Tri-State Area - Figurative Drawings and Watercolors

Roy Lichtenstein Handwritten note on card ink on paper hand signed by Roy Lichtenstein The card reads "Thank you so much for the wonderful prints Very kind of you to send them to me Best regards, Roy Lichtenstein This card depicts Roy Lichtenstein's American Indian Theme II (from American Indian Theme Series), 1980, Woodcut in colors on Suzuki handmade paper Provenance: This card was acquired from Dan Pope, a longtime CBS photographer and cameraman, who had amassed a superb collection of autographs by visual artists over many decades. This work has been elegantly floated and framed in a museum quality wood frame under UV plexiglass. Measurements: Framed 14.75 inches vertical by 11.5 horizontal by 1.5 inches depth Card (image) Roy Lichtenstein Biography Roy Lichtenstein was one of the most influential and innovative artists of the second half of the twentieth century. He is preeminently identified with Pop Art, a movement he helped originate, and his first fully achieved paintings were based on imagery from comic strips and advertisements and rendered in a style mimicking the crude printing processes of newspaper reproduction. These paintings reinvigorated the American art scene and altered the history of modern art. Lichtenstein’s success was matched by his focus and energy, and after his initial triumph in the early 1960s, he went on to create an oeuvre of more than 5,000 paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures, murals and other objects celebrated for their wit and invention. Roy Fox Lichtenstein was born on October 27, 1923, in New York City, the first of two children born to Milton and Beatrice Werner Lichtenstein. Milton Lichtenstein (1893–1946) was a successful real estate broker, and Beatrice Lichtenstein (1896–1991), a homemaker, had trained as a pianist, and she exposed Roy and his sister Rénee to museums, concerts and other aspects of New York culture. Roy showed artistic and musical ability early on: he drew, painted and sculpted as a teenager, and spent many hours in the American Museum of Natural History and the Museum of Modern Art. He played piano and clarinet, and developed an enduring love of jazz, frequenting the nightspots in Midtown to hear it. Lichtenstein attended the Franklin School for Boys, a private junior high and high school, and was graduated in 1940. That summer he studied painting and drawing from the model at the Art Students League of New York with Reginald Marsh. In September he entered Ohio State University (OSU) in Columbus in the College of Education. His early artistic idols were Rembrandt, Daumier and Picasso, and he often said that Guernica (1937; Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid), then on long-term loan to the Museum of Modern Art, was his favorite painting. Even as an undergraduate, Lichtenstein objected to the notion that one set of lines (one person’s drawings) “was considered brilliant, and somebody’s else’s, that may have looked better to you, was considered nothing by almost everyone.”i Lichtenstein’s questioning of accepted canons of taste was encouraged by Hoyt L. Sherman, a teacher whom he maintained was the person who showed him how to see and whose perception-based approach to art shaped his own. In February 1943, Lichtenstein was drafted, and he was sent to Europe in 1945. As part of the infantry, he saw action in France, Belgium and Germany. He made sketches throughout his time in Europe and, after peace was declared there, he intended to study at the Sorbonne. Lichtenstein arrived in Paris in October 1945 and enrolled in classes in French language and civilization, but soon learned that his father was gravely ill. He returned to New York in January 1946, a few weeks before Milton Lichtenstein died. In the spring of that year, Lichtenstein went back to OSU to complete his BFA and in the fall he was invited to join the faculty as an instructor. In June 1949, he married Isabel Wilson Sarisky (1921–80), who worked in a cooperative art gallery in Cleveland where Lichtenstein had exhibited his work. While he was teaching, Lichtenstein worked on his master’s degree, which he received in 1949. During his second stint at OSU, Lichtenstein became closer to Sherman, and began teaching his method on how to organize and unify a composition. Lichtenstein remained appreciative of Sherman’s impact on him. He gave his first son the middle name of “Hoyt,” and in 1994 he donated funds to endow the Hoyt L. Sherman Studio Art Center at OSU. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Lichtenstein began working in series and his iconography was drawn from printed images. His first sustained theme, intimate paintings and prints in the vein of Paul Klee that poked lyrical fun at medieval knights, castles and maidens, may well have been inspired by a book about the Bayeux Tapestry. Lichtenstein then took an ironic look at nineteenth-century American genre paintings he saw in history books, creating Cubist interpretations of cowboys and Indians spiked with a faux-primitive whimsy. As with his most celebrated Pop paintings of the 1960s, Lichtenstein gravitated toward what he would characterize as the “dumbest” or “worst” visual item he could find and then went on to alter or improve it. In the 1960s, commercial art was considered beneath contempt by the art world; in the early 1950s, with the rise of Abstract Expressionism, nineteenth-century American narrative and genre paintings were at the nadir of their reputation among critics and collectors. Paraphrasing, particularly the paraphrasing of despised images, became a paramount feature of Lichtenstein’s art. Well before finding his signature mode of expression in 1961, Lichtenstein called attention to the artifice of conventions and taste that permeated art and society. What others dismissed as trivial fascinated him as classic and idealized—in his words, “a purely American mythological subject matter.”ii Lichtenstein’s teaching contract at OSU was not renewed for the 1951–52 academic year, and in the autumn of 1951 he and Isabel moved to Cleveland. Isabel Lichtenstein became an interior decorator specializing in modern design, with a clientele drawn from wealthy Cleveland families. Whereas her career blossomed, Lichtenstein did not continue to teach at the university level. He had a series of part-time jobs, including industrial draftsman, furniture designer, window dresser and rendering mechanical dials for an electrical instrument company. In response to these experiences, he introduced quirkily rendered motors, valves and other mechanical elements into his paintings and prints. In 1954, the Lichtensteins’ first son, David, was born; two years later, their second child, Mitchell, followed. Despite the relative lack of interest in his work in Cleveland, Lichtenstein did place his work with New York dealers, which always mattered immensely to him. He had his first solo show at the Carlebach Gallery in New York in 1951, followed by representation with the John Heller Gallery from 1952 to 1957. To reclaim his academic career and get closer to New York, Lichtenstein accepted a position as an assistant professor at the State University of New York at Oswego, in the northern reaches of the state. He was hired to teach industrial design, beginning in September 1957. Oswego turned out to be more geographically and aesthetically isolated than Cleveland ever was, but the move was propitious, for both his art and his career. Lichtenstein broke away from representation to a fully abstract style, applying broad swaths of pigment to the canvas by dragging the paint across its surface with a rag wrapped around his arm. At the same time, Lichtenstein was embedding comic-book characters figures such as Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck in brushy, expressionistic backgrounds. None of the proto-cartoon paintings from this period survive, but several pencil and pastel studies from that time, which he kept, document his intentions. Finally, when he was in Oswego, Lichtenstein met Reginald Neal, the new head of the art department at Douglass College, the women’s college of Rutgers University, in New Brunswick, New Jersey. The school was strengthening and expanding its studio art program, and when Neal needed to add a faculty member to his department, Lichtenstein was invited to apply for the job. Lichtenstein was offered the position of assistant professor, and he began teaching at Douglass in September 1960. At Douglass, Lichtenstein was thrown into a maelstrom of artistic ferment. With New York museums and galleries an hour away, and colleagues Geoffrey Hendricks and Robert Watts at Douglass and Allan Kaprow and George Segal at Rutgers, the environment could not help but galvanize him. In June 1961, Lichtenstein returned to the idea he had fooled around with in Oswego, which was to combine cartoon characters from comic books with abstract backgrounds. But, as Lichtenstein said, “[I]t occurred to me to do it by mimicking the cartoon style without the paint texture, calligraphic line, modulation—all the things involved in expressionism.”iii Most famously, Lichtenstein appropriated the Benday dots, the minute mechanical patterning used in commercial engraving, to convey texture and gradations of color—a stylistic language synonymous with his subject matter. The dots became a trademark device forever identified with Lichtenstein and Pop Art. Lichtenstein may not have calibrated the depth of his breakthrough immediately but he did realize that the flat affect and deadpan presentation of the comic-strip panel blown up and reorganized in the Sherman-inflected way “was just so much more compelling”iv than the gestural abstraction he had been practicing. Among the first extant paintings in this new mode—based on comic strips and illustrations from advertisements—were Popeye and Look Mickey, which were swiftly followed by The Engagement Ring, Girl with Ball and Step-on Can with Leg. Kaprow recognized the energy and radicalism of these canvases and arranged for Lichtenstein to show them to Ivan Karp, director of the Leo Castelli Gallery. Castelli was New York’s leading dealer in contemporary art, and he had staged landmark exhibitions of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg in 1958 and Frank Stella in 1960. Karp was immediately attracted to Lichtenstein’s paintings, but Castelli was slower to make a decision, partly on account of the paintings’ plebeian roots in commercial art, but also because, unknown to Lichtenstein, two other artists had recently come to his attention—Andy Warhol and James Rosenquist—and Castelli was only ready for one of them. After some deliberation, Castelli chose to represent Lichtenstein, and the first exhibition of the comic-book paintings was held at the gallery from February 10 to March 3, 1962. The show sold out and made Lichtenstein notorious. By the time of Lichtenstein’s second solo exhibition at Castelli in September 1963, his work had been showcased in museums and galleries around the country. He was usually grouped with Johns, Rauschenberg, Warhol, Rosenquist, Segal, Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Indiana and Tom Wesselmann. Taken together, their work was viewed as a slap in the face to Abstract Expressionism and, indeed, the Pop artists shifted attention away from many members of the New York School. With the advent of critical and commercial success, Lichtenstein made significant changes in his life and continued to investigate new possibilities in his art. After separating from his wife, he moved from New Jersey to Manhattan in 1963; in 1964, he resigned from his teaching position at Douglass to concentrate exclusively on his work. The artist also ventured beyond comic book subjects, essaying paintings based on oils by Cézanne, Mondrian and Picasso, as well as still lifes and landscapes. Lichtenstein became a prolific printmaker and expanded into sculpture, which he had not attempted since the mid-1950s, and in both two- and three-dimensional pieces, he employed a host of industrial or “non-art” materials, and designed mass-produced editioned objects that were less expensive than traditional paintings and sculpture. Participating in one such project—the American Supermarket show in 1964 at the Paul Bianchini Gallery, for which he designed a shopping bag—Lichtenstein met Dorothy Herzka (b. 1939), a gallery employee, whom he married in 1968. The late 1960s also saw Lichtenstein’s first museum surveys: in 1967 the Pasadena Art Museum initiated a traveling retrospective, in 1968 the Stedelijk Musem in Amsterdam presented his first European retrospective, and in 1969 he had his first New York retrospective, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Wanting to grow, Lichtenstein turned away from the comic book subjects that had brought him prominence. In the late 1960s his work became less narrative and more abstract, as he continued to meditate on the nature of the art enterprise itself. He began to explore and deconstruct the notion of brushstrokes—the building blocks of Western painting. Brushstrokes are conventionally conceived as vehicles of expression, but Lichtenstein made them into a subject. Modern artists have typically maintained that the subject of a painting is painting itself. Lichtenstein took this idea one imaginative step further: a compositional element could serve as the subject matter of a work and make that bromide ring true. The search for new forms and sources was even more emphatic after 1970, when Roy and Dorothy Lichtenstein bought property in Southampton, New York, and made it their primary residence. During the fertile decade of the 1970s, Lichtenstein probed an aspect of perception that had steadily preoccupied him: how easily the unreal is validated as the real because viewers have accepted so many visual conceptions that they don’t analyze what they see. In the Mirror series, he dealt with light and shadow upon glass, and in the Entablature series, he considered the same phenomena by abstracting such Beaux-Art architectural elements as cornices, dentils, capitals and columns. Similarly, Lichtenstein created pioneering painted bronze sculpture that subverted the medium’s conventional three-dimensionality and permanence. The bronze forms were as flat and thin as possible, more related to line than volume, and they portrayed the most fugitive sensations—curls of steam, rays of light and reflections on glass. The steam, the reflections and the shadow were signs for themselves that would immediately be recognized as such by any viewer. Another entire panoply of works produced during the 1970s were complex encounters with Cubism, Futurism, Purism, Surrealism and Expressionism. Lichtenstein expanded his palette beyond red, blue, yellow, black, white and green, and invented and combined forms. He was not merely isolating found images, but juxtaposing, overlapping, fragmenting and recomposing them. In the words of art historian Jack Cowart, Lichtenstein’s virtuosic compositions were “a rich dialogue of forms—all intuitively modified and released from their nominal sources.”v In the early 1980s, which coincided with re-establishing a studio in New York City, Lichtenstein was also at the apex of a busy mural career. In the 1960s and 1970s, he had completed four murals; between 1983 and 1990, he created five. He also completed major commissions for public sculptures in Miami Beach, Columbus, Minneapolis, Paris, Barcelona and Singapore. Lichtenstein created three major series in the 1990s, each emblematic of his ongoing interest in solving pictorial problems. The Interiors, mural-sized canvases inspired by a miniscule advertisement in an Italian telephone...

Interior design paintings. The work was done with ink and watercolor on watercolor paper 300g. The work is 11 by 15 inches in size framed (gold) with a glass on a mat board in white ...

Paul Kohn - Man Smoking Pipe, Year: 1969, Medium: Watercolor and Graphite, signed and dated in pencil lower right, Size: 11 x 8.5 x 3 in. (27.94 x 21.59 x 7.62 cm), Frame Size: 1...

3942 Antique gouache and watercolor on paper set in a period 19th century frame Image size 10x5.5"

Clinton Hill (1922-2003), created quintessential mid-century images, but figures are unusual in his work. This is from a very early period. From 1949 to 1951 Hill attended the Brookl...

Clinton Hill (1922-2003), created quintessential mid-century images, but figures are unusual in his work. This is from a very early period. In 1951 Hill studied at the Academie de la...

Gary Bukovnik, American (1947 -) - Spring Bloom, Year: 1983, Medium: Watercolor on Paper, signed and dated in pencil lower right, Size: 45 x 71 in. (114.3 x 180.34 cm), Frame Size...

Pink Flamingo Venus, 2020, watercolor, ink, and salt on Arches paper. Venus of Willendorf, fertility goddess, pink, black, and white.

Raoul Dufy, French (1877 - 1953) - Tirez les Premiers, Messieurs les Francais, Year: 1915, Medium: Woodcut and Pencil Drawing, signed, dated and numbered in pencil, Edition: 25/10...

A muted color acrylic and oil pastel of an androgenous subject with Modigliani eyes, Ornette by African American artist Bai is an enigmatic portrait made on 15” x 11” etching paper. ...

Artist: Ian Hornak (1944-2002) Title: Renaissance Male Foot Figure Study Year: circa 1964 Medium: Original drawing on vélin paper Size: 18 x 23 inches Condition: Good Provenance: Est...

Clinton Hill (1922-2003), created quintessential mid-century images, but figures are unusual in his work. This is from a very early period. In 1951 Hill studied at the Academie de la...

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...

Artist: Will Barnet, American (1911 - 2012) Title: Spirit of Youth Year: circa 1980 Medium: Watercolor and Pastel on Paper, signed and dedicated Size: 11 in. x 7.5 in. (27.94 cm ...

James Childs (1945-2020) Untitled (Standing Male Nude with Ropes and Arm Band) 2010 Signed and dated, l.l. Graphite and pastel crayon on paper 30.5 x 22 inches $3,125

This work was intentionally torn and mended. It predates the artist's full immersion, years later into torn and re-pasted collages, using ripped previous drawings and paper-based materials from media. These recently discovered 1984 oversize drawings on archival papers were created working quickly, from a live model. The series shows the last existing observational drawings prior to the artist's switch to working with her non- dominant left hand. As a feminist, Anastasi's main focus is presenting other women. Unlike the often objectified male gaze...

Leon Dolice Empire State Building Signed lower right Watercolor on paper 19 x 12 inches The romantic backdrop of Vienna at the turn of the century had a life-long influence upon th...

Keith Haring Original Handwritten, hand signed Letter, ca. 1987 Ink on Haring's Private letterhead Stationery, Hand written and hand signed by Keith...

Cattle Louis De Mayo, American (1926–2016) Ink on paper, signed in pencil lower right Size: 8.25 x 6.25 in. (20.96 x 15.88 cm) Frame Size: 16.25 x 14.25 inches

Mabel E. Johnston Untitled, c. 1930s Watercolor and pencil on paper Sight: 12 1/2 x 10 1/2 in. Framed: 21 1/8 x 17 1/4 x 1/2 in. Signed lower right: Mabel E. Johnston The first tidb...

David Hockney Hockney Paints the Stage (Signed and inscribed to Walker Museum trustees), 1983 Original acrylic, watercolor and ink painting done on title page of monograph (Signed an...

This is a hand painted oil and mixed media artwork on canvas by internet sensation mad charcoal He is represented by Krause Gallery NYC Ships rolled in ...

Artist: Ian Hornak (1944-2002) Title: Renaissance Male Nude Figure Study Year: circa 1963 Medium: Original drawing on vélin paper Size: 23 x 18 inches Condition: Good Provenance: Est...

Artist: Raoul Dupoux (1906-1988) Title: Untitled Year: circa 1965 Medium: Watercolor and pastel on wove paper Size: 26 x 27 inches Condition: Good Inscrip...

Ultra vibrant orange version of the Stik Holding Hands print. Issued folded in the Hackney Today newspaper as a special thank you to the residents of Hackney. The color in each paper...

GUILLAUME CORNET (b. 1987, Paris, France) Guillaume Cornet is an artist working with illustration and painting, exploring notions of abstract geometry, influenced by surreal perspec...

"Behold" by Halsey Chait India Ink on 250 Lenox 100 Cotton Rag Paper Halsey Chait's drawings develop according to the rules and mathematics that govern the growth processes of life ...

Sol LeWitt Lines in Four Different Directions, 1997 Original drawing in black felt tip pen on postmarked (franked) postcard Signed, dated and inscribed "For Andrew Thanks for the Dra...

Richard Prince Untitled (de Kooning), 2008 Collage with color offset lithograph, hand-cutting, hand-painting and assemblage with extensive additions in graphite mounted on on inset board. Hand signed and numbered with the letter L (from A-Z) by artist on the front Frame Included Richard Prince’s “de Kooning” series is a process of interaction and appropriation with the works of ground-breaking imagery of the Abstract Expressionist master, Willem de Kooning. The idea for these edgy, Oedipal works came to him when he was leafing through a catalogue of de Kooning’s "Women" series. Prince started sketching over the paintings, and, as time went on, he began applying fragments cut and pasted from catalogues and vintage porn...

Leon Dolice Central Park Signed lower left Watercolor on paper 12 x 19 inches The romantic backdrop of Vienna at the turn of the century had a life-long influence upon the young ma...

About the Series: “Sensitive Material” In this Work on Paper Series, started in 2020, Claire Gilliam continues her exploration of Visual Language. She uses a common motif, the Latin ...

Ink on paper Signed and dated, l.c. This artwork is offered by ClampArt, located in New York City. Mark Beard, born in 1956 in Salt Lake City, now...

Graphite on paper Signed, c.l. This artwork is offered by ClampArt, located in New York City. Mark Beard, born in 1956 in Salt Lake City, now live...

Leon Dolice Chrysler Building Signed lower right Watercolor on paper 19 x 12 inches The romantic backdrop of Vienna at the turn of the century had a life-long influence upon the yo...

This gouache painting on illustration board was created by American artist Jack Leynnwood. Fascinated by aviation from a young age, Leynnwood did kit illustrations of everything from military aircraft to rigged ships, Rat Finks, Flash Gordon, space ships and Ed “Big Daddy...

Artist: Lowell Nesbitt (1933-1993) Title: (Male Nude) Untitled Year: 1977 Medium: Graphite on Artist's Board Size: 48.5 x 38.75 inches Condition: Excellent Inscription: Signed & date...

Takashi Murakami Original hand signed Flower Drawing on limited edition skateboard, 2017 Unique Flower Drawing in Marker on skateboard. Signed by Murakami Flower drawing done in mark...

Mary Frank (British/American, b. 1933) Chant, 1984 Charcoal and pastel on paper 41 3/4 x 29 3/4 in. Framed: 46 1/2 x 34 1/4x 2 in. Signed and dated lower right: Mary Frank 84 Midtown Payson Galleries Label Verso Mary Frank is known for creating stoneware sculptures that have the appearance of terra cotta fragments dug up at an archaeological site. Sometimes a half-finished relief head...

Interior design paintings. The work was done with ink and watercolor on watercolor paper 300g. The work is 11 by 15 inches in size framed (gold) with a styrene face on a double mat b...

Clinton Hill (1922-2003), created quintessential mid-century images, but figures are unusual in his work. This is from a very early period. From 1949 to 1951 he attended the Brooklyn...

Clinton Hill (1922-2003), created quintessential mid-century images. This abstraction references Florence, Italy, where he studied in the early 1950s. He lived in SoHo, New York, a...

May Mott Smith (1879 - 1952) A Martinique Native in French Guiana, circa 1925 Watercolor on paper 24 x 20 inches Signed lower right; titled on the reverse “Martinique Native” is an ...

This radiant purple pink poster was designed by Jim Dine for a production of Gilbert and Sullivan at New York City Center in 1968. The stripe down...

This is a hand painted oil and mixed media artwork on paper by internet sensation mad charcoal professionally He is represented by Krause Gallery NYC the artwork will be rolled and...

Leon Dolice New York Harbor Nocturne Signed lower right Pastel on paper 12 x 19 inches The romantic backdrop of Vienna at the turn of the century had a life-long influence upon the...

"Pink Lady X" (2019) by SarahGrace Archival ink on archival paper, block print; woman, nude, figurative portrait, hot pink pigment Hand-signed by artist Certificate of Authenticity I...

This drawing by Mark Beard is already framed, price includes framing. Untitled (Nude Man with Raised Leg) 1990 Signed and dated, l.l. Charcoal with red and white conté crayon on R...

Alexander Calder Handwritten, signed letter, 1956 Ink on paper: 2 page handwritten and hand signed letter Hand signed by Calder at the end of the letter on the second page. Unique 11...

Artist: Ian Hornak (1944-2002) Title: Renaissance Hand Figure Study Year: circa 1963 Medium: Original drawing on vélin Strathmore paper Size: 18 x 23 inches Condition: Good Provenanc...

These recently discovered 1983-84 oversize pastels on archival papers were created working quickly, in pastel. The series shows the last existing obs...

Artist: Ian Hornak (1944-2002) Title: Renaissance Female Nude Figure Study Year: circa 1963 Medium: Original drawing on vélin paper Size: 23 x 18 inches Condition: Good Provenance: E...

Artist: Ian Hornak (1944-2002) Title: Renaissance Hand Study Year: circa 1963 Medium: Original drawing on vélin paper Size: 23 x 18 inches Condition: Good...

Artist: Lowell Nesbitt (1933-1993) Title: (Male Nude) Untitled, 1973 Year: 1973 Medium: Graphite on Artist's Board Size: 40 x 30.25 inches Condition: Excellent Inscription: Signed & ...

Artist: Ian Hornak (1944-2002) Title: Renaissance Male Hand Figure Study Year: circa 1964 Medium: Charcoal on vélin paper Size: 18 x 23 inches Condition: Good Provenance: Estate of I...

NYC Subway Riders Mid 20th Century American Scene Social Realism WPA Modern 1930s Daniel Celentano (1902 - 1980) Subway Scene, 1930s 8 x 9 inches Ink and wash on paper Singed lower ...

This gestural Claes Oldenburg drawing features subdued watercolor hues of green, orange, brown and grey. Pictured is “Ball”, an unbuilt monument conceived of in 1967 with Oldenburg’s wife Coosje van Bruggen. They imagined two ballcocks – the round mechanism in a toilet tank...

This is a drawing of a naked man sitting by Mark Beard. This work is offered by CLAMP in New York City.

This is a hand painted oil and mixed media artwork on canvas by internet sensation mad charcoal He is represented by Krause Gallery NYC Ships rolled in ...

Alphonse Mucha (Czech, 1860 - 1939) Medieval Thoughts, circa 1890 Wash, ink, and watercolor on paper 11 x 9 inches Signed lower right Provenance: Phillips New York, 19th and 20th ce...

Apparently Bendiner never went a day without drawing. He was amazing! In this scene of a young 'cowgirl' is working a lasso while an 'old cowhand' looks on -- clutching a cigaret of...