Todd Smith

Square Variables XII

1972

Bright vibrant blue, yellow lithograph in color. This is signed in the plate and dated. Dufy's abstract drawing lithograph was drawn by the artist direct on to plastic plates newly d...

Pablo Picasso (after) "Portrait de Marie Therese" limited edition print on Arches paper, Hand signed by Marina Picasso lower right and numbered 274/500 lower left From the estate of Pablo Picasso with an embossed blindstamp in the lower right side of the piece. After Pablo Picasso's death in 1973, his granddaughter Marina authorized the printing of these original lithographs, which have come to be known as the Picasso Estate Collection. The lithographs were meticulously created after the original works (Oil Paintings, Watercolors, Pastels, Charcoal Drawings, etc.) by Master Chromist Marcel Salinas, who worked closely with Picasso in his lifetime. They are printed in an edition of 500 on Arches paper. Embossed with the estate and chromist's stamp seals, along with the legend on the reverse "Approved by the heirs of Pablo Picasso". Image: 19 1/2" x 15". Paper: 28" x 20 3/4". Pablo Ruiz Picasso (1881 – 1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, stage designer, poet and playwright who spent most of his adult life in France. Regarded as one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, he is known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture, the co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore. Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), and Guernica (1937), a dramatic portrayal of the bombing of Guernica by the German and Italian air forces during the Spanish Civil War...

Henry Spencer Moore (1898 – 1986) Moore was born in Castleford, the son of a coal miner. He became well-known through his carved marble and larger-scale abstract cast bronze sculptures, and was instrumental in introducing a particular form of modernism to the United Kingdom later endowing the Henry Moore Foundation, which continues to support education and promotion of the arts. After the Great War, Moore received an ex-serviceman's grant to continue his education and in 1919 he became a student at the Leeds School of Art (now Leeds College of Art), which set up a sculpture studio especially for him. At the college, he met Barbara Hepworth, a fellow student who would also become a well-known British sculptor, and began a friendship and gentle professional rivalry that lasted for many years. In Leeds, Moore also had access to the modernist works in the collection of Sir Michael Sadler, the University Vice-Chancellor, which had a pronounced effect on his development. In 1921, Moore won a scholarship to study at the Royal College of Art in London, along with Hepworth and other Yorkshire contemporaries. While in London, Moore extended his knowledge of primitive art and sculpture, studying the ethnographic collections at the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Museum. Moore's familiarity with primitivism and the influence of sculptors such as Constantin Brâncuși, Jacob Epstein, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Frank Dobson led him to the method of direct carving, in which imperfections in the material and marks left by tools became part of the finished sculpture. After Moore married, the couple moved to a studio in Hampstead at 11a Parkhill Road NW3, joining a small colony of avant-garde artists who were taking root there. Shortly afterward, Hepworth and her second husband Ben Nicholson moved into a studio around the corner from Moore, while Naum Gabo, Roland Penrose, Cecil Stephenson and the art critic Herbert Read also lived in the area (Read referred to the area as "a nest of gentle artists"). This led to a rapid cross-fertilization of ideas that Read would publicise, helping to raise Moore's public profile. The area was also a stopping-off point for many refugee artists, architects and designers from continental Europe en route to America—some of whom would later commission works from Moore. In 1932, after six year's teaching at the Royal College, Moore took up a post as the Head of the Department of Sculpture at the Chelsea School of Art. Artistically, Moore, Hepworth and other members of The Seven and Five Society would develop steadily more abstract work, partly influenced by their frequent trips to Paris and their contact with leading progressive artists, notably Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Jean Arp and Alberto Giacometti. Moore flirted with Surrealism, joining Paul Nash's modern art movement "Unit One", in 1933. In 1934, Moore visited Spain; he visited the cave of Altamira (which he described as the "Royal Academy of Cave Painting"), Madrid, Toledo and Pamplona. Moore made his first visit to America when a retrospective exhibition of his work opened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.[28] Before the war, Moore had been approached by educator Henry Morris, who was trying to reform education with his concept of the Village College. Morris had engaged Walter Gropius as the architect for his second village college at Impington near Cambridge, and he wanted Moore to design a major public sculpture for the site. In the 1950s, Moore began to receive increasingly significant commissions. He exhibited Reclining Figure: Festival at the Festival of Britain in 1951, and in 1958 produced a large marble reclining figure for the UNESCO building in Paris. With many more public works of art, the scale of Moore's sculptures grew significantly and he started to employ an increasing number of assistants to work with him at Much Hadham, including Anthony Caro and Richard Wentworth. Moore produced at least three significant examples of architectural sculpture during his career. In 1928, despite his own self-described extreme reservations, he accepted his first public commission for West Wind for the London Underground Building at 55 Broadway in London, joining the company of Jacob Epstein and Eric Gill..At an introductory speech in New York City for an exhibition of one of the finest modernist sculptors, Alberto Giacometti, Sartre spoke of The beginning and the end of history...

Pablo Picasso (after) "Le Bouquet" Bouquet of flowers, abstract floral arrangement. limited edition print on Arches paper, Hand signed by Marina Picasso lower right and numbered 244...