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Surrealist oil on canvas by Jacob Moses Semiatin (1915–2003), dated 1948 and housed in its original custom-made frame. The work measures 20 x 28 inches (art) and 24 x 32 inches (frame). On the verso appears a typed poem, signed illegibly, that reads: “Real Deal, Picasso would be proud, so would Marc Chagall. Salvador Dali would agree. Taking on fantasy. Color foam distort, mind to sort. Connecting the Surreal. The real deal.” A fitting homage to Semiatin’s vision, its words echo the hallucinatory distortions and charged palette seen on the canvas.
Born in Ireland to Hungarian Jewish parents and raised in New York, Semiatin exhibited in the late 1930s and 1940s with the Brooklyn Society of Artists and the Contemporary Arts Gallery. After World War II, he moved from figuration toward abstraction, a trajectory that would secure his place in important museum collections including the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and The Jewish Museum of Dublin. His career bridged Surrealism, abstraction, and the early currents of postwar American modernism.
Provenance: George Glazer Gallery, New York.