Alan Rosenberg - Works of Art presents several exhibitions of 20th century art and design each year. Please sign up on the homepage to be notified of upcoming exhibitions.

• Edward John Stevens, Jr. (April - May, 2004)
• John Stuart Cloud (November - December, 2003)
• David Berger (July - August, 2003)

Edward John Stevens, Jr. (April - May, 2004)


When Edward John Stevens, Jr. was featured on the cover of Life magazine in 1950 he was only 27 years old. He was chosen for the cover as an outstanding representative of the up-and-coming painters whose works were shown in an article titled “Nineteen Young American Artists.” At that time Stevens had already had one-man museum exhibitions at the Baltimore Museum of Art (1948) and the Honolulu Academy of Art (1947) as well as six one-man shows at the Weyhe Gallery in Manhattan. He went on to have 24 one-man gallery exhibitions and his works were acquired by many museums including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Boston's Museum of Fine Arts and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Stevens lived and worked in New Jersey throughout his life, studied art at the State Teachers College in Newark and received a Master's degree from Columbia University.

From the time of his first exhibition, Stevens enjoyed the enthusiastic patronage of a wide variety of art collectors. Fleur Cowles, revered tastemaker and editor of Flair, was a fan of Stevens' work, which she published in the magazine in December 1950. In November 1950 she wrote to Stevens, praising his paintings: “I have long admired your work, and pounced on the opportunity to publish it in FLAIR . . . About two years ago I practically tore your picture off the wall of the Art Institute of Chicago . . . It has a dominant place in my rather large collection of paintings at home and it never fails to cause widespread comment, and all good.”

Stevens' strange and delightful works depicted imaginary scenes of archaic cultures adorned with primitive symbols, fantastic interpretations of flowers and animals, and glistening, jewel-like landscapes and town-scapes. Many critics observed that Stevens was able to adroitly meld a number of aspects of contemporary and ancient art. Jo Gibbs, writing in the Art Digest in 1947 wrote that “this young artist has absorbed more influences than one would think was possible--African primitive, Mayan, Byzantine, Cubism, Braque, Klee and Chagall, to name a few--and yet has come through with something that is strictly Stevens rather than eclectic.”

Although appealing to many, Stevens' art gently drifted away from public notice by the late 1960's. With the rapidly increasing interest in mid-20th century design there is a growing interest in the art that hung on the walls of mid-century homes decorated in modern style. There are significant aesthetic and theoretical correspondences between Stevens' art and the work of designers such as Edward Wormley and Dorothy Liebes. Their syncretic, multi-cultural modernism is part of the “big picture” of mid-20th century art and design. Stevens' art is unique, in its exquisite aesthetic, but is also part of that bigger mid-century cultural picture.

See our catalogue for more works by Edward John Stevens, Jr.



John Stuart Cloud (November - December, 2003)


John Stuart Cloud was born in 1914 in Minneapolis and now lives in Medford Massachusetts. Cloud was taught photography by his father and at Boston University where he traded his photography services for classes.

In 1947 Cloud took a large group of photographs as promotional tools for Thomas Taylor and Sons, Inc., a manufacturer of elastic shoe goring, shoe and corset laces, braids and trimmings, in Hudson, Massachusetts. The original, vintage prints of these photographs were exhibited in 2004 at Alan Rosenberg - Works of Art.

Cloud had a lengthy career as a commercial/industrial photographer but gained a small measure of public renown for several aspects of his unusual personal life that intersected with his work. Cloud was a close friend of Norman Rockwell and collaborated with the artist by taking photographs, the subjects of which Rockwell incorporated into his paintings. Their collaborative process was documented in articles that appeared in 1948 in American Camera magazine and the Saturday Evening Post. In 1949 the Saturday Evening Post reported on another aspect of Cloud's life in an article titled “Even You Can Own an Island.” The year before Cloud and his wife had purchased a tiny uninhabited island in Maine which they discovered while he was taking aerial photographs of a factory in Portland, Maine. They built a log cabin on the island and their rustic life there was also featured in articles that appeared in 1954 in Life magazine and in Reader's Digest. By 1949 there was a new addition to the Cloud family: a female monkey named Jo-Jo. Jo-Jo's antics in the photography studio and her run of the tiny island were captured on camera by Cloud and featured in a 1949 article in U.S. Camera magazine.



David Berger (July - August, 2003)


When David Berger died in 1966, at 46 years old, he left behind a beloved wife, two little daughters and a wondrous legacy of paintings, sculptures and works on paper. Although he couldn't have intended it, the image we envision of these circumstances, the mix of family love, grief, fear, fracture, as well as joy, ritual and celebration, is depicted in his art.

David Berger studied painting at the Massachusetts College of Art and received his MFA degree from the esteemed Cranbrook Academy in Michigan in 1950. His art was the subject of one-man museum exhibitions at the De Cordova Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts, in 1954 (prints), 1955 (paintings) and 1967 (memorial retrospective), at the Cranbrook Academy in 1957 and at the Kalamazoo Art Institute in 1957. Berger had numerous gallery exhibitions and was represented in New York by the Cober Gallery. In 1956 Berger was included in Art in America magazine's “100 Outstanding New Talents in the USA.”

See our catalogue for more works by David Berger.