Walter Charles Klett

Environs of Rome

1946- 1950

A part woman and part snail, a nude young black woman on all fours has a sizeable yellow snail's shell emerging from her back. She inches through a dense, verdant forest abundant wit...

"Civil Rights." Evergood's early commentary on racial issues in the 1950s depicts four black men gagged, roped and hanging from a tree. In the background, imprisoned blacks look on through a barbed-wire fence. Whites watch in horror but do nothing to help. Meanwhile, a two-legged and three-headed serpent who symbolizes evil - wraps himself around the tree that physically and symbolically separates the races. This is an important work in the history of American art. It may be one of the very earliest examples of a major American painter doing a major work that challenges racial segregation and injustice at a time when no one else would. The title of the work is inspired by a Historic Supreme Court decision on racial segregation. The Little Rock...

The Island Woman (La Mujer Isla) Artist signed and titled. Enrique Chavarría (1927-1998) was a Mexican painter and neo-surrealist, whose fantastic imagery carries forward the work of the Mexican Surrealists. He created hundreds of easel-sized oil paintings on masonite and numerous smaller works. For four decades his principal patron was Bryna Prensky, an American gallery owner from Florida who moved to Mexico City in 1954. She bought most of Chavarría’s known works for her gallery and her own collection. Prensky said she often found Chavarría in his pajamas at mid-day. He read widely and painted dreamlike images that reflect his wide-ranging scholarly interests. Much of his work is thought to have been inspired by poetry, especially the writings of André Breton, Paul Éluard, Arthur Rimbaud, and Paul Valéry; by the classic surrealism of Salvador Dalí; and by the paintings of Mexican neo-surrealist artists Remedios Varo...

In The New York Times Arts in America column, Edward M. Gomez wrote of Valton Tyler: Visionary seems the right word for describing his vivid, unusual and technically refined painting...