HEADS AND CUTS AT BOTTOM OF RELEASE

 

20th Anniversary of Works on Paper

By Regina Kolbe

NEW YORK CITY — Given this year’s 366 days, New Yorkers viewed Leap Day as an extra opportunity to squeeze in a bit more shopping. And the best shopping in town was to be had at Sanford Smith’s art show, Works on Paper, presented at the Seventh Regiment Armory. Seventy international dealers installed themselves in the swank setting and unveiled their finest offerings.

Running through Monday, March 5, this year’s 20th Anniversary event celebrated “Women in the Arts,” and most of the exhibitors played to the theme, either featuring paintings in which females were depicted or showing art created by women artists.

As a result, several contemporary female artists had their day at the armory. Women of generations past, some forgotten, others overshadowed by male counterparts, were given an opportunity to shine anew before the elite audience that annually attends Works on Paper.

At the gala preview, proceeds of which support the Citizens’ Committee for Children, Boston artist Cheryl Warwick was in attendance at the stand of Dolan/Maxwell, where her works were featured. With pieces placed in corporate and museum collections, Warwick’s multimedia works are reminiscent of quilts that present everyday objects, citing dreams and memories with a universal theme that give the works their layered impact.

Nearby, Childs Gallery, the longest running of Boston’s Newbury Street galleries, showed a suite of rare etchings by Queen Victoria that were created during the second of her many pregnancies. The works on paper captured the essence of Childs’ mission, to bring to the collector of modest means fine works of art by seeking out the unusual, the overlooked and the out-of-taste. By show’s end, Queen Victoria’s works had proven their popularity.

Alexander Gallery, New York City, provided a glimpse into the life of the aristocrats who lived in Russia in the years prior to the Revolution. A series of detailed watercolors by Russian-born Marianma Davidoff documented the visually enchanting existence she lived as the child of Russian elite. The works, according to dealer Alex Acevedo, were also featured in a book about her life.

Acevedo, whose specialty spans the Fifteenth through the Nineteenth Century, also hung works by French classicist Pierre Paul Prud’hon and American Peter Caledon Cameron.

Manhattan dealer DFN Gallery brought the focus on female artists into the present with works by Susan Grossman and Susan Shatter. Both working, the artists’ oeuvres are stylistically different. Grossman’s representational panoramas trick the eye, luring viewers from a distance to see them as outsized black and white photographs when they are actually highly articulated charcoal and pastels on paper.

Shatter, on the other hand, paints large landscapes and seascapes that defy preconceived opinion about watercolor. Both artists commanded strong viewer interest as soon as the show opened.

Jill Bokor of Sanford Smith Fine Art, Great Barrington, Mass., featured the work of contemporary painter Judy Pfaff. An untitled four-panel mixed media work of woodblock, digital elements and painting that hung on the center wall wove landscape, architecture and color together to suggest a natural environment. Another living artist featured here was Will Barnet, whose iconic pencil on vellum study “Introspection” was hung nearby. Barnet, now well into his 90s, made an appearance at Works on Paper on preview night. At the front of the Smith/Bokor stand was “Midtown Deli” a 3-D lithograph by Red Grooms, which sported a red sold button within minutes of the show’s opening.

Dominic J. Taglialatella, founder of DJT Fine Art, New York City, showing for the first time this year, offered the buying public “Warhol’s Women.” The iconic display from the master of Pop played well with the crowd.

Elsewhere around the floor, Peter Fetterman of Santa Monica, Calif., showed a broad range of photographic works that touched soul, the heart and the eye. Sebastião Salgado’s black and white humanist photos, including “Dinka Man in the Kei Camp, Africa,” riveted viewers. Lillian Bassman’s high-style fashion highlighted a different photographic genre. Julia Margaret Cameron, an early professional female photographer, was represented by several works, of which “We Love America” stood out. Additionally, “Women: A Celebration,” a collection of photographs featuring the expected celebrities and the unexpected, such as Mother Teresa, was offered.

Photography in the booth of Jean Paul Perrier of Barcelona, Spain, stood like dark sculptures of the human form. From the eye of Miguel Arnal, the 1960 series immortalized models with limbs like animals, and caught the essence of life study in sensuous nude photographs. A selection of knotted works by Julian Aragoneses added an abstract and metaphysical element to the booth’s offerings. Aragoneses, who has been called an avatar of the god Shiva, believes there exists a commitment between the parts of his work that cannot be undone. Meanwhile, balancing — or perhaps tying together — the vastly divergent styles of Spain’s new breed were classic examples of Picasso’s genius as defined in crayon and ink.

Simon Capstick-Dale Fine Art, New York City, showed Twentieth Century masters. Included was Picasso’s later period pencil on paper, “Nu Couché,” 1972, Leger’s “Composition Murale,” 1950, a gouache on paper, and Degas’s “Étude de Nu,” a charcoal over charcoal counterproof.

Framont Gallery, Greenwich, Conn., led with a work by the American Impressionist Martha Walter. Backing it were works by Picasso and other Modernist masters.

Also mining the Modern past was Jan Juffermans Jr of Kunsthandel Juffermans, the Netherlands. A collection of 15 works by Kees van Dongen put the Fauvist painter’s prints in the spotlight.

Accorsi Arts, East Aurora, New York City, specialists in postwar and contemporary art, showed Fernand Léger’s “Montparnasse,” a 1954 watercolor, gouache and pencil on paper along with Spanish artist Antoni Tapies’s “American Eagle,” 1953, an ink on paper, and Marino Marini’s “Horse and Rider,” 1952, ink, pastel and gouache on paper. Warhol’s “Chanel #5,” a screen print on museum board, one of an edition of 91, seemed glaring in contrast, although popular.

Jim Elkind of Lost City Arts, New York City, filled a booth with Harry Bertoia monotypes. The reasonably priced ink on rice paper studies provide a “good entry point” for buyers, stated Elkind.

Ohio dealer Thomas French is the agent for the heirs of George Bellows, whose iconic works were prominently featured in the booth. However, Thomas Hart Benton’s “A Singing” and Childe Hassam’s “Fifth Avenue Noon,” 1916, captured the spirit of postwar America as it extended from the Main Street to Wall Street.

Michael Verne of Cleveland, Ohio, showed a collection of woodblock prints that ranged from Ito Shinsui, who Verne called “the most famous painter of women,” to Daniel Kelly, whose outsized works expand traditional woodblock to include lithography, cement block printing, chine colle and hand coloring techniques. Melding old with new, Verne specializes in contemporary artists working in Japan.

Art of Japan, Medina, Wash., also melded the traditional with Twentieth Century works. Among them, a dramatic likeness by Kunimasa, 2003, titled “Oneo Eisaburo as Saga no Goro.”

The globalism of the show was reinforced by works in the stand of Berlin, Germany, dealer Jörg Maas. German Expressionism was well represented by the community of Dresden artists working under the name Brücke (Bridge). Judging by the selection and sales of woodcuts, lithos and etchings by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Herman Max Pechstein and Emil Nolde, it was clear that the five have been reevaluated and come up winners with buyers.

The Adam Gallery of London made a special presentation of the works of Richard Cartwright. Intended to be “spiritual, transcendent, mysterious,” this is the largest group collection of Cartwright’s work that has been shown outside of the United Kingdom. Working in pastels, an unusual medium for works as large as his, he layers the medium to deliver an intense feeling of color and atmosphere.

Miller Block Gallery, Boston, showing the work Lori Nix, found its booth filled throughout the show. Nix’s work bends the line between truth and illusion with images that at first appear to be computer-generated art but are, in fact, photographs of actual models the artist builds and paints. Eerie, many allude to the horror movies of past decades.

Kay Ruane, a survivor of a major plane crash, also walks that fine line between truth and art, but in a different way. Contorting herself into a variety of poses, she is photographed by her husband. The images then become studies as she then creates graphite and gouache works from them, adding unusual backgrounds and elements.

Finally, the galleries that have become the standard by which all others are judged maintained their posture at Works on Paper.

James Graham & Sons devoted its space to the artist David Fertig, whose boldly rendered British battle scenes relating to the Napoleonic era call to mind the Romanticism of Delacroix and Gericautt. His energetic loose brush strokes, however, are more rooted in Modernist abstraction.

At Hirschl & Adler, Joseph Goddu had at hand a remarkable body of works that included small graphic collections by Josef Albers and Donald Judd. The work of Susan Headley van Campen, including “Bouquet,” 2006, put the gallery in the mainstream of the show’s theme.

Always sensitive to the broad range of tastes at shows, Hirschl & Adler maintained balance by showing a range of works by Frederick Rosen, including “Brooklyn Bridge,” 1954, and John Singer Sargent, albeit the latter was represented by “Study of a Salmon,” in distinct contrast to the society portraits most closely associated with him.

Historicana, Burlingame, Calif., devoted its display to the works of Arthur Szyk, one of the foremost illuminators of the Twentieth Century. Syzk’s work was published in illustrated copies of Andersen’s Fairy Tales, the Arabian Nights Entertainments and the Canterbury Tales, as well as numerous periodicals of the period. Although not part of a movement, interest in Syzk’s work was rekindled in the early 1990s. With interest again welling up, the display attracted plenty of attention.

Rather than take anything too seriously, Beetles Gallery, London, presented amusing portraits and caricatures from the early Twentieth Century. Among the works were Edmund Dulac’s watercolor with pen and ink, 1907, titled “As So Arrogant a Claim All the Courtiers Burst into Laughter.” Other artists included Ronald Searle, Sir Max Beerbohm, Poweys Evans and Arthur Rackman, all of who knew how to draw an ounce of pretension from the most haughty.

With the 20th Anniversary edition of Works on Paper now a memory, Sanford Smith predicts that “even with the new challenges facing art shows at the armory, we fully expect to be here to celebrate our 25th anniversary!”

Only a master could make it look so easy.

The New York Antiquarian Book Fair, promoted by Sanford Smith and Associates, will take place April 4–6 at the Seventh Regiment Armory. For information, 212-777-5218 or www.sanfordsmith.com.

Works On Paper Celebrates

20th Anniversary In Style

Works on Paper

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162

The rare set of four Donald Judd woodcuts printed in black, orange, yellow and ultramarine on Japanese paper were from an edition of 25 executed in 1993. They were price on request at Hirschl & Adler gallery, New York City.

 

332

“Warhol’s Women” was the subject at DJT Fine Art, New York City.

 

366

The nude study by Edward Hopper, circa 1924, Conte crayon on paper, $40,000, and George Wesley Bellows litho “Preliminaries” $35,000, at Thomas French Fine Art, Fairlawn, Ohio.

 

665

The art of Mel Ramos at Galerie Hafenrichter & Flügel, Nuremberg, Germany.

 

629

Jean-Michel Basquiat and Matt Siren were among the artists represented at Woodward Gallery, New York City.

 

206

A selection of pastels by David Fertig were featured at James Graham Gallery, New York City.

 

227

Mary Cassatt’s “Mrs Harris Whittemore and Baby Helen,” circa 1898, a pastel on paper, was at ACA Galleries, New York City. Also shown was the Romare Bearden collage, right, and Charles White’s “Mayibuye Afrika,” 1961.

 

 

 

 

 

134

“Colonial Post” a pencil drawing by Thomas Hart Benton, left, and N.C. Wyeth’s charcoal on paper titled “Massasoit,” circa 1945, at Bernard Goldberg Gallery, New York City.

 

150

Romare Bearden’s collage on board “Cattle of the Sun God,” left, 1977, was price on request, while Robert Motherwell’s ink on paper study for “Wall of the Temple” was $40,000 at Jerald Melberg Gallery, Charlotte, N.C.

 

181

Fernand Leger’s 1949 gouache “Elegant Mecanique,” left, and “Personnage dans vu Interior” from 1920 were displayed at Simon Capstick-Dale Fine Art, New York City.

 

188

Bridget Riley screen prints, left, ranged from $4,500 to $38,000, while Joan Miro’s “Femme et Chien Devant La Lune,” a pochoir printed in colors, bottom right, was $48,000, and “Femme,” was stickered $85,000 at Sims Reed Gallery, London.

 

196

Andy Warhol’s “Superman” and “Marilyn” at Sims Reed, London.

 

237

The works of Hans Burkhardt were featured in the booth of Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, Los Angeles.

 

259

“Sunset Over Paradise Mountain, Saint Martin,” $19,500, top, and “School,” circa 1976, mixed media, $85,000, both by Romare Bearden at Aaron Payne, Santa Fe, N.M.

 

274

John Marin, Oscar Bluemner and Arthur Dove at Meredith Ward Fine Art, New York City.

 

285

Photographs by Miquel Arnal were featured at Jean Paul Perrier, Barcelona, Spain.

 

291

Jean Paul Perrier, Barcelona, Spain

 

312

Framont, Greenwich, Conn.

 

314

Picasso and Chagall at Juffermans Fine Art, The Netherlands.

 

318

The deluxe edition of the 1924 printing of Max Beckman, from an edition of 180 copies, included four signed prints, $36,500, at Juffermans Fine Art, The Netherlands.

 

322

Victor Vasarely and Andy Warhol at Accorsi Art, East Aurora, N.Y.

 

343

The art of Harry Bertoia at Lost City Arts, New York City.

 

344

Original drawings by Thomas Hart Benton at Ernest S. Kramer Fine Art and Prints, Wellesley, Mass.

 

352

Ted Faiers was a featured artist at David Lusk Gallery, Memphis, Tenn.

 

377

Charcoal portraits of ladies by Louis Wolff, circa 1890, at Conner Rosenkranz, New York City.

 

392

Max Weber charcoals were featured at Gerald Peters Gallery, New York City. “Standing Female,” left, 1915, was $30,000, and “Posing Model,” 1911, $20,000.

 

416

The portrait of George Washington by English artist Thomas Stothard, a watercolor from 1783, was at Alexander Galleries, New York City.

 

420

The Daniel Kelly painting on handmade paper, “Buttercups,” was $100,000 at The Verne Collection Cleveland, Ohio.

 

424

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s circa 1909 charcoal drawing on brown paper, $60,000, and his woodcut from 1916, “Tochter Sternheim,” $110,000, were offered at Jörg Maass Kunsthandel, Berlin, Germany.

 

433

At Michael Rosenfeld, New York City, the portrait by Alfonso Ossorio, left, “Dunstun Thompson,” 1942, was $90,000, the set of four Aaron Douglas woodblocks were $95,000, and the Jacob Lawrence ink on paper was $110,000.

 

441

Manhattan dealer Mark Borghi offered Mary Cassatt’s pastel from 1901 titled “Sara,” and Andrew Wyeth’s watercolor “Tom’s Shed.”

 

458

“Utamaro” was $24,500 at The Art Of Japan, Medina, Wash.

 

462

Karel Appel mixed media works on paper at Adam Gallery, London.

 

469

The Laura Combs Hill pastel “Marsh magnolias,” upper left, was $42,000; Reynolds Beal’s “Rockport Harbor” was $7,500; and Andrew Wyeth’s “Dormer Window, Cushing, Maine” was $250,000 at Vincent Vallarino Fine Art, New York City.

 

489

Dolan Maxwell, Philadelphia

 

508

The Arthur Szyk watercolor, “To the People of France in a Brotherhood of Arms (From) The People of America” was $175,000 at Historicana, Burlingame, Calif.

 

515

Platt Fine Art, Chicago.

 

525

Frank Usrey’s “Crow Series” was popular at Tanner Hill Gallery, Chattanooga, Tenn.

 

544

A rare full frame image of Robert Jackson’s Pulitzer Prize image of Lee Harvey Oswald being shot by Jack Ruby was $5,750 at Charles Schwartz, New York City.

 

553

Will Barnet, left, and Howard Daum offered at Susan Teller Gallery, New York City.

 

562

Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood at Kiechel Fine Art, Lincoln, Neb.

 

569

Red Grooms was among the artists represented at Sanford Smith Fine Art, Great Barrington, Mass.

 

580

Hill-Stone, New York City

 

586

Childs Gallery, Boston

 

596

William Weston Gallery, London

 

606

The Edgar Degas pastel, “Femme après son bain,” about 1900, top, was sold as the show opened for preview from the booth of R.S. Johnson, Chicago.

 

615

Clients looking over the selection of art from the booth of Gary Bruder, New York City.

 

619

Picasso’s “Femme au Cheveaux Flous,” printed in 1962, was $50,000, and “La Danse (Bacchanale),” an original brush and ink on paper, was $375,000 at Gary Bruder, New York City.

 

643

Acme Fine Art, Boston

 

653

Show promoter Sanford Smith works the front gate of Works on Paper.

 

662

Clients looking over the selection of art at Platt Fine Art, Chicago.

 

668

Large crowds were in attendance at the preview party for Works on Paper, a benefit for the Citizen’s Committee for Children of New York.

 

683

Dealer David Lusenhop discusses a drawing with artist Will Barnet.