Unframed Abstract Prints

Wood engraving, 1966 Handsigned by the artist in pencil and numbered 3/60 Publisher : Louis Broder (Paris) Printer : Féquet & Baudier (Paris) 47.00 cm. x 36.00 cm. 18.5 in. x 14.17 ...

Lithograph, stencil on vélin paper. Paper Size: 12.4 x 9.65 inches. Inscription: Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued. Notes: From the album, XXe siècle, Nouvelle série N° 11 (double) ...

Lithograph on vélin paper. Paper Size: 15 x 11 inches. Inscription: Unsigned and unnumbered. Notes: From the folio, Derrière le miroir, N° 151-152, 1965. Published by Aimé Maeght, Éd...

The Night is original etching realized by Jean Fautrier. Hand-signed on the lower right in pencil. Numbered on the lower left, edition of 22/50 prints. This formidable print repre...

Lithograph on Japon à la main, attached with chine appliqué to vélin d’Arches paper. Paper Size: 21.5 x 17.875 inches. Inscription: Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued. Notes: From th...

Colour lithograph, 1890. 210mm by 285mm (sheet). From W Peck's 'A Handbook and Atlas of Astronomy', 1890. Sir William Peck FRSE FRAS (1862 – 1925) was a Scottish astronomer and scien...

Lithograph on vélin paper. Inscription: Unsigned and unnumbered. Good condition. Notes: From Derrière le miroir, N° 149, published by Aimé Maeght, Éditeur, Paris; printed by Éditions...

Lithograph on vélin paper. Paper Size: 12.4 x 9.65 inches. Inscription: Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued. Catalogue raisonné references: Poliakoff, Alexis, and Gérard Schneider. Se...

Mitsuaki Sora, Japanese (1933 - ) - Three Birds, Year: 1972, Medium: Woodcut, signed, dated and numbered in pencil, Edition: 3/50, Image Size: 30 x 15 inches, Size: 37 x 25 in. ...

'Russian - Russe - Russisch' Late 19th century interior design chromolithograph, from Racinet’s ‘L’Ornement Polychrome’, 1887. Published in Paris. Albert Racinet's 'L' Ornement Pol...

"Earthcore" is an abstract of a familiar image ... a view of earth sliced in half usually as an explanation of the many layers of spaceship earth. This print is more than its title. It is rich in its depth of color and texture. Upon close inspection there is much activity on the surface which continually adds to its visual complexity. The name given to this print process is “Collagraph” It is made by glueing different materials to cardboard and creating a kind of collage. During the inking process the ink will rub off surfaces that are smooth or higher and stay on surfaces that hold more ink, at edge and at lower points thus creating the image. To protect the plate through the printing process it’s sealed with one or more layers of shellac. A collagraph plate is quite sensitive and will be deformed by the pressure of the printing press. Joyce Tilley Nagel...

Artist/Designer; Manufacturer: Yaacov Agam (Israeli, b. 1928) Marking(s); notes: signed; ed. 11/100 and 40/100 Materials: screenprint on paper Dimensions (H, W, D): 26.5"h, 28"w each...

Le Lézard aux Plumes d'Or is a beautiful colored lithograph on mother-of-pearl Japan paper from the series realized by Joan Miró in 1971. Signed on the lower right corner. Printed by...

Artist: After Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011) Title: Mary Mary (Lincoln Center Honorary) Year: 1991 Medium: Offset lithograph poster on extra thick Somerset paper Edition: 2000 Size...

Yaacov Agam, Israeli (b. 1928) Hand signed, and numbered. Limited edition lenticular lens kinetic Agamograph Titled 'Sea Fathom'. Hand-signed and numbered edition 24/99, size of w...

Damien Hirst Forever (Large), 2020 Laminated Giclée print on aluminium composite panel digitally signed by the artist on the back 78 x 78 cm Edition of 1449 The editions titled Fru...

5 Colour lithograph on Somerset Satin Tub Sized White 410gsm. 60 x 76 cm (23.6 x 29.9 in) Signed, dated and numbered by the artist Edition of 125 ‘Peace Be Still’ (2022) showcases S...

Abstract Composition  is a lithograph realized by Piero Sadun in the 1970s. The state of preservation of the artwork is good.

Peano Curves is an original Serigraph realized by Bruno Munari in 1991. Hand-signed and numbered with pencil by the artist on the lower margin. Excellent condition. Bruno Munari (...

Lithograph, 1973 Handsigned by the artist in pencil and numbered 131/300 Publisher : Jacques Putman - Editions Prisunic Printer : Pierre Badey (Paris) Catalog : [Mason Putman 109] 49...

Pierre SOULAGES Lithograph n°9 Original stone lithograph (3 colors- atelier Mourlot) Unsigned On vellum 12 x 10" (31 x 24 cm) REFERENCES : Catalogue raisonné BNF #53 Created in 19...

Jasper Johns 50th Anniversary of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, 1979 Original lithograph on heavy wove paper 46 × 30 inches Limited Edition of 5000 (unnumbered) Stamped with copyright mark and publisher's blindstamp Published by Stony Johns, Inc. and Gemini G.E.L. Accompanied by Certificate of Guarantee issued by Alpha 137 Gallery Unframed This stunning, impressive, large vintage lithograph...

      Bullfight No. 5 is a signed limited edition ( 4/300 ) original lithograph by Salvador Dali from the Taureaumachie Suite of five original lithographs. Published by Phyllis Lucas...

Lithograph on vélin paper. Inscription: Unsigned and unnumbered. Good condition. Notes: From XXe siècle, N° 29, Published and printed under the direction of Gualtieri di San Lazzaro,...

For over thirty years, Nozkowski has practiced his own form of idiosyncratic abstraction, foregoing a signature style or subject matter in favor of seemingly limitless variations in ...

Aquatint and etching on vélin cuve de Rives paper. Inscription: Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued. Good condition. Notes: From the folio, Feuilles éparses, 1965. Published and print...

Lithograph, stencil on vélin d’Arches paper. Paper Size: 11.75 x 15.75 inches. Inscription: Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued. Catalogue raisonné reference: Goeppert, Sebastian, et ...

Colorful vintage poster for the 1980 Democratic National Convention, held in Madison Square Garden in New York.Concentric lines of orange and bright green interweave with strokes of pink, yellow, red, turquoise, silver, and gold. Printed with metallic ink that catches light differently from each angle, complementing the poster’s lime green and red text. The top of the poster reads “Let us move forward with a strong and active faith.” It was at this 1980 convention that Jimmy Carter was nominated for reelection. This large poster was printed by Petersburg Press in 1980, and features Frank Stella’s Polar...

Touched by the influence of Andy Warhol, champion of a young Jean-Michel Basquiat, Rene Ricard served as enfant terrible of the 1980s New York art scene. In this rainbow print, Ricar...

Helen Frankenthaler (after) Frankenthaler: The Darker Palette (autographed and inscribed), 1998 Offset Lithograph print 42 × 35 in hand signed "Frankenthaler" lower left; inscribed a...

Joan Miró Lithographie Originale (Cover) Color Lithograph Year: 1981 Size: 15.6 × 12.75 inches Catalogue Raisonné: Cramer 177, Der Lithograph IV, 1969-1972, Ref.: 1255, p.178 Publisher: Maeght Editeur, Paris, France With coverfold, recto - as issued Recto, right: Typographically annotated: 'Lithographie Originale' Unsigned, Unknown Edition Size COA provided --------------------------------------- Joan Miró i Ferrà was a Spanish painter, sculptor, and ceramicist born in Barcelona. A museum dedicated to his work, the Fundació Joan Miró, was established in his native city of Barcelona in 1975, and another, the Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró, was established in his adoptive city of Palma de Mallorca in 1981 Surrealism, Fauvism, Cubism, Abstract expressionism, Naive art, Expressionism, Suprematism Pablo Picasso, André Breton, Hans Arp, André Masson, Hieronymus Bosch, Tristan Tzara, Modest Urgell

Touched by the influence of Andy Warhol, champion of a young Jean-Michel Basquiat, Rene Ricard served as enfant terrible of the 1980s New York art scene. This red and black lithograp...

Looking out over the Seine and a bridge running across it, Pablo Picasso's view of the famed Notre Dame de Paris is filled with light, airy buildings layered in front of one another....

Pawel Kontny was born in Poland, he began with sketching wartime scenes combining abstract with realism. He exhibited throughout Europe. This piece is a part of my private collection...

’Pulpit rock and cockatoos’ By Arthur Boyd Medium - Lithograph Signed - Yes Edition - Artists Proof Size - 840mm x 610mm Date - c1990 Condition - 9 Colour of print may not be accurate when viewed on a monitor. Hand drawn metal plate lithograph printed with Senefelder press on rag paper. Being sold from the Andrew Purches collection. Arthur Merric Bloomfield Boyd AC OBE (24 July 1920 – 24 April 1999) was a leading Australian painter...

Watercolor on paper

Lithograph realized by Giulio Marelli in 1970 ca. Edition of 150 in arab numbers and XXV in roman numbers. Hand signed and numbered in pencil. Very g...

Set against a flat black background, the female figure in this Pablo Picasso print appears up-close with a detailed view of her face and shoulders. Rendered in the style of Cubism, this work features all of the classic tenents of the style such as differing perspectives and an emphasis on color and shape. A lithograph from the Marina Picasso Estate Collection after the Pablo Picasso painting "Buste de Femme au Chapeau Bleu...

Staring ahead, Pablo Picasso's portrayal of a woman using broad, geometric shapes of bright colors is emblematic of the artist's mastery of Cubism. A lithograph from the Marina Picas...

Joe Goode Floating Cards - Part IV, 1969 Lithograph on Arches paper with two deckled edges. Hand signed, dated and annotated Artists Proof on the lower front 22 1/4 × 29 4/5 inches Unframed Part of Joe Goode's five part 1960s series "Floating Cards". Rarely to market. The provenance of this print is from the Reese-Palley Gallery. The famous dealer and adventurer Reese Palley of Atlantic City New Jersey - was the second gallerist in the 1960s - after Paula Cooper - to set up shop in SOHO. Hand signed, dated, and annotated Artist's Proof aside from the regular edition. Pop art pioneer Joe Goode (born 1937) was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, in 1937. In 1959 he moved to Los Angeles, California, where he attended the Chouinard Art Institute until 1961. First recognized for his Pop Art milk bottle paintings and cloud imagery, Goode's work was included along with Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Jim Dine, Phillip Hefferton, Robert Dowd, Edward Ruscha, and Wayne Thiebaud, in the 1962 ground-breaking exhibit New Painting of Common Objects, curated by Walter Hopps...

Olaolu Akeredolu-Ale better known as Olaolu Slawn is a British Nigerian artist and designer. He began his career working at Wafflesncream, Nigeria’s first skate shop, catching the at...

VILLA NEUVE is an original limited edition lithograph printed using hand lithography techniques on archival printmaking paper 100% acid free. VILLA NEUVE is an imaginative modernist ...

Sku: AW1177 Artist: Willem de Kooning Title: Spoleto-14 Giugno Year: 1974 Signed: No Medium: Offset Lithograph Paper Size: 41.25 x 29.5 inches ( 104.775 x 74.93 cm ) Image Size: 41.2...

Composition is a contemporary artwork realized by Luigi Spacal (Trieste, 1907 - Trieste, 2000) in the 1970s. Original Colored woodcut print on cardboard. Image Dimensions: 18 x 14 cm Good conditions. Lojze Spacal...

Lithograph on vélin d’Arches paper. Inscription: Signed in the plate, embossed with the official Braniff Flying Colors Collection seal, and unnumbered, as issued. Good condition. Not...

Abstract Composition is a beautiful colored serigraph on cream-colored paper, realized in the 1970's by the Italian artist, Luigi Montanarini (1906-1998) and published by La Nuova Fo...

Yayoi Kusama Infinity Umbrella, 2014 Silkscreen on 100% polyester umbrella with plastic handle 37 × 54 × 54 inches This limited edition silkscreened umbrella was created exclusively...

Sybil Kleinrock’s work straddles the borders between expressionism and surrealism. Colorful and soft pastels play together to suggest a composition that can be interpreted as both a ...

Charles Quest, 'Still Life', 1947, wood engraving, edition 8. Signed, dated, and numbered '3/8' in pencil. Titled and annotated 'wood engraving' in the bottom left margin. A fine impression, on off-white wove paper, with full margins (1 to 2 inches), in excellent condition. Scarce. Matted to museum standards, unframed. ABOUT THE ARTIST Charles Quest, painter, printmaker, and fine art instructor, worked in various mediums, including mosaic, stained glass, mural painting, and sculpture. Quest grew up in St. Louis, his talent evident as a teenager when he began copying the works of masters such as Michelangelo on his bedroom walls. He studied at the Washington University School of Fine Arts, where he later taught from 1944 to 1971. He traveled to Europe after his graduation in 1929 and studied at La Grande Chaumière and Academie Colarossi, Paris, continuing to draw inspiration from the works of the Old Masters. After returning to St. Louis, Quest received several commissions to paint murals in public buildings, schools, and churches, including one from Joseph Cardinal Ritter, to paint a replica of Velasquez's Crucifixion over the main altar of the Old Cathedral in St. Louis. Quest soon became interested in the woodcut medium, which he learned through his study of J. J. Lankes' A Woodcut Manual (1932) and Paul Landacre's articles in American Artist magazine ‘since no artists in St. Louis were working in wood’ at that time. Quest also revealed that for him, wood cutting and engraving were ‘more enjoyable than any other means of expression.’ In the late 1940s, his graphic works began attracting critical attention—several of his woodcuts won prizes and were acquired by major American and European museums. His wood engraving entitled ‘Lovers’ was included in the American Federation of Art's traveling print exhibition in 1947. Two years later, Quest's two prize-winning prints, ‘Still Life with Grindstone’ and ‘Break Forth into Singing’, were exhibited in major American museums in a traveling show organized by the Philadelphia Print Club. His work was included in the Chicago Art Institute's exhibition, ‘Woodcut Through Six Centuries’, and the print ‘Still Life with Vise’ was purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1951 he was invited by artist-Curator Jacob Kainen to exhibit thirty wood engravings and color woodcuts in a one-person show at the Smithsonian's National Museum (now known as the American History Museum). Kainen's press release praised the ‘technical refinement’ of Quest's work: ‘He obtains a great variety of textural effects through the use of the graver, and these dense or transparent grays are set off against whites or blacks to achieve sparkling results. His work has the handsome qualities characteristic of the craftsman and designer.’ At the time of the Smithsonian exhibition, Quest's work was represented by three New York galleries in addition to one in his home town. He had won 38 prizes, and his prints were in the collections of the Library of Congress, the Chicago Art Institute, the Metropolitan Museum, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In cooperation with the Art in Embassies program, his color woodcuts were displayed at the American Embassy in Paris in 1951. Recognition at home came in 1955 with his first solo exhibition in St. Louis. Press coverage of the show heralded the ‘growth of graphic arts toward rivaling painting and sculpture as a major independent medium’. An exhibition of his prints at the Bethesda Art Gallery in 1983 attracted Curator Emeritus Joseph A. Haller, S.J., who began purchasing his work for Georgetown University's collection. In 1990 Georgetown University Library's Special Collections Division was the recipient of a large body of Quest's work, including prints, drawings, paintings, sculpture, stained glass, and his archive of correspondence and professional memorabilia. These extensive holdings, including some 260 of his fine prints, provide a rich opportunity for further study and appreciation of this versatile and not-to-be-forgotten mid-Western American artist...

Abstract Composition is a lithograph realized by Antonio Sanfilippo in 1973.. Hand-signed and dated in pencil on the lower right. Numbered, edition of 100 prints. Good conditions....

Artist: Peter Alexander (1939) Title: Hallelujah II Year: 1988 Edition: 50, plus proofs Medium: Lithograph on Guarro paper Size: 22 x 30 inches Condition: Excellent Inscription: Sign...

Screenprint in colours on wove paper Edition 55 of 100 81.3 x 135.3 cm (32 x 53.2 in) Signed and numbered on the front Mint Published by Pace Prints Our mission is to connect art co...

Linocut on vélin paper. Paper Size: 12.4 x 9.65 inches. Inscription: Signed in the plate and unnumbered, as issued. Catalogue raisonné references: Catalogue raisonné reference: Matis...

Fantasy, Japanese, limited edition lithograph, black, white, red, signed, titled 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...

Joan Miró - Maravillas con variaciones acrósticas en el jardín de Miró I Date of creation: 1975 Medium: Lithograph Media: Gvarro paper Edition: 1500 Size: 49,5 x 35,5 cm Condition: I...

Artist : Romare Bearden Title; Bopping at Birdland (stomp time) Year: 1979 Size: 33 ¼ x 24 inches Lithograph on Arches Paper Edition; Signed in pencil and marked 114/175 (Gelburd/Ros...

Artist: Salvador Dali (1904-1989) Title: Le Girafe en Feu Year: 1976 Medium: Lithograph on Arches paper Edition: CXLII/CCL; 250 Roman Numerals, plus proofs...

BLUE BOY is a limited edition lithograph by the Dutch artist Karel Appel, printed using hand lithography techniques on archival Arches paper, 100% acid free. BLUE BOY presents a fant...

LIMITED EDITION PRINT - Edition of 75 signed by the artist. Price for unframed. Ask us for custom framing options for this piece. Craig Alan is a Pop Surrealist, internationally rec...

Mark di Suvero Untitled, 2014 Acrylic hand painting on digital print. Unique trial proof. Hand signed and annotated Hand signed and annotated Trial Proof by di Suvero 17 1/2 × 16 inches Unframed This is a unique Trial Proof done with acrylic paint on paper, depicting the artist's public abstract expressionist sculpture "Johnny Appleseed...