Naturalistic landscape of idyllic lake is complicated by Andrews' use of impressionist blocks of color that flatten the picture plane into birch trees and a diorama behind them. Their leaf color suggests a time of late summer which, if true, helps explain a brown falling leaf suspended in the moment. About the Artist: We haven’t located much reliable information about this artist. He studied at the Art Students League and exhibited with the Salons of America and the Society of Independent Artists durin the early 1930s. Please contact us if you're able to help.
New Deal Gallery, Genesee Valley Council on the Arts Object #FA18111
Ritz, Abigail (photography) Cooper, Ken (biography)
We see a wooden table, whose surface appears to consist of different textures, one half smooth and the other ridged. It becomes the space for an arrangement of autumn flowers and leaves in a white ceramic bouquet vessel, flowers painted on the vase itself. It rests on the table unnaturally, appearing two-dimensional. Bright white, orange and yellows are contrasted with dark browns, red and coppers colors to complete this bouquet. As the fall flowers begin to droop, winter seems to be in the near future. Caloenesco's background space creates a frame for the bouquet with an off-white background surrounded by a beige border; almost replicating the shape of the vase itself. About the Artist: Born in Romania, Caloenesco— her name sometimes misspelled as “Aurica Calonesco”—studied at the Beaux-Arts School, Bucharest, and exhibited even during the German occupation. She traveled to Paris in 1918 on an art scholarhip and received guidance from Picasso, Utrillo, and Modigliani. In 1926 she married Robert C. Hallowell, who along with Walter Lippman and Herbert Croly founded the New Republic magazine (he had become an artist himself in 1925, devoting his energies to watercolors and portraits, including Theodore Roosevelt and the revolutionary John Reed). Caloenesco exhibited in Paris at the Salon des Artistes Independants and Salon de la Societe des Artistes Francais, 1922-1928, in New York City in solo shows and with her husband at the Montross Gallery (1929) and the Delphic Studios (1936). Responding to her 1931 show at Hartford’s Colonial Galleries a reviewer wrote: “Along with color and composition, she is preoccupied with line wherein can be found much of the beauty of her work. Her lines are always sweeping, flowing, and very live. Most of her pictures are flat, with no attention to the tricks of achieving three dimensional effects by the use of light and in accordance with the school which claims that two dimensional canvas should be used to represent two dimensional things” (Hartford Courant 23 Mar. 1931: 2). During 1935-36 Robert Hollowell served as assistant to the director of the Federal Art Project; he died in 1939 while working on a mural. 4 images at University of St. Joseph Art Museum. 1 work at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.
Multiple small craft boats of different shapes, sizes and colors are moored alongside a wooden dock. The water is calm enough to see a green look-out tower, the blue sky, and white clouds in its reflection. The water level, however, appears to be low. Buildings, trees, and a small town occupy the background of this piece, including a large brick church at the top of the hill. Predominantly earth-toned, including various shades of greens, browns, and reds. Two American flags and two crosses prominently stand out, suggesting patriotism and religion. About the Artist: Born in Budapest, Hungary, Candell described in an interview how, as a boy, he was attracted to movie posters; by age 15 he already was a professional graphic artist, branching out to illustrations and caricatures in theater journals. Candell immigrated to America in the aftermath of World War I and the rise of fascism—although he returned to Paris during 1928-30 so as to educate himself via paintings (he called Cezanne and Degas “my teachers”). At that point Candell thought of himself as a cubist, the transiton from illustrator to painter influenced by Cezanne’s “direct contact with nature, still-life, figure, and all the rest of it, not on the academic level but on the level of just being confronted not so much with the idea or concepts of space or style but concrete reality and learn from it. This was my understanding that the great men had this as a kind of ante chamber to their main work” (“Oral History”). Candell immersed himself in self-guided study for 15 years, finally offering his first show at age 43. He was involved with the Whitney Studio project during the early 1930s and joined the Federal Art Project near its inception. In 1939, he contributed the political cartoon “That’s My Meat!” to a pamphlet entitled 12 Cartoons Defending the WPA by Members of the American Artists Congress. His work was shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the Carnegie Institute. A respected teacher, Candell began this phase of his life teaching art to traumatized veterans at the Brooklyn Navy Hospital; in 1958, he and Leo Manso started the Provincetown Workshop—an art school modeled after the Cooper Union. Candell received numerous awards for his art work, including prizes from the Museum of Modern Art and the Unites States Treasury Department, the Emily Lowe Award, the Lamont Prize, and the Audubon and Silvermine Awards. 1 work at the Whitney Museum of American Art. 1 work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 1 work at Provincetown Art Association and Museum. 60 images at Nutshell Arts Center. His papers are at Syracuse Univesity.
Either a table or chest is the resting place for a ceramic pot holding an acacia plant, a decorative bottle of wine, and possibly apples or peaches. Blues and reds are the two main colors, with white accents in the plant and the jug. One apple is balanced on two others while also leaning on the jug. The table is either painted with simlar colors or is glass and reflecting the objects. About the Artist: Born in Philadelphia, there is little biographical information on Bernstein. In 1932, he showed his work at a small exhibition in Asbury Park, NJ with George Constant. For a show at Marie Sterner Gallery, he contributed “two original conceptions, brilliantly executed if in a decided macabre vein of fantasy” (New York Evening Post 12 Mar. 1932: 3). His chalk painting “Epitaph” appeared in a 1936-37 Museum of Modern Art show entitled “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism.”
A canal of water fills the foreground of this humble scene; red, white, and blue buildings fill the middle and background. Bright whites and blues of the sky and water fill a majority of the frame, which is split in half by a wooden bridge and its pilings. Mostly earthy colors are used, and there are visible brush strokes. About the Artist: Born in Dublin, OH, Bentz grew up in Columbus and eventually moved to New York. As a teenager, he worked in his uncle’s photograph gallery and his talents were such that he was encouraged to attend art school—first at the Columbus Art School, then later at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the Art Students League in New York. He studied with Herman F. Deigendesch, Kenyon Cox, William Merritt Chase, and Thomas Pollock Anshutz. Bentz was a sought-after portrait painter, especially in miniatures on ivory, whose clients included many wealthy families: the Vanderbilts, the Goulds, and the Morgans. Later Bentz was a well-regarded restorer of paintings, including those of Rembrandt, Goya, and Benjamin West. At New York City Hall in 1946 he restored 25 paintings that had been in storage during World War II, including John Trumbull’s portrait of George Washington (New York Daily News 20 Jan. 1946: 102). Between 1914 and 1930 he was a portrait photographer in New York and Leonia, NJ. Bentz worked at the National Academy of Design and, according to a pupil named Alice Dibble, at the Brooklyn Museum. There is a tantalizing reference to Bentz having painted murals, “putting in one building alone six paintings each fifteen by twenty-five feet in size” (Hackensack, NJ Record 10 Sept. 1926: 6). 1 more image at FAP.
We look at what appears to be a table, many different items rest on its surface. Towards the bottom right corner there is half of a block of cheese that is hidden through the strokes of the table. Moving further up into the middle ground, there is a pear standing on a blue piece of cloth and towards it right side there is clay pot resting on a red piece of cloth with strips. The pot has a dove resting on an olive branch. Behind these two objects, there is a orange hidden behind the pear and a flower pot with numerous Canna Lilies. The plant seems fatigued by the lack of space in the frame. Most of the objects presented in this piece are juxtaposed by its surrounding as these natural objects are constrained by their surrounding. About the Artist: Born in New York City, Winograd’s parents Sigmund and Sadie Winograd both were immigrants—from Poland and Russia, respectively. Their daughter seems to have been born an artist. She was first recognized at the age of 10, winning a gold medal in the Wanamaker competition for an oil painting of a New York City street scene. Winograd attended the Art Students League of New York, where were she was taught by George Bridgman and Guy Pène du Bois. She pursued further education at the National Academy of Design and City College of New York after graduation, becoming an art teacher in the New York City Public Schools. During the 1930s Winograd worked in the WPA Easel divsion and, throughout World War II, in the USO’s Hospital Sketching Program: she drew portraits of wounded soldiers recovering in military hospitals. In 1951 Winograd married physicist Felix E. Geigner, who had worked on the Manhattan Project and would go on to research for NASA's Mercury and Apollo projects. Winograd later earned her BFA and MFA from the George Washington University. According to her family she spent the last 25 years of her life “chang[ing] the paradigm of aging” by challanging the stereotype of the elderly’s inablity to be active in different forms. Winograd died peacefully in her sleep at the age of one hundred. Source Consulted: “Helen Winograd Geiger,” Ancestry.com. U.S. Cemetery and Funeral Home Collection [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2011.
This painting features a wilderness scene, strikingly symmetrical in its composition, with a pond, undulating row of trees, hills, and clouds. It is rendered mainly in earthy brown tones with a small pop of blue in the color of the pond. Waltemath’s painting itself is very still but, we can infer some movement with the depiction of clouds in the sky, reflected upon the pond. About the Artist: Born as August Fredrik Vilhelm Axelsen in Tönsberg, Norway, dire economic conditions there led to his immigration—at eight years old—to the US with his maternal aunt and her husband, Wilhelm Waltemath of Germany. That family settled in Minneapolis, MN, where William eventually began work as a printer. His paintings were exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Salons of America, and Society of Independent Artists, along with group and individual events. At a 1931 show in Baltimore, MD, the art critic Henry McBride wrote that Waltemath “commands rich pigment and has a sense of picture making, though his tendency is toward the somber.” By 1932, however, Waltemath’s professional and financial situation had suffered; he was one of a dozen New York painters selected for inclusion in a show featuring artists “who are for the most part unknown, indigent, or neglected” (“Unsung”). The Federal Art Project provided a crucial lifeline, for example in 1937 his work shown at a WPA exhibition along with fellow NDG artist Carl Nordell. He remained active in civic organizations, notably as chairman of the Art League of Nassau County. There is something moving to to a photograph of Waltemath with one of his paintings, where it’s revealed that he considers himself “a printer by trade and an artist because he insists on being one....He has been unemployed for some time, but refuses to allow that to halt his painting” (“An Artist”). Sources Consulted: Henry McBride, “Some Foreign Impressions of Our Art,” Baltimore Sun 22 Nov. 1931: 66; “Unsung Artists Exhibit at Show on Heights,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle 3 Sept. 1932: 3; “An Artist—By Choice!” New York Daily News 10 Jan. 1937: 181.
We behold five white Easter lilies in a glass jug on a red tablecloth. The background is beige, but Spinchorn has dabbed in hints of red, purple, and orange. The lilies and their jug fully fill out the canvas, leaving little negative space. The background beige ends where the lilies begin; whites and highlights remain untouched to leave the white canvas shining through the watercolor. About the Artist: Born in Broby, Sweden, Sprinchorn traveled to the US in 1903 at age sixteen to study with Robert Henri at the New York School of Art, continuing his study through 1907. An early exhibition at the Union League in 1908 made a deep impression upon one critic, who called “Winter Day” and its ferryboat on the East River an image “we shall never forget—the dreariest, wettest canvas we ever saw, and therein is its power...It is realism pushed to the eleventh degree” (“Around”). After a period managing the Henri Art School, Sprinchorn taught at the Art Students League in Los Angeles and then traveled to Paris before returning to the New York art scene. His work appeared in the famous Armory Show of 1913, at the 1914 World’s Fair, and numerous group and solo shows. “But in 1919,” Sprinchorn later wrote, “chance brought me to the Maine woods,” and it is for his paintings of rural life there that he is perhaps best known, first during the 1920s and then periodically between 1937 and 1952. Against this desire to grow as an artist were what Sprinchorn termed “almost continuous economic sieges,” and Sprinchorn’s abilities as an administrator—which resulted in his working as director of the New Gallery for a period. His work was respected by contemporaries like Robert Henri, Marsden Hartley, and the avant-garde Stettheimer sisters, and has grown in reputation since then. 11 works at the Portland Museum of Art. 4 works at the Farnsworth Museum of Art. 8 works at the Brooklyn Museum. 3 works at the Memorial Art Gallery. 1 work at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. 16 works at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 1 more image at FAP. Works Consulted: “Around the Galleries,” New York Sun 14 Jan. 1908: 6; Chris Huntington/Charlotte McGill, Carl Springchorn Admiration Society
A traditional oil on canvas still life with visible brush strokes features two and a half green-yellow pears, a golden pineapple, a paring knife, a bottle of Italian wine, and a red bowl propped up as the centerpiece on a wooden dining table. In facing the window to the right, a chair juts out from the make-shift blue backdrop. The contrasting but warm colors reflect the different origins of the items found in a classic American household. About the Artist: Born in Dresden, Germany, Schiff immigrated to the US in 1915 with her mother Lydia and father Jacob, a portrait painter. Her formative years were spent in Chicago, where she received training from her father and was featured at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1934. Her work also was exhibited by the Hadassah women’s Zionist organization of that city. Shortly thereafter, perhaps in 1935, Schiff moved to New York and took classes at the Art Students League, meanwhile showing her work at the Washington Square Outdoor Art Exhibit. Although her paintings at the New Deal Gallery collection consist of still lifes, Schiff took great pleasure in portraiture; at a 1941 show she sketched visitors to her own exhibit and then displayed them on the walls (“Art Show”). The physicist Albert Einstein was a subject of her sketching. In 1943 she married James Vrettos, then moved to Colorado in 1956. Schiff’s work took a turn toward more chimerical subject matter, described by gallery director Simon Zalkind as tableaux of paper-doll characters: “Schiff's women, alternately alluring, playful and coy are always being seen. Figuratively and often literally, they are ‘on stage’. As Schiff's work evolves through the decades her women progressively lose the appearance of physical solidity, acquiring instead cartoon-like curves and contours. Bodies are flattened and appear to float weightlessly.” Her son recalls that Schiff “remained a loving, joyous, positively spirited person until the end of her life—true to her name Luba—Luboff in Russian meaning love.” 3 more images at FAP. Sources Consulted: “Art Show Continues,” Gloverville Morning Herald 8 May 1941: 20. For additional information, a special thanks to Schiff’s son James Vrettos.
Two curtains in warm yellow and pink frame the painting from the right, with the rest of the background in a mesh of cool blues and greens in a quasi-watercolor style. The brushstrokes are evident and very thick in some parts of the background. The middle ground houses an emerald vase with seven pink tulips, six yellow tulips, and two red tulips all in full bloom. The area of the clearest focus is in the foreground, centered on the pink paint jar, with paint splotches around it, but an obvious absence of a paint brush. Even in the darkest shadows of the painting, there is no black paint used, and other colors mixed together to create darker hues. This demonstrates formal art training, because the usage of black paint, when mixed with white paint, grays out a painting. By not using black paint, the vibrant hues stand out more. About the Artist: Little is known about George Spector. He was a Russian immigrant to the United States and lived in the New York City area. Between 1913 and 1914 he got a diploma from the Cooper Union Night School of Art and received recognition for the category “Drawing from Life.” Given Spector's grasp of detail and three dimensional modeling, it seems possible that he had formal art training prior to the Cooper Union. He exhibited at the Salons of America in 1926 and 1927. 2 works at the Index of American Design. 7 more images at FAP.