Skip to main content
Video Loading
Want more images or videos?
Request additional images or videos from the seller
1 of 17

William Sanderson
Abandoned (Colorado) - Oil on Canvas, American Modern Landscape Painting

About the Item

'Abandoned (Colorado)' is an oil painting by William Sanderson (1905-1990) depicting an abandoned house in green grass hills. Presented in a custom frame measuring 13 ¼ x 16 ½ inches; image size measures 8 ½ x 11 ¼ inches. Painting is in good condition - please contact us for a detailed condition report. About the Artist: Born Latvia 1905 Died Colorado 1990 The elder son of a construction engineer, he was born Wilhelm Tsiegelnitsky in a seaside resort near Riga, Latvia, then part of the Russian Empire. His father, Grigori Mojesevich (later Anglicized to Gregory) was of Russian-Jewish heritage, while his mother Berta (Bertha) came from a German-Jewish background. Because preference in awarding construction contracts at that time were being given to members of the Russian Orthodox Church, his father had the whole family baptized in that church which he kept a secret from Sanderson’s grandparents. His father’s profession took the family to a number of cities in various parts of the Russian Empire including Warsaw, Kharkhov, Kiev, and Samarkand in Asia. To his mother’s annoyance, he scribbled on anything within easy reach, deciding by age ten that he would make art his lifetime goal. During the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 the family lived with relatives in Rostov-on-the-Don where his mother enrolled him in the local Chinyenov Art School, marking the first step in his art career. Feeling that they would have no place in the new Communist political reality, in 1921 the family left Rostov for Kiev, emigrating to Italy and Greece on short-term visas before arriving in New York two years later, sponsored by Gregory’s relatives in New Jersey. The Tsiegelnitsky surname was changed to the more pronounceable Siegel. Experiencing the frustration shared by most immigrants seeking to establish themselves in a new, unfamiliar environment, Sanderson sufficiently mastered English by 1924 to attend the Fawcett School of Industrial Art in Newark (later the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Art) where he studied with Ida Wells Stroud, herself a student of William Merritt Chase and Arthur Dow and part of the early twentieth-century Arts & Crafts Movement. Seeking a more challenging curriculum, he enrolled at the National Academy of Design in Manhattan (1924-1927), studying painting with Charles Hawthorne, etching with William Auerbach-Levy, and life drawing with Charles L. Hinton. Sanderson won the Suydam Medal for Life Drawing, First Prize in Composition, and Honorable Mention in Etching. He also briefly attended the Art Students League in New York in 1928, studying lithography with Charles Locke who in 1936 taught a summer course in the medium at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. However, Sanderson quit the League when he could no longer afford the tuition. With his art studies behind him, he began a successful career in illustration in New York. Briefly associated with the Evening Graphic, he maintained a decade-long affiliation with the New Masses, honored to be in the company of such established artist-contributors as Jean Charlot, Stuart Davis, Adolf Dehn, Louis Lozowick, Reginald Marsh, Jan Matulka and Boardman Robinson – some of whom later were affiliated with the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center in the 1930s and 1940s. As a young immigrant he came to share some of the popular views of the left-wing intellectual community in American in the 1920s and early 1930s; but in 1936 he severed his connections with the New Masses because he did not like the direction it had taken by that time. In 1929, the year of the stock market crash and the onset of the Great Depression, he began doing commercial book illustration in New York which he continued until being drafted during World War II. However, his steady income disqualified him from participation in the Works Progress Administration (WPA)-era art projects. A barometer of his success was his inclusion in the Fifth Exhibition of American Book Illustration in 1935 sponsored by American Institute of Graphic Arts whose jurors included Edith Halpert of The Downtown Gallery in New York. Among the book titles he illustrated were: Marian Hurd McNeeley, The Jumping Off Place; P.N. Krasnoff, Yermak the Conqueror; Joe Lederer, Fanfan in China; Fay Orr, Freighter Holiday; and The Cavalcade of America. His images of a covered wagon and a Daniel Boone prototype in the last-named publication anticipate subjects he later explored more fully in his easel painting in Colorado with likenesses such as The Woman of the Plains and Hombre. In the 1930s and early 1940s he also produced illustrations and covers for leading American magazines such as The New Yorker, Esquire, Cue, and Harper’s. In 1931 he became a naturalized U.S. citizen in Manhattan and by 1936 began informally using Sanderson as his surname, making the change official in 1941. In 1937 he was given a solo show at the American Contemporary Art (A.C.A.) Gallery in New York. The following year he became art director at the McCue Ad Agency in New York where he worked until after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Looking forward to the day when he could give up illustration for the fine arts, his career change was set in motion when he was drafted into the U.S. Army in March 1942. After basic training at Kessler Field near Biloxi, Mississippi (where the Tuskegee Airmen also trained) he shipped out at his own request to Lowry Air Force Base in Denver, becoming part of the Army Air Corps and taking an instant liking to Colorado. At Lowry his humorous drawings of barracks life were published in the base newspaper, The Rev-Meter. In the summer of 1943 he had his first solo exhibition in Colorado at the Denver Art Museum-Chappell House that consisted of black-and-white drawings of army life. He also began painting watercolor scenes from memory of his previous life in the East. His two visits to Vance Kirkland’s studio in Denver’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, while stationed at Lowry, occasioned a lifelong friendship and professional association. On Sanderson’s excursion in 1943 to the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center he met his future wife, Ruth Lambertson from Cedar Falls, Iowa, whom he married eight weeks later, initiating a union lasting forty-seven years. His fluency in Russian landed him an assignment as an interpreter with the American ground forces meeting up with the Soviet Army marching westward toward Berlin in the last months of World War II. His impressions and photos of the bombed-out city formed the basis of his montage, Berlin 1945, painted in Denver in 1947. Its palette and collage-like quality and that of some of his other paintings from this period reflect the influence of American modernist, Stuart Davis. Following his military discharge and some brief design work for the Kistler Stationery Company and the A.B. Hirschfeld Press in Denver, Sanderson swapped commercial art for academia in 1946 when Vance Kirkland hired him as Assistant Professor of Advertising Design at the University of Denver, which subject he taught until retiring in 1972. Along with Kirkland and other faculty artists, he became a charter member of the 15 Colorado Artists. Founded in 1948, the group comprised some of the state’s leading contemporary artists seeking to distance themselves from much of the traditional imagery then being produced and exhibited in Denver and elsewhere. Reflecting the viewpoint of his fellow charter members Sanderson said, "I’m very taken with the nature scenes in this region, but it’s not the function of the artist to paint them when there are photographers around." Paraphrasing Picasso, the leading representative of contemporary art at that time, he added: "The painting is the artist’s representation of what nature is not." The financial security and stability of his teaching position at the University of Denver (DU) gave him the freedom to develop his easel painting. He produced a large body of oils and watercolors in both stylized Realism and Surrealism depicting, respectively, Colorado-inspired subject matter and social criticism of modern life and industrial civilization. One of his first canvases, Steamship Ruth, titled in honor of his wife and incorporating elements remembered from the port of Rostov in Russia has large, precisely-arranged areas of flat color with crisp edges seen in many of his Colorado paintings in the 1950s and 1960s. Similarly, Mountain Rhythm employs a bright palette and undulating lines conveying his fascination with the overall composition of irregular mountain and cloud shapes. Trailer Park, near the foothills west of Denver, provided abundant material for a geometric form study, while Composition with Fried Eggs in the Denver Art Museum’s collection essentially is a semi-cubistic arrangement of interlocking planes and spaces that was reproduced in the August 25, 1952, issue of Time Magazine. His work was also shown in group exhibitions outside Colorado at the Dallas Fine Art Museum, Museum of New Mexico (now, New Mexico Museum of Art) in Santa Fe, Joslyn Memorial Museum in Omaha, San Francisco Art Association, Salt Lake City Art Center, and the Cedar City Art Museum Association in Utah. The positive notice accorded his work in the early 1950s earned him a commission from the Ford Motor Company to illustrate an article, Fort Garland, by Marshall Sprague in the June 1954 issue of Ford Times. (Similar commissions were also given at that time to Denver’s Vance Kirkland and Richard Sorby.) In the mid-1950s Sanderson also executed several murals in different techniques for secular and religious buildings in Colorado, reminiscent of artists’ commissions under the Federal Arts Projects (FAP) during the Depression era: the Graland School lobby and the Colorado Tobacco Building, both in Denver; St. Joseph’s School, Salida; Mesa Elementary School, Cortez; as well as the Andrew Jackson Hotel in Nashville, Tennessee. Sanderson’s life in Europe and illustration work for the New Masses in New York made him very aware of ethnic and racial prejudice. He said, "I believe the artist is first of all a human being with the ability to see and depict the hope, aspirations and the despair of other human beings." In the 1950s he recorded the political movement for Black racial equality in paintings such as Noon Hour, Whites Only, and Brief Encounter showing an inter-racial couple seated at a tavern table. A decade later the search for group identity by young, politically active Chicanos in Colorado and elsewhere was reflected in Tierra y Libertad (Land and Liberty) and La Pulqueria (Pulque Drinking). The latter images reflect the Socialist Realist style of Mexican muralist, Diego Rivera, whose work became widely known in the United States in the 1930s. On the occasion of a DU faculty show in 1964, Sanderson explained the social commitment in his art, "Unfortunately most artists today are concerned only with textures, brushstrokes and technique. It isn’t very fashionable to be involved. But my feeling is that a painter has a responsibility to society." In the mid-1950s his work began critiquing the alienation, pressures and potential destructiveness inherent in the urban experience with Beginning of the End. In it a single individual looks up out of his window at a heady admixture of big business and politics intertwined with amusement and consumerism suspended mid-air with the potential of crashing down at any moment, sweeping away everything in its path. No Way Out (1961) graphically expresses the utter feeling of helplessness experienced by a driver whose car is poised on the jagged edge of a serpentine mountain road. In American Afternoon a lone female figure sunbathes with her radio and picnic basket, dwarfed by a huge revolving radar dish and a large billboard advertisement along an empty road hurtling across a treeless plain. By the late 1950s Abstract Expressionism made significant inroads in Denver, reflected in some twenty-five paintings he did during the 1960s in a hard-edge abstract style not previously seen in his work. Emphasizing pure color, balance and design, he derived the non-representational subject matter from a variety of sources: the port of Rostov-on-the-Don, Hebrew letters, and the ornamental patterns used by the Northwest Indian tribes to decorate their ceremonial objects and distinctive wooden houses. Regarding these paintings as a personal experiment to see if he could paint that way, he soon returned to more traditional imagery. After teaching at the University of Denver for a quarter century, he retired as Associate Professor Emeritus in 1972. Maynard Tischler, Director of the School of Art, described him as "one of the mainstays, one of the people who helped build the School of Art. He had a keen wit, tremendous knowledge and outstanding wisdom." Sanderson and his wife spent the balance of their years in Fort Morgan on the eastern Colorado plains. The relocation wrought changes in his subject matter and style which he noted: I’ve done hard-edge paintings because I was always interested in typography and shapes and forms but then I finally decided I wanted to make…a record of things before they are completely inundated by shopping centers, highways and pizza parlors…. The isolation, the loneliness of life on the plains is not that dissimilar from the isolation and loneliness one feels living in New York City. His output assumed a more regionalist style as his new environment challenged him to paint the broad panorama of Colorado’s high plains dominated by the sky, clouds, seasonal changes, windmills and ranches. In the process, he took on the "myth of the West" with his own brand of humor and irreverence: I have a dislike for what usually passes as Western art…It’s terribly repetitious. Most of it is just an imitation of what Russell and Remington did… What I’ve painted about the West is not reality; I’ve painted the West as it never was and I know it. I’ve taken the romantic, wild image – bad men, shootouts in the street – done it in an exaggerated style. Some of the subject matter are clichés – and worn out clichés at that. But I’m not mocking the West so much as I’m exaggerating it. About five years before he died of complications from leukemia and Alzheimer’s, he candidly summed up his long and varied career, "I’m very happy that I am in a position to devote all my time to painting… I don’t give a damn that, to date, I’ve neither fame nor fortune." He nevertheless occupies an important place as a modernist artist in Colorado’s art history in the second half of the twentieth century. Born and raised in a different culture half a world away from the American West, he successfully assimilated over the years to his adopted country. He maintained an abiding belief in the timeless, universality and spiritual sustenance which art provides. As he stated in an interview in the University of Denver’s newspaper Pioneer, "Because I feel that art is fundamentally humanistic, that it has its roots in a concern with man – not with the machine, the computer nor the rocket – I believe that the artist can use his multiple abilities of communication to offer men spiritual release and infuse meaning into what is often a meaningless existence." Solo Exhibitions: American Artists Gallery, New York (1931); A.C.A. (American Contemporary Art Gallery), New York (1937); Denver Art Museum (1947); Saks Galleries, Denver, (1956); Brass Cheque Gallery, Denver (1976); Stuhr Museum, Grand Island, Nebraska (1978); Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities, Arvada, Colorado (1983); Savageau Gallery, Denver (1981, 1985, retrospective); University of Denver (1989, retrospective); "The Centennial of William Sanderson," Kirkland Museum of Fine & Decorative Art, Denver (2005-06). Group Exhibitions: "Annual Western Shows," Denver Art Museum (1945, 1950); Colorado State Fair Art Exhibit, Pueblo, Colorado (1948, 1950); "Second Annual Exhibition of Painting," California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco (1947); Gilpin County Art Association, Central City, Colorado (1947, Helen Bonfils First Prize); "15 Colorado Artists," Denver Art Museum (1948-49, inaugural exhibition and subsequent annuals); "Made in the U.S.A." Hackley Art Gallery, Muskegon, Michigan (1950) and Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center (1952); Haig Art Gallery, Denver (1952); Denver Art Galleries, (1964); "Faculty Show," University of Denver (1964); Bernardi Studio Gallery, Denver (1971, 1973); International House, Denver (1972); "The D.U. School of Art Faculty-1968," Denver Art Museum (1968); Museum Collections: Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, DC; Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, New Hampshire; Ford Motor Times Collection of American Art, Dearborn, Michigan; Northeastern Junior College, Sterling, Colorado; Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities, Colorado; University of Denver; Denver Art Museum; American Museum of Western Art-The Anschutz Collection, Denver; Denver Public Library Western Art Collection; Kirkland Museum of Fine & Decorative Art, Denver. ©Stan Cuba for David Cook Galleries, LLC
  • Creator:
    William Sanderson (1905-1990)
  • Dimensions:
    Height: 13.25 in (33.66 cm)Width: 16.5 in (41.91 cm)Depth: 0.75 in (1.91 cm)
  • Medium:
  • Movement & Style:
  • Period:
  • Framing:
    Frame Included
    Framing Options Available
  • Condition:
  • Gallery Location:
    Denver, CO
  • Reference Number:
    Seller: 270281stDibs: LU27312678812
More From This SellerView All
  • Colorado Mine, 1940s WPA Modern Mountain Landscape Oil Painting, 18 x 24 inches
    By Paul Kauvar Smith
    Located in Denver, CO
    Colorado landscape with an old mine building, trestle, mountains and dark stormy sky, vintage circa 1940 oil painting on canvas by Denver modernist, Paul K. Smith. Painted in colors ...
    Category

    1940s American Modern Landscape Paintings

    Materials

    Oil, Canvas

  • Adobe Church, New Mexico, 1940s Modernist Southwestern Landscape Oil Painting
    By Paul Kauvar Smith
    Located in Denver, CO
    Vintage 1930s - 1940s oil painting of an adobe church in New Mexico with a brilliant blue sky and clouds (likely Rancho de Taos), circa 1940. Painted by Denver modernist, Paul K...
    Category

    1940s American Modern Landscape Paintings

    Materials

    Canvas, Oil

  • Native American Figures at Taos Pueblo, New Mexico Southwestern Oil Painting
    Located in Denver, CO
    Original 20th century oil painting by Wolfgang Pogzeba (1936-1982) with Native American figures standing in bright blankets with adobe buildings in th...
    Category

    Mid-20th Century American Modern Figurative Paintings

    Materials

    Oil, Canvas

  • Colorado Mountain Summer Landscape, 1930s Framed Modernist Oil Painting
    By Arnold Blanch
    Located in Denver, CO
    Vintage Modernist WPA era painting by Arnold Blanch (1896-1968) of a Colorado Landscape, likely near Colorado Springs, Colorado, with green fields, red rocks and mountains in the background under a moody sky. Dominant colors include, green, yellow, red/brown, gray, white and blue. Painting is clean and in good vintage condition - please contact us for a detailed condition report. About the Artist: Arnold Blanch was an illustrator, printmaker, teacher and painter. He was primarily known for his landscape, genre, figurative, realist, and surrealist paintings. Born in Manterville, Minnesota, he was encouraged to study art by his mother, an amateur artist. He began studying at the Minneapolis Art Institute in 1914. In 1916, he received a scholarship to study in New York at the Art Students League. In New York, he studied under Robert Henri, Francis Luis Mora, Boardman Robinson, John Sloan, and Kenneth Hayes Miller. In 1919, Blanch arrived in Woodstock, New York to study at the Art Students League summer school. He married his fellow student Lucile Lundquist, and they settled in Woodstock in 1922 after traveling to France for a year. Blanch remained in Woodstock for more than forty years, until his death. He was an important figure in the Woodstock Artists Association, as he devoted much of his time to maintaining financial and moral support for the Association. Throughout his life, Blanch had more than sixty solo and group exhibits. He was awarded the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 1940. In 1962, he had a retrospective at the Krasner Gallery in New York. Blanch's artistic style changed frequently throughout his career. After the 1930's, Blanch's palette became lighter and his subjects became less serious. In the 1930s, after he and his first wife separated, Blanch became romantically involved with artist Doris Lee, and both were influenced by each other's artistic styles for the next thirty years. Blanch was also influenced by the Abstract Expressionists; however, he primarily remained a figurative painter. His last artistic style consisted of shallow pictoral space and tightly arranged structures. ©David Cook Galleries...
    Category

    1930s American Modern Landscape Paintings

    Materials

    Canvas, Oil

  • Central City, Colorado, 1950s Modernist Cityscape Oil Painting with Buildings
    Located in Denver, CO
    Oil on canvas modernist city scape painted circa 1950 by Paul K Smith (1893-1977) titled Central City, Colorado. Portrays a city scene of historic buildin...
    Category

    1950s American Modern Landscape Paintings

    Materials

    Canvas, Oil

  • View From the Park (Colorado) Mountain View Oil Landscape Painting
    By Charles Ragland Bunnell
    Located in Denver, CO
    Oil on canvas painting by Charles Ragland Bunnell (1987-1968) titled 'View from the Park'. Presented in a custom frame measuring 28 ¾ x 32 ¾ inches; image size is 22 ½ x 26 inches. ...
    Category

    Mid-20th Century American Modern Landscape Paintings

    Materials

    Canvas, Oil

You May Also Like
  • San Pedro Harbor
    By Paul Sample
    Located in New York, NY
    It is infrequent, to say the least, that a diagnosis of tuberculosis proves fortuitous, but that was the event, in 1921, that set Paul Starrett Sample on the road to becoming a professional artist. (The best source for an overview of Sample’s life and oeuvre remains Paul Sample: Painter of the American Scene, exhib. cat., [Hanover, New Hampshire: Hood Museum of Art, 1988] with a detailed and definitive chronology by Sample scholar, Paula F. Glick, and an essay by Robert L. McGrath. It is the source for this essay unless otherwise indicated.) Sample, born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1896 to a construction engineer and his wife, spent his childhood moving with his family to the various locations that his father’s work took them. By 1911, the family had landed in Glencoe, Illinois, settling long enough for Paul to graduate from New Trier High School in 1916. Sample enrolled at Dartmouth College, in Hanover, New Hampshire, where his interests were anything but academic. His enthusiasms included the football and basketball teams, boxing, pledging at a fraternity, and learning to play the saxophone. After the United States entered World War I, Sample, to his family’s dismay, signed on for the Naval Reserve, leading directly to a hiatus from Dartmouth. In 1918 and 1919, Sample served in the U.S. Merchant Marine where he earned a third mate’s license and seriously contemplated life as a sailor. Acceding to parental pressure, he returned to Dartmouth, graduating in 1921. Sample’s undergraduate life revolved around sports and a jazz band he formed with his brother, Donald, two years younger and also a Dartmouth student. In November 1933, Sample summarized his life in a letter he wrote introducing himself to Frederick Newlin Price, founder of Ferargil Galleries, who would become his New York art dealer. The artist characterized his undergraduate years as spent “wasting my time intensively.” He told Price that that “I took an art appreciation course and slept thru it every day” (Ferargil Galleries Records, circa 1900–63, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, available on line). In 1920, Donald Sample contracted tuberculosis. He went for treatment to the world-famous Trudeau Sanitorium at Saranac Lake, in New York State’s Adirondack Mountains for the prescribed regimen of rest, healthful food, and fresh air. Visiting his brother in 1921, Paul also contracted the disease. Tuberculosis is highly contagious, and had no certain cure before the development of streptomycin in 1946. Even for patients who appeared to have recovered, there was a significant rate of recurrence. Thus, in his letter to Price, Sample avoided the stigma conjured by naming the disease, but wrote “I had a relapse with a bad lung and spent the next four years hospitalized in Saranac Lake.” The stringent physical restrictions imposed by adherence to “the cure” required Sample to cultivate an alternate set of interests. He read voraciously and, at the suggestion of his physician, contacted the husband of a fellow patient for instruction in art. That artist, then living in Saranac, was Jonas Lie (1880–1940), a prominent Norwegian-American painter and an associate academician at the National Academy of Design. Lie had gained renown for his dramatic 1913 series of paintings documenting the construction of the Panama Canal (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; United States Military Academy, West Point, New York). Primarily a landscape artist, Lie had a particular affinity for scenes with water. His paintings, impressionistic, atmospheric, and brushy, never strayed from a realistic rendering of his subject. Sample regarded Lie as a mentor and retained a lifelong reverence for his teacher. Sample’s early paintings very much reflect Lie’s influence. ` In 1925, “cured,” Sample left Saranac Lake for what proved to be a brief stay in New York City, where his veteran’s benefits financed a commercial art course. The family, however, had moved to California, in the futile hope that the climate would benefit Donald. Sample joined them and after Donald’s death, remained in California, taking classes at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. In Sample’s account to Price, “I couldn’t stomach the practice of painting a lot of High Sierras and desert flowers which seemed to be the only kind of pictures that were sold here so I got a job teaching drawing and painting at the art school of the University of Southern California.” Initially hired as a part-time instructor, Sample progressed to full-time status and ultimately, by the mid-1930s, to the post of Chairman of the Fine Art Department. Sample, however, did not want to wind up as a professor. “Teaching is all right in small doses,” he wrote, “but I have a horror of drifting into being a college professor and nothing more.” At the same time as he taught, Sample began to exhibit his work in a variety of venues at first locally, then nationally. Though he confessed himself “a terrible salesman,” and though occupied with continued learning and teaching, Sample was nonetheless, ambitious. In 1927, he wrote in his diary, “I am eventually going to be a painter and a damned good one. And what is more, I am going to make money at it” (as quoted by Glick, p. 15). In 1928, Sample felt sufficiently solvent to marry his long-time love, Sylvia Howland, who had also been a patient at Saranac Lake. The Howland family were rooted New Englanders and in summertime the Samples regularly traveled East for family reunion vacations. While the 1930s brought serious hardship to many artists, for Paul Sample it was a decade of success. Buttressed by the financial safety net of his teacher’s salary, he painted realist depictions of the American scene. While his work addressed depression-era conditions with a sympathetic eye, Sample avoided the anger and tinge of bitterness that characterized much contemporary realist art. Beginning in 1930, Sample began to exhibit regularly in juried exhibitions at important national venues, garnering prizes along the way. In 1930, Inner Harbor won an honorable mention in the Annual Exhibition of the Art Institute of Chicago. That same year Sample was also represented in a show at the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo and at the Biennial Exhibition of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. In 1931, Dairy Ranch won the second Hallgarten Prize at the Annual Exhibition of the National Academy of Design, in New York. Sample also made his first appearances at the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, and The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. In 1936, Miner’s Resting won the Temple Gold Medal at the Pennsylvania Academy’s Annual Exhibition. Always interested in watercolor, in 1936, Sample began to send works on paper to exhibitions at the Whitney Museum, New York. While participating in juried exhibitions, Sample also cultivated commercial possibilities. His first New York art dealer was the prestigious Macbeth Gallery in New York, which included his work in a November 1931 exhibition. In 1934, Sample joined the Ferargil Galleries in New York, after Fred Price arranged the sale of Sample’s Church Supper to the Michele and Donald D’Amour Museum of Fine Arts in Springfield, Massachusetts. In 1937, The Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased Sample’s Janitor’s Holiday from the annual exhibition of the National Academy of Design, a notable honor. As prestigious as this exhibition schedule may have been, by far Sample’s most visible presence in the 1930s and 1940s was the result of his relationship with Henry Luce’s burgeoning publishing empire, Time, Inc. Sample’s first contribution to a Luce publication appears to have been another San Pedro...
    Category

    20th Century American Modern Landscape Paintings

    Materials

    Canvas, Oil

  • The Old Monastery Wall
    By William S. Schwartz
    Located in New York, NY
    Signed (at lower left): WILLIAM S. SCHWARTZ
    Category

    Early 20th Century American Modern Landscape Paintings

    Materials

    Canvas, Oil

  • Landscape
    By Marcel Emile Cailliet
    Located in Los Angeles, CA
    Landscape, 1940, oil on canvas, 24 x 20 inches, signed, dated and titled verso: “Marcel Cailliet ’40 – S.C.” and “Marcel Cailliet Landscape”; likely exhibited at the annual juried st...
    Category

    1940s American Modern Paintings

    Materials

    Canvas, Oil

  • Untitled (Collapsed Shacks)
    By Karl Fortress
    Located in Los Angeles, CA
    Untitled (Collapsed Shacks), c. 1940s, oil on canvas, signed lower left, 20 ½ x 26 ½ inches, presented in a period frame This work is part of our exhibition America Coast to Coast: ...
    Category

    1940s American Modern Paintings

    Materials

    Canvas, Oil

  • Untitled (Farm in Winter)
    By Julius M. Delbos
    Located in Los Angeles, CA
    This work is part of our exhibition America Coast to Coast: Artists of the 1940s Untitled (Farm in Winter), 1940s, oil on canvas, signed lower right, 26 x 30 inches, presented in an original frame Julius Delbos...
    Category

    1940s American Modern Paintings

    Materials

    Canvas, Oil

  • 1927 Oil Painting Eiffel Tower Paris American Modernist Wpa Artist Morris Kantor
    By Morris Kantor
    Located in Surfside, FL
    Morris Kantor New York (1896 - 1974) Paris from the Ile St. Louis, 1927 (view of Eiffel Tower) Oil painting on canvas Hand Signed lower left. Provenance: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution ( bears label verso) Size: 20 3/4"H x 28 1/8"W (sight), 28.75 "H x 36"W (framed) Morris Kantor (Belarusian: Морыс Кантор) (1896-1974) was a Russian Empire-born American painter based in the New York City area. Born in Minsk on April 15, 1896, Kantor was brought to the United States in 1906 at age 10, in order to join his father who had previously relocated to the states. He made his home in West Nyack, New York for much of his life, and died there in 1974. He produced a prolific and diverse body of work, much of it in the form of paintings, which is distinguished by its stylistic variety over his long career. Perhaps his most widely recognized work is the iconic painting "Baseball At Night", which depicts an early night baseball game played under artificial electric light. Although he is best known for his paintings executed in a realistic manner, over the course of his life he also spent time working in styles such as Cubism and Futurism, and produced a number of abstract or non-figural works. A famous cubist, Futurist, painting of his "Orchestra" brought over 500,000$ at Christie's auction house in 2018 Kantor found employment in the Garment District upon his arrival in New York City, and was not able to begin formal art studies until 1916, when he began courses at the now-defunct Independent School of Art. He studied landscape painting with Homer Boss (1882-1956). In 1928, after returning to New York City from a year in Paris, Kantor developed a style in which he combined Realism with Fantasy, often taking the streets of New York as his subject matter. He did some moody Surrealist Nude paintings and fantasy scenes. In the 1940's he turned towards figural studies. Later in his career, Kantor himself was an instructor at the Cooper Union and also at the Art Students League of New York in the 1940s, and taught many pupils who later became famous artists in their own right, such as Knox Martin, Robert Rauschenberg, Sigmund Abeles and Susan Weil...
    Category

    1920s American Modern Landscape Paintings

    Materials

    Canvas, Oil

Recently Viewed

View All