Anatoli Lvovich Kaplan

Vintage Russian Shtetl Scene, Judaica Lithograph

1957-1961

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...

Francois Gilot, (1921-) studied English Literature at Cambridge University, and then, encouraged by her father, studied international law, though she secretly also took art lessons a...

Rare vintage limited edition Stone Lithograph printed at Mourlot in Paris. this is from a signed and numbered portfolio but the individual sheets are not hand signed and numbered. Francois Gilot, (1921-) studied English Literature at Cambridge University, and then, encouraged by her father, studied international law, though she secretly also took art lessons at the same time. In 1943, during her first exhibition in Paris, Gilot (then 21) met Pablo Picasso (who was 61) for the first time. In 1946, Gilot started a 10-year relationship with the notorious womanizer and had two of his children,Claude and Paloma. As a result of her relationship with Picasso, Gilot "became both a witness and a participant in one of the last great periods of the modern art movement in Europe. Their circle included poets, philosophers, writers, and many of the legends of the art world, such as Braque, Chagall, Cocteau and Matisse. In 1953, Gilot left Picasso and the home they shared in Vallauris and moved back to Paris. "Lithographs are printed from stones and each stone is an echo of my artistic voice," said Gilot. "Many artists use their art as a personal catharsis. I have never done that. I am more intellectual. Each artistic process -- oils, lithographs, monotypes -- allows me a different freedom and suits a different mood." While Gilot did her first lithograph in 1950 at the Mourlot Atelier, the same studio used by Picasso, Henri Matisse, Marc Chagall, Jean Miro and Jean Dubuffet, it was in the 1970s that she really began to experiment with the process. "In the beginning I turned to lithography because I wanted to show off my technical skills. Now I am more interested in color," said Gilot. "I also thought that lithographs would make my works more accessible to young collectors." While her oils are priced up to $100,000, her lithographs begin at $2,000 and her monotypes range from $1,000 to $2,500. HONORS Officier de la Legion d'Honneur, Presidence de la Republique, France Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur, Ministere de la Culture, France SELECTED MUSEUM COLLECTIONS Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Musee d'Art Moderne, Paris Musee Picasso, Antibes, France National Acadamy of Design, New York Musee de Tel Aviv, Tel Aviv, Israel Museum of Modern Art, New York Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris (complete collection of original prints) SELECTED IMPORTANT EXHIBITION CATALOGUES 2012 Françoise Gilot, Paris - Vallauris, 1943 - 1953, The Gagosian Gallery, New York Essays: John Richardson, Françoise Gilot, Charles Stuckey and Michael Cory 2011 Françoise Gilot, at 90, Drawings 1941 - 2010, Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz, Germany Essays: Françoise Gilot and Louise Tolliver Deutschman (exhibition curator) 2006 Françoise Gilot, Portraits From a Life, The Elkon Gallery Inc., New York 2003 Françoise Gilot Painting...

Rare Original limited edition lithograph, printed by Mourlot in Paris, France on vélin du Marais watermarked paper. this is not signed as issued. This is from a signed and numbered ...

Abstract Composition, 1959 Silkscreen Lithograph "Phoenix". This was from a portfolio which included works by Yosl Bergner, Menashe Kadishman, Yosef Zaritsky, Aharon Kahana, Jacob Wexler, Moshe Tamir and Michael Gross. Bergner, Yosl (Vladimir Jossif) (b Vienna, 13 Oct 1920). surrealist, surrealism. belongs to the generation of people uprooted from childhood landscapes and forced by circumstance to build a life elsewhere. Uniquely, he became an Israeli without shedding his Jewish cosmopolitan-refugee identity, an identity he zealously guarded in the melting pot of Israel of the "fifties" and "sixties". In the years that have passed since he acquired his art education at the Melbourne National Gallery Art School in Australia, concepts in the art world have changed many times over. from the Jewish paintings and the depictions of Australian Aborigines through the children of safed, the wall paintings, the masks, the angels and kings, the still lifes, the "Surrealistic" paintings, the toys and flowers, the paintings inspired by the Bird-head Haggada, the Kafka paintings, the Pioneers, the Kimberley fantasy (about his father's excursion in 1933 to northern Australia, in search of a "territory for the Jews"), Brighton Beach and the seascapes inspired by Eugene Boudin, through the chairs in the "Kings of Nissim Aloni" episode to the "Zionists" and the recent "Tahies". "During the six years that Bergner has lived in Israel," wrote Eugene KoIb, Direct. or of the Tel Aviv Museum, in the catalog of the Bergner exhibit in 1957, "he has established himself among Israeli artists." Bergner was indeed one of the artists who represented Israel in the Venice Biennial (1956; 1958) and in the Sao Paulo Biennial in 1957; this, in spite of the fact that Yosl Bergner did not harness his art to serve the Zionist ethos, that being, at the time, the order of the day (his paintings were in fact rejected at first as being those of a "Diaspora Jew"); he didn't "naturalize" himself by alliance to the country's landscape or its special light, nor did he turn to abstract painting. Painter of "the Jewish condition". the painter involved in Nissim Aloni's theater and the popular illustrator of poetry books and literary texts, he stuck to the narrative which drew its images from his childhood world, from Yiddish and from the Jewish culture of Poland in whose bosom he grew, with its literature, theater and fantasy. From this point of view his position as an "outsider", first in Australia and later in Israel, like that of the European Jew on the periphery of the dominant culture, afforded him a special dialectic vantage point from which to view his human and cultural surroundings. He was and remains a figurative painter even when he verges on the abstract. Israeli painter of Austrian birth, active in Australia. He grew up in Warsaw. His father, the pseudonymous Jewish writer Melech Ravitch, owned books on German Expressionism, which were an early influence. Conscious of rising anti-Semitism in Poland, Ravitch visited Australia in 1934 and later arranged for his family to settle there. Bergner arrived in Melbourne in 1937. Poor, and with little English, his struggle to paint went hand-in-hand with a struggle to survive. In 1939 he attended the National Gallery of Victoria’s art school and came into contact with a group of young artists including Victor O’Connor (b 1918) and Noel Counihan...

Rare vintage limited edition Stone Lithograph printed at Mourlot in Paris. this is from a signed and numbered portfolio but the individual sheets are not hand signed and numbered. Francois Gilot, (1921-) studied English Literature at Cambridge University, and then, encouraged by her father, studied international law, though she secretly also took art lessons at the same time. In 1943, during her first exhibition in Paris, Gilot (then 21) met Pablo Picasso (who was 61) for the first time. In 1946, Gilot started a 10-year relationship with the notorious womanizer and had two of his children,Claude and Paloma. As a result of her relationship with Picasso, Gilot "became both a witness and a participant in one of the last great periods of the modern art movement in Europe. Their circle included poets, philosophers, writers, and many of the legends of the art world, such as Braque, Chagall, Cocteau and Matisse. In 1953, Gilot left Picasso and the home they shared in Vallauris and moved back to Paris. "Lithographs are printed from stones and each stone is an echo of my artistic voice," said Gilot. "Many artists use their art as a personal catharsis. I have never done that. I am more intellectual. Each artistic process -- oils, lithographs, monotypes -- allows me a different freedom and suits a different mood." While Gilot did her first lithograph in 1950 at the Mourlot Atelier, the same studio used by Picasso, Henri Matisse, Marc Chagall, Jean Miro and Jean Dubuffet, it was in the 1970s that she really began to experiment with the process. "In the beginning I turned to lithography because I wanted to show off my technical skills. Now I am more interested in color," said Gilot. "I also thought that lithographs would make my works more accessible to young collectors." While her oils are priced up to $100,000, her lithographs begin at $2,000 and her monotypes range from $1,000 to $2,500. HONORS Officier de la Legion d'Honneur, Presidence de la Republique, France Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur, Ministere de la Culture, France SELECTED MUSEUM COLLECTIONS Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Musee d'Art Moderne, Paris Musee Picasso, Antibes, France National Acadamy of Design, New York Musee de Tel Aviv, Tel Aviv, Israel Museum of Modern Art, New York Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris (complete collection of original prints) SELECTED IMPORTANT EXHIBITION CATALOGUES 2012 Françoise Gilot, Paris - Vallauris, 1943 - 1953, The Gagosian Gallery, New York Essays: John Richardson, Françoise Gilot, Charles Stuckey and Michael Cory 2011 Françoise Gilot, at 90, Drawings 1941 - 2010, Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz, Germany Essays: Françoise Gilot and Louise Tolliver Deutschman (exhibition curator) 2006 Françoise Gilot, Portraits From a Life, The Elkon Gallery Inc., New York 2003 Françoise Gilot Painting...

Marc Chagall (Russia/France 1887‑1985). ”L’Oranger”. Year 1975 Signed and numbered Marc Chagall 8/50. Colour lithograph printed on Arches. Framed 35.5H x 28W x 2D Inches Illustr...

Tom Wesselmann- Lulu Lithograph on somerset paper, 1982 A unsigned and undated ‘Travel proof’ (for presentation) apart from the signed and numbered edition of 250 & 25 AP’s. Stamped...

Pablo Picasso - Buste au corsage à carreaux Lithograph on Arches paper (with Arches watermark), 1957 Executed in 1957; Mourlot's first state (of two), printed by Mourlot, Paris. Publ...

Kees van Dongen - Les Cheveux Courts, 1th state, 1924 Edition of only 30 copies on Arches paper. Signed in the stone and with the artist signature stamp. Numbered 23/30 in pencil. Pu...

Kees Van Dongen- L'Espagnole Lithograph in color, 1927 The print is from a portfolio called “Femmes,” published by 'Editions Les Quatre Chemins', Paris, 1927. Edition: 120 & a few un...

Kees van Dongen- Marcelle Leoni Lithograph, on Arches paper (with watermark), 1959. Edition: 200 Signed in ballpoint, numbered 92/200 in pencil (verso) Printed by Mourlot, Paris Pape...