Charles W. Adams

Jefferson Market Library (Courthouse)

This painting is part of our exhibition America Coast to Coast: Artists of the 1940s. Gracie Mansion, c. 1944, oil on canvas, signed lower right, 25 x 30 inches, presented in a ne...

This painting is part of our exhibition America Coast to Coast: Artists of the 1930s Abstract Street (Untitled), 1939, oil on canvas, signed and dated lower right, 12 x 32 inches; provenance includes a private collection in Venice, California; presented in what is likely the artist's original handmade frame About the Painting The present work is the culmination of a series of mainly horizontal urban abstractions Harari completed between 1937 and 1939. Deeply influenced by Stuart Davis, Harari’s New York streetscapes began with clearly recognizable objects and landmarks as in Into New York (1937 - Collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art), New York Harbor (1937), Up and Downtown (1938), and his other mural proposals for the Nurses Home on Welfare Island (1937) and the Williamsburg Housing Project (1938). At the end of the series, Harari’s vistas became increasingly abstract with broad planes of color representing buildings and streets, the slightest cross-hatching forming a bridge or elevated train track and the vague suggestion of a streetlight looping in the right center of the composition. Figures, birds, and a street vendor’s cart are reduced to pictograms scratched into the surface of the canvas. Abstract Street (Untitled) is among Harari’s most spare works of the 1930s and 1940s and calls to mind the seemingly childlike, but deeply sophisticated works of Paul Klee from the 1920s. It serves as an excellent reminder of why Harari was heralded as one of the earliest members of the American Abstract Artists. About the Artist Hananiah Harari was an artistic polyglot who was equally at home working in styles as diverse as Cubism, Constructivism, Expressionism, Hard Edged Abstraction and trompe l’oeil Realism. A native of Rochester, New York, Harari initially studied as a child at the Memorial Art Gallery in his hometown and later as a scholarship student at the College of Fine Arts at Syracuse University. In 1932, Harari left for Paris where he befriended Nahum Tschacbasov, Benjamin Benno and John Graham and studied at the ateliers of Lhote, Leger and Gromaire. He also studied fresco painting at the Ecole de Fresque. By 1933, Harari had completed enough work and gained a sufficient reputation to have a solo exhibition at the American Club in Paris. The following year, Harari and his childhood friend and fellow artist Herzl Emanuel traveled to Palestine, where the artists worked hard in the orchards and fields of Kibbutz Deganiah, but produced little art. After returning to New York, Harari married Emanuel’s sister, Freda, and set out on the development of what noted scholar Gail Stavitsky has called an “original synthesis of the old and new." Harari became an early member of the American Abstract Artists (AAA), an organization formed to give modernists exhibition opportunities. Harari was also a member of the socially conscious Artist’s Union and the American Artist’s Congress. From 1936 through 1942, Harari worked on the Federal Art Project and assisted Marion Greenwood on a project as part of the Mural Division, but to his disappointment did not lead his own project. During the late 1930s and early 1940s, Harari completed a series of paired paintings with the same subject matter depicted in a Cubist manner and in trompe l’oeil Realism. Harari was acclaimed by Clement Greenberg and six of the artist’s works were selected for the Museum of Modern Art’s important 1943 exhibition American Realists and Magic Realists. During World War II, Harari served in the US Army Air Corps. Following the war, Harari continued to produce fine art while also producing commercial art. During the McCarthy Era, Harari’s progressive politics and leftist leaning art...

"Coney Island" Brooklyn NYC Amusement Park Mid-century American Scene WPA Modern Ludwig Bemelmans (1898 – 1962), “Coney Island" 35 x 27 inches Oil on board Signed lower left Origin...

ADOLF ARTHUR DEHN (American, 1895-1969) San Francisco Bay Area street scene, with Trolley, Streetcar, Cable Car with bay and Alcatraz Island in background. Hand signed LRC. Sight 19" x 15", overall 23" x 19". Adolf Dehn (November 22, 1895 – May 19, 1968) was an American artist known mainly as a lithographer. Throughout his artistic career, he participated in and helped define some important movements in American art, including regionalism, social realism, and caricature. A two-time recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, he was known for both his technical skills and his high-spirited, droll depictions of human foibles. Adolph Dehn was born in 1895 in Waterville, Minnesota. He began creating artwork at the age of six, and by the time of his death had created nearly 650 images. Dehn went to the Minneapolis School of Art (known today as the Minneapolis College of Art and Design), where he met and became a close friend of Wanda Gag. In 1917 he and Gág were two of only a dozen students in the country to earn a scholarship to the Art Students League of New York. He was drafted to serve in World War I in 1918, but declared himself a conscientious objector and spent four months in a guardhouse detention camp in Spartanburg, SC and then worked for eight months as a painting teacher at an arm rehabilitation hospital in Asheville, NC. Later, Dehn returned to the Art Students League for another year of study and created his first lithograph, The Harvest. In 1921 Dehn's lithographs were featured in his first exhibition at Weyhe Gallery in New York City. From 1920 to 1921 in Manhattan, he was connected to New York's politically left-leaning activists. In 1921, he went to Europe. In Paris and Vienna he belonged to a group of expatriate intellectuals and artists, including Andrée Ruellan, Gertrude Stein, and ee cummings...