Modern Still-life Prints

Lithograph and stencil on vélin d'Arches paper. Inscription: Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued. Good condition. Notes: From the album, Mon ami Léger par André Maurois de l'Académie ...

Cathedral  is an etching realized by the Italian artist Riccardo Tommasi Ferroni  (1934-2000). The state of preservation is good. Tommasi Ferroni's style is recognizable in the flu...

Artist: Ben Shahn, American (1898 - 1969) Title: Many Things from the Rilke Portfolio Year: 1968 Medium: Lithograph on Arches, signed in the plate Edition: 750 Size: 22.5 x 17.75 in....

This etching is a study in light and shadow of Taos pueblo pots (Georgia O'Keefe's Adobe staircase) by Santa Cruz, California artist Pam Ackerman (American,...

Artist: Ben Shahn, American (1898 - 1969) Title: Of Light, White Sleeping Women in Childbed from the Rilke Portfolio Year: 1968 Medium: Lithograph on Arches, signed in the plate Edit...

A lithograph from the Marina Picasso Estate Collection after the Pablo Picasso painting "Nature Morte a la Fenetre". The original painting was completed in 1932. In the 1970's after...

Signed lower right, 'Margie Dickson' (American, 20th century) and dated 1990; additionally inscribed lower center 'hand colored screen print' with number and limitation, '5/20' and titled lower left...

after Henri MATISSE (1869-1954) Lithograph after a drawing of 1941 Printed signature and date Book plate from Aragon. Henri Matisse: Dessins, Thèmes et Variations : précédés de "Matisse-en-France". (M. Fabiani: Paris 1943). Vélin Paper Dimensions: 32 x 24 cm (12 x 9") This lithograph is one of a rare edition made during the Second World War (1941 - 1943) by the Fabiani Editions. 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...

Artist: Andre Minaux, French (1923 - 1986) Title: Goldfish Year: circa 1979 Medium: Lithograph on Arches Paper, signed and numbered in pencil Edition: 120...

Signed lower right, "Ryonosuke Fukui" (Japanese, 1923-1986), a listed artist, and created circa 1965. An artist's proof, hand-colored etching compris...

A superb, richly-inked impression of this early, very scarce lithograph. Signed and dated in pencil, lower right.

“Man needs color to live; it’s just as necessary an element as fire and water.” - Fernand Léger This lithograph by Fernand Leger is from the portfolio entitled "La Ville" (The City...

This beautiful modernist aquatint etching was realized by the esteemed Indian artist Kaiko Moti, circa 1975. It offers an abstracted and stylized tree branch (presumably that of a Ch...

Lithograph on vélin paper. Inscription: Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued. Good condition. Notes: From Derrière le miroir, N° 121-122, 1960. Published by Aimé Maeght, Éditeur, Paris...

ED BAYNARD (American, 1940-2016) Flowers, Flowers in a Vase, Etching. 1979/1980, Hand signed, dated l.r., Hand numbered from small edition 12/24, Dimensions: 23 by 19 in. Framed 25 by 21 in Born in Washington, D.C. in 1940. Raised in Washington, D.C. and newly graduated from high school, he flew to Europe living off and on in Paris and London. During this time, he designed costumes for Jimi Hendrix, worked as a graphic designer for the Beatles as well as Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Returning to New York, he dedicated his life to art after a surprise success with his first show in 1971 at the Willard Gallery in NYC. Ed's images are Zen-like in their simplicity and grace rendered in a flat, graphic style that recalls Japanese Ukiyo-e prints. His watercolors are luminous, like the rest of his representations regardless of the medium. The Japanese inspired ukiyo-e style woodblock prints and lithograph works he created at Tyler Graphics in 1980 contain a 20th century "floating world" sensibility. Ed's wish was to bring harmony, color, and a meditative stillness to this chaotic planet. He did so in a gentle and powerful way, always as an expression of his deep gratitude for the love and beauty, friendship, and concerns he held dearest. His first solo exhibition was in 1971 at New York's legendary Willard Gallery on the recommendation of Agnes Martin. Baynard went on to have exhibitions at galleries including Betty Parsons Gallery, New York (1973); Marian Goodman Gallery, New York (1977); John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco (1980); and Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York (1980/81).. Baynard manages to retain a simplicity of form inspired by a love of Japanese Woodblock prints. His new works reflect the same poetry of his earlier paintings, retaining his stylized compositions with their Zen like minimalism and Oriental calm, along with a new sense of rhythm and movement. Baynard uses familiar themes such as flowers, plants, pots, and vases, incorporating them into his delicate watercolor still lifes, thus creating stunning visual feasts. He was included in the 1972 Landscape exhibition at MoMA NY alone with other luminaries James Boynton...

Still, Life is a woodcut print on paper, realized by an Anonymous artist in 1936 It is monogrammed and dated on the lower with pencil and numbered, rare edition of 1/20 prints. Goo...

after Henri MATISSE (1869-1954) Lithograph after a drawing of 1941 Printed signature and date Book plate from Aragon. Henri Matisse: Dessins, Thèmes et Variations : précédés de "...

Composition of  Still Life is an artwork realized in the 1970s by Vairo Mongatti. Black and white etching. Hand-signed and numbered. Edition of 21/120 prints. Good conditions with...

Decal printed on porcelain plate. Edition of 510. Depiction of a wrapped ravioli.

Hand-numbered in front lower left corner. Hand-signed in front lower right corner. Framed under glass in natural wood frame. Framed dimensions are 32 1/2 x 24 1/2 inches. Image size ...

Untitled Floral Still Life Color lithograph, c. 1960's Signed lower right Numbered 1/10 lower left Most probably printed in Paris at Atelier Desjobert Provenance: Estate of the artist Dehn Heirs Image size: 14 x 9 11/16 inches Sheet size: 17 3/4 x 11 3/4 inches From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Virginia Dehn Virginia Dehn in her studio in Santa Fe Virginia Dehn (née Engleman) (October 26, 1922 – July 28, 2005) was an American painter and printmaker. Her work was known for its interpretation of natural themes in almost abstract forms. She exhibited in shows and galleries throughout the U.S. Her paintings are included in many public collections. Life Dehn was born in Nevada, Missouri on October 26, 1922.] Raised in Hamden, Connecticut, she studied at Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri before moving to New York City. She met the artist Adolf Dehn while working at the Art Students League. They married in November 1947. The two artists worked side by side for many years, part of a group of artists who influenced the history of 20th century American art. Their Chelsea brownstone was a place where artists, writers, and intellectuals often gathered. Early career Virginia Dehn studied art at Stephens College in Missouri before continuing her art education at the Traphagen School of Design, and, later, the Art Students League, both located in New York City. In the mid-1940s while working at the Associated American Artists gallery, she met lithographer...

Artist unknown "Tomato Sauce I" c. 1960s Lithograph on paper 18.5"x23" unframed unsigned

Artist unknown "Tomato Sauce II" c. 1960s Lithograph on paper 18.5"x23" unframed unsigned

Print, abstract, inspired by the wonderful red... signed by the author, limited edition of 5.

Artist: Andre Minaux, French (1923 - 1986) Title: Nature Morte from the Helene Portfolio Year: 1974 Medium: Lithograph, signed and numbered in pencil Edition: 18/60 Size: 25.75 in. x...

Lithograph " Still life with Plums "numbered 195/275 and signed by Agostini Tony Agostini was a French painter who was born in 1916. Tony Agostini's work has been offered at aucti...

Inspired by F.X. Messerschmidt, hope to give some ideas for thoughts, print, limited of 15.

Lithograph on vélin paper. Inscription: Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued. Good condition. Notes: From Derrière le miroir, N° 211, 1974. Published by Aimé Maeght, Éditeur, Paris; pr...

Fine Art Print, limited edition of 10. Photo photographed in NY, signed by the author.

Fine Art Print, limited edition, Hahnemuhle paper.

Etching on fine art paper, E.A. 1/1 from the cycle " Botanical Dream Nr. 11", recently presented in the Danubiana Meulenstein Art Museum in Bratislava.

Mezzotint is the technique of Laurent Scholnyk (born in Paris in 1953). His use of muted colors is very appealing in the very limited edition lithograph entitled "Limonade" (Lemon...

Engraver's Tools Engraving, 1974 Signed and annotated in pencil by the artist (see photos) This a "Trial Proof" impression with graphite additions Regular Edition: 100 References And...

An exclusive publication for Stone and Press Gallery, "Snow Does" was created in an edition of 100. It is FIROS #66 in the catalogue raisonne. Carol Wax originally trained to be a classical musician at the Manhattan School of Music but fell in love with printmaking. Soon after she began engraving mezzotints she was asked by the renowned print dealer Sylvan Cole to exhibit at Associated American Artists Gallery, launching her career as a professional artist/printmaker. With the publication of her book, The Mezzotint: History and Technique, published by Abrams, 1990 and 1996, Carol added author and teacher to her credits. In the ensuing years she has expanded her repertoire of mediums beyond printmaking into other works on paper and painting. In compositions reflecting an appreciation for antiquated machinery and vintage textiles, Wax creates imagery that, in her own words, “… speaks to an inner life perceived in inanimate objects.” She uses stylization and imagination to reinvent subjects, transforming an ordinary typewriter into a monumental icon...

Blue Hydrangea - image bled to plate size ~ 39 x 29 - printed on 100% cotton rag - edition 3/5 Architectural elements

Joan Miro - a plate from L'Issue Dérobée Etching, aquatint and drypoint in colors 1974 Dimensions: 36 x 54 cm Edition: 220 Jacques Dupin, L'Issue Dérobée, Maeght Editeur, Paris, 19...

Georges Rohner Original Handsigned Lithograph Dimensions: 76 x 54 cm Edition: HC XXI/XXX HandSigned and Numbered Ecole de Paris au seuil de la mutation des Arts Sentiers Editions Georges Rohner was one of the great painters of the “Ecole de Paris” and of the second mid twenty century. Georges Rohner, French (1913 - 2000) Georges Rohner Georges Rohner was a French painter, born July 20, 1913 in Paris and died on 3 November 2000 in Lannion. Georges Rohner was born in 1913 in Paris. His uncle George Stugocki, art teacher, gives him an early taste for art and thus develops his passion. In 1929 he left school to run in the "galleries" of the School of Fine Arts in Paris where he will be received. A year later, it will be admitted as a student in the workshop Lucien Simon alongside Robert Humblot...

Floating Figures undated lithograph, artist proof (E.A) & signed by the artist 22 x 15,5 x 0,1 cm sold without frame about Jean Hélion (April 21, 1904 – October 27, 1987) Jean Hélion was born on April 21, 1904, in Couterne, France. He entered the Institut Industriel du Nord in Lille to study chemistry in 1920 but left the following year to become an architectural apprentice in Paris. He painted while working as an architectural draftsman in the early 1920s. Hélion attracted the attention of the collector Georges Bine in 1925 and was soon able to devote himself entirely to painting. In 1927 he met Joaquín Torres-García, who collaborated on L'Acte, a short-lived magazine founded by Hélion and others. Hélion first exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in 1928. Shortly thereafter he became acquainted with Jean Arp, Piet Mondrian, and Antoine Pevsner...

Mily POSSOZ The table MEDIUM : Etching SIGNATURE : Handsigned LIMITED : 30 copies PAPER : Rives vellum SIZE : 15 x 11" INFORMATIONS : Bears the blind stamp of the editor "Marc...

Sally Mara Sturman studied art at the University of Michigan, the Rhode Island School of Design, ands the École des Beaux Artes, Paris, France. She has exhibited widely in the Unite...

'Lobsterman's Wharf, Maine' is an original lithograph signed by Malvin Marr "Zsissly" Albright. While Malvin Marr – along with his better-known identical twin Ivan Albright – was known for his meticulous and unsettling magic realist compositions, he and his brother were also prolific in capturing landscapes of the coast of Maine where the two spent several consecutive summers away from Chicago over their lives. Sometimes these Maine landscapes and views would be painterly and seemingly antithetical to the careful realism of his other work; but in this example, however, the wharf is treated with the same macabre decay as his human subjects. In the composition, the shack...

In many of his prints, Ed Baynard presents familiar still-life scenes, such as flowers in vases. He reduces the compositions, divorcing the forms from a context, thus accentuating the stylized embellishments that betray an Eastern influence. Baynard’s success began over thirty years ago, with his first solo exhibition at the Ivan Spence Gallery...

CHAREWICZ Gochka (XXe) Michel Butor's Herbarium Signed and numbered 2/29 Dimensions: 42 x 32 cm. Toutes marges.

Surrealist composition with a dog, figure, cockerel floating above the still life In a cream mount, visible sheet length 19.50cm, height 22.50cm Within a black and silvered moulded ...

Sally Mara Sturman studied art at the University of Michigan, the Rhode Island School of Design, ands the École des Beaux Artes, Paris, France. She has exhibited widely in the Unite...

CHAREWICZ Gochka (XXe) Michel Butor's Herbarium Signed and numbered 2/29 Dimensions: 42 x 32 cm. Toutes marges.

Still Life Fresco from "Antiquities of Herculaneum" is an etching on paper realized by Vincenzo Campana in the 18th Century. Signed on the plate. Good conditions with slight foldin...

Still Life With Bottles is an etching and drypoint realized by André Dunoyer de Segonzac (1884-1974) in the mid-20th Century. Good condition on a yellowed paper. Hand-signed by the artist on the plate. Limited edition of 60 copies numbered and signed. André Dunoyer de Segonzac (7 July 1884 – 17 September 1974) was a French painter and graphic artist.In 1947, he published his suite of etchings illustrating the Georgics of Virgil. In the judgement of Anne Distel, chief curator of the Musée d'Orsay, "The technical perfection and the nobility of the tone, which carried the cachet of the original, but was imbued throughout with an unfailing lyricism, make this work Segonzac's masterpiece. It must be included in a list of the most beautifully illustrated books of [the 20th] century."The gossamer quality of his etchings stood in contrast to the thickly painted surfaces and generally somber color of his oil paintings, which reflected his admiration for Courbet and Cézanne. His subjects include landscapes, still lifes, and nudes. He influenced other artists like Samuel Peploe...

Julia Jacquette is an American artist based in New York City and Amsterdam. Her work has been shown extensively at galleries and museums around the world, including the Museum of Mo...

Still Life is an original screen print on paper, realized by Domenico Purificato in the 1970s. Hand-signed in pencil on the lower and numbered on ...

Aubrey Schwartz, American (1928 - 2019) - Wild Flowers V, Year: 1966, Medium: Etching, signed and numbered in pencil, Edition: 28/100, Image Size: 4.75 x 3.75 inches, Size: 14 x 10 ...

Ira Moskowitz, Polish/American (1912 - 2001) - Flowers 7, Year: circa 1979, Medium: Lithograph, signed and numbered in pencil, Edition: 250, AP, Size: 30 x 21 in. (76.2 x 53.34 cm...

Garden is an Original Pencil Drawing realized by Gustave Pierre. No signature, but Stamp signed on the back. Good condition included a white cardboard passpartout (37x55 cm). Gustave René Pierre...

Flowers is an original Contemporary artwork realized in the half of the 20th Century by Robert Naly (1900 - 1983). Original ink drawing. Hand-signed. Good conditions except for ...

Boat is an original Contemporary artwork realized in the half of the 20th Century by Robert Naly (1900 - 1983). Original ink drawing. Hand-signed. Good conditions except for con...

Ancient Roman Fresco, from the series "Antiquities of Herculaneum", is an original etching on paper realized from a design by Cepparuli after Niccolò Vanni in the 18th century. Sign...

Ancient Roman Still Life, from the series "Antiquities of Herculaneum", is an original etching on paper realized by Carlo Oraty in the 18th century. Signed on the plate. Good condi...

Ex Libris Dolezal is an original Contemporary Artwork realized in the mid-20th Century. Original Ex Libris. Original B/W woodcut print on ivory-colored paper. The work is glued...