Paula Schuette Kraemer

"Don't Wine, " Original Surreal Serigraph by Paula Schuette Kraemer & Bill Weege

1994

"Galerie Maeght" lithograph poster by Jean Rene Bazaine. This poster holds Bazine's name in harsh orange lines near the top of the piece. Diagonally bisecting the b and a in Bazaine is a teal line. Bellow this horizontally against the white backgrounds are two lines, one painted yellow and the other blue. Image: 29 x 21 in Jean Bazaine was a French painter, designer of stained glass windows, and writer. He was the great great grandson of the English Court portraitist Sir George Hayter. In 1949/1950 he had his first major one man show at the Galerie Maeght, who remained his art dealer thenceforth. From then on it was a steady progress of major exhibitions: Bern, Hanover, Zürich, Oslo... 1987 a retrospective exhibition in Galerie Maeght, 1988 a retrospective of his drawings in the Musée Matisse and finally in 1990 the Exposition Bazaine in the Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, Paris., which was accompanied by the reissue of his major texts on painting in art theory as Le temps de la peinture (Paris, Aubier 1990). "The motley crowds of international tourists and souvenir-shoppers who fill the ancient streets of the Latin Quarter in Paris spend most of their time admiring the open-air displays of seafood outside the Greek restaurants in the rue de la Huchette. They ignore the beautiful church of St Severin in the same street, for have they not already "done" Notre Dame? So they miss one of the most wonderful series of stained-glass windows in France: Jean Bazaine's vivid, dynamic works irradiating the sombre ambulatory and apsidal chapels. These windows represent the seven sacraments of the Church, portrayed as essential forms from nature in all its glory and symbolising Water, Fire and Light, sacred emblems of Divine Grace. An appropriate biblical verse is inscribed beneath each. Only Pierre Soulages with his "luminous black" windows at l'Abbaye de Conques (1998) can stand comparison with the majesty of these contemporary works by Bazaine, created between 1965 and 1970. Bazaine was fortunate in his friends. He received at an early stage in his student career support and advice from another master colourist, Pierre Bonnard. In his youth he knew Leger, Braque, James Joyce and Marcel Proust. One of his great personal friends was Jean Fautrier, with whom he shared his first exhibition in 1930. His work gradually developed as a form of bold tachisme - brilliantly composed but well-controlled "splashes" of sumptuous colour. He rejected the term "abstract" which he considered a denial of the essentially intimate relationships between art and reality. He quoted his friend Braque: "The canvas must efface the idea behind it." In 1941, during the Nazi occupation, at a time when Hitler was destroying many works of modern art, Bazaine had the courage to organise in Paris a first "avant-garde" exhibition of 20 French artists. In 1948, he wrote his first book, an unpedantic, unacademic view of contemporary painting, Notes sur la peinture d'aujourd'hui. He quotes Braque on Cezanne: "He's a painters' painter - other people think it's unfinished." Bazaine, too, reverenced Cezanne: Three lines drawn by Cezanne overturn our whole concept of the world, proclaim the liberty of man, his courage. The great painters have never had any other aims. The painter says: "I exist, therefore you exist. I am free, therefore you are free. Or at least he tries to. It's his one aim in life." After the Second World War, Bazaine produced vast compositions with virtuoso colour structures, mostly with references to nature, like the breathtaking Vent de mer (1949, now in the Museum of Modern Art, Paris) and Orage au jardin (1952, now in the Van Abbemuseum at Eindhoven). His Earth and Sky (1950) is in the Maeght Foundation at Saint Paul de Vence. One of his greatest works, L'Arbre tenebreux (1962), was sold to the Sonja Henie...

"Stabile with Red Sun Galerie Maught" is an original color lithograph by Alexander Calder. The Stabile is a black topsy-turvy statue taking up most of the piece. A red sun sits to th...

‘Venus & Shooting Stars Over the Mountain’ is a reproduction giclée print on canvas, signed by the artist in the lower center. It is based after the original Mixed Media piece. Alte...

Originally drawn in 1964 while Barnett was still in high school, ‘Human Geography’ depicts an anthropomorphic figure assembled from the continents. Featuring the simultaneous points ...

"Pura Vida" is an original color woodcut signed by Carol Summers. A multi-colored piece shows a waterfall with red flames behind it in the middle of the piece. On the left stands a tree with yellow leaves on a hill. To the right is a rainbow. This is an excellent example of Summer's printmaking, not just because of the technique and imagery, but because it numbered 1 of the edition of 125. In addition, it contains a personal inscription to the Milwaukee gallerist David Barnett, who has championed the work of Summers and produced catalogs of his work. Indeed, this print appears as no. 189 in the David Barnett Gallery's 1988 catalogue raisonné of Summer's woodcuts. Feel free to inquire if you would like to purchase a copy of the catalogue raisonné along with your Carol Summers print. Art: 24.25 x 24.75 in Frame: 36 x 35 in signed lower right titled and inscribed to David [Barnett] lower right edition (1/125) lower right Carol Summers (1925-2016) has worked as an artist throughout the second half of the 20th century and into the first years of the next, outliving most of his mid-century modernist peers. Initially trained as a painter, Summers was drawn to color woodcuts around 1950 and it became his specialty thereafter. Over the years he has developed a process and style that is both innovative and readily recognizable. His art is known for it’s large scale, saturated fields of bold color, semi-abstract treatment of landscapes from around the world and a luminescent quality achieved through a printmaking process he invented. In a career that has extended over half a century, Summers has hand-pulled approximately 245 woodcuts in editions that have typically run from 25 to 100 in number. His talent was both inherited and learned. Born in 1925 in Kingston, a small town in upstate New York, Summers was raised in nearby Woodstock with his older sister, Mary. His parents were both artists who had met in art school in St. Louis. During the Great Depression, when Carol was growing up, his father supported the family as a medical illustrator until he could return to painting. His mother was a watercolorist and also quite knowledgeable about the different kinds of papers used for various kinds of painting. Many years later, Summers would paint or print on thinly textured paper originally collected by his mother. From 1948 to 1951, Carol Summers trained in the classical fine and studio arts at Bard College and at the Art Students League of New York. He studied painting with Steven Hirsh and printmaking with Louis Schanker. He admired the shapes and colors favored by early modernists Paul Klee (Sw: 1879-1940) and Matt Phillips (Am: b.1927- ). After graduating, Summers quit working as a part-time carpenter and cabinetmaker (which had supported his schooling and living expenses) to focus fulltime on art. That same year, an early abstract, Bridge No. 1 was selected for a Purchase Prize in a competition sponsored by the Brooklyn Museum. In 1952, his work (Cathedral, Construction and Icarus) was shown the first time at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in an exhibition of American woodcuts. In 1954, Summers received a grant from the Italian government to study for a year in Italy. Woodcuts completed soon after his arrival there were almost all editions of only 8 to 25 prints, small in size, architectural in content and black and white in color. The most well-known are Siennese Landscape and Little Landscape, which depicted the area near where he resided. Summers extended this trip three more years, a decision which would have significant impact on choices of subject matter and color in the coming decade. After returning from Europe, Summers’ images continued to feature historical landmarks and events from Italy as well as from France, Spain and Greece. However, as evidenced in Aetna’s Dream, Worldwind and Arch of Triumph, a new look prevailed. These woodcuts were larger in size and in color. Some incorporated metal leaf in the creation of a collage and Summers even experimented with silkscreening. Editions were now between 20 and 50 prints in number. Most importantly, Summers employed his rubbing technique for the first time in the creation of Fantastic Garden in late 1957. Dark Vision of Xerxes, a benchmark for Summers, was the first woodcut where Summers experimented using mineral spirits as part of his printmaking process. A Fulbright Grant as well as Fellowships from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation and the Guggenheim Foundation followed soon thereafter, as did faculty positions at colleges and universities primarily in New York and Pennsylvania. During this period he married a dancer named Elaine Smithers with whom he had one son, Kyle. Around this same time, along with fellow artist Leonard Baskin, Summers pioneered what is now referred to as the “monumental” woodcut. This term was coined in the early 1960s to denote woodcuts that were dramatically bigger than those previously created in earlier years, ones that were limited in size mostly by the size of small hand-presses. While Baskin chose figurative subject matter, serious in nature and rendered with thick, striated lines, Summers rendered much less somber images preferring to emphasize shape and color; his subject matter approached abstraction but was always firmly rooted in the landscape. In addition to working in this new, larger scale, Summers simultaneously refined a printmaking process which would eventually be called the “Carol Summers Method” or the “ Carol Summers Technique”. Summers produces his woodcuts by hand, usually from one or more blocks of quarter-inch pine, using oil-based printing inks and porous mulberry papers. His woodcuts reveal a sensitivity to wood especially its absorptive qualities and the subtleties of the grain. In several of his woodcuts throughout his career he has used the undulating, grainy patterns of a large wood plank to portray a flowing river or tumbling waterfall. The best examples of this are Dream, done in 1965 and the later Flash Flood Escalante, in 2003. In the majority of his woodcuts, Summers makes the blocks slightly larger than the paper so the image and color will bleed off the edge. Before printing, he centers a dry sheet of paper over the top of the cut wood block or blocks, securing it with giant clips. Then he rolls the ink directly on the front of the sheet of paper and pressing down onto the dry wood block or reassembled group of blocks. Summers is technically very proficient; the inks are thoroughly saturated onto the surface of the paper but they do not run into each other. The precision of the color inking in Constantine’s Dream in 1969 and Rainbow Glacier in 1970 has been referred to in various studio handbooks. Summers refers to his own printing technique as “rubbing”. In traditional woodcut printing, including the Japanese method, the ink is applied directly onto the block. However, by following his own method, Summers has avoided the mirror-reversed image of a conventional print and it has given him the control over the precise amount of ink that he wants on the paper. After the ink is applied to the front of the paper, Summers sprays it with mineral spirits, which act as a thinning agent. The absorptive fibers of the paper draw the thinned ink away from the surface softening the shapes and diffusing and muting the colors. This produces a unique glow that is a hallmark of the Summers printmaking technique. Unlike the works of other color field artists or modernists of the time, this new technique made Summers’ extreme simplification and flat color areas anything but hard-edged or coldly impersonal. By the 1960s, Summers had developed a personal way of coloring and printing and was not afraid of hard work, doing the cutting, inking and pulling himself. In 1964, at the age of 38, Summers’ work was exhibited for a second time at the Museum of Modern Art. This time his work was featured in a one-man show and then as one of MOMA’s two-year traveling exhibitions which toured throughout the United States. In subsequent years, Summers’ works would be exhibited and acquired for the permanent collections of multiple museums throughout the United States, Europe and Asia. Summers’ familiarity with landscapes throughout the world is firsthand. As a navigator-bombardier in the Marines in World War II, he toured the South Pacific and Asia. Following college, travel in Europe and subsequent teaching positions, in 1972, after 47 years on the East Coast, Carol Summers moved permanently to Bonny Doon in the Santa Cruz Mountains in Northern California. There met his second wife, Joan Ward Toth, a textile artist who died in 1998; and it was here his second son, Ethan was born. During the years that followed this relocation, Summers’ choice of subject matter became more diverse although it retained the positive, mostly life-affirming quality that had existed from the beginning. Images now included moons, comets, both sunny and starry skies, hearts and flowers, all of which, in one way or another, remained tied to the landscape. In the 1980s, from his home and studio in the Santa Cruz mountains, Summers continued to work as an artist supplementing his income by conducting classes and workshops at universities in California and Oregon as well as throughout the Mid and Southwest. He also traveled extensively during this period hiking and camping, often for weeks at a time, throughout the western United States and Canada. Throughout the decade it was not unusual for Summers to backpack alone or with a fellow artist into mountains or back country for six weeks or more at a time. Not surprisingly, the artwork created during this period rarely departed from images of the land, sea and sky. Summers rendered these landscapes in a more representational style than before, however he always kept them somewhat abstract by mixing geometric shapes with organic shapes, irregular in outline. Some of his most critically acknowledged work was created during this period including First Rain, 1985 and The Rolling Sea, 1989. Summers received an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, Bard College in 1979 and was selected by the United States Information Agency to spend a year conducting painting and printmaking workshops at universities throughout India. Since that original sabbatical, he has returned every year, spending four to eight weeks traveling throughout that country. In the 1990s, interspersed with these journeys to India have been additional treks to the back roads and high country areas of Mexico, Central America, Nepal, China and Japan. Travel to these exotic and faraway places had a profound influence on Summers’ art. Subject matter became more worldly and nonwestern as with From Humla to Dolpo, 1991 or A Former Life of Budha, 1996, for example. Architectural images, such as The Pillars of Hercules, 1990 or The Raja’s Aviary, 1992 became more common. Still life images made a reappearance with Jungle Bouquet in 1997. This was also a period when Summers began using odd-sized paper to further the impact of an image. The 1996 Night, a view of the earth and horizon as it might be seen by an astronaut, is over six feet long and only slightly more than a foot-and-a-half high. From 1999, Revuelta A Vida (Spanish for “Return to Life”) is pie-shaped and covers nearly 18 cubic feet. It was also at this juncture that Summers began to experiment with a somewhat different palette although he retained his love of saturated colors. The 2003 Far Side of Time is a superb example of the new direction taken by this colorist. At the turn of the millennium in 1999, “Carol Summers Woodcuts...

"India" is a woodcut and monotype signed by Carol Summers. Here, Summer's abstract language for landscape imagery is taken to its most extreme: The image offers a view of a highly stylized waterfall, with red water falling down behind green foliage below. A hint of light blue at the lower left suggests a continuation of the water's flow. Above, purples and yellows mist upward from the power of the water. The playfulness of the image is enhanced by Summers' signature printmaking technique, which allows the ink from the woodblock to seep through the paper, blurring the edges of each form. Summers' signature can be found in pencil at the bottom of the rightmost blue form, with the title and edition at the bottom of the leftmost blue form. A copy of this print can be found in the collection of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. 37.25 x 24.88 inches, artwork 48.5 x 35.5 inches, frame Numbered 44 from the edition of 75 Carol Summers (1925-2016) has worked as an artist throughout the second half of the 20th century and into the first years of the next, outliving most of his mid-century modernist peers. Initially trained as a painter, Summers was drawn to color woodcuts around 1950 and it became his specialty thereafter. Over the years he has developed a process and style that is both innovative and readily recognizable. His art is known for it’s large scale, saturated fields of bold color, semi-abstract treatment of landscapes from around the world and a luminescent quality achieved through a printmaking process he invented. In a career that has extended over half a century, Summers has hand-pulled approximately 245 woodcuts in editions that have typically run from 25 to 100 in number. His talent was both inherited and learned. Born in 1925 in Kingston, a small town in upstate New York, Summers was raised in nearby Woodstock with his older sister, Mary. His parents were both artists who had met in art school in St. Louis. During the Great Depression, when Carol was growing up, his father supported the family as a medical illustrator until he could return to painting. His mother was a watercolorist and also quite knowledgeable about the different kinds of papers used for various kinds of painting. Many years later, Summers would paint or print on thinly textured paper originally collected by his mother. From 1948 to 1951, Carol Summers trained in the classical fine and studio arts at Bard College and at the Art Students League of New York. He studied painting with Steven Hirsh and printmaking with Louis Schanker. He admired the shapes and colors favored by early modernists Paul Klee (Sw: 1879-1940) and Matt Phillips (Am: b.1927- ). After graduating, Summers quit working as a part-time carpenter and cabinetmaker (which had supported his schooling and living expenses) to focus fulltime on art. That same year, an early abstract, Bridge No. 1 was selected for a Purchase Prize in a competition sponsored by the Brooklyn Museum. In 1952, his work (Cathedral, Construction and Icarus) was shown the first time at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in an exhibition of American woodcuts. In 1954, Summers received a grant from the Italian government to study for a year in Italy. Woodcuts completed soon after his arrival there were almost all editions of only 8 to 25 prints, small in size, architectural in content and black and white in color. The most well-known are Siennese Landscape and Little Landscape, which depicted the area near where he resided. Summers extended this trip three more years, a decision which would have significant impact on choices of subject matter and color in the coming decade. After returning from Europe, Summers’ images continued to feature historical landmarks and events from Italy as well as from France, Spain and Greece. However, as evidenced in Aetna’s Dream, Worldwind and Arch of Triumph, a new look prevailed. These woodcuts were larger in size and in color. Some incorporated metal leaf in the creation of a collage and Summers even experimented with silkscreening. Editions were now between 20 and 50 prints in number. Most importantly, Summers employed his rubbing technique for the first time in the creation of Fantastic Garden in late 1957. Dark Vision of Xerxes, a benchmark for Summers, was the first woodcut where Summers experimented using mineral spirits as part of his printmaking process. A Fulbright Grant as well as Fellowships from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation and the Guggenheim Foundation followed soon thereafter, as did faculty positions at colleges and universities primarily in New York and Pennsylvania. During this period he married a dancer named Elaine Smithers with whom he had one son, Kyle. Around this same time, along with fellow artist Leonard Baskin, Summers pioneered what is now referred to as the “monumental” woodcut. This term was coined in the early 1960s to denote woodcuts that were dramatically bigger than those previously created in earlier years, ones that were limited in size mostly by the size of small hand-presses. While Baskin chose figurative subject matter, serious in nature and rendered with thick, striated lines, Summers rendered much less somber images preferring to emphasize shape and color; his subject matter approached abstraction but was always firmly rooted in the landscape. In addition to working in this new, larger scale, Summers simultaneously refined a printmaking process which would eventually be called the “Carol Summers Method” or the “ Carol Summers Technique”. Summers produces his woodcuts by hand, usually from one or more blocks of quarter-inch pine, using oil-based printing inks and porous mulberry papers. His woodcuts reveal a sensitivity to wood especially its absorptive qualities and the subtleties of the grain. In several of his woodcuts throughout his career he has used the undulating, grainy patterns of a large wood plank to portray a flowing river or tumbling waterfall. The best examples of this are Dream, done in 1965 and the later Flash Flood Escalante, in 2003. In the majority of his woodcuts, Summers makes the blocks slightly larger than the paper so the image and color will bleed off the edge. Before printing, he centers a dry sheet of paper over the top of the cut wood block or blocks, securing it with giant clips. Then he rolls the ink directly on the front of the sheet of paper and pressing down onto the dry wood block or reassembled group of blocks. Summers is technically very proficient; the inks are thoroughly saturated onto the surface of the paper but they do not run into each other. The precision of the color inking in Constantine’s Dream in 1969 and Rainbow Glacier in 1970 has been referred to in various studio handbooks. Summers refers to his own printing technique as “rubbing”. In traditional woodcut printing, including the Japanese method, the ink is applied directly onto the block. However, by following his own method, Summers has avoided the mirror-reversed image of a conventional print and it has given him the control over the precise amount of ink that he wants on the paper. After the ink is applied to the front of the paper, Summers sprays it with mineral spirits, which act as a thinning agent. The absorptive fibers of the paper draw the thinned ink away from the surface softening the shapes and diffusing and muting the colors. This produces a unique glow that is a hallmark of the Summers printmaking technique. Unlike the works of other color field artists or modernists of the time, this new technique made Summers’ extreme simplification and flat color areas anything but hard-edged or coldly impersonal. By the 1960s, Summers had developed a personal way of coloring and printing and was not afraid of hard work, doing the cutting, inking and pulling himself. In 1964, at the age of 38, Summers’ work was exhibited for a second time at the Museum of Modern Art. This time his work was featured in a one-man show and then as one of MoMA’s two-year traveling exhibitions which toured throughout the United States. In subsequent years, Summers’ works would be exhibited and acquired for the permanent collections of multiple museums throughout the United States, Europe and Asia. Summers’ familiarity with landscapes throughout the world is firsthand. As a navigator-bombardier in the Marines in World War II, he toured the South Pacific and Asia. Following college, travel in Europe and subsequent teaching positions, in 1972, after 47 years on the East Coast, Carol Summers moved permanently to Bonny Doon in the Santa Cruz Mountains in Northern California. There met his second wife, Joan Ward Toth, a textile artist who died in 1998; and it was here his second son, Ethan was born. During the years that followed this relocation, Summers’ choice of subject matter became more diverse although it retained the positive, mostly life-affirming quality that had existed from the beginning. Images now included moons, comets, both sunny and starry skies, hearts and flowers, all of which, in one way or another, remained tied to the landscape. In the 1980s, from his home and studio in the Santa Cruz mountains, Summers continued to work as an artist supplementing his income by conducting classes and workshops at universities in California and Oregon as well as throughout the Mid and Southwest. He also traveled extensively during this period hiking and camping, often for weeks at a time, throughout the western United States and Canada. Throughout the decade it was not unusual for Summers to backpack alone or with a fellow artist into mountains or back country for six weeks or more at a time. Not surprisingly, the artwork created during this period rarely departed from images of the land, sea and sky. Summers rendered these landscapes in a more representational style than before, however he always kept them somewhat abstract by mixing geometric shapes with organic shapes, irregular in outline. Some of his most critically acknowledged work was created during this period including First Rain, 1985 and The Rolling Sea, 1989. Summers received an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, Bard College in 1979 and was selected by the United States Information Agency to spend a year conducting painting and printmaking workshops at universities throughout India. Since that original sabbatical, he has returned every year, spending four to eight weeks traveling throughout that country. In the 1990s, interspersed with these journeys to India have been additional treks to the back roads and high country areas of Mexico, Central America, Nepal, China and Japan. Travel to these exotic and faraway places had a profound influence on Summers’ art. Subject matter became more worldly and nonwestern as with From Humla to Dolpo, 1991 or A Former Life of Budha, 1996, for example. Architectural images, such as The Pillars of Hercules, 1990 or The Raja’s Aviary, 1992 became more common. Still life images made a reappearance with Jungle Bouquet in 1997. This was also a period when Summers began using odd-sized paper to further the impact of an image. The 1996 Night, a view of the earth and horizon as it might be seen by an astronaut, is over six feet long and only slightly more than a foot-and-a-half high. From 1999, Revuelta A Vida (Spanish for “Return to Life”) is pie-shaped and covers nearly 18 cubic feet. It was also at this juncture that Summers began to experiment with a somewhat different palette although he retained his love of saturated colors. The 2003 Far Side of Time is a superb example of the new direction taken by this colorist. At the turn of the millennium in 1999, “Carol Summers Woodcuts...

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Includes a Certificate of Authenticity