Figural/Architectural Surreal & Abstract Landscape Oil Painting-1940s-Gar Sparks

Description: Gar Sparks was born in Columbus, Ohio, he in 1888 . In 1912 Sparks was employed as an elevator operator in New York City. Stuart Davis, the pioneering American modernist who was sharing an apartment in Hoboken with Glenn Coleman and Henry Glintencamp, has given an account of his meeting Gar Sparks: "I first met Gar Sparks in a Negro saloon on Arlington Street in Newark, N.J. on April 12, 1912. He was drinking celery tonic. I remember the date because I had found a new friend. And a good friend is hard to find. It seems that Sparks was inspired by some paintings by Glenn Coleman, which he had seen in Columbus, Ohio. Since Coleman was my best friend, we found it easy to talk.Sparks told me about his own paintings and shortly afterwards I saw them. They were portraits of people he had seen while running an elevator in New York City. They had the quality of authentic art.In some way,probably an inner image, (certainly not by instruction) he knew that a shape had a shape. He also had some paintings of people standing around in an expanse. A river was involved in some cases. I never inquired into the psychology of these things. They looked good. At that epoch Sparks was the director of a Nedick's Orange Juice stand. I used to meet him at midnight and we would go to the Arlington Street saloon to listen to real music, or to Child's restaurant to talk about art.” (* Painting and Sculpture in New Jersey, William Gerdts,page 206(From Foreword in Catalog for Gar Sparks 1946 Show at Julian Levy Gallery). Further indication of both the Sparks/Davis friendship and Sparks' business ventures is indicated by the creation by Davis in 1921 of a large-scale wall decoration for The Nut House, a confectionary store located at 889 Broad Street, Newark that was owned and operated by Sparks.The almost musical, syncopated and modernist lettering on the wrap-around mural was the precursor of later variants in Davis' own and others' modernism. This venture into decorative advertising was new for Davis as seeing it must have been for Sparks. From available photos it is clear that Spark's Nut House ( the official name in the 1922 City Directory) sold more than just nuts since the signage mentions "Orangeade,Hot Sundaes, Lemonade and Ice Parfait". It was more like a candy store/ice cream parlor complete with a counter and stool seats. Business appears to have been good. Sparks moved from an apartment at 899 Broad Street in 1920 to 15 Conklin Avenue in Newark in 1922 to a single family house at 36 Grant Avenue, East Orange in 1925 where he and Amalia lived out their lives. He moved his business to 921 Broad Street around 1925 and remained there as Sparks Nut House until becoming Sparks Inc. around 1940 with a 196 Halsey Street address. Gar Sparks was part of the Newark business and artistic community for most of his life. Sparks either met Marcel Duchamps while attending the Art Students League in New York City or as a result of working at the 1913 landmark Armory Show. While a student at the League, Sparks was asked, along with other ASL students, to sell art at the show which would become historical for the impact it would make on America modernist art.Sparks sold more than $45,000 worth of artwork, the most by any student, including Duchamp's landmark "Nude Descending the Staircase." It is unclear what the twenty-four year-old Sparks was painting, what style he employed, during the period of the Armory Show. Most or all of his artwork, including works done as far back as 1910 and perhaps even earlier, was destroyed in a Brooklyn warehouse fire in 1914 while he was on a trip to Ohio. Accordingly, we do not know if his paintings reflected a modernism akin to either that of his friend Stuart Davis or that of his newer friend Marcel Duchamps. Nonetheless, he was clearly one of New Jersey's and the country's first known surrealists. Man Ray was doing work in Ridgefield, N.J. , some of which would later would be considered surreal as well as dada. The term "surrealism" was first used by Apollinaire in his 1917 play "Las Mamelles de Teresias." Andre Breton would not write his first Surrealist Manifesto until 1924. Whether Gar Sparks & Man Ray ever met, given their proximity to each other and at least one or two mutual artist friends, they may have very likely met. Dream imagery, mist-infused atmosphere, expansive landscapes, and contemplative nudes or figures are among the commonly found elements in the paintings of Sparks. The subjects often seem preoccupied with other places or times. Sometimes these figures or their surroundings have a classical ambiance as manifested by the statuary or architecture and in Sparks' case the expansive compositional order of the images or figures, as if they were symbols, often mysterious, of societal mores, behavior and institutions, the significance of which is often perplexing and provocative. They often depict incongruous images that appeal to the subconscious. The paintings have a sense of enigmatic quietude. They speak to us softly without dynamism, passion or cognitive clarity. There is a longing for something more or for a return to a lost place or state of mind. They seem emeshed in a subtle time warp. The landscapes reach beyond the earth and sky into conceptual or psychological space. The serenity expressed is more than occasionally other-worldly and/or remote. The past frequently dominates the present. They speak to us more often from the head than from the heart. Sparks has created a world that is intriguing, genuine and evocative. Indicative of how "automatic" and responsive he was to his unconscious and how naturally imaginative he really was, Sparks said in an interview about his paintings in an ironic denial of his own imagination: "Many people say they are imaginative. But they aren’t. When I sit down to paint,it is not with any preconceived idea. I set up my canvas and see upon it what I am going to paint. What I see comes from my experience and feeling. I really see it on the canvas. Then I try to paint what I see. Usually I succeed." Besides the actual body of the art produced by Sparks, his accomplishments within the regional art world were considerable. In the 1940s Sparks was selected to exhibit at the "Art of the Century" show sponsored by the Guggenheim Foundation. His drawings were shown at the Nierendorf Galleries in New York. Because of his friendship with Sparks and probably his good opinion of Gar's paintings, Marcel Duchamps introduced Sparks to the well-respected surrealist Julien Levy. Duchamps actually brought Julien Levy to the Sparks' East Orange home where after seeing Gar's paintings Levy carted away half of them for a one-man show that opened May 14th, 1946 at his New York City Gallery. The foreword to the catalog was written by Stuart Davis. This exhibit was followed by another one-man show at the Levy Gallery in May 1948. Some of Gar's paintings owned by Levy would later be acquired by Sullivan Goss, the noted Santa Barbara,California art dealer. From 1945 until its closing in 1955 the Hugo Gallery, located at 55th Street & Madison Avenue, handled the greatest known surrealists in the world including Giorgio De Chirico, Roberto Matta, Salvadore Dali, Rene Magritte and Arshile Gorky. In 1952 from June 16th until July 3rd the Hugo Gallery gave Andy Warhol his first solo exhibition named "Fifteen Drawings Based on the Writings of Truman Capote". The Hugo Gallery also hosted a one-man Gar Sparks exhibition, further validation from the surreal art world. The dreamscapes and visionary places depicted in the paintings of Sparks do not appear to come come from a negative mind frame. The mystery his paintings evoke does not engender dismay or defeat. From available evidence the life of Gar Sparks was one of relative satisfaction that is reflected in his pictorialization which, although it often includes enigma and solitude, is seldom disconsolate. The Newark Museum in juried exhibitions in 1952 and 1955 showed one of Sparks' paintings, "Concert" (oil) and "Landscape"(oil) respectively. The 1955 entry was shown postumously. Amalia Ludwig also had a painting ,"Message to the Sea" and "Beyond the City" in each exhibition. Rabin & Krueger Gallery, which operated from the 1930s to 1974 at 47 Halsey Street with the distinct reputation of showing the works of the newest and best artists from New Jersey and New York, also regularly carried the works of Sparks. Finding the work of Sparks has been difficult and thus the building of a substantive legacy based on that work has been even harder.

Price: 700 USD

Location: Westfield, New Jersey

End Time: 2024-12-21T20:33:15.000Z

Shipping Cost: 55 USD