Russell Cowles Art

"Dusseldorf, Germany" 1993, oil on canvas, hand signed and dated lower left, Canvas (unframed):18 X 48. framed: 19.5 X 49.5 Provenance: directly from the artist. Exhibited at Phyllis Kind Gallery in NYC in 1987. Archie Rand (American, born 1949) is an artist from Brooklyn, New York. Rand's work as a painter and muralist is held in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris, and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. His graphic works and books are held by the Metropolitan Museum Of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute Of Chicago, The Brooklyn Museum, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institution, and The New York Public Library; and are owned by Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Brown, and Johns Hopkins universities. Born in Brooklyn, Rand received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in cinegraphics from the Pratt Institute, having studied previously at the Art Students League of New York. His first exhibition was in 1966, at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York. He has since had over 100 solo exhibitions, and his work has been included in over 200 group exhibitions. He is currently Presidential Professor of Art at Brooklyn College which granted him the Award for Excellence in Creative Achievement in 2016. Before joining Brooklyn College, Rand was the chair of the Department of Visual Arts at Columbia University. The Italian Academy For Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University presented him with The Siena Prize in 1995. He was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation Foundation Fellowship in 1999 and was made a Laureate of the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, which awarded him the Achievement Medal for Contributions in the Visual Arts. In 2002 he received the Presidential Award for Excellence in Teaching from Columbia University. In 2002 he became the artistic advisor to film director Ang Lee for his production of The Hulk, and was asked by Milestone Films to provide a commentary track for the DVD release of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s classic 1955 film The Mystery of Picasso. Archie Rand’s earliest major works are “The Letter Paintings” (or “The Jazz Paintings”) (1968–71), a radically positioned series of technically inventive, mural-sized canvases. The Letter Paintings, by incorporating the names of mainly male and female African-American musicians, undermined prevailing aesthetic categories by conflating many contemporary movements including Conceptual Art, Color Field, Pattern and Decoration, diary entry and social commentary. In 1974 Rand received a commission from Congregation B’nai Yosef in Brooklyn. Rand was asked to paint thematic murals on the complete 16,000-square-foot (1,500 m2) interior surfaces of the synagogue. The work took three years, and completing this commission made Rand the author of the only narratively painted synagogue in the world and the only one we know of since the 2nd Century Dura-Europos. The religious legal controversy raised by placing wall paintings in a traditionally iconoclastic space was resolved by the verdict of Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, then considered to be the world’s leading Talmudic scholar, who declared the paintings to be in conformity with the law. His subsequent turn to figuration may have been influenced by his friendship with Philip Guston, whose own work was transformed in the late 1960s. Like Guston, Rand "chafed at the limitations of purely abstract forms." A near-cult figure who started out as a child prodigy and whose admirers range from John Ashbery to Julian Schnabel. Rand’s paintings display a vast and savvy menu of inventive and finely executed approaches. He has completed many series after the works of Paul Celan, Moyshe-Leyb Halpern, Eugenio Montale, Yehuda Amichai, Rainer Maria Rilke, Samuel Beckett/Paul Eluard and Jack Spicer. Working often with poets, he has produced books and continues to engage in publishing collaborative projects. He maintained a correspondence with the American British Jewish painter R.B. Kitaj. In 2008, on a warehouse wall, Rand mounted the painting, “The 613”, which at 1700 square feet (17’ x 100’) is nearly twice the size of James Rosenquist’s F-111. It is one of the largest freestanding paintings ever made. Reminiscent of “The Segments” paintings it is intimidatingly enormous. Paradoxically, despite the raucous cartoony bytes that shoot colorful flashes from the manic surface, “The 613” glows warmly. Its overall effect is strangely calming and majestic. In an article on a 2011 exhibition of Rand's "Had Gadya" series, David Kaufmann wrote: Rand displayed his work in 15 solo exhibitions between 2008 and 2017, many of them showcasing paintings done after Scripture, or his workings with poets: Including “Had Gadya, 2005”, Borowsky Gallery, Philadelphia, PA (2011); “Gods Change, Prayers Are Here To Stay (after Yehuda Amichai), 2000", Katz Gallery, Atlanta, GA (2014); “Psalm 68, 1994”, Derfner Museum, Riverdale, NY (2014); “The Chapter Paintings”, Tribeca Gallery, NY (2015); “Men Who Turn Back (after Eugenio Montale), 1995", SRO Gallery, Brooklyn, NY (2016); “Sixty Paintings From the Bible” & “The Book of Judith, 2012”, Cleveland State University Galleries, Cleveland, OH (2016) & The American Jewish Museum, Pittsburgh, PA (2017); “Archie Rand: Early Works With Poetry: Jack Spicer, 1991 and Samuel Beckett/Paul Eluard, 1993”, St. Francis College, Brooklyn, NY (2017). "The 613" In 2015 Blue Rider/Penguin/Random House published The 613, allotting one color plate per page for each of the 614 units in the painting. The Wall Street Journal labeled The 613 as “dynamic…remarkable…thrilling” The New York Times selected the book as “Editors' Choice” and praised it in two separate reviews calling it “wonderfully garish” and declaring that “nothing prepared the art world for 'The 613.' Recent Activity In 2016 Rand showed two bodies of work that were done in Italy, “La Certosa Di Pontignano, 1995” and “Mount Etna, 2005,” at The Interchurch Center Galleries, New York. From 2016 to 2017 he served as the Curator and Juror for the Governor of Wyoming’s Capitol Arts Exhibition at The Wyoming State Museum, Cheyenne, WY. A 2017 exhibition, “Archie Rand: Early Works With Poetry”, featured two series of work from 1991 and 1993 after poems by Jack Spicer and Samuel Beckett/Paul Eluard. This painting was exhibited in the Phyllis Kind Gallery in NY in 1987. (Phyllis Kind was an American art dealer active in Chicago and New York. She promoted the work of the Chicago Imagists, The Monster Roster and The Hairy Who and outsider artists. Kind opened a gallery in Chicago in 1967. Called Pro Grafica Arte, the gallery dealt in master prints and drawings. In 1975, she opened a gallery on Spring Street in New York's SoHo district. She gave some of the artists in the movement their first solo shows: Jim Nutt and Gladys Nilsson...

Betsy Podlach (American, born 1964.) Still life with Tin Cup, 1996 17.5 X 16.5 inches. Framed it measures 18.25 X 17.25 Betsy Podlach graduated from Harvard, cum laude, (she studied at Harvard with Alfred Decreido and William Reimann as well as Carlos Fuentes continuing her studies at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture, Ms. Podlach was awarded an art fellowship and residency at The International School of Art in Umbria, Italy. Betsy Podlach is an American painter who considers the Italian Venetians and the american abstract expressionist painters her mentors. The two painters she is most inspired by are Titian and Jackson Pollock, Both use the picture plane and abstraction and space, light, movement and form to communicate a physicality built entirely on the principals of painting, in the “classical” sense of a flat plane and lines, color, shape, space and light applied to that flat surface to create magic – light, space, form, emotion, force, movement, the physical and the spiritual. She describes her work as a figurative version of abstract expressionism. She was influenced by many of the abstract expressionists from the NY school...

Signed lower left, 'Millicent Tomkins' for Millicent Hanson Tomkins (American, 1930-2021) and dated 1959. Millicent Tomkins began painting at a young age and, as a child, was awarde...

Morris Kantor New York (1896 - 1974) Paris from the Ile St. Louis, 1927 (view of Eiffel Tower) Oil painting on canvas Hand Signed lower left. Provenance: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution ( bears label verso) Size: 20 3/4"H x 28 1/8"W (sight), 28.75 "H x 36"W (framed) Morris Kantor (Belarusian: Морыс Кантор) (1896-1974) was a Russian Empire-born American painter based in the New York City area. Born in Minsk on April 15, 1896, Kantor was brought to the United States in 1906 at age 10, in order to join his father who had previously relocated to the states. He made his home in West Nyack, New York for much of his life, and died there in 1974. He produced a prolific and diverse body of work, much of it in the form of paintings, which is distinguished by its stylistic variety over his long career. Perhaps his most widely recognized work is the iconic painting "Baseball At Night", which depicts an early night baseball game played under artificial electric light. Although he is best known for his paintings executed in a realistic manner, over the course of his life he also spent time working in styles such as Cubism and Futurism, and produced a number of abstract or non-figural works. A famous cubist, Futurist, painting of his "Orchestra" brought over 500,000$ at Christie's auction house in 2018 Kantor found employment in the Garment District upon his arrival in New York City, and was not able to begin formal art studies until 1916, when he began courses at the now-defunct Independent School of Art. He studied landscape painting with Homer Boss (1882-1956). In 1928, after returning to New York City from a year in Paris, Kantor developed a style in which he combined Realism with Fantasy, often taking the streets of New York as his subject matter. He did some moody Surrealist Nude paintings and fantasy scenes. In the 1940's he turned towards figural studies. Later in his career, Kantor himself was an instructor at the Cooper Union and also at the Art Students League of New York in the 1940s, and taught many pupils who later became famous artists in their own right, such as Knox Martin, Robert Rauschenberg, Sigmund Abeles and Susan Weil...

Signed lower right, "Auge" (French, born 1935) for Philippe Auge (French, born 1935) and painted circa 1965. An elegant and substantial, mid-century figurative oil by this member of...

Signed lower left, 'J.da Silveira' for Jose Da Silveira (French-American, born 1965), titled, 'The Soul is Music' and painted circa 2002. Additionally signed and titled, and with figural drawing, verso; Previously with: Chabot Gallery, Campbell, California Born in a tiny jungle village in Mozambique to a Portuguese bullfighter and the daughter of one of the leaders of the French Resistance...

Rare Mid Century Judaic figure of a Jewish rabbi at prayer. signed A. Einstein.

Walking Home [2023] original Oil on Canvas Image size: H:8.5 cm x W:10 cm Complete Size of Unframed Work: H:46 cm x W:55 cm x D:1.5cm Frame Size: H:60 cm x W:79 cm x D:5cm Sold Fram...

EMŐD, AURÉL (Budapest 1897-1958) A pupil of János Vaszary at the Academy of Fine Arts, he then went to Italy, Germany and France on study trips. Not only his master but also the Italian novecento affected him strongly. He worked as an art teacher in Budapest. From 1933 and 1935 he won a scholarship to Collegium Hungaricum. He was included in the exhibition The Art Of Modern Hungary 1931 and other exhibitions along with Vilmos Novak Aba, Count Julius Batthyany, Pal Bor, Bela Buky, Denes Csanky, Istvan Csok, Bela Czobel, Peter Di Gabor, Bela Ivanyi Grunwald, Baron Ferenc Hatvany, Lipot Herman, Odon Marffy, C. Pal Molnar...

Signed lower right, 'M. Watorski' for Mieczyslaw Watorski (Polish, 1903 - 1979) and painted circa 1950. This Polish history and landscape painter is particularly revered for his doc...

Richard Marshall Merkin (American, 1938-2009) Gladys and Half-Pint Hand signed 'Merkin' (center right), Titled, inscribed, dated, and initialed 'GLADYS BENTLEY AND FRANKIE 'HALF-PINT' JAXON 1997/R.M.' verso. Oil on canvas 37 1/2 x 72 in. (95.3 x 182.9 cm) framed 39 1/4 x 74 x 2 in. Gladys Alberta Bentley (August 12, 1907 – January 18, 1960) was an American blues singer, pianist, and entertainer during the Harlem Renaissance. Her career skyrocketed when she appeared at Harry Hansberry's Clam House, a well-known gay speakeasy in New York in the 1920s, as a black, lesbian, cross-dressing performer. She headlined in the early 1930s at Harlem's Ubangi Club, where she was backed up by a chorus line of drag queens. She dressed in men's clothes (including a signature tailcoat and top hat), played piano, and sang her own raunchy lyrics to popular tunes of the day in a deep, growling voice while flirting with women in the audience. On the decline of the Harlem speakeasies with the repeal of Prohibition, she relocated to southern California, where she was billed as "America's Greatest Sepia Piano Player" and the "Brown Bomber of Sophisticated Songs". She was frequently harassed for wearing men's clothing. She tried to continue her musical career but did not achieve as much success as she had had in the past. Bentley was openly lesbian early in her career, but during the McCarthy Era she started wearing dresses and married, claiming to have been "cured" by taking female hormones. Frankie "Half-Pint" Jaxon, born Frank Devera Jackson was an African American vaudeville singer, stage designer and comedian, popular in the 1920s and 1930s. He was born in Montgomery, Alabama, orphaned, and raised in Kansas City, Missouri. His nickname of "Half Pint" referred to his 5'2" height. He started in show business around 1910 as a singer in Kansas City, before travelling extensively with medicine shows in Texas, and then touring the eastern seaboard. His feminine voice and outrageous manner, often as a female impersonator, established him as a crowd favorite. By 1917 he had begun working regularly in Atlantic City, New Jersey and in Chicago, often with such performers as Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters, whose staging he helped design. He served slightly less than a year in the United States Army in 1918–1919 and rose to the rank of sergeant. In the late 1920s he sang with top jazz bands when they passed through Chicago, working with Bennie Moten, King Oliver, Freddie Keppard and others. He performed and recorded with the pianists Cow Cow Davenport, Tampa Red and "Georgia Tom" Dorsey, recording with the latter pair under the name of The Black Hillbillies. He also recorded with the Harlem Hamfats. In the 1930s, he was often on radio in the Chicago area, and led his own band, titled Frankie "Half Pint" Jaxon and His Quarts of Joy. Jaxon appeared with Duke Ellington in a film short titled Black and Tan (1929), and with Bessie Smith in "St. Louis Blues" (1929). Cab Calloway's "Minnie the Moocher" (1931) is based both musically and lyrically on Jaxon's "Willie the Weeper" (1927). Richard Merkin, Sometimes described as Rhode Island’s most famous New York artist, Richard Merkin has led a dual life for nearly 40 years - teaching at RISD while enjoying a celebrated painting career based in New York City. He has exhibited in countless gallery and museum shows in the US and abroad and is represented in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian Institution, The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the RISD museum and many others. In addition to contributing drawings and paintings to The New Yorker (along with, Art Spiegelman, Saul Steinberg, Harper’s, The New York Times Sunday Magazine and several books on Erotica and Baseball, he is a contributing editor for Vanity Fair and a former style columnist for GQ. Merkin’s honors include a Tiffany Foundation Fellowship and the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Museums and Selected Collections : The American Federation of Arts, New York, NY Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA First city Bank, Chicago, Ill Fisk University Art Gallery, Nashville, TN Hallmark Collections, Kansas City, MO Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA Maimi-Dade Junior College, Miami, FL Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI Minnesota Museum of Art, Minneapolis, MN Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, RI McClung Museum, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN Pennsylvania Acadamy of the Arts, Philadelphia PA Prudential Insurance Company, Boston, Ma Prudential Insurance Company, Newark, NJ Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA Sara Robey Foundation, New York, NY Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC State University of Brockport, Brockport, NY Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY Selected Publications : 1986-Present Contributing Editor, Vanity Fair ..1988-Present, New Yorker... 1988-Present, style column, GQ...1997, Text and Illustration for The Tijuana Bibles, published by Simon & Shuster, 1995, Illustrated book, Leagues Apart: the Men and Times of the Negro Baseball Leagues published by Morrow. 1967 Cover of the Beatles “Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band” Album (Mr. Merkin appears in the back row, right of center) RISD: MFA in Painting, 1963; Professor, Department of Painting special skill: Merging his role as flaneur (connoisseur of city life) with his role as painter and social historian, Merkin retrieves lost cultural artifacts – a Turkish cigarette, a gangster, a bowler and generally “things most people don’t know about” – and reconstitutes their Jazz Age virtues on canvas in cubist, comic-laced landscapes of tropical color. (ala Robert Crumb and Ben Katchor) breaking in: Perpetually on the fly from his middle-class Brooklyn background, Merkin found the perfect escape in the mid ‘60s in George Frazier, a dapper Boston columnist who inspired the emerging New York painter’s overnight reinvention of himself. The elements of structure, stability and surprise he admired in this well-dressed dandy – a cool linen suit, a splash of suspender, a polka dot scarf and pearl-handled walking stick – soon surfaced in paintings peopled by impeccable underdogs of café society along with his personal pop heroes: William Burroughs, Bobby Short and Krazy Kat...

Signed lower right, 'Cabaniss' for Larry Cabaniss (American-Italian, 1926-2007) and painted circa 1975; additionally signed, verso, 'Cabaniss'. Born in...