Gianni L. Cilfone “After the Rain” Oil on canvas 1928
GIANNI L. CILFONE (1908-1990) USA
“After the Rain” 1928
Oil on canvas, contemporary quarter sawn oak pegged frame with yellow gold filet.
Signed: Cilfone, 1928 (lower left corner)
Marks: Illinois Academy of Fine Arts, Second Annual Exhibition 1928, Gianni L. Clifone, 905 South Ashland Boulevard, “After the Rain,” $500 (paper label).
Exhibited: Illinois Academy of Fine Arts, Second Annual Exhibition 1928, Art Institute of Chicago 1928
For more information see: Who Was Who in American Art (Madison, Conn.: Sound View Press, 1985) p. 115.
Canvas: H: 30” x W: 40”
Framed: H: 38” x W: 48”
Gianni Cilfone emigrated with his family from San Marco, Italy to Chicago at the age of five. After studying at the Art Institute of Chicago, Cilfone took lessons from Hugh Breckenridge and John F. Carlson. His consistently won many prizes from the Chicago Gallery Association throughout the 1930s and 40s. He exhibited at the Hoosier Salon between 1949 and 1958, at the North Shore Arts Association, at the Association of Chicago Painters and Sculptors, and at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1919 and 1928.
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.
Peter Svenson, “Triangle Painting”, Oil on canvas 1976
PETER SVENSON (b. 1944)
“Triangle Painting” 1976
Oil on Canvas
Signed: Peter Svenson 1976, Turkey Shoot (on the stretcher) and canvas on verso.
H: 41 ½” x W: 48”
Nationally recognized artist and writer Peter Svenson was born in 1944 and received a bachelor of arts degree from Tufts University and a masters of fine arts in painting from the University of North Carolina.
Svenson created “Turkey Shoot” in 1976 based on color field painting theories. The triangular shaped canvas is unusual in this style of painting, the lines are precise, the paint is thinly laid on the primed canvas in flat primary and secondary colors. “During the late 1950s and 1960s, color field painters emerged in Great Britain, Canada, Washington, DC and the West Coast of the United States using formats of stripes, targets, simple geometric patterns and references to landscape imagery and to nature.” Some of the artists of the Washington Color School included Gene Davis, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland and Sam Gilliam.
Peter Svenson’s work relates to this group of Washington color field artists working in the style in the 1950s, 60s and 70s.
Arthur N. Colt, “The Wrestlers”, Oil on canvas c. 1938
ARTHUR N. COLT (1889-1972) USA
The Wrestlers c. 1938
Oil on canvas
Signed: A. N. Colt in lower right corner
For more information on Colt see: Who Was Who in American Art (Madison, Conn.: Sound View Press, 1985). p.125. Hove, Arthur, ed. Wisconsin Alumnus Vol. 61, No. 9 (January 1960), “Portrait Patterns” Art Digest v. 9 (December 15, 1934) p. 7
Canvas: H: 29 ½” x W: 34”
Framed: H: 38 ½” x W: 43”
Arthur Colt studied painting at the Art Institute of Chicago and in Paris. He was not only an important Wisconsin painter but also an influential teacher. He taught at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, founded a summer art colony at Black River and Devil’s Lake, WI and went on to form the Colt School of Art. Arthur Colt exhibited at the Madison Salon of Art Exhibition in 1934.
Victor Arnautoff, The Felt Hat, Oil on Canvas c. 1930
VICTOR ARNAUTOFF (1896-1979) USA
The Felt Hat c. 1930
Oil on canvas, white gold frame
Signed: V. Arnautoff, lower right
Exhibited: Art Center San Francisco, 1931 (see image of the review in the San Francisco Examiner, July 12th, 1931)
For more information see: The New Deal for Artists, Richard D. McKinzie (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), Coit Tower, San Francisco : Its History and Art
Painting: H: 26” x W: 21”
Framed: H: 32 ½” x 27 ½”
Price: $60,000
Victor Arnautoff created paintings and watercolors, focusing on portraits, still lifes and rural landscapes in his early years, and moved to more socially conscious themes later in his career. Arnautoff was a native of Russia, to which he returned during the 1960s after thirty years in the United States. He came to San Francisco from Russia via China, bringing his wife and children with him, and studied at the California School of Fine Arts studying with Ralph Stackpole and Edgar Walter before going to Mexico. There he worked as an assistant to the famous Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. During the 1930s, Arnautoff worked as project director and one of the artists selected to create the famed Coit Tower murals, he played a key role in determining the political and social content of the frescoes painted in the San Francisco landmark. His own contribution, City Life, appears to be a lively, non-political melding of downtown San Francisco scenes; however, closer study reveals two leftist newspapers on the newsstand, while the city’s most mainstream daily, the San Francisco Chronicle, is strangely missing. Arnautoff also painted frescoes in the Military Chapel at San Francisco’s Presidio, in the Anne Bremer Library of the San Francisco Art Institute, and in high schools and other buildings in the Bay Area. He was a professor of art at Stanford University from 1939 until his retirement in 1963.
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