Robert Natkin

Robert Natkin, Intimate Lighting (Pink), large Abstract Expressionist silkscreen

1974

Hans Hofmann Composition in Blue, 1952 Color silkscreen with unique hand painted gouache additions Hand signed and numbered 76/120 on the front in ink (unique variant) (unique variant with hand painting) Published by Esther Gentle and 167 Gallery, New York Frame included: held in the original wood frame Measurements: Work: 16⅞ by 15 inches Framed: 24⅝ by 21¼ inches Dazzling mid century modern (1952) mixed media silkscreen and gouache by Hans Hofmann - one of the most influential artists of the 20th Century. The gouache additions are done by hand, making each work in this series absolutely unique. A superb impression of this extremely scarce, early print with strong colors. According to Reba and Dave Williams (Reba and Dave Williams, American Screenprints, New York, 1987, page 32), Hofmann was persuaded to make this print by Esther Gentle (who later married Abraham Rattner), his student at the time, who was starting to publish screenprints reproducing well-known artists' paintings. Unlike other screenprints by Abstract Expressionist artists, Hofmann's is an original work which does not reproduce a painting. An unusual feature of Composition in Blue is that the blue background varies; the artist authorized different color mixtures and strengths for each example in the printing of this particular silkscreen (Williams, page 32). HANS HOFMANN (1880-1966) Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) is one of the most important figures of postwar American art. Celebrated for his exuberant, color-filled canvases, and renowned as an influential teacher for generations of artists—first in his native Germany, then in New York and Provincetown—Hofmann played a pivotal role in the development of Abstract Expressionism. Between 1900 and 1930, Hofmann’s early studies, decades of painting, and schools of art took him to Munich, to Paris, then back to Munich. By 1933, and for the next four decades, he lived in New York and in Provincetown. Hofmann’s evolution from foremost modern art teacher to pivotal modern artist brought him into contact with many of the foremost artists, critics, and dealers of the twentieth century: Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Wassily Kandinsky, Sonia and Robert Delaunay, Betty Parsons, Peggy Guggenheim, Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock, and many others. His successful career was shepherded by the postwar modern...

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...

Sam Gilliam Buoy Landscape IV, 1982 Color relief print, etching, screenprint, drypoint, aquatint and roulette all from deeply etched copper plates, on handmade wove paper 31 1/2 × 24 inches Hand signed and numbered 3/25 in graphite pencil Hand-signed by artist, Signed by artist, numbered, and dated in pencil and blind-stamped by printer-publisher on lower right, titled in pencil on lower left, recto Unframed with elegant deckled edges Rare vintage intaglio and relief, all from deeply etched copper plates. Other works from this series are in the permanent collections of major museums & institutions like the Smithsonian, so they are quite scarce on the open market. Steven M. Andersen (Printer) Philip Barber (Printer) Hang Nguyen (Printer) Stephanie Nowack (Printer) Michael Reid (Printer) Daniel Rounds (Printer) Vermillion Editions Limited (Publisher) Sam Gilliam Biography: Sam Gilliam was one of the great innovators in postwar American painting. He emerged from the Washington, D.C. scene in the mid 1960s with works that elaborated upon and disrupted the ethos of Color School painting. A series of formal breakthroughs would soon result in his canonical Drape paintings, which expanded upon the tenets of Abstract Expressionism in entirely new ways. Suspending stretcherless lengths of painted canvas from the walls or ceilings of exhibition spaces, Gilliam transformed his medium and the contexts in which it was viewed. As an artist in the nation’s capital at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, this was not merely an aesthetic proposition; it was a way of defining art’s role in a society undergoing dramatic change. Gilliam pursued a pioneering course in which experimentation was the only constant. Inspired by the improvisatory ethos of jazz, his lyrical abstractions took on an increasing variety of forms, moods, and materials. In addition to a traveling retrospective organized by the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. in 2005, Sam Gilliam was the subject of solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1971); The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (1982); Whitney Museum of American Art, Philip Morris Branch, New York (1993); J.B. Speed Memorial Museum, Louisville, Kentucky (1996); Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. (2011); and Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland (2018), among many other institutions. A semi-permanent installation of Gilliam’s paintings opened at Dia:Beacon in August 2019. His work is included in over fifty public collections, including those of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Tate Modern, London; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the Art Institute of Chicago. Sam Gilliam, Green April, 1969, acrylic on canvas, 98 x 271 x 3 7/8 inches (248.9 x 688.3 x 9.8 cm), Collection of Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel, Switzerland, Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, photography by Lee Thompson...

Robert Natkin Untitled, ca. 1979 Monotype with heart drawing Hand signed twice; inscribed to Dorothy and Arthur with text and heart Unique Original vintage frame included Measurement...

Artist: Raymond Parker, American (1922 - 1990) Title: Untitled Year: 1980 Medium: Silkscreen, signed and numbered in pencil Edition: 70 Size: 23 x 30 inches

Artist: Raymond Parker, American (1922 - 1990) Title: Untitled 5 Year: 1980 Medium: Silkscreen, signed and numbered in pencil Edition: AP Image Size: 21.5 x 25.5 inches Size: 22.5 x ...

Spartan Sun Box, 1971 Screenprint 25 22/25 × 23 22/25 in 65.7 × 60.7 cm Edition of 75 The Greek American artist, Theodoros Stamos, was born in 1922 in New Yor...

The Greek American artist, Theodoros Stamos, was born in 1922 in New York City into a family of Greek immigrants. He was a member of The Irascibles gr...