Judy Pfaff

Squash scarce Abstract Expressionist woodcut print, Signed/N, top female artist

1985

Nancy Graves 5745, for the Jewish Museum, 1984 Silkscreen on paper Signed, numbered 5/90 and dated in graphite pencil on the front; bears publishers' blind stamp front left corner 30 1/4 × 40 1/2 inches Unframed Commissioned by the Mr. and Mrs. Albert A. List Graphic Fund for The Jewish Museum, New York Signed, numbered and dated in graphite pencil on the front; bears publishers' blind stamp front left corner. Commissioned by the Mr. and Mrs. Albert A. List New Year's Graphic Fund for The Jewish Museum, New York. During the 1980s, various artists were commissioned to create a print celebrating the Jewish New Year. This is the silkscreen renowned sculptor Nancy Graves created to celebrate the year 5745 of the Jewish Calendar, beginning in September 1984 (Rosh Hashanah). This work was published in a limited edition of 90. The number 90 has special significance in Jewish gamatria (numerology) for several reasons, including the fact that it equals five times life - or Chai. The number for Chai, meaning "Life " s 18, and 18 x 5 = 90. This is a magical number in Judaism. All of the works were published in editions that were multiples of 18, or the Life. In her lifetime, Nancy Graves did not receive the renown or acknowledgement that her ex-husband and former Yale School of Art classmate Richard Serra did, but she is finally getting the recognition she richly deserves. Biography: Nancy Graves (1939 – 1995) is an American artist of international renown. A prolific cross-disciplinary artist, Graves developed a sustained body of sculptures, paintings, drawings, watercolors, and prints. She also produced five avant-garde films and created innovative set designs. Born in Pittsfield Massachusetts, Graves graduated from Vassar College in 1961. She then earned an MFA in painting at Yale University in 1964, where her classmates included Robert Mangold, Rackstraw Downes, Brice Marden, Chuck Close, as well as Richard Serra with whom she was married from 1964 to 1970. Five years after graduating, her career was launched in 1969 when she was the youngest artist — and only the fifth woman — to be selected for a solo presentation at the Whitney Museum of Art. Graves’ work was subsequently featured in hundreds of museum and gallery exhibitions worldwide, including several solo museum exhibitions. She was awarded commissions for large-scale site-specific sculptures and her work is in the permanent collections of major art museums. A frequent lecturer and guest artist, her work was widely documented during her lifetime. In 1991 she married veterinarian Dr. Avery Smith. Graves travelled extensively and was fully engaged with the cultural and intellectual issues of her times. Her brilliant career and life were cut short by her untimely death from cancer at age 54. From a point of view that she described as “objective,” Graves transformed scientific sources, such as maps and diagrams, into artworks by re-producing their complex visual information in detailed paintings and drawings. Investigating the intersections between art and scientific disciplines, Graves created compelling, formally rigorous, yet ultimately expressive works of art that examine concepts of repetition, variation, verisimilitude, and the presentation and perception of visual information. Based in SoHo, New York, Graves gained prominence in the late 1960s as a post-Minimalist artist for innovative camel, fossil, totem, and bone sculptures that were hand formed and assembled from unusual materials such as fur, burlap, canvas, plaster, latex, wax, steel, fiberglass and wood. Made in reaction to Pop and Minimalism, these works reference archaeological sites, anthropology, and natural science displays. Suspended from the ceiling or clustered directly on the floor, these early sculptures also engage with Conceptualist ideas of display. For her Whitney Museum presentation Graves exhibited three seemingly realistic sculptures of camels in an installation that evoked taxidermy specimens and questioned issues of verisimilitude in art and science, particularly in light of their hand patched and painted fur surfaces. The exhibition elicited wide spread critical responses and established her artistic significance. After intensely engaging with sculpture in the early 1970s, Graves returned to painting. Her detailed pointillist canvasses re-produced — in paint — images culled from documentary nature photographs, NASA satellite recordings, and Lunar maps, commingling scientific exactitude with abstraction. Resuming sculpture in the late 1970s, Graves was among the first contemporary artists to experiment with bronze casting. She re-invigorated the traditional lost wax technique by assembling cast found objects into unique improbably balanced sculptures, with bright polychrome surfaces and distinctive patinas. Throughout the 1980s Graves became widely recognized for her increasingly large and graceful open-form sculpture commissions. At the same time, she also expanded her drawing, painting, and printmaking practice and made large gestural watercolors. Then, in the late 1980s she created wall-mounted works that combined her explorations of sculpture, painting, form and color. In these large-scale pieces, she mounted high relief polychrome sculptural elements to the surfaces and edges of painted shaped canvases so that patterned shadows were cast onto the paintings and surrounding wall. By the 1990s Graves was casting in glass, resin, paper, aluminum, and bronze, combining these varied materials and colors into daring sculptures with moving parts. As she proceeded in all the media she mastered, Graves increasingly re interpreted and transmuted forms sourced from her own earlier artwork — rather than from outside research — creating elaborate compositions that form a layered a-temporal archaeology of her own visual production. Nancy Graves’ pioneering art...

Werner Drewes Untitled Mid Century Modern Abstract Woodcut, 1974 Woodcut fold-out card on Rives BFK paper with deckled edges 9 1/5 × 6 1/4 inches Unframed Rarely seen, this twice sig...

Cleve Gray Untitled, 1970 Silkscreen Boldly signed and numbered 32/100 in graphite pencil by Cleve Gray on the front 30 × 22 1/2 inches Signed and numbered 32/100 by artist on the fr...

KIMBER SMITH Untitled Abstract Expressionist Geometric Abstraction, 1967 Lithograph on Rives paper 25 × 19 3/5 inches Signed in silver...

Artist: Charlie Hewitt, American (1946 - ) Title: Untitled Year: circa 1995 Medium: Woodblock, Signed and Numbered in Pencil Edition: 100 Image Size: 16 x 20 inches Size: 20 in. x 24...

Artist: Charlie Hewitt, American (1946 - ) Title: Untitled - J Year: circa 1985 Medium: Woodblock, Signed and Numbered in Pencil Edition: 100 Size: 20 in. x 24 in. (50.8 cm x 60.96 cm)

Artist: Charlie Hewitt, American (1946 - ) Title: Untitled - i Year: circa 1995 Medium: Woodblock, Signed and Numbered in Pencil Edition: 100 Image Size: 16 x 20 inches Size: 18.5 x ...

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