Alvin C. Hollingsworth

Slate Stone Collage Painting - African American Artist

1955 - 1963

Salvatore Grippi was my art professor at Ithaca college from 1970- 1971 Who was doing paintings like this in 1950? Jackson Pollack, Willem De Kooning and Salvatore Grippi, and a few...

Acrylic on masonite. This is a pivotal work in deep and radiant cobalt blue from 1950. It dipicts calligraphic and hieroglyph structures over a grid and pyramidal base by the first generation abstract expressionist. Provenance: Skinner: November 13, 1992 [Lot 00219}, The entry in the Skinner catalog indicates that the painting came directly from the artist to the family of the consignor to Skinner. Kaminsky Auctions. There is an unbroken paper trail that traces the ownership of the painting from the current owner, through two auction houses to the artist. Perfect unbroken provenance. Pousette-Dart was among the most inventive of the Abstract Expressionist generation, His uncanny talent was to expand the nature of abstraction and still make each mark each element very much his own; a reflection of what he called   "the concealed power of the spirit," he said, “not of the brute physical form."   His was not aiming for a singular, realized aesthetic formula but to expand the possibilities of painting; the transcendental in painting. Typical of such invention and exploration is this  painting  Untitled 1950 when the artist was only 34 years old and represented by one of the champions of the new American painting, Betty Parsons.  
A banner year for Pousette-Dart, the Museum of Modern Art acquired their first painting by the Minnesota born artist.  He worked on easel size works such as this painting an oil on masonite. At the same time Pousette-Dart was also working on larger scale works such as Path of the Hero, running over ten feet in length now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Both contain fields of color articulated by a highly sophisticated white hieroglyphic vocabulary. Rather than demonstrate an expressionist sensibility, Pousette-Dart harnesses his more cerebral ideas transforming thick areas of paint into a more refined composition of geometric forms akin to the pattern and forms of say a stained glass window. In a way he is looking back at Fugue, 1940 a black and white composition which makes use of a similar format of painting albeit smaller. Color and form are minimal, but what Pousette-Dart has maximized is the rhythmic and syncopated character of painting casting his ideas into purely symbolic terms that one might link to the pictograms of Adolph Gottlieb. Nonetheless, nature is always at the core of Pousette-Dart’s thinking and dreaming. Here he has transformed the local Ramapo Mountains—where he will eventually move with his family to live and work— into a complex series of articulated fragments linked by style, scale and color.  The painting’s imagery built on two large triangles and reduced to just two colors, cobalt blue and white all outlined in black.  Pousette-Dart symbols stacked in horizontal and vertical rows:  blue is ground, white is language, symbolic of light, consciousness and awareness . The painting maintains a mystical character images compounded that formulate a secret code and linked to the series of white paintings Pousette-Dart authored in the first half of the 1950s. Get up close to the picture and you discover images within images a kind of picture puzzle...

The work is executed at the heyday of abstract expressionsim in the mid-50s. Colors are saturated and bright. Goldfield (of Goldfield Gallery). Written on the stretcher. Goldfield G...

Signed and dated lower right; inscribed, Dated and Signed on Verso Provenance: Ashley John Gallery

Football plays cloaked in oversized Browns jackets are seen from behind running off the field. Always the graphic innovator, legendary illustrator Bob Peak creates a radical composition by leaving the bottom two-thirds of the picture plane empty of detail. To convey a sense of motion, Peak uses broad strokes of paint similar to the action painters Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning, who were the dominant force in the fine art world in the 1960s. Clearly, one can see a cross-over influence from Fine Art to commercial illustration as Peak strikes a balance between abstract versus figurative art. This work was done on an assignment for Sports Illustrated...

In Byron Brown's "The Night Journey", 1947, Picasso meets Jackson Pollock. Here Brown strikes a balance between fanciful representation and abstraction. ...

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