Charles W. Hess "Abstraction" Resin-oil on plexiglas, sheet aluminum 1948
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Charles W. Hess, “Abstraction”, Resin-oil on plexiglas, sheet aluminum 1948
CHARLES W. HESS (1921-1998) USA
Abstraction 1948
Resin-oil on plexiglas, sheet aluminum
Signed: CH (in a circle)
Exhibited: Solo Exhibition, Modernism, San Francisco, CA, 1981; Charles Hess and Leta English Hess: Joint Retrospective, University Art Gallery, University of California, Riverside, October 1 – November 10, 1985; Charles Hess: Neoplastic Works, Modernism, Art of the 20th Century, San Francisco, CA; June 6 – 29, 1991.
Painting illustrated: “On Transparency and Reflection,”
The Structurist No. 27/28, 1987/1988.
Painting H: 12” x W: 12” x D: 1”
Framed H: 22” x W: 22” x D: 1 1/2”
Price: $58,000
Born in 1921 in Long Beach, California, Charles Hess studied painting at UCLA, University of Chicago and University of California, Berkeley. In 1962 he joined the faculty of San Francisco State University where he taught until 1983. Hess’s paintings have been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions including shows at the Pasadena Art Museum, the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago where his work is also in the permanent collection.
Working in the neo-plasticist style for over thirty years, Hess’s work explored the three-dimensional relationship between the basic elements of painting: color, form, and space. Abstraction is one of the few works to survive from this period; most pieces from this period were lost due to the 1991 fire in the Oakland, CA hills.
***Charles and Leta English Hess papers, 1895-1987 can be found at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.
Included are ten letters from Stanton Macdonald-Wright to Hess (1954-1965) relating to his views of the relationship between patrons and artists, the 1956 Paris art scene, contemporary art criticism, the art market, and his break with the Duveen Graham Gallery.
Herbert Bayer, Self Portrait, Gelatin silver print , 1932, printed later
HERBERT BAYER (1900-1985) Austria
Self portrait 1932 (printed later)
Silver gelatin print
Edition: 28/40
Signed: bayer 32 (in ink on bottom right corner)
Provenance: Kennedy Gallery, New York
H: 13 7/16” x W: 9 ½”
Framed size: H: 21 ½” x W: 17 ½”
Price: $16,000
Herbert Bayer (1900 – 1985) was an Austrian graphic designer, painter, photographer, and architect. Bayer apprenticed under the artist Georg Schmidthammer in Linz. Leaving the workshop to study at the Darmstadt Artists’ Colony, he became interested in Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus manifesto. After Bayer had studied for four years at the Bauhaus under such teachers as Wassily Kandinsky and László Moholy-Nagy, Gropius appointed Bayer director of printing and advertising. In the spirit of reductive minimalism, Bayer developed a crisp visual style and adopted use of all-lowercase, sans serif typefaces for most Bauhaus publications. Bayer is one of several typographers of the period including Kurt Schwitters and Jan Tschichold who experimented with the creation of a simplified more phonetic-based alphabet. Bayer designed the 1925 geometric sans-serif typeface, universal, now issued in digital form as Architype Bayer that bears comparison with the stylistically related typeface Architype Schwitters.
In 1928, Bayer left the Bauhaus to become art director of Vogue magazine’s Berlin office. He remained in Germany far later than most other progressives. In 1936 he designed a brochure for the Deutschland Ausstellung, an exhibition for tourists in Berlin during the 1936 Olympic Games. In 1938 he left Germany and settled in New York City where he had a long and distinguished career in nearly every aspect of the graphic arts. In 1946 Bayer relocated again. Hired by industrialist and visionary Walter Paepcke, Bayer moved to Aspen, Colorado as Paepcke promoted skiing as a popular sport. Bayer’s architectural work in the town included co-designing the Aspen Institute and restoring the Wheeler Opera House, but his production of promotional posters identified skiing with wit, excitement, and glamour. Bayer would remain associated with Aspen until the mid-1970s. Bayer gave the Denver Art Museum a collection of around 8,000 of his works. In 1959, he designed his “fonetik alfabet”, a phonetic alphabet, for English. It was sans-serif and without capital letters. He had special symbols for the endings -ed, -ory, -ing, and -ion, as well as the digraphs “ch”, “sh”, and “ng”. An underline indicated the doubling of a consonant in traditional orthography.
Karl Benjamin, “Geo-metricized figure”, Oil on canvas 1954
KARL BENJAMIN (1925-2012) USA
Geometricized figure 1954
Oil on canvas
Signed: Benjamin 54 (lower left)
For more information see: Dictionnaire des Peintres, Sculpteurs, Dessinateurs et Graveurs, Vol. 1 to 10, E. Bénézit (Paris: Librairie Gründ, 1976).
Canvas: H: 17″ x W: 6″
Framed: H: 24 1/2″ x W: 13 1/2″
Karl Benjamin was born in Chicago, IL in 1925. He received his BA from the University of Redlands, CA and his MFA at Claremont Graduate School, CA. Benjamin belonged to the Hard Edge group of West Coast painters led by John McLaughlin during the 1950s, 60s and early 70s. He was awarded the National Endowment for the Arts Grant for Visual Arts in both 1983 and 1989. His work has been featured in numerous museum exhibitions and is included in the public collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, Israel; Oakland Museum, Oakland, CA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Seattle Art Museum, WA; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, among others. For many years, Benjamin taught painting at Pomona College and Claremont Graduate School, and currently is Professor Emeritus. He lived in Claremont, CA.
Peter Canty received his BA in art from the Chouniard Art Institute, Los Angeles (now California Institute of the Arts) and an MA from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1969. Heavily influenced by the Post-Impressionist masters Van Gogh, Gauguin and Cezanne, in his own he words he describes his interest in landscapes, believing they are, “the best vehicle for motion, force, and color dynamics.” Although his work reference realistic subjects, Canty’s imagery is drawn strictly from his own imagination.
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