Given this year’s 366 days, New Yorkers viewed Leap Day as an extra opportunity to squeeze in a bit more shopping. And the best shopping in town was to be had at Sanford Smith’s art show, Works on Paper, presented at the Seventh Regiment Armory. Seventy international dealers installed themselves in the swank setting and unveiled their finest offerings.
Running through Monday, March 5, this year’s 20th Anniversary event celebrated “Women in the Arts,” and most of the exhibitors played to the theme, either featuring paintings in which females were depicted or showing art created by women artists.
As a result, several contemporary female artists had their day at the armory. Women of generations past, some forgotten, others overshadowed by male counterparts, were given an opportunity to shine anew before the elite audience that annually attends Works on Paper.
At the gala preview, proceeds of which support the Citizens’ Committee for Children, Boston artist Cheryl Warwick was in attendance at the stand of Dolan/Maxwell, where her works were featured. With pieces placed in corporate and museum collections, Warwick’s multimedia works are reminiscent of quilts that present everyday objects, citing dreams and memories with a universal theme that give the works their layered impact.
Nearby, Childs Gallery, the longest running of Boston’s Newbury Street galleries, showed a suite of rare etchings by Queen Victoria that were created during the second of her many pregnancies. The works on paper captured the essence of Childs’ mission, to bring to the collector of modest means fine works of art by seeking out the unusual, the overlooked and the out-of-taste. By show’s end, Queen Victoria’s works had proven their popularity.
Alexander Gallery, New York City, provided a glimpse into the life of the aristocrats who lived in Russia in the years prior to the Revolution. A series of detailed watercolors by Russian-born Marianma Davidoff documented the visually enchanting existence she lived as the child of Russian elite. The works, according to dealer Alex Acevedo, were also featured in a book about her life.
Acevedo, whose specialty spans the Fifteenth through the Nineteenth Century, also hung works by French classicist Pierre Paul Prud’hon and American Peter Caledon Cameron.
Manhattan dealer DFN Gallery brought the focus on female artists into the present with works by Susan Grossman and Susan Shatter. Both working, the artists’ oeuvres are stylistically different. Grossman’s representational panoramas trick the eye, luring viewers from a distance to see them as outsized black and white photographs when they are actually highly articulated charcoal and pastels on paper.
Shatter, on the other hand, paints large landscapes and seascapes that defy preconceived opinion about watercolor. Both artists commanded strong viewer interest as soon as the show opened.
Jill Bokor of Sanford Smith Fine Art, Great Barrington, Mass., featured the work of contemporary painter Judy Pfaff. An untitled four-panel mixed media work of woodblock, digital elements and painting that hung on the center wall wove landscape, architecture and color together to suggest a natural environment. Another living artist featured here was Will Barnet, whose iconic pencil on vellum study “Introspection” was hung nearby. Barnet, now well into his 90s, made an appearance at Works on Paper on preview night. At the front of the Smith/Bokor stand was “Midtown Deli” a 3-D lithograph by Red Grooms, which sported a red sold button within minutes of the show’s opening.
Dominic J. Taglialatella, founder of DJT Fine Art, New York City, showing for the first time this year, offered the buying public “Warhol’s Women.” The iconic display from the master of Pop played well with the crowd.
Elsewhere around the floor, Peter Fetterman of Santa Monica, Calif., showed a broad range of photographic works that touched soul, the heart and the eye. Sebastião Salgado’s black and white humanist photos, including “Dinka Man in the Kei Camp, Africa,” riveted viewers. Lillian Bassman’s high-style fashion highlighted a different photographic genre. Julia Margaret Cameron, an early professional female photographer, was represented by several works, of which “We Love America” stood out. Additionally, “Women: A Celebration,” a collection of photographs featuring the expected celebrities and the unexpected, such as Mother Teresa, was offered.
Photography in the booth of Jean Paul Perrier of Barcelona, Spain, stood like dark sculptures of the human form. From the eye of Miguel Arnal, the 1960 series immortalized models with limbs like animals, and caught the essence of life study in sensuous nude photographs. A selection of knotted works by Julian Aragoneses added an abstract and metaphysical element to the booth’s offerings. Aragoneses, who has been called an avatar of the god Shiva, believes there exists a commitment between the parts of his work that cannot be undone. Meanwhile, balancing †or perhaps tying together †the vastly divergent styles of Spain’s new breed were classic examples of Picasso’s genius as defined in crayon and ink.
Simon Capstick-Dale Fine Art, New York City, showed Twentieth Century masters. Included was Picasso’s later period pencil on paper, “Nu Couché,” 1972, Leger’s “Composition Murale,” 1950, a gouache on paper, and Degas’s “Étude de Nu,” a charcoal over charcoal counterproof.
Framont Gallery, Greenwich, Conn., led with a work by the American Impressionist Martha Walter. Backing it were works by Picasso and other Modernist masters.
Also mining the Modern past was Jan Juffermans Jr of Kunsthandel Juffermans, the Netherlands. A collection of 15 works by Kees van Dongen put the Fauvist painter’s prints in the spotlight.
Accorsi Arts, East Aurora, New York City, specialists in postwar and contemporary art, showed Fernand Léger’s “Montparnasse,” a 1954 watercolor, gouache and pencil on paper along with Spanish artist Antoni Tapies’s “American Eagle,” 1953, an ink on paper, and Marino Marini’s “Horse and Rider,” 1952, ink, pastel and gouache on paper. Warhol’s “Chanel #5,” a screen print on museum board, one of an edition of 91, seemed glaring in contrast, although popular.
Jim Elkind of Lost City Arts, New York City, filled a booth with Harry Bertoia monotypes. The reasonably priced ink on rice paper studies provide a “good entry point” for buyers, stated Elkind.
Ohio dealer Thomas French is the agent for the heirs of George Bellows, whose iconic works were prominently featured in the booth. However, Thomas Hart Benton’s “A Singing” and Childe Hassam’s “Fifth Avenue Noon,” 1916, captured the spirit of postwar America as it extended from the Main Street to Wall Street.
Michael Verne of Cleveland, Ohio, showed a collection of woodblock prints that ranged from Ito Shinsui, who Verne called “the most famous painter of women,” to Daniel Kelly, whose outsized works expand traditional woodblock to include lithography, cement block printing, chine colle and hand coloring techniques. Melding old with new, Verne specializes in contemporary artists working in Japan.
Art of Japan, Medina, Wash., also melded the traditional with Twentieth Century works. Among them, a dramatic likeness by Kunimasa, 2003, titled “Oneo Eisaburo as Saga no Goro.”
The globalism of the show was reinforced by works in the stand of Berlin, Germany, dealer Jörg Maas. German Expressionism was well represented by the community of Dresden artists working under the name Brücke (Bridge). Judging by the selection and sales of woodcuts, lithos and etchings by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Herman Max Pechstein and Emil Nolde, it was clear that the five have been reevaluated and come up winners with buyers.
The Adam Gallery of London made a special presentation of the works of Richard Cartwright. Intended to be “spiritual, transcendent, mysterious,” this is the largest group collection of Cartwright’s work that has been shown outside of the United Kingdom. Working in pastels, an unusual medium for works as large as his, he layers the medium to deliver an intense feeling of color and atmosphere.
Miller Block Gallery, Boston, showing the work Lori Nix, found its booth filled throughout the show. Nix’s work bends the line between truth and illusion with images that at first appear to be computer-generated art but are, in fact, photographs of actual models the artist builds and paints. Eerie, many allude to the horror movies of past decades.
Kay Ruane, a survivor of a major plane crash, also walks that fine line between truth and art, but in a different way. Contorting herself into a variety of poses, she is photographed by her husband. The images then become studies as she then creates graphite and gouache works from them, adding unusual backgrounds and elements.
Finally, the galleries that have become the standard by which all others are judged maintained their posture at Works on Paper.
James Graham & Sons devoted its space to the artist David Fertig, whose boldly rendered British battle scenes relating to the Napoleonic era call to mind the Romanticism of Delacroix and Gericautt. His energetic loose brush strokes, however, are more rooted in Modernist abstraction.
At Hirschl & Adler, Joseph Goddu had at hand a remarkable body of works that included small graphic collections by Josef Albers and Donald Judd. The work of Susan Headley van Campen, including “Bouquet,” 2006, put the gallery in the mainstream of the show’s theme.
Always sensitive to the broad range of tastes at shows, Hirschl & Adler maintained balance by showing a range of works by Frederick Rosen, including “Brooklyn Bridge,” 1954, and John Singer Sargent, albeit the latter was represented by “Study of a Salmon,” in distinct contrast to the society portraits most closely associated with him.
Historicana, Burlingame, Calif., devoted its display to the works of Arthur Szyk, one of the foremost illuminators of the Twentieth Century. Syzk’s work was published in illustrated copies of Andersen’s Fairy Tales, the Arabian Nights Entertainments and the Canterbury Tales, as well as numerous periodicals of the period. Although not part of a movement, interest in Syzk’s work was rekindled in the early 1990s. With interest again welling up, the display attracted plenty of attention.
Rather than take anything too seriously, Beetles Gallery, London, presented amusing portraits and caricatures from the early Twentieth Century. Among the works were Edmund Dulac’s watercolor with pen and ink, 1907, titled “As So Arrogant a Claim All the Courtiers Burst into Laughter.” Other artists included Ronald Searle, Sir Max Beerbohm, Poweys Evans and Arthur Rackman, all of who knew how to draw an ounce of pretension from the most haughty.
With the 20th Anniversary edition of Works on Paper now a memory, Sanford Smith predicts that “even with the new challenges facing art shows at the armory, we fully expect to be here to celebrate our 25th anniversary!”
Only a master could make it look so easy.
The New York Antiquarian Book Fair, promoted by Sanford Smith and Associates, will take place April 4‶ at the Seventh Regiment Armory. For information, 212-777-5218 or www.sanfordsmith.com.
