Jonah Kinigstein

Large Oil Painting Circus Scene Clowns Rediscovered NY Artist Jonah Kinigstein

c. 1950s

Jonah Kinigstein (b. 1923) is an American Postwar & Contemporary painter. He works in a figurative expressionist style. His works are featured in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Academy of Design, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He lives in New York City. Jonah Kinigstein was trained at Cooper Union Art School, The Grande Chaumiere in Paris; and Belle Arte in Rome. He has been a Fulbright Fellow. He has holdings at MOMA, the Ain Herod Museum in Tel Aviv; Smithsonian; the Albright-Knox Gallery and the Nelson Gallery of Art. He lived and worked in Brooklyn New York. Kinigstein was inducted as an Academician into the National Academy of Design in 1997. Exhibits include: Young Americans at the Whitney Museum of American Art; the National Academy of Arts and Letters; ACA Gallery; Rittenhouse Gallery; the Washington Irving Gallery; and the Pindar Gallery. Contemporary American Painting and Sculpture (CAPS) '59, University of Illinois, Arthur Okamura, Fred Farr, Jonah Kinigstein, Lawrence Calcagno, Reuben Tam...

Jean Pierre Serrier (French, 1934-1989) Oil on canvas painting depicting four figures Hand signed lower right. Measures (frame) 26.5" x 30" wide, and (sight) 18.25." x 22.25" wide. Jean Pierre Serrier (1934 – 1989) was a French painter known for surrealism and absurdist art. Jean-Pierre Serrier was born in Montparnasse, Paris and attended the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris. the son of Louis and Solange Serrier. His father fought in World War II and became a prisoner of war. In 1940, as a six-year-old, he and his mother fled Paris for Corrèze in southwest France. Childhood memories of close escapes from German bombardments would later influence his absurdist philosophy of life. Passionate about drawing, in 1951 he applied and was admitted to the École nationale supérieure des arts appliqués et des métiers d'art in Paris. He shared an attic apartment in the 16th arrondissement with fellow student Jean-Baptiste Valadié. For income, he decorated shop windows. A trip to Spain provided motifs for early works. His student work might be characterized as art naïf (Naive art). While still a student, he sold a ceramic artwork to the poet and publisher Pierre Seghers, who would later commission drawings from him. He frequented jazz clubs in Saint-Germain des Près, and while listening to Sidney Bechet at the Vieux Colombier, he met his wife, Yvette.One of the last French Surrealist and follower of Nietzsche. His art conveyed the message to all of mankind that we are only human. The other Surrealist to center his art in philosophy was Rene Magritte whose paintings reflect his understanding of Sigmund Freud. He had his first exhibition in 1955, before being sent to Algeria to complete his military service. After graduating in 1955, he was drafted for military service, spent time in Germany and Morocco, and was sent to the front lines of the Algerian War. In 1959 he exhibited works at two Parisian galleries and at Juan-les-Pins on the Côte d'Azur. From 1961, he exhibited annually at the Salon des Artistes Français. In 1962, the City of Paris purchased his painting Un dimanche In 1961, Serrier made his first visit to the United States to exhibit at a New York gallery. In 1975 and 1979, he had successful exhibitions in New Orleans, and his work was included in art and news magazines, including Time and Newsweek. Beginning in the 1950s, his works included stylized portraits similar in some ways to the "big eyes" art of Margaret Keane, though it is uncertain that either artist influenced the other. Keane painted children, and so did Serrier, sometimes from life, but Serrier’s models are usually somewhat older, though uniformly slender and with androgynous features. A gallery owner introduced Serrier to American collectors Edgar Garbisch and his wife, Bernice Chrysler (daughter of Chrysler founder Walter P. Chrysler), who had a particular interest in naïve art; they commissioned a series of portraits from Serrier. At the same time, he met Reine Ausset in Paris, who in 1961 invited him to New York to take part in an exhibition at Galerie Norval on 57th Street. The show also included work by Moïse Kisling, and the exhibition program explicitly linked the two artists, saying that Serrier, who considered Moise Kisling "the Master," had found his own technique, but "the same vision joins the grand Kisling to the young Serrier: plenitude of shapes, sureness of palette, precision in outlines." In the 1960s he began painting slender, young, androgynous figures in groups, set in sparse landscapes with suggestions of the surreal and sometimes wearing costumes of the Commedia dell'arte. In some of these paintings the eyes of the figures are completely black, a motif that would continue in his later work. In 1965, he exhibited at Forest and Reed Gallery in London. Also in 1965, he discovered the small town of Martel, and with his old roommate Jean-Baptiste Valadié purchased a house that they opened as the gallery La Licorne (The Unicorn) in 1967. Responding to the political upheavals of May 1968 in France, and following the advice of Geneva gallery owner Roger Ferrero, Serrier's work became increasingly complex, idiosyncratic, and surreal. Imagery included the Tower of Babel, bodies suspended in space, and crowds of people all dressed alike, with identical features and entirely black eyes. Mannequins, playing cards, nudes, and levitating orbs also figured in the work. In a nod to Magritte, his men sometimes wear bowler hats. Another influence may have been the works of the Franco-Belgian surrealist Gaston Bogaert (1918-2008). Serrier's first major exhibit of these works, in Geneva in 1971, was titled Le Réalisme Fantastique. (Magic Realism) In 1972, he was made a member of the Société du Salon d'Automne, under whose auspices he was invited by the Polish government to exhibit in Warsaw in 1973, as part of a cultural exchange across the Iron Curtain. In 1976, he served on the jury of the Salon d'Automne. In 1975, New Orleans gallery owner Kurt E. Schon brought his work to several cities in the United States. A copiously illustrated monograph in English, Surrealism and the Absurd: Jean Pierre Serrier, was published in 1977. Author Thomas M. Bayer wrote: Serrier's world is one where—to use Friedrich Nietzche's term—the "human herd animal" is being confronted with the overwhelming task of coping with the world, his solitude, and at times, his resignation in the face of its monstrous size and duration. It is a world where the characterless, "blind" man faces the institutions, rules and symbols that made him into the being he now is…But Serrier does not lose himself in this world he portrays. He never forgets the old French tradition, the "black" humor, à la Molière. This classical humor at times is more felt than seen, in a manner that can be terribly funny, because it is horrifying, laughable, poignant and always true. Serrier told a friend, "In each of my paintings there's a message of hope amid the crowd of stereotypical figures. It could be an escaping dirigible, or a nymphet who flees like a deer under the red and blue trees of paradise...

WERNER LIEBMANN (German b. 1951) "Elf Köpfe Bei Nacht," Oil on canvas, signed L/R, "Liebmann;" 29 1/4'' x 35 1/2'', framed 31'' x 37''. Werner Liebmann (born 1951) is a German painter and graphic artist . Werner Liebmann was born in Königsthal in Thuringia. Born in Königsthal from 1969 to 1973 he studied chemistry at the Martin Luther University in Halle (Saale) . From 1973 to 1976 he worked as a project engineer. He was active as a chemist until he opted for an artistic career and studied painting at the University of Art and Design in Halle. A master student of Bernhard Heisig, he graduated at the College of Fine Arts Leipzig. Since then, he has been a freelance artist, as well as a professor at the College of Fine Arts in Dresden and currently at the Art school Berlin – Weissensee. His works were represented at numerous group exhibitions and solo exhibitions in Halle, Hamburg, Berlin, Düsseldorf and further cities, mostly in Germany. Influenced by the Neo Figuraist artists of the Junge Wilde painters. In 1978, the Junge Wilde painting style arose in the German-speaking world in opposition to established avant garde, minimal art and conceptual art. It was linked to the similar Transavanguardia movement in Italy, USA (neo-expressionism) and France (Figuration Libre). The Junge Wilde painted their expressive paintings in bright, intense colors and with quick, broad brushstrokes very much influenced by Professor at the Academy of Art in Berlin, Karl Horst Hödicke (b:1938). They were sometimes called the Neue Wilde. Berlin: Luciano Castelli, Rainer Fetting...

EMŐD, AURÉL (Budapest 1897-1958) A pupil of János Vaszary at the Academy of Fine Arts, he then went to Italy, Germany and France on study trips. Not only his master but also the Italian novecento affected him strongly. He worked as an art teacher in Budapest. From 1933 and 1935 he won a scholarship to Collegium Hungaricum. He was included in the exhibition The Art Of Modern Hungary 1931 and other exhibitions along with Vilmos Novak Aba, Count Julius Batthyany, Pal Bor, Bela Buky, Denes Csanky, Istvan Csok, Bela Czobel, Peter Di Gabor, Bela Ivanyi Grunwald, Baron Ferenc Hatvany, Lipot Herman, Odon Marffy, C. Pal Molnar...

Kristians Tonny (French, born Holland; 1907-1977) Circus Oil on prepared board, 16 1/2 x 13 inches Framed: 22 x 19 inches (approx.) Inscribed on reverse: (in pencil) "cadre noir/ave...

Antique American school modernist circus scene by Ann Taube Goodman (Born 1905). Oil on canvas, circa 1925. Signed. Displayed in a modernist fra...

Surreal abstract expressionist painting of a group of clowns in the style of Belgian painter James Ensor. Combining the macabre with the playful, the work features distorted clowns a...

ARTIST: Norayr Gevorgyan WORK: Original oil Painting, One of a Kind Medium: Oil on Cardboard, Unique style, YEAR: 2016 STYLE: Abstract, Figurative SUBJECT: Circus SIZE: 12" x 16" x 0...