1990s Abstract Prints

Screenprint Edition 16 of 120 75.8 x 62.3 cm (29.8 x 24.5 in) Signed, numbered, and dated on the front Condition Upon Request Publisher Okabe Tokuzo, Japan Kusama 182. 2

Contemporary colorful silkscreen by Louisiana born artist George Rodrigue. The work features Rodrigue's iconic blue dog character dressed in a yellow bandana and a cowboy hat set aga...

This fold-out card showcases Donald Judd's Series of Ten Woodcuts in Three Color States: Cadmium Red Light, Ultramarine Blue, and Ivory Black. Published by Brooke Alexander, the card...

Reproduction of Joan Mitchell’s Mon Paysage (1967), published by Éditions Maeght. This striking piece captures Mitchell’s bold brushwork and emotional resonance, evoking a landscape ...

Monoprint with screenprint, collage, acrylic, stitching and embossing in colors on handmade paper, 1994, signed, dated, titled, and numbered 10/40 (each unique) in black and silver i...

Tracey Emin Every Bodies Been There (signed twice), 1998 Lithograph on paper Underneath that existing plate signature, Tracey Emin has, exceptionally hand signed and dated the work f...

Jasper Johns The Drawings of Jasper Johns (hand signed and inscribed by Jasper Johns), 1991 Amazing provenance: Offset lithograph poster (hand signed and inscribed to Frank Martin, former conservator of the Whitney Museum) Hand signed and inscribed by Jasper Johns on the front Frame Included: matted in cream colored matting and held in original vintage frame Jasper Johns signed and inscribed this poster to Jack Martin, former Head Preparator at the Whitney Museum. This print was published by the Whitney Museum of American Art for the exhibition, " The Drawings of Jasper Johns Whitney...

Through The Ages by Toko Shinoda, black and white signed lithograph calligraphy 11/35 obituary published by CNN March 2021 Celebra...

Wayne Thiebaud Cake Slices, for the New SFMOMA (Hand signed by Wayne Thiebaud), 1996 Color Offset lithograph (hand signed by Wayne Thiebaud) B...

Inviernosexoprimaveral 1995 17-color silkscreen with poured resin 40 x 30 inches (102 x 76 cm) Edition of 80 "Sexual Spring-like Winter" is a large painterly work, created with laye...

Robert Indiana, American (1928 - 2018) - Die Deutsche Liebe, 1968, Portfolio: The American Dream, Year: 1997, Medium: Screenprint on Wove Paper, Edition: 395, Image Size: 14 x 1...

Sam Gilliam Cuatro, 1994 Monoprint with screenprint, collage, acrylic, stitching and embossing in colors on handmade paper Hand signed, dated, titled and annotated P/P by Sam Gilliam...

"Mizuhiki" is an exclusive publication by Stone + Press in an edition of 100. Katsunori Hamanishi was born in 1949 on Hokkaido island - Japan's second largest island. In 1973 he fi...

BASKET DRAWING, by Dale Chihuly(American b.1941) renowned glass sculpture artist depicts one of his signature abstract basket forms. This unique, limited edition lithograph was print...

Artist: Yaacov Agam Title: The Blessing Medium: Screenprint in colors on Arches Year: 1990 Edition: 28/54 Sheet Size: 30" x 42" Image Size: 27 1/8" x 33 1/2" Signed: Hand signed and ...

Etching in colors on vélin de Lana Royal paper. Paper Size: 11.93 x 9.81 inches. Inscription: Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued. Notes: From the album, Heart of Darkness, 1992. Publ...

Artist: Joan Mitchell (American, 1925-1992) Title: "Fields I" Portfolio: Fields *Signed and numbered by Mitchell in pencil (on second sheet) lower right Year: 1992 Medium: Original E...

David Hockney Richard Strauss: Los Angeles Music Center Opera (Hand Signed and Inscribed), 1993 Offset Lithograph (hand signed and inscribed by David Hockney) 30 × 20 inches Signed a...

Lithograph, 1990 Handsigned by the artist in pencil and numbered 30/150 Catalog : [Sorlier 524] 76.00 cm. x 58.00 cm. 29.92 in. x 22.83 in. (paper) 67.00 cm. x 50.00 cm. 26.38 in. ...

Original Absolut Vodka Absolument vintage exhibition poster. Archival linen backed invery good condition, ready to frame. Like most Warhol artwork, this is very vibrant and colorful. This 1994 poster was used for the exposition of contemporary artists at Galerie Lauvigne in Paris. Andy Warhol...

From the Moby Dick Domes series. Aquatint, etching, engraving, relief, screen print and stencil with hand-coloring in acrylic on handmade, shaped TGL paper. Hand signed and dated l...

Lithograph, 1997 Handsigned by the artist in pencil and numbered XXXI/L Corneille, a Belgian-born artist who belonged to the CoBrA group, presents a panorama of his imagination in th...

Artist: Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) Title: Charms against harms Year: 1993 Medium: Lithograph on wove paper Edition: H.C. 8/15, 100, plus proofs Size: 40.5 x 28 inches Condition:...

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...

Elizabeth Catlett (1915-2012) BRONX COMMUNITY COLLEGE THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK Specially commissioned fine art poster designed in 1992 by Elizabeth Catlett, printed in 4-col...

Medium: lithograph (after the gouache). Printed in 1992 by l'Imprimerie Karcher and published by Nouvelles Editions Seguier in an edition of 1000 for the Sol LeWitt "Black Gouaches" ...

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...

Hand signed and dated, and signed on plate. Artist's proof. Good conditions.

Howard Hodgkin (1932-2017), one of Britain’s greatest contemporary artists became best known for his vibrantly colored paintings that chronicle his personal experiences. IN TANGIER...

Artist: Charlie Hewitt, American (1946 - ) Title: Untitled - A Year: circa 1995 Medium: Woodblock, Signed and Numbered in Pencil Edition: 80 Image Size: 16 x 20 inches Size: 20 in. x...

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...

Artist: Jim Dine Title: Woodcut Heart. 1993 Image Size: 15 1/8 x 13 1/8 inches Paper size: 23 × 17½ inches Carrier: Mohawk Superfine Cover Medium: Woodcut Proiect Began:January 26, 1...

Barbara Keidel Untitled (XX) (Abstract, Red, Grey) Linocut 1996 Edition: 3 Numbered and dated by hand in pencil Size: 9 x 8.25 inches (22.86 x 20.95 cm) COA provided Tags: Abstr...

Julian Schnabel Invierno Primaveral, 1995 Hand-painted, 17-color screenprint with poured resin 40 x 30 inches (102 x 76 cm) Edition of 80 signed in pencil and stamped on verso ...

SUMMER RUSH is an original limited edition lithograph from the Sacred Garden Series of works by the British artist David Leverett (1938-2020), printed using hand lithography techniqu...

Arnaldo Pomodoro di Auguri, 1992-1993 Etching on art paper Hand signed, numbered 69 from an edition of 100 and dated by the artist on the front Frame Included This uncommon limited e...

Screenprint on Rives BFK paper , edited in 1995. Limited edition of 120 copies plus 30 AP. Signed in pencil by artist in lower right corner , numbered 71/120 and dated 95. Paper siz...

Richard Serra (born 1939) Videy Afangar #6, from Videy Afangar Series, 1991 Etching on Hahnemühle paper Signed and dated in pencil lower right Edition 73/75 (there were also 20 artis...

RICHARD ANUSZKIEWICZ Grey Tinted Rainbow, 1992 Assemblage with 14 Color Silkscreen and Lithograph Pencil signed and numbered 11/40 on the front Frame included: elegantly framed in a ...

Otono Floral, 1995 Hand-painted, 15-color screenprint with poured resin 40 x 30 inches (102 x 76 cm) Edition of 80 signed in pencil and stamped on verso "Sexual Spring-like Win...

Fletcher Benton Etching on wove paper in artist's frame Signed by the artist with his printed signature in graphite, signed by the artist with his hand signature also in graphite, nu...

Woman Waving - 1991 Abstract Expressionist Lithograph on Paper 1991 black and yellow abstract expressionist lithograph depicting a woman by Sidney Jonas Budnick (1921 - 1994). The w...

Elizabeth Catlett - THERE IS A WOMAN IN EVERY COLOR Rare vintage fine art lithograph poster reproduced after Catlett's original 1975 woodcut print entitled THERE IS A WOMAN IN EVERY...

Etching in colors on vélin de Lana Royal paper. Paper Size: 11.93 x 9.81 inches. Inscription: Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued. Notes: From the album, Heart of Darkness, 1992. Publ...

This original limited-edition exhibition poster was created for the 1990 show at the prestigious Galerie Lelong in Paris, France. Known for showcasing the works of some of the most ...

Artist: Robert Indiana Title: Parrot Portfolio: 1997 The American Dream Medium: Original serigraph Year: 1997 Edition: 76/395 Frame Size...

Helen Frankenthaler (after) A Paintings Retrospective: vintage LACMA Museum poster, 1990 Offset lithograph museum poster (Unsigned & Unnumbered) 37 × 25 inches Unframed This was printed in the artists lifetime - making it more collectible - on the occasion of the exhibition, "Helen Frankenthaler: A Paintings Retrospective from February to April, 1990 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) Print is published by Editions Limited Galleries, San Francisco for Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), LA, CA The work depicted is Helen Frankenthaler, The Bay, 1963, acrylic on canvas, Detroit Institute of Arts, Michigan (Incidentally, this beautiful work is featured on the cover of the book Water and Art' by David Clarke.) “What concerns me when I work is not whether a picture is a landscape… or whether somebody will see a sunset in it. What concerns me is, did I make a beautiful picture?” - - Helen Frankenthaler This is Frankenthaler's first silkscreen, produced for the portfolio New York Ten, which includes works by other New York-based artists at the time such as Roy Lichtenstein, Jim Dine, Tom Wesselmann and Claes Oldenburg. (She created her first lithograph in 1961) Other examples of this edition are found in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, MOCA Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum, the Philadelphia Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, and numerous regional museums and institutions in the United States and worldwide. Helen Frankenthaler, A Brief Biography Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011), whose career spanned six decades, has long been recognized as one of the great American artists of the twentieth century. She was eminent among the second generation of postwar American abstract painters and is widely credited for playing a pivotal role in the transition from Abstract Expressionism to Color Field painting. Through her invention of the soak-stain technique, she expanded the possibilities of abstract painting, while at times referencing figuration and landscape in unique ways. She produced a body of work whose impact on contemporary art has been profound and continues to grow. Frankenthaler was born on December 12, 1928, and raised in New York City. She attended the Dalton School, where she received her earliest art instruction from Rufino Tamayo. In 1949 she graduated from Bennington College, Vermont, where she was a student of Paul Feeley. She later studied briefly with Hans Hofmann. Frankenthaler’s professional exhibition career began in 1950, when Adolph Gottlieb selected her painting Beach (1950) for inclusion in the exhibition titled Fifteen Unknowns: Selected by Artists of the Kootz Gallery. Her first solo exhibition was presented in 1951, at New York’s Tibor de Nagy Gallery, and that year she was also included in the landmark exhibition 9th St. Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture. In 1952 Frankenthaler created Mountains and Sea, a breakthrough painting of American abstraction for which she poured thinned paint directly onto raw, unprimed canvas laid on the studio floor, working from all sides to create floating fields of translucent color. Mountains and Sea was immediately influential for the artists who formed the Color Field school of painting, notable among them Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland. As early as 1959, Frankenthaler began to be a regular presence in major international exhibitions. She won first prize at the Premiere Biennale de Paris that year, and in 1966 she represented the United States in the 33rd Venice Biennale, alongside Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, and Jules Olitski. She had her first major museum exhibition in 1960, at New York’s Jewish Museum, and her second, in 1969, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, followed by an international tour. Frankenthaler experimented tirelessly throughout her long career. In addition to producing unique paintings on canvas and paper, she worked in a wide range of media, including ceramics, sculpture, tapestry, and especially printmaking. Hers was a significant voice in the mid-century “print renaissance” among American abstract painters, and she is particularly renowned for her woodcuts. She continued working productively through the opening years of this century. Frankenthaler’s distinguished, prolific career has been the subject of numerous monographic museum exhibitions. The Jewish Museum and Whitney Museum shows were succeeded by a major retrospective initiated by the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth that traveled to The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Detroit Institute of Arts, MI (1989); and those devoted to works on paper and prints organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (1993), among others. Select recent important exhibitions have included Painted on 21st Street: Helen Frankenthaler from 1950 to 1959 (Gagosian, NY, 2013); Making Painting: Helen Frankenthaler and JMW Turner (Turner Contemporary, Margate, UK, 2014); Giving Up One’s Mark: Helen Frankenthaler in the 1960s and 1970s (Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY, 2014–15); Pretty Raw: After and Around Helen Frankenthaler (Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, 2015); As in Nature: Helen Frankenthaler, Paintings and No Rules: Helen Frankenthaler Woodcuts...

DeLoss McGraw Leaving Home (97-301), 1997 Five color lithograph on tan Rives BFK paper with deckled edges Signed and numbered 3/75 in graphite pencil on the front 17 × 24 3/25 inches...

A print by Frank Stella. “Fattipuff, from Imaginary Places II” is a lithograph, screenprint, etching, aquatint, and relief print in a palette of bright colors by American painter and...

Theodore Waddell Osage Sheep State II Year: 1994 Color Lithograph Edition: 30 Papers: Arches Cover, Black Paper Size: 22.5 x 30 inches Image Size: Same Signed and numbered by hand CO...

In the center of a royal blue field of color, Ricard has scrawled “Jasper Johns over 34,000,000 sold”.  Ricard’s work brims with cultural references: with this statement he positions...

Artist: Robert Rauschenberg Title: Architecture Year: 1994 Medium: Lithograph with vegetable dye water transfer on Arches Infinity paper Edition: 50; signed, dated and numbered in pe...

Ellsworth Kelly Blue Yellow Red (Gemini 1524), 1991 Lithograph on Rives BFK paper with blind stamps Signed and numbered in graphite pencil; bears publisher's and artist's blind stamp...

Julian Schnabel Invierno Primaveral, 1995 Hand-painted, 17-color screenprint with poured resin 40 x 30 inches (102 x 76 cm) Edition of 80 signed in pencil and stamped on verso "S...

Artist: Doo Shik Lee, Korean (1947 - 2013) Title: Impressions of Women Year: 1993 Medium: Suite of Five Lithographs on Arches, Each signed and numbered in pencil Edition: 175 Size: ...

Martel Wiegand Falter Notierung 2 Linoleum Cut 1996 39.37 x 26.77 inches (100 x 68 cm) Edition: Unique Monogrammed and dated by hand COA provided *Condition: Some creasing along the...

Judy Pfaff Wufu Wu (The Five Chinese Blessings), 1995 Signed, dated, numbered and titled in graphite pencil on the front Edition of 120 (unnumbered) Original etching on Japanese Kozo...

Artist: Kenny Scharf Title: Sajippe Kraka Joujesh Medium: Silkscreen Signed: Hand Signed Measurements: 39" x 46" Edition Number: 26/150 PRINTER: Fine Art Printing Ltd, NYC PUBLIS...

Peter Halley Core, 1991 Limited Edition Silkscreen with lithography on Coventry Rag paper. Pencil signed and numbered 13/50 on the front Publisher: Edition Schellmann & Pace Editions...

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