Paul K Smith

Central City, Colorado, 1950s Modernist Cityscape Oil Painting with Buildings

Circa 1950

This stunning mid-20th-century oil and spackle painting by Henriette "Yetti" Stolz captures a bold, abstract cityscape with a dramatic bridge and towering buildings. The striking com...

20th century modernist watercolor painting depicting an old mine and houses in Cortez, Colorado by Richard K. Ayers with colors of blue, green, gold, and brown. Presented in a custom frame with all archival materials, outer dimensions measure 36 ½ x 30 ½ x ¾ inches. Image size is 24 ¾ x 18 ¾ inches. Painting is clean and in very good vintage condition. About the Artist: Richard K. Ayers (1921-2003) studied art at Miami University...

Discover the vibrant world of Martin Saldana, a talented Mexican-American folk artist known for his captivating rustic and naïve style. This original painting, titled "The Train", wa...

This original 1949 painting by Kansas artist Zona Wheeler (1913–1998) beautifully captures the essence of Colorado’s majestic mountains through an abstract lens. Using vibrant shades...

"Cellar with Horseshoe" WPA American Scene Modernism 20th Century NYC Industrial Joseph Solman (1909-2008) "Cellar with Horseshoe," 16 x 20 inches, oil on canvas circa 1938, initial...

Woman and Child in the Woods - Midcentury Abstracted Landscape in Oil on Canvas Dramatic abstracted painting of a woman holding a child in the woods by Maley (20th Century). This pi...

Abstract watercolor composition bearing the influence of the earlier color-block compositions of Paul Klee. Pawel August Kontny, (Polish-German-American artist) He was born in Laurahuette, Poland, in 1923, the son of a wealthy pastry shop owner. In 1939 he began studying architecture in Breslau where he was introduced to the European masters and to the work of some of the German Expressionists, soon afterward banned as "degenerate artists" and removed from museums throughout Germany by the Nazi regime. His studies were interrupted by World War II. Drafted into the German army, traveling in many countries as a soldier, he sketched various landscapes but in 1945, he was captured and held as a prisoner of war in Italy. After the war, he studied at the Union of Nuremberg Architects to help design buildings to replace ones destroyed in the war. He recorded his impressions of the local population and the landscapes through his watercolors and drawings. Pawel Kontny thereafter moved to Nuremberg, Germany, becoming a member of the Union of Nuremberg Architects and helping to rebuild the city's historic center. He soon decided to concentrate on his professional art career. He married Irmgard Laurer, a dancer with the Nuremberg Opera. Pavel Kontny 's career as an artist was launched with his participation in an all German exhibition, held at the Dusseldorf Museum in 1952. He held one-man shows in Germany, Switzerland and the United States. During his trip to the United States in 1960, Kontny became instantly enamored with Colorado, and decided to relocate to Cherry Hills with his wife and two children. He quickly established himself in the local art community, being affiliated for a time with Denver Art Galleries and Saks Galleries. His subject matter became the Southwest. During this time he received the Prestigious Gold Medal of the Art Academy of Rome. His extensive travel provided material for the paintings he did using his hallmark marble dust technique. he also worked equally in pastel, watercolor, charcoal and pencil-and-ink. in a style which merged abstraction and realist styles, influenced by Abstract Expressionist painting and South Western American landscapes. In the early 1960s he was one of only a few European-born professional artists in the state, a select group that included Herbert Bayer (1900-1985), a member of the prewar Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau, Germany, and Roland Detre (1903-2001), a Hungarian modernist painter. As a Denver, Colorado resident, Pavel Kontny exhibited at galleries and museums throughout the United States, Germany and Japan. There, he was inspired by frequent trips to Native American pueblos in the Southwest, as well as by the study of the Plains Indians of Montana and Wyoming. Over the years Kontny had a number of students and generously helped young artist by hosting exhibitions at his Cherry Hills home. For many years he generously donated his paintings to support charitable causes in Denver. Influences during his European years included German pastelist C.O. Muller, German Informel painter Karl Dahmen and Swiss artist, Hans Erni. In the early 1950s his painting style showed the influence of the Die Brücke (The Bridge), a group of German expressionist artists formed in Dresden in 1905 who had a major impact on the evolution of modern art in the twentieth century in Germany. By the middle of the decade his style incorporated more referential abstraction and total abstraction, resulting in part from his study of Hans Hartung, a German artist based in Paris who exhibited his gestural abstract work in Germany. The American moon landing in 1969 inspired Paul Kontny...

Out of many come one. A huge back mountain is formed out of scores of gas spewing smokestacks. The foreboding back mass fills most of the pictorial area. As one gets closer to the canvas, the complexity of the mass if revealed in low on contrast as we see the diverse variety of the stacks with accompanying petrochemical architecture. Above the stacks, plums of air pollutants like sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides rise gracefully into the atmosphere. The artist focuses less on the by-product of the stacks and more on his giant pollution machine that he has so astutely rendered. The work is mostly monochromatic but the artist has indicted a red tonality of a sunset/sunrise that offsets the charcoal blacks and grays. ______________________________________________ Submitted by Tamarind Institute Ian Davis...