Ben Shahn met writer and artist Bernarda Bryson in 1933 while working as an assistant to Diego Rivera at the RCA Building in Rockefeller Center. Bryson, the daughter of a newspaper editor and publisher from Athens, OH, was in New York on assignment as an art critic to interview Diego but quickly found a rapport with Shahn. Within a few short years, Bryson was accompanying Shahn on his trips throughout rural America while he served with the Farm Security Administration, creating a series of lithographs entitled The Vanishing American Frontier. Before the decade was out, the couple had returned to the East Coast and settled in Roosevelt, NJ, just east of Princeton, where a federal relief program had recently created a modernist subdivision.
Shahn and Bryson would live out the rest of their lives in their cinder block Bauhaus home, surrounded by a politically progressive community where they amassed a collection reflecting their personalities and values. Amid furniture pieces by George Nakashima were illuminated Indian manuscripts, classical sculpture, and works by Shahn’s contemporaries including Robert Rauschenberg, Jacob Lawrence, Rufino Tamayo, and Alfred Maurer.
Each was committed to their artistic career, Shahn creating and showing works alongside his teaching engagements after the war, Bryson illustrating for Fortune, Harper’s, and Scientific America before turning to book illustration in the mid-1950s. Following Shahn’s death in 1969, Bryson remained in their Roosevelt home where the couple had hosted friends and luminaries such as Albert Einstein, Dorothea Lange, Eleanor Roosevelt, Alfred Barr, and Alexander Calder. Throughout the 1980s and until her death at the age of 101, Bryson focused her energies on producing the realist and surrealist paintings for which she would become best known. She participated in solo exhibitions at the Midtown and Susan Teller Galleries in New York as well as the Ben Shahn Galleries at William Paterson University, Wayne, NJ, and served on the Board of Governors of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. The recipient of the Outstanding Achievement in the Visual Arts Award from the 1989 Women’s Caucus for Art and an honorary doctorate from Ohio University, her work can be found in the permanent collections of major institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Alexander Calder 1898–1976
Born in 1898 to Nanette Lederer Calder and Alexander Stirling Calder, a painter and a sculptor respectively, Alexander Calder was encouraged to be creative and make things by hand. As a child he made gifts for his family and jewelry for his sister’s dolls. In 1915, Calder attended Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey graduating in 1919 with a degree in mechanical engineering because his parents didn’t want him to struggle as an artist. After completing school, Calder work a myriad of jobs including draftsman for Edison Company, a staff member at Lumber magazine, coloring maps for a hydraulics engineer and timekeeper for a logging camp.
In the spring of 1922 Calder attended night classes in drawing and the following year he decides to pursue a career as a painter. By 1925 Calder had his first art exhibition and in 1926 he made his first sculptures out of wood and wire. Calder relocated to Paris, socializing with the Parisian avant-garde, and started making mechanical toys and abstract sculptures. His kinetic works, a departure from traditional sculpture, became known as ‘mobiles’, a term coined by Marcel Duchamp.
Calder’s artistic endeavors ranged from mobiles to stabiles (static sculptures) both small and large, to jewelry and paintings. Today his works can be found in numerous museum collections around the world including The Whitney Museum of American Art, the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid.
Auction Results Alexander Calder
