Rolph Scarlett

Abstract and Drip

Signed lower right Agnes Hart was born in Meridan, Connecticut. She studied at the Ringling School of Art in Sarasota, Florida; at Iowa State University with Josef Presser, Paul Burlin and Lucile...

Signed lower left. “Abstract and Fractured Biomorphic and Geometric Forms” which was painted in the mid to late 1950’s is a nod to Picasso’s famous painting Guernica, which Hart may have seen when it was given to the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1958. Several elements in the painting clearly reference Guernica: the black geometric and cut-out shapes, the biomorphic shapes, the abstracted horse’s head and body, with a district reference to the bull’s tail, along with the black and white pallet choice and various details throughout-all hallmarks of Picasso’s Guernica. The abstracted reality Hart presents in these references go beyond a simple nod and reflect a personal interpretation reflected in the splintered abstraction and her bespoke interpretation. Agnes Hart’s first began her career as a social realist artist in the 1930’s. She was also WPA artist. Her longtime friend Milton Avery encouraged her, and she exhibited in the same gallery in the late 1940’s, the RoKo Gallery. Her instinctive and personalized modernist periods often reflected a similar path of her compatriot artists during the first half of the 20th century. Her early works were influenced by her teachers Josef Presser, Paul Burlin and Lucile Blanch, and Reginald Neal, and reflected historical modern trends-at times showing the influence of Avery and other modernist. Like Elaine DeKooning, Lee Kraser, Michael Corrine West...

Signed lower right and a double sided painting.

Signed lower right and dated & titled verso. Enrico Donati, a surrealist and abstract expressionist painter, was born in Milan, Italy in 1909 and died in Manhattan on April 25, 2008. He was known for his association with the surrealist movement of the 1940's, but his artwork continued to transform itself through the many trends that have occurred during his long career. In Italy he attended the Universita degli Studi in Pavia where he studied economics. In 1934, he moved to the United States settling in New York where he studied at the New School for Social Research and the Art Students' League. Considered the surviving dean of the Surrealist Movement and a member of the New York School, Donati painted with Ernst, Matta and Tanguy in the thirties and forties, and in particular with Andre Breton, regarded by many to be the grand master of Surrealism. He helped organize the Exposition Internationale du Surrealisme in Paris in 1947 where he exhibited three of his pieces. The Surrealists were known to avoid presenting or representing reality, and put the emphasis on invention and creativity by uncovering the poetic aspect of life with its kaleidoscopic multidimensional images, using reality only to enhance imagination. Donati survived the decline of Surrealism in the late 1940's by adapting his style to current art trends as he worked with new materials and textures throughout the 1950's. One trend with which he became involved was Abstract Expressionism, which originated in the 1940s, and became popular in the 1950s. It was a movement in which artists typically applied paint, rapidly and with force, to large canvases, in an effort to show feelings and emotions. Paint might be applied with large brushes, sometimes dripping or even throwing it onto canvas. Abstract Expressionist work is characterized by a strong dependence on what appears to be accident and chance, although it is actually highly planned. Donati held a retrospective at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels in 1961 and went on to exhibit at the Betty Parsons Gallery with other forerunners of American Abstract Expressionism: Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Jackson Pollock. It was at this time that Donati created some of his most inventive and extraordinary work, some of which was featured in a survey exhibition at the Alter & Gil Gallery, Beverly Hills, California, in January 2000. He has held many teaching positions and has been an active lecturer, while continuing to add to his artistic repertoire. From 1960 to 1962 he was a Visiting Lecturer at Yale University, and from 1962 to 1972 a Member of the Yale University Council for the Arts and Architecture. He has had seventy-five one-man shows, among them an exhibit of new paintings at the Maxwell Davidson Gallery (57th St., New York) in the fall of 1997. Donati's work is held in collections throughout the world, and his work has appeared in over 300 articles and publications, two hard cover books...

Signed verso & dated 2013. Dexter Holmes was born in Binghamton, New York in 1986 and is from first generation Italian heritage. His mother and fath...

Signed & dated Verso. 1965 Paul Reed in 1970. He favored “staining” untreated canvas. Paul Reed, the last surviving member of the Washington Color School, who explored the complexities of color and form in vibrant bio-morphic and hard-edge abstract paintings, died on Sept. 26 at his home in Phoenix. He was 96. His death was confirmed by his daughter, Jean Reed Roberts. Mr. Reed acquired his public identity as an artist when he was included, along with Gene Davis, Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis, Thomas Downing and Howard Mehring, in “The Washington Color Painters,” a landmark traveling exhibition that began at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art in 1965. All of the other painters had been shown, the year before, in “Post-Painterly Abstraction,” a 31-artist exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art organized by the critic Clement Greenberg in an effort to write a new chapter in the historic march of abstract art. Like his fellow Washington artists, Mr. Reed rejected the hot, gestural approach of Abstract Expressionism and explored color and abstract forms in a cooler mode. Working with diluted acrylic paint, in discrete series that methodically explored formal issues, he created luminous fields of color by letting the paint bleed into, or stain, untreated canvas. “I have a saying: Pollock dripped, Frankenthaler poured,” he told The Washington Post in 2011, referring to the artist Helen Frankenthaler. “Morris Louis poured. Howard Mehring sprinkled. I blot.” In his first stained series, “Mandala,” color radiated from a circular central image. The nearly 100 paintings in his “Disk” series, which he called “a matrix for exploiting color,” consisted of a central circle and two triangles positioned at the corners of the canvas. Over the next decade he moved to hard-edge geometric zigzags and stripes in the vertical “Upstart” series, color grids and shaped canvases that allowed for more complex experiments in form and color relations. He also made welded steel sculptures and, in the “Quad” series of the 1980s, collaged photographs. “Reed was, in a sense, the ‘little master’ of that first batch of Washington colorists,” the critic Benjamin Forgey wrote in The Washington Post in 1997. “He was a latecomer — he didn’t turn seriously to painting until he was in his mid-30s — but he never considered becoming anything other than an abstract painter. And when he was ready to show, in his early 40s, he was a very good abstract painter indeed.” Mr. Reed gave himself a more modest assessment in an interview with NPR last year. “I’m sort of low man on the totem pole of that group of six,” he said. Paul Allen...

Wesley Kimler (born 1953) an American artist based in Chicago, Illinois, is known for his colossal paintings, up to 15 feet high and 27 feet wide. According to critic Kevin Nance, th...

Jim’s of Lambertville is proud to offer this artwork by: Mercedes Matter (1913 - 2001) Best known as a painter of abstract still life and founder of the New York Studio School, M...

Phenomena like Byron by PAUL JENKINS (1923-2012) Oil on canvas 74 x 60 cm (29¹/₈ x 23⁵/₈ inches) Signed lower left, Paul Jenkins Signed, titled and dated on the reverse and on the stretcher Executed in 1990, Saint Paul Provenance Waterhouse & Dodd Fine Art, London/New York Private collection, Europe, acquired from the above in 2012 Private collection, Austria Artist biography Born in Kansas City, the multi-media artist, poet and playwright Paul Jenkins began his studies at Kansas City Art Institute and the Art Students League in New York City. After his discharge from military service at the end of February 1946, he briefly studied playwriting with dramatist George McCalmon at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh. Thereafter, Jenkins spent four years studying with Japanese American artist Yasuo Kuniyoshi in New York City. His first solo exhibitions were held at Studio Paul Facchetti in Paris in 1954 and the Martha Graham Gallery in New York City in 1956. Over the past thirty years, numerous retrospectives have been curated across the globe and Jenkins’ work can found in national collections from Europe and the United States to Israel, Australia and Japan. The diversity of Jenkins’ work springs from a wealth of eclectic influences. Some of his earliest works included what he called "interior landscapes", influenced by ancient natural forms. Frequent student visits to the Frick Collection in New York fostered a love of the great masters, and lingering student visits to the renowned Eastern collection of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City evoked powerful sympathy for a monumental Chinese fresco...

Alan Fenton (1927 - 2000) Pond I, 1958 Oil on canvas 81 x 90 inches Signed, titled and dated on the reverse Fenton's quiet and contemplative nonobjective paintings and drawings were...

Alan Fenton (1927 - 2000) Untitled, 1958-1960 Oil on canvas 90 x 84 inches Fenton's quiet and contemplative nonobjective paintings and drawings were widely recognized for their demanding yet understated means of revealing a serious and sober essence. He identified greatly with Mark Rothko, a friend, as well as Adolph Gottlieb and Jack Tworkov, with whom he had studied privately. Fenton painted in New York City in the late 50's as the explosion of Abstract Expressionism turned into a rebellion against gestural, emotional painting. More concerned about his art than his posture, he expanded upon a tradition in painting with influences as diverse as Whistler and Turner as well as Ad Reinhardt and Joseph Albers. Alan Fenton was born in Cleveland in 1927, studied at the Cleveland School of Art, The Arts Students League, The New School, and at NYU, earning his BFA at Pratt Institute, where he later taught painting for many years. At seventeen, Fenton served in the Merchant Marines where he began a career as a professional boxer, a skill he had honed on the streets. He moved successfully through the graphic design business en route to becoming a painter in New York at the height of the art revolution of the fifties and sixties. Fenton enjoyed success with his subtle washes and pencil drawings as well as large abstract...

Alan Fenton (1927 - 2000) Untitled, 1958-1960 Oil on canvas 90 x 84 inches Fenton's quiet and contemplative nonobjective paintings and drawings were widel...