Alfred Statler

New York City Crossing Street Light

1940s

Signed Lower Left Poskas was born in Waterbury, Connecticut, a small industrial city set on the banks of the Naugatuck River. He was interested in art as a child, but on entering ...

Heller covers monumental and lesser-known works starting with Frank Lloyd Wright and tracing his design principles through his son Lloyd Wright, and students Richard Neutra, Rudolph ...

Heller covers monumental and lesser-known works starting with Frank Lloyd Wright and tracing his design principles through his son Lloyd Wright, and students Richard Neutra, Rudolph ...

Heller covers monumental and lesser-known works starting with Frank Lloyd Wright and tracing his design principles through his son Lloyd Wright, and students Richard Neutra, Rudolph ...

Thomas Fransioli’s cityscapes are crisp and tidy. Buildings stand in bold outline, trees are sharp, and saturated color permeates the scene. But Fransioli’s cities often lack one critical feature: people. His streets are largely deserted, save for the rare appearance of figure and the occasional black cat scurrying across pavement. Instead, humanity is implied. Magic Realism neatly characterizes Fransioli’s viewpoint. First applied to American art in the 1943 MoMA exhibition “American Realists and Magic Realists...

In 1852, twenty-nine year old William Bradford was a failing shopkeeper in Fairhaven, Massachusetts. With a wife and child at home, Bradford, by his own admission, “spent too much time in painting to succeed” in business. Rescued from insolvency by his well-to-do in-laws, this is not the beginning of a narrative that generally leads to a happy ending. Not so with Bradford, who ultimately found international fame and fortune as a painter of arctic seascapes and dramatic marine paintings. William Bradford, the artist, was a lineal descendant of the 17th-century Separatist leader William Bradford, a founder of the Plymouth Plantation, signer of the Mayflower Compact and Governor of the Plymouth Colony. Our Bradford born to a New Bedford ship outfitter in Fairhaven, Massachusetts By the nineteenth century, this line of Bradfords were Quakers, living on the tract purchased nearly two centuries earlier by their pilgrim ancestor. Fairhaven, across the mouth of the Acushnet River from the whaling center of New Bedford was described by a New York journalist in 1857 as “the Brooklyn of New Bedford” (Home Journal, January 3, 1857). Young Bradford displayed an early predilection for the arts, but his Quaker parents were disinclined to support this particular pursuit. After working in his father’s business and then for a dry goods merchant in New Bedford, by 1849 Bradford had set up in New Bedford as a “merchant tailor” offering outfits for “those going to California,” “seamen’s clothing,” custom-tailored “piece goods...