Gilles-Marie Dupuy

Nuages Passents (Clouds Pass)

1990

Acrylic on canvas embedded with glitter and gold leaf Unsigned, as per usual Provenance: Estate of the artist Sheet: 14 x 17" Peter Marks (1935 -2010...

Words and Deeds Oil and collage on wood panel, c. 1990 Signed recto lower right (see photo) Verso: See photo Signed, verso: Ben Wilson Dated: c. 1990 Titled: Words and Deeds Condition: Excellent Image/panel size: 23 1/4 x 19 inches Frame size: 26 1/4 x 21 1/4 inches To gain exposure to a wider range of styles, he also studied at the National Academy of Design and at the Educational Alliance. Admired by critics throughout his long career, Wilson was singled out as a “discovery” by the New York Times art critic Edward Alden Jewel even before his rst one-man show at the Galerie Neuf in 1946. His paintings of the ’30s and ’40s were expressionistically rendered, often Biblical parables, lled with what he called “the grief of the intolerable” and reecting an acute awareness of the agony of the time, from the Holocaust to the Spanish Civil War. A WPA artist who identied strongly with the plight of the Jews in Europe, he relentlessly explored themes of war, torment, and futility in his early decades of painting. When times changed and social pressures subsided, Wilson’s mood lifted. He spent 1952-54 in Paris working at the Academie Julien. During the ’50s his involvement with specic imagery persisted but became more psychological and mythic in orientation. Inuenced by Cubism, he created a vocabulary of interlocking shapes and bold, sweeping gestures that served as a transition between his early gurative expressionism and his later abstract constructivist concerns. Towards the end of the decade Wilson reached a crossroads, moving towards abstraction and searching for what he called “a scaffolding under the externals.” By 1960, inuenced by the Russian Constructivists, Mondrian, and Abstract Expressionism, Wilson turned to abstraction. Reexamining the basic elements of painting, he evolved his own personal vocabulary and structure, fusing the cerebral and the emotive. He became increasingly experimental, using house paint, sand, and other unorthodox materials in paintings that he worked from all directions, dripping, spraying, stenciling, and collaging. He employed elements of disjunction, repetitions of geometric motifs, linear networks, and complex overlays to create the transparent, multi-layer development of space that characterizes his later paintings. A consummate draftsman, Wilson lled notebook after notebook with drawings that he amplied in his paintings. Eschewing popular movements, Wilson was always one to pursue a personal aesthetic. Despite more than 30 one-man shows and 50 years of teaching, he increasingly withdrew from the gallery scene but continued to paint daily until his death at age 88 in 2001 in Blairstown, New Jersey, where he and his sculptor wife Evelyn Wilson...

Original mid-century modern abstract oil on canvas painting by the well known Russian/American artist Nahum Tschacbasov. Signed lower right and dated 1945. Condition is very good. P...

Original oil and acrylic painting on canvas titled “Sandscape 2” by the well known American artist, Syd Solomon. Signed Syd Solomon lower left. Signed and dated Syd Solomon 1972 and inscribed as titled on the reverse. 22 × 30 inches. Overall very good to excellent condition. No notable issues detected during inspection. No signs of restoration under UV inspection. The painting is in its original wood with silver reveal floating frame. Overall framed measurements are 24.25 by 32.25 inches. Provenance: A private collector. Syd Solomon was born near Uniontown, Pennsylvania, in 1917. He began painting in high school in Wilkes-Barre, where he was also a star football player. After high school, he worked in advertising and took classes at the Art Institute of Chicago. Before the attack on Pearl Harbor, he joined the war effort and was assigned to the First Camouflage Battalion, the 924th Engineer Aviation Regiment of the US Army. He used his artistic skills to create camouflage instruction manuals utilized throughout the Army. He married Ann Francine Cohen in late 1941. Soon thereafter, in early 1942, the couple moved to Fort Ord in California where he was sent to camouflage the coast to protect it from possible aerial bombings. Sent overseas in 1943, Solomon did aerial reconnaissance over Holland. Solomon was sent to Normandy early in the invasion where his camouflage designs provided protective concealment for the transport of supplies for men who had broken through the enemy line. Solomon was considered one of the best camoufleurs in the Army, receiving among other commendations, five bronze stars. Solomon often remarked that his camouflage experience during World War II influenced his ideas about abstract art. At the end of the War, he attended the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Because Solomon suffered frostbite during the Battle of the Bulge, he could not live in cold climates, so he and Annie chose to settle in Sarasota, Florida, after the War. Sarasota was home to the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, and soon Solomon became friends with Arthur Everett “Chick” Austin, Jr., the museum’s first Director. In the late 1940s, Solomon experimented with new synthetic media, the precursors to acrylic paints provided to him by chemist Guy Pascal, who was developing them. Victor D’Amico, the first Director of Education for the Museum of Modern Art, recognized Solomon as the first artist to use acrylic paint. His early experimentation with this medium as well as other media put him at the forefront of technical innovations in his generation. He was also one of the first artists to use aerosol sprays and combined them with resists, an innovation influenced by his camouflage experience. Solomon’s work began to be acknowledged nationally in 1952. He was included in American Watercolors, Drawings and Prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. From 1952–1962, Solomon’s work was discovered by the cognoscenti of the art world, including the Museum of Modern Art Curators, Dorothy C. Miller and Peter Selz, and the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Director, John I. H. Baur. He had his first solo show in New York at the Associated American Artists Gallery in 1955 with “Chick” Austin, Jr. writing the essay for the exhibition. In the summer of 1955, the Solomons visited East Hampton, New York, for the first time at the invitation of fellow artist David Budd. There, Solomon met and befriended many of the artists of the New York School, including Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, James Brooks, Alfonso Ossorio, and Conrad Marca-Relli. By 1959, and for the next thirty-five years, the Solomons split the year between Sarasota (in the winter and spring) and the Hamptons (in the summer and fall). In 1959, Solomon began showing regularly in New York City at the Saidenberg Gallery with collector Joseph Hirshhorn buying three paintings from Solomon’s first show. At the same time, his works entered the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford, Connecticut, among others. Solomon also began showing at Signa Gallery in East Hampton and at the James David Gallery in Miami run by the renowned art dealer, Dorothy Blau. In 1961, the Guggenheim Museum’s H. H. Arnason bestowed to him the Silvermine Award at the 13th New England Annual. Additionally, Thomas Hess of ARTnews magazine chose Solomon as one of the ten outstanding painters of the year. At the suggestion of Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the Museum of Modern Art’s Director, the John and Mable Ringling Museum in Sarasota began its contemporary collection by purchasing Solomon’s painting, Silent World, 1961. Solomon became influential in the Hamptons and in Florida during the 1960s. In late 1964, he created the Institute of Fine Art at the New College in Sarasota. He is credited with bringing many nationally known artists to Florida to teach, including Larry Rivers, Philip Guston, James Brooks, and Conrad Marca-Relli. Later Jimmy Ernst, John Chamberlain, James Rosenquist, and Robert Rauschenberg settled near Solomon in Florida. In East Hampton, the Solomon home was the epicenter of artists and writers who spent time in the Hamptons, including Alfred Leslie, Jim Dine, Ibram Lassaw, Saul Bellow, Barney Rosset, Arthur Kopit, and Harold Rosenberg. In 1970, Solomon, along with architect Gene Leedy, one of the founders of the Sarasota School of Architecture, built an award-winning precast concrete and glass house and studio on the Gulf of Mexico near Midnight Pass in Sarasota. Because of its siting, it functioned much like Monet’s home in Giverny, France. Open to the sky, sea, and shore with inside and outside studios, Solomon was able to fully solicit all the environmental forces that influenced his work. His friend, the art critic Harold Rosenberg, said Solomon’s best work was produced in the period he lived on the beach. During 1974 and 1975, a retrospective exhibition of Solomon’s work was held at the New York Cultural Center and traveled to the John and Mable Ringling Museum in Sarasota. Writer Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. conducted an important interview with Solomon for the exhibition catalogue. The artist was close to many writers, including Harold Rosenberg, Joy Williams, John D. McDonald, Budd Schulberg, Elia Kazan, Betty Friedan...