Harry Sudman

Portrait of a Girl

1997

Maybe her name doesn’t ring a bell. Like everyone else who ever went into the old Mooresville Post Office at 305 N. Main St., across the street from the bank, I would look at the large mural over the door to the postmaster’s office — now the school district superintendent’s office — read the name of the artist, and wonder who she was. Alicia Wiencek (April 23, 1918- Feb. 17, 1961) has remained something of an enigma, at least locally. I set about finding more regarding the artist. The first clue I found about her came from a small, 1937 article in the old Mooresville Enterprise: “Miss Alicia Wiencek of New York City will paint the mural for the local [post office] building. She was in the city several days last week, looking over the various industries and talking with a number of ‘old–timers’ about Mooresville’s early history and present trend of development. She visited a number of places of business, the cotton gins and the mills, seeming to be impressed with the importance of the cotton industry, so that it is believed cotton will at least have its share of the subject matter of the decoration. “The mural will cover the space above the entrance to the postmaster’s office, a space of about 8 by 4 feet. It is not known whether Miss Wiencek will do the work here, or whether she will bring it with her completed, upon her return.” Fine, but what happened to her after she did the mural in Mooresville? What other works did she complete? Where might one go to view them? How long did Miss Wiencek stay in the Mooresville area, absorbing local color and sights? Alicia was born in Chicopee, Mass., and was apparently of Polish descent. She studied at the Art Students League in New York City. One of her instructors there was Ernest Feine (1894-1965), a naturalized citizen of German birth who was both a painter and a printmaker. He was also known for his fine murals and frescoes. Ernest, with Alicia as his assistant, worked on two murals, one for the post office in Canton, Mass., and one in Washington, D.C., in the Department of the Interior Building. The two must have worked well together, for Feine divorced his first wife and married Alicia on Aug. 13, 1945, in Connecticut. Of the two artists, Ernest is the more famous. But back to Mooresville. The official title of her oil-on-canvas work in Mooresville is “The Cotton Industry in North Carolina.” It is interesting to note that the post office building was completed and in use by August 1937, several months before Alicia received the government contract for the mural. Her work was part of President Roosevelt’s New Deal, a Works Progress Administration project to put artists and writers to work during the Great Depression. The old Mooresville Post Office Building is one of several in the same style in North Carolina built according to the town’s population. The old post offices in Beaufort, Laurinburg, Marion, Siler City, Wake Forest...

Angelic boy with a devil figure. Gary Hansmann (1947-2008) was active/lived in California. He is known for abstract, Surrealism figure painting. Gary William Hansmann was born Dec. 4, 1940, in San Diego to Ethel May Williams and Lester Hughes Hansmann. He grew up in Encinitas and served in the Army in the early 1960s. Gary Hansmann, San Diego artist, teacher and gallery owner, was known for his Surrealist drawings and graphics. He spent time working in Paris and exhibiting his art throughout Europe, but San Diego was home until he moved to Washington state. His life partner was fellow artist, Jill Hosmer. Mr. Hansmann, a respected printmaker and prolific artist, created thousands of drawings, prints and paintings as well as hundreds of poems. His interest in bullfighting led to a book of poetry and illustrations on the subject, “La Corrida, The Run”, a collection of poetry & artwork written as he was preparing for his first bullfight. Prologue written by famous Mexican Matador Antonio Lomelin. The book is written in English and translated into Spanish on opposing pages and was published in 1983. Mr. Hansmann taught intaglio and monotype at the Academy of Fine Arts in San Diego from 1977 to 1980 and at the San Diego Museum of Art in 1980. He also gave lectures and demonstrations throughout the art community, including at the San Diego Art Guild in Del Mar and Artist Equity in San Diego. Although he attended Palomar College in San Marcos and studied lithography at the San Diego Academy of Fine Arts, Mr. Hansmann was mostly self-taught and self-educated. Mr. Hansmann had shows in several art-world capitals, including Paris; Lisbon, Portugal; Cologne, Germany; Brussels, Belgium; and New York. he had one-person exhibits at the Loft Gallery in Clarkston, the Lewis-Clark State College Center of Arts & History, the Carnegie Art Center in Walla Walla and the Valley Art Center in Clarkston. During his long, distinguished career as an artist he had numerous one-person exhibits all over the world and the United States. His group shows are too numerous to mention, but his one-person exhibits were in Koln, Germany; Bruxelles, Belgium; Paris, France; Viana do Castelo, Portugal; Lisbon, Portugal; Tecate, Mexico; and British Columbia, Canada; and many states at home. Palomar College, San Marcos, Calif. San Diego Academy of Fine Arts Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, N.Y. University of Southern California, Idyllwild (ISOMATA) University of San Diego San Diego Museum of Art James Copley Library, La Jolla, Calif. Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Venice, Italy Centre de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, Portugal Museo Taurino de la Communidad de Madrid, Madrid, Spain Atelier Lacouriere et Frelaut, Paris, France Gordon Gilkey Collection Portland Art Museum, Portland, Or. Coos Art Museum, Coos Bay...

Joseph Floch (1894-1977). Young Girl, c.1930s. Lithograph on paper, plate measures 9 1/8 x 13 3/4 inches. Measures 17 x 21 inches framed. Excellent condition with no damage or conser...

Untitled (Portrait) Drypoint printed in blue-black graphite mixed with silver, 1974 Signed and dated lower ight (see photo) From: Series entitled Six Drypoints Edition: 23 (4/23) Numbered lower left (see photo) Print Shop: Crown Point Press Printer: Jeannie Fine Publisher: Parasol Press, New York Note: A portfolio is in the collection of the National Gallery, Australia, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco- de Young/Legion of Honor, Davis Museum at Wellesley College and the Yale University Art Gallery. Condition: Excellent Image/Plate size: 6 3/8 x 5 3/8 inches Sheet size: 24 x 20 inches From a portfolio of six drypoints, printed with unqiue combination of blue-black graphite shavings combined with silver to create the appearence of an original drawing. I know of no other artist to use a similar printing technique. William Bailey studied art at the University of Kansas, Yale University and Yale School of Art where he studied with Josef Albers receiving his MFA in 1957. Mr. Bailey’s first exhibition in New York was at Robert Schoelkopf Gallery in 1968, where he showed regularly until its closing in 1990. During the 90’s he exhibited at the Andre Emmerich Gallery and on its closing, exhibited at the Robert Miller Gallery. In 2004 Bailey moved to the Betty Cuningham Gallery where his most recent exhibition was held from April 30 - June 11, 2016. Mr. Bailey’s work has been exhibited extensively in both America and Europe. He is represented in the collections of The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, among others. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in painting in 1965. Mr. Bailey was elected to The National Academy of Design in 1983 and to The American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1986. Mr. Bailey taught at The Yale School of Art from 1958 to 1962 and from 1969 to 1995. He has also taught at The Cooper Union, University of Pennsylvania and Indiana University. He maintains studios in New Haven and in Umbertide, Italy. Courtesy Betty Cunningham Gallery Tribute to William Bailey THE NEW YORK TIMES William Bailey, whose pristine, idealized still lifes and female nudes made him one of the leading figures in the return of figurative art in the 1980s, died on April 13 at his home in Branford, Conn. He was 89. His death was confirmed by his daughter, Alix Bailey. Beyond his painting, Mr. Bailey influenced generations of students in his many years as a teacher at the Yale School of Art. In some of his best-known work, Mr. Bailey arranged simple objects — the eggs, bowls, bottles and vases that he once called “my repertory company” — along a severe horizontal shelf, or on a plain table, swathing them in a breathless, deceptively serene atmosphere heavy with mystery. William Bailey, Modernist Figurative Painter, Dies at 89 He swathed his nudes and still lifes of eggs, vases, bottles and bowls in a breathless, deceptively serene atmosphere heavy with mystery. The painter William Bailey in 2009. He was never given a career survey in a major museum, but his influence, particulary on students at Yale, was deep. Ford Bailey By William Grimes for the New York Times April 18, 2020 William Bailey, whose pristine, idealized still lifes and female nudes made him one of the leading figures in the return of figurative art in the 1980s, died on April 13 at his home in Branford, Conn. He was 89. His death was confirmed by his daughter, Alix Bailey. Beyond his painting, Mr. Bailey influenced generations of students in his many years as a teacher at the Yale School of Art. In some of his best-known work, Mr. Bailey arranged simple objects — the eggs, bowls, bottles and vases that he once called “my repertory company” — along a severe horizontal shelf, or on a plain table, swathing them in a breathless, deceptively serene atmosphere heavy with mystery. His muted ochres, grays and powdery blues conjured up a still, timeless world inhabited by Platonic forms, recognizable but uncanny, in part because he painted from imagination rather than life. “They are at once vividly real and objects in dream, and it is the poetry of this double life that elevates all this humble crockery to the realm of pictorial romance,” Hilton Kramer wrote in The New York Times in 1979. Mr. Bailey’s female figures, some clothed in a simple shift or robe and others partly or entirely nude, are disconcertingly impassive, implacable and unreadable, fleshly presences breathing an otherworldly air. The critic Mark Stevens, writing in Newsweek in 1982, credited Mr. Bailey with helping to “restore representational art to a position of consequence in modern painting.” But his version of representation was entirely idiosyncratic, seemingly traditional but in fact “a modernism so contrarian,” the artist Alexi Worth wrote in a catalog essay for the William Harrison Bailey...