1940s Figurative Paintings

A vintage, dramatic scene of the rigorous sport of steeplechasing by artist Benton Henderson Clark (American, 1895-1964). Signed and dated lower right "Benton Clark 1945." Presented ...

Eric James Mellon (1925-2014) Eric James Mellon was a painter, printmaker and ceramicist who was born in Watford, Hertfordshire. In his early teens he attended Watford Technical and Art Institute to prepare for a career in the local printing industry and at weekends he would Harrow School of Art for life drawing and pottery classes. In 1944 he enrolled at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London to study book production and printmaking. The wood-engraver John Farleigh...

Astounding painting and carving on wood panel by the “Hound of Heaven” artist Robert Gammell. Created 1947. This beautiful work features rich color, gold accents and incredible detail. Signed lower right “R.H. Ives Gammell” and dated ‘47. The subject comes from the imagination of the artist and is titled “Lady of the Seven Sorrows.” The work measures 34 1/2"h x 11 1/4"w and is considered to be one of the artist’s “Puppy Panels.” The ornate frame measures 38 1/2"h x 15 1/2"w x 1 1/4"d. The weight is 9 ½ pounds. A label is attached to the verso listing the work as being an entry for the 1967 Grand National Show with the American Artists Professional League in New York. This detailed and beautiful painting is a work to be treasured. More Information Robert Hale Ives Gammell: After completing his major allegorical sequence, the Hound of Heaven, Gammell felt compelled to revisit certain themes and figurative compositions in later years. His original plan was to display the smaller panels, or "Puppy Panels" as he affectionately called them, between the larger Hound panels. Robert Hale Ives Gammell (1893-1981) was a prolific professional painter working in Boston, Provincetown, and Williamstown, Massachusetts. During the sixty-five years of his career, Gammell painted murals, portraits, landscapes, and still lifes, but the pieces which excited him most were the allegorical works drawn from his imagination. In his diary Gammell wrote that he was “fascinated by the drama of man in his relationship to the forces of the universe and of his own nature.” Over the years he experimented using ancient myths and rituals as well as contemporary symbols in his attempts to articulate images of man’s terror, wonder and yearning in the face of a century of upheaval. Excerpt from Elizabeth Ives Hunter, the God-daughter of R. H. Ives Gammell and the daughter of his assistant, Theodore W. J. Valsam. R. H. Ives Gammell believed in the practice and standards of art should rest on the Gold standard established by the 19th-century French system of learning, as practiced by the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and Academie Julian of Paris. His personal mission was to follow that tradition, so he established his own Studio working with a handful of students at a time. His book ‘Twilight of Painting’ would help define a way back to those lofty goals for future artists, reflecting the uncompromising levels of quality that he embraced, and maintained. Robert Hale Ives Gammell was born to wealth in Providence, Rhode Island and spent the majority of his artistic life in Boston at the Fenway Studios and in Williamstown, MA, where he died in 1981. In 1910, Gammell studied briefly with William C. Loring and Wm. Sergeant Kendall before training in 1913 at Boston's Museum School with Philip Hale, F.W. Benson and Edmund C. Tarbell for a few months. Gammell then went to Provincetown, MA to study with Charles Hawthorn and then to the Academie Julian in Paris and the Academie Baschet until the end of 1914. He was tremendously influenced by the teachings of Tarbell and the work of Joseph DeCamp and William M. Paxton. He was so influenced by the Boston School he vowed to hand down their teaching traditions to generations of students and he did exactly that. Some of the painters who are "Gammellites" are Samuel Rose, Thomas R. Dunlay, Robert Cormier, Richard Lack, Gary Hoffman, Stephen Gjerston, Robert Douglas Hunter, David Lowrey, David Curtis...

Symbolic figurative abstract of wispy figures surrounding a heart by Marguerite Louis Blasingame (American; 1906-1947), circa 1940-45. Marguerite and her husband Frank Blasingame...

Oil Painting Portrait of Ashcan Artist John Sloan. Signed I. Holtz. The youngest of four children, Holtz was born and spent his early childhood in Skierniewice, Poland, a small town near Warsaw. His father was a hat maker and a furrier. In 1935, prior to World War II, when Holtz was ten years old, his family moved to Jerusalem, Israel, where they settled in the Geula neighborhood near Meah Shearim. Itzhak Holtz's passion for art began early. When he was five years old, in Poland, his father first drew a picture of a horse and sled in the snow for him. The young Holtz looked at the drawing and studied it in wonderment. From that moment on, Holtz remembers, he constantly begged his father to draw for him. His enthusiasm for art grew and Holtz longed to study art. In 1945, he enrolled at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem, where he primarily studied lettering and poster work in a program geared toward commercial art Holtz became interested in painting, prompting him to move to New York City in 1950 to study at the Art Students League of New York under Robert Brackman and Harry Sternberg, and then at the National Academy of Design under Robert Philipp. Holtz has stated that his artwork, which primarily but not exclusively, depict scenes of Jewish spirituality and tradition, is driven by his Orthodox Jewish beliefs: "You have to live that religious life to fully capture it on canvas." He has been classified in the school of genre painting, often depicting street scenes of ordinary people in everyday Jewish life in the back alleys and markets of Jerusalem neighborhoods such as Me'ah Shearim and Geula; and in New York neighborhoods and hamlets such as Monsey, Boro Park and Williamsburg. Along with street scenes, his work includes portraits of scribes, tailors, cobblers and fishmongers, and images such as shtetls, lighthouses, and wedding scenes. He started out painting mostly portraits in order to support his family, before expanding to include street scenes. His beloved subject matter is painting scenes of Jewish life, his childhood memories when his mother took him along shopping for the Sabbath to the markets of Meah Shearim, has left a deep impression on him and influenced many of his works. Holtz has experimented in the abstract, but then reverted to representational and figurative art to which he devoted himself exclusively. His Israeli street scenes are said to combine “an affectionate recollection of the past with the brilliance of the color of modern Israel.” Holtz has stated that he struggled at first when he arrived to the USA because of financial reasons and because he only knew Polish, Yiddish and Hebrew, but then made good ties with his instructor who greatly influenced him Robert Philipp who helped him make friends and referred him to paint portraits. Examples of Holtz's work throughout the years include: Yerusalem Wedding (2010), depicting a Chuppa in Jerusalem on early evening, oil on canvas; The Funeral(1966), depicting five stoic Hasidim carrying a body on a bier over to a gravesite, with the people behind them crying, in charcoal on paper and oil on canvas; Rejoicing (1974), an image of religious men dancing, in felt pen and marker on paper; and the oil painting Shamash Learning in Shul (2003), a portrait of a pious Jew studying the Talmud inside a claustrophobic synagogue scene. Throughout the years Holtz has created hundreds of works in many art mediums, including, genre scenes, portraits, still lifes and landscape scenery, his works are sought after by art collectors worldwide, and he has been called the greatest living Jewish artist. It is said that no artist ever explored the Jewish subject like Holtz. Today some of his oil paintings have been commanding over $100,000. Holtz creates his scenes after researching locations, and often uses locals as models. He paints slowly and with great care, but with a swift Impressionistic style. The people in his portraits and scenes are generally more cheerful and optimistic than standard portraits of Hassidic individuals. He paints oils and watercolors, and also does felt pen, pastel, marker, ink and charcoal drawings, as well as woodcuts. His oil paintings typically have a brown hue, while his work with felt pen is often in sepia tones, and on some of his works he used very bright colors, with a strong emphasis on the interplay of light and shadow. He is heavily influenced by the ancient staircases and alleyways of Jerusalem, with its modest religious population, which has made a strong impression on him in his youth, the streets of Tzfat, and the works of Rembrandt, Johannes Vermeer and Peter Bruegel, as well as Jewish artists Moritz Daniel Oppenheim...

Deep tonal cubist style painting of the Crucifixion of Christ. Like traditional Crucifixion imagery, there are two figures on either side ...

Constantin Font, born January 11, 1890 in Auch (Gers) and died in 1954 in Paris, is a French artist, painter of genre, nudes, landscapes, orientalist, sculptor and engraver. Outstand...

Work on canvas Molded plaster frame and gilded wood 56 x 70 x 6 cm

Four women with puppets. 1947, paper, mixed media, 16.3x11 cm Adolfs Zardins (1890 08 II Riga, Latvia – 1967 07 II Jurmala, Latvia), painter. Only in 1990 his relatives give his art...

Fiocchetto is an artwork realized by Elica Balla (Rome,1914 - 1993) Hand signed lower right. Hand signed and titled o rear. Good conditions!

This serene subject, the Lambs' Creel relates to Minna Citron's mural project focusing on the Tennessee Valley Authority. It was such a new ...

Clarence Holbrook Carter (American, 1904-2000) Still Life with Apples, 1940 Oil on canvas Signed and dated upper right 18 x 24 inches Clarence Holbrook Carter achieved a level of national artistic success that was nearly unprecedented among Cleveland School artists of his day, with representation by major New York dealers...

Original oil on canvas painting by the well known Russian/American artist, Nahum Tschacbasov. Signed middle right and dated 1943. Condition is very good. Unlined canvas. The painti...

UN Poster Design American Scene Mid 20th Century Modernism WPA World Peace Jo Cain (1904 – 2003) We Are All Members of the Human Race: UN Poster Proposal 21 x...

Ponte Garibaldi is an original oil on canvas realized by the Italian artist Antonio Vangelli (Rome, 1917 – Rome, 2003) in 1941. Hand-signed and dated by the artist on the lower righ...

"Mother and Daughter" Expressionist Portrait in Oil on Cardstock Mid Century expressionist portrait by unknown artist Jane W. Grace (American, 20th C...

Surrealist Nocturnal Hawaiian Figurative Landscape w. Blue Skirted Woman & Moon by Marguerite Louis Blasingame Striking mid century modern Hawaiian noct...

This is a oil on masonite painting by Nahum Tschacbasov done in 1946. Signed lower left and housed in a hand carved wood frame circa 1920. Overall size with frame is 40 x 33 inches.

Oil on masonite Signed and dated, l.r. This painting is offered by ClampArt, located in New York City. About the artist: Konrad Cramer grew up in Wurtzburg, Germany, and attended the Karlsruhe Academy. He was a member of Der Blaue Reiter...

Monumental, important WPA painting by Percy Albee. The painting is oil canvas measuring 36" x 48". Titled verso "New Americans", this WPA painting was exhibited at the Carnegie Insti...

Jack Levine: 1915-2010. Well listed American social realist painter with auction results over $220,000. This fabulous gem was most likely painted between 1942 and 1945 as he was serv...

Outstanding and vibrant figurative oil on canvas painting by the well known American artist, Nahum Tschacbasov. Signed lower right and dated 1945. Partial Perl’s Gallery, New York label verso with partial title on same label verso. Title might be “Mountains and Horses” Condition is very good. The painting is housed in it”s original House...

This is a modernist Judaic painting of a Jewish scene of the Kiddush Levanah prayer. The monthly hebrew blessing on the new moon. It is not dated but I am estimating it to the 1940s...

From The British mandate Pre State of Israel Palestine Period. Eliahu Sigad (Eliyahu Sigard), painter, born 1901, Lithuania. Founder of Israeli Painters' Association. Educated in Europe. Prizes in Israel, Exhibitions in Israel and various countries of the world. Died 1975. Education Riga, architecture and drawing Colarossi Academy, Paris, France 1930 Grande Chaumiere, Paris, France Awards And Prizes 1938 Dizengoff Prize 1945-46, Dizengoff Prize 1945 Ramat Gan...

Wonderful French mid-20th-century portrait of a young girl holding her hand up. The artist was a highly talented painter in the Cubist style. He painted interiors, portraits, and la...

A unique, humorous and colorful landscape painting by Harold Haydon depicting the artist painting alongside cows. The painting dates from 1941. Harold Emerson Haydon was born in Fo...

Beautiful oil on mahogany panel painting of the bustling Port of Ostend in Belgium by Louis Clesse. Signed lower right and dated 1942. Titled verso and signed again by the artist ve...

Oil on canvas painting by the well known Russian/American artist, Nahum Tschacbasov. Done with a thick impasto paint the artist portrays the powerful yet colorful nature of the general...

Baron Michael D`Aguilar was born on May 15, 1922 in London to Spanish parents. He was brother of the artist Paul D`Aguilar. He spent much of his early life in Spain. He studied at...

The Runner is an original artwork realized by Maurice Rouzée in the 1940s. Signed by the artist on the upper left margin. Good conditions, except for a sma...

Original oil on canvas painting by Nahum Tschacbasov of his daughter Sondra Tschacbasov (Sasha) at approximately the age of eleven or twelve. Signed lower left and dated 1942. Condition is very good. The painting has been relined. Sasha Tschacbasov later became the second wife of the famous American writer Saul Bellow...

Original watercolor on paper, signed in pencil.

A whimsical modernist painting depicting an old home on a dark and stormy night. Unsigned but with an important look and feel created by a talented hand.

Basketball Player Gouache on card stock, c. 1940 Signed by the artist in ink lower center A study for the fresco mural in the Social Security Buildin...

Modernist oil painting done in miniature on a thick block of wood of a female nude in the artist’s studio. Signed lower left by the well known New York artist, Nicholas Takis...

Genre: Impressionist Subject: People Medium: Oil Surface: Panel Frederick Serger (given name Frederick Bedrick Sinaberger) was born in 1889 to a family of Jewish manufacturers in the village of Ivancice near Brno Moravia, a province of Czechoslovakia. Showing artistic talent at a young age, he attended art schools in Brno, Vienna, and Munich. During World War I, Serger joined the Austrian Army...

A period work by a Russian artist working in a Cubist approach. The canvas is 24 1/4 x 22 1/4 inches and the above dimension is the framed size. The frame is an older frame, with a flat gold/brown finish. In Woman with Guitar, Simkhovitch plays on his his early fascination with Cubism and Constructivism (and his background in illustration) expressing and compressing with planes and color the spatiality of a domestic scene. Considered a master draftsman and an adherent of certain classicism, Simkhovitch’s compositions are often built up in a complicated but well-managed counterpoint, at heart, he is a romanticist preferring the dreamy colors of a Russian fairy tale.

Signed lower right 'Muff' for Orla Muff (Danish, 1903-1984) and painted circa 1940. Orla Muff received his first formal art instruction at the Copenhagen Technical School from 1917-21, where he studied with the theatrical painter, Carl Lund. He subsequently traveled, studied and painted throughout Europe including in France, Germany, Sweden and Holland. In the early years of his career, Muff was celebrated as a designer of sophisticated Art Deco sets and costumes for prominent theatrical productions and revues throughout Europe. These included productions for Max Reinhardt...

Oil on canvas painting by the Russian/American artist, Nahum Tschacbasov. Signed and dated top right, 1942. Condition: Good. Old relined canvas.. Provenance: Estate of The artis...

BETTY BALL "LA NOVA" PASTEL, SIGNED AMERICAN, DATED 1949 18 x 14 Inches

Maurice Asselin (1882-1947) A Still life with a book Signed upper right Oil on canvas 54 x 65 cm no frame In good condition, a small superficial scratch on the lower right side, ...

Italian painting from the first half of the 20th century. Framework oil on board depicting a wooded landscape with a character of good pictorial quality. Modern frame in carved and g...

WILLEM VAN DE BERG Den Haag 1886-1970 Amsterdam Portrait of a fisherman, Volendam 1940 Oil on canvas 70 x 55 cm. Signed and dated: lower left ‘Willem van den Berg...

Sylvia Wald Stick Season, 1948 Signed and dated lower right Oil on canvas 40 x 25 inches Born in Philadelphia, Sylvia Wald studied at the Philadelphia Sc...

A "Thumb Box" (or diminutive) painting of sailors in fort of a store front in Hanover, NH by artist Harold Haydon. Image size: 4 1/2" x 6". Fra...

red, odalisque,orange,yellow Giulio DA MILANO (Nizza, 1895 - Torino, 1990) Giulio Da Milano was a Giacomo Grosso's disciple and he was very close to the artists that used to patronize La Coupole de Montparnasse (from Kisling to Pascin, from Derain to Vlaminck). He is considered one of most representative exponents of the Turin’s artistic scene in the ‘30s-‘40s, close to the Gruppo dei Sei. His works can be found in the following museums: Turin, Modern Art Gallery...

The present mid-century work features two taboos in one painting. In 1949, it was verboten to glamorize gay life and even more prohibited to show interracial love. This work by Dan A...

The setting reminds us of a Rear Window by Alfred Hickcock but Evergood did it 8 years before. It's most likely Greenwich Village since Evergood lived there. This is a very big and heavy to lift painting Signed lower left Framed 56 x 51 in a period very heavy rustic wood frame. Exhibited Center Gallery, Bucknell University, PA, among others venus. gallery label remnants on verso - The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis The Whitney Museum of American Art Annual 1949 - Label Provenance: Naomi and Walter Rosenblum Best Viewed with a top gallery light...

Spanish Beauty (Portrait of the Artist's Wife) Oil on canvas, c. 1940's Signed upper right "A.G. Warshawsky" (see photo) According to the daughter-in-law of the artist, this painting...

Russell Sambrook: 1891-1956. Well listed American illustrator with auction results as high as $23,900. This fantastic illustration is an oil on board. I believe this was used for an ...

Overflight over the city. 1947, paper, mixed media, 23x20 cm Adolfs Zardins (1890 08 II Riga, Latvia – 1967 07 II Jurmala, Latvia), painter. Only in 1990 his relatives give his arti...

Magazine story illustration for part four of “Black Jack” by Robert E. Pinkerton, published in The Saturday Evening Post, December 11, 1943, page 32. This compelling illustration, ...

Frederick Serger Genre: Post Impressionist Subject: Flowers, Poppies Medium: Oil Surface: Panel Frederick Serger (given name Frederick Bedrick Sinaberger) was born in 1889 to a family of Jewish manufacturers in the village of Ivancice near Brno Moravia, a province of Czechoslovakia. Showing artistic talent at a young age, he attended art schools in Brno, Czech, Vienna, Austria and Munich, Germany. During World War I, Serger joined the Austrian Army and served in the Balkans. Once his service ended, he traveled to Paris where he resumed his art training and eagerly joined the Ecole de Paris (School of Paris) artists’ movement. During this period, he was greatly influenced by the Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and Expressionist movements. While living in Paris, he met and married Helen Spitzer. Serger and his young wife moved from Paris to Scoczow, a city on the Polish-Czech border. They remained in Scoczow for 12 years and he continued to work as an artist, exhibiting in museums in Cracow and Warsaw, Poland. He also showed at the Paris Salon de Tuilleries and the Salon d’Automne. He was part of the generation of expat artists, mostly jewish known as the School of Paris. They created art in the styles of Post-Impressionism, Cubism and Fauvism. The group included artists Marc Chagall, Chaim Soutine, Amedeo Modigliani and Piet Mondrian. Associated French artists included Pierre Bonnard, Henri Matisse, Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes. Many École de Paris artists lived in the iconic La Ruche, a complex of studio apartments and other facilities in Montparnasse on the Left Bank, at 2 Passage Dantzig, built by a successful sculptor, Alfred Boucher, who wanted to develop a creative hub where struggling artists could live, work and interact. A significant subset, the Jewish artists, came to be known as the Jewish School of Paris or the School of Montparnasse. The core members were almost all Jews, included Emmanuel Mane-Katz, Abraham Mintchine...

Threshing 1940. Canvas, oil. 54.5x73.5 cm Artist painted scene of every day life of countryside people in working atmosphere - threshing and haying. There is captured two haystacks, tractor, barn, and people in working process. Information about artist...

"The Saint of the Flaming City" is an original oil painting on canvas by Raymond Breinin. It depicts a group of figures looking over an abstracted and green city as the colors of fire rage through the sky. The artist signed and dated the piece in the lower right. This painting was lent by the David Barnett Gallery to the Art Institute of Chicago for their 52nd Annual Exhibition. 30" x 40" art 39 3/4" x 49 3/4" frame Raymond Breinin, Russian/American painter & designer (1910-2000), was born in Vitebsk, Russia, where he commenced his art studies with Uri Pen (who was also the first teacher of Marc Chagall) and later attended the Vitebsk Academy of Art where Malevitch was the director. He came to the United States with his family in 1922. When he came to America he attended classes at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. A painter of murals for the WPA, he was invited to join the Downtown Gallery in New York City, one of the foremost galleries at the time, where he exhibited in one man shows and group shows over a period of 18 years. The winner of numerous major prizes at the Chicago Art Institute and other museums, he also won the $1000 purchase prize at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's "Artists for Victory" exhibition. He designed the sets and costumes for Anthony Tudor's ballet, "Undertow" produced by the American Ballet Theater. He executed commissions for "Life", "Fortune" and "Redbook" magazines, for the Capehart Corporation, Eli Lilly...

BALTASAR LOBO Abstract Seated Nude Female Figure 1946 Gouache & Ink on Paper Provenance: Ivan Boesky Collection, La Jolla, California Signed & Dated "Lobo '46 Bruxelles" Baltasar...

Gustl Stark (1917 Mainz - 2009 ibid.), Small Nude, 1946. Oil on canvas, marouflaged, 54 x 25 cm (picture), 30 x 60 cm (frame), signed "Stark" top left, verso twice signed "Gustav Stark", inscribed by hand as "Small Nude" and dated by hand "1946". With label of the exhibition of the Bundeshaus Bonn from 1956. - Rubbed area in the lower third of the body, at the same level a retouch in the ochre background. I provisional frame. - Abstract Figurativity - About the artwork During the war, Gustl Stark suffered a particularly severe blow for an artist: he lost his right arm. Nevertheless, he continued to devote himself to art, and the painting, created in 1946, immediately after the end of the Nazi reign of terror, testifies to the dawn of a new era. At the same time, the work is a rare example of the artist's early figurative work, as Stark turned entirely to abstract painting as early as 1950. And even this painting is by no means purely figurative; rather, it already illustrates Stark's turn toward abstraction. We see a female nude, but one that remains faceless. This can be read symbolically and in relation to the immediate past epoch, which, in the face of horrors, silences and blinds - literally renders faceless. In this sense, the figure is positioned to 'look back'. But she does not look. While this meaning may resonate and make the painting an important work of the immediate postwar period, Gustl Stark is primarily concerned with something else here, namely art itself. The absence of the face leads to the body becoming something flat. Due to the de-individualization, we do not see a concrete person with his individual features, but a body surface. And indeed, the body is constructed through an extremely planar design. Even the contour lines that form the corporeality have a planar rather than a linear character, especially where they merge into shadow zones of almost the same color. And the surfaces themselves are not modeled. The incarnate parts do not show any plastic gradations; the corporeality is completely withdrawn into the plane, which is also true for the hair. In addition, there is no uniform background against which the figure could appear; rather, the area next to the hair is kept bluish, creating a succession of earth-toned colored areas, which again binds the figure to the surface. Last but not least, the flatness is also forced by the painting technique. Gustl Stark paints directly, a la prima, onto the coarse canvas, whereby the structure of the painting support remains visible in the picture, and in places - around the hair, for example - the canvas itself can be seen. This structural all-over lends the picture a certain flatness. Gustl Stark thus uses the very motif that stands for the corporeality of art par excellence - the female nude - to transform the spatiality of the traditional picture into a flatness characteristic of modern art. And yet, a strong impression of corporeality is created, without being produced by a painterly modeling of the body. The oscillation between flatness and corporeality creates the intense tension of this groundbreaking painting. In Gustl Stark's oeuvre, as a consequence of the abstraction we see here, the figurative is completely stripped away in a further step, which is also a loss when looking at this early key work. About the artist Gustl Stark was the son of a woodcarver and, after an apprenticeship as a decorative painter, attended the State School of Arts and Crafts in Mainz from 1936 to 1937. Although he was severely wounded in the war and lost his right arm, he studied at the Würzburg School of Painting and Drawing from 1943-1944 and then at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg from 1944-1948. He won a state scholarship at the state art competition in Bad Ischl. Numerous study trips to Sylt, Paris, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Holland and Belgium followed. Gustl Stark worked in Mainz and was the first artist there to focus on abstract painting. His work quickly gained international recognition, including the Salon Réaliés Nouvelles in Paris. From 1963-1970 he taught at the State University Institute for Art and Work Education in Mainz and from 1970-1975 at the Johannes Gutenberg University. Gustl Stark became particularly famous for his color embossed prints, for which he invented his own technique. Gustl Stark received numerous awards for his work. He received the Art Prize for Painting of the City of Mainz in 1962, the State Prize of Rhineland-Palatinate in 1984, and the Gutenberg Bust of the City of Mainz in 1987. Selected Bibliography Hans Vollmer (Hrsg.): Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler des XX. Jahrhunderts, Vierter Band, Leipzig 1958, S. 344. Hans H...

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...