Ben Messick (1901-1981)Telephones signed 'Ben Messick' (lower left)oil on canvas20 x 22 in.framed 24 x 26 in.Painted circa 1940.Footnotes:ProvenanceCline Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1997.Private collection, Santa Fe, New Mexico.ExhibitedLaguna, Laguna Art Museum, Ben Messick: An American Scene Painter, August 18 - November 19, 1988. LiteratureCathy Curtis, Los Angeles Times, ART / Cathy Curtis: Short-Short Stories on Canvas, in Vernacular, September 15, 1988.Los Angeles regionalist painter, Ben Messick, often compared to New York's Reginald Marsh or the Mid-West's Thomas Hart Benton, captured charming, amusing and pointed moments in the vernacular of mid-Century life in Southern California. The present work is described in a 1988 Los Angeles Times review as '[a] venture into a thickly encrusted method of paint application [that] yielded a marvelous friezelike painting of people scrunched up in telephone booths...with an impatient woman waiting outside.' 1 1 Cathy Curtis, Los Angeles Times, ART / Cathy Curtis: Short-Short Stories on Canvas, in Vernacular, September 15, 1988, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1988-09-05-ca-1043-story.html.