William Schwartz

A Song Without Words oil painting by William Schwartz

1927

Provenance: The Artist. Menikoff collection (friends of the artist) About this artist: Born in Little Italy in 1907, Gregorio Prestopino first set out to become a sign painter as the son of New York City immigrants. Instead, his talent provided a life-changing scholarship to the National Academy of Design, and for five years he studied drawing under C. W. Hawthorne. He spent the summer of 1934 at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire. His deep involvement with the colony led him to later serve as its director in 1954. Much of Prestopino’s work was in the vein of social realism. During the 1940s and 1950s he became deeply invested in portraying everyday Manhattan and Harlem scenes. He first became interested in the Ashcan school at the National Academy of Design, and remained committed to an interest in working with urban scenes. His lively treatment of people and events revealed his affinity for sixteenth-century artist Pieter Breughel. Later in his career, he focused on producing images of nudes and picturesque New Hampshire landscapes, and investigated the relationship between color and form. Prestopino exhibited at several biennials at the Corcoran Gallery, at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art. His work was frequently shown at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where he was awarded the Temple Gold Medal in 1946 and an additional prize in 1952. He was awarded a National Institute of Arts and Letter Grant in 1961, and in 1972 the National Academy of Design awarded him the Altman Figure Painting Award. Prestopino’s artistic cache skyrocketed when Life magazine published his images from New York’s maximum security institution Green Haven as part of its “Prison Series” in 1957. That same year his paintings and sketches of urban life were featured in the short film Harlem Wednesday. Directed by John and Faith Hubley...

Byron Browne On the Beach (1959) Oil on canvas, 20" x 26" 26" x 32" x 1" frame size - likely original Inscribed verso "On the Beach / 1959 / Byron Browne" Provenance: Private collection, Berkley, California About this artist: Through an oeuvre displaying the re-envisioning of figural subjects and the formation of an abstract expressionist style, Byron Browne stands out among the American abstractionists of his generation. Born in Yonkers, New York, in 1907, the artist was a bright talent at the National Academy of Design in his teens. From 1924 to 1928 Browne studied at the Academy under notable artists Robert Aitkin, Charles Courtney Curran, Charles Hawthorne, Alice Murphy...

This painting is illustrated in the Catalogue of the 1945 Encyclopedia Britannica Collection of Contemporary American Painting, p.84. Written and edited by Grace Pagano. "Painting ...

Exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (1947) and the University of Illinois Exhibition of Contemporary Painting (1948), this painting by Philip Evergood exemplifies the ...