Rene Beckley

City Streets (British Street scene architectural landscape)

1965

De Hirsh Margules (1899-1965). Christopher Street, 1939. Watercolor on Arches wove paper. Signed and dated in pencil by artist lower margin. Sheet measures 15.5 x 20 inches. Window in matting measures 15 x 19 inches. Framed measurement: 23 x 30 inched. Bears fragment of original label affixed on verso. Incredibly vibrant and saturated color with no fading or toning of sheet. Provenance: Babcock Galleries, NYC Exhibited: The American Federation of Arts Traveling Exhibition. From the facade of The Waverly at Christopher is depicted One Christopher Street, the 16-story Art Deco residential building erected in 1931. It is not a casual coincidence that the structure appears in this cityscape: 1 Christopher Street is the subject. The original intention of this project was to transform the neighborhood, bring a bit of affluence and make a bid to rival the Upper West Side. Margules, a sensitive aesthete, understood how a massive piece of architecture such as One changes a neighborhood. Sound, scale and focal points are forever altered. A pedestrian's sense of depth and distance becomes pronounced. All of these factors contribute to the intent behind this image. Tall buildings disrupt the human scale, change the skyline and carve up space. In this piece, negative space conforms to the man-made geometries. Clouds become gems fixed in settings. De Hirsh Margules (1899–1965) was a Romanian-American "abstract realist" painter who crossed paths with many major American artistic and intellectual figures of the first half of the 20th century. Elaine de Kooning said that he was "[w]idely recognized as one of the most gifted and erudite watercolorists in the country". The New York Times critic Howard Devree stated in 1938 that "Margules uses color in a breath-taking manner. A keen observer, he eliminates scrupulously without distortion of his material." Devree later called Margules "one of our most daring experimentalists in the medium" Margules was also a well-known participant in the bohemian culture of New York City's Greenwich Village, where he was widely known as the "Baron" of Greenwich Village.[1] The New York Times described him as "one of Greenwich Village's best-known personalities" and "one of the best known and most buoyant characters about Greenwich Village. Early Life De Hirsh Margules was born in 1899 in the Romanian city of Iași (also known as Iasse, Jassy, or Jasse). When Margules was 10 weeks old, his family immigrated to New York City. Both of his parents were active in the Yiddish theater, His father was Yekutiel "Edward" Margules, a "renowned Jewish actor-impresario and founder of the Yiddish stage." Margules' mother, Rosa, thirty-nine years younger than his father, was an actress in the Yiddish theater and later in vaudeville. Although Margules appeared as a child actor with the Adler Family[11] and Bertha Kalich, his sister, Annette Margules, somewhat dubiously continued in family theater and vaudeville tradition, creating the blackface role of the lightly-clad Tondelayo (a part later played on film Hedy Lamarr) in Earl Carroll's 1924 Broadway exoticist hit, White Cargo. Annette herself faced stereotyping as an exotic flower: writing about her publicist Charles Bouchert stated that "Romania produces a stormy, temperamental type of woman---a type admirably fitted to portray emotion." His brother Samuel became a noted magician who appeared under the name "Rami-Sami." Samuel later became a lawyer, representing magician Horace Goldin, among others. A family portrait including a young De Hirsh, a portrait of Rosa and Annette together, and individual photos of Rosa and Edward can be found on the Museum of the City of New York website. At around age 9 or 10, Margules took art classes with the Boys Club on East Tenth Street, and his first taste of exhibition was at a student art show presented by the club. By age 11, he had won a city-wide prize (a box camera) at a children's art show presented by the department store Wanamakers. As a young teenager, Margules was already displaying a characteristic kindness and loyalty. Upon hearing that two friends (one of them was author Alexander King), were in trouble for breaking a school microscope, the nearly broke Margules gave them five dollars to repair the microscope . Margules had to approach a wealthy man that Margules had once saved on the subway from a heart attack. Margules didn't reveal the source of the five dollars to King until twenty-five years later. In his late teens, Margules studied for a couple of months in Pittsburgh with Edwin Randby, a follower of Western painter Frederic Remington. Thereafter he pursued a two-year course of studies in architecture, design and decoration at the New York Evening School of Art and Design, while working as a clerk during the day at Stern's Department Store. He was encouraged in these artistic pursuits by his neighbor, the painter Benno Greenstein (who later went by the name of Benjamin Benno). Artistic career In 1922, Margules began work as a police reporter for the City News Association of New York .Margules then considered himself something of an expert on art, and the painter Myron Lechay is said to have responded to some unsolicited analysis of his work with the remark "Since you seem to know so much about it, why don't you paint yourself?" This led to study with Lechay and a flurry of painting. Margules' first show was in 1922 at Jane Heap's Little Review Gallery. Thereafter Margules began to participate in shows with a group including Stuart Davis, Jan Matulka, Buckminster Fuller (exhibiting depictions of his "Dymaxion house") in a gallery run by art-lover and restaurateur Romany Marie on the floor above her cafe. Jane Heap, left, with Mina Loy and Ezra Pound During the 1920s, Margules traveled outside of the country a number of times. In 1922, with the intent of reaching Bali, he took a job as a "'wiper on a tramp steamer where [he] played nursemaid to the engine." He reached Rotterdam before he turned back. He would return to Rotterdam shortly thereafter. In 1927, Margules took a lengthy leave of absence from his day job as a police reporter in order to travel to Paris, where he "set up a studio in Montmartre's Place du Tertre, on the top floor of an almost deserted hotel, a shabby establishment, lacking both heat and running water." He studied at the Louvre and traveled to paint landscapes in provincial France and North Africa. Margules also joined the "Noctambulist" movement and experimented with painting and showing his artwork in low light.Jonathan Cott wrote that: the painter De Hirsch Margulies sat on the quays of the Seine and painted pictures in the dark. In fact, the first exhibition of these paintings, which could be seen only in a darkened room, took place in [ Walter Lowenfels'] Paris apartment. Elaine de Kooning remarked that studying the works of the Noctambulists confirmed Margules' "direction toward the use of primary colors for perverse effects of heavy shadow." It was also in Paris that Margules initially conceived his idea of "Time Painting", where a painting is divided into sectors, each representing a different time of day, with color choices meant to evoke that time of day. In Paris, his social circle included Lowenfels, photographer Berenice Abbott, publisher Jane Heap, composer George Anthiel, sculptor Thelma Wood, painter André Favory, writer Norman Douglas, writer and editor George Davis, composer and writer Max Ewing, and writer Michael Fraenkel. Upon his return to New York in 1929, Margules attended an exhibition of John Marin's paintings. While at the exhibition, he "launched into an eloquent explanation of Marin to two nearby women", and was overheard by an impressed Alfred Stieglitz. The famous photographer and art promoter invited Margules to dine with his wife, the artist Georgia O'Keeffe, and his assistant, painter Emil Zoler. Stieglitz thereafter became a friend and mentor to Margules, becoming for him "what Socrates was to his friends." Alfred Stieglitz Stieglitz introduced Margules to John Marin, who quickly became the most important painterly influence upon Margules. Elaine de Kooning later noted that Margules was "indebted to Marin and through Marin to Cézanne for his initial conceptual approach - for his constructions of scenes with no negative elements, for skies that loom with the impact of mountains." Margules himself said that Marin was his "father and ... academy." The admiration was by no means unreciprocated: Marin said that Margules was "an art lover with abounding faith and sincerity, with much intelligence and quick seeing." Stieglitz also introduced Margules to many other artistic and intellectual figures in New York. With the encouragement of Alfred Stieglitz, Margules in 1936 opened a two-room gallery at 43 West 8th Street called "Another Place." Over the following two years there were fourteen solo exhibitions by Margules and others, and the gallery was well-respected by the press. It was in this gallery that the painter James Lechay, Myron's brother, exhibited his first painting. In 1936, Margules first saw recognition by major art museums when both the Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston purchased his works. In 1942, Margules gave up working as a police reporter, and apparently dedicated himself thereafter solely to an artistic vocation. "The Baron of Greenwich Village"[edit] Margules made his mark not only as an artist, but also as an outsized personality known throughout Greenwich Village and beyond. To local residents, Margules was known as the "Baron", after Baron Maurice de Hirsch, a prominent German Jewish philanthropist. Margules was easily recognizable by the beret he routinely wore over his long hair. Writer Charles Norman said that he "dressed with a flair for sloppiness." He was said to "know everybody" in Greenwich Village, to the extent that when the novelist and poet Maxwell Bodenheim was murdered, Margules was the first one the police sought to identify the body. Margules' letters show him interacting with art world figures such as Sacha Kolin, John Marin and Alfred Stieglitz, as well as with prominent figures outside the art world such as polymath Buckminster Fuller and writer Henry Miller. Most of his friends and acquaintances found Margules a generous and voluble man, given to broadly emotionally expressive gestures and acts of kindness and loyalty. In 1929, he exhibited an example of this loyalty and fellow-feeling when he appeared in court to fight what the wrongful commitment of his friend, writer and sculptor Alfred Dreyfuss, who appeared to have been a victim of an illicit attempt to block an inheritance. The Greenwich Village chronicler Charles Norman described the bone-crushing hugs that Margules would routinely bestow on his friends and acquaintances, and speaks of the "persuasive theatricality" that Margules seemed to have inherited from his actor parents. Norman also wrote about Margules' routine acts of kindness, taking in homeless artists, constantly feeding his friends and providing the salvatory loan where needed. Norman also notes that Margules was blessed with a loud and good voice, and was apt to sing an operatic air without provocation. The writer and television personality Alexander King said I think the outstanding characteristics of my friend's personality are affirmation, emphasis, and overemphasis. He chooses to express himself predominantly in superlatives and the gestures which accompany his utterances are sometimes dangerous to life and limb. Of the bystanders, I mean. King also spoke with affectionate amusement about Margules' pride in his cooking, speaking of how "if he should ever invite you to dinner, he may serve you a hamburger with onions, in his kitchen-living room, with such an air of gastronomic protocol, such mysterious hints and ogliing innuendoes, as if César Ritz and Brillat-Savarin had sneaked out, only a moment before, with his secret recipe in their pockets." Margules was such a memorable New York personality that comic book writer Alvin Schwartz imagined him at the Sixth Avenue Cafeteria in a risible yet poignant debate with Clark Kent about whether Superman had the ability to stop Hitler. Margules' entrenchment in the Greenwich Village milieu can be seen in a photograph from Fred McDarrah's "Beat Generation Album" of a January 13, 1961 writers' and poets' meeting to discuss "The Funeral of the Beat Generation", in Robert Cordier [fr]'s railroad flat at 85 Christopher Street. Among the people in the same photograph are Shel Silverstein...

De Hirsh Margules (1899-1965). North on West Street , 1939. Watercolor on Arches wove paper. Signed and dated in pencil by artist lower margin. Sheet measures 15 x 22 inches. Framed measurement: 27 x 34 inched. Incredibly vibrant and saturated color with no fading or toning of sheet. Provenance: Babcock Galleries, NYC De Hirsh Margules (1899–1965) was a Romanian-American "abstract realist" painter who crossed paths with many major American artistic and intellectual figures of the first half of the 20th century. Elaine de Kooning said that he was "[w]idely recognized as one of the most gifted and erudite watercolorists in the country". The New York Times critic Howard Devree stated in 1938 that "Margules uses color in a breath-taking manner. A keen observer, he eliminates scrupulously without distortion of his material." Devree later called Margules "one of our most daring experimentalists in the medium" Margules was also a well-known participant in the bohemian culture of New York City's Greenwich Village, where he was widely known as the "Baron" of Greenwich Village.[1] The New York Times described him as "one of Greenwich Village's best-known personalities" and "one of the best known and most buoyant characters about Greenwich Village. Early Life De Hirsh Margules was born in 1899 in the Romanian city of Iași (also known as Iasse, Jassy, or Jasse). When Margules was 10 weeks old, his family immigrated to New York City. Both of his parents were active in the Yiddish theater, His father was Yekutiel "Edward" Margules, a "renowned Jewish actor-impresario and founder of the Yiddish stage." Margules' mother, Rosa, thirty-nine years younger than his father, was an actress in the Yiddish theater and later in vaudeville. Although Margules appeared as a child actor with the Adler Family[11] and Bertha Kalich, his sister, Annette Margules, somewhat dubiously continued in family theater and vaudeville tradition, creating the blackface role of the lightly-clad Tondelayo (a part later played on film Hedy Lamarr) in Earl Carroll's 1924 Broadway exoticist hit, White Cargo. Annette herself faced stereotyping as an exotic flower: writing about her publicist Charles Bouchert stated that "Romania produces a stormy, temperamental type of woman---a type admirably fitted to portray emotion." His brother Samuel became a noted magician who appeared under the name "Rami-Sami." Samuel later became a lawyer, representing magician Horace Goldin, among others. A family portrait including a young De Hirsh, a portrait of Rosa and Annette together, and individual photos of Rosa and Edward can be found on the Museum of the City of New York website. At around age 9 or 10, Margules took art classes with the Boys Club on East Tenth Street, and his first taste of exhibition was at a student art show presented by the club. By age 11, he had won a city-wide prize (a box camera) at a children's art show presented by the department store Wanamakers. As a young teenager, Margules was already displaying a characteristic kindness and loyalty. Upon hearing that two friends (one of them was author Alexander King), were in trouble for breaking a school microscope, the nearly broke Margules gave them five dollars to repair the microscope . Margules had to approach a wealthy man that Margules had once saved on the subway from a heart attack. Margules didn't reveal the source of the five dollars to King until twenty-five years later. In his late teens, Margules studied for a couple of months in Pittsburgh with Edwin Randby, a follower of Western painter Frederic Remington. Thereafter he pursued a two-year course of studies in architecture, design and decoration at the New York Evening School of Art and Design, while working as a clerk during the day at Stern's Department Store. He was encouraged in these artistic pursuits by his neighbor, the painter Benno Greenstein (who later went by the name of Benjamin Benno). Artistic career In 1922, Margules began work as a police reporter for the City News Association of New York .Margules then considered himself something of an expert on art, and the painter Myron Lechay is said to have responded to some unsolicited analysis of his work with the remark "Since you seem to know so much about it, why don't you paint yourself?" This led to study with Lechay and a flurry of painting. Margules' first show was in 1922 at Jane Heap's Little Review Gallery. Thereafter Margules began to participate in shows with a group including Stuart Davis, Jan Matulka, Buckminster Fuller (exhibiting depictions of his "Dymaxion house") in a gallery run by art-lover and restaurateur Romany Marie on the floor above her cafe. Jane Heap, left, with Mina Loy and Ezra Pound During the 1920s, Margules traveled outside of the country a number of times. In 1922, with the intent of reaching Bali, he took a job as a "'wiper on a tramp steamer where [he] played nursemaid to the engine." He reached Rotterdam before he turned back. He would return to Rotterdam shortly thereafter. In 1927, Margules took a lengthy leave of absence from his day job as a police reporter in order to travel to Paris, where he "set up a studio in Montmartre's Place du Tertre, on the top floor of an almost deserted hotel, a shabby establishment, lacking both heat and running water." He studied at the Louvre and traveled to paint landscapes in provincial France and North Africa. Margules also joined the "Noctambulist" movement and experimented with painting and showing his artwork in low light.Jonathan Cott wrote that: the painter De Hirsch Margulies sat on the quays of the Seine and painted pictures in the dark. In fact, the first exhibition of these paintings, which could be seen only in a darkened room, took place in [ Walter Lowenfels'] Paris apartment. Elaine de Kooning remarked that studying the works of the Noctambulists confirmed Margules' "direction toward the use of primary colors for perverse effects of heavy shadow." It was also in Paris that Margules initially conceived his idea of "Time Painting", where a painting is divided into sectors, each representing a different time of day, with color choices meant to evoke that time of day. In Paris, his social circle included Lowenfels, photographer Berenice Abbott, publisher Jane Heap, composer George Anthiel, sculptor Thelma Wood, painter André Favory, writer Norman Douglas, writer and editor George Davis, composer and writer Max Ewing, and writer Michael Fraenkel. Upon his return to New York in 1929, Margules attended an exhibition of John Marin's paintings. While at the exhibition, he "launched into an eloquent explanation of Marin to two nearby women", and was overheard by an impressed Alfred Stieglitz. The famous photographer and art promoter invited Margules to dine with his wife, the artist Georgia O'Keeffe, and his assistant, painter Emil Zoler. Stieglitz thereafter became a friend and mentor to Margules, becoming for him "what Socrates was to his friends." Alfred Stieglitz Stieglitz introduced Margules to John Marin, who quickly became the most important painterly influence upon Margules. Elaine de Kooning later noted that Margules was "indebted to Marin and through Marin to Cézanne for his initial conceptual approach - for his constructions of scenes with no negative elements, for skies that loom with the impact of mountains." Margules himself said that Marin was his "father and ... academy." The admiration was by no means unreciprocated: Marin said that Margules was "an art lover with abounding faith and sincerity, with much intelligence and quick seeing." Stieglitz also introduced Margules to many other artistic and intellectual figures in New York. With the encouragement of Alfred Stieglitz, Margules in 1936 opened a two-room gallery at 43 West 8th Street called "Another Place." Over the following two years there were fourteen solo exhibitions by Margules and others, and the gallery was well-respected by the press. It was in this gallery that the painter James Lechay, Myron's brother, exhibited his first painting. In 1936, Margules first saw recognition by major art museums when both the Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston purchased his works. In 1942, Margules gave up working as a police reporter, and apparently dedicated himself thereafter solely to an artistic vocation. "The Baron of Greenwich Village"[edit] Margules made his mark not only as an artist, but also as an outsized personality known throughout Greenwich Village and beyond. To local residents, Margules was known as the "Baron", after Baron Maurice de Hirsch, a prominent German Jewish philanthropist. Margules was easily recognizable by the beret he routinely wore over his long hair. Writer Charles Norman said that he "dressed with a flair for sloppiness." He was said to "know everybody" in Greenwich Village, to the extent that when the novelist and poet Maxwell Bodenheim was murdered, Margules was the first one the police sought to identify the body. Margules' letters show him interacting with art world figures such as Sacha Kolin, John Marin and Alfred Stieglitz, as well as with prominent figures outside the art world such as polymath Buckminster Fuller and writer Henry Miller. Most of his friends and acquaintances found Margules a generous and voluble man, given to broadly emotionally expressive gestures and acts of kindness and loyalty. In 1929, he exhibited an example of this loyalty and fellow-feeling when he appeared in court to fight what the wrongful commitment of his friend, writer and sculptor Alfred Dreyfuss, who appeared to have been a victim of an illicit attempt to block an inheritance. The Greenwich Village chronicler Charles Norman described the bone-crushing hugs that Margules would routinely bestow on his friends and acquaintances, and speaks of the "persuasive theatricality" that Margules seemed to have inherited from his actor parents. Norman also wrote about Margules' routine acts of kindness, taking in homeless artists, constantly feeding his friends and providing the salvatory loan where needed. Norman also notes that Margules was blessed with a loud and good voice, and was apt to sing an operatic air without provocation. The writer and television personality Alexander King said I think the outstanding characteristics of my friend's personality are affirmation, emphasis, and overemphasis. He chooses to express himself predominantly in superlatives and the gestures which accompany his utterances are sometimes dangerous to life and limb. Of the bystanders, I mean. King also spoke with affectionate amusement about Margules' pride in his cooking, speaking of how "if he should ever invite you to dinner, he may serve you a hamburger with onions, in his kitchen-living room, with such an air of gastronomic protocol, such mysterious hints and ogliing innuendoes, as if César Ritz and Brillat-Savarin had sneaked out, only a moment before, with his secret recipe in their pockets." Margules was such a memorable New York personality that comic book writer Alvin Schwartz imagined him at the Sixth Avenue Cafeteria in a risible yet poignant debate with Clark Kent about whether Superman had the ability to stop Hitler. Margules' entrenchment in the Greenwich Village milieu can be seen in a photograph from Fred McDarrah's "Beat Generation Album" of a January 13, 1961 writers' and poets' meeting to discuss "The Funeral of the Beat Generation", in Robert Cordier [fr]'s railroad flat at 85 Christopher Street. Among the people in the same photograph are Shel Silverstein...

Andre Elbaz (b.1934). Landscape, ca. 1980 . Oil on card panel, image measures 14 x 20 inches; 18.5 x 24.5 inches framed. Signed lower right. Excellent condition. André Elbaz (born April 26, 1934, El Jadida, Morocco) is a famous Moroccan painter and filmmaker. Elbaz studied art and theatre in Rabat and Paris from 1950 to 1961. He started painting only at the age of 21, until which age he had been interested mainly in theatre. A few years later, he managed to combine his two passions into a new approach in art-therapy, inventing together with his wife, a psychiatrist, the Pictodrame, which brought him world recognition. His first exhibition, which was very successful, took place in Casablanca in 1961 and earned him an appointment as Professor at the Beaux-Arts school in Casablanca. Years later, in 1976, he exhibited his paintings at the Tel-Aviv Museum. In parallel to his career as a painter, Elbaz is also known as a filmmaker. He produced several short films in France, Canada and the United States. One of them, La nuit n'est jamais complète (The night is never complete), won a prize at the "5th Biennale de Paris in 1967" .[citation needed] Among the themes chosen for the many films he produced, there was a short one about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, as well as a series of drawings entitled Seuls (Alone), with texts written by both Elie Wiesel...

Karl Drerup (1904-2000). Italian City, c.1930. Oil on masonite panel, 24 x 32 inches; 34 x 42 in custom frame. Signed lower right. Minor conservation to loss in margins. Price on request Biography: Born in Borghorst, Germany in 1904, Karl Drerup earned a Master’s Degree in graphic arts working under Hans Meid...

Enrique Climent (1897-1980). Casas de Ibiza, c.1960. Oil and sand on canvas, 35 x 46 inches; 44.5 x 55.5 inches (frame). Signed lower left. Excellent condition with no damage or conservation. Instituo National de Bellas Artes lebel affixed en verso. Biography: Enrique Climent ( Valencia , Spain, 1897- Mexico City , 1980) was a Spanish painter and graphic designer, present in the Spanish Pavilion of the International Exhibition of Paris in 1937 , two of whose works are conserved in the National Museum Art Center Reina Sofía , as part of the collection of the Spanish Museum of Contemporary Art (MEAC). Exiled in Mexico , country in which he died at 83 years of age. He has been associated with the driving group in Spain of the "New Art". Born in a bourgeois family of the Valencian capital, despite paternal opposition, Climent studied at the School of Fine Arts of San Carlos , and with a scholarship received in 1919, traveled to Madrid to complete them in San Fernando . In the capital of Spain he participated in the gathering of Ramón Gómez de la Serna , for whom he illustrated some greguerías , and in the avant-garde activities of the then-called first Escuela de Vallecas , Associated with the Society of Iberian Artists . He also collaborated as an illustrator of Blanco y Negro magazine, 3 and illustrated books by Elena Fortún , Azorín , Juan Manuel Díaz Caneja and Manuel Abril . 3 Before, in 1924 he had been in Paris for two years, where he came to design some stage sets for opera shows. 6 He participated in three of the exhibitions of "Los Ibéricos" (San Sebastián in 1931, Copenhagen in 1932 and Berlin in 1933), as well as in the International Exhibitions of Contemporary Spanish Art in Paris and Venice in 1936. He was one of the Spanish exiles who in 1939 landed in Veracruz , after the crossing of the Sinaia , along with other intellectuals and artists (such as José Moreno Villa , Arturo Souto...

Sterling Strauser (1907-1995). Dorothy and Jasper, Crystal Street Station, 1970. Oil on masonite panel, 11.5 x 22.25 inches. Signed and dated lower right. Very good condition with no damage or conservation. Unframed. Framing services available. Image depicts the artist's wife, Dorothy Strauser, walking the beloved family cat, Jasper. In the background can be seen the East Stroudsburg Pa Train Depot on Crystal Street. Provenance: Estate of the artist's Granddaughter, Princeton NJ. Often called a romantic expressionist and American intimist, self-taught Pennsylvania artist Sterling Strauser (1907-1995) completed his first oil painting in 1922- inspired by frequent visits to the collection of American folk art at the Everhardt Museum in Scranton. Throughout the following seven decades of his career, Strauser’s artistic pursuit was based on his own intuition and determination to paint what he saw, rather than adhering to the conventional pictorial structures prescribed by prevailing styles at the time. Strauser rejected pretension, believing instead that art should work from life as it was lived. His oeuvre therefore serves as an extremely personal record of his observations and experiences from his lifetime painting in East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. Beginning early in his career, Strauser took his inspiration from American regionalists and traditional realists in the Ashcan style, as well as European movements such as Fauvism and Cubism, yet he eventually developed his own fluid realism based on subject matter beloved and familiar to him- family and friends, local landscapes and floral still lifes. Known for his distorted pictorial space, exaggerated with vivid color, heavy impasto and an intensity of emotion, Strauser was adept at altering and rearranging the details and aspects of any given form to create a new kind of beauty. "All a painting has to do, or a piece of sculpture, or whatever, is to entertain the critical eye. You have to have a fresh seeing eye… to look at things like a child, as if looking at the world for the first time (seeing) something that somebody else doesn’t see, something you want to identify with… Painting is largely a matter of evaluation. (It) doesn’t matter how much it looks like the subject matter. It just depends on how interesting you have made it so that it pleases the critical eye." STERLING STRAUSER, STERLING STRAUSER: A MODERNIST REVISTED, P. 23 Sterling exhibited his work extensively throughout the country and drew the attention of many notable fellow artists including Milton Avery, Louise Nevelson, David Burliuk, Chaim Gross and Red Grooms. Sterling was also extremely influential within the arts community of Pennsylvania through his discovery and promotion of self-taught American Folk artists such as Justin McCarthy, Jack Savitsky, Joseph Gatto...

Born 1955 in Broken Bow, Nebraska. Lives and works in New York. AWARDS
 National Endowment for the Arts, Major Grant Robert Terry was best noted in his depictions of romantic moons...

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...

Katharyn Gwendoln Truesdell - (American; 1909-1996) This colorful painting depicts a Southern California valley, likely near Sun City, over the mountains from Los Angeles and San Di...

“… look into the stains of walls, or the ashes of a fire, or clouds, or mud … you may find really marvelous ideas. The mind of the painter is stimulated to new discoveries … various ...

Robert Motelski's paintings are exceptional visions of nature, visions of space which surrounds us. They tell about being, fate and passing. They depend on the season of year, the ti...