Skip to main content

Schomer Lichtner Animal Prints

American, 1905-2006

Schomer Lichtner was well known for his whimsical cows and ballerinas and abstract imagery. He and his late wife, Ruth Grotenrath (1912–88), both well-known Wisconsin artists, began their prolific careers as muralists for WPA projects, primarily post offices. Lichtner also painted murals for industry and private clients. Lichtner was a printmaker and produced block prints, lithographs and serigraph prints. His casein (paint made from dairy products) and acrylic paintings are of the rural Wisconsin landscapes and farm animals. He became interested in cows when he and Ruth spent summers near Holy Hill in Washington County. According to David Gordon, director of the Milwaukee Art Museum, Lichtner had a tremendous joie de vivre and expressed it in his art. 

Lichtner was nationally known for his whimsical paintings and sculptures of black-and-white-patterned Holstein cows and elegant ballerina dancers. Lichtner also painted all sorts of combinations of beautiful women, flowers and country landscapes. The late James Auer, former Milwaukee Journal Sentinel art critic, said that his art eventually "exploded into expressionistic design elements with bold, flat areas of color and high energy that anticipated Pop Art." Auer went on to describe Lichtner’s work as full of "wit, vigor and virtuosity." In as early as 1930, Lichtner’s work was shown at the prestigious Carnegie International Exhibition in New York and museums throughout the Midwest. As a student, he was a protégé of another icon of 20th century American art, Gustave Moeller. 

Lichtner and his wife, Ruth, are celebrated as Milwaukee’s first couple of paintings and are regarded as major Wisconsin artists. Lichtner’s impressive production, perseverance, longevity and positive approach to his life and art made him and his work distinctive and much loved by his many admirers. His work is currently represented in collections at the Milwaukee Art Museum, the John Michael Kohler Art Center, the West Bend Museum and in the collections of many individuals. He continued to amaze and create with his whimsical paintings of ballerinas and cows. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Auer referred to Lichtner as the artist laureate of Milwaukee. Lichtner was the official artist of the Milwaukee Ballet and was a recipient of the 2006 Wisconsin Visual Artist Lifetime Achievement Award. He passed away on May 9, 2006 at the age of 101.

to
1
Overall Width
to
Overall Height
to
1
14
200
163
103
101
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
Artist: Schomer Lichtner
"The Flight (Duck Flying), " Silkscreen signed by Schomer Lichtner
By Schomer Lichtner
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"The Flight (Duck Flying) is an original color silkscreen by Schomer Lichtner. The artist initialed the piece lower right. This piece features a duck in flight through red hatched lines. 4 3/4" x 6 3/4" art 13" x 15" frame Milwaukee artist, Schomer Lichtner passed away on May 9, 2006 at the age of 101. He continued to amaze and create with his whimsical paintings of ballerinas and cows. He and his late wife Ruth Grotenrath, both well-known Wisconsin artists, began their prolific careers as muralists for WPA projects, primarily post offices. Schomer Lichtner was well known for his whimsical cows and ballerinas, such as his "Ballerina Dancing on Cow" sculpture below. The late James Auer, art critic for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel referred to Lichtner as the artist laureate of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He was the official artist of the Milwaukee Ballet. Lichtner also painted murals for industry and private clients. Schomer was a printmaker and produced block prints, lithographs, and serigraph prints. His casein (paint made from dairy products) and acrylic paintings are of the rural Wisconsin landscape and farm animals. He became interested in cows when he and Ruth spent summers near Holy Hill in Washington County. According to David Gordon, director of the Milwaukee Art Museum, Schomer Lichtner had a tremendous joie de vivre, " joy of life," and expressed it in his art. Schomer Lichtner was nationally known for his whimsical paintings and sculptures of black- and white-patterned Holstein cows...
Category

1940s American Modern Schomer Lichtner Animal Prints

Materials

Screen

Related Items
Seattle United Air Lines original vintage travel poster
Located in Spokane, WA
Original excellent condition, linen backed United Airlines: Seattle, the 1968 airplane airline aviation travel poster promoting travel to Seattle, Washington aboard United Airlines and featuring art of a Native American Indian totem pole...
Category

1960s American Modern Schomer Lichtner Animal Prints

Materials

Offset

Original Fly TWA India vintage travel poster David Klein
By David Klein
Located in Spokane, WA
Original Fly TWA India vintage travel poster. Artist: David Klein. Archival linen backed in very fine condition, ready to frame. This poster features a...
Category

1960s American Modern Schomer Lichtner Animal Prints

Materials

Offset

Jon Corbino, Montana Earthquake, 1936, lithograph
By Jon Corbino
Located in New York, NY
Works by Jon Corbino (1905-1964) feature drama. Here he's showing us the chaos produced by a major earthquake in rural Montana in 1936 -- an actual historical event. The horses (ear...
Category

1930s American Modern Schomer Lichtner Animal Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Alexander Calder Circus Reproduction Lithograph After a Drawing
By (after) Alexander Calder
Located in Surfside, FL
(after) Alexander Calder "Calder's Circus" offset lithograph on wove paper after drawings by the artist Published by Art in America and Perls gallery in 1964 (from drawings done in the 1930's) these range slightly in size but they are all about 13 X 17 inches (with minor variations in size as issued.) These have never been framed. The outer folio is not included just the one lithograph. James Sweeny from the introduction “The fame of Calder’s circus spread quickly between the years 1927 and 1930. All the Paris art world came to know it. It brought him his first great personal success. But what was more important, the circus also provided the first steps in Calder’s development as an original sculptor” Clive Gray wrote ”A visit to the studio of Alexander Calder led to the chance discovery of some hundred masterful circus drawings completed over thirty years ago. We publish, for the first time, a choice of sixteen from that group.” With signed introduction by Miro. These whimsical drawings, done in the style of wire sculpture, include acrobats, clowns, jugglers, trapeeze artists, an elephant, dog and lion. they are great. Alexander Calder is widely considered to be one of the most important American sculptors of the 20th century. He is best known for his colorful, whimsical abstract public sculptures and his innovative mobiles, kinetic sculptures powered by motors or air currents, which embraced chance in their aesthetic. Born into a family of accomplished artists, Calder's work first gained attention in Paris in the 1930s and was soon championed by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, resulting in a retrospective exhibition in 1943. Major retrospectives were also held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1964) and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1974). Calder’s work is in many permanent collections, most notably in the Whitney Museum of American Art, but also the Guggenheim Museum; the Museum of Modern Art; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and the Centre Georges Pompidou. He produced many large public works, including .125 (at JFK Airport, 1957), Pittsburgh (Carnegie International prize winner 1958, Pittsburgh International Airport) Spirale (UNESCO in Paris, 1958), Flamingo and Universe (both in Chicago, 1974), and Mountains and Clouds (Hart Senate Office Building, Washington, D.C., 1976). Although primarily known for his sculpture, Calder was a prodigious artist with a restless creative spirit, whose diverse practice included painting and printmaking, miniatures (such as his famous Cirque Calder), children’s book illustrations, theater set design, jewelry design, tapestry and rug works, and political posters. Calder was honored by the US Postal Service with a set of five 32-cent stamps in 1998, and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, posthumously in 1977, after refusing to receive it from Gerald Ford one year earlier in protest of the Vietnam War. Calder moved to New York and enrolled at the Art Students League, studying briefly with Thomas Hart Benton, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and John Sloan. While a student, he worked for the National Police Gazette where, in 1925, one of his assignments was sketching the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. Calder became fascinated with the action of the circus, a theme that would reappear in his later work. In 1926, Calder moved to Paris, enrolled in the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, and established a studio at 22 rue Daguerre in the Montparnasse Quarter. In June 1929, while traveling by boat from Paris to New York, Calder met his future wife, Louisa James (1905-1996), grandniece of author Henry James and philosopher William James. They married in 1931. While in Paris, Calder met and became friends with a number of avant-garde artists, including Fernand Léger, Jean Arp, and Marcel Duchamp. Cirque Calder (on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art at present) became popular with the Parisian avant-garde. He also invented wire sculpture, or "drawing in space," and in 1929 he had his first solo show of these sculptures in Paris at Galerie Billiet. Hi! (Two Acrobats) in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art is an early example of the artist's wire sculpture. The painter Jules Pascin, a friend of Calder's from the cafes of Montparnasse, wrote the preface to the catalog. A visit to Piet Mondrian's studio in 1930, where he was impressed by the environment-as-installation, "shocked" him into fully embracing abstract art, toward which he had already been tending. Dating from 1931, Calder’s sculptures of discrete movable parts powered by motors were christened “mobiles” by Marcel Duchamp, a French pun meaning both "motion" and "motive." At the same time, Calder was also experimenting with self-supporting, static, abstract sculptures, dubbed "stabiles" by Jean Arp in 1932 to differentiate them from mobiles. Public commissions increasingly came his way in the 1960s. Notable examples are .125 for JFK Airport in 1957, Spirale for UNESCO in Paris 1958 and Trois disques, commissioned for Expo 67 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Calder's largest sculpture at 25.7 meters high was El Sol Rojo, constructed outside the Aztec Stadium for the 1968 Summer Olympics "Cultural Olympiad" events in Mexico City. Many of his public works were commissioned by renowned architects; I.M. Pei commissioned his La Grande Voile (1966), a 25-ton, 40-foot high stabile for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Part of Calder's repertoire includes pivotal stage sets for more than a dozen theatrical productions, including Nucléa, Horizon, and most notably, Martha Graham’s Panorama (1935), a production of the Erik Satie symphonic drama Socrate (1936), and later, Works in Progress (1968). In addition to sculptures, Calder painted throughout his career, beginning in the early 1920s. He picked up his study of printmaking in 1925, and continued to produce illustrations for books and journals.As Calder’s professional reputation expanded in the late 1940s and 1950s, so did his production of prints. Masses of lithographs based on his gouache paintings hit the market, and deluxe editions of plays, poems, and short stories illustrated with fine art prints by Calder became available for sale. One of Calder's most celebrated and unconventional undertakings was a commission from Dallas-based Braniff International Airways to paint a full-size Douglas DC-8-62 four-engined jet as a "flying canvas." Calder created over 2,000 pieces of jewelry over the course of his career, many of them as gifts for friends and relatives. For his lifelong friend Joan Miró, he set a shard of a broken porcelain vessel in a brass ring. Peggy Guggenheim received enormous silver mobile earrings and later commissioned a hammered silver headboard...
Category

1930s American Modern Schomer Lichtner Animal Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Haystack
By Thomas Hart Benton
Located in London, GB
A fine impression of this very popular image with full margins (smaller on top and bottom) published by Associated American Artists.
Category

1930s American Modern Schomer Lichtner Animal Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Haystack
Haystack
$4,367
H 19 in W 21.25 in D 1.5 in
Nebraska Evening
By Thomas Hart Benton
Located in London, GB
A fine impression with good margins published by Associated American Artists.
Category

1940s American Modern Schomer Lichtner Animal Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Nebraska Evening
Nebraska Evening
$4,367
H 19 in W 21.5 in D 1.5 in
Summer Gold, American Modern Lithograph by Millard Sheets
By Millard Sheets
Located in Long Island City, NY
Artist: Millard Owen Sheets, American (1907 - 1989) Title: Summer Gold Medium: Lithograph, signed and numbered in pencil Edition: 250, 5 HC Image S...
Category

1970s American Modern Schomer Lichtner Animal Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Alexander Calder Circus Reproduction Lithograph of a Drawing
By (after) Alexander Calder
Located in Surfside, FL
(after) Alexander Calder "Calder's Circus" offset lithograph on wove paper a reproduction lithograph after the drawings by the artist Published by Art in America and Perls gallery in 1964 (from drawings done in the 1930's) these range slightly in size but they are all about 13 X 17 inches (with minor variations in size as issued.) These have never been framed. The outer folio is not included just the one lithograph. James Sweeny from the introduction “The fame of Calder’s circus spread quickly between the years 1927 and 1930. All the Paris art world came to know it. It brought him his first great personal success. But what was more important, the circus also provided the first steps in Calder’s development as an original sculptor” Clive Gray wrote ”A visit to the studio of Alexander Calder led to the chance discovery of some hundred masterful circus drawings completed over thirty years ago. We publish, for the first time, a choice of sixteen from that group.” With signed introduction by Miro. These whimsical drawings, done in the style of wire sculpture, include acrobats, clowns, jugglers, trapeeze artists, an elephant, dog and lion. they are great. Alexander Calder is widely considered to be one of the most important American sculptors of the 20th century. He is best known for his colorful, whimsical abstract public sculptures and his innovative mobiles, kinetic sculptures powered by motors or air currents, which embraced chance in their aesthetic. Born into a family of accomplished artists, Calder's work first gained attention in Paris in the 1930s and was soon championed by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, resulting in a retrospective exhibition in 1943. Major retrospectives were also held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1964) and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1974). Calder’s work is in many permanent collections, most notably in the Whitney Museum of American Art, but also the Guggenheim Museum; the Museum of Modern Art; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and the Centre Georges Pompidou. He produced many large public works, including .125 (at JFK Airport, 1957), Pittsburgh (Carnegie International prize winner 1958, Pittsburgh International Airport) Spirale (UNESCO in Paris, 1958), Flamingo and Universe (both in Chicago, 1974), and Mountains and Clouds (Hart Senate Office Building, Washington, D.C., 1976). Although primarily known for his sculpture, Calder was a prodigious artist with a restless creative spirit, whose diverse practice included painting and printmaking, miniatures (such as his famous Cirque Calder), children’s book illustrations, theater set design, jewelry design, tapestry and rug works, and political posters. Calder was honored by the US Postal Service with a set of five 32-cent stamps in 1998, and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, posthumously in 1977, after refusing to receive it from Gerald Ford one year earlier in protest of the Vietnam War. Calder moved to New York and enrolled at the Art Students League, studying briefly with Thomas Hart Benton, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and John Sloan. While a student, he worked for the National Police Gazette where, in 1925, one of his assignments was sketching the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. Calder became fascinated with the action of the circus, a theme that would reappear in his later work. In 1926, Calder moved to Paris, enrolled in the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, and established a studio at 22 rue Daguerre in the Montparnasse Quarter. In June 1929, while traveling by boat from Paris to New York, Calder met his future wife, Louisa James (1905-1996), grandniece of author Henry James and philosopher William James. They married in 1931. While in Paris, Calder met and became friends with a number of avant-garde artists, including Fernand Léger, Jean Arp, and Marcel Duchamp. Cirque Calder (on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art at present) became popular with the Parisian avant-garde. He also invented wire sculpture, or "drawing in space," and in 1929 he had his first solo show of these sculptures in Paris at Galerie Billiet. Hi! (Two Acrobats) in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art is an early example of the artist's wire sculpture. The painter Jules Pascin, a friend of Calder's from the cafes of Montparnasse, wrote the preface to the catalog. A visit to Piet Mondrian's studio in 1930, where he was impressed by the environment-as-installation, "shocked" him into fully embracing abstract art, toward which he had already been tending. Dating from 1931, Calder’s sculptures of discrete movable parts powered by motors were christened “mobiles” by Marcel Duchamp, a French pun meaning both "motion" and "motive." At the same time, Calder was also experimenting with self-supporting, static, abstract sculptures, dubbed "stabiles" by Jean Arp in 1932 to differentiate them from mobiles. Public commissions increasingly came his way in the 1960s. Notable examples are .125 for JFK Airport in 1957, Spirale for UNESCO in Paris 1958 and Trois disques, commissioned for Expo 67 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Calder's largest sculpture at 25.7 meters high was El Sol Rojo, constructed outside the Aztec Stadium for the 1968 Summer Olympics "Cultural Olympiad" events in Mexico City. Many of his public works were commissioned by renowned architects; I.M. Pei commissioned his La Grande Voile (1966), a 25-ton, 40-foot high stabile for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Part of Calder's repertoire includes pivotal stage sets for more than a dozen theatrical productions, including Nucléa, Horizon, and most notably, Martha Graham’s Panorama (1935), a production of the Erik Satie symphonic drama Socrate (1936), and later, Works in Progress (1968). In addition to sculptures, Calder painted throughout his career, beginning in the early 1920s. He picked up his study of printmaking in 1925, and continued to produce illustrations for books and journals.As Calder’s professional reputation expanded in the late 1940s and 1950s, so did his production of prints. Masses of lithographs based on his gouache paintings hit the market, and deluxe editions of plays, poems, and short stories illustrated with fine art prints by Calder became available for sale. One of Calder's most celebrated and unconventional undertakings was a commission from Dallas-based Braniff International Airways to paint a full-size Douglas DC-8-62 four-engined jet as a "flying canvas." Calder created over 2,000 pieces of jewelry over the course of his career, many of them as gifts for friends and relatives. For his lifelong friend Joan Miró, he set a shard of a broken porcelain vessel in a brass ring. Peggy Guggenheim received enormous silver mobile earrings and later commissioned a hammered silver headboard...
Category

1930s American Modern Schomer Lichtner Animal Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Original Armagnac Ryst vintage French liquor poster, linen backed lithograph
Located in Spokane, WA
Original Armagnac Ryst - de Haut Parage vintage poster. This great lithographic image features a lion holding both a shield which is a lion on a shield and a sparkling glass of Armagnac. Original old French vintage...
Category

1940s American Modern Schomer Lichtner Animal Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Washington D. C. United Airlines original vintage travel poster
Located in Spokane, WA
Original linen backed vintage travel poster on United Air Lines to Washington D. C. Artist: Jebary. Linen backed vintage poster. Ve...
Category

1960s American Modern Schomer Lichtner Animal Prints

Materials

Offset

2 Lazy 2 P
Located in Phoenix, AZ
2 Lazy 2P, ca. 1939 Lon Megargee Serigraph 20 x 24 inches Signed in screen Original serigraph print by Lon Megargee 1883 - 1960 Featured in "Hot Irons" by Oren Arnold and John Hale, 1940 SHIPPING CHARGES INCLUDE SHIPPING, PACKAGING & INSURANCE Lon Megargee created this serigraph from his commission with Oren Arnold and John Hale to do their dust jacket for the book, " Hot Irons", 1940. Arnold and Hale wanted to establish a reference work, an "authority", with a entertaining history about the evolution of the brand. Megargee created a painting of a steer that was branded with the script, 2 Lazy 2 P. Surrounding the steer is a random display of famous brands of ranches in the Southwest. It was well received and must have prompted Megargee to create the likeness as a print. The brand is described in chapter thirteen, page 207-208 and says, " Ed Stram, who was Arizona state veterinarian for sixteen years, fire-branded his cattle with this peculiar crest. It isn't peculiar unless you have an equally peculiar sense of humor. At a glance it appears to be just another typically unimaginative brand, but it has been used to make many a thousand girls blush, and a few thousand bashful young men as well". COLLIER GALLERY, FINE ART ESTATE OF LON MEGARGEE Born and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Lon Megargee, at age 13, ran away from his upper class home and went West in 1896 led by his zest for the wild and adventuresome life. There he established a reputation as a cowboy painter and illustrator with work most associated with Arizona Brewing Company ads featuring humorous aspects of cowboy life. In his youth, he worked as a free-lance cowboy, exhibition roper, poker dealer, and bronco buster in Arizona, and then went east again to study art in Philadelphia at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and to New York at the Art Students League and Pratt Institute. He returned to Arizona, living in Cave Creek, Salt River Canyon, Phoenix and the last years of his life near Sedona. His Phoenix home later became a popular hotel and dining place called the Hermosa Inn. Megargee was a ranch owner and also did oil canvases of the places he loved and the cowboy life he admired. By 1910, he was among the earliest resident artists, and was probably the best known artist in Arizona. His name was first associated with a landscape series of 15 large murals for the Capitol Building, newly constructed just after Arizona became a state in 1912. Another one of his paintings, Elemental, was the first painting by an artist living in Arizona to be acquired for the Municipal Collection of Phoenix. These works were chosen from entries in the State Fair, where he continued to win prizes for figure and landscape painting. From 1911 to 1953, he did numerous commission works for the Santa Fe Railroad, including a work titledNavajos Watching a Santa Fe Train. Between 1915 and 1930, he also painted in the Los Angeles area of California and had entries in the California State Fair. He died in Cottonwood, Arizona. After his death, theSaturday Evening Post had a double-page reproduction of his painting Cowboy's Dream. Creator of the iconic logo for the Stetson Hat Company, " Last Drop From his Stetson", still in use today. Fine Art Estate of Lon Megargee We offer signed in print and original signature block prints. Custom, hand carved, signature frames, with archival standards and a speciality in hand dyed mats and french matting are provided for a beautiful and timeless presentation. Megargee explored different mediums; printmaking captivated him in particular. The contrast of the black and white block print method captured perfectly his interpretation of a bold American West. The first print was produced around 1921 and culminated with the creation of “The Cowboy Builds a Loop” in 1933 with 28 images and poetry by his friend, Roy George. Megargee continued producing prints throughout the 1940s and early 50s. At age 13, Lon Megargee came to Phoenix in 1896 following the death of his father in Philadelphia. For several years he resided with relatives while working at an uncle’s dairy farm and at odd jobs. He returned to Philadelphia in 1898 – 1899 in order to attend drawing classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Back in Phoenix in 1899, he decided at the age of 16 to try to make his living as a cowboy. Lon moved to the cow country of Wickenburg where he was hired by Tex Singleton’s Bull Ranch. He later joined the Three Bar Ranch . . . and, after a few years, was offered a job by Billy Cook...
Category

1930s American Modern Schomer Lichtner Animal Prints

Materials

Screen

2 Lazy 2 P
$1,800
H 20 in W 24 in
Original "Wonderful Copenhagen" vintage travel poster
Located in Spokane, WA
Original vintage poster: WONDERFUL COPENHAGEN created by the artist Viggo Vagnby. This antique poster is archival linen-backed, in excellent condition, and ready to frame. No da...
Category

1950s American Modern Schomer Lichtner Animal Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Previously Available Items
"The Merrymakers, " holiday landscape silkscreen by Schomer Lichtner
By Schomer Lichtner
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"The Merrymakers" is an original silkscreen print by Schomer Lichtner. The artist's signature is in the lower right. This artwork features white rabbits frolicking in a winter landsc...
Category

1940s American Modern Schomer Lichtner Animal Prints

Materials

Screen

Schomer Lichtner animal prints for sale on 1stDibs.

Find a wide variety of authentic Schomer Lichtner animal prints available for sale on 1stDibs. You can also browse by medium to find art by Schomer Lichtner in screen print and more. Much of the original work by this artist or collective was created during the 1940s and is mostly associated with the modern style. Not every interior allows for large Schomer Lichtner animal prints, so small editions measuring 15 inches across are available. Customers who are interested in this artist might also find the work of Ray H. French, Carol Wax, and Beniamino Bufano. Schomer Lichtner animal prints prices can differ depending upon medium, time period and other attributes. On 1stDibs, the price for these items starts at $875 and tops out at $875, while the average work can sell for $875.

Recently Viewed

View All