David Fredenthal Drawings and Watercolor Paintings

You are viewing a modernist American watercolor painting by Robert Noel Blair. Robert Noel Blair (American, 1912-2003) was an American artist, painter, sculptor, printmaker and te...

Robert Noel Blair (American, 1912-2003) was an American artist, painter, sculptor, printmaker and teacher. He is best known for his rural life & desert landscapes and World War II sc...

Children, illustrations, tales Marina Evgenevna USPENSKAYA (Moscow, 1925 – 2007) Marina Evgenevna Uspenskaya was born in Moscow. She graduated from the 1905 Art College, where she ...

This appears to be dated 1927. It came in with a piece dated 1929. A very early, rare work. Framed 22.5 x 18. Image 14.5 x 9 A great New York city street scene with an El train (elevated subway line) and architectural renderings of buildings. This is a wonderful piece by one of America's most treasured artists, Chaim Gross. Throughout his lifetime Gross has gone through tragedy and a real test of faith however, he has the unique ability to focus and direct his expression to the most joyful and beautiful works of art, such as the present lot. For more than sixty years Chaim Gross's art has expressed optimistic, affirming themes. His acrobats, cyclists, and mothers and children convey joyfulness, exuberance, love, and intimacy. This aspect of his work remained consistent with his Hasidic heritage, which teaches that "only in his childlike happiness is man nearest to God." He often used his creative abilities to explore and experiment with media. In his artwork he retains an optimistic philosophy, even when facing somber issues such as war, depression, and the Holocaust. Chaim Gross (March 17, 1904 – May 5, 1991) was an American 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. 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...

If you are interested in African American Art and in Women in the Arts, I will certainly not need to introduce Lois Mailou Jones (1905-1988). Often associated with the Harlem Renaiss...

This late 19th-century watercolour by Scottish artist George H Hay RSA (1831-1912) depicts four young ladies, wearing outfits synonymous with the 1820s, spinning wool within a simple...

A delightful composition by this master watercolourist. William Payne (1760-1830) Figures and cattle by a river Watercolour 7¾ inches, circular, unframed 15 x 14½ inches with the fr...

Vibrant figurative seascape of a beach in Mazatlan, Mexico with several figures and a catamaran reflecting beautifully in the shallow water by William A. Corbett (American. 1914-1960). Titled "Beach- Mazatlan" on verso. Signed "William Corbett" in lower left corner. Presented in a simple wood frame, with a double mat of off-white silk and royal blue with plexiglass. Image size: 22”H x 14.75”L William A. Corbett began drawing at an early age. He constructed signs and displays for theaters and nightclubs around Pittsburg. He studied art with Vincent Nesbert at the Pittsburg Art Institute and with Robert Gwathmoy, Roy Hilton, and Robert Laper at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. He also studied painting and sculpture at the Louisville Art Center. Corbett was in the Army Engineers at Fort Knox, Kentucky where he studied, practiced, and had exhibits with army artists there from 1941-1943. He was very much interested in materials and technique, content and style in painting. His favorite Artists were El Greco, Leonardo, Rembrandt, Renoir, Burchfield, and Andrew Wyeth, Jr. He studied two years at Boston museum School with Karl Zerbe, Daivid Aronson and others. He later designed and did art work for General Outdoor Advertising Co. In 1943, he married Ruth Osborne of Louisville and they had one son, Michael. In 1951 he moved to Fort Lauderdale, Florida with his family. Exhibitions: Army Art Show--- 1st Prize in Landscape, 1942 Kentucky & southern Indiana Exhibition-- Honorable mentions for Fisherman's Curse 1949, Don Q...

Eleanor Park Custis painted scenes as varied as the artist's travels: from her hometown of Washington, D.C., to the coastal towns of New England; from the prosperous fishing villages of Brittany, to Venice and the mountain villages and lakes of northern Italy. While Custis's subjects are diverse, her style is consistent and distinctive throughout this body of work. Her use of flat areas of color delineated by dark contours is reminiscent of the aesthetics of woodblock printing. Like many artists of the day, she was profoundly influenced by Japanese woodblock prints, and her adaptation of the aesthetic by 1924 led to her most productive artistic period. Eleanor Custis hailed from a socially prominent Washington, D.C., family. She was distantly related to Martha Custis Washington, America's first First Lady. Custis began three years of formal art training in the autumn of 1915 at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, and was guided and inspired by Impressionist artist Edmund C. Tarbell, one of the Ten American Painters, who became the Corcoran School's principal in 1918. Custis exhibited widely in many of the Washington art societies and clubs for much of her career. She was also a frequent exhibitor at the Grand Central Art Galleries in New York City; her last one-woman show there was in April 1945. Custis's mature style emerged in scenes of the streets, wharves, and drydocks of seacoast villages from Maine to Massachusetts, which she visited during the summers of 1924 and 1925. She was working in Gloucester, Massachusetts in August 1924, and painted several gouaches of the town's wharves and winding streets, including In Gloucester Harbor and At the Drydock, Gloucester. During her stay, Custis may have met Jane Peterson or at least must have seen her work, the best of which was executed in Gloucester during the preceding ten years. The similarity between their styles is unmistakable, but, while it may be tempting to suggest that Custis was influenced by Peterson during her summer in Gloucester, the connection between their work is probably more a case of shared aesthetics and common European influences. Custis expanded her subject repertoire with three trips to Europe between 1926 and 1929, and was inspired by the Old World charm of Holland, northern France, Switzerland, and Italy, leading to such works as New Kirk, Delft, Holland, Market Day in Quimper, At the Foot of the Matterhorn, and The Town Square, Varenna. A Mediterranean cruise in 1934 introduced her to the Near East, and the bustling, colorful streets and bazaars of Cairo, captured in works like A Street in Cairo, Egypt and A Moroccan Jug...

Francis Chapin was one of the most celebrated painters in Chicago during his lifetime. When he was a young art student, Valley House founder, Donald Vogel, painted with "Chape" on th...

Scenography is an original watercolor drawing on cream-colored paper applied on a white Passepartout, realized by The French artist Auguste Leroux ( Par...

Interior Design is a beautiful drawing on paper, realized in 1948 by the French architect  Victor Courtray (1897-1971). Ink and watercolor on paper. Hand-signed and dated on the low...