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Emerson WoelfferEarly Abstract Expressionist - Black Mountain College Teacher, Franz Kline1951
1951
$38,000
£29,180.35
€33,474.45
CA$53,394.46
A$59,798.42
CHF 31,201.84
MX$730,412.04
NOK 396,978.18
SEK 374,199.51
DKK 249,815.76
About the Item
With Abstract Expressionist painting, one could argue that the earlier, the more historically important. This stunning non-objective action painting is characterized by vast swaths of pure color applied quickly and dynamically. One might think it was a Franz Kline in color. However, it was done by trailblazer Emerson Woelffer and was painted in 1951. The date says it all.
Signed and dated lower right. unframed
provenance: The Artists' Gallery, New York, Estate of the artist
The uploaded video on 1stDibs is coming up a bit off color. Refer to the still images for more accurate color
Emerson Seville Woelffer (July 27, 1914 – February 2, 2003), was an American artist and arts educator. He was known as a prominent abstract expressionist artist and painter and taught art at some of the most prestigious colleges and universities. Woelffer was one of the important people in bringing modernism to Los Angeles, when he taught at Chouinard Art Institute.
Woelffer was born July 27, 1914, in Chicago, Illinois.[2][3] He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago between 1935 and 1937, with László Moholy-Nagy.[2]
In 1938 he joined the WPA Arts Program.[2] After serving in the US Air Force, from 1942 until 1949, he taught at Art Institute of Chicago.[1] At the request of Buckminster Fuller, in 1949 he taught at Black Mountain College.[1] In 1954 he taught at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center.
In 1959 he and his wife Dina moved to Los Angeles, California, where they settled down in the Mount Washington neighborhood.[1] From 1959 to 1973 he taught at the Chouinard Art Institute (now known as California Institute of the Arts) in Valencia, California.[1]
From 1974 and 1992 he taught at The Otis Art Institute (now called Otis College of Art and Design) in Los Angeles, serving as Chair of the Painting Department from 1974 to 1978. In 1991 he received an Honorary Doctorate Degree from Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. He felt such a strong attachment to Otis that he left his estate to the college in the form of an endowment, to set up a scholarship fund to benefit future artists.[1][4]
Woelffer is best known for his boldly colored abstract paintings and collages with jagged forms. He also created sculpture and lithographs. Late in his career―suffering from macular degeneration―he began working in white crayon on black paper.
Woelffer's work is held in many public museum collections including at Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, Honolulu Museum of Art, the Montana Historical Society (Helena, Montana), Museum of Art (Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah), Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Neuberger Museum of Art, Oklahoma City Museum of Art, Portland Art Museum,[5] San Diego Museum of Art, Yellowstone Art Museum (Billings, Montana),[6] Asheville Art Museum, Black Mountain College Museum + Art Center,[7] and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA).
- Creator:Emerson Woelffer (1914 - 2003, American)
- Creation Year:1951
- Dimensions:Height: 21.75 in (55.25 cm)Width: 35.88 in (91.14 cm)
- Medium:
- Movement & Style:
- Period:
- Condition:Overall good conditions. A few minor scuffs visible mostly on close inspection. Nail holes on perimeter. Slight desaturation of color. Other than that, it presents very well for a work almost 75 years old - unframed.
- Gallery Location:Miami, FL
- Reference Number:1stDibs: LU385316211992
Emerson Woelffer
Once dubbed “the Grandfather of L.A. Modernism,” the Chicago-born Emerson Seville Woelffer was active as an innovative painter, collagist, and educator throughout his long and prolific career. A pioneering Abstract Expressionist, Woelffer’s brightly colored work with jagged forms reveals Cubist and Surrealist influences. Coming of age in Chicago during the Great Depression, Woelffer appreciated the improvisational nature of jazz music, a sensibility he would later apply to painting through gestural variation, energetic strokes, and a rhythmic use of line. From 1935 to 1938, Woelffer, a high school dropout, studied at the Art Institute of Chicago while employed as a janitor, early evidence of his enduring work ethic. He joined the Works Progress Administration arts program in 1938 as an easel painter, followed by a two-year stint as a topographical draftsman for the United States Air Force. The director of the Chicago Institute of Design, László Moholy-Nagy, invited Woelffer to join the faculty in 1942. His experiences there brought him into contact with the modernist idiom of the day, and his interactions with students caused him to re-examine his own practice. He also exhibited in group shows at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, participated in the Whitney Museum Annual (1949) and won the Pauline Palmer Prize for painting at the Art Institute of Chicago (1948). In 1949 Emerson Woelffer and his wife Dina, a fine art photographer, were invited by Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner to New York before they headed to Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. Exposure to Pre-Columbian art led Woelffer to incorporate totemic figures and vibrant colors into his abstract paintings. In 1959 Woelffer joined the faculty at the Chouinard Art Institute (later the California Institute of the Arts) in Los Angeles, where he instructed notable emerging artists until 1973 and where he was instrumental in bringing Modernism to LA. Ed Ruscha was one of his students. In 1974, Woelffer was named chair of the art department at the Otis Art Institute (now the Otis School of Art and Design). His tenure lasted until his retirement in 1989, and he was widely admired for his interdisciplinary approach in the classroom. An endowed scholarship fund in his name provides support for promising young artists and designers. Suffering from macular degeneration, Woelffer switched to drawing with white crayon on black paper in his final years of artistic activity. Emerson won a prestigious Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 1967 and then went to wprk in Europe. Woelffer’s work is represented in the collections of such distinguished institutions as the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Gallery of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art, among others.

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Jack Wolfe (14 January 1924 – 18 November 2007) was a 20th-century American painter most known for his abstract art, portraiture, and political paintings. Jack Wolfe was born in Omaha, Nebraska on January 14, 1924, to Blanche and Everett L. Wolfe. Soon after his birth, his family moved to Brockton, MA. At 18, Wolfe had an interest in commercial illustration, which he pursued at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). However, upon matriculating at RISD in 1942, he developed an interest in fine art and painting inspired by an exhibition of modern French art. He described this change of direction, explaining that, "One day, for the first time, I saw an exhibition of modern French art. It was like being struck by lightning." He became particularly interested in the work of a number of European modernists, including Rouault, Cézanne, Braque, Modigliani, and Picasso.[1] Following his time at RISD, he pursued a Master’s in Fine Arts degree at the Museum of Fine Arts School in Boston, MA. At the Museum School, Wolfe studied under the renowned Expressionist Karl Zerbe, a German-born artist who was the Museum School's most influential and vital teacher until 1953.[2] After graduating from the Museum School, Wolfe was represented by the Margaret Brown Gallery in Boston, which also represented many other cutting edge Moderns that defied the more conservative tastes of New England collectors at the time, including György Kepes, Congur Metcalf, and Alexander Calder.[3]
Career and Museum Representation
Jack Wolfe's painting "Robin's Rock" 1962, 72" x 72"
Jack Wolfe's artwork received early recognition from a number of organizations and was consistently featured in influential exhibitions, including the 1955 Carnegie International at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, PA, the American Federation of Art's traveling exhibition New Talent in the USA in 1956-57, the Whitney Museum’s Young America exhibition in 1957,[4] the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art's Selection exhibition in 1957,[5] and both the Whitney Museum’s 1958 Annual exhibition and its Forty Artists Under Forty show in 1962-63.[6] In 1959, his widely acclaimed Portrait of Abraham Lincoln toured Europe in a show circulated by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. In addition, his painting Crucifixion was chosen by the United States Information Agency to be exhibited across Europe, including being shown at the Salzburg Biennial in Austria in 1958.[7] Crucifixion was also exhibited at the Whitney Museum and subsequently displayed in the National Cathedral in Washington, DC, in 1958.[8] In 1966-67, his work was selected for Art for Embassies by the U.S. State Department.[9] He received the first annual Margaret Brown Memorial Award for high achievement by a New England Artist from the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, in 1958.[10]
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