Face Prints and Multiples

Steve Jobs had just returned to the struggling company, Apple Computer in 1997. Jobs and Lee Clow had collaborated back in 1984 to launch the MacIntosh. Now was the time to recover t...

Artist: Hunt Slonem, American (1951 - ) Title: Purple Spell Year: 1980 Medium: Serigraph, signed and numbered in pencil Edition: AP 29 Size: 22 x 30 inches

TECHNICAL INFORMATION Alex Katz Dancer 3 2019 Silkscreen 60 x 36 in. Edition of 60 Pencil signed and numbered Accompanied with COA by Gregg Shienbaum Fine Art Condition: This work...

Original Lithograph by Jean Cocteau Title: Artaban 1961 signed in the stone/printed signature Dimensions: 38 x 28 cm Lithograph made for the portfolio "Gitans et Corridas" ...

Cherry Kate by BATIK BATIK is an increasingly collectable pop artist currently living and working in London. The artist is purposely elusive with their true identity, sex and age ...

"James Cagney" original etching by Al Hirschfeld. Caricature portrait of Jimmy Cagney in "Yankee Doodle Dandy." Hand pulled from an edition of 200 plus 30 artist's proofs and 2 print...

Walter Schnackenberg’s style changed several times during his long and successful career. Having studied in Munich, the artist traveled often to Paris where he fell under the spell o...

Maurice DENIS (1870 - 1943) The Woman in the Green Coat, 1918 Lithograph On vellum 47 x 36,5 cm (c. 18,5 x 14,3 inch) INFORMATION : Edited by Louis Rouart in Paris, from a drawing ...

PABLO PICASSO 1881-1973 Málaga 1881-1973 Mougins (Spanish) Title: Reclining Man and Crouching Woman Homme couché et femme accroupie, 1956 Technique:...

This artwork titled "La Collana II" 1952, is an original color lithograph on Wove paper by renown German/Italian artist Massimo Campigli, 1895-1971. It is hand signed and numbered 15...

June is an expertly crafted, embossed serigraph on paper with foil stamping and an image size of 27 x 22 inches. From the edition of 650, the art is numbered 203/300 and estate-stamp...

This woodcut print was created by American artist Leonard Baskin. Baskin is well known for his somewhat grotesque, intricate, surreal drawings and natural subject matter. This print ...

James Whistler (1834-1903), Venus, 1859. Etching and drypoint, printed in black ink on laid paper, an impression in the second (final) state: there was no published edition. 6 x 9 inches (15 x 22.6 cm) sheet 73/8 x 117/8 inches (18.8 x 30.3 cm) Reference: Kennedy 59; Glasgow 60 A very fine impression. A study of Héloïse, ‘Fumette’, asleep in bed, her head pressed into the pillow and the bedclothes covering her lower legs. This is one of three portraits Whistler made of Fumette in 1859: one of the others shows her standing and in the third only her head and shoulders are depicted. Venus is a work in the Realist tradition, and may be compared with Courbet’s nudes of the same period. The artist may also have had in mind Rembrandt’s study of Antiope in his etching Jupiter and Antiope. Venus was never published and there is no record of it being shown until 1898 when it was included in an Exhibition of Etchings, Drypoints and Lithographs by Whistler at H. Wunderlich & Co., New York. To have been overlooked for exhibition until so late in Whistler’s life might suggest that the subject was considered improper. Frederick Wedmore, whose catalogue of Whistler’s etchings...

This is a newly released platinum print of "The Observer and Observed" by Susan Derges. Printed in 2022. Listing includes framing, a label of authentici...

2018 marks the centenary anniversary of Ferdinand Hodler’s death. In that 100 years time, the art world’s esteem of this important artist has proved fickle. It has shifted from extol...

28" x 20.5" Unframed Limited Edition Giclée with Hand Embellishment of 100 Hand Signed by Todd White

A nice rare early etching by the noted American Artist Will Barnet titled "Mary", created in 1936.

Photography Stamped, verso In great condition

A relic from the early days of streetwear culture in 2001, this mini poster features a photograph by reknown photographer David Sims reworked by KAWS in his interventionist style. A Kimpsons Krusty the Clown is in the background while a KAWS Bendy wraps itself around the model. On the reverse is information about KAWS's exhibition at Parco Gallery in Tokyo. Sponsors include Supreme and A Bathing Ape...

Artist: Alexander Calder, American (1898 - 1976) Title: Two Acrobats from Derriere le Miroir Year: 1975 Medium: Lithograph Size: 15 in. x 11 in. (38.1 cm x 27.94 cm) Frame Size: 23 x...

Jean-Michel Basquiat Photograph by Nick Taylor of Gray: This rare Basquiat photograph was taken from Nicholas Taylor’s well-documented portfolio exploring his friendship with Jean-Michel Basquiat - a friendship which began when both collaborated on the historic New York No Wave band, “GRAY” in the late 1970s; before the two briefly lived together in the East Village. Selections from Taylor's portfolio were most notably exhibited as part of the Basquiat retrospective at London's Barbican in 2017 and have been featured in numerous noteworthy publications on Basquiat. "Basquiat knew funk, jazz and what was up. How many people were equally versed in Miles Davis and Funkadelic, Charlie Parker and Bootsy Collins, Thelonious Monk and the JBs?" (Glenn O'Brien, 'Gray Matters,' GQ, 2011) Archival Inkjet Print. 11 x 14 inches (including borders). Hand signed by Taylor on the reverse from a limited edition of 50. Excellent overall condition. Provided directly by artist. Listing dealer is a primary representative of Nicholas Taylor. Related exhibitions featuring this work: Basquiat: Boom for Real; Barbican London; September 2017-January 2018. Museum of the City of New York (NY, New Music: 1980-1986): 2021. Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (Seeing Loud: Basquiat and Music): 2022. Nicholas Taylor (American, b. 1953) is a renowned photographer and musician. Taylor moved to New York in 1977 to pursue a career as a photographer and it was through the vibrant New York art scene that he came to know the young artist, Jean-Michel Basquiat. It was, in fact, his intimate portfolio of photographs documenting his friendship with Basquiat that rocketed Taylor to fame. The two would collaborate in the No Wave band “Gray” before Taylor launched a successful career as a DJ famous for track-looping (named "DJ High Priest" by Basquiat). His track “Suicide Mode” would later be used in the soundtrack for Julian Schnabel’s 1996 film “Basquiat." Exhibitions: Basquiat: Boom For Real at the Barbican Centre, London (9/21/17- Present) Literature/Catalog Raisonne: Basquiat: Boom For Real (Eleanor Nairne/Dieter Buchart) Jean-Michel Basquiat: King For A Decade (Taka Kawachi) Jean-Michel Basquiat: 1981, Studio of The Street (Diego Cortez) For further history on Basquiat & his group Gray, please see: "Gray Matters," by Glenn O'Brien (GQ magazine, 4/21/11) "We formed a band: Jean-Michel Basquiat and the New York noise underground," The New Statesman, 9/29/17 "Bowie, Bach and Bebop: How Music Powered Basquiat" (New York Times 9/22/17) Glenn O'Brien, "Gray Matters," GQ Magazine April, 2011: "Gray’s approach to music was having heard music, to approach instruments and sound systems the way one would pick up a strange machine and try to intuit its operation and function. Since Basquiat didn’t know guitar technique, it seemed like a good idea to play one with a steel file. Michael Holman discovered that you could achieve a very nice effect by pulling masking tape off the skin of a snare drum... And then there was the clarinet that Basquiat liked to walk around with, that was as much a scepter and wand as wind instrument. This utterly charming 27-track album is chock full of the road not taken, which sounds so right just now. It is refreshingly stripped of flagrant virtuosity but it is conceived brilliantly, played perfectly, and arranged impeccably... If a wine can have notes of chocolate, leather, licorice, and tobacco, then this record can have notes of William DeVaughn, Willie Hutch, Marcel Duchamp, Larry Coryell, the Modernaires, Sergio Mendez...

David Roberts R.A. 1796 - 1864 Interior of the Great Temple of Aboo Simbel Subscription edition and First edition lithographs available Full plate: 139 Acid free mount With David ...

This archival illustrative photography pigment print on cotton rag by Andrew Pinkham measures 20in x 16in and is signed and numbered. This piece is part of a small edition of 10. ...

Created in 2019, this screenprint with diamond dust is hand-signed by Russell Young Russell Young, British (Northern England, 1959- ) in pencil on verso. This is a unique and origina...

MORTON DIMONDSTEIN (NY 1920 - LA 2000) MARKET IN ERONGARICUARO 1954 Serigraph, silkscreen. Signed titled and dated in pencil. Image 10 ¼ x 25 ½ inches. Large full sheet 17 1/4 x 30...

Walter Schnackenberg’s style changed several times during his long and successful career. Having studied in Munich, the artist traveled often to Paris where he fell under the spell of the Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s colorful and sensuous posters depicting theatrical and decadent subjects. Schnackenberg became a regular contributor of similar compositions to the German magazines Jugend and Simplicissimus before devoting himself to the design of stage scenery and costumes. In the artist’s theatrical work, his mastery of form, ornamentation, and Orientalism became increasingly evident. He excelled at combining fluid Art Nouveau outlines, with spiky Expressionist passages, and the postures and patterns of the mysterious East. In his later years, Schnackenberg explored the unconscious, using surreal subject matter and paler colors that plainly portrayed dreams and visions, some imbued with political connotations. His drawings, illustrations, folio prints, and posters are highly sought today for their exceedingly imaginative qualities, enchanting subject matter, and arresting use of color. SCHNACKENBERG: KOSTUME, PLAKATE UND DEKORATIONEN, a cardboard bound art book consisting of 43 prints of work by Walter Schnackenberg, 30 of which are color lithographs that are signed and some are titled and dated in the plate, as well as black and white prints and photographs with accompanying text by Oskar Bie; lithographs printed at Kunstanstalt Oskar Consee in Munich, other images printed by Gesellschaft Pick & Co. in Munich, the text and cover with color images by Schnackenberg front and verso printed by R. Oldenbourg in Munich; published by Musarion Verlag, Munich, 1920. The majority of Walter Schnackenberg’s artistic output was destroyed by bomb attacks in Munich in 1944. The highly publicized 2013 auction in New York of the recovered pre-war poster collection once belonging to German poster aficionado, Hans Sachs has reintroduced the world to Walter Schnackenberg’s graphic genius and priceless ephemeral art from a lost era. Besides the museum world, designer Karl Lagerfeld is one of the most prodigious collectors of Schnackenberg. Flipping through the pages of Kostume, Plakate und Dekorationen, it becomes quite clear that Schnackenberg’s collection is ground zero at the crossroads of early modern fashion where the cult of celebrity meets up with dance, music, theater and cabaret, film and the graphic medium. Berlin and Munich under Germany’s Weimar Republic in the first quarter of the 20th century produced just the atmosphere to feed this burgeoning industry. Rising inflation sparked a recklessness to live large for the moment and heightened a desire for escapism. An influx of Indian and East Asian dancers and musicians added to the artsy bohemian cultural mix. A new decadence and tolerance resulted. Film boldly featured provocative subject matter. Cabarets became popular venues giving rise to the demi-monde in which people from all social stations mixed more freely in a thriving underground economy and culture where there was a blurring of boundaries and of social codes. Noted art historian and cultural doyen, Oskar Bie astutely observes in his introduction to Schnackenberg’s publication that what unites the images is fantasy and advertisement. Schnackenberg uses the eye as an instrument to brilliantly construct and convey this double message. His personages never directly confront the viewer. Their eyes gaze off in the distance like those of the screenplayer and film star Hedamaria Scholz in Schnackenberg’s “Die Rodelhexe” movie poster. Their eyes follow the path of a dance composition or become a transfixed and ogling male gaze such as the iconic 1911 Odeon Casino poster...

"From: Ilsee, Princess of Tripoli "Jaufre and Eymardine" is an original lithograph by Alphonse Mucha. From "Ilsee, Princesse de Tripoli," a rare illustrated book. Image: 8.12" x 6"...

WITH THE COMING OF SPRING, THE GRASS RETURNS NATURALLY Date of creation: 2013 Medium: Offset lithograph with silver on paper Edition: 300 Size: 50 x 50 cm Condition: In mint conditio...

Pas de Deux V (Red Grooms and Liz Ross) is a serigraph on paper with an image size of 36 x 20 inches, signed ‘Alex Katz’ lower left and numbered 75/150. From the edition of 173 (ther...

Egon Schiele (1890 – 1918), AUSTRIA “ART CANNOT BE MODERN, ART IS PRIMORDIALLY ETERNAL.” -SCHIELE Defiantly iconoclastic in life and art, Egon Schiele is esteemed for his masterful draftsmanship and precocious insight into the human condition. Part of the first wave of Austrian Modernism, he was swept away by the Viennese fascination with the tension between Life and Death (known in the works of Freud and his later interpreters as Eros and Thanatos). Life, identified with attraction, love, sexuality, and reproduction, and Death, represented by distortion, disease, repulsion, and hysteria, often appeared in the same composition, thereby suggesting the frightening life cycle of the human mind and body. Young throughout his career, Schiele universalized his childhood traumas, thriving libido, insecurities, fears, and longings. His contorted line, jarring contrasts, and flat areas of color, demonstrate an early alliance with Expressionist philosophy and artists who were relentlessly frustrated by conventionality in all its forms. Schiele’s work embodied man’s disorientation and confusion in a seemingly absurd world, a world plagued by disease and war. It continues to be astonishingly relevant today, not just because it helped define Modernism but also because it revealed the dark and immutable aspects of the human condition. Zeichnungen is a fine art print portfolio published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Richard Lanyi, Vienna, 1917, printed by Max Jaffe...

Marc Chagall, Original Lithograph depicting an instant of the Bible. Technique: Original lithograph in colours Year: 1956 Sizes: 35,5 x 26 cm / 14" x 10.2" (...

A brilliant, richly-inked impression of this etching and drypoint printed in dark brownish black on antique cream laid paper with very strong contrasts....

In this print, Wenceslaus Hollar presents a portrait of an unidentified woman, copying a portrait by Hans Holbein the Younger. The identity of the sitter is a mystery: formerly, the portrait was believed to be of Catherine of Aragon, and the National Portrait Gallery in London identifies her as Queen Mary I...

Ting Shao Kuang (b. 1939) Chinese American) "Emerald Valley" (S.49), 1987, color screen print, signed and numbered ##/275 in penci...

This work is edition number 33/50. Signed/numbered in pencil, lower lect. By reducing his subjects to their most essential visual components, Alex Katz engages in a reductive proc...

Color aquatint and hardground etching. Edition of 25

Suzanne VALADON (1865-1938) Toileting Children in the Garden, 1932 Original etching Signed in pencil On BFK Rives vellum 53.5 x 44 cm (c. 21 x 17.3 in) INFORMATION : Printed in 193...

Claudine Loquen is a French artist born in 1965 who lives & works in Paris, France. She depicts portraits, especially women faces as Colette for litera...

Pablo O'Higgins (1904-1983). The Bricklayer and His Son, 1946. Lithographic ink on paper, Sheet measuring 15 x 17 5/8 inches. Signed in pencil by artist lower right. Water stai...

Egon Schiele (1890 – 1918), AUSTRIA “ART CANNOT BE MODERN, ART IS PRIMORDIALLY ETERNAL.” -SCHIELE Defiantly iconoclastic in life and art, Egon Schiele is esteemed for his masterful draftsmanship and precocious insight into the human condition. Part of the first wave of Austrian Modernism, he was swept away by the Viennese fascination with the tension between Life and Death (known in the works of Freud and his later interpreters as Eros and Thanatos). Life, identified with attraction, love, sexuality, and reproduction, and Death, represented by distortion, disease, repulsion, and hysteria, often appeared in the same composition, thereby suggesting the frightening life cycle of the human mind and body. Young throughout his career, Schiele universalized his childhood traumas, thriving libido, insecurities, fears, and longings. His contorted line, jarring contrasts, and flat areas of color, demonstrate an early alliance with Expressionist philosophy and artists who were relentlessly frustrated by conventionality in all its forms. Schiele’s work embodied man’s disorientation and confusion in a seemingly absurd world, a world plagued by disease and war. It continues to be astonishingly relevant today, not just because it helped define Modernism but also because it revealed the dark and immutable aspects of the human condition. Zeichnungen is a fine art print portfolio published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Richard Lanyi, Vienna, 1917, printed by Max Jaffe...

GRAPHICTHERAPY is David Calderley: an Englishman in New York, Creative/Art Director, Graphic Designer and Illustrator. After graduating from the esteemed St. Martin’s School of Art ...

Crite, Alan Rohan. THE REVELATION OF SAINT JOHN THE DIVINE. Limited Editions Club, NY, 1995. Number 88 of the edition of 300 copies. Large folio (22 x 16 inches) clamshell box in black cloth with morocco label, book in Black Cloth, with morocco label, 58 pages with the text of Revelations in the King James Version, and fifteen "relief engravings" (wood-engravings?) by Alan Crite...

Yoshitomo Nara Peace of Mind Offset print on paper Sheet size 72.8 x 51.5 cm

Original Lithograph - Henri Matisse - Apollinaire Artist : Henri MATISSE 13 x 10 inches Edition: 151/330 References : Duthuit-Matisse Catalogue raisonné 31 MATISSE'S BIOGRAPHY YOUTH AND EARLY EDUCATION Henri Emile Benoît Matisse was born in a tiny, tumbledown weaver's cottage on the rue du Chêne Arnaud in the textile town of Le Cateau-Cambrésis at eight o'clock in the evening on the last night of the year, 31 December 1869 (Le Cateau-Cambrésis is in the extreme north of France near the Belgian border). The house had two rooms, a beaten earth floor and a leaky roof. Matisse said long afterwards that rain fell through a hole above the bed in which he was born. Matisse’s ancestors had lived in the area for centuries before the convulsive social and industrial upheavals of the nineteenth century. Matisse grew up in a world that was still detaching itself from a way of life in some ways unchanged since Roman times. The coming of the railway had put Bohain on the industrial map, but people still traveled everywhere on foot or horseback. Matisse’s father, Émile Hippolyte Matisse, was a grain merchant whose family were weavers. His mother, Anna Heloise Gerard, was a daughter of a long line of well-to-do tanners. Warmhearted, outgoing, capable and energetic, she was small and sturdily built with the fashionable figure of the period: full breasts and hips, narrow waist, neat ankles and elegant small feet. She had fair skin, broad cheekbones and a wide smile. "My mother had a face with generous features," said her son Henri, who always spoke of her with particular tenderness of the sensitivity. Throughout the forty years of her marriage, she provided unwavering, rocklike support to her husband and her sons. Matisse later said: "My mother loved everything I did." He grew up in nearby Bohain-en-Vermandois, an industrial textile center, until the age of ten, when his father sent him to St. Quentin for lycée. Anna Heloise worked hard. She ran the section of her husband's shop that sold housepaints, making up the customers' orders and advising on color schemes. The colors evidently left a lasting impression on Henri. The artist himself later said he got his color sense from his mother, who was herself an accomplished painter on porcelain, a fashionable art form at the time. Henri was the couple’s first son. The young Matisse was an awkward youth who seemed ill-adapted to the rigors of the North; in particular, he hated the gelid winters. He was a pensive child and by his own account he was a dreamy, frail and not outstandingly bright. In later life he never lost his feeling for his native soil, for seeds and growing things he had encountered in his youth. The fancy pigeons he kept in Nice more than half a century after he left home recalled the weavers' pigeon-lofts tucked away behind even the humblest house in Bohain. Matisse's childhood memories were of a stern upbringing. "Be quick!" "Look out!" "Run along!" "Get cracking!" were the refrains that rang in his ears as a boy. In later years when survival itself depended on habits of thrift and self-denial, the artist prided himself on being a man of the North. When Matisse in turn had children of his own to bring up, he chided himself for any lapse in discipline or open display of tenderness as weakness on his part. In 1887 he went to Paris to study law, working as a court administrator in Le Cateau-Cambrésis after gaining his qualification. Although he considered law as tedious, he nonetheless passed the bar in 1888 with distinction and began his practice begrudgingly. Once Matisse finished school, his father, a much more practical man, arranged for his son to obtain a clerking position at a law office. PAINTING: BEGINNINGS Matisse’s discovery of his true profession came about in an unusual manner. Following an attack of appendicitis, he began to paint in 1889, when his mother had brought him art supplies during the period of convalescence. He said later, “From the moment I held the box of colors in my hands, I knew this was my life. I threw myself into it like a beast that plunges towards the thing it loves.” Matisse’s mother was the first to advise her son not to adhere to the “rules” of art, but rather listen to his own emotions. Matisse was so committed to his art that he later extended a warning to his fiancée, Amélie Parayre, whom he later married: “I love you dearly, mademoiselle; but I shall always love painting more.” Matisse had discovered "a kind of paradise" as he later described it. His drastic change of profession deeply disappointed his father. Two years later in 1891 Matisse returned to Paris to study art at the Académie Julian and became a student of William-Adolphe Bouguereau. After a discouraging year at the Académie Julian, he left in disgust at the overly perfectionist style of teaching there. Afterwards he trained with Gustave Moreau, an artist who nurtured more progressive leanings. In both studios, as was usual, students drew endless figure studies from life. From Bouguereau, he learned the fundamental lessons of classical painting. His one art-schooled technical standby, almost a fetish, was the plumb line. No matter how odd the angles in any Matisse, the verticals are usually dead true. Moreau was a painter who despised the "art du salon", so Matisse was destined, in a certain sense, to remain an "outcast" of the art world. He initially failed his drawing exam for admission to the École des Beaux-Arts, but persisted and was finally accepted. Matisse began painting still-lives and landscapes in the traditional Flemish style, at which he achieved reasonable proficiency. Most of his early works employ a dark palette and tend to be gloomy. Chardin was one of Matisse's most admired painters having made four the French still-life master paintings in the Louvre. Although he executed numerous copies after the old masters he also studied contemporary art. His first experimentations earned him a reputation as the rebellious member of his studio classes. In 1896, Matisse was elected as an associate member of the Société Nationale, which meant that each year he could show paintings at the Salon de la Société without having to submit them for review. In the same year he exhibited 5 paintings in the salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, and the state bought two of his paintings. This was the first and almost only recognition he received in his native country during his lifetime. In 1897 and 1898, he visited the painter John Peter Russell on the island Belle Île off the coast of Brittany. Russell introduced him to Impressionism and to the work of Van Gogh who had been a good friend of Russell but was completely unknown at the time. Matisse's style changed completely, and he would later say "Russell was my teacher, and Russell explained color theory to me." Matisse also observed Russell's and other artists' stable marriages. This probably influenced him to find in Amélie Noellie Parayre, his future wife, his anchor. The Dinner Table (1897) was Matisse’s first masterpiece, and he had spent the entire winter working on the oeuvre. Though the Salon displayed the piece, they hung the work in a poor location, disgusted by what they considered its radical, Impressionist aspects. Caroline Joblaud was Matisse's early lover for four years during his initial struggles to affirm his artistic direction and professional career. Caroline (also called Camille) gave Matisse his first daughter Marguerite in 1894, who after Matisse's marriage to Amélie Noellie Parayre was warmly accepted contrary to conventional hostility such arrangements provoked. Caroline posed various times for the artist’s compositions while Marguerite served many times as a model for Matisse throughout his life. MARRIAGE WITH AMÉLIE NOELLIE PARAYRE The Matisses of Bohain and the Parayres of Beauzelle had outwardly nothing in common, and there was no reason why Matisse and Amélie should ever have met. But in October 1897 Matisse went to a wedding in Paris and happened to sit next to her at the uproarious banquet that followed. There had been no banal flirtation between them, even when the wine flowed, each recognized the other as true metal, and when they got up from the table she held out her hand to Henri Matisse in a way that he never forgot. Matisse at that time was not yet the professorial figure of legend. He was known as a prankster, as a ribald and anti-clerical songster, and as someone who had once broken up a café concert performance just for the hell of it. Amélie's relatives operated at that time within a social, intellectual, and political context of which Matisse had had no previous experience. They stood for free thinking, for the separation of church and state, and for the secularization of the French educational system. Her family, better off that that of Matisse, provided the support he needed for the budding artist. When Matisse married Amélie in January 1898, they had been introduced only three months after. Amélie's Aunt Noélie and two of her brothers ran a successful women's shop called the Grande Maison des Modes. Before her marriage, Amélie had shown a gift for designing, making, and modeling hats for a fashionable clientele. In June 1899, she found a partner and opened a shop of her own on the rue de Châteaudun. This allowed Henri and herself to live, with Marguerite, in a tiny two-room apartment on the same street. Madame Matisse, fervently loyal, would play a fundamental role in the life and career of the artist for more than 40 years. Marguerite was to become her father's lifetime mainstay In 1902 disaster struck. Amélie’s parents were disgraced and financially ruined in a spectacular scandal of national scope, as the unsuspecting employees of a woman whose financial empire was based on fraud. Thanks to his early years in a lawyer's office, Matisse was able to busy himself to great effect in the organization of his father-in-law's defense. When all about him lost their heads, burst into tears, and felt more than sorry for themselves, Henri Matisse dealt with their problems one by one. The ordeal had taken its toll, in more than one way. His doctors ordered Matisse to go to Bohain and take two months' complete rest. Amélie had lost both her hat shop and the apartment on the rue de Châteaudun. For the first time, Henri, Amélie and the three children were united in Bohain, having nowhere else to go. Hillary Spurling, one of Matisse’s biographers, asserts that Amélie’s memories of that public disgrace nurtured a “suspicion of the outside world” that would always mark the Matisse family. The Matisse family formed a kind of hermetic unit which revolved around the artist’s work and profession. They fitted their activities according his breaks and work sessions. Silence was essential. Even during the years when Matisse lived mostly alone in Nice, an annual ritual of unpacking, stretching, framing and hanging ended with the whole family settling down to respond to the paintings. The conference might last several days. Then the dealers were admitted. Matisse and his wife had had two sons, Jean (born 1899) and Pierre (born 1900). He was not always in peace with his family. He wrote that their views were not always in accord “which disturbs me considerably in my work, for which I require the most complete calm and from those how surround me, a serenity that I cannot find here. I intend to move to a village a few league away.” Pierre, his brother, Jean, and Marguerite remained close to their father through every vicissitude, and Matisse, in his last invalid years, was devoted to his several grandchildren. In 1899, at a time when his paintings displayed rebellious talent but not much clear direction, Matisse began attending classes in clay modeling and sculpture. Assigned to copy one of the sculptural masterpieces in the Louvre, he selected Jaguar Devouring a Hare a violently precise work by Antoine-Louis Barye. Later, whenever his paintings seemed stuck, he turned to sculpture to organize his thoughts and sensations. Influenced by the works of the post-Impressionists Paul Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh and Paul Signac, and also by Japanese art, Matisse made color a crucial element of his paintings. Matisse said, "In modern art, it is indubitably to Cézanne that I owe the most." By studying Cézanne’s fragmented planes -- which stretched the idea of the still life to a forced contemplation of color surfaces themselves -- Matisse was able to reconstruct his own philosophy of the still life. Many of his paintings from 1899 to 1905 make use of a pointillist technique adopted from Signac. In 1898, he went to London to study the paintings of J. M. W. Turner and then went on a trip to Corsica. After years in poverty, Matisse went through his "dark period" (1902-03), moved briefly to naturalism, went back to a dark palette and told friends in 1903 that he had lost all desire to paint and had almost decided to give up. Fortunately, Matisse was able to earn some money painting a frieze for the World Fair at the Grand Palais in Paris. He also traveled extensively in the early 1900s when tourism was still a new idea. Brought on by railroad, steamships, and other forms of transportation that appeared during the industrial revolution, travel became a popular pursuit. As a cultured tourist, he developed his art with regular doses of travel. FAUVISM Matisse's career can be divided into several periods that changed stylistically, but his underlying aim always remained the same: to discover "the essential character of things" and to produce an art "of balance, purity, and serenity," as he himself put it. The changing studio environments seemed always to have had a significant effect on the style of his work. In these first years of struggle Matisse set his revolutionary artistic agenda. He disregarded perspective, abolished shadows, repudiating the academic distinction between line and color. He was attempting to overturn a way of seeing evolved and accepted by the Western world for centuries by substituting a conscious subjectivity in the place of the traditional illusion of objectivity . Matisse hit his stride in the avant-garde art world in the first years of the new decade. He explored the modern art scene through frequent visits to galleries such as Durand-Ruel and Vollard, where he was exposed to work by Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, and Vincent van Gogh. Matisse’s first solo exhibition took place in 1904, without much success. In 16 May 1905 he arrived in the charming Catalan port of Collioure, in the south of France. He soon invited the painter André Derain (1880-1954), 11 years his junior, to join him. By 1905, Matisse was considered spearhead the Fauve movement in France, characterized by its spontaneity and roughness of execution as well as use of raw color straight from the palette to the canvas. Matisse combined pointillist color and Cézanne’s way of structuring pictorial space stroke by stroke to develop Fauvism - a way less of seeing the world than of feeling it with one’s eyes. When the Fauve summer drew to an end, Derain left Collioure with 30 paintings, 20 drawings and some 50 sketches, never to return, while Matisse departed some days later bringing back to Paris 15 finished paintings, 40 aquarelles, over 100 drawings. He returned Collioure in the summers of 1906, 1907, 1911 and 1914. The lure of the sun would prove always to have powers of restoration to the artist throughout his life particularly after periods of great emotional exertion. When Fauvist works were first exhibited Salon d'Automne in Paris they created a scandal. Eyewitness accounts tell of laughter emanating from room VII where they were displayed. Gertrud Stein, one of Matisse's most important future supporters, reported that people scratched at the canvases in derision. "A pot of paint has been flung in the face of the public" was the reaction by the critic Camille Mauclair. Louis Vauxcelles described the work with the historic phrase "Donatello au milieu des fauves!" (Donatello among the wild beasts), referring to a Renaissance-type sculpture that shared the room with them. His comment was printed on 17 October 1905 in Gil Blas, a daily newspaper, and passed into popular usage. Derain himself later called the Fauves' color "sticks of dynamite." The painting that was singled out for attacks was Matisse's Woman with a Hat, a portrait of Madame Matisse. This picture was bought be was bought by Gertrude and Leo Stein, a fact which had a very positive effect on Matisse who was suffering demoralization from the bad reception of his work. Matisse continued his experiments in Collioure, visible in the painting The Open Window and the View of Collioure , also a characteristic work of Fauvism in its raw color and disregard for details. Both of these works of the landscape in the French Mediterranean present a distinct development towards the spontaneous and uninhibited style. Other than André Derain, Georges Braque, Raoul Dufy and Maurice Vlaminck were also members of the Fauve movement. However, Matisse’s intimate friends among artists were mostly easygoing minor painters, such as Albert Marquet. Matisse’s temperamental aloneness made him prey to vertiginous depressions. He later recalled a breakdown that he underwent in Spain, in 1910: “My bed shook, and from my throat came a little high-pitched cry that I could not stop.” From the onset of is career women were from one of the cardinal motifs of the artist's production. His Joy of Life (1906) draws us into the world of hallucinatory vividness composed of nymphs set in an idyllic open fields dressed in pure color and sensual outline. Two women lounge in the sunlight while two more chat on the edge of the forest. One crouches to pick some flowers while her companion weaves a chain of them into her hair. A couple embraces each other while another group engages in a lively round-dance in the distance. In this way, Joy of Life depicts woodland nymphs engaging in a celebration of their life, their womanhood, and their sexuality. Due to the recurrent incidence of nude women and intensely sensual interpretation many observers have assumed that as a man Matisse must have been a hedonist. On the contrary, historic examination demonstrates that in reality, he was rather a self-abnegating Northerner who lived only to work, and did so in chronic anguish, recurrent panic, and amid periodic breakdowns. While Picasso recompensed himself, as he went along, with gratifications of intellectual and erotic play Matisse did not. In an age of ideologies, Matisse dodged all ideas except perhaps one: that art is life by other means. Matisse’s uninhibited celebration of women is often believed to have initiated from Cézanne’s painting Three Bathers (1882) (which he had acquired for himself along with a Van Gogh and a Gauguin). However, Matisse depicts women as nurturing, welcoming, and unlike the forbidding, massive clay-like presence of those of Paul Cézanne. FAME The decline of the Fauvist movement, after 1906, did nothing to deter the rise of Matisse. From 1906 -1917 he lived in Paris and established his home, studio, and school at Hôtel Biron. Among his neighbors is sculptor Auguste Rodin, writer Jean Cocteau, and dancer Isadora Duncan. Many of his finest works were created in this period, when he was an active part of the great gathering of artistic talent in Montparnasse, even though he did not quite fit in with his conservative appearance and strict bourgeois work habits. In fact, the aim of Matisse’s art was something less than revolutionary. In 1908, in a famous statement drawn from “Notes of a Painter,” Matisse declared as his ideal an art “for every mental worker, for the businessman as well as the man of letters, for example, a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.” Matisse's personal habits were incredibly regular. On a typical day rose early and worked all morning with a second work session after lunch, followed by violin practice, a simple supper (vegetable soup, two hard-boiled eggs, salad and a glass of wine) and an early bedtime. In 1906, he created a series of 12 lithographs, all variations on the theme of a seated nude. He chose to share his graphic work with the public almost immediately. The lithographs were exhibited at the Druet Gallery in Paris the same year that they were produced, and the woodcuts were shown at the Salon des Independants in the spring of 1907. In 1907 Appolinaire, commenting about Matisse in an article published in La Falange, said, "We are not here in the presence of an extravagant or an extremist undertaking: Matisse's art is eminently reasonable." Notwithstanding newly-won fame, Matisse's work continued to encounter vehement criticism and it was difficult for him to provide for his family. His controversial 1907 painting Blue Nude was burned in effigy at the Armory Show in Chicago in 1913. Contrary to the fate of the Impressionists, Matisse and other Fauves were able to exhibit in art galleries. In 1908 Paul Cassirer, the German art dealer and editor who played a significant role in the promotion of the work the French Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, staged an exhibit of Matisse’s works in Berlin. In the same year the American photographer Alfred Stieglitz in New York organized him one-man show in his tiny Manhattan gallery called 291 which effectively introduced Matisse the powerful American art market. In the first decade of his notoriety as the leader of the Fauves, Matisse was more admired by foreigners than by the French. It was, after all, the Russians and the Americans who acquired significant collections of his early work almost as quickly as it was created. The great Matisses we see in the Paris museums today were mostly acquired after the artist's death in lieu of death duties. It took the French a good deal longer to understand Matisse's greatness-longer, certainly, than the international cadre of aspiring talents that flocked to his classes when he was still one of the most controversial figures in the Paris avant-garde. In the summer of 1907, Matisse and his wife went on a long trip to italy "for work and Pleasure," visiting Venice and Padua, where they admired Giotto's frescos. In Florence the were the guests of the Steins in their villa in Fiesole. From this base matisse visited Arezzo, to study Piero della Francesca, and Siena, attracted by the early Sienese painters, especially, Duccio. PICASSO, GERTRUDE STEIN AND THE CONE SISTERS During the first decade of the 20th century Americans in Paris Gertrude Stein, her brothers Leo Stein, Michael Stein and Michael's wife Sarah took keen interest in Matisse's art. In addition, Gertrude Stein's two friends from Baltimore. Clarabel and Etta Cone, became major patrons of Matisse and Picasso, collecting hundreds of their works.The Cone Sisters acquired their first Matisse in 1906 and, during the next four decades, went on to form one of the world's great collections of his art. The Cone Collection not only contains major works from every phase of Matisse's long career but reflects the sisters' special interest in his Nice period, when a new complexity of form and psychology entered the ever intense surface allure of his paintings. In April of 1906 during a gathering at the house of the legendary Gertrude Stein, Matisse was introduced to Pablo Picasso who was 11 years younger. Picasso and Matisse were poles apart aesthetically and their life styles were no less so. Matisse was markedly taller and more polished than the stocky, cocky Catalan, was then ruler of the turbulent Paris avant-garde art scene. The two were said to have always been looking over their shoulders at each other. It is well-known that after their rivalry grew, sides were taken. Picasso later said: "No one has ever looked at Matisse's paintings more carefully than I; and no one has looked at mine more carefully than he." One key difference between their pictorial concepts was that Matisse drew and painted from nature, while Picasso was much more inclined to work from imagination. The subjects painted most frequently by both artists were women and still lives, with Matisse more likely to place his figures in fully realized interiors. Gertrude Stein, who loved stirring things up, wrote, "the feeling between the Picassoites and the Matisse-ites became bitter." Although Matisse dryly noted that "our disputes were always friendly," it should be pointed out that Picasso and his friends threw suction-cupped darts at Matisse's 1906 Portrait of Marguerite (which Picasso had obtained in a trade for his own Pitcher, Bowl and Lemon, from 1907). While the rift between the two artists eventually healed, the one between their supporters remained. ACADEMIE MATISSE IN PARIS & SERGEI SHCHUKIN In 1909, with the Matisse family lived in a former convent on the Boulevard des Invalides, in Paris, where the artist conducted a painting school. His immense notoriety, which had been confirmed in 1905-06 by Joy of Life, a work which seemed to trash every possible norm of pictorial order and painterly finesse.His friends organized and financed the Académie Matisse in Paris, a private and non-commercial school in which Matisse instructed young artists. It operated from 1911 until 1917. Hans Purrmann and Sarah Stein were several of his most loyal students. Although it lasted for only three years (1908-11), and yet, during its brief existence the Académie Matisse became one of the principal crossroads of modern painting for a number of gifted European and American artists. Given the reputation Matisse had acquired as the"wild man" of modernist color, it must have come as a shock to some of his early students that the program of instruction he offered was remarkably conservative. As Jean Heiberg, the first Norwegian to enroll in the Académie, later wrote in a memoir: "The school had, at Matisse's suggestion, acquired a copy of two antique sculptures from the Louvre, Mars and an archaic sculpture, which he often used to demonstrate. Every now and then he got completely rid of the life model and we only drew from the plaster casts, and his critiques then were no less profitable." Among Matisse’s students was Olga Meerson, a Russian Jew who had studied with Wassily Kandinsky in Munich and, already possessed of an elegant style, sought to remake herself under Matisse’s tutelage. Amélie suspected the worst. Perhaps a combination of Amélie’s jealousy and Meerson’s neediness caused a Matisse to end the connection, with bad feeling all around. Meerson moved to Munich, where she married the musician Heinz Pringsheim, a brother-in-law of Thomas Mann. Never having fulfilled her promise as a painter, she committed suicide in Berlin, in 1929. One of Matisse's biographers, with access to much of the artist's correspondence, contends that the artist, after his marriage, rarely, if ever, had sex with models, despite his apparent feelings for many. Two Russian art collectors stood out at the beginning of the 20th century: the cloth merchant Sergei Shchukin (1854–1936) and the textile manufacturer Ivan Morozov (1871–1921). Both acquired modern French art, developed a sensibility for spotting new trends, and publicized them in Russia. In this period, Matisse had initiated his fecund association with the Russian textile magnate and visionary collector, Sergei Shchukin. The artist created one of his major works La Danse specially for Shchukin as part of a two painting commission. Inspired by a circular dance-- perhaps a sardana - performed by fishermen at Collioure, this painting embodies the clash between the sacred and reality. Human hands link together, but they form a divine spirit. Moreover, Matisse all but abandoned perspective The work ’s flatness emphasizes the idea, colors, and material, a notion that made Matisse a model for Modernists. The other painting commissioned was Music, 1909. Shchukin was considered by some almost as a co-producer of some of the artist’s greatest works and was strongly commuted to the French painter’s work. Concerning the violent attacks on his friend, the Russian wrote to the artist: “The public is against you, but the future is yours.” By 1914 Shchukin’s house in Moscow contained thirty-seven Matisses. “He always picked the best,” the artist said. During the political revolution Lenin expropriated Shchukin collection in person but allowed Shchukin to remain, in servants’ quarters, as caretaker and guide. He died in Paris, in 1936. The collection is now in the Hermitage and Pushkin Museums From about 1911 to 1915, Matisse struggled with the ideas of Cubism, an experiment he felt he was "not participating in" because it did not "speak to [his] deeply sensory nature." MOROCCO Like many avant-garde artists in Paris, Matisse was receptive to a broad range of influences. He is one of the first painters to take an interest in various forms of “primitive” art. His art was profoundly influenced by Easter art as well. Matisse first flirted with the idea of visiting Morocco after a trip to the Moorish part of Spain in the winter of 1910. This taste of the Moors incited a flame of hope that there would be greater inspiration to paint in Morocco. Furthermore, well aware of the exotic subjects in Morocco that had engendered a wealth of inspiration for the famous French painter Delacroix when he visited the country over eighty years before, Matisse felt Morocco would stimulate his painting genius in ways Europe could not. He strove for neither the picturesque nor the pornographic. In Morocco, Matisse seems to have had difficulties finding models who would pose for him, particularly women because of the law of the veil. Only Jewesses and prostitutes were exempt. Luckily, Matisse to have found the prostitute Zorah for the purpose although he did not paint her as a prostitute. Instead, in his first picture of her, Zorah en Jaune, sexual themes are most conspicuously absent from the canvas. As a prostitute used to exposing and flaunting her body, Zorah could have easily been painted nude or with less clothing to show herself off, but instead Matisse chooses to keep her clothed and posed with prudence. Unlike the primitive, nude Western women in the Fauve Joy of Life. Moroccan Zorah is clothed with respect and detail to her finer characteristics. He is developing his ability to paint with awareness of the non-sexual qualities of his subject, a movement away from Fauve women. Many of Matisse's Moroccan paintings are covered only in the thinnest washes of pigment, as if he wanted the texture of the unpainted canvas to show through so that it would add rawness to the browns and grays. Matisse's odalisques have been described as "elaborate fictions" in which the artist re-created the image of the Islamic harem using French models posed in his Nice apartment. The fabrics, screens, carpets, furnishings and costuming recalled the exoticism of the "Orient" and provided a theme for Matisse's preoccupation with the figure and elaborate patterns of exotic fabrics. Although Matisse's interest in textiles are evident in his compositions made during his 1906 trip to Morocco, it didn't begin as a typical European attraction to the exotic. It was already present to him as a descendent of generations of weavers, who was raised among weavers in Bohain-en-Vermandois, which in the 1880's and 90's was a center of production of fancy silks for the Parisian fashion houses. Like virtually all his northern compatriots, he had an inborn appreciation of their texture and design. He understood the properties of weight and hang, he knew how to use pins and paper patterns, and he was supremely confident with scissors. Matisse was known to be an avid collector of fabrics, from his days as a poor art student in Paris to the latter years of his life, when his Nice studio overflowed with Persian carpets, delicate Arab embroideries, richly hued African wall hangings, and any number of colorful cushions, curtains, costumes, patterned screens, and backcloths. Textiles soon became the springboard for his radical experiments with perspective and an art based on decorative patterning and pure harmonies of color and line. When he moved house, he also moved his fabrics, describing them as "my working library." He added to the collection all his life, from markets in Algeria, Morocco and Tahiti to the end-of-season sales of Parisian haute couture. The revitalizing spirit of Morocco would live on in the artist's imagination until the cutouts of the artist's last years. AFTER PARIS Matisse continued to evolve in unexpected directions even though never became an abstract painter (though some of his most adventurous works, such as the View of Notre Dame of 1914 or the Yellow Curtain of 1916 come close). His motifs were always recognizable, and the tension between the subject and the formal aspects of the painting was a central concept of his artistic ideal. Matisse moved to Nice in 1917 to distance himself from wartime activity, where bright, warm colors showed him "simpler venues which won’t stifle the spirit." His spirit became loyal to the "silver clarity of light" in Nice, and he returned to Paris only for a few months each summer. The years 1917–30 are known as his early Nice period, when his principal subject remained the female figure or an odalisque dressed in oriental costume or in various stages of undress, depicted as standing, seated, or reclining in a luxurious, exotic interior of Matisse's own creation. These paintings are infused with southern light, bright colors, and a profusion of decorative patterns. They emanate the atmosphere suggestive of a harem. In 1929, Matisse temporarily suspended easel painting and traveled to America to sit on the jury of the 29th Carnegie International and, in 1930, spent some time in Tahiti and New York as well as Baltimore, Maryland and Merion, Pennsylvania.He was especially thrilled with New York. An important collector of modern art, and owner of the largest Matisse holdings in America, Dr. Albert Barnes of Merion, commissioned the artist to paint a large mural for the two-story picture gallery of his mansion. Matisse chose the subject of the dance, a theme that had preoccupied him since his early Fauve masterpiece Joy of Life. Americans were prominent among Matisse's patrons throughout his career, beginning with the Steins (Leo Stein bought Joy of Life right out of the Salon in 1906) and including the Cone sisters of Baltimore and the notoriously cantankerous Barnes. The foundational Matisse monograph was written during his lifetime by another American, Alfred Barr. Also important in promoting Matisse's presence before the transatlantic public was the Manhattan gallery founded in 1931 by the artist's son, Pierre, who remained a prominent figure in the New York art world for almost six decades. In addition to his father, he represented Balthus, Calder, Dubuffet, Giacometti, Miro, Tanguy and others, many of them also friends. Throughout his long and productive career, Matisse periodically refreshed his creative energies by turning from painting to drawing, sculpture and other forms of artistic expression. In his lifetime he also produced 12 illustrated books which were known as “livre d’artiste” (artist’s book), a specific type of illustrated book that became common in France around the turn of the century. These books were deluxe, limited editions, meant to be collected and admired as works of art, as well as, read. This process began when Swiss publisher Albert Skira first approached the modern master in 1930 to illustrate the work, Poesies, by 19th century French symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé . Matisse responded to Skira’s invitation with great enthusiasm and that summer, devoted most of his attention to the commission while he was residing in Paris. The result was a collection of 29 beautiful etchings, of which the Museum will display 16. The subject matter, like the poems themselves, varies considerably, although many of the images reflect the artist’s vacation to the South Pacific. Matisse’s etchings of Mallarmé’s poems are considered among his greatest works in the print medium. In 1941, again for Skira, Matisse began one of his most complicated and successful printmaking projects, Florilege des Amours de Ronsard, illustrating the love poems of 16th century French Renaissance poet Pierre de Ronsard. Ronsard’s subject and strong imagery lent themselves gracefully to Matisse’s favored themes of fruits, flowers, the female form and portraits. The artist selected the poems himself and translated the work from Renaissance French to contemporary French for the publication of the anthology DIVORCE & LATE FAMILY RELATIONSHIPS For all his long-lasting friendships with other artists, famous and obscure, Matisse's days and nights were absorbed by solitary labor. Playing the violin seemed a more intimate consolation for decades of critical abuse than the affections of his wife and children. Although their marriage was still somewhat fragile, the Matisses had decided to stay on in Nice when their lease expired at Place Charles-Félix in the summer of 1938. Matisse and his wife were separated in 1939 after 41 years when Amélie tried to dismiss the coolly efficient young Lydia Delectorskaya, an orphan refugee from Siberia, who had been hired as Amélie’s companion. However, the Matisses’ marriage ran afoul not of any romantic rival but for the artist’s wish to stand on his own. The first climax came years before in 1913, when Amélie sat more than a hundred times for the Portrait of Madame Matisse. A friend’s diary reported at the time. “Crazy! weeping! By night he recites the Lord’s Prayer! By day he quarrels with his wife!” The portrait, which was the last work to enter Shchukin’s collection, caused Matisse “palpitations, high blood pressure and a constant drumming in his ears.” Such frenzy was not rare when Matisse had difficulty with a painting. He referred to the painting years later in a letter to her as “the one that made you cry, but in which you look so pretty.” Amélie ceded routine leadership of the family to Marguerite. The 1913 portrait was his last painting of her. Matisse and his wife met the last time to discuss details of their legal separation, in July 1939. One of its key provisions was that everything would be divided equally between the couple. The meeting took place in Paris at the Gare St. Lazare and lasted thirty minutes, during which Amélie Matisse kept up a flow of small talk while her husband."My wife never looked at me, but I didn't take my eyes off her...," Matisse wrote on the night of that final encounter: "I couldn't get a word out.... I remained as if carved out of wood, swearing never to be caught that way again." "I'm going to try to isolate myself as if I were still absent,'' Matisse announced on his first return to Paris since the official separation from his wife, 'rarely leaving his apartment except for visits to the cinema (his first color film, starring Danny Kaye, was a revelation).'' After her dismissal, Delectorskaya shot herself in the chest with a pistol, remarkably with only a slight effect. Soon after the artist and his wife were legally separated Delectorskaya was back. She arrived with a bouquet of white daisies and blue cornflowers from her Aunt’s garden on July 15th, St Henry’s Day. Their working collaboration was to last right up to Matisse’s death in 1954. Her will throughout was indomitable; she typed, kept records and meticulous accounts and paid the household bills. She also organized Matisse’s correspondence and coordinated his business affairs with an iron grip as well as being his studio assistant and muse. And when called upon, even scoured the countryside on her bike for provisions during the war. Matisse claimed that his entire household came to a standstill in her absence which, in the light of what Lydia accomplished is anything, if not an understatement. In the face of the family’s icy resentment, the Russian said of Matisse, “He knew how to take possession of people and make them feel they were indispensable. That was how it was for me, and that was how it had been for Mme. Matisse.” Life with Matisse must have been taxing but it had been Amélie’s chosen vocation, through years of their studio-centered homes. Her central role in the artist's life was security, which Shchukin’s patronage provided, along with a sizable house in Issy-les-Moulineaux, where the family moved in 1909. However, in this period Matisse was increasingly absent. In 1930, his travels took him to the United States, where he was thrilled by New York, and to Tahiti. Matisse found that Tahiti was "both superb and boring . . . There the weather is beautiful at sunrise and it does not change until night. Such immutable happiness is tiring." He dived off the reefs and never forgot the colors of the madrepores and the absinthe-green water; these appear in cut-outs like Polynesia, 1946, or The Bird and the Shark, 1947, as images of a spectacular and, on the whole, beneficent nature. In September of 1940 he employed a temporary stand-in for his regular night nurse...

Beautiful limited edition posters by Yoshitomo Nara for his exhibition at the Hammer Museum. Only available for a limited amount of time where they sold out quickly, edition size unk...

Walter Schnackenberg’s style changed several times during his long and successful career. Having studied in Munich, the artist traveled often to Paris where he fell under the spell o...

Héliogravure on brown-toned paper, no signature. Héliogravure  on bot sheets, recto and verso. Edition of 6500 unsigned copies. Printed by Mourlot and published by Tériade on the A...

Original poster showing a “Baby in a Bidet”. In Italian it is Maniffatura Ceramica Pozzi. Linen backed in very fine condition, ready to frame. This Italian poster was only know...

Walter Schnackenberg’s style changed several times during his long and successful career. Having studied in Munich, the artist traveled often to Paris where he fell under the spell o...

Still in her silken evening gown and dancing slippers, the glamorous ingénue is savoring her memories, her ribbon-tied love letters and long draws on her cigarette holder. Was he eve...

This bright and cheerful poster was created by famous poster artist, Leonetto Cappiello in 1903 for a fundraiser being held in Paris' Bois de Boulogne. One of his signature smiling l...

Color lithograph created from Gustav Kilmt’s sketch of a semi-nude figure on bedding. Edited by Alice Strobl and published in 1964 by Akademische Druck und Verlagsanstalt Graz in Vie...

Marc Chagall, Original Lithograh depicting an instant of the Bible. Technique: Original lithograph in colours (Mourlot no. 234) On the reverse: another black and white original litho...

Kuhn, Walt, (American, 1877-1949). HULDA. Lithograph, not dated, but likely 1925-1930. Edition size not stated, but likely 50. Signed in pencil, and inscribed at the lower edge of th...

DAS WERK GUSTAV KLIMTS, a portfolio of 50 prints, ten of which are multicolor collotypes on chine colle paper laid down on hand-made heavy cream wove paper w...

This original vintage poster was created in the 1990's by artist, Paul Davis. It is part of a campaign to promote the 200 year old Benedictine as a drink for the modern age. Paul Davis (b.1938) is an American graphic artist and illustrator. After graduating from the School of Visual Arts in New York, Davis was hired on by celebrated graphic designer Milton Glaser to paint for Push Pin Studios. Davis’s work was recognized by many prominent leaders in the art industry, and in 1963, Davis opened Paul Davis Studio. Davis’s illustrations have appeared in noteworthy publications such as Life, Time, Playboy, Sports Illustrated, The New York Times and The Saturday Evening Post. He is also the recipient of two honorary doctorate degrees from the School of Visual Arts and Maryland Institute College of Art. He is also a fellow of the American Academy in Rome. Bénédictine is a herbal liqueur that was developed by Alexandre Le Grand...

Born in Bronx, NY, Ida Applebroog attended NY State Institute of Applied Arts and Sciences and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She received a MacArthur Foundation Fellows...

Enclosed is a rare etching of the famous image of "Sylvie" with either she was a model or a lover. Nicola was a Lady's man and loved woman who are his major theme. Sylvie, was origin...

In continuing with representing fine artists that are connected to the music industry we are please to announce that we are the only gallery in the United States representing the wor...

Original lithograph by Mexican artist Emilio Amero (1901-1976) created 1950. Titled: “Mujer Escuchando La Concha (Woman with Shell). Edition size is 15 of 125. Signed in pencil lower left. In excellent condition. Image size: 12 1/4"h x 9 3/4"w. Presents in a 4-ply museum mat measuring 20"h x 16"w. Born in the village of Ixtlahuaca, in the state of Mexico, Emilio Amero counts Spaniards and Otomi Indians among his ancestors. Shortly after his birth, the family moved to Mexico City. In 1911 he began his studies in art at the Academy of San Carlos. He also studied drawing privately with Antonio Gomez, a family friend and well-known newspaper artist. At the academy in 1917, he became acquainted with Diaz de Leon, Rufino Tamayo, Ramon Alva de la Canal, Enrique Ugarte, and Leopoldo Mendez-all students there at the time. Later he joined the open air school in Coyoacan, founded and directed by Alfredo Ramos Martinez...