Henry Sandham

A Base Ball Game

1897

“Hidden Cities I : The Ministry. Second State.” Contemporary artist Peter Milton created this etching and engraving in 2006. The printed image size is Image size 23.50 x 36.88 inches and the paper size is 31 x 42 inches. This impression is signed, dated, and titled in pencil and inscribed “11/75” – the 11th impression from the total printing of 75. “I do love to draw. I feel that I am being granted membership in the Brotherhood of Merlin, conjuring forth some apparition. As a drawing develops, I sense a vague presence coming more and more into focus, something in a white fog emerging and becoming increasingly palpable.” – P. Milton, “The primacy of touch. The Drawings of Peter Milton” “Working in layers, Milton begins with drawings based on people and places, with nods to Western art history and culture. He is a master of the appropriated image, a term that may conjure Andy Warhol and his Pop Art comrades. But Milton steps further back in history, avoiding the Pop sense of cool advertising and popular culture references. Instead, a broader cultural past is tapped through historical photographs of key players, architecture, and locales, which he reinvents by hand. He adds content drawn from his life as an avid reader – always with multiple possible interpretations – thus incorporating deeper meaning in his cinematic worlds. Elements of Greek mythology, classical music, art history, and history coalesce in his images, which embrace the messiness, sorrow, and elation that is life. One is hard-pressed to imagine a more erudite, skilled, passionate, and cheeky soul. In addition to a storied career in printmaking, since 2007 Milton has fearlessly produced artwork digitally. He now creates images using Adobe Photoshop in files consisting of more than two thousand layers, which are printed both as digital prints on paper and, for display on Led light boxes...

Richard Florsheim created this color lithograph entitled “Carnival” in 1972 in an edition of 30 pieces. Published by Associated American Artists and printed by Landfall Press, this i...

The University Cricket Match, 19th Century English School Large 19th Century English University Cricket Match, oil on canvas, Early and important exten...

Signed lower right and dated 1954. Bio: FASANELLA, RALPH (1914-97) was a self-taught painter who created large, colorful and intricate paintings of working-class culture and American politics from 1945 until his death in 1997. Fasanella had an artistic vision born of a working life. A child of Italian immigrants, he spent his youth delivering ice with his father and enduring the harsh regimen of a Catholic reform school. During the Great Depression, Fasanella worked in garment factories and as a truck driver. From his mother—a literate, sensitive, and progressive woman, Fasanella acquired a social conscience. Through her influence he became active in antifascist and trade union causes. Fasanella's political beliefs were radicalized by the Depression. His antifascist zeal led him to volunteer for duty in the International Brigades fighting fascism in Spain, where he served in 1937-1938. Upon his return to New York City Fasanella became an organizer for various unions, particularly the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America, with whom he achieved some major organizing successes. In 1945, disillusioned by the labor movement and plagued by a painful sensation in his fingers, Fasanella started to draw. He left organizing and began to paint full time. He painted obsessively, capturing the vibrant moods of the city and the tumult of American politics. For a brief time he received some critical notice for his work, and had shows of his work in galleries as well as union halls. Fasanella included in his paintings a profusion of brightly colored details, showed interiors and exteriors simultaneously, and combined past and future. He populated his paintings with likenesses of family and friends. In 1950 Fasanella married Eva Lazorek, a schoolteacher who supported the couple through over two decades of artistic obscurity and blacklisting by the FBI. In the 1950s Fasanella retreated from political content in his works out of fear of reprisals. With the emergence of the New Left in the 1960s, however, his works became large, sharply focused political essays using images from the popular media. In 1972 Fasanella was featured in "New York" magazine and in an illustrated coffee-table book, "Fasanella's City". His large-scale, intricate paintings of urban life and American politics were then introduced to art critics and the public. In the late 1970s Fasanella spent two years in Lawrence, researching the 1912 Bread and...