2015 Jonathan Boos Catalogue

Specializing Specializinginin20th 20thCentury CenturyAmerican AmericanArt Art

Specializing in 20th Century American Art

2015

801 Madison Avenue, 5th floor, New York, NY 10065 212.535.5096 jb@jonathanboos.com jonathanboos.com

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As I wrote last year, the art world remains a fascinating and sometimes confusing place. It can be difficult to explain how certain works bring ceiling-shattering prices at auction while others underperform or fail to sell at all. It remains our firm belief that buyers who approach collecting with good sense and careful study—and who are willing to seek the proper professional advice—can experience years of enjoyment from collecting and create a truly valuable asset in the process. We have made a pledge to always provide clients with the best counsel possible. Whether a collector is acquiring works from our own inventory or from others, we offer unsurpassed guidance in our areas of expertise and act as transparent and responsible advisers.

We have had a very exciting 2014 with our expansion into new gallery space at 801 Madison Avenue. Our new galleries offer a fresh, contemporary setting to highlight twentieth-century American art. The remarkable and varied mix in this catalogue gives you an example of the quality and range of the works of art we focus on. Our goal has always been to seek out and offer fresh and exciting works of art by some of the finest artists our country has produced. We are committed to offering the best works we can find from the Ashcan School, the Stieglitz Group and other Modernists, American Scene painting and Social Realism, art by African Americans and from the post-war period.

As the art market grows more and more event driven, we continue to exhibit at several major fairs in New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia, and we hope to continue to add other important fairs to our schedule in 2015. We look forward to welcoming friends, old and new, to our new galleries and sharing with you our special selections of twentiethcentury American art.

Jonathan Boos

Pages 2–3: Charles Burchfield, September Wind, detail, 1955 (see p. 60) Pages 4–5: Henry Koerner, The Showboat, detail, 1948 (see p. 50) Opposite: Max Weber, Abstraction, detail, 1917 (see p. 12) Pages 8–9: Jacob Lawrence, Harlem Street Scene, detail, 1942 (see p. 42)

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John Singer Sargent (american, 1856–1925) Young Girl Wearing a White Muslin Blouse, c. 1882–1885 Oil on canvas, 19½ x 15 inches Signed top center

The most successful international society portrait artist of his generation, John Singer Sargent was born in Florence, Italy.

His parents were Americans who lived abroad for most of the artist’s childhood. His early education consisted of visiting museums and churches while traveling throughout Europe.

Sargent began drawing at a young age and became fluent in French, Italian and German. In Paris, he took classes at the École des Beaux-Arts and also studied under Emile Auguste Carolus-Duran from 1874–78. Carolus-Duran encouraged students to steer away from the traditional academic approach to painting, which required careful drawing and underpainting, in favor of the alla prima method of working directly on the canvas with a loaded brush, derived from Diego Velázquez.

Sargent preferred landscapes early in his career, but soon turned to portraiture through the influence of Carolus-Duran, a successful portrait artist at that time. Portraits were more readily exhibited in the Paris Salon and Sargent realized that an artist could earn a livelihood through portrait commissions.

While Sargent’s sophisticated portraits of men and women were well-known in England and Europe, his images of children played an equally important role in establishing his reputation in England, France, and the United States. It was through his portraits and genre scenes of children that the artist conveyed feelings about his own childhood and family life.

Sargent’s portraits of children often demonstrated less of a focus on the social status of the sitter. As Robin Jaffee Frank states: “In Young Girl Wearing a White Muslin Blouse, Sargent has turned the formula inside out: he reveals the interior

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character of the child, but less of the costume and bearing evocative of class so often associated with his art. She appears to be distracted, and we are left wondering what has captured her attention, what she sees. Throughout his career, Sargent created many small portraits like this one—usually of friends or family, often noncommissioned—that intentionally emphasize intimacy rather than formality” (Yale University Art Gallery, A Private View: American Paintings from the Manoogian Collection, New Haven, 1993, p. 76).

Using lush brushstrokes and a somber palette, Sargent masterfully depicts adolescence through the expression on the young sitter’s face. Again, Robin Jaffee Frank analyzes the portrait: “As surely as he captured the beauty of this young girl, Sargent also detected her vulnerability, the outward manifestation of a child coming to terms with an adult world.

For boys, doors opened with adulthood; for girls, social constraints meant the closing of doors. The loss of freedom that girls usually experienced at some point between thirteen and sixteen years old was symbolized by the practice of gathering their hair up into a mass spiked with hairpins, called ‘clubbed-up hair.’ Here the young girl still wears her hair loose, but she is nearing that trying time described repeatedly in nineteenth-century women’s autobiographies and diaries as ‘fateful.’ Her head and upper body emerge from a greenbrown background, emanating a dreamy, melancholy quality.

Although Sargent responded sensitively to the child’s sensuality, it is the ambiguity of the stage of life that seems to have attracted him, and that holds us” (ibid.).

Max Weber (american, 1881–1961) Abstraction, 1917 Gouache on paper, 18 ⅞ x 11½ inches Signed lower left

Max Weber was born in 1881 in Bialystok, Russia. The Weber family emigrated to New York in 1891 and settled in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. The young Weber quickly became immersed in the burgeoning artistic community of New York when he enrolled at the Pratt Institute of Brooklyn in 1898. As a student, he trained beneath Arthur Wesley Dow, the inf luential arts educator. Dow encouraged Weber to explore artistic themes beyond the conventional notions of the Beaux Arts tradition. Drawing from the early modern movement in Europe, Dow stressed the importance of form, color, and composition over a literal depiction of nature. With this foundation, Weber had his sights set on Paris, the art capital of the world.

When Weber arrived in Paris in 1905, he was met with a v ibrant and ex perimenta l ar tistic communit y. Weber attended the prestigious Académie Julian, Académie Colarossi and Académie de la Grande Chaumiere. His paintings were first exhibited in 1906 at the Salon des Independants and the Salon d’Automne alongside the works of Delaunay, Cézanne, and Matisse. Further, his entry into the circles of Leo and Gertrude Stein, Henri Matisse, Henri Rousseau, and Pablo Picasso gave him closer access to the avant-garde movements he would later bring to New York. In 1907, Weber was a pupil in Matisse’s studio art class where he experimented with the master’s Fauvist color theories. While also in Paris, Weber was introduced to the early developments of Cubism. The fragmented and repeated geometric shapes abstracted to depict African masks, musical instruments, and the female nude transformed Weber’s painting style and helped to usher in Modernism to the United States.

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In 1909, Weber returned to New York, a city now bursting with dynamic modern life. The decade following his return was filled with experimentation with the radical theories learned in Paris. Support for his revolutionary works of art was provided by Alfred Stieglitz, the influential gallerist and photographer. Weber often exhibited his Cubist oil paintings, works on paper, and sculpture at Stieglitz’s “291” gallery on Fifth Avenue. Despite his progressive aims, Weber was initially met with harsh reviews from conservative American art critics.

Abstraction, 1917 is a major work on paper from Weber’s most important period known as his “Cubist Decade.”

Works from this period are very rare to come to market, as most are in museum collections. In this work, Weber uses a subdued palette of blues and grays along with mauves and yellows to construct a portrait. Recognizable elements—red lips, a chin, an ear—float among geometric shapes of cones and trapezoids. The artist’s use of gouache conveys a softness not seen in his oils and Manhattan cityscapes of the period. However, Weber succeeds in portraying a dynamic yet balanced composition typical in his best Cubist works of this important period in his career.

Weber’s aim to overcome criticism and introduce art was eventually met with recognition from patrons, notable artists, and intellectuals. He remained a revolutionary throughout his career as his style evolved with each decade. Abstraction and his other early Cubist works contributed to the foundation of American Modernism.

Louis Lozowick (american, 1892–1973) Red Circle, 1924 Oil on canvasboard, 18 x 15 inches Signed on the reverse

Louis Lozowick was born in 1892 in Ludvinovka, Ukraine, then part of the Russian empire. Lozowick’s interest in art began in 1903 when he enrolled in the Kiev Art School. This early education was a formative experience for Lozowick; he would spend the rest of his career pursuing art studies.

Seeking greater civil and economic liberties, Lozowick followed his brother to New York in 1906. Lozowick arrived at Ellis Island alone, and was stunned by the modern developments of the growing metropolis. New York was unlike anything he had seen during his rural upbringing in Russia, with the vertical architecture and industrialized economy.

From 1912 to 1915, Lozowick attended the prestigious National Academy of Design in New York. He studied under Ivan Olinsky, Emil Carlsen, Douglas Volk, George W. Maynard, and Leon Kroll. The curriculum was largely academic in tradition, a style that he felt did not accurately portray the modern city. In 1915, Lozowick began his college studies at Ohio State University, where he graduated in three short years. He served briefly in the army in 1919 with the U.S. participation in World War I. Immediately after his discharge, Lozowick embarked on a cross-country trip, visiting major industrial cities of the United States. The visual landscape of these cities, filled with smokestacks, factories, skyscrapers, and the expanding network of highways, informed his style in the years to follow.

In 1922, Lozowick traveled to Europe like many likeminded artists seeking avant-garde movements. He first went to Paris, where he studied French at the Sorbonne Institute and surveyed the Cubist masterpieces of Juan Gris and Fernand Léger. He then went to Berlin, a city vibrant with artists and intellectuals. Lozowick was drawn in particular to the Russian Constructivists, who championed the machine aesthetic through abstraction and minimalism. His art career took off in this experimental environment, as he was inspired by the works of El Lissitsky and Kazimir Malevich.

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Drawing from the vivid memories of his cross-country trip, Lozowick created his American Cities series while still in Berlin.

The fourteen paintings in this series depict Pittsburgh, Detroit, New York, Seattle, Minneapolis, Butte, Cleveland, and Chicago.

Red Circle is part of the series, although its title does not suggest a specific location. The works are Precisionist in style and composition; simple shapes are rendered with precise and sharp clarity, depicting common subjects from the American landscape. Monumental and soaring structures were at the forefront of this series and many of his works during the 1920s.

Red Circle is a series of overlapping architectural forms and geometric shapes. The repeated window patterns on the starkly linear buildings suggest a landscape of factories; the cylindrical forms at center represent the smoke stacks adjacent to an industrial facility. The grey palette of the composition is further heightened by the dark shadows cast by the buildings from an unidentified light source. Four fractured, red circles overlap with the buildings.

Lozowick’s predilection for Constructivist design principles is evident in Red Circle, although his influence is purely aesthetic. The primary color palette of red, black, grey, and white is symbolic of the Russian revolution and was often used by the Russian avant-gardes. Lozowick incorporated these artistic principles in poster designs, stage sets, and window displays in addition to his painting.

Lozowick continued to paint skyscrapers, factories, and machine parts during the 1920s with an optimistic vigor shared by many artists. After his return to New York, Lozowick exhibited his Cities and Machine Ornament works at J.B. Neumann’s New Art Circle in 1926. That same year, he had a two-man show at New Art Circle with the Precisionist artist Charles Sheeler. With the economic crash in 1929, images of urban growth and industrial progress were no longer relevant.

Lozowick then began to experiment in realism, with the human figure central to the composition.

Charles Biederman (american, 1906–2004) Untitled 35-1, 1935 Gouache on brown paper, 17¼ x 13 inches Signed lower right

Charles Biederman was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1906. He studied at the Cleveland Art Institute before enrolling at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Biederman was talented, receiving the prestigious Paul Trebeilcock Prize, but he dropped out of school in 1929 due to ideological differences with the faculty.

Biederman spent formative years working in Chicago, New York and Paris, encountering and befriending leading abstract and Cubist artists of the time, such as Piet Mondrian, Constantin Brancusi, Hans Arp, Joan Miró and Fernand Léger.

Biederman moved to New York City in 1934. Two years later, he was included in the show “Five Contemporary American Concretionists” at Paul Reinhardt Gallery in New York. The show also featured Alexander Calder, John Ferren, George L. K . Morris and Charles Green Shaw. At the same time, Biederman had a solo exhibition at Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York. Both exhibitions helped to establish Biederman as an important modern artist. His arrogance,

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however, sometimes served as an impediment to his career.

Biederman focused on painting during the early part of his career. The two years in New York from 1934–36 represent a formative time for the artist, when he experienced a great degree of inspiration from the art scene surrounding him. The present work was created during these productive years. Bright blue lines outline two figures and Biederman used only yellow and white to fill select portions of the forms. He painted a number of large oils at this time, but in the present smaller sketchier work, one can sense the freedom of expression of a young artist at an important stage of his development.

After his time in Paris from 1936–37, Biederman returned to New York and focused on the ideas of De Stijl, the methods of Constructivism, and the work of Mondrian. He was extremely inventive at this time, and began to develop his Construction-ist and Structurist theories that he would advance for the remainder of his career upon moving to Red Wing, Minnesota shortly after he was married in 1942.

Charles Biederman (american, 1906–2004) 6 / 35, 1935 Oil on canvas, 29 x 23¼ inches Signed and inscribed upper right

Charles Biederman spent two intense years in New York City from September 1934 to September 1936. Working out of a studio in Washington Square, Biederman was inspired by the city and the art scene around him. He arrived as an unknown Midwesterner, and by the time he left in the fall of 1936, he was a celebrated American artist with exhibitions on both sides of the Atlantic (Susan C. and Neil Juhl Larsen, Charles Biederman, Manchester and New York, 2011, p. 43).

Biederman made use of the most notable artistic resource of the neighborhood, Albert E. Gallatin’s Museum of Living Art. Installed in the reading room of the New York University’s downtown campus, this groundbreaking private collection of the latest in modern art featured important works by Fernand Léger, Joan Miró, and Piet Mondrian. Biederman met the “Park Avenue Cubists” George L. K . Morris, Suzy Frelinghuysen, Charles Green Shaw, and Gallatin while in New York (see pp. 24–29). Interestingly, in June of 1935, the date of this work, Biederman was a guest at Morris’ penthouse full of paintings

by Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris, Léger and other inf luential European modernists.

James Sweeney, curator of painting and drawing at the Museum of Modern Art, visited Biederman’s studio in May of

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1935. Susan C. Larsen explains Sweeney’s first visit: “Sweeney’s first visit to Biederman’s studio revealed a remarkable series of abstract paintings full of elegant and playful forms realized in pastel colors with bright accents of red, yellow, and blue. They bear a passing resemblance to Picasso’s bathing scenes of the 1920s, but are much more abstract with felicitous curves, flat biomorphic shapes, and a grand buoyant energy. Closely related to one another they demonstrate Biederman’s ongoing practice of working in series. These sunny and intricate canvases have a cheerful character all their own. They are the most mature and fully realized paintings of Biederman’s early career” (ibid., p. 51).

The present work may very well have been in progress at the time of Sweeney’s visit. Geometric forms in black, blue and red, sit against a wonderfully textured pale pink background. A yellow band at the bottom creates the horizon line, which may represent a beach (a reference to Picasso’s 1920s bathing scenes as described above). Although Biederman would later come to know Alexander Calder (and show with him), at the time he painted the present work, he was not yet familiar with Calder.

Biederman’s swooping black form could have inspired, to some extent, Calder’s later fantastic stabiles and standing mobiles.

Charles Biederman (american, 1906–2004) Structurist Relief, Red Wing Number 1, 2 / 3 / 1958 Oil on aluminum, 23 x 33³⁄₁₆ x 5 ⅝ inches Signed, titled and dated on the reverse

Charles Biederman started making reliefs as early as 1935, primarily in wood and plastic, and became the leading theoretician and the most accomplished practitioner of the new relief art of the 1930s and 40s. In 1948 he published Art as the Evolution of Visual Knowledge, which had a profound inf luence in the United States and abroad. It was a controversial publication because Biederman proposed the constructed relief as the logical last step in a process of historic development from the Egyptians to the present. At the time, he called this “new art” Constructionism, and would later term it Structurism when he discussed his art and theories.

Jan van der Marck, an inf luential early curator of contemporary art, owned the present work, and often wrote on Biederman and the Constructionists. In a 1968 exhibition, he explained: “The relief construction, which Biederman carried from its formative beginnings to its present state of accomplishment, developed from painting but incorporates some of the properties of sculpture. It consists of a flat rectangular plane with an ingeniously organized array of smaller planes attached to the background and to one another. Within the limitations of their geometric shapes and their orthogonal or slanted positions, these planes create a stratification of form and space that is unique to the constructed relief” (Jan van der Marck, Relief/ Construction/Relief, exhibition catalogue, Chicago, 1968, n.p.).

Further, van der Marck aptly describes the wonderful properties of the relief forms that Biederman pioneered: “Viewed head-on, the Structurist relief acts as a complex of

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light-catching lines in space which hover before a field of saturated color. From an off-center position, and changing as the observer alters his viewing angle, the multifaceted foreground structure reveals its rich composition. Instead of optical illusion, Biederman offers optical complexity of actual forms in space, creating tensions within balance, ambiguity within precision and change within immobile relationships” (ibid.).

In the late 1940s, Biederman introduced aluminum as a new material in his reliefs, and he was prolific in the 1950s using this material. His structurist reliefs began with loosely drawn sketches in crayon and ink. He then produced a formal rendering comparable to an architect’s blueprint. Local machinists would fabricate the individual parts out of aluminum according to his specification. In his studio, Biederman then began to construct, taking the slender, rectangular parts that needed to be drilled, assembled, and precisely painted.

“Endlessly, he moved parts around, changed their colors, and watched the effect of the play of light on forms, their shadows, and the activity of adjacent areas” (Susan C. and Neil Juhl Larsen, Charles Biederman, Manchester and New York, 2011, p. 194).

Structurist Relief, Red Wing Number 1 is an outstanding example of Biederman’s innovative aluminum relief sculptures. Thin panels of varying scales in bright shades of red, yellow, green and blue are meticulously organized and set against a pristine turquoise background, resulting in a balanced and beautiful work of art.

Charles Howard (american, 1899–1978) Presage, 1938 Gouache, watercolor, ink and pencil on paper, 14 ⅞ x 22 inches Signed and dated lower right

Charles Houghton Howard was born in 1899 in Montclair, New Jersey. His father, John Galen Howard, was an accomplished architect with a distinguished family background. In 1901, he moved his family to California to begin work on the new campus of the University of California at Berkeley.

Howard later enrolled in this school and studied journalism and English. He then pursued graduate studies at Columbia and Harvard, with aspirations to become a writer.

In 1920, Howard embarked on a trip to Europe that inadvertently changed his career path. While immersing himself in the Parisian literary scene, he met the American artist Grant Wood who persuaded Howard to abandon writing for painting. This encounter, coupled with his discovery of Italian Renaissance art, encouraged Howard to embrace painting as his primary focus. Howard then moved to New York where he mostly worked in satirical literary sketches. His first solo exhibition of these early drawings was held in 1926 at the Whitney Studio Club.

By the 1930s, Howard experimented with abstraction and Surrealism through his association with Unit One—a group of painters, sculptors, and architects that he joined following his move to London in 1933. While the group’s work was politically charged, Howard was strictly aesthetic in his abstract compositions. He favored Surrealism for its imaginative imagery and its departure from American scene painting. His unique style was a combination of his own development and his exposure to the

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European Surrealists Jean Arp, André Masson, and Joan Miró.

Drawing from these artists, his Surrealist works of the 1930s feature representational, biomorphic, and geometric forms. In 1933, he had a solo show at the Julien Levy Gallery, the influential dealer responsible for introducing Americans to the Surrealist works of Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dalí, and Max Ernst.

Through its title, Presage conveys a foreboding tone. The biomorphic abstraction was completed in London in 1938 and is perhaps an allusion to the stirrings of European conf lict.

Howard’s paintings during the ensuing war years took on a similar ominous and emotional tone; First War Winter was painted during the blitz of London in 1940 and conveys a sense of darkness brought on by the war. Presage is an exploration of f lat, two-dimensional shapes set against sinuous, biomorphic imagery. An amorphous, orange form supported by elongated insect-like legs leans against a geometric shape resembling wood. The saturated palette of blue and grey tones further heightens the mysterious, dream-like scene drawn from Howard’s imagination.

Howard returned to California in 1940, where he was met with recognition as a Surrealist painter. He was included in the Museum of Modern Art’s show, “Americans 1942 / 18 Artists from 9 States.” and Peggy Guggenheim’s inaugural exhibition at Art of this Century that same year. Presage was exhibited at Howard’s first retrospective exhibition at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in 1946.

Charles Green Shaw (american, 1892–1974) Buildings in a Night Sky, 1941 Oil on canvas, 11½ x 8 ½ inches Signed and dated on the verso

Untitled (B), c. 1940 Oil on canvasboard, 12 x 16 inches Signed on the verso

Charles Green Shaw, a native New Yorker from a wealthy family, embarked on a successful painting career that would span four decades of American Modernism when he was in his mid-thirties.

A graduate of Yale and a World War I veteran, Shaw got much of his artistic education by wandering Parisian galleries in the early 1930s. While in Paris, Shaw visited the studios of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Fernand Léger, three ar tists who were becoming increasing ly popu lar a nd influential for American Abstract Expressionist artists.

In 1935, Shaw was introduced to Albert Eugene Gallatin and George L. K . Morris. Gallatin, who reluctantly visited Shaw at his apartment in the Drake Hotel at the urging of a friend, was electrified by his findings. Gallatin asserted that Shaw was “doing the most important work in abstract painting in America today.” A 1937 exhibition at Paul Reinhardt Galleries in New York with Gallatin, Morris and Suzy Frelinghuysen marked Shaw’s induction into a group known as the “Park Avenue Cubists.” Shaw identified with not only the aesthetic objectives of the group, but also the upper-class lifestyle. Debra Bricker Balken explains that the class separateness of the Park Avenue Cubists was “offset by their absolute conviction in art and by their ingenious refashioning of European modernist

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styles into a distinctly American look” (Debra Bricker Balken, The Park Avenue Cubists, New York, 2002, p. 7).

During the 1930s and 40s, Shaw avidly explored New York’s vibrant social scene, sharing his findings regularly in the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and Smart Set. Quickly, New York ’s cityscapes began to inspire painting as well as writing. He applied his intense fascination with Manhattan to his art and in 1933 embarked on one of his most well known series featuring the plastic polygon. These geometric compositions echoed the New York skyline. Shaw explains the city’s effect on the polygon: “In the main these experiments were founded upon the New York scene—or rather the Manhattan Skyline— structurally and functionally [the plastic polygon] is solely of America” (Jacobs, April Richon, The Park Avenue Cubists, New York, 2002, p. 75). Buildings in a Night Sky is a small but powerful example of Shaw’s geometric skyline depictions.

Also during the 1940s, Shaw moved away from smooth surfaces typical in his earlier compositions and began exploring broader brushstrokes and the effects of surface texture.

Untitled (B) is a beautiful example of the result of Shaw’s investigations into texture. The abstract composition evokes sky with clouds above a building, and it is very possible that once again Shaw was seeking inspiration from New York’s cityscapes.

Suzy Frelinghuysen (american, 1911–1988) Composition, 1942 Oil and collage on board laid down on panel, 16 x 12 inches Signed and dated on the frame

Suzy Frelinghuysen was born to an affluent family in Newark, New Jersey in 1911. She was a descendent of several prominent political leaders in the country, and enjoyed a privileged upbringing through her connections. Frelinghuysen received a formal education at Miss Fine’s school of Princeton, where she developed an interest in art and music. Despite her early artistic inclinations, she received no formal training in the subject. Frelinghuysen pursued a career in music with more intent; at the age of eighteen she moved to New York to become an opera singer.

In 1935, Frelinghuysen married the abstract artist, George L. K . Morris. The two were equally prominent both socially and economically. Together, the couple continued to prosper and had homes on the Upper East Side and near the Berkshires in Lenox, Massachusetts. Morris was an established artist at the time of his marriage to Frelinghuysen. After studying at Yale University, and the Art Students League, Morris traveled to Paris to study the French Cubists. After the couple wed, Frelinghuysen developed a more serious interest in art through the influence of her husband. In 1937, she joined the American Abstract Artists (AAA), a group co-founded by Morris to promote abstract art in the country.

Frelinghuysen imbued the lessons of abstraction and Cubism in her art from this period. Within her artistic circle,

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she was known for her work in collage. Frelinghuysen often layered clippings of ephemeral material, such as newspapers, music sheets, and product labels with her Cubist forms. In Composition, a page from the French art publication Plastique is layered on the board beneath fragmented forms of saturated colors. Morris was an art critic and contributor to Plastique, and the publication appears in several works by Frelinghuysen.

The names “Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, and Jean Arp” are visible through the broken forms and reference the source of her avant-garde inspiration. Frelinghuysen used a similar bold and cheerful palette of purple, blue, and grey on several collage works from this period.

Frelinghuysen was a well-known and respected artist during her time through her affiliation with the AAA. She was additionally known as one of the “Park Avenue Cubists” along with Morris, Albert E. Gallatin, and Charles G. Shaw, for their wealth and social status. In 1937, her work was acquired by Gallatin for his Museum of Living Art; she was the first female artist to be featured in the collection. In 1943, Peggy Guggenheim exhibited a collage by Frelinghuysen in the Art of This Century Gallery. She was later included in the Whitney annual exhibition in 1944. Frelinghuysen continued to perform as an opera singer, and enjoyed great success in the New York City Opera following World War II.

George L. K. Morris (american, 1905–1975) Composition, 1941 Oil on canvas, 24 x 20 inches Signed, titled and dated on the verso

George L. K . Morris devoted his career to both avant-garde painting and sculpture. After studying with Kenneth Hayes Miller and John Sloan at the Art Students League in New York, he traveled to Paris in 1929 and 1930, where he became immersed in the tenets of abstraction. At the Acadèmie Modern, he studied with devoted adherents to abstraction Fernand Léger and Amédée Ozenfant. By the mid-1930s, his work bore almost no traces of figuration.

Among his extensive network in New York was Albert Eugene Gallatin—a distant cousin of Morris—whose substantial collection of modern art became the foundation of the Museum of Living Art at New York University. Gallatin named Morris a curator of the museum in 1933. Together with Charles G. Shaw and Suzy Frelinghuysen (who married Morris in 1935), they became known as the “Park Avenue Cubists.”

Morris was also deeply involved in art writing and criticism.

He and Gallatin were among the founders of the Paris-based journal Plastique, to which Hans Arp also contributed. He was involved in the creation of the Partisan Review and was the first author of its “Art Chronicle” column, which in later years was continued by Clement Greenberg and Robert Goldwater.

Composition was painted by Morris in 1941, during his involvement with the American Abstract Artists (AAA) group. The organization was co-founded by Morris and aimed to distinguish abstract, non-representational art from Expressionism, Realism, Surrealism, and other artistic currents of the era. While his formal training was completed at the Yale School of Art and the Art Students League, Morris was most informed by his exposure to the Cubist artists of

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Paris. Morris was committed to the principles of abstraction and worked to overcome resilience to the movement with his dynamic works of art. Defending the legitimacy of his style, Morris later stated, “While on the subject of technique I might paraphrase Ezra Pound (‘poetry should be at least as well written as prose’) and suggest that abstraction should be at least as well painted as realism” (George L. K. Morris, George L. K . Morris: A Retrospective Exhibition, October 5–30, 1971, New York: Hirschl and Adler Galleries, 1971).

The precision and structure of Morris’ distinct abstraction is evident in Composition. Fractured, overlapping shapes of various colors are arranged on the canvas in a kaleidoscopic formation. A juxtaposition of texture is suggested in the squares painted as grained wood and the flat, saturated colors of the other forms. Cast-shadows from the irregular shapes imply depth in an otherwise two-dimensional canvas. Thin, intersecting lines join the geometric shapes, and are flanked with the graphic letters, O, B, and C. Morris used letters and numbers as design elements in other canvases, including Precision-Bombing (1944, private collection), and Ground Tension (1948, location unknown).

While Composition does not suggest a link to World War II in form or title, it was included in an exhibition at Edith Halpert’s Downtown Gallery with many of his wartime abstractions in 1944. Works titled Munition Factory (1943), Parachutes (1943), Invasion Barge (1943, Yale University Art Gallery), House-to-House Fighting (1943, McNay Art Museum), and Night Bombing (1942, Frelinghuysen Morris House & Studio) are a clear response to the chaos and destruction of war.

Balcomb Greene (american, 1904–1990) The King Is Blacker than the Queen, c. 1945 Oil on canvas, 46 x 36 inches Signed lower right

Active in Pittsburgh and New York, Balcomb Greene was one of the leading abstract artists of his time. Born in Milville, New York, Greene was well-educated—he studied psychology in Vienna, graduated with a degree in Philosophy from Syracuse University, studied English literature at Columbia University, undertook painting in Paris at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, and received a Master’s degree in art history later in life from New York University. Greene taught at the Carnegie Institute of Technology while maintaining his painting career. He met his wife, Gertrude Glass, a sculptor, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and together the two were great advocates of abstract art in the United States.

Greene’s first solo shows were in Paris in 1937 and by 1961 the Whitney Museum of American Art held a retrospective exhibition of his work. A fire in his New York studio in 1941 destroyed many of his early paintings. Greene showed at Bertha Schaefer Gallery in New York from 1950–1961 and for three years in the 1950s his exhibitions were nominated by ArtNews as among the year’s ten best. In 1972, Greene was elected into the National Academy of Design.

In the exhibition catalogue for Modern Dialect: American Paintings from the John and Horseman Collection, Julie Novarese Pierotti discusses Greene and his painting The King Is Blacker than the Queen:

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“. . . Greene became an unwavering advocate of abstract art, championing it as a truly international style. He would find an ally in his friend Burgoyne Diller, who through his work for the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), commissioned him, along with Stuart Davis and Willem de Kooning, to paint modernist-leaning murals for the Williamsburg Housing Project in Brooklyn, New York.

As the first president of the American Abstract Artists group, founded in 1937 to help give visibility to artists working in a nonrepresentational style, Greene called for an art that was free of narrative and the political context that characterized the work of many American Scene painters of that era. In about 1945, Greene painted The King Is Blacker than the Queen, using bolder colors and a freer hand than he had brought to his earlier, more precise works from the 1930s.

With just a suggestion of figural representation and narrative, the painting, stylistically, is a paradox of sorts, combining the steady lines of his earlier work with more boldly applied areas of impasto. Although Greene would continue to incorporate representational elements into his work of the 1940s, he never abandoned his commitment to abstract art” (Julie Novarese Pierotti, Modern Dialect: American Paintings from the John and Susan Horseman Collection, Memphis, Tennessee: Dixon Gallery and Gardens, 2012, p. 115).

Zoltan Sepeshy (american, 1898–1974) Driftwood and Dying Tree,

c. 1940 Tempera on board, 18 x 24½ inches Signed lower right

Zoltan Sepeshy was born in Kassa, Hungary. At the urging of his father, he moved to America to live with his uncle in Detroit, Michigan in 1921. Prior to his immigration, he enjoyed a privileged existence as the only child of an aristocratic family. Sepeshy studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest and simultaneously at the Fine Arts Academy in Vienna. He earned degrees in art and art education and traveled throughout Europe with his father.

Sepeshy encountered a different lifestyle in his new country.

He spent his first few years in the United States performing a range of menial jobs, including stacking lumber, whitewashing walls, window trimming, and selling books. He later worked for the well-known Detroit architect Albert Kahn doing architectural perspectives and renderings. He continued to produce art during this time and his subjects included railroad bridges, factories, miners and city scenes. Sepeshy’s first patrons were professionals in downtown Detroit, doctors and lawyers who would purchase what the artist carried around in his suitcase.

By the 1930s, Sepeshy had become a successful and innovative painter, and an influential educator. He had a number of solo exhibitions in New York from 1932 to 1956, and was represented by Midtown Galleries. Sepeshy was the first Michigan artist to be elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters and he earned the Carnegie medal in 1947. He became an instructor at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1930, and

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held various roles there, ultimately becoming the director in 1947, replacing the well-known architect Eliel Saarinen.

Sepeshy was passionate about working with tempera, even though he called it a “stubborn medium.” He wrote a book on tempera technique in 1947. Most of Sepeshy’s paintings from the 1940s depict the people, seagulls, dock scenes, and landscape of the northern Lake Michigan resort town of Frankfort, where he spent many summers. While Driftwood and Dying Tree may have been inspired by Sepeshy’s time in Frankfort, the work also conjures a surreal quality.

In the exhibition catalogue for Modern Dialect: American Paintings from the John and Horseman Collection, Julie Novarese Pierotti describes Driftwood and Dying Tree as follows: “In this surrealistic landscape, the remnants of a fallen tree litter the desolate sands of a dreamlike beach. Completely devoid of life, these relics, with their sharp, jagged points and tanned hue, transform into skeletal remains under the watch of vulturelike seagulls looming overhead. Though bizarre, Sepeshy’s vision remains indebted to the tenets of traditional painting through his emphasis on light and shadow, volume, and tone yet simultaneously represents a departure for the artist as he sought to combine theory and practice in his work” (Julie Novarese Pierotti, Modern Dialect: American Paintings from the John and Susan Horseman Collection, Memphis, Tennessee: Dixon Gallery and Gardens, 2012, p. 96).

Zoltan Sepeshy (american, 1898–1974) Sunbath, c. 1945 Tempera on masonite, 30 x 36 inches Signed lower left

Zoltan Sepeshy was passionate about working with tempera, even though he called it a “stubborn medium.” Most of Sepeshy’s paintings from the 1940s depict the people, seagulls, dock scenes, and landscape of the northern Lake Michigan resort town of Frankfort, where he spent many summers. In Sunbath, a man (possibly the artist) rests in the sun, next to a ping-pong table in a lakeside boathouse. The artist’s wife, Dorothy, and son, Michael, play in the sand. Sepeshy featured the work in his instructional book on tempera painting that he wrote in 1947. The idyllic scene was carefully planned and constructed by Sepeshy. He explained that he used many sketches, drawings, and a final transfer sketch to get the position of the sunbathing man and the overall composition just right.

While Sepeshy’s preferred medium was obvious, he did not like to be categorized, as put forth in an article he wrote entitled “I Don’t Like Labels” in The Magazine of Art in May of 1944. He asserted his belief about the importance of originality and creativity for artists in an address to a Cranbrook graduating class when he said: “The physicist can afford to be like other physicists—the businessman like other businessmen. The artist cannot afford to be and dare not be a replica of other artists” (Laurence Schmeckebier, Zoltan Sepeshy: Forty Years of His Work, Syracuse, New York, 1966, p. 19).

Sepeshy certainly achieved originality with his 1940s highstyle temperas.

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John Rogers Cox (american, 1915–1990) Wheat Field Landscape, c. late 1940s Oil on canvas, 30 x 36 inches Signed lower right

John Rogers Cox was born in 1915 in Terre Haute, Indiana. He was the free spirit amongst four boys growing up in a prominent local banking family. Cox went on to study business and eventually art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts where he graduated in 1938. After graduation, Cox spent some time in New York City. In 1941, Cox became the first Director at the Swope Art Museum in Terre Haute. Cox was responsible for forming the core of the museum’s collection including major works by Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, Charles Burchfield, Zoltan Sepeshy and Edward Hopper.

In 1943, Cox left the museum and enlisted in the Army.

After two years, he left the Army and decided to dedicate himself full-time to painting. Cox moved to Chicago in 1948 and taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago until 1965. Prior to his time in the Army, Cox had already achieved status as an important painter. His painting Gray and Gold (1942, oil on canvas, 45⅝ x 59¹³⁄₁₆ inches, Cleveland Museum of Art) won the Popular Prize at the Carnegie Institute. It was purchased by the Cleveland Museum of Art from the traveling exhibition Artists for Victory, a show of works by artists who wanted to help in the war effort. That show opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York on the first anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, and Gray and Gold won the Second Medal. Cox’s works were exhibited and illustrated in nearly all of the Carnegie Institute’s annual shows of painting in the United States in the 1940s. In both 1944 and 1946, the visitors at the Carnegie exhibition chose his paintings as the best in the show and voted him the annual Popular Prize.

Cox produced approximately twenty oil paintings during his most important period of the 1940s. Considered one of the great

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American Scene/Magic Realist painters, his powerful works from this period are extremely rare. The Swope Museum states that Cox “portrayed the Midwest through a fantastical lens focused on the minutia of the American landscape. Often called a magic realist, Cox was interested in the tiniest details of his world, from the seeds on a shock of wheat to the lettering on the side of a building” (Brian Lee Whisenhunt, Swope Art Museum, “J. R . Cox’s White Cloud Included in Iowa and Pennsylvania Exhibitions,” June 2, 2009). Wheat fields were the artist’s favorite subject and one he knew well from his Terre Haute surroundings. In Cox’s own words: “A wheat field has a whispering sound and an awe-inspiring quality like drifting music and, like an ocean, it gives you a lonely feeling” (Life Magazine, “John Rogers Cox, Bank Clerk Wins Fame Painting Wheat Fields,” July 12, 1948).

The present work shows the same abandoned plow as seen in the Swope Art Museum’s White Cloud (1943, oil and acrylic on canvas, 37 x 45½ inches) and the Sinquefield Collection’s Grain Farm (1959, oil on canvas, 34 x 47 inches). A barn and silo are hidden behind a wheat-covered hill; two barren trees stand in the foreground. The moon and cloud set against the midnight blue sky depict the eeriness seen in Cox’s best pictures. As such, Wheat Field Landscape is an exemplary work from Cox’s critical 1940s period. Several of the wheat field works from this period are in museums, such as Gray and Gold, Cleveland Museum of Art; White Cloud, Swope Art Museum; Cloud Trails, St. Louis Museum of Art (1944, oil on canvas, 20¼ x 27 ⅛ inches); The Meadow, Butler Institute of American Art (1947, oil on board, 19½ x 26½ inches); and Wheat Field, Norton Museum of Art (1949, oil on canvas, 30 x 40 inches).

Clyde Singer (american, 1908–1999) Mill Workers, 1939 Oil on board, 14 x 30 inches Signed lower center

Clyde Singer was a small town boy who remained endeared to small town American life in the more than 3000 paintings he created during his career. His prodigious output was propelled by a pure love of painting. He never sought a pedigree agent or major gallery representation. Born in Malvern, Ohio in 1908, Singer’s family was amongst the poorest in town. There was no hiding his place in the world: his clothes told the story and his classmates referred to him as “Rags.” He started drawing as a young boy at age five and continued chronicling the daily life of Americans through a span of almost nine decades.

Singer began his art training in 1931 at the Columbus Art School (now the Columbus Museum of Art). After two years, he felt the school had little more to offer and he applied to the Art Students League in New York. Singer was one of ten applicants (out of a thousand) to be awarded a scholarship.

At the League, Singer was taught by the American Scene realists John Steuart Curry, Thomas Hart Benton and Kenneth Hayes Miller. For Singer, the precedent of the Ashcan painters John Sloan and George Bellows sharpened his aesthetic impulse to capture the quotidian, in an unvarnished portrayal and with a seemingly spontaneous hand. In 1934, a struggling Singer could no longer afford to live and study in the city he had fallen in love with. When Curry heard about Singer’s plan to return to Malvern, he responded, “Oh, you’re going home to paint the American Scene! Good!” (M. J. Albacete, Clyde Singer’s America, Kent, Ohio, 2008, p. 8).

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Between 1934 and 1939, Singer’s work ref lected the highs and lows of life in his Midwestern community. During an eighteen-month period, he participated in eighty-two exhibitions in fifty-six cities, and was the recipient of numerous awards. As his celebrity grew, Singer’s commitment to portraying the activities of local life remained unbowed. While continuing to paint, Singer began as assistant director at the Butler Institute of American Art in 1940, a role he continued for nearly 60 years until his death. He was also a teacher and art critic for the local newspaper, writing over two thousand articles and reviews throughout his career.

Malvern’s small community was once surrounded by five active brickyards. The smoke spewing from the kilns was a reassuring sight to those gainfully employed. Mill Workers is exemplar of Singer’s candid rendering of a group of these working townsfolk making their way in the world. Singer has presented each man as an individual—subtlety differentiated by their practical headwear. The inclusion of the dog, as another member of the group, suggests that the route these men are taking is part of a ritual that remains constant from day to day, week to week and month to month.

The painting may be specific to Singer’s hometown but the viewer also recognizes it as a scene repeated in many small towns throughout America. “The things I’ve done,” said Singer accepting an Ohioana Library Association award, “are little bits of history, something I’ve seen, felt, experienced very deeply.”

Emerson Burkhart (american, 1905–1969) Life of the Spirit Is Elevated by Pain, 1943 Oil on canvas, 60 x 40 inches Signed lower left

Born in Kalida, Ohio, Emerson Burkhart received his first art lessons from a local minister who gave him pointers on drawing. In school, Burkhart’s teachers and peers recognized his artistic ability and often asked him to produce playbills, posters and announcements for school events.

Burkhart studied art at the Ohio Wesleyan University, attended the Art Students League in New York and then went to Provincetown and studied painting under Charles Hawthorne.

In 1931, he returned to the Midwest and taught at the Columbus School of Art in Ohio. Burkhart would become a notorious figure in Central Ohio. Michael Hall explains: “As Columbus’s rebel in residence, Burkhart never missed an opportunity to claim to be the city’s only true believer in creativity and artistic integrity. As he acted out his self-appointed role, his antics and outbursts made local headlines that, in turn, promoted the sale of his work” (Michael D. Hall, Emerson Burkhart: An Ohio Painter’s Song of Himself, Scala Publishers, Ltd., International School of America: London, 2009, p. 91).

Burkhart died of a stroke when he was only 64. Despite the artist’s feuding with the Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts (later the Columbus Museum of Art), the museum held a retrospective of his paintings within two years of his death. In the introduction for the exhibition, Mahonri Sharp Young, director of the museum at the time, called Burkhart “Ohio’s leading painter” and aptly stated the following: “His best paintings are his worst, certainly his most unpleasant. The powerful pictures of tragic life and dead death are his claim to greatness. They cover ten or fifteen years, the painwracked humans with no hope, coffins and the abandoned cars.

The vision that produced them came out of his personal life.”

Life of the Spirit Is Elevated by Pain exemplifies the above statement and is one of Burkhart’s major American Scene pic-

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tures. The subject of the painting is Oscar Coleman, an African American man from Columbus, Ohio. Burkhart said of Coleman, “I’ll never forget him. He suffered more hardships than anybody” (Columbus Citizen Journal, “Portrait Is Honored After Subject’s Death, But Its Painter Will Always Remember Him,” October 13, 1954). Burkhart explained that Coleman had lost his wife, and later his three children had died in a fire. He survived a stroke that paralyzed one arm.

Burkhart painted his subject larger than life, and masterfully captured Coleman’s life experiences, his pain and perseverance. Coleman sits in front of his mailbox, on a tattered chair, his veins clearly delineated in his hands; his paralyzed right arm limp in his lap. The lines on his face appear countless— the signs of a hard life endured.

Burkhart also painted Oscar Coleman’s mother Cora in a work entitled Matriarch II (1946, location unknown) as a companion piece to a painting of the mother of Roman Johnson entitled Matriarch (1944, private collection). Burkhart’s poignant portrait of Roman Johnson is in the Columbus Museum of Art’s collection. Johnson had seen Burkhart painting in his neighborhood one day and asked Burkhart for art instruction. The two became good friends and Johnson went on to be a fine artist.

After the death of Burkhart’s wife, who had been a model for Edward Hopper, and his brother in the same year, Burkhart’s style changed. He painted more freely and his subject matter was less heavy. He became artist-in-residence at the International School of America, traveling around the world; he had rarely left the Midwest before. While this later period may have been enlightening for the artist, Burkhart’s paintings from the 1940s, painted in his immediate surroundings in darker days, remain his best and his most sought-after.

Jacob Lawrence (american, 1917–2000) Harlem Street Scene, 1942 Gouache on paper, 22¼ x 22 ¾ inches Signed and dated lower right

Jacob Lawrence was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey in 1917 to parents migrating north from Virginia and South Carolina.

After his father abandoned the family when he was only seven, Lawrence spent time in foster care in Philadelphia before his mother was able to move him and his two siblings to Harlem to be with her. Lawrence arrived in Harlem in 1930 when the Harlem Renaissance was in full swing. He was surrounded by talented and inspiring African-American writers, musicians, artists, intellectuals and politicians.

At the Utopia Children’s House, an art program for children of working mothers, Lawrence met his mentor Charles Alston. Lawrence painted nonfigurative geometric designs and papier-mâché masks and three-dimensional tableaux in small boxes. Several years later, he would continue working with Alston and Henry Bannarn at Studio 306, an art center partially funded by the Works Projects Administration, which became a meeting place for writers, actors, artists and musicians. Here, Lawrence would have some of his first exhibits.

In the spring of 1941, Lawrence worked simultaneously on the 60 panels of The Migration of the Negro. Artist Gwendolyn Knight assisted him, preparing the gesso panels and helping to write the captions. The two were married later that year.

This series launched Lawrence onto the national stage.

Fortune Magazine reproduced twenty-six of the images and the Museum of Modern Art and the Phillips Collection in

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Washington vied for ownership of the series, ultimately dividing the paintings evenly between them. By the end of 1941 (at the age of 24), Lawrence joined the Downtown Gallery, becoming the first African-American artist to be represented by a major New York gallery. Lawrence would become one of the most important Modernist painters of his time.

According to Peter Nesbett, co-author of the Jacob Lawrence catalogue raisonné, at the time Harlem Street Scene was executed, Lawrence was living off Convent Avenue at the corner of West 144th Street and Hamilton Terrace in Harlem, New York.

While the street corner depicted in Harlem Street Scene may be more of a constructed composition than a representation of a specific location, the perspective was likely influenced by the view from the nearby City College campus over St. Nicholas Park to the neighborhood below. Lawrence poignantly depicts a community in Harlem, going about their daily business—vendors peddle fruit and flowers, children jump rope, men play checkers and movers hoist a piano into a building. On the rooftops, another sort of activity occurs—a drunken man lies asleep on one building and a group of men play craps on another rooftop. Residents peer out their windows onto the world below. Writers of the time described the vitality and the sense of community in Harlem, despite the harsh living conditions inhabitants often encountered. Lawrence masterfully conveys 1940s Harlem in this wonderful street scene.

Ben Shahn (american, 1898–1969) Bather, c. 1945 Tempera on canvas tacked over board, 13½ x 9½ inches Signed lower right

One of the most important Social Realist artists of the 1930s and 1940s, Ben Shahn was born in Lithuania and immigrated to the United States at the age of eight. His family settled in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where they lived in a succession of row houses on Walton Street. Shahn’s impoverished childhood informed the social commentary of his paintings, which illuminate the oppression and injustices suffered by working class, minority and immigrant families during the Depression.

Shahn said of the inspiration for his work, “At some point very early in my life I became absorbed—not in Man’s Fate, but rather in Man’s State. The question of suffering is an eternal mystery wearing many masks and disguises as well as its true face, but its reality impinges upon us everywhere. I am sure that to some of us it is a more deeply felt and personal burden than to others. Perhaps I am trying primitively to exorcise it by painting it; perhaps I am trying to understand it, perhaps to share it. Whatever my basic promptings and urges may be, I am aware that the concern, the compassion for suffering—feeling it, formulating it—has been the constant intention of my work since I first picked up a paintbrush” (Jean Lipman, ed., What is American in American Art, New York, 1963, p. 95).

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In New York, Shahn first trained as a lithographer. His ability in lithography and graphic design can often be perceived in his paintings. His preferred medium was egg tempera, a popular medium for many of the social realists of the time, such as Paul Cadmus, Jared French, and Thomas Hart Benton. Shahn was also a graphic artist who designed posters supporting social and political causes for various organizations and media outlets. Bather was in the collection of Cipe Pineles, art director at Glamour, CHARM, and Seventeen magazines during the 1940s and 1950s. Shahn and Pineles had a personal relationship, as Shahn created illustrations for Seventeen during her tenure. Pineles was the first female art director at a mass-market American magazine, and the first female to become a member of the Art Directors Club. She sought to deliver fine art to the masses by commissioning artists like Shahn, Leonard Baskin, Ad Reinhardt and Andy Warhol to illustrate articles.

Bather demonstrates Shahn’s graphic power and his sensitivity towards his subjects. Shahn’s composition and palette allow the vastness of the rocks, sea, and sky to contrast with the singularity of the lone bather. This work evokes the poignancy of the human experience, which Shahn is famous for capturing.

Robert Vickrey (american, 1926–2011) Shutter Patterns in the Corner, c. 1960s Tempera on board, 12½ x 17 inches Signed lower left

Robert Vickrey’s paintings are often imbued with psychological overtones. Although considered a Realist, he created paintings that are expressive and have a feeling of the surreal. His favorite subject was that of nuns, which he depicted more than anything else. In explaining the subject, Vickrey stated that he felt “that the particular order I depict is the perfect fusion of a beautiful abstract shape and a spiritual anachronism.”

Vickrey was born in Manhattan in 1926. He studied art at the Pomfret School in Pomfret, Connecticut before enlisting in the Navy’s V-12 officers’ training program, which sent him to study at Wesleyan University and Yale. While at Yale, he mastered the Renaissance technique of egg tempera painting that he would be known for throughout his career. After earning a bachelor’s degree at Yale in 1947, he spent a year in New York studying with Reginald Marsh and Kenneth Hayes Miller at the Art Students League before returning to Yale, where he received a bachelor of fine arts degree in 1950.

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In the 1950s and 1960s Vickrey was a highly visible artist. He was included in no fewer than nine of the Whitney Museum’s annual exhibitions showcasing contemporary art. He was also commissioned to paint dozens of portraits for the cover of Time, notably a portrait from life of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for the magazine’s Man of the Year issue in 1964.

Painting on primed masonite panels, Vickrey began fusing realism and surrealism in city scenes that showed children making chalk marks on the sidewalk, nuns walking down labyrinthine streets, adolescents caught in a web of luminous halos, and shadows cast by bicycle spokes.

Vickrey also had a fascination with recreating textures in his surroundings, as seen in his skillful rendering of the brickwork in Shutter Patterns in the Corner. He was an avant-garde filmmaker on the side, with a deep knowledge of expressionism and film noir, whose shadows, angles and distortions he introduced into his paintings, as exemplified in the present work.

Hazel Janicki (british/american, 1918–1976) Theatre, 1945 Oil on masonite, 31 x 50 inches Signed lower right

Hazel Janicki was born in London, England, but moved to Cleveland with her family in 1928. After suffering a long illness, she was advised by her doctor to take up painting. In 1941 Janicki graduated from the Cleveland Institute of Art, and the following year she married John Teyral, an instructor at the school. During World War II, Janicki designed displays at the Cleveland Public Library and received an honorable mention in the Artists for Victory mural competition for her mural at the USO Lounge in Cleveland. Her work also won many prizes at the May Show between 1943 and 1949. She exhibited her work extensively at galleries across the country and in 1949 received a fellowship from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation.

After her divorce from Teyral, Janicki married another artist, William Schock, and the two moved to Kent, Ohio. There, she taught design, drawing, and painting at Kent State University until her death in 1976. Theatre exemplif ies Janicki’s interest in exploring theatrical and circus subjects in her art. This mysterious composition presents fancifully dressed figures in an imaginative landscape under a clouded sky. In the right foreground, a woman, representing the artist, appears in a frame, her arm extended slightly beyond the frame’s boundaries. Janicki submitted this painting to the May Show in 1945, where it won third prize. (Julie Novarese Pierotti, Modern Dialect: American Paintings from the John and Susan Horseman Collection, Memphis, Tennessee: Dixon Gallery and Gardens, 2012, p. 102).

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Henry Koerner (american, 1915–1991) The Showboat, 1948 Tempera on masonite, 48½ x 26 inches

Henry Koerner’s works from the 1940s represent some of the greatest examples of Magic Realism and remain his most sought-after. Magic Realism was first defined by a major exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1943. Alfred H. Barr, Jr., described it as “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” (The Museum of Modern Art, American Realists and Magic Realists, New York, 1943, p. 5).

Koerner’s paintings from the late 1940s demonstrate the defining characteristics of the style, such as the sharply focused delineation of forms, a painstakingly minute rendering of detail, f lattened perspective, an absence of shadows, and a strong, precise, severe manner of execution.

Koerner fled Vienna in 1938 after Hitler annexed Austria, leaving his family behind. When he returned to visit in 1946 after serving in the United States Army, he discovered that his entire family had been killed during the Holocaust. As a survivor, he felt intense pain and guilt, but also appreciated the fact that he was spared. Despite the grief associated with Vienna, Koerner returned there every year for the last thirty years of his life. He often felt out of place wherever he was— he seemed a European in America and was considered an

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American when in Europe. Contemporary observers often sensed this dual identity in his work.

Before moving to the United States, Koerner studied at the Graphic Academy of Applied Art in Vienna. He considered it an advantage that he did not attend a traditional art school. He admired contemporary Viennese painters and studied the Old Masters, especially Pieter Brueghel and Hieronymus Bosch. In The Showboat, Koerner’s subject matter is a direct reference to Bosch’s Ship of Fools (c. 1490–1500, oil on wood, 22¾ x 13 inches, Musée du Louvre, Paris), a painting he knew well.

In the United States, Koerner first worked as a graphic artist at a New York studio designing book covers for detective and mystery stories. Koerner met Ben Shahn, who became his mentor when he joined the Office of War Information in 1943. Koerner admired Shahn’s highly stylized figures and distorted perspectives, techniques that he would develop in his own work.

The Showboat is a masterpiece of Magic Realism. Painted

by Koerner in 1948 in Brooklyn, it depicts dozens of clowns, freaks, acrobats and other performers, recalling the nearby influence of Coney Island. The work, purchased when it was first exhibited at Midtown Galleries in 1948, remained in a private collection until now.

Helen Lundeberg (american, 1908–1999) Irises (The Sentinels), 1936 Oil on canvas, 30 x 25 inches Signed lower left

Helen Lundeberg was born in 1908 in Chicago, Illinois to second-generation Swedish parents. At the age of four, her family moved to Pasadena, at that time a rural enclave of Southern California experiencing rapid cultural growth. As a child, Lundeberg was a participant in a Stanford University program for gifted children. She was an avid reader of poetry, novels, and travel books and would later credit her artistic imagination to the knowledge absorbed during her youth.

Lundeberg’s artistic immersion began in 1930 after graduating from Pasadena Junior College. Recognizing her innate artistic talent, a family friend sponsored the young Lundeberg to attend the Stickney Memorial School of Art in Pasadena.

There, Lundeberg was a pupil of Lorser Feitelson, a New York artist recently returned from Paris to study the French avantgarde movement. Under his training, Lundeberg studied the principles of Renaissance and Modern masters, and would carry these lessons into her mature career. Eventually, Feitelson and Lundeberg married and would become lifelong artistic collaborators.

Lundeberg’s early works demonstrate the principles of PostSurrealism, a movement she co-founded with Feitelson. The style was one of the first American responses to the recent wave of European Surrealism and developments in psychology.

While European Surrealists explored the chaotic confusion of the subconscious, Post-Surrealists used a more classical approach to content and structure. Lundeberg’s paintings invite the viewer to develop a rational understanding of a work through recognizable symbols arranged in a readable narrative.

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In Irises (The Sentinels), Lundeberg addresses the theme of life and death. Two vivid purple irises are monumental in scale against the rising mountains in the distance. Their position and stature suggest their role as sentinels over the empty desert landscape, largely devoid of life. Lundeberg’s early interest in botany is revealed in the exquisite detailing of veining and the sinuous growth of the leaves. The two buds at left are rendered in full bloom, while one remains closed either in the phase of growth or decay. The withering stalks and dead leaves draped at its base remind the viewer of the tenuous nature of life. Further, the iris flower is symbolically linked with death, as Iris is the mythological Greek goddess who transported women’s souls to the underworld. The dreamlike, transcendental nature of the flowering plants in an arid, desert environment suggest the influence of Georgia O’Keeffe on Lundeberg.

The depicted mountain range in Irises may suggest the dominating Arroyo Seco, a canyon interrupted by the arched concrete Colorado Street Bridge in Pasadena. This particular geography features prominently in other paintings throughout her career, even as she evolved into a style known as HardEdge painting during the 1950s.

Lundeberg exhibited her early Post-Surrealist works at seminal exhibitions in Southern California during the 1930s and 1940s. In 1936, her work was featured in the Museum of Modern Art exhibition, “Fantastic Art, Dada, and Surrealism.”

Lundeberg was also included in the 1942 exhibition at MoMA entitled, “Americans 1942 / 18 Artists from 9 States.”

Thomas Hart Benton (american, 1889–1975) Still Life, 1951 Tempera on canvas mounted on panel, 25½ x 18½ inches Signed and dated lower right

Thomas Hart Benton was born in Neosho, Missouri in 1889, the son of a U.S. Congressman and the grandnephew of a U.S. Senator (the artist’s namesake). This legacy explains the influence of American politics and the American scene on his artistic output. Benton studied at the Art Institute of Chicago before moving to Paris to study at the Académie Julian for three years. From Europe, he moved to New York in 1913.

Benton worked as a naval draftsman in Norfolk, Virginia during World War I, making drawings and illustrations of shipyard work and life, and documenting the camouflage patterns of the ships that entered the harbor. After this formative experience, Benton returned to New York and started capturing the American scene on his canvases, a movement that would later be called Regionalism. While he was aware of the modern movement in art occurring around him, Benton primarily drew his subject matter from sketches of the people and places in America’s heartland that he had compiled on a number of sketching expeditions to the Midwest. By 1934, Benton’s selfportrait appeared on the cover of Time magazine and he was considered America’s foremost Regionalist painter.

Benton met his wife, Rita, in New York City where she was a student in his art class. The couple moved to Kansas City in 1935, where Benton continued to paint and teach. Rita made a number of frames for her husband’s paintings, including one for the present work. In New York at the Art Students League

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and in Kansas City at the Art Institute, Benton taught many students who went on to become successful artists—the most famous among them was Jackson Pollock.

Best known for his murals and depictions of the American landscape and its laborers, Benton also painted beautiful still lifes. In particular, after he completed the controversial work Persephone (1938–39, tempera with oil glazes on canvas, mounted on panel, 72⅛ x 56 ¹⁄₁₆ inches, Collection of The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art), a large-scale nude representing the Greek goddess of spring who was captured by the ruler of the underworld, Benton painted still lifes more frequently (Henry Adams, Thomas Hart Benton: An American Original, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1989, p. 320). While painting Persephone—in his advanced painting class at the Kansas City Art Institute as his students made smaller versions of the subject around him—he became adept at handling natural textures. The last elements he painted for this composition were the flowers in the foreground, which perhaps led to his further interest in mastering the depiction of flowers in his still lifes.

The present painting is a wonderful example of a Benton still life, showing the artist’s skill at rendering light, shadow, and texture as seen in the background and in the creases of the tablecloth. The apple perhaps represents the forbidden fruit. Here, Benton has left it untouched, but with a knife alongside it, to suggest that it will soon be eaten.

Horace Pippin (american, 1888–1946) Flowers with Four Doilies, 1946 Oil on canvas, 9 x 11 inches Signed lower right

Horace Pippin lived in West Chester, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia not far from Lancaster County. The artist drew his subject matter primarily from the activities of smalltown life. He had little use for those who suggested he seek formal artistic training. Instead, he preferred to embrace his own method, painting each work on the basis of images visualized in his head with no preparatory drawings or sketches.

Pippin suffered an injury in World War I that limited the mobility of his right arm, so he used small canvases, which offer an intimate glimpse into the world of his imagination.

He built his scenes with areas of color using very little perspective, resulting in a graphic quality that set his work apart from that of his contemporaries.

By 1938, Pippin’s work was included in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York entitled Masters of Popular Painting: Exhibition of Modern Primitives of Europe and America, April 27–June 27. His work was shown alongside artists such as Henri Rousseau and Edward Hicks, among others.

Robert Carlen, an art dealer in Philadelphia, took a great interest in Pippin’s work and mounted his first solo exhibition in January 1940. The visionary collector Albert Barnes saw Pippin’s paintings as they were being installed at Carlen’s gallery and bought several on the spot.

Pippin painted at least two dozen f loral still lifes in the 1940s, including those featured in several unpeopled domestic interiors. A range of inspirational factors are credited to Pippin: his exposure to French Impressionist still lifes in the Barnes collection in 1939, his dealer’s interest in marketable subjects, or a natural evolution from war-oriented subjects to

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those indicative of a greater peace of mind. However, there was also a long still-life tradition in Philadelphia and the Brandywine River Valley, and quite simply Pippin also loved gardening. “Neighbors readily recall the animation with which the Pippins discussed selections and designs for their two gardens, one grown in their backyard essentially for pleasure from spring to late fall since the 1920s and another to which they drove” (Judith Stein, I Tell My Heart: The Art of Horace Pippin, Philadelphia, 1993, pp. 106, 115).

Pippin painted doilies in nearly all of his still lifes, draped over the arms and backs of chairs and underneath vases. The size of the flower arrangements he chose to paint varied from quite grand to small-scale, and Pippin depicted a variety of vase forms. The flowers in the present work appear to be yellow hibiscus, daisies and red asters. The yellow polka-dots and diamond pattern on the vase in Flowers with Four Doilies give the painting a wonderful texture.

Despite their relatively sanguine subject matter, scholar Lynda Roscoe Hartigan makes a case for the value of Pippin’s still lifes among his entire artistic output. She states: “Horace Pippin insisted that he ‘have all the details that are necessary’ to ‘paint it exactly the way it is and exactly the way I see it.’

Similarly, we need to retrieve these details to locate the reality of Pippin’s works, from landscapes to still lifes, from portraits to life’s interiors. Equally crucial is valuing these diverse subjects for their autobiographical, regional, and cultural underpinnings—underpinnings that link them irrevocably to Pippin’s more celebrated paintings of war, spiritual harmony and African-American life” (ibid., p. 121).

Charles Sheeler (american, 1883–1965) Tree and Landscape,

1947 Tempera on paper on board, 15⅝ x 13½ inches Signed and dated lower right

Considered one of the founders of American modernism and one of the master photographers of the twentieth century, Charles Sheeler achieved great success as both a painter and a photographer. Using photography as a means to push the boundaries of his painting, Sheeler once made the following statement: “Photography is nature seen from the eyes outward, painting from the eyes inward” (Charles Brock, Exhibition Catalogue, Charles Sheeler: Across Media, Washington, D. C ., 2006, p. ix). His photographs are meticulously composed documents of the early industrial period and his paintings exemplify the Precisionist movement—a crisp, clean, hard-edged style that combined aspects of Cubist abstraction and the machine aesthetic.

Born in Philadelphia, Sheeler trained in industrial drawing, decorative painting, and applied art at the School of Industrial Art. He expanded his artistic training under William Merritt Chase at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he learned an impressionistic, painterly style.

Sheeler developed excellent technique during his time at the Academy, but once he left and traveled to Italy and Paris with the artist Morton Schamberg in 1908, he returned determined to explore new directions. He relied on photography as a means to experiment with the new concepts of modern painting, which he saw in the work of Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. Arthur B. Davies invited Sheeler to show his paintings in the 1913 Armory Show and Alfred Stieglitz asked him to be part of the 1916 Forum Exhibition. Stieglitz and his circle, as well as other New York avant-garde artists, such as Charles Demuth, Joseph Stella and Louis Lozowick simultaneously influenced and were influenced by Sheeler.

Sheeler’s approach to his art is well-described by Charles Brock, Curator at the National Gallery of Art, as follows: “Possessing the ability to synthesize, he delighted in layering and juxtaposing opposing views. At almost every turn in Sheeler’s early evolution as an artist he demonstrated an ability to absorb artistic inf luences as well as counter them with new, often

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starkly contradictory experiences and ideas. Relating to but distinguishing himself from the many influences he encountered, Sheeler’s approach to developing his personal idiom—by employing a strategy akin to musical counterpoint—culminated in an ambitious and complex artistic language characterized by sharp tonal and conceptual contrasts such as figure/ ground, dark/light, object/void, inside/outside, personal/impersonal/ and realism/abstraction, and animated by a rich interplay of media” (Charles Brock, Exhibition Catalogue, Charles Sheeler: Across Media, Washington, D. C., 2006, p. 12).

In 1930 Sheeler’s work was included in Paintings and Sculpture by Living Americans at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1931, he had his first solo exhibition at Edith Halpert’s Downtown Gallery, which began an exclusive affiliation with the gallery. At this time, Halpert encouraged Sheeler to concentrate on painting. Along with Downtown Gallery shows, Sheeler’s paintings were exhibited at various institutions throughout the 1930s and 1940s. He was included in the 1943 show at the MoMA entitled Realists and Magic Realists, and the Whitney Museum’s Pioneers of Modern Art in America in 1946.

In 1946, Sheeler was the first artist invited to participate in the Addison Gallery’s artist-in-residence program, and in 1948 he completed another residency at the Currier Gallery in Manchester, New Hampshire. From these two experiences, he began to develop new processes involving photomontage. He also became interested with the textile mills of New England.

Tree and Landscape was created in 1947 during the time Sheeler was between his artist-in-residence experiences in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. One can assume that, while he was a mature artist by this time, he continued to push the boundaries of his art while still refining his style. Sheeler lived in Ridgefield, Connecticut when he painted Tree and Landscape, a town situated in the foothills of the Berkshire Mountains, which are perhaps the mountains formed by/ viewed behind the branches of the tree in Tree and Landscape.

Charles Burchfield (american, 1893–1967) September Wind, 1955 Watercolor on paper, 13¾ x 20 inches Signed lower left

Charles Ephraim Burchfield was born in Ashtabula, Ohio, and was the son of a tailor and a schoolteacher. Following his father’s death when Burchfield was five years old, the family moved to his mother’s hometown of Salem, Ohio. Burchfield would go onto graduate as valedictorian from his high school class. He then attended the Cleveland School of Art (later Institute of Art) from 1912–1916. In 1918, he was inducted into the U.S. Army where he served as a camouflage artist and was discharged with the rank of sergeant in 1919.

Burchfield’s time spent in the Midwest during his formative years influenced his art throughout his career, as did his many years living in Gardenville, New York, 10 miles east of Buffalo, where he moved in 1921 and remained until he died 46 years later. In Buffalo, he was an assistant designer, and later head of the design department, for the wallpaper company M. H. Birge and Sons.

Burchfield considered the year 1915 to be the beginning of his career. Still in school, he began to put down on paper abstractions of natural forces such as the sun, wind, and rain in a flat, boldly patterned style. For the next six years he used watercolor to capture childhood memories and give pictorial form to recollected fears, dreams, and fantasies. He used the symbols he devised to represent his emotions time and again in his body of work.

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In 1916 Burchfield spent a brief period of time in New York City, studying at the National Academy of Design. It was at this time that he met Mary Mowbray-Clark. She showed his work in her gallery, the Sunwise Turn Bookshop, and effectively launched Burchfield’s career as an artist. During his training in Cleveland, Burchfield had become familiar with the teachings of influential American printmaker and art educator Arthur Wesley Dow (1857–1922), who asserted that the harmonious arrangement of line, color, and notan (tonal contrasts), rather than the copying of nature, was the fundamental basis of art. Rooted in Dow’s belief in the expressive potential of decorative design and pattern, Burchfield’s imagery often consisted of a repetition of motifs.

Nature was Burchfield’s greatest inspiration throughout his career. He focused on his immediate surroundings, painting views from his windows and his garden, depicting sudden atmospheric changes, dense forests at dawn and dusk, or insects buzzing and birds flying in fantastic, colorful scenes.

The present work is a smaller version of the watercolor titled September Wind, 1954, in the collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D. C . With Burchfield’s use of bright colors in the foreground and a moody sky looming above, September Wind is a superb example of the artist’s emotive landscapes.

Ruth Asawa (american, 1926–2013) Untitled (S. 446, Hanging, Seven-Lobed Single-Layer Continuous Form), c. 1952 Looped brass wire, 78 x 14 x 14 inches

Ruth Asawa was born in 1926 in Norwalk, California. Her parents immigrated to California from Japan at the turn of the century, and operated a seasonal crop farm where Asawa worked as a child. Like many Americans, the Asawa family endured extreme financial hardships during the Depression.

Their situation was further exacerbated by the prejudice against their foreign ancestry. After Pearl Harbor was attacked in 1941, the U.S. Government issued the removal of Japanese Americans, displacing the Asawa family and thousands of others along the Pacific Coast. With her family, Asawa was interned in the stables of the Santa Anita Race Track, and later to a camp in Arkansas. Amazingly, Asawa persevered in the face of opposition; she would go on to obtain a college education, and become a pioneering sculptor of spiritually arresting forms. The grace and beauty of her works defies the oppressive upbringing she endured from the discrimination towards her Japanese ancestry.

Asawa first practiced art and design during high school while she was still interned in Arkansas. Following graduation, she pursued an advanced degree to become an art teacher at the Milwaukee State Teacher’s College. Her hopes of teaching were swiftly destroyed when she was barred from the profession because of lingering discrimination towards JapaneseAmericans. Asawa, with unnerving resiliency, then enrolled in Black Mountain College, an interdisciplinary program near Asheville, North Carolina, to pursue her interest in art.

Black Mountain College opened in 1933 to promote art within a cross-disciplinary curriculum. Buckminster Fuller, Ilya Bolotowsky, Merce Cunningham, and Walter Gropius were among the influential teachers who fostered the notion of American avant-garde art. Asawa studied beneath Josef

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Albers, a former educator at the Bauhaus school of art and design in Germany. During her three years at Black Mountain College, Asawa experimented with wire sculpture, a medium for which she quickly became known.

A trip to Mexico in 1947 implanted further creativity in Asawa. She applied the traditional crochet techniques of Mexican basket makers to her interest in sculpture. The looped-wire Mexican baskets inspired Asawa to create a series of hanging mobiles constructed of thin, yet durable metal wires. A continuous thread of wire was woven together to construct biomorphic, organic forms, an aesthetic widely used by designers in the post-war era as an antidote to the inhumane atrocities of war. Asawa considered her sculptures as three-dimensional drawings; the looped wires acted as lines drawn in space. The painstaking effort of weaving an unmalleable material is barely apparent as the form evokes the softness of a pliable textile.

Untitled, S. 446 is an exceptional example of Asawa’s hanging orbs completed during the 1950s. The seven-lobed sculpture of crocheted brass wire was produced shortly after her inf luential trip to Mexico and exemplifies her unique understanding of form. The hollow, transparent shape challenges the traditional idea of sculpture as a solid mass as light permeates through the looped wires and transforms the space surrounding the object. The undulating and irregular shapes, whose curvature resembles the female form, varies in appearance according to the viewer’s position. Asawa’s wire sculptures were widely celebrated during her career; she received her first solo show at New York’s Peridot Gallery in 1954 and would later find inclusion in the Whitney’s annual exhibitions.

Harry Bertoia (american, 1915–1978) Untitled (Welded Tree Form), c. 1960 Welded copper and bronze, 32 x 22 x 12 inches

Harry Bertoia was a prominent and prolific mid-twentieth century sculptor, with wide-ranging design ability. Throughout his career, he created furniture, jewelry, large-scale screens, city fountains, masterful architectural installations and innovative sculptures.

Bertoia was born in San Lorenzo, Italy in 1915 and moved to the United States with his father when he was fifteen years old. They settled in Detroit, Michigan where Harry attended Cass Technical High School before receiving a scholarship to attend Detroit School of Arts and Crafts. He then earned a scholarship to attend Cranbrook Academy of Art. It was here that he met several important people in his life, including his future wife, Brigitta, and her father, a famous art historian and collector, who taught him about the great masters of art.

He also met Charles Eames, with whom he collaborated on furniture design until he went off on his own to design for Knoll Associates in 1950.

Bertoia’s exposure to metalworking and drawing at Cranbrook provided him with the impetus to explore the sculptural forms for which he later became known. He considered nature to be his strongest influence. This is most apparent in his sculptures of bushes and trees. He worked in a restored barn on his property in rural Pennsylvania, where he felt close to nature. He liked to place his works outside to become weathered and he felt that his works had a permanence that nature lacked. The present work is a beautiful and early example of Bertoia’s tree-type sculptures. He produced most of them in the 1960s and 1970s, working in a combination of copper, bronze, and sometimes brass, which allowed for a much broader color palette. The result is fascinating in terms of both color and texture.

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Michael Goldberg (american, 1924–2007) Red Stripe, 1959 Oil on paper, 11 x 14 inches Signed lower right

Born in the Bronx in 1924, Michael Goldberg pushed the boundaries imposed upon second-generation Abstract Expressionists for more than 60 years. Having shown an interest in painting in his youth, he began taking classes at the Art Students League in New York at age 14; three years later, he en rol led i n t he school r u n by t he Abst rac t Expressionist painter and teacher Hans Hofmann. During World War II, Goldberg interrupted his art studies to enlist in the U.S. Army.

In 1948, he resumed painting with Hofmann and was subsequently introduced to the work of Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Milton Resnick. Goldberg met Joan Mitchell around 1951, beginning a nearly three-year relationship with the artist. They spent significant time together in New York City and lived together in East Hampton in the summers.

Mitchell scholar Jane Livingston noted that Grace Hartigan believed that “one of Joan’s most important relationships with a man was Mike [Goldberg]. They were together when her art was being formed, and he had a big impact” (Jane Livingston, Linda Nochlin and Yvette Y. Lee, The Paintings of Joan Mitchell, Whitney Museum of American Art, 2002: 20).

Goldberg participated in the groundbreaking Ninth Street Show in 1951, which included works by Mitchell, Jackson Pollock, and Robert Motherwell; two years later he received his first solo show at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery. In 1955, Goldberg befriended fellow Abstract Expressionist painter

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Norman Bluhm, which proved to be a fateful meeting. In 1956, Bluhm brought art collector Wa lter P. Chr ysler Jr. to Goldberg’s studio, and Chrysler proceeded to buy 17 of his paintings. With new interest in his work, Goldberg caught the eye of art dealer Martha Jackson and was soon represented by her gallery. Throughout the fifties and into the sixties, Goldberg maintained his connection with the Abstract Expressionist painters. By 1953, he was a regular at the Cedar Tavern, known as a meeting place for avant-garde artists. Two years later, he moved into a studio next to that of de Kooning and Resnick. In 1962, he acquired Mark Rothko’s studio at 222 Bowery, where he worked until his death.

In 1969, Goldberg met artist Lynn Umlauf; they married ten years later and both began teaching at Manhattan’s School of Visual Arts. In 1980, the couple began splitting their time between Tuscany and New York, participating in group shows during this period.

While Goldberg experimented with various techniques throughout his career, he remained dedicated to abstract painting. He made the following statement in 2001, “For me, the concept of abstract painting is still the primary visual challenge of our time. It might get harder and harder to make an abstract image that’s believable, but I think that just makes the challenge greater.” Red Stripe is a prime example of Goldberg’s work from the early 1960s with its all-over composition and gestural painting style.

Hans Hofmann (american, 1880–1966) Concerto in Colours, 1964 Oil on panel, 32 x 23 ⅞ inches Signed and dated lower right; signed, titled, and dated on the verso

Hans Hofmann was born in Weissenburg, Germany in 1880.

When he was six years old, the family moved to the Bavarian capital of Munich. Hofmann enjoyed a privileged upbringing through the connections his father made as a bureaucrat in the German government. While his father insisted that his son pursue a career similar to his own, Hofmann had alternate plans. At eighteen, he began art lessons with the German painter, Moritz Heymann and soon after enrolled in a graphic arts school.

To fully realize his artistic ambitions, Hofmann moved to Paris in 1905 where he remained for ten years. Here, Hofmann met Henri Matisse at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, and befriended Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Sonia and Robert Delauney, and Gertrude Stein. The inf luence of Cubism and Fauvism from these visionaries in Paris would provide the foundation for Hofmann’s own unique, and indefinable style as he matured as an artist.

The outbreak of World War I in 1914 forced Hofmann to move back to Munich, where he was introduced to the abstractionist Wassily Kandinsky. The Russian artist pioneered abstract art, using vibrant and expressive masses of color with no recognizable subjects. Kandinsky credited his revolutionary theories of abstraction to contemporary atonal music that disregarded traditional harmonies. Hofmann was compelled by Kandinsky’s theory and practice of art, and would carry this influence with him when he opened his first school in 1915.

The Hans Hofmann Schule für Bildende Kunst was located in a Bohemian district of Munich, and attracted artists from across Europe and the United States. His engaging lessons on modern avant-garde painting brought him wide acclaim.

Having cemented his reputation as an instructor of modern art, Hofmann was invited by a former student to teach a summer course at the University of California at Berkeley.

Following the successful course, he returned to California several summers before finally remaining in the United States by 1932. In New York, Hofmann was a regular faculty member of the Art Students League, where his pupils included Ray Eames, Louise Nevelson, Lillian Keisler, and many others who would earn recognition in the years to follow.

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In 1933, Hofmann founded a school of his own, called the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts. By 1938, it was located at 52 West 8th Street in the thriving artistic enclave of Greenwich Village. Hofmann additionally led summer programs in Provincetown, Massachusetts, an artist’s colony that later drew Abstract Expressionists in the 1950s. His school and unique theories of art were a welcome respite from the more practiced tenets of American regionalism. Hofmann’s first-hand experience with European modernism sparked the interests of his American students to experiment in new styles.

During the span of 25 years, Hofmann was devoted to teaching and had little time to spend on his own art. By the 1940s he was painting again and was almost entirely devoted to abstraction. At this time, Hofmann revised many of his writings on painting to reflect his theory of the “push-pull” dynamic of his works. His famous concept suggested the illusion of space, depth, and movement could be achieved through abstract forms and color.

Concerto in Colours is a masterful example of Hofmann’s late “Slab” paintings, a style that visualized his theoretical concepts.

Thick, richly painted orange brushstrokes overlap on the canvas and act as a background to the bursts of red, blue, green, and yellow forms. The liberal use of pigments create texture and depth, and reveal Hofmann’s dynamic energy as a painter. The balancing of vivid color with the forms and textured surface served to fulfill his notion of the “push-pull,” thereby achieving a harmonious composition. The title recalls Kandinsky’s musical source of inspiration for his abstractions, while also suggesting color as the primary vehicle for expression.

Recognition for Hofmann’s work was received later in his career; his first solo show was held in 1944 at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of the This Century Gallery when he was sixty-four years old.

His expressive work during the early 1940s would act as the foundation for Abstract Expressionism, a style made famous

by Jackson Pollock. Through his prolific teaching career and experimental painting, Hofmann made a generous impact on generations of twentieth-century artists.

Nick Cave  (american, b. 1959) Soundsuit, 2007 Fabric, sequins, beads, embroidery and plastic mannequin, 96 x 26 x 30 inches

Nick Cave is a performer and artist whose famous Soundsuits have earned acclaim for their unconventional sculptural form and imaginative and captivating force. Born in 1959 in Fulton, Missouri, Cave was one of seven children and raised within modest means. He earned a bachelor of arts degree from the Kansas Art Institute in 1982, where he also learned how to sew. Cave then attended the prestigious Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, earning a graduate degree in 1989. In addition to his formal art studies, Cave trained as a dancer with Alvin Ailey in New York and Kansas City, cementing his multidisciplinary approach to art.

Although exuberant and whimsical in design, Cave’s Soundsuits were first created after a somber and emotional incident: the 1991 beatings of Rodney King and the ensuing Los Angeles riots. Cave imagined the suits as protective armor from ongoing racial injustices. The Soundsuits are both exhibited as sculpture and can be worn, allowing the wearer anonymity against race, gender, and class judgment. Through their powerful and expressive design, the suits acted as a form of protest.

Soundsuits are named for the noise created when worn by performers. The varied materials used to construct the costumes

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are layered and textured to rustle and rattle with movement, transforming the sculpture into a performance. Cave is fascinated with the discarded items found in f lea markets and antique shops. Buttons, synthetic fur, beads, and sequins adorn the theatrical sculptures, and result in a fantastical, vibrant color palette with reference to African ceremonial costumes and masks.

This example, executed in 2007, features fabric, sequins, beads, and embroidery. Colorful and densely rendered stylistic floral medallions at the cylindrical head of the sculpture suggest traditional textiles and beadwork. The design transforms into a more loose depiction of sun rays and abstract forms at the base of the costume in vibrant pink, purple, and green tones.

In addition to his prolific career as an artist and performer, Cave is an inf luential educator in the arts; he is currently a professor and chairman of the Fashion Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Cave is an awardwinning artist whose works have received numerous exhibitions and are collected by prestigious institutions, including the Brooklyn Museum, the Detroit Institute of the Arts, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Smithsonian Institution.

Please contact us for complete provenance information and prices.

index of artists Asawa, Ruth, 62 Benton, Thomas Hart, 54

I would like to thank my director, Valerie Stanos, for her continued commitment to my vision for the gallery. Valerie, your advice and counsel have been invaluable. The creative genius of Gavin Ashworth’s photography and Russell Hassell’s design have been terrific. And finally, to all those unnamed but critical to our success, thank you for your talents and professionalism. —JB

Bertoia, Harry, 64 Biederman, Charles, 16–21 Burchfield, Charles, 2–3, 60 Burkhart, Emerson, 40 Cave, Nick, 70 Cox, John Rogers, 36 Frelinghuysen, Suzy, 26 Goldberg, Michael, 66 Greene, Balcomb, 30 Hofmann, Hans, 68 Howard, Charles, 22 Janicki, Hazel, 48 Koerner, Henry, 4–5, 50 Lawrence, Jacob, 8–9, 42 Lozowick, Louis, 14 Lundeberg, Helen, 52 Morris, George L. K., 28 Pippin, Horace, 56 Sargent, John Singer, 10 Sepeshy, Zoltan, 32–35 Shahn, Ben, 44 Shaw, Charles Green, 24 Sheeler, Charles, 58 Singer, Clyde, 38 Vickrey, Robert, 46 Weber, Max, 6, 12

Essays: Elizabeth D. Hamilton Sandy Pearl Emelia Scheidt Valerie Stanos Editing: Tom Fredrickson Photography: Gavin Ashworth Josh Nefsky Tim Thayer Michael Tramis, Fine Art Photographer at Julius Lowy Framing and Restoring Graphic Design: Russell Hassell Printing: Puritan Capital All rights reserved.

Reproduction of contents prohibited Publication copyright © 2015 Jonathan Boos 801 Madison Avenue, 5th floor, New York, New York 10065 tel 212.535.5096 fax 212.535.3554 965 East Glengarry Circle, Bloomfield Village, Michigan 48301 tel 248.312.8589 fax 248.723.8205 jb@jonathanboos.com jonathanboos.com Reproduction copyrights: Back cover, 27, 29, © Frelinghuysen Morris Foundation, Lenox Massachusetts; pp. 2–3, 61, image use with permission from the Charles E. Burchfield Foundation; pp. 8–9, 43, © 2015 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; p. 45, © Estate of Ben Shahn/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY; p. 47, © Estate of Robert Vickrey/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY; p. 53, © The Feitelson/Lundeberg Art Foundation; p. 55, © Benton Testamentary Trusts/ UMB Bank Trustee/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY; p. 63, © Ruth Asawa; p. 65, © 2015 Estate of Harry Bertoia / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; p. 69, © 2015 The Renate, Hans & Maria Hofmann Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; p. 71, © Nick Cave. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Front cover: Louis Lozowick, Red Circle, detail, 1924 (see p. 14) Back cover: George L. K. Morris, Compostion, detail, 1941 (see p. 28)

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801 Madison Avenue, 5th floor, New York, NY 10065 212.535.5096 jonathanboos.com