Summer Selections – Works on Paper

A Group Exhibition

Findlay Galleries presents the second installment of Summer Selections with our Works on Paper series on view at our Palm Beach Gallery. This exhibition includes a carefully coordinated and diverse selection of works from our vast collection of works on paper by artists such as Henri Matisse, Joan Miro, Alexander Calder, Marc Chagall and others. Visit or view this exhibition online to discover the works on paper that provide the foundation for the artists’ styles we treasure today.

Paper was one of the first mediums used by artists to express their creativity and vision and often affords the viewer a glimpse into the artist’s thoughts and experimental practices. We see many expressions of art born from the initial process of a sketch. At the same time, we also have works on paper that encompass the complete process of artmaking, not only a new concept but a finished work. Findlay Galleries’ collection of Works on Paper showcases a vital and unique artistic genre unlike any other. Often the result is small and intimate, allowing the viewer to engage with each piece personally. We invite you to view this carefully curated collection of works that are not only historically significant but beautiful and inspiring.

Byron Browne

(1907 – 1961)

Byron Browne’s received his formal artistic training at the National Academy of Design from 1924-1928. In 1927 he and his friend Arshile Gorky visited Albert E. Gallatin’s Gallery of Living Art, where they saw works by Picasso, Braque, and Miró. Stimulated from what he saw there, Browne began to study Cahiers d’Art, the French magazine devoted to progressive European art. As he experimented with Cubism, Browne’s conviction that abstraction represented the future of art grew. His complete break from traditional art is perhaps best expressed in his decision to destroy his early representational work…

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Henri Matisse

(1869-1954)

Henri Matisse the French artist and leader of the fauve group is regarded as one of the great formative figures in 20th-century art, a master of the use of color and form to convey emotional expression.

Matisse was born in Le Cateau in northern France on December 31, 1869. The son of a middle-class family, he studied and began to practice law. In 1890, however, while recovering slowly from an attack of appendicitis, he became intrigued by the practice of painting. In 1892, having given up his law career, he went to Paris to study art formally. His first teachers were academically trained and relatively conservative; Matisse’s own early style was a conventional form of naturalism, and he made many copies after the old masters. He also studied more contemporary art, especially that of the impressionists, and he began to experiment, earning a reputation as a rebellious member of his studio classes…

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Marc Chagall

(1887-1985)

Marc Chagall was born July 7, 1887, in Vitebsk, Russia. From 1907 to 1910, he studied in St. Petersburg at the Imperial Society for the Protection of the Arts and later with Leon Bakst.  In 1910 he moved to Paris, where he was associated with Guillaume Apollinaire and Robert Delaunay and encountered Fauvism and Cubism. He participated in the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d’Automne in 1912 and held his first solo show in 1914 at Der Sturm Gallery in Berlin.

Chagall visited Russia in 1914 and was prevented from returning to Paris by the outbreak of the war. He settled in Vitebsk where he was appointed Commissar for Art in 1918.  He founded the Vitebsk Popular Art School and directed it until his resignation in 1920. He moved to Moscow and executed his first stage designs for the State Jewish Chamber Theater. He returned to Paris in 1923 and his first retrospective took place in 1924 at the Galerie Barbazanges-Hodebert, Paris. In 1933, the Kunsthalle Basel held a major retrospective of his work…

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Marino Marini

(1901-1980)

Marino Marini attended the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence in 1917. Although he never abandoned painting, Marini devoted himself primarily to sculpture from about 1922. During this time, his work was influenced by Etruscan art and the sculpture of Arturo Martini. Marini succeeded Martini as a professor at the Scuola d’Arte di Villa Reale in Monza, near Milan, in 1929, a position he retained until 1940.During this period, Marini traveled frequently to Paris, where he associated with Massimo Campigli, Giorgio de Chirico, Alberto Magnelli, and Filippo Tibertelli de Pisis. In 1936 he moved to Tenero-Locarno, in Ticino Canton, Switzerland; during the following few years, he often visited Zürich and Basel, where he became a friend of Alberto Giacometti, Germaine Richier, and Fritz Wotruba. In 1936, he received the Prize for the Quadriennale of Rome. In 1938, he married Mercedes Pedrazzini.In 1940, he accepted a professorship in sculpture at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera (now Brera Academy) in Milan. Notable students of his include sculptor Parviz Tanavoli. In 1943, he went into exile in Switzerland, exhibiting in Basel, Bern, and Zurich. In 1946, the artist settled permanently in Milan.

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Contact your gallery to enquire about a work of art, for more information on the exhibition, or to schedule an appointment.

Pablo Picasso

(1881-1973)

Pablo Picasso was born in Malaga, Spain on October 25, 1881.  By the age of 15 he was already technically skilled in drawing and painting.  Picasso’s highly original style continuously evolved throughout his long career, expanding the definition of what art could be.  In addition to painting, he would explore sculpture, ceramics and other art forms, and became one of the most influential artists of the 1900s.

Paintings from Picasso’s Blue Period (1901 –1904) depict forlorn people painted in shades of blue, evoking feelings of sadness and alienation.  After his move to Paris in 1904, Picasso’s Rose Period paintings took on a warmer, more optimistic mood. In 1907 he and French painter Georges Braque pioneered Cubism.

By 1912 Picasso was incorporating newsprint and other materials into his paintings. By the 1920s he turned toward a flat cubist-related style. During the 1930s his paintings became militant and political. Guernica (1937), a masterpiece from this period depicts the terror of the bombing in the town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War…

Joan Miro

(1893-1983)

Joan Miró, painter, sculptor, printmaker and decorative artist, was born in Barcelona on April 20, 1893. At the age of fourteen he went to business school in Barcelona and also attended La Lonja, the academy of arts in the same city. After completing three years of art studies he took a position as a clerk. When Miró suffered a nervous breakdown he abandoned business and resumed his art studies, attending Francesc Galí’s Escola d’Art in Barcelona from 1912 to 1915. Miró received early encouragement from the dealer José Dalmau, who gave him his first solo exhibition at his gallery in Barcelona in 1918.

Miro made his first trip to Paris in 1919, where he visited Pablo Picasso in his studio.. From 1920 Miró divided his time between Paris and Montroig. Dalmau organized Miro’s first solo exhibition in Paris, at the Galerie la Licorne in 1921. His work was included in the Salon d’Automne of 1923.

Surrealism began at this time, with the writer Andre Breton issuing the Surrealist Manifesto. Surrealism was supposed to be a fusion of reality and the dream, a sort-of “super” reality. Breton felt that Miró’s work had an innocence and freedom about it. Miro showed his work in Surrealist exhibitions, and was influenced especially by the poets Max Jacob, Pierre Reverdy and Tristan Tzara.

Joan Miro joined the Surrealist group. His solo exhibition at the Galerie Pierre in Paris in 1925 was a major Surrealist event.

In 1929 Miro started his experiments in lithography, and his first etchings date from 1933. During the early 1930s he made Surrealist sculpture-objects incorporating painted stones and found objects. In 1936 Miró left Spain because of the Civil War; he returned in 1941…

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Alexander Calder

(1898 – 1976)

Sculptor and kinetic artist Alexander Calder was born in 1898 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of Alexander Stirling Calder and grandson of Alexander Milne Calder, both well know sculptors. He was encouraged to sculpt and construct things in his own workshop at an early age. In 1919 he graduated from Stevens Institute of Technology with a degree in mechanical engineering, and after holding several jobs, he decided to take classes at the Art Students League in New York City. During his student years he did line drawings for the National Police Gazette. Calder began exhibiting his paintings at this time, but also focused on drawing, illustration, and wood and wire sculpture.

In June, 1926 Calder moved to Paris. He attended classes at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere and he created his performance piece, Cirque Calder, a complex and unique body of art. The assemblage included diminutive performers, animals, and props fashioned from wire, leather, cloth, and other found materials. Cirque Calder was designed to be manipulated manually by Calder. Every piece was small enough to be packed into a large trunk, enabling the artist to carry it with him and hold performances anywhere. Its first performance was held in Paris for an audience of friends and peers, and soon Calder was presenting the circus in both Paris and New York to much success. Calder’s renderings of his circus often lasted about two hours and were quite elaborate. Indeed, the Cirque Calder predated performance art by forty years…

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Leonard Edmondson

(1916 – 2002)

Leonard Edmondson was born in Sacramento in 1916 and became widely respected as a prominent figure in the abstract expressionist movement in the United States. Edmondson spent his career in California, where he eventually served as President of the California Watercolor Society and the Los Angeles Printmaking Society. During the Watercolor Society’s annual exhibits at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the artist was acclaimed one of the “radically modern” painters as he made an abrupt change from figuration to abstraction, cited by him as a journey of discovery, inspiration, and meaning in his work.

Edmondson’s abstract works present biomorphic shapes (his signature motifs) floating through an atmosphere of soft color. Often, his palette consisted of limpid hues of translucent rose, terra-cotta, pink, gray-blue, and yellow. Following the 1950s, Leonard learned advanced intaglio techniques from Ernest Freed at the University of Southern California…

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David Finn

(1921-2022)

David Finn has had an outstanding career as a widely known author and photographer. Spending his life studying the art of sculptures, Finn has published more than a dozen books and articles on that subject and established an enormous collection of photographs featuring various sculptures. Although mostly recognized for sculptural photography, his watercolors have always been his personal outlet for his creativity. He was interested in painting ever since he was a child, using his bedroom as a makeshift studio and passing time on his commute to school sketching the people he saw and his surroundings.

He continued to draw and paint as he grew older; however, it was through photography and publishing that he gained recognition. During the 1990s, Finn often wrote for the National Sculpture Society’s quarterly journal Sculpture Review, which he headed as editor-in-chief. Finn brought wide attention to contemporary sculpture and dozens of accomplished living sculptors utilizing his position and skill. His photographs have appeared in over 100 books on the history of sculpture and also have been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

The works included in this exhibition focus on the trees surrounding his Westchester home and utilize various styles, varying from works displaying bold colors and lines to works with a delicate quality, almost oriental in style.

Get in Touch

Contact your gallery to enquire about a work of art, for more information on the exhibition, or to schedule an appointment.

James MuldoonSummer Selections: Works on Paper – Exhibitions Preview Page