7 x 6 1/2 in., 16 1/2 x 12 1/2 in. (framed). William Scharf is a modernist painter in abstract-expressionist style. His work is noted for its expansive color applied with sweeping gestures and bold structures. He is an artist who seems better known among other artists than the general public. From November, 2000 to January, 2001, The Phillips Collection in Washington DC held an exhibition of his paintings.In the catalog of that exhibition, titled "The Paintings of William Scharf," Hilton Kramer wrote: "It is with the work of the early years of the New York School that all of Scharf's recent paintings have their closest affinities. . . .This was a period in which myth and ritual, the primitive and the archaic, and concepts of the sacred based more on poetry and ethnology than on theology were advanced as appropriate 'subjects' for a mode of abstraction that abjured both the representation of recognizable objects and the restrictive geometry of constructivist form."In the same catalog, essayist Brian O'Doherty describes Scharf's paintings as "an organic paradise---cells, magnifications of organic fragments, biomorphs, scenarios of metamorphosis, archetypes, fish; distances---a sky with sudden surprising windows into a further sky; a cacophony of signs in which occasional squares reside like authorial escutcheons---all set in those life-giving elements of air and water.Born in Media, Pennsylvania, Scharf showed art talent at an early age, and when he was ten years old, he showed his drawings to N.C. Wyeth, who was encouraging and give him art supplies. Seven years later, Wyeth, declaring "this boy has the stuff, successfully promoted Scharf's admission to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.After serving in the U.S. Army Corps, he also took classes at the Barnes Foundation and the University of Pennsylvania and traveled to Europe, 1948-49, which included study at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere in Paris. He worked as a seaman on a tanker, traveled to South America and was a clown diver in an aquacade in Florida before settling in New York in 1952.He became a close friend of Mark Rothko, and in the 1960s assisted Rothko in the early stages of his mural project for the De Menil Chapel in Houston, Texas. After Rothko's death and during the legal problems with the estate, Scharf was appointed to serve as an officer of the newly created Rothko Foundation.Scharf has been an instructor of art at various institutions including The Art Students League, the San Francisco Art Institute, and the School of Visual Arts in New York. He is a member of the Society of Illustrators and the Artists Equity Association.Source: "William Scharf, Paintings, 1984-2000" with Preface by Eliza Rathbone and essays by Hilton Kramer, Harry Rand, and Brian O'Doherty.Who's Who in American Art, 1997-1998.

Good condition