Mid-20th Century Abstract Paintings

Title: Overlook Mountain, Woodstock Medium: Oil on Canvas Size: 24 x 33 inches Date: c. 1960 Archive No.: 382 The painting is signed 'Pinajian' in the lower right corner and dated b...

'Abstract in Red' by Carmélio' Rodrigues Cruz, 1966. Brasil, São Paulo Bienniale, MoMA Resende, New York, Chicago ---- Signed twice, verso, 'Carmélio' and 'Carmélio Cruz' for Carmélio' Rodrigues Cruz (Brazilian, born 1924) and dated 1966. Carmélio Rodrigues Cruz first studied art with the Brazilian painter, Jacinto de Souza (1935-1940). In 1944, he was invited to participate in the Sociedade Cearense de Artes Plásticas (SCAP), alongside other Latin American Modernists including Antonio Bandeira...

A Transendental Abstraction by famed Chicago Modernist, William S. Schwartz titled "Impressions of the West #7". Anecdotally, Schwartz's notable "Impressions of the West" series wer...

A mid-century gouache on board painting by American female artist Harriet Holden Nash depicting an abstract Matisse like floral composition in shades of green and black. The board i...

Vintage American modernist abstract oil painting. Oil on canvas. Framed. Measuring: 40 by 40 inches overall. In excellent original condition. Handsomely framed in a wood strip mold...

Vintage American modern abstract oil painting. Oil on canvas, circa 1960. Unsigned. Image size, 48L x 36H. Unframed.

"Abstract Composition" signed by Armand Rottenberg (French 1903-2000) oil painting on card, unframed painting: 18 x 15 inches Superb original painting by the French abstract artis...

Work on wood

Early American school modernist abstract landscape. Oil on canvas. Nicely framed.

James Earl Ray (1928-1998). Landscape with Orange Sky. ca. 1975. Oil on masonite panel measures 6.5 x 8.5 inches, 10.5 x 12.5 inches framed. Signed lowe...

It’s time to bury the so-last-century idea that folks are either "right-brained,” i.e., naturally creative, or (boringly) "left-brained," always operating logically. And here’s just ...

"Annie Nobles Miller" Abstract Florida landscape oil on board painting Hand signed lower left Inscribed on verso St. Lucie County. Measures: Board 24"H x 30"W; Framed - 32"H x 38"W. Annie Miller was a member of the Indian River School of Painting, which was not a formal school but was a group of mostly African-American Florida working class people who wanted to paint. Following is the explanation of that school and its participants. Indian River School is a name applied to Floridian artists in the 1950's and 1960's. They were heavily influenced by nature. Most of the artists in this movement were African American. Their work is characterized by quick strokes and eschews traditional methods of paintings. The main influence for the group was a man named A.E. Backus, a Bohemian white man who mentored the group of young black artists. The group used to congregate in his studio and learnt to paint from 'Beanie' (as he was called) as a way out of their lower class labour jobs. Their work was powerful, dramatic yet captured the serenity and beauty of the Florida Although the exact count of artists mentored by A.E. Backus remains unknown, experts estimate it to be around 20 individuals, many of whom he supported through college. Albert Ernest "Beanie" Backus (1906–1990) was famous for his vivid, naturalist Florida landscapes capturing a fast-vanishing Florida wild lands. Backus would come to be seen as the seminal Florida landscape painter, and others who followed would emulate him. Primarily of the Indian River and Everglades areas of Florida. Backus was a Native Floridian artist of great importance recreating scenes of Florida's sky, rivers, ocean, back country, unpredictable weather, clouds, and birds. Born in Fort Pierce, FL to a family of talented boat designers and builders. His "Uncle" Reg Goodwin helped Backus as a young painter go to the Parsons School of Fine Art in New York in 1924. He was referred to as “Florida’s painter laureate,” and the “Dean of Florida’s landscape painters.”In addition to his influence on the Florida Highwaymen painters (Alfred Hair...

A painting by Alexander Calder. "The Oval Spiral" is a Post-War, geometric abstract painting, gouache and ink on paper in bold colors of reds and blacks by artist Alexander Calder. T...

Antique American modernist signed abstract tropical oil painting. Oil on board. Framed.

Antique American modernist landscape oil painting. Oil on canvas board. Framed. Measuring: 21 by 27 inches overall, and 18 by 24 painting alone.. In excellent original condition. Ha...

A commanding piece of Mid-Century abstraction, this painting composition by American artist Canthi—signed and dated 1961—exudes raw, architectural energy layered over a vivid color f...

Abstract Expressionist Sky Composition by Gerard Guegueniat (French 1970's) signed oil painting on board, framed: 16.5 x 32.5 inches board: 15.5 x 31.5 inches provenance: private co...

Albert Heckman Cubist Landscape Signed lower right Oil on canvas 21 3/4 x 30 inches Albert Heckman was born in Meadville, Western Pennsylvania, 1893. He went to New York City to tr...

Samson Schames (German-American, 1898-1967) Untitled, 1960 Mixed media on paper Sight: 16 1/2 x 14 in. Framed: 27 1/2 z 22 1/2 x 1/2 in. Signed and dated lower right Samson Schames ...

Antique American school seascape oil painting. Oil on canvas. Framed. Signed. Image size, 30L x 24H.

French Surrealist artist, circa 1960’s oil painting on canvas with stuck on magazine art, unframed canvas: 15 x 18 inches provenance: private collection, Paris condition: overall good

Boys in Blue French School, Mid 20th century Oil painting on board, framed Signed on the lower right hand corner Framed size: 34.5 x 23 inches This artist was clearly inspired by Pi...

This unique double-sided work in the neo-cubist style bursts with vibrant color and fractured geometry. The painting exhibits a Cubist and Modernist abstract style, featuring bold co...

This captivating work is a dazzling demonstration of contemporary abstract art. Created with impressive technical mastery, it is distinguished by its bold use of concentric circles, ...

Sylvia Bernstein (1918-1990). Portrait of a Young Woman, ca. 1960. Gouache on paper, image measures 9.5 inch h.., 10 inches w. ; 17 x 17 inches framed measurement. Signed lower right. Excellent condition. Born : New York City Education : National Academy of Design Exhibits (group) Juried Shows at : Allied Artists; Audubon Artists; National Society of Painters in Casein; Hudson River Museum; Butler Institute of American Art; Portland Summer Art Festival; Columbia Painting Biennial; Columbia Museum; Riverside Museum; Brick Store Museum; First National Exhibition of American Art, Chautauqua, New York; New York City Center; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts; Philadelphia Watercolor Annual; Brooklyn Museum International Watercolor Exhibition; Art-USA; J & M Ringling Museum; 9th Annual American Watercolor Traveling Show; Whitney Museum of American Art; Parrish Museum; American Academy of Arts and Letters; Wadsworth Atheneum. Solo Exhibits 1956 Ruth White Gallery; 1959 Ruth White Gallery; 1959 Silvermine Guild of Artists; 1960 Ruth White Gallery. Awards : National Association of Women Artists, 1954, 1957; New York City Center 1956; 1957 Honorable Mention National Arts Club, Allied Artists, Jane C. Stanley Memorial Award, Grumbacher Award in Watercolor at New England Painting...

This Modern abstract painting by Stanley Bate features a warm, deep palette of red, yellow, orange, and burnt umber. Thick strokes of paint are layered beneath light white overlappin...

Stunning Synchromist abstract by Danish/American artist, Benny Collin (1896-1980). Symphonic Forms, 1955. Oil on wood panel measures 22 x 29 inches. Measures 24 x 31 inches in custo...

1968 Oil on canvas, signed and dated « Mathieu 68 » lower right and titled « Sator » on the stretcher. The artwork is accompanied by a certificate by the Association “Archives Jean-M...

A modern abstract collage and oil on panel by American artist James Koenig. This Untitled work created in 1969 will be featured in our exhibition "Draw Near" which will run from Mar...

Cubist Abstract, Purple, Colourful Oil Painting, Original By French artist 'Mauduil', 20th Century Signed on the lower right hand corner Oil painting on card, unframed Board size: 22...

Oil on board. Framed. Signed. Exhibited at the Butler Art Institute.

Abstracto Rojo (Red Abstract) Hand signed and dated 1966 Angel Ponce de León (Spanish-French, 1925-) The artist, apparently still living in his ...

Title: Still Life with Yellow Flowers Bottle and Autumn Leaves French Modernist Gouache Guy Nicod (French 1923 - 2021) Gouache on artist paper, unframed Size: 24 x 19.75 inches (hei...

Nicely painted mid century abstract oil painting. Great color. Framed.

Modernist abstract composition signed Geist. Oil on board, circa 1950. Signed lower right. Displayed in a wood frame. Image size, 7"L x 10"H, overall 15"L x 17"H.

Fredric Karoly (1898-1987). Etude III, 1950. Oil on masonite panel measures 18 x 24 inches. Unframed. Signed, titled, dated on reverse. Good condition with minor paint loss at edges. Biography: An abstract painter, Karoly was born in Hungary and studied painting in Paris, architectural eingineering in Berlin, and emigrated to the U.S. in 1926. He began a successful career as a fashion and fabric designer. In 1948 he was working as a fashion director for Simplicity Patters, when he had a solo exhibition of of his oil paintings, wire montages, dry-pen drawings and abstract photography. Solo Exhibitions: Hugo Gallery (Alexandre Iolas) New York 1948; Gallery Mai. Paris 1949; New Gallery (Eugene Thaw) New York 1950; Museu de Arte, Sao Paulo, Brazil 1951; Miami Museum of Modern Art, Miami, Florida 1959; Loft Gallery, New York City, 1966.Group Exhibitions: Hugo Gallery, New York 1947; Salon des Realities Nouvelles, Paris 1949-1953; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (Annual) 1951-1953, 1963; Biennale of Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1951; International Independent Exhibition, Tokyo, 1951; Martha Jackson Gallery, New York, 1959; The Butler Institute of Art, Youngstown, Ohio, 1960; Stuttman Gallery, New York, 1960; The Art Institute of Chicago (Annual), 1960; International Watercolor Exhibition, Brookyln Museum, 1961; Westchester Art Museum, White Plains, NY, 1963; Whitney Museum, Annual, NY 1963; Cleveland Art Festival, Park Synagogue, Cleveland, 1963; Whitney Museum, Sculpture Annual, NY, 1964.Works in Institutional Collections: Museu de Arte, San Paulo, Brazil; Museu de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires, Argentina; New York University, New York; Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri; Finch College, NY; Barnard College, NY; Metropolitan Museum, Whitney Museum and Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, FL. Awards: National Council Arts Awards, 1968. Frederic Karoly died on December 15, 1987 at the Inter-Continental Hotel in Manhattan, where he had made his home for many years. Fredric Karoly was born in Budapest in 1893. According to Karoly’s own vitae, his exhibition history began in New York in 1947, when at the age of 54 he took part in a four-person group show at Hugo Gallery. His involvement with visual art however was apparently life long. In a brief introduction to his solo show at Galerie Mai in Paris in June of 1949, Jen Luc de Rudder, reports that Karoly began painting at the age of 12 in Budapest. After several years of studying, then working in London, Paris and Berlin, Karoly emigrated to the United States in 1925 or 1926 (he probably first came to the US on a work visa in 1925). In New York, Karoly worked in women’s fashion as a designer. In 1948 Karoly worked in a manner than was clearly influenced by the work of such European surrealists as Max Ernst, creating spiked automatic bi-chromatic paintings. His style progressed into a progressively more biomorphic vein, similar to explorations by Theodore Stamos, Daphnis, Milton Avery and Mark Rothko around the same period. He was supported with patronage during this period by Mrs. Mimi Baliff, who apparently supported the “Industrial Design Workshop” that she helped open to feature Karoly’s designs in 1948. By the early 1950’s (1951) Karoly started experimenting with the drip and splatter process as well. Drip paintings dominated his process until the late 50’s-early 60’s, when linear compositional elements began to reemerge. By the late 50’s multi-layered drip grid motifs asserted a masque of spatial organization over looser washed fields and splatters of paint that Karoly worked off of. This development was consistent with concurrent explorations into the grid by artist Agnes Martin and others. By the mid-50’s Karoly’s style began another transition into a more surface concerned “Color Field” style of painting. There are elements still reminding one of Abstract Expressionist concerns as such painters as Clifford Still. But the works that began to emerge from Karoly’s studio in 1958 presaged the Morris Lewis fan motifs and Friedl Dzubas’s epic and romantic color spewing expanses of canvas. In 1959 Karoly began experiments using washes of turpentine diluted oil paint directly onto raw linen, and all of these subsequently suffered the consequences of oil oxidation and acidity upon the surfaces. However, many of Karoly’s washes in color field happily occurred on lightly prepared primed canvas surfaces as well. By 1960 Karoly began reintroducing imagistic references to his visual content. There were also various references to Japanese and Zen influences. He experimented with a variety of processes that included mixed media and marbleized surfaces achieved by the intermixture of oil and water mediums. A calligraphic element also enter Karoly’s work in the early 60’s. Then in 1961 glued and assembled objects begin to show up in Karoly’s work in earnest. The influence of early POP artists, particularly Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg, become apparent. From 1961-63, a series of the assemblage works transition from canvas to the sculptural to pieces obviously intended for full scale installation. Many of these pieces were among the most fragile of his works primarily due to their reliance upon the of gluing of objects such as plastic or paper cups on flexible surfaces of stretched linen or canvas. In the mid-60’s Karoly apparently produced a number of photo-silk screened series of Picasso, De Kooning and other significant artists of his generation. These were executed in a style somewhere between Rauschenberg’s and Roy Lichtenstein’s, primarily because of their reliance upon half tones and Ben-Day dot effects. Then Karoly began a series of paintings conflating his drip and grid styles with super imposed and painted over string. In the late 60’s Karoly embarked upon a series of multi-paneled stretched linen constructions often with slits and fiber optic back-lit elements that were prescient of the work of Dan Flavin and others. It was this body of work that was shown at Hofstra University’s Emily Lowe Gallery, and it was these works that suffered perhaps the most irreparable damage from a steam/water infiltration in a space where they were being stored. The late professional start that Karoly had into the art world was balanced by his long life span and early immersion into the design issues of modernism as it emerged in turn of the century Europe and later evolved in America. He was clearly an artist who subscribed to the ethos of the new in abstraction and was obviously impressionable and in some instances prescient with regard to various trends in abstraction. Several noteworthy and influential collectors and institutions during his 40 years of professional engagement acquired his work. The Whitney Museum of American Art had and may still own a large Karoly canvas from 1960, but this is doubtful as the artist failed to list it on the vitae he filed with MoMA in 1965. His work was recognized and honored by the Whitney with its inclusion in four of their annual survey shows (1951,1953, 1963 and 1964). The artist’s surrealist influenced paintings from 1948-1950 were the focus of a solo exhibition held of his work by the Museo de Art in Sao Paulo and eight years later a ten year survey of his work was the focus of a solo show at the Miami Museum of Modern art. The Sao Paulo Museum in Brazil, and the Museo de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires, Argentina each acquired Karoly paintings for their collections in the 1950’s. One of Karoly’s surrealist pieces was apparently purchased by Christian Zervos, Picasso’s designated chronicler, who apparently also wrote a piece on Karoly in Cahiers D’Art in 1949. A 60’s piece of Karoly art that is in the New York University’s permanent collection is included in the MoMA Library’s catalog...

French expressionist artist, circa 1960’s Circle of Bernard Buffet oil painting on board, framed framed: 37.5 x 31 inches board: 32 x 25.5 inches provenance: private collection, Fran...

Gorgeous oil on wood by 20th century American painter Don Smith. The piece is a beautiful candy apple red color with a grass green border and touches of cobalt blue, mustard yellow ...

Berto Lardera (1911-1989). Collage, 1958. Paper, cardboard, paint. 29 x 40.5 inches; 31.5 x 42 inches framed. Signed and dated lower right. Bears origina...

A Large, Dynamic Mid-Century Modern Painting of a Horse Race by noted Chicago Artist, Rudolph Pen. Artwork size: 24" x 36"; Framed size: 25" x 37". Signed "Pen" lower right and ti...

Very finely painted modernist landscape by Robert Noel Blair (1912 - 2002). Watercolor and gouache on paper. Signed Image size, 23 by 31 inches. In excellent original condition. ...

A small, vibrant 1950s Mid-Century Modern mountain landscape painting depicting Aspen, Colorado by famed Chicago artist Harold Haydon. Titled "View NW fr...

Large American modernist abstract oil painting. Framed. Oil on canvas. Signed. Image size, 50H by 40L.

An abstract collage on wood by Kenneth Morrow Martin, American (1911-1983). Exhibited: 1st Knoxville Art Center National Exhibtion, 1961 White Landscape by Keith Morrow Martin...

SALE ONE WEEK ONLY This abstract acrylic work by Max Günther is an exquisite example of his abstract cityscape work. A preferred subject of Günther's, his work took cityscape shapes...

Pointillist Abstract Design by Louis Bellon (French 1908-1998) initialled lower right in the image and again in the margin gouache painting on paper, unframed unfinished sketch on th...

This Modern painting by Abstract Expressionist Stanley Bate was made with oil on canvas circa 1960. In it, layers of red, yellow, white, and umber paint are expressively applied over...

Watercolor on paper, sheet measures 12 x 17.5 inches. Unframed. Signed and dated lower right. Estate stamp on verso. EVE PERI (1897-1966) Born in Bangor, Maine, Eve Peri worked...

This superb British Abstract Expressionist oil painting on board is by noted artist Bernard Kay. It was painted in London in 1955. This striking painting is a mix of shades of black ...

Artist: Claude Lagouche (French 1943-2020) Claude Lagouche was born January 2, 1943 in Naves, died January 16, 2020. He quickly gained recognition for his talent and his work, exh...

Title: Original Oil Abstract Still Life with Cheese Slices and Knife Artist: Roland Pichard Medium: Oil on oil paper, mounted on card Size: 9.5 (height) x 13.25 (width), (Includin...

Witches Banner is an original mid-century abstract painting by celebrated Denver modernist Edward Marecak (1919–1993), created circa 1960s. This bold, expressionistic work features r...

Antique American modernist signed interior oil painting. Oil on board. Signed. Framed. Image size, 9L x 10H. Provenance from the San Francisco Museum of Art.

Syril Frank (American, 1929-2021) Untitled, c. 1963 Oil on canvas 44 1/2 x 47 3/4 in. Provenance: Estate of the Artist Syril Harriet Frank was born in Br...

Abstract Expressionist Composition by Jacques COULAIS (1955-2011) gouache painting on board unframed: 7.75 x 7.75 inches condition: excellent provenance: all the paintings we have fo...

Antique American abstract landscape painting. Watercolor on paper. Framed.

Jacques Villon original etching “Figure de Femme” in the Cubist Surreal style. Hand signed and numbered. Small Edition, created 1951. Edition of 30 of which this print is no. 21. Unm...

George Dannatt (1915-2009) Aigues - Mortes 1961 Gouache on paper Image: 11.4 x 22.8 cm Frame: 38.7 x 48.9 cm Exhibition 1981 May. Newlyn Gallery: Retrospective Exhibition Pr...

Vintage modernist still life painting. Oil on canvas. Image size, 18L x 24H.

Title: French Modernist Still Life with African Masks and Sculptural Forms Guy Nicod (French 1923 - 2021) Gouache on artist paper, unframed Size: 19.5 x 24 inches (height x width) P...