Edith Kramer (Austrian born American, 1916-2014). "Jersey Landscape with Moon" oil on linen, 1988. Signed and dated at lower right. A quiet band of marsh grasses stretches across the foreground, dense and untamed, before giving way to water, infrastructure, and a softened skyline beyond. In "Jersey Landscape with Moon," Edith Kramer fixes her gaze from the New Jersey side of the Hudson River toward New York City, where the Twin Towers rise faintly on the horizon, framed by atmosphere rather than assertion. Between the viewer and the distant city sits a water treatment plant, its low, functional forms embedded into the landscape like a pause between nature and monument. The painting unfolds horizontally, encouraging the eye to drift slowly from tangled vegetation to open sky. Kramer renders the grasses with layered, rhythmic strokes, punctuated by rust reds, muted greens, and silvery browns that suggest seasonal change and late-day light. Size: 42" W x 24" H (106.7 cm x 61 cm) The industrial structures are treated with restraint, their geometry softened by distance and haze, never overpowering the organic life that claims the foreground. A pale moon hangs quietly in the sky, lending the scene a reflective stillness. Its presence shifts the painting from simple observation into something more contemplative, a moment suspended between day and night, land and city, growth and containment. Kramer’s interest in balance and structure is evident here, not as a formal exercise, but as lived experience, shaped by sustained looking and working directly from the landscape. Painted in 1988, the work carries an unintended poignancy. The Twin Towers appear as distant markers rather than symbols, part of a lived geography rather than an icon. Kramer offers no drama, no narrative insistence. Instead, she records coexistence as she found it, wetlands breathing in the foreground, industry and skyline receding into quiet alignment. "Jersey Landscape with Moon" stands as a measured, deeply attentive meditation on place, presence, and the fragile calm between them. About the Artist: "Edith Kramer was born in Vienna, Austria in 1916. Her exploration of art began at the age of 13 when Kramer took classes with Friedl Dicker, a graduate of the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. Kramer was greatly influenced by the theories of Bauhaus artist Johannes Itten who developed the preliminary Bauhaus course from 1919 to 1922. After Kramer graduated from Realgymnasium, Vienna in 1934 , she followed Dicker to Prague to continue her studies. Perhaps even more impactful was the time she spent assisting Dicker in teaching art to the children of political refugees. Fearing the Nazi invasion, Kramer sought refuge in the United States. She arrived in New York City in 1938, and taught sculpture at the Little Red School House, one of the city's first progressive schools. During WWII, Kramer worked in a machine shop in Soho. This experience resonated with her Bauhaus education and presented an opportunity to sketch and paint sitters in industrial settings. In addition to being a painter, Kramer was a sculptor, a printmaker, a collage maker, a mosaicist, a professor, and a founder of the Art Therapy movement. Kramer is perhaps best known for her work as a pioneer in the field of Art Therapy. In 1971 she was part of the team that established an Art Therapy program at George Washington University, and she created the graduate program in Art Therapy at New York University in 1973. With her training in art, art education, as well as psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy, Kramer believed that negative emotions and thoughts could be transformed and rechanneled into productive energy through art. She and fellow pioneer Margaret Naumburg set out to champion the new field of Art Therapy. Kramer also believed that art therapists should create their own art in order to deal with the stress and exhaustion of clinical work, so she continued to create her own art. The following is Kramer's statement about art therapy: "I perceive myself as a specialist who combines the general qualifications of being a competent artist with specialized capacities in the field of psychotherapy and education. The theoretical framework of my understanding of child psychology is based in the main on Freudian psychoanalytic thought. The emphasis, however, is on the idea of art as therapy rather than on psychotherapy which uses art as a tool. My therapeutic medium is as old as mankind. Since human society has existed the arts have helped man to reconcile the eternal conflict between the individual's instinctual urges and the demands of society. Thus, all art is therapeutic in the broadest sense of the word. The artist who applies modern psychology in the field of art has to adapt his methods to the medium so that the therapeutic value of art is heightened by the introduction of therapeutic thinking, not destroyed or weakened by the introduction of concepts and methods that might be incompatible with the inner laws of artistic creation. It is not always easy for the art therapist to reconcile the therapist's approach with her function as an artist and teacher. In her function as a teacher who introduces disturbed children or adults into the realms of art, she has to be ready to accept the limitations of the individuals in her care. She has to be interested in progress on any level. She has to be flexible enough to accept and understand a diversity of styles and to find ways of helping each person according to his individual needs. As therapist she has to accept the unbeautiful manifestations of sexual and aggressive impulses in the raw, along with the results of confusions and incomplete sublimation. But this attitude of acceptance, which is essential in all therapy, must not dull the artist's capacity for discrimination. The teacher has to preserve her integrity genuine, between blocks and limitations, regressions and progress, superficial pretense and genuine communication. Even though my therapeutic approach includes awareness of psychic processes that may remain unconscious, the therapeutic maneuvers I am apt to employ seldom include uncovering unconscious material or the interpretation of unconscious meaning. Art therapy is conceived primarily as a means of supporting the ego. It harnesses the power of art to the task of fostering a psychic organization that is sufficiently resilient to function under pressure without breakdown or the need to resort to stultifying defensive measures. Thus conceived, art therapy constitutes an element of the therapeutic milieu that complements or supports psychotherapy but does not replace it. While art therapists encourage unconventional form and content in the art of their patients they are also intent on fostering artistic eloquence. The spoken words in psychotherapy and the play and talk in clinical therapy are typically formless and fluid. Content rather than form is essential. In art therapy form and content are equally important and the order and structure with which artistic creation endows experience constitutes a powerful aid in sorting out and mastering experience. To quote of art Susan Langer (1962): 'The primary function of art is to objectify experience so that we can contemplate and understand it' (p.90)." (source: Edith Kramer website) Item # 196999
Edith Kramer (Austrian born American, 1916-2014). Vermont Woods. Woodcut print on paper, 1972. Hand-signed and dated at lower right. A dense stand of Vermont woods rises in rhythmic silence, where trunks press close and branches interlace like a private language spoken by trees. In this woodblock print, Edith Kramer pares the landscape down to its essential architecture - verticals, diagonals, and the pulsing contrast of black ink against pale paper. The forest feels at once crowded and contemplative, a place where depth is suggested not by distance but by repetition, by the steady insistence of line upon line. Kramer's handling of the woodblock medium is deliberate and physical. Carved marks remain visible, lending the scene a tactile immediacy that mirrors the roughness of bark and the uneven forest floor. Light filters through the composition in fragments, catching on negative spaces between trunks, while darker passages gather into shadowed thickets. Size of print: 16" W x 15.5" H (40.6 cm x 39.4 cm); of paper: 17" W x 18" H (43.2 cm x 45.7 cm) The result is not a picturesque woodland, but a lived-in one - a place to move through slowly, attentive to texture, pattern, and pause. The print reflects Kramers Bauhaus-rooted sensibility, where structure and expression work in tandem rather than opposition. The woods become an ordered field of energy, disciplined yet alive, echoing her belief in form as a means of understanding experience. Here, nature is neither romanticized nor subdued. It stands firm, layered, and quietly absorbing, offering the viewer not escape, but grounding. About the artist: Edith Kramer was born in Vienna, Austria in 1916. Her exploration of art began at the age of 13 when Kramer took classes with Friedl Dicker, a graduate of the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. Kramer was greatly influenced by the theories of Bauhaus artist Johannes Itten who developed the preliminary Bauhaus course from 1919 to 1922. After Kramer graduated from Realgymnasium, Vienna in 1934 , she followed Dicker to Prague to continue her studies. Perhaps even more impactful was the time she spent assisting Dicker in teaching art to the children of political refugees. Fearing the Nazi invasion, Kramer sought refuge in the United States. She arrived in New York City in 1938, and taught sculpture at the Little Red School House, one of the city's first progressive schools. During WWII, Kramer worked in a machine shop in Soho. This experience resonated with her Bauhaus education and presented an opportunity to sketch and paint sitters in industrial settings. In addition to being a painter, Kramer was a sculptor, a printmaker, a collage maker, a mosaicist, a professor, and a founder of the Art Therapy movement. Kramer is perhaps best known for her work as a pioneer in the field of Art Therapy. In 1971 she was part of the team that established an Art Therapy program at George Washington University, and she created the graduate program in Art Therapy at New York University in 1973. With her training in art, art education, as well as psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy, Kramer believed that negative emotions and thoughts could be transformed and rechanneled into productive energy through art. She and fellow pioneer Margaret Naumburg set out to champion the new field of Art Therapy. Kramer also believed that art therapists should create their own art in order to deal with the stress and exhaustion of clinical work, so she continued to create her own art. The following is Kramer's statement about art therapy: "I perceive myself as a specialist who combines the general qualifications of being a competent artist with specialized capacities in the field of psychotherapy and education. The theoretical framework of my understanding of child psychology is based in the main on Freudian psychoanalytic thought. The emphasis, however, is on the idea of art as therapy rather than on psychotherapy which uses art as a tool. My therapeutic medium is as old as mankind. Since human society has existed the arts have helped man to reconcile the eternal conflict between the individual's instinctual urges and the demands of society. Thus, all art is therapeutic in the broadest sense of the word. The artist who applies modern psychology in the field of art has to adapt his methods to the medium so that the therapeutic value of art is heightened by the introduction of therapeutic thinking, not destroyed or weakened by the introduction of concepts and methods that might be incompatible with the inner laws of artistic creation. It is not always easy for the art therapist to reconcile the therapist's approach with her function as an artist and teacher. In her function as a teacher who introduces disturbed children or adults into the realms of art, she has to be ready to accept the limitations of the individuals in her care. She has to be interested in progress on any level. She has to be flexible enough to accept and understand a diversity of styles and to find ways of helping each person according to his individual needs. As therapist she has to accept the unbeautiful manifestations of sexual and aggressive impulses in the raw, along with the results of confusions and incomplete sublimation. But this attitude of acceptance, which is essential in all therapy, must not dull the artist's capacity for discrimination. The teacher has to preserve her integrity genuine, between blocks and limitations, regressions and progress, superficial pretense and genuine communication. Even though my therapeutic approach includes awareness of psychic processes that may remain unconscious, the therapeutic maneuvers I am apt to employ seldom include uncovering unconscious material or the interpretation of unconscious meaning. Art therapy is conceived primarily as a means of supporting the ego. It harnesses the power of art to the task of fostering a psychic organization that is sufficiently resilient to function under pressure without breakdown or the need to resort to stultifying defensive measures. Thus conceived, art therapy constitutes an element of the therapeutic milieu that complements or supports psychotherapy but does not replace it. While art therapists encourage unconventional form and content in the art of their patients they are also intent on fostering artistic eloquence. The spoken words in psychotherapy and the play and talk in clinical therapy are typically formless and fluid. Content rather than form is essential. In art therapy form and content are equally important and the order and structure with which artistic creation endows experience constitutes a powerful aid in sorting out and mastering experience. To quote of art Susan Langer (1962): 'The primary function of art is to objectify experience so that we can contemplate and understand it' (p.90)." (source: Edith Kramer website) Item # 197432
Edith Kramer (Austrian born American, 1916-2014). "Rocks and Sea" oil on linen, 1968. Signed at lower right, and again with artist's address on verso. Faint remains of title, location, and date on verso. Painted on Cranberry Island, this seascape carries the raw temperament of a coast that refuses to sit still. Kramer presses the Atlantic into motion with strokes that churn and drag across the linen, building a shoreline that feels half seen, half remembered. The rocks thrust upward like stubborn survivors, dark silhouettes bracing against a crush of white water that keeps rearranging the world around them. The sea hurls itself forward, then folds back, leaving the whole scene caught in a breathless rhythm that is never quite the same twice. Kramer understood how form can hold feeling, and here the palette does much of the talking. Grays slip into bruised blues, foam ignites in sudden streaks of pale light, and the sky sinks low, as if the weather itself had leaned close to whisper. Size: 30.25" W x 16" H (76.8 cm x 40.6 cm) Her early Bauhaus training taught her to see structure hidden inside chaos, and that sensibility hums beneath the waves: even in the turbulence, each gesture belongs to an underlying order. Nothing is decorative. Everything is a consequence of wind, tide, and the artist's keen eye. The painting reflects a shoreline experienced not as a tourist but as a participant. You can almost sense her standing at the edge of the surf, letting the spray hit her face, trying to pin down the feeling of a moment that will not politely hold still. "Rocks and Sea" is less a depiction of Cranberry Island than a negotiation with it, a way of shaping wildness into a language sturdy enough to contain both motion and mood. About the Artist: Edith Kramer was born in Vienna, Austria in 1916. Her exploration of art began at the age of 13 when Kramer took classes with Friedl Dicker, a graduate of the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. Kramer was greatly influenced by the theories of Bauhaus artist Johannes Itten who developed the preliminary Bauhaus course from 1919 to 1922. After Kramer graduated from Realgymnasium, Vienna in 1934 , she followed Dicker to Prague to continue her studies. Perhaps even more impactful was the time she spent assisting Dicker in teaching art to the children of political refugees. Fearing the Nazi invasion, Kramer sought refuge in the United States. She arrived in New York City in 1938, and taught sculpture at the Little Red School House, one of the city's first progressive schools. During WWII, Kramer worked in a machine shop in Soho. This experience resonated with her Bauhaus education and presented an opportunity to sketch and paint sitters in industrial settings. In addition to being a painter, Kramer was a sculptor, a printmaker, a collage maker, a mosaicist, a professor, and a founder of the Art Therapy movement. Kramer is perhaps best known for her work as a pioneer in the field of Art Therapy. In 1971 she was part of the team that established an Art Therapy program at George Washington University, and she created the graduate program in Art Therapy at New York University in 1973. With her training in art, art education, as well as psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy, Kramer believed that negative emotions and thoughts could be transformed and rechanneled into productive energy through art. She and fellow pioneer Margaret Naumburg set out to champion the new field of Art Therapy. Kramer also believed that art therapists should create their own art in order to deal with the stress and exhaustion of clinical work, so she continued to create her own art. The following is Kramer's statement about art therapy: "I perceive myself as a specialist who combines the general qualifications of being a competent artist with specialized capacities in the field of psychotherapy and education. The theoretical framework of my understanding of child psychology is based in the main on Freudian psychoanalytic thought. The emphasis, however, is on the idea of art as therapy rather than on psychotherapy which uses art as a tool. My therapeutic medium is as old as mankind. Since human society has existed the arts have helped man to reconcile the eternal conflict between the individual's instinctual urges and the demands of society. Thus, all art is therapeutic in the broadest sense of the word. The artist who applies modern psychology in the field of art has to adapt his methods to the medium so that the therapeutic value of art is heightened by the introduction of therapeutic thinking, not destroyed or weakened by the introduction of concepts and methods that might be incompatible with the inner laws of artistic creation. It is not always easy for the art therapist to reconcile the therapist's approach with her function as an artist and teacher. In her function as a teacher who introduces disturbed children or adults into the realms of art, she has to be ready to accept the limitations of the individuals in her care. She has to be interested in progress on any level. She has to be flexible enough to accept and understand a diversity of styles and to find ways of helping each person according to his individual needs. As therapist she has to accept the unbeautiful manifestations of sexual and aggressive impulses in the raw, along with the results of confusions and incomplete sublimation. But this attitude of acceptance, which is essential in all therapy, must not dull the artist's capacity for discrimination. The teacher has to preserve her integrity genuine, between blocks and limitations, regressions and progress, superficial pretense and genuine communication. Even though my therapeutic approach includes awareness of psychic processes that may remain unconscious, the therapeutic maneuvers I am apt to employ seldom include uncovering unconscious material or the interpretation of unconscious meaning. Art therapy is conceived primarily as a means of supporting the ego. It harnesses the power of art to the task of fostering a psychic organization that is sufficiently resilient to function under pressure without breakdown or the need to resort to stultifying defensive measures. Thus conceived, art therapy constitutes an element of the therapeutic milieu that complements or supports psychotherapy but does not replace it. While art therapists encourage unconventional form and content in the art of their patients they are also intent on fostering artistic eloquence. The spoken words in psychotherapy and the play and talk in clinical therapy are typically formless and fluid. Content rather than form is essential. In art therapy form and content are equally important and the order and structure with which artistic creation endows experience constitutes a powerful aid in sorting out and mastering experience. To quote of art Susan Langer (1962): 'The primary function of art is to objectify experience so that we can contemplate and understand it' (p.90)." (source: Edith Kramer website) Item # 197003
Edith Kramer (Austrian born American, 1916-2014). "Derelict House" oil on linen, 1968. Signed and dated at lower right and again with title and artist's address on verso. A fractured building looms out of a dim, smoke-softened night, its walls broken into planes of shadow and muted color. In "Derelict House," Edith Kramer turns her attention to the quiet aftermath of demolition, capturing a structure caught between existence and erasure. Windows appear as dark, watchful apertures, while the architecture itself seems to dissolve into the surrounding air, as if the city is already forgetting it. Painted in the late 1960s, the work reflects Kramer's sustained engagement with New York City during a period of aggressive urban renewal. Entire neighborhoods were being dismantled, streets emptied, and familiar forms reduced to rubble or memory. Size of painting: 34" W x 30" H (86.4 cm x 76.2 cm); of frame: 34.5" W x 30.5" H (87.6 cm x 77.5 cm) Though the painting recalls the bombed-out buildings of wartime Europe, its subject is firmly rooted in the American cityscape, where progress arrived with a wrecking ball and left silence in its wake. Kramer's palette is restrained and nocturnal, dominated by grays, browns, and ashen blues that compress space and mute detail. Forms are built through blocks of color rather than line, giving the structure a weighty, almost geological presence. The house feels less like a single building than a psychological site, a repository for displacement, loss, and unresolved tension. There are no figures, no visible movement, only the stillness of abandonment. Yet the painting does not dramatize ruin. Kramer approaches the scene with steady observation, allowing ambiguity to do the work. "Derelict House" becomes a meditation on transition, on what lingers when purpose has been stripped away, and on the uneasy calm that settles over places once full of life. About the Artist: "Edith Kramer was born in Vienna, Austria in 1916. Her exploration of art began at the age of 13 when Kramer took classes with Friedl Dicker, a graduate of the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. Kramer was greatly influenced by the theories of Bauhaus artist Johannes Itten who developed the preliminary Bauhaus course from 1919 to 1922. After Kramer graduated from Realgymnasium, Vienna in 1934 , she followed Dicker to Prague to continue her studies. Perhaps even more impactful was the time she spent assisting Dicker in teaching art to the children of political refugees. Fearing the Nazi invasion, Kramer sought refuge in the United States. She arrived in New York City in 1938, and taught sculpture at the Little Red School House, one of the city's first progressive schools. During WWII, Kramer worked in a machine shop in Soho. This experience resonated with her Bauhaus education and presented an opportunity to sketch and paint sitters in industrial settings. In addition to being a painter, Kramer was a sculptor, a printmaker, a collage maker, a mosaicist, a professor, and a founder of the Art Therapy movement. Kramer is perhaps best known for her work as a pioneer in the field of Art Therapy. In 1971 she was part of the team that established an Art Therapy program at George Washington University, and she created the graduate program in Art Therapy at New York University in 1973. With her training in art, art education, as well as psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy, Kramer believed that negative emotions and thoughts could be transformed and rechanneled into productive energy through art. She and fellow pioneer Margaret Naumburg set out to champion the new field of Art Therapy. Kramer also believed that art therapists should create their own art in order to deal with the stress and exhaustion of clinical work, so she continued to create her own art. The following is Kramer's statement about art therapy: "I perceive myself as a specialist who combines the general qualifications of being a competent artist with specialized capacities in the field of psychotherapy and education. The theoretical framework of my understanding of child psychology is based in the main on Freudian psychoanalytic thought. The emphasis, however, is on the idea of art as therapy rather than on psychotherapy which uses art as a tool. My therapeutic medium is as old as mankind. Since human society has existed the arts have helped man to reconcile the eternal conflict between the individual's instinctual urges and the demands of society. Thus, all art is therapeutic in the broadest sense of the word. The artist who applies modern psychology in the field of art has to adapt his methods to the medium so that the therapeutic value of art is heightened by the introduction of therapeutic thinking, not destroyed or weakened by the introduction of concepts and methods that might be incompatible with the inner laws of artistic creation. It is not always easy for the art therapist to reconcile the therapist's approach with her function as an artist and teacher. In her function as a teacher who introduces disturbed children or adults into the realms of art, she has to be ready to accept the limitations of the individuals in her care. She has to be interested in progress on any level. She has to be flexible enough to accept and understand a diversity of styles and to find ways of helping each person according to his individual needs. As therapist she has to accept the unbeautiful manifestations of sexual and aggressive impulses in the raw, along with the results of confusions and incomplete sublimation. But this attitude of acceptance, which is essential in all therapy, must not dull the artist's capacity for discrimination. The teacher has to preserve her integrity genuine, between blocks and limitations, regressions and progress, superficial pretense and genuine communication. Even though my therapeutic approach includes awareness of psychic processes that may remain unconscious, the therapeutic maneuvers I am apt to employ seldom include uncovering unconscious material or the interpretation of unconscious meaning. Art therapy is conceived primarily as a means of supporting the ego. It harnesses the power of art to the task of fostering a psychic organization that is sufficiently resilient to function under pressure without breakdown or the need to resort to stultifying defensive measures. Thus conceived, art therapy constitutes an element of the therapeutic milieu that complements or supports psychotherapy but does not replace it. While art therapists encourage unconventional form and content in the art of their patients they are also intent on fostering artistic eloquence. The spoken words in psychotherapy and the play and talk in clinical therapy are typically formless and fluid. Content rather than form is essential. In art therapy form and content are equally important and the order and structure with which artistic creation endows experience constitutes a powerful aid in sorting out and mastering experience. To quote of art Susan Langer (1962): 'The primary function of art is to objectify experience so that we can contemplate and understand it' (p.90)." (source: Edith Kramer website) Item # 196996
Edith Kramer (Austrian born American, 1916-2014). "Exposed Exterior" oil on linen, 1960. Signed and dated in black pigment at lower right. "Exposed Exterior" is a powerful painting by Edith Kramer, an accomplished Austrian-born artist as well as an important pioneer of the art therapy profession. The composition captures the effects of Robert Moses's massive demolition of entire neighborhoods in Brooklyn, New York which displaced communities to construct the Brooklyn Queens Expressway (BQE). While some communities engaged in successful resistence, many working class neighborhoods like Red Hook and Cobble Hill were dramatically impacted. In this painting Kramer made a poignant visual rebuttal to Urban Renewal's destruction of homes in mid century America. All is rendered with Kramer's expressive, loose brushwork in warm earthtones and shades of blue. Size: 26" L x 17" W (66 cm x 43.2 cm) About the Artist: Edith Kramer was born in Vienna, Austria in 1916. Her exploration of art began at the age of 13 when Kramer took classes with Friedl Dicker, a graduate of the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. Kramer was greatly influenced by the theories of Bauhaus artist Johannes Itten who developed the preliminary Bauhaus course from 1919 to 1922. After Kramer graduated from Realgymnasium, Vienna in 1934 , she followed Dicker to Prague to continue her studies. Perhaps even more impactful was the time she spent assisting Dicker in teaching art to the children of political refugees. Fearing the Nazi invasion, Kramer sought refuge in the United States. She arrived in New York City in 1938, and taught sculpture at the Little Red School House, one of the city's first progressive schools. During WWII, Kramer worked in a machine shop in Soho. This experience resonated with her Bauhaus education and presented an opportunity to sketch and paint sitters in industrial settings. In addition to being a painter, Kramer was a sculptor, a printmaker, a collage maker, a mosaicist, a professor, and a founder of the Art Therapy movement. Kramer is perhaps best known for her work as a pioneer in the field of Art Therapy. In 1971 she was part of the team that established an Art Therapy program at George Washington University, and she created the graduate program in Art Therapy at New York University in 1973. With her training in art, art education, as well as psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy, Kramer believed that negative emotions and thoughts could be transformed and rechanneled into productive energy through art. She and fellow pioneer Margaret Naumburg set out to champion the new field of Art Therapy. Kramer also believed that art therapists should create their own art in order to deal with the stress and exhaustion of clinical work, so she continued to create her own art. The following is Kramer's statement about art therapy: "I perceive myself as a specialist who combines the general qualifications of being a competent artist with specialized capacities in the field of psychotherapy and education. The theoretical framework of my understanding of child psychology is based in the main on Freudian psychoanalytic thought. The emphasis, however, is on the idea of art as therapy rather than on psychotherapy which uses art as a tool. My therapeutic medium is as old as mankind. Since human society has existed the arts have helped man to reconcile the eternal conflict between the individual's instinctual urges and the demands of society. Thus, all art is therapeutic in the broadest sense of the word. The artist who applies modern psychology in the field of art has to adapt his methods to the medium so that the therapeutic value of art is heightened by the introduction of therapeutic thinking, not destroyed or weakened by the introduction of concepts and methods that might be incompatible with the inner laws of artistic creation. It is not always easy for the art therapist to reconcile the therapist's approach with her function as an artist and teacher. In her function as a teacher who introduces disturbed children or adults into the realms of art, she has to be ready to accept the limitations of the individuals in her care. She has to be interested in progress on any level. She has to be flexible enough to accept and understand a diversity of styles and to find ways of helping each person according to his individual needs. As therapist she has to accept the unbeautiful manifestations of sexual and aggressive impulses in the raw, along with the results of confusions and incomplete sublimation. But this attitude of acceptance, which is essential in all therapy, must not dull the artist's capacity for discrimination. The teacher has to preserve her integrity genuine, between blocks and limitations, regressions and progress, superficial pretense and genuine communication. Even though my therapeutic approach includes awareness of psychic processes that may remain unconscious, the therapeutic maneuvers I am apt to employ seldom include uncovering unconscious material or the interpretation of unconscious meaning. Art therapy is conceived primarily as a means of supporting the ego. It harnesses the power of art to the task of fostering a psychic organization that is sufficiently resilient to function under pressure without breakdown or the need to resort to stultifying defensive measures. Thus conceived, art therapy constitutes an element of the therapeutic milieu that complements or supports psychotherapy but does not replace it. While art therapists encourage unconventional form and content in the art of their patients they are also intent on fostering artistic eloquence. The spoken words in psychotherapy and the play and talk in clinical therapy are typically formless and fluid. Content rather than form is essential. In art therapy form and content are equally important and the order and structure with which artistic creation endows experience constitutes a powerful aid in sorting out and mastering experience. To quote of art Susan Langer (1962): 'The primary function of art is to objectify experience so that we can contemplate and understand it' (p.90)." (source: Edith Kramer website) Item # 197002
Edith Kramer (Austrian born American, 1916-2014). "Jersey Landscape with Moon" oil on linen, 1988. Signed and dated at lower right. A quiet band of marsh grasses stretches across the foreground, dense and untamed, before giving way to water, infrastructure, and a softened skyline beyond. In "Jersey Landscape with Moon," Edith Kramer fixes her gaze from the New Jersey side of the Hudson River toward New York City, where the Twin Towers rise faintly on the horizon, framed by atmosphere rather than assertion. Between the viewer and the distant city sits a water treatment plant, its low, functional forms embedded into the landscape like a pause between nature and monument. The painting unfolds horizontally, encouraging the eye to drift slowly from tangled vegetation to open sky. Kramer renders the grasses with layered, rhythmic strokes, punctuated by rust reds, muted greens, and silvery browns that suggest seasonal change and late-day light. Size: 42" W x 24" H (106.7 cm x 61 cm) The industrial structures are treated with restraint, their geometry softened by distance and haze, never overpowering the organic life that claims the foreground. A pale moon hangs quietly in the sky, lending the scene a reflective stillness. Its presence shifts the painting from simple observation into something more contemplative, a moment suspended between day and night, land and city, growth and containment. Kramer’s interest in balance and structure is evident here, not as a formal exercise, but as lived experience, shaped by sustained looking and working directly from the landscape. Painted in 1988, the work carries an unintended poignancy. The Twin Towers appear as distant markers rather than symbols, part of a lived geography rather than an icon. Kramer offers no drama, no narrative insistence. Instead, she records coexistence as she found it, wetlands breathing in the foreground, industry and skyline receding into quiet alignment. "Jersey Landscape with Moon" stands as a measured, deeply attentive meditation on place, presence, and the fragile calm between them. About the Artist: "Edith Kramer was born in Vienna, Austria in 1916. Her exploration of art began at the age of 13 when Kramer took classes with Friedl Dicker, a graduate of the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. Kramer was greatly influenced by the theories of Bauhaus artist Johannes Itten who developed the preliminary Bauhaus course from 1919 to 1922. After Kramer graduated from Realgymnasium, Vienna in 1934 , she followed Dicker to Prague to continue her studies. Perhaps even more impactful was the time she spent assisting Dicker in teaching art to the children of political refugees. Fearing the Nazi invasion, Kramer sought refuge in the United States. She arrived in New York City in 1938, and taught sculpture at the Little Red School House, one of the city's first progressive schools. During WWII, Kramer worked in a machine shop in Soho. This experience resonated with her Bauhaus education and presented an opportunity to sketch and paint sitters in industrial settings. In addition to being a painter, Kramer was a sculptor, a printmaker, a collage maker, a mosaicist, a professor, and a founder of the Art Therapy movement. Kramer is perhaps best known for her work as a pioneer in the field of Art Therapy. In 1971 she was part of the team that established an Art Therapy program at George Washington University, and she created the graduate program in Art Therapy at New York University in 1973. With her training in art, art education, as well as psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy, Kramer believed that negative emotions and thoughts could be transformed and rechanneled into productive energy through art. She and fellow pioneer Margaret Naumburg set out to champion the new field of Art Therapy. Kramer also believed that art therapists should create their own art in order to deal with the stress and exhaustion of clinical work, so she continued to create her own art. The following is Kramer's statement about art therapy: "I perceive myself as a specialist who combines the general qualifications of being a competent artist with specialized capacities in the field of psychotherapy and education. The theoretical framework of my understanding of child psychology is based in the main on Freudian psychoanalytic thought. The emphasis, however, is on the idea of art as therapy rather than on psychotherapy which uses art as a tool. My therapeutic medium is as old as mankind. Since human society has existed the arts have helped man to reconcile the eternal conflict between the individual's instinctual urges and the demands of society. Thus, all art is therapeutic in the broadest sense of the word. The artist who applies modern psychology in the field of art has to adapt his methods to the medium so that the therapeutic value of art is heightened by the introduction of therapeutic thinking, not destroyed or weakened by the introduction of concepts and methods that might be incompatible with the inner laws of artistic creation. It is not always easy for the art therapist to reconcile the therapist's approach with her function as an artist and teacher. In her function as a teacher who introduces disturbed children or adults into the realms of art, she has to be ready to accept the limitations of the individuals in her care. She has to be interested in progress on any level. She has to be flexible enough to accept and understand a diversity of styles and to find ways of helping each person according to his individual needs. As therapist she has to accept the unbeautiful manifestations of sexual and aggressive impulses in the raw, along with the results of confusions and incomplete sublimation. But this attitude of acceptance, which is essential in all therapy, must not dull the artist's capacity for discrimination. The teacher has to preserve her integrity genuine, between blocks and limitations, regressions and progress, superficial pretense and genuine communication. Even though my therapeutic approach includes awareness of psychic processes that may remain unconscious, the therapeutic maneuvers I am apt to employ seldom include uncovering unconscious material or the interpretation of unconscious meaning. Art therapy is conceived primarily as a means of supporting the ego. It harnesses the power of art to the task of fostering a psychic organization that is sufficiently resilient to function under pressure without breakdown or the need to resort to stultifying defensive measures. Thus conceived, art therapy constitutes an element of the therapeutic milieu that complements or supports psychotherapy but does not replace it. While art therapists encourage unconventional form and content in the art of their patients they are also intent on fostering artistic eloquence. The spoken words in psychotherapy and the play and talk in clinical therapy are typically formless and fluid. Content rather than form is essential. In art therapy form and content are equally important and the order and structure with which artistic creation endows experience constitutes a powerful aid in sorting out and mastering experience. To quote of art Susan Langer (1962): 'The primary function of art is to objectify experience so that we can contemplate and understand it' (p.90)." (source: Edith Kramer website) Item # 196999
Edith Kramer (Austrian born American, 1916-2014). Vermont Woods. Woodcut print on paper, 1972. Hand-signed and dated at lower right. A dense stand of Vermont woods rises in rhythmic silence, where trunks press close and branches interlace like a private language spoken by trees. In this woodblock print, Edith Kramer pares the landscape down to its essential architecture - verticals, diagonals, and the pulsing contrast of black ink against pale paper. The forest feels at once crowded and contemplative, a place where depth is suggested not by distance but by repetition, by the steady insistence of line upon line. Kramer's handling of the woodblock medium is deliberate and physical. Carved marks remain visible, lending the scene a tactile immediacy that mirrors the roughness of bark and the uneven forest floor. Light filters through the composition in fragments, catching on negative spaces between trunks, while darker passages gather into shadowed thickets. Size of print: 16" W x 15.5" H (40.6 cm x 39.4 cm); of paper: 17" W x 18" H (43.2 cm x 45.7 cm) The result is not a picturesque woodland, but a lived-in one - a place to move through slowly, attentive to texture, pattern, and pause. The print reflects Kramers Bauhaus-rooted sensibility, where structure and expression work in tandem rather than opposition. The woods become an ordered field of energy, disciplined yet alive, echoing her belief in form as a means of understanding experience. Here, nature is neither romanticized nor subdued. It stands firm, layered, and quietly absorbing, offering the viewer not escape, but grounding. About the artist: Edith Kramer was born in Vienna, Austria in 1916. Her exploration of art began at the age of 13 when Kramer took classes with Friedl Dicker, a graduate of the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. Kramer was greatly influenced by the theories of Bauhaus artist Johannes Itten who developed the preliminary Bauhaus course from 1919 to 1922. After Kramer graduated from Realgymnasium, Vienna in 1934 , she followed Dicker to Prague to continue her studies. Perhaps even more impactful was the time she spent assisting Dicker in teaching art to the children of political refugees. Fearing the Nazi invasion, Kramer sought refuge in the United States. She arrived in New York City in 1938, and taught sculpture at the Little Red School House, one of the city's first progressive schools. During WWII, Kramer worked in a machine shop in Soho. This experience resonated with her Bauhaus education and presented an opportunity to sketch and paint sitters in industrial settings. In addition to being a painter, Kramer was a sculptor, a printmaker, a collage maker, a mosaicist, a professor, and a founder of the Art Therapy movement. Kramer is perhaps best known for her work as a pioneer in the field of Art Therapy. In 1971 she was part of the team that established an Art Therapy program at George Washington University, and she created the graduate program in Art Therapy at New York University in 1973. With her training in art, art education, as well as psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy, Kramer believed that negative emotions and thoughts could be transformed and rechanneled into productive energy through art. She and fellow pioneer Margaret Naumburg set out to champion the new field of Art Therapy. Kramer also believed that art therapists should create their own art in order to deal with the stress and exhaustion of clinical work, so she continued to create her own art. The following is Kramer's statement about art therapy: "I perceive myself as a specialist who combines the general qualifications of being a competent artist with specialized capacities in the field of psychotherapy and education. The theoretical framework of my understanding of child psychology is based in the main on Freudian psychoanalytic thought. The emphasis, however, is on the idea of art as therapy rather than on psychotherapy which uses art as a tool. My therapeutic medium is as old as mankind. Since human society has existed the arts have helped man to reconcile the eternal conflict between the individual's instinctual urges and the demands of society. Thus, all art is therapeutic in the broadest sense of the word. The artist who applies modern psychology in the field of art has to adapt his methods to the medium so that the therapeutic value of art is heightened by the introduction of therapeutic thinking, not destroyed or weakened by the introduction of concepts and methods that might be incompatible with the inner laws of artistic creation. It is not always easy for the art therapist to reconcile the therapist's approach with her function as an artist and teacher. In her function as a teacher who introduces disturbed children or adults into the realms of art, she has to be ready to accept the limitations of the individuals in her care. She has to be interested in progress on any level. She has to be flexible enough to accept and understand a diversity of styles and to find ways of helping each person according to his individual needs. As therapist she has to accept the unbeautiful manifestations of sexual and aggressive impulses in the raw, along with the results of confusions and incomplete sublimation. But this attitude of acceptance, which is essential in all therapy, must not dull the artist's capacity for discrimination. The teacher has to preserve her integrity genuine, between blocks and limitations, regressions and progress, superficial pretense and genuine communication. Even though my therapeutic approach includes awareness of psychic processes that may remain unconscious, the therapeutic maneuvers I am apt to employ seldom include uncovering unconscious material or the interpretation of unconscious meaning. Art therapy is conceived primarily as a means of supporting the ego. It harnesses the power of art to the task of fostering a psychic organization that is sufficiently resilient to function under pressure without breakdown or the need to resort to stultifying defensive measures. Thus conceived, art therapy constitutes an element of the therapeutic milieu that complements or supports psychotherapy but does not replace it. While art therapists encourage unconventional form and content in the art of their patients they are also intent on fostering artistic eloquence. The spoken words in psychotherapy and the play and talk in clinical therapy are typically formless and fluid. Content rather than form is essential. In art therapy form and content are equally important and the order and structure with which artistic creation endows experience constitutes a powerful aid in sorting out and mastering experience. To quote of art Susan Langer (1962): 'The primary function of art is to objectify experience so that we can contemplate and understand it' (p.90)." (source: Edith Kramer website) Item # 197432
Edith Kramer (Austrian born American, 1916-2014). "Rocks and Sea" oil on linen, 1968. Signed at lower right, and again with artist's address on verso. Faint remains of title, location, and date on verso. Painted on Cranberry Island, this seascape carries the raw temperament of a coast that refuses to sit still. Kramer presses the Atlantic into motion with strokes that churn and drag across the linen, building a shoreline that feels half seen, half remembered. The rocks thrust upward like stubborn survivors, dark silhouettes bracing against a crush of white water that keeps rearranging the world around them. The sea hurls itself forward, then folds back, leaving the whole scene caught in a breathless rhythm that is never quite the same twice. Kramer understood how form can hold feeling, and here the palette does much of the talking. Grays slip into bruised blues, foam ignites in sudden streaks of pale light, and the sky sinks low, as if the weather itself had leaned close to whisper. Size: 30.25" W x 16" H (76.8 cm x 40.6 cm) Her early Bauhaus training taught her to see structure hidden inside chaos, and that sensibility hums beneath the waves: even in the turbulence, each gesture belongs to an underlying order. Nothing is decorative. Everything is a consequence of wind, tide, and the artist's keen eye. The painting reflects a shoreline experienced not as a tourist but as a participant. You can almost sense her standing at the edge of the surf, letting the spray hit her face, trying to pin down the feeling of a moment that will not politely hold still. "Rocks and Sea" is less a depiction of Cranberry Island than a negotiation with it, a way of shaping wildness into a language sturdy enough to contain both motion and mood. About the Artist: Edith Kramer was born in Vienna, Austria in 1916. Her exploration of art began at the age of 13 when Kramer took classes with Friedl Dicker, a graduate of the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. Kramer was greatly influenced by the theories of Bauhaus artist Johannes Itten who developed the preliminary Bauhaus course from 1919 to 1922. After Kramer graduated from Realgymnasium, Vienna in 1934 , she followed Dicker to Prague to continue her studies. Perhaps even more impactful was the time she spent assisting Dicker in teaching art to the children of political refugees. Fearing the Nazi invasion, Kramer sought refuge in the United States. She arrived in New York City in 1938, and taught sculpture at the Little Red School House, one of the city's first progressive schools. During WWII, Kramer worked in a machine shop in Soho. This experience resonated with her Bauhaus education and presented an opportunity to sketch and paint sitters in industrial settings. In addition to being a painter, Kramer was a sculptor, a printmaker, a collage maker, a mosaicist, a professor, and a founder of the Art Therapy movement. Kramer is perhaps best known for her work as a pioneer in the field of Art Therapy. In 1971 she was part of the team that established an Art Therapy program at George Washington University, and she created the graduate program in Art Therapy at New York University in 1973. With her training in art, art education, as well as psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy, Kramer believed that negative emotions and thoughts could be transformed and rechanneled into productive energy through art. She and fellow pioneer Margaret Naumburg set out to champion the new field of Art Therapy. Kramer also believed that art therapists should create their own art in order to deal with the stress and exhaustion of clinical work, so she continued to create her own art. The following is Kramer's statement about art therapy: "I perceive myself as a specialist who combines the general qualifications of being a competent artist with specialized capacities in the field of psychotherapy and education. The theoretical framework of my understanding of child psychology is based in the main on Freudian psychoanalytic thought. The emphasis, however, is on the idea of art as therapy rather than on psychotherapy which uses art as a tool. My therapeutic medium is as old as mankind. Since human society has existed the arts have helped man to reconcile the eternal conflict between the individual's instinctual urges and the demands of society. Thus, all art is therapeutic in the broadest sense of the word. The artist who applies modern psychology in the field of art has to adapt his methods to the medium so that the therapeutic value of art is heightened by the introduction of therapeutic thinking, not destroyed or weakened by the introduction of concepts and methods that might be incompatible with the inner laws of artistic creation. It is not always easy for the art therapist to reconcile the therapist's approach with her function as an artist and teacher. In her function as a teacher who introduces disturbed children or adults into the realms of art, she has to be ready to accept the limitations of the individuals in her care. She has to be interested in progress on any level. She has to be flexible enough to accept and understand a diversity of styles and to find ways of helping each person according to his individual needs. As therapist she has to accept the unbeautiful manifestations of sexual and aggressive impulses in the raw, along with the results of confusions and incomplete sublimation. But this attitude of acceptance, which is essential in all therapy, must not dull the artist's capacity for discrimination. The teacher has to preserve her integrity genuine, between blocks and limitations, regressions and progress, superficial pretense and genuine communication. Even though my therapeutic approach includes awareness of psychic processes that may remain unconscious, the therapeutic maneuvers I am apt to employ seldom include uncovering unconscious material or the interpretation of unconscious meaning. Art therapy is conceived primarily as a means of supporting the ego. It harnesses the power of art to the task of fostering a psychic organization that is sufficiently resilient to function under pressure without breakdown or the need to resort to stultifying defensive measures. Thus conceived, art therapy constitutes an element of the therapeutic milieu that complements or supports psychotherapy but does not replace it. While art therapists encourage unconventional form and content in the art of their patients they are also intent on fostering artistic eloquence. The spoken words in psychotherapy and the play and talk in clinical therapy are typically formless and fluid. Content rather than form is essential. In art therapy form and content are equally important and the order and structure with which artistic creation endows experience constitutes a powerful aid in sorting out and mastering experience. To quote of art Susan Langer (1962): 'The primary function of art is to objectify experience so that we can contemplate and understand it' (p.90)." (source: Edith Kramer website) Item # 197003
Edith Kramer (Austrian born American, 1916-2014). "Derelict House" oil on linen, 1968. Signed and dated at lower right and again with title and artist's address on verso. A fractured building looms out of a dim, smoke-softened night, its walls broken into planes of shadow and muted color. In "Derelict House," Edith Kramer turns her attention to the quiet aftermath of demolition, capturing a structure caught between existence and erasure. Windows appear as dark, watchful apertures, while the architecture itself seems to dissolve into the surrounding air, as if the city is already forgetting it. Painted in the late 1960s, the work reflects Kramer's sustained engagement with New York City during a period of aggressive urban renewal. Entire neighborhoods were being dismantled, streets emptied, and familiar forms reduced to rubble or memory. Size of painting: 34" W x 30" H (86.4 cm x 76.2 cm); of frame: 34.5" W x 30.5" H (87.6 cm x 77.5 cm) Though the painting recalls the bombed-out buildings of wartime Europe, its subject is firmly rooted in the American cityscape, where progress arrived with a wrecking ball and left silence in its wake. Kramer's palette is restrained and nocturnal, dominated by grays, browns, and ashen blues that compress space and mute detail. Forms are built through blocks of color rather than line, giving the structure a weighty, almost geological presence. The house feels less like a single building than a psychological site, a repository for displacement, loss, and unresolved tension. There are no figures, no visible movement, only the stillness of abandonment. Yet the painting does not dramatize ruin. Kramer approaches the scene with steady observation, allowing ambiguity to do the work. "Derelict House" becomes a meditation on transition, on what lingers when purpose has been stripped away, and on the uneasy calm that settles over places once full of life. About the Artist: "Edith Kramer was born in Vienna, Austria in 1916. Her exploration of art began at the age of 13 when Kramer took classes with Friedl Dicker, a graduate of the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. Kramer was greatly influenced by the theories of Bauhaus artist Johannes Itten who developed the preliminary Bauhaus course from 1919 to 1922. After Kramer graduated from Realgymnasium, Vienna in 1934 , she followed Dicker to Prague to continue her studies. Perhaps even more impactful was the time she spent assisting Dicker in teaching art to the children of political refugees. Fearing the Nazi invasion, Kramer sought refuge in the United States. She arrived in New York City in 1938, and taught sculpture at the Little Red School House, one of the city's first progressive schools. During WWII, Kramer worked in a machine shop in Soho. This experience resonated with her Bauhaus education and presented an opportunity to sketch and paint sitters in industrial settings. In addition to being a painter, Kramer was a sculptor, a printmaker, a collage maker, a mosaicist, a professor, and a founder of the Art Therapy movement. Kramer is perhaps best known for her work as a pioneer in the field of Art Therapy. In 1971 she was part of the team that established an Art Therapy program at George Washington University, and she created the graduate program in Art Therapy at New York University in 1973. With her training in art, art education, as well as psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy, Kramer believed that negative emotions and thoughts could be transformed and rechanneled into productive energy through art. She and fellow pioneer Margaret Naumburg set out to champion the new field of Art Therapy. Kramer also believed that art therapists should create their own art in order to deal with the stress and exhaustion of clinical work, so she continued to create her own art. The following is Kramer's statement about art therapy: "I perceive myself as a specialist who combines the general qualifications of being a competent artist with specialized capacities in the field of psychotherapy and education. The theoretical framework of my understanding of child psychology is based in the main on Freudian psychoanalytic thought. The emphasis, however, is on the idea of art as therapy rather than on psychotherapy which uses art as a tool. My therapeutic medium is as old as mankind. Since human society has existed the arts have helped man to reconcile the eternal conflict between the individual's instinctual urges and the demands of society. Thus, all art is therapeutic in the broadest sense of the word. The artist who applies modern psychology in the field of art has to adapt his methods to the medium so that the therapeutic value of art is heightened by the introduction of therapeutic thinking, not destroyed or weakened by the introduction of concepts and methods that might be incompatible with the inner laws of artistic creation. It is not always easy for the art therapist to reconcile the therapist's approach with her function as an artist and teacher. In her function as a teacher who introduces disturbed children or adults into the realms of art, she has to be ready to accept the limitations of the individuals in her care. She has to be interested in progress on any level. She has to be flexible enough to accept and understand a diversity of styles and to find ways of helping each person according to his individual needs. As therapist she has to accept the unbeautiful manifestations of sexual and aggressive impulses in the raw, along with the results of confusions and incomplete sublimation. But this attitude of acceptance, which is essential in all therapy, must not dull the artist's capacity for discrimination. The teacher has to preserve her integrity genuine, between blocks and limitations, regressions and progress, superficial pretense and genuine communication. Even though my therapeutic approach includes awareness of psychic processes that may remain unconscious, the therapeutic maneuvers I am apt to employ seldom include uncovering unconscious material or the interpretation of unconscious meaning. Art therapy is conceived primarily as a means of supporting the ego. It harnesses the power of art to the task of fostering a psychic organization that is sufficiently resilient to function under pressure without breakdown or the need to resort to stultifying defensive measures. Thus conceived, art therapy constitutes an element of the therapeutic milieu that complements or supports psychotherapy but does not replace it. While art therapists encourage unconventional form and content in the art of their patients they are also intent on fostering artistic eloquence. The spoken words in psychotherapy and the play and talk in clinical therapy are typically formless and fluid. Content rather than form is essential. In art therapy form and content are equally important and the order and structure with which artistic creation endows experience constitutes a powerful aid in sorting out and mastering experience. To quote of art Susan Langer (1962): 'The primary function of art is to objectify experience so that we can contemplate and understand it' (p.90)." (source: Edith Kramer website) Item # 196996
Edith Kramer (Austrian born American, 1916-2014). "Exposed Exterior" oil on linen, 1960. Signed and dated in black pigment at lower right. "Exposed Exterior" is a powerful painting by Edith Kramer, an accomplished Austrian-born artist as well as an important pioneer of the art therapy profession. The composition captures the effects of Robert Moses's massive demolition of entire neighborhoods in Brooklyn, New York which displaced communities to construct the Brooklyn Queens Expressway (BQE). While some communities engaged in successful resistence, many working class neighborhoods like Red Hook and Cobble Hill were dramatically impacted. In this painting Kramer made a poignant visual rebuttal to Urban Renewal's destruction of homes in mid century America. All is rendered with Kramer's expressive, loose brushwork in warm earthtones and shades of blue. Size: 26" L x 17" W (66 cm x 43.2 cm) About the Artist: Edith Kramer was born in Vienna, Austria in 1916. Her exploration of art began at the age of 13 when Kramer took classes with Friedl Dicker, a graduate of the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. Kramer was greatly influenced by the theories of Bauhaus artist Johannes Itten who developed the preliminary Bauhaus course from 1919 to 1922. After Kramer graduated from Realgymnasium, Vienna in 1934 , she followed Dicker to Prague to continue her studies. Perhaps even more impactful was the time she spent assisting Dicker in teaching art to the children of political refugees. Fearing the Nazi invasion, Kramer sought refuge in the United States. She arrived in New York City in 1938, and taught sculpture at the Little Red School House, one of the city's first progressive schools. During WWII, Kramer worked in a machine shop in Soho. This experience resonated with her Bauhaus education and presented an opportunity to sketch and paint sitters in industrial settings. In addition to being a painter, Kramer was a sculptor, a printmaker, a collage maker, a mosaicist, a professor, and a founder of the Art Therapy movement. Kramer is perhaps best known for her work as a pioneer in the field of Art Therapy. In 1971 she was part of the team that established an Art Therapy program at George Washington University, and she created the graduate program in Art Therapy at New York University in 1973. With her training in art, art education, as well as psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy, Kramer believed that negative emotions and thoughts could be transformed and rechanneled into productive energy through art. She and fellow pioneer Margaret Naumburg set out to champion the new field of Art Therapy. Kramer also believed that art therapists should create their own art in order to deal with the stress and exhaustion of clinical work, so she continued to create her own art. The following is Kramer's statement about art therapy: "I perceive myself as a specialist who combines the general qualifications of being a competent artist with specialized capacities in the field of psychotherapy and education. The theoretical framework of my understanding of child psychology is based in the main on Freudian psychoanalytic thought. The emphasis, however, is on the idea of art as therapy rather than on psychotherapy which uses art as a tool. My therapeutic medium is as old as mankind. Since human society has existed the arts have helped man to reconcile the eternal conflict between the individual's instinctual urges and the demands of society. Thus, all art is therapeutic in the broadest sense of the word. The artist who applies modern psychology in the field of art has to adapt his methods to the medium so that the therapeutic value of art is heightened by the introduction of therapeutic thinking, not destroyed or weakened by the introduction of concepts and methods that might be incompatible with the inner laws of artistic creation. It is not always easy for the art therapist to reconcile the therapist's approach with her function as an artist and teacher. In her function as a teacher who introduces disturbed children or adults into the realms of art, she has to be ready to accept the limitations of the individuals in her care. She has to be interested in progress on any level. She has to be flexible enough to accept and understand a diversity of styles and to find ways of helping each person according to his individual needs. As therapist she has to accept the unbeautiful manifestations of sexual and aggressive impulses in the raw, along with the results of confusions and incomplete sublimation. But this attitude of acceptance, which is essential in all therapy, must not dull the artist's capacity for discrimination. The teacher has to preserve her integrity genuine, between blocks and limitations, regressions and progress, superficial pretense and genuine communication. Even though my therapeutic approach includes awareness of psychic processes that may remain unconscious, the therapeutic maneuvers I am apt to employ seldom include uncovering unconscious material or the interpretation of unconscious meaning. Art therapy is conceived primarily as a means of supporting the ego. It harnesses the power of art to the task of fostering a psychic organization that is sufficiently resilient to function under pressure without breakdown or the need to resort to stultifying defensive measures. Thus conceived, art therapy constitutes an element of the therapeutic milieu that complements or supports psychotherapy but does not replace it. While art therapists encourage unconventional form and content in the art of their patients they are also intent on fostering artistic eloquence. The spoken words in psychotherapy and the play and talk in clinical therapy are typically formless and fluid. Content rather than form is essential. In art therapy form and content are equally important and the order and structure with which artistic creation endows experience constitutes a powerful aid in sorting out and mastering experience. To quote of art Susan Langer (1962): 'The primary function of art is to objectify experience so that we can contemplate and understand it' (p.90)." (source: Edith Kramer website) Item # 197002
Edith Kramer (Austrian born American, 1916-2014). Mountain Landscape. Watercolor on paper, 1955. Signed and dated at lower right. A luminous and quietly expansive plein air watercolor in which Edith Kramer turns her attention from the built world to the slow geometry of mountains, stone, and weather. Broad slopes unfold across the sheet in layered bands of muted green, ochre, rose, and gray, their surfaces animated by quick, directional brushstrokes that suggest shifting light and moving air. A low stone wall anchors the foreground, its dark, irregular forms providing a tactile counterpoint to the soft recession of the hills beyond. Kramer structures the composition with clarity and restraint. The mountain forms rise and overlap in gentle diagonals, leading the eye toward a distant range rendered in pale washes and softened edges. The sky is treated sparingly, with translucent gray clouds drifting across a light ground, allowing atmosphere to emerge through suggestion rather than detail. Size: 20" W x 14" H (50.8 cm x 35.6 cm) Color is applied economically, yet with confidence, each stroke carrying both descriptive weight and emotional tone. Painted in 1955, this landscape reflects Kramer's sensitivity to structure as a means of organizing experience, even in nature. The scene is neither dramatic nor picturesque. Instead, it feels observed and inhabited, shaped by time spent looking rather than by theatrical effect. The terrain appears stable and enduring, while the brushwork retains a sense of immediacy, capturing the momentary conditions of light and weather. This watercolor stands as a meditative counterpart to Kramer's urban and industrial imagery, revealing her ability to translate the same disciplined visual language to the natural world. The result is a landscape that feels both grounded and reflective, offering a measured, attentive encounter with place and perception. About the artist: Edith Kramer was born in Vienna, Austria in 1916. Her exploration of art began at the age of 13 when Kramer took classes with Friedl Dicker, a graduate of the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. Kramer was greatly influenced by the theories of Bauhaus artist Johannes Itten who developed the preliminary Bauhaus course from 1919 to 1922. After Kramer graduated from Realgymnasium, Vienna in 1934 , she followed Dicker to Prague to continue her studies. Perhaps even more impactful was the time she spent assisting Dicker in teaching art to the children of political refugees. Fearing the Nazi invasion, Kramer sought refuge in the United States. She arrived in New York City in 1938, and taught sculpture at the Little Red School House, one of the city's first progressive schools. During WWII, Kramer worked in a machine shop in Soho. This experience resonated with her Bauhaus education and presented an opportunity to sketch and paint sitters in industrial settings. In addition to being a painter, Kramer was a sculptor, a printmaker, a collage maker, a mosaicist, a professor, and a founder of the Art Therapy movement. Kramer is perhaps best known for her work as a pioneer in the field of Art Therapy. In 1971 she was part of the team that established an Art Therapy program at George Washington University, and she created the graduate program in Art Therapy at New York University in 1973. With her training in art, art education, as well as psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy, Kramer believed that negative emotions and thoughts could be transformed and rechanneled into productive energy through art. She and fellow pioneer Margaret Naumburg set out to champion the new field of Art Therapy. Kramer also believed that art therapists should create their own art in order to deal with the stress and exhaustion of clinical work, so she continued to create her own art. The following is Kramer's statement about art therapy: "I perceive myself as a specialist who combines the general qualifications of being a competent artist with specialized capacities in the field of psychotherapy and education. The theoretical framework of my understanding of child psychology is based in the main on Freudian psychoanalytic thought. The emphasis, however, is on the idea of art as therapy rather than on psychotherapy which uses art as a tool. My therapeutic medium is as old as mankind. Since human society has existed the arts have helped man to reconcile the eternal conflict between the individual's instinctual urges and the demands of society. Thus, all art is therapeutic in the broadest sense of the word. The artist who applies modern psychology in the field of art has to adapt his methods to the medium so that the therapeutic value of art is heightened by the introduction of therapeutic thinking, not destroyed or weakened by the introduction of concepts and methods that might be incompatible with the inner laws of artistic creation. It is not always easy for the art therapist to reconcile the therapist's approach with her function as an artist and teacher. In her function as a teacher who introduces disturbed children or adults into the realms of art, she has to be ready to accept the limitations of the individuals in her care. She has to be interested in progress on any level. She has to be flexible enough to accept and understand a diversity of styles and to find ways of helping each person according to his individual needs. As therapist she has to accept the unbeautiful manifestations of sexual and aggressive impulses in the raw, along with the results of confusions and incomplete sublimation. But this attitude of acceptance, which is essential in all therapy, must not dull the artist's capacity for discrimination. The teacher has to preserve her integrity genuine, between blocks and limitations, regressions and progress, superficial pretense and genuine communication. Even though my therapeutic approach includes awareness of psychic processes that may remain unconscious, the therapeutic maneuvers I am apt to employ seldom include uncovering unconscious material or the interpretation of unconscious meaning. Art therapy is conceived primarily as a means of supporting the ego. It harnesses the power of art to the task of fostering a psychic organization that is sufficiently resilient to function under pressure without breakdown or the need to resort to stultifying defensive measures. Thus conceived, art therapy constitutes an element of the therapeutic milieu that complements or supports psychotherapy but does not replace it. While art therapists encourage unconventional form and content in the art of their patients they are also intent on fostering artistic eloquence. The spoken words in psychotherapy and the play and talk in clinical therapy are typically formless and fluid. Content rather than form is essential. In art therapy form and content are equally important and the order and structure with which artistic creation endows experience constitutes a powerful aid in sorting out and mastering experience. To quote of art Susan Langer (1962): 'The primary function of art is to objectify experience so that we can contemplate and understand it' Item # 197425
Edith Kramer (Austrian born American, 1916-2014). "Bowery, New York" etching on paper, 1961. Number 9. Hand-signed, dated, and numbered in pencil beneath etching. A quietly powerful depiction of urban pause and human proximity, "Bowery, New York" captures a small group gathered within the compressed interior of a Bowery storefront or doorway, rendered with clarity, restraint, and psychological attentiveness. Four figures occupy the shallow space, seated or crouched close to the ground, their bodies angled inward as if drawn together by shared circumstance rather than conversation. Behind them, a metal security gate forms a rigid lattice, its repeating pattern pressing forward and enclosing the scene. Kramer organizes the composition with careful structural logic. Vertical bars, angled limbs, and the draped fabric above the figures create a rhythm of intersecting lines that stabilize the image while heightening its tension. Size of etching: 5.25" W x 4.75" H (13.3 cm x 12.1 cm); of paper: 9.5" W x 11" H (24.1 cm x 27.9 cm) The figures are individualized yet interconnected, each absorbed in their own posture or gesture, suggesting fatigue, waiting, or quiet endurance rather than overt drama. No single figure dominates. Instead, attention moves gently across the group, mirroring the slow, observational pace of street life. The etched line is confident but never heavy-handed. Kramer allows areas of openness to breathe, using restraint rather than contrast to convey mood. The architecture does not overwhelm the figures, yet it clearly shapes their experience, reinforcing the Bowery as both a physical and psychological environment. The scene feels observed rather than interpreted, offering presence without judgment. Dated 1961, this work reflects Kramer's sustained engagement with New York's social spaces and her belief in structure as a means of containing and understanding experience. "Bowery, New York" stands as a sensitive record of human stillness within the city's harder edges, transforming an everyday moment into a composed, empathetic study of shared urban life. About the artist: Edith Kramer was born in Vienna, Austria in 1916. Her exploration of art began at the age of 13 when Kramer took classes with Friedl Dicker, a graduate of the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. Kramer was greatly influenced by the theories of Bauhaus artist Johannes Itten who developed the preliminary Bauhaus course from 1919 to 1922. After Kramer graduated from Realgymnasium, Vienna in 1934 , she followed Dicker to Prague to continue her studies. Perhaps even more impactful was the time she spent assisting Dicker in teaching art to the children of political refugees. Fearing the Nazi invasion, Kramer sought refuge in the United States. She arrived in New York City in 1938, and taught sculpture at the Little Red School House, one of the city's first progressive schools. During WWII, Kramer worked in a machine shop in Soho. This experience resonated with her Bauhaus education and presented an opportunity to sketch and paint sitters in industrial settings. In addition to being a painter, Kramer was a sculptor, a printmaker, a collage maker, a mosaicist, a professor, and a founder of the Art Therapy movement. Kramer is perhaps best known for her work as a pioneer in the field of Art Therapy. In 1971 she was part of the team that established an Art Therapy program at George Washington University, and she created the graduate program in Art Therapy at New York University in 1973. With her training in art, art education, as well as psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy, Kramer believed that negative emotions and thoughts could be transformed and rechanneled into productive energy through art. She and fellow pioneer Margaret Naumburg set out to champion the new field of Art Therapy. Kramer also believed that art therapists should create their own art in order to deal with the stress and exhaustion of clinical work, so she continued to create her own art. The following is Kramer's statement about art therapy: "I perceive myself as a specialist who combines the general qualifications of being a competent artist with specialized capacities in the field of psychotherapy and education. The theoretical framework of my understanding of child psychology is based in the main on Freudian psychoanalytic thought. The emphasis, however, is on the idea of art as therapy rather than on psychotherapy which uses art as a tool. My therapeutic medium is as old as mankind. Since human society has existed the arts have helped man to reconcile the eternal conflict between the individual's instinctual urges and the demands of society. Thus, all art is therapeutic in the broadest sense of the word. The artist who applies modern psychology in the field of art has to adapt his methods to the medium so that the therapeutic value of art is heightened by the introduction of therapeutic thinking, not destroyed or weakened by the introduction of concepts and methods that might be incompatible with the inner laws of artistic creation. It is not always easy for the art therapist to reconcile the therapist's approach with her function as an artist and teacher. In her function as a teacher who introduces disturbed children or adults into the realms of art, she has to be ready to accept the limitations of the individuals in her care. She has to be interested in progress on any level. She has to be flexible enough to accept and understand a diversity of styles and to find ways of helping each person according to his individual needs. As therapist she has to accept the unbeautiful manifestations of sexual and aggressive impulses in the raw, along with the results of confusions and incomplete sublimation. But this attitude of acceptance, which is essential in all therapy, must not dull the artist's capacity for discrimination. The teacher has to preserve her integrity genuine, between blocks and limitations, regressions and progress, superficial pretense and genuine communication. Even though my therapeutic approach includes awareness of psychic processes that may remain unconscious, the therapeutic maneuvers I am apt to employ seldom include uncovering unconscious material or the interpretation of unconscious meaning. Art therapy is conceived primarily as a means of supporting the ego. It harnesses the power of art to the task of fostering a psychic organization that is sufficiently resilient to function under pressure without breakdown or the need to resort to stultifying defensive measures. Thus conceived, art therapy constitutes an element of the therapeutic milieu that complements or supports psychotherapy but does not replace it. While art therapists encourage unconventional form and content in the art of their patients they are also intent on fostering artistic eloquence. The spoken words in psychotherapy and the play and talk in clinical therapy are typically formless and fluid. Content rather than form is essential. In art therapy form and content are equally important and the order and structure with which artistic creation endows experience constitutes a powerful aid in sorting out and mastering experience. To quote of art Susan Langer (1962): 'The primary function of art is to objectify experience so that we can contemplate and understand it' Item # 197430
Edith Kramer (Austrian born American, 1916-2014). "Cranberry Isles, Maine" engraving on paper, 1962. Hand-signed and dated in pencil beneath image at lower right and titled on verso. A finely observed coastal scene, this 1962 engraving depicts the rugged rocks and restless waters of the Cranberry Isles off the coast of Maine. Kramer renders the ocean as a living surface, built from dense networks of etched lines that churn and fold around the fractured stone forms. The rocks rise like architectural remnants, sharply angled and weighty, their solidity held in tension with the constant motion of the surrounding sea. The composition reflects Kramers disciplined graphic sensibility, rooted in modernist training that prized structure, balance, and clarity of form. Line becomes both descriptive and expressive here, mapping the physical landscape while conveying the elemental force of water against stone. Size of engraving: 7" W x 3.75" H (17.8 cm x 9.5 cm); of paper: 14" W x 11" H (35.6 cm x 27.9 cm) The restrained palette of ink on paper heightens the drama, allowing light, texture, and rhythm to carry the emotional register of the scene. "Cranberry Isles, Maine" stands as a quiet but powerful meditation on endurance and flux, where nature is not romanticized but carefully studied, its energies ordered through the artist's measured hand. About the Artist: Edith Kramer was born in Vienna, Austria in 1916. Her exploration of art began at the age of 13 when Kramer took classes with Friedl Dicker, a graduate of the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. Kramer was greatly influenced by the theories of Bauhaus artist Johannes Itten who developed the preliminary Bauhaus course from 1919 to 1922. After Kramer graduated from Realgymnasium, Vienna in 1934 , she followed Dicker to Prague to continue her studies. Perhaps even more impactful was the time she spent assisting Dicker in teaching art to the children of political refugees. Fearing the Nazi invasion, Kramer sought refuge in the United States. She arrived in New York City in 1938, and taught sculpture at the Little Red School House, one of the city's first progressive schools. During WWII, Kramer worked in a machine shop in Soho. This experience resonated with her Bauhaus education and presented an opportunity to sketch and paint sitters in industrial settings. In addition to being a painter, Kramer was a sculptor, a printmaker, a collage maker, a mosaicist, a professor, and a founder of the Art Therapy movement. Kramer is perhaps best known for her work as a pioneer in the field of Art Therapy. In 1971 she was part of the team that established an Art Therapy program at George Washington University, and she created the graduate program in Art Therapy at New York University in 1973. With her training in art, art education, as well as psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy, Kramer believed that negative emotions and thoughts could be transformed and rechanneled into productive energy through art. She and fellow pioneer Margaret Naumburg set out to champion the new field of Art Therapy. Kramer also believed that art therapists should create their own art in order to deal with the stress and exhaustion of clinical work, so she continued to create her own art. The following is Kramer's statement about art therapy: "I perceive myself as a specialist who combines the general qualifications of being a competent artist with specialized capacities in the field of psychotherapy and education. The theoretical framework of my understanding of child psychology is based in the main on Freudian psychoanalytic thought. The emphasis, however, is on the idea of art as therapy rather than on psychotherapy which uses art as a tool. My therapeutic medium is as old as mankind. Since human society has existed the arts have helped man to reconcile the eternal conflict between the individual's instinctual urges and the demands of society. Thus, all art is therapeutic in the broadest sense of the word. The artist who applies modern psychology in the field of art has to adapt his methods to the medium so that the therapeutic value of art is heightened by the introduction of therapeutic thinking, not destroyed or weakened by the introduction of concepts and methods that might be incompatible with the inner laws of artistic creation. It is not always easy for the art therapist to reconcile the therapist's approach with her function as an artist and teacher. In her function as a teacher who introduces disturbed children or adults into the realms of art, she has to be ready to accept the limitations of the individuals in her care. She has to be interested in progress on any level. She has to be flexible enough to accept and understand a diversity of styles and to find ways of helping each person according to his individual needs. As therapist she has to accept the unbeautiful manifestations of sexual and aggressive impulses in the raw, along with the results of confusions and incomplete sublimation. But this attitude of acceptance, which is essential in all therapy, must not dull the artist's capacity for discrimination. The teacher has to preserve her integrity genuine, between blocks and limitations, regressions and progress, superficial pretense and genuine communication. Even though my therapeutic approach includes awareness of psychic processes that may remain unconscious, the therapeutic maneuvers I am apt to employ seldom include uncovering unconscious material or the interpretation of unconscious meaning. Art therapy is conceived primarily as a means of supporting the ego. It harnesses the power of art to the task of fostering a psychic organization that is sufficiently resilient to function under pressure without breakdown or the need to resort to stultifying defensive measures. Thus conceived, art therapy constitutes an element of the therapeutic milieu that complements or supports psychotherapy but does not replace it. While art therapists encourage unconventional form and content in the art of their patients they are also intent on fostering artistic eloquence. The spoken words in psychotherapy and the play and talk in clinical therapy are typically formless and fluid. Content rather than form is essential. In art therapy form and content are equally important and the order and structure with which artistic creation endows experience constitutes a powerful aid in sorting out and mastering experience. To quote of art Susan Langer (1962): 'The primary function of art is to objectify experience so that we can contemplate and understand it' (p.90)." (source: Edith Kramer website) Item # 197428
Edith Kramer (Austrian born American, 1916-2014). New York City Rooftops #1. Brush and ink on paper, 1946. Signed and dated at lower right. A restless geometry of rooftops stretches across the page in this sweeping brush and ink drawing, a view captured from the heights of Edith Kramers own New York apartment in 1946. The city unfurls as a dense thicket of chimneys, water towers, vents, and sharply angled parapets, all rendered through a storm of crosshatched strokes that turn brick, metal, and shadow into a vibrating field of energy. Kramer often worked outdoors atop her building, and that immediacy pulses through every mark - the wind in the lines, the grit in the ink, the sense of a living metropolis pressing forward. The composition is broad and cinematic. Horizontal sweeps anchor the rooftops, while diagonal thrusts carve deep into the urban blocks, giving the drawing a rhythm that borders on orchestral. Size: 29" W x 19.25" H (73.7 cm x 48.9 cm) Kramer works wet and dry together, letting ink pool in some passages and glide lightly across the paper in others, creating tonal shifts that resemble the shifting light of late afternoon. Her forms echo the weighty stillness found in the city paintings of Edward Hopper, yet her line is far more urgent, almost improvisational, as if she is holding the city in place just long enough to record its restless character. Although the scene is rooted in observation, the drawing feels charged with abstraction. Brick stacks become solid blocks of parallel strokes. Guardrails and fire escapes dissolve into a lattice of dark verticals. Even the boats at the lower edge of the sheet appear half constructed from shadow, half from memory. Kramer strips the city down to its essential planes and patterns, revealing the industrial vocabulary she absorbed during her wartime work in a Soho machine shop. "New York City Rooftops #1" stands as an early and compelling example of Kramers sensitivity to structure, rhythm, and the expressive potential of line. It is the New York skyline not as postcard, but as lived experience - a place of sharp edges, pulsing light, and the quiet but insistent presence of a young artist looking out across the city she had recently begun to call home. About the Artist: Edith Kramer was born in Vienna, Austria in 1916. Her exploration of art began at the age of 13 when Kramer took classes with Friedl Dicker, a graduate of the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. Kramer was greatly influenced by the theories of Bauhaus artist Johannes Itten who developed the preliminary Bauhaus course from 1919 to 1922. After Kramer graduated from Realgymnasium, Vienna in 1934 , she followed Dicker to Prague to continue her studies. Perhaps even more impactful was the time she spent assisting Dicker in teaching art to the children of political refugees. Fearing the Nazi invasion, Kramer sought refuge in the United States. She arrived in New York City in 1938, and taught sculpture at the Little Red School House, one of the city's first progressive schools. During WWII, Kramer worked in a machine shop in Soho. This experience resonated with her Bauhaus education and presented an opportunity to sketch and paint sitters in industrial settings. In addition to being a painter, Kramer was a sculptor, a printmaker, a collage maker, a mosaicist, a professor, and a founder of the Art Therapy movement. Kramer is perhaps best known for her work as a pioneer in the field of Art Therapy. In 1971 she was part of the team that established an Art Therapy program at George Washington University, and she created the graduate program in Art Therapy at New York University in 1973. With her training in art, art education, as well as psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy, Kramer believed that negative emotions and thoughts could be transformed and rechanneled into productive energy through art. She and fellow pioneer Margaret Naumburg set out to champion the new field of Art Therapy. Kramer also believed that art therapists should create their own art in order to deal with the stress and exhaustion of clinical work, so she continued to create her own art. The following is Kramer's statement about art therapy: "I perceive myself as a specialist who combines the general qualifications of being a competent artist with specialized capacities in the field of psychotherapy and education. The theoretical framework of my understanding of child psychology is based in the main on Freudian psychoanalytic thought. The emphasis, however, is on the idea of art as therapy rather than on psychotherapy which uses art as a tool. My therapeutic medium is as old as mankind. Since human society has existed the arts have helped man to reconcile the eternal conflict between the individual's instinctual urges and the demands of society. Thus, all art is therapeutic in the broadest sense of the word. The artist who applies modern psychology in the field of art has to adapt his methods to the medium so that the therapeutic value of art is heightened by the introduction of therapeutic thinking, not destroyed or weakened by the introduction of concepts and methods that might be incompatible with the inner laws of artistic creation. It is not always easy for the art therapist to reconcile the therapist's approach with her function as an artist and teacher. In her function as a teacher who introduces disturbed children or adults into the realms of art, she has to be ready to accept the limitations of the individuals in her care. She has to be interested in progress on any level. She has to be flexible enough to accept and understand a diversity of styles and to find ways of helping each person according to his individual needs. As therapist she has to accept the unbeautiful manifestations of sexual and aggressive impulses in the raw, along with the results of confusions and incomplete sublimation. But this attitude of acceptance, which is essential in all therapy, must not dull the artist's capacity for discrimination. The teacher has to preserve her integrity genuine, between blocks and limitations, regressions and progress, superficial pretense and genuine communication. Even though my therapeutic approach includes awareness of psychic processes that may remain unconscious, the therapeutic maneuvers I am apt to employ seldom include uncovering unconscious material or the interpretation of unconscious meaning. Art therapy is conceived primarily as a means of supporting the ego. It harnesses the power of art to the task of fostering a psychic organization that is sufficiently resilient to function under pressure without breakdown or the need to resort to stultifying defensive measures. Thus conceived, art therapy constitutes an element of the therapeutic milieu that complements or supports psychotherapy but does not replace it. While art therapists encourage unconventional form and content in the art of their patients they are also intent on fostering artistic eloquence. The spoken words in psychotherapy and the play and talk in clinical therapy are typically formless and fluid. Content rather than form is essential. In art therapy form and content are equally important and the order and structure with which artistic creation endows experience constitutes a powerful aid in sorting out and mastering experience. To quote of art Susan Langer (1962): 'The primary function of art is to objectify experience so that we can contemplate and understand it' (p.90)." (source: Edith Kramer website) Item # 197012
Edith Kramer (Austrian born American, 1916-2014). Amiens Cathedral. Ink drawing on paper, 1948. Dated on verso. A 1948 ink drawing on paper by Edith Kramer depicts the towering west facade of Amiens Cathedral, rendered with bold crosshatching and a crisp, architectural command. Kramer builds the Gothic structure through rhythmic linework, stacking lancet openings, sculptural portals, and the great rose window like a darkened sun at the center of the composition. Her marks feel both precise and urgent, as if the cathedral is being reconstructed stroke by stroke - not merely observed, but understood through structure. The subject carried particular weight for Kramer, who remembered Amiens as a city still marked by the violence of World War II. She described the cathedral as standing "in a wilderness," surrounded by collapse, yet miraculously intact because it was "built on arches and withstood the bombing." Size: 23" W x 29" H (58.4 cm x 73.7 cm) Size: 0.1" L x 23" W x 29" H (0.3 cm x 58.4 cm x 73.7 cm) That uncanny survival shapes the drawing's mood. With the cathedral's stained-glass windows removed for safekeeping, the facade's openings read as hollow, shadowed voids, giving the building an eerie, stripped grandeur - a monument temporarily emptied of its most famous light. Executed just a few years after the war, this work becomes more than an architectural study. It is a portrait of endurance: Gothic stone held upright against history, and an artist using ink to translate survival into form. About the artist: "Edith Kramer was born in Vienna, Austria in 1916. Her exploration of art began at the age of 13 when Kramer took classes with Friedl Dicker, a graduate of the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. Kramer was greatly influenced by the theories of Bauhaus artist Johannes Itten who developed the preliminary Bauhaus course from 1919 to 1922. After Kramer graduated from Realgymnasium, Vienna in 1934 , she followed Dicker to Prague to continue her studies. Perhaps even more impactful was the time she spent assisting Dicker in teaching art to the children of political refugees. Fearing the Nazi invasion, Kramer sought refuge in the United States. She arrived in New York City in 1938, and taught sculpture at the Little Red School House, one of the city's first progressive schools. During WWII, Kramer worked in a machine shop in Soho. This experience resonated with her Bauhaus education and presented an opportunity to sketch and paint sitters in industrial settings. In addition to being a painter, Kramer was a sculptor, a printmaker, a collage maker, a mosaicist, a professor, and a founder of the Art Therapy movement. Kramer is perhaps best known for her work as a pioneer in the field of Art Therapy. In 1971 she was part of the team that established an Art Therapy program at George Washington University, and she created the graduate program in Art Therapy at New York University in 1973. With her training in art, art education, as well as psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy, Kramer believed that negative emotions and thoughts could be transformed and rechanneled into productive energy through art. She and fellow pioneer Margaret Naumburg set out to champion the new field of Art Therapy. Kramer also believed that art therapists should create their own art in order to deal with the stress and exhaustion of clinical work, so she continued to create her own art. The following is Kramer's statement about art therapy: "I perceive myself as a specialist who combines the general qualifications of being a competent artist with specialized capacities in the field of psychotherapy and education. The theoretical framework of my understanding of child psychology is based in the main on Freudian psychoanalytic thought. The emphasis, however, is on the idea of art as therapy rather than on psychotherapy which uses art as a tool. My therapeutic medium is as old as mankind. Since human society has existed the arts have helped man to reconcile the eternal conflict between the individual's instinctual urges and the demands of society. Thus, all art is therapeutic in the broadest sense of the word. The artist who applies modern psychology in the field of art has to adapt his methods to the medium so that the therapeutic value of art is heightened by the introduction of therapeutic thinking, not destroyed or weakened by the introduction of concepts and methods that might be incompatible with the inner laws of artistic creation. It is not always easy for the art therapist to reconcile the therapist's approach with her function as an artist and teacher. In her function as a teacher who introduces disturbed children or adults into the realms of art, she has to be ready to accept the limitations of the individuals in her care. She has to be interested in progress on any level. She has to be flexible enough to accept and understand a diversity of styles and to find ways of helping each person according to his individual needs. As therapist she has to accept the unbeautiful manifestations of sexual and aggressive impulses in the raw, along with the results of confusions and incomplete sublimation. But this attitude of acceptance, which is essential in all therapy, must not dull the artist's capacity for discrimination. The teacher has to preserve her integrity genuine, between blocks and limitations, regressions and progress, superficial pretense and genuine communication. Even though my therapeutic approach includes awareness of psychic processes that may remain unconscious, the therapeutic maneuvers I am apt to employ seldom include uncovering unconscious material or the interpretation of unconscious meaning. Art therapy is conceived primarily as a means of supporting the ego. It harnesses the power of art to the task of fostering a psychic organization that is sufficiently resilient to function under pressure without breakdown or the need to resort to stultifying defensive measures. Thus conceived, art therapy constitutes an element of the therapeutic milieu that complements or supports psychotherapy but does not replace it. While art therapists encourage unconventional form and content in the art of their patients they are also intent on fostering artistic eloquence. The spoken words in psychotherapy and the play and talk in clinical therapy are typically formless and fluid. Content rather than form is essential. In art therapy form and content are equally important and the order and structure with which artistic creation endows experience constitutes a powerful aid in sorting out and mastering experience. To quote of art Susan Langer (1962): 'The primary function of art is to objectify experience so that we can contemplate and understand it' (p.90)." (source: Edith Kramer website) Item # 197008
Edith Kramer (Austrian born American, 1916-2014). New York City Rooftops. Woodblock print on paper, 1947. Signed and dated in plate at lower right. A dynamic and tightly constructed urban scene, this 1947 woodblock engraving captures the dense rooftops of New York City as an interlocking field of beams, tanks, ladders, and platforms. Kramer reduces the city to a lattice of sharp angles and rhythmic diagonals, where architecture becomes almost abstract, yet remains unmistakably lived-in. Water towers, stair rails, and brick structures press against one another, creating a sense of compressed energy and constant motion. The bold contrasts of black and white emphasize structure over sentiment, reflecting Kramers modernist training and her affinity for clarity, order, and disciplined line. Carved marks alternate between precise cuts and expressive striations, giving the scene a tactile immediacy that echoes the physical labor and industrial character of mid-century New York. Size of paper: 23.6" W x 15.75" H (59.9 cm x 40 cm) The viewpoint feels elevated and intimate, as if observed from a neighboring roof, placing the viewer inside the city rather than at a distance. Created less than a decade after her arrival in New York, this engraving reads as both observation and assimilation, a study of the city as a constructed environment shaped by human effort. It stands as a strong example of Kramer's graphic work, where urban life is distilled into structure, rhythm, and resilient form. About the artist: "Edith Kramer was born in Vienna, Austria in 1916. Her exploration of art began at the age of 13 when Kramer took classes with Friedl Dicker, a graduate of the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. Kramer was greatly influenced by the theories of Bauhaus artist Johannes Itten who developed the preliminary Bauhaus course from 1919 to 1922. After Kramer graduated from Realgymnasium, Vienna in 1934 , she followed Dicker to Prague to continue her studies. Perhaps even more impactful was the time she spent assisting Dicker in teaching art to the children of political refugees. Fearing the Nazi invasion, Kramer sought refuge in the United States. She arrived in New York City in 1938, and taught sculpture at the Little Red School House, one of the city's first progressive schools. During WWII, Kramer worked in a machine shop in Soho. This experience resonated with her Bauhaus education and presented an opportunity to sketch and paint sitters in industrial settings. In addition to being a painter, Kramer was a sculptor, a printmaker, a collage maker, a mosaicist, a professor, and a founder of the Art Therapy movement. Kramer is perhaps best known for her work as a pioneer in the field of Art Therapy. In 1971 she was part of the team that established an Art Therapy program at George Washington University, and she created the graduate program in Art Therapy at New York University in 1973. With her training in art, art education, as well as psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy, Kramer believed that negative emotions and thoughts could be transformed and rechanneled into productive energy through art. She and fellow pioneer Margaret Naumburg set out to champion the new field of Art Therapy. Kramer also believed that art therapists should create their own art in order to deal with the stress and exhaustion of clinical work, so she continued to create her own art. The following is Kramer's statement about art therapy: "I perceive myself as a specialist who combines the general qualifications of being a competent artist with specialized capacities in the field of psychotherapy and education. The theoretical framework of my understanding of child psychology is based in the main on Freudian psychoanalytic thought. The emphasis, however, is on the idea of art as therapy rather than on psychotherapy which uses art as a tool. My therapeutic medium is as old as mankind. Since human society has existed the arts have helped man to reconcile the eternal conflict between the individual's instinctual urges and the demands of society. Thus, all art is therapeutic in the broadest sense of the word. The artist who applies modern psychology in the field of art has to adapt his methods to the medium so that the therapeutic value of art is heightened by the introduction of therapeutic thinking, not destroyed or weakened by the introduction of concepts and methods that might be incompatible with the inner laws of artistic creation. It is not always easy for the art therapist to reconcile the therapist's approach with her function as an artist and teacher. In her function as a teacher who introduces disturbed children or adults into the realms of art, she has to be ready to accept the limitations of the individuals in her care. She has to be interested in progress on any level. She has to be flexible enough to accept and understand a diversity of styles and to find ways of helping each person according to his individual needs. As therapist she has to accept the unbeautiful manifestations of sexual and aggressive impulses in the raw, along with the results of confusions and incomplete sublimation. But this attitude of acceptance, which is essential in all therapy, must not dull the artist's capacity for discrimination. The teacher has to preserve her integrity genuine, between blocks and limitations, regressions and progress, superficial pretense and genuine communication. Even though my therapeutic approach includes awareness of psychic processes that may remain unconscious, the therapeutic maneuvers I am apt to employ seldom include uncovering unconscious material or the interpretation of unconscious meaning. Art therapy is conceived primarily as a means of supporting the ego. It harnesses the power of art to the task of fostering a psychic organization that is sufficiently resilient to function under pressure without breakdown or the need to resort to stultifying defensive measures. Thus conceived, art therapy constitutes an element of the therapeutic milieu that complements or supports psychotherapy but does not replace it. While art therapists encourage unconventional form and content in the art of their patients they are also intent on fostering artistic eloquence. The spoken words in psychotherapy and the play and talk in clinical therapy are typically formless and fluid. Content rather than form is essential. In art therapy form and content are equally important and the order and structure with which artistic creation endows experience constitutes a powerful aid in sorting out and mastering experience. To quote of art Susan Langer (1962): 'The primary function of art is to objectify experience so that we can contemplate and understand it' (p.90)." (source: Edith Kramer website) Item # 197426
Edith Kramer (Austrian born American, 1916-2014). Untitled (pipes). Pencil and colored pencil drawing on paper, n.d. Unsigned. A delicately observed study of industrial plumbing rendered in graphite with washes of pale colored pencil on paper, the composition arranging a tangle of horizontal pipes, valves, gauges, and overhead conduit into a quiet architectural rhythm. The artist's line is searching rather than declarative, building form through careful repetition and tonal accents of blue, green, and rust. Edith Kramer (1916-2014), Vienna-born painter and pioneering art therapist, emigrated to the United States in 1938 and spent decades teaching and working between studios in New York and Grundlsee, Austria. Her drawings of mechanical and architectural subjects, often executed in factories, boiler rooms, and industrial interiors, reveal her abiding interest in the dignity of labor and the visual logic of working environments, themes that paralleled her therapeutic practice with children and her commitment to art as a humanizing discipline. Unsigned, in keeping with many sheets that remained in her studio. About the artist: "Edith Kramer was born in Vienna, Austria in 1916. Her exploration of art began at the age of 13 when Kramer took classes with Friedl Dicker, a graduate of the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. Kramer was greatly influenced by the theories of Bauhaus artist Johannes Itten who developed the preliminary Bauhaus course from 1919 to 1922. After Kramer graduated from Realgymnasium, Vienna in 1934 , she followed Dicker to Prague to continue her studies. Perhaps even more impactful was the time she spent assisting Dicker in teaching art to the children of political refugees. Fearing the Nazi invasion, Kramer sought refuge in the United States. She arrived in New York City in 1938, and taught sculpture at the Little Red School House, one of the city's first progressive schools. During WWII, Kramer worked in a machine shop in Soho. This experience resonated with her Bauhaus education and presented an opportunity to sketch and paint sitters in industrial settings. In addition to being a painter, Kramer was a sculptor, a printmaker, a collage maker, a mosaicist, a professor, and a founder of the Art Therapy movement. Kramer is perhaps best known for her work as a pioneer in the field of Art Therapy. In 1971 she was part of the team that established an Art Therapy program at George Washington University, and she created the graduate program in Art Therapy at New York University in 1973. With her training in art, art education, as well as psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy, Kramer believed that negative emotions and thoughts could be transformed and rechanneled into productive energy through art. She and fellow pioneer Margaret Naumburg set out to champion the new field of Art Therapy. Kramer also believed that art therapists should create their own art in order to deal with the stress and exhaustion of clinical work, so she continued to create her own art. The following is Kramer's statement about art therapy: "I perceive myself as a specialist who combines the general qualifications of being a competent artist with specialized capacities in the field of psychotherapy and education. The theoretical framework of my understanding of child psychology is based in the main on Freudian psychoanalytic thought. The emphasis, however, is on the idea of art as therapy rather than on psychotherapy which uses art as a tool. My therapeutic medium is as old as mankind. Since human society has existed the arts have helped man to reconcile the eternal conflict between the individual's instinctual urges and the demands of society. Thus, all art is therapeutic in the broadest sense of the word. The artist who applies modern psychology in the field of art has to adapt his methods to the medium so that the therapeutic value of art is heightened by the introduction of therapeutic thinking, not destroyed or weakened by the introduction of concepts and methods that might be incompatible with the inner laws of artistic creation. It is not always easy for the art therapist to reconcile the therapist's approach with her function as an artist and teacher. In her function as a teacher who introduces disturbed children or adults into the realms of art, she has to be ready to accept the limitations of the individuals in her care. She has to be interested in progress on any level. She has to be flexible enough to accept and understand a diversity of styles and to find ways of helping each person according to his individual needs. As therapist she has to accept the unbeautiful manifestations of sexual and aggressive impulses in the raw, along with the results of confusions and incomplete sublimation. But this attitude of acceptance, which is essential in all therapy, must not dull the artist's capacity for discrimination. The teacher has to preserve her integrity genuine, between blocks and limitations, regressions and progress, superficial pretense and genuine communication. Even though my therapeutic approach includes awareness of psychic processes that may remain unconscious, the therapeutic maneuvers I am apt to employ seldom include uncovering unconscious material or the interpretation of unconscious meaning. Art therapy is conceived primarily as a means of supporting the ego. It harnesses the power of art to the task of fostering a psychic organization that is sufficiently resilient to function under pressure without breakdown or the need to resort to stultifying defensive measures. Thus conceived, art therapy constitutes an element of the therapeutic milieu that complements or supports psychotherapy but does not replace it. While art therapists encourage unconventional form and content in the art of their patients they are also intent on fostering artistic eloquence. The spoken words in psychotherapy and the play and talk in clinical therapy are typically formless and fluid. Content rather than form is essential. In art therapy form and content are equally important and the order and structure with which artistic creation endows experience constitutes a powerful aid in sorting out and mastering experience. To quote of art Susan Langer (1962): 'The primary function of art is to objectify experience so that we can contemplate and understand it' (p.90)." (source: Edith Kramer website) Item # 197009
Edith Kramer (Austrian born American, 1916-2014). "High Meadow, Austria" watercolor, 1997. Signed and dated at lower right. A landscape built of wind, stone, and the stubborn greening of high country plants unfolds in Edith Kramer's plein air watercolor "High Meadow, Austria," painted in 1997. The work looks as if it were pulled straight from a mountainside breath: pale limestone ridges ripple like frozen waves, each fold and fissure described with Kramer's attentive, Bauhaus-trained hand. Here the stones are not sterile, but alive with delicate sprays of ferns, alpine blossoms, and the quiet insistence of early spring growth. The sky, a broad sweep of clean Austrian blue, opens the scene with a clarity that feels almost ceremonial. Kramer painted this view near her ancestral home in Grundlsee, Austria, where she often hiked to a shepherd's cabin to work directly in the open air. Even in early spring, when the wind remains sharp and the earth still holds winter's chill, she sought these heights. Size: 37" W x 26" H (94 cm x 66 cm) The painting carries that sense of bracing solitude: nature observed not from comfort, but from immersion. Her lifelong discipline in drawing from life, strengthened by her early studies with Friedl Dicker and her exposure to Bauhaus principles of structure, line, and clarity, echoes subtly through the watercolor's crisp edges and careful modulations of light. "High Meadow, Austria" reveals an artist who understood the emotional architecture of landscape. It is both a record of place and a meditation shaped by decades of artistic and psychological insight. Kramer's brush balances precision and lyricism, turning stone and scrub into something contemplative and quietly radiant. About the Artist: Edith Kramer was born in Vienna, Austria in 1916. Her exploration of art began at the age of 13 when Kramer took classes with Friedl Dicker, a graduate of the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. Kramer was greatly influenced by the theories of Bauhaus artist Johannes Itten who developed the preliminary Bauhaus course from 1919 to 1922. After Kramer graduated from Realgymnasium, Vienna in 1934 , she followed Dicker to Prague to continue her studies. Perhaps even more impactful was the time she spent assisting Dicker in teaching art to the children of political refugees. Fearing the Nazi invasion, Kramer sought refuge in the United States. She arrived in New York City in 1938, and taught sculpture at the Little Red School House, one of the city's first progressive schools. During WWII, Kramer worked in a machine shop in Soho. This experience resonated with her Bauhaus education and presented an opportunity to sketch and paint sitters in industrial settings. In addition to being a painter, Kramer was a sculptor, a printmaker, a collage maker, a mosaicist, a professor, and a founder of the Art Therapy movement. Kramer is perhaps best known for her work as a pioneer in the field of Art Therapy. In 1971 she was part of the team that established an Art Therapy program at George Washington University, and she created the graduate program in Art Therapy at New York University in 1973. With her training in art, art education, as well as psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy, Kramer believed that negative emotions and thoughts could be transformed and rechanneled into productive energy through art. She and fellow pioneer Margaret Naumburg set out to champion the new field of Art Therapy. Kramer also believed that art therapists should create their own art in order to deal with the stress and exhaustion of clinical work, so she continued to create her own art. The following is Kramer's statement about art therapy: "I perceive myself as a specialist who combines the general qualifications of being a competent artist with specialized capacities in the field of psychotherapy and education. The theoretical framework of my understanding of child psychology is based in the main on Freudian psychoanalytic thought. The emphasis, however, is on the idea of art as therapy rather than on psychotherapy which uses art as a tool. My therapeutic medium is as old as mankind. Since human society has existed the arts have helped man to reconcile the eternal conflict between the individual's instinctual urges and the demands of society. Thus, all art is therapeutic in the broadest sense of the word. The artist who applies modern psychology in the field of art has to adapt his methods to the medium so that the therapeutic value of art is heightened by the introduction of therapeutic thinking, not destroyed or weakened by the introduction of concepts and methods that might be incompatible with the inner laws of artistic creation. It is not always easy for the art therapist to reconcile the therapist's approach with her function as an artist and teacher. In her function as a teacher who introduces disturbed children or adults into the realms of art, she has to be ready to accept the limitations of the individuals in her care. She has to be interested in progress on any level. She has to be flexible enough to accept and understand a diversity of styles and to find ways of helping each person according to his individual needs. As therapist she has to accept the unbeautiful manifestations of sexual and aggressive impulses in the raw, along with the results of confusions and incomplete sublimation. But this attitude of acceptance, which is essential in all therapy, must not dull the artist's capacity for discrimination. The teacher has to preserve her integrity genuine, between blocks and limitations, regressions and progress, superficial pretense and genuine communication. Even though my therapeutic approach includes awareness of psychic processes that may remain unconscious, the therapeutic maneuvers I am apt to employ seldom include uncovering unconscious material or the interpretation of unconscious meaning. Art therapy is conceived primarily as a means of supporting the ego. It harnesses the power of art to the task of fostering a psychic organization that is sufficiently resilient to function under pressure without breakdown or the need to resort to stultifying defensive measures. Thus conceived, art therapy constitutes an element of the therapeutic milieu that complements or supports psychotherapy but does not replace it. While art therapists encourage unconventional form and content in the art of their patients they are also intent on fostering artistic eloquence. The spoken words in psychotherapy and the play and talk in clinical therapy are typically formless and fluid. Content rather than form is essential. In art therapy form and content are equally important and the order and structure with which artistic creation endows experience constitutes a powerful aid in sorting out and mastering experience. To quote of art Susan Langer (1962): 'The primary function of art is to objectify experience so that we can contemplate and understand it' (p.90)." (source: Edith Kramer website) Item # 197005
Edith Kramer (Austrian born American, 1916-2014). "Rooftops in the Rain" ink drawing on paper, 1945. Dated at lower right and titled on verso. A rain-soaked city rises in fractured planes and urgent lines in "Rooftops in the Rain," Edith Kramer's 1945 ink drawing of New York City seen from above. Chimneys, parapets, and flat roofs stack and intersect in a dense urban lattice, their edges blurred and sharpened in equal measure by falling rain and restless motion. The city feels compressed and alive, as if the weather itself were pressing down on the architecture. Kramer constructs the scene through vigorous, overlapping strokes of black ink, allowing structure to emerge from accumulation rather than outline. Crosshatching thickens into shadowed blocks, while slashing diagonals suggest slick surfaces, runoff, and the relentless rhythm of rain. Perspective shifts subtly across the composition, refusing a single stable viewpoint and instead mirroring the disorientation and energy of the city during the wartime years. Size: 29" W x 20" H (73.7 cm x 50.8 cm) The drawing reflects Kramer's Bauhaus-influenced approach to form and spatial organization, where geometry and expression are inseparable. Rooftops become abstracted volumes, reduced to their essential relationships of mass, line, and pressure, yet the scene never loses its specificity. Firewalls, vents, and water-darkened surfaces remain unmistakably New York, observed with the clarity of someone who knew the city intimately and worked within its industrial pulse. Created during Kramer's early years in the United States, "Rooftops in the Rain" captures an urban moment that is both external and psychological. The rain binds the city together, flattening distance and softening edges, while the assertive mark-making speaks to resilience and forward momentum. It is a drawing that holds tension between order and turbulence, structure and flux, rendering the city not as spectacle, but as lived experience. About the artist: Edith Kramer was born in Vienna, Austria in 1916. Her exploration of art began at the age of 13 when Kramer took classes with Friedl Dicker, a graduate of the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. Kramer was greatly influenced by the theories of Bauhaus artist Johannes Itten who developed the preliminary Bauhaus course from 1919 to 1922. After Kramer graduated from Realgymnasium, Vienna in 1934 , she followed Dicker to Prague to continue her studies. Perhaps even more impactful was the time she spent assisting Dicker in teaching art to the children of political refugees. Fearing the Nazi invasion, Kramer sought refuge in the United States. She arrived in New York City in 1938, and taught sculpture at the Little Red School House, one of the city's first progressive schools. During WWII, Kramer worked in a machine shop in Soho. This experience resonated with her Bauhaus education and presented an opportunity to sketch and paint sitters in industrial settings. In addition to being a painter, Kramer was a sculptor, a printmaker, a collage maker, a mosaicist, a professor, and a founder of the Art Therapy movement. Kramer is perhaps best known for her work as a pioneer in the field of Art Therapy. In 1971 she was part of the team that established an Art Therapy program at George Washington University, and she created the graduate program in Art Therapy at New York University in 1973. With her training in art, art education, as well as psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy, Kramer believed that negative emotions and thoughts could be transformed and rechanneled into productive energy through art. She and fellow pioneer Margaret Naumburg set out to champion the new field of Art Therapy. Kramer also believed that art therapists should create their own art in order to deal with the stress and exhaustion of clinical work, so she continued to create her own art. The following is Kramer's statement about art therapy: "I perceive myself as a specialist who combines the general qualifications of being a competent artist with specialized capacities in the field of psychotherapy and education. The theoretical framework of my understanding of child psychology is based in the main on Freudian psychoanalytic thought. The emphasis, however, is on the idea of art as therapy rather than on psychotherapy which uses art as a tool. My therapeutic medium is as old as mankind. Since human society has existed the arts have helped man to reconcile the eternal conflict between the individual's instinctual urges and the demands of society. Thus, all art is therapeutic in the broadest sense of the word. The artist who applies modern psychology in the field of art has to adapt his methods to the medium so that the therapeutic value of art is heightened by the introduction of therapeutic thinking, not destroyed or weakened by the introduction of concepts and methods that might be incompatible with the inner laws of artistic creation. It is not always easy for the art therapist to reconcile the therapist's approach with her function as an artist and teacher. In her function as a teacher who introduces disturbed children or adults into the realms of art, she has to be ready to accept the limitations of the individuals in her care. She has to be interested in progress on any level. She has to be flexible enough to accept and understand a diversity of styles and to find ways of helping each person according to his individual needs. As therapist she has to accept the unbeautiful manifestations of sexual and aggressive impulses in the raw, along with the results of confusions and incomplete sublimation. But this attitude of acceptance, which is essential in all therapy, must not dull the artist's capacity for discrimination. The teacher has to preserve her integrity genuine, between blocks and limitations, regressions and progress, superficial pretense and genuine communication. Even though my therapeutic approach includes awareness of psychic processes that may remain unconscious, the therapeutic maneuvers I am apt to employ seldom include uncovering unconscious material or the interpretation of unconscious meaning. Art therapy is conceived primarily as a means of supporting the ego. It harnesses the power of art to the task of fostering a psychic organization that is sufficiently resilient to function under pressure without breakdown or the need to resort to stultifying defensive measures. Thus conceived, art therapy constitutes an element of the therapeutic milieu that complements or supports psychotherapy but does not replace it. While art therapists encourage unconventional form and content in the art of their patients they are also intent on fostering artistic eloquence. The spoken words in psychotherapy and the play and talk in clinical therapy are typically formless and fluid. Content rather than form is essential. In art therapy form and content are equally important and the order and structure with which artistic creation endows experience constitutes a powerful aid in sorting out and mastering experience. To quote of art Susan Langer (1962): 'The primary function of art is to objectify experience so that we can contemplate and understand it' (p.90)." (source: Edith Kramer website) Item # 197011
Edith Kramer (Austrian born American, 1916-2014). "High Meadow, Austria" watercolor, 1997. Signed and dated at lower right. A landscape built of wind, stone, and the stubborn greening of high country plants unfolds in Edith Kramer's plein air watercolor "High Meadow, Austria," painted in 1997. The work looks as if it were pulled straight from a mountainside breath: pale limestone ridges ripple like frozen waves, each fold and fissure described with Kramer's attentive, Bauhaus-trained hand. Here the stones are not sterile, but alive with delicate sprays of ferns, alpine blossoms, and the quiet insistence of early spring growth. The sky, a broad sweep of clean Austrian blue, opens the scene with a clarity that feels almost ceremonial. Kramer painted this view near her ancestral home in Grundlsee, Austria, where she often hiked to a shepherd's cabin to work directly in the open air. Even in early spring, when the wind remains sharp and the earth still holds winter's chill, she sought these heights. Size: 37" W x 26" H (94 cm x 66 cm) The painting carries that sense of bracing solitude: nature observed not from comfort, but from immersion. Her lifelong discipline in drawing from life, strengthened by her early studies with Friedl Dicker and her exposure to Bauhaus principles of structure, line, and clarity, echoes subtly through the watercolor's crisp edges and careful modulations of light. "High Meadow, Austria" reveals an artist who understood the emotional architecture of landscape. It is both a record of place and a meditation shaped by decades of artistic and psychological insight. Kramer's brush balances precision and lyricism, turning stone and scrub into something contemplative and quietly radiant. About the Artist: Edith Kramer was born in Vienna, Austria in 1916. Her exploration of art began at the age of 13 when Kramer took classes with Friedl Dicker, a graduate of the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. Kramer was greatly influenced by the theories of Bauhaus artist Johannes Itten who developed the preliminary Bauhaus course from 1919 to 1922. After Kramer graduated from Realgymnasium, Vienna in 1934 , she followed Dicker to Prague to continue her studies. Perhaps even more impactful was the time she spent assisting Dicker in teaching art to the children of political refugees. Fearing the Nazi invasion, Kramer sought refuge in the United States. She arrived in New York City in 1938, and taught sculpture at the Little Red School House, one of the city's first progressive schools. During WWII, Kramer worked in a machine shop in Soho. This experience resonated with her Bauhaus education and presented an opportunity to sketch and paint sitters in industrial settings. In addition to being a painter, Kramer was a sculptor, a printmaker, a collage maker, a mosaicist, a professor, and a founder of the Art Therapy movement. Kramer is perhaps best known for her work as a pioneer in the field of Art Therapy. In 1971 she was part of the team that established an Art Therapy program at George Washington University, and she created the graduate program in Art Therapy at New York University in 1973. With her training in art, art education, as well as psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy, Kramer believed that negative emotions and thoughts could be transformed and rechanneled into productive energy through art. She and fellow pioneer Margaret Naumburg set out to champion the new field of Art Therapy. Kramer also believed that art therapists should create their own art in order to deal with the stress and exhaustion of clinical work, so she continued to create her own art. The following is Kramer's statement about art therapy: "I perceive myself as a specialist who combines the general qualifications of being a competent artist with specialized capacities in the field of psychotherapy and education. The theoretical framework of my understanding of child psychology is based in the main on Freudian psychoanalytic thought. The emphasis, however, is on the idea of art as therapy rather than on psychotherapy which uses art as a tool. My therapeutic medium is as old as mankind. Since human society has existed the arts have helped man to reconcile the eternal conflict between the individual's instinctual urges and the demands of society. Thus, all art is therapeutic in the broadest sense of the word. The artist who applies modern psychology in the field of art has to adapt his methods to the medium so that the therapeutic value of art is heightened by the introduction of therapeutic thinking, not destroyed or weakened by the introduction of concepts and methods that might be incompatible with the inner laws of artistic creation. It is not always easy for the art therapist to reconcile the therapist's approach with her function as an artist and teacher. In her function as a teacher who introduces disturbed children or adults into the realms of art, she has to be ready to accept the limitations of the individuals in her care. She has to be interested in progress on any level. She has to be flexible enough to accept and understand a diversity of styles and to find ways of helping each person according to his individual needs. As therapist she has to accept the unbeautiful manifestations of sexual and aggressive impulses in the raw, along with the results of confusions and incomplete sublimation. But this attitude of acceptance, which is essential in all therapy, must not dull the artist's capacity for discrimination. The teacher has to preserve her integrity genuine, between blocks and limitations, regressions and progress, superficial pretense and genuine communication. Even though my therapeutic approach includes awareness of psychic processes that may remain unconscious, the therapeutic maneuvers I am apt to employ seldom include uncovering unconscious material or the interpretation of unconscious meaning. Art therapy is conceived primarily as a means of supporting the ego. It harnesses the power of art to the task of fostering a psychic organization that is sufficiently resilient to function under pressure without breakdown or the need to resort to stultifying defensive measures. Thus conceived, art therapy constitutes an element of the therapeutic milieu that complements or supports psychotherapy but does not replace it. While art therapists encourage unconventional form and content in the art of their patients they are also intent on fostering artistic eloquence. The spoken words in psychotherapy and the play and talk in clinical therapy are typically formless and fluid. Content rather than form is essential. In art therapy form and content are equally important and the order and structure with which artistic creation endows experience constitutes a powerful aid in sorting out and mastering experience. To quote of art Susan Langer (1962): 'The primary function of art is to objectify experience so that we can contemplate and understand it' (p.90)." (source: Edith Kramer website) Provenance: private Denver, Colorado, USA collection SHIPPING: We coordinate worldwide shipping in-house through specialist international forwarders experienced with fine art and antiquities customs manifests. International buyers must confirm, prior to bidding, that their country's customs authority will accept the item. All duties, taxes, clearance fees, and any costs arising from customs delays, seizures, re-export, returns, or loss in transit are the buyer's sole responsibility. Artemis assumes no liability for items refused entry, detained, or lost after export. We cannot ship ancient items to their country of origin (Egyptian to Egypt, Greek to Greece, etc.). PAYMENT EXCEPTION: For clients not previously established with Artemis, payment for all gold, precious metal, and gemstone lots must be made by bank wire transfer or certified bank check/money order, without exception. Item # 197005
Edith Kramer (Austrian born American, 1916-2014). Untitled (pipes). Pencil and colored pencil drawing on paper, n.d. Unsigned. A delicately observed study of industrial plumbing rendered in graphite with washes of pale colored pencil on paper, the composition arranging a tangle of horizontal pipes, valves, gauges, and overhead conduit into a quiet architectural rhythm. The artist's line is searching rather than declarative, building form through careful repetition and tonal accents of blue, green, and rust. Edith Kramer (1916-2014), Vienna-born painter and pioneering art therapist, emigrated to the United States in 1938 and spent decades teaching and working between studios in New York and Grundlsee, Austria. Her drawings of mechanical and architectural subjects, often executed in factories, boiler rooms, and industrial interiors, reveal her abiding interest in the dignity of labor and the visual logic of working environments, themes that paralleled her therapeutic practice with children and her commitment to art as a humanizing discipline. Unsigned, in keeping with many sheets that remained in her studio. Size: 19" W x 25" H (48.3 cm W x 63.5 cm H). About the artist: "Edith Kramer was born in Vienna, Austria in 1916. Her exploration of art began at the age of 13 when Kramer took classes with Friedl Dicker, a graduate of the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. Kramer was greatly influenced by the theories of Bauhaus artist Johannes Itten who developed the preliminary Bauhaus course from 1919 to 1922. After Kramer graduated from Realgymnasium, Vienna in 1934 , she followed Dicker to Prague to continue her studies. Perhaps even more impactful was the time she spent assisting Dicker in teaching art to the children of political refugees. Fearing the Nazi invasion, Kramer sought refuge in the United States. She arrived in New York City in 1938, and taught sculpture at the Little Red School House, one of the city's first progressive schools. During WWII, Kramer worked in a machine shop in Soho. This experience resonated with her Bauhaus education and presented an opportunity to sketch and paint sitters in industrial settings. In addition to being a painter, Kramer was a sculptor, a printmaker, a collage maker, a mosaicist, a professor, and a founder of the Art Therapy movement. Kramer is perhaps best known for her work as a pioneer in the field of Art Therapy. In 1971 she was part of the team that established an Art Therapy program at George Washington University, and she created the graduate program in Art Therapy at New York University in 1973. With her training in art, art education, as well as psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy, Kramer believed that negative emotions and thoughts could be transformed and rechanneled into productive energy through art. She and fellow pioneer Margaret Naumburg set out to champion the new field of Art Therapy. Kramer also believed that art therapists should create their own art in order to deal with the stress and exhaustion of clinical work, so she continued to create her own art. The following is Kramer's statement about art therapy: "I perceive myself as a specialist who combines the general qualifications of being a competent artist with specialized capacities in the field of psychotherapy and education. The theoretical framework of my understanding of child psychology is based in the main on Freudian psychoanalytic thought. The emphasis, however, is on the idea of art as therapy rather than on psychotherapy which uses art as a tool. My therapeutic medium is as old as mankind. Since human society has existed the arts have helped man to reconcile the eternal conflict between the individual's instinctual urges and the demands of society. Thus, all art is therapeutic in the broadest sense of the word. The artist who applies modern psychology in the field of art has to adapt his methods to the medium so that the therapeutic value of art is heightened by the introduction of therapeutic thinking, not destroyed or weakened by the introduction of concepts and methods that might be incompatible with the inner laws of artistic creation. It is not always easy for the art therapist to reconcile the therapist's approach with her function as an artist and teacher. In her function as a teacher who introduces disturbed children or adults into the realms of art, she has to be ready to accept the limitations of the individuals in her care. She has to be interested in progress on any level. She has to be flexible enough to accept and understand a diversity of styles and to find ways of helping each person according to his individual needs. As therapist she has to accept the unbeautiful manifestations of sexual and aggressive impulses in the raw, along with the results of confusions and incomplete sublimation. But this attitude of acceptance, which is essential in all therapy, must not dull the artist's capacity for discrimination. The teacher has to preserve her integrity genuine, between blocks and limitations, regressions and progress, superficial pretense and genuine communication. Even though my therapeutic approach includes awareness of psychic processes that may remain unconscious, the therapeutic maneuvers I am apt to employ seldom include uncovering unconscious material or the interpretation of unconscious meaning. Art therapy is conceived primarily as a means of supporting the ego. It harnesses the power of art to the task of fostering a psychic organization that is sufficiently resilient to function under pressure without breakdown or the need to resort to stultifying defensive measures. Thus conceived, art therapy constitutes an element of the therapeutic milieu that complements or supports psychotherapy but does not replace it. While art therapists encourage unconventional form and content in the art of their patients they are also intent on fostering artistic eloquence. The spoken words in psychotherapy and the play and talk in clinical therapy are typically formless and fluid. Content rather than form is essential. In art therapy form and content are equally important and the order and structure with which artistic creation endows experience constitutes a powerful aid in sorting out and mastering experience. To quote of art Susan Langer (1962): 'The primary function of art is to objectify experience so that we can contemplate and understand it' (p.90)." (source: Edith Kramer website) Provenance: private Denver, Colorado, USA collection SHIPPING: We coordinate worldwide shipping in-house through specialist international forwarders experienced with fine art and antiquities customs manifests. International buyers must confirm, prior to bidding, that their country's customs authority will accept the item. All duties, taxes, clearance fees, and any costs arising from customs delays, seizures, re-export, returns, or loss in transit are the buyer's sole responsibility. Artemis assumes no liability for items refused entry, detained, or lost after export. We cannot ship ancient items to their country of origin (Egyptian to Egypt, Greek to Greece, etc.). PAYMENT EXCEPTION: For clients not previously established with Artemis, payment for all gold, precious metal, and gemstone lots must be made by bank wire transfer or certified bank check/money order, without exception. Item # 197009
Edith Kramer (Austrian born American, 1916-2014). "Tanks und Graser" (Tanks and Grasses) oil on linen, 1990. Signed and dated at lower right and again with title on verso. A windswept field of grasses fills the foreground, their slender blades bending and crossing like quick, nervous lines of thought, while the horizon settles into the unmistakable geometry of industry. Painted from life in the Meadowlands of New Jersey, not far from JFK Airport, "Tanks und Graser" or "Tanks and Grasses" captures a landscape where wetlands and infrastructure exist in an uneasy but enduring truce. Kramer worked plein air, positioning herself amid the marsh grasses as storage tanks and industrial buildings hovered in the distance. The tanks do not dominate the scene. Instead, they sit low and restrained, softened by atmosphere and scale, allowing the vitality of the grasses to command the composition. Size: 40" W x 32" H (101.6 cm x 81.3 cm) Earthy browns, muted greens, and pale sky blues weave together in a palette that feels deliberate and grounded, attentive to the rhythms of the site rather than its spectacle. This quiet juxtaposition reflects Kramer's sustained interest in places where natural growth persists alongside systems of containment and control. The Meadowlands, with their fragile ecology and industrial proximity, offered an ideal setting for her exploration of balance, structure, and resilience. The grasses sway, adapt, and continue, while the tanks remain fixed, patient, and inert. Painted late in her career, the work reads as both observation and reflection. "Tanks und Graser" resists judgment or drama, favoring instead a steady, almost meditative attention. In this marshland view, Kramer allows nature and industry to share the frame, suggesting not conflict but coexistence, and finding in that coexistence a quiet, persistent beauty. About the Artist: "Edith Kramer was born in Vienna, Austria in 1916. Her exploration of art began at the age of 13 when Kramer took classes with Friedl Dicker, a graduate of the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. Kramer was greatly influenced by the theories of Bauhaus artist Johannes Itten who developed the preliminary Bauhaus course from 1919 to 1922. After Kramer graduated from Realgymnasium, Vienna in 1934 , she followed Dicker to Prague to continue her studies. Perhaps even more impactful was the time she spent assisting Dicker in teaching art to the children of political refugees. Fearing the Nazi invasion, Kramer sought refuge in the United States. She arrived in New York City in 1938, and taught sculpture at the Little Red School House, one of the city's first progressive schools. During WWII, Kramer worked in a machine shop in Soho. This experience resonated with her Bauhaus education and presented an opportunity to sketch and paint sitters in industrial settings. In addition to being a painter, Kramer was a sculptor, a printmaker, a collage maker, a mosaicist, a professor, and a founder of the Art Therapy movement. Kramer is perhaps best known for her work as a pioneer in the field of Art Therapy. In 1971 she was part of the team that established an Art Therapy program at George Washington University, and she created the graduate program in Art Therapy at New York University in 1973. With her training in art, art education, as well as psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy, Kramer believed that negative emotions and thoughts could be transformed and rechanneled into productive energy through art. She and fellow pioneer Margaret Naumburg set out to champion the new field of Art Therapy. Kramer also believed that art therapists should create their own art in order to deal with the stress and exhaustion of clinical work, so she continued to create her own art. The following is Kramer's statement about art therapy: "I perceive myself as a specialist who combines the general qualifications of being a competent artist with specialized capacities in the field of psychotherapy and education. The theoretical framework of my understanding of child psychology is based in the main on Freudian psychoanalytic thought. The emphasis, however, is on the idea of art as therapy rather than on psychotherapy which uses art as a tool. My therapeutic medium is as old as mankind. Since human society has existed the arts have helped man to reconcile the eternal conflict between the individual's instinctual urges and the demands of society. Thus, all art is therapeutic in the broadest sense of the word. The artist who applies modern psychology in the field of art has to adapt his methods to the medium so that the therapeutic value of art is heightened by the introduction of therapeutic thinking, not destroyed or weakened by the introduction of concepts and methods that might be incompatible with the inner laws of artistic creation. It is not always easy for the art therapist to reconcile the therapist's approach with her function as an artist and teacher. In her function as a teacher who introduces disturbed children or adults into the realms of art, she has to be ready to accept the limitations of the individuals in her care. She has to be interested in progress on any level. She has to be flexible enough to accept and understand a diversity of styles and to find ways of helping each person according to his individual needs. As therapist she has to accept the unbeautiful manifestations of sexual and aggressive impulses in the raw, along with the results of confusions and incomplete sublimation. But this attitude of acceptance, which is essential in all therapy, must not dull the artist's capacity for discrimination. The teacher has to preserve her integrity genuine, between blocks and limitations, regressions and progress, superficial pretense and genuine communication. Even though my therapeutic approach includes awareness of psychic processes that may remain unconscious, the therapeutic maneuvers I am apt to employ seldom include uncovering unconscious material or the interpretation of unconscious meaning. Art therapy is conceived primarily as a means of supporting the ego. It harnesses the power of art to the task of fostering a psychic organization that is sufficiently resilient to function under pressure without breakdown or the need to resort to stultifying defensive measures. Thus conceived, art therapy constitutes an element of the therapeutic milieu that complements or supports psychotherapy but does not replace it. While art therapists encourage unconventional form and content in the art of their patients they are also intent on fostering artistic eloquence. The spoken words in psychotherapy and the play and talk in clinical therapy are typically formless and fluid. Content rather than form is essential. In art therapy form and content are equally important and the order and structure with which artistic creation endows experience constitutes a powerful aid in sorting out and mastering experience. To quote of art Susan Langer (1962): 'The primary function of art is to objectify experience so that we can contemplate and understand it' (p.90)." (source: Edith Kramer website) Provenance: private Denver, Colorado, USA collection SHIPPING: We coordinate worldwide shipping in-house through specialist international forwarders experienced with fine art and antiquities customs manifests. International buyers must confirm, prior to bidding, that their country's customs authority will accept the item. All duties, taxes, clearance fees, and any costs arising from customs delays, seizures, re-export, returns, or loss in transit are the buyer's sole responsibility. Artemis assumes no liability for items refused entry, detained, or lost after export. We cannot ship ancient items to their country of origin (Egyptian to Egypt, Greek to Greece, etc.). PAYMENT EXCEPTION: For clients not previously established with Artemis, payment for all gold, precious metal, and gemstone lots must be made by bank wire transfer or certified bank check/money order, without exception. Item # 196993
Edith Kramer (Austrian born American, 1916-2014). "Moonlit Woods, Vermont" oil on canvas, 1971. Signed and dated at lower right. Titled and dated on verso. Inscribed "Night Painting" on top edge. Bathed in the cool hush of nocturnal light, Edith Kramer's "Moonlit Woods, Vermont" evokes the mystery and quiet pulse of the natural world after dark. Painted directly under moonlight - as the artist's inscription suggests - the work captures the Vermont forest not as a static scene, but as a living, breathing presence. Swaths of muted violet, blue-gray, and deep green coalesce into rhythmic abstractions of foliage and shadow, suggesting the movement of leaves in a whispering wind. The composition reveals Kramer's mastery of tonal subtlety and emotional restraint. Her Bauhaus-influenced training under Friedl Dicker and the color theories of Johannes Itten resonate here in the painting's carefully balanced contrasts of darkness and luminosity. Size of painting: 29.75" W x 35.75" H (75.6 cm x 90.8 cm); of frame: 30.75" W x 36.5" H (78.1 cm x 92.7 cm) The forest's obscurity becomes a psychological landscape - an inward space of reflection and transformation. Created during a period when Kramer was deepening her exploration of art's therapeutic power, "Moonlit Woods, Vermont" embodies her belief that art could transmute emotion into order and clarity. The painting's meditative brushwork mirrors the act of self-regulation she saw as central to both creation and healing. Its stillness is not the absence of life but a moment of suspended perception - a visual counterpart to the quiet mental states art can produce. With its layered atmosphere and restrained palette, "Moonlit Woods, Vermont" stands as both a study in nocturnal color and a personal testament to Kramer's lifelong conviction that art, like nature, is a means of restoring balance between the inner and outer worlds. About the Artist: Edith Kramer was born in Vienna, Austria in 1916. Her exploration of art began at the age of 13 when Kramer took classes with Friedl Dicker, a graduate of the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. Kramer was greatly influenced by the theories of Bauhaus artist Johannes Itten who developed the preliminary Bauhaus course from 1919 to 1922. After Kramer graduated from Realgymnasium, Vienna in 1934 , she followed Dicker to Prague to continue her studies. Perhaps even more impactful was the time she spent assisting Dicker in teaching art to the children of political refugees. Fearing the Nazi invasion, Kramer sought refuge in the United States. She arrived in New York City in 1938, and taught sculpture at the Little Red School House, one of the city's first progressive schools. During WWII, Kramer worked in a machine shop in Soho. This experience resonated with her Bauhaus education and presented an opportunity to sketch and paint sitters in industrial settings. In addition to being a painter, Kramer was a sculptor, a printmaker, a collage maker, a mosaicist, a professor, and a founder of the Art Therapy movement. Kramer is perhaps best known for her work as a pioneer in the field of Art Therapy. In 1971 she was part of the team that established an Art Therapy program at George Washington University, and she created the graduate program in Art Therapy at New York University in 1973. With her training in art, art education, as well as psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy, Kramer believed that negative emotions and thoughts could be transformed and rechanneled into productive energy through art. She and fellow pioneer Margaret Naumburg set out to champion the new field of Art Therapy. Kramer also believed that art therapists should create their own art in order to deal with the stress and exhaustion of clinical work, so she continued to create her own art. The following is Kramer's statement about art therapy: "I perceive myself as a specialist who combines the general qualifications of being a competent artist with specialized capacities in the field of psychotherapy and education. The theoretical framework of my understanding of child psychology is based in the main on Freudian psychoanalytic thought. The emphasis, however, is on the idea of art as therapy rather than on psychotherapy which uses art as a tool. My therapeutic medium is as old as mankind. Since human society has existed the arts have helped man to reconcile the eternal conflict between the individual's instinctual urges and the demands of society. Thus, all art is therapeutic in the broadest sense of the word. The artist who applies modern psychology in the field of art has to adapt his methods to the medium so that the therapeutic value of art is heightened by the introduction of therapeutic thinking, not destroyed or weakened by the introduction of concepts and methods that might be incompatible with the inner laws of artistic creation. It is not always easy for the art therapist to reconcile the therapist's approach with her function as an artist and teacher. In her function as a teacher who introduces disturbed children or adults into the realms of art, she has to be ready to accept the limitations of the individuals in her care. She has to be interested in progress on any level. She has to be flexible enough to accept and understand a diversity of styles and to find ways of helping each person according to his individual needs. As therapist she has to accept the unbeautiful manifestations of sexual and aggressive impulses in the raw, along with the results of confusions and incomplete sublimation. But this attitude of acceptance, which is essential in all therapy, must not dull the artist's capacity for discrimination. The teacher has to preserve her integrity genuine, between blocks and limitations, regressions and progress, superficial pretense and genuine communication. Even though my therapeutic approach includes awareness of psychic processes that may remain unconscious, the therapeutic maneuvers I am apt to employ seldom include uncovering unconscious material or the interpretation of unconscious meaning. Art therapy is conceived primarily as a means of supporting the ego. It harnesses the power of art to the task of fostering a psychic organization that is sufficiently resilient to function under pressure without breakdown or the need to resort to stultifying defensive measures. Thus conceived, art therapy constitutes an element of the therapeutic milieu that complements or supports psychotherapy but does not replace it. While art therapists encourage unconventional form and content in the art of their patients they are also intent on fostering artistic eloquence. The spoken words in psychotherapy and the play and talk in clinical therapy are typically formless and fluid. Content rather than form is essential. In art therapy form and content are equally important and the order and structure with which artistic creation endows experience constitutes a powerful aid in sorting out and mastering experience. To quote of art Susan Langer (1962): 'The primary function of art is to objectify experience so that we can contemplate and understand it' (p.90)." (source: Edith Kramer website) Provenance: private Denver, Colorado, USA collection SHIPPING: We coordinate worldwide shipping in-house through specialist international forwarders experienced with fine art and antiquities customs manifests. International buyers must confirm, prior to bidding, that their country's customs authority will accept the item. All duties, taxes, clearance fees, and any costs arising from customs delays, seizures, re-export, returns, or loss in transit are the buyer's sole responsibility. Artemis assumes no liability for items refused entry, detained, or lost after export. We cannot ship ancient items to their country of origin (Egyptian to Egypt, Greek to Greece, etc.). PAYMENT EXCEPTION: For clients not previously established with Artemis, payment for all gold, precious metal, and gemstone lots must be made by bank wire transfer or certified bank check/money order, without exception. Item # 196995
Edith Kramer (Austrian born American, 1916-2014). "Rock & Sea, Cranberry" oil on linen, 1968. Signed and dated at lower right and again with title on verso. Signature on verso is in pencil with title in ink over it. A brooding coastal meditation, this painting captures the granite outcrops and restless waters of the Cranberry Isles off the coast of Maine, where land and sea lock into a slow, elemental argument. Kramer renders the shoreline not as a postcard view but as a physical encounter - slabs of rock press forward, fractured and weighty, while the sea surges and recoils in thick, smoky strokes. The composition feels compressed and intimate, as if the viewer stands at the edge of the tide, watching weather and stone negotiate their boundaries. The palette is restrained and moody: deep umbers, slate grays, muted greens, and flashes of pale surf that flicker like breath against the darker mass of rock. Size of painting: 44" W x 22" H (111.8 cm x 55.9 cm); of frame: 44.5" W x 22.5" H (113 cm x 57.2 cm) Kramer builds the surface with confident, structural brushwork, allowing planes of color to interlock and dissolve. Forms emerge and recede without hard outlines, giving the scene a sense of perpetual motion, as though the coast itself were thinking. Painted in 1968, this work reflects Kramer's mature approach to landscape, shaped by her Bauhaus training and her lifelong belief in form as a means of ordering experience. The rugged Maine coast becomes a place of psychological as well as physical resonance - solid yet unstable, calm yet charged. "Rock & Sea, Cranberry" is less about describing a specific view than about embodying the enduring tension between permanence and change, a theme that runs quietly but insistently through Kramer's art. About the artist: "Edith Kramer was born in Vienna, Austria in 1916. Her exploration of art began at the age of 13 when Kramer took classes with Friedl Dicker, a graduate of the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. Kramer was greatly influenced by the theories of Bauhaus artist Johannes Itten who developed the preliminary Bauhaus course from 1919 to 1922. After Kramer graduated from Realgymnasium, Vienna in 1934 , she followed Dicker to Prague to continue her studies. Perhaps even more impactful was the time she spent assisting Dicker in teaching art to the children of political refugees. Fearing the Nazi invasion, Kramer sought refuge in the United States. She arrived in New York City in 1938, and taught sculpture at the Little Red School House, one of the city's first progressive schools. During WWII, Kramer worked in a machine shop in Soho. This experience resonated with her Bauhaus education and presented an opportunity to sketch and paint sitters in industrial settings. In addition to being a painter, Kramer was a sculptor, a printmaker, a collage maker, a mosaicist, a professor, and a founder of the Art Therapy movement. Kramer is perhaps best known for her work as a pioneer in the field of Art Therapy. In 1971 she was part of the team that established an Art Therapy program at George Washington University, and she created the graduate program in Art Therapy at New York University in 1973. With her training in art, art education, as well as psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy, Kramer believed that negative emotions and thoughts could be transformed and rechanneled into productive energy through art. She and fellow pioneer Margaret Naumburg set out to champion the new field of Art Therapy. Kramer also believed that art therapists should create their own art in order to deal with the stress and exhaustion of clinical work, so she continued to create her own art. The following is Kramer's statement about art therapy: "I perceive myself as a specialist who combines the general qualifications of being a competent artist with specialized capacities in the field of psychotherapy and education. The theoretical framework of my understanding of child psychology is based in the main on Freudian psychoanalytic thought. The emphasis, however, is on the idea of art as therapy rather than on psychotherapy which uses art as a tool. My therapeutic medium is as old as mankind. Since human society has existed the arts have helped man to reconcile the eternal conflict between the individual's instinctual urges and the demands of society. Thus, all art is therapeutic in the broadest sense of the word. The artist who applies modern psychology in the field of art has to adapt his methods to the medium so that the therapeutic value of art is heightened by the introduction of therapeutic thinking, not destroyed or weakened by the introduction of concepts and methods that might be incompatible with the inner laws of artistic creation. It is not always easy for the art therapist to reconcile the therapist's approach with her function as an artist and teacher. In her function as a teacher who introduces disturbed children or adults into the realms of art, she has to be ready to accept the limitations of the individuals in her care. She has to be interested in progress on any level. She has to be flexible enough to accept and understand a diversity of styles and to find ways of helping each person according to his individual needs. As therapist she has to accept the unbeautiful manifestations of sexual and aggressive impulses in the raw, along with the results of confusions and incomplete sublimation. But this attitude of acceptance, which is essential in all therapy, must not dull the artist's capacity for discrimination. The teacher has to preserve her integrity genuine, between blocks and limitations, regressions and progress, superficial pretense and genuine communication. Even though my therapeutic approach includes awareness of psychic processes that may remain unconscious, the therapeutic maneuvers I am apt to employ seldom include uncovering unconscious material or the interpretation of unconscious meaning. Art therapy is conceived primarily as a means of supporting the ego. It harnesses the power of art to the task of fostering a psychic organization that is sufficiently resilient to function under pressure without breakdown or the need to resort to stultifying defensive measures. Thus conceived, art therapy constitutes an element of the therapeutic milieu that complements or supports psychotherapy but does not replace it. While art therapists encourage unconventional form and content in the art of their patients they are also intent on fostering artistic eloquence. The spoken words in psychotherapy and the play and talk in clinical therapy are typically formless and fluid. Content rather than form is essential. In art therapy form and content are equally important and the order and structure with which artistic creation endows experience constitutes a powerful aid in sorting out and mastering experience. To quote of art Susan Langer (1962): 'The primary function of art is to objectify experience so that we can contemplate and understand it' (p.90)." (source: Edith Kramer website) Provenance: private Denver, Colorado, USA collection SHIPPING: We coordinate worldwide shipping in-house through specialist international forwarders experienced with fine art and antiquities customs manifests. International buyers must confirm, prior to bidding, that their country's customs authority will accept the item. All duties, taxes, clearance fees, and any costs arising from customs delays, seizures, re-export, returns, or loss in transit are the buyer's sole responsibility. Artemis assumes no liability for items refused entry, detained, or lost after export. We cannot ship ancient items to their country of origin (Egyptian to Egypt, Greek to Greece, etc.). PAYMENT EXCEPTION: For clients not previously established with Artemis, payment for all gold, precious metal, and gemstone lots must be made by bank wire transfer or certified bank check/money order, without exception. Item # 197000
Edith Kramer (Austrian born American, 1916-2014). Man in Machine Shop, oil on linen, 1955. Signed and dated in black paint at lower right. A large-scale painting by Edith Kramer, an amazing artist as well as a world-renowned pioneer in the field of Art Therapy. The theme of this piece reflects Kramer's Bauhaus roots in Europe as well as her time working in a machine shop in the Soho District of New York City during WWII. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Kramer painted works with industrial themes. She would stay after her machinist shifts to draw other machinists in an industrial setting. In this impressive painting, Kramer pays homage to a young man diligently working in a machine shop. All is rendered in the Social Realist style with Kramer's eye for meticulous detail. Size: 35" L x 31" W (88.9 cm x 78.7 cm) Size (frame): 35.5" L x 31.5" W (90.2 cm x 80 cm) About the Artist: Edith Kramer was born in Vienna, Austria in 1916. Her exploration of art began at the age of 13 when Kramer took classes with Friedl Dicker, a graduate of the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. Kramer was greatly influenced by the theories of Bauhaus artist Johannes Itten who developed the preliminary Bauhaus course from 1919 to 1922. After Kramer graduated from Realgymnasium, Vienna in 1934 , she followed Dicker to Prague to continue her studies. Perhaps even more impactful was the time she spent assisting Dicker in teaching art to the children of political refugees. Fearing the Nazi invasion, Kramer sought refuge in the United States. She arrived in New York City in 1938, and taught sculpture at the Little Red School House, one of the city's first progressive schools. During WWII, Kramer worked in a machine shop in Soho. This experience resonated with her Bauhaus education and presented an opportunity to sketch and paint sitters in industrial settings. In addition to being a painter, Kramer was a sculptor, a printmaker, a collage maker, a mosaicist, a professor, and a founder of the Art Therapy movement. Kramer is perhaps best known for her work as a pioneer in the field of Art Therapy. In 1971 she was part of the team that established an Art Therapy program at George Washington University, and she created the graduate program in Art Therapy at New York University in 1973. With her training in art, art education, as well as psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy, Kramer believed that negative emotions and thoughts could be transformed and rechanneled into productive energy through art. She and fellow pioneer Margaret Naumburg set out to champion the new field of Art Therapy. Kramer also believed that art therapists should create their own art in order to deal with the stress and exhaustion of clinical work, so she continued to create her own art. The following is Kramer's statement about art therapy: "I perceive myself as a specialist who combines the general qualifications of being a competent artist with specialized capacities in the field of psychotherapy and education. The theoretical framework of my understanding of child psychology is based in the main on Freudian psychoanalytic thought. The emphasis, however, is on the idea of art as therapy rather than on psychotherapy which uses art as a tool. My therapeutic medium is as old as mankind. Since human society has existed the arts have helped man to reconcile the eternal conflict between the individual's instinctual urges and the demands of society. Thus, all art is therapeutic in the broadest sense of the word. The artist who applies modern psychology in the field of art has to adapt his methods to the medium so that the therapeutic value of art is heightened by the introduction of therapeutic thinking, not destroyed or weakened by the introduction of concepts and methods that might be incompatible with the inner laws of artistic creation. It is not always easy for the art therapist to reconcile the therapist's approach with her function as an artist and teacher. In her function as a teacher who introduces disturbed children or adults into the realms of art, she has to be ready to accept the limitations of the individuals in her care. She has to be interested in progress on any level. She has to be flexible enough to accept and understand a diversity of styles and to find ways of helping each person according to his individual needs. As therapist she has to accept the unbeautiful manifestations of sexual and aggressive impulses in the raw, along with the results of confusions and incomplete sublimation. But this attitude of acceptance, which is essential in all therapy, must not dull the artist's capacity for discrimination. The teacher has to preserve her integrity genuine, between blocks and limitations, regressions and progress, superficial pretense and genuine communication. Even though my therapeutic approach includes awareness of psychic processes that may remain unconscious, the therapeutic maneuvers I am apt to employ seldom include uncovering unconscious material or the interpretation of unconscious meaning. Art therapy is conceived primarily as a means of supporting the ego. It harnesses the power of art to the task of fostering a psychic organization that is sufficiently resilient to function under pressure without breakdown or the need to resort to stultifying defensive measures. Thus conceived, art therapy constitutes an element of the therapeutic milieu that complements or supports psychotherapy but does not replace it. While art therapists encourage unconventional form and content in the art of their patients they are also intent on fostering artistic eloquence. The spoken words in psychotherapy and the play and talk in clinical therapy are typically formless and fluid. Content rather than form is essential. In art therapy form and content are equally important and the order and structure with which artistic creation endows experience constitutes a powerful aid in sorting out and mastering experience. To quote of art Susan Langer (1962): 'The primary function of art is to objectify experience so that we can contemplate and understand it' (p.90)." (source: Edith Kramer website) Provenance: private Denver, Colorado, USA collection SHIPPING: We coordinate worldwide shipping in-house through specialist international forwarders experienced with fine art and antiquities customs manifests. International buyers must confirm, prior to bidding, that their country's customs authority will accept the item. All duties, taxes, clearance fees, and any costs arising from customs delays, seizures, re-export, returns, or loss in transit are the buyer's sole responsibility. Artemis assumes no liability for items refused entry, detained, or lost after export. We cannot ship ancient items to their country of origin (Egyptian to Egypt, Greek to Greece, etc.). PAYMENT EXCEPTION: For clients not previously established with Artemis, payment for all gold, precious metal, and gemstone lots must be made by bank wire transfer or certified bank check/money order, without exception. Item # 196992
Edith Kramer (Austrian born American, 1916-2014). "Exposed Exterior" oil on linen, 1960. Signed and dated in black pigment at lower right. "Exposed Exterior" is a powerful painting by Edith Kramer, an accomplished Austrian-born artist as well as an important pioneer of the art therapy profession. The composition captures the effects of Robert Moses's massive demolition of entire neighborhoods in Brooklyn, New York which displaced communities to construct the Brooklyn Queens Expressway (BQE). While some communities engaged in successful resistence, many working class neighborhoods like Red Hook and Cobble Hill were dramatically impacted. In this painting Kramer made a poignant visual rebuttal to Urban Renewal's destruction of homes in mid century America. All is rendered with Kramer's expressive, loose brushwork in warm earthtones and shades of blue. Size: 26" L x 17" W (66 cm x 43.2 cm) About the Artist: Edith Kramer was born in Vienna, Austria in 1916. Her exploration of art began at the age of 13 when Kramer took classes with Friedl Dicker, a graduate of the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. Kramer was greatly influenced by the theories of Bauhaus artist Johannes Itten who developed the preliminary Bauhaus course from 1919 to 1922. After Kramer graduated from Realgymnasium, Vienna in 1934 , she followed Dicker to Prague to continue her studies. Perhaps even more impactful was the time she spent assisting Dicker in teaching art to the children of political refugees. Fearing the Nazi invasion, Kramer sought refuge in the United States. She arrived in New York City in 1938, and taught sculpture at the Little Red School House, one of the city's first progressive schools. During WWII, Kramer worked in a machine shop in Soho. This experience resonated with her Bauhaus education and presented an opportunity to sketch and paint sitters in industrial settings. In addition to being a painter, Kramer was a sculptor, a printmaker, a collage maker, a mosaicist, a professor, and a founder of the Art Therapy movement. Kramer is perhaps best known for her work as a pioneer in the field of Art Therapy. In 1971 she was part of the team that established an Art Therapy program at George Washington University, and she created the graduate program in Art Therapy at New York University in 1973. With her training in art, art education, as well as psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy, Kramer believed that negative emotions and thoughts could be transformed and rechanneled into productive energy through art. She and fellow pioneer Margaret Naumburg set out to champion the new field of Art Therapy. Kramer also believed that art therapists should create their own art in order to deal with the stress and exhaustion of clinical work, so she continued to create her own art. The following is Kramer's statement about art therapy: "I perceive myself as a specialist who combines the general qualifications of being a competent artist with specialized capacities in the field of psychotherapy and education. The theoretical framework of my understanding of child psychology is based in the main on Freudian psychoanalytic thought. The emphasis, however, is on the idea of art as therapy rather than on psychotherapy which uses art as a tool. My therapeutic medium is as old as mankind. Since human society has existed the arts have helped man to reconcile the eternal conflict between the individual's instinctual urges and the demands of society. Thus, all art is therapeutic in the broadest sense of the word. The artist who applies modern psychology in the field of art has to adapt his methods to the medium so that the therapeutic value of art is heightened by the introduction of therapeutic thinking, not destroyed or weakened by the introduction of concepts and methods that might be incompatible with the inner laws of artistic creation. It is not always easy for the art therapist to reconcile the therapist's approach with her function as an artist and teacher. In her function as a teacher who introduces disturbed children or adults into the realms of art, she has to be ready to accept the limitations of the individuals in her care. She has to be interested in progress on any level. She has to be flexible enough to accept and understand a diversity of styles and to find ways of helping each person according to his individual needs. As therapist she has to accept the unbeautiful manifestations of sexual and aggressive impulses in the raw, along with the results of confusions and incomplete sublimation. But this attitude of acceptance, which is essential in all therapy, must not dull the artist's capacity for discrimination. The teacher has to preserve her integrity genuine, between blocks and limitations, regressions and progress, superficial pretense and genuine communication. Even though my therapeutic approach includes awareness of psychic processes that may remain unconscious, the therapeutic maneuvers I am apt to employ seldom include uncovering unconscious material or the interpretation of unconscious meaning. Art therapy is conceived primarily as a means of supporting the ego. It harnesses the power of art to the task of fostering a psychic organization that is sufficiently resilient to function under pressure without breakdown or the need to resort to stultifying defensive measures. Thus conceived, art therapy constitutes an element of the therapeutic milieu that complements or supports psychotherapy but does not replace it. While art therapists encourage unconventional form and content in the art of their patients they are also intent on fostering artistic eloquence. The spoken words in psychotherapy and the play and talk in clinical therapy are typically formless and fluid. Content rather than form is essential. In art therapy form and content are equally important and the order and structure with which artistic creation endows experience constitutes a powerful aid in sorting out and mastering experience. To quote of art Susan Langer (1962): 'The primary function of art is to objectify experience so that we can contemplate and understand it' (p.90)." (source: Edith Kramer website) Provenance: private Denver, Colorado, USA collection SHIPPING: We coordinate worldwide shipping in-house through specialist international forwarders experienced with fine art and antiquities customs manifests. International buyers must confirm, prior to bidding, that their country's customs authority will accept the item. All duties, taxes, clearance fees, and any costs arising from customs delays, seizures, re-export, returns, or loss in transit are the buyer's sole responsibility. Artemis assumes no liability for items refused entry, detained, or lost after export. We cannot ship ancient items to their country of origin (Egyptian to Egypt, Greek to Greece, etc.). PAYMENT EXCEPTION: For clients not previously established with Artemis, payment for all gold, precious metal, and gemstone lots must be made by bank wire transfer or certified bank check/money order, without exception. Item # 197002
Edith Kramer (Austrian-American, 1916-2014). Three ink drawings, including "Worker at Lathe," dated 1943, 1944, and 1947. All signed and dated at lower corners. "Worker at Lathe" titled on verso. A forceful and revealing group of three ink drawings that trace Edith Kramer's close observation of industrial labor during the wartime years, when physical work, precision, and endurance shaped daily life. Executed between 1943 and 1947, these works reflect Kramer's firsthand engagement with machine shops and manufacturing environments, translated through a disciplined yet expressive graphic language. The most fully realized drawing, titled "Worker at Lathe", presents a machinist absorbed in the act of turning metal, surrounded by belts, gears, pulleys, and stacked components that crowd the picture plane. Dense crosshatching builds the space from all sides, pressing inward while remaining carefully structured. Size of largest: 13.25" W x 13" H (33.7 cm x 33 cm) The figure is neither heroic nor diminished. Instead, Kramer depicts labor as concentration embodied, a choreography of hands, tools, and attention. The machine feels alive, but never overpowering, held in equilibrium by the worker's steady posture and focused gaze. The two earlier and later drawings offer looser, more exploratory views of the same subject. Lines become quicker, more economical, suggesting movement, repetition, and physical strain without fully enclosing the space. These sketches function as visual thinking, studies of rhythm and motion rather than finished statements. Together, they chart Kramer's process, moving from observation to articulation, from immediacy to composed structure. Across the group, Kramer's Bauhaus-informed sensitivity to form and construction is evident, yet always in service of human presence. Machinery is rendered with clarity and respect, but it is the worker who anchors the composition. These drawings are not celebrations of industry alone, but meditations on labor as lived experience, demanding focus, resilience, and balance. Seen together, this lot offers a rare and compelling window into Kramer's early artistic practice, revealing how her engagement with industrial environments informed a lifelong interest in structure as a means of understanding and containing experience. About the artist: Edith Kramer was born in Vienna, Austria in 1916. Her exploration of art began at the age of 13 when Kramer took classes with Friedl Dicker, a graduate of the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. Kramer was greatly influenced by the theories of Bauhaus artist Johannes Itten who developed the preliminary Bauhaus course from 1919 to 1922. After Kramer graduated from Realgymnasium, Vienna in 1934 , she followed Dicker to Prague to continue her studies. Perhaps even more impactful was the time she spent assisting Dicker in teaching art to the children of political refugees. Fearing the Nazi invasion, Kramer sought refuge in the United States. She arrived in New York City in 1938, and taught sculpture at the Little Red School House, one of the city's first progressive schools. During WWII, Kramer worked in a machine shop in Soho. This experience resonated with her Bauhaus education and presented an opportunity to sketch and paint sitters in industrial settings. In addition to being a painter, Kramer was a sculptor, a printmaker, a collage maker, a mosaicist, a professor, and a founder of the Art Therapy movement. Kramer is perhaps best known for her work as a pioneer in the field of Art Therapy. In 1971 she was part of the team that established an Art Therapy program at George Washington University, and she created the graduate program in Art Therapy at New York University in 1973. With her training in art, art education, as well as psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy, Kramer believed that negative emotions and thoughts could be transformed and rechanneled into productive energy through art. She and fellow pioneer Margaret Naumburg set out to champion the new field of Art Therapy. Kramer also believed that art therapists should create their own art in order to deal with the stress and exhaustion of clinical work, so she continued to create her own art. The following is Kramer's statement about art therapy: "I perceive myself as a specialist who combines the general qualifications of being a competent artist with specialized capacities in the field of psychotherapy and education. The theoretical framework of my understanding of child psychology is based in the main on Freudian psychoanalytic thought. The emphasis, however, is on the idea of art as therapy rather than on psychotherapy which uses art as a tool. My therapeutic medium is as old as mankind. Since human society has existed the arts have helped man to reconcile the eternal conflict between the individual's instinctual urges and the demands of society. Thus, all art is therapeutic in the broadest sense of the word. The artist who applies modern psychology in the field of art has to adapt his methods to the medium so that the therapeutic value of art is heightened by the introduction of therapeutic thinking, not destroyed or weakened by the introduction of concepts and methods that might be incompatible with the inner laws of artistic creation. It is not always easy for the art therapist to reconcile the therapist's approach with her function as an artist and teacher. In her function as a teacher who introduces disturbed children or adults into the realms of art, she has to be ready to accept the limitations of the individuals in her care. She has to be interested in progress on any level. She has to be flexible enough to accept and understand a diversity of styles and to find ways of helping each person according to his individual needs. As therapist she has to accept the unbeautiful manifestations of sexual and aggressive impulses in the raw, along with the results of confusions and incomplete sublimation. But this attitude of acceptance, which is essential in all therapy, must not dull the artist's capacity for discrimination. The teacher has to preserve her integrity genuine, between blocks and limitations, regressions and progress, superficial pretense and genuine communication. Even though my therapeutic approach includes awareness of psychic processes that may remain unconscious, the therapeutic maneuvers I am apt to employ seldom include uncovering unconscious material or the interpretation of unconscious meaning. Art therapy is conceived primarily as a means of supporting the ego. It harnesses the power of art to the task of fostering a psychic organization that is sufficiently resilient to function under pressure without breakdown or the need to resort to stultifying defensive measures. Thus conceived, art therapy constitutes an element of the therapeutic milieu that complements or supports psychotherapy but does not replace it. While art therapists encourage unconventional form and content in the art of their patients they are also intent on fostering artistic eloquence. The spoken words in psychotherapy and the play and talk in clinical therapy are typically formless and fluid. Content rather than form is essential. In art therapy form and content are equally important and the order and structure with which artistic creation endows experience constitutes a powerful aid in sorting out and mastering experience. To quote of art Susan Langer (1962): 'The primary function of art is to objectify experience so that we can contemplate and understand it' Provenance: private Denver, Colorado, USA collection SHIPPING: We coordinate worldwide shipping in-house through specialist international forwarders experienced with fine art and antiquities customs manifests. International buyers must confirm, prior to bidding, that their country's customs authority will accept the item. All duties, taxes, clearance fees, and any costs arising from customs delays, seizures, re-export, returns, or loss in transit are the buyer's sole responsibility. Artemis assumes no liability for items refused entry, detained, or lost after export. We cannot ship ancient items to their country of origin (Egyptian to Egypt, Greek to Greece, etc.). PAYMENT EXCEPTION: For clients not previously established with Artemis, payment for all gold, precious metal, and gemstone lots must be made by bank wire transfer or certified bank check/money order, without exception. Item # 197423
Edith Kramer (Austrian born American, 1916-2014). New York City Rooftops. Woodblock print on paper, 1947. Signed and dated in plate at lower right. A dynamic and tightly constructed urban scene, this 1947 woodblock engraving captures the dense rooftops of New York City as an interlocking field of beams, tanks, ladders, and platforms. Kramer reduces the city to a lattice of sharp angles and rhythmic diagonals, where architecture becomes almost abstract, yet remains unmistakably lived-in. Water towers, stair rails, and brick structures press against one another, creating a sense of compressed energy and constant motion. The bold contrasts of black and white emphasize structure over sentiment, reflecting Kramers modernist training and her affinity for clarity, order, and disciplined line. Carved marks alternate between precise cuts and expressive striations, giving the scene a tactile immediacy that echoes the physical labor and industrial character of mid-century New York. Size of paper: 23.6" W x 15.75" H (59.9 cm x 40 cm) The viewpoint feels elevated and intimate, as if observed from a neighboring roof, placing the viewer inside the city rather than at a distance. Created less than a decade after her arrival in New York, this engraving reads as both observation and assimilation, a study of the city as a constructed environment shaped by human effort. It stands as a strong example of Kramer's graphic work, where urban life is distilled into structure, rhythm, and resilient form. About the artist: "Edith Kramer was born in Vienna, Austria in 1916. Her exploration of art began at the age of 13 when Kramer took classes with Friedl Dicker, a graduate of the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. Kramer was greatly influenced by the theories of Bauhaus artist Johannes Itten who developed the preliminary Bauhaus course from 1919 to 1922. After Kramer graduated from Realgymnasium, Vienna in 1934 , she followed Dicker to Prague to continue her studies. Perhaps even more impactful was the time she spent assisting Dicker in teaching art to the children of political refugees. Fearing the Nazi invasion, Kramer sought refuge in the United States. She arrived in New York City in 1938, and taught sculpture at the Little Red School House, one of the city's first progressive schools. During WWII, Kramer worked in a machine shop in Soho. This experience resonated with her Bauhaus education and presented an opportunity to sketch and paint sitters in industrial settings. In addition to being a painter, Kramer was a sculptor, a printmaker, a collage maker, a mosaicist, a professor, and a founder of the Art Therapy movement. Kramer is perhaps best known for her work as a pioneer in the field of Art Therapy. In 1971 she was part of the team that established an Art Therapy program at George Washington University, and she created the graduate program in Art Therapy at New York University in 1973. With her training in art, art education, as well as psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy, Kramer believed that negative emotions and thoughts could be transformed and rechanneled into productive energy through art. She and fellow pioneer Margaret Naumburg set out to champion the new field of Art Therapy. Kramer also believed that art therapists should create their own art in order to deal with the stress and exhaustion of clinical work, so she continued to create her own art. The following is Kramer's statement about art therapy: "I perceive myself as a specialist who combines the general qualifications of being a competent artist with specialized capacities in the field of psychotherapy and education. The theoretical framework of my understanding of child psychology is based in the main on Freudian psychoanalytic thought. The emphasis, however, is on the idea of art as therapy rather than on psychotherapy which uses art as a tool. My therapeutic medium is as old as mankind. Since human society has existed the arts have helped man to reconcile the eternal conflict between the individual's instinctual urges and the demands of society. Thus, all art is therapeutic in the broadest sense of the word. The artist who applies modern psychology in the field of art has to adapt his methods to the medium so that the therapeutic value of art is heightened by the introduction of therapeutic thinking, not destroyed or weakened by the introduction of concepts and methods that might be incompatible with the inner laws of artistic creation. It is not always easy for the art therapist to reconcile the therapist's approach with her function as an artist and teacher. In her function as a teacher who introduces disturbed children or adults into the realms of art, she has to be ready to accept the limitations of the individuals in her care. She has to be interested in progress on any level. She has to be flexible enough to accept and understand a diversity of styles and to find ways of helping each person according to his individual needs. As therapist she has to accept the unbeautiful manifestations of sexual and aggressive impulses in the raw, along with the results of confusions and incomplete sublimation. But this attitude of acceptance, which is essential in all therapy, must not dull the artist's capacity for discrimination. The teacher has to preserve her integrity genuine, between blocks and limitations, regressions and progress, superficial pretense and genuine communication. Even though my therapeutic approach includes awareness of psychic processes that may remain unconscious, the therapeutic maneuvers I am apt to employ seldom include uncovering unconscious material or the interpretation of unconscious meaning. Art therapy is conceived primarily as a means of supporting the ego. It harnesses the power of art to the task of fostering a psychic organization that is sufficiently resilient to function under pressure without breakdown or the need to resort to stultifying defensive measures. Thus conceived, art therapy constitutes an element of the therapeutic milieu that complements or supports psychotherapy but does not replace it. While art therapists encourage unconventional form and content in the art of their patients they are also intent on fostering artistic eloquence. The spoken words in psychotherapy and the play and talk in clinical therapy are typically formless and fluid. Content rather than form is essential. In art therapy form and content are equally important and the order and structure with which artistic creation endows experience constitutes a powerful aid in sorting out and mastering experience. To quote of art Susan Langer (1962): 'The primary function of art is to objectify experience so that we can contemplate and understand it' (p.90)." (source: Edith Kramer website) Provenance: private Denver, Colorado, USA collection SHIPPING: We coordinate worldwide shipping in-house through specialist international forwarders experienced with fine art and antiquities customs manifests. International buyers must confirm, prior to bidding, that their country's customs authority will accept the item. All duties, taxes, clearance fees, and any costs arising from customs delays, seizures, re-export, returns, or loss in transit are the buyer's sole responsibility. Artemis assumes no liability for items refused entry, detained, or lost after export. We cannot ship ancient items to their country of origin (Egyptian to Egypt, Greek to Greece, etc.). PAYMENT EXCEPTION: For clients not previously established with Artemis, payment for all gold, precious metal, and gemstone lots must be made by bank wire transfer or certified bank check/money order, without exception. Item # 197426
Edith Kramer (Austrian born American, 1916-2014). "Tanks und Graser" (Tanks and Grasses) oil on linen, 1990. Signed and dated at lower right and again with title on verso. A windswept field of grasses fills the foreground, their slender blades bending and crossing like quick, nervous lines of thought, while the horizon settles into the unmistakable geometry of industry. Painted from life in the Meadowlands of New Jersey, not far from JFK Airport, "Tanks und Graser" or "Tanks and Grasses" captures a landscape where wetlands and infrastructure exist in an uneasy but enduring truce. Kramer worked plein air, positioning herself amid the marsh grasses as storage tanks and industrial buildings hovered in the distance. The tanks do not dominate the scene. Instead, they sit low and restrained, softened by atmosphere and scale, allowing the vitality of the grasses to command the composition. Size: 40" W x 32" H (101.6 cm x 81.3 cm) Earthy browns, muted greens, and pale sky blues weave together in a palette that feels deliberate and grounded, attentive to the rhythms of the site rather than its spectacle. This quiet juxtaposition reflects Kramer's sustained interest in places where natural growth persists alongside systems of containment and control. The Meadowlands, with their fragile ecology and industrial proximity, offered an ideal setting for her exploration of balance, structure, and resilience. The grasses sway, adapt, and continue, while the tanks remain fixed, patient, and inert. Painted late in her career, the work reads as both observation and reflection. "Tanks und Graser" resists judgment or drama, favoring instead a steady, almost meditative attention. In this marshland view, Kramer allows nature and industry to share the frame, suggesting not conflict but coexistence, and finding in that coexistence a quiet, persistent beauty. About the Artist: "Edith Kramer was born in Vienna, Austria in 1916. Her exploration of art began at the age of 13 when Kramer took classes with Friedl Dicker, a graduate of the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. Kramer was greatly influenced by the theories of Bauhaus artist Johannes Itten who developed the preliminary Bauhaus course from 1919 to 1922. After Kramer graduated from Realgymnasium, Vienna in 1934 , she followed Dicker to Prague to continue her studies. Perhaps even more impactful was the time she spent assisting Dicker in teaching art to the children of political refugees. Fearing the Nazi invasion, Kramer sought refuge in the United States. She arrived in New York City in 1938, and taught sculpture at the Little Red School House, one of the city's first progressive schools. During WWII, Kramer worked in a machine shop in Soho. This experience resonated with her Bauhaus education and presented an opportunity to sketch and paint sitters in industrial settings. In addition to being a painter, Kramer was a sculptor, a printmaker, a collage maker, a mosaicist, a professor, and a founder of the Art Therapy movement. Kramer is perhaps best known for her work as a pioneer in the field of Art Therapy. In 1971 she was part of the team that established an Art Therapy program at George Washington University, and she created the graduate program in Art Therapy at New York University in 1973. With her training in art, art education, as well as psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy, Kramer believed that negative emotions and thoughts could be transformed and rechanneled into productive energy through art. She and fellow pioneer Margaret Naumburg set out to champion the new field of Art Therapy. Kramer also believed that art therapists should create their own art in order to deal with the stress and exhaustion of clinical work, so she continued to create her own art. The following is Kramer's statement about art therapy: "I perceive myself as a specialist who combines the general qualifications of being a competent artist with specialized capacities in the field of psychotherapy and education. The theoretical framework of my understanding of child psychology is based in the main on Freudian psychoanalytic thought. The emphasis, however, is on the idea of art as therapy rather than on psychotherapy which uses art as a tool. My therapeutic medium is as old as mankind. Since human society has existed the arts have helped man to reconcile the eternal conflict between the individual's instinctual urges and the demands of society. Thus, all art is therapeutic in the broadest sense of the word. The artist who applies modern psychology in the field of art has to adapt his methods to the medium so that the therapeutic value of art is heightened by the introduction of therapeutic thinking, not destroyed or weakened by the introduction of concepts and methods that might be incompatible with the inner laws of artistic creation. It is not always easy for the art therapist to reconcile the therapist's approach with her function as an artist and teacher. In her function as a teacher who introduces disturbed children or adults into the realms of art, she has to be ready to accept the limitations of the individuals in her care. She has to be interested in progress on any level. She has to be flexible enough to accept and understand a diversity of styles and to find ways of helping each person according to his individual needs. As therapist she has to accept the unbeautiful manifestations of sexual and aggressive impulses in the raw, along with the results of confusions and incomplete sublimation. But this attitude of acceptance, which is essential in all therapy, must not dull the artist's capacity for discrimination. The teacher has to preserve her integrity genuine, between blocks and limitations, regressions and progress, superficial pretense and genuine communication. Even though my therapeutic approach includes awareness of psychic processes that may remain unconscious, the therapeutic maneuvers I am apt to employ seldom include uncovering unconscious material or the interpretation of unconscious meaning. Art therapy is conceived primarily as a means of supporting the ego. It harnesses the power of art to the task of fostering a psychic organization that is sufficiently resilient to function under pressure without breakdown or the need to resort to stultifying defensive measures. Thus conceived, art therapy constitutes an element of the therapeutic milieu that complements or supports psychotherapy but does not replace it. While art therapists encourage unconventional form and content in the art of their patients they are also intent on fostering artistic eloquence. The spoken words in psychotherapy and the play and talk in clinical therapy are typically formless and fluid. Content rather than form is essential. In art therapy form and content are equally important and the order and structure with which artistic creation endows experience constitutes a powerful aid in sorting out and mastering experience. To quote of art Susan Langer (1962): 'The primary function of art is to objectify experience so that we can contemplate and understand it' (p.90)." (source: Edith Kramer website) Provenance: private Denver, Colorado, USA collection SHIPPING: We coordinate worldwide shipping in-house through specialist international forwarders experienced with fine art and antiquities customs manifests. International buyers must confirm, prior to bidding, that their country's customs authority will accept the item. All duties, taxes, clearance fees, and any costs arising from customs delays, seizures, re-export, returns, or loss in transit are the buyer's sole responsibility. Artemis assumes no liability for items refused entry, detained, or lost after export. We cannot ship ancient items to their country of origin (Egyptian to Egypt, Greek to Greece, etc.). PAYMENT EXCEPTION: For clients not previously established with Artemis, payment for all gold, precious metal, and gemstone lots must be made by bank wire transfer or certified bank check/money order, without exception. Item # 196993
Edith Kramer (Austrian born American, 1916-2014). "Derelict House" oil on linen, 1968. Signed and dated at lower right and again with title and artist's address on verso. A fractured building looms out of a dim, smoke-softened night, its walls broken into planes of shadow and muted color. In "Derelict House," Edith Kramer turns her attention to the quiet aftermath of demolition, capturing a structure caught between existence and erasure. Windows appear as dark, watchful apertures, while the architecture itself seems to dissolve into the surrounding air, as if the city is already forgetting it. Painted in the late 1960s, the work reflects Kramer's sustained engagement with New York City during a period of aggressive urban renewal. Entire neighborhoods were being dismantled, streets emptied, and familiar forms reduced to rubble or memory. Size of painting: 34" W x 30" H (86.4 cm x 76.2 cm); of frame: 34.5" W x 30.5" H (87.6 cm x 77.5 cm) Though the painting recalls the bombed-out buildings of wartime Europe, its subject is firmly rooted in the American cityscape, where progress arrived with a wrecking ball and left silence in its wake. Kramer's palette is restrained and nocturnal, dominated by grays, browns, and ashen blues that compress space and mute detail. Forms are built through blocks of color rather than line, giving the structure a weighty, almost geological presence. The house feels less like a single building than a psychological site, a repository for displacement, loss, and unresolved tension. There are no figures, no visible movement, only the stillness of abandonment. Yet the painting does not dramatize ruin. Kramer approaches the scene with steady observation, allowing ambiguity to do the work. "Derelict House" becomes a meditation on transition, on what lingers when purpose has been stripped away, and on the uneasy calm that settles over places once full of life. About the Artist: "Edith Kramer was born in Vienna, Austria in 1916. Her exploration of art began at the age of 13 when Kramer took classes with Friedl Dicker, a graduate of the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. Kramer was greatly influenced by the theories of Bauhaus artist Johannes Itten who developed the preliminary Bauhaus course from 1919 to 1922. After Kramer graduated from Realgymnasium, Vienna in 1934 , she followed Dicker to Prague to continue her studies. Perhaps even more impactful was the time she spent assisting Dicker in teaching art to the children of political refugees. Fearing the Nazi invasion, Kramer sought refuge in the United States. She arrived in New York City in 1938, and taught sculpture at the Little Red School House, one of the city's first progressive schools. During WWII, Kramer worked in a machine shop in Soho. This experience resonated with her Bauhaus education and presented an opportunity to sketch and paint sitters in industrial settings. In addition to being a painter, Kramer was a sculptor, a printmaker, a collage maker, a mosaicist, a professor, and a founder of the Art Therapy movement. Kramer is perhaps best known for her work as a pioneer in the field of Art Therapy. In 1971 she was part of the team that established an Art Therapy program at George Washington University, and she created the graduate program in Art Therapy at New York University in 1973. With her training in art, art education, as well as psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy, Kramer believed that negative emotions and thoughts could be transformed and rechanneled into productive energy through art. She and fellow pioneer Margaret Naumburg set out to champion the new field of Art Therapy. Kramer also believed that art therapists should create their own art in order to deal with the stress and exhaustion of clinical work, so she continued to create her own art. The following is Kramer's statement about art therapy: "I perceive myself as a specialist who combines the general qualifications of being a competent artist with specialized capacities in the field of psychotherapy and education. The theoretical framework of my understanding of child psychology is based in the main on Freudian psychoanalytic thought. The emphasis, however, is on the idea of art as therapy rather than on psychotherapy which uses art as a tool. My therapeutic medium is as old as mankind. Since human society has existed the arts have helped man to reconcile the eternal conflict between the individual's instinctual urges and the demands of society. Thus, all art is therapeutic in the broadest sense of the word. The artist who applies modern psychology in the field of art has to adapt his methods to the medium so that the therapeutic value of art is heightened by the introduction of therapeutic thinking, not destroyed or weakened by the introduction of concepts and methods that might be incompatible with the inner laws of artistic creation. It is not always easy for the art therapist to reconcile the therapist's approach with her function as an artist and teacher. In her function as a teacher who introduces disturbed children or adults into the realms of art, she has to be ready to accept the limitations of the individuals in her care. She has to be interested in progress on any level. She has to be flexible enough to accept and understand a diversity of styles and to find ways of helping each person according to his individual needs. As therapist she has to accept the unbeautiful manifestations of sexual and aggressive impulses in the raw, along with the results of confusions and incomplete sublimation. But this attitude of acceptance, which is essential in all therapy, must not dull the artist's capacity for discrimination. The teacher has to preserve her integrity genuine, between blocks and limitations, regressions and progress, superficial pretense and genuine communication. Even though my therapeutic approach includes awareness of psychic processes that may remain unconscious, the therapeutic maneuvers I am apt to employ seldom include uncovering unconscious material or the interpretation of unconscious meaning. Art therapy is conceived primarily as a means of supporting the ego. It harnesses the power of art to the task of fostering a psychic organization that is sufficiently resilient to function under pressure without breakdown or the need to resort to stultifying defensive measures. Thus conceived, art therapy constitutes an element of the therapeutic milieu that complements or supports psychotherapy but does not replace it. While art therapists encourage unconventional form and content in the art of their patients they are also intent on fostering artistic eloquence. The spoken words in psychotherapy and the play and talk in clinical therapy are typically formless and fluid. Content rather than form is essential. In art therapy form and content are equally important and the order and structure with which artistic creation endows experience constitutes a powerful aid in sorting out and mastering experience. To quote of art Susan Langer (1962): 'The primary function of art is to objectify experience so that we can contemplate and understand it' (p.90)." (source: Edith Kramer website) Provenance: private Denver, Colorado, USA collection SHIPPING: We coordinate worldwide shipping in-house through specialist international forwarders experienced with fine art and antiquities customs manifests. International buyers must confirm, prior to bidding, that their country's customs authority will accept the item. All duties, taxes, clearance fees, and any costs arising from customs delays, seizures, re-export, returns, or loss in transit are the buyer's sole responsibility. Artemis assumes no liability for items refused entry, detained, or lost after export. We cannot ship ancient items to their country of origin (Egyptian to Egypt, Greek to Greece, etc.). PAYMENT EXCEPTION: For clients not previously established with Artemis, payment for all gold, precious metal, and gemstone lots must be made by bank wire transfer or certified bank check/money order, without exception. Item # 196996
Edith Kramer (Austrian born American, 1916-2014). "Cranberry Isles, Maine" engraving on paper, 1962. Hand-signed and dated in pencil beneath image at lower right and titled on verso. A finely observed coastal scene, this 1962 engraving depicts the rugged rocks and restless waters of the Cranberry Isles off the coast of Maine. Kramer renders the ocean as a living surface, built from dense networks of etched lines that churn and fold around the fractured stone forms. The rocks rise like architectural remnants, sharply angled and weighty, their solidity held in tension with the constant motion of the surrounding sea. The composition reflects Kramers disciplined graphic sensibility, rooted in modernist training that prized structure, balance, and clarity of form. Line becomes both descriptive and expressive here, mapping the physical landscape while conveying the elemental force of water against stone. Size of engraving: 7" W x 3.75" H (17.8 cm x 9.5 cm); of paper: 14" W x 11" H (35.6 cm x 27.9 cm) The restrained palette of ink on paper heightens the drama, allowing light, texture, and rhythm to carry the emotional register of the scene. "Cranberry Isles, Maine" stands as a quiet but powerful meditation on endurance and flux, where nature is not romanticized but carefully studied, its energies ordered through the artist's measured hand. About the Artist: Edith Kramer was born in Vienna, Austria in 1916. Her exploration of art began at the age of 13 when Kramer took classes with Friedl Dicker, a graduate of the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. Kramer was greatly influenced by the theories of Bauhaus artist Johannes Itten who developed the preliminary Bauhaus course from 1919 to 1922. After Kramer graduated from Realgymnasium, Vienna in 1934 , she followed Dicker to Prague to continue her studies. Perhaps even more impactful was the time she spent assisting Dicker in teaching art to the children of political refugees. Fearing the Nazi invasion, Kramer sought refuge in the United States. She arrived in New York City in 1938, and taught sculpture at the Little Red School House, one of the city's first progressive schools. During WWII, Kramer worked in a machine shop in Soho. This experience resonated with her Bauhaus education and presented an opportunity to sketch and paint sitters in industrial settings. In addition to being a painter, Kramer was a sculptor, a printmaker, a collage maker, a mosaicist, a professor, and a founder of the Art Therapy movement. Kramer is perhaps best known for her work as a pioneer in the field of Art Therapy. In 1971 she was part of the team that established an Art Therapy program at George Washington University, and she created the graduate program in Art Therapy at New York University in 1973. With her training in art, art education, as well as psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy, Kramer believed that negative emotions and thoughts could be transformed and rechanneled into productive energy through art. She and fellow pioneer Margaret Naumburg set out to champion the new field of Art Therapy. Kramer also believed that art therapists should create their own art in order to deal with the stress and exhaustion of clinical work, so she continued to create her own art. The following is Kramer's statement about art therapy: "I perceive myself as a specialist who combines the general qualifications of being a competent artist with specialized capacities in the field of psychotherapy and education. The theoretical framework of my understanding of child psychology is based in the main on Freudian psychoanalytic thought. The emphasis, however, is on the idea of art as therapy rather than on psychotherapy which uses art as a tool. My therapeutic medium is as old as mankind. Since human society has existed the arts have helped man to reconcile the eternal conflict between the individual's instinctual urges and the demands of society. Thus, all art is therapeutic in the broadest sense of the word. The artist who applies modern psychology in the field of art has to adapt his methods to the medium so that the therapeutic value of art is heightened by the introduction of therapeutic thinking, not destroyed or weakened by the introduction of concepts and methods that might be incompatible with the inner laws of artistic creation. It is not always easy for the art therapist to reconcile the therapist's approach with her function as an artist and teacher. In her function as a teacher who introduces disturbed children or adults into the realms of art, she has to be ready to accept the limitations of the individuals in her care. She has to be interested in progress on any level. She has to be flexible enough to accept and understand a diversity of styles and to find ways of helping each person according to his individual needs. As therapist she has to accept the unbeautiful manifestations of sexual and aggressive impulses in the raw, along with the results of confusions and incomplete sublimation. But this attitude of acceptance, which is essential in all therapy, must not dull the artist's capacity for discrimination. The teacher has to preserve her integrity genuine, between blocks and limitations, regressions and progress, superficial pretense and genuine communication. Even though my therapeutic approach includes awareness of psychic processes that may remain unconscious, the therapeutic maneuvers I am apt to employ seldom include uncovering unconscious material or the interpretation of unconscious meaning. Art therapy is conceived primarily as a means of supporting the ego. It harnesses the power of art to the task of fostering a psychic organization that is sufficiently resilient to function under pressure without breakdown or the need to resort to stultifying defensive measures. Thus conceived, art therapy constitutes an element of the therapeutic milieu that complements or supports psychotherapy but does not replace it. While art therapists encourage unconventional form and content in the art of their patients they are also intent on fostering artistic eloquence. The spoken words in psychotherapy and the play and talk in clinical therapy are typically formless and fluid. Content rather than form is essential. In art therapy form and content are equally important and the order and structure with which artistic creation endows experience constitutes a powerful aid in sorting out and mastering experience. To quote of art Susan Langer (1962): 'The primary function of art is to objectify experience so that we can contemplate and understand it' (p.90)." (source: Edith Kramer website) Provenance: private Denver, Colorado, USA collection SHIPPING: We coordinate worldwide shipping in-house through specialist international forwarders experienced with fine art and antiquities customs manifests. International buyers must confirm, prior to bidding, that their country's customs authority will accept the item. All duties, taxes, clearance fees, and any costs arising from customs delays, seizures, re-export, returns, or loss in transit are the buyer's sole responsibility. Artemis assumes no liability for items refused entry, detained, or lost after export. We cannot ship ancient items to their country of origin (Egyptian to Egypt, Greek to Greece, etc.). PAYMENT EXCEPTION: For clients not previously established with Artemis, payment for all gold, precious metal, and gemstone lots must be made by bank wire transfer or certified bank check/money order, without exception. Item # 197428
Edith Kramer (Austrian born American, 1916-2014). Landscape. Etching on paper, 1961. Hand-signed and dated at lower right. A hushed, contemplative landscape in which Edith Kramer trades the density of the city for a wide, breathing horizon, rendered with delicacy and patient attention. Low hills rise gently across the distance, their silhouettes softened by layered crosshatching, while water stretches calmly across the middle ground, acting as both mirror and boundary. In the foreground, a tangle of grasses and flowering plants emerges through fine, searching lines, grounding the scene in lived, tactile observation. The composition is carefully balanced, structured through horizontal bands that guide the eye from earth to water to sky. Kramer's touch is restrained yet expressive, allowing light to surface through the accumulation of marks rather than through dramatic contrast. Size of etching: 6.25" W x 5.25" H (15.9 cm x 13.3 cm); of paper: 15" W x 11" H (38.1 cm x 27.9 cm) The sky, built from softly interwoven lines, feels expansive without becoming theatrical, lending the entire scene a quiet, meditative tempo. This landscape reflects Kramer's deep commitment to structure as a stabilizing force, a principle rooted in her modernist training and lifelong belief in art's capacity to organize experience. Nature here is not romanticized or grandiose. Instead, it is presented as something steady and restorative, a place where form and perception gently align. The plants in the foreground are observed closely, almost intimately, while the distant hills remain intentionally remote, creating a subtle dialogue between immediacy and distance. Dated 1961, this etching stands as a lyrical counterpoint to Kramer's urban imagery, revealing her sensitivity to natural environments and her ability to translate psychological quiet into visual form. The result is a work that invites prolonged looking, offering a moment of stillness shaped by clarity, discipline, and thoughtful restraint. About the Artist: Edith Kramer was born in Vienna, Austria in 1916. Her exploration of art began at the age of 13 when Kramer took classes with Friedl Dicker, a graduate of the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. Kramer was greatly influenced by the theories of Bauhaus artist Johannes Itten who developed the preliminary Bauhaus course from 1919 to 1922. After Kramer graduated from Realgymnasium, Vienna in 1934 , she followed Dicker to Prague to continue her studies. Perhaps even more impactful was the time she spent assisting Dicker in teaching art to the children of political refugees. Fearing the Nazi invasion, Kramer sought refuge in the United States. She arrived in New York City in 1938, and taught sculpture at the Little Red School House, one of the city's first progressive schools. During WWII, Kramer worked in a machine shop in Soho. This experience resonated with her Bauhaus education and presented an opportunity to sketch and paint sitters in industrial settings. In addition to being a painter, Kramer was a sculptor, a printmaker, a collage maker, a mosaicist, a professor, and a founder of the Art Therapy movement. Kramer is perhaps best known for her work as a pioneer in the field of Art Therapy. In 1971 she was part of the team that established an Art Therapy program at George Washington University, and she created the graduate program in Art Therapy at New York University in 1973. With her training in art, art education, as well as psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy, Kramer believed that negative emotions and thoughts could be transformed and rechanneled into productive energy through art. She and fellow pioneer Margaret Naumburg set out to champion the new field of Art Therapy. Kramer also believed that art therapists should create their own art in order to deal with the stress and exhaustion of clinical work, so she continued to create her own art. The following is Kramer's statement about art therapy: "I perceive myself as a specialist who combines the general qualifications of being a competent artist with specialized capacities in the field of psychotherapy and education. The theoretical framework of my understanding of child psychology is based in the main on Freudian psychoanalytic thought. The emphasis, however, is on the idea of art as therapy rather than on psychotherapy which uses art as a tool. My therapeutic medium is as old as mankind. Since human society has existed the arts have helped man to reconcile the eternal conflict between the individual's instinctual urges and the demands of society. Thus, all art is therapeutic in the broadest sense of the word. The artist who applies modern psychology in the field of art has to adapt his methods to the medium so that the therapeutic value of art is heightened by the introduction of therapeutic thinking, not destroyed or weakened by the introduction of concepts and methods that might be incompatible with the inner laws of artistic creation. It is not always easy for the art therapist to reconcile the therapist's approach with her function as an artist and teacher. In her function as a teacher who introduces disturbed children or adults into the realms of art, she has to be ready to accept the limitations of the individuals in her care. She has to be interested in progress on any level. She has to be flexible enough to accept and understand a diversity of styles and to find ways of helping each person according to his individual needs. As therapist she has to accept the unbeautiful manifestations of sexual and aggressive impulses in the raw, along with the results of confusions and incomplete sublimation. But this attitude of acceptance, which is essential in all therapy, must not dull the artist's capacity for discrimination. The teacher has to preserve her integrity genuine, between blocks and limitations, regressions and progress, superficial pretense and genuine communication. Even though my therapeutic approach includes awareness of psychic processes that may remain unconscious, the therapeutic maneuvers I am apt to employ seldom include uncovering unconscious material or the interpretation of unconscious meaning. Art therapy is conceived primarily as a means of supporting the ego. It harnesses the power of art to the task of fostering a psychic organization that is sufficiently resilient to function under pressure without breakdown or the need to resort to stultifying defensive measures. Thus conceived, art therapy constitutes an element of the therapeutic milieu that complements or supports psychotherapy but does not replace it. While art therapists encourage unconventional form and content in the art of their patients they are also intent on fostering artistic eloquence. The spoken words in psychotherapy and the play and talk in clinical therapy are typically formless and fluid. Content rather than form is essential. In art therapy form and content are equally important and the order and structure with which artistic creation endows experience constitutes a powerful aid in sorting out and mastering experience. To quote of art Susan Langer (1962): 'The primary function of art is to objectify experience so that we can contemplate and understand it' (p.90)." (source: Edith Kramer website) Provenance: private Denver, Colorado, USA collection SHIPPING: We coordinate worldwide shipping in-house through specialist international forwarders experienced with fine art and antiquities customs manifests. International buyers must confirm, prior to bidding, that their country's customs authority will accept the item. All duties, taxes, clearance fees, and any costs arising from customs delays, seizures, re-export, returns, or loss in transit are the buyer's sole responsibility. Artemis assumes no liability for items refused entry, detained, or lost after export. We cannot ship ancient items to their country of origin (Egyptian to Egypt, Greek to Greece, etc.). PAYMENT EXCEPTION: For clients not previously established with Artemis, payment for all gold, precious metal, and gemstone lots must be made by bank wire transfer or certified bank check/money order, without exception. Item # 197427
Edith Kramer (Austrian born American, 1916-2014). Amiens Cathedral. Ink drawing on paper, 1948. Dated on verso. A 1948 ink drawing on paper by Edith Kramer depicts the towering west facade of Amiens Cathedral, rendered with bold crosshatching and a crisp, architectural command. Kramer builds the Gothic structure through rhythmic linework, stacking lancet openings, sculptural portals, and the great rose window like a darkened sun at the center of the composition. Her marks feel both precise and urgent, as if the cathedral is being reconstructed stroke by stroke - not merely observed, but understood through structure. The subject carried particular weight for Kramer, who remembered Amiens as a city still marked by the violence of World War II. She described the cathedral as standing "in a wilderness," surrounded by collapse, yet miraculously intact because it was "built on arches and withstood the bombing." Size: 23" W x 29" H (58.4 cm x 73.7 cm) Size: 0.1" L x 23" W x 29" H (0.3 cm x 58.4 cm x 73.7 cm) That uncanny survival shapes the drawing's mood. With the cathedral's stained-glass windows removed for safekeeping, the facade's openings read as hollow, shadowed voids, giving the building an eerie, stripped grandeur - a monument temporarily emptied of its most famous light. Executed just a few years after the war, this work becomes more than an architectural study. It is a portrait of endurance: Gothic stone held upright against history, and an artist using ink to translate survival into form. About the artist: "Edith Kramer was born in Vienna, Austria in 1916. Her exploration of art began at the age of 13 when Kramer took classes with Friedl Dicker, a graduate of the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. Kramer was greatly influenced by the theories of Bauhaus artist Johannes Itten who developed the preliminary Bauhaus course from 1919 to 1922. After Kramer graduated from Realgymnasium, Vienna in 1934 , she followed Dicker to Prague to continue her studies. Perhaps even more impactful was the time she spent assisting Dicker in teaching art to the children of political refugees. Fearing the Nazi invasion, Kramer sought refuge in the United States. She arrived in New York City in 1938, and taught sculpture at the Little Red School House, one of the city's first progressive schools. During WWII, Kramer worked in a machine shop in Soho. This experience resonated with her Bauhaus education and presented an opportunity to sketch and paint sitters in industrial settings. In addition to being a painter, Kramer was a sculptor, a printmaker, a collage maker, a mosaicist, a professor, and a founder of the Art Therapy movement. Kramer is perhaps best known for her work as a pioneer in the field of Art Therapy. In 1971 she was part of the team that established an Art Therapy program at George Washington University, and she created the graduate program in Art Therapy at New York University in 1973. With her training in art, art education, as well as psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy, Kramer believed that negative emotions and thoughts could be transformed and rechanneled into productive energy through art. She and fellow pioneer Margaret Naumburg set out to champion the new field of Art Therapy. Kramer also believed that art therapists should create their own art in order to deal with the stress and exhaustion of clinical work, so she continued to create her own art. The following is Kramer's statement about art therapy: "I perceive myself as a specialist who combines the general qualifications of being a competent artist with specialized capacities in the field of psychotherapy and education. The theoretical framework of my understanding of child psychology is based in the main on Freudian psychoanalytic thought. The emphasis, however, is on the idea of art as therapy rather than on psychotherapy which uses art as a tool. My therapeutic medium is as old as mankind. Since human society has existed the arts have helped man to reconcile the eternal conflict between the individual's instinctual urges and the demands of society. Thus, all art is therapeutic in the broadest sense of the word. The artist who applies modern psychology in the field of art has to adapt his methods to the medium so that the therapeutic value of art is heightened by the introduction of therapeutic thinking, not destroyed or weakened by the introduction of concepts and methods that might be incompatible with the inner laws of artistic creation. It is not always easy for the art therapist to reconcile the therapist's approach with her function as an artist and teacher. In her function as a teacher who introduces disturbed children or adults into the realms of art, she has to be ready to accept the limitations of the individuals in her care. She has to be interested in progress on any level. She has to be flexible enough to accept and understand a diversity of styles and to find ways of helping each person according to his individual needs. As therapist she has to accept the unbeautiful manifestations of sexual and aggressive impulses in the raw, along with the results of confusions and incomplete sublimation. But this attitude of acceptance, which is essential in all therapy, must not dull the artist's capacity for discrimination. The teacher has to preserve her integrity genuine, between blocks and limitations, regressions and progress, superficial pretense and genuine communication. Even though my therapeutic approach includes awareness of psychic processes that may remain unconscious, the therapeutic maneuvers I am apt to employ seldom include uncovering unconscious material or the interpretation of unconscious meaning. Art therapy is conceived primarily as a means of supporting the ego. It harnesses the power of art to the task of fostering a psychic organization that is sufficiently resilient to function under pressure without breakdown or the need to resort to stultifying defensive measures. Thus conceived, art therapy constitutes an element of the therapeutic milieu that complements or supports psychotherapy but does not replace it. While art therapists encourage unconventional form and content in the art of their patients they are also intent on fostering artistic eloquence. The spoken words in psychotherapy and the play and talk in clinical therapy are typically formless and fluid. Content rather than form is essential. In art therapy form and content are equally important and the order and structure with which artistic creation endows experience constitutes a powerful aid in sorting out and mastering experience. To quote of art Susan Langer (1962): 'The primary function of art is to objectify experience so that we can contemplate and understand it' (p.90)." (source: Edith Kramer website) Provenance: private Denver, Colorado, USA collection SHIPPING: We coordinate worldwide shipping in-house through specialist international forwarders experienced with fine art and antiquities customs manifests. International buyers must confirm, prior to bidding, that their country's customs authority will accept the item. All duties, taxes, clearance fees, and any costs arising from customs delays, seizures, re-export, returns, or loss in transit are the buyer's sole responsibility. Artemis assumes no liability for items refused entry, detained, or lost after export. We cannot ship ancient items to their country of origin (Egyptian to Egypt, Greek to Greece, etc.). PAYMENT EXCEPTION: For clients not previously established with Artemis, payment for all gold, precious metal, and gemstone lots must be made by bank wire transfer or certified bank check/money order, without exception. Item # 197008
Edith Kramer (Austrian born American, 1916-2014). "Jersey Landscape with Moon" oil on linen, 1988. Signed and dated at lower right. A quiet band of marsh grasses stretches across the foreground, dense and untamed, before giving way to water, infrastructure, and a softened skyline beyond. In "Jersey Landscape with Moon," Edith Kramer fixes her gaze from the New Jersey side of the Hudson River toward New York City, where the Twin Towers rise faintly on the horizon, framed by atmosphere rather than assertion. Between the viewer and the distant city sits a water treatment plant, its low, functional forms embedded into the landscape like a pause between nature and monument. The painting unfolds horizontally, encouraging the eye to drift slowly from tangled vegetation to open sky. Kramer renders the grasses with layered, rhythmic strokes, punctuated by rust reds, muted greens, and silvery browns that suggest seasonal change and late-day light. Size: 42" W x 24" H (106.7 cm x 61 cm) The industrial structures are treated with restraint, their geometry softened by distance and haze, never overpowering the organic life that claims the foreground. A pale moon hangs quietly in the sky, lending the scene a reflective stillness. Its presence shifts the painting from simple observation into something more contemplative, a moment suspended between day and night, land and city, growth and containment. Kramer’s interest in balance and structure is evident here, not as a formal exercise, but as lived experience, shaped by sustained looking and working directly from the landscape. Painted in 1988, the work carries an unintended poignancy. The Twin Towers appear as distant markers rather than symbols, part of a lived geography rather than an icon. Kramer offers no drama, no narrative insistence. Instead, she records coexistence as she found it, wetlands breathing in the foreground, industry and skyline receding into quiet alignment. "Jersey Landscape with Moon" stands as a measured, deeply attentive meditation on place, presence, and the fragile calm between them. About the Artist: "Edith Kramer was born in Vienna, Austria in 1916. Her exploration of art began at the age of 13 when Kramer took classes with Friedl Dicker, a graduate of the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. Kramer was greatly influenced by the theories of Bauhaus artist Johannes Itten who developed the preliminary Bauhaus course from 1919 to 1922. After Kramer graduated from Realgymnasium, Vienna in 1934 , she followed Dicker to Prague to continue her studies. Perhaps even more impactful was the time she spent assisting Dicker in teaching art to the children of political refugees. Fearing the Nazi invasion, Kramer sought refuge in the United States. She arrived in New York City in 1938, and taught sculpture at the Little Red School House, one of the city's first progressive schools. During WWII, Kramer worked in a machine shop in Soho. This experience resonated with her Bauhaus education and presented an opportunity to sketch and paint sitters in industrial settings. In addition to being a painter, Kramer was a sculptor, a printmaker, a collage maker, a mosaicist, a professor, and a founder of the Art Therapy movement. Kramer is perhaps best known for her work as a pioneer in the field of Art Therapy. In 1971 she was part of the team that established an Art Therapy program at George Washington University, and she created the graduate program in Art Therapy at New York University in 1973. With her training in art, art education, as well as psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy, Kramer believed that negative emotions and thoughts could be transformed and rechanneled into productive energy through art. She and fellow pioneer Margaret Naumburg set out to champion the new field of Art Therapy. Kramer also believed that art therapists should create their own art in order to deal with the stress and exhaustion of clinical work, so she continued to create her own art. The following is Kramer's statement about art therapy: "I perceive myself as a specialist who combines the general qualifications of being a competent artist with specialized capacities in the field of psychotherapy and education. The theoretical framework of my understanding of child psychology is based in the main on Freudian psychoanalytic thought. The emphasis, however, is on the idea of art as therapy rather than on psychotherapy which uses art as a tool. My therapeutic medium is as old as mankind. Since human society has existed the arts have helped man to reconcile the eternal conflict between the individual's instinctual urges and the demands of society. Thus, all art is therapeutic in the broadest sense of the word. The artist who applies modern psychology in the field of art has to adapt his methods to the medium so that the therapeutic value of art is heightened by the introduction of therapeutic thinking, not destroyed or weakened by the introduction of concepts and methods that might be incompatible with the inner laws of artistic creation. It is not always easy for the art therapist to reconcile the therapist's approach with her function as an artist and teacher. In her function as a teacher who introduces disturbed children or adults into the realms of art, she has to be ready to accept the limitations of the individuals in her care. She has to be interested in progress on any level. She has to be flexible enough to accept and understand a diversity of styles and to find ways of helping each person according to his individual needs. As therapist she has to accept the unbeautiful manifestations of sexual and aggressive impulses in the raw, along with the results of confusions and incomplete sublimation. But this attitude of acceptance, which is essential in all therapy, must not dull the artist's capacity for discrimination. The teacher has to preserve her integrity genuine, between blocks and limitations, regressions and progress, superficial pretense and genuine communication. Even though my therapeutic approach includes awareness of psychic processes that may remain unconscious, the therapeutic maneuvers I am apt to employ seldom include uncovering unconscious material or the interpretation of unconscious meaning. Art therapy is conceived primarily as a means of supporting the ego. It harnesses the power of art to the task of fostering a psychic organization that is sufficiently resilient to function under pressure without breakdown or the need to resort to stultifying defensive measures. Thus conceived, art therapy constitutes an element of the therapeutic milieu that complements or supports psychotherapy but does not replace it. While art therapists encourage unconventional form and content in the art of their patients they are also intent on fostering artistic eloquence. The spoken words in psychotherapy and the play and talk in clinical therapy are typically formless and fluid. Content rather than form is essential. In art therapy form and content are equally important and the order and structure with which artistic creation endows experience constitutes a powerful aid in sorting out and mastering experience. To quote of art Susan Langer (1962): 'The primary function of art is to objectify experience so that we can contemplate and understand it' (p.90)." (source: Edith Kramer website) Provenance: private Denver, Colorado, USA collection; sold in May 2011 SHIPPING: We coordinate worldwide shipping in-house through specialist international forwarders experienced with fine art and antiquities customs manifests. International buyers must confirm, prior to bidding, that their country's customs authority will accept the item. All duties, taxes, clearance fees, and any costs arising from customs delays, seizures, re-export, returns, or loss in transit are the buyer's sole responsibility. Artemis assumes no liability for items refused entry, detained, or lost after export. We cannot ship ancient items to their country of origin (Egyptian to Egypt, Greek to Greece, etc.). PAYMENT EXCEPTION: For clients not previously established with Artemis, payment for all gold, precious metal, and gemstone lots must be made by bank wire transfer or certified bank check/money order, without exception. Item # 196999
Edith Kramer (Austrian born American, 1916-2014). "High Meadow, Austria" watercolor, 1997. Signed and dated at lower right. A landscape built of wind, stone, and the stubborn greening of high country plants unfolds in Edith Kramer's plein air watercolor "High Meadow, Austria," painted in 1997. The work looks as if it were pulled straight from a mountainside breath: pale limestone ridges ripple like frozen waves, each fold and fissure described with Kramer's attentive, Bauhaus-trained hand. Here the stones are not sterile, but alive with delicate sprays of ferns, alpine blossoms, and the quiet insistence of early spring growth. The sky, a broad sweep of clean Austrian blue, opens the scene with a clarity that feels almost ceremonial. Kramer painted this view near her ancestral home in Grundlsee, Austria, where she often hiked to a shepherd's cabin to work directly in the open air. Even in early spring, when the wind remains sharp and the earth still holds winter's chill, she sought these heights. Size: 37" W x 26" H (94 cm x 66 cm) The painting carries that sense of bracing solitude: nature observed not from comfort, but from immersion. Her lifelong discipline in drawing from life, strengthened by her early studies with Friedl Dicker and her exposure to Bauhaus principles of structure, line, and clarity, echoes subtly through the watercolor's crisp edges and careful modulations of light. "High Meadow, Austria" reveals an artist who understood the emotional architecture of landscape. It is both a record of place and a meditation shaped by decades of artistic and psychological insight. Kramer's brush balances precision and lyricism, turning stone and scrub into something contemplative and quietly radiant. About the Artist: Edith Kramer was born in Vienna, Austria in 1916. Her exploration of art began at the age of 13 when Kramer took classes with Friedl Dicker, a graduate of the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. Kramer was greatly influenced by the theories of Bauhaus artist Johannes Itten who developed the preliminary Bauhaus course from 1919 to 1922. After Kramer graduated from Realgymnasium, Vienna in 1934 , she followed Dicker to Prague to continue her studies. Perhaps even more impactful was the time she spent assisting Dicker in teaching art to the children of political refugees. Fearing the Nazi invasion, Kramer sought refuge in the United States. She arrived in New York City in 1938, and taught sculpture at the Little Red School House, one of the city's first progressive schools. During WWII, Kramer worked in a machine shop in Soho. This experience resonated with her Bauhaus education and presented an opportunity to sketch and paint sitters in industrial settings. In addition to being a painter, Kramer was a sculptor, a printmaker, a collage maker, a mosaicist, a professor, and a founder of the Art Therapy movement. Kramer is perhaps best known for her work as a pioneer in the field of Art Therapy. In 1971 she was part of the team that established an Art Therapy program at George Washington University, and she created the graduate program in Art Therapy at New York University in 1973. With her training in art, art education, as well as psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy, Kramer believed that negative emotions and thoughts could be transformed and rechanneled into productive energy through art. She and fellow pioneer Margaret Naumburg set out to champion the new field of Art Therapy. Kramer also believed that art therapists should create their own art in order to deal with the stress and exhaustion of clinical work, so she continued to create her own art. The following is Kramer's statement about art therapy: "I perceive myself as a specialist who combines the general qualifications of being a competent artist with specialized capacities in the field of psychotherapy and education. The theoretical framework of my understanding of child psychology is based in the main on Freudian psychoanalytic thought. The emphasis, however, is on the idea of art as therapy rather than on psychotherapy which uses art as a tool. My therapeutic medium is as old as mankind. Since human society has existed the arts have helped man to reconcile the eternal conflict between the individual's instinctual urges and the demands of society. Thus, all art is therapeutic in the broadest sense of the word. The artist who applies modern psychology in the field of art has to adapt his methods to the medium so that the therapeutic value of art is heightened by the introduction of therapeutic thinking, not destroyed or weakened by the introduction of concepts and methods that might be incompatible with the inner laws of artistic creation. It is not always easy for the art therapist to reconcile the therapist's approach with her function as an artist and teacher. In her function as a teacher who introduces disturbed children or adults into the realms of art, she has to be ready to accept the limitations of the individuals in her care. She has to be interested in progress on any level. She has to be flexible enough to accept and understand a diversity of styles and to find ways of helping each person according to his individual needs. As therapist she has to accept the unbeautiful manifestations of sexual and aggressive impulses in the raw, along with the results of confusions and incomplete sublimation. But this attitude of acceptance, which is essential in all therapy, must not dull the artist's capacity for discrimination. The teacher has to preserve her integrity genuine, between blocks and limitations, regressions and progress, superficial pretense and genuine communication. Even though my therapeutic approach includes awareness of psychic processes that may remain unconscious, the therapeutic maneuvers I am apt to employ seldom include uncovering unconscious material or the interpretation of unconscious meaning. Art therapy is conceived primarily as a means of supporting the ego. It harnesses the power of art to the task of fostering a psychic organization that is sufficiently resilient to function under pressure without breakdown or the need to resort to stultifying defensive measures. Thus conceived, art therapy constitutes an element of the therapeutic milieu that complements or supports psychotherapy but does not replace it. While art therapists encourage unconventional form and content in the art of their patients they are also intent on fostering artistic eloquence. The spoken words in psychotherapy and the play and talk in clinical therapy are typically formless and fluid. Content rather than form is essential. In art therapy form and content are equally important and the order and structure with which artistic creation endows experience constitutes a powerful aid in sorting out and mastering experience. To quote of art Susan Langer (1962): 'The primary function of art is to objectify experience so that we can contemplate and understand it' (p.90)." (source: Edith Kramer website) Provenance: private Denver, Colorado, USA collection SHIPPING: We coordinate worldwide shipping in-house through specialist international forwarders experienced with fine art and antiquities customs manifests. International buyers must confirm, prior to bidding, that their country's customs authority will accept the item. All duties, taxes, clearance fees, and any costs arising from customs delays, seizures, re-export, returns, or loss in transit are the buyer's sole responsibility. Artemis assumes no liability for items refused entry, detained, or lost after export. We cannot ship ancient items to their country of origin (Egyptian to Egypt, Greek to Greece, etc.). PAYMENT EXCEPTION: For clients not previously established with Artemis, payment for all gold, precious metal, and gemstone lots must be made by bank wire transfer or certified bank check/money order, without exception. Item # 197005
Edith Kramer (Austrian born American, 1916-2014). Man in Machine Shop, oil on linen, 1955. Signed and dated in black paint at lower right. A large-scale painting by Edith Kramer, an amazing artist as well as a world-renowned pioneer in the field of Art Therapy. The theme of this piece reflects Kramer's Bauhaus roots in Europe as well as her time working in a machine shop in the Soho District of New York City during WWII. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Kramer painted works with industrial themes. She would stay after her machinist shifts to draw other machinists in an industrial setting. In this impressive painting, Kramer pays homage to a young man diligently working in a machine shop. All is rendered in the Social Realist style with Kramer's eye for meticulous detail. Size: 35" L x 31" W (88.9 cm x 78.7 cm) Size (frame): 35.5" L x 31.5" W (90.2 cm x 80 cm) About the Artist: Edith Kramer was born in Vienna, Austria in 1916. Her exploration of art began at the age of 13 when Kramer took classes with Friedl Dicker, a graduate of the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. Kramer was greatly influenced by the theories of Bauhaus artist Johannes Itten who developed the preliminary Bauhaus course from 1919 to 1922. After Kramer graduated from Realgymnasium, Vienna in 1934 , she followed Dicker to Prague to continue her studies. Perhaps even more impactful was the time she spent assisting Dicker in teaching art to the children of political refugees. Fearing the Nazi invasion, Kramer sought refuge in the United States. She arrived in New York City in 1938, and taught sculpture at the Little Red School House, one of the city's first progressive schools. During WWII, Kramer worked in a machine shop in Soho. This experience resonated with her Bauhaus education and presented an opportunity to sketch and paint sitters in industrial settings. In addition to being a painter, Kramer was a sculptor, a printmaker, a collage maker, a mosaicist, a professor, and a founder of the Art Therapy movement. Kramer is perhaps best known for her work as a pioneer in the field of Art Therapy. In 1971 she was part of the team that established an Art Therapy program at George Washington University, and she created the graduate program in Art Therapy at New York University in 1973. With her training in art, art education, as well as psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy, Kramer believed that negative emotions and thoughts could be transformed and rechanneled into productive energy through art. She and fellow pioneer Margaret Naumburg set out to champion the new field of Art Therapy. Kramer also believed that art therapists should create their own art in order to deal with the stress and exhaustion of clinical work, so she continued to create her own art. The following is Kramer's statement about art therapy: "I perceive myself as a specialist who combines the general qualifications of being a competent artist with specialized capacities in the field of psychotherapy and education. The theoretical framework of my understanding of child psychology is based in the main on Freudian psychoanalytic thought. The emphasis, however, is on the idea of art as therapy rather than on psychotherapy which uses art as a tool. My therapeutic medium is as old as mankind. Since human society has existed the arts have helped man to reconcile the eternal conflict between the individual's instinctual urges and the demands of society. Thus, all art is therapeutic in the broadest sense of the word. The artist who applies modern psychology in the field of art has to adapt his methods to the medium so that the therapeutic value of art is heightened by the introduction of therapeutic thinking, not destroyed or weakened by the introduction of concepts and methods that might be incompatible with the inner laws of artistic creation. It is not always easy for the art therapist to reconcile the therapist's approach with her function as an artist and teacher. In her function as a teacher who introduces disturbed children or adults into the realms of art, she has to be ready to accept the limitations of the individuals in her care. She has to be interested in progress on any level. She has to be flexible enough to accept and understand a diversity of styles and to find ways of helping each person according to his individual needs. As therapist she has to accept the unbeautiful manifestations of sexual and aggressive impulses in the raw, along with the results of confusions and incomplete sublimation. But this attitude of acceptance, which is essential in all therapy, must not dull the artist's capacity for discrimination. The teacher has to preserve her integrity genuine, between blocks and limitations, regressions and progress, superficial pretense and genuine communication. Even though my therapeutic approach includes awareness of psychic processes that may remain unconscious, the therapeutic maneuvers I am apt to employ seldom include uncovering unconscious material or the interpretation of unconscious meaning. Art therapy is conceived primarily as a means of supporting the ego. It harnesses the power of art to the task of fostering a psychic organization that is sufficiently resilient to function under pressure without breakdown or the need to resort to stultifying defensive measures. Thus conceived, art therapy constitutes an element of the therapeutic milieu that complements or supports psychotherapy but does not replace it. While art therapists encourage unconventional form and content in the art of their patients they are also intent on fostering artistic eloquence. The spoken words in psychotherapy and the play and talk in clinical therapy are typically formless and fluid. Content rather than form is essential. In art therapy form and content are equally important and the order and structure with which artistic creation endows experience constitutes a powerful aid in sorting out and mastering experience. To quote of art Susan Langer (1962): 'The primary function of art is to objectify experience so that we can contemplate and understand it' (p.90)." (source: Edith Kramer website) Provenance: private Denver, Colorado, USA collection SHIPPING: We coordinate worldwide shipping in-house through specialist international forwarders experienced with fine art and antiquities customs manifests. International buyers must confirm, prior to bidding, that their country's customs authority will accept the item. All duties, taxes, clearance fees, and any costs arising from customs delays, seizures, re-export, returns, or loss in transit are the buyer's sole responsibility. Artemis assumes no liability for items refused entry, detained, or lost after export. We cannot ship ancient items to their country of origin (Egyptian to Egypt, Greek to Greece, etc.). PAYMENT EXCEPTION: For clients not previously established with Artemis, payment for all gold, precious metal, and gemstone lots must be made by bank wire transfer or certified bank check/money order, without exception. Item # 196992
Edith Kramer (Austrian born American, 1916-2014). "Tanks und Graser" (Tanks and Grasses) oil on linen, 1990. Signed and dated at lower right and again with title on verso. A windswept field of grasses fills the foreground, their slender blades bending and crossing like quick, nervous lines of thought, while the horizon settles into the unmistakable geometry of industry. Painted from life in the Meadowlands of New Jersey, not far from JFK Airport, "Tanks und Graser" or "Tanks and Grasses" captures a landscape where wetlands and infrastructure exist in an uneasy but enduring truce. Kramer worked plein air, positioning herself amid the marsh grasses as storage tanks and industrial buildings hovered in the distance. The tanks do not dominate the scene. Instead, they sit low and restrained, softened by atmosphere and scale, allowing the vitality of the grasses to command the composition. Size: 40" W x 32" H (101.6 cm x 81.3 cm) Earthy browns, muted greens, and pale sky blues weave together in a palette that feels deliberate and grounded, attentive to the rhythms of the site rather than its spectacle. This quiet juxtaposition reflects Kramer's sustained interest in places where natural growth persists alongside systems of containment and control. The Meadowlands, with their fragile ecology and industrial proximity, offered an ideal setting for her exploration of balance, structure, and resilience. The grasses sway, adapt, and continue, while the tanks remain fixed, patient, and inert. Painted late in her career, the work reads as both observation and reflection. "Tanks und Graser" resists judgment or drama, favoring instead a steady, almost meditative attention. In this marshland view, Kramer allows nature and industry to share the frame, suggesting not conflict but coexistence, and finding in that coexistence a quiet, persistent beauty. About the Artist: "Edith Kramer was born in Vienna, Austria in 1916. Her exploration of art began at the age of 13 when Kramer took classes with Friedl Dicker, a graduate of the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. Kramer was greatly influenced by the theories of Bauhaus artist Johannes Itten who developed the preliminary Bauhaus course from 1919 to 1922. After Kramer graduated from Realgymnasium, Vienna in 1934 , she followed Dicker to Prague to continue her studies. Perhaps even more impactful was the time she spent assisting Dicker in teaching art to the children of political refugees. Fearing the Nazi invasion, Kramer sought refuge in the United States. She arrived in New York City in 1938, and taught sculpture at the Little Red School House, one of the city's first progressive schools. During WWII, Kramer worked in a machine shop in Soho. This experience resonated with her Bauhaus education and presented an opportunity to sketch and paint sitters in industrial settings. In addition to being a painter, Kramer was a sculptor, a printmaker, a collage maker, a mosaicist, a professor, and a founder of the Art Therapy movement. Kramer is perhaps best known for her work as a pioneer in the field of Art Therapy. In 1971 she was part of the team that established an Art Therapy program at George Washington University, and she created the graduate program in Art Therapy at New York University in 1973. With her training in art, art education, as well as psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy, Kramer believed that negative emotions and thoughts could be transformed and rechanneled into productive energy through art. She and fellow pioneer Margaret Naumburg set out to champion the new field of Art Therapy. Kramer also believed that art therapists should create their own art in order to deal with the stress and exhaustion of clinical work, so she continued to create her own art. The following is Kramer's statement about art therapy: "I perceive myself as a specialist who combines the general qualifications of being a competent artist with specialized capacities in the field of psychotherapy and education. The theoretical framework of my understanding of child psychology is based in the main on Freudian psychoanalytic thought. The emphasis, however, is on the idea of art as therapy rather than on psychotherapy which uses art as a tool. My therapeutic medium is as old as mankind. Since human society has existed the arts have helped man to reconcile the eternal conflict between the individual's instinctual urges and the demands of society. Thus, all art is therapeutic in the broadest sense of the word. The artist who applies modern psychology in the field of art has to adapt his methods to the medium so that the therapeutic value of art is heightened by the introduction of therapeutic thinking, not destroyed or weakened by the introduction of concepts and methods that might be incompatible with the inner laws of artistic creation. It is not always easy for the art therapist to reconcile the therapist's approach with her function as an artist and teacher. In her function as a teacher who introduces disturbed children or adults into the realms of art, she has to be ready to accept the limitations of the individuals in her care. She has to be interested in progress on any level. She has to be flexible enough to accept and understand a diversity of styles and to find ways of helping each person according to his individual needs. As therapist she has to accept the unbeautiful manifestations of sexual and aggressive impulses in the raw, along with the results of confusions and incomplete sublimation. But this attitude of acceptance, which is essential in all therapy, must not dull the artist's capacity for discrimination. The teacher has to preserve her integrity genuine, between blocks and limitations, regressions and progress, superficial pretense and genuine communication. Even though my therapeutic approach includes awareness of psychic processes that may remain unconscious, the therapeutic maneuvers I am apt to employ seldom include uncovering unconscious material or the interpretation of unconscious meaning. Art therapy is conceived primarily as a means of supporting the ego. It harnesses the power of art to the task of fostering a psychic organization that is sufficiently resilient to function under pressure without breakdown or the need to resort to stultifying defensive measures. Thus conceived, art therapy constitutes an element of the therapeutic milieu that complements or supports psychotherapy but does not replace it. While art therapists encourage unconventional form and content in the art of their patients they are also intent on fostering artistic eloquence. The spoken words in psychotherapy and the play and talk in clinical therapy are typically formless and fluid. Content rather than form is essential. In art therapy form and content are equally important and the order and structure with which artistic creation endows experience constitutes a powerful aid in sorting out and mastering experience. To quote of art Susan Langer (1962): 'The primary function of art is to objectify experience so that we can contemplate and understand it' (p.90)." (source: Edith Kramer website) Provenance: private Denver, Colorado, USA collection SHIPPING: We coordinate worldwide shipping in-house through specialist international forwarders experienced with fine art and antiquities customs manifests. International buyers must confirm, prior to bidding, that their country's customs authority will accept the item. All duties, taxes, clearance fees, and any costs arising from customs delays, seizures, re-export, returns, or loss in transit are the buyer's sole responsibility. Artemis assumes no liability for items refused entry, detained, or lost after export. We cannot ship ancient items to their country of origin (Egyptian to Egypt, Greek to Greece, etc.). PAYMENT EXCEPTION: For clients not previously established with Artemis, payment for all gold, precious metal, and gemstone lots must be made by bank wire transfer or certified bank check/money order, without exception. Item # 196993
Edith Kramer (Austrian born American, 1916-2014). "Moonlit Woods, Vermont" oil on canvas, 1971. Signed and dated at lower right. Titled and dated on verso. Inscribed "Night Painting" on top edge. Bathed in the cool hush of nocturnal light, Edith Kramer's "Moonlit Woods, Vermont" evokes the mystery and quiet pulse of the natural world after dark. Painted directly under moonlight - as the artist's inscription suggests - the work captures the Vermont forest not as a static scene, but as a living, breathing presence. Swaths of muted violet, blue-gray, and deep green coalesce into rhythmic abstractions of foliage and shadow, suggesting the movement of leaves in a whispering wind. The composition reveals Kramer's mastery of tonal subtlety and emotional restraint. Her Bauhaus-influenced training under Friedl Dicker and the color theories of Johannes Itten resonate here in the painting's carefully balanced contrasts of darkness and luminosity. Size of painting: 29.75" W x 35.75" H (75.6 cm x 90.8 cm); of frame: 30.75" W x 36.5" H (78.1 cm x 92.7 cm) The forest's obscurity becomes a psychological landscape - an inward space of reflection and transformation. Created during a period when Kramer was deepening her exploration of art's therapeutic power, "Moonlit Woods, Vermont" embodies her belief that art could transmute emotion into order and clarity. The painting's meditative brushwork mirrors the act of self-regulation she saw as central to both creation and healing. Its stillness is not the absence of life but a moment of suspended perception - a visual counterpart to the quiet mental states art can produce. With its layered atmosphere and restrained palette, "Moonlit Woods, Vermont" stands as both a study in nocturnal color and a personal testament to Kramer's lifelong conviction that art, like nature, is a means of restoring balance between the inner and outer worlds. About the Artist: Edith Kramer was born in Vienna, Austria in 1916. Her exploration of art began at the age of 13 when Kramer took classes with Friedl Dicker, a graduate of the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. Kramer was greatly influenced by the theories of Bauhaus artist Johannes Itten who developed the preliminary Bauhaus course from 1919 to 1922. After Kramer graduated from Realgymnasium, Vienna in 1934 , she followed Dicker to Prague to continue her studies. Perhaps even more impactful was the time she spent assisting Dicker in teaching art to the children of political refugees. Fearing the Nazi invasion, Kramer sought refuge in the United States. She arrived in New York City in 1938, and taught sculpture at the Little Red School House, one of the city's first progressive schools. During WWII, Kramer worked in a machine shop in Soho. This experience resonated with her Bauhaus education and presented an opportunity to sketch and paint sitters in industrial settings. In addition to being a painter, Kramer was a sculptor, a printmaker, a collage maker, a mosaicist, a professor, and a founder of the Art Therapy movement. Kramer is perhaps best known for her work as a pioneer in the field of Art Therapy. In 1971 she was part of the team that established an Art Therapy program at George Washington University, and she created the graduate program in Art Therapy at New York University in 1973. With her training in art, art education, as well as psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy, Kramer believed that negative emotions and thoughts could be transformed and rechanneled into productive energy through art. She and fellow pioneer Margaret Naumburg set out to champion the new field of Art Therapy. Kramer also believed that art therapists should create their own art in order to deal with the stress and exhaustion of clinical work, so she continued to create her own art. The following is Kramer's statement about art therapy: "I perceive myself as a specialist who combines the general qualifications of being a competent artist with specialized capacities in the field of psychotherapy and education. The theoretical framework of my understanding of child psychology is based in the main on Freudian psychoanalytic thought. The emphasis, however, is on the idea of art as therapy rather than on psychotherapy which uses art as a tool. My therapeutic medium is as old as mankind. Since human society has existed the arts have helped man to reconcile the eternal conflict between the individual's instinctual urges and the demands of society. Thus, all art is therapeutic in the broadest sense of the word. The artist who applies modern psychology in the field of art has to adapt his methods to the medium so that the therapeutic value of art is heightened by the introduction of therapeutic thinking, not destroyed or weakened by the introduction of concepts and methods that might be incompatible with the inner laws of artistic creation. It is not always easy for the art therapist to reconcile the therapist's approach with her function as an artist and teacher. In her function as a teacher who introduces disturbed children or adults into the realms of art, she has to be ready to accept the limitations of the individuals in her care. She has to be interested in progress on any level. She has to be flexible enough to accept and understand a diversity of styles and to find ways of helping each person according to his individual needs. As therapist she has to accept the unbeautiful manifestations of sexual and aggressive impulses in the raw, along with the results of confusions and incomplete sublimation. But this attitude of acceptance, which is essential in all therapy, must not dull the artist's capacity for discrimination. The teacher has to preserve her integrity genuine, between blocks and limitations, regressions and progress, superficial pretense and genuine communication. Even though my therapeutic approach includes awareness of psychic processes that may remain unconscious, the therapeutic maneuvers I am apt to employ seldom include uncovering unconscious material or the interpretation of unconscious meaning. Art therapy is conceived primarily as a means of supporting the ego. It harnesses the power of art to the task of fostering a psychic organization that is sufficiently resilient to function under pressure without breakdown or the need to resort to stultifying defensive measures. Thus conceived, art therapy constitutes an element of the therapeutic milieu that complements or supports psychotherapy but does not replace it. While art therapists encourage unconventional form and content in the art of their patients they are also intent on fostering artistic eloquence. The spoken words in psychotherapy and the play and talk in clinical therapy are typically formless and fluid. Content rather than form is essential. In art therapy form and content are equally important and the order and structure with which artistic creation endows experience constitutes a powerful aid in sorting out and mastering experience. To quote of art Susan Langer (1962): 'The primary function of art is to objectify experience so that we can contemplate and understand it' (p.90)." (source: Edith Kramer website) Provenance: private Denver, Colorado, USA collection SHIPPING: We coordinate worldwide shipping in-house through specialist international forwarders experienced with fine art and antiquities customs manifests. International buyers must confirm, prior to bidding, that their country's customs authority will accept the item. All duties, taxes, clearance fees, and any costs arising from customs delays, seizures, re-export, returns, or loss in transit are the buyer's sole responsibility. Artemis assumes no liability for items refused entry, detained, or lost after export. We cannot ship ancient items to their country of origin (Egyptian to Egypt, Greek to Greece, etc.). PAYMENT EXCEPTION: For clients not previously established with Artemis, payment for all gold, precious metal, and gemstone lots must be made by bank wire transfer or certified bank check/money order, without exception. Item # 196995
Edith Kramer (Austrian born American, 1916-2014). Untitled (pipes). Pencil and colored pencil drawing on paper, n.d. Unsigned.. A delicately observed study of industrial plumbing rendered in graphite with washes of pale colored pencil on paper, the composition arranging a tangle of horizontal pipes, valves, gauges, and overhead conduit into a quiet architectural rhythm. The artist's line is searching rather than declarative, building form through careful repetition and tonal accents of blue, green, and rust. Edith Kramer (1916-2014), Vienna-born painter and pioneering art therapist, emigrated to the United States in 1938 and spent decades teaching and working between studios in New York and Grundlsee, Austria. Her drawings of mechanical and architectural subjects, often executed in factories, boiler rooms, and industrial interiors, reveal her abiding interest in the dignity of labor and the visual logic of working environments, themes that paralleled her therapeutic practice with children and her commitment to art as a humanizing discipline. Unsigned, in keeping with many sheets that remained in her studio.. 19" W x 25" H (48.3 cm W x 63.5 cm H). About the artist: "Edith Kramer was born in Vienna, Austria in 1916. Her exploration of art began at the age of 13 when Kramer took classes with Friedl Dicker, a graduate of the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. Kramer was greatly influenced by the theories of Bauhaus artist Johannes Itten who developed the preliminary Bauhaus course from 1919 to 1922. After Kramer graduated from Realgymnasium, Vienna in 1934 , she followed Dicker to Prague to continue her studies. Perhaps even more impactful was the time she spent assisting Dicker in teaching art to the children of political refugees. Fearing the Nazi invasion, Kramer sought refuge in the United States. She arrived in New York City in 1938, and taught sculpture at the Little Red School House, one of the city's first progressive schools. During WWII, Kramer worked in a machine shop in Soho. This experience resonated with her Bauhaus education and presented an opportunity to sketch and paint sitters in industrial settings. In addition to being a painter, Kramer was a sculptor, a printmaker, a collage maker, a mosaicist, a professor, and a founder of the Art Therapy movement. Kramer is perhaps best known for her work as a pioneer in the field of Art Therapy. In 1971 she was part of the team that established an Art Therapy program at George Washington University, and she created the graduate program in Art Therapy at New York University in 1973. With her training in art, art education, as well as psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy, Kramer believed that negative emotions and thoughts could be transformed and rechanneled into productive energy through art. She and fellow pioneer Margaret Naumburg set out to champion the new field of Art Therapy. Kramer also believed that art therapists should create their own art in order to deal with the stress and exhaustion of clinical work, so she continued to create her own art. The following is Kramer's statement about art therapy: "I perceive myself as a specialist who combines the general qualifications of being a competent artist with specialized capacities in the field of psychotherapy and education. The theoretical framework of my understanding of child psychology is based in the main on Freudian psychoanalytic thought. The emphasis, however, is on the idea of art as therapy rather than on psychotherapy which uses art as a tool. My therapeutic medium is as old as mankind. Since human society has existed the arts have helped man to reconcile the eternal conflict between the individual's instinctual urges and the demands of society. Thus, all art is therapeutic in the broadest sense of the word. The artist who applies modern psychology in the field of art has to adapt his methods to the medium so that the therapeutic value of art is heightened by the introduction of therapeutic thinking, not destroyed or weakened by the introduction of concepts and methods that might be incompatible with the inner laws of artistic creation. It is not always easy for the art therapist to reconcile the therapist's approach with her function as an artist and teacher. In her function as a teacher who introduces disturbed children or adults into the realms of art, she has to be ready to accept the limitations of the individuals in her care. She has to be interested in progress on any level. She has to be flexible enough to accept and understand a diversity of styles and to find ways of helping each person according to his individual needs. As therapist she has to accept the unbeautiful manifestations of sexual and aggressive impulses in the raw, along with the results of confusions and incomplete sublimation. But this attitude of acceptance, which is essential in all therapy, must not dull the artist's capacity for discrimination. The teacher has to preserve her integrity genuine, between blocks and limitations, regressions and progress, superficial pretense and genuine communication. Even though my therapeutic approach includes awareness of psychic processes that may remain unconscious, the therapeutic maneuvers I am apt to employ seldom include uncovering unconscious material or the interpretation of unconscious meaning. Art therapy is conceived primarily as a means of supporting the ego. It harnesses the power of art to the task of fostering a psychic organization that is sufficiently resilient to function under pressure without breakdown or the need to resort to stultifying defensive measures. Thus conceived, art therapy constitutes an element of the therapeutic milieu that complements or supports psychotherapy but does not replace it. While art therapists encourage unconventional form and content in the art of their patients they are also intent on fostering artistic eloquence. The spoken words in psychotherapy and the play and talk in clinical therapy are typically formless and fluid. Content rather than form is essential. In art therapy form and content are equally important and the order and structure with which artistic creation endows experience constitutes a powerful aid in sorting out and mastering experience. To quote of art Susan Langer (1962): 'The primary function of art is to objectify experience so that we can contemplate and understand it' (p.90)." (source: Edith Kramer website) Provenance: private Denver, Colorado, USA collection SHIPPING: We coordinate worldwide shipping in-house through specialist international forwarders experienced with fine art and antiquities customs manifests. International buyers must confirm, prior to bidding, that their country's customs authority will accept the item. All duties, taxes, clearance fees, and any costs arising from customs delays, seizures, re-export, returns, or loss in transit are the buyer's sole responsibility. Artemis assumes no liability for items refused entry, detained, or lost after export. We cannot ship ancient items to their country of origin (Egyptian to Egypt, Greek to Greece, etc.). PAYMENT EXCEPTION: For clients not previously established with Artemis, payment for all gold, precious metal, and gemstone lots must be made by bank wire transfer or certified bank check/money order, without exception. Item # 197009
Edith Kramer (Austrian born American, 1916-2014). Ocean and Rocks, Maine. Lithograph on paper, 1962. Hand-signed and dated in pencil at lower right beneath print. A bracing Atlantic wind seems to move through this finely worked engraving, where the rocky coast of Maine rises in sharp, faceted planes against a wide, restless sea. Kramer builds the scene through disciplined crosshatching and dense, angular mark-making, carving light and shadow into the stone as if the shoreline itself were a kind of architecture. In the distance, the horizon stretches calm and spare, while closer in the water churns and pulls around the outcroppings, its surface rendered with quick, looping strokes that suggest tide, foam, and motion. The contrast between the measured structure of the rocks and the shifting energy of the ocean gives the composition its quiet drama. Size of print: 7" W x 5.25" H (17.8 cm x 13.3 cm); of paper: 15" W x 10.5" H (38.1 cm x 26.7 cm) Created in 1962, the print reflects Kramer's Bauhaus-rooted sensitivity to form and design, translated here into a landscape that feels both observed and distilled. It is an image of Maine not as postcard scenery, but as something elemental: weathered, rhythmic, and enduring, with the sea doing what it has always done, patiently reshaping the world one wave at a time. About the artist: "Edith Kramer was born in Vienna, Austria in 1916. Her exploration of art began at the age of 13 when Kramer took classes with Friedl Dicker, a graduate of the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. Kramer was greatly influenced by the theories of Bauhaus artist Johannes Itten who developed the preliminary Bauhaus course from 1919 to 1922. After Kramer graduated from Realgymnasium, Vienna in 1934 , she followed Dicker to Prague to continue her studies. Perhaps even more impactful was the time she spent assisting Dicker in teaching art to the children of political refugees. Fearing the Nazi invasion, Kramer sought refuge in the United States. She arrived in New York City in 1938, and taught sculpture at the Little Red School House, one of the city's first progressive schools. During WWII, Kramer worked in a machine shop in Soho. This experience resonated with her Bauhaus education and presented an opportunity to sketch and paint sitters in industrial settings. In addition to being a painter, Kramer was a sculptor, a printmaker, a collage maker, a mosaicist, a professor, and a founder of the Art Therapy movement. Kramer is perhaps best known for her work as a pioneer in the field of Art Therapy. In 1971 she was part of the team that established an Art Therapy program at George Washington University, and she created the graduate program in Art Therapy at New York University in 1973. With her training in art, art education, as well as psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy, Kramer believed that negative emotions and thoughts could be transformed and rechanneled into productive energy through art. She and fellow pioneer Margaret Naumburg set out to champion the new field of Art Therapy. Kramer also believed that art therapists should create their own art in order to deal with the stress and exhaustion of clinical work, so she continued to create her own art. The following is Kramer's statement about art therapy: "I perceive myself as a specialist who combines the general qualifications of being a competent artist with specialized capacities in the field of psychotherapy and education. The theoretical framework of my understanding of child psychology is based in the main on Freudian psychoanalytic thought. The emphasis, however, is on the idea of art as therapy rather than on psychotherapy which uses art as a tool. My therapeutic medium is as old as mankind. Since human society has existed the arts have helped man to reconcile the eternal conflict between the individual's instinctual urges and the demands of society. Thus, all art is therapeutic in the broadest sense of the word. The artist who applies modern psychology in the field of art has to adapt his methods to the medium so that the therapeutic value of art is heightened by the introduction of therapeutic thinking, not destroyed or weakened by the introduction of concepts and methods that might be incompatible with the inner laws of artistic creation. It is not always easy for the art therapist to reconcile the therapist's approach with her function as an artist and teacher. In her function as a teacher who introduces disturbed children or adults into the realms of art, she has to be ready to accept the limitations of the individuals in her care. She has to be interested in progress on any level. She has to be flexible enough to accept and understand a diversity of styles and to find ways of helping each person according to his individual needs. As therapist she has to accept the unbeautiful manifestations of sexual and aggressive impulses in the raw, along with the results of confusions and incomplete sublimation. But this attitude of acceptance, which is essential in all therapy, must not dull the artist's capacity for discrimination. The teacher has to preserve her integrity genuine, between blocks and limitations, regressions and progress, superficial pretense and genuine communication. Even though my therapeutic approach includes awareness of psychic processes that may remain unconscious, the therapeutic maneuvers I am apt to employ seldom include uncovering unconscious material or the interpretation of unconscious meaning. Art therapy is conceived primarily as a means of supporting the ego. It harnesses the power of art to the task of fostering a psychic organization that is sufficiently resilient to function under pressure without breakdown or the need to resort to stultifying defensive measures. Thus conceived, art therapy constitutes an element of the therapeutic milieu that complements or supports psychotherapy but does not replace it. While art therapists encourage unconventional form and content in the art of their patients they are also intent on fostering artistic eloquence. The spoken words in psychotherapy and the play and talk in clinical therapy are typically formless and fluid. Content rather than form is essential. In art therapy form and content are equally important and the order and structure with which artistic creation endows experience constitutes a powerful aid in sorting out and mastering experience. To quote of art Susan Langer (1962): 'The primary function of art is to objectify experience so that we can contemplate and understand it' (p.90)." (source: Edith Kramer website) Provenance: private Denver, Colorado, USA collection SHIPPING: We coordinate worldwide shipping in-house through specialist international forwarders experienced with fine art and antiquities customs manifests. International buyers must confirm, prior to bidding, that their country's customs authority will accept the item. All duties, taxes, clearance fees, and any costs arising from customs delays, seizures, re-export, returns, or loss in transit are the buyer's sole responsibility. Artemis assumes no liability for items refused entry, detained, or lost after export. We cannot ship ancient items to their country of origin (Egyptian to Egypt, Greek to Greece, etc.). PAYMENT EXCEPTION: For clients not previously established with Artemis, payment for all gold, precious metal, and gemstone lots must be made by bank wire transfer or certified bank check/money order, without exception. Item # 197429
Edith Kramer (Austrian born American, 1916-2014). "Rock & Sea, Cranberry" oil on linen, 1968. Signed and dated at lower right and again with title on verso. Signature on verso is in pencil with title in ink over it. A brooding coastal meditation, this painting captures the granite outcrops and restless waters of the Cranberry Isles off the coast of Maine, where land and sea lock into a slow, elemental argument. Kramer renders the shoreline not as a postcard view but as a physical encounter - slabs of rock press forward, fractured and weighty, while the sea surges and recoils in thick, smoky strokes. The composition feels compressed and intimate, as if the viewer stands at the edge of the tide, watching weather and stone negotiate their boundaries. The palette is restrained and moody: deep umbers, slate grays, muted greens, and flashes of pale surf that flicker like breath against the darker mass of rock. Size of painting: 44" W x 22" H (111.8 cm x 55.9 cm); of frame: 44.5" W x 22.5" H (113 cm x 57.2 cm) Kramer builds the surface with confident, structural brushwork, allowing planes of color to interlock and dissolve. Forms emerge and recede without hard outlines, giving the scene a sense of perpetual motion, as though the coast itself were thinking. Painted in 1968, this work reflects Kramer's mature approach to landscape, shaped by her Bauhaus training and her lifelong belief in form as a means of ordering experience. The rugged Maine coast becomes a place of psychological as well as physical resonance - solid yet unstable, calm yet charged. "Rock & Sea, Cranberry" is less about describing a specific view than about embodying the enduring tension between permanence and change, a theme that runs quietly but insistently through Kramer's art. About the artist: "Edith Kramer was born in Vienna, Austria in 1916. Her exploration of art began at the age of 13 when Kramer took classes with Friedl Dicker, a graduate of the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. Kramer was greatly influenced by the theories of Bauhaus artist Johannes Itten who developed the preliminary Bauhaus course from 1919 to 1922. After Kramer graduated from Realgymnasium, Vienna in 1934 , she followed Dicker to Prague to continue her studies. Perhaps even more impactful was the time she spent assisting Dicker in teaching art to the children of political refugees. Fearing the Nazi invasion, Kramer sought refuge in the United States. She arrived in New York City in 1938, and taught sculpture at the Little Red School House, one of the city's first progressive schools. During WWII, Kramer worked in a machine shop in Soho. This experience resonated with her Bauhaus education and presented an opportunity to sketch and paint sitters in industrial settings. In addition to being a painter, Kramer was a sculptor, a printmaker, a collage maker, a mosaicist, a professor, and a founder of the Art Therapy movement. Kramer is perhaps best known for her work as a pioneer in the field of Art Therapy. In 1971 she was part of the team that established an Art Therapy program at George Washington University, and she created the graduate program in Art Therapy at New York University in 1973. With her training in art, art education, as well as psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy, Kramer believed that negative emotions and thoughts could be transformed and rechanneled into productive energy through art. She and fellow pioneer Margaret Naumburg set out to champion the new field of Art Therapy. Kramer also believed that art therapists should create their own art in order to deal with the stress and exhaustion of clinical work, so she continued to create her own art. The following is Kramer's statement about art therapy: "I perceive myself as a specialist who combines the general qualifications of being a competent artist with specialized capacities in the field of psychotherapy and education. The theoretical framework of my understanding of child psychology is based in the main on Freudian psychoanalytic thought. The emphasis, however, is on the idea of art as therapy rather than on psychotherapy which uses art as a tool. My therapeutic medium is as old as mankind. Since human society has existed the arts have helped man to reconcile the eternal conflict between the individual's instinctual urges and the demands of society. Thus, all art is therapeutic in the broadest sense of the word. The artist who applies modern psychology in the field of art has to adapt his methods to the medium so that the therapeutic value of art is heightened by the introduction of therapeutic thinking, not destroyed or weakened by the introduction of concepts and methods that might be incompatible with the inner laws of artistic creation. It is not always easy for the art therapist to reconcile the therapist's approach with her function as an artist and teacher. In her function as a teacher who introduces disturbed children or adults into the realms of art, she has to be ready to accept the limitations of the individuals in her care. She has to be interested in progress on any level. She has to be flexible enough to accept and understand a diversity of styles and to find ways of helping each person according to his individual needs. As therapist she has to accept the unbeautiful manifestations of sexual and aggressive impulses in the raw, along with the results of confusions and incomplete sublimation. But this attitude of acceptance, which is essential in all therapy, must not dull the artist's capacity for discrimination. The teacher has to preserve her integrity genuine, between blocks and limitations, regressions and progress, superficial pretense and genuine communication. Even though my therapeutic approach includes awareness of psychic processes that may remain unconscious, the therapeutic maneuvers I am apt to employ seldom include uncovering unconscious material or the interpretation of unconscious meaning. Art therapy is conceived primarily as a means of supporting the ego. It harnesses the power of art to the task of fostering a psychic organization that is sufficiently resilient to function under pressure without breakdown or the need to resort to stultifying defensive measures. Thus conceived, art therapy constitutes an element of the therapeutic milieu that complements or supports psychotherapy but does not replace it. While art therapists encourage unconventional form and content in the art of their patients they are also intent on fostering artistic eloquence. The spoken words in psychotherapy and the play and talk in clinical therapy are typically formless and fluid. Content rather than form is essential. In art therapy form and content are equally important and the order and structure with which artistic creation endows experience constitutes a powerful aid in sorting out and mastering experience. To quote of art Susan Langer (1962): 'The primary function of art is to objectify experience so that we can contemplate and understand it' (p.90)." (source: Edith Kramer website) Provenance: private Denver, Colorado, USA collection SHIPPING: We coordinate worldwide shipping in-house through specialist international forwarders experienced with fine art and antiquities customs manifests. International buyers must confirm, prior to bidding, that their country's customs authority will accept the item. All duties, taxes, clearance fees, and any costs arising from customs delays, seizures, re-export, returns, or loss in transit are the buyer's sole responsibility. Artemis assumes no liability for items refused entry, detained, or lost after export. We cannot ship ancient items to their country of origin (Egyptian to Egypt, Greek to Greece, etc.). PAYMENT EXCEPTION: For clients not previously established with Artemis, payment for all gold, precious metal, and gemstone lots must be made by bank wire transfer or certified bank check/money order, without exception. Item # 197000
Edith Kramer (Austrian born American, 1916-2014). "Rooftops in the Rain" ink drawing on paper, 1945. Dated at lower right and titled on verso. A rain-soaked city rises in fractured planes and urgent lines in "Rooftops in the Rain," Edith Kramer's 1945 ink drawing of New York City seen from above. Chimneys, parapets, and flat roofs stack and intersect in a dense urban lattice, their edges blurred and sharpened in equal measure by falling rain and restless motion. The city feels compressed and alive, as if the weather itself were pressing down on the architecture. Kramer constructs the scene through vigorous, overlapping strokes of black ink, allowing structure to emerge from accumulation rather than outline. Crosshatching thickens into shadowed blocks, while slashing diagonals suggest slick surfaces, runoff, and the relentless rhythm of rain. Perspective shifts subtly across the composition, refusing a single stable viewpoint and instead mirroring the disorientation and energy of the city during the wartime years. Size: 29" W x 20" H (73.7 cm x 50.8 cm) The drawing reflects Kramer's Bauhaus-influenced approach to form and spatial organization, where geometry and expression are inseparable. Rooftops become abstracted volumes, reduced to their essential relationships of mass, line, and pressure, yet the scene never loses its specificity. Firewalls, vents, and water-darkened surfaces remain unmistakably New York, observed with the clarity of someone who knew the city intimately and worked within its industrial pulse. Created during Kramer's early years in the United States, "Rooftops in the Rain" captures an urban moment that is both external and psychological. The rain binds the city together, flattening distance and softening edges, while the assertive mark-making speaks to resilience and forward momentum. It is a drawing that holds tension between order and turbulence, structure and flux, rendering the city not as spectacle, but as lived experience. About the artist: Edith Kramer was born in Vienna, Austria in 1916. Her exploration of art began at the age of 13 when Kramer took classes with Friedl Dicker, a graduate of the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. Kramer was greatly influenced by the theories of Bauhaus artist Johannes Itten who developed the preliminary Bauhaus course from 1919 to 1922. After Kramer graduated from Realgymnasium, Vienna in 1934 , she followed Dicker to Prague to continue her studies. Perhaps even more impactful was the time she spent assisting Dicker in teaching art to the children of political refugees. Fearing the Nazi invasion, Kramer sought refuge in the United States. She arrived in New York City in 1938, and taught sculpture at the Little Red School House, one of the city's first progressive schools. During WWII, Kramer worked in a machine shop in Soho. This experience resonated with her Bauhaus education and presented an opportunity to sketch and paint sitters in industrial settings. In addition to being a painter, Kramer was a sculptor, a printmaker, a collage maker, a mosaicist, a professor, and a founder of the Art Therapy movement. Kramer is perhaps best known for her work as a pioneer in the field of Art Therapy. In 1971 she was part of the team that established an Art Therapy program at George Washington University, and she created the graduate program in Art Therapy at New York University in 1973. With her training in art, art education, as well as psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy, Kramer believed that negative emotions and thoughts could be transformed and rechanneled into productive energy through art. She and fellow pioneer Margaret Naumburg set out to champion the new field of Art Therapy. Kramer also believed that art therapists should create their own art in order to deal with the stress and exhaustion of clinical work, so she continued to create her own art. The following is Kramer's statement about art therapy: "I perceive myself as a specialist who combines the general qualifications of being a competent artist with specialized capacities in the field of psychotherapy and education. The theoretical framework of my understanding of child psychology is based in the main on Freudian psychoanalytic thought. The emphasis, however, is on the idea of art as therapy rather than on psychotherapy which uses art as a tool. My therapeutic medium is as old as mankind. Since human society has existed the arts have helped man to reconcile the eternal conflict between the individual's instinctual urges and the demands of society. Thus, all art is therapeutic in the broadest sense of the word. The artist who applies modern psychology in the field of art has to adapt his methods to the medium so that the therapeutic value of art is heightened by the introduction of therapeutic thinking, not destroyed or weakened by the introduction of concepts and methods that might be incompatible with the inner laws of artistic creation. It is not always easy for the art therapist to reconcile the therapist's approach with her function as an artist and teacher. In her function as a teacher who introduces disturbed children or adults into the realms of art, she has to be ready to accept the limitations of the individuals in her care. She has to be interested in progress on any level. She has to be flexible enough to accept and understand a diversity of styles and to find ways of helping each person according to his individual needs. As therapist she has to accept the unbeautiful manifestations of sexual and aggressive impulses in the raw, along with the results of confusions and incomplete sublimation. But this attitude of acceptance, which is essential in all therapy, must not dull the artist's capacity for discrimination. The teacher has to preserve her integrity genuine, between blocks and limitations, regressions and progress, superficial pretense and genuine communication. Even though my therapeutic approach includes awareness of psychic processes that may remain unconscious, the therapeutic maneuvers I am apt to employ seldom include uncovering unconscious material or the interpretation of unconscious meaning. Art therapy is conceived primarily as a means of supporting the ego. It harnesses the power of art to the task of fostering a psychic organization that is sufficiently resilient to function under pressure without breakdown or the need to resort to stultifying defensive measures. Thus conceived, art therapy constitutes an element of the therapeutic milieu that complements or supports psychotherapy but does not replace it. While art therapists encourage unconventional form and content in the art of their patients they are also intent on fostering artistic eloquence. The spoken words in psychotherapy and the play and talk in clinical therapy are typically formless and fluid. Content rather than form is essential. In art therapy form and content are equally important and the order and structure with which artistic creation endows experience constitutes a powerful aid in sorting out and mastering experience. To quote of art Susan Langer (1962): 'The primary function of art is to objectify experience so that we can contemplate and understand it' (p.90)." (source: Edith Kramer website) Provenance: private Denver, Colorado, USA collection SHIPPING: We coordinate worldwide shipping in-house through specialist international forwarders experienced with fine art and antiquities customs manifests. International buyers must confirm, prior to bidding, that their country's customs authority will accept the item. All duties, taxes, clearance fees, and any costs arising from customs delays, seizures, re-export, returns, or loss in transit are the buyer's sole responsibility. Artemis assumes no liability for items refused entry, detained, or lost after export. We cannot ship ancient items to their country of origin (Egyptian to Egypt, Greek to Greece, etc.). PAYMENT EXCEPTION: For clients not previously established with Artemis, payment for all gold, precious metal, and gemstone lots must be made by bank wire transfer or certified bank check/money order, without exception. Item # 197011
Edith Kramer (Austrian born American, 1916-2014). "Exposed Exterior" oil on linen, 1960. Signed and dated in black pigment at lower right. "Exposed Exterior" is a powerful painting by Edith Kramer, an accomplished Austrian-born artist as well as an important pioneer of the art therapy profession. The composition captures the effects of Robert Moses's massive demolition of entire neighborhoods in Brooklyn, New York which displaced communities to construct the Brooklyn Queens Expressway (BQE). While some communities engaged in successful resistence, many working class neighborhoods like Red Hook and Cobble Hill were dramatically impacted. In this painting Kramer made a poignant visual rebuttal to Urban Renewal's destruction of homes in mid century America. All is rendered with Kramer's expressive, loose brushwork in warm earthtones and shades of blue. Size: 26" L x 17" W (66 cm x 43.2 cm) About the Artist: Edith Kramer was born in Vienna, Austria in 1916. Her exploration of art began at the age of 13 when Kramer took classes with Friedl Dicker, a graduate of the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. Kramer was greatly influenced by the theories of Bauhaus artist Johannes Itten who developed the preliminary Bauhaus course from 1919 to 1922. After Kramer graduated from Realgymnasium, Vienna in 1934 , she followed Dicker to Prague to continue her studies. Perhaps even more impactful was the time she spent assisting Dicker in teaching art to the children of political refugees. Fearing the Nazi invasion, Kramer sought refuge in the United States. She arrived in New York City in 1938, and taught sculpture at the Little Red School House, one of the city's first progressive schools. During WWII, Kramer worked in a machine shop in Soho. This experience resonated with her Bauhaus education and presented an opportunity to sketch and paint sitters in industrial settings. In addition to being a painter, Kramer was a sculptor, a printmaker, a collage maker, a mosaicist, a professor, and a founder of the Art Therapy movement. Kramer is perhaps best known for her work as a pioneer in the field of Art Therapy. In 1971 she was part of the team that established an Art Therapy program at George Washington University, and she created the graduate program in Art Therapy at New York University in 1973. With her training in art, art education, as well as psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy, Kramer believed that negative emotions and thoughts could be transformed and rechanneled into productive energy through art. She and fellow pioneer Margaret Naumburg set out to champion the new field of Art Therapy. Kramer also believed that art therapists should create their own art in order to deal with the stress and exhaustion of clinical work, so she continued to create her own art. The following is Kramer's statement about art therapy: "I perceive myself as a specialist who combines the general qualifications of being a competent artist with specialized capacities in the field of psychotherapy and education. The theoretical framework of my understanding of child psychology is based in the main on Freudian psychoanalytic thought. The emphasis, however, is on the idea of art as therapy rather than on psychotherapy which uses art as a tool. My therapeutic medium is as old as mankind. Since human society has existed the arts have helped man to reconcile the eternal conflict between the individual's instinctual urges and the demands of society. Thus, all art is therapeutic in the broadest sense of the word. The artist who applies modern psychology in the field of art has to adapt his methods to the medium so that the therapeutic value of art is heightened by the introduction of therapeutic thinking, not destroyed or weakened by the introduction of concepts and methods that might be incompatible with the inner laws of artistic creation. It is not always easy for the art therapist to reconcile the therapist's approach with her function as an artist and teacher. In her function as a teacher who introduces disturbed children or adults into the realms of art, she has to be ready to accept the limitations of the individuals in her care. She has to be interested in progress on any level. She has to be flexible enough to accept and understand a diversity of styles and to find ways of helping each person according to his individual needs. As therapist she has to accept the unbeautiful manifestations of sexual and aggressive impulses in the raw, along with the results of confusions and incomplete sublimation. But this attitude of acceptance, which is essential in all therapy, must not dull the artist's capacity for discrimination. The teacher has to preserve her integrity genuine, between blocks and limitations, regressions and progress, superficial pretense and genuine communication. Even though my therapeutic approach includes awareness of psychic processes that may remain unconscious, the therapeutic maneuvers I am apt to employ seldom include uncovering unconscious material or the interpretation of unconscious meaning. Art therapy is conceived primarily as a means of supporting the ego. It harnesses the power of art to the task of fostering a psychic organization that is sufficiently resilient to function under pressure without breakdown or the need to resort to stultifying defensive measures. Thus conceived, art therapy constitutes an element of the therapeutic milieu that complements or supports psychotherapy but does not replace it. While art therapists encourage unconventional form and content in the art of their patients they are also intent on fostering artistic eloquence. The spoken words in psychotherapy and the play and talk in clinical therapy are typically formless and fluid. Content rather than form is essential. In art therapy form and content are equally important and the order and structure with which artistic creation endows experience constitutes a powerful aid in sorting out and mastering experience. To quote of art Susan Langer (1962): 'The primary function of art is to objectify experience so that we can contemplate and understand it' (p.90)." (source: Edith Kramer website) Provenance: private Denver, Colorado, USA collection SHIPPING: We coordinate worldwide shipping in-house through specialist international forwarders experienced with fine art and antiquities customs manifests. International buyers must confirm, prior to bidding, that their country's customs authority will accept the item. All duties, taxes, clearance fees, and any costs arising from customs delays, seizures, re-export, returns, or loss in transit are the buyer's sole responsibility. Artemis assumes no liability for items refused entry, detained, or lost after export. We cannot ship ancient items to their country of origin (Egyptian to Egypt, Greek to Greece, etc.). PAYMENT EXCEPTION: For clients not previously established with Artemis, payment for all gold, precious metal, and gemstone lots must be made by bank wire transfer or certified bank check/money order, without exception. Item # 197002
Edith Kramer (Austrian born American, 1916-2014). "Tanks und Graser" (Tanks and Grasses) oil on linen, 1990. Signed and dated at lower right and again with title on verso. A windswept field of grasses fills the foreground, their slender blades bending and crossing like quick, nervous lines of thought, while the horizon settles into the unmistakable geometry of industry. Painted from life in the Meadowlands of New Jersey, not far from JFK Airport, "Tanks und Graser" or "Tanks and Grasses" captures a landscape where wetlands and infrastructure exist in an uneasy but enduring truce. Kramer worked plein air, positioning herself amid the marsh grasses as storage tanks and industrial buildings hovered in the distance. The tanks do not dominate the scene. Instead, they sit low and restrained, softened by atmosphere and scale, allowing the vitality of the grasses to command the composition. Size: 40" W x 32" H (101.6 cm x 81.3 cm) Earthy browns, muted greens, and pale sky blues weave together in a palette that feels deliberate and grounded, attentive to the rhythms of the site rather than its spectacle. This quiet juxtaposition reflects Kramer's sustained interest in places where natural growth persists alongside systems of containment and control. The Meadowlands, with their fragile ecology and industrial proximity, offered an ideal setting for her exploration of balance, structure, and resilience. The grasses sway, adapt, and continue, while the tanks remain fixed, patient, and inert. Painted late in her career, the work reads as both observation and reflection. "Tanks und Graser" resists judgment or drama, favoring instead a steady, almost meditative attention. In this marshland view, Kramer allows nature and industry to share the frame, suggesting not conflict but coexistence, and finding in that coexistence a quiet, persistent beauty. About the Artist: "Edith Kramer was born in Vienna, Austria in 1916. Her exploration of art began at the age of 13 when Kramer took classes with Friedl Dicker, a graduate of the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. Kramer was greatly influenced by the theories of Bauhaus artist Johannes Itten who developed the preliminary Bauhaus course from 1919 to 1922. After Kramer graduated from Realgymnasium, Vienna in 1934 , she followed Dicker to Prague to continue her studies. Perhaps even more impactful was the time she spent assisting Dicker in teaching art to the children of political refugees. Fearing the Nazi invasion, Kramer sought refuge in the United States. She arrived in New York City in 1938, and taught sculpture at the Little Red School House, one of the city's first progressive schools. During WWII, Kramer worked in a machine shop in Soho. This experience resonated with her Bauhaus education and presented an opportunity to sketch and paint sitters in industrial settings. In addition to being a painter, Kramer was a sculptor, a printmaker, a collage maker, a mosaicist, a professor, and a founder of the Art Therapy movement. Kramer is perhaps best known for her work as a pioneer in the field of Art Therapy. In 1971 she was part of the team that established an Art Therapy program at George Washington University, and she created the graduate program in Art Therapy at New York University in 1973. With her training in art, art education, as well as psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy, Kramer believed that negative emotions and thoughts could be transformed and rechanneled into productive energy through art. She and fellow pioneer Margaret Naumburg set out to champion the new field of Art Therapy. Kramer also believed that art therapists should create their own art in order to deal with the stress and exhaustion of clinical work, so she continued to create her own art. The following is Kramer's statement about art therapy: "I perceive myself as a specialist who combines the general qualifications of being a competent artist with specialized capacities in the field of psychotherapy and education. The theoretical framework of my understanding of child psychology is based in the main on Freudian psychoanalytic thought. The emphasis, however, is on the idea of art as therapy rather than on psychotherapy which uses art as a tool. My therapeutic medium is as old as mankind. Since human society has existed the arts have helped man to reconcile the eternal conflict between the individual's instinctual urges and the demands of society. Thus, all art is therapeutic in the broadest sense of the word. The artist who applies modern psychology in the field of art has to adapt his methods to the medium so that the therapeutic value of art is heightened by the introduction of therapeutic thinking, not destroyed or weakened by the introduction of concepts and methods that might be incompatible with the inner laws of artistic creation. It is not always easy for the art therapist to reconcile the therapist's approach with her function as an artist and teacher. In her function as a teacher who introduces disturbed children or adults into the realms of art, she has to be ready to accept the limitations of the individuals in her care. She has to be interested in progress on any level. She has to be flexible enough to accept and understand a diversity of styles and to find ways of helping each person according to his individual needs. As therapist she has to accept the unbeautiful manifestations of sexual and aggressive impulses in the raw, along with the results of confusions and incomplete sublimation. But this attitude of acceptance, which is essential in all therapy, must not dull the artist's capacity for discrimination. The teacher has to preserve her integrity genuine, between blocks and limitations, regressions and progress, superficial pretense and genuine communication. Even though my therapeutic approach includes awareness of psychic processes that may remain unconscious, the therapeutic maneuvers I am apt to employ seldom include uncovering unconscious material or the interpretation of unconscious meaning. Art therapy is conceived primarily as a means of supporting the ego. It harnesses the power of art to the task of fostering a psychic organization that is sufficiently resilient to function under pressure without breakdown or the need to resort to stultifying defensive measures. Thus conceived, art therapy constitutes an element of the therapeutic milieu that complements or supports psychotherapy but does not replace it. While art therapists encourage unconventional form and content in the art of their patients they are also intent on fostering artistic eloquence. The spoken words in psychotherapy and the play and talk in clinical therapy are typically formless and fluid. Content rather than form is essential. In art therapy form and content are equally important and the order and structure with which artistic creation endows experience constitutes a powerful aid in sorting out and mastering experience. To quote of art Susan Langer (1962): 'The primary function of art is to objectify experience so that we can contemplate and understand it' (p.90)." (source: Edith Kramer website) Provenance: private Denver, Colorado, USA collection Notice: We coordinate worldwide shipping to most destinations, overseeing every detail in-house to guarantee a smooth and exceptional delivery experience. SHIPPING EXCEPTIONS: Due to customs clearance issues, we are unable to ship to Germany, Switzerland and Australia. If you live in Germany, Switzerland or Australia, you will need to provide an alternate shipping destination, or we will not be able to complete your purchase. In addition, please note that we are unable to ship ancient items back to the original country of origin (Egyptian to Egypt, Greek to Greece, etc.) PAYMENT EXCEPTION: For clients not previously established with Artemis, payment for all gold, precious metal, and gemstone lots is required via bank wire transfer or certified bank check/money order, without exception. Item # 196993
**Originally Listed At $300** Edith Kramer (Austrian born American, 1916-2014). "Bowery, New York" etching on paper, 1961. Number 9. Hand-signed, dated, and numbered in pencil beneath etching. A quietly powerful depiction of urban pause and human proximity, "Bowery, New York" captures a small group gathered within the compressed interior of a Bowery storefront or doorway, rendered with clarity, restraint, and psychological attentiveness. Four figures occupy the shallow space, seated or crouched close to the ground, their bodies angled inward as if drawn together by shared circumstance rather than conversation. Behind them, a metal security gate forms a rigid lattice, its repeating pattern pressing forward and enclosing the scene. Kramer organizes the composition with careful structural logic. Vertical bars, angled limbs, and the draped fabric above the figures create a rhythm of intersecting lines that stabilize the image while heightening its tension. Size of etching: 5.25" W x 4.75" H (13.3 cm x 12.1 cm); of paper: 9.5" W x 11" H (24.1 cm x 27.9 cm) The figures are individualized yet interconnected, each absorbed in their own posture or gesture, suggesting fatigue, waiting, or quiet endurance rather than overt drama. No single figure dominates. Instead, attention moves gently across the group, mirroring the slow, observational pace of street life. The etched line is confident but never heavy-handed. Kramer allows areas of openness to breathe, using restraint rather than contrast to convey mood. The architecture does not overwhelm the figures, yet it clearly shapes their experience, reinforcing the Bowery as both a physical and psychological environment. The scene feels observed rather than interpreted, offering presence without judgment. Dated 1961, this work reflects Kramer's sustained engagement with New York's social spaces and her belief in structure as a means of containing and understanding experience. "Bowery, New York" stands as a sensitive record of human stillness within the city's harder edges, transforming an everyday moment into a composed, empathetic study of shared urban life. About the artist: Edith Kramer was born in Vienna, Austria in 1916. Her exploration of art began at the age of 13 when Kramer took classes with Friedl Dicker, a graduate of the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. Kramer was greatly influenced by the theories of Bauhaus artist Johannes Itten who developed the preliminary Bauhaus course from 1919 to 1922. After Kramer graduated from Realgymnasium, Vienna in 1934 , she followed Dicker to Prague to continue her studies. Perhaps even more impactful was the time she spent assisting Dicker in teaching art to the children of political refugees. Fearing the Nazi invasion, Kramer sought refuge in the United States. She arrived in New York City in 1938, and taught sculpture at the Little Red School House, one of the city's first progressive schools. During WWII, Kramer worked in a machine shop in Soho. This experience resonated with her Bauhaus education and presented an opportunity to sketch and paint sitters in industrial settings. In addition to being a painter, Kramer was a sculptor, a printmaker, a collage maker, a mosaicist, a professor, and a founder of the Art Therapy movement. Kramer is perhaps best known for her work as a pioneer in the field of Art Therapy. In 1971 she was part of the team that established an Art Therapy program at George Washington University, and she created the graduate program in Art Therapy at New York University in 1973. With her training in art, art education, as well as psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy, Kramer believed that negative emotions and thoughts could be transformed and rechanneled into productive energy through art. She and fellow pioneer Margaret Naumburg set out to champion the new field of Art Therapy. Kramer also believed that art therapists should create their own art in order to deal with the stress and exhaustion of clinical work, so she continued to create her own art. The following is Kramer's statement about art therapy: "I perceive myself as a specialist who combines the general qualifications of being a competent artist with specialized capacities in the field of psychotherapy and education. The theoretical framework of my understanding of child psychology is based in the main on Freudian psychoanalytic thought. The emphasis, however, is on the idea of art as therapy rather than on psychotherapy which uses art as a tool. My therapeutic medium is as old as mankind. Since human society has existed the arts have helped man to reconcile the eternal conflict between the individual's instinctual urges and the demands of society. Thus, all art is therapeutic in the broadest sense of the word. The artist who applies modern psychology in the field of art has to adapt his methods to the medium so that the therapeutic value of art is heightened by the introduction of therapeutic thinking, not destroyed or weakened by the introduction of concepts and methods that might be incompatible with the inner laws of artistic creation. It is not always easy for the art therapist to reconcile the therapist's approach with her function as an artist and teacher. In her function as a teacher who introduces disturbed children or adults into the realms of art, she has to be ready to accept the limitations of the individuals in her care. She has to be interested in progress on any level. She has to be flexible enough to accept and understand a diversity of styles and to find ways of helping each person according to his individual needs. As therapist she has to accept the unbeautiful manifestations of sexual and aggressive impulses in the raw, along with the results of confusions and incomplete sublimation. But this attitude of acceptance, which is essential in all therapy, must not dull the artist's capacity for discrimination. The teacher has to preserve her integrity genuine, between blocks and limitations, regressions and progress, superficial pretense and genuine communication. Even though my therapeutic approach includes awareness of psychic processes that may remain unconscious, the therapeutic maneuvers I am apt to employ seldom include uncovering unconscious material or the interpretation of unconscious meaning. Art therapy is conceived primarily as a means of supporting the ego. It harnesses the power of art to the task of fostering a psychic organization that is sufficiently resilient to function under pressure without breakdown or the need to resort to stultifying defensive measures. Thus conceived, art therapy constitutes an element of the therapeutic milieu that complements or supports psychotherapy but does not replace it. While art therapists encourage unconventional form and content in the art of their patients they are also intent on fostering artistic eloquence. The spoken words in psychotherapy and the play and talk in clinical therapy are typically formless and fluid. Content rather than form is essential. In art therapy form and content are equally important and the order and structure with which artistic creation endows experience constitutes a powerful aid in sorting out and mastering experience. To quote of art Susan Langer (1962): 'The primary function of art is to objectify experience so that we can contemplate and understand it' Provenance: private Denver, Colorado, USA collection All items legal to buy/sell under U.S. Statute covering cultural patrimony Code 2600, CHAPTER 14, and are guaranteed to be as described or your money back. A Certificate of Authenticity will accompany all winning bids. We ship worldwide and handle all shipping in-house for your convenience. Please note that buyers are responsible for understanding and complying with the import regulations of their destination country. While we carefully prepare and document all shipments, we cannot be held responsible for customs delays, clearance issues, additional duties or taxes, or any seizure of property. In addition, please note that we are unable to ship ancient items back to the original country of origin (Egyptian to Egypt, Greek to Greece, etc.). PAYMENT EXCEPTION: Unless a known customer of Artemis, payment for all gold / precious metal / gem lots must be made via Bank Wire Transfer or Certified Bank Check/Money Order, no exceptions. #197430
**Originally Listed At $300** Edith Kramer (Austrian born American, 1916-2014). Three lithographs on paper. Largest is dated 1959 and hand-signed at lower right. A quietly observant trio of lithographs in which Edith Kramer transforms the stoops of New York into intimate theaters of urban life, where architecture and emotion press closely together. Drawn from the city she made her home, these works linger on unguarded moments, bodies resting, gathering, or withdrawing along stairways that serve as both passage and refuge. The lithograph depicting four figures seated together on a stoop is dated 1959, anchoring the group firmly in mid-century New York. In this scene, restrained gestures and attentive postures suggest conversation, shared experience, or the simple gravity of being together. Another composition presents a solitary figure stretched across a run of stone steps, the body echoing the hard geometry of the architecture beneath it. Size of largest (four figures): 5.75" W x 8.5" H (14.6 cm x 21.6 cm) The third focuses on an ornate stairwell with decorative railings, where human presence feels compressed within the surrounding structure, as though the building itself quietly observes the scene. Executed with finely controlled line and subtle tonal gradation, these lithographs reflect Kramer's disciplined sense of structure while remaining acutely sensitive to interior states. The stoops are rendered as stabilizing frameworks, yet the figures within them retain a sense of vulnerability and psychological weight. There is no excess narrative here, only careful observation and restraint, allowing emotion to surface through posture, spacing, and light. Taken together, the three works read as variations on a single theme, exploring the stoop as a threshold between public and private life in mid-century New York. This cohesive group highlights Kramer's ability to merge modernist clarity with human insight, offering a thoughtful meditation on everyday moments and the quiet dramas embedded in the city's architecture. About the Artist: Edith Kramer was born in Vienna, Austria in 1916. Her exploration of art began at the age of 13 when Kramer took classes with Friedl Dicker, a graduate of the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. Kramer was greatly influenced by the theories of Bauhaus artist Johannes Itten who developed the preliminary Bauhaus course from 1919 to 1922. After Kramer graduated from Realgymnasium, Vienna in 1934 , she followed Dicker to Prague to continue her studies. Perhaps even more impactful was the time she spent assisting Dicker in teaching art to the children of political refugees. Fearing the Nazi invasion, Kramer sought refuge in the United States. She arrived in New York City in 1938, and taught sculpture at the Little Red School House, one of the city's first progressive schools. During WWII, Kramer worked in a machine shop in Soho. This experience resonated with her Bauhaus education and presented an opportunity to sketch and paint sitters in industrial settings. In addition to being a painter, Kramer was a sculptor, a printmaker, a collage maker, a mosaicist, a professor, and a founder of the Art Therapy movement. Kramer is perhaps best known for her work as a pioneer in the field of Art Therapy. In 1971 she was part of the team that established an Art Therapy program at George Washington University, and she created the graduate program in Art Therapy at New York University in 1973. With her training in art, art education, as well as psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy, Kramer believed that negative emotions and thoughts could be transformed and rechanneled into productive energy through art. She and fellow pioneer Margaret Naumburg set out to champion the new field of Art Therapy. Kramer also believed that art therapists should create their own art in order to deal with the stress and exhaustion of clinical work, so she continued to create her own art. The following is Kramer's statement about art therapy: "I perceive myself as a specialist who combines the general qualifications of being a competent artist with specialized capacities in the field of psychotherapy and education. The theoretical framework of my understanding of child psychology is based in the main on Freudian psychoanalytic thought. The emphasis, however, is on the idea of art as therapy rather than on psychotherapy which uses art as a tool. My therapeutic medium is as old as mankind. Since human society has existed the arts have helped man to reconcile the eternal conflict between the individual's instinctual urges and the demands of society. Thus, all art is therapeutic in the broadest sense of the word. The artist who applies modern psychology in the field of art has to adapt his methods to the medium so that the therapeutic value of art is heightened by the introduction of therapeutic thinking, not destroyed or weakened by the introduction of concepts and methods that might be incompatible with the inner laws of artistic creation. It is not always easy for the art therapist to reconcile the therapist's approach with her function as an artist and teacher. In her function as a teacher who introduces disturbed children or adults into the realms of art, she has to be ready to accept the limitations of the individuals in her care. She has to be interested in progress on any level. She has to be flexible enough to accept and understand a diversity of styles and to find ways of helping each person according to his individual needs. As therapist she has to accept the unbeautiful manifestations of sexual and aggressive impulses in the raw, along with the results of confusions and incomplete sublimation. But this attitude of acceptance, which is essential in all therapy, must not dull the artist's capacity for discrimination. The teacher has to preserve her integrity genuine, between blocks and limitations, regressions and progress, superficial pretense and genuine communication. Even though my therapeutic approach includes awareness of psychic processes that may remain unconscious, the therapeutic maneuvers I am apt to employ seldom include uncovering unconscious material or the interpretation of unconscious meaning. Art therapy is conceived primarily as a means of supporting the ego. It harnesses the power of art to the task of fostering a psychic organization that is sufficiently resilient to function under pressure without breakdown or the need to resort to stultifying defensive measures. Thus conceived, art therapy constitutes an element of the therapeutic milieu that complements or supports psychotherapy but does not replace it. While art therapists encourage unconventional form and content in the art of their patients they are also intent on fostering artistic eloquence. The spoken words in psychotherapy and the play and talk in clinical therapy are typically formless and fluid. Content rather than form is essential. In art therapy form and content are equally important and the order and structure with which artistic creation endows experience constitutes a powerful aid in sorting out and mastering experience. To quote of art Susan Langer (1962): 'The primary function of art is to objectify experience so that we can contemplate and understand it' (p.90)." (source: Edith Kramer website) Provenance: private Denver, Colorado, USA collection All items legal to buy/sell under U.S. Statute covering cultural patrimony Code 2600, CHAPTER 14, and are guaranteed to be as described or your money back. A Certificate of Authenticity will accompany all winning bids. We ship worldwide and handle all shipping in-house for your convenience. Please note that buyers are responsible for understanding and complying with the import regulations of their destination country. While we carefully prepare and document all shipments, we cannot be held responsible for customs delays, clearance issues, additional duties or taxes, or any seizure of property. In addition, please note that we are unable to ship ancient items back to the original country of origin (Egyptian to Egypt, Greek to Greece, etc.). PAYMENT EXCEPTION: Unless a known customer of Artemis, payment for all gold / precious metal / gem lots must be made via Bank Wire Transfer or Certified Bank Check/Money Order, no exceptions. #197431
**Originally Listed At $250** Edith Kramer (Austrian born American, 1916-2014). Mountain Landscape. Watercolor on paper, 1955. Signed and dated at lower right. A luminous and quietly expansive plein air watercolor in which Edith Kramer turns her attention from the built world to the slow geometry of mountains, stone, and weather. Broad slopes unfold across the sheet in layered bands of muted green, ochre, rose, and gray, their surfaces animated by quick, directional brushstrokes that suggest shifting light and moving air. A low stone wall anchors the foreground, its dark, irregular forms providing a tactile counterpoint to the soft recession of the hills beyond. Kramer structures the composition with clarity and restraint. The mountain forms rise and overlap in gentle diagonals, leading the eye toward a distant range rendered in pale washes and softened edges. The sky is treated sparingly, with translucent gray clouds drifting across a light ground, allowing atmosphere to emerge through suggestion rather than detail. Size: 20" W x 14" H (50.8 cm x 35.6 cm) Color is applied economically, yet with confidence, each stroke carrying both descriptive weight and emotional tone. Painted in 1955, this landscape reflects Kramer's sensitivity to structure as a means of organizing experience, even in nature. The scene is neither dramatic nor picturesque. Instead, it feels observed and inhabited, shaped by time spent looking rather than by theatrical effect. The terrain appears stable and enduring, while the brushwork retains a sense of immediacy, capturing the momentary conditions of light and weather. This watercolor stands as a meditative counterpart to Kramer's urban and industrial imagery, revealing her ability to translate the same disciplined visual language to the natural world. The result is a landscape that feels both grounded and reflective, offering a measured, attentive encounter with place and perception. About the artist: Edith Kramer was born in Vienna, Austria in 1916. Her exploration of art began at the age of 13 when Kramer took classes with Friedl Dicker, a graduate of the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. Kramer was greatly influenced by the theories of Bauhaus artist Johannes Itten who developed the preliminary Bauhaus course from 1919 to 1922. After Kramer graduated from Realgymnasium, Vienna in 1934 , she followed Dicker to Prague to continue her studies. Perhaps even more impactful was the time she spent assisting Dicker in teaching art to the children of political refugees. Fearing the Nazi invasion, Kramer sought refuge in the United States. She arrived in New York City in 1938, and taught sculpture at the Little Red School House, one of the city's first progressive schools. During WWII, Kramer worked in a machine shop in Soho. This experience resonated with her Bauhaus education and presented an opportunity to sketch and paint sitters in industrial settings. In addition to being a painter, Kramer was a sculptor, a printmaker, a collage maker, a mosaicist, a professor, and a founder of the Art Therapy movement. Kramer is perhaps best known for her work as a pioneer in the field of Art Therapy. In 1971 she was part of the team that established an Art Therapy program at George Washington University, and she created the graduate program in Art Therapy at New York University in 1973. With her training in art, art education, as well as psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy, Kramer believed that negative emotions and thoughts could be transformed and rechanneled into productive energy through art. She and fellow pioneer Margaret Naumburg set out to champion the new field of Art Therapy. Kramer also believed that art therapists should create their own art in order to deal with the stress and exhaustion of clinical work, so she continued to create her own art. The following is Kramer's statement about art therapy: "I perceive myself as a specialist who combines the general qualifications of being a competent artist with specialized capacities in the field of psychotherapy and education. The theoretical framework of my understanding of child psychology is based in the main on Freudian psychoanalytic thought. The emphasis, however, is on the idea of art as therapy rather than on psychotherapy which uses art as a tool. My therapeutic medium is as old as mankind. Since human society has existed the arts have helped man to reconcile the eternal conflict between the individual's instinctual urges and the demands of society. Thus, all art is therapeutic in the broadest sense of the word. The artist who applies modern psychology in the field of art has to adapt his methods to the medium so that the therapeutic value of art is heightened by the introduction of therapeutic thinking, not destroyed or weakened by the introduction of concepts and methods that might be incompatible with the inner laws of artistic creation. It is not always easy for the art therapist to reconcile the therapist's approach with her function as an artist and teacher. In her function as a teacher who introduces disturbed children or adults into the realms of art, she has to be ready to accept the limitations of the individuals in her care. She has to be interested in progress on any level. She has to be flexible enough to accept and understand a diversity of styles and to find ways of helping each person according to his individual needs. As therapist she has to accept the unbeautiful manifestations of sexual and aggressive impulses in the raw, along with the results of confusions and incomplete sublimation. But this attitude of acceptance, which is essential in all therapy, must not dull the artist's capacity for discrimination. The teacher has to preserve her integrity genuine, between blocks and limitations, regressions and progress, superficial pretense and genuine communication. Even though my therapeutic approach includes awareness of psychic processes that may remain unconscious, the therapeutic maneuvers I am apt to employ seldom include uncovering unconscious material or the interpretation of unconscious meaning. Art therapy is conceived primarily as a means of supporting the ego. It harnesses the power of art to the task of fostering a psychic organization that is sufficiently resilient to function under pressure without breakdown or the need to resort to stultifying defensive measures. Thus conceived, art therapy constitutes an element of the therapeutic milieu that complements or supports psychotherapy but does not replace it. While art therapists encourage unconventional form and content in the art of their patients they are also intent on fostering artistic eloquence. The spoken words in psychotherapy and the play and talk in clinical therapy are typically formless and fluid. Content rather than form is essential. In art therapy form and content are equally important and the order and structure with which artistic creation endows experience constitutes a powerful aid in sorting out and mastering experience. To quote of art Susan Langer (1962): 'The primary function of art is to objectify experience so that we can contemplate and understand it' Provenance: private Denver, Colorado, USA collection All items legal to buy/sell under U.S. Statute covering cultural patrimony Code 2600, CHAPTER 14, and are guaranteed to be as described or your money back. A Certificate of Authenticity will accompany all winning bids. We ship worldwide and handle all shipping in-house for your convenience. Please note that buyers are responsible for understanding and complying with the import regulations of their destination country. While we carefully prepare and document all shipments, we cannot be held responsible for customs delays, clearance issues, additional duties or taxes, or any seizure of property. In addition, please note that we are unable to ship ancient items back to the original country of origin (Egyptian to Egypt, Greek to Greece, etc.). PAYMENT EXCEPTION: Unless a known customer of Artemis, payment for all gold / precious metal / gem lots must be made via Bank Wire Transfer or Certified Bank Check/Money Order, no exceptions. #197425
**Originally Listed At $300** Edith Kramer (Austrian born American, 1916-2014). "Cathedral" brush and ink on paper, 1948. Signed and dated at lower right and titled on verso. Strathmore blind stamp at lower right. A majestic French cathedral rises in Edith Kramers bold brush and ink, its facade built from a cascade of dark, rhythmic strokes that bring the Gothic architecture to life with remarkable immediacy. This sheet bears drawings on both sides - one complete, dense with sweeping arches and energetic linework, and the other an unfinished study in which the upper portions of the structure begin to take form before dissolving into open paper. Together they reveal the artist in motion, moving from exploration to resolution. The finished composition fills the page with an almost symphonic layering of marks. Kramer carves out the towers with firm vertical strokes, then threads smaller, agile lines across the lower register to animate the foliage and figures around the entrance. Size: 23" W x 29" H (58.4 cm x 73.7 cm) The rose window becomes a richly worked center of gravity, while the deep portals read like shadowed thresholds cut directly into the page. Her approach is not architectural drafting but expressive encounter - a direct, vigorous response to the cathedral's soaring mass and complex ornament. The verso offers a quieter insight into her process. Here, the drawing begins with the same decisive hand but remains suspended in an early stage, as if Kramer were testing the balance and rhythm of the facade before committing to the fully realized version on the opposite side. Created during her travels in France in 1948, this double-sided work captures Kramer at a moment of artistic clarity, translating monumental stone into lively, breathing ink. It reveals both the analytical eye of a trained sculptor and the intuitive fluency of a painter who trusted the expressive power of line. About the Artist: Edith Kramer was born in Vienna, Austria in 1916. Her exploration of art began at the age of 13 when Kramer took classes with Friedl Dicker, a graduate of the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. Kramer was greatly influenced by the theories of Bauhaus artist Johannes Itten who developed the preliminary Bauhaus course from 1919 to 1922. After Kramer graduated from Realgymnasium, Vienna in 1934 , she followed Dicker to Prague to continue her studies. Perhaps even more impactful was the time she spent assisting Dicker in teaching art to the children of political refugees. Fearing the Nazi invasion, Kramer sought refuge in the United States. She arrived in New York City in 1938, and taught sculpture at the Little Red School House, one of the city's first progressive schools. During WWII, Kramer worked in a machine shop in Soho. This experience resonated with her Bauhaus education and presented an opportunity to sketch and paint sitters in industrial settings. In addition to being a painter, Kramer was a sculptor, a printmaker, a collage maker, a mosaicist, a professor, and a founder of the Art Therapy movement. Kramer is perhaps best known for her work as a pioneer in the field of Art Therapy. In 1971 she was part of the team that established an Art Therapy program at George Washington University, and she created the graduate program in Art Therapy at New York University in 1973. With her training in art, art education, as well as psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy, Kramer believed that negative emotions and thoughts could be transformed and rechanneled into productive energy through art. She and fellow pioneer Margaret Naumburg set out to champion the new field of Art Therapy. Kramer also believed that art therapists should create their own art in order to deal with the stress and exhaustion of clinical work, so she continued to create her own art. The following is Kramer's statement about art therapy: "I perceive myself as a specialist who combines the general qualifications of being a competent artist with specialized capacities in the field of psychotherapy and education. The theoretical framework of my understanding of child psychology is based in the main on Freudian psychoanalytic thought. The emphasis, however, is on the idea of art as therapy rather than on psychotherapy which uses art as a tool. My therapeutic medium is as old as mankind. Since human society has existed the arts have helped man to reconcile the eternal conflict between the individual's instinctual urges and the demands of society. Thus, all art is therapeutic in the broadest sense of the word. The artist who applies modern psychology in the field of art has to adapt his methods to the medium so that the therapeutic value of art is heightened by the introduction of therapeutic thinking, not destroyed or weakened by the introduction of concepts and methods that might be incompatible with the inner laws of artistic creation. It is not always easy for the art therapist to reconcile the therapist's approach with her function as an artist and teacher. In her function as a teacher who introduces disturbed children or adults into the realms of art, she has to be ready to accept the limitations of the individuals in her care. She has to be interested in progress on any level. She has to be flexible enough to accept and understand a diversity of styles and to find ways of helping each person according to his individual needs. As therapist she has to accept the unbeautiful manifestations of sexual and aggressive impulses in the raw, along with the results of confusions and incomplete sublimation. But this attitude of acceptance, which is essential in all therapy, must not dull the artist's capacity for discrimination. The teacher has to preserve her integrity genuine, between blocks and limitations, regressions and progress, superficial pretense and genuine communication. Even though my therapeutic approach includes awareness of psychic processes that may remain unconscious, the therapeutic maneuvers I am apt to employ seldom include uncovering unconscious material or the interpretation of unconscious meaning. Art therapy is conceived primarily as a means of supporting the ego. It harnesses the power of art to the task of fostering a psychic organization that is sufficiently resilient to function under pressure without breakdown or the need to resort to stultifying defensive measures. Thus conceived, art therapy constitutes an element of the therapeutic milieu that complements or supports psychotherapy but does not replace it. While art therapists encourage unconventional form and content in the art of their patients they are also intent on fostering artistic eloquence. The spoken words in psychotherapy and the play and talk in clinical therapy are typically formless and fluid. Content rather than form is essential. In art therapy form and content are equally important and the order and structure with which artistic creation endows experience constitutes a powerful aid in sorting out and mastering experience. To quote of art Susan Langer (1962): 'The primary function of art is to objectify experience so that we can contemplate and understand it' (p.90)." (source: Edith Kramer website) Provenance: private Denver, Colorado, USA collection All items legal to buy/sell under U.S. Statute covering cultural patrimony Code 2600, CHAPTER 14, and are guaranteed to be as described or your money back. A Certificate of Authenticity will accompany all winning bids. We ship worldwide and handle all shipping in-house for your convenience. Please note that buyers are responsible for understanding and complying with the import regulations of their destination country. While we carefully prepare and document all shipments, we cannot be held responsible for customs delays, clearance issues, additional duties or taxes, or any seizure of property. In addition, please note that we are unable to ship ancient items back to the original country of origin (Egyptian to Egypt, Greek to Greece, etc.). PAYMENT EXCEPTION: Unless a known customer of Artemis, payment for all gold / precious metal / gem lots must be made via Bank Wire Transfer or Certified Bank Check/Money Order, no exceptions. #197007
