Joseph Martinek

Czech Art Deco Carved Natural Resin Cubist Owl Bird Sculpture Joseph Martinek

American sculptor Joseph Martinek was born in Chicago in 1915. He was a second generation apprentice to Auguste Rodin. He studied sculpture at the State Industrial School of Art, Pra...

Florencio Gelabert Y Perez (Cuban, 1904-1995) Hand carved, signed; 1979 Materials: Cuban wood (mahogany?) Dimensions 23 X 4 X 4 inches Label affixed to underside: National Registry of Cultural Assets of the Republic of Cuba Ministry of Culture. Provenance: Art Master Collection, Miami, Florida. Florencio Gelabert, with a style reminiscent of Art Deco and Art Nouveau in a Latin American Expressionist stylization. Carved wood sculpture. Depicts a modernist stylized form of a man in a streamline moderne style. José Florencio Gelabert Pérez (Caibarien, 1904 - Havana, 1995) Cuban musician, sculptor, draftsman and teacher. He graduated from the San Alejandro National Academy of Fine Arts in 1934. He received numerous awards, mentions and recognitions in Fine Arts Halls and Circles. His works are in the permanent collection of the National Museum of Fine Arts. Florencio Gelabert is a renowned sculptor, who made more than twenty solo exhibitions beginning in 1929, several in the National Museum of Fine Arts, and participated in more than thirty collectives in Cuba, Spain and Brazil, the latter in the Sao Paulo Biennial. he traveled from Caibarién to Santa Clara in 1928 to audition to enter the famous San Alejandro Fine Arts School in Havana. He obtained one of the five vacancies. Already in the Cuban capital, he combined fine arts and music. When he graduated, he became a professor in San Alejandro and the academy’s principal in 1960. With a calling common to wood sculptors –which began with his primary school carving carpentry classes and the active life of his home town’s shipyards, his chisels and gouges feverishly turned mahogany, “ácana” and ebony into female heads with black African features dating back to 1930. In 1938 he used his savings to explore Europe: France (Paris, Marseilles), Italy (Naples, Rome, Florence, and Venice), Belgium (Malina). His encounter with the works by Aristide Maillol, Auguste Rodin, Ossip Zadkine, Constantin Brancusi and even with Wifredo Lam, who was also born in another Cuban coastal area, Sagua la Grande, and his encounter with the nude marble David sculpture...

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...

Miriam Sommerburg (American female artist, born Germany, Hamburg, 1900–1980 New York) Modernist Wood Carved Sculpture, Carving depictin...