Original 1939 Louis Schanker WPA Abstract Football Watercolor Gouache Painting

Description: This listing is for the Original 1939 Louis Schanker American Abstract Football Watercolor Gouache Painting pictured above. About this work: A wonderful watercolor/gouache on paper of abstracted football players by important American modernist artist Louis Schanker (1903-1981). Dated 1939 and titled Football, this work was produced during the height of Schanker’s artistic career. Louis Schanker was prominent among the painters of the 1930s and 1940s for his advocacy of expressionism in American abstraction. His constant activities as a sculptor and as a printmaker were also reflected in his paintings, both in style and technique. Born in New York, Schanker left school as a teenager to join the circus. After several peripatetic years as a laborer, he settled in New York in 1920, beginning five years of part-time studies at Cooper Union, the Education Alliance, and the Art Students League. Although his earliest works reflect the Social Realism promoted at the league, he experimented with the styles of the School of Paris in the 1920s. Schanker left for Europe in 1931, studied briefly in Paris, and then traveled widely. When he lived in Majorca in 1933, his style became markedly abstract, with a vivid palette and cubist distortions of space. Soon after Schanker's return from Europe, his work reflected the influences of Georges Rouault and Fernand Leger, with undertones of German Expressionism. Schanker become a member of the Mural Division of the WPA Federal Art Project; among his most important projects were murals for the lobby of the radio station WNYC in New York (1937) and the Science and Health Building at the New York World's Fair (1939). In the mid 1930s, the artist began making woodcuts, which he printed in colors from multiple blocks. In 1935 Schanker also become one of "The Ten," a group of young artists who championed abstraction and publicly protested the preference of the museum establishment for conservative, representational styles. He was also a founding member of the AAA. From 1938 to 1941 Schanker was employed by the Graphic Arts Division of the Federal Art Project, and he become a supervisor for relief printmaking. From the late 1930s on, he worked simultaneously in painting, printmaking, and carved sculpture, and he found reciprocal influences in subject, style, and technique among these media. Football belongs to a series of paintings and prints that Schanker produced in the late 1930s and early 1940s depicting figures engaged in sports. Several works on canvas and paper of this period represent the subject of football, and one four-color woodcut of the some title relates closely to this particular work. Schanker transferred to this painting the angular, splintered quality of the lines hewn from the woodblock. He abstracted several figures in action and the shapes between them into a collection of forms floating before a flat, unmodulated field. Although these are essentially simple geometric solids, they hang on a linear superstructure of black lines. However, like many of Schanker’s paintings of the period, this composition is more formal than linear, and it derives from the work of such French Cubists as Albert Gleizes and Andre Lhote. During the 1940s, Schanker began teaching printmaking courses at the New School for Social Research, where he briefly shared a studio with Stanley William Hayter's Atelier 17. The thrust of Schanker's teaching and his own work was independence and experimentation, and he attracted and motivated many innovative artists. He held several teaching posts at the New School, the Brooklyn Museum School, and Bard College from the mid 1940s until his retirement. In the 1950s Schanker become very active with printmaking associations, exhibiting prints which focused on abstract circular forms and which employed shape and color to express a kinesthetic sense of revolution. In the following decade Schanker returned to sculpture, carving freestanding pieces from wood and plastic; in the 1970s he also experimented with relief prints from carved lucite plates. The work is signed and dated in the lower right corner. It is also titled in the lower center. It is framed and matted behind glass. A woodcut print also titled Football by Schanker of a slightly smaller size and extremely similar composition sold at Swann Auction Galleries in NYC for $2,500 on February 4, 2021 (lot 211). Given this work is an original painting (not a print) and is larger, it has been priced to sell. Provenance: Sid Deutsch Gallery, NYC; Private Collection, NY Size: 12 inches tall by 15 inches wide (artwork by sight) 19.75 inches tall by 22.75 inches wide (frame) Condition: Good vintage condition with some minor rippling to the sheet and some light toning to the paper. Some light staining to the upper left corner. The frame is in very good condition. It is ready to be displayed and enjoyed! This painting will be well packed and shipped with insurance and signature confirmation. Free local pickup is also available. Feel free to ask any questions!

Price: 2750 USD

Location: Morrisville, Pennsylvania

End Time: 2024-05-12T04:05:57.000Z

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