Vertical Portrait Prints

This piece is a Limited Edition Lithograph, 16/200 and is pencil-signed and numbered by the artist. The image size is 29 x 22 in. and the full size is 33.75 x 26.25 in. The image is ...

Thomas Maitland Cleland by Rockwell Kent, American (1882–1971) Date: 1929 Lithograph, signed in pencil Image Size: 9.5 x 7 inches Size: 12 x 10 in. (30.48 x 25.4 cm)

Françoise GILOT (1921) Portrait of a Man in Love, 1951 Original lithograph On Marais vellum 28 x 22.5 cm (c. 11 x 9 inches) REFERENCES : Catalog raisonne "Stone Echoes, Original Prints by Francoise Gilot, A catalog Raisonne", Mel Yoakum, #8 From the poetry portfolio "Pages d'Amour" by André VERDET, editions Raison d'être, 1951, printed by Mourlot in 366 copies. Françoise GILOT is a famous french painter...

Henri Matisse Patitcha. Masque 1947 Aquatint on BFK Rives paper, signed in pencil and numbered 3/25 Paper size: 56.2 x 38.1 cms (22.1 x 15 ins) Image size: 34.6 x 27.4 cms (13 5/8 x 10 7/8 ins) HM16063 Duthuit, C.,1983. Henri Matisse: Catalogue raisonné de l'oeuvre gravé, Paris. n. 786 plate 367. Yau, J., 2018. Henri Matisse Prints...

Fred Astaire Dancer Movie Star Oscars Academy Award Mid 20th Century Hollywood Al Hirschfeld (1903 – 2003) Fred Astaire Sight Size: 17 x 12 1/2 Etching with aquatint Signed lower ri...

Gregor MacGregor was a Scottish wicketkeeper for Middlesex and England. Tayler was an English artist who was a member of the Royal Academy of Painters. He was a cricketer himself, a...

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 ...

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...

This print depicts a baseball game mid-play. An umpire crouches with his hand up, and the batter stands poised. In the lower right, spectators peer onto ...

Arturo Rivera Araf Omne Vivium Serigraph 36.61 x 22.44 in Edition 5 of 100 Serigraph by Mexican artist Arturo Rivera. Edition 5 of 100. Certificate of authenticity included. This pr...

This work is inspired by collage and surrealist artworks. I like combining images removed from their original narrative context and reconfigured into a new scenario. This screen prin...

Herman Hyneman (American, 1849-1907) Untitled, c. 1880 Engraving Sight: 13 x 8 1/2 in. Framed: 26 1/2 x 20 1/2 x 3/4 in. Signed bottom The following is from Peter Jung who credits "a friend named Jeff Gold on Long Island." Herman N. Hyneman (1849 - 1907) was born in 1849 to one of the most prominent Jewish families in Philadelphia. Unlike most Jewish families of the time, his embraced and encouraged his artistic talent. In 1874, Hyneman followed his first cousin Moses Ezekiel, National Academy member, to Europe to study. They first went to Germany and then to France where Hyneman began eight years of study with Leon Bonnat, the French Master. In Paris, the twenty-five year old Hyneman resided in a studio building at 75 Boulevard Clichy, with expatriates Frederic Arthur Bridgeman, Charles Sprague Pearce, Milne Ramsey, and Edwin Blashfield. Hyneman was clearly exposed to the works of these more experienced artists, as well as that of Walter Gay. In 1879, one of Hyneman's genre paintings, entitled "Desdemona", was accepted into the Paris Salon. That painting received favorable reviews both in Europe, and later in Philadlephia where it was exhibited alongside the works of other Philadelphia Artists exhibiting at the Salon that included Thomas Eakins, Pearce, Edward May...

Chuck Close: Self-Portraits 1967-2005 (Hand signed and inscribed to Michelle with heart doodle), 2005 Hardcover. Bound in publisher's original quarter iv...

It's In The Eyes Gold - Kate Moss Pop Art Print 2023 by BATIK paper size 40x30" inches / 101 x 76 cm signed and numbered by artist on front Limite...

Agustin Bejarano (Cuba, 1964) 'Tejedoras de mano II', 2003 engraving on paper Guarro Biblos 250g. 30.6 x 23.3 in. (77.5 x 59 cm.) Edition of 20 Unfram...

Lithograph realized in 1970s, after the original work by Toulouse-Lautrec of 1896. Limited edition of 1000. Excellent condition.

Lithograph on foil movie poster for the musical western movie "Paint Your Wagon" designed by Peter Max. These posters were distributed to exhibitors show...

The poster features David Hockney's 1972 drawing Celia in a Black Dress. Viewed through elegantly drooping tulip stems, Celia Birtwell stares dreamily ahead. With one hand paused in ...

Pablo PICASSO Métarmorphoses d'Ovide, The Murder of Procris, 1936 Original etching (Atelier Lacourière, Paris) Unsigned On BFK Rives vellum 32.5 x 25 cm (12.7 x 9.8 in) REFERENCES ...

RENJISHI is a hand drawn, limited edition lithograph by the renowned artist/caricaturist Al Hirschfeld (1903-2003) printed by hand using traditional lithography techniques on archiva...

Auxiliary Territorial Service (now the Women's Royal Army Corps) 1939 - 1945 uniform Lithograph 50 x 31 cm Produced for the Institute of Army Education. Printed for HM Stationery Of...

L'Eventail (Anaïs) also called The Fan. 1921. Etching. Fletcher 22. Final state. 6 3/8 x 4 7/16 (sheet 11 1/2 x 9 1/4). Edition 76. An extremely rich, tonal impression printed on cr...

"Kitsch Floral Portrait with Doll and Clock on Green Background" is a limited edition high-quality Dibond direct UV Print, part of the celebrated "Fetiches" series by Natasha Lelenco...

This print is from a highly regarded series by the Edo woodblock artist Utagawa Kuniyoshi: in the period, there were at times prohibitions in depicting a...

This is an original 19th century hand-colored McKenney and Hall lithograph of a Native American entitled "Not-Chi-Mi-Ne, An Ioway Chief, No. 91", published by Rice, Rutter & Co. in 1865. This original McKenney and Hall lithograph is presented in a cream-colored mat, suitable for framing with a protective clear sleeve. The mat measures 13.88" x 11.75" and the sheet measures 10.63" x 7.38. There is a spot in the lower left margin and tiny faint spots in the periphery, but the print is otherwise in very good condition. Col. Thomas J. McKenney was Superintendant of The Bureau of Indian Affairs from 1816 until 1830. He was one of a very few government officials to defend American Indian interests and attempt to preserve their culture. He travelled to Indian lands meeting the Native American leaders. He brought with him an accomplished artist, James Otto Lewis...

Lenticular acrylic panel mounted to white acrylic. Hand signed by Julian Opie on label attached on verso. Edition of 55 plus 5 Artist Proofs. Printed 52/55 on label attached on ve...

Original “Noc-turno or Nocturno” vintage European movie poster. This stone lithograph printing is for the Swedish release of the film. Archi...

Lithograph in colors, on Arches wove paper. Sheet size 11 x 8.5 inches. Frame size approx 19 x 17 inches. Littmann p. 168. Estate stamped, hand signed by Julia Gruen, Executor of...

This is a framed 19th century color lithograph entitled "Mothu et Doria" created by Theophile Alexandre Steinlen and published between 1896 and 1899 in Paris, France by Jules Cheret in his famous series of miniature colored stone lithographs of popular Belle Epoch posters...

Army Of Me II - Oversize limited edition - Pop Art - Muhammad Ali by the London based contemporary pop art image creator and artist, BATIK. Measures 40 x 30" inches / 101 x 76 cm ...

Artist: Salvador Dali Title: Mark (Merlin the Magician) Portfolio: 1972 The Twelve Apostles (Knights of the Round Table) Medium: Lithograph Year: 1972 Edition: 41/350 Frame Size: 29 ...

Actor Iwai Shigaku as Somenoi in "Denka chaya adauchi" (Revenge at the Denka Teahouse), by Shigeharu, Ryusai (also called Kuniyoshi) Tokyo: Horie Ichiba Wataki, 1835. Woodcut on la...

This piece is a silkscreen montage with unique coloring, originally shot by Bert Stern in 1962 and printed at a later date. This piece depicts Marilyn Monroe for "The Last Sitting" photo shoot, taken six weeks before Marilyn Monroe’s death...

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.

Medium: original lithograph. Printed by Mourlot and published in Paris by Teriade for the art revue Verve in 1960 for a special edition devoted exclusively to Chagall's original Bibl...

Paul CEZANNE (1839-1906) Armand Guillaumin Hanged Original Etching Unsigned On laid paper, 32 x 25 cm (c. 13 x 10 in) REFERENCES: - Catalogue Raisonné Venturi #1159 - Catalogue Rai...

ALL THE PEOPLE is an original hand drawn limited edition lithograph by the highly acclaimed African-American woman artist Elizabeth Catlett, master printmaker and sculptor best known for her depictions of the African-American experience. ALL THE PEOPLE is graphic composition comprised of a brilliant multi color rainbow across the bottom of the image with a centered, rose beige textured circle filled with simple black line drawings of men, women, and children's faces, a blue sky like area on top consists of textural effects obtained from Japanese rice paper. This impressive composition by the master print maker and sculptor, Elizabeth Catlett is from the FOR MY PEOPLE suite of prints, a set of 6 lithographs illustrating the well known 1942 poem by Margaret Walker. "For my people standing staring trying to fashion a better way from confusion, from hypocrisy and misunderstanding, trying to fashion a world that will hold all the people, all the faces, all the adams and eves and their countless generations;" - Stanza from the poem FOR MY PEOPLE by Margaret Walker Print size 23” x 19”, Edition size 99, unframed color lithograph on archival Arches paper, 100% acid free, Edition printed using traditional hand lithography methods by J.K. Fine Art Editions Co, NJ. Published in 1992 by the Limited Editions Club, NY. Excellent condition, never been framed or mounted, hand signed in pencil, dated and inscribed P.P.(Printers Proof) aside from edition of 99, print documentation/COA will be provided. From the master printer's private collection. About the artist - Elizabeth Catlett (born April 15, 1915, Washington, D.C., U.S.—died April 2, 2012, Cuernavaca, Mexico), American-born Mexican sculptor and printmaker renowned for her intensely political art. Catlett, a granddaughter of enslaved people, was born into a middle-class Washington family; her father was a professor of mathematics at Tuskegee Institute. After being disallowed entrance into the Carnegie Institute of Technology because she was Black, Catlett enrolled at Howard University (B.S., 1935), where she studied design, printmaking, and drawing and was influenced by the art theories of Alain Locke and James A...

Poster. Measures 26.75 x 18.5 inches and is Unframed. Good Condition.

Original “Le Rapide, Grand Journal Quotidien” art nouveau vintage poster. Conservation linen backed and ready to frame. Year: 1892 Artist: Jules Cheret, referred to as the father of the poster. Le Rapide, Grand Journal Quotidien. Jules Cheret (French, 1836-1932) is a well-listed draftsman, printmaker, and designer is best known as a fin de siecle poster designer. Arguably, he is the best-known French poster designer of his age. Figure no 126; No 568; Posters of Jules Cheret. Most people overlook the fact that she is still writing for Le Rapide using a quill instead of an ink pen. Yes, this poster is over 130 years old and still presents itself well. There are telegraph wires in the sky background. The last time this poster was sold in the big NYC poster...

Original Los Angeles, United Air Lines vintage travel poster. Archival linen backed in A- condition, ready to frame. Images shown are of the exact poster you will receive. Step ...

Cindy Sherman Limited Edition Offset Lithograph on 200g Profisilk paper 33 × 23 1/4 inches Edition of 200 Limited Edition Offset Lithograph on 200g Profisilk paper Hand signed in re...

Chocolat Dancing in the Achille Bar is a modern artwork realized in the mid-20th century. Mixed colored lithograph after H. de Toulouse-Lautrec. Original title: Chocolat dansant da...

Elizabeth Peyton (American, b. 1965) Portrait of Alexander Tovborg, 2015 Medium: Etching on wove paper Dimensions: 48 x 39 cm Edition of 18: Hand-signed, numbered and dated

This is a hand-colored aquatint and engraving entitled "Principal Square in Grand Cairo, with Murad Bey's Palace", published in London by R. Bowyer in 1801. The print was created by ...

Original Christmas Mailing Time vintage poster: Artist: Bogorad. Original World War I (2) U. S. Army and Navy Postal Service. Linen backed in B co...

Dans les Cendres (In the embers). 1887. Delteil catalog 67 state iii. State after the plate was cut down and a second figure eliminated (the two earlier states are of the greatest rarity). Etching, drypoint and roulette. 16 3/4 x 12 1/8 (sheet 19 1/2 x 14). Edition 50. Illustrated: Print Collector's Quarterly 9 (1921): 254. A very rich impression with plate tone and drypoint burr, printed on simili-japon. Provenance: Frederick Keppel & Co. This is one of the artist's most striking images. Signed in pencil. Housed in 25 x 20-inch archival mat, suitable for framing. Paul Albert Besnard, was an impressionist painter. In 1866, the seventeen-year-old son of artist parents began his studies at the École des Beaux-Arts Paris. In 1874, Besnard won the important Prix de Rome, with which the academy distinguished young talent. A portion of the scholarship is a stay of several years in Rome. Besnard married Charlotte Dubray, a sculptress, during this time in Rome. The couple lived in England, where Besnard exhibited at the Royal Academy London, between 1881 and 1884. He became involved with English portrait painting during this period, which had a lasting influence on his work. In the years that followed, Besnard broke with the academic tradition. In 1886, he presented the portrait of Madame Roger Jourdain...

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...

Modern abstract figurative lithograph by German artist Horst Antes. The work features a Cubist inspired figure with abstracted facial features set against a teal background. This wor...

Medium: Intaglio and Chine Colle Year: 2024 Image Size: 12 x 9 inches Edition of 15 Signed, titled and numbered by the artist. A young Japanese woman contemplating her image in a mi...

Part of Natasha Lelenco’s Fetiches series, this high-quality limited edition Dibond UV print encapsulates the fusion of portraiture and botanical elements that defines her artistic l...

Shirley MacLaine Dances Broadway Film Star 20th Century Litho NYRT Published Al Hirschfeld (1903 -2003) "Shirley MacLaine Dances on Broadway" Hand-signed L...

This limited edition color lithograph, titled The Serpent, beautifully recreates the iconic watercolors from the beloved book Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Each print ...

At theatre is a modern artwork realized in the mid-20th century. Mixed colored lithograph after H. de Toulouse-Lautrec. The artwork is a reproduction of the original artwork realiz...

A beautiful poster advertising a less famous, doomed Cunard ship. c1950. Offset lithograph in colors on lightweight white wove paper, 16 x 12 3/8 (420 x 315 mm); sheet 21 7/8 x 17 7...

The Thinker 2023 Archival pigment print 16 x 20 inches edition of 20 Skasi’s work arises from the belief that we inhabit the final romantic era before humanity's inevitable expansio...

Original Lithograph - Henri Matisse - Portrait of Guillaume Apollinaire From the book by André Rouveyre, "Apollinaire " (Paris: Raisons d'Etre, 1952) 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...

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