1960s Abstract Paintings

Antique American modernist abstract expressionist oil painting. Oil on canvas. Signed lower right and dated 1962.

SENZA TITOLO 1961 Tecnica mista su carta Mixed media on paper cm 35 x 50 Opera in corso di archiviazione - Artwork archiving in progress

A major work by Noche Crist (1909- 2004). Noche Crist was an American artist born in Romania. Painting is casein paint and plaster on board, which allows for wonderful color and text...

Lucien BEYER (1908-1983) Composition Oil on canvas Size: 65 x 92 cm Signed lower right Provenance : - Yves Jaubert Gallery, Paris - Private collection,...

This superb British Abstract Expressionist oil painting in by noted British artist Ron Russell. Russell was born in Britain but lived in Australia for over 10 years in the late forti...

It makes a bold statement. Field Green is one of a series of colour field paintings created by modernist Milly Ristvedt. Renowned as a master colourist, Ristvedt chose a bright palet...

Vintage modernist abstract still life oil painting. Oil on canvas. Signed. Framed.

Untitled, 1963 Unique Piece Oil on canvas 60 x 90 x cm. 23.6 x 35.4 in. ABOUT THE ARTIST Oswaldo Vigas (b. 1923, Valencia, Venezuela; d. 2014, Caracas, Venezuela) is a protean crea...

An abstract acrylic piece by Murray Reich completed in 1969.

Robert Motherwell (1915-1991) Open No. 45: In Blue with Brown 1969 Acrylic and charcoal on canvas 55.9 x 71.1 cms (22 x 28 ins) RM9741 P447 Exhibited: Art Galleries, American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, Exhibition of Work by Newly Elected Members and Recipients of Awards, 1970, no. 55. Galerie Templon, Paris, Robert Motherwell Open...

Robert Motherwell Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 60 1960 Oil on paperboard 17.8 x 23.8 cms (7 x 9 3/8 ins) RM14624 W111 Provenance: Harriet Mnuchin Weiner, 1961. Christie's, New ...

LOT:20230613N02 Kazuo Shiraga [Untitled] Oil on canvas Signed by the artist on the lower right and the reverse, dated 1965 on the reverse Unique COA issued by the Japan Art Dealers A...

Aubrey Penny (1917 - 2000) Abtract Painting, Oil on Board. Signed and Dated 62, lower right Titled: "Laws of Chance" Series One 3-185- C 1962 Aubrey Penny (American 1917-2000) wa...

ALEXANDER CALDER 1898-1976 Lawnton, Pennsylvania 1898 - 1976 New York (American) Title: Eclipse, 1961 Technique: Signed and Dated Gouache on Wove Paper Size: 55 x 74.5 cm. / 21.7 ...

The artwork is handsigned "Emblema 1966" on the back of the canvas by the artist.

For David Smith, America's greatest sculptor of the twentieth century, there is little difference between drawing, painting, and sculpture. He easily moved from one medium to the next and indeed one subject to the next, such that a drawing could be a unique object in its own right or a sculpture could in turn be an inspiration for a drawing. Smith was an artist of the outdoors; his work bears the mark of his surroundings. Black lines on white paper can suggest natural elements like sticks in a snow-covered field, or even less empirical and rather conceptual renderings of his sculpture imagined within the same snow-covered field. This oil on canvas painting is signed with the Greek letters "Delta Sigma...

SHANTI DAVE, Untitled Composition, Mixed Media on Canvas, 21" x 25", signed upper right and dated '61, framed, 24 1/2" x 28 1/2". Perlman Gallery. Shanti Dave is an Indian painter and sculptor, considered by many as one of the major Indian artists of the twentieth century. He is a former member of the Lalit Kala Akademi and the Sahitya Kala Parishad. The Government of India awarded him the fourth highest Indian civilian honour of Padma Shri in 1985. Dave was born on 25 September 1931 at the northern Gujarat village of Badpura as one of the four children of a rural family of modest means. He did his education in Baroda by joining the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda in 1951 from where he completed his graduate and post graduate studies in Fine Arts. He started his career as a commercial artist doing banners and sign boards...

Mid Century Modern "Reflections" Oil 1950s Early morning abstract landscape with birds and reflections of a European scene by Marjorie Suits Erbesa Fresno, California artist (America...

Joseph Kapeza was a Congolese artist working in Sub Saharan Africa in the mid 20th century. Kapeza had a long and troubled life of mental illness. He sta...

Joseph Kapeza was a Congolese artist working in Sub Saharan Africa in the mid 20th century. Kapeza had a long and troubled life of mental illness. He sta...

Oil on canvas. Signed and dated lower left. 39 x 25.25 in. 39.25 x 25.5 in. (framed) Framed in maple. Provenance David Findlay Galleries, New York Ga...

Fernando de Szyszlo was a Peruvian painter and sculptor who was a key figure in advancing abstract art in Latin America since the mid-1950s. Untitled II Fernando de Szyszlo, Peruvia...

1960 Oil on canvas 34 x 50 in. (86.4 x 127 cm) Signed and dated, verso

Original acrylic on canvas painting signed by artist Angelo Di Benedetto (1913-1992) from 1964. Painting features an abstract composition depicting a large circle encompassing smaller circles in blue, green, white, and black. Signed and dated by the artist in the lower right corner of the canvas. Image size measures 50 x 49 3⁄4 inches. Framed image size measures 50 3⁄4 x 50 1⁄2 x 1 1⁄4 inches. About the Artist: Born New Jersey 1913 Died Central City, CO 1992 The son of Italian immigrants from the Salerno province in southern Italy, as a teenager Di Benedetto worked to study at the Cooper Union Art School in New York City (1930-34) from which he graduated with a certificate in freehand drawing. He won a scholarship to the Boston Museum Art School where he studied for three years, beginning in 1934. In 1937, he entered his first juried exhibition at the Montclair Museum in New Jersey, winning first prize and first honorable mention. In December 1938, the Royal Netherlands Steamship Line sent him on a two-month ethnological study trip to Haiti, his first exposure to a different environment outside the United States. In 1940, his Haitian paintings were exhibited at the Montross Gallery in New York – his first solo show. Before World War II, Di Benedetto traveled extensively around the United States doing regional paintings. During the war in 1941, Di Benedetto volunteered for a secret mission based in Eritrea, Africa before the Allied invasion. Following Africa, he served as an orientation officer and aerial photographic officer in the District of Columbia. In 1945 he was assigned to a mapping unit at Buckley Airfield in Denver where he served until his discharge in 1946. Like many other servicemen stationed at the time in Colorado, Di Benedetto chose to remain in Colorado, impressed by the state’s physical grandeur and healthful climate. He settled in the old mining town of Central City in 1947. In 1949 Di Benedetto and his wife, ceramist Lee Porzio, opened the Benpro Art School in his studio where he conducted summer art classes. In 1950, Di Benedetto teamed up with Frank Vavra...

Signed lower right. From the later 1950s, Vaughan painted landscapes without figures that verged towards complete abstraction: works in which colour is tessellated into compositions ...

The artwork is handsigned "Emblema 67" on the back of the canvas by the artist.

The artwork is authenticated by the Emblema heirs and archived - number 2553 - at the Archivio and Museo Emblema (Terzigno - NA), Italy. The artwork is handsigned "Emblema 1969" on t...

The artwork is handsigned "Emblema 67" on the back of the canvas by the artist.

Pastel, 1961 Handsigned by the artist in pencil Certificate of authenticity Pastel, graphite and scratching Framed work : 57 x 72 cm Support: baryta cardboard laminated on wood pane...

Oswaldo Vigas Terricola, 1963 Oil on Canvas 116 x 90 cm 45.6 x 35.4 in. The painting is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity. Cat. Rais. 1963.131 Provenance: Private Collect...

Signed, titled and dated on verso Provenance: Waddington Galleries Peter Stuyvesant Foundation Belgrave Gallery, London Private Collection, UK (purchased from the above, 2001)

Kestutis Edward Zapkus was born in Lithuania in 1938. He was predominantly influenced creatively by the Abstract Expressionist movement in Post War New York. Zapkus soon immigrated t...

CLEVE GRAY Silver Song, 1967 Acrylic on canvas with aluminum paint and bronze 101 x 80 inches Signed, titled and dated

CLEVE GRAY Silver Voyage, 1967 Acrylic on canvas with silver enamel 79 x 80 inches Signed, titled and dated

Robert Motherwell Open #125: Jeannie 1969 Acrylic and charcoal on canvasboard 76.2 x 50.8 cms (30 x 20 ins) RM9796 P532 The title of this painting refers to Motherwell's elder daugh...

Robert Motherwell Automatism No. 11 1965 Ink and oil on paper 67.3 x 61.6 cms (26 1/2 x 24 1/4 ins) Part of the Beside the Sea series, a series of oil paintings influenced by Mother...

Robert Motherwell Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 110C 1968 Acrylic and graphite on paper 15.2 x 20.3 cms (6 x 8 ins) Robert Motherwell's Elegies series represent one of the iconic motifs of Abstract Expressionism.  Based on a 1948 ink illustration the artist executed accompanying a Harold Rosenberg poem, “A Bird for every bird,” the drawing shows the hypnotically repetitive patterning of ovoids and vertical beams.  The stark contrast of the black ink on white paper references the symbolic use of the color black by artists such as Goya, Manet and Matisse to convey death, loss, and tragedy.  Motherwell was quite affected by the turbulence of the Spanish Civil War and alludes to the Spanish republic in his Elegies. Motherwell’s plumbing the depths of poetry, history, and primordial art in the Elegies is considered a hallmark of nascent Abstract Expressionist painting in its desire to "excavate" essential imagery of mankind. Motherwell, who originally trained as a philosophy scholar and later became of the great editors of 20th century art documents, grasped very early on the crucial importance that in order to contribute meaningfully to the canon of modern art, one must create a principle of aesthetics. Through the surrealist concept of automatism, the artist finally found the creative principle that eventually governed his extraordinary artistic output and produced the Elegies, one of the most salient, immediate painterly images of 20th century abstract painting. In fact, he has alluded to the fact that each one of his Elegies begins as an automatic drawing, and certain shapes are then blocked to create the signature armature of the vertical bars and ovals. The Elegies seem to possess the power of an archetypal image, an image the mind already grasps on a subconscious level. Motherwell's play of dualities of black and white as well as other dichotomies—the geometric versus the organic, chaos versus order, death versus life—was a condition of living through a tumultuous period in American history. During an interview, he vividly recalled the 1940s as the time when society was ordered by a set of contradictions.  In Motherwell's Elegies, he not only discovered an incredibly elastic pictorial language that would communicate on multiple levels but also acknowledged these contradictions in a manner that would resonate in abstract form.  The present work served as a model for a painting, Spanish Elegy...

Variation #5, by Don Olsen. Oil on canvas, 64 x 86 x 1 inches (unframed, gallery wrapped canvas), $25,000 Previously owned (purchased directly from artist),...

This stunning abstract watercolor was realized in the United States circa 1960. The work represents a fantastic hybrid between figurative and abstract painting realized in a style su...

SHIRLEY GOLDFARB LA 8, 1969 Oil on canvas 10 x 8 inches signed on back "Goldfarb '69"

Vintage American school abstract expressionist cityscape painting. Oil on board, circa 1968. Signed. Displayed in a period frame. Image, 24.5"L x 20.5"H.

Blue On Blue #1, original vintage 1965 abstract painting by Denver artist, Angelo Di Benedetto (1913-1992). Acrylic paint in shades of blue on shaped 3 dimensional (3D) canvas with a circular form protruding from the center of square painting. Presented in a vintage/original frame, outer dimensions measure 26 ¾ x 26 ½ x 1 ¼ inches. Image size is 26 x 26 x 3 ¼ inches. Exhibited: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1965 Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting December 8, 1965 to January 30, 1966 The son of Italian immigrants from the Salerno province in southern Italy, as a teenager Di Benedetto worked as a truck driver in the mornings and a bartender in the afternoons to study at the Cooper Union Art School in New York City (1930-34) from which he graduated with a certificate in freehand drawing. He won a scholarship to the Boston Museum Art School where he studied for three years, beginning in 1934, with Russian émigré painter, Alexandre Jacovleff, a member of Mir Isskustva (World of Art) in St. Petersburg before the Russian Revolution. In 1936 he painted a religious mural for St. Michael’s Grove in Paterson, New Jersey. The following year, he entered his first juried exhibition at the Montclair Museum in New Jersey, winning first prize and first honorable mention. In December 1938, the Royal Netherlands Steamship Line sent him on a two-month ethnological study trip to Haiti, his first exposure to a different environment outside the United States. During what turned out to be an extended six-month stay, he studied and painted the life and religious customs of the island, resulting in a series of colorful, stylized paintings inspired by his immersion in the local culture. He also did scenes of Port-au-Prince and executed commissions received from prominent people in Haiti, including government officials. In 1940, his Haitian paintings were exhibited at the Montross Gallery in New York (his first solo show) and also reproduced in the January 1940 issue of Life Magazine. One of his Haitian paintings, Morning in Port-au-Prince, was owned by an American author, politician and U.S. ambassador, Clare Boothe Luce, while another image, Haiti Post Office, was acquired for the Encyclopedia Britannica Collection and later donated to Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. Before World War II, Di Benedetto traveled extensively around the United States in his car and trailer doing regional paintings. In 1941, he did what is considered the first authentic version of George Washington Crossing the Delaware, a contrast to the well-known painting on the same subject (1851) by German-born painter, Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze. During the war, Di Benedetto volunteered for a secret mission to Africa in 1941 before the Allied invasion, serving as director of camouflage, foreman of native laborers, and an interpreter while based in Eritrea. The following year he received a direct commission as a Second Lieutenant in the U.S. Army Air Corps in the First Photo Mapping Squadron, leading groups as a guide and interpreter and doing ground control. During his free time in Africa, he sketched and painted the local population and his fellow servicemen. Following Africa, he served as an orientation officer and aerial photographic officer for the 311th Photo Wing at Bolling Field, in the District of Columbia where he did a series of illustrated articles describing the natives in the different countries where the men of his organization were stationed during the war. In 1945 he was assigned to a mapping unit at Buckley Air Field in Denver where he served until his discharge in 1946. Like many other servicemen stationed at the time in Colorado, Di Benedetto chose to remain in Colorado, impressed by the state’s physical grandeur and healthful climate. After the war, he lived briefly for about a year in Rangely, a small town in northwest Colorado where he traveled and sketched. But finding it a little too remote, he settled in the old mining town of Central City in 1947, his home base for the rest of his life. He spent his first six years there transforming the old Sauder-McShane Mercantile warehouse into a giant art studio. His initial acquaintance with the town’s mining town history in 1947 resulted in a drawing, Death of a Miner, showing a male figure buried under a pile of collapsed rock in a mining tunnel. In 1949 Di Benedetto and his wife, ceramist Lee Porzio, opened the Benpro Art School in his studio where he conducted summer art classes. The following year he teamed up with a Denver-based artist, Frank Vavra, to open the Denver Art Center at 924 Broadway. He and Vavra were founding members of the 15 Colorado Artists who seceded in 1948 from the Denver Artists Guild because they were dissatisfied with the older organization’s underlying conservatism and the disdain of some of its members for modern art. Welcoming anyone wanting to learn how to draw or paint, the Denver Art Center in downtown Denver only lasted about a year. Undeterred by its lack of success, Di Benedetto continued throughout his career to give workshops, classes, and lectures on art-related topics in Denver and elsewhere. Examples of topics ranged from subjects such as “African Art,” Chappell House, Denver (1945) and “University or Artistic Thought” sponsored by the Art for World Friendship Committee (1954). He also taught locally at the Jewish Community Center, Steele Community Center, International House, Southern Colorado State College-Pueblo, and lectured at the University of Denver. Beginning in 1969 he sponsored over one hundred youths at his studio in Central City to spend a summer learning about art. He also conducted classes for serious working artists. His efforts earned him an honorary doctorate from the University of Colorado in 1977. He likewise promoted contemporary Colorado artists’ work in the 1950s, heading a committee that presented one-person exhibitions in a small gallery at the Vogue Art Cinema on South Pearl Street in Denver. His interest in promoting the arts led to his participation in numerous organizations. In the 1960s he became concerned with environmental and urban art and was the president of Art for the Cities, a Denver-based nonprofit organization. He also was the chairman of and a participant in the first annual environmental art exhibit held at Denver’s American Medical Center. In 1968 Colorado Governor John Love appointed him to the Colorado Council on the Arts and Humanities in which he remained active until 1975. He served for two consecutive years as program coordinator for the Governor’s Conference on the Arts and Humanities. At the 1969 conference, Governor Love presented him an award for his contribution to the art and artists of Colorado. At the same time, he actively participated in the civic life of Central City. The town’s Police Magistrate (1955-56), he twice campaigned for mayor, first in 1966 and again in 1973, and ran for commissioner in 1979. He socialized with artists Ben Shahn, Herbert Bayer and Mark Rothko, as well as theatrical stars appearing at the Central City Opera House, including Helen Hayes, Mae West, and Gypsy Rose Lee. He invited them to carve their autographs on his kitchen table. Di Benedetto worked with equal facility in a variety of media: acrylic, oil paint, watercolor, charcoal, Conte crayon, graphic arts and metal (copper, iron). Up until the early 1950s, his output was dominated by representational figure work and expressionist Colorado landscapes that were not always immune from controversy. When Life Magazine included a reproduction of his Regionalist painting, Lovers in the Cornfield (1941) in its article, “Ten Years of American Art: Life Reviews the Record of a Lively, Important Decade” (November 26, 1946, issue), three counties in Massachusetts banned the publication. Just as immediately, the painting was exhibited in Denver. He said that he liked the West because the people, despite their lack of exposure to art, were individualistic and almost “anarchistic.” In the early 1950s he did woodcuts in a modernist style, including Remembrance, showing his two young daughters. Influenced by Abstract Expressionism at that time, he began considering the elimination of the image from his work. By the end of the decade, he had decided that “the circle – pure and simple was one of the most familiar symbols of mankind and that it metaphored into everything.” At the same time, he noted that “99% of the abstract painters shied away from using…[the circle]. When they didn’t, they slaughtered it, murdered it and buried it. So it became my motif.” For more than three decades he explored the circle in paint, sculpture and shaped canvas. Two examples of the last-named medium are his Red CQ and Black C-1, both from 1969. Because abstraction touched upon his deep feelings and spirituality, he felt he could make visible that part of life which “we feel but almost never see.” His fascination with the circle also relates to his belief that to affect the dialogue existing between object and maker, the artist must “create archetypal shapes [that have universal appeal], not symbols…to reflect simply the intrinsic beauty of the shape itself.” A strong advocate for public art, Di Benedetto headed Art for the Cities, Inc., which sponsored nine sculptures for Burns Park as part of the Denver Sculpture Symposium held in the Mile High City in 1968. The catalysts for the idea of the sculptures were Beverly and Bernie Rosen, who had been instrumental in the creation of the contemporary department at the Denver Art Museum. Along with Di Benedetto, the other participating sculptors were Dean Fleming, Peter Forakis, Roger Kotoske, Tony Magar, Robert Mangold, Robert Morris, Richard Van Buren and Bill Verhelst. The park project eventually served as a prototype for twenty-two states, bringing the sculpture to urban spaces. The sculptures reflected Di Benedetto’s concept of “burden-less environmental art” with no hidden meaning for the public to decipher. His goal in public art was to “create a work which, when integrated with the site, will create a tranquil oasis, a counterbalance to the modern chaotic world we experience daily.” During the 1960s and 1970s, he received other major sculpture commissions: an 80-foot-long copper wall, Jewish Community Center, Denver (1962); sculpture garden, General Rose Hospital, Denver (1964); Fountain, First National Bank of Dallas (1966); Colorado Fuel & Iron Company, Pueblo, Colorado (1969); neighborhood park sculpture, Yonkers, New York (1971); High School Park, Northglenn, Colorado (1974); ice skating rink sculpture, Pueblo (1976). Fate was not as kind to his mural which the Colorado Supreme Court justices commissioned him to paint in 1976 for the Colorado Judicial Building from a field of twenty-two candidates. With his former student, Phyllis Montrose as his principal assistant along with three others, he spent a year and a half executing the mural. Entitled Justice Through the Ages (aka Lawgivers), it depicted sixty individuals from ancient Babylon...

Oil on canvas

Work on paper Gilded wood frame with glass pane 52 x 43 x 2,5 cm

"Nightscape" was painted in 1960 by the African-American artist, Merton Simpson. It is a mixture of deep blues and black with what may be a white moon whose reflection in the lower half of the painting literally causes the painting to glow. Simpson became the first African American to receive a prestigious five-year fellowship from the Charleston Scientific and Cultural Education fund and left South Carolina in 1949 for New York City after he finished high school. He attended New York University and Cooper Union while working in the frame shop of Herbert Benevy. Many well-known artists came to the frame shop and in time critiqued Simpson's work and developed a relationship with him. At NYU Simpson became acquainted with Hale Woodruff...

“Icarus Suspended” is an extraordinary painting of Ayrton's obsession with flight, myths, mirrors and mazes. This complex piece shows a figure in flight, frozen in action, either swooping down or, perhaps, falling to earth. Named after the Greek mythological figure, Icarus, who along with his father attempted to escape from Crete by means of wings that his father constructed from feathers and wax. Flying too close to the sun the wax melted and both fell to earth. The positioning of Ayrton's figure is reminiscent of "The Fall of Icarus" by Jacob Peter Gowy, Museo Nacional del Prado. This is part of a series of artworks on Icarus some sculptural and some three-dimensional paintings on canvas. Verso contains gallery label Matthiesen Gallery, 142 Bond St., London, England, with a signature and text in upper right corner: "To Morton Schotnick. Bought on the occasion of The Archives of American Arts Tour to London, England. October 10, 1961. Michael Ayrton...

Léopold Survage (1879-1968) Porteuse 1962 oil on canvas 100 x 81.3 cm signed and dated ‘Survage. 48.’ (lower right) Price: $63,000 USD (inc. 5% UK imp...

A painting by Willem de Kooning. "Woman in a Rowboat" is an abstract, oil on paper laid on masonite painting executed in a lush and swirling palette primarily of greens, whites, beiges and yellow and depicting an abstracted, nude woman in a boat by Post War artist Willem de Kooning. "Woman in a Rowboat" is a seminal work by de Kooning that has a new fluidity which relates to his next major series of Woman paintings which he began in 1964. Signed lower left, "de Kooning." Provenance: Allan Stone Gallery, New York Private Collection, New York Private Collection, Arizona Exhibition: North Hampton, Smith College Museum of Art; Cambridge, The New Gallery, Charles Hayden Memorial Library, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Willem de Kooning: a Retrospective from Public and Private Collections, April – June 1965 (Cambridge only) New York, Allan Stone Gallery, De Kooning/Cornell, February – March 1965 Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, American Paintings, September - October 1966, cat. no. 26 Dublin, The Royal Dublin Society, Rosc'67:The Poetry of Vision, November – December 1967, p. 201, illustrated Detroit, J.L. Hudson, Willem de Kooning: Three Decades of Painting, March – April 1968, no. 31 (exhibition checklist) Easthampton, Gild Hall...

DANIEL GORSKI Untitled, 1964 Acrylic on canvas mounted on board 90 x 90 inches

DANIEL GORSKI Untitled, 1963 Acrylic on canvas (Diptych) 80 x 45 inches

DANIEL GORSKI Sentinel #1, 1964 Acrylic on canvas 85 x 23 inches

AL HELD 60 S-2 AP, 1964-1965 Ink and acrylic on paper mounted on board 15 x 39-7/8 inches

Red, yellow, and orange tonal cubist landscape. The work is signed by the artist on the back of the canvas. It is framed in a black floating frame. Dimensions without Frame: H 18 in x W 14 in x D 1 in. Artist Biography: Robert Rogan...

RICHARD ANUSZKIEWICZ Temple of Yellow Light II, 1984 Acrylic on panel 17 x 12 inches

Titled and numbered 3 on an artist's label verso

RICHARD ANUSZKIEWICZ The Wind’s Eye, 1965 Liquitex on Masonite 24 x 24 inches

Edith Stone Philips (American 1900-1988) "Maelstrom" 1965 Oil on Canvas 30 x 40 inches Signed and Dated Lower Left EDITH STONE PHILIPS, 88 St. Louis Post-Dispatch (MO) - Sunday, Oc...

NORMAN BLUHM Untitled, 1962 Oil on paper 23 3/4 x 19 3/4 inches 60.3 x 50.2 cm Signed "to Bill / Bluhm 62" Bill Berkson