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Portrait Prints For Sale
"Phantom of the Opera, Journey" Broadway Musica lAndrew Lloyd Webber Tony Awards
Located in New York, NY
"Phantom of the Opera, Journey" Broadway Musica lAndrew Lloyd Webber Tony Awards
Al Hirschfeld (American, 1903-2003). A signed and numbered limited edition lithograph on rag paper. "The Journey" a caricature depiction from "The Phantom of the Opera...
Category
1980s Performance Portrait Prints
Materials
Lithograph
Henri Matisse, Themes et Variations
Located in Boston, MA
Artist: Matisse, Henri
Title: Themes et Variations
Series: Dessins: Themes et Variations
Date: 1942
Medium: Lithograph
Unframed Dimensions: 9" x 12"
Framed Dimensions: 20.75" ...
Category
1940s Modern Portrait Prints
Materials
Lithograph
Jèsus sera en Agonie jusqu'à la fin du Monde; from Folio Miserere, 1922
Located in Soquel, CA
Jèsus sera en Agonie jusqu'à la fin du Monde; from Folio Miserere, 1922
Aquatint of Jesus' crucifixion by Georges Rouault (French, 1871-1958). Jesus is depicted with his head lowere...
Category
1920s Modern Portrait Prints
Materials
Aquatint
Seamstress, Impressionist Drypoint Etching by Paul César Helleu
Located in Long Island City, NY
Paul César Helleu, French (1859 -1927) - Seamstress, Year: 1892, Medium: Drypoint Etching, Image Size: 7.5 x 5.75 inches, Size: 17.25 x 14.5 in. (43.82 x 36.83 cm), Description: ...
Category
1890s Impressionist Portrait Prints
Materials
Drypoint, Etching
Mirror Images
Located in Kansas City, MO
Roy Lichtenstein
Mirror Images
Offset Lithograph
2000
33.07 x 23.22 inches (84 x 59 cm)
Unsigned as issued
Publisher: VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn - Germany
COA provided
The exhibition in Wo...
Category
1960s Pop Art Portrait Prints
Materials
Lithograph, Offset
My Mother Bridlington, Hand Signed Tate Gallery print, Ed. of 250 w/official COA
Located in New York, NY
David Hockney
My Mother (Bridlington), 1988
Four Color Lithograph on T.H. Saunders Waterford 250 gram paper. Hand signed. Also accompanied by a separate signed Certificate of Authent...
Category
1980s Pop Art Portrait Prints
Materials
Lithograph, Offset
Melancholic Muses II
Located in London, GB
'Melancholic Muses II', one of a poignant set of six signed artist proof lithographs by the celebrated Spanish artist from Barcelona, Vicenç Caraltó (circa 1960s). This collection of...
Category
1960s Modern Portrait Prints
Materials
Lithograph
Original Kosciuszko Pulawski Jedz Mniej vintage World War 1 poster
Located in Spokane, WA
Original WW1 poster: Kosciuszko Pulawski. Walczyli o wolnosc w Ameryce. Czy ty pomozesz Ameryce walczyc o wolnosc w Polsce? They fought for freedom in America. Will you help Ameri...
Category
1910s American Realist Portrait Prints
Materials
Lithograph
UNTITLED (RUNNING SNOOPY)
By KAWS
Located in Aventura, FL
Screen print cutout on Saunders Waterford 425gm HP Hi-White paper. Hand signed, dated and numbered by the artist. Artwork size 9 x 10 inches. Custom framed as pictured. Frame size...
Category
21st Century and Contemporary Street Art Portrait Prints
Materials
Paper, Screen
Man With Sailor Blouse - Stone lithograph - 1965
Located in Paris, IDF
Pablo Picasso (after)
Man With Sailor Blouse (Garçonnet III)
Stone lithograph in colors
Printed signature in the plate
On vellum 38 x 28 cm (c. 15 x 11 ...
Category
1960s Modern Portrait Prints
Materials
Lithograph
Lucille Ball on Silk - Peter Tunney Signed
By Peter Tunney
Located in Austin, TX
Hand-pulled silkscreen with hand coloring on museum board. Signed by artist Peter Tunney.
About the Artist:
Peter Tunney (b.1961) is a legitimate force of nature with boundless cr...
Category
21st Century and Contemporary Contemporary Portrait Prints
Materials
Archival Ink, Digital
'Babylone d'Allemagne' original lithograph poster by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
Located in Milwaukee, WI
'Babylone d'Allemagne' or 'German Babylon' is an original lithograph poster by the lauded artist of the Art Nouveau style Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. This is the second poster that La...
Category
1890s Art Nouveau Portrait Prints
Materials
Paper, Lithograph
Sonic Youth at Frankfurt Music Hall (Signed by Raymond Pettibon and Kim Gordon)
Located in New York, NY
Raymond Pettibon, Kim Gordon
Sonic Youth at Frankfurt Music Hall (Hand Signed by Raymond Pettibon and Kim Gordon), 1990
Offset Lithograph Poster
Boldly signed, and dated 2016 in ink ...
Category
1990s Pop Art Portrait Prints
Materials
Lithograph, Offset, Ink
Ninetta - Etching by Arthure Greuell - Mid-20th century
Located in Roma, IT
Ninetta is an artwork realized by Arthur Greuell (1891-1966) in 1950.
Etching on paper. Hand-signed on the lower right margin. Limited edition n. 25/65 ex.
Good condition on a yell...
Category
Mid-20th Century Modern Portrait Prints
Materials
Etching
lithograph for Florilege des amours de Ronsard
Located in Henderson, NV
Medium: lithograph (after Matisse). Printed in sanguine ink on cream laid paper from the Papeteries Casteljoux and published in Geneva by Edito-Service in 1970. This reproduces one o...
Category
1970s Portrait Prints
Materials
Lithograph
Lithographie III (Duthuit 20), Repli, Gravures de Henri Matisse
Located in Auburn Hills, MI
Lithograph on vélin a la forme des papeteries d'Arches paper. Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued. Good condition. Notes: From the volume, Repli, Gravures de Henri Matisse, 1947. Publ...
Category
1940s Modern Portrait Prints
Materials
Lithograph
"Nocturne at Vence" original lithograph
By Marc Chagall
Located in Henderson, NV
Medium: original lithograph. Printed in Paris in 1963 by the Mourlot Freres atelier. Size: 12 1/2 x 9 1/2 inches (320 x 240 mm). Not signed.
Category
1960s Portrait Prints
Materials
Lithograph
Still Life with Pisanello, Pop Art Screenprint by Josef Levi
By Josef Levi
Located in Long Island City, NY
Josef Levi, American (1938 - ) - Still Life with Pisanello, Year: 1979, Medium: Screenprint on Arches, signed, titled, dated and numbered in pencil, Edition: AP 4/16, Image Size: 1...
Category
1970s Pop Art Portrait Prints
Materials
Screen
Ada 3 - From the Ada Portfolio
By Alex Katz
Located in Fort Lauderdale, FL
Alex Katz (b. 1927)
Ada 3 — From the ADA Portfolio, 2022, (/100)
Silkscreen in colors on Saunders Waterford High White HP 425 gsm paper
54 x 40.50 in
Category
2010s Contemporary Portrait Prints
Materials
Screen
BARELY LEGAL SET
By Banksy
Located in Aventura, FL
Banksy's Barely Legal is a set of six screen prints on paper named after the Barely Legal exhibition held in 2006 in a warehouse in Los Angeles. From the unsigned edition and each numbered 59/500 (there are also 17 artist's proofs). Published by Modern Multiples Fine Art Editions, Los Angeles, with Pictures on Walls and the publisher's blindstamp. Pest Control authentication certificates included.
The Barely Legal Set includes the following:
Grannies (22.05 x 29.92 inches)
Sale Ends (22.05 x 29.92 inches)
Applause (29.92 x 44.89 inches)
Trolleys (22.05 x 29.92 inches)
Festival (22.05 x 29.92 inches)
Morons (22.05 x 29.92 inches)
About the Artist: Banksy (British, born 1974) is a contemporary street artist and activist who, despite his international fame, has maintained an anonymous identity. Aimed as a form of cultural criticism, the artist often targets established social and political agendas with his witty illustrations produced with stencils and spray paint in cities such as New Orleans, New York, and Paris. “The art world is the biggest joke,” he said. “It’s a rest home of the over privileged, the pretentious, and the weak.” Although details of the artist’s life are largely unknown, it is thought that Banksy was born in Bristol, United Kingdom, c. 1974, starting his career as a graffiti artist in the city. Better Out Than In, Banksy’s month-long residency in New York during October 2013, featured a man hawking the artist’s paintings for $60 a piece outside Central Park. In 2015, Banksy opened Dismaland Bemusement Park, a temporary art exhibition that functioned as a theme park. After a 36-day run, its workers and materials were sent to the Calais migrant camp in France to build additional housing. Among the artist's most famous stunts include his shredded painting: When a painting by Banksy was sold at auction for $1.4 million in 2018, a mechanism was triggered to cause the artwork to partially destroy itself, resulting in a new piece titled Love in the Bin (2018). The ongoing question as to who Banksy is continued to reach the headlines when in 2017 Robert Del Naja...
Category
Early 2000s Street Art Portrait Prints
Materials
Paper, Screen
Blondie Blue by BATIK signed limited edition Oversize POP ART
By BATIK
Located in London, GB
Blondie Blue by BATIK signed limited edition POP ART print
Paper Size OVERSIZE 40 x 30" inches / 101 x 76 cm
Signed & numbered by artist on front
Archival Pigment print
Limited to 15 only
Featuring pop art artwork of the iconic Debbie Harry from pop punk band Blondie circa 1979
Note other sizes and framing options available
BATIK is a London based contemporary pop artist
Sex symbol glamour music artist heart of glass...
Category
2010s Pop Art Portrait Prints
Materials
Color, Archival Pigment
SOL Y SOMBRA
By José Royo
Located in Aventura, FL
Serigraph on clayboard panel. Hand signed and numbered by the artist. Edition PA of 14.
Artwork is in excellent condition. Certificate of authenticity included. All reasonable offe...
Category
1990s Impressionist Portrait Prints
Materials
Board, Screen, Clay
Crying Girl
Located in Miami, FL
Hand signed in pencil lower right. Printed by Colorcraft, New York. Published by Leo Castelli Gallery, New York. From an edition of unknown size. Catalogue Raisonné The Prints of Roy...
Category
1960s Contemporary Portrait Prints
Materials
Lithograph
Self Portrait (~24% OFF LIST PRICE, Midwestern Art, American Painter, Modern)
Located in Kansas City, MO
Thomas Hart Benton
Self Portrait
1972
Lithograph
Image Size: 19.5 x 13.75 inches
Matted Size: 28.5 x 22.25 inches
Edition: 300
Signed by hand, lower right
COA provided
Ref.: Fath, 84...
Category
1970s Modern Portrait Prints
Materials
Lithograph
Grande masque
Located in London, GB
Henri Matisse
Grande Masque
1948
Aquatint on Marais paper, signed in pencil and numbered 11/25, there were also 5 artist’s proofs.
Signed, dedicated "à Nadia Sednaoui" and inscribed ...
Category
1940s Modern Portrait Prints
Materials
Aquatint
lithograph for "Le Gout du Bonheur"
Located in Henderson, NV
Medium: lithograph (after the drawing). This Picasso lithograph from the "Le Gout du Bonheur" portfolio (the French title translates to "The Taste of Happiness") was printed in Munic...
Category
1970s Portrait Prints
Materials
Lithograph
Cabeza en la Ventana, Surrealist Etching by Rufino Tamayo
Located in Long Island City, NY
Rufino Tamayo, Mexican (1899 - 1991) - Cabeza en la Ventana, Portfolio: Rufino Tamayo 8 aquafuertes, Year: 1984, Medium: Etching, signed and numbered in crayon, Edition: 11/99, S...
Category
1980s Surrealist Portrait Prints
Materials
Etching
Femme au Chapeau, Cubist Lithograph after Pablo Picasso
Located in Long Island City, NY
Wearing a hat, the woman is represented with a series of black and white shapes that surve alongside one another. Accented by a mustard yellow, the portrait features different perspe...
Category
1980s Cubist Portrait Prints
Materials
Lithograph
lithograph for "Le Gout du Bonheur"
Located in Henderson, NV
Medium: lithograph (after the drawing). This Picasso lithograph from the "Le Gout du Bonheur" portfolio was printed in Munich in the studios of Guenther Dietz under the personal supe...
Category
1970s Portrait Prints
Materials
Lithograph
Studied
By Leonor Fini
Located in Columbia, MO
Leonor Fini (Argentine-French, 1907–1996)
A fiercely spirited Surrealist unfettered by social mores, Leonor Fini defied convention with her haunting, dreamlike works that explore the...
Category
20th Century Surrealist Portrait Prints
Materials
Paper, Screen
Andy Warhol, Marilyn Monroe Print, Invitation to the Leo Castelli Gallery, 1981
By Andy Warhol
Located in Santa Monica, CA
An invitation to "Andy Warhol: A Print Retrospective 1963-1981" held at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City, printed with the iconic image of Marilyn Monroe. Published by Caste...
Category
1980s Pop Art Portrait Prints
Materials
Lithograph, Offset
Portrait of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham: Rare Framed Mezzotint after Brompton
By Edward Fisher
Located in Alamo, CA
This is a large framed very rare hand-colored copperplate mezzotint engraved portrait of William Pitt, the Elder, 1st Earl of Chatham by Edward Fisher, published in London in 1779 after a painting by Richard Brompton. Pitt is depicted attired in a flowing regal appearing cape, standing in an ornate room with his left hand outstretched over a serious of manuscripts and scrolls that are laying on a table or desk to his left. The table is covered by a beautiful oriental carpet. The manuscripts include the Magna Carta, a map of the colonies, including Long Island and Staten Island, and papers entitled "A Plan for the Reconciliation between Great Britain and the Colonies", "A Motion Made in 1775 for the Recall of Troops from Boston", "A Provisional Act for Settling the Troubles in America Offered to the House of Lords in 1775", and "It is doing Nothing to repeal a few Scraps of Paper or Pieces of Parchment called Acts of Parliament. But our Business is to repeal the Ill-Will and the Animosity unfortunately now subsisting between Great Britain and North America". This engraving is held by the British Museum and the British Royal Collection Trust.
This large framed mezzotint engraving is presented in a brown wood frame with gold-colored beaded inner and outer trim, and a cream-colored French mat. The frame measures 31.63" high by 26.63" wide by 0.75" deep. There are three short tears along the right edge and mild creasing in the left upper, left lower and right lower corners. It is otherwise in very good condition.
William Pitt (1708-1778) was a member of the British parliament from 1735 to 1761 and prime minister from 1766 to 1768. Pitt was an advocate for the American colonies leading up to the War of Independence. He called for an amiable relationship between Great Britain and the colonies and opposed the Stamp Act and military action in America. He advocated for a withdrawal of English troops from Boston in 1775 and the settling of troubles in America, as two of his manuscripts on the table outline. Pitt's colleague, Lord Shelburne (later the Marquess of Lansdowne) shared his sympathies and after Pitt's death, signed a peace treaty with the United States in 1782.
The American city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is named for William Pitt, the Elder. The name originated when the conflict between the British and French over territorial claims in the Northeast were settled in 1758. General John Forbes and his British army, supported by the American colonial troops, expelled the French from Fort Duquesne (which had been constructed by the French in 1754). Forbes re-named the site for William Pitt the Elder, who at the time was a British statesman. The earliest known reference to the new name, Pittsburgh, is in a letter sent from General John Forbes to Pitt, dated November 27, 1758. Pitt's son, William Pitt, the Younger, like his father, also served as British Prime Minister.
Edward Fisher (1730-1785) was born in Ireland in 1730. He was originally a hatter, but learned engraving in London. He became a member of the Incorporated Society of Artists in 1766, and exhibited there fourteen times between 1761 and 1776. He engraved more than sixty portraits. In addition to this portrait of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, after Richard Brompton he engraved several portraits after Brompton, including George, Earl of Albemarle, as well as engraved portraits after paintings by Joshua Reynolds, including the Shakespearean actor David Garrick, Hugh, Earl of Northumberland, and Elizabeth, Countess of Northumberland and Laurence Sterne, and Hope Nursing Love, as well as Robert Brown, after Mason Chamberlin, Colley Cibber, after Jean-Baptiste van Loo, Christian VII of Denmark, after Nathaniel Dance, Simon, Earl Harcourt, after Hunter, Roger Long, after Benjamin Wilson...
Category
Late 18th Century Old Masters Portrait Prints
Materials
Mezzotint
Original Lithograph - Henri Matisse - Apollinaire
Located in Collonge Bellerive, Geneve, CH
Original Lithograph - Henri Matisse - Apollinaire
Artist : Henri MATISSE
13 x 10 inches
Edition: 151/330
References : Duthuit-Matisse Catalogue raisonné 31
MATISSE'S BIOGRAPHY
YOUTH AND EARLY EDUCATION
Henri Emile Benoît Matisse was born in a tiny, tumbledown weaver's cottage on the rue du Chêne Arnaud in the textile town of Le Cateau-Cambrésis at eight o'clock in the evening on the last night of the year, 31 December 1869 (Le Cateau-Cambrésis is in the extreme north of France near the Belgian border). The house had two rooms, a beaten earth floor and a leaky roof. Matisse said long afterwards that rain fell through a hole above the bed in which he was born. Matisse’s ancestors had lived in the area for centuries before the convulsive social and industrial upheavals of the nineteenth century. Matisse grew up in a world that was still detaching itself from a way of life in some ways unchanged since Roman times. The coming of the railway had put Bohain on the industrial map, but people still traveled everywhere on foot or horseback.
Matisse’s father, Émile Hippolyte Matisse, was a grain merchant whose family were weavers. His mother, Anna Heloise Gerard, was a daughter of a long line of well-to-do tanners. Warmhearted, outgoing, capable and energetic, she was small and sturdily built with the fashionable figure of the period: full breasts and hips, narrow waist, neat ankles and elegant small feet. She had fair skin, broad cheekbones and a wide smile. "My mother had a face with generous features," said her son Henri, who always spoke of her with particular tenderness of the sensitivity. Throughout the forty years of her marriage, she provided unwavering, rocklike support to her husband and her sons. Matisse later said: "My mother loved everything I did." He grew up in nearby Bohain-en-Vermandois, an industrial textile center, until the age of ten, when his father sent him to St. Quentin for lycée.
Anna Heloise worked hard. She ran the section of her husband's shop that sold housepaints, making up the customers' orders and advising on color schemes. The colors evidently left a lasting impression on Henri. The artist himself later said he got his color sense from his mother, who was herself an accomplished painter on porcelain, a fashionable art form at the time. Henri was the couple’s first son.
The young Matisse was an awkward youth who seemed ill-adapted to the rigors of the North; in particular, he hated the gelid winters. He was a pensive child and by his own account he was a dreamy, frail and not outstandingly bright. In later life he never lost his feeling for his native soil, for seeds and growing things he had encountered in his youth. The fancy pigeons he kept in Nice more than half a century after he left home recalled the weavers' pigeon-lofts tucked away behind even the humblest house in Bohain.
Matisse's childhood memories were of a stern upbringing. "Be quick!" "Look out!" "Run along!" "Get cracking!" were the refrains that rang in his ears as a boy. In later years when survival itself depended on habits of thrift and self-denial, the artist prided himself on being a man of the North. When Matisse in turn had children of his own to bring up, he chided himself for any lapse in discipline or open display of tenderness as weakness on his part.
In 1887 he went to Paris to study law, working as a court administrator in Le Cateau-Cambrésis after gaining his qualification. Although he considered law as tedious, he nonetheless passed the bar in 1888 with distinction and began his practice begrudgingly. Once Matisse finished school, his father, a much more practical man, arranged for his son to obtain a clerking position at a law office.
PAINTING: BEGINNINGS
Matisse’s discovery of his true profession came about in an unusual manner. Following an attack of appendicitis, he began to paint in 1889, when his mother had brought him art supplies during the period of convalescence. He said later, “From the moment I held the box of colors in my hands, I knew this was my life. I threw myself into it like a beast that plunges towards the thing it loves.” Matisse’s mother was the first to advise her son not to adhere to the “rules” of art, but rather listen to his own emotions. Matisse was so committed to his art that he later extended a warning to his fiancée, Amélie Parayre, whom he later married: “I love you dearly, mademoiselle; but I shall always love painting more.” Matisse had discovered "a kind of paradise" as he later described it. His drastic change of profession deeply disappointed his father.
Two years later in 1891 Matisse returned to Paris to study art at the Académie Julian and became a student of William-Adolphe Bouguereau. After a discouraging year at the Académie Julian, he left in disgust at the overly perfectionist style of teaching there. Afterwards he trained with Gustave Moreau, an artist who nurtured more progressive leanings. In both studios, as was usual, students drew endless figure studies from life. From Bouguereau, he learned the fundamental lessons of classical painting. His one art-schooled technical standby, almost a fetish, was the plumb line. No matter how odd the angles in any Matisse, the verticals are usually dead true. Moreau was a painter who despised the "art du salon", so Matisse was destined, in a certain sense, to remain an "outcast" of the art world. He initially failed his drawing exam for admission to the École des Beaux-Arts, but persisted and was finally accepted.
Matisse began painting still-lives and landscapes in the traditional Flemish style, at which he achieved reasonable proficiency. Most of his early works employ a dark palette and tend to be gloomy. Chardin was one of Matisse's most admired painters having made four the French still-life master paintings in the Louvre. Although he executed numerous copies after the old masters he also studied contemporary art. His first experimentations earned him a reputation as the rebellious member of his studio classes.
In 1896, Matisse was elected as an associate member of the Société Nationale, which meant that each year he could show paintings at the Salon de la Société without having to submit them for review. In the same year he exhibited 5 paintings in the salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, and the state bought two of his paintings. This was the first and almost only recognition he received in his native country during his lifetime. In 1897 and 1898, he visited the painter John Peter Russell on the island Belle Île off the coast of Brittany. Russell introduced him to Impressionism and to the work of Van Gogh who had been a good friend of Russell but was completely unknown at the time. Matisse's style changed completely, and he would later say "Russell was my teacher, and Russell explained color theory to me." Matisse also observed Russell's and other artists' stable marriages. This probably influenced him to find in Amélie Noellie Parayre, his future wife, his anchor.
The Dinner Table (1897) was Matisse’s first masterpiece, and he had spent the entire winter working on the oeuvre. Though the Salon displayed the piece, they hung the work in a poor location, disgusted by what they considered its radical, Impressionist aspects.
Caroline Joblaud was Matisse's early lover for four years during his initial struggles to affirm his artistic direction and professional career. Caroline (also called Camille) gave Matisse his first daughter Marguerite in 1894, who after Matisse's marriage to Amélie Noellie Parayre was warmly accepted contrary to conventional hostility such arrangements provoked. Caroline posed various times for the artist’s compositions while Marguerite served many times as a model for Matisse throughout his life.
MARRIAGE WITH AMÉLIE NOELLIE PARAYRE
The Matisses of Bohain and the Parayres of Beauzelle had outwardly nothing in common, and there was no reason why Matisse and Amélie should ever have met. But in October 1897 Matisse went to a wedding in Paris and happened to sit next to her at the uproarious banquet that followed. There had been no banal flirtation between them, even when the wine flowed, each recognized the other as true metal, and when they got up from the table she held out her hand to Henri Matisse in a way that he never forgot. Matisse at that time was not yet the professorial figure of legend. He was known as a prankster, as a ribald and anti-clerical songster, and as someone who had once broken up a café concert performance just for the hell of it. Amélie's relatives operated at that time within a social, intellectual, and political context of which Matisse had had no previous experience. They stood for free thinking, for the separation of church and state, and for the secularization of the French educational system. Her family, better off that that of Matisse, provided the support he needed for the budding artist. When Matisse married Amélie in January 1898, they had been introduced only three months after.
Amélie's Aunt Noélie and two of her brothers ran a successful women's shop called the Grande Maison des Modes. Before her marriage, Amélie had shown a gift for designing, making, and modeling hats for a fashionable clientele. In June 1899, she found a partner and opened a shop of her own on the rue de Châteaudun. This allowed Henri and herself to live, with Marguerite, in a tiny two-room apartment on the same street. Madame Matisse, fervently loyal, would play a fundamental role in the life and career of the artist for more than 40 years. Marguerite was to become her father's lifetime mainstay
In 1902 disaster struck. Amélie’s parents were disgraced and financially ruined in a spectacular scandal of national scope, as the unsuspecting employees of a woman whose financial empire was based on fraud. Thanks to his early years in a lawyer's office, Matisse was able to busy himself to great effect in the organization of his father-in-law's defense. When all about him lost their heads, burst into tears, and felt more than sorry for themselves, Henri Matisse dealt with their problems one by one. The ordeal had taken its toll, in more than one way. His doctors ordered Matisse to go to Bohain and take two months' complete rest. Amélie had lost both her hat shop and the apartment on the rue de Châteaudun. For the first time, Henri, Amélie and the three children were united in Bohain, having nowhere else to go.
Hillary Spurling, one of Matisse’s biographers, asserts that Amélie’s memories of that public disgrace nurtured a “suspicion of the outside world” that would always mark the Matisse family. The Matisse family formed a kind of hermetic unit which revolved around the artist’s work and profession. They fitted their activities according his breaks and work sessions. Silence was essential. Even during the years when Matisse lived mostly alone in Nice, an annual ritual of unpacking, stretching, framing and hanging ended with the whole family settling down to respond to the paintings. The conference might last several days. Then the dealers were admitted.
Matisse and his wife had had two sons, Jean (born 1899) and Pierre (born 1900). He was not always in peace with his family. He wrote that their views were not always in accord “which disturbs me considerably in my work, for which I require the most complete calm and from those how surround me, a serenity that I cannot find here. I intend to move to a village a few league away.” Pierre, his brother, Jean, and Marguerite remained close to their father through every vicissitude, and Matisse, in his last invalid years, was devoted to his several grandchildren.
In 1899, at a time when his paintings displayed rebellious talent but not much clear direction, Matisse began attending classes in clay modeling and sculpture. Assigned to copy one of the sculptural masterpieces in the Louvre, he selected Jaguar Devouring a Hare a violently precise work by Antoine-Louis Barye. Later, whenever his paintings seemed stuck, he turned to sculpture to organize his thoughts and sensations.
Influenced by the works of the post-Impressionists Paul Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh and Paul Signac, and also by Japanese art, Matisse made color a crucial element of his paintings. Matisse said, "In modern art, it is indubitably to Cézanne that I owe the most." By studying Cézanne’s fragmented planes -- which stretched the idea of the still life to a forced contemplation of color surfaces themselves -- Matisse was able to reconstruct his own philosophy of the still life.
Many of his paintings from 1899 to 1905 make use of a pointillist technique adopted from Signac. In 1898, he went to London to study the paintings of J. M. W. Turner and then went on a trip to Corsica.
After years in poverty, Matisse went through his "dark period" (1902-03), moved briefly to naturalism, went back to a dark palette and told friends in 1903 that he had lost all desire to paint and had almost decided to give up.
Fortunately, Matisse was able to earn some money painting a frieze for the World Fair at the Grand Palais in Paris. He also traveled extensively in the early 1900s when tourism was still a new idea. Brought on by railroad, steamships, and other forms of transportation that appeared during the industrial revolution, travel became a popular pursuit. As a cultured tourist, he developed his art with regular doses of travel.
FAUVISM
Matisse's career can be divided into several periods that changed stylistically, but his underlying aim always remained the same: to discover "the essential character of things" and to produce an art "of balance, purity, and serenity," as he himself put it. The changing studio environments seemed always to have had a significant effect on the style of his work.
In these first years of struggle Matisse set his revolutionary artistic agenda. He disregarded perspective, abolished shadows, repudiating the academic distinction between line and color. He was attempting to overturn a way of seeing evolved and accepted by the Western world for centuries by substituting a conscious subjectivity in the place of the traditional illusion of objectivity .
Matisse hit his stride in the avant-garde art world in the first years of the new decade. He explored the modern art scene through frequent visits to galleries such as Durand-Ruel and Vollard, where he was exposed to work by Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, and Vincent van Gogh.
Matisse’s first solo exhibition took place in 1904, without much success. In 16 May 1905 he arrived in the charming Catalan port of Collioure, in the south of France. He soon invited the painter André Derain (1880-1954), 11 years his junior, to join him. By 1905, Matisse was considered spearhead the Fauve movement in France, characterized by its spontaneity and roughness of execution as well as use of raw color straight from the palette to the canvas. Matisse combined pointillist color and Cézanne’s way of structuring pictorial space stroke by stroke to develop Fauvism - a way less of seeing the world than of feeling it with one’s eyes. When the Fauve summer drew to an end, Derain left Collioure with 30 paintings, 20 drawings and some 50 sketches, never to return, while Matisse departed some days later bringing back to Paris 15 finished paintings, 40 aquarelles, over 100 drawings. He returned Collioure in the summers of 1906, 1907, 1911 and 1914. The lure of the sun would prove always to have powers of restoration to the artist throughout his life particularly after periods of great emotional exertion.
When Fauvist works were first exhibited Salon d'Automne in Paris they created a scandal. Eyewitness accounts tell of laughter emanating from room VII where they were displayed. Gertrud Stein, one of Matisse's most important future supporters, reported that people scratched at the canvases in derision. "A pot of paint has been flung in the face of the public" was the reaction by the critic Camille Mauclair. Louis Vauxcelles described the work with the historic phrase "Donatello au milieu des fauves!" (Donatello among the wild beasts), referring to a Renaissance-type sculpture that shared the room with them. His comment was printed on 17 October 1905 in Gil Blas, a daily newspaper, and passed into popular usage. Derain himself later called the Fauves' color "sticks of dynamite." The painting that was singled out for attacks was Matisse's Woman with a Hat, a portrait of Madame Matisse. This picture was bought be was bought by Gertrude and Leo Stein, a fact which had a very positive effect on Matisse who was suffering demoralization from the bad reception of his work.
Matisse continued his experiments in Collioure, visible in the painting The Open Window and the View of Collioure , also a characteristic work of Fauvism in its raw color and disregard for details. Both of these works of the landscape in the French Mediterranean present a distinct development towards the spontaneous and uninhibited style.
Other than André Derain, Georges Braque, Raoul Dufy and Maurice Vlaminck were also members of the Fauve movement. However, Matisse’s intimate friends among artists were mostly easygoing minor painters, such as Albert Marquet. Matisse’s temperamental aloneness made him prey to vertiginous depressions. He later recalled a breakdown that he underwent in Spain, in 1910: “My bed shook, and from my throat came a little high-pitched cry that I could not stop.”
From the onset of is career women were from one of the cardinal motifs of the artist's production. His Joy of Life (1906) draws us into the world of hallucinatory vividness composed of nymphs set in an idyllic open fields dressed in pure color and sensual outline. Two women lounge in the sunlight while two more chat on the edge of the forest. One crouches to pick some flowers while her companion weaves a chain of them into her hair. A couple embraces each other while another group engages in a lively round-dance in the distance. In this way, Joy of Life depicts woodland nymphs engaging in a celebration of their life, their womanhood, and their sexuality.
Due to the recurrent incidence of nude women and intensely sensual interpretation many observers have assumed that as a man Matisse must have been a hedonist. On the contrary, historic examination demonstrates that in reality, he was rather a self-abnegating Northerner who lived only to work, and did so in chronic anguish, recurrent panic, and amid periodic breakdowns. While Picasso recompensed himself, as he went along, with gratifications of intellectual and erotic play Matisse did not. In an age of ideologies, Matisse dodged all ideas except perhaps one: that art is life by other means.
Matisse’s uninhibited celebration of women is often believed to have initiated from Cézanne’s painting Three Bathers (1882) (which he had acquired for himself along with a Van Gogh and a Gauguin). However, Matisse depicts women as nurturing, welcoming, and unlike the forbidding, massive clay-like presence of those of Paul Cézanne.
FAME
The decline of the Fauvist movement, after 1906, did nothing to deter the rise of Matisse. From 1906 -1917 he lived in Paris and established his home, studio, and school at Hôtel Biron. Among his neighbors is sculptor Auguste Rodin, writer Jean Cocteau, and dancer Isadora Duncan. Many of his finest works were created in this period, when he was an active part of the great gathering of artistic talent in Montparnasse, even though he did not quite fit in with his conservative appearance and strict bourgeois work habits. In fact, the aim of Matisse’s art was something less than revolutionary. In 1908, in a famous statement drawn from “Notes of a Painter,” Matisse declared as his ideal an art “for every mental worker, for the businessman as well as the man of letters, for example, a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.”
Matisse's personal habits were incredibly regular. On a typical day rose early and worked all morning with a second work session after lunch, followed by violin practice, a simple supper (vegetable soup, two hard-boiled eggs, salad and a glass of wine) and an early bedtime.
In 1906, he created a series of 12 lithographs, all variations on the theme of a seated nude. He chose to share his graphic work with the public almost immediately. The lithographs were exhibited at the Druet Gallery in Paris the same year that they were produced, and the woodcuts were shown at the Salon des Independants in the spring of 1907.
In 1907 Appolinaire, commenting about Matisse in an article published in La Falange, said, "We are not here in the presence of an extravagant or an extremist undertaking: Matisse's art is eminently reasonable." Notwithstanding newly-won fame, Matisse's work continued to encounter vehement criticism and it was difficult for him to provide for his family. His controversial 1907 painting Blue Nude was burned in effigy at the Armory Show in Chicago in 1913. Contrary to the fate of the Impressionists, Matisse and other Fauves were able to exhibit in art galleries. In 1908 Paul Cassirer, the German art dealer and editor who played a significant role in the promotion of the work the French Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, staged an exhibit of Matisse’s works in Berlin. In the same year the American photographer Alfred Stieglitz in New York organized him one-man show in his tiny Manhattan gallery called 291 which effectively introduced Matisse the powerful American art market.
In the first decade of his notoriety as the leader of the Fauves, Matisse was more admired by foreigners than by the French. It was, after all, the Russians and the Americans who acquired significant collections of his early work almost as quickly as it was created. The great Matisses we see in the Paris museums today were mostly acquired after the artist's death in lieu of death duties. It took the French a good deal longer to understand Matisse's greatness-longer, certainly, than the international cadre of aspiring talents that flocked to his classes when he was still one of the most controversial figures in the Paris avant-garde.
In the summer of 1907, Matisse and his wife went on a long trip to italy "for work and Pleasure," visiting Venice and Padua, where they admired Giotto's frescos. In Florence the were the guests of the Steins in their villa in Fiesole. From this base matisse visited Arezzo, to study Piero della Francesca, and Siena, attracted by the early Sienese painters, especially, Duccio.
PICASSO, GERTRUDE STEIN AND THE CONE SISTERS
During the first decade of the 20th century Americans in Paris Gertrude Stein, her brothers Leo Stein, Michael Stein and Michael's wife Sarah took keen interest in Matisse's art. In addition, Gertrude Stein's two friends from Baltimore. Clarabel and Etta Cone, became major patrons of Matisse and Picasso, collecting hundreds of their works.The Cone Sisters acquired their first Matisse in 1906 and, during the next four decades, went on to form one of the world's great collections of his art. The Cone Collection not only contains major works from every phase of Matisse's long career but reflects the sisters' special interest in his Nice period, when a new complexity of form and psychology entered the ever intense surface allure of his paintings.
In April of 1906 during a gathering at the house of the legendary Gertrude Stein, Matisse was introduced to Pablo Picasso who was 11 years younger. Picasso and Matisse were poles apart aesthetically and their life styles were no less so. Matisse was markedly taller and more polished than the stocky, cocky Catalan, was then ruler of the turbulent Paris avant-garde art scene. The two were said to have always been looking over their shoulders at each other. It is well-known that after their rivalry grew, sides were taken. Picasso later said: "No one has ever looked at Matisse's paintings more carefully than I; and no one has looked at mine more carefully than he."
One key difference between their pictorial concepts was that Matisse drew and painted from nature, while Picasso was much more inclined to work from imagination. The subjects painted most frequently by both artists were women and still lives, with Matisse more likely to place his figures in fully realized interiors.
Gertrude Stein, who loved stirring things up, wrote, "the feeling between the Picassoites and the Matisse-ites became bitter." Although Matisse dryly noted that "our disputes were always friendly," it should be pointed out that Picasso and his friends threw suction-cupped darts at Matisse's 1906 Portrait of Marguerite (which Picasso had obtained in a trade for his own Pitcher, Bowl and Lemon, from 1907). While the rift between the two artists eventually healed, the one between their supporters remained.
ACADEMIE MATISSE IN PARIS & SERGEI SHCHUKIN
In 1909, with the Matisse family lived in a former convent on the Boulevard des Invalides, in Paris, where the artist conducted a painting school. His immense notoriety, which had been confirmed in 1905-06 by Joy of Life, a work which seemed to trash every possible norm of pictorial order and painterly finesse.His friends organized and financed the Académie Matisse in Paris, a private and non-commercial school in which Matisse instructed young artists. It operated from 1911 until 1917. Hans Purrmann and Sarah Stein were several of his most loyal students.
Although it lasted for only three years (1908-11), and yet, during its brief existence the Académie Matisse became one of the principal crossroads of modern painting for a number of gifted European and American artists.
Given the reputation Matisse had acquired as the"wild man" of modernist color, it must have come as a shock to some of his early students that the program of instruction he offered was remarkably conservative. As Jean Heiberg, the first Norwegian to enroll in the Académie, later wrote in a memoir: "The school had, at Matisse's suggestion, acquired a copy of two antique sculptures from the Louvre, Mars and an archaic sculpture, which he often used to demonstrate. Every now and then he got completely rid of the life model and we only drew from the plaster casts, and his critiques then were no less profitable."
Among Matisse’s students was Olga Meerson, a Russian Jew who had studied with Wassily Kandinsky in Munich and, already possessed of an elegant style, sought to remake herself under Matisse’s tutelage. Amélie suspected the worst. Perhaps a combination of Amélie’s jealousy and Meerson’s neediness caused a Matisse to end the connection, with bad feeling all around. Meerson moved to Munich, where she married the musician Heinz Pringsheim, a brother-in-law of Thomas Mann. Never having fulfilled her promise as a painter, she committed suicide in Berlin, in 1929. One of Matisse's biographers, with access to much of the artist's correspondence, contends that the artist, after his marriage, rarely, if ever, had sex with models, despite his apparent feelings for many.
Two Russian art collectors stood out at the beginning of the 20th century: the cloth merchant Sergei Shchukin (1854–1936) and the textile manufacturer Ivan Morozov (1871–1921). Both acquired modern French art, developed a sensibility for spotting new trends, and publicized them in Russia.
In this period, Matisse had initiated his fecund association with the Russian textile magnate and visionary collector, Sergei Shchukin. The artist created one of his major works La Danse specially for Shchukin as part of a two painting commission. Inspired by a circular dance-- perhaps a sardana - performed by fishermen at Collioure, this painting embodies the clash between the sacred and reality. Human hands link together, but they form a divine spirit. Moreover, Matisse all but abandoned perspective The work ’s flatness emphasizes the idea, colors, and material, a notion that made Matisse a model for Modernists. The other painting commissioned was Music, 1909.
Shchukin was considered by some almost as a co-producer of some of the artist’s greatest works and was strongly commuted to the French painter’s work. Concerning the violent attacks on his friend, the Russian wrote to the artist: “The public is against you, but the future is yours.” By 1914 Shchukin’s house in Moscow contained thirty-seven Matisses. “He always picked the best,” the artist said.
During the political revolution Lenin expropriated Shchukin collection in person but allowed Shchukin to remain, in servants’ quarters, as caretaker and guide. He died in Paris, in 1936. The collection is now in the Hermitage and Pushkin Museums
From about 1911 to 1915, Matisse struggled with the ideas of Cubism, an experiment he felt he was "not participating in" because it did not "speak to [his] deeply sensory nature."
MOROCCO
Like many avant-garde artists in Paris, Matisse was receptive to a broad range of influences. He is one of the first painters to take an interest in various forms of “primitive” art. His art was profoundly influenced by Easter art as well.
Matisse first flirted with the idea of visiting Morocco after a trip to the Moorish part of Spain in the winter of 1910. This taste of the Moors incited a flame of hope that there would be greater inspiration to paint in Morocco. Furthermore, well aware of the exotic subjects in Morocco that had engendered a wealth of inspiration for the famous French painter Delacroix when he visited the country over eighty years before, Matisse felt Morocco would stimulate his painting genius in ways Europe could not. He strove for neither the picturesque nor the pornographic.
In Morocco, Matisse seems to have had difficulties finding models who would pose for him, particularly women because of the law of the veil. Only Jewesses and prostitutes were exempt. Luckily, Matisse to have found the prostitute Zorah for the purpose although he did not paint her as a prostitute. Instead, in his first picture of her, Zorah en Jaune, sexual themes are most conspicuously absent from the canvas. As a prostitute used to exposing and flaunting her body, Zorah could have easily been painted nude or with less clothing to show herself off, but instead Matisse chooses to keep her clothed and posed with prudence. Unlike the primitive, nude Western women in the Fauve Joy of Life. Moroccan Zorah is clothed with respect and detail to her finer characteristics. He is developing his ability to paint with awareness of the non-sexual qualities of his subject, a movement away from Fauve women.
Many of Matisse's Moroccan paintings are covered only in the thinnest washes of pigment, as if he wanted the texture of the unpainted canvas to show through so that it would add rawness to the browns and grays.
Matisse's odalisques have been described as "elaborate fictions" in which the artist re-created the image of the Islamic harem using French models posed in his Nice apartment. The fabrics, screens, carpets, furnishings and costuming recalled the exoticism of the "Orient" and provided a theme for Matisse's preoccupation with the figure and elaborate patterns of exotic fabrics.
Although Matisse's interest in textiles are evident in his compositions made during his 1906 trip to Morocco, it didn't begin as a typical European attraction to the exotic. It was already present to him as a descendent of generations of weavers, who was raised among weavers in Bohain-en-Vermandois, which in the 1880's and 90's was a center of production of fancy silks for the Parisian fashion houses. Like virtually all his northern compatriots, he had an inborn appreciation of their texture and design. He understood the properties of weight and hang, he knew how to use pins and paper patterns, and he was supremely confident with scissors.
Matisse was known to be an avid collector of fabrics, from his days as a poor art student in Paris to the latter years of his life, when his Nice studio overflowed with Persian carpets, delicate Arab embroideries, richly hued African wall hangings, and any number of colorful cushions, curtains, costumes, patterned screens, and backcloths. Textiles soon became the springboard for his radical experiments with perspective and an art based on decorative patterning and pure harmonies of color and line. When he moved house, he also moved his fabrics, describing them as "my working library." He added to the collection all his life, from markets in Algeria, Morocco and Tahiti to the end-of-season sales of Parisian haute couture.
The revitalizing spirit of Morocco would live on in the artist's imagination until the cutouts of the artist's last years.
AFTER PARIS
Matisse continued to evolve in unexpected directions even though never became an abstract painter (though some of his most adventurous works, such as the View of Notre Dame of 1914 or the Yellow Curtain of 1916 come close). His motifs were always recognizable, and the tension between the subject and the formal aspects of the painting was a central concept of his artistic ideal.
Matisse moved to Nice in 1917 to distance himself from wartime activity, where bright, warm colors showed him "simpler venues which won’t stifle the spirit." His spirit became loyal to the "silver clarity of light" in Nice, and he returned to Paris only for a few months each summer. The years 1917–30 are known as his early Nice period, when his principal subject remained the female figure or an odalisque dressed in oriental costume or in various stages of undress, depicted as standing, seated, or reclining in a luxurious, exotic interior of Matisse's own creation. These paintings are infused with southern light, bright colors, and a profusion of decorative patterns. They emanate the atmosphere suggestive of a harem.
In 1929, Matisse temporarily suspended easel painting and traveled to America to sit on the jury of the 29th Carnegie International and, in 1930, spent some time in Tahiti and New York as well as Baltimore, Maryland and Merion, Pennsylvania.He was especially thrilled with New York. An important collector of modern art, and owner of the largest Matisse holdings in America, Dr. Albert Barnes of Merion, commissioned the artist to paint a large mural for the two-story picture gallery of his mansion. Matisse chose the subject of the dance, a theme that had preoccupied him since his early Fauve masterpiece Joy of Life.
Americans were prominent among Matisse's patrons throughout his career, beginning with the Steins (Leo Stein bought Joy of Life right out of the Salon in 1906) and including the Cone sisters of Baltimore and the notoriously cantankerous Barnes. The foundational Matisse monograph was written during his lifetime by another American, Alfred Barr. Also important in promoting Matisse's presence before the transatlantic public was the Manhattan gallery founded in 1931 by the artist's son, Pierre, who remained a prominent figure in the New York art world for almost six decades. In addition to his father, he represented Balthus, Calder, Dubuffet, Giacometti, Miro, Tanguy and others, many of them also friends.
Throughout his long and productive career, Matisse periodically refreshed his creative energies by turning from painting to drawing, sculpture and other forms of artistic expression. In his lifetime he also produced 12 illustrated books which were known as “livre d’artiste” (artist’s book), a specific type of illustrated book that became common in France around the turn of the century. These books were deluxe, limited editions, meant to be collected and admired as works of art, as well as, read. This process began when Swiss publisher Albert Skira first approached the modern master in 1930 to illustrate the work, Poesies, by 19th century French symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé . Matisse responded to Skira’s invitation with great enthusiasm and that summer, devoted most of his attention to the commission while he was residing in Paris. The result was a collection of 29 beautiful etchings, of which the Museum will display 16. The subject matter, like the poems themselves, varies considerably, although many of the images reflect the artist’s vacation to the South Pacific. Matisse’s etchings of Mallarmé’s poems are considered among his greatest works in the print medium. In 1941, again for Skira, Matisse began one of his most complicated and successful printmaking projects, Florilege des Amours de Ronsard, illustrating the love poems of 16th century French Renaissance poet Pierre de Ronsard. Ronsard’s subject and strong imagery lent themselves gracefully to Matisse’s favored themes of fruits, flowers, the female form and portraits. The artist selected the poems himself and translated the work from Renaissance French to contemporary French for the publication of the anthology
DIVORCE & LATE FAMILY RELATIONSHIPS
For all his long-lasting friendships with other artists, famous and obscure, Matisse's days and nights were absorbed by solitary labor. Playing the violin seemed a more intimate consolation for decades of critical abuse than the affections of his wife and children.
Although their marriage was still somewhat fragile, the Matisses had decided to stay on in Nice when their lease expired at Place Charles-Félix in the summer of 1938.
Matisse and his wife were separated in 1939 after 41 years when Amélie tried to dismiss the coolly efficient young Lydia Delectorskaya, an orphan refugee from Siberia, who had been hired as Amélie’s companion. However, the Matisses’ marriage ran afoul not of any romantic rival but for the artist’s wish to stand on his own. The first climax came years before in 1913, when Amélie sat more than a hundred times for the Portrait of Madame Matisse. A friend’s diary reported at the time. “Crazy! weeping! By night he recites the Lord’s Prayer! By day he quarrels with his wife!” The portrait, which was the last work to enter Shchukin’s collection, caused Matisse “palpitations, high blood pressure and a constant drumming in his ears.” Such frenzy was not rare when Matisse had difficulty with a painting. He referred to the painting years later in a letter to her as “the one that made you cry, but in which you look so pretty.” Amélie ceded routine leadership of the family to Marguerite. The 1913 portrait was his last painting of her.
Matisse and his wife met the last time to discuss details of their legal separation, in July 1939. One of its key provisions was that everything would be divided equally between the couple.
The meeting took place in Paris at the Gare St. Lazare and lasted thirty minutes, during which Amélie Matisse kept up a flow of small talk while her husband."My wife never looked at me, but I didn't take my eyes off her...," Matisse wrote on the night of that final encounter: "I couldn't get a word out.... I remained as if carved out of wood, swearing never to be caught that way again." "I'm going to try to isolate myself as if I were still absent,'' Matisse announced on his first return to Paris since the official separation from his wife, 'rarely leaving his apartment except for visits to the cinema (his first color film, starring Danny Kaye, was a revelation).''
After her dismissal, Delectorskaya shot herself in the chest with a pistol, remarkably with only a slight effect. Soon after the artist and his wife were legally separated Delectorskaya was back. She arrived with a bouquet of white daisies and blue cornflowers from her Aunt’s garden on July 15th, St Henry’s Day. Their working collaboration was to last right up to Matisse’s death in 1954. Her will throughout was indomitable; she typed, kept records and meticulous accounts and paid the household bills. She also organized Matisse’s correspondence and coordinated his business affairs with an iron grip as well as being his studio assistant and muse. And when called upon, even scoured the countryside on her bike for provisions during the war. Matisse claimed that his entire household came to a standstill in her absence which, in the light of what Lydia accomplished is anything, if not an understatement.
In the face of the family’s icy resentment, the Russian said of Matisse, “He knew how to take possession of people and make them feel they were indispensable. That was how it was for me, and that was how it had been for Mme. Matisse.”
Life with Matisse must have been taxing but it had been Amélie’s chosen vocation, through years of their studio-centered homes. Her central role in the artist's life was security, which Shchukin’s patronage provided, along with a sizable house in Issy-les-Moulineaux, where the family moved in 1909. However, in this period Matisse was increasingly absent. In 1930, his travels took him to the United States, where he was thrilled by New York, and to Tahiti.
Matisse found that Tahiti was "both superb and boring . . . There the weather is beautiful at sunrise and it does not change until night. Such immutable happiness is tiring." He dived off the reefs and never forgot the colors of the madrepores and the absinthe-green water; these appear in cut-outs like Polynesia, 1946, or The Bird and the Shark, 1947, as images of a spectacular and, on the whole, beneficent nature.
In September of 1940 he employed a temporary stand-in for his regular night nurse...
Category
1930s Modern Portrait Prints
Materials
Linocut
Melancholic Muses III
Located in London, GB
'Melancholic Muses III', one of a poignant set of six signed artist proof lithographs by the celebrated Spanish artist from Barcelona, Vicenç Caraltó (circa 1960s). This collection o...
Category
1960s Modern Portrait Prints
Materials
Lithograph
Marco
Located in San Francisco, CA
Artist: Nicola Simbari – Italian (1927-2012)
Title: Marco
Year: 1978
Medium: Screen Print
Image size: 28.5 x 31.75 inches.
Sheet size: 35 x 37.5 inches.
Signature: Signed lower ri...
Category
1970s Modern Portrait Prints
Materials
Paper, Screen
MISFITS Marilyn Monroe Clark Gabel Arthur Miller Caricature Movie Star Legends
Located in New York, NY
MISFITS Marilyn Monroe Clark Gabel Arthur Miller Caricature Movie Star Legends
Al Hirschfeld (American, 1903 - 2003)
21" x 27" sheet
"Misfits", 1999
Litho...
Category
1980s Performance Portrait Prints
Materials
Lithograph
Breakers
Located in Westmount, QC
David Blackwood, Canadian, 1941-2022
BREAKERS, 1976
etching, aquatint in colours
7.75 x 9.75 in (plate)
19.7 x 24.8 cm
signed, titled, dated 1976 and inscribed “Artist’s Proof” in th...
Category
1970s Portrait Prints
Materials
Etching
Plate 195 from Imaginary Beings - Giclée Print on Archival Paper
Located in Brighton, GB
Giclée print on Archival Matte Paper with Archival Pigment Ink.
In 2017 she was awarded the New York State Council for the Arts/New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship grant for...
Category
2010s Contemporary Portrait Prints
Materials
Archival Ink, Archival Paper, Giclée
'The Speaker', Vanity Fair portrait of The Rt. Hon. Arthur Wellesley Peel
Located in Melbourne, Victoria
'The Speaker'
Chromolithograph, 1887.
Vanity Fair portrait of The Rt. Hon. Arthur Wellesley Peel PC (1829 - 1912), who was a British Liberal politician who sat in the House of Com...
Category
Late 19th Century Victorian Portrait Prints
Materials
Lithograph
Erwin Blumenfeld Doe Eye "Oeil de Biche" Offset Lithograph
Located in Plainview, NY
Erwin Blumenfeld Doe eye " Oeil de Biche" offset lithograph of a closeup of the model Jean Patchett face measuring 18 5/8 x 16 1/4 inches with no apparent inscriptions or marks. The art work has not been examined out of frame. The art work is finely presented in black composite frame and double matted in white.
Erwin Blumenfeld (26 January 1897 – 4 July 1969) was an American Jewish photographer...
Category
1950s Modern Portrait Prints
Materials
Glass, Paper
Noémie (Marguérite).
Located in Storrs, CT
Noémie (Marguérite). 1926. Etching. Fletcher catalog 57 state vi 7 1/8 x 4 3/16 (sheet 10 15/16 x 8 7/16). Edition 111 in this state (total 132 impressions). A fine impression print...
Category
Early 20th Century Modern Portrait Prints
Materials
Etching
INTRODUCTION FOR A BLUES QUEEN(Uptown At Savoy) Signed Lithograph, Jazz Club
Located in Union City, NJ
INTRODUCTION FOR A BLUES QUEEN(Uptown At Savoy) is a limited edition color lithograph by the renowned African American artist Romare Bearden, printed on archival printmaking paper, 100% acid free, in an edition size of 175. INTRODUCTION FOR A BLUES QUEEN 1979 from Romare Bearden's colorful JAZZ series of musical imagery, is an abstract live music scene that captures the energy inside a jazz club where a female blues singer...
Category
1970s Contemporary Portrait Prints
Materials
Lithograph
'Badminton', Alfred Watson, Vanity Fair caricature portrait, 1897
Located in Melbourne, Victoria
'Badminton'
Chromolithograph. 1897.
Vanity Fair portrait of Alfred Edward Thomas Watson (1849-1922) who was a Music and Drama Critic. He wrote for the Saturday Review and occasion...
Category
Late 19th Century Victorian Portrait Prints
Materials
Lithograph
Original "The Savage Guns" vintage movie poster NSS 62/298
Located in Spokane, WA
Original linen backed one sheet "The Savage Guns". Nss: 62/298. Archivally linen backed with the original issued fold marks restored. Great color, no paper loss, Excellent condition. As close to mint as you will find. Because the original fold marks were restored, it can only be listed as good. Condition: A.
The gunfighter and the spitfire meet and love in a wild wind-lashed land where the law ends ... And the one they thought was afraid surprised them the day the banditos came!. Metro Goldwyn Mayer. Starring: Richard Basehart; Don Taylor, Alex Nicol, Pacquita Rico. In Metrocolor and Metroscope. Western movie poster...
Category
1960s American Modern Portrait Prints
Materials
Offset
Portrait
Located in Belgrade, MT
This lithograph is a piece of my private collection from artists of the 20th Century. It is original, signed by artist and numbered 217/220. It is vibrant in color and in very good...
Category
Mid-20th Century Abstract Expressionist Portrait Prints
Materials
Plate Glass, Oil, Lithograph, Watercolor
Figure - Original Woodcut Print by Amadore Porcella - Early 20th Century
Located in Roma, IT
Figure is an original woodcut print realized by Amadore Porcella.
The state of preservation of the artwork is very good.
Passepartout dimension: ...
Category
Early 20th Century Modern Portrait Prints
Materials
Woodcut
MARIE
By Isaac Maimon
Located in Aventura, FL
Serigraph on paper. Hand signed and numbered by the artist. Image size approx 28.5 x 21 inches. Edition of 275.
Artwork is in excellent condition. Certificate of Authenticity is i...
Category
Late 20th Century Contemporary Portrait Prints
Materials
Paper, Screen
Ruth Smoking 1, from 26 Portraits
By Julian Opie
Located in Washington, DC
Artist: Julian Opie
Title: Ruth Smoking 1
Portfolio: 26 Portraits
Medium: Screenprint
Date: 2006
Edition: 250
Frame Size: 21 1/4" x 16 1/2"
Sheet Size: 15" x 9 3/4"
Signature: Unsigned
Category
Early 2000s Contemporary Portrait Prints
Materials
Screen
Composition (Duthuit 31), Apollinaire, Henri Matisse
Located in Auburn Hills, MI
Lithograph on vélin a la forme des papeteries d'Arches paper. Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued. Good condition. Notes: From the folio, Apollinaire, Henri Matisse, 1952. Published by Éditions Raisons d'être, Paris; printed by Mourlot Frères, Paris, April 24, 1952. Excerpted from the folio (translated from French), Printing of this folio was finished on April, Twenty-Four, M.CM.LII for the Éditions Raisons d'être, 2 rue des Beaux-Arts in Paris, was produced by Fernand Mourlot, based on the models of Henri Matisse. The eight original lithographs were shot on the presses of Mourlot Frères who also printed the cover and case composed by the artist. The stones were erased after drawing. The text and letrins engraved by Henri Matisse were drawn by Coulouma S.A., printer in Paris. Justification of the draw— XXX examples on large vélin d'Arches a la form, signed by the author and the artist, accompanied by a series of original lithographs numbered from I to XXX; CCC examples on vélin d'Arches a la forme numbered from XXXI to CCCXXX; XX examples of non-commerce collaborators numbered from I to XX and in addition a few nominative copies on Grand Vélin.
HISTORY OF THE EDITION: According to the Minneapolis Institute of Art, This publication was a joint effort by Matisse and author André Rouveyre...
Category
1950s Modern Portrait Prints
Materials
Lithograph
KACHINA DOLLS FS II.381
By Andy Warhol
Located in Aventura, FL
Screen print on Lenox museum board. From the Cowboys And Indians Portfolio. Hand signed and numbered lower front by Andy Warhol. Numbered 138/250 (there were also 50 AP's, 15 PP's, 15 HC's and 10 numbered in Roman numerals). Published by Gaultney, Klineman Art, Inc., New York. Printed by Rupert Jasen Smith, New York.
The artwork is in excellent condition. Certificate of authenticity issued by Gallery Art included. All reasonable offers will be considered.
In Cowboys and Indians, Warhol interspersed recognizable portraits of well-known American heroes with less familiar Native American images and motifs. It demonstrates his ironic commentary on America’s collective mythologizing of the historic West. Rather than portraying Native Americans within their historical landscape, Warhol chose to portray a romanticized version of the American West. The West that he chose to represent is familiar to everyone and can be seen in novels, films, and television series. Warhol’s Cowboys and Indians suite...
Category
1980s Pop Art Portrait Prints
Materials
Board, Screen
The Cow, etching by Stan Washburn
Located in Palm Springs, CA
Signed, titled and numbered etching from the edition of 100. In individual prints, and his illustrated books, Washburn cleverly skewers human frailties with Renaissance-style engravi...
Category
1970s Contemporary Portrait Prints
Materials
Etching
Debbie Harry (Blondie), Max's Kansas City 1976 Signed Edition of 10 Diamond Dust
By Bob Gruen
Located in New York, NY
Bob Gruen
Debbie Harry (Blondie) Max's Kansas City, 1976, 2018
Limited Edition silkscreen and diamond dust on 320 gram coventry rag paper
Signed, numbered 7/10 and dated in graphite ...
Category
2010s Pop Art Portrait Prints
Materials
Rag Paper, Screen, Mixed Media
French Vintage Exhibition Poster for Yves Brayer - Galerie Isy Brachot Brussels
By Yves Brayer
Located in London, GB
French Vintage Exhibition Poster for Yves Brayer (1964). Newly framed, the poster announces an exhibition of the works of Yves Brayer at the Galerie Isy Brachot in Brussels, Belgium....
Category
1960s Modern Portrait Prints
Materials
Lithograph
Teruta-hime - Woodcut by Utagawa Kuniyoshi - 1842/43
Located in Roma, IT
Teruta-hime is a woodcut print realized by Utagawa Kuniyoshi in 1842/43.
Lifetime impression of chuban tate-e, it depicts Teruta-hime carrying a bucket of water through the snow, wi...
Category
Mid-19th Century Modern Portrait Prints
Materials
Woodcut
Melancholic Muses VI
Located in London, GB
'Melancholic Muses', one of a poignant set of six signed artist proof lithographs by the celebrated Spanish artist from Barcelona, Vicenç Caraltó (circa 1960s). This collection of li...
Category
1960s Modern Portrait Prints
Materials
Lithograph
Conventional sentiment. Limited edition print Surreal Established Polish artist
Located in Warsaw, PL
Giclee limited edition print by worldwidely established Polish artist Rafal Olbinski. Figurative surrealistic print with man and a woman standing on the road. The road is transformin...
Category
2010s Surrealist Portrait Prints
Materials
Paper, Color
Square Head of a Woman with Full Lips, from Carmen
Located in Washington, DC
Artist: Pablo Picasso
Title: Square Head of a Woman with Full Lips
Portfolio: Carmen
Medium: Etching on Montval wove paper
Year: 1949
Edition Size: 289
Framed Size: 18 3/4" x 16 3/4"...
Category
1940s Portrait Prints
Materials
Etching
The Little Prince and His Red Cape
Located in Brooklyn, NY
This limited edition color lithograph, titled The Little Prince and His Red Cape, is a beautiful reproduction from the beloved book Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. This ...
Category
2010s Contemporary Portrait Prints
Materials
Offset