Mel Ramos

Señorita Rio, from the Deluxe signed edition of 1 Cent Life Portfolio (85/100)

1963

Ben Schonzeit Yankee Flame, from the portfolio: America: the Third Century, 1975 Collotype on wove paper Pencil signed and numbered 50/200 on the front Publisher: APC Editions, Chermayeff & Geismar Associates, Inc Printer: Triton Press 27 × 19 3/10 inches Unframed Note: this is the original hand signed and numbered collotype; not to be confused with the separate (unsigned) poster edition. This hand-signed, numbered and dated collotype in colors by photorealist pioneer artist Ben Schonzeit was created in 1975 for the portfolio America: the Third Century, commissioned by Mobil Oil Corporation in which 13 American artists, including Roy Lichtenstein, Ed Ruscha, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist and others created works celebrating America's bicentennial. Yankee Flame combines the iconic images of George Washington, Coca-Cola and the Statue of Liberty into a collaged interpretation of contemporary American life and the meaning of freedom. "Yankee Flame" is in excellent condition and never framed. It was acquired as part of the America: The Third Century full portfolio. Ben Schonzeit (b. 1942, Brooklyn, New York) is one of the original Photorealist painters and is considered to have pioneered the airbrush technique. His works often depict still life arrangements that are intentionally out of focus. He received his B.F.A. from The Cooper Union in 1964 and has since had over 50 solo exhibitions both in the United States and abroad. His paintings are held in numerous museum collections including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, Virginia, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In 1973 Nancy Hoffman introduced me to Ben Schonzeit in the backroom of her gallery on West Broadway. She had been open less than a year, and Ben was one of the artists in her original stable. His large Crab Blue It had arrived from his studio a few days earlier and was leaning against the wall. I thought at the time it was one of the most impressive, virtuosic Photorealist works I had seen. That first encounter was more than a quarter of a century ago and I have always considered it to be one of the quintessential, tour de force paintings of American Photorealism. In the early seventies one could stand on West Broadway on any pleasant, sunny weekday and see less than a dozen people on the street between the Nancy Hoffman Gallery and OK Harris Works of Art. Almost all of the SoHo galleries, such as Leo Castelli, Paula Cooper, Ward-Nasse, and Ivan Karp’s Hundred Acres, could be visited in an afternoon. At night the streets were almost deserted. With the exception of Andy Warhol, there were no art world superstars. More importantly, none of the artists expected to achieve celebrity status. That was a phenomenon of the eighties and nineties. There were a only a handful of restaurants and watering holes, such Elephant and Castle, Fanelli’s, the Spring Street Bar and Prince Street Bar. Fanelli’s closed on weekends, which was a holdover from their sweatshop clientele during lunch and ragtag group of artists in the evenings. In those early days of SoHo, the drafty, raw sweatshop spaces with their large windows, rough floors, and service elevators provided large, inexpensive living quarters and studios for many artists. Unlike today, there were no boutiques. The area was not chic and with the exception of Lowell Nesbett’s showplace, the lofts were not glamorous. Schonzeit was in the same living and working space the he now occupies when I first visited him, but SoHo was a very different time and place. When the National Endowment of the Arts recommended me to curate America 1976, which turned into one of the major visual arts projects for the Bicentennial, Ben Schonzeit was on the first list of participants I made up for the U.S. Department of the Interior. His large diptych, Continental Divide, was one of the most memorable works produced for the exhibit. I stopped by his studio four or five times while it was in progress and have visited him many times over the years. We have maintained a very cordial working relationship and friendship over the past three decades. I saw The Music Room exhibit in 1978 and realized at the time that the vigorously rendered mural sized canvases and mirror and related works represented a major catharsis in his painting. In many ways, it and the other paintings and drawings based on the same image represented a sharp, decisive break with the tenets of Photorealism, or at least the photo-replicative aspects that had been so widely heralded in America and abroad in the mid-seventies. Over the years we have continued to work together. He has been in almost all of the major exhibitions I have curated here and abroad and in almost all of the books I have written. I am familiar with his studio habits, his quiet, internalized restlessness that manifests itself in the hundreds of small, unknown drawings and watercolors, doodles on napkins during lunch, and imaginary landscapes. I also know that he would rather do a painting than think or talk about it. Over the years I have followed the shifts in his studio procedure from the monumental airbrushed fruit and vegetable paintings to the most recent bouquets of flowers and decorative paintings. Our discussions of these matters tends to lapse into a verbal shorthand at this point. The following essay is based on both my longstanding familiarity and admiration for his work and involvement with contemporary realism and figurative painting. A booklet of color xeroxes with notes made up by Schonzeit was extremely helpful. In addition to several interviews, much of the information unfolded through a lengthy series of Emails. Due to our different working habits these were composed and sent out very late at night and answered by Ben the following morning. They dealt with the specifics of many of the paintings, generalities, his background and childhood in Brooklyn, and occasional bits of art world gossip. And there were odd discoveries. Prior to discussing his witty, tongue in cheek painting of Buffalo Bill, I did not know or had long forgotten that William Cody...

Ed Ruscha Absolut Ruscha, 1988 Offset Lithograph in colors on wove paper Hand signed and dated by Ed Ruscha in pencil on lower right front Limited Edition of 200 (unnumbered) 45.25 x...

Christo and Jeanne-Claude The Wrapped (MCA), 1969 (Hand Signed), 2019 Four-color offset lithograph on 110 lb. Crane Lettra Cover stock, with an elegant gold foil stamp. Hand Signed by Christo 22 3/5 × 30 inches Edition of 200 Hand-signed by artist, Signed in graphite pencil by Christo on the front. Also elegant gold foil stamp. Unnumbered from the documented limited edition of only 200 Published by Museum of Contemporary Art, (MCA) Chicago Unframed A great gift for anyone with ties to Chicago! This limited-edition, hand signed offset lithograph on 110 lb. Crane Lettra Cover stock commemorates Christo's exhibition "Wrap In Wrap Out", which took place at the MCA’s original location on 237 East Ontario Street, Chicago. The project became the first public building Christo and his wife, Jeanne-Claude, wrapped in the United States. In an illuminating 2010 article entitled, "A daring plan to wrap a Chicago museum raises city ire – and makes art history," author Robin Amer recounts how Christo came to choose Chicago -- or rather how Chicago chose New York based artist Christo: "During a recent conversation he [Christo] ticked off the list of buildings he approached in downtown Manhattan starting in 1961. “Number 2 Broadway, number 20 Exchange Place,” he recalled. “We tried to wrap a building at Times Square. They all said no. Christo said he quickly realized that his best hope to wrap a building – his first in North America – would be to wrap a museum, which might be more amenable to his strange proposition.Christo and Jeanne-Claude approached New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1967. The museum was interested, but Christo said they failed to secure permission for the show from the New York Fire...

Jim Dine Love for Channel 13 Lithograph. Hand signed and numbered recto 27 × 21 1/2 inches Edition 185/200 Signed and numbered 185/200 in graphite pencil on the recto Unframed Rarel...

Kenny Scharf Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods Before Me (The First Commandment), 1987 5-Color lithograph on Dieu Donne handmade paper with deckled edges 24 × 18 inches Hand signed, date...

Sister Mary Corita Kent Sister Corita hand signed poster, 1985 Offset Lithograph Signed in pencil by the artist on the lower right 24 x 18 inches Unframed This offset lithograph post...

This large Allen Jones lithograph is printed exuberantly in primary colors. A swath of bright red brushstrokes represents the side of a bus. In the upper left, small windows reveal the passengers: a woman’s face is cut off above her vampy red lips, and a blue-haired man’s face is hidden. Royal blue fills the upper right corner of the composition, giving the impression of looking up at a passing bus against the cloudless sky. One can imagine Jones was thinking of the iconic red double decker bus the AEC Routemaster, first introduced in London in 1954. In the 1960s buses were a living symbol of familiar and new technology coexisting: as David Bucken put it, “In and around London a midpoint change on a journey might involve alighting from an RT bus, of which production had started just prior to World War II, and getting on one of the sexy new Routemasters.” In the artist’s words: “The whole problem as a figurative artist was that it was going against the main march of modernism, which was towards abstraction. But here was a way of making the subject you were painting the same as the object you were painting on. By making the canvas a rhomboid, and putting little wheels on it, you have a schematic version of a vehicle, in this case a London bus.” Jones plays with the space between abstraction and figuration: windowed passengers, elaborated with just a few lines and placed adjacent to a weighty red ground of brushstrokes, easily convey the form of a bus, yet the print also conveys Jones’ visceral, painterly delight in color play. Four color lithograph on wove paper Paper 28.5 x 42.5 / 72.4 X 108 cm Wood frame 31 x 46 x 2 in. / 78.75 x 117 x 5 cm with 1 in. moulding Signed by the artist lower right in pencil, labeled Trial Proof lower left in pencil. Edition 20. Printed at Tamarind Los Angeles with Clifford Smith...

Lithograph on Black Fabriano paper. Signed by the artist and dated 1970 lower right in pencil; numbered 59/68 lower left in pencil. This electric blue image of a neon sculpture was d...

Original poster: a l'Arc Musee d'art Moderne; artist Robert Combas; lithograph, 1984, excellent condition. Ready to frame. Year: 1984. Size 24.87" x 32.12" Artist: Robert Combas This poster is also known as the Cat or "Le Chat". Vintage original poster...

C.O.R.E. 1965 Lithograph Signed and numbered edition of 200 36 X 24 inches Robert Rauschenberg’s work reflects a methodology between the approaches of structuralism and post-...

Shepard Fairey Screen-prints: collection of 60 works: 2009-2022: A rare assemblage of 60 hand-signed Shepard Fairey screen-prints; collected over a near 15 year period (2009-2022). Notable imagery includes: Bob Marley, Keith Haring, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Kurt Cobain, as well as a series of vivid anti-war pieces defining the artist's practice (title list found further below). Each very well-preserved. Medium: Screen-prints on heavy paper. 2009-2022 (see below for a list of titles & years). Dimensions ranging from: 19.5 x 16 inches to 24x36 inches. Each work is hand-signed; works are either numbered from their respective main editions or notated 'AP' (see last listing image); a few or several works are signed, but not numbered. Excellent overall condition with the exception of perhaps some minor signs of handling on a few examples. Provenance: Private collection New York via Shepard Fairey. Listing images beginning with image 2 represent the actual works. These works will be shipped flat using protective materials. Please feel free to contact us with any additional questions. Titles & Years: OCEAN TODAY...

1980s Milton Glaser Poster Art: San Diego Jazz Festival: Vintage original Milton Glaser poster c.1983. Designed by Milton Glaser on the occasion of the San Diego Jazz Festival, a Pacific Coast event depicted with a suit-and-sandal clad bear at dusk. Several favorite Glaserisms show up here: the swirling contours, the loose cross-hatching and the saxophone. Offset lithograph poster in colors. 24x36 inches. Very good overall vintage condition with the exception of perhaps some minor signs of handling. A suit-and-sandal bear heralds this Pacific Coast event with a serenade with a beautiful sunset. Several favorite Glaserisms show up here: the swirling contours, the loose cross-hatching and the sax. Literature: Milton Glaser Posters Legendary graphic designer, illustrator, and art director Milton Glaser created some of the most recognizable iconography in America today —including the iconic I ♥ N Y logo —and countless posters and ad campaigns. Glaser changed the face of commercial art in the 1960s and ’70s, breaking with the conventions of modernism and drawing inspiration from a wide variety of art-historical and pop-cultural sources, from Art Nouveau to comic illustration...