Wes Hempel

Family Circle (COLLABORATION WITH JACK BALAS)

2023

Represented by George Billis Gallery, NYC & LA -- A walk through any major museum will reveal paintings that depict or legitimate only certain kinds of experience. Despite the good i...

A walk through any major museum will reveal paintings that depict or legitimate only certain kinds of experience. Despite the good intentions of critical theorists questioning the validity of the canon, paintings of the old masters on the walls of museums like the Met, the Louvre, Rijks museum still have a certain cache. They're revered not just for their technique but because they enshrine our collective past experience. Of course, it's a selected past that gets validated. Conspicuously absent to me as a gay man...

Represented by George Billis Gallery, NYC & LA --A walk through any major museum will reveal paintings that depict or legitimate only certain kinds of experience. Despite the good in...

Represented by George Billis Gallery, NYC & LA --A walk through any major museum will reveal paintings that depict or legitimate only certain kinds of experience. Despite the good in...

Represented by George Billis Gallery, NYC & LA --A walk through any major museum will reveal paintings that depict or legitimate only certain kinds of experience. Despite the good in...

This painting is a collaboration with artist Jack Balas. Jack is Wes Hempel's partner. Represented by George Billis Gallery, NYC & LA -- A walk through an...

Oil paint on canvas Hand-signed on the back by the artist Louis-Paul Ordonneau is a French painter born in 1975. He lives and works in Paris. In 1999, he set up his studio in tempo...

Oil on canvas signed ROBJ, France, 1930s. Couple near the Pound. with frame - 134.6x107x7 cm - 53"x42"x2.75" ; without frame - 116x89 cm - 45.7x35 inches. 50F format. Signed "Robj" l...

Mid century figurative landscape of a nude female figure with tree at El Capitan, Yosemite, California by Margaret Wherry Ziegler (American, 1909-1989). Signed "M. Ziegler" lower right. Displayed in a rustic new silver gilt frame. Image, 24"H x 12"W. Margaret Wherry Ziegler was born in Cincinnati, Ohio on November 27, 1909. At a young age she traveled with her parents to the Philippines, Japan, India, Italy, Greece, and Europe. She studied art at the Cincinnati Art Academy, Minneapolis Art Institute, the University of the Philippines, and the California College of Arts and Crafts. While in Japan she studied Japanese brush painting...

Antique American signed modernist nude male landscape oil painting. Oil on canvas. Signed. Framed. Image size, 18L x 14H.

Fukui began his artistic career in post-war occupied Japan as an innovator in Japanese prints by producing work utilizing his unique mimeographic process. Though he was very active i...

Childe Hassam 1859-1935 American The Bather Signed and dated “Childe Hassam” (lower right) Oil on canvas Considered by many to be America’s foremost Impressionist painter, Childe Hassam composed his tranquil and intimate oil on canvas The Bather in the early years of the 20th century. The creation of the artwork aligns with a period of Hassam’s career where the artist’s palette was transforming, matching ever closer with the pale and pastel hues of French Impressionists like Claude Monet. Even the subject — a nude woman — represents a greater alignment with the Impressionist project, as artists of the movement and their non-mythological and non-biblical nudes still generated cries of indecency. With Hassam’s signature brushwork and attention to color, The Bather serves as a dream-like vision, serene and sensuous, of a young woman bathing in a lush forest. While the artist's skill for landscape painting is on display, it is Hassam's command of form, light and color that brings this canvas to life. He creates a captivating composition, placing the nude subject in the bottom left of the canvas. The soft, undulating curves of the woman's body in contrapposto and the glow of her fair skin are balanced by the strong verticals and deep earth tones of the tall trees to her right. Hassam delicately frames the nude in the vivid blues of the distant water, building luminous color that further draws the viewer’s eye and results in a somewhat voyeuristic appeal — endowing his nude with both a natural innocence and an intentional sensuality. Born in Dorchester, Massachusetts, Childe Hassam began his artistic career as a freelance illustrator, working for national publications such as Harper’s Weekly, Scribner’s Monthly, and The Century. His first solo exhibition of watercolors took place in Boston in 1883, and he quickly catapulted onto the international scene, winning a bronze medal at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889. The year before the present work was created, he received the Webb Prize from the Society of American Artists for another landscape painted at Gloucester. Hassam would receive numerous other awards throughout his career, most notably the Gold Medal for Distinguished Services to Fine Art from the American Dealers Association. A true master, Hassam depicted a way of life characteristic of both American and French society, and his work elucidates a critical chapter in American art history. Today, his work resides in the Oval Office of the White House and in numerous important museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, among others. This painting will be included in Stuart P. Feld's and Kathleen M. Burnside's forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the artist's work. Circa 1905 Canvas: 24 1/2“ high x 20 18” wide Frame: 35 7/8“ high x 31 1/4” wide x 3 1/4“ deep Provenance: Private Collection of William Young...