Shelly Fink Art

Thomas Hart Benton, 'Goin' Home', lithograph, 1937, edition 250, Fath 14. Signed in pencil. Signed in the stone, lower right. A fine, richly-inked impression, on off-white, wove paper, with margins, in excellent condition. Published by Associated American Artists. Archivally matted to museum standards, unframed. Image size 9 7/16 x 11 7/8 inches; sheet size 10 3/4 x 13 5/16 inches. Impressions of this work are held in the following museum collections: Figge Art Museum, Georgetown University Art Collection, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Library of Congress, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. ABOUT THE ARTIST “Benton’s idiom was essentially political and rhetorical, the painterly equivalent of the country stump speeches that were a Benton family tradition. The artist vividly recalled accompanying his father, Maecenas E. Benton — a four-term U.S. congressman, on campaigns through rural Missouri. Young Tom Benton grew up with an instinct for constituencies that led him to assess art on the basis of its audience appeal. His own art, after the experiments with abstraction, was high-spirited entertainment designed to catch and hold an audience with a political message neatly bracketed between humor and local color.” —Elizabeth Broun “Thomas Hart Benton: A Politician in Art,” Smithsonian Studies in American Art, Spring 1987. Born in 1889 in Neosho, Missouri, Thomas Hart Benton spent much of his childhood and adolescence in Washington, D.C., where his father, Maecenas Eason Benton, served as a Democratic member of Congress from 1897 to 1905. Hoping to prepare Benton for a political career, his father sent him to Western Military Academy. After nearly two years at the academy, Benton persuaded his mother to support him in attending the Art Institute of Chicago for two years, followed by two additional years at the Académie Julian in Paris. In 1912, Benton returned to America and moved to New York to pursue his artistic career. One of his first jobs involved painting sets for silent films, which were being produced in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Benton credits this experience with equipping him with the skills necessary to create his large-scale murals. When World War I broke out, Benton joined the Navy. Stationed in Norfolk, Virginia, he was assigned to create drawings of camouflaged ships arriving at Norfolk Naval Station. These renderings were used to identify vessels that might be lost in battle. Benton later remarked that being a "camofleur" profoundly impacted his career: "When I came out of the Navy after the First World War," he said, "I made up my mind that I wasn’t going to be just a studio painter, a pattern maker in the fashion then dominating the art world—as it still does. I began to think of returning to the painting of subjects, subjects with meanings, which people, in general, might be interested in." While developing his Regionalist vision, Benton also taught art, first at a city-supported school and later at The Art Students League from 1926 to 1935. One of his students was a young Jackson Pollock, who regarded Benton as both a mentor and father figure. In 1930, Benton was commissioned to paint a mural for the New School for Social Research. The "America Today" mural, now permanently exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, led to many more commissions as Benton’s work gained wide recognition. The Regionalist Movement became popular during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Painters such as Benton, Grant Wood, and John Steuart Curry rejected modernist European influences, choosing instead to depict realistic images of small-town and rural life—comforting representations of the American heartland during a period of upheaval. Time Magazine referred to Benton as "the most virile of U.S. painters of the U.S. Scene," featuring his self-portrait on the cover of a 1934 issue that included a story titled "The Birth of Regionalism." In 1935, Benton left New York and returned to Missouri, where he taught at the Kansas City Art Institute. His outspoken criticism of modern art, art critics, and political views alienated him from many influential figures in both political and art circles. Nonetheless, Benton remained true to his beliefs, continuing to create murals, paintings, and prints that captured enduring images of American life. The dramatic and engaging characteristics of Benton’s artwork drawn the attention of Hollywood producers, leading him to create illustrations and posters for films, including his famous lithographs for the film adaptation of John Steinbeck’s "The Grapes of Wrath," produced by Twentieth Century Fox. During the 1930s, The Limited Editions Club of New York asked Benton to illustrate special editions of three of Mark Twain’s books...

Duane Bryers, American (1911 - 2012) - Cooling Off, Year: 1979, Medium: Lithograph, Signed and Numbered in Pencil, Edition: 300, AP, Image Size: 17.5 x 22.5 inches, Size: 21.5 i...

Original poster: Rembember Your First Thrill of Ameridan Liberty YOUR DUTY Buy United States Government Bonds 2nd Liberty Loan of 1917. Linen backed and ready to frame. Poste...

The Jewish Welfare Board. Original World 1 vintage poster, excellent condition; archival linen backed and ready to frame. Printer: Alco-Gravure, Inc., N. Y. Civilians: When we...

Eric Fischl (AMERICAN, Born 1948) Lithograph depicting figures on a beach., 1991 Hand signed in pencil to lower left and edition numbered 41/125. Mounted in a black painted wooden frame behind glass screen. Dimensions: Frame: 18.75 X 22.75, Image: 16 X 20 From Art Pro-Choice II, 1991 Relief pressure print from stratified collage on wove Okawara paper Printed by Spring Street Workshop,New York and published by Pace Editions,Inc., New York. This was a portfolio of 8 works by artists Jennifer Bartlett, Ross Bleckner, Francesco Clemente, Eric Fischl, April Gornik, Claes Oldenburg, Cindy Sherman and Pat Steir. Eric Fischl (born March 9, 1948) is an American painter, sculptor, printmaker, draughtsman and educator. He is known for his paintings depicting American suburbia from the 1970s and 1980s. Fischl was born in New York City and grew up on suburban Long Island; his family moved to Phoenix, Arizona, in 1967. His art education began at Phoenix College for two years, followed with studying at Arizona State University. Followed by studying at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California, where he received a B.F.A. in 1972. He then moved to Chicago, taking a job as a guard at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Between 1974 and 1978 he taught at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Nova Scotia. It was at this school where he met his future wife, painter April Gornik. In 1978, he moved back to New York City. Fischl is a trustee and senior critic at the New York Academy of Art and President of the Academy of the Arts at Guild Hall of East Hampton. In addition to receiving Guild Hall's Academy of the Art's Lifetime Achievement Award in 1994, Fischl was extended the honor of membership to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2006. Fischl has embraced the description of himself as a painter of the suburbs, not generally considered appropriate subject matter prior to his generation. In 2002, Fischl collaborated with the Museum Haus Esters in Krefeld, Germany. Haus Esters is a 1928 home, designed by Mies van der Rohe in 1928 to be a private home. It now houses changing exhibitions. Fischl refurbished it as a home (though not particularly in Bauhaus style) and hired models who, for several days, pretended to be a couple who lived there. He took 2,000 photographs, which he reworked digitally and used as the basis for a series of paintings, one of which, the monumental Krefeld Redux, Bedroom #6 (Surviving the Fall Meant Using You for Handholds) (2004) was purchased by Paul Allen featured in the 2006 Double Take Exhibit at Experience Music Project, where it was juxtaposed with a much smaller Degas pastel. This is by no means the first time Fischl has been compared to Degas. Twenty years earlier, reviewing a show of 28 Fischl paintings at New York's Whitney Museum, art critic John Russell wrote in The New York Times, "[Degas] sets up a charged situation with his incomparable subtlety of insight and characterization, and then he goes away and leaves us to figure it out as best we can. That is the tactic of Fischl, too, though the society with which he deals has an unstructured brutality and a violence never far from release that are very different from the nicely calibrated cruelties that Degas recorded." Fischl also collaborated with Jamaica Kincaid, E. L. Doctorow and Frederic Tuten combining paintings and sketches with literary works.Composer Bruce Wolosoff was inspired by Fischl's watercolors to compose "The Loom" for the classical ensemble Eroica Trio. Fischl's work can be found in the permanent collections of museums such as the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Art Institute of Chicago; Broad Museum, Los Angeles; Dallas Museum of Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek; Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Philadelphia Museum of Modern Art, among many others. In May 2022, a new auction record was set for Eric Fischl when his 1982 painting The...

Norman Rockwell (1894-1978) Courting Couple at Midnight (with Cuckoo clock) 1972 Offset lithograph print, collotype) Hand signed in pencil, numbered H AP 9/10 26 x 21 in. (sight),...

Original vintage poster: The U.S. Marines Want You. This military vintage poster is archival linen-backed and in fine condition, ready to frame. There is no date, artist, or printer'...

A group of 14 Blackfeet Indians prints created by the artist Winold Reiss. The Great Northern Railway printed and released these prints in c. 1940. This is for the entire group...

Artist: Ernie Barnes Title: Destination Unknown Year: 1979 Print - Lithograph Size: 25" x 19 ½" inches Edition: Pencil signed and numbered 24/300 Unframed ‘Destination Unknow...

Original vintage poster: THE GREATEST MOTHER IN THE WORLD. archivally linen backed. Very clean. Artist: Alonzo Earl Foringer. Lithograph, circa 1917-1918. Good condition, restored tear near the center top in the white area, ready to frame. Loosely based on Michelangelo's "Pieta," the image in this poster depicts a monumental Red Cross nurse...

Original WW1 poster, linen-backed. Very good condition, rare American WW1 antique military poster. Navy ships need binoculars and spy-glasses. Will you ...

Original Pin-Up Girl with Red Hat vintage pin-up poster. Artist: Billy Devorss. Size: 15.25" x 20". Archival linen backed in mint condition; ready to frame. This striking original poster displays a graceful model wearing a vibrant red sun hat against a light blue background. This is truly a lovely piece! Billy DeVorss (1908 – 1985) was a self-taught illustration artist who started his commercial career in 1933. He was well known throughout his career for the voluptuous figures and attractive faces of his images. This poster is one of those great pin-up style images created by DeVorss. Alone among the pin-up artists in being entirely self-taught, Billy De Vorss sold his first three published pin-ups to the Louis F. Dow Calendar Company in St. Paul in about 1933. Until that time, he had been working as a teller in a bank in St. Joseph, Missouri. There, he met the stunning woman Glenna, who became his wife and first official model. Encouraged to develop his talent by Gene Sayles, the manager of Brown and Bigelow...