People Reading: Selections from the Collection of Donald and Patricia Oresman

	People Reading: Selections from the Collection of Donald and Patricia Oresman All text and images are copyrighted. CATALOGS AVAILABLE to order click here The following text was written by exhibit curator Thomas L. Johnson, Ph.D. This text, along with an essay and additional information, has been extracted from the catalog. To request information about the catalogue, please click here. home • go to page 2
	MAURICE ASKENAZY (1888-1961) American, born in Russia [Two works in one frame] PIONEER, 1929 Ink and pencil on paper 2 15/16 x 3 11/16 Unsigned READER BY CANDLELIGHT, c. 1925 Gouache, ink, and pencil on paper 3 1⁄2 x 4 7/8 Unsigned When he was four years old, Russian-born Mischa (Maurice) Askenazy was brought with his family from the region near Odessa to New York City. Showing an early talent for art, he eventually became a student at the National Academy of Design, where he won a scholarship that allowed him to travel in France and Italy for two years. After returning to the United States, he established himself as a highly successful portrait, landscape and still-life painter. During the 1920s he averaged $50,000 a year as a portraitist to the wealthy. A portrait commission in the early 1920s took him to Montecito, California, and, charmed by the climate, he wound up settling in Los Angeles for the rest of his life. Showing the influence of Cezanne, Askenazy’s work reflected the European-inspired Modernism that made its way west in the early twentieth century. In 1924, and for many years thereafter, Askenazy’s work was exhibited at the California State Fair in Sacramento. It was also shown at the Pasadena Museum of Art (now the Norton Simon), the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, the National Academy of Design, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Golden Gate International Exhibition. He is represented in the permanent collections of major California museums and in many notable private ones.
	ELEANOR BANKS (fl. 1930s) American WANT-ADS, 1939 Aquatint for the NYC WPA (edition of 25) 7 1⁄2 x 5 15/16 in. Signed in pencil, lower right: “Eleanor Banks” Inscribed: “Want-Ads 1/25” (lower left) No biographical data could be found on Eleanor Banks beyond the fact that this piece, WANT-ADS, was created under the auspices of the New York City unit of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project.
	WILL BARNET (b. 1911) American SWING AT DUSK, n.d. Lithograph (edition unknown), 11 x 14 in. Signed in pencil, lower right: “Will Barnet” Inscribed: “Swing at Dusk” (lower left) Born in Beverly, Massachusetts, painter and printmaker Will Barnet studied at the School of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (1927-1930) before moving to New York, where he attended the Art Students League on scholarship (1930-1933). In 1935 Barnet succeeded his mentor Charles Locke as official lithographic printer at the League, printing stones for such artists as Raphael Soyer, Jose Clement Orozco, and Adolph Dehn. Barnet was then hired by the WPA Graphics Project not only as a printmaker but also as a technical adviser to improve the quality of the WPA prints. Barnet joined the faculty of the League in 1937. He was also appointed instructor at the New School for Social Research in 1941, and in 1945 he began to teach at the Cooper Union, where twenty years later he was made full professor. He has served as guest professor, visiting critic, or artist-in-residence at numerous universities and other institutions. Beginning in 1954 he became associated with the Famous Artists School. Barnet has exhibited extensively since 1935, with numerous one-man shows and retrospectives throughout the United States. He is the recipient of many prestigious prizes and important monographs have been written on his work, which may be seen in such major collections as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art, the Fogg Museum at Harvard, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Through the years Barnet’s work has been stylistically eclectic and diverse. He has experimented with abstraction and been a member of the American Abstract Artists group. But his work in the realist mode, showing the influence of the French artist Honore Daumier, established him as a powerful interpreter both of the scenes and persons immediate to him and of the social problems of America during the 1930s.
	ROBERT L. BARNUM (b. 1951) American A GOOD BOOK, 1997-1999 Hand-colored lithograph (unique proof) 4 x 4 1⁄2 in. Signed in pencil, lower right: “Robert L. Barnum” Inscribed: “1/1” (lower left): “A GOOD BOOK” (bottom center) Robert L. Barnum is a contemporary regionalist artist, muralist, oil painter, watercolorist, printmaker and sculptor who has specialized in figurative and narrative art. “My art is all about story telling,” he writes, “[but] my original story is not as important as the story viewers think they see in the art.” Evidence of his achievement is manifested in the dozens of awards he has received in national and international juried competitions over the past quarter-century. In 2003 he was named Michigan Artist of the Year, and in 2005 he was presented with the Greater Michigan Solo Exhibition award. Barnum grew up in a blue-collar environment in Oregon and went on to attend the Oregon College of Art and Southern Oregon State University. He received his Master of Fine Arts degree from Idaho State University in 1980. Since 1989 he has been teaching at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan. Public art has long been one of Barnum’s special interests, and he has created numerous oil-on-canvas murals and steel sculptures for community-centered spaces. His work, whether on canvas, paper, or otherwise, is characterized by an organic sense of movement, drama, color, social immediacy. Distortion and exaggeration are often seen in his art. But rather than being handicaps to the truth, these stylistic elements are for him the very language of truth. “Views of everyday life are what I find so compelling,” he says, “but it’s not a photographic or journalistic approach I’m after. I want to exaggerate the scenes, to take the Twain or Hemingway approach. . . . Visual narratives that offer exaggerated views of Middle America reel in the observer by raising more questions than they answer.”
	WILDER BENTLEY (1900-1989) American “I SEE BY THE PAPERS...,” 1948 Brush drawing (watercolor mounted to cream paper), 4 1⁄4 x 6 1⁄2 in. Initialed and dated in ink, vertically, left side: “W. B. ‘48”; inscribed on mount: “‘I see by the papers…by Wilder Bentley 1948” Printer, poet, calligrapher, brush artist and teacher Harvey Wilder Bentley was reared in San Francisco and then went on to study at Yale and the University of Michigan. During the 1920s he spent several years in Europe doing relief work with French orphans and traveling. After a stint at the University of Oklahoma and the publication of his book THE ART OF LAURENCE PICKETT WILLIAMS (1930), Bentley spent three years honing his printing skills at Porter Garnett’s Laboratory Press at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. By 1934 he and his wife, Ellen, were back in California, living in Berkeley, where they established a small fine-arts printing firm, using an old Acorn hand press to produce their books, portfolios, broadsides, scrolls and cards. Their Archetype Press soon succeeded the Acorn endeavor, and by the time of World War II, when they closed the press, they had produced at least two modern classics: William Saroyan’s A NATIVE AMERICAN and Ansel Adams’ photographic masterpiece SIERRA NEVADA: THE JOHN MUIR TRAIL (both 1938). Between 1946 and 1956 Bentley taught English and Philosophy in Stockton at the College of the Pacific and Stockton Junior College. In 1957 he was appointed professor at San Francisco State College, where he taught until 197l. In retirement, until 1985, he dedicated himself to writing and then printing in scroll form his magnum opus, THE POETRY OF LEARNING, a massive humanistic narrative and descriptive autobiography written in various verse forms. He produced scarcely more than two dozen of these and they were never sold commercially. Today they fetch very high prices whenever and wherever they can be found for sale. Collections of his papers and printed works have been preserved in archives in Los Angeles and Berkeley. In 1943 the M. H. deYoung Memorial Museum in San Francisco organized an exhibition of Bentley’s “brush drawings,” of which the inscribed one here (“I SEE BY THE PAPERS...”) is an example.
	BEN BLACKWOOD (fl. 1990s) American DONALD ORESMAN READING HIS GROLIER CLUB EXHIBITION CATALOGUE] Colored pencil and crayon, 1996-97 14 x 10 in. Signed in pencil, lower right: “Ben Blackwood” Ben Blackwood, the son of the Oresmans’ friends Mr. and Mrs. Michael Blackwood, was an adolescent when he drew this portrait of Donald Oresman reading a Grolier Club exhibition catalogue. Oresman has long been a member and supporter of the Grolier Club, a society devoted to the book arts founded by a group of New York City bibliophiles in 1884, the oldest such club in North America. It organized the exhibition READERS: 20TH CENTURY PRINTS, DRAWINGS AND PHOTOGRAPHS OF PEOPLE READING FROM THE COLLECTION OF DONALD ORESMAN, which ran from November 19, 1996, to January 10, 1997.
	ARNOLD BLANCH (1896-1968) American DEEP SOUTH, 1944 Lithograph (edition of 40) 11 1⁄4 x 20 in. Signed in pencil, lower right: “Arnold Blanch” Inscribed: “40 prints 1944” (lower left); ”Deep South” (bottom center) Arnold Blanch was born in Mantorville, Minnesota, and attended the Minneapolis School of Fine Arts and then the Art Students League in New York City. During World War I he drew maps for the intelligence corps of the American Expeditionary Forces. In 1923 he joined the Woodstock Art Colony, where he was living at the time of his death forty-five years later. He taught in numerous art schools and colleges (including the Art Students League), won numerous awards, had several one-man shows, and became a highly respected member of the art world. Like many other American artists of his generation, Blanch found employment in the 1930s on federal projects and painted murals in post offices in Columbia, Wisconsin; Norwalk, Connecticut; and Fredonia, New York. In his book AMERICAN EXPRESSIONISM, Bram Dijkstra speaks of Blanch as “a regionalist without any idealizing tendency” and states that as early as 1932 Blanch had begun to create images of a nation in decline. “The cartoon,” Blanch would insist, “can contain art as well as propaganda. And to many of us who are within or sandwiched between [the abstractionists and the ‘American Scene’ painters], I wish to prove it is not our fellow artist who is the enemy, but those who have made art the booty of exploitation, and who use it as a deodorant for war and fascism.”
	PIERRE BONNARD (1867-1947) French AU THEATRE (Image from QUELQUES ASPECTS DE LA VIE DE PARIS), 1899 Color lithograph published by Vollard and printed by the artist and Auguste Clot, Paris (edition of 100) 8 x 15 in. Unsigned In his book PRINTS AND DRAWINGS (1954), art historian Paul J. Sachs said of Pierre Bonnard that, like Vuillard, he was a “delightful, honest bourgeois [artist] untouched by the tensions and tragedies of the Twentieth Century.” Born at Fontenay-aux-Roses, Bonnard studied with Vuillard, Roussel and Bouguereau at the Academie Julian, and during the 1890s he exhibited in Paris with the Impressionists and Symbolists at Pere Tanguy’s shop and at Vollard’s and Durand-Ruel’s. His wide-ranging artistic career embraced, at various times, the creation of stained glass, furniture and stage decoration, book illustration, painting and printmaking. An early advocate of lithography, Bonnard experimented with the use of color in this medium, and in 1896 his first one-man show included lithographs. He also became known for his book illustrations and ultimately preferred to illustrate books rather than to create individual color lithographs. The year he died, an important Bonnard retrospective was presented at the Orangerie in Paris, and in 1948 New York’s Museum of Modern Art featured a large exhibition of his work. Sachs remarked that Bonnard was “ever on the alert for the pictorial in daily life,” which he then rendered in simple, unembroidered terms. And French novelist and critic Andre Gide, in speaking of the artist’s technical skill, remarked that Bonnard’s “very touch [was] mischievous, quite independent of the subject.”
	BERNARD BRUSSEL-SMITH (1914-1989) American GUTENBERG (FROM THE PRINTER SERIES), 1945 Wood engraving (edition of 100) 6 x 4 1⁄4 in. Signed in pencil, lower right: “Bernard Brussel-Smith” Inscribed: “18/100” (lower left); “Gutenberg” (bottom center) An artist who would establish himself as one of the leading wood engravers in America, Bernard Brussel-Smith was born in Greenwich Village, New York City. He studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia and at the New School for Social Research in New York, where he became interested in the demanding art form of the wood engraving. During the 1940s and 1950s his subject was often the urban working class, but he also became known for the posters he created for the New York Auto Show in the 1950s and 1960s. Brussel-Smith taught art classes at the Brooklyn Museum, the Cooper Union, the City College of New York, and the National Academy of Design (to which he was twice elected an Associate Member). He also wrote articles on the subjects of wood engraving and relief etching. His summers were often spent in Collonges la Rouge, France, and in 1957 and 1958 he studied relief etching with Stanley William Hayter at the latter’s Atelier 17 in Paris. Fairleigh Dickinson and Yale universities own large holdings of Brussel-Smith’s prints, and they have also been collected by other major museums and institutions in America and in Europe. GUTENBERG, from the Printer Series, is one of three works by this artist owned by the Oresmans.”
	ELIZABETH CATLETT (b.1919) American Cartas [Letters], 1986 Lithograph (edition of 80) 29 1⁄2 x 21 1⁄2 in. Signed and dated in pencil, lower right: “E Catlett 1986” Inscribed: “31/80 Cartas” (lower left) A prolific artist in various mediums, including prints and sculpture, Elizabeth Catlett was born in Washington, D.C., where she attended Howard University and was mentored by such teachers as James A. Porter and Lois Mailou Jones. She went on to study at the State University of Iowa (where she was greatly influenced by Grant Wood), the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Art Students League in New York, and the Escuela de Pintura y Escultura at La Esmeralda, Mexico. Her career as teacher and arts administrator took her to New York City and North Carolina, and to Prairie View College in Texas and Dillard University in New Orleans. In 1946 Catlett moved to Mexico on a Rosenwald Grant, became affiliated with the famed printmaking center Taller de Graphica Popular, and in 1947 married fellow artist Francisco Mora. Always committed to political causes, Catlett has unapologetically advocated using art as an instrument of social change and taking it to the people. Much of her work focuses upon the dignity and strength of the black woman. One critic-historian speaks of it as “Afrofemcentrist.” “My purpose,” Catlett has written, “is…to present black people in their beauty and dignity for ourselves and others to understand and enjoy [and] to exhibit my work where black people can visit and find art to which they can relate.” Since 1941 Catlett has garnered multiple awards in the United States, Mexico, and Cuba; and since 1947 she has held numerous individual exhibitions and been included in innumerable group shows all over America and Mexico.
	MARC CHAGALL (1887-1985) Russian/French The Artist with the Book (POEMES, Plate I), 1968; woodcut on Japanese Imperale, published by Cramer, Geneva (edition of 26), 13 x 10 in.; signed in pencil, lower right: “Marc Chagall” The whimsical, irrational, childlike, “floating” universe presented in Marc Chagall’s paintings, prints, illustrations and stage designs has made his works some of the most immediately recognizable in the world. While influenced by Cubism and German Expressionism and anticipatory of Surrealism, Chagall’s art nevertheless maintains its own dynamic stylistic independence and the unique substance of his work is anchored in his Russian Jewish background. Born into a poor family in Vitebsk, Russia, Chagall studied under master-artist Yehuda Pen at the Vitebsk Popular Art School before traveling to St. Petersburg in 1907 to attend the Imperial School of Fine Arts. From 1910 to 1914 he worked in Paris, came to know Leger and Modigliani, and was discovered by the poet Blaise Cendrar, Max Jacobs and Guillaume Apollinaire After returning to Russia in 1914, Chagall first became Commissar of Fine Arts in Vitebsk, where he founded a State Academy. He then went to Moscow, where he painted a mural and designed sets and costumes for the State Jewish Theatre. Following a 1922 trip to Berlin, where he studied the technique of engraving and tried to recover paintings left there from a 1914 exhibit (he found that they had been sold or confiscated), Chagall returned to Paris. There, between 1923 and 1940, he undertook the creation of etchings for publishing projects sponsored by Ambroise Vollard: editions of Gogol’s novel DEAD SOULS, the seventeenth-century FABLES OF LA FONTAINE, and the Bible, respectively. In 1931 he traveled to Egypt and Palestine. Chagall left occupied France for the United States in 1941 at the invitation of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where he was given an exhibition in 1946. In 1948 he returned to France and settled in Vence. By 1957 Chagall had begun to receive commissions to create artistic works for major institutions in France and Israel. His prints and paintings came to be represented internationally in public and private collections, and in 1973 the Musee Chagall opened in Nice.
	ALEXANDRE CHARPENTIER (1856-1909) French LA LISEUSE [THE READER], 1896-97 Color lithograph with embossing 6 1⁄4 x 11 in. Unsigned Blind stamp of the publication THE STUDIO, lower right Alexandre Louis Marie Charpentier, born in the Marais section of Paris, was apprenticed at the age of twelve to a decorative engraver. Trained in the 1870s at the Ecole des Beaux Arts under the renowned medalist Hubert Ponscarme, he took the art beyond the predictable numismatic limits and experimented with novel formats, styles and subjects. Although he worked almost exclusively in bas-relief medals and plaques and used traditional metals such as bronze and tin, he also used terra cotta, pressed paper, plaster and fused glass for his images. He took as his subject matter human activity and domestic pursuits. Among his most famous portraits were those of his friend the novelist Emile Zola. First exhibited in Paris, Charpentier’s work was regularly shown in other well-known cultural venues in France, Belgium and Austria. In his later years, he focused his creative efforts upon furniture, cabinetry and interior decorating, which he helped to revive as an art form. In the 1890s he became one of the founding members of the “L’Art dans Tout” (“Art in everything”) group. A brief notice of his death in the NEW YORK TIMES on March 5, 1909, identified him simply as “the well-known French sculptor” and mentioned that he was a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor.
	GEORGE CHUNG (b. 1935) American, born in Panama WRITER’S BLOCK, 1986 Lithograph (edition of 6) 19 7/8 x 14 in. Signed in pencil, lower right: “G. Chung”; inscribed: “2/6”(lower left) George Chung lives and works in Port Haywood, Mathews County, Virginia, just north of the Norfolk-Virginia Beach area and not far from Washington, D.C., where he is well known as a printmaker. Chung studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Although WRITER’S BLOCK is a lithograph, his main medium is color etching and aquatint. He typically uses three zinc plates to produce a color print. A critic for the WASHINGTON POST has described Chung as “audaciously original.” Another, calling him a master of both etching and aquatint techniques, has also referred to him as “an imaginative, highly original figurative artist with an especially tender, lyric touch.” In 2007 a selection of his work comprised half of a two-person exhibition organized by the Foster City (California) Art Gallery.
	MINNA CITRON (1896-1992) American BOY READING, c. 1935 Etching and aquatint on blue paper faded yellow (edition unknown) 7 x 8 1⁄4 in. Signed in pencil, lower right: “Minna Citron S.A.E. Minna Wright Citron was born in Newark, New Jersey. She studied at the Brooklyn Model School, the Manual Training High School, the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, the New York School of Applied Design, and City College of New York. She also took classes off and on at the Art Students League, where she studied with Kimon Nicolaides, Kenneth Hayes Miller, Reginald Marsh, John Sloan, and Charles Locke. Citron’s work in the 1930s was characterized by a satirical but good-humored look at American social mores, especially relating to women. Through the U.S. Treasury Department’s Section of Painting and Sculpture, she received commissions to paint post office murals in Newport and Manchester, Tennessee. From 1943 to 1946 Citron taught drawing at the Brooklyn Museum and exhibited work having to do with America at war. In the mid-1940s she became associated with Stanley William Hayter’s Atelier 17 and began to change from creating representational genre pieces to making Abstract Expressionist-influenced, non-objective works. In the early 1970s she taught at the Pratt Institute, and all of her work after that was done at the Pratt Graphic center. Beginning in 1930, she held numerous solo shows in America--from New York to New Orleans--and abroad: England, Yugoslavia, and South America. Her work is in such permanent collections as those in the National Museum of American Art, the White House, the Museum of Modern Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. Citron was also a writer who contributed articles to such magazines as ICONOGRAPH, ARTIST’S PROOF, IMPRESSION, and the COLLEGE ART JOURNAL.
	BARBARA CLARK (fl. 1950) WALKING READING, c. 1950 Etching (edition unknown) 5 7/8 x 5 3⁄4 in. Signed in pencil, lower right: “Barbara Clark” Inscibed: “Walking Reading” No biographical data could be located on Barbara Clark beyond the approximate date attributed to this etching.
	BERNADINE CUSTER (1900-1991) American MAN READING IN BATHTUB, n.d. Ink on paper 9 1⁄2 x 8 in. Signed in ink, lower left: “custer” Known as a painter, illustrator, muralist and writer, Bernadine Custer was born in Bloomington, Illinois, and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago. During her professional years she lived and worked in New York City, where her art was shown commercially through the Midtown Galleries. She taught at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and spent the summers in Londonderry, Vermont, where she was a member of the Southern Vermont Artists. Her works were exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Corcoran Gallery, the Cincinnati Museum of Fine Arts, the Rhode Island School of Design, and the Brooklyn Museum. She is represented in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the Detroit Institute, the Whitney Museum and Williams College, among others. Her murals are in the Treasury Department in Washington, D.C.
	FRITZ EICHENBERG (1901-1990) American, born in Germany DREAM OF REASON (SELF PORTRAIT), 1976 Woodcut (edition unknown) 9 x 7 in. Signed in pencil, lower right: “Fritz Eichenberg” Eichenberg was a native of Cologne, Germany, where he worked as a printer’s apprentice and attended the Municipal School of Applied Arts. He later studied at the Academy of Graphic Arts in Leipzig. He produced his first prints at the age of eighteen. In 1923 he moved to Berlin, where he worked as an illustrator of books and newspapers. He was politically outspoken and often both wrote and illustrated his own articles. In 1933 Eichenberg emigrated with his family to the United States as refugees from the Hitler regime, settled in New York City, and soon established himself as a cartoonist for THE NATION. He participated in the Federal Art Project and taught art at the New School for Social Research and at the Pratt Institute. He later enjoyed great success with the Limited Editions Club and the Heritage Press by providing illustrations for their editions of the writings of such literary giants as Shakespeare, the Bronte sisters, Swift, Poe, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Bernanos and Sandburg. He also wrote and illustrated many books of folklore. Since he felt that they had the character of fine line engravings, he preferred that his prints from wood be called “wood engravings.” In his later years Eichenberg served as head of the Art Department at the University of Rhode Island, and was living in Peacedale at the time of his death. By then he was considered one of the most renowned book illustrators in the world. Among his books, THE ART OF THE PRINT (1976) is a monumental achievement: a lifework of inestimable value to the history and practice of printmaking.
	JEAN LOUIS FORAIN (1852-1931) French LE CAFÉ DE LA NOUVELLE ATHENES, c. 1925 Etching (edition unknown), 6 1⁄4 x 4 3⁄4 in. Signed in the plate, bottom center: “Forain” A native of Rheims, France, Jean-Lous Forain held his artistic mirror up to the social, political and legal world of Paris and came to be considered one of the greatest satirists in the history of French art. Although he studied briefly under Gerome and others, he was largely self-taught, finding his principal inspiration in the work of Degas, Manet, Rembrandt and Goya. He would become as famous for his World War I pictures as he was admired for the drawings and cartoons he contributed for some thirty years to various French newspapers and journals. Degas himself, as well as Toulouse Lautrec, respected his artistry. As he matured, his work became notable for its economy of line, a technique that underscored the satiric thrust of his images. Although he was known as a “famous painter,” it was his etchings and lithographs that in his later years commanded higher and higher auction prices. These seemed to be the most powerful conveyances for his “corrosive comment upon the spectacle of manners” (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 12 July 1931). In 1923 Forain was elected to the Institute of France. He was a member of the Royal Academy and at one time served as president of the Society of French Humorists. During World War I he received the Croix de Guerre with the Citation of the Order of the Army, and he was honored by being named a commander of the Legion of Honor.
	HELENE FUNKE (1869-1957) Austrian LECTURE [Reading], c. 1920 Lithograph (edition unknown) 13 3⁄4 x 8 1⁄2 in. Signed in pencil, lower right: “H. Funke” Inscribed: “Orig. Lithograffie/Lecture” (lower left) Marking the fiftieth anniversary of the artist’s death, the Lentos Art Museum in Linz, Austria, presented in 2007 the first museum retrospective of the work of Helene Funke, exhibiting 125 of her works: paintings, watercolors and prints. A native of Chemnitz, she studied in Munich before going to Paris in 1906 and then in 1913 on to Vienna, where she spent the rest of her life. She witnessed, absorbed, and contributed to virtually the entire range of modernistic expression that swept across the European art scene at the end of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth: late Impressionism, Classical Modernism, Fauvism, Cubism, Expressionism, Japonism, the Secession in Vienna and Neue Sachlichkeit. Because she tended to be a loner and a recluse who traveled extensively and many of whose works were destroyed, lost to fire, or otherwise unaccounted for, she is not widely represented in public collections. Nevertheless, enough of her work survives, largely in private hands, to justify and document by its quality the claim that she was “one of the most important women painters of the first half of the 20th century” (on-line exhibition notes).
	HUGO GELLERT (1892-1985) American, born in Hungary HIGHER MATHEMATICS, 1935 Lithograph for COMRADE GULLIVER (edition of 55) 14 1⁄2 x 16 in. Signed in pencil, lower left: “HUGO-/GELLERT” Painter and graphic artist Hugo Gellert was born in Budapest, Hungary, and in 1906 emigrated with his family to the United States. He studied at the Cooper Union and the National Academy of Design in New York City. An artist with a strong social conscience, Gellert published his first anti-war art in 1916 in the leftist periodical THE MASSES, and in 1918 he worked for the magazine THE LIBERATOR. He was a close friend of the leading American radicals of the day. Bram Dijkstra, in his book AMERICAN EXPRESSIONISM, claims that Gellert became “one of the powerhouses of radical advocacy in the visual arts.” Starting in 1925, through his contributions as a staff artist for the NEW YORKER and the NEW YORK TIMES, Gellert’s work became familiar to millions of Americans. He also created a number of public murals and original lithographs. Two one-man shows of his work were held in New York City in the 1920s. In 1927 Gellert was appointed head of the first anti-fascist organization in America and in 1939 he helped organize the group Artists for Defense. He later became the chairman of Artists for Victory, an organization that included over 10,000 members. Dijkstra focuses upon Gellert as one of the principal activist artists of the 1930s, those who were instrumental in helping to change working conditions for the American laborer and whose commitment and perseverance provided “a proper anchor” for the later Civil Rights and New Left movements in this country.
	HENDRIK GLINTENKAMP (1887-1946) American BOARD OF DIRECTORS, 1929 Wood engraving from FOREIGN AFFAIRS (edition unknown) 6 1⁄2 x 4 1⁄4 in. Unsigned Artistic diversity characterized the life of Hendrik (Henry) J. Glintenkamp, who worked variously as a painter, sculptor, etcher, illustrator and teacher—and who excelled in landscape painting and wood engraving. Born in Augusta, New Jersey, he received his art education in New York City at the National Academy of Design and at the Art Students League, where he studied under Robert Henri and thereafter came to be considered one of the “Ashcan School” of urban realist painters. He taught at the Hoboken Art Club (1912-17) and later at the American Artists School in New York, where he also served on the editorial board of the magazine ART FRONT. In 1912 his cartoons appeared in the HUDSON DISPATCH and from 1913 to 1917 he created illustrations for the leftist magazine THE MASSES. He exhibited in the 1913 Armory Show in New York City and in the San Francisco Panama-Pacific Exhibition of 1915. His work was shown in exhibitions in many major east-coast museums, clubs and academies from New York to North Carolina, and his woodblock prints, in particular, were acquired by such institutions as London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, the New York Public Library, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Cleveland Museum and the Baltimore Museum. Glintenkamp was widely traveled. He painted in Mexico, and after an extended trip to Europe he produced A WANDERER IN WOODCUTS (1932), a book which included 126 woodcuts and told the story of his travels through ten countries. It was one of five books published between 1930 and 1934 that featured his illustrations.
	RAY GLOECKLER (b. 1928) American READER RIDER, ED.II, 1993 Wood engraving (edition of 35) 2 1⁄4 x 3 in. Inscribed: “Reader Rider Ed. II 6/35” (lower left) Signed in pencil, lower right: “Gloeckler” “With a sharp eye for the ludicrous in American society and an abiding sense of humor, Wisconsin artist Ray Gloeckler creates images that lampoon the inflated and celebrate the everyday.” Thus the artist is described in a note promoting Wisconsin art curator Andrew Stevens’ book RAY GLOECKLER: MASTER PRINTMAKER (2005). Wisconsin-born (at Portage) and -educated (BS and MS degrees, University of Wisconsin), Raymond Gloeckler also stayed there to teach from 1961 through l993, when he retired from the post of Professor of Art. The recipient of over 100 awards, Gloeckler has held one-man exhibitions throughout the United States and Canada and has participated in multiple exhibits nationally and internationally. His work has been collected by such institutions as the Butler Institute of American Art, the Detroit Art Institute, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio State University, the University of South Dakota, the Wichita Art Association, and the Print Club of Philadelphia. Gloeckler sees himself in the comic-satirical-grotesque tradition of artists like Gillray, Cruikshank, Hogarth, Rowlandson, Kollwitz, Munakata, Breughel and Grosz. “During the best times woodcutting becomes instinctive,” Gloeckler has remarked about his artistic process. “The drawing on the board ceases to dictate. The artist reacts to the cut and the thrust of the wood. Cut follows cut with vigor and certainty. The tool has its way.”
	EDWARD GOREY (1925-2000) American UNTITLED [READER WITH CATS], n.d. Lithograph (edition of 750) 12 x 8 in. Signed in pencil, lower right: “Edward Gorey” Inscribed: “600/750” (lower left) A prolific, multitalented artist and writer who produced over a hundred books, Edward Gorey became both a popular and a cult figure whose illustrations were recognizable for their peculiar quality of ominous whimsy or sinister merriment. Although his books and images appealed to children and conveyed a certain dark pseudo-English Gothic-Victorian-Edwardian atmosphere, he had no particular fondness for children and never went to England. He classified his own work as “literary nonsense,” and reportedly said that “if you’re doing nonsense it has to be rather awful, because there’d be no point. . . . Sunny, funny nonsense for children—oh, how boring.” Edward St. John Gorey—who used such anagrammatic names as “Ogdred Weary” and “Wardore Edgy”—was born in Chicago, attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago briefly (1943), spent 1944-46 in the Army at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, and then attended Harvard University (1946-50), where he roomed with the poet Frank O’Hara. He moved to New York City and from 1953 to 1960 was employed in the Art Department of Doubleday Anchor. Among the works he illustrated were H. G. Wells’s THE WAR OF THE WORLDS, Bram Stoker’s DRACULA and T. S. Eliot’s OLD POSSUM’S BOOK OF PRACTICAL CATS. He won a Tony Award for Best Costume Design for the 1977 Broadway production of DRACULA, and in the early 1980s became internationally known for his creation of the animated introduction to the PBS series MYSTERY! He spent his later years on Cape Cod, in Yarmouth Port, Massachusetts, where he wrote and directed evening-length entertainments and created works for theatre and screen. Called “Elephant House,” his home now serves as a gallery and museum. Gorey had a fondness for the ballet—and for cats (count the number of them that appear in his lithograph READER WITH CATS).
	DOUGLAS GORSLINE (1913-1985) American BEHIND THE SCENES, 1954 Etching (edition unknown), 7 x 6 in Signed and dated, lower right: “Douglas Gorsline ‘54” Douglas Warner Gorsline was born in Rochester, New York, and received his training as an artist at the Art Students League in New York City and the Yale School of Fine Arts. Although his paintings and watercolors included many landscapes and portraits, he became best known for his work as an illustrator. He illustrated more than seventy-five books, including two of his own: FARM BOY (1950) and WHAT PEOPLE WORE (1952). Among others he illustrated were three in the Rivers of America series; a dozen titles for young readers issued by Random House between 1952 and 1980; and works by such authors as Izaak Walton (THE COMPLEAT ANGLER, 1948), Jane Austen (PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, 1950) and Thomas Wolfe (THE WEB AND THE ROCK, 1939; LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL, 1947). In 1947 Gorsline was elected a full academician by the National Academy of Design, where he also taught from 1960 to 1962. He then began a long association as an artist with SPORTS ILLUSTRATED. He received numerous awards during his lifetime, and his works were widely exhibited and collected. In 1973 he became the first American artist to be invited by the People’s Republic of China to paint and discuss art. Cubism, realism, and the work of the French artist Marcel Duchamp strongly influenced Gorsline, and his affinity for France resulted in his living there for at least the last fifteen years of his life. He died in Dijon on June 26, 1985, and in 1994 the Gorsline Museum was inaugurated at Bussy-le-Grand, in the Côte-d’Or region.
	SAMUEL GREENBURG (1905-1980) American, born in the Ukraine MURAL STUDY, c. 1940 Gouache and pencil, squared in pencil 5 x 8 in. Signed in pencil by the artist’s wife, verso: “From the Estate of Samuel Greenburg/Leah Greenburg” Ukrainian-born Samuel Greenburg earned both bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Chicago and also studied art abroad. His travels led him to Eastern Europe, Egypt, Palestine—and to Paris, where he spent a good deal of time. He identified El Greco, Modigliani, Soutine and Kokoschka as among the figures central to his artistic development. Greenburg taught art at Tuley High School in Chicago and became supervisor of art for the Chicago Board of Jewish Education (1949-1951). In 1947 he published a textbook, MAKING LINO CUTS, and in 1952 he co-authored ARTS AND CRAFTS IN THE JEWISH SCHOOL. Between 1934 and 1951, four one-man exhibitions of his paintings and graphics were held in New York and Chicago, and his work appeared in numerous group shows. It is included in the permanent collections of New York City’s Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Modern Art in Tel-Aviv. Bram Dijkstra, in his book AMERICAN EXPRESSIONISM (2003), identifies Greenburg as one of the American social realist artists of the 1930s whose work was characterized by a superbly individualized style. “I consciously distort to heighten my description,” Greenburg once stated. “Everything—color, form, line, and movement—is used to bring out my emotional reaction to the subject.”
	SUSAN HASS (fl. 1996) American (?) LATE AFTERNOON, 1996 Photolithograph (edition unknown) 20 x 14 in. Signed and dated, lower right: “S HASS 12-96” No biographical data could be found on Susan Hass beyond the date of this photolithograph.
	RIVA HELFOND (1910-2002) American THE LETTER Screenprint (edition of 40), 19 x 12 1⁄2 in. Signed in pencil, lower right: “Riva Helfond” Inscribed “‘The Letter’ 29/40” Starting in the 1930s, Brooklyn-born Riva Helfond was a singular presence in American art as a painter, printmaker and educator. Between 1928 and 1940 she attended the School of Industrial Arts and studied at the Art Students League in New York City with William von Schlegel, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Morris Kantor, Alexander Brook and Harry Sternberg. After teaching in the College Art Association program (1933-36) she worked for the New York City unit of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project (1936-41), where she mastered the mediums of etching, aquatint, woodcut, lithography and serigraphy—and printed all of her own work. While assigned to the Harlem Art Center, she taught lithography with Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden. She eventually joined the silk-screen division supervised by Anthony Velonis and became one of the early innovators in serigraphy. From 1965 to 1967 she taught advanced printmaking at New York University and after 1980 she served on the faculty of Union College in Cranford, New Jersey, as instructor in painting and art appreciation. She also conducted private studio classes and, with her husband, managed the Barrett Art Gallery in Plainfield, New Jersey. Through the years she won numerous awards and was active in many art organizations. Her work has been exhibited in major institutions nationally and has become a permanent part of important public and private collections. Helfond’s artistic style changed with the years, from the stark realism of the 1930s prints to an abstract lyricism in her later years, when a colorful palette predominated, perhaps inspired by her travels in France and Greece.
	JOSEPH HIRSCH (1910-1981) American STRICTLY FROM THE RECORD, c. 1970 Lithograph (edition of 300) 19 1⁄2 x 14 in. Signed in pencil, lower right: “Joseph Hirsch” Inscribed: “170/300” (lower left) The Philadelphia-born artist Joseph Hirsch would be characterized by his New York dealer, the Kennedy Gallery, as “an allegorical, figurative, still life and portrait painter who also worked as a draftsman.” He attended the School of Industrial Art (1928-31) before going to New York to study with George Luks. His work as a muralist for the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s first brought him to national attention. Among the murals he completed in Philadelphia were FOOTBALL, INTEGRATION, BEGINNINGS OF EARLY UNIONISM, and ADOPTION. During World War II he served in the South Pacific, North Africa and Italy as an artist-correspondent for the Navy and made some seventy-five paintings and drawings between 1943 and l944. His career as a teacher took him to the Art Institute of Chicago and then to the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League in New York. He also served as visiting artist at Dartmouth College. Hirsch became a founding member of Artists Equity, an association established to protect the rights and interests of artists, and in 1967 he was elected to membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters. “I believe that some day the fabric of art will be threaded with morality, enabling us to distinguish evil from good,” he once wrote in reference to his own work.
	RICHARD HOOD (1910-1995) American E[DWIN]. A[RLINGTON]. ROBINSON, 1933 Etching (edition unknown) 8 1⁄2 x 7 in. Signed in pencil, lower right: “Richard Hood imp” Inscribed: “E. A. Robinson” (lower left, in Robinson’s hand) Referred to at the time of his death as “a magnificently talented printmaker,” Thomas Richard Hood was born in Philadelphia, attended the University of Pennsylvania and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in advertising design at the Philadelphia College of Art in 1953, where he subsequently taught and directed the school’s exhibition program. He began his career making multicolor woodcuts with animal themes, but later turned to creating silkscreened abstract works with geometric forms. Between 1936 and 1942 he served as director of the Pennsylvania Art Program of the Works Progress Administration. Army service during World War II took him to Washington and a two-year stint at the Army Medical Library as an artist and public relations specialist. He later became design coordinator for the Philadelphia Museum School. Hood received more than sixty awards, and his prints are among the permanent collections of such institutions as the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, the New York Public Library and the Museum of Modern Art.
	EDGAR IMLER (1896-1973) American CAMP MEETING, c. 1936-42 Wood engraving for the NYC WPA (edition of 25) 4 1⁄2 x 6 in. Signed in pencil, lower right: “E. Imler” Inscribed: “Camp Meeting” (bottom center) Pennsylvania-born Edgar Imler studied at Franklin and Marshall College, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Art Students League of New York, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. He was a painter, illustrator and printmaker whose work was exhibited at the Library of Congress, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Carnegie Institute, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Academy of Design in New York. He is included in the permanent collections of the Library of Congress, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New York Public Library. In 1953 the Delphic Press brought out Imler’s SILENT CARAVAN in limited edition. This book, lavishly illustrated by the author, has been described as a work of “brilliant and many faceted quatrains” in which “Western man looks to the East for emotional release and aesthetic intuition.”
	KYOHEI INUKAI (1913-1985) American GIRL READING BY A WINDOW, 1984 Drypoint (edition of 10) 5 1⁄2 x 7 1/8 in. Signed in pencil, lower right: “inukai” Inscribed: “9/10” (lower left); “Girl reading by a window” (bottom center) Chicago-born Kyohei Inukai was known for his artistic diversity as a painter, printmaker, sculptor and haiku poet. He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, and the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League in New York City, where he spent the last years of his life. In Les Krantz’s book AMERICAN ARTISTS: AN ILLUSTRATED SURVEY OF LEADING CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS (1985), Inukai is described as “an abstract pattern painter” who “worked in a variety of styles from expressionism to constructivism and hard-edged geometric abstraction.” The artist held his first one-man show at the California Arts Club in 1934. Additional ones followed at such venues and shows as Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Institute, the Brooklyn Museum, the Corcoran Biennial, the White House Rotating Exhibition, and the USIA Print Exhibition at the Osaka World’s Fair in Japan. Inukai’s work is included in such collections as those of the Albright-Knox Museum, Buffalo; the Portland Museum of Fine Art, Oregon; and the Wichita University Museum of Fine Art, Kansas.