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SAM FRANCIS (1923-1994)

ARTIST BIO INQUIREEXHIBITIONSSIMILAR ARTWORKS
 
SAM FRANCIS - Untitled - acrylic on canvas - 24 x 15 in.SAM FRANCIS - Untitled - acrylic on canvas - 24 x 15 in.SAM FRANCIS - Untitled - acrylic on canvas - 24 x 15 in.SAM FRANCIS - Untitled - acrylic on canvas - 24 x 15 in.SAM FRANCIS - Untitled - acrylic on canvas - 24 x 15 in.SAM FRANCIS - Untitled - acrylic on canvas - 24 x 15 in.
SAM FRANCIS - Untitled - acrylic on canvas - 24 x 15 in.
Untitled199424 x 15 in. acrylic on canvas
Provenance
Private Collection, Oslo
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The stands are: The 32 H x 19-3/4 W x 19-3/4 D in. <br> <br>Rat: 27 7/8 x 12 7/8 x 20 7/8 in. <br>Ox: 29 1/8 x 20 1/8 x 16 7/8 <br>Tiger: 25 7/8 x 14 7/8 x 16 7/8 <br>Rabbit: 27 7/8 x 9 7/8 x 18 7/8 <br>Dragon: 35 7/8 x 18 1/8 x 25 7/8 <br>Snake: 27 7/8 x 14 1/8 x 6 3/4 <br>Horse: 29 1/8 x 12 1/4 x 22 <br>Ram: 25 1/4 x 20 7/8 x 16 1/8 <br>Monkey: 27 1/8 x 12 7/8 x 14 7/8 <br>Rooster: 24 x 9 x 16 7/8 <br>Dog: 25 1/4 x 14 7/8 x 18 7/8 <br>Boar: 27 1/8 x 16 1/8 x 20 7/8

AI WEIWEI

Blood Cinema is an elegant and interactive masterwork of steel and acrylic by Anish Kapoor. The artist’s most notable works are grand-scale public installations that explore perception, captivating and challenging viewers worldwide with iconic public installations such as Chicago’s Cloud Gate (2006) and in his well-known glass and mirror pieces. Resting on the floor like an oversized lens, Blood Cinema warps the viewer’s perspective and distorts its environment through ethereal shades of red, epitomizing Kapoor's capacity for viewer immersion.

ANISH KAPOOR

Tom Wesselmann’s supercharged colors mirror popular advertising while the lounging female forms allude to Western art history’s classic figurative motif. A wonderful example of this synthesis is the 1997 painting 1962 Plus 35 Nude Sketch II. Here, the reclining woman’s eyes are barely visible beneath the surface of the paint, yet her lips are a bold red with a thick black outline. The hyper-sexualized presentation of the female body seems to address the consumer culture of Post War America – the commoditization of the flesh. Wesselmann’s dazzling paintings bring together elements of art historical tradition and 1960s imagination, creating a singular style.

TOM WESSELMANN

Rothenberg created Diagonal (1975) in the year of her breakout exhibition at 112 Greene Street in New York. Her Horses series reintroduced representational imagery when the dominant trends were abstraction and Minimalism. The painting’s expressive brushwork, sense of movement, and simplified forms result in a triumphant blend of figuration and abstraction. As in many of Rothenberg's important works, Diagonal evokes the muted and enchanting colors and atmosphere of her adopted home in the American Southwest.

SUSAN ROTHENBERG

Shortly after his major retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1941, Salvador Dalí parlayed the idea of accumulated, or “flowering,” eyes into a grand oil and tempera painting for the set of his 1944 ballet Mad Tristan. In this painting from the same year, Les Yeux Fleuris, Dalí depicts three rows of four eyes with long lashes and a tear dropping on a brick wall backdrop. Eyes appear in Dalí paintings, sculpture, and jewelry throughout his career — as late as the 1981 painting Argus and, most notably, in paintings Dalí made for the dream sequences of the film Spellbound directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

SALVADOR DALI

San Loretto (2008) references a story from the Catholic faith, in which the house of the Holy Family was miraculously transported out of Nazareth for protection during the Crusades. The story appeals to Anselm Kiefer's distinctive visual themes of ruin and renewal, depicting the great effort of carrying the structure to Italy while speaking to the destruction of the Crusades. The buildup of fragments and rubble on San Loretto coalesces into an image of a bird, which combined with the title and its layers of meaning, suggests the figure of a dove and even the Holy Spirit.

ANSELM KIEFER

Nectarine (c. 1976) is an example of the large-scale steel sculpture for which Anthony Caro is best known. Considered to be a major influence in the development of modern sculpture, Caro was once a studio assistant to Henry Moore and sought inspiration from American sculptor David Smith. Often recognized for the revolutionary contribution of removing sculpture from pedestals and installing them directly on the ground, Caro places his work directly in the viewer’s space.

ANTHONY CARO

JAMES ROSENQUIST - Untitled - oil on canvas laid on panel - 101 3/4 x 85 in.

JAMES ROSENQUIST

American painter John Marin set up his studio in Paris where he drew upon ideas from both the Post-Impressionists and the budding Modernism of the early 20th century. Championed and supported by renowned gallerist Alfred Stieglitz and photographer Edward Steichen, Marin returned to the United States, bringing with him the avant-garde European style of painting that he rooted in the natural landscape. Marin made annual trips to Maine, inspired by its coast and landscape. In Cape Split, Maine, Marin captures the stark ruggedness of the seacoast.

JOHN MARIN

Robert Motherwell is admired for his gestural contributions to Abstract Expressionism. From his early period starting in the 1940s until his final works of the 1990s, one can see a distinct stylistic shift into his characteristic Elegy paintings and signature gestural works. Gesture No. 45 demonstrates Motherwell’s intuitive approach to painting influenced by the automatic drawing of the Surrealists. His gestures in this painting are characterized by a suggestion of chance and accident: “Painting is a medium in which the mind can actualize itself; it is a medium of thought,” he said. “Thus painting, like music, tends to become its own content.”

ROBERT MOTHERWELL

N.C. Wyeth created this painting as an illustration for Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (p. 270), part of the Scribner’s Classics series. The painting represents a pivotal scene in the novel in which Crusoe meets and rescues Friday, the indigenous man who becomes his companion. The scene here depicts Friday expressing his gratitude to Crusoe. Among the most noteworthy illustrators the United States has ever produced, Wyeth is also the patriarch of one of America’s most esteemed artistic dynasties. His son Andrew Wyeth produced some of the most celebrated realist works of 20th-century American art, admired for the emotional impact of their stories. N.C. Wyeth's mastery of visual narrative is on full display in this 1920 scene from classic literature.

N.C. WYETH

Andy Warhol, the most famous and infamous of Pop artists, first created his electric chair works in 1963, based on an image of the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison. He returned to the image for this 1971 set of prints and in which he put more prominence on the chair by cropping the image. Warhol repeats the image ten times and in different color combinations to produce a hypnotic and alluring effect. Warhol’s artworks helped define American culture while, like in Electric Chair, he meditated on the promises and dark-edge of media and consumer culture.

ANDY WARHOL

Julian Schnabel is an American painter whose style is associated with the Neo-Expressionist movement of the 1980s. Pascin Pig Passin Time is part of Schnabel’s broken plate series of paintings, inspired by the trencadís, or broken tile mosaic, of architect Antoni Gaudí. With a humorous title and depicting his first wife, Jacqueline Beaurang, the broken ceramics give Schnabel an assertive and textural surface in which to create large-scale works that captured the brash and audacious period of the 1980s.

JULIAN SCHNABEL

Pre-eminent surrealist Frida Kahlo created paintings and drawings that conjured up a vision of herself and of her world. This drawing, a spontaneous creation and meditation of herself, was included in the major Kahlo retrospective in Berlin in 2010, the 2018 exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up, and the 2019 exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving. Her image and identity were central to her artwork as she defined herself through her ethnicity, disability, and politics in her paintings and drawings.

FRIDA KAHLO

Jim Dine was an American Pop artist whose work meditated on objects with childlike appeal to find a universal and nostalgic language. Dine’s robes are among the most recognizable images to have emerged from his long and illustrious career. They were first shown at Sidney Janis gallery in the fall of 1964 – this is one such example. Double Silver Point Robes is a large-scale mixed media assemblage. The work is executed in silverpoint – a technique that utilizes a piece of silver as a drawing instrument over a specially prepared ground by which it oxidizes over a period of months to create a warm brown tone. The two joined canvases feature blocks of wood in place of where the heads should be and a hanging wood element that moves in response to air currents.

JIM DINE

ANDREW WYETH - Star Route - watercolor on paper - 21 1/4 x 29 in.

ANDREW WYETH

Deborah Butterfield is an American sculptor, best known for her sculptures of horses made of objects ranging from wood, metal, and other found objects. The 1981 piece, Untitled (Horse), is comprised of sticks and paper on wire armature. The impressive scale of this piece creates a remarkable effect in person, presenting a striking example of Butterfield's celebrated subject matter. Butterfield originally created the horses from wood and other materials found on her property in Bozeman, Montana and saw the horses as a metaphorical self-portrait, mining the emotional resonance of these forms.

DEBORAH BUTTERFIELD

Jasper Johns is a seminal figure of modern art in America for his association with Neo-Dadaism and Pop art. Johns utilized familiar iconography as well as contradictory or paradoxical elements in his works, including flags, targets, letters, and numbers. This piece is one of the few sculptures from an artist who has had a large impact on the development of American art after WWII. The sculpture is both a satirical comment on critics who speak more than they see but also an exploration of art and language.

JASPER JOHNS

Alex Katz is a pivotal figure in American figurative art. His colorful, stylized, flat portraiture and paintings stand in stark contrast to the Abstract Expressionism in which he came of age. Not quite minimalist, his deadpan figures have qualities that also lends comparisons to pop culture and commercial design. This painting of a man playing the ukulele highlights the sort of gatherings of young people that would interest Katz giving both the sense of cool detachment but also cool hipness.

ALEX KATZ

Henry Moore, a father of Modern British sculpture, is known for his large-scale, semi-abstract figurative sculptures in bronze, wood, and marble. This 1960 bronze sculpture of two seated figures demonstrates Moore’s gestural treatment of material. The focus on a family group is reflective of the artist’s move toward a sense of optimism after World War II. Small sculptures like this one are rare, and in subject mater and composition are reminiscent of his earlier seated figures based upon ancient Egyptian royal sculpture.

HENRY MOORE

DAVIS CONE - River Oaks Theater - acrylic on canvas - 40 x 61 1/4 in.

DAVIS CONE

In the late 1970s, Richard Prince began taking photographs of photographs, appropriation art in line with the readymades of Marcel Duchamp. Untitled (Portrait)(Boy) was included in the sensational 2014 Gagosian exhibition, New Portraits. For this series, Prince himself commented on each of the Instagram images and appropriated them for this body of work, creating a precise snapshot of our time. This work challenges ideas of authorship, capturing a sense of immediacy within the apparatus of social media.

RICHARD PRINCE

Guenther Uecker and his avant-garde contemporaries experimented with monochromatic color, light, materiality, and repetition. For Uecker, this experimentation manifested in his noteworthy nail-covered canvases. The 1984 piece, Poesie der Destruktion – Poetry of Destruction – presents a tumultuous arrangement on a neat square background. The swarming bed of nails evokes a forceful action with violent connotations. Black and orange swaths of oil paint undulate on the rough surface beneath the exterior of hammered and bent metal. The composition suggests wreckage, yet it lives in the context of artistic creativity, urging the viewer to observe the coexistence of creative and destructive forces.

GUENTHER UECKER

Argentinian-born artist Leonor Fini worked alongside surrealists in Paris, and her work exudes surrealistic themes and fantastical imagery that engages with the unconscious. Throughout her work there are themes of magic and myths that showcase women not as object, but as agents of their own desires, exemplified here in Sphinx Ariene from c. 1970. The Sphinx is an archetype that she uses often in her work, which is about women as active and powerful beings. Fini is considered among the 20th century’s greatest surrealist artists. Three of her works were included in the landmark exhibition “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism” in 1936 at the Museum of Modern Art.

LEONOR FINI

Brightly colored geometric paintings by Peter Halley address the rigid organization of social space through visual representations of cells and conduits. Eulogy (Commission), a 2004 piece at a grand scale, presents the neon-colored forms that characterize his work. The piece incorporates Roll-a-Tex, a material most often used as cheap surfacing for suburban homes or motels, a comment on the commoditization of domestic life.

PETER HALLEY

A leading artist of the Arte Povera movement in the 1960s and '70s, Jannis Kounellis challenged the traditional media of art making. His work often incorporates natural or everyday materials, installation, or performance. Untitled (2014) is a unique example of his sculptural work in iron, canvas, and enamel. A common thread in his work is a sense of isolation experienced in contemporary society, combining elements of the past and the present to address memory, detachment, history, and loss. Kounellis once explained, “[art] must be born of historical necessity: that is, it must be of a historical situation and constitute the indispensable language of that moment.”

JANNIS KOUNELLIS

Roy Lichtenstein’s style of Pop art was inspired by comic strips, in which he created images through a combination of mechanical reproduction and hand-drawing. He used iconic images and cultural influences to create striking action images, often with captions and onomatopoeic exclamations, much as one would find in comics. This screenprint is from a group of seven Reflections prints and in each, the image is obscured by color and patterns resembling the reflected light as if behind glass. Inspired by trying to photograph a work by Robert Rauschenberg behind glass, Lichtenstein appropriated images from his past and thus brings the appropriation of Pop art full circle.

ROY LICHTENSTEIN

Bay Area artist Roland Petersen’s Luncheon is an oil on canvas from 1961, a critical year for his best-known Picnic series. His work from this period is characterized by thick impasto and rich color. Profoundly influenced by studies with Hans Hoffman, Petersen experimented with abstraction, here blending abstract and figurative styles. Painted when Petersen was 35 years old, Luncheon lies within a timeframe that includes his sold-out one-man show in 1962 at Staempfli Gallery, New York, his solo show at Esther-Robles in Los Angeles, and the Guggenheim Fellowship that afforded the opportunity for study in Paris.

ROLAND PETERSEN

Enoc Perez is a Puerto Rican artist who brings aesthetic pleasure to painting. Nude, an oil on canvas from 2012-2013, is a layered composition of shapes in a palette of soft colors. The work synthesizes Perez’s process of bringing sensual pleasure and vibrant color to nudes.

ENOC PEREZ

More than an artist, Theaster Gates also works as curator, urban planner, and project facilitator. From sculpture to painting, installation to public projects, Gates’s works are hubs in which to question labor and commodity while also bringing to the fore people and things that are often unseen and unheard. Convex Concave takes custom-made bricks that Gates had previously used for Black Vessel for a Saint at the Walker Art Center and repurposes it into a painting-like sculpture that references minimalist artist like Sol LeWitt, the labor of making bricks, and the original context of the bricks for the installation at the Walker.

THEASTER GATES

Henri Matisse is one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century and whose oeuvre covers painting, drawing, sculpture, etchings, linocuts, lithographs, aquatints, paper cutouts, and book illustration. An early proponent of Fauvism with its outrageous colors and dynamic composition, Matisse would also move into abstraction, pioneering the use of color and form in each stage of his career. This drawing depicts Madame Monchaux and displays the incredible draftsmanship that often characterized his work. Striving to achieve “the art of balance, of purity and serenity”, his drawings appear effortless but are careful studies to unite line and form.

HENRI MATISSE

Pre-eminent surrealist Frida Kahlo created paintings and drawings that conjured up a vision of herself and of her world. Kahlo’s drawings are rare owing to the fact they were meant as gifts and mementos for friends, as this drawing of Diego Rivera was. Rivera was Kahlo’s husband and with whom she had a strong but explosive relationship. This portrait is a playful example of her thoughts on her husband. This drawing was included in the Detroit Institute of Art’s exhibition on the year Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera spent in the city and the drawing showcases Kahlo’s emerging voice as an artist.

FRIDA KAHLO

Mel Ramos is best known for his paintings of superheroes and female nudes juxtaposed with pop culture imagery. Ramos’s Peek-A-Boo portfolio is a well-known series by the artist, positioning the viewer to observe the pin-up girl figures through a keyhole shape surrounded by black. The series is noted for the confident and direct gazes of its subjects as well as the commentary it provides on the sexualization of a traditional art historical motif: the nude female figure. Alongside fellow Pop artists like Andy Warhol, James Rosenquist, and friend Roy Lichtenstein, Ramos provided a visual language for audiences to understand and experience the proliferation of commercial images that exploded in post-war America.

MEL RAMOS

Ross Bleckner is a celebrated American painter whose works reference loss, memory, and change such as explorations of the cell during the AIDS epidemic or in response to his father’s cancer diagnosis. The 1965 MoMA exhibition that brought Op Art to the fore, The Responsive Eye and included artists Richard Anuszkiewicz, Tadasky, and Francis Celentano, had a profound influence on him as an artist. This painting, like his other immersive, large-scale works, elicit a powerful, hypnotic, dizzying effect. Aesthetically pleasing, Bleckner’s canvases explore perception – visual, emotional, physical, time. Bleckner is part of the same generation of and friends with Julian Schnabel, David Salle, Eric Fischl, and Peter Halley, all of whom returned painterly technique to the canvas.

ROSS BLECKNER

Richard Tuttle is a seminal American postminimalist artist. Tuttle’s work is conceptual and meditative, crossing the boundary of sculpture, painting, and poetry, and often challenging the viewer. Untitled (Cloth and Paint Work #2) from 1973, a pivotal period in the artist’s career, evokes the earlier minimalism of his career while pushing towards material-based conceptual art. In the work he pays homage to Marcel Duchamp’s readymades. Textiles, as in this piece, play a large role in his oeuvre and become sites on which to focus performance, engagement, and meaning.

RICHARD TUTTLE

Ed Ruscha is one of the most distinguished American artists due in part for his explorations of the symbols of Americana and the relationship between language and art. The End is a cinematic theme that the artist used in the 1990s and 2000s, appearing in paintings, prints, and drawings – notably the 1991 large-scale painting at the Museum of Modern Art. Addressing the passage of time and obsolescence, Ruscha makes use of an antiquated typeface and an old cinematic tradition of using text in film. The concept of ephemerality is enhanced by the words themselves, The End, and the nature of the medium itself; considered futuristic when it was developed in the 1960s, the laser technology for holograms also creates a sense of impermanence as the images change with the viewer’s movement. While there is innate movement in the shifting words and images, these holograms also represent a full stop – a transitory moment frozen in time.

ED RUSCHA

American artist Robert Rauschenberg helped to revolutionize art in the 20th century through his assemblages incorporating found objects and pop culture. For the Hoarfrost series, Rauschenberg used solvent to transfer images from newspapers and magazines to unstretched fabric. Hoarfrost is a kind of lacy film made up of minute, needle-like ice crystals. Rauschenberg evoked the transience of the hoarfrost by printing newspaper and magazine pages on overlapping layers of delicate fabrics. Other pieces in this series are in the collections of The Guggenheim, MoMA, SF MOMA, the National Gallery of Art and Tate.

ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG

Irving Norman was an American painter whose works examined modern civilization and the human condition. Norman conceived his paintings as public works that bore witness to history and systems of power. He was influenced by his experiences as a Polish immigrant, as a defender of the Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War, and as an observer of the conflicts in the 20th century. The Palace has been exhibited at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, the Pasadena Museum of California Art, the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art at Utah State University, and Katzen Arts Center at American University in Washington D.C. Heather James is proud to represent the estate of Irving Norman.

IRVING NORMAN

Stanton Macdonald-Wright was a co-founder of the Synchromism movement, which combined abstraction and intense color. He was influenced by ideas that the qualities of color were connected to the qualities of music. He stopped painting this way in the 1920s, but his work experienced a revitalization in the 1950s, following a retrospective of his work at LACMA. Inspired by the renewed interest, Wright began producing works with increased passion; these works were considered Neo-Synchromism. La Gaîté is a phenomenal example of this period in Wright’s career, showcasing the brighter colors and larger canvases he favored during his personal renaissance.

STANTON MACDONALD-WRIGHT

Norman Bluhm's Black and Red (1953), first owned by fellow artist Sam Francis, is an explosive drip painting that characterizes the artist’s style in the late 1950s. Bluhm's process and resulting work epitomizes the category of Abstract Expressionist painters that earned the moniker "action" painters. The energy and passion present in Bluhm’s work was likely fueled by his experience fighting in World War II. The intensity of his paintings from the decade following the war is one reason why Bluhm’s work from the 1950s are some of the most highly sought-after. The top ten prices for the artist at auction are held by paintings from this era.

NORMAN BLUHM

Contemporary American artist George Condo coined the term “artificial realism” to characterize the figures that appear in his work – often described as a combination of European Old Master painting and American Pop art. Condo has defined the term as the “realistic representation of that which is artificial.” Known for figures that are often grotesque or fractured, Condo creates art that is both Contemporary and rooted in art historical tradition, drawing inspiration from Cubism or, in this case, reaching back to ancient Greece. In an uncommon work of sculpture, Condo imparts his distinctive style to the face of a Mycenaean archetype, the goddess figure.

GEORGE CONDO

Ed Moses was a prominent figure in the Los Angeles art scene for nearly 70 years. He first exhibited in 1949 and was part of the original group of artists from the Ferus Gallery in 1957 – fellow Cool School artist Ed Ruscha also had his first solo exhibition there in 1963. The large scale and tryptic formation of “Franco-Del #1 & #3” from 2006 is rare for Moses. The piece is executed in earth tones of browns, grey, black, rust and pine green. Always working with process and experimenting with materials as a painter, Moses has been critically lauded for his bold composition and innovation.

ED MOSES

N.C. Wyeth is regarded as a father of American Illustration, and his prolific career was marked by artworks with distinctive personality and majestic storytelling. In Don, Pointer Dog (1902), the artist brings his sense of majesty to a personal context. Wyeth was twenty years old when he painted the charming canine portrait, a special commission for a family he met in Massachusetts while on a walking trip with his brothers.

N.C. WYETH

Untitled (Hologram Suite) by Louise Bourgeois contains eight individual glass holograms initially created by the artist in 1998 and fully realized in 2014. The imagery includes lovers, chairs, a bell jar, and enclosures. These elements reoccur in many of the artist's installations and are related to her interest in physical and emotional isolation and sexuality. The images recorded within these holograms were created from original Bourgeois sculptures. Encoded on glass and activated by light, the images appear only when illuminated at a particular angle, and they come to life with a red glow.

LOUISE BOURGEOIS

Donald Sultan’s Black and Blue from 2008 fits comfortably within both Pop art and Minimalism. The work is a sly reference to Warhol as if a polarized negative image of the Pop artist’s iconic Flower series. Working with unconventional use and application of paint, Sultan vacillates between abstraction and representational art, but always maintaining strong contrasts and powerful, simple statements. Sultan describes his work as "heavy structure, holding fragile meaning." Sultan’s work is represented in the permanent collections of many major museums in the United States and abroad, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

DONALD SULTAN

HANS HOFMANN - Purple Tree - casein on board - 20 x 24 in.

HANS HOFMANN

RICHARD DIEBENKORN - Untitled - ink and graphite on paper - 16 7/8 x 13 3/4 in.

RICHARD DIEBENKORN

After producing a large cycle of works known as Contrasts of Forms, which infuse abstraction into genres of landscape, still life, and figure, Leger In the mid-1920s, was associated with the French formalist movement called Purism, which sought to strip Cubism of its decorative aspects. This is when he created Profil, Vase et Clef, adopting flatter colors and bold, black outlines in his work. From this point forward on, his art was essentially figurative. Profil, Vase et Clef was exhibited at Galerie Beyeler in Basel and illustrated in the catalog, and the provenance also includes Galerie Louise Leiris and Galerie Seroussi in Paris.

FERNAND LEGER

Pat Steir is a celebrated American painter and printmaker, best known for her Waterfall paintings of dripped, splashed, and poured paint. This large work on paper completed in 1985 is characterized by her usual sense of spontaneity and unpredictability, embracing nature as an active force in art. Recalling the explosive power of waves, the work on paper references the art historical tradition of 19th century artists Ando Hiroshige and Gustave Courbet, re-imagining their previous depictions of the irrepressible sea. This drawing was featured in the Museum of Modern Art’s 1985 exhibition, New Works on Paper 3. Steir’s large wave drawings comprise a distinct body of work from the mid 1980s, after which she began to experiment with the poured canvases that became waterfall paintings.

PAT STEIR

Carl Andre is an American artist who helped pioneer minimalist sculpture and was the husband of famed and celebrated artist Ana Mendieta. This is a classic text piece from the early 1960s and is typical of his poems which are composed by selecting individual words from source texts, and then ordering them on the page according to simple and self-evident criteria, which, in this case, is by alphabetical listing. Aviator Charles Lindbergh deep fascinated Carl Andre whom he returned to as a source for his poetry. This work with its structured repetition like his famed sculptures reflect the minimalism and post-minimalism emerging in the 1960s and the 1970s including fellow concrete poet Christopher Knowles.

CARL ANDRE

Part of the post-war Abstract Expressionist movement, Paul Jenkins was renowned for his technique of controlled paint pouring and use of translucent colors. His paintings drew on wide range of philosophies from Gurdjieff to Goethe, Jung to Zen Buddhism, astrology to alchemy, and all of which inspired him to preface the titles of his works with the word “Phenomena,” followed by an evocative word or phrase. Jenkins remarked of his painting process, “I try to paint like a crapshooter throwing dice, utilizing past experience and my knowledge of the odds. It’s a big gamble, and that’s why I love it.” His combination of chance and control reveals paintings of dazzling depth and beauty with their sinuous seams and arcs of colors, in other words, a phenomenon. Paul Jenkins was friends with Willem de Kooning and even took over de Kooning’s loft near Union Square in New York City.

PAUL JENKINS

Celebrated Hassel Smith moved through different styles over his long career including Abstract Expressionism, his “Measured” series, and Gestural Abstraction. This painting comes from his “Measured” period in which paintings encompassed geometric shapes and numbers on grids. Smith finds rhythms in the paintings through the intervals and sizes of the shapes. Among his friends were Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko. Smith lived in the Bay Area of California before moving to the UK, settling in Cornwall and Bristol. Heather James is proud to represent the estate of Hassel Smith.

HASSEL SMITH

Paul Wonner is one of the most celebrated artists of the Bay Area Figurative movement, along with David Park, Elmer Bischoff, Richard Diebenkorn, and his partner William Theophilus Brown. The Bay Area Figurative Movement was a loose collection of artists that broke away from the dominant and overly-influential style of abstract expressionism, pushing considerations of what is modern away from abstraction once more onto the body and figuration. This painting comes from Wonner’s period in which he adopted the crisp realism of Dutch Baroque still life painting, populating his works with objects from everyday contemporary life. Acclaimed for his expressive figurative paintings and distinctive style of still life painting, Wonner had numerous solo exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco and his works are held at major museums throughout the United States, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Heather James is proud to partner with the Crocker Art Museum to represent the estate of Paul Wonner and William Theophilus Brown.

PAUL WONNER

William Theophilus Brown, along with his partner Paul Wonner, is one of the most celebrated artists of the Bay Area Figurative movement, along with David Park, Elmer Bischoff, and Richard Diebenkorn. The inspiration to take chances and to try new mediums is evident in Brown’s works including his fearless examination of nude forms, bold colors, his shifts from sensual form to precise architectural landscapes, and even his experimentation during his last decade with collage and pure abstraction. This painting is a great example of Brown’s draftsmanship in its careful but bright study of the seated figure. Brown ran through many artistic circles and included among his friends, Samuel Barber, Igor Stravinski, Paul Hindemith, André Previn, Mary Sarton, Christopher Isherwood, and Don Bacardy. Heather James is proud to partner with the Crocker Art Museum to represent the estate of Paul Wonner and William Theophilus Brown.

WILLIAM THEOPHILUS BROWN