Drawing Still-life Prints

Burke Libaire is a Charleston based visual artist and designer. She began her career in New York City, translating her love of art and architecture into the world of interior design ...

Burke Libaire is a Charleston based visual artist and designer. She began her career in New York City, translating her love of art and architecture into the world of interior design ...

Still Life is an original colored lithograph on Fabriano watermarked paper realized by the Italian artist Rosario Mazzella. Representing a colorful autumnal still life, this origina...

Still Life is an Original Lithograph on ivory-colored paper realized by Luc Albert Moreau. The artwork is in good condition. Hand-signed on the lower. Luc-Albert Moreau (1882-1948...

Artist: James Sowerby (English, 1757-1822) Title: "Aquilegia Vulgaris (Common Columbine)" (Plate 297) Portfolio: English Botany Year: 1796 Medium: Original Hand-Colored Engraving on ...

From the edition published as part of the fine press book Quartet, with essays by Lewis Thomas. Signed by the artist. The paper was commissioned for the edition from Twinrocker Paper...

One of seven engravings of flowers done for the portfolio "Flore Mutine". Signed, titled and numbered IX/XV. Imaginary botanical image. She studied at the Institute of Visual Arts of Orleans then she returned to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. She currently teaches at the Palace of Fine Arts...

Screenprint in colors on wove paper. Hand signed and numbered by the artist. HC Edition 6 of 12, the total edition was 90. Published by International Images, Putney, Vermont. Sheet...

Signed, titled and numbered in pencil, from the edition of 40. Surrrealistic, imaginary character with flowing robes. François Houtin was born in Crao...

This is a hand-colored copper plate engraving entitled "Cataputia Vulgaris, Parietaria Sylvestris, Nummularia", depicting flowering Spanish Nut, Yellow Turk's-cap Lily, Yellow Turk's...

Artist: Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (French, 1707-1788) Title: "Euphorbia (Spurge)" (Dodecandrie, Trigynie, Plate 411) Portfolio: Histoire Naturelle Year: 1749-1789 Medium...

SURVIVOR TREE is an original, hand drawn limited edition lithograph(not a photo reproduction or digital print) printed in khaki grey ink using traditional hand lithography techniques on white archival printmaking paper 100% acid free. SURVIVOR TREE is a botanical fantasy portrait depicting a meticulously drawn tree with roots clinging to a circular platform suspended in the air. SURVIVOR TREE is expressed with highly detailed pencil markings that create the intricate foliage crown, massive trunk, and multi-fingered roots. SURVIVOR TREE is truly an imaginative, surreal tree portrait drawing of a mysterious lone tree surviving in time and space . Superb quality, hand crafted original lithograph, very fine impression. Print size - 23 x 28.5 inches, unframed, excellent condition, pencil signed by Hanna Kay...

MIGHTY TREE II is an original limited edition lithograph(not a photo reproduction or digital print) using traditional hand lithography techniques on archival Arches buff colored paper, 100% acid free. MIGHTY TREE II is a realistic tree drawing expressed as a three panel, horizontally placed composition printed in dark brown gray and pale green ink from a hand drawn lithography stone. The tree is meticulously drawn using highly detailed pencil markings which create the intricate foliage crown, massive trunk, and multi-fingered roots. MIGHTY TREE II is truly an imaginative, surrealist style triptych drawing of an uprooted age-old tree existing from another time. Superb quality, hand crafted original lithograph, very fine impression. Print size - 20.5 x 30 inches, unframed, very good condition, light handling, printer registration pin holes on left and right margin, pencil signed by Hanna Kay...

Portrait of Boy is an original artwork realized by Hugo Pereyra in 1964. Original Ink and Watercolor Hand-signed.

Rye bread. 1980, Paper, linocut, print size 50x65 cm; total 65x73 cm Dainis Rozkalns (1928 - 2018) Artist, graphic artist, illustrator of folklore and fiction publications. The mai...

Apple tree. 1976, linocut, print size 65x50 cm; total 75x60 cm Dainis Rozkalns (1928 - 2018) Artist, graphic artist, illustrator of folklore and fiction publications. The main dire...

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 ...

Rye spring. 1980, Paper, linocut, print size 50x65 cm; total 70x80 cm Dainis Rozkalns (1928 - 2018) Artist, graphic artist, illustrator of folklore and fiction publications. The ma...

Dedication to Valmiera city. 1982, linocut, print size 60x42 cm; total 70x55 cm Dainis Rozkalns (1928 - 2018) Artist, graphic artist, illustrator of folklore and fiction publicatio...

Pamela Bianco achieve success as an artist in Britain while still a child. This accomplishment resulted in the family coming to the United States where ...

MARTA WAKUŁA-MAC: Master of Arts in Fine Art Education- Diploma in Fine Art Printmaking at the Institute of Art, Pedagogical University, Krakow, 2003. Member of Graphic Studio Dubl...

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...

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...

'Dendrobium Albo-Sanguineum – White and Sanguine Dendrobium' Orchid lithograph with original hand-colouring , 1859, by Walter Hood Fitch (1817-1892). 25c...

Still Life is an original woodcut print realized by Giuseppe Haas-Triverio in the early 20th century. Good conditions. The artwork is depicted through strong strokes in a well-bala...

Still Life by Ludovic-Rodo Pissarro (1878-1952) Wood engraving 14.5 x 10.8 cm (5 ³/₄ x 4 ¹/₄ inches) Initialed LR in the plate Exhibition Fort Lauderdale, Museum of Art, Camille Pis...

Artist: Donald Saff Medium: Etching with Aquatint, Hand signed and numbered in pencil Donald Jay Saff (born 12 December 1937) is an artist, art historian, educator, and lecturer, specializing in the fields of contemporary art in addition to American and English horology. Saff was born in Brooklyn, New York. Donald Saff began his undergraduate degree at Queens College, City University of New York, in 1955, initially envisioning a career as an electrical engineer. However, the following year Saff changed his major to art and learned printmaking, to graduate with a B.A. in 1959 and a M.A. in art history from Columbia University in 1960. In the years following, Saff was awarded a M.F.A. from Pratt Institute in 1962 and an Ed.D. in studio art and art history from Columbia University in 1964. In his early career, Saff studied with Robert Goldwater, Robert Branner, Louis Hechenbleikner, and Meyer Schapiro. Saff is primarily known for his work and collaboration with the leading artists of the late-twentieth century, including Robert Rauschenberg, Jim Dine, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, Nancy Graves, Philip Pearlstein, and James Turrell. Saff's prolific career is the subject of Marilyn S. Kushner's book, Donald Saff: Art in Collaboration (2010). Saff began his teaching career at Queens College as a lecturer in Art History, Design, and Drawing, from 1961 to 1964. In 1965, Saff was appointed as an associate professor in the visual arts department of the University of South Florida in Tampa, Florida, and became professor and chairman of the visual arts department two years later. In 1971, Saff became the founding dean of the College of Fine Arts at U.S.F., and was awarded the rank of distinguished professor at the university in 1982. Saff was later named dean emeritus by USF in 1989, and distinguished professor emeritus in 1996. In 1999, Saff was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Fine Arts at U.S.F. He was appointed the Director of Capital Projects of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, in 2001, followed by the appointment of Senior Curator of Prints and Drawings in 2002. In 1968, Saff founded Graphicstudio at U.S.F. through funding by a seed grant from the Florida Arts Council and community supporters; the following year, Philip Pearlstein was the first artist invited to Graphicstudio to collaborate with Saff and his team. Saff became Founding Dean of the College of Fine Arts at U.S.F. in 1971. Under Saff's directorship, Graphicstudio collaborated with artists such as James Rosenquist, Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Anuszkiewicz, Shusaku Arakawa, Jim Dine, Lee Friedlander, Nancy Graves, Ed Ruscha, and Roy Lichtenstein. The collection of Graphicstudio is archived in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Graphicstudio was founded by Dr. Donald Saff as part of the renaissance in American printmaking in the 1960s, in the company of studios such as ULAE, Tamarind, and Gemini GEL. This renaissance brought artists involved in the Pop art movement, such as Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, and Jim Dine, together with a growing number of trained printmakers from around the world. After Saff retired from U.S.F., he continued to collaborate with these artists, as well as James Turrell, at Saff Tech Arts in Oxford, Maryland, which was established in 1991. While Saff and Rauschenberg were traveling in China, Rauschenberg conceived of the Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange (ROCI) in 1982, which began in 1984 with Saff as the artistic director. Saff travelled to over twenty countries and met with poets and writers in order to decide which were the most appropriate venues for the show and prepare for Rauschenberg's visit and exhibition. In recent years, Saff has continued to lecture and write on art and the history and mechanics of nineteenth-century clocks; in particular, the work of Charles Fasoldt, in addition to the development of time distribution from the Harvard College Observatory, and the horological innovations of Richard F. Bond. He has lectured on Fasoldt for the Antiquarian Horological Association in Cincinnati, OH (2001), the National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors in Pittsburgh, PA, and Anheim, CA (2003), and at the 26th Annual Ward Francillon Time Symposium in Houston, TX (2004), among other venues. Saff continues to work with the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, collaborating with Jonathan Betts and Rory McEvoy, on the trials of Burgess Clock B. (See "Honors.") Exhibitions Saff's individual work spans across his career of collaborative art. As early as 1965, Saff produced Duino Elegies, a print suite that was published and exhibited by Martin Gordon Gallery in New York and at the Galleria Academia in Rome; it was acquired by the Library of Congress, the Brooklyn Museum, and Lessing Rosenwald. Saff also collaborated with printers Galli and Arduini in Urbino to create print suites Breezes (1969), exhibited and published by the Martin Gordon Gallery. Additionally, Saff collaborated with Galli on print suites Paradise Lost (1970) and Numbers (1972), the former printed in Tampa, FL, and exhibited at the Martin Gordon Gallery, the University of South Florida Gallery, the Toronto Art Gallery, and the Loch Haven Art Center, FL. Numbers was exhibited at Multiples Gallery, New York. In 1979, Saff produced print suite Fables that was published and exhibited by the Getler/Pall Gallery in New York, followed by the print suite Constellations (1980), which was also exhibited at the Tom Lutrell Gallery in San Francisco. In 1981, Saff had solo exhibitions of his artwork in the Galleria d'Arte Moderna in Udine, Italy, Youngstown State University, OH, the Leo Castelli Gallery, NY, and in "Recent Acquisitions" at The Museum of Modern Art, NY. Additionally, Saff had solo exhibitions at Dyansen Gallery, NY (1982), at I. Feldman Gallery, Sarasota (1983), and at Edison Community College, FL (1988). In 1989, the retrospective Donald Saff: Mixed Metaphors, 1956–1989 was held at the Tampa Museum of Art and traveled to the Virginia Beach Center for the Arts, followed by his solo exhibition Winged Metaphors: Sculpture and Prints by Donald Saff at the Barbara Gillman Gallery in Miami later that year. In 1997, Brenau University Galleries exhibits Poetics: The Work of Donald Saff in Gainesville, GA. The same year, the Tampa Museum of Art exhibited Donald Saff/Robert Rauschenberg: In Collaboration. Finally, the Academy Art Museum in Easton, MD, exhibited Donald Saff: Gravity and Constellations; Selected Works in 2006. Honors Saff was awarded a Teaching Fellowship at Queens College (1960), a Yaddo Fellowship, Saratoga Springs, NY (1963), and Fulbright Fellowship (1964) to Italy where he studied at Istituto Statale di Belle Arti. While in Urbino, Saff met lifelong friend and colleague Deli Sacilotto, with whom he would co-author Printmaking: History and Process (1978) and Screenprinting: History and Process (1979). He received the Governor's Award for the Arts from the State of Florida in 1973, and was awarded the Florida Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist Grant in 1980. In 1997, Saff was awarded the title "Printmaker Emeritus" by the 25th Southern Graphics Council Conference in Tampa, F.L. In 2002, he was appointed as Visiting Distinguished Professor of Rhode Island School of Design. In April 2015, Saff was awarded a certificate from the Guinness World Records for his work on completing the world's most accurate pendulum clock, "Clock B", which was started by Martin Burgess in 1975. The official title awarded by Guinness World Records, as "the most accurate mechanical clock with a pendulum...

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 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...

Homage to Jean Cocteau is a beautiful brown-ink lithograph on paper, realized in 1987 by the Italian artist Giancarlo Limoni . Hand-signed , dated, and titled "Omaggio a Cocteau/Limoni 87 " with a brown pencil on the lower margin. Edition 138 of 150 prints. This contemporary artwork representing an abstract composition is in excellent conditions. Giancarlo Limoni was born in Rome in 1947, where he lives and works. In 1975, he opened his first personal exhibition at the "Galleria della Trinità" in Rome. In 1983-84, he briefly studied at the Pastificio Cerere, where Fabio Sargentini...

Signed, titled and numbered by the artist. Born in 1966, Lanfranco Quadrio is a draftsman and engraver whose work fuses the ability of the Old Masters with a contemporary vision. He...

Gussie and Connor 5 9.5" x 12" (HxW) Original Signed Monoprint A minimalist color scheme composed of only white and blue, this work by Casey Blanchard...

'Flower Piece' shows the artist, John Billmyer, to be a highly accomplished wood engraver. There are endless patterns and created details -- all executed flawlessly. Mostly made up o...

Please note the price is for the unframed original etching . Swallowtail Butterfly is an original etching, engraved onto a copper plate, from which Guy Allen creates an impression o...

'Atragene Capensis - Cape Atragene' Native of the Cape of Good Hope. Original copper-line engraving with original hand-colouring from Henry Andrews' 'The Botanist's Repository', 1...

Signed and numbered from the edition of 90. While grand architecture and imaginary places feature in the artist’s fantastical prints, his more intimate interior scenes like Intéri...

Botanical lithograph with original hand-colouring , 1873, by Walter Hood Fitch (1817-1892). 145mm by 235mm (sheet) Walter Hood Fitch was a Scottish...

Artist Commentary: “Collage is the exploitation of the chance meeting of two distant realities on an unfamiliar plane… and the spark of poetry that leaps across the gap as the two r...

Print is singed, dated and numered. It comes from limited edition of 50 copies JOANNA WISZNIEWSKA DOMAŃSKA (born in 1946) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts, Faculty of Graphic Arts in 1972 at the atelier of professor Stanisław Fijałkowski. She works in the techniques of aquafort and aquatint. Her etchings are to be found in the collections of Museum of Contemporary Art in Lodz (the oldest contemporary art museum worldwide), Museum in Walbrzych and Museum of Couvin (Belgium), Miejska Galeria Sztuki in Łódź, National Library of Poland in Warsaw, Eugenio Granell...

Gussie and Connor 1 17" x 12" (HxW) Original Signed Monoprint A simple color palette of blue and white is reminiscent of blue and white china. The use of natural elements and the bl...

Fine art print, limited edition of 15.

A Piece of Swiss Cheese Clare Halifax Artist a 3 colour interpretation of a swiss cheese plant found in the the Barbican conservatory, its pink with the p...

HIDDEN PEAR, color etching, signed in pencil, numbered 7/50, Jerusalem Print workshop blind stamp, image 7 ½ x 5 ½”, sheet 15 x 10 ¼”. Samuel Bak (born 12 August 1933) is a Polish- American painter and writer who survived the Holocaust and immigrated to Israel in 1948. Since 1993, he has lived in the United States. Samuel Bak was born in Wilno, Poland, Bak was recognized from an early age as having an artistic talent. He describes his family as secular, but proud of their Jewish identity. By 1939 when Bak was six years old, the war began and Wilno was transferred from Poland to Lithuania. When Wilno was occupied by the Germans on June 24, 1941, Bak and his family were forced to move into the ghetto. At the age of nine, he held his first exhibition inside the Ghetto. Bak and his mother sought refuge in a Benedictine convent where a Catholic nun named Maria Mikulska tried to help them. After returning to the ghetto, they were deported to a forced labour camp, but took shelter again in the convent where they remained in hiding until the end of the war. By the end of the war, Samuel and his mother were the only members of his extensive family to survive. His father, Jonas, was shot by the Germans in July 1944, only a few days before Samuel's own liberation. As Bak described the situation, "when in 1944 the Soviets liberated us, we were two among two hundred of Vilna's survivors--from a community that had counted 70 or 80 thousand." Bak and his mother as pre-war Polish citizens were allowed to leave Soviet-occupied Wilno and travel to central Poland, at first settling briefly in Lodz. They soon left Poland and traveled into the American occupied zone of Germany. From 1945 to 1948, he and his mother lived in Displaced Persons camps in Germany. He spent most of this period at the Landsberg am Lech DP camp in Germany. It was there he painted a self-portrait shortly before repudiating his Bar Mitzvah ceremony. Bak also studied painting in Munich during this period, and painted "A Mother and Son", 1947, which evokes some of his dark memories of the Holocaust and escape from Soviet-occupied Poland. In 1948, Bak and his mother immigrated to Israel. In 1952, he studied art at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem. After serving in the Israel Defense Forces, he continued his studies in Paris (from 1956 at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts) and spent various periods of time in Rome, Paris, Switzerland and Israel before settling permanently in the United States. In 2001, Bak returned to Vilnius for the first time and has since visited his hometown several times. Samuel Bak is a conceptual artist with elements of post-modernism as he employs different styles and visual vernaculars, i.e. surrealism (Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte), analytical cubism (Picasso), pop art (Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein) and quotations from the old masters. The artist never paints direct scenes of mass death. Instead, he employs allegory, metaphor and certain artistic devices such as substitution: toys instead of the murdered children who played with them, books, instead of the people who read them. Further devices are quotations of iconographical prototypes, i.e. Michelangelo's "Creation of Adam" on the Sistine Ceiling or Albrecht Dürer's famous engraving entitled "Melencholia" . In the late 1980s Bak opened up about his paintings, stating they convey “a sense of a world that was shattered.” He turns these prototypes into ironical statements. Irony in the art of Samuel Bak does not mean parody or derision, but rather disenchantment, and the attempt to achieve distance from pain. Recurring symbols are: the Warsaw Ghetto Child, Crematorium Chimneys or vast backgrounds of Renaissance landscape that symbolize the indifference of the outside world. These form a disturbing contrast with the broken and damaged images in the foreground. Samuel Bak's paintings cause discomfort, they are a warning against complacency, a bulwark against collective amnesia with reference to all acts of barbarism, worldwide and throughout the ages, through his personal experience of genocide. In Bak's piece entitled Trains Bak creates a vast grey landscape with large mounts creating the structure of a train. Massive taper candles burn in the distance further down the train tracks, surrounding an eruption. The smoke from the candles and volcano pour into a sky of dark ominous clouds that lurk over the landscape. Here Bak has created a whole new meaning for “trains.” Many of Bak’s pieces incorporate aspects of Jewish culture and the holocaust with a dark and creative twist, such as Shema Israel, Alone, and Ghetto. Chess as a theme of life has always fascinated Bak. In the DP camps and in Israel, he often played chess with his stepfather Markusha. Underground II, 1997, portrays chess pieces in a sunken, subterranean evocation of the Vilna ghetto. Select Group Exhibitions Graphic Works by Contemporary Israeli artists - Israel Museum, Jerusalem Avraham Ofek, Igael Tumarkin, Shmuel Bak, Avigdor Arikha,Jakob Steinhardt, Anna Ticho Artist and Society in Israeli Art, Tel Aviv Museum, Tel Aviv Moshe Gat, Marcel Janco, Yohanan Simon, Ruth Schloss, Menashe Kadishman, Samuel Bak, Yosl Bergner. Selected museum exhibitions Bezalel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel – 1963 Tel Aviv Museum, Tel Aviv, Israel – 1963 Rose Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA – 1976 Germanisches National Museum, Nuremberg, Germany – 1977 Heidelberg Museum, Heidelberg, Germany – 1977 Haifa University, Haifa, Israel – 1978 Kunstmuseum, Düsseldorf, Germany – 1978 Jüdisches Museum, Stadt Frankfurt am Main, Germany – 1993 Hebrew Union College, Jewish Institute of Religion, New York, NY – 1994 South African Jewish Museum, Cape Town, South Africa. 2013-2014. B’nai B’rith Klutznick National Jewish Museum, Washington, DC – 1997 Holocaust Museum Houston, Houston, TX – 1997 National Museum of Lithuania, Vilnius, Lithuania – 2001 Felix Nussbaum...

Flowers is a beautiful original etching by the Italian artist Paulucci. Signed on the lower right margin. Artist's proof The artwork represents flowers, depicted by strong express...

The Bottle is an original lithograph realized in 1944. Black and white lithograph. Hand signed, numbered and dated. Edition of 55/60. Signature on plate.

The still life is an original etching artwork realized after Charles Coleman (1807, Yorkshire - 1874, Roma) in 1992. Signed on the plate, the rare edition of only 25 copies. Good c...

Composition n. 20 is an original artwork realized in the 1970s by Vairo Mongatti. Black and white etching. Hand signed and numbered. Edition of 26/120 prints.

Charlie Davies Flying amongst the flowers Original botanical etching Soft ground etching on paper Image Size: 35 cm x 35 cm x 1 cm Sheet/Canvas Size: 50 cm x 50 cm x 1 cm Unframed Fr...

Vintage Floral study etching titled "Weeds" by Marina Payot (American, 20th century), 1983. Titled, signed, and dated lower edge. Artists Proof designation. Unframed. Image: 11.75"H ...

Botanical print. Plate-signed. Measures 22.25 x 16.375 in. Unframed. Printed in Italy. Good Condition.

Wine and Grapes is an original print in Etching technique on ivory-colored paper, realized by Maxime Juan in 1955. Hand-signed and dated on the lower right. Numbered. Edition, 4/20...

Fish and Birds is an original artwork realized in 1972 by the italian Contemporary artist Leo Guida (1992 - 2017). Original black and white etching ...

Jim Dine drew the plate for this image in the same period as his “Thirty Bones of My Body” 1972 portfolio of drypoint tool images. Crisbrook paper (30 x 22 in. / 76.2 x 56 cm.) and p...

'Burtonia Villosa - Villous Burtonia' Botanical lithograph of a Western Australian native plant with original hand-colouring , 1848, by Walter Hood Fitch (1817-1892). 235mm by 145m...

Jim Dine drew the plate for this image in the same period as his “Thirty Bones of My Body” 1972 portfolio of drypoint tool images. Crisbrook paper (30 x 22 in. / 76.2 x 56 cm.) and p...

Poster. Measures 19.5 x 27.75 inches and is Unframed. Good/Fair Condition-signs of wear consistent with age and handling.

British Pop artist Harvey Daniels created this image in 1970 in a small edition of 20. This impression is #2 His work has described by art historian Norbert Lynton as a “visual carni...

Annotated in pencil "Eprueve HC" A trial proof reserved for the artist Printed by Mourlot, Paris First edition was 100 signed and numbered This a color variant proof before the first...

These works were printed in November 1967 by Fernand Mourlot, master lithographer in Paris.