Michael Alford Art

La Chapelle de la Protection in Cagnes, circa 1925 Oil on panel, signed with the monogram lower left 27 x 34.5 cm Bibliography: The Painters of Cagnes, exhibition catalogue, Château-Musée Grimaldi, 2011, p.62 Paul Leduc...

Clown with Bouquet - Acrylic and Ink on Cardstock Colorful portrait of a clown holding a bouquet of flowers by Jassen Marek (20th Century). A sad clown in a suit with a straw hat ho...

Pair of two vintage portraits of Native American figures, one older and one younger, in profile with braids and headdresses by Victor S. ...

Signed figurative oil on board circa 1890 by French Nabis school painter Edouard Vuillard. The work depicts two seated ladies dressed in black with grey pinafores enjoying coffee together. Illustrated in the Catalogue Raisonne of Edouard Vuillard by Antoine Salomon and Guy Cogeval - Volume I, Page 229 - Reference IV-7 This striking work dates to between 1890 and 1891 which was without doubt Vuillard’s greatest decade as an artist. At this time the painter was working with the group of artist known as "Les Nabis" which included Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Paul Ranson, Ker-Xavier Roussel, Félix Vallotton, Paul Sérusier and Auguste Cazalis. The group played a large part in the transition from impressionism and academic art to abstract art, symbolism and the other early movements of modernism. They believed that a work of art was not a depiction of nature, but a synthesis of metaphors and symbols created by the artist. Signature: Signed lower right Dimensions: Framed: 19.25"x20.25" Unframed: 9.25"x10.25" Provenance: Renou et Poyet - Paris Roland, Browse & Delbanco - London (labels verso) c. 1955 The collection of Sir Alec Guinness Galerie Jan Krugier, Geneva - 1972 Nichido Gallery - Tokyo 1972 Private collection - Japan Christie's London - Impressionist & Modern Art - June 2016 Édouard Vuillard attended the Lycée Condorcet in Paris, where he made friends with Maurice Denis, Lugné-Poe, and Ker-Xavier Roussel, later his brother-in-law. He studied in Maillart’s studio; for six weeks came under the tutelage of Jean-Léon Gérôme at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris; and later under William Bouguereau and Robert at the Académie Julian, where he became closely linked with the Nabis group (from the Hebrew word for ‘prophet’). He met Marcel Proust in 1902. From 1908, he taught at the Académie Ranson. In 1937, he was elected member of the Institute. At first, Vuillard painted small subjects, disciplined and proficient, qualities for which the prestigious École Française was famous. His earliest still-lifes (1888) are astonishing in their decisiveness and subtlety. His empathy for the object had already compelled him to soften its appearance; the object, which, by virtue of its bright or glossy presence, remained the nonego and the ‘thing represented’ for so many others. ‘Intimacy’ developed immediately between the painter and this modest environment; inhabiting it every day enabled him to celebrate its splendour, and it was to remain his favourite environment. But he was already alternating between small portraits and still-lifes, which gained recognition because of their natural qualities and dignity of tone: a rare combination in a beginner. About 1890, influenced indirectly by Paul Gauguin, all the certainties which the self-styled Nabis painters had contented themselves with suddenly collapsed. Everything was called into question again: both the linear layout of the picture and its colour scheme; the choice of subject and its material aspect; its manufacture and its purpose. Vuillard’s paintings at that time show surprising, bold innovations and an arbitrary power, which one would expect 15 or 20 years later at the height of the Fauvist period. The preoccupation with an internal geometry set them apart from earlier studies. From then on, the paintings were based on forms, lines, and colours. Vuillard made concessions. He produced a portrait or interior with its furniture and its wallpapers, in which the family inhabiting it, evolves. Treated with flat areas of colour and solid shades of ochres, reds, blues, and saffron yellow, without modulation, they seem to prefigure certain paintings by Henri Matisse and Roger de La Fresnaye. In 1891, Vuillard painted an Elegant Lady, a silhouette seen from the back; a long vertical shape starting from the hair decorated with brown feathers; there is a kind of pink cloak, the tight and never-ending black skirt, erect in front of a half-open, bright orange door in a green wall, from where the light of another vertical shape emerges, which is bright yellow, and is reflected in red on the parquet at the feet of the elegant lady. This painting meets his concerns about the actual moment of creating ‘harmonies corresponding to our feeling’, and by virtue of its almost geometric structure, its drawing entirely free of detail, its light effects and colour harmonies, very much prefigures aspects of the future Abstraction movement and is oddly reminiscent of the final period of Nicolas de Staël. All too often, Vuillard is only admired in his role as the harmonist, the serene contemplator who combines an exquisite sense of nuance, rhythms, and values with the most acute observation. These singular investigations, these three-dimensional meditations including a table, a folding metal cot...

David Grossman's (US based) "Evening View to the South West" is an original, handmade oil painting that depicts a wide open plain of the West with fields of...

Enrique Montserrat Foj (1935-2022) - Girl playing the flute - Oil Oil on canvas glued to cardboard. Oil measures 46x38 cm. Frameless. Romantic cartoonist, especially for the foreign market, and also a gymnast. Cartoonist linked to Editorial Bruguera and its agency Creaciones Editoriales. She got her start drawing girls' or adventure comics in Stories and the Sissi Graphic Novel Supplement. Much of her work from the 1960s was aimed at the European market for young women's magazines through the Selecciones Ilustradas agency. Anecdotally, he collaborated with Marvel Comics, drawing a romantic comic based on a script by Stan Lee for the title My Love (later republished in Our Love Story), credited there as Enrique Monserratt. He retired from comics in the 1980s to focus on painting. He was also an Olympic gymnast, a member of the Barcelona Gymnastics Center and the Barcino Tennis Club. He was champion of Spain in the third category (1955) and third in the Spanish Artistic Gymnastics Championships (1961). He participated in the Mediterranean Games (1959) and in the Rome Olympic...

Ron Hick's (US based) "Axiomatic Appeal" is an original, handmade oil painting that depicts an impasto rendering of a male figure with dark hair and an abstracted background. Ron Hi...

Mid-Century Modern portrait of a man by California artist Genevieve Rogers (American, 1904-1984). The abstracted background has texture created with d...

Joan Vives Maristany (XX) - Boat ride - Oil on panel Oil measures 46x28 cm. Frameless.

Suchitra Bhosle's "Rhythmic Silk" is an original, handmade oil painting that depicts a dark-haired woman on a red chair with a red silk top and flowing white skirt. About the Artis...

Mark Andrew Bailey's "Bad Hombre XXXII" is an original, handmade oil painting that depicts an impressionistic, monochrome portrait of an old western cowboy or Vaquero (Mexican Cowboy...

Signed impressionist figurative oil on board circa 1940 by Russian painter Constantin Terechkovitch. The piece depicts a portrait of a lady in a dress and sun hat undressing in a wooded area beside a lake. The red of the dress contrasts beautifully against the deep blue of the water. Signature: Signed lower right Dimensions: Framed: 23.5"x15.5" Unframed: 18.5"x10.5" Provenance: Private French collection - Angers Konstantin Tereshkovich went to school in Moscow, where his family had moved in 1907. In 1917 he attended classes briefly at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. In 1920, after the revolution and civil war, during which he may have served as a Red soldier, he made his way to Paris, where, since his adolescence, he had always dreamed of being a painter in the city's vibrant artistic climate. To welcome him in Paris were Larionov (this was the time of the Ballets Russes) and Soutine, who were full of the experience of living along with Chagall, Modigliani and many others in La Ruche, the famous rotunda built for the Paris Exposition and later used for artists' studios. Making a living as best he could, Tereshkovich went to draw at the Académie de la Grande-Chaumière. He joined the Montparnasse circle of Kisling, Kremen and Lanskoy and later that of Roland Oudot, Maurice Brianchon and Raymond Legueult. Later they went on to form Réalité Poétique (Poetic Reality), a spontaneous group of painters that only became formalised in 1948. Tereshkovich joined the French Foreign Legion in 1939 but was demobilised in 1940. In 1944 he fled with his family to Avallon, where he had often painted. From 1950 he lived and worked in Menton, travelling, either in search of new subject matter or for pleasure, and once every four years went to the Olympic Games, to indulge his taste for sport. When Tereshkovich arrived in Paris he was overwhelmed by it, at first letting himself simply be carried away like a tourist, by shows like the French Can-Can, whose young dancers he painted both on stage and backstage; these paintings brought him some success. In 1933, he designed sets and costumes for the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo. That year, he also married. His wife became his favourite model, and she was joined later by their two daughters, in countless family scenes that show his evident happiness down the years. He painted a wide variety of subjects, including Portrait of Frédéric Lefèvre, L'Espagnole, La Belle Danoise, and Avallon Town Crier, all of which were typical of his style. He also painted still-lifes and landscapes, such as Church near Avallon and Landscape at Villeneuve, and many horse racing scenes (he was a great racing enthusiast). In addition, he also produced many lithographs, some of which were illustrations for works by Colette or Chekhov, as well as designs for ceramics and tapestries. In his landscapes of the outskirts of Paris and the nearby countryside he would seize on a sudden intense ray of light piercing the mists on the Seine and turn it into something quite personal. During his travels, he went in search of ever more distant landscapes, both in France and beyond. Over the years, he also painted many portraits of his painter friends and others whom he met. Some of these portraits are entirely predictable, such as that of Bonnard, for whom he had nothing but admiration, but some of his other subjects are more surprising. These include: Soutine, Bonnard, Matisse, Utrillo, Vlaminck, Dunoyer de Segonzac, Rouault, Derain, Friesz, Van Dongen and Braque. Tereshkovich exhibited in various group exhibitions, including: from 1925 at the Salon d'Automne, Paris; in 1929, in Moscow, Tretyakov Gallery, along with Chagall, Soutine, Zadkine and Puni (the exhibition of Russian artists working in France). He went on to show work in many exhibitions around the world, such as: 1951, 1st Menton Biennale, where he won the Grand Prix; 1954 to 1958, 1963, the École de Paris exhibition at the Galerie Charpentier; regularly at the Salon des Peintres Témoins de leur Temps; 1972 Galerie des Granges, Geneva, Les Maîtres de la Réalité Poétique; and 2003, Musée de Montmartre, Paris, A Russian Summer in Montmartre: St Petersburg Artists in Paris in the Early 20th Century. He also showed work in solo exhibitions: 1927 Paris, Galerie Ch. Aug. Girard; 1934 Geneva, Musée de l'Athénée; 1937 Chicago, New York; 1938 Paris, Galerie de l'Élysée; 1942 Paris, Galerie Pétridès; 1946 Paris, Galerie Dubourg; 1948, 1951 Paris, Galerie Bernier; 1953 Paris, Galerie Pétridès, and Nice, Galerie Matarasso (watercolours and lithographs); 1957 Paris...