Arthur Dove

Yours Truly

1927

Charles Houghton Howard was born in Montclair, New Jersey, the third of five children in a cultured and educated family with roots going back to the Massachusetts Bay colony. His father, John Galen Howard, was an architect who had trained at M.I.T. and the École des Beaux Arts in Paris, and apprenticed in Boston with H. H. Richardson. In New York, the elder Howard worked for McKim, Mead and White before establishing a successful private practice. Mary Robertson Bradbury, Charles’s mother, had studied art before her marriage. John Galen Howard moved his household to California in 1902 to assume the position of supervising architect of the new University of California campus at Berkeley and to serve as Professor of Architecture and the first Dean of the School of Architecture (established in 1903). The four Howard boys grew up to be artists and all married artists, leaving a combined family legacy of art making in the San Francisco Bay area that endures to this day, most notably in design, murals and reliefs at the Coit Tower and in buildings on the Berkeley campus. Charles Howard graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1921 as a journalism major, and pursued graduate studies in English at Harvard and Columbia Universities before embarking on a two-year trip to Europe. Howard went to Europe as a would-be writer. But a near-religious experience, seeing a picture by Giorgione in a remote town outside of Venice, proved a life-altering epiphany. In his own words, “I cut the tour at once and hurried immediately back to Paris, to begin painting. I have been painting whenever I could ever since” (Charles Howard, “What Concerns Me,” Magazine of Art 39, no. 2 [February 1946], p. 63). Giorgione’s achievement, in utilizing a structured and rational visual language of art to convey high emotion on canvas, instantly convinced Howard that painting, and not literature, offered the best vehicle to express what he wanted to say. Howard returned to the United States in 1925, confirmed in his intent to become an artist. Howard settled in New York and supported himself as a painter in the decorating workshop of Louis Bouché and Rudolph Guertler, where he specialized in mural painting. Devoting spare time to his own work, he lived in Greenwich Village and immersed himself in the downtown avant-garde cultural milieu. The late 1920s and early 1930s were the years of Howard’s art apprenticeship. He never pursued formal art instruction, but his keen eye, depth of feeling, and intense commitment to the process of art making, allowed him to assimilate elements of painting intuitively from the wide variety of art that interested him. He found inspiration in the modernist movements of the day, both for their adherence to abstract formal qualities and for the cosmopolitan, international nature of the movements themselves. Influenced deeply by Surrealism, Howard was part of a group of American and European Surrealists clustered around Julien Levy. Levy opened his eponymously-named gallery in 1931, and rose to fame in January 1932, when he organized and hosted Surrealisme, the first ever exhibition of Surrealism in America, which included one work by Howard. Levy remained the preeminent force in advocating for Surrealism in America until he closed his gallery in 1949. Howard’s association with Levy in the early 1930s confirms the artist’s place among the avant-garde community in New York at that time. In 1933, Howard left New York for London. It is likely that among the factors that led to the move were Howard’s desire to be a part of an international art community, as well as his marriage to English artist, Madge Knight...

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...

Signed (on stretcher): Stanley Twardowicz Stanley Twardowicz (1917–2008), a one-time orphan, Golden Gloves boxer, professional baseball player and auto worker, emerged from a hards...

Signed and dated (on verso): Louisa Chase 1985

Figurative Cubist Surrealist Abstraction Mid 20th Century American Modern Large O. Louis Guglielmi (1906 - 1956) OBSESSIVE THEME 44 x 33 inches Oil on canvas Signed and dated '48 lo...

"Backstage, Ambassador" Broadway Theatre NYC Mid-century Modern Modernist CubistSigned lower left, titled on the stretcher. Norkin was a Brooklyn, Ne...

"Riviera" is an exquisite painting of American Modern - primary colors actively composed in energetic movement and structure on the painted surface. These colors formulate the painting, play both for and against each other and create a lively surface with hints of either an architectural structure or freeway. This painting hints to future Modernists such as Richard Diebenkorn "Driveway" and David Hockney "Garrowby." Unframed the piece measures 18 x 24. "Riviera" is signed on lower left. On verso is Provenance of over 70 years, 3 galleries in New York and one in Detroit, Michigan: Andrew Crispo Gallery, Sid Deutsch Gallery and Linda Hyman Gallery in New York and Collected Detroit Gallery in Detroit, Michigan. Abstractionist Carl Robert Holty was known for his biomorphic abstract forms as well as the geometric abstractions he painted with his vibrant color palette. Born in Frieburg, Germany his family immigrated to the United States settling in Wisconsin. In 1919, he enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago, and shortly thereafter attended the Parsons School of Design. He spent a short time at the National Academy of Design and studied with Francis Coates Jones...

You are viewing a modern abstract painting by Robert Blair. Robert Noel Blair (American, 1912-2003) was an American artist, painter, sculptor, printmaker and teacher. He is best k...