Blue Green Orange
A Color Theme
A Cézanne painting "exhibited in 1936
and hidden away ever since" is now on view.
L'Estaque aux toits rouges /
L'Estaque with Red Roofs
Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), French
Oil on canvas, 32" x 26" (w x h), 1883-85
Christie's 2021 auction estimate: $35,000,000-55,000,000 USD
In 1876, seven years before he started painting this, Cezanne wrote to his friend and mentor Camille Pissarro about the village of L'Estaque. "It's like a playing card, red roofs against the blue sea… It's olive trees and pines, which always keep their leaves. The sun here is so frightful that it seems to me the objects are silhouetted not in white or black, but in blue, red, brown, violet. I could be wrong, but it seems to me that this is the opposite of modeling."
Christie's Notes (edited):
This painting,is a view of L'Estaque, the Provençal fishing village where the artist forged a radical new way of depicting the world around him. Exhibited in 1936 and hidden away ever since, this will finally come back on view as part of The Cox Collection: The Story of Impressionism, taking place at Christie's New York on November, 11, 2021.
While Cézanne is primarily associated with Aix-en-Provence, the village of L'Estaque near Marseille was a place that he returned to again and again when he sought sanctuary. He holidayed there as a child with his mother. In 1870, when Cézanne left Paris to avoid conscription into the army following the start of the Franco-Prussian War, he escaped to L'Estaque. In 1878, Cézanne once again fled to L'Estaque to avoid the disapproval of his father, who'd discovered Cézanne's semi-secret family life with his unwed partner Hortense and their illegitimate son, Paul.
L'Estaque aux toits rouges transformed the landscape into planes and facets of color. Shadows are gone. Provençal light is depicted through a brighter palette, while the balance between the trees, buildings and the flat blue sea vibrates at a perfect tension, evoking the intense heat of the south.
Christie's Auction House video about this art (2:17) HERE.
Christies web page about this, including a circa 1935 postcard photo of this view is HERE.
Nasturtiums in a Blue Ginger Jar /
Oost-Indische kers in een blauwe gemberpot
Jan Voerman (1857-1941), Dutch
Watercolor on paper, 8" x 12" (w x h), , circa 1935
Wiki (edited):
Dutch painter Jan Voerman was also known as Jan Voerman Sr. He studied at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten (State Academy of Fine Arts) in Amsterdam and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp. Around 1900, Voerman painted the clouds above the IJssel river. In Hattem, many of his works can be seen in the Voerman Museum Hattem, Netherlands.
He married Anna Henriette Gezina Verkade, in 1889 in Amsterdam. They had two sons, Jan Voerman Jr. (1890–1976) and Tijs Voerman (1891–1970), who both became illustrators.
His art is in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, the Museum de Fundatie in Zwolle, the Voerman Museum Hattem, the Drents Museum and the Stedelijk Museum Zutphen, all in the Netherlands.
You can put together a 108-piece jigsaw puzzle of this painting online HERE.
Bluebirds and Persimmon
Andrea Johnson (1954 ), American
Acrylic on canvas, 11" x 17" (w x h), 2020
Sold, Winfield Gallery, Carmel-by-the-Sea, California
Andrea Johnson is the daughter of Barbara Johnson, painter, printmaker and member of the Carmel (California) Art Association. Her life-long involvement with art and nature has manifested intricately detailed watercolors and acrylics with nature themes.
Timeline
1954, Born, Key West, FL
1974, Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History, Annual Watercolor Show, Award
1975, Purchase Prize-Lodi Annual at Barengo Cellars, Lodi, CA
1975, Award, Painting and Ceramics-Monterey County Annual, Monterey Peninsula Museum of Art
1976, BFA Painting, University of California Santa Barbara, CA
1979, Graduate work in Painting, California State Univ. Long Beach, CA
1999, Monterey Peninsula Museum Biennial Award of Merit
Andrea Johnson, daughter, has a web page with art at the Carmel Art Association is HERE.
Barbara Johnson, mother, has a web page with art at the Carmel Art Association is HERE.
You can put together a 25-piece jigsaw puzzle of this painting online HERE.
Lake George, Autumn, 1922
Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986), American
Oil on canvas, 27" x 15" (w x h), 1922
Private Collection
Minnesota Marine Art Museum, Winona, Minnesota
Museum Notes (edited):
Nicole Chamberlain-Dupree,
Executive Director, Minnesota Marine Art Museum
Lake George Autumn, from 1922, is a small, personal work of blues, greens, reds and orange. It was painted at Lake George in New York, where O'Keeffe spent long summers with her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, and his family on their massive property on the southern shore of the lake.
Apparently, the Stieglitz family was "a large and sometimes boisterous clan," that would intrude on her time to paint. So, to escape them, O'Keeffe would wander the 40-acre property and enjoy (and paint) all that the land had to offer.
O'Keeffe, like many artists before and since, was an original 'social distancer.' From 1918 to 1934, her summers at the Stieglitz estate were the most productive of her career and resulted in the creation of over 200 works; over 20 of which are dedicated to Lake George.
Herbsthimmel am Meer /
Autumn Sky by the Sea
Emil Nolde (1867-1956), German
Watercolor on Japanese paper,
20" x 14" (w x h), circa 1940
Christie's 2012 auction sold for $698,500 USD
About Nolde. Christie's notes (edited):
His birth name was Emil Hassen but he later changed it to Emil Nolde after the name of the German town near where he grew up. Nolde was one of the first Expressionists. Nolde was a supporter of the Nazi party from the early 1920s. He had considered Expressionism to be a distinctively Germanic style and shared viewpoints with high level Nazi officials such as Joseph Goebbels.
Ironically, Adolph Hitler rejected all forms of modern art as "degenerate art", and Nolde's work was officially condemned by the Nazi party. Prior to that point in time Nolde had been a highly regarded and famous artist in Germany. 1,052 of Nolde's works were removed from German museums, more than those of any other artist. Some were included in the Degenerate Art exhibition of 1937.
By law he wasn't even permitted to paint. In personal protest he painted hundreds of watercolors, which he titled the "Unpainted Pictures". After World War II, Nolde was reaffirmed as a great German artist and even received the German Order of Merit, Germany's highest civilian award. A 2019 exhibition (Emile Nolde: A German Legend, The Artist during the Nazi Regime, Berlin National Gallery, 2019) examined Nolde's self-professed Nazi leanings, and the tendency of postwar art historians to downplay them.
About Nolde and This Painting. Christie's notes (edited):
Watercolor played a central role in Nolde's artistic practice from 1910 until his death in 1956. Working on highly absorbent paper that he dampened before painting, Nolde created vibrant colors flowing into one another and saturating the page in fluid, transparent pools. Two of the pre-eminent subjects in Nolde's watercolor oeuvre are flowers and the sea, both of which gave rise to extravagant, emotive displays of color. For much of his life, Nolde lived on the edge of, or close to the ocean. It was the dominant element in his native region of Schleswig-Holstein, the German portion of the Danish peninsula, and although he spent a great deal of time in Berlin, it was always to this North Sea coast that he returned.
Nolde began to work with watercolor in 1892-1898, while teaching commercial drawing at St. Gallen in Switzerland. His watercolor production from this early period, however, consists almost entirely of accurately drawn, topographically correct landscape views. After St. Gallen, it would be another decade until Nolde picked up watercolor again, this time during a stay at Cospeda, near Jena, in 1908. Nolde recounted, "I made great advances in this technique... and painting in watercolors has remained a need for me ever since... From the intimate, somewhat fussy manner of my earliest watercolors, I progressed with infinite trouble towards a freer, broader, and more flowing style, which requires especially thorough understanding of and feeling for the different types of paper and the possibilities of color."
His breakthrough at Cospeda occurred as he was painting winter landscapes en plein air, and falling snow melted onto his work, causing the colors to run into one another and to crystallize on the page. "Sometimes I also painted in the ice-cold evenings, and I enjoyed seeing the colors freeze into crystal stars and rays. I loved this collaboration with nature, in which painter, reality, and painting seemed to fuse into one entity." Although he never repeated this "collaboration with nature" in the same form, it was decisive in his development of his mature watercolor technique. In 1910, seeking to duplicate the accidental changes brought about at Cospeda by the sleet and snow, he used thick, highly absorbent rice paper that he dampened first and then saturated with layers of watercolor. The fluid, transparent colors would penetrate the paper, flowing into one another, blurring contours and altering forms; the act of creation thus became part of the picture, forms no longer delineated but seemingly conjured up out of the superimposed strata of pigment. After the page had dried, Nolde could add additional layers of paint, strengthening one or another focus of interest or heightening the free, often extravagant play of colors.
Orange, Yellow, Green, and Blue
Wolf Kahn (1927-2020), German-born, American
Pastel,20" x 17" (w x h), 1995
Private Collection
Valued at $10,000 USD, in 2019 Kahn donated it
to the Brattleboro (Vermont) Museum & Art Center
for a museum fundraising raffle.
Art historian Barbara Novak wrote, "Kahn's remarkable work in [pastels] emphasizes color — at first in austere, tonalist images, and later in brilliant, high-keyed paintings that have established his reputation as one of the most important colorists working in America today."
Kahn spent his summers and autumns in Vermont on a hillside farm, which he and his wife, the painter Emily Mason, owned since 1968. His primary residence was in New York City. They had two daughters, Cecily and Melany. Cecily Kahn, also an artist, is married to the painter David Kapp.
The Gorge
George Noyes (1864-1954), Canadian, American
Oil on canvas, 1912
Believed to be the mountains of New Hampshire
Wiki and Who Was Who in American Art (edited):
George Loftus Noyes was an American painter, born in Canada of American parents, who started painting at an early age. He was a noted landscape painter in the Boston area just after the turn of the 20th Century.
In 1901, Noyes he established a summer school and taught painting in Annisquam on the North shore of Massachusetts. One of his first students was N. C. Wyeth. In 1921 Wyeth studied with Noyes again, saying, "His color knowledge is superb and I think he will give me much help at this juncture".
Noyes first studied with English artist George Bartlett in Boston, and later studied in Paris at the ateliers of Gustave Courtois, Joseph-Paul Blanc and Paul-Louis Delance. It was there that he joined in the new enthusiasm among French painters for painting en plein air, and was undoubtedly influenced by the French Impressionist works making headlines at the time.
Noyes was able to exhibit successfully at the Paris Salon, and on his return to Boston, established himself as a landscape painter, painting many coastal paintings. Noyes was painted in Cape Cod, as well as the mountains of New Hampshire and Vermont. He lived in Boston/E. Gloucester, Massachusetts, 1893-1931; Winter Park, Florida, 1931-35; and Pittsford/Branden, Vermont, 1935-on.
He married Mabel Hall of Newtonville, Massachusetts, in 1903. Tragically, much of his work was lost in a barn fire.
North Truro Porch (Orange)
Mitchell Johnson (1964 ), American
Oil on linen, 32" x 24" (w x h), 2020
The Author's website (edited):
Mitchell Johnson, born in 1964, in Rock Hill, South Carolina, was raised in New York and Virginia. In 1990 he received an MFA from Parson School of Design. After graduating, he took a studio assistant position for artist Sam Francis which brought him to Silicon Valley, where he currently lives and works in Menlo Park, California. In the 2000s Johnson began making regular trips to New England and Asia, in particular painting trips to Truro, Massachusetts. His paintings are in over 700 private collections and 25 museum collections, including Bakersfield Museum of Art.
Johnson's paintings have appeared in numerous feature films, mostly Nancy Meyers projects, including The Holiday (2006), Crazy Stupid Love (2011), and It's Complicated (2009).
The artist's website is HERE.
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