Fall Foliage Art by Noted Artists

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Fall Foliage Art by
Noted Artists
Carl Sprinchorn, Wolf Kahn, Alma Thomas,
Werner Drewes, Tom Thomson,
Maurice de Vlaminck, and
Georgia O'Keeffe

Five works in art museums, one in a private collection, and one auctioned at Christies, Nov 8, 2022, for $15,275,000 USD after an estimate of $4,000,000 – $6,000,000 USD Note: The artist, deceased 36 years previously, of course realized none of the this money. Details below...

1
Gloria October, Shin Pond, Maine
Carl Sprinchorn, (1887-1971), American (born in Sweden)
Oil on canvas, 34" x 26" (w x h), 1946
Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine

I can look at this painting for hours, a favorite of mine.

Carl Sprinchorn made his first visit from Manhattan to north-central Maine in 1910. It was at the invitation a family friend to visit Monson, where there was a small community of Swedish immigrants. In the winter Monson was home to camps of loggers. He return to visit Monson and other locales in the North Maine Woods over the next thirty years. He spent most of his time there between 1942 and 1952. Sprinchorn's paintings, drawings, and watercolors from the Maine woods became his most popular works.

2
Green, Orange and Gray
Wolf Kahn (1927-2020), American (born in Germany)
Pastel on paper, 1997
Private Collection
Wolf Kahn was a resident of New York City, but during the summer and autumn, lived at a farm he and his wife, painter Emily Mason, bought in 1968 in West Brattleboro, Vermont. Maine's coastline interested him during vacations to Deer Isle Maine with its visual effects. In the late 1960s the coastal foggy conditions influenced a shift in his painting. Years of his monochromatic work with varying tonalities reformed to intense color. Kahn reminisced, "I began to let the color come through on my canvases . . . my pastels were always intense, and finally my painting caught up with them."

3
Autumn Leaves Fluttering in the Breeze
Alma Thomas (1891-1978), American
Acrylic on canvas, 50" x 40" (w x h), 1973
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.
Alma Thomas, an African-American artist and teacher, lived and worked in Washington, D.C.. She's recognized as a major American painter of the 20th century, best known for exuberant, colorful, abstract paintings created after her retirement from a 35-year career teaching art at Washington's Shaw Junior High School. In 2021, years after her passing, a museum sold a Thomas painting for $2.8 million.

4
Sunlit Forest (Autumn Forest)
Werner Drewes (1899- 1985), American (Born German/Poland)
Color Woodcut,
Smithsonian American Art Museum

Werner Drewes, a painter, printmaker, and art teacher, is one of the founding fathers of American abstraction. He was one of the first artists to introduce concepts of the Bauhaus school within the US. In addition to oil painting and teaching, he was a prolific printmaker. Drewes produced at least 732 fine prints, including 269 etchings and dry-points, 30 lithographs, 14 cello-prints, a lone silkscreen, and 418 woodcuts, of which 255 were in color, the one above a woodcut example.

5
The Pool
Tom Thomson (1877-1917), Canadian
Oil on canvas, 32" x 30" (w x h), 1915-1916
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Canada

Tom Thomson, during his brief 40 year life, produced roughly 400 oil sketches on small wood panels and approximately 50 larger works on canvas, including the one above. Although he died before the formal establishment of the Canadian Group of Seven, Thomson is often considered an unofficial member and his art is exhibited with the Group's art. He enjoyed and painted in the outdoors, his last few years in the wilds of Algonquin Park, a provincial park Ontario, Canada, where this painting above was painted.

6
Autumn Landscape
Maurice de Vlaminck (1876-1958), French
Oil on canvas, 22" x 18" (w x h), circa 1905
MoMA, Museum of American Art, New York, NY

Maurice de Vlaminck, a French painter, is one of the principal figures in the 1904-1908 Fauve movement, united in their use of intense color. He was one of the Fauves at the controversial 1905 Salon d'Automne exhibition. In his landscape paintings at this time he ignored the details, the landscape expressing mood through color and brushwork, like this one above.

7
Autumn Leaf II
Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986), American
Oil on canvas, 21"x 32" (w x h), 1927
The Paul G. Allen Collection
Christies NY Auction Nov 2022,
Estimate: $4,000,000 - $6,000,000 USD, Sold: $15,275,000 USD

Georgia O'Keeffe painted the art above in 1927, the year same year the Brooklyn Museum held a retrospective of her work. This was two years before O'Keeffe first visited New Mexico. She and Alfred Stieglitz, married in 1924, lived primarily in New York City but spent their summers at his father's family estate, Oaklawn, in Lake George in upstate New York, likely where this art was painted or inspired.

On November 9, 2022, achieving $1.5 billion in sales in a single evening, "Visionary: The Paul G. Allen Collection" was the biggest art sale in auction history. Pursuant to Mr. Allen's wishes, the estate dedicated all proceeds from these sales to philanthropy. Christies, with its commission, is not a philanthropy. The paintings are in private collections, investments for a few, and not shared in museums where all could enjoy this fine art. See this fabulous collection as an online flip book HERE.