Unique coastal landscape by leading colorist Wolf Kahn, "The Gradual Meeting of Wet and Dry II"

Wolf Kahn The Gradual Meeting of Wet and Dry II , 2000  
oil on canvas, 52 x 66 in. 

Wolf Kahn is one of the most important colorists working in America today. Born in Stuttgart, Germany in 1927, Wolf Kahn—the son of a noted Jewish musician—immigrated to the United States by way of England in 1940 through the Kindertransport. In 1945, he graduated from the High School of Music and Art in New York after which he spent time in the Navy. Under the GI Bill, he studied with the well-known teacher and abstract expressionist Hans Hoffman, becoming Hofmann's studio assistant. In 1950, he enrolled in the University of Chicago from which he graduated in 1951 with a BA.
 
Having completed his baccalaureate degree in only one year, Kahn was determined to become a professional artist. He and other former Hofmann students established The Hansa (meaning "guild"), a cooperative gallery where he had his first one man show. In 1956 he joined the Grace Borgenicht Gallery where he exhibited regularly until 1995. Mr. Kahn has received a Fulbright Scholarship, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, and an Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is a member of the National Academy of Design, as well as the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has recently completed an appointment to the New York City Art Commission. Traveling extensively, he has painted landscapes in such diverse locales as Maine, Mexico, Italy, Greece, Kenya, New Mexico, Namibia, Hawaii and Egypt. He spends his summers and autumns in Vermont on a hillside farm, which he and his wife, the painter Emily Mason, have owned since 1968. They have two daughters, Cecily and Melany. Cecily Kahn is a painter, married to the painter David Kapp.
 
The unique blend of Realism and the formal discipline of Color Field painting sets the work of Wolf Kahn apart. Kahn is an artist who embodies the synthesis of his modern abstract training with Hans Hofmann, with the palette of Matisse, Rothko's sweeping bands of color, and the atmospheric qualities of American Impressionism. It is precisely this fusion of color, spontaneity and representation that has produced such a rich and expressive body of work. A departure from his identifiable compositions of wooded New England Landscapes, this coastal piece, painted in 2000, invites the viewer into a stunning atmosphere where a subtly changing field of color dances from the suggestion of a shoreline to the disappearing horizon. 
 
Wolf Kahn regularly exhibits at galleries and museums across North America. Selected museum collections include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Hirshhorn Museum, and the Los Angeles County Museum.

Contact the gallery for additional information about this work:
art@cavaliergalleries.com or 203.869.3664
 

 

Rare Nantucket painting by Important Member of THE TEN

Edward Emerson Simmons Sconset Beach, Nantucket, 1916

oil on canvas board, 12 x 16 in. 

Edward Emerson Simmons was a key member of the group known as The Ten American Painters (or more commonly “The Ten”), an important association of artists who came together in 1897. The group was formed for the purpose of exhibiting the members' works, independent of any gallery or museum establishment, which they did successfully over the next 20 years. The Ten included other celebrated American artists such as Childe Hassam, John Twachtman, Julien Alden Weir, and William Merritt Chase.

Simmons was born in Concord, Massachusetts and was related to—as well as named after—the great writer and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. Simmons graduated from Harvard in 1874, and began his formal artistic training at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 1877. From there he went on to Paris to study at the prestigious Académie Julian, and the École des Beaux-Arts, the preeminent art school in France.

The murals that Simmons created throughout his career are perhaps his most acknowledged works, but he did produce a significant number of oil paintings as well. He achieved notable success and critical acclaim for his colorful Impressionist landscapes, several of which appeared in exhibitions produced by The Ten.

Simmons visited Nantucket on various occasions, completing this particular work in July 1916 in Sconset. The piece was later exhibited in the 1916 and 1917 exhibitions of The Ten in Providence and New York.

Simmons' public murals were created for Harvard University's Memorial Hall; the Manufacturers and Fine Arts Building at the World's Columbian Exposition held in Chicago, IL in 1893 (aka the Chicago World's Fair); The Massachusetts State House, Boston, MA; Library of Congress, Washington, DC; The Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, New York, NY; and the State Capitol buildings of St. Paul, MN and Pierre, SD.

Contact the gallery for additional information about this work: 

art@cavaliergalleries.com or 203.869.3664

Man of Steel - Feature on Alexander Krivosheiw in Luxe Palm Beach

WRITTEN BY BRADLEY NESBITT / PHOTOGRAPHY BY SONYA REVELL

View Alexander Krivosheiw's available work on our website

Historic Nantucket Maritime Painting by Maarten Platje

Maarten Platje Whaler Three Brothers arrives in Nantucket Harbour
oil on canvas, 27 1/2 x 39 5/16 in. 

This painting brings us back to 1851 as the whaler Three Brothers slowly maneuvers into Nantucketharbor surrounded by small boats.  The vessel had departed Nantucket in July of 1846 and was now returning from her Pacific voyage five years later. During this journey, the ship Three Brothers was captained by Joseph Mitchell, and owned by George and Mathew Starbuck. By this time, Whaling had become a strong, yet brutal industry. This was one of the most successful whaling ships of the Nantucket fleet, logging more than 10 whaling trips during her career. The ship Three Brothers, originally built in New Bedford in 1833, was later abandoned in the ice fields of Point Barrow in the Arctic in 1877.
 
The history of American whale fishing started with Native Americans along the north-western and north-eastern coasts. They hunted using drift whaling where they would process the whale once it had died and washed ashore. In the 16th century, European sailors sailed from America in 20 foot long boats with harpoons. The towns of Long Island are believed to have been the first to establish a whale fishery on the shores of New England sometime around 1650 and Nantucket joined in on the trade in 1690. In the early 1700’s the Nantucket whale trade depended on sighting whales off the coast of the island, harpooning them and towing them to shore.  By the 1800’s whaling vessels were outfitted to process the whales on board the ship and they ventured out on long whale fishing hunts. The end of the 1800s brought the decline of the American whaling industry with competition from new fishing technology out of Norway, a dwindling population of whales, and the rise alternate fuel sources.
 
The artist, Maarten Platje, was born in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, in 1967 and still lives and works there today.  Platje studied at the Ars Aemula Naturae Art Academy in Leiden where we was able to hone his technical skills as a draftsman and painter. Prior to his artistic studies, Platje spent much of his youth as a sailor, a period that certainly contributed to his ability to transform his impressions and observations into highly accurate and lively marine paintings later in life. In 1996 Platje was invited by the Royal Dutch Navy to embark on a frigate during NATO operations in the Mediterranean waters around the former Yugoslavia. During this voyage, he followed in the steps of the famous Dutch marine painter Willem van de Velde (1611-1693), the official artist for the Dutch Fleet in his time. This resulted in a series of paintings illustrating various naval operations which are now on a permanent display at theNaval Museum in Den Helder and at the Museum of the Marine Corps of the Royal Netherlands Navy in Rotterdam. Platje’s current body of work focuses on accurate recreations of historically important ships and regatta’s from the 18th and 19th Centuries.  This painting was created to honor the men who risked their lives on whale ships during one of the most important times in American maritime history.

Contact the gallery for additional information about this work: 
art@cavaliergalleries.com or 203.869.3664

Vibrant Works by two Prominent New England Painters, Jason Berger & Jerome Myers

Jason Berger Boatyard, Edam, Holland
oil on canvas, 31 x 39 in. 

Cavalier Galleries is pleased to present a group of works by Jason Berger as part of our exhibit of The Boston Expressionists now on view in our New York gallery. One of Boston’s most beloved modern artists, Jason Berger (1924-2010) expressed his joyful outlook on life throughout his stylistic evolution. 

Raised in Malden, MA by first-generation Jewish immigrants from Russia and Lithuania, Berger took advantage of his proximity to Boston’s cultural resources from a young age, spending hours at the Museum of Fine Arts and the Boston Public Library. He describes exploring the Newbury Street galleries where “there were many artists doing plein air painting at that time…and a lot of Boston watercolors”. Winslow Homer and John Singer Sargent were two of the region’s most celebrated and represented artists; Berger was particularly influenced by their watercolor landscapes. 

In 1947, after World War II most American artists were embracing abstraction with gusto, Jason Berger focused on representational painting, along with a group of contemporaries now known as the Boston Expressionists. Yet Berger eschewed the moody and pensive tones favored by many Boston Expressionists and instead became known for bright, vibrant, and playful canvases that reflected his personality and penchant for painting en plein air. 

Berger was awarded the Museum School’s European Traveling Fellowship, and traveled to France with his wife after graduation in 1949. His first stop was Normandy, to absorb the landscapes of Claude Monet, and then on to Paris to study with the cubist sculptor Ossip Zadkine. While in France, Berger viewed numerous exhibitions and was able to meet both George Braque and Henri Matisse. With assistance from the G.I. Bill, the Bergers were able to stay in Europe for three years. While many have felt a “European” influence in his art, Berger insisted that the “sense of motion in my paintings is a very American kind of thing.”

Upon his death in 2010, Berger’s work had been exhibited in museums nationwide, including the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA; Art Institute, Chicago, IL; Danforth Museum of Art, Framingham, MA; DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA; Fitchburg Museum of Art, Fitchburg, MA; Museum of Modern Art, NYC; Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA; Worcester Museum of Art, Worcester, MA. He has also exhibited widely in France, Mexico and Portugal. Berger’s work can be found in numerous private collections, as well as in the permanent collections of many institutions which include: Danforth Museum of Art, Framingham, MA; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA; and Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA.

Jerome Myers West 68th Street Park (NYC)
oil on canvas, 12 x 16 in.

West 68th Street Park (NYC) currently on view in our Greenwich gallery, is one of the few known representations of the original 1930s West 68th Street Central Park playground designed by Robert Moses, the master builder of twentieth-century New York City. This playground was rebuilt as Adventure Playground in 1967, and Tots Playground was added to this in 1989.

Born in Petersburg, Virginia in 1867, Myers lived in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New Orleans before he established residence in New York City in 1886. Within a year, he had enrolled in his first formal art courses at Cooper Union and, shortly thereafter, the Art Students' League, where he studied with George de Forest Brush and Kenyon Cox, both competent and learned academicians. However valuable the technical training and discipline, the young artist questioned the highly structured, conservative nature of these institutions. According to Myers, his instructors frowned upon his interest in city life. "Brush did not believe in doing the crowd," he wrote, "but to me the importance of group life became a guiding star." Responding to this impulse, Myers set out to interpret the life of the city for himself: "If ever I was to create beauty I know that it would not be by imitating the classical Greeks of Michelangelo but by expressing what was in me, as they had expressed themselves."

 Jerome Myers is best known for his paintings of New York City life during the opening decades of the twentieth century. Described as "the gentle poet of the slums," Myers found beauty and a poetic grandeur in the simple, ordinary life of the common man. He was, in fact, one of the first artists to explore and subsequently paint the life of the urban poor in this country. Myers firmly adhered to this philosophy and painted canvases that revealed his deep and abiding respect for the unpretentious life of the masses. While pioneering new thematic materials in American art, Myers also actively participated in several progressive art organizations that helped encourage and develop new directions in American art. He was, for example, one of the four original founders of the 1913 Armory show, considered to be the most significant art exhibition ever held in this country.

 Jerome Myers had his first one-person show at the Macbeth Gallery in 1908 and exhibited nationally throughout his lifetime. He received many awards, including ones at the National Academy of Design and at the Carnegie Institute, and had several important museum purchases, the Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired a painting in 1912. In 1929, he was elected to the National Academy.Myers died in New York in 1940.

Contact the gallery for additional information about these works: 
art@cavaliergalleries.com or 212.570.4696