Kamil Kubik

"Copley Square, Boston, " Kamil Kubik Massachusetts Cityscape Street Scene

1984

Yvonne Jacquette uses pastel on a heavy rag paper to depict an ariel city scene at night with pulsing lights. There is a heavy texture to the paper and the surface is rich and vibra...

Yvonne Jacquette (American, b. 1935) Tokyo Diptych, 1985 Pastel on paper Overall 17 1/4 x 28 1/2 inches Signed lower center Provenance: Carey Ellis Company, Houston, Texas Brooke Alexander, New York Collection of an American Corporation Exhibited: New York, Brooke Alexander, Yvonne Jacquette: Tokyo Nightviews, April 5 - May 3, 1986, n.p., illustrated; this exhibition later traveled to Brunswick, Maine, Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Yvonne Jacquette: Tokyo Nightviews, June 27 - August 24, 1986. Yvonne Jacquette has a preference for high places, a circling plane, a penthouse window, an aerie from which to watch the world. Her work has often depicted the city and man-made landscape from the vantage of angels. It is a privileged perspective, long loved by photographers, who were perhaps the first to recognize the geometric grandeur of the city below. That grandeur structures Jacquette's images but is not its full content. Her work attempts to resolve the visual and emotional pardoxes of the modern metropolis. Only from the tower is there the possibility of order and context. And unlaced beauty. Jacquette first visited Japan in 1982. Nighttime Tokyo, its cars and crowds and canyons of loud Vegas neon, made a vivid and bewildering impression on her. The neon signs, pulsing, scaling the walls of high rises, fascinated the artist, "like Times Square spread over miles." Her fascination was equal parts marvel, confusion, and curiosity—the sparks of art. She returned to Tokyo in May of 1985, choosing hotel rooms with expansive vistas. From these views Jacquette excerpted images for a series of pastel night scenes. The basic forms and colors of each drawing were blocked in during night sessions by the window. She worked in the dark, selecting colors by flashlight. In daylight, she sharpened the geometry and corrected ambiguous passages. She refined the drawings further in the studio until the images read clearly. Photographic correctness was not important. The finished drawings are complete statements, not simply preparatory sketches for paintings. They have the authority of expert witness. In clear, discreet jots of pastel they record the performance of seeing, each touch of color attesting to a moment's close scrutiny. Yvonne Jacquette was born on December 15, 1934 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and grew up in Stamford, Connecticut. She attended the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence from 1952 to 1955, when she moved to New York City. Her late husband was photographer Rudy Burckhardt, and the couple were part of a circle of artist friends that included Fairfield Porter, Alex Katz, Red Grooms, and Mimi Gross. She continues to live and work in New York City, as well as in Searsmont, Maine. A flight to San Diego in 1969 sparked Jacquette’s interest in aerial views, after which she began flying in commercial airliners to study cloud formations and weather patterns. She soon started sketching and painting the landscape as seen from above, beginning a process that has developed into a defining element of her art. Her first nocturnal painting...

A Colorful, Panoramic Mid-Century Modern View of the famed fishing village (and renowned surfing locale) of Nazaré, Portugal by Rudolph Pen. Painted in the 1960s, this vivid waterco...

A Large, Dynamic 1950s Mid-Century Modern Watercolor of Lower Manhattan, New York City by Noted Chicago Artist, Francis Chapin (Am. 1899-1965). The image is watercolor, pastel and c...

Walter Anderson ( American, 1903 - 1965) Hydrangeas, circa 1950 Mixed media on paper 11 x 8 1/2 inches Provenance: Luise Ross Gallery, New York Private Collection, New Jersey Acquired from the estate of the above, 2021 Walter Anderson firmly believed that quality art was an important part of life and should be made available to everyone. As he said, "There should be simple, good decorations, to be sold at prices to rival the five-and-ten." Noticing that only poor quality art was available in stores and little was available for children, he resolved to make art which could be reproduced easily and sell inexpensively — linoleum block prints. This technique enabled him to provide affordable, quality art. The technique of linoleum block printing is a simple concept; however, it requires much skill and talent to actually produce memorable art. Anderson purchased surplus "battleship linoleum," thicker than ordinary linoleum with a burlap backing for better support, to create his blocks. During the mid-1940s, he created almost 300 linocuts working in the attic of the sea-side plantation house, Oldfields, his wife's family home in Gautier. Masses of linoleum chips accumulated at the foot of the attic stairs as he often worked night and day. He began with sketching out a design directly on the linoleum. Once he had carved the image into the surface, he used the back of faded, surplus stock wallpaper that a friend sent him, laying long strips on top of the inked linoleum. A roller made of sewer pipe filled with sand served as his press. When the print was completed, he often colored it by hand with bold strokes and vivid colors. The prints were sold at Shearwater Pottery, the family business, for a mere dollar a foot. But "what about a well-designed fairy tale for a child's room?" he asked himself. Since there was a lack of affordable art for children, much of his work with linoleum blocks focused on subjects for children. He depicted fables and fairy tales ranging from Arabian Nights, to Germany and the Grimm Brothers' Rapunzel, to the French story of The White Cat, to the Greek tales such as Europa and the Bull, and to tales from China, India, and other cultures. Anderson also created "mini" books featuring the alphabet and Robinson Cat. The blocks are not only alive with the story being depicted, but they are also filled with designs taken from Best-Maugard's Method for Creative Design. Swirls, half-circles and zig-zag lines fill every available space on the linoleum block making them come alive and capture their audience. But fairy tales, children's verses and the "mini" books, consisting of about 90 blocks, were not the sole subject of Anderson's linoleum block prints. In total, he created approximately 300 linoleum blocks with subjects ranging from coastal flora and fauna, coastal animals, and sports and other coastal activities. Anderson even created linoleum blocks to be used to print tablecloths and clothing, some worn by his own children. Color and subjects of the linoleum block prints were not the only things that got them noticed. In 1945 when Anderson was creating these prints, the standard size of linoleum block prints was only 12 by 18 inches. These small dimensions were due to the common size of the paper available and the restrictions made by national competitions. Since Anderson used wallpaper...

August Frederick Biehle (1885-1979) Houses in Zoar, c. 1921 Gouache, litho crayon, colored pencil and graphite on paper Signed lower right 14 x 19 inches 20.25 x 25.25 inches, framed...

August Frederick Biehle (1885-1979) Farm Landscape, Zoar, c. 1923 Gouache, litho crayon and graphite on paper Signed lower right 14 x 19 inches 17 x 23 inches, framed A versatile pa...

Early 1960s work on paper of a group of trees at Buckfast Abbey in Devon, England, by Alban Atkins. Signed bottom left, titled and dated to the reverse. There is also a collection or accession number to the backboard. Atkins has captured the sculptural nature of the tree trunks as they have grown in the landscape giving the work a feeling of living, writhing things as well as an abstract feel in the composition. Atkins was one of the group of important artists chosen and commissioned by Sir Kenneth Clark...

Oscar Bluemner Sheepshead, Long Island, 1907 Signed with the artist's conjoined initials "OB" and dated "4-30 - 5 - 30" / "Aug 3, 07" Watercolor on paper 6 x 10 inches Provenance: J...

Lionel S. Reiss (1894 - 1988) New York City Skyline View from the East River Watercolor on paper 13 x 19 inches Signed lower left In describing his own style, Lionel Reiss wrote, “By nature, inclination, and training, I have long since recognized the fact that...I belong to the category of those who can only gladly affirm the reality of the world I live in.” Reiss’s subject matter was wide-ranging, including gritty New York scenes, landscapes of bucolic Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and seascapes around Gloucester, Massachusetts. However, it was as a painter of Jewish life—both in Israel and in Europe before World War II—that Reiss excelled. I.B. Singer, the Nobel Prize winner for Literature, noted that Reiss was “essentially an artist of the nineteenth century, and because of this he had the power and the courage to tell visually the story of a people.” Although Reiss was born in Jaroslaw, Poland, his family immigrated to the United States in 1898 when he was four years old. Reiss's family settled on New York City’s Lower East Side and he lived in the city for most of his life. Reiss attended the Art Students League and then worked as a commercial artist for newspapers and publishers. As art director for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, he supposedly created the studio’s famous lion logo. After World War I, Reiss became fascinated with Jewish life in the ‘Old World.’ In 1921 he left his advertising work and spent the next ten years traveling in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. Like noted Jewish photographers Alter Kacyzne and Roman Vishniac, Reiss depicted Jewish life in Poland prior to World War II. He later wrote, “My trip encompassed three main objectives: to make ethnic studies of Jewish types wherever I traveled; to paint and draw Jewish life, as I saw it and felt it, in all aspects; and to round out my work in Israel.” In Europe, Reiss recorded quotidian scenes in a variety of media and different settings such as Paris, Amsterdam, the Venice ghetto, the Jewish cemetery in Prague, and an array of shops, synagogues, streets, and marketplaces in the Jewish quarters of Warsaw, Lodz, Krakow, Lublin, Vilna, Ternopil, and Kovno. He paid great attention to details of dress, hair, and facial features, and his work became noted for its descriptive quality. A selection of Reiss’s portraits appeared in 1938 in his book My Models Were Jews. In this book, published on the eve of the Holocaust, Reiss argued that there was “no such thing as a ‘Jewish race’.” Instead, he claimed that the Jewish people were a cultural group with a great deal of diversity within and between Jewish communities around the world. Franz Boas...