Current Exhibition


 

Contours of Abstraction

May 13 - July 2, 2021


 
 

“We are cluttered with images, and only abstract art can bring us to the threshold of the divine.”
― Dominique De Menil

 

In the Graphics Gallery:
Spring, A celebration of the Season by four Contemporary Artists
Alperin, Breunig, Drabkin, Somosi


The American Art Fair

May 15 - 22, 2021


PAST EXHIBITIONS


“Abstraction allows man to see with his mind what he cannot see physically with his eyes....Abstract art enables the artist to perceive beyond the tangible, to extract the infinite out of the finite. It is the emancipation of the mind. It is an exploration into unknown areas.”

― Arshile Gorky
Enter Virtual Exhibit Here


 

Marissa Alperin: Interlaced

A Virtual Exhibit

 
 

 

We are delighted to present our first exhibition by Marissa Alperin: Interlaced, a selection of woven paintings. Alperin’s works are imaginative, rich with color and varied with texture. Some move with the rhythms of landscape, some have the balance of a still life while others have collage-like qualities.
A graduate of the Fashion Institute of Technology with an eponymous jewelry line, Alperin has recently taken her passion for creativity and flare for color to her textile designs. She handcrafts her own looms. Her vibrant hued yarns are either locally sourced, heirlooms from her mother or gifts from friends. Alperin creates her own, unique weaves. “Weaving allows me precious space to clear my head, remove everyday stresses and enjoy the moment – and most importantly smile at what I create.”
Complementing the weavings will be beaded jewelry, unique designs that fuse the artist’s woven work with her jewelry design.

Enter Virtual Exhibit Here

The works can be viewed only by appointment. Kindly call or email to schedule your visit.


 

Under the Sky

A Virtual Exhibit

 
 

 

Enter Virtual Exhibit Here

Available October 9 through November 13, 2020


The American Art Fair logo

The American Art Fair

Online Only

Please join us for the thirteenth annual and first virtual American Art Fair.  This online presentation features works from 24 dealers and runs for a limited time, beginning at noon on Friday, October 9 and continuing through Sunday, October 18.

In addition to the two works we feature at the fair we are delighted to share a virtual exhibition, Under the Sky, a selection of 20th Century landscape paintings, sculpture and works on paper.


 

The Same Boat

 
 

 

“We may have all come on different ships, but we're in the same boat now." Martin Luther King, Jr.


 

Summer Afternoon

 
 

 

“Summer afternoon, summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language."
Henry James
 
Perhaps it is the view to the ocean from John Marin's Porch in Cape Split, Maine, captured by William Kienbusch, or the view of her back yard from Catherine Drabkin's Pittsburgh porch, or admiring William Glackens' lively bouquet of gladioli, freshly picked from the garden, or envisioning the shade provided by freshly washed laundry on a New York roof top for John Sloan's mother and son, the summer afternoon is, indeed, a lovely time.


 

“The Eyes are the window to your soul”

 
 

 

“The eyes are the window to your soul” William Shakespeare

This quote, attributed to William Shakespeare, seems  particularly appropriate as New York City ends our PAUSE. We continue to venture forth with our masks, covering so much of our face, and as our eyes become the expression of our emotions they truly become the window to our soul.  And we open our windows, to the nice weather, to the new normal, and beyond.
Using the idea of windows as personal and intimate views both in and out, we share selections from our inventory.
In John Sloan's iconic image, Night Windows, we look with him from the roof of his Greenwich Village apartment into the windows of his neighbors. George Ault reveals the anonymity of his Greenwich Village experience when he shares the opaque backyard windows of his neighbors. Dorothy Dehner's view into the Bolton Landing studio of her husband David Smith, with a perspective that is both fractured and modern, feels a reflection on their art and the end of their relationship. The empty windows in William Kienbusch's Deserted Factory reveal the absent soul of a New England mill town. Marissa Alperin and Catherine Drabkin each look from their personal windows, revealing something about their life and allowing us to see the world through their eyes.


 

New York (Pause week 7)

 
 

 

“As for New York City, it is a place apart.  There is not its match in any other country in the world.” Pearl S. Buck

With his prints John Sloan (1871 - 1951) captured the range and vibrant qualities of life in New York during the first decades of the 20th century.

“London is satisfied, Paris is resigned, but New York is always hopeful.” Dorothy Parker


 

ADAA Gallery Walk: Midtown + Upper East Side

February 29, 2020

 
 

 

Kraushaar Galleries is participating in the 2020 Art Dealers Association of America Gallery Walk. The ADAA Gallery Walk will be featuring over 40 ADAA member galleries and is open to the public showcasing some of the most dynamic exhibitions in New York City this season.


 

Natural Color

February 6 - February 29, 2020

 
 

 

We are exhibiting Natural Color, a group of paintings and works on paper by 20th Century American artists, in which the colors of nature burst forth.  The varied palette of landscape is captured in a sunset on Monhegan Island by Robert Henri, the summer sunlight on the rocks and vegetation at Dogtown on Cape Ann, Massachusetts by both John Sloan and William Kienbusch, and the bold strength of fruit and flowers in still lifes by William Glackens, Alice Neel, Priscilla Roberts, Joseph Stella among others.


Color Works

January 21 - February 29, 2020

 

 

Concurrent with Master Drawings, Kraushaar Galleries will present Color Works, a small exhibition of works on paper by a selection of mid-century and contemporary women artists.  The show will open January 21st and continue through February 29th.

Beginning with Dorothy Dehner’s 1933 watercolor, Bolton Landing Highway, using a nearly abstract visual vocabulary, Dehner captures the empty road and almost barren landscape near the upstate New York farm she shared with David Smith.  Judith Rothschild’s Untitled, circa 1945, mixed media on paper, pushes abstraction even further as her works from this period are “a lesson in the vitality of late Cubism to bring abstract and representational pictorial space together in recombinant rhythms. (Westfall, Stephen, Judith Rothschild: Paintings of the 1940s, Valerie Carberry Gallery, Chicago, Illinois, 2008).  Complete abstraction is found in Charmion Von Wiegand’s vibrant Telescopic Forms, 1945 and in Anne Ryan’s subtly textured oval collage, 1948-54. Catherine Drabkin’s saturated gouache, Window on the Northside 5, 2019, challenges our perspective and sense of space, “places and objects are signifiers for the passage of time, for the presence or absence of one beloved; they are used to create visual compositions as equivalents for a longing that can't be quenched.”  The most recent work is Marissa Alperin’s Oceana, a fusion of strong color and multiple textures. Alperin will have her first solo exhibition at Kraushaar Galleries in April 2020.


Master Drawings New York

January 25 - February 1, 2020

Vernissage: January 24, 4-8pm

 

 

We are delighted to be hosting Découvert Fine Art for Master Drawings New York. This year their presentation will feature Grace in Nature and Faith: Drawings 16th-19th Century.


 

REMEMBERED PLACES

through November 1, 2019

 
 

 

For artists, the landscape is a continual source of inspiration and exploration. This small selection of 20th Century American paintings and works on paper captures the coasts of Maine and Massachusetts, and the further shores of France and India. The rugged terrains or the mysterious woods, the rocky shores or rural pathways, each are a chance to capture and portray the landscape in the artist’s unique voice. Works by Robert Henri, John Heliker, Maurice Prendergast, John Sloan, and Marguerite Zorach among others are included. 

Monochromatic works by Dorothy Dehner, John Heliker, John Storrs, and Jack Tworkov are on view in the Graphics Gallery.


“A Chair is a Very Difficult Object”

April 3 - May 24, 2019

 

 

“A chair is a very difficult object.  A skyscraper is almost easier.  That is why Chippendale is famous.” 

These words by the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe form a theme for Kraushaar Galleries’ first spring exhibition.  We will present a selection of paintings and works on paper which include a chair as a primary or supporting element.  The exhibition will begin on April 3rd and continues through May 24th, 2019.

During the first decades of the 20th century studio scenes frequently included a chair as a subject in a room, like Gifford Beal’s formal portrait of Harrison Cady’s Studio, or as a support for a subject, as in John Sloan’s Kathleen Resting or William Glackens’ The Breakfast Porch.  As Modernist theories influenced American art, the chair took on architectural qualities as apparent in the two portraits of Bea Ault, a painting by Marguerite Zorach and a drawing by George Ault.  Ruth Asawa and Elmer Bischoff straddle a line between painterly representation and elements of abstraction while Jack Tworkov pushes the chair to complete abstraction. 

The exhibition can be viewed from the antique copies of Chippendale chairs that have been a part of the Galleries exhibition space for about 100 years.


Catherine Drabkin
Interior Truth

March 28 - April 30, 2019

Artist Talk: Saturday, April 27, 2019

 

 

Kraushaar Galleries is pleased to present Interior Truth, a selection of small-scale paintings by Catherine Drabkin.  In these intimate interiors, Drabkin continues her exploration of the nuances of everyday life and the “mystery of reality,” using color and light as a means of meditation or reflection. Moments, brief and seemingly insignificant, transcend the mundane, “[a] glass bottle absentmindedly left on a kitchen shelf become[s] memorable to me through a combination of color sensations, a luminous quality, or the echo of a human presence.  The exhibition title comes from Drabkin’s own comments about her work, “this search is for the elusive moments of recognition when a place or shape of light brings from below consciousness a feeling or interior truth, creating connections from shapes and forms to turn the ordinary into a glimpse into the extraordinary.”

Catherine Drabkin has exhibited throughout the United States and internationally.  Solo exhibitions have been presented at Kraushaar Galleries, NY, where she has been represented since 1994; the Delaware Division of the Arts ,Wilmington; The McKinney Gallery, West Chester University, PA; Rowayton Arts Center, Norwalk, CT; and the Jaffe-Friede and Strauss Galleries, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH among others. 

A founding faculty of the Delaware College of Art and Design, she has taught at the University of Nebraska/Omaha, Southern Connecticut State University, Dartmouth College and Point Park University, Pittsburgh, where she is currently teaching figure drawing.


American Art, Selections

A selection of American Art including works by Gifford Beal, Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, George Luks, and John Sloan. 


MASTER DRAWINGS NEW YORK 2019

Saturday, January 26 - Saturday, February 2

Preview Friday, January 25, 4 - 8 pm

 

 

This year we are delighted to host Découvert Fine Art for Master Drawings New York. In addition to their presentation, Transformations: Drawings From the 16th to 20th Century, we will have a small selection of 20th Century American works on paper.


“American Art Fair” circling A shape in center

THe American Art Fair

November 10 - 13, 2018

The Bohemian National Hall

321 E 73rd Street, New York, NY 10021

Kraushaar Galleries is participating in the 2018 American Art Fair. We are exhibiting works by Milton Avery, Gifford Beal, Elmer Bischoff, Dorothy Dehner, William Glackens, Edward Hopper, John Koch, Alice Neel, John Sloan, among others.


In The Middle

November 1 - December 31, 2018
Just off Madison: Wednesday, November 14th, 5-8pm

 

 

In The Middle is a selection of mid 20th Century paintings and works on paper.  We highlight a small group of artists who show some of the creative vocabulary during a vibrant time in American art.  Included is William Kienbusch’s 1953 homage to Marsden Hartley, Mt. Katahdin, Winter, Karl Schrag's Rainstorm in a Forest, 1955, in which he fuses his experiences at Atelier 17 with his interpretation of the Maine landscape, a special fractured oval collage by Anne Ryan, and Esphyr Slobodkina's Sails which shows her interest in collage with its flat, layered forms and carefully constructed arrangements. Also included are works by Dorothy Dehner, John Marin, George L.K. Morris among others.


Standing Room

November 1 - December 31, 2018

 

 

Our graphics gallery features Standing Room, a selection of 20th Century figurative works on paper. Included are examples by Guy Pène du Bois, Edward Hopper, Walt Kuhn, Reginald Marsh, and John Sloan.


SUMMER'S HERE

 

 

Summer's Coming

Friday, April 6 - Friday, May 25, 2018

Madison Avenue Gallery Walk: Saturday, April 28th

Just Off Madison: Tuesday, May 22nd, 5 - 8 pm 

 

 

Our spring exhibition will begin as we say good bye to winter with Alice Neel’s painting, Snow Scene, circa 1938, which comes from the collection of the writer Fanya Foss. Foss and Neel maintained a stormy friendship and each featured their relationship in their own work.  

The arrival of warm weather, spring and summer, will be on view in a selection of 20th century works. John Sloan captures the vibrant colors of Gloucester and the heat of the sun in his 1914 “portrait of a place,” Niles Pond, Gloucester. Alfred Maurer’s equally lush and modern Landscape with Path is a fauvist rendering of the landscape in the woods along the Hudson River. Working the garden with a shovel, “[an] object made by anonymous hands”, becomes intimate as you move the soil with the painterly surface of Jim Dine’s Shovel, 1975. With a nod to Cezanne, Matisse and Renoir, the southern France landscape bears fruit in William Glackens’ Picking Fruit, 1925.    

The graphics gallery will focus on images of fruit and include works by Gifford Beal, Catherine Drabkin, William Glackens, Marsden Hartley, Robert Kulicke, William Sommer, and Max Weber. 

ANTICIPATING Spring

February - March, 2018

 

 

Logo of “Master Drawings New York” inside an oval

MASTER DRAWINGS NEW YORK 2018

Saturday, January 27 - Saturday, February 3

Preview Friday, January 26, 4 - 8 pm

 

 

Other Women And OTher Paintings

Thursday, November 9 - Thursday, December 21, 2017

 

 

                                In Celebration of the 100th Anniversary of John Sloan's                                                                        first Exhibition at C. W. Kraushaar Art Galleries                                        A Selection of Etchings included in that show

Thursday, September 7 - Friday, October 27, 2017

EXTENDED THROUGH Friday, November 3, 2017

 

 

In 1917 John Sloan had his first exhibition at C. W. Kraushaar Art Galleries.  We are thrilled to celebrate the 100th anniversary of this exhibition that began a relationship which continues to this day.  The contemporary homage will run from September 7 through October 27, 2017.

Of the forty-three etchings exhibited in 1917, forty-two will be included.  Perennial favorites from the “New York City Life” set, The Woman’s Page (1905), Fifth Avenue Critics (1905) and Fun, One Cent (1905), will be seen with the 1913 “glimpse into one of the of the cellars on West Third Street under the elevated tracks” in Rag Pickers, the rare The Barber Shop (1915) and Mosaic (The New Movement), (1917), Sloan’s “satire on abstract art,” among others.

Fifteen paintings spanning ten years were presented. Eleven of these works are now in public collections including #3, Twin Lights (Worcester Museum of Art, Massachusetts), #5, Gloucester Harbor (Syracuse University Art Collection, New York), #9, Clown Making Up (The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC), #13 Renganeschi’s Saturday Night (Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois) and #15, Spring Planting, Greenwich Village (Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio).

In his biography of the artist, John Loughery wrote about the exhibition:

“John Kraushaar …[had] a genuine respect for his new artist’s strengths….  The etchings found some enthusiastic buyers, and Sloan knew that Kraushaar’s commitment was for the long run.  More important, the attention he received from the New York critics, now that he was represented by a major gallery, seemed more respectful.  Sloan’s paintings and etchings “more than justify the big faith that has been placed in him as an American artist,” the reviewer for the Evening Mail noted… and the Times in its Sunday Magazine gave Sloan an approving notice.”

The Delaware Art Museum, the repository of the Sloan Archives, presents An American Journey: The Art of John Sloan, October 21, 2017 through January 28, 2018 and Gerald Peters Gallery Santa Fe will focus on New Mexico subjects in John Sloan: Santa Fe Sojourn from August 25 through October 7, 2017.


 

Summer Journeys

Wednesday, June 7 - Thursday, July 27, 2017

 
 

 

 

Spring!

Through Friday, May 26, 2017

Madison Avenue Gallery Walk

Just Off Madison 2017

 
 

 

To celebrate the season, Kraushaar Galleries presents a selection of paintings and works on paper of flowers and summer landscapes. From the vibrant bouquets of William Glackens, Gifford Beal, Robert Kulicke, and Alfred Maurer and the summer fruits of Marsden Hartley, William Sommer and Elsie Manville to the verdant landscapes of Preston Dickinson, John Sloan and William Zorach, SPRING is in the air!

In the Graphics Gallery, we present mid century abstract works.


Catherine Drabkin

Graphics Gallery

April 2017

Artist Talk: Saturday, April 29, 1 pm, RSVP

 

 

Kraushaar Galleries presents a selections of new gouaches by Catherine Drabkin. The exhibition will be on view in the graphics gallery through the end of April, 2017. Please join us for an artist talk on Saturday, April 29 at 1 pm in conjunction with the Madison Avenue Gallery Walk. Catherine Drabkin will discuss her work, approach to painting and thoughts on process and inspiration. For more information and to RSVP, please click here.


 
logo reading “art on paper”

March 2 - 5, 2017

Booth A6 | Pier 36 | Downtown Manhattan

299 South Street, New York, NY 10002

 
 

 

Kraushaar Galleries will be participating in the annual Art on Paper fair. In this year's edition, over 80 galleries from around the world will be showcasing a diverse range of work on and about paper at Pier 36 on the lower east side of Manhattan. Download complimentary passes to the fair here.


Master Drawings New York 2017

Saturday, January 21 - Saturday, January 28

Preview Friday, January 20, 4 - 8 pm

 

 

On view is a selection of drawings and watercolors by renowned 20th Century and Contemporary American artists including, Elmer Bischoff, Dorothy Dehner, Marsden Hartley, John Heliker, William Kienbusch, Reginald Marsh, Georgia O’Keeffe, William Sommer and Marguerite Zorach among others.

The gallery will be open Sunday, January 22, from 2pm - 6pm and Monday - Saturday from 10am to 6pm. For more information including a map and list of participating exhibitors please visit the Master Drawings 2017 website.


Interior Views

Thursday, November 3 - Friday, December 16, 2016

 

 


With Interior Views, Kraushaar Galleries presents a selection of early to mid 20th Century paintings and works on paper by American artists.  Emphasizing the intimate and frequently personal nature of interiors, these works often invite the viewer to an otherwise private space.

In Pool Room, 1903, Everett Shinn captured a typical scene of turn-of-the-twentieth century New York nightlife, featuring a pool table, brightly lit from above by a long vertical light fixture that casts its artificial glow into a darkened tavern. Another evening activity is captured Circus, circa 1935, by Virginia Berresford. With an aerial view of a circus ring, it is as if the spectator were a high wire performer. This is the side of the circus that the visitor would not otherwise see. Marguerite Zorach captures three friends Playing Cards At Camp, 1912, in a summer tent in Yosemite National Park. Margarett Sargent has a modern interpretation of a waiter clearing a table in After Dinner, Paris, circa 1930.

Humor is evident in several works. John Sloan’s 1926 etching and aquatint, X-Rays (The Fluoroscope), is “a consultation on the interior arrangements of John Sloan.” And Guy Pene du Bois’ bourgeois Music Lovers, 1922, are so bored that they have fallen asleep. 

George Ault’s 1928 watercolor, My Studio, enables the artist to find inspiration from the everyday that surrounds him. William Glackens also uses his studio as a backdrop for Nude Arranging Hair, circa 1915, in which a model sits on a studio prop chair with richly patterned wallpaper behind, her back to the viewer, as she attends to her coiffeur. Edward Hopper's Standing Nude, 1920-5, depicts a male model, at the Whitney Studio Club, rendered in a scholastic technique, with accurate proportions and heightened shading. The model stands above a classroom setting, as referenced by the gestural sketch of another figure at an easel in the bottom right of the picture.  Dorothy Dehner's abstract print, Barn in Bolton/Studio Interior, 1952/3, captures studio space she shared with David Smith.

Also included in the exhibition are works by Gifford Beal, Romare Bearden and Niles Spencer among others.


Intimate Visions:

Small Scale Paintings and Works on Paper

Thursday, September 8 - Friday, October 28, 2016

 

 

Other artists with works in the exhibition include Thomas Anshutz, Esphyr Slobodkina, and Lee Walton.


Summer Thoughts

Tuesday, April 26 - Friday, June 3, 2016

 

 

Kraushaar Galleries welcomes the spring with Summer Thoughts. As April showers continue into May, we think of the warm, sunlit days ahead. 

The earliest works are from the first part of the last century. From the front porch of his Fourth Street home in Salem, Ohio, Charles Burchfield (1893 – 1967) captures the sun emerging through the trees after a rainstorm in the watercolor Sun-Burst After Spring-Storm, 1917. The Acequia Madre, Evening, 1920, from John Sloan’s (1871- 1951) second summer in Santa Fe, shows the sun setting on the main water irrigation source as two local figures pause to enjoy the fading light.  A summer concert in Salem, Massachusetts is shown in Gifford Beal’s (1879 – 1956) Bandstand, Salem. Isle-Adam, a fashionable resort on the Oise River, north of Paris, is the scene of Bathing Pavilion at Isle Adam, 1926, by William Glackens (1870 – 1936). He focuses on the essential immediacy of his subject, its incidental details, and its humanity, with a gentleness, piquancy, and joyousness. 

The subdued colors of an overcast sky and loose, overlapping brushwork found in Fairfield Porter’s (1907 – 1975) Red House on Cobb Road, 1966, creates the narrative of a recent summer storm on a quiet Southampton street. In contrast, the many colors of the Maine meadows and spruce trees are seen through the vigorous handling of paint in Karl Schrag’s (1912 – 1995) Forest Meadow, Gray and Gold, 1979.  Philip Evergood (1901 – 1973) captures a romantic summer stroll in Berkshire Paradise, 1959.  The orange glow of the sun appears through the windows of Blue Monday, 1969, by Romare Bearden. Bearden transforms the potentially mundane act of a woman bathing into a complex composition which is keenly reminiscent of Mondrian as the rectangular blocks of color emphasize the painting’s flat surfaces and limiting spatial recession.  Ferns hang from the porch roof as the sun shines on a Pittsburgh home in Catherine Drabkin’s Porch with Ferns in Mt. Gretna, 2015.

The graphics gallery will also feature summer themed works including the watercolor A Glass with Two Pears, circa 1927, by Marsden Hartley (1877 – 1943), John Marin’s Boats and Sea, 1946, seen through his modernist lens, and, from the summer of 1912 in which she spent a number of weeks camping in the Sierra Mountains in California, Marguerite Zorach’s Playing Cards at Camp.

Other artists with work in the exhibition include Carl Holty, Edward Hopper, William Kienbusch, Alfred Maurer and William Zorach.


Lee Walton: Social Systems

Tuesday, March 15 - Friday, April 15, 2016

Reception for the artist Wednesday, March 16, 5 to 7 pm

 

 

            With Social Systems Walton continues his exploration of two-dimensional expression.  Expanding upon ideas from his earlier system drawings, Walton’s current body of work records human interaction on its most fundamental level. In a statement, he explains his inspiration:

Social Systems drawings operate through an inherent system of responses in which each individual mark is in direct relationship to another. The grouping of marks is bound to the surrounding architectural structures, although some find ways to escape their barriers. Patterns of behavior, interactions and events emerge to create unique social situations.

            Lee Walton has had museum funded projects (Reykjavik Art Museum of Iceland, Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, ICA Boston), public commissions (Art in General, Socrates Sculpture Park, Rhizome at The New Museum, New York) and his work has been included in national and international exhibition venues (Shanghai, China, Clubs Project Inc., Australia, Ljubljana Museum of Art, Slovenia).  Walton lectures extensively on his practice and related subjects.

            His work is in the collections of the Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock; Deutsche Bank, New York; California College of Arts, San Francisco; The Columbus Museum, Georgia; The Hood Art Museum, Dartmouth College, New Hampshire; Knoxville Museum of Art, Tennessee; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and many private collections. 

 

Water Water Everywhere

Friday, February 19 - Friday, April 15, 2016

 

 

            Water Water Everywhere features a diverse group of American artists who found inspiration from their surroundings that, in these instances, include water.  

            The earliest works are from 1894.  Robert Henri sketched Breton women along the canal in Concarneau, France and John Sloan etched the Schuylkill River, in which he “went out and drew directly from nature on the waxed plate, then came back to the studio to do the biting.”

            The Massachusetts coastline is captured in 1915 by Charles Demuth’s fluid watercolor of beaches at Provincetown and by Sloan’s rugged Gloucester rocks, The Popples, 1917. The same locale is the subject for Milton Avery’s 1945 view of Roosting Seagulls in Lavender Sea.  William Glackens’ The Headlands, Rockport, 1936 is a sophisticated and vibrant multi-figure composition.  The rocks, boats and islands in the Maine waters are transformed through the Modernist visions of John Marin, William Kienbusch, John Heliker and Karl Schrag.

            The urban waters of New York City are seen in drawings of the Central Park Lake by Edward Hopper and Gifford Beal.  In 1934 Dorothy Dehner drew Governors’ Island and the Statue of Liberty from the Brooklyn Promenade and ten years later Joseph Stella also found inspiration in Brooklyn, looking towards another East River crossing, the Williamsburg Bridge. Carl Holty’s 1943 painting of the New York Harbor breaks down the subject in a Cubist-like fashion of cool blue and grey hues.

            Contemporary artists in the exhibition are Catherine Drabkin and Robert Ohnigian.


Master Drawings New York 2016

Saturday, January 23 - Saturday, January 30

Preview Friday, January 22, 4 - 8 pm

 

 

On view is a selection of drawings and watercolors by renowned 20th Century and Contemporary American artists including Thomas Anshutz, Dorothy Dehner, Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, John Heliker, Lyonel Feininger, William Kienbusch, Alfred Maurer, and Marguerite Zorach among others.

The gallery will be open Sunday, January 24, from 2pm - 6pm and Monday - Saturday from 11am to 6pm. For more information including a map and list of participating exhibitors please visit the Master Drawings 2016 website.

 

20th Century American Art, A Selection of Paintings and Works on Paper

Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - Thursday, December 24, 2015

 

 

On view will be a selection of 20th Century American Art including works by Thomas Anshutz, Dorothy Dehner, Charles Demuth, William Glackens, John Heliker, William Kienbusch, John Koch, Alfred Maurer, George L. K. Morris, John Sloan and Esphyr Slobodkina among others.

 

Captured Moments, A Selection of 20th Century American Still Lifes

Thursday, October 1, 2015 - Friday, November 6, 2015

 

 

With Captured Moments Kraushaar Galleries features a selection of still lifes by renowned American artists, including Gifford Beal, Dorothy Dehner, Charles Demuth, William Glackens, Marsden Hartley, John Heliker, Alfred Maurer, Vaclav Vytlacil, and Marguerite Zorach among others.  


Figuratively Considered, A Selection of Early 20th Century American Figurative Works

Spring 2015

 

 

Figuratively Considered begins with the elegantly subdued 1903 Look of a Woman by John Sloan.  About this painting, the artist recalled “[Thomas] Eakins saw ‘The Look of a Woman’ in a Pennsylvania Academy exhibition and said, ‘That young fellow is going some place.’”  George Luks’ Child with Doll, circa 1907, manifests his particular sensitivity and keen understanding of children. Bal Martinique, 1928-9, by William Glackens, is a sophisticated and vibrant multi-figure composition, an example of the artist’s mature work. Music Lovers, 1922, a watercolor by Guy Pène du Bois, offers another perspective on the spectacle of social life and demonstrates his keen interest in social archetypes and his graceful and congenial wit.  Bold and modernist depictions of figures by Alfred Maurer and Marguerite Zorach represent the influence of contemporary European art on American art.  Bay Area Figurative artist David Park’s thick paint and vigorous brushstrokes are seen in a pair of 1938/9 abstracted portraits of his wife, Lydia Park (Before) and Lydia Park (After).  The sculptors Gaston Lachaise and John Storrs are represented by lithe figure drawings.

Works on paper that use the window as a pictorial and compositional element are featured in the Graphics Gallery.  Included are examples by Romare Bearden, Dorothy Dehner, Catherine Drabkin, William Kienbusch, and John Marin.


Dorothy Dehner, The Creative Process, 1930 - 1950

Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - Friday, April 10, 2015

 

 

Dorothy Dehner, The Creative Process, 1930 - 1950, is a selection of works on paper that explores Dehner’s artistic development.  The exhibition focuses on drawings and watercolors created during the formative years of Abstract Expressionism.  The show opens February 24th and continues through April 10th, 2015.

Better known for her bronze and wood sculptures, throughout her life Dorothy Dehner (1901 – 1994) worked on paper. In 1991, the artist said, “I love to draw.  It is very basic in all of my work, I think.”  

The Creative Process explores the personal and experimental yet vital and bold nature of Dehner’s early years as an artist.  Her visual vocabulary has diverse influences ranging from her experience as a serious dancer to the freedom and personal autonomy of the emerging abstract movement.  This was further reinforced by her exposure to the European avant-garde during a 1925 trip to Paris, her study with Jan Matulka, and her friendship with John Graham.  These sources combined to produce works that fuse aspects of cubism, surrealist abstraction and gestural elements.  Landscapes made during the early years of her marriage to David Smith record the topography of their life in Bolton Landing, New York City and the Virgin Islands.  Sea forms, including shells and fish, are a recurring subject.  Marital struggles are documented in symbolic and at times surreal iconography.

Dehner and her art resist any intrusions of dogma, and the freedom of the Abstract Expressionist prevails….  Her mysterious and resplendent meditations of line on paper represent the culminate resolution of her art.

(Excerpted from Dorothy Dehner: Poetry of Line, A Retrospective of Work on Paper, Boulder Art Center, Colorado, 1994)

Dorothy Dehner’s work is in the collection of museums around the country including the National Gallery of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Arkansas Arts Center, The Columbus Museum (Georgia), Cleveland Museum of Art, Palmer Museum of Art, the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art, The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Whitney Museum of American Art, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Block Museum of Art, and Brooklyn Museum.

The Dorothy Dehner Foundation for the Visual Arts is represented exclusively by Kraushaar Galleries, New York.  Kraushaar Galleries is celebrating its 130th year in business.  


20th Century American Art

 

On view will be a selection of early to mid 20th Century works by American artists. Included are examples by Stuart Davis, Dorothy Dehner, Carl Holty, Gwen John, John Marin, George L.K. Morris, Grandmas Moses, Jerome Myers, Maurice Prendergast, Karl Schrag, Marguerite Zorach, and others. 


When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d

Wednesday, October 1, 2014– Friday, October 31, 2014

 

 

When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d, a selection of new paintings by Catherine Drabkin begins on October 1st and continues through October 31st.  This is her seventh exhibition with the Gallery.

Drabkin’s current body of work was inspired by Walt Whitman’s 1865 elegiac poem. In a statement, she explains her inspiration:

               [P]laces and objects are signifiers for the passage of time, for the presence or     
               absence of one beloved; they are used to create visual compositions as equivalents
               for a longing that can't be quenched.

               Three mismatched cups on a table or a too tall sunflower in a little flowerbed,
               such transient experiences can be an excuse to transform. Can they be exploited
               to dislodge a buried memory with a color harmony? Can they be used to connect
               seen reality with feeling, or are they tools for linking the exterior world to the studio.

               This search is for the elusive moments of recognition when a place or shape of light
               brings up from below consciousness a feeling or interior truth, creating connections
               from shapes and forms to turn the ordinary into a glimpse into the extraordinary.

               And I like the colors: to look at them, to touch them, to transcribe them.

Catherine Drabkin’s work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally, and the artist is the recipient of numerous residency fellowships and grants, including most recently an opportunity grant from the Delaware Division of the Arts to support Finding Home: an American Neighborhood, an artist's book inspired by her neighborhood in downtown Wilmington. Examples of her work can be found in the Association des Petites Cités de Caractère de Bretagne, France; the Getty Trust, Santa Monica, CA; The Rauner Special Collections Library of Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH; Washington University, St. Louis, MO; Amtrak, Wilmington, DE; and numerous private collections. 

As a founding faculty member of the Delaware College of Art and Design, Drabkin taught in several departments. She has also taught at the University of Nebraska/Omaha, Southern Connecticut State University, Dartmouth College and Point Park University, Pittsburgh, where she is currently teaching figure drawing.


Summer Thoughts

Tuesday, June 24, 2014– Thursday, July 31, 2014

 

 

A selection of paintings and works on paper with summer themes by Beal, Burchfield, Drabkin, Glackens, Hartley, Heliker, Kienbusch, Lawson, Lee, Luks, Sloan, Slobodkina, Zorach and others.


Elements of Abstraction:
A Selection of Paintings, Work on Paper and
Sculpture by American Artists

Tuesday, April 1, 2014–Friday, May 23, 201

    


     

With Elements of Abstraction Kraushaar Galleries will present a selection of early to mid 20th Century works by American artists. The earliest example is Max Weber’s Head of a Woman, 1918, in which the artist combines aspects of Cubism and African sculpture and translates the human form into simplified geometric units, angularizing the figure’s forehead, nose, chin, and hair and elongating the shape of her face. In Autumn Sun on the Range, 1920, John Sloan continues his exploration of the vast, abstract and organic elements of the New Mexico landscape while including lessons learned from the 1913 Armory Show. With his silverpoint drawing, Plums on White Cloth, 1927, Marsden Hartley, suavely plays with the perspective and hatching devices of Cézanne. The plums, and the cloth on which they lie, rest elegantly across the whole field of the composition, in no particular order. But the repetition of even hatching holds even their most knotted and complicated forms lightly in place.

By 1933, in Nebulous, John Storrs was complementing his sculptural work with paintings that manifest his burgeoning interest in the Surrealist movement, as well as to his ongoing relationships with painters such as Marsden Hartley whom he had known from the early 1920s. Burgoyne Diller’s First Theme, #246, circa 1940, may seem deceptively simple, but we know that he proceeded slowly and deliberately by methods that included the pinning of colored construction paper to the canvas in a nearly endless search for a perfect and elusive visual statement. The mid century works on paper by Dorothy Dehner and Theodoros Stamos introduce the foundation of Abstract Expressionism.

Other works presented are Vaclav Vytlacil’s circa 1924 Abstract Composition, which reflects the early teachings of Hans Hoffman; Esphyr Slobodkina’s fragmented painting of Sails, circa 1958, and William Kienbusch’s vibrant casein, Autumn Hill, 1971, a mature fusion of his own vision and the historical lessons of Hartley, Marin and Dove. John Von Wicht’s gestural abstraction, Forms on Red #2, 1963, and Lenore Tawney’s circa 1978 Untitled collage are also included.


The 26th Annual ADAA Art Show,
The Park Avenue Armory, Park Avenue at 67th Street,
New York

March 4th–9th, 2014


 

Private Goes Public: Selections from
the Private Art Dealers Association

Friday, November 1, 2013–Saturday, November 16, 2013

  

   


   

Figuratively Considered, Works on Paper by Selected Artists who Participated in The 1913 “International Exhibition of Modern Art” , March 1st through April 6th, 2013

Although best known for introducing European avant-garde painting and sculpture to the American public, the direct influence of “The Armory Show” exhibition on American artists was varied.  Some artists were inspired to explore greater abstraction and dramatic variations in palette while others incorporated more modest elements in their work.

Figuratively Considered presents the work of twenty artists who were moderately or profoundly influenced by this “modern” art.  John Sloan (1871 – 1951) and William Glackens (1870 – 1938) were affected by what they saw but their works on paper remained more traditionally figurative.  Stuart Davis (1892 – 1964), John Marin (1870 – 1953) and Marguerite Zorach (1887 – 1968) would become important participants in the American Modernist movement.  New York City itself will be represented by a circa 1913 park scene by George Luks (1867 – 1933) which is an exciting contrast to John Marin’s 1925 drawing of the New York Stock Exchange and watercolor of Nassau Street.   A self portrait by Jerome Myers (1867 – 1940), one of the organizers of The Armory Show is complimented by a thoughtful circa 1915 male portrait by Joseph Stella each of which are in sharp contrasts to Alfred Maurer’s bold 1928 double portrait and two 1946 circus figures by Walt Kuhn (1877 – 1949), another show organizer.  Oscar Bluemner (1867 – 1938), not typically thought of as a figurative artist, is humorously represented by his Red Buildings with Statue, and the figures of William Zorach (1887 – 1966), best known for his sculpture, are horses in a landscape.  Four of the few women exhibitors will be included, Mary Cassatt (1844 – 1926), Gwen John (1876 –1939), Ethel Myers (1881 – 1960) and Marguerite Zorach (1887 – 1968).


Lee Walton: Transcriptions

October 18th–November 16th, 2012

 

 

Kraushaar Galleries presents its third exhibition of works by Lee Walton: Transcriptions. The show includes a selection of recent system based drawings and six works from his Angry Birds series.

Also known for his performance art and for his site-specific installations, Transcriptions continues Walton’s exploration of two-dimensional expression.  He continually challenges recording and rendering the game, its own art form, as art, be it the traditional team sports of baseball and basketball or the individual challenges of contemporary computer play.

In his catalogue essay, John Muse, Postdoctoral Fellow in Visual Studies at Haverford College observes:

        Lee Walton’s series of drawings, Angry Birds… look very much like minor ruins; they are charcoal and paper snapshots of heaped and torturing slabs.  … [T]hese monuments cut trifling figures, referencing as they do hyper-cute puzzle games, cartoon enthusiasms, and micro-muscular feats….  The systems drawings thus far are fan lit and fan bait; the true fan gets the drawings, the truer fan sees the fan in the drawings … and the truest fan not only wants to parse and pick but sees too the drive to do so….

       Drawing for Walton then is a transcription game; drawing mediates and grants degrees of freedom, but only degrees.  It also captures and holds the hand and eye of draftsman and viewer alike, leveraging their powers to assemble and read the works.

Lee Walton has received many accolades from Museum funded projects (Reykjavik Art Museum of Iceland, Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, SECCA, ICA Boston), public commissions (Art in General, Socrates Sculpture Park, Rhizome at the New Museum of NY, national and international exhibition venues (Island #6, Shanghai, China, Clubs Project Inc., Australia, Ljubljana Museum of Art).  Walton has also lectured extensively on his practice and related subjects. Recent lectures, panel discussions and visits include MIT, Art in General, The New School, Art Institute of Boston, Columbia University, Portland State University and the University of Ulster, Belfast Ireland. Walton is an Assistant Professor of Art at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.


Karl Schrag, The Rhythms of Nature, A Centennial Celebration

September 6th–October 12th, 2012

 

 

In celebration of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Karl Schrag (1912 – 1995), Kraushaar Galleries, in collaboration with Alexandre Gallery, will open the fall season with Karl Schrag, The Rhythms of Nature, A Centennial Celebration.  The joint exhibition will feature 20 paintings covering a quarter century of work.  Many of the works come directly from the artist’s family and have not previously been exhibited.

Most of the paintings explore the Maine landscape that inspired Karl Schrag for fifty years. He finds the mysteries of land and sea and captures them in a fusion of realism and abstraction that forever changes the way we see our world. The glow of the sun, the shimmer of the moon, the motion of the grasses, the power of the rocky shore, the many mysteries of the bushes and trees are all captured in the vigorous brushstrokes and vibrant colors of the paintings.  “My strong desire to express from sunlit serenity to the darkest moods has its roots in a constant awareness of myself being a part of the nature and life which I observe.  With every breath I take, with every heartbeat I feel within myself the rhythms of nature” the artist wrote on the occasion of his 1992 traveling retrospective organized by the Farnsworth Museum of Art, Rockland, Maine. 

Schrag was born in Germany; after study in Paris and Brussels he came to New York in 1930.  He worked with S. W. Hayter at and became director of his international print studio, Atelier 17. He taught at Brooklyn College and Cooper Union.  Since 1938 Schrag’s work has been the subject of over 40 one-person exhibitions.

A concurrent exhibition, Memories and Premonitions: A Karl Schrag Retrospective, which will focus on Schrag’s print work, will be held at Syracuse University Art Galleries, Syracuse, New York, from August 30th – October 21st.
 


Gifford Beal, Moments Remembered

November 15th–December 16th, 2011

 

 

Gifford Beal, Moments Remembered, is a selection of in-situ drawings that record many of the subjects that interested the artist through his long career, the genteel charm and natural beauty of Central Park, the spectacle of country fairs and the circus, and the rugged calm of the landscapes of New York State and Rockport, Massachusetts.  

As Gifford Beal (1879 – 1956) developed his working drawings into paintings, the frequently active subjects he chose to portray were well suited to drawings in which natural, spontaneous motion played a crucial role.  Beal’s approach to painting derived from his study with William Merritt Chase, from 1891 through 1900, but his process was different.  Beal used on-the-spot sketches to familiarize himself with his subjects and to capture a sense of motion.

When one has known a subject for a long time, when one is familiar with all its aspects, when one has sought for what makes it beautiful, what gives it movement – then is the time to paint it, because most of the problems have already been solved in the painter’s mind…

In nearly all of Beal’s work, nature is the most important component, and sunshine the key element.  Even in his autobiographical notes, it is obvious that a day spent indoors was a precious moment in art that was lost.

Gifford Beal’s work is in the collection of museums around the country including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Phillips Collection, The Brooklyn Museum, Arkansas Arts Center, Westmoreland Museum of American Art, New Britain Museum of American Art, Muscarelle Museum of Art; Santa Barbara Museum of Art; Whitney Museum of American Art; Joslyn Art Museum; The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.


Dorothy Dehner, The Intimate Gesture

February 24th–March 31st, 2011

 

 

Better known for her bronze and wood sculptures, throughout her artistic life Dorothy Dehner (1901 – 1994) worked on paper, both as a draughtsman and a printmaker. Early on Dehner was an intimate member of the core group of artists later recognized as the Abstract Expressionists.  Like other women artists from that period, Dehner is often now seen as overlooked and under-recognized.

The Intimate Gesture, a selection of drawings and prints from the 1950s, explores the personal and experimental yet vital and bold nature of Dehner’s work from this time.  While acknowledging the larger developments in the New York art world, Dehner’s abstractions are also predictions and responses to her three dimensional work.  There is a constant play between opposites: powerful and delicate, big gesture and intimate line, architectonic figures and biomorphic forms.  Dehner would splatter paint with a brush and combine the results with geometric forms; she would wet paper and then paint, contrasting blurred images with fine lines.

        [Dehner’s] art, particularly her drawing, is about the essence of “line.”  It is not the line that we thought we knew – not simply gestural, not just to produce a contour or a form.  Though one finds oneself making familiar associations (a “grid,” a “net,” a “convergence”), her line defies the familiar.  Her graphic is a personal one, full of surprises, and with hardly a dull moment.  Whereas Jackson Pollock took the line from drawing into painting, Dehner has taken it from drawing into sculpture, and then back again.  In both her drawing and her sculpture, volume and space are created from the same visual precepts.  Her drawing has a sculptural quality of line, but yet her drawings are not studies for sculpture. 

 (Excerpted from Dorothy Dehner: Poetry of Line, A Retrospective of Work on Paper, Boulder Art Center, Colorado, 1994)

 Dorothy Dehner’s work is in the collection of museums around the country including the National Gallery of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Arkansas Arts Center, The Columbus Museum (Georgia), Cleveland Museum of Art, Palmer Museum of Art, the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art, The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Whitney Museum of American Art, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Block Museum of Art, and Brooklyn Museum.


John Sloan, An American View

May 1st–May 30th, 2008

 

 

John Sloan is celebrated as one of the most distinguished American painters of the twentieth century. His portraits, landscapes, figure studies and genre scenes of New York, Gloucester and Santa Fe have resonated for art lovers and art historians alike. Sloan’s rise to the challenge of color and form, combined with his uniquely American view, give us a body of paintings, drawings and prints that withstands the test of time.

Beginning in 1914, and continuing for almost forty years, Sloan made artistic departure from the familiar urban milieu of New York City. He began spending summers in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and later, Santa Fe, New Mexico.

The exhibition John Sloan: An American View chronicles work created by the artist during this period, wherein he explored both the daily life and landscape of a small New England fishing village and the mingling of European, Hispanic, and Native American cultures of the Southwest.

 A keen observer of humanity, Sloan had a tendency toward autobiography in his work, as well as an uncanny talent for capturing his subjects unawares in seemingly insignificant moments: women hanging out laundry, for example, or plastering a wall. The Gloucester works, in particular, also reflect a brightening of Sloan’s palette, due to influence by the Cubists and Post-Impressionists, whose work was widely seen in America in the Armory Show of 1913

“While my work is sufficient evidence that the city streets and landscape have afforded me a rich subject matter, there is now a prevailing idea that I am no longer painting ‘Sloans’ because I am also doing figures and portraits,” the artist once said of the themes he explored in New England and New Mexico. “These subjects are just as much part of my life experience as the teeming streets of New York.”

An illustrated exhibition catalog for John Sloan: An American View is available for purchase.


Anne Frank: A Private Photo Album

May 21st–July 29th, 2004

 

 

A world premiere exhibit of 69 photographs taken by Otto Frank of his daughters, Anne and Margot, and his wife, Edith, will open on May 21st.  These are images of the Frank family before they were forced into hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam during World War II.  Included are 8 original loose photographs and facsimiles of Anne Frank’s diary and of family albums created by Otto Frank.  The public has never seen most of these images.  An illustrated catalogue is available.

This exhibit is organized by The Anne Frank House, Amsterdam, in collaboration with The Anne Frank Center USA, New York, and in association with Kraushaar Galleries.  Anne Frank: A Private Photo Album will travel to the Holocaust Museum Houston in August and a related exhibit will be on view at the Fotographie Museum Amsterdam.

Otto Frank was a prolific and gifted amateur photographer before the war and took many photos of his family, especially of his two daughters.  It is because of his photographs of Anne that we know the face of the author of The Diary.  After the war, Otto Frank was haunted by the painful memories of the wife and daughters lost to him and never took another photo.

The family photo albums at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam are unique documents that offer insight into the everyday life of the Frank family.  The Anne Frank House has decided to show a unique selection of this photo collection to the general public in commemoration of Anne Frank’s 75th birthday.

The Anne Frank Center USA is an independent, non-sectarian, not-for profit educational organization founded in 1977 to assist young people and communities in exploring the causes and consequences of prejudice and discrimination through the life and ideals of Anne Frank. AFC-USA operates under exclusive license in North America to promote and distribute exhibitions and materials of the Anne Frank House, Amsterdam. For more information, please call (212) 431-7993 or visit www.annefrank.com.

The Anne Frank House in Amsterdam is a museum where visitors are given the opportunity to envision the events that took place there when it was a hiding place for Anne Frank, her family and friends during World War II. Salvaged documents and objects belonging to the eight people in hiding are on permanent display, along with Anne’s original first diary. The mission of The House is to preserve Anne Frank’s hiding place and to propagate her ideals, both in relationship to the times in which she lived, and in terms of their current significance. For more information visit www.annefrank.nl


Esphyr Slobodkina: Journey Into Abstraction

October 1st–October 30th, 2004

 

 

Esphyr Slobodkina’s (1908 – 2002) second exhibition at Kraushaar Galleries opens on October 1st.  Journey Into Abstraction features works from 1937 to 1950, small gouaches, two WPA mural studies and two major, rarely seen paintings, The Witching Hour (1949) and Turboprop Skyshark (1950).

Journey Into Abstraction focuses on the development of the Slobodkina’s abstract voice during her brief marriage to Ilya Bolotowsky and their participation in the 1937 founding of the American Abstract Artists. By the late 1930s she had begun working in a flattened, abstracted style that incorporated line, suspended or interlocking forms, and pure, unmodulated color and began to synthesize the both cubist and surrealist abstraction.

Born in Siberia, Slobodkina moved with her family to Manchuria to escape the political unrest of the Russian revolution.  As a young woman, she traveled alone to America, enrolling at the National Academy of Design, an experience she found stultifying. Like other Russian modernists, surrounded by ancient icons and a rich craft tradition, Slobodkina developed a lifelong appreciation of clear, rich colors, and flat, stylized forms.

Slobodkina’s work is in the collection of major public institutions around the United States included The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and a recent acquisition by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.


John Sloan as Illustrator

November 3– December 23rd, 2004

 

 

Kraushaar Galleries is pleased to feature an exhibition of magazine and book illustrations by John Sloan  (1871 – 1951).  Created between 1902 and 1913 these works on paper are a varied selection of the many drawings he produced for Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s and The Masses, among other publications.  In addition, six preparatory drawings, along with their etchings for the 1903 – 1905 novels of Charles Paul de Kock will be included.

         In her essay to accompany the exhibition, social historian Avis Berman writes:

This massive enterprise [the deKock commission] gave Sloan the practice to conquer the medium of etching.  By the time Sloan finished, printmaking was no longer merely an extension of his illustrations, but part of his larger artistic raison d’etre. Likewise, Sloan’s painting was shaped by his illustrating.

 Sloan received the best possible training for developing a bold graphic style.  In the 1890’s, he worked as an artist-reporter on several Philadelphia newspapers, along with William Glackens, George Luks, and Everett Shinn.   Before photography came to dominate spot-news reporting, artists were sent on location to cover an event.  They made on-site sketches, and then hurried back to their desks to finish them for the next edition.  Anyone who succeeded at that job learned to draw quickly and accurately.  Later, in New York, the socially conscious Sloan readily accepted magazine assignments whose stories told of immigrant life, suffragettes, or loan sharks.


William Glackens as Illustrator

December 2nd–December 31st, 2003

 

 

Kraushaar Galleries is pleased to feature an exhibition of magazine and book illustrations by William Glackens  (1870 – 1938).  Created between 1899 and 1918 these fifteen works on paper are a varied selection of the over one thousand drawings he produced for Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s and Scribner’s Magazine among other publications.

 In her essay to accompany the exhibition, social historian Avis Berman writes:

[Glackens’] line was nimble and his observation unerring, and the result – a seemingly spontaneous transcription of a contemporary incident – belied the agonized labors involved in bringing it into being.  In his memoir of his father, Ira Glackens wrote, “[G]lued to his drawing board hour after hour, he did the same subject over and over, tearing up the drawings in disgust or throwing them aside until the floor was carpeted with them, and starting over again, cursing.”

 Glackens received the best possible training for developing a bold graphic style.  From 1891-1894, he worked as an artist-reporter on several Philadelphia newspapers, along with John Sloan, George Luks, and Everett Shinn.   Before photography came to dominate spot-news reporting, artists were sent on location to cover an event.  They made on-site sketches, and then hurried back to their desks to finish them for the next edition.  Anyone who succeeded at that job learned to draw quickly and accurately.  As Shinn recalled, Glackens’s “memory was amazing … one look on an assignment was much the same to him as taking an exhaustive book on that incident … and [translating] it into pen lines.”

Illustrations have been included in all major Glackens exhibitions and were the subject of a traveling show arranged by the Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington in 1985 and a focus of a 1972 exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC.