Consuelo Cloos, the woman seen on the left in the photograph, was a poet, author, and artist highly regarded during her lifetime. (The photo is worth a click to enlarge it. You can clearly see that she was remarkable.) She was particularly admired, according to a biographical note supplied by Folio Gallery on AskART.com, by Salvador Dali, who invited her to exhibit her work in his gallery in Spain. Cloos worked for many years in Maine in the mid-20th Century. The photograph of the artist with her friend Thomas Cushing is by George Daniel, who moved to Maine in 1960 where he lived until his death in 2002. (A painter as well in his late years, Daniell was well-known for his photographs of movie stars, especially Audrey Hepburn and Sophia Loren, of artists including Georgia O'Keefe, and of his travels throughout the world. Two unrelated images by Daniell are in the sale as well.) Cloos was also known on the West Coast where her work during an exhibition at St. Mary's College in Moraga, California, was reviewed by Charles Chere in the Oakland Tribune of January 25, 1975, who wrote of her as follows: To the extent the visionaries [Cloos and Bruce Corroner]...evoke or resonate our own [visions], their art is enormously effective.

Olive Buhfer is another artist we never knew whose work has been consigned to this auction. Her work, like that of Cloos, is unique - at once idiosyncratic and approachable. Her work is also and at once serious and humorous, yet without irony or satire.

Barridoff Galleries is delighted to present the work of these two artists at auction on April 24, held as always at the Institute of Contemporary at Maine College Art in Portland, Maine. The auction features important work by major artists as well as those whose work feels special but has not yet found its way into the history books or the auction houses. Women play a particularly strong role in this auction, including Mary Cassatt, whose "Study for At the Opera" is well documented; Mildred Burrage, an influential artist in Maine during the 20th Century, and Jehudith Sobel, whose powerful and beautiful work is in many private collections and museums including the Museum of Modern Art at Lodz, Poland, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, The Jewish Museum where she had a solo show of her work, and was shown with the Polish Abstract Painters. Her work shows the influence of her contemporaries including Matisse, Bonnard, Malevich, Braque and of another Polish American Painter, Frederick Serger, her neighbor and friend in Woodstock. She lived and worked in Woodstock and in Manhattan.