People
Reading:
Selections
from the Collection of
Donald
and Patricia Oresman
All text and images are copyrighted.
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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,
TATIANA
KOZMINA (b. 1968)
Russian
Two Readers], 1998
Lithograph (edition of 21)
4 1/8 x 4 7/8 in.
Signed and dated in pencil, lower right:
“T. Kozmina 98”
Inscribed: “Ymenue [?] L-1, 9/21”
(lower left)
Born in St. Petersburg, Tatiana Kozmina graduated in 1988 from the I.E. Repin Academie Institute of Arts, Sculpture and Architecture. Since 1991 she has been a member of the Union of Artists of St. Petersburg, working in lithography, serigraphy, etching, watercolor, gouache, tempera, and oil. She has illustrated more than twenty books and is active in ex-libris circles. She has participated in more than fifty national and international art competitions, won numerous awards in Europe and Canada, and seen her work acquired by various public institutions and private collections.
CLARE LEIGHTON (1899-1989)
American, born in England
MARQUESA AND PEPITA AT SUPPER, 1929
Wood engraving from THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY (edition of 40)
3 1⁄2 x 3 1⁄4 in.
Signed in pencil, lower right: “Clare Leighton”
Inscribed: “16/40” (lower left)
Born and reared in London, Clare Veronica Hope Leighton first trained at the Brighton College of Art and then at the Slade School of Art at the University of London and the Central School of Arts and Crafts, where she studied wood engraving under Noel Rooke. Although she painted, this printmaking medium would become her principal artistic mode. Her distinctive style came to be recognizable in the use of large dark areas defined by very fine lines.
Her early illustrations appeared in the NEW LEFT REVIEW and the LONDON MERCURY. In 1932 her handbook, WOOD-ENGRAVING AND WOODCUTS, was published, and by the time she emigrated to America with her parents in 1939 she had written and illustrated three more books: THE FARMER’S YEAR: A CALENDAR OF ENGLISH HUSBANDRY (1933), FOUR HEDGES: A GARDENER’S CHRONICLE (1935), and COUNTRY MATTERS (1937).
In America she first lived in Baltimore, then in Durham (where she taught at Duke) and finally in Woodbury, Connecticut, becoming established as one of the best-known book illustrators in the country. By the end of her life she had illustrated at least 65 volumes, encompassing everything from cookbooks, country chronicles, regional histories, religious documentaries and devotional works, letters and diaries to biographies, children’s books, essay collections, poetry and short-story anthologies, and novels—most notably works by Emily Bronte, Thomas Hardy and Thornton Wilder. Her own books, in addition to the four published in the 1930s, went on to include SOUTHERN HARVEST (1942) and TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT: THE STORY OF AN INVINCIBLE EDWARDIAN (1948), in which she describes her childhood and the life of her bohemian mother.
In the 1950s her career extended to the creation of designs for Steuben Glass, Wedgewood plates, and stained glass windows for several New England churches.
Leighton is represented in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Her papers are located in the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art.
WILLIAM
ASHBY MCCLOY (1913-2000)
American
HOW TO TEAR DOWN MORALE—THE SAD LETTER FROM HOME, c. 1943
Ink and watercolor on paper
6 1⁄4 x 7 in.
Signed in ink, lower left: “W.A.M.”
Born in China, William Ashby McCloy lived in Nanking and Shanghai until 1926, when he returned to the United States, where he attended Phillips Andover Academy in Massachusetts. He received a B.A. in Art from Iowa State University and spent a year at the Yale School of Fine Arts before returning to Iowa State to work towards a master’s degree in the Psychology of Art. He would later receive an MFA degree from there.
McCloy became an instructor in Art at Drake University and an assistant professor of Art History at the University of Wisconsin. While in Wisconsin he assisted John Steuart Curry in painting murals. He went on to become the first director of the School of Art of the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg. His later years were spent in New London, Connecticut.
McCloy’s work can be found in such collections as those of the Walker Art Center and the Carnegie Institute. Bram Dijkstra in his book AMERICAN EXPRESSIONISM includes McCloy in his discussion of the social realist artists of the 1930s, saying that McCloy reflected in his art a straightforward sardonic treatment of the harsh realities of life in America in that decade, as distinct from the romantic idealism represented in the works of such artists as Curry, Grant Wood, and Thomas Hart Benton.
LEO
MEISSNER (1895-1977)
American
WAR BULLETINS, c. 1942
Wood engraving (edition of 50)
6 1/8 x 11 1⁄4 in.
Signed in the block, lower left: “M”
Exhibited: Grolier Club, New York, READERS, November 19, 1996-January 10, 1997
Leo John Meissner was born in Hamtramck, Michigan, in one of the newly industrialized areas around Detroit. His art training began at the Detroit Fine Arts Academy before and after service as an army enlistee in France during World War I. He then won a scholarship to the Art Students League in New York City, where he studied painting with Guy Pene du Bois, Robert Henri and George Luks.
Meissner’s career as a printmaker was initiated in the early 1920s with linoleum prints. During this time he found work as an assistant art director for CHARM MAGAZINE and he discovered Monhegan Island, twelve miles off the coast of Maine, whose sensational rock topography and maritime views would hold him in thrall seasonally for the next forty years.
In the 1930s Meissner began to specialize in end-grain wood engraving. After being employed from 1927 to 1950 as art editor of MOTOR BOATING MAGAZINE in New York, he devoted himself to his own work, especially wood engraving. In the early 1950s he spent time in the Smokies, painting rural cabins, farms and and mountain views.
Between 1929 and his death in 1977, Meissner held over seventy-five one-man shows, and received many prizes and awards. Best known for his wood engravings and linocuts (he produced more than 150 relief prints during a span of over fifty years), he was often included during the late 1920s and 1930s in FIFTY PRINTS OF THE YEAR. His work can be found in the permanent collections of many major museums and private collections.
The wood engraving WAR BULLETINS was one of an edition of fifty created during the 1940s and documents some of his brilliant Manhattan subjects. It was featured on the cover of the catalogue for the World War II-era exhibition AMERICA IN THE WAR.
LEOPOLDO
MENDEZ (1922-1969)
Mexican
FOR TEACHING THEM TO READ, c. 1940
Wood engraving (edition unknown)
5 1⁄4 x 7 in.
Signed in pencil, lower right: “Mendez”
The youngest of eight children, Leopoldo Mendez was born in Mexico City, where he became the youngest student to attend the San Carlos Academy of Fine Arts. While studying at the experimental Escuela de Pintura al Aire Libre de Chimalistac (1920-22), he taught drawing and crafts in elementary school.
In the late 1920s he moved to Jalapa with a group known as the Stridentists, working as an illustrator for such magazines as HORIZONTE and NORTE DE VERA CRUZ. His work designing book jackets and posters reflected his interest in social conditions and radical causes. During the 1930s and 1940s he contributed anti-Franco and anti-fascist works to various mediums and was associated with the Taller de Grafica Popular (TGP). His work came to be featured in numerous exhibitions in both Mexico and the United States.
After World War II he designed murals and traveled widely in Europe (where he was especially hailed in Russia), and he became so popular and successful that he was expelled from the Communist Party for being an imperialist agent.
It was observed that whenever he produced a limited-edition portfolio of his work, Mendez insisted that there be a mass-produced version of the same work at a price within the reach of the average person. Furthermore, he ensured that his prints became visible to the masses, perhaps in the form of posters pasted up in public places or as sheets handed out to citizens of Mexico City.
FRANCISCO
MORA (1922-2002)
Mexican
EL RELATOR (ESCUELA), 1960
Linocut (edition of 50), 5 1⁄2 x 7 1⁄2 in.
Signed and dated in pencil, lower right: “-MORA-/ -60-”; inscribed: “A/P” (lower left)
In his own words, Francisco Mora began as “a figurative political and social artist” who eventually turned from the figurative to the abstract while searching “for ways to intensify color and strengthen light, to clarify my concepts of form and space.”
Born in Uruapan, Michoacan, Mexico, Mora was early introduced to the colorful world of the arts through the lives of his musical father and textile-making mother. He began his studies in art at the University of San Nicolas de Hidalgo, in Moralia, before leaving for Mexico City in 1941. There he became a part of the Taller de Grafica Popular, the legendary printmaking center which was influenced by the Mexican muralist movement that linked art with democratic responsibility rather than with aristocratic privilege.
In the prints and paintings he created from the 1940s until the mid-1960s, some of which won awards, his work reflected the influence of the social and ideological viewpoint and practices of the TGP and the Mexican School. He taught adult art classes, participated in numerous Mexican and international exhibitions, and engaged in the painting of murals.
Mora’s later work became successively more expressionistic and abstract, reflecting a greater interest in the expression of ideas and aesthetic values than in a realistic depiction of the human figure.
Mora met the American-born artist Elizabeth Catlett when she came to Mexico in 1946 and became affiliated with the TGP. They married in 1947. In the early 1990s, the Mississippi Museum of Art organized an exhibition of their work entitled A COURTYARD APART.
HANS
ALEXANDER MUELLER (1888-1962)
American, born in Germany
UNTITLED [LIBRARY LADDER], c. 1945
Color woodcut (edition unknown)
6 1⁄2 x 3 1⁄2 in.
Signed in pencil, lower right: “Hans A. Mueller”
German-born woodcut and engraving master Hans Mueller was a native of Leipzig, at whose Academy for Graphic Arts he first studied and then later taught woodcutting and engraving (1923-33). In 1937 Mueller and his wife, Maria (a painter, who was Jewish), fled the Nazi regime and settled in New York City, where his friend Rudolf Littauer, a professor at Columbia University, arranged an exhibition of his work that resulted in Mueller’s securing a position teaching graphic arts in the Department of Adult Education.
Mueller continued to design book jackets and to produce illustrations, prints and drawings for a variety of clients. He illustrated the works of such writers as Marcus Aurelius, Cervantes, Coleridge, Wilde, Conrad, Poe and Emerson. His WOODCUTS AND WOOD ENGRAVINGS: HOW I MAKE THEM (1939) has remained a valuable reference book for printmakers.
FRED
NAGLER (1891-1983)
American
Etching (edition of 100)
6 1⁄2 x 5 5/8 in.
Signed in pencil, lower right:
“FRED NAGLER”
Inscribed: “Edition 100” (bottom center);
“CHURCH AND STATE” (lower left)
A native of West Springfield, Massachusetts, Fred A. Nagler studied at the Art Students League in New York, where his teachers were Frank Dumond, George Bridgman and Robert Henri.
In addition to being a printmaker, Nagler was also a painter, sculptor and lecturer. Beginning in the 1930s his works were exhibited at the Midtown Galleries in New York City and in public venues elsewhere. His paintings and prints are in many private collections, as well as in those of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City and of Southern Methodist, Temple and Vanderbilt universities.
Nagler perhaps became best known for his oil paintings on religious subjects. He was once quoted in TIME MAGAZINE as saying, “The Word is the way to settle things. War is our greatest fear and love is our only possible way to overcome it. I want to make my contribution to the world through religious art.”
After living for many years in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, in 1978 Nagler moved to Dallas, where he died in a nursing home.
MICHAEL
PELLETTIERI (b. 1943)
American
CONFRONTATION, 1983
Color etching (edition of 15), 12 x 16 1⁄2 in.
Signed and dated in pencil, lower right:
“M. Pellettieri 1983”
Inscribed: “VI/XV AP” (lower left);
“Confrontation” (bottom center)
In 2002 the Art Students League in New York City celebrated the career of Michael Pellettieri with a retrospective honoring the work and career of this painter and printmaker who in 1969 became the Master Printer at the League and since 1977 had taught drawing and painting, as well as printmaking, there.
Pellettieri grew up in New York, where he studied at the League with Harry Sternberg, Edwin Dickinson, Robert Beverly Hale, Joseph Hirsch and Thomas Fogarty. He also earned a bachelor’s degree in Fine Art at the College of the City of New York and later a master’s from Hunter College.
His paintings and prints have been featured in major exhibitions in New York and elsewhere, and his work has been acquired for collections in the New York Public Library, the Newark Art Library, the Columbia Museum of Art in South Carolina, the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts, and other institutions.
“The presentation of the artist’s work before the public becomes a part of the creative cycle,” he has written. “It is...the imagination of the observer that breathes life into the art form.”
TOM
PHILLIPS (b. 1937)
English
VIRGIL IN HIS STUDY, c. 1982
Silkscreen (edition of 75)
19 3⁄4 x 15 1⁄2 in.
Signed in pencil, lower right: “Tom [illeg.]”
Inscribed: “57/75” (lower left)
For almost a generation, Tom Phillips has been one of the most innovative, eclectic, and diverse figures on the modern English art scene. His varied interests have led him into painting and printmaking, book production, and television directing.
Born in London, he studied at the Camberwell School of Art there and at St. Catherine’s School, Oxford, where, in addition to his focus on Anglo-Saxon literature, he became vitally interested in contemporary theatre, music and film.
Following his university years, Phillips began to create what would become his signature work of “transformational” art: groups or series of prints that combine various elements (music, graphics, text) or that use or “treat” existing materials to produce a new, organic whole. Critic Philip Wright has written that underlying all of Phillips’ work “and constantly returning in one form or another, are the parallels of word- and image-making, ‘found’ poetry, inspiring and accompanying a panoply of visual images.”
Phillips’ work has been the subject of one-man exhibitions and retrospectives in London, across Europe, and in New York, and it has been collected privately and publicly all over the world.
VIRGIL IN HIS STUDY is one of a set of nine silkscreen prints, proofed and editioned by Chris Betambeau of London between 1979 and 1982, in which Phillips has used a quasi-Renaissance style to express the major themes in Dante’s INFERNO. This fourth in the set is filled with signs and symbolic motifs relating to the imaginative worlds of Dante and his mentor, Virgil, and the literary tradition that connects them. As there is no known authoritative image of Virgil, he is portrayed here without features. The hands are the artist’s own, drawn from life.
CAROL
PYLANT (b. 1953)
American
SECRET SHARER, 1991
Five-color lithograph on
Rives BFK white
(edition of 40)
12 x 7 1⁄2 in.
Signed and dated in
pencil, lower right:
“C. Pylant 1991”
Inscribed: “30/40” (lower
left): “The Secret Sharer”
(bottom center)
Painter and printmaker Carol Pylant is a native of Louisville, Kenucky. She earned both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Fine Arts from Wayne State University in Detroit and has subsequently taught in the Art Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has received major awards for her work, which since 1982 has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions from Arizona, Michigan, and Massachusetts to Bellagio, Italy, and Regensburg, Germany.
Among the permanent collections in which she is represented are those of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, the University of Kansas, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the University of Wisconsin, and the Oberpfalzer Kunstlerhaus in Schwandorf/Fromberg, Germany.
Pylant used the figure of her husband in shaping the image of THE SECRET SHARER, whose title purposely alludes to the novel of the same name by Joseph Conrad.
GENADDY
PUGACHEVSKY (b. 1966)
Ukrainian
READING], n.d.
Color wood engraving (edition of 25)
4 x 3 3⁄4 in.
Signed in pencil, lower right: “Pugachevsky”
Inscribed: “XVIII/XXV” (lower left)
Like his father, Arkady Pugachevsky, Genaddy has become a master in the field of engraving, specializing in the creation of small graphic forms and miniature art such as that of the bookplate (“ex-libris”).
Born in Kiev, the Ukraine, Genaddy graduated from the Republican School for Art and studied painting and drawing at the private school of Zaretsky and the art of wood engraving with his father. He has participated in more than fifty international free graphic and ex-libris exhibitions and has been recognized with fourteen international awards.
Pugachevsky is an Associate Fellow of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers and a member of the Society of Wood Engravers (both United Kingdom). He also belongs to the “Griffin” group, XYLON Ukraine, and the Deutschen Exlibris-Gesellschaft.
JAN
RAMBOUSECK (1895-1976)
Czechoslovakian
DANS LA RUE, c. 1930
Color lithograph (edition unknown)
8 1⁄4 x 7 in.
Signed in pencil, lower right: “Jan Rambouseck”
The Czechoslovakian engraver, illustrator and writer Jan Rambouseck studied at Prague’s Academy of Fine Arts in his native city before going to Paris for further training at the Ecole des Beaux Arts (1921-22). In 1923 he returned to Prague, where he worked until 1929 as assistant to the legendary painter and printmaker Max Svabinsky at the Academy of Fine Arts. Subsequently Rambouseck became known as a cartoonist, journalist and poster designer. In 1948 he published LITOGRAFIE A OFSET, a book celebrating the 150th anniversary of the invention of lithography and the fortieth anniversary of offset printing. Prague’s Musee d’Art Moderne is among the institutions which have collected his work.
DIEGO
RIVERA (1886-1957)
Mexican
LA MAESTRA RURAL, n.d.
Lithograph (edition unknown)
12 1⁄2 x 16 1⁄2 in.
Intitaled in the plate, lower right:
“DR32 [?]”; inscribed: “Geo. C.
Miller, (Litho)” (lower left)
Volumes have been written about the life and work of the leader of the twentieth-century Mexican art movement (and of his wife, Frida Kahlo). Rivera was born in the Mexican mining district of Guanajuato of a father who was a mining chemist, rural schoolteacher, mason and anticlerical, and whose sympathies for working people helped to shape Diego’s rebel spirit.
As a boy Rivera began taking art classes at the National Academy of Fine Arts in Mexico City. Trips to Europe, the first of which was facilitated in 1907 by scholarship money, would later expose him to the work of artists who would have a lifelong impact upon his own art, especially that of Goya, Cezanne, Breughel, Giotto and of the artists he came to know in Paris: Braque, Derain, Gris, Klee and Picasso. Powerful in his draftsmanship and prolific in output, Rivera produced hundreds of oils and works on paper. He also became a modern master of fresco painting, creating some 300 murals in Mexico alone, plus famous commissions in San Francisco, Detroit and New York City. The dominant themes of this often controversial artist were revolution and labor.
What Rivera said about mural painting in the introduction to the 1934 book PORTRAIT OF AMERICA can be applied to his other work as well: that it “must help in man’s struggle to become a human being.” Art existed “to fulfill its primary functions of nutrition and enlightenment,” he insisted.
MANUEL
ROBBE (1872-1936)
French
WOMAN READING WITH HER CAT, ca. 1907
Black chalk with pastel
22 3/4 x 16 1⁄2 in.
Signed, lower left: “Manuel Robbe”
Born in Paris into a family from the small northern French town of Bethune, Manuel Robbe would come to be known as one of the most gifted artists of that country’s Belle Epoque period.
Although Robbe was a talented painter, it was as a printmaker that he excelled. An accomplished technician, he was among the French printmakers of the 1890s who led the way in the revival of the aquatint, and it was in this medium, as well as in his engravings, that his own greatness was achieved. By 1900 he had been awarded a Gold Medal at the Universal Exhibition and his color prints began to be issued regularly by Edmond Sagot, one of the most significant publishers of prints at the time. Between the turn of the century and the beginning of World War I he produced numerous aquatints both in color and in black and white.
Influenced by Renoir and others, Robbe’s work came to epitomize Belle Epoch Paris, especially in his depictions of upper middle class women and the world of the bourgeoisie, with whom he seemed to be more at home than with the aristocracy.
NORMAN
SASOWKSY (b.1931)
American
FIGURE STUDIES, 1957
Ink on paper
10 x 7 in.
Signed and dated in ink, lower left: “© Sasowsky ’57-4”
Brooklyn-born Norman Sasowsky began oil painting as a young man and found himself at that time deeply influenced by the styles, techniques and subjects of the Renaissance masters. He received formal training at the Art Students League and the City College of New York, where he studied briefly with Reginald Marsh (after Marsh died in 1954, Sasowsky would spend the next twenty-five years curating and cataloguing the artist’s work). During the 1950s and 1960s he became particularly interested in painting images of artists, musicians and others.
In his early years Sasowsky found employment in art studios, as a publishers’ production assistant, and as a freelance illustrator before going on to earn a Doctor of Education degree at New York University. He then taught junior and senior high school in New York prior to accepting a teaching position at the University of Delaware, from which he has since retired as Professor Emeritus.
Sasowsky has said that his interest in artists, performers, jazz musicians and the settings in which they performed played an important part in the way he painted. Looking back, he sees the seeds of his work from the 1990s—solitary human beings in some act of survival—in his early work. His subject has generally been the human figure, which in some of his later works has become more abstractly rendered.
BEN
SHAHN (1898-1969)
American, born in Lithuania
SILENT NIGHT, n.d.
Serigraph (edition of 200)
25 x 19 in.
Signed in pencil, lower right: “Ben Shahn”
Inscribed: “98/200” (lower left)
Painter and graphic artist Ben Shahn was born in Kaunas, Lithuania, but came to America with his family in 1906. He worked as a lithographer’s apprentice while attending night school in Brooklyn. Subsequently he attended New York University, City College (where he majored in biology), and the National Academy of Design. His first one-man show was held in 1930, and in 1947 his work was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art. In addition to being a painter and illustrator, which included executing large murals, Shahn also excelled as a photographer.
A searing social commentator and satirist in his art, Shahn always possessed a special talent for eliciting strong emotion through the deft placement of a few strokes of a pen or brush. Stylistically he often juxtaposed units of brute strength with elements of keen delicacy. “His interest in recording mood,” wrote Paul J. Sachs in MODERN PRINTS AND BOOKS, “adds significance to his works and would have been appreciated by Corot, Manet, and Degas.” Yet he spoke in an idiom that was “unmistakably American,” stated Sachs.
LYNN
SHALER (b.1955)
American
LE TIERCE, 1991
Color etching (edition of 100)
6 1/8 x 5 1/8 in
Signed in pencil, lower right: “Shaler 91.”
Inscribed: “Le Tierce 35/100” (lower left)
Fifty-two-year-old Lynn Shaler, who studied printmaking at the University of Michigan and received a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Pratt Institute, won a Fulbright Scholarship in 1984 to pursue postgraduate studies in Paris. She still lives there, and Paris often figures in her art.
Since 1975 she has produced more than 200 etchings and is perhaps best known for her hand-colored aquatint etchings. The subjects of her art have included everything from common domestic objects (doorknobs, envelopes, shoes, umbrellas) and animals (cats and dogs) to figures such as the one here.
Shaler has won many awards since 1979 and has been featured in dozens of individual exhibitions in America and Europe. Her work has been collected by such institutions as the Bibliotheque Nationale de France (Paris), the Victoria and Albert Museum (London) the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), and the Library of Congress.
WILLIAM
SHARP (1900-1961)
American, born in Austria
OF BOOKS AND SINS, n.d.
Etching (edition unknown), 5 x 8 in.
Signed in pencil, lower right: “William Sharp”
Inscribed: “Of Books and Sins” (lower left)
William Sharp, born in Lemberg, Austria (now Lvov in the Ukraine), was educated at the Academy of Fine Art and Industry there, and later in Cracow, Poland, and in England, France and Germany (at the art academies in Munich and Berlin, 1918-20). He served as a German machine gunner on the Russian front during World War I.
In post-war Germany he became a well-known etcher and newspaper artist whose bitterly critical anti-Nazi cartoons placed him in jeopardy and led to the necessity of his escape to America in 1934. Here one of his first newspaper assignments was producing sketches of the Lindbergh baby kidnapping trial for the NEW YORK MIRROR. He went on to do courtroom sketches and cartoons for LIFE MAGAZINE and became a staff artist for ESQUIRE, in which he illustrated stories by Thomas Mann and Ernest Hemingway. His work appeared in PM, CORONET, and the NEW YORK POST, and he was a long-time contributor to the NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE. He produced book illustrations for the Limited Editions Club, the Illustrated Modern Library of Random House, the Heritage Press and other leading publishers. He also illustrated children’s books.
After 1938 Sharp devoted less time to producing lithographs and more to creating etchings and aquatints, in which he replaced satire with pathos and compassion for Americans trapped in circumstances of poverty and deprivation.
Sharp won many prizes for his art throughout his career and had one-man exhibitions in several galleries in New York City. The Graham Gallery there gave him a posthumous show in 1972. His work can be found in major East Coast collections.
BARBARA
SHERMUND (1899-1978)
American
HOW TO SAVE YOUR MARRIAGE, c. 1950
Crayon on paper
10 1⁄2 x 8 1⁄4 in.
Signed with stamp, lower left: “Shermund”
San Francisco-born Barbara Shermund is probably best known for the cartoons she contributed to newspapers and periodicals through King Features Syndicate and to such magazines as ESQUIRE and the NEW YORKER. She had studied at the California School of Fine Arts and worked as a painter, illustrator, and graphic artist. She was a member of the Society of Illustrators and the National Cartoonists Society.
HARRY
SHOKLER (1896-1978)
American
GIRL READING, c. 1945
Serigraph (edition unknown)
7 1⁄2 x 5 in.
Signed in pencil, lower right: “Harry Shokler”
Inscribed: “Girl Reading” (lower left)
First trained at the Cincinnati Art Academy in his native city, Harry Shokler went on to study at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the New York School of Fine and Applied Art. He served overseas in World War I, and then during the 1920s he reportedly painted formal portraits of such prominent personalities as Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb.
On a Freiburg Traveling Scholarship awarded in 1929, Shokler went to Paris and studied at the Academie Colorossi and then traveled extensively around France and to Tunisia, Italy and Germany.
During the 1930s he worked on the Public Works of Art Project, the predecessor of the WPA, and he became part of an experimental silkscreen group which started the Workshop School on New York City’s East 10th Street in 1940. He taught serigraphy at Princeton and Columbia universities, among other schools, and in 1946 the American Artists Group published his ARTISTS’ MANUAL FOR SILKSCREEN PRINTMAKING.
Between 1926 and 1977 Shokler held over fifty one-man exhibitions. For many years he spent part of his time near Londonderry, Vermont, where he taught oil painting for the Southern Vermont Artists and where he later settled.
BLANDING
SLOAN (1886-1975)
American
WEDDING ON STAGE, c. 1930
Linocut (edition unknown)
9 x 5 7/8 in.
Signed in pencil, lower right: “Blanding Sloan”
Inscribed: “Wedding on Stage” (lower left)
The multifaceted James Blanding Sloan had a varied career as a painter, wood carver, graphic artist, set designer, sculptor, illustrator, and puppeteer.
Born in Corsicana, Texas, he studied in Chicago, where he attended the Academy of Fine Arts and met George Senseney, whose color etchings inspired him. Although he spent brief periods in New York and kept his ties with Texas (during the 1930s he was employed by the National Youth Administration in San Antonio as supervisor of arts and crafts at the La Villita restoration project), Sloan settled in California. He first lived in San Francisco, where he maintained a studio and a puppet theater. He moved to Hollywood and worked as a stage and set designer and then, by 1934, as director of the WPA Federal Theater in Los Angeles.
When he died in Canyon, it was said of him, “He etched here, painted here and made glorious puppets here.”
Among his best known works are the numerous woodcut illustrations he contributed to the 1932 book DOWN SOUTH, written by Clarence Muse and David Arlen (Hollywood: David Graham Fischer). He is represented in the permanent collections of the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco and the Brooklyn Museum of Art.
COREEN
MARY SPELLMAN (1905-1978)
American
GIRL STUDYING, 1941
Etching with hand-worked plate tone (edition of 20)
7 3⁄4 x 6 in.
Signed in pencil, lower right: “Coreen Mary Spellman”
Inscribed: “Girl Studying 5/20” (lower left)
The second of six children born into a well-to-do Irish farming and banking family in Forney, Texas, Coreen Mary Spellman began taking weekly art lessons twenty miles away in Dallas as an adolescent. In 1925 she graduated from the Texas State College for Women in Denton with a major in costume design. Between 1926, when she received a master’s degree in Art from the Teachers’ College at Columbia University, and 1941, when she achieved another in Fine Arts from the University of Iowa, she studied at Harvard, the Art Students League in New York City and the University of Colorado. From 1929 to 1974 she taught in the Art Department at the State College in Denton.
An especially talented lithographer, Spellman was also skilled in watercolor, etching, aquatint and mezzotint mediums. She won many competitive prizes in printmaking and her work was featured in more than thirteen solo exhibitions during her lifetime, mostly in the Southwest.
In addition to her teaching, exhibition and multiple organizational commitments, she lectured, illustrated pamphlets and books, and traveled extensively. Her work is represented in many public and private collections throughout the United States.
BENTON
SPRUANCE (1904-1967)
American
THE SECOND FRONT, 1943
Lithograph (edition unknown)
10 x 16 in.
Signed in pencil, lower right: “Spruance 43”
Inscribed: “The Second Front” (bottom center)
Born in Philadelphia, Benton Murdoch Spruance began the study of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania but became interested in graphic sketching and painting, which led to his switching to an art curriculum. He continued his studies at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where in 1928 and 1929 he received two Cresson Traveling Fellowships that gave him the opportunity to study with Andre L’Hote in Paris. There he learned the technique of lithography and began to create lithographic prints.
Although Sprance received a Guggenheim grant to study color lithography, he is probably best remembered for his black-and-white prints. His work is often recognized for its unique combination of social, mythological or religious subject matter with a style characterized by abstract organization and pattern.
A dedicated art teacher, Spruance became chairman of the Arts Department of Beaver College in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, and chairman of the Printmaking Department at the Philadelphia College of Art (1934-65).
In the course of his career he held many one-man shows and participated in numerous group exhibitions. Complete retrospectives were held in Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and Bridgeport, Connecticut. His works are a part of such permanent collections as those of the Carnegie Institute, the National Gallery of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the New York Public Library, the Whitney Museum of American art, and the Museum of Modern Art.
BEULAH
STEVENSON (1890-1965)
American
PURITY, 1930
Etching (edition unknown)
4 3⁄4 x 7 in.
Unsigned
Inscribed: “Purity-“ (lower left); “1930” (lower right)
A lifelong resident of Brooklyn Heights, New York, Beulah Stevenson became a printmaker, painter, illustrator, teacher and curator (at the Brooklyn Museum) whose diversified career in art brought her wide recognition.
She studied at the Pratt Institute, the Art Students League with John Sloan, and in Provincetown with Hans Hoffman. She participated in many group shows and won many awards. Eleven solo exhibits held during her lifetime brought attention to her work from New York to Santa Fe, London and Paris. It is represented in such public collections as those of the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, and the Brooklyn Museum.
Stevenson’s work became known for its wide range of subject matter, which included urban views and rural landscapes, genre scenes, and abstract and modernist constructs. It was often characterized by wit, humor, and unconventional subjects. She fused elements of realism and abstraction, dissolution and order, Cubism and literal representation. Critics described her as “an experimenter in originality” and a “Happy Modernist.”
KEES
VAN DONGEN (1877-1968)
Dutch/French
LA SIRENE, n.d.
Color lithograph (edition of 100)
16 1⁄2 x 20 3⁄4 in.
Signed, lower right: “van Dongen.”
Inscribed: “37/100” (lower left)
An exuberant painter who would become known for his riotous use of color and self-deprecating wit, Dutch-born Theodorus Marie van Dongen grew up in the environs of Rotterdam, where he began his studies at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts.
By the late 1890s he had gravitated to Paris, where his work began to be shown, even in the controversial 1905 exhibition Salon d’Automne (he would become a French citizen in 1929). He was a practicing member of les Fauves (“Wild Beasts”), a group of artists led by Henri Matisse that included Derain, Vlaminck, Dufy and Braque, whose intense work was characterized by the use of blazing color and a free-brush style. Van Dongen supplemented his income at various times by selling satirical sketches to the newspaper REVUE BLANCHE and the weekly L’ASSIETTE AU BEURRE (The Butter Dish).
Adapting his colorful palette to figure painting, van Dongen became popular with the French bourgeoisie and later a much-favored portraitist among the wealthy and the well-known. He was awarded a membership in the French Legion of Honor (1926) and was received into the Order of the Crown of Belgium (1927).
He died at his home in Monaco, where he had lived since World War II.
REYNOLD
WEIDENAAR (1915-1985)
American
HOMELESS ONES, 1942
Etching (edition unknown)
8 3⁄4 x 7 in.
Signed in pencil, lower right: “Reynold H. Weidenaar”
Inscribed: “Homeless Ones / 12.00 4th State” (lower left)
Reynold Henry Weidenaar was born and reared in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he studied at the Kendall School of Design (and where he would later return to teach for more than twenty years). From 1938 to 1940 he attended the Kansas City Art Institute on scholarship. Subsequent Guggenheim (1944) and Tiffany (1949) awards allowed him to travel to Mexico and Carmel, California, where he produced many of his most famous prints of landscapes, seascapes, human and religious subjects.
Weidenaar received national acclaim early in his career for his achievement in aquatint, drypoint, and engraving processes—and especially in the field of the “lost art” of mezzotint printmaking, in which he made a lasting contribution. After his death a family survey of his output identified over 200 different prints he had produced using various techniques, working primarily on copper with all the intaglio processes.
He became a prolific illustrator of books, especially for Grand Rapids’ William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, for which he illustrated twenty titles, many of them having to do with his native territory and his religious interests.
Weidenaaar was elected to the National Academy in 1949. His works won numerous prizes and became part of the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the Library of Congress and Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., and the Cleveland Museum of Art, among others.
ELOISE
H. WILSON (1906-1994)
American
DORMITORY, c. 1940
Woodcut (edition of 10)
4 1⁄2 x 6 in.
Signed in pencil, lower right: “E. A. Wilson imp”
Inscribed: “1/10 Dormitory” (lower left)
Printmaker Eloise Hampton Wilson’s wood engravings from the 1930s and 1940s were the subject of an exhibit held at Goucher College in 1998. These wood engravings, mostly of workers in various occupations, were discovered in her home in Harford County, Maryland, after her death. The work of this artist and illustrator had been published in THE NEW YORKER and other magazines in the 1930s.
Her woodcut here, DORMITORY, was one of the images included in THE PARIS REVIEW’S portfolio READERS AND READINGS, which featured selections from the Oresman collection.
TED
WITKOWSKY (fl. 1936-1939)
American
DEAR MA, c. 1936-39
Lithograph for the NYC WPA (edition of 25)
6 7/8 x 4 3/8 in.
Signed in pencil, lower right: “Ted Witkowsky”
Federal Art Project stamp, lower left
Inscribed: “Dear Ma” (bottom center)
No biographical data could be located on Ted Witkowsky beyond the information accompanying his lithograph DEAR MA, which was probably created sometime between 1936 and 1939 under the auspices of the New York City unit of the WPA’s Federal Art Project.