🔥 Unusual Vintage Modern Surrealist Moth Man Collage Painting

Description: This is a fascinating and Unusual Vintage Modern Surrealist Moth Man Mixed Media Collage Painting / Print on Paper, by the notorious New York contemporary artist and political provocateur, Arnold Mesches (1923 - 2016.) Mesches is best known for having been monitored by the F.B.I. for decades, and for his provocative Neo-Expressionist paintings, drawings and prints. This piece depicts a surreal, seated moth-headed man in a black business suit, with his arms crossed. The subject's head is rendered as a large moth, with its wings outstretched. Signed: "Mesches '67 - '71" in the lower left corner. This artwork is a mixed media piece, with lithographed, hand painted, and collaged paper application. Approximately 20 1/2 x 26 inches. Good overall condition for age and storage, with some light creases and lifting to a few areas of the thin collage paper applique (please see photos carefully.) I cannot find another example of this particular image, and I believe that it is a one-of-one. Acquired in Los Angeles County, California. Priced to Sell. If you like what you see, I encourage you to make an Offer. Please check out my other listings for more wonderful and unique artworks! About the Artist: Arnold Mesches Born: 1923 - Bronx, New York CityDied: 2016 - Gainesville, FloridaKnown for: Political activity themed painting, scenic artist, teaching Arnold Mesches (1923 - 2016) was active/lived in New York, California. Arnold Mesches is known for Political activity themed painting, scenic artist, teaching. Following is The New York Times obituary of Arnold Mesches."Arnold Mesches, Artist Who Was Recorded by the F.B.I., Dies at 93"by William Grimes, November 9, 2016Arnold Mesches, a socially conscious painter whose political activities were recorded by the F.B.I. for more than 25 years in a thick dossier that he later used for his series “The F.B.I. Files,” died on Saturday at his home in Gainesville, Fla. He was 93.His death was confirmed by his wife, the novelist Jill Ciment.Mr. Mesches (pronounced MESH-ees) was a scenic artist in Hollywood when his work for the Communist Party came to the attention of the F.B.I. in 1945. A file the bureau started began filling up quickly the next year, when he dropped his work as a storyboard artist on a Tarzan film and took part in a strike against the studios.Over the years, agents and informers kept track of Mr. Mesches’s day-to-day activities, reporting to headquarters on matters large and small. If he signed a petition, it went into his file. When he turned in an illustration for Mad magazine, the fact was duly noted. One informant, noting his paint-spattered pants, wrote that Mr. Mesches “dressed like a Communist.”In 1956 most of his artwork was stolen from his studio, including dozens of paintings and drawings inspired by the trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, convicted of spying for the Soviet Union. He strongly suspected that the F.B.I. was behind the break-in.And so it went until 1972, when the surveillance sputtered to its conclusion.In the late 1990s, Mr. Mesches obtained his file under the Freedom of Information Act and reaped a bonanza of 760 pages, with classified information ruled over in heavy black lines. They had a certain look, he decided.“I saw other people’s files and realized they were aesthetically beautiful,” he told The New York Times in 2003. “Kind of like Franz Kline sketches. Those big, black slashes where they block things out.”Going to work, he cut and pasted 57 of the documents into a series of collaged paintings first exhibited at P.S. 1, the Museum of Modern Art’s satellite museum in Queens, in 2003 and later at several other museums. It was, in a way, a collaborative work — an inspired if unexpected union of opposites.Arnold Mesches was born on Aug. 11, 1923, in the Bronx. His father, Benjamin, traded gold door to door and later sold cut-rate suits. His mother, the former Anna Grosse, was a homemaker.When Arnold was 2 years old, his father moved the family to Dunkirk, N.Y., near Buffalo, where he managed his sister’s haberdashery store. When the Depression took hold, he was reduced to working odd jobs in Buffalo, where Arnold, an only child, grew up from the age of 7.After graduating in 1941 from Technical High School (now Hutchinson Technical Central High School) in Buffalo, where he studied advertising design, Mr. Mesches worked at a munitions factory making machine guns. He tried to enlist in the Army Signal Corps but was rejected because he suffered from migraine headaches.In 1943, with a scholarship in hand, Mr. Mesches moved to Los Angeles to study commercial art at the Art Center School (now the Art Center College of Design). He soon realized that he wanted to be a fine artist and, dropping out of the Art Center School, studied drawing at the Jepson Art Institute and composition at the Chouinard Art Institute.While on strike, Mr. Mesches walked the picket line in the morning and painted watercolor landscapes in the afternoon with a group of other scenic artists. “I knew nothing about painting, so I’d look over the other guy’s shoulders — when they made a stroke, I’d make a stroke — that’s how I learned about painting,” he told the arts journal The Brooklyn Rail in 2010.Influenced by the social realism of Ben Shahn and the crowd scenes of the German expressionist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Mr. Mesches began painting laborers plying their trades, rendered in a propulsive, gestural style, with broad, heavy brush strokes. At the Graphic Arts Workshop, which he helped found, he turned out political posters and banners.Mr. Mesches moved from straightforward realism to a more idiosyncratic style, with surrealistic touches that infused his social panoramas with a dreamlike, often nightmarish, quality.His commentary tended to be indirect. In Anomie 2006: Dog Eared, part of a series he said was intended to show “a condition of society marred by the absence of moral standards,” a giant ice cream cone and a childlike robot tower over an auto graveyard at sunset.The F.B.I. Files 56, one of the best-known works in the F.B.I. series, juxtaposes a man’s head, mouth open as though declaiming, next to a ragged page from Mr. Mesches’s file noting his involvement in the Walk for Peace Committee in 1961. Along the borders of the page Mr. Mesches sprinkled cryptic images: a tricycle, a Ferris wheel, a set of keys, a tiny Viking doll with sword and shield.Ms. Ciment wove the F.B.I. project into her novel Heroic Measures, about a painter and his wife living in a Brooklyn brownstone. It was made into the 2015 film “5 Flights Up,” with Morgan Freeman and Diane Keaton in the lead roles.Over one crazy weekend a long-time married couple discover that finding a new apartment is not about winding down but starting a new adventure.When he moved to New York in the mid-1980s, Mr. Mesches found that his work chimed with the vogue for Neo-Expressionism. By then in his 60s, he jumped right into the exploding East Village scene with a solo show at the Civilian Warfare gallery, his first in New York. Grace Glueck of The Times called it “another interesting case of a trend catching up to an artist.”Mr. Mesches’s first marriage ended in divorce. In addition to his wife, he is survived by two children from his first marriage, Paul and Susan Mesches, and two grandsons. He divided his time between Gainesville and Brooklyn.In 2013, the Museum of Art and Design at Miami Dade College organized a retrospective covering 60 years of his work, much of it devoted to class conflict and political violence. “It’s a frightening world,” he told The Miami Herald, “and I have to do something about it.” Biography from Nancy Moure - special bio account “Born in New York City in 1923, Arnold Mesches came to Los Angeles in 1943. His commercial art education includes training in advertising design, Art Center School in Los Angeles, five months each at the Jepson Art Institute, and at Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles. He is self-taught as a fine artist.Of his eighteen one-man exhibits, the most recent are those at the Paul Rivas Gallery, Los Angeles, in 1960 and at the Ankrum Gallery in Los Angeles in 1964. His major juried shows include the Los Angeles and Vicinity Annuals, the Long Beach State College Drawing Annuals, the Westwood Art Association Annuals, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City; Library of Congress Print Annuals, the Butler Institute Annual, and was a prize winner in the ACA Gallery competition. He also was represented in Art: USA, 1958.Mr. Mesches is the winner of numerous awards, purchase prizes, and honorable mentions. His work is included in many prominent collections, both in museums and privately owned. He is currently teaching at the Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles, and privately. He previously taught at Kann Institute of Art, University of Southern California, and the New School of Art.”Source:September 1964 Laguna Beach Art Association catalogSource: Nancy Dustin Moure, "Publications in California Art No. 11 , Index to California Art Exhibited at the Laguna Beach Art Association, 1918-1972; 2015 edition" Arnold Mesches(1923-2016)AmericanBorn: Bronx, New York, United States Arnold Mesches was a painter and political activist who was born in the Bronx (N.Y.) in 1923 to an orthodox Jewish family. They soon moved to Dunkirk, N.Y., where Mesches’s father, a Lithuanian immigrant, managed his sister’s clothing store until the Great Depression hit. After the store closed, Mesches moved with his parents to a working-class neighborhood in Buffalo, N.Y. In an essay accompanying a 2001 exhibition of his work, he recalled this period of his father's life:“Pop wound up buying and selling old gold on strange streets, in a hostile environment, uncomfortably living with in-laws. Peddling old gold had to be the most humiliating experience imaginable. Certainly, the loneliest. You bang on doors, in the dead of brutal winters, in the heat of breathless summers, begging poor, desperate people to part with their ancient, cherished heirlooms; watches and bracelets from their wrists, necklaces and pendants from their necks, rings from their fingers, bridges from their mouths, paying a few meager dollars so you can resell the goods for a tiny profit to contribute to the rent of a place you don’t want to be in, at an unexplainable time, facing a frightening future.” [1]Mesches demonstrated an interest in and talent for visual art as a teenager. (The first work for which he achieved recognition was a drawing of Theodore Herzl, the father of Zionism, created while Mesches was active with a leftist Jewish youth group before abandoning religion altogether.) While attending Buffalo Technical High School he received scholarships and other awards for his artwork. Upon graduating in 1941, he worked as a freelance advertising designer until the U.S. entered World War II, when he took a job in a machine gun factory. He enlisted in a Signal Corps class, but was rejected after failing his physical.A scholarship brought him to the Art Center School (now Art Center College of Design) in Pasadena, Cal. in 1943, where his primary mentor was Lorser Feitelson. This period marked his only formal art education, although both inside and outside the academy he learned about artists who would become major influences on his work, including Brueghel, Goya, Käthe Kollwitz, Anselm Kiefer, Jose Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera and other Mexican muralists, and especially Ben Shahn.In 1945 Mesches married Sylvia Snetzky and the newlyweds moved to Los Angeles. It was there that he launched his fine art career while taking a short-lived day job as a set and storyboard illustrator in Hollywood (where he learned watercolor technique from studio professionals) until a studio strike inspired him to join the picket line. In the late 1940s and 1950s he sought work teaching art wherever he could, with little long-term success. (He was fired from one such position in Salt Lake City in 1948 because of his political activities.) Meanwhile he took commissions to paint murals, worked on filmstrips about African-American history and the Progressive Party, and designed the cover of an album by Pete Seeger, among other odd jobs.The artist’s first solo museum show was mounted in 1953 at what was then called the Pasadena Art Museum (now the Norton Simon Museum). In 1955, he began work on Family Background, a series of paintings examining parallels between his own life and those of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who had been executed three years earlier after being convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage. In 1956, the entire series and many other paintings were stolen from Mesches’s studio, a theft which the artist and his legal advisers suspected was the work of the FBI.During the late 1950s and early 1960s, Mesches worked on a series about the Holocaust; as the nation’s attention turned to Vietnam in the mid 1960s, he joined the anti-war movement. In 1966 he traveled to Europe for the first time, where he was able to see artworks he had previously only read about and seen in reproductions. Returning to the States, he worked as a courtroom artist for television news. For several years, beginning in the late 1960s, he shifted from painting to printmaking and creative writing.Mesches's first marriage ended in the 1970s, and he began a relationship with student, artist, and future novelist Jill Ciment. They married in 1983, and in 1984 they moved to New York City. The couple arrived in the East Village at the height of the Neo-Expressionist movement, and Mesches’s solo exhibition at the gallery Civilian Warfare that year—his first one-man show in New York, at the age of 61 - attracted attention in the city’s art world. Critic Kim Levin described the work in the Village Voice:“Mesches’s long preoccupation with the madness of civilization has recently converged with a younger generation’s angst. … First [he] recreates a familiar Old Master composition, sands it down and stains it until all that’s left is a murky, eroded picture, a receding memory. This becomes the background for a seemingly unrelated overpainted foreground image. … Though the overlay is a relatively simple formal device, the results resonate with issues of survival, madness, victory, and defeat. They speak to the relativity of events, the precariousness of art, life, and history, and the perils of ignoring the past.” [2]The Civilian Warfare show ran concurrently with another exhibition of recent work at the Karl Bornstein Gallery in Santa Monica and was followed by one at Hallwalls in Buffalo. Over the course of his 18 years in New York, Mesches taught at New York University, Rutgers University, and Parsons School of Design. In 1988, the Buscaglia-Castellani Art Gallery (Niagara University, Niagara Falls, N.Y.; now the Castellani Art Museum) and the Burchfield Art Center (Buffalo, N.Y.; now the Burchfield Penney Art Center) collaborated on a mini-retrospective of his work, Arnold Mesches: Selections from the 80s.In the late 1990s, Mesches and Ciment, while maintaining a residence in Brooklyn, relocated to Florida, where he taught at Florida State University and the University of Florida at Gainesville. (The latter institution granted him an honorary Doctorate in 2010.) In 1999, through the Freedom of Information Act, he gained access to his FBI file, containing 780 pages of material that confirmed the agency had closely followed his actions for 26 years, beginning in 1946. The documents became the basis for a mixed media series called The FBI Files, a collection of collages resembling illuminated manuscript pages. First shown at P.S. 1 in Brooklyn in 2002, the project toured extensively, including a stop at the University at Buffalo Art Gallery in 2004.Other series Mesches has created over the years include War Images, Anomie, Coming Attractions, It’s a Circus, Weather Patterns, Paint, and Shock and Awe [3]. In 2013, a major retrospective (curated by Levin) spanning more than 60 years, Arnold Mesches: A Life's Work, opened at the Miami Dade College Museum of Art + Design. On the occasion of the retrospective, Shana Mason wrote in Art in America:"Mesches focuses on marginalized and forgotten characters. Acrobats, waiters and busboys, martyrs and demonic animals are all set against opaque voids and elegant, empty Baroque spaces. Mesches's nightmarish visions of the modern world are articulated with dense fields of vividly colored brushstrokes. They are theaters of the surreal, grotesque and absurd, lamenting and satirizing society's elite and the horrors of human cruelty." [4]Mesches’s extensive body of work has been featured in over 125 solo exhibitions and can be found in both private collections and the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery, the Burchfield Penney Art Center, and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, among other institutions. He has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Florida Department of State Division of Cultural Affairs.

Price: 1350 USD

Location: Orange, California

End Time: 2024-10-31T00:10:46.000Z

Shipping Cost: N/A USD