Skip to main content
Want more images or videos?
Request additional images or videos from the seller
1 of 6

Marcel Emile Cailliet
Landscape

1940

$4,250
£3,259.93
€3,811.18
CA$6,119.49
A$6,209.81
CHF 3,549.58
MX$75,681.29
NOK 41,913.58
SEK 42,151.85
DKK 28,489.32

About the Item

Landscape, 1940, oil on canvas, 24 x 20 inches, signed, dated and titled verso: “Marcel Cailliet ’40 – S.C.” and “Marcel Cailliet Landscape”; likely exhibited at the annual juried students' exhibition of paintings at the Fine Arts Gallery of the United States Department of the Interior, Washington, DC., January/February, 1941, organized under the auspices of the United States Office of Education; Literature: Students’ Paintings Shown in Washington, The Los Angeles Times, February 11, 1941, Part I, p. 8 (“Of the 148 paintings selected, five were chosen from S.C.’s College of Architecture and Fine Arts . . . “Landscape” also was submitted by Marcel Cailliet, graduate student and now instructor at Arizona State Teachers College.”), presented in a newer frame This work is part of our exhibition America Coast to Coast: Artists of the 1940s. Landscape is a rare California Scene oil painting by the little-known, but talented, Marcel Cailliet. Cailliet painted Landscape in Los Angeles in 1940 during the last year of his MFA studies at the University of Southern California. Although still a student when he painted Landscape, Cailliet had already won awards and had his paintings included in prestigious museums and exhibitions, including the Golden Gate International Exhibition in San Francisco. Landscape itself was likely exhibited in Washington DC at the Fine Arts Gallery of the Department of the Interior in Washington DC, after having been selected in a national competition. The present work portrays a highly designed cluster of California ranch buildings and a windmill for drawing water from a well, all sitting above a sunken road where a rancher walks into the distance. These elements are typical of many regionalist paintings from the Depression Era Mid-West, but what sets Cailliet’s California landscape apart is its dramatic quality. By adopting a palette of strongly contrasting colors to render the stormy sky, the barns, the single figure, and the surrounding dry California hills, Cailliet creates dark, clearly defined and ominous shadows. The stark lighting, upward thrust of the ranch structures and the bare tree to the right of the composition are distinctly cinematic, which is not surprising given the influence movie and animation studio artists had over the Los Angeles artworld of the 1930s and 1940s. The overall feel of Landscape seems to recall the farm and tornado scenes from 1939’s The Wizard of Oz, as Dorothy’s fictional Kansas collides with the Southern California ranchlands. Marcel Emile Cailliet lived and worked in Pennsylvania, California and Hawaii. There are conflicting records regarding his exact date and place of birth. He was born either in Dijon, France or Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It is clear, however, that he was living in the United States from a young age. Cailliet graduated from Villanova University and studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art before relocating to Los Angeles in 1938, where he and his family lived at 1302 W 45th St. Calliet’s Father was a professor of music at the University of Southern California and an arranger for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Cailliet continued his art training in Los Angeles at the Chouinard Art School and in the graduate program at the University of Southern California’s School of Architecture and Fine Arts, where he received a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1940 and served as a painting instructor. While a student, he was a member of the Laguna Beach Art Association which awarded a prize to one of Cailliet’s marine paintings in 1939, the same year his works were exhibited at the Golden Gate International Exhibition and the Oakland Art Gallery. Cailliet was also a member of the California Watercolor Association. After graduating from USC, Cailliet became an assistant professor of painting at the Arizona State Teachers College in Tempe (now Arizona State) in late 1940. He was honored with a well-reviewed one-person show at the Lyceum Building soon after his arrival at Arizona State. In addition to painting, Cailliet designed theater sets and even puppets during his time in Tempe. In 1941, he married Helene Amoy, who was from a prominent family in Hawaii, and painter and muralist in her own right. In 1942, Cailliet stepped back from working full-time as a professional artist and painting instructor to accept positions in the aviation industry, first as a designing engineer for Goodyear Aircraft Corporation and later for Lockheed. He then served in the US Navy during World War II, including as the Executive Officer of the Navy Pacific University at Pearl Harbor, and he continued in the Naval Reserves into the 1950s. After leaving active service, Cailliet stayed in Hawaii where he pursued various business management roles, while working part-time as an artist. In 1946, he illustrated a book on Hawaiian Luaus and in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Cailliet taught painting at the Honolulu School of Art. Both Cailliets continued to paint and sometimes teach and exhibit their work through Helene’s death in 1986. Marcel remarried and lived a long life before his death in 2007.
  • Creator:
    Marcel Emile Cailliet (1914 - 2007, French)
  • Creation Year:
    1940
  • Dimensions:
    Height: 20 in (50.8 cm)Width: 24 in (60.96 cm)Depth: 1 in (2.54 cm)
  • More Editions & Sizes:
    20 x 24 inchesPrice: $4,250
  • Medium:
  • Movement & Style:
  • Period:
  • Condition:
  • Gallery Location:
    Los Angeles, CA
  • Reference Number:
    1stDibs: LU1859214251132

More From This Seller

View All
Landscape

Landscape

By Jeanette Maxfield Lewis

Located in Los Angeles, CA

Landscape, c. 1930-40s, oil on panel, signed lower right, 16 x 20 inches Jeanette Maxfield Lewis was a California-based landscape painter and etcher. Born in Oakland, she spent much...

Category

1930s American Modern Landscape Paintings

Materials

Oil, Panel

The Ditch

The Ditch

By Virginia True

Located in Los Angeles, CA

The Ditch, 1934, oil on board, signed and dated lower right, 18 x 24 inches, label verso has title, artist’s name, Colorado and New York addresses, and original price Virginia True ...

Category

1930s American Modern Landscape Paintings

Materials

Oil, Board

Provincetown Landscape (Ptown Landscape)

Provincetown Landscape (Ptown Landscape)

By Beulah Stevenson

Located in Los Angeles, CA

Provincetown Landscape (Ptown Landscape), 1942, oil on canvas board, signed lower left, 20 x 24 inches, titled and dated verso, labels verso read 1) “Provincetown Landscape / oil painting by Buelah Stevenson / 252 Fulton St. / Brkn / price $ [illegible] /” and 2) “New York Society of Women Artists”, perhaps exhibited: 1) Society of Independent Artists, American Society of Fine Arts, New York, NY, 1942 – 1944 under the title “Landscape", 2) 17th Annual Exhibition of the New York Society of Women Artists, New York, NY, February - March, 1942; and/or 3) Beulah Stevenson Paintings, Fifteen Gallery, New York, NY, April 6 -18, 1942 Provincetown Landscape is a beautiful example of Beulah Stevenson's painting from the 1940s, a time when she honed her mature style which emphasized rhythmic patterns developed in a semi-abstract idiom executed with a bright, saturated palette. Provincetown had long been a source of inspiration for American painters and Stevenson knew it well from her time studying there with Hans Hoffman. In reviewing her solo exhibition of twenty-five works at Fifteen Gallery which included a large section of Provincetown paintings...

Category

1940s American Modern Landscape Paintings

Materials

Canvas, Oil, Board

Untitled (House in the Hills)

Untitled (House in the Hills)

By Dorothy Sklar

Located in Los Angeles, CA

Untitled (Houses in the Hills), 1946, watercolor on paper, signed and dated lower right, 14 x 20 inches (image), 24 x 30 inches (frame) Dorothy Sklar was a popular and prolific Los ...

Category

1940s American Modern Landscape Paintings

Materials

Paper, Watercolor

Six O'Clock

Six O'Clock

Located in Los Angeles, CA

Six O-Clock, c. 1942, oil on canvas, 30 x 20 inches, signed and titled several times verso of frame and stretcher (perhaps by another hand), marked “Rehn” several times on frame (for the Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries in New York City, who represented Craig at the time); Exhibited: 1) 18th Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Oil Paintings from March 21 to May 2, 1943 at The Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. #87, original price $450 (per catalog) (exhibition label verso), 2) Craig’s one-man show at the Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries, New York City, from October 26 to November 14, 1942, #10 (original price listed as $350); and 3) Exhibition of thirty paintings sponsored by the Harrisburg Art Association at the State Museum of Pennsylvania in Harrisburg in March, 1944 (concerning this exhibit, Penelope Redd of The Evening News (Harrisburg, Pennsylvania) wrote: “Other paintings that have overtones of superrealism inherent in the subjects include Tom Craig’s California nocturne, ‘Six O’Clock,’ two figures moving through the twilight . . . .” March 6, 1944, p. 13); another label verso from The Museum of Art of Toledo (Ohio): original frame: Provenance includes George Stern Gallery, Los Angeles, CA About the Painting Long before Chris Burden’s iconic installation outside of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Urban Light, another artist, Tom Craig, made Southern California streetlights the subject of one of his early 1940s paintings. Consisting of dozens of recycled streetlights from the 1920s and 1930s forming a classical colonnade at the museum’s entrance, Burden’s Urban Light has become a symbol of Los Angeles. For Burden, the streetlights represent what constitutes an advanced society, something “safe after dark and beautiful to behold.” It seems that Craig is playing on the same theme in Six O-Clock. Although we see two hunched figures trudging along the sidewalk at the end of a long day, the real stars of this painting are the streetlights which brighten the twilight and silhouette another iconic symbol of Los Angeles, the palm trees in the distance. Mountains in the background and the distant view of a suburban neighborhood join the streetlights and palm trees as classic subject matter for a California Scene painting, but Craig gives us a twist by depicting the scene not as a sun-drenched natural expanse. Rather, Craig uses thin layers of oil paint, mimicking the watercolor technique for which he is most famous, to show us the twinkling beauty of manmade light and the safety it affords. Although Southern California is a land of natural wonders, the interventions of humanity are already everywhere in Los Angeles and as one critic noted, the resulting painting has an air of “superrealism.” About the Artist Thomas Theodore Craig was a well-known fixture in the Southern California art scene. He was born in Upland California. Craig graduated with a degree in botany from Pomona College and studied painting at Pamona and the Chouinard Art School with Stanton MacDonald-Wright and Barse Miller among others. He became close friends with fellow artist Milford Zornes...

Category

1940s American Modern Landscape Paintings

Materials

Canvas, Oil

Untitled (Perhaps New Jersey Factories)

Untitled (Perhaps New Jersey Factories)

Located in Los Angeles, CA

Untitled (perhaps New Jersey Factories), c. 1940s, oil on board, signed lower left, 24 x 28 inches, perhaps exhibited Fifty-First Annual Exhibition, National Association of Women Art...

Category

1940s American Modern Landscape Paintings

Materials

Oil, Board

You May Also Like

Mid-Century Country Lane Landscape

Mid-Century Country Lane Landscape

By Frank Leslie True

Located in Soquel, CA

Charming rural western scene of a tree lined county lane painted during bright daylight by listed artist Frank Leslie True (American, 1877-1963). Signed and dated by the artist, lower right: "Frank L. True 1050." Cut down painting of flowers on verso. Presented in an vintage, rustic wood frame. Image, 9"H x 12"W. Frank Leslie True was born in Iowa on May 22, 1877. True moved to California in 1906. For 45 years, he worked for the Southern Pacific Railroad...

Category

1950s American Impressionist Landscape Paintings

Materials

Masonite, Oil

Hillside Landscape

Hillside Landscape

Located in Soquel, CA

Misty and verdant small-scale landscape by an unknown artist ("CMK"). The composition of the hillside in this landscape creates a diagonal across the canvas, bringing more visual int...

Category

1990s American Impressionist Landscape Paintings

Materials

Canvas, Oil, Cardboard