CW American Modernism Paintings

This mural study is part of our exhibition America Coast to Coast: Artists of the 1930s San Pedro Post Office: History of Writing Mural South, Preliminary Mural Maquette right panel...

This painting is part of our exhibition America Coast to Coast: Artists of the 1930s Jefferson Market Library (Courthouse), c. 1930s, oil on canvas, 30 x 24 inches, signed lower right; presented in a newer silver painted frame About the Painting Writing about an exhibition of Charles W. Adams’ work at the Eighth Street Art Gallery in the mid-1930s, Emily Grenauer observed in The World-Telegram that the artist’s paintings were “distinguished for their solid form, well organized design and sumptuous color” and the art critic for The Herald Tribune found Adam’s work “a strong, formal realization of his subject . . . he paints with vital emphasis on structure and composition.” Although we do not know which works these critics referenced, it is likely they were writing about paintings like Jefferson Market Library (Courthouse). With its carefully designed reality, strong angles, solid forms, and well-disciplined puffs of smoke in the background, Adams presents a highly structured version of the Greenwich Village landmark, the Jefferson Market Library, which was a courthouse at the time Adams completed this work. The Jefferson Market Library was a prized subject for downtown painters, including the Ashcan School painter, John Sloan, the modernist, Stuart Davis, and the precisionist, Francis Criss...

This painting is part of our exhibition American Coast to Coast: Artists of the 1930s Knight’s Lodging, 1941, oil on canvas panel, signed and dated lower left, 16 x 20 inches, exhi...

This painting is part of our exhibition American Coast to Coast: Artists of the 1930s Subway Construction, c. 1928, oil on board, 19 x 15 ¾ inches, signed upper left, artist and title verso; exhibited: 1) 12th Annual Exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists, The Waldorf Astoria, New York NY, from March 9 to April 1, 1928, no. 864 (original price $250) (see Death Prevailing Theme of Artists in Weird Exhibits, The Gazette (Montreal, Quebec, Canada), March 8, 1928); 2) Boston Tercentenary Exhibition Fine Arts and Crafts Exhibition, Horticultural Hall, Boston MA, July, 1930, no. 108 (honorable mention - noted verso); 3) 38th Annual Exhibition of American Art, Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, OH, June, 1931 (see Alexander, Mary, The Week in Art Circles, The Cincinnati Enquirer, June 7, 1931); and 4) National Art Week Exhibition [Group Show], Montross Gallery, New York, New York, December, 1940 (see Devree, Howard, Brief Comment on Some Recently Opened Exhibitions in the Galleries, The New York Times, December 1, 1940) About the Painting Ernest Stock’s Subway Construction depicts the excavation of New York’s 8th Avenue line, which was the first completed section of the city-operated Independent Subway System (IND). The groundbreaking ceremony was in 1925, but the line did not open until 1932, placing Stock’s painting in the middle of the construction effort. The 8th Avenue line was primarily constructed using the “cut and cover” method in which the streets above the line were dug up, infrastructure was built from the surface level down, the resulting holes were filled, and the streets reconstructed. While many artists of the 1920s were fascinated with the upward thrust of New York’s exploding skyline as architects and developers sought to erect ever higher buildings, Stock turned his attention to the engineering marvels which were taking place below ground. In Subway Construction, Stock depicts workers removing the earth beneath the street and building scaffolding and other support structures to allow concrete to be poured. Light and shadow fall across the x-shaped grid pattern formed by the wooden beams and planks. It is no surprise that critics reviewing the painting commented on Stock’s use of an “interesting pattern” to form a painting that is “clever and well designed.” About the Artist Ernest Richard Stock was an award-winning painter, print maker, muralist, and commercial artist. He was born in Bristol, England and was educated at the prestigious Bristol Grammar School. During World War I, Stock joined the British Royal Air Flying Corps in Canada and served in France as a pilot where he was wounded. After the war, he immigrated to the United States and joined the firm of Mack, Jenny, and Tyler, where he further honed his architectural and decorative painting skills. During the 1920s, Stock often traveled back and forth between the US and Europe. He was twice married, including to the American author, Katherine Anne Porter. Starting in the mid-1920s, Stock began to exhibit his artwork professionally, including at London’s Beaux Arts Gallery, the Society of Independent Artists, the Salons of America, the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Whitney Studio and various locations in the Northeast. Critics often praised the strong design sensibility in Stock’s paintings. Stock was a commercial illustrator for a handful of published books and during World War II, he worked in the Stratford Connecticut...

This painting is part of our exhibition America Coast to Coast: Artists of the 1930s Refreshment and Intermission, tempera on board, 11 x 19 inches, c. 1930/40s, signed lower middle, exhibited at Groom's one person show at Closson’s Gallery, Cincinnati, OH, March, 1943 (see The Cincinnati Enquirer, March 7, 1943, section 3, p. 4); provenance includes a private Ohio collection; presented in a period gold painted frame About the Painting Refreshment and Intermission is part of a series of paintings of Amish subjects Grooms started in 1938 based on his travels in Pennsylvania. These tempera works reflect the Regionalist impulse to paint local scenes far away from big cities. Focusing on both people and landscape, Grooms' compositions tell the stories of the uniquely American experience of the Amish. “Grooms paints the Amish people with as much understanding of type and appreciation of the plastic quality as any artist who has approached this challenging subject," noted the art critic for The Cincinnati Inquirer when reviewing Grooms' solo exhibition at Closson' Gallery, "In his current show, ‘Refreshment and Intermission,’ is a case in point. Here the absorbed concentration of people eating is described without an ounce of sentimentality. He has made the most of the interest between groups and of the conversations, both humorous and serious. The work has the quaint simplicity of a Lord’s Supper...

This painting is part of our exhibition America Coast to Coast: Artists of the 1930s Street Cleaners, c. 1940s, oil on canvas, signed lower right, 28 ¾ x 42 inches, Gallery Z...

This painting is part of our exhibition America Coast to Coast: Artists of the 1930s Quarry Workers, c. 1930s, mixed media on board, unsigned, 24 x 24 inches, possibly exhibited at...

(Note: This work is part of our exhibition Connected by Creativity: WPA Era Works from the Collection of Leata and Edward Beatty Rowan) Oil on panel, 14 ½ x 18 inches unframed, 22 x 25 ½ inches framed, inscribed “painted by David McCosh Property of Edward b. Rowan” and numbered “8” verso Exhibited: The First Exhibit of the Iowa Artist...

(Note: This work is part of our exhibition Connected by Creativity: WPA Era Works from the Collection of Leata and Edward Beatty Rowan) Oil on canvas, 18 x 14 inches unframed, 22 x 18 inches framed, signed and dated lower right, inscribed “Mother and Son by Herman Maril ‘31” and “property Edward B. Rowan Falls Church VA” verso Literature: i) Dows, Olin, Herman Maril, The American Magazine of Art, Vol. 28, No. 7 (July 1935), p. 407 (illustrated with the title “Mare and Colt...

(Note: This work is part of our exhibition Connected by Creativity: WPA Era Works from the Collection of Leata and Edward Beatty Rowan) Oil on canvas, 24 ½ x 19 ½ inches unframed, 32 x 27 inches framed, signed and inscribed “Adrian Dornbush/ Flower Still Life” verso, a remnant of exhibition label verso, stamped “1454” verso, original frame Exhibited: i) Midwestern Artist’s Exhibition Representative Work from Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska & Colorado, Kansas City Art Institute, February 1 to March 2, 1931, no. 34 (see catalog with a listing of work with this title); and ii) Special Display and Sale of Late Oil Paintings Produced by Cedar Rapids Own Artists from the Little Gallery, at Newman’s Department Store, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, March 1932 (see [Advertisement], The Gazette (Cedar Rapids, Iowa), March 15, 1932 – listing a work with this title, together with paintings by fourteen other artists, including Grant Wood, Marvin Cone...

(Note: This work is part of our exhibition Connected by Creativity: WPA Era Works from the Collection of Leata and Edward Beatty Rowan) Fresco, 20 x 16 inches unframed, 22 x 18 inch...

The Railway Station, c. 1934, oil on canvas, signed lower right, titled verso and noted "34"; illustrated Kaufman, Jeffrey, Brush with Life: The Art of Being Edward Biberman...

Six O-Clock, c. 1942, oil on canvas, 30 x 20 inches, signed and titled several times verso of frame and stretcher (perhaps by another hand), marked “Rehn” several times on frame (for the Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries in New York City, who represented Craig at the time); Exhibited: 1) 18th Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Oil Paintings from March 21 to May 2, 1943 at The Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. #87, original price $450 (per catalog) (exhibition label verso), 2) Craig’s one-man show at the Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries, New York City, from October 26 to November 14, 1942, #10 (original price listed as $350); and 3) Exhibition of thirty paintings sponsored by the Harrisburg Art Association at the State Museum of Pennsylvania in Harrisburg in March, 1944 (concerning this exhibit, Penelope Redd of The Evening News (Harrisburg, Pennsylvania) wrote: “Other paintings that have overtones of superrealism inherent in the subjects include Tom Craig’s California nocturne, ‘Six O’Clock,’ two figures moving through the twilight . . . .” March 6, 1944, p. 13); another label verso from The Museum of Art of Toledo (Ohio): original frame: Provenance includes George Stern Gallery, Los Angeles, CA About the Painting Long before Chris Burden’s iconic installation outside of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Urban Light, another artist, Tom Craig, made Southern California streetlights the subject of one of his early 1940s paintings. Consisting of dozens of recycled streetlights from the 1920s and 1930s forming a classical colonnade at the museum’s entrance, Burden’s Urban Light has become a symbol of Los Angeles. For Burden, the streetlights represent what constitutes an advanced society, something “safe after dark and beautiful to behold.” It seems that Craig is playing on the same theme in Six O-Clock. Although we see two hunched figures trudging along the sidewalk at the end of a long day, the real stars of this painting are the streetlights which brighten the twilight and silhouette another iconic symbol of Los Angeles, the palm trees in the distance. Mountains in the background and the distant view of a suburban neighborhood join the streetlights and palm trees as classic subject matter for a California Scene painting, but Craig gives us a twist by depicting the scene not as a sun-drenched natural expanse. Rather, Craig uses thin layers of oil paint, mimicking the watercolor technique for which he is most famous, to show us the twinkling beauty of manmade light and the safety it affords. Although Southern California is a land of natural wonders, the interventions of humanity are already everywhere in Los Angeles and as one critic noted, the resulting painting has an air of “superrealism.” About the Artist Thomas Theodore Craig was a well-known fixture in the Southern California art scene. He was born in Upland California. Craig graduated with a degree in botany from Pomona College and studied painting at Pamona and the Chouinard Art School with Stanton MacDonald-Wright and Barse Miller among others. He became close friends with fellow artist Milford Zornes...

Lake Street, c. 1920 -30s, oil on board, 12 x 9 inches, signed lower right and verso, titled verso About the Painting At the center of Oscar Daniel Soellner’s Lake Street, we see the stairway leading to an elevated railway station on what is now Chicago’s Green Line route. When its first section opened in 1893 as the second permanent elevated rapid transit line in Chicago, this route was known as the Lake Street Elevated Railroad. Chicago’s “L,” like the New York subway and rapid transit system, played an instrumental role in the development of the urban economy and the overall look and feel of the city. The formal aspects of urban railroads and the role they played in efficiently moving large number of everyday citizens across America’s growing metropolises were catnip for many American Scene painters during the first half of the 20th Century. Here, Soellner uses the techniques of the impressionists and the palette of the Ash Can School, to convincingly depict a classic Chicago scene...

Moonlight Shanties, c. 1940s, oil on canvas, 24 x 18 inches, signed lower right, signed and titled verso About the Painting In Moonlight Shanties, Joachim depicts a lower-class neighborhood sitting along-side an elevated road or railway which crowds out the small nearby houses and structures. Joachim’s use of an expressionist palette and gestural brushstrokes together with the isolated figures obscured in the shadows, create a feeling of unease, isolation and even loneliness. From the 1920s through 1940s, American artists commonly employed expressionist conventions in their social realist works which portrayed the gritty side of urban America, especially the communities of the city-dwelling poor. Expressionist styles were considered appropriate for bridging the gap between the modernist idea of art-for-art’s-sake and the narrative qualities demanded by the dual crises of the Great Depression and World War II. Moonlight Shanties successfully uses these expressionist methods to portray a neighborhood and its people who appear to be literally and figuratively “on the edge.” About the Artist Paul Lamar Joachim...

Nude with Drape, c. 1937, oil on board, 24 x 17 (oval), signed lower right, provenance: Frances Lee Kent Falcone Family Trust About the Painting Fletcher Martin’s Nude with Drape ...

Pittsburgh Alleyway, c. 1946, oil on gouache on paper on “prestwood” (Masonite), 9 x 12 inches, signed lower middle, Bohrod’s original label verso from his gallery at 4811 Tonyawatha...

What a Life, c. 1930, mixed media on board, 18 x 24 inches, signed lower left; titled on label; exhibited at The San Francisco Art Association Fifty-Second Annual Exhibition at the P...

Exterior Stairway, c. 1970s, oil on masonite, signed upper right, 12 x 24 inches; illustrated (film) Kaufman, Jeffrey, Brush with Life: The Art of Being Edward Biberman...