Stanley Twardowicz Art

This 2012 oil on canvas abstract in yellow, blue, and purple is by Bay Area painter and sculptor Laura Lengyel (b. 1946). She studied at Oakland’s Mills College and later moved to M...

Sally Avery (1902 - 2003) Rushing Brook #2, 1980 Oil on canvas 50 x 34 inches Signed and dated lower right; signed, titled, and dated on the reverse Provenance: Childs Gallery Boston, Massachusetts Private Collection, Massachusetts Born in 1902, Sally Avery knew by the age of five that she wanted to be an artist. After high school, she continued her studies at the Art Students League in New York City. In 1924, she spent the summer painting in East Gloucester, where she met and fell in love with the artist in the next studio, Milton Avery, (1893 - 1965). At this time in his career, Milton Avery was painting Impressionist works and was living with his mother in Connecticut. He soon followed Sally to New York. Two years later, they were married. For the next forty years, the two artists were inseparable. They were each other's model, collaborator, critic and champion. Together they created a style of "high modernist" painting that is most often solely attributed to Milton's hand. Although they painted side by side, their purposes were quite different. Sally made no effort to exhibit or sell her art, but instead managed Milton's career and the Avery household. For many years, it was her work as an illustrator for "The New York Times", children's books, and other publications, which supported the family. During the summer, the Avery family would often spend their vacations travelling throughout New England, Canada, Mexico, and Europe from their home in New York. Their excursions were often in the company of their close friends and fellow artists, Mark Rothko, Adolph Gotlieb and Barnett Newman. By the mid-1950's, their daughter, March, had grown up and Milton's works had finally begun to sell. Both enabled Sally to devote more time to her own painting (still largely for her own pleasure). She exhibited at a handful of shows during the decade. Roberta Smith wrote "Without Sally Michel...

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...

Large acrylic painting by Pat Rosenstein, American Woman Artist, graduate of Pratt Institute whose work has been exhibited extensively. Rosenstein, who...

NYC 1939 World's Fair 5 - 8 x 10 photographs Mid 20th Century WPA Architectural Underwood and Underwood 1939 World’s Fair Photographs 8 x 10 inches each All five prints are stamped...

ABOUT Erica Hauser is a Newburgh, NY based artist and has a BFA from the School of Visual Arts (2002). She received a 2011 NYFA grant, and has attended artist residencies in New Mexi...

interior painting with a flower in the minimalist style "Red Gerbera" The painting is perfect for the most sophisticated interior.

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 Trus...

Evocative abstract acrylic painting on canvas that explores the relationship between yellow and grey. Painted with acrylic on canvas in 1973 by Bonnie Lewton, titled on the back yell...

Ponting: In the Pack (1910) - Silver Gelatin Fibre Print (Photo by Herbert Ponting/Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge/Getty Images) A penguin wanders across th...

Slim Aarons Digging for Clams on Black Beach (Slim Aarons Estate Edition), 1960 Chromogenic Lambda print Mrs Hans Estin watches her children digging for clams at low tide on Black B...

Urban landscape of city harbor, marine scene, (North Africa?) bearing the influence of the earlier color-block compositions of Paul Klee. Modernist Cityscape 24" x 36" sight. oil on ...