WILLARD NASH (American 1898-1942) Los Angeles/Modernist Street Scene, c.1930
$3,000
Graphite on white paper, 11 x 14 inches
Signed verso: “WILLARD AYER NASH”
Born in Philadelphia, PA on March 29, 1898. Nash studied art with Wicker in Detroit. At 16 he was a successful commercial artist in Detroit and the highest paid boy soprano in the U.S.! He also acted on the Detroit stage and enjoyed a brief career as an amateur boxer. At age 22 he moved to Santa Fe, NM and became active with Los Cinco Pintores. Nash moved to California in 1933.
Nash, a Santa Fe modernist, leans toward Cubism in this view of an LA street and vintage automobile; highly gestural strokes define the adobe buildings and trees. He created many lithographs of Santa Fe and environs that were generally printed in editions of twenty.
Nash said of himself, “I am an individualist, and a self-analytical one. I am an experimenter in art and have worked through many phases, going step by step deeper into the mysteries of esthetics.”