Esther Rollick

Modernist Cityscape

1940's

Wonderful modernist landscape painting. Francis Kelly was born in 1927 in St. Paul, Minnesota. He received his early education in Chicago and California. He served in the United States Navy from 1944 to 1948 when he entered the Art Center School, Los Angeles. During 1951 in 1952 he lived in Paris, attending the Academie de la Grande, Chaumiere. In 1953 he went to the University of Hawaii, Honolulu, and then to the University of California at Los Angeles, where he was graphic laboratory assistant to John Paul Jones. Awarded a Fulbright Grant in 1955 he came to the Graphic Department of the Central School, London. The St. George's Gallery first introduced his etchings in Britain. In 1958 Kelly was awarded the Stacy Grant for painting. His work has been shown at Royal Academy Exhibitions and he has traveled extensively. In 1966 he was appointed Art organizer for the U.S. Embassy "Festival of Arts in Humanities". His paintings were shown in the exhibition "Five American Artists in Britain". During 1976 he acted in a similar capacity on behalf of Windsor & Newton Ltd., who sponsored an exhibition of American artists commemorating the U.S. Bicentennial. He appeared in the film Science in Art. Kelly has studied painting conservation at the Courtald Institute. In 1967 he was sent to the Italian Art and Archives Rescue Fund to Florence to restore flood damaged paintings. In 1971 his book, Art Restoration, was published by David and Charles and in the U.S. by McGraw-Hill. His second book, The Studio and The Artist was published in 1975. Kelly's work has been shown at 24 museums in Great Britain and numerous galleries. Acquisitions have been made by many public and private collections, universities and educational services. During more than 40 years in Britain he has found a growing affinity with the countryside, observing less the well-known landmarks but rather more the timeless rural lanes and by-ways as yet still unspoiled by building and industry. A member of the group in Brighton preserving Brighton's West Pier, he has produced a series of works recording the ravages of time on this finest of Victorian structures.

A Pair of Modernist Landscapes by listed female artist Margaret Munro Stratton McLennan. Margaret was a painter working in the early 20th Century in the Syracuse area. These charmi...

Landscape, 1940, oil on canvas, 24 x 20 inches, signed, dated and titled verso: “Marcel Cailliet ’40 – S.C.” and “Marcel Cailliet Landscape”; likely exhibited at the annual juried st...

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...