Irving Amen Art

Henry Gasser American Scene Realism Regionalism Mid-20th Century Modern WPA Henry Martin Gasser (1909-1981) "Village in Snow" Oil on canvas laid on artist's board, c. 1930s 28 x 22...

Etching on cream wove paper. 6 5/16 x 3 3/4 inches (159 x 94 mm), full margin. Signed in pencil lower center margin, from the edition of 111. A well inked impression with a minor cre...

Sunflower, no. 10 from the third installment of Das Werk Gustav Klimts Created during his residency in Litzlberg on Attersee, where Klimt and the Floge family summered from 1900-1907, Klimt explores nature’s transcendental qualities. His single sunflower is human-like, it’s golden halo is like a ring of sun-kissed hair surrounding a bald pate. It’s known that at the same time Klimt was creating this image, he was also at work on a photo essay about the Floge sisters’ clothing from their fashion salon. Their fashion house was best known for its “reform dresses” which featured loose-fitting long robes which billowed at the arms and torso. Viewed with this in mind, it is not a hard leap to imagine the lone sunflower as a self-portrait from reverse. Klimt’s balding head crowned in a golden corona forms the apex of a pyramidal flowing gown of foliage and flowers. By orienting the anthropomorphic flower at the garden’s central foreground and adorning it with repetitive motifs of round flowers of varying sizes, Klimt’s sunflower...

Sangre de Christos is a hand-pulled, limited edition serigraph, no. 39 / 260 and is signed in pencil by the artist. Published by Aspen Mountain Graphic...

A fantastic WPA-era painting of a Georgia moonshiner by famed Italian-American artist Athos Menaboni (1895-1990). This work depicts an older man sporting a brown hat, brown jacket, ...

Chama Canyon is a limited edition hand-pulled serigraph no. 225 /260 in excellent condition. It is signed in pencil and published by Aspen Mountain Graphics. sheet size 14 x 18 image 12 x 16 For American artist William Hook ( b. 1948- ) art was a central focus in his family home and he began his career in art at an early age.. He studied at several prestigious art schools in the US and abroad. His work has been featured in magazines such as Southwest Art, Art of the West, U. S. Art, American Artist and Focus Santa Fe. The book… Leading the West… by Donald Hagerty features William Hook as one of the most notable influences on the western art scene. Publishers Harper-Collins and North Light have included his work in numerous books written about the contemporary art process in Europe and America. Hook’s paintings can be found in the permanent collections of the Denver Art Museum, the Tucson Art Museum, the University of New Mexico, the FORBES Museum, NYC, and the Genesee Museum, NY as well as in many corporate and private collections. His work has also been featured in prints for the New Mexico Symphony, Music from Angel Fire...

NORBERTINE VON BRESSLERN-ROTH (1891 1978) KAMPF (BATTLE - LOBSTER and OCTOPUS) c. 1928 Color linoleum cut Signed in pencil. Image 8 5/8 x 8 11/16” In excellent condition and full ...

DOEL REED (1894 - 1958) HARVESTERS, c. 1954 Aquatint in sepia. Signed and numbered in pencil, Image 11 1/2 x 17 ¾". Sheet with deckle edges 13 ¾ x19 3/8”. In good condition save ...

Magda Watts (Israeli, b. 1928) Handmade Folk Art Sculpture Old Folks with a newspaper Hand signed to underside, Dimensions: 12"h x 14.5" l x 7.5"d. Magda Watts, Holocaust survivor, dollmaker She grew up in the Hungarian town of Nyiregyhaza, which the war reached in 1944. Jews were herded into a ghetto, where they remained for several weeks. Magda began making dolls while being held in the concentration camp at Auschwitz, Poland in 1944. Her creativity and imagination helped her to survive the horrors of the holocaust and led to an inspirational career in art and visual storytelling. A resident of Eilat, Israel, she is an internationally known artist. Her intricate soft fabric and textile dolls and panoramas bring the people of the shtetl back to life. She has recreated part of the Jewish community of her native Hungary in order that it might never be forgotten. A documentary was made on her life, “Liberation of the Spirit: The Journey of Magda Watts”. The film opens with a close-up of Watts' hands. She is shaping a doll head, pressing creases with a wooden tool into pliable sculpting resin that later will be hardened by baking. With a few nicks and strokes, human features begin to emerge from the shapeless lump. "I don't know why I am making old people," she says. "It is coming out from me. I can't order my hand what to do." She calls her dolls "small human beings. When you see them in half-dark, you see them dancing, speaking, like they are in life." She makes the dolls in batches of body parts, and also makes most of the props that go with them: miniature furniture, musical instruments, tiny leather shoes with wax soles, even treadle sewing machines. Watts survived the Auschwitz death factory, then the labor camp at Nuremberg. It was there that she created the ancestors of the folk-art masterpieces she now crafts, such artful and appealing rag dolls that Nazi guards would swap extra bread for them. That, she says, "was life" for her and her sister Shari, enough to keep them alive. The doll scene is typical of her work: lifelike yet cartoonish figures set in evocative tableaux. She makes them in her workshop in Israel. Starting at $1,500, Watts' soft dolls are sold only in Israel, but collected worldwide. She once made a panorama of the Jewish people's 5,000-year history for an Israel museum, and a violinist doll for concert great Isaac Stern. The dolls are tailors, jewelers, klezmer musicians, seamstresses, musicians, students, rabbis, a cast of characters from the shtetl of a bygone Europe and from small corners of the modern Jewish world. Like Frank Meisler but in fabric and cloth. They laugh and brood, gossip and smoke, fiddle and play cards. Infused, as if by some spiritual alchemy, with the full range of human emotion, they furrow their aging brows in worry and concentration. Soulful eyes gaze both outward and inward. Here and there, figures from her life emerge. "When I make the seamstress, I am thinking of my aunt. She had a little bit of a hunchback. She had a Singer machine and many drawers, with every one something beautiful inside." A careful observer can spot visual jokes in her work. "I'm making the Bible, and (a museum panorama character) is sitting on the camel with a cigarette in his hand. Nobody sees it, but I know it. I made it for myself. I have to make something that makes me laugh." From oven-baked clay and Styrofoam, she’s re-creating her past: rabbis, gossipy ladies, peddlers, jewelers, tailors, old couples and fish vendors from her small village in central Hungary. Nearly all perished during the Holocaust. Most were sent to the gas chambers in 1944 when Nazis overran her country, including some in Watts’ family. Her lifelike creations have been displayed – and sold – around the world. Her creations emerge from the back of her memory. She remembers a gentler Hungary, where Jewish communities thrived before the Nazis came. On one doll’s baked clay face, she paints the knotted frown of a rabbi concentrating on a Torah passage. Another doll grows into a man hawking fish. Women play cards. A stern schoolmaster presides over a class. “They love to love,” she says. She has exhibited with Malcah Zeldis. Her naive, whimsical images contain a number of storytelling devices and attempt to convey a narrative. She is also fond of Mea Shearim...

KATHE KOLLWITZ (German 1867 -1945) ENDE, (Klipstein 37 ) Etching and aquatint with the von de Becke blind stamp in the lower right. Printed around 1945. Unsigned posthumous impres...

Neon Lighting WPA Mid 20th Century Social Realism American Scene Modern Figures MAURICE BECKER (1889-1975) 'Neon Lighting 17 1/4 x 13 3/4 inches Oil on masonite Signed, dated 1936 and titled on verso BIO Maurice Becker, painter, political cartoonist and social reformer, was born in 1889 either in Gorky or Niznij Novgorod, in Russia. His family came to the United States in 1892, to New York City. After high school, Becker worked in a clothing factory. He studied with Ash Can School artist Robert Henri in 1908, and exhibited in the famous 1913 Armory Show in New York City when he was only twenty-four years of age. At the Armory show, Becker showed a drawing of a dog's head...

William Lester Stevens Winter Landscape Signed lower right Oil on canvas 32 x 36 inches Born on June 15, 1888, in Rockport, Massachusetts, Stevens displayed his artistic abilities ...

SALE ONE WEEK ONLY “Santa Cruz de las Huertas Jalisco” is a whimsical, charming and colorfully ceramic rendition painted blue and red of a local bus that traversed the town where the artist Candelario Medrano...

SALE ONE WEEK ONLY "El Tren" is a whimsical and playful rendition of a train. It is beautifully glazed in various colors. This particular ceramic was from the collection of Jane and Richard Knight’s Estate. Jane Knight was a famous fiber and textile artist. Richard was a photographer who worked for Eliel Saarinen and Alexander Girard. The Knights and Girard became close friends and it was Girard who gifted “Santa Cruz De Las Huertas Jalisco” to the Knights. Alexander Girard left his personal collection to the Museum of International Folk Art, Santa Fe, NM. The Girards eventually amassed a collection of more than 106,000 objects from across the globe. Their 1978 gift of this collection to the Museum of International Folk art quintupled the size of their collection and prompted the construction of a new wing, which opened in 1982 and houses a mere 10% of the Girard Collection in the permanent exhibition Multiple Visions: A Common Bond, which was designed by Alexander Girard himself. This collection includes numerous multiples and is notable for its great breadth, including traditional arts, popular arts, and paper ephemera. “I believe we should preserve this evidence of the past, not as a pattern for sentimental imitation,” Girard once said, “but as nourishment for the creative spirit of the present.” Indeed, folk art was an important inspiration for Girard’s design work. The renowned Candelario Medrano...

An exceptional, large, early work by American artist Dorothy Eisner (1906-1984). This painting was recently exhibited at Gracie Mansion in 2019 as part of “She Persists” - a show de...