Van Doren Waxter at Independent 20th Century

Booth E4

Sept 7 – 10, 2023

Cipriani South Street
10 South Street
New York City

Van Doren Waxter presents a selection of gallery artists at Independent 20th Century Art Fair (Sept 7-10). The booth will feature works by James Brooks, Richard Diebenkorn, Zoe Longfield, Milton Resnick, Hedda Sterne, and Jack Tworkov. Tworkov will be represented by a historic painting, an abstract portrait from 1949.

Seated Figure: Z. Sharkey, 1949

The sitter for this portrait was Margaret “Zue” Sharkey (1915-1994). Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, Zue was raised in New York City and Hamilton, Canada. In the late 1940s she went to work for the Carstairs Gallery at 11 East 57th Street. When the owner Carroll Carstairs, who for a time was a partner in Knoedler & Co., died suddenly Sharkey was made partner. Carstairs was historically recognized for exhibiting and selling modern and impressionist masters selling art to millionaire collectors Henry Clay Frick and Isabella Stewart Gardener, and celebrities including Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, and even the Duchess of Windsor.

Tworkov met Zue Sharkey likely through his sister, the painter Janice Biala. Having lived in France during the decade of the 1930s, Biala was acquainted with all the major European dealers in New York and she was represented by Bignou Gallery. Its director, Georges Keller became the director of Carstairs Gallery when Bignou closed in 1949.

Having regularly worked from the model throughout his career to this point and honing his skills as a draftsman which he employed during WWII, Tworkov invited Zue to sit for him creating a series of striking psychological paintings of his vibrant subject. The result would be the first major group of paintings Tworkov completed in the second-floor studio at 85 Fourth Avenue, which he rented from his friend Willem de Kooning.

“Sharkey is seen frontally,” wrote Lindsay Pollock in her 2009 essay “Jack Tworkov: Women”:

“She sits on a blue chair, on leg slung over the other in a casual pose, perhaps befitting a businesswoman art seller like Sharkey. Her wide-set eyes and mask-like stare recall the faces of Arshile Gorky.” 

Sharkey wears a classy victory suit with broad-shoulders and tapered streamlined slim look. A bright emerald buttoned-up blouse flashes beneath. Zue’s leather gloves match the violet color of her stockings. To the left of the seater sits a large bulbous vase—an echo of Tworkov’s celebrated series of abstractions based on a still life which premiered at the Charles Egan Gallery in October 1947.

The portraits of Zue, including this one, made up Tworkov’s solo return to Charles Egan two years later in October 1949. In his review of the show in the November issue of Art News, Thomas B. Hess wrote:

“Space is the clue to Tworkov’s pictures […] the spontaneous calligraphy that loops over his waving textures has a sureness and a precision that comes only from complete mastery …. [Expressed in] statements at once reticent and eloquent, emotional and disciplined...”

Zue Sharkey inspired a number of paintings and works on paper, many of which can be found in the public collections of Peggy Guggenheim Museum, Venice, and The Katzen Center, Washington, DC to name a few.

The story of Zue Sharkey continued. She became the director of UNICEF greeting card operation—a worldwide enterprise traveling to Europe, North Africa, and Russia. For many years she lived in Snedens Landing, NY—an enclave of artists and writers. She was said to have had an infectious laugh and according to her obituary published in The Sag Harbor Express in February 1994, “gaiety of spirit that charmed all who knew her.” She retired from UNICEF in 1978 and in 1984 moved to the Hamptons with her longtime companion the writer Barbara Wersba.