PALM SPRINGS FINE ART FAIR

February 17 through 19, 2012

Palm Springs Convention Center

Inaugural Year of the Fair and our first trip to Palm Springs.

THEODORE HAUPT, THE THREE GRACES, 1941

It’s Modernism Week in Palm Springs: THEODORE HAUPT'S Acrobats, 1939, and Three Graces, 1941, HUGH MESIBOV'S Mechanical Dancers, 1943, and ANNE RYAN'S Collage, 1951, will all be on view. 

We're featuring Industrial Realism with FRED SHANE'S monumental painting Clam Shell Dredge, 1952, JUDITH SHAHN’S Plimsoll Line, 1949, and CHARLES KELLER'S Saturday Siesta, 1946. PEGGY BACON & HER CIRCLE show up as well with drawings and prints by ISABEL BISHOP, REGINALD MARSH, and MARGUERITE ZORACH.   

Also on hand will be works by WILL BARNET, HOWARD DAUM, DOROTHY DEHNER, PETER GRIPPE, FANNIE HILLSMITH, BERNARD ROSENQUIT, and LOUIS SCHANKER.

FRED SHANE, CLAM SHELL DREDGE, 1952

The big news is that curator Peter Frank selected paintings by DOROTHY BROWDY KUSHNER and FRED SHANE for the exhibition The Big Picture, on view at the Fair. Sub-titled Paintings from Southern California, 1960-1980, The Big Pictures is designed to celebrate the development of the LA art scene, and is part of the multi-venued extravaganza, Pacific Standard Time.

REPORT FROM LA, JANUARY 23, 2012

Bernard Rosenquit, Playroom, 1952

The LA Art Show ended at 5 last evening, January 22. It was a lovely fair, great looking, with lots on diverse material, well attended, and well run. The paintings of Theodore Haupt, Bernard Rosenquit, Anne Ryan, and Judith Shahn, all attracted interest. 

 

Peggy Bacon, All Alone, 1951, drypoint

The prints and drawings by Peggy Bacon (and embroidery), Peter Grippe, Dorothy Browdy Kushner, and Angelo Pinto, did as well.

LA is always a wonder. There's fantasy architecture. The Mayan Theatre — thanks Joseph -- is on South Hill; it opened in 1927 with a facade by Francisco Cornejo.

Mayan Theatre, South Hill, Los Angeles, 1927

There is hard-core reality: a street plaque tribute to the builders of 5000 miles of LA storm drains built in the 1920s and 30s by laborers earning $1 a day.

And, there is the cleverest possible ad/bus decor for Rise -- Planet of the Apes -- note the handsome passengers. Click on image to enlarge.

Los Angeles Art Show, through tomorrow

The Los Angeles Art Show is at the LA Convention Center through tomorrow, January 22, 2012.

                                        Susan Teller Gallery, Booth A-107, south and west walls.

      We are featuring Judith Shahn’s Back Yards, Greenwich Village, 1948, and a group of Anne Ryan paintings and works on paper. In an inaugural view, Theodore Haupt’s Three Graces, 1941, pairs with Acrobats, 1937.  Also hanging are Bernard Rosenquit’s Playroom, 1946, and drawings and prints by  Peggy Bacon and Her Circle -- Isabel Bishop, Wanda Gag, Reginald Marsh, and Marguerite Zorach.

     The fair seems to have gotten much larger.  There’s an extensive show of Chinese Buddhist paintings and an installation of a Qing Dynasty Reading Room. Attendance has been great and the weather wonderful. Wednesday and Thursday were beautiful -- 65 degrees with a cloud-less sky. Ensconced at the picturesque Figueroa Hotel, we can see as far west as the Hollywood sign. Today, however, Southern California is getting some much needed rain. 

Print Fair Follow-Up -- Peggy Bacon Featured

This year at the New York Print Fair we featured a collection under the Peggy Bacon & Circle banner.  On November 4 Andrew Raftery put our Bacons among The Top Ten Prints at the IFPDA in his Art in America blog article. Referring to the Bacons, both titled Alone in a Crowd, 1951, he wrote that “Teller has mounted a focused show based on two prints by the satirist Peggy Bacon....Bacon’s satire is poignant and effect and witty.”

Raftery noted the related pieces by her "New York peers in social satire" including Isabel Bishop, Minna Citron, Reginald Marsh, and Marguerite Zorach.

Bertrand Goldberg show at the Art Institute of Chicago

 Bertrand Goldberg: Architecture of Invention is on view at the Art Institute through January 15, 2012.

A Chicago native, Goldberg is known for the Marina City, Raymond Hilliard Homes, and River City projects. As both an engineer and architect, Bauhaus-trained Goldberg envisioned re-invigorated downtowns with multi-use buildings. He created urban communities utilizing industrially innovative concepts such as prefabricated modules and cantilevered construction. The Astor Tower of the early 1960s is contemporary to Marina City.

Goldberg also designed private homes, furniture, refrigerated railroad cars, and a mobile Fumigation Unit for the military.  

New York Times Review of Anne Ryan Show

ANNE RYAN

THE BLACK--LINE WOODCUT, 1945--1948

On VIEW  THROUGH Saturday, NOVEMBER 19, 2011

In The New York Times review of November 4, 2011, Roberta Smith wrote:

(Ryan’s) subjects include bathers, reclining nudes, still lifes and juggling clowns. Most are implicitly nocturnal, which is especially effective in stark images of apartment buildings and in two examples of “The Argument.” Here two scrawled figures confront each other against a cragged, gray background that, suggesting an urban wall, recasts them as giant graffiti. These are physically obstreperous works, shot through with unsettling emotions.

              Anne Ryan, The Argument, 1946, black-line woodcut

Link to entire article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/04/arts/design/anne-ryan-the-black-line-woodcut-1945-48.html


The entire show may be seen under Exhibitions at:

WWW.SUSANTELLERGALLERY.COM.

 

ANNE RYAN, BLACK--LINE WOODCUTS NOW ON VIEW

Anne Ryan: The Black-Line Woodcut exhibition will be on view from October 19 through November 19, 2011.


Ryan  (1889-1954) made woodcuts for three or four years stating in 1945. Starting in 1941 she studied printmaking with Stanley William Hayter at the New York home of Atelier 17, under the auspices of The New School. She learned woodcut techniques from Louis Schanker, who also taught at the New School. 

Capricioso, 1946/47

The white--line woodcut technique, as developed by B.J.O. Nordfeldt, in Provincetown, Massachusetts, during the First World War, simplified the printing of color relief prints. An image was drawn on a piece of soft pine and these lines were then cut away, making grooves. The primary advantage was that these lines isolated different colors and made it possible to place several inks on the block at once without the wet inks touching. This drastically reduced the number of blocks needed to make an image, sometimes to even a single one. Ryan used her fingers as well as more traditional rollers to apply ink or oil paint onto the matrix. The damped paper could be attached or folded under the block to ensure registration of colors.

Ryan was a master at layering inks and transferring the ink to the paper by hand rubbing; each impression is essentially a monoprint. Further, she used black paper that changed the white line of the Provincetown prints to black. In the finished images these read as drawn lines and also outlined shapes and areas. Where the paper showed through the pigments it added an additional richness to the color. The black sheets themselves were originally used to wrap photographic papers in stacks of 10 x 8 x 1 inches. Ryan ironed and sometimes patched them. The creases form lines of their own and are intrinsic to a particular impression.

In the catalogue for the exhibition A Spectrum of Innovation, Color Printing in America 1890-1960, David Acton wrote that in printing on black paper Ryan’s “Colors achieved a saturation and luminosity quite different from those caused by white papers. In Ryan’s prints, the black ground read through the thin layers of ink, and an organic mottled texture was effectively achieved. This extraordinary luminosity and the softness and subtlety of hue are what distinguish these woodcuts.”

Although a few prints are totally abstract, Ryan explored a full repertoire of themes in woodcut, while similar compositions might reveal vases on a table, women under a proscenium arch or on a beach, or boulders on a gently curving planet. Within a single subject space and light changed from one impression to another.

       Ryan began painting in 1938 when she was nearly fifty.

Within an abbreviated career, from 1939 to 1953, she made paintings, drawings, collages, plaster pieces, and prints. Her first one-woman painting show was at the Pinacotheca Gallery, NY, in 1941. She lived in Greenwich Village; the artists Giorgio Cavallon, Hans Hofmann, Barnet Newman, Jackson Pollock, and Tony Smith, were among her friends. The Prismatic Eye: Collages by Anne Ryan, 1948-1954, was shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2010

Link to site to view exhibition:

http://gallery.me.com/stg568#100748