Sasha Makovkin Art

This bronze sculpture of a woman in a chair, is typical of the work of Bruno Lucchese. Born in Italy in 1926, Bruno Lucchesi has been referred to as “the last of the Renaissance scu...

1961 Coty Award Plaque Kenneth Hairdresser Jacqueline Onassis Bronze Fashion Bronze on wood. The wood plaque measures 12 3/4" by 20 3/4 inches. The bronze plaque itself is 13 3/4 x 8 3/4 inches and the the bronze inscription, which reads "COTY, American Fashion Critics Special Award 1961 to KENNETH of LILY DACHE...

Industrial Machine Age American Scene WPA Mid 20th Century 1939 SF World's Fair HAIG PATIGIAN (American/Armenian, 1876-1950) Aeronautics Pediments Two Plaster Casts, c. 1930s each 13.25 x 14.75 x 6 inches It's possible these moquettes were created for the 1939 World's Fair, the Golden Gate International Exhibition in San Francisco. Provenance: Private Collection of Lois M. Wright, Author of "A Catalogue of the Life Works of Haig Patigian, San Francisco Sculptor, 1876-1950),” 1967 Loan to Oakland Museum of California (Oakland, CA) BIO Haig Patigian is noted for his classical works, which are especially numerous in public venues in San Francisco, California. Patigian was born in Van, Armenia, which at that time was under Turkish rule. Haig was the son of Avedis and Marine Patigian, both teachers in the American Mission School there. He and his older brother showed an aptitude for art early on and were encouraged by their parents. Their father himself had taken up the new hobby of photography. The 1880s were harsh times, however, for many Armenians under an oppressive rule by the Turkish government. Many people were fleeing to the safety of the United States. Suspicious Turkish authorities accused his father of photographing city structures for the Russian government, and in 1888 he fled for his life to America. Haigs father made his way to Fresno, California, and began life anew as a ranch hand. Within two years he sent for his wife, as well as Haig, his three sisters and brother, and in 1891 the Patigians made the journey from Armenia. Haigs father, an industrious man, worked on various farms, and eventually bought his own ranch and vineyard. It was among fertile farmland of Fresno that Haig grew up. Young Haigs education consisted of teachings by his parents and by intermittent attendance in public schools. Although he had dreams of becoming an artist, he did not have the opportunity for formal study of art, and began working long days in the vineyards around Fresno. At age seventeen, Haig made a step towards his dreams and apprenticed himself to learn the trade of sign painting. In his spare time he nurtured his interest in art by painting nature and life scenes with watercolors and oil paints. When his sign-painting mentor left Fresno, Haig opened his own shop and made a name for himself in the town. San Francisco, in the meantime, had been attracting artists since the Gold Rush and had become a thriving art center. Within a few years, Haig had put aside several hundred dollars to move to San Francisco, joining his brother who was already working there as an illustrator. In 1899, when he was twenty-three, Haig had saved enough money to enroll at the Mark Hopkins Art Institute in San Francisco. Like many aspiring artists of his time, Patigian supported himself by working as a staff artist in the art department of a local newspaper, and in the winter of 1900, nearing his 24th birthday, Haig began work for the San Francisco Bulletin, producing cartoons, black and white illustrations, as well as watercolors. In 1902 tragedy struck Haig and his family. His 29-year-old brother died of pneumonia, and then his frail mother died a short time later. Five months more saw his youngest sister, just out of high school, die too. Saddened and depressed, Haig moved out of the studio he had shared with his brother, and into a dilapidated studio in a poor section of town. During this time of sadness, Haig fed a growing interest in sculpture. In 1904 Haig created what he later called his "first finished piece in sculpture". The work, called "The Unquiet Soul", depicted a man thrown back against a rock while waves lash at his feet. The body was tense and twisted, with one hand, in Haig's own words, "searchingly leaning and clutching the rock, while the other masks his troubled head". The Press Club of San Francisco, which Haig had joined in 1901, put "The Unquiet Soul" on exhibition and local headlines proclaimed "Local Newspaper Artist Embraces Sculptor's Art", and "First Work Predicts Brilliant Future". With the support of friends and community acclaim, the young illustrator left his newspaper job and became a professional sculptor. The path of his new career was not easy though. Haig had never made much money working for the newspaper and his father needed help with growing debt from funeral expenses and business problems. From time to time Haig sold some artwork, but also occasionally borrowed from friends to pay the rent. He was the classic 'starving artist'. In the spring of 1905 a white-bearded 81-year-old stranger knocked on Haig's door. It was George Zehndner, from Arcata, California. Zehndner had been born in Bavaria, Germany in 1824, the son of a farmer. In 1849 he had come to America looking for prosperity, settling in Indiana, where he worked on a farm and learned English. He found his way to the West Coast in 1852. Penniless, he worked in various jobs from San Francisco to Sacramento, then found some luck working in the gold fields of Weaverville in Trinity County, and eventually moving to a farm on 188 acres near Arcata. In his 77th year in May of 1901, Zahndner had taken a trip to San Jose, where he stood in a crowd to see a man he thought much of, President William McKinley. McKinley was popular as 'the first modern president' partially because he realized going out to meet the common person increased his support. In September of that year, however, an anarchist assassinated the president while he stood in a receiving line at the Pan-American Exhibition in Buffalo, New York. Soon after, the city of San Jose erected a statue of the slain president in St. James Park. Zehndner took a second trip to San Jose where he visited the McKinley monument. Touched, Zehndner decided that, no matter the cost, his town of Arcata too would memorialize McKinley. George Zehndner had read about Haig in a newspaper article and asked if Patigian would create a heroic statue of the late President McKinley for Arcata. When asked how much it would cost, Haig responded, despite his borderline poverty, with the fabulous sum of $15,000. Zehndner agreed. The President was to be portrayed standing, wearing an overcoat, with his feet planted squarely on the ground. In the finished statue, one hand is held out before him in a typical posture of speaking, with the other hand holding the speech as his side. The 9-foot statue...

Chaim Gross (American, 1904-1991) Patinated cast bronze sculpture, Three Acrobats, signed mounted on black marble plinth 24.5"h x 14"w x 7"d (bronze alone) Chaim Gross (March 17, 1904 – May 5, 1991) was an American modernist sculptor and educator. Gross was born to a Jewish family in Austrian Galicia, in the village of Wolowa (now known as Mezhgorye, Ukraine), in the Carpathian Mountains. In 1911, his family moved to Kolomyia (which was annexed into the Ukrainian USSR in 1939 and became part of newly independent Ukraine in 1991). When World War I ended, Gross and brother Avrom-Leib went to Budapest to join their older siblings Sarah and Pinkas. Gross applied to and was accepted by the art academy in Budapest and studied under the painter Béla Uitz, though within a year a new regime under Miklos Horthy took over and attempted to expel all Jews and foreigners from the country. After being deported from Hungary, Gross began art studies at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Vienna, Austria shortly before immigrating to the United States in 1921. Gross's studies continued in the United States at the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design, where he studied with Elie Nadelman and others, and at the Art Students League of New York, with Robert Laurent. He also attended the Educational Alliance Art School, studying under Abbo Ostrowsky, at the same time as Moses Soyer and Peter Blume. In 1926 Gross began teaching at The Educational Alliance, and continued teaching there for the next 50 years. Louise Nevelson was among his students at the Alliance (in 1934), during the time she was transitioning from painting to sculpture. In the late 1920s and early 1930s he exhibited at the Salons of America exhibitions at the Anderson Galleries and, beginning in 1928, at the Whitney Studio Club. In 1929, Gross experimented with printmaking, and created an important group of 15 linocuts and lithographs of landscapes, New York City streets and parks, women in interiors, the circus, and vaudeville. The entire suite is now in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Gross returned to the medium of printmaking in the 1960s, and produced approximately 200 works in the medium over the next two decades. For more than sixty years Chaim Gross's art has expressed optimistic, affirming themes, Judaica, balancing acrobats, cyclists, trapeze artists and mothers and children convey joyfulness, modernism, exuberance, love, and intimacy. This aspect of his work remained consistent with his Jewish Hasidic heritage, which teaches that only in his childlike happiness is man nearest to God. In March 1932 Gross had his first solo exhibition at Gallery 144 in New York City. For a short time they represented Gross, as well as his friends Milton Avery, Moses Soyer, Ahron Ben-Shmuel and others. Gross was primarily a practitioner of the direct carving method, with the majority of his work being carved from wood. Other direct carvers in early 20th-century American art include William Zorach, Jose de Creeft, and Robert Laurent. Works by Chaim Gross can be found in major museums and private collections throughout the United States, with substantial holdings (27 sculptures) at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. A key work from this era, now at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, is the 1932 birds-eye maple Acrobatic Performers, which is also only one and one quarter inch thick. In 1933 Gross joined the government's PWAP (Public Works of Art Project), which transitioned into the WPA (Works Progress Administration), which Gross worked for later in the 1930s. Under these programs Gross taught and demonstrated art, made sculptures that were placed in schools and public colleges, made work for Federal buildings including the Federal Trade Commission Building, and for the France Overseas and Finnish Buildings at the 1939 New York World's Fair. Gross was also recognized during these years with a silver medal at the Exposition universelle de 1937 in Paris, and in 1942, with a purchase prize at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's "Artists for Victory" exhibition for his wood sculpture of famed circus performer Lillian Leitzel. In 1949 Gross sketched Chaim Weizmann, President of Israel, at several functions in New York City where Weizmann was speaking, Gross completed the bust in bronze later that year. Gross returned to Israel for three months in 1951 (the second of many trips there in the postwar years) to paint a series of 40 watercolors of life in various cities. This series was exhibited at the Jewish Museum (Manhattan) in 1953. In the 1950s Gross began to make more bronze sculptures alongside his wood and stone pieces, and in 1957 and 1959 he traveled to Rome to work with famed bronze foundries including the Nicci foundry. At the end of the decade Gross was working primarily in bronze which allowed him to create open forms, large-scale works and of course, multiple casts. Gross's large-scale bronze The Family, donated to New York City in 1991 in honor of Mayor Ed Koch, and installed at the Bleecker Street Park at 11th street, is now a fixture of Greenwich Village. In 1959, a survey of Gross's sculpture in wood, stone, and bronze was featured in the exhibit Four American Expressionists curated by Lloyd Goodrich at the Whitney Museum of American Art, with work by Abraham Rattner, Doris Caesar, and Karl Knaths. In 1976, a selection from Gross's important collection of historic African sculpture, formed since the late 1930s, was exhibited at the Worcester Art Museum in the show The Sculptor's Eye: The African Art Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Chaim Gross. Gross was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate member, and became a full Academician in 1981. In 1984, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, with Jacob Lawrence and Lukas Foss. In the fall of 1991, Allen Ginsberg gave an important tribute to Gross at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which is published in their Proceedings. In 1994, Forum Gallery, which now represents the Chaim Gross estate, held a memorial exhibition featuring a sixty-year survey of Gross's work. Gross was a professor of printmaking and sculpture at both the Educational Alliance and the New School for Social Research in New York City, as well as at the Brooklyn Museum Art School, the MoMA art school, the Art Student's League and the New Art School (which Gross ran briefly with Alexander Dobkin...

Max Kalish (American, 1891-1945) Nude Walking, 1930 Bronze Signed and dated on base 17 x 9 x 4 inches Born in Poland March 1, 1891, figurative sculptor Max Kalish came to the United...

"Pioneer Family," 23 1/2 x 16 1/4 x 10 3/4 inPlaster. c. 1927. Unsigned. Realism The Smithsonian has a cast of this sculpture in its collection. Pictured on the cover of “The Sculpt...

Rosa Portugal marble torso of a woman. Unsigned. Late 20th century. In excellent condition. American School. 18.5 inches high by 10 wise by 7 inche...

2 Sculptures: "The Power" & "The Glory" WPA Depression WWII era mid 20th century by Agnes Yarnall circa 1940s. Sculptor, painter, poet and artistic historian, Agnes Yarnall has, since the age of six been breathing life into her art. Renowned as a sculptor, whose commissioned portrayals of contemporary celebrities are prized. She has sculpted Judith Anderson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Carl Sandburg...

"The Test," 1970 Aluminum sculpture in 5 parts. Artist's cipher and AP stamped into male figure, front, 20 5/16" x 12 1/2" x 6 5/7" (approx.) American sculptor King is most noted for his long-limbed figurative public art sculptures depicting people engaged in everyday activities such as reading or conversing. He created his busts and figures in a variety of materials, including clay, wood, metal, and textiles. William Dickey King was born in Jacksonville, Florida. As a boy, William made model airplanes and helped his father and older brother build furniture and boats. He came to New York, where he attended the Cooper Union and began selling his early sculptures even before he graduated. He later studied with the sculptor Milton Hebald and traveled to Italy on a Fulbright grant. Mr. King worked in clay, wood, bronze, vinyl, burlap and aluminum. He worked both big and small, from busts and toylike figures to large public art pieces depicting familiar human poses — a seated, cross-legged man reading; a Western couple (he in a cowboy hat, she in a long dress) holding hands; a tall man reaching down to tug along a recalcitrant little boy; a crowd of robotic-looking men walking in lock step. Mr. King’s work often reflected the times, taking on fashions and occasional politics. In the 1960s and 1970s, his work featuring African-American figures (including the activist Angela Davis, with hands cuffed behind her back) evoked his interest in civil rights. But for all its variation, what unified his work was a wry observer’s arched eyebrow, the pointed humor and witty rue of a fatalist. His figurative sculptures, often with long, spidery legs and an outlandishly skewed ratio of torso to appendages, use gestures and posture to suggest attitude and illustrate his own amusement with the unwieldiness of human physical equipment. His subjects included tennis players and gymnasts, dancers and musicians, and he managed to show appreciation of their physical gifts and comic delight at their contortions and costumery. His suit-wearing businessmen often appeared haughty or pompous; his other men could seem timid or perplexed or awkward. Oddly, or perhaps tellingly, he tended to depict women more reverentially, though in his portrayals of couples the fragility and tender comedy inherent in couplehood settled equally on both partners. His first solo exhibit took place in 1954 at the Alan Gallery in New York City. King was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2003, and in 2007 the International Sculpture Center honored him with the Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award. Mr. King’s work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Hirshorn Museum at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, among other places, and he had dozens of solo gallery shows in New York and elsewhere. Reviews of his exhibitions frequently began with the caveat that even though the work was funny, it was also serious, displaying superior technical skills, imaginative vision and the bolstering weight of a range of influences, from the ancient Etruscans to American folk art to 20th-century artists including Giacometti, Calder and Elie Nadelman. The New York Times critic Holland Cotter once described Mr. King’s sculpture as “comical-tragical-maniacal,” and “like Giacomettis conceived by John Cheever.”

Ann Rothman Female Tightrope Acrobat (Circus, Whimsical, Viola Frey, Delicate, Playful, Fun, Cirque du Soleil, The Ringling Bros., Barnum & Bailey) 2021 Porcelain, Low Fire Glazes, C...

"A beautiful work, full of Hebald's lyrical expression." To my knowledge, as the representative for the life works of Milton Hebald, (and through extensive research over the past 20...

In front of Robert Lee Morris's Beverly Hills store in 1993 stood this unique life-size brass sculpture of a nude woman with a bob cut, dressed only with luxurious jewelry. The sculp...