Tri-State Area - Landscape Drawings and Watercolors

Edward Dufner (1872 - 1957) Monhegan Island, Maine Watercolor on paper Sight 16 x 20 inches Signed lower right With a long-time career as an art teacher and painter of both 'light' and 'dark', Edward Dufner was one of the first students of the Buffalo Fine Arts Academy to earn an Albright Scholarship to study painting in New York. In Buffalo, he had exchanged odd job work for drawing lessons from architect Charles Sumner. He also earned money as an illustrator of a German-language newspaper, and in 1890 took lessons from George Bridgman at the Buffalo Fine Arts Academy. In 1893, using his scholarship, Dufner moved to Manhattan and enrolled at the Art Students League where he studied with Henry Siddons Mowbray, figure painter and muralist. He also did illustration work for Life, Harper's and Scribner's magazines. Five years later, in 1898, Dufner went to Paris where he studied at the Academy Julian with Jean-Paul Laurens and privately with James McNeill Whistler. Verification of this relationship, which has been debated by art scholars, comes from researcher Nancy Turk who located at the Smithsonian Institution two 1927 interviews given by Dufner. Turk wrote that Dufner "talks in detail about Whistler, about how he prepared his canvasas and about numerous pieces he painted. . . A great read, the interview puts to bed" the ongoing confusion about whether or not he studied with Whistler. During his time in France, Dufner summered in the south at Le Pouleu with artists Richard Emil Miller...

Eve Nethercott, American (1925 - 2015) - Woodstock (77), Year: 1958, Medium: Watercolor, Size: 14 in. x 20 in. (35.56 cm x 50.8 cm), Description: Eve Nethercott's serene depict...

Eve Nethercott, American (1925 - 2015) - House (46), Year: circa 1959, Medium: Watercolor, Size: 9 in. x 12 in. (22.86 cm x 30.48 cm), Description: Looking toward the white hou...

Eve Nethercott, American (1925 - 2015) - Forest Floor (P1.27), Year: circa 1960, Medium: Watercolor on Paper, Size: 15 x 22 in. (38.1 x 55.88 cm), Description: Scattered with...

Eve Nethercott, American (1925 - 2015) - Canal (P2.51), Year: 1947, Medium: Watercolor on Paper, Size: 13 x 12 in. (33.02 x 30.48 cm), Description: Viewed through the shimmer...

Eve Nethercott, American (1925 - 2015) - Forest (P2.65), Year: 1958, Medium: Watercolor on Paper, Image Size: 10 x 12 inches, Size: 11 x 13.5 in. (27.94 x 34.29 cm), Descript...

Eve Nethercott, American (1925 - 2015) - Wooded Landscape (P3.1), Year: 1958, Medium: Watercolor on Paper, Size: 18 x 23.5 in. (45.72 x 59.69 cm), Description: Peering out in...

Eve Nethercott, American (1925 - 2015) - Nissequogue (Hecate's Garden), Year: 1959, Medium: Watercolor, Size: 13 in. x 20 in. (33.02 cm x 50.8 cm), Description: Eve Nethercott'...

Eve Nethercott, American (1925 - 2015) - Alley Pond park (P6.9), Year: 1952, Medium: Watercolor on Paper, Size: 18 x 24 in. (45.72 x 60.96 cm), Description: Reflecting onto t...

Eve Nethercott, American (1925 - 2015) - Flushing Armory (P6.6), Year: 1949, Medium: Watercolor on Paper, Size: 15 x 19.5 in. (38.1 x 49.53 cm), Description: Looking up throu...

Eve Nethercott, American (1925 - 2015) - Surf Bald Head Cliff (P4.26), Year: 1958, Medium: Watercolor on Paper, Size: 14 x 21 in. (35.56 x 53.34 cm), Description: Viewed from...

Eve Nethercott, American (1925 - 2015) - Aimhi Lodge (P5.4), Year: 1951, Medium: Watercolor on Paper, Size: 15.5 x 22 in. (39.37 x 55.88 cm), Description: Peering through the...

Eve Nethercott, American (1925 - 2015) - Rocky Shore (P4.6), Year: circa 1960, Medium: Watercolor on Paper, Size: 13.5 x 18 in. (34.29 x 45.72 cm), Description: Looking out o...

Eve Nethercott, American (1925 - 2015) - Bronx Park (P4.28), Year: 1959, Medium: Watercolor on Paper, Size: 13.5 x 21 in. (34.29 x 53.34 cm), Description: A unique watercolor...

Represented by George Billis Gallery, NYC & LA --RUSS HAVARD Artist Statement I'm drawn towards nature imagery that depicts isolated elements in their continual struggle to flourish ...

Wolf Kahn Ocean Cove, 1996 Pastel on paper painting Hand signed and dated by Wolf Kahn on the lower right Frame included: matted and framed in a wood frame with UV plexiglass This u...

Leon Dolice (1892 - 1960) New York Harbor (Brooklyn Bridge), circa 1930-40 Pastel on paper 12 x 19 inches Signed lower right Provenance: Spanierman Gallery, New York The romantic b...

Artist: Guy Dollian (1887 - 1964) Title: L'Escalier Date: 1926 Medium: Watercolor on paper, signed and dated lower left Image Size: 18.5 x 11.5 inches Frame Size: 27 x 19.5 inches

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...

Sandy Litchfield found peace and inspiration in regular solitary walks through nature throughout the pandemic. Her most recent body of work diaristically documents her constitutional...

Boy Kong (b. 1993, Orlando) is a self-taught multi-media artist. Raised in Orlando and of Chinese-Vietnamese heritage, his growing body of work draws inspiration from a vast array of...

Oil on paper. Signed and dated 'Walinska 57' (lower left). image size 20 x 13 1/2 in. framed size 28 1/3 x 22 1/2 inches Provenance Martha Jackson Gallery Anderson Gallery, Buffalo...

Charcoal on paper drawing by Toronto-based artist Katherine Curci. From her "Irrepressible" series. Comes framed. Lake Pleasant, Phoenix, AZ Katherine Curci began this series of ch...

Monotype Ms. Murray is notable for capturing the crystalline quality of northern light. She has an extensive exhibition history and she is represented in both private and public co...

Signed lower left: Pleissner

"Rouen" is a watercolor by Frank- Will , it is extremely large in size and from an important place in the history of France. This is where the tower of Joan of Arc is located and wh...

42nd Street NYC 1923 Deco WPA Ashcan American Modern Cityscape Realism Broadway. 10 x 7 1/2 inches. Graphite on paper. Signed, titled "42nd Street" and dated July 26, 1923, lower l...

William Zorach, 1887-1966 Redwoods, Yosemite Valley, 1920 Watercolor and pencil 15 ¾ x 13 ⅜ inches Signed (at lower right): William Zorach WZorach-7 Provenance: Estate of William Zorach Exhibited: William Zorach, 1887-1996, Sculpture, Drawings and Watercolors, Zabriskie Gallery, New York; Feb. 10 – March 14, 1998. William Zorach was born in Lithuania in 1889, and immigrated to the United States with his family in 1893. Settling in Cleveland with his parents, he worked as a lithographer from 1902- 1908, making enough money to study painting with Henry G. Keller at the School of Art. In 1910, Zorach traveled to Paris to study in La Palette, where he was encouraged to develop his own unique style rather than adhere to traditional teachings. Zorach once said, “I began to be conscious of the various modern influences that were invading the art world…I was disturbed and confused, and yet I felt that I was a very young man entering a new age. The forces creating modern art seemed more alive to me than anything I had known or anything being done in America.” 1 Together with his wife Marguerite, William Zorach produced a number of Cubist- style paintings for the American Armory Show of 1913, and the Forum Exhibition in New York in 1916. Around 1917, Zorach followed the lead of cubist artist Pablo Picasso and began experimenting with wood and stone carvings. By 1922, he devoted himself entirely to sculpture, and like Picasso, became fascinated in “primitive art”—the ritual objects and sculpture pieces of Oceanic, Native American and African tribes. Zorach’s work developed in its use of block-like forms with progressive suppression of detail—drawing elements from sources as disparate as the contemporary cubist and modernist movements, and combining them with forms seen in early African sculpture. Though the forms of his sculpture were often abstract, Zorach primarily focused upon a traditional subject matter, producing such well-known sculptures as Young Girl, now in the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Mother and Child, in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Today, William Zorach is known as one of the earliest and most influential American artists dedicated to direct carving. Zorach also made an impression as a teacher and writer, facilitating a major change in the aesthetic philosophy and technique of sculpture in the United States. During the summers from 1913 to 1922, Zorach and his wife Marguerite painted...

Railroad Worker Industrial WPA American Scene Mid Century Modern Social Realism Jo Cain (1904 - 2003) Railroad worker 36 ¼ x 27 inches Oil on paper c. 1930s S...

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...

John Koch, American (1909 - 1978) - Landscape Sketch, Year: circa 1970, Medium: Graphite on Paper, Size: 13.75 x 20 in. (34.93 x 50.8 cm)

Watercolor 9 is a 22" x 17.5" , watercolor on paper, by Melinda Hacket. It is white framed to 25" x 20.25. It is filled with rich earthy colors and organic moving shapes. Melinda H...

Magazine Cover Illustration Mid 20th Century Modern Theatre Broadway Realism WPA Ernest Hamlin Baker (1889 – 1975) “Today Magazine” Cover ...

Represented by George Billis Gallery, NYC & LA --RUSS HAVARD Artist Statement I'm drawn towards nature imagery that depicts isolated elements in their continual struggle to flourish ...

Watercolor 7 is a 13.5" x 10.5" , watercolor on paper. It is filled with earthy colors and organic shapes. Melinda Hackett is a mid-career New York Artist. She received her BA at ...

Represented by George Billis Gallery, NYC & LA --RUSS HAVARD Artist Statement I'm drawn towards nature imagery that depicts isolated elements in their continual struggle to flourish ...

Renelio Marin is a visual artist with a diverse range of influences and styles. Born in Cuba, he received his graduate degree from the San Alejandro School of Fine Arts in Havana in ...

Robert Strati is an American artist who creates multimedia artworks using broken plates. His recent series “Fragmented” started when he accidentally drop...

"Rail Yard" Urban Industrial WPA American Scene Drawing NYC Mid-Century. Initialed "JS" upper right Solman was a pivotal figure in the development of 20th century American art. He ...

Artist: Gay Kabbash, American Title: Miss Maude Year: 1988 Medium: Watercolor on Paper, signed and dated Size: 18 in. x 23.5 in. (45.72 cm x 59.69 cm) Frame Size: 23 x 29 inches

André Hambourg (French, 1909-1999) Le Marchande Tour Eiffel (The Eiffel Tower Merchant) Watercolor on paper Sight: 12 1/4 x 17 1/4 in. Framed: 19 3/4 x 24 1/4 x 2/3 in. Titled lower ...

5125 Antique charcoal drawing of a landscape as viewed from the Charles River in Boston from 1827 Signed J.G.Berry

Jennifer Losch Bartlett Ocean piece: Untitled painting studies, 1975 Ink and pastel, mixed media on graph paper Boldly signed and dated "Summer 75" by Jennifer Bartlett on the lower right front Frame included: held in a museum quality wood frame with UV plexiglass Ink and pastel on graph paper drawing. Boldly signed and dated "Summer 75" by Jennifer Bartlett on the lower right front. Some of the artist's annotations on the drawings say: Ocean piece Sky Water Beach Sometimes looking from water maybe see mountain two people on beach lying down sometimes they face each other ... bwhitefree hand drawing from water beach w/ towel sky sand water on a diagonal on a curve sky water sand...

Richard Anuszkiewicz Old Door, 1953 Watercolor on paper Signed and dated by the artist on the lower right front 20 × 14 inches Unframed This unique and extre...

"Under and Behind" Contemporary artist Thomas Roese, inspired by the industrial landscape of steel mills, rail yards, architectural details, and urban neighborhoods surrounding him,...

RUSS HAVARD Artist Statement I'm drawn towards nature imagery that depicts isolated elements in their continual struggle to flourish under desolate circumstances. The seemingly bleak...

Singed (at lower left): Jane Peterson

This mural depicting ancient myths was designed for the Hotel Ambassador, a skyscraper at 345 Park Avenue, NYC; the building was converted to the Sheraton East in 1958. It was demolished in 1966. It could only be mid-century American! Signed, titled, and annotated, 'Scale 2" = 1' in ink. Edward Laning is largely known as a mural artist. His series The History of the Printed Word is installed at the New York Public Library at 42nd Street, New York City, and Building of the Transcontinental Railroad Mural, is in the Railroad Museum, Ogden, Utah. Laning was briefly a student of Kenneth Hayes Miller at the Art Students League, New York. They were lifelong colleagues and had studios on Union Square near friends Isabel Bishop, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Reginald Marsh, and Raphael Soyer. As a group they were the Fourteenth Street School...

Harvest Moon 12:32pm is a watercolor work on paper by Cynthia MacCollum. This original artwork is 12x9 on archival paper. It is currently framed to 14 x 11. It was part of a 2020 ...

Wheat Field and House Oliviero Masi Italian (1948) Date: 1987 Pastel on paper, signed and dated lower right Size: 12 x 19 in. (30.48 x 48.26 cm)

Eve Nethercott, American (1925 - 2015) - Tidal Pool (65), Year: 1961, Medium: Watercolor, Size: 8.5 in. x 22 in. (21.59 cm x 55.88 cm), Description: Rendered in neutral hues of...

North African Orientalist Scene (Horseman and Nomadic Traders) Giulio Rosati, Italian (1857–1917) Date: circa 1880 Watercolor on Paper, signed lower righ...

Olive trees and olive groves are often the main subject of Tzannes paintings. An American painter of Greek origins, Tzannes visited the Greek island of Kythera in his twenties. Since that time, the island has become the major reference of his creativity. The choice of using black and white to represent this landscape gives the mighty hundred-years old olive trees a monumental presence. The viewer is drawn into the timeless, spiritual quality of the Greek landscape. Despite the absence of color, Tzannes' mastery of drawing creates a tangible effect of the Greek light...

Mary M. Johnsen Four Paintings, c. 1950s Watercolor Dimensions: 1. Mat: 18 x 21 1/4 in., page: 8 x 12 1/4 in. 2. Page: 14 7/8 x 22 in. 3. Mat: 15 x 19 in., page: 10 1/2 x 14 1/2 in....

Paul Gattuso attended the Art Students League and worked primarily in New York City. There is an old address with a Bronx, Grand Concourse address. Gattus...

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...

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

On verso: Original - A. Lassell Ripley / By – (D.R.) –

West Virginia native Grace Martin Taylor, artist for the brightly colored pastel (TownView), attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the Art S...

An early painting by Omar Rayo from 1955. An abstract geometric work with multi-colored shapes on a surrealist horizon. Artist: Omar Rayo, Colombian (1928 - ) Title: Mountains Year:...