Michele Oka Doner

Original Drawing Painting Abstract Biomorphic Art Gold Leaf Michele Oka Doner

2004

After Hans Bellmer (German, 1902-1975) Surrealist engraving, etching after drawings from a 1942 notebook, engraved in 1974-75 by Cecile Reims Printed by L'Atelier de Chalcographie du Louvre, Paris, Having printed monogram lower left in plate, pencil notations and #7/10 and 'Musee du Louvre' blindstamp verso Dimensions: Sheet 11 X 7.5, Plate size 6.5 X 4 Hans Bellmer ( 1902 – 1975) was a Polish born German artist, best known for his drawings, etchings that illustrates the 1940 edition of Histoire de l’œil, and the life-sized female sculpture mannequin dolls he produced in the mid-1930s. Historians of art and photography also consider him a Surrealist photographer. Bellmer was born in the city of Kattowitz, then part of the German Empire (now Katowice, Poland). Up until 1926, he worked as a draftsman for his own advertising company. Bellmer is most famous for the creation of a series of dolls as well as photographs of them. He was influenced in his choice of art form in part by reading the published letters of Oskar Kokoschka (Der Fetisch, 1925) and Surrealism. Bellmer's puppet doll project is also said to have been catalysed by a series of events in his personal life. Hans Bellmer takes credit for provoking a physical crisis in his father and brings his own artistic creativity into association with childhood insubordination and resentment toward a severe and humorless paternal authority. Perhaps this is one reason for the nearly universal, unquestioning acceptance in the literature of Bellmer's promotion of his art as a struggle against his father, the police, and ultimately, fascism and the state. Events of his personal life also including meeting a beautiful teenage cousin in 1932 (and perhaps other unattainable beauties), attending a performance of Jacques Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann (in which a man falls tragically in love with an automaton), and receiving a box of his old toys. After these events, he began to actually construct his first dolls. In his works, Bellmer explicitly sexualized the doll as a young girl (his work bears connection to the works of Bathus). Hirschfeld has claimed (without further argumentation) that Bellmer initiated his doll project to oppose the fascism of the Nazi Party by declaring that he would make no work that would support the new German state. Represented by mutated forms and unconventional poses, his dolls (according to this view) were directed specifically at the cult of the perfect body then prominent in Germany. He visited Paris in 1935 and made contacts there, such as Paul Éluard, but returned to Berlin because his wife Margarete was dying of tuberculosis. He was part of the circle of Surrealist luminaries such as Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Joan Miro, André Masson, René Magritte, Alberto Giacometti and Salvador Dali as well as women artists—such as Frida Kahlo, Dorothea Tanning and Leonora Carrington. Bellmer produced the first doll in Berlin in 1933. Long since lost, the assemblage can nevertheless be correctly described thanks to approximately two dozen photographs Bellmer took at the time of its construction. Standing about fifty-six inches tall, the doll consisted of a modeled torso made of flax fiber, glue, and plaster; a mask-like head of the same material with glass eyes and a long, unkempt wig; and a pair of legs made from broomsticks or dowel rods. One of these legs terminated in a wooden, club-like foot; the other was encased in a more naturalistic plaster shell, jointed at the knee and ankle. As the project progressed, Bellmer made a second set of hollow plaster legs, with wooden ball joints for the doll's hips and knees. There were no arms to the first sculpture, but Bellmer did fashion or find a single wooden hand, which appears among the assortment of doll parts the artist documented in an untitled photograph of 1934, as well as in several photographs of later work. Bellmer's 1934 anonymous book, The Doll (Die Puppe), produced and published privately in Germany, contains 10 black-and-white photographs of Bellmer's first doll arranged in a series of "tableaux vivants" (living pictures). The book was not credited to him, as he worked in isolation, and his photographs remained almost unknown in Germany. Yet Bellmer's work was eventually declared "degenerate" (entartete kunst) by the Nazi Party, and he was forced to flee Germany to France in 1938, where Bellmer's work was welcomed by the Surrealists around Andre Breton. He aided the French Resistance during the war by making fake passports. He was imprisoned in the Camp des Milles prison at Aix-en-Provence, a brickworks camp for German nationals, from September 1939 until the end of the Phoney War in May 1940. After the war, Bellmer lived the rest of his life in Paris. Bellmer gave up doll-making and spent the following decades creating erotic drawings, etchings, sexually explicit photographs, paintings, and prints of pubescent girls. In 1954, he met Unica Zürn...

Nancy Graves, American (1939-1995) Borborygmi (1988) aquatint, drypoint, gold leaf and screenprint on Fabriano Artistico paper pencil hand signed by artist lower right, numbered 4/50 (there were also 6 Artist Proofs of this edition) plate: 49.5 x 49.5 inches Publisher: 2RC Edizioni d'Arte, Rome Nancy Graves (December 23, 1939 – October 21, 1995) was an American woman sculptor, painter, printmaker, and sometime-filmmaker known for her focus on natural phenomena like camels or maps of the moon. Her works are included in many public collections, including those of the National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.), the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Gallery of Australia (Canberra), Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), and the Museum of Fine Arts (St. Petersburg). When Graves was just 29, she was given a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. At the time she was the youngest artist, and fifth woman to achieve this honor. Graves was born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Her interest in art, nature, and anthropology was fostered by her father, an accountant at a local museum. After graduating from Vassar College in English Literature, Graves attended Yale University, where she received her bachelor's and master's degrees. Fellow Yale Art and Architecture alumni of the 1960s include the painters, photographers, and sculptors Brice Marden, Richard Serra, Chuck Close, Janet Fish, Gary Hudson...

Heavily textured abstract print in a serigraph and terragraph technique. It has a raised texture to the surface, A beautiful piece. This listing is for the one print, the cover justification sheet and the photograph are just included for provenance. This is from the limited edition of 100. Hand signed and numbered on colophon page. (They are not signed and numbered on each print) Arches paper. Dimensions: 15.75 X 15.25 These have a texture that feels like a painting. Done in Jaffa Israel based on the Hebrew Bible. Jewish, Judaica interest. Emil Schumacher is among the best-known exponents of Art Informel in Germany. His painting style, which he initially developed in the 1950s under the influence of Wols, is marked by dark, brownish black or brilliant thick red colours and a graffiti like sign language that endow the pictures the expressive character of old cracked masonry. Emil Schumacher (29 August 1912 in Hagen, Westfalen – 4 October 1999 in San José, Ibiza) was a German artist and painter. He was an important representative of abstract expressionism in post-war Germany. As an 18-year-old, Emil Schumacher undertakes a four-week-long bicycle tour to Paris, France. 1932–1935: Studies graphic design at the School of Applied Arts in Dortmund intending to become a graphic designer in advertising. 1935–1939: Independent artist without participating in exhibits. He undertakes study trips by bicycle to the Netherlands and Belgium. 1939–1945: Service obligation as draftsman in an arms factory, the Akkumulatoren–Werke of Hagen. Since 1945: Immediately after end of war, new start as independent artist. 1947: First solo exhibit in the Studio für neue Kunst. Co-founder of the artist group Junger Westen. 1954: Participates in the Willem Sandberg...

Published Benincasa Carmine. Edizioni SEAT, Torino, Italy. Offset directly from the original plates. Limited edition. This is not hand signed or numbered. Signature in the printing p...

Large abstract work on paper mixed technique ink and paint by Nicole Noailles Lascaux (1926-2021) Parisian artist. In its original frame.

Some Colde Night Mixed media: acrylic, ink marker, pastel on archival paper. Malgosia Kiernozycka was born in Wroclaw, Poland. She graduated high school at the School of Fine Arts a...

Inspired by nature, this dramatic image of a swirling torrent is one in a series of monoprints created by Toronto print and ceramic artist, Susan Collett...

Lisa Pressman earned her BA in Art from Douglas College, Rutgers University and an MFA from Bard College. Her work has been exhibited extensively throughout the U.S. and abroad, incl...