Make It New: Modernist Paintings, 1930-1975

Make It New: Modernist Paintings, 1930-1975

“Make it new”—more than a call to aesthetic innovation, Ezra Pound’s modernist dictum carried the weight of an ethical imperative. Emerging as a response to the economic and technological revolutions that had torn asunder old social relations, the modernist sought an art form that could respond in equal measure to the times. Thus, the call to bury old artistic formulas in favor of aesthetic experimentation and innovative techniques was understood as an appeal to more deeply and authentically grapple with the experience of an ever-mutable modernity.

Make it New: Modernist Paintings, 1930 – 1975 presents work by both international and local artists that took up modernism’s gauntlet and sought formal experimentation as a primary goal. These artists actively engaged the liminal possibilities of the pictorial medium to expand its expressive potential.

The exhibition encompasses many different artistic movements that fall broadly under the umbrella term ‘Modernism.’ The roots of Modernism itself trace back to the 19 th century when artists began to deviate from the strict confines of realism, but its tenets became boldly prominent in the early half of the following century and carried onwards. Make It New explores the various facets of Modern art, as works pivoted away from the representational toward the surreal and abstract, and subsequently branched forward into a myriad of other correlated genres.

Featuring works by Milton Avery, Herbert Barnett, Jason Berger, Henry Botkin, Ted Davis, Werner Drewes, Ruth Eckstein, Jacob Kainen, Henry Koerner, Lawrence Kupferman, Sally Michel, Raymond Moisset, Robert S. Neuman, and Ben Norris, among others, Make It New pulls from Childs Gallery’s extensive inventory, presenting an array of artists who pushed the boundaries of what painting meant and what a painting could be, during several decades of dynamic restructuring for Western society.

The work of Herbert Barnett, for example, draws from the formal innovations pioneered by Picasso and Braque’s Cubist experimentations. From these works can be traced an ever-expanding repertoire of techniques that sought to open up the formal limits of painting. Sally Michel took up Matisse’s flat, expansive color plains and Lawrence Kupferman, in a radical withdrawal of authorial intent that would foreshadow things to come, experimented with pouring paint directly on to the picture surface in order to allow the pigment to freely find its own path.

Left:

Sally Michel, American (1902-2003). Untitled [Seated Woman], 1973. Oil on canvas board, 20 x 16 in. Signed and dated lower right: “Sally Michel/ 1973”. From the Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation. $16,000.

Front Cover:

Henry Botkin, American (1896-1983). [Untitled], circa 1955. Oil on board, 33 ¾ x 42 ¾ in. Signed lower left: “Botkin”. From the estate of the artist. $15,000.

Back Cover:

Ruth Eckstein, American (1916-2011). Distant Goal, circa 1970. Acrylic on canvas, 32 x 28 in. Signed lower right: "Ruth Eckstein". Signed and titled verso: "Ruth Eckstein Distant Goal". From the estate of the artist. $8,500.

Milton Avery, American (1885-1965)

“During the years 1931 and 1932 Avery made a series of gouaches of acrobats, jugglers, dancers, singers, tumblers, and bicyclists…Years later [his wife] Sally described Avery’s way of approaching these works of the early thirties:

We used to go to the Palace Theater every week and always sat in the first row of the gallery to see the vaudeville acts. Milton had his sketch pad and was constantly drawing from the scenes on the stage. It was from these sketches that the Theater Series was born.

Avery belongs to a tradition of artists who enjoyed acrobatic acts and the circus in general… But he probably owed a debt to [Marsden] Hartley for the idea of commemorating vaudeville. An established American modern artist who belonged to the highly esteemed Stieglitz group, Hartley pleaded the case of vaudeville so persuasively that it no doubt was discussed in various artistic circles in the 1920s…

In his Theater series Avery appears to have reinforced Hartley’s idea of dignifying various vaudeville acts by making them the subject of his art…Avery created a charming, boisterous series of vignettes that testifies to the lively entertainment provided by vaudeville…The naïveté of this series is crucial to its success, for it characterizes the artist as a simple person who is not bored with the repetitiveness and what must at times have been the downright corniness of vaudeville acts, a simple person who instead finds these acts fun, magical, and full of life. The deliberate simplicity of this series continues an important trend in Avery’s art that can be traced back to works from 1929 and perhaps even earlier to the Rehn Gallery showing of watercolors…” (Hobbs, 59-63)

Theater Series – Spotlight or Singing Trio, 1931 Gouache on paper, 12 X 18 in. Signed lower right: "Milton Avery".

$29,000

Ross Moffett, American (1888-1971)

Born in Clearfield, Iowa, Ross Moffett maintains an important place in the development of American Modernism. He began his studies at the Cummins Art School in Des Moines before transferring to the Art Institute of Chicago in 1908. During the summer of 1913 he studied with Charles Hawthorne in Provincetown, Massachusetts; a decade later he returned, and help found the Provincetown Art Association and Museum.

Moffett began to enjoy success in the 1920s with a one-man show at the Frank Rehn Gallery in New York and another at the Art Institute of Chicago. In the 1930s he completed four murals for the WPA and later was commissioned by the National Academy of Design for one of the murals at the Eisenhower Memorial Foundation in Abilene, Kansas. After briefly teaching at the University of Miami, Ohio from 1932-33, Moffett returned to Provincetown to paint and further commit himself to the Art Association he had helped found. He was a member of the National Academy of Design, the American Society of Painters, Sculptors, and Gravers, and the National Society of Mural Painters.

Moffett’s work is included in many institutions such as the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the New Britain Museum of American Art, and the Provincetown Art Museum and Association, among others.

Conquest of Mexico, 1930 Oil on canvas, 24 x 30 in.

Exhibited: "29th Carnegie International", Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA, 1930, 29; "127th Annual Exhibition, in Oil and Sculpture", Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA, January 24 - March 13, 1932, 127.

Published: Figures in a Landscape: The Life and Times of American Painter Ross Moffett 1888-1971, Josephine C. Del Dio, p.143,152.

$45,000.

Henry Koerner, American (1915-1991)

Henry Koerner was born in Vienna in 1915 and trained there as a graphic designer. In 1938, following the rise of Hitler, Koerner fled to the United States where he first achieved success as a commercial artist working in poster design in New York. In 1943, he joined the Office of War Information in their graphics department - there, he was influenced by the work of fellow artist Ben Shahn and began to paint. Sent to Europe in 1944, Koerner was tasked by the US Army with capturing images of life during the war. The following year, he was reassigned to Germany to document the Nuremberg Trials.

After his discharge from the army, Koerner received acclaim for his first solo exhibition, held in Berlin in 1947; his success continued after returning to New York. Koerner's paintings incorporated fantasy and surreal elements, which earned the artist recognition as a master of magic realism. In the 1950s and 60s, the artist painted over fifty portraits for the cover of Time magazine; his sitters included John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Barbara Streisand, and Maria Callas.

An early painting by Koerner, Hat Shoppers reflects the artist's dedication at the time to depicting scenes of the real world and everyday life. The work does, however, also contain elements of the surrealism for which he would later become famous, such as the seemingly hundreds of disembodied faces swarming the three central figures.

Hat Shoppers, circa 1945 Oil on paper, 11 1/2 X 16 1/2 in.

Exhibited: "American Social Realism: 1920-1950", Forum Gallery, NY, January 18 - February 24, 2007.

Provenance available upon request.

$35,000.

Jacob Kainen, American (1909-2001)

Jacob Kainen was a man of many talents: a painter and printmaker with numerous gallery and museum shows to his credit; an internationally known curator who helped build and manage the print collections at the Smithsonian Institution; a major force in creating the Washington, D.C. art scene; a scholar who published research on such subjects as 16th century mannerism, 18th century Venetian etchings and woodcuts, and German expressionism; a collector and patron of the arts; and a beloved teacher and mentor who generously gave his time to help fellow artists.

Throughout his remarkable life, Kainen experimented with different mediums and explored many styles, yet he identified himself as a painter. His work took root in the Social Realism of the 1930s, later becoming involved in the development of abstract expressionism. Fiercely independent and anti-establishment, he rejected labels and moved from visceral abstractions to figurative work to abstraction again, refining these styles at his own pace. His work became well known for its variations and diversity, color and form and explorations of light and space.

Kainen participated in more than twenty-five one-man shows and many group exhibitions. Today his work is represented in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Gallery of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Yale University Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among other public and private collections.

Signed lower right: "Kainen". Inscribed verso: "J. Kainen/ Eyrie- Dec 1949".

$25,000.

Eyrie, 1949 Oil on canvas, 20 X 16 in.

Ruth Eckstein, American (1916-2011)

Ruth Eckstein was an abstract modernist painter and master printmaker, working when the world of Abstract Expressionism at the mid-20 th Century was male-dominated. Critical success was an all-too-rare achievement for a female artist trying to gain a foothold in the competitive, even prohibitive art market of the postwar period and this exhibition aims to shed new light on Eckstein’s masterful contribution to modern abstract painting and printmaking.

Among the crowded field of 20th-century art, Eckstein stands apart for her refined organic abstractions. Her pared-down compositions layer flat planes of color and texture, balancing simplified forms and gentle color harmonies to create a remarkable sense of tranquility.

Eckstein’s tranquil compositions belie her tumultuous beginnings. A fugitive of Nazi Germany, she immigrated first to the provisional safety of neighboring Paris in 1934 and finally to New York in 1939. There she found asylum within a burgeoning network of émigré artists living in political exile. Her life and art intersected with a number of influential figures in postwar American art. She studied with Stuart Davis at The New School for Social Research, and with Harry Sternberg, Julian Levi and Vaclav Vytlacil at the Art Students League, where she immersed herself in printmaking techniques as well as painting and drawing. Later, intrigued by the woodcut technique of printmaker Seong Moy, Eckstein studied with him at the Pratt Graphic Art Center.

Eckstein enjoyed switching freely between various mediums and techniques. “I do not like being confined to a single medium. I like the excitement that comes from switching modes. I like to ‘walk’ around an idea, deal with it in various ways,” she explained. This is markedly evident in Eckstein’s prints, which often incorporate collage or layer multiple processes, combining relief, intaglio, and planographic elements in the same work.

Eckstein’s work is represented in over fifty prestigious public collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Modern Art; the Guggenheim Museum; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris; the National Museum of American Art; and the Harvard Art Museums.

Still life with Green Apples, circa 1950s

Acrylic on board, 16 x 24 in.

Signed top right: "Ruth Eckstein“

From the estate of the artist.

$4,000.

Ben Norris, American (1910-2006)

Robert Benjamin Norris was born in 1910 in southern California, where he completed his undergraduate education, executed his first professional paintings, and first exhibited to critical acclaim. Although he continued to paint for 20 years after retiring to New York City and Philadelphia, he may be best known in Hawaii, where he spent the highly prolific middle part of his professional career.

In the 1950s, abstract landscapes by Ben Norris made their way from his remote home in Honolulu to gallery and museum exhibitions in New York. Though he was known primarily as a watercolorist, one of Norris's monumental oils was prominently displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the show American Painting Today, 1950.

In describing Norris's work at that time, noted art critic Margaret Breuning wrote: "Ben Norris is showing paintings of Hawaiian scenes - not veracious records of landscapes so much as a seizure of their salient character in vivid abstract designs. Sweeping curves, thrusting verticals, and upward surge of intricate, impinging planes through which some flaunting growth asserts itself, convey the impressions of a strange exotic land."

Landscape Variations No. 1- Conflict, 1950 Oil on canvas, 36 x 44 in.

Signed and dated lower left: "Ben Norris / XII - 50".

With label verso: "Landscape Variations - I - Conflict / by Ben Norris".

From the Estate of the Artist.

$24,000.

Werner Drewes, German-American (1899-1985)

When Werner Drewes immigrated to the United States in 1930, he brought with him an active influence in German Expressionism and his formal training in the doctrines of the Bauhaus. At the Bauhaus, his most influential teachers included Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger and Wassily Kandinsky who directed him toward the abstract style. While teaching at the Brooklyn Museum under the Federal Arts Project from 1934-36, Drewes concentrated on spreading this interest in German Expressionism and the avant-garde concepts of the Bauhaus. In an attempt to further attract American artists to these philosophies, Drewes helped found the American Abstract Artists Group in 1936, an organization that would eventually become a major force in the American art scene. At the time, few American artists were working in a semiabstract fashion, and Drewes was viewed as somewhat of a pioneer.

In the early 1940s, he served as director of the WPA Graphic Arts Division in New York City where he was also working at Stanley William Hayter’s Atelier 17. Having contact with so many well-known American and European artists aided his exploration into abstract imagery. By the 1950s, Drewes began to concentrate more on experimental coloring while adhering to the stylistic methods of the Expressionist vision. He used touches of strong colors and bright accents to affect a less somber tone.

After several decades of teaching and printmaking, Drewes withdrew in 1965 from his academic duties in order to devote all his energy to his work. In his later career, he shifted from German Expressionism to Abstract Expressionism as he continued to experiment with shape, form and tone.

Signed

Framed

$14,000.

Stones and Pine Needles, 1958 Oil on canvas, 16 x 20 in.

Signed lower left: "Drewes".

and titled on stretcher verso: "Drewes" and "Stones and Pine Needles”

in the original artist's frame.

Fritz Levedag, German (1899-1951)

Having studied at the Bauhaus and worked as an assistant to Walter Gropius, Fritz Levedag synthesized the styles of a range of fellow Bauhaus artists in his, oil, crayon, watercolor, and graphite works.

Levedag was both a student and friend to Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, and his art was influenced by the stark, geometric forms of Kandinsky and the gentle color harmonies of Klee. The artist switched between depicting figural and abstract block-like forms, but he always employed proportion as a binding factor. As a result, his compositions appear spontaneous yet balanced.

Square and Picture #1482 came from Fritz Levedag's personal collection of works that remained in his estate after his death in 1951.

Square. Oil on paper, 6 ½ x 4 ¼ in. $5,000.

Picture #1482, 1948. Oil, 16 x 17 ½ in. $12,000.

Raymond Moisset, French (1906-1994)

Canicule, Eygalières (Heat wave, Eygalières), 1955. Oil on canvas, 25 ½ x 32 in. Signed lower left: "Moisset". Signed, dated, and titled verso: "Moisset / 1955 / canicule / Eygalières". $4,500.

Untitled (Abstract), 1948. Oil on board, 16 x 10 in. Signed and dated verso: "Moisset / 1948". $2,500.

In the 1920s, Raymond Moisset was a student at the National School of Applied Arts and Crafts. He is nevertheless said to be self-taught. Around 1935, along with a group of colleagues, he formed the Forces Nouvelles a group which denounced all intellectual pretensions in painting, giving if no other purpose than to provoke emotion

Lawrence Kupferman, American (1909-1982)

Profoundly experimental abstract painter Lawrence Kupferman’s artistic career was initially kindled by a deep sense of loss. Born in the Boston neighborhood of Dorchester in 1909 to Samuel and Rose Kupferman, a Jewish family of Austrian descent, the Kupfermans led an impoverished working-class life. At the tender age of five, Kupferman experienced the tragic loss of his mother. In the wake of this loss, he was sent to live with his grandparents, and, for several years afterwards, the reality of his mother’s passing was kept from him. Devastated by the eventual realization of his mother’s death, and facing increasing anti-Semitic bullying from his peers, Kupferman was eventually able to find solace in art.

In the late 1920s he began his studies at the Museum School where he became increasingly discontented by the confining and rigid pedagogy of his instructor, the American impressionist Philip L. Hale, and ended up transferring to the Massachusetts College of Art.

A turning point came in the 1940s, when Kupferman befriended several members of the Abstract Expressionists, including Mark Rothko, Hans Hoffman, and Jackson Pollock. This meeting encouraged Kupferman to push his formal experimentation further, prompting him to begin incorporating more expressionistic elements into his works.

By the early 1940s, propelled by a search for a freer way of applying paint, Kupferman began experimenting with pouring paint directly onto his canvases and letting the medium find its own path on the surface. According to the artist, it might have been these works which inspired Jackson Pollock, upon seeing them in Kupferman's Provincetown studio, to adopt his own splatter technique.

In his later years Kupferman became a professor at the Massachusetts College of Arts, where he gained a reputation for encouraging experimentation and innovative techniques.

September Landscape, 1957

Acrylic and ink on paper, 39 x 16 ¼ in. Signed lower right: "Kupferman".

Inscribed lower right: "1204". Titled, signed, dated, and inscribed verso: "EG: 1,204.J / "September Landscape, 1967" / Lawrence Kupferman".

From the estate of the artist.

$2,700.

Jason Berger, American (1924-2010)

One of Boston’s most beloved modern artists, Jason Berger expressed his joyful outlook on life throughout his stylistic evolution.

Raised in Malden, MA by first-generation Jewish immigrants from Russia and Lithuania, Berger took advantage of his proximity to Boston’s cultural resources from a young age, spending hours at the Museum of Fine Arts and the Boston Public Library. He describes exploring the Newbury Street galleries where “there were many artists doing plein air painting at that time…and a lot of Boston watercolors”. Winslow Homer and John Singer Sargent were two of the region’s most celebrated and represented artists; Berger was particularly influenced by their watercolor landscapes. And so, as a thirteen-year old, he started his career painting outdoors, often painting with friends Jack Kramer and Reed Kay. These three were offered scholarships, along with Arthur Polonsky, for an art program for high-school students at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. This served as an important introduction; Berger and those childhood friends earned scholarships to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1941.

Berger was later awarded the Museum School’s European Traveling Fellowship, and traveled to France with his wife after graduation in 1949. His first stop was Normandy, to absorb the landscapes of Claude Monet, and then on to Paris to study with the cubist sculptor Ossip Zadkine. While in France, Berger immersed himself in the art scene, and was able to meet both George Braque and Henri Matisse. While many have felt a “European” influence in his art, Berger insisted that the “sense of motion in my paintings is a very American kind of thing.”

Upon his death in 2010, Berger’s work had been exhibited in museums nationwide, including the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA; Art Institute, Chicago, IL; Danforth Museum of Art, Framingham, MA; DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA; Fitchburg Museum of Art, Fitchburg, MA; Museum of Modern Art, NYC; Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA; Worcester Museum of Art, Worcester, MA. He has also exhibited widely in France, Mexico and Portugal. Berger’s work can be found in numerous private collections, as well as in the permanent collections of many institutions which include: Danforth Museum of Art, Framingham, MA; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA; and Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA.

The Pines, Normandy #3, 1960 Oil on canvas, 50 x 44 in.

Signed lower right: "Jason Berger"

From the estate of the artist.

Published: Katz, Lois, The Paintings of Jason Berger, 1997: Page 174, Plate 13.

$30,000.

Robert S. Neuman, American (1926-2015)

Over the course of more than six decades, Robert S. Neuman – a second-generation Abstract Expressionist – bridged the gap between gestural and geometric abstraction. His richly pigmented paintings fuse form, content, and vibrant color to explore the visual language of landscape, voyage, and globalization.

From 1947 to 1953 Neuman was active in the San Francisco Bay Area, completing his Master of Fine Arts degree at the California College of the Arts in 1951 and holding faculty appointments at the San Francisco College of Fine Arts and the California College of Arts and Crafts. While in California, he exhibited alongside a number of established and emerging West Coast painters, including Richard Diebenkorn, David Park, Elmer Bischoff, Wayne Thiebaud, and Clyfford Still. The influence of the Bay Area School is evident in Neuman’s use of broad surface treatments, calligraphic drawings, energized expression, and a full color palette.

In 1953, Neuman was awarded a Fulbright Grant for painting, which brought him to Stuttgart, Germany to study with the abstract artist Willi Baumeister. In 1956, he received a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship which allowed him to spend a year in Barcelona, Spain. In between these prestigious awards, Neuman left California and settled on the East Coast, where he went on to teach at SUNY New Paltz, NY, Massachusetts College of Art, MA, Brown University, RI, Harvard University, MA, and Keene State College, NH. As a result of his travels, Neuman’s oeuvre illustrates a remarkable combination of influences, imbuing his paintings with a dramatic universality.

Neuman’s work is in numerous public collections including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; Boston Public Library; Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, NH; DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA; Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, ME; Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA; Harvard University Art Museums, Cambridge, MA; List Visual Arts Center, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA; Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA; Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA; and many others.

$25,000.

Small Landscape, 1966 Oil on French linen, 24 x 24 in. From the estate of the Artist.

Henry Botkin, American (1896-1983)

Henry Botkin was a mid-century American modernist equally known as a painter, a collage artist, and for his work as a proponent of abstract art. Botkin’s oeuvre can be defined by three distinct styles—School of Paris Modernism, Cubism, and Abstract Expressionism.

Botkin studied at the Massachusetts College of Art before moving to New York City, where he worked as an illustrator for publications such as Harper’s. By the 1920s Botkin had moved to Paris, establishing a studio with the assistance of his cousins George and Ira Gershwin. Throughout the 1920s and 30s, his work was heavily influenced by artists of the School of Paris, including Jules Pascin, Marc Chagall, and Chaim Soutine. Botkin later returned to New York and in the late 1930s began to develop a new Cubist approach to his painting.

By the late 1940s, Botkin was fully immersed in the Abstract Expressionist movement then taking hold of the New York art scene. His interest in collage dominated his work for the remainder of his life

Botkin’s work can be found in the collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C., the Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson MS, the Hilliard University Art Museum, Lafayette LA, and the Rose Art Gallery, Waltham MA

Blue Space, circa 1955

Oil and conte crayon on board, 44 1/16 x 33 ¾ in.

Signed lower left: "Botkin". Inscribed verso: "Botkin". From the estate of the artist.

$16,000.

Herbert Barnett, American (1910-1972)

Herbert Barnett was an American artist whose life and work was closely tied to New England, and yet, his distinctive style of painting drew heavily upon the artistic innovations of Cubism. Though portraits, landscapes, and genre scenes are all among the artist’s oeuvre, still lifes were a thematic constant throughout Barnett’s career, providing an endless study of Cubist forms and angles.

Barnett was born in Rhode Island in 1910 and studied at the Rhode Island School of Design while still in high school. He graduated from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts School in 1930 and spent the next three years traveling and studying in Europe. From 1934 to 1940, he taught privately in New York by winter and Cape Ann, MA by summer. In 1940, Barnett became head of the Worcester Art Museum School, a position he held for the next 11 years. During the summers, he painted in Vermont and at one point, taught at the University of Vermont. In addition to Vermont landscapes, Barnett focused on Rockport and central Massachusetts. In 1951, he became the Dean of the Cincinnati Art Academy, where he remained until his death in 1972.

Barnett’s style was influenced by Cubism, as well as the late work of Cezanne, the French Fauves, German Expressionists, and Futurist compositions. Similar to the style of Oscar Fehrer (1872-1958), Barnett's paintings reflect a three-dimensional crystallized structure on the two dimensions of the canvas. For Barnett, “this simultaneous concern with threedimensional volume and two dimensional design presents a contrapuntal problem and can result in a satisfying sense of reconciliation between the complexity of nature and the limitations of the picture plane." Barnett’s emphasis on structural problems reflected his admiration for the technical breakthroughs pioneered by Cézanne and realized by Picasso and Braque during the cubist movement.

Barnett's work is represented in many public and private collections including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; the Worcester Art Museum, MA; the Cincinnati Art Museum, OH; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia; Art Institute of Chicago; Mead Art Center, Amherst College, MA; University of Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson; Maier Museum, Randolph Macon College, Lynchburg, VA; Art Academy of Cincinnati, OH; New Britain Museum of American Art, CT; and the Robert Hull Fleming Museum, University of Vermont.

Still Life with Jugs Oil on board, 29 ¼ x 24 in. From the estate of the artist.

$7,500.

Sally Michel, American (1902-2003)

Sally Michel painted in a distinctive style of simplified shapes and lively colors, developed during the long collaborative career between herself and husband, Milton Avery. Michel and Avery met during a summer spent painting in Gloucester, Massachusetts in 1924. At the end of the summer, Avery followed her back to New York where Michel was studying at the Art Students League, and two years later, they were married. While Avery pursued painting fulltime, Michel was the family breadwinner, working in commercial art and illustration to make ends meet. She painted only when time allowed and in doing so, created work reflective of her appreciation for both the playful and the domiciliary.

In the 1930s the Averys befriended fellow New York artists Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, and Barnett Newman. The group would vacation and paint together, often discussing art theory and critiquing one another’s works. Though Rothko, Gottlieb, and Newman would go on to become amongst the foremost Abstract Expressionists, the Averys never abandoned the representational aspect of their art. They instead forged ahead into a new kind of Modernism, reinterpreting color, line, and form to render recognizable, yet abstracted images.

Throughout her career Michel crafted an oeuvre that conveys moods and emotions. Her paintings alternatively feel cozy, quiet, lively, happy, content, and humorous depending on the scene. Whatever the image, Michel’s work often focuses on relations, be it between people, animals, or objects, and explores the various feelings inherent in such connections.

Michel’s work, however, cannot be reduced to merely pretty hues and agreeable subjects. Her simple shapes and flattened planes demonstrate a hand adept at form without the need for over description. It is these lines and shapes that beckon the eye to linger within her paintings, to follow along and distinguish various figures and their spatial relation. The pleasing, if unusual, colors then allow one to idle within the picture plane, while the emotional levity invites further stay.

Teapot Bouquet, 1971

Oil on canvas board, 36 x 24 in.

Signed and dated in pencil lower right: "Sally Michel / 1971".

From the Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation.

$25,000.

Additional Works

Ted Davis, American (1908-1995)

Musicians, circa 1953

Oil on board, 20 x 16 in.

Signed in ink lower right: "Ted Davis".

$10,000.

Jacob Kainen, American (1909-2001). U Street Capriccio, 1967. Oil on canvas, 24 x 30 ¾ in. Signed lower left: "Kainen”. $7,500.

Werner Drewes, German-American (1899-1985) [French] Hilltown, 1961

Oil on canvas, 14 x 10 inches. Signed lower left: "Drewes". Signed and titled on stretcher verso: "Drewes" and "[French] / Hilltown". In fine condition.

This painting was a favorite of the artist's and hung on his walls; it remains in Drewes' original frame.

$13,600.

Jason Berger, American (1924-2010). Bridge Over St. Ouen, Paris, circa 1955. Oil on canvas, 28 ½ x 45 ½ in. Study for "The Siene at St. Ouen". From the estate of the artist. $14,000.