Alpha 137 Gallery Black and White Photography

Andy Warhol Portrait of Ivan Karp, ca. 1975 Acetate negative acquired directly from Chromacomp, Inc. Andy Warhol's printer in the 1970s. Accompanied by Letter of Provenance from the...

This work features a photographic portrait of Helen Frankenthaler, taken by renowned musician and photographer Jim Arkatov, founder of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchester, and author of the 1998 book "The Creative Personality". The photograph is hand signed and dated '92 by Jim Arkatov. Framed alongside the photograph is a typed letter, hand signed in marker with a personal annotation ("Thanks again!!") by Helen Frankenthaler, thanking Mr. Arkatov for sending her glossy prints of his photograph and stating that she looks forward to seeing his book. Arkatov's original signed portrait, along with Frankenthaler's original signed letter, are elegantly framed in a museum quality wood frame under UV plexiglass. There is also a die-cut window in the back of the frame to reveal Arkatov's signature on the back of his photograph. Measurements: Framed 14.25 inches (vertical) by 19.75 inches (horizontal) by 1.75 inches (depth) Photographic portrait of Helen Frankenthaler: 9.25 inches (vertical) by 7.25 inches (horizontal) Letter from Frankenthaler to Arkatov: 7 inches (vertical) by 6.25 inches (horizontal) This collection was acquired from the Estate of Jim Arkatov. Below is an excerpt from his 2019 obituary in the Los Angeles Times: "...His was an immigrant’s story, a child from Russia who landed in San Francisco, befriended violinist Isaac Stern — whose fame was still to come — took up the cello and decided to pour his life into making music. James Arkatov found work with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and then with the philharmonic in San Francisco before coming to L.A. as a Hollywood studio musician who worked on movie soundtracks and backed up Ella Fitzgerald on some of her more memorable recordings, such as “Ella Fitzgerald Sings the George and Ira Gershwin Song Books.” Amazed at the dazzling talent around him in Hollywood, he came up with a simple but lasting idea — form their own orchestra. The Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra made its debut on an April evening in 1968, as hundreds squeezed into the newly built Mark Taper Forum. Arkatov played cello as usual as the ensemble drifted through the works of Mozart, Vivaldi, Haydn and other legends of the classics who’d written music specially for smaller orchestras. Arkatov, who lived long enough to see the orchestra celebrate its 50th anniversary, died Saturday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 98. “The orchestra represented a contextualized part of L.A. that had simply never been captured,” said his son, Alan Arkatov, the chair of the education and technology program at USC’s Rossier School of Education. “L.A. simply didn’t have this type of ensemble.” Arkatov was born in Odessa, Russia, on July 17, 1920, and moved around Europe before sailing with his family to San Francisco, where his father opened a photo studio. One of his early childhood friends was Stern, who would become an international star who performed on the world’s biggest stages. Arkatov, who began playing the cello when he was 9, formed a string quartet with Stern when they were teens. After stints as a cellist in San Francisco, Pittsburgh and Indianapolis, Arkatov became a member of the NBC Orchestra, the studio musicians who supplied the soundtracks for the movies that kept Hollywood humming. Pulling from the talent of Hollywood like an NFL team on draft day, he cobbled together a roster capable of handling the delicate and nuanced music written for chamber orchestras. In contrast to the L.A. Phil, which filled the stage with 100 or so musicians, the chamber orchestra was but half that size. The idea was to create a group that would play works written expressly for such an orchestra, many of them from the Baroque era. “The ensemble was never meant to compete with the Philharmonic,” Arkatov’s son said...." Helen Frankenthaler Biography: Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011), whose career spanned six decades, has long been recognized as one of the great American artists of the twentieth century. She was eminent among the second generation of postwar American abstract painters and is widely credited for playing a pivotal role in the transition from Abstract Expressionism to Color Field painting. Through her invention of the soak-stain technique, she expanded the possibilities of abstract painting, while at times referencing figuration and landscape in unique ways. She produced a body of work whose impact on contemporary art has been profound and continues to grow. Frankenthaler was born on December 12, 1928, and raised in New York City. She attended the Dalton School, where she received her earliest art instruction from Rufino Tamayo. In 1949 she graduated from Bennington College, Vermont, where she was a student of Paul Feeley. She later studied briefly with Hans Hofmann. Frankenthaler’s professional exhibition career began in 1950, when Adolph Gottlieb selected her painting Beach (1950) for inclusion in the exhibition titled Fifteen Unknowns: Selected by Artists of the Kootz Gallery. Her first solo exhibition was presented in 1951, at New York’s Tibor de Nagy Gallery, and that year she was also included in the landmark exhibition 9th St. Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture. In 1952 Frankenthaler created Mountains and Sea, a breakthrough painting of American abstraction for which she poured thinned paint directly onto raw, unprimed canvas laid on the studio floor, working from all sides to create floating fields of translucent color. Mountains and Sea was immediately influential for the artists who formed the Color Field school of painting, notable among them Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland. As early as 1959, Frankenthaler began to be a regular presence in major international exhibitions. She won first prize at the Premiere Biennale de Paris that year, and in 1966 she represented the United States in the 33rd Venice Biennale, alongside Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, and Jules Olitski. She had her first major museum exhibition in 1960, at New York’s Jewish Museum, and her second, in 1969, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, followed by an international tour. Frankenthaler experimented tirelessly throughout her long career. In addition to producing unique paintings on canvas and paper, she worked in a wide range of media, including ceramics, sculpture, tapestry, and especially printmaking. Hers was a significant voice in the mid-century “print renaissance” among American abstract painters, and she is particularly renowned for her woodcuts. She continued working productively through the opening years of this century. Frankenthaler’s distinguished, prolific career has been the subject of numerous monographic museum exhibitions. The Jewish Museum and Whitney Museum shows were succeeded by a major retrospective initiated by the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth that traveled to The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Detroit Institute of Arts, MI (1989); and those devoted to works on paper and prints organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (1993), among others. Select recent important exhibitions have included Painted on 21st Street: Helen Frankenthaler from 1950 to 1959 (Gagosian, NY, 2013); Making Painting: Helen Frankenthaler and JMW Turner (Turner Contemporary, Margate, UK, 2014); Giving Up One’s Mark: Helen Frankenthaler in the 1960s and 1970s (Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY, 2014–15); Pretty Raw: After and Around Helen Frankenthaler (Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, 2015); As in Nature: Helen Frankenthaler, Paintings and No Rules: Helen Frankenthaler Woodcuts...

LORNA SIMPSON Recall, from the Exit Art/The First World Portfolio, 1998 Silkscreen on Felt 30 × 22 inches Hand signed and numbered 17/50 on the front Unframed This impressive silkscr...

Silver gelatin print The present work is hand signed with the artist's copyright, dated 1983, and titled on the back. It is numbered 3 of an edition of only 10. On October 3, 1983, Madonna headlined a memorial concert in honor of Michael Stewart, a graffiti artist in the midst of the AIDS crisis who became a victim of police brutality. Madonna was only 24 years old in 1983, but had already signed her first record deal and was on the cusp of superstardom. In 1984, the year after Madonna appeared in Kroll's shoot, she would release chart hits Like A Virgin, Material Girl and Crazy For You, cementing her place as an international star. This photograph was taken by renowned photographer and editor Eric Kroll backstage at Danceteria - a gritty and popular after hours club and concert venue on West 21st Street in Manhattan, operating out of the first three floors in an old industrial 12-story building. The visible text "ACCUTUNKTIONA TO THE POINT!" and "UNK" are actual, gritty wall graffiti from the venue, adding to the candid nature of the shot. Eric Kroll is a notable photographer, best known for his many fetish subjects, and for documenting America’s seediest spots and denizens, sharing a certain aesthetic with fellow photographers Larry Clark and Richard Kern...

Intended for Andy Warhol Marcel Proust, ca. 1976 Acetate positive acquired directly from Chromacomp, Inc. Andy Warhol's printer in the 1970s. Derivative on acetate, based on a photo by Otto Wegener...

Christopher Makos, Andy Warhol Portrait of Andy Warhol taken by photographer Christopher Makos (Hand signed by BOTH Andy Warhol and Christopher Makos...

This gorgeous offset lithograph poster was created on the occasion of the Eva Arnold exhibition, Marilyn Monroe: An Appreciation, at the famed Leo Castelli Gallery in 1987 - Castelli...

Andy Warhol Hammer & Sickle, 1976 Acetate negative acquired directly from Chromacomp, inc. Andy Warhol's printer in the 1970s. accompanied by a signed letter of provenance from the r...

Michael Childers Andy Warhol in Paris with Sitting Bird 1976, 2007 Photographic print hand signed in black felt tip pen lower right front; the back be...

Andy Warhol Baroness de Waldner, ca. 1975 Unique Acetate positive This piece comes with a signed letter of provenance from the representative of Chromacomp, Warhol's printer. Frame i...

Richard Corman Jean-Michel Basquiat VI: A Portrait, 1984, 2018 Gelatin silver print Signed, titled, dated and numbered 4/30 by Richard Corman in marker on the reverse 20 × 16 inches...

Andy Warhol Nicola (Nicky) Weymouth, ca. 1976 Acetate positive, acquired directly from Chromacomp, Inc. Andy Warhol's printer in the 1970s. Accompanied by a Letter of Provenance from the representative of Chromacomp Unique Frame included: Elegantly framed in a museum quality white wood frame with UV plexiglass: Measurements: Frame: 18 x 15.5 x 1.5 inches Acetate: 11 x 8 inches This is the original, unique photographic acetate positive taken by Andy Warhol as the basis for his portrait of Nicky Weymouth, that came from Andy Warhol's studio, The Factory to his printer. It was acquired directly from Chromacomp, Inc. Andy Warhol's printer in the 1970s. It is accompanied by a Letter of Provenance from the representative of Chromacomp. This is one of the images used by Andy Warhol to create his iconic portrait of the socialite Nicola Samuel Weymouth, also called Nicky Weymouth, Nicky Waymouth, Nicky Lane Weymouth or Nicky Samuel. Weymouth (nee Samuel) was a British socialite, who went on to briefly marry the jewelry designer Kenneth Lane, whom she met through Warhol. This acetate positive is unique, and was sent to Chromacomp because Warhol was considering making a silkscreen out of this portrait. As Bob Colacello, former Editor in Chief of Interview magazine (and right hand man to Andy Warhol), explained, "many hands were involved in the rather mechanical silkscreening process... but only Andy in all the years I knew him, worked on the acetates." An acetate is a photographic negative or positive transferred to a transparency, allowing an image to be magnified and projected onto a screen. As only Andy worked on the acetates, it was the last original step prior to the screenprinting of an image, and the most important element in Warhol's creative process for silkscreening. Warhol realized the value of his unique original acetates like this one, and is known to have traded the acetates for valuable services. This acetate was brought by Warhol to Eunice and Jackson Lowell, owners of Chromacomp, a fine art printing studio in NYC, and was acquired directly from the Lowell's private collection. During the 1970s and 80s, Chromacomp was the premier atelier for fine art limited edition silkscreen prints; indeed, Chromacomp was the largest studio producing fine art prints in the world for artists such as Andy Warhol, Leroy Neiman, Erte, Robert Natkin, Larry Zox, David Hockney and many more. All of the plates were done by hand and in some cases photographically. Famed printer Alexander Heinrici worked for Eunice & Jackson Lowell at Chromacomp and brought Andy Warhol in as an account. Shortly after, Warhol or his workers brought in several boxes of photographs, paper and/or acetates and asked Jackson Lowell to use his equipment to enlarge certain images or portions of images. Warhol made comments and or changes and asked the Lowells to print some editions; others were printed elsewhere. Chromacomp Inc. ended up printing Warhol's Mick Jagger Suite and the Ladies & Gentlemen Suite, as well as other works, based on the box of photographic acetates that Warhol brought to them. The Lowell's allowed the printer to be named as Alexander Heinrici rather than Chromacomp, since Heinrici was the one who brought the account in. Other images were never printed by Chromacomp- they were simply being considered by Warhol. Warhol left the remaining acetates with Eunice and Jackson Lowell. After the Lowells closed the shop, the photographs were packed away where they remained for nearly a quarter of a century. This work is exactly as it was delivered from the factory. Unevenly cut by Warhol himself. This work is accompanied by a signed letter of provenance from the representative of Chromacomp, Andy Warhol's printer for many of his works in the 1970s. About Andy Warhol: Isn’t life a series of images that change as they repeat themselves? —Andy Warhol Andy Warhol’s (1928–1987) art encapsulates the 1960s through the 1980s in New York. By imitating the familiar aesthetics of mass media, advertising, and celebrity culture, Warhol blurred the boundaries between his work and the world that inspired it, producing images that have become as pervasive as their sources. Warhol grew up in a working-class suburb of Pittsburgh. His parents were Slovak immigrants, and he was the only member of his family to attend college. He entered the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in 1945, where he majored in pictorial design. After graduation, he moved to New York with fellow student Philip Pearlstein and found steady work as a commercial illustrator at several magazines, including Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and the New Yorker. Throughout the 1950s Warhol enjoyed a successful career as a commercial artist, winning several commendations from the Art Directors Club and the American Institute of Graphic Arts. He had his first solo exhibition at the Hugo Gallery in 1952, showing drawings based on the writings of Truman Capote; three years later his work was included in a group show at the Museum of Modern Art for the first time. The year 1960 marked a turning point in Warhol’s prolific career. He painted his first works based on comics and advertisements, enlarging and transferring the source images onto canvas using a projector. In 1961 Warhol showed these hand-painted works, including Little King (1961) and Saturday’s Popeye (1961), in a window display at the department store Bonwit Teller; in 1962 he painted his famous Campbell’s Soup Cans, thirty-two separate canvases, each depicting a canned soup of a different flavor. Soon after, Warhol began to borrow not only the subject matter of printed media, but the technology as well. Incorporating the silkscreen technique, he created grids of stamps, Coca-Cola bottles, shipping and handling labels, dollar bills, coffee labels...

Michael Childers Andy Warhol in New York, 1976, 2007 Photographic print Signed and numbered 8/60 on the front in black felt tip marker Frame included ...

Ed Ruscha Some Los Angeles Apartments, 1970 Softback monograph with stiff wraps Second Edition Limited Edition of 3000 (the first edition in 1968 was 700) 7 × 5 1/2 inches Accompanie...

Debi Szarkowski-Effron Warhol in Cookieland, 1987 Limited Edition offset lithograph poster Bears the photographer's copyright stamp and pencil numbered 138/190 on the lower left fron...

Edward Quigley Crowd Scene, 1931 Vintage gelatin silver print Artist's stamp on the back of the photograph Frame Included Frame bears labels from: Joel Soroka Gallery, Co Ota House, CA Measurements: Frame: 13 x 11.25 x 0.5 inch Photograph: 4.5 x 3.5 inches About Edward Quigley: Edward Quigley was a leading American modernist who became known in the 1930s for his experimental photographic work with light. Quigley acquired his first camera at age twelve, joined the Photographic Society of Philadelphia in1929, and opened his own studio a year later. He supported himself with innovative advertising and editorial work published regularly in magazines such as U.S. Camera and Photographie, while winning prizes in numerous salons for his experimental light abstractions, captured with the aid of prisms and lenses to startling affect. Today, photographs by Edward Quigley are housed in the permanent collections of The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Biography Courtesy Robert Koch Gallery

Sabine Weiss Alberto Giacometti dans son Atelier, 1954 (Giacometti in his studio), ca. 1970 Gelatin silver print mounted on paper Signed in graphite by Sabine Weiss on the mount directly underneath the photograph Frame Included This now iconic photograph of Alberto Giacometti in his studio was taken in 1954 by the celebrated photographer Sabine Weiss, who at the time, had unparalleled access to the artist. It was printed ca. 1970 and signed on the mount directly underneath the photograph in a limited edition of an undisclosed size. Highly collectible. Elegantly matted and framed in a museum quality wood frame with UV plexiglass. Measurements: Framed 18 x 14.5 x 1.25 inches Photograph 12.5 x 8.75 inches Sabine Weiss biography: For over sixty years, Sabine Weiss’s name has been synonymous with the seminal era of French Humanist photography. A living legend, Weiss’s images from 1950s Paris speak of a postwar time when a feeling of hope and joie de vivre could be felt in the people populating the city’s cafes, squares, streets, and in all corners throughout Paris. Weiss would photograph individuals going about their daily lives capturing their emotions and creating a style that combined spontaneity and informality, backed by photographer’s intuition and knack for seeing and celebrating the simple joys of life. As she said, “I take photographs to hold on to the ephemeral, capture chance, keep an image of something that will disappear: gestures, attitudes, objects that are reminders of our brief lives. The camera picks them up and freezes them at the very moment that they disappear. I love this constant dialogue between myself, my camera and my subject, which is what differentiates me from certain other photographers, who don’t seek this dialogue and prefer to distance themselves from their subject.” Originally from Switzerland, Weiss moved to Paris in 1946 where she first assisted fashion photographer Willy...

Michael Childers Andy Warhol in his studio, 1987, 2007 Photographic print Hand Signed on the lower right front in black felt tip marker Frame Included This is one of a series of port...