James Coignard Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

'Midcentury Biomorphic Abstract', NYMoMA, Paris, XXXII Venice Biennale, MALI, Lima, Peru Signed, lower right, 'E.R. Larrain' for Emilio Rodríguez Larraín (Peruvian, 1928-2015), and inscribed 'Roma, Nov 1963, Enero 1964'. (Rome, Nov 1963-January 1964). Verso titled, "L'Homme C'est Sujet à Errer" (Man Tends to Wander), and bearing the artist's self-portrait in india ink and wash. Exhibited: XXXII Venice Biennale, 1964. (original exhibition label verso) Previously with Staempfli Galleries, New York. This painting is registered in the Archives of American Art as 'Staempfli Gallery, inventory #775'. A monumental and historically distinguished work by this groundbreaking Peruvian Modernist who drew inspiration from Peruvian indigenous and pre-colonial culture. The paintings of Emilio Rodríguez Larraín are held in the permanent collections of museums worldwide including the Musée de la Ville de Paris, Peru's Museo de Arte de Lima and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. This painting was selected by the Peruvian Government for exhibition at the XXXII Venice Biennale in 1964 and is the largest single recorded work by the artist. Emilio Rodríguez Larraín received his Bachelors of Architecture in 1949 from Peru's Universidad Nacional de Ingeniería and held his first solo exhibition in Lima after visiting Europe in 1950. In 1951, he returned to Europe in the company of the artists Alfredo Ruiz Rosas and Joaquín Roca Rey...

Simon Samsonian (1912 - 2003) Colorful Geometric Abstraction, 1981 Oil on paper 16 x 22 inches Signed and dated lower right Provenance: Estate of the artist This survivor of the Armenian genocide wound up in a Cairo orphanage in 1927. He rose to fame as one of Egypt’s great modernists, but after moving to Long Island late in life he withdrew into anonymity. Now his compelling story is being told. Art historians are finally beginning to realize that the power of abstraction in its early years was a zeitgeist not limited to the major European centers of the avant-garde — Paris, Munich, and Moscow — but one that quickly rippled to major cities throughout the world. Within a few decades that original shock of a new vision had inspired thousands of artists from different cultures — particularly those the Middle East — whose translations were not slavish imitations of works by seminal figures like Picasso, Braque, Malevich, and Kandinsky but creative variants colored by their respective cultures. This essay focuses on an extraordinary Armenian artist, his harrowing survival of the genocide, his rise to fame in Cairo, and his creation of a unique style of abstraction. Art historians have typically formed a chorus that teaches the history of abstraction like this: Just before and during the World War I era, several avant-garde artists emerged to create shockingly different new forms by which artists could express themselves. In Paris, Picasso and Braque broke out with cubism, quickly followed by Mondrian. In Moscow, Malevich created Suprematism, the ultimate hard-edge geometric abstraction. And in Munich, Kandinsky emerged as the father of Abstract Expressionism. Within these few short years a zeitgeist was sensed throughout the art world. American pioneers, too — particularly Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Morgan Russell — felt this explosive freedom of expression. When Europe was recovering after World War I it became clear that Paris would retain its title as capitol of the art world, lasting through the Roaring Twenties and even through the Great Depression. But the end of World War II changed everything. A parallel war had been won by a group of irascible young Abstract Expressionists in New York — led by Pollock, Rothko, DeKooning, and Kline. No sooner had Paris been liberated from the Germans than Picasso, Matisse, Breton, and Duchamp surrendered to the Americans. From that point on New York would be the epicenter of the art world. But a lens that focuses myopically on the war between the avant-garde of Paris and New York misses the wider narrative of multiple aesthetic modernities that developed in the several decades following World War I. For Armenian artists the matter is even more complex owing to the genocide of 1915 where more than 1.5 million people — seventy-five percent of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire — were massacred. Those not shot on the spot were sent on death marches through the Mesopotamian desert without food or water. Frequently, the marchers were stripped and forced to walk naked under the scorching sun until they dropped dead. As a child Samsonian witnessed the murder of his parents and most of the members of his family. Soon thereafter, his older sister, Anahid, quickly shepherded him into a line of children being rescued by Greek nuns. But they became separated and he lost her, too. He was sent to a Greek orphanage in Smyrna (now Izmir), on Turkey’s west coast. Because he only knew his first name, the orphanage gave him a last name based on the place where they found him — Samsun — a major port on Turkey’s north coast on the Black Sea. His birth date was unknown, too. According to Samsonian’s vague recollections he assumed he was about three or four years old at the onset of the genocide, which would place his birth year in 1911 or 1912. In 1922, when Samsonian was about 10, the Turks ended their war with the Greeks by putting Smyrna to the torch in what has been called the “Catastrophe of Smyrna.” Once again, the child was on the run, escaping the fire and slaughter. He found temporary refuge in Constantinople, but within a year that major port would fall to the Turks, too, and become renamed as Istanbul. This time, Samsonian was whisked away to an orphanage in Greece founded by the American charity, Near East Relief — which is credited with saving so many Armenian orphans that the American historian Howard M. Sachar said it “quite literally kept an entire nation alive. Any understanding of Samsonian’s approach to modernism requires careful consideration of the impact of his early years because his art is inseparable from the anguish he experienced. In 1927, when he was a teenager, he was transferred to Cairo, Egypt, then a cosmopolitan city hosting a sizable portion of the Armenian diaspora. There he lived with thirty-two other children on the top floor of the Kalousdian Armenian School. Upon graduating in 1932 he won a scholarship to attend the Leonardo da Vinci Art Institute — an Italian art school in Cairo — where he won first prize in final examinations among one hundred students. He found work with an Armenian lithographic printer and he returned to the Kalousdian Armenian School to teach drawing. In 1939 he married one of his students, Lucy Guendimian. The Cairo in which Samsonian matured as an artist was home to many prominent art collectors after World War I. In this receptive environment Samsonian exhibited widely and won many awards. Beginning in 1937 and for the next thirty years he exhibited annually at the prestigious Le Salon du Caire hosted by the Société les Amis de l’Art (founded in 1921). After World War II he hit his stride as a modernist in Cairo, counting among his peers other artists of the Armenian diaspora such as Onnig Avedissian, Achod Zorian, Gregoire Meguerdichian, Hagop Hagopian...

Terrell James Field Study #749, 2020 Oil on vellum 20 x 16 in (50.8 x 40.6 cm)

Nam June Paik Untitled, Plate Six from Novecento, 1992 Mixed Media: Color offset lithograph with unique chalk pastel drawing 13 3/10 × 18 inches Hand signed, Edition 104/130 Pencil numbered 104/130, hand signed in pastel chalk on the front Edizioni Carte Segrete, Rome, Italy Excellent condition; held in matting which can be easily removed The matting measures 18" x 21" This was part of a series of works produced for the Nam June Paik retrospective at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, 1992, Nam June Paik: Arti Elletroniche. This is one of the editions which bears unique hand coloring with pastel chalk. A comparable work sold at auction in 2015 for US $12,583. (see details below): Nam June Paik Title Novecento Description Nam June PAI K Novecento 1930-1940, 1992 Pastel sur offset en couleurs, épreuve signée et numérotée 104/130 Edizioni Carte Segrete, Rome 23,5 x 39,5 cm EH Oeuvre réalisée a l'occasion de la rétrospective Paik au Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, 1992, Nam June Paik: Arti Elletroniche, cinema e Media Verso il XXI Secolo Medium pastel Year of Work 1992 Size Height 9.3 in.; Width 15.6 in. / Height 23.5 cm.; Width 39.5 cm. Misc. Signed Sale of Millon & Associés: Monday, June 22, 2015 [Lot 00090] Design Sold For 11,057 EUR Hammer (12,583 USD) Nam June Paik Biography Nam June Paik was born in 1932 in Seoul. He received a BA in aesthetics from the University of Tokyo in 1956 where he also studied music and art history. After graduating, he studied for a year with composer Thrasybulus Georgiades Georgiades at the University of Munich and for two years with composer Woflgang Fortner at the International Music College in Freiburg. He attended the International Summer Courses for New Music in Darmstadt in 1957, when he met Karlheinz Stockhausen, and in 1958, when he met John Cage. Cage, and through him Marcel Duchamp, had a significant influence on Paik as he became a major force in the avant-garde through performances. In Hommage à John Cage (1959), Paik employed audiotape and performance to attack traditional musical instrumentation and compositional practices, splicing together piano playing, screaming, bits of classical music, and sound effects. Realizing that taped sound was not enough, he decided to move into performance, first by introducing performative actions into his audio works. In 1961 Paik performed Simple, Zen for Head and Étude Platonique No. 3, in which he became a volatile figure, thrashing about in unexpected patterns and sudden movements to his signature soundtracks. In 1962 Paik participated in the Fluxus International Festival of the New Music in Weisbaden. Paik's first exhibition, entitled Exposition of Music - Electronic Television, in 1963 at Galerie Parnass at Wuppertal, launched his transition from composer and performance artist to the inventor of a new art form: an engagement with the material site of television as an instrument. In the exhibition, thirteen televisions lay on their backs and sides with their reception altered; for example, Zen for TV (1963) reduced the television picture to a horizontal line and Kuba TV (1963) shrank and expanded the image on the television set according to the changing volume. In 1964 Paik traveled to the US. He quickly settled in New York and became a leading innovator among an emerging generation of artists seeking new modes of artistic expression and distribution. That same year, Paik collaborated with Shuya Abe to create Robot K-456 (1964), a remote controlled robot that played audiotaped speeches by John F. Kennedy and defecated beans in Paik's Robot Opera (1964). In the interactive work Magnet TV (1965), Paik invited viewers to modify the television's output into swerving abstract lines through the movement of a magnet over the TV. In 1967 Paik and frequent collaborator Charlotte Moorman were arrested when Moorman performed Paik's Opera Sextronique (1967), a striptease as she played the cello at the Filmmakers' Cinematheque in New York. Paik's TV Bra for Living Sculpture (1969), which Moorman wore in performances, featured two television tubes...

Mark di Suvero Grass Power, 1979-2014 Mixed Media drawing: marker, ink and pencil on paper Hand titled, signed and inscribed to Nadine by Mark di Suvero Frame included: Floated and f...

Hans Hofmann Untitled, circa 1943 Signed lower right Oil and watercolor on paper 22 1/4 x 30 3/4 inches The only artist of the New York school to participate directly in European m...

Kim Fonder, SHIZEN SERIES V, Mixed Media on Handmade Paper with Plexi, 12.00 X 12.00 in, $600.00, Blue Abstract, contemporary, White, mixed media, fine art Kim Fonder loves texture ...

Interior design paintings. The artwork were done with oil, acrylic, ink and watercolor. The work are 11 by 14 inches in size, framed (black) with a styrene face on a mat board in whi...

JAY MILDER Untitled, ca. 1987 Gouache on Paper hand signed in pencil, lower left. Image is 9 square inches; framed it's 16 square inches Frame included: held in the original vintag...

William Fredericksen Untitled mid century modern geometric abstraction, 1958-1959 Watercolor and Gouache on Board Hand signed and dated on the front 12 4/5 × 11 7/10 inches Unframed ...

Oil on paper, signature Tom Bennett freedom of rich brushwork, warm colors

Tom Holland (b. 1936) Violet, 1971 Watercolor and Mixed Media on Paper. Hand Signed. Framed with Charles Cowles Gallery, Albright Knox Gallery and Baltimore Museum of Art labels. Han...