AMERICAN MINING Now on View in Gallery

AMERICAN MINING

PAINTINGS AND WORKS ON PAPER, 1932 TO 1947

JUNE 4 -- 28, 2014

Fred Shane, Climax, Colorado, 1943-44 (A molybdenum mine)

The paintings and works on paper in this exhibition largely feature coalmines and miners of Pennsylvania and West Virginia, as well as feldspar mining in North Carolina and a molybdenum mine in Climax, Colorado.

         The earliest works in the show are by Riva Helfond. Her future husband, Bill Barrett, was from the anthracite region of northeastern Pennsylvania and her works of that area date from 1932.

         In 1936 Harry Sternberg was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to record American industry; the coalmines of Pennsylvania were a focus of that project. Sternberg was an instructor at the Art Students League in New York City. Helfond was in one of his classes and she had entrée into the homes of miners. In the 1936-37 season Sternberg and a few students would leave New York on Friday afternoons, drive to Pennsylvania, and stay with a mining family. They would draw on Saturday and then head back to the city on Sunday.

         Will Barnet, Blanche Grambs, Mary Sinclair (whose work in the show dates to 1934), and Charles Keller (represented here by the Deer Park Mine, a source of feldspar in North Carolina), all worked at the League. There are also pieces by Georges Schreiber and Ben Shahn.

         A number of the works in show are by Michael J. Gallagher. From a mining family, Gallagher was the director of the Philadelphia WPA Printmaking Project; Hugh Mesibov also worked at that shop. Recently the Gallagher estate released a significant number of early prints, including the iconic carborundum print Anthracite, 1939-40, that have not been on the market in decades. 

         The Fred Shane painting Climax, Colorado, 1943-44, refers to the site of an enormous molybdenum mine still in operation. Molybdenum, a metal with an extremely high melting point, is used in the production of steel.

         The entire show may be seen under Exhibitions at WWW.SUSANTELLERGALLERY.COM

HOURS: TUESDAY THROUGH SATURDAY, 11 AM TO 5 PM

Artists of Roosevelt

On view through tomorrow, May 25:

Artists of Roosevelt

New Jersey State Museum, Trenton

Bernarda Bryson Shahn, Little Winter Sky, 1990

Works by BERNARDA BRYSON SHAHN, BEN SHAHN, and JONATHAN SHAHN, on included. The museum’s permanent collection is showing paintings by BEN SHAHN and ALICE TRUMBULL MASON.

Medium at Muse: Woodcuts and the Modern Book

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On view through May 11, 2014

Medium at Muse: Woodcuts and the 
Modern Book

The Morgan Library & Museum, NYC

Lynd Ward, Wild Pilgrimage, 1932

Lynd Ward is featured with woodcuts from Wild Pilgrimage, 1932, and the U.S. Pipeline company’s advertisements and calendars (although the Morgan didn’t go into those), 1946. Also in the show is the short film by Elias Katz. It documents Ward working on a print for Vertigo, 1937. 

Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris are also well represented.

NOW ON VIEW: MARY SINCLAIR, A Centennial Retrospective, through Saturday, April 5

May 24, 2014 is the Centennial of the birth of Mary Sinclair. This exhibition covers sixty-five years of paintings, prints, and drawings, from 1933 to 1997.

Mary Sinclair, Judith Practicing, 1978

A Detroit native, Mary Sinclair (1914-2004) grew up in Connecticut. She lost her father, Samuel Eastwick Sinclair, at the Second Battle of the Marne in 1918. Her mother, Grace Elizabeth Williams, was a commercial artist. She married again, to colleague George Annand. Mary Sinclair was Annand’s model for the now iconic National Biscuit Company’s child in a yellow raincoat. Sinclair started to make art seriously as a child; she was nine years old when New York’s Macy’s Department Store incorporated her drawing The Queen into one of their advertisements.

After graduating from Darien High School, Connecticut, Sinclair attended the Art Students League, New York City, from 1931 to 1933.  There she met fellow student Will Barnet (1911-2012); they were married from 1933 to 1952. In the 1930s and 40s Sinclair taught art at the Birch Wathen School, NY (now the Birch Wathen Lenox School). Her second marriage, in the early 1950s was to the doctor and artist Joshua Epstein.

Sinclair had six children: Peter, Richard, Todd, Mary Elizabeth (Betsy), Margaret (Peggy), and Judith. Peter Barnet and Richard Barnet both became artists. Her children, her home, and her Union City, New Jersey, neighborhood, were Sinclair’s most important subjects. She considered herself an impressionist. Richard Barnet noted, “The skill and beauty of Mary Sinclair’s drawing-in-color does not stand alone. Rather, central to her work are the compositions. She always builds powerful designs from these elements: people and the places they inhabit.”

Throughout her life Sinclair was an active member of the artists’ community and she participated in group shows across the country. At the National Arts Club, NY, a work received the Best Oil Painting Award, 1975, and two pieces were included in American Modernist Drawings, at the Susan Teller Gallery, September 3--28, 2013. Sinclair had one-person shows at the New School for Social Research, the Van Diemen Lilienfeld Galleries (with Joshua Epstein), 1950, the Hilda Carmel Gallery, the Education Alliance of New York, the Carl Ashby Gallery, NY; the College of Mount Saint Vincent, 1992, Riverdale, NY (which also has a work by Sinclair in their permanent collection); and the Robert Hutchins Gallery, Maplewood, NJ, 1996.

Report from Los Angeles

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Fred Shane, Nether World, 1968-69

LA was as beautiful as ever – one lovely day after another.

The LA Art Show that ended Sunday was well attended with as lively and interesting visitors as ever. Fred Shane’s Nether World, 1968-69, joined Hugh Mesibov’s Mechanical Dancers, 1944, and William Baziotes’ Young Clown, 1943, as the major crowd pleasers.

Hugh Mesibov, Mechanical Dancers, 1944

At LACMA the Calder and Abstraction: From Avant-Garde to Iconic show was a knockout. We could still see the Hollywood sign from our window at the Hotel Figueroa, and Musso and Franks was wonderfully unchanged.

William Baziotes, Young Clown, 1943

Report from RED DOT ART FAIR, Miami -- following upgrade to Booth B -- 116

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We're in Miami, Booth B -- 116, Red Dot Art Fair

Susan Teller Gallery, Booth B -- 116

Through tomorrow, Sunday, December 8, the Susan Teller Gallery is participating in Art Basel week in Miami, showing at Red Dot in the Wynwood Art District.  

William Baziotes, Young Clown, 1943-46

We are featuring American Modernist works by William Baziotes, Theodore Haupt, Alice Trumbull Mason, Hugh Mesibov, Angelo Pinto, Bernard Rosenquit, Anne Ryan, Louis Schanker, and Judith Shahn.

 

Miami Sunset During Red Dot Set Up

Report from Flint, Michigan

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The Flint Institute of Arts Fifth Annual Print Fair was November 22-24, 2013. There was a steady stream of visitors throughout Saturday and Sunday, both novice and experienced collectors. In particular there was interest in the works of Bernard Rosenquit and Anne Ryan.

     The Flint Institute of Arts (Michigan) is located in the Cultural Center, near The Whiting, a performing arts theatre, the Longway Planetarium, the Flint Youth Theatre, the Flint Institute of Music, and the Buick Automotive Gallery.

    

     The Cultural Center is anchored at the north-east of Kearsley Street by Applewood, a gentleman’s farm, built for Charles Stewart Mott in 1916. The orchards include 26 varieties of apples. Mott, from Newark, NJ, was born into a bicycle-wheel making family that merged with the Buick Motor Company; Mott was an original partner in the General Motors Corporation.

     At the south-west end is the 1885 Whaley House, 624 East Kearsley Street, designed by Detroit architect George Watkins; it is the only Gilded Age house in the Cultural Center area.