Neo-Expressionist Nude Prints

Reuben Nakian (1897-1986) Original Etching Titled "Leda and the Swan" c.1980 Pencil signed and lettered "HC" (Hors Commerce) Plate dimensions 16 3/4" X 13 3/4". Paper dimensions 20" x 17". Frame dimensions 27" x 24 1/2". Very good condition. Reuben Nakian was born in College Point, New York. Before 1911, he had briefly studied art before going to work for an advertising agency. In 1915 he attended, possibly one of the only schools at the time to have students studying modernist art, the Independent School of Art in New York City. He then went on to study at the Robert Henri School with Homer Boss...

After Hans Bellmer (German, 1902-1975) Surrealist engraving, etching after drawings from a 1942 notebook, engraved in 1974-75 by Cecile Reims Printed by L'Atelier de Chalcographie du Louvre, Paris, Having printed monogram lower left in plate, pencil notations and #7/10 and 'Musee du Louvre' blindstamp verso Dimensions: Sheet 11 X 7.5, Plate size 6.5 X 4 Hans Bellmer ( 1902 – 1975) was a Polish born German artist, best known for his drawings, etchings that illustrates the 1940 edition of Histoire de l’œil, and the life-sized female sculpture mannequin dolls he produced in the mid-1930s. Historians of art and photography also consider him a Surrealist photographer. Bellmer was born in the city of Kattowitz, then part of the German Empire (now Katowice, Poland). Up until 1926, he worked as a draftsman for his own advertising company. Bellmer is most famous for the creation of a series of dolls as well as photographs of them. He was influenced in his choice of art form in part by reading the published letters of Oskar Kokoschka (Der Fetisch, 1925) and Surrealism. Bellmer's puppet doll project is also said to have been catalysed by a series of events in his personal life. Hans Bellmer takes credit for provoking a physical crisis in his father and brings his own artistic creativity into association with childhood insubordination and resentment toward a severe and humorless paternal authority. Perhaps this is one reason for the nearly universal, unquestioning acceptance in the literature of Bellmer's promotion of his art as a struggle against his father, the police, and ultimately, fascism and the state. Events of his personal life also including meeting a beautiful teenage cousin in 1932 (and perhaps other unattainable beauties), attending a performance of Jacques Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann (in which a man falls tragically in love with an automaton), and receiving a box of his old toys. After these events, he began to actually construct his first dolls. In his works, Bellmer explicitly sexualized the doll as a young girl (his work bears connection to the works of Bathus). Hirschfeld has claimed (without further argumentation) that Bellmer initiated his doll project to oppose the fascism of the Nazi Party by declaring that he would make no work that would support the new German state. Represented by mutated forms and unconventional poses, his dolls (according to this view) were directed specifically at the cult of the perfect body then prominent in Germany. He visited Paris in 1935 and made contacts there, such as Paul Éluard, but returned to Berlin because his wife Margarete was dying of tuberculosis. He was part of the circle of Surrealist luminaries such as Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Joan Miro, André Masson, René Magritte, Alberto Giacometti and Salvador Dali as well as women artists—such as Frida Kahlo, Dorothea Tanning and Leonora Carrington. Bellmer produced the first doll in Berlin in 1933. Long since lost, the assemblage can nevertheless be correctly described thanks to approximately two dozen photographs Bellmer took at the time of its construction. Standing about fifty-six inches tall, the doll consisted of a modeled torso made of flax fiber, glue, and plaster; a mask-like head of the same material with glass eyes and a long, unkempt wig; and a pair of legs made from broomsticks or dowel rods. One of these legs terminated in a wooden, club-like foot; the other was encased in a more naturalistic plaster shell, jointed at the knee and ankle. As the project progressed, Bellmer made a second set of hollow plaster legs, with wooden ball joints for the doll's hips and knees. There were no arms to the first sculpture, but Bellmer did fashion or find a single wooden hand, which appears among the assortment of doll parts the artist documented in an untitled photograph of 1934, as well as in several photographs of later work. Bellmer's 1934 anonymous book, The Doll (Die Puppe), produced and published privately in Germany, contains 10 black-and-white photographs of Bellmer's first doll arranged in a series of "tableaux vivants" (living pictures). The book was not credited to him, as he worked in isolation, and his photographs remained almost unknown in Germany. Yet Bellmer's work was eventually declared "degenerate" (entartete kunst) by the Nazi Party, and he was forced to flee Germany to France in 1938, where Bellmer's work was welcomed by the Surrealists around Andre Breton. He aided the French Resistance during the war by making fake passports. He was imprisoned in the Camp des Milles prison at Aix-en-Provence, a brickworks camp for German nationals, from September 1939 until the end of the Phoney War in May 1940. After the war, Bellmer lived the rest of his life in Paris. Bellmer gave up doll-making and spent the following decades creating erotic drawings, etchings, sexually explicit photographs, paintings, and prints of pubescent girls. In 1954, he met Unica Zürn...

Lithograph on vélin du Marais paper. Inscription: Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued. Good condition. Notes: From the volume, Verve: Revue Artistique et Littéraire, Vol. IX, N° 35-36...

SPELLBOUND is an original hand drawn lithograph(not a photo reproduction or digital print) printed using traditional hand lithography techniques on archival Arches paper, 100% acid f...

Mark Podwal (American, New York, born 1945) "All This Has Come Upon Us" Archival pigment print Dimensions: 22 X 30 inches Temple Menora and Hanukkah Chanukah Menorah From a 2014 ...

Lithograph on vélin du Marais paper. Inscription: Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued. Good condition. Notes: From the volume, Verve: Revue Artistique et Littéraire, Vol. IX, N° 35-36...

Lithograph on vélin du Marais paper. Inscription: Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued. Good condition with centerfold, as issued. Notes: From the volume, Verve: Revue Artistique et Li...

"Nymphee" is a colorful Roberto Matta etching from his Requiem pour la Fin des Temps suite. The print is signed and numbered (44/100) in pencil w...

Lithograph on vélin du Marais paper. Inscription: Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued. Good condition. Notes: From the volume, Verve: Revue Artistique et Littéraire, Vol. IX, N° 35-36...

Lithograph on vélin du Marais paper. Inscription: Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued. Good condition with publisher’s folds, as issued. Notes: From the volume, Verve: Revue Artistiqu...

Lithograph on vélin du Marais paper. Inscription: Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued. Good condition. Notes: From the volume, Verve: Revue Artistique et Littéraire, Vol. IX, N° 35-36...

Vitaly was considered an up and coming artist in his native Ukraine, after years of training under one of the Ukraine’s greatest graphic artists...