Parc Monceau Harold Altman

Harold Altman was born in New York City in 1924. He attended the Art Students League, the Black Mountain College, the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere in Paris, and was a graduate of the Cooper Union Art School.

Beginning in 1962 he lived in the central Pennsylvanian village of Lemont, where a 19th-century frame church served as his studio. Altman spent one-third of each year working in Paris where his lithographs were printed at Atelier DesJobert. In previous years his etchings were printed at Atelier George LeBlanc.

Altman's prints have been exhibited at numerous galleries and museums, both in the United States and abroad. He is represented in nearly every significant collection in the world. New York's Museum of Modern Art owns over forty Altmans while the Whitney and Brooklyn Museum each have over fifty of his works in their permanent collections.

Altman's work can be found in many museum collections outside of the United States, several of which are the Victoria and Albert Museum of London, the Stedelijk Museum of Amsterdam, the Kunstmuseum Basel, the Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Copenhagen and the Bibliotheque Nationale of Paris.

Altman received numerous awards, grants and fellowships. Among them were two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Tamarind Lithography Fellowship, a National Institute of the Arts and Letters Award, a Fulbright-Hayes Senior Research Fellowship for work in France and a National Endowment for the Arts Grant.

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(Biography provided by David Barnett Gallery)

Bring energy and an array of welcome colors and textures into your space by decorating with figurative fine-art prints and works on paper.

Figurative art stands in contrast to abstract art, which is more expressive than representational. The oldest-known work of figurative art is a figurative painting — specifically, a rock painting of an animal made over 40,000 years ago in Borneo. This remnant of a remote past has long faded, but its depiction of a cattle-like creature in elegant ocher markings endures.

Since then, figurative art has evolved significantly as it continues to represent the world, including a breadth of works on paper, including printmaking. This includes woodcuts, which are a type of relief print with perennial popularity among collectors. The artist carves into a block and applies ink to the raised surface, which is then pressed onto paper. There are also planographic prints, which use metal plates, stones or other flat surfaces as their base. The artist will often draw on the surface with grease crayon and then apply ink to those markings. Lithographs are a common version of planographic prints.

Figurative art printmaking was especially popular during the height of the Pop art movement, and this kind of work can be seen in artist Andy Warhol’s extensive use of photographic silkscreen printing. Everyday objects, logos and scenes were given a unique twist, whether in the style of a comic strip or in the use of neon colors.

Explore an impressive collection of figurative art prints for sale on 1stDibs and read about how to arrange your wall art.