Milton Avery

"Inlets, " Milton Avery, Provincetown, Cape Cod, New England American Modernism

1957

Lionel S. Reiss (1894 - 1988) New York City Skyline View from the East River Watercolor on paper 13 x 19 inches Signed lower left In describing his own style, Lionel Reiss wrote, “By nature, inclination, and training, I have long since recognized the fact that...I belong to the category of those who can only gladly affirm the reality of the world I live in.” Reiss’s subject matter was wide-ranging, including gritty New York scenes, landscapes of bucolic Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and seascapes around Gloucester, Massachusetts. However, it was as a painter of Jewish life—both in Israel and in Europe before World War II—that Reiss excelled. I.B. Singer, the Nobel Prize winner for Literature, noted that Reiss was “essentially an artist of the nineteenth century, and because of this he had the power and the courage to tell visually the story of a people.” Although Reiss was born in Jaroslaw, Poland, his family immigrated to the United States in 1898 when he was four years old. Reiss's family settled on New York City’s Lower East Side and he lived in the city for most of his life. Reiss attended the Art Students League and then worked as a commercial artist for newspapers and publishers. As art director for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, he supposedly created the studio’s famous lion logo. After World War I, Reiss became fascinated with Jewish life in the ‘Old World.’ In 1921 he left his advertising work and spent the next ten years traveling in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. Like noted Jewish photographers Alter Kacyzne and Roman Vishniac, Reiss depicted Jewish life in Poland prior to World War II. He later wrote, “My trip encompassed three main objectives: to make ethnic studies of Jewish types wherever I traveled; to paint and draw Jewish life, as I saw it and felt it, in all aspects; and to round out my work in Israel.” In Europe, Reiss recorded quotidian scenes in a variety of media and different settings such as Paris, Amsterdam, the Venice ghetto, the Jewish cemetery in Prague, and an array of shops, synagogues, streets, and marketplaces in the Jewish quarters of Warsaw, Lodz, Krakow, Lublin, Vilna, Ternopil, and Kovno. He paid great attention to details of dress, hair, and facial features, and his work became noted for its descriptive quality. A selection of Reiss’s portraits appeared in 1938 in his book My Models Were Jews. In this book, published on the eve of the Holocaust, Reiss argued that there was “no such thing as a ‘Jewish race’.” Instead, he claimed that the Jewish people were a cultural group with a great deal of diversity within and between Jewish communities around the world. Franz Boas...

Oscar Bluemner Sheepshead, Long Island, 1907 Signed with the artist's conjoined initials "OB" and dated "4-30 - 5 - 30" / "Aug 3, 07" Watercolor on paper 6 x 10 inches Provenance: J...

Yvonne Jacquette (American, b. 1935) Tokyo Diptych, 1985 Pastel on paper Overall 17 1/4 x 28 1/2 inches Signed lower center Provenance: Carey Ellis Company, Houston, Texas Brooke Alexander, New York Collection of an American Corporation Exhibited: New York, Brooke Alexander, Yvonne Jacquette: Tokyo Nightviews, April 5 - May 3, 1986, n.p., illustrated; this exhibition later traveled to Brunswick, Maine, Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Yvonne Jacquette: Tokyo Nightviews, June 27 - August 24, 1986. Yvonne Jacquette has a preference for high places, a circling plane, a penthouse window, an aerie from which to watch the world. Her work has often depicted the city and man-made landscape from the vantage of angels. It is a privileged perspective, long loved by photographers, who were perhaps the first to recognize the geometric grandeur of the city below. That grandeur structures Jacquette's images but is not its full content. Her work attempts to resolve the visual and emotional pardoxes of the modern metropolis. Only from the tower is there the possibility of order and context. And unlaced beauty. Jacquette first visited Japan in 1982. Nighttime Tokyo, its cars and crowds and canyons of loud Vegas neon, made a vivid and bewildering impression on her. The neon signs, pulsing, scaling the walls of high rises, fascinated the artist, "like Times Square spread over miles." Her fascination was equal parts marvel, confusion, and curiosity—the sparks of art. She returned to Tokyo in May of 1985, choosing hotel rooms with expansive vistas. From these views Jacquette excerpted images for a series of pastel night scenes. The basic forms and colors of each drawing were blocked in during night sessions by the window. She worked in the dark, selecting colors by flashlight. In daylight, she sharpened the geometry and corrected ambiguous passages. She refined the drawings further in the studio until the images read clearly. Photographic correctness was not important. The finished drawings are complete statements, not simply preparatory sketches for paintings. They have the authority of expert witness. In clear, discreet jots of pastel they record the performance of seeing, each touch of color attesting to a moment's close scrutiny. Yvonne Jacquette was born on December 15, 1934 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and grew up in Stamford, Connecticut. She attended the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence from 1952 to 1955, when she moved to New York City. Her late husband was photographer Rudy Burckhardt, and the couple were part of a circle of artist friends that included Fairfield Porter, Alex Katz, Red Grooms, and Mimi Gross. She continues to live and work in New York City, as well as in Searsmont, Maine. A flight to San Diego in 1969 sparked Jacquette’s interest in aerial views, after which she began flying in commercial airliners to study cloud formations and weather patterns. She soon started sketching and painting the landscape as seen from above, beginning a process that has developed into a defining element of her art. Her first nocturnal painting...

Leon Dolice (1892 - 1960) New York Harbor (Brooklyn Bridge), circa 1930-40 Pastel on paper 12 x 19 inches Signed lower right Provenance: Spanierman Gallery, New York The romantic b...

John Marin New York from the Ferry, 1914 Signed and dated lower right Watercolor and graphite on paper 11 x 12 3/4 inches Provenance: An American Place, New York Kennedy Galleries, Inc., New York Christie's, New York, March 16, 1990, Lot 278 Private Collection (acquired from the above) Sotheby's New York, American Paintings, Drawings, & Sculpture, October 2, 2014, Lot 10 A major figure in early twentieth-century modernism, John Marin captured the colliding energies of the American urban scene and the vibrant contrasts of natural elements in the coastal landscape of Maine and other countryside locales. As one of the premier watercolorists of his era, Marin developed a light, spontaneous style ideally suited to conveying the freshness and flux of city and country experience -- his watercolors are often considered to match in strength those created by Winslow Homer in previous century. At the same time, Marin's sensitivity to mass, form, color, and line and their dynamic interchanges provided a precedent for the Abstract Expressionist movement of the late 1950s. Marin was born in Rutherford, New Jersey, to a family of European descent. After studying mechanical drawing and mathematics for half a year at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New York, Marin worked as a draftsman for several architects. It was not until he was almost thirty years old that he began to study art. He enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia from 1899 to 1901, and at the Art Students League in New York from 1901 to 1903, where his teachers were William Merritt Chase and Frank Vincent Dumond. While Marin was attending the League, the radical ideas of Arthur Wesley Dow were being disseminated and had an impact on the direction Marin would soon take in his art. Marin left for Europe in 1905. The next five years, which he spent abroad, were of tremendous importance to his career. He became a significant figure in the expatriate community in Paris, frequenting the Dôme, a café that served as a meeting place for artists and writers. While in Europe, Marin visited the Louvre and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and, despite his claims that he had been indifferent to the Paris art world, he undoubtedly became aware of the art of Paul Cézanne and Henri Matisse. The works Marin created in Europe most strongly reflect the influence of James McNeill Whistler, especially the pastels he rendered in Venice. In the summer of 1909, Marin met Alfred Stieglitz in Paris. In February of the next year, Marin's work was shown along with that of Alfred Maurer at Stieglitz's gallery, 291. After returning to America in the following year, Marin became one of the most consistent members of Stieglitz's inner circle, showing at all three of his galleries -- 291, The Intimate Gallery, and An American Place. After 1910, Marin developed the routine that he would follow for the rest of his life, creating paintings, drawings, and prints in New York City and surrounding areas during the winter, and in the summer, traveling to the country, where he focused on the particular characteristics of the regions that he visited. He worked mainly in watercolor until 1928, when he began also to use oil. Marin never became purely abstract. He formulated a unique style melding influences of the art of the French Fauves, Cézanne, Matisse, and the French Cubists with a personal style of luminescent colors, agile brushwork, and a simultaneously delicate and strong handling. In city views, he used broken lines, a light touch, fluid color, and rhythmic compositions to convey what he described as the "great forces at work." He expressed the warring of the great and the small through relationships between masses. As he said, he sought to express the "pull forces" of the modern urban scene. Often portraying the new tall buildings of New York seen...

Louis Wolchonok (1898 - 1973) Industrial Landscape, 1925 Watercolor on paper 22 1/4 x 16 inches Louis Wolchonok was an author of art books, etcher, painter of townscapes, landscapes, figures, muralist, and graphic artist. Wolchonok was a social realist...

Jack Hooper "Tree Landscape" 1981 Ink on glossy paper 11"x7" unframed Signed and dated in pencil lower right Embrace the serene beauty of nature through this abstract line drawing b...

A 1926 ink on paper drawing of a Cedar tree and northern lake by artist Harold Haydon. Harold Emerson Haydon was born in Fort William, Ontario, Canada in 1909. Haydon came to Ch...

A ca. 1931 charming watercolor forest scene; a study in yellow by artist Harold Haydon. Harold Emerson Haydon was born in Fort William, Ontario, Canad...

Signed lower right, 'Gilberg' for Robert George Gilberg (American, 1911-1970) and painted circa 1965. Born in Oakland, Robert George Gilberg first studied at the Oakland Art Center during the 1930s. Following service during WWII, he settled in Nevada City, California where he lived and painted until shortly before his death in San Francisco. Gilberg exhibited widely and with success and was the recipient of numerous medals, prizes and juried awards, including at the San Francisco Museum of Fine Arts...

Jim’s of Lambertville is proud to offer this artwork by: Tobias Musicant (1921 – 2004) A new discovery in the art world is something always searched for and rarely found. Surely th...

Francis Chapin was one of the most celebrated painters in Chicago during his lifetime. When he was a young art student, Valley House founder, Donald Vogel, painted with "Chape" on th...