Charles Green Shaw

"Happening" Charles Green Shaw, Abstract Red Composition, Mid Century

1964

Seymour Fogel Untitled Oil on illustration board construction 10 x 7 1/2 inches Provenance: Estate of the artist Charles and Faith McCracken Larry and Trish Heichel Private Collection Seymour Fogel was born in New York City on August 24, 1911. He studied at the Art Students League and at the National Academy of Design under George Bridgeman and Leon Kroll. When his formal studies were concluded in the early 1930s he served as an assistant to Diego Rivera who was then at work on his controversial Rockefeller Center mural. It was from Rivera that he learned the art of mural painting. Fogel was awarded several mural commissions during the 1930s by both the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Treasury Section of Fine Arts, among them his earliest murals at the Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn, New York in 1936, a mural in the WPA Building at the 1939-1940 New York World's Fair, a highly controversial mural at the U.S. Post Office in Safford, Arizona (due to his focus on Apache culture) in 1941 and two murals in what was then the Social Security Building in Washington, D.C., also in 1941. Fogel's artistic circle at this time included Phillip Guston, Ben Shahn, Franz Kline, Rockwell Kent and Willem de Kooning. In 1946 Fogel accepted a teaching position at the University of Texas at Austin and became one of the founding artists of the Texas Modernist Movement. At this time he began to devote himself solely to abstract, non-representational art and executed what many consider to be the very first abstract mural in the State of Texas at the American National Bank in Austin in 1953. He pioneered the use of Ethyl Silicate as a mural medium. Other murals and public works of art done during this time (the late 1940s and 1950s) include the Baptist Student Center at the University of Texas (1949), the Petroleum Club in Houston (1951) and the First Christian Church, also in Houston (1956), whose innovative use of stained glass panels incorporated into the mural won Fogel a Silver Medal from the Architectural League of New York in 1958. Fogel relocated to the Connecticut-New York area in 1959. He continued the Abstract Expressionism he had begun exploring in Texas, and began experimenting with various texturing media for his paintings, the most enduring of which was sand. In 1966 he was awarded a mural at the U.S. Federal Building in Fort Worth, Texas. The work, entitled "The Challenge of Space", was a milestone in his artistic career and ushered in what has been termed the Transcendental/Atavistic period of his art, a style he pursued up to his death in 1984. Painted and raw wood sculpture...

Charles Green Shaw Harvard vs. Yale, 1944 Signed and dated on the reverse Oil on canvasboard 9 x 12 inches Provenance: Harvey and Francois Rambach, New Jersey Private Collection, California Washburn Gallery, New York D. Wigmore Fine Art, New York Private Collection, New York Charles Green Shaw, born into a wealthy New York family, began painting when he was in his mid-thirties. A 1914 graduate of Yale, Shaw also completed a year of architectural studies at Columbia University. During the 1920s Shaw enjoyed a successful career as a freelance writer for The New Yorker, Smart Set and Vanity Fair, chronicling the life of the theater and café society. In addition to penning insightful articles, Shaw was a poet, novelist and journalist. In 1927 he began to take a serious interest in art and attended Thomas Hart Benton's class at the Art Students League briefly in New York. He also studied privately with George Luks, who became a good friend. Once he had dedicated himself to non-traditional painting, Shaw's writing ability made him a potent defender of abstract art. After initial study with Benton and Luks, Shaw continued his artistic education in Paris by visiting numerous museums and galleries. From 1930 to 1932 Shaw's paintings evolved from a style imitative of Cubism to one directly inspired by it, though simplified and more purely geometric. Returning to the United States in 1933, Shaw began a series of abstracted cityscapes of skyscrapers he called Manhattan Motifs which evolved into his most famous works, the shaped canvases he called Plastic Polygons. The 1930s were productive years for Shaw. He showed his paintings in numerous group exhibitions, both in New York and abroad, and was also given several one-man exhibitions. Shaw had his first one-man exhibition at the Valentine Dudensing Gallery in New York in 1934, which included 25 Manhattan Motif paintings and 8 abstract works. In the spring of 1935 Shaw was introduced to Albert Gallatin and George L.K. Morris. Gallatin was so impressed with Shaw's work, he broke a policy against solo exhibitions at his museum, the Gallery of Living Art, and offered Shaw an exhibition there. In the summer of 1935 Shaw traveled to Paris with Gallatin and Morris who provided introductions to many great painters. Shaw regularly spent time with John Ferren and Jean Hélion. The following year Gallatin organized an exhibition called Five Contemporary American Concretionists at the Reinhardt Gallery that included Shaw, Ferren, and Morris, Alexander Calder, and Charles Biederman...

William Baziotes (1912 - 1963) Untitled, circa 1935-1940 Oil on board 14 x 19 3/4 inches Illegible Inscription present to the verso Provenance: Previously from the estate of Consta...

Susan Tunick (American, b. 1946) Speedy Run #1, 1983 Oil on canvas 62 1/2 x 10 3/4 inches Signed and dated on the reverse Susan Tunick, artist and Presid...

Danny McCaw's (US based) "Red Symphony" is an original, handmade oil painting with impasto brushstrokes that depicts two ambiguous human figures of white and grey sitting in an inter...

Floral composition "Blossom", 1950-1959 by Ferdinand Springer ( 1907-1998 ), Germany. Oil on hardboard. Signed lower left: Springer. Signed verso: ...

Massimo Caiafa (Naples 23/05/1965) is a contemporary painter who currently lives in Naples. Trained in a family of artists and antique dealers, he lived in New York for many years, e...

Massimo Caiafa (Naples 23/05/1965) is a contemporary painter who currently lives in Naples. Trained in a family of artists and antique dealers, he lived in New York for many years, e...