Benny Collin

Symphonic Forms

1955

Werner Drewes (1899-1985). Composition 209, 1939. oil on canvas, 20 x 24 inches; 28 x 32 inches in original frame. Signed and dated with artist monogram lower left and again on verso...

Edward August Landon (1911-1984). Untitled, ca. 1960. Oil on wood panel, 4 x 4 inches. Measures 7 x 7.25 inches framed. Signed lower right. Excellent condition. Minor staining in matting. Birth place: Hartford, CT Death place: Hartford Addresses: NYC, 1947; Weston, VT, 1973 Profession: Printmaker, painter Studied: Hartford Art School; ASL; also with Carlos Merida, Mexico. Exhibited: S. Indp. A., 1940; Nat. Serigraph Soc., 1940-60; Am. Color Print Soc. Ann., 1945-65; Northwest Printmakers Ann., 1950-60; U.S. Info Agency Int. Circulating Exhib., 1952; Boston Printmakers Ann., 1955-70; nationally in print exhibs., since 1941; Doris Meltzer...

Murray Hantman (1904-1999). Industrial Composition, c.1948-50. Oil on canvas measures 18 x 24 inches, 19 x 25 inches in original simple wood strip frame. Signed lower right. Excellent condition with no conservation. Exhibition label affixed en verso. Provenance: estate of Murray Hantman. This piece was included in the exhibition Murray Hantman: From Image to Abstraction, Portland Museum of Art, 2005. Anonymous lender. Biography: Shaped by his life experiences and a commitment to the practice of making art, the work of Murray Hantman represents a career of personal exploration and aesthetic refinement that took him from New York, to Los Angeles, back to New York and eventually to the serene, yet dramatic, coast of Maine where he worked as part of the artists’ colony on Monhegan Island. Born in Pennsylvania in 1904, Hantman’s family moved many times to follow his father’s business opportunities, eventually settling in New York. A childhood of economic instability and dislocation formed Hantman’s early years, making him independent and self-reliant from a very early age. Hantman’s father owned movie theatres and photography studios and, recognizing his son’s artistic ability, employed him to print and hand-color photographs as a child. When he was eleven and living in Michigan, a public school teacher arranged for Hantman to receive a scholarship to the Detroit Museum of Art School where after a year he was awarded another scholarship to study at the Detroit School of Design. He studied in Detroit for a year until his family abruptly moved to Alabama, interrupting his artistic and academic studies until the family moved to New York at the end of the first World War. As a young man, Hantman supported himself by working many different jobs in New York and New Jersey. Steady work with his brother at the Hartford and New Haven Railroad office in New York City finally allowed Hantman to pursue his artistic studies in a formal way. In 1928, he enrolled in the Art Students League and became part of a social circle of artists and activists. While at the Art Students League, Hantman worked with faculty members Boardman Robinson and Thomas Hart Benton on two mural projects. During the years around the Great Depression, Hantman worked in Los Angeles with a group of artists known as the Bloc of Painters. Recruited through an advertisement to attend a course on fresco painting, the Bloc group was headed by Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros who had recently been exiled from Mexico for political activism. Through his work with Siqueiros, Hantman became motivated by social and political issues and their creative expression. In 1934, Hantman returned to New York and found the community of artists there equally engaged in social justice issues. While enrolling at the newly-formed Artists’ Union to advocate for the labor rights of creative workers, Hantman met sculptor Jo Levy who would become his wife. Like many artists at the time, Hantman found work through the Federal Art Project as a member of the Easel Painting Division which strove to create “works of art for the public which have a definite social value to the community”. (1) Along with the work he exhibited as a member of the WPA group, Hantman’s personal work from this period was in the style of Social Realism he learned from Siqueiros. Hantman and his wife, Jo Levy, believed in creating art for the public good. Their Artists’ Union friends and colleagues from the Federal Art Project formed the nucleus of their social circle and would become the community of artists who worked together during summers on Monhegan Island off the coast of Maine. In 1945, Hantman had his first solo painting show at Marquie Gallery in New York, and visits Monhegan Island for the first time. The following summer, he and Levy spend the summer in Maine, and would continue to do so for the next thirty years. The landscapes and seascapes of Maine would become a central subject in his work after 1946. The dramatic coastline of Monhegan Island had been inspiration for other New York artists before Hantman, including George Bellows and Rockwell Kent. As Hantman matured as an artist he began to reject academic narrative in his work, moving towards a more expressionistic and abstract style. During this shift into abstraction, nature remained central to his work and the seascape and Maine light provided continual inspiration. In the late 1940s, Hantman begins to reduce the landscape into elemental forms of color and shape. As he pursues this mode of painting his work moves further into abstraction, juxtaposing large blocks of saturated color to convey the drama of sea and sky. Always a student and teacher, Hantman distilled the ideologies of Abstract Expressionism and synthesized its concepts into his own work. Throughout the 1950s, he experimented with Action Painting, color, form and expression. By the late 1950s, Hantman’s mature style had developed into abstract works of pure color masses in simple geometric forms. His mastery of color and form continued into his late work, always reflecting the beauty of the natural world around him. Dedicated to the idea of exploration in his art, Hantman made hundreds of small color and form studies that hint at the large-scale works that would follow in the late 1960s and beyond. Hantman’s work from the ‘70s and ‘80s shows even more intensity of color and distillation of composition. The landscape of the Maine coast remained his muse throughout, the stark lines suggesting the flat plane of sea and horizon line beyond. Hantman and Jo Levy lived in New York and summered on Monhegan Island until 1975, followed by summers in Owls Head and New Harbor...

Edwin Kosarek (b.1929). Portrait, 1951. Oil on masonite panel, 20 x 24 inches; 25 x 29 inches in period frame. Signed and dated on verso. Edwin Kosarek...

Edwin Kosarek (b.1929). Reclining Nude, 1952. Oil on wood panel, 17 x 48 inches. Signed and dated on verso. Edwin Kosarek Born: 1929 Studied: The Cit...

Marjorie Doolittle Hodges (1888-1972). Going to Market, ca. 1955. Oil on canvas, measuring 18 x 22 inche; 24 x 28 inches framed. Signed lower right. Signed and titled on verso. Excellent condition. orn in Nebraska on Jan. 15, 1888, Hodges was educated at the University of St Louis and Columbia University. Upon moving to the Monterey Peninsula in 1912, she studied at the Carmel Art Institute. From 1917 to 1932 she taught in the Los Angeles public schools. She started a greeting card company called House of K.H.S. in Los Angeles together with Vivian Stringfiled and Fannie Kerns. They made handpainted greeting cards, using wood block print methods, for all seasons of the year. Inspired by the Arts & Crafts Movement and incorporating modernist aesthetics, they used their skills to produce wonderful one-of-a-kind cards. Not only were they friends, artists, and business owners, they took part in a three woman exhibit at the Museum of History, Science, and Art, Los Angeles (now LACMA) in 1918 titled An Exhibit of Decorative Landscapes by Fannie M Kerns, Vivian F. Stringfield, and Marjorie Hodges. After her marriage to Robert Doolittle in 1932, she returned to the Monterey Peninsula where she further studied with Armin Hansen and Ralph Johonnot...

Haavikko 2, Oil on wood panel by Karl Böhmer. Dimensions: 19 x 15 cm Karl Böhmer – The Logic of Passion A Paradox: All art has its beginning in perception, and yet it only really...

Vectorscape I, 2015 oil, oil enamel and acrylic enamel on wood panels 10 x 20 feet (in 12 parts) Rafael Vargas-Suarez (born 1972), more commonly known as Vargas-Suarez Universal, is a contemporary artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Born in Mexico City, Vargas-Suarez was raised in the Houston suburb of Clear Lake City, adjacent to the Johnson Space Center. From 1991 to 1996 he studied astronomy and art history at the University of Texas at Austin[citation needed] and moved to New York City in 1997. He is primarily known for large-scale wall drawings, paintings, drawings, and photographs that draw inspiration from architecture, astronomy, biology, and medicine. His work has been or is currently featured in numerous exhibits, such as the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, New York, the Jersey City Museum in Jersey City, New Jersey, the Thomas Erben Gallery in New York City, the Galeria Ramis...

Four smooth wood panels painted off white with four different cut outs, come together to form a unique and sophisticated ensemble. The works can be mounted either in a square or in ...

ADDITIONAL PHOTOS OF THIS WORK WILL BE SENT UPON REQUEST: Jean Feinberg is a NY based artist whose wall constructions - paintings on found wood and paintings on painted plywood - ar...

ADDITIONAL PHOTOS OF THIS WORK WILL BE SENT UPON REQUEST: Jean Feinberg is a NY based artist whose wall constructions - paintings on found wood and paintings on painted plywood - a...

Susan Kiefer Confronting the Void Oil on Wood Panel Year: 2023 Size: 12x12x1.35in Signed by hand COA provided Ref.: 924802-1488 Tags: texture, hard-edged abstract, angular shapes, t...