Tag Archives: industrial

Online Exhibition Of 1930s American Art Now Running

Walter Quirt

“This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.”           President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, June 27, 1936

A Rendezvous with Destiny: 1930s American Art, the new online exhibition from Helicline Fine Arthas started and runs through November 5, 2023. The exhibition features a variety of artistic styles and subject matters from urban, industrial and rural to abstract, people working and scenes of everyday life. For New York City based artists, the City itself was glorified on canvas, paper and bronze. Several of the artists who thrived during that period are still well known today, but most are obscure.


The exhibition, of predominantly 1930s artworks, features that range. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new exhibition, “Art for the Millions: American Culture and Politics in the 1930s” celebrates the American spirit during the depression era and serves as the inspiration for Helicline Fine Art’s new exhibition. 

After the stock market crash of 1929, Americans experienced a time of great transition at every level of society. After a terrible slump, the men and women of the country came together to rebuild the economy, their lives and their spirits. For the first time, our government paid artists to create. To this day, many Federal buildings – post offices, court houses, schools, hospitals, administrative buildings – still have the murals of WPA artists emblazoned on the walls and statues standing in courtyards. The work of these artists reflected that renewal. 

The artists of that generation are being rediscovered in 2023 and for generations into the future, thanks to the Met’s new exhibition, and galleries that keep the modernist art flame burning. Helicline’s proprietors, Keith Sherman and Roy Goldberg, recall discovering the WPA period. “We had just moved into our first apartment, constructed in 1929, on the Upper West Side. In attempting to furnish our home we realized we had no sense of style or taste. We spent time in the Strand Book Store to see what homes looked like in the 20s and 30s,” said Goldberg. “We discovered Art Deco, the Machine Age, the WPA and more.

We spent time in museums, art fairs and something that has disappeared from the cultural landscape, antique shows, where we developed our eye. Today we are collectors turned dealers still collecting. The WPA period is in our hearts,” added Sherman. 

Highlights of A Rendezvous with Destiny: 1930s American Art include a bold Stuart Davis gouache on paper; a “Mercury” bronze by Joseph Freedlander that sat on top of 5th Avenue traffic lights from the 1930s-60s; two works by Daniel Celentano (Thomas Hart Benton’s first and youngest student), many works depicting New York City, including a Cecil Bell of street life under the EL train and a Reginald Marsh depicting the Brooklyn Bridge, mural studies, and a Mervin Jules oil of a tailor with astonishing perspective.
MORE ABOUT HELICLINE FINE ART:MORE ABOUT HELICLINE FINE ART:Helicline Fine Art, founded in 2008 by Roy Goldberg and Keith Sherman, specializes in American and European modernism. The gallery’s core offerings are works from the WPA period. Additionally, Helicline offers American scene, social realism, mural studies, industrial landscapes, regionalism, abstracts, and other artwork. Located in a private space in midtown Manhattan, Helicline is open by appointment. The artworks on the site represent a sampling of available works. Helicline’s offerings are also available on artsy.net and 1stDibs.com.

Featured image- |Reginald Marsh.

Mervin Jules

Mecha Artist Simon Kotsch Predated Steampunk

In 1968 Simon Kotsch got into the army surplus business. It was good to him, but in ways you might not expect. Something began to happen to Simon as he sorted through his bounty of obsolete engine parts and electrical fittings: he noticed that he found the pieces beautiful. An excitement took hold of him. And then he went to work, drilling and cutting and fitting metal components together to make new things. Beautiful things. He felt “caught up,” he says simply. So began a love affair with military-industrial cast-offs that continues to this day. This was the birth of a sculptor and of a mecha artist.Let us throw aside, officially and forever, the artifice of journalistic objectivity.

I like this guy’s passion and I like his work. When we visited Kotsch’s Victoria St. Studio in Simcoe, Ontario we were greeted with warm smiles that never went away.  Taking joy from your work is one thing, but when you combine joy with the sensibility of a true artist who respects, even loves his materials, the results can be magical.Some of Kotsch’s sculptures look like they could have come from the mind of Jules Verne—grand, monumental machines whose functions border on the mysterious, infused with Kotsch’s concern for symmetry and his acute sense of balance, proportion, and pattern. Others have a strong vertical momentum, like castles or rockets with many levels. But not everything has a sci-fi feel.

Kotsch uses the heft and gravity of larger pieces to create powerful and interesting earthbound sculpture. His ability to recognize, or create, striking patterns makes some of his metal works quite decorative to my eye—and that in no way infringes on their status as works of art.

Kotsch says he “savours the natural colour” of each item, whether it’s aluminum, copper, brass or porcelain (used as insulation in old electrical systems). You will not find much (any) painting here. You will also not find much welding. This, by his own admission, is because he’s not very good at it, and mediocre welding would make a sculpture look awful. He cuts and drills to make pieces fit. One technique he has developed is to take slices out of solid machine parts with a band saw, revealing patterns of copper wire within, like opening a geode.

An example of influence: years of working with Army surplus ephemera have inspired Simon’s forms

Simon Kotsch takes obsolete machinery—all of his extensive catalogue of parts predate metric—and turns it into stimulating works of art. We spent about an hour with him, and I left both  excited and energized. I, too, had been “caught up.” This is one of the miracles of art for me:  through active engagement with an artist’s work a kind of interface occurs between creator and appreciator, mediated through the work itself. I certainly appreciated the skill and imagination of Simon Kotsch, but I think I caught a bit of his love as well.  For the Silo, Chris Dowber.

A look at some of Simon’s works.

Listen To Simon Kotsch Interview

An oil fluid coolant system split in two reveals a beautiful maze structure