James Grashow

Original Woodcut Print Statue of Liberty Centennial Color Woodblock Signed LtdEd

1986

Title: Zion Subject: Various biblical images depicting Creation and prayer 1922 Medium: woodcut Frame: 14" x 18" Image: 12.5" x 16.75" Provenance: owned and signed verso by Peter Keil. Central panel shows the Jewish star over a crown, with inscription in Hebrew: "When God comforts Zion, He will comfort all its ruins and make its deserts look like Eden," and "You have sanctified the seventh day, the goal of creation of Heaven and Earth." This is flanked by a Palestinian farmer pioneer on the left and a Jew praying on the right. The lower tier shows six vignettes of the days of creation from Genesis. Hermann Fechenbach was born in 1897 in Württemberg, Germany. He grew up in Bad Mergentheim where his parents had an inn, which served as a meeting place for the local Jewish community. He left school early and through family connections with clothing retailers received training in window dressing. His skill with brush writing was quickly recognised by a big firm in Dortmund where he was responsible for the displays in 10 large windows. He received his conscription papers in 1916 and recalls “being as patriotic as any other fool”. In August 1917 he was involved in a grenade attack in which he was the sole survivor. With serious injuries to both legs he struggled to safety and was eventually transported to a front line “slaughterhouse” where the first of a series of amputations was performed which led to the loss of his left leg. As a result of his injuries his father dropped his opposition to him becoming an artist. His formal art education started in 1918 with training at a Stuttgart handcraft school for invalids. He attended the Academies in Stuttgart and Munich to learn painting and restoration for 3 years. He was influenced at this time by Max Liebermann. He has been compared to Kathe Kollwitz and was a contemporary of Jakob Steinhardt and hermann Struck. In 1923 he went to Florence for a year. While in Florence he started to produce a series of miniature wood engravings to illustrate the stories of Genesis. This was followed by periods in Pisa, Venice, Vienna and Amsterdam. In 1924 he returned to Stuttgart to paint in the contemporary style “Die Neue Sachlichkeit”. (The New Objectivity was a movement in German art that arose during the 1920s Weimar republic as a reaction against expressionism. The term was coined by Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub, the director of the Kunsthalle in Mannheim, who used it as the title of an art exhibition staged in 1925 to showcase artists who were working in a post-expressionist spirit. These artists—who included Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Christian Schad, Rudolf Schlichter and Jeanne Mammen) Every spring and autumn he exhibited at the “Kunstgebit” which served as the showcase for all serious artists of the period. His professional status “Kunstmaler und Grafiker” was recognised by Berlin in 1926. Practically all his work from this period was sold following exhibition. In 1926 he collaborated with an architect friend to build a bungalow in Hohenheim, a non-Jewish area and a suburb of Stuttgart. Hermann alternately lived in his country bungalow and his town studio, producing portraits for sale or barter and wood engravings for his own pleasure. In 1930 he married a non-Jewish professional photographer – Greta Batze. They had a studio in Stuttgart, which was used to teach art to a group of 12 students. In 1933 the Nazi influence removed his name from the official state register together with the right to exhibit. By spending most of his time in his bungalow out of the Jewish quarter the Fechenbachs escaped being registered by the Nazis for some years. They were ostracised and abused by their non-Jewish neighbours. Hermann made weekly visits to friends in town to teach them the practical skills they would need assuming they were to escape from Germany. His energies were directed towards protection and survival. Ultimately the Nazi persecution forced the Fechenbachs to flee their homeland. They moved to Palestine for 3 months in 1938, but found the political and physical environment unsustainable. Greta arrived in England penniless in January 1939 to work as a domestic servant and to find a guarantor for her husband. Hermann arrived in May 1939. They moved to Blackheath a few months later. Hermann resumed his painting and engraving as a means of earning a living. He raised enough money to get his parents out of Germany to join his brothers in Argentina but was unable to save his twin sister Rosa who died in a Nazi concentration camp. In 1940 Hermann was interned in Bury as a suspect alien. He protested about his treatment by starting a hunger strike. Because of his persistence he was moved to a prison in Liverpool. From Liverpool he was moved to the Hutchinson Camp in the Isle of Man with fellow artist Kurt Schwitters. Arrangements were made for Greta to be accommodated near by. While interned he commenced work on “Refugee Impressions”, a series of linocut prints (no wood was available). In 1941 when released from internment the Fechenbachs came under the sponsorship of Dr. Bela Horovitz, the Austrian art publisher who in turn made an introduction to Professor Tancred Borenius. They were offered lodgings with a family in Oxford. Hermann had his first public exhibition for many years in a small gallery in Oxford in 1942. A second exhibition of oils, pencil drawings, coloured linocut and woodblock prints held later in the year was opened by the mayor of Oxford and critically acclaimed. In 1944 the first London exhibition took place at the Anglo-Palestinian club in Piccadilly. There were two exhibitions at the Ben Uri Art gallery during this period. In 1948 a second exhibition at the Anglo Palestinian club was inaugurated by a member of the Rothschild family and several members of Parliament. This was a great success. In 1944 the Fechenbachs moved to a top floor studio flat in Colet Gardens. Open exhibitions were held each Spring at the Embankment from 1946 to 1951. Movietone News produced a short feature on the artist, which was shown in cinemas in England and Germany. In 1969 he published the Genesis story in a hard back volume containing 137 prints. He started to research the fate of the entire Jewish community of Bad Mergentheim during the period of the second world war, liaising with historian Dr. Paul Sauer and Professor Max Miller, historian and theologian. In 1972 Kohlhammer published his partly autobiographical book “The last Jews of Mergentheim”. He exhibited at the Anglo-Palestinian Club & the Ben Uri Gallery in the 1940s. His works only came to prominence during the last year of his life when he exhibited at Blond Fine Art. Peter Keil part of the Junge Wilde. In 1978, the Junge Wilde painting style arose in the German-speaking world in opposition to established avant garde, minimal art and conceptual art. It was linked to the similar Transavanguardia movement in Italy, USA (neo-expressionism) and France (Figuration Libre). They were also known as the Neue Wilde. Artists included; Austria: Siegfried Anzinger, Erwin Bohatsch, Herbert Brandl, Gunter Damisch, Hubert Scheibl, Hubert Schmalix...

Theo Tobiasse Title "On the Shores of the Circus" Suite: Song of Songs of King Solomon Year: 1975 Medium: Original lithograph in colors on paper (deckle edged paper) Publisher: Leon Amiel, Paris & New York Signature: Hand signed by the artist Theo Tobiasse, born Tobias Eidesas, 1927 in Jaffa then in British Mandate Palestine, died 2012 in Cagnes-sur-Mer in France. Well known painter, engraver, draftsman and sculptor. French Jewish artist. The youngest son of Chaim (Charles) Eidesas and Brocha (Berthe) Slonimsky from Kaunas, Lithuania, Théo Tobiasse was born in Mandatory Palestine in 1927, where his Jewish parents lived since 1925, far from the threat of pogroms and upheavals of East European policies. The family encountered material difficulties and decided to return to Lithuania, ultimately leaving for Paris in 1931 where his father typographer finds work in a Russian printing press. Theo Tobiasse shows very early talent for drawing and painting, and during a visit to the Special Exhibition of 1937 held in Paris, he is enchanted by Raoul Dufy. The death of his mother (in June 1939) followed by the outbreak of the Second World War, Paris under the German Nazi occupation, the wearing of the yellow star and his registration at the National School of Decorative Arts denied for racist reasons upsets his life. He enrolled in a private advertising design course on the boulevard Saint-Michel, which he abandoned nine months later because his family, narrowly escaping the Winter Vélodrome roundup in July 1942 was forced to hide in an apartment in Paris for two years. At the Liberation of Paris, he quickly began a career as an advertising graphic designer with the Draeger art printer and also produced tapestry cartoons, stage sets and Hermes showcases at the Hermès boutique on rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. In 1950, he obtained French nationality and moved to Nice in the Alpes-Maritimes, where he continued his advertising graphic design career. His first paintings were exhibited at the Salon des peintres du Sud-Est in 1960. He was laureate in 1961 the "prize of the young Mediterranean painting" and Armand Drouant offers him a first contract and exhibited at the Faubourg Saint-Honoré Gallery in Paris in 1962. Théo Tobiasse also won the Dorothy Gould Prize in 1961. He decided to devote himself solely to the visual arts. Numerous exhibitions are dedicated to him all over the world, in Paris at the Drouant Gallery, in Geneva, Montreal or Tokyo, then London, Zurich, Lausanne, Los Angeles, Kiev, and then a first personal exhibition in New York (1968). Self-taught, he studied the technique of grand masters in museums during his travels. The reliefs, glazes and colors of Rembrandt's Jewish Fiancee at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, in particular, open up new technical possibilities that he explores in his canvases back to his studio. The figurative subjects without narrative or symbolism (cat, bird, kite, velocipede, etc.) of his first paintings, allow him to focus on the techniques, the color and the texture of oil painting and gouache. From 1964, Theo Tobiasse develops a more personal iconography drawn from his own memories of his childhood in Lithuania, the wanderings of a family seeking a land of asylum and the Holocaust. The train, the one which drove his family from Kaunas to Paris, or the Jews to the camps, becomes a recurring motif and memory a major theme in his work. A visit to Jerusalem, Israel in 1970 brings him closer to his Israeli Jewish origins. He created his first Judaic stained-glass windows on the theme of "Jewish Feasts" for the Jewish Community Center in Nice and a monumental oil painting titled " Que tentes sont beau", O Jacob (1982). He continues to travel and immerse himself in the cultures he meets, New Orleans jazz, Mexican archaeological sites and Native American totems . In New York, he meets Elie Wiesel (1982). While Josy Eisenberg makes a film about Théo Tobiasse, entitled Tell me who you are painting, for French television in 1977, many personal exhibitions are devoted to him in France and abroad, notably at the Passali gallery in Paris, France. Atheneum Museum in Geneva and the Nahan Gallery in New Orleans. In 1983, a retrospective exhibition of his work was organized in Nice , at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Ponchettes. Carborundum engraving, lithography, stained glass, mosaic, pottery, bronze and ceramic sculpture are all tools of expression he first explored in the studio he had built at his home on the heights of Nice (1954 -1972), then to the Rauba Capeu wharf in Nice (1971-1976). He leaves Nice to install his main workshop on his property in Saint-Paul-de-Vence in 1976. In collaboration with Pierre Chave, lithographer in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Théo Tobiasse is developing a technique for making lithographs of eighteen to twenty colors that he produces for many original portfolio editions published in France, Sweden and the United States. In addition to the theme of memory of the wanderings and exodus of his family and the Jewish people, the personal iconography of Tobiasse comprises three other major themes that recur in his work: The cities that are dear to him (Paris and Jerusalem, first, then New York and Venice from the 1980s); twenty-eight monochrome gouaches, From Notre-Dame to Saint-Germain-des-Près (1969). The Hebrew Bible, an endless source of human dramas, which he re-imagines in contemporary times. Rachel (1978), Sarah and the three messengers (1981),Bathsheba in the Garden of Pomegranates (1982). The woman, lover, erotic and shameless, Daphnis and Chloé (1978), Portrait of a woman immobile in ecstasy , (1978), a creature-sex apple whose skin burns and arms twist (1980). To explore the theme of the erotic woman, Tobiasse adopts nude drawing in graphite, ink and pastel on paper, as well as the writing of poetic texts he inscribed in his drawings and notebooks. The American merchant, Kenneth Nahan Sr., met in 1978, encourages Théo Tobiasse to join in the United States other French painters he represents, including Max Papart and James Coignard. Tobiasse moved to New York in 1984. He first worked at the Chelsea Hotel and then set up his studio in Manhattan. He decides to split his time and his work between Saint-Paul-de-Vence and New York. The first paintings painted in America are distinguished from their European production by their scale and their bright themes. Oil-painted canvases are filled with family portraits, children, and biblical characters. My family came from Lithuania, Little Girl Sitting , Saul and David (1984). In these paintings, families no longer flee the pogroms in the trains, but land in New York, new host country according to his imagination, as in America (1984). He also created the Myriam sculpture in New York, which became the model for the Venus, a monumental bronze sculpture to be installed at the entrance of Saint-Paul-de-Vence in 2007 15. New York joins the inspiring cities of Theo Tobiasse and the woman now personifies freedom. Along with Marc Chagall, Raya Sorkine, Zamy Steynovitz and Yoel Benharrouche, Tobiasse becomes one of the pillars of modern French Judaica...

Original 1979 “HAIR let the sun shine in!" vintage musical movie poster. Archival linen backed with the original fold marks restored. Grade A condition. Size: 27” x 41”. Se...

Original WW1 poster: YOU BUY A LIBERTY BOND, LEST I PERISH! Linen-backed, fine condition. Ready to frame. Statue of Liberty lithograph, W...