Product Description
Duval Eliot “Still life”, Oil on canvas, wood frame c. 1945
DUVAL ELIOT (1909-1990) USA
Still life c. 1945
Oil on canvas, wood frame
Signed: Duval Eliot (lower right)
Painting H: 30” x W: 24”
Frame H: 38” x W: 32”
Duval Eliot, nee’ Ruby Duval Bearden, was born in Arkansas, and at a young age moved with her family to California. After going to Hollywood High School, she attended The Los Angeles Trade Technical College (then known as Frank Wiggins Trade School), studying Commercial Art and Design. While there, she began her art career as a men’s fashion illustrator. Then, because of her immense interest in art, immediately enrolled in Art Center School in Los Angeles, being one of their first students. She studied landscape painting (watercolor and oil), portrait, life drawing and illustration with Barse Miller and with Joseph Henniger, life drawing. At Art Center she continued studying all facets of commercial art and simultaneously worked at the Columbia Advertising Agency designing newspaper layouts and fashion illustrations for the major Los Angeles department stores such as I. Magnin, The Broadway, I. Miller, Wetherby Kayser, and Sak’s in Beverly Hills.
Throughout the 1940’s, Duval continued to create watercolor landscapes of Southern California and the West, while illustrating for J.J. Hagarty. Commercially, her prime focus was free-lance illustration, which could be created with a young child in tow, finding interesting work at the “Western Family Magazine,” for whom she did illustrations for over ten years. She also illustrated children’s storybooks and textbooks for MacMillian and L.W. Stinger publishing houses, meanwhile creating Fashion Advertisements and billboards in full color for Phelps & Terkel for several years and billboards for Silverwoods Department Store. For this work, Duval received the Western Art Directors Award in 1946.
During the post World War II years, Duval honed her fine art techniques. She studied with such notable artists as: Barse Miller, Hardy Gramatky and Ejnar Hansen (watercolor) and also with Hansen, (landscape & portrait painting in oil). In 1948, in The Fourth Annual Los Angeles Exhibition at The Greek Theater in Griffith Park, she won 1st Prize for her watercolor entitled “End of the Trail” among her peers of 326 entrants for painting, including Francis De Erdely, Lorser Feitelson, Conrad Buff, James Couper Wright, Frode N. Dann, Joshua Meador, Dan Lutz, and Chas. Payzant. She also studied painting with Conrad Buff, J.C.Wright, Design and Abstract Painting with Leonard Edmonson, and later, painting in acrylic with 2 years of intensive color with Guy MacCoy and silk-screen Serigraphy with Mario De Perentes. Duval also became close friends with Milford Zornes.
Duval became active in “The Southern California Designer Craftsmen” (S.C.D.C.) She won many awards and exhibited extensively throughout the 1950’s and 1960’s at Barnsdall Municipal Art Gallery, Pasadena Art Museum (paintings and enamels}, Gallery 333 on La Cienega. In the 1940s, she turned towards more formal subject matter including landscape and still life and honed her fine art techniques in watercolor, oil, acrylic, and printmaking.
She participated in several group exhibitions in the Los Angeles area in the late 50s and early 60s. Her work was featured in solo exhibitions at the Jack Carr Gallery in Pasadena in 1976 and the Brand Library Gallery in Glendale in 1988.
Duval was also an active member and on the boards of “The Pasadena Society of Artists”, ”The Los Angeles Art Association”, “Women Painters of the West”, as well as S.C.D.C., participating in numerous group (Design 6, 7, 8, and 9 at the Pasadena Art Museum) and one man shows in the vicinities of Pasadena, Glendale, Santa Barbara and Claremont. She was represented in Paris by two silk screen serigraphs at The Exposicion Internacionale des Federacion Femenine at The Museum des Arts Decoratifs in 1971.
Duval Eliot was also represented in The Los Angeles County Art Museum’s show “MADE IN CALIF” in 2001 with “Chavez Ravine” and “3rd St. Traffic”.
Duval Eliot “Still life”, Oil on canvas, wood frame c. 1945
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.
JOSEPH RASKIN (1897-1981) USA
Seaside scene c. 1920 -1925
Oil on canvas, gold leaf frame
Signed: Jos. Raskin (lower left)
For more information see: Who Was Who in American Art,
(Madison, Conn.: Sound View Press, 1985), p. 505
Canvas: 25 1/4” x 21 1/4”
Frame: 31 1/4” x 26 3/4”
Price: $35,000
Born in Nogaisk, Russia, Joseph Raskin made a name for himself as a painter in New York City, where he was also recognized as an etcher, teacher and writer. He studied at the National Academy of Design and, in 1921, received a fellowship from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation. A member of the American Artists Congress, Raskin’s work was exhibited at the Schervee Gallery (Boston) in 1927, Tricker Gallery in 1939, the Schneider-Gabriel Gallery in 1941, Steinway Hall in 1942, and the American Artists Association in 1945. Raskin’s work may be found in several museum collections including the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art and National Academy of Design, both in Washington, D.C.