Ben-Zion Weinman was the son of a Polish cantor and composer who raised him for the rabbinate. He became “Ben-Zion” in America after World War I because “to drag around two names is rather too difficult.” His beginnings in America are sketched elsewhere in this catalogue by his wife, Lillian Ben-Zion, but in 1983 he told an interviewer from the…

Harry Lee Gatch was a twentieth-century American artist known for his lyrical abstractions and his ability to find "a fresh approach" to painting the figure and nature "through interwoven patterns of flattened figures" and a Fauvist-inspired sense of landscape. Gatch was born in a rural community near Baltimore. His family had no sympathy with his artistic aspirations, which was a…

Painter, printmaker, and designer Karl Knaths was born Otto Karl Knaths in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, on October 21, 1891. After the death of his father when Karl was still a teenager, he was put in the position of supporting the family and took an internship with his uncle, a baker. A chance visit to his high school by author, Zona…

Stephanie Mallis is an architect, she also exhibits her paintings with the Mercury Gallery in Rockport MA. Current work includes the Mandel Foundation and the Mandel School for the Humanities @ The Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Previous works include the OPCW in The Hague, U.S. Court House in Cleveland OH & Jefferson City MO with Kallmann McKinnell & Wood Architects.…

Throughout artist Michael McKinnell's (1935-2020) work, we see the influences of Braque, Picasso, and Bonnard in his exploration of composition and formal technique. What makes his work so compelling, however, is his use of color, celebration of geometry, and engagement with everyday subject matter. McKinnell often finds inspiration in the intimate details of daily life and delights in simplifying the…

Herman Rose, an American, lyrical representational painter, was called "the painter's painter's painter" by Gerrit Henry in a review of Rose's work in 1984. Rose's rise to fame began in 1952 when the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) included him in the show, 15 Americans, along with Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollack and Clyfford Still. During his lifetime he won a…

A visionary painter with ties to the avant-garde artistic community in New York at midcentury, William Scharf nevertheless defies art historical categorization. His abstracted compositions of organic and geometric formal elements recall the free associations of Surrealism and the all-over grandeur of Abstract Expressionism, and at the same time embody a very individual and immediately recognizable pictorial sense. Scharf combines…

Brought to America from Russia as a child in 1912, Joseph Solman was a prodigious draftsman and knew, in his earliest teens, that he would be an artist. He went straight from high school to the National Academy of Design, though he says he learned more by sketching in the subway on the way back from school late at night:…

Born in Berlin and maturing in Paris with his family and engineer father, Karl Zerbe returned to Frankfort at eleven. World War I events, including his father’s death, affected his adolescence. Turning briefly to chemistry, by 1920, he enrolled in Munich’s Debschitz School. Recognition came with a solo show in Berlin’s Gurlitt Galley and a fellowship allowing Italian travels. Back…