20th Century Art
to
55,170
63,569
32,853
31,250
16,909
13,241
Overall Width
to
Overall Height
to
7,564
20,693
158,449
237,369
1,846
2,270
4,782
6,289
5,920
15,262
20,786
24,747
17,348
13,284
5,337
41,421
19,376
14,830
10,381
6,787
6,360
4,612
2,537
1,798
1,133
672
449
94
89
83,267
62,094
8,092
77,236
39,403
28,458
22,220
17,485
14,263
13,011
12,856
10,430
10,120
8,939
7,888
7,884
5,344
4,280
4,179
4,044
4,040
3,785
3,617
48,058
28,911
28,861
28,588
15,018
8,106
2,503
1,651
1,246
1,183
34,393
43,651
87,043
62,542
Period: 20th Century
“Roses in a Porcelain Pitcher”
Located in Southampton, NY
Original oil on board still life painting of roses in a blue and white porcelain pitcher. Signed lower right by the artist and dated 1999. Condition is excellent. The painting is housed in a gold gallery frame with narrow linen liner. Overall framed measurements are 17.5 by 14.5 inches. Provenance: A Sarasota, Florida collector.
John C. Traynor combines the 19th century element of atmosphere with the realistic, yet soft rendering of color and light reminiscent of the Dutch Masters to create his own distinctive style.
John was born in 1961 and spent his early years growing up in Chester and Mendham, New Jersey. His classical training began at the Delbarton School in Morristown, New Jersey, and afterward he continued his art education at Paier College of Art in New Haven, Connecticut. As a merit scholar, John studied figure painting with Frank Mason at the Art Students League of New York. He concentrated on his understanding of form while studying drawing with Carroll Jones...
Category
Contemporary 20th Century Art
Materials
Oil, Board
Alexander Calder 'Spirales' 1974
Located in Brooklyn, NY
Paper Size: 15 x 11.5 inches ( 38.1 x 29.21 cm )
Image Size: 15 x 11.5 inches ( 38.1 x 29.21 cm )
Framed: No
Condition: A-: Near Mint, very light signs of handling
Supplemental Condi...
Category
20th Century Art
Materials
Lithograph
$120 Sale Price
20% Off
Juventus 1995-96 - The Embrace of Victory. UEFA. 1996
Located in Firenze, IT
Juventus 1995-96 - The Embrace of Victory
Artist: Marco Silombria (Savona, 1936 - Albissola, 2017)
Medium: Charcoal on paper
Dimensions: 101 x 72 cm
Signed: Lower right, "Si...
Category
Pop Art 20th Century Art
Materials
Paper, Charcoal, Carbon Pencil
'Poolside Pairs' 1970 Slim Aarons Premium Collection Estate Stamped Edition
By Slim Aarons
Located in London, GB
'Poolside Pairs' 1970 Slim Aarons Limited Estate Edition Print
Former fashion model Helen Dzo Dzo Kaptur (in white lace) and Nelda Linsk (in yellow), wife of art dealer Joseph Lins...
Category
Modern 20th Century Art
Materials
Color, Archival Pigment
Untitled (Two Birds) - Etching by Max Ernst - 1972
By Max Ernst
Located in Roma, IT
Etching and aquatint on Japan paper, realized in 1972.
Printed and published by Georges Visat, Paris.
Edition of 100, numbered 99/100 and hand signed in pencil.
Category
Surrealist 20th Century Art
Materials
Etching
$2,462 Sale Price
25% Off
A Fabulous, Abstract 1960s Mid-Century Modern Painting of a Sleeping Female Nude
Located in Chicago, IL
A Fabulous, Abstract 1960s Mid-Century Modern Painting of a Sleeping Female Nude by Noted Chicago Artist, Rudolph Pen. A sensuous, intimate studio depiction of a sleeping nude femal...
Category
American Modern 20th Century Art
Materials
Canvas, Oil
Composition, Hiroshima, Jacob Lawrence
Located in Auburn Hills, MI
Silkscreen in eleven colors on vélin paper. Paper Size: 12.81 x 9.375 inches. Inscription: Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued. Notes: From the album, Hiroshima, 1983. Published by Th...
Category
Expressionist 20th Century Art
Materials
Screen
$2,796 Sale Price
20% Off
original lithograph
Located in Henderson, NV
Medium: original lithograph by artist Regina Cassolo Bracchi, better known simply as Regina. Printed in 1956 for the very rare Documenti d'Arte d'Oggi, published in Milan by Groupe E...
Category
20th Century Art
Materials
Lithograph
Olympics of Sarajevo - Vintage Poster - 1984
Located in Roma, IT
Vintage poster realized after Piero Dorazio in occasion of the Winter Olympic Games in Sarajevo in 1984.
Offset print.
Good condition.
Category
Contemporary 20th Century Art
Materials
Paper, Offset
Vintage portrait oil painting of a woman in a garden landscape original French
Located in AIGNAN, FR
Vintage French landscape oil painting/figurative oil painting of a woman sewing in the garden by French artist, Armand Fouquet. A very charming, calmin...
Category
French School 20th Century Art
Materials
Oil
Bay of Naples and fishermen
Located in Genève, GE
Work on canvas
Molded frame in plaster and gilded wood
36 x 40 x 4 cm
Category
Italian School 20th Century Art
Materials
Oil
Art Deco Couple Portrait
Located in Wilton Manors, FL
Beautiful Art Deco illustration by unknown artist.
Ink and gouache on faux wood grain illustration board.
Image field measuring 14 x 18 inches on a 17 x 21 inch illustration panel...
Category
Art Deco 20th Century Art
Materials
Ink, Gouache, Illustration Board
Henri Matisse 'Nu Assis I' Serigraph
Located in Brooklyn, NY
"Nu Assis I" is a large serigraph reproduction by Henri Matisse, utilizing his renowned cut-out technique. Released by Silvio Zamorani Editore in Italy, this print has the approval o...
Category
Modern 20th Century Art
Materials
Screen
$200 Sale Price
20% Off
After Man Ray 'Lips' 1966 ORIGINAL POSTER
By Man Ray
Located in Brooklyn, NY
Paper Size: 21.25 x 36.75 inches ( 53.975 x 93.345 cm )
Image Size: 14 x 36.75 inches ( 35.56 x 93.345 cm )
Framed: No
Condition: C: Several Signs of use and handling, some visible m...
Category
Contemporary 20th Century Art
Materials
Offset
$360 Sale Price
20% Off
Nature Morte country side farming scene
Located in Belgrade, MT
This lithograph is part of my private collection. It is original and pencil signed and numbered by the artist.
Category
Abstract Expressionist 20th Century Art
Materials
Engraving, Lithograph
$320 Sale Price
30% Off
Landscape painting Cote d'Azur France MENTON Marine painter 20th Modern Art
Located in PARIS, FR
Lucien LAURENT-GESLL
Paris, 1860 – Paris, 1944
View of the Bay of Menton on the Cote d'Azur
Oil on canvas
81 x 100 cm
Signed lower right “Laurent Gsell”
Lucien Laurent-Gsell is the ...
Category
Modern 20th Century Art
Materials
Oil
French Expressionist Abstract Original Painting Artists Studio Provenance
Located in Cirencester, Gloucestershire
Abstract Expressionist Composition
by Jacques COULAIS (1955-2011)
gouache painting on paper/ card
unframed: 12.75 x 9.75 inches
condition: excellent
provenance: all the paintings we ...
Category
Abstract Impressionist 20th Century Art
Materials
Oil
Impressionist Paris Sunday Outdoor Market Landscape Figurative Painting
By A. Veschi
Located in Douglas Manor, NY
5-2519a Oil on artist board displayed in a painted wood frame
Image size 10x12.5"
Category
Impressionist 20th Century Art
Materials
Oil
Composition with Stars - Original lithograph (Mourlot #332)
By Joan Miró
Located in Paris, IDF
Joan MIRO
Composition with Stars
Original lithograph (printed in Mourlot workshop)
Printed signature in the plate
On Arches vellum 25 x 19 cm (c. 10 x 8 inch)
Edited by Mourlot in 1...
Category
Modern 20th Century Art
Materials
Lithograph
'Portrait of a Young Man in a Red Tie' French School (1956)
Located in London, GB
'Portrait of a Young Man in a Red Tie', gouache and ink on art paper, French School (1956). Step into the world of mid-20th century European art with a striking portrait that capture...
Category
Modern 20th Century Art
Materials
Paper, Ink, Gouache
$658 Sale Price
20% Off
Diurnes: The Goat in a Mountain - Original Collotype and Stencil (Cramer #115)
Located in Paris, IDF
Pablo PICASSO (1881-1973)
Diurnes: The Goat in a Mountain, 1962
Original collotype and stencil (Jacomet workshop)
Unsigned
Limited to 1000 copy
On paper 40 x 30 cm (c. 15,7 x 11,8 ...
Category
Modern 20th Century Art
Materials
Stencil
Impressionist Landscape by American Artist George Renouard
Located in Rochester, NY
Impressionist landscape by George Renouard. Beautiful blues and mauves. Oil on academy board. Unsigned.
George Renouard, was born in Rochester, New York and lived much of his life ...
Category
20th Century Art
Materials
Oil, Board
Man Walking the Dog at a River Side in the Lush Green English Countryside
By John Haskins
Located in Preston, GB
Man Walking the Dog at a River Side in the Lush Green English Countryside by 20th Century British Artist
Art measures 20 x 16 inches
Frame measures 25 x 21 inches
John Haskins...
Category
Realist 20th Century Art
Materials
Oil, Board
Mediterranean Coastal Landscape Garden View and Seascape Cote d'Azur Riviera
Located in Cirencester, Gloucestershire
La Cote d' Azur
French School, mid 20th century
signed
oil on canvas, framed
framed: 25 x 43 inches
canvas: 20 x 36.5 inches
Provenance: Private collection, France
Condition: Good co...
Category
Impressionist 20th Century Art
Materials
Oil
Ileana and Michael Sonnabend Collection: Princeton University Art Museum poster
Located in New York, NY
Roy Lichtenstein (after)
Eddie Diptych: Selections from the Ileana and Michael Sonnabend Collection, Princeton University Art Museum poster, 1985
Off...
Category
Pop Art 20th Century Art
Materials
Offset
Huge Spanish Modernist Oil Painting Fisherfolk Drying Nets on the Shore signed
Located in Cirencester, Gloucestershire
Drying Nets
Spanish School, late 20th century
signed lower corner and inscribed verso
oil on canvas, framed
framed: 29.75 x 41 inches
canvas: 28.5 x 29.5 inches
provenance: private c...
Category
Modern 20th Century Art
Materials
Oil, Canvas
$2,251 Sale Price
30% Off
1930's French Impressionist Red Roof Top Village In Green Fields Landscape
Located in Cirencester, Gloucestershire
French Landscape
by Louise Alix, French 1950's Impressionist
oil on artist paper, unframed
painting: 16 x 12.5 inches
provenance: from a large private collection of this artists wor...
Category
Impressionist 20th Century Art
Materials
Oil
Alexander Calder, 'Convection' from Flying Colors suite 1974-1975
Located in Pembroke Pines, FL
Artist: Alexander Calder (1898-1976)
Title: "Convection" (from the Braniff International Airways Flying Colors Collection)
Year: 1974-75
Medium: Lithographs on Arches paper
Size: 20 ...
Category
Contemporary 20th Century Art
Materials
Lithograph
Sarajevo 1984 Winter Olympics - by Cy Twombly - 1984
By Cy Twombly
Located in Roma, IT
Untitled, Sarayevo Winter Olympic Games 1984, is an etching with aquatint and lithograph in colors realized by Cy Twombly on the occasion of the Winter Olympics Games 1984 in Sarajev...
Category
Contemporary 20th Century Art
Materials
Etching, Aquatint, Lithograph
Blue Lagoon - large, colourful, modernist, gestural abstract, acrylic on canvas
Located in Bloomfield, ON
Milly Ristvedt has captured, in vivid colour, and expressive form the wonders of the ‘deep’ in this gorgeous abstract painting. Against a rich blue colour field, ethereal forms and g...
Category
Abstract 20th Century Art
Materials
Canvas, Acrylic
JULES RENE HERVE (1887-1981) Childen Feeding Ducks Woodland River signed oil
Located in Cirencester, Gloucestershire
Feeding the Ducks
by Jules Rene Herve (1887-1981) French, signed front and back
oil painting on canvas, framed
canvas: 9 x 11 inches
framed: 15 x 16.5 inches
Provenance: private col...
Category
Impressionist 20th Century Art
Materials
Oil, Canvas
$2,107 Sale Price
30% Off
Cocteau, Composition, Sous le Manteau de Feu (after)
By Jean Cocteau
Located in Auburn Hills, MI
Lithograph on vélin paper. Inscription: signed in the plate and unnumbered, as issued. Good condition. Notes: from the album, Les Cavaliers d'Ombre; Sous le Manteau de Feu, 1956. Pub...
Category
Modern 20th Century Art
Materials
Lithograph
$956 Sale Price
20% Off
French Town Square Impressionist Painting with Figures and Market Stalls
By Fanch Lel
Located in Cirencester, Gloucestershire
Title: French Town Square Impressionist Painting with Figures and Market Stalls
by Fanch Lel
Size: 8.75 inches (height) x 10.5 inches (wi...
Category
Impressionist 20th Century Art
Materials
Oil
$397 Sale Price
30% Off
Playboy 35th Anniversary
Located in Brooklyn, NY
This vibrant limited edition serigraph is a striking example of late 20th-century American printmaking, produced in collaboration with Special Editions LTD and Mirage Editions Inc., ...
Category
Pop Art 20th Century Art
Materials
Screen
Surrealist composition
Located in Henderson, NV
Medium: collotype (after the Miro lithograph). Printed in 1947 in an edition of 1500 by Meriden Gravure and published by Curt Valentin for "The Prints of Joan Miro" portfolio. Size: ...
Category
Surrealist 20th Century Art
Materials
Photogravure
Three Young Men
Located in Wilton Manors, FL
Beautiful ca. 1960 portrait by American artist, Vito Tomasello. Oil on sized illustration board measuring 21.5 x 30 inches. Signed lower right.
A lifetime NYC resident, Tomasello ...
Category
Abstract 20th Century Art
Materials
Oil, Board
$2,400 Sale Price
40% Off
Salvador dali 'Passiflora lauigera - 1968' Lithograph/Etching, Signed & numbered
Located in Pembroke Pines, FL
Artist: Salvador Dali
Title: Passiflora laurigera (Le vine, Passionflower)
Portfolio: 1968 Flora Dalinae
Medium: Photolithograph, etching, and pochoir in colors on BFK Rives
Date: 19...
Category
Surrealist 20th Century Art
Materials
Etching, Photographic Film, Lithograph
Ulrica
Located in München, BY
Limited Edition 25
More sizes on request
The photographic work of the internationally well-known Austrian photographer Andreas H. Bitesnich is captivating by its beauty and aestheti...
Category
Contemporary 20th Century Art
Materials
Archival Pigment
French school Seascape Landscape Oil painting Signed
Located in Zofingen, AG
⭐Landscape ⭐
Seascape from M Dubois probably born in XIX, was a plein air artist
⭐Structural Analysis :⭐
This composition is a rocky coast line in the west coast of France (Brittany...
Category
20th Century Art
Materials
Oil, Stretcher Bars, Canvas
$351 Sale Price
81% Off
Modern Impressionist French Oil Painting Lush Garden Scene with Seated Figure
Located in Cirencester, Gloucestershire
Title: Modern Impressionist French Oil Painting Lush Garden Scene with Seated Figure
by Bernadette Kelly (French b. 1933)
Unsigned
Medium: oil painting on board, unframed
Painting si...
Category
Modern 20th Century Art
Materials
Oil
Flower Still Life
By Adrian Dornbush
Located in Los Angeles, CA
(Note: This work is part of our exhibition Connected by Creativity: WPA Era Works from the Collection of Leata and Edward Beatty Rowan)
Oil on canvas, 24 ½ x 19 ½ inches unframed, 32 x 27 inches framed, signed and inscribed “Adrian Dornbush/ Flower Still Life” verso, a remnant of exhibition label verso, stamped “1454” verso, original frame
Exhibited:
i) Midwestern Artist’s Exhibition Representative Work from Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska & Colorado, Kansas City Art Institute, February 1 to March 2, 1931, no. 34 (see catalog with a listing of work with this title); and ii) Special Display and Sale of Late Oil Paintings Produced by Cedar Rapids Own Artists from the Little Gallery, at Newman’s Department Store, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, March 1932 (see [Advertisement], The Gazette (Cedar Rapids, Iowa), March 15, 1932 – listing a work with this title, together with paintings by fourteen other artists, including Grant Wood, Marvin Cone...
Category
American Modern 20th Century Art
Materials
Oil
Clara, Paris 1997
Located in München, BY
Total Edition of 15
signed and numbered
Also available in:
90 x 120 cm / 35.4 x 47.2 in
120 x 160 cm / 47.2 x 63 in
A black naked model from the front.
Thierry Le Gouès...
Category
Contemporary 20th Century Art
Materials
Black and White
Very Large British Oil depicting famous Naval battle
Located in Cirencester, Gloucestershire
Artist/ School: British School, second half 20th century, signed lower left 'Champion'
Title: a copy after de Loutherbourg's 1795 painting of Lord Howe's action of 1 June 1794 in th...
Category
Victorian 20th Century Art
Materials
Oil, Canvas
$1,436 Sale Price
30% Off
Picasso, Composition (Orozco 193-204), Au Baiser D'Avignon (after)
Located in Auburn Hills, MI
Lithograph on vélin d’Arches paper. Signed in the plate and unnumbered, as issued. Good condition. Notes: From the folio, Picasso au baiser d'Avignon, douze dessins, lavis, aquarelle...
Category
Cubist 20th Century Art
Materials
Lithograph
$3,596 Sale Price
20% Off
Arnold Palmer: King of Golf
Located in Austin, TX
Spectacular retro 1960's black and white capture featuring legendary golfer Arnold Palmer in his prime.
Arnold Palmer was an American professional golfer who is widely regarded as o...
Category
Contemporary 20th Century Art
Materials
Archival Ink, Archival Paper, Archival Pigment
APRIL
Located in Santa Monica, CA
FRANCES H. GEARHART
APRIL c. 1928-30
Color block print, signed and titled in pencil. Image 9" x 5". sheet 11 1/8 x 7 1/8. Very good impression. The usual tack holes at the right she...
Category
Impressionist 20th Century Art
Materials
Woodcut
Midnight Angus Drawing #3 (Midwest, Cattle, Mid-Century, Prairie, Blue, 25% OFF)
Located in Kansas City, MO
Theodore Waddell
Midnight Angus Drawing #3 (Midwest, Cattle, Mid-Century, Prairie, Blue)
Oil on Paper
Year: 1990
Sheet Size: 30 x 40 inches (76.2 x 101.6 cm)
Mat Size: 33.5 x 43.5 in...
Category
Modern 20th Century Art
Materials
Paper, Oil
Les roses coupees
Located in Henderson, NV
Medium: offset lithograph (after the watercolor). Printed in 1970 on velin bouffant paper from the Papeteries Casteljoux and published in France by Edito-Service Geneve. This reprodu...
Category
20th Century Art
Materials
Offset
Tableau, Japanese, limited edition lithograph, black, white, red, signed, number
By Toko Shinoda
Located in Santa Fe, NM
Tableau, Japanese, limited edition lithograph, black, white, red, signed, number
Shinoda's works have been collected by public galleries and museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Brooklyn Museum and Metropolitan Museum (all in New York City), the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, the British Museum in London, the Art Institute of Chicago, Arthur M. Sackler Gallery of the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., the Singapore Art Museum, the National Museum of Singapore, the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, Netherlands, the Albright–Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, the Cincinnati Art Museum, and the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut.
New York Times Obituary, March 3, 2021 by Margalit Fox, Alex Traub contributed reporting.
Toko Shinoda, one of the foremost Japanese artists of the 20th century, whose work married the ancient serenity of calligraphy with the modernist urgency of Abstract Expressionism, died on Monday at a hospital in Tokyo. She was 107.
Her death was announced by her gallerist in the United States.
A painter and printmaker, Ms. Shinoda attained international renown at midcentury and remained sought after by major museums and galleries worldwide for more than five decades.
Her work has been exhibited at, among other places, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the British Museum; and the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo. Private collectors include the Japanese imperial family.
Writing about a 1998 exhibition of Ms. Shinoda’s work at a London gallery, the British newspaper The Independent called it “elegant, minimal and very, very composed,” adding, “Her roots as a calligrapher are clear, as are her connections with American art of the 1950s, but she is quite obviously a major artist in her own right.”
As a painter, Ms. Shinoda worked primarily in sumi ink, a solid form of ink, made from soot pressed into sticks, that has been used in Asia for centuries.
Rubbed on a wet stone to release their pigment, the sticks yield a subtle ink that, because it is quickly imbibed by paper, is strikingly ephemeral. The sumi artist must make each brush stroke with all due deliberation, as the nature of the medium precludes the possibility of reworking even a single line.
“The color of the ink which is produced by this method is a very delicate one,” Ms. Shinoda told The Business Times of Singapore in 2014. “It is thus necessary to finish one’s work very quickly. So the composition must be determined in my mind before I pick up the brush. Then, as they say, the painting just falls off the brush.”
Ms. Shinoda painted almost entirely in gradations of black, with occasional sepias and filmy blues. The ink sticks she used had been made for the great sumi artists of the past, some as long as 500 years ago.
Her line — fluid, elegant, impeccably placed — owed much to calligraphy. She had been rigorously trained in that discipline from the time she was a child, but she had begun to push against its confines when she was still very young.
Deeply influenced by American Abstract Expressionists like Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell, whose work she encountered when she lived in New York in the late 1950s, Ms. Shinoda shunned representation.
“If I have a definite idea, why paint it?,” she asked in an interview with United Press International in 1980. “It’s already understood and accepted. A stand of bamboo is more beautiful than a painting could be. Mount Fuji is more striking than any possible imitation.”
Spare and quietly powerful, making abundant use of white space, Ms. Shinoda’s paintings are done on traditional Chinese and Japanese papers, or on backgrounds of gold, silver or platinum leaf.
Often asymmetrical, they can overlay a stark geometric shape with the barest calligraphic strokes. The combined effect appears to catch and hold something evanescent — “as elusive as the memory of a pleasant scent or the movement of wind,” as she said in a 1996 interview.
Ms. Shinoda’s work also included lithographs; three-dimensional pieces of wood and other materials; and murals in public spaces, including a series made for the Zojoji Temple in Tokyo.
The fifth of seven children of a prosperous family, Ms. Shinoda was born on March 28, 1913, in Dalian, in Manchuria, where her father, Raijiro, managed a tobacco plant. Her mother, Joko, was a homemaker. The family returned to Japan when she was a baby, settling in Gifu, midway between Kyoto and Tokyo.
One of her father’s uncles, a sculptor and calligrapher, had been an official seal carver to the Meiji emperor. He conveyed his love of art and poetry to Toko’s father, who in turn passed it to Toko.
“My upbringing was a very traditional one, with relatives living with my parents,” she said in the U.P.I. interview. “In a scholarly atmosphere, I grew up knowing I wanted to make these things, to be an artist.”
She began studying calligraphy at 6, learning, hour by hour, impeccable mastery over line. But by the time she was a teenager, she had begun to seek an artistic outlet that she felt calligraphy, with its centuries-old conventions, could not afford.
“I got tired of it and decided to try my own style,” Ms. Shinoda told Time magazine in 1983. “My father always scolded me for being naughty and departing from the traditional way, but I had to do it.”
Moving to Tokyo as a young adult, Ms. Shinoda became celebrated throughout Japan as one of the country’s finest living calligraphers, at the time a signal honor for a woman. She had her first solo show in 1940, at a Tokyo gallery.
During World War II, when she forsook the city for the countryside near Mount Fuji, she earned her living as a calligrapher, but by the mid-1940s she had started experimenting with abstraction. In 1954 she began to achieve renown outside Japan with her inclusion in an exhibition of Japanese calligraphy at MoMA.
In 1956, she traveled to New York. At the time, unmarried Japanese women could obtain only three-month visas for travel abroad, but through zealous renewals, Ms. Shinoda managed to remain for two years.
She met many of the titans of Abstract Expressionism there, and she became captivated by their work.
“When I was in New York in the ’50s, I was often included in activities with those artists, people like Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Motherwell and so forth,” she said in a 1998 interview with The Business Times. “They were very generous people, and I was often invited to visit their studios, where we would share ideas and opinions on our work. It was a great experience being together with people who shared common feelings.”
During this period, Ms. Shinoda’s work was sold in the United States by Betty Parsons, the New York dealer who represented Pollock, Rothko and many of their contemporaries.
Returning to Japan, Ms. Shinoda began to fuse calligraphy and the Expressionist aesthetic in earnest. The result was, in the words of The Plain Dealer of Cleveland in 1997, “an art of elegant simplicity and high drama.”
Among Ms. Shinoda’s many honors, she was depicted, in 2016, on a Japanese postage stamp. She is the only Japanese artist to be so honored during her lifetime.
No immediate family members survive.
When she was quite young and determined to pursue a life making art, Ms. Shinoda made the decision to forgo the path that seemed foreordained for women of her generation.
“I never married and have no children,” she told The Japan Times in 2017. “And I suppose that it sounds strange to think that my paintings are in place of them — of course they are not the same thing at all. But I do say, when paintings that I have made years ago are brought back into my consciousness, it seems like an old friend, or even a part of me, has come back to see me.”
Works of a Woman's Hand
Toko Shinoda bases new abstractions on ancient calligraphy
Down a winding side street in the Aoyama district, western Tokyo. into a chunky white apartment building, then up in an elevator small enough to make a handful of Western passengers friends or enemies for life. At the end of a hall on the fourth floor, to the right, stands a plain brown door. To be admitted is to go through the looking glass. Sayonara today. Hello (Konichiwa) yesterday and tomorrow.
Toko Shinoda, 70, lives and works here. She can be, when she chooses, on e of Japans foremost calligraphers, master of an intricate manner of writing that traces its lines back some 3,000 years to ancient China. She is also an avant-garde artist of international renown, whose abstract paintings and lithographs rest in museums around the world. These diverse talents do not seem to belong in the same epoch. Yet they have somehow converged in this diminutive woman who appears in her tiny foyer, offering slippers and ritual bows of greeting.
She looks like someone too proper to chip a teacup, never mind revolutionize an old and hallowed art form She wears a blue and white kimono of her own design. Its patterns, she explains, are from Edo, meaning the period of the Tokugawa shoguns, before her city was renamed Tokyo in 1868. Her black hair is pulled back from her face, which is virtually free of lines and wrinkles. except for the gold-rimmed spectacles perched low on her nose (this visionary is apparently nearsighted). Shinoda could have stepped directly from a 19th century Meji print.
Her surroundings convey a similar sense of old aesthetics, a retreat in the midst of a modern, frenetic city. The noise of the heavy traffic on a nearby elevated highway sounds at this height like distant surf. delicate bamboo shades filter the daylight. The color arrangement is restful: low ceilings of exposed wood, off-white walls, pastel rugs of blue, green and gray.
It all feels so quintessentially Japanese that Shinoda’s opening remarks come as a surprise. She points out (through a translator) that she was not born in Japan at all but in Darien, Manchuria. Her father had been posted there to manage a tobacco company under the aegis of the occupying Japanese forces, which seized the region from Russia in 1905. She says,”People born in foreign places are very free in their thinking, not restricted” But since her family went back to Japan in 1915, when she was two, she could hardly remember much about a liberated childhood? She answers,”I think that if my mother had remained in Japan, she would have been an ordinary Japanese housewife. Going to Manchuria, she was able to assert her own personality, and that left its mark on me.”
Evidently so. She wears her obi low on the hips, masculine style. The Porcelain aloofness she displays in photographs shatters in person. Her speech is forceful, her expression animated and her laugh both throaty and infectious. The hand she brings to her mouth to cover her amusement (a traditional female gesture of modesty) does not stand a chance.
Her father also made a strong impression on the fifth of his seven children:”He came from a very old family, and he was quite strict in some ways and quite liberal in others.” He owned one of the first three bicycles ever imported to Japan and tinkered with it constantly He also decided that his little daughter would undergo rigorous training in a procrustean antiquity.
“I was forced to study from age six on to learn calligraphy,” Shinoda says, The young girl dutifully memorized and copied the accepted models. In one sense, her father had pushed her in a promising direction, one of the few professional fields in Japan open to females. Included among the ancient terms that had evolved around calligraphy was onnade, or woman's writing.
Heresy lay ahead. By the time she was 15, she had already been through nine years of intensive discipline, “I got tired of it and decided to try my own style. My father always scolded me for being naughty and departing from the traditional way, but I had to do it.”
She produces a brush and a piece of paper to demonstrate the nature of her rebellion. “This is kawa, the accepted calligraphic character for river,” she says, deftly sketching three short vertical strokes. “But I wanted to use more than three lines to show the force of the river.” Her brush flows across the white page, leaving a recognizable river behind, also flowing.” The simple kawa in the traditional language was not enough for me. I wanted to find a new symbol to express the word river.”
Her conviction grew that ink could convey the ineffable, the feeling, "as she says, of wind blowing softly.” Another demonstration. She goes to the sliding wooden door of an anteroom and disappears in back of it; the only trace of her is a triangular swatch of the right sleeve of her kimono, which she has arranged for that purpose. A realization dawns. The task of this artist is to paint that three sided pattern so that the invisible woman attached to it will be manifest to all viewers.
Gen, painted especially for TIME, shows Shinoda’s theory in practice. She calls the work “my conception of Japan in visual terms.” A dark swath at the left, punctuated by red, stands for history. In the center sits a Chinese character gen, which means in the present or actuality. A blank pattern at the right suggests an unknown future.
Once out of school, Shinoda struck off on a path significantly at odds with her culture. She recognized marriage for what it could mean to her career (“a restriction”) and decided against it. There was a living to be earned by doing traditional calligraphy:she used her free time to paint her variations. In 1940 a Tokyo gallery exhibited her work. (Fourteen years would pass before she got a second show.)War came, and bad times for nearly everyone, including the aspiring artist , who retreated to a rural area near Mount Fuji and traded her kimonos for eggs.
In 1954 Shinoda’s work was included in a group exhibit at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art. Two years later, she overcame bureaucratic obstacles to visit the U.S.. Unmarried Japanese women are allowed visas for only three months, patiently applying for two-month extensions, one at a time, Shinoda managed to travel the country for two years. She pulls out a scrapbook from this period. Leafing through it, she suddenly raises a hand and touches her cheek:”How young I looked!” An inspection is called for. The woman in the grainy, yellowing newspaper photograph could easily be the on e sitting in this room. Told this, she nods and smiles. No translation necessary.
Her sojourn in the U.S. proved to be crucial in the recognition and development of Shinoda’s art. Celebrities such as actor Charles Laughton and John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet bought her paintings and spread the good word. She also saw the works of the abstract expressionists, then the rage of the New York City art world, and realized that these Western artists, coming out of an utterly different tradition, were struggling toward the same goal that had obsessed her. Once she was back home, her work slowly made her famous.
Although Shinoda has used many materials (fabric, stainless steel, ceramics, cement), brush and ink remain her principal means of expression. She had said, “As long as I am devoted to the creation of new forms, I can draw even with muddy water.” Fortunately, she does not have to. She points with evident pride to her ink stone, a velvety black slab of rock, with an indented basin, that is roughly a foot across and two feet long. It is more than 300 years old. Every working morning, Shinoda pours about a third of a pint of water into it, then selects an ink stick from her extensive collection, some dating back to China’s Ming dynasty. Pressing stick against stone, she begins rubbing. Slowly, the dried ink dissolves in the water and becomes ready for the brush. So two batches of sumi (India ink) are exactly alike; something old, something new. She uses color sparingly. Her clear preference is black and all its gradations. “In some paintings, sumi expresses blue better than blue.”
It is time to go downstairs to the living quarters. A niece, divorced and her daughter,10,stay here with Shinoda; the artist who felt forced to renounce family and domesticity at the outset of her career seems welcome to it now. Sake is offered, poured into small cedar boxes and happily accepted. Hold carefully. Drink from a corner. Ambrosial. And just right for the surroundings and the hostess. A conservative renegade; a liberal traditionalist; a woman steeped in the male-dominated conventions that she consistently opposed. Her trail blazing accomplishments are analogous to Picasso’s.
When she says goodbye, she bows. --by Paul Gray...
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Materials
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