American Modern Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Abstract watercolor composition bearing the influence of the earlier color-block compositions of Paul Klee. Pawel August Kontny, (Polish-German-American artist) He was born in Laurahuette, Poland, in 1923, the son of a wealthy pastry shop owner. In 1939 he began studying architecture in Breslau where he was introduced to the European masters and to the work of some of the German Expressionists, soon afterward banned as "degenerate artists" and removed from museums throughout Germany by the Nazi regime. His studies were interrupted by World War II. Drafted into the German army, traveling in many countries as a soldier, he sketched various landscapes but in 1945, he was captured and held as a prisoner of war in Italy. After the war, he studied at the Union of Nuremberg Architects to help design buildings to replace ones destroyed in the war. He recorded his impressions of the local population and the landscapes through his watercolors and drawings. Pawel Kontny thereafter moved to Nuremberg, Germany, becoming a member of the Union of Nuremberg Architects and helping to rebuild the city's historic center. He soon decided to concentrate on his professional art career. He married Irmgard Laurer, a dancer with the Nuremberg Opera. Pavel Kontny 's career as an artist was launched with his participation in an all German exhibition, held at the Dusseldorf Museum in 1952. He held one-man shows in Germany, Switzerland and the United States. During his trip to the United States in 1960, Kontny became instantly enamored with Colorado, and decided to relocate to Cherry Hills with his wife and two children. He quickly established himself in the local art community, being affiliated for a time with Denver Art Galleries and Saks Galleries. His subject matter became the Southwest. During this time he received the Prestigious Gold Medal of the Art Academy of Rome. His extensive travel provided material for the paintings he did using his hallmark marble dust technique. he also worked equally in pastel, watercolor, charcoal and pencil-and-ink. in a style which merged abstraction and realist styles, influenced by Abstract Expressionist painting and South Western American landscapes. This one bears the influence of Sam Francis. In the early 1960s he was one of only a few European-born professional artists in the state, a select group that included Herbert Bayer (1900-1985), a member of the prewar Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau, Germany, and Roland Detre...

This artwork titled "Riverwash" 1985 is an original watercolor on Arches watermarked paper by noted American artist Anne Popperwell, born 1948. It is signed at the lower right corner by the artist. The artwork size is 22 x 30 inches, framed is 28.25 x 36.25 inches. It is custom framed in a metal bronze color frame. It is in very good condition. About the artist. Anne Popperwell was born in Oakland, California, in 1948 and studied art at the San Francisco Art Institute from 1968-1970 with a major in painting and a minor in photography. She has been painting and exhibiting her work in both private and public galleries, primarily in Canada, since 1981. She paints in watercolour on paper and acrylic on canvas, though not exclusively, using nature-based imagery. Shortly after her arrival in Canada in 1976, Anne moved to an island off the West Coast to paint a particular landscape, the eroded sandstone shoreline. In the course of this eight-year series of paintings, she experimented with point of view, scale and colour, developing a method of working that creates the effect of light coming from within the subject itself. Her paintings are included in private, corporate and public collections in Canada and in private collections in the United States, Mexico and Europe. Solo Exhibitions: 2016 "Shades of Saturna", Artlink Canada, Jaydon Gallery, Vancouver, British Columbia 2009 “Beauty” Casa Dahlia Galeria, San Jose del Cabo, Mexico 2008 “Tropical Flowers” Casa Dahlia Galeria, San Jose del Cabo, Mexico 996- "Why Don't You Just Leave?" paintings and video installation 1998 tour to 11 British Columbia regional galleries, originating at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria Victoria, British Columbia 1993 Fran Willis Gallery, Victoria, British Columbia 1991 Fran Willis North Park Gallery, Victoria, British Columbia 1990 Fran Willis North Park Gallery, Victoria, British Columbia 1986 Robert Vanderleelie Gallery, Victoria, British Columbia Thomas Gallery, Winnipeg, Manitoba 1984 Grace Gallery, Vancouver, British Columbia Winchester Galleries, Victoria, British Columbia 1982 Kyle's Gallery, Victoria, British Columbia 1981 Kyle's Gallery, Victoria, British Columbia Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia Burnaby Art Gallery, Burnaby, British Columbi1980 Kamloops Public Art Gallery, Kamloops, British Columbia Selected Group Exhibitions: 2014 Insight Art Gallery, Galiano, B.C 2012 The Field Gallery, San Jose del Cabo, Mexico 2002 “European Media Arts Festival”, Osnabruck, Germany 1997 “Open House”, Canadian Cultural Centre, Paris, France 1994 "Spring Run", Baux-Xi Gallery, Vancouver, British Columbia 1994-1996 Government House, Victoria, B.C. 1992 "Hanging Gardens", Fran Willis Gallery, Victoria, British Columbia 1990 "Bumbershoot Festival 1990", Seattle, Washington 1986 "Images B.C." The British Columbia Pavilion, Expo 86 Vancouver, British Columbia 1985 "Hot Water Colour", Harbourfront, Toronto, Ontario "B.C. Women Artists" Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia 1983 "National Watercolour Exhibition" Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, British Columbia 1981 “Painter’s Day”, Kyle’s Gallery, Victoria, B.C. Public Collections British Columbia Art Collection, Victoria, British Columbia Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia Maltwood Art Museum, Victoria, British Columbia City of Vancouver, Vancouver, British Columbia Esso Resources Canada, Ltd., Calgary, Alberta Canada Council Art Bank, Ottawa, Ontario Grants and Awards 1995 British Columbia Cultural Services Branch grant 1973 City of Vancouver Purchase Grant Exhibition Reviews, Catalogues and Articles "A Sense of Place", Aqua magazine, Salt Spring Island, B.C. (Summer 2014) illus. “Why Don’t You Just Leave?”, Exhibition Catalogue, Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Victoria, B.C. (April, 1996) illus. Cover, Preview Magazine, Vancouver, B.C., (May/June 1990) Waterman, Jennifer A. “Planetary Visions, Sacred Images of the Earth” Herizons, Winnipeg, Manitoba (Volume 4 #8, December, 1986) p. 44, illus. “B.C. Women Artists”,Exhibition Catalogue, Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Victoria, B.C. (October, 1985) illus. Orford, Emily Jane, “Anne Popperwell’s Intimate Earth”, Victoria Times-Colonist, Victoria, B.C. (October 7, 1984) p. 8 Hartog, Diana, “Body Landscapes...

Abstract watercolor composition bearing the influence of the earlier color-block compositions of Paul Klee. Pawel August Kontny, (Polish-German-American artist) He was born in Laurahuette, Poland, in 1923, the son of a wealthy pastry shop owner. In 1939 he began studying architecture in Breslau where he was introduced to the European masters and to the work of some of the German Expressionists, soon afterward banned as "degenerate artists" and removed from museums throughout Germany by the Nazi regime. His studies were interrupted by World War II. Drafted into the German army, traveling in many countries as a soldier, he sketched various landscapes but in 1945, he was captured and held as a prisoner of war in Italy. After the war, he studied at the Union of Nuremberg Architects to help design buildings to replace ones destroyed in the war. He recorded his impressions of the local population and the landscapes through his watercolors and drawings. Pawel Kontny thereafter moved to Nuremberg, Germany, becoming a member of the Union of Nuremberg Architects and helping to rebuild the city's historic center. He soon decided to concentrate on his professional art career. He married Irmgard Laurer, a dancer with the Nuremberg Opera. Pavel Kontny 's career as an artist was launched with his participation in an all German exhibition, held at the Dusseldorf Museum in 1952. He held one-man shows in Germany, Switzerland and the United States. During his trip to the United States in 1960, Kontny became instantly enamored with Colorado, and decided to relocate to Cherry Hills with his wife and two children. He quickly established himself in the local art community, being affiliated for a time with Denver Art Galleries and Saks Galleries. His subject matter became the Southwest. During this time he received the Prestigious Gold Medal of the Art Academy of Rome. His extensive travel provided material for the paintings he did using his hallmark marble dust technique. he also worked equally in pastel, watercolor, charcoal and pencil-and-ink. in a style which merged abstraction and realist styles, influenced by Abstract Expressionist painting and South Western American landscapes. In the early 1960s he was one of only a few European-born professional artists in the state, a select group that included Herbert Bayer (1900-1985), a member of the prewar Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau, Germany, and Roland Detre...

Expressive line drawing figure study featuring a group of figures in a classroom by David Rosen (Canadian, 1912-2004). Unsigned, but was acquire...

Abstract watercolor or gouache composition bearing the influence of the earlier color-block compositions of Paul Klee. Pawel August Kontny, (Polish-German-American artist) He was born in Laurahuette, Poland, in 1923, the son of a wealthy pastry shop owner. In 1939 he began studying architecture in Breslau where he was introduced to the European masters and to the work of some of the German Expressionists, soon afterward banned as "degenerate artists" and removed from museums throughout Germany by the Nazi regime. His studies were interrupted by World War II. Drafted into the German army, traveling in many countries as a soldier, he sketched various landscapes but in 1945, he was captured and held as a prisoner of war in Italy. After the war, he studied at the Union of Nuremberg Architects to help design buildings to replace ones destroyed in the war. He recorded his impressions of the local population and the landscapes through his watercolors and drawings. Pawel Kontny thereafter moved to Nuremberg, Germany, becoming a member of the Union of Nuremberg Architects and helping to rebuild the city's historic center. He soon decided to concentrate on his professional art career. He married Irmgard Laurer, a dancer with the Nuremberg Opera. Pavel Kontny 's career as an artist was launched with his participation in an all German exhibition, held at the Dusseldorf Museum in 1952. He held one-man shows in Germany, Switzerland and the United States. During his trip to the United States in 1960, Kontny became instantly enamored with Colorado, and decided to relocate to Cherry Hills with his wife and two children. He quickly established himself in the local art community, being affiliated for a time with Denver Art Galleries and Saks Galleries. His subject matter became the Southwest. During this time he received the Prestigious Gold Medal of the Art Academy of Rome. His extensive travel provided material for the paintings he did using his hallmark marble dust technique. he also worked equally in pastel, watercolor, charcoal and pencil-and-ink. in a style which merged abstraction and realist styles, influenced by Abstract Expressionist painting and South Western American landscapes. In the early 1960s he was one of only a few European-born professional artists in the state, a select group that included Herbert Bayer (1900-1985), a member of the prewar Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau, Germany, and Roland Detre...

Abstract watercolor composition bearing the influence of the earlier color-block compositions of Paul Klee. Pawel August Kontny, (Polish-German-American artist) He was born in Laurahuette, Poland, in 1923, the son of a wealthy pastry shop owner. In 1939 he began studying architecture in Breslau where he was introduced to the European masters and to the work of some of the German Expressionists, soon afterward banned as "degenerate artists" and removed from museums throughout Germany by the Nazi regime. His studies were interrupted by World War II. Drafted into the German army, traveling in many countries as a soldier, he sketched various landscapes but in 1945, he was captured and held as a prisoner of war in Italy. After the war, he studied at the Union of Nuremberg Architects to help design buildings to replace ones destroyed in the war. He recorded his impressions of the local population and the landscapes through his watercolors and drawings. Pawel Kontny thereafter moved to Nuremberg, Germany, becoming a member of the Union of Nuremberg Architects and helping to rebuild the city's historic center. He soon decided to concentrate on his professional art career. He married Irmgard Laurer, a dancer with the Nuremberg Opera. Pavel Kontny 's career as an artist was launched with his participation in an all German exhibition, held at the Dusseldorf Museum in 1952. He held one-man shows in Germany, Switzerland and the United States. During his trip to the United States in 1960, Kontny became instantly enamored with Colorado, and decided to relocate to Cherry Hills with his wife and two children. He quickly established himself in the local art community, being affiliated for a time with Denver Art Galleries and Saks Galleries. His subject matter became the Southwest. During this time he received the Prestigious Gold Medal of the Art Academy of Rome. His extensive travel provided material for the paintings he did using his hallmark marble dust technique. he also worked equally in pastel, watercolor, charcoal and pencil-and-ink. in a style which merged abstraction and realist styles, influenced by Abstract Expressionist painting and South Western American landscapes. This one bears the influence of Sam Francis. In the early 1960s he was one of only a few European-born professional artists in the state, a select group that included Herbert Bayer (1900-1985), a member of the prewar Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau, Germany, and Roland Detre...

Abstracted composition by Les (Leslie Luverne) Anderson (American, 1928-2009). Unsigned, but acquired from the estate of Les Anderson in Monterey, California. Presented in a new grey...

"Bourrée Fantasque #7", Pastel on Paper by Artist Francisco Moncion, is a Mid-20th Century fantasy image inspired by George Balanchine's 1949 ballet of the same name for the New York...

Abstract Mid 20th Century WPA Non Objective American Modernism New Hope Modern.mixed media. 21 x 16 (sight). Housed in a hand carved frame. Louis King Stone ...

Mid century inspired aerial landscape pastel drawing by contemporary artist R. Michael Wommack. The work features a birds eye view of a planned neighborhood at night with glowing swi...

Charles Schorre 1925-1996 Texas Image Size: 22 x 30 Frame Size: 27 x 35.5 Medium: Watercolor on Paper "Red Wing" Biography Charles Schorre 1925-1996 Charles Schorre (1925 - 1996) was...

"Bourrée Fantasque #12 Blue", Pastel on Paper by Artist Francisco Moncion, is a Mid-20th Century fantasy image inspired by George Balanchine's 1949 b...

Harmony Hammond Ruffled Waters, 1980 Signed lower right Mixed media on paper 18 1/8 x 24 inches Provenance Private Collection, New York Heritage Auctions, Dallas, Contemporary Art W...

"Bourrée Fantasque #11 Blue", Pastel on Paper by Artist Francisco Moncion, is a Mid-20th Century fantasy image inspired by George Balanchine's 1949 ballet of the same name for the Ne...

"Bourrée Fantasque #1", Pastel on Paper by Artist Francisco Moncion, is a Mid-20th Century fantasy image inspired by George Balanchine's 1949 ballet ...

Howard Daum Untitled Abstract, 1963 Signed and dated upper left, Signed on the reverse Pencil on paper 4 1/2 x 6 inches Provenance The artist Ashby Gallery, New York Carl Ashby, New...

Joyce Treiman Ink on paper, framed under glass; signed in pencil lower right; Dimensions: 16 1/2 x 13 3/4 inches; 18 3/4 x 14 3/4 inches frame. Joyce Wahl Treiman was an American painter, printmaker, sculptor and teacher. Her work ranged from "the impishly perverse and humorously paradoxical to the brilliant and profound." She was known as an excellent draftsperson throughout her career. She made several trips to Europe to study the old masters, and the human figure is central in her work. In her later paintings she is known to have inserted self-portraits. She attended Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri, and then studied at the State University of Iowa (today the University of Iowa) under the influential painter Philip Guston. During World War II she worked as a commercial artist but resigned when she began to have success with exhibitions of her work in Chicago and New York. In 1945 she married Kenneth Treiman, and son Donald, now an Architect, was born in 1950. The Treimans, along with Rene and Rose Wahl, moved to Los Angeles in 1960. She was in an exhibit of Tamarind prints...

An original watercolor painting by American artist Wes Olmsted depicting an abstract landscape view.

Hai (Abba) (Hebrew translation: Hey Father) Signed in ink lower left by the artist’s widow “AL” (Adele Lozowick) Original label from early exhibition verso at The Art Corner Graphit...

This vintage 1938 ink drawing by Charles Ragland Bunnell (1897–1968) beautifully depicts a church nestled amid the dramatic Rocky Mountains of Georgetown, Colorado. Executed in bold ...

You are viewing a modernist American watercolor painting by Robert Noel Blair Robert Noel Blair (American, 1912-2003) was an American artist, painter, sculptor, printmaker and te...

It's 1970 in America, and the vanguard thinking from the editors of Playboy magazine propelled them to do a cutting-edge feature on a new breed of politician. Enter Julian Bond - a y...

Lee Hall (1934-), Connecticut Summer Fragments, a portfolio of watercolor, 29 in all, each about 5 ¼ x 7 ¼ inches, on hand made paper attached to a backing, i...

This artwork "Untitled #1" c.1970 is a colors pastel and crayon on thick paper by American artist Jerry Opper, 1924-2014. It is hand signed in pencil at the lower right corner by the artist. The image size is 23 x 18 inches, sheet size is 24 x 19 inches. It is in excellent condition, there are pastel marks on the margin all around the artwork and also on the back, see picture #1. About the artist: Jerry Opper was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on September 5, 1924. He moved to Los Angeles with his family in 1933. After graduating from Hollywood High School, he worked in movie studios and attended art classes at Chouinard Art Institute. In May 1942, Opper was drafted into the army and was then able to study at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center while his outfit was stationed in Colorado. Later he was sent to Guam and was discharged in December 1945. Opper returned to Chouinard and his work in movie studios until 1947, when he moved to San Francisco. He enrolled as a full-time student at the California School of Fine Arts (now SFAI) and received his diploma in June of 1950. In 1948, Opper met his wife Gertrud Ruth Friedmann, daughter of artist Gustav Friedmann, whose works are also in the Lost Art Salon collection. It was love at first sight and a few weeks after their first encounter at the Black Cat in San Francisco's North Beach, they got married and enjoyed a passionate, life-long romance. Shortly after he finished school, Opper worked briefly as a decorator’s assistant and then started his career as a commercial artist, working for several firms such as Fibreboard, Beatrix Food and Precision. Working full-time and dedicating himself to having a rich family life occupied most of Opper's time, but he continued to be creative. He was above all a family man with the pride of having raised two exceptional daughters, Erika and Jody. Year after year, Opper would painstakingly craft their Halloween costumes...

This work is a modernist study created by the artist in the 1940s. (possibly the 1930s). Erle Loran, (1905-1999), was an American painter and educator who painted for the entirety ...

MODERNIST DRAWING New Hope Mid-Century WPA Abstract Non-Objective Jazz Modern. Signed with a "Ramstonev" stamp lower right. RAMSTONEV Cooperative Art Project (1937-1939). In the late 1930s, Charles Ramsey became close friends with Charles Evans and Louis Stone. He persuaded them to join him teaching his New Hope summer classes in non-objective painting. Soon, a history-making collaboration began. In 1937, meeting in Evans' studio at the rear of Cryer's Hardware store on Main Street in New Hope, a decision was made to establish the Co-Operative Painting Project. They were intrigued by the cooperative ad-lib process by which jazz musicians created their music. Believing this to be the quintessential American contribution to music, they theorized that a similar result might be obtainable with art, a "visual jam session." This particlarly fascinated Ramsey, who was a jazz buff and had a large collection of jazz records. The objective was to jointly collaborate in the creation of a painting as well as applying collective criticism during its creation. By creating forward movement by general consent, they believed they could produce a higher level of beauty. By consensus it was decided that subject matter would be non-objective. Up to eight people would participate and stop when the painting "felt" finished by common agreement. These co-operative works were done in several different mediums- the majority in pastel, but some in watercolor, gouache, graphite or cut paper collage. On occasion, the group would create a series, as opposed to a single work, created in steps by three or four artists. One of the occasional participants was famed New Hope poet, Stanley Kunitz. These series could range in number from four to sixteen paintings in each. The first of a series would be very basic and the last a fully finished work. In the scope of importance among the New Hope Modernist...

Vibrant Japanese Irises Still Life by Les (Leslie Luverne) Anderson (American, 1928-2009). From the estate of Les Anderson in Monterey, California. Signed twice "Les Anderson" lower ...

Classroom interior scene by Les (Leslie Luverne) Anderson (American, 1928-2009). From the estate of Les Anderson in Monterey, California. Signed in the lower right corner and unframe...

"Abstract With Clouds" is an original ink drawing on paper by Sylvia Spicuzza, stamped with her signature in the lower right. The drawing is done entirely in pink with a combination ...

Charles Schorre 1925-1996 Texas Image Size: 30 x 22 Frame Size: 40.75 x 33.25 Medium: Watercolor on Paper "Untitled Abstract" Biography Charles Schorre 1925-1996 Charles Schorre (192...

Ellen Steinfeld is a sculptor, a painter and has worked in several different media. She graduated with a degree in painting and design from Carnegie Mellon University and earned a graduate degree from the University of Pittsburgh. She has received numerous large-scale public and private commissions including an 18’ steel sculpture for the atrium of Roswell Park Cancer Institute and a commission to design 16 large stained glass windows for Christ Church in Detroit. Works in various media have been selected and incorporated into public spaces including schools, hotels, hospitals, museums, airports, stadiums and corporate collections. Her work was selected to represent New York State for the Absolut...

Ellen Steinfeld is a sculptor, a painter and has worked in several different media. She graduated with a degree in painting and design from Carnegie Mellon University and earned a graduate degree from the University of Pittsburgh. She has received numerous large-scale public and private commissions including an 18’ steel sculpture for the atrium of Roswell Park Cancer Institute and a commission to design 16 large stained glass windows for Christ Church in Detroit. Works in various media have been selected and incorporated into public spaces including schools, hotels, hospitals, museums, airports, stadiums and corporate collections. Her work was selected to represent New York State for the Absolut...

Modern abstract watercolor painting with blue and grey tones. The artist sketched out crosses within the blue abstract landscape. The piece is signed by the artist. It is framed in a silver metal frame with a white matte. Dimensions without Frame: H 25 in x W 33 in. Artist Biography: Peter Keefer...

Oscar Bluemner was a German and an American, a trained architect who read voraciously in art theory, color theory, and philosophy, a writer of art criticism both in German and English, and, above all, a practicing artist. Bluemner was an intense man, who sought to express and share, through drawing and painting, universal emotional experience. Undergirded by theory, Bluemner chose color and line for his vehicles; but color especially became the focus of his passion. He was neither abstract artist nor realist, but employed the “expressional use of real phenomena” to pursue his ends. (Oscar Bluemner, from unpublished typescript on “Modern Art” for Camera Work, in Bluemner papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, as cited and quoted in Jeffrey R. Hayes, Oscar Bluemner [1991], p. 60. The Bluemner papers in the Archives [hereafter abbreviated as AAA] are the primary source for Bluemner scholars. Jeffrey Hayes read them thoroughly and translated key passages for his doctoral dissertation, Oscar Bluemner: Life, Art, and Theory [University of Maryland, 1982; UMI reprint, 1982], which remains the most comprehensive source on Bluemner. In 1991, Hayes published a monographic study of Bluemner digested from his dissertation and, in 2005, contributed a brief essay to the gallery show at Barbara Mathes, op. cit.. The most recent, accessible, and comprehensive view of Bluemner is the richly illustrated, Barbara Haskell, Oscar Bluemner: A Passion for Color, exhib. cat. [New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2005.]) Bluemner was born in the industrial city of Prenzlau, Prussia, the son and grandson of builders and artisans. He followed the family predilection and studied architecture, receiving a traditional and thorough German training. He was a prize-winning student and appeared to be on his way to a successful career when he decided, in 1892, to emigrate to America, drawn perhaps by the prospect of immediate architectural opportunities at the Chicago World’s Fair, but, more importantly, seeking a freedom of expression and an expansiveness that he believed he would find in the New World. The course of Bluemner’s American career proved uneven. He did indeed work as an architect in Chicago, but left there distressed at the formulaic quality of what he was paid to do. Plagued by periods of unemployment, he lived variously in Chicago, New York, and Boston. At one especially low point, he pawned his coat and drafting tools and lived in a Bowery flophouse, selling calendars on the streets of New York and begging for stale bread. In Boston, he almost decided to return home to Germany, but was deterred partly because he could not afford the fare for passage. He changed plans and direction again, heading for Chicago, where he married Lina Schumm, a second-generation German-American from Wisconsin. Their first child, Paul Robert, was born in 1897. In 1899, Bluemner became an American citizen. They moved to New York City where, until 1912, Bluemner worked as an architect and draftsman to support his family, which also included a daughter, Ella Vera, born in 1903. All the while, Oscar Bluemner was attracted to the freer possibilities of art. He spent weekends roaming Manhattan’s rural margins, visiting the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, and New Jersey, sketching landscapes in hundreds of small conté crayon drawings. Unlike so many city-based artists, Bluemner did not venture out in search of pristine countryside or unspoiled nature. As he wrote in 1932, in an unsuccessful application for a Guggenheim Fellowship, “I prefer the intimate landscape of our common surroundings, where town and country mingle. For we are in the habit to carry into them our feelings of pain and pleasure, our moods” (as quoted by Joyce E. Brodsky in “Oscar Bluemner in Black and White,” p. 4, in Bulletin 1977, I, no. 5, The William Benton Museum of Art, Storrs, Connecticut). By 1911, Bluemner had found a powerful muse in a series of old industrial towns, mostly in New Jersey, strung along the route of the Morris Canal. While he educated himself at museums and art galleries, Bluemner entered numerous architectural competitions. In 1903, in partnership with Michael Garven, he designed a new courthouse for Bronx County. Garven, who had ties to Tammany Hall, attempted to exclude Bluemner from financial or artistic credit, but Bluemner promptly sued, and, finally, in 1911, after numerous appeals, won a $7,000 judgment. Barbara Haskell’s recent catalogue reveals more details of Bluemner’s architectural career than have previously been known. Bluemner the architect was also married with a wife and two children. He took what work he could get and had little pride in what he produced, a galling situation for a passionate idealist, and the undoubted explanation for why he later destroyed the bulk of his records for these years. Beginning in 1907, Bluemner maintained a diary, his “Own Principles of Painting,” where he refined his ideas and incorporated insights from his extensive reading in philosophy and criticism both in English and German to create a theoretical basis for his art. Sometime between 1908 and 1910, Bluemner’s life as an artist was transformed by his encounter with the German-educated Alfred Stieglitz, proprietor of the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession at 291 Fifth Avenue. The two men were kindred Teutonic souls. Bluemner met Stieglitz at about the time that Stieglitz was shifting his serious attention away from photography and toward contemporary art in a modernist idiom. Stieglitz encouraged and presided over Bluemner’s transition from architect to painter. During the same period elements of Bluemner’s study of art began to coalesce into a personal vision. A Van Gogh show in 1908 convinced Bluemner that color could be liberated from the constraints of naturalism. In 1911, Bluemner visited a Cézanne watercolor show at Stieglitz’s gallery and saw, in Cézanne’s formal experiments, a path for uniting Van Gogh’s expressionist use of color with a reality-based but non-objective language of form. A definitive change of course in Bluemner’s professional life came in 1912. Ironically, it was the proceeds from his successful suit to gain credit for his architectural work that enabled Bluemner to commit to painting as a profession. Dividing the judgment money to provide for the adequate support of his wife and two children, he took what remained and financed a trip to Europe. Bluemner traveled across the Continent and England, seeing as much art as possible along the way, and always working at a feverish pace. He took some of his already-completed work with him on his European trip, and arranged his first-ever solo exhibitions in Berlin, Leipzig, and Elberfeld, Germany. After Bluemner returned from his study trip, he was a painter, and would henceforth return to drafting only as a last-ditch expedient to support his family when his art failed to generate sufficient income. Bluemner became part of the circle of Stieglitz artists at “291,” a group which included Marsden Hartley, John Marin, and Arthur Dove. He returned to New York in time to show five paintings at the 1913 Armory Show and began, as well, to publish critical and theoretical essays in Stieglitz’s journal, Camera Work. In its pages he cogently defended the Armory Show against the onslaught of conservative attacks. In 1915, under Stieglitz’s auspices, Bluemner had his first American one-man show at “291.” Bluemner’s work offers an interesting contrast with that of another Stieglitz architect-turned-artist, John Marin, who also had New Jersey connections. The years after 1914 were increasingly uncomfortable. Bluemner remained, all of his life, proud of his German cultural legacy, contributing regularly to German language journals and newspapers in this country. The anti-German sentiment, indeed mania, before and during World War I, made life difficult for the artist and his family. It is impossible to escape the political agenda in Charles Caffin’s critique of Bluemner’s 1915 show. Caffin found in Bluemner’s precise and earnest explorations of form, “drilled, regimented, coerced . . . formations . . . utterly alien to the American idea of democracy” (New York American, reprinted in Camera Work, no. 48 [Oct. 1916], as quoted in Hayes, 1991, p. 71). In 1916, seeking a change of scene, more freedom to paint, and lower expenses, Bluemner moved his family to New Jersey, familiar terrain from his earlier sketching and painting. During the ten years they lived in New Jersey, the Bluemner family moved around the state, usually, but not always, one step ahead of the rent collector. In 1917, Stieglitz closed “291” and did not reestablish a Manhattan gallery until 1925. In the interim, Bluemner developed relationships with other dealers and with patrons. Throughout his career he drew support and encouragement from art cognoscenti who recognized his talent and the high quality of his work. Unfortunately, that did not pay the bills. Chronic shortfalls were aggravated by Bluemner’s inability to sustain supportive relationships. He was a difficult man, eternally bitter at the gap between the ideal and the real. Hard on himself and hard on those around him, he ultimately always found a reason to bite the hand that fed him. Bluemner never achieved financial stability. He left New Jersey in 1926, after the death of his beloved wife, and settled in South Braintree, Massachusetts, outside of Boston, where he continued to paint until his own death in 1938. As late as 1934 and again in 1936, he worked for New Deal art programs designed to support struggling artists. Bluemner held popular taste and mass culture in contempt, and there was certainly no room in his quasi-religious approach to art for accommodation to any perceived commercial advantage. His German background was also problematic, not only for its political disadvantages, but because, in a world where art is understood in terms of national styles, Bluemner was sui generis, and, to this day, lacks a comfortable context. In 1933, Bluemner adopted Florianus (definitively revising his birth names, Friedrich Julius Oskar) as his middle name and incorporated it into his signature, to present “a Latin version of his own surname that he believed reinforced his career-long effort to translate ordinary perceptions into the more timeless and universal languages of art” (Hayes 1982, p. 189 n. 1). In 1939, critic Paul Rosenfeld, a friend and member of the Stieglitz circle, responding to the difficulty in categorizing Bluemner, perceptively located him among “the ranks of the pre-Nazi German moderns” (Hayes 1991, p. 41). Bluemner was powerfully influenced in his career by the intellectual heritage of two towering figures of nineteenth-century German culture, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. A keen student of color theory, Bluemner gave pride of place to the formulations of Goethe, who equated specific colors with emotional properties. In a November 19, 1915, interview in the German-language newspaper, New Yorker Staats-Zeitung (Abendblatt), he stated: I comprehend the visible world . . . abstract the primary-artistic . . . and after these elements of realty are extracted and analyzed, I reconstruct a new free creation that still resembles the original, but also . . . becomes an objectification of the abstract idea of beauty. The first—and most conspicuous mark of this creation is . . . colors which accord with the character of things, the locality . . . [and which] like the colors of Cranach, van der Weyden, or Durer, are of absolute purity, breadth, and luminosity. . . . I proceed from the psychological use of color by the Old Masters . . . [in which] we immediately recognize colors as carriers of “sorrow and joy” in Goethe’s sense, or as signs of human relationship. . . . Upon this color symbolism rests the beauty as well as the expressiveness, of earlier sacred paintings. Above all, I recognize myself as a contributor to the new German theory of light and color, which expands Goethe’s law of color through modern scientific means (as quoted in Hayes 1991, p. 71). Hayes has traced the global extent of Bluemner’s intellectual indebtedness to Hegel (1991, pp. 36–37). More specifically, Bluemner made visual, in his art, the Hegelian world view, in the thesis and antithesis of the straight line and the curve, the red and the green, the vertical and the horizontal, the agitation and the calm. Bluemner respected all of these elements equally, painting and drawing the tension and dynamic of the dialectic and seeking ultimate reconciliation in a final visual synthesis. Bluemner was a keen student of art, past and present, looking, dissecting, and digesting all that he saw. He found precedents for his non-naturalist use of brilliant-hued color not only in the work Van Gogh and Cezanne, but also in Gauguin, the Nabis, and the Symbolists, as well as among his contemporaries, the young Germans of Der Blaue Reiter. Bluemner was accustomed to working to the absolute standard of precision required of the architectural draftsman, who adjusts a design many times until its reality incorporates both practical imperatives and aesthetic intentions. Hayes describes Bluemner’s working method, explaining how the artist produced multiple images playing on the same theme—in sketch form, in charcoal, and in watercolor, leading to the oil works that express the ultimate completion of his process (Hayes, 1982, pp. 156–61, including relevant footnotes). Because of Bluemner’s working method, driven not only by visual considerations but also by theoretical constructs, his watercolor and charcoal studies have a unique integrity. They are not, as is sometimes the case with other artists, rough preparatory sketches. They stand on their own, unfinished only in the sense of not finally achieving Bluemner’s carefully considered purpose. The present charcoal drawing is one of a series of images that take as their starting point the Morris Canal as it passed through Rockaway, New Jersey. The Morris Canal industrial towns that Bluemner chose as the points of departure for his early artistic explorations in oil included Paterson with its silk mills (which recalled the mills in the artist’s childhood home in Elberfeld), the port city of Hoboken, Newark, and, more curiously, a series of iron ore mining and refining towns, in the north central part of the state that pre-dated the Canal, harkening back to the era of the Revolutionary War. The Rockaway theme was among the original group of oil paintings that Bluemner painted in six productive months from July through December 1911 and took with him to Europe in 1912. In his painting journal, Bluemner called this work Morris Canal at Rockaway N.J. (AAA, reel 339, frames 150 and 667, Hayes, 1982, pp. 116–17), and exhibited it at the Galerie Fritz Gurlitt in Berlin in 1912 as Rockaway N. J. Alter Kanal. After his return, Bluemner scraped down and reworked these canvases. The Rockaway picture survives today, revised between 1914 and 1922, as Old Canal, Red and Blue (Rockaway River) in the collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D. C. (color illus. in Haskell, fig. 48, p. 65). For Bluemner, the charcoal expression of his artistic vision was a critical step in composition. It represented his own adaptation of Arthur Wesley’s Dow’s (1857–1922) description of a Japanese...

Charles Houghton Howard was born in Montclair, New Jersey, the third of five children in a cultured and educated family with roots going back to the Massachusetts Bay colony. His father, John Galen Howard, was an architect who had trained at M.I.T. and the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and apprenticed in Boston with Henry Hobson Richardson. In New York, the elder Howard worked for McKim, Mead and White before establishing a successful private practice. Mary Robertson Bradbury Howard, Charles’s mother, had studied art before her marriage. John Galen Howard moved his household to California in 1902 to assume the position of supervising architect of the new University of California campus at Berkeley and to serve as Professor of Architecture and the first Dean of the School of Architecture (established in 1903). The four Howard boys grew up to be artists and all married artists, leaving a combined family legacy of art making in the San Francisco Bay area that endures to this day, most notably in design, murals, and reliefs at the Coit Tower and in buildings on the Berkeley campus. Charles Howard graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1921 as a journalism major and pursued graduate studies in English at Harvard and Columbia Universities before embarking on a two-year trip to Europe. Howard went to Europe as a would-be writer. But a near-religious experience, seeing a picture by Giorgione in a remote town outside of Venice, proved a life-altering epiphany. In his own words, “I cut the tour at once and hurried immediately back to Paris, to begin painting. I have been painting whenever I could ever since” (Charles Howard, “What Concerns Me,” Magazine of Art 39 [February 1946], p. 63). Giorgione’s achievement, in utilizing a structured and rational visual language of art to convey high emotion on canvas, instantly convinced Howard that painting, and not literature, offered the best vehicle to express what he wanted to say. Howard returned to the United States in 1925, confirmed in his intent to become an artist. Howard settled in New York and supported himself as a painter in the decorating workshop of Louis Bouché and Rudolph Guertler, where he specialized in mural painting. Devoting spare time to his own work, he lived in Greenwich Village and immersed himself in the downtown avant-garde cultural milieu. The late 1920s and early 1930s were the years of Howard’s art apprenticeship. He never pursued formal art instruction, but his keen eye, depth of feeling, and intense commitment to the process of art making, allowed him to assimilate elements of painting intuitively from the wide variety of art that interested him. He found inspiration in the modernist movements of the day, both for their adherence to abstract formal qualities and for the cosmopolitan, international nature of the movements themselves. Influenced deeply by Surrealism, Howard was part of a group of American and European Surrealists clustered around Julien Levy. Levy opened his eponymously-named gallery in 1931, and rose to fame in January 1932, when he organized and hosted Surrealisme, the first ever exhibition of Surrealism in America, which included one work by Howard. Levy remained the preeminent force in advocating for Surrealism in America until he closed his gallery in 1949. Howard’s association with Levy in the early 1930s confirms the artist’s place among the avant-garde community in New York at that time. In 1933, Howard left New York for London. It is likely that among the factors that led to the move were Howard’s desire to be a part of an international art community, as well as his marriage to English artist, Madge Knight...

Dove uses ink to render angular and rounded shapes, he then fills in these shapes with gouache using loose brush marks which create a sensitive textural landscape. The transparency o...

Signed (in white gouache, at lower left): Winold Reiss; (with estate stamp, at lower right): Winold / Reiss