Jim Rabby

"Cast of the Sun" Early Small Abstract Textured Painting

1968

Seascape view of a boat dock. Painting is in a cubist style with neutral tones. The artist uses color and shape to create depth in the painting. Placed in a thick wooden frame. Artis...

Modern abstract landscape painting by Houston, TX artist Margaret Nobler. The work features a boat floating near an oceanside dock with the sun setting...

Modern abstract coastal city painting by Houston, TX artist David Adickes. The work features a colorful town rendered in orange, blue, and white towns with boats docked on the shore....

Modern pastel pink and yellow toned landscape painting by Texas born artist Clark Fox. The work features a clean-lined, geometric rendering of an architectur...

Modern blue toned tropical landscape painting by Texas born artist Clark Fox. The work features an abstract depiction of a sunset behind palm trees using pointillism, the practice of applying small strokes or dots of color to a surface so that from a distance they visually blend together. Signed and dated in the front lower left corner. Currently hung in a light wood floating frame. Dimensions Without Frame: H 24 in. x W 30 in. Artist Biography: Clark V. Fox was born in Austin, TX, in 1946. His father in the Army Air Forces, Clark spent the first five years of his life in Honolulu before the family moved to several cities throughout Texas, including Galveston, Houston, Corpus Christi, Hereford and Amarillo. In 1960 just before Clark entered high school, the family settled in Washington, D.C. Clark attended high school in Alexandria, Virginia, a period during which he had a studio with fellow classmates, David Lynch and Jack Fisk. Clark studied with Japanese art master Unichi Hiratsuka at the Japan-American Society of Washington, D.C. (1964-1965). Clark spent his first year of college at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York (1965-66) with part-time stints at Andy Warhol’s “The Factory” studio, after which he returned to D.C., where he received his BFA in 1969 from the Corcoran School of Art. He soon became involved with the Washington Color School of Painting, where he apprenticed with artist Tom Downing...

Modern grey and black toned landscape painting by Texas born artist Clark Fox. The work features a clean-lined, geometric rendering of an architectural façad...

The Surf at Newport (Rhode Island). c. 1906. Oil on canvas. 17 x 24 (framed 26 x 34). Lined; extensive craquelure; otherwise fine condition. Housed in an exceptional Louis XV (reviva...

A beautiful wooded landscape scene with houses and trees. Painted on a masonite board. hand signed lower right. with framers label verso. Framed to 40 X 55 inches. 33 X 48 without the frame and mat. It is not dated. Lena Gurr (1897–1992), was an American woman artist who made paintings, prints, and drawings During the course of her career Gurr's compositions retained emotional content as they evolved from a naturalistic to a semi-abstract cubist style. Born into a Russian-Jewish Yiddish speaking immigrant family, she was the wife of Joseph Biel, also Russian-Jewish and an artist of similar genre and sensibility. Gurr used Lena Gurr as her professional name. After marrying Joseph Biel she was sometimes referred to as Lena Gurr Biel. Biel had been born in Grodno, Poland (later absorbed into Russia) and had lived in England, France, and Australia before coming to New York. An artist, he specialized in landscape paintings and silkscreen printing as well as photography. He studied art at the Russian Academy in Paris. After immigrating to the United States, he studied under George Grosz at the Arts Students League. Gurr was born in Brooklyn and, apart from brief stays in Manhattan and in Paris, lived there her whole life. This painting bears the influence of Lyonel Feininger an influential German American artist. Gurr began studying art at a young age. In 1919 she studied painting and printmaking at the Educational Alliance Art School and between 1920 and 1922 she won a scholarship to attend the Art Students League where she took classes with John Sloan and Maurice Sterne. In 1926 and 1928 Gurr participated in group shows at the Whitney Studio Club in Greenwich Village and in 1928 she also participated in the 12th annual exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists at the Waldorf Roof in New York. (Reviewing this show, Helen Appleton Read, the critic for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, said "I made three discoveries on my first visit, Thomas Nagel, Eugenie McEvoy and Lena Gurr with two figure compositions which have something of Marie Laurencin or Helene Perdriat quality of naive sophistication.") The Waldorf Roof was a set of rooms on the top floor of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, one of which had glass sides and a glass roof. The rooms were used for concerts, dances, benefits, and exhibitions.From 1929 to 1931 Gurr took a leave of absence from her teaching position to travel in France with Joseph Biel, an artist whom she had met while studying at the Art Students League. They spent time in Nice and Mentone but mainly in Paris. During the early months of 1931, while she was still abroad, her work appeared in group exhibitions held at the R. H. Macy department store and the Opportunity Gallery (opened by Gifford Beal). In 1932 she participated in three shows: a solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, an annual exhibition of the New York Society of Women Artists, ( Its first president was Marguerite Zorach. Founding members included Agnes Weinrich, Anne Goldthwaite...

GRACE HILL TURNBULL (1880-1976) Waterfall (Woodstock, New York), c. 1925 Oil on canvas 14 x 20 inches Unsigned PROVENANCE The Maryland Historical Society The work of pai...

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...

Amish Farmscape #3, 1984, oil on canvas, 40 x 30 inches, signed and dated lower right; signed, dated, and titled verso About the Painting Amish Farmscape #3 is part of a multi-painting series of barns completed in the early 1980s for an exhibition at New York’s prestigious Sid Deutsch Gallery. Lewandowski painted this work at an important point in his career. It was the first major project undertaken by Lewandowski after his retirement from serving as the Chairman of Winthrop University’s Art Department, the last academic position he held after teaching for nearly thirty years. Lewandowski had been inspired to work on the series by a visit to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Like his friend and mentor, Charles Sheeler, Lewandowski had always been fascinated by vernacular architecture and the Amish barns of Pennsylvania brought back memories of rural scenes Lewandowski had painted in the Midwest much earlier in his career. Amish Farmscape #3 is a strong example of Lewandowski’s late precisionist work. The complexity of the composition and Lewandowski’s technical acumen are on full display. Being relieved of the burdens of teaching and administering a university art department likely allowed Lewandowski greater freedom and most importantly more time to complete the Amish Farmscape series. Although Lewandowski’s brand of precisionism changed throughout the years, he never deviated from the core tenets of the Immaculate School artists. In this work, we see simplified and flattened forms, the use of ray-lines to define light and space, the elimination of extraneous details, a polished almost machine-like finish, and the complete lack of visible brushstrokes, all hallmarks of the precisionist painters. Lewandowski was the last of the 20th century precisionists and in Amish Farmscape #3, we see just how successfully he continued to work in this style until his death in 1998. About the Artist Edmund Lewandowski was among the best of the second-generation precisionist painters. He was born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and studied at the Layton School of Art with Garrett Sinclair. Lewandowski achieved early success when in 1936 two of his watercolors were shown at the Phillips Collection as part of a Federal Art Project exhibition. Then, in 1937, his work was first exhibited at Edith Halpert’s Downtown Gallery which represented Lewandowski into the 1950s. Under Halpert’s guidance, Lewandowski continued to explore watercolor as his main medium during the 1930s and 1940s, since the gallery already represented Charles Sheeler, who worked primarily in oils. Sheeler became Lewandowski’s major influence as the primary leader of the ill-defined, but very recognizable Immaculate School artists, which included other Downtown Gallery painters, Niles Spencer, George Ault, and Ralston Crawford, as well as Charles Demuth and Preston Dickinson, both of whom died at a young age and had been represented by the Charles Daniel Gallery. Sheeler is credited with giving Lewandowski technical advice on how to make his paintings more precise and tightly rendered and by all accounts, Sheeler was a fan of Lewandowski’s work. Through the Downtown Gallery, Lewandowski’s paintings were accepted into major national and international exhibitions and purchased by significant museums and collectors. Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and Nelson Rockefeller acquired works by Lewandowski. He was included in the Museum of Modern Art’s important 1943 exhibition, American Realists and Magic Realists as well as juried exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Lewandowski also completed commissions for magazines during the 1940s and 1950s, including several covers for Fortune. Throughout his career, Lewandowski explored urban and rural architecture, industry, machinery, and nautical themes. Looking back on his career, Lewandowski wrote, “My overwhelming desire as an artist through the years has been to record the beauty of man-made objects and energy of American industry on canvas. For as far back as I can recall, the cityscapes, farms and depictions of industrial power and technological efficiency has had a great attraction for me. I try to treat these observations with personal honesty and distill these impressions to a visual order.” Lewandowski is credited with extending precisionism to the Midwest and successfully continuing the style into the 1990s, three decades after Sheeler’s death and six decades after Demuth’s passing. Late in his career, Lewandowski enjoyed a resurgence of popularity as he was represented during the 1980s by New York’s Sid Deutsch and Allison Galleries...

Reminiscent of an Edward Hopper or Andrew Wyeth scene, or even Charles Demuth with its cubist elements. William Sanderson (1905 - 1990) Colorado Landscape Oil on canvas 23 1/2 x 31 1/2 inches Signed lower right: Sanderson Born in Dubbeln, near Riga, Latvia in 1905, his personal journey from Czarist Russia, to New York City, and finally to Colorado, is one of remarkable courage and perseverance. Sanderson exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout Colorado and the West between 1945 and 1985, and he was voted one of Colorado's influential artists of the 20th Century. Sanderson's paintings are represented in many museums and are sought after by collectors who appreciate his composition and precise use of color. The year 2005 marked the Centennial of Sanderson's birth, and he is now recognized as a major contributor to the development of modern art in Colorado. As a student at the National Academy of Design in 1927, Sanderson exemplifies an individual dedicated to creativity and the life-long passion for art. Known primarily as a Colorado artist, Sanderson first developed his skills as a graphic illustrator in New York City, and his work has appeared in numerous magazines, including New Yorker and New Masses. Notable book illustrations include The Jumping Off Place - 1929, by Marion Hurd McNeely, Jews Without Money - 1930, by Michael Gold...