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Period: Mid-20th Century
Salvador Dali - John Kennedy - Original Handsigned Etching
Located in Collonge Bellerive, Geneve, CH
Salvador Dali - John Kennedy - Original Handsigned Etching Dimensions: 38 x 28 cm 1968 Signed in pencil EA in Sanguine Jean Schneider, Basel References : ...
Category

Surrealist Mid-20th Century Figurative Prints

Materials

Etching

Picasso, Shakespeare X (Bloch 1197), Picasso-Aragon Shakespeare (after)
Located in Fairfield, CT
Medium: Lithograph on vélin paper Year: 1965 Paper Size: 19 x 13 inches Catalogue raisonné reference: Bloch, illustration 1197 Inscription: Signed in the plate and unnumbered, as iss...
Category

Cubist Mid-20th Century Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph

SCULTURE - VETRO - DEDICATA AL MAESTRI DEL VETRO DI MURANO ROBERT WILLSON
Located in New York, NY
Robert Willson SCULTURE - VETRO - DEDICATA AL MAESTRI DEL VETRO DI MURANO ROBERT WILLSON, 1964 Offset lithograph on wove paper 27 1/2 × 20 1/2 inches Un...
Category

Contemporary Mid-20th Century Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph, Offset

LE BALLON VERT
Located in Portland, ME
Rodo-Boulanger, Graciela. LE BALLON VERT. Lublin 20. Etching with aquatint in colors, 1967. Edition of 100. Numbered 31/100 and signed in pencil. 21 1/8 x 17...
Category

Modern Mid-20th Century Figurative Prints

Materials

Etching, Aquatint

Broadway Parade
Located in Fairlawn, OH
Broadway Parade Lithograph, 1934-1935 Signed, titled and editoned in pencil (see photos) Printer: George Miller, New York Edition: 100, plus trial proofs Printed on cine collee Creat...
Category

American Realist Mid-20th Century Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Eric Gill 1934 Woodblock Print 'From the Books of Philip Hofer' 'Ex Libris' Lion
Located in London, GB
From a series of wood engravings by Eric Gill. To see them or our other Modern British Art, scroll down to "More from this Seller" and below it click on "See all from this Seller" - ...
Category

Modern Mid-20th Century Figurative Prints

Materials

Woodcut

SUBWAY - THREE PEOPLE
Located in Portland, ME
Marsh, Reginald. SUBWAY - THREE PEOPLE. S. 149. Etching, 1934. 9 x 7 inches; 228 x 178 mm. Numbered "10b," and signed in pencil "Reginald Marsh (F.M.)" b...
Category

Mid-20th Century Figurative Prints

Materials

Etching

The Magic Flute
Located in New York, NY
Color lithograph, 1967. Edition of 3000. Printed by Mourlot, Paris. Published by Editions of the Metropolitan Opera, New York. Catalogue raisonne reference: Sorlier 38.
Category

Modern Mid-20th Century Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph, Color

Equestrian Love lithograph by Marcel Vertes
Located in Paonia, CO
Equestrian Love is from Vertes's circus series. Two lovers are embracing in a passionate kiss a few feet away from a majestic stallion drawn in sepia on yellowish paper. Original Lithograph in good condition, backed on original paper and signed in plate. Marcel Vertes...
Category

Expressionist Mid-20th Century Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Alexander Calder Circus Reproduction Lithograph After a Drawing
Located in Surfside, FL
(after) Alexander Calder "Calder's Circus" offset lithograph on wove paper after drawings by the artist Published by Art in America and Perls gallery in 1964 (from drawings done in the 1930's) these range slightly in size but they are all about 13 X 17 inches (with minor variations in size as issued.) These have never been framed. The outer folio is not included just the one lithograph. James Sweeny from the introduction “The fame of Calder’s circus spread quickly between the years 1927 and 1930. All the Paris art world came to know it. It brought him his first great personal success. But what was more important, the circus also provided the first steps in Calder’s development as an original sculptor” Clive Gray wrote ”A visit to the studio of Alexander Calder led to the chance discovery of some hundred masterful circus drawings completed over thirty years ago. We publish, for the first time, a choice of sixteen from that group.” With signed introduction by Miro. These whimsical drawings, done in the style of wire sculpture, include acrobats, clowns, jugglers, trapeeze artists, an elephant, dog and lion. they are great. Alexander Calder is widely considered to be one of the most important American sculptors of the 20th century. He is best known for his colorful, whimsical abstract public sculptures and his innovative mobiles, kinetic sculptures powered by motors or air currents, which embraced chance in their aesthetic. Born into a family of accomplished artists, Calder's work first gained attention in Paris in the 1930s and was soon championed by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, resulting in a retrospective exhibition in 1943. Major retrospectives were also held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1964) and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1974). Calder’s work is in many permanent collections, most notably in the Whitney Museum of American Art, but also the Guggenheim Museum; the Museum of Modern Art; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and the Centre Georges Pompidou. He produced many large public works, including .125 (at JFK Airport, 1957), Pittsburgh (Carnegie International prize winner 1958, Pittsburgh International Airport) Spirale (UNESCO in Paris, 1958), Flamingo and Universe (both in Chicago, 1974), and Mountains and Clouds (Hart Senate Office Building, Washington, D.C., 1976). Although primarily known for his sculpture, Calder was a prodigious artist with a restless creative spirit, whose diverse practice included painting and printmaking, miniatures (such as his famous Cirque Calder), children’s book illustrations, theater set design, jewelry design, tapestry and rug works, and political posters. Calder was honored by the US Postal Service with a set of five 32-cent stamps in 1998, and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, posthumously in 1977, after refusing to receive it from Gerald Ford one year earlier in protest of the Vietnam War. Calder moved to New York and enrolled at the Art Students League, studying briefly with Thomas Hart Benton, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and John Sloan. While a student, he worked for the National Police Gazette where, in 1925, one of his assignments was sketching the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. Calder became fascinated with the action of the circus, a theme that would reappear in his later work. In 1926, Calder moved to Paris, enrolled in the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, and established a studio at 22 rue Daguerre in the Montparnasse Quarter. In June 1929, while traveling by boat from Paris to New York, Calder met his future wife, Louisa James (1905-1996), grandniece of author Henry James and philosopher William James. They married in 1931. While in Paris, Calder met and became friends with a number of avant-garde artists, including Fernand Léger, Jean Arp, and Marcel Duchamp. Cirque Calder (on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art at present) became popular with the Parisian avant-garde. He also invented wire sculpture, or "drawing in space," and in 1929 he had his first solo show of these sculptures in Paris at Galerie Billiet. Hi! (Two Acrobats) in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art is an early example of the artist's wire sculpture. The painter Jules Pascin, a friend of Calder's from the cafes of Montparnasse, wrote the preface to the catalog. A visit to Piet Mondrian's studio in 1930, where he was impressed by the environment-as-installation, "shocked" him into fully embracing abstract art, toward which he had already been tending. Dating from 1931, Calder’s sculptures of discrete movable parts powered by motors were christened “mobiles” by Marcel Duchamp, a French pun meaning both "motion" and "motive." At the same time, Calder was also experimenting with self-supporting, static, abstract sculptures, dubbed "stabiles" by Jean Arp in 1932 to differentiate them from mobiles. Public commissions increasingly came his way in the 1960s. Notable examples are .125 for JFK Airport in 1957, Spirale for UNESCO in Paris 1958 and Trois disques, commissioned for Expo 67 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Calder's largest sculpture at 25.7 meters high was El Sol Rojo, constructed outside the Aztec Stadium for the 1968 Summer Olympics "Cultural Olympiad" events in Mexico City. Many of his public works were commissioned by renowned architects; I.M. Pei commissioned his La Grande Voile (1966), a 25-ton, 40-foot high stabile for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Part of Calder's repertoire includes pivotal stage sets for more than a dozen theatrical productions, including Nucléa, Horizon, and most notably, Martha Graham’s Panorama (1935), a production of the Erik Satie symphonic drama Socrate (1936), and later, Works in Progress (1968). In addition to sculptures, Calder painted throughout his career, beginning in the early 1920s. He picked up his study of printmaking in 1925, and continued to produce illustrations for books and journals.As Calder’s professional reputation expanded in the late 1940s and 1950s, so did his production of prints. Masses of lithographs based on his gouache paintings hit the market, and deluxe editions of plays, poems, and short stories illustrated with fine art prints by Calder became available for sale. One of Calder's most celebrated and unconventional undertakings was a commission from Dallas-based Braniff International Airways to paint a full-size Douglas DC-8-62 four-engined jet as a "flying canvas." Calder created over 2,000 pieces of jewelry over the course of his career, many of them as gifts for friends and relatives. For his lifelong friend Joan Miró, he set a shard of a broken porcelain vessel in a brass ring. Peggy Guggenheim received enormous silver mobile earrings and later commissioned a hammered silver headboard...
Category

American Modern Mid-20th Century Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Portrait of Francoise Gilot
Located in OPOLE, PL
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) - Portrait of Francoise Gilot Lithograph from 1954. Dimensions of work: 35.5 x 26.5 cm Publisher: Tériade, Paris. The work is in Excellent condition. F...
Category

Modern Mid-20th Century Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Stepping Up from La Dame aux Camelias, Art Nouveau Etching after Louis Icart
Located in Long Island City, NY
Louis Icart, After, French (1888 - 1950) - Stepping Up from La Dame aux Camelias, Year: 1938, Medium: Hand-Colored Etching, Image Size: 5 x 3.5 inches, Frame Size: 20.5 x 17 inches
Category

Art Nouveau Mid-20th Century Figurative Prints

Materials

Etching

Salvador Dali - Women - Original Etching
Located in Collonge Bellerive, Geneve, CH
Salvador Dali - Women - Original Etching Embossed signature From the edition of 731 Dimensions: 38,5 x 28,5 cm 1969 References : Field 69-1 / Michler & Lopsinger 305
Category

Surrealist Mid-20th Century Figurative Prints

Materials

Etching

Alexander Calder Circus Reproduction Lithograph After a Drawing
Located in Surfside, FL
(after) Alexander Calder "Calder's Circus" offset lithograph on wove paper after drawings by the artist Published by Art in America and Perls gallery in 1964 (from drawings done in the 1930's) these range slightly in size but they are all about 13 X 17 inches (with minor variations in size as issued.) These have never been framed. The outer folio is not included just the one lithograph. James Sweeny from the introduction “The fame of Calder’s circus spread quickly between the years 1927 and 1930. All the Paris art world came to know it. It brought him his first great personal success. But what was more important, the circus also provided the first steps in Calder’s development as an original sculptor” Clive Gray wrote ”A visit to the studio of Alexander Calder led to the chance discovery of some hundred masterful circus drawings completed over thirty years ago. We publish, for the first time, a choice of sixteen from that group.” With signed introduction by Miro. These whimsical drawings, done in the style of wire sculpture, include acrobats, clowns, jugglers, trapeeze artists, an elephant, dog and lion. they are great. Alexander Calder is widely considered to be one of the most important American sculptors of the 20th century. He is best known for his colorful, whimsical abstract public sculptures and his innovative mobiles, kinetic sculptures powered by motors or air currents, which embraced chance in their aesthetic. Born into a family of accomplished artists, Calder's work first gained attention in Paris in the 1930s and was soon championed by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, resulting in a retrospective exhibition in 1943. Major retrospectives were also held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1964) and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1974). Calder’s work is in many permanent collections, most notably in the Whitney Museum of American Art, but also the Guggenheim Museum; the Museum of Modern Art; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and the Centre Georges Pompidou. He produced many large public works, including .125 (at JFK Airport, 1957), Pittsburgh (Carnegie International prize winner 1958, Pittsburgh International Airport) Spirale (UNESCO in Paris, 1958), Flamingo and Universe (both in Chicago, 1974), and Mountains and Clouds (Hart Senate Office Building, Washington, D.C., 1976). Although primarily known for his sculpture, Calder was a prodigious artist with a restless creative spirit, whose diverse practice included painting and printmaking, miniatures (such as his famous Cirque Calder), children’s book illustrations, theater set design, jewelry design, tapestry and rug works, and political posters. Calder was honored by the US Postal Service with a set of five 32-cent stamps in 1998, and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, posthumously in 1977, after refusing to receive it from Gerald Ford one year earlier in protest of the Vietnam War. Calder moved to New York and enrolled at the Art Students League, studying briefly with Thomas Hart Benton, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and John Sloan. While a student, he worked for the National Police Gazette where, in 1925, one of his assignments was sketching the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. Calder became fascinated with the action of the circus, a theme that would reappear in his later work. In 1926, Calder moved to Paris, enrolled in the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, and established a studio at 22 rue Daguerre in the Montparnasse Quarter. In June 1929, while traveling by boat from Paris to New York, Calder met his future wife, Louisa James (1905-1996), grandniece of author Henry James and philosopher William James. They married in 1931. While in Paris, Calder met and became friends with a number of avant-garde artists, including Fernand Léger, Jean Arp, and Marcel Duchamp. Cirque Calder (on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art at present) became popular with the Parisian avant-garde. He also invented wire sculpture, or "drawing in space," and in 1929 he had his first solo show of these sculptures in Paris at Galerie Billiet. Hi! (Two Acrobats) in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art is an early example of the artist's wire sculpture. The painter Jules Pascin, a friend of Calder's from the cafes of Montparnasse, wrote the preface to the catalog. A visit to Piet Mondrian's studio in 1930, where he was impressed by the environment-as-installation, "shocked" him into fully embracing abstract art, toward which he had already been tending. Dating from 1931, Calder’s sculptures of discrete movable parts powered by motors were christened “mobiles” by Marcel Duchamp, a French pun meaning both "motion" and "motive." At the same time, Calder was also experimenting with self-supporting, static, abstract sculptures, dubbed "stabiles" by Jean Arp in 1932 to differentiate them from mobiles. Public commissions increasingly came his way in the 1960s. Notable examples are .125 for JFK Airport in 1957, Spirale for UNESCO in Paris 1958 and Trois disques, commissioned for Expo 67 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Calder's largest sculpture at 25.7 meters high was El Sol Rojo, constructed outside the Aztec Stadium for the 1968 Summer Olympics "Cultural Olympiad" events in Mexico City. Many of his public works were commissioned by renowned architects; I.M. Pei commissioned his La Grande Voile (1966), a 25-ton, 40-foot high stabile for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Part of Calder's repertoire includes pivotal stage sets for more than a dozen theatrical productions, including Nucléa, Horizon, and most notably, Martha Graham’s Panorama (1935), a production of the Erik Satie symphonic drama Socrate (1936), and later, Works in Progress (1968). In addition to sculptures, Calder painted throughout his career, beginning in the early 1920s. He picked up his study of printmaking in 1925, and continued to produce illustrations for books and journals.As Calder’s professional reputation expanded in the late 1940s and 1950s, so did his production of prints. Masses of lithographs based on his gouache paintings hit the market, and deluxe editions of plays, poems, and short stories illustrated with fine art prints by Calder became available for sale. One of Calder's most celebrated and unconventional undertakings was a commission from Dallas-based Braniff International Airways to paint a full-size Douglas DC-8-62 four-engined jet as a "flying canvas." Calder created over 2,000 pieces of jewelry over the course of his career, many of them as gifts for friends and relatives. For his lifelong friend Joan Miró, he set a shard of a broken porcelain vessel in a brass ring. Peggy Guggenheim received enormous silver mobile earrings and later commissioned a hammered silver headboard...
Category

American Modern Mid-20th Century Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Abel Pann Israeli Bezalel School Lithograph Judaica Biblical Print Jewish Art
Located in Surfside, FL
Abel Pann (1883–1963) was a European Jewish painter who settled in the Talpiot neighborhood of Jerusalem in the early twentieth century and taught at the Bezalel Academy of Art under...
Category

Symbolist Mid-20th Century Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Pout
Located in Columbia, MO
Leonor Fini was born in Argentina in 1907 but travelled and lived in Europe with her mother from a young age. By 1931, she was in Paris, in the full swing of the Surrealist movement....
Category

Surrealist Mid-20th Century Figurative Prints

Materials

Etching

The Circus : Clowns and Acrobats - Original Lithograph (Mourlot #503)
Located in Paris, IDF
Marc Chagall (1887-1985) The Circus : Clowns and Acrobats, 1967 Original lithograph (Mourlot Workshop) On Arches vellum 42 x 32 cm (c. 17 x 13 in) REFERENCE : Catalog raisonne C...
Category

Modern Mid-20th Century Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Cocteau, Concordance, Lithographies de Jean Cocteau (after)
Located in Auburn Hills, MI
Lithograph on vélin de Rives paper. Paper Size: 15 x 11 inches. Inscription: Signed in the plate and unnumbered, as issued. Notes: From the folio, Taureaux, Lithographies de Jean Coc...
Category

Modern Mid-20th Century Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Portrait of Henrietta Moraes - Lithograph in Colors - 150 copies
Located in Paris, IDF
Francis BACON (1909-1992) Portrait of Henrietta Moraes Lithograph in colors, 1966 Unsigned as usual Limited to 150 copies On Rives vellum size 38 x 28 cm (c. 15 x 11 in) Very good c...
Category

Modern Mid-20th Century Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph

The Bible : Esther and her Cousin - Original Lithograph
Located in Paris, IDF
Marc Chagall (1887-1985) The Bible, Esther and her Cousin Original lithography (Daeger Workshop) On paper 36 x 26.5 cm (c. 14.2 x 10.2 in) Second illustration on the back, see pho...
Category

Modern Mid-20th Century Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Max Eisler Eine Nachlese folio "Portrait of Serena Lederer" collotype
Located in Chicago, IL
After Gustav Klimt, Max Eisler Plate #6, Bildnis Frau Serena Lederer; grey monochrome collotype after the 1905 painting in oil on canvas. GUSTAV KLIMT EINE NACHLESE (GUSTAV KLIMT AN...
Category

Vienna Secession Mid-20th Century Figurative Prints

Materials

Paper

Sara et Abimelech (Mourlot 230-77; Cramer 42)
Located in Auburn Hills, MI
Lithograph on vélin des Papeteries du Marais paper. Paper Size: 14 x 10.25 inches. Inscription: Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued. Catalogue raisonné references: Mourlot, Fernand. C...
Category

Expressionist Mid-20th Century Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Giacometti, Nu de Profil, Derrière le miroir (after)
Located in Auburn Hills, MI
Etching, cuivre rayé après tirage on vélin paper. Paper Size: 15 x 11 inches; image size: 12.2 x 2.17 inches. Inscription: Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued. Notes: From the folio, ...
Category

Modern Mid-20th Century Figurative Prints

Materials

Etching

Original Lithograph - Henri Matisse - Apollinaire
Located in Collonge Bellerive, Geneve, CH
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...
Category

Modern Mid-20th Century Figurative Prints

Materials

Linocut

Mexican Art: A Portfolio of Mexican People and Places
Located in Palm Springs, CA
Ten lithographs in excellent condition, with portfolio cover. The ten artists included in the 1946 portfolio "Mexican Art: A Portfolio of Mexican People and Places" include: Ángel Bracho / Francisco Mora / Fernando Castro Pacheco / Raúl Anguiano / Alberto Beltrán...
Category

Mid-20th Century Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Eight Reclining Figures I
Located in London, GB
Lithograph printed in colours on Japon nacré paper 77 x 57 cm hand-signed by the artist H.C from an aside edition of 50
Category

Modern Mid-20th Century Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Le Poisson Bleu, Lithograph by Marc Chagall 1957
Located in Long Island City, NY
An impression of "Le Poisson Bleu" (The Blue Fish) from the Jacques Lassaigne book "Marc Chagall" with 15 unsigned lithographs. This is one lithograph of...
Category

Modern Mid-20th Century Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph

French Mid-Century 1952 Womens Fashion Design Vintage Coat Suit Halftone Print
Located in Melbourne, Victoria
French women's fashion design from 'La Revue Paris Mode' a Parisien fashion periodical, illustrated by Bryn Smith. 370mm by 270mm (sheet)
Category

Post-War Mid-20th Century Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph

French Mid-Century 1952 Womens Fashion Design Vintage Coat Suit Halftone Print
Located in Melbourne, Victoria
French women's fashion design from 'La Revue Paris Mode' a Parisien fashion periodical, illustrated by Bryn Smith. 370mm by 270mm (sheet)
Category

Post-War Mid-20th Century Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph

French Mid-Century 1952 Womens Fashion Design Vintage Coat Suit Halftone Print
Located in Melbourne, Victoria
French women's fashion design from 'La Revue Paris Mode' a Parisien fashion periodical, illustrated by Bryn Smith. 370mm by 270mm (sheet)
Category

Post-War Mid-20th Century Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Paradise: Canto 5 from The Divine Comedy
Located in Washington, DC
Artist: Salvador Dali Medium: Woodblock engraving Title: Paradise: Canto 5 Portfolio: The Divine Comedy: Paradise Year: 1963 Edition: 4765 Framed Size: 19 1/8...
Category

Surrealist Mid-20th Century Figurative Prints

Materials

Engraving

L'Aigle Mademoiselle - Etching by Hans Bellmer - 1968
Located in Roma, IT
Hand Signed. From the Portfolio "Petit Traité de Morale", Paris, Editions Georges Visat, 1968. Copy on Japon Nacré from the additional suite. Includes passepartout. Hans Bellmer wa...
Category

Surrealist Mid-20th Century Figurative Prints

Materials

Paper, Etching

Le Pêcheur - Lithograph - 1967
Located in Roma, IT
Le Pêcheur is a contemporary artwork realized in 1967, as part to the "Homage à Meissonier". Lithograph on ivory-colored wove paper. Edition of 1177 prints....
Category

Surrealist Mid-20th Century Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Salvador Dali - Large Flask
Located in Collonge Bellerive, Geneve, CH
Salvador Dali - Large Flask - Original Etching Dimensions: 38 x 28 cm Edition: 390 1967 On Rives Vellum References : Field 67-4 (p. 32-33) / Michler & Lops...
Category

Surrealist Mid-20th Century Figurative Prints

Materials

Etching

Jacob Pins "Lonely Walker" 1960 Woodcut
Located in San Francisco, CA
Jacob Pins: 1917-2005. Was a German born Israeli woodcut artist and art collector. He has had auction results over $3000 for a print. This powerful scarce example...
Category

Expressionist Mid-20th Century Figurative Prints

Materials

Woodcut

Salvador Dali - Reverie of Don Quichotte - Original Lithograph
Located in Collonge Bellerive, Geneve, CH
Salvador Dali - Don Quixote Reading - Original Lithograph Joseph FORET, Paris, 1957 PRINTER : Atelier Mourlot. SIGNATURE : plate signed by Dali. LIMITED : 197 copies. SIZE : 41 x ...
Category

Modern Mid-20th Century Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph

1960s Kusama exhibition poster (Yayoi Kusama Driving Image Show 1966)
Located in NEW YORK, NY
Yayoi Kusama Driving Image Show: An impossibly rare 1960s Kusama exhibition poster/brochure, published on the occasion of: Yayoi Kusama at Galleria del Naviglio Milan: Jan. 26-Feb. ...
Category

Pop Art Mid-20th Century Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph, Offset

Portrait of Isabel - Lithograph in colors - 150 copies
Located in Paris, IDF
Francis BACON (1909-1992) Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne Lithograph in colors, 1966 Unsigned as usual Limited to 150 copies On Rives vellum size 38 x 28 cm (c. 15 x 11 in) Very good ...
Category

Modern Mid-20th Century Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph

THE CLINIC
Located in Portland, ME
Bacon, Peggy. THE CLINIC. Flint 109. Drypoint, 1932. Edition size not known, but likely very small as the print is rare. 4 15/16 x 6 7/8 inches, plus wide margins (the sheet is 11 x ...
Category

American Modern Mid-20th Century Figurative Prints

Materials

Drypoint

Fils Noir Sur Le Rouge, Modern Screenprint by Christian Jaccard
Located in Long Island City, NY
Artist: Christian Jaccard (French/Swiss 1939 - ) Title: Fils Noir Sur Le Rouge Year: circa 1970 Medium: Screenprint, signed and numbered in pencil Image Size:...
Category

Abstract Expressionist Mid-20th Century Figurative Prints

Materials

Screen

Cocteau, La cravate de deuil, Taureaux, Lithographies de Jean Cocteau (after)
Located in Auburn Hills, MI
Lithograph on vélin de Rives paper. Paper Size: 15 x 11 inches. Inscription: Signed in the plate and unnumbered, as issued. Notes: From the folio, Taureaux, Lithographies de Jean Coc...
Category

Modern Mid-20th Century Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph

René Magritte - LA VALSE HESITATION. Limited Surrealism French Contemporary
Located in Madrid, Madrid
René Magritte - LA VALSE HESITATION, 1950 (THE HESITATION WALTZ) Date of creation: 2010 Medium: Lithograph on BFK Rives Paper Edition number: 131/275 Size: 60 x 45 cm Condition: New,...
Category

Surrealist Mid-20th Century Figurative Prints

Materials

Paper, Lithograph

Métarmorphoses d'Ovide, Four Nude Men - Original Etching (Baer #155)
Located in Paris, IDF
Pablo PICASSO Métarmorphoses d'Ovide, Three Naked Women, 1936 Original etching (Atelier Lacourière, Paris) Unsigned On BFK Rives vellum 32.5 x 25 cm (12.7 x 9.8 in) REFERENCES : -...
Category

Modern Mid-20th Century Figurative Prints

Materials

Etching

Pablo Picasso, L'Atelier du vieux peintre
Located in Chatsworth, CA
This piece is an original lithograph in five colors by Pablo Picasso, created in 1954. Each of the 5 colors of this lithograph was executed with litho crayon on transparent transfer...
Category

Post-Impressionist Mid-20th Century Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Purgatory: Canto 11 from The Divine Comedy
Located in Washington, DC
Artist: Salvador Dali Medium: Woodblock engraving Title: Purgatory Canto: 11 Portfolio: The Divine Comedy: Purgatory Year: 1963 Edition: 4765 Framed Size: 19 1/8" x 16 5/8" Sheet Siz...
Category

Surrealist Mid-20th Century Figurative Prints

Materials

Engraving

Isaiah
Located in OPOLE, PL
Marc Chagall (1887-1985) - Isaiah Lithograph from 1956. Dimensions of work: 35 x 26 cm. Publisher: Tériade, Paris. Reference: Mourlot 141. On the reverse: another original lithog...
Category

Modern Mid-20th Century Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Isaiah
Isaiah
$657 Sale Price
20% Off
'Reclining Nude', Cabinet-Sized Post-Impressionist Figural
Located in Santa Cruz, CA
A hand-colored linocut created circa 1950 by Wedo Georgetti (American, 1911-2005) and stamped verso with Certification of Authenticity. Born in Italy, this California Post-Impressi...
Category

Post-Impressionist Mid-20th Century Figurative Prints

Materials

Crayon, Paper, Linocut

Un chant d'amour (Spies/Leppien 71C) Société internationale d'art XXe siècle
Located in Auburn Hills, MI
Lithograph on vélin paper. Paper Size: 12.4 x 9.65 inches. Inscription: Signed in the plate and unnumbered, as issued. Catalogue raisonné references: Ernst, Max, et al. Max Ernst : G...
Category

Surrealist Mid-20th Century Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Jean Cocteau - Animalism - Original Lithograph
Located in Collonge Bellerive, Geneve, CH
Original Lithograph by Jean Cocteau Title: Taureaux Signed in the plate Dimensions: 40 x 30 cm Edition: 200 Luxury print edition from the portfolio of Trinckvel 1965 Jean Cocteau W...
Category

Modern Mid-20th Century Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph

The Ladder
Located in OPOLE, PL
Marc Chagall (1887-1985) - The Ladder Original Lithograph from 1957. Dimensions of work: 23 x 20 cm. Publisher: Maeght Éditeur, Paris. The work is in Excellent condition.
Category

Modern Mid-20th Century Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Max Eisler Eine Nachlese folio "Portrait of Baroness Wittgenstein" collotype
Located in Chicago, IL
After Gustav Klimt, Max Eisler Plate #4, Bildnis Baronin Wittgenstein; dark grey monochrome collotype after the 1905 painting in oil on canvas. GUSTAV KLIMT EINE NACHLESE (GUSTAV KLIMT AN AFTERMATH), a portfolio of 30 collotypes prints, 15 are multi-color and 15 are monochrome, on chine colle paper laid down on heavy cream-wove paper with deckled edges; Max Eisler, Editor-Publisher; Osterreichischer Staatsdruckerei (Austrian State Printing Office), Printer; in a limited edition of 500 numbered examples of which: 200 were printed in German, 150 were printed in French and 150 were printed in English; Vienna, 1931. 2018 marks the 100th anniversary of Gustav Klimt’s death. It is a fitting time to reflect upon the enduring legacy and deep impact of his art. Recognizing this need for posterity with uncanny foresight, the publication of Gustav Klimt: An Aftermath (Eine Nachlese) provides a rare collection of work after Klimt which has proven to be an indispensable tool for Klimt scholarship as well as a source for pure visual delight. Approximately 25 percent of the original works featured in the Aftermath portfolio have since been lost. Of those 30, six were destroyed by fire on 8 May 1945. On that fateful final day of WWII, the retreating Feldherrnhalle, a tank division of the German Army, set fire to the Schloss Immendorf which was a 16th century castle in Lower Austria used between 1942-1945 to store objects of art. All three of Klimt’s Faculty Paintings: Philosophy, Medicine and Jurisprudence (1900-1907), originally created for the University of Vienna, were on premises at that time. Also among the inventory of Klimt paintings in storage there was art which had been confiscated by the Nazis. One of the most significant confiscated collections was the Lederer collection which featured many works by Gustav Klimt such as Girlfriends II and Garden Path with Chickens...
Category

Vienna Secession Mid-20th Century Figurative Prints

Materials

Paper

Salvador Dali - The Lane of the Birches - Original Stamp-Signed Etching
Located in Collonge Bellerive, Geneve, CH
Salvador Dali - The Lane of the Birches - Original Stamp-Signed Etching Stamp signed by Dali Edition of 294 copies. Paper : Arches vellum. Dimensions : 16x12". Catalogue Raisonné ...
Category

Surrealist Mid-20th Century Figurative Prints

Materials

Etching

Salvador Dali - Nude with Guitar - Original Etching
Located in Collonge Bellerive, Geneve, CH
Salvador Dali - Nude with Guitar - Original Etching Dimensions: 38 x 28 cm Edition: 235 1967 embossed signature On Arches Vellum References : Field 67-10 (p. 34-35)
Category

Surrealist Mid-20th Century Figurative Prints

Materials

Etching

Surrealist Figurative Aquatint Etching California Modernist Sculptor Artist
Located in Surfside, FL
Jack Zajac, American, born 1929 1964 Etching and aquatint hand printed on Fabriano paper, pencil signed and editioned. Edition Roman Numeral III Image: 12 9/16 x 8 5/8 in. (31.9 x 2...
Category

Surrealist Mid-20th Century Figurative Prints

Materials

Etching, Aquatint

Marc Chagall - The Bible - Paradise - Original Lithograph
Located in Collonge Bellerive, Geneve, CH
Marc Chagall, Original Lithograh depicting an instant of the Bible. Technique: Original lithograph in colours (Mourlot no. 234) On the reverse: another black and white original litho...
Category

Modern Mid-20th Century Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph

JACQUELINE KENNEDY I FS II.13
Located in Aventura, FL
Jacqueline Kennedy I, from 11 Pop Artists I. Screenprint in silver, on wove paper. Artist's stamped signature on the reverse and numbered. From the edition of 200. Published by O...
Category

Pop Art Mid-20th Century Figurative Prints

Materials

Screen

Picasso, Composition, Les Bleus de Barcelone (after)
Located in Auburn Hills, MI
Lithograph and stencil with gouache and pastel inks on vélin de Rives paper, archivally hinged on vélin de Rives backing sheet, as issued. Inscription: signed in the plate and unnumb...
Category

Modern Mid-20th Century Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph, Stencil

The Cherub - Héliogravure by Marc Chagall - 1960
Located in Roma, IT
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...
Category

Surrealist Mid-20th Century Figurative Prints

Materials

Photogravure

L'Arbre de Jessé (Cramer 40; Mourlot 297), Derrière le miroir
Located in Auburn Hills, MI
Lithograph on vélin paper. Paper Size: 15 x 11 inches. Inscription: Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued. Catalogue raisonné references: Mourlot, Fernand, and Marc Chagall. “Chagall Li...
Category

Expressionist Mid-20th Century Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Jean Cocteau - Poets - Original Lithograph
Located in Collonge Bellerive, Geneve, CH
Original Lithograph by Jean Cocteau Title: Poets Signed in the plate Dimensions: 50 x 35 cm Jean Cocteau Writer, artist and film director Jean Cocteau was one of the most influenti...
Category

Surrealist Mid-20th Century Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph

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