Landmarks of 20th Century American Art

LANDMARKS OF 20TH CENTURY

AMERICAN ART

LANDMARKS OF 20TH CENTURY

AMERICAN ART N O V E M B E R 8 , 2 0 1 8 – J A N UA RY 5 , 2 0 1 9

NEW YORK

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his exhibition speaks to the history of Forum Gallery, which began in 1960, as much as to the history of Twentieth Century American art.

The gallery was started by my mother, Bella Fishko, herself an immigrant from Odessa, Ukraine in the early 1920’s. She was a humanist, and Forum has always shown American art inspired by American culture, landscape, and population; art created from observation, ingenuity and dedication, imbued with respect for the American art of Eakins, Homer, Cole and Church.

We are indebted to the artists and estates we represent, some for more than fifty years; and to the lenders, the custodians of these extraordinary works of art who have entrusted them to us so we may present them to you.

Landmarks are points of exceptional interest, guideposts along a continuum.

We make no effort to create an encyclopedic journey through the entire century, nor do we explore directions, like abstract expressionism, that would take an entire exhibition of its own. But we do think we have chosen significant works that demonstrate the vitality, creativity and originality of some of the most exceptional artists of Twentieth Century America.

Niccolò Brooker has tirelessly and brilliantly researched and written this catalogue; without his participation and his twenty years of association with Forum Gallery, we could not have presented this exhibition; all of us at Forum Gallery appreciate his contribution.

— Robert Fishko October, 2018

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I N TRO D UC T IO N

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esearching and writing this catalog has afforded me the opportunity to reacquaint myself with artists whose work I’ve known for a long time.

In the pre-World War II era, when transatlantic voyages meant ocean liners rather than jets, and cross-country trips were done on trains, many of these artists traveled with exceptional frequency. Their ability to access information, ingest new ideas while disseminating their own, and to find one another as they formed cogent artistic expression is both remarkable and inspirational. A number of them were recent European immigrants who artistically integrated their heritage into an American vernacular. Some were highly regarded during their own lifetimes. For others, recognition came posthumously.

The breadth of material in this exhibition bridges numerous artistic styles, social movements, and two world wars. While some of the artworks are stylistically related and may be readily associated with particular movements, others appear sui generis. What all of them do share is the intent on the part of their creators to perceive, interpret, even pass judgment on manifest aspects of the world in which they lived. In other words, rather than an internal, private world projected outwardly, as in the form of abstract expressionism, the artists in this exhibition questioned, reconfigured, and at times did abstract an externally perceived reality.

It is my sincere hope that the publication is both informative and insightful, that in its pages the reader finds something to love, and that many faces of 20th Century American art are appropriately considered.

— Niccolò Brooker October, 2018

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A L E XA N DE R A RC H IP E N KO (1887–1964) Leaning Figure

Cézanne’s landscapes into the Proto-Cubism which soon blossomed into the style which revolutionized 20th Century art for a half century. While Braque united with Picasso to pioneer Analytical (1908–12) and Synthetic Cubism (1912–14), in 1911 Archipenko joined an eclectic group of artists known as the Section d’Or, whose generative salon exhibitions of the 1910s succeeded in disseminating Cubism to a much broader public.

incised with signature bottom left ARCHIPENKO – terra-cotta, partly metalized with silver Height: 19⅛ inches Executed in 1935; unique Provenance: Katherine Kuh Gallery, Chicago Mr. & Mrs. Daniel Saidenberg, Chicago (acquired from the above) Noah Goldowsky Gallery, New York Private Collection, Milwaukee (acquired directly from the above, Jan. 15, 1969) Private collection, New York (acquired from the above, Feb. 5, 2018) Exhibited: Chicago, IL, Katherine Kuh Gallery, Alexander Archipenko, Dec., 1937.

Literature: Archipenko, Alexander, Fifty Creative Years: 1908– 1958, Tekhne Publishing, New York, 1960, no. 214 (illustrated in black and white).

Note: A certificate of authenticity from Frances Archipenko Gray, dated September 6, 2016, accompanies this work.

By the mid-1910s, he had embarked on a novel and ambitious enterprise: to successfully synthesize the visual arts of painting and sculpture into a new discipline. While the Italian Futurist Umberto Boccioni pushed the possibilities of volumetric sculptural depth with his Development of a Bottle in Space (1912), as did soon thereafter the American Cubist Max Weber in his 1915 bronze Spiral Rhythm, I, it was Archipenko who invented the so-called “sculpto-painting,” the consequence of tireless experimentation with both new means and techniques. This innovation represented a visual, tangible hybrid of both painting and sculpture. Many pieces have been lost due to their innate fragility, while Woman with Hat (1915), Woman Pondering Face (1916), Woman in Armchair (1918) and Metal Lady (1923) are reminders of Archipenko’s irrepressible lifelong instinct to experiment, materialistically and stylistically.

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Russian sculptor from the Ukraine, Alexander Archipenko joined the Parisian avant-garde in 1908. It was the same year in which the great Fauvist painters Georges Braque and Raoul Dufy met in L’Estaque and collaborated to deconstruct

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Never fully abstract in his compositions, always wedded at least partially to the representational, and highly favoring female over the male figures, Archipenko’s various “sculpto-painting” manifestations brought him to the attention of the celebrated American art patron Katherine Dreier. With her

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artist friends Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, in 1920 Dreier founded the Société Anonyme in New York as a venue for the exhibition of avant-garde European art in the United States. Timed with Dreier’s symposium The Psychology of Modern Art and Archipenko, in 1921 the Société gave Archipenko his first American exhibition, “the most important held this season” in Dreier’s own words. With a renewed sense of purpose, possibilities, and patrons, Archipenko arrived in New York City on October 16, 1923. He had immigrated to America.

Moving to Los Angeles for two years in 1935, Archipenko spent much time working and re-working a number of his most identifiable torso compositions, modeling his female figures to the streamlined, lustrous aesthetic of the prevailing Art Deco style.

Archipenko, Two Bodies, 1936, polychromed terra-cotta (coll. Frederick R. Weisman Museum, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis)

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In 1936, Alfred H. Barr, scholar, taste-maker, and first director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, invited Archipenko to take part in that institution’s seminal exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art. In 1937, Archipenko moved to Chicago to be on the faculty of the New Bauhaus school, founded by László Moholy-Nagy who had taught at the original German Bauhaus in both Weimar and Dessau.

While the American recreation of the School was short-lived, Archipenko’s presence in Chicago and friendship with Moholy-Nagy resulted in perhaps the most successful and meaningful professional relationship of his life, with gallerist Katherine Kuh. Having studied art history under Barr at Vassar College, for seven years (1935–43) Kuh operated the most important Chicago gallery of its day,

Archipenko, Meditation, 1938, polychromed terra-cotta (coll. Spencer Museum of Art, Lawrence, Kansas)

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Archipenko, Yellow and Black, 1938 polychromed terra-cotta (coll. Los Angeles County Museum of Art)

exposed but weight-bearing leg firm. As with the dancers of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes, which Archipenko had so admired as early as 1910, her poise is never in question, her arms locked together as a single sphere, pushing upward a bare breast below the neckline as her unobstructed face beams back at the viewer.

“The impact of Archipenko’s innovation is that it is embodied in the human form. {. . .} Archipenko’s penetrated figures become a compelling metaphor for a public whose sense of reality was shifting with each new scientific discovery. The fact that the female form was the vehicle of this transformation carries its own vital resonance.”

(Leshko, Jaroslaw. Alexander Archipenko: Vision and Continuity, exhibition catalogue, The Ukranian Museum, New York, 2005, p. 68)

From 1937 to 1942 Archipenko had five solo exhibitions at the Katherine Kuh Gallery in Chicago (photograph by the archipenko foundation )

notwithstanding both the Great Depression and the Second World War, before being hired for her curatorial skills by the Art Institute of Chicago.

An avid fan of Archipenko, she gave him five solo shows in six years. The first was in December of 1937 shortly after Archipenko’s arrival in Chicago and included twenty-seven terra-cotta sculptures which he had produced in the preceding five years.

Kuh’s first Archipenko exhibition included his 1935 terra-cotta Leaning Figure, a unique, singular sculpture which he partially covered with a thin layer of silver so as to add sheen, texture, and color contrast.

Untreated clay-colored terra-cotta fills the figure’s interior while the partly metalized skin coats portions with the suggestive effect of garb draped over the body. The sculpture’s strength stems from its curvilinearity, its sensuality from the sinuous stance of the female form starting to sway and step, hip

Alexander Archipenko

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RO B E RT C OTT ING H AM (Born 1935) ME signed, dated and titled on the reverse COTTINGHAM 1972 ME oil on canvas 78 x 78 inches Painted in Los Angeles in 1972, the painting depicts a part of the marquee of the now defunct Cameo Theatre on Broadway.

Provenance: Carlo Bilotti, London Anon. Sale, Sotheby Parke Bernet, New York, May, 1982 Private Collection, Westchester County, New York (acquired from the above sale) Literature: Meisel, Louis K., Photo-Realism, Harry N. Abrams, New York, 1981, Robert Cottingham, fig. 297 (illustrated in color, p. 146 and dated 1973).

Note: Opened in 1910 under the name Clune’s Broadway Theatre and renamed Cameo in 1924, the theater was one of the nation’s first to exclusively show motion pictures and the longest running and continuously operated in Los Angeles. Almost twenty years after Cottingham captured it in his painting ME, in 1991 the Cameo’s doors closed forever. Now an electronics store, its former lobby serves as the retail space and its auditorium as the storage facility.

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obert Cottingham’s entire artistic career has revolved around communication. Refining his prodigious skills as an advertising agency art director in Los Angeles in the mid-1960’s, he quickly realized he had more to say in his work than what others asked, and became an independent easel artist. From his earliest paintings of oil trucks, Victorian homes, and Art Deco buildings to his recent series of machine “components,” Cottingham has carefully selected his subjects to transmit multi-layered messages. In the information age, which Cottingham anticipated and through which he continues to produce, his bold visuals and strong linguistic content are as germane as ever. Often grouped with Photorealist artists because of the coincidence of time period and the use of preparatory photographs, Cottingham is actually an artist whose unique approach touches Pop Art, Photorealism, Precisionism and other American movements. For Robert Cottingham, born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, the dynamic energy of the constantly changing landscape of Los Angeles, with its illuminated billboards, contemporary buildings, plentiful signs and inexorable storefronts, spoke volumes and inspired him to find and show the universality of the coded messages always on display.

Selection of words is central to Cottingham’s art and critical to all his signage painting. The subject matter is not premeditated but dictated by his environment and spontaneous discovery. In coming across shop billboards or theater marquees, parts of words literally speak to Cottingham, visually and audibly, as shorthand for American popular culture.

For instance, in the paintings he titled ODE (1971),

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Cottingham, An American Alphabet, 1994-1996, twenty-six individual canvases (coll. German Corporate Collection, Günther Quandt-Haus, Bad Homberg, Germany)

ART (1971), HI (1973), and HOT (1973), Cottingham excerpted particular letter sequences from longer words to form the dominant images of their respective works. As newly created words, they are meant to be contemplated by the viewer and taken as verbal cues for more recondite concepts. In his large-scale 1972 painting ME, Cottingham chose two of five letters from a vertical theater marquee illuminated at night. The M and the E, reflected in the adjacent glass surface of the building, are enclosed by bright yellow bulbs which intensify the letters’ shine. Conceived and created

by Cottingham, the word ME is at once extolled by the bulbs’ luminosity and resonated in the glass pane. Cottingham is recognizing the dawn of the ME Generation, the culture of narcissism, the glorification of self, which the early 1970s inaugurated.

By the mid-1970s, Cottingham’s painting began to show the entire sign and building, in what became known as his “façade” series and which included

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Davis, Stuart. Int’l Surface No. 1, 1960 (coll. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.)

paintings such as Buschs (1974), Champagne (1975), and Tip Top (1981). In the mid-1980s, Cottingham moved on to “heralds,” the first of his “rolling stock” series of railroad images which included flat boxcar logos like Santa Fe (1985) and more ominous “warning stripes” (circa 1990) and “portals” (circa 1992), wordless images with enigmatic, subliminal meanings. From 1994 to 1996 Cottingham composed his An American Alphabet, a work of twentysix individual canvases, in the mid 1990s. Each 40 by 30 inch painting portrays an individual letter of the alphabet taken from a different iconographic American sign. Viewable as the sum of its parts, it is Cottingham’s most monumental work. Always selecting, as his subjects, means of communication, in the late 1990s Cottingham began his “still lifes,” a broad body of work consisting of vintage cameras and typewriters. His painting of the camera Bimat (1998), its roll-film lens peering out from lateral accordion folds, or the typewriter Red Corona (2003) with its radiating three-row keyboard and

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type guide, are both examples of poised “machines of witness”* to the communicative process of information transmittal.

Clearly, for Cottingham the structure or object from which he sources his linguistic material is, in and of itself, incidental to the conceptual nature of his art. Nonetheless, he acknowledges a potent documentary aspect to his work. Cottingham has captured movie theaters which have subsequently been dismantled, billboards long-gone, cameras and typewriters which only an older generation recalls from personal use and he ascribes a predisposition for such matter to his lifelong interest in historic American art; the sign-covered buildings of photographer Edward Weston and the paintings of Stuart Davis, the American Modernist who introduced words as discontinuous arrangements into the American painting vernacular. There is a profoundly American quality to Cottingham. His eye has always specifically been for an American iconography, drawn from American traditions which in earlier decades colored American commercialism. Robert Cottingham harvests his American language from the American scene.

“I will take two or three shots of a sign and occasionally as many as a dozen if it seems especially fertile. But quite often it’s the photograph taken on the run, something I just snapped because it was there rather than because I thought I needed it, that becomes a painting.” (Robert Cottingham in an interview by John Arthur, pub. in Realists at Work, Watson-Guptill, New York, 1983, p. 60)

The Cameo Theatre, 28 South Broadway, downtown Los Angeles

Robert Cottingham

*Kino, Carol, Machines of Witness, exhibition catalogue, Forum Gallery, New York, 2000

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ELA I N E DE KO O N ING (1918–1989) Harold Rosenberg #2 signed with initials lower right E. de K. oil on canvas 48¼ x 36 inches Painted in New York in 1967 Provenance: Estate of the artist Private Collection, New York Salander O’Reilly Galleries, Inc., New York Private Collection, New York (acquired from the above, 2006) Exhibited: Athens, GA, Georgia Museum of Art, Elaine de Kooning, March – May, 1992, no. 22 (illustrated in color, p. 70). The exhibition traveled to Santa Barbara, CA, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Aug. – Nov., 1992; Baltimore, MD, Maryland Institute College of Art, Decker Gallery, Jan. – Feb., 1993; Little Rock, AR, Arkansas Art Center, March – April, 1993 and Huntsville, AL, Huntsville Museum of Art, May – June, 1993.

Note: Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg were the foremost art critics of their day, the latter championing the work of Jackson Pollock, the former tirelessly advocating that of Willem de Kooning. Rosenberg wrote his first influential essay in 1952, The American Action Painters, thereby coining the term “action painters” for the cadre of artists soon to be known as Abstract Expressionists. From the time he met Willem and subsequently Elaine (with whom he had an affair), Rosenberg remained lifelong friends with

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them both. The author of seven didactic art books beginning in 1959, from 1967 until his death in 1978 Rosenberg was the art critic for The New Yorker Magazine.

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n 1951, New York art dealer Sidney Janis held an exhibition titled Artists: Man and Wife which displayed the work of artist couples Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, and Jean and Sophie Taeuber-Arp. While an intriguing concept, after the show Elaine de Kooning had the forthrightness to comment that the experience had felt belittling to the female artists, as though they had been accessories to their husbands, the “real artists.”

While her painting career began in the 1940s, initially Elaine devoted most of her efforts to advancing that of Willem, her husband and personal art instructor. Latter-day critical reflection on Elaine’s work has borne insight into her own painterly skill and originality.

Like other Abstract Expressionists of the late 1940s and 50s, Elaine de Kooning mastered drawing technique only then to choose to discard purely realist imagery for a less representational approach.

Alongside other countercultural artists, in 1948 she and Willem went to study at the experimental, antihierarchy Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Even after Willem left, Elaine remained, taking classes under Josef Albers and working through her own, brief Surrealist period. Elaine was an active member of New York’s Eighth Street Club (39 East 8th Street) during its early and most thought-provoking years (1949–1957). There, she and her artist colleagues weighed in on the Existentialism

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of Martin Heidegger, the analytical psychology of Carl Jung and the latest art exhibitions and reviews. She herself joined the fledgling Art News magazine as an editorial associate.

Paradoxically, the artist whose friendship and support Elaine de Kooning most enjoyed was Fairfield Porter, the preeminent pictorial painter of his day, a landscapist-portraitist both criticized and revered for adhering to figuration as a counterweight to the dominance of the “action painters.” By the early 1950s, Elaine was showing at Stable Gallery and painting the type of portrait which would be her greatest contribution to Post-War America.

Even at their most gestural and schematic, these paintings and the drawings which accompany them are respectful renderings of readily recognizable figures in her life. She was mostly intrigued by the male figure and, eager to flip the age-old gender relationship of artist to model, almost always painted men, usually seated. Fascinated by how male poses denoted their personalities, how their clothes divided their bodies, in 1951–52 Elaine completed numerous portraits of Willem, then

Harold Rosenberg

in the Summer of 1953 of art dealer Leo Castelli, followed in 1954 by a series of Fairfield Porter, and in 1956 of art critic Harold Rosenberg whom she painted again in 1967.

“The figures in Elaine’s male portraits almost always appear relaxed and casual. {. . .} many of her subjects, including Porter and her brother Conrad, sit with their legs apart in a typically male posture that is acceptable but can be read as revealing male sexuality. Elaine arrayed the men in varied ways, however. The portraits of

Black Mountain College, The Studies Building, designed by A. Lawrence Kocher, 1940 ( photograph by eastern regional archive , state archives of north carolina , ashville ,

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north carolina )

Thomas B. Hess and Harold Rosenberg are good examples, their poses reflecting Elaine’s interest in the male body” (Fortune, Brandon Brame. Elaine de Kooning Portraits, exhibition catalogue, The National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., 2015, p. 29) Elaine de Kooning’s success and notoriety led to her receiving a commission to paint President John F. Kennedy the year he was assassinated.

After Elaine and Willem separated in 1957, she held numerous teaching positions at esteemed institutions across the country. Although apart for nearly twenty years, she and Willem never divorced and eventually reunited (at least as close confidants) in The Hamptons, Long Island, in the late 1970s. Willem died in East Hampton in March of 1997. He was preceded by Elaine who passed away in Southampton in February, 1989.

Elaine de Kooning, 1960 (courtesy Estate of Rudy Burkhardt & Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York)

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W I L L E M D E KO ON ING (1904 –1997) Untitled (Still Life with Eggs and Potato Masher) oil and sand on canvas 18 x 24 inches Painted in New York, circa 1928–29 Provenance: The artist, New York Mr. Maxfield Vogel, New York (acquired directly from the above, early 1930s until 1991) Gladys Liroff Vogel, New York (wife of the above) Louise Vogel, Mérida, México (daughter of the above) Salander O-Reilly Galleries, Inc., New York (acquired directly from the above, 2002) Private Collection, New York (acquired directly from the above, 2006) Exhibited: New York, NY, Paul Kasmin Gallery & Edelman Arts, Inc., Surrealism: Then and Now, Oct. – Nov., 2006. Purchase, NY, Neuberger Museum of Art, American Vanguards: Graham, Davis, Gorky, de Kooning and Their Circle, 1927-1942, Jan. – April, 2012, no. 4 (illustrated in color, p. 11). The exhibition traveled to Fort Worth, TX, Amon Carter Museum, June – Aug., 2012 and Andover, MA, Phillips Academy, Addison Gallery of American Art, Sept. – Dec., 2012.

Literature: Rosenberg, Karen, The New York Times, Art Review: The Modernist Musketeers are Reunited: February 3, 2012 (illustrated, p. C30). Schwendener, Martha, The New York Times, Arts Westchester, Art Review: Debunking a Myth of Solitary American Artists, February 19, 2012 (ill., p. WE19).

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Note: According to Louise Vogel, Untitled (Still Life with Eggs and Potato Masher) was purchased by her father, architect Maxfield (Mac) Vogel, directly from de Kooning in the early 1930s. Vogel knew de Kooning, and the artist temporarily moved into Vogel’s apartment at 40 Union Square when he was between apartments in 1934. Arshile Gorky, from whom Vogel also purchased two paintings, lived nearby.

After the death of Maxfield Vogel, the de Kooning and two Gorky paintings remained in the Vogel residence in Queens, passing first to his widow Gladys, then to daughter Louise.

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ach painter in the coterie of vanguard artist friends working in New York City in the late 1920s painted eggs. This included Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, John Graham, and Stuart Davis, all but the last doing so in an attenuated Cubist style which replaced its pre-World War I European antecedents and found fertile ground in America.

In his catalogue essay for the 2012 exhibition American Vanguards, art historian William Agee calls attention to the “egg” subject matter, recording manifold reasons for the extent to which it was depicted by Modern painters. He commented that the rendering of its ovular shape, while descriptive of an “egg” within the confines of the pictorial space, acted as a substitute for the formal exercise of reproducing a “circle,” a historically challenging artistic task. At the same time, such an oval, or circle, serves as a “central point of reference within the painting, giving it a kind of symmetry and balance that we seek in any work of art” (Agee, American Vanguards: pps. 125-6).

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In part because of the fractured, dispirited Parisian art scene in the immediate aftermath of World War I, de Kooning chose instead to proceed to New York.

This personal decision not only impacted his own artistic future, but remarkably also that of 20th Century Western art.

The immediate years before the War in Europe represented a hotbed of artistic creativity. Cutting edge movements, new “isms,” were spawning right up to guns of August, 1914, and mostly out of England, France, Italy, Germany, Austria, and Russia, the very countries most ravaged by the bloodshed. Then all did become silent on both Western and Eastern fronts. Many of Europe’s great moderns perished in the devastation; others were handicapped; still others had lost their creative way. Cubism, the newfound language of the avant-garde, was declared dead as its greatest advocate, critic Guillaume Apollinaire, had passed away from his head wound in 1918. Ozenfant and Corbusier’s Après le Cubisme (1917) was the new handbook for restoring Europe to artistic harmony by abandoning the visually shocking, perplexing, and jarring. A return to order was called for, a prolonged period of comprehensible figuration, a New Objectivity in Germany, Purism in France, De Stijl where art and living could coexist.

Relative to Europe, the United States had remained conservative, following artistic suit where possible and adapting abstraction to an American vernacular. By the 1920s, some young European artists gravitated to New York rather than to traditional European cultural centers. The young Dutchman, Willem de Kooning, entered the United States as a stowaway in 1926. He had worked for decorative stores in Rotterdam and Brussels, and attended night classes in drawing

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and the applied arts at the Rotterdam Academy of the Fine Arts and Techniques (1917–1921). After settling in New York City in 1927, he began working for Eastman Brothers, the design firm which would put him in contact with other immigrant artists and which, because of its proximity to Midtown, allowed him to participate in the modern art gallery scene. Soon, Willem was purchasing supplies, painting and drawing on the side and, what is more, he was becoming American.

Eventually de Kooning would emerge as one the greatest painters of the 20th Century. In many ways, he defined what it meant to be an artist, certainly in post-World War II America: a loft living urbanite with an irrepressible connection to nature; the reclusive virtuoso, known by all but ever apart from society; the utterly indifferent yet highly successful singularity; and the self-destructive alcoholic off of whom masterpieces, nonetheless, kept flowing. He and Jackson Pollock were the premier prototypes for what generationally followed, the incomparable who every ersatz tried to imitate, the authentic before an onslaught of affectation. His early, gritty

John Graham, Coffee Cup (with Saucer and Egg), 1928–29 (Private Collection)

New York years of the late 1920s and 1930s when he was still a European masking his Dutch accent as best he could, when all seemed possible to him even after the onset of the Great Depression, was the time of his gestation. De Kooning landed in the United States, stepped off the boat and never looked back. The art world seemed to have no choice but to follow him to America.

“De Kooning’s earliest known paintings in America attest to his budding modernism.

He was particularly interested in painting small, fairly abstract still lifes that included egglike shapes that owed something both to Miró and Arp and to his classical training at the academy, where students were painstakingly taught to draw pure geometric forms.

The pictures have a surrealist air of possibility and implication; the suggestion of birth, evoked by the eggs, may also have been appealing to an immigrant hoping to remake his life. The “eggs” are also rich in contrary meaning. On the one hand, they are still and delicate and poised; on the other, they

Jean Arp (Hans), Balcon I, 1925 (ex. coll.

Hubertus Wald, Hamburg)

call to mind cracking and breaking. They are metaphors about metamorphosis itself.

The ever-changing oval would never leave de Kooning’s art.” (Stevens, Mark and Swan, Annalyn. de Kooning: An American Master, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2006, p. 78)

Willem de Kooning (photograph by tony

vaccaro )

Constantin Brâncus, i, The Beginning of the World, 1924 (coll. Dallas Museum of Art) Exhibited, Brummer Gallery, New York, 1926

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C H A R L E S DE M U T H (1883–1935) Flowers

surrounding background space were brought close to the surface. By manipulating his motifs and the areas between and around them with equal intensity, Demuth created all-over patterns. Deftly controlling the amount of water he added to the mediums, he also achieved mottled surfaces and subtle variations of tone which caused color to advance and recede. These are not florals in the traditional sense of still life but are explosive, animate landscapes which exude life; his bleeding of warm and cool colors further intensified the sense of a moving, breathing surface.” (Haskell, Barbara. Charles Demuth exhibition catalogue, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1987, p. 51)

watercolor and gouache on paper 10⅞ x 8⅜ inches Painted circa 1915 Provenance: Estate of the artist Robert Lochner, New York and Lancaster, Pennsylvania Fulton National Bank, Lancaster, Pennsylvania (acquired from the above, 1956) Richard W.C. Weyand, Richmond, New York Sale, Parke-Bernet Galleries, Inc., New York, Watercolors and Paintings by Charles Demuth, Part One of the Collection Belonging to the Estate of the Late Richard W.C. Weyand, Oct. 16, 1957, lot 1 (as Field Flowers) Coe Kerr Gallery, New York Private Collection (acquired from the above) Adelson Galleries, Inc, New York Mark Borghi Fine Art, New York (by 1999) Private Collection, New York (acquired from the above, 2002) Exhibited: New York, NY, Hollis Taggart Galleries, Works on Paper, 1999 (illustrated, p. 21). New York, NY, Zabriskie Gallery, Charles Demuth: 1883-1935, Jan. – March, 2004, no. 7.

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he still lifes which Demuth began painting in 1915 just preceded his Vaudeville-themed figurative works and were an early validation of the artistry of which he was capable in watercolor, his lifelong medium of choice. Demuth attended a 1910 exhibition at Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery ‘291’ of watercolors by Auguste Rodin. He greatly admired them and later transposed the provocative nature of Rodin’s women to his own homoerotic images, maintaining the subtle variations in viscosity of the watercolors used by the French master.

“Demuth’s commitment to color as a vehicle of mood and emotional content accelerated in 1915 as he added flowers to his pictorial repertoire. In contrast to his Provincetown landscapes, these floral images and their

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In Demuth’s simply titled work Flowers, which dates from this period, the individual blossoms and their stalks appear to float in midair against a deep blue background, perhaps a thematic continuation if not immediate precursor to his Floating Flowers (Grand Rapids, Michigan, Art Museum) or Strawflowers (Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford), both of 1915.

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the social misfit sublimating sensuality through conventional compositions.

Demuth, Strawflowers, 1915 (coll. Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut)

Born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Charles Demuth grew up conservatively, even for the time, in a well-to-do, upper-class Lutheran family. With an obvious artistic gift, Demuth studied first at Drexel Institute of Art and, by the Spring of 1905, at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts under Thomas Anschutz whose realism had spawned that of the most highly regarded Ashcan School painters.

Demuth was first in Europe in 1907–08, then back amid the pre-World War I innovative fervor from 1912–14. Stieglitz admired Demuth greatly (they had been introduced by Marsden Hartley), photographed him a number of times, and eventually did exhibit his work. However it was Charles Daniel who gave the artist his first one-man exhibition, in October of 1914, upon Demuth’s return to the U.S. Along with “291” and a handful of others, the

In these still lifes, the allover watercolor approach has removed the subject matter from any discernable topographic setting. In doing so, the flowers’ status as and only flowers (i.e. their unwavering recognition as such) is called into question. Could they not instead be surreptitious surrogates for corporeal entities, the blooms and their stems tantamount to faces and limbs impishly prancing about a stage set? The anthropologic had clearly crept into his still life painting, the metaphorical into his production at large. From this point forward in his work, thematic transparency acceded to an everpresent suggestive symbolism whose conceptual brilliance propelled Demuth into the vanguard of 20th Century American Modernists. The physically handicapped, homosexual artist was peering into or out from an isolated world of forbidden fantasy,

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Rodin, Cambodian Dancer, circa 1909 (reproduced in Camera Work by Alfred Stieglitz, issue XXXIV–XXXV, 1911)

Daniel Gallery fostered the careers of some of the most cutting-edge artists of the day during its two decade run (1913–1932).

The Vaudeville watercolors Demuth began in 1915 were a conduit to the sexually explicit subject matter he defiantly depicted in the 1920s and into the age of Freudian enlightenment. Conceivably, his mid-late 1910s still lifes anchored him instead to the suggestive sensibilities of both painterly and literary aesthetes of the late 19th Century. Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde were great influences on Demuth and on his own, personal writings. Their premise that life must be lived intensely, that art need not serve morality but only beauty, and their Epicurean devotion to pleasure must have been intellectually liberating for Demuth, if not yet sexually so. In terms of the visual arts, Demuth was drawn to Whistler’s flaunting of aesthetics over subject matter and seduced by the self-indulgence if not outright eroticism of English Art Nouveau illustrator Aubrey Beardsley (whose demeanor and appearance he emulated). Subtly in his still lifes and abruptly in his figures, Charles Demuth was an artistic thread through libertine 19th Century Victorian aestheticism into the 20th Century demimonde of outlander American artists.

Charles Demuth, 1915 (Photographed

by Alfred Stieglitz; no. 133, p. 362 from Modern Art and America: Alfred Stieglitz and his New York Galleries, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 2001)

Demuth, Vaudeville, 1917 (coll. Museum of Modern Art, New York)

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P R E STO N DI CKIN S O N (1889–1930) Still Life with Flowers signed lower right Dickinson oil on canvas 20 x 24 inches Painted in Valley Stream, New York, 1923–24 Provenance: The Daniel Gallery, New York The Downtown Gallery, New York Mrs. William Bender, New York Anon. sale Sotheby Parke Bernet, New York, Dec. 14, 1973, lot 19 Kraushaar Galleries, New York Dr. & Mrs. Harold Rifkin, New York Adelson Galleries, New York Private Collection, Short Hills, New Jersey (acquired directly from the above) Exhibited: Pittsburgh, PA, Carnegie Institute, Twenty-eighth Annual International Exhibition of Paintings, Oct. – Dec., 1929, no. 88 (as Still Life, Flowers). Lincoln, NE, Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, Preston Dickinson 1889-1930, Sept. – Oct., 1979, no. 68 (illustrated in black and white, p. 181). The exhibition traveled to New York, NY, Whitney Museum of American Art, Dec., 1979-Feb., 1980; Albuquerque, NM, University Art Museum, University of New Mexico, March – April, 1980; Colorado Springs, CO, Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, May – June, 1980 and Athens, GA, Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia, July – Aug., 1980. Tulsa, OK, Philbrook Art Center, Painters of the Humble Truth: Masterpieces of American Still Life 1801–1939, Sept., 1981-July, 1982, no. 29, fig.

11.8 (illustrated in black and white, p. 259).

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t was in a frame shop on West 43rd Street that Preston Dickinson first met Charles Daniel, a saloon owner with an uncanny eye for contemporary art. The Daniel Gallery opened in December, 1913, and became the first to deal and promote the work of a loosely associated group of American Modernists called the Immaculates or Cubist-Realists, decades later known as Precisionists. Later recognized by way of the 1920s work of Charles Sheeler, Georgia O’Keeffe, Ralston Crawford and others, Dickinson stylistically anticipated by a number of years the refined, simplified, and precise structural motifs which typified the dispassionate objectivity of American Precisionism.

Daniel saw great potential in the young artist and arranged to finance an extended trip for him to Europe, where Dickinson remained until the outbreak of WWI in 1914. He had excelled during his years (1906 –1910) at the Art Students League under the tutelage of Ernest Lawson and William Merrit Chase. However, as with so many aspiring American artists of the epoch, it was his time in Europe and particularly Paris that equipped him with a visual language for his developing painting style. He saw the Orphism of Kupka and Delaunay, the Improvisations of Kandinsky, and Duchamp’s Nude Descending the Staircase a year before its unveiling to the American public at the Armory Show of 1913. Dickinson greatly admired the acute angularity, special volumes, and dark contours of Spanish born Cubist Juan Gris, whose 1912 The Man in the Café he would have seen in the Section d’Or exhibition of the same year. The painting likely inspired Dickinson’s own composition of a fellow American Modernist in Paris

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which he titled Café Scene with a Portrait of Charles Demuth (1912-14). Both works are now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

ments of receding and intersecting lines. In Still Life with Flowers, a fanciful distortion of perspective is attained by obstructing the convergence of the table edges behind a vase of flowers. Objects such as a pipe resting over an ashtray or a stamped letter beneath tableware are perceptible from varying viewpoints. The technique serves to deepen spatial relationships, as does the dark silhouette about the subject matter.

In the mid-1910s, Dickinson developed a fascination with Japanese woodcuts whose chromatic gradation and variable texture he emphasized in his compositions. According to Thomas Hart Benton, the two artists explored Synchronism together in New York in 1916, which is certainly conceivable considering Dickinson’s intensifying prismatic coloring and geometric fracturing of picture planes.

A group of still lifes all executed about 1924, Still Life with Knife, Still Life with Round Plate, and Still Life with Navajo Blanket exemplify his nuanced attenuation of paint hues amidst complicated arrange-

Dickinson, Café Scene with a Portrait of Charles Demuth, 1912–14 (coll. Philadelphia Museum of Art)

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“The New York Times critic, writing of a still life {by Dickinson} exhibited in 1924, remarked on its expressive quality. ‘The lines of the composition are thrust and pulled. . . . as the lines of column and façade in medieval architecture are pulled

Juan Gris, Man in the Café, 1912 (coll.

Philadelphia Museum of Art)

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and thrust out of a cold symmetry into a soaring emotional irregularity expressing the cadences of life.’ Through dynamic distortions of perspective and form, Dickinson, within the limits of the Precisionist style, succeeded in investing these paintings with an expressive quality.” (Cloudman, Ruth.

Preston Dickinson 1889–1930, exhibition catalogue, Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, Lincoln, in collaboration with the Nebraska Art Association, 1979, p. 28) In search of artistic inspiration, in June of 1930 Dickinson moved to Northeastern Spain with his companion and fellow painter Oronzo Gasparo.

Six months later, he contracted double-pneumonia and died quickly. He was 41 years old. The following year Duncan Phillips, an admirer of his work, staged a retrospective at the Phillips Collection in Washington D.C. Dickinson had been prolific, producing nearly two hundred works, a quantity that only appears modest because of his drastically shortened life. Considering his talent, it is difficult not to speculate how Dickinson’s art might have impacted the 1930s and 40s. Certainly he holds a proper place within the discourse of American Modernism and, if only for a relatively brief period, successfully communicated his distinctive conceptual approach to those aspects of reality he chose to portray.

Preston Dickinson in New York City, c. 1920 (coll : smithsonian american art museum , washington , d . c .)

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P H I L I P E VE RG OO D (1901–1973) Workers Victory signed bottom center Philip Evergood oil on canvas laid down on board 49 ¾ x 48 inches Painted in Patchogue, New York, in 1948 Provenance: Robert Gwathmey, Amagansett, New York (gift of the artist) Bette-Ann Gwathmey, New York (daughter-in-law of the above, 1996) Terry Dintenfass, Inc., NY Private Collection, New South Wales, Australia (acquired directly from the above) Exhibited: New York, NY, The Gallery of Modern Art, in collaboration with the Huntington Hartford Collection, Philip Evergood: a Painter of Ideas, 1969, no. 37. Lewisburg, PA, Center Gallery of Bucknell University, Philip Evergood: Never Separate from the Heart, Sept. – Oct., 1986, page 23 (described, pps.

176-7). The exhibition traveled to Annandale-onHudson, NY, Bard College, The Edith C. Blum Art Institute, Nov. – Dec., 1986 and Los Angeles, CA, University of California, Frederick S. Wright Art Gallery, Jan.-March, 1987. New York, NY, Galerie St. Etienne, Revolution, Dec., 2016 – March, 2017.

Literature: Baur, John I.H., Philip Evergood, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York, 1975 (illustrated in color, plate 86).

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Note: Prior to 1940, Philip Evergood had only casually known fellow ACA Gallery artist Robert Gwathmey.

However, in September of that year Philip and his wife Julia stayed with Robert and his wife Rosalie in the Gwathmey’s Pittsburgh home. It was then that the couples’ friendship solidified. Having received a Carnegie artist grant, Evergood was on his way from New York to Kalamazoo (Michigan) College to complete an artist-in-residency and mural project titled The Bridge to Life.

“And so they go, each picture containing its own particular expression of the artist’s hatred of cruelty and oppression, and his tender feelings of love and sympathy for the oppressed and mistreated of this world. For Philip Evergood is a painter of ideas, not things – ideas that spring from a great heart and a profound mind. And harnessed to them is a technical skill that brings these moving ideas to passionate life on canvases of power and pictorial excitement.” (Valente, Alfredo.

Philip Evergood: a Painter of Ideas exhibition catalogue, New York, The Gallery of Modern Art, Barnes & Co., Inc., Cranbury, N.J., p. 10) Born Philip Howard Francis Dixon Bulashki in New York City, at the age of seven, Evergood was sent to England to receive a traditional British education. After graduating from Eton and realizing he wanted to become an artist, he studied at London’s Slade School of Art. Upon his return to New York in 1923, he enrolled at the Art Students League and the Educational Alliance where he would meet lifelong friends Chaim Gross and

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Evergood, Mine Disaster, 1933 (coll. Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia)

Moses Soyer. By the late 1920s, Evergood was zealously sketching urban scenes of contemporary New York life but in the 1930s, as the Great Depression continued to deepen, he began to question the validity of the American capitalist system whose failure had impoverished so many.

In 1933, Philip Evergood spent a night with the “Hooverville jungle-dwellers,” a homeless group which hung about Christopher Street in New York City’s West Village. He befriended them and drew them until dawn. Perhaps it was during this particular episode that Evergood’s social conscience became the driving force of his life and art. Having once written that “some people are born without hearts,” it is fair to state that few American artists have ever committed themselves so totally to promulgating the effects of injustice and to perorating the cause of the exploited. Evergood believed as much as any of his contemporaries in the humanistic quality of art, that it could make a difference towards the greater good, and that it was therefore his personal duty to communicate reformist ideas

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in his work to a larger public. Later in the same year, he painted Mine Disaster for an exhibition titled Hunger, Fascism and War (December, 1933 – January, 1934) at the New York headquarters of the John Reed Club. While the painting might have been a one-year commemoration of the 1932 Christmas Eve Shafer Mine Explosion in Moweaqua, Illinois (which killed 54), more likely it broadly honored the nearly 500 miners who had perished since 1930 in no less than twenty-eight separate disasters.

Purposely placing indefinite titles to canvases which depict universal truths was a practice Evergood continued throughout his career.

A year later, Ashcan School painter John Sloan (who had personally purchased one of Philip Evergood’s paintings after having failed to get the Brooklyn Museum to do so) coordinated through Whitney Museum of American Art director Juliana Force that Evergood be one of the first artists to join the Public Works of Art Project. Evergood’s poignant painting Railroad Men was followed by his 1936 multipaneled mural for the Richmond Hill

(Queens) Public Library, in which he juxtaposed pastoral pleasure with urban upheaval. After seven years exhibiting at two highly respectable New York galleries, first Montross and then Midtown, in 1937 he joined Herman Baron’s American Contemporary Artists Gallery (ACA) and began a reciprocally beneficial relationship which lasted for decades and saw him through his greatest painting years.

On a Sunday afternoon in 1943, Joseph Hirshhorn purchased ten of Evergood’s paintings and over the years became his most loyal collector.

been subjected.” (Taylor, Kendall. Philip Evergood: Never Separate from the Heart retrospective exhibition catalogue, Center Gallery Publication, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, page 23, description, pp 176–177.)

While certain Evergood paintings have been described as “gothic” for their eldritch imagery and arcane significance, there is nothing elusive or enigmatic about the ageless conflict he represents. With mordant clarity and in a singular style, Evergood’s work is as lasting as its subject matter.

When Evergood painted Workers Victory in 1948 the Great Depression and second World War were over. Nevertheless, he was at the nadir of his career, his art of social protest at its most potent and expressionistic. As usual, time and location are left ambiguous in Workers Victory. Beside a railroad yard and track, a throng of operatives occupy the majority of the canvas, with three prominent figures in the foreground and the rest receding progressively into the background until only their diminutive faces are visible.

“Workers Victory in one sense commemorates a specific victory for the working class, but also transcends its own topicality by expressing what Evergood viewed as the characteristic exuberance of the decade. ‘As life today is insecure and dangerous,’ he said, so human character is uncertain and liable to malformation from social strain and stress.

Our workers are our heroes. Our workers are the hope of America, but they bear on their faces and bodies and in their souls, the mark of social distortion to which they have

Philip Evergood, seated in front of Anton Refregier’s Café Society mural. (Seated next to Evergood, at far left, is Anton Refregier, Juliana Force, Frank Kleinholz, Robert Gwathmey, and Yasuo Kuniyoshi). (coll . of author , photograph by albert freeman )

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G R E G O RY G I L L E S P IE (1936–2000) Roman Interior – Kitchen (Still Life with Milk Carton) signed and dated on the reverse Gillespie 1967 oil and pencil on panel with portions of cement and affixed pieces of Masonite and metal 63 x 45½ inches Painted in Rome, Italy, 1967–69; reworked in Massachusetts, 1976 Provenance: The artist, Rome Forum Gallery, New York (the artist’s dealer; acquired directly from the above Nov. 25, 1969) George Gilbert, New York (acquired directly from the above, early 1970s) Estate of the above, New York Forum Gallery, New York (acquired directly from the above, March, 1988) Private Collection, Greenwich, Connecticut (acquired directly from the above, June 6, 2000) Forum Gallery, New York (reacquired from the above, April 16, 2015) Exhibited: New York, NY, Forum Gallery, Gregory Gillespie, Paintings (Italy: 1962-1970), Feb. – March, 1970.

Amherst, MA, University Gallery, Frances Cohen Gillespie and Gregory Gillespie, Sept. – Oct., 1976.

New York, NY, Forum Gallery, Gregory Gillespie: Recent Paintings, Nov.-Dec., 1976. Washington, D.C. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Gregory Gillespie, Dec., 1977-Feb., 1978, no. 22 (illustrated in color, p. 53). The exhibition traveled to Athens, GA, Georgia Museum of Art, April-May, 1978.

Miami, FL, University Art Museum, American Art

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Today: Images from Abroad, Feb.–March, 1996.

Athens, GA, Georgia Museum of Art, A Unique American Vision: Paintings by Gregory Gillespie, April– May, 1999, no. 19 (illustrated in color, p. 41). The exhibition traveled to La Jolla, CA, San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, June–Sept., 1999; Cambridge, MA, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, List Visual Arts Center, Oct.–Dec., 1999 and Youngstown, OH, Butler Institute of American Art, Jan.–March, 2000.

Literature: Betz, Margaret, Art News, New York Reviews, Gregory Gillespie, Jan., 1977, p. 126.

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regory gillespie was born in New Jersey, studied at New York’s Cooper Union (1954-60), then at the San Francisco Art Institute (1960-62). It was soon apparent he would not follow in the footsteps of New York’s Abstract Expressionists nor in those of the Bay Area Figurative painters, but that his art would always remain fully individualist, highly personal, and outside the parameters of the critical mainstream. Some saw his artistry as the contrivance of an art world contrarian; others recognized that Gregory was painstakingly progressing through his own personal demons and, in so doing, flabbergasting a limited audience with the painterly results. Estrangement, entrapment, isolation, anxiety, repression, guilt, violence, and a heightened, even pornographic sexuality, consumed his Italian period work and divulged his psychic pain. Gillespie’s focus on human genitalia as much betrayed his own-worded “horror of sex” as served to commit the intended sacrilege of savagely refuting the Catholic stricture with which he was raised.

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Inspired by the beauty of historic paintings depicting scenes from a religion he had come to hate, Gregory’s studio at the American Academy, less than a mile from the Vatican, became his personal artistic asylum.

Roman Interior – Kitchen is a classic Gillespie composite of authenticity and fantasy. The verisimilitude of its components is eerily impeccable: the flawless but elementary brickwork, the ubiquitous Christ Crucified, the old-style Italian milk carton long-since superseded in form. However, the arrangement of the objects is somehow disconcerting, inexplicably unsettling, not wrong but not quite right. Sensing the artist’s paranormal presence, the viewer cannot discern which spatial ingredients Gillespie included as realism instead of metaphor. Although Gillespie’s Fulbright grant project was to study the work of the early Renaissance master Masaccio, it is Carlo Crivelli, Saint Peter of Verona (Peter Martyr), circa 1475 (coll. National Gallery, London)

fitting that he was most captivated by that of Carlo Crivelli. A mid-to-late 15th Century painter with an intense, haunting neo-Gothic sensibility, Gillespie commented of Crivelli that he was one of the few artists skillful enough to seamlessly incorporate sculptural elements with those of painting, and to do so deftly enough to mask what one perceives as reality versus illusion. Such was the schizophrenic sphere of contradictions which Gregory Gillespie sought and succeeded in occupying.

Pier Paolo Pasolini, film-clip from his Teorema (Theorem), 1968

No painters of the decade came close to Gillespie’s graphic nature and explicit scenes. A small coterie of 1960s Italian filmmakers, however, shared his capacity to transform the mundane into the hallucinatory. Like Gregory, these independent, outsider artists were interfacing with reality and sanity.

Although it is doubtful that Gregory knew them personally, he may well have seen the controversial work they produced, precisely concurrent with his own: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Theorem (1968) in which an enigmatic male visitor has consensual sex with every member of a bourgeois Italian family before disappearing; Liliana Cavani’s Year of the Cannibals (1969) where the streets of Milan are laden with the corpses of ill-defined state enemies while indifferent pedestrians walk past; and Michelangelo

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Antonioni’s Blowup (1966), an existential mystery thriller whose bizarre, unrelated events terminate in a mimed tennis match with imaginary rackets and ball, the protagonist dematerializing just as the sound of the ball becomes audible. Although Gillespie did bring his phantasmagoric universe back with him to the United States (to rural Massachusetts) never was it so potent as in his Roman days of the mid to late 1960s. Unlike any artwork done previously or since, its rawness, its brilliance and perversion, remain a mystery to the mentally sound. Ultimately, Gregory was overpowered by his demons and took his own life on April 26, 2000.

Gregory Gillespie

“It’s almost like being in a dream. I’m sure a lot of people have experienced that—it’s not unique to me. But it’s often struck me that some of these paintings came out of experiences I had when I was young. My mother was mentally ill, she had been in asylums all during my childhood—ever since I was in second grade. We used to visit her every week and it was a world which made a great impression on me—people wandering about.

The same feeling often recurs when I’m in public places or in social settings. It’s like a huge insane asylum where people have costumes on and they’re doing their routine and I’m doing mine. And I sometimes get this incredible feeling of insecurity. Often I like to get that feeling in the painting without making it too obvious.” (Gregory Gillespie in an interview with Howard Fox and Abram Lerner at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; recorded in two sessions, March 24, 1977)

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A R SHI L E G O R KY (1904–1948) Enigma (Composition of Forms on Table) signed upper right A. Gorky – signed again, inscribed and dated on the reverse Top Gorky Red 1928–29 oil on canvas 33 x 44 inches Painted in New York, 1928–29 Provenance: The artist, New York Mr. and Mrs. M. Martin Janis, Buffalo (acquired in 1934) Allan Stone, New York Sale, Selections from the Allan Stone Collection, Christie Manson & Woods, New York, November 12, 2007, lot 614 Private Collection, New York (acquired from the above sale) Exhibited: Buffalo, NY, Albright-Knox Gallery, The Mr. and Mrs. M. Martin Janis Collection, 1935. Buffalo, NY, Albright-Knox Gallery, Two Collections from Western New York, Jan-Feb., 1952. New York, NY, Allan Stone Gallery, Abstraction, March – April, 2002.

Philadelphia, PA, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective, Oct., 2009 – Jan., 2010, p. 173 & p. 387 (illustrated in color, pl. 15). The exhibition traveled to London, U.K., Tate Modern, Feb. – May, 2010 and Los Angeles, CA, Museum of Contemporary Art, June – Sept., 2010.

Purchase, NY, Neuberger Museum of Art, American Vanguards: Graham, Davis, Gorky, de Kooning and Their Circle, 1927–1942, no. 19 (illustrated in color, p. 26). The exhibition traveled to Fort Worth, TX,

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Amon Carter Museum of American Art, June – Aug., 2012 and Andover, MA, Addison Gallery of American Art, Sept. – Dec., 2012.

Literature: Jordan, J. and Goldwater, R., The Paintings of Arshile Gorky: A Critical Catalogue, New York University Press, 1982, no. 74 (illustrated in black and white, p. 201).

Note: This painting is recorded in the Arshile Gorky Foundation Catalogue as No. JJ74.

B

orn Vosdanig Adoian, Arshile Gorky’s artistic maturation was rapid. Like many Armenians fleeing genocide, the first chapter of his American life was in Watertown, Massachusetts, where he and his sister Vartoosh were reunited with their father. In 1922, he enrolled at the New School of Art & Design in Boston. Within two years he was working there as an instructor of life drawing. His 1924 Impressionist painting of the nearby Park Street Church (coll. Lowell, Massachusetts, Art Association) is the first to bear the legendary Gorky signature. Soon, however, he would relocate to the art hub of the country, New York City, where in the Fall of 1925 Gorky began an important early career affiliation with the Grand Central School of Art, a cooperative located on the seventh floor of the East wing of Grand Central Station and founded by businessman and art collector Walter Leighton Clark, and celebrated painters Edmund William Greacen and John Singer Sargent.

There, Gorky quickly went from student to faculty and remained as such until 1931. He fully discovered

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Gorky, The Antique Cast, 1926 (coll. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art)

the artistic values of Paul Cézanne, whose painting and watercolor technique he taught his own students by way of visual reproductions. Gorky availed himself of art dealer Erhard Weyhe (who on occasion sold his work) and his impressive art bookstore in order to build his own art library, which particularly focused on Cézanne. While many artists have claimed Cézanne and his protoCubist landscapes as their foremost formal inspiration, Gorky penetrated the psyche of the French master as much as he deciphered his sculpted use of space. He identified personally with Cézanne, with whom he shared the sorrow and solitude they both deemed requisite for the production of quality work. Such forces would ultimately overwhelm Gorky.

Another important development during Gorky’s time at Grand Central was his growing fascination with plaster casts, some of which were copies of ancient marble sculpture. He painted his own The Antique Cast, 1926, most likely inspired by the 1908 Matisse Still Life with Greek Torso (ex. coll. National

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Pablo Picasso, Studio with Plaster Head, 1925 (coll. Museum of Modern Art, New York)

Gallery, Berlin). The Antique Cast was an important work for Gorky as it revealed his deference to the figure within the greater context of color and surface. The next natural development for Gorky would be the more fragmented spaces and tactile surfaces of Picasso. These he no doubt saw by 1927 when he moved his studio to a space at Washington Square South, very close to the newly opened Gallery of Living Art in the south study hall of New York University’s main building, also on Washington Square. The Gallery was the nation’s first exclusively modern art museum.

In 1924, Picasso painted his Mandolin and Guitar (coll. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York), an oil painting into which he incorporated sand. He and Gino Severini had been among the very first to use collage and to incorporate external material in their work. In the late 1920s, Gorky executed a number of horizontal, abstract still lifes clearly influenced by Picasso, culminating in the most complex and complete, the 192829 Enigma (Composition of Forms on Table). Here,

Gorky scratched into the paint surface while reinforcing the impasto in other areas so as to suggest the inclusion of sand. The result was the most sophisticated painting he had executed to date, a richly surfaced Cubist composition with early hints of Surrealism, a pivotal step forward for the autodidact genius.

“Composition of Forms on Table {. . .} appears to be related compositionally to Picasso’s Studio with Plaster Head of 1925, now in the Museum of Modern Art {. . .} The plaster cast at the upper right was reduced

by Gorky to a biomorphic abstraction, with only an indentation for an eye, but with a curiously powerful suggestiveness regarding the human head. On the left a circle with a center, or ‘nave,’ is borrowed from Picasso.

Throughout the rest of the composition, Gorky drew free variations with his biomorphic line, richly encrusting the surface with a texture of sand in paint that goes well beyond the Cubist practice.” ( Jordan, Jim M. and Goldwater, Robert. The Paintings of Arshile Gorky: A Critical Catalogue, New York University Press, 1982)

Arshile Gorky (photograph by

gjon gili )

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A R SHI L E G O R KY (1904–1948) Mother and Child oil on canvas 47 x 36 inches Painted in New York in 1937 Provenance: Anna Walinska, New York (gift of the artist, 1937) Anon. sale; Christie Manson & Woods, New York, May 3, 1989, lot 7 Private Collection (acquired from the above sale) Anon. sale; Christie Manson & Woods, New York, May 12, 2011, lot 215 Private Collection, New York (acquired from the above sale) Exhibited: New York, Forum Gallery, 20/20 Visionary Artists of the 20th Century, July – Aug., 2016, no. 10.

Literature: Jordan, J. and Goldwater, R., The Paintings of Arshile Gorky: A Critical Catalogue, New York University Press, 1982, no. 191 (illustrated in black and white, p. 339). A descriptive text by the authors follows in which they propose Marcel Duchamp’s 1911 Portrait of Chess Players (coll. Walter and Louise Arensberg, Philadelphia Museum of Art) as potential inspiration for the painting. They also disclose that the resultant composition of turning Mother and Child ninety degrees to its left could be the graphic source for Gorky’s seminal 1942-43 painting, Pirate II (Private Collection, New York).

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n 1929 or 1930, Gorky was introduced to Stuart Davis by John Graham. When Willem de Kooning joined the group, they became so close that he nicknamed them the “Three Musketeers.”

However, Arshile Gorky was reticent and inscrutable, and eventually insulated himself from New York’s art scene. He was too gifted, too facile an artist to be overly influenced by the styles and movements of others, nor did he seem to require the much-cherished sodality of fellow painters.

Moreover, he was too fixated on purely aesthetic values to be swayed by the societal climate of 1930s America.

Gorky studied art. He admired both the monumental machine-age Cubism of Fernand Léger and the attenuated, tonal version of Amédée Ozenfant.

During the late 1920s, Gorky’s canvases manifest elements of Picasso’s increasingly open Cubism; at other times they allude to the Spanish master’s Neoclassicism. By the early 1930s, the fluidity of Matisse’s graphic work can also be detected in Gorky’s works on paper. And his obsession with Cézanne’s negative use of space and his delight in the elegance of Ingres’ women never faded. Nevertheless, it was the advent of Surrealism, in poetry and in art, that most affected him and ultimately steered Gorky away from the calculated, intellectual structure of Cubism into the nebulous world of the unconscious, where dreams and reality become isochronous and indistinguishable. While emerging from a different standpoint than Gorky, perhaps only Roberto Matta can be considered a true visual and conceptual link from pre-War Surrealism to post-War Abstract Expressionism. By the mid-1930s, Gorky was seduced by the biomorphic forms and

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spatial illusions of Catalan artist Joan Miró, as he was by the organic shapes of his fellow Surrealist André Masson.

At this time Gorky produced a group of figurative works and “Armenian Portraits,” as he called them, whose imagery is more kindled by personal memory than informed by outside sources. In 1936, he painted Woman with Necklace and in 1937, his elder half-sister in Portrait of Ahko. Also in 1937, Gorky painted Mother and Child which he gifted to Anna Walinska, the director of the Guild Art Gallery where he had exhibited. Gorky scraped the paint surface of Mother and Child several times with a razor blade (perhaps also with sandpaper) before refinishing it. He tended towards this technique when he wished to generate a glossy, opaline surface texture. The painting’s chalky, peach tone may derive from Gorky’s admiration for the paint hues of Ozanfant, which he would soon see firsthand when the French Purist moved to New York (1939). Veiled in the indigenous garb of Gorky’s homeland, with timeless dignity a loving mother upholds her infant.

Marcel Duchamp, Portrait of Chess Players, 1911 (coll. Philadelphia Museum of Art)

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Joan Miró The Reaper, mural decoration prepared for 1937 Paris Exposition (destroyed)

“Gorky’s portraits are distinguished from his other early work in an extremely significant respect: they are based primarily upon deeply personal sources—a photograph of his mother and himself {. . .} his memories – rather than the images of other artists. To be sure, Gorky continued to seek certain formal solutions for his portraits in Picasso, Ingres and Corot, but their essential, fundamental inspiration is personal. The artist himself referred to these paintings as his “Armenian Portraits” and spoke of them as the beginning of his true self-expression.

Gorky drew upon himself—his past and feelings—to create statements of eloquence and passion.” (Waldman, Diane., Arshile Gorky, 1904–1948: A Retrospective exhibition catalogue, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, April – July, 1981, p. 33)

Gorky, Pirate II, 1942–43 (Private Collection)

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JO HN G R A H A M (1886–1961) Angel in Dodecahedron signed twice on the reverse GRAHAM and IOANNUS SAN GERMANUS titled on the stretcher Angel in Dodecahedron oil on canvas 30 x 24 inches Painted in 1959. Graham spent the majority of the final five months of 1959 traveling between England, France, and the United States. Inferred by the second signature written in Latin, IOANNUS SAN GERMANUS, it is most likely that Graham painted Angel in Dodecahedron (or at least completed it) in December, the only full month he seems to have remained in the French capital.

Provenance: Estate of the artist André Emmerich Gallery, New York Donald Morris Gallery, Detroit, Michigan Mr. and Mrs. Melvin Kolbert, Huntington Woods, Michigan Maurice and Margo Cohen, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan (by 1987) Donald Morris Gallery, New York Private Collection, New York (acquired directly from the above, 2004) Exhibited: New York, NY, André Emmerich Gallery, John Graham, June – Aug., 1968. New York, NY, Museum of Modern Art, John D. Graham, Paintings and Drawings, Aug. – Oct., 1968, no. 22 (dated circa 1954).

The exhibition traveled to Athens, GA, University of Georgia, Dec., 1968; Grinnell, IA, Grinnell College, Jan. – Feb., 1969; Auburn, AL, Auburn University,

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Mar. 1969; Houston, TX, Museum of Fine Arts, Apr. – May 1969; San Antonio, TX, Marion Koogler McNay Art Institute, June – Aug., 1969; Seattle, WA, Henry Gallery, University of Washington, Oct. – Nov., 1969; Chicago, IL, Art Institute of Chicago, Dec. – Jan. 1970 and Hanover, NH, Hopkins Center Art Galleries, Dartmouth College, Feb., 1970.

Chicago, IL, Phyllis Kind Gallery, John Graham, 1970.

Detroit, MI, Donald Morris Gallery, Inc., John D. Graham, 1972 (illustrated, p. 18). Purchase, NY, Neuberger Museum, State University of New York, John Graham: Artist and Avatar, June – Sept., 1987, no.

70 (illustrated in color, p. 90). The exhibition traveled to Newport Beach, CA, Harbor Art Museum, University of California, Oct., 1987 – Jan., 1988; Berkeley, CA, University Art Museum, Jan. – March, 1988; Chicago, IL, The David and Alfred Smart Gallery of the University of Chicago, April – June, 1988 and Washington, D.C., The Phillips Collection, July – Sept., 1988. Water Mill, NY, Parrish Art Museum, John Graham: Maverick Modernist, May – July, 2017, pl. 63 (illustrated in color, p. 136).

Literature: Art News, Reviews and Previews, Exhibition at Emmerich Gallery, vol. 67, no. 4, Summer, 1968 (illustrated, p. 19). Tall, William, Detroit Free Press, John D. Graham, June 18, 1972 (cited, p. 4D).

Note: John Graham’s birthname was Ivan Dombrowsky. In the 1940s he customarily added the Latin version of Ivan or John, namely Ionnus, immediately after his signature, Graham. Around 1950 until his death eleven years later, his signature became more varied and complex. While he continued to sign Ionnus, he

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also used Photius (Latin for judge), Magus (Magician), Servus Domini (Servant of God), Doctor Juritruesque (Doctor of Jurisprudence), and St. Georgii Equitus (the martyred St. George, a Roman soldier sentenced to die in 303 AD for refusing to renounce Christianity). Most frequent, however, during this time was the annex to his signature of San Germanus, a reference to the Count of Saint Germain (circa 1710–1784). Named by Voltaire “The Wonderman,” Germain was a mysterious European scholar known to the courts and high society of numerous countries.

Claiming to be the son of a Transylvanian prince, the Count adopted a number of names and titles so as to avert proper examination into his origin. He also claimed to be five hundred years old. Likewise, John Graham projected a variety of personal narratives, painting himself as Apollo with a laurel wreath, Satan with horns, even Zeus impregnating Leda, and at one point declared himself to be two hundred years of age. In 1779, Germain ended up in Schleswig (modern day Germany-Denmark) where he and Prince Charles of Hesse-Kassel proceeded to experiment with alchemy, a subject of great interest to Graham. San Germanus and Graham’s other sobriquets were not meant to be descriptive of alternative personalities but actual aliases, or pseudonyms, for the same, perpetual identity.

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he mid-late 1950s continued to be a tumultuous time for John Graham. In 1955, Marianne Strate, his wife and companion of twelve years, passed away leaving him deeply distraught. He subsequently sold their home in The Hamptons and moved into the basement of the Manhattan townhouse at 4 East 77th Street, whose upper stories were soon converted into the first gallery of his late wife’s son-in-law, Leo Castelli. In April of 1957, at one of Castelli’s openings, the sixty-nine-yearold Graham met the twenty-one-year-old FrenchAmerican beauty Isabelle Collin Dufresne. The two

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Graham, Woman in Dodecahedron, 1959 (a second painting inspired by Linda Leyden; ex-coll. Myron Kunin, Minneapolis)

began a psychologically draining affair that endured, off and on, until Graham’s death in 1961. Within three months of returning to New York from visiting Isabelle in France (October, 1958) Graham began another affair. This time it was with Linda Leyden, the twenty-two-year-old daughter of Graham’s acquaintance Frank Leyden from the Arts Students League. Arriving from Denver in January 1959, Linda looked Graham up and, shortly after their meeting, moved in with him. By August, however, Graham was off to France in search of Isabelle followed by a torrent of longing love letters from Linda. It is Linda’s image which was the inspiration for Graham’s great, late painting, Angel in Dodecahedron.

“From an early age Linda Leyden had been determined to meet Graham {. . .}. The first evening she came to his apartment, Graham thought she was the Angel of Death: She was dressed all in black, and that afternoon he had found a dead pigeon on his doorstep. Her social call extended to more than six months, until July of 1959 {. . .} Linda

worked in an advertising agency, so she knew little of Graham’s weekday activities, not even that he was painting. The work he named Linda showed a woman with a swan – a play on Leda and the Swan, with Graham fancying himself as Jupiter in the guise he assumed to impregnate Leda. He also painted Angel in Dodecahedron and Woman with Dodecahedron, two of his most expansive and delicately hued canvases. The face had not appeared earlier, nor does it appear again, and it bears some resemblance to photographs of Linda.” (Green, Eleanor.

John Graham: Artist and Avatar exhibition catalogue, The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., 1987, p. 89) It was not surprising that Graham, obsessed as he was with his own mortality, first described Linda Leyden as an omen for death. His female portraits of this time are among Graham’s most austere and psychologically disturbing images. After the passing of Marianne five years earlier, he had announced to artist friend Alexander Brook that, from then on, he was only going to depict women with skewed eyes.

Among the ladies who infatuated him near the end of his life was the thirty-nine-year-old Françoise Gilot (Picasso’s ex-lover of seven years prior), with whom Graham had a final romance the year before he died. Isabelle, Linda, even Françoise, seemed to intensify Graham’s thematic exploration of the malevolence of female pulchritude. As he viewed it, beauty as evil, and evil as beauty, were vice-versa transmogrifications of each state, the equivalent of Newtonian law whereby every force is naturally countervailed by an equally opposite reaction.

The presence of physical wounds is common in Graham’s late women paintings.* While some of these ladies’ eyes are crossed, others are actually

Linda Leyden, model for Angel in Dodecahedron, 1959; John Graham papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

John Graham, Self-portrait, 1959, oil, ink and graphite on vellum; signed Ionnus and painted the same year as Angel in Dodecahedron, in this drawing the artist depicts himself as Lucifer (whereabouts unknown)

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gouged or hollowed out; a forehead may be pierced by a dagger, a lip by a nail; neck and chest breached by subcutaneously visible phallic rods.

These are the women of Graham’s life and the manner in which he chose to experience them, as ugly, beautiful givers of both pain and delight.

Still, for all the mental anguish he created and endured in his female relationships, Graham moved from one wife or lover to another as readily as he altered his chosen painting sequence, relying foremost on the sheer force of his temperament, charismatic yet overbearing, to dominate his personal and painting narratives. Simulating both magician and chameleon, Graham was a raconteur of far-fetched fables in all earnestness, a grandiloquent intellectual, an artistic autodidact who found inspiration in tantric scripture, enervating yoga, Jungian psychology, Hindu reincarnation, occult literature, arcane manuscripts, religious mysticism, mythological rites, astral worship and, like the Count of Saint German two centuries before, alchemy.

* “Faithful are the wounds of a friend; but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful” (King James Version, Proverb 27, Verse 6). Conversant in Judeo-Christian texts, Graham would have known this verse from the Christian transcription of the second book of the third section of the Hebrew Bible, first translated into Latin as Proverbia.

Contextually, Verse 6 is preceded by “Open rebuke is better than secret love,” and followed by “The full soul loatheth as honeycomb; but to the hungry soul every bitter thing is sweet” (nos. 5 & 7 both KJV).

For a master of paradox, the prophetic admonitions of Proverb 27 must have been particularly tantalizing for Graham.

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While he was producing his late figurative portraits of the 1950s, some claimed that Graham was betraying his earlier 1930s and 40s identity. In 1937, as the self-professed apostle of modern taste, he had published his System of Dialectics of Art. With his uncanny eye and cerebral rigor, Graham nurtured the careers of artists such as Gorky, de Kooning, even Pollock, whose work he included in the major 1942 exhibition he curated at New York’s McMillen Gallery, French and American Painters. His own recondite visual vocabulary was accompanied by a hermetic linguistic one which drew from many languages, living and dead (he was thought to speak twelve although he certainly commanded at least five), through which Graham formulated polysemous terms, bilingual homonyms, and other esoteric literary correlations which accompanied his art. An unorthodox Catholic from Eastern Europe, what Graham did bring to American Modernism was a new language of iconographic associations quite unfamiliar to both a mainstream Protestant population and Jewish art world circles. Even Graham’s

collectors, like Duncan Phillips, were flummoxed upon having to describe his paintings and drawings. But Graham did not forsake Modernism in the 1950s, neither by affirming figurative imagery nor by presaging Post-Modernism with both his anachronistic visuals and literary subjectivity. Into his planar Renaissance compositions of broad surface color and flattened forms, Graham injected a spontaneous surrealist sensibility whose potent primevalism was meant to affirm the existential tension latent in modernity itself and unveil the enigma of human nature.

Department of Circulating Exhibitions Records, II.2.143.1.1.

The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York.

John Graham

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CH A I M G RO SS (1904–1991) Acrobatic Performers signed and dated on the base CHAIM GROSS 1942 carved mahogany wood Height: 37¼ inches Sculpted in New York in 1942; cast in bronze in 1956

the sculpture remained in his personal collection until 1949 when Gross requested to purchase it back from him.

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Provenance: Reeves Lewenthal, New York (acquired directly from the artist, 1942) The artist, New York (reacquired from the above, after 1949) The Renee and Chaim Gross Foundation, New York (1991, bequeathed by the artist) Exhibited: New York, NY, Associated American Artists, Chaim Gross, Dec., 1942. New York, NY, Forum Gallery, The Figure in Modern Sculpture: Works by Alexander Archipenko, Chaim Gross, Gaston Lachaise, Jacques Lipchitz, Elie Nadelman and John Storrs, May – June, 2012 (illustrated in color).

Literature: Getlein, Frank, Chaim Gross, Harry N. Abrams, Incorporated, New York, 1974, no. 33 (bronze version illustrated in color, p. 38).

Note: In 1934 Reeves Lewenthal, the first owner of Acrobatic Performers, founded Associated American Artists (AAA) at 20 West 57th Street in Manhattan.

From 1942 to 1952, the gallery held seven oneman Chaim Gross exhibitions. While Lewenthal included Acrobatic Performers in the first of these,

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he year when Chaim Gross carved his mahogany Acrobatic Performers may well have been the most important of his career. Not only did Associated American Artists hold his first one-man exhibition, but the Whitney Museum of American Art purchased his ebony sculpture Acrobatic Dancers and the Museum of Modern Art his lignum vitae Handle Bar Riders. Also in 1942, the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened its Artists for Victory Exhibition (in December) which it billed as an assertion of America’s vitality, diversity, and strength versus the existential foreign threat. With jurists including Alfred H. Barr (MoMA) and Juliana Force (Whitney), the Metropolitan awarded Gross a purchase prize by acquiring his ebony wood submission of the Ringling Brothers’ acrobat Lillian Leitzel. In 1927 Gross had learned the technique of direct carving (taille directe) from the immigrant French master Robert Laurent. By 1942, he was poised for widespread recognition as the 20th Century American artist most responsible for reviving the significance of wood as a fundamental sculptural medium.

Gross’ father Moses was the controller and appraiser for a timber company. As a child, Chaim would accompany him as he surveyed lumber yards in the remote Carpathian Mountain region of Eastern Europe where the family lived. Early on Chaim recognized his own penchant for particularly dense wood, appreciating its resistance to cleaving as testimony to its true, immutable essence. Its defiance to permutation well-suited Gross, since he was solely

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Brazil; cocobolo from Central Africa; ipil from South Africa to the South Pacific; palo blanco from Mexico; beefwood from Australia and lignum vitae from the West Indies and Central America.

Using an old-style mallet and chisel, Gross “the woodchopper” (as the father of his wife Renee once called him) derived psycho-aesthetic pleasure from extracting form from wood. As in Acrobatic Performers, his figures soar out of their medium, usually upwards, delicately balanced, jubilantly liberated.

Gross, Handlebar Riders, 1935, lignum vitae (purchased by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1942) Gross, Lillian Leitzel, 1938, Macassar ebony (purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1942)

Gross, Acrobatic Dancers, 1942, ebony (purchased by Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1942)

interested in the expressive qualities of the material as an artistic end instead of a means. Hence, his handling of wood as a medium in and of itself, rather than as a truncated support for further application, is the essence of Gross’ contribution in sculpture.

These varied hardwoods on which Chaim Gross arduously worked would be the mainstay of his life. It is astonishing to recognize that by 1930 he had already carved forty distinct kinds of wood. As his father had done in another world, Gross used to visit New York lumber yards, whenever and wherever possible obtaining hardwoods which he could repurpose to his sculptural vision. From all about the globe these included: mahogany from Cuba and Central America; ebony from West Africa, India and Indonesia (particularly from Macassar, the provincial capital of South Sulawesi); imbuia from

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Gross transcribed his ingenuity in wood to marble, both white and pink, and to serpentine and lithium stone. His later bronzes are sometimes translations of his wood and marble sculpting, if not casts made directly from their images. Working in bronze, however, is an additive process, while ultimately Chaim was pursuing the reductive nature of wood carving. He exposed wood’s textures and grains as part of its intrinsic variegations, a total reversal of the extrinsic gesso and gilt applied to the softwood backings of traditional religious retables. Equally dissimilar to the nature of his sculpture is the appropriation of wood for conceptual inquiry, as did his prized student Louise Nevelson. For Chaim Gross his work was an unadulterated homage to the material he found most life-affirming, which reflected his own optimism and the family togetherness he experienced in both pre and post cataclysmic times—the very material which made him most happy.

“Out of this intrinsic physical feature of wood Gross has fashioned a means for the enhancement of form. In a way, this deliberate use of the grain is a surface embellishment of the sculptural form related to the polychrome and gilt used by earlier sculptors. But it is in every sense more profound than that, for it comes, after all, out of the material itself: it is essentially a resource of the material. Modern wood carving, as Gross perfected and refined it, takes advantage of the grain not to embellish form, as paint and gilt do, but to reveal it with added force.” (Getlein, Frank. Chaim Gross, Harry N. Abrams, Incorporated, New York, 1974, p. 25)

Chaim Gross carving Black Figure at the Cummington School, Cummington, MA, 1935. (photograph by ruth weller )

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MA R SD E N H A RT L E Y (1877–1943) Still Life with Lemons signed and dated on the reverse Marsden Hartley Conway Mass 1928 oil on board 23⅞ x 19 ⅝ inches Painted in Conway, Massachusetts, in July, 1928 Provenance: George Alexander Carden, Sr. Bayshore, New York (gift of the artist) Dr. George Alexander Carden, Jr. (son of the above) and Constance Carden, New York & Far Hills, New Jersey Private Collection (by descent from the above, 1996) Sale, Carden Family Collection, Sotheby Parke Bernet, New York, Nov. 29, 2006, lot 48 (as Lemons) Private Collection, New York (acquired from the above sale) Exhibited: New York, NY, Berry-Hills Galleries, Inc., The Heart of the Matter: The Still Lifes of Marsden Hartley, May – June, 2003, p. 160 (illustrated in color, pl. 26).

New York, NY, Forum Gallery, American Masters, May, 2015.

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n January of 1928 Marsden Hartley returned to New York from France, where he had been since the Summer of 1925. In March, he traveled to Chicago to attend an exhibition of his work at the Arts Club, then on to Colorado to see another show of his work organized by his old friend Arnold Rönnebeck, the director of the Denver Art Museum. Before heading back to France on August 20th, Hartley spent the month of July at the

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Summer home of William Bullitt and Louise Bryant in Conway, Massachusetts. There, he devoted time to writing poetry, essays on art, and completing a group of paintings, at least one of which, Still Life with Lemons, was a direct consequence of Hartley’s recently initiated work in silverpoint.

From about 1927 to 1933 Hartley worked on and off in silverpoint, a process with which he had become familiar via his artist friend John Storrs.

Compared to drawing, the medium can be timeconsuming and demanding, but also delicate and subtle, as Hartley revealed in his silverpoints from Aix-en-Provenance (1927) and the Bavarian Alps (1933). Standing directly overhead the paper sheet, he incised multiple, same directional diagonals through which he compressed the picture plane and generated ambiguity between verisimilitude and abstraction. Naturalism is challenged from the same above position and via the same flattened pictorial surface in Still Life with Lemons.

“The lemons and plate in the foreground are carefully and solidly modeled. In contrast, the drapery, glass, and orange are painted in a flat, schematic, and sketchy style. Compositional unity is achieved through Hartley’s harmonious handling of brilliant colors. The painting exemplifies one of Hartley’s favorite sayings from Cézanne: ‘When the colour harmonizes the design becomes precise.’ ” (Weber, Bruce, The Heart of the Matter: Still Lifes of Marsden Hartley, exhibition catalogue, Berry Hill Galleries, New York, 2003, p. 17) Hartley became an artist just as the century had turned, beginning with four years of study at

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the National Academy of Design in 1900. Young and restless, he was drawn to art at the time of his own self-identification as a homosexual. Like Charles Demuth, Hartley channeled his sexuality through painterly expression, but unlike his artist friend was never overt or graphic about the issue and fully ensconced it within symbolism and allegory. The last of his Post-Impressionist paintings, his so-called “stitch” sequence, won him early esteem from Alfred Stieglitz, who gave Hartley his first one-man exhibition in 1909. Along with Georgia O’Keeffe, Arthur Dove, and John Marin, Hartley would enjoy Stiegtliz’s imprimatur for the rest of his life. Before the end of the 1910s he was impressively given another four solo shows at Stiegltiz’s gallery “291”; remarkably, by 1920 Hartley had painted in Paris, Berlin, Munich, New Mexico, Southern California, Maine, and Province-

Perhaps it is precisely because of his accolades that finding an overarching narrative for Hartley’s oeuvre is elusive. Or maybe that narrative lies less within the confines of his variable imagery than in the immateriality of Hartley’s lifelong spirituality.

While studying as a young man at the Cleveland Institute of Art a professor gave him a copy of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays. Written in two series in the 1840s, the Essays are the essence of Emerson’s transcendentalism, of his philosophy of the soul and how it may relate to the natural

Hartley, The Old Bars, Dogtown, 1936 (coll. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York)

Hartley, Plums on White Cloth, 1927, silverpoint (coll. Detroit Art Institute)

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town (Massachusetts). Hartley’s success hardly waned over three full decades, during which time he experienced major accomplishments in both Europe and the United States. He left an abundant production in different mediums and varying subject matter for posterity.

world. At the time thirty years old, Hartley spent several months with the community of mystics at Green Acre in Eliot, Maine, where he lived among theologians and theosophists. A few years later, in Germany in 1913, he met Wassily Kandinsky, whose On the Spiritual in Art he had already read.

From this point onwards Hartley’s work harbored symbolic, often cryptic imagery, which quickly manifested itself in his German military War Motifs and Amerika paintings. In his late Dogtown (Cape Ann, Massachusetts) oils, Hartley was still coalescing interpretive and representational imagery, at times distinguishable only to himself.

If Emerson was the cornerstone of the American Romantic movement, his devotee Hartley was the post-Romantic mystic, the cosmic cubist aloft the pantheon of American Modernist giants.

Marsden Hartley, 1916, photograph by Alfred Stieglitz. (coll. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

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NO R MA N L E W IS (1909–1979) Jazz signed and dated lower right Norman Lewis, 6–45 oil on canvas 21½ x 35 ½ inches Painted in New York in 1945 Provenance: Estate of the artist, New York Private Collection, New York (acquired from the above, 1992)

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ontemporary journalist, author, and historian Chris Hedges has insightfully commented that African Americans managed to endure the savagery of two and a half centuries of chattel enslavement with the buoy of music.* In adapted forms, slave and gospel music lived on through the Second Great Awakening, the Civil War, and a hundred years of Jim Crow. Born in New Orleans in the early 20th Century, Jazz joined Blues as a salve for black America in an increasingly urbanized, ever segregated nation, and by the early 1940s Charlie Parker, Sonny Rollins, and Dizzy Gillespie had let loose the fast tempo and complex cadences of Bebop. Such was the historic intimacy with music in the culture of which Norman Lewis was a part; such were the crisp sounds of the day upon his artistic maturation.

Growing up poor and black in Harlem, Norman Wilfred Lewis made some money playing pool and poker. Returning from the poolroom one day in 1933, he passed by the studio of Augusta Savage, the African American sculptress whose career defied race and gender and whose 143rd Street basement

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Arts and Crafts Studio fostered the creativity of indigent community artists. While Lewis had no interest in sculpture per se and largely taught himself to paint and draw, Savage was his fortuitous introduction to art and its greater world. His first opportunity to exhibit came via the tutelage of Urban Realist Raphael Soyer at the free, educative arts program sponsored by the John Reed Club. In December, 1933, the Club organized the thematic group exhibition Hunger, Fascism, and War in which Lewis participated. It was the same show in which Social Realist and political activist Philip Evergood exhibited his Mine Disaster. In that instant, impoverished white America shared certain invariable afflictions with black America, and for that momentary period their social goals could squarely align.

Initially Lewis never overtly used his art for political mobilization and social change. However, the colorful portraits he made of African Americans in the late 1930s and early 1940s, such as his 1939 Self-Portrait (1939), Woman with Red Hat (1942) or Woman with Yellow Flower (1943), parody the very caricatures of lampooned blacks and their minstrelsy, the sitters’ eyes rarely daring to look directly at the would-be white viewing audience. The 1939-1940 Picasso retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art led Lewis’ work towards abstraction. By the mid to late 1940s he was painting some of his most pictorially successful, increasingly non-representational work such as Twilight Sounds (1947) and Jazz Band (1948). A forerunner of two years is his 1945 oil simply titled Jazz. Never before exhibited, it is boldly composed, brightly hued, and suggestive of synesthesia as though Lewis had envisaged the

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Self-portrait, 1939 (coll. Estate of the artist & Iandor Fine Arts, Newark, New Jersey)

Lewis, Twilight Sounds, 1947 (coll. St. Louis Museum of Art)

through the late Cubist paintings like The Musicians, to the looser, Surrealist work of the Thirties, Lewis discovered an idiom suited to his needs. The jagged rhythms of Picasso’s paintings proved an ideal vehicle for suggesting a syncopated jazz notation, the beginnings of an abstract style based on sense perceptions, the rhythm of music, a sense of space, and of motion in space.”

(Lawon, Thomas. Norman Lewis: A Retrospective, exhibition catalogue, The Graduate School and University Center, New York, 1976, p. 5)

painting, all the while listening to a Bebop score.

A performer’s denatured arms and legs emanate from an abstract cluster of layered colors. Sensate and lyrical, the painting is musically and artistically fused.

“Able to scrutinize the whole range of Picasso’s art, from Les Demoiselles d’Avignon

Lewis, Procession, 1965 ink on paper variation of the 1964 painting Processional (Estate of the artist)

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Alongside David Smith, Morris Graves, and Mark Tobey, by 1946 Lewis was represented by art dealer Marian Guthrie Willard who gave him a solo exhibition in 1949. By the 1950s, Lewis’s non-objective work was less associated with African American art and more with Abstract Expressionism, with his sgraffito-like calligraphic surfaces bringing to mind those of Richard Pousette-Dart and fellow Willard Gallery artist Mark Tobey. Yet Lewis had quit neither Harlem nor jazz. Now with appropriately

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sable colors, his canvasses evoked the euphonious sequences of Miles Davis’s Cool Jazz. And unlike those of the “action painters,” Lewis’ pigments were culturally implicit and replete with heritage and history. In 1963 he co-founded the Spiral Group, an art alliance formed to document the Civil Rights Movement. The following year he painted his horizontally large-scale, black and white Processional (1964) which in its abstraction simulates united protest marchers of both races. Indeed, Lewis’ paintings served justice, and should still be doing so.

Jazz remains an important, formative and pivotal canvas for Lewis.

Norman Lewis, circa 1950 (photograph courtesy of

the estate of the artist & michael rosenfeld gallery , new york )

* “Chants, work songs, spirituals, the blues, poetry, dance, and art converged under slavery to nourish and sustain the imagination” (Hedges, Chris. Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt, Nation Books, New York, 2015, p. 222)

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STA N TO N MAC D O NAL D -WR IG H T (1890–1973) Portrait of a Woman

own art ambiance and implemented his own curriculum for students who included future California modernist Mabel Alvarez and filmmaker John Huston. The second development was MacdonaldWright’s increasing absorption by the Chinese tradition of Taoism, a philosophy determining how to live within the natural, universal order.

oil on canvas 21½ x 16¾ inches Painted in Los Angeles, circa 1925 Provenance: Lawrence Beebe, Costa Mesa, California Private Collection, Palm Springs, California George Stern Fine Arts, West Hollywood, California & Forum Gallery, New York Note: This work is accompanied by two letters from Stanton Macdonald-Wright scholar Dr. Will South, each confirming the authenticity of this painting. The first letter, dated November 23, 1998, is addressed to Mr. Lawrence Beebe; the second letter, dated May 1, 2003 to Mr. George Stern.

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tanton Macdonald-Wright grew up in Los Angeles, California. After spending his twenties in Paris, he returned to his hometown in the Fall of 1918. Los Angeles had rapidly industrialized, but remained artistically conservative. Returning to the opposite end of Western culture, MacdonaldWright soon sought to advance the values and aesthetics of Synchromism, the abstract color-based art theory and style he and fellow American artist Morgan Russell had invented amid the sophistication of Parisian culture.

Two important developments became central to the artist’s new, West Coast life. First, he inherited the chair of his alma mater, The Art Students League of Los Angeles. There, he established his

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Macdonald-Wright spent much time studying the Chinese language and attending Chinese traditional theater in Los Angeles’ Chinatown, where he painted scenes directly from plays he attended.

Maintaining vibrant color cadences in his Synchromies, Macdonald-Wright added the human form where it had been absent in his earlier Parisian rhythms. Asian figures began to appear amidst the fusion of color opposites. Around 1925, MacdonaldWright painted Theatre Synchomy – Bok Haw Tah in the Sword Dance, for which he chose the Chinatown actress Bok Haw Tah as the model. According to expert Will South, Bok Haw Tah was also the subject for both his 1925 paintings Earth Synchromy and Fire Synchromy, as well as the sitter for his Portrait of a Woman, a work reflective of the artist’s “brilliant prismatic range, subtle shifts in value, and the use of sinuous line weaving in and out of the composition.” * After becoming director of the Santa Monica Theater Guild in 1927, Macdonald-Wright wrote four of his own plays, all based on the Eastern theater about which he had become passionate.

He called this métier “Synchromist Theatre.”

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The pioneering artwork that Stanton MacdonaldWright and Morgan Russell executed together in

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Because of Macdonald-Wright’s seminal work in Paris in the 1910s, his achievements in the following decades are often overlooked. Nonetheless, what Stanton Macdonald-Wright accomplished in Los Angeles, particularly in the 1920s, is remarkable.

He persuaded Alfred Stielglitz to recreate The Forum Exhibition of Modern American Painters which his brother, art critic and novelist Willard Huntington Wright, had helped organize in New York in 1916. Hence, the first Modernist show in Los Angeles opened in Exposition Park in February 1920 under the title Exhibition of American Modernists. Then, three years later, Stanton mounted the First Exhibition of the Group of Independent Artists of Los Angeles which

Macdonald-Wright, Yin Synchromy, 1925 (Private Collection, California)

Paris may be considered the most cutting-edge by any American moderns before World War II. Along with the coeval experiments in color theory and composition by the French-Czech duo Robert Delaunay and František Kupka, Macdonald-Wright and Russell represent the very first artists of their time to achieve full abstraction in painting, predating the non-objectivity of Russian Suprematism.

The object-subject had survived the formal manipulations of Analytic Cubism, Italian Futurism, British Vorticism, and German Der Blaue Reiter, dissipating through Delaunay’s fenêtres of 1912 into his pure Orphist abstraction. While the Americans’ road to abstraction was no less sophisticated than that of the Orphists, their approach to color was different, the result of theorems, scales, and harmonies which were first debuted in 1913 at Munich’s Neue Kunstsalon.

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Macdonald-Wright, Creation Synchromy, 1914 (coll. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.)

introduced the work of local, Southern California moderns. Through most of the decade Macdonald-Wright strove to produce a so-called “kinetic light machine” a full decade prior to the experiments of Swiss artist-architect Max Bill. In Los Angeles in 1924, after a decade of Synchromist work, Macdonald-Wright penned his Treatise on Color, in which he formally detailed his process to define form through color, crystallized his theories, and demonstrated himself to be the dynamic inventor and seminal artist he was.

“Both Macdonald-Wright and Russell maintained harmony and balance of form in their 1920s production, which, they felt, was consistent with their early work in abstraction and finally nonobjectivity. Retention of the movement’s name was not meant to recapture a past glory or to capitalize on whatever notoriety they could attach to their role as early moderns {. . .}: both painters genuinely felt the term still applied to their individual aesthetics.” (South, Will, Color, Myth, and Music: Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Synchromism exhibition catalogue, North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, 2001, p. 88)

Macdonald-Wright (photograph by michel

magne )

*Will South in a November, 1998 letter discussing the painting Portrait of a Woman.

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JO HN MA R I N (1870–1953) Sea and Boat Fantasy signed and dated lower right Marin ’44 oil on canvas 28 x 34¼ inches Painted in 1944, probably at or near Cape Split, Addison, Maine Provenance: The Downtown Gallery, New York (artist’s dealer as of August, 1950) Mr. and Mrs. James S. Schramm, Burlington, Iowa (acquired from the above) Sale of the above Christie Manson & Woods, New York, May 25, 2006, lot 130 Private Collection, New York (acquired from the above sale) Exhibited: New York, NY, An American Place, John Marin, Nov., 1944 – Jan., 1945. Washington, D.C., Corcoran Gallery, John Marin in Retrospect: An Exhibition of His Oils and Watercolors, March – April, 1962, no. 18. The exhibition traveled to Manchester, NH, Currier Gallery of Art, May – June, 1962.

Berlin, Germany, American House, John Marin, Sept. – Nov., 1962, no. 11.

Literature: Reich, Sheldon, John Marin: A Stylistic Analysis and Catalogue Raisonné, Tucson, AZ, University of Arizona Press, 1970, Vol II, no. 44.18 (illustrated in black and white, p. 734).

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orn in Rutherford, New Jersey, John Marin was raised in Weehawken where from 191016 he painted a series of lyrical oil sketches with views across the Hudson River to Manhattan. He attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia and the Arts Students League in New York before heading to Europe in 1905 where he gained recognition for his masterful black and white etchings of old-world monuments. In Paris, photographer Edward Steichen introduced him to Alfred Stieglitz who, beginning in 1909 exhibited and dealt his art work for the next thirty-seven years. With Stieglitz’s endorsement, Marin brilliantly bridged both the first and second periods of American Modernism, and in 1936 was given a retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. He worked extensively in both watercolor and oil, although he favored the latter throughout the 1920s and 30s.

He thrived in urban and rural settings, both as the avant-garde artist in the bustling metropolis of New York as well as the authentic American maverick in rural Maine, where he first summered in 1914.

In the 1930s and earlier, Marin generally emulated in his oil paintings the opacity of his thickly applied gouaches. By the start of the 1940s, however, his style began to change as he started thinning his mediums and painting with broader, more gestural strokes. While leaving larger areas unworked, Marin otherwise attacked his canvases and paper with a jazzy and colorful calligraphy. His Maine scenes (where he continued to spend happy summers) seemed particularly liberated both in their linearity and in the sensual, serpentine fluidity of his paint application. Marin painted many of those coastline compositions near or at one of his favorite spots,

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Marin, Movement—Sea and Sky, 1946 (coll. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

a bluff called Cape Split close to the town of Addison. He clearly delineated his horizon line, demarcating sea and sky, fore and background as he evoked the complexity of the surf (My Hell Raising Sea, 1941) and the drama of the sky (Movement – Sea and Sky, 1946).

“The paint is scrubbed on to the canvas quickly, and line is applied with equal impulsiveness. The function of the line is different from that which it had been earlier: it does not outline painted forms or enclose them within interior frames; it does not outline the establishment of a geometric structure or relationship of parts. In an emotional, baroque manner it cuts across the picture, into space and back out to the surface. It is not the earlier rugged painted line that so thoroughly integrated itself with painting: it has become a definitely drawn line, maintaining its identity in regard to the brushedin areas. {…} Marin again was seeking a new unity of line and color capable of expressing the joyousness of his spirit.” (Reich, Sheldon.

John Marin: A Stylistic Analysis and Catalogue Raisonné, Tucson, Arizona, 1970, Vol. I, p. 232)

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Sea and Boat Fantasy from 1944 is a particularly animated oil painting. Through the craggy shoals of a rocky inlet, three distant figures prepare to launch their two-master into the open sea, which on this day is neither pacific nor perilous. Deep blues, aquamarines, and bright whites yield to swathes of taupe and ocher as three aligned cumulous clouds cast intermittent shadows over water and shore. As though his own essence rested within the scene, Marin echoed a longstanding tradition of American landscape painting by incorporating his signature within the composition itself, highlighting it with one of the very slashes of silvery paint that appear throughout. The artist’s blitheness evaporated the following year with the death of his wife, Marie Hughes, to whom he had been married for thirty-three years. Shortly thereafter in 1946, Alfred Stieglitz, his invaluable dealer and the era’s most important, also passed away.

Marin, My Hell Raising Sea, 1941 (coll. the late Barney A. Ebsworth, Bellevue, Washington)

Edith Halpert, founder of the Downtown Gallery, organized and opened a John Marin exhibition on December 27, 1950. It was the first solo show of his new works ever held at a gallery unassociated with Stieglitz. By this time Marin was enjoying the most notoriety of his career. A poll of two years earlier, conducted by Look magazine of both museum directors and fellow artists, had elected John Marin America’s No. 1 artist. A new generation of artists and critics were examining his work at a time when, late in life, he continued to consistently work in oil. His palpable paint surfaces intensified and drew more attention to themselves than to the abbreviated pictorial structures they informed. When, in 1947, Marin testified to “using paint as paint” he foreshadowed what soon came to be an aesthetic ethos within vanguard art circles, a notion which spawned one of the great dialectics of contemporary art. John Marin died in 1953 in Addison, Maine, near his beloved Cape Split.

John Marin painting at Cape Split, Maine (photographer unknown – estate of john

marin )

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EL I E NA DE L M AN (1882–1946) Two Circus Women plaster 59 x 35 x 21 inches Executed in Riverdale, New York circa 1928-29 Provenance: The artist, Riverdale, New York Estate of the artist, Riverdale, New York Private collection, Scarsdale, New York Anon sale of the above, Sotheby’s, New York, Sept. 28, 2011, lot 208 Private Collection, New York (acquired from the above sale) Exhibited: San Antonio, TX, Marion Koogler McNay Art Museum, Elie Nadelman: Classical Folk, June – Aug., 2001, pps. 97– 98 (illustrated in color, pl. 58). The exhibition traveled to Pittsburgh, PA, The Frick Art and Historical Center, Sept. – Dec., 2001.

Literature: New York, Museum of Modern Art, The Sculpture of Elie Nadelman, 1948, p. 62, no. 33 (as Two Female Nudes, nearly identical papier-mâché version illus trated full page in black and white, p. 44). Kirstein, Lincoln, Elie Nadelman, The Eakins Press, New York, 1973, no. 155 (as Two Female Nudes, nearly identical papier-mâché version illustrated full page in black and white, pl. 164). Baur, John. The Sculpture and Drawings of Elie Nadelman, exhibition catalogue, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1975, p. 90, no. 94 (as Two Female Nudes, posthumous bronze cast illustrated full page in black and white, p. 94, lent to the exhibition by Nelson A. Rockefeller,

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New York). Haskell, Barbara, Elie Nadelman: Sculptor of Modern Life, exhibition catalogue, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2003, Fig. 196 (as Two Circus Women, nearly identical papier-mâché version illustrated in color, p. 172) .

“The subject of any work of art is for me nothing but a pretext for creating significant form, relations of forms which create a new life that has nothing to do with life in nature, a life from which art is born, and from which spring style and unity.” (Nadelman, Elie, pub.

Stieglitz, Alfred, Camera Work: issue XXXII, New York, October, 1910)

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y the time Elie Nadelman landed in New York City on October 31, 1914, he was already a famous artist. His commentaries on art had appeared in Alfred Stieglitz’s Camera Work periodical in 1910 and, from afar, he had contributed to the groundbreaking Armory Show of 1913 with two plasters and a group of twelve drawings. Born in what was then known as Polish Russia, Nadelman studied at the Warsaw Academy before arriving in Paris in late 1904. During the following ten years in the French capital, his work was exhibited in prominent galleries and sold to important collections in France, Spain, England, and Germany, conferring onto him international recognition as a sculptor. Nadelman was part of a Parisian circle of prominent artists, critics, and cognoscenti, and actively participated in dialectics over modern art. He met Picasso through the avid patronage of Leo Stein, was reviewed by famed art critic and poet Guillaume Apollinaire, and was even slapped in the face by Italian Futurist founder Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.* While he

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Michelangelo, Rebellious Slave, marble, begun 1513 (coll. Louvre Museum, Paris)

espoused proto-Cubist tendencies in both pen and plaster (1906–1908) Nadelman was more influenced by the curvilinear features of Art Nouveau (most popular between 1890-1910), the sculptural naturalism of Auguste Rodin, and specifically by two Michelangelo marbles at the Louvre with which he was familiar, Rebellious Slave and Dying Slave. In Michelangelo’s own words, both of his marbles were “non-finito” (unfinished), intentionally so as to exhibit the figures in the process of disencumbering themselves from the weighty masses of marble from which they originate. The resultant ambiguity of Michelangelo’s convergence, or concurrence, of sculptural form represented a modernist sensibility Nadelman would explore in America in the 1920s.

Soon after arriving in New York, Nadelman took a studio on West 14th Street and gave his first American exhibition at Stieglitz’s “291” gallery (December, 1915 to January, 1916). The show included a plaster version of his just produced Man in the Open Air (1915), a captivating sculpture and perhaps the artist’s most iconic figure, to whose elongated, mannered features Nadelman added contemporary elements like a hat, bowtie, and slender tree against which the man leans. This work augured his wood and plaster pieces (the latter all destroyed) of 1916–1919 in which Nadelman’s fascination with American folk-art was fully expressed. In this body of work, he sculpted vignettes from scenes largely native to American culture, such as those derived from vaudeville, particularly popular in early 20th Century New York: circus performers, dancers, a woman at the piano, an orchestra conductor. Nadelman coalesced his

*The event took place in 1912 at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune when Marinetti, who wrote the Futurist Manifesto in 1909, was giving a lecture on his movement. Nadelman interjected the words: “Monsieur Marinetti declares he will demolish all the arts of the past; he shows he does not in the least comprehend the nature of the art of the past.”

At this point the Italian theorist jumped from the podium and accosted Nadelman. A kerfuffle ensued, the gallery lights were turned off, and the evening was over.

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Nadelman, Man in the Open Air, 1915, bronze (coll. Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, Nebraska)

Nadelman, Two Circus Women, sculpted in Italy after 1946; two same titled Carrara marble sculpture facing each other (David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center, New York)

newfound folk images and his inherited classical vision into sophisticated, stylish scenes that reveal his genius for gesture and contrapposto. In 1917 Nadelman was given another solo show, this time at Scott & Fowles Gallery at 590 Fifth Avenue, which consisted of marble and bronze heads, largely neoclassical but some with a subtle cubist tinge. The fact that the exhibition was nearly a sellout confirmed that Nadelman’s work was quite suitable for an American collector base that favored a more restrained kind of modernist art than that developed in pre-War Europe.

In 1920 Nadelman and his wife, the heiress Viola Flannery, purchased an estate (called Alderbrook) in Riverdale, New York, as well as a nearby townhouse. There, Nadelman established his sculpture studio, which included three assistants, and a museum to house his growing, personal folk-art collection. Circa 1924 he began experimenting with a new type of production he called galvano-plastique, which involved glazing his plaster sculptures with a metal coating that he thinned

down to a uniform state with the use of an electric current (electroplating, or electrolytic deposition).

The reaction caused the interior plaster forms to partially dissolve into themselves, making less obvious the clear definition of body parts. As extremities evanesced and facial features melded, the sculpture seemed to alter its molecular structure, metamorphosing from solid structure into liquid volume, no doubt Nadelman’s intended effects, like Michelangelo’s “non-finiti.” In the late 1920s, Nadelman explored galvano-plastique to its fullest and with life-sized figures, intensifying the electroplating effects to approach abstraction. He sought to emulate his galvanos in papier-mâché, terra-cotta, and marble, coming as close as he ever would to favoring shapeless forms over his clearly defined, classically inspired ones. As Nadelman continued to work in what John I. H. Baur described as a “veiled style,” his sculpture assumed both a meditative mood and mysterious monumentality which culminated in two plaster, papiermâché sculptural compositions (1928–29) both of which he titled Two Circus Women.

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“{. . .} Nadelman modeled in plaster, covered with paper, two five-foot-high pairs of women which were later cast in bronze and still later enlarged in marble for the Promenade of the State Theater in Lincoln Center. In these his blurred style reached its fullest expression and justified itself by the extraordinary unity and monumentality he achieved. They look, each pair, like Siamese twins inextricably joined, as if growing out of each other. But since they are plainly goddesses, not mortals nor even individualized, we accept the distortions and indeed forget it in the powerful flow of forms that ripple without stop across the heavy masses.

Here Nadelman achieves a unity that he had sought in his tubular nudes of twenty years earlier, and in the big galvanos of the twenties, but with a new assurance.” (Baur, John I. H., The Sculpture and Drawings of Elie Nadelman, exhibition catalogue, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1975, p. 10)

an elusive mystery, more psychologically nuanced than in any of Nadelman’s previous work. Coupled in poses of gentle intimacy and private communication, these paired figures display an idealized stillness and secular grace that is totally human without being individualized. (Haskell, Barbara, Elie Nadelman: Sculptor of Modern Life, exhibition catalogue, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2003, p.169) The example of Two Circus Women in this exhibition was left white and for many years stood in the imposing position of the bay window of the downstairs drawing room of the artist’s home in Riverdale.

Barbara Haskell describes Nadelman’s “three over-life-size sculptures of paired female circus performers that he executed in 1928 and 1929.”

She writes: “As with his Galvano-plastiques, he created them first as hollow-core plaster shapes, apparently from molds, judging from the existence of duplicate images{. . .} Their melting contours and veiled facial features suggested a delicate weightlessness that contradicted the figures’ massive, Amazonian proportions. Joined in a single contour, these figures radiated a serene equanimity and detachment from the world{. . .} Uninterrupted by surface detail, their seamless, fluid curvilinearity endowed them with

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Posthumously, Nadelman’s foremost critical supporter, Lincoln Kirstein, had both of his Two Circus Cover of Lincoln Kirstein’s 1948 retrospective exhibition catalogue for Elie Nadelman at the Museum of Modern Art, New York

Women cast in bronze for Nelson Rockefeller. Kirstein also commissioned the marble copies of each, three times the size of the original plasters, from the Carrara marble quarry in Italy. Just before the completion (1964) of the New York State Theater (now David H. Koch Theater), home to the New York City Ballet at Lincoln Center, Kirstein had the two sculptures installed facing one another at each end of the Promenade. The theater’s architect was Philip Johnson who, years prior, at Kirstein’s recommendation, purchased the near life-sized papier-mâché of one of Nadelman’s Two Circus Woman, positioning it as one of only three works of fine art inside his Glass House (1949) in New Canaan, Connecticut. Lincoln Kirstein had cofounded the New York City Ballet the same year (1948) he wrote the catalogue for Nadelman’s first retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The next year he published an essay on Nadelman’s dancing figures and a monograph on his drawings. Kirstein’s scholarship on the sculptor reached its conclusion in his comprehensive 1973 survey of Nadelman’s life and work.

Elie Nadelman, c. 1905–08 (photograph courtesy estate of elie nadelman )

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LOUI SE N E VE L S O N (1899–1988) Night Zag VI wood wall-relief construction of eight (8) adjoining parts with metal frame, painted black overall: 32 x 59 x 9 ¾ inches Executed in New York in 1966 Provenance: Pace Gallery, New York Private Collection, Colorado (acquired from the above) Anon sale. Sotheby Parke Bernet, New York, May 9, 1990, lot 192 Sid Deutsch Gallery, New York Private Collection Anon sale. Wright, Chicago, Nov. 19, 2002, lot 255 Forum Gallery, New York (acquired from the above sale) Private Collection, New York (acquired from the above, Feb. 2, 2014) Exhibited: Denver, Art Museum, Colorado Collects: A Panorama of World Art from Private Collections, June-Aug., 1977, p. 57. New York, Forum Gallery, American Masters, May, 2015. New York, Nohra Haime Gallery, The Intimate World of Louise Nevelson, Oct. – Nov., 2017.

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n late May of 1964, Louise Nevelson returned to the city of her wedding, Boston, this time to attend her first exhibition at Pace Gallery. Since starting his business a few years prior, the young, aspiring gallerist Arnie Glimcher had been courting the recognized sculptress. It was a risky undertaking for Glimcher, one that could make or break his finances and reputation, but within a few weeks of the opening Glimcher had sold most of her works. As Nevelson’s relationships with dealers Sidney Janis and Martha Jackson came to a close, Glimcher soon began representing her in his new venue in New York on West 57th Street. One of the great dealer-artist rapports of post-War America was born. Just in the second half of 1966, the year Nevelson created Night Zag VI, Pace sold more than $200 thousand dollars of her art while steadily raising her prices, advancing her money, and ultimately securing her financial future. In recompense, the well-connected Nevelson personally introduced her dynamic dealer to the artists Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning (among others).

Perhaps it was no coincidence that Louise’s father, Isaac Berliawsky, was in the lumber business. Little did he know that as he built houses in Rockland, Maine, his daughter would become a famous artist by making unique wooden constructions out of her own imagination. Born at the turn of the century near Kiev (Ukraine’s present-day capital), at the age of five Louise, with her mother and three siblings, joined Isaac in America. From childhood Louise Berliawsky knew she was meant to be an artist. She weathered her rural Maine upbringing, married Charles Nevelson in June, 1920, and followed him back to New York City. While her relationship with

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her exhibition titled The Forest in January of 1957.

Nevelson’s earliest monumental sculpture (First Personnage; quickly purchased by the Brooklyn Museum) cast its shadow over a memorable environment of bent driftwood remains and aged lumber. Over the next two decades she modified her format, scale, even color and finally medium, but it was that show which ushered in Nevelson’s signature style. By the end of 1957, she had become enthralled by the potential for patterns created by the intersecting planes, shards, and molds of wood.

She hurried to gather and reshape crates, boxes, even Chaim Gross’ seedling containers which she requisitioned from his home in Provincetown, Massachusetts. And everything she painted black.

Nevelson, Big Black, 1963 (coll. Museum of Modern Art, New York)

Much has been written about Nevelson’s black monochromatism. Arthur Danto astutely called attention to the transgressive nature of Nevelson’s blackness

Charles was over by 1931, Nevelson thrived in the Big Apple. She studied drama, opera, dance, and naturally the fine arts, first at the Arts Students League under Hans Hofmann, then in 1934 expressly sculpture at the Educational Alliance under master carver Chaim Gross. Immersed in the Jewish intellectual life of the political Left during the Depression years, she assisted Diego Rivera (with whom she had an affair) in his murals for The New Workers’ School on East 14th Street, the educational center for the American Communist Party which survived until 1944.

In the 1940s and early 50s Louise Nevelson’s reputation grew as she experimented with found objects within a Cubist and Surrealist context. Karl Nierendorf exhibited her until his death in 1947, after which Colette Roberts did so at her Grand Central Modern Gallery which relocated to the top floor of the famed gallery building at 1081 Madison Avenue. Then and there it happened:

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Nevelson, First Personnage, 1956, Height: 94 in. (coll. Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York)

with respect to its dissociative powers. For instance, not only does the invariance of any color neutralize certain inferences which can be made about the nature of an object (as with black and white reproductions, photographs, or prints), but the particular anti or non-color of blackness liberates viewers from nearly all involuntary mental connotations. In other words, her Black Wedding Cake (1955) cannot be a wedding cake since no wedding cake is black.

Nevelson confirmed her own premise when later on she experimented with white and gold, separately producing bodies of work in each color but recognizing the likely compromising deficiencies of both, white conceivably calling forth notions of purity or innocence and gold those of luxuriance and baroqueness. In other words, Nevelson availed herself of blackness to suppress the evocative nature of color itself while striving to confect and convey conceptual clues (abundant and nonliteral) to the viewer.

In disengaging the nature of object and subject (i.e. the material used from the meaning of the work itself ) Nevelson produced all-wooden sculpture having nothing to do with wood. For this reason, her work populated an aesthetic space polarized from that of her teacher Chaim Gross, whose adherence to wood as wood is discernable in every grain of his sculpture. In an art world defined by two-dimensional painting and three-dimensional sculpture, Nevelson also came to occupy a third dimension, that of the giant wall-relief ensemble, the bricolage assemblage which far exceeds the confines of basrelief both in depth and complexity. Her tenebrous forests evolved into her Big Black (1963), then contracted into her Night Zags, a series in which VI (1966) is particularly hypnotic for its distinctly stacked miniature compartments that elicit impressions of a highly dense, urbanized world. In 1969 she received a proposal from the Princeton University Art Museum for a giant, outdoor piece. For Nevelson it was the

Louise Nevelson, circa 1955 (photograph smithsonian archives of american art , washington , d . c .)

first of many commissions she would be awarded to produce the monumental, black sculptures in Cor-Ten steel that have come to universally pepper museum, corporate and educational campuses. As with Henry Moore and Alexander Calder, Louise Nevelson was granted archetypal status. “In time, her use of square, hard-edged boxes gave a more classic, orderly appearance to her walls, particularly the outside perimeters.

It also conformed to the new minimalist aesthetic, which emphasized clarity and simplification. Before long she turned to children’s toys like Lincoln Logs and Playskool blocks.

In her frequent use of factory-made forms, her assemblages emphasized reasoning over romanticism, structure over detail, craft over chance, and deliberate design over inspired improvisation. Instead of found wood that expressed the mystery of lost civilizations, the tooled elements suggested the machinery of the modern era.� (Lisle, Laurie, Louise Nevelson: A Passionate Life, Pocket Books, New York, 1990, p. 245)

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JU L E S PA SCI N (1885–1930) Lucy after Shampooing signed lower right pascin oil on canvas 36¼ x 28 ¾ inches Painted in Sanary-sur-Mer, France, in 1926 Provenance: Lucy Krohg Paris (the sitter, gift of the artist, 1926) Guy Krohg, Oslo (son of the sitter, by descent) Theo Waddington Fine Art, London Forum Gallery, New York (acquired directly from the above, August 5, 2009) Exhibited: Paris, France, Galerie Abel Rambert, Jules Pascin, Oct.-Dec., 1979 (illustrated as the frontispiece).

Oslo, Norway, National Gallery, Pascin, Jan. – March, 1980 (illustrated in color, p. 43) 1980. The exhibition traveled to Bergen, Norway, Art Association, April, 1980 and Trondhjem, Norway, Art Association, May – June, 1980. Paris, France, Hotel de Ville, Pascin, March-May, 1982 (illustrated).

Tokyo, Odakyo Grand Gallery, Pascin, Prince de 1001 nuits, April-May, 1984, no. 48 (illustrated in color). The exhibition traveled to Sapporo, Hokkaïdo Museum of Modern Art, June-July, 1984; Nagasaki, Museum of Art, July, 1984; Yamaguchi, Museum of Art, Aug., 1984, and Osaka, Daimaru Museum, Aug.-Sept., 1984. Osaka, Japan, Daimaru Umeda Museum, Pascin de Munich à Paris, March, 1999, no. 43 (illustrated in color, p. 99). The exhibition traveled to Fukuoka City, History Museum and Tenjin Daimaru Gallery, March– April, 1999; Tokyo, Daimaru Museum, April, 1999; Kyoto, Daimaru Museum, May, 1999; Hakodate,

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Museum of Art, June–Aug., 1999 and Tokuyama, City Museum of Art & History, Aug.-Sept., 1999.

New York, NY, Forum Gallery and Boca Raton, FL, Waddington & Tribby Fine Art, Jules Pascin (18851930): Important Works, Feb. – March, 2001 (illustrated in color, p. 17). Los Angeles, CA, Forum Gallery, Modernism: The Aesthetic of Change, Feb. – April, 2006, no. 23.

Literature: Hermin, Yves, Krohg, Guy, Perls, Klaus and Rambert, Abel, Pascin: Catalogue Raissonné, Peintures, Aquarelles, Pastels, Dessins, Editions Abel Rambert, Paris, 1984, Tome I, no. 538 (illustrated in black and white, p. 284).

Note: When living in Munich in 1905, Jules Pascin began contributing his drawings for illustration in the satirical weekly Simplicissimus. Except for a ten-year lapse (1944-1954) the magazine operated from 1896 until 1967, its many contributors including the writers Herman Hesse and Robert Walser, and artists George Grosz and Käthe Kollwitz. Especially in its early years, Simplicissimus was a source of scandal for its ongoing derision of important figures in Germany’s conservative establishment, including Kaiser Wilhelm himself. The magazine employed mordant humor, graphic images, and scathing commentaries, for which reason Pascin’s father, Marcus Pincas, remonstrated against his son’s involvement.

While Jules continued to contribute to Simplicissimus for the rest of his life, so as to protect the family name in 1905 he adopted the pseudonym Pascin, an anagram of his actual surname Pincas, which he used from that point forward.

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Simplicissimus, title page of number 38, 1905 caricature of Kaiser Wilhelm II

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orn Julius Mordecai Pincas into a wealthy Jewish family in Vidal, Bulgaria, Jules Pascin learned to draw in a most peculiar way. In 1900, at the age of fifteen, he began to work for his father’s flourishing grain company in Bucharest, Romania.

During that time Pascin met a beguiling woman of Phanariot Greek origin and old Romanian aristocracy. Twice his age, not only did she seduce Pascin but introduced him to the brothel of which she was the madam. In the first of his many unconventional female relationships, Pascin became her protégé, of sorts. She nurtured him, encouraging his budding artistic talent by providing the facilities and means for him to draw the comings-and-goings within her establishment. In fact, the first, extant examples of his brilliant draftsmanship date to this time in the Bucharest bordello. From then on, art and the demimonde would be synonymous for Pascin.

After this chapter in Pascin’s early development, his art training followed a more typical track. He lived

(Right) Hermine David (photograph by wil howard ,

1910 )

(Far right) Lucy Krogh (anonymous photographer )

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and studied in Vienna, Munich, and Berlin and, by the end of 1905 was in Paris where he joined other immigrant artists from Eastern Europe in the circle of Les Domiers, so called because of its frequent evening gatherings at Le Dôme Café in the bohemian district of Montparnasse. Pascin soon met the visionary French dealer Berthe Weill, presumed to be the first to sell Picasso and Matisse’s work in Paris and the only to ever give Modigliani a solo exhibition. She exhibited Pascin’s work between 1908 and 1914, during which years he participated in every Paris Salon d’Automne and also made a name for himself in Germany, at the Berlin Secession of 1911 and the Cologne Sonderbund Exhibition of 1912. All the while, Pascin continued to take refuge in the seedier side of life, drawing inspiration from the city’s underclass, vagabonds and, as the French successor to Toulouse de Lautrec, particularly prostitutes.

It was also during these years in the French capital that Pascin met the two most important women of his life, Hermine Lionette David and Lucy Vidil Krogh. The former became his wife; the latter his greatest love. A miniaturist and printmaker,

Hermine may have offered the vital inspiration for Pascin to graduate from watercolor to oil painting.

Escaping World War I, Jules landed in New York City in 1914; Hermine followed and they were married at City Hall in 1918. Serving as their witness was Max Weber, America’s preeminent Cubist; aiding Pascin in securing his U.S. citizenship was Alfred Stiegltiz, the foremost dealer of the American art world vanguard. Even before his arrival, Pascin’s work was known to the American market through the landmark Armory Show of the year prior, where six of his twelve exhibited paintings were purchased by the Irish-American lawyer John Quinn, who would soon possess the largest single collection of modern European paintings in the world. Quinn’s patronage was soon followed by that of the American chemist Albert Barnes who was actively acquiring for the art foundation he established in 1922 outside Philadelphia. During his New York period Pascin befriended Social and Urban Realist painters like Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Maurice Sterne, Raphael Soyer, and Guy Pène du Bois. Naturally, he also sought out the city’s dilapidated pleasure haunts.

Back in Paris in 1920, Pascin became the incontrovertible Prince of both the Montparnasse and Montmartre quarters, as well as the self-anointed Prince of the Orient, the character he assumed at extravagant parties. He also began his love affair with Lucy Vidil, the wife of the Norwegian painter Per Krogh, a relationship which defined the final chapter of his life.

Lucy helped him sell his work, found him appropriate models to paint and studios in which to do so.

His career continued to blossom. However, it was her friendship, understanding, and closeness which sustained Pascin during the 1920s. The intimacy he shared with Lucy endures in the surviving letters he wrote her and in the endearing portraits of her he painted. In 1926 he depicted Lucy after Shampooing,

Jules Pascin at the Café du Dôme, Paris 1910 (anonymous photographer )

seated on a chair in a frontal pose. Her hair is disheveled, as if she just passed a towel through it; her attire casual as though she threw on a blouse for the moment, its wrinkles failing to fully cover her inner thighs. The scene is evocative but not erotic, the moment improvisational just as Pascin relished. And Lucy’s languid but piercing eyes look straight ahead, at the viewer, at Pascin, all-knowingly. On June 5, 1930, his money once again squandered and syphilis surely upon him, Pascin drank himself into a depression and took his own life. On the bathroom door he wrote in his own blood his last words: “Adieu Lucy.”

“His young women, clothed in a wisp of a chemise, or quite nude, are not mere studio models; they are his friends and comrades, and worthy of his art, and so he loved to paint them, searching out subtleties of colour, to note the texture of their skin, and, then to scumble a dirty white smear of paint across their delicate bodies, miraculously suggesting an undergarment or a piece of drapery. And, at the same time, he unconsciously bestows upon them his poetic melancholy. And this he could not help.”

(Brodzky, Horace, Pascin, Nicholson & Watson Publishing, London, 1946, p. 33)

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MA N R AY (1890–1976) Painting signed and dated lower right Man Ray 1924 oil on canvas 18 x 15 inches Painted in New York City in 1918; reworked, 1924.

In December of 1915 Man Ray moved from the Grantwood Artist Colony of Ridgefield, New Jersey, to a studio on Lexington Avenue near Grand Central Station in midtown Manhattan, where he remained until he left for Europe in 1921. For many of the paintings, drawings, and sculpture he produced in both Ridgefield (Spring, 1913 – December, 1915) and New York City (December, 1915 – July, 1921) Man Ray maintained a numbered card file. On each card he documented the descriptive information of his art work, and he usually affixed a small photograph or thumbnail sketch to the card. On the card for his work titled Painting, the date 1918 is recorded; in the accompanying diminutive photograph for Painting the stippled white dots in the ochre-colored plane (center-right) do not appear so were added by the artist in 1924, the date inscribed by Man Ray beside his signature (lower right). A nearly identical painting titled Abstraction dates from the same years (coll.

Baltimore Museum of Art).

Provenance: Private Collection, Paris Timothy Baum (executor of the estate of the artist), New York (1981) Stephan C. Lion, Southampton, New York, 1981) The Honorable Joseph P. Carroll, New York and Paris (acquired directly from the above, 1994) Forum Gallery, New York (acquired directly from the above, March 24, 2000)

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Exhibited: Washington, D.C., National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Perpetual Motif: The Art of Man Ray, Dec., 1988 – Feb., 1989, no. 68 (illustrated in color, p. 50, full-page, and in black and white, p. 76; footnoted, no. 32). The exhibition traveled to Los Angeles, CA, The Museum of Contemporary Art, March – May, 1989; Houston, TX, The Menil Collection, June – Sept., 1989 and Philadelphia, PA, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Oct., 1989 – Jan., 1990.

New York, NY, Zabriskie Gallery, Charles Daniel and the Daniel Gallery, 1913-1932, Dec., 1993- Feb., 1994, p.

24, no. 32 (illustrated in color, p. 9). London, UK, Serpentine Gallery, Man Ray, Nov., 1994 – March, 1995, p. 13. New York, NY, Hollis Taggart Galleries, Recent Acquisitions, Nov., 1998. Montclair, NJ, Montclair Art Museum, Conversion to Modernism: The Early Works of Man Ray, Feb. – Aug., 2003, no. 186 (illustrated in color, p. 191). The exhibition traveled to Athens, GA, Georgia Museum of Art, Sept. – Nov., 2003 and Chicago, IL, Terra Museum of American Art, Jan. – April, 2004. Los Angeles, CA, Forum Gallery, Modernism: The Aesthetic of Change, Feb. – April, 2006, no. 58.

Literature: Naumann, Francis, Perpetual Motif: The Art of Man Ray, National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., 1988 (illustrated in color, p. 50, full-page, and in black and white, p. 76; footnoted, no. 32). Naumann, Francis. Man Ray and America: The New York and Ridgefield Years, 1907-1921, unpublished doctoral dissertation, City University of New York, 1988. Naumann, Francis.

Conversion to Modernism: The Early Works of Man Ray, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 2003, no. 186 (illustrated in color, p. 191).

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(left) Man Ray, Portrait of Alfred Stieglitz, 1913, oil on canvas; believed to be the first painting he produced after seeing the Armory Show (Yale University Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven, Connecticut) (right) Man Ray, New York, 1966 chrome plated bronze with metal, after original 1917 with wood strips and carpenter’s C-clamp (lost)

Note: As cited above, Painting was owned by Stephan C. Lion (1916–2009), who acquired it directly from the executor of the Man Ray estate, Dada and Surrealist expert Timothy Baum. Born in Germany, Lion was an advertising consultant and avid art collector, consultant, and curator. His Papers: 1940-1996 are held by the Smithsonian Archives of American Art in Washington, D.C. They contain correspondence between Lion and artists, including Alexander Calder, Piet Mondrian, René Magritte, and Georgia O’Keeffe, as well as his 1996 video A Love for Art, A Personal Recollection: 1939–1995.

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orn Emmanuel Radnitzky in Philadelphia to immigrant Russian Jewish parents, in 1912 the aspiring artist changed his name to Man Ray. In the Fall of that year he enrolled in art classes at the Modern School in East Harlem, New York, an institution whose goal was to replicate the pedagogically progressive teachings of Francisco Ferrer, the anti-clerical, libertarian educator from Catalonia.

The School was sponsored by New York’s Ferrer Association, founded by Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman and others in 1909, the year when Ferrer was arrested and executed in Spain. The notion of creating an environment so nurturing for its students as to foster in them a selfreliance formidable enough to eliminate all need for governmental oversight effectively coupled

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the School’s educational program with political anarchism. While it is unclear just how affected the young Man Ray was by the socio-philosophical orientation of his place of study, the artistic freedom encouraged in him by the School must have been inestimable, for what he soon came to accomplish within the context of early American Modernism was no less radical. When working as a calligrapher at a publishing company on Fourteenth Street, Man Ray would dash over to Alfred Stieglitz’s “291” Fifth Avenue gallery on lunch breaks in order to familiarize himself with some of Europe’s (and most of America’s) leading modernists. By the time of the landmark Amory Show of 1913 he had assimilated the work of many of them. Shortly thereafter, Man Ray left his parent’s home in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and moved to the artist’s colony of Grantwood in Ridgefield, New Jersey where he shared a shack with painter Samuel Halpert, the future husband of Downtown Gallery owner and director Edith Halpert. By this time, Man Ray was experimenting with Cubist forms, whose structural simplifications he amplified by adding the accentuated, dark outlines he admired in Halpert’s paintings. The results were his ever more boldly contoured and sharply fissured compositions Ramapo Hills, The Reaper and War. In April–May of 1913 ten of Man Ray’s works were included in the Exhibition of Paintings and Water Colors at the Modern School, for which fellow student and budding Cubist, Max Weber, wrote the

catalogue introduction presciently predicting the dawn of a new artistic reality. The stage was set.

In June of 1915, Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia arrived in New York City. Man Ray soon met them both; his life and art forever changed.

Picabia’s exaltation of modern machinery gave Man Ray a new vocabulary with which to work. Even before he began his Dada periodical 391 (fashioned after Stieglitz’s “291” gallery publication, Camera Work) Picabia’s mechanomorphic drawings of 1915, such as Viola la femme, and their paroxysms of pain endowed the machine with human attributes, neuroses, and sexuality. In his portrait of Stieglitz as a camera-like apparatus fused with the gear shaft and brake of a car, Picabia amalgamated the corporeal and the mechanistic into a futuristic, posthuman cyborg. Duchamp, in turn, elevated the status of commonly manufactured objects to works of art merely by designating and titling them as such. Unlike the found object which could be permutated, his “readymades” consisted of artifacts altered only in concept.

Man Ray quickly recognized the newfound, evocative possibilities for objects based on artistic selection, and began to develop his own Dada vernacular, experimenting with readymades, found objects, assemblage, photography, aerographs, and rayographs. When, in fact, in 1918 he produced the work he titled Painting, Man Ray was well on his way to distancing himself from any empirical interpretation of the natural world, and soon disengaged from the conceptual limits of both the word “painting” and the age-old art form it represented. Nonetheless, by painting the painting he called Painting, Man Ray availed himself of that word and its associative meanings to intentionally neutralize subject and object. An American Dadaist was born.

“. . . he continued his experiments with the palette knife, producing an abstract painting of irregular shapes defined entirely by layers of thickly modulated pigment. This is a most unusual painting for the artist, for it is known to exist in two separate versions, one image so perfectly replicating the other that until recently they were believed to be the same paining. {…} there can be little doubt that these paintings represent Man Ray’s most abstract work of these years. In both works, angular color planes are carefully defined by means of a palette knife, their surfaces so emphatically textural that the image is more readily comprehended for its material presence than for any illusionistic properties one might associate with the art of painting.” (Naumann, Francis. Conversion to Modernism: The Early Works of Man Ray, exhibition catalogue, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 2003, p. 189)

Man Ray, circa 1914 (photograph by Alfred Stieglitz; coll. Musée d’Orsay, Paris)

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IR E N E R I CE PE RE IR A (1907–1971) Three-Dimensional Abstract Composition signed and dedicated lower right on the board To BERENICE with love, I. RICE PEREIRA painted glass and board construction 9 ¼ x 7 ¼ x ⅛ inches artist’s shadow box frame: 16 x 14 x 1⅜ inches Executed in New York circa 1945 Provenance: Berenice Abbott, New York (gift of the artist) Sale, Collection of Berenice Abbott, Sotheby Parke Bernet, September 23, 1981, lot 203 Forum Gallery, New York (acquired from the above sale) Private Collection, Washington, D.C. (acquired directly from the above, March, 1985) Forum Gallery, New York, (reacquired from the above, April 9, 2005) Exhibited: New York, NY, Forum Gallery, Structure, Dec. 2005 – Jan., 2006. Los Angeles, CA, Forum Gallery, The Aesthetic of Change, Feb. – April, 2006, no. 62.

“In 1945 Pereira began to construct multiplanar paintings in which there are two panes of glass superimposed over a recessed ground. The interplay of forms painted now on three levels becomes more complex, and visual penetration to the ground layer becomes more difficult. {. . .} Each painted surface is clearly differentiated physically and yet, due to the transparency of the glass, fully integrated optically.”

(Bearor, Karen A., Irene Rice Pereira: Her

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Paintings and Philosophy, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1993, pps. 153–4)

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rene Rice Pereira was one of the most intellectual and esoteric American artists of the 20th Century. She sought greater social awareness by underscoring the relativity of human perception, not through the prevailing Social Realist imagery of her time but rather through geometrically devised constructions of painted glass. The assemblages she created were inspired as much by the new age of glass architecture as by the novel therapeutics of psychoanalysis. These are constructions of complex spatial dimensions, whose progressive visual apprehension is meant to be a conduit to self-awareness. Wholly absorbed by the transcendental potential of Carl Jung’s holism, Pereira owned and studied the Swiss doctor’s publications on the analytical psychology of the unconscious and his interpretations of archetypal manifestations in the collective human experience.

In order to sufficiently devise the optical depth required for her introspective voyages through glass, Pereira adopted a threefold, interrelational system of spatial, directional, and tangential planes. The calculus for this optical organization came both from her years teaching at the Design Laboratory of the Works Project Administration in the mid-late 1930s and from her contemporaneous studies of the spatial concepts of Adolf von Hildebrand. In his writings, the German sculptor turned theoretician stressed the imperative of arousing in the viewer the sensation of space as an axiom for truth, for which reason he formu-

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lated criteria for the recessional representation of objects. Hence, Pereira’s spatial, or frontal, plane remains parallel to her pictorial surface, while directional ones appear as receding orthogonal rectangles which intersect the uninterrupted and retreating tangential plane. This geometry systematized her glass constructions onwards of the early 1940s. Rather than directing mankind outward through the translucence of glass, Pereira harnessed its spectral quality to encase external existence with internal self.

Pereira’s influential publications such as her first, Light and the New Reality (1951), and her last, The Poetic of the Form on Space, Light and the Infinite (1969), are esteemed essays by an exceptional mid-century woman artist working through highly

Pereira, diagram showing spatial, directional and tangential planes; Pratt Institute lecture, Fall 1942 (reproduced)

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cerebral concepts within a radical aesthetic. As abstruse as her approach may seem and as unorthodox as her multi-paneled glass medium may appear, Pereira relied on similar notions of self-awareness as would the Abstract Expressionists.

The objective appearance of her art, however, and the anonymity of glass as a medium incorrectly led her to being affiliated more with the architecture of pre-War industrialization than with the subjectivism of post-War expressionism. Notwithstanding, Pereira enclosed her painted glass creations in shadow-box frames, thus elevating each to an individually artistic status, each an unconventional alliance between artist and material, each a rhythmic descent through Jungian alchemy to the primeval depths of the subconscious.

Carl Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious, 1912

Pereira in studio, Jan. 1, 1953 (photograph by eliot elisofon ,

the life picture collection )

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IR E N E R I CE PE R E IRA (1907–1971) Three-Dimensional Composition in Blue signed and dedicated lower right on the board To BERENICE with love, I. RICE PEREIRA – signed again lower right on the glass PEREIRA painted glass and board construction 11½ x 9 ½ x 1⅛ inches artist’s shadow box frame: 17⅛ x 15⅞ x 1⅝ inches Executed in New York circa 1940 Provenance: Berenice Abbott, New York (gift of the artist) Sale, Collection of Berenice Abbott, Sotheby Parke Bernet, September 23, 1981, lot 203 Forum Gallery, New York (acquired from the above sale) Exhibited: New York, NY, Forum Gallery, Structure, Dec. 2005– Jan., 2006. Los Angeles, CA, Forum Gallery, The Aesthetic of Change, Feb. – April, 2006, no. 63.

Note: Irene Rice Pereira gifted this work of art to photographer Berenice Abbott, whom she knew from the Artists Union and its magazine Art Front, to which Abbott contributed articles and of which Pereira was an avid reader. Other Art Front essayists included Meyer Shapiro, Isamu Noguchi, and the art critic Elizabeth McCausland who after 1935 became Abbott’s life partner.

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he 1939 World’s Fair was held in Flushing Meadows, Queens. The vast complex centered around an enormous three-sided obelisk known as the Trylon and a giant hollow globe called the

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Perisphere. The latter symbolized the “infinite,” especially in relation to the possibilities which new factory-made materials could offer an American workforce ten years into the Great Depression.

On view in the nearby Glass Center were elaborate exhibits featuring the history of glassmaking, all financed by the companies Corning Glass Works, Owens-Illinois Glass Co., and Pittsburgh Plate Glass Co. One fair publication described the setting as “An enchanted palace.” Writing in the brochure Science for the World of Tomorrow, Gerald Wendt, director of the Fair’s Science Department, stressed that glass architecture was healthful for both the individual and society at large. Hence, in what aspired to be a new industrial age, the medium of glass was introduced on the world stage as the 20th Century’s romantic emblem for progress. It was during the 1939 World’s Fair that Irene Rice Pereira made her first painting on glass.

Pereira was born in the Northern suburbs of Boston, spent her early childhood in Massachusetts, then moved to Brooklyn when she was sixteen years old. She studied literature, wrote poetry, took art classes, and briefly pursued a career in fashion all the while working as a stenographer. She became engrossed in the alternative lifestyle of Greenwich Village and was briefly the girlfriend of its “bohemian king,” the novelist Maxwell Bodenheim. In 1927, Pereira enrolled at the Art Students League under the professorship of Jan Matulka, whose undulant nautical motifs she emulated in her paintings of the early 1930s. After visiting Europe in 1931, it was the Purism of Le Corbusier and Ozenfant, the Constructivism of the De Stijl movement, and particularly the values of the Bauhaus School

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Thus, by the time Pereira attended the World’s Fair and executed her first glass painting (Untitled, 1939) she had fully embraced Bauhaus principles. Not only did Untitled display her trademark grid-pattern but, equally significant, it was fully colored. In fact, Pereira conceived it for a stained-glass design probably inspired by Josef Albers’ nearly monochromatic painting Colored Window in Red which was exhibited at the Weimar Bauhaus in 1923 and illustrated in the exhibition’s catalogue, a copy of which Pereira owned. Her innovative career in glass had begun.

Pereira painted her glass on the reverse side, as did Bauhaus instructors Kandinsky and Klee in their own experimental efforts with glass. In her initial pieces she was most influenced by the “space modulators” of yet another Bauhaus professor, László Moholy-Nagy. Even in Shadow with Painting (1940; only her third glass work) one may already detect her painted rectilinear forms on the recessed Pereira, Shadow with Painting, 1940 (coll. Museum of Modern Art, New York)

which most influenced Pereira. When she returned to New York her new acquaintances included Burgoyne Diller, Dorothy Dehner, Hilla Rebay and, most notably, the inventive designer/architect and industrial glass enthusiast Frederick Kiesler.

Kiesler had long conceived of a Bauhaus analogous school in New York which would offer coordinated instruction in architecture, painting, sculpture, and the industrial arts. In large part his vision was realized by Pereira in 1935 when, under the sponsorship of the Works Progress Administration, she founded the Design Laboratory, later known as the Laboratory School of Industrial Design. There, unity was stressed between painter and architect, between artist and industrialist, and personal ambition was subordinated to the greater whole.

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László Moholy-Nagy, Light-Room-Modulator, 1922–30 (1970 replica; Bauhaus-Archives, Berlin)

Pereira transcended everyone in the sophistication of her glass projects, through which she ensured a continuity of light and space.

The Glass Center, 1939 World’s Fair, Queens, New York

“Pereira was justly proud of her early, singular accomplishments in art. She felt she had made original contributions to concepts of space, light and optics, particularly in her experimentation with layered glass painting. In her own writings she tried to express these insights through new approaches to philosophical inquiry. {…} Pereira read, studied and absorbed a plethora of facts and ideas, elaborating them over a lifetime into a personal aesthetic and philosophical system. In her search for unity she was both absorbed and plagued by her attempts to reconcile the contrary nature of mind and matter.” (Hill, Martha. Irene Rice Pereira’s Library: A Metaphysical Journey, exhibition catalogue, The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C., 1988, p. 11)

De Stijl design: Le Maison d’Artiste by Cornelis van Esteren & Theo van Doesburg, 1923 (reconstructed maquette; coll. The New Institute, Rotterdam)

cardboard behind the lattice-like surface. The shadows cast by her network of shapes are often only visible by examining the structures at oblique angles. These shadows became more variable and the internal reflections more interlaced as the complexity of her arrangements grew. Soon Pereira worked with layered glass and, always in search of reflective qualities, began incorporating marble dust and painted parchment in her ensembles.

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FA I TH R I N G G OL D (b. 1930) Wedding on the Seine (from the French Connection, Part 1: #2) signed, titled, dated and inscribed on a piece of fabric affixed to the reverse THE FRENCH COLLECTION PART 1 #2 WEDDING ON THE SEINE 1991 74” X 89 ½ “ PAINTED STORY QUILT” ACRYLIC O/C by Faith Ringgold acrylic on canvas, tie-dyed, with pieced fabric border 74 x 89 inches Executed in Paris in 1991 Provenance: The artist, New York ACA Galleries, New York (the artist’s dealer as of 1996) Private Collection, New York (acquired directly from the above) Exhibited: Yonkers, NY, The Hudson River Museum of Westchester, The French Collection Story Quilts of Faith Ringgold, Feb. – March, 1996. Akron, OH, Akron Art Museum, Dancing at the Louvre: Faith Ringgold’s French Collection and Other Story Quilts, Jan. – March, 1998 (illustrated in black and white, pps. 18-20; full page in color, pps. 94-95 and in color, pps. 130-131). The exhibition traveled to Berkeley, CA, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, May – Aug., 1998; New York, NY, New Museum of Contemporary Art, Sept. – Dec., 1998; Baltimore, MD, Baltimore Museum of Art, Jan. – April, 1999; Fort Wayne, IN, Fort Wayne Museum of Art, April – June, 1999; Chicago, IL, Chicago Cultural Center, Aug. – Oct., 1999; Virginia Beach, VA, Contempo-

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rary Art Center of Virginia, Nov. 1999 – Jan., 2000; Wichita, KS, Wichita Art Museum, Jan. – April, 2000; Kalamazoo, MI, Kalamazoo Institute for the Arts, Apr. 14 – May 28, 2000; Madison, WI, Madison Art Center, June – Aug., 2000 and Salt Lake City, UT, Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Sept. – Nov., 2000. Middlebury, VT, Middlebury College Museum of Art, Every Picture Tells a Story, Jan. – April, 2004.

Shirley, NY, Dowling College, Anthony Giordano Gallery, Faith Ringgold: Color and Cloth, Sept. – Oct., 2004. New Brunswick, NJ, Rutgers Institute for Women and Art, Mason Gross School of Arts Galleries, Declaration of Independence: 50 Years of Art by Faith Ringgold, May – June, 2009 (illustrated in color, p. 40, fig. 56). Westport, CT, Westport Arts Center. Handmade: Women Reshaping Contemporary Art, March – June, 2018.

Literature: Ringgold, Faith, French Collection, Part I, Being My Own Woman Press, New York, 1992 (illustrated in color, p. 17). Ringgold, Faith. We Flew Over the Bridge: The Memoirs of Faith Ringgold, A Bulfinch Press Book, Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1995 (illustrated, p. 123).

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aith Ringgold is a towering figure in late 20th Century American art. Her countless accomplishments speak to unwavering courage in the face of profound adversity. She came of age in Harlem when its Renaissance was over. She lost her brother Andrew and first husband Earl to heroin, her sister Barbara to alcoholism, but overcame personal tragedy to confront racism and sexism on an institutional level. In a decade when the mainstream art world was preoccupied with

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Ringgold, American People Series #20 Die, 1967, two panels (coll. Museum of Modern Art, New York)

post-painterly theories, she fearlessly made work that was overtly political and put her images front and center with the Civil Rights and Black Liberation movements. She directly addressed the centers of power and led the charge against racism in the museum world, demanding in 1969 that there be a wing at the Museum of Modern Art dedicated to African American artists. Ringgold advanced her objectives through her highly original art, a rich panoply of interdisciplinary mixed-media derived from her ingenious storytelling abilities. With her innovation, the “story quilt,” she redefined the art of quilt-making and elevated it to its highest state of artistry.

In 1963 Ringgold began a four-year series of twenty paintings called The American People, the first seventeen thought-provoking but visually restrained canvases about black and white America. Then came the poignant No. 18 in the series, The Flag is Bleeding. In The Flag is Bleeding, Ringgold’s most famous painting, she introduced her polemic image of a black man and a white couple standing behind the Stars and Stripes in a year characterized by race riots and militant social protest. And purposely absent from the narrative in The Flag is Bleeding is the African American woman.

By 1970, the year Ringgold was arrested for her participation in the Judson Church Flag Sho,* she had fully embraced the Feminist Movement. It is critical not to underestimate the courage of her position, since feminism was widely eschewed not just by androcentric Black Power circles such as the Black Panthers but also by black women in general who perceived their victimization to be the sole result of racism, not sexism. Ringgold, however, understood the inseparable nature of sexism and racism for

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the black woman, a double dilemma. The effect of complex male-female, black-white dynamics had a profound effect on Ringgold’s art, as she came to conceive and devise an alternate, less strident and more inclusive imagery, sustained by well-formed storylines meant to interpret and elucidate genderracial issues.* In the early 1970s Ringgold began making her “soft sculpture,” mostly in the form of costume masks composed of linen shards which she painted, beaded, and wove with raffia, the fiber leaf from the palm tree native to tropical Africa. Aided by her mother, Willi Posey, Ringgold made a series of eleven such costumes, all of which could be worn and which had feminine features. She considered them to be spiritual as well as sculptural, gave them the title The Witch Mask Series, and followed up with her Family of Woman Mask Series. While Ringgold was experimenting in sculpture, she and her daughter Michele visited Europe (Summer, 1972) where, at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, she discovered 14th and 15th Century thangkas** from Nepal and Tibet. This was a landmark moment in her life and art, which directly led to her quilt paintings. When she returned to the United States, Ringgold decided to liberate her canvases from their stretchers and hang them with dowels. Like the thangkas, they became far more portable and disencumbered from male-dominated, art world conventions.

In 1990, while working in her Paris studio and in the South of France, Ringgold created the first of The French Collection series (1991-1994). After the publication of her first children’s book in New York the following year, she returned to Paris and completed nine of the series’ twelve quilts, of which Wedding on the Seine is the second. The French

Collection revolves around the fictional story of aspiring black female artist Willia Marie Simone who becomes successful in France during the 1920s and is a peer of many prominent artists and historical figures of her time, such as Josephine Baker, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso. The series’ first quilt, Dancing at the Louvre, portrays Willia Marie’s friend Marcia and her three little girls dancing in the museum. In the story, Willia Marie takes them to see the Mona Lisa but Marcia and her girls upstage da Vinci and put on a show like the French have never before seen. In the Louvre’s marked absence of artworks by black and women artists, one is reminded of both the influence of European art on Ringgold’s work and the historic hegemony of male European artistic traditions. Handwritten on fourteen panels, seven across the top of the quilt and seven across the bottom, Wedding on the Seine continues the narrative of Dancing at the Louvre by relating a scene from Willia Marie’s marriage to a Frenchman named Pierre. Realizing that this new Ringgold, Dancing at The Louvre, French Collection Series, 1991, Part 1, # 1 (Private Collection)

Faith Ringgold, Mrs. Jones & Family, 1973, from the Family of Woman Mask Series (coll. of the artist)

beginning may bring about an end to her creative development, Willia Marie abruptly throws her wedding bouquet into the Seine River as she flees the ceremony and runs towards her independence.

Hand-Written Artist Text: 1. You could say, I ran comme un dératé, like a bat outta hell. There was only one thing I could think about. Get out of this church and get some air. Never mind what this crowd thinks about it. Run, girl, run. To the river fast as you can. And get rid of these damn flowers and this wedding veil and train. What is this, a funeral?

2. I’ve only been in Paris 6 months. I came to be une artiste, not a wife. I don’t even know the language.

Pierre is American born with French parents, so he speaks l’Anglaise et le Français parfaitement though he loves everything American, le plus noir que possible. But what about his family and his friends?

3. There is something in the way they look at me, as if to say: How did you get so far away from home, l’enfant?

Will you become civilized, or will you remain just a beautiful savage dressed in a Paris frock? The French believe they are the unique civilization. But what about the Bastille, the Nazi collaboration, the Haitian and Algerian revolutions?

4. They will kill with a glass of wine raised for a toast.

Vive la France! And you will be just as dead as if you had your throat cut in some back alley in Harlem over 25 cents and a bottle of beer. Is it because I am a little black girl from Harlem that I don’t believe their charade?

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Ringgold, Echoes of Harlem, 1980 (coll. Studio Museum of Harlem, New York)

beds. I looked back at my wedding procession. They stood frozen, waiting for my next move. Pierre was in front now. An aging man, résolu.

5. Why did I marry this Frenchman? I hardly know him.

He’s more than twice my age, and white. We have very little in common. Il sera un bon mari. Il est très riche et généreux. They all said. “You will be very happy with him, my dear. His family has been in Paris for three generations. He is practically French.”

6. The wedding procession was hot on my heels. Pierre was holding up the rear puffing and blowing. Ne l’arrêtez pas d’aller! Elle reviendra. Elle est le mienne maintenant.

“Let her go. She’ll come back. She’s mine.” I ran even faster. “Pierre will make you a great husband,” someone yelled at me. But will he leave me alone? Or will he make me over into his shadow?

7. Could I be une artiste and a wife? “Take a studio in Paris or in our chateau in the South,” Pierre said. But I don’t even know if I can paint. Now I may never find out.

I ran even faster down the narrow streets to the Ile de la Cité past the Notre Dame Cathedral and on to the PontNeuf, overlooking the Seine.

8. I could have run forever. The wedding procession was gaining on me. I had to make a statement. Something more than “I obey” and “I do.” Cause I don’t, I won’t!

I hurled my bouquet into the river and it landed on the Bateaux Mouche and the crowd of tourists looked up and applauded me with Vive la France!

9. I made my statement. Would it be the last I’d make?

Oh God, don’t let me sink like those flowers. I want to live a life of making art, not babies and dinners and

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10. What does Pierre know about me and the way I was raised in our little tiny apartment in Harlem? Does he understand what my mother and father sacrificed to give me the little they gave me? Does he know that as meager as our life was it was beautiful, and that we loved each other as if we were rich?

11. What do I know about Pierre’s family and his life in the Fifth Avenue town house he was born in New York City? Who was the pretty black girl who changed his diapers and took care of him? Did she look like me? When he is holding me and telling me how much he loves me, is it memories of her that make his voice tremble as it does?

12. Will our children be French? Or French speaking coloreds? And why have I waited till it is too late to ask these questions? Is it because the answers are not as important as amour? For whatever reason, I know he loves me. It may be because I am black that he loves me.

But that’s no reason to run away.

13. Later I learned that Pierre had a serious heart condition with only a few years to live. No wonder I never had to put up with a mistress. He had assez d’amour seulement pour moi. We were together- death do we part Not much time for art or anything else but being with Pierre, and two babies- one a year and then . . .

14. I was again on the Seine, without flowers, applause, or a wedding procession in hot pursuit. I was remembering our wedding day. They were right all the time- Pierre was un bon mari. But would he leave me alone? Could I do my art? Within just three years Pierre died, leaving me alone with my art and two babies.”

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“The stories Ringgold imparts through her art are at times actual records of historical events, but often they offer her personal insight into life situations such as love, marriage, and family related events.

Some of the most sought-after examples of Ringgold’s artistry are the story quilts that she began making during the 1980s.

The artist advanced traditional painting to the stretcher-free design art form after she observed the sewn artistry of Tibetan Buddhist thangkas and African textiles such as Kente cloth and Dahomian appliqués. The styles inspired Ringgold to create a new way of expressing herself that was in line with family traditions. These textile-based works added a revisionist approach to Ringgold’s repertoire, allowing her to continue working in the painterly tradition. From the wedding of ideas emerged an inordinate amount of research into the study of textiles and a revisit to the artistry of her mother, Willi Posey, a clothing designer. Ringgold reinvented herself as a textile-based artist, in the main, whose expression in the medium would be unlimited thereafter.” (Farrington, Lisa E., Faith Ringgold, Pomegranate Communications, Inc., Petaluma, California, 2004, Foreword, Driskell, David C., p. vii)

*On November 14, 1970, three artists, Faith Ringgold, Jean Toche, and John Hendricks, were arrested for desecrating the Flag in a demonstration called the People’s Flag Show at the Judson Memorial Church (Washington Square South). The event was organized to show support for Stephen Radich, a New York City art dealer convicted earlier in the year for violating a state law prohibiting the desecration of the Flag.

Faith Ringgold

** A thangka is a painted or embroidered banner made from silk appliqué (ornamental needlework) and mounted to a textile backing. Usually depicting a Buddhist god or his life, thangkas served an important didactic purpose. While some are small and used for meditation, others are quite large and meant for display on the walls of monasteries during religious festivals. Traditionally, they were unframed and, when not shown, kept rolled.

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CH A R L E S SH E E L E R (1883–1965) Barn Abstraction signed and dated lower right Charles Sheeler–1946 tempera on board 21½ x 29⅜ inches Painted in Pennsylvania in 1946 Provenance: The Downtown Gallery, New York Sidney S. Spivak, New York Davis & Long Company, New York Robert David and Carol Straus, Houston Hirschl & Adler Galleries, New York Andrew Crispo Gallery, New York Sale, Property from the Andrew Crispo Gallery, Sotheby Parke Bernet, New York, Dec. 3, 1987, lot 334 Babcock Galleries, New York Mr. and Mrs. Arthur E. Imperatore, New Hope, Pennsylvania Salander-O’Reilly Galleries, Inc., New York ACA Galleries, New York Private Collection, New York (acquired directly from the above) Exhibited: New York, NY, The Downtown Gallery, Charles Sheeler, Jan. – Feb., 1949, no. 12 (illustrated in black and white). Houston, TX, Contemporary Arts Museum, Sheeler and Dove, Jan., 1951, no. 46.

São Paulo, Brazil, Museum of Modern Art, First Biennial, Oct. – Dec., 1951, no. 63. Fort Worth, TX, Fort Worth Art Center, A Selection of Paintings, Drawings, Prints, Sculpture from the Home and Office Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Robert David Straus, April, 1953, no. 27 (illustrated in black and white). Los

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Angeles, CA, University of California Art Galleries, Charles Sheeler: A Retrospective Exhibition, Oct., 1954, no. 28. The exhibition traveled to San Francisco, CA, M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, Nov., 1954 – Jan., 1955; San Diego, CA, Fine Arts Gallery, Jan. – Feb., 1955; Fort Worth, TX, Fort Worth Art Center, March, 1955; Philadelphia, PA, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, April – May, 1955 and Utica, NY, Munson-Williams-Proctor Art Institute, May – June, 1955. Washington, D.C., Smithsonian Institution, National Collection of Fine Arts, Charles Sheeler, Oct. – Nov., 1968, p. 25, no. 109 (dated 1947). The exhibition traveled to Philadelphia, PA, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Jan. – Feb., 1969 and New York, NY, Whitney Museum of American Art, March – April, 1969, no. 109. New York, NY, Davis & Long Company, American Painting, 1974, no. 32 (illustrated). New York, NY, Hirschl & Adler Galleries, Buildings and Architecture in American Modernism, 1980, no. 70 (illustrated in color, p. 69). New York, NY, Andrew Crispo Gallery, American Works on Paper, 1982, no.

65 (illustrated). Miami, FL, Frances Wolfson Gallery, Miami Dade Community College, The Spirit of Paper: Twentieth Century Americans, 1982, no.

46 (illustrated in black and white). Davenport, IA, Davenport Art Gallery, American Works on Paper: 100 Years of American Art History, Dec., 1983 – Feb., 1984, p. 87, no. 80 (illustrated, p. 111 and front cover color illustration). The exhibition traveled to Little Rock, AR, Arkansas Arts Center, Feb. – April, 1984; Oklahoma City, OK, Oklahoma Art Center, April – May, 1984; Wichita Falls, TX, Wichita Falls Museum, May – July, 1984; Corpus Christi, TX, Art Museum of South Texas, July – Aug., 1984; Kansas City, MO, Nelson-Atkins Museum of

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Art, Aug. – Sept., 1984; Huntsville, AL, Huntsville Museum of Art, Sept. – Nov., 1984; Stillwater, OK, Gardiner Art Gallery, Nov. – Dec., 1984; Pueblo, CO, Sangre de Christo Art Center, Jan. – March, 1985; Lincoln, NE, Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, March – April, 1985; Peoria, IL, Lakeview Museum of Arts & Sciences, May – June, 1985; Salina, KS, Salina Art Center, Aug. – Sept., 1985; Springfield, MO, Springfield Art Museum, Sept. – Nov., 1985 and Terre Haute, IN, Sheldon Swope Art Museum, Nov. – Dec., 1985. Allentown, PA, Allentown Art Museum, Charles Sheeler in Doylestown: American Modernism and the Pennsylvania Tradition, April

Sheeler, Barn Abstraction, conté crayon, 1918 (coll. Philadelphia Museum of Art)

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– June, 1997, no. 44 (illustrated in color, p. 113).

The exhibition traveled to Fort Worth, TX, Amon Carter Museum, Aug. – Nov., 1997 and Cincinnati, OH, Cincinnati Art Museum, Dec., 1997 – March, 1998. New York, NY, Berry-Hill Galleries, Inc. Masters of American Modernism, 2000, pp. 34-5; (illustrated in color). New York, NY, Berry-Hill Galleries, Inc. American Paintings X, New York, 2002, p. 112 ; (illustrated in color with closeup, pps. 113–4). Doylestown, PA, James A. Michener Art Museum, Charles Sheeler: Fashion, Photography, and Sculptural Form, March – July, 2017.

Literature: Dochterman, Lillian N., The Stylistic Development of the Work of Charles Sheeler, State University of Iowa, doctoral dissertation, Iowa City, 1963, no. 47.26.

Friedman, Martin, Charles Sheeler, Watson-Gupil Publications, New York, 1975 (illustrated in color, p. 152). Berman, Ann E., Art & Auction, A Harvest of Homegrown Art, New York, Jan., 2003, p. 120.

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ntermittently throughout his career Charles Sheeler returned to the subject matter he had first explored in the 1910s, Pennsylvania farmhouse barns. In 1940 he expanded on the values of a particular conté crayon drawing he had done in 1918, Barn Abstraction. Part of a series of drawings he executed of Bucks County barns, it was acquired by the vanguard Philadelphia collectors Walter and Louise Arensberg who befriended Sheeler and patronized his photography, paintings, and works on paper. In his 1940 oil painting which he titled Bucks County Barn, Sheeler expanded on his early sketch by introducing pastoral elements in the foreground, including a cow, wagon, and fence. In its enriched rural environment, the barn was now a full-fledged American Scene painting.

In 1946, Sheeler once again revisited the topic of the same barn, this time producing an egg tempera painting on board. He restored the starkness of his original 1918 drawing by removing all bucolic imagery and focusing on the formalistic vigor of Cubism. The rectangular and triangular shapes of Sheeler’s 1946 Barn Abstraction are notably more concrete than in his 1940 genre rendition, their geometry more resolved and contours more defined. Here, Sheeler communicated his fascination with both the translucence of shadow-free forms as well as the obfuscation of shadow and form when the two overlap. He undoubtedly selected tempera with a low-keyed color spectrum

(blue, purple, pink, gray, and taupe) in order to more convincingly convey the subtle implications of imbricated forms and shadows.

Sheeler was born and raised in Philadelphia. He attended the city’s School of Industrial Art, then the Pennsylvania Academy of Art where, like so many of his generation, he studied under the esteemed William Merritt Chase. In 1908, at the MacBeth Gallery in New York, the famed Ashcan School had its landmark exhibition in the form of The Eight. Although some of Sheeler’s paintings were on view at the same venue during the same year, he quickly rejected the Social Realists for a much more imaginative form of modernism. With his close artist friend Morton Schamberg, Sheeler traveled through France and Italy where the two assimilated the art of the new. Upon his return, he began his inexhaustible love affair with American historical themes.

In 1910 Sheeler started renting the 18th Century farmhouse known as the Worthington House near Doylestown, Pennsylvania, which he eventually purchased. All the while working as an architectural photographer in Philadelphia, Sheeler spent every weekend he could at the house, photographing and sketching farms, barns, and the abundant homegrown artifacts of the Pennsylvania countryside. Often Schamberg would accompany him from Philadelphia to the countryside. Steering clear of the neighboring New Hope Impressionists, the two artists shared a burgeoning artistic sensibility. In 1918, Schamberg suddenly fell ill and quickly died in the Great Influenza pandemic.

Crushed by the loss, Sheeler could hardly spend weekends in Doylestown any longer. Still, the bond he had formed with the vernacular of Bucks County remained as strong in him as the one he would soon develop with the modern machine.

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Sheeler, Bucks County Barn, 1940 oil painting (coll. The Art Institute, Chicago)

In 1954 Frederick Wight, chair of the UCLA Art Department, wrote that “what is most American in Sheeler is not the American scene but the American way of seeing.” If the American regionalists Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry were portraying the scene, then Sheeler was paying homage to the object, never deteriorated or dilapidated in his depictions no matter how historic and always occupying an idealized, timeless present.

For Sheeler, the presential purity of the object was testimony to his own values and those of a Yankee, Protestant, capitalist country: work, invention, ownership, worth. Likewise, the object for Sheeler was never meant to be symbolic, neither influenced by an artist’s personality nor redolent with associative meanings. While Cubism enlightened Sheeler, his objects always resisted the theoretical and remained actual, fully themselves in their glacial solitude.

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“One of his first early successes was an abstract drawing of a barn, a barn revealed in its essentials without background of any sort. From there on he has chosen, led by an inscrutable logic, to reveal such studies of barns, with necessary variations, in all their aspects.� (Williams, William Carlos.

Charles Sheeler: A Retrospective Exhibition, Fine Arts Production Committees, University of California, Los Angeles, 1954, p. 7, foreword)

Charles Sheeler, beside a Pennsylvania barn in West Redding, Connecticut, circa 1932; photographed by Edward Steichen (coll. Museum of Modern Art, New York, gift of Samuel M. Kootz, Estate of Edward Steichen / Artist Rights Society (ARS), NY

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RAPH A E L SOYE R (1899–1987) Under the Bridge

the structure’s architecture. In reviewing photographic images of contemporary New York City bridges, the overpass he painted across the East River matches that of the Williamsburg Bridge, with its massive Manhattan terminus at Delancey Street in the heart of the Lower East Side. A year or so prior, Soyer painted the site specific Under the Williamsburg Bridge (coll. Jewish Museum, New York) in which its span over the river is not visible.

The bridge was constructed during the final years of the 19th Century to facilitate transportation between Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and the Lower East Side, districts which were both experiencing explosions in their immigrant populations.

oil on canvas 26¼ x 32⅛ in.

Painted in New York, circa 1932 Provenance: The artist, New York Mary Soyer, New York Exhibited: New York, NY, Whitney Museum of American Art, Raphael Soyer, Oct. – Dec., 1967 (illustrated in black and white, p. 30). The exhibition traveled to Chapel Hill, NC, University of North Carolina, William Hayes Ackland Memorial Center, Jan. – Feb., 1968; Atlanta, GA, High Museum of Art, Feb. – April, 1968; San Francisco, CA, Palace of the Legion of Honor, June, 1968; Columbus, OH, Gallery of Fine Arts, July – Aug., 1968; Minneapolis, MN, Institute of Arts, Sept. – Oct., 1968 and Des Moines, IA, Art Center, Nov. – Dec., 1968. New York, NY, Forum Gallery, Raphael Soyer: 20 Great Paintings, Jan. – March, 1995 (illustrated full page and in color).

Roslyn Harbor, NY, Nassau County Museum of Art, The Ashcan Tradition, Aug. – Nov., 2001.

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Literature: Goodrich, Lloyd, Raphael Soyer, H.N. Abrams, New York, 1972, referenced, pps. 18–19 (illustrated in color, pps. 58–59).

Note: Soyer omitted from the title the name of the bridge depicted, perhaps to maintain focus on the scene at hand rather than draw attention to

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s an artist, Raphael Soyer came of age just as the Great Depression began, and he painted many of his most important canvases during the 1930s and early 1940s in New York City. He depicted the reality of American’s largest city with an authenticity that made him the most important Social (or Urban) Realist painter of the time.

While he was active in New York organizations aligned with the political Left, Soyer shielded his art from outside influences, captured life as it was, and let his paintings speak for themselves. The people and scenes he chose to portray, and the humanity with which he did so, speak to Soyer’s benevolent character and to his heartfelt empathy for the indigent he came across, pictured, and even be-friended.* In the mid-1930s, Soyer began tackling other aspects of urban life, less the unemployed homeless and more the working lower class, in particular young women, office or shop girls, and housewives. But during the first, dark years of the Depression, such as 1932 when

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Hardlulcksville aka Hard Luck Town or Hard-Luck-on-the-River, New York’s largest Hooverville, circa 1932, East River between 8th & 10th Streets (photograph coll . museum of the city of new york )

half of New York City’s manufacturing plants had closed and one in three New Yorkers was out of a job, Soyer headed to the Lower East Side, the Bowery, Union Square, and further South to the base of the Williamsburg Bridge, in order to chronicle a reality which few could have predicted or imagined.

Raphael Soyer and his twin brother Moses were born in the city of Borisoglebsk between Moscow and the Black Sea in the Southern Russian province of Voronezh Oblast. Their father, Abraham, was a Hebrew writer, scholar, and teacher who fostered the humanities both at his school and at home. As children, Moses and Raphael read the great Russian writers as well as Dickens and Mark Twain (in translation), discovered the seminal painters of Western art, and began to draw. Due to the ongoing oppression of Jews in Czarist Russia, in 1912 the Soyer family emigrated to the United States, settling in Brooklyn. In 1914, the

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twins enrolled at the free evening classes offered at Cooper Union, where their formal art training began and where they remained until 1918. Then Moses went to study at the Educational Alliance Reginald Marsh, East 10th Street Jungle, 1934 (coll. Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut)

Williamsburg Bridge, view from Lower East Side, Manhattan, circa 1904, upon its completion (photograph coll . detroit publishing company )

and Raphael at the National Academy of Design where, for four years, he learned traditional painting technique by working from life models in the realist tradition.

While at the Academy, however, and after leaving it, Raphael also took courses at the Arts Students League. There, he came under the guidance and professorship of painter Guy Pène du Bois (whose own teacher had been famed Ashcan School leader Robert Henri), who encouraged Soyer to paint his own real-life surroundings, and to do so instinctively. Throughout the remaining years of Soyer, Under the Williamsburg Bridge, 1931 (coll.

Jewish Museum, New York)

the decade, Soyer continued to develop and work through what he described as his own “primitive” period, when his canvases shared the simplified pictorial space and naïve subject matter (albeit more personal in the case of Soyer) as those of the French “primitivist” painter Henri Rousseau.

Raphael’s most meaningful piece of this time is Dancing Lesson (1926), an enchanting composition of his sister Rebecca teaching Moses to dance while his parents look on and brother Isaac plays the harmonica. The piece eventually led to the art dealer Charles Daniel offering Soyer his first solo exhibition (April, 1929).

Within four months of Soyer’s one-man show at the Daniel Gallery, the stock market crashed, drastically reshaping America. Shantytowns, or Hoovervilles, named after president Herbert Hoover and built by and for the homeless, sprang up about the nation. In New York City, for instance, they were found on the Great Lawn in

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Central Park (“Hoover Valley”) and at Riverside Park along the Hudson (“Camp Thomas Paine”).

Near where Soyer commonly painted and not far from the Bowery Mission, where New York City’s homeless converged for food and shelter, were the Hoovervilles known as “Packing Box City” on Houston Street and “Hardlucksville” on the East River, the latter by August of 1932 consisting of about 450 men living in sixty shacks occupying two blocks on East 9th and 10th Streets. In November of that year, a new president was elected, Franklin Roosevelt, who pushed through Congress his overarching New Deal program within his first hundred days in office. But recovery would prove to be a long, slow road. For Soyer, poverty, privation, and abandonment were not abstract concepts to which he had to adjust. They filled the pages of the Russian authors he had read as a youth. Moreover, as an Eastern European Jew, fear of itinerancy had always been an unfortunate part of his ethnic past. In New York, he adapted to the new hardships just as his painting style adapted to “Urban Realism.”

Soyer, Men at the Mission, 1933, black and white lithograph, edition of 25

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When, around 1932, Soyer painted Under the Bridge, he was continuing the narrative of his 1931 Under the Williamsburg Bridge, a composition in which vagrant men, all identically dressed, loiter about the steel girders below the overpass. Some of them nap in what appears to be the glow of late afternoon sun. In Soyer’s second painting, the viewer is once again Under the Bridge, only this time in the dead of winter with the street (most likely Rivington) and sidewalks partially covered by snow and ice. On one side a row of horsedrawn carts reading “Surprise Laundry” lay in wait; on the other groups of homeless men, some recumbent, huddle beneath the colossal stone terminus of the Williamsburg Bridge. Like Walker Evans and Berenice Abbott, whose candid photography overlapped his canvases in time and venue, Soyer, in his own nascent, painterly style was documenting for posterity a bleak but consequential time in American history.

“Soyer did not need the Depression to make him aware of the facts of life in most of New York; he had lived with them since childhood. As boy and youth he had roamed the streets, drawing the people of the East Side. About 1933 he embarked on a series of paintings and prints of life on the Bowery and Fourteenth Street, focusing on the derelicts – men existing without hope, begging, sleeping in parks and under bridges, dependent on missions for food and shelter. Three bums on benches in Union Square, one asleep, the others looking lost, while in the background the Father of His Country rides his bronze horse.”

Goodrich, Lloyd, Raphael Soyer, exhibition catalogue, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1967, p. 12)

* Raphael came to know many of the dispossessed he pictured, which accounts for both his ready access to and intimate portrayal of them, as well as for the recurring faces that appear in his paintings of the period.

After sketching the impoverished, Soyer would sometimes invite them back to his studio for a more in-depth painting session, even furnishing them with a little money and a night’s lodging. For example, Soyer depicted the elderly homeless man Walter Broe, whom he first encountered picking up dropped coins through a subway grill using a long pole and chewing gum, numerous times. Soyer soon dignified the down-and-out Mr. Broe by introducing him to fellow painters, Reginald Marsh, Isabel Bishop, and Katherine Schmidt who also immortalized him in their own work.

Raphael Soyer (photograph by

peter a . juley & son )

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G E O RG E TO O KE R (1920–2011) The Red Carpet signed lower left Tooker egg tempera on gessoed panel 16 x 20¼ inches Painted in Brooklyn, New York, in 1953 Provenance: Edwin Hewitt Gallery, New York Nananne Porcher, New York Private Collection, Cape Cod, Massachusetts (by descent from the above, 2001) Private Collection, New York Exhibited: Hanover, NH, Jaffe-Friede Gallery, Dartmouth College, George Tooker, Aug. – Sept., 1967. Ogunquit, ME, Ogunquit Museum of America Art, Reality and Dream: The Art of George Tooker, Aug. – Sept., 1996.

New York, National Academy Museum, George Tooker: A Retrospective, pl. 22 (illustrated in color, p. 128). The exhibition traveled to Philadelphia, PA, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Jan. – April, 2009 and Columbus, OH, Columbus Museum of Art, May – Sept., 2009. New York, NY, DC Moore Gallery, George Tooker (1920–2011): Reality Returns as a Dream, a Memorial Exhibition, June – Aug., 2011, p. 80 (illustrated full page and in color, p. 25).

Literature: Garver, Thomas H., George Tooker, Clarkson N. Potter Publishers, Inc., New York, 1985, p. 53 (illustrated full page and in color).

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Note: Nananne Porcher (1922–2001) likely acquired The Red Carpet from Edwin Hewitt in New York, the gallery which gave Tooker his first major exhibition in 1951. At the time, Porcher was the technical director and lighting designer for the New York City Ballet (1950-1956, 1958), whose legendary cofounder Lincoln Kirstein was also an enthusiast of George Tooker.

B

efore becoming an artist George Tooker obliged his parents by completing his formal education, which he did at the Philips Academy prep school in Massachusetts followed by Harvard University. In 1943 Tooker enrolled at the Art Students League in New York City where he principally studied under Reginald Marsh, the great Urban Realist who introduced him to the medium of egg tempera. At the League, Tooker soon met Paul Cadmus, another brilliant tempera painting disciple of Marsh. Both were highly influenced by Quattrocento Italian painters, Tooker mostly by Piero della Francesca and Paolo Uccello, Cadmus by Andrea Mantegna and Luca Signorelli. Cadmus introduced Tooker to fashion photographer George Platt Lynes, ballet and art connoisseur Lincoln Kirstein, and yet another deft representational painter in tempera, Jared French. Tooker and Cadmus were lovers and the group was tight-knit, nurturing, and long-lasting. Tooker, Cadmus, and French spent the Summer of 1945 together on Fire Island (Long Island), the following Summer on Nantucket, and those of 1947 and ’48 in Provincetown, Massachusetts. During the final years of the 1940s Tooker reached his mature style, a figurative one in which he formulated his subjects with the

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Tooker, Government Bureau, 1956 (coll. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

exacting precision possible via tempera and formatted them within a geometrically conceived Renaissance framework.

In 1950, Lincoln Kirstein curated the exhibition Symbolic Realism at New York’s Edwin Hewitt Gallery, in which he consolidated the work of certain painters (including Tooker, Cadmus, French, Peter Blume, Henry Koerner, and Andrew Wyeth) who were working in a stylistically unconventional, albeit loosely associated, representational manner during the maelstrom of abstract expressionism.

Kirstein classified the realist paintings as “symbolic,” “metaphysical,” or in the case of Tooker “Magic Realist,” a term which, to the artist’s dismay, firmly affixed itself to him for the rest of his life and thereafter. Magic Realist painting had its roots in mid-1920s Weimar Germany when Christian Schad and Carl Grossberg distanced themselves from the expressionism of other New Objectivity artists and moved towards a more simplified, New or “Magic” Realism. Upon the movement’s immigration to the United States, Alfred Barr of the Museum of Modern Art proffered the descriptive word “improbable” to differentiate its aesthetic values from the “impossible” scenes represented by Surrealism.* Tooker, however, always refuted that he was painting anything other than mere reality as he experienced it, neither impossible, dream-like Surrealism nor improbable, life-warping Magic Realism. Hence, while Paul Delvaux and George Tooker compositions may share similar content, it is noteworthy that both the genesis and intentionality of each’s imagery are very different.

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In 1953, Tooker and his life partner, William Christopher, managed to purchase a brownstone on State Street in a diverse and unfashionable part of Brooklyn Heights. In the same year, Tooker painted The Red Carpet, depicting three figures in the Puerto Rican rooming house across State Street from his apartment. As Thomas Garver recorded in his perceptive essay about the work, the left-most figure in the composition is the first manifestation of the trance-like, hypnotic gaze which came to pervade many of Tooker’s future canvases, and which developed into a distinctive hallmark of his overall work.

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“Red Carpet (1953) is a picture based on a glimpse into a basement room in a Puerto Rican apartment house in the neighborhood. From that glimpse, Tooker reinvented the scene, investing in the simple room and its occupants a complex visual iconography influenced, in turn, by his reading of Robert Graves’s interpretation of the theme of the White Goddess. This creature, a synthesis from a number of mythological and religious sources, is an extension and embodiment of the three Fates of Greek and Roman mythology, those three figures of destiny that rule birth, life, and death. {. . .} The composition supports the curious stares of these three figures. Two of them gaze across the almost empty expanse of room, and their placement at the lower left corner gives emphasis to the closed geometry of the space, pressed forward by the remarkable red rug – a Tooker invention. The color is that of passion, this time a passion of the imagination, of the transformation Tooker has wrought upon these figures and the new meaning he has cast upon them. It is perhaps the figure at the left, the one who stares out

George Tooker (photograph by friend and fashion photographer George Platt Lynes, 1907–1955)

beyond the picture plane, that most captures our attention. The eyes appear to see the viewer, yet without making eye contact.

She appears to be transfixed, utterly lost in thought.” (Garver, Thomas H., George Tooker, Clarkson N. Potter Publishers, Inc., New York, 1985, p. 51)

The White Goddess, closeup of the frontispiece to Robert Graves’ 1948 novel.

The indecipherable altered state, evinced by The Red Carpet, most hauntingly distinguished Tooker’s output by the 1950s. It appeared again individually in the wide-eyed look of The Artist’s Daughter (1955), then propagated to evenly inhabit the nearly identical figures in his canvases Sleepers II (1959), Lunch (1964), and Teller (1967). Later in Tooker’s life when his work began to be reexamined for its chilling narrative, which had survived waves of abstraction, it seemed as germane and cautionary as ever to contemporary life: deadpan monotony reinforced by stifling confinement in a world of institutionalized automatism run by the collective nameless.

The stuporous “stare” Tooker originated in his Red Carpet had congealed his paintings of social concern into ruminations on mass human estrangement, man’s very fear of “becoming a thing among the very things he produces.”**

*Barr, Alfred H. Jr. on Magic Realism: “A term sometimes applied to the work of painters who by means of an exact realistic technique try to make plausible and convincing their improbable, dreamlike or fantastic visions.” (MoMA, Painting and Sculpture in the Museum of Modern Art, 1942, and MoMA, American Realists and Magic Realists, 1943) **Tillich, Paul Johannes. This partial quote is extracted from Tillich’s prefatory note to Peter Selz’s catalogue (p. 9) for the 1959 exhibition New Images of Man at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in which the German-American theologian raises existential questions of human existence: “There are demonic forces in every man which try to take possession of him, and the new images of man shows faces in which the anxiety at the thought of living is predominant, and again in others there are feelings of emptiness, meaninglessness and despair.” (p. 10)

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