\"Painter\" John von Wicht Signed Magazine Page For Sale

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\"Painter\" John von Wicht Signed Magazine Page:
$69.99

Up for sale "Painter" John von Wicht Hand Signed Magazine Page. 

ES-5799E

John von Wicht was

highly trained in fine and applied arts in his native Germany before he

immigrated to the United States in 1923. When he was seventeen he

apprenticed in a painting and decorating shop, and spent his spare time

drawing from nature. He began painting in oil about 1908, and soon

thereafter sold his first canvas. Encouraged that her son would have

a future as an artist, von Wicht’s mother sent him to the advanced private

school of the Grand Duke of Hesse, where the professors encouraged students to

draw plants and flowers to learn about organic growth, shape and

proportion. ​“I remember the Professor speaking of circular movements, of

space between forms and of Equilibrium,” von Wicht later recalled.(1) The

students also studied ancient art, Chinese and Japanese calligraphy, as well as

Mathias Grünewald, Albrecht Dürer, Martin Schongauer, Hans Memling, and other

German masters whose work was in local collections. Von Wicht subsequently

studied printing methods at the Royal School for Fine and Applied Arts in

Berlin, but said he skipped class frequently to visit exhibitions of the newest

painting—van Gogh, Cézanne, Munch, Gauguin, Kandinsky, and Franz Marc. Wounded

and partially paralyzed in the trenches during World War I, von Wicht spent

several years recovering, doing book design and illustration work, and looking

at art. It was during this recuperation that he discovered Mondrian and

Malevich. In 1923, with inflation devastating the German economy, he

immigrated to the United States. In New York, his early training served him

well. He worked for two years with a lithography company, then joined

a firm making stained glass and mosaics. He learned to use symbols rather

than naturalistic motifs, and explored both geometry and dense color in

abstract paintings such as the Untitled gouache of about 1938,

and in murals for radio station WNYC and the New York World’s Fair. Von

Wicht had his first solo show, of mural designs, at the Architect’s Building

in 1936. It was followed, in 1939, by an exhibition of his paintings

at Theodor A. Kohn Gallery. The show at Kohn was well received by the New York

press, and the following year he exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American

Art. This exposure cemented von Wicht’s reputation as an abstract painter.

Throughout the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, he exhibited frequently

in solo and group exhibitions in New York and around the country. He was

invited to join the American Abstract Artists and the Federation of Modern

Painters and Sculptors. During World War II, von Wicht served as captain

of a supply barge ferrying food to army transport ships in New York

harbor; after the war he continued to command a supply scow. Harbor themes

began to appear in his abstractions, and during the 1950s his sensuously

colored geometric abstractions gave way to loose, expressionistic forms.

In 1954 von Wicht received the first of twelve annual residencies at the

MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire. The spacious studio and contact with other

artists at the MacDowell Colony had an important impact on his work. In his

exhibition at Passedoit Gallery that year, he exhibited paintings with nautical

motifs in which the Cubist device of interlocking and overlapping planes was

paramount. But von Wicht also began relating his work to music created by the

composers he had met at MacDowell. Although his work was well received from the

time of his first exhibition, critics attributed the expanded sense of space,

brilliant color, and vigorous handling of paint surfaces in his new work to the

experience of living away from the city. By the time he died, in 1970, von

Wicht had received international acclaim.

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"Painter" John von Wicht Signed Magazine Page

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