William Sommer (American, 1867-1949) Boy Painting

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By Myers Antiques

Apr 30, 2023

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• Lot Description

  William Sommer (American, 1867-1949) Painting. Title - Boy in Green Chair. Tempera on artist board painting. The interior bottom of frame edge is inscribed, Tony Harvey - 24 3/8 x 30 1/2. Painting is professionally framed with a linen mat and mounted on linen that is attached to a back board. Artist board painting is floating and attached with one piece of double sided tape near the top to the linen back. Unsigned. Painting measures 23.5 inches high, 17.5 inches wide. Frame measures 31.5 inches high, 25.25 inches wide. Included with the painting is a postcard that was attached to the back showing a similar boy painting. In good condition. From the Water Mill estate on Long Island, NY of Academy Award nominated film director (Tony) Anthony Harvey (1930-2017).
  
  From Askart: William Sommer is seen as a key person in bringing European modernism to Northeast Ohio. He was born in Detroit, Michigan, and in his youth apprenticed for seven years to a lithographer. He briefly studied at an art academy in Germany and then worked as a lithographer in New York before moving to Cleveland, where he was awarded a major contract with the Otis Lithography Company. There he became friends with sculptor and painter William Zorach, and the two, determined to be fine artists began painting together on weekends. They also became intrigued by avant-garde movements, especially after Zorach's trip to Paris in 1910. In 1911, Sommer co-founded a group in Cleveland called the Kokoon Club, a mixed group of commercial artists and radical modernists who sought the freedom to pursue their independent tendencies. They converted a tailor's shop into a studio and held exhibitions and lectures and organized an annual masked ball that became the focus of Cleveland's bohemian life. In 1913, he and his colleagues began painting at Brandywine, about 30 miles south of Cleveland and made a school house into a studio. They devoted increasing time to watercolor painting because they could work spontaneously and it would dry quickly. Rejecting the conventional ideas of beauty, they strove for the expression of emotion and spontaneity and fantasy. One of Sommer's most successful students was Charles Burchfield. As he was perfecting his mature style, he had financial difficulties because he made his living from commercial lithography, which was becoming obsolete, and the Depression was hitting the nation causing him to lose his job. He became a WPA artist, doing murals in northeastern Ohio. After his death at age 82, he was largely forgotten until 1980 when Hilton Kramer, a New York Times critic, praised his work. In May to July, 1994, the Ohio Arts Council held a retrospective of his work at the Riffe Gallery in Columbus. His work is found in many public collections including the National Museum of American Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
  
  From HollisTaggartGalleries,com: The son of German immigrants, William Sommer (1867-1949) was born in Detroit on January 18, 1867. He was largely self-taught, but early-on received instruction from artist and commercial lithographer Julius Melchers. In 1881 Melchers was instrumental in obtaining for Sommer an apprenticeship with the Detroit Calvert Lithograph Company. Following his seven years' apprenticeship, Sommer created a solid reputation as a lithographer, and job offers took him to Boston, New York, and England. In 1890 Sommer traveled to Europe with, and at the expense of fellow lithographer Fred Hager. He pursued a year of additional training in Munich, where he worked with Professors Johann Herterich, Ludwig Schmid, and Adolph Menzel, and he made brief excursions to the Alps, Italy and Holland. Upon his return to the United States, Sommer took up residence in New York, returning to commercial lithography, while pursuing his own art in paints and pastels. In keeping with the Munich aesthetic, he painted portraits in predominantly earthen tones with broad strokes of the brush. In 1907 Sommer accepted a position with the Otis Lithograph Company of Cleveland, Ohio. His fellow lithographers at Otis included William Zorach and Abel Warshawsky, both of whom left to study in Paris. In 1911 Sommer co-founded the Kokoon Arts Club to promote modern art in Cleveland. Zorach and Warshawsky joined the group after returning from Paris. Warshawsky taught Sommer the fundamentals of Impressionism, the style that Sommer practiced from 1910 to 1912. Zorach inspired Sommer in Post-Impressionism, and this influence was registered in his large, flat areas of bright color and simplified forms in his works of 1913-1914. A visit to the 1913 Armory Show in New York aroused Sommer's interest in the work of Henri Matisse and the Fauves, and his canvases began to reflect their vivid colorism and energetic brushstrokes. In 1914 Sommer relocated to Brandywine, mid-way between Cleveland and Akron. He converted an abandoned schoolhouse into a studio, producing festive watercolors of sensuous nudes that show Matisse's influence. He kept up with the vanguard artists and thinkers through his job at Otis. Inspired by Cézanne and German Expressionism, in about 1917 Sommer began to combine angular and curving forms in his compositions. Increasingly, through the mid-1920s he painted expressive, geometric oils in dense form and earth tones, focusing on the familiar themes of children, livestock, landscapes, and still lifes. Throughout his career, Sommer assimilated broken masses with the flat, patterned arrangement of Matisse's lines and colors. He developed his own unique style by the late 1920s, his classic period. Through watercolor, which had become his primary medium, he incorporated Midwestern subject matter with European Modernism. In 1924 the Cleveland Museum of Art awarded Sommer First Prize for drawing; thereafter, he garnered awards from that institution and exhibited yearly in their May shows. From his earliest Munich works to the portraits and genre subjects of the 1940s, Sommer remained master of the line. Sommer was hard hit by the Depression and gladly accepted work on several large-scale murals for federal art projects. He continued to paint until his death on June 20, 1949. Art critic Hilton Kramer noted in the New York Times that . . . his work seems to have been born. . . of a remarkable inner serenity and lyric grace. Whatever the disorder or disappointments of his life, his art is beautifully controlled. The Cleveland Museum of Art gave Sommer a memorial exhibition in 1950, and the Akron Art Institute hosted a retrospective show in 1970. Sommer's work is represented in leading public collections, among them the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts; the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio; Akron Art Institute; and Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio.
  
  Obituary from NY Times - Dec. 13, 2017: Anthony Harvey, Lion in Winter - Director and Kubrick Editor, Dies at 87.
  
  It might have gone down as the most ridiculous scene in the most audacious film that Anthony Harvey ever worked on, but at least as Mr. Harvey told the story, a momentous event in the real world kept it from the moviegoing public. It was an epic two minutes worth of pie throwing, and it was originally to be the ending of - Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, - Stanley Kubrick's dark satire of the nuclear age. Mr. Harvey, the editor on that movie, was pretty pleased with the way the chaotic scene had come out. It was a brilliant piece of work, he once said. Who knows? I certainly thought it was. But the movie, which was scheduled for release in January 1964, was to receive its press premiere in late November 1963, right when all sorts of plans were thrown into turmoil by the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. That ending, how it started, the George Scott character threw a custard pie to the Russian ambassador, and it missed and hit the president, Mr. Harvey told the film journalist Glenn Kenny in 2009. Columbia Pictures, he said, was very nervous about anything to show the president, any president in that state. As a result, the pie-throwing scene was scrapped. Others involved with the movie have over the years given different explanations for the changed ending, but in any case the airborne pies were replaced with the now familiar montage of nuclear explosions - set to Vera Lynn's rendition of the song We'll Meet Again, an unsettling ending instead of a slapstick one. Mr. Harvey would go on to become a director himself, teaming with Katharine Hepburn on several films, most notably The Lion in Winter (1968), for which he was nominated for an Oscar. He died on Nov. 23 at his home in Water Mill, on Long Island, at age 87. The Brockett Funeral Home confirmed the death. Mr. Harvey was born on June 3, 1930, in London. His father, Geoffrey Harrison, died when he was young, and after his mother, the former Dorothy Leon, remarried, he took the surname of his stepfather, Morris Harvey, an actor. He got an early taste of the movie business when he was cast in a small part in the 1945 film "Caesar and Cleopatra," which starred Claude Rains and Vivien Leigh, but his real entree came when he landed a job as an editor for the British filmmakers John and Roy Boulting. He learned the art of editing as it was done in predigital days, pasting countless film clips together by hand. He received his first film-editor credits in 1956, on a short called - On Such a Night and the feature Private's Progress, a war comedy. He was the editor on Kubrick's - Lolita in 1962, which led to the - Dr. Strangelove assignment, a difficult one that involved cutting between three concurrent story lines, one set in the war room of the American government. We had a huge kind of war room of our own in the cutting room, Mr. Harvey told Mr. Kenny, and we put up pieces of paper representing every sequence in different order. It was Kubrick, he said in a 1994 interview with The New York Times, who told Mr. Harvey that he was ready to direct. It was Kubrick, too, who gave him an important piece of advice: If an actor is giving a dazzling performance, hold on to that shot and resist the temptation to cut away to, for instance, the reactions of other characters in the scene. In 1966, Mr. Harvey directed - Dutchman, a short film based on a play by LeRoi Jones, who would become better known as Amiri Baraka. Peter O'Toole was impressed enough by that film that he recruited Mr. Harvey for - The Lion in Winter, in which Mr. O'Toole starred as Henry II opposite Katharine Hepburn as Eleanor of Aquitaine. Working with her is like going to Paris at the age of 17 and finding everything is the way you thought it would be, Mr. Harvey said. Hepburn won an Oscar for her performance, splitting the award with Barbra Streisand, who won for Funny Girl. Mr. Harvey also directed Hepburn in a well-regarded television adaptation of Tennessee William's - The Glass Menagerie in 1973. John J. O'Connor, reviewing that film in The Times, called it a special TV event, demanding attention. It won four Emmy Awards. But Mr. Harvey's output as a director was limited. His handful of theatrical releases included the comedy - They Might Be Giants in 1971, the drama Richard's Things in 1981 and another Hepburn vehicle, Grace Quigley, in 1985. That movie was poorly received, and Mr. Harvey retreated from film directing, returning only in 1994 for This Can't Be Love, a television movie starring Hepburn and Anthony Quinn. He retired to his Long Island home, which he had acquired three years earlier. He leaves no immediate survivors. Mr. Harvey was comfortable working in Hollywood but preferred life on the East Coast, where the film business was not quite so all-consuming. He told of once having surgery in a Los Angeles hospital. As I was coming to, he recalled, the anesthesiologist said, - I'm very anxious to get into movies.

  Condition

  Condition is listed in the description

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