Nell Blaine Art

Provenance: Fischbach Gallery Tibor De Nagy Gallery Exhibited in The Virginia Museum, 1979 Nell Blaine, painter of still lifes and landscapes in brilliant colors, created abstract wo...

Provenance: Corporate Art Collection Nell Blaine, painter of still lifes and landscapes in brilliant colors, created abstract work that gives the appearance of being done in a carefree, totally lighthearted manner but in fact is the result of years of disciplined study. It is also an effect achieved after rehabilitation from polio, which nearly took her life. Suffering a paralyzed right hand, she taught herself to paint with her left hand, and she devoted much time to applying colors, some times as many as fifty varieties. She attributed her fascination with color with its discovery when she was two years old and corrective eye surgery allowed her to see color for the first time. Blaine was raised in the Richmond, Virginia, where she grew to hate the prevalent racial discrimination and left home at an early age. In high school, she was skilled enough to begin selling her artwork, which was mostly posters and portraits. She attended the Richmond School of Art, now Virginia Commonwealth University, between 1939 and 1942 but left its classical realist curriculum when one of the instructors introduced her to modern art. She used money she had earned from commercial art and went to New York and studied with Hans Hofmann, teacher of Abstract Expressionism. Shortly after, she married a jazz musician and immersed herself in the world of jazz, beating drums and improvising expressive dances, and associating with Charlie Parker, Dizzie Gillespie, and Beat Generation writer Jack Kerouac. Her paintings of that time reflect her strong developing sense of relationship between jazz and abstract art. In 1944 at age twenty two, she became the youngest member of the American Abstract Artists and exhibited hard-edged geometric paintings, mostly black and white with accents of bright colors. She joined a cooperative of abstract artists and worked so hard at organizing shows that some referred to it as the Blaine Street Gallery. She was a strong personality who had special influence on Larry Rivers and Jane Freilicher and appeared to thrive in the New York art scene of the 1940s. However, she decided that her lifestyle was unhealthy, and she left the city, had a period of seclusion, and then went to France where she admired the work of Gustave Courbet, Jean Antoine Watteau, Eugene Delacroix, and Nicholas Poussin and took up figurative art in an abstract style. She became known as a "painterly realist," and added landscapes and interiors to her subject matter. She earned fellowships to Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony and began spending at least half the year in Gloucester, Massachusetts. She also traveled in Mexico. In 1959 on the island of Mykonos, Greece, she had polio. Her New York art friends in an exhibition of seventy-one artists raised money for extensive treatment at Mount Sinai Hospital. After recovery, she settled in a studio on Riverside Drive, spent her summers in Gloucester, and painted from her wheelchair. She died in 1996. Source: Charlotte Streifer Rubinstein, American Women Artists Biography from Hess Fine Art & Auctions Nell Blaine is sometimes called a "painterly realist. This term belies her beginnings in abstract expressionism. She studied with Hans Hofmann in the mid-1940s and was fascinated by the geometric painting of Mondrian. By the late 1950s she turned towards representation. This change was reinforced when she met the French painter Jean Helion. He too had returned to representation. There is French flavor to Blaine's work in the Fauve-like use of pure color. Her typical subject matter is still life, landscapes and gardens. In some of her still life Matisse is brought to mind, but her style could not be mistaken for French. It has the unmistakable free brushstroke of the action painters, imbued with awe for the beauty of nature. Her preference is the use of pure color, cobalt violet being her favorite, and she reportedly said she "enjoy(s) color more than words". She respects the traditions of composition and structure, and is influenced by French Impressionism in terms of light and subject matter. Nell Blaine, painter of still lifes and landscapes in brilliant colors, created abstract work that not only is the result of years of disciplined study but was achieved after rehabilitation from polio. She taught herself to paint with her left hand because she suffered a paralyzed right hand. She devoted much time to applying colors, some times as many as fifty varieties. She attributed her fascination with color with its discovery to corrective eye surgery she had when she was two years old. This operation allowed her to see color for the first time. Nell Blaine was raised in Richmond, Virginia. In high school, she was skilled enough to begin selling her artwork, which consisted mostly of posters and portraits. She attended the Richmond School of Art, now Virginia Commonwealth University, between 1939 and 1942 but left when introduced to modern art. She used money she had earned and went to New York and studied with Hans Hofmann. Six months after she arrived in New York, Blaine married Bill Bass...

Nell Blaine Tree at the Edge of the Field, Springs, 1967 Signed and dated lower left Watercolor on paper 14 1/2 x 20 inches Nell Blaine was born in Richmond, Virginia in 1922. She ...

Nell Blaine (1922-1996) American Original India Ink and Wash titled "The Harbor from Banner Hill" The sight size is 17 x 27 inches. Signed and dated 1986 lower right and again verso...

Daureen, II Etching, 1969 Signed in pencil lower right Edition: 28 (17/28) Condition: Excellent Two hinges from previous matting Blaine studied etching at Atelier 17 in New York and considered one of their distinguished alums. "Blaine was foremost an abstract painter, first a student of Theresa Pollak...

Signed "Nell Blaine" upper left in pencil. Signed, titled, dated verso on sheet. Signed, titled, dated verso on backing panel. The artist. Exhibited at Fischbach Gallery, NYC, in 1994 (Gallery label verso, and wall label affixed verso). Purchased by private collectors c.1994. By descent. Tibor de Nagy Gallery, NYC (the artist's estate representative), exhibited 2020 (label verso). Exhibited at Fischbach Gallery, NYC, in 1994 (Gallery label verso, and wall label affixed verso). Tibor de Nagy Gallery, NYC (the artist's estate representative), exhibited 2020 (label verso). From her November 15, 1996 NYT obituary: Nell Blaine, a widely respected New York landscape painter and watercolorist, died yesterday at Mount Sinai Hospital. She was 74 and had homes in Manhattan and Gloucester, Mass. Ms. Blaine, who had been hospitalized since July, had been confined to a wheelchair since 1959, when she contracted polio. Ms. Blaine was born in Richmond, Va., in 1922, and first studied at the Richmond School of Art, now part of Virginia Commonwealth University. She moved to New York in 1942 to study painting with Hans Hofmann and later studied etching and engraving at Atelier 17 with Stanley William Hayter. During her first years in New York, her work, which had previously been tightly realist, turned abstract, inspired by Mondrian, Leger and Jean Helion. At one time she was the youngest member of the American Abstract Artists. She was also a founding member of the Jane Street Gallery, one of Manhattan's earliest artists' cooperatives, and had her first solo show there in 1945. Just as Ms. Blaine was becoming known as a promising abstract painter, and gaining the admiration of such critics as Clement Greenberg, she started to shift back to representation. Inspired in part by a trip with Larry Rivers in 1950 to Paris, where she was especially impressed by the work of Vuillard and Bonnard, she immersed herself in the tradition of 19th-century European painting. From the mid-1950's, she cultivated an increasingly painterly and colorful style, usually working directly from nature, or still life, with particular emphasis on the forms and hues of flowers. Her work retained a sense of all-over structure and pulsating energy that she nonetheless credited to abstract art. ''It all goes back to Mondrian,'' she would say. In the 1950's, Ms. Blaine was prominent among a circle of New York artists and poets that included John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, Mr. Rivers, Jane Freilicher, Leland Bell, Louisa Matthiasdottir, Robert De Niro Sr. and Rudy Burckhardt. She had her first solo show of representational work at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in 1953 and was represented by the Poindexter Gallery until it closed in 1978, and, in recent years, by the Fischbach Gallery. During the 1950's she supported herself as a commercial artist, designing brochures for art galleries. In 1955, she designed the original logo, column heads and layout for The Village Voice. In 1957, Ms. Blaine was featured in Life magazine as one of five leading young female artists in America. In 1959, after several months of traveling and painting in Greece, she contracted severe bulbar polio on the island of Mykonos. ''To Nell Blaine,'' an exhibition organized at Poindexter to raise money for her hospital bills, included the work of 79 artists, including Saul Steinberg, Robert Motherwell, Elaine and Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, Mr. Rivers, Ms. Freilicher and Robert Rauschenberg. After eight months in a New York hospital, including five months in an iron lung...

This work by Nell Blaine was exhibited at the Poindexter Gallery, as well as the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, both in New York City. It is signed lower left, and signed, titled, and dated ...

Nell Blair Walden Blaine (1922-1996) "Standing Figure" pastel drawing circa 1967 A Fine original pastel portrait of a standing nude figure by listed artist Nell Blaine. Dimensions ...