LeRoy Neiman

Elephant Charge

1999

Bareback Act, Old Hippodrome By Gifford Beal (1879-1956) Signed Lower Right Unframed: 6.5" x 9.5" Framed: 17.5" x 20" Gifford Beal, painter, etcher, muralist, and teacher, was born in New York City in 1879. The son of landscape painter William Reynolds Beal, Gifford Beal began studying at William Merritt Chase's Shinnecock School of Art (the first established school of plein air painting in America) at the age of thirteen, when he accompanied his older brother, Reynolds, to summer classes. He remained a pupil of Chase's for ten years also studying with him in New York City at the artist's private studio in the Tenth Street Studio Building. Later at his father's behest, he attended Princeton University from 1896 to 1900 while still continuing his lessons with Chase. Upon graduation from Princeton he took classes at the Art Students' League, studying with impressionist landscape painter Henry Ward Ranger and Boston academic painter Frank Vincent DuMond. He ended up as President of the Art Students League for fourteen years, "a distinction unsurpassed by any other artist." His student days were spent entirely in this country. "Given the opportunity to visit Paris en route to England in 1908, he chose to avoid it" he stated, "I didn't trust myself with the delightful life in ParisIt all sounded so fascinating and easy and loose." His subjects were predominately American, and it has been said stylistically "his art is completely American." Gifford achieved early recognition in the New York Art World. He became an associate member of the National Academy of Design in 1908 and was elected to full status of academician in 1914. He was known for garden parties, circuses, landscapes, streets, coasts, flowers and marines. This diversity in subject matter created "no typical or characteristic style to his work." Beal's style was highly influenced by Chase and Childe Hassam, a long time friend of the Beal family who used to travel "about the countryside with Beal in a car sketching...

Tree and Dove Ferol K. Sibley Warthen (American, 1890-1986) Color Woodblock Print Edition of 3 6.25 x 4.75 inches 13 x 11.5 inches with frame Signed Lower Right Titled Lower Left Born 1890, Died 1986...

Jamie Wyeth "Herring Gulls" 1978 Color Lithograph Signed Lower Right Numbered Lower Left 149/300 Born in 1946, James Browning Wyeth came of age when the meaning of patriotism was clouded by the traumas of the Vietnam War and the scandals of Watergate. Working in an era of turmoil and questioning of governmental authority, he did art that encompassed both marching off to war and marching in protest. One of James's early masterworks, Draft Age (1965) depicts a childhood friend as a defiant Vietnam-era teenager resplendent in dark sunglasses and black leather jacket in a suitably insouciant pose. Two years later Wyeth painstakingly composed a haunting, posthumous Portrait of President John F. Kennedy (1967) that seems to catch the martyred Chief Executive in a moment of agonized indecision. As Wyeth Center curator Lauren Raye Smith points out, Wyeth "did not deify the slain president, [but] on the contrary made him seem almost too human." Based on hours of study and sketching of JFK's brothers Robert and Edward - documented by insightful studies in the exhibition - the final, pensive portrait seemed too realistic to family members and friends. "His brother Robert," writes Smith in the exhibition catalogue, "reportedly felt uneasy about this depiction, and said it reminded him of the President during the Bay of Pigs invasion." In spite of these misgivings, James's JFK likeness has been reproduced frequently and is one of the highlights of this show. The poignancy, appeal and perceptiveness of this portrait, painted when the youngest Wyeth was 21 years old, makes one wish he would do more portraits of important public figures. James himself feels he is at his best painting people he knows well, as exemplified by his vibrant Portrait of Jean Kennedy Smith (1972), which captures the vitality of the slain President's handsome sister. He did paint a portrait of Jimmy Carter for the January 1977 man-of-the-year cover of Time magazine, showing the casually dressed President-elect as a straightforward character posed under a flag-draped water tower next to the family peanut plant in Plains, Ga. James recalls that Carter had one Secret Service agent guarding him as he posed outdoors, a far cry from the protection our Chief Executives require today. As a participating artist in the "Eyewitness to Space" program organized by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in collaboration with the National Gallery of Art in the late 1960s, Wyeth deftly recorded in a series of watercolors his eyewitness observations of dramatic spacecraft launchings and more mundane scenes associated with the space program. Commissioned by Harper's Magazine to cover the 1974 congressional hearings and trials of Watergate figures, James Wyeth executed a series of perceptive and now evocative sketches that recall those dark chapters in our history. Memorable images include a scowling John Ehrlichman, a hollow-eyed Bob Haldeman, an owlish Charles Colson, a focused Congressman Peter Rodino, a grim visaged Father/ Congressman Robert Drinan, and vignettes of the press and various courtroom activities. An 11-by-14-inch pencil sketch of the unflappable Judge John Sirica is especially well done. These "images are powerful as historical records," observes Smith, "and as lyrically journalistic impressions of events that changed the nation forever." Wyeth's sketch of early-morning crowds lined up outside the Supreme Court building hoping to hear the Watergate case, with the ubiquitous TV cameramen looking on, is reminiscent of recent scenes as the high court grappled with the Bush-Gore contest. The Wyeth family penchant for whimsy and enigmatic images is evident in Islanders (1990), showing two of James's friends, wearing goofy hats, sitting on the porch of a small Monhegan Island (Me.) cottage draped with a large American flag. Mixing the serious symbolism of Old Glory with the irreverent appearance of the two men, James has created a puzzling but interesting composition. Painting White House...

Colossal Flashlight in Place of Hoover Dam, 1982 By Claes Oldenburg (Swedish, American, 1929-2022) Signed Lower Right Dated Middle Right Unframed: 23" x 22" Framed: 36.5" x 27.5" Whimsical sculpture of pop culture objects, many of them large and out-of-doors, is the signature work of Swedish-born Claes Oldenburg who became one of America's leading Pop Artists. He was born in Stockholm, Sweden. His father was a diplomat, and during Claes' childhood moved his family from Stockholm to a variety of locations including Chicago where the father was general consul of Sweden and where Oldenburg spent most of his childhood. He attended the Latin School of Chicago, and then Yale University where he studied literature and art history, graduating in 1950, the same year Claes became an American citizen. Returning to Chicago, he enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1952 to 1954 and also worked as a reporter at the City News Bureau. He opened his own studio, and in 1953, some of his satirical drawings were included in his first group show at the Club St. Elmo, Chicago. He also painted at the Oxbow School of Painting in Michigan. In 1956, he moved to New York where he drew and painted while working as a clerk in the art libraries of Cooper-Union Museum for the Arts of Decoration. Selling his first artworks during this time, he earned 25 dollars for five pieces. Oldenburg became friends with numerous artists including Jim Dine, Red Grooms and Allan Kaprow, who with his "Happenings" was especially influential on Oldenburg's interest in environmental art. Another growing interest was soft sculpture, and in 1957, he created a piece later titled Sausage, a free-hanging woman's stocking stuffed with newspaper. In 1959, he had his first one-man show, held at the Judson Gallery at Washington Square. He exhibited wood and newspaper sculpture and painted papier-mache objects. Some viewers of the exhibit commented how refreshing Oldenburg's pieces were in contrast to the Abstract Expressionism, a style which much dominated the art world. During this time, he was influenced by the whimsical work of French artist, Bernard Buffet, and he experimented with materials and images of the junk-filled streets of New York. In 1960, Oldenburg created his first Pop-Art Environments and Happenings in a mock store full of plaster objects. He also did Performances with a cast of colleagues including artists Lucas Samaras, Tom Wesselman, Carolee Schneemann, Oyvind Fahlstrom and Richard Artschwager, dealer Annina Nosei, critic Barbara Rose, and screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer. His first wife (1960-1970) Pat Muschinski, who sewed many of his early soft sculptures, was a constant performer in his Happenings. This brash, often humorous, approach to art was at great odds with the prevailing sensibility that, by its nature, art dealt with "profound" expressions or ideas. In December 1961, he rented a store on Manhattan's Lower East Side to house "The Store," a month-long installation he had first presented at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York. This installation was stocked with sculptures roughly in the form of consumer goods. Oldenburg moved to Los Angeles in 1963 "because it was the most opposite thing to New York I could think of". That same year, he conceived AUT OBO DYS, performed in the parking lot of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics in December 1963. In 1965 he turned his attention to drawings and projects for imaginary outdoor monuments. Initially these monuments took the form of small collages such as a crayon image of a fat, fuzzy teddy bear looming over the grassy fields of New York's Central Park (1965) and Lipsticks in Piccadilly Circus, London (1966). Oldenburg realized his first outdoor public monument in 1967; Placid Civic Monument took the form of a Conceptual performance/action behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, with a crew of gravediggers digging a 6-by-3-foot rectangular hole in the ground. Many of Oldenburg's large-scale sculptures of mundane objects elicited public ridicule before being embraced as whimsical, insightful, and fun additions to public outdoor art. From the early 1970s Oldenburg concentrated almost exclusively on public commissions. Between 1969 and 1977 Oldenburg had been in a relationship with Hannah Wilke, feminist artist, but in 1977 he married Coosje van Bruggen, a Dutch-American writer and art historian who became collaborator with him on his artwork. He had met her in 1970, when she curated an exhibition for him at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Their first collaboration came when Oldenburg was commissioned to rework Trowel I, a 1971 sculpture of an oversize garden tool, for the grounds of the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, the Netherlands. Oldenburg has officially signed all the work he has done since 1981 with both his own name and van Bruggen's. In 1988, the two created the iconic Spoonbridge and Cherry sculpture for the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota that remains a staple of the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden as well as a classic image of the city. Typewriter Eraser...

Original Radio Radiola vintage French antique poster. Archival linen-backed and in very good condition. Bright and vibrant. Artist: Rene Ravo....

Original excellent condition, linen backed United Airlines: Seattle, the 1968 airplane airline aviation travel poster promoting travel to Seattle, Washington aboard United Airlines and featuring art of a Native American Indian totem pole...

Original linen backed vintage travel poster on United Air Lines to Washington D. C. Artist: Jebary. Linen backed vintage poster. Ve...

Original The Owl And The Pussycat, by Edward Lear with all text in Greek. Linen backed and in very good condition. One tiny printing flaw under the foot of the cat. Translation:...