Bacia Gordon

Mid Century Modernist Israeli 'Sabra in Haifa' Landscape Harbor Oil Painting

1960

Samuel Seeberger (Sieberger) was a known artist and post-card designer who lived in Paris and was active around 1900-1940. He was arrested for being a Jew when the Germans occupied Paris in the 1940s. He was brought into a concentration camp...

Morris Kantor New York (1896 - 1974) Paris from the Ile St. Louis, 1927 (view of Eiffel Tower) Oil painting on canvas Hand Signed lower left. Provenance: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution ( bears label verso) Size: 20 3/4"H x 28 1/8"W (sight), 28.75 "H x 36"W (framed) Morris Kantor (Belarusian: Морыс Кантор) (1896-1974) was a Russian Empire-born American painter based in the New York City area. Born in Minsk on April 15, 1896, Kantor was brought to the United States in 1906 at age 10, in order to join his father who had previously relocated to the states. He made his home in West Nyack, New York for much of his life, and died there in 1974. He produced a prolific and diverse body of work, much of it in the form of paintings, which is distinguished by its stylistic variety over his long career. Perhaps his most widely recognized work is the iconic painting "Baseball At Night", which depicts an early night baseball game played under artificial electric light. Although he is best known for his paintings executed in a realistic manner, over the course of his life he also spent time working in styles such as Cubism and Futurism, and produced a number of abstract or non-figural works. A famous cubist, Futurist, painting of his "Orchestra" brought over 500,000$ at Christie's auction house in 2018 Kantor found employment in the Garment District upon his arrival in New York City, and was not able to begin formal art studies until 1916, when he began courses at the now-defunct Independent School of Art. He studied landscape painting with Homer Boss (1882-1956). In 1928, after returning to New York City from a year in Paris, Kantor developed a style in which he combined Realism with Fantasy, often taking the streets of New York as his subject matter. He did some moody Surrealist Nude paintings and fantasy scenes. In the 1940's he turned towards figural studies. Later in his career, Kantor himself was an instructor at the Cooper Union and also at the Art Students League of New York in the 1940s, and taught many pupils who later became famous artists in their own right, such as Knox Martin, Robert Rauschenberg, Sigmund Abeles and Susan Weil...

Boris Vassiloff, Russian/American (1906 - 2000) Artist Boris Vassiloff was born on March 24, 1906 to Julia Nikolaevna and Boris Ivanovich Vassiloff in Russia. He died peacefully on D...

Nahum Tschacbasov was born in Baku, in the southeast of Russia. When he was eight years old, he came to America, where his family settled in Chicago. His career, spanning more than five decades from the 1930’s to the 1980’s, is a kaleidoscope of influences, from modernism to the Byzantine style and expressionism of his Russian roots. Tschacbasov’s paintings of the 1930’s reflect the social and political preoccupations of the times. He received considerable critical attention for his powerful dramatic satirical depiction of social injustice. In the 1940’s he gained wider recognition when his style evolved into a fusion of Cubism and Surrealism. Through the influence of Jung, as well as currents brought to America by the newly arrived group of European Surrealists, he created a powerful personal iconography in which the inner workings of the psyche are revealed as myth and metaphor. His first encounters with modern art are the works of Cezanne, Van Gogh, and Rouault. 1932-33 Tschacbasov moves for a short time to New York City in order to be in a modern art center and then to Paris, where he adopts the name Tschacbasov, an anagram of different family names. He studies with Leopold Gottlieb for eight months, then with Marcel Gromaire, who teaches him pictorial structure, and briefly with Fernand Leger. Working in his studio on the edge of Montmartre and later in the Hotel de Sante in Montparnasse, he produces a large body of work, retaining fifty paintings. After trips to North Africa, Spain, and the Balearic Islands, he travels often from Paris to New York City, where he spends six months painting a series of Depression-inspired pictures after finding that his American business has gone bankrupt in his absence. 1934 In Paris, Galerie Zak exhibits landscapes from his trip to Majorca in the first one-man exhibition of Tschacbasov paintings; Salon de Tuileries also exhibits his work. His savings exhausted, he returns to New York via Tunisia in the midst of the Depression. 1935 Living on Pineapple Street in Brooklyn Heights, Tschacbasov works on the WPA Federal Arts Project, Easel Division, where he meets other artists and becomes politically involved. His works are shown at Galerie Secession with those of Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, and other modernist and expressionist painters. Tschacbasov, Rothko, Gottlieb, Joseph Solman and others from Galerie Secession form a group called The Ten combining common aims of social consciousness with an expressionist and abstract style. Themes of social injustice are more dominant in Tschacbasov's work than in that of others of The Ten, as he draws on his own childhood experiences of the harsh realities of immigrant life in industrial Chicago. In the summer, a one-man exhibition of his non-objective paintings is held at Galerie Secession, and in December, Montross Gallery in New York City holds the first exhibition of The Ten, including two works by Tschacbasov, "Handout" and "Three Graces." 1936 In January, an exhibition of The Ten is held at Municipal Art Galleries in New York City, and later in the fall an exhibition, also of The Ten, is held at Galerie Bonaparte in Paris. 1936-38 Among the paintings exhibited in the "Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting" at the Whitney Museum of American Art are Tschacbasov's "Deportation", "Clinic", "Friday Night", "Harbor Sunset", and "The Matriarch". 1936-37 Tschacbasov is appointed business manager of Art Front Magazine, a publication associated with the Artists' Union. His circle of friends at this time include Philip Evergood, Milton Avery, Stuart Davis, David Burliuk, William Gropper, the Soyer brothers, Robert Gwathmey, Marsden Hartley, and Max Weber. Due to cut-backs in WPA funding, he teaches at his 38 West 22nd Street studio and at the American Artists' School. On the faculty are David Burliuk and the Soyer brothers, as well as Elaine de Kooning and other artists with similar aesthetic and social points of view. Personal and artistic crises lead to his entering into Jungian psychoanalysis, which provides new impetus and direction to his painting. Under the influence of analysis, he starts to write portions of a surrealistic autobiography, The Moon is My Uncle. His paintings, "Refugees" and "Friday Night" are shown with works by Avery, Burliuk, and DeHirsh Margules in a group exhibition at Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York. In September, the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, Massachusetts focuses on themes of social criticism in an exhibition entitled "The World Today", curated by Elizabeth McCausland, which includes Tschacbasov's, "Little Red School House". 1940 Tschacbasov takes up photography. Photographing the works of friends and other artists, he builds a collection of color slides...

Oil on canvas 30 x 24 inches Signed verso Not framed Provenance: Private collection, USA Aaron Berkman was born in Hartford, Connecticut where his parents had been settled since 1...

Aaron Berkman (1900 - 1991) “Bowling in Central Park” New York Oil on canvas 10 x 14 inches Signed and titled verso: Aaron Berkman 1950 Provenance: Private collection, USA Aaron Ber...

Provenance: Cernuda Art, Coral Gables Private Collection, Los Angeles

Collections: Robert Isaacson; James Draper, New York, 2014. Exhibited: Cambridge, The Fitzwilliam Museum, Beggarstaffs: William Nicholson and James Pr...