Seymour Fogel

"Untitled, " Seymour Fogel, Geometric Abstraction, Texas Hard-Edge

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...

Hananiah Harari Abstract Street (Untitled), 1939 Signed and dated lower right Oil on canvas 12 x 32 inches Born in Rochester, New York, Harari studied at the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, and from 1930 to 1932 at the School of Fine Arts, Syracuse University, where he was exposed to modernism. In 1932 he left for Paris and worked with André Lhote and Fernand Léger. He held his first solo show at the American Club in Paris in 1933. In 1934 Harari moved to Cagnes-sur-Mer, the artists' colony on the French Riviera, where he stayed in Chaim Soutine's former studio, before travelling to Palestine with his friend, the sculptor Herzl Emanuel...

Larry Zox Jean Jean, 1964 Signed, dated, and titled on the stretcher Liquitex on canvas 58 x 62 inches Provenance: Solomon & Co., New York Private Collection, NJ Estate of the above, 2023 Committed to abstraction throughout his career, Larry Zox played a central role in the Color Field discourse of the 1960s and 1970s. His work of the time, consisting of brilliantly colored geometric shapes in dynamic juxtapositions, demonstrated that hard-edge painting was neither cold nor formalistic. He reused certain motifs, but he did so less to explore their aspects than to “get at the specific character and quality of each painting in and for itself,” as James Monte stated in his essay for Zox’s solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1973. By the 1970s, Zox was using a freer, more emotive method, while maintaining the autonomy of color, which increasingly became more important to him than structure in his late years. Zox began to receive attention in the 1960s, when he was included in several groundbreaking exhibitions of Color Field and Minimalist art, including Shape and Structure (1965), organized by Henry Geldzahler for the Gallery of Modern Art, New York, and Systemic Painting (1966), organized by Lawrence Alloway for the Guggenheim Museum. In 1973, the Whitney’s solo exhibition of Zox’s work gave recognition to his significance in the art scene of the preceding decade. In the following year, Zox was represented in the inaugural exhibition of the Hirshhorn Museum, which owns fourteen of his works. Zox was born in Des Moines, Iowa. He attended the University of Oklahoma and Drake University. While studying at the Des Moines Art Center, he was mentored by George Grosz, who despite his own figurative approach encouraged Zox’s forays into abstraction. In 1958, Zox moved to New York, joining the downtown art scene. His studio on 20th Street became a gathering place for artists, jazz musicians, bikers, and boxers. He occasionally sparred with the visiting fighters. He later established a studio in East Hampton, where he painted and fished including using a helicopter to spot fish. In the 1950s and early 1960s, Zox’s works were collages consisting of painted pieces of paper stapled onto sheets of plywood. He then produced paintings that were illusions of collages, including both torn- and trued-edged forms, to which he added a wide range of intense hues that created ambiguous surfaces. Next, he omitted the collage aspect of his work and applied flat color areas to create more complete statements of pure color and shape. From 1962 to 1965, he produced his Rotation Series, at first creating plywood and Plexiglas reliefs, which turned squares into dynamic polygons. He used these shapes in his paintings as well, employing white as a foil between colors to produce negative spaces that suggest that the colored shapes had only been cut out and laid down instead of painted. The New York Times noted in 1964: “The artist is hip, cool, adventurous, not content to stay with the mere exercise of sensibility that one sees in smaller works.” In 1965, he began the Scissors Jack...

Stephen Edlich Ouverture, with Cypress Forms, 1982 Signed, dated and titled on the stretcher Acrylic paint, mixed media, and burlap on canvas 60 x 40 inches An artist who worked in the post-cubist and constructivist traditions, Stephen P. Edlich gained a considerable amount of acclaim in the 1970s and 1980s for his collages, sculpture, and paintings. His promising career was cut short due to his untimely death at age 45 in 1989. Edlich was born in New York City. He received his undergraduate degree with a major in fine arts studies from New York University in 1967. During his college years, he traveled to London, where he met the art dealer Victor Waddington and created his first white on white collage. In that same year, he attended a major exhibition of the work of Ben Nicholson, which would be influential source in his art. Edlich returned to England in 1967, where he met Barbara Hepworth and Patrick Heron in London and traveled to St. Ives, Cornwall, long a favorite artists' haunt. Edlich began creating acrylic reliefs...

Oil on 3-D stretched canvas, dimensions listed for piece as shown. Dimensions are variable depending on hanging formation. Wall sculpture, white, orange, and gray.

Oil on 3-D stretched canvas, dimensions listed for piece as shown. Dimensions are variable depending on hanging formation. Wall sculpture, white, red, and gray.

Richard Hall (-1952) Oil on steel sculptural painting Depicting amorphous forms in vibrant colors and patterns. With a painted steel base Hand signed on base. Height: 78 1/2 in x width: 19 1/4 in x depth: 19 1/4 in. Very solid and heavy, possibly suited for outdoor use. Richard Hall (British - American, 1952-) was born in 1952 in Bradford, Yorkshire, the industrial heart of northern England. He attended both the Sheffield College of Art and the Kingston-upon-Hull College of Art, receiving his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting in 1976. After earning his Master of Fine Arts from Sussex University, he left England for the Southwest of the USA. As a boy growing up in England, Hall spent many hours watching his grandfather create fine furniture. According to Hall, The man was a master craftsman, employing traditional tools and working methods handed down through generations. He passed on to me to joy of creating something unique. I carry on these traditions in my own work. As I learned to finish fine furniture with layer upon layer of polish and wax, so I now find myself working with layer upon layer of texture and color. Richard’s first love was realism art. His college education was frustrating, steeped in conceptual art rather than traditional practices, reflecting the trends of 1970s art colleges. After moving to the United States in 1978 he began exploring various mediums, including printmaking, sculpture in bronze, and stainless steel, mixed media, gold leaf and acrylic painting, finding himself primarily drawn to abstract painting. Hall has been painting all his life, creating works of art in a wide variety of styles. This reminds me of Gregg Robinson, George Snyder...

Acrylic and resin on 3-D stretched canvas. Sculpture, blue, green, orange. Abstract, biomorphic.