George Picken

"Blackwell's Island (Roosevelt Island, New York City), " George Picken, WPA Scene

1928

Dorothy Eaton Tully Lumber Mill, Orange, Massachusetts, 1935 Signed and dated lower right Oil on canvas 17 1/2 x 23 1/2 inches Dorothy Eaton was born in East Orange, New Jersey in 1893. She studied at Smith College...

Ernest Fiene (1894 - 1965) Low Tide at Noon, Wellfleet, Massachusetts Oil on canvas 26 x 36 inches Signed lower right Ernest Fiene was born in Elberfeld, Germany in 1894. As a teenager, Fiene immigrated to the United States in 1912. He studied art at the National Academy of Design in New York City from 1914 to 1918, taking day classes with Thomas Maynard and evening classes with Leon Kroll. Fiene continued his studies at the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design in Paris from 1916 to 1918, adding classes in printmaking at the Art Students League in 1923. Fiene began his career as an artist in 1919 with his first exhibition of watercolors at the MacDowell Club arranged by his mentor Robert Henri. In 1923 the Whitney Studio Club mounted a large exhibition of his works. The following year he had an exhibition at the New Gallery in New York, which completely sold out all fifty-two works, including paintings, watercolors, drawings, and etchings. With the proceeds of sales from the New Gallery exhibition, Ernest Fiene and his younger brother Paul, a sculptor, built studios in Woodstock, New York in 1925. In the early Twenties Ernest Fiene painted mostly landscapes of Woodstock and both the Ramapo and Hudson River Valleys. He was the subject of the first monograph for the Younger Artists Series in 1922. Published in Woodstock, the series went on to include Alexander Brook, Peggy Bacon, and Yasuo Kuniyoshi. The book reproduced 1 illustration in color and another 27 reproductions in black and white. Around 1925 Fiene became fascinated with the intensity, excitement, and opportunities for color harmonies New York City offered as a subject. His paintings shifted to urban and industrial themes with architecture, industry, and transportation becoming his subjects. By 1926 Fiene had attracted the dealer Frank K.M. Rehn, who gave him a one-man exhibition that year, which travelled to the Boston Arts Club. C.W. Kraushaar Galleries gave Fiene a one-man exhibition of urban, landscape, portrait, and still life paintings in 1927. Julianna Force, the director of the Whitney Studio Club and first director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, included two of Fiene's paintings in a fall exhibition in 1928. The Whitney Studio Club showed Fiene's paintings in a two-man exhibition with Glenn O. Coleman that year and acquired three of Fiene's paintings. Also in 1928 Fiene became affiliated with Edith Halpert's Downtown Gallery where he had an exhibition of 20 lithographs in the spring. Fiene sold his house in Woodstock in 1928 to spend more of his time in New York City. With so many successful exhibitions, Fiene returned to Paris in 1928-29 where he rented Jules Pascin's studio and studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. In France, Fiene painted both landscape and urban subjects developed from ideas influenced by Cubist geometry and the use of flat areas of broad color. Upon returning to New York in 1930, Fiene used this new approach to continue to paint New York skyscraper and waterfront subjects, as well as to begin a series of paintings on changing old New York based on the excavations for Radio City Music Hall and the construction of the Empire State Building. Frank K.M. Rehn Galleries exhibited this series, titled "Changing Old New York," in 1931. Fiene also has solo exhibitions at Rehn Galleries in 1930 and 1932. Fiene's oil paintings are exhibited at the Chicago Arts Club in 1930 as well. Fiene was included in the Museum of Modern Art's exhibition Painting and Sculpture by Living Americans in December of 1931. Visiting New York, Henri Matisse saw the exhibition and called Fiene's Razing Buildings, West 49th Street the finest painting he had seen in New York. Fiene had two mural studies from his Mechanical Progress series exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art's exhibition Murals by American Painters and Photographers in 1932. Fiene sent View from my Window which depicts Fiene working on a lithograph stone while looking out his window to the newly completed Empire State Building to the Carnegie International in 1931. In 1932 Fiene participated in the first Biennial of American Painting at the Whitney Museum and his prints were included in exhibitions at the Downtown Gallery and the Wehye Gallery. In the same year, Fiene was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to further study mural painting in Florence, Italy. On his return from Italy in 1933 Fiene re-engaged himself in New York City life and won several public and private mural projects. Fiene resumed his active exhibition schedule, participating in two group exhibitions at the Whitney Museum and a one-man exhibition of recent paintings at the Downtown Gallery in January 1934. In 1933 he purchased a farm in Southbury, Connecticut, which added Connecticut scenes to his landscape subjects. This was also the year Fiene began to spend summers on Monhegan Island, Maine, where he painted seascapes, harbor scenes, and still lifes. Fiene's landscape paintings attracted numerous commissions as part of the American Scene movement. From 1935-36 Fiene took an extended sketching trip through the urban, industrial, and farming areas of Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Most of the twenty-four Pennsylvania urban and rural paintings from this trip were featured in an exhibition held at the First National Bank in Pittsburgh in October of 1937 by the Pittsburgh Commission for Industrial Expansion. Fiene said of these works that he formed rhythm, opportunity for space and color, and integrity in the Pennsylvania mill and furnace paintings. Fiene received the silver medal for one of the Pittsburgh paintings...

Fletcher Martin Lunch Break, circa 1940 Signed lower right Oil on canvas 31 1/2 x 37 3/8 inches When Fletcher Martin died in 1979, the New York Times entitled his obituary “Artist o...

William Sharp (1900 - 1961) Factory on the River Oil on canvas 20 1/2 x 28 1/2 inches Initialed lower left: WS Provenance: Estate of the artist Private Collection, New York Swann Auction Galleries, American Art, June 13, 2019, Lot 178 Private Collection, New York Colonial Sand and Stone Co., founded by Generoso Pope, was once the country’s largest sand and gravel business, providing the concrete for much of New York City’s skyline, including the Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center, Radio City Music Hall, airports and subways. William Sharp was born on June 13, 1900, in Lemberg, Austria, where he attended college and the Academy for Arts and Industry. He later studied in Kraków, Poland, and in Berlin and Munich, Germany. Sharp began his career as a designer of stained-glass windows and as a painter of murals. He served in the German army during World War I. After the war he became a newspaper artist in Berlin and a well-known etcher. Sharp drew political cartoons that were bitterly critical of the growing Nazi movement. As the influence of National Socialism intensified, he began to contribute drawings, under a pseudonym, to publications that were hostile to Hitler. After Hitler assumed power, Sharp was confronted with these drawings and told that he would be sent to a concentration camp. However, in 1934, he escaped to the United States. His first newspaper assignment in America was making courtroom sketches for The New York Mirror...

George Picken Playground, Carl Schurz Park, 1938 Signed and dated lower left Oil on canvas 28 x 36 inches Provenance: Estate of the artist A native New Yorker, George Picken was born in 1898. His father, an artist and photographer, emigrated from Scotland; his mother came from Wales. They joined other European immigrants settling in New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen. Picken enlisted in the army during World War I and saw action at Verdun. After the war, he stayed in France and like many Americans returning from the vibrant Paris art scene, was inspired by the radical movement known as Impressionism. Upon his return Picken decided to follow in his father’s footsteps and become an artist. George began his studies in 1919 at the Art Students League during Robert Henri, Max Weber, and John Sloan’s tenure. There he took classes in studio art, illustration, and etching through 1923 studying extensively with George Bridgman. The writings of French philosopher Henri Bergson were widely circulated among the artistic community and looking at Picken’s early paintings one cannot help but wonder if as a young artist he was influenced by Bergson’s ideas. Bergson said, "[There are] two profoundly different ways of knowing a thing. The first implies that we move round the object; the second that we enter into it. The first depends on the point of view at which we are placed and on the symbols by which we express ourselves. The second neither depends on a point of view nor relies on any symbol. The first kind of knowledge may be said to stop at the relative; the second, in those cases where it is possible, to attain the absolute.” Picken’s recognition came early with showings of his work while he was a student. His drawings were published in the New Masses, a significant left-wing publication. The New York Public Library honored him with one-man shows in 1924 and 1928 and his work was included in group exhibitions at the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, the Whitney Studio Club, Montross Gallery, and the Art Students League. During this time Picken married Viola Carton, one of Reginald Marsh’s models, and they lived in Westchester. Later they moved to Yorkville in Manhattan between 82nd street and East End Avenue where they began their family. Picken’s grandson Niles Jaeger recalled that, “Grandpa’s home and studio were in a five-story walk-up apartment, heated only by a coal stove. But there were wonderful views of the East River and the Queensborough Bridge...

Bumpei Usui Shanties in the Bronx, 1933 Signed lower right Oil on canvas 14 x 20 inches Provenance: The artist's estate Salander O'Reilly Galleries, New Y...

Moonlite, 2021, Daniel Blagg, Oil on canvas, 38 x 58" By meticulously depicting forgotten road signs and roadside debris, Daniel Blagg invites his viewers to re-consider objects th...

Chinese Restaurant, 2009, Daniel Blagg, Oil on canvas, 80 x 60" By meticulously depicting forgotten road signs and roadside debris, Daniel Blagg invites...

Playland, 2018, Daniel Blagg, Oil on panel, 26 x 50" By meticulously depicting forgotten road signs and roadside debris, Daniel Blagg invites his viewer...

Paper, 2020, Daniel Blagg, Oil on canvas, 38 x 58" By meticulously depicting forgotten road signs and roadside debris, Daniel Blagg invites his viewers to re-consider objects that ...

This vibrant oil painting is brought to you by the incredible hand of Dan Blagg. His works are filled with themes of nostalgia, a rustic lifestyle, and Americana. Add a pop of color to any space by collecting a Daniel Blagg. This may be a conversation piece, but when the conversation runs dry, you can look deep into Dan's work and feel at peace with the silence. This work is titled, "Stars" by Daniel Blagg. 2021. Oil paint on canvas. 44 x 55." A well-known figure of the contemporary Fort Worth art scene, Daniel Blagg has worked in the DFW area for over four decades. Blagg creates compositions that are both large-scale and intimate, familiar and unfamiliar, through his realistic style and chosen subject matter. Inspired by the surroundings of his studio warehouse on the outskirts of Fort Worth, his paintings of deteriorating road signs, empty streets, and vacant buildings examine urban decay and the byproducts of American capitalism. Blagg is interested in portraying what society discards; what once was useful is now abandoned and left to rot with no thought of recycling or re-use. According to Blagg, this wastefulness is particularly evident in American culture, where advertising is driven by the constant and even desperate desire to make a profit, without regard for the ramifications of this model of economic enterprise. By meticulously depicting forgotten road signs and roadside debris, Blagg invites his viewers to re-consider objects that are often ignored or forgotten. He masterfully crafts his paintings to create moody, unsettling compositions that feel desolate and neglected through his detailed depictions. Quick brushstrokes or soft washes of paint form fields of grass, distant mountains, and stretches of roads, while sharp shadows and the lack of figures heighten the feeling of loneliness and seclusion in these landscapes. Blagg’s representations evoke the work of Edward Hopper through a similar use of light and dark contrasts, as well as an emphasis on the urban subject matter. However, unlike Hopper, Blagg’s explorations ominously foretell the effects of the passage of time. These signs and objects act not only as markers of the past but also as forewarnings for the future. What will we as a contemporary society build and forsake? How will our creations stand the test of time? What will outlive its use in our culture but may ultimately outlast us, the creators? Blagg visually poses these questions to his audiences, hinting that the answers will only be realized with the next generation of creators and builders. Until that time comes, we are responsible for the creations of past generations, whether we preserve, restore, or ignore those objects. We are also accountable for what we leave behind, whether it is art, architecture, or physical waste. Blagg’s paintings have been exhibited in over sixty prominent shows across the United States, and his work is collected by numerous institutions and companies, such as the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the Museum of South Texas in Corpus Christi, the Old Jail House Arts Center, Shell Oil, Fidelity Investments, and The Coca-Cola Company. He has curated multiple exhibitions at the Fort Worth Community Arts Center and was President of the Exhibition Advisory Panel from 2006 to 2008. In 2012 and 2009, he was a finalist for the Hunting Prize, an annual competition in Houston, Texas, that supports Texas artists. He has also received the Cynthia Brants...

Tribute, 2009, Daniel Blagg, Oil on canvas, 60 x 90" By meticulously depicting forgotten road signs and roadside debris, Daniel Blagg invites his viewer...