GLENN O COLEMAN (1887 1932) Arrangement

Sale 2678 - Lot 58

Price Realized: $ 13,750

?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price

Estimate: $ 15,000 - $ 20,000

GLENN O. COLEMAN (1887-1932)
Arrangement.

Oil on canvas, 1927. 600x525 mm; 23⅝x20⅝ inches. Signed lower right, and signed and dated in ink, verso.

Provenance
Downtown Gallery, New York.
Whitney Studio Club, New York.
Collection of Sydney Kellner, California.
Thence by descent to current owner, California.

Literature
M. Mannes, "Glenn O. Coleman," Creative Art, March 1928, volume II, number 3 (illustrated).
C. A. Glassgold, Glenn O. Coleman, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1932, pages 24-25 (illustrated).

Note
Arrangement was trimmed from its original composition by the artist, after 1928. The full composition was reproduced for Creative Art in March 1928.

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Additional Details

According to C. Adolf Glassgold, in Glenn O. Coleman's 1932 biography published by the Whitney Museum, the year 1927 marked an important turning point in Coleman's career, when he started to move away from depicting people to focus on formal compositional elements. These three new paintings from 1927, what Glassgold called "arrangements," were brighter, and depicted structures one would see daily in the city. Coleman was concerned with showing the rapid growth of New York, and stressed the intersection of forms, shapes, and lines. His "arrangements" may be seemingly a fractured departure from his earlier work, but Coleman was steadfastly devoted to Manhattan. Glassgold wrote, "They were still the same scenes of his earlier works— a bit of Greenwich Village, a corner of Chinatown, a view of Brooklyn Bridge." John Sloan wrote upon Coleman's death that "His pictures are love letters to the great lady of his heart— Manhattan. They reveal his love and understanding of his mighty mistress... the deep quiet love that loves the faults and weaknesses... as the sailor loves the sea."

Coleman was born in Springfield, Ohio though spent his childhood in Indianapolis. After receiving some artistic training at the Industrial High School in Indianapolis, he got an apprenticeship in the art department of a newspaper. In 1905 Coleman made the decision to move to New York, but due to lack of funds his only option was to travel in a train's stockcar, taking care of the animals in exchange for passage. Once in New York, he worked odd jobs to support himself while attending the New York School of Art and studying under Robert Henri and Everett Shinn. Henri encouraged drawing from life, which seemed to make a deep impression on Coleman and his fellow students, including Guy Pène du Bois and Rockwell Kent. Coleman's first solo exhibition was held in 1918 at the Whitney Studio Club and Galleries in New York, and he continued to show his work with the Club throughout his short career.

By the end of 1919, Coleman again sought adventure in a new city. This time, he traveled to Havana, Cuba with his close friend Stuart Davis, where they could live inexpensively while painting new and lively street scenes.

When he returned from Havana in 1920, he exhibited his work, mainly paintings of daily life, at Daniel Gallery, and later at the Downtown Gallery. He became an adherent to Socialist ideology and was an active member of progressive artist groups including The Independent Society of Artists and The American Society of Painters, Sculptors and Gravers. Coleman was closely associated with the circle of artists who drew inspiration from the working class bars and rowdy environs of the seedy Bowery neighborhood. Although seemingly surrounded by a "city of drunks and happy slatters and workers and gaunt tarts," in her profile of Coleman in Creative Art, Marya Mannes wrote of the tender spirit with which the artist approached his work, and seems to be especially applicable to the present lot, Arrangement: "His city is not cold or hard or mathematical. It would be impossible for Coleman's eyes to see without sympathy— not to enrich the baldness of stone and take the angularity out of angles. With all their blues and greys, with all their restraint of tone and dignity of form and line, those canvases of his are warm, emotional projections of an emotional city. Such paradoxes form the miracles of art."By 1924, Coleman resided in Long Beach, Long Island, where he died in May of 1932 of a throat infection. Coleman gained international attention during his career, having entered the art competition at the 1932 Summer Olympic Games. His work is represented in several important private and public collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.