Skip to main content
Want more images or videos?
Request additional images or videos from the seller
1 of 15

Deborah Kass
Deborah Kass Feminist Jewish American Pop Art Silkscreen Screenprint Ltd Edition

1973

$2,400
£1,792.69
€2,078.33
CA$3,332.34
A$3,735.12
CHF 1,944.77
MX$45,607.46
NOK 24,691.51
SEK 23,405.33
DKK 15,506.61
Shipping
Retrieving quote...
The 1stDibs Promise:
Authenticity Guarantee,
Money-Back Guarantee,
24-Hour Cancellation

About the Item

Deborah Kass (born 1952) Limited edition geometric abstract lithograph in colors on artist paper. Hand signed and dated in pencil to lower right. 1973. Edition: 102/120 to lower left. Dimensions: sight: 16-3/4" W x 21-1/4" H. Frame: 24-5/8" W x 28-7/8" H. Finding inspiration in pop culture, political realities, film, Yiddish, art historical styles, and prominent art world figures, Deborah Kass uses appropriation in her work to explore notions of identity, politics, and her own cultural interests. She received her BFA in painting at Carnegie Mellon University and studied at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and the Art Students League of New York. Deborah Kass (born 1952) is an American artist whose work explores the intersection of pop culture, art history, and the construction of self. Deborah Kass works in mixed media, and is most recognized for her paintings, prints, photography, sculptures and neon lighting installations. Kass's early work mimics and reworks signature styles of iconic male artists of the 20th century including Frank Stella, Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock, and Ed Ruscha. Kass's technique of appropriation is a critical commentary on the intersection of social power relations, identity politics, and the historically dominant position of male artists in the art world. Deborah Kass was born in 1952 in San Antonio, Texas. Her grandparents were from Belarus and Ukraine, first generation Jewish immigrants to New York. Kass's parents were from the Bronx and Queens, New York. Her father did two years in the U.S. Air Force on base in San Antonio until the family returned to the suburbs of Long Island, New York, where Kass grew up. Kass’s mother was a substitute teacher at the Rockville Centre public schools and her father was a dentist and amateur jazz musician. At age 14, Kass began taking drawing classes at The Art Students League in New York City which she funded with money she made babysitting. In the afternoons, she would go to theater on and off Broadway, often sneaking for the second act. During her high school years, she would take her time in the city to visit the Museum of Modern Art, where she would be exposed to the works of post-war artists like Frank Stella and Willem De Kooning. At age 17, Stella’s retrospective exhibition inspired Kass to become an artist as she observed and understood the logic in his progression of works and the motivation behind his creative decisions. Kass received her BFA in Painting at Carnegie Mellon University (the alma mater of artist Andy Warhol), and studied at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program Here, she created her first work of appropriation, Ophelia’s Death After Delacroix, a six by eight foot rendition of a small sketch by the French Romantic artist, Eugène Delacroix. At the same time Neo-Expressionism was being helmed by white men in the late Reagan years, women were just beginning to create a stake in the game for critical works. “The Photo Girls” consisted of artists like Sherrie Levine, Cindy Sherman, and Barbara Kruger. Kass felt that content of these works connected those of the post-war abstract painters of the mid-70s including Elizabeth Murray, Pat Steir, and Susan Rothenberg. All of these artists critically explored art in terms of new subjectivities from their points-of-view as women. Kass took from these artists the ideas of cultural and media critique, inspiring her Art History Paintings. Kass is most famous for her “Decade of Warhol,” in which she appropriated various works by the pop artist, Andy Warhol. She used Warhol’s visual language to comment on the absence of women in art history at the same time that Women’s Studies began to emerge in academia. Reading texts on subjectivity, objectivity, specificity, and gender fluidity by theorists like Judith Butler and Eve Sedgwick, Kass became literate in ideas surrounding identity. She engaged with art history through the lens of feminism, because of this theory which “The Photo Girls” drew upon. Kass's work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art; Whitney Museum of American Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Jewish Museum (New York); Museum of Fine Art, Boston; Cincinnati Museum of Art; New Orleans Museum; National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; Fogg Museum, Harvard Art Museums; and Weatherspoon Museum, among others. In 2012 Kass's work was the subject of a mid-career retrospective Deborah Kass, Before and Happily Ever After at The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, PA. An accompanying catalogue published by Skira Rizzoli, included essays by noted art historians Griselda Pollock, Irving Sandler, Robert Storr, Eric C. Shiner and writers and filmmakers Lisa Liebmann, Brooks Adams, and John Waters. Kass's work has been shown at international private and public venues including at the Venice Biennale, the Istanbul Biennale, the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, the Museum of Modern Art, The Jewish Museum, New York, the National Portrait Gallery, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. A survey show, Deborah Kass, The Warhol Project traveled across the country from 1999–2001. She is a Senior Critic in the Yale University M.F.A. Painting Program. Kass's later paintings often borrow their titles from song lyrics. Her series feel good paintings for feel bad times, incorporates lyrics borrowed from The Great American Songbook, which address history, power, and gender relations that resonate with Kass's themes in her own work. In Kass's first significant body of work, the Art History Paintings, she combined frames lifted from Disney cartoons with slices of painting from Pablo Picasso, Jasper Johns, Jackson Pollock, and other contemporary sources. Establishing appropriation as her primary mode of working, these early paintings also introduced many of the central concerns of her work to the present. Before and Happily Ever After, for example, coupled Andy Warhol’s painting of an advertisement for a nose job with a movie still of Cinderella fitting her foot into her glass slipper, touching on notions of Americanism and identity in popular culture. The Art History Paintings series engages critically with the history of politics and art making, especially exploring the power relationship of men and women in society. Deborah Kass's work reveals a personal relationship she shares with particular artworks, songs and personalities, many of which are referenced directly in her paintings. In 1992, Kass began The Warhol Project. Beginning in the 1960s, Andy Warhol’s paintings employed mass production through screen-printing to depict iconic American products and celebrities. Using Warhol’s stylistic language to represent significant women in art, Kass turned Warhol’s relationship to popular culture on its head by replacing them with subjects of her own cultural interests. She painted artists and art historians that were her heroes including Cindy Sherman, Elizabeth Murray, and Linda Nochlin. Drawing upon her childhood nostalgia, the Jewish Jackie series depicts actress Barbra Streisand, a celebrity with whom she closely identifies, replacing Warhol's prints of Jackie Kennedy Onassis and Marilyn Monroe. Her My Elvis series likewise speaks to gender and ethnic identity by replacing Warhol's Elvis with Barbra Streisand from Yentl: a 1983 film in which Streisand plays a Jewish woman who dresses and lives as a man in order to receive an education in the Talmudic Law. Kass's Self Portraits as Warhol further deteriorates the idea of rigid gender norms and increasingly identifies the artist with Warhol. By appropriating Andy Warhol's print Triple Elvis and replacing Elvis Presley with Barbara Streisand’s Yentl, Kass is able to identify herself with history’s icons, creating a history with powerful women as subjects of art. The work embodies her concerns surrounding gender representation, advocates for a feminist revision of art, and directly challenges the tradition of patriarchy. America's Most Wanted is a series of enlarged black-and-white screen prints of fake police mug shots. The collection of prints from 1998–1999 is a late-1990s update of Andy Warhol’s 1964 work 13 Most Wanted Men, which featured the most wanted criminals of 1962. The “criminals” are identified in titles only by first name and surname initial, but in reality the criminals depicted are individuals prominent in today's art world. Some of the individuals depicted include Donna De Salvo, deputy director for international initiatives and senior curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art; Thelma Golden, director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem, and Robert Storr, dean of the Yale School of Art. Kass's subjects weren’t criminals. Through this interpretation, Kass show's how they are wanted by aspirants for their ability to elevate artists’ careers. The series explores the themes of authorship and the gaze, at the same time problematizing certain connotations within the art world. In 2002, Kass began a new body of work, feel good paintings for feel bad times, inspired, in part, by her reaction to the Bush administration. These works combine stylistic devices from a wide variety of post-war painting, including Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella, Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, and Ed Ruscha, along with lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, Laura Nyro, and Sylvester, among others, pulling from popular music, Broadway show tunes, the Great American Songbook, Yiddish, and film. The paintings view American art and culture of the last century through the lens of that time period's outpouring of creativity that was the result of post-war optimism, a burgeoning middle class, and democratic values. Responding to the uncertain political and ecological climate of the new century in which they have been made, Kass's work looks back on the 20th century critically and simultaneously with great nostalgia, throwing the present into high relief. Drawing, as always, from the divergent realms of art history, popular culture, political realities, and her own political and philosophical reflection, the artist continues into the present the explorations that have characterized her paintings since the 1980s in these new hybrid textual and visual works. OY/YO In 2015, Two Tree Management Art in Dumbo commissioned of a monumentally scaled installation of OY/YO for the Brooklyn Bridge Park. The sculpture, measuring 8×17×5 ft., consists of big yellow aluminum letters, was installed on the waterfront and was visible from the Manhattan. It spells “YO” against the backdrop of Brooklyn. The flip side, for those gazing at Manhattan, reads “OY.”[ An article and photo appeared on the front page of the New York Times 3 days after its installation in the park. An instant icon, OY/YO stayed at that site for 10 months where it became a tourist destination, a favorite spot for wedding, graduation, class photos and countless selfies. After its stay in Dumbo it moved to the ferry stop at North 6th Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn for a year, where it greeted ferry riders. Since 2011, OY/YO has been a reoccurring motif in Deborah Kass's work in the form of paintings, prints, and tabletop sculptures. Kass first created “OY” as a painting riffing on Edward Ruscha’s 1962 Pop canvas, “OOF.” She later painted “YO” as a diptych that nodded to Picasso's 1901 self-portrait, “Yo Picasso” (“I, Picasso”). OY/YO is now installed in front of the Brooklyn Museum. Another arrived at Stanford University in front of the Cantor Arts Center late 2019. A large edition of OY/YO was acquired by the Jewish Museum in New York in 2017 and is on view in the exhibition Scenes from the Collection. On December 9, 2015 Deborah Kass introduced her new paintings that incorporated neon lights in an exhibition at Paul Kasmin Gallery entitled "No Kidding" in Chelsea, New York. The exhibition was an extension of her Feel Good Paintings for Feel Bad Times, but it sets a darker, tougher tone as she reflects on contemporary issues such as global warming, institutional racism, political brutality, gun violence, and attacks on women's health, through the lens of minimalism and grief. The series is ongoing. Deborah Kass has spoken about creating an “ode to the great Louises,” a space dedicated to her works inspired by famous Louise’s which she would call the “Louise Suite.” The earliest of these odes is “Sing Out Louise,” a 2002 oil on linen painting from her Feel Good Paintings Feel Bad Times collection. “Sing out Louise” is driven by her fondness for Rosalind Russel and the fact Kass feels it is her time to “Sing Out] “After Louise Bourgeois” is a 2010 sculpture made of neon and transformers on powder-coated aluminum monolith; it is a spiraling neon light with a phrase inspired by French-American artist Louise Bourgeois.[22] The neon installation reads “A woman has no place in the art world unless she proves over and over again that she won’t be eliminated.” Kass changed the quote slightly to better represent her beliefs but it was derived from Bourgeois. “After Louise Nevelson” is a 2020 spiraling neon work of art that reads "Anger? I'd be dead without my anger" a quote from American sculptor, Louise Nevelson. Award and Grants New York Foundation for the Arts, inducted into NYFA Hall of Fame (2014) Art Matters Inc. Grant (1996) Art Matters Inc. Grant (1992) New York Foundation for the Arts, Fellowship in Painting 1987 National Endowment for the Arts, Painting (1991) National Endowment For The Arts (1987) Selected solo and group exhibitions The Jewish Museum, New York, NY, “Scenes from the Collection” National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC “Eye Pop: the Celebrity Gaze” Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York, NY, “No Kidding” (2015-2016) Sargent's Daughters, New York, NY, “Deborah Kass: America’s most Wanted” (2015-2016) Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York, NY, "Deborah Kass: My Elvis+" (2013) [34] National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC, “Eye Pop: The Celebrity Gaze” Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, "Deborah Kass: Before and Happily Ever After" (2012-2013) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, “Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years” (2012) Barbara Kraków Gallery, Boston, MA (1994) fiction/nonfiction, New York, NY, "The Jewish Jackie Series and My Elvis" In 2012, the Andy Warhol Museum presented a mid-career retrospective, which received much well-deserved attention. Kass's work has been shown at the Venice Biennale, Istanbul Biennale, Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Museum of Modern Art, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC; Jewish Museum, NY; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Selected collections include the Museum of Modern Art, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY; Jewish Museum, NY; Museum of Fine Art, Boston; Cincinnati Museum of Art; New Orleans Museum; National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC; Smithsonian Institute; Fogg Museum, Harvard University; and Weatherspoon Museum, Greensboro, NC.
  • Creator:
    Deborah Kass (1952, American)
  • Creation Year:
    1973
  • Dimensions:
    Height: 25 in (63.5 cm)Width: 29 in (73.66 cm)
  • Medium:
  • Movement & Style:
  • Period:
  • Condition:
  • Gallery Location:
    Surfside, FL
  • Reference Number:
    1stDibs: LU38213494982

More From This Seller

View All
Surrealist Abstract Hebrew Aleph Pop Art Silkscreen Judaica Jewish Serigraph
By Jozsef Jakovits
Located in Surfside, FL
Abstract Hebrew Prints on heavy mould made paper from small edition of 15. there is a facing page of text in Hungarian folded over. Hard edged geometric abstract prints in color base...
Category

1980s Pop Art Abstract Prints

Materials

Archival Paper, Screen

Hungarian Surrealism Pop Art Hebrew Silkscreen Judaica Print Jewish Serigraph
By Jozsef Jakovits
Located in Surfside, FL
Abstract Hebrew Prints on heavy mould made paper from small edition of 15. there is a facing page of text in Hungarian folded over. Hard edged geometric abstract prints in color base...
Category

1980s Pop Art Abstract Prints

Materials

Archival Paper, Screen

Surrealist Abstract Hebrew Shabbat Pop Art Silkscreen Judaica Jewish Serigraph
By Jozsef Jakovits
Located in Surfside, FL
Abstract Hebrew Prints on heavy mould made paper from small edition of 15. there is a facing page of text in Hungarian folded over. Hard edged geometric abstract prints in color base...
Category

1980s Pop Art Abstract Prints

Materials

Archival Paper, Screen

Vibrant Joe Tilson British Pop Art Screenprint, Woodblock, Colorful Print
By Joe Tilson
Located in Surfside, FL
Silkscreen screenprint with woodblock and silver leaf Hand signed and numbered. In vibrant color of blue and silver on heavy paper with an almost painting type texture to it. Josep...
Category

1990s Pop Art Abstract Prints

Materials

Screen

Feminist Surrealist French Abstract Colorful Lithograph Print Myriam Bat Yosef
Located in Surfside, FL
Myriam Bat-Yosef Surrealist abstract lithograph print in colorful abstract shapes and shades Hand signed and dated 1971. sheet measures 9.25 X 9.25 inches The envelope and the Peter Buch poster is just for provenance and is not included in this sale. Myriam Bat-Yosef, whose real name is Marion Hellerman, born on January 31, 1931 in Berlin, Germany to a Jewish family from Lithuania, she is an Israeli-Icelandic artist who paints on papers, paintings, fabrics, objects and human beings for performances. Myriam Bat-Yosef currently lives and works in Paris. In 1933, her family fleeing the Nazi Holocaust, Miriam Bat-Yosef emigrates to Palestine and settles in Jaffa. In 1936, she suffers a family tragedy, her father, militant Zionist, is called to fight, still recovering from an operation of appendicitis. The incision will become infected, antibiotics did not exist yet, and her father will die in the hospital after 9 months of suffering. Myriam and her mother leave Palestine to live in Paris for three years. French is Myriam's first school language. In 1939, still fleeing Nazism, she returned to Palestine, leaving France by the last boat from Marseille. She moved to Tel Aviv with her mother, aunt and maternal grandmother. In 1940, she began attending the Academy of Fine Arts in Tel Aviv and took her name as an artist, Bat-Yosef, which means Joseph's daughter in Hebrew, as a tribute to her father. In 1946, Myriam graduated as a kindergarten teacher but wanted to be an artist. Her mother enrolled her in an evening school to prepare a diploma of art teacher. At 19, she performs two years of military service in Israel. In 1952, with a pension of $50 a month that her mother allocated, she went to study at the Beaux-Arts in Paris. To survive, she has several activities while studying. In 1955, she had her first solo exhibition, at the Israeli Club on Wagram Avenue in Paris. Many artists, such as Yaacov Agam, Yehuda Neiman Avigdor Arikha, Raffi Kaiser, Dani Karavan and sculptors Achiam and Shlomo Selinger attended the opening . In 1956, she enrolled at the School of Fine Arts in Florence. This is where she meets the painter Errô. They share an icy studio in winter. Myriam moves to Milan with friends. She organizes a joint exhibition with Erro, one room each, at the Montenapoleone gallery. Her works are admired by the sculptor Marino Marini and the painters Renato Birolli and Enrico Prampolini. Myriam and Erro exhibit in Rome, Milan, Florence and meet many personalities: Alain Jouffroy and his wife, the painter Manina, Roberto Matta and his wife Malitte, textile artist who was one of the founders of the Pompidou Center. Back in Paris, Myriam and Erro get married, which allows Myriam to avoid being called into the Israeli army during the Suez Canal War. In 1957, Myriam and her husband went to Iceland. Myriam works in a chocolate factory. Having enough money, she starts producing art again. She exhibited in Reykjavik's first art gallery. She meets the artist Sigridur Bjornsdottir, married to the Swiss painter Dieter Roth . In 1958, Myriam and her husband leave for Israel. They exhibit in Germany, then in Israel. Back in Paris, the couple became friends with artists of the surrealist movement, such as Victor Brauner, Hans Bellmer, the sculptor Philippe Hiquily, Liliane Lijn, future wife of Takis and photographer Nathalie Waag. Erro and Myriam have a daughter on March 15, 1960, named Tura, after the painter Cosmè Tura, but also close to the Icelandic Thora or the Hebrew Torah. Bat-Yosef’s complex trajectory throughout the 20th century is linked as much to the transnational history of what was for a time called the School of Paris as it is to a certain legacy of Surrealism. Her work features the same idea of resolving antinomies that also defined the spirit of surrealism, and is enhanced with her readings of the Kabbalah and her spiritual grounding in Taoism. However, while there are reasons for her approach to be associated with the process of the ready-made, it is important to consider the immediate intrication of these works with her practice of performance, during which the body itself is also painted – a feminist response to Yves Klein’s Anthropometries (1960) and an echo of the happenings which Jean-Jacques Lebel organised at the time in Paris. In 1963, Erró told Myriam that if she wants to be a painter, she can not be his wife. Myriam chose to be a painter and the couple divorced in 1964. Since that time, Myriam Bat-Yosef has exhibited in many countries: Europe, United States, Japan, etc. Although long in the shadows, the work of Myriam Bat-Yosef has been greeted by many artists and personalities: Anaïs Nin, Nancy Huston, André Pieyre of Mandiargues, José Pierre, René de Solier , Jacques Lacarrière, Alain Bosquet, Pierre Restany, Sarane Alexandrian and Surrealist André Breton who, after a visit to her studio, confided to having been intrigued by its phantasmagorical dimension. She was included in the book Pop Art and Beyond: Gender, Race, and Class in the Global Sixties by Mona Hadler and Kalliopi Minioudaki. Extract "World Citizen, Artist of the Pop Era Sarah Wilson; Why do we know so little of Myriam Bat-Yosef, the most important female Israeli artist of the Pop era? Issues of identity and sexuality feature constantly in her work. She exhibited internationally from Reykjavik to Tokyo; she had two shows at Arturo Schwarz’s famous Dada/surrealist gallery in Milan; she participated in feminist art events in Los Angeles. Above all, in 1971, she conceived Total Art, a Pop Gesamtkunstwerk inside and outside the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Painter, performer, and installation artist, she was also a lover, wife, and mother. Of Lithuanian-Jewish descent, she was close to the family of philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. An émigré in Paris she would repudiate a national passport, participating in Garry Davis’s short-lived “World Citizens” movement. She continues the lineage of women surrealist artists: Valentine Hugo, Leonor Fini, Dorothea Tanning, Leonora Carrington, Unica Zürn, Jane Graverol, Toyen, Alice Rahon...
Category

1970s Surrealist Abstract Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Israeli Contemporary Vintage Lithograph Poster
Located in Surfside, FL
Buky Schwartz (pronounced BOO-kie) (Hebrew: בוקי שוורץ‎; June 16, 1932 – September 1, 2009, Tel Aviv) was an Israeli sculptor and video artist. Moshe (Buky) Schwartz was born in Jer...
Category

Late 20th Century Contemporary Prints and Multiples

Materials

Lithograph

You May Also Like

Ebu, Pop Art Silkscreen by Hunt Slonem, 1981
By Hunt Slonem
Located in Long Island City, NY
This serigraph was created by contemporary American artist Hunt Slonem. Slonem is best known for his Neo-Expressionist paintings and bright tropical palette, and his subject matter o...
Category

1980s Contemporary Figurative Prints

Materials

Screen

Composition - Original Screen Print by Andrea Ratto - 1980s
By Andrea Ratto
Located in Roma, IT
Composition is an Original Screen Print realized in the 1980s by Andrea Ratto. Good conditions.Hand-signed. Numbered. Edition,17/120 The artwork is depicted through soft strokes ...
Category

1980s Contemporary Abstract Prints

Materials

Screen

Untitled - Screenprint and collage by Lucio del Pezzo, Italy
By Lucio Del Pezzo
Located in Napoli, IT
Serigraphy and collage of elements on Lucio del Pezzo hand-painted hand-made paper. Graphic work created in the 80s in 50 numbered copies signed by the artist.  The sheet is in perfe...
Category

1980s Modern Abstract Prints

Materials

Paper

Untitled - Screenprint by Lucio Del Pezzo - 1990s
By Lucio Del Pezzo
Located in Roma, IT
The proposed print is a screenprint made on fine paper with collage inserts and a print run of 30 artist's proof copies, in excellent condition. The screenprint has the print number...
Category

1990s Contemporary Figurative Prints

Materials

Screen

Untitled I, Abstract Lithograph and Screenprint by Deborah Kass
By Deborah Kass
Located in Long Island City, NY
Artist: Deborah Kass Title: Untitled - I Year: 1987 Medium: Silkscreen and Lithograph, signed and numbered in pencil, verso Edition: 22 Paper Size: 15.5 x 44 inches
Category

1980s Abstract Abstract Prints

Materials

Lithograph, Screen

North End, Nicholas Krushenick
By Nicholas Krushenick
Located in Fairfield, CT
Artist: Nicholas Krushenick (1929-1999) Title: North End Year: 1979 Edition: 15/200, plus proofs Medium: Silkscreen on wove paper Size: 36 x 26 inches Condition: Good Inscription: Signed and numbered by the artist. NICHOLAS KRUSHENICK (1929-1999) One of America’s premier Pop artists, Nicholas Krushenick’s work consists of geometric abstract motifs whose shapes were outlined in heavy black lines. In this regard his original prints were often compared to those of Pop Art co-horts Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, but unlike these masters Krushenick avoided any imagery from commercial art...
Category

1970s Pop Art Abstract Prints

Materials

Screen