Carl Hofer Art

ABOUT Stephen Basso Stephen Basso's highly original pastels and oil paintings are romantic, yet thought provoking fantasies. His whimsical works are alive with boundless imaginat...

Artist: Alice Neel (1900-1984) Title: The Family Year: 1982 Medium: Lithograph on Arches paper Edition: 57/175, plus proofs Size: 31.25 x 27 inches Condition: Excellent Inscription: ...

Artist: Alice Neel (1900-1984) Title: Man with Pipe (John Rothschild) Year: 1979 Medium: Lithograph on Arches paper Edition: XXXVIII/L; 150 Arabic Numerals, 50 Roman Numerals, plus p...

Lithograph on vélin paper. Inscription: Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued. Good condition, with centerfold, as issued. Notes: From the volume, Chagall, Monumental Works XXe Siècle, ...

"#70 – I AM TIRED" is from Amy Williams' series "A Farewell to Arms" – wherein the artist works directly onto page 70 of a found copy of Ernest Hemingway'...

Pastel, Pencil, petal flowers, Color and Ink on Paper. The base of this drawing is Fabriano paper of 120g /m2. I use natural dyes of flowers, herbs, leaves, bark of trees as the fir...

Artist: Alice Neel (1900-1984) Title: The Youth (John Cheim) Year: 1982 Medium: Lithograph on Arches paper Edition: 20/25 A.P. Size: 38 x 24 inches Condition: Good Inscription: Signe...

"#220 – PEACE" is from Amy Williams' series "A Farewell to Arms" – wherein the artist works directly onto page 220 of a found copy of Ernest Hemingway's W...

A Distinctive, 1950s Mid-Century Modern Cubist Figure Study by Noted Chicago Artist, Harold Haydon (Am. 1909-1994). A visually striking charcoal composite study of three figures, ex...

A Dynamic, 1945 Mid-Century Modern Cubist Studio Scene, Artist's Sketch Class by Noted Chicago Painter, Harold Haydon (Am. 1909-1994). Artwork size: 11 x 8 1/2 inches, unframed, mo...

Mid-century lyrical surrealist abstract watercolour on paper by French artist Jean Clerté, signed and dated bottom right. Presented in mid-century frame. Jean Clerté , born in 1930 in Saint-Savin-sur-Gartempe in Vienne, is a French painter, engraver, draftsman, watercolourist and sculptor . This work is a great example of his more humorous and expressive work influenced by Alechinsky from the late 1960s onwards. There is a light playfulness and yet the watercolours are more vivid than his previous palette. Jean Clerté works in series. His sequential narrations testify both to a youthful spontaneity and to a perfect mastery in the distribution of forms and images on the painted surface. The narration is not only an accumulation of juxtaposed fragments and symbols, it forms a whole, it takes on and gives meaning. In general, we can say of Clerté that he practices an “eco-art” that feeds on primary hungers: the feeling of being united with nature, the vegetable, the mineral, the aquatic. In his colourful canvases, his inks, his boxes, his objects, like a shaman on the path of his dreams, the painter Clerté mounts an assault on beasts and demons, elves and gnomes. From the Poitevin marshes to the tropical forests emerges a fauna caught in the meanders of a design that marvels at the appearance of these grotesque idols. Jean Clerté began to draw and paint at a very young age, and at the age of 15 he enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts in Poitiers. Then in 1949, curious about the capital, he moved to Paris. Having very few financial resources, he could not continue his studies at first, worked as a model to survive, and met other artists; he was then admitted to the studio of Ossip Zadkine and, from 1952, he was also able to study engraving at Atelier 17 of Stanley William Hayter, an English engraver and printer living in Paris associated in the 1930s with surrealism. At the end of the 1960s, he worked alongside Pierre Alechinsky, founding member of the Cobra movement, engraving Alechinsky's originals, benefiting from his advice, and discovering acrylic as a medium. From 1976, Jean Clerté became associate professor at Hayter. Clerté had taught previously, in 1971 at the Salzburg Summer University and in 1972 he gave courses at the Paris-Sorbonne University . In 1981, he was appointed professor at the School of Decorative Arts , where he had Maïlys Seydoux-Dumas as a student and, from 1983 to 1988, he was Alechinsky's assistant professor at the Paris School of Fine Arts. His first works are part of the current of lyrical abstraction, and are nourished by impressions of nature (landscape motifs, e.g. forest fires, waterscapes), then around 1968, encouraged by Alechinsky, he rejects abstraction, and his work becomes more figurative with expressive and humorous elements. From this period his colours are more subdued, often with pastel tones, he works on series. Jean Clerté has created a world in a space where drawing, painting, objects participate in a playful figuration. From his drawings were born sculptures and sometimes mobiles (Le Moulin à dessin). If it is the artist who makes astonishing, polychrome, whimsical “toys”, it is the painter who appeals to adults through his caustic and satirical humour. His first exhibitions in France took place at the Galerie Massol , then at the Galerie Pascal...

A Stylish, 1940s Art Deco Cubist Drawing of a Seated Female, "The Telephone Call", by Note Chicago Modern Artist, Harold Haydon (Am. 1909-19940. A striking charcoal drawing executed...