Paul Cézanne

Le Sentier

1890

Paul Cézanne Le Sentier ca. 1890 Watercolour and pencil on paper 34.6 x 51.5 cms (13 5/8 x 20 1/4 ins) PC16325 Provenance: Walther Halvorsen, Oslo Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Paris Ju...

Stanley Spencer Sword of the Lord c.1935 Pencil on paper 17.8 x 25.4 cms (7 x 10 ins) SS8308

Henry Moore Reclining Figures 1940 Chalk, pen and watercolour on paper 25.4 x 43.2 cms (10 x 17 ins) HM15852 Provenance: Willard Gallery, New York Private Collection, New York, ac...

Robert Motherwell (1915-1991) Untitled 1990 Acrylic and coloured pencil on panel 40.6 x 50.8 cms (16 x 20 ins) RM13143 P1195 The composition of this painting is based on the left ...

Robert Motherwell Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 110C 1968 Acrylic and graphite on paper 15.2 x 20.3 cms (6 x 8 ins) Robert Motherwell's Elegies series represent one of the iconic motifs of Abstract Expressionism.  Based on a 1948 ink illustration the artist executed accompanying a Harold Rosenberg poem, “A Bird for every bird,” the drawing shows the hypnotically repetitive patterning of ovoids and vertical beams.  The stark contrast of the black ink on white paper references the symbolic use of the color black by artists such as Goya, Manet and Matisse to convey death, loss, and tragedy.  Motherwell was quite affected by the turbulence of the Spanish Civil War and alludes to the Spanish republic in his Elegies. Motherwell’s plumbing the depths of poetry, history, and primordial art in the Elegies is considered a hallmark of nascent Abstract Expressionist painting in its desire to "excavate" essential imagery of mankind. Motherwell, who originally trained as a philosophy scholar and later became of the great editors of 20th century art documents, grasped very early on the crucial importance that in order to contribute meaningfully to the canon of modern art, one must create a principle of aesthetics. Through the surrealist concept of automatism, the artist finally found the creative principle that eventually governed his extraordinary artistic output and produced the Elegies, one of the most salient, immediate painterly images of 20th century abstract painting. In fact, he has alluded to the fact that each one of his Elegies begins as an automatic drawing, and certain shapes are then blocked to create the signature armature of the vertical bars and ovals. The Elegies seem to possess the power of an archetypal image, an image the mind already grasps on a subconscious level. Motherwell's play of dualities of black and white as well as other dichotomies—the geometric versus the organic, chaos versus order, death versus life—was a condition of living through a tumultuous period in American history. During an interview, he vividly recalled the 1940s as the time when society was ordered by a set of contradictions.  In Motherwell's Elegies, he not only discovered an incredibly elastic pictorial language that would communicate on multiple levels but also acknowledged these contradictions in a manner that would resonate in abstract form.  The present work served as a model for a painting, Spanish Elegy...

Acrylic and graphite on paper. 15.2 x 21 cms (6 x 8 1/4 ins)

Estate stamp lower right

John Dean Monroe Harvey (1895-1978) A design for Barclays Bank, Walthamstow, London, England, UK (1964) Gouache 41 x 60 cm Signed and dated 1964. A very fine architectural perspe...

Cityscape is a Pencil and Watercolour Drawing realized by Reynold Arnould (Le Havre 1919 - Parigi 1980). Good condition. No signature. Reynold Arnould was born in Le Havre, Franc...

This drawing records the destruction that was endured by London during the Blitz. The building in the foreground is St Nicholas Cole Abbey, situated in the city of London. Whilst a church was recorded on this site from the twelfth century, this church was destroyed in the Great Fire of London so the remnants of the church that we see here is one that was built by Sir Christopher Wren...

Piazza Navona is a drawing in pencil and watercolor on paper realized by  Nicola Simbari  in 1964. Hand-signed on the lower right in pencil In good conditions except for some soft ...

Fred Nagler was born in 1891 in Springfield, Massachusetts, where he first studied wood carving. From 1914 to 1917, he studied at The Art Students League of New York, where his prof...