Oil Landscape Paintings

Antique American modernist signed landscape oil painting. Oil on canvas. Signed. Framed.

"Le Mas" French Modernist artist, 21st century indistinctly signed lower corner oil on canvas, framed framed: 21.5 x 25.5 inches canvas: 15 x 18 inches provenance: private collection...

Monumental antique American modernist abstract cityscape oil painting. Oil on canvas. Framed. No signature found. Very impressive painting in person here.

Vintage modernist abstract village painting. Oil on board. Housed in a period frame. Image size, 24L x 12H. Signed.

Antique American modernist abstract seascape oil painting. Oil on canvas. Framed.

Hans Hofmann Hiddensee, Herbst (Autumn), 1927 Signed with initials and dated lower left; titled on the reverse Oil on paper 18 x 22 inches Provenance: John Adams Fine Art, London Pr...

Work on canvas

2023, Oil on canvas

Work on wood Beige wooden frame 44 x 54 x 4 cm

Oil on canvas

Winter evening. Church 2011. Oil on canvas. 40x50 cm "Winter Evening. Church" is a captivating artwork created in 2011 by Igor Maikov. It is an oil painting on canvas with dimensio...

Antique American modernist signed landscape oil painting. Oil on board. Signed. Framed.

This artwork "Market Scene" 1968 is an oil painting on canvas by noted Haitian artist Petion Savain, 1906-1973. It is signed and dated at the lower right...

Signed lower right, 'Caputo' for Antonio "Tonino' Caputo (Italian, 1933-2021) and dated 1962. Born in 1933, Antonio Caputo studied in Rome at the Faculty of Architecture and held hi...

Antique American modernist surreal oil painting. Oil on canvas. Framed. No signature found.

Canvas measures 24" x 30" and framed 30" x 36" x 3" About this artist: Anni Baldaugh was the daughter of Anthonius Hendricus Schade van Westrum. With a father who was a naval officer, the van Westrum family spent significant amounts of time in the Dutch East Indies. After returning to Europe, Baldaugh studied art with various teachers in Vienna, Munich and Paris. She and her husband ended up living in Los Angeles, though they suffered financial losses during World War I. While in Los Angeles, Baldaugh joined the California Watercolor Club, the California Society of Miniature Painters, the Bookplate Association International, the Laguna Beach Art Association, and the San Diego Fine Arts Society. She also became a member of the Connecticut Academy of Fine Arts. During the Great Depression...

Landscape is an artwork realized by an artist of the late 19th century. Oil on board, 11 x 8 cm ; 16 x 12 cm with frame 19th century. Original wooden handmade frame. Good condit...

Oil on board Image size: 19 x 14 inches (48.25 x 35.5 cm) Contemporary style handmade frame

A gem of a painting depicting a Nantucket lighthouse by Francis Chapin, from around 1950. Francis Chapin, affectionately called the “Dean of Chicago Painters” by his colleagues, was...

CALM SHORE Size: 55.5 x 63 cm (including frame) Oil on canvas A beautiful and expressive composition of a coastline, executed in oil onto canvas and dated 1960. The painting captur...

Peter Donnithorne (b.1933) The opening hunt meet, November 1984 Oil on canvas Signed lower right Canvas Size 14 x 18 in Framed Size 17 x 20 1/2 in Peter Donnithorne British born in ...

Antique American modernist nocturnal starlit harbor painting. Watercolor on paper. Signed. Framed.

THE WORKING FARM Size: 48 x 56.5 cm (including frame) Oil on Board A brilliantly executed mid century modernist landscape composition of a farm, painted in oil onto board. Executed...

Drying the Nets French School, mid 20th century signed oil on board, framed framed: 13 x 18 inches board: 10.5 x 15 provenance: private collection, France condition: might benefit f...

Duncan Gleason lived in New York and other places for work or studies but it was really Southern California where he felt most at home, and looking at his body of work, that love of ...

Oil on canvas modernist city scape painted circa 1950 by Paul K Smith (1893-1977) titled Central City, Colorado. Portrays a city scene of historic buildin...

Antique American modernist signed landscape oil painting. Oil on canvas. Signed. Framed. Image size, 36L x 30H.

Avraham Binder was born in 1906 in Vilnius (or Vilna), now part of Lithuania. He began painting at an early age and completed the prescribed studies in painting at the academy of art...

CITY STROLL Size: 44 x 66 cm (including frame) Oil on Canvas A very pleasant modernist oil street scene composition, painted by the established Swedish artist Stig Wernheden (1921-1...

NYC Cityscape American Scene WPA Modern Realism Mid 20th Century Architectural Ernest Fiene (1894-1965) Cityscape 36 x 30 inches Oil on canvas Signed and dated 1930. lower right Provenance Estate of the artist. ACA Galleries, New York Exhibited New York, Frank Rehn Gallery, Changing Old New York, 1931. New York, ACA Galleries, Ernest Fiene: Art of the City, 1925-1955, May 2-23, 1981, n.p., no. 5. BIO 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 New York 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. The first monograph from the Younger Artists Series was published on Fiene 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. Through the fall and winter of 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...

NYC 1939 World's Fair Mural Study American Scene WPA Modern Mid 20th Century Eugene Savage (1883 – 1978) 1939 World’s Fair Mural Study 45 x 30 inches Oil on Canvas Signed lower right The painting is part of a 1,000 piece collection of art and objects from the 1939 World’s Fair. The collection as a whole is available. Savage created the mural for the facade of the Communications Building. An image of the completed mural, along with a published postcard, is part of the listing. Note the center top female figure, she resembles the figure in the offered painting. BIO Eugene Francis Savage was born in Covington, Indiana 1883. He underwent various forms of art training in the early years. He was a pupil of The Corcoran Gallery and The Art Institute of Chicago, and was later awarded a fellowship to study in Rome at The American Academy. While under the spell of that ancient city the young artist began to render historic figures that were suitable for the classic style needed for mural painting in the traditional manor. During this period he was able to study and observe Roman and Greek sculpture, although much of the academic training was accomplished by using plaster casts along with the incorporation of live models. This method survived and was used efficiently throughout Europe and the United States. After leaving the Academy, Savage was commissioned to paint numerous murals throughout the United States and Europe. This artist received acclaim for the works he produced while under commissions from various sources. This young master was a contemporary of Mexican muralists David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896-1974), Jose Clemente Orozco (1883-1949) and Diego Rivera (1886-1957). In this period he was to show the influence of his contemporaries in formulating a modern style. Savage also played a vital role in the WPA Federal Art program, and he was a member of The Mural Art Guild.. Savage was elected an associate member of The National Academy of Design in 1924 and a full member in 1926. From 1947, he held a professorship at Yale University where he taught mural painting, and some of his students went on to significant positions. By this time the artist had painted large-scale murals at Columbia, Yale University, Buffalo N.Y., Dallas, Texas, Chicago, Indiana, along with other commissioned works. He also achieved recognition for a series of murals commissioned by the Matson Shipping Line and completed around 1940. For this commission, Savage made many exacting studies of customs and folkways of the Hawaiian natives. However, the award-winning murals were not installed as planned but were put in storage during the war years when the ships were used for troop transportation and were in danger of attack. However the mural images were reproduced and distributed by the shipping company including nine of the mural scenes that were made into lithographed menu covers in 1948. The American Institute of Graphic Arts awarded certificates of excellence for their graphic production, and the Smithsonian Institute exhibited the works in 1949. Today Savages' Hawaiian Art production is held in high regard by collectors of Hawaiian nostalgia. In later years the artist focused his attention on a theme that dealt with the customs and tribal traditions of the Seminole Indians of Florida. He produced many variations of this theme throughout his lifetime, and the pictures were usually modest scale easel paintings, precise and carefully delineated. Many of these pictures incorporate Surrealistic elements and show some minor stylistic influences of the painters Kay Sage...

Early modernist Israeli Judaica painting, by British mid-century artist. Israel Old City of Jerusalem scene.

Valence French School, circa 1960's signed oil on canvas, unframed inscribed verso canvas: 21.5 x 29 inches provenance: private collection, France condition: very good and sound cond...

Antique American modernist architectural iron gate oil painting. Oil on canvas. Signed. Framed.

Signed and titled with Yiddish inscription verso. 9 X 12 inches board size. beng sold unframed. Painter, New York, N.Y. Samuel David Lev-Landau was born in Warsaw, Poland and emigr...

"Riverside Bliss" captures the essence of a serene summer day by the Seine River, where modernity meets impressionism in a vibrant blend of colors and emotions. In this picturesque s...

Work on canvas Wooden frame 69 x 89.5 x 2.5 cm

A beautiful oil on canvas impressionistic painting featuring a young lady dressed in white and holding a white umbrella while watching the sea and seagulls. The sky shows rainbow col...

Antique American modernist street scene oil painting. Oil on board. Framed.

Battle at Sea by Gordon Wood Armstrong (British late 20th century) signed oil on board, framed framed: 23 x 29 inches board: 18 x 24 inches provenance: pr...

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...

Oil on canvas painting by Ferdinand Kaufmann. Signed by the artist in the lower left corner. Mountain landscape painting, likely of Colorado or California in summer with a rushing...

BOATHOUSE Size: 54 x 48 cm (including frame) Oil on canvas A soothing and restful modernist style river landscape composition, executed in oil and dated 1971. The composition pres...

Swimmers and sun tanners at the local watering hole. Her birth name was Theresa Berney. At the time of her passing she was known as Theresa Loew. Birth place: Baltimore artist, blo...

Kansas landscape oil on canvas painting by Robert N. Sudlow (1920-2010) titled 'Pioneer Bluffs in Spring' painted in 1986. Presented in original frame measuring 50 1⁄4 x 46 1⁄2 x 5 1...

Framed Pegsdon by Tim Woodcock-Jones [2019] Signed by the artist Oil on canvas Image size: H:91 cm x W:122 cm x D:2cm Frame Size: H:99 cm x W:130 cm x D:4cm Please note that insitu i...

Robert SAVARY Paris : Square in Montmartre, 1966 Original oil on canvas Signed bottom right Signed, titled and dated on the back On canvas 60 x 73 cm (c. 24 x 29 in) Presented in a ...

Antique American modernist surreal landscape oil painting. Oil on canvas. Framed. Signed.

A fine oil by Bengy Hansson ( Danish) circa 1974. Landscape with a quarry . An extensive natural landscape interupted by mans activity scaring the natural topography creating artific...

Night Life in the City - Figurative Cityscape Mid 1960s cityscape by an unknown artist. Oil on artists board. Image, 16"H x 20"W

A colorful view of Martha's Vineyard by Francis Chapin, from the 1930s. Francis Chapin, affectionately called the “Dean of Chicago Painters” by his colleagues, was one of the city’s most popular and celebrated painters in his day. Born at the dawn of the 20th Century in Bristolville, Ohio, Chapin graduated from Washington & Jefferson College near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania before enrolling at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1922. He would set down deep roots at the Art Institute of Chicago, exhibiting there over 31 times between 1926 and 1951. In 1927 Chapin won the prestigious Bryan Lathrop Fellowship from the Art Institute – a prize that funded the artist’s yearlong study trip to Europe. Upon his return to the United States, Chapin decided to remain in Chicago, noting the freedom Chicago artists have in developing independently of the pressure to conform to pre-existing molds (as was experienced by artists in New York, for example). Chapin became a popular instructor at the Art Institute, teaching there from 1929 to 1947 and at the Art Institute’s summer art school in Saugatuck, Michigan (now called Oxbow) between 1934 – 1938 (he was the director of the school from 1941-1945). A prolific painter, Chapin produced numerous works while traveling in Mexico, France, Spain, Saugatuck and Martha’s Vineyard, where he frequently spent summers and taught at the Old Sculpin Gallery there. Chapin was best recognized for his dynamic and vibrant images of Chicago during the 1930s and 40s. Chapin was a resident of the Old Town neighborhood where he lived and kept his studio on Menomonee Street for many years. Described as a “colorful figure, nearly 6 feet 6 inches tall, and thin, and usually wearing tweeds”, it is easy to imagine Chapin at work observing the busy street life of the city. In addition to his many exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago, Chapin’s work was shown during his lifetime at such institutions as the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia; the Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C.; the National Academy of Design, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, among others. Francis Chapin’s paintings are represented in the collections the Art Institute of Chicago; the Friedman Collection, Chicago; the Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown; the Denver Art Museum; the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse; the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach...

This painting is part of our exhibition American Coast to Coast: Artists of the 1930s Subway Construction, c. 1928, oil on board, 19 x 15 ¾ inches, signed upper left, artist and title verso; exhibited: 1) 12th Annual Exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists, The Waldorf Astoria, New York NY, from March 9 to April 1, 1928, no. 864 (original price $250) (see Death Prevailing Theme of Artists in Weird Exhibits, The Gazette (Montreal, Quebec, Canada), March 8, 1928); 2) Boston Tercentenary Exhibition Fine Arts and Crafts Exhibition, Horticultural Hall, Boston MA, July, 1930, no. 108 (honorable mention - noted verso); 3) 38th Annual Exhibition of American Art, Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, OH, June, 1931 (see Alexander, Mary, The Week in Art Circles, The Cincinnati Enquirer, June 7, 1931); and 4) National Art Week Exhibition [Group Show], Montross Gallery, New York, New York, December, 1940 (see Devree, Howard, Brief Comment on Some Recently Opened Exhibitions in the Galleries, The New York Times, December 1, 1940) About the Painting Ernest Stock’s Subway Construction depicts the excavation of New York’s 8th Avenue line, which was the first completed section of the city-operated Independent Subway System (IND). The groundbreaking ceremony was in 1925, but the line did not open until 1932, placing Stock’s painting in the middle of the construction effort. The 8th Avenue line was primarily constructed using the “cut and cover” method in which the streets above the line were dug up, infrastructure was built from the surface level down, the resulting holes were filled, and the streets reconstructed. While many artists of the 1920s were fascinated with the upward thrust of New York’s exploding skyline as architects and developers sought to erect ever higher buildings, Stock turned his attention to the engineering marvels which were taking place below ground. In Subway Construction, Stock depicts workers removing the earth beneath the street and building scaffolding and other support structures to allow concrete to be poured. Light and shadow fall across the x-shaped grid pattern formed by the wooden beams and planks. It is no surprise that critics reviewing the painting commented on Stock’s use of an “interesting pattern” to form a painting that is “clever and well designed.” About the Artist Ernest Richard Stock was an award-winning painter, print maker, muralist, and commercial artist. He was born in Bristol, England and was educated at the prestigious Bristol Grammar School. During World War I, Stock joined the British Royal Air Flying Corps in Canada and served in France as a pilot where he was wounded. After the war, he immigrated to the United States and joined the firm of Mack, Jenny, and Tyler, where he further honed his architectural and decorative painting skills. During the 1920s, Stock often traveled back and forth between the US and Europe. He was twice married, including to the American author, Katherine Anne Porter. Starting in the mid-1920s, Stock began to exhibit his artwork professionally, including at London’s Beaux Arts Gallery, the Society of Independent Artists, the Salons of America, the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Whitney Studio and various locations in the Northeast. Critics often praised the strong design sensibility in Stock’s paintings. Stock was a commercial illustrator for a handful of published books and during World War II, he worked in the Stratford Connecticut...

Antique American modernist signed landscape oil painting. Oil on canvas. Signed. Framed.

'Abandoned (Colorado)' is an oil painting by William Sanderson (1905-1990) depicting an abandoned house in green grass hills. Presented in a custom frame measuring 13 ¼ x 16 ½ inches; image size measures 8 ½ x 11 ¼ inches. Painting is in good condition - please contact us for a detailed condition report. About the Artist: Born Latvia 1905 Died Colorado 1990 The elder son of a construction engineer, he was born Wilhelm Tsiegelnitsky in a seaside resort near Riga, Latvia, then part of the Russian Empire. His father, Grigori Mojesevich (later Anglicized to Gregory) was of Russian-Jewish heritage, while his mother Berta (Bertha) came from a German-Jewish background. Because preference in awarding construction contracts at that time were being given to members of the Russian Orthodox Church, his father had the whole family baptized in that church which he kept a secret from Sanderson’s grandparents. His father’s profession took the family to a number of cities in various parts of the Russian Empire including Warsaw, Kharkhov, Kiev, and Samarkand in Asia. To his mother’s annoyance, he scribbled on anything within easy reach, deciding by age ten that he would make art his lifetime goal. During the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 the family lived with relatives in Rostov-on-the-Don where his mother enrolled him in the local Chinyenov Art School, marking the first step in his art career. Feeling that they would have no place in the new Communist political reality, in 1921 the family left Rostov for Kiev, emigrating to Italy and Greece on short-term visas before arriving in New York two years later, sponsored by Gregory’s relatives in New Jersey. The Tsiegelnitsky surname was changed to the more pronounceable Siegel. Experiencing the frustration shared by most immigrants seeking to establish themselves in a new, unfamiliar environment, Sanderson sufficiently mastered English by 1924 to attend the Fawcett School of Industrial Art in Newark (later the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Art) where he studied with Ida Wells Stroud, herself a student of William Merritt Chase and Arthur Dow and part of the early twentieth-century Arts & Crafts Movement. Seeking a more challenging curriculum, he enrolled at the National Academy of Design in Manhattan (1924-1927), studying painting with Charles Hawthorne, etching with William Auerbach-Levy, and life drawing with Charles L. Hinton. Sanderson won the Suydam Medal for Life Drawing, First Prize in Composition, and Honorable Mention in Etching. He also briefly attended the Art Students League in New York in 1928, studying lithography with Charles Locke who in 1936 taught a summer course in the medium at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. However, Sanderson quit the League when he could no longer afford the tuition. With his art studies behind him, he began a successful career in illustration in New York. Briefly associated with the Evening Graphic, he maintained a decade-long affiliation with the New Masses, honored to be in the company of such established artist-contributors as Jean Charlot, Stuart Davis, Adolf Dehn, Louis Lozowick, Reginald Marsh, Jan Matulka and Boardman Robinson – some of whom later were affiliated with the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center in the 1930s and 1940s. As a young immigrant he came to share some of the popular views of the left-wing intellectual community in American in the 1920s and early 1930s; but in 1936 he severed his connections with the New Masses because he did not like the direction it had taken by that time. In 1929, the year of the stock market crash and the onset of the Great Depression, he began doing commercial book illustration in New York which he continued until being drafted during World War II. However, his steady income disqualified him from participation in the Works Progress Administration (WPA)-era art projects. A barometer of his success was his inclusion in the Fifth Exhibition of American Book Illustration in 1935 sponsored by American Institute of Graphic Arts whose jurors included Edith Halpert of The Downtown Gallery in New York. Among the book titles he illustrated were: Marian Hurd McNeeley, The Jumping Off Place; P.N. Krasnoff, Yermak the Conqueror; Joe Lederer, Fanfan in China; Fay Orr, Freighter Holiday; and The Cavalcade of America. His images of a covered wagon and a Daniel Boone prototype in the last-named publication anticipate subjects he later explored more fully in his easel painting in Colorado with likenesses such as The Woman of the Plains and Hombre. In the 1930s and early 1940s he also produced illustrations and covers for leading American magazines such as The New Yorker, Esquire, Cue, and Harper’s. In 1931 he became a naturalized U.S. citizen in Manhattan and by 1936 began informally using Sanderson as his surname, making the change official in 1941. In 1937 he was given a solo show at the American Contemporary Art (A.C.A.) Gallery in New York. The following year he became art director at the McCue Ad Agency in New York where he worked until after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Looking forward to the day when he could give up illustration for the fine arts, his career change was set in motion when he was drafted into the U.S. Army in March 1942. After basic training at Kessler Field near Biloxi, Mississippi (where the Tuskegee Airmen also trained) he shipped out at his own request to Lowry Air Force Base in Denver, becoming part of the Army Air Corps and taking an instant liking to Colorado. At Lowry his humorous drawings of barracks life were published in the base newspaper, The Rev-Meter. In the summer of 1943 he had his first solo exhibition in Colorado at the Denver Art Museum-Chappell House that consisted of black-and-white drawings of army life. He also began painting watercolor scenes from memory of his previous life in the East. His two visits to Vance Kirkland’s studio in Denver’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, while stationed at Lowry, occasioned a lifelong friendship and professional association. On Sanderson’s excursion in 1943 to the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center he met his future wife, Ruth Lambertson from Cedar Falls, Iowa, whom he married eight weeks later, initiating a union lasting forty-seven years. His fluency in Russian landed him an assignment as an interpreter with the American ground forces meeting up with the Soviet Army marching westward toward Berlin in the last months of World War II. His impressions and photos of the bombed-out city formed the basis of his montage, Berlin 1945, painted in Denver in 1947. Its palette and collage-like quality and that of some of his other paintings from this period reflect the influence of American modernist, Stuart Davis. Following his military discharge and some brief design work for the Kistler Stationery Company and the A.B. Hirschfeld Press in Denver, Sanderson swapped commercial art for academia in 1946 when Vance Kirkland hired him as Assistant Professor of Advertising Design at the University of Denver, which subject he taught until retiring in 1972. Along with Kirkland and other faculty artists, he became a charter member of the 15 Colorado Artists. Founded in 1948, the group comprised some of the state’s leading contemporary artists seeking to distance themselves from much of the traditional imagery then being produced and exhibited in Denver and elsewhere. Reflecting the viewpoint of his fellow charter members Sanderson said, "I’m very taken with the nature scenes in this region, but it’s not the function of the artist to paint them when there are photographers around." Paraphrasing Picasso, the leading representative of contemporary art at that time, he added: "The painting is the artist’s representation of what nature is not." The financial security and stability of his teaching position at the University of Denver (DU) gave him the freedom to develop his easel painting. He produced a large body of oils and watercolors in both stylized Realism and Surrealism depicting, respectively, Colorado-inspired subject matter and social criticism of modern life and industrial civilization. One of his first canvases, Steamship Ruth, titled in honor of his wife and incorporating elements remembered from the port of Rostov in Russia has large, precisely-arranged areas of flat color with crisp edges seen in many of his Colorado paintings in the 1950s and 1960s. Similarly, Mountain Rhythm employs a bright palette and undulating lines conveying his fascination with the overall composition of irregular mountain and cloud shapes. Trailer Park, near the foothills west of Denver, provided abundant material for a geometric form study, while Composition with Fried Eggs in the Denver Art Museum’s collection essentially is a semi-cubistic arrangement of interlocking planes and spaces that was reproduced in the August 25, 1952, issue of Time Magazine. His work was also shown in group exhibitions outside Colorado at the Dallas Fine Art Museum, Museum of New Mexico (now, New Mexico Museum of Art) in Santa Fe, Joslyn Memorial Museum in Omaha, San Francisco Art Association, Salt Lake City Art Center, and the Cedar City Art Museum Association in Utah. The positive notice accorded his work in the early 1950s earned him a commission from the Ford Motor Company to illustrate an article, Fort Garland, by Marshall Sprague in the June 1954 issue of Ford Times. (Similar commissions were also given at that time to Denver’s Vance Kirkland and Richard Sorby.) In the mid-1950s Sanderson also executed several murals in different techniques for secular and religious buildings in Colorado, reminiscent of artists’ commissions under the Federal Arts Projects (FAP) during the Depression era: the Graland School lobby and the Colorado Tobacco Building, both in Denver; St. Joseph’s School, Salida; Mesa Elementary School, Cortez; as well as the Andrew Jackson Hotel in Nashville, Tennessee. Sanderson’s life in Europe and illustration work for the New Masses in New York made him very aware of ethnic and racial prejudice. He said, "I believe the artist is first of all a human being with the ability to see and depict the hope, aspirations and the despair of other human beings." In the 1950s he recorded the political movement for Black racial equality in paintings such as Noon Hour, Whites Only...

Antique American impressionist seascape signed oil painting. Oil on canvas. Signed. Framed. Image size, 14L x 18H.

Work on canvas

Antique American signed modernist oil painting. Oil on canvas. Signed. Framed. Image size, 24L x 20H.

Abstract watercolor composition bearing the influence of the earlier color-block compositions of Paul Klee. Pawel August Kontny, (Polish-German-American artist) He was born in Laurahuette, Poland, in 1923, the son of a wealthy pastry shop owner. In 1939 he began studying architecture in Breslau where he was introduced to the European masters and to the work of some of the German Expressionists, soon afterward banned as "degenerate artists" and removed from museums throughout Germany by the Nazi regime. His studies were interrupted by World War II. Drafted into the German army, traveling in many countries as a soldier, he sketched various landscapes but in 1945, he was captured and held as a prisoner of war in Italy. After the war, he studied at the Union of Nuremberg Architects to help design buildings to replace ones destroyed in the war. He recorded his impressions of the local population and the landscapes through his watercolors and drawings. Pawel Kontny thereafter moved to Nuremberg, Germany, becoming a member of the Union of Nuremberg Architects and helping to rebuild the city's historic center. He soon decided to concentrate on his professional art career. He married Irmgard Laurer, a dancer with the Nuremberg Opera. Pavel Kontny 's career as an artist was launched with his participation in an all German exhibition, held at the Dusseldorf Museum in 1952. He held one-man shows in Germany, Switzerland and the United States. During his trip to the United States in 1960, Kontny became instantly enamored with Colorado, and decided to relocate to Cherry Hills with his wife and two children. He quickly established himself in the local art community, being affiliated for a time with Denver Art Galleries and Saks Galleries. His subject matter became the Southwest. During this time he received the Prestigious Gold Medal of the Art Academy of Rome. His extensive travel provided material for the paintings he did using his hallmark marble dust technique. he also worked equally in pastel, watercolor, charcoal and pencil-and-ink. in a style which merged abstraction and realist styles, influenced by Abstract Expressionist painting and South Western American landscapes. In the early 1960s he was one of only a few European-born professional artists in the state, a select group that included Herbert Bayer (1900-1985), a member of the prewar Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau, Germany, and Roland Detre (1903-2001), a Hungarian modernist painter. As a Denver, Colorado resident, Pavel Kontny exhibited at galleries and museums throughout the United States, Germany and Japan. There, he was inspired by frequent trips to Native American pueblos in the Southwest, as well as by the study of the Plains Indians of Montana and Wyoming. Over the years Kontny had a number of students and generously helped young artist by hosting exhibitions at his Cherry Hills home. For many years he generously donated his paintings to support charitable causes in Denver. Influences during his European years included German pastelist C.O. Muller, German Informel painter Karl Dahmen and Swiss artist, Hans Erni. In the early 1950s his painting style showed the influence of the Die Brücke (The Bridge), a group of German expressionist artists formed in Dresden in 1905 who had a major impact on the evolution of modern art in the twentieth century in Germany. By the middle of the decade his style incorporated more referential abstraction and total abstraction, resulting in part from his study of Hans Hartung, a German artist based in Paris who exhibited his gestural abstract work in Germany. The American moon landing in 1969 inspired Paul Kontny...