Skip to main content
Want more images or videos?
Request additional images or videos from the seller
1 of 8

Hans Burkhardt
Untitled-147 mixed media painting by Hans Burkhardt

1979

About the Item

From December 30, 1979, a small mixed media piece by the Swiss/American artist Hans Burkhardt. Gifted from the artist to his daughter, by descent to her son, this work is now available to buy. About this artist: Hans Burkhardt was born December 20th, 1904 in Basel Switzerland. His artwork has gone through several important changes from early pastel nudes to Arshille Gorky's influence and finally to his collage style skull paintings of the 1980s. Burkhardt truly carries Modernism to a new level of profound psychological character through the means of fragmentation and amazing depth of composition. However, to understand the reach that Burkhardt's work has had on Post-Modern art, we must examine the artist's varied and experimental career. Hans' early childhood was spent in an orphanage, apprenticing with a gardener for which he was never paid. In 1924, Hans wrote to his father who had moved to the U.S. and begged for his help. Six months afterward, he also immigrated to America and found work in the furniture factory where his father was employed. During his first year there he attended night classes at Copper Union, winning first prize ($20 gold coin) for period decoration. The following year, 1927, Burkhardt enrolled full time at Grand Central School of Art at 42nd Street. This was a pivotal point in Burkhardt's early work because it was here that he met his life-long friend and mentor Arshille Gorky. Burkhardt was in Gorky's life drawing class and learned about Cubism, Cezanne, Miro and "how to put paint on". He also attended private classes on Saturdays at Gorky's studio. Burkhardt's early pastels and chalk drawings showed his struggle with abstract motion and self generated line through their intuitive conception. He did no preliminary sketches for these types of work and just went straight for the end result. It has been said that these pieces are a synthesis of Matisse's gestural line and Picasso's conceptual organic construction. The female nudes usually appear in groups of three as if muses in a progression of style, rough to complex. They are rendered not as how they were seen but as they would be touched and felt. The line both describes the form as it breaks away from the body in schematized color and bold backgrounds. Burkhardt's work resembled Gorky's style in its fluid, vertical movement from abstract to figurative and through it's sensuous, gestural color application. However, it becomes much more densely composed with intense and empathetic color. There is a clear difference between the draftsman-like work of 1934 and the much more Modern, experimental work in 1938. In 1939, Burkhardt held his first one-man show at the Stendhal Gallery in Los Angeles, set up by the artist Lorser Feitelson. After his move out West, Burkhardt never returned permanently to New York and would no longer be recognized by the East Coast. Throughout the '50s and '60s, Burkhardt lived in virtual isolation from the prominent art world of New York and Europe. At this point his work became more reflective of current political strife, in particular the Spanish Civil War. In 1944 Burkhardt showed "War - Agony of Death" at the Circle Gallery, where it was attacked by a woman with a cane. His original interest in war and death was reinvented into the theme of tragic isolation in life. The final realization of his ideas emerged in his skull paintings, begun in the 1960s. A new aesthetic of beauty arose though the surface drama of skulls in his collage work used to literalize the power of gesture. The morbidity of the relief work reveals density with physiognomic power. Surprised by Gorky's death in 1948, Burkhardt paints three versions of "The Burial of Gorky" in the following two years, which are then shown at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City. He later exhibited "The Studio of Gorky" at the Whitney Museum of American Art (NYC) and received strong critical acclaim. However, he rejected several offers of representation from galleries in New York, preferring to exhibit on his own. Burkhardt remained quite active as he took on a full time position teaching at the University of Southern California in 1959, three years after a 10 year retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum. "Last Judgment, Dark Shadows - The Burial of my Enemies" was completed in 1966 and was Burkhardt's first time using actual skulls in his paintings. His work evolved around themes of trying to break away from regiment and hope for peace. Another painting revolving around World War II, entitled "Horror Never Happens Again", shows a circular border or arms and hands around an iridescent figure which represents protection and safety. Burkhardt was highly praised for his mature work both in ArtNews and by critic Hilton Kramer in The New York Times. By the 1980s, Burkhardt's work had reached its fullest potential, turning from images of imbalance to tragedy. As the post-painterly Abstract Expressionist artists sought to expel this tragedy, Burkhardt embraced it. He continues to live and work in California while making occasional trips to Guadalajara, Mexico. Burkhardt's delve into the depths of human tragedy produces beauty and understanding unparalleled in Post-Modern art.
  • Creator:
    Hans Burkhardt (1904 - 1994, Swiss)
  • Creation Year:
    1979
  • Dimensions:
    Height: 9 in (22.86 cm)Width: 6 in (15.24 cm)
  • Medium:
  • Movement & Style:
  • Period:
  • Condition:
    Good condition, appropriate for a work of its age.
  • Gallery Location:
    Hudson, NY
  • Reference Number:
    Seller: BuHa1471stDibs: LU2465214055772

More From This Seller

View All
Conflict, 1941 gouache by John Von Wicht
By John von Wicht
Located in Hudson, NY
Conflict (1941) Gouache on paper 20" x 12" 27 ½" x 19 ¼" x 1 ½" framed Signed "V. Wicht" lower right. An important work from the artist's "Force" series, which were executed in hom...
Category

1940s Abstract Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Gouache

Untitled-019 gouache and pencil by Vaclav Vytlacil
By Vaclav Vytlacil
Located in Hudson, NY
Delightful petite abstract work by American abstract artist Vaclav Vytlacil. About this artist: Born in 1892 to Czechoslovakian parents in New York, Vaclav Vytlacil and his parents ...
Category

1930s Abstract Expressionist Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Gouache, Cardboard, Pencil

Touch of Fall watercolor and pastel painting by Nell Blaine
By Nell Blaine
Located in Hudson, NY
Signed "Nell Blaine" upper left in pencil. Signed, titled, dated verso on sheet. Signed, titled, dated verso on backing panel. The artist. Exhibited at Fischbach Gallery, NYC, in 1994 (Gallery label verso, and wall label affixed verso). Purchased by private collectors c.1994. By descent. Tibor de Nagy Gallery, NYC (the artist's estate representative), exhibited 2020 (label verso). Exhibited at Fischbach Gallery, NYC, in 1994 (Gallery label verso, and wall label affixed verso). Tibor de Nagy Gallery, NYC (the artist's estate representative), exhibited 2020 (label verso). From her November 15, 1996 NYT obituary: Nell Blaine, a widely respected New York landscape painter and watercolorist, died yesterday at Mount Sinai Hospital. She was 74 and had homes in Manhattan and Gloucester, Mass. Ms. Blaine, who had been hospitalized since July, had been confined to a wheelchair since 1959, when she contracted polio. Ms. Blaine was born in Richmond, Va., in 1922, and first studied at the Richmond School of Art, now part of Virginia Commonwealth University. She moved to New York in 1942 to study painting with Hans Hofmann and later studied etching and engraving at Atelier 17 with Stanley William Hayter. During her first years in New York, her work, which had previously been tightly realist, turned abstract, inspired by Mondrian, Leger and Jean Helion. At one time she was the youngest member of the American Abstract Artists. She was also a founding member of the Jane Street Gallery, one of Manhattan's earliest artists' cooperatives, and had her first solo show there in 1945. Just as Ms. Blaine was becoming known as a promising abstract painter, and gaining the admiration of such critics as Clement Greenberg, she started to shift back to representation. Inspired in part by a trip with Larry Rivers in 1950 to Paris, where she was especially impressed by the work of Vuillard and Bonnard, she immersed herself in the tradition of 19th-century European painting. From the mid-1950's, she cultivated an increasingly painterly and colorful style, usually working directly from nature, or still life, with particular emphasis on the forms and hues of flowers. Her work retained a sense of all-over structure and pulsating energy that she nonetheless credited to abstract art. ''It all goes back to Mondrian,'' she would say. In the 1950's, Ms. Blaine was prominent among a circle of New York artists and poets that included John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, Mr. Rivers, Jane Freilicher, Leland Bell, Louisa Matthiasdottir, Robert De Niro Sr. and Rudy Burckhardt. She had her first solo show of representational work at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in 1953 and was represented by the Poindexter Gallery until it closed in 1978, and, in recent years, by the Fischbach Gallery. During the 1950's she supported herself as a commercial artist, designing brochures for art galleries. In 1955, she designed the original logo, column heads and layout for The Village Voice. In 1957, Ms. Blaine was featured in Life magazine as one of five leading young female artists in America. In 1959, after several months of traveling and painting in Greece, she contracted severe bulbar polio on the island of Mykonos. ''To Nell Blaine,'' an exhibition organized at Poindexter to raise money for her hospital bills, included the work of 79 artists, including Saul Steinberg, Robert Motherwell, Elaine and Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, Mr. Rivers, Ms. Freilicher and Robert Rauschenberg. After eight months in a New York hospital, including five months in an iron lung...
Category

1990s Abstract Impressionist Landscape Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Pastel, Watercolor

Abstract Still Life by Evelyn Mills Cory
Located in Hudson, NY
Abstract Still Life c/1935-1945) Gouache and watercolor on paper 17 3/4" x 24" 21 1/2" x 27 1/2" x 1 1/4" framed Signed "E Cory" lower right.
Category

1930s Abstract Geometric Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Watercolor, Gouache

Synchromist Abstraction watercolor by Jay Van Everen
Located in Hudson, NY
Jay Van Everen was a pioneering early American abstractionist known for his affiliation with the Synchromists. His abstract color studies would take him to the forefront of the Ameri...
Category

1920s Modern Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Ink, Watercolor

O.P. 88 collage on paper by Glenn Goldberg
By Glenn Goldberg
Located in Hudson, NY
O.P. 88 (1988) Pencil, ink, enamel and collage on paper 46" x 30" 48 ½" x 32 ½" x 2" framed Stamped "GG88" lower right by artist with his signature stamp. Provenance: M. Knoedler &...
Category

1980s Abstract Mixed Media

Materials

Enamel

You May Also Like

Be the Dance, Colorful Abstract Mixed-Media Art on Design Work on Paper
By a.muse
Located in New york, NY
In the artist's Art on Design print series, Be the Dance, 2023 by a.muse is a colorful one-of-a-kind art on paper. The work is an invitation to freedom of self-expression and invites...
Category

2010s Abstract Mixed Media

Materials

Ink, Gouache, Rag Paper, Monotype

1950s Abstract Composition: Brown, Orange, Blue, Black Lines, Ink Watercolor Art
By Herbert Bayer
Located in Denver, CO
This captivating watercolor and ink abstract composition by Herbert Bayer (1900-1985) features dynamic shapes in brown, orange, and blue, framed by bold black parallel lines. The wor...
Category

1950s Abstract Geometric Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Ink, Mixed Media, Watercolor

"#186 – WOUNDED WERE COMING", ink, pencil, gouache, found vintage book, poetry
By Amy Williams
Located in Toronto, Ontario
"#186 – WOUNDED WERE COMING" is from Amy Williams' series A Farewell to Arms – wherein the artist works directly onto pages of a found copy of Ernest Hemingway's WWII romance novel. The artist selects certain words and phrases from page 186 to isolate as a poem, and then draws, inks, redacts and paints the rest of the page according to the text. The resulting poem reads "The wounded were coming / men that were scared / I felt the rain in my face / It was getting dark." – Hemingway's novel is a doomed romance between a wounded American soldier and an Italian nurse – note the feminine form on the page, with a "dress" or apron that looks skeletal, bloody and rained upon, all at once. From Amy Williams – "My recent work is focused on making treated book pages using a found vintage...
Category

21st Century and Contemporary Abstract Mixed Media

Materials

Paper, Found Objects, Ink, Gouache, Pencil

Second Floor Systems
By Kory Twaddle
Located in Kansas City, MO
Artist : Kory Twaddle Title : Second Floor Systems Materials : Acrylic, tempera, gouache, glitter, paint brushes, and mixed media on drawing pad cardboard back with spiral top Date ...
Category

2010s Abstract Expressionist Mixed Media

Materials

Pencil, Graphite, Color Pencil, Paint, Newsprint, Cardboard, Watercolor,...

Blue Springs Semi Upper Level
By Kory Twaddle
Located in Kansas City, MO
Artist : Kory Twaddle Title : Blue Springs Semi Upper Level Materials : Colored pencil, marker, tempera, gouache, stickers, tape, glitter glue, pastel, oil pastel, acrylic, graphite...
Category

2010s Abstract Geometric Mixed Media

Materials

Pencil, Graphite, Color Pencil, Paint, Newsprint, Cardboard, Watercolor,...

Third Floor Systems
By Kory Twaddle
Located in Kansas City, MO
Artist : Kory Twaddle Title : Third Floor Systems Materials : Acrylic, tempera, gouache, glitter, paint brushes, and mixed media on drawing pad cardboard back with spiral Date : 201...
Category

2010s Abstract Mixed Media

Materials

Pencil, Graphite, Color Pencil, Paint, Newsprint, Cardboard, Watercolor,...

Recently Viewed

View All