Lincoln Glenn Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Alexander Calder Preliminary drawing for the Spinner, 1966 Signed lower right Felt tip pen on paper Overall 27 x 15 1/2 inches Individual sheets 8 x 10 1/2 inches Alexander Calder ...

Theresa Bernstein The Gathering, circa 1990 Signed lower right Mixed media on paper 9 x 10 3/4 inches Theresa F. Bernstein was born in Philadelphia in 1895 to cultured, middle-clas...

Diana Kurz Untitled, circa 1961 Pastel on paper 25 1/2 x 20 1/2 inches Diana Kurz (born 1936) is an Austrian-born feminist painter. In 1938, Diana Kurz's family fled Austria, first...

Diana Kurz Still Life, 1966 Signed and dated lower right Pastel on paper 19 3/4 x 25 1/2 inches Diana Kurz (born 1936) is an Austrian-born feminist painter. In 1938, Diana Kurz's f...

Diana Kurz Green Square #19 Gouache on paper 25 x 19 inches Diana Kurz (born 1936) is an Austrian-born feminist painter. In 1938, Diana Kurz's family fled Austria, first to England...

Diana Kurz Green Square #14 Gouache on paper 11 x 14 inches Diana Kurz (born 1936) is an Austrian-born feminist painter. In 1938, Diana Kurz's family fled Austria, first to England...

Diana Kurz Light White Pastel on Paper 14 x 11 inches Diana Kurz (born 1936) is an Austrian-born feminist painter. In 1938, Diana Kurz's family fled Austria, first to England and t...

Diana Kurz Casper Gouache on paper 11 x 17 inches Diana Kurz (born 1936) is an Austrian-born feminist painter. In 1938, Diana Kurz's family fled Austria, first to England and then ...

Diana Kurz Pink Green Study Pastel on paper 20 x 15 inches Diana Kurz (born 1936) is an Austrian-born feminist painter. In 1938, Diana Kurz's family fled Austria, first to England ...

Diana Kurz June Watercolor and pastels on board 17 x 23 inches Diana Kurz (born 1936) is an Austrian-born feminist painter. In 1938, Diana Kurz's family fled Austria, first to Engl...

Diana Kurz Study for TH Pastel and gouache on paper 21 1/2 x 20 inches Diana Kurz (born 1936) is an Austrian-born feminist painter. In 1938, Diana Kurz's family fled Austria, first...

Diana Kurz Green Square #12 Gouache on paper 19 x 14 inches Diana Kurz (born 1936) is an Austrian-born feminist painter. In 1938, Diana Kurz's family fled Austria, first to England...

Betty Parsons Untitled, 1977 Signed and dated lower right Gouache on paper 5 1/2 x 3 3/4 inches Renowned as an esteemed and legendary art dealer who for more than three decades was...

Vivian Springford Untitled (Rice Paper Mounting), 1963-65 Signed lower left Ink, watercolor and acrylic on rice paper laid to canvas 27 1/4 x 53 3/8 inches A contributor to Abstrac...

Hans Hofmann Untitled, circa 1943 Signed lower right Oil and watercolor on paper 22 1/4 x 30 3/4 inches The only artist of the New York school to participate directly in European m...

Sonia Gechtoff Portico I, 1979 Signed, dated, and inscribed Acrylic and pencil on paper 40 x 40 inches Sonia Gechtoff was born in Philadelphia to Ethel "Etya" and Leonid Gechtoff. ...

Juanita Guccione (1904 - 1999) Study for Ladders, 1948 Gouache on paper 17 x 13 inches Signed lower left, dated, and inscribed “Study for Oil Painting...

Gerome Kamrowski Pink Garden, 1947 Signed lower left Watercolor on paper 22 x 30 inches Gerome Kamrowski was born in Warren, Minnesota, on January 19, 1914. In 1932 he enrolled in ...

Hannelore Baron Untitled (C82-142), 1982 Signed and dated on the reverse Mixed media collage Sheet 12 1/4 x 10 1/2 inches Provenance: Manny Silverman ...

Charles Burchfield Drawing Study Graphite on paper 5 1/2 x 8 inches Charles Ephraim Burchfield (1893–1967) was an American painter, best known for his watercolor landscapes. Burchfi...

Jane Freilicher Untitled I, 1958-59 Signed lower right Charcoal on paper 11 1/2 x 8 3/4 inches Provenance: Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York Private Collection, New York Jane Freilic...

Thiago Rocha Pitta Untitled, 2006 Watercolor on paper 30 x 23 inches Brazil-based artist Thiago Rocha Pitta’s (b. 1980) temporal and sensitive body of work depicts interventions wit...

Thiago Rocha Pitta Untitled, 2006 Watercolor on paper 30 x 23 inches Brazil-based artist Thiago Rocha Pitta’s (b. 1980) temporal and sensitive body of work depicts interventions wit...

Simon Samsonian (1912 - 2003) Colorful Geometric Abstraction, 1981 Oil on paper 16 x 22 inches Signed and dated lower right Provenance: Estate of the artist This survivor of the Armenian genocide wound up in a Cairo orphanage in 1927. He rose to fame as one of Egypt’s great modernists, but after moving to Long Island late in life he withdrew into anonymity. Now his compelling story is being told. Art historians are finally beginning to realize that the power of abstraction in its early years was a zeitgeist not limited to the major European centers of the avant-garde — Paris, Munich, and Moscow — but one that quickly rippled to major cities throughout the world. Within a few decades that original shock of a new vision had inspired thousands of artists from different cultures — particularly those the Middle East — whose translations were not slavish imitations of works by seminal figures like Picasso, Braque, Malevich, and Kandinsky but creative variants colored by their respective cultures. This essay focuses on an extraordinary Armenian artist, his harrowing survival of the genocide, his rise to fame in Cairo, and his creation of a unique style of abstraction. Art historians have typically formed a chorus that teaches the history of abstraction like this: Just before and during the World War I era, several avant-garde artists emerged to create shockingly different new forms by which artists could express themselves. In Paris, Picasso and Braque broke out with cubism, quickly followed by Mondrian. In Moscow, Malevich created Suprematism, the ultimate hard-edge geometric abstraction. And in Munich, Kandinsky emerged as the father of Abstract Expressionism. Within these few short years a zeitgeist was sensed throughout the art world. American pioneers, too — particularly Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Morgan Russell — felt this explosive freedom of expression. When Europe was recovering after World War I it became clear that Paris would retain its title as capitol of the art world, lasting through the Roaring Twenties and even through the Great Depression. But the end of World War II changed everything. A parallel war had been won by a group of irascible young Abstract Expressionists in New York — led by Pollock, Rothko, DeKooning, and Kline. No sooner had Paris been liberated from the Germans than Picasso, Matisse, Breton, and Duchamp surrendered to the Americans. From that point on New York would be the epicenter of the art world. But a lens that focuses myopically on the war between the avant-garde of Paris and New York misses the wider narrative of multiple aesthetic modernities that developed in the several decades following World War I. For Armenian artists the matter is even more complex owing to the genocide of 1915 where more than 1.5 million people — seventy-five percent of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire — were massacred. Those not shot on the spot were sent on death marches through the Mesopotamian desert without food or water. Frequently, the marchers were stripped and forced to walk naked under the scorching sun until they dropped dead. As a child Samsonian witnessed the murder of his parents and most of the members of his family. Soon thereafter, his older sister, Anahid, quickly shepherded him into a line of children being rescued by Greek nuns. But they became separated and he lost her, too. He was sent to a Greek orphanage in Smyrna (now Izmir), on Turkey’s west coast. Because he only knew his first name, the orphanage gave him a last name based on the place where they found him — Samsun — a major port on Turkey’s north coast on the Black Sea. His birth date was unknown, too. According to Samsonian’s vague recollections he assumed he was about three or four years old at the onset of the genocide, which would place his birth year in 1911 or 1912. In 1922, when Samsonian was about 10, the Turks ended their war with the Greeks by putting Smyrna to the torch in what has been called the “Catastrophe of Smyrna.” Once again, the child was on the run, escaping the fire and slaughter. He found temporary refuge in Constantinople, but within a year that major port would fall to the Turks, too, and become renamed as Istanbul. This time, Samsonian was whisked away to an orphanage in Greece founded by the American charity, Near East Relief — which is credited with saving so many Armenian orphans that the American historian Howard M. Sachar said it “quite literally kept an entire nation alive. Any understanding of Samsonian’s approach to modernism requires careful consideration of the impact of his early years because his art is inseparable from the anguish he experienced. In 1927, when he was a teenager, he was transferred to Cairo, Egypt, then a cosmopolitan city hosting a sizable portion of the Armenian diaspora. There he lived with thirty-two other children on the top floor of the Kalousdian Armenian School. Upon graduating in 1932 he won a scholarship to attend the Leonardo da Vinci Art Institute — an Italian art school in Cairo — where he won first prize in final examinations among one hundred students. He found work with an Armenian lithographic printer and he returned to the Kalousdian Armenian School to teach drawing. In 1939 he married one of his students, Lucy Guendimian. The Cairo in which Samsonian matured as an artist was home to many prominent art collectors after World War I. In this receptive environment Samsonian exhibited widely and won many awards. Beginning in 1937 and for the next thirty years he exhibited annually at the prestigious Le Salon du Caire hosted by the Société les Amis de l’Art (founded in 1921). After World War II he hit his stride as a modernist in Cairo, counting among his peers other artists of the Armenian diaspora such as Onnig Avedissian, Achod Zorian, Gregoire Meguerdichian, Hagop Hagopian...