings, died on Sept. 26 at his home in Phoenix. He was 96. His death was confirmed by his daughter, Jean Reed Roberts. Mr. Reed acquired his public identity as an artist when he was included, along with Gene Davis, Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis, Thomas Downing and Howard Mehring, in “The Washington Color Painters,” a landmark traveling exhibition that began at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art in 1965. All of the other painters had been shown, the year before, in “Post-Painterly Abstraction,” a 31-artist exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art organized by the critic Clement Greenberg in an effort to write a new chapter in the historic march of abstract art. Like his fellow Washington artists, Mr. Reed rejected the hot, gestural approach of Abstract Expressionism and explored color and abstract forms in a cooler mode. Working with diluted acrylic paint, in discrete series that methodically explored formal issues, he created luminous fields of color by letting the paint bleed into, or stain, untreated canvas. “I have a saying: Pollock dripped, Frankenthaler poured,” he told The Washington Post in 2011, referring to the artist Helen Frankenthaler. “Morris Louis poured. Howard Mehring sprinkled. I blot.” In his first stained series, “Mandala,” color radiated from a circular central image. The nearly 100 paintings in his “Disk” series, which he called “a matrix for exploiting color,” consisted of a central circle and two triangles positioned at the corners of the canvas. Over the next decade he moved to hard-edge geometric zigzags and stripes in the vertical “Upstart” series, color grids and shaped canvases that allowed for more complex experiments in form and color relations. He also made welded steel sculptures and, in the “Quad” series of the 1980s, collaged photographs. “Reed was, in a sense, the ‘little master’ of that first batch of Washington colorists,” the critic Benjamin Forgey wrote in The Washington Post in 1997. “He was a latecomer — he didn’t turn seriously to painting until he was in his mid-30s — but he never considered becoming anything other than an abstract painter. And when he was ready to show, in his early 40s, he was a very good abstract painter indeed.” Mr. Reed gave himself a more modest assessment in an interview with NPR last year. “I’m sort of low man on the totem pole of that group of six,” he said. Paul Allen...

Signed lower right. A major exponent of non-objective painting, Rolph Scarlett's career and artistic philosophy is closely linked with the early history of the Solomon R. Guggenhei...

Signed & dated 2020 lower right. His father nearly sold 5-year- old Erik Johnsen in 1965 for $600. What followed was a chaotic journey into beatings, sexual abuse and groundlessness...

Rolph Scarlett (Canadian/American, 1889 - 1984) “Geometric Composition” Signed lower right, circa late 1930’s early 1940’s 19 ½ x 26 inches Mixed media, Price on request About Rolph...

Signed lower right Agnes Hart was born in Meridan, Connecticut. She studied at the Ringling School of Art in Sarasota, Florida; at Iowa State University with Josef Presser, Paul Burlin and Lucile...

Leslie Wilkes’ pieces are an explosion of shape and color. With near perfect symmetry, these works exhibit opaque and smooth surfaces. “Wilkes’ geometric patterns are unique in that ...

Leslie Wilkes’ paintings on canvas and gouaches on paper are an explosion of shape and color. With near perfect symmetry, the colors of these works exhibit an opaque, smooth surface....

Leslie Wilkes’ pieces are an explosion of shape and color. With near perfect symmetry, these works exhibit opaque and smooth surfaces. “Wilkes’ geometric patterns are unique in that ...

Leslie Wilkes’ pieces are an explosion of shape and color. With near perfect symmetry, these works exhibit opaque and smooth surfaces. “Wilkes’ geometric patterns are unique in that ...

Leslie Wilkes’ pieces are an explosion of shape and color. With near perfect symmetry, these works exhibit opaque and smooth surfaces. “Wilkes’ geometric patterns are unique in that ...

Leslie Wilkes’ pieces are an explosion of shape and color. With near perfect symmetry, these works exhibit opaque and smooth surfaces. “Wilkes’ geometric patterns are unique in that ...