Julio de Diego

"City East" Julio De Diego, Spanish Modernist Composition, Abstracted Cityscape

circa 1943

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...

Delos Palmer Jr. Tree in Winter Signed lower left Oil on Masonite 10 x 8 inches Delos Palmer, Jr. was born January 26, 1890 in New York City. His father was Dr. Delos Palmer, a socially prominent Park Avenue dentist. His mother was Jennifer Emma Banta. His parents were both born in NYC, where they married in 1880 and had five children. There had three sons and two daughters. He was the fourth born. They lived in a private townhouse at 48 West 50th Street, with a cook, a waitress, and a nurse to assist in his father's dental practice on the ground floor. They lived a privileged life and the children all went to the best private schools. He graduated high school in June of 1908. He studied at The Art Students League from 1911 to 1915 with the renowned American Impressionist, George Bellows. According to the artist, "Bellows was a good influence on me. He taught me how to paint what I see and what I feel!" In 1916 Palmer moved to the historic Holbein Studios at 139 West 55th Street. He worked there until 1920, when he moved to the more fashionable Greenwich Village, where he became a successful society portraitist. He was 27 years old during the Great War, so he was not selected for military service. In 1923 Palmer began to sell interior story illustrations to Metropolitan Magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, and Liberty. In 1924 he married Helen Smith Romme and moved to Stamford, CT, where they raised a daughter and two step-sons. The fateful market crash of 1929 ended Palmer's high society portrait business, but he soon found work through his contacts at Liberty magazine's MacFadden Publishing, which also produced several crime and detective magazines such as Master Detective and True Detective. He then began to paint pulp covers for Dime Mystery, Clues, Frontier Stories, Action Stories, Western Trails, All Star Adventure, Complete Western Book...

Corcos paints what appears to be the northern part Central Park from an elevated view looking northwest. The artist used a restricted palette of warm browns and grays with heavy outl...

The Mid-Century mindset As expected, 65 years ago.. people looked at art/painting a little differently. Back then, many artists were concerned with depicting simple and beautiful t...