Shmuel Katz

Port of Old Jaffa, Tel Aviv Lithograph

Hand signed, numbered and titled. It depicts the old lower east side of New York city with its tenements and different language signes, barber shop poles...

screenprint printed in color ink on wove paper. New York City subway station interior. Anthony Velonis (1911 – 1997) was an American painter and designer born in New York City who helped introduce the public to silkscreen printing in the early 20th century. While employed under the federal Works Progress Administration, WPA during the Great Depression, Velonis brought the use of silkscreen printing as a fine art form, referred to as the "serigraph," into the mainstream. By his own request, he was not publicly credited for coining the term. He experimented and mastered techniques to print on a wide variety of materials, such as glass, plastics, and metal, thereby expanding the field. In the mid to late 20th century, the silkscreen technique became popular among other artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol. Velonis was born into a relatively poor background of a Greek immigrant family and grew up in the tenements of New York City. Early on, he took creative inspiration from figures in his life such as his grandfather, an immigrant from the mountains in Greece, who was "an ecclesiastical painter, on Byzantine style." Velonis attended James Monroe High School in The Bronx, where he took on minor artistic roles such as the illustration of his high school yearbook. He eventually received a scholarship to the NYU College of Fine Arts, into which he was both surprised and ecstatic to have been admitted. Around this time he took to painting, watercolor, and sculpture, as well as various other art forms, hoping to find a niche that fit. He attended NYU until 1929, when the Great Depression started in the United States after the stock market crash. Around the year 1932, Velonis became interested in silk screen, together with fellow artist Fritz Brosius, and decided to investigate the practice. Working in his brother's sign shop, Velonis was able to master the silkscreen process. He reminisced in an interview three decades later that doing so was "plenty of fun," and that a lot of technology can be discovered through hard work, more so if it is worked on "little by little." Velonis was hired by Mayor LaGuardia in 1934 to promote the work of New York's city government via posters publicizing city projects. One such project required him to go on a commercial fishing trip to locations including New Bedford and Nantucket for a fortnight, where he primarily took photographs and notes, and made sketches. Afterward, for a period of roughly six months, he was occupied with creating paintings from these records. During this trip, Velonis developed true respect and affinity for the fishermen with whom he traveled, "the relatively uneducated person," in his words. Following this, Velonis began work with the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), an offshoot of the Civil Works Administration (CWA), where he was assigned to serve the different city departments of New York. After the formation of the federal Works Progress Administration, which hired artists and sponsored projects in the arts, he also worked in theater. Velonis began working for the federal WPA in 1935. He kept this position until 1936 or 1938, at which point he began working in the graphic art division of the Federal Art Project, which he ultimately led. Under various elements of the WPA program, many young artists, writers and actors gained employment that helped them survive during the Depression, as well as contributing works that created an artistic legacy for the country. When interviewed in December 1994 by the Library of Congress about his time in the WPA, Velonis reflected that he had greatly enjoyed that period, saying that he liked the "excitement" and "meeting all the other artists with different points of view." He also said in a later interview that "the contact and the dialogue with all those artists and the work that took place was just invaluable." Among the young artists he hired was Edmond Casarella, who later developed an innovative technique using layered cardboard for woodcuts. Velonis introduced silkscreen printing to the Poster Division of the WPA. As he recalled in a 1965 interview: "I suggested that the Poster division would be a lot more productive and useful if they had an auxiliary screen printing project that worked along with them. And apparently this was very favorably received..." As a member of the Federal Art Project, a subdivision of the WPA, Velonis later approached the Public Use of Arts Committee (PUAC) for help in "propagandizing for art in the parks, in the subways, et cetera." Since the Federal Art Project could not be "self-promoting," an outside organization was required to advertise their art more extensively. During his employment with the Federal Art Project, Velonis created nine silkscreen posters for the federal government. Around 1937-1939 Velonis wrote a pamphlet titled "Technical Problems of the Artist: Technique of the Silkscreen Process," which was distributed to art centers run by the WPA around the country. It was considered very influential in encouraging artists to try this relatively inexpensive technique and stimulated printmaking across the country. In 1939, Velonis founded the Creative Printmakers Group, along with three others, including Hyman Warsager. They printed both their own works and those of other artists in their facility. This was considered the most important silkscreen shop of the period. The next year, Velonis founded the National Serigraph Society. It started out with relatively small commercial projects, such as "rather fancy" Christmas cards that were sold to many of the upscale Fifth Avenue shops...

Participation in salons: Grand Prix International de Peinture, Cannes, France 1958 Jeune peinture, Paris, France 1960-65 Grands et jeunes d'aujourd'hui, France 1960-85 des Beaux-Arts, Paris, France 1960-65 Comparaisons, Paris, France 1980 de Montrouge, France 1980-83 Nissan Engel's works are found in numerous private and public collections, including the following: Abright-Knox Museum, Buffalo, New York Bridgeston Museum, Tokyo The Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, Michigan Elf Atochem Corporation, Paris Fresno Art Museum, Fresno, California The Jewish Museum, New York City Muscarelle Museum of Art, Williamsburg, Virginia Neuberger Museum of Art, State University of New York at Purchase Schlumberger Foundation, Paris Weizman Institute, Rehovot, Israel Nissan Engel graduated from the Beaux-Arts Bezalel in Jerusalem before receiving a diploma from the Centre Dramatic de L'Est in Strasbourg, France. He began his career designing costumes and sets for the theater in Paris. Engel moved to New York City in 1965 following a series of successful gallery exhibitions. His early work in Paris and New York was characteristic of his academic training and his subject matter was predominately figural and representational. He returned to Paris in 1975, and inspired by a flea market find of old sheet music...

Pencil signed artists proof lithograph or serigraph. Shmuel Katz (Hebrew: שמואל כ"ץ‎) (August 18, 1926 – March 26, 2010) was an Israeli artist, illustrator, and cartoonist. A Holocau...

Pencil signed artists proof lithograph or serigraph. Shmuel Katz (Hebrew: שמואל כ"ץ‎) (August 18, 1926 – March 26, 2010) was an Israeli artist, illustrator, and cartoonist. A Holocau...

Participation in salons: Grand Prix International de Peinture, Cannes, France 1958 Jeune peinture, Paris, France 1960-65 Grands et jeunes d'aujourd'hui, France 1960-85 des Beaux-Arts, Paris, France 1960-65 Comparaisons, Paris, France 1980 de Montrouge, France 1980-83 Nissan Engel's works are found in numerous private and public collections, including the following: Abright-Knox Museum, Buffalo, New York Bridgeston Museum, Tokyo The Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, Michigan Elf Atochem Corporation, Paris Fresno Art Museum, Fresno, California The Jewish Museum, New York City Muscarelle Museum of Art, Williamsburg, Virginia Neuberger Museum of Art, State University of New York at Purchase Schlumberger Foundation, Paris Weizman Institute, Rehovot, Israel Nissan Engel graduated from the Beaux-Arts Bezalel in Jerusalem before receiving a diploma from the Centre Dramatic de L'Est in Strasbourg, France. He began his career designing costumes and sets for the theater in Paris. Engel moved to New York City in 1965 following a series of successful gallery exhibitions. His early work in Paris and New York was characteristic of his academic training and his subject matter was predominately figural and representational. He returned to Paris in 1975, and inspired by a flea market find of old sheet music...

Original Swiss Vintage Travel Poster promoting the TEE service linking Zurich and Milano (operated 1961 to 1988) by Kurt Wirth, a notable Swiss graphic designer and co-founder of the Swiss Graphic Designers Association. A great modernist design evoking speed and reliability. The international first-class railway service of Trans Europ Express...

Original Vintage Poster, issued 1980 on the occasion of the exhibition in Lugano named after Le Corbusier's famous dictum "creation is a patient sea...

Original Vintage Poster, issued 1987 by the ETH in Zurich on the occasion of its exhibition on Le Corbusier's famous – and revolutionary – Villa Savoye, c...

Original Swiss Travel Poster promoting St. Moritz as winter destination, featuring Germaine Aussey, then a famous French actress. Created by Walter Herdeg who – together with Herber...

A poster belonging to Erik Nitsche's second series for General Dynamics, promoting its nuclear research. Founded 1952, General Dynamics hired Nitsche as Art Director – a Swiss (1908 – 1998) educated at the Collège Classique in his birth town Lausanne and at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Munich. 1934 he emigrated to the United States and became an incredibly versatile graphic designer whose work became exemplary modernist. General Dynamics for its part focused on – amongst others – aerodynamics, aerospace, electronics and nuclear power. So here the company had a problem: Only a few years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki it wasn’t exactly the simplest thing to explore nuclear energy and not to be suspected of developing weapons of mass destruction. The International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy 1955 in Geneva was a great opportunity to be seen as a provider of peaceful technology. The guys in charge chose Erik Nitsche to communicate this message. He created four poster series. Atoms for Peace was the first consisting of eleven posters. The second was made for the Conference 1958; these posters are titled Exploring the Universe and represent different aspects of technological research. The third series promoted General Dynamics’ departments. The last series of six smaller posters...

This is a framed silkscreen print entitled New Moon Eclipse over the Marsh 24 . The image is designed by Francis Pavy and is part of the Pavy Art and Design series. It is printed on ...