Humor Arts Museum

Joseph Baron DuCreux, 1783
Oil on canvas

A French Nobleman, DuCreux was a successful portraitist, pastelist and engraver, who put his painting career on hold during the French Revolution.  

Vincent Van Gogh, 1890

Oil on canvas

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Painted while Van Gogh was a voluntary patient at an asylum in Saint-Remy, France.  An ardent admirer of Millet, he created twenty one copies of his works, which he considered "translations."  He mostly worked from black and white images: prints, photos and reproductions.

Ron Hershey, 1989

Silver halide print

9 x 12 in. | 27.94 x 35.56 cm

$100 (unframed), $150 (framed, 11 x 14 in.) (+S/H)       BUY 

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Hershey travels the world and captures imagery of every country he visits: both the people and the mesmerizing scenics he encounters.  He says, of Mexican children and festivals: "They both seem to be everywhere in Mexico.  The spirited magic they spark is a larger part of the irresistible spell that Mexico casts over me."

Gabrielle Ann Dearborn, 1990

Oil on canvas

20 x 16 in. | 50.81 x 40.64 cm

$1,500 (+S/H)       BUY

Born near Scotland, GAD was a lifelong artist, homeschooled by her own mother - a notable painter herself. Her first formal studies were at the London School of Art when she was 17.  During WWII, she worked for the Allied forces drawing aerial maps and met her American husband, an economist with the O.S.S. After the war, they lived in Brussels and France before returning to the states, where they settled in Westport, CT.  The lush English garden that GAD created, served as a muse for much of her continued paintings, drawings and prints.   

Karen E. Gersch, 2001

Ink on paper

9 x 12 in. | 23 x 30 cm.

$300 (+S/H)       BUY

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 Next to circus, one of my favorite live sketching venues are in zoos.  I have hundreds of drawings from animal habitats around the world.  This is from one of my longtime haunts: the Paris Zoo.  I love penguins - those absolute diplomats of Waddle.

Ruth Geneslaw, 2019

Carved wood and mixed media

11 x 18 x 14 in. | 27.94 x 45.72 x 35.56 cm.

$1800 (+S/H)       BUY

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An award-winning sculptor, Geneslaw hand carves and paints figurines (what she terms: "narrative vignettes") that describe with great humor, the social and political issues that touch our lives.  Originally from Buffalo, her studio is now in Havestraw, NY, where she continues to create stunning dimensional illustrations of the human condition.  

Edouard von Grutzner, 1921

Oil on canvas

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Born to a noble family near Prussia, von Grutzner - a German painter and art professor - was noted for his richly humane portraits of Monks, especially those engaged in drinking.  He was one of Munich's leading genre painters, was knighted in 1916, and was known to be one of Hitler's favorite artists.

Jean-Leon Gerome, 1890

Oil on canvas

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A French painter and later sculptor in the Academecism style, Gerome was considered the world's most famous living artist by 1880.  Highly decorated throughout his career, he helped design Napoleon's Paris home and served as one of three professors in the early days of Ecole des Beaux-Arts.  Many of his paintings depicted the slave trade and exploitation of women or heralded them as living models for his work.   

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J.J. Grandville (artist), Paul Constant Soyer (engraver), 1820-47

Wood engraving

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 A prominent illustrator who studied physiological theory and experimented with dream images in art, Grandville considered his dreamwork "metamorphoses of the night".

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Edouard Manet,1878

Oil on canvas

Original at The Art Institute of Chicago.  

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 With a minimum of brushstrokes, Manet - a famed French Impressionist painter, nailed this unidentified model's jovial personality.  Manet, a modernist, was pivotal in the period's artistic transition from Realism to Impressionism.​

Kubota Shunman, 19th Century

Vintage Japanese print

Original in Minneapolis Institute of Art

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Shunman (1757-1820) was as famed for his writing as his remarkably detailed woodcuts.  He was a left-handed printmaker, as well as a published novelist and poet.

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Barbara Masterson, 2019

Oil on canvas

22 x 28 in. | 55.88 x 71.12 cm.

$1300 (+S/H)       BUY

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An award-winning artist, Masterson focuses on the migrant workers who dutifully toil on farms throughout the Hudson Valley, a seemingly unrecognized populace who ensure that crops are cared for and maintained.  She not only captures their spirits in colorful portraits, but learns the personal history and background of each she befriends. 

Leo Gestel, 1891

Ink on paper

Original at Rijks Museum

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Gestel, a Dutch painter who experimented with cubism, expressionism, futurism and post impressionism was - as well as Piet Mondrian, one of the leading artists of Dutch Modernism.  His paintings are far more elaborate and rich, but the simplicity of this drawing lured me.  

Georges Croegaert, (1848-1923)

Oil on canvas

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Croegaert, a Belgium academic painter, spent most of his life in Paris.  He was known for his humorous and hyperrealist depictions of Catholic Cardinals eating, drinking and playing chess in their scarlet robes.  Hyper-realism imbued with charm and personality!

Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1984

Print

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Basquiat was an iconic neo-expressionist painter and graffiti artist who radicalized the NYC art scene in the eighties.  He was friends of and sometimes collaborated with Andy Warhol and Keith Haring.  It is said that Basquiat liked to paint to bebop music.  Tragically, he died in 1988 at the age of 27.  He was also my neighbor; he lived and painted half a block from my Bowery loft, on the corner of Great Jones St.   

Pat MacDonald, 2022

Oil on canvas

30 x 20 in. | 76.2 x 50.8 cm.

$600 (+S/H)       BUY

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MacDonald lives in Orange County, NY and works chiefly in pastels and oils, creating soft, subtle and peaceful landscapes and botanical paintings.  She presently has a solo art exhibition: "Road Trip" that will run until December 31st at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation (9 Vance Road, Rock Tavern, NY).  MacDonald is a longstanding member of the Goshen Art League and serves as a curator herself for some of their gallery shows.  

Ida Rentoul Outhwaite, 1918
Pen, ink and watercolor

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Outhwaite, a famed Australian illustrator, mostly depicted animals and magical creatures - elves and fairies - in delicately drawn and intricate settings.  First published at the age of 15, she had an illustrous career with more than fifty children's books to her name.  She sometimes collaborated on scenes with her older sister and later, her husband.  Australia honored her with a postage stamp depicting her work.  

Fred Gwynne, 1970
Illustration from"The King Who Rained"

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The public knows him best as Herman Munster, from his long-standing television role, but Gwynne was a wonderful painter and illustrator of several children's books; most of them centering on visual puns.  I saw an exhibition of his large oil paintings in CT decades ago - again, full of humor - but beautifully executed and composed.  It made me a double fan of his.  

Frederick Childe Hassam, 1912

Oil on canvas
Original at Los Angeles City Museum of Art

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Hassam, an American Impressionist Painter, began as a watercolorist and children's book illustrator before his successful foray into oil paintings.  Despite his exotic name, he was born in Boston and is descended from a long line of New Englanders.  The radiance and illumination of his colors and brushstrokes are alluring (reminding me of Bonnard) and somehow lift one's spirits.  ​

Saul Steinberg, 1946

Ink on paper

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No one better personifies humor in art than Steinberg's ingenious and charming illustrations; what he termed: "a way of reasoning on paper".  A Romanian-American artist, he was famed for his covers and drawings that graced the New Yorker Magazine for six decades and his beloved maps that joined whole continents and states, in a comic accordion.  A brilliant mind, deft hand and modest soul; he tagged himself as "a writer who draws".

Rene Magritte, 1936

Oil on canvas

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Magritte was a Belgian surrealist well known for his witty and thought-provoking work.  His highly realistic but romantically painted arrangements of objects in space, inspired new meanings of familiar things and created atmospheres and scenics that were both eerie, charming and shrewdly comic.  Although he had difficult times throughout his career and was often unable to support himself and his family from painting; history has shown how much he ultimately influenced pop, minimalist and conceptual art.

Paul Klee, 1924

Watercolor

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 Klee, a Swiss-born German artist, was a Master of Color Theory.  There is something inherently bright, positive and cheering about this painting.  The artist and his Russian friend, Wassily Kandinsky, taught together at the Bauhaus School.  Klee possessed a dry humor and childlike perspective, but his artwork was considered by the Swiss to be too revolutionary and even degenerate.  It was not until after his death that fame and an acknowledgement of his visual philosophies and prolific achievements were honored globally.   

Heinrich Kley (1863-1945)

Ink and watercolor

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Kley's early works were conventional paintings: landscapes, portraits, still lifes and historical images.  His fame and popularity was reserved for his darkly humorous pen drawings, often of animals merged with humanity in simple social situations.  Walt Disney possessed an extensive private collection of Kley's work, some of which directly influenced the film "Fantasia".

Hector Giacomelli, 1880

Watercolor and graphite
A variant of this composition of 24 finches is part of the Lucas Collection at the Baltimore Museum of Art.

French illustrator Giacomelli worshipped birds.  He created this affecting watercolor over a graphite underdrawing with white and gum on heavily textured wove paper.  

Katsushika Hokusai

Japanese Daikokuten from Album of Sketches
Original in Minneapolis Institute of Art.

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Hokusai (1760-1849) was an ukiyo-e artist of the Edo Period, both a painter and printmaker.  He is best known for his woodcut series "Thirty Six Views of Mount Fuji."

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Gustav Klimt, 1907

Oil on canvas

An Austrian Symbolist Painter, Klimt was a prominent member of Vienna's Secession Movement.  Although his primary subject matter was the female body, his landscapes also possessed a magical, mystical quality.