Oil Paintings – Page 31

Boris Deutsch

1892-1978

Theme/Style – Modernism, figurative art, religious subjects

Media – Oils, murals, watercolors, ceramics

Artistic Focus – Through his careful application of form, line, tone, color and texture, Deutsch infused his canvases and murals with a compositional movement and rhythm that evokes a strong emotional response. His deep concern for the human condition comes through in his depiction of people engaged in everyday activities, whether in the Russian marketplaces of his childhood, or the fields, factories, and synagogues in which Jews engage in timeless prayer rituals.

Career Highlights –

Deutsch fled Russia in 1916 and arrived in Los Angeles soon after, taking work in a Hollywood film studio from 1919 to 1922.
In 1930, Boris Deutsch was awarded the purchase prize award from the Fine Arts Gallery of San Diego for his exquisite painting, Girl with Yellow Shawl. The award was in the amount of $500, which was a considerable sum at that time.
Deutsch was hired in the 1930s by the Resettlement Administration to travel the nation and sketch the American scene. The paintings which resulted from his travels were hung in government buildings throughout the land.
As a mural artist working for the New Deal Art program, Deutsch depicted events from American history and scenes of industrious American laborers. His 11-mural representation of the cultural contributions of the Americas to California life, which still graces the walls of the Los Angeles Terminal Annex Post Office, reflected Deutsch’s determination to acknowledge the ethnic cultures that have helped to define Southern California life.

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Pele de Lappe

1916-2007

Theme/Style – Social Realism, portraiture, political satire, illustration

Media – Oils, watercolors, lithography, drawings, charcoal

Artistic Focus – Phyllis “Pele” de Lappe was an artist, editor and instructor committed to political activism and social justice. From the beginning of her artistic career in the early 1930s, de Lappe devoted herself to making images of working-class people, and was widely respected in San Francisco Bay Area progressive communities. Her works demonstrate both her tremendous drawing skill, especially in her ability to capture faces and figures, and her commitment to the dignity of the “common person.”

Career Highlights –

A fourth-generation San Franciscan, Pele de Lappe was born in 1916, the daughter of illustrator and commercial artist Wesley de Lappe, who encouraged her artistic pursuits.
de Lappe enrolled in the California School of Fine Arts at age 14, where she studied with Arnold Blanch, and as a young teenager was befriended by Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, who were staying in San Francisco while Rivera painted murals both at the school and at the San Francisco Stock Exchange.
de Lappe left San Francisco to live in the artists’ colony of Woodstock, New York, and eventually moved to Manhattan, where she studied at the Art Students’ League from 1931 to 1933 and both assisted with and posed for Diego Rivera’s Rockefeller Center mural.
de Lappe returned to San Francisco during the 1934 maritime strike, which she actively supported. The series of portraits she executed the following year, depicting longshoremen who had participated in the strike, now hang in the San Francisco headquarters of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union.
de Lappe also drew caricatures and political cartoons for the Union’s publications, after which she continued her association with newspapers, contributing cartoons and illustrations to the San Francisco Chronicle, as well as acting as arts editor for the San Francisco Communist Party paper People’s World and working for the African-American-oriented West Oakland Beacon.
de Lappe exhibited with the San Francisco Art Association in 1936 and 1937, and in 1939 she exhibited at the New York World’s Fair and had a solo show in Washington D.C.
de Lappe was an art instructor at the California Labor School during the 1940s, and co-founded San Francisco’s Graphic Arts Workshop in the early 1950s.
de Lappe married and was later divorced from lawyer Bertram Edises, who became prominent as a defender of left-wing causes. A long-time resident of Berkeley, de Lappe eventually moved to Petaluma, California in the 1990s to join her friend and fellow artist Byron Randall. While living in Petaluma, Pele published her autobiography, Pele: A Passionate Journey through Art and the Red Press.
de Lappe’s work is in the collections of the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco; the Woodstock Art Association, New York; and the Library of Congress.
Just weeks before her death, the Huntington museum in San Marino, California interviewed her for their major American print exhibition, which showcased her work and recordings of her voice. Pele de Lappe passed away in Petaluma, California in 2007.

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Ralph Chessé

1900-1991

Theme/Style – California Modernism, African-American subjects, portraits

Media – Oils, murals, wood sculptures

Artistic Focus – A self-taught artist and generally a painter on canvas, Ralph Chessé explored many styles of Modernist painting, and was strongly motivated by color. Primarily in the 1940’s, Chessé painted African American figures in scenes recalling his boyhood in New Orleans, in socially realist depictions of dock workers, and in religious themed motifs derived from the Bible. During World War II, he created paintings of the shipyards in the Bay Area.

Career Highlights –

Ralph Chessé was born in New Orleans and moved to Southern California in 1923. He headed north to the San Francisco Bay Area in the early 1930s, where he painted and worked as a professional puppeteer, an activity he mastered and continued throughout his life.
As one of the artists selected in 1933 by the Public Works of Art Project, Chessé’s contribution to the Coit Tower murals, his sole work in fresco, reflected his work in children’s theater.
Later in life Chessé moved to Oregon where he painted in a more abstract, but still figurative style, until his death at the age of 91.

The Gallery proudly represents the Estate of Ralph Chessé.

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Margaret Bruton

1894-1983

Theme/Style – Modernism, landscapes, portraits

Media – Oils, murals, watercolors, gouache, mosaic murals, etchings

Artistic Focus –The most reserved and sensitive of the three Bruton sisters, Margaret Bruton’s work demonstrates a clean, solid approach, yet one that is expressive as well. She used colors and tones confidently, creating paintings that were evocative and yet free of sentimentality; and her works exhibited an arrangement of planes, lines and colors that seemed to occur naturally. Although a Modernist, Margaret found a stylistic middle ground between traditional and modern treatment of subject matter, creating works that were both critically and popularly acclaimed.

Career Highlights –

Margaret Bruton’s talent as an artist was noticed early in her life, when she received a prize for her work at age 12. She began formal art studies at the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art (later the San Francisco Art Institute) in 1913, where she studied with Frank Van Sloun.
A scholarship enabled Bruton to travel to New York City, where she studied for four years at the Art Students League under Frank Vincent DuMond and Robert Henri.
In the mid-1920s Bruton studied with Armin Hansen in Monterey; her entire family moved there in 1924.
In 1925, Bruton spent a year studying at Paris’s Academie de la Grande Chaumiere, along with her sisters Esther and Helen.
Traveling across America and through Europe with her sisters, Margaret Bruton focused most of her artistic effort on paintings. Her portraits, figures and genre works won many prizes and medals.
Among Bruton’s best-known works are paintings of Pueblo Indians created during her trip to Taos and Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1929; and her ghost town paintings, produced as a result of her travel through Nevada in 1933.
With her sisters, Margaret Bruton also created a particularly ambitious mural, Peace Makers, for the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition.
Margaret remained active in San Francisco art circles until her demise in 1983.

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Mabel Alvarez

1891-1985

Theme/Style – California Impressionism, Art Nouveau, Symbolism, Modernism, figurative art, portraits, still lifes

Media – Oils, murals, watercolors, lithographs

Artistic Focus – Mabel Alvarez enjoyed a six-decade career of artistic exploration. Her work is known for its use of high-key color and atmospheric effects reminiscent of traditional Impressionism, as well as for its careful rendering of figures, keen focus and economy of design. Much of Alvarez’ work focuses on themes of youth, growth and regeneration. By carefully selecting colors for their psychological impact, and by incorporating images of women and flowers into many of her canvases, she succeeded in expressing emotion through her art rather than simply offering visual representations of people and places.

Career Highlights –

Born at Wailua, Oahu, Hawaii, in 1891, Mabel Alvarez settled in Los Angeles in 1906, where she later would study with, among others, Synchromist painters Stanton Macdonald Wright and Morgan Russell.
Recognized early in her career, Alvarez was one of just three Southern California artists mentioned, along with Conrad Buff and Clarence Hinkle, in the 1934 publication, Art In America: In Modern Times.
As she progressed in her career, Alvarez’ palette became in certain respects brighter, but also less exacting and more abstract.
Alvarez’ works have been widely exhibited at sites including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and its predecessor institutions, the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Gene Autry Museum of Western Heritage in Los Angeles.
Mabel Alvarez passed away in Los Angeles in 1985.

Victor Arnautoff

1896-1979

Theme/Style – Social Realism, Regionalism, landscapes

Media – Oils, murals, lithography, mosaic murals

Artistic Focus – Victor Arnautoff created paintings and watercolor works, focusing on portraits, still lifes and rural landscapes in his early years, and moved to more socially conscious themes later in his career

Career Highlights –

He came to America through China, bringing his wife and children with him, and studied at the California School of Fine Arts before going to Mexico. There he worked as an assistant to muralist Diego Rivera.
As project director and one of the artists selected to create the famed Coit Tower murals, Victor Arnautoff played a key role in determining the political and social content of the frescoes painted in the San Francisco landmark. His own contribution, City Life, appears to be a lively, non-political melding of downtown San Francisco scenes; however, closer study reveals two leftist newspapers on the newsstand, while the city’s most mainstream daily, the San Francisco Chronicle, is strangely missing.
Painted frescoes in the Military Chapel at San Francisco’s Presidio, in the Anne Bremer Library of the San Francisco Art Institute, and in high schools and other buildings in the Bay Area.
Taught art at Stanford University from 1939 until his retirement in 1963 after which he returned to Russia, where he lived out his life.

The Gallery proudly represents the Estate of Victor Arnautoff.

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