Ifpda Print Fair 2014

    This week at New York's Park Avenue Armory, prints are allowed a rare moment in the spotlight. Amidst a larger week-long program of print-related events, lectures and exhibitions throughout the city, the International Fine Print Dealers Association’s annual fair (November 5 to 9) presents more than half a millennium of printmaking history.

    Here our editors have selected their favorite prints and drawings from 1stdibs’ participating IFPDA galleries. The collection highlights such techniques as woodcutting, etching, lithography, silk-screening and digital printing across various motifs and palettes, including Andy Warhol’s vibrantly screen-printed Flowers from 1970 and Henri Matisse’s thinly drawn flower petals from the mid-1940s. Note that this particular Matisse, Branche de Fleurs, boasts a “verso,” or reverse side, that the artist used as a study for one of his “cut-outs,” a selection of which are on view at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The same gallery, David Tunick, also has an exceptionally rare and early impression of Albrecht Dürer’s Four Horseman of the Apocalypse from 1498 — likely the most famous woodcut in both Dürer’s prolific career if not in the history of fine art, posits Tunick — that appears to predate any other example of this print in any American museum collection.

    Beyond the earliest forms of printmaking, the fair also covers such key 19th- and 20th-century art movements as Realism, Art Nouveau, Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art and Minimalism. Says Michele Senecal, the executive director of the IFPDA, "Beyond being beautiful and easy to navigate, this fair is marked by the extraordinary caliber of works on offer. There are discoveries to be made in every booth."