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Antique American pastel abstract by Elaine Etta Kahn Kurtz (1928 - 2003). Pastel on paper. Signed on back. Framed. Please see all images for condition. Size is measured and written on the back of the painting. The first size is the overall size, the second size is the image size. For detailed condition questions please text 617-835-2496. Artist Bio:The Painting of Elaine Kurtz: Judith Stein Reviews: Published by Martha Jackson Gallery, New York in cooperation with Marian Locks Gallery, PhiladelphiaJUDITH STEIN REVIEWPhiladelphia, June, 1978Elaine Kurtz was born in Philadelphia in 1928 and has spent most of her life with art. By the age of seven she had shown more than the usual talent for drawing. She excelled in her art classes and became a Saturday student in the school of the Fleisher Art Memorial and the YMHA. She was graduated with honors from the Philadelphia College of Art, at the same time taking evening courses wherever and whenever they were available.In the years following graduation, Kurtz earned her living as a free lance illustrator, working successfully for magazines, advertising agencies and individual clients. These years of illustration earned her admiration and distinction in the field. Twice the Philadelphia Art Directors Club awarded her their gold medal and three times Certificates of Merit for illustration. For four years she taught drawing at the Philadelphia College of Art.She married Jerome Kurtz in 1956 and they spent the next 18 months in Europe while he completed his military service. This was a period of intense exposure to the art and architecture of France and Italy.Upon their return to the United States Kurtz resumed her career as an illustrator, with time out to start a family. Their first daughter, Madeleine was born in 1958 and their second, Anne Nettie, in 1961.Kurtz painted occasionally, but essentially in a figurative style and with little satisfaction. “I had great difficulty separating my painting from my illustration,” she says. The “perception that I could be a painter” she dates from her studies of art history and aesthetics at the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania (1963-65), a period of systematic thought about the aesthetic problems of painting, but her personal viewpoint had yet to emerge.In 1966 Kurtz and her family moved to Washington, D.C. where the most exciting work with color was being done. She enrolled in a class taught by painter Tom Downing and, in the very first session, recognized the direction she wanted her work to take.Elaine Kurtz became a fulltime working painter, concentrating on color, light, space, and the perception of color illusions. By eliminating known objects she was able to break with her past and concentrate wholly on the subtle relationships of color and illusion which were her primary interest. Her work has explored with increasing inventiveness and subtlety the effect of color on its environment and of one color on another. “I constantly want to show myself something new … and to treat my own eyes and yours to something they didn’t see before,” she says.After her return to Philadelphia in 1968, Edna Andrade, an artist friend, admired her work and brought her to the attention of gallery owner Marian Locks. A short time later Locks included Kurtz in a group show.Kurtz’ first one-man exhibition came in 1970 at the Philadelphia Art Alliance where her work was well received. She won her first painting award the same year in the Annual Painting Show of the Cheltenham Art Center, a distinguished regional exhibition juried by Stephen Prokopoff, currently Director of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston.Her early work employed some definite shapes — flat, with hard edges-but by the time of her first one-man show at Marian Locks Gallery (1972) Kurtz had softened the edges of her diamonds, x’s and bands of color, allowing the interaction of shape, color and space to create what she now sees as “cautious illusion”.It was at this time she made further exploration of the silkscreen process. Although she had produced earlier (with John Bolles) a portfolio of prints in flat colors she believed illusion could be created by blended colors. Luitpold Domberger saw and liked her work and was confident he could achieve her aims. She went to Stuttgart and completed a successful portfolio with Domberger, who included one of her prints in his Editions Domberger Calendar 1974, produced in West Germany.By 1974 — and her second one-man show at Marion Locks Gallery-Kurtz — had brought further simplification to her forms and was now using vertical and horizontal bands to create more and more illusion. Her first one man show in New York (1976) brought a reduction in the number of bands of color on the canvas and an expansion of the size of the illusion. One canvas in this exhibition (an untitled black painting divided in half) predicted the step taken in her current Bordered Illusions … where narrow, changing bands frame the interior space, controlling and giving the illusion of change in the entire canvas. Now, too, came the experiments with tiny dots of color mixed by the viewer’s eye to create the illusion of color painted flat.Since 1970 Kurtz’ paintings and prints have been shown in rnore than 50 group exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe. In 1973 she was one of eight artists who contributed original prints to the publication of Poems by Lynn Honickman, with an introduction by Anais Nin, published by Oser Press, Philadelphia. In 1974 one of her large paintings Warm Spectrum was purchased for the foyer of the last residence designed by noted architect Louis Kahn prior to his death. Since that time she has completed more than 10 commissions for private and public collections.In granting Elaine Kurtz the Silver Star Alumni Award of the Philadelphia College of Art in 1977, Morris Berd, professor in drawing and painting, said “It is most gratifying and uplifting to find an artist who is a meticulous worker and deeply concerned with the quality of ideas and the execution of product — in this case paintings and prints. In the last few years Elaine has matured and perfected her ideas, both optical and poetic.”She has recently returned to Washington, D.C. where, in addition to painting, she is preparing a book entitled Color Illusion designed to broaden understanding of color and its relationships for the beginning artist and the layman.