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Charles Elmer Harris Paintings

Charles Elmer Harris or Beni E. Kosh was born in Cleveland, Ohio. In the 1960s, he legally changed his name to Beni E. Kosh, which translates to the son of Ethiopia. He was a student of Cleveland artist Paul Travis at the Cleveland Institute of Art and later connected to the Sho-Nuff Art Group, a group of African-American artists and the Karamu House artist group, which was a center for artists, writers, dancers and the oldest African-American theater in the United States. Kosh rarely exhibited or sold his work and it was not until after his death that his stylistically diverse oeuvre was rediscovered to receive critical recognition. Kosh’s work is noted in the catalog Yet Still, We Rise: African American Art in Cleveland 1920–1970 and included in exhibitions at the Cleveland State University and the Butler Institute of American Art.

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Artist: Charles Elmer Harris
'African Idol' — Mid-Century African-American artist
By Charles Elmer Harris
Located in Myrtle Beach, SC
Charles Elmer Harris (Beni E. Kosh), Untitled (African Idol), watercolor, c. 1950s. Estate stamped verso, 'Beni E Kosh COLLECTION' and numbered '570' in ink. A fine, spontaneous wat...
Category

1950s American Modern Charles Elmer Harris Paintings

Materials

Watercolor

'6th City Wire Works' — Mid-Century African-American Artist
By Charles Elmer Harris
Located in Myrtle Beach, SC
Charles Elmer Harris (Beni E. Kosh), '6th City Wire Works', watercolor, c. 1950s. Estate stamped verso, 'Beni E Kosh COLLECTION' and numbered '859' in ink. A fine, spontaneous waterc...
Category

1950s American Modern Charles Elmer Harris Paintings

Materials

Watercolor

'Central Railroad' — Mid-Century African-American Artist
By Charles Elmer Harris
Located in Myrtle Beach, SC
Charles Elmer Harris (Beni E. Kosh), Untitled (Central Railroad), watercolor, c. 1945. Estate stamped verso, 'Beni E Kosh COLLECTION' and numbered '697' in ink. A fine, modernist re...
Category

1940s American Modern Charles Elmer Harris Paintings

Materials

Watercolor, India Ink

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Christopher Street (abstract Greenwich Village cityscape)
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De Hirsh Margules (1899-1965). Christopher Street, 1939. Watercolor on Arches wove paper. Signed and dated in pencil by artist lower margin. Sheet measures 15.5 x 20 inches. Window in matting measures 15 x 19 inches. Framed measurement: 23 x 30 inched. Bears fragment of original label affixed on verso. Incredibly vibrant and saturated color with no fading or toning of sheet. Provenance: Babcock Galleries, NYC Exhibited: The American Federation of Arts Traveling Exhibition. From the facade of The Waverly at Christopher is depicted One Christopher Street, the 16-story Art Deco residential building erected in 1931. It is not a casual coincidence that the structure appears in this cityscape: 1 Christopher Street is the subject. The original intention of this project was to transform the neighborhood, bring a bit of affluence and make a bid to rival the Upper West Side. Margules, a sensitive aesthete, understood how a massive piece of architecture such as One changes a neighborhood. 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Devree later called Margules "one of our most daring experimentalists in the medium" Margules was also a well-known participant in the bohemian culture of New York City's Greenwich Village, where he was widely known as the "Baron" of Greenwich Village.[1] The New York Times described him as "one of Greenwich Village's best-known personalities" and "one of the best known and most buoyant characters about Greenwich Village. Early Life De Hirsh Margules was born in 1899 in the Romanian city of Iași (also known as Iasse, Jassy, or Jasse). When Margules was 10 weeks old, his family immigrated to New York City. Both of his parents were active in the Yiddish theater, His father was Yekutiel "Edward" Margules, a "renowned Jewish actor-impresario and founder of the Yiddish stage." Margules' mother, Rosa, thirty-nine years younger than his father, was an actress in the Yiddish theater and later in vaudeville. Although Margules appeared as a child actor with the Adler Family[11] and Bertha Kalich, his sister, Annette Margules, somewhat dubiously continued in family theater and vaudeville tradition, creating the blackface role of the lightly-clad Tondelayo (a part later played on film Hedy Lamarr) in Earl Carroll's 1924 Broadway exoticist hit, White Cargo. Annette herself faced stereotyping as an exotic flower: writing about her publicist Charles Bouchert stated that "Romania produces a stormy, temperamental type of woman---a type admirably fitted to portray emotion." His brother Samuel became a noted magician who appeared under the name "Rami-Sami." Samuel later became a lawyer, representing magician Horace Goldin, among others. A family portrait including a young De Hirsh, a portrait of Rosa and Annette together, and individual photos of Rosa and Edward can be found on the Museum of the City of New York website. At around age 9 or 10, Margules took art classes with the Boys Club on East Tenth Street, and his first taste of exhibition was at a student art show presented by the club. By age 11, he had won a city-wide prize (a box camera) at a children's art show presented by the department store Wanamakers. As a young teenager, Margules was already displaying a characteristic kindness and loyalty. Upon hearing that two friends (one of them was author Alexander King), were in trouble for breaking a school microscope, the nearly broke Margules gave them five dollars to repair the microscope . Margules had to approach a wealthy man that Margules had once saved on the subway from a heart attack. Margules didn't reveal the source of the five dollars to King until twenty-five years later. In his late teens, Margules studied for a couple of months in Pittsburgh with Edwin Randby, a follower of Western painter Frederic Remington. Thereafter he pursued a two-year course of studies in architecture, design and decoration at the New York Evening School of Art and Design, while working as a clerk during the day at Stern's Department Store. He was encouraged in these artistic pursuits by his neighbor, the painter Benno Greenstein (who later went by the name of Benjamin Benno). Artistic career In 1922, Margules began work as a police reporter for the City News Association of New York .Margules then considered himself something of an expert on art, and the painter Myron Lechay is said to have responded to some unsolicited analysis of his work with the remark "Since you seem to know so much about it, why don't you paint yourself?" This led to study with Lechay and a flurry of painting. Margules' first show was in 1922 at Jane Heap's Little Review Gallery. Thereafter Margules began to participate in shows with a group including Stuart Davis, Jan Matulka, Buckminster Fuller (exhibiting depictions of his "Dymaxion house") in a gallery run by art-lover and restaurateur Romany Marie on the floor above her cafe. Jane Heap, left, with Mina Loy and Ezra Pound During the 1920s, Margules traveled outside of the country a number of times. In 1922, with the intent of reaching Bali, he took a job as a "'wiper on a tramp steamer where [he] played nursemaid to the engine." He reached Rotterdam before he turned back. He would return to Rotterdam shortly thereafter. In 1927, Margules took a lengthy leave of absence from his day job as a police reporter in order to travel to Paris, where he "set up a studio in Montmartre's Place du Tertre, on the top floor of an almost deserted hotel, a shabby establishment, lacking both heat and running water." He studied at the Louvre and traveled to paint landscapes in provincial France and North Africa. Margules also joined the "Noctambulist" movement and experimented with painting and showing his artwork in low light.Jonathan Cott wrote that: the painter De Hirsch Margulies sat on the quays of the Seine and painted pictures in the dark. In fact, the first exhibition of these paintings, which could be seen only in a darkened room, took place in [ Walter Lowenfels'] Paris apartment. Elaine de Kooning remarked that studying the works of the Noctambulists confirmed Margules' "direction toward the use of primary colors for perverse effects of heavy shadow." It was also in Paris that Margules initially conceived his idea of "Time Painting", where a painting is divided into sectors, each representing a different time of day, with color choices meant to evoke that time of day. In Paris, his social circle included Lowenfels, photographer Berenice Abbott, publisher Jane Heap, composer George Anthiel, sculptor Thelma Wood, painter André Favory, writer Norman Douglas, writer and editor George Davis, composer and writer Max Ewing, and writer Michael Fraenkel. Upon his return to New York in 1929, Margules attended an exhibition of John Marin's paintings. While at the exhibition, he "launched into an eloquent explanation of Marin to two nearby women", and was overheard by an impressed Alfred Stieglitz. The famous photographer and art promoter invited Margules to dine with his wife, the artist Georgia O'Keeffe, and his assistant, painter Emil Zoler. Stieglitz thereafter became a friend and mentor to Margules, becoming for him "what Socrates was to his friends." Alfred Stieglitz Stieglitz introduced Margules to John Marin, who quickly became the most important painterly influence upon Margules. Elaine de Kooning later noted that Margules was "indebted to Marin and through Marin to Cézanne for his initial conceptual approach - for his constructions of scenes with no negative elements, for skies that loom with the impact of mountains." Margules himself said that Marin was his "father and ... academy." The admiration was by no means unreciprocated: Marin said that Margules was "an art lover with abounding faith and sincerity, with much intelligence and quick seeing." Stieglitz also introduced Margules to many other artistic and intellectual figures in New York. With the encouragement of Alfred Stieglitz, Margules in 1936 opened a two-room gallery at 43 West 8th Street called "Another Place." Over the following two years there were fourteen solo exhibitions by Margules and others, and the gallery was well-respected by the press. It was in this gallery that the painter James Lechay, Myron's brother, exhibited his first painting. In 1936, Margules first saw recognition by major art museums when both the Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston purchased his works. In 1942, Margules gave up working as a police reporter, and apparently dedicated himself thereafter solely to an artistic vocation. "The Baron of Greenwich Village"[edit] Margules made his mark not only as an artist, but also as an outsized personality known throughout Greenwich Village and beyond. To local residents, Margules was known as the "Baron", after Baron Maurice de Hirsch, a prominent German Jewish philanthropist. Margules was easily recognizable by the beret he routinely wore over his long hair. Writer Charles Norman said that he "dressed with a flair for sloppiness." He was said to "know everybody" in Greenwich Village, to the extent that when the novelist and poet Maxwell Bodenheim was murdered, Margules was the first one the police sought to identify the body. Margules' letters show him interacting with art world figures such as Sacha Kolin, John Marin and Alfred Stieglitz, as well as with prominent figures outside the art world such as polymath Buckminster Fuller and writer Henry Miller. Most of his friends and acquaintances found Margules a generous and voluble man, given to broadly emotionally expressive gestures and acts of kindness and loyalty. In 1929, he exhibited an example of this loyalty and fellow-feeling when he appeared in court to fight what the wrongful commitment of his friend, writer and sculptor Alfred Dreyfuss, who appeared to have been a victim of an illicit attempt to block an inheritance. The Greenwich Village chronicler Charles Norman described the bone-crushing hugs that Margules would routinely bestow on his friends and acquaintances, and speaks of the "persuasive theatricality" that Margules seemed to have inherited from his actor parents. Norman also wrote about Margules' routine acts of kindness, taking in homeless artists, constantly feeding his friends and providing the salvatory loan where needed. Norman also notes that Margules was blessed with a loud and good voice, and was apt to sing an operatic air without provocation. The writer and television personality Alexander King said I think the outstanding characteristics of my friend's personality are affirmation, emphasis, and overemphasis. He chooses to express himself predominantly in superlatives and the gestures which accompany his utterances are sometimes dangerous to life and limb. Of the bystanders, I mean. King also spoke with affectionate amusement about Margules' pride in his cooking, speaking of how "if he should ever invite you to dinner, he may serve you a hamburger with onions, in his kitchen-living room, with such an air of gastronomic protocol, such mysterious hints and ogliing innuendoes, as if César Ritz and Brillat-Savarin had sneaked out, only a moment before, with his secret recipe in their pockets." Margules was such a memorable New York personality that comic book writer Alvin Schwartz imagined him at the Sixth Avenue Cafeteria in a risible yet poignant debate with Clark Kent about whether Superman had the ability to stop Hitler. Margules' entrenchment in the Greenwich Village milieu can be seen in a photograph from Fred McDarrah's "Beat Generation Album" of a January 13, 1961 writers' and poets' meeting to discuss "The Funeral of the Beat Generation", in Robert Cordier [fr]'s railroad flat at 85 Christopher Street. 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By Joyce Treiman
Located in Surfside, FL
Joyce Treiman Ink on paper, framed under glass; signed in pencil lower right; Dimensions: 16 1/2 x 13 3/4 inches; 18 3/4 x 14 3/4 inches frame. Joyce Wahl Treiman was an American painter, printmaker, sculptor and teacher. Her work ranged from "the impishly perverse and humorously paradoxical to the brilliant and profound." She was known as an excellent draftsperson throughout her career. She made several trips to Europe to study the old masters, and the human figure is central in her work. In her later paintings she is known to have inserted self-portraits. She attended Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri, and then studied at the State University of Iowa (today the University of Iowa) under the influential painter Philip Guston. During World War II she worked as a commercial artist but resigned when she began to have success with exhibitions of her work in Chicago and New York. In 1945 she married Kenneth Treiman, and son Donald, now an Architect, was born in 1950. The Treimans, along with Rene and Rose Wahl, moved to Los Angeles in 1960. She was in an exhibit of Tamarind prints...
Category

Mid-20th Century American Modern Charles Elmer Harris Paintings

Materials

India Ink, Paper

Glassblowers WPA American Scene Mid- 20th Century Modern Figurative Workers 1932
By Harry Gottlieb
Located in New York, NY
Glassblowers WPA American Scene Mid- 20th Century Modern Figurative Workers. Dated and signed "32 Harry Gottlieb" lower right. Sight: 13 1/8" H x 18 1/4" W. Harry Gottlieb, painter, screenprinter, educator, and lithographer, was born in Bucharest, Rumania. He emigrated to America in 1907, and his family settled in Minneapolis. From 1915 to 1917, Gottlieb attended the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. After a short stint as an illustrator for the U.S. Navy, Gottlieb moved to New York City; he became a scenic and costume designer for Eugene O"Neill's Provincetown Theater Group. He also studied at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts and the National Academy of Design. He was one of America's first Social Realist painters, influenced by that Robert Henri-led movement in New York City where Gottlieb settled in 1918. He was also a pioneer in screen printing, which he learned while working for the WPA. He married Eugenie Gershoy, and the couple joined the artist colony at Woodstock, New York. He lectured widely on art education. In 1923, Gottlieb settled in Woodstock, New York and in 1931, spent a a year abroad studying under a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1935, he joined the Federal Art Project...
Category

1930s American Modern Charles Elmer Harris Paintings

Materials

Paper, Gouache

1950s "Curled Up Cubist" MidCentury Figurative Gouache University of Paris
By Donald Stacy
Located in Arp, TX
Donald Stacy "Curled Up Cubist c.1950s Gouache on paper 24" x 18" unframed Unsigned Came from artist's estate Donald Stacy (1925-2011) New Jersey Studied: Newark School of Fine Art The Art Students League Pratt Graphic Arts Center University of Paris 1953-54 University of Aix-en-Provence 1954-55 Faculty: Art Department of the New School Museum of Modern Art School of Visual Arts Stacy Studio Workshop Exhibitions: Grand Central Moderns George Wittenborn The New School Print Exhibitions, Chicago University of Oklahoma Honolulu Museum Monclair Museum Wisconsin State College Louisiana Art Commission Philadelphia...
Category

Mid-20th Century American Modern Charles Elmer Harris Paintings

Materials

Paper, Gouache

Charles Elmer Harris paintings for sale on 1stDibs.

Find a wide variety of authentic Charles Elmer Harris paintings available for sale on 1stDibs. You can also browse by medium to find art by Charles Elmer Harris in paint, watercolor, india ink and more. Much of the original work by this artist or collective was created during the 20th century and is mostly associated with the modern style. Not every interior allows for large Charles Elmer Harris paintings, so small editions measuring 10 inches across are available. Customers who are interested in this artist might also find the work of William Harnden, Alfred Wands, and Tarmo Pasto. Charles Elmer Harris paintings prices can differ depending upon medium, time period and other attributes. On 1stDibs, the price for these items starts at $1,800 and tops out at $2,400, while the average work can sell for $1,800.

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