Figurative Paintings

A very rare composition by the artist Jean-Pierre Cassigneul, the woman holds a beautiful Bouquet of Roses is rare by the artist, she is wearing a beautiful chapeau in front of a p...

This is a rare ceramic plaque painted with enamel glaze by famed Israeli German artist Irene Awret is signed Awret Safed on the verso. the actual glazed ceramic is 10X15 inches. Irène Awret was born to a Jewish family in Berlin called Spicker, the youngest of three children. Her mother died in 1927, when Irène was six years old. In 1937 she was forced to stop high school, due to the Nazi race laws. Because she could not continue her regular studies, her father sent her to study drawing, painting and art restoration with a Jewish painter. Among his students were a large number of German Jews who knew they would have to leave Germany within a short time and would require a profession to enable them to support themselves. When the situation grew worse, following the Kristallnacht (the first major attack on German and Austrian Jews in November 1938), her uncle decided to move to Belgium. In 1939 the situation became even worse - her father was fired from his job and the family were forced to leave their home. As a result, Awret's father tried to send her and her sister to Belgium, with the help of smugglers. The first smuggler proved to be a double agent and they were sent back from Aachen to Berlin. Two weeks later they made a second, successful, attempt to sneak across the border. Awret worked for a Dutch Jewish family as a maid. As she had her room and board there, she was able to save enough money to study art part-time at Brussels' Académie Royal des Beaux-Arts. A few months later Awret's father joined her and her financial situation became easier. She left her job and studied full-time, helping support herself with restoration work when it was available and by painting portraits to order. Later, Awret found a hiding place on a farm in Waterloo with a Jewish family who were connected with the underground. In January 1943 she had to return to Brussels, living with a false identity card which stated she was a married woman with two children. Awret succeeded in renting an attic without informing the police where she was - she told her landlady that she had been forced to flee her husband because he beat her. While there, she supported herself by restoring wooden sculptures. A Jewish informer gave her up to the Gestapo, accompanying the two Gestapo men who arrested her. Awret was able to take a bag containing food and drawing materials. She was detained in the Gestapo cellars in Brussels where she drew. Because there was nothing there to draw, she sketched her own hand (view this work). Awret was interrogated in order to reveal the hiding place of her father who was still in Brussels. The National Socialist regime was determined to persecute him, even though he had fought for Germany in World War I and been permanently disabled. They stepped up their torture and brought Awret before Hartmann, the head of the Gestapo in Brussels. When Hartmann saw her block of drawings, he asked her where she had studied art and halted the interrogation. Awret was placed in a narrow cell and then transferred to Malines camp, which the Belgian's called Mechelen. Malines was a transit camp to Auschwitz, regularly sending 2000 people at a time. Although she arrived just before Transport No. 20, Irène Awret avoided being included. Instead she was put to work in the leather workshop, decorating broaches. While she was there, Hartmann visited the camp and spotted her: "I could have discovered where your father is hiding," he told her. When her artistic talents became known, she was transferred to the Mahlerstube (artist's workshop) where she worked producing graphics for the Germans until the end of the war. When Carol (Karel) Deutsch (whose works are now on view at Yad Vashem) was sent from Mechelen to his death with his wife, he left young Irene his paintbox. Irene also recalls seeing the great painter Felix Nussbaum and his wife being pushed into a boxcar bound for the gas, and tells of the aftermath of the famous 20th Train incident, when a young Jewish doctor armed only with a pistol and helped by two unarmed friends with a lantern ambushed one of Mechelen's Auschwitz-bound trains carrying 1,618 Jews, most of whom had fled Eastern Europe for Belgium. Awret's job enabled her to paint and draw - mainly in pencil, but also in watercolors and oils. In the artists' workshop she met a Jewish refugee from Poland - Azriel Awret...

This recently rediscovered expressionist drawing by László Moholy-Nagy is part of a small group of drawings made by the artist early in his career, in Vienna and Berlin. The use of interlaced curves, typical of the artist's technique, gives this hieratic portrait a magnetic radiance, while the absence of any connection with the rest of the body evokes a profane Holy Face. 1. From Hungary to Chicago, the ardent life of László Moholy-Nagy Moholy-Nagy was born in Borsod, now known as Bácsborsód in Southern Hungary, in July 1895. He studied law in Budapest in 1913, when he was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army to serve as an artillery officer on the Italian and Russian fronts. While serving at artillery observation posts, Moholy-Nagy was able to execute numerous drawings, recording his traumatic war experience, on the reverse of military-issued postcards which he could easily carry with him. In 1917, he was seriously wounded and hospitalized. The following year (around 1918 at the age of 23), he abandoned his plans to become a lawyer in favour of a career as an artist, with the encouragement of his friend, the art critic Iván Hevesy. The drawings executed in those early years reveal Moholy-Nagy's powerful Expressionist lines. In his autobiography of 1944, Abstract of an Artist, Moholy-Nagy explained his early figurative style, writing that contemporary art in those days was too chaotic and that and all the '-isms' were incomprehensible and puzzling to him. He was, however, experimenting with Dadaist compositions already in 1919 and then moved to Vienna and later to Berlin, where he would soon make his first works in his Constructivist style of the early 1920s. In Berlin he met photograph and writer Lucia Schultz who became his wife the next year. In 1922 he met Walter Gropius. During a vacation on the Rhome with Lucia, she introduced him to making photograms on light-sensitized paper. Walter Gropius invited him to teach at the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1923 where he replaced Paul Klee as Head of the Metal Workshop. The Bauhaus became known for the versatility of its artists and Moholy-Nagy was no exception: throughout his career, he became proficient in the fiels of photography, typography, sculpture, painting, printmaking, film-making and industrial design. In 1928 Moholy-Nagy left the Bauhaus and established his own design studio in Berlin. He separated from his first wide Lucia in 1929. In 1931 he met actress and scriptwriter Sibylle Pietzsch. They married in 1932 and has two daughters, Hattula (born 1933) and Claudia. After the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, he was no longer allowed to work there. He moved his family to London in 1935. In 1937, on the recommendation of Walter Gropius, Moholy-Nagy moved to Chicago to become the director of the New Bauhaus, but the school closed in 1938. Moholy-Nagy resumed doing commercial design work, which he continued for the rest of his life. In 1939 Moholy-Nagy opened the School of Design in Chicago, which became in 1944 the Institute of Design, becoming part of the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1949. Diagnosed with leukemia in 1945, Moholy-Nagy died of the disease in Chicago in 1946. 2. Description of the artwork This drawing presents us with a frontal representation of a man in his thirties, whose penetrating gaze seems to stare at us. The face is highly symmetrical and is modelled by curved black lines. The very high forehead and the slightly dilated left pupil reinforce the very expressive character of the face. Like the Holy Face which appeared on the cloth stretched out to wipe Christ's face by Saint Veronica, only the model's face is represented on the cardboard piece. The curved lines that define the face, hollowing out the temples, the eyelids, the cheeks and the area around the mouth, create a kind of magnetic radiation around a median point located between the eyebrows. In some respects, this face may evoke one of the most famous representations of the Holy Face: the extraordinary engraving by Claude Mellan...

Adolphe Aizik Feder (Ukrainian, 1886-1943), alternate spelling Adolf Feder "Portrait of a Rabbi" Oil painting mounted to board. Signed (upper left). Sight size, 6 3/4 by 5 1/8 inches; overall as framed, 8 3/8 by 6 3/4 inches. Adolphe Féder (1886 – 1943) was a Jewish-Ukrainian painter and illustrator. He moved to France in 1908, where he remained until his deportation and subsequent murder at the hands of the Vichy regime. Adolphe Feder is best-known today for the artwork he produced of those interned with him in the Drancy internment camp. Born to Jewish Ukrainian merchant parents, in 1905 Féder found himself involved in the revolutionary Bund Labor Movement. His involvement in the organization would force him to flee to Berlin, Germany at the age of 19. Following his time in Berlin, Féder moved to Geneva, Switzerland before moving to Paris, France in 1908 to study at the Académie Julian. At the Académie he studied painting and worked closely with the French Impressionist, Henri Matisse in his workshop. In 1926, Féder made a trip to British Mandate Palestine (Israel). On his trip he encountered many Judaic elements, which he painted. The trip's impact on him yielded many of his most notable paintings such as "Juif à barbe tenant un plateau" ("Bearded Jew holding a tray"). When Féder returned to Paris, he brought many of these paintings back with him, which garnered him recognition in the Parisian artistic community. Before Féder was sent to Auschwitz he painted prisoners and guards in the Drancy internment camp. When Nazi troops marched across France in 1942, Féder, aged 52, tried to get in contact with the French Resistance but was caught by the Pétain militia. He and his wife were arrested on 10 June 1942 and imprisoned in Cherche-Midi prison; he was transferred to the Drancy internment camp in September 1942. In Drancy, Féder continued to paint, creating portraits of those around him such as the other prisoners and guards. His paintings stopped with his deportation to the Auschwitz concentration camp on 13 December 1943 where he was murdered. Féder's wife, Sima Féder, donated Féder's works from inside Drancy to the Ghetto Fighters' House upon her death in 1967. Féder's success came in 1912 when his landscape works were displayed at the Salon d'Automne. He continued to paint following this including a series of 45 illustrations created for a book of poetry by French poet Arthur Rimbaud. The book received a limited run of 350 copies in 1924, but was commended for its watercolor illustrations. When Féder's work appeared in the Fearon Galleries in 1923, his work received great praise. A monograph on Féder was written in 1929 by Gustave Kahn. (also known as Aizik Féder or Айзик Федер) He was associated with The School of Paris, Ecole de Paris, which was not a single art movement or institution, but refers to the importance of Paris as a center of Western art in the early decades of the 20th century. Between 1900 and 1940 the city drew artists from all over the world and became a centre for artistic activity. School of Paris was used to describe this loose community, particularly of non-French artists, centered in the cafes, salons and shared workspaces and galleries of Montparnasse. Before World War I, a group of expatriates in Paris created art in the styles of Post-Impressionism, Cubism and Fauvism. The group included artists like Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Amedeo Modigliani and Piet Mondrian. Associated French artists included Pierre Bonnard, Henri Matisse, Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes. The term "School of Paris" was used in 1925 by André Warnod to refer to the many foreign-born artists who had migrated to Paris. The term soon gained currency, often as a derogatory label by critics who saw the foreign artists—many of whom were Jewish—as a threat to the purity of French art. Art critic Louis Vauxcelles, noted for coining the terms "Fauvism" and "Cubism", Waldemar George, himself a French Jew, in 1931 lamented that the Ecole de paris, School of Paris name "allows any artist to pretend he is French. it refers to French tradition but instead annihilates it. The artists working in Paris between World War I and World War II experimented with various styles including Cubism, Orphism, Surrealism and Dada. Foreign and French artists working in Paris included Jean Arp, Joan Miro, Constantin Brancusi, Raoul Dufy, Tsuguharu Foujita, artists from Belarus like Michel Kikoine, Pinchus Kremegne, and Jacques Lipchitz, the Polish artist Marek Szwarc and others such as Russian-born prince Alexis Arapoff. A significant subset, the Jewish artists, came to be known as the Jewish School of Paris...

Academic style figurative painting of a young athlete, wrestler in training "Wrestler in Training", Painted by Mark Beard as Bruce Sargeant (pseudonym in h...

This painting by Jean-Léon Gérôme entitled La Danse pyrrhique is among the most fascinating compositions ever composed by the Academic master’s hand. Gérôme’s iconic scenes of the East captivated a generation, and this work showcases all of the artist’s unparalleled talents. Set in the Ptolemaic period of Ancient Egypt, its depiction of the ritual Pyrrhic dance is vivid and striking. Beautifully painted and rich with detail, it represents the best of Gérôme’s famed Orientalist scenes. In La Danse pyrrhique, Gérôme gives us a dramatic rendering of this ancient war dance. Greek in origin, it was performed by costumed dancers armed with swords who completed a series of movements set to music pantomiming combat. Homer wrote that Achilles performed this dance in a show of respect and grief at the funeral of his friend, Patroclus. When Julius Caesar introduced it to the Roman Games, its popularity spread across the Roman Empire to include Egypt, where Gérôme’s composition is set. Gérôme visited Egypt for the first time in 1856, and he returned throughout the late 19th century when this work was created. Gérôme’s first-hand familiarity with this setting is evident in this piece, and his visual narrative is unlike any other. His paintings combine the rationalist style of historical paintings and the theatrical...

French Academic painter Louis-Joseph Courtat displays his mastery of composition and the female form in this entrancing oil on canvas. Entitled Baigneuses, the work was painted for and exhibited at the 1885 Paris Salon, the foremost exhibition of painters in the Western world. Large in size, it captures two nude bathers within a tranquil beach scene. While the artist's skill for landscape painting is on display, it is his command of form, light and color that bring this canvas to life. The artist specialized in paintings that glorified the nude, and his skill is clear in the luminosity of his models' skin and the classical beauty of their form and proportions. With their soft, undulating curves and flowing hair, Courtat's models reflect the two key influences on the young painter, that of the great Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres as well as his teacher Alexandre Cabanel. Like these two greats who came before him, Courtat similarly follows in the artistic tradition of the female nude that is traceable to classical antiquity and the Italian Renaissance. Born in Paris in 1847, Courtat studied at the famed École des Beaux-Arts under Cabanel. He was one of the Academic master's first students at the school, where he began to teach in 1864. Displaying considerable skill at an early age, Courtat won the Prix de Rome around 1870, and subsequently studied in Rome for a number of years. He returned to Paris in 1873 to make his debut at the Salon, where he was met with immediate success, receiving a third class medal. He received medals again in 1874 and 1875, a remarkable achievement for a painter of his age. In addition to the monumental nudes...

When viewed straight on, this "turning picture" by French artist Gaspar Antoine de Bois-Clair appears to be a disorganized collection of painted facial features and wooden slats. However, when viewed at an angle from either side, two separate images are revealed — portraits of Frederik IV and Louise of Mecklenburg-Güstrow, the King and Queen of Denmark. A wonder of both portraiture and trompe l'oeil, this work demonstrates the artist's skill in rendering intriguing visual effects. An impressive exercise in representing depth and 3-dimensionality in painting, the work is executed on a series of triangularly-cut strips of wood to create an effect now known as lenticular imaging...

Theo Tobiasse's Expressionist painting of several Jewish men in traditional clothing features the artist's signature use of bold colors and emotive forms. Artist: Theo Tobiasse Tit...

"Passers By" is an oil painting with chalk and graphite on wood panel, and measures 12" high by 16" wide. It is finished with a clear resin across the surface, lending the artwork a ...

The Masquerade, oil painting signed lower right JANSEM. The painting size is 38"x51" with framed (original frame) size 47"x60". Excellent in condition. From 1934 – 1936 he attended ...

"The Card Players" is an extraordinarily rare and early painting of Alvin Demar Loving, a major artist in the lexicon of 20th century African-American artists. This piece has just re...

Delphin Enjolras "In the Boudoir" Oil on Canvas Signed Lower Left Canvas: approx 29 x 22 inches Framed: approx. 37 x 30 inches Renowned as a portraitist of the upper echelons of s...

Jean Carzou, L'etang, 21.5x26 inches, oil on canvas, 1991 LIST OF MUSEUMS WITH WORKS BY JEAN CARZOU Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris Musée d’Art Moder...

This refined and sophisticated still life painting was realized in Italy, circa 1950, by the esteemed Italian artist Romano Campagnoli. Executed in oil paint on canvas, the still lif...

Title: Still Life with Chess Materials : Oil on Canvas Date : 1960's Dimensions : 42 1/2 x 31 in. In the late 1960's, Daniel Brennan had a day job loading boxcars for Railway Express. During nights, he would go to a coffee house (Lawrence Gallery and Coffee House, at 43rd and Main St., KCMO), to sit and draw before heading home to paint. The gallery owners, Anne and Sidney Lawrence...

Bernard Aptekar's For the Megaliths to the Megalopolis is a figurative painting measuring 49.5" x 65". Aptekar's paintings are often a political and social commentary of the contradi...

Aptekar's paintings are often a political and social commentary of the contradictions inherent to the human mankind. The surrealistic and expressionistic language used to covey the m...

Expressionist painting of two abstract skulls in flowers on a field of red. Framed in a white frame with a white matte. Painting was newly framed. Dime...

Axel Henry Helge Helme (1894 Roskilde, Denmark 1987), Seated Nude, circa 1930, oil on canvas, original frame Son of a merchant, Helge Helme was admitted ...

Noted German Expressionist artist Fritz Schwaderer(1901-1974), , was classically schooled in fine art in Germany in the early-mid 1920as. ...

Signed upper left

We are proud to premier for the first time in more than twenty years, the paintings of Austrian/American artist Gustav Rehberger (1910–1995). ...

We are proud to premier for the first time in more than twenty years, the paintings of Austrian/American artist Gustav Rehberger (1910–1995). ...

We are proud to premier for the first time in more than twenty years, the paintings of Austrian/American artist Gustav Rehberger (1910–1995). ...

An original oil on canvas by American artist Darren LeGallo. “Devotion and Love”, was exhibited in our recent premiere solo exhibition of American artist Darren LeGallo, “Darren LeGa...

Presenting an original mixed media watercolor by Hungarian artist Bela Kadar. Bela Kadar was a historically important artist, is work was included as part of the degenerate art movement of Nazi Germany. His works appeared illustrated in the famous German arts magazine Der Sturm...

An exceptional original watercolor by American artist Byron Randall. "The Accordionist", is an original watercolor on heavy paper, signed, c.1945, ...

Presenting a rare oil on panel by German artist Otto Tugel. Otto Tugel worked in Germany before settling in New York. This is an early oil on panel, signed in monogram, dated 1925.