By Artist Ramsey, Charles Frederic



Charles Frederic Ramsey (1875-1951) Charles Frederic Ramsey was the earliest artist to champion the radical ideas of abstraction within the established Impressionist art colony of New Hope, Pennsylvania. Although some of Ramsey's innovative paintings were just as avant-garde as those of leading New York modernists, his work was virtually unknown outside of the New Hope colony. Omitted from entire major exhibition catalogues devoted to American abstract paintings over the past thirty years, with the exception of one with regional focus, Charles Ramsey's ambitious and daring modernist work is now fertile material for criticism and acclaim. A leader within the New Hope art colony, he opened its first art gallery, organized a regional art school, led in the formation of a local secessionist exhibiting group, and was a key figure in the Cooperative painting Project, whose members met from 1938 to 1939 in a studio in the rear of a New Hope hardware store. Unlike New Hope primitive painter Joseph Pickett, whose work Ramsey was instrumental in rediscovering, and whose paintings are now represented in major New York museums, Ramsey remains almost as obscure today as he was in 1953, when Frederick Walker wrote his article. Charles's own formal art training began in 1893 at the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art (a forerunner to the Philadelphia Museum of Art). The young Ramsey attended for a year during which he was awarded the Weber Prize for work in design. Ramsey then went to France to attend classes at the Academie Julian in Paris from 1896 to 1898. In 1903, Ramsey took a walking trip to New Hope and subsequently spent the summer there. He became friends with William Lathrop and Charles Rosen, early seminal members of a group of landscape painters known as the Philadelphia Impressionists. The leading Impressionist in the area, however, was Edward Redfield, whose broadly painted snow scenes had earned him a national reputation. Although there is no record of any encounter between Ramsey and Redfield that summer, exposure to the art of Redfield, Lathrop and Rosen may have had some later influence on Ramsey's development as an Impressionist. It was probably at about this time that Ramsey completed a group of small oil studies on panel, which were stylistically more advanced than his pleasant Impressionist landscapes. Composed of tiny flecks of paint, two Pointillist sketches dating from around 1911, deliberately distort the visual clarity of a hazy evening on the Delaware. One seems to suggest the reflection of amber and scarlet lights from the opposite shore. The most remarkable work in this group is "Fauve Bridge on the Delaware," an expressive view of the New Hope/Lambertville Bridge painted during the evening hours and evocative of contemporary Post-Impressionist French painting. "Fauve Bridge on the Delaware" may well be the first modernist painting executed in New Hope. During the mid-to-late twenties, Ramsey established New Hope's first art gallery. Called The Blue Mask, it was located on Main Street. Ramsey never exhibited his Synchromist paintings from the late teens, so his gallery was the first place that modernist art was seen in the area. He must have exhibited some of his own paintings there as well as the work of a range of other artists. From time to time, he exhibited Asian and tribal art, both pivotal in the birth and evolution of modernist art. The Blue Mask hosted such artists as Ethel Wallace, a painter known for her batiks and cloth murals, lithographer and etcher Paul Cadmus, modernist painter Adolph Blondheim and stained-glass maker Valentine d'Ogries, who collaborated with Ramsey on some small stained-glass panels based on Ramsey's designs. During the thirties, Ramsey produced some of his most outstanding abstractions. Although he never acknowledged any foreign influences, judging by his work from this period his most significant influences were probably the famous European abstractionists Piet Mondrian and Fernand Leger. Ramsey's compositions became more abstract and geometric, adopting crisp, linear contours. Although the New Hope modernists never produced a manifesto laying out the concepts and practices underlying their work, Ramsey recorded some of his own ideas and discoveries, and hundreds of abstract drawings in a sketchbook covering the period 1936 to 1944. Ramsey illustrates ideas like a "system of balance modulation," based on ratios of diminishing squares in continued proportion. Basically, Ramsey was searching for a mathematical way to prove the aesthetics of abstraction, or to put it another way, looking for a formula to determine which arrangements of geometric shapes are pleasing to the eye and which are not. The compositions Ramsey executed in the thirties focus on abstracted machine images, although some revisit older themes, such as the female figure. His forms, however, are not as easily recognizable. There is also a greater flatness related to Synthetic Cubism. The modernist movement lost momentum in New Hope by the 1940s. Ramsey continued to create abstract compositions, such as "White, Black and Orange Abstraction," but these works are more reductive and decorative, and less complex and intellectual than his earlier abstractions. In his late sixties, Ramsey was perhaps getting too old to attempt an even more radical style.

Available Works


Abstract Series V 3" x 3" Our Price: $2,750.00	Abstract Series VII 3.5" x 3" Our Price: $2,750.00	Blue Lady 30" x 25" Our Price: $150,000.00	Abstract Series III 4" x 3" Our Price: $2,750.00

Abstract Series II 4" x 3.5" Our Price: $2,750.00	Abstract Series IV 4.5" x 3" Our Price: $2,750.00	Abstract Series VI 4.5" x 4" Our Price: $3,450.00	Abstract Series VIII 4.5" x 4" Our Price: $3,750.00

Assembly 40" x 30" Our Price: $78,000.00	Abstract Series I 5" x 4" Our Price: $2,750.00	A Lady 8" x 6" Our Price: $42,000.00

Русский

עִברִית

한국어

All Brands are Trademarks of their Respective Holders. Retail price is Manufacturer's Suggested Retail Price and may not reflect actual selling prices. All items are covered by LuxuryBazaar.com's guarantee to refund your purchase price if you are not completely satisfied. Our guarantee applies even though some items may not be covered by the manufacturers warranty, because LuxuryBazaar.com is not an "authorized" dealer of the merchandise. LuxuryBazaar.com is not affiliated with any website that sells fake or replica watches.

Sitemap