american

A large pastel by Leon Dolice featuring a stark view of an illuminated New York City skyline. Leon Dolice worked for over 60 years painting New York City views borrowing from the French Impressionists and Claude Monet specifically. His countless pastel variations capture his beloved Manhattan in varying lighting and color combinations and pastel configurations. The work highlights the extreme skyscraper forms and machine age industrialism which transformed the New York skyline during the art deco jazz age. A fresh estate find from the Collection of The Mayo Clinic in Rochester Minnesota.

New York City Skyline

Artist: Leon Dolice

An original gouache on board created for the cover of the September 1962 edition of For Men Only, illustrating the story Operation”Never-Talk:” Shocking Revenge of Norway’s Partisan Nymph. (A Smuggled-In Yank And A Wild Anti-Nazi Underground Girl by James S. Wagner. A large finely rendered scene of a bungled SS operation, with a trio of tightly wound American service men, a gathering of inebriated Nazi’s and a pair of scantily clad female secret agents acting as decoys.

Norway’s Partisan Nymph

Artist: Mort Künstler

A large gouache illustration for the January 1961 edition of Stag Magazine. A daring night time rescue depiction illustrating the interior story “The Amazing GI Who Took Three Head Hunting Brides. A Pacific Island World War II entanglement complete with topless native women and native headhunters and a lone anglo-saxonized square jawed daring G.I.

Amazing G.I. Who Took Three Head Hunting Brides

Artist: Mort Künstler

An alarmingly disturbing and well rendered original gouache illustration by the highly regarded and prolific illustrator Mort Kunstler, this interior 2-page spread appeared in the August 1961 edition of Male Magazine, illustrating Martin Fass’s Million-Dollar Manhunt For A Cold War Nymph. The lurid, defining action-filled image captures the prevailing nihilism associated with the 1960’s “sweat magazine” art and envelope-pushing adventure fiction. Text reads “She was the top female agent of BACO-Europe’s anti-fascist Assassin’s League, and when she fell into enemy hands, the Yanks had two weeks to find her-or it was war in the Middle East.”

Cold War Nymph

Artist: Mort Künstler

This original gouache noir illustration by well listed and prolific illustrator Mort Kunstler was used as the January 1968 edition of Male, illustrating Mario Cleri’s “Blonde Bandit in Black Lace.” An explosive sex kitten car chase that captures the prevailing nihilism associated with the 1960’s “sweat magazine” art and envelope-pushing adventure fiction, this is a tense and hyper-realistic pop-art time capsule.

Blonde Bandit in Black Lace

Artist: Mort Künstler

A charming and vanguard view of the generation gap which incited “The Jazz Age”. Boomerang, which in the 1910s was synonymous with backfire, was a key flashpoint term of the era, since the older generation found all their efforts to instill their Victorian values on their children failed drastically. This lovely watercolor work is by Rose O’Neill, the most famous and prolific female illustrator of the early 1900’s. She is best remembered for her creation the Kewpie doll.

A Boomerang

Artist: Rose O'Neill

A beautiful historically inspired maiden with a sword amidst Moorish castles and architecture. A dazzling charcoal rendering by the Polish emigrant W.T. Benda, a frequent cover artist for Life, Hearst’s and The Shrine Magazine. Benda is perhaps best remembered today for his elaborate theater masks which made him the toast of New York City during the roaring 20’s jazz age. He also favored images of exotic European and Asian ingenues with mysterious foreign features and dress.

A Benda Princess

Artist: Wladyslaw Benda

A dark and deeply erotic Salmagundi Club Exhibited large oil on canvas by R.K. Ryland titled “Woodland Melodies.” Ryland was a celebrated New York based illustrator and fine artist who worked extensively creating modernist murals and posters for the 1939 New York World’s Fair. A work by Ryland illustrating that fair is on permanent display at the Wolfsonian Museum of Modernism in Miami. A large, defining example of the woodland nymph imagery that captivated 1920’s artists and illustrators.

Woodland Melodies

Artist: Robert Ryland

This set of two pendant oil paintings is unusual within Wenzell’s oervre, both for its classical mythological subject and explicit eroticism. These two paintings were clearly conceived as a matched set; they present a “before” and “after” narrative. The first panel was published as a vignette in the March 26th, 1910 issue of Collier’s magazine but we don’t believe that the second work was created for publication. This pair was displayed in the Wenzell’s 1967 Maxwell Gallery (San Francisco) exhibition, “The Age of Elegance.” An illustrated program is included with sale.

Bacchus and Nude Nymph

Artist: Albert Wenzell

This wonderful, coy and large original pastel on board by Earl Moran was created as a commissioned illustration for Brown & Bigelow. The pin-up calendar image was published in the early 1950’s with the quip “Leading a parade Without a falter, is easier than leading A man to the altar.” Pastel is beautifully framed in a gold gilt fine museum frame and properly lined with printed tear sheet of published calendar included in sale.

Leading a Parade

Artist: Earl Moran

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