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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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  Gerrit V. Sinclair “Third Ward Milwaukee”, Oil on board, lemon gold frame c. 1940

  GERRIT V. SINCLAIR   (1890-1955) USA

  Third Ward Milwaukee c. 1940

  Oil on board, lemon gold frame

  Signed: GV Sinclair (lower right corner on front of painting)

  For more information see: Who Was Who in American Art (Madison, Conn.: Sound View Press, 1985) p. 571.

  Painting H: 15” x W: 20”

  Framed H: 20 7/16” x W: 25 7/16”

  Price: $27,500

  Gerrit V. Sinclair was born in Grand Haven, Michigan in 1890.  He studied art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1910 to 1915.  His most well known teachers at the Art Institute were John Vanderpoel and John Norton.  In 1917 the artist enlisted in the Army Ambulance Corps and served in northern Italy and Austria.  Scenes from his experience abroad are recorded in his works of the early 1920s.  Following the war, Sinclair settled in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he became a member of the faculty of the Layton School of Art upon the school’s founding in 1920.  He continued to teach at the Layton School and at the Oxbow Summer School of Art in Saugatuck, Michigan until his retirement in 1954.  Sinclair is recognized both as an important artist and teacher from the Great Lakes region.  During his lifetime Sinclair’s paintings were exhibited at the Salon d’Automne in Paris, the Salon Printemps in Paris, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the National Academy of Design, the Whitney Museum in New York, the New York Watercolor Club, the Brooklyn Museum, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, the Art Institute of Chicago and in many other museums and galleries.  He received numerous prizes and commissions for his work including a W.P.A. mural commission for the Federal Building in Wassau, Wisconsin.  Sinclair was a member of Wisconsin Painters & Sculptors, Wisconsin Federation of the Arts and the Wisconsin Painting Museum. His style is a blend of realism and Impressionism but is clearly modern in its abstract concern for composition and color.  Sinclair is best known for his regionalist paintings of rural and urban Wisconsin.  His farm scene entitled ”Spring in Wisconsin” was exhibited at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York.  Gerrit V. Sinclair died in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1955.

   

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  Gertrude Burgess Murphy American Modern Post-War Reclining nude sculpture c. 1950

  GERTRUDE BURGESS MURPHY (b. 1899) USA

  Reclining nude sculpture c. 1950

  Fired and glazed earthenware on a wooden base

  Marks: original paper exhibition label (San Francisco Museum of Art, Rental Gallery); tape with the name of the artist

  For more information on Murphy see: Who Was Who in American Art, ed. Peter Hastings Falk (Madison, Conn.: Sound View Press, 1985), p. 439.

  H: 5 7/8” x L: 10 5/8” x D: 5”

  Price: $11,500

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  Hank Pitcher, “Life Guard Tower”, Oil on canvas c. 2002

  HANK PITCHER (b. 1949) U.S.A.

  “Life Guard Tower” c. 2002

  Oil on canvas

  Signed (on back)

  For more information see: Hank Pitcher Surf, exhibit. cat. (Santa Barbara: Sullivan Goss Gallery, 2003); Surfboard Wax – A History, Jefferson “Zuma Jay” Wagner (Atglen, PA: Schiffer Publishing Ltd., 2005).

  Canvas H: 15 7/8” x W: 19 7/8”

  Framed: H: 21 3/8” x W: 25 3/8”

  Pitcher’s surfboard paintings are the symbol of California beach culture…strong, definite, positive and euphoric statements about life in California. The surfboard’s power as totem is seen in its power to convey identity: surfer, Californian, Hank Pitcher. All are identifiable from this symbolic representation. Hank Pitcher is the voice of California culture. At the beach, in the surf, approaching the foothills, in the mountains, on the spit of Point Conception, in the crags of Big Sur, at a beach campfire in Santa Barbara, Pitcher paints the icons of California’s culture.

  Hank Pitcher’s paintings are grounded in a particular sense of place. He was born in Pasadena, California on July 20, 1949, but his family moved to Isla Vista, near Santa Barbara, when he was two years old. When they came to Isla Vista it was an outpost on the beach, and Goleta was a farm town where kids rode their horses down the avenue to buy candy at the store. He was a football star at San Marcos High School and was recruited by big-name universities. Instead of football, he chose to attend the College of Creative Studies, an alternative program within the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) where he now teaches painting. He splits his time between painting and surfing, pursuing each with the commitment and energy of a linebacker.