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.
Orange anodized and contoured aluminum wire manipulated into a cube form
Signed: Orange Cube, 08, Forrest Myers (on plaque)
For more information see: Who Was Who in American Art(Madison, Conn.: Sound View Press, 2003-2004 25th Edition), Dictionary of American Sculptors: 18th Century to the Present, Glen Opitz (Poughkeepsie, NY: Apollo, 1984).
Dimension: 10 1/2″ cube
Price: $15,000
A sculptor and art teacher born in Long Beach, California, Forrest Myers settled in Brooklyn, New York. Myers studied at the San Francisco Art Institute. His teaching venues include the San Francisco Art Institute, School of Visual Arts in New York, Kent State University, and the Parsons School of Design. His studio is in Brooklyn.
In the early 1980s, Forrest Myers was applying Buckminster Fuller's principles of tensegrity and repeated tetrahedrons into his designs for furniture. This exploration culminated in the use of aluminum wire that becomes structural when bent and pressed into a dense tangle.
Giovanni Battista Filosa, In the Garden, Watercolor, 1884
GIOVANNI BATTISTA FILOSA (1850-1935) Naples, Italy
“In the Garden” 1884
Watercolor, gilt frame and filet with silk mount.
Signed: G Filosa '84
***Filosa exhibited at the Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte della Città di Venezia 1895 – La Biennale di Venezia, Venice
An extremely fine and exquisitely painted watercolor “In the Garden” by the Italian artist Giovanni Battista Filosa (1850-1935). It is a radiant painting with a wonderful subtle coloration and very charming late 19th century “en plein-air” imagery. Filosa's technique is similar in quality to the work of the 19th Century Pre-Raphaelite watercolorist, Albert Moore. Gilt frame and filet with silk mount. Signed: G Filosa '84 Filosa exhibited at the Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte della Città di Venezia 1895 – La Biennale di Venezia, Venice
Watercolor: H: 7 1/2″ x W: 5 1/4″
Framed: H: 14 1/2″ x W: 12″
GALERIE CARREFOUR 141 Boulevard Raspail, Paris Vérité Collection Wood block print poster, ARTS PRIMITIFS, CARREFOUR, 141 BD RASPAIL, DAN 5803 c. 1948
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.
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