Ben Benn

Boy Feeding Birds, Oil Painting by Ben Benn 1946

1946

Man with Bird (21) John F. Leonard American (1921–1987) Date: circa 1965 Oil on Board Size: 25 in. x 20 in. (63.5 cm x 50.8 cm)

Artist: Alexander Raymond Katz, Hungarian / American (1895 - 1974) Title: Nude with Fruit Basket Year: circa 1949 Medium: Oil on Canvas Size: 48 x 33 in. (121.92 x 83.82 cm)

Oil on board, signed verso Image size: 40 1/4 x 29 inches (102.25 x 73.5 cm) Hand made contemporary style frame Here we see a smartly dressed woman sat on a park bench, feeding a group of pigeons that surround her. Lena Gurr had a prolific career in which she painted landscape scenes and still lifes but her most noted works are ones such as these, showing everyday city scenes that were laced with social commentary. Indeed, Gurr noted that her artwork always aimed to show "the joys and sorrows of everyday life." During the course of her career Gurr's compositions retained emotional content as they evolved from a naturalistic to a semi-abstract cubist style. Discussing this trend, she once told an interviewer that as her work tended toward increasing abstraction she believed it nonetheless "must have some kind of human depth to it." Lena Gurr  Lena Gurr, born in Brooklyn in 1897, studied at the Brooklyn Training School for Teachers, the Educational Alliance Art School, the Arts Students League with John Sloan, and with Maurice Sterne in Paris as well as in Mentone and Nice, France. Gurr was a member of the Artists League of America, the National Association of Women Artists, the New York Society of Women Artists, the Brooklyn Society of Artists, Audubon Artists and the American Artists Congress. She exhibited in numerous exhibitions held by these organizations as well as the Whitney Studio Club, National Academy of Design, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Brooklyn Museum, and the 1939 World's Fair. Her work is included in the collections of the Biro-Bidjan Museum, Russia and the Library of Congress, where she has been selected as a "Curator's Choice" in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. In addition to her career as a painter, lithographer and serigrapher, she also taught art in the New York City public school system. She had three solo exhibitions at the ACA Gallery in 1935, 1939 and 1945, and a retrospective in 1963. Notable among Gurr's colleagues - many of them WPA artists - were Mary Cecil Allen...

Genre: Modern Subject: People Medium: Acrylic Surface: Canvas Country: United States Dimensions: 20" x 24" Scene of a family leisurely gathering together in a park to picnic and enjoying their day by the artist Ben Benn. Ben Benn, Russian/American (1884-1983) Ben Benn, a Russian-born American still-life and Post Impressionist landscape painter who was part of the first generation of artists in America to try to digest the lessons of Cubism Benn Benn was a pioneer American modernist whose independent style defied stylistic classification. Despite excursions into Cubism and Abstract Expressionist style, Benn “seems always to have been a ‘subject’ painter. Considering this, it is remarkable that he remained visible at all during the 50’s and early 60’s, when prejudice against the representational amounted nearly to a proscription of it.” Benn’s prominence in the art world over 6 decades was reaffirmed at a 90th birthday show at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington , D.C. in 1974. Benn was born Benjamin Rosenberg in the town of Kamenets Podolsk in the Russian empire in 1884. This town was the regional capital of an area in what is today, SW Ukraine, and was historically known as Podolia. the Rosenberg family chose, along with thousands of others, to immigrate from Podolia to the United States in 1894 or 1899. “Between 1904 and 1908 Benn attended the National Academy of Design and he studied at the Arts Students League In New York City. He spent most of his career in New York City including memberships with the American Society of Painters and Sculptors, American Artists Congress and the Woodstock Artist Association. Academy curriculum stressed portraiture built up with broad, painterly brushstrokes, a technique that remained the foundation of Benn’s style. In his first group show, in 1913, he exhibited with Max Weber and Man Ray. By the mid teens his canvases were bolder in color and more decorative in style. In 1916, Benn participated in the important "Forum Exhibition of Modern American Painters...