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  Knox Martin, “Eight”, Magna and oil on canvas 1958

  KNOX MARTIN (1923-) USA

  Eight 1958

  Magna and oil on canvas

  Signed: Knox Martin on lower left on front of canvas, Knox M on back of canvas

  Marks: From: CORE, 38 Park Row, New York 38, NY, To: Martin, Knox, Eight, 1958, Magna/Oil, 30×40, 700. (paper label), Fischbach Gallery, 799 Madison Avenue, New York 21, Knox Martin, Eight, C.O.R.E., Price $700 (paper label), Mr. Ned L. Pines, 605 Park Ave., New York 21, NY (address label).

  Exhibited: Fischbach Gallery, New York 1963; I. Jankowski Gallery, New York, 1975

  Provenance: Personal Collection of the artist; Private Collection New York

  Canvas: H: 40 1/4” x W: 26 1/4””

  Framed: H: 52 3/8” x W: 38 3/8”

  From 1957 to about 1964, the spirit of art in New York City was moving in directions for which Abstract Expressionism had not prepared us. By 1965, the strokes, swipes, drips, and splatters of New York painting had given way to cool, laconic representations of the most ordinary of ordinary objects. It was a transformation in artistic culture in which intellectual rewards replaced, or at least supplemented, visual ones, and the whole philosophical face of art was beginning to disclose itself in a particularly vivid way. I saw Knox Martin’s paintings as embodying this transformative moment. In them, I thought, the tension between the two rival philosophies of art could be felt. the way I saw them: they appeared at first glance to be collages, made of large, irregular, overlapping swatches of patterned cloth. Some of the swatches were striped, some appeared to be decorated with circles. It must be conceded that stripes and circles belong to the vocabulary of one kind of abstract art, while the irregular shapes, which felt as though they had been torn from bolts of material, belonged to another.

  So one might properly claim that Martin was synthesizing an expressionist abstraction with a geometrical one. For me, however, Knox’s stripes and circles evoked the life of the circus: the striped tents, the loudly patterned costume of clowns. And Martin’s colors—pistachio, raspberry, banana—were festive and impudent. That is why I felt that the paintings referred to vernacular reality, as much so as Campbell Soup cans or Coca Cola bottles. The circus was a recurring theme in modernist art, and I thought it appropriate for late modernist painting to reduce the circus to patterned rags expressive of its raucous gaiety.

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  Pedro de Lemos / Art Deco Orange glazed American Pottery Clydesdale Horse Sculpture c. 1930

  PEDRO DE LEMOS (1882-1945) Bay Area, California

  Clydesdale horse sculpture c. 1930

  Hand modeled orange glazed terra cotta.

  Marks: De Lemos Palo Alto (sticker on the bottom), various pencil notations on the foot bottom

  H: 9 1/8″ x D: 3 1/2″ x W: 9 1/2″

  Pedro Joseph de Lemos (25 May 1882 Austin, Nevada – 5 December 1945) was an American painter, printmaker, architect, illustrator, writer, lecturer and museum director. He started his art career in the Bay Area. He studied under Arthur Frank Mathews at the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art in 1900, later was a student of George Bridgman at the Art Students League in New York and of Arthur Wesley Dow at Columbia University Teachers College. The influence of traditional Japanese woodcuts is clearly seen in his work.

  Pedro’s father Francisco, a cobbler, emigrated from the Azores in 1872, and settled in Oakland, California where Pedro was educated. Pedro and his brothers Frank and John all followed careers in art. Pedro was employed by Pacific Press Publishing Company between 1900 and 1906, afterwards starting the Lemos Illustrating Company with his brothers in 1907. Later this became known as the Lemos Brothers Art and Photography Studio, which offered art classes in copper, leather and landscaping as well as the traditional media of drypoint, etching and illustrating.

  Lemos worked from a studio overlooking Lake Merritt and taught art at the University of California, Berkeley, working at the same time as illustrator and designer and giving classes in decorative design and etching at the San Francisco Institute of Art, where he had earlier studied when it was the Mark Hopkins Institute. He helped found the California Society of Etchers and an aqua print of his was acclaimed at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, for which he helped organise the California print exhibition. He filled the position of Professor of Design at Stanford University and became director of the Stanford University Museum of Art in 1919. Besides being the first president of the Carmel Art Association, he was an affiliate member of several art organisations such as the California Society of Etchers, the California Print Makers, the Palo Alto Art Association, the Chicago Society of Etchers and the Bohemian Club. In 1943 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in London.