Adja Yunkers
Summer in Venice
1966

Name: Summer in Venice
Brand: Adja Yunkers
Price: 700 USD
Availability: InStock

About the Item

Summer in Venice Lithograph printed in colors from five stones on Italian "Pascia" paper, 1966 Signed and dated lower left in pencil (see photo) The Print Club of Cleveland Publication No. 43 for 1965 Printed by Emiliano Sorini, New York Condition: Mint Image size: 13 1/2 x 9 1/8 inches Sheet dimensions: 18 1/8 x 13 7/8 inches Original PCC label included (see photo) Verso: Print Club of Cleveland publsihers stamp, Lugt 2049b Adja Yunkers (1900-1983) A major twentieth century abstract painter and printmaker, Adja Yunkers studied art in Leningrad, Berlin, Paris and London. His first solo exhibition took place in Hamburg in 1921. For a period of fourteen years, Yunkers lived and worked in Paris. At the outbreak of World War II (1939), he moved to Stockholm, Sweden, where he edited and published the arts magazines, ARS and Creation. Adja Yunkers settled permanently in the United States in 1947. During the following years important exhibitions of his woodcuts, lithographs and paintings were held at the Smithsonian Institute, the Corcoran Gallery, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The prints of Adja Yunkers are today included in the following collections: The Victoria and Albert Museum, London, the Hamburg Kunsthalle, the Stockholm National Gallery, the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Corcoran Museum, Harvard University and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Before 1960, the majority of Yunkers's graphic art was in the medium of the color woodcut. During the 1950's decade, he established himself at the forefront of American woodcut creation, along with Louis Schanker and Seong Moy. Concentrating on large compositions with complex color printings, Yunkers introduced painterly conceptions in his woodcuts, including the added devices of brushwork. Beginning in 1960, however, the artist began experimenting with these concerns in another medium -- lithography. Working at the now famous Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles, Yunkers created two of his finest series of lithographs during this year, Salt (five lithographs) and Skies of Venice (ten lithographs). Textural qualities and lightness of form became Yunkers's primary objectives and during this period he worked closely with the Tamarind master printer, Bohuslav Horak, to achieve these challenging effects. Courtesy: AskArt Source: Annex Galleries Adja Yunkers B. 1900, RIGA, RUSSIA (NOW LATVIA); D. 1983, NEW YORK Adja Yunkers was born Adolf Junkers on July 15, 1900, in Riga, Russia (now Latvia). He studied art in Petrograd (now Saint Petersburg), but from 1917 to 1919 his schooling was interrupted by military service in the Russian army. Yunkers soon left Russia for Europe and traveled extensively for the next two decades, settling for long periods in Cuba, France, and Germany. During much of his early career, Yunkers was active in political as well as artistic movements. At times his political investments even outweighed his commitment to his art, and in 1936 he moved to Spain to fight in its civil war. When the war ended in 1939, he moved to Stockholm and began to focus on art making again. He became associated with the Swedish Surrealists and published three journals devoted to art and politics. These handcrafted publications signaled a strong interest in printmaking, and in the 1940s he made many woodblock prints depicting distorted objects and figural compositions that demonstrate the influence of German Expressionism on his work. In 1947, Yunkers moved to New York and began to teach at the New School for Social Research. After four tumultuous marriages, he married one of his former students from the New School, Dore Ashton, in 1952. Ashton became an art critic for the New York Times in 1955, and through her, Yunkers was introduced to the artists who would become known as the Abstract Expressionists. He began drawing with pastel directly on canvas, resulting in large-scale works that recall Color Field painting in their emphasis on the materiality of color. Expanding on this impulse, Yunkers's later work made extensive use of negative space, collage, and monochrome. The influence of Minimalism in this more reduced aesthetic is clear, and his canvases became more object-like. Both printmaking and bookmaking were central to Yunkers's oeuvre. He founded the Rio Grande Workshop in New Mexico (where he also taught) in 1949, publishing an entirely handmade art magazine called Prints in the Desert. In 1969 he illustrated a limited-edition book by the poet Octavio Paz, a collaboration that sparked both a friendship and a number of additional illustrated books in the years to come. Yunkers also produced two large public works on commission: A Human Condition (1966), a mural for Syracuse University, and a tapestry produced for Stony Brook University (1968), both in New York. Yunkers had his first solo exhibition in 1921 at the Maria Kunde Galerie, Hamburg, Germany. Later that same year, he was part of a group show featuring Eastern European and Russian artists, including Alexander Archipenko, Marc Chagall, and Vasily Kandinsky, held in Hannover, Germany. He exhibited widely in the United States and Europe, with retrospectives at the Baltimore Museum of Art (1960); Utah Museum of Art, Salt Lake City (1968); Museo de arte moderno, Bosque de Chapultepec, Instituto nacional de bellas artes, Mexico City (1975); and Fine Arts Museum of Long Island, Hempstead, New York (1984). In 1967, the Brooklyn Museum presented a retrospective devoted entirely to his prints. Yunkers died on December 24, 1983, in New York." Courtesy Guggenheim Museum

Creator:

Adja Yunkers

Creation Year:

1966

Dimensions:

Height: 13.5 in (34.29 cm)Width: 9.07 in (23.04 cm)

Medium:

Lithograph

Movement & Style:

Abstract

Period:

1960-1969