🔥 Antique Mid Century Modern Los Angeles Oil Painting, David Smith Sculpture For Sale

This is an interesting and well done Antique Mid Century Modern Los Angeles Plein Air Oil Painting, depicting the renowned Franklin D. Murphy sculpture gardens at U.C.L.A. Prominently featured in this work is the Expressionist sculptor David Smith’s “Cubi XX” created in 1964, and gifted to the university by David E. Bright in 1967. This work is signed in the lower right corner: “Rosette D’Albert.” Additionally, this work is titled and signed on the verso: “U.C.L.A. Sculpture Gardens by Rosette D’Albert. 10501 Wilshire Bvd. LA 90024 California...” Approximately 19 1/4 x 25 1/4 inches (including frame.) Actual artwork is approximately 18 x 24 inches. I could not find much information on D’Albert, but perhaps you know more about the painter or her work? This work approximately dates to the late 1960’s - early 1970’s. Good condition, with a few light scratches to the canvas, and mild scuffing and edge wear to the original period frame. This painting is loose in the frame and would need a few nails to keep it firmly in place (please see photos.) If you like what you see, I encourage you to make an Offer. Please check my other listings for more wonderful and unique artworks!
About David Smith:
Biography

David Smith was born in Decatur, Indiana, in 1906. His mother was a school teacher and a devout Methodist; his father was a telephone engineer and part-time inventor, who fostered in his son a reverence for machinery. After his family moved to Paulding, Ohio, in 1921, Smith developed an interest in art, taking a correspondence course in drawing under the auspices of the Cleveland Art School. Although he spent one year at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, Smith felt that the studio art curriculum there did not offer the stimulation he sought, and he subsequently dropped out in the spring of 1925. During that summer, he worked as a welder and riveter at a Studebaker automobile factory, where his understanding and love for industrial materials and techniques took root. Much of this rudimentary training proved essential to Smith\'s career as an artist.

Smith moved to New York in 1926 and enrolled in classes at the Art Students League, where he met Jan Matulka, a Czech abstractionist. Through Matulka, Smith became familiar with the work of Piet Mondrian, Wassily Kandinsky, and the cubists. By the early 1930s, Smith had begun to incorporate found objects such as shells, bones, wood, and wire into his paintings, adding depth and transforming them into sculptural reliefs. Soon thereafter he began constructing welded steel sculptures, and it is for these works that Smith is best known. Smith developed friendships with other avant-garde artists, including Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, and John Graham. Graham, a painter and critic, introduced Smith to the welded sculptures of Julio Gonzáles and Pablo Picasso, which made a tremendous impression on the artist. By 1934 he had settled into a \"studio\" at Terminal Iron Works, a foundry in Brooklyn, where he constructed innovative and remarkably diverse sculpture from used machine parts, scrap metal, and found objects.

Throughout his career Smith\'s largely abstract work evoked the figure. Often executed in series, his sculptures fully explored particular ideas about materials and composition. In 1965 David Smith\'s career was cut short when he died in a tragic automobile accident at the age of fifty-nine.

David Smith

David Smith was an American artist and sculptor of the Abstract Expressionist movement. Smith is best known for his large, geometric sculptures formed from welded steel. As with other American Abstract Expressionists, including his friend, Jackson Pollock, Smith’soeuvrewas influenced by the Surrealist art movement.

Roland David Smith was born on 9 March, 1906 in Decatur, Indiana. Soon after, Smith’s family moved to Ohio – it’s there that Smith spent his childhood and teenage years. In the early 1920s, Smith briefly attended Ohio University in Athens, the University of Notre Dame and George Washington University in Washington, D.C. During his summers, Smith worked on an assembly line of an automobile factory.

In 1926, Smith moved to New York City and began taking classes at the Art Students League of New York. (He did this on the advice of the then-art student, and future revered sculptor, Dorothy Dehner – Smith and Dehner were married in 1927–1952.) At the Art Students League, Smith was taught by American painter John Sloan and Czech artist Jan Matulka; his fellow students included Hans Hofmann. Through his classes and friendships, Smith was exposed to welded-sculpture work by Pablo Picasso and Julio González.

During the early 1930s, Smith joined the New York Works Progress Administration\'s Federal Art Project. Through the project, he became friends with artists Adolph Gottlieb and Milton Avery. At this time, Smith and Dehner, then married, purchased a farm in Bolton Landing, a town on Lake George in New York. Here, Smith set up a studio and began creating three-dimensional sculptures using wood, coral, wire and soldered metal. Soon, though, Smith began to use an oxyacetylene torch to weld metal sculptures – creating what were likely the first welded-metal sculptures in the United States. In 1938, Smith’s first solo exhibition, which included both his drawings and sculptures, took place at the Willard Gallery in New York. In 1941, sculptures by Smith were included in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art\'s Annual exhibition, both in New York.

During WWII, Smith worked as a welder at the American Locomotive Company, Schenectady, NY, and taught at Sarah Lawrence College.

Following the war, Smith began creating sculptures with renewed focus. While most metal sculptures are made from casts, Smith’s pieces were made entirely from scratch; in this way, each sculpture was unique.

In 1950, Smith was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. The fellowship granted Smith financial freedom, allowing him to begin producing an extensive series of sculptures.

In 1960, an issue ofArtsmagazine was devoted to Smith. That same year, he had his first solo exhibition on the West Coast, at the Everett Ellin Gallery in Los Angeles.

Smith died as a result of a car crash in May 1965.

Today, Smith’s sculptures are held in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Storm King Art Center in New Windsor, New York, among others.