New York School Abstract Expressionist Drawing Watercolor Painting Carmen Cicero

Dimensions: H: 22.5, W: 28.5 IN

This is a stylized figurative abstract expressionist nude. This one is hand signed and dated. From the style we are estimating it to the 1970's They have abstract stylized erotic male and female nude elements to them some have a stylized American flag.

Carmen Louis Cicero (born 1926) is an American figurative abstract painter from Newark, New Jersey. Cicero attended the New Jersey State Teachers College (now Kean University) from 1947 to 1951. Cicero studied painting under Hans Hofmann and Robert Motherwell at Hunter College in 1953. He received an MFA from Montclair State University in 1991.Cicero started as an abstract painter and use automatism in his drawings of memories of places. In 1957, Cicero had his first solo show at the Peridot Gallery, New York, showing with fellow artists Louise Bourgeois and Philip Guston. In the early 1960s, Cicero’s canvases began to be populated with intense, expressionist figures. These works positioned him as one of the earliest figurative expressionist painters of his generation. In 1971 a studio fire destroyed the work still in his possession. He moved to New York to a studio loft on the Bowery and started over in a dramatically different figurative style. In the 1990s, Cicero's style changed again, from figurative expressionism to visionary realism/surrealism reminiscent of magic realism. His work spans three periods and styles Abstract Expressionism, Figurative Expressionism, and surrealist “visionary.”

In the late 1970s and 1980s and produced a body of work that was well received both uptown on Madison Avenue and downtown during the heyday of the East Village art scene. He was represented by the Berta Walker Gallery. He lives in New York City and Truro on Cape Cod. He is also an accomplished jazz musician.

Cicero taught painting at Sarah Lawrence College 1959 to 1968. Cicero was a professor of painting at Montclair State University from 1970 through 2001.

A monograph, The Art of Carmen Cicero was published in 2013 by Schiffer Publishing in Atglen, PA.

Awards Guggenheim Fellowship 1957-58 and 63-64

Ford Foundation, Purchase Prizes 1961 and 65 Jackson Pollock- Lee Krasner Foundation Grant, 2008 Jacob Lawrence and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Awards, 2016. Member of Artists Equity and PAAM.

Select Exhibitions Corcoran Gallery, 1957, 59,

Guggenheim Museum Inaugural Show 1959,

Rome 1959

PAFA 1963 Peridot-Washburn Gallery, NYC 1970.

Work by Cicero is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum of Modern Art Paris, France, Stedelijk Museum, Holland, Aldrich Museum Ridgefield, CT., the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art;

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Brooklyn Museum of Art; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; Harvard Art Museums/Fogg; Newark Museum; Montclair Museum of Art; National Academy Museum; National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; Provincetown Art Association and Museum, MA; and Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands.