Blue Deb
View Similar Items
Deborah KassBlue Deb
About the Item
- Creator:Deborah Kass (1952, American)
- Dimensions:Height: 24 in (60.96 cm)Width: 24 in (60.96 cm)
- Condition:
- Gallery Location:New York, NY
- Reference Number:1stDibs: LU249898753
Deborah Kass
Deborah Kass made her name in the late 1980s and early ’90s riffing on postwar greats from Jackson Pollock and Robert Rauschenberg to, most famously, Andy Warhol, giving their signature styles her own brand of feminist cheekiness.
The daughter of a dentist whose passion was playing jazz sax, Kass grew up in Rockville Centre, Long Island. When she was old enough, she would use her babysitting money to take the train to Manhattan and roam the Museum of Modern Art, where she noticed a dearth of female artists, but “it didn’t stop me from falling in love with Cézanne or Stella or Warhol,” she says.
After attending the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and earning a BFA at Carnegie Mellon University in 1974, Kass hightailed it back to New York, where she concentrated on Expressionistic landscapes. “There was no shortage of women painters or women artists,” she recalls. “That’s what people were looking at. The zeitgeist was about feminism and women.” Yet when the Reagan Era hit, as Kass sees it, women were shunted aside.
Kass responded with mash-ups of male-dominated art history, references to other female artists and her own imagery. Then came the “Warhol Project.” In 1991 she made Before and Happily Ever After, which paired Warhol’s painting of a woman pre- and post-nose job with a close-up of the prince placing the glass slipper on Cinderella’s foot. There were her “Barbras” in profile — her Warholesque silk-screen series of Barbra Streisand — which she dubbed “The Jewish Jackie Series,” as well as more self-portrait parodies, including “The Deb Suite,” a takeoff of Warhol’s Elizabeth Taylor series.
Kass was deeply influenced by Warhol himself — a gay Catholic who sought acceptance in the culture — as well as Cornel West, Elaine Showalter and other theorists in black and feminist studies. “I thought Jewishness belonged in the discourse of multiculturalism,” she says. “Barbra was a celebration. I was tired of talking about my absence. I wanted to talk about my presence.” That her work, aimed at heralding women’s contributions, relies to a large extent on those of men does not bother her. She sees no need to downplay the men in order to give the women a shout-out. The men she references “deserve to be on pedestals. These are artists I love,” she says. The problem is not their inclusion in the canon but rather what she calls the “omissions.”
In 2002, Kass began “Feel Good Paintings For Feel Bad Times,” text-centric, graphically rendered canvases that play her emotions and politics off her love of popular culture, particularly Broadway. Works include Oh God I Need This Show (which references A Chorus Line), If I Were a Wealthy Man (Fiddler on the Roof), Nobody Puts Baby in a Corner (Dirty Dancing) and Sing Out Louise (Gypsy). Kass’s signature paintings, done primarily in the 1990s and often riffing on the imagery of Warhol, came together in “My Elvis+” at New York’s Paul Kasmin Gallery in 2013.
The Kasmin show came on the heels of Kass’s first museum retrospective, which was well received at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh in 2012. One critic wrote that she “pays affectionate homage . . . to an art-world society with which she maintains a close bond, even as she castigates it for sins and omissions.” Another compared her to Virginia Woolf.
Find a collection of Deborah Kass prints, paintings and other art on 1stDibs.
- "Two Women" Pair EtchingsBy Marie LaurencinLocated in Rio Vista, CAElegant pair of etchings by Marie Laurencin (French 1883-1956) from the "Poemes de Sapho" published in 1950 ref. 273. Each beautifully mounted in fram...Category
20th Century Modern Portrait Prints
MaterialsEtching
$2,000 Sale Price20% Off - Sandeman Porto & Sherry – Iconic Original PosterLocated in Zurich, CHThe Don: One of the most recognizable figures in poster history ever, quietly reveling in the simple delights of a glass of ruby port – typically thought of as a horseman, clad in a ...Category
1920s Art Deco Figurative Prints
MaterialsPaper, Lithograph
- Original Vintage Secession Poster celebrating the emperor's jubileeLocated in Zurich, CHOriginal Vintage Poster by the Austrian artist Ferdinand Ludwig Graf, a member of the Hagenbund. This Viennese artist association moved as soon a...Category
Early 1900s Vienna Secession Figurative Prints
MaterialsPaper
- Original Exhibition Poster – Le Corbusier's difficult relation to SwitzerlandLocated in Zurich, CHOriginal Vintage Poster, issued 1987 by the ETH in Zurich on the occasion of its exhibition on Le Corbusier's difficult relation with his native country, using a photograph taken 193...Category
1930s Modern Portrait Prints
MaterialsPaper
- General Dynamics, Exhibition Dynamic America, New York; Original Vintage PosterBy Erik NitscheLocated in Zurich, CHA poster by Erik Nitsche advertising General Dynamics' exhibition "Dynamic America" held 1961 at the Rockefeller Plaza in New York where the company promoted its achievements. Pictured is William Woodnut Griscom, an American inventor who founded the Electro Dynamic Company in 1880, based in Philadelphia. Griscom patented the world's first double induction motor, and his electric drive powered the the first trolley system in Washington D. C. In 1899 Electro Dynamic became Electric Boat...Category
Mid-20th Century Modern Portrait Prints
MaterialsPaper
- Kunsthalle Bern ("Hopeless", Roy Lichtenstein) – Original Exhibition PosterBy Roy LichtensteinLocated in Zurich, CHOriginal Swiss Vintage Exhibition Poster (screenprint by Albin Uldry, Bern) on the occasion of Lichtenstein's show 1968 at the Kunsthalle Bern, curated...Category
Mid-20th Century Pop Art Figurative Prints
MaterialsPaper