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Description:
This Modernist oil on canvas depiction of a reclining figure measures 26 x 35 inches, unframed, and is signed upper right. Like so many aspiring artists of the 1920s and 30s, notably Jackson Pollock, Thomas Brownell Eldred (1903-1993) studied in New York City at the Art Student’s League with the famous Thomas Hart Benton and Guy Pene du Bois. Eldred was born in Climax, MI where the walls of his childhood home became surfaces for his illustrations and doodles. He studied economics at Kalamazoo College and was admitted to the prestigious Art Institute of Chicago, where he was struck by the diligence and dedication of his peers and roused by the Art Institute’s collection. He served a stint in the Merchant Marines, then attended The Art Student’s League. In the 1930s, he was invited to the famous artist’s colony Yaddo, but declined for financial reasons, taking a position teaching lithography and drawing at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, funded through the WPA’s Federal Art Project, established to provide struggling artists with economic support during The Great Depression. In Brooklyn, Eldred met the innovative printmaker Werner Drewes,who studied at Bauhaus with major modernists Johannes Itten, Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger and Wassily Kandinsky. Drewes also served as Director of the Graphic Art Project of the WPA in New York and was a founding member of the American Abstract Artists group. During these years, Eldred also worked for shipbuilders as a wood pattern designer for boats needed in the war effort. Hilla Rebay and the Guggenheims acquired his work for their new Museum of Non-Objective painting (now the Guggenheim Museum), which showcased international abstraction. He participated in William Stanley Hayter’s famous experimental and influential printmaking workshop in Paris, Atelier 17. In 1940 Eldred joined him again when Hayter opened a school in the USA. Both locations attracted key modern artists with many ties to Surrealism, such as Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Jaques Lipshitz, Andre Masson, Matta, Joan Miro, Yves Tanguy and Americans Robert Motherwell, Louise Nevelson and Jackson Pollack. In the 1930s and 40s, Eldred produced a skillful body of work,and much of it illustrates the complex position of modernist Abstraction at this time. The 1930s in America was generally regarded as an era of representational art, harkening back to the early 20th-century American Ashcan School and mid-century French Realsim, when events such as economic depression and impending war demanded an art of precise messages. Called “American Scene” art, it concentrated on indigenous subject matter and probed America’s roots and traditions. It was divided between Regionalists (politically conservative artists who extolled rural values as the key to the American spirit) and the more liberal urbanists, who focused on the city, often highlighting hardship, thus intending to spur social reform. For many, abstraction stood in vanguard opposition to this realist sensibility. In Europe, it had a strongly social bent. When it came to America, it became a purely aesthetic pursuit, a kind of “art for Art’s sake.” Some saw Abstraction as an antidote to Surrealism and its preoccupation with the stranger side of dreams, psychology and sexuality. But abstraction had many different forms, including biomorphism, which incorporated organic and curvilinear forms and owed a debt to Surrealism. Eldred’s art was eclectic, revealing the impact of a myriad of major artists: Jean Arp, Georges Braque, Feininger, Kandinsky, Joan Miro, and Pablo Picasso. His work can have the structure of modern geometric abstraction or the fluidity of biomorphism, both cohabiting in the same piece, as is common in the art of the 1930s and 40s. Eldred’s art displays fluid draftsmanship, beguiling color combinations, graphic use of flat space and evocative use of deep space, paint application punctuation by scoring, incising, and scratching, and explosions of decorative patterning. Some of these characteristics may be informed by his skills as a printmaker and as a naval wood-pattern maker. Eldred’s work is rarely on display, but is housed in collections such as The Guggenheim and the Detroit Institute of Arts.
| Status: No Longer Available |
Reference#: RecliningFigure |
| Condition:
excellent |
Year:
1920s-30s
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| Country:
USA |
Maker:
Thomas Brownell Eldred |
| Height:
26 in. (66.04 cm) |
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Width: 35 in. (88.90 cm)
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| Title:
MODERNIST/ABSTRACT/WPA O/C RECLINING FIGURE/THOMAS BROWNELL ELDRED (1903-1993) |
Style:
Abstract Modernist |
| Materials:
oil on canvas |
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