1940s Prints and Multiples

Original vintage World War Two recruitment propaganda poster for the Second Australian Imperial Force (2nd AIF; 1939-1947) voluntary military forces - How proud they'll be to pass ar...

Original vintage movie poster for a 1942 World War Two drama film - Secret Mission an exciting adventure / Service Secret une aventure passionnante - about British spies and a French resistance fighter gathering information about the Nazi German forces, directed by Harold French and starring Hugh Williams, James Mason...

Original vintage motorsport poster for the Grote Prijs van Zandvoort der KNAC / Zandvoort Grand Prix on 31 July 1949 featuring a dynamic design depicting a classic car racing at spee...

Original WWII vintage poster: FOR THEIR FUTURE - BUY WAR BONDS. Original vintage WWII poster by the artist Munsett, 1943. U. S. Government printing: 1943-0-513138. Archival l...

Original vintage travel poster for the Hotel Candanchu in Canfranc at an altitude of 1600m captioned Verano / Summer featuring a great illustration of the Aragon Valley with a view o...

Original vintage travel poster for St Moritz featuring a great design by Hugo Laubi (1888-1959) of a smiling lady in a traditional red dress waving a handkerchief as she rides on a carved wooden horse drawn sleigh...

Original vintage summer travel poster for Beatenberg Niederhorn Switzerland Berner Oberland Suisse. Great artwork by Martin Peikert (1901-1975) depicti...

Konrad Cramer, 1888-1963 was a painter, photographer, printer, and illustrator. Based in the fertile Woodstock, New York, artistic community along with Yasuo Kuniyoshi and Russell Lee, Cramer was both educator and artist. He ran a summer school for miniature camera photography in the 1930s and later taught one of the first American college courses in photography at Bard College. Although he began as a painter of abstract, geometric forms in bold colors, Cramer is most known as a photographer. Konrad Cramer was born and raised in Wurzburg, Germany. Cramer studied to be an artist at the Karlsruhe Academy under Ludwig Schmidt-Reutte and Ernest Schurth. He became interested in the German avant-garde early in his schooling, he was a member of the Blaue Reiter, exposed and encouraged by the experimental works of Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc. An additional influence on Cramer's artistic development was the Cubist landscapes of Paul Cézanne. Florence Ballin Cramer opened a gallery on 57th Street in 1919, encouraged by the sculptor Elie Nadelman. Florence Gallery exhibited and sold the works of living artists. Although it only survived briefly, it was the first New York gallery to show works by Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Alexander Brook, Ernest Fiene, and Stefan Hirsch. Cramer then settled with his wife in Woodstock, New York, where Ballin had painted with the Art Students League each summer since 1906. Cramer established a reputation as one of Woodstock's most modern painters with an impressive series of abstract paintings exhibited at the MacDowell Club in 1913. In the 1920s Cramer developed a personal representational style which blended modern and regional influences. Cramer received a Rockefeller grant in 1920 to study educational methods for craftsmen in Germany and France. In 1922 he took a teaching position at the Woodstock School of Painting and helped establish the Woodstock Artists Association, where he served as a director. While teaching and painting, Cramer also applied his artistic talent to illustration and textile design. Konrad Cramer first exhibited at the Whitney Studio Club in 1924 and participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art's first and second biennials in 1933 and 1935. He was also included in the 1935 exhibition Abstract Painting in America at the Whitney. Cramer was later included in the Whitney Museum exhibition Pioneers of Modern Art in America in 1946. In the 1930s Cramer participated in many other museum invitationals, including: the Carnegie International (1929, 1933, 1937, 1938); the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1934, 1936), and the Corcoran Gallery of Art (1935, 1937). In 1934 Konrad Cramer and his wife travelled to Mexico where they produced many paintings and drawings. Back in Woodstock in 1935, Cramer briefly joined the (WPA) Federal Art Project, administering the regional program in Woodstock. In the mid-1930s Cramer took up photography to clarify aesthetic issues in his painting. Cramer had gotten to know Alfred Stieglitz upon his arrival in America in 1911 and wrote an essay about 291 Gallery for Stieglitz's magazine Camera Work in 1914. Through Stieglitz and then in the 1930s fellow Woodstockers like Russell Lee, Cramer became interested in the possibilities of photography and began working with it as an artistic medium. In the 1950s Cramer collaborated on a traveling exhibition and book of abstract photographs with Manuel Komroff...

Original vintage travel advertising poster for ABA Swedish Air Lines (1924-1950; now part of the SAS Group / Scandinavian Airlines System). Great design de...

Original Santa Fe The Chief Way vintage railroad travel poster. Archival linen backed in very fine condition, ready to frame. Most of the Santa Fe Railway posters feature American Indians, but this poster features the big boss, The Chief! The poster has about a 1" white border around the entire image, the linen backing is not counted in the poster's measurement. Several of the trains were named "Chief" which includes the San Francisco Chief, Texan Chief, Kansas City Chief...

Original vintage poster - South Wales Docks For Quick Despatch - featuring a busy scene at the docks with cranes hauling crates and boxes from a ship named the Cymric Enterprise moored alongside, dock workers...

Original vintage election propaganda poster - Batir la France avec le peuple MRP Mouvement Republicain Populaire / Building France with the people Po...

Caroline Durieux's image captures a lone figure in her garden in this southern plantation in Louisiana. "Plantation Garden" is a lithograph created by Durieux in 1946 in an edition of 20. It is signed in pencil. Durieux shared her feeling about this piece with these reflections. “The spectrum analysis of satire runs from the red of invective at one end to the violet of the most delicate irony at the other.” David Worcester 16, "The Art of Satire". The feeling expressed in Plantation Garden is that of a dirge with ironic overtones; it is sad, nostalgic yet satirical. The bent figure of the old lady, the ancient trees, the static moss, all seem to belong to the past; even the lady is old. For contrast, a ray of late afternoon sun lights up the only young note in the picture: perennials in the foreground. When “we are satirical and we are friendly at the same time, the consciousness of the friendship gives a regretful and tender touch to the satire, and the sting of the satire makes the friendship a trifle humble and sad.” George Santayna 255, "The Sense of Beauty". This concept of satire mixed with friendship comes closer to humor because there is less censure involved. In "Plantation Garden", the satire is tempered by a feeling of empathy. Caroline Durieux (American, 1896 – 1989) Printmaker, painter, satirist, innovator, social activist, Caroline Durieux was born in New Orleans and was already making sketches by the age of four. Her formal art training was at Newcomb College (1912-1917) and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (1918-1920). Carl Zigrosser of the Philadelphia Museum of Art encouraged Durieux to try lithography. While living in Mexico, she learned lithography from Emilio Amero...

after Henri MATISSE (1869-1954) Lithograph after a drawing of 1941 Printed signature and date Book plate from Aragon. Henri Matisse: Dessins, Thèmes et Variations : précédés de "...

Original vintage advertising poster for BSA The Real Quality Bicycle featuring a smiling lady holding the handlebar of a new bike in front of a country cottage and trees below the bl...

This listing is for the one Silkscreen serigraph piece listed here. Mexico City, 1945. First edition. plate signed, limited edition of 1000, these serigraph plates depict various types of traditional and folk art indigenous clothing and costume styles from around Mexico. The illustrations depict the cultures of many different states in Mexico, including Oaxaca, Chiapas, Jalisco and Veracruz. Carlos Mérida (December 2, 1891 – December 21, 1985) was a Guatemalan artist who was one of the first to fuse European modern painting to Latin American themes, especially those related to Guatemala and Mexico. He was part of the Mexican muralism movement in subject matter but less so in style, favoring a non-figurative and later geometric style rather than a figurative, narrative style. Mérida is best known for canvas and mural work, the latter including elements such as glass and ceramic mosaic on major constructions in the 1950s and 1960s. One of his major works, on the Benito Juarez housing complex, was completely destroyed with the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, but a monument to it exists at another complex in the south of the city. Carlos Mérida was born Carlos Santiago Ortega in Guatemala City to Serapio Santiago Mérida and Guadalupe Ortega Barnoya. He later changed his name what is known by as he thought it was more sonorous. His brothers and children also took the Mérida name later on. He was of mixed Spanish/Maya-Quiché heritage which he promoted during his life. As a young child, Mérida had both music and art lessons, and his first passion was music, which led to piano lessons. He studied at a trade school called the Instituto de Artes y Oficios, then the Instituto de Ciencias y Letras. Here he began to have a reputation for the avant garde. Merída’s first trip to the United States was in 1917, where he met writer Juan José Tablada. Mérida made several trips to Europe over his lifetime to both study art and work as an artist and diplomat. His early trips in the 1920s and 1930s put him in touch with both avant garde movements in Europe as well as noted Latin American artists, especially those from Mexico. His last trip was in 1950s. In 1963, he donated canvases, graphic pieces and mural sketches to the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico. Merida was one of a number of artists such as Diego Rivera and Gerardo Murillo who became committed to promoting the handcrafts and folk art of Mexico and Central America, with a particular interest in those of Guatemala, often featuring Mayan textiles or elements in their decoration in his artwork. He died in Mexico City at the age of 94 on December 21, 1985. As there was little opportunity for artists in Guatemala, in 1910, Mérida traveled to Paris with a friend named Carlos Valenti on a German cargo ship. From then until 1914, he lived and worked in Paris and traveled much of Europe. This put him in touch with European avant garde artists such as Van Dagen, Amedeo Modigliani, Pablo Picasso and Piet Mondrian as well as Latin American artists studying in Europe such as Diego Rivera, Jorge Enciso, Ángel Zárraga and Dr. Atl. He exhibited his work in venues such as the Independent Salon and the Giroux Gallery in Paris. Mérida has forty five exhibitions in the United States and eighteen in Mexico from 1928 to 1948. These included an exhibition with Rufino Tamayo at the Art Center of New York (1930), the John Becker and Valentine galleries in New York (1930), the Club de Escritores de México and the Galería Posada in Mexico City (1931), the Stendhal Gallery and the Stanley Rose...

Original vintage ski poster for Flims Graubunden Grisons die modernste sesselbahn Europas / the most modern chairlift in Europe. Colourful design depicting a lady in skiing boots and...

This listing is for the one Silkscreen serigraph piece listed here. Mexico City, 1945. First edition. plate signed, limited edition of 1000, these serigraph plates depict various types of traditional and folk art indigenous clothing and costume styles from around Mexico. The illustrations depict the cultures of many different states in Mexico, including Oaxaca, Chiapas, Jalisco and Veracruz. Carlos Mérida (December 2, 1891 – December 21, 1985) was a Guatemalan artist who was one of the first to fuse European modern painting to Latin American themes, especially those related to Guatemala and Mexico. He was part of the Mexican muralism movement in subject matter but less so in style, favoring a non-figurative and later geometric style rather than a figurative, narrative style. Mérida is best known for canvas and mural work, the latter including elements such as glass and ceramic mosaic on major constructions in the 1950s and 1960s. One of his major works, on the Benito Juarez housing complex, was completely destroyed with the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, but a monument to it exists at another complex in the south of the city. Carlos Mérida was born Carlos Santiago Ortega in Guatemala City to Serapio Santiago Mérida and Guadalupe Ortega Barnoya. He later changed his name what is known by as he thought it was more sonorous. His brothers and children also took the Mérida name later on. He was of mixed Spanish/Maya-Quiché heritage which he promoted during his life. As a young child, Mérida had both music and art lessons, and his first passion was music, which led to piano lessons. He studied at a trade school called the Instituto de Artes y Oficios, then the Instituto de Ciencias y Letras. Here he began to have a reputation for the avant garde. Merída’s first trip to the United States was in 1917, where he met writer Juan José Tablada. Mérida made several trips to Europe over his lifetime to both study art and work as an artist and diplomat. His early trips in the 1920s and 1930s put him in touch with both avant garde movements in Europe as well as noted Latin American artists, especially those from Mexico. His last trip was in 1950s. In 1963, he donated canvases, graphic pieces and mural sketches to the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico. Merida was one of a number of artists such as Diego Rivera and Gerardo Murillo who became committed to promoting the handcrafts and folk art of Mexico and Central America, with a particular interest in those of Guatemala, often featuring Mayan textiles or elements in their decoration in his artwork. He died in Mexico City at the age of 94 on December 21, 1985. As there was little opportunity for artists in Guatemala, in 1910, Mérida traveled to Paris with a friend named Carlos Valenti on a German cargo ship. From then until 1914, he lived and worked in Paris and traveled much of Europe. This put him in touch with European avant garde artists such as Van Dagen, Amedeo Modigliani, Pablo Picasso and Piet Mondrian as well as Latin American artists studying in Europe such as Diego Rivera, Jorge Enciso, Ángel Zárraga and Dr. Atl. He exhibited his work in venues such as the Independent Salon and the Giroux Gallery in Paris. Mérida has forty five exhibitions in the United States and eighteen in Mexico from 1928 to 1948. These included an exhibition with Rufino Tamayo at the Art Center of New York (1930), the John Becker and Valentine galleries in New York (1930), the Club de Escritores de México and the Galería Posada in Mexico City (1931), the Stendhal Gallery and the Stanley Rose...

Arising Mezzotint, 1942 Signed in pencil lower right (see photo) Publisher : Issued by the Miniature Print Collectors Society. Edition: 200 Condition: Mint Archival framing with Museum Glass Image/Plate size: 2 3/8 x 2 7/8 inches Sheet size: 3 3/4 x 4 5/8 inches Archival Framed: 17 1/4 x 15 1/4 inches Mastro-Valerio was educated at the Salvador Rosa Institute in Naples, Italy (1906-1912), and came to the U.S. in 1913. He settled in Chicago, and after a brief period as a commerical artist, established a portrait studio near the Loop. Among his patrons were the industrialists Harvey S...

Original vintage travel poster - Winter sports in Switzerland? Of course, with Swissair / Sports d'hiver en Suisse? Bien entendu, avec la Swissair - featuring colourful artwork by Henri Ott (b.1919) depicting a scenic view of people on a horse drawn sleigh...

This rare and beautiful lithographic poster was produced at the Ateliers Mourlot to advertise an exhibition of Poteries and Ceramics created in the South of France by Pablo Picasso in 1948. It was designed by Picasso and reproduced by Mourlot Master Printer Henri Deschamps. This is a vintage lithographic poster and not a reprint. Ref. Czwiklitzer #66. Certificate of Provenance: Each individual work of art carefully curated by Mourlot Editions comes with a Certificate of Provenance, signed, dated, stamped, and numbered by Eric Mourlot...

Bull is an original artwork realized by the french artist Jean Lurçat (1892 Bruyeres - 1966 St.-Paul-de-Vence) Lithograph print, mid-20th century. Very good conditions. Jean L...

Original vintage travel poster for the Kent seaside resort of Birchington - At all Seasons the fine dry air is invigorating beyond any other on our coasts - featuring a colourful ill...

Lithograph titled "Mining Town" by Otis Dozier (1904-1987) from 1940. Modernist scene of a mountain mining town with several buildings at the base of the mountain. Presented in a custom black frame, outer dimensions measure 25 ½ x 18 ⅜ x ¼ inches. Image sight size is 16 ¼ x 9 ½ inches. Print is clean and in very good condition - please contact us for a detailed condition report. Provenance: Private Collection, Denver, Colorado Expedited and international shipping is available - please contact us for a quote. About the Artist: Born in Forney, Texas, Otis Marion Dozier was raised on a farm in Mesquite, Texas. Dozier was a muralist, potter, lithographer, sculptor, and painter. Dozier was a member of a group of Texas regionalist artists known as the "Dallas Nine." His surroundings in Texas became the focus of much of his art. Dozier’s first artistic training took place in the early 1920’s when his family moved to Dallas. He studied under Vivian Aunspaugh, Cora Edge, and Frank Reaugh...

A splendid and historical poster made by Jack Maxwell in 1948. ⛳️ The history of this legendary golf course begins in 1924: the company "Biarritz Anglet la Forêt" became the owner o...

Original vintage World War Two poster - The Clouds Have Eyes - featuring a German Nazi pilot on a reconnaissance spy mission kneeling next to his plane on ...

Propaganda poster during the Second World War for going to work in Germany. The Service du travail obligatoire (STO) was, during the occupation of France by Nazi Germany, the requisition and transfer to Germany of hundreds of thousands of French workers against their will, in order to participate in the German war...

Original “Radio Point Bleu Musical!” vintage French antique poster. Archivail linen backed in very fine condition, ready to frame. Signed J.L.B. in the plate at upper right. No specific year is indicated on the poster. Point Bleu / Radio Musical! Paris: Bedos & Cie. Lithograph poster for the French radio manufacturer, showing a woman’s face in silhouette with a treble clef over her ear; red and blue lettering against a bright yellow background. Printer: Paris: Bedos & Cie. The poster does not have a date, but most of the Point Bleu radio posters...

William Ross Abrams, 'The Green Sugarbowl', color woodcut, 1949, edition 24. Signed, titled, dated, and annotated 'Artist’s proof' in pencil. A fin...

Original vintage advertising poster for BSA Streamlight Bicycles featuring a colourful image of a smartly dressed cyclist smiling to the viewer as he rides his new bike below the tex...

Original vintage World War Two military safety propaganda poster - Rough Handling Ruins Ammunition Handle It With Care - featuring a dynamic des...

Caruso is an original b/w photograph about Hollywod '40 realized by De Wan Studios. Some pen notes on the back. Good condition, mounted on a white cardboard p...

Original vintage advertising poster for Nachte Neben der Tur neuer Roman in der Kollnischen Illustrierten / Nights by the Door new novel by Justus Franz Wittkop in the Koln illustrated featuring a great graphic design depicting a pair of black shoes outside a row of numbered hotel doors...

Original vintage World War Two poster - Your Britain Fight For It Now - featuring a great design by the notable British graphic designer Abram Games (Abraham Gamse; 1914-1996) showin...

Beautiful poster for the national lottery and the slice of the supply of the disaster victims in 1944. The French National Lottery is the distant heir of the Royal Lottery of France, which was managed by the General Administration of Lotteries. This lottery was created by decree on July 22, 1933, to help war invalids, veterans and victims of agricultural disasters. After the war, the draw became weekly. Special instalments appeared on Valentine's Day, Mother's Day and Friday the 13th...

Original vintage World War Two poster - Your Britain Fight For It Now - featuring a great design by the notable British graphic designer Abram Games (Abraham Gamse; 1914-1996) depict...

Original vintage World War Two poster - Blood donors are needed urgently to save lives Emergency blood transfusion service - featuring a modernist design by the notable British graphic designer Abram Games (Abraham Gamse; 1914-1996) depicting a dramatic illustration of a soldier wearing a military...

Original vintage health and safety poster - Don't talk to the man on the job - featuring a great design by the notable artist duo Tom...

Very nice original 1948 tourism poster created by Panagiotis Tetsis for Greece and the Aegean coastline. Tetsis was a Greek painter. He was a represent...

Original WWII poster: A British "Commando" raid on a German-held port in Norway. Back Them Up! Linen backed and ready to frame. Printed in England...

To see more, scroll down to "More from this Seller" and below it click on "See all from this Seller." N. V. Gray The Royal Wedding: Picture Map of the Route through London (1947) Lithograph 50 x 76 cm Produced by H.A. & W.L. Pitkin Ltd for the Daily Telegraph and published by Geographia Ltd., of Hutchinson & Co. Signed in plate lower right. Complete with slip showing the genealogy of the two parties. Princess Elizabeth (later Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II) and Prince Philip...

A superb, richly-inked impression of this very scarce aquatint. Edition of approximately 80. Signed in pencil by Orozco.

Original vintage World War Two bomb safety poster - This child found a 'blind' Accidents occur daily with blinds left on ranges Report all blinds for destruction at the end of the da...

Original vintage World War Two anti-Soviet German Nazi political propaganda poster depicting a smiling lady against a blue background with the text in Russ...

Original vintage Belgian World War Two poster - Belgium Resists - issued by The Belgian War Relief Society Inc of the United States of America Member Agenc...

Charles CAMOIN The Rest : Woman on a Bed, 1946 Original etching Hand signed in pencil Numbered / XX copies On Lana vellum 26 x 36 cm (c. 10.2 x 14 inch...

Ian Hugo, 'Forest Woman', engraving, 1945, edition 50. Signed, dated, titled, and numbered '5/50' in pencil. With the blind stamp 'madeleine-claude jobrack E...

Artist: Pablo Picasso Medium: Original etching on Montval wove paper Title: Square Head of a Man with Soft Features (Plate IV) Portfolio: Carmen Year: 1949 Edition Size: 289 Framed S...

Original vintage Soviet propaganda poster issued just a month before the attack of Germany on the Soviet Union in the World War Two - I'm Proud Of My Son! / Горжусь Сыном! The image ...

Original vintage World War Two recruitment propaganda poster for the Second Australian Imperial Force (2nd AIF; 1939-1947) voluntary military forces - Make her proud to say 'My Son overseas' Join the AIF - featuring a photograph of a smiling soldier in uniform in a picture frame with a ball of wool and knitting needles...

Original Pull down your shades! Rare original World War II poster. Save up to 10% on fuel. Isn't that the truth. Created for the U. S. Government Window Shade Institute. The original poster issued by the US Government. The purchase comes with a certificate of authenticity. Conservation linen backed and ready to frame. Very good condition with original U.S. Government issued poster fold marks restored. The poster indicates that 30% of all heat loss is through windows. Your cloth window shades...

Original vintage World War Two poster for the 20-Ton Giant Of The Coastal Command - A Short Sunderland Flying Boat featuring an annotated technical cut-out...

Packard, Emmy Lou (American, 1914 - 1998). WOMAN DRAWING. Color Woodcut, not dated. Edition size not known. Signed in pencil. 18 1/16" x 14 1/8" inches (...

Charles CAMOIN A long Study Day : Girl Reading, 1946 Original etching Hand signed in pencil Numbered / XX copies On Lana vellum 26 x 36 cm (c. 10.2 x 14 inch) Excellent condition

Original vintage propaganda poster to encourage savings - Economy / Your job in the Battle of the Atlantic / Waste in peace time costs money Waste in war costs lives Economy can save both - featuring a dynamic design by the notable British graphic designer Abram Games (Abraham Gamse; 1914-1996) depicting a black and white arrow pointing down with the word Economy on a sea water illustration background at the top and a submarine shape diving down with the Battle of Atlantic text across it, a periscope view in the centre showing a ship being sunk with flames and smoke against a blue and white background, the rest of the text on a stylised banner below. The Battle of the Atlantic between German Nazi U-Boats and Kriegsmarine ships against the Allied navy and merchant shipping forces including the Royal Navy, Royal Canadian Navy...

after Henri MATISSE (1869-1954) Lithograph after a drawing of 1941 Printed signature and date Book plate from Aragon. Henri Matisse: Dessins, Thèmes et Variations : précédés de "Matisse-en-France". (M. Fabiani: Paris 1943). Vélin Paper Dimensions: 32 x 24 cm (12 x 9") This lithograph is one of a rare edition made during the Second World War (1941 - 1943) by the Fabiani Editions. 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...

Original vintage food poster showing the different methods of cutting sausage meat slices with the description below each board, the title...

Original La Memphis Belle; original vintage lithograph movie poster, French version; size 23" x 31", 1949; archival linen backed and ready to frame. Fi...