Leon Bibel

"Shattered" WPA Mid 20th Century Modernism American Scene Surrealism Figurative

1937

UN Poster Design American Scene Mid 20th Century Modernism WPA World Peace Jo Cain (1904 – 2003) We Are All Members of the Human Race: UN Poster Proposal 21 x...

"Two Seas and a Moon" Surrealism American Scene WWII Modern WWI Denver WPA Era Arnold Ronnebeck (1885 - 1947) Two Seas and a Moon 30 x 22 1/2 inches Oil on Canvas, c. 1943 Signed u...

Industrial Mid-20th Century WPA Modern Men Working American Scene Social Realism George Pearse Ennis (American, 1884-1936) "Forging a Gun Tube #1...

"Audience" Mid 20th Century American Figurative Theatre Performance Contemporary Leon Bibel (1912 - 1995) "The Audience," 52 ½ x 41 ¼ inches. Oil on canvas, c. 1963. Signed lower right. Framed. BIO Painter, printmaker and sculptor, Leon Bibel was born in San Francisco in 1913. He trained at the California School of Fine Arts and received a scholarship to study under the German Impressionist Maria Riedelstein. He worked in collaboration with Bernard Zackheim, a student of Diego Rivera, to create frescoes for the San Francisco Jewish Community Center and the University of California Medical School. In 1936 Bibel moved from California to join the Federal Art Project at Harlem Art...

"Sock Hop" Mid-Century American Modernism WPA Female Artist 20th Century Realism. 30 x 24 inches. Oil on canvas. Signed on stretcher, c. 1940s. Frame is likely original to the painting. Realist painter-printmaker Kyra Markham...

"Concert" Early 20th Century WPA Modernism American City Landscape Scene Ashcan The size of the canvas 28 3/4 x 43 1/4 inches. The painting comes directly from the artist's estate. It is signed lower right as well as signed, titled and dated verso. We have available more than two dozen paintings and works on paper from the 1930s - 80s that come directly from the Loew estate. BIO Michael Loew (1907 – 1985) was the son of a New York City baker. After high school, he was an apprentice to a stained-glass maker, and from 1926-1929, he studied at the Art Students League. In 1929, he traveled to Paris, North Africa, Germany, and Italy with a group of artists. When he returned to New York City in 1931, the Great Depression hit Loew unexpectedly, and for the next two years he paid his apartment rent with his paintings. In 1935, he found work with the WPA where he painted murals and partnered up with longtime friend Willem de Kooning in 1939 on a mural for the Hall of Pharmacy at the New York World’s Fair. Their friendship lasted for the rest of their lives. In the mid-30’s he painted in Mexico and the Yucatán documenting the construction of a U.S. Naval airbase on Tinian Island. It was from this airbase that the Enola...

Frann Spencer Reynolds (1926-2008) "Pink Triangle" c 1950s Oil on canvas 24"x32" float mount white distressed wood frame 26"x34.25" Signed on reverse Go...

Louisa Lizbeth Chase was born in 1951 to Benjamin and Wilda Stengel Chase in Panama City, Panama, where her father, a West Point graduate, was stationed. The family moved to Pennsylv...

Genre: Modern Subject: Abstract Medium: Oil Surface: Canvas Country: United States Sabina Teichman: (1905-1983) Studied at Columbia Univ. (BA, MA), also with Charles J. Martin and A...

Substantial and period painting, a Mid Century Modern portrait of a woman in an abstracted landscape by listed California artist Tarmo Pasto...

1950s abstract oil on canvas painting by Henriette "Yetti" Stolz from 1956. Completed in shades of brown, white, black, and gray. Signed by the artist in the lower right corner. Presented in a vintage frame measuring 42 ¾ x 16 ¾ inches. Image size measures 42 ¼ x 16 ¼ inches. Provenance: Estate of the Artist, Henriette "Yetti" Stolz Painting is in good condition - please contact us for a detailed condition report. About the Artist: Henriette “Yetti” Stolz was born in Serbia in 1935 ( and is still living ). Her family emigrated to Denver, Colorado, in the early 1950s after WWII and she attended East High School before studying art at Colorado College, in Colorado Springs in the mid to late 50s. While there studying she would have been exposed to modernist artists working both at the college ( ie. Mary...

Richard Marshall Merkin (American, 1938-2009) Gladys and Half-Pint Hand signed 'Merkin' (center right), Titled, inscribed, dated, and initialed 'GLADYS BENTLEY AND FRANKIE 'HALF-PINT' JAXON 1997/R.M.' verso. Oil on canvas 37 1/2 x 72 in. (95.3 x 182.9 cm) framed 39 1/4 x 74 x 2 in. Gladys Alberta Bentley (August 12, 1907 – January 18, 1960) was an American blues singer, pianist, and entertainer during the Harlem Renaissance. Her career skyrocketed when she appeared at Harry Hansberry's Clam House, a well-known gay speakeasy in New York in the 1920s, as a black, lesbian, cross-dressing performer. She headlined in the early 1930s at Harlem's Ubangi Club, where she was backed up by a chorus line of drag queens. She dressed in men's clothes (including a signature tailcoat and top hat), played piano, and sang her own raunchy lyrics to popular tunes of the day in a deep, growling voice while flirting with women in the audience. On the decline of the Harlem speakeasies with the repeal of Prohibition, she relocated to southern California, where she was billed as "America's Greatest Sepia Piano Player" and the "Brown Bomber of Sophisticated Songs". She was frequently harassed for wearing men's clothing. She tried to continue her musical career but did not achieve as much success as she had had in the past. Bentley was openly lesbian early in her career, but during the McCarthy Era she started wearing dresses and married, claiming to have been "cured" by taking female hormones. Frankie "Half-Pint" Jaxon, born Frank Devera Jackson was an African American vaudeville singer, stage designer and comedian, popular in the 1920s and 1930s. He was born in Montgomery, Alabama, orphaned, and raised in Kansas City, Missouri. His nickname of "Half Pint" referred to his 5'2" height. He started in show business around 1910 as a singer in Kansas City, before travelling extensively with medicine shows in Texas, and then touring the eastern seaboard. His feminine voice and outrageous manner, often as a female impersonator, established him as a crowd favorite. By 1917 he had begun working regularly in Atlantic City, New Jersey and in Chicago, often with such performers as Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters, whose staging he helped design. He served slightly less than a year in the United States Army in 1918–1919 and rose to the rank of sergeant. In the late 1920s he sang with top jazz bands when they passed through Chicago, working with Bennie Moten, King Oliver, Freddie Keppard and others. He performed and recorded with the pianists Cow Cow Davenport, Tampa Red and "Georgia Tom" Dorsey, recording with the latter pair under the name of The Black Hillbillies. He also recorded with the Harlem Hamfats. In the 1930s, he was often on radio in the Chicago area, and led his own band, titled Frankie "Half Pint" Jaxon and His Quarts of Joy. Jaxon appeared with Duke Ellington in a film short titled Black and Tan (1929), and with Bessie Smith in "St. Louis Blues" (1929). Cab Calloway's "Minnie the Moocher" (1931) is based both musically and lyrically on Jaxon's "Willie the Weeper" (1927). Richard Merkin, Sometimes described as Rhode Island’s most famous New York artist, Richard Merkin has led a dual life for nearly 40 years - teaching at RISD while enjoying a celebrated painting career based in New York City. He has exhibited in countless gallery and museum shows in the US and abroad and is represented in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian Institution, The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the RISD museum and many others. In addition to contributing drawings and paintings to The New Yorker (along with, Art Spiegelman, Saul Steinberg, Harper’s, The New York Times Sunday Magazine and several books on Erotica and Baseball, he is a contributing editor for Vanity Fair and a former style columnist for GQ. Merkin’s honors include a Tiffany Foundation Fellowship and the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Museums and Selected Collections : The American Federation of Arts, New York, NY Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA First city Bank, Chicago, Ill Fisk University Art Gallery, Nashville, TN Hallmark Collections, Kansas City, MO Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA Maimi-Dade Junior College, Miami, FL Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI Minnesota Museum of Art, Minneapolis, MN Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, RI McClung Museum, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN Pennsylvania Acadamy of the Arts, Philadelphia PA Prudential Insurance Company, Boston, Ma Prudential Insurance Company, Newark, NJ Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA Sara Robey Foundation, New York, NY Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC State University of Brockport, Brockport, NY Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY Selected Publications : 1986-Present Contributing Editor, Vanity Fair ..1988-Present, New Yorker... 1988-Present, style column, GQ...1997, Text and Illustration for The Tijuana Bibles, published by Simon & Shuster, 1995, Illustrated book, Leagues Apart: the Men and Times of the Negro Baseball Leagues published by Morrow. 1967 Cover of the Beatles “Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band” Album (Mr. Merkin appears in the back row, right of center) RISD: MFA in Painting, 1963; Professor, Department of Painting special skill: Merging his role as flaneur (connoisseur of city life) with his role as painter and social historian, Merkin retrieves lost cultural artifacts – a Turkish cigarette, a gangster, a bowler and generally “things most people don’t know about” – and reconstitutes their Jazz Age virtues on canvas in cubist, comic-laced landscapes of tropical color. (ala Robert Crumb and Ben Katchor) breaking in: Perpetually on the fly from his middle-class Brooklyn background, Merkin found the perfect escape in the mid ‘60s in George Frazier, a dapper Boston columnist who inspired the emerging New York painter’s overnight reinvention of himself. The elements of structure, stability and surprise he admired in this well-dressed dandy – a cool linen suit, a splash of suspender, a polka dot scarf and pearl-handled walking stick – soon surfaced in paintings peopled by impeccable underdogs of café society along with his personal pop heroes: William Burroughs, Bobby Short and Krazy Kat...