Gallery of the Masters Mixed Media

John Steuart Curry (American, 1897-1946) Wisconsin Twilight, 1934 Signed Lower Left Gold Leafed Frame with Silk Mat and Gold Leafed Fillet 29 x 36.5 inches 41 x 46.5 inches with frame Born in Dunavant, Kansas on November 14, 1897, John Steuart Curry became the youngest member of the famed "Benton-Wood-Curry trio" of Regional Painters of the early 20th-century American Scene movement. He gained national reputation for his Kansas rural scenes of people terrorized by natural phenomena such as tornadoes, drab farm-house living conditions, religious gatherings such as prayer meeting and baptisms, and spirited animals who got out of control. A good example of his weather-related painting was Tornado Over Kansas, 1929, in the collection of the Muskegon Museum of Art in Muskegon, Michigan. In this scene, a family scurries for shelter, trying to outrun a funnel cloud headed for their home. The mother carries her baby, and the children rescue pets and toys. It was later said that Curry never directly experienced a tornado but had many scares from them as a child when his family, faced with frightening skies, made frequent trips to their fruit cellar. In 1933, Tornado Over Kansas received second prize at the Carnegie International Exhibit. He was especially focused on people who were down-to-earth, plain spoken and who were self reliantly making a living through hard physical labor challenged by harsh weather. In many of his paintings, he showed his disdain for racial discrimination and hatred, something he believed was psychologically poisonous. He did many murals dealing with land settlement and these themes of racial justice, and his, reflecting these themes, murals are in the Capitol Building in Kansas, the University of Wisconsin, Department of the Interior, and Department of Justice in Washington D.C. Curry was a descendant of many generations of farmers, whose American ancestors originally were from Scotland. Some of them immigrated to South Carolina, and later followed "the line of the frontier into the Mississippi Valley." The first born of five children, Curry said of his childhood: "I was raised on hard work and the shorter catechism---Up at four o'clock the year round, doing half a day's work before we rode to town on horseback to our lessons." From a young age, he was constantly drawing, an activity encouraged by his mother, who arranged art lessons for him from age 12. She also gave him his first glimpse of the Old Master painters through reproductions of their work she had collected on her honeymoon. Never of the studious nature, Curry quit the county high school in Winchester, Kansas and spent that summer as a railroad section-hand. His earnings provided him with enough money to buy a suit of clothes so that he could go to Kansas City and attend the Art Institute. A month later he moved to the Art Institute of Chicago, and remained there for two years, supporting himself by sweeping floors and acting as a bus-boy in the cafeteria. Upon America's declaration of war, Curry went to training camp, only to be sent home when it was discovered that he was still under age. In 1918 he enrolled at Geneva College, played football for two seasons, and spent the following five years training to earn his money as an illustrator of "blood-and-thunder" scenes for a popular western story magazine. In this capacity, he worked for illustrator Harvey Dunn in New Jersey from 1919 to 1926. He married and then persuaded art patron Seward Prosser to loan him $1000. 00,, which he used for one year of study in Paris in 1927. The year in Europe, which included study at the Academy Julian, reinforced his independent nature. He was much more impressed by the paintings of Rembrandt and Rubens than by the modernist American painters, many whom were adopting the 'isms' of abstract styles of French contemporary artists such as Pablo Picasso's Cubism and Max Ernst's Surrealism. Curry determined to paint American subjects without European models and to celebrate American patriotism and regional pride rather than lofty, remote ideals espoused by the academics. He returned to America penniless, and settling in Westport, Connecticut, swore that he would turn out a worthwhile picture or give up painting entirely. There in 1928 from memory he painted his first picture that became famous, Baptism in Kansas. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney bought it for her museum and subsidized him for two years at $50 a week. Baptism in Kansas was heralded nationally as work of a new American genre, but fellow Kansans were not impressed until much later when they realized the scope of his recognition. Purchased by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, one of his key benefactors, Baptism launched his career as a regionalist. In 1930, he had his first one-man exhibition, held at the Whitney Studio Club, and was received enthusiastically by critics. Although he lived primarily in the East, he returned often to Kansas where he stayed at his parents' farm and sketched rural-life scenes. His first wife died, and he gave up his studio in Westport, and secluded himself in a drab New York City studio. He taught at the Cooper Union and the Art Students' League, and held a show of circus studies after touring New England with Ringling Bros.-Barnum & Bailey Circus. This tour and the resulting circus sketches and watercolors were inspired from his attendance in Kansas at many rural county fairs. Reportedly the circus people said they liked Curry but "quibbled over minor technical errors in his series of circus paintings." In 1934 he married Kathleen Shepard, returned to Westport, recovered his old enthusiasm, and painted one of his most famous paintings, Line Storm. Westport beginning to appreciate him, commissioned him to do a double mural for the local high school. Additionally, the United States government selected him to paint murals for the Department of Justice and the Department of Interior buildings in Washington, D.C. He was appointed Artist-in-Residence in the College of Agriculture, University of Wisconsin, in 1936. At $4,000 a year he had his studio on the campus, where he could mingle with students, but he conducted no formal classes. Curry also traveled occasionally to Arizona where he visited his parents who had a second home there and spent their winters. The Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art in Manhattan, Kansas, is the repository of the Curry archives including many paintings. According to Bill North, the Museum's Senior Curator, Curry "did produce a number of paintings and watercolors with Arizona subjects, some, certainly prior to 1940. Relatively little is known about this aspect of his life and work. I assume that many, if not all of Curry's Arizona paintings...

Robert Kushner (American, b. 1949) Alphonsine, 1983 30 x 22 inches without frame 32.75 x 25 inches with frame Titled Lower Left Signed and dated Mid Lower Right A member of the Patt...

Yellow Store Front, Project, 1980 By. Christo (Bulgarian, 1935-2020) Signed Lower Right Titled Lower Left Unframed: 32 x 23.5 inches Framed: 32.5 x 24 inches An environmental instal...

Float Drawing, Venice By. Dale Chihuly (American, b. 1941) With frame: 40.75 x 28.75 inches Without frame: 36.5 x 24.75 inches Edition: 142/150 bottom right Signed in Paint bottom ce...

A Stroll Through the Village, Two Figures By. Theo Tobiasse (Israeli, French, 1927-2012) Signed Lower Left Unframed: 40" x 27.5" Framed: 55.5" x 42.25" Théo Tobiasse came from a Lithuanian-Jewish immigrant family who moved to Paris in 1931 for economic reasons. Here Tobiasse completed an apprenticeship at the École des Arts Décoratifs, which was interrupted by the outbreak of World War II. The family lived hidden in the French metropolis for over two years without ever leaving the small apartment or even lighting it up. The time was spent reading, drawing and playing chess, and Tobiasse built up a huge pool of drawings from which he could later draw. After the end of the war, he worked as a graphic designer for the Hermès company...

Pickaxe (Spitzhacke) Superimposed on a Drawing of the Site by E.L. Grimm, 1982 By Claes Oldenburg (Swedish, American, 1929-2022) Unframed: 26" x 20" Framed: 28.75" x 22.75" Signed and Dated Lower Right Whimsical sculpture of pop culture objects, many of them large and out-of-doors, is the signature work of Swedish-born Claes Oldenburg who became one of America's leading Pop Artists. He was born in Stockholm, Sweden. His father was a diplomat, and during Claes' childhood moved his family from Stockholm to a variety of locations including Chicago where the father was general consul of Sweden and where Oldenburg spent most of his childhood. He attended the Latin School of Chicago, and then Yale University where he studied literature and art history, graduating in 1950, the same year Claes became an American citizen. Returning to Chicago, he enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1952 to 1954 and also worked as a reporter at the City News Bureau. He opened his own studio, and in 1953, some of his satirical drawings were included in his first group show at the Club St. Elmo, Chicago. He also painted at the Oxbow School of Painting in Michigan. In 1956, he moved to New York where he drew and painted while working as a clerk in the art libraries of Cooper-Union Museum for the Arts of Decoration. Selling his first artworks during this time, he earned 25 dollars for five pieces. Oldenburg became friends with numerous artists including Jim Dine, Red Grooms and Allan Kaprow, who with his "Happenings" was especially influential on Oldenburg's interest in environmental art. Another growing interest was soft sculpture, and in 1957, he created a piece later titled Sausage, a free-hanging woman's stocking stuffed with newspaper. In 1959, he had his first one-man show, held at the Judson Gallery at Washington Square. He exhibited wood and newspaper sculpture and painted papier-mache objects. Some viewers of the exhibit commented how refreshing Oldenburg's pieces were in contrast to the Abstract Expressionism, a style which much dominated the art world. During this time, he was influenced by the whimsical work of French artist, Bernard Buffet, and he experimented with materials and images of the junk-filled streets of New York. In 1960, Oldenburg created his first Pop-Art Environments and Happenings in a mock store full of plaster objects. He also did Performances with a cast of colleagues including artists Lucas Samaras, Tom Wesselman, Carolee Schneemann, Oyvind Fahlstrom and Richard Artschwager, dealer Annina Nosei, critic Barbara Rose, and screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer. His first wife (1960-1970) Pat Muschinski, who sewed many of his early soft sculptures, was a constant performer in his Happenings. This brash, often humorous, approach to art was at great odds with the prevailing sensibility that, by its nature, art dealt with "profound" expressions or ideas. In December 1961, he rented a store on Manhattan's Lower East Side to house "The Store," a month-long installation he had first presented at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York. This installation was stocked with sculptures roughly in the form of consumer goods. Oldenburg moved to Los Angeles in 1963 "because it was the most opposite thing to New York I could think of". That same year, he conceived AUT OBO DYS, performed in the parking lot of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics in December 1963. In 1965 he turned his attention to drawings and projects for imaginary outdoor monuments. Initially these monuments took the form of small collages such as a crayon image of a fat, fuzzy teddy bear looming over the grassy fields of New York's Central Park (1965) and Lipsticks in Piccadilly Circus, London (1966). Oldenburg realized his first outdoor public monument in 1967; Placid Civic Monument took the form of a Conceptual performance/action behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, with a crew of gravediggers digging a 6-by-3-foot rectangular hole in the ground. Many of Oldenburg's large-scale sculptures of mundane objects elicited public ridicule before being embraced as whimsical, insightful, and fun additions to public outdoor art. From the early 1970s Oldenburg concentrated almost exclusively on public commissions. Between 1969 and 1977 Oldenburg had been in a relationship with Hannah Wilke, feminist artist, but in 1977 he married Coosje van Bruggen, a Dutch-American writer and art historian who became collaborator with him on his artwork. He had met her in 1970, when she curated an exhibition for him at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Their first collaboration came when Oldenburg was commissioned to rework Trowel I, a 1971 sculpture of an oversize garden tool, for the grounds of the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, the Netherlands. Oldenburg has officially signed all the work he has done since 1981 with both his own name and van Bruggen's. In 1988, the two created the iconic Spoonbridge and Cherry sculpture for the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota that remains a staple of the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden as well as a classic image of the city. Typewriter Eraser...

"Portrait of Victory" By Paul Pletka (1946- ) Image Size: 30" x 23" Framed: 42" x 36" Signed: Lower Right Paul Pletka is a neo-surrealistic painter inspired by his fascination from early childhood with Native Americans of the Southwest. His style, described as neo-surrealistic, "is both realistic and deeply spiritual, being highly sensitive to the inner thoughts of Native Americans." Paul Pletka was born in southern California in 1946 and currently resides in New Mexico. After high school, he won a scholarship to Arizona State University and then transferred to Colorado State University, but feeling disappointed in his college art training, did not paint seriously until the late 1960s. His works of art have been exhibited in one-man shows in Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, Illinois, New York, Kansas and Missouri continuously since 1964. Pletka's paintings are in more than 40 private and public art collections including the Albany Museum of Art, Albany, GA; Hallmark Cards, Kansas City, MO; Mel Pfaelzer Collection, University of Northern Illinois, De Kalb; the Norton Gallery & School of Art, West Palm Beach...

Gaudi XX, (D. 1079), 1979 By. Joan Miro Signed Lower Right Edition 41/50 Lower Left Unframed: 37.5" x 30.75" Framed: 46.5" x 39" Joan Miro was born in Barcelona, Spain on April 20, 1893, the son of a watchmaker. From 1912 he studied at the Barcelona Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the Academie Gali. In the first quarter of the 20th century, Barcelona was a cosmopolitan, intellectual city with a craving for the new in...

This is an original production animation cel painting from a RAID television commercial. Provenance: Gallery Lainzberg, Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Original Production Cell From the Color Remake of the original 1930s Cartoon Mutt and Jeff is a long-running and widely popular American newspaper com...

Cone Drawing with Sculpture By Jane Sauer (b. 1937- ) Cone Drawing Unframed: 30" x 31.5" Cone Drawing Framed: 37" x 29" Cone Sculpture: 27" x 4" Born i...

*PLEASE INQUIRE IF YOU HAVE QUESTIONS AND/OR IF YOU WOULD LIKE US TO SEND A VIDEO WITH THE MUSIC PLAYING. Beautiful Antique Swiss Music Box, Inlaid ...

Cast Paper with Hand-Coloring 19 x 19 inches Signed and Numbered 4/15 *In Plexiglass Shadowbox Frame (27.5 x 27.5 inches) Figurative* artist Larry Rivers was born in the Bronx in 19...