Nathaniel Kaz

Bronze Sculpture to Isaac Bashevis Singer, Arts in Judaism Award signed Judaica

1966

Seymour Lipton Maquette for Laureate, ca. 1968-1969 Nickel silver on monel metal Unique 18 × 8 1/2 × 7 inches Marlborough-Gerson Gallery, New York Acquired from the above by the previous owner, 1969 thence by descent Christie's New York: Monday, June 30, 2008 [Lot 00199] Acquired from the above Christie's sale This unique sculpture by important Abstract Expressionist sculptor Seymour Lipton is a maquette of the monumental sculpture "Laureate" - one of Lipton's most iconic and influential works located on the Riverwalk in downtown Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Laureate is a masterpiece that was commissioned by the Allen-Bradley Company in memory of Harry Lynde Bradley and as an enhancement for the newly constructed Performing Arts Center. It is located on the east bank of the Milwaukee River at 929 North Water Street. The Bradley family in Milwaukee were renowned patrons of modernist sculpture, known for their excellent taste who also founded an eponymous sculpture park. For reference only is an image of the monumental "Laureate" one of Milwaukee's most beloved public sculptures. According to the Smithsonian, which owns a different unique variation of this work, "The full-size sculpture Laureate was commissioned by the Marcus Center for the Performing Arts in Milwaukee. In the initial drawings, Seymour Lipton combined details from the architectural plan with a wide variety of images, ranging from musical instruments to a lighthouse on the island of Tobago. He transformed the basic shapes from these sketches into a welded sculpture, which evokes a figure composed of columns, harp strings, and coiled rope. Lipton created this piece to celebrate achievement in the arts. The dramatic silhouette commands your attention, reflecting the title Laureate, which means worthy of honor and distinction. The final version of the piece is over twelve feet high and stands out against the pale, flat buildings of the arts center.,," Provenance Marlborough-Gerson Gallery, New York Acquired from the above by the previous owner, 1969 thence by descent Christie's New York: Monday, June 30, 2008 [Lot 00199] Acquired from the above Christie's sale About Seymour Lipton: Born in New York City in 1903, Seymour Lipton (1903-1986) grew up in a Bronx tenement at a time when much of the borough was still farmland. These rural surroundings enabled Lipton to explore the botanical and animal forms that would later become sources for his work. Lipton’s interest in the dialogue between artistic creation and natural phenomena was nurtured by a supportive family and cultivated through numerous visits to New York’s Museum of Natural History as well as its many botanical gardens and its zoos. In the early 1920s, with the encouragement of his family, Lipton studied electrical engineering at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute and pursued a liberal arts education at City College. Ultimately, like fellow sculptor Herbert Ferber, Lipton became a dentist, receiving his degree from Columbia University in 1927. In the late 1920s, he began to explore sculpture, creating clay portraits of family members and friends. In addition to providing him with financial security, dentistry gave Lipton a foundation in working with metal, a material he would later use in his artwork. In the early 1930s, though, Lipton’s primary sculptural medium was wood. Lipton led a comfortable life, but he was also aware of the economic and psychological devastation the Depression had caused New York. In response, he generally worked using direct carving techniques—a form of sculpting where the artist “finds” the sculpture within the wood in the process of carving it and without the use of models and maquettes. The immediacy of this practice enabled Lipton to create a rich, emotional and visual language with which to articulate the desperation of the downtrodden and the unwavering strength of the disenfranchised. In 1935, he exhibited one such early sculpture at the John Reed Club Gallery in New York, and three years later, ACA Gallery mounted Lipton’s first solo show, which featured these social-realist-inspired wooden works. In 1940, this largely self-taught artist began teaching sculpture at the New School for Social Research, a position he held until 1965. In the 1940s, Lipton began to devote an increasing amount of time to his art, deviating from wood and working with brass, lead, and bronze. Choosing these metals for their visual simplicity, which he believed exemplified the universal heroism of the “everyman,” Lipton could also now explore various forms of abstraction. Lipton’s turn towards increasing abstraction in the 1940s allowed him to fully develop his metaphorical style, which in turn gave him a stronger lexicon for representing the horrors of World War II and questioning the ambiguities of human experience. He began his metal work with cast bronze sculptures, but, in 1946, he started welding sheet metal and lead. Lipton preferred welding because, as direct carving did with wood, this approach allowed “a more direct contact with the metal.”[ii] From this, Lipton developed the technique he would use for the remainder of his career: “He cut sheet metal, manipulated it to the desired shapes, then joined, soldered, or welded the pieces together. Next, he brazed a metal coating to the outside to produce a uniform texture.”[iii] In 1950, Lipton arrived at his mature style of brazing on Monel metal. He also began to draw extensively, exploring the automatism that abstract expressionist painters were boasting at the time. Like contemporaries such as Jackson Pollock, Lipton was strongly influenced by Carl Jung’s work on the unconscious mind and the regenerative forces of nature. He translated these two-dimensional drawings into three-dimensional maquettes that enabled him to revise his ideas before creating the final sculpture.The forms that Lipton produced during this period were often zoomorphic, exemplifying the tension between the souls of nature and the automatism of the machine. In the years following the 1950s, Lipton’s optimism began to rise, and the size of his work grew in proportion. The oxyacetylene torch—invented during the Second World War—allowed him to rework the surfaces of metal sculptures, thus eliminating some of the risks involved with producing large-scale finished works. In 1958, Lipton was awarded a solo exhibition at the Venice Biennale and was thus internationally recognized as part of a small group of highly regarded avant-garde constructivist sculptors. In 1960, he received a prestigious Guggenheim Award, which was followed by several prominent public commissions, including his heroic Archangel, currently residing in Lincoln Center’s David Geffen Hall. A number of important solo exhibitions of his work followed at The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC (1964); the Milwaukee Art Center and University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee (1969); the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond (1972); the Everson Museum in Syracuse, NY (1973); the Herbert E. Johnson Museum of Art of Cornell University in Ithaca, NY (1973); the National Collection of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institution (now the Smithsonian American Art Museum) in Washington, DC (1978); and a retrospective in 1979 at The Jewish Museum in New York. In 1982 and 1984 alone, two exhibitions of his sculpture, organized respectively by the Mint Museum (Charlotte, NC) and the Hillwood Art Gallery of Long Island University (Greenvale, NY), traveled extensively across museums and university galleries around the nation. In 2000, the traveling exhibition An American Sculptor: Seymour Lipton was first presented by the Palmer Museum of Art of Pennsylvania State University in University Park. Most recently, in 2009, the Ackland Art Museum in Chapel Hill, NC mounted The Guardian and the Avant-Garde: Seymour Lipton’s Sentinel II in Context. Since 2004, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery has been the exclusive representative of the Estate of Seymour Lipton and has presented two solo exhibitions of his work—Seymour Lipton: Abstract Expressionist Sculptor (2005) and Seymour Lipton: Metal (2008). In 2013, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery presented Abstract Expressionism, In Context: Seymour Lipton, which included twelve major sculptures by the artist, along with works by Charles Alston, Norman Bluhm, Beauford Delaney, Willem de Kooning, Jay DeFeo, Michael Goldberg, Adolph Gottlieb, Hans Hofmann, Lee Krasner, Norman Lewis, Conrad Marca-Relli, Boris Margo, Alfonso Ossorio, Richard Pousette-Dart, Milton Resnick, Charles Seliger...

Nancy Graves New York State Governor's Arts Award, 1988 Bronze, polychrome patina and baked enamel on base with Award plaque 10 1/4 × 7 × 10 1/4 inches Hand signed and dated with inc...

Peter Voulkos Ceramic Sculptural Dish, ca. 1985 Sculpted ceramic Hand-signed by artist, Incised signature on the base. 1.5 x 11.5 inches This charger plate by Voulkos features a Gree...

Stephen Talasnik Untitled sculpture, from the collection of Dick Polich, Tallix Foundry, ca. 1997 Cast light metal signed by the artist on the work (see close up photograph) 6 3/5 × 12 × 4 inches Provenance Estate of Dick Polich, founder of the legendary Tallix Foundry and Polich Art works Beacon, NY Manufacturer Stephen Talasnik at Tallix Foundry, Beacon, New York This work is signed by the artist (see close up photograh) Abstract metal sculpture The work is lightweight so it is believed to be in aluminum or an aluminum alloy, Provenance: acquired from the Estate of Dick Polich - founder of the legendary Tallix foundry and Polich Art Works. Polich and Tallix fabricated significant sculptural works over many years, collaborating with such as, Willem de Kooning, Jeff Koons, Roy Lichtenstein, Frank Stella, Helen Frankenthaler, ERTE, Julian Schnabel, Richard Artschwager, Isamu Noguchi, Isaac Witkin...

Benedict Tatti (1917-1993) worked in New York city as a sculptor, painter, educator, and video artist. He studied stone and wood carving under Louis Slobodkin at the Roerich Museum. He later attended the Leonardo da Vinci School of Art studying under Attilio Piccirelli. In l939 he taught adult classes with the Teachers Project of the WPA and attended the Art Students League for three and a half years on full scholarship. He studied under William Zorach and Ossip Zadkine and later became Zorach’s assistant. Later in his career, he attended the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts. During World War II, Tatti served in the United States Army Air Force, where he spent three years assigned to variety of projects. In 1948, Benedict Tatti married Adele Rosenberg in New York City. Throughout his career, Tatti continuously experimented with various media. From 1952-1963, Tatti executed sculptural models of architectural and consumer products for the industrial designers, Raymond Loewy Associates; later he became a color consultant for the firm. In the 1960s, influenced by the Abstract Expressionists, Tatti turned from carving directly in wood and stone to creating assemblage architecture sculptures, using bronze metal and other industrial materials. He was included in the important show "Aspects de la Sculpture Americaine", at Galerie Claude Bernard Paris, France, in October 1960 along with Ibram Lassaw, Theodore Roszak, David Smith, Louise Bourgeois, Danese Corey, Dorothy Dehner, Lin Emery, Lily Ente, David Hayes, Louise Nevelson, Tony Rosenthal, Richard Stankiewicz, Sam Szafran...

"Metamorphosis" Bronze and Marble sculpture 22" x 6" in by Ibrahim Abd Elmalak Songbird, 2004 Bronze & Marble 56 x 16 cm, Signed & Dated Sculptures that mostly depict his charact...

"Chrysalis" Bronze and Marble sculpture 19" x 15" in by Ibrahim Abd Elmalak Chrysalis, 2005 Bronze & Marble 48 x 39 cm, Signed & Dated Sculptures that mostly depict his character...

"Songbird" Bronze and Marble sculpture 22.5" x 5" in by Ibrahim Abd Elmalak Songbird, 2008 Bronze & Marble 57 x 13 cm, Signed & Dated Sculptures that mostly depict his characteri...