20th Century Art
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31,242
62,383
32,647
30,699
16,630
13,125
Overall Width
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Overall Height
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7,448
20,161
156,112
236,985
1,804
2,261
4,719
6,197
5,845
15,065
20,391
24,186
17,043
13,627
5,272
40,708
19,570
14,613
9,995
6,768
6,218
4,526
2,525
1,735
1,144
663
437
87
87
82,010
61,276
7,990
76,558
39,117
28,161
22,094
17,369
14,157
12,898
12,781
10,357
10,199
8,896
7,832
7,796
5,270
4,206
4,164
4,029
3,937
3,757
3,606
46,913
29,054
27,932
27,890
14,685
7,675
2,503
1,494
1,212
1,180
33,982
42,358
86,642
60,879
Period: 20th Century
Destination Unknown 1979 Signed Limited Edition Lithograph
By Ernie Barnes
Located in Rochester Hills, MI
Artist: Ernie Barnes
Title: Destination Unknown
Year: 1979
Print - Lithograph
Size: 25" x 19 ½" inches
Edition: Pencil signed and numbered 24/300
Unframed
‘Destination Unknow...
Category
American Realist 20th Century Art
Materials
Lithograph
Homme dévoilant une Femme. (Man unveiling a woman).
Located in Storrs, CT
Homme dévoilant une Femme. (Man uncovering a woman). 1931. Drypoint. Bloch 138; Baer 203 B.d. Vollard Suite, plate 5. Printed by: Lacourie...
Category
Modern 20th Century Art
Materials
Etching
A room full of straw by David Hockney (Six Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm)
Located in New York, NY
This etching from David Hockney’s celebrated Six Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm portfolio pictures the story ‘Rumpelstilzchen’. A room full of straw references Magritte’s The To...
Category
Modern 20th Century Art
Materials
Etching, Aquatint
Mille et une Nuits
Located in Brooklyn, NY
Henri Matisse created One Thousand and One Nights in 1950 during his renowned cut-out period, crafting vibrant compositions using gouache-painted paper cut-outs. The original, made i...
Category
Impressionist 20th Century Art
Materials
Screen
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
Landscape with characters spanish original oil on canvas painting
Located in Barcelona, Barcelona
Joaquim Marsillach i Codony (1905-1986) - Landscape with characters
Oil on canvas
Oil measures 46x55 cm.
Frame measures 69x78 cm.
Marsillach Codony...
Category
Impressionist 20th Century Art
Materials
Canvas, Oil
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
Marc Chagall and Charles Sorlier, Carmen, Lithograph, signed 98/150 Mourlot CS39
By Marc Chagall
Located in New York, NY
Marc Chagall (After) and Charles Sorlier (his collaborator and printer)
Carmen, Metropolitan Opera, New York City, 1966
Color Lithograph on Arches watermarked Paper with deckled edg...
Category
Surrealist 20th Century Art
Materials
Lithograph
Abstract Composition - Lithograph by Carla Accardi - 1970 ca.
Located in Roma, IT
Limited edition of 150 pieces, hand signed and numbered.
Excellent conditions.
Category
Abstract 20th Century Art
Materials
Lithograph
L'Astronome - Lithograph - 1900-1944 - Signed
Located in Sint-Truiden, BE
Color lithograph after the watercolor illustrations by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry from his beloved masterpiece "The Little Prince".
This lithograph was printed and published in 2009 ...
Category
Contemporary 20th Century Art
Materials
Lithograph
M. Sola - Framed Early 20th Century Oil, Alpine Mountains with Snow
Located in Corsham, GB
Impressionist, oil on board. Well presented in an elaborate gilt effect frame with lamb's tongue, bead course, and palmette ornamentation to the profile. Signed and inscribed to the ...
Category
20th Century Art
Materials
Oil
Down the Rabbit Hole, from Alice in Wonderland
Located in Washington, DC
Artist: Salvador Dali
Medium: Heliogravure
Title: Down the Rabbit Hole
Portfolio: 1969 Alice in Wonderland
Year: 1969
Edition: 2430/2500
Frame Size: 24 1/4" x 19 1/2"
Sheet Size: 16 ...
Category
20th Century Art
Materials
Woodcut
Mid 20th French Modernist Landscape with Rolling Hills and Path in Muted Green
Located in Cirencester, Gloucestershire
Modernist Landscape
Suzanne Vattier, French 1901-1996
gouache painting on artist paper, framed
size: 7 x 9 inches
Suzanne Vattier (1901-1996) was a pupil of the famous painter, Andr...
Category
Fauvist 20th Century Art
Materials
Gouache
Dufy, Composition, Eaux-de-vie, Esprit de la fleur et du fruit (after)
By Raoul Dufy
Located in Auburn Hills, MI
Lithograph and stencil on vélin d’Arches paper. Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued. Good condition. Published and printed by Bernard Klein, éditeur, Paris, February 26, 1954. Notes: ...
Category
Modern 20th Century Art
Materials
Lithograph, Stencil
Divine Comedy
Located in OPOLE, PL
Salvador Dalí’s Divine Comedy is a series of 100 color wood engravings, each corresponding to a canto from Dante Alighieri’s epic poem. Created between 1960 and 1964, these engraving...
Category
Surrealist 20th Century Art
Materials
Woodcut
Picasso, Composition (Cramer 84), Picasso en marge du Buffon (after)
Located in Fairfield, CT
Medium: Lithograph on vélin du Marais paper
Year: 1957
Paper Size: 14.5 x 11 inches
Catalogue raisonné reference: Cramer, illustration 84
Inscription: Inscription: Unsigned and unnum...
Category
Cubist 20th Century Art
Materials
Lithograph
“1998 speak see hear no evil”
By Keith Haring
Located in Warren, NJ
This is an Keith Haring rare poster speak 1998 speak see hear no evil. In good condition framed. Measures 34x24
Category
20th Century Art
Materials
Lithograph
"Over Looking the Delaware" Upper Bucks County PA Pastoral Landscape Scene
Located in New York, NY
A wonderful Impressionist summer pastoral scene of a colorful quaint home and barn in a green pastoral landscape. Willet has portrayed this piece in a most intimate, yet energetic wa...
Category
American Impressionist 20th Century Art
Materials
Oil, Board
Tree - Lithograph Signed in the Plate - Mourlot 1965
Located in Paris, IDF
Henri Matisse
Tree
Lithograph in colors (printed in Atelier Mourlot)
Signed in the plate
Edition of 250 copies
On Arches vellum 38 x 28 cm (c. 15 x 11 in)
Very good condition
INFO...
Category
Modern 20th Century Art
Materials
Lithograph
Colombe volant (à l'Arc-en-ciel)
Located in Wien, 9
Picasso's *Colombe volant (à l'Arc-en-ciel)* is a captivating example of his mastery in the realm of printmaking. This color lithograph, signed and dated in the lower right corner, f...
Category
Expressionist 20th Century Art
Materials
Lithograph
Chagall, Composition (Mourlot 297; Cramer 40), Derrière le miroir (after)
By Marc Chagall
Located in Auburn Hills, MI
Lithograph on vélin paper. Inscription: Unsigned and unnumbered. Good condition. Notes: From Derrière le miroir, N° 119. Published by Aimé Maeght, Éditeur, Paris; printed by Éditions...
Category
Expressionist 20th Century Art
Materials
Lithograph
Fine French Impressionist Signed Oil Elegant Ladies with Parasols in Meadows
Located in Cirencester, Gloucestershire
Artist/ School: French Impressionist School, indistinctly signed lower corner, 20th century.
Title: Elegant Ladies in Wild Flower Meadow
Medium...
Category
Impressionist 20th Century Art
Materials
Oil
"Dear Prudence" Limited Edition Hand Written Lyrics
By John Lennon
Located in Laguna Beach, CA
Rare Limited Edition Serigraph of John Lennon's handwritten lyrics for the song "Dear Prudence" first released as on The White Album by the Beatles in 1968 . It was written when Len...
Category
Contemporary 20th Century Art
Materials
Other Medium
Original 1970 exhibition poster was created for Henri Matisse’s Œuvre Gravé
Located in PARIS, FR
This original 1970 exhibition poster was created for Henri Matisse’s "L’Œuvre Gravé" (The Engraved Work) at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. This event celebrated Matisse’s maste...
Category
20th Century Art
Materials
Lithograph, Paper
Adult film star Cal Culver (AKA Casey Donovan) 'After Dark' Nude, Signed
Located in Senoia, GA
Adult film star Cal Culver (AKA Casey Donovan) 'After Dark' magazine nude study, photographed in 1972. This is a vintage gelatin silver print, selenium...
Category
Pop Art 20th Century Art
Materials
Silver Gelatin
The Palm Trees - Vintage Photograph - 1970s
Located in Roma, IT
The Palm Trees is a black and white vintage photo, realized in 1970s.
Good conditions and aged.
It belongs to a historical and nostalgic album including historical moments, places,...
Category
Contemporary 20th Century Art
Materials
Photographic Paper
Sunset Over the Lake, 1919 by Swedish Artist Carl Kjellin (1862-1939)
Located in Stockholm, SE
"Sunset Over the Lake" by Carl Kjellin is a Nordic Light painting capturing the ephemeral beauty of a lake at sunset. The vibrant canvas, dominated by a b...
Category
Post-Impressionist 20th Century Art
Materials
Canvas, Oil
'Partners' — Mid-Century Modernist Regionalism
By Dale Nichols
Located in Myrtle Beach, SC
Dale Nichols, 'Partners', lithograph, edition 250, 1950. Signed in pencil. A fine, richly-inked impression, on cream wove paper; the full sheet with margins (7/8 to 1 5/8 inches); tw...
Category
American Modern 20th Century Art
Materials
Lithograph
WATTS TOWER
By Gloria Stuart
Located in Santa Monica, CA
GLORIA STUART (1910 – 2010)
WATTS TOWERS, 1971
Oil on canvas, signed lower right, 24” x 50 ½”. Gloria Stuart, an Academy Award nominated actress was also a painter, illustrator and printmaker. She most recently portrayed Rose in the blockbuster film “Titanic”. She was a Santa Monica native.
In 2013 The Los Angeles Museum of Art, LACMA exhibited a nearly identical painting looking from the south, the same size and frame. Last 5 photos show the example at LACMA. One shows theirs in a distant room with a major Thomas Hart Benton painting in the foreground
A VERY IMPORTANT MULTI-LEVELED DOCUMENT OF LOS ANGELES AND HOLLYWOOD CULTURAL HSTORYi
The following is from her obituary in the Los Angeles Times upon her death in September 2010 at the age of 100
Gloria Stuart, a 1930s Hollywood leading lady who earned an Academy Award nomination for her first significant role in nearly 60 years — as Old Rose, the centenarian survivor of the Titanic in James Cameron’s 1997 Oscar-winning film — has died. She was 100.
.......She devoted much of her time to designing and printing artists’ books (handmade, letter-press printed books in limited editions, with her own artwork and writing). Her work is in the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and other museums.
Stuart, a founding member of the Screen Actors Guild who later became an accomplished painter and fine printer, died Sunday night at her West Los Angeles home, said her daughter, writer Sylvia Thompson.
Stuart had been diagnosed with lung cancer five years ago.
“She also was a breast cancer survivor,” Thompson said, “but she just paid no attention to illness. She was a very strong woman and had other fish to fry.”
In July the actress was honored at an “Academy Centennial Celebration With Gloria Stuart” at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills.
“She was a charming and beautiful leading lady in the ‘30s, and I never understood why her career didn’t go further at that time,” film historian and critic Leonard Maltin, who interviewed Stuart on stage at the event, told The Times on Monday.
As for Stuart’s high-profile comeback in “Titanic”: “She was thrilled by the attention that that performance brought her and really wanted to win that Oscar. I thought she hit just the right notes in that performance. She was wry and engaging.”
As a glamorous blond actress under contract to Universal Studios and 20th Century Fox in the 1930s, Stuart appeared opposite Claude Rains in James Whale’s “The Invisible Man” and with Warner Baxter in John Ford’s “The Prisoner of Shark Island.”
She also appeared with Eddie Cantor in “Roman Scandals,” with Dick Powell in Busby Berkeley’s “Gold Diggers of 1935” and with James Cagney in “Here Comes the Navy.” And she played romantic leads in two Shirley Temple movies, “Poor Little Rich Girl” and “Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.”
But mostly she played what Stuart later dismissed as “stupid parts with nothing to do” — “girl reporter, girl detective, girl nurse” — and “it became increasingly evident to me I wasn’t going to get to be a big star like Katharine Hepburn and Loretta Young.”
After making 42 feature films between 1932 and 1939, Stuart’s latest studio contract, with 20th Century Fox, was not renewed. She appeared in only four films in the 1940s and retired from the screen in 1946.
By 1974, “the blond lovely of the talkies” had become an entry in one of Richard Lamparski’s “Whatever Happened to” books.
Writer-director Cameron’s $200-million “Titanic” changed that.
Stuart played Rose Calvert, the 100-year-old Titanic survivor who shows up after modern-day treasure hunters searching through the wreckage of the sunken ship find a charcoal drawing of her wearing a priceless blue diamond necklace.
Stuart’s performance as Old Rose frames the 1997 romantic- drama that starred Leonardo DiCaprio as lower-class artist Jack Dawson...
Category
American Modern 20th Century Art
Materials
Oil
Salvador Dalí, Composition (Field 69-5, A-M), Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Located in Auburn Hills, MI
Héliogravure on Papeterie de Mandeure vélin paper. Inscription: Signed in the plate and unnumbered, as issued. Good condition. Notes: From the folio, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland...
Category
Surrealist 20th Century Art
Materials
Lithograph
Listed Italian Artist Renato Longanesi Large oil painting on canvas Clipper ship
Located in Palm Coast, FL
This is an amazing vintage original oil painting on canvas depicting Clipper ships in the stormy ocean by Listed Italian Artist Renato Longanesi (b.19...
Category
Impressionist 20th Century Art
Materials
Oil
Paul McCartney - Farirground
Located in Norwich, GB
Astrid Kirchherr ( 20 May 1938 – 12 May 2020) was a German photographer and artist known for her association with the Beatles (along with her friends Klaus Voormann...
Category
Contemporary 20th Century Art
Materials
Photographic Paper
Henri Matisse 'Editions du Desastre' 1992- Poster
Located in Brooklyn, NY
Paper Size: 31.5 x 23.5 inches ( 80.01 x 59.69 cm )
Image Size: 31.5 x 23.5 inches ( 80.01 x 59.69 cm )
Framed: No
Condition: B: Very Good Condition, with signs of handling or age...
Category
20th Century Art
Materials
Offset
Mabel Oliver Rae, etching of Tom Tower, Oxford
Located in London, GB
To see our other views and maps of England - including London, Oxford and Cambridge, scroll down to "More from this Seller" and below it click on "See all from this Seller" - or send...
Category
Modern 20th Century Art
Materials
Etching
Sun Beams Into Grand Central Station (1930) - Silver Gelatin Fibre Print
Located in London, GB
Sun Beams Into Grand Central Station (1930) - Silver Gelatin Fibre Print
(Photo by Hal Morey/Getty Images)
Beams of sunlight streaming through the windows ...
Category
Modern 20th Century Art
Materials
Black and White, Silver Gelatin
Caped Skiers, Colorado, Estate Edition, Landscape Photograph
By Slim Aarons
Located in Los Angeles, CA
Caped Skiers, Colorado, Estate Edition, Landscape Photograph
This late 1960s landscape photograph, captured by society photographer Slim Aarons, features skimaster Stein Eriksen lea...
Category
American Realist 20th Century Art
Materials
Lambda
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...
Category
Contemporary 20th Century Art
Materials
Lithograph
Huge Eastern Painting 4 Red Crowned Cranes Asian Wading in Water Bamboo Golden
Located in Cirencester, Gloucestershire
Four Red Crowned Cranes wading in Bamboo Water
B Joseph, 20th century (French?)
signed oil painting on canvas, framed
framed: 52 x 64 inches
canvas: 48 x 60 inches
condition: very g...
Category
Aesthetic Movement 20th Century Art
Materials
Oil, Canvas
Dutch Sailing Ships in Calm Harbour Signed Antique English Marine Oil Painting
Located in Cirencester, Gloucestershire
Dutch Vessels Morning Light
by C.W. Smith (British, early 20th century)
signed oil on canvas, framed
framed: 15.5 x 21.5 inches
canvas: 12 x 18 inches
inscribed verso
Provenance: pr...
Category
English School 20th Century Art
Materials
Oil, Canvas
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
Vintage David Hockney Poster San Francisco Opera 1982, whimsical color drawings
Located in New York, NY
Vintage poster for the 1982 Summer Festival season of the San Francisco Opera. David Hockney designed the whimsical sets and costumes for the San Francisco Opera's production of Igor...
Category
Neo-Expressionist 20th Century Art
Materials
Lithograph
L.T. Sola - Early 20th Century Oil, Alpine Landscape
Located in Corsham, GB
Well presented in a gilt-effect frame. Signed. On board.
Category
20th Century Art
Materials
Oil
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
1988 poster for David Hockney: A Retrospective at The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Located in PARIS, FR
The 1988 poster for “David Hockney: A Retrospective” at The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a vibrant and visually striking representation of the artist’s distinct style. Featuring Hoc...
Category
20th Century Art
Materials
Paper, Lithograph
Interior scene
Located in Riga, LV
Interior scene
oil/canvas, 64x70. cm., 1995.
Category
Impressionist 20th Century Art
Materials
Canvas, Oil
Aperitif on the terrace of the bar spanish oil on canvas painting
Located in Barcelona, Barcelona
Illegible signature lower right.
Oil measures 38x46 cm.
Frameless.
Dated 1976.
Category
Fauvist 20th Century Art
Materials
Canvas, Oil
Clinton Hill, (Nude #1), 1951, drawing, figure/abstraction
By Clinton Hill
Located in New York, NY
Clinton Hill (1922-2003), created quintessential mid-century images, but figures are unusual in his work. This is from a very early period. In 1951 Hill studied at the Academie de la...
Category
American Modern 20th Century Art
Materials
Gouache
Pumpkin (White T)
By Yayoi Kusama
Located in Bristol, GB
Screenprint
Edition 102 of 120
83.5 × 70.5 cm (32.9 x 27.8 in)
Signed, titled, dated and numbered on front
Artwork in excellent condition considering its age. Only visible under stud...
Category
Contemporary 20th Century Art
Materials
Screen
Spanish seascape oil on canvas painting european art xx century cadaques
Located in Barcelona, Barcelona
Rafael Durancamps (1891-1979) - Cadaques - Oil on canvas
Oil measures 38x61 cm.
Frame measures 52x75 cm.
Rafael Durancamps i Folguera (Sabadell, March 29, 1891 [1] - Barcelona, January 4...
Category
Impressionist 20th Century Art
Materials
Canvas, Oil
The Horsemen
By Gen Paul
Located in Paris, FR
Ink on paper
50.00 cm. x 65.00 cm. 19.69 in. x 25.59 in. (paper)
LCD6765
Category
Abstract 20th Century Art
Materials
Ink
1969 Signed Limited Edition Etching Abstract Nude
Located in Rochester Hills, MI
Artist Name: Barbara Kwasniewska
Year: 1969
Medium Type: etching
Size-Width Size-Height: 22.5'' x 30" inches
Signed Edition Size: Signed, Titled, and Numbered 2/75
Barbabra Kwas...
Category
Abstract 20th Century Art
Materials
Etching
French 20th Century Abstract Expressionism Painting with Bold Pink and Orange
Located in Cirencester, Gloucestershire
Abstract Expressionist Composition
by Marie Deloume (French born 1942)
signed on back, inscribed verso with the artists Paris address
oil painting on paper stuck on canvas, unframed
...
Category
Abstract Expressionist 20th Century Art
Materials
Canvas, Oil, Paper
Abstract Figurative Expressionist painting
Located in Wilton Manors, FL
Amazing Figurative Expressionism painting with exceptional color and movement. Oil on canvas, ca. 1960s. Measures 40 x 52 inches. Unsigned and unattributed. Excellent condition.
Category
Expressionist 20th Century Art
Materials
Oil
Ostrich and the Woman ~ L'autruche et la femme 1980 Signed Limited Edition
Located in Rochester Hills, MI
Artist: Philippe Noyer
Title: L'autruche et la femme ~ The ostrich and the woman
Year: 1980
Print: Lithograph 46'' x 31.5'' inches
Edition: Signed in pencil and numbered 9/325
Date:...
Category
Contemporary 20th Century Art
Materials
Lithograph
Mario Schifano Acrylic on Canvas Signed Schifano Archivio Schifano Roma
Located in Roma, IT
Mario Schifano Acrylic on Canvas Signed Schifano unique authentic and certified work Archivio Schifano Roma, second half of the seventies. Provenance Bologna, Galleria Studio G7 (lab...
Category
20th Century Art
Materials
Acrylic
(Untitled). A Moody, Golden-Tone Barbizon School Landscape
Located in San Francisco, CA
The subdued palette of the subject trees sets them against a background of palest yellow into amber for a striking effect reminiscent of dawn. The artist, Eduard Caret, was born in P...
Category
Barbizon School 20th Century Art
Materials
Oil, Board
Darkness (portrait of a young woman)
Located in Wilton Manors, FL
Fletcher Martin (1904-1979). Darkness, 1940. Oil on canvas, 18 x 22 inches; 28.5 x 32.5 inches framed. Signed and dated lower left. Presented in a carved chestnut Heydenryk custom frame of the period. Excellent condition with no damage or conservation.
Biography:
Birth place: Palisade, CO
Death place: Guanajuato, Mexico
Addresses: NYC; Woodstock, NY, 1947 and after; Guanajuato, Mexico in 1976
Profession: Painter, lithographer, block printer, muralist, illustrator, teacher
Studied: Stickney Mem. Sch. Art
Exhibited: Hatfield Gal., Los Angeles, 1932 (solo); LACMA, 1935 ( Van Rensselaer Wilbur Prize), 1939 (prize), 1944; FAP, 1937 (prize); PAFA Ann., 1939-54 frequently (prize 1947); 48 States Comp., 1939 (prize); WMAA, 1940-57; AIC, 1940-45; VMFA, 1941; CI, 1942-44; MoMA, 1942; NAD, 1943, 1949 (Altman Prize); Corcoran Gal. biennials, 1943-53 (6 times); Roberson Mem. Center, Binghamton, NY, 1968 (retrospective); Eve Loring Gal., Cedarhurst, NY & Rudolph Gals., Woodstock, NY, 1970s
Member: A.N.A., 1969; Woodstock AA (chmn., 1953-55); Calif. WC Soc.; Am. Artists Cong.; Fnd. of Western Art; AEA (nat. committee,1949-55).
Work: MMA; WMAA; MoMA; LOC; Cranbrook Acad. Art; William Rockhill Nelson Gal., Kansas City, KS; LACMA; Denver Art Mus.; Mus. FA, Houston; SFMA; PAFA. Commissions: true fresco, WPA, Hollywood H.S., 1935; oil on canvas, U.S. Secretary Fine Art, Fed. Bldg., San Pedro, CA, 1937; oil on canvas, U.S. Secretary Fine Art, Post Office Bldg., Lamesa, TX, 1938; bas relief sculpture, U.S. Secretary Fine Art, County Court House, Bonner's Ferry, ID, 1939; oil on canvas, U.S. Secretary Fine Art, Post Office Bldg., Kellogg, ID, 1940.
Comments: Preferred media: oils, watercolors, print media. Specialty: Western subjects. Illustrator: Tales of the Gold Rush, 1944; Mutiny on the Bounty, 1947; The Sea Wolf, 1961; The Jungle, 1965; Of Mice and Men...
Category
American Realist 20th Century Art
Materials
Canvas, Oil
'Simplicius' Farewell to the World' — Graphic Modernism
Located in Myrtle Beach, SC
Fritz Eichenberg, 'Simplicius’ Farewell To The World' from the suite 'The Adventurous Simplicissimus', wood engraving, 1977, artist's proof apart from the edition of 50. Signed in pencil. Signed in the block, lower right. A fine, richly-inked impression, on cream wove paper, with full margins (1 1/2 to 2 inches), in excellent condition. Image size 14 x 12 inches (356 x 305 mm); sheet size 17 1/2 x 15 inches (445 x 381 mm). Archivally sleeved, unmatted.
ABOUT THIS WORK
'Simplicius Simplicissimus' (German: Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus Teutsch) is a picaresque novel of the lower Baroque style, written in five books by Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen published in 1668, with the sequel Continuatio appearing in 1669.
The novel is told from the perspective of its protagonist Simplicius, a rogue or picaro typical of the picaresque novel, as he traverses the tumultuous world of the Holy Roman Empire during the Thirty Years' War. Raised by a peasant family, he is separated from his home by foraging dragoons. He is adopted by a hermit living in the forest, who teaches him to read and introduces him to religion. The hermit also gives Simplicius his name because he is so simple that he does not know his own name. After the death of the hermit, Simplicius must fend for himself. He is conscripted at a young age into service and, from there, embarks on years of foraging, military triumph, wealth, prostitution, disease, bourgeois domestic life, and travels to Russia, France, and an alternate world inhabited by mermen. The novel ends with Simplicius turning to a life of hermitage, denouncing the world as corrupt.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Fritz Eichenberg (1901–1990) was a German-American illustrator and arts educator who worked primarily in wood engraving. His best-known works were concerned with religion, social justice, and nonviolence.
Eichenberg was born to a Jewish family in Cologne, Germany, where the destruction of World War I helped to shape his anti-war sentiments. He worked as a printer's apprentice and studied at the Municipal School of Applied Arts in Cologne and the Academy of Graphic Arts in Leipzig, where he studied under Hugo Steiner-Prag. In 1923 he moved to Berlin to begin his career as an artist, producing illustrations for books and newspapers. In his newspaper and magazine work, Eichenberg was politically outspoken and sometimes wrote and illustrated his reporting.
In 1933, the rise of Adolf Hitler drove Eichenberg, who was a public critic of the Nazis, to emigrate with his wife and children to the United States. He settled in New York City, where he lived most of his life. He worked in the WPA Federal Arts Project and was a member of the Society of American Graphic Artists.
In his prolific career as a book illustrator, Eichenberg portrayed many forms of literature but specialized in works with elements of extreme spiritual and emotional conflict, fantasy, or social satire. Over his long career, Eichenberg was commissioned to illustrate more than 100 classics by publishers in the United States and abroad, including works by renowned authors Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Poe, Swift, and Grimmelshausen. He also wrote and illustrated books of folklore and children's stories.
Eichenberg was a long-time contributor to the progressive magazine The Nation, his illustrations appearing between 1930 and 1980. Eichenberg’s work has been featured by such esteemed publishers as The Heritage Club, Random House, Book of the Month Club, The Limited Editions Club, Kingsport Press, Aquarius Press, and Doubleday.
Raised in a non-religious family, Eichenberg had been attracted to Taoism as a child. Following his wife's unexpected death in 1937, he turned briefly to Zen Buddhist meditation, then joined the Religious Society of Friends in 1940. Though he remained a Quaker until his death, Eichenberg was also associated with Catholic charity work through his friendship with Dorothy Day...
Category
American Modern 20th Century Art
Materials
Woodcut
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