Cubist Perspectives

CUBIST

PERSPECTIVES

P E R S P E C T I V E S S E PTEMB ER 14 – N OV EM BER 14, 2016

Georges Valmier Personnage debout, 1920 Gouache and collage on paper 10.63 x 8.25 in.

19 E AS T 66 T H S TR EE T

N EW Y O R K , NY 10065

212.202.3270

WW W. RO S EN BE R GC O . C OM

P E R S P E C T I V E S S EPTEMBER 14 – D ECEMBER 21, 2016

19 E AST 66 TH S TREET

N EW Y OR K , NY 10065

212.202.3270

W W W. R OSE N B E R GC O . C OM

Gino Severini Harlequins, 1922 Pastel on grey paper 19.29 x 12.8 in.

INTRODUCTION

“Le cubisme est l’art de peindre des ensembles nouveaux avec des elements empruntés non à la réalité de vision, mais à la réalité de conception.”

G UI L L AUME A PP OL L I N AI R E

UBISM IS, according to Guillaume Apollinaire, the art of depicting new

composites with elements borrowed not from the reality of vision but from that of ideas. The formal historical definition of Cubism is considered to be an avant-garde art movement of the early twentieth century in which objects are depicted from a multitude of viewpoints to represent the subject as part of its context.

The definition matters much less than the irrefutable fact that from the seed of Cubism grew a reassessment of pictorial perspectives that endured through subsequent movements. It remains an endless source of wonderment and influence. The movement’s very essence enables interpretation and integration into various other art forms and media. The visual language and the geometric clues of Cubism are like Lego pieces with endless construction possibilities.

Art historians may debate when Cubism reached its apogee, how or where it was modified, and how it was abandoned. A wider and bolder perspective on Cubism reveals that Cubism in its very essence remains a vibrant and ever present source of inspiration and expression to this very date.

This exhibition of course does not purport to provide a complete retrospective of the history and evolution of Cubism. It is an invitation to a voyage through one of the most enduring visual and intellectual ideas in the arts.

M A RIA N N E R O S E N B E R G

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CUBIST

PERSPECTIVES

HE EXHIBITION Cubist Perspectives and this accompanying catalogue

are invitations to follow the development of Cubism from twentiethcentury Paris up until the present moment. The works by artists such as Serge Férat, Auguste Herbin, Jean Metzinger, and Georges Valmier allow the viewer to witness Cubism’s birth in Paris at the turn of the twentieth-century. Crossing the Atlantic, the viewer is summoned to the artist colony of Provincetown, Massachusetts, where Karl Knaths, Blanche Lazzell, and Kenneth Stubbs kept the Cubist aesthetic alive. Finally, works by Marcin Dudek, Oleg Kudryashov, and Tom John bring the viewer back to the twenty-first century and demonstrate how contemporary artists continue to find inspiration in their Cubist predecessors.

PA R I S A ND T HE B IRTH O F C UBISM From 1907 to 1920, a handful of ambitious artists and writers in Paris developed what would become one of the most influential art movements: Cubism. On the slopes of Montmartre, a Spanish expatriate and a house painter’s son were engaged in a fruitful collaboration, creating some of the most groundbreaking works in the history of art.

Meanwhile, in the sleepy suburb of Puteaux, a group of artists and writers met regularly to discuss how best to promulgate this new artistic movement. Although there was some exchange of ideas between these two groups, for the most part they developed Cubism independently, and it was only in 1912 that Albert Gleize’s and Jean Metzinger’s seminal publication, Du Cubisme, offered a coherent view of the movement and its theoretical underpinnings.

The Montmartre Cubists, as they are often called, centered around two young artists: Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. Picasso and Braque first met in 1907 and soon became close friends and collaborators; by 1910 their collaboration was so intense that — even for art historians — it is sometimes difficult to tell their works apart. They would work side-by-side in Picasso’s studio in Le Bateau-Lavoir, a decrepit building in Montmartre. There, they were joined by the poets and art critics Guillaume Apollinaire and André Salmon, along with the

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artists Juan Gris and Marie Laurencin. Meanwhile, a separate group had begun gathering in Puteaux, a town on the Western banks of the Seine. The Salon Cubists, as they came to be known, included the three brothers Jacques Villon, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, and Marcel Duchamp, along with Albert Gleize and Jean Metzinger.

While the Montmartre Cubists rarely showed their works, the Salon Cubists were determined to exhibit publicly and frequently, first at the 1910 Salon d’Automne, and then at the 1911 Salon des Indépendants, where they were joined by Fernand Léger, Robert Delaunay, and Marie Laurencin (who was previously working alongside the Montmartre Cubists). The following year, 1912, was a watershed moment for the Cubists on both sides of the Seine.

In Montmartre, Georges Braque invented his papier collé technique, which enabled him to incorporate ordinary objects such as newspapers, cigarette boxes, and playing cards onto his paintings. This technical breakthrough catalyzed a transformation in both his and Picasso’s Cubism — a transformation that is now recognized as the shift from Analytic to Synthetic Cubism.1 Meanwhile, the artists in Puteaux had been joined by a second-wave of Cubists, including Joseph Csáky, Roger de la Fresnaye, František Kupka, and Henri Laurens. Together, they began to prepare for the largest Cubist exhibition to date: the Salon de la Section d’Or, to be held at the Galerie la Boétie2 in October of 1912. To coincide with the start of the exhibition, Albert Gleize and Jean Metzinger wrote Du Cubisme, the first theoretical text explaining the origins of the movement. More so than any other pre-war exhibition, the Salon de la Section d’Or and its accompanying publication Du Cubisme introduced the Parisian public to the revolutionary artistic movement.

C UB I SM A ND T HE G A LE RIE D E L’E FFORT M ODE RNE The fervor of the early Cubists languished during World War I, as numerous artists enlisted in the war effort. By the time armistice was declared in 1918, many of the early Cubists and their champions (including Georges Braque, Roger de la Fresnaye, Fernand Léger, Jean Metzinger, and the poet Guillaume Apollinaire) had served in the war. And with such an integral group of early Cubists away at war, many who were left behind began to use Cubism as a jumping-off point for related artistic movements, such as Orphism, Futurism, Constructivism, and Dada.

With the war over, however, Cubism began once more to gain prominence due in a large part to the support of the gallerist Léonce Rosenberg and his Galerie de l’Effort Moderne.

After opening the gallery in 1918, Léonce became an adamant champion of the movement, organizing solo shows for the Cubist artists Joseph Csáky, Juan Gris, Auguste Herbin, Henri

Analytic Cubism was highly theoretical, with artists trying to deconstruct images into a myriad of facets and perspectives. In comparison, Synthetic Cubism was more intuitive and spontaneous. By incorporating external materials and imitative textures, artists sought to represent objects with symbols and fragments.

1

2

Galerie la Boétie was a private exhibition gallery, unrelated to Paul Rosenberg’s gallery at 21, Rue La Boétie.

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Oleg Kudryashov Composition (Plate 2413) , 1997 Drypoint and watercolor on paper 41.25 x 28.75 in.

Laurens, Fernand Léger, Jean Metzinger, Pablo Picasso, Gino Severini, and Georges Valmier.

Along with the gallery, Léonce directed the publishing house Éditions de l’Effort Moderne, which published the Bulletin de l’Effort Moderne, an art journal that championed Cubism and included articles written by Léonce and various artists, poets, and critics.

I NF LUENC ES O N C UBISM : S CIE NCE , C É ZA NNE , A ND A FRIC A N A R T To understand Cubism is to understand the intellectual milieu that produced it. Paris in the early twentieth-century was the artistic and literary heart of Europe, attracting an influx of creatives from across the European continent. They congregated in cafés, salons, and bars to discuss art, philosophy, and science. Of particular interest to the avant-garde café crowd were the writings of mathematician Henri Poincaré, most notably his 1902 book Science and Hypothesis in which Poincaré outlined modern scientific and mathematical discoveries that had shattered previous assumptions about the nature of reality.

In terms accessible to laymen, Poincaré detailed what he considered the most important scientific breakthroughs of the past century. In physics, he described Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen’s discovery of x-rays in 1895, and J. J. Thompson’s discovery two years later of the first subatomic particle: the electron. Both discoveries shed light on the internal structure of objects, revealing marvels invisible to the naked eye. Poincaré also explained theoretical breakthroughs in mathematics, such as the work of the nineteenth-century German mathematician Bernhard Riemann, who posited that objects change shape as they traverse irregular surfaces. Furthermore, Poincaré outlined his own rebuttal of Euclidean geometry, arguing that our notion of geometrical space is nothing but a construction of the mind to facilitate our interactions with the world. For Poincaré, any chosen geometric system is merely a convention we can use to arrive at a given end — regardless of whether that end is solving a differential equation or simply going for a walk. Thanks to Poincaré’s coherent explanations, these theoretical breakthroughs — the proof of hidden realities and multiple geometric systems outside of human perception — catalyzed the development of Cubism.

Meanwhile, the French colonial empire was at its peak, second only to Britain in terms of geographical area. Artworks and artifacts from France’s overseas colonies were displayed at the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro, the first anthropological museum in Paris. Of the early Cubists, Pablo Picasso was especially fascinated by the aesthetic properties of objects returning from France’s conquests, in particular the art from West and Central Africa. He was awestruck by the reversal of concave and convex lines in masks produced by the Fang people in present-day Gabon and Guinea, and the sculptures of the Bateke in the present-day Democratic Republic of Congo that broke the human body down into simple geometric shapes. Through African art, Picasso saw how shapes and forms could be distorted while retaining their essential signifiers.

While Picasso was most influenced by African art, Georges Braque and other early Cubists such as Henri Hayden, Auguste Herbin, Jean Metzinger, and Georges Valmier sought

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inspiration from the oeuvre of Post-Impressionist painter Paul Cézanne. Cézanne died in 1906, a year before Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso created their first Cubist works, but in the last decade of his life he exhibited frequently at his dealer Ambroise Vollard’s gallery, as well as at the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d’Automne. Therefore, it is almost certain that all the young Cubists encountered Cézanne’s paintings during their time in Paris. And for the early Cubists, Cézanne’s art was nothing short of revolutionary. He would deliberately distort perspective and tilt the the surfaces of objects towards the viewer, offering a view of the world that was more all-encompassing than that afforded to the naked eye. These distortions allowed him to find a balance between rendering the pictorial space voluminous and three-dimensional, while still preserving the flatness of the canvas as picture-plane.

Similarly to Poincaré’s ideas of geometries as mere conventions, these innovations proved to the Cubists that there were a myriad of ways to depict surfaces and space.

Armed with new ways of seeing and thinking about the world, the Cubists began to translate these understandings into an innovative new aesthetic. They fractured images into overlapping and intersecting surface planes, and created new geometries by channeling the dynamic and vibrating energies underlying static appearances. Although Cubism frequently seemed incomprehensible and otherworldly to early twentieth-century viewers, in fact it was deeply indebted to the science, philosophy, and politics of its time.

A C ROSS T HE P OND : A M E RIC A N C UBISM Unlike in Paris, where the advances made by the Montmartre and Puteaux groups were gradually unveiled to the art world and general public, Cubism arrived in the United States with all the subtlety of a backfiring car. In 1913, the Armory Show exploded upon New York, offering many Americans their first taste of the European avant-garde. From February to March of that year, the city was awash with talk of Cubism, which seemed to laymen, artists, and critics alike an indecipherable and opaque artistic movement. Even the venerable New York Times took a jab at the Cubists, publishing an interview with Kenyon Cox (whom they described as “one of America’s foremost painters”) in which he derisively dismissed Cubism by stating that “it is my conviction that the Cubists and the Futurists are giving us a wigglety-wagglety-wigglety variety of art.”3 Despite America’s abrupt introduction to Cubism and its offshoots, American artists learned to comprehend and expand upon the aesthetic developments of early twentiethcentury Paris. One year after the Armory Show, and roughly three hundred and fifty miles from the hubbub of New York, the Provincetown Art Association was inaugurated in Provincetown, Massachusetts. By the summer of 1916, more than two hundred artists and students had descended upon Provincetown, including expatriate artists who had studied in Paris and returned to the United States with the outbreak of World War I. Among the artists in Provincetown were Blanche Lazelle, who used woodcut prints to develop her own 3

“Cubists and Futurists are Making Insanity Pay,” The New York Times, March 16, 1913.

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personal interpretation of Cubism, and Karl Knaths, who also pursued his unique vein of Cubism. Some fifteen years later, the young artist Kenneth Stubbs would arrive in Provincetown, and become equally enchanted with the Cubist ideas taught to him by his teacher Ambrose E. Webster. While the New York School of artists used the conceptual breakthrough of Cubism as a springboard for succeeding art move ments, in Provincetown the spirit of Cubism was kept alive.

C O NTE M PORA RY I NTE RPRE TATIONS It is not hard to find parallels between our present moment and the tumultuous period from which Cubism was born, even if over a century has passed. In the early 1900s, just as today, society was rife with new technologies and discoveries that reorganized how humans interacted. Now that we are faced with an onslaught of “disruptive innovations” that promise to change not just the global market but also the very minutiae of our lives, Cubism has returned as a wellspring of inspiration and wisdom. The contemporary artists included in Cubist Perspectives look to the lessons provided by the early Cubists to guide their work.

Although some of the artists respond to the tradition of Cubism with a formalist continuation, others choose a more conceptual interpretation of the genre. While the mixedmedia compositions of Robert Marc and the papier collé masterpiece by Sophia Vari explicitly reference the techniques and visual lexicon employed by the early Cubists, Marcin Dudek and Oleg Kudryashov instead use the geometric underpinnings of Cubism to explore the industrial character of their ex-Soviet nations. Echoes of Braque’s experimentations with Synthetic Cubism appear in Morris Barazani’s collage; Tom John channels František Kupka and Fernand Léger’s colorful mechanistic forms in his exquisite drawings; and Lachlan Thom’s Futurist-titled Blue Steel bears traces not only of the Cubists, but also of Paul Cézanne and Joan Miro. But regardless of how they choose to reinterpret the movement, the contemporary artists selected for Cubist Perspectives demonstrate that the legacy of Cubism has endured well into the twenty-first century.

E LLIO T T B RO O K S ROSENBERG & CO.

Henri Laurens Femme Nue Allongée, 1937

Gouache and pencil on cardboard 4.49 x 12.01 in.

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JEAN

(HANS) ARP

EAN ARP was a French sculptor, painter, and one of the key figures in the

creation of Dada. But even before the birth of Dada, Arp participated in many of the notable twentieth-century avant-garde art movements. After studying art at the Académie Julian in Paris, in 1911 Arp moved to the Swiss town Weggis, where he founded the art group Der Moderne Bund (The Modern Alliance). The following year, while traveling in Munich, Arp met the German Expressionist painter Wassily Kandinsky, and joined Wassily’s group Der Blaue Reiter. Arp also became associated with the group Der Sturm, and exhibited with them in Berlin in 1913. In 1914, Arp moved back to Paris, where he befriended many of the artistic luminaries of the time, including Sonia and Robert Delaunay, Amedeo Modigliani, Pablo Picasso, and the writer Max Jacob. After the war, Arp moved to Zurich, where he became one of the founders of the Dada movement.

It was also in Zurich that Arp met the woman who would become his artistic collaborator and wife, Sophie Taeuber. The two became known for their series of “Duo Collages” that they made together. In 1926, Arp and Taeuber moved back to France, and in 1930 Arp joined the avantgarde group Cercle et Carré. During this time, he made his famous series of “papiers déchirés:” torn paper collages guided by randomness and chance. During World War II, Arp and Taeuber moved back to Zurich one last time, and in 1943 Taeuber tragically died from a malfunctioning stove’s carbon monoxide emissions. Grieving from his wife’s unexpected death, Arp returned to Meudon where he wrote a series of essays on poetry dedicated to Taueber while continuing his experiments with abstraction.

In Arp’s last decade of life he reached worldwide acclaim; he received the Grand Prize for Sculpture at the 1954 Venice Biennale and was given retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1958) and at the Musée Nationale d’Art Moderne in Paris (1962).

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Jean (Hans) Arp

Collage sur fond blanc

Provenance

b. 1887, Strasburg, Germany

Ink, gouache, graphite, and collage on paper

Dominion Gallery, Montreal

d. 1966, Basel, Switzerland

13.5 x 11 in.

[Sotheby’s New York, Impressionist & Modern Art Sale, May 26, 2016, lot 78] Rosenberg & Co., New York

MORRIS

BARAZANI

ORRIS BARAZANI was a Chicago-based abstract painter who was

particularly involved in the American Modernism movement of the mid-century. After serving in World War II, Barazani first studied at Stanford University, and then at the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Institute of Design.

Called the “New Bauhaus,” the school was founded by László Moholy-Nagy, whose Constructivist philosophy asserted a large influence on Morris Barazani’s early career. After graduating from the Institute of Design in 1948, Barazani and his wife moved to Detroit, where he attended Cranbook Academy. The two also opened Circle Gallery, an independent art exhibition space. In 1949, Barazani exhibited at the seminal Momentum Exhibition in Chicago. He founded DePaul University’s art department, and taught for many years at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In 1969, Barazani was invited to serve as the director of the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois Chicago Circle Campus.

In 2014, a year before he died, Barazani was given a retrospective at the Ukrainian Institute for Modern Art, Chicago.

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Morris Barazani

Collage #16, 1964

Provenance

b. 1924, Highland Park, Michigan

Collage on paper

John Toomey Gallery, Oak Park, IL

d. 2015, Steuben, Wisconsin

13 x 13 in.

Rosenberg & Co., New York

HANS

BURKHARDT

ORN IN Switzerland at the beginning of the twentieth century, Hans

Burkhardt endured a tumultuous childhood. When he was only three years old, his father moved to the United States to seek work. Three years later, Burkhardt’s mother died, and he and his sister were sent to an orphanage.

Growing up in the orphanage, Burkhardt would frequently visit the museum in Basel, teaching himself how to paint by copying the masterpieces hanging there.

As a young man, Burkhardt moved to the United States, where he was reunited with his father. He found work in the decorating department of a furniture factory, but he would spend his nights and weekends attending art classes at Cooper Union and at the Grand Central School of Art. It was at the latter institution that Burkhardt met Arshile Gorky, who offered to give Burkhardt private lessons. In 1937 Burkhardt moved to Los Angeles, becoming one of the seminal Modernists of the West Coast.

His unique oeuvre blends aspects of Abstract Expressionism and Cubism — as he once said, “I don’t make a painting to please people, I make it to express something. If people like it, it’s fine; if they don’t like it, it’s just too damn bad.” In his lifetime, Burkhardt received solo shows at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1976-1977), and the Portland Art Museum, Maine (1985). His work appears in the collections of the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco; the British Museum, London; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Kunstmuseum, Basel; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles; and the Portland Museum of Art, Oregon.

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Hans Burkhardt

Untitled, 1939

Provenance

b. 1904, Basel, Switzerland

Charcoal on paper

Acquired from the artist

d. 1994, Los Angeles, California

17.38 x 23.88 in.

Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, Los Angeles Rosenberg & Co., New York

JOSEPH

CSÁKY

OSEPH CSÁKY was a pioneer of Cubist sculpture who, contemporaneously

with Pablo Picasso, revolutionized the discipline. Notably Csáky’s 1911 bust Tête Cubiste was made the same year as Picasso’s first sculptures. He exhibited alongside his Cubist contemporaries in some of Paris’s most important avant-garde exhibitions, including the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts (1910–1911), the Salon de la Section d’Or (1911), the “Cubist Room” of the Salon d’Automne (1911, 1912), and the Salon des Indépendants (1912).

Csáky’s artistic education began in 1905, when he enrolled at the Mintarajziskola (The School of Decorative Arts) in Budapest. However, he only lasted a year at the Mintarajziskola; he found the pedagogy to be too traditional, and so he began instead to work in the arts — first in the studio of painter and designer László Kimnach, and later in a porcelain factory and a lead foundry in Budapest.

These work experiences provided him with the skill-set to excel as a sculptor. In 1908, he moved to Paris, where he attended the Académie de la Palette. He also moved into the famous studio complex La Ruche, which was a dirt-cheap artist residency complex in Montparnasse.

With the start of World War I, Csáky volunteered to fight in the French army, and in 1922 he became a naturalized French citizen. When he returned to civilian life, Csáky continued working in the Cubist vein, while also experimenting with the Purism of Amédée Ozenfant and Le Corbusier. This first stylistic experiment heralded Csáky’s 1928 adoption of a more figurative style.

Influenced by Aristide Maillol, Csáky’s later oeuvre was dominated by his voluptuous renderings of human and animal forms.

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Joseph CsĂĄky

Composition Cubist, 1919

Provenance

b.1888, Hungary

India ink and watercolor on paper

Private collection, Paris

d.1971, Paris, France

13.4 x 10 in.

Galerie Berès, Paris Rosenberg & Co., New York

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Joseph Csáky

Imbrication de Cônes, 1920

Provenance

b.1888, Hungary

Gouache and India ink on brown paper

Acquired from the artist

d.1971, Paris, France

12.1 x 9.8 in.

Galerie de l’Effort Moderne, Paris

C S ÁK Y

JOSEPH

Collection of Léonce Rosenberg , Paris Galerie Berès, Paris Rosenberg & Co., New York

ROGER DE LA

FRESNAYE

OGER DE LA FRESNAYE was a French Cubist painter. As a young man, he

received a comprehensive arts education, studying at the Académie Julian, the Ecole des Beaux Arts, and the Ranson Academy in Paris between the years of 1903 and 1909. In 1910, after completing his arts education, he began frequenting the Section d’Or, a Cubist artist association that held meetings in painter Jacques Villon’s studio.

Although most Cubists at the time used subdued colors, de la Fresnaye was inspired by the bright vibrancy of František Kupka and Robert Delaunay’s Orphism. In 1914, de la Fresnaye left Paris to fight in World War I. He served for four years, and was discharged in 1918 after coming down with tuberculosis. Roger de la Fresnaye moved to the south of France in the hopes that a change in environment would help him recover; however he remained weak for the remaining decade of his life. He died in 1925 at the young age of forty. In his last years of life, de la Fresnaye abandoned his avant-garde techniques for a return to realist painting.

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Roger de La Fresnaye

Eve, 1910

Provenance

b. 1885, Le Mans, France

Bronze

Collection of Jocelyn Reboul, Paris

d. 1925, Grasse, France

12.75 in.

Martin du Louvre, Paris Private collection, New York

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Roger de La Fresnaye

La table Louis-Philippe, 1920

Provenance

b. 1885, Le Mans, France

Black pencil and conte crayon on paper

Collection of Henri Petiet

d. 1925, Grasse, France

9.53 x 12.52 in.

Galerie Berès, Paris

FRESNAYE

ROGER DE LA

Rosenberg & Co., New York

ISMAEL

GONZÁLEZ DE LA SERNA

SMAEL GONZÁLEZ DE LA SERNA was a Spanish artist, who is known for his

contributions to the twentieth-century avant-garde. As a young man he attended the Academy of Fine Arts in his hometown of Grenada. In 1917, an exhibition of French Impressionists came to Grenada; its revolutionary aesthetic had a profound effect on de la Serna, who considered the local artistic sensibilities stuffy and traditional in comparison.

In 1921 de la Serna moved to Paris where he hoped to join the luminaries of the avantgarde. In 1927 the influential art critic Tériade devoted an article to him in his art journal Cahiers d’Art, propelling him to transcontinental success. The German dealer Alfred Flechtheim organized a show of de la Serna’s works and, when the exhibition sold out, offered him a contract. But when the Nazis came to power, the majority of Flechtheim’s inventory was either looted or destroyed, and Flechtheim was forced to annul his artist contracts. Fortunately, de la Serna had also signed contracts with the Galerie Zak in Paris and with the Galerie Le Centaure in Brussels.

In 1936 de la Serna participated in a group exhibition at the Musée du Jeu de Paume in Paris. During his lifetime, he also exhibited at the Hammer Galleries in New York and the Tate Gallery in London. In 1974, just a few years after his death, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris held a major retrospective of his works.

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Ismael González de la Serna

Interieur cubiste à la guitare, 1927

Provenance

b. 1897, Granada, Spain

Tempera and collage on paper

Private collection, Paris

d. 1968, Paris, France

20 x 14 in.

[Rossini Paris, Tableaux Modernes Sale, May 27, 2011, lot 102] Collection of Mr. Pallais, Paris Framont Gallery, Greenwich, CT Rosenberg & Co., New York

MARCIN

DUDEK

ARCIN DUDEK is a contemporary Polish artist, who is known for

both his installations and smaller-scale pieces. Born in Krakow, his works are informed by his childhood growing up in the Sovietera concrete housing projects, which he found oppressively monotonous due to their repeated architectural forms.

Guided by these pivotal childhood experiences, Dudek attempts to elevate mundanity into ar t through unexpected juxtapositions and placements of forms. He often incorporates commonplace industrial materials, such as PVC tape and vinyl, into his works.

Dudek has had solo shows in London, Brussels, and Singapore, and lives and works between London and Salzburg, Austria.

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Marcin Dudek

The Major Event, 2013

Provenance

b. 1979, Krakow, Poland

Vinyl, cork, fluorescent tape,

Acquired from the artist

and oil paint on cardboard

Edel Assanti, London

11.5 x 8.33 in.

Rosenberg & Co., New York

SERGE

FÉRAT

ERGE FÉRAT (né Serguei Zhastrebzov) was a French-Russian artist. He

was a close friend to the writer Guillaume Apollinaire, who inducted him into the Parisian creative community of the early twentieth century. Férat grew up outside of Moscow, the son of Russian nobility. As a young man, he studied at the School of Fine Art in Kiev before traveling around Europe with Yelena Zhadviga Mionteska, whom he wo uld later introduce to his friends as either his cousin or his foster sister.

In 1901, the two settled in Paris, where Mionteska adopted the pseudonym Helène d’Oettingen. She opened the literary salon Boulevard Bertier, which soon became a hub for Parisian creatives. Férat met Pablo Picasso at the Boulevard Bertier, and Picasso in turn introduced him to Apollinaire. Férat and Apollinaire quickly became fast friends; in fact, it was Apollinaire who suggested the name “Serge Férat” as an alias. Férat soon found himself surrounded by an entourage of painters and poets who were attracted, in part, to his ostentatious displays of wealth. Férat collected works by his peers Pablo Picasso, Henri Rousseau, Giorgio de Chirico, and others, and began taking painting classes under the instruction of William-Adolphe Bouguereau at the Académie Julian.

He exhibited his works at the Salon des Indépendants in 1905, 1910, 1911, and 1912, and at the Salon des Artistes Français in 1906, for which he won a prize. In 1914, Apollinaire offered Férat the directorship of his artistic and literary review, Soirées de Paris and, a few years later, asked Férat to design the program, sets, and costumes for his play Les mamelles de Tirésias. Unfortunately, the convergence of the Russian Revolution, along with his dear friend Apollinaire’s death in 1918, left Férat ruined, both emotionally and financially. In the aftermath of these two events, many of Férat’s purported friends abandoned him. Férat continued to sell his art, but by the time he died in 1958, he was alone and destitute.

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Serge Férat

Nature Morte à la Cafetière à la Guitare, c. 1918

Provenance

b. 1881, Moscow, Russia

Gouache on paper

Estate of the artist

d. 1958, Paris, France

8.27 x 12.24 in.

Galerie Berès, Paris Rosenberg & Co., New York

BALCOMB

GREENE

ALCOMB GREENE was an American abstract artist who, influenced by Gris,

Mondrian, and Picasso, arrived at his own unique hybridization of Cubism and Abstract Expressionism, writing that “The abstract artist can approach man through the most immediate of aesthetic experiences, touching below consciousness and the veneer of attitudes, contacting the whole ego rather than the ego on the defensive”.

In 1931 he traveled to Paris to study at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, and after his return to the United States in 1935 he became the first President of the Artists Union, and in 1936 he became the first Chairman of the American Abstract Artists (AAA). He was given a retrospective at the Whitney in 1961, and in 1976 he won the Altman First Prize in Figure Painting and became a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

His works can be found in notable public collections across the United States, including the Brooklyn Museum; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford; the Museum of Fine Art, Houston; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Museum of American Art, Washington D.C.; the Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena; the Guggenheim Museum of Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

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Balcomb Greene

#10, 1935

Provenance

b. 1904, Millville, New York

Collage on paper

ACA Galleries, New York

d. 1990, Montauk, New York

7.5 x 6 in.

Private collection James Reinish & Associates, New York Rosenberg & Co., New York

JUAN

GRIS

HE CUBIST painter and sculptor Juan Gris (né José Victoriano Carmelo

Carlos González-Pérez) was born in Madrid, the thirteenth of fourteen children. As a young man, he studied illustration at the Escuela de Artes y Manufacturas in Madrid (1902-1904) while submitting his drawings to the local newspapers. After graduating, he studied under the guidance of Spanish artist José Maria Carbonero (1904-1905). In 1906 he moved to Paris and adopted the pseudonym Juan Gris.

In Paris, Gris rented a studio in the same building as Picasso, the Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre. Along with Picasso, Gris soon became friends with other Cubists of Paris: Georges Braque and Fernand Léger. Whereas Braque and Picasso’s intuition guided the development of their Cubism, Gris worked logically and mathematically. However, Gris gradually ceded his analytic process to that of intuition and developed his own unique Cubism, inspiring his friend, Apollinaire, to write of Gris, “Here is a man who has meditated on everything modern, here is a painter who wants only to conceive new entities.” In 1919, Léonce Rosenberg organized the first major solo show of Juan Gris at his Galerie de l’Effort Moderne in Paris, exhibiting around fifty of his works. However, starting in 1920, Gris began suffering the effects of pleurisy, and his painting suffered. In 1927, Juan Gris passed away at the young age of thirty-nine.

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Juan Gris

Bouquet de fleurs, Early 1920s

Provenance

b. 1887, Madrid, Spain

Pencil on paper

Acquired from the artist

d. 1927, Boulogne-Billancourt, France

10.31 x 8.15 in.

Galerie de L’Effort Moderne, Paris Private collection, France Private collection [Sotheby’s London, Impressionist & Modern Art Sale, February 4, 2015, lot 150] Rosenberg & Co., New York

HENRI

HAYDEN

ENRI HAYDEN was a Polish painter, known for his early Cubist works and

later, colorful landscapes. He was born into a family of wine distributors, and as a young man simultaneously pursued his studies at the Polytechnic School and the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. After demonstrating his prodigious artistic talent, he abandoned his engineering studies and moved to the European capital of art, Paris.

In 1908 he began taking classes at the avant-garde art school Académie de la Palette. His first works in Paris were Cézannian in style — landscapes and figures modulated with flattened, faceted brushstrokes and scrapes of a palette knife. However, after befriending the Montparnasse Cubists — Juan Gris, Pablo Picasso, Jacques Lipchitz, and Jean Metzinger — his works gravitated increasingly towards Cubism. Juan Gris introduced Hayden to the gallerist Léonce Rosenberg who, starting in 1915, officially represented him.

By the mid-1920s, however, Hayden had abandoned Cubism in favor of a more naturalistic painting style. And then, with the start of World War II, he was forced into hiding. He fled first to Mougins, where he was reunited with his old friend Robert Delaunay, and then to Roussillon, where he befriended Samuel Beckett. When he returned to Paris at the end of the war, he was devastated to find that his entire studio had been ransacked by the Germans, and all his artworks stolen. With his entire oeuvre lost, Hayden’s recognition in the art world was severely damaged, and it was only later in his life that his work began to gain attention once more.

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Henri Hayden

Still Life with Compote, 1920

Provenance

b. 1883, Warsaw, Poland

Oil and gouache on paper

Private collection, Spain

d. 1970, Paris, France

10.24 x 11.61 in.

Galerie Berès, Paris Rosenberg & Co., New York

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Henri Hayden

Nature morte, 1918

Provenance

b. 1883, Warsaw, Poland

Gouache on board

Roland, Browse and Delbanco, London

d. 1970, Paris, France

13 x 16 in.

Malcolm Bendon, New York

HAYDEN

HENRI

[Sotheby’s London, Impressionist & Modern Art Sale, June 25, 1997, lot 277] Waterhouse & Dodd, London Rosenberg & Co., New York

AUGUSTE

HERBIN

ORN IN A WORKING-CLASS town in Northern France, Herbin attended the

Ecole des Beaux Arts in Lille before moving to Paris in his twenties. His studio was adjacent to Braque’s and Picasso’s, which allowed Herbin to witness the progression of early Cubism. In 1913 Herbin himself produced his first Cubist paintings. By 1917 Herbin’s works became increasingly more Constructivist, favoring the careful arrangement of geometric forms over a multi-faceted representation of the external world, and in 1932 he became one of the founding members of the Abstraction-Création Movement.

In 1953, after suffering paralysis in his right hand, Herbin taught himself to paint with his left.

This impediment did not stop him from becoming widely successful — he participated in Documenta in 1955 and 1972, and exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1979.

His works can be found in public collections worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Gallery, London; the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

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Auguste Herbin

Paysage urbain au cercle bleu, 1919

Provenance

b. 1882, Quiévy, France

Gouache on paper

Acquired from the artist

d. 1960, Paris, France

12.32 x 9.37 in.

Galerie de L’Effort Moderne, Paris Galerie Berès, Paris Private collection, New York

JEAN

HÉLION

EAN HÉLION played a key role in bringing European abstraction to American

shores. Born in 1904, Hélion abandoned his chemistry studies at university to become an apprentice to an architect in Paris. It was while he was apprenticing that Hélion first began to paint. In 1926, when Hélion was twenty-two years old, he met the Uruguayan artist Joaquín Torres-Garcia.

Torres-Garcia, who was living in Paris at the time, introduced the young Hélion to Cubism, and also collaborated with him on the avant-garde magazine L’Acte.

Jean Hélion soon became a prominent member of the Parisian art circles, exhibiting in the 1927 Salon des Indépendants. In the 1930s, Hélion moved to the United States and married an American woman who, in an odd twist of fate, shared his first name: Jean Blair. But in 1940, compelled by Europe’s suffering, Hélion returned to France to fight in World War II. He was captured by the Nazis and interned in a prisoner of war camp near Poland. He miraculously escaped and, once back in the United States, recounted the events in his 1943 wartime memoir They Shall Not Have Me. Like many artists who experienced the war first-hand, both Hélion and his art were profoundly changed by what he had experienced. His works became more figurative as he attempted to grapple with bleak reality. As he said during an interview with Time magazine, “A man who has been locked up for a few years knows the value of reality. What can you communicate but the problematic meaning of the world?”

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Jean Hélion

Composition Abstraite, 1936

Provenance

b. 1904, Couterne, France

Watercolor and India ink on paper

Collection of Nicolas Hélion

d. 1987, Paris, France

9.88 x 9.25 in.

Galerie Berès, Paris Rosenberg & Co., New York

TOM

JOHN

OM JOHN is an American artist and production designer. He studied at

the Art Institute of Chicago, and has painted all his life, creating architectural renderings, designing sets for television and theater, and painting on paper and canvas. He is inspired by Georges Braque, FrantiĹĄek Kupka, the architectural school of Bauhaus, and whimsical shapes of Paul Klee and Jules Bissier. He has had solo shows on the East and West Coast, and his paintings are in a number of private collections.

Highlights from his career as a production designer include the African Pavilion for the 1964 New York World’s Fair, the television shows Much Ado About Nothing, Death of a Salesman, and the 50th Anniversary of the Academy Awards. He has also designed six Broadway productions, including Guys & Dolls, George M!, and The Whiz. He has received five Emmys and the Peabody Award. John lives and works in New York.

42

Tom John

Untitled, 2010

Provenance

b. 1931, St. Louis, Missouri

Gouache and pencil on paper

Acquired from the artist

13 x 15 in.

Rosenberg & Co., New York

44

Tom John

Untitled, 2010

Provenance

b. 1931, St. Louis, Missouri

Gouache and pencil on paper

Acquired from the artist

13 x 15 in.

Rosenberg & Co., New York

JOHN

TOM

KARL

KNATHS

ARL KNATHS was an American Modernist painter who combined the Cubist

aesthetic with a lyrical rendering of the representational. He was known for using Cubist forms and blocks of color to illustrate with varying degrees of abstraction and realism the local life around him, from lush flowers to the Cape Cod fishing life. Knaths studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, and while employed as a guard at the Chicago Armory show in 1913 discovered Modernism and Cézanne’s works in particular.

In 1919, he moved to Provincetown, Massachusetts where he would stay for the remainder of his life in the house that he built there. Knaths showed his works in the 1921 Society of Independents Artists, and in 1926 Duncan Phillips of The Phillips Memorial Gallery (now The Phillips Collection) purchased the first Knaths painting in what was to become the largest collection of his works.

In 1929, Knaths had in effect his first solo show by having a room at The Phillips Collection devoted to his works. In 1945, Paul Rosenberg & Co. became Knaths’s dealer, thus starting a relationship that would endure for the rest of his life. In addition to The Phillips Collection, Knaths’s works can be seen at the Art Institute of Chicago; the Detroit Institute of Arts; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Wahington D.C., among many others.

46

Karl Knaths

Still Life, c. 1964

Provenance

b. 1891, Eau Claire, Wisconsin

Oil on canvas

Acquired from the artist

d. 1971, Hyannis, Massachusetts

36 x 42 in.

Paul Rosenberg & Co., New York Collection of J. Schlosser Acme Fine Art, Boston Rosenberg & Co., New York

OLEG

KUDRYASHOV

T THE YOUNG AGE OF TEN, Kudryashov’s innate artistic talent won

him a spot at a Moscow art school, where he was instructed in the conservative painting styles of Soviet-era Russia. But strangely enough, Kudryashov’s childhood memories outside of art school arguably influenced his later, avant-garde works more so than his fine arts training. Having grown up in a communal housing complex, he remembered playing with the detritus from a factory next door. Later, he described the experience thus, “The whole yard was littered with heaps of iron and filled with racks and gas containers, pipes and huge rusted concrete mixers that the factory manufactured. The earth was covered with thick layers of iridescent steel shavings swimming in pools of machine oil made of the entire spectrum of rainbow colors. Here we played hide-and-seek among pipes and right beside us worked the welders without paying attention to us the children.” These hints of raw industrial matter resurface in his works, especially in his three-dimensional constructions. Although they appear to be composed of abstract shapes, they are in fact Kudryashov’s reflections on the built environment. As he himself has said, “My works are not abstract — I build myself a house, a home, a shelter from the elements, from everything that weighs on my soul.”

In 1959, Kudryashov had his first exhibition, along with a group of other young artists. After that, he began exhibiting frequently in both Russia and Western Europe. However, he felt increasingly stifled by the conventions of Soviet art, and so in 1974 he immigrated to London along with his wife Dina. In London, Kudryashov researched Soviet artists that had been deemed “degenerate” back home, such as Wassily Kandinsky, Kasimir Malevich, and Vladimir Tatlin. Nevertheless, throughout his career, Kudryashov’s complex hybrid of abstraction and reality has remained uniquely his own. He is little influenced by other Russian artists, just as he is little influenced by his contemporaries in Europe and the United States.

Through his art, he has managed to represent the eternal paradox: the wonder of life despite its brevity and cruelness.

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Oleg Kudryashov

Construction (Plate 552), 1983

Provenance

b. 1932, Moscow, Russia

Drypoint on paper

Acquired from the artist

16 x 12 x 5 in.

Robert Brown Gallery, Washington, D.C. Rosenberg & Co., New York

50

KUDRYASHOV

OLEG

Oleg Kudryashov

Composition (Plate 2413), 1997

Provenance

b. 1932, Moscow, Russia

Drypoint and watercolor on paper

Acquired from the artist

41.25 x 28.75 in.

Robert Brown Gallery, Washington, D.C. Rosenberg & Co., New York

FRANTIŠEK

KUPKA

RANTIŠEK KUPKA was a Czech painter and, as one of the first artists to

completely abandon figurative representation, an early pioneer of abstract art. After having studied art in Prague and Vienna, Kupka moved to Paris in 1896, where he studied first at the Académie Julian and then at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts under the tutelage of Jean-Pierre Laurens. He exhibited with the Salon Cubists in the 1912 Salon des Indépendants, and in 1921 received his first solo show at the Galerie Povolozky in Paris.

He was a founding member of the Abstraction-Création Movement, and along with Robert and Sonia Delaunay, he also helped develop Orphism. In 1936 his work was shown in the Cubism and Abstract Art exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Today his works can be found in nearly all major public collections devoted to Modern art, including the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Musée d’Orsay, Paris; and the Art Institute of Chicago.

52

František Kupka

Etude de la série “Circulaires et rectilignes”, c. 1932

Provenance

b. 1871, Opočno, Czech Republic

Gouache on paper

[Camard & Associés Paris, Russian Works

d. 1957, Puteaux, France

10 x 10 in.

19th – 20th Centuries, May 19, 2004, lot 112]

Galerie Berès, Paris Rosenberg & Co., New York

MARIE

LAURENCIN

ARIE LAURENCIN was a French Modernist painter. Although she

often exhibited with the Cubists of early twentieth century Paris, her style was distinctly figurative. She is well known for her soft, pastel portraits of pale, doe-eyed women, which are held in some of the world’s finest public collections of art, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Tate Gallery, London; the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Art Institute of Chicago. Laurencin’s career began in 1903, when she enrolled in the Hubert Academy in Paris with the intention of learning porcelain decoration.

However, one of her classmates recognized her innate talent and encouraged her to paint instead. This classmate, although at the time merely an ambitious but unknown twentyone-year-old, was none other than Georges Braque.

Three years after graduating from the Hubert Academy, Marie Laurencin exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants and had her first solo show, which caught the eye of dealer Clovis Sago. He in turn introduced her to Pablo Picasso, who in turn introduced Laurencin to the Paris School of artists. She was Appolinaire’s lover and muse for half a decade, and famously painted a portrait of him surrounded by his friend Picasso, his lover Fernande Olivier, his dog Fricka, and Marie Laurencin herself. Gertrude Stein immediately purchased the painting upon completion, and so Laurencin painted another one, this time also including Stein and a few other friends. Appolinaire kept the second version for himself.

In 1912, she participated in the Section d’Or exhibition at the Galerie la Boétie in Paris (along with Fernand Léger, Marcel Duchamp, Juan Gris, Francis Picabia, and Robert Delaunay) and in 1913, she exhibited at the Armory Show in New York, the watershed moment when the American public was first introduced to French modernism. The following year, Laurencin moved to Germany after having married German painter a nd baron Otto von Waëtgen. She wasn’t allowed back into France until 1921, due to ongoing hostilities following World War I. However, while in Germany Laurencin divorced von Waëtgen, and dedicated herself to her art with extra vigor. Upon her return to Paris, Marie Laurencin was represented by Paul Rosenberg.

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Marie Laurencin

Simone Moreau, 1939

Provenance

b. 1883, Paris, France

Oil on canvas

Acquired from the artist by Paul Rosenberg (1939)

d. 1956, Paris, France

16 x 13 in.

Stolen from the premises of Rosenberg’s home and gallery between 1940-1942 [Sotheby’s New York, Impressionist, Modern, and Contemporary Art Sale, March 11, 1998, lot 149] Collection of Marie-Louise Jackson, Pennsylvania Restituted to the Rosenberg family heirs Rosenberg & Co., New York

HENRI

LAURENS

ENRI LAURENS was a French sculptor and illustrator, and is considered

one of the pioneers of Cubist sculpture. Growing up, Laurens apprenticed with an ornamental sculptor, where he learned direct stone carving. While an apprentice, he also took evening drawing classes from the popular Parisian instructor “Père Perrin.” In 1911, he first met Georges Braque who, along with introducing Laurens to Cubism, also became a life-long friend. In 1913, Laurens exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants and, two years later, met Juan Gris, Amedeo Modigliani, and Pablo Picasso.

Pablo Picasso later introduced him to Léonce Rosenberg, who gave him a solo show at his Galerie de l’Effort Moderne in 1917. A year later, Laurens signed a contract with Léonce, who supported his career throughout the two world wars. After World War II, Laurens turned away from Cubism and began to work more figuratively. Many of his works from this period were re-interpretations of Greco-Roman mythology.

By the end of his career, Lauren’s oeuvre had reached international acclaim. He exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1948 and 1950, and received the Prize of the IV Centenary at the São Paulo Bienal in 1953.

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Henri Laurens

Femme Ă la Draperie, 1932

Provenance

b. 1885, Paris, France

Bronze with brown patina

Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris

d. 1954, Paris, France

17 x 17.7 in.

Galerie Berès, Paris Rosenberg & Co., New York

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LAURENS

HENRI

Henri Laurens

Nature Morte Ă la Guitare, c. 1918

Provenance

b. 1885, Paris, France

Collage, crayon and white chalk on card

Collection of Gertrude Bernoudy

d. 1954, Paris, France

16.5 x 16.13 in.

Galerie Berès, Paris Private collection, New York

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Henri Laurens

Aphrodite et Séléné, c. 1950

Provenance

b. 1885, Paris, France

Collage and gouache with highlights of

Acquired from the artist

d. 1954, Paris, France

pencil and chalk on paper

Collection of Pierre Berès

13.8 x 10.4 in.

Galerie Berès, Paris Rosenberg & Co., New York

LAURENS

HENRI

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Henri Laurens

Zeus et Hermès, c. 1950

Provenance

b. 1885, Paris, France

Collage and gouache with highlights

Acquired from the artist

d. 1954, Paris, France

of white chalk on paper

Collection of Pierre Berès

13.7 x 10.4 in.

Galerie Berès, Paris Rosenberg & Co., New York

LAURENS

HENRI

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Henri Laurens

Femme Nue Allongée, 1937

Provenance

b. 1885, Paris, France

Gouache and pencil on cardboard

Collection of Curt Valentin, New York

d. 1954, Paris, France

4.49 x 12.01 in.

Galerie Berggruen & Co., Paris

LAURENS

HENRI

Collection of Samuel and Luella Malson, New York Galerie Berès, Paris Rosenberg & Co., New York

BLANCHE

LAZZELL

LANCHE LAZZELL was a painter and printmaker, and one of the few female

pioneers of Modernist American art. In 1908 she enrolled in classes at the Art Student League of New York, and three years later she traveled to Europe, visiting England, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Italy before finally settling in Paris where she attended classes at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, the Académie Julian, the Académie Delécluse, and the Académie Moderne.

After two years Lazzell returned to the United States, and in 1915 she moved to the growing artist colony of Provincetown, Massachusetts. She was a founding member of the Provincetown Printers, who utilized Japanese woodblock techniques to create avant-garde works. Lazzell developed her own unique hybrid of Cubism and Abstract Expressionism with her white-line woodblock prints. In 1923 Lazzell returned for a brief stint in Paris, where she studied Cubism with Albert Gleizes, Fernand Léger, and André Lhote, and exhibited in the Salon d’Automne of that year.

Her works can be found in major American public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Art Institute of Chicago; and the Whitney Museum of Art, New York.

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Blanche Lazzell

Abstract Composition, 1924

Provenance

b. 1878, Monongalia County, West Virginia

Mixed media on paper

Estate of the artist

d. 1956, Bourne, Massachusetts

9 x 8 in.

Private collection, New York James Reinish & Associates, New York Rosenberg & Co., New York

ROBERT

MARC

OBERT MARC was a French post-Cubist artist who lived and worked in Paris.

His paintings and collages reflect numerous influences, including African sculpture and the music of John Coltrane, along with artists of the Russian avant-garde such as Alexander Rodchenko. Although Marc first began painting in Paris during the 1960s, he preferred to paint while surrounded by nature, and so he would escape to the French countryside whenever possible. In the 1980s, the gallerist Barry Friedman purchased an unsigned Cubist painting, only later realizing that it was by Robert Marc.

He met with Marc, who confirmed that the painting was his, and the two began a friendship that would last until the end of Marc’s life. In 1989, Friedman gave Marc his first United States solo show. Due to its success — all the works were sold — Friedman gave him another show in 1995. Throughout his career, Marc exhibited frequently, both in France and internationally.

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Robert Marc

Cubist Composition,

Provenance

b. 1943, Auxerre, France

c. middle – late 20th century

Estate of the artist

d. 1999, Paris, France

Mixed media

Akiba Antiques, Florida

12.5 x 24 in.

Rosenberg & Co., New York

70

Robert Marc

Untitled (9499),

Provenance

b. 1943, Auxerre, France

c. middle – late 20th century

Forum Gallery, New York

d. 1999, Paris, France

Collage on board

Barry Friedman, New York

6.1 x 8.46 in.

Alon Zakaim Fine Art, London Rosenberg & Co., New York

MARC

ROBERT

JEAN

METZINGER

T THE AGE OF TWENTY, Jean Metzinger moved to Paris, where he

almost immediately befriended Robert Delaunay. A few years later, in 1908, he met Max Jacob, who introduced him to Apollinaire, Braque, and Picasso. This meeting would prove pivotal in young Metzinger’s life; up until 1923, Metzinger remained greatly influenced by Picasso. In 1910, Metzinger exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants, and also began to write on contemporary painting.

In fact, he was the first to write about how Picasso and Braque had done away with traditional perspective and instead created images out of a multiplicity of viewpoints (his article on this subject appeared in Pan magazine in 1910). In 1911, he exhibited in the controversial Salle 41 at the Salon des Indépendants, which was the first formal group exhibition of Cubist painters. The following year, he and Albert Gleizes wrote Du Cubisme, the first theoretical text on cubist aesthetics. He also founded the Section d’Or, a collective of Cubist and Orphist painters, and exhibited along with other members at the Galerie la Boétie.

In 1916, he exhibited in a group exhibition at the Montross Gallery in New York along with Jean Crotti, Marcel Duchamp and Albert Gleizes. After serving in World War I, Metzinger returned to Paris where he resided for the rest of his life.

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Jean Metzinger

The Windmill of Calvados, 1918

Provenance

b. 1883, Nantes, France

Oil on pieced panel

Acquired from the artist

d. 1956, Paris, France

24.02 x 18.31 in.

Collection of LÊonce Rosenberg, Paris Collection of J. Van Wisselingh, Amsterdam Galerie Berès, Paris Rosenberg & Co., New York

GINO

SEVERINI

FTER STUDYING at the Scuola Tecnica in Cortona and living for five

years in Rome, Severini moved to Paris in 1906 where he studied Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist painting. However, Severini soon met many of the Parisian avant-garde artists and writers, including Guillaume Apollinaire, Georges Braque, Juan Gris, Amedeo Modigliani, and Pablo Picasso, and learned from them the tenets of Cubism. Severini absorbed these lessons and applied them to Italian Futurism, a movement that celebrated the mechanical above all else. In 1912 Severini organized the first Futurist exhibition at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris, and in 1913 he was given solo shows at the Marlborough Gallery, London, and Der Sturm, Berlin.

In 1920, after serving as an essential link between Parisian Cubists and Italian Futurists, Severini chose to return to making solely Cubist works. As one of the most important avantgarde Italian artists, his work can be found in public collections worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Tate Gallery, London; the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo; and GAM - Gallerie Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin.

74

Gino Severini

Harlequins, 1922

Provenance

b. 1883, Cortona, Italy

Pastel on grey paper

Galerie Berès, Paris

d. 1966, Paris, France

19.29 x 12.8 in.

Private collection, New York

EDIK

STEINBERG

DIK STEINBERG was a Russian artist who was born in Soviet-era Moscow,

the son of a poet who was condemned to work in a Gulag camp for much of Steinberg’s life. Due to his father’s influence, Steinberg spent much of his formative years in the village of Tarusa reading Russian symbolist poetry, which would have a profound influence on his art, as would the Suprematist compositions of Kazimir Malevich.

As a young man he moved to Moscow, where he joined the ranks of the “non-conformists” — the marginal and radical artists who refused to submit to Social Realist conventions. He received his big break in the 1980s, when the Parisian gallerist Claude Bernard visited Moscow. Impressed by Steinberg’s oeuvre, Bernard offered him a solo show at his gallery in 1988. From the proceeds of the works that Bernard sold, Steinberg raised enough money to buy himself a studio in Paris, where he worked for the remainder of his life. He died in 2012 at his home in Paris.

76

Edik Steinberg

Composition, 2002

Provenance

b. 1937, Moscow, Russia

Gouache on cardboard

Acquired from the artist

d. 2012, Paris, France

12.6 x 12.5 in.

Galerie Berès, Paris Rosenberg & Co., New York

KENNETH

STUBBS

ENNETH STUBBS was a Modernist painter, and one of the preeminent American

Cubists of the twentieth century. Born with an insatiable curiosity that surpassed the confines of his small-town origins, Stubbs was a largely autodidactic intellectual. Along with being a painter of incredible merit, he was a tournament chess player and a lover of mathematics. In 1931, Stubbs visited the artist haven of Provincetown, MA, which ignited his passion for painting.

Due to his analytical mind, he sought inspiration in historic artists who based their compositions on mathematical principles, such as the Cubists Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris, and the Italian Renaissance painter Piero della Francesca, whose works were guided by the golden ratio. As Stubbs described his own artistic philosophy, “the structure of my painting is based on tradition, while the content is based on ideas. Where these two things — tradition and idea — meet in the form of my painting, they become real.” Stubbs died in 1967 at the age of sixty. His works can be found in the permanent collections of the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.; the Provincetown Art Museum, Provincetown, MA; and the University of Maryland Art Collection, College Park, MD.

78

Kenneth Stubbs

Still Life with Pipe and Bottle, 1934

Provenance

b. 1907, Ochlocknee, Georgia

Gouache on paper

Acme Fine Art, Boston

d. 1967, Washington, D.C.

10 x 16 in.

Rosenberg & Co., New York

80

Kenneth Stubbs

Geometric Still Life, c. 1954

Provenance

b. 1907, Ochlocknee, Georgia

Casein on paper

Acme Fine Art, Boston

d. 1967, Washington, D.C.

8 x 4.5 in.

Rosenberg & Co., New York

STUBBS

KENNETH

LACHLAN

THOM

ACHLAN THOM is a contemporary British painter. His oeuvre is

characterized by his use of pastel colors, along with his hybridization of highbrow and lowbrow themes — on his canvases, Greek mythology and populist cartoons take on the same ontological weight. Thom’s work has been highly accoladed, most notably receiving The School of Visual Arts Chairman’s Award (New York, 2001).

He has exhibited worldwide, including in London, Barcelona, Vienna, Florence, and New York; and his work has been acquired by collectors in England, the United States, the Czech Republic, Austria, Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, Morocco, and Costa Rica. Thom lives and works in New York.

82

Lachlan Thom

Blue Steel, 2014

Provenance

b. 1979, London, United Kingdom

Oil on canvas

Acquired from the artist

44 x 50 in.

Rosenberg & Co., New York

GEORGES

VALMIER

EORGES VALMIER was a French painter who, in 1909, began

experimenting with Cubism independently from both the Montmartre and Salon Cubists. In 1906 Valmier enrolled at the Académie Hubert and by 1907 he was accepted into the studio of Luc-Olivier Merson at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. However, he found the education there too conservative, and soon became enamored instead with the oeuvre of Cézanne. Valmier had his public debut at the 1913 Salon des Indépendants. From 1918 until his death he was represented by Léonce Rosenberg, and often wrote short essays for Léonce’s Bulletin de l’Effort Moderne.

In 1921 Rosenberg gave Valmier his first solo show at Galerie de l’Effort Moderne. Around a decade later, Georges Valmier became a founding member of the Abstraction-Création Movement, along with Jean Arp, Auguste Herbin, Jean Hélion, and František Kupka. An evolution of Cubism, the group championed the use of geometric abstraction to achieve purity in their art. Valmier’s art can be found in public collections worldwide, including: the Guggenheim Museum, New York; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Musée National d’Art Moderne (Pompidou), Paris; the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT.

84

Georges Valmier

Personnage debout, 1920

Provenance

b. 1885, AngoulĂŞme, France

Gouache and collage on paper

Private collection, Bordeaux

d. 1937, Paris, France

10.63 x 8.25 in.

Brame & Lorenceau, Paris Rosenberg & Co., New York

SOPHIA

VARI

OPHIA VARI is a Greek artist who is renowned for her bronze sculptures,

along with her paintings and drawings. Born to a Greek father and a Hungarian mother, Vari spent most of her childhood studying abroad, first in England and then in France where, at the age of sixteen, Vari first began painting. When she was eighteen, she enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, Paris, and began sculpting.

Her earliest sculptures, from the 1960s, are overwhelmingly figurative; however, starting in 1980 her works become increasingly abstracted while never losing their humanist underpinnings. As Vari has said, through her art she attempts to “imbue shapes and colors, and even their very geometry, with human qualities, within a spatial context.� She summons her sculptural forms from her comprehensive knowledge of art history, drawing inspiration equally from the monumentality of Olmec sculptures in Mexico, and the human sensuality of Donatello.

Vari has exhibited around the world, including at the Palazzo Bricherassio, Torino; The Ludwig Museum, Kombletz; and the Pera Museum, Istanbul. Vari currently divides her time between Tuscany, Mexico, New York, and Paris.

86

Sophia Vari

Fulgurations, 1994

Provenance

b. 1940, Vari, Greece

Canvas, paper, and charcoal collage on canvas

Acquired from the artist

47.25 x 39.25 in.

Nohra Haime Gallery, New York Atrium Gallery, St. Louis Rosenberg & Co., New York

American Cubists

Cubists of Paris

Contemporary Interpretations

Morris Barazani

Jean Arp

Marcin Dudek

Hans Burkhardt

Joseph Csáky

Tom John

Balcomb Greene

Roger de la Fresnaye

Oleg Kudryashov

Karl Knaths

Serge Férat

Edik Steinberg

Blanche Lazzell

Ismael González de la Serna

Lachlan Thom

Kenneth Stubbs

Juan Gris

Sophia Vari

Henri Hayden Jean Hélion Auguste Herbin František Kupka Marie Laurencin Henri Laurens Robert Marc Jean Metzinger Gino Severini Georges Valmier

88

Rosenberg & Co. ©2016

CUBIST

ARTISTS REPRESENTED

Balcomb Greene #10, 1935

Collage on paper 7.5 x 6 in.

American Cubists

Cubists of Paris

Contemporary Interpretations

Morris Barazani

Jean Arp

Marcin Dudek

Hans Burkhardt

Joseph Csáky

Tom John

Balcomb Greene

Roger de la Fresnaye

Oleg Kudryashov

Karl Knaths

Serge Férat

Edik Steinberg

Blanche Lazzell

Ismael Gonzalez de la Serna

Lachlan Thom

Kenneth Stubbs

Juan Gris

Sophia Vari

Henri Hayden Jean Hélion Auguste Herbin Frantisek Kupka Marie Laurencin Henri Laurens Robert Marc Jean Metzinger Gino Severini Georges Valmier

88

Rosenberg & Co. ©2016

CUBIST

ARTISTS REPRESENTED