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1990s Prints and Multiples

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Period: 1990s
Helen Frankenthaler 'Sesame' Vintage
Located in Brooklyn, NY
Silkscreen poster featuring Helen Frankenthaler’s Sesame, showcasing her expressive use of color and fluid form that helped define postwar American abstraction. The artwork is presen...
Category

American Modern 1990s Prints and Multiples

Materials

Screen

David Hockney 'The Road Across the Wolds' 1997
Located in Brooklyn, NY
The Road Across the Wolds reflects David Hockney’s lifelong connection to the Yorkshire landscape, with sweeping roads, undulating fields, and expansive skies that evoke both movemen...
Category

1990s Prints and Multiples

Materials

Offset

Art Card: Marilyn Monroe (Revues Empaquetees), 1962, (Hand Signed by Christo)
Located in New York, NY
Christo and Jeanne-Claude Art Card: Wrapped Magazines with Marilyn Monroe (Revues Empaquetees), 1962, (Hand Signed by Christo), 1991 Offset lithograph postcard (hand signed by Christ...
Category

Pop Art 1990s Prints and Multiples

Materials

Postcard

Mark Rothko 'No. 37' Vintage Abstract Framed
By Mark Rothko
Located in Brooklyn, NY
Offset lithograph poster featuring Mark Rothko’s No. 37, a powerful example of his signature exploration of color, form, and emotional depth. The artwork is framed in a black wood fr...
Category

American Modern 1990s Prints and Multiples

Materials

Offset

Edward Ruscha 'Standard Station' 1992 Pop Art Vintage
Located in Brooklyn, NY
Offset lithograph from a portfolio of six prints published by the Museum of Modern Art, now out of print. Ed Ruscha’s Standard Station is among his most iconic images, encapsulating...
Category

Pop Art 1990s Prints and Multiples

Materials

Offset

Helen Frankenthaler 'Ocean Drive' Vintage
Located in Brooklyn, NY
Silkscreen poster featuring Helen Frankenthaler’s Ocean Drive, a vibrant example of her signature lyrical abstraction and pioneering use of color. The piece is framed in a black wood...
Category

American Modern 1990s Prints and Multiples

Materials

Screen

Robert Longo 'Gretchen #2' from Men in the Cities 1991 Vintage
Located in Brooklyn, NY
Striking and instantly recognizable, Gretchen is an original poster designed and created by Robert Longo as part of his iconic Men in the Cities series. Published in 1991 in collabor...
Category

Pop Art 1990s Prints and Multiples

Materials

Offset

Paolo Pannini 'Galleria Con Vedute Di Roma Antica' 1996
Located in Brooklyn, NY
This Italian print, published by Nuova Arti Grafiche Ricordi and printed in Italy, features Galleria Con Vedute Di Roma Antica by the renowned 18th-century artist Paolo Pannini. Know...
Category

Northern Renaissance 1990s Prints and Multiples

Materials

Offset

Mark Rothko 'Untitled, 1950' Vintage
By Mark Rothko
Located in Brooklyn, NY
Offset lithograph poster featuring Mark Rothko’s Untitled (1950), exemplifying the artist’s iconic color field style and emotive abstraction. The piece is framed in a black wood fram...
Category

American Modern 1990s Prints and Multiples

Materials

Offset

Bunny On The Run, Screenprint Poster by Keith Haring
Located in Long Island City, NY
Date: 1990 Screenprint Poster, signed and dated in plate, numbered in pencil Edition of 1000 Image Size: 28 x 20 inches Size: 32 x 23 in. (81.28 x 58.42 cm) Commissioned by Playboy. ...
Category

Pop Art 1990s Prints and Multiples

Materials

Screen

Welcoming Jeers - Lithograph, 1997
Located in Paris, IDF
Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) Welcoming Jeers, 1997 Lithograph Printed signature in the plate On Arches vellum 76 x 56 cm (c. 29.9 x 22 in) Published by Galerie Enrico Navarra ...
Category

American Modern 1990s Prints and Multiples

Materials

Lithograph

Crowned T-Rex (Pez Dispenser) - Lithograph, 1997
Located in Paris, IDF
Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) Crowned T-Rex, 1997 Lithograph Printed signature in the plate On paper 76 x 56 cm (c. 29.9 x 22 in) Published by Galerie Enrico Navarra Authentica...
Category

American Modern 1990s Prints and Multiples

Materials

Lithograph

Andy Warhol 'Torso' 1993 Pop Art Vintage
Located in Brooklyn, NY
Torso is an offset lithograph from a portfolio of five Andy Warhol prints published by te Neues, now out of print. This striking work reflects Warhol's ongoing fascination with the h...
Category

Pop Art 1990s Prints and Multiples

Materials

Offset

Cat and Bird at the Sunset - Original Handsigned Lithograph
Located in Paris, IDF
Guillaume Corneille (1922-2010) Cat and Bird at the Sunset, 1991 Original color lithograph Signed and dated in pencil Artist proof On vellum, 53 x 76 cm (c. 21 x 30 in) Very good ...
Category

Surrealist 1990s Prints and Multiples

Materials

Lithograph

WALKS TALKS FLIES SWIMS AND CRAWLS, Rare Card, (Hand Signed by Ed Ruscha) Framed
Located in New York, NY
Ed Ruscha WALKS TALKS FLIES SWIMS AND CRAWLS (Hand Signed by Ed Ruscha), 1992 Offset lithograph invitation card (hand signed) Vintage Robert Miller Gallery invitation card Boldly sig...
Category

Pop Art 1990s Prints and Multiples

Materials

Postcard, Lithograph, Offset

Henri Matisse 'A Thousand and One Nights' 1950 Mid Century
Located in Brooklyn, NY
This framed piece features an estate-authorized 1999 reproduction of Henri Matisse’s One Thousand and One Nights (Les Mille et Une Nuits), originally created in 1950 during the artis...
Category

Modern 1990s Prints and Multiples

Materials

Offset

Untitled #10, Minimalist lithograph on vellum transparency paper Lt. Ed., Framed
Located in New York, NY
Agnes Martin Untitled #10, 1990 Lithograph on vellum transparency paper Unsigned Limited Edition of 2500 Publisher: Nemela & Lenzen GmbH, Monchengladback & Stedelijk Museum, ...
Category

Minimalist 1990s Prints and Multiples

Materials

Vellum, Lithograph

Walasse Ting 'Blue Horse'
Located in Brooklyn, NY
Walasse Ting was a Chinese American artists renowned for the use of vibrant colors, evident in this limited edition large scale “Blue Horse”. ??Oversized poster. Published by Yves Ri...
Category

Contemporary 1990s Prints and Multiples

Materials

Offset

Marc Chagall 'Still Life with Flowers' 1994- Vintage
Located in Brooklyn, NY
Still Life with Flowers is a high-quality reproduction included in a 1994 portfolio published by Taschen and printed in Germany. This vibrant composition exemplifies Marc Chagall’s u...
Category

1990s Prints and Multiples

Materials

Offset

Robert Mapplethorpe 'Antinous' 1994 Vintage
Located in Brooklyn, NY
This evocative image by Robert Mapplethorpe, titled Antinous, reflects the photographer’s reverence for classical beauty and sculptural form. The statue of Antinous—Hadrian’s famed c...
Category

1990s Prints and Multiples

Materials

Offset

Countryside - Lithograph by Lucio Rofrano - 1990s
Located in Roma, IT
Lithograph realized by Lucio Rofrano in 1990s. Edition of 150, numbered and hand signed. Excellent condition.
Category

Contemporary 1990s Prints and Multiples

Materials

Lithograph

Walasse Ting 'Blue Horse' Vintage
Located in Brooklyn, NY
This is a reproduction of the original gouache "Blue Horse" by Walasse Ting, presented as a rare, out-of-print limited edition poster. Published by Yves Rivière in Paris, France, thi...
Category

Contemporary 1990s Prints and Multiples

Materials

Offset

Andy Warhol 'Heart (Open Candy Box)' 1993 Vintage Pop Art
Located in Brooklyn, NY
Heart (Open Candy Box) is an offset lithograph from a portfolio of five Andy Warhol prints published by te Neues, now long out of print and increasingly sought after by collectors. I...
Category

Pop Art 1990s Prints and Multiples

Materials

Offset

"Imagine" Limited Edition Hand Written Lyrics
Located in Laguna Beach, CA
Very rare Limited Edition Serigraph of John Lennon's handwritten lyrics for the song "Imagine," first released on the LP of the same name in 1971. The best-selling single of his s...
Category

Contemporary 1990s Prints and Multiples

Materials

Other Medium

Donald Judd- Series of Ten Woodcuts in Three Color States Vintage
Located in Brooklyn, NY
This fold-out card showcases Donald Judd's Series of Ten Woodcuts in Three Color States: Cadmium Red Light, Ultramarine Blue, and Ivory Black. Published by Brooke Alexander, the card...
Category

Contemporary 1990s Prints and Multiples

Materials

Offset

The Golden Road, Los Angeles Music Center Opera print (Hand Signed & inscribed)
Located in New York, NY
David Hockney Richard Strauss: Los Angeles Music Center Opera (Hand Signed and Inscribed), 1993 Offset Lithograph (hand signed and inscribed by David Hockney) 30 × 20 inches Signed a...
Category

Pop Art 1990s Prints and Multiples

Materials

Lithograph, Offset

"Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds" Limited Edition Hand Written Lyrics
Located in Laguna Beach, CA
Rare Limited Edition Serigraph of John Lennon's handwritten lyrics for the song "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds," first released on "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" by the...
Category

Contemporary 1990s Prints and Multiples

Materials

Other Medium

Keith Haring 'Untitled (1983)' - Vintage Pop Art
Located in Brooklyn, NY
In 1983, Keith Haring collaborated with the Italian company LEM to produce larger reproductions of his untitled artworks. This initiative was part of Haring's broader effort to make ...
Category

Pop Art 1990s Prints and Multiples

Materials

Offset

Orange Flowers
Located in Toronto, Ontario
Donald Sultan (b. 1951) is a prolific American painter, sculptor, and printmaker best known for his unconventional use and application of industrial materials such as tar, aluminum, ...
Category

Pop Art 1990s Prints and Multiples

Materials

Lithograph

ERTE 'Sunrise' 1992
Located in Brooklyn, NY
This enchanting reproduction titled Sunrise by Erté beautifully captures a moment of transformation and renewal, where a woman gracefully emerges from her cocoon, seemingly transform...
Category

Art Deco 1990s Prints and Multiples

Materials

Offset

ERTE 'Sunrise' 1992
ERTE 'Sunrise' 1992
$60 Sale Price
20% Off
Fernando Botero 'La Lettera' 1991-Vintage
Located in Brooklyn, NY
La Lettera is a notable work by Fernando Botero, from 1976. This reproduction captures Botero's distinctive style, characterized by his use of exaggerated, rounded forms and his expl...
Category

Contemporary 1990s Prints and Multiples

Materials

Offset

Jasper Johns 'Edingsville' 1990- Pop Art Vintage
Located in Brooklyn, NY
This reproduction of Edingsville by renowned American artist Jasper Johns, published by Edition 5 in Germany, offers a faithful and striking representation of the original artwork. J...
Category

Pop Art 1990s Prints and Multiples

Materials

Offset

Illeana II, John Kacere
Located in Fairfield, CT
Artist: John Kacere (1930-1999) Title: Illeana II Year: 1991 Edition: A.P.; 100, plus proofs. Medium: Lithograph on wove paper Size: 23.5 x 31.5 inches Inscription: Signed by the art...
Category

Pop Art 1990s Prints and Multiples

Materials

Lithograph

"Grow Old With Me"/"Self Portrait" Limited Edition Hand Written Lyrics/Drawing
Located in Laguna Beach, CA
Rare Limited Edition Serigraph Diptych of John Lennon's handwritten lyrics for John's song "Grow Old With Me," one of the final songs Lennon wrote; it first appeared on "Milk & Hon...
Category

Contemporary 1990s Prints and Multiples

Materials

Other Medium

Gunter Blum 'Grazia' 1994
Located in Brooklyn, NY
This striking photograph of Grazia by Gunter Blum exemplifies the artist’s renowned ability to capture the female form in all its unabashed beauty and power. Grazia is depicted tilti...
Category

Abstract Expressionist 1990s Prints and Multiples

Materials

Offset

Gunter Blum 'Grazia' 1994
$72 Sale Price
20% Off
The House of Shango — African American artist
Located in Myrtle Beach, SC
Samella Sanders Lewis, 'The House of Shango', lithograph, 1992, edition 60. Signed, dated, titled, and numbered '31/60' in pencil. A superb, richly-inked impression, on Arches cream wove paper; the full sheet with margins (1 1/4 to 3 1/2 inches), in excellent condition. Image size 24 x 18 inches (610 x 457 mm); sheet size 30 inches x 22 1/4 inches (762 x 565 mm). Archivally matted to museum standards, unframed. ABOUT THIS WORK “The title of this piece is an unmistakable harkening to African roots. Shango is a religious practice with origins in Yoruba (Nigerian) belief, deifying a god of thunder by the same name. Shango has been adopted in the Caribbean, most notably in Trinidad and Tobago, a fact that underscores the importance of transnationalism to Samella Lewis’s piece. Her work often grapples with issues of race in the U.S., and The House of Shango is no exception. Through a reliance on the gradual transformation of Shango—one that took place across continents and time—Lewis’s piece forms a powerful link between black Americans and their African and Caribbean counterparts. The figure depicted in the piece appears to emerge, quite literally, from the house of Shango. Given the roots and transformative process of the religion, The House of Shango can draw attention to the historical intersections to which black American culture is indebted.” —Laura Woods, Scripps College, Ruth Chander Williamson Gallery, Collection Highlights, 2018 ABOUT THE ARTIST Samella Lewis’ lifelong career as an artist, art historian, critic, curator, collector, and advocate of African American art has helped empower generations of artists in the United States and worldwide, earning her the designation “the Godmother of African American art.” Born and raised in Jim Crow era New Orleans, Lewis began her art education at Dillard University in 1941, transferring to Hampton University in Virginia, where she earned her B. A. and master's degrees. She completed her master's and a doctorate in art history and cultural anthropology at Ohio State University in 1951, becoming the first female African American to earn a doctorate in fine art and art history. Lewis taught art at Morgan State University while completing her doctorate. She became the first Chair of the Fine Arts Department at Florida A&M University in 1953. That same year Lewis also became the first African American to convene the National Conference of African American artists held at Florida A&M University. She was a professor at the State University of New York, California State University, Long Beach, and at Scripps College in Claremont, California. Lewis co-founded, with Bernie Casey, the Contemporary Crafts Gallery in Los Angeles in 1970. In 1973, she served on the selection committee for the exhibition BLACKS: USA: 1973 held at the New York Cultural Center. Samella Lewis's 1969 catalog 'Black Artists on Art', featured accomplished black artists typically overlooked in mainstream art galleries. She said of the book, "I wanted to make a chronology of African American artists, and artists of African descent, to document our history. The historians weren't doing it. It was really about the movement." From the 1960s through the 1970s, her work, which included lithographs, linocuts, and serigraphs, reflected her concerns with the values of human dignity, democracy, and freedom of expression. Between 1969 and 70, Lewis and E.J. Montgomery were consultants for a groundbreaking exhibition at the Oakland Public L designed to create greater awareness of African American history and art. Lewis was the founder of the International Review of African American Art in 1975. In 1976, she founded the Museum of African-American Art with a group of artistic, academic, business, and community leaders in Los Angeles, California. Lewis, the museum’s senior curator, organized exhibitions and developed new ways of educating the public about African American art. She celebrated African American art as an 'art of experience’ inspired by the artists’ lives. And she espoused the concept of African American art as an 'art of tradition', urging museums to explore the African roots of African American art. In 1984, Lewis produced an extensive monograph on Elizabeth Catlett, her beloved mentor at Dillard University. Lewis has been collecting art since 1942, focusing primarily on the WPA era and work created during the Harlem Renaissance. Pieces from her collection were acquired by the Hampton University Museum in Virginia, the world’s earliest collection of African American fine art...
Category

Realist 1990s Prints and Multiples

Materials

Lithograph

Illeana, John Kacere
Located in Fairfield, CT
Artist: John Kacere (1930-1999) Title: Illeana II Year: 1991 Edition: A.P.; 100, plus proofs. Medium: Lithograph on wove paper Size: 23.5 x 31.5 inches Inscription: Signed by the art...
Category

Pop Art 1990s Prints and Multiples

Materials

Lithograph

Gerhard Richter 'Two Candles' 1995- Poster
Located in Brooklyn, NY
This original museum poster titled Two Candles was created for the Fast Forward exhibition at the Dallas Art Museum in 1995. The artwork featur...
Category

Contemporary 1990s Prints and Multiples

Materials

Offset

ALL THE PEOPLE Signed Lithograph, For My People-Margaret Walker, Rainbow Faces
Located in Union City, NJ
ALL THE PEOPLE is an original hand drawn limited edition lithograph by the highly acclaimed African-American woman artist Elizabeth Catlett, master printmaker and sculptor best known...
Category

Contemporary 1990s Prints and Multiples

Materials

Lithograph

ELLA FITZGERALD Lithograph, Celebrity Caricature Portrait, Female Jazz Vocalist
Located in Union City, NJ
ELLA FITZGERALD is a limited edition lithograph by the renowned artist/caricaturist Al Hirschfeld (1903-2003) printed using traditional lithography techniques on archival printmaking...
Category

Contemporary 1990s Prints and Multiples

Materials

Lithograph

South Of France 1994 Signed Limited Edition Lithograph
Located in Rochester Hills, MI
Tony Bennett Title: South of France Lithograph Signed and Marked ATL  5/5 ( Printers Proof ) Paper Size: 31" x 24" inches Image Size : 26" x 20" inches Published By : Atelier E. Ettinger Gallery Anthony Dominick Benedetto, known professionally as Tony Bennett, is an American singer of traditional pop standards, big band, show tunes, and jazz. He is also a painter, having created works under his birth name that are on permanent public display in several institutions. Whether he is performing as Tony Bennett or painting as Anthony Benedetto...
Category

American Impressionist 1990s Prints and Multiples

Materials

Lithograph

"You Are Here" Limited Edition Drawing From 1969
Located in Laguna Beach, CA
Rare Limited Edition Serigraph of John Lennon's "You Are Here" drawing, which is a loving image of John and Yoko in the year there were married. Originally drawn in 1969 this limite...
Category

Contemporary 1990s Prints and Multiples

Materials

Screen, Other Medium

Emmanuele Brambilla 'Rome, Panoramic View of Piazza Di Spagna' 1999- Lithograph
Located in Brooklyn, NY
Paper Size: 10.25 x 39.5 inches ( 26.035 x 100.33 cm ) Image Size: 6 x 35.5 inches ( 15.24 x 90.17 cm ) Framed: No Condition: B: Very Good Condition, with signs of handling or age...
Category

1990s Prints and Multiples

Materials

Offset

Gene Autry. by Frank Romero
Located in Palm Springs, CA
Portrait of Gene Autry, by Frank Romero This print was featured in “Dreamland”, the first solo exhibition of a Chicano artist at MOLAA (Museum of Latin American Art). This is the f...
Category

Contemporary 1990s Prints and Multiples

Materials

Screen

Jean-Michel Basquiat 'Hardware Store' 1992- Offset Lithograph
Located in Brooklyn, NY
Paper Size: 4.25 x 6 inches ( 10.795 x 15.24 cm ) Image Size: 3.75 x 5.75 inches ( 9.525 x 14.605 cm ) Framed: Yes Frame Size: H: 17.25 x W: 13 x D: 1.25 in. Condition: A-: Near Mint, very light signs of handling Additional Details: This vintage blank...
Category

1990s Prints and Multiples

Materials

Offset

Mark Rothko 'Untitled, 1969'
By Mark Rothko
Located in Brooklyn, NY
This exquisite reproduction of Mark Rothko's Untitled, originally painted in 1969 using oil on cardboard, showcases the artist's masterful use of pastel colors. Distributed by New Yo...
Category

Abstract 1990s Prints and Multiples

Materials

Offset

Marc Chagall 'Paris Opera Ceiling' Mid Century Vintage
Located in Brooklyn, NY
This five-color offset lithograph, featuring a facsimile signature of Marc Chagall, masterfully captures a vibrant detail from his iconic Paris Opera ceiling. Printed on high-quality...
Category

Modern 1990s Prints and Multiples

Materials

Offset

Margit Smiles
Located in New York, NY
signed and numbered lower image edition 7/40 Catalogue raisonné 00269 Internationally recognized painter and printmaker Alex Katz was born in 1927 in Brooklyn, New York. Over a thir...
Category

Contemporary 1990s Prints and Multiples

Materials

Aquatint

Nude With Blue Hair
Located in Washington, DC
Artist: Roy Lichtenstein Title: Nude With Blue Hair Medium: Relief print on Rives BFK mold-made paper Date: 1994 Edition: 28/40 Sheet Size: 57 7/8" x 37 5/8" Image Size: 51 5/16" x 3...
Category

Pop Art 1990s Prints and Multiples

Materials

Woodcut

1995 Christo The Blue Umbrellas Japan Vintage
By Javacheff Christo
Located in Brooklyn, NY
This rare exhibition poster, titled "Blue Umbrellas," commemorates the remarkable installation created by Christo and Jeanne-Claude in October 1991. The project featured 960 yellow u...
Category

Contemporary 1990s Prints and Multiples

Materials

Offset

1991 Christo 'The Yellow Umbrellas' Japan Vintage
By Javacheff Christo
Located in Brooklyn, NY
In October of 1991 Christo and his collaborator Jean-Claude constructed an installation in two valleys, in Japan, north of Tokyo and one in California, north of Los Angeles. 960 yell...
Category

Contemporary 1990s Prints and Multiples

Materials

Offset

Bearden Come Sunday Vintage African American
Located in Brooklyn, NY
The reproduction of Come Sunday by Romare Bearden is based on a piece he originally created in 1967. Come Sunday is a powerful work that reflects the significance of spirituality and...
Category

Contemporary 1990s Prints and Multiples

Materials

Offset

Segui Roland Garros French Open 1999 Vintage
Located in Brooklyn, NY
The 1999 Roland Garros poster by Antonio Seguí is a vibrant and whimsical work that captures the lively spirit of the French Open through a playful and satirical lens. Seguí’s use of...
Category

Contemporary 1990s Prints and Multiples

Materials

Offset

David Hockney 'The Road to York Through Sledmere' 1997
Located in Brooklyn, NY
In The Road to York Through Sledmere, David Hockney transforms a familiar Yorkshire scene into something luminous and almost enchanted. The brilliant red brick of the buildings aroun...
Category

1990s Prints and Multiples

Materials

Offset

Tableau, Japanese, limited edition lithograph, black, white, red, signed, number
Located in Santa Fe, NM
Tableau, Japanese, limited edition lithograph, black, white, red, signed, number Shinoda's works have been collected by public galleries and museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Brooklyn Museum and Metropolitan Museum (all in New York City), the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, the British Museum in London, the Art Institute of Chicago, Arthur M. Sackler Gallery of the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., the Singapore Art Museum, the National Museum of Singapore, the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, Netherlands, the Albright–Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, the Cincinnati Art Museum, and the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut. New York Times Obituary, March 3, 2021 by Margalit Fox, Alex Traub contributed reporting. Toko Shinoda, one of the foremost Japanese artists of the 20th century, whose work married the ancient serenity of calligraphy with the modernist urgency of Abstract Expressionism, died on Monday at a hospital in Tokyo. She was 107. Her death was announced by her gallerist in the United States. A painter and printmaker, Ms. Shinoda attained international renown at midcentury and remained sought after by major museums and galleries worldwide for more than five decades. Her work has been exhibited at, among other places, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the British Museum; and the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo. Private collectors include the Japanese imperial family. Writing about a 1998 exhibition of Ms. Shinoda’s work at a London gallery, the British newspaper The Independent called it “elegant, minimal and very, very composed,” adding, “Her roots as a calligrapher are clear, as are her connections with American art of the 1950s, but she is quite obviously a major artist in her own right.” As a painter, Ms. Shinoda worked primarily in sumi ink, a solid form of ink, made from soot pressed into sticks, that has been used in Asia for centuries. Rubbed on a wet stone to release their pigment, the sticks yield a subtle ink that, because it is quickly imbibed by paper, is strikingly ephemeral. The sumi artist must make each brush stroke with all due deliberation, as the nature of the medium precludes the possibility of reworking even a single line. “The color of the ink which is produced by this method is a very delicate one,” Ms. Shinoda told The Business Times of Singapore in 2014. “It is thus necessary to finish one’s work very quickly. So the composition must be determined in my mind before I pick up the brush. Then, as they say, the painting just falls off the brush.” Ms. Shinoda painted almost entirely in gradations of black, with occasional sepias and filmy blues. The ink sticks she used had been made for the great sumi artists of the past, some as long as 500 years ago. Her line — fluid, elegant, impeccably placed — owed much to calligraphy. She had been rigorously trained in that discipline from the time she was a child, but she had begun to push against its confines when she was still very young. Deeply influenced by American Abstract Expressionists like Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell, whose work she encountered when she lived in New York in the late 1950s, Ms. Shinoda shunned representation. “If I have a definite idea, why paint it?,” she asked in an interview with United Press International in 1980. “It’s already understood and accepted. A stand of bamboo is more beautiful than a painting could be. Mount Fuji is more striking than any possible imitation.” Spare and quietly powerful, making abundant use of white space, Ms. Shinoda’s paintings are done on traditional Chinese and Japanese papers, or on backgrounds of gold, silver or platinum leaf. Often asymmetrical, they can overlay a stark geometric shape with the barest calligraphic strokes. The combined effect appears to catch and hold something evanescent — “as elusive as the memory of a pleasant scent or the movement of wind,” as she said in a 1996 interview. Ms. Shinoda’s work also included lithographs; three-dimensional pieces of wood and other materials; and murals in public spaces, including a series made for the Zojoji Temple in Tokyo. The fifth of seven children of a prosperous family, Ms. Shinoda was born on March 28, 1913, in Dalian, in Manchuria, where her father, Raijiro, managed a tobacco plant. Her mother, Joko, was a homemaker. The family returned to Japan when she was a baby, settling in Gifu, midway between Kyoto and Tokyo. One of her father’s uncles, a sculptor and calligrapher, had been an official seal carver to the Meiji emperor. He conveyed his love of art and poetry to Toko’s father, who in turn passed it to Toko. “My upbringing was a very traditional one, with relatives living with my parents,” she said in the U.P.I. interview. “In a scholarly atmosphere, I grew up knowing I wanted to make these things, to be an artist.” She began studying calligraphy at 6, learning, hour by hour, impeccable mastery over line. But by the time she was a teenager, she had begun to seek an artistic outlet that she felt calligraphy, with its centuries-old conventions, could not afford. “I got tired of it and decided to try my own style,” Ms. Shinoda told Time magazine in 1983. “My father always scolded me for being naughty and departing from the traditional way, but I had to do it.” Moving to Tokyo as a young adult, Ms. Shinoda became celebrated throughout Japan as one of the country’s finest living calligraphers, at the time a signal honor for a woman. She had her first solo show in 1940, at a Tokyo gallery. During World War II, when she forsook the city for the countryside near Mount Fuji, she earned her living as a calligrapher, but by the mid-1940s she had started experimenting with abstraction. In 1954 she began to achieve renown outside Japan with her inclusion in an exhibition of Japanese calligraphy at MoMA. In 1956, she traveled to New York. At the time, unmarried Japanese women could obtain only three-month visas for travel abroad, but through zealous renewals, Ms. Shinoda managed to remain for two years. She met many of the titans of Abstract Expressionism there, and she became captivated by their work. “When I was in New York in the ’50s, I was often included in activities with those artists, people like Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Motherwell and so forth,” she said in a 1998 interview with The Business Times. “They were very generous people, and I was often invited to visit their studios, where we would share ideas and opinions on our work. It was a great experience being together with people who shared common feelings.” During this period, Ms. Shinoda’s work was sold in the United States by Betty Parsons, the New York dealer who represented Pollock, Rothko and many of their contemporaries. Returning to Japan, Ms. Shinoda began to fuse calligraphy and the Expressionist aesthetic in earnest. The result was, in the words of The Plain Dealer of Cleveland in 1997, “an art of elegant simplicity and high drama.” Among Ms. Shinoda’s many honors, she was depicted, in 2016, on a Japanese postage stamp. She is the only Japanese artist to be so honored during her lifetime. No immediate family members survive. When she was quite young and determined to pursue a life making art, Ms. Shinoda made the decision to forgo the path that seemed foreordained for women of her generation. “I never married and have no children,” she told The Japan Times in 2017. “And I suppose that it sounds strange to think that my paintings are in place of them — of course they are not the same thing at all. But I do say, when paintings that I have made years ago are brought back into my consciousness, it seems like an old friend, or even a part of me, has come back to see me.” Works of a Woman's Hand Toko Shinoda bases new abstractions on ancient calligraphy Down a winding side street in the Aoyama district, western Tokyo. into a chunky white apartment building, then up in an elevator small enough to make a handful of Western passengers friends or enemies for life. At the end of a hall on the fourth floor, to the right, stands a plain brown door. To be admitted is to go through the looking glass. Sayonara today. Hello (Konichiwa) yesterday and tomorrow. Toko Shinoda, 70, lives and works here. She can be, when she chooses, on e of Japans foremost calligraphers, master of an intricate manner of writing that traces its lines back some 3,000 years to ancient China. She is also an avant-garde artist of international renown, whose abstract paintings and lithographs rest in museums around the world. These diverse talents do not seem to belong in the same epoch. Yet they have somehow converged in this diminutive woman who appears in her tiny foyer, offering slippers and ritual bows of greeting. She looks like someone too proper to chip a teacup, never mind revolutionize an old and hallowed art form She wears a blue and white kimono of her own design. Its patterns, she explains, are from Edo, meaning the period of the Tokugawa shoguns, before her city was renamed Tokyo in 1868. Her black hair is pulled back from her face, which is virtually free of lines and wrinkles. except for the gold-rimmed spectacles perched low on her nose (this visionary is apparently nearsighted). Shinoda could have stepped directly from a 19th century Meji print. Her surroundings convey a similar sense of old aesthetics, a retreat in the midst of a modern, frenetic city. The noise of the heavy traffic on a nearby elevated highway sounds at this height like distant surf. delicate bamboo shades filter the daylight. The color arrangement is restful: low ceilings of exposed wood, off-white walls, pastel rugs of blue, green and gray. It all feels so quintessentially Japanese that Shinoda’s opening remarks come as a surprise. She points out (through a translator) that she was not born in Japan at all but in Darien, Manchuria. Her father had been posted there to manage a tobacco company under the aegis of the occupying Japanese forces, which seized the region from Russia in 1905. She says,”People born in foreign places are very free in their thinking, not restricted” But since her family went back to Japan in 1915, when she was two, she could hardly remember much about a liberated childhood? She answers,”I think that if my mother had remained in Japan, she would have been an ordinary Japanese housewife. Going to Manchuria, she was able to assert her own personality, and that left its mark on me.” Evidently so. She wears her obi low on the hips, masculine style. The Porcelain aloofness she displays in photographs shatters in person. Her speech is forceful, her expression animated and her laugh both throaty and infectious. The hand she brings to her mouth to cover her amusement (a traditional female gesture of modesty) does not stand a chance. Her father also made a strong impression on the fifth of his seven children:”He came from a very old family, and he was quite strict in some ways and quite liberal in others.” He owned one of the first three bicycles ever imported to Japan and tinkered with it constantly He also decided that his little daughter would undergo rigorous training in a procrustean antiquity. “I was forced to study from age six on to learn calligraphy,” Shinoda says, The young girl dutifully memorized and copied the accepted models. In one sense, her father had pushed her in a promising direction, one of the few professional fields in Japan open to females. Included among the ancient terms that had evolved around calligraphy was onnade, or woman's writing. Heresy lay ahead. By the time she was 15, she had already been through nine years of intensive discipline, “I got tired of it and decided to try my own style. My father always scolded me for being naughty and departing from the traditional way, but I had to do it.” She produces a brush and a piece of paper to demonstrate the nature of her rebellion. “This is kawa, the accepted calligraphic character for river,” she says, deftly sketching three short vertical strokes. “But I wanted to use more than three lines to show the force of the river.” Her brush flows across the white page, leaving a recognizable river behind, also flowing.” The simple kawa in the traditional language was not enough for me. I wanted to find a new symbol to express the word river.” Her conviction grew that ink could convey the ineffable, the feeling, "as she says, of wind blowing softly.” Another demonstration. She goes to the sliding wooden door of an anteroom and disappears in back of it; the only trace of her is a triangular swatch of the right sleeve of her kimono, which she has arranged for that purpose. A realization dawns. The task of this artist is to paint that three sided pattern so that the invisible woman attached to it will be manifest to all viewers. Gen, painted especially for TIME, shows Shinoda’s theory in practice. She calls the work “my conception of Japan in visual terms.” A dark swath at the left, punctuated by red, stands for history. In the center sits a Chinese character gen, which means in the present or actuality. A blank pattern at the right suggests an unknown future. Once out of school, Shinoda struck off on a path significantly at odds with her culture. She recognized marriage for what it could mean to her career (“a restriction”) and decided against it. There was a living to be earned by doing traditional calligraphy:she used her free time to paint her variations. In 1940 a Tokyo gallery exhibited her work. (Fourteen years would pass before she got a second show.)War came, and bad times for nearly everyone, including the aspiring artist , who retreated to a rural area near Mount Fuji and traded her kimonos for eggs. In 1954 Shinoda’s work was included in a group exhibit at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art. Two years later, she overcame bureaucratic obstacles to visit the U.S.. Unmarried Japanese women are allowed visas for only three months, patiently applying for two-month extensions, one at a time, Shinoda managed to travel the country for two years. She pulls out a scrapbook from this period. Leafing through it, she suddenly raises a hand and touches her cheek:”How young I looked!” An inspection is called for. The woman in the grainy, yellowing newspaper photograph could easily be the on e sitting in this room. Told this, she nods and smiles. No translation necessary. Her sojourn in the U.S. proved to be crucial in the recognition and development of Shinoda’s art. Celebrities such as actor Charles Laughton and John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet bought her paintings and spread the good word. She also saw the works of the abstract expressionists, then the rage of the New York City art world, and realized that these Western artists, coming out of an utterly different tradition, were struggling toward the same goal that had obsessed her. Once she was back home, her work slowly made her famous. Although Shinoda has used many materials (fabric, stainless steel, ceramics, cement), brush and ink remain her principal means of expression. She had said, “As long as I am devoted to the creation of new forms, I can draw even with muddy water.” Fortunately, she does not have to. She points with evident pride to her ink stone, a velvety black slab of rock, with an indented basin, that is roughly a foot across and two feet long. It is more than 300 years old. Every working morning, Shinoda pours about a third of a pint of water into it, then selects an ink stick from her extensive collection, some dating back to China’s Ming dynasty. Pressing stick against stone, she begins rubbing. Slowly, the dried ink dissolves in the water and becomes ready for the brush. So two batches of sumi (India ink) are exactly alike; something old, something new. She uses color sparingly. Her clear preference is black and all its gradations. “In some paintings, sumi expresses blue better than blue.” It is time to go downstairs to the living quarters. A niece, divorced and her daughter,10,stay here with Shinoda; the artist who felt forced to renounce family and domesticity at the outset of her career seems welcome to it now. Sake is offered, poured into small cedar boxes and happily accepted. Hold carefully. Drink from a corner. Ambrosial. And just right for the surroundings and the hostess. A conservative renegade; a liberal traditionalist; a woman steeped in the male-dominated conventions that she consistently opposed. Her trail blazing accomplishments are analogous to Picasso’s. When she says goodbye, she bows. --by Paul Gray...
Category

Contemporary 1990s Prints and Multiples

Materials

Lithograph

Bearden 'School Bell Time' Serigraph African American
Located in Brooklyn, NY
This reproduction of Romare Bearden's School Bell Time has been officially approved and numbered by the Bearden Foundation, with the foundation's seal printed in the lower right-hand...
Category

Contemporary 1990s Prints and Multiples

Materials

Screen

Southern Cross Road Grocery Store and Gas Pump 1994
Located in Brooklyn, NY
Paper Size: 31.5 x 23.75 inches ( 80.01 x 60.325 cm ) Image Size: 31.5 x 23.75 inches ( 80.01 x 60.325 cm ) Framed: No Condition: A-: Near Mint, very light signs of handling ...
Category

1990s Prints and Multiples

Materials

Offset

Woodcut Heart 1993 Signed Limited Edition Lithograph
Located in Rochester Hills, MI
Artist: Jim Dine Title: Woodcut Heart. 1993 Image Size: 15 1/8 x 13 1/8 inches Paper size: 23 × 17½ inches Carrier: Mohawk Superfine Cover Medium: Woodcut Proiect Began:January 26, 1...
Category

1990s Prints and Multiples

Materials

Lithograph

Viusal Poetics
Located in Washington, DC
Artist: Donald Sultan Title: Visual Poetics Portfolio: Visual Poetics Medium: Screenprint Date: 1998 Edition: 174/395 Frame Size: 23" x 23" Sheet Size: 16 1/4" x 16 1/4" Signature: H...
Category

Contemporary 1990s Prints and Multiples

Materials

Screen

"Texas Ranger" Contemporary Blue Dog in Cowboy Hat Silkscreen Ed. 391/800
Located in Houston, TX
Contemporary colorful silkscreen by Louisiana born artist George Rodrigue. The work features Rodrigue's iconic blue dog character dressed in a yellow bandana and a cowboy hat set aga...
Category

Contemporary 1990s Prints and Multiples

Materials

Screen

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