Lennart Anderson studied at the school of the Art Institute of Chicago, Cranbrook Academy, and at the Art Students League under Edwin Dickinson. He is a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and is an Associate of the National Academy of Design. He has received the Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Endowment for the Arts grant, the Tiffany Foundation grant, the Rome Prize, and awards from the National Academy of Design and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has a distinguished exhibition history and his work is in the permanent collections of The Brooklyn Museum,The Cleveland Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and the Delaware Art Museum.
Best known for his large allegorical idylls, street scenes, portraits, figures and still lifes, one can feel the spirits of Degas, Piero, and Chardin, echoing through his work. Anderson, however adds to the dialog with a pitch and touch that is near perfect. He has written that "For me, painting from nature is akin to playing music.The notes are there. One tries to get them down in the proper proportion to bring out the proper impression. One seeks to disarm the objects as objects to seek for an agreement of tone that encompasses differences of color that can cross the barriers of object. It is these agreements, these similarities that float in and out that coordinate the work and allow the subject matter to have its eloquence. It amazes me how the same material can be seen in so many different ways all in an honest attempt to see it justly."
Maureen Mullarkey observed that Anderson is "[a painter] of extraordinary power. In his hands, the things of the table assume a grandeur we had missed before seeing them through his eyes. He makes of them what Velasquez did not decorative items but sacramental ones, ordinary things elevated by their service to life. ... No canon of forms and motifs, no codex of rules, can substitute for that gracious and tender assent to earthly potential that touches Anderson's work.Therein lies the genius that can not be imitated."

Rosemarie Beck's paintings of interiors with figures from the fifties and sixties gleam with a bohemian radiance. Seen now they seem to reflect their period and yet relate to certain tendencies in contemporary representational painting. Beck was always a polymath. She played the violin, worked in theater, and studied art history at NYU's Institute of Fine Arts with Erwin Panofsky. Her studio mentors included Robert Motherwell as well as Philip Guston and Bradley Walker Tomlin. She married the literary critic and Colette scholar Robert Phelps. Her pictures moved from abstract fields built from a tapestry of individual marks in the fifties, into still life tables and figures which began to coalesce into focus in the early sixties. From then on until her death she was dedicated to representation. Her later works often took on mythological subject matter.There is a consistency of touch between her earlier abstract paintings and her early figurative paintings. Hilton Kramer writing in 1963 described how "formerly Miss Beck produced a kind of abstract painting in which each stroke of the brush, very deliberate and carefully articulated, was at once annotation of light:" free, shimmering, and with a direct appeal to the retina,"and a measured unit in a complex formal structure. In her new paintings . . . she has tried to retain the plastic integrity of her abstract style while at the same time investing it with a greater range of expressive functions. One still feels the deliberate force of each stroke as both a bearer of light and a structural unit, but now it is a deeper, more literal, more circumscribed space that these strokes denote, and within that space, they are employed in the construction of figures that have a lyric as well as a plastic existence. An abstract infinitude of formal and spatial discriminations has thus given way to a more realistic rendering of observed visual fact. Yet the basic manner of painting the way the paint is applied, and the way the surface is conceived as an over-all decorative unit," remains more or less the same."Beck speaking to students at Wesleyan University in 1960 stated "I am now convinced that if the anguish of paradox is not somewhere felt," the paradox of a patch of paint being also a hand or an apple" we are still hungry; there is not enough food for the mind."

Gregory Botts is a contemporary American painter whose subject seems to be the land and sky of the whole of America. He has studios on the waterfront of Brooklyn and in the desert of New Mexico. In an outfitted Toyota van he crisscrosses the West in between teaching assignments.The landscape paintings he makes along the road serve as the compositional alphabet for larger, occasionally monumental studio paintings that mix elements from his plein-air paintings-clouds, trees and land into more abstract spatial complexes.
The critic Harold Bloom describes Botts's "marvelous still lifes of sunflowers caught against the seascape, skyscapes of Long Island.Very different from the visions of Van Gogh and Mondrian, they yet add their transcendental testimony to the same rugged agon undertaken by Van Gogh and Mondrian, to preserve a sense of the sacred in the secularized universe."

Gandy Brodie was born in New York City and grew up in the tenements on the lower east side. Essentially a self taught artist, Brodie was deeply impressed by the work of Van Gogh, Picasso, Klee, Soutine, and Mondrian, all who had an influence on his singular "expressionist"style. He rose to prominence in the mid-1950's as his work was included in important group exhibitions at the Kootz Gallery in 1953 and 1954 and at the Stable Gallery in 1954, 1957, and 1959. Between 1954 and 1961 his work was also included in a number of annual and biennial exhibitions at the Whitney Museum Of American Art.The Phillips Collection, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art all hold work by Gandy Brodie in their permanent collections, and artists from Hans Hofmann to Willem de Kooning had paintings of Brodie's in their personal collections. Writing in The New York Times, critic Grace Glueck observed that "Brodie reveled in the materiality of paint, stroking or palette-knifing it on in thick, rich impastos to form a surface that turns the viewer's eye into an organ of touch,"and the two floral paintings here are quintessential examples of Brodie's powerfully accreted surfaces. It is as if he could best discover the emotional life of things, and by implication his apprehension of the world itself, by first embedding them deeply, and then coaxing them out. The great art historian, Meyer Shapiro, was a particular champion of Brodie's work, and he observed the following: "Characteristic of Gandy and most essential in his self- awareness as well as in his vision of nature was his haunted sense of the fragility and solitude of living things. In fidelity to those feelings and to a poetic attraction, he painted the little bird, the eggs in the nest, the fallen branch, the wilted flower, in a long patient effort to realize their mysterious qualities through a painted surface as material and as exposed to time as the objects themselves.Very early when I first met him he yearned for the noble in art as a model of self-transcendence. Of this personal goal his art, I believe, is a true fulfillment."

Robert De Niro, Sr. was an important postwar artist whose paintings conjoined abstract and expressionist methods with classical compositions and subject matter. Part of the now legendary New York School of the forties and fifties, De Niro painted traditional representational subject matter-landscapes, still lifes, and figures-but used these themes primarily as formal constructs for exploring the fertile possibilities inherent in paint, color, and form. De Niro's style of gestural expression places his work within the abstract expressionist discourse but it nonetheless remains firmly grounded in European art, specifically that of the French modernists Pierre Bonnard,Andre Derain, Henri Matisse, and Chaim Soutine. Born in Syracuse, New York, De Niro was something of a prodigy and at age 18, he attended Black Mountain College in North Carolina where he studied under Josef Albers. He returned to New York in 1941, to study with Hans Hofmann, and Hofmann considered De Niro one of his finest students.
De Niro quickly achieved critical acclaim in New York and in 1946 had his first solo show at Peggy Guggenheim's gallery, Art of This Century. Throughout the fifties he exhibited at the Charles Egan Gallery alongside artists such as Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Philip Guston. In the 1960's, he moved to Paris, thanks in large part to the patronage of collector Joseph Hirshhorn. He returned to America and worked in San Francisco and New York, where he died in 1993.
De Niro's work is represented in major American museums including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and the Corcoran Gallery of Art,Washington, D.C., the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, among others.

There has always been something in Leon Hartl's work that seems oddly detached from his time. His lovely refined landscapes and still lifes place him in a tangential position to Modernism and the succeeding movements in American painting. Hartl was a French painter who lived and worked in New York for more than fifty years. He was trained as a dyer. His earlier work displays an ingenious detailing almost like Persian miniature painting or cloisonné. In his later work Fairfield Porter astutely observes that there is a superficial resemblance to Arnold Friedman, principally due to the modified pointillism they both employed. However, Hartl's still lifes are calm where Friedman's are agitated and they suggest an atmosphere of almost Chinese timelessness. There is also something of the hermetic stillness of Morris Graves's still lifes or the occasional tabletop arrangements of Balthus. Hartl's late still lifes possess a tangible albeit subdued color atmosphere.The values are autumnal in tone, the still life objects like porcelains from another era. Fairfield Porter, one of Hartl's most dedicated supporters observed,"He doesn't fit current American categories. The lack of negative elements in his sweet subject matter, which shows only the prettiest aspects of landscapes, still lifes and girls, goes against the grain of the existentialist cult of sincerity that values violence, ill-adjustment and awkwardness. More than other paintings today, for a painter, Hartl's paintings are supremely about spaces and volumes expressed in the colors and textures of paint.Their double appeal, both extremely professional and very ordinary, gives them a quality of endurance."The poet and critic James Schuyler wrote to Porter,"Hartl seems to me to be about joy and permanence, beyond a point of view, a comment or a moral, an exaltation in repose." Hartl's admirers included not only figures from the circle around Fairfield Porter. Marsden Hartley, in a note to Milton Avery, suggested that the two might exhibit together along with Hartl. Still Life with Melon #1 bears remnants of a label from Peridot Gallery and was probably shown there in the artist's 1961 exhibition.A reviewer of that exhibition wrote that Hartl "fills atmospheres with pure breezes, smells and colors of a virgin nature.The bowls and vases are often the same ones he painted thirty years ago, the bouquets as fresh as if cut this morning."

The same month that he made this drawing, Hartley wrote to Adelaide Koontz: "I know these forms and lines so well for I have not only climbed everywhere to see the masses of them at a distance but I have climbed in and through them and know the inside of them as well–and mountains being a language with me–nothing looks strange or bizarre . . . the main forms and the vegetation are just my own country all over again,”just more grandiose in volume and I have never made a move in my life that was more important to me than coming here." Hartley arrived in Hamburg for his second visit to Germany in May of 1933, shortly after Hitler came to power. Despite an obvious atmosphere of cultural intolerance and social and political persecution, Hartley enjoyed the old world ambience of Hamburg and by August he was focused on reaching the Bavarian Alps in order to draw and paint. In the summer of 1933 quickly adapting to the quietude of alpine village life, he made drawings, paintings and lithographs. First he tackled the Waxenstein peaks, teepee like vertical mountains.These tall slender forms can be seen in prints, paintings and in the present sheet in delicate sepia ink dated Oct 29, 1933. Michael Brenson wrote that "Hartley was not interested in the sense of mountainous infinity that Caspar David Friedrich wanted to paint. Hartley pulled the mountains close to him. He believed that God could be found in them, and he wanted, respectfully, to make that God his. The Alps, he wrote,"help me 'in time of trouble.' "In fact, Hartley described his Bavarian stay to Steiglitz as "the shrine of my delivery."
The work that Hartley made in the Bavarian Alps was direct and unforced and without the symbolic program he'd brought to mountain imagery in Mexico. Hartley's experience working in the Bavarian Alps clearly lead him into the last great flowering of his work in Maine, Dogtown and Nova Scotia.

Anne Harvey was an American artist who worked primarily in France. Her admirers included Giacometti (who bought a painting), Calder (who commissioned a painting,) Miro, Brancusi (her first teacher) and Duchamp (who offered to arrange a show of her work in America just before he died.) She exhibited her work occasionally, first in Chicago in the thirties and later in Paris, and then as part of both exhibitions of women artists at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of this Century.Texts by Patrick Waldberg, Brancusi and Andre Masson accompanied her exhibitions. Lawrence Campbell reviewing her 1971 memorial exhibition at the Robert Schoelkopf Gallery describes the singular quality of her line. He writes,"In her work we can truly sense what the privacy of the expression,"travailler après la nature"can mean to an artist as withdrawn and secretive as she was.The act of trying to draw the grain of a board on the studio floor-her studio was wherever she was, indoors or out-unfailingly triggered imaginative responses. She saw patterns inside other patterns, and these hair-like patterns became quirky fine ink lines or in paintings, paint, meandering, eddying, dissolving, disappearing, then coming into focus elsewhere, as though the wood grain pushed her ever deeper into a world she could see as well as invent at the same time." John Ashbery, in a 1966 Art News Annual writing about American painters in Paris describes her ". . . curious metaphysical still lives . . . that look conventional during the first few seconds of glimpsing, but this effect is quickly replaced by a perception of the probing anguish of an almost Jamesian dissecting eye . . . a curious anxiety, tempered by the exhilaration is the result."

Wolf Kahn is regarded as one of America's most prominent and influential landscape painters.An intense involvement with light and color dominates his work, and redefines the actual world of nature. Kahn's paintings and pastels offer a successful resolution of the language of abstraction together with the perception of the landscape.They are the contemporary manifestation of a long tradition of American painting that runs from George Inness to Milton Avery. Wolf Kahn was born in Stuttgart, Germany. In 1939, at the age of 12, he fled Germany for England and in 1940 moved to the United States. He attended the High School of Music and Art in New York City and graduated in 1945. Under the GI Bill, he was able to continue his studies for two years at the Hans Hofmann School in both New York and Provincetown, and he became Hofmann's studio assistant. He then received a Bachelors Degree in Philosophy from the University of Chicago in 1951. His works are represented in numerous public and private collections including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Wolf Kahn's work from the 1950's reflects the influence of Soutine, Bonnard, and the German Expressionists, but in the 1960's one feels a stronger pull towards abstraction, and can see the kind of mark making found in other contemporary artists such as Joan Mitchell and Cy Twombley. 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.

Robert Kulicke; painter, designer, inventor, framer, and jeweler, is truly a renaissance man.The son and brother of designing engineers, he grew up in Philadelphia, and studied painting at the Tyler School of Art and design at the Philadelphia Museum School. In art school he developed an interest in framing, and in 1949 went to Paris to study painting with Lèger, and to apprentice himself to master French framers. Upon his return to America, Kulicke developed the welded corner frame for the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and later the Plexi-box frame. In 1953, Kulicke designed and developed the Floating Frame for Knoll, employing smoothly welded, distinctively simple and modern polished metal. He continued to develop his frame concept, which was aesthetically based upon Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona chair. A major turning point in Kulicke's career occurred in 1957 when he framed 300 works by the Italian master Giorgio Morandi for a retrospective exhibition, organized by Lionell Venturi, at the World House Gallery in New York. This historic exhibition offered a more comprehensive view of Morandi than had ever before been seen in America, and provided a major impetus for Kulicke to devote more time to his own painting. It was also at this time, not coincidentally, that Kulicke began to create the beautiful painterly still lifes of pears, oranges, and flowers that have come to define him as an artist. There is something in the understated objects that inhabit Kulicke's still lifes that speaks directly to Morandi's influence; a certain kind of humility, and a sensitivity to the things of this world and, by extension, to the very act of seeing.This particular painting is especially pleasing, the color and light harmonious and poetic.

Stanley Lewis works on his plein-air landscapes directly In front of the motif for prolonged periods, sometimes even over years, until they possess a lapidary gleam and a scrambled facture unique in American painting. His paintings may seem kin to the painterly furrows of Lucien Freud and the School of London artists such as Auerbach and Kossoff, yet Lewis possesses a native wildness that harkens back to Ralph Albert Blakelock and by extension to Whitman and Thoreau. Coming to terms with Lewis's obsessive process, critic Lance Esplund notes that "one of the overwhelming aspects of Lewis's paintings and drawings is their sense of having been run through the gauntlet and then,"as if, surprisingly, whatever did not kill them made them stronger," emerging in the end triumphant and anew . . . " As critic Jed Perl has noted,"no one else has rendered the odd, edgy spaces in suburban America," the sides of roads, the gas stations with quite the lyric delicacy that Lewis achieves." In Chautauqua, as his wife Karen points out, Stanley is able to immerse himself completely in his work with few distractions and so this painting possesses high degree of craggy finish and an amazing verisimilitude of wandering details. In his starling facture Lewis has created an equivalency to the multitude of surfaces he paints. As Jed Perl observes,"Lewis uses abstract velocities for realist effect." Stanley Lewis received his MFA at Yale where he stud- ied with Leland Bell and Nicholas Carone. In the late sixties he went to Paris where Bell provided him with an introduction to Jean Heìlion, an artist whose work was revelatory for him. Lewis has taught for years at The Kansas City Art Institute, Smith College,American University, and currently at the New York Studio School. He is a painter who seems comfortable with the routine of teaching and finds in the exchange with his students something that feeds his work and interests. Lewis is also a relentless draftsman, drawing along with his students from projected slides in class and from objects in the museum. His practice of copying has led Lewis into diverse areas," including preoccupations with Cubism, Greek vase painting and Ceìzanne that continue to feed his landscape painting.

Seymour was so articulate and clear about his process of working. Painting from nature as an activity not concerned with making a careful inventory list of things “out there”, as much as constructing a selectively edited description of the inside of a perceptual moment. Pigment smeared around with oil and solvent could, as a shorthand, describe different kinds of visual moments - everything from a fleeting glance to a slower, sustained examination. Whatever the size of the painting or the length of the sitting, Seymour always emphasized that the primary ambition was holding together the envelope of perceptual unity - a visual unity in which the forms are first, abstract presences within painted space before they are objects with names.
- Stuart Shils

Paul Resika is a major figure of the Hans Hofmann school whose work started to really show Hofmann's influence many years after he actually studied with him. Resika grew up in New York City, and at the age of twelve he studied with Sol Wilson, and then with Hofmann from 1945-47 in Greenwich Village. In 1950 Resika went to Italy in search of the tradition he felt he'd missed in Hofmann's classes.There he worked in Venice with Edward Melcarth on murals done in the manner of Tintoretto intended for U.S. Labor unions. For the next twenty-five years Resika worked under the influence of Corot and the French landscape tradition painting in France, Mexico, and America. He has for years been strongly identified with Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he spends every summer painting. It was in the late eighties with his Provincetown Pier series, and then his progressively more abstract Vessels paintings of the nineties, that Hofmann's influence began to assert itself in a more direct way.This was evidenced by a newly independent color, an emptying out of space, and a largeness of internal scale. In some of Resika's recent paint- ings there is the sense of classic late work as a distillation to essences,”as with Matisse's cutouts or the paintings that Milton Avery produced in the late fifties and early sixties in Provincetown.

The Vermont-born New York painter Bill Rice was a master of the nocturnal cityscape.A personality of cosmopolitan diversity, he was a respected actor in underground film and lower east side theater as well as a painter with over forty years of work exhibited in galleries such as the 56 Bleeker in the 80's and the Sidney Janis Gallery in the 90's. In 1985 in the pages of Artforum, the poet René Ricard celebrated Rice, as "the greatest living painter of the city and in his painting there is no other city than New York, black New York."The critic Ted Castle described Rice in Art in America as "the painter of modern life for our time . . . The paintings are . . . angular like the cities we inhabit, and rather dark, like the mood of modern life; they communicate a reality that middle-class life generally ignores." Rice's subject was the lower east side and the beautiful black and Latino men (and women) who inhabited it. Bill, whose slender frail body seemed sometimes barely to exist, painted the men on the streets around his studio across from the men's shelter on East 3rd Street. He adored their style; lounging, looking, stretching, having sex, handsomely endowed. His work, like Whitman's, was a paean to the erotic city. Rice's touch is as seductive as his content, painting, as was said about Bonnard,"with a brush in one hand and a rag in the other,"Rice builds thin turped- out layers into surfaces of great delicacy and refinement. Silksgleams like illuminated advertising in the night. It is a large version of a small panel from the eighties, a nocturnally glimpsed view of a red- touched figure bundling down the Bowery.As Richard Milazzo puts it,"nightness or darkness ... has to do with specific conditions of vision, of look- ing, of seeing, or somehow highlighting for the viewer not only the things we often do not see (precisely because they are so generally "there') but the act of seeing itself (perception) ... "Rice understands that what is seen in a glimpse can serve as the foundation for the monumental. Rice has stated that "I would like to invest the rectangle-the basic unit in any cityscape-with the sensuality, color, texture, I find in the streets. I'd like to record the young, elegant black Asian, and Hispanic men who know how to move and glow in what would otherwise be a dreary landscape."This credo can be no more plainly viewed than in this significant and highly resolved example of his work.

E. M. Saniga presents a naturalistic yet mysterious vision of reality. His genres, still life, landscape and figures are entirely traditional but something marks them as different. His American masters seem to be Eakins, Homer and Dickinson and the European influences that we can perceive in his work include Corot, Degas, Balthus and Vuillard among others.Yet there is a strange edge that seems unique to Saniga's vision.
Saniga, who is also a professor of Information Technology, was trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art where he studied with Seymour Remenick among others. He observes of Vermeer that "he made a model of reality out of paint that seemed to be at least as strong as reality itself."That sentiment is appropriate to his own images of land and pointers, and riders at rest.They too are "models of reality"-human constructions of the very fragile shell of things.

Stuart Shils's expressionist landscapes have been exhibited widely to great critical attention. His paintings take as their subject the rural landscapes of Indiana,Vermont and County Mayo, Ireland. Shils is a painter of specific moments, working quickly to capture shifting light and weather conditions, time of day and qualities of season. In an essay on the artist's work, Justin Spring writes,"These beautifully focused small works are intimate in scale, suggesting that they have been designed for domestic spaces.They are inspired by European art of nearly two centuries ago, but they partake in the contemporary dialogue of New York painting."
Stuart Shils studied at The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts with Seymour Remenick and at the Philadelphia College of Art. Mr. Shils is the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Ballinglen Arts Foundation Fellowship for Residency in Ballycastle, Ireland, and an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Writing of his work critic Maureen Mullarkey observed that "his landscapes dwell on the uncertain border between representation and abstraction; increasingly, they cross into pure suggestion. Landscape is inseparable from scenery; yet scenes all but dissolve. In their place is something more elusive, harder to evoke: the mood of a locale and the temper of its weather.With each successive show, Mr. Shils reveals himself as a poet of atmosphere."
Though specific to the locales in which he paints, Shils sees his work as an extended metaphor, a highly compressed meditation on form and light.