Jason Berger

Still Life

Signed lower left. This is a large example of a non-objective painting by Rolph Scarlett. Scarlett was a painter of geometric forms and shapes. His intuitive style helped establish ...

Signed lower right. The composition is a tightly organized geometric abstraction on a deep blue ground. A large, centrally placed triangular form asserts the vertical axis and is an...

Signed lower right. David Solot, a dentist and painter, was born in Falciu (Romania) and settled in Paris in 1928. His art was surrealistic dentally inspired plus portraits and city landscapes. **************************** Translated from an article by Luana Hrisanti Rigot: "In 1956, at the Charlotte Norberg Gallery (Paris), he presented his first personal exhibition, composed of an ensemble of surrealist paintings of professional inspiration (dental elements). Two years later, at Gallery Royale (Rochefort), he exhibits another 50 paintings on the subject. At that time, a decisive event for the painter David Solot was made: a great new-York-born antibiotic producer Lederle Cy learns about his work and contacts him through the US Ambassador to Paris, proposing an advertising contract and buying the reproduction right for 24 of its canvases. A year later, the same company bought the right to print three of its cloths in color. This was the starting point of his international notoriety. In 1959, the American Dental Association celebrated its centenary, and to make it brilliant, David Solot invites him to a large exhibition at Columbus Circle, in Manhattan New York. The press, television is doing a great deal of promotion, and in the end, the interest shown by the medical professionals in the beginning only reaches an echo in the world of passionate art collectors. It is the beginning of a major international adventure! David Solot is invited to Stockholm in 1960, then to Dublin and Belfast by the Cema Art Gallery. In 1962 his works are exhibited in Helsinki. In 1963 his life was disturbed by a very painful event ... His only son, a medical student in the last year, dies in an accident. For two years, overwhelmed by pain, David Solot neglects painting. His wife, Becutza Solot, encourages him to go to Israel. David accepts, and the voyage and exhibition (1965) are successful. When returning from the voyage, he makes material for an exhibition he will present at the Transposition Gallery, while at the Salon of Physicians his "Jerusalem" painting gets the Medal of Honor, the greatest possible reward. Continuing to work on all plans, he adds a new activity to his concerns: writing. In 1967, he was impressed by a passage in Maurice Goudeket book Prés...

Signed & dated Verso. 1965 Paul Reed in 1970. He favored “staining” untreated canvas. Paul Reed, the last surviving member of the Washington Color School, who explored the complexities of color and form in vibrant bio-morphic and hard-edge abstract paintings, died on Sept. 26 at his home in Phoenix. He was 96. His death was confirmed by his daughter, Jean Reed Roberts. Mr. Reed acquired his public identity as an artist when he was included, along with Gene Davis, Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis, Thomas Downing and Howard Mehring, in “The Washington Color Painters,” a landmark traveling exhibition that began at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art in 1965. All of the other painters had been shown, the year before, in “Post-Painterly Abstraction,” a 31-artist exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art organized by the critic Clement Greenberg in an effort to write a new chapter in the historic march of abstract art. Like his fellow Washington artists, Mr. Reed rejected the hot, gestural approach of Abstract Expressionism and explored color and abstract forms in a cooler mode. Working with diluted acrylic paint, in discrete series that methodically explored formal issues, he created luminous fields of color by letting the paint bleed into, or stain, untreated canvas. “I have a saying: Pollock dripped, Frankenthaler poured,” he told The Washington Post in 2011, referring to the artist Helen Frankenthaler. “Morris Louis poured. Howard Mehring sprinkled. I blot.” In his first stained series, “Mandala,” color radiated from a circular central image. The nearly 100 paintings in his “Disk” series, which he called “a matrix for exploiting color,” consisted of a central circle and two triangles positioned at the corners of the canvas. Over the next decade he moved to hard-edge geometric zigzags and stripes in the vertical “Upstart” series, color grids and shaped canvases that allowed for more complex experiments in form and color relations. He also made welded steel sculptures and, in the “Quad” series of the 1980s, collaged photographs. “Reed was, in a sense, the ‘little master’ of that first batch of Washington colorists,” the critic Benjamin Forgey wrote in The Washington Post in 1997. “He was a latecomer — he didn’t turn seriously to painting until he was in his mid-30s — but he never considered becoming anything other than an abstract painter. And when he was ready to show, in his early 40s, he was a very good abstract painter indeed.” Mr. Reed gave himself a more modest assessment in an interview with NPR last year. “I’m sort of low man on the totem pole of that group of six,” he said. Paul Allen...