Stanton MacDonald-Wright

Synchromy

1955 circa

The artist has painted the work in matte black and gloss black. It a sense this is also an optical art “Op Art” in that it changes as the light changes. Jimmy Ernst was a major figure of the New York School of abstract painting and part of The Irascibles, and son of Max Ernst: Provenance: Grace Borgenicht Gallery, New York, New York; Joseph H. Hirshhorn, New York and Washington, D.C. (acquired from the above in 1966); Joseph H. Hirshhorn bequest, Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C., 1981; Sotheby's Arcade, New York, New York, February 24, 1995, lot 331; The Jeanne and Carroll Berry...

Acrylic on masonite. This is a pivotal work in deep and radiant cobalt blue from 1950. It dipicts calligraphic and hieroglyph structures over a grid and pyramidal base by the first generation abstract expressionist. Provenance: Skinner: November 13, 1992 [Lot 00219}, The entry in the Skinner catalog indicates that the painting came directly from the artist to the family of the consignor to Skinner. Kaminsky Auctions. There is an unbroken paper trail that traces the ownership of the painting from the current owner, through two auction houses to the artist. Perfect unbroken provenance. Pousette-Dart was among the most inventive of the Abstract Expressionist generation, His uncanny talent was to expand the nature of abstraction and still make each mark each element very much his own; a reflection of what he called   "the concealed power of the spirit," he said, “not of the brute physical form."   His was not aiming for a singular, realized aesthetic formula but to expand the possibilities of painting; the transcendental in painting. Typical of such invention and exploration is this  painting  Untitled 1950 when the artist was only 34 years old and represented by one of the champions of the new American painting, Betty Parsons.  
A banner year for Pousette-Dart, the Museum of Modern Art acquired their first painting by the Minnesota born artist.  He worked on easel size works such as this painting an oil on masonite. At the same time Pousette-Dart was also working on larger scale works such as Path of the Hero, running over ten feet in length now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Both contain fields of color articulated by a highly sophisticated white hieroglyphic vocabulary. Rather than demonstrate an expressionist sensibility, Pousette-Dart harnesses his more cerebral ideas transforming thick areas of paint into a more refined composition of geometric forms akin to the pattern and forms of say a stained glass window. In a way he is looking back at Fugue, 1940 a black and white composition which makes use of a similar format of painting albeit smaller. Color and form are minimal, but what Pousette-Dart has maximized is the rhythmic and syncopated character of painting casting his ideas into purely symbolic terms that one might link to the pictograms of Adolph Gottlieb. Nonetheless, nature is always at the core of Pousette-Dart’s thinking and dreaming. Here he has transformed the local Ramapo Mountains—where he will eventually move with his family to live and work— into a complex series of articulated fragments linked by style, scale and color.  The painting’s imagery built on two large triangles and reduced to just two colors, cobalt blue and white all outlined in black.  Pousette-Dart symbols stacked in horizontal and vertical rows:  blue is ground, white is language, symbolic of light, consciousness and awareness . The painting maintains a mystical character images compounded that formulate a secret code and linked to the series of white paintings Pousette-Dart authored in the first half of the 1950s. Get up close to the picture and you discover images within images a kind of picture puzzle...

An intriguing and complex composition composed of guns, rifles, ammo and a bullseye. Work is housed in a rustic Heydenryk frame.

This colorful painting by Eleanor Parke Custis is in the spirit of Louis Valtat and the Fauves. The subject of flowers in the foreground is repeated in the backdrop. It straddles the line between abstraction and representation. Signed lower right - Work is framed. Eleanor Parke Custis studied in Corcoran School of the Arts and Design under Edmund C. Tarbell and Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts with Henry B. Snell. Initially, she began her art career as a painter, creating watercolors. Custis created illustrations for Scribner's Magazine, Harper's, Doubleday, Harcourt. She started to take photographs in her youth, using a Brownie camera...

Complex and masterfully thought out the composition of rifle, gun shells, target shapes, and buck shots. Most likely done for a ad or men's magazine. Signed lower right Atherton. Housed in a rustic House of Heydenryk frame...

Blueprints into Reality - Full-page ad for United Engineers that ran in Fortune Magazine, March 1958, and other business magazines. As Fred Taraba stated, this image is symbolic of optimism and potential. Work includes the original issue of Fortune Magazine with the ad in which United Engineers mentions Stanley Meltzoff. "Here Stanley Meltzoff dramatizes with tools and massive concrete forms...

Translated title: "Pink tree". Oil paint on masonite.

red and black abstract composition worked in oil and knife. The viewer is invited to let his imagination work to eventually find a representation. Why the name fantasia? The meeting ...

A paintings from contemporary AbEx painter Darius Yektai

This superb British Abstract Expressionist oil painting is by noted artist Bernard Kay. It was painted in 1953 and is titled Irises. Painted in a loose style with a palette of bruise...

Sophisticated, chic, worldly--call it what you wish--but abstract expressionist flowers by Sonia Grineva, shown here freshly cut and placed in an emerald green glass vase, is what br...

Large mid-century abstract expressionist oil on canvas of a still life of flowers by Belgian artist Eric Verhal. Signed and dated '65 to the bottom right and again to the reverse of the canvas. A colourful and energetic painting of a vase of flowers. Very much of its period. Angular lines reminiscent of the work of Bernard Buffet outline and crisscross luminescent fields of colour in orange, yellow, white and red. A real period piece, strong and full of energy. Eric Verhal ( born: 1938 ) : Masters of Art History and Archaelogy, State University, Ghent, Belgium. Masters of Fine Arts, Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.A. In 1968, after a period of four years as a teacher at the Lycée des Garçons in Sfax, Tunisia, Verhal left for Spain and Portugal with a scholarship from the Belgian Gouverment. After this, he traveled to the U.S.A. where he taught painting and printmaking at the Washington University, St. Louis, U.S.A. In 1970 he obtained his Masters of Fine Arts degree at the same university. From 1973 up until 1999, Verhal taught history of art at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Ghent, Belgium. In the summers of 1974 till 1981, Verhal taught diffirent courses at the Portland School of Art, Maine, U.S.A. and at the University of North-Carolina, Greensboro, North-Carolina, U.S.A. Verhal obtained scholarships for Rome, Italy, in 1961-1962, Lisbon in 1966-1967 and Germany in 1978. In September and October 1979, he worked in Boston, U.S.A., and obtained a scholarship for Japan, in 1983, where he had a show in the White Striped House Museum, Tokyo, Japan. In 1998 Verhal opened a studio in Brooklyn (N.Y. City, U.S.A.). Arsonists burned the studio down and Verhal’s studio moved to Coton-on-Hudson, N.Y., U.S.A., in the house of his oldest daughter. Verhal opened a new studio in France, Le Massif...