Orange and Green Art Theme
Visual Essay
and Maybe Some with Blue
Art of Leo Gestel, Oskar Kokoschka, Elizabeth Enders, Lynne Drexler, Georgia O'Keeffe, Yulian Rich, Serge Lemoyne and Marc Chagall, in this named order.
Het land van Montfoort / The Land of Montfoort
Leo Gestel (1881-1941) Dutch
Oil on canvas, 34" x 20" (w x h), 1909
Sotheby's Auction
Leo Gestel (1881-1941) was a Dutch painter. His father Willem Gestel, the director of an art school, was also an artist and his first instructor. His uncle, Dimmen Gestel, painted with Vincent van Gogh. Leo Gestel, to make a living, created advertisements and illustrated books. As a painter he experimented with cubism, expressionism, futurism and postimpressionism. Along with Piet Mondrian and Jan Sluyters, Leo Gestel was among the leading artists of Dutch modernism. While in Paris he came in contact with the avant-garde movement. In 1913 Herwarth Walden offered him the chance to exhibit work in Berlin. Generally Gestel spent the summer in Bergen, where he joined the Bergen School. In 1929 the majority of his works were lost when a fire destroyed his studio. He moved to Blaricum in North Holland, Netherlands.
Girl with Boots
Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980) Austrian
Watercolor on paper, 19" x 26" (w x h), 1922
Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN
Oskar Kokoschka, CBE (Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) (1886-1980) was an Austrian artist, poet, playwright, and teacher best known for his intense expressionistic portraits and landscapes, as well as his theories on vision that influenced the Viennese Expressionist movement. He was deemed a degenerate by the Nazis and fled Austria in 1934 for Prague, and again fled, this time to England in 1938. After World War II artist Oskar Kokoschka, traveled across Europe painting townscapes and portraits. In the 1947 he traveled briefly to paint in the US, where he taught at the Minneapolis School of Fine Arts, now the Minneapolis College of Art & Design. Eventually, he settled in Villeneuve, Switzerland in 1953, where he lived the rest of his life. In 1966 he won the competition for the commissioned portrait of Konrad Adenauer for the German Bundestag.
Chicago
Elizabeth Enders (1939- ) American
Oil on canvas, 60" x 60" (w x h), 2022
Betty Cunningham Gallery, NY, exhibited:
Lyman Allyn Art Museum, New London, CT
Elizabeth Enders, born in 1939 in New London, CT, graduated with a B.A. from Connecticut College in 1962 and an M.A. from New York University in 1987. Her work is included in the collections of the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA; the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Canada; the Brooklyn Museum of Art, NY; Colby College Art Museum, Waterville, ME; the Detroit Institute of Arts, MI; the Florence Griswold Museum, Old Lyme, CT; Frances Young Tang Museum, Saratoga, NY; the Lyman Allyn Art Museum, New London, CT; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; the New Britain Museum of American Art, CT; the Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA; the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT; and the Whitney Museum, New York, NY, among others.
Untitled (Green and Orange)
Lynne Drexler (1928-1999) American
Gouache on paper, 25" x 19" (w x h), 1959
Private Collection
Lynne Drexler, who lived on Monhegan Island, Maine, began making landscape paintings at the age of eight, and later pursued training under Hans Hofmann and Robert Motherwell. Drexler, who loved both representational landscape painting and Abstract Expressionism, produced works that connected her two interests. She became known for a style that layered small, repetitive brush marks in vivid colors across large areas of canvas. Drexler considered herself a colorist. She was an admirer of Henri Matisse, though she also drew inspiration from classical music and opera; in the 1970s Drexler made hundreds of works based on musical pieces, in particular Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle. In 2022 Christies auctioned one of her works for $1,500,000 USD.
Anything
Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986) American
Oil on board, 16" x 20" (w x h) 1916
Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, NM
Beginning in the fall of 1915 and continuing until the following March, worked for an academic year as an art teacher at Columbia College in College Place, SC, a Methodist music school for women. She used a room as an art studio to pursue her drawing. In 1916 her friend, Pollitzer, a woman's rights activist, showed a sampling of O'Keeffe's abstract charcoal drawings made in South Carolina to an impressed Alfred Stieglitz at the 291 gallery in New York. Stieglitz wrote to O'Keeffe and said it was impossible to put into words what he felt when looking at her work. The two began a regular correspondence.
She on the Grass
Yulian Rich (1961- ), Bulgarian
Acrylic on canvas, 12" x 12" (w x h),
$330 USD
Yulian Rich, (Yulian Hristov Trichkov) was born in Sofia, Bulgaria. From 1983-1989, he studied at the Art Academy Poster, in Sofia, Bulgaria. He's a commercial artist, a web designer, and painter, exhibiting as both a commercial artist and a pure painter.
Vert, Orange, Vert / Green Orange Green
Serge Lemoyne (1941-1998) Canadian (Quebec)
Oil on canvas, 60" x 83" (w x h), 1982
Sotheby's 2011 Toronto auction sold $11,560 USD
Serge Lemoyne (1941-1998) was a Canadian artist from Quebec. He worked as a performance artist as well as creating paintings, assemblages and prints. Lemoyne explored themes such as the environment, technology, and social justice. Lemoyne's work was exhibited in Canada and internationally, and he received numerous awards throughout his career. He died in 1998 at the age of 57. The commemorative envelope for the postage stamp to celebrate the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts issued by Canada Post on September 26, 2011 features a portion of Lemoyne's work Dryden (1975).
Esquisse pour l'affiche Le ciel Bleu ou Profils vert et orange /
Sketch for the poster The Blue Sky or Green and Orange Profiles
Marc Chagall (1887-1985) Belarusian and French
Watercolor, ink and pencil on paper,
10" x 13" (w x h), circa 1964
Sotheby's 2022 auction sold $81,900 USD
Chagall biographer Jackie Wullschlager praised Marc Chagall as a "pioneer of modern art and one of its greatest figurative painters... [who] invented a visual language that recorded the thrill and terror of the twentieth century."
She adds: "On his canvases we read the triumph of modernism, the breakthrough in art to an expression of inner life that ... is one of the last century's signal legacies. At the same time Chagall was personally swept up in the horrors of European history between 1914 and 1945: world wars, revolution, ethnic persecution, the murder and exile of millions. [His home town, Vitebsk, had only 118 of 240,000 survive the Second World War.] In an age when many major artists fled reality for abstraction, he distilled his experiences of suffering and tragedy into images at once immediate, simple, and symbolic to which everyone could respond."
A 1928 Chagall oil painting, Les Amoureux, depicting Bella Rosenfeld, the artist's first wife and adopted home Paris, sold for $28.5 million at Sotheby's New York in 2017, almost doubling Chagall's 27-year-old $14.85 million auction record.
