Thornton Dial was a pioneering African-American artist who produced exuberant drawings and paintings and large scale assemblages and sculptures with oil paint and the found material he collected. The work by Dial most admired in the art world are his assemblages commenting on race and the place of African-Americans in the larger society. Dial rightfully credited Bill Arnett, founder of the Souls Run Deep Foundation, as the person who recognized and championed his artistry. His work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC.; High Museum, Atlanta, GA; Houston Museum of Art, Houston, TX; and the American Visionary Art Museum, Baltimore, MD; among many others.

Information Courtesy of Rago Arts, October, 2019.

“The Lord spoke and he said: Give up the repair of lawn mowers; Give up the repair of bicycles; Give up sermons; Paint my pictures… And that’s what I done.” Howard Finster is among the most prolific and best-known outsider artists. He turned his house in Georgia into “Paradise Garden”, a venue to display his vision of preaching through art, with a constant display of work for sale to the collectors and dealers who were frequent visitors. Much of the building material in the garden was accumulated from Finster’s television and bicycle repair businesses and his twenty-one other trades. His art came to national attention in 1980 when LIFE magazine featured him among several leading folk artists. He played his banjo on Johnny Carson’s television show, designed an award-winning record album cover for the Talking Heads and executed paintings to hang in the Library of Congress. Finster produced more than 20,000 works of art using anything at hand – furniture, bottles, mirrors, plastic, plywood, canvas, and, as he would say, “the best bicycle paint available”. His style is instantly recognizable; the best is deserving of the status he earned by preaching and promoting to aspiring believers and collectors. Finster had his first solo show in a commercial gallery at Phyllis Kind Gallery in Chicago in 1979, and another at Ms. Kind’s New York gallery in 1981. His work is in the collections of national and international museums and he was chosen to represent the U.S. at the Venice Biennale in 1984.

Information Courtesy of Rago Arts, October, 2019.

Victor Salmones, born in Mexico City, worked as a commercial artist to pay his tuition at the Instituto de Bellas Artes (Mexican National Institute of Fine Arts) where he trained in the exacting lost wax method of casting bronze. Salmones opened a workshop in Cuernavaca in 1966. In 1967 he was awarded first prize at the Biennale Exposition of the Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City, Mexico. He gained recognition steadily, both in Mexico and internationally, becoming the most prominent sculptor living and working in Mexico during his lifetime. Public and private collections in some thirty-eight countries have collected and showcased his figural sculpture.

Information Courtesy of Rago Arts, October, 2019.

Pennyworth was one of America’s most outstanding kennels of the 20th century boasting over seven Best In Show winners. Margaret Newcombe inherited her love of breeding and show dogs from her mother, the owner of the famous Clairedale Kennels and winner of Best In Show at Westminster in 1936. Margaret Newcombe eventually came to win the revered ‘triple crown’ of dog shows in 1964 with Courtenay Fleetwood. This dog has sired many of today’s whippet champions. In total, Pennyworth owned 55 champion whippets, 36 of which were home-bred. These paintings and bronzes reflect the passion of Margaret Newcombe for the whippet breed.

Information courtesy of Brunk Auctions, May 2013.

Otto Natzler (Austrian/American, 1908 to 2007) and Gertrud Natzler (Austrian/American, died 1971) are well known to collectors of art pottery. They married in Vienna in 1938 and then removed to Los Angeles, California and began their work together with Gertrud as the potter and Otto as the glazer. Their work is represented in dozens of the world’s museums, including the Jewish Museum, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Information courtesy of Skinner Inc., April 2001.

Otto and Gertrud enjoyed a long, prolific career highlighted by international recognition, numerous exhibitions, and many honors, among them the American Craft Council’s Gold Medal (2001). Their work has been the subject of retrospective shows at the Renwick Gallery in Washington, D.C. (1973), the Craft and Folk Art Museum in Los Angeles (1977), and the American Craft Museum in New York (1993), and can be found in over eighty permanent museum collections around the world including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Everson Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Information courtesy of Rago Arts and Auction Center, 2014

The artist was born to Orange and Jane Brown Edmondson, former slaves, on a plantation in the Hillsboro Road section of Davidson County, Tennessee. He worked from childhood as a field hand, and, until 1907, when his leg was injured, he was a railroad worker for the Nashville, Chattanooga, and St. Louis Railroad. For the next twenty-five years he was employed by the Women’s Hospital (known also as McGannon Hall and, later, Baptist Hospital), beginning as a janitor in charge of the furnace. He then worked as a porter and assistant stonemason for a local contractor in Nashville until 1931. Retired from that job, he spent much time in his garden, near Vanderbilt University, tending to his vegetables and fruit trees. Edmondson began to carve in 1934. He claimed to have been inspired by a series of visions he experienced in which God ordered him to carve. Between 1939 and 1941, Edmondson worked for the Works Progress Administration, which had a no-racial-discrimination clause. He carved until 1948, and died in 1951 after a long illness. The Nashville Banner carried his obituary, as did the New York Times and Art Digest.

Edmondson’s property was filled with hundreds of his carved tombstones, figurative sculptures, and garden ornaments. He used an old hammer and a railroad spike to chisel mostly limestone blocks from demolished buildings and curbstones. His carvings range in size from 20″ critters to a birdbath 32″ birdbath.

Sydney Hirsch, a professor on the art faculty of George Peabody College for Teachers, discovered Edmondson’s art in 1935 as he walked through the neighborhood. Hirsch took his fashion photographer friend, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, and others to see the artist. Dahl-Wolfe visited Edmondson several times beginning in 1937 but was unable to publish photographs of Edmondson’s work in the William Randolph Hearst-owned Harper’s Bazaar, where she worked, because Hearst forbade “negros” in his publications. Dahl-Wolfe directed the photographs instead to Alfred H. Barr, the visionary director of the Museum of Modern Art. Impressed, Barr arranged the exhibition for the museum. (Dahl-Wolfe purchased this Angel from the artist in 1937 as a gift to her friends and neighbors Janet Chase and Fred Hauck, grandparents of the present owner.)

Edmondson received recognition during his lifetime. Besides Dahl-Wolfe, the photographers Edward Weston and Consuelo Kanaga were interested in him, and photographed the artist and his carvings. Following the Museum of Modern Art exhibition, Edmondson was represented in “Three Centuries of Art in the United States” (1938) at the Musee du Jeu de Paume, in Paris. In 1948, Charles Johnson, the first black president of Fisk University, chaired a symposium that was accompanied by the exhibition “Stone Carvings by William Edmondson.” Members of Edmondson’s community, including those from the Primitive Baptist Church, where he was a member, were in attendance. In 2000 a major exhibition and catalog was organized by the Cheekwood Museum of Art, in Nashville. The exhibition traveled to many venues, including the American Folk Art Museum in New York.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Arnett, Paul and William. Souls Grown Deep: African American Vernacular Art of the South. Atlanta: Tinwood Books, 1999.

The Art of William Edmondson. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi in association with Cheekwood Museum of Art, 1999.

Beardsley, John, and Jane Livingston. Black Folk Art in America, 1930-1980. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi in association with Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1982.

Bird, Paul. “The Fortnight in New York.” Art Digest (Nov. 1, 1937): 18. [vol. 13, February 1, 1939, pp. 18-19].

DeCarlo, Tessa. “A Master Sculptor, No Longer A Secret.” New York Times (May 14, 2000), p. 41.

Fuller, Edmund L. Visions in Stone: The Art of William Edmondson. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973.

“Inspired Self-Taught Artist, William Edmondson Dies.” [Nashville] Tennessean (February 9, 1951), pp. 1, 6.

Lindsey, Jack. Miracles: The Sculptures of William Edmondson. Philadelphia: Janet Fleisher Gallery, 1994.

“William Edmondson.” Folk Art 20, no. 1 (Spring 1995): 43-47.

Lowe, Harry, Carl Zibart, and Walter Sharp. Will Edmondson’s Mirkels. Nashville: Tennessee Fine Arts Center atCheekwood, 1964.

“Mirkels.” Time. (November 1, 1937).

The New Yorker (November 6, 1937).

“Sculpture in the Modern Carving Tradition by a Tombstone Carver.” The Art News (October 23, 1937).

Storr, Robert. “William Edmondson.” In Elsa Longhauser and Harald Szeemann. Self-Taught Artists of the Twentieth Century: An American Anthology. San Francisco: Chronicle Books in association with Museum of American Folk Art, 1998, 62-67.

Thompson, John. “Negro Stone Cutter Here Says Gift From Lord; Work Praised.” [Nashville] Tennessean (February 9, 1941), p. 11A.

Lee Kogan

Curator Emerita

American Folk Art Museum

New York, New York

Information courtesy of Sotheby’s, September 2011.

Edmondson, son of freed slaves, took up stone cutting and carving when he was in his late 50s. He had worked in Nashville as a laborer until the 1930s, and as he later recalled, was commanded by God to do his carvings, which he called his “miracles.” He expressed his profound faith by working on discarded pieces of limestone from demolished buildings and treets, using basic tools. Edmondson established himself as a stone-cutter, at first creating grave markers, in the tradition of carving seen in the South. His yard was soon replete with his creations of Biblical images, heroes and animals. These unique stone “miracles” were exceptionally sensitive, yet powerful creations.

It was in the 30s that Edmondson and his sculpture yard were “discovered” by Louise Dahl-Wolfe, a noted New York fashion photographer. Later, he was also photographed by Edward Weston and the New York art world discovered him, a pure product of America. There was keen awareness of indigenous American art following the landmark exhibit “The Art of the Common Man in America.” Edmondson was the first African American artist to have a one-man show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1937; soon after his work was included in an American exhibition at the Jeu de Paume in Paris. Edmondson continued carving throughout the 1940s until age slowed his hand. He died in 1951 in relative obscurity.

In a period of almost twenty years, Edmondson completed about 100 sculptures. Edmondson has emerged as one of America’s most significant folk artists. The 1982 seminal exhibition “Black Folk Art in America” at the Corcoran Gallery of Art; and more recently a major retrospective at the American Museum of Folk Art that traveled nationwide “The Art of William Edmondson,” has renewed interest in his work. The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Center, National Museum of American Art, Hirshhorn Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Cheekwood Museum of Art in Nashville are some of the museums with Edmondson’s work in their collections.

Information courtesy of Northeast Auctions, August, 2002.

“Marly Horses,” paired sculptures also sometimes known as “horse tamers,” or just “horses restrained by grooms,” have their origins in France, probably by way of ancient Rome. Since the early days of Rome, a pair of sculptures, each of a man with a horse, have been on Quirinal Hill in the city. The spirited horses and the men seeking to control them are a discourse on power that has appealed to various political figures throughout history, and the theme has been replicated frequently.

A pair of bronze Marly horses. (p4A item # D9812387)

A Ludwig Bemelmans painting of the village of Marly-le-Roi from 1957. (p4A item # D9943544)

Sadly, Marly’s fate was link to the fate of the royal family. Damage was done during the French Revolution, and the property was sold around 1800. The chateau was completely demolished and sold off in pieces, but Napoleon later bought back the estate, so while the chateau is no longer there, the park still exists. The Chevaux de Marly (Horses of Marly) statues, completed in 1745, were moved in 1795 to Place de la Concorde, the square in Paris where the guillotine had been in operation during the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror, as part of a post-revolution makeover. (The Champs-Elysees runs between Place de la Concorde with the Chevaux de Marly and the Obelisk of Luxor in the east to the Place Charles de Gaulle with the Arc de Triomphe in the west.)

The Marly Horses remained in the Place de la Concorde for almost two centuries, until they were moved to the Musee de Louvre in 1984, where other Marly sculptures are now housed. There, they have been conserved, and cement copies have been placed both in the Place de la Concorde and in the grounds at Marly.

The motion and dramatic moment captured in Coustou’s works along with their prominent iconic placement in Paris made the sculptures immensely popular, and throughout the nineteenth century, numerous versions were replicated in bronze and smelter on a smaller scale for Victorian homes.

For more information, visit the Musee de Louvre’s website at http://www.louvre.fr/.

Hollie Davis, p4A Senior Editor, June 26, 2009

Joan Miro lithograph, Signes Et Meteores, printed in colors, 1958, p4A item E8972489

Joan Miro was born in Barcelona, Spain, on April 20, 1893, the son of a watchmaker. From 1912 he studied at the Barcelona Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the Academie Gali. In the first quarter of the 20th century, Barcelona was a cosmopolitan, intellectual city with a craving for the new in art, music, and literature. But, it was not the place where great art was being made. That place was Paris, and Miro established himself there at the age of twenty-six. He made friends with Pablo Picasso, Alexander Calder, Ernest Hemingway, Max Ernst, and Paul Klee and was accepted as a Surrealist, looking stronger as the years went by. He lived alone in Paris in total poverty, but every time he went out, he wore a monocle and white spats. He kept his brushes clean, waxed and polished the floor of his studio, and arranged his canvases in neat order.

Miro went about his career with orderly determination. He wrote to Picasso in 1929 that he was looking for a studio, a dealer, and a wife. That same year he married the daughter of family friends. Her name was Pilar Juncosa, and they were happily married and were together for fifty-four years. They had one daughter, Dolores. Miro was certainly the most distinguished painter of Catalonia; he was intensely proud of that fact. All of his work was conceived in Montroig (the site of his family’s farm). Most important of these was the painting named “The Farm” which did not sell in Paris and was finally sold to Ernest Hemingway for $250.

He was the most enduring of the Surrealist artists; he first visited the United States in 1947 to execute a mural commission at the Terrace Plaza Hotel in Cincinnati, Ohio with Alexander Calder. His reputation had preceded him, and he had already had enormous influence on such American artists as Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko, who had adopted his Surrealist automatism and mysterious primitive symbols for their own purposes. Miro had tried his hand at ceramics, bronze sculpture, printmaking, book illustration, posters, costume design, etc. He was seventy-nine years old when he began his series of monumental bronzes. When he was eighty, he joined forces with a young Spaniard named Josep Royo who was a weaver of tapestries. Miro would spread Royo’s tapestries on the floor and design changes, adding all kinds of materials, painting some areas, even burning areas. The result was a series called Sobreteixims. Miro transformed the Royo tapestries from admirable folk art into perhaps masterpieces. He died on Christmas Day in 1983 in Palma Majorca, where he had lived and worked for several years.

Information courtesy of Charlton Hall Galleries, February 2007