1950s Art

Morris Blackburn, 'Avalon South', wood engraving, 1951, edition 30. Signed, titled, and numbered '12/30' in pencil. A fine black impression on cream wove Japan paper, with wide margins (1 3/8 to 2 1/4 inches), in excellent condition. Archivally sleeved, unmatted. Image size 5 x 7 inches (127 x 178 mm); sheet size 8 5/8 x 10 7/8 inches (219 x 276 mm). ABOUT THE ARTIST Morris Blackburn was a prominent painter, printmaker, and graphic artist, as well as a respected teacher at the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Born in Philadelphia, where he spent most of his career, Blackburn was a descendant of the notable colonial portrait artist Joseph J. Blackburn (c. 1700–1780). He developed an interest in art early on and studied architectural drawing at the Philadelphia Trade School. In 1922, he took classes at the Graphic Sketch Club and later attended the School of Industrial Art. While working for the well-known Philadelphia furniture designer Oscar Mertz, he studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from 1925 to 1929. During his studies, he learned painting from Henry Bainbridge McCarter...

Ed Feingersh photographed Marilyn Monroe for Redbook magazine in March 1955 for a story which would follow Monroe through her daily routine, the photography to be candid and shot wit...

Vibrant mid century modern abstracted figurative in orange, red and black by Bay Area artist Paul Sheppard. Dated 1959 and signed "Sheppard." Presented i...

Kings Of Hollywood 1957 Clark Gable (1901 – 1960), Van Heflin (1910 – 1971), Gary Cooper (1901 – 1961) and James Stewart (1908 – 1997) enjoying a joke at a New Year’s party held at...

Elizabeth Taylor with Sunglasses for "Giant" 1955 by Frank Worth This iconic and elegant portrait captured by celebrity photographer Frank Worth features actress Elizabeth Taylor o...

Lady Daphne Cameron (Mrs George Cameron) on a tiger skin rug in the trophy room at socialite Laddie Sanford's home in Palm Beach, Florida, 1959. Slim Aarons Beauty and the Beast 19...

Leonard Baskin (1922-2000) Death of the Laureate, `1957 Wood Engraving Framed: 18 1/2 x 18 in. Signed and inscribed bottom: Death of the Laureate, Ed. 20, For Walter [Rosenblum], Leo...

Bay Area Abstract Expressionist Composition in Oil Pastel on Cardboard San Francisco Bay area abstract expressionist composition by Ho...

A stunning mid-century landscape oil painting by Danish artist Max Victor (1919-1993), signed and dated July 3, 1958. The beautiful composition portrays a vast, open field under a ...

Palm Beach Pastels 1959 by Slim Aarons Slim Aarons Limited Estate Edition Socialite Alice Topping relaxing by a swimming pool in Palm Beach, Florida, 1959. unframed c type pr...

An abstract collage on wood by Kenneth Morrow Martin, American (1911-1983). Exhibited: 1st Knoxville Art Center National Exhibtion, 1961 White Landscape by Keith Morrow Martin...

Lithograph on vélin paper. Inscription: Unsigned and unnumbered. Good condition. Notes: From Derrière le miroir, N° 110, published by Aimé Maeght, Éditeur, Paris; printed by Éditions...

Ed Feingersh photographed Marilyn Monroe for Redbook magazine in March 1955 for a story which would follow Monroe through her daily routine, the photography to be candid and shot wit...

"Superficie 324" is a 1988 screen print (serigraph) of a 1959 painting by Capogrossi. This is one of his famous "comb" or "fork" works that he perfected in the 1950s and continued to create for the remainder of his life. The blocks of primary red and yellow colors give a bright, joyful feel and contrast to the strong bold black that was Capogrossi's consistent color for the "combs". With no allegorical, psychological, or symbolic meanings, these structural elements could be assembled and connected in countless variations. Intricate and insistent, Capogrossi's signs determined the construction of the pictorial surface. This piece is identified along one side: Giuseppe Capogrossi By SIAE 1988 Silvio Zamorani Editor Via Saccarelli, 9 10144 Torino Italy Tel. (39)(11) 4730554 Progetto Grafico (Graphic Project): Studio Walter Benjamin. Serigrafia (Screen Print): BISI Torino. Capogrossi was born in Rome. After obtaining a degree in law in 1923–1924, he decided to study painting with Felice Carena at Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma. In 1927 Capogrossi embarked on a formative trip to Paris together with fellow artists and acquaintances Fausto Pirandello, Corrado Cagli and Emanuele Cavalli...

Sophia Loren holding a flower in Karlsruhe, Germany circa 1961. This listing is for a limited edition archival print. What's included: - Limited Edition Archival Print - Numbered C...

Lithograph, stencil on vélin paper. Paper Size: 12.4 x 9.65 inches. Inscription: Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued. Notes: From the album, XXe siècle, Nouvelle série N° 7 (double) J...

ROLLING GREENS Size: 60 x 66 cm (including frame) Oil on board A mid-century modernist landscape painting that features a serene rural scene characterised by geometric simplicity an...

Impressive early American modernist abstract oil painting. Framed. Oil on board. Signed. Image size, 12H by 10L.

Silver Gelatine Print from 1998, photo by Erich Andres, 1956, Andres was born 1905 in Germany and passed away 1992. He started his career as a photographer in 1920. He was one of t...

Signed lower left, 'Ventosa' for Jose Ventosa Domenech (Spanish, 1897-1982) and painted circa 1950. A very substantial oil showing a luminous view of the isle of Mallorca with ancient olive groves and mountain cliffs bathed in warm evening light beneath clouded blue skies. A large and rare Mallorcan landscape by this notable Catalan painter. Born in Barcelona, José Ventosa Doménech first attended the San Jorge School of Fine Arts in 1911. He then undertook an extended trip to Brussels where he studied Vanguard painting before returning to Barcelona where he continued his studies with the Realist, Martí Alsina. In 1922, Ventosa worked alongside Eliseu Meifren and Domingo Soler in Ripoll. From 1924, Ventosa exhibited in Barcelona as a member of the "Nou Ambient", the Catalan art...

Joan Miro, Spanish (1893 - 1983) - A Toute Epreuve (D 204), Year: 1958, Medium: Woodcut on Rice Paper, Edition: 130, Size: 12.75 x 9.75 in. (32.39 x 24.77 cm), Printer: Jacques Frel...

This work is signed, titled, and dated, in pencil. Grippe was a master printer, highly creative printmaker, and sculptor.

The 1958 original lithography by Hans Hartung, titled "Composition noir L56" represents a significant milestone in the artist's illustrious career, showcasing his profound exploratio...

Created circa 1955 by Victor Di Gesu (American, 1914-1988) and stamped, verso, with Victor di Gesu estate stamp. Winner of the Prix Othon Friesz, Victor di Gesu first attended the L...

Medium: lithograph (after the drawing). Printed in Paris in 1951 at the atelier Dreux-Barry in an edition of 1000. Sheet size: 12 1/4 x 9 1/4 inches (310 x 235 mm). Signed in the pla...

Artist: Jean Cocteau Medium: Original Lithograph, 1956 / 1975 Dimensions: 19.5 x 25.5 in, 49.5 x 64.8 cm Arches Paper - Excellent Condition A This original lithograph is from the illustrated portfolio: "Jean Cocteau: 25 Lithographies, 1956-58". This project represents a group of lithographs...

Wonderful early American modernist abstract expressionist oil painting. Framed. Oil on canvas. Signed.

Rare 1950s Original Vintage Gelatin Silver Photograph by DOUGLAS JULEFF - also known as DOUG OF DETROIT - of popular young physique model LARRY KLEIN. Klein is seen here in a double ...

Pierre SOULAGES Lithograph n°9 Original stone lithograph (3 colors- atelier Mourlot) Unsigned On vellum 12 x 10" (31 x 24 cm) REFERENCES : Catalogue raisonné BNF #53 Created in 19...

Unknown photographer, 1950's nude, printed on Epson paper, original was handtinted 13.375 x9 in Colors: Black, Skin colored, green tint in photo

Impressive early American modernist abstract oil painting. Framed. Oil on board. Signed.

To see our other Architectural Drawings, scroll down to "More from this Seller" and below it click on "See all from this Seller." V A Hards (British, c. 1930-c. 2012) An Architectur...

Palazzo, Florence Etching, engraving, aquatint, soft ground and lift ground, printed in colors from three copper plates. 1954 Signed in pencil lower right (see photo) Edition 250 plis 10 on Rives wove paper, printed by the artist Published by The Print Club of Cleveland, No. 33 for 1955 REFERENCE: Geske #32 Condition: Mint Image size: 9 3/16 x 13 1/8 inches Impressions of this image can be found in the following museums: National Gallery of Art, Washington Toledo Museum of Art Oberlin, Allen Museum of Art Cornell Univeristy Cleveland Museum of Art Indianapolis Museum of Art Baltimore Museum of Art Georgetown University Indiana Univeristy, Eskenazi Museum of Art David Museum of Art at Wellesley College "Painter and printmaker Rudolph Otto "Rudy" Pozzatti was born in Telluride, Colorado, on January 14, 1925. Upon graduation from high school, he received a scholarship to attend the University of Colorado in Boulder where he enrolled as an art major. In 1943, his studies were interrupted by his induction into the U. S. Army. After his discharge in 1946, he re-enrolled in the University of Colorado where he studied under Wendell...

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) - La Comédie Humaine Lithograph from 1954. Dimensions of work: 35.5 x 26.5 cm Publisher: Tériade, Paris. The work is in Excellent condition. Fast and s...

Medium: Collotype, héliogravure, recto and verso, on grand vélin Renage filigrané paper, as issued Year: 1954 Paper Size: 12 x 9.25 inches; image size: 9.05 x 6.3 inches Inscription:...

Flower Vase, Red Camellia, white plum, white daffodils and orchids Color woodcut, c. 1950 Signed "B. Ohno" (see photo) Seal: Bakufu (see photo) Series: Flowers of the Four Seasons Ca...

This elegant oil on mounted canvas is by André Hambourg (France, 1909-1999) and features a seaside composition. The artwork is signed in the bottom left corner. The landscape is a lo...

Artist: Édouard Léon Cortès (French, 1882-1969) Title: "Le Théâtre du Vaudeville (à Paris, France)" Series: Théâtre du Vaudeville *Signed by Cortès lower left Circa: 1950 Medium: Ori...

A simply beautiful oil on canvas circa 1950 by French post-impressionist painter Jacques Martin-Ferrieres. The work is of a field filled with bright flowers in all shades of red, lil...

Antique American modernist abstract landscape oil painting. Oil on canvas. Framed. No signature found.

Antique American modernist abstract oil painting by Ervin B. Nussbaum (1914 - 1996). Oil on canvas. Framed. Signed. Dated 1950. Artist Bio: Ervin B. Nussbaum was born in Co...

Medium: original lithograph. Catalogue reference: Mourlot 201. Printed in 1957 at the Mourlot atelier and published in Paris by Maeght. This charming composition is one of the origin...

Cold Winter Special....$825...Framed. Rare early 1950s Original Vintage Gelatin Silver Photograph by DOUGLAS JULEFF - also known as DOUG OF DETROIT - of model AL WALCH. Photograph is...

The 1953 original exhibition poster by Raoul Dufy for the Musée National d'Art Moderne is a vibrant and captivating piece that captures the essence of Dufy's iconic style and celebra...

Medium: original lithograph. This lithograph is from the rare 1951 "Improvisations" portfolio, published by the Artists Equity Association of New York on the occasion of the 1951 Spr...

Andy Warhol Original vintage Christmas Card, ca. 1957 Offset lithograph card Plate signed on the front (see close up image) Unnumbered Frame included Offset lithograph card, ca. 1957...

Porfirio Salinas (1910-1973) San Antonio Artist Image Size: 27 x 33 Frame Size: 35 x 41 Medium: Oil On Canvas Late 1940s-Early 1950s "Bluebonnet Time" Texas Hill Country Landscape Biography Porfirio Salinas (1910-1973) Porfirio Salinas was a self-taught artist who painted landscapes of Central Texas with an emphasis on the vast bluebonnet fields that grow there in the springtime. Born in 1910 in Bastrop, Texas, he attended public schools in San Antonio. He also observed works in progress by the director of the San Antonio Art School, Jose Arpa, as well as landscape painter, Robert Wood. Wood is said to have paid Salinas five dollars a picture to paint bluebonnets because "he hated to paint bluebonnets". Salinas served in the military from 1943 to 1945. Although he was assigned to Fort Sam Houston, he was allowed to live at home. At the fort, Colonel Telesphor Gottchalk assigned him to paint murals for the officer's lounge and various other projects, and Salinas continued to be able to paint during his entire conscripted period. Even before he achieved notoriety among galleries, dealers, and museums, Salinas was widely followed and appreciated by many Texans, including former President Lyndon B. Johnson, who may be considered responsible for launching Salinas popularity beyond the boundaries of Texas. In 1973, Texas capital, Austin, honored Salinas for having "done much to bring the culture of Mexico and Texas closer together with his paintings". Salinas died in April 1973 in San Antonio, Texas. From the years of the Great Depression through President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society of the 1960s, Texan Porfirio Salinas (1910-1973) remained one of the Lone Star State's most popular artists. Today, his works remain popular with Texas collectors and those who love landscapes of the beautiful "Hill Country" that lies in the center of the state. One of the first Mexican-American painters to become widely recognized for his art, Salinas was a favorite of President Lyndon Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird Johnson, as well as of Sam Rayburn, the longest-serving Speaker of the House of Representatives, and Texas Governor John Connelly. In fact, President Johnson was so enamored with his Salinas paintings that the artist will forever be associated with America's first Texas-born President. Works by Porfirio Salinas are in a number of museum collections, grace the halls of the Texas State Capitol and the Governor's Mansion in Austin, and are included in virtually every major private collection of Early Texas Art. Porfirio Salinas was born on November 6, 1910 near the small town of Bastrop, Texas, about thirty miles from Austin. His father, Porfirio G. Salinas (1881-1967), and his mother, Clara G. Chavez, struggled to make a hardscrabble living as tenant farmers, but eventually were forced to give up farming. The family moved to San Antonio, where Salinas' father was able to get a job working as a laborer for the railroad, but the scenic area around Bastrop, with its pine trees and the wide expanse of the Rio Grande River, would forever remain a touchstone for the artist. For the rest of his life, Salinas and his brothers went back frequently to visit their grandmother in her little farmhouse. When in Bastrop, Porfirio painted on the banks of the Rio Grande or in the groves of pine trees. The Salinas family was close-knit and Porfirio was the middle child of five children, so he had an older brother and sister as well as a younger brother and sister. His mother was a native of Mexico, so throughout his childhood the family made the long drive to Mexico to visit Clara Salinas' family. As a child growing up in the bi-lingual section of San Antonio, Salinas drew and painted incessantly and by the time he was ten, he was already producing work that was mature enough to sell to his schoolteachers. Many years later in an article in the New York Times he was described as a "boy whose textbooks were seldom opened and whose sketchbook was never closed." Instead of studying, the young artist spent his spare time watching artists paint in and around San Antonio. As an aspiring painter, Salinas was fortunate to grow up in the historic city, which had the most active art scene in Texas. It was his exposure to older, professional painters that encouraged the precocious young painter to leave school early in order to help his family and pursue a career as a professional artist, despite his father's inability to see art as a career with any future for his son. When Salinas was about fifteen he came to know the artist Robert W. Wood (1889-1979). He met Wood while he was employed in an art supply store and he soon began to work as an assistant to the English-born painter, who had moved from Portland to San Antonio in 1924. Although the diminutive Englishman was already an established professional artist, he did not have a great deal of formal art training and so he was then studying with the academically trained Spanish painter Jose Arpa (1858-1952) in order to augment his knowledge and give his work a more polished look. Salinas was an eager young man, and while working in Wood's downtown San Antonio studio he learned to stretch canvases, frame paintings and to sketch in larger compositions from small plein-air studies for the English artist. He began to accompany Wood and Arpa to the hills outside San Antonio, where they painted small Plein-air studies of fields of blue lupin - the state flower, the famous "Bluebonnets" of Texas - in the springtime and scenes of the gnarled Red Oaks as they changed color in the fall. He was soon assisting Wood in the tedious work of painting the tiny blue flowers that collectors wanted to see in the landscapes they purchased of central Texas. According to a 1972 newspaper story, "Legend has it that one day in the 1920s artist Robert Wood decided he could not bear to paint another bluebonnet in one of his landscapes. He hired young Porfirio Salinas to paint them in for him at five dollars a painting." Whether this story is accurate or apocryphal isn't clear, but the ambitious and independent young Salinas wasn't destined to be anyone's assistant for very long. The formative event of Porfirio Salinas' teenage years was the Texas Wildflower Competitive Exhibitions, a Roaring-Twenties dream of the eccentric oilman Edgar B. Davis (1873-1951). These competitive shows of paintings of wildflowers and Texas life were mounted in San Antonio from 1927 to 1929. Held at the newly opened Witte Museum each spring, the exhibition featured large cash prizes donated by the philanthropic Davis, which were an inducement for artists to travel from all over the United States to paint in the Hill Country of Texas. The "Davis Competitions," as they were known, helped to cement San Antonio's reputation as an art center, a legacy that remains with the "River City" today. The shows generated a great deal of excitement in the area, helping to make celebrities of the some of the artists who had already settled there and encouraging others to make San Antonio their home. Over the three years that the wildflower competitions were held, more than 300 paintings were exhibited, and many thousands of viewers saw the paintings at the Witte Museum and on tours throughout the state and in New York. Each year Davis would generously purchase the winning paintings and then donate them to the San Antonio Art League. Young Porfirio Salinas would have been able to not only watch his two mentors - Robert W. Wood and Jose Arpa - paint the works that they entered in the Davis Competitions, he would have been able to see Arpa take several of the major prizes, receiving the judge's accolades for "Verbena," "Cactus Flower" and "Picking Cotton," works that are still on view at the San Antonio Art League Museum today. Unfortunately, Davis eventually put his donations to work in other charitable endeavors, bringing to an end the wildflower events, but only after they inspired Salinas and other young painters and had helped to make wildflower paintings the most sought-after subject for traditionalist Texas collectors. In 1930, when he was only twenty, Salinas hung out a shingle and began to paint professionally, augmenting the sales of his easel paintings with what little business he could garner by painting signs for local concerns. It was a struggle for the young artist to make a living, as the effects of the Great Depression were settling in. His early works are very similar to those of Robert Wood's, both in subject matter and treatment. Salinas did small paintings of Bluebonnets for the tourists who visited San Antonio to see the famous Alamo as well as paintings of the Texas missions. While a few of his early works have a soft, tonalist quality, with subtle gradations of sunset colors, most were painted in a style that fits well within the currents of the late American Impressionist style, with solid drawing and a warm, chromatic palette. Like Robert Wood's works of the 1930s, the paintings Salinas produced as a young man were usually well composed and detailed views of the spring wildflowers in full bloom in the Texas countryside. In contrast to Wood's work, however, early Salinas compositions were usually pure landscapes without the pioneer farms or dilapidated fences that Wood often used to add visual interest to his wildflower scenes, and he also painted scenes of San Antonio itself as his mentor Jose Arpa had done. To residents of the Hill Country, Salinas was especially adept at accurately capturing the palette of the region and its unique atmosphere. In 1939 Salinas began working with Dewey Bradford (1896-1985), one of the great characters of Texas art. Bradford was a second-generation dealer whose family operated the Bradford Paint Company in Austin, where they sold art supplies, framed artwork, restored paintings and exhibited paintings by Texas artists. Salinas was struggling when he met Bradford, but the older man took the young artist under his wing and began to sell his work reliably, even though the prices that people would pay for a painting were still low due to the lingering effects of the Great Depression. Bradford was a born salesman with a gift for storytelling, and truth be told, a bit of embroidery. The relationship between Bradford and Salinas was often rocky, but it was to last the rest of the artist's life and give him a modest sense of loyalty and security, things which are all too rare in the art world. While Bradford could be critical of his work, Salinas knew that he had a dealer who encouraged him, believed in him and was not shy about singing his praises to anyone who entered Bradford's store on Guadalupe Street. During the early years of World War II Salinas met a pretty Mexican woman from Guadalajara named Maria Bonillas, who was working as a secretary for the Mexican National Railways office in San Antonio. While he was walking downtown with a painting of a bullfighter under his arm, he started a conversation with the young woman, and things progressed rapidly. The couple were married on February 15, 1942 and settled into life in bi-lingual San Antonio and they eventually purchased a tidy stone home on Buena Vista street that had a detached studio in back. By the time the United States entered World War II, Salinas was starting to make a decent living selling his art and beginning to garner recognition across Texas. However, in 1943, like millions of other young men, he was drafted into the service of his country. Fortunately, as an older Army draftee with special talents, after his training he was assigned to Fort Sam Houston, right in San Antonio, allowing him to remain at home while still completing his obligation to "Uncle Sam." Because of his artistic abilities, Salinas was asked to do paintings for the Army as well as a mural for the Officer's Club, which has been re-discovered in recent years. In his spare time he kept working on landscapes and when the war ended in 1945, he was not faced with the same rocky transition from military to civilian life as many veterans. That same year, Salinas became a father as he and Maria celebrated the birth of his only child, Christina Maria Salinas. Like most landscape artists of the era, Salinas was an avid Plein-air painter, and he took his easel and paint box with him on trips throughout Texas and into Mexico. He and his wife traveled deep into her native country, where the artist painted the majestic volcanic peaks of Iztaccihuatl (known as the "Sleeping Woman" because of its unique shape) and Popocatepetl (called the "smoking mountain" because the volcano is still active), south of Mexico City. Salinas also painted studies of rustic villages and their residents. While his most popular paintings were always the scenes of the Texas Bluebonnets and other wildflowers that bloom all over the Hill Country in the spring, he also painted scenes of the twisted Texas oak trees of central Texas, the more arid landscapes of the Texas panhandle and West Texas, and the historic Texas missions; he even sold rapidly executed scenes of bullfights and cockfights for Mexican-American collectors. By the late 1940s, the American economy was finally growing again and wealthier Texans began to collect Salinas paintings, purchasing them from galleries in San Antonio and Dallas and at Dewey Bradford's County Store Gallery in Austin. Salinas also sold work to the Atlanta dealer Dr. Carlton Palmer, who represented Robert W. Wood for many years. In 1948 Palmer sold two large Salinas paintings to the Citizen National Bank in Abilene, Texas. Because Austin was the state capitol, Bradford counted many of the state's elite among his patrons, and due to his interest in history and literature, he played a large role in the cultural history of central Texas. Bradford introduced a number of the major Texas political figures to Salinas' work, including Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908-1973), who was then in the House of Representatives and on his way to winning a controversial election that vaulted him in the United States Senate. Johnson became an enthusiastic collector, as did his political mentor, the legendary House Speaker Sam Rayburn (1882-1961). Johnson decorated his Washington offices with Salinas paintings and he brought a number of them home to his vast LBJ Ranch, near Johnson City, Texas. In spite of his important patrons, Salinas went through a fallow and difficult period in the late 1950s. He had a volatile temperament, which made relationships difficult, and it took great patience for his wife to help him manage his career. As Salinas entered middle age his work began to sell steadily, but except for tourists who purchased his paintings in San Antonio, he was known primarily only to Texas art collectors. All that changed in 1961 with the election of John F. Kennedy (1917-1963) to the Presidency of the United States and his running mate Lyndon Johnson to the Vice Presidency. Johnson was an expansive, larger-than-life character and his status as a long, tall Texan in a cowboy hat was a large part of his imposing political image. During his storied career in the House of Representatives and the United States Senate, Johnson and Lady Bird Johnson (1912-2007) spent their time in Washington in a modest house on the edge of Rock Creek Park, but this home would not do for a Vice President. So, in 1961, the Johnsons purchased a French chateau-styled home in the Spring Valley section of the Capitol. Obtained from the famed socialite and ambassador Perle Mesta (1889-1975), the house came with a fine collection of French furniture and tapestries, and the designer Genevieve Hendricks was hired to meld the French look with objects from the Johnsons' overseas travels and paintings of the flora and fauna of their native Texas. Featured prominently in the foyer were the paintings of Porfirio Salinas. Because of the Johnsons' patronage, his work was mentioned in Time Magazine and other national publications. Lady Bird Johnson loved her landscapes of the Texas Hill Country and told reporters that, "I want to see them when ever I open the door, to remind me where I come from." After President Kennedy's death thrust Lyndon Johnson into the Presidency, he brought his Salinas paintings into the historic halls of the White House, further enhaning the Texas painter's national reputation. At the time of the President Kennedy's assassination, Salinas had completed a scene of a horse drinking titled "Rocky Creek" that was to have been presented to Kennedy during his ill-fated visit to Dallas. Instead, in an effort to memorialize the fallen President, Salinas painted a symbolic work of a lone horse depicted against foreboding clouds. During his tenure in the White House, President Johnson presented a Salinas landscape as a state gift to the President of Mexico, Gustavo Diaz Ordaz (1911-1979). During the 1960s, Salinas paintings sold briskly and, thanks to Presidential patronage, for escalating prices. In an interview with a writer from the New York Times, President Johnson enthused about the work of "his favorite artist" and said that, "his work reminds me of the country around the ranch." Salinas was invited to the LBJ Ranch frequently during the Johnson administration and his paintings were hung throughout the ranch, in the President's offices and even in the private quarters of the White House. The connection to President Johnson was a great boon to sales of Salinas paintings, and in 1964, when the demand was at its height, Texas Governor John Connelly (1917-1993) was told that all Salinas'work was sold and that he would have to wait for a painting. In 1960, a half century after his birth, Salinas was honored by his home town of Bastrop, a celebration that touched the modest artist. In 1962 Salinas was given a solo exhibition at the Witte Museum in San Antonio that featured more than twenty of his works. By the early 1960s, sales of reproductions of the artist's landscapes by the New York Graphic Society and other publishers grew rapidly, enlarging his audience throughout the United States. In 1967, Dewey Bradford helped to organize the production of a book of Texas stories titled "Bluebonnets and Cactus" (Austin: Pemberton Press: 1967), which was profusely illustrated with paintings by Salinas. His works were still popular when Salinas died after a brief illness in April of 1973, just a few months after former President Johnson's passing. He was memorialized in the City of Austin by Porfirio Salinas Day, which honored him for having "done much to bring the culture of Mexico and Texas together with his paintings." Bastrop, Texas, the city of the artist's birth, has been holding a Salinas Art Exhibition annually since 1981. He painted hundreds of scenes of the wildflowers, including the various varieties of Blue Lupin, the state flower, as well as other flowering flora. These show the influence of his artistic mentors Robert W. Wood and Jose Arpa Y Perea. Salinas also painted a number of scenes of Prickly Pear Cactus that show the influence of the English painter Dawson Dawson-Watson (1864-1939), who painted many such works during his tenure in Texas. He painted the more arid Texas landscape infrequently and these works are very rare today and sought after by collectors from the Texas Panhandle and West Texas. Salinas also painted many river landscapes along the Guadalupe, Rio Frio, the San Antonio and the Rio Grande. On trips to his wife's homeland of Mexico, he painted a number of scenes of the volcanic peaks as well as scenes of peasant villages and villagers. Figurative paintings are rare among Salinas' works and these scenes of bullfights, fandangos and cock fights are probably the least sought after of his paintings. There are also a small number of modest marines, painted on trips to the Texas and California coast. Salinas paintings are highly prized by collectors of early Texas art, with the paintings of wildflowers in greatest demand. Works by Porfirio Salinas can be found in a number of public collections, including the Panhandle Plains Historical Museum in Canyon, Texas; the Texas State Capitol; the Texas Governor's Mansion; the Lyndon Baines Johnson Ranch; the Sam Rayburn Library and Museum in Bonham, Texas; Amarillo High School; the Witte Museum in San Antonio; the historic Joan and Price Daniel House in San Antonio; the Stark Museum in Orange, Texas; the R.W. Norton Art Gallery in Shreveport, Louisiana; the Sangre de Cristo Arts Center in Pueblo, Colorado; Texas A & M University and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Salinas has been featured in a number of reference works as well as anthologies devoted to American Western Art...

Artist: Bernard Buffet, French (1928 - 1999) Title: Rooster Year: 1953 Medium: Lithograph mounted on Board, signed in the plate Image Size: 15 x 10 in. (50.8 x 36.83 cm) Frame: 22 x ...

Antique American modernist abstract oil painting. Oil on canvas. Framed.

Medium: original lithograph. Catalogue reference: Lust 100. Printed for Derriere le Miroir (issue number 98) and published in Paris in 1957 by Maeght. Sheet size: 15 x 22 inches. The...

Medium: lithograph (after the painting). Printed in Paris on smooth wove paper at the atelier Mourlot and published in 1954. Size: 10 x 6 1/2 inches (257 x 163 mm). Not signed. Con...

Medium: original lithograph. Printed in Paris in 1957 at the Mourlot Freres atelier. Size: 9 x 5 3/4 inches (225 x 145 mm). Jean Cocteau executed this original lithograph to depict a...

Jean-Gabriel DOMERGUE At the Moulin Rouge : French Cancan, 1956 Original lithograph (Mourlot workshop) Printed signature in the plate On Japan paper 40 x 31 cm (c. 16 x 12") INFORM...

Medium: lithograph (after the original lithograph poster for the Maeght Gallery). During the late 1940's and throughout the 1950's, Georges Braque created a series of posters at the ...

The Swan Etching and soft ground intaglio, 1957 Signed and dated lower right (see photo) Titled and numbered lower left (see photo) From the second edition of 75 impressions, printed...

Pablo Picasso, considered the greatest artist of the 20th Century, was a master of all art mediums. He collaborated with Madoura to produce editions of his painted ceramic works beginning in the 1940’s...

This awesome capture features jazz legends Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong posed smiling for the camera, circa 1956. Louis Armstrong was an American trumpeter, composer, vocalis...

Antique American modernist landscape oil painting. Oil on canvas. Framed. Signed verso.

This mid-1950s portrait photograph, captured by society photographer Slim Aarons, features a woman sunbatheing, wearing a novelty straw sun hat with built-in sunglasses, Venice. Th...

Porfirio Salinas (1910-1973) San Antonio Artist Image Size: 25 x 30 Frame Size: 34 x 39 Medium: Oil on Canvas Circa 1950 "Lazy Day Blues" Texas Bluebonnet Biography Porfirio Salinas (1910-1973) Porfirio Salinas was a self-taught artist who painted landscapes of Central Texas with an emphasis on the vast bluebonnet fields that grow there in the springtime. Born in 1910 in Bastrop, Texas, he attended public schools in San Antonio. He also observed works in progress by the director of the San Antonio Art School, Jose Arpa, as well as landscape painter, Robert Wood. Wood is said to have paid Salinas five dollars a picture to paint bluebonnets because "he hated to paint bluebonnets". Salinas served in the military from 1943 to 1945. Although he was assigned to Fort Sam Houston, he was allowed to live at home. At the fort, Colonel Telesphor Gottchalk assigned him to paint murals for the officer's lounge and various other projects, and Salinas continued to be able to paint during his entire conscripted period. Even before he achieved notoriety among galleries, dealers, and museums, Salinas was widely followed and appreciated by many Texans, including former President Lyndon B. Johnson, who may be considered responsible for launching Salinas popularity beyond the boundaries of Texas. In 1973, Texas capital, Austin, honored Salinas for having "done much to bring the culture of Mexico and Texas closer together with his paintings". Salinas died in April 1973 in San Antonio, Texas. From the years of the Great Depression through President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society of the 1960s, Texan Porfirio Salinas (1910-1973) remained one of the Lone Star State's most popular artists. Today, his works remain popular with Texas collectors and those who love landscapes of the beautiful "Hill Country" that lies in the center of the state. One of the first Mexican American painters to become widely recognized for his art, Salinas was a favorite of President Lyndon Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird Johnson, as well as of Sam Rayburn, the longest-serving Speaker of the House of Representatives, and Texas Governor John Connelly. In fact, President Johnson was so enamored with his Salinas paintings that the artist will forever be associated with America's first Texas-born President. Works by Porfirio Salinas is in a number of museum collections, grace the halls of the Texas State Capitol and the Governor's Mansion in Austin, and are included in virtually every major private collection of Early Texas Art. Porfirio Salinas was born on November 6, 1910, near the small town of Bastrop, Texas, about thirty miles from Austin. His father, Porfirio G. Salinas (1881-1967), and his mother, Clara G. Chavez, struggled to make a hardscrabble living as tenant farmers, but eventually were forced to give up farming. The family moved to San Antonio, where Salinas' father was able to get a job working as a laborer for the railroad, but the scenic area around Bastrop, with its pine trees and the wide expanse of the Rio Grande River, would forever remain a touchstone for the artist. For the rest of his life, Salinas and his brothers went back frequently to visit their grandmother in her little farmhouse. When in Bastrop, Porfirio painted on the banks of the Rio Grande or in the groves of pine trees. The Salinas family was close-knit, and Porfirio was the middle child of five children, so he had an older brother and sister as well as a younger brother and sister. His mother was a native of Mexico, so throughout his childhood the family made the long drive to Mexico to visit Clara Salinas' family. As a child growing up in the bi-lingual section of San Antonio, Salinas drew and painted incessantly and by the time he was ten, he was already producing work that was mature enough to sell to his schoolteachers. Many years later in an article in the New York Times he was described as a "boy whose textbooks were seldom opened and whose sketchbook was never closed." Instead of studying, the young artist spent his spare time watching artists paint in and around San Antonio. As an aspiring painter, Salinas was fortunate to grow up in the historic city, which had the most active art scene in Texas. It was his exposure to older, professional painters that encouraged the precocious young painter to leave school early in order to help his family and pursue a career as a professional artist, despite his father's inability to see art as a career with any future for his son. When Salinas was about fifteen he came to know the artist Robert W. Wood (1889-1979). He met Wood while he was employed in an art supply store and he soon began to work as an assistant to the English-born painter, who had moved from Portland to San Antonio in 1924. Although the diminutive Englishman was already an established professional artist, he did not have a great deal of formal art training and so he was then studying with the academically trained Spanish painter Jose Arpa (1858-1952) in order to augment his knowledge and give his work a more polished look. Salinas was an eager young man, and while working in Wood's downtown San Antonio studio he learned to stretch canvases, frame paintings and to sketch in larger compositions from small plein-air studies for the English artist. He began to accompany Wood and Arpa to the hills outside San Antonio, where they painted small Plein-air studies of fields of blue lupin - the state flower, the famous "Bluebonnets" of Texas - in the springtime and scenes of the gnarled Red Oaks as they changed color in the fall. He was soon assisting Wood in the tedious work of painting the tiny blue flowers that collectors wanted to see in the landscapes they purchased of central Texas. According to a 1972 newspaper story, "Legend has it that one day in the 1920s artist Robert Wood decided he could not bear to paint another bluebonnet in one of his landscapes. He hired young Porfirio Salinas to paint them in for him at five dollars a painting." Whether this story is accurate or apocryphal isn't clear, but the ambitious and independent young Salinas wasn't destined to be anyone's assistant for very long. The formative event of Porfirio Salinas' teenage years was the Texas Wildflower Competitive Exhibitions, a Roaring-Twenties dream of the eccentric oilman Edgar B. Davis (1873-1951). These competitive shows of paintings of wildflowers and Texas life were mounted in San Antonio from 1927 to 1929. Held at the newly opened Witte Museum each spring, the exhibition featured large cash prizes donated by the philanthropic Davis, which were an inducement for artists to travel from all over the United States to paint in the Hill Country of Texas. The "Davis Competitions," as they were known, helped to cement San Antonio's reputation as an art center, a legacy that remains with the "River City" today. The shows generated a great deal of excitement in the area, helping to make celebrities of the some of the artists who had already settled there and encouraging others to make San Antonio their home. Over the three years that the wildflower competitions were held, more than 300 paintings were exhibited, and many thousands of viewers saw the paintings at the Witte Museum and on tours throughout the state and in New York. Each year Davis would generously purchase the winning paintings and then donate them to the San Antonio Art League. Young Porfirio Salinas would have been able to not only watch his two mentors - Robert W. Wood and Jose Arpa - paint the works that they entered in the Davis Competitions, he would have been able to see Arpa take several of the major prizes, receiving the judge's accolades for "Verbena," "Cactus Flower" and "Picking Cotton," works that are still on view at the San Antonio Art League Museum today. Unfortunately, Davis eventually put his donations to work in other charitable endeavors, bringing to an end the wildflower events, but only after they inspired Salinas and other young painters and had helped to make wildflower paintings the most sought-after subject for traditionalist Texas collectors. In 1930, when he was only twenty, Salinas hung out a shingle and began to paint professionally, augmenting the sales of his easel paintings with what little business he could garner by painting signs for local concerns. It was a struggle for the young artist to make a living, as the effects of the Great Depression were settling in. His early works are very similar to those of Robert Wood's, both in subject matter and treatment. Salinas did small paintings of Bluebonnets for the tourists who visited San Antonio to see the famous Alamo as well as paintings of the Texas missions...