George Aarons

Large George Aarons Terracotta Sculpture Relief Art Deco Plaque WPA Artist

c.1930's -1940's

Sydney Kumalo. Features a bronze stylized female figural form sculpture fixed to a marble plinth and wood base. Bears signature on base. Measures 9 1/2" x 4 1/4". There is no edition number on the piece. Sydney Kumalo (1935 - 1988) was born in Sophiatown, Johannesburg, on 13 April 1935. His was one of the families who had to move out of the "white" city to the South Western Townships, or Soweto. Raised in Diepkloof and educated at Madibane High School, he took with him from old Sophiatown the curious and diverse heritage of its heyday. Art classes in the Catholic school, "Sof' town" blues and jazz, the vibrant street culture and growing defiance of its population of various races who were gradually forced out into separate race-group areas. So it was that these various aspects of his early life created for Kumalo a cultural mix of a Zulu family related to the traditional royal house; city schooling, nascent township music and lingo; growing urbanised political defiance and the deep-rooted Zulu pride and respect for the legends and ancient stories of a tribal people. This mix of old and new cultures was reinforced when he began his studies at the Polly Street Art Centre in 1953 where he became a member of Cecil Skotnes group of serious artists who were encouraged to acquire professional skills. Skotnes introduced a basic training programme with modelling as a component, which marked the introduction of sculpting (in brick-clay) at Polly Street. Kumalo was Skotnes’ assistant at Polly Street from 1957 to 1964, and having recognised his great talent as a sculptor, Skotnes encouraged him to become a professional artist. After Kumalo’s very successful assistance with a commission to decorate the St Peter Claver church at Seeisoville near Kroonstad, with painting designs, sculpture and relief panels in 1957, Skotnes arranged for Kumalo to continue his art training by working in Edoardo Villa ’s studio from 1958 to 1960. Working with Villa, he received professional guidance and began to familiarize himself with the technical aspects of sculpting and bronze casting. In 1960 he became an instructor at the Polly Street Art Centre. Kumalo started exhibiting his work with some of the leading commercial Johannesburg galleries in 1958, and had his first solo exhibition with the Egon Guenther Gallery in 1962. He was a leader of the generation who managed to leave behind the forms of African curios, reject the European-held paternalism which encouraged notions of "naive" and "tribal" African art, and yet still hold fast to the core of the old legends and spiritual values of his people. He introduced these subjects into his bronze sculptures and pastel drawings, evolving his own expressive, contemporary African "style". Together with Skotnes, Villa, Cecily Sash and Giuseppe Cattaneo, Kumalo became part of the Amadlozi group in 1963. This was a group of artists promoted by the African art collector and gallery director Egon Guenther, and characterised by their exploration of an African idiom in their art. Elza Miles writes that Cecil Skotnes’ friendship with Egon Guenther had a seminal influence on the aspirant artists of Polly Street: “Guenther broadened their experience by introducing them to German Expressionism as well as the sculptural traditions of West and Central Africa. He familiarised them with the work of Ernst Barlach, Käthe Kollwitz, Gustav Seitz, Willi Baumeister and Rudolf Sharf.” It is therefore not surprising that some of Kumalo’s sculptures show an affinity with Barlach’s powerful expressionist works. Guenther organised for the Amadlozi group to hold exhibitions around Italy, in Rome, Venice, Milan and Florence, in both 1963 and 1964. Kumalo’s career took off in the mid 1960s, with his regular participation in exhibitions in Johannesburg, London, New York and Europe. He also represented South Africa at the Venice Biennale in 1966, and in 1967 participated in the São Paulo Biennale. EJ De Jager (1992) describes Kumalo’s sculpture as retaining much of the “canon and formal aesthetic qualities of classical African sculpture. His work contains the same monumentality and simplicity of form.” His main medium for modelling was terra cotta, which was then cast in bronze, always paying careful attention to the finish of both the model as well as the final cast. He began casting the pieces he modelled in clay or plaster into bronze at the Renzo Vignali Artistic Foundry in Pretoria North. He worked throughout his life with its owners, the Gamberini family, and enjoyed learning the technical aspects of the casting process, refining his surfaces according to what he learned would produce the best results in metal. De Jager further writes that Kumalo’s distinctive texturing of the bronze or terra cotta is reminiscent of traditional carving techniques of various African cultures. “In many respects Kumalo thus innovated a genuine contemporary or modern indigenous South African sculpture”. Kumalo came to admire the works of the Cubists, and of British sculptors Henry Moore and Lynn Chadwick. He became noted for adapting shapes from them into his own figures. The success of his use of the then current monumental simplicity and purely aesthetic abstractions of natural forms has been emulated by many South African sculptors since the 1970s. He was in many ways the doyen of South African Black art. As such he was an important influence especially on younger African sculptors, by whom he is greatly revered. Through his teaching at Polly Street and at the Jubilee Centre, as well as through his personal example of integrity, dedication and ability, he inspired and guided students who in their own right became outstanding artists, for example, Ezrom Legae, Leonard Matsoso and Louis Maqhubela From 1969 onward, he allied himself with Linda Givon, founder of The Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg, where he exhibited regularly until his death in December 1988. Working with Givon also perpetuated his associations with his many friends of strong principles. Skotnes, Villa, Legae and later such peers from the Polly Street era as Leonard Matsoso, Durant Sihlali and David Koloane have all exhibited at The Goodman Gallery. Kumalo, Legae, and later Fikile (Magadlela) and Dumile (Feni) were among the leading exponents of a new Afrocentric art...

Jose Marmol "An American Marriage" Hand signed and dated Painted bronze Provenance: Allan Stone Gallery, New York. It came with an inlaid art deco box also signed Marmol. I cannot find any conclusive biography of the artist. Allan Stone (1932–2006) was a legendary American art dealer, collector, and leading authority on Abstract Expressionism. In 1960, he founded the Allan Stone Gallery where he became renowned for his early advocacy of preeminent 20th-century artists. He championed artists such as John Chamberlain, Joseph Cornell, Willem de Kooning, Richard Estes, Arshile Gorky, John Graham, Eva Hesse, Franz Kline, Yasuhide Kobashi, Wayne Thiebaud, and Jack Whitten. He was also known for his zealous and eclectic approach to art collecting, amassing a collection that spanned painting, sculpture, assemblage, collage, folk art, Art Nouveau, Art Deco, furniture, mechanical parts, signs, and bugatti cars. At the time of his death, he had the largest collection of African and Oceanic art in private hands. His clientele included Robert Mallary, John Chamberlain, and Elaine de Kooning, During the gallery's first decade Stone showed established luminaries such as Willem de Kooning, César, Franz Kline, John Chamberlain, Barnett Newman, and Alfred Leslie. He gave first or early shows to Arman, Robert Arneson, Richard Estes, Dorothy Grebenak,Eva Hesse, Robert Ryman, Wayne Thiebaud, and Jack Whitten. The Allan Stone Gallery was one of the few that would see artists and their work without an appointment—a vital lifeline for the inexperienced and unconnected. It was also unconventional in its frequent showings of unknown woman artists and artists of color, such as Eva Hesse, Gerald Jackson, Jack Whitten, Elizabeth King, Sue Miller, Sylvia Lark, Kazuko Inoue, Diana Moore, Oliver Lee Jackson, Mary Lovelace O'Neal and Lorraine...

Chaim Gross (American, 1904-1991) Patinated cast bronze sculpture, Three Acrobats, signed mounted on black marble plinth 24.5"h x 14"w x 7"d (bronze alone) Chaim Gross (March 17, 1904 – May 5, 1991) was an American modernist sculptor and educator. Gross was born to a Jewish family in Austrian Galicia, in the village of Wolowa (now known as Mezhgorye, Ukraine), in the Carpathian Mountains. In 1911, his family moved to Kolomyia (which was annexed into the Ukrainian USSR in 1939 and became part of newly independent Ukraine in 1991). When World War I ended, Gross and brother Avrom-Leib went to Budapest to join their older siblings Sarah and Pinkas. Gross applied to and was accepted by the art academy in Budapest and studied under the painter Béla Uitz, though within a year a new regime under Miklos Horthy took over and attempted to expel all Jews and foreigners from the country. After being deported from Hungary, Gross began art studies at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Vienna, Austria shortly before immigrating to the United States in 1921. Gross's studies continued in the United States at the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design, where he studied with Elie Nadelman and others, and at the Art Students League of New York, with Robert Laurent. He also attended the Educational Alliance Art School, studying under Abbo Ostrowsky, at the same time as Moses Soyer and Peter Blume. In 1926 Gross began teaching at The Educational Alliance, and continued teaching there for the next 50 years. Louise Nevelson was among his students at the Alliance (in 1934), during the time she was transitioning from painting to sculpture. In the late 1920s and early 1930s he exhibited at the Salons of America exhibitions at the Anderson Galleries and, beginning in 1928, at the Whitney Studio Club. In 1929, Gross experimented with printmaking, and created an important group of 15 linocuts and lithographs of landscapes, New York City streets and parks, women in interiors, the circus, and vaudeville. The entire suite is now in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Gross returned to the medium of printmaking in the 1960s, and produced approximately 200 works in the medium over the next two decades. For more than sixty years Chaim Gross's art has expressed optimistic, affirming themes, Judaica, balancing acrobats, cyclists, trapeze artists and mothers and children convey joyfulness, modernism, exuberance, love, and intimacy. This aspect of his work remained consistent with his Jewish Hasidic heritage, which teaches that only in his childlike happiness is man nearest to God. In March 1932 Gross had his first solo exhibition at Gallery 144 in New York City. For a short time they represented Gross, as well as his friends Milton Avery, Moses Soyer, Ahron Ben-Shmuel and others. Gross was primarily a practitioner of the direct carving method, with the majority of his work being carved from wood. Other direct carvers in early 20th-century American art include William Zorach, Jose de Creeft, and Robert Laurent. Works by Chaim Gross can be found in major museums and private collections throughout the United States, with substantial holdings (27 sculptures) at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. A key work from this era, now at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, is the 1932 birds-eye maple Acrobatic Performers, which is also only one and one quarter inch thick. In 1933 Gross joined the government's PWAP (Public Works of Art Project), which transitioned into the WPA (Works Progress Administration), which Gross worked for later in the 1930s. Under these programs Gross taught and demonstrated art, made sculptures that were placed in schools and public colleges, made work for Federal buildings including the Federal Trade Commission Building, and for the France Overseas and Finnish Buildings at the 1939 New York World's Fair. Gross was also recognized during these years with a silver medal at the Exposition universelle de 1937 in Paris, and in 1942, with a purchase prize at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's "Artists for Victory" exhibition for his wood sculpture of famed circus performer Lillian Leitzel. In 1949 Gross sketched Chaim Weizmann, President of Israel, at several functions in New York City where Weizmann was speaking, Gross completed the bust in bronze later that year. Gross returned to Israel for three months in 1951 (the second of many trips there in the postwar years) to paint a series of 40 watercolors of life in various cities. This series was exhibited at the Jewish Museum (Manhattan) in 1953. In the 1950s Gross began to make more bronze sculptures alongside his wood and stone pieces, and in 1957 and 1959 he traveled to Rome to work with famed bronze foundries including the Nicci foundry. At the end of the decade Gross was working primarily in bronze which allowed him to create open forms, large-scale works and of course, multiple casts. Gross's large-scale bronze The Family, donated to New York City in 1991 in honor of Mayor Ed Koch, and installed at the Bleecker Street Park at 11th street, is now a fixture of Greenwich Village. In 1959, a survey of Gross's sculpture in wood, stone, and bronze was featured in the exhibit Four American Expressionists curated by Lloyd Goodrich at the Whitney Museum of American Art, with work by Abraham Rattner, Doris Caesar, and Karl Knaths. In 1976, a selection from Gross's important collection of historic African sculpture, formed since the late 1930s, was exhibited at the Worcester Art Museum in the show The Sculptor's Eye: The African Art Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Chaim Gross. Gross was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate member, and became a full Academician in 1981. In 1984, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, with Jacob Lawrence and Lukas Foss. In the fall of 1991, Allen Ginsberg gave an important tribute to Gross at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which is published in their Proceedings. In 1994, Forum Gallery, which now represents the Chaim Gross estate, held a memorial exhibition featuring a sixty-year survey of Gross's work. Gross was a professor of printmaking and sculpture at both the Educational Alliance and the New School for Social Research in New York City, as well as at the Brooklyn Museum Art School, the MoMA art school, the Art Student's League and the New Art School (which Gross ran briefly with Alexander Dobkin...

Chaim Gross (American, 1904-1991) Patinated cast bronze sculpture, Balancing, Mother and child signed and editioned 1/6 mounted on black marble plinth 14"h x 11.5"w x 8"d (height w...

Pair of 20th century Tuscan terracottas. Objects of great size and impact, Manufacture of Signa, depicting cherubs with musical instruments of excellent quality. Terracottas complete...

Questa statua in terracotta in eccellente stato conservativo considerata l'età e la fragilità del materiale, raffigura un putto nell'atto di soffiare, colto in una posa di intenso p...

Questa piccola terracotta raffigura una scena mitologica, probabilmente una scena da un baccanale o un "ratto". Si vede infatti un centauro al centro sollevare una ninfa nuda, i due ...

Sculpture Terracotta From Marcel Bouraine (1886-1948)" Original terra cotta sculpture of Marcel Bouraine Naïade of the 1930's Signed Bouraine On the ...