Oil on board. Dimensions: 8" x 10". Signed & dated '1962' recto & verso. During a successful painting career, which spanned four decades of modernism, Charles Green Shaw (1892-1974) skillfully explored several abstract idioms. A native New Yorker, Shaw's early work was as a writer, contributing material to the New Yorker and Vanity Fair . The style Shaw developed by the early 1930s was a hard-edged, crisply defined interpretation of Cubism, which depicted the geometry of urban architecture. In 1935, Shaw met Albert Eugene Gallatin, collector, painter, and founder of the prominent Gallery of Living Art. Gallatin and Shaw, along with George L. K. Morris, were dubbed the "Park Avenue Cubists," reflecting the group's wealth and artistic style. Through this association, Shaw gained prominence in the art world. He had a solo exhibition at the Gallery of Living Art in 1935 (the museum's first solo show devoted to any artist) and served on the Museum of Modern Art's Advisory Committee. By 1940, Shaw developed the idea of the "plastic polygon," a pictorial structure based on simplified architectonic and organic shapes combined with a Cubist grid. Shaw worked with variants of this concept in painting and in wood relief constructions. With the exception of a few depictions of simplified, angular figures in the late 1940s, Shaw's work remained essentially non-representational for the rest of his career. Shaw's work is part of most major collections of American Art, including the Whitney Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Art Institute of Chicago, among many others.

Good

8 x 10 in

4 lb