Skip to main content
Video Loading
Want more images or videos?
Request additional images or videos from the seller
1 of 19

Edward Marecak
Two Ladies Trying to Out-Mystify Each Other, Semi Abstract Figural Oil Painting

1969

About the Item

'Two Ladies Trying to Out-Mystify Each Other', Original 1969 semi-abstract cubist style oil painting portraying two female figures with still life. Figural abstraction, oil paint on burlap, estate stamped, titled, and dated verso. Painted in colors red, pink, yellow, orange, blue, green. Presented in a vintage frame, outer dimensions measure 33 ¼ x 37 x 2 ¼ inches. Image size is 32 x 35 ¾ inches. Provenance: Estate of the Artist, Edward Marecak About the Artist: Many who took art classes in Denver high schools fondly remember the legendary Edward Marecak. Rather than pursue fame, this prolific artist directed his zeal toward fostering younger generations in the principles of art as well as his simple philosophies. Moreover, his teaching salary allowed him to ply his prodigious talent at whatever he pleased, instead of bending to the dictates of trends and sales. Having inherited his faith in education from his Slovakian immigrant parents, Marecak could add the shaping of lives to his mastery of art forms, including lithographs, monoprints, drawings, hooked rugs, ceramics, paintings, wood sculptures, stained-glass windows, and jewelry. While exhibiting in his lifetime, he was, in his wife’s words, “his own greatest collector,” but recent shows and his popularity at the Kirkland Museum have positioned Marecak posthumously among Colorado’s preeminent modernists. Growing up in the farming community of Brunswick, Ohio, he showed early artistic promise, hired by the National Youth Adminstration to document historic barns. Study began in earnest at the Cleveland Institute of Art and then Cranbrook, only to be interrupted by service in World War II as an Army ski trooper in the Aleutians where he was badly wounded. In 1946, Marecak came to the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center for a year and after a semester interlude at Cranbrook returned to study lithography with Lawrence Barrett. There he also met his future wife and sometime collaborator, ceramicist Theresa Madonna (Donna) Fortin. Given the opportunity to teach a summer course at the University of Colorado, he decided to obtain a teaching certificate at the University of Denver and subsequently embarked on his twenty-five-year career in the Denver Public School system. As a child, Marecak was enthralled by the Carpathian tales of magic and supernatural beings told by his grandmother. As with other artists with roots in Eastern Europe, his artistic turn to folk tradition would free him from learned practices of perspective and modeling in favor of flat patterns within patterns and brilliant, throbbing color. While others ventured further into abstraction, Marecak stylized figurative elements into crowded compositions that appeared like mosaic or stained glass. As he matured, he could declare, “I am still very much a Byzantine designer and my joy with what color can do grows all the time.” The traceries of strong outlines and bold shapes provide compartments for vibrant colors, contrasts, and rough textures that can scarcely be contained. Red is the dominant color of his palette. As in Eastern European folk art, it embodies the life-giving force of blood as well as love and passion. If as his wife suspects, Marecak never forgot the brutal cold of the Aleutians, perhaps the blaze of red that distinguishes his artwork may have been a steady fire. Traveling to Colorado for her fashion show in 1966, designer Adele Simpson discovered and bought Marecak’s work, which influenced her next clothing line. Calling her collection “The Art of Living,” she incorporated his ethnic patterning and characteristic “Marecak red” and green, anticipating hippie couture of the late 60s. Gaining national attention, Marecak was spotted by Hollywood producer Hugh Benson, who sponsored a show off 220 works at Martin Lowitz Gallery, Beverly Hills, in 1968. Bemused by the experience, the artist wrote, “…the scale and style of the production was so wonderfully operatic that I came away delighted and full of chuckles — pink plastic flamingos had nothing on this.” Later his amusement turned to disenchantment, when the gallery owner died and the Marecak’s works were included in the IRS seizure of property. The artist largely withdrew from exhibiting, with a show near the time of his death at Rule Gallery. In his last requests, he asked that his ashes be strewn in his garden around a big peace rose, a variety so-named at the end of WWII and appropriately displaying a golden yellow edged with crimson pink. Upon closing his Inkfish Gallery in 1997, Paul Hughes, who had previously given Marecak a one-man show, chose to go out with what critic Michael Paglia called a “blaze of glory,” showing the deceased artist work. The Kirkland Museum staged a retrospective of Edward and Donna Marecak in 2007. ©David Cook Galleries, LLC
  • Creator:
    Edward Marecak (1919 - 1993)
  • Creation Year:
    1969
  • Dimensions:
    Height: 33.25 in (84.46 cm)Width: 37 in (93.98 cm)Depth: 2.25 in (5.72 cm)
  • Medium:
  • Movement & Style:
  • Period:
  • Framing:
    Frame Included
    Framing Options Available
  • Condition:
    very good to excellent condition.
  • Gallery Location:
    Denver, CO
  • Reference Number:
    Seller: DCG-221751stDibs: LU2738037482
More From This SellerView All
  • The Dance of Salome, Abstracted Figural Framed Triptych, 1960s Oil Paintings
    By Edward Marecak
    Located in Denver, CO
    The Dance of Salome or the Dance of the Seven Veils is a Triptych painted in 3 panels in oil on board. Each panel depicts a semi-abstract, cubist style individual figure: Herod, Herodias and Salome. Painted in bright colors of yellow, orange, red, green, fuchsia, purple, pink, white, blue, black and brown. Presented in vintage frames, framed dimensions of each panel measure 29 x 17 x 1 ½ inches, Image size is 23 ½ x 12 ¼ inches, each. Overall dimensions of the triptych measure 29 x 53 ½ x 1 ½ inches as displayed with 1 inch spacing between each panel. Based on the Dance of Seven Veils in which Princess Salome danced...
    Category

    1960s American Modern Portrait Paintings

    Materials

    Canvas, Oil

  • Deserted Street, Figurative Exterior Painting with Yellow, Orange and Red
    By Jenne Magafan
    Located in Denver, CO
    Oil on canvas painting from 1946 by Colorado/Woodstock modernist Jenne Magafan (1916-1952) titled 'Deserted Street'. Single figure portrayed in a ghost town with buildings and teleph...
    Category

    1940s American Modern Portrait Paintings

    Materials

    Oil, Board

  • Vintage Semi-Abstract Brightly Colored Portrait, Woman with Plant and Flowers
    By Edward Marecak
    Located in Denver, CO
    Semi-abstract oil on canvas painting by Edward Marecak (1919-1993). Composition featuring a brightly colored portrait of a woman holding flowers. Presented in an original frame measu...
    Category

    Mid-20th Century Abstract Portrait Paintings

    Materials

    Canvas, Oil

  • Fertility Goddesses, Abstract Nude Figures 1950s Oil Painting, Pink, Blue, Green
    By Edward Marecak
    Located in Denver, CO
    Fertility Goddesses, original abstract figurative painting, vintage 1950, by 20th century Denver modernist artist, Edward Marecak (1919-1993). ,Three nude female figures with fruit. ...
    Category

    1950s Abstract Portrait Paintings

    Materials

    Oil, Board

  • 1940s Oil Painting Portrait of Two Figures, American Modernist Figurative
    By Angelo Di Benedetto
    Located in Denver, CO
    Oil on canvas signed by artist Angelo Di Benedetto (1913-1992) featuring two young figures reading a book together while sitting from 1947. Painted in shades of green, orange, red, gray, and green. Image measures 28 x 38 inches, framed dimensions are 33 ¾ x 39 ¾ inches. Painting is in good condition - please contact us for a detailed condition report. About the Artist: Born New Jersey 1913 Died Central City, CO 1992 The son of Italian immigrants from the Salerno province in southern Italy, as a teenager Di Benedetto worked to study at the Cooper Union Art School in New York City (1930-34) from which he graduated with a certificate in freehand drawing. He won a scholarship to the Boston Museum Art School where he studied for three years, beginning in 1934. In 1937, he entered his first juried exhibition at the Montclair Museum in New Jersey, winning first prize and first honorable mention. In December 1938, the Royal Netherlands Steamship Line sent him on a two-month ethnological study trip to Haiti, his first exposure to a different environment outside the United States. In 1940, his Haitian paintings were exhibited at the Montross Gallery in New York – his first solo show. Before World War II, Di Benedetto traveled extensively around the United States doing regional paintings. During the war in 1941, Di Benedetto volunteered for a secret mission based in Eritrea, Africa before the Allied invasion. Following Africa, he served as an orientation officer and aerial photographic officer in the District of Columbia. In 1945 he was assigned to a mapping unit at Buckley Airfield in Denver where he served until his discharge in 1946. Like many other servicemen stationed at the time in Colorado, Di Benedetto chose to remain in Colorado, impressed by the state’s physical grandeur and healthful climate. He settled in the old mining town of Central City in 1947. In 1949 Di Benedetto and his wife, ceramist Lee Porzio, opened the Benpro Art School in his studio where he conducted summer art classes. In 1950, Di Benedetto teamed up with Frank Vavra...
    Category

    1940s American Modern Portrait Paintings

    Materials

    Canvas, Oil

  • Portrait of Artist's Wife with Fruit, 1945 American Modern Oil Painting
    By Hayes Lyon
    Located in Denver, CO
    Untitled (Portrait of Bessy Lyon, Artist Wife) is an oil on canvas painting by Hayes Lyon (1901-1987) from 1945. Presented in a wood frame, outer dimensions measure 35 ¼ x 29 ¼ x 1 ¾ inches. Image size is 30 x 24 inches. About the Artist: A native of Athol, Kansas, Lyon is primarily associated with Colorado. After several summer vacations at the Boulder Chautauqua and at Manitou near Colorado Springs, his family relocated in 1920 to Boulder where his father had a lumber business. Nine years later they settled in Denver where his father owned the Acme Lumber Company. To comply with his desire for his son’s financial self-reliance, Lyon graduated from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1931 with a B.A. degree in economics. But shortly thereafter he returned to his first love – art – that ultimately became his career. His interest in the arts was nurtured by his mother, herself a talented amateur artist, and by two of his aunts who served as role models. Beginning in 1932, he pursued a five-year course of study at the Chappell School of Art in Denver which by then had become part of the University of Denver. During his time at the school he studied with John E. Thompson and Santa Fe artist, Józef Bakoś. He also met two other Santa Fe-based artists, Willard Nash and B.J.O. Nordfeldt, when they exhibited at Chappell House, then the home of the Denver Art Museum. Lyon likewise attended the Cooke-Daniels Lecture Series there on the arts in the 1930s. Following graduation with a B.F.A. degree from the University of Denver in 1937, he studied privately for about a year with Andrew Dasburg in Taos, New Mexico, that redirected his attention to the rugged Rocky Mountain landscape, which he saw with directness and painted with an economy of means. His canvas, Winter Vista, done following his study with Dasburg, received the Edward J. Yetter Memorial Prize at the 45th Annual Exhibition of the Denver Art Museum in 1939. The painting was reproduced in the September 1939 issue of the Magazine of Art (Washington, DC). That same year his painting, Mount Evans, was included as one of Colorado’s entries in the American Art Today Pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. The money he received from the Yetter Prize financed his trip to Mexico City and Guadalajara in 1939 to see firsthand the frescoes of José Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera and the easel paintings of David Alfaro Siqueiros. Their work was admired by many Americans who participated in the WPA-era mural projects in the United States in the 1930s and early 1940s. The economic fallout from the Great Depression affecting many American artists at the time likewise resulted in Lyon’s participation in the Colorado Art Project, part of the WPA’s national program. Under its auspices he produced three murals in 1940 about the pioneer era of Fort Lupton, Colorado, which were installed in the auditorium of the local high school. Covering 367 square feet of wall space, one of the murals – Behold the West (the largest one) – incorporates the old fort for which the town is named. Before Lyon painted the murals, the students at Fort Lupton High School researched the history of their community and contributed to their cost, facilitating the murals’ allocation to their school under the Colorado Art Project. In the early 1940s Lyon shifted his focus to two new subjects – bathers, and canyons with conifers – reflecting his ongoing search for personal artistic growth. However, his reliance on structure to create form in his paintings and works on paper alienated some of his longtime followers. Nonetheless, his painting Conifers and Canyons won recognition at the 47th Annual Exhibition at the Denver Art Museum. The watercolor version of the piece was among three hundred works in that medium selected by John Marin, Charles Burchfield and Eliot O’Hara from a national competition held by the Section of Fine Arts (Federal Works Agency) and shown at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, in 1941. Later that year Lyon spent time in California where he saw Orozco’s Prometheus, influencing him to increase his range of originality and expression. In 1942 Lyon enlisted in the U.S. Army, spending almost three years in the Mediterranean Theater – Africa and Italy – preparing camouflage operations and scale models of proposed landing sites. He used his free time in Italy to expand his artistic vocabulary by seeing cultural masterpieces in Rome, Florence, Siena and Milan, and through his extensive contact with Giorgio de Chirico, founder of the scuola metafisica art movement, and Gino Severini, a leading member of the Futurist movement. Because of Lyon’s low army rank and pay, de Chirico did a small watercolor for him signing it, "For Mr. Lyon; G de Chirico, 1944." Lyon often visited de Chirico and his wife, Isa, at their apartment near the Spanish Steps in Rome. Following his Army discharge in 1945 fellow Kansas native, Ward Lockwood, invited him to join the Art Department at the University of Texas at Austin where he taught painting from 1946 to 1951. During this period some of Lyon’s work employed the palette of the School of Paris which he had seen while stationed in Europe, while other paintings had a certain flatness found in some of Lockwood’s work from the 1930s. From 1951 to 1953 he was affiliated with the Lower Colorado River Authority in Austin as an illustrator and editor of the employee magazine. In 1953, following time spent in Mexico, he returned to Denver, working as an illustrator at Lowry Air Force Base until retirement in 1961. During that time he did little of his own art because he also was designing and building a home in Arvada, Colorado, and re-establishing himself in the Denver art community after a decade-long absence. His painting, Autumn Aspens (1953-present location unknown) illustrates his experimentation with abstraction. In the early 1960s he began painting from memory that continued until the steadily degenerative effects of Alzheimer’s disease took their toll a decade later. He depicted scenes from his wartime European sojourn and from his early adulthood. The latter include Souvenir of Boulder (1962), a nostalgic return to his boyhood home in Boulder; and Holly Mayer and Friends, a painting of Glenn Miller and his musicians, inspired by Lyon’s first encounter with jazz in Boulder in the 1920s. His lifelong passion for vintage cars and automobile racing...
    Category

    1940s American Modern Figurative Paintings

    Materials

    Oil, Canvas

You May Also Like
  • Girl with Blue Face
    By James Koskinas
    Located in East Hampton, NY
    Girl with Blue Face, 48 X 36 X 1.5 This large scale painting of a woman's face hints at Picasso. Both technically accomplished and classically approached, the thick gestural brushstrokes add a fragmented & tactile character to the canvas. The cool palette makes it easy to live with and makes it perfect for any room. This comes stretched and ready to hang. Message me for shipping quote About the artist: James Koskinas, born in Terre Haute...
    Category

    2010s American Modern Portrait Paintings

    Materials

    Canvas, Acrylic

  • "Don't Cry Long" Abstracted and Distorted Self-Portrait, One Crying Eye
    Located in Detroit, MI
    "Don't Cry Long" is a self-portrait of the artist and an unusual one at that in which the artist portrays herself shedding tears. Perhaps it is an expression of some grief experienced by Ms. Woodlock, but it also admonishes her to not "Cry Long" while at the same time poking fun because of her elongated face and the one lone "long" tear tracing a pattern down her face. In addition to self-portraits, Ethelyn painted commissioned portraits. In this painting her head is cocked and her famous bangs hang down her forehead. Compare two self-portraits, “Up From Under”, and “M’Eyes" to "Don't Cry Long." The major differences are the close facial view and the brilliant blood red paint that fills the entire canvas. This painting is included in the book, "Dreams Have Wings: An Artist's Journey into Magic and Mystery" printed in the United States, 1985. She describes "Don't Cry Long" as showing how funny looking we are, if we cry too long. Ethelyn Woodlock...
    Category

    Mid-20th Century American Modern Abstract Paintings

    Materials

    Masonite, Oil

  • Small Dark Grey Abstract Expressionist Figurative Portrait Painting
    By Dick Wray
    Located in Houston, TX
    Small dark grey abstract expressionist painting of a figure's face by Dick Wray. The painting is currently unframed. Artist Biography: Dick Wray, a native Houstonian, born in Heigh...
    Category

    1990s Modern Abstract Paintings

    Materials

    Canvas, Mixed Media, Oil

  • Antique American Modernist Nude Artist Studio Surreal Portrait Oil Painting
    Located in Buffalo, NY
    Antique American school surreal composition painting. Oil on board, circa 1950. Unsigned. Image size, 8L x 12H. Housed in a period modern frame.
    Category

    1930s Modern Portrait Paintings

    Materials

    Canvas, Oil

  • Antique American School Signed Framed Modernist "Massage" Oil Painting
    Located in Buffalo, NY
    Vintage American signed interior scene oil painting. Oil on canvasboard. Signed. Framed. Image size, 14L x 11H.
    Category

    1950s Modern Portrait Paintings

    Materials

    Canvas, Oil

  • Harlem Renaissance Signed Ellis Original Abstract Portrait Framed Oil Painting
    Located in Buffalo, NY
    Antique American modernist abstract painting. Oil on board, circa 1940. Signed. Image size 22L x 30H. Housed in a period modern frame.
    Category

    1940s Modern Abstract Paintings

    Materials

    Canvas, Oil

Recently Viewed

View All