Related Products

• 

  Details

  Raymond Barger Post-War Polychrome wood Sculpture c. 1955

  RAYMOND BARGER (1906-2001) USA

  Sculpture c. 1955

  Polychrome contoured wood of interlocking circular forms in white, blue and pink on a bronze base.

  Signed: RB (artist initials), USA, Z0I

  H: 8 1/2” x L: 12 ¾” x D: 8

  Price: $5,800

  Raymond Granville Barger was a sculptor working in metal, plastelin, and bronze among other materials. Barger was educated at Carnegie Institute of Technology and Yale University School of Fine Art. He received a Winchester Fellowship from Yale, and a special fellowship from the American Academy in Rome. Barger moved to California, where he died in 2001.

• 

  Details

  Robert Breer “Untitled” Oil on canvas 1950

  ROBERT BREER (1926-2011) USA

  Untitled 1950

  Oil on canvas, white-gold leaf and lacquer frame

  Marks: Untitled, 1950, Robert Breer, 26×32, No. 29 in a circle (paper label)

  Provenance: Robert Breer, Private Collection, Chicago

  Canvas: H: 25 3/4” x W: 32”

  Framed: H: 32 1/4” x W: 39″

   

  “Breer acknowledges his respect for this purist, “cubist” cinema, which uses geometric shapes moving in time and space”

   

  Robert Breer’s career as an artist and animator spans 50 years and his creative explorations have made him an international figure. He began his artistic pursuits as a painter while living in Paris from 1949-59. Using an old Bolex 16mm camera, his first films, such as “Form Phases”, were simple stop-motion studies based on his abstract paintings.

  Breer has always been fascinated by the mechanics of film. Perhaps it was his father’s fascination with 3-D work that inspired Breer to tinker with early mechanical cinematic devices. His father was an engineer and designer of the legendary Chrysler Airflow automobile in 1934 and built a 3-D camera to film all the family vacations. After studying engineering at Stanford, Breer changed his focus toward handcrafted arts and began experimenting with flip books. These animations, done on ordinary 4″ by 6″ file cards have become the standard for all of Breer’s work in fim.

  Like many of his generation, Breer did early work influenced by the various European modern art movements of the early 20th century, ranging from the abstract forms of the Russian Constructivists and the structuralist formulas of the Bauhaus, to the nonsensical universe of the Dadaists. As a result of his association with the Denise René Gallery, which specialized in geometric art, he saw the abstract films of such pioneers as Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling, Walter Ruttmann and Fernand Léger. Breer acknowledges his respect for this purist, “cubist” cinema, which uses geometric shapes moving in time and space.

  In 1955, he helped organize and exhibited in a show in Paris entitled “Le Mouvement” (The Movement), which paved the way for new cinema aesthetics. During this period, Breer also met the poet Allen Ginsberg and introduced him to his film “Recreation” (1956), which made use of frame-by-frame experiments in a non-narrative structure. Although Breer resisted being labeled a beatnik, the film does capture some aspects of beat poetry and music.

  When Breer returned to the United States in the late 1950s, the American avant-garde was thriving and films by Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, Peter Kubelka and Maria Menken were creating a new visionary movement. Breer found kindred spirits within the New York experimental scene. As Pop Art emerged as a phenomenon in the 1960s, Breer befriended Claes Oldenburg and others. He worked on the TV show, “David Brinkley’s Journal”, filming pieces on art shows in Europe; at the same time, he made his debut documentary on the sculptor Jean Tinguely in 1961.

   

   

   

   

• 

  Details

  Nile Behncke “Oshkosh, Wisconsin” Watercolor and pencil on paper c. 1935

  NILE BEHNCKE (1894-1954) USA

  Oshkosh, Wisconsin  c. 1935

  Watercolor and pencil on paper

  Painting: H: 20 ¼” x W: 24 ¾”

  Framed: H: 33” x W: 37 1/2”

  Nile Juergen Behncke was a well-known Wisconsin watercolorist and the first director of the Oshkosh Public Museum, from 1924-1954.

• 

  Details

  Jan de Swart, Handcarved “Peach” Sculpture, c.1970

  JAN DE SWART (1908-1987) Netherlands / USA

  Peach sculpture  c. 1970

  Hand carved and formed jelutong wood in a symbolic / erotic form of a peach

  For more information see: Jan de Swart: A Day That Becomes a Lifetime, exhibition catalogue (California: Fine Arts Gallery at the San Fernando Valley State College, February 1972); Jan de Swart, Mike McGee and William G. Otton (Laguna Beach, California: Laguna Art Museum, 1986).

  H: 7 ½” x D: 4”

  Price: $7,500

  Constantly seeking and inventing new materials Jan de Swart was a true modernist.  He was influenced by artists such as Isamu Noguchi, Harry Bertoia, Charles Eames, and later Sam Maloof and Wendell Castle.  Although he had been creating small sculptures since his arrival in California from Holland in 1929, he had not been widely recognized until being introduced to John Entenza, publisher of Arts & Architecture magazine in 1947.  Soon thereafter, he was able to create larger works and began collaborating with architects such as Whitney Smith and Victor Gruen on special commissions.  His work is in the permanent collection of Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Smithsonian, and the Ford Foundation.  He was honored with the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal for Sculpture in 1965.