Daum

Horse Carrying Fire by Hilton McConnico

Vinyl and Aluminum Sculptor William King is widely renowned for his signature flattened and stilt-legged figures, gesturing dramatically. Humorous and rife with social commentary, h...

This sculpture is edition 2/7, cast posthumously by the Boaz Vaadia Estate.

AP 2 Ernest Trova was an artist whose signature creation, a gleaming humanoid known as “Falling Man,” appeared in a series of sculptures and paintings and became a symbol of an imperfect humanity hurtling into the future. Mr. Trova was largely known as a sculptor, but his “Falling Man,” a standard of Pop Art, began life as a painted figure, taking shape on his easel in the early 1960s. Faceless, armless, with a hint of a belly and, its name notwithstanding, of indeterminate sex, the figure struck a variety of poses, sometimes juxtaposed with other like figures, sometimes with mechanical appendages. In October 1963 his one-man show, “Falling Man Paintings,” was the inaugural exhibition of the Pace Gallery on West 57th Street in Manhattan; it sold out, with the works purchased by the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the architect Philip Johnson and others. In three dimensions, the “Falling Man” figure was made from different materials over the years — nickel and chrome-plated bronze, enamel on aluminum, stainless steel — and often, like the Oscar statuette, was polished to an industrial sheen. It was clearly a space age creation, a forerunner of C3PO, the golden robot in “Star Wars.” “He found the space age both inspiring and dehumanizing,” Arne Glimcher, who founded the Pace Gallery, now PaceWildenstein, said in an interview on Friday. By the end of the 1960s, “Falling Man” had become Mr. Trova’s trademark, provoking Hilton Kramer, the art critic of The New York Times, to write that Mr. Trova had subjected his favorite figure “to almost as many variations as the Kama Sutra describes for the act of love.” Ernest Tino Trova Jr. was born in St. Louis on Feb. 19, 1927. Shortly after his high school graduation his father, an industrial tool designer and inventor, died, and young Ernie, as he was known, went to work, most significantly as a window dresser for a department store. His early paintings were in the Abstract Expressionist mode, but his attentiveness to the mannequins had an influence on his art. Through the 1970s and 1980s he continued with “Falling Man,” though he also became interested in formalized, almost mechanical-seeming landscapes, and the figures began to appear, reduced in size, within the context of abstractly rendered gardens. A self-taught artist with an impish wit and an eccentric turn of mind, Mr. Trova craved the recognition that was available to artists only in New York City, but he never visited for more than a week at a time and made almost no friends among New York artists. He did befriend Ezra Pound. As a fevered fan of Julio Iglesias...

Vinyl and Aluminum Sculptor William King is widely renowned for his signature flattened and stilt-legged figures, gesturing dramatically. Humorous and rife with social commentary, h...

Limited edition encased glass Art Deco vase with raised and etched design in frosted and cobalt blue glass colors. Holds Erte signature to lower right of figure. Stamp numbered with ...

Limited edition encased glass Art Deco vase with raised and etched design in frosted and cranberry glass colors. Holds Erte signature to lower right of figure. Stamp numbered with fo...

Europe & Zeus (divine love) Europa the daughter of the Phoenician king of Tyre, Agenor and Zeus in love in the shape of the bull. Bronze, on onyx pedestal Signed: Bruno Zach

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...