Benton Murdoch Spruance

Out of the City

1930

Elegant and glamorous fashion illustration from the 1920's, Original signed gouache painting on paper. Monogrammed V.S. lower right. Site: 10"x 7.75" Frame: 19.25"x 17"

Beautiful Art Deco era drawing by American artist, Wright Ludington (1900-1992). Graphite on paper measures 7.75 x 9 inches; 14.5 x 16 inches framed. No damage or restoration. Sheet is glued down to cardboard backing. Partial signature in margins under matting identifies artist. Biography: Born in New York on June 10, 1901. By 1940 Ludington had settled in Montecito. He died there on May 13, 1992. Exh: Montecito Country Club, 1940. Noted philanthropist, art collector and founder of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Wright Luddington was a friend of Lockwood de Forest...

76 x 52 cm. Printed by Fernand Mourlot on rag paper watermarked "Mourlot." A condition. Not in Saphire. .Fernand Mourlot was born in Paris in 1895. He grew up in the family print shop but it wasn't until he took over in the early 1920s that he would change the fabric of printing forever. His influence fostered a resurgence of lithography, revealing it as a new avenue for expression and a new realm of possibilities for likes of Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Marc Chagall, Joan Miró, Georges Braque, Fernand Léger, and Alberto Giacometti to enrich their own work as well as fine art in general. Fernand cultivated the lithograph as a painter's medium and the family studio on Rue Chabrol became a hub where he could invite artists to work directly on the stone, as if creating a poster. In 1937, the studio produced two posters (based on paintings by Matisse...

Jasper Johns (b. 1930): Recent Still Life Lithograph in black on wove paper, 1966, signed and dated '2016' in ink. 34 1/2 x 19 3/4 in. (sheet), 36 1/2 x 21 1/2 in. (frame). Provenance: Property from the Collection of Tom Levine...

Marc-Luc (French, active 1920s-30s). Boys Fashion Illustration, ca. 1920s. Watercolor and pencil on paper, image measures 8 x 11 inches on panel measuring 12.5 x 18 inches. Signed lo...

Barbara Shermund (1899-1978). Showgirls Cartoon for Life Magazine, 1934. Ink, watercolor and gouache on heavy illustration paper, matting window measures 16.5 x 13 inches; sheet measures 19 x 15 inches; Matting panel measures 20 x 23 inches. Signed lower right. Very good condition with discoloration and toning in margins. Unframed. Provenance: Ethel Maud Mott Herman, artist (1883-1984), West Orange NJ. For two decades, she drew almost 600 cartoons for The New Yorker with female characters that commented on life with wit, intelligence and irony. In the mid-1920s, Harold Ross, the founder of a new magazine called The New Yorker, was looking for cartoonists who could create sardonic, highbrow illustrations accompanied by witty captions that would function as social critiques. He found that talent in Barbara Shermund. For about two decades, until the 1940s, Shermund helped Ross and his first art editor, Rea Irvin, realize their vision by contributing almost 600 cartoons and sassy captions with a fresh, feminist voice. Her cartoons commented on life with wit, intelligence and irony, using female characters who critiqued the patriarchy and celebrated speakeasies, cafes, spunky women and leisure. They spoke directly to flapper women of the era who defied convention with a new sense of political, social and economic independence. “Shermund’s women spoke their minds about sex, marriage and society; smoked cigarettes and drank; and poked fun at everything in an era when it was not common to see young women doing so,” Caitlin A. McGurk wrote in 2020 for the Art Students League. In one Shermund cartoon, published in The New Yorker in 1928, two forlorn women sit and chat on couches. “Yeah,” one says, “I guess the best thing to do is to just get married and forget about love.” “While for many, the idea of a New Yorker cartoon conjures a highbrow, dry non sequitur — often more alienating than familiar — Shermund’s cartoons are the antithesis,” wrote McGurk, who is an associate curator and assistant professor at Ohio State University’s Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum. “They are about human nature, relationships, youth and age.” (McGurk is writing a book about Shermund. And yet by the 1940s and ’50s, as America’s postwar focus shifted to domestic life, Shermund’s feminist voice and cool critique of society fell out of vogue. Her last cartoon appeared in The New Yorker in 1944, and much of her life and career after that remains unclear. No major newspaper wrote about her death in 1978 — The New York Times was on strike then, along with The Daily News and The New York Post — and her ashes sat in a New Jersey funeral home...

Peter Behrens, (German 1868-1940), Deutsche Werkbund-Ausstellung, 1914, Deutsche Werkbund-Ausstellung, Kunst in Handwerk, Industrie und Handel Archit...

This advertising poster from the 1930s melds the meticulous detail of traditional Chinese painting with the craft of color lithography. These advertisements, influenced by the Art De...

It's a bird! It's a plane! It's a... very large teenage boy appearing out of the clouds? Villa created this powerful image to encourage young people to practice light aviation—an ini...

Latitude 43 was designed by the avant-garde architect Georges-Henri Pingusson. The building, listed as a historical monument in 1992, is a reference in ter...

The annual Furriers Ball in Paris was advertised by such Art Deco luminaries as Charles Gesmar, Maurice Milliere and the unknown Asta Tigri who designed both this poster and the imag...

Original poster for the Bern Lotschberg Simplon Railway (BLS; 1913-2006). The image by Eugen Henziross (1877-1961) shows a train making its way through a rocky mountain tunnel and ov...