Emil Bisttram Still-life Drawings and Watercolors

(Note: This work is part of our exhibition Connected by Creativity: WPA Era Works from the Collection of Leata and Edward Beatty Rowan) Watercolor on paper, 12 x 9 ½ inches unframed sheet, 15 x 12 ½ inches framed, signed lower left About the Artist: Nan Watson...

A ca. 1938 graphite on paper, study of a classical drapery by notable Modernist artist Jan Matulka. The image is drawn on the back of a typewritten, folded sheet of stationery, from...

Best known as an impassioned supporter and avid collector of modern art, Earl Horter was also an artist himself. Largely self-taught, Horter was a highly skilled draftsman and engrav...

A ca. 1945, Cubist black & white graphite drawing of fruit by artist Illinois and Michigan artist Stanley Bielecky. Image size: 4" x 5". Archivally matted to: 13 1/4" x 16". Stanley Bielecky was an Indiana artist who painted the American scene, from the factories and workers around East Chicago to the bucolic settings of Mackinac Island...

White Poppies - Botanical Watercolor on Paper Detailed floral watercolor by Harry Federico (American, 1922-2022). Several white poppies ...

Though signed "Yolanda," the artist of this gouache and watercolor painting is unknown. The still life, contained and symmetrical, is dominated by the form of a pear. On either side,...

Joseph Stella was a visionary artist who painted what he saw, an idiosyncratic and individual experience of his time and place. Stella arrived in New York in 1896, part of a wave of ...

British-born, New Jersey-based, George Drittler was primarily know for landscapes. In this still life that expansive approach serves him well. Richly drawn, with pottery, books and a...

Silverpoint and crayon on paper 4 11/16 x 3 inches 11.9 x 7.6 cm Framed dimensions 8 1/8 x 9 7/8 inches Provenance The artist; By bequest to his nephew, Sergio Stella, 1946; By desc...

Joseph Stella was a visionary artist who painted what he saw, an idiosyncratic and individual experience of his time and place. Stella arrived in New York in 1896, part of a wave of Italian immigrants from poverty-stricken Southern Italy. But Stella was not a child of poverty. His father was a notary and respected citizen in Muro Locano, a small town in the southern Appenines. The five Stella brothers were all properly educated in Naples. Stella’s older brother, Antonio, was the first of the family to come to America. Antonio Stella trained as a physician in Italy, and was a successful and respected doctor in the Italian community centered in Greenwich Village. He sponsored and supported his younger brother, Joseph, first sending him to medical school in New York, then to study pharmacology, and then sustaining him through the early days of his artistic career. Antonio Stella specialized in the treatment of tuberculosis and was active in social reform circles. His connections were instrumental in Joseph Stella’s early commissions for illustrations in reform journals. Joseph Stella, from the beginning, was an outsider. He was of the Italian-American community, but did not share its overwhelming poverty and general lack of education. He went back to Italy on several occasions, but was no longer an Italian. His art incorporated many influences. At various times his work echoed the concerns and techniques of the so-called Ashcan School, of New York Dada, of Futurism and, of Cubism, among others. These are all legitimate influences, but Stella never totally committed himself to any group. He was a convivial, but ultimately solitary figure, with a lifelong mistrust of any authority external to his own personal mandate. He was in Europe during the time that Alfred Stieglitz established his 291 Gallery. When Stella returned he joined the international coterie of artists who gathered at the West Side apartment of the art patron Conrad Arensberg. It was here that Stella became close friends with Marcel Duchamp. Stella was nineteen when he arrived in America and studied in the early years of the century at the Art Students League, and with William Merritt Chase, under whose tutelage he received rigorous training as a draftsman. His love of line, and his mastery of its techniques, is apparent early in his career in the illustrations he made for various social reform journals. Stella, whose later work as a colorist is breathtakingly lush, never felt obliged to choose between line and color. He drew throughout his career, and unlike other modernists, whose work evolved inexorably to more and more abstract form, Stella freely reverted to earlier realist modes of representation whenever it suited him. This was because, in fact, his “realist” work was not “true to nature,” but true to Stella’s own unique interpretation. Stella began to draw flowers, vegetables, butterflies, and birds in 1919, after he had finished the Brooklyn Bridge series of paintings, which are probably his best-known works. These drawings of flora and fauna were initially coincidental with his fantastical, nostalgic and spiritual vision of his native Italy which he called Tree of My Life (Mr. and Mrs. Barney A. Ebsworth Foundation and Windsor, Inc., St. Louis, illus. in Barbara Haskell, Joseph Stella, exh. cat. [New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994], p. 111 no. 133). Two Wood Ducks...

In the 1950s and 60s Grambs worked on many commissions. This was probably for a cookbook. The dimensions are for the drawing. The sheet is somewhat larger, 7 x 6 1/2 inches.

Four pencil drawings, each with hand coloring in watercolor, each 6 3/4 x 10 inches (sheet) (172 x 254 mm), full margins. Each with inscriptions and notations by the artist in the up...