20th Century Prints and Multiples

Medium: collotype (after the Miro lithograph). Printed in 1947 in an edition of 1500 by Meriden Gravure and published by Curt Valentin for "The Prints of Joan Miro" portfolio. Size: ...

Michel Delacroix lithograph signed and numbered “Paris scene”. In good condition measures 40x33

An original Joan Miro lithograph on BFK Rives with signature in the plate (printing). Printed and published by Arte Adrien Maeght, Paris. Nicely framed. Artist: Joan Miro, Spanish...

This is an original exhibition poster for the show titled Observatory Earthwork – Project for Sonsbeek 71, Arnhem, held at the Tate Gallery from April 28 to June 6, 1971. The poster ...

Lithograph, stencil on vélin paper. Paper Size: 12.4 x 9.65 inches. Inscription: Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued. Notes: From the album, XXe siècle, Nouvelle série N° 7 (double) J...

Medium: original lithograph. Printed in Paris in 1967 by Clot, Bramsen et Georges and issued in an edition of 2500 for "Les Temps Situationistes" (The Situationist Times -- a radical...

Note: This is a unique text variant which Albers titled in pencil "Blue Reminder" instead of "Blue Reminding". The authenticity of this work has been kindly confirmed by Brenda Danil...

Silkscreen in eleven colors on vélin paper. Paper Size: 12.81 x 9.375 inches. Inscription: Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued. Notes: From the album, Hiroshima, 1983. Published by Th...

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...

Le chapeau épinglé (La fille de Berthe Morisot et sa cousine) 3e planche. Etching realized by Renoir in 1894. Image dimension 11.5x8 cm. / sheet dimension 33.2x15.1 cm. The final s...

This limited edition color lithograph, titled The Little Prince and His Fox, is a beautiful reproduction from the beloved book Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. This print...

Robert Indiana LOVE (the original), Sheehan, 39, 1967 Silkscreen on Buckeye Cover paper Artists copyright stamp on the back Edition of 2275 33 3/4 × 33 3/4 inches Unframed Artists co...

Joan Miró (Spain, 1893-1983) 'Sala Gaspar, Metras and Belarte Gallery (avant la lettre)', 1964 Lithograph on Paper (Cahiers d'Art magazine Nº4-5) Original lithograph without signing ...

This rare lithographic poster is steeped in history. in 1949, author Louis Aragon (1897-1982) chose Picasso's lithograph "La Colombe" (The Dove) for posters commemorating the first p...

The 1968 original lithograph by Alexander Calder for the XXIVe Salon de Mai is a striking embodiment of the artist’s unmistakable style—an interplay of bold color, rhythmic form, and...

Salvador DALI (1904-1969) Casanova : Aphrodisiac Oyster, 1967 Original etching Signed in the plate On vellum Rives 38 x 28 cm (c. 14.9 x 11 inch) REFERENCES : - Catalog raisonné Fi...

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) - Mother and Child Lithograph from 1946. Dimensions of work: 48 x 32.8 cm Publisher: Pantheon. The work is in Excellent condition. Fast and secure shi...

This original museum poster titled Two Candles was created for the Fast Forward exhibition at the Dallas Art Museum in 1995. The artwork featur...

Edward Landon, 'The French Farm', color serigraph, 1942, Ryan 86. Signed, titled, and annotated 'Edition 50' in pencil. A superb impression, with fresh colors, on cream, wove paper; ...

Luigi Kasimir, 'Coenties Slip', color etching with aquatint, 1927, edition 100. Signed in pencil. Dated in the plate, lower right. Annotated 'NEW YORK HANOVER SQUARE (COENTIES SLIP)'...

Medium: Lithograph on vélin paper Year: 1972 Paper Size: 20.5 X 26.4 inches Catalogue raisonné reference: Cramer, illustration 155 Inscription: Inscription: Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued Notes: From the folio, Pablo Picasso, La Chute D'Icare, Décoration du Foyer des Délégués Palais de l'UNESCO à Paris, Suite d'études préparatoires en noir et en couleurs réalisées du 6 décembre 1957 au 29 janvier 1958, 1972. Published by Albert Skira, Éditeur, Genève; printed by Roto-Sadag S.A. Genève, December 20, 1972. Excerpted from the folio (translated from French), This album contains the series of preparatory tests in black and VII color studies, reproduced, made by Pablo Picasso for the decoration of the home of the delegates at the Palais de l'UNESCO in Paris, was completed to print on December 20, 1972 on the presses of Imprimeries Roto-Sadag S.A. and Atar S.A. in Genève. The edition of this album is as follows: CXXV examples numbered from I to CXXV, XXV examples, out of commerce, numbered H.C. I to XXV, reserved for the artist and the publisher. Each of these albums contains an etching by Pablo Picasso, signed and numbered...

Original, Linen backed New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival poster from 1983. A fun image with a crawfish holding an umbrella with streamers. 1983 JAZZ & HERITAGE FESTIVAL PRO-MO ...

Lithograph, 1959 Handsigned by the artist in pencil and numbered 234/275 Publisher : Maeght (Paris) Catalog : [Maeght 1036] 20.00 cm. x 30.50 cm. 7.87 in. x 12.01 in. (paper) 10.00 ...

Pablo PICASSO (1881-1973) Comédie Humaine, Circus clown and Ballerina, 1954 Original lithograph (Mourlot workshop) Unsigned On paper 26 .5 x 35.5 cm (c. 10,2 x 13.7 in) INFORMATION : Created for portfolio Verve n°29-30 "La comédie humaine, suite de 180 dessins de Picasso...

Vintage poster realized after Piero Dorazio in occasion of the Winter Olympic Games in Sarajevo in 1984. Offset print. Good condition.

Pablo PICASSO (1881-1973) Diurnes: The Goat in a Mountain, 1962 Original collotype and stencil (Jacomet workshop) Unsigned Limited to 1000 copy On paper 40 x 30 cm (c. 15,7 x 11,8 ...

Elizabeth Catlett Blues, 1983 Color offset lithograph and lithograph on cream wove paper Signed, titled, dated and numbered (126/130) in graphite pencil on the front Printed and publ...

"Ahava"—which means "LOVE" in Hebrew—is a vintage original postcard from the Flowers portfolio, created by Robert Indiana in 1995. The term "Ahava" translates to "LOVE" in Hebrew, re...

Artist: Alexander Calder (1898-1976) Title: "Convection" (from the Braniff International Airways Flying Colors Collection) Year: 1974-75 Medium: Lithographs on Arches paper Size: 20 ...

Roy Lichtenstein (after) Eddie Diptych: Selections from the Ileana and Michael Sonnabend Collection, Princeton University Art Museum poster, 1985 Off...

Untitled, Sarayevo Winter Olympic Games 1984, is an etching with aquatint and lithograph in colors realized by Cy Twombly on the occasion of the Winter Olympics Games 1984 in Sarajev...

Lithograph on vélin paper. Inscription: signed in the plate and unnumbered, as issued. Good condition. Notes: from the album, Les Cavaliers d'Ombre; Sous le Manteau de Feu, 1956. Pub...

Paper Size: 22 x 28 inches ( 55.88 x 71.12 cm ) Image Size: 22 x 28 inches ( 55.88 x 71.12 cm ) Framed: No Condition: A-: Near Mint, very light signs of handling Additional Det...

Joan MIRO Composition with Stars Original lithograph (printed in Mourlot workshop) Printed signature in the plate On Arches vellum 25 x 19 cm (c. 10 x 8 inch) Edited by Mourlot in 1...

LADIES WITH PARROTS is an original hand drawn lithograph printed using hand lithography techniques on archival Somerset printmaking paper, 100% acid free by the renowned Chinese born...

'New York, Central Park', etching, edition 40, c. 1930. Signed in pencil. Titled and numbered '14/40' on the bottom sheet edge, in pencil. Signed in the plate, lower left. A superb, ...

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) - La Comédie Humaine Lithograph from 1954. Dimensions of work: 35.5 x 26.5 cm Publisher: Tériade, Paris. The work is in Excellent condition. Fast and s...

Lithograph on vélin paper. Paper Size: 12.4 x 9.65 inches. Inscription: Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued. Catalogue raisonné references: Léger, Fernand, and Lawrence Saphire. Ferna...

Medium: original lithograph. Printed by Mourlot in 1975 and published for the "Miro Lithographe II" catalogue raisonné. Size: 12 1/2 x 19 1/2 inches (320 x 490 mm). Not signed. Cond...

Marc Chagall (1887-1985) - Maternity and Centaur Original Lithograph from 1957. Dimensions of work: 23 x 20 cm. Publisher: Maeght Éditeur, Paris. The work is in Excellent condition.

Medium: original etching and aquatint. Signed in pencil and numbered 68 of 80. Printed in 1947 on Velin de Hollande paper and published in New York by the Quadrangle Press as a speci...

La pointe sèche etching on vélin de Rives filigrané à notre nom paper. Paper size: 9.5 x 7.5 inches; image size: 6.5 x 4.5 inches. Inscription: unsigned and unnumbered, as issued. No...

Original off set lithograph in black and white with hand colored tinting by the artist. Artist signed, titled and numbered by the artist 47/250. Condition is excellent. Under glass...

Paper Size: 15 x 11.5 inches ( 38.1 x 29.21 cm ) Image Size: 15 x 11.5 inches ( 38.1 x 29.21 cm ) Framed: No Condition: A-: Near Mint, very light signs of handling Supplemental Condi...

Medium: offset lithograph (after the watercolor). Printed in 1970 on velin bouffant paper from the Papeteries Casteljoux and published in France by Edito-Service Geneve. This reprodu...

Roy Lichtenstein, 'Paper Plate', serigraph, 1969, edition unknown, Corlett III.45. Printed in dark blue ink verso, 'Roy Lichtenstein © On 1st Inc. 1969'. A fine impression, on white paperboard pressure formed into a 3-dimensional plate; age toning verso, otherwise in very good condition. Published by Bert Stern, New York. Image size 10 1/4 inch diameter, 1-inch depth. Archivally sleeved, unmounted, unframed. Carefully protected for shipping. Literature: John Russell. 'Art: Time for Old-Master Prints', New York Times (July 27, 1979), p. C16. Jan Howard. 'Reflections on 'The Prints of Roy Lichtenstein', Print Collector's Newsletter 26 (July–August 1995), p. 82. Mark M. Johnson. 'The Great American Pop Art Store: Multiples of the '60s', Art & Activities 123 (June–Summer 1998), ill. p. 37 (color). Mary Lee Corlett. 'The Prints of Roy Lichtenstein: A Catalogue Raisonné', New York, 2002, p. 286, no. III.45. Susan Dackerman, ed., 'Corita Kent and the Language of Pop', exhibition catalog, Harvard Art...

This print, Nude Reading from Roy Lichtenstein’s Nudes portfolio, showcases his signature fusion of Pop Art and comic-book aesthetics. Published by Tyler Graphics, the piece is part ...

Original Swedish movie poster, The Sea Master. (Herre på Skutan).. Archival linen backed in good condition, ready to frame. The USA silent movie was produced in 1917 but released in ...

Boris Lovet-Lorski, 'Untitled (Black Woman Crouching)', lithograph, edition 250, 1929. Signed and numbered 16 in pencil. Number 16 of Volume 2, a series of...

Vintage French fashion poster, original lithograph, by Jean Choiselat, (1947). Take a step back to the 1940s to immerse yourself in the surprising work ...

This vintage postcard, estate authorized and produced in 1998, features an iconic design by Keith Haring, showcasing his signature style and playful themes. Titled Fold 'n Please Car...

Etching and aquatint on Japan paper, realized in 1972. Printed and published by Georges Visat, Paris. Edition of 100, numbered 99/100 and hand signed in pencil.

Héliogravure on Papeterie de Mandeure vélin paper. Paper Size: 16.93 x 11.22 inches. Inscription: Signed in the plate and unnumbered, as issued. Catalogue raisonné references: Dalí, ...

Marc Chagall (1887-1985) Circus: Lovers with a Rooster and a Donkey (Pirouette), 1961 Original lithograph (Mourlot workshop) Signed and numbered ‘III/XX’ in pencil. There was an edition of 50 in Arabic numerals On Arches vellum, 76 x 58 cm REFERENCE: Mourlot Catalogue Raisonné...

David Hockney, Bridget Riley, Joe Tilson, Howard Hodgkin, Peter Blake + 99 artists Visual Aid for Band Aid - designed, and HAND SIGNED and annotated by 104 renowned artists, with official signed COA, 1985 Large olor silkscreen on velin Arches 300 gsm paper with publishers' blind stamp and COA Signed and annotated in various inks and pencil by all 104 artists listed in the official publishers' COA affixed to the back of the frame; numbered 215/500 Publisher Coriander Studio, United Kingdom Frame included: Floated and framed in a wood frame under UV acrylic glazing Measurements: Framed: 59.5 inches (vertical) by 39 inches (horizontal) by .75 inches (depth) Artwork: 48 inches (vertical) by 36 inches (horizontal) Some of the 104 renowned visual artists who signed and annotated this print in pencil are: Bridget Riley, David Hockney, Peter Blake, Allen Jones, Eduardo Paolozzi, Elisabeth Frink, R.B. Kitaj, Richard Hamilton, Howard Hodgkin, Joe Tilson, Patrick Heron, Paula Rego, Terry Frost, Patrick Caulfield, Craigie Aitchison. Gillian Ayres, Maggi Hambling, Michael Craig-Martin, Frank Bowling, Humphrey Ocean...

FRANCES H. GEARHART APRIL c. 1928-30 Color block print, signed and titled in pencil. Image 9" x 5". sheet 11 1/8 x 7 1/8. Very good impression. The usual tack holes at the right she...

Lithograph on vélin d’Arches paper. Signed in the plate and unnumbered, as issued. Good condition. Notes: From the folio, Picasso au baiser d'Avignon, douze dessins, lavis, aquarelle...

Paper Size: 21.25 x 36.75 inches ( 53.975 x 93.345 cm ) Image Size: 14 x 36.75 inches ( 35.56 x 93.345 cm ) Framed: No Condition: C: Several Signs of use and handling, some visible m...

"Nu Assis I" is a large serigraph reproduction by Henri Matisse, utilizing his renowned cut-out technique. Released by Silvio Zamorani Editore in Italy, this print has the approval o...

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...