Color crayons on cream wove paper, circa 1940. 195x252 mm; 7 3/4x10 inches. Signed in ink, lower left recto.
Provenance: Estate of the artist, New York; private collection, New Jersey.
After attending the Canadian Royal Academy of Arts, Ontario and working as an artist in Montreal, Benjamin (1899-1985) moved to New York in 1923 and attended classes at the Art Students League, Cooper Union, and the Educational Alliance Art School while working as a commercial artist for the New York Sun newspaper, where he would work for the next 25 years. Benjamin received instruction from Joseph Pennell, John Sloan and Yasuo Kuniyoshi and became close friends with Sally and Milton Avery. As part of the artist circle surrounding Avery and the studios in the Lincoln Arcade, a building at 65th Street and Broadway later torn down to build Lincoln Center, Benjamin became acquainted with French modernists such as Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia as well as other New York artists including Stuart Davis and Mark Rothko. Benjamin's formal training and his close association with French and American modernists created a stylistically blended œuvre that incorporated minute details with dynamic, sweeping lines and colors, which became more abstract as his career progressed. During the Great Depression, Benjamin moved from Lincoln Arcade to East 59th Street, though still kept close ties with the Avery family, accompanying them to Gloucester, Massachusetts during the summers. Rather than appeasing critics who called for a thoroughly American art genre to be consumed by the masses, Benjamin held to his idea that art should convey personal emotions and feelings rather than conforming to a strict dogma as in Social Realism, though he painted much of the same subjects.
