Sterling Strauser

Floral Still Life

1993

Louise Delorme (b. 1928). Vase of Flowers, 1969. 26 x 36 inches; 27 x 37 inches framed. Signed lower left. Titled and dated on verso. Excellent condition.

Alice B. Doughten (1880-1969). Still Life with Roses, ca. 1930. Oil on masonite panel, 12 x 16 inches. Measures 18 x 22 inches framed. Signed lower right. Original label affixed on verso with Moorestown NJ identified as artist's address. Born in Camden, New Jersey, Alice Doughten became noted for her still life and landscape paintings with figures, usually watercolors and sometimes abstract in style. She studied art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts with Henry McCarter, Earl Horter, Ralph Pearson...

Vito Tomasello (American, ?-1982). Still Life with Strawberries, 1979. Oil on masonite panel, 10 1/2 x 11 5/8 inches. Signed and dated low...

A pair of evocative beach still life painting that flirt with surrealism by outsider artist, John Prue. Oil on masonite panel, each measures 12 x 24 i...

Beautiful still life arrangement by unknown artist. Circle of Peale Family, ca. 1870. Oil on canvas, 18.5 x 25.5 inches. Unframed. Paint loss along entirety of lower edge, below tabl...

Ronald Bateman (b.1947). Friday Hangover, March 1985, 1985. Oil on canvas, 8 x 10 inches; 9 x 11 inches framed. Signed , title and dated lower margin. ...

Sylvia Rutkoff (1919-2011) "Traffic" c.1950s Oil, sand, grout, gesso on masonite 48"x36" wood period frame Signed on reverse in pencil Collection acquired from family estate Sylvia ...

Artist: William Littlefield, American (1902 - 1969) Title: Still Life and Abstract Year: 1950 & 1954 Medium: Double-Sided Oil on Masonite, signed and dated both sides Size: 22 x 28 i...

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

Sylvia Rutkoff (1919-2011) 26-1 "The Schoolgirl" c.1950s Oil paint, sand on Masonite 36x48 wood period frame Unsigned Collection acquired from family estate Sylvia Weinreb Rutkoff (...

Vibrant mid-century modern still life with abstracted synthetic cubist elements in warm colors, highlighted by texture in white by E. A Blake (American, 20th century). Signed "E.A. B...

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...