Karl Fortess

"Beach Landscape" Karl Fortess, WPA, American Landscape, Sand Dunes, Clouds

circa 1930s

Nicolai S. Cikovsky (1894 - 1984) On the Beach Oil on panel 15 1/4 x 20 inches Signed lower right Provenance: ACA Galleries, New York

Wesley Webber Martha's Vineyard Coastline Signed lower right, inscribed on stretcher Oil on canvas 16 x 26 inches Marine, landscape, and historical artist, Wesley Elbridge Webber w...

Ernest Fiene (1894 - 1965) Low Tide at Noon, Wellfleet, Massachusetts Oil on canvas 26 x 36 inches Signed lower right Ernest Fiene was born in Elberfeld, Germany in 1894. As a teenager, Fiene immigrated to the United States in 1912. He studied art at the National Academy of Design in New York City from 1914 to 1918, taking day classes with Thomas Maynard and evening classes with Leon Kroll. Fiene continued his studies at the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design in Paris from 1916 to 1918, adding classes in printmaking at the Art Students League in 1923. Fiene began his career as an artist in 1919 with his first exhibition of watercolors at the MacDowell Club arranged by his mentor Robert Henri. In 1923 the Whitney Studio Club mounted a large exhibition of his works. The following year he had an exhibition at the New Gallery in New York, which completely sold out all fifty-two works, including paintings, watercolors, drawings, and etchings. With the proceeds of sales from the New Gallery exhibition, Ernest Fiene and his younger brother Paul, a sculptor, built studios in Woodstock, New York in 1925. In the early Twenties Ernest Fiene painted mostly landscapes of Woodstock and both the Ramapo and Hudson River Valleys. He was the subject of the first monograph for the Younger Artists Series in 1922. Published in Woodstock, the series went on to include Alexander Brook, Peggy Bacon, and Yasuo Kuniyoshi. The book reproduced 1 illustration in color and another 27 reproductions in black and white. Around 1925 Fiene became fascinated with the intensity, excitement, and opportunities for color harmonies New York City offered as a subject. His paintings shifted to urban and industrial themes with architecture, industry, and transportation becoming his subjects. By 1926 Fiene had attracted the dealer Frank K.M. Rehn, who gave him a one-man exhibition that year, which travelled to the Boston Arts Club. C.W. Kraushaar Galleries gave Fiene a one-man exhibition of urban, landscape, portrait, and still life paintings in 1927. Julianna Force, the director of the Whitney Studio Club and first director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, included two of Fiene's paintings in a fall exhibition in 1928. The Whitney Studio Club showed Fiene's paintings in a two-man exhibition with Glenn O. Coleman that year and acquired three of Fiene's paintings. Also in 1928 Fiene became affiliated with Edith Halpert's Downtown Gallery where he had an exhibition of 20 lithographs in the spring. Fiene sold his house in Woodstock in 1928 to spend more of his time in New York City. With so many successful exhibitions, Fiene returned to Paris in 1928-29 where he rented Jules Pascin's studio and studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. In France, Fiene painted both landscape and urban subjects developed from ideas influenced by Cubist geometry and the use of flat areas of broad color. Upon returning to New York in 1930, Fiene used this new approach to continue to paint New York skyscraper and waterfront subjects, as well as to begin a series of paintings on changing old New York based on the excavations for Radio City Music Hall and the construction of the Empire State Building. Frank K.M. Rehn Galleries exhibited this series, titled "Changing Old New York," in 1931. Fiene also has solo exhibitions at Rehn Galleries in 1930 and 1932. Fiene's oil paintings are exhibited at the Chicago Arts Club in 1930 as well. Fiene was included in the Museum of Modern Art's exhibition Painting and Sculpture by Living Americans in December of 1931. Visiting New York, Henri Matisse saw the exhibition and called Fiene's Razing Buildings, West 49th Street the finest painting he had seen in New York. Fiene had two mural studies from his Mechanical Progress series exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art's exhibition Murals by American Painters and Photographers in 1932. Fiene sent View from my Window which depicts Fiene working on a lithograph stone while looking out his window to the newly completed Empire State Building to the Carnegie International in 1931. In 1932 Fiene participated in the first Biennial of American Painting at the Whitney Museum and his prints were included in exhibitions at the Downtown Gallery and the Wehye Gallery. In the same year, Fiene was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to further study mural painting in Florence, Italy. On his return from Italy in 1933 Fiene re-engaged himself in New York City life and won several public and private mural projects. Fiene resumed his active exhibition schedule, participating in two group exhibitions at the Whitney Museum and a one-man exhibition of recent paintings at the Downtown Gallery in January 1934. In 1933 he purchased a farm in Southbury, Connecticut, which added Connecticut scenes to his landscape subjects. This was also the year Fiene began to spend summers on Monhegan Island, Maine, where he painted seascapes, harbor scenes, and still lifes. Fiene's landscape paintings attracted numerous commissions as part of the American Scene movement. From 1935-36 Fiene took an extended sketching trip through the urban, industrial, and farming areas of Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Most of the twenty-four Pennsylvania urban and rural paintings from this trip were featured in an exhibition held at the First National Bank in Pittsburgh in October of 1937 by the Pittsburgh Commission for Industrial Expansion. Fiene said of these works that he formed rhythm, opportunity for space and color, and integrity in the Pennsylvania mill and furnace paintings. Fiene received the silver medal for one of the Pittsburgh paintings...

Guy Pene du Bois Seaside (Amagansett Beach), 1939 Signed and dated lower left; artist label on the reverse: "Seaside CAT No 192" Oil on canvas 16 x 20 inches Pène du Bois descended...

Beautiful California landscape painting of a path to the beach by listed Berkeley, California artist Rowena R. Smith (American, 1881-195...

Marla Korr attended Brooklyn College, earning both a B.A. and a M.F.A. There she studied with Philip Pearlstein, Lennart Anderson and Jimmy Ernst. She has also studied at Stevenson...

Consigned to the gallery, Pasadena, California; By descent to a private collector, Encino, California; Acquired in 1998 by a private collector, San Carlos, Palo Alto, and Oceanside, California; From the Santa Barbara Historical Society Signed "Carl Sammons" on lower right Description This luminous coastal landscape by Carl Sammons is a striking example of the artist’s signature plein air style, depicting the rolling coastal dunes and lush vegetation of California’s shoreline. Best known for his depictions of Carmel and Monterey, the composition and palette of this work suggest inspiration from the Monterey Peninsula dunes. Sammons’ ability to merge vibrant, clean color with a sense of atmospheric perspective is evident here in the interplay of bright, sunlit sands and the rich greens of windswept foliage. His vibrant yet naturalistic color harmonies, crisp edges, and keen sensitivity to light bring the fleeting beauty of the coastal environment to life. The hazy eucalyptus grove in the background adds a distinctive regional touch, situating the composition firmly within California’s coastal identity. Sammons’ paintings of California’s unique landscapes played a significant role in documenting the natural beauty of the state during the early 20th century. Connection to the Monterey Art Colony By the 1920s and 1930s, Sammons became closely associated with the Monterey art colony, an influential hub for plein air painters such as Armin Hansen (1886–1957), William Ritschel (1864–1949), and Percy Gray...

A.H. Nordberg (Swedish-American) Untitled, 20th Century Oil on canvas 24 x 36 in. Framed: 28 x 39 3/4 x 1 3/4 in. Signed lower left A.H. Nordberg was a known Swedish painter who was...