RT sent me a midcentury painted mosaic tile plaque, a curious image of a yellow fern with green and red foliage signed EC or CC Bealle. The work has been painted in sections and placed together to tell a story, the visual language which is the glory of the art form that for generations has been mosaic art.
If the artist is CC Bealle, this is quite a find. Bealle (1892-1970), an American portraitist and illustrator, became known for his bright, passionate paintings of WWII related images. In fact he became the artist responsible for the success of the WWII Loan War Drives. His visual images and evocative language appealed to all Americans to “give to the War Fund!” and help the US government win the war.
Bealle’s Famous Works
Americans recognize his greatest work, the portrayal of the Iwo Jima Flag raisers on a poster that raised millions of dollars. Donators, for the most part, purchased bonds, worth, at the top value, only $200 and down. EC participated in eight combined War Drives as an artist with his compelling painted posters made 156 billion dollars.
The other famous image he painted represented his work as a war correspondent. Aboard the USS Missouri in 1945 he witnessed the Japanese surrender and painted MacArthur accepting that surrender.
Before he became a realist painter of actual events we saw another side to his personality, abstraction and surrealism. We see hints of this style in the little tile plaque owned by RT. As a young artist trained at the famous Art Students League in NYC, he joined a group show at the young MOMA in winter 1936-7, Fine Art Dada and Surrealism.
RT’s Mosaic is Interesting
I see no other mosaic work sold or offered for this artist. I have sales and auction records through such subscription services as ArtNet, ArtPrice, and AskArt, to name a few. That doesn’t mean he didn’t dabble in mosaics. The tradition of artists painting on ceramic tiles goes back well over 2,000 years. While I’m on that subject, ART WORLD News reported the discovery of ancient mosaic works of art.
I read in ArtNet News that the famously persistent Art Crimes unit of the Italian Government, the Carabinieri, took quite a wild ride in Los Angeles these past few months. They worked with the FBI to apprehend sixteen huge slabs of an ancient Roman Mosaic floor cut in weighty two-hundred pounds segments and stored since the 1980s in an LA storage locker.
They packed the slabs under the watchful eyes of the Italian Consulate in LA. They’re shipping them to the newly opened Museum of Rescued Art in Rome.
The Carabinieri has a notoriously long memory. They knew about the theft of this whole slab of Roman mosaic floor in 1909, but found no proof. The owners, an ancient Roman family, persisted in the search for the floor as well. The only other document of an alleged theft was a curious ad in 1959 in the LA newspaper for a Roman floor offered for sale.
More Mosaic History
In England this past week we also heard about mosaic history in the making. The supermarket chain ALDI is building a market in Milton Keynes, but work temporarily shutdown due to the discovery of a entire intact Roman mosaic floor. These remnants of a Roman Villa and Bathhouse were wonderfully well preserved. The Oxford University Archaeological Team offered to publish their findings about the floor, now under investigation, assumed to be the work of an entire School of mosaic artists active in the East Midlands of England over 2,000 year ago called the Druidians. Ironically, ALDI will not choose a new piece of land to build a supermarket, but will build the market over the site, claiming they will preserve the mosaic floor, but we will see.
Back to RT’s Mosaic
The era of course is the 1950s, not first or second century. The value is $250. Bealle’s illustration work sells for much more. He painted the covers of Colliers, Vanity Fair, Cosmo, Saturday Evening Post, and many Reader’s Digests covers as well as paperback book covers. The originals of these covers sell for over $1,500.