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.

NY Print Fair Review

--> This year's NY IFPDA Print Fair at the Park Avenue Armory ended Sunday evening, November 10.  We are still unpacking, but with an eye to shipping to Flint and then Miami for Red Dot.
It was a beautiful fair, extremely well attended from opening bell to closing.  

Alice Trumbull Mason, Lip's Edge, 1950

The Alice Trumbull Mason and Women of the Atelier 17 installation attracted lots of attention.  The centerpiece was Mason's Lip's Edge, 1950, which looked more modern than some of the contemporary pieces in the room.  Surface Tension was another favorite.  Intaglios by Minna Citron, Dorothy Dehner, Sue Fuller (including her seven piece Lancelot and Guinevere, and Concerto, Proof Set with Collage), and Fannie Hillsmith, rounded out Mason's Atelier 17 colleagues.

Our Cities Shift collection featuring Michael J, Gallagher, Hugh Mesibov, and Angelo Pinto, was opposite the American Modernism wall with works by William Baziotes, Edmond Casarella, Peter Grippe, Franz Kline, Dorothy Browdy Kushner, Louis Lozowick, Anne Ryan, Louis Schanker, and Ansei Uchima.

Six Degrees of Peggy Bacon at The Art Students League

The exhibition Six Degrees of Peggy Bacon is on view at The Art Students League, NYC, through November 1.  It was organized with the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

 

Drawings, prints, letters, sketchbooks, photographs, and memorabilia trace connections that wonder through the art world and beyond, as far as Eleanor Roosevelt and Albert Einstein. Three works by Bacon are on loan from us, including the drypoint Clams and Clodhoppers, 1933.

Peggy Bacon, Clams and Clodhoppers, 1933

Peggy Bacon, Djuna Barnes, about 1945

Included are Bacon’s friends such as artist-colleagues Louis Bouché, Arthur B. Davies, Philip Evergood, Reginald Marsh, Kenneth Hayes Miller, Katherine Schmidt, Max Weber, and Marguerite Zorach, as well as the writers Djuna Barnes and Frank O’Hara.

 

Franz Kline, Poem (by Frank O'Hara), 1957

At MoMA, American Modern

Museum of Modern Art, NYC

American Modern: Hopper to O’Keeffe

August 17, 2013, through January 26, 2014

Ben Shahn, Head of a Welder, 1940

With work from 1915 to 1950 the show is arranged thematically featuring artists “who expressed compelling emotional and visual tendencies of the time.” The show is tame and calm, too calm for some perhaps, but still it was great to see work by Louis Lozowick and Ben Shahn, as well as the dreamy images of Charles Burchfield and outlandish Paul Cadmus Greenwich Village Cafeteria, 1936. Literally  --  it was outside the doors going into the show and therefore unable to participate in the museum’s goal of “contextualizing” the works.
 

Paul Cadmus, Waiting for the Rehearsal, 1094

Link:

http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/1344?utm_source=cmail&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=e100113_tmam