Unknown

20th Century Brazilian Minimalist Modern Oil Painting

1969

The painting depicts a vibrant, sunlit coastal village in Rockport Massachusetts, set in the 20th Century, exuding a cheerful and nostalgic mood...

A beautiful oil on canvas painting by Georges Gerbier. He was a French painter known for colorfully rich cityscapes depicting the times of her generation. This painting is a wonderfu...

This painting depicts an village scene of people gathering about to have lunch in a Mexican town street. The fun details are what make this painting so attractive and desirable; ther...

A wonderful depiction of a day in the life 1930s in New York City. Here people walk across the street as a car waits for them to pass. An impressionistic work, with great use of cont...

'Sicilian Farmhouse', oil on canvas, by Yves Brayer (circa 1950s). A dedicated lover of Mediterranean countries and their varied landscapes, this charming and diminutive work by the ...

Vintage Winter Snowy Mountain River Landscape Oil Painting of La Rivière du Nord in Canada, by 20th Century Canadian Artist, Sydney Berne (1921-2013) Ar...

Mountain & Lake in Ireland Countryside - Oil Painting by Northern Irish Artist, Dennis Orme Shaw Art measures 12 x 10 inches Frame measures 18 x 16 inches Dennis Orme Shaw was b...

Six O-Clock, c. 1942, oil on canvas, 30 x 20 inches, signed and titled several times verso of frame and stretcher (perhaps by another hand), marked “Rehn” several times on frame (for the Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries in New York City, who represented Craig at the time); Exhibited: 1) 18th Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Oil Paintings from March 21 to May 2, 1943 at The Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. #87, original price $450 (per catalog) (exhibition label verso), 2) Craig’s one-man show at the Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries, New York City, from October 26 to November 14, 1942, #10 (original price listed as $350); and 3) Exhibition of thirty paintings sponsored by the Harrisburg Art Association at the State Museum of Pennsylvania in Harrisburg in March, 1944 (concerning this exhibit, Penelope Redd of The Evening News (Harrisburg, Pennsylvania) wrote: “Other paintings that have overtones of superrealism inherent in the subjects include Tom Craig’s California nocturne, ‘Six O’Clock,’ two figures moving through the twilight . . . .” March 6, 1944, p. 13); another label verso from The Museum of Art of Toledo (Ohio): original frame: Provenance includes George Stern Gallery, Los Angeles, CA About the Painting Long before Chris Burden’s iconic installation outside of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Urban Light, another artist, Tom Craig, made Southern California streetlights the subject of one of his early 1940s paintings. Consisting of dozens of recycled streetlights from the 1920s and 1930s forming a classical colonnade at the museum’s entrance, Burden’s Urban Light has become a symbol of Los Angeles. For Burden, the streetlights represent what constitutes an advanced society, something “safe after dark and beautiful to behold.” It seems that Craig is playing on the same theme in Six O-Clock. Although we see two hunched figures trudging along the sidewalk at the end of a long day, the real stars of this painting are the streetlights which brighten the twilight and silhouette another iconic symbol of Los Angeles, the palm trees in the distance. Mountains in the background and the distant view of a suburban neighborhood join the streetlights and palm trees as classic subject matter for a California Scene painting, but Craig gives us a twist by depicting the scene not as a sun-drenched natural expanse. Rather, Craig uses thin layers of oil paint, mimicking the watercolor technique for which he is most famous, to show us the twinkling beauty of manmade light and the safety it affords. Although Southern California is a land of natural wonders, the interventions of humanity are already everywhere in Los Angeles and as one critic noted, the resulting painting has an air of “superrealism.” About the Artist Thomas Theodore Craig was a well-known fixture in the Southern California art scene. He was born in Upland California. Craig graduated with a degree in botany from Pomona College and studied painting at Pamona and the Chouinard Art School with Stanton MacDonald-Wright and Barse Miller among others. He became close friends with fellow artist Milford Zornes...