Manhattan - Drawings and Watercolor Paintings

James Nares Untitled flower monotype, 1988 Monotype on hand made paper Pencil signed and dated by James Nares on the lower right front Frame included: floated in the original wood fr...

Lester Johnson untitled charcoal, conte crayon, and spray enamel on board from 1972. Framed.

Linda Stein, Profile Notation 418.007 - Signed Feminist LGBTQ+ Colorful Ink on Paper Drawing Profile Notation 418.007 is from Linda Stein's Profiles series--drawings, collages and ...

Philip Wittmann work is based on signs. Signs are for him an intermediary between abstraction and writing. He started painting 32 years ago, at the age...

Of her recent works, Urso states, "I make exploratory paintings, working in response to my immediate environment. My approach involves moment-to-moment extrapolation governed by intu...

Of her recent works, Urso states, "I make exploratory paintings, working in response to my immediate environment. My approach involves moment-to-moment extrapolation governed by intu...

Josette Urso "Nest" Water Color on Paper

Jerome Witkin Proof that a Cat is a Snake with Fur, from the Patrick Eddington Cat Project, ca. 2004 Marker on paper drawing Boldly signed by Jerome Wit...

Robert Strati is an American artist who creates multimedia artworks using broken plates. His recent series “Fragmented” started when he accidentally dropped and broke a porcelain pla...

David Roberts, Tombs of the Mamelukes. David Roberts (1796-1864) antique lithograph of the "Tombs of the Mamelukes, Cairo" from the 1st edition in gilt frame, England, 1849. Dimensi...

Leonor Fini La Sorcière, ca. 1960 Ink on paper 21 x 15.5 cm 8 1/4 x 5 7/8 in. 41.5 x 36 cm 16 1/8 x 14 1/8 in. (Frame included) Unique work Exhibition History: Leonor Fini: Small ...

Line is the operative formal element in the work shown here, but there are many other lines in play. Pieces walk a line between drawings that might be tapestries or sculptures or pa...

Signed and dated

Josette Urso Lake and Sky, 2022 watercolor on paper 6 x 6 in.

Polly Apfelbaum Color Circle and Star, 2004 Fabric Marker and Fabric Dye on Velvet Cotton Signed and dated in ink by the artist on the front with artist's inkstamp. Frame Included Si...

Linda Stein, Profile Solid 383.049 - Signed Feminist LGBTQ+ Colorful Acrylic and Gouache on Paper Drawing Profile Solid 383.049 is from Linda Stein's Profiles series--drawings, coll...

Jeff Koons Original tulips in landscape drawing, 2011 Original drawing done in ink across the title pages of Gagosian Gallery monograph Signed, dated and warmly inscribed to Jennifer...

Signed and dated

WILLIAM BAZIOTES Untitled Abstract Expressionist Mid Century Modern ink drawing with Estate COA, ca. 1955 Ink Drawing on Paper Signed lower right recto. Accompanied by letter of aut...

About the Series: Gilliam began the series Life Lines in 2017 after recently coming into possession of MRI scans of her brain. The scans, which she spent hours pouring over, both fas...

Signed and dated

30"x22" watercolor on paper, signed on reverse. New York artist, Thomas Broadbent, well know for his contemporary naturalist depictions of the intersection of nature and man, presents a humorous depiction of an ibis bird...

Jasper Johns Letter ("one either jumps into the water or doesn't"), 1996 Hand signed letter framed on top of a Time Magazine cover depicting a work by the artist Hand signed by Jasper Johns underneath a typewritten letter by his secretary (JJ/st) Frame Included This listing consists of a typewritten letter, hand signed by Jasper Johns in response to one sent by the present addressee. While we do not see the fan's letter that prompted this response from Johns, it's not too difficult to guess, as Jasper Johns replies, stating, in part, "I wish I felt I could advise you but I can't. One either jumps in the water or doesn't. There doesn't seem to be any in-between." No truer words could have been spoken regarding the artist's life. Underneath this letter, is a vintage Time Magazine cover, presumably from the same year, depicting a Jasper Johns Flag...

Signed and dated

Jacquelyn Strycker Sunlight on the Lattice of Memory, 2025 risograph on handmade paper with sewing, acrylic gouache, and watercolor 8.5 x 11 in. (Str001) Pattern is also prominent ...

Colored Pencil on Museum Board Signed and Dated; Impressed with artist's stamp lower right Archivally framed with black float mount and bleached maple surround.

Katherine Porter Geometric Abstraction, 1971 Watercolor and graphite on graph paper Signed and dated "Katherine Porter 1971" in pencil on the front Held in original vintage 1970s met...

Wes Lang The World is Yours (original drawing), ca. 2010 Signed, titled and inscribed original drawing done in marker and held in hard back monograph Hand signed, inscribed and drawing by Wes Lang in marker 11 1/4 × 9 1/4 inches Unframed This is an entirely original (unique) drawing, a distinctive Wes Land Skull, hand signed and inscribed by Wes Lang to Nate, and held in the first front end page of the scarce long sold out 2010 hardback monograph of works by Wes Lang and Donald Baechler. Inscription: For Nate, THE WORLD IS YOURS... -Wes (Skull Drawing...

Seymour Lipton Study for Pacific Bird Sculpture, 1965 Crayon on paper (Hand Signed & Dated, in Kulicke Frame w/Marlborough-Gerson gallery label) Signed and dated on center right rect...

Unknown/Unidentified Artist, "Untitled: Solo Seated Nude Twist", Signed Figurative/ Nude Watercolor Painting on Paper, 18 x 14, Late 20th Century Colors: Black, Brown, Orange, Yellow, Turquoise, Green, Purple, Red *Unidentified/ Unknown Artist signature...

This is a hand drawn original artwork on heavyweight paper by internet sensation mad charcoal He is represented by Krause Gallery NYC Ships rolled in a ...

Robert Petersen After A Rain #2, 1987 Collage on Paper: Pencil, Oil, Acrylic and Cloth Hand signed, dated and titled on lower front with Castelli Graphics label on the back Frame Inc...

Colored Pencil on Museum Board Signed and Dated; Impressed with artist's stamp lower right

Barbara Regina Dietzsch, 1706-1783 White Primrose, Japanese Quince, a Beetle, and a Butterfly, ca. 1730 Opaque watercolor painting inscribed on...

David Storey Untitled, 1993 Charcoal and pastel 29 x 19 inches (sheet) 30 x 20 inches (frame) Unsigned Natural wood frame with light white wash. Floated in window opening. 1.5'' dep...

Linda Stein, Figures with Horse 986 - Contemporary Art Drawing Collage In 2000, Linda Stein began a series called Knights of Protection. Her Knights...

Reginald Marsh, 1898 – 1954 Monseigneur News Theatre, 1925 Signed and dated at lower right: 'Reginald Marsh 1925' Watercolor on card 8 x 11 inches Born in Paris to parents who were American artists, Reginald Marsh became an adept illustrator at an early age. His family returned to the United States in 1900. Upon graduating from Yale University, Marsh moved to New York and in 1922 took a job as an illustrator at the New York Daily News. For the paper he provided cartoons of vaudeville and burlesque shows. In 1925 Marsh went to work for a new magazine -- The New Yorker -- as one of its original cartoonists. That same year he married Betty Burroughs, daughter of the paintings curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Later that year they traveled to Europe where Marsh discovered the work of the old masters at the Louvre in Paris and British museums. With a sketchbook always on hand, he wandered the streets of Europe and began depicting bums or what he called figures of failure. Upon the couple’s return, Marsh, now with a serious interest in pursuing art, enrolled at the Art Students League where he studied under George Luks, John Sloan, and Kenneth Hayes Miller. This work, Monseigneur News Theatre, is accompanied by a letter from Marsh Scholar Professor Norman Sasowsky, University of Delaware...

Lois Dodd Untitled Landscape, 1990 Colored chalk on grey wove paper Signed, dated and inscribed "For Beverly & Howard", lower right. Original artist's frame included This unique work...

Original drawing by Elizabeth McGhee Elizabeth McGhee (b. 1985, Southern California) completed her BFA in 2009 at the Laguna College of Art and Design, Laguna Beach, CA. She continu...

Oscar Bluemner was a German and an American, a trained architect who read voraciously in art theory, color theory, and philosophy, a writer of art criticism both in German and English, and, above all, a practicing artist. Bluemner was an intense man, who sought to express and share, through drawing and painting, universal emotional experience. Undergirded by theory, Bluemner chose color and line for his vehicles; but color especially became the focus of his passion. He was neither abstract artist nor realist, but employed the “expressional use of real phenomena” to pursue his ends. (Oscar Bluemner, from unpublished typescript on “Modern Art” for Camera Work, in Bluemner papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, as cited and quoted in Jeffrey R. Hayes, Oscar Bluemner [1991], p. 60. The Bluemner papers in the Archives [hereafter abbreviated as AAA] are the primary source for Bluemner scholars. Jeffrey Hayes read them thoroughly and translated key passages for his doctoral dissertation, Oscar Bluemner: Life, Art, and Theory [University of Maryland, 1982; UMI reprint, 1982], which remains the most comprehensive source on Bluemner. In 1991, Hayes published a monographic study of Bluemner digested from his dissertation and, in 2005, contributed a brief essay to the gallery show at Barbara Mathes, op. cit.. The most recent, accessible, and comprehensive view of Bluemner is the richly illustrated, Barbara Haskell, Oscar Bluemner: A Passion for Color, exhib. cat. [New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2005.]) Bluemner was born in the industrial city of Prenzlau, Prussia, the son and grandson of builders and artisans. He followed the family predilection and studied architecture, receiving a traditional and thorough German training. He was a prize-winning student and appeared to be on his way to a successful career when he decided, in 1892, to emigrate to America, drawn perhaps by the prospect of immediate architectural opportunities at the Chicago World’s Fair, but, more importantly, seeking a freedom of expression and an expansiveness that he believed he would find in the New World. The course of Bluemner’s American career proved uneven. He did indeed work as an architect in Chicago, but left there distressed at the formulaic quality of what he was paid to do. Plagued by periods of unemployment, he lived variously in Chicago, New York, and Boston. At one especially low point, he pawned his coat and drafting tools and lived in a Bowery flophouse, selling calendars on the streets of New York and begging for stale bread. In Boston, he almost decided to return home to Germany, but was deterred partly because he could not afford the fare for passage. He changed plans and direction again, heading for Chicago, where he married Lina Schumm, a second-generation German-American from Wisconsin. Their first child, Paul Robert, was born in 1897. In 1899, Bluemner became an American citizen. They moved to New York City where, until 1912, Bluemner worked as an architect and draftsman to support his family, which also included a daughter, Ella Vera, born in 1903. All the while, Oscar Bluemner was attracted to the freer possibilities of art. He spent weekends roaming Manhattan’s rural margins, visiting the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, and New Jersey, sketching landscapes in hundreds of small conté crayon drawings. Unlike so many city-based artists, Bluemner did not venture out in search of pristine countryside or unspoiled nature. As he wrote in 1932, in an unsuccessful application for a Guggenheim Fellowship, “I prefer the intimate landscape of our common surroundings, where town and country mingle. For we are in the habit to carry into them our feelings of pain and pleasure, our moods” (as quoted by Joyce E. Brodsky in “Oscar Bluemner in Black and White,” p. 4, in Bulletin 1977, I, no. 5, The William Benton Museum of Art, Storrs, Connecticut). By 1911, Bluemner had found a powerful muse in a series of old industrial towns, mostly in New Jersey, strung along the route of the Morris Canal. While he educated himself at museums and art galleries, Bluemner entered numerous architectural competitions. In 1903, in partnership with Michael Garven, he designed a new courthouse for Bronx County. Garven, who had ties to Tammany Hall, attempted to exclude Bluemner from financial or artistic credit, but Bluemner promptly sued, and, finally, in 1911, after numerous appeals, won a $7,000 judgment. Barbara Haskell’s recent catalogue reveals more details of Bluemner’s architectural career than have previously been known. Bluemner the architect was also married with a wife and two children. He took what work he could get and had little pride in what he produced, a galling situation for a passionate idealist, and the undoubted explanation for why he later destroyed the bulk of his records for these years. Beginning in 1907, Bluemner maintained a diary, his “Own Principles of Painting,” where he refined his ideas and incorporated insights from his extensive reading in philosophy and criticism both in English and German to create a theoretical basis for his art. Sometime between 1908 and 1910, Bluemner’s life as an artist was transformed by his encounter with the German-educated Alfred Stieglitz, proprietor of the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession at 291 Fifth Avenue. The two men were kindred Teutonic souls. Bluemner met Stieglitz at about the time that Stieglitz was shifting his serious attention away from photography and toward contemporary art in a modernist idiom. Stieglitz encouraged and presided over Bluemner’s transition from architect to painter. During the same period elements of Bluemner’s study of art began to coalesce into a personal vision. A Van Gogh show in 1908 convinced Bluemner that color could be liberated from the constraints of naturalism. In 1911, Bluemner visited a Cézanne watercolor show at Stieglitz’s gallery and saw, in Cézanne’s formal experiments, a path for uniting Van Gogh’s expressionist use of color with a reality-based but non-objective language of form. A definitive change of course in Bluemner’s professional life came in 1912. Ironically, it was the proceeds from his successful suit to gain credit for his architectural work that enabled Bluemner to commit to painting as a profession. Dividing the judgment money to provide for the adequate support of his wife and two children, he took what remained and financed a trip to Europe. Bluemner traveled across the Continent and England, seeing as much art as possible along the way, and always working at a feverish pace. He took some of his already-completed work with him on his European trip, and arranged his first-ever solo exhibitions in Berlin, Leipzig, and Elberfeld, Germany. After Bluemner returned from his study trip, he was a painter, and would henceforth return to drafting only as a last-ditch expedient to support his family when his art failed to generate sufficient income. Bluemner became part of the circle of Stieglitz artists at “291,” a group which included Marsden Hartley, John Marin, and Arthur Dove. He returned to New York in time to show five paintings at the 1913 Armory Show and began, as well, to publish critical and theoretical essays in Stieglitz’s journal, Camera Work. In its pages he cogently defended the Armory Show against the onslaught of conservative attacks. In 1915, under Stieglitz’s auspices, Bluemner had his first American one-man show at “291.” Bluemner’s work offers an interesting contrast with that of another Stieglitz architect-turned-artist, John Marin, who also had New Jersey connections. The years after 1914 were increasingly uncomfortable. Bluemner remained, all of his life, proud of his German cultural legacy, contributing regularly to German language journals and newspapers in this country. The anti-German sentiment, indeed mania, before and during World War I, made life difficult for the artist and his family. It is impossible to escape the political agenda in Charles Caffin’s critique of Bluemner’s 1915 show. Caffin found in Bluemner’s precise and earnest explorations of form, “drilled, regimented, coerced . . . formations . . . utterly alien to the American idea of democracy” (New York American, reprinted in Camera Work, no. 48 [Oct. 1916], as quoted in Hayes, 1991, p. 71). In 1916, seeking a change of scene, more freedom to paint, and lower expenses, Bluemner moved his family to New Jersey, familiar terrain from his earlier sketching and painting. During the ten years they lived in New Jersey, the Bluemner family moved around the state, usually, but not always, one step ahead of the rent collector. In 1917, Stieglitz closed “291” and did not reestablish a Manhattan gallery until 1925. In the interim, Bluemner developed relationships with other dealers and with patrons. Throughout his career he drew support and encouragement from art cognoscenti who recognized his talent and the high quality of his work. Unfortunately, that did not pay the bills. Chronic shortfalls were aggravated by Bluemner’s inability to sustain supportive relationships. He was a difficult man, eternally bitter at the gap between the ideal and the real. Hard on himself and hard on those around him, he ultimately always found a reason to bite the hand that fed him. Bluemner never achieved financial stability. He left New Jersey in 1926, after the death of his beloved wife, and settled in South Braintree, Massachusetts, outside of Boston, where he continued to paint until his own death in 1938. As late as 1934 and again in 1936, he worked for New Deal art programs designed to support struggling artists. Bluemner held popular taste and mass culture in contempt, and there was certainly no room in his quasi-religious approach to art for accommodation to any perceived commercial advantage. His German background was also problematic, not only for its political disadvantages, but because, in a world where art is understood in terms of national styles, Bluemner was sui generis, and, to this day, lacks a comfortable context. In 1933, Bluemner adopted Florianus (definitively revising his birth names, Friedrich Julius Oskar) as his middle name and incorporated it into his signature, to present “a Latin version of his own surname that he believed reinforced his career-long effort to translate ordinary perceptions into the more timeless and universal languages of art” (Hayes 1982, p. 189 n. 1). In 1939, critic Paul Rosenfeld, a friend and member of the Stieglitz circle, responding to the difficulty in categorizing Bluemner, perceptively located him among “the ranks of the pre-Nazi German moderns” (Hayes 1991, p. 41). Bluemner was powerfully influenced in his career by the intellectual heritage of two towering figures of nineteenth-century German culture, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. A keen student of color theory, Bluemner gave pride of place to the formulations of Goethe, who equated specific colors with emotional properties. In a November 19, 1915, interview in the German-language newspaper, New Yorker Staats-Zeitung (Abendblatt), he stated: I comprehend the visible world . . . abstract the primary-artistic . . . and after these elements of realty are extracted and analyzed, I reconstruct a new free creation that still resembles the original, but also . . . becomes an objectification of the abstract idea of beauty. The first—and most conspicuous mark of this creation is . . . colors which accord with the character of things, the locality . . . [and which] like the colors of Cranach, van der Weyden, or Durer, are of absolute purity, breadth, and luminosity. . . . I proceed from the psychological use of color by the Old Masters . . . [in which] we immediately recognize colors as carriers of “sorrow and joy” in Goethe’s sense, or as signs of human relationship. . . . Upon this color symbolism rests the beauty as well as the expressiveness, of earlier sacred paintings. Above all, I recognize myself as a contributor to the new German theory of light and color, which expands Goethe’s law of color through modern scientific means (as quoted in Hayes 1991, p. 71). Hayes has traced the global extent of Bluemner’s intellectual indebtedness to Hegel (1991, pp. 36–37). More specifically, Bluemner made visual, in his art, the Hegelian world view, in the thesis and antithesis of the straight line and the curve, the red and the green, the vertical and the horizontal, the agitation and the calm. Bluemner respected all of these elements equally, painting and drawing the tension and dynamic of the dialectic and seeking ultimate reconciliation in a final visual synthesis. Bluemner was a keen student of art, past and present, looking, dissecting, and digesting all that he saw. He found precedents for his non-naturalist use of brilliant-hued color not only in the work Van Gogh and Cezanne, but also in Gauguin, the Nabis, and the Symbolists, as well as among his contemporaries, the young Germans of Der Blaue Reiter. Bluemner was accustomed to working to the absolute standard of precision required of the architectural draftsman, who adjusts a design many times until its reality incorporates both practical imperatives and aesthetic intentions. Hayes describes Bluemner’s working method, explaining how the artist produced multiple images playing on the same theme—in sketch form, in charcoal, and in watercolor, leading to the oil works that express the ultimate completion of his process (Hayes, 1982, pp. 156–61, including relevant footnotes). Because of Bluemner’s working method, driven not only by visual considerations but also by theoretical constructs, his watercolor and charcoal studies have a unique integrity. They are not, as is sometimes the case with other artists, rough preparatory sketches. They stand on their own, unfinished only in the sense of not finally achieving Bluemner’s carefully considered purpose. The present charcoal drawing is one of a series of images that take as their starting point the Morris Canal as it passed through Rockaway, New Jersey. The Morris Canal industrial towns that Bluemner chose as the points of departure for his early artistic explorations in oil included Paterson with its silk mills (which recalled the mills in the artist’s childhood home in Elberfeld), the port city of Hoboken, Newark, and, more curiously, a series of iron ore mining and refining towns, in the north central part of the state that pre-dated the Canal, harkening back to the era of the Revolutionary War. The Rockaway theme was among the original group of oil paintings that Bluemner painted in six productive months from July through December 1911 and took with him to Europe in 1912. In his painting journal, Bluemner called this work Morris Canal at Rockaway N.J. (AAA, reel 339, frames 150 and 667, Hayes, 1982, pp. 116–17), and exhibited it at the Galerie Fritz Gurlitt in Berlin in 1912 as Rockaway N. J. Alter Kanal. After his return, Bluemner scraped down and reworked these canvases. The Rockaway picture survives today, revised between 1914 and 1922, as Old Canal, Red and Blue (Rockaway River) in the collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D. C. (color illus. in Haskell, fig. 48, p. 65). For Bluemner, the charcoal expression of his artistic vision was a critical step in composition. It represented his own adaptation of Arthur Wesley’s Dow’s (1857–1922) description of a Japanese...

Colored Pencil on Museum Board Signed and Dated; Impressed with artist's stamp lower right Archivally framed with black float mount and bleached maple surround.

William Glackens, 1870-1938 M. Durand... Arrived on the Scene, 1903 Ink, wash, charcoal and Chinese white on paper Signed (at lower left): W. Glackens...

Marilla Palmer Ecstasy of the Sun, 2025 watercolor, gold leaf, embroidery, millinery foliage, pressed flowers, Durabright prints on Arches paper 29.5 x 41 in. (pal256) Marilla Palm...

ABOUT Matt Kinney was born in Georgetown, Massachusetts. He attended Pratt Institute and The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, graduating in 1998. After graduation, Kinney began in...

Linda Stein, Courante 418.030 - Signed Feminist LGBTQ+ Colorful Ink, Color Pencil, and Graphite on Paper Drawing Courante 418.030 is from Linda Stein's Profiles Notation series--d...

Colored Pencil on Museum Board Signed and Dated; Impressed with artist's stamp lower right Archivally framed with black float mount and bleached maple surround.

Wolf Kahn Bay with Boats, 1987 Color monotype on Somerset white wove paper Hand signed and dated by Wolf Kahn on the lower right front, bears labels on the back Frame Included: matte...

Norman Barr recorded his beloved New York City from the Bronx, to Coney Island, to the Fulton Fish Market. In this period he was on the New Deal's Mural ...

Robert Strati is an American artist who creates multimedia artworks using broken plates. His recent series “Fragmented” started when he accidentally dropped and broke a porcelain pla...

Jacquelyn Strycker A Sky Woven with Openings, 2025 risograph on handmade paper with sewing, acrylic gouache, and watercolor 8.5 x 11 in. (Str002) Pattern is also prominent in the li...

Marilla Palmer Euphoria, 2025 watercolor, gold leaf, pressed flowers, sequins, holographic vinyl, Durabrite prints, mushroom spores, millinery velvet, stitching on Arches cold press ...

Colored Pencil on Museum Board Signed and Dated; Impressed with artist's stamp lower right Archivally framed with black float mount and bleached maple surround.

Ernesto Neto Quem paga o arrego, spray! (Who pays the bill, spray!), 2012 Ink on Cotton Rag Paper, signed & numbered. Signed, dated and numbered from the edition of 45 on the front (...

Walasse Ting 丁雄泉 Original three parrots drawing, 1984 Original parrots drawing done in ink with inscription held inside elegant hardback monograph with ...

Unknown Artist Untitled, c. 1960s Ink on paper Sight size: 10 x 7 in. Framed: 15 1/4 x 12 1/4 in. Signed illegibly lower right: Jack Bl...?

This striking colored pencil drawing by David Morrison showcases his unrivaled mastery of the medium. Rendered with extraordinary precision, this larger-than-life section of pomegran...

Walter Darby Bannard Ammersee #2, 1975 Watercolor and acrylic painting on paper Signed, titled and dated lower recto This is a unique work Frame included: elegantly floated and frame...

JACK YOUNGERMAN Intored, 2015 Watercolor painting on Dieu Donne handmade paper with one deckled edge Pencil signed and dated on the front This is a unique painting on paper Provenan...

Of course it's possible that these baseball players aren't from a Philadelphia team, but I doubt it. There was so much drama and intrigue with both the Philadelphia Phillies...

In 2000, Linda Stein began a series called Knights of Protection. Her Knights functioned both as defenders in battle and symbols of pacifism. In 2019, Stein re-conceived her Kni...