Related Products

• 

  Details

  Louis F. Berneker, The Three Graces, Oil on Canvas c. 1910

  LOUIS F. BERNEKER  (1872-1937)  USA

  “The Three Graces”   c. 1910

  Oil on canvas, gilt Arts & Crafts style frame

  Signed:  Louis F. Berneker  (lower left)

  For more information see: Who Was Who in American Art
  (Madison, Conn.: Sound View Press, 1985) p. 50

  Canvas: H: 25 1/8” x W: 30 1/8”
  Frame:   H: 35 5/8” x W: 40 5/8”

  Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Louis Berneker first began his art training at the St. Louis School of Fine Art.  From 1903 to 1904, he studied at the prestigious Académie Julian in Paris under J.P. Laurens.  Upon his return to the United States, he lived primarily in New York City and later in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where he died in 1937.  An accomplished painter in oils and watercolors, he was a member of the New York Watercolor Club, American Watercolor Society, the National Arts Club, and an associate member of the National Academy of Design.  In 1930, the painter won prizes for works exhibited at both the National Academy of Design and Allied Artists of America’s juried shows.  Berneker exhibited his work at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from 1910 to 1914 and again in 1921, as well as at the National Academy of Design in 1930 (prize), Art Institute of Chicago, and the Society of Independent Artists.  His works are housed in the Church of St. Gregory the Great, New York City; the Belmont Theatre, both in New York City, the Chicago Theatre, and the Dallas Art Academy.

• 

  Details

  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.