RHODE ISLAND, RISD, AND THE CAPE
Four artistic contemporaries find their way to our most recent catalog.
Since our move to Providence, Rhode Island, our auctions have been lucky enough to explore the breadth of creativity and artistic history that New England is steeped in. A thriving artistic community has been integral to culture of Rhode Island and nearby Cape Cod for centuries, each becoming hot beds for creatives, educators and movements.
From indigenous tribes practice of wampum jewelry making, to the earliest American painters of the colonial era, to the subversive work of the PaJaMA collective, Southern New England has long produced a remarkable volume of artistic talent and expression.
Key amongst the development of Southern New England’s artist identity, are the Rhode Island School of Design and Providence Art Club. Both institutions over the 20th century created an environment of artistic rigor that produced some of the region’s, and country’s most notable names in art. In our current catalog, four contemporaries, Florence Leif, her husband and widow Gordon Peers, Gilbert Franklin, and their mentor and contemporary John Robinson Fraizer, who all split their time between Rhode Island and the Cape, give a view into the changing artist landscapes of the mid-century.
Lot 140: John Robinson Fraizer (American, 1889 - 1966) “Sand Dunes, Cape Cod'“
John Fraizer served as head of the fine arts department at RISD and then president from 1955 to 1962, and in his lifetime saw tectonic shifts in the world of American art during the first half of the 20th century. In his tenure at RISD alone, he saw the start of the school's modernist turn, moving away from many of the traditional methods of art teaching, toward the Bauhaus-influenced tenents the school is heavily influenced by to this day.
Frazier’s work, heavily influenced by his teaching and time on Cape Cod and early education at both RISD and the Art Students League in the 1910s, reflects the sensibilities of realist, opting for landscape and portrait subjects. His clear interest in optics and dynamics of light, speak to the influence of 19th-century plein-air, and a distinctly post-photographic approach to his partitioning of color seeking not to mimic reality exactly but create a fuller sense of place and emotional truth. The acidic greens and the monumental shadows of the cliff face in “Sand Dunes Cape Cod” indicate a kind of bravado, and strength of vision not unlike Edward Hopper’s natural landscapes.
Lot 133: Gordon F. Peers (American, 1909 - 1988) “Still Life with Lemon”
Gordon Peers life and legacy are indelibly linked to RISD. First as a student, Peers became a long-tenured professor painting department while being an exhibiting member of the Providence Art Club, leaving his mark on a generation of RISD painting graduates and New England artists. Like Fraizer, Peer’s artistic background in academics is evident in his gravitation toward traditional subject matter and focused heavily on still life and landscape.
In “Still Life with Lemon”, the clear influence of Post-Impressionists like Cézanne, is coupled with stark essentialized forms. His quick indicating stroke around the lemon reflects the stoic futurist forms of Giorgio Morandi. Like Morandi and other artists who devoted themselves to the still life, Peers found the iconic aspect of his inanimate subjects and brought to them an enduring calm and resoluteness.
Lot 126: Gilbert Franklin (American/English, 1919-2004) “Shrouded Figure”
Initially a student of Fraizer’s at the Cape Cod School of Art (then the Hawthorne School of Art) Gilbert (Gil) Franklin continued his education at RISD, and like Peers would go on to serve as faculty at the school for several decades.
A multidisciplinary artist, Franklin is best known for his bronze work and sculpture. Clear Futurist and Brutalist influences give his work both the elegance of clean lines and geometric forms, with the timeless presence of an ancient artifact. The enduring qualities of his bronze work and obscured figurative imagery throughout his work, create a dynamic of contrasts, between the hard surface and geometry and sinuous primordial forms of his figurative subjects.
His mark was indelibly left on the school by his two monumental sculptural works at the center of the RISD’s campus, “Daybreak” and “Orpheus Ascending”.
Lot 168: Florence Peers (American, 1913 - 1968) "Under the Umbrella”
Florence Leif's career and life were cut short after her diagnosis with an inoperable brain tumor, and, like many female artists of her time, her work has gone underappreciated. Peers and Leif met and married in the 1940s and traveled extensively as founding members of RISD’s burgeoning Honors European Travel program. Like Franklin, Florence was a student
Through her work on the Cape, and travels in Europe, Leif synthesizes a distinctive forward-thinking style. Leif’s career spans genres and movements though her later work is evidently influenced by the expressionists, doubtless by Hans Hoffman’s presence in Provincetown, at the time. This piece, made in 1950s, shows a remarkably contemporary approach to color. Deep phthalo and cobalt vibrate above the beach, her striking brush strokes showing a distinct vision, hurriedly transcribed to a painting surface with a freshness that makes you feel the paint might not yet be dry.
These four artists’ works, all concentrated in and around America’s smallest state, create a remarkably varied look at some of the greatest transformative moments in 20th-century art. From the observational realism that defined the first half of the century, to the abstraction that would overtake the American art world in the second half, these artists and educators created in a time on the cusp between the old and new.
You can find all four pieces in our catalog, and register to bid live below for Thursday, February 20th at 12PM EST.