Late 20th Century Prints and Multiples

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...

"Homage to the Square - Portfolio 2, Folder 14, Image 1" from the portfolio “Formulation: Articulation” created by Josef Albers in 1972. This monumental series consists of 127 origin...

Walasse Ting Grasshoppers - 1981 Print - Lithograph on Arches Archival Paper   22'' x 30'' Edition: Signed in pencil and marked 170/200 Walasse Ting (DING XIONGQUAN) (October 13, 19...

Artist: Andy Warhol Title: Wayne Gretzky #99 Medium: Screenprint on Lenox Museum Board Date: 1984 Edition: AP 32/50 Sheet Size: 40" x 32" Signature: Hand signed by Andy Warhol and Wa...

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...

Karel Appel Sitting in a Landscape Animals and monsters series Year 1979 Print - Lithograph 22.0'' x 30'' inches Edition: signed in pencil and marked 160/160 Karel Appel is one of t...

This exquisite lithograph by Joan Miro (1893–1983), titled La Melodie acide (The Acid Melody), from the folio 14 original lithographs by Joan Miro "La Melodie acide" (The Acid Melody...

Artist Mati (Abdul) Klarwein Title: The Good Life Year: 1978 Print - Lithograph Paper Size 23" x 23½" inches Edition: signed in pencil and marked 3/300 Hand embellished by the artis...

Pablo PICASSO (1881-1973) Series 156, Painter Drawing is Model (plate 16), 1978 Original etching (Crommelynck workshop) Signed with stamp Justified HC B/C On vellum, 63 x 76 cm (c. ...

Kandinsky at Galerie Karl Flinker - 1977 Exhibition Poster - in Ink on Paper Poster with a reproduction of "Merry Structure" by Vassily Kandinsky (Russian, 1866-1944). This posted i...

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...

Artist: John Kacere (1930-1999) Title: Jill Year: 1979 Edition: 166/300, plus proofs Medium: Lithograph on Waterford paper Size: 29.75 x 22.25 inches Inscription: Signed by the artis...

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...

Poster advertising the National Gallery of Art, Washington, featuring Mark Rothko’s Blue, Green and Brown. Presented in a refined black wood frame with a 3/4-inch front profile and a...

Joan Miro was a Spanish Surrealist artist, world-renowned for his unique art style that blended surrealist fantasy and modern life. This lithograph is part of the series "Lithographs...

This original exhibition poster for Romare Bearden's work titled The Woodshed refers to a piece he created in 1967. The Woodshed depicts a scene filled with rich, layered imagery tha...

Parapliers the Willow Dipped by Van Vliet, better known as Captain Beefheart from The Mothers of Invention, is part of the Collection of American Masters at the Nordfallen Museum in ...

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

This exquisite lithograph after Alberto Magnelli (1888–1971), titled Hommage a San Lazzaro (Homage to San Lazzaro), from the album San Lazzaro et ses Amis, Hommage au fondateur de la...

ARTIST: Salvador Dali TITLE: Memories of Surrealism The Eye of Surrealist Time MEDIUM: Etching on Japon Paper SIGNED: Hand Signed by Salvador Dali EDITION NUMBER: A XXX/XL MEASU...

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...

This original poster by Jean-Michel Folon is part of the Artists for Amnesty series, a collection of art posters created by 15 world-renowned artists to highlight Amnesty Internation...

This vintage blank notecard, published by te Neues Publishing, features artwork by Jean-Michel Basquiat and is a rare example of his painting titled "Hardware Store." Elegantly frame...

ROMARE BEARDEN 1970-1980 The Brooklyn Museum, September 26-November 29, 1981 Vintage 1981 Exhibition Poster "Jamming At The Savoy" (image from original 14" x 18" collage on board by ...

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...

This poster reproduction of Alexei Jawlensky’s Crown of Thorns captures the artist’s bold Expressionist style and spiritual depth. The subject’s mask-like face, rendered in thick bru...

Artist: Sam Francis (American, 1923-1994) Title: "Untitled (SF-348) (Fresh Air School)" Portfolio: Fresh Air School *Unsigned edition Year: 1972 Medium: Original Lithograph on white ...

Willem de Kooning Annual Spring Invitational Art Exhibition (limited edition, hand signed & numbered by Willem de Kooning), 1979 Offset lithograph (hand signed and numbered) Sign...

Vintage, 1984, James Goodwin New York Gallery exhibition poster; signed, lower right, in pencil, 'R. Lichtenstein' for Roy Lichtenstein (American, 1923-1997) and accompanied by certi...

Raymond PEYNET Astrology - Zodiac : Libra, 1979 Original etching Handsigned in pencil Numbered /220 On Arches vellum 76x56 cm (c. 30 x 22 inches) This etching is authentified by the...

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...

Color screen print on Becket High White wove paper, realized by Warhol in 1972. Verso hand signed by the Artist in pen, as well as with the stamp numbering and the stamp "Copyright ...

Joan Miro (Spain, 1893-1983) 'Joan Miró. Fotoscop', 1974 lithograph on paper 12.9 x 20.5 in. (32.7 x 52 cm.). The size of the stamp paper has been slightly modified. Its original dim...

Framed in an ornate wood frame with a front profile of 1 1/2 inches and a side profile of 1 inch, this piece is elegantly seated behind a 4-inch mat. This is Edition #669/900, publis...

Artist: Salvador Dali (1904-1989) Title: Téléphone-homard cybernétique (Michler/Löpsinger 822-831; Field 75-13), Imaginations et Objets du Futur (Cybernetic lobster phone, Imaginatio...

This artwork titled " Paris, Place Du Tertre" c.1980, is an original colors lithograph on Arches paper by French artist Urbain Huchet, 1930-2014. It is hand signed and numbered 183/2...

Paper Size: 25.25 x 15 inches ( 64.135 x 38.1 cm ) Image Size: 19.5 x 15.5 inches ( 49.53 x 39.37 cm ) Framed: No Condition: D: Heavy signs of wear, Torn, Damaged. SOLD AS IS. Pri...

Hand signed and numbered. Edition of 150 prints. Excellent condition.

This reproduction of “Superman” by Mel Ramos, part of the De Young Museum’s permanent collection, showcases the artist’s signature Pop Art style, blending comic book aesthetics with ...

Paper Size: 35.5 x 27.5 inches ( 90.17 x 69.85 cm ) Image Size: 24 x 22.5 inches ( 60.96 x 57.15 cm ) Framed: No Condition: A: Mint Additional Details: Rare exhibition poster from t...

This vibrant mid-century travel poster advertising Aeroflot, the official Soviet airline, offers a cheerful invitation to visit Moscow, the beating heart of the USSR. Created around 1970, the composition reflects the optimism and modernism of Soviet graphic design during the Cold War era, when air travel was increasingly used as a symbol of national pride and progress. At the center of the poster is a stylized female figure in traditional Russian dress...

This poster features Andrew Wyeth's *Karl's Room*, an intimate and evocative work that captures the quiet, poignant atmosphere of a personal space. Presented in collaboration with th...

Serge LASSUS (1933-) Thalasso at Saint Malo, 1983 Original Lithograph Handsigned in pencil Numbered / 250 (the number you can see can be different) On Vellum 76 x 56 cm (c. 30 x 22 ...

Artist: Salvador Dali (1904-1989) Title: Antiombrelle à atomiseurs de liquides (Michler/Löpsinger 822-831; Field 75-13), Imaginations et Objets du Futur (Liquid atomizer anti-shade, ...

Biagio Civale, Italian/American (1936 - ) - Nude Woman, Medium: Screenprint, Signed and Numbered in Pencil, Edition: 65/100, Size: 19 x 13 in. (48.26 x 33.02 cm)

Colorful dots, lines and squares in bright blue, pink, green, lilac and yellow in wood grain form a totem against a lavender purple background. This jubilant take on Cubism features ...

Hank Laventhol, American (1927 - 2001) - Plum, Year: Circa 1980, Medium: Aquatint Etching, signed and numbered in pencil, Edition: 300, AP XXXV, Image Size: 20 x 15.5 inches, Siz...

ANDRE LANSKOY (French / Russian 1902-1976) 1966 Original color lithograph on watermarked Arches paper The title sheet was hand signed in pencil on the justification page by the arti...

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...

Alexander CALDER Les Travestis du Reel, 1979 Original vintage lithograph poster Printed in Atelier Arts-Litho Printed signature in the plate 82 x 57 cm (c. 32.2 x 22.4 in) Excelle...

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...

Medium: original lithograph. Printed in 1970 and published by Art In America. Size: 14 1/2 x 11 1/2 inches (365 x 293 mm). This lithograph was published as a folded sheet with a hori...

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, ...

This is a vintage exhibition poster for an Andy Warhol exhibition held at The Tate Gallery in London from February 17 to March 28, 1971. The poster features Andy Warhol's iconic ima...

Lithograph, 1970 Edition : 85/90 Publisher : Atelier Clot, Paris Printer : Atelier Clot, Paris 56.00 cm. x 43.00 cm. 22.05 in. x 16.93 in. (paper) 54.00 cm. x 41.00 cm. 21.26 in. x...

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...

This striking vintage poster, titled Verticality, is a classic example of Elba Alvarez's distinctive style that gained her prominence as one of the top artists of the 1990s. Known fo...

This exquisite lithograph by Joan Miro (1893–1983), titled Sans titre (Untitled), from the folio Maravillas con variaciones acrosticas en el Jardin de Miro (Marvels with Acrostic Var...

Jim Dine, 1985 Color Lithograph on wove paper with deckled edges 38 1/2 × 27 1/2 inches Edition of 300 Unframed Signed in plate, unnumbered; bears museum copyright on the lower front...

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...