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"Woman with Flowers"

Creator: Ben Benn
Offered by: Arthur T. Kalaher Fine Art

Description
Oil on canvas painting by the famous Russian/American artist Ben Benn. Signed lower right and dated 1962. In fine original condition . Overall in contemporary gold gilt frame 48 by 36 inches.

Ben Benn, a Russian-born American still-life and landscape painter who was part of the first generation of artists in America to try to digest the lessons of Cubism, died Friday in Connecticut. He was 98 years old.

Throughout his career, Mr. Benn shifted back and forth between figuration and abstraction, never becoming wholly one or the other. His pictorial approach was always marked by Cezanne and Cubism, but his concern for composition was always tempered by a passion for the world around him and an instinctive feeling for color and line.

''There is a wonderful vigor,'' the art critic Hilton Kramer wrote in The New York Times in 1967, ''an exemplary professionalism and elan, that has been characteristic of his art for many decades. Here is easel painting in the classical lyric mode, without chic or subterfuge.''

Ben Benn was born Benjamin Rosenberg in the Ukraine in 1884. He migrated to the United States in 1899 with Max Weber and Man Ray.

In his first group show, in 1913, he exhibited with Max Weber and Man Ray. In 1917, he participated in the important Forum exhibition of modern American art, which was organized largely in reaction to the Armory show of 1913. The Forum show will be recreated by the Midtown branch of the Whitney Museum of American Art later this year.

Mr. Benn had one-man shows at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Jewish Museum in New York and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington. He participated in group shows at the Museum of Modern Art in 1933 and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1950.

His work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney, the Met, the Hirshhorn, the Walker and the Baltimore Museum of Art. Mr. Benn was a member of the National Academy of Design. In 1951, he was given the Schiedt Award by the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.

More Information

Origin:	United States, New York
Period:	1950-1979
Materials:	Oil paint on canvas
Condition:	Excellent.
Creation Date:	1962
Styles / Movements:	Modernism
Incollect Reference #:	230036