1930s Paintings

Mystery Artist Untitled, 1993 Watercolor on paper Sight: 13 x 19 1/4 in. Framed: 25 1/2 x 29 1/2 x 1 1/4 in. Signed and dated lower right

Oil on board by Spanish artist Mariano Andreu Estany (1888-1976). Amazing quality and fine detail. Excellent original condition. Signed lower left, "Mariano Andreu '39". Image si...

Tlaloc and the Tiger (1939) Oil on panel 16" x 12" 23 ¾" x 18 ¾"x 2 ½" framed Signed and dated (and inscribed) "de Diego 39" lower left. Provenance: The artist; private collection Ch...

An oil on canvas painted by Jack Sassoon which was certainly a premonition of what was to come. Entitled Death of the Young Men and dated 1938, it depicts men in gas masks and a woma...

Oil on board. Surrealist/Modernist painting with a female nude reaching into a wood burning stove, hilly landscape with barn, houses, still life with a bowl of fruit, stormy sky and a small male figure. Presented in a custom frame, outer dimensions measure 29 ¼ x 35 x ¾ inches. Image size is 24 ¼ x 30 inches. Provenance: Private Collection, Colorado About the Artist: The daughter of a classically-trained pianist mother and a concert violinist father, she had an intellectually stimulating upbringing enhanced by Christian Science values. After graduation from high school in Hannibal, Missouri, she enrolled in the College of Education at Butler University in Indianapolis, Indiana in 1919. Soon, however, she gave up the idea of becoming a teacher and entered at the John Herron Art Institute (whose collections are now part of the Indianapolis Museum of Art). The Institute’s early faculty included artists from the Hoosier Group trained at the Royal Academy in Munich, Germany, who educated artists in the realist tradition. True’s teacher and mentor, William Forsyth, gave her an excellent foundation in drawing and the technical aspects of painting and composition. When the failure of her father’s business in the early 1920s forced her to start earning a living, the Herron Institute hired her as an instructor for its art school, allowing her to support herself while she finished her studies. Following graduation from the Institute in 1925, she received a one-year scholarship to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. Her former teacher William Forsyth wrote in his recommendation: "I can say without exaggeration that she was one of the best pupils I ever had during the twenty-five years I was a teacher at the John Herron Art School." At the Academy, she studied with Daniel Garber, an impressionist landscape painter associated with the New Hope art colony, and Hugh Breckenridge noted for his bold palette and expressionistic use of color, as well as the abstract work he started doing by 1922. She also studied briefly in the art department at Columbia University, perhaps in1928 when she produced some of her New York street scenes. From Pennsylvania, she returned to Indiana teaching for several years at Shortridge High School in Indianapolis. She also began showing her work at several area venues, including the Herron Institute, the Artists of Indiana, and the Hoosier Salon held early on in Chicago. Among the Salon’s exhibitors were Gustave Baumann, Victor Higgins, and Olive Rush, who either were Indiana natives or whose careers included connections with the state. By the 1920s all three of them had become associated with the Santa Fe and Taos art colonies. In the summer of 1928 True experienced both New Mexico communities and Southwest culture firsthand with Francis Hoar and her husband Clement Trucksess, her friends from the Herron Institute. They had relocated to Boulder in 1927 and were teaching at the University of Colorado. She recorded in her journal her initial reaction to the New Mexico landscape: "Might I preserve on canvas my thrill and deep feeling of the grand things of nature I have beheld today….There’s a wideness in God’s country that expresses peace to me." Inspired by her trip, True created a group of watercolors for her solo exhibition in 1928 at the Lieber Gallery in Indianapolis. They marked a transition from the realist style she learned at the Herron Institute to the more modernist, semi-abstract one she soon adopted. In the summer of 1929, she accepted an instructor’s position on the faculty of the Fine Arts Department at the University of Colorado (CU) in Boulder. She after that joined the Art Association of Boulder founded in 1923 by Mrs. Jean Sherwood, an art patron and club woman who relocated from Chicago to teach at the Boulder Chautauqua. Sherwood helped convince Dean Fred B...

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

Antique American modernist signed monkey drawing by Aurion M. Proctor (1909 - 1983). Drawing and charcoal on paper. Signed. Framed.

Rare and interesting original drawing. Charcoal and penicl on paper. Signed. Framed. Image size, 15L x 13H.

Antique American modernist interior scene with two monkeys. Oil on canvas. No signature found. Framed. Image size, 39H x 26L.

The Amazon Benjamin Benno, American (1901–1980) Date: 1938 Oil and montage on canvas, signed and dated lower left Size: 31.75 x 26.13 in. (80.65 x 66.36 cm) Frame Size: 33.5 x 27.5 i...

Never afraid of trying new styles, curious and opinionated, constantly engaged with the world around him, Rolph Scarlett more than once proved to be at the artistic zeitgeist in a career that stretched for more than 75 years. Born in 1889, Scarlett had his first retrospective by 1928. He subscribed fully to the modernist credo. Interviewed at the time, he said: "If a futuristic painting brings the casual gallery patron to an abrupt stop and forces him to spend five minutes in front of the painting, then the ends of modernism have been served," A major proponent of non-objective painting, Scarlett's career and artistic philosophy is closely linked with the early history of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. His work, along with that of Kandinsky, Klee, and German artist Rudolph Bauer...

An original oil on canvas by WPA era artist Cleo Sara Thornberg whose work is represented in the collections of the National Gallery, The MOMA, and The National Gallery. This utterl...

'Characters in a Surrealist Landscape', oil on canvas, by Lucien Coutaud (1931). A couple entwine with the male character seemingly in grief, the female not returning with a comforting embrace. In the distant landscape a sole character meanders. This painting seems to be a creation of the artist's dreams, perhaps reflecting events in his personal life. It seems there is a relationship problem. In the world of Surrealists, there is a focus on the unconscious mind through Freudian methods of free association, trance-like states or dreams. Some Surrealists practiced psychic 'automatism' which was automatic writing or drawing, turning off the conscious mind and producing streams of words or images directly from the unconscious. In unlocking the unconscious in this way, Surrealism was individually expressed (Ref. 'The Short Story of Art...

Never afraid of trying new styles, curious and opinionated, constantly engaged with the world around him, Rolph Scarlett more than once proved to be at the artistic zeitgeist in a ca...

A view of a landscape with a young woman shown seated and bathing her bare foot in a pool of water with white doves flying in a clouded, blue sky. Signed verso 'Nura' for Nura Wood...

WALTER QUIRT Strong Man, c. 1939-40 Oil on masonite 2 1/16 x 2 1/8 inches Signed at lower right: QUIRT Titled verso Oxidized metal frame (possibly silver) ...

Oil on canvas, signed lower right Dated '1932' and inscribed on reverse Image size: 28 x 22 inches (71 x 56 cm) This vivid painting depicts a beech tree at Hopetoun House on the outskirts of Edinburgh. Hopetoun House is a remarkable stately home that has been home to the Hope family since the late 1600s - it is filled with stunning collections and sits in majestic grounds. However, the colour pallet, low view point and stylised forms in this painting have transformed this picturesque pastoral scene into something psychedelic, other-worldly and uncanny. Harry Fabian Ware Harry Fabian Ware was a British post-impressionist artist who created bold artworks. Harry married fellow artist Armyne May Davidson on 1st August 1928 in Aboyne, Aberdeenshire. They both exhibited at the New Gallery, Edinburgh on 9th November 1935 alongside fellow artists James Cowie...

A monumental oil painting by Benjamin Benno, American (1901 - 1980) measuring 80 x 67 inches, framed to 84 x 71 inches. Signed and dated 1938. By the early 1930s Benno had establis...