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Painting Title: The Gowanus Canal Painting Date: Undated, ca. 1919 Medium: Oil on Artist Board
Signature: Signed Lower Left Provenance: Private Collection
Condition: Very Good
Size Unframed: 10 1/4 x 14
Frame Condition: Worn
Artist Best Price: $159,625
Offered At: CALL
Nowhere is this better expressed than in his New York harbor scenes, and especially so in the small yet masterful Gowanus Canal (which we are very proud to offer). Lever has put all of Brooklyn’s powerful industrial expansion into a brilliant single image that portrays the Williamsburg Bank building (the borough’s tallest) and the St. George hotel (once New York’s largest) poised alongside the industrial canal with its bascule bridges raised for a freighter being tugged out to the open harbor. The elements are monumental, but Lever has captured them with a fascinating and magnetic simplicity. The Gowanus canal, named after a Chief of the Canarsee Indians, was an engineering wonder, completed in 1868 and followed by George “Skyscraper” Post’s bank building finished in 1875 and then by Augustus Hatfield's 1885 massive St. George. This is an extremely important American work where using a contrived perspective Lever sets down Brooklyn's three biggest symbols as though they were children's blocks, to capture the magnificent innocence and energy of pre-Depression American industrial society. Lever’s work dates to the early 1920s, and certainly prior to his post-1930 withdrawal and the construction of the (view blocking) Gowanus Expressway soon after WWII.
Lever was little seen after 1931, owing to alcoholism-related illness and physical decline. Some say he painted on shirt cardboards because that was all he could get in hospital, others claim he turned out these works for the price of a drink. He loved painting, and when arthritis took his right hand, Lever taught himself to paint with his left. While it is true that Lever left behind a large cache of unseen works painted during his more than twenty-five years of isolation lasting until his death at his Mount Vernon home, we note that the State of New York has recently indicted one art dealer for forgeries that included works supposedly signed by this artist. We tend to favor his land-mark New York harbor scenes and earlier St. Ives canvases, both rendered in flatter, earthier tones, and we are wary of what appear to us to be more and more China-painting-factory forgeries of late-period works. Collectors must be extremely careful, please contact us for a professional opinion.
