Product Description
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.
Hank Pitcher, “Life Guard Tower”, Oil on canvas c. 2002
GALERIE CARREFOUR 141Boulevard Raspail, Paris
Vérité Collection Wood block print poster “ARTS PRIMITIFS, CARREFOUR, 141 BD RASPAIL, DAN 5803″ c. 1948
Float mounted in a finely contoured oak frame.
Inscribed to: A Monsieur E Mme Breton, Vérité Image dimension:
H: 19 1/2″ x W: 12 3/4″
Framed dimension: H: 26 3/4″ x W: 19 3/4”
Price: $9,000
The Vérité Collection of primitive arts started after World War 1 in 1920. Pierre Vérité, a young artist started buying primitive art before anyone else. Vérité opened a small store selling exclusively tribal art in 1931 in conjunction with the Paris Colonial Exposition. Pierre Vérité regarded “primitive arts” as art, and it is the raw power of these primitive pieces that changed the history of 20th-century European culture. In 1936, he opened the Galerie Carrefour on the Boulevard Raspail, which was a hangout for artists and collectors such as Pablo Picasso, Helena Rubenstein, Nancy Cunard and Andre Breton. Tribal art was one of the key influences on Pablo Picasso and he often dropped into Pierre Vérité’s Galerie Carrefour in Paris to buy masks and carvings from Africa and Oceania. Henri Matisse was also a regular visitor, as were other artists such as Fernand Léger and Maurice de Vlaminck, while Vérité used to browse Parisian flea markets with André Breton, Surrealism’s chief theorist. In the decades that followed the opening of the gallery, the Vérité family’s client list grew to include Hollywood stars and leading museum curators, as well as some of the greatest names in 20th-century art. Vérité very quickly became the most important art dealer for primitive arts. In the 1948, Pierre’s son Claude became increasingly involved in the gallery. He went on African expeditions, collecting objects and information, and took photographs to document his travels, while his wife Jeannine was running the gallery operations. With Claude and Jeannine joining the gallery, Galerie Carrefour showed at all “Art Primitifs” exhibitions in Europe and the United States. The gallery established itself as the most important player in tribal arts in the world and exhibited until the 1990’s.
1950’s ITALIAN DESIGN
Futurist pitcher c. 1950
Handwrought and hand hammered pewter in an overall footed ovoid form with a traingle form spout body and an elongated arching contoured handle
Marked: PELTRO with lion, MADE ITALIA
H: 15″ x W: 9″ x D: 4″
Price: $6,000
The 1958 classic film, Auntie Mame, starring Rosalind Russell, features this sculptural pitcher on the coffee table in the surrealist interior of Mame Dennis’ penthouse on Beekman Place #3, New York City.
CLAIRE MCCARTHY FALKENSTEIN (1908-1997) Coos Bay, OR
“Chase” 1955
Structure-graphic, unique impression of metal sculptural forms on handmade paper (artist’s proof), steel frame.
Signed: “Claire Falkenstein ‘55” (on bottom right corner), “E prevue d’artiste” (on bottom left corner), #6, “Chase”, Structura grafica, Milano, Italy, Giorgo Unglio Shop (label on back)
*** A related structure-graphic from 1952-55 is in the collection of the Yale University Art Gallery.
Framed: H: 15 11/16” x 22 9/16”
SOLD
Falkenstein was born in the first decade of the century and was still hard at work in the last. Her life was precisely coincident with the 20th century, and she was a full participant in the tumultuous events in the art world. Her work incorporated modern technology, process, assemblage, chance, light, space, and what has been called “anti-form” as creative principles. Falkenstein was a contemporary of the Abstract Expressionists but, in fact, started sooner, lasted longer, and surpassed them in formal vocabulary, in the variety of materials she used and in her highly experimental techniques. Starting her career, (working, teaching and exhibiting} in San Francisco until 1950 when she moved to Paris for a dozen years to pursue her art career, where her association with critic Michel Tapié and his group Art Autre developed into many commissions including the gates at the home of her longtime friend Peggy Guggenheim in Venice, Italy. She returned to Venice, California in 1960. In other words, like a heat-seeking missile, she found and participated in the liveliest and most challenging art centers of the time. During her career she created over four thousand sculptures, paintings, and drawings, and became known for her innovative and often controversial abstract public art. Among major commissions were the windows for St. Basil’s Catholic Church, and fountains at California Federal Savings (now destroyed) and California State University. Putting her in the immediate milieu of many of the century’s greatest artists, she studied, worked, competed, collaborated and, in several cases, became close personal friends with several, including Alexander Archipenko, Clyfford Still, David Smith, Hans Arp, Mark Tobey, Antoni Tapies and Alberto Giacometti. Many years later, she said: “…there were marvelous things, marvelous people, but I took it all in stride. I was completely engrossed in what I was doing. There were people who were accustomed to being treated with deference and I guess I didn’t – and I guess that’s why they got interested.” (Falkenstein, Oral History, UCLA) Throughout Falkenstein’s career, she created a prodigious amount and variety of work, well beyond the traditional categories of painting and sculpture. She explored printmaking, ceramics, functional art, jewelry, and public monuments — ranging from the miniature (jewelry) to the colossal (50’ fountains and 100’ stained glass windows). And in each of these areas, her accomplishment has been consistently and unmistakably of historical significance.
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.