Steel & Roses at Grolier Club

September 8 through November 4, 2011, The Grolier Club will be featuring an unusual joint exhibition: Steel & Roses.  Roses: Botanical Books section refers to the eighteenth and nineteenth century volumes collected by Fern Cohen. Steel refers to mid-twentieth century American prints collected by her husband, Hersh Cohen.  Among works in Steel are etchings or lithographs by PEGGY BACON, FRED BECKER, ABE BLASHKO, BERNARDA BRYSON SHAHN, RIVA HELFOND, ALBERT POTTER, WILLIAM E. SMITH, HARRY STERNBERG, and LYND WARD. 

Harry Sternberg, Drilling a Breast, 1937, lithograph, 15 x 21

The Grolier Club is located at 47 East 60th Street, NYC.

2011’s Summer of Drama

Thursday, September 15

Judith Shahn, Early Work, New York City • Cape Cod • Mexico opened at Gallery.  Fall is around the corner.

Judith Shahn, Back View, Greenwich Village, NYC, 1948

Sunday, September 11

Ten Years.  The 2753 empty chairs facing South at Bryant Park were as moving as ever.

Friday, September 9

Prince Street/N&RHenge. Around 9 AM, actual sunlight falls onto the floor of the Prince Street station, south-bound. This rare event occurs three or four days in the spring and then late summer, providing they are sunny days, of course.

Friday, September 2

 A B-24 World War II plane, the last one fully restored and still operational, flew over us.

Saturday, August 27

North-East Corner of Broadway and Prince, Sunday Morning

Hurricane Irene hit. Subway and busses were shut down! There was extensive damage in NJ, NY State, and New England. New York City was spared the worst. Just in case, we spent the night – first time ever – in the gallery.

Tuesday, August 23

A 5.8 magnitude earthquake hit the East Coast. The Gallery rattled but came through without injury.

Monday, August 15

Trip to Philip Johnson Glass House – heavy rain let up late in visit.

Sunday, August 14

NYC broke an all-time record for one day’s rainfall with as much as 8 inches in some areas.

Friday, August 5

In his glowing review of the Peggy Bacon & Her Circle show, Holland Cotter wrote in The Times that Bacon and “All of the colleagues in the circle traced here are now gone, though shows like this ensure that their link with history, however slender, will not be broken.” Thank you Holland.

Friday, July 22

Temperature hit 104 degrees in Central Park making it one of the five hottest NYC days ever.
 

Thursday, July 14

Manhattanhenge. The sun setting on Fourteenth Street was spectacular. Fortunately it was two days because we missed in on the 13^th.

Wednesday, June 29

The US Postal Service officially debuted their Pioneers of American Industrial Design stamp pane at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. The Dave Chapman -- Industrial Sewing Machines was our favorite. Chapman was the father of Associated American Artists’ colleague Carol Evans.

Whitney's Breaking Ground on view through September 18

The Whitney’s Breaking Ground show closes September 18.

It is such a stunner -- everything looks wonderful.  The Edward Laning 1931 painting of 14^th Street is an entire universe.  The Alexander Brook and the Isabel Bishop are just beautiful. (Bishop modern before she was consciously modern). Peggy Bacon, 

Arthur B. Davies, Ernest Fiene, Katherine Schmidt, Arthur B. Davies, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Georgina Klitgaard  (Mrs. Kai Klitgaard), Katherine Schmidt, Marguerite Zorach, and Max Weber, are just a few of the others in the show.

Peggy Bacon, Going Fishing, 1953

New York Times Review of Bacon & Circle Show

In the New York Times review of the Peggy Bacon & Her Circle show August 5, 2011, Holland Cotter wrote about the “distinctly geeky male students lurking in the background” of Bacon’s 1918 drypoint, Lunch at the League, with Dorothy Varian and Doris Rosenthal.

                              Peggy Bacon, Lunch at the League, 1918

He also noted that George Bellows, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and John Sloan, teachers at the League, are represented in the show along with Isabel Bishop, Minna Citron (he called her depiction of childbirth a kind of “Titian-esque allegory”)

and Alexander Brook (with a portrait of Rosalie Hook – the photographer and wife of Robert Gwathmey).

  

In conclusion Cotter wrote, “All of the colleagues in the circle traced here are now gone, though shows like this ensure that their link with history, however slender, will not be broken.”  

We are thrilled, of course.

The show is on through August 18, 2011.

Link for site:

http://www.susantellergallery.com/cgi/STG_exh.pl

Peggy Bacon & Her Circle

JULY 13 THROUGH AUGUST 18, 2011

 Peggy Bacon, Close Quarters, 1932, (shipboard cabin, Bacon is at sink)

Peggy Bacon & Her Circle is on view at the Susan Teller Gallery from July 13 through August 18, 2011. There are paintings and works on paper from 1919 to 1952.

Bacon attended the Art Students League from 1917 to 1920. It was there she met Alexander Brook; they were married from 1920 to 1940. She studied with George Bellows, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and John Sloan. Bacon taught at the League in 1935-36 and from 1948 to 1952.

For most of her career Bacon lived in the East Village or Greenwich Village neighborhoods of New York City. She spent extended periods in Woodstock, NY, Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and the coastal region of Maine, to which she moved in 1961. Many of her fellow students and neighbors became close colleagues, including Isabel Bishop, Minna Citron, Wanda Gag, Kai Klitgaard, Yasuo Kuniyoshi and his wife Katherine Schmidt, Reginald Marsh, Raphael Soyer, Dorothy Varian, and Marguerite Zorach.

 Kai Klitgaard, Abstract Tondo (or Monster in Tondo), 1930, ink drawing, 3 inches in diameter.

 

Bacon's book of caricatures, Off with Their Heads, was published in 1934.

DAVE CHAPMAN STAMP ISSUED

Carol Evans at the debut of Dave Chapman's stamp by the USPS.

On Wednesday, June 29, 2011, the US Postal Service officially debuted their Pioneers of American Industrial Design stamp pane at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.

The ceremony started off with the Presentation of Colors by the High School of Graphic Communication Art Navy Junior ROTC and the singing of the National Anthem. Bill Moggridge, Director of the Cooper-Hewitt and inventor of the laptop computer, 1979, welcomed the audience and Jessica Helfand, Design Subcommittee Chair of the Citizen’s Stamp Advisory Committee said “It was a great day for design and designers.”

Of course, our favorite was the stamp featuring two sewing machines in streamlined elegance. They were designed by Dave Chapman (1909-1978) for the White Sewing Machine Company of Cleveland, in 1949. Chapman began his career at  Montgomery Ward and Company, and in1935 founded Dave Chapman Industrial Design. He was a president of the Society of Industrial Designers, a recipient of the Design Award Medal given by the Industrial Designers Institute, and a fellow of the International Institute of Arts and Letters. His papers are at Syracuse University.

Most importantly, to us, Chapman is also the father of our friend and years-ago Associated American Artists’ colleague Carol Evans.

The stamp pane features twelve designers.  There’s only one woman, Greta von Nessen, but it’s a wonderful group including Frederick Hurten Rhead who developed Fiesta Dinnerare, as well as Norman Bel Geddes, Henry Dreyfuss, Raymond Loewy, and Russel Wright.

These are forever stamps with short histories printed on the reverse, the peel off backs.

JUDITH SHAHN

Work by Judth Shahn is now in the Gallery.

             Judith Shahn, Beach Cabins (Cape Cod), about 1950.

The exhibition Judith Shahn, Early Work, 1948 to 1955, New York City, Cape Cod, Mexico, will be on view September 15 through October 8, 2011.