Vintage American School New York Artist Sylvia Carewe Oil Painting Killer Frame, O/C, "Soliloquy", Portrait of an African American Gentleman, ACA Gallery Label verso of an exceptionally wonderful House of Heydenryk Frame from the 1940's-1950's, 24 x 20", 33 x 29" Framed.
Sylvia Carewe (née Kerewsky) was the oldest daughter and second child born to Esther and Louis Kerewsky, who immigrated to New York City from Uman, Russia (now central Ukraine) in 1899.1 She changed her last name to Carewe around 1930 and entered the advertising industry after attending Columbia University.2 Carewe acted in a multifaceted role in advertising, writing ad copy, drawing images, executing market research.3 She began to work as a fine artist around 1943. After her marriage in October 1944, Carewe switched from commercial to fine art and, by September 1947, she had her first solo exhibition of paintings and gouaches at The Three Arts, a gallery in Poughkeepsie, New York, near where she and her husband, Marvin Small—also advertising executive and businessman—had a summer home in Millbrook, New York.4 The couple became increasingly involved within the New York and Paris arts community as collectors of modern art and as friends of artists, dealers and others in the art world. Carewe had three solo exhibitions at ACA Gallery (1948, 1950, 1953), the first as a result of winning an annual competition. During these early years, her paintings were very boldly colored, figurative abstractions executed in a primitive style, which mostly captured the locales from her frequent travels. Carewe was largely self-taught and had brief instruction with Hans Hofmann and Yasuo Kuniyoshi. Between January 1953 and May 1954, she worked at Atelier 17 and made several etchings, which she showed at The Three Arts in March 1954.5 Dorothy Dehner and I. Rice Pereira were close friends of Carewe’s at this time, and it is possible that one of them may have introduced her to Atelier 17. Two rare impressions of Carewe’s early etchings, likely created at Atelier 17, evidence her experimentation with printmaking techniques.6 In the first, Ebb and Flow (1953), Carewe dribbled stop-out varnish abstractly onto the plate and completed it by etching a spiral design into the white circle and lines into the crescent shape. This work was a forerunner to a tapestry design, La Firmament, that Carewe would create in the late 1950s and early 1960s with Braquenié & Cie, the renown weaver in Aubusson, France. The second, At Anchor (1954), features a very primitive, nocturnal composition of several boats and buoys rocking on the waves—a frequent motif of Carewe’s work through several media.Carewe continued to create prints through the late 1950s, expanding the complexity of her designs and also trying her hand at lithography, though she turned her focus increasingly to nocturnal paintings and drawings of city lights, and, more importantly, tapestry design. Encouraged by Katia Granoff, who represented the artist’s work in Paris, Carewe was one of the earliest modern artists—and one of the first women—to adopt the historic art form, a precursor to the explosion of modern tapestry manufacture during the 1960s and 1970s.7 She worked under the sponsorship of the French cultural attaché and created original cartons for her tapestry designs, which were produced with Braquenié & Cie. Represented by French & Company in New York, Carewe’s tapestries were well received, and John and Jacqueline Kennedy purchased one for their apartment at the Carlyle Hotel.8 In addition to the visual arts, Carewe was a prolific poet and writer of short stories.

33 x 29 x 3 in

10 lb