Michael L. Mason Art

Little Hall's Island. 1940. Etching and sandpaper ground. Giardina 199. 10 x 15. Edition 100. Little Hall's Island is located off the coast of Friendship. Maine. Signed and annotated 'imp' (imprimit) in pencil, indicating a proof printed Eby. Housed in a 16 x 20-inch archival mat. Eby was an Associate of the National Academy NA (1930); National Academy of Design (1934); Society of American Etchers; Chicago Society of Etchers; Philadelphia Society of Etchers; National Institute of Arts and Letters. Kerr...

A very good impression of this early color offset lithograph on white wove paper. Signed, dated and numbered 8/150 in felt-tip pen and black ink by Rauschenberg...

"Tree in Ranchitos II" (New Mexico) is a lithograph initialed lower right by artist Andrew Michael Dasburg (1887-1979) from 1975. Presented in a custom frame measuring 30 ½ x 36 ¼ inches. Image size is 16 ½ x 23 ¼ inches. About the Artist: Born France, 1887 Died New Mexico, 1979 Andrew Dasburg was born in Paris, but emigrated to New York City in 1892 with his mother. A childhood sickness left him lame, and his artistic propensities were first recognized by a teacher at the crippled children’s school. She enrolled him in the Art Students League in 1902. There he studied under Kenyon Cox, Frank Vincent Dumond, and Birge Harrison. Later, he began taking night classes from Robert Henri at the New York School of Art. Dasburg spent 1908-1910 in Paris, where he was introduced to the great impressionist painters Matisse and Cezanne. Inspired by the work of the European modernists, Dasburg returned to the United States, where he moved to Woodstock, New York. In Woodstock, he and his wife, Grace Mott Johnson, lived with Morgan Russell...

Artist: Alexander Calder (1898-1976) Title: Sky Swirl (from the Braniff International Airways Flying Colors Collection) Year: 1974 Medium: Lithograph on Arches paper Size: 20 x 26 inches Condition: Excellent Edition: 3,000, plus proofs Inscription: Signed and dated in the lithographic plate; embossed with Flying Colors Collection blindstamp lower right. Notes: Published by Braniff International Airways, Dallas, TX; printed at Atelier Fernand Mourlot, Paris. ABOUT THE FLYING COLORS COLLECTION: In 1972, Dallas based Braniff International Airways commissioned Alexander Calder to paint a full-size Douglas DC-8-62 airliner, dubbed a “flying canvas.” Models of the aircraft were sent to Calder at his studio in France in November of 1972, and work commenced. Braniff announced the Calder collaboration to the public on June 4, 1973. It was the first time in aviation history that an seminal fine artist had ever painted a aircraft to be used in regular airline service...

Artist: Alexander Calder (1898-1976) Title: Sky Bird (from the Braniff International Airways Flying Colors Collection) Year: 1974 Medium: Lith...

Artist: Alexander Calder (1898-1976) Title: Friendship (from the Braniff International Airways Flying Colors Collection) Year: 1974 Medium: Li...

Gregory Amenoff (Contemporary American abstract painter, b. 1948), Title: Haven, STATE II Lithograph, 1986 Edition 4/4 Printer Proof Image Size 21.5 x 30.75" Gregory Amenoff is a...

ALEXANDER CALDER (1898-1976) Credited with the invention of the mobile, Alexander Calder revolutionized twentieth-century art with his innovative use of subtle air currents to animat...

ALEXANDER CALDER (1898-1976) Credited with the invention of the mobile, Alexander Calder revolutionized twentieth-century art with his innovative use of subtle air currents to animat...

Amish Farmscape #3, 1984, oil on canvas, 40 x 30 inches, signed and dated lower right; signed, dated, and titled verso About the Painting Amish Farmscape #3 is part of a multi-painting series of barns completed in the early 1980s for an exhibition at New York’s prestigious Sid Deutsch Gallery. Lewandowski painted this work at an important point in his career. It was the first major project undertaken by Lewandowski after his retirement from serving as the Chairman of Winthrop University’s Art Department, the last academic position he held after teaching for nearly thirty years. Lewandowski had been inspired to work on the series by a visit to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Like his friend and mentor, Charles Sheeler, Lewandowski had always been fascinated by vernacular architecture and the Amish barns of Pennsylvania brought back memories of rural scenes Lewandowski had painted in the Midwest much earlier in his career. Amish Farmscape #3 is a strong example of Lewandowski’s late precisionist work. The complexity of the composition and Lewandowski’s technical acumen are on full display. Being relieved of the burdens of teaching and administering a university art department likely allowed Lewandowski greater freedom and most importantly more time to complete the Amish Farmscape series. Although Lewandowski’s brand of precisionism changed throughout the years, he never deviated from the core tenets of the Immaculate School artists. In this work, we see simplified and flattened forms, the use of ray-lines to define light and space, the elimination of extraneous details, a polished almost machine-like finish, and the complete lack of visible brushstrokes, all hallmarks of the precisionist painters. Lewandowski was the last of the 20th century precisionists and in Amish Farmscape #3, we see just how successfully he continued to work in this style until his death in 1998. About the Artist Edmund Lewandowski was among the best of the second-generation precisionist painters. He was born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and studied at the Layton School of Art with Garrett Sinclair. Lewandowski achieved early success when in 1936 two of his watercolors were shown at the Phillips Collection as part of a Federal Art Project exhibition. Then, in 1937, his work was first exhibited at Edith Halpert’s Downtown Gallery which represented Lewandowski into the 1950s. Under Halpert’s guidance, Lewandowski continued to explore watercolor as his main medium during the 1930s and 1940s, since the gallery already represented Charles Sheeler, who worked primarily in oils. Sheeler became Lewandowski’s major influence as the primary leader of the ill-defined, but very recognizable Immaculate School artists, which included other Downtown Gallery painters, Niles Spencer, George Ault, and Ralston Crawford, as well as Charles Demuth and Preston Dickinson, both of whom died at a young age and had been represented by the Charles Daniel Gallery. Sheeler is credited with giving Lewandowski technical advice on how to make his paintings more precise and tightly rendered and by all accounts, Sheeler was a fan of Lewandowski’s work. Through the Downtown Gallery, Lewandowski’s paintings were accepted into major national and international exhibitions and purchased by significant museums and collectors. Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and Nelson Rockefeller acquired works by Lewandowski. He was included in the Museum of Modern Art’s important 1943 exhibition, American Realists and Magic Realists as well as juried exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Lewandowski also completed commissions for magazines during the 1940s and 1950s, including several covers for Fortune. Throughout his career, Lewandowski explored urban and rural architecture, industry, machinery, and nautical themes. Looking back on his career, Lewandowski wrote, “My overwhelming desire as an artist through the years has been to record the beauty of man-made objects and energy of American industry on canvas. For as far back as I can recall, the cityscapes, farms and depictions of industrial power and technological efficiency has had a great attraction for me. I try to treat these observations with personal honesty and distill these impressions to a visual order.” Lewandowski is credited with extending precisionism to the Midwest and successfully continuing the style into the 1990s, three decades after Sheeler’s death and six decades after Demuth’s passing. Late in his career, Lewandowski enjoyed a resurgence of popularity as he was represented during the 1980s by New York’s Sid Deutsch and Allison Galleries...

The Orchestra, 1950, oil on canvas, 21 ½ x 25 3/4 inches, signed and dated lower left, labeled verso “Brown University, Trustee, The Walter Feldman T...

Non Objective Design, c. 1940s, oil on canvas board, 16 x 12 inches, Exhibited at Greenfield’s solo memorial exhibition at the John Wanamaker Gallery in Philadelphia in October 4 to 14, 1949, #21 (listed in the brochure and labeled verso: “Title: Non Objective Design; Artist: Etelka J. Greenfield; Size: 12 x 16; Medium: Oil: Price: $350; Address: 10 South 18th Street, Philadelphia, Penn.”) About the Painting Reflecting on his pupil’s work, the prominent Philadelphia portrait painter, Lazar Raditz, commented, “Etelka Greenfield’s adaptability, her open-mindedness in style and technique w[ere] outstanding for any artist, but most especially for one of her years.” Much of Greenfield’s work reflected a form of precise academic realism akin to Luigi Lucioni, but in Non Objective Design we see a thoroughly modern painting which successfully combines elements of abstraction and surrealism with a bright palette reminiscent of the later works of fellow native Philadelphian Arthur Beecher Carles, Jr. Greenfield uses a variety of surface techniques to depict the abstract designs across the canvas, including thin layers of wash, sprinkled coarse sand in the pink area, and thick applications of impasto which are worked into vertical lines in the center white section, a grid structure in the yellow section in the lower left and a series of peaks and valleys in the upper right. The overall feeling of the canvas owes a debt to the artists of the Fifth Avenue Cubists and the American Abstract Artists Group who were working at the time Greenfield painted Non Objective Design. But, Greenfield isn’t a copyist. Her abstracted patterns have a dynamic movement from lower left to upper right, which break free from the formal staid structures of many pre-war abstractions. And, belying its title, Greenfield depicts recognizable figures and objects amid the abstract patterns. Greenfield’s art historical and pop culture “easter eggs” include a figure to the left whose face is obscured by a pipe (think - Magritte’s The Treachery of Images – Ceci n’est pas une pipe), a figure in the right middle playing a violin or cello (think – any number of cubist paintings by Picasso or Braque), and the horn of a gramophone (think – the famous tagline and logo “His Master’s Voice”). Combining these elements, we are left to wonder is Greenfield hearing the voices of the great French modernist masters? About the Artist Etelka Greenfield was a little-known, but critically acclaimed Philadelphia-based painter of the late 1930s and 1940s. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, as Etelka Joseph, Greenfield moved to New York City and then studied in France and Switzerland. In 1937, she married Albert M...