Mid-20th Century Figurative Prints

Woodcut print realized by Escher in 1931. It belongs to the series "Emblemata". Signed with initials in the plate lower center. Ref. -F.H. Bool, J.R. Kist, J.L. Locher and F. Wier...

Lynd Ward, 'Judges' from the series 'Moriae Encomium (In Praise of Folly),' mezzotint, 1943, no edition, proofs only. Signed, dated, and titled in pencil. A superb, richly-inked impression, on cream wove paper; the full sheet with margins (1 1/4 to 2 inches) in excellent condition. Scarce. Matted to museum standards, unframed. Image size 7 13/16 x 4 7/8 inches (198 x 124 mm); sheet size 10 3/4 x 8 1/8 inches (273 x 206 mm). Created by the artist for 'Erasmus's Moriae Encomium,' or 'In Praise of Folly,' published by the Limited Editions Club, 1943. A rare, signed, proof impression apart from the Limited Editions Club publication. ABOUT THE ARTIST Lynd Ward is acknowledged as one of America’s foremost wood engravers and book illustrators of the first half of the twentieth century. His innovative use of narrative printmaking as a stand-alone storytelling vehicle was uniquely successful in reaching a broad audience. The powerful psychological intensity of his work, celebrated for its dynamic design, technical precision, and compelling dramatic content, finds resonance in the literature of Poe, Melville, and Hawthorne. Like these classic American writers, Ward was concerned with the themes of man’s inner struggles and the role of the subconscious in determining his destiny. An artist of social conscience during the Great Depression and World War II, he infused his graphic images with his unique brand of social realism, deftly portraying the problems that challenged the ideals of American society. The son of a Methodist preacher, Lynd Ward, moved from Chicago to Massachusetts at an early age. He graduated from the Teachers College of Columbia University, New York, in 1926, where he studied illustration and graphic arts. He married May Yonge McNeer in 1936 and left for Europe for their honeymoon in Eastern Europe. After four months, they settled in Leipzig, where Ward studied at the National Academy of Graphic Arts and Bookmaking. Inspired by Belgian expressionist artist Frans Masereel's graphic novel ‘The Sun,’ and another graphic novel by the German artist Otto Nückel, ‘Destiny,’ he determined to create his own "wordless" novel. Upon his return to America, Ward completed his first book, ‘God's Man: A Novel in Woodcuts,’ published in 1929. ‘Gods’ Man’ was a great success for its author and publisher and was reprinted four times in 1930, including a British edition. This book and several which followed it, ‘Madman’s Drum,’ 1930, ‘Wild Pilgrimage,’ 1932, ‘Prelude to a Million Years,’ 1933, ‘Song Without Words,' 1936, ‘Vertigo,’ 1937; and ‘Last Unfinished Wordless Novel’ (created in the 1960s and published in 2001) were comprised solely of Ward's wood engravings. Ward designed each graphic image to occupy an entire page, the sequence of which conveys the story's narrative. In 1937, Ward was named Director of the Graphic Arts Division of the Federal Art Project, a division of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). In the following years, Ward went on to illustrate more than one hundred books (some of which he wrote), including classics for the Limited Editions Club Goethe’s ‘Faust,’ Faulkner’s ‘A Green Bough,’ and Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein,’ and several children’s books. He also produced single-subject wood engravings, paintings, and drawings. His print ‘Sanctuary,’ 1939, was shown at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, and ‘Clouded Over,’ 1948, received the 1948 Library of Congress Award and was included in ‘American Prize Prints of the 20th Century’ by Albert Reese. He received the National Academy of Design Print Award (1949), the New York Times Best Illustrated Award (1973), and the Regina Award (Catholic Library Association, 1975). ‘The Biggest Bear,’ a children’s book with illustrations by Ward, was the recipient of the esteemed 1952 Caldecott Medal of the American Library Association. An Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers, Ward was a member and board member of the National Academy of Design and the Artists’ League of America. He served several terms as president of the Society of American Graphic Artists and was a member of the American Artists Congress and the Society of Illustrators. Ward exhibited at the American Artists Congress; the National Academy of Design; the John Herron Art Institute; and the Library of Congress. He had a one-person show at Associated American Artists, NY, on the publication of his monograph 'Storyteller Without Words,' 1974; AAA mounted a memorial exhibition in 1986. The May 1976 issue of 'Bibliognost,' a book collector’s publication, was dedicated to Ward. ‘Lynd Ward, His Bookplate Designs,’ an article by Dan Burne Jones, was published in the American Society of Bookplate Collectors and Designers Yearbook, 1981/82. In 2001, sixteen years after his death, Rutgers University Libraries published ’Lynd Ward’s Last Unfinished Wordless Novel.’ The blocks were intended to be part of a novel in woodcuts, the first since Vertigo, but Ward did not live to complete the project. Master printer and book designer Barbara Henry collated and printed the twenty-six finished blocks out of the forty-four initially planned for the still unnamed narrative. In 2010 the Library of America honored Ward’s achievements with the meticulous production of a collection of Ward’s woodcut novels—the first time the Library had gone wordless. The publication replicated his original editions with a single full-size image printed on the right page of each double-page spread. In his introduction to the books, renowned cartoonist/illustrator Art...

ARTIST: Salvador Dali TITLE: LEs Chantes de Maldoror Memory of Music MEDIUM: Etching Arches paper SIGNED: Not signed PUBLISHER: Albert Skira, Paris MEASUREMENTS: 10" x13" YEAR...

Lithograph on vélin d’Arches paper. Signed in the plate, as issued. Good condition. Notes: From the folio, Picasso, Vingt-Neuf Portraits Imaginaires, 1969. Published by Éditions Cerc...

Behold the original lithographic Petty Pin-up, a unique vertical-format piece. The see-through bathing suit she wears seems to make her glow, especially with her red hair peeking fro...

Original “Watch Out .. Point the Muzzle in a SAFE Direction” vintage National Rifle Association of America vintage poster. Printed in 1946 on a thick cardboard stock. Excellent ...

Lithograph on vélin des Papeteries du Marais paper. Inscription: Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued. Good condition. Notes: From the volume, Drawings from the Bible by Marc Chagall, ...

Lithograph on vélin des Papeteries du Marais paper. Inscription: Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued. Good condition. Notes: From the volume, Marc Chagall, Dessins Pour La Bible, Verv...

Lithograph and stencil on papier a la cuve du moulin Richard de Bas paper, spécialement filigrané pour cette édition. Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued. Good condition. Notes: From ...

Woodcut in colors on vélin pur chiffon de Rives paper. Paper size: 13 x 10.375 inches. Inscription: Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued. Catalogue raisonné reference: Michler & Löpsin...

Medium: offset lithograph (after the Rodin watercolor). Printed in 1945 on Vélin de Lana paper and published in Paris by the Musée Rodin in an edition of 2500. Image size: 7 1/4 x 5 ...

Pulled from the "L'Atelier Mourlot" exhibition catalog, published by The Redfern Gallery, London, 1965 By Joan Miró Joan Miró was a pioneering Spanish artist celebrated for his whi...

Lithograph and stencil on vélin Foreign Affairs paper mounted on Foreign Affairs museum board, as issued . Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued. Good Condition. Notes: From the folio, Édouard Manet, Letters with Aquarelles, 1944. Published by Pantheon Books, New York; rendered and printed by Raymond and...

Pablo PICASSO (1881-1973), The Little Old man with a Mask, 1954 Original lithography (Mourlot workshop) Unsigned Printed date in the plate On paper 26 .5 x 35.5 cm (c. 10,2 x 13.7 ...

Lithograph on vélin paper. Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued. Good condition. Published and printed by Art in America, New York in an edition of CDVII/D. From the folio, The Four Se...

Tomi Ungerer Nude Gun: a selection from Underground Sketchbook: First printing, 1965. Medium: Vintage poster. Dimensions: 23 in. x 29 in. (58.42 cm x 73.66 cm). Very good overall vi...

Washington At Pohick Church - 1932 Etching On Paper 1932 black and white etching depicting George Washington at Pohick Church by Ernest David Roth (German, 1879-1964). George Washin...

Original 1940 Loterie Nationale Vintage Poster. Tranche de l”Historie de France. Linen-backed in very good condition – excellent, ready to frame. The team of Eddgard Derouet and C...

The only mention I can find of Evelyn G. Schultz is that she was a charter member of the San Diego Watercolor Society. But the medium of the linocut (here on tan paper) was frequentl...

Woodcut in colors on vélin pur chiffon de Rives paper. Paper size: 13 x 10.375 inches. Inscription: Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued. Catalogue raisonné reference: Michler & Löpsin...

Héliogravure on brown-toned paper, so signature. On bot sheets, recto and verso. Edition of 6500 unsigned copies. Printed by Mourlot and published by Tériade, Paris. Ref. Mourlot,...

Hand signed. Edition 35 of 50. From the Serie “Les 347”, table no. 110. Perfect impression on vélin blanc, very fresh and with sheet in full margins and perfect conditions, numbered ...

Original “Chicago Continental Airlines” linen-backed mint vintage poster. FREE Continental USA shipping on this Continental poster! Step back in ...

Woodcut in colors on vélin pur chiffon de Rives paper. Paper size: 13 x 10.375 inches. Inscription: Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued. Catalogue raisonné reference: Michler & Löpsin...

Héliogravure on brown-toned paper, no signature. Héliogravure  on bot sheets, recto and verso. Edition of 6500 unsigned copies. Printed by Mourlot and published by Tériade on the A...

Lithograph and stencil on vélin papier a la cuve du moulin richard de bas specialement filigrané pour cette édition paper. Inscription: signed in the plate and unnumbered, as issued....

ARTIST: Salvador Dali TITLE: Faust Chevalier a Genou MEDIUM: Etching SIGNED: Hand Signed EDITION NUMBER: 9/95 MEASUREMENTS: 15.3" x 11.4" YEAR: 1969 FRAMED: No CONDITION: Ex...

Le Corbusier Hand with Enigmatic Symbol, 1964 Original lithograph Printed signature in the plate On vellum 42.5 x 35.5 cm (c. 16.5 x 13.7 in) Edited by Forces-Vives (Paris) in 1964...

This artwork titled "Fete Champetre" c.1950 is an original colors lithograph by renown artist Jean Dufy, 1888-1964. It is hand signed and numbered 80/220 in pencil by the artist. The...

Howard Cook, 'Soaring New York', aquatint, soft-ground etching, roulette, 1931-32, edition 25, Duffy 165. Signed, dated, and annotated 'imp' in pencil. A superb, richly-inked, atmosp...

Woodcut in colors on vélin pur chiffon de Rives paper. Paper size: 13 x 10.375 inches. Inscription: Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued. Catalogue raisonné reference: Michler & Löpsin...

Woodcut in colors on vélin pur chiffon de Rives paper. Paper size: 13 x 10.375 inches. Inscription: Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued. Catalogue raisonné reference: Michler & Löpsin...

JOSE CLEMENTE OROZCO (1893 – 1949) WOMEN, 1934 ( Orozco 25) Lithograph, One of 127 signed & unnumbered impressions, (total printed 255) Printer Jesus Arteaga. Image 12 1/2 x 17 inches, sheet 17 x 23 inches. Large sheet. top sheet edge with deckle edge and with some remnants of old old tape. Some slight mat burn verso., just a hint on the recto. This impression is also dedicated to Rosita Boyce by Clemente Orozco - (the Artist's Son) in 1961 From "Jose Clemente Orozco - Graphic Work" by Clemente Orozco, University of Texas Press, 2004. "The image is a detail of the Mural "Contemporary World" in the Palace of Fine Arts, Mexico City. The mural depicts "the real prostitution of power is implied by prostitutes fighting for survival. in a game of exuberance and decadence. The theme of women, especially prostitutes, has a special significance in Orozco's work, from his early watercolors to this fresco.." This print is related to Orozco's MACHINES also on 1stdibs offered by this dealer. Mexican Prints...

Bernard Brussel-Smith, 'City Scene II', wood engraving, 1949, artist's proof, edition 100. Signed, titled, and annotated 'A.P.' in pencil. A superb, richly-inked impression, on whit...

This lithograph Les baigneuses ( The bathers) by Andre Marchand is part of my private collection since the 1970's. It is in very good condition, artist pencil signed in the lower lef...

Artist: Warrington Colescott (1921-2018) Title: Cowboys and Indians Year: 1969 Edition: 24/75, plus proofs Medium: Lithograph on paper Inscription: Signed & numbered in pencil Size: ...

THOMAS HART BENTON (1890- 1975) HYMN SINGER / THE MINSTREL (Portrait of Burl Ives) 1950 (Fath 74) Lithograph signed with full signature “Thomas H. Benton” A large image, 15 ¾ x 12 i...

La Monaca is a color lithograph on ivory paper, created by the Italian artist Umberto Brunelleschi (Montemurlo 1879- Paris 1949). Illustration for “Tales and Short Stories” by La Fo...

Artist: Salvador Dali Title: Inferno: Canto 20 Portfolio: The Divine Comedy: Inferno Medium: Woodblock engraving Year: 1963 Edition: 4765 Framed Size: 19 1/4" x 16 3/4" Sheet Size: 1...

Medium: Engraving on vélin du Marais paper Year: 1948 Paper Size: 12.25 x 9.125 inches; image size: 9 x 6 inches Inscription: Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued Notes: From the volum...

Marc Chagall (1887-1985) The Bible, Daniel the Prophet Original lithography (Mourlot Workshop) On paper 37 x 26.5 cm (c. 14.5 x 10.2 in) Second illustration on back, see photo no...

Medium: Lithograph and stencil on vélin paper Year: 1945 Paper Size: 17 x 13 inches Inscription: Signed in the plate and unnumbered, as issued Notes: From the folio, Degas, Ten Balle...

Lithograph on vélin paper. Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued. Good condition. Notes: From the volume, XXe Siècle, vol. n°9, 1957. Published and printed under the direction of Gualti...

"Accidente" - 1943 Linocut on Paper "Accidente" from the portfolio "25 Prints of Leopoldo Méndez", depicts a figure, upside down, appearing to fall downward from a ladder. Another f...

Etching on vélin Johannot d’Arches paper. Inscription: Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued. Good condition. Notes: From the album, Paroles peintes I, 1962. Published by Éditions O. La...

About In-folio Oblong Dimensions : 29x39 cm. Paris Atelier Crommelynck 1968 Edition #41 of 200 copies including 12 original out-of-text etchings (7 etchings, 4 etchings and aquatint...

Rare Authentic original "Take me out to the ball game' vintage movie poster. NSS: 49/119. Linen backed. Frank Sinatra, Ester Williams, Gene Kelly. M.G.M's Gay Technicolor Musical! TAKE ME OUT TO THE BALL GAME Cast overview, first billed only: Frank Sinatra .... Dennis Ryan Esther Williams .... K.C. Higgins Gene Kelly .... Eddie O'Brien Betty Garrett .... Shirley Delwyn Edward Arnold .... Joe Lorgan Jules Munshin .... Nat Goldberg Richard Lane...

Andy Warhol Studies for a Boy Book 1956: A rare sought-after, 1950s Andy Warhol designed poster invitation published on the occasion of: Warhol's 'Studies for a Boy Book', held at the Bodley Gallery and Bookshop Feb. 14 - March 3, 1956. A rare early Warhol collectible that seldom comes to market. Not to be passed upon. Medium: Offset lithograph on wove paper. Framed in glass. Dimensions: 15.75 x 13.5 inches (40 x 34.3 cm). Framed dimensions: 24h x 26w inches. Good overall vintage condition; fold-lines as originally issued; Unsigned from an edition of unknown. Rare. With the Estate of Andy Warhol and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Authorization ink-stamps on the reverse; initialed 'T.J.H.' by Timothy J. Hunt of the Andy Warhol Foundation and annotated 'XX-07.16' and 'PM19.0242' in pencil on the reverse. Provenance: The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, New York Susan Sheehan Gallery, New York Private Collection, New York Further Background: "In the 1950's Warhol self-published a large series of artist’s books & hold parties at Serendipity 3, a restaurant and ice cream parlor on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, where his friends would help him hand color his books. In 1956, he presented a solo exhibition at the Bodley Gallery called Studies for a Boy Book. These sketchbook drawings of portraits of young men and erotic portrayals of male nudes contrasted with the work of other contemporary gay artists, such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, who considered Warhol 'too swish.' (source: The Andy Warhol Museum) Collections: The Art Institute of Chicago Further background: Warhol’s career began as a commercial illustrator on New York’s Madison Avenue in 1949, during the massive post-war economic boom. His arrival additionally coincided with an extensive change in the motivations and strategies behind advertising, utilizing applied psychology to influence American consumers to purchase products. This stint as an ad man would further his Pop interest in cultural commercialization and start his artistic career; thus began the first chapter of Warhol’s oeuvre, dominated by charming and light-handed ink drawings. As a master of line and contour, Warhol’s consistent and unique drawings and designs piqued the interest of his clients, earning him commissions and collaborations with some of the biggest brands of the day: Tiffany & Co., Columbia Records, and Vogue, to name a few. Though stylistically different from the Pop, these early drawings offer a glimpse at an artist well on his way to establishing an art movement that would change the way the world conceived of contemporary art and its connection to pop culture, morphing from his early successes in the commercial art scene. The simple yet sophisticated line drawings contain... his favorite things: cherubs, shoes, cats, and often young men. Across these drawings and hand-colored prints, we see Warhol as a compulsive creator, documenting life and fantasy with the stark clarity of ink on paper." (source: Phillips) _ Obsessed with celebrity, consumer culture, and mechanical reproduction, Pop Art king, Andy Warhol created some of the 20th century’s most iconic images. Warhol was widely influenced by popular & consumer culture, with this being evident in some of his most famous works: 32 Campbell's soup cans, Brillo pad box sculptures, and portraits of Marilyn Monroe & Mick Jagger, for example. Rejecting the standard painting and sculpting modes of his era, Warhol embraced silk-screen printmaking to achieve his characteristic hard edges and flat areas of color. The artist mentored Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat and continues to influence contemporary art around the world: His most bold successors include Richard Prince, Takashi Murakami, and Jeff Koons. Warhol has been the subject of exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern, and Centre Pompidou, among other institutions. Related Categories 1950s Andy Warhol. Vintage Andy Warhol. Mid century modern. Pop Art. Andy Warhol advertising...

Lithograph on vélin d'Arches à la forme savoir paper. Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued. Good condition. Notes: From the volume, Dans l'Atelier de Picasso, 1957. Published by Fernan...

Lithograph on vélin pur fil paper. Inscription: Signed in the plate and unnumbered, as issued. Good condition. Notes: From the folio, Henri Matisse, Dessins, Thèmes et Variations, 19...

Medium: Engraving on vélin du Marais paper Year: 1948 Paper Size: 9.125 x 12.25 inches; image size: 4.5 x 9 inches Inscription: Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued Notes: From the vol...

Lithograph on vélin des Papeteries du Marais paper. Inscription: Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued. Good condition. Notes: From the volume, Marc Chagall, Dessins Pour La Bible, Verv...

Lithograph on vélin d'Arches paper. Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued. Good Condition; never framed or matted. Notes: From the folio, Les Signes du zodiaque, 1959. Published by Édit...

Original Lithograph - Henri Matisse - Apollinaire Artist : Henri MATISSE 13 x 10 inches Edition: 151/330 References : Duthuit-Matisse Catalogue raisonné 31 MATISSE'S BIOGRAPHY YOUTH AND EARLY EDUCATION Henri Emile Benoît Matisse was born in a tiny, tumbledown weaver's cottage on the rue du Chêne Arnaud in the textile town of Le Cateau-Cambrésis at eight o'clock in the evening on the last night of the year, 31 December 1869 (Le Cateau-Cambrésis is in the extreme north of France near the Belgian border). The house had two rooms, a beaten earth floor and a leaky roof. Matisse said long afterwards that rain fell through a hole above the bed in which he was born. Matisse’s ancestors had lived in the area for centuries before the convulsive social and industrial upheavals of the nineteenth century. Matisse grew up in a world that was still detaching itself from a way of life in some ways unchanged since Roman times. The coming of the railway had put Bohain on the industrial map, but people still traveled everywhere on foot or horseback. Matisse’s father, Émile Hippolyte Matisse, was a grain merchant whose family were weavers. His mother, Anna Heloise Gerard, was a daughter of a long line of well-to-do tanners. Warmhearted, outgoing, capable and energetic, she was small and sturdily built with the fashionable figure of the period: full breasts and hips, narrow waist, neat ankles and elegant small feet. She had fair skin, broad cheekbones and a wide smile. "My mother had a face with generous features," said her son Henri, who always spoke of her with particular tenderness of the sensitivity. Throughout the forty years of her marriage, she provided unwavering, rocklike support to her husband and her sons. Matisse later said: "My mother loved everything I did." He grew up in nearby Bohain-en-Vermandois, an industrial textile center, until the age of ten, when his father sent him to St. Quentin for lycée. Anna Heloise worked hard. She ran the section of her husband's shop that sold housepaints, making up the customers' orders and advising on color schemes. The colors evidently left a lasting impression on Henri. The artist himself later said he got his color sense from his mother, who was herself an accomplished painter on porcelain, a fashionable art form at the time. Henri was the couple’s first son. The young Matisse was an awkward youth who seemed ill-adapted to the rigors of the North; in particular, he hated the gelid winters. He was a pensive child and by his own account he was a dreamy, frail and not outstandingly bright. In later life he never lost his feeling for his native soil, for seeds and growing things he had encountered in his youth. The fancy pigeons he kept in Nice more than half a century after he left home recalled the weavers' pigeon-lofts tucked away behind even the humblest house in Bohain. Matisse's childhood memories were of a stern upbringing. "Be quick!" "Look out!" "Run along!" "Get cracking!" were the refrains that rang in his ears as a boy. In later years when survival itself depended on habits of thrift and self-denial, the artist prided himself on being a man of the North. When Matisse in turn had children of his own to bring up, he chided himself for any lapse in discipline or open display of tenderness as weakness on his part. In 1887 he went to Paris to study law, working as a court administrator in Le Cateau-Cambrésis after gaining his qualification. Although he considered law as tedious, he nonetheless passed the bar in 1888 with distinction and began his practice begrudgingly. Once Matisse finished school, his father, a much more practical man, arranged for his son to obtain a clerking position at a law office. PAINTING: BEGINNINGS Matisse’s discovery of his true profession came about in an unusual manner. Following an attack of appendicitis, he began to paint in 1889, when his mother had brought him art supplies during the period of convalescence. He said later, “From the moment I held the box of colors in my hands, I knew this was my life. I threw myself into it like a beast that plunges towards the thing it loves.” Matisse’s mother was the first to advise her son not to adhere to the “rules” of art, but rather listen to his own emotions. Matisse was so committed to his art that he later extended a warning to his fiancée, Amélie Parayre, whom he later married: “I love you dearly, mademoiselle; but I shall always love painting more.” Matisse had discovered "a kind of paradise" as he later described it. His drastic change of profession deeply disappointed his father. Two years later in 1891 Matisse returned to Paris to study art at the Académie Julian and became a student of William-Adolphe Bouguereau. After a discouraging year at the Académie Julian, he left in disgust at the overly perfectionist style of teaching there. Afterwards he trained with Gustave Moreau, an artist who nurtured more progressive leanings. In both studios, as was usual, students drew endless figure studies from life. From Bouguereau, he learned the fundamental lessons of classical painting. His one art-schooled technical standby, almost a fetish, was the plumb line. No matter how odd the angles in any Matisse, the verticals are usually dead true. Moreau was a painter who despised the "art du salon", so Matisse was destined, in a certain sense, to remain an "outcast" of the art world. He initially failed his drawing exam for admission to the École des Beaux-Arts, but persisted and was finally accepted. Matisse began painting still-lives and landscapes in the traditional Flemish style, at which he achieved reasonable proficiency. Most of his early works employ a dark palette and tend to be gloomy. Chardin was one of Matisse's most admired painters having made four the French still-life master paintings in the Louvre. Although he executed numerous copies after the old masters he also studied contemporary art. His first experimentations earned him a reputation as the rebellious member of his studio classes. In 1896, Matisse was elected as an associate member of the Société Nationale, which meant that each year he could show paintings at the Salon de la Société without having to submit them for review. In the same year he exhibited 5 paintings in the salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, and the state bought two of his paintings. This was the first and almost only recognition he received in his native country during his lifetime. In 1897 and 1898, he visited the painter John Peter Russell on the island Belle Île off the coast of Brittany. Russell introduced him to Impressionism and to the work of Van Gogh who had been a good friend of Russell but was completely unknown at the time. Matisse's style changed completely, and he would later say "Russell was my teacher, and Russell explained color theory to me." Matisse also observed Russell's and other artists' stable marriages. This probably influenced him to find in Amélie Noellie Parayre, his future wife, his anchor. The Dinner Table (1897) was Matisse’s first masterpiece, and he had spent the entire winter working on the oeuvre. Though the Salon displayed the piece, they hung the work in a poor location, disgusted by what they considered its radical, Impressionist aspects. Caroline Joblaud was Matisse's early lover for four years during his initial struggles to affirm his artistic direction and professional career. Caroline (also called Camille) gave Matisse his first daughter Marguerite in 1894, who after Matisse's marriage to Amélie Noellie Parayre was warmly accepted contrary to conventional hostility such arrangements provoked. Caroline posed various times for the artist’s compositions while Marguerite served many times as a model for Matisse throughout his life. MARRIAGE WITH AMÉLIE NOELLIE PARAYRE The Matisses of Bohain and the Parayres of Beauzelle had outwardly nothing in common, and there was no reason why Matisse and Amélie should ever have met. But in October 1897 Matisse went to a wedding in Paris and happened to sit next to her at the uproarious banquet that followed. There had been no banal flirtation between them, even when the wine flowed, each recognized the other as true metal, and when they got up from the table she held out her hand to Henri Matisse in a way that he never forgot. Matisse at that time was not yet the professorial figure of legend. He was known as a prankster, as a ribald and anti-clerical songster, and as someone who had once broken up a café concert performance just for the hell of it. Amélie's relatives operated at that time within a social, intellectual, and political context of which Matisse had had no previous experience. They stood for free thinking, for the separation of church and state, and for the secularization of the French educational system. Her family, better off that that of Matisse, provided the support he needed for the budding artist. When Matisse married Amélie in January 1898, they had been introduced only three months after. Amélie's Aunt Noélie and two of her brothers ran a successful women's shop called the Grande Maison des Modes. Before her marriage, Amélie had shown a gift for designing, making, and modeling hats for a fashionable clientele. In June 1899, she found a partner and opened a shop of her own on the rue de Châteaudun. This allowed Henri and herself to live, with Marguerite, in a tiny two-room apartment on the same street. Madame Matisse, fervently loyal, would play a fundamental role in the life and career of the artist for more than 40 years. Marguerite was to become her father's lifetime mainstay In 1902 disaster struck. Amélie’s parents were disgraced and financially ruined in a spectacular scandal of national scope, as the unsuspecting employees of a woman whose financial empire was based on fraud. Thanks to his early years in a lawyer's office, Matisse was able to busy himself to great effect in the organization of his father-in-law's defense. When all about him lost their heads, burst into tears, and felt more than sorry for themselves, Henri Matisse dealt with their problems one by one. The ordeal had taken its toll, in more than one way. His doctors ordered Matisse to go to Bohain and take two months' complete rest. Amélie had lost both her hat shop and the apartment on the rue de Châteaudun. For the first time, Henri, Amélie and the three children were united in Bohain, having nowhere else to go. Hillary Spurling, one of Matisse’s biographers, asserts that Amélie’s memories of that public disgrace nurtured a “suspicion of the outside world” that would always mark the Matisse family. The Matisse family formed a kind of hermetic unit which revolved around the artist’s work and profession. They fitted their activities according his breaks and work sessions. Silence was essential. Even during the years when Matisse lived mostly alone in Nice, an annual ritual of unpacking, stretching, framing and hanging ended with the whole family settling down to respond to the paintings. The conference might last several days. Then the dealers were admitted. Matisse and his wife had had two sons, Jean (born 1899) and Pierre (born 1900). He was not always in peace with his family. He wrote that their views were not always in accord “which disturbs me considerably in my work, for which I require the most complete calm and from those how surround me, a serenity that I cannot find here. I intend to move to a village a few league away.” Pierre, his brother, Jean, and Marguerite remained close to their father through every vicissitude, and Matisse, in his last invalid years, was devoted to his several grandchildren. In 1899, at a time when his paintings displayed rebellious talent but not much clear direction, Matisse began attending classes in clay modeling and sculpture. Assigned to copy one of the sculptural masterpieces in the Louvre, he selected Jaguar Devouring a Hare a violently precise work by Antoine-Louis Barye. Later, whenever his paintings seemed stuck, he turned to sculpture to organize his thoughts and sensations. Influenced by the works of the post-Impressionists Paul Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh and Paul Signac, and also by Japanese art, Matisse made color a crucial element of his paintings. Matisse said, "In modern art, it is indubitably to Cézanne that I owe the most." By studying Cézanne’s fragmented planes -- which stretched the idea of the still life to a forced contemplation of color surfaces themselves -- Matisse was able to reconstruct his own philosophy of the still life. Many of his paintings from 1899 to 1905 make use of a pointillist technique adopted from Signac. In 1898, he went to London to study the paintings of J. M. W. Turner and then went on a trip to Corsica. After years in poverty, Matisse went through his "dark period" (1902-03), moved briefly to naturalism, went back to a dark palette and told friends in 1903 that he had lost all desire to paint and had almost decided to give up. Fortunately, Matisse was able to earn some money painting a frieze for the World Fair at the Grand Palais in Paris. He also traveled extensively in the early 1900s when tourism was still a new idea. Brought on by railroad, steamships, and other forms of transportation that appeared during the industrial revolution, travel became a popular pursuit. As a cultured tourist, he developed his art with regular doses of travel. FAUVISM Matisse's career can be divided into several periods that changed stylistically, but his underlying aim always remained the same: to discover "the essential character of things" and to produce an art "of balance, purity, and serenity," as he himself put it. The changing studio environments seemed always to have had a significant effect on the style of his work. In these first years of struggle Matisse set his revolutionary artistic agenda. He disregarded perspective, abolished shadows, repudiating the academic distinction between line and color. He was attempting to overturn a way of seeing evolved and accepted by the Western world for centuries by substituting a conscious subjectivity in the place of the traditional illusion of objectivity . Matisse hit his stride in the avant-garde art world in the first years of the new decade. He explored the modern art scene through frequent visits to galleries such as Durand-Ruel and Vollard, where he was exposed to work by Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, and Vincent van Gogh. Matisse’s first solo exhibition took place in 1904, without much success. In 16 May 1905 he arrived in the charming Catalan port of Collioure, in the south of France. He soon invited the painter André Derain (1880-1954), 11 years his junior, to join him. By 1905, Matisse was considered spearhead the Fauve movement in France, characterized by its spontaneity and roughness of execution as well as use of raw color straight from the palette to the canvas. Matisse combined pointillist color and Cézanne’s way of structuring pictorial space stroke by stroke to develop Fauvism - a way less of seeing the world than of feeling it with one’s eyes. When the Fauve summer drew to an end, Derain left Collioure with 30 paintings, 20 drawings and some 50 sketches, never to return, while Matisse departed some days later bringing back to Paris 15 finished paintings, 40 aquarelles, over 100 drawings. He returned Collioure in the summers of 1906, 1907, 1911 and 1914. The lure of the sun would prove always to have powers of restoration to the artist throughout his life particularly after periods of great emotional exertion. When Fauvist works were first exhibited Salon d'Automne in Paris they created a scandal. Eyewitness accounts tell of laughter emanating from room VII where they were displayed. Gertrud Stein, one of Matisse's most important future supporters, reported that people scratched at the canvases in derision. "A pot of paint has been flung in the face of the public" was the reaction by the critic Camille Mauclair. Louis Vauxcelles described the work with the historic phrase "Donatello au milieu des fauves!" (Donatello among the wild beasts), referring to a Renaissance-type sculpture that shared the room with them. His comment was printed on 17 October 1905 in Gil Blas, a daily newspaper, and passed into popular usage. Derain himself later called the Fauves' color "sticks of dynamite." The painting that was singled out for attacks was Matisse's Woman with a Hat, a portrait of Madame Matisse. This picture was bought be was bought by Gertrude and Leo Stein, a fact which had a very positive effect on Matisse who was suffering demoralization from the bad reception of his work. Matisse continued his experiments in Collioure, visible in the painting The Open Window and the View of Collioure , also a characteristic work of Fauvism in its raw color and disregard for details. Both of these works of the landscape in the French Mediterranean present a distinct development towards the spontaneous and uninhibited style. Other than André Derain, Georges Braque, Raoul Dufy and Maurice Vlaminck were also members of the Fauve movement. However, Matisse’s intimate friends among artists were mostly easygoing minor painters, such as Albert Marquet. Matisse’s temperamental aloneness made him prey to vertiginous depressions. He later recalled a breakdown that he underwent in Spain, in 1910: “My bed shook, and from my throat came a little high-pitched cry that I could not stop.” From the onset of is career women were from one of the cardinal motifs of the artist's production. His Joy of Life (1906) draws us into the world of hallucinatory vividness composed of nymphs set in an idyllic open fields dressed in pure color and sensual outline. Two women lounge in the sunlight while two more chat on the edge of the forest. One crouches to pick some flowers while her companion weaves a chain of them into her hair. A couple embraces each other while another group engages in a lively round-dance in the distance. In this way, Joy of Life depicts woodland nymphs engaging in a celebration of their life, their womanhood, and their sexuality. Due to the recurrent incidence of nude women and intensely sensual interpretation many observers have assumed that as a man Matisse must have been a hedonist. On the contrary, historic examination demonstrates that in reality, he was rather a self-abnegating Northerner who lived only to work, and did so in chronic anguish, recurrent panic, and amid periodic breakdowns. While Picasso recompensed himself, as he went along, with gratifications of intellectual and erotic play Matisse did not. In an age of ideologies, Matisse dodged all ideas except perhaps one: that art is life by other means. Matisse’s uninhibited celebration of women is often believed to have initiated from Cézanne’s painting Three Bathers (1882) (which he had acquired for himself along with a Van Gogh and a Gauguin). However, Matisse depicts women as nurturing, welcoming, and unlike the forbidding, massive clay-like presence of those of Paul Cézanne. FAME The decline of the Fauvist movement, after 1906, did nothing to deter the rise of Matisse. From 1906 -1917 he lived in Paris and established his home, studio, and school at Hôtel Biron. Among his neighbors is sculptor Auguste Rodin, writer Jean Cocteau, and dancer Isadora Duncan. Many of his finest works were created in this period, when he was an active part of the great gathering of artistic talent in Montparnasse, even though he did not quite fit in with his conservative appearance and strict bourgeois work habits. In fact, the aim of Matisse’s art was something less than revolutionary. In 1908, in a famous statement drawn from “Notes of a Painter,” Matisse declared as his ideal an art “for every mental worker, for the businessman as well as the man of letters, for example, a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.” Matisse's personal habits were incredibly regular. On a typical day rose early and worked all morning with a second work session after lunch, followed by violin practice, a simple supper (vegetable soup, two hard-boiled eggs, salad and a glass of wine) and an early bedtime. In 1906, he created a series of 12 lithographs, all variations on the theme of a seated nude. He chose to share his graphic work with the public almost immediately. The lithographs were exhibited at the Druet Gallery in Paris the same year that they were produced, and the woodcuts were shown at the Salon des Independants in the spring of 1907. In 1907 Appolinaire, commenting about Matisse in an article published in La Falange, said, "We are not here in the presence of an extravagant or an extremist undertaking: Matisse's art is eminently reasonable." Notwithstanding newly-won fame, Matisse's work continued to encounter vehement criticism and it was difficult for him to provide for his family. His controversial 1907 painting Blue Nude was burned in effigy at the Armory Show in Chicago in 1913. Contrary to the fate of the Impressionists, Matisse and other Fauves were able to exhibit in art galleries. In 1908 Paul Cassirer, the German art dealer and editor who played a significant role in the promotion of the work the French Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, staged an exhibit of Matisse’s works in Berlin. In the same year the American photographer Alfred Stieglitz in New York organized him one-man show in his tiny Manhattan gallery called 291 which effectively introduced Matisse the powerful American art market. In the first decade of his notoriety as the leader of the Fauves, Matisse was more admired by foreigners than by the French. It was, after all, the Russians and the Americans who acquired significant collections of his early work almost as quickly as it was created. The great Matisses we see in the Paris museums today were mostly acquired after the artist's death in lieu of death duties. It took the French a good deal longer to understand Matisse's greatness-longer, certainly, than the international cadre of aspiring talents that flocked to his classes when he was still one of the most controversial figures in the Paris avant-garde. In the summer of 1907, Matisse and his wife went on a long trip to italy "for work and Pleasure," visiting Venice and Padua, where they admired Giotto's frescos. In Florence the were the guests of the Steins in their villa in Fiesole. From this base matisse visited Arezzo, to study Piero della Francesca, and Siena, attracted by the early Sienese painters, especially, Duccio. PICASSO, GERTRUDE STEIN AND THE CONE SISTERS During the first decade of the 20th century Americans in Paris Gertrude Stein, her brothers Leo Stein, Michael Stein and Michael's wife Sarah took keen interest in Matisse's art. In addition, Gertrude Stein's two friends from Baltimore. Clarabel and Etta Cone, became major patrons of Matisse and Picasso, collecting hundreds of their works.The Cone Sisters acquired their first Matisse in 1906 and, during the next four decades, went on to form one of the world's great collections of his art. The Cone Collection not only contains major works from every phase of Matisse's long career but reflects the sisters' special interest in his Nice period, when a new complexity of form and psychology entered the ever intense surface allure of his paintings. In April of 1906 during a gathering at the house of the legendary Gertrude Stein, Matisse was introduced to Pablo Picasso who was 11 years younger. Picasso and Matisse were poles apart aesthetically and their life styles were no less so. Matisse was markedly taller and more polished than the stocky, cocky Catalan, was then ruler of the turbulent Paris avant-garde art scene. The two were said to have always been looking over their shoulders at each other. It is well-known that after their rivalry grew, sides were taken. Picasso later said: "No one has ever looked at Matisse's paintings more carefully than I; and no one has looked at mine more carefully than he." One key difference between their pictorial concepts was that Matisse drew and painted from nature, while Picasso was much more inclined to work from imagination. The subjects painted most frequently by both artists were women and still lives, with Matisse more likely to place his figures in fully realized interiors. Gertrude Stein, who loved stirring things up, wrote, "the feeling between the Picassoites and the Matisse-ites became bitter." Although Matisse dryly noted that "our disputes were always friendly," it should be pointed out that Picasso and his friends threw suction-cupped darts at Matisse's 1906 Portrait of Marguerite (which Picasso had obtained in a trade for his own Pitcher, Bowl and Lemon, from 1907). While the rift between the two artists eventually healed, the one between their supporters remained. ACADEMIE MATISSE IN PARIS & SERGEI SHCHUKIN In 1909, with the Matisse family lived in a former convent on the Boulevard des Invalides, in Paris, where the artist conducted a painting school. His immense notoriety, which had been confirmed in 1905-06 by Joy of Life, a work which seemed to trash every possible norm of pictorial order and painterly finesse.His friends organized and financed the Académie Matisse in Paris, a private and non-commercial school in which Matisse instructed young artists. It operated from 1911 until 1917. Hans Purrmann and Sarah Stein were several of his most loyal students. Although it lasted for only three years (1908-11), and yet, during its brief existence the Académie Matisse became one of the principal crossroads of modern painting for a number of gifted European and American artists. Given the reputation Matisse had acquired as the"wild man" of modernist color, it must have come as a shock to some of his early students that the program of instruction he offered was remarkably conservative. As Jean Heiberg, the first Norwegian to enroll in the Académie, later wrote in a memoir: "The school had, at Matisse's suggestion, acquired a copy of two antique sculptures from the Louvre, Mars and an archaic sculpture, which he often used to demonstrate. Every now and then he got completely rid of the life model and we only drew from the plaster casts, and his critiques then were no less profitable." Among Matisse’s students was Olga Meerson, a Russian Jew who had studied with Wassily Kandinsky in Munich and, already possessed of an elegant style, sought to remake herself under Matisse’s tutelage. Amélie suspected the worst. Perhaps a combination of Amélie’s jealousy and Meerson’s neediness caused a Matisse to end the connection, with bad feeling all around. Meerson moved to Munich, where she married the musician Heinz Pringsheim, a brother-in-law of Thomas Mann. Never having fulfilled her promise as a painter, she committed suicide in Berlin, in 1929. One of Matisse's biographers, with access to much of the artist's correspondence, contends that the artist, after his marriage, rarely, if ever, had sex with models, despite his apparent feelings for many. Two Russian art collectors stood out at the beginning of the 20th century: the cloth merchant Sergei Shchukin (1854–1936) and the textile manufacturer Ivan Morozov (1871–1921). Both acquired modern French art, developed a sensibility for spotting new trends, and publicized them in Russia. In this period, Matisse had initiated his fecund association with the Russian textile magnate and visionary collector, Sergei Shchukin. The artist created one of his major works La Danse specially for Shchukin as part of a two painting commission. Inspired by a circular dance-- perhaps a sardana - performed by fishermen at Collioure, this painting embodies the clash between the sacred and reality. Human hands link together, but they form a divine spirit. Moreover, Matisse all but abandoned perspective The work ’s flatness emphasizes the idea, colors, and material, a notion that made Matisse a model for Modernists. The other painting commissioned was Music, 1909. Shchukin was considered by some almost as a co-producer of some of the artist’s greatest works and was strongly commuted to the French painter’s work. Concerning the violent attacks on his friend, the Russian wrote to the artist: “The public is against you, but the future is yours.” By 1914 Shchukin’s house in Moscow contained thirty-seven Matisses. “He always picked the best,” the artist said. During the political revolution Lenin expropriated Shchukin collection in person but allowed Shchukin to remain, in servants’ quarters, as caretaker and guide. He died in Paris, in 1936. The collection is now in the Hermitage and Pushkin Museums From about 1911 to 1915, Matisse struggled with the ideas of Cubism, an experiment he felt he was "not participating in" because it did not "speak to [his] deeply sensory nature." MOROCCO Like many avant-garde artists in Paris, Matisse was receptive to a broad range of influences. He is one of the first painters to take an interest in various forms of “primitive” art. His art was profoundly influenced by Easter art as well. Matisse first flirted with the idea of visiting Morocco after a trip to the Moorish part of Spain in the winter of 1910. This taste of the Moors incited a flame of hope that there would be greater inspiration to paint in Morocco. Furthermore, well aware of the exotic subjects in Morocco that had engendered a wealth of inspiration for the famous French painter Delacroix when he visited the country over eighty years before, Matisse felt Morocco would stimulate his painting genius in ways Europe could not. He strove for neither the picturesque nor the pornographic. In Morocco, Matisse seems to have had difficulties finding models who would pose for him, particularly women because of the law of the veil. Only Jewesses and prostitutes were exempt. Luckily, Matisse to have found the prostitute Zorah for the purpose although he did not paint her as a prostitute. Instead, in his first picture of her, Zorah en Jaune, sexual themes are most conspicuously absent from the canvas. As a prostitute used to exposing and flaunting her body, Zorah could have easily been painted nude or with less clothing to show herself off, but instead Matisse chooses to keep her clothed and posed with prudence. Unlike the primitive, nude Western women in the Fauve Joy of Life. Moroccan Zorah is clothed with respect and detail to her finer characteristics. He is developing his ability to paint with awareness of the non-sexual qualities of his subject, a movement away from Fauve women. Many of Matisse's Moroccan paintings are covered only in the thinnest washes of pigment, as if he wanted the texture of the unpainted canvas to show through so that it would add rawness to the browns and grays. Matisse's odalisques have been described as "elaborate fictions" in which the artist re-created the image of the Islamic harem using French models posed in his Nice apartment. The fabrics, screens, carpets, furnishings and costuming recalled the exoticism of the "Orient" and provided a theme for Matisse's preoccupation with the figure and elaborate patterns of exotic fabrics. Although Matisse's interest in textiles are evident in his compositions made during his 1906 trip to Morocco, it didn't begin as a typical European attraction to the exotic. It was already present to him as a descendent of generations of weavers, who was raised among weavers in Bohain-en-Vermandois, which in the 1880's and 90's was a center of production of fancy silks for the Parisian fashion houses. Like virtually all his northern compatriots, he had an inborn appreciation of their texture and design. He understood the properties of weight and hang, he knew how to use pins and paper patterns, and he was supremely confident with scissors. Matisse was known to be an avid collector of fabrics, from his days as a poor art student in Paris to the latter years of his life, when his Nice studio overflowed with Persian carpets, delicate Arab embroideries, richly hued African wall hangings, and any number of colorful cushions, curtains, costumes, patterned screens, and backcloths. Textiles soon became the springboard for his radical experiments with perspective and an art based on decorative patterning and pure harmonies of color and line. When he moved house, he also moved his fabrics, describing them as "my working library." He added to the collection all his life, from markets in Algeria, Morocco and Tahiti to the end-of-season sales of Parisian haute couture. The revitalizing spirit of Morocco would live on in the artist's imagination until the cutouts of the artist's last years. AFTER PARIS Matisse continued to evolve in unexpected directions even though never became an abstract painter (though some of his most adventurous works, such as the View of Notre Dame of 1914 or the Yellow Curtain of 1916 come close). His motifs were always recognizable, and the tension between the subject and the formal aspects of the painting was a central concept of his artistic ideal. Matisse moved to Nice in 1917 to distance himself from wartime activity, where bright, warm colors showed him "simpler venues which won’t stifle the spirit." His spirit became loyal to the "silver clarity of light" in Nice, and he returned to Paris only for a few months each summer. The years 1917–30 are known as his early Nice period, when his principal subject remained the female figure or an odalisque dressed in oriental costume or in various stages of undress, depicted as standing, seated, or reclining in a luxurious, exotic interior of Matisse's own creation. These paintings are infused with southern light, bright colors, and a profusion of decorative patterns. They emanate the atmosphere suggestive of a harem. In 1929, Matisse temporarily suspended easel painting and traveled to America to sit on the jury of the 29th Carnegie International and, in 1930, spent some time in Tahiti and New York as well as Baltimore, Maryland and Merion, Pennsylvania.He was especially thrilled with New York. An important collector of modern art, and owner of the largest Matisse holdings in America, Dr. Albert Barnes of Merion, commissioned the artist to paint a large mural for the two-story picture gallery of his mansion. Matisse chose the subject of the dance, a theme that had preoccupied him since his early Fauve masterpiece Joy of Life. Americans were prominent among Matisse's patrons throughout his career, beginning with the Steins (Leo Stein bought Joy of Life right out of the Salon in 1906) and including the Cone sisters of Baltimore and the notoriously cantankerous Barnes. The foundational Matisse monograph was written during his lifetime by another American, Alfred Barr. Also important in promoting Matisse's presence before the transatlantic public was the Manhattan gallery founded in 1931 by the artist's son, Pierre, who remained a prominent figure in the New York art world for almost six decades. In addition to his father, he represented Balthus, Calder, Dubuffet, Giacometti, Miro, Tanguy and others, many of them also friends. Throughout his long and productive career, Matisse periodically refreshed his creative energies by turning from painting to drawing, sculpture and other forms of artistic expression. In his lifetime he also produced 12 illustrated books which were known as “livre d’artiste” (artist’s book), a specific type of illustrated book that became common in France around the turn of the century. These books were deluxe, limited editions, meant to be collected and admired as works of art, as well as, read. This process began when Swiss publisher Albert Skira first approached the modern master in 1930 to illustrate the work, Poesies, by 19th century French symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé . Matisse responded to Skira’s invitation with great enthusiasm and that summer, devoted most of his attention to the commission while he was residing in Paris. The result was a collection of 29 beautiful etchings, of which the Museum will display 16. The subject matter, like the poems themselves, varies considerably, although many of the images reflect the artist’s vacation to the South Pacific. Matisse’s etchings of Mallarmé’s poems are considered among his greatest works in the print medium. In 1941, again for Skira, Matisse began one of his most complicated and successful printmaking projects, Florilege des Amours de Ronsard, illustrating the love poems of 16th century French Renaissance poet Pierre de Ronsard. Ronsard’s subject and strong imagery lent themselves gracefully to Matisse’s favored themes of fruits, flowers, the female form and portraits. The artist selected the poems himself and translated the work from Renaissance French to contemporary French for the publication of the anthology DIVORCE & LATE FAMILY RELATIONSHIPS For all his long-lasting friendships with other artists, famous and obscure, Matisse's days and nights were absorbed by solitary labor. Playing the violin seemed a more intimate consolation for decades of critical abuse than the affections of his wife and children. Although their marriage was still somewhat fragile, the Matisses had decided to stay on in Nice when their lease expired at Place Charles-Félix in the summer of 1938. Matisse and his wife were separated in 1939 after 41 years when Amélie tried to dismiss the coolly efficient young Lydia Delectorskaya, an orphan refugee from Siberia, who had been hired as Amélie’s companion. However, the Matisses’ marriage ran afoul not of any romantic rival but for the artist’s wish to stand on his own. The first climax came years before in 1913, when Amélie sat more than a hundred times for the Portrait of Madame Matisse. A friend’s diary reported at the time. “Crazy! weeping! By night he recites the Lord’s Prayer! By day he quarrels with his wife!” The portrait, which was the last work to enter Shchukin’s collection, caused Matisse “palpitations, high blood pressure and a constant drumming in his ears.” Such frenzy was not rare when Matisse had difficulty with a painting. He referred to the painting years later in a letter to her as “the one that made you cry, but in which you look so pretty.” Amélie ceded routine leadership of the family to Marguerite. The 1913 portrait was his last painting of her. Matisse and his wife met the last time to discuss details of their legal separation, in July 1939. One of its key provisions was that everything would be divided equally between the couple. The meeting took place in Paris at the Gare St. Lazare and lasted thirty minutes, during which Amélie Matisse kept up a flow of small talk while her husband."My wife never looked at me, but I didn't take my eyes off her...," Matisse wrote on the night of that final encounter: "I couldn't get a word out.... I remained as if carved out of wood, swearing never to be caught that way again." "I'm going to try to isolate myself as if I were still absent,'' Matisse announced on his first return to Paris since the official separation from his wife, 'rarely leaving his apartment except for visits to the cinema (his first color film, starring Danny Kaye, was a revelation).'' After her dismissal, Delectorskaya shot herself in the chest with a pistol, remarkably with only a slight effect. Soon after the artist and his wife were legally separated Delectorskaya was back. She arrived with a bouquet of white daisies and blue cornflowers from her Aunt’s garden on July 15th, St Henry’s Day. Their working collaboration was to last right up to Matisse’s death in 1954. Her will throughout was indomitable; she typed, kept records and meticulous accounts and paid the household bills. She also organized Matisse’s correspondence and coordinated his business affairs with an iron grip as well as being his studio assistant and muse. And when called upon, even scoured the countryside on her bike for provisions during the war. Matisse claimed that his entire household came to a standstill in her absence which, in the light of what Lydia accomplished is anything, if not an understatement. In the face of the family’s icy resentment, the Russian said of Matisse, “He knew how to take possession of people and make them feel they were indispensable. That was how it was for me, and that was how it had been for Mme. Matisse.” Life with Matisse must have been taxing but it had been Amélie’s chosen vocation, through years of their studio-centered homes. Her central role in the artist's life was security, which Shchukin’s patronage provided, along with a sizable house in Issy-les-Moulineaux, where the family moved in 1909. However, in this period Matisse was increasingly absent. In 1930, his travels took him to the United States, where he was thrilled by New York, and to Tahiti. Matisse found that Tahiti was "both superb and boring . . . There the weather is beautiful at sunrise and it does not change until night. Such immutable happiness is tiring." He dived off the reefs and never forgot the colors of the madrepores and the absinthe-green water; these appear in cut-outs like Polynesia, 1946, or The Bird and the Shark, 1947, as images of a spectacular and, on the whole, beneficent nature. In September of 1940 he employed a temporary stand-in for his regular night nurse...

An original etching created by Pablo Picasso in 1966 . It is stamp signed and numbered from the edition of 50. This piece measures 8.8 x 12.8 inches and the framed dimensions are 1...

Linocut on vélin paper. Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued. Good condition. Notes: From the album, Pablo Picasso: Grabados al linóleo. Published by Gustavo Gili, S.A., Barcelona, and...

Original 1934 Lithograph poster for TSF radio Monopole "une vague de puissance et d'harmonie" (a wave of power and harmony) with the beautiful mermaid strumming her harp. Archival...

Marc Chagall - Original Lithograph The Red Rider From the unsigned, unnumbered lithograph printed in the literary review XXe Siecle 1957 See Mourlot 191 Dimensions: 32 x 24 cm Publisher: G. di San Lazzaro. Marc Chagall (born in 1887) Marc Chagall was born in Belarus in 1887 and developed an early interest in art. After studying painting, in 1907 he left Russia for Paris, where he lived in an artist colony on the city’s outskirts. Fusing his own personal, dreamlike imagery with hints of the fauvism and cubism popular in France at the time, Chagall created his most lasting work—including I and the Village (1911)—some of which would be featured in the Salon des Indépendants exhibitions. After returning to Vitebsk for a visit in 1914, the outbreak of WWI trapped Chagall in Russia. He returned to France in 1923 but was forced to flee the country and Nazi persecution during WWII. Finding asylum in the U.S., Chagall became involved in set and costume design before returning to France in 1948. In his later years, he experimented with new art forms and was commissioned to produce numerous large-scale works. Chagall died in St.-Paul-de-Vence in 1985. The Village Marc Chagall was born in a small Hassidic community on the outskirts of Vitebsk, Belarus, on July 7, 1887. His father was a fishmonger, and his mother ran a small sundries shop in the village. As a child, Chagall attended the Jewish elementary school, where he studied Hebrew and the Bible, before later attending the Russian public school. He began to learn the fundamentals of drawing during this time, but perhaps more importantly, he absorbed the world around him, storing away the imagery and themes that would feature largely in most of his later work. At age 19 Chagall enrolled at a private, all-Jewish art school and began his formal education in painting, studying briefly with portrait artist Yehuda Pen. However, he left the school after several months, moving to St. Petersburg in 1907 to study at the Imperial Society for the Protection of Fine Arts. The following year, he enrolled at the Svanseva School, studying with set designer Léon Bakst, whose work had been featured in Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. This early experience would prove important to Chagall’s later career as well. Despite this formal instruction, and the widespread popularity of realism in Russia at the time, Chagall was already establishing his own personal style, which featured a more dreamlike unreality and the people, places and imagery that were close to his heart. Some examples from this period are his Window Vitebsk (1908) and My Fianceé with Black Gloves (1909), which pictured Bella Rosenfeld, to whom he had recently become engaged. The Beehive Despite his romance with Bella, in 1911 an allowance from Russian parliament member and art patron Maxim Binaver enabled Chagall to move to Paris, France. After settling briefly in the Montparnasse neighborhood, Chagall moved further afield to an artist colony known as La Ruche (“The Beehive”), where he began to work side by side with abstract painters such as Amedeo Modigliani and Fernand Léger as well as the avant-garde poet Guillaume Apollinaire. At their urging, and under the influence of the wildly popular fauvism and cubism, Chagall lightened his palette and pushed his style ever further from reality. I and the Village (1911) and Homage to Apollinaire (1912) are among his early Parisian works, widely considered to be his most successful and representative period. Though his work stood stylistically apart from his cubist contemporaries, from 1912 to 1914 Chagall exhibited several paintings at the annual Salon des Indépendants exhibition, where works by the likes of Juan Gris, Marcel Duchamp and Robert Delaunay were causing a stir in the Paris art world. Chagall’s popularity began to spread beyond La Ruche, and in May 1914 he traveled to Berlin to help organize his first solo exhibition, at Der Sturm Gallery. Chagall remained in the city until the highly acclaimed show opened that June. He then returned to Vitebsk, unaware of the fateful events to come. War, Peace and Revolution In August 1914 the outbreak of World War I precluded Chagall’s plans to return to Paris. The conflict did little to stem the flow of his creative output, however, instead merely giving him direct access to the childhood scenes so essential to his work, as seen in paintings such as Jew in Green (1914) and Over Vitebsk (1914). His paintings from this period also occasionally featured images of the war’s impact on the region, as with Wounded Soldier (1914) and Marching (1915). But despite the hardships of life during wartime, this would also prove to be a joyful period for Chagall. In July 1915 he married Bella, and she gave birth to a daughter, Ida, the following year. Their appearance in works such as Birthday (1915), Bella and Ida by the Window (1917) and several of his “Lovers” paintings give a glimpse of the island of domestic bliss that was Chagall’s amidst the chaos. To avoid military service and stay with his new family, Chagall took a position as a clerk in the Ministry of War Economy in St. Petersburg. While there he began work on his autobiography and also immersed himself in the local art scene, befriending novelist Boris Pasternak, among others. He also exhibited his work in the city and soon gained considerable recognition. That notoriety would prove important in the aftermath of the 1917 Russian Revolution when he was appointed as the Commissar of Fine Arts in Vitebsk. In his new post, Chagall undertook various projects in the region, including the 1919 founding of the Academy of the Arts. Despite these endeavors, differences among his colleagues eventually disillusioned Chagall. In 1920 he relinquished his position and moved his family to Moscow, the post-revolution capital of Russia. In Moscow, Chagall was soon commissioned to create sets and costumes for various productions at the Moscow State Yiddish Theater, where he would paint a series of murals titled Introduction to the Jewish Theater as well. In 1921, Chagall also found work as a teacher at a school for war orphans. By 1922, however, Chagall found that his art had fallen out of favor, and seeking new horizons he left Russia for good. Flight After a brief stay in Berlin, where he unsuccessfully sought to recover the work exhibited at Der Sturm before the war, Chagall moved his family to Paris in September 1923. Shortly after their arrival, he was commissioned by art dealer and publisher Ambroise Vollard to produce a series of etchings for a new edition of Nikolai Gogol's 1842 novel Dead Souls. Two years later Chagall began work on an illustrated edition of Jean de la Fontaine’s Fables, and in 1930 he created etchings for an illustrated edition of the Old Testament, for which he traveled to Palestine to conduct research. Chagall’s work during this period brought him new success as an artist and enabled him to travel throughout Europe in the 1930s. He also published his autobiography, My Life (1931), and in 1933 received a retrospective at the Kunsthalle in Basel, Switzerland. But at the same time that Chagall’s popularity was spreading, so, too, was the threat of Fascism and Nazism. Singled out during the cultural "cleansing" undertaken by the Nazis in Germany, Chagall’s work was ordered removed from museums throughout the country. Several pieces were subsequently burned, and others were featured in a 1937 exhibition of “degenerate art” held in Munich. Chagall’s angst regarding these troubling events and the persecution of Jews in general can be seen in his 1938 painting White Crucifixion. With the eruption of World War II, Chagall and his family moved to the Loire region before moving farther south to Marseilles following the invasion of France. They found a more certain refuge when, in 1941, Chagall’s name was added by the director of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City to a list of artists and intellectuals deemed most at risk from the Nazis’ anti-Jewish campaign. Chagall and his family would be among the more than 2,000 who received visas and escaped this way. Haunted Harbors Arriving in New York City in June 1941, Chagall discovered that he was already a well-known artist there and, despite a language barrier, soon became a part of the exiled European artist community. The following year he was commissioned by choreographer Léonide Massine to design sets and costumes for the ballet Aleko, based on Alexander Pushkin’s “The Gypsies” and set to the music of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. But even as he settled into the safety of his temporary home, Chagall’s thoughts were frequently consumed by the fate befalling the Jews of Europe and the destruction of Russia, as paintings such as The Yellow Crucifixion...