Unknown

Art Deco Couple Portrait

ca. 1930

Beautiful cubist portrait of a woman by unknown Russian artist. Oil on canvas measures 17 x 25 inches. Signed and dated lower right. Label fragments affixed on verso.

Barbara Shermund (1899-1978). Showgirls Cartoon for Life Magazine, 1934. Ink, watercolor and gouache on heavy illustration paper, matting window measures 16.5 x 13 inches; sheet measures 19 x 15 inches; Matting panel measures 20 x 23 inches. Signed lower right. Very good condition with discoloration and toning in margins. Unframed. Provenance: Ethel Maud Mott Herman, artist (1883-1984), West Orange NJ. For two decades, she drew almost 600 cartoons for The New Yorker with female characters that commented on life with wit, intelligence and irony. In the mid-1920s, Harold Ross, the founder of a new magazine called The New Yorker, was looking for cartoonists who could create sardonic, highbrow illustrations accompanied by witty captions that would function as social critiques. He found that talent in Barbara Shermund. For about two decades, until the 1940s, Shermund helped Ross and his first art editor, Rea Irvin, realize their vision by contributing almost 600 cartoons and sassy captions with a fresh, feminist voice. Her cartoons commented on life with wit, intelligence and irony, using female characters who critiqued the patriarchy and celebrated speakeasies, cafes, spunky women and leisure. They spoke directly to flapper women of the era who defied convention with a new sense of political, social and economic independence. “Shermund’s women spoke their minds about sex, marriage and society; smoked cigarettes and drank; and poked fun at everything in an era when it was not common to see young women doing so,” Caitlin A. McGurk wrote in 2020 for the Art Students League. In one Shermund cartoon, published in The New Yorker in 1928, two forlorn women sit and chat on couches. “Yeah,” one says, “I guess the best thing to do is to just get married and forget about love.” “While for many, the idea of a New Yorker cartoon conjures a highbrow, dry non sequitur — often more alienating than familiar — Shermund’s cartoons are the antithesis,” wrote McGurk, who is an associate curator and assistant professor at Ohio State University’s Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum. “They are about human nature, relationships, youth and age.” (McGurk is writing a book about Shermund. And yet by the 1940s and ’50s, as America’s postwar focus shifted to domestic life, Shermund’s feminist voice and cool critique of society fell out of vogue. Her last cartoon appeared in The New Yorker in 1944, and much of her life and career after that remains unclear. No major newspaper wrote about her death in 1978 — The New York Times was on strike then, along with The Daily News and The New York Post — and her ashes sat in a New Jersey funeral home...

Laura M. GREENWOOD (1897-1951). Portrait of Woman in Winter Coat Oil on canvas, 18 x 24.5 inches. Signed lower left. Excellent condition. Would beneifit from a cleaning. Origina...

Laura M. GREENWOOD (1897-1951). Portrait of Woman in Head Shawl Oil on canvas, 8 x 10 inches. Signed upper stretcher verso. Excellent condition. Would benefit from a cleaning. O...

Our Gallery acquired the estate of a Northern California artist, Thelma Terrell. Terrell lived in Oakland and was an illustrator and profes...

Couple is a drawing artwork realized by an Anonymous artist in the early 20th century. Black China ink on paper. Good conditions and aged.  

Artist: Erik Freyman, Russian (1932 - ) Title: A Jeweled Kiss Year: 1992 Medium: Oil on Canvas, signed l.r. Size: 60 x 36 in. (152.4 x 91.44 cm)

Fabled Vogue Magazine Cover Artist Eduardo Garcia Benito depicts a perfectly posed long-neck flapper with her reflection in a mirror, Her extrav...