Francis Shields

The Decent (Published by the WPA/Federal Arts Project)

c. 1937

KURT SELIGMANN (1900–1962 American, born in Switzerland,) LA SORCIERE - (The Witch) 1934 Etching and aquatint, unsigned ? possibly a proof aside from The ...

CARL HOECKNER (1883 – 1972) PHANTASY c 1935 Lithograph edition unknown, but rare. Slight glue stain upper margin. 10 ½” x 15 ¾” ...

EDWARD HAGEDORN (AMERICAN 1902 – 1982) PLUNGING COMET - Large Ink and graphite drawing. Signed, titled and dated in pencil. Image, 16 x 22, Sheet 22 1/2 x 28 1/2 inches See also ...

EDWARD HAGEDORN (AMERICAN 1902 – 1982) SURREAL LANDSCAPE 1931 mixed media on paper, Graphite, ink and watercolor. Unsigned. Dtaed 2/26/31, in ink lower left margin. Image 13 3/4 x 16 1/2 inches. On a large sheet 20 x 25 inches. Provenance: Hagedorn estate, Around the mid 1980's The Hagedorn estate was dispersed in Berkeley by a local dealer. This drawing was part of a group of Hagedorn works on paper that I acquired from that dispersal. Much of the balance was later acquired the Struart Denenberg Fine Art. Denenberg published a very fine book on the artist's work. EDWARD HAGEDORN: CALIFORNIA MODERNIST, RESTLESSNESS AND RESTRAINT Hardcover – January 1, 2009 Subsequently Hagedorn's works on paper have been acquired by many museums and some accompanying exhibitions. ALL OF THE COMMENTS BELOW ARE FROM THE FOLLOWING EXHIBITION EDWARD HAGEDORN (1902-1982) American Modernist A New Traveling Exhibition “VOLCANOS, WRECKS, RIOTS, & NUDES”, EDWARD HAGEDORN (1902-1982) premiere at the Danforth Museum. Framingham, MA, in March 2016. The exhibition includes 75 works of art in various mediums and is accompanied by the first monograph devoted to the artist’s work with essays by leading curators, critics, and art historians. Edward Hagedorn was a true Modernist who created a trove of powerful works on paper--drawings, watercolors, oils, and original graphics that reveal the hand of a master draftsman and the mind of an astute political observer. He rejected the general trend in early 20th century California of local landscapes and coastal views, becoming virtually the single voice of Expressionism. He conveyed the darkness and upheaval that gripped the country in the depression years between the two World Wars, 1925- 1935, more forcefully than any of his contemporaries, influenced by German art of the time, engaging in modernist styles of Expressionism and Surrealism. Hagedorn’s skeletons are ferocious yet somehow endearing; printed in deep black ink on off-white paper, they march across Lilliputian landscapes of grim disorder and destruction. Comets and volcanoes explode in fauvist colors, their other-worldly fluorescent temperas framed in black, while nude female figures, executed in exquisitely refined pen and ink, or graphite line drawings, are as economical in their means as Matisse, and can be compared with the neo-classical drawings of Picasso. Among his most lyrical works of the 1920s is a series of rhythmically abstracted watercolor and ink views of Golden Gate Park, evoking the sensual demi-geometries of Balthus, Derain , and early Mondrian. American Modernist Edward Hagedorn (1902-1982) was born in San Francisco of German descent; his mother (née Kafka) died in childbirth, and he was legally adopted and raised by his grandmother and aunt. After attendance at the San Francisco School of Fine Arts in the early 1920s, by age 22 he had a studio in the famed "100" block of Montgomery Street ("the Monkey Block,") then a haven for bohemians. In 1926, a year of tremendous importance in California artists' embrace of modern art, the Oakland Art Gallery, with the guidance and inspiration of their European representative Emmy (Galka) Scheyer, was the first museum in the United States to show the art of the "Blue Four," among the leading artists of International Modernism--Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, Alexei Jawlensky...

Douglas C. Backhaus - Air, Year: 1978, Medium: Hand colored Etching, signed, dated, titled and numbered in pencil, Edition: AP, Image Size: 9.25 x 7 inches, Size: 13.25 x 11 in. (33....

Jack Zajac, American, born 1929 1964 Etching and aquatint hand printed on Fabriano paper, pencil signed and editioned. This one depicts winged angels. Edition Roman Numeral III Ima...

Figure is an original artwork realized by Rémy Hetreau in the late 20th Century. Etching on paper. Image Dimensions: 26 x 15 cm. signed on the plate on...

Karl Eugene Fortess (1907-1993) Original color lithographs on BFK Rives paper, 1966, Hand signed and numbered 29/36 in pencil, Sheet size 20.5 x 15 inches. Karl E. Fortess (1907-1993) was a painter, printmaker and teacher, of Boston, Massachusetts and Woodstock, N.Y. Fortess was born in Antwerp, Belgium on October 13, 1907, and became an American citizen in 1923. He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Art Students League in New York, and the Woodstock School of Painting with Yasuo Kuniyoshi. In 1937 the Works Progress Administration sent him and several other artists to Alaska to document the towns, villages, and remote wilderness landscapes (Pemberton, “Alaska art museum collects WPA’s Depression works from the territory,” Columbia Daily Tribune, November 9, 2003). Trains, trucks, and industrial buildings were what Karl Fortess envisioned when the Public Works of Art Project suggested that he depict “the American Scene.” His work bears the influence of Surrealism, Russsian Constructivist art and Cubism. He was part of a circle of left leaning artists loosley involved with the WPA which included Sol Wilson, Isaac Soyer, Louis Lozowick, Abraham Harriton, Ben Shahn, William Gropper, Nahum Tschacbasov, Morris Shulman, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Louis Slobodkin, Adolf Dehn, Le Corbusier and Louis Schanker. Karl Fortress taught at the Art Students League, Brooklyn Museum Art School, Louisiana State University, Fort Wright College, and Boston University School of Fine and Applied Arts. He was a member of the Artists Equity Association, Society of American Graphic Artists, American Association of University Professors, and the British Film Institute. He was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1946, was named an Associate of the National Academy of Design in 1960 and elected to full Academician in 1971. Fortess taught at many different schools, including Boston University School of Fine Art, where he also created an archive of interviews with more than two hundred and fifty contemporary American painters, sculptors, and graphic artists including many with with artists associated with the Woodstock, N.Y. art community. Among the interviewees are Kenneth Armitage, Will Barnet, Romare Bearden, George Biddle, James Brooks, Adolph Dehn, Jane Freilicher, Julian Levi, Alice Neel, Larry Rivers, Moses Soyer, Dorothy Varian...