Burton Kramer

Garden Music - colourful, geometric abstraction, modernist, acrylic on panel

2017

This modern geometric painting by Burton Kramer was inspired by music. During his storied decades-long career, Burton Kramer has achieved international recognition as one of Canada’...

Kramer’s modern and graphic paintings express lyrical, geometric abstraction via a harmonic interplay of syncopated shapes of various sizes and colours. Trained at Yale University ...

A staccato of geometric shapes in orange, indigo, blue and more dance on a ground of turquoise in this lively composition by Burton Kramer. Like 20th century European painter Wassi...

Modernist Burton Kramer finds inspiration for his abstract paintings in the beauty of a musical beat. In Vivace 12, one of a series, geometric shapes in blues, pinks, greens and yell...

Colorful abstract brushwork on a background of various unsaturated light blues. This painting reminded me of relaxing out back on the patio with slightly overcast skies. :: Painting ...

Richard Andres (American, 1927-2013) Garden, 1972 acrylic on canvas signed, dated and titled verso 59.5 x 50 inches Richard Andres was born in Buffalo, New York in 1927. A graduate of the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1950, he was immediately drafted and served for two years in the army as a mural painter. He received his Master of Arts from Kent State in 1961. A frequent exhibitor at galleries and museums and winner of multiple May Show prizes, Andres taught art in the Cleveland Public Schools for 28 years, as well as teaching the University of Buffalo, the Cleveland Institute of Art and the Western Reserve University. Very little in Richard Andres’ childhood would have predicted his love of classical music, mid-century-modern architecture and certainly not his lifelong passion for art and in particular abstract art. Richard’s father, Raymond, had no more than a third-grade education, and his mother, Clara, was one of thirteen children – only three of whom lived into adulthood and none of whom attended high school. They lived, when Richard was a boy, in a dingy area of Buffalo, NY in a walk-up apartment situated above a tavern. Raymond and Clara supplemented the income from their factory jobs in the bar downstairs with Raymond playing ragtime on the piano and Clara serving drinks. This often left Richard and his two older brothers at home alone to fend for themselves. The two older boys, Raymond and Russell, were - unlike Richard- rather rough and tumble and entertained themselves with stickball, boxing and the like. Richard, on the other hand, from a very young age liked to draw, or better yet even, to paint with the small set of watercolors he received for Christmas one year. Paper, however, at the height of the depression, was hard to come by. Luckily, Clara used paper doilies as decoration for the apartment and Richard would contentedly paint and then cut up doilies, gluing the pieces together to create collages. At eight-years-old, he discovered the Albright-Knox Museum (then known as the Albright Art Gallery) and spent several hours a week there studying the paintings. He was particularly fond of Charles Burchfield‘s landscapes, enamored with their ‘messiness’ and thinking that they somehow captured more ‘feeling’ than works he was previously familiar with. For his tenth Christmas, he asked for and received a ‘how-to’ paint book by Elliot O’Hare. Through this self-teaching, he assembled the portfolio needed for acceptance to Buffalo Technical High School where he studied Advertising Arts. In his Junior year, he was encouraged to enter a watercolor painting, “Two Barns,” in the national 1944-45 Ingersoll Art Award Contest and was one of twelve grand prize winners – each one winning one hundred dollars. More importantly the painting was exhibited at the Carnegie Institute Galleries, which resulted in his winning a national scholarship to the Cleveland School of Art (The Cleveland Art Institute). He flourished at the art school under the tutelage of faculty members such as Carl Gaertner, as well as that of visiting artists such as William Sommer and Henry George Keller. He would say in later years that Gaertner, in particular, influenced his attitude toward life as well as art. “Gaertner,” Andres said, “believed that there was no need to be a ‘tortured artist’, that an artist should rather enjoy beauty, family, and life in general.” Free to spend his days as he chose, he wandered the Cleveland Art Museum for most of the hours he was not attending classes or painting; the remaining time was spent drinking coffee at a local hangout with art school friends – which is where he met fellow Henry Keller scholarship winner, Avis Johnson. Richard was immediately smitten with Avis, but being rather shy, it took him the entire summer of 1948 to build up his courage to ask her out. Over that summer he ‘thought about Avis’ and worked in a diner to save money. He also used the hundred-dollar prize money won in High School to visit the first Max Beckmann retrospective in the United States at the City Art Museum in St. Louis. Over a half century later he spoke of that exhibit with a reverence usually reserved for spiritual matters, “I walked in and it was like nothing I had ever seen before... the color...It just glowed.” Returning to campus in the Fall, the first thing he did was go to the coffee shop in hopes of finding Avis. He did, and she, upon seeing him, realized that she was also smitten with him. They quickly became known as ‘the couple’ on campus, and a year later, with Richard being drafted for the Korean war, they were quickly married by a Justice of the Peace, celebrating after with family at Avis’s Cleveland home. As a gift, faculty member John Paul Miller...

Waterline Fine Art, Austin, TX is pleased to present the following work: Diptych, acrylic on canvas. Signed lower right. Two canvases, joined along vertical stretcher on verso. 40 x 60 in. 41 x 61 in. (framed) Custom framed in maple. Provenance Estate of Beatrice Mandelman 203 Fine Art, Taos, NM A certificate of authenticity issued by the Mandelman Ribak Collection at the University of New Mexico Foundation will be provided with this work. Beatrice Mandelman was born on December 31, 1912 in Newark, New Jersey. At age 12, she began taking classes at the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Art, subsequently attending Rutgers University, the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Art, and the Art Students League in New York. In 1935, Mandelman was employed by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), first as a muralist and then as a printmaker with the Graphic Division of the New York Project. One of the original members of the Silk Screen Unit under Anthony Velonis, she worked until the disbandment of the WPA in 1942. During this period, she was associated with numerous New York School artists including Louis Lozowick, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, and Stuart Davis. Mandelman married fellow artist Louis Ribak in 1942, and two years later they traveled to Santa Fe, NM to visit his teacher and mentor, the artist John Sloan. Finding Santa Fe congested, they took the train along the Rio Grande and a stagecoach up to Taos and decided to settle there. An impulsive and inspired move, it was a decision that would effectively remove them from mainstream art involvement, for which Santa Fe had become an important outpost in the west. While Taos was a well-known within the art community, there were no galleries exhibiting modern art. This changed later in the decade, with an influx of new artists arriving from New York and California. Some of these artists would come to be known collectively as the “Taos Moderns...

Charles Hinman is best known for his custom-shaped geometric canvas paintings. This is an original silkscreen from the Licht Calendar portfolio, unsigned from the edition of 3000. Fr...