Catalog: Fine Art (124)

Post impressionist oil painting of a partial nude in blue tones. Reminiscent of Picasso's Blue Period. Signed lower right and presented in original dark wood frame with white insert. Masonite panel measures 20 x 30 inches.

A rare color lithograph by Wayne Thiebaud titled Coronado signed, numbered 5 of 15 and dated 1956. overall sheet size 16 x25 12.5 x 21.5 inches. A beautiful colorful modernist image of sail boats off the San Diego coast with the old Coranado Hotel in the left of the image. A very scarce print in excellent condition some slight discoloration from a previous matte.

Biography

A painter of pop-art realism combined with a great respect for traditional methods and subject matter, Wayne Thiebaud is one of the most prominent of the Bay Area painters in California in the latter part of the 20th century. His reputation spread far beyond his own state. In his painting, he focuses on the commonplace in a way that suggests irony and objective distance from his subjects. He also makes a point of keeping an independent distance from the New York art scene. He was born in Mesa, Arizona, in 1920, and for one summer during his high school years he apprenticed at the Walt Disney Studio and then studied at an Los Angeles trade school the next summer. He earned a degree from Sacramento State College in 1941. From 1938 to 1949, he worked as a cartoonist and designer in California and New York and served as an artist in the United States Army. In 1950, at the age of thirty, he enrolled in Sacramento State where he earned a Master's Degree in 1952 and began teaching at Sacramento City College. In 1960, he became assistant professor at the University of California, Davis, where he remained through the 1970s and influenced numerous artist students. However, he did not have much following among Conceptualists because of his adherence to basically traditional disciplines, emphasis on hard work rather than creativity, and love of realism. On a leave of absence, he spent time in New York City where he became friends with Willem De Kooning and Franz Kline and was much influenced by these abstractionists as well as Pop Artists Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. During this time, he began a series of very small paintings based on images of food displayed in windows, and he focused on their basic shapes. Returning to California, he pursued this subject matter and style, isolating triangles, circles, squares, etc. He also co-founded the Artists Cooperative gallery, now Artists Contemporary Gallery, and other cooperatives including Pond Farm, having been exposed to the concept of cooperatives in New York. In 1960, he had his first one-man shows in San Francisco at the Museum of Art and New York at the Staempfli and Tanager galleries. These shows received little notice, but two years later, a 1962 New York Sidney Janis Gallery exhibition officially launching Pop Art, brought him national recognition although he disclaimed being anything other than a painter of illusionistic form. In 1963, he turned increasingly to figure painting, wooden and rigid with each detail sharply emphasized; in 1967 his work was shown at the Biennale Internationale, and in 1985, he was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

William Keith original oil painting wooded landscape with cattle by a lake. Oil on panel signed lower right canvas measuring Approx 14 x 22 a magnificent example of this famed California and American artists work. William Keith rivalled Thomas Hill as the most accomplished and successful landscape painter working in California during the 19th century. After two years spent studying art in Düsseldorf, Paris and Boston, Keith returned to California in 1872 as a sophisticated painter whose work drew on several prevailing styles popular in the cultural centers of the world. Many of his paintings reflect the influence of the "Hudson River School" and depict sublime mountain scenery à la Church or Bierstadt. But at the same time as he was painting alpine panoramas, Keith also focused on the more intimate landscapes of the French Barbizon movement that had come to the forefront of Parisian art appreciation during the 1860s. Barbizon painters adopted a more natural and impressionistic style than that of the academic painters; their works often communicate a rougher and stronger presence of nature than sweeter, more sentimental academic landscapes. Major works of the English painter John Constable, exhibited at Paris Salons of the 1820s, influenced the Barbizon painters in the direction of this stronger style. Works held: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Metropolitan Museum; Crocker Museum (Sacramento); Art Institute of Chicago; Oakland Museum; Stanford University; Boston Museum; De Young Museum San Francisco; California State Capitol.

Winter Landscape Oil on canvas by Fred Wagner 24" L x 36"W. overall framed size 27 x 33. Signed lower right. Wagner exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy over 35 times from 1906-1940, winning prizes in 1914 and 1922. Wagner exhibited at the Carnegie 14 times from 1898 - 1925. He showed two works at the Armory Show, and exhibited 11 times at the Corcoran between 1907 - 1935. He had a special exhibit of 100 pastels, at the Corcoran in April 1924. Wagner exhibited at the National Academy of Design in 1884, 1907, 1925 and 1928.