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1930s Mixed Media

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Period: 1930s
Panthers in the Jungle Art Deco Carved Gilt Wood Panel by N. R. Brunet
Located in Atlanta, GA
This sumptuous engraved wooden panel depicting panthers in the bush was created by N.R. Brunet (France, 20th Century). Art Deco design typical of the period, N.R. Brunet is known for...
Category

Art Deco 1930s Mixed Media

Materials

Gold

Abstract Cubist Construction Collage Mid 20th Century American Modernism Cubism
Located in New York, NY
Abstract Cubist Construction Collage Mid 20th Century American Modernism Cubism Vaclav Vytacil (1892 - 1984) Abstract Construction #2 Caesin on board collage 11 x 13 1/2 th inches S...
Category

Abstract 1930s Mixed Media

Materials

Board, Casein

St Andrew's Church, Mells, Somerset stained glass window by William Nicholson
Located in London, GB
To see more stained glass designs, scroll down to "More from this Seller" and below it click on "See all from this Seller." William Nicholson (1872 - 1949) Mells Window Photographi...
Category

1930s Mixed Media

Materials

Mixed Media

American Surrealist pipes and playing cards spirit of Magritte abstract Montage
Located in Norwich, GB
I love this extraordinary American surrealist piece - a collage/montage, an assembly of objects in a velvet-clad box/frame - for a number of reasons reasons. I love the fact that it depicts pipes, among the most iconic images of the surrealist movement, rooted in Magritte’s famous 1929 painting which depicts a pipe accompanied by the caption “Ceci n'est pas une pipe” (This is not a pipe). Marcel Duchamp loved using pipes...
Category

Surrealist 1930s Mixed Media

Materials

Clay, Glass, Paper, Found Objects, Wood

Scene in Front of a Burning House
Located in Wien, 9
In diesem Katalog soll es auch ein paar Entdeckungen geben, denn sie sind der Antrieb für alle Kunstaficionados und somit auch für mich als Galerist. Diese wunderbar reduzierte Arbei...
Category

Modern 1930s Mixed Media

Materials

Glass

" Surrealist collage "
Located in CANNES, FR
Max Bucaille ( 1906 -1996 ) . French artist . Surrealist collage realized in 1938-1939 . 10 x 16 cm image 16 x 23 cm feuille 39 x 45 cm vintage liege ...
Category

Surrealist 1930s Mixed Media

Materials

Mixed Media

Pre-War Abstraction - Modernism - Tan Bronze Tope - Nonrepresentational
Located in Miami, FL
Pioneering female abstract artist Elsie Driggs paints stylized abstract organic forms in a warm palette of orange browns and tope. She merges abstraction with some figuration. A structured face composed of lines and tone emerges from an orange background. It's 1939, and even though Driggs is not well known, she is preceding many of the marquee names of abstraction by a decade. Although under the radar, this is a major work and is titled on the back stretcher is " Egyptian Gothic." It features the artist's inventiveness with her fine pencil lines incorporated in flat washes of color and collage elements. Signed lower right and inscribed on frame verso with title, artist and the date of 1939. Provenance, Christie's, Freemans. Framed under glass.. Elsie Driggs (1898 – July 12, 1992 in New York City) was an American painter known for her contributions to Precisionism, America's one indigenous modern-art movement before Abstract Expressionism, and for her later floral and figurative watercolors, pastels, and oils. She was the only female participant in the Precisionist movement, which in the 1920s and 1930s took a Cubist-inspired approach to painting the skyscrapers and factories that had come to define the new American landscape. Her works are in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Houston Museum of the Fine Arts, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the James A. Michener Art Museum in Pennsylvania, and the Columbus Museum of Art, among others. She was married to the American abstract artist Lee Gatch. Career Born in Hartford, Connecticut, Driggs grew up in New Rochelle, a suburb of New York City, in a family that was supportive of her artistic interests. After a summer spent painting with her sister in New Mexico in her late teens, she felt she had found her life's calling. At twenty, she enrolled in classes at the Art Students League of New York, where she studied under George Luks and Maurice Sterne, both of whom were charismatic, inspirational figures in her early life. She also attended the evening criticism classes held at the home of painter John Sloan. Driggs spent fourteen months in Europe from late 1922 to early 1924, drawing and studying Italian art. There she met Leo Stein, first in Paris and later in Florence, who became an important intellectual influence, and who urged her to study Cézanne. He also introduced her to the works of Piero della Francesca, the Renaissance artist for whom she felt throughout her life the greatest admiration.[1] Driggs eventually settled in New York City, where she found representation with the progressive Charles Daniel Gallery.[2] (Advised that the old-fashioned and misogynistic Daniel would be unlikely to take on a woman artist, she signed the works she left for his consideration simply "Driggs" and waited to meet him in person until he had expressed his eagerness to include her in his gallery.)[3] In sympathy with those artists Daniel represented who were part of the burgeoning Precisionist movement, such as Charles Demuth, Charles Sheeler, George Ault, Niles Spencer, and Preston Dickinson, she too painted "the modern landscape of factories, bridges, and skyscrapers with geometric precision and almost abstract spareness."Impressionism and academic or Ashcan realism represented the past, in Driggs' view, and she intended to be resolutely modern. She was an attractive and engaging woman, but her demeanor belied a strong ambition and a clear sense of what it would take to make her mark in the New York art world. Driggs was part of the pre-eminent first group of Precisionist painters, including Demuth and Sheeler, who exhibited at the Daniel Gallery in the 1920s. Although a later group of Precisionist painters, including Louis Lozowick, Ralston Crawford and others, came on the American Art scene during the 1930s, Driggs felt that the style came to an end with the 1929 stock market crash.[5] In 1926 she painted her most famous work, Pittsburgh, a dark and brooding picture now in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, which depicts the gargantuan smokestacks of the Jones & Laughlin steel mills in Pittsburgh. Its focus is an overpowering mass of black and gray smokestacks, thick piping, and crisscrossing wires with only clouds of smoke to relieve the severity of the image, yet it was an image in which she found an ironic beauty. She called the picture "my El Greco" and expressed surprise that viewers in later years interpreted the painting as a work of social criticism. Like the other Precisionists (e.g., Demuth, Charles Sheeler, Louis Lozowick, Stefan Hirsch), she was concerned with applying modernist techniques to renderings of the new industrial and urban landscape, not in commenting on potential dangers the overly mechanized modern world of 1920s America might present. If anything, Precisionism, like Futurism, was a celebration of man-made energy and technology. One year later, she painted Blast Furnaces, in a similar vein. As noted above, Piero della Francesca's mural depicting "The Story of the True Cross" in Arezzo, with its tubular, static and frozen forms was the major influence on Driggs' "Pittsburgh" (it may have been the major influence for "Blast Furnaces" as well).[7] After Pittsburgh, Driggs' most acclaimed work was probably Queensborough Bridge...
Category

1930s Mixed Media

Materials

Paper, Watercolor, Pencil

" Surrealist Collage " . New York .
Located in CANNES, FR
Max Bucaille ( 1906 -1996 ) . French Surrealist Artist . born in Normandy in 1906 . Image : 12 x 18 cm Page : 21 x 30 cm Framed : 38 x 52 cm Max Bucaille prend une paire de ciseaux et de colle , il se munit de vieux ouvrages illustrés et , pour notre plaisir , rêve éveillé ! auteur de poèmes et de collages surréalistes...
Category

Surrealist 1930s Mixed Media

Materials

Paper, Mixed Media

Surrealist Collage
Located in CANNES, FR
Max Bucaille ( 1906-1996) , né à Sainte-Croix-Hague.FRANCE poèmes et collages surréalistes depuis 1930 . " les Cris de la Fée " 1939 . ce collage d...
Category

Surrealist 1930s Mixed Media

Materials

Archival Paper

Cubist abstract composition
Located in Wilton Manors, FL
Robert Lepper (1906-1991) . Cubist composition, 1931. Cut copper, brass and steel sheeting tacked to masonite panel. Panel measures 14.5 x 24 inches. Total framed measurement 20 x 29...
Category

Cubist 1930s Mixed Media

Materials

Brass, Copper, Stainless Steel

"The Million-Dollar Hairpin" Story Illustration, Good Housekeeping, 1931
Located in Fort Washington, PA
Signed "James Montgomery Flagg" Lower Right by Artist "Mr. Corroway was wearing a broad smile. He slapped Dave jovially on the shoulder and said: 'No hard feelings, I hope, about o...
Category

1930s Mixed Media

Materials

Ink, Gouache, Graphite

"A Six-Letter Word Meaning Trouble" Story Illustration, Good Housekeeping
Located in Fort Washington, PA
Signed "James Montgomery Flagg" Lower Right by Artist "'I've found a woman to sew on buttons,' he said politely. 'Have I?' he inquired of Nancy. 'Big Boy, you have.'" Illustration ...
Category

1930s Mixed Media

Materials

Ink

For Fireside Comfort, High Beam Gas Fires brochure design by Brownbridge
Located in London, GB
To see more, scroll down to "More from this Seller" and below it click on "See all from this Seller." Brownbridge (flourished 1930s - 1940s) For Fireside Comfort, High Beam Gas Fire...
Category

Art Deco 1930s Mixed Media

Materials

Mixed Media, Gouache

Art Deco Venetian Mask Handcarved Wood Panel Wall Sculpture
Located in Atlanta, GA
This French Art-Deco hand-carved wooden panel or wall-mounted sculpture features a stunning Venetian mask. This high-dimensional panel is made of natural wood with a warm tone and re...
Category

Art Deco 1930s Mixed Media

Materials

Wood

Dinka with a Bongo by Orovida Pissarro - Animal painting
Located in London, GB
Dinka with a Bongo by Orovida Pissarro (1893-1968) Egg tempera on linen, laid on board 85 x 62.3 cm (33 ½ x 24 ½ inches) Signed and dated lower right Orovida 1937 Provenance Redfern Gallery, London, August 1937 Collection of Mrs Tongo, from whence to: Sotheby's, London,15th December 1965 Royal Academy, London 11th May 1966, no. 728 Reverend Canon Ernest A Bawtree, Cambridgeshire, England Gillian Jason Gallery, London, acquired from the above, 8th November 1984 Christie's, London, 7th June 1985 Literature K L Erickson, Orovida Pissarro: Painter and Print-Maker with A Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, (doctoral thesis), Oxford, 1992, Appendices, no. 69, p. 73-74 (illustrated) Exhibition London, Redfern Gallery, Summer Salon, 5th August - 25th September 1937, no. 12 London, Royal Academy, 1966, no. 728 Detailed Description Orovida’s first series of imaginative works, executed in the 1920s and 30s, reflect her interest in non-Western art. This was largely fuelled by the fashion for Orientalism in fin-de-siècle France, but also by the works of Paul Gauguin and those of her uncle Georges Manzana Pissarro, particularly his solo show at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris in 1914. Orovida was struck by her uncle’s Orientalist and Decorative portraits and his use of gold and silver. The flattening of the picture plane and the increasingly stylised treatment of her subjects would also have been influenced by exhibitions which she frequented in London, including a presentation on Persian art at Burlington house in 1930-31 as well as her numerous trips to the British Museum. To Orovida, non-Western art offered greater creative freedom, as she later wrote: ‘Western art has led straight to the photo and eastern art is still free.’ As a result, her early works often show subjects such as Mongolian horse...
Category

Art Deco 1930s Mixed Media

Materials

Linen, Egg Tempera, Board

Cat Friends Portrait, Collage on Paper - Guggenheim Museum Founder
Located in Miami, FL
A portrait of two cats is deftly assembled by trailblazing modernist Hilla Rebay. The work is signed and titled lower left. 'Muschi et Antonio v. Rebay - Rome'. Titled to verso ‘Musc...
Category

Blue Rider 1930s Mixed Media

Materials

Paper, Pencil

"Long Isle Land c1930s Crewelwork Linen Embroidered Map"
Located in Bristol, CT
Sz: 18"H x 26"W
Category

1930s Mixed Media

Materials

Linen

Portrait of a Woman, Paper Collage
Located in Miami, FL
Hildegard Anna Augusta Elisabeth Freiin Rebay von Ehrenwiesen, known as Baroness Hilla von Rebay or simply Hilla Rebay was the co-founder of the Museum...
Category

Modern 1930s Mixed Media

Materials

Paper

Abstract American Modernism Mid-Century WPA Era Drawing Woodstock 20th Century
Located in New York, NY
Abstract American Modernism Mid-Century WPA Era Drawing Woodstock 20th Century, Sight size is 16 x 12 inches. The drawing is currently at the framers. A photo will be posted asap. A...
Category

Abstract 1930s Mixed Media

Materials

Paper, Ink, Watercolor

Birds at a waterhole, Heron, Flamingos, Swans, Egrets- San Diego Zoo
Located in Miami, FL
The iconic subject matter from Botke's oeuvre often features birds, particularly white peacocks, geese, egrets, and cockatoos. Women artists are on fire and very much in demand today...
Category

Post-Impressionist 1930s Mixed Media

Materials

Watercolor, Paper

MODERNIST DRAWING New Hope Mid-Century WPA Abstract Non-Objective Jazz Modern
Located in New York, NY
MODERNIST DRAWING New Hope Mid-Century WPA Abstract Non-Objective Jazz Modern. Signed with a "Ramstonev" stamp lower right. RAMSTONEV Cooperative Art Project (1937-1939). In the late 1930s, Charles Ramsey became close friends with Charles Evans and Louis Stone. He persuaded them to join him teaching his New Hope summer classes in non-objective painting. Soon, a history-making collaboration began. In 1937, meeting in Evans' studio at the rear of Cryer's Hardware store on Main Street in New Hope, a decision was made to establish the Co-Operative Painting Project. They were intrigued by the cooperative ad-lib process by which jazz musicians created their music. Believing this to be the quintessential American contribution to music, they theorized that a similar result might be obtainable with art, a "visual jam session." This particlarly fascinated Ramsey, who was a jazz buff and had a large collection of jazz records. The objective was to jointly collaborate in the creation of a painting as well as applying collective criticism during its creation. By creating forward movement by general consent, they believed they could produce a higher level of beauty. By consensus it was decided that subject matter would be non-objective. Up to eight people would participate and stop when the painting "felt" finished by common agreement. These co-operative works were done in several different mediums- the majority in pastel, but some in watercolor, gouache, graphite or cut paper collage. On occasion, the group would create a series, as opposed to a single work, created in steps by three or four artists. One of the occasional participants was famed New Hope poet, Stanley Kunitz. These series could range in number from four to sixteen paintings in each. The first of a series would be very basic and the last a fully finished work. In the scope of importance among the New Hope Modernist...
Category

American Modern 1930s Mixed Media

Materials

Paper, Watercolor, Gouache

Thistles
Located in Miami, FL
Signature: Signed, dated 1938 and inscribed Italy lower right. Thistles, 1938 Pastel on paper 25 3/4 × 18 3/4 in Work is framed Christie's, New York Very strong in person. Gallery st...
Category

Post-Impressionist 1930s Mixed Media

Materials

Pastel

Tobacco Package - Original Bonding after Juan Gris - 1933
Located in Roma, IT
The Tobacco Package is an original bonding realized by Juan Gris (d'après M. Beaufuret) in 1933. Good condition on a watermarked paper by the Editor Bucher-Becker. No signed. On th...
Category

Cubist 1930s Mixed Media

Materials

Paper

Laundry Day. Child hanging cloths in Breeze. Cover. The Household Guest
Located in Miami, FL
The Artist captures a "caught moment" of cloths blowing in the wind. It's being witnessed by an inquisitive bird, while be ducklings and a cute kitty cat accompany her. Signed lower...
Category

American Modern 1930s Mixed Media

Materials

Pastel, Archival Ink, Gouache, Graphite

Musicians - China Mixed Media on Paper by Willem Van Hasselt - 1930s
Located in Roma, IT
Musicians is an original drawing in mixed media on paper, realized in 1930 ca. by Willem van Hasselt (Dutch, 1882–1963). The state of preservation ...
Category

Modern 1930s Mixed Media

Materials

Mixed Media, Watercolor, Permanent Marker

"Preview" Story Illustration for Saturday Evening Post, Nov. 5, 1938
Located in Fort Washington, PA
Medium: Mixed Media on Board Signature: Signed Lower Center "Dancing the minuet before a camera and the hundred people behind it isn't the same as just dancing because you like the ...
Category

1930s Mixed Media

Materials

Crayon, Mixed Media, Oil, Gouache, Board

Couple - Original Drawing in Mixed Media - 1940 ca.
Located in Roma, IT
Couple is an original drawing in mixed media realized in 1940 ca. by an unknown artist of the XX century. Sheet dimension: 33.5 x 39 cm. In very good conditions with small tearing ...
Category

Modern 1930s Mixed Media

Materials

Tempera, Watercolor, Mixed Media

Nude - Original Mixed Media on Paper - 1930s
Located in Roma, IT
Nude is an original painting in charcoal, tempera and watercolor on ivory-colored paper realized in 1930 ca, by Anonymous Artist of the early 20th Century. Hand-signed, illegible. ...
Category

1930s Mixed Media

Materials

Paper, Tempera, Watercolor, Charcoal

SURREALIST LANDSCAPE
Located in Santa Monica, CA
EDWARD HAGEDORN (AMERICAN 1902 – 1982) SURREAL LANDSCAPE 1931 mixed media on paper, Graphite, ink and watercolor. Unsigned. Dtaed 2/26/31, in ink lower left margin. Image 13 3/4 x 16 1/2 inches. On a large sheet 20 x 25 inches. Provenance: Hagedorn estate, Around the mid 1980's The Hagedorn estate was dispersed in Berkeley by a local dealer. This drawing was part of a group of Hagedorn works on paper that I acquired from that dispersal. Much of the balance was later acquired the Struart Denenberg Fine Art. Denenberg published a very fine book on the artist's work. EDWARD HAGEDORN: CALIFORNIA MODERNIST, RESTLESSNESS AND RESTRAINT Hardcover – January 1, 2009 Subsequently Hagedorn's works on paper have been acquired by many museums and some accompanying exhibitions. ALL OF THE COMMENTS BELOW ARE FROM THE FOLLOWING EXHIBITION EDWARD HAGEDORN (1902-1982) American Modernist A New Traveling Exhibition “VOLCANOS, WRECKS, RIOTS, & NUDES”, EDWARD HAGEDORN (1902-1982) premiere at the Danforth Museum. Framingham, MA, in March 2016. The exhibition includes 75 works of art in various mediums and is accompanied by the first monograph devoted to the artist’s work with essays by leading curators, critics, and art historians. Edward Hagedorn was a true Modernist who created a trove of powerful works on paper--drawings, watercolors, oils, and original graphics that reveal the hand of a master draftsman and the mind of an astute political observer. He rejected the general trend in early 20th century California of local landscapes and coastal views, becoming virtually the single voice of Expressionism. He conveyed the darkness and upheaval that gripped the country in the depression years between the two World Wars, 1925- 1935, more forcefully than any of his contemporaries, influenced by German art of the time, engaging in modernist styles of Expressionism and Surrealism. Hagedorn’s skeletons are ferocious yet somehow endearing; printed in deep black ink on off-white paper, they march across Lilliputian landscapes of grim disorder and destruction. Comets and volcanoes explode in fauvist colors, their other-worldly fluorescent temperas framed in black, while nude female figures, executed in exquisitely refined pen and ink, or graphite line drawings, are as economical in their means as Matisse, and can be compared with the neo-classical drawings of Picasso. Among his most lyrical works of the 1920s is a series of rhythmically abstracted watercolor and ink views of Golden Gate Park, evoking the sensual demi-geometries of Balthus, Derain , and early Mondrian. American Modernist Edward Hagedorn (1902-1982) was born in San Francisco of German descent; his mother (née Kafka) died in childbirth, and he was legally adopted and raised by his grandmother and aunt. After attendance at the San Francisco School of Fine Arts in the early 1920s, by age 22 he had a studio in the famed "100" block of Montgomery Street ("the Monkey Block,") then a haven for bohemians. In 1926, a year of tremendous importance in California artists' embrace of modern art, the Oakland Art Gallery, with the guidance and inspiration of their European representative Emmy (Galka) Scheyer, was the first museum in the United States to show the art of the "Blue Four," among the leading artists of International Modernism--Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, Alexei Jawlensky...
Category

American Modern 1930s Mixed Media

Materials

Watercolor

Cosmic Fantasy - Original Tempera and Pastel by Leandra Angelucci - 1936
Located in Roma, IT
Cosmic Fantasy is an original artwork realized by the Futurist painter Leandra Angelucci (Foligno,1890 - Foligno,1981) in 1936. Tempera and pastels ...
Category

Futurist 1930s Mixed Media

Materials

Oil Pastel, Tempera

What Happened To You In Altoona
Located in Fort Washington, PA
Signed Lower Left Illustrated in October 23, 1938 Issue of "This Week Magazine" Page 3
Category

1930s Mixed Media

Materials

Paper, Charcoal, Mixed Media, Watercolor, Gouache

Composition - Original Mixed Media by Mario Sironi - 1937
Located in Roma, IT
Signed lower in the center. Good conditions. Mario Sironi (1885-1961) Mario Sironi was an Italian modernist painter, sculptor, illustrator and designer. He was born in Sassari, his...
Category

1930s Mixed Media

Materials

Mixed Media

VAN BIESBROECK Jules. Arab women working. Pastel on grey paper.
Located in Paris, FR
Arab women working. Black and white pastel on thick grey paper. Monogrammed. Provenance : granddaughter of the artist. This work will be recorded in the catalogue raisonné of the work of the artist currently in preparation. Jules Van Biesbroeck...
Category

1930s Mixed Media

Materials

Pastel

Edgar Allan Poe
By Henry Kurt Stoessel
Located in Fort Washington, PA
Date: 1933 Medium: Mixed Media on Board Dimensions: 18.50" x 25.50" Signature: Signed Lower Left Shows Poe seated at a desk in the offices of The Evening Mirror (early publishe...
Category

1930s Mixed Media

Materials

Board, Mixed Media

Reclama (Advertisement work) 1935
Located in New York, NY
Rare original photo montage, tempera and paper collage on heavy carton. signed in the upper left image “Vasarely" The work measures 39.5 x 31 cm. good condition, some glue r...
Category

Surrealist 1930s Mixed Media

Materials

Paper, Mixed Media, Watercolor

Pastel and Pencil on Paper 1933, untitled
Located in Berlin, DE
Color pencil and pastel on paper. Signed and dated top right : FGray? 1933. Described top left: " Wilfrabot" Image size: 13.19 x 9.69 in ( 33,5 x 24,6 cm ), Framed: 19.8 x 14.84 in ...
Category

1930s Mixed Media

Materials

Paper, Pastel, Pencil

Wisconsin Twilight
Located in Missouri, MO
John Steuart Curry (American, 1897-1946) Wisconsin Twilight, 1934 Signed Lower Left Gold Leafed Frame with Silk Mat and Gold Leafed Fillet 29 x 36.5 inches 41 x 46.5 inches with frame Born in Dunavant, Kansas on November 14, 1897, John Steuart Curry became the youngest member of the famed "Benton-Wood-Curry trio" of Regional Painters of the early 20th-century American Scene movement. He gained national reputation for his Kansas rural scenes of people terrorized by natural phenomena such as tornadoes, drab farm-house living conditions, religious gatherings such as prayer meeting and baptisms, and spirited animals who got out of control. A good example of his weather-related painting was Tornado Over Kansas, 1929, in the collection of the Muskegon Museum of Art in Muskegon, Michigan. In this scene, a family scurries for shelter, trying to outrun a funnel cloud headed for their home. The mother carries her baby, and the children rescue pets and toys. It was later said that Curry never directly experienced a tornado but had many scares from them as a child when his family, faced with frightening skies, made frequent trips to their fruit cellar. In 1933, Tornado Over Kansas received second prize at the Carnegie International Exhibit. He was especially focused on people who were down-to-earth, plain spoken and who were self reliantly making a living through hard physical labor challenged by harsh weather. In many of his paintings, he showed his disdain for racial discrimination and hatred, something he believed was psychologically poisonous. He did many murals dealing with land settlement and these themes of racial justice, and his, reflecting these themes, murals are in the Capitol Building in Kansas, the University of Wisconsin, Department of the Interior, and Department of Justice in Washington D.C. Curry was a descendant of many generations of farmers, whose American ancestors originally were from Scotland. Some of them immigrated to South Carolina, and later followed "the line of the frontier into the Mississippi Valley." The first born of five children, Curry said of his childhood: "I was raised on hard work and the shorter catechism---Up at four o'clock the year round, doing half a day's work before we rode to town on horseback to our lessons." From a young age, he was constantly drawing, an activity encouraged by his mother, who arranged art lessons for him from age 12. She also gave him his first glimpse of the Old Master painters through reproductions of their work she had collected on her honeymoon. Never of the studious nature, Curry quit the county high school in Winchester, Kansas and spent that summer as a railroad section-hand. His earnings provided him with enough money to buy a suit of clothes so that he could go to Kansas City and attend the Art Institute. A month later he moved to the Art Institute of Chicago, and remained there for two years, supporting himself by sweeping floors and acting as a bus-boy in the cafeteria. Upon America's declaration of war, Curry went to training camp, only to be sent home when it was discovered that he was still under age. In 1918 he enrolled at Geneva College, played football for two seasons, and spent the following five years training to earn his money as an illustrator of "blood-and-thunder" scenes for a popular western story magazine. In this capacity, he worked for illustrator Harvey Dunn in New Jersey from 1919 to 1926. He married and then persuaded art patron Seward Prosser to loan him $1000. 00,, which he used for one year of study in Paris in 1927. The year in Europe, which included study at the Academy Julian, reinforced his independent nature. He was much more impressed by the paintings of Rembrandt and Rubens than by the modernist American painters, many whom were adopting the 'isms' of abstract styles of French contemporary artists such as Pablo Picasso's Cubism and Max Ernst's Surrealism. Curry determined to paint American subjects without European models and to celebrate American patriotism and regional pride rather than lofty, remote ideals espoused by the academics. He returned to America penniless, and settling in Westport, Connecticut, swore that he would turn out a worthwhile picture or give up painting entirely. There in 1928 from memory he painted his first picture that became famous, Baptism in Kansas. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney bought it for her museum and subsidized him for two years at $50 a week. Baptism in Kansas was heralded nationally as work of a new American genre, but fellow Kansans were not impressed until much later when they realized the scope of his recognition. Purchased by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, one of his key benefactors, Baptism launched his career as a regionalist. In 1930, he had his first one-man exhibition, held at the Whitney Studio Club, and was received enthusiastically by critics. Although he lived primarily in the East, he returned often to Kansas where he stayed at his parents' farm and sketched rural-life scenes. His first wife died, and he gave up his studio in Westport, and secluded himself in a drab New York City studio. He taught at the Cooper Union and the Art Students' League, and held a show of circus studies after touring New England with Ringling Bros.-Barnum & Bailey Circus. This tour and the resulting circus sketches and watercolors were inspired from his attendance in Kansas at many rural county fairs. Reportedly the circus people said they liked Curry but "quibbled over minor technical errors in his series of circus paintings." In 1934 he married Kathleen Shepard, returned to Westport, recovered his old enthusiasm, and painted one of his most famous paintings, Line Storm. Westport beginning to appreciate him, commissioned him to do a double mural for the local high school. Additionally, the United States government selected him to paint murals for the Department of Justice and the Department of Interior buildings in Washington, D.C. He was appointed Artist-in-Residence in the College of Agriculture, University of Wisconsin, in 1936. At $4,000 a year he had his studio on the campus, where he could mingle with students, but he conducted no formal classes. Curry also traveled occasionally to Arizona where he visited his parents who had a second home there and spent their winters. The Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art in Manhattan, Kansas, is the repository of the Curry archives including many paintings. According to Bill North, the Museum's Senior Curator, Curry "did produce a number of paintings and watercolors with Arizona subjects, some, certainly prior to 1940. Relatively little is known about this aspect of his life and work. I assume that many, if not all of Curry's Arizona paintings...
Category

Other Art Style 1930s Mixed Media

Materials

Paper, Charcoal, Pastel, Graphite

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