modernist

A large art deco modernist pastel illustration by Rolf Armstrong titled “Hello Everybody”. From the estate of Mike Wooldridge and never before offered for sale, this is easily one of Armstrong’s most iconic works for The Brown & Bigelow Calendar Company. For good reason, this is one of the artist’s most widely distributed images featuring a cute and sassy flapper girl in feminine jazz-age business attire. One of Armstrong’s most prolifically used creations, Wooldridge collected versions of the image used in playing cards, advertising blotters, notebook tablets, calendars and prints in all sizes and configurations. Many are included with sale.

Hello Everybody

Artist: Rolf Armstrong

An inventive and unique hand crafted Holiday Seasons Greeting Card from the F. Burtis Clayton Company who we believe were a commercial airbrush art studio. The cover features a streamlined airbrushed painting of a modernist silhouetted cityscape with planes, trains and automobiles ushering in the machine age. Nicely framed, this opens to reveal text and New Year’s wishes as would a more typical holiday card.

Planes, Trains, and Automobiles

Artist: Unknown

A stark, eerie, machine age/industrial revolution 1938 Works Progress Administration sponsored oil painting by Thomas Tyrone Comfort, this darkly modernist view titled “Heat on Steel” features a haunting view of an arc welder at work in a surrealist factory. This large scale painting was created as public art and exhibited by the Federal Arts Project in 1938 and retains its original verso label. 1938 marked the height of the WPA art movement, and Comfort was one of its promising talents, creating evocatively expressive, and moody visions of Depression era science and industry.

Heat On Steel

Artist: Tyrone Comfort

A large, inventive oil on canvas by the well listed artist and illustrator Charles Shepard Chapman. A spirited look at the ongoing Industrial Revolution and progress minded upheaval of the 1920s with a focus on transportation. Pictured in the mist of streamlined modernist trains and bi-planes are antiquated horse and buggy carriages and river paddle boats. The artwork heralds the machine age and harnesses the art deco shapes, forms and exuberance that was infectious in the epoch before the stock market crash of 1929.

The Spirit of Transportation

Artist: Charles Chapman

A wonderfully inventive and unique early space-age (dated 1955) gouache calendar illustration by Bill Layne for the Royal 76 Gas Station chain. Showing the companies inventive and modernist machine age state of the art service station facilities. Uniquely embellished by the artist with his familiar elf figures and space exploration themes. Banner flag reads “Tickets Here For Cosmic Ray Absorber”. This is a tremendous futuristic work that should find traction among Petroliana collectors and space-age/atomic age lovers.

Space Age Royal 76 Petroliana

Artist: Bill Layne

Grapefruit Moon Gallery is happy to offer an original gouache illustration likely used as the final preliminary study for the cover of the May 17th, 1930 Edition of Judge Magazine. Verso reads “Cover for Judge, Joseph Morgan.” Work is in a John Held Jr. jazz age, modernist style with a flapper girl enduring the attention of an over zealous Soda Fountain attendant. The smaller sight size leads us to believe this is not the completed cover, but it is the most fun you can have in the world of Illustration art for $850.00.

The Soda Jerk

Artist: Joseph Morgan

A dazzling art deco era original oil on canvas by noted New York Illustrator Walter Beach Humphrey. Humphrey did 3 covers for The Saturday Evening Post in 1923. He also was a frequent cover contributor for Colliers , Liberty and Argosy Magazines. He currently has works on display at the Norman Rockwell Museum in their Toast of the Town exhibit. The model was the artist’s wife Connie Regina. I am assuming this was painted as a decorative work as I cannot imagine a cover it could have been used for with the possible exception of a Burlesque or Follies Bergere type program cover.

Decorative Art Deco Nude

Artist: Walter Beach Humphrey

An exquisite stylized, modernist, French art deco mixed media work in subdued muted tones by Edouard Sureau. In pastel and gold gilt paint, this features a delicately rendered muse with halo enraptured by a musical lyre. The top of the instrument forms a cross and the figure itself forms an angelic allegory, of the style popular in the art deco decorative arts. Work is signed and in a fine state of preservation nicely matted, framed, and ready to hang.

A Modernist Muse

Artist: Edouard Sureau

A deftly rendered cover painting for The American Magazine by Herbert Paus, who developed an inventive and entirely modernist, machine age, industrial aesthetic. A striking seaside beauty is depicted playing a concertina in this rare surviving original cover painting from the golden age of American illustration. Herbert Paus was a leading illustrator who contributed covers for Life, Collier’s, Leslie’s and the Woman’s Home Companion magazines.

Seaside with a Concertina

Artist: Herbert Paus

An inventive mixed medium early work by Edwin Georgi used as the cover for an early 1930s issue of “The Woman’s Home Companion.” A linear and modernist rendering of women’s disembodied heads that contrasts the art deco era ideal of make-up enhanced feminine beauty with classic Greek porcelain statuary. A clever and stylized early work by one of our favorite American Illustrators, Edwin Georgi.

A Pair of Art Deco Heads

Artist: Edwin Georgi

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