Crazy person of the day. "Crazy Nora" mid-19th Century, Philadelphia, Pa. Painted in 1850 by William Winner, American (1815-1883). Historical Society of Pennsylvania, gift of A. Cuthbert Thomas 1897

Irish immigrant Honora Powers (1790-1865) was a familiar street person in Philadelphia during the 1820s and 1830s.  She reportedly “had gone mad” as a result of a fever and dissension between factions at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in 1822.  In 1871 The Sunday Dispatch carried an article by Betsey Baker who observed that “she [Nora] was a never-ceasing object of interest and sympathy…her weird ramblings, her minglings of creeds and curses, her keen wit and her scathing sarcasm, her piety and her profanity had for me greater attractions….She sold ointment purchased from the Friends of the Almshouse, loaned out books, given to her by charity for one-cent a day—she earned food by scrubbing and house-cleaning.”   

 

 

William E. Winner (c. 1815-1883) was born and practiced in Philadelphia.  He exhibited at the Academy of Fine Arts and focused on genre and portrait painting.  Other examples of his work in the collection are “Street Scene in Winter,” “The Pie Man,” “Home from School,” and “The Skaters.”
(Color photo and text courtesy of Philadelphia History Museum). (Black and white image courtesy of  The Frick Collection)

Just in: 1930's vintage impressionist landscape with factory town, original oil on canvas painting.

This is a very affordable but painterly impressionist painting probably from western Pennsylvania or eastern Ohio c. 1930's. It is 24" x 30", signed verso Joseph Leukhard and is available for purchase here

Original classical music, symphony orchestra, illustration art by Thornton Utz, American (1914-1988)

We sold this great original piece of illustration art last night. Watercolor, pencil and gouache on illustration board. Image size 11" x 14". Housed in it's original frame. Remember, our Etsy shop is open 24/7/365 and has over 1500 antique, vintage and retro items available to ship worldwide. You can find it here

Sold in 2014.

Unsigned, Boston School, impressionist painting ca. 1910. Cape Cod origin. Sold in 2014.

"300 SL" by Lisa Lanier 2015

Lisa just finished this painting of the iconic Mercedes Benz 300SL Gullwing. It is 8" square on artist board and is ready to hang. It is available for purchase here.

The Oscar Peterson Trio featuring Ray Brown on bass and Herb Ellis on guitar.

Oscar Emmanuel Peterson (1925-2007)

 Courtesy William Smith

 Courtesy Paul Hoeffler

Peterson redefined the jazz trio by bringing the musicianship of all three members to the highest level. The trio with Ray Brown and Herb Ellis was, in his own words, "the most stimulating" and productive setting for public performances as well as in studio recordings. In the early 1950s, Peterson began performing with Ray Brown and Charlie Smith as the Oscar Peterson Trio. Shortly afterward the drummer Smith was replaced by guitarist Irving Ashby, formerly of the Nat King Cole Trio. Ashby, who was a swing guitarist, was soon replaced by Kessel.^[13] Kessel tired of touring after a year, and was succeeded by Ellis. As Ellis was white, Peterson's trios were racially integrated, a controversial move at the time that was fraught with difficulties with segregationist whites and blacks.
Oscar Peterson at the Stratford Shakespearean Festival is widely regarded as the landmark album in Peterson's career, and one of the most influential trios in jazz.^{[citation needed]} Their last recording, On the Town with the Oscar Peterson Trio, recorded live at the Town Tavern in Toronto, captured a remarkable degree of emotional as well as musical understanding between three players.^[14] All three musicians were equal contributors involved in a highly sophisticated improvisational interplay. When Ellis left the group in 1958, Peterson and Brown believed they could not adequately replace Ellis. Ellis was replaced by drummer Ed Thigpen in 1959. Brown and Thigpen worked with Peterson on his albums Night Train and Canadiana Suite. Brown and Thigpen left in 1965 and were replaced by bassist Sam Jones and drummer Louis Hayes (and later, drummer Bobby Durham). The trio performed together until 1970. In 1969 Peterson recorded Motions and Emotions, featuring orchestral arrangements of pop songs such as The Beatles' "Yesterday" and "Eleanor Rigby". In the fall of 1970, Peterson's trio released the album Tristeza on Piano. Jones and Durham left in 1970.
In the 1970s Peterson formed another trio with guitarist Pass and Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen on bass. This trio emulated the success of the 1950s trio with Brown and Ellis, gave acclaimed performances at numerous festivals, and made best-selling recordings, most notably The Trio, which won the 1974 Grammy for Best Jazz Performance by a Group, and the 1978 double album recorded live in Paris. In 1974 Oscar added British drummer Martin Drew, and this quartet toured and recorded extensively worldwide. Pass said in a 1976 interview: "The only guys I've heard who come close to total mastery of their instruments are Art Tatum and Peterson."

From Wiki

The personnel changed several times over the years but Oscar always fronted an exceptional trio. The one we are interested in featured Ray Brown on bass and Herb Ellis on guitar. We are happy to offer an original oil on canvas from the 1950's. The painting is 18" x 24" and is signed T. Dole. It has no damage or in-painting and is available for purchase here

Cool Jazz Art

Courtesy here

Syncromism.

A short-lived but important movement in American modernism was called Synchromism. It helped American abstract painting become appreciated internationally.

Per Wiki: Synchromism was an art movement founded in 1912 by American artists Stanton MacDonald-Wright (1890-1973) and Morgan Russell (1886-1953). Their abstract "synchromies," based on an approach to painting that analogized color to music, were among the first abstract paintings in American art. Though it was short-lived and did not attract many adherents, Synchromism became the first American avant-garde art movement to receive international attention.^[1] One of the difficulties inherent in describing Synchromism as a coherent style is connected to the fact that some Synchromist works are purely abstract while others include representational imagery.

 Stanton MacDonald-Wright 1948 Archive of American Art

Portrait of Morgan Russell 1918 by Amedeo Modigliani. The Athenaeum.

Synchromism was developed by Stanton MacDonald-Wright and Morgan Russell while they were studying in Paris during the early 1910s.^[6] From 1911 to 1913, they studied under the Canadian painter Percyval Tudor-Hart, whose color theory connected qualities of color to qualities of music, such as tone to hue and intensity to saturation.^[7] Also influential upon MacDonald-Wright and Russell were the paintings of the Impressionists, Cézanne, and Matisse, which heavily emphasized color over drawing.^[8] Russell coined the term "Synchromism" in 1912, in an express attempt to convey the linkage of painting and music.

The first Synchromist painting, Russell's Synchromy in Green, exhibited at the Paris Salon des Indépendants in 1913. Later that year, the first Synchromist exhibition by Macdonald-Wright and Russell was shown in Munich.^[9] Exhibitions followed in Paris in October 1913 and in New York in March 1914. Macdonald-Wright moved back to the United States in 1914, but he and Russell continued separately to paint abstract synchromies.^[10] Synchromism remained influential among artists well into the 1920s, though its purely abstract period was relatively brief.^[11] Many synchromies of the late 1910s and 1920s contain representational elements. At no time, though, did Macdonald-Wright or Russell achieve the level of critical or commercial success they had hoped for when they introduced Synchromism to the United States. It was not until after Russell's death and late in Macdonald-Wright's life that extensive museum and scholarly attention was paid to their highly original achievements. Other American painters who experimented with Synchromism include Thomas Hart Benton, Andrew Dasburg, Patrick Henry Bruce, and Albert Henry Krehbiel.^[12] 

The earliest extended discussion of Synchromism appeared in the book Modern Painting: Its Tendency and Meaning (1915) by Willard Huntington Wright. Wright was a literary editor and art critic and the brother of Stanton Macdonald-Wright, and the book was secretly co-authored by Stanton. It surveyed the major modern art movements from Manet to Cubism, praised the work of Cézanne (at the time relatively unknown in the United States), denigrated "lesser Moderns" such as Kandinsky and the Futurists (and, of course, the Orphists), and predicted a coming age in which color abstraction would supplant representational art. Synchromism is presented in the book as the culminating point in the evolution of modernism. Willard Huntington Wright never acknowledged that he was writing about his own brother's work.^[13]

Three other extended treatments of Synchromism can be found in the catalogue by Gail Levin that accompanied a major traveling exhibition organized the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1978, Synchromism and American Color Abstraction, 1910-1925, in Marilyn Kushner's catalogue for a 1990 Morgan Russell retrospective at the Montclair Museum, and in Color, Myth, and Music: Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Synchromism by Will South, a catalogue-biography published in conjunction with a three-museum exhibition of the artist's work in 2001. Levin and South are the two art historians most responsible for
attracting scholarly and public attention to Synchromism, a movement that has often occupied a minor place in twentieth-century art-history textbooks.

Synchromism is based on the idea that color and sound are similar phenomena and that the colors in a painting can be orchestrated in the same harmonious way that a composer arranges notes in a symphony.^[2] Macdonald-Wright and Russell believed that, by painting in color scales, their visual work could evoke the same complex sensations as music. As Macdonald-Wright said,"Synchromism simply means 'with color' as symphony means 'with sound.'"^[3] The phenomenon of "hearing" a color or the pairing of two or more senses--synesthesia—was also central to the work of Wassily Kandinsky, who was developing his own synesthetic paintings, or "compositions," in Europe at approximately the same time.

The abstract "synchromies" are based on color scales, using rhythmic color forms with advancing and reducing hues. They typically have a central vortex and explode in complex color harmonies. The Synchromists avoided using atmospheric perspective or line, relying solely on color and shape to express form. Macdonald-Wright and Russell were among a number of avant-garde artists at work in the period immediately before World War I who believed that realism in the visual arts had long since reached a point of exhaustion and that, to be meaningful in the modern world, painting needed to sever any ties to older ideas about perspective and to literary or anecdotal content.

The earliest Synchromist works were similar to Fauvist paintings. The multi-colored shapes of Synchromist paintings also loosely resembled those found in the Orphism of Robert and Sonia Delaunay.^[4] MacDonald-Wright insisted, however, that Synchromism was a unique art form and "has nothing to do with Orphism and anybody who has read the first catalogue of Synchromism ... would realize that we poked fun at Orphism." The Synchromists' debts to Orphism remain a source of debate among art historians. Their approach more clearly owed something to Cubism. The Synchromists made use of the broken planes of the Cubists, but their lavishly colored areas of paint sometimes looked, as the art historian Abraham Davidson has described them, like "eddies of mist, the droplets of which collect to form parts of a straining torso....To find anything like this in American painting one has to wait for the color-field canvases of Jules Olitski in the 1960s. All images courtesy Wiki Images 

A highlight of 2014 for Hazel Home Art and Antiques was the acquisition and sale of this period Synchromist painting. It was only initialed and dated 1957 which is a bit late but it is still mid-century. 24 x 18, o/c.  As you can see, it is almost completely non-representational with just hints of birds in the painting. The palette is heavily influenced by the works of MacDonald-Wright and Russell.

"Cabaret" by Bud Grossman Philadelphia, Pa. 1955 Sold in 2014

We really loved this painting. It just screamed out mid-century "Mad Men" cocktail and conversation time. Well exhibited and a prize winner. We agree.

Portrait of Emile Albert Gruppe (1896-1978)

Great portrait of Emile Gruppe by one of his students E. Bushnell. It is 18 x 24 sight size in its original period frame. It also has brass plaque that reads First Prize Meriden Conn. 1981

  Available for purchase here

Portraits of famous artists are really cool and this one sure is. No damage at all and not dirty either. Smoke free home. Titled "Emile" on stretcher. Gruppe's paintings are often seen in major auction galleries, such as Sotheby's, Christies, and Skinners. Auction prices have risen steadily and exceed most Rockport School artists. Gruppe is among the most prominent of Rockport, MA artists, a group that that includes: Anthony Thieme, Marguerite Pierson, Antonio Cirino, W Lester Stevens, and Aldro Hibbard.

Here are a few examples of Gruppe's Cape Ann/New England work. Courtesy here

Emile Gruppes website

In stock now: Delightful 19th century American folk art painting. New England origin.

We also sell earlier, more traditional art and antiques. This charming 9" x 15" oil on canvas was painted by Mamie Crump age 11 years. No in-painting or damage at all. Ready to hang. If you would like to learn more about New England folk paintings visit the Shelburne Museum here

 This painting is available for purchase here

This couple bought a 1930's midwestern farm still life painting and a toy steam engin.

"with love to the everyday miracle" by Sister Corita Kent American 1918-1986

The artist that truly reflected the 1960's mantra of "make love, not war" definitely was Sister Corita Kent.  Not only did she carry this message in her art she lived it throughout her life of devotion and spiritualism. 

Recently Google used her as their artist of the day and so people are re-interested in this fascinating woman.  The most complete bio and evaluation of Sister's work can be found here Please check it out it is really wonderful.

  Corita Kent (November 20, 1918 – September 18, 1986), aka Sister Mary Corita Kent, was born Frances Elizabeth Kent in Fort Dodge, Iowa. Kent was an artist and an educator who worked in Los Angeles and Boston. She worked almost exclusively with silkscreen and serigraphy, helping to establish it as a fine art medium. Her artwork, with its messages of love and peace, was particularly popular during the social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. Kent designed the 1985 United States Postal Service annual "love" stamp. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corita_Kent https://www.corita.org/ #popart #art #sistercorita

Over 700 million copies of her 1985 LOVE stamp for the U.S Postal Service were printed.

 

We are selling an original, signed serigraph, from 1967. Image size is 23" x 35", original 1970 framing company stamp verso. Newspaper review of a documentary called "Primary Colors: The Story of Corita" verso. Non-reflective glass.  It is available here

 

Quote text: Conversion is revolution is growth is living in a way appropriate to the coming age and is not understood by the present age which is passing away God descends man ascends and they move on For you WITH LOVE TO the everyday miracle that's me! that's my color!