Note 1) The following biographical materials are taken from the Askart.com website:

"The following is from Roger Van Oosten, art patron of Seattle and researcher:

Martha Levy's early art training included a membership at the Art Students League* where she attended the League's summer school in Woodstock in 1926 and 1932. Also in Woodstock, she studied under John Fabian Carlson, and she later traveled to Italy in the late 1920's to further her art education.

In Woodstock from the mid-1920's to the mid-1930's, Levy focused her art on landscapes, choosing oil painted over tempera as her medium of choice. Like many artists in the 1930's, Levy fell on hard times. She joined the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) in 1933. The PWAP was the first New Deal Project to aid artists hard hit by the Great Depression.

Her PWAP painting, Landscape-Winter, was shown in a local exhibition of PWAP art in 1934, and was selected, along with the work of several other local artists, to represent the work of Woodstock area artists at a national exhibition of PWAP art at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington D.C. The exhibit was the first national exhibition of federally funded art, and one of the most important art exhibitions in American history.

In 1935, she joined the Federal Art Project* of the Works Progress Administration and stayed on the project until 1940. The WPA/FAP was the largest, and most famous, of the New Deal programs to help starving artists through the 1930's. In 1939, while on the project, she painted a mural entitled Men Working in a Slate Quarry for Granville Central School.

She exhibited at the Woodstock Artists Association (1933-34), Salons of America* (1934), the Corcoran Gallery in Washington DC (1934), the WPA Pavilion at the New York World's Fair* (1939), the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts* (1942), and the Woodstock Historical Society (1983).

Her works are in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Slate Valley Historical Museum in Granville, N.Y."

Note 2) Askart.com does not record any Levy sales. This highly stylized American Regionalist school of painting of the 1930's was very popular in its day and has started to regain its popularity. This Levy painting should be an attractive and extremely interesting composition for any collector of American Regionalist art, which Mr. Fastov has always found interesting and appealing, particularly because of the highly stylized and angular Regionalist painting technique used by Levy and its original composition involving twisting, curling landscape features. The painting is clean and in good condition and has its original 1930's frame. The foregoing considerations warrant the conclusion that the presale estimate of $500-$700 is reasonable and justifiable.