Artist: Marion Maas
Title: Untitled Figure Painting by Marion Maas
Date: c. 1980s
Condition: Good condition
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 24 H. X 36 W. inches
Estimated Value: $5,000
Signature/Markings: Signed lower right
Marion Maas studied art at the following institutions: Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY; New York University, New York, NY; The Art Students League, New York, NY. While she maintained studios both on Long Island and in upstate New York during her long career, she had her closest connections with the National Art League, a nonprofit studio space for artists located in Douglaston, Long Island. Maas retired from active painting in 2014. Not long after, her life and work were featured in an article in the Queens Chronicle.
While Marion Maas began exhibiting her works on a very regular basis by the 1970s, it was during the 1980s that she began to receive consistently positive reviews for her paintings. At the 1983 group exhibition held at the Birch Hill Gallery on Long Island, noted art reviewer Malcolm Preston noted “… my favorite work in this holiday collection is an oil, Surf by Marion Maas. In style it lies somewhere between John Marin and Willem de Kooning. It is strong in color, very free and spontaneous in handling, yet quite disciplined in its way. I look forward to seeing more of Mass’ work.”
A few months later, Preston was again enthusiastic about Maas’s works, this time remarking on her watercolors: “In the kinds of shapes and the way in which she handles color there is some suggestion of early Kandinsky… [the] quasi-abstract work of Arthur Dove…[and a boldness] that reminds us of Charles Burchfield.”
Her paintings continued to garner positive reviews through the 1990s. In a group exhibition at the Islip Art Museum in 1996, Maas’s submission Bon-bons III was noted as being: “an exuberance of flowers and foods, along with a hurricane lamp, in the brushy pinks and reds of Matisse, yet it still manages to come across with vigorous originality.”
Provenance:
PRIVATE NEW YORK COLLECTION
Exhibition History:
N/A
Publication History:
N/A