Phillip Callahan Oil Painting of Stylized Blue Figures

Item Details

An oil painting on canvas by American painter Phillip Callahan (1918-1991). This piece depicts two figures whose bodies have been abstracted into intertwining lines and swirls of blue. It has a stamped signature to the lower right corner, a stamp from the artist’s estate to the verso, and is presented as an unstretched canvas.

Phillip Callahan was born in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1918. By the age of eighteen his work had been exhibited in several galleries throughout New York. Callahan received his formal artistic training at the Worcester Institute of Fine Art in 1937 as well as the Advanced School of the Boston Museum of Fine Art. He studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris before World War II broke out. Callahan enlisted in the United States Army in February of 1941. After the war he returned to the United States and began studying at the Art Students League of New York. It was during this time that Callahan studied under Czech-American modernist painter, Vaclav Vytlacil (1892-1984). Callahan’s earlier works, remained ultimately realistic with slight abstraction. However, after studying in New York and Europe his work started to become abstraction. By the 1950s and 1960s his work became completely non-objective.

Condition

- some abrasions to canvas with minor areas of paint loss; fraying to edges of canvas; nail holes from previous stretching; spliced extensions to canvas on either side.

Dimensions

- measures canvas with extensions.

Item #

17IND158-046