Vintage Artist Proof Print of Carnival by New York City Artist Bea Kreloff, 1975

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Vintage Artist Proof Print of Carnival by New York City Artist Bea Kreloff, 1975

About the Item

A vintage, 1975, artist's proof print by New York City artist Bea Kreloff (1926 - 2016). This work depicts a samba dancer set against a graphic background of red, white and blue. An edition of this work is in the Leslie Lohman Museum in New York City. This work is framed in a double sided Plexiglas enclosure allowing the back of the print to also be visible. The print is signed and dated in the lower right corner in pencil. Please note, there are some areas of foxing to the paper and some scratches to the Plexiglas. The artwork itself measures approximately 28" by 28". From a write up by her son, Charles Kreloff, "Bea Kreloff (1925-2016) died August 17, 2016, at the age of 90. She was a painter, teacher, activist, radical lesbian feminist, and deeply involved with the antiwar movement, gay liberation, and women’s issues. She was a co-founder and Director Emeritus of Art Workshop International in Assisi, Italy. Bea was born in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, in 1925, into a middle-class Jewish household, and showed an interest in art and political activism from an early age. Her father, a clothing designer, and her mother, a housewife, encouraged and supported her ambition. Bea attended Washington Irving High School in Manhattan, then studied at and worked for The Brooklyn Museum Art School from 1950 to 1958, where she took classes with the painters Max Beckmann and Rubin Tam. In the 1960s she painted and taught privately, and from 1973 to 1985 she was Art Department Chair at Ethical Culture Fieldston School, Riverdale, N.Y. Bea taught painting workshops, seminars, and lectured on art at Cooper Union, Marymount Manhattan College, the Women’s Caucus for Art, The New School University and The College Art Association, among other institutions. This retrospective is both a celebration and exploration of her journey from the culturally repressive postwar years in Brooklyn—where she balanced being a wife and mother with her artistic growth—to living in Manhattan at Westbeth Artist Housing—where she was finally free to embrace fully her life as artist, activist and lesbian. Bea moved into Westbeth with her sons Charles and Elliot in December 1970, and lived there until her death with her partner Edith Isaac Rose. Bea was exposed to progressive and leftist politics in the years leading up to World War II. Like many women at the time, she also married young (at 19). She maintained a home in Brooklyn with her husband until the late 1960s. While raising her children, Bea studied art and painting, and kept a separate studio of her own where she could work and teach privately. Bea had begun as a figurative artist. In the 1940s and 50s she began to paint in a more personal expressionist style, which evolved further in the early 1960s, when her older brother was institutionalized for severe depression. Encountering him and other patients in the bright, impersonal interiors and on the lush grounds of Creedmoor psychiatric hospital inspired her to produce a series of vivid, unsettling paintings that featured him and other patients. The resulting works are a series of haunting portraits of disassociation that featured gray, expressionistic figures within flat, hard-edged, brightly colored environments. Following the political evolution of the 1960s and the move to Greenwich Village in 1970, Bea divorced, came out as a lesbian, aligned herself with the political left and the antiwar movement, and embraced radical feminism. This was reflected more and more in her art. She was able to use her home studio space at Westbeth to explore her views on contemporary society and image. In many of her paintings at the time, Bea, drawing from personal photos, news photography and advertising, depicted women trapped in their environments and imprisoned in their roles. Over the years, Bea had moved from using oil to a mix of oils and acrylics, finally concentrating solely on acrylic in her painting. In the acrylic works of her later period, she would stain her gray figures into raw canvas within a bright hard-edged environment that evoked the dissonance of modern life. Bea also produced a series of silkscreens of enlarged postage stamps of famous and influential women. She eventually embarked on a series of large, square, pencil portraits of the women in her life, including friends, lovers, associates and acquaintances, with the goal of creating a wallpaper of impassive female faces gazing intently at the viewer. Beyond her teaching at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School and elsewhere, Bea held annual painting and drawing classes at Art Workshop International, Assisi, Italy, over the course of 35 years. She exhibited her paintings and drawings nationally and internationally, and her work is in the permanent collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., as well as in a number of private collections".

Dimensions:
Height: 33.5 in (85.09 cm)Width: 33.5 in (85.09 cm)Depth: 1 in (2.54 cm)
Style:
Post-Modern (Of the Period)
Materials and Techniques:
Glass,Metal,Paper
Place of Origin:
United States
Period:
Late 20th Century
Date of Manufacture:
1975
Condition:
Wear consistent with age and use. This work shows signs of age appropriate wear and use. Please note, there are some areas of foxing to the paper and some scratches to the Plexiglas.
Seller Location:
Atlanta, GA
Reference Number:
1stDibs: LU7240230183592