Creator of mosaic tile plaque is also known for his World War II-related paintings

R.T. sends me a midcentury painted mosaic tile plaque, which is a curious image of a yellow fern with green and red foliage signed by E.C. or C.C. Bealle.

The work has been painted in sections and placed together to tell a story in a work of mosaic art.

If the artist is C.C. Bealle, I can tell the owner that this is quite a find, because Mr. Bealle (1892-1970) was an American portraitist and illustrator known for his bright and passionate paintings of World War IIrelated images.

In fact, he was the artist responsible for the success of the World War II (Loan) War Drives, appealing to all Americans with his visual images and his evocative language to “give to the War Fund!!” and help the U.S. win the war.

R.T. would recognize his greatest work: the portrayal of the Iwo Jima Flag raisers on a poster that raised millions of dollars from average Americans who, for the most part, purchased bonds, which, at the top value, were only $200. The combined eight War Drives that involved posters painted by C.C. Bealle made $156 billion.

The other famous image he painted represented his work as a war correspondent. He witnessed the Japanese surrender in 1945 aboard the USS Missouri and painted MacArthur accepting that surrender.

Before Mr. Bealle became a realist painter of actual events, however, he had another side to his personality: abstraction and surrealism, of which we see hints in the little tile plaque owned by R.T. As a young artist trained at the famous Art Students League in NYC, he was part of a group show at the young MOMA in winter 1936-37: “Fine Art Dada and Surrealism.”

But R.T.’s piece is interesting because I see no other mosaic work sold or offered for this artist. (I have sales and auction records through such subscription services as ArtNet and ArtPrice and AskArt, to name a few.)

That doesn’t mean he didn’t dabble in mosaics. The tradition of artists painting on ceramic tiles goes back well over 2,000 years, and while I am on that subject, there is Art World news about the discovery of ancient mosaic works of art.

I read in ArtNet news that the famously persistent Art Crimes unit of the Italian Government, the Carabinieri, has been on quite a wild ride in Los Angeles these past few months, where they have been working with the FBI to apprehend 16 huge slabs of an ancient Roman Mosaic floor, cut into weighty segments of 200 pounds each and stored since the 1980s in an L.A. storage locker.

Today the slabs are being shipped to the newly opened Museum of Rescued Art in Rome, having been packed and crated under the watchful eyes of the Italian Consulate in Los Angeles. The Carabinieri has a notoriously long memory. They have known of the theft of this whole slab of Roman mosaic floor since 1909, but could find no proof, although the owner is from an ancient Roman family that has been persistent in the search for the floor as well. The only other document of an alleged theft was a curious ad in 1959 in the L.A. newspaper for a Roman floor offered for sale.

In England this past week, we heard about mosaic history in the making. The supermarket chain ALDI is building a market in Milton Keynes, but work has been temporarily shut down because of the discovery of an entire intact Roman mosaic floor buried for over 2,000 years, the remnants of a Roman Villa and Bathhouse. It’s wonderfully well preserved.

The Oxford University Archaeological Team has offered to publish its findings about the floor, which it is now investigating. It’s assumed to be the work of an entire school of mosaic artists who were active in the East Midlands of England over 2,000 years ago called the Druidians.

Ironically, ALDI will not choose a new piece of land upon which to build a supermarket, but will build the market over the site, claiming that it will preserve the mosaic floor, but we will see.

Back to R.T.’s piece. The era, of course, is the 1950s, not 1st or 2nd century C.E. The value is $250.

Mr. Bealle’s illustration work sells for much more. He painted the covers of Colliers, Vanity Fair, Cosmo, Saturday Evening Post, and many Reader’s Digests covers as well as paperback book covers. The originals of these covers sell for over $1,500.

Dr. Elizabeth Stewart’s “Ask the Gold Digger” column appears Saturdays in the News-Press.

Written after her father’s COVID-19 diagnosis, Dr. Stewart’s book “My Darlin’ Quarantine: Intimate Connections Created in Chaos” is a humorous collection of five “what-if” short stories that end in personal triumphs over presentday constrictions. It’s available at Chaucer’s in Santa Barbara.