Avis Zeidler Nemkoff

Kossack

This sculpture is part of our exhibition Charles Goeller: A Wistful Loneliness. Carved and painted wood and gesso, 23 x 15 3/4 x 3 inches, Signed verso "Carved by Charles L. Goeller...

Untitled Portrait Head (perhaps Arnold Geissbuhler, the artist’s husband), c. 1920s, bronze, signed verso, 11 x 9 x 7 inches (excluding base) Elizabeth Chase was a sculptor, printma...

This sculpture is part of our exhibition America Coast to Coast: Artists of the 1930s Music (attributed), brass and wire construction, c. 1936, 28 x 14 x 5 inches; perhaps exhibited at Hollywood Riviera Gallery, 1936 (third prize); provenance includes Estate of Jon Spencer Helfen (Los Angeles, CA About the Sculpture In 1935, Philip Paval bought a box of metal in a “blind auction.” Paval, a painter, sculptor, and jeweler, had hoped the box contained silver. To his dismay, it was brass. Seeing an opportunity, Paval started to make sculptures from the brass sheets. His subjects included Cinema, Hollywood, Radio, Dance, Aviation and Music. The works were well-received with the Hollywood crowd and critically acclaimed. Actor and comedian, Ben Bard, purchased four of them for his theater, and novelist and screenwriter, Vicki Baum ordered four more for her drawing room. Movie director King Vidor also purchased them. Los Angeles Times art critic, Arthur Millier, described Paval’s “contraptions” as “ingenious, decorative, different.” Paval exhibited these works for several years in the late 1930s, including at the American Artists’ Congress Gallery in Los Angeles in an exhibition called Formalism and Abstraction in 1938 and at a solo show at Stendahl Galleries in 1939. The appeal of these works must have been irresistible, as a 1936 Los Angeles Times article noted, “Two feet of brass art has been stolen from the Hollywood Riviera Galleries. The work is an abstraction. It portrays the spirit of music and rested on the grand piano in the main hall. The work of Philip Paval, it won third prize in the current gallery exhibition at the gallery.” One can only wonder whether this is the “contraption” which was pilfered from the gallery nearly one hundred years ago. Given the description of the work, its subject matter and size, it seems likely. About the Artist Philip Paval was a sculptor, painter, and jeweler. Born in Denmark, Paval was apprenticed to a silversmith and studied art in Denmark. He immigrated to the US in 1919 and first worked as a merchant seaman in New York. The following year, Paval settled in Los Angeles where he later opened his own jewelry shop featuring works he designed and produced. Paval became a favorite in the entertainment world, making a good living selling silver...

Three Chimneys, 1956, oil on Masonite, signed and dated lower left, 18 x 36 inches, titled verso, presented in its original frame Three Chimneys is a prime example of Ethel Margolies’ Precisionist-influenced industrial scenes. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Margolies made a name for herself by painting the Northeast’s factories, foundries, and manufacturing plants. Although this subject matter is often associated with male artists, Margolies is part of an important lineage of female modernists who depicted symbols of America’s industrial might. Starting with artists like New Jersey’s Elsie Driggs and Chicago’s Yvonne Deluc Pryor, Margolies is part of a through line of women Precisionist painters that also included the West Coast’s Vanessa Helder. Whereas these artists tended towards a stark and pristine realism, Margolies seems to have been influenced by the 1920s and early 1930s work of Charles Demuth’s and Charles Sheeler’s highly designed paintings from the same period, as both adopted a cubo-futurist oriented brand of Precisionism. Ethel Polacheck Margolies was a Connecticut painter...

This 18 x 9 x 4 inch carved wood sculpture is unsigned and comes directly from the artist's family. Louis 'Lou' Bunin (28 March 1904 – 17 February 1994) was an American puppeteer, artist, and pioneer of stop-motion animation in the latter half of the twentieth century. While working as a mural artist under Diego Rivera in Mexico City in 1926, Bunin created political puppet shows using marionettes...

Inspired by amateur archaeologists such as Heinrich Schliemann who discovered Troy and by past elaborate hoaxes like that of the Piltdown Man, Joshua travels the world performing sta...

American artist Burton Freund worked in Chicago in the 1930's and 1940’s for the FAP (Federal Arts Project) as an illustrator and sculptor. These original wood sculptures are time capsules of the 1930's and 1940's, hand carved out of solid wood including their bases. Walking the train platform in Chicago in 1938, the artist saw a "Red Cap" porter with a Phi Beta Kappa key hanging around his neck. When asked, the porter...

Philip Shore uses his art to illustrate man's relationship to the environment and how the connection between nature and culture is becoming more fractured. Rel 17.1 consists of wood,...