Continental US - Prints and Multiples

Kyohei Inukai Life Forces - 1978 Print - Silkscreen   30'' x 22½'' in Edition: signed in pencil and marked 128/200 Since the 1940s, Kyohei Inukai has created his own brand of illusi...

Robert Cottingham Everybody's Bookshop, Everybody's Books, 1975 Color Lithograph 23 × 18 inches Signed and numbered from the edition of 200 in pencil on the front; Bears Artist's cop...

Note: This is a unique text variant which Albers titled in pencil "Blue Reminder" instead of "Blue Reminding". The authenticity of this work has been kindly confirmed by Brenda Danil...

large scale original photograph from a series of conceptual motivational messages on classic Americana billboard signs in iconic landscape of the American West YES by Frank Schott ...

Medium: collotype (after the Miro lithograph). Printed in 1947 in an edition of 1500 by Meriden Gravure and published by Curt Valentin for "The Prints of Joan Miro" portfolio. Size: ...

"Cheetah (black & white)," Amir Akhavan, 2017 Silkscreen and iridescence on 290 gram Coventry Rag paper Dimensions: 25" x 19.25" Signed and numbered by the Artist in pencil An editio...

Original 1964 Los Angeles, California vintage travel poster. Professionally archivally linen-backed in mint condition. This is one of four ...

Lithograph on vélin Chiffon de Mandeure paper. Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued. Good condition. Notes: From the album, Lithographies et Eaux-Fortes Originales, Livres Illustres Or...

Original boxing print with the initials P.B. in the upper left corner. Printer Ed. Sagot Editeur, Paris. Professional acid-free archival linen backed and ready to frame. Excel...

SHARING THE CHORES is a hand drawn, limited edition lithograph by the acclaimed Charleston SC artist JONATHAN GREEN printed using hand lithography techniques on archival Arches paper...

Rufino Tamayo, Mexican (1899 - 1991) - Sandias, Year: 1977, Medium: Mixographia, signed and numbered in crayon, Edition: 31/100, Size: 29 x 20.75 in. (73.66 x 52.71 cm), Publishe...

This piece titled "Rooster Totem" is an original artwork made from Letterpress, coque feather, mixed media by Katie VanVliet. This piece is shipped in the pictured white frame and me...

First edition exhibition poster designed and created by Man Ray for the opening of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1966. It is unsigned and not numbered. An undetermined amou...

Untitled, ca. 1960. Lithograph on paper, sheet measuring 18.5 x 26.5 inches Measuring 27 x 35 inches in original mid-century beveled oak frame. Signed and numbered in pencil by ...

Michel Delacroix lithograph signed and numbered “Paris scene”. In good condition measures 40x33

Joseph Beuys Stripes from the House of the Shaman (Hand Signed), 1980 Silkscreen exhibition poster with offset lettering on wove paper; hand signed by Joseph Beuys Boldly signed on t...

Lithograph, stencil on vélin paper. Paper Size: 12.4 x 9.65 inches. Inscription: Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued. Notes: From the album, XXe siècle, Nouvelle série N° 7 (double) J...

This rare lithographic poster is steeped in history. in 1949, author Louis Aragon (1897-1982) chose Picasso's lithograph "La Colombe" (The Dove) for posters commemorating the first p...

Edward Landon, 'The French Farm', color serigraph, 1942, Ryan 86. Signed, titled, and annotated 'Edition 50' in pencil. A superb impression, with fresh colors, on cream, wove paper; ...

This original museum poster titled Two Candles was created for the Fast Forward exhibition at the Dallas Art Museum in 1995. The artwork featur...

ABOUT THIS ARTIST: Jessica Brilli (Sayville, NY 1977) has been drawing and painting since her childhood. Working in a style that encompasses American realism and 20th century graphic...

Lithograph on vélin paper. Paper Size: 12.4 x 9.65 inches. Inscription: Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued. Notes: From the album, XXe siècle, Nouvelle série N° 4 (double) Janvier 19...

Medium: Lithograph on vélin paper Year: 1972 Paper Size: 20.5 X 26.4 inches Catalogue raisonné reference: Cramer, illustration 155 Inscription: Inscription: Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued Notes: From the folio, Pablo Picasso, La Chute D'Icare, Décoration du Foyer des Délégués Palais de l'UNESCO à Paris, Suite d'études préparatoires en noir et en couleurs réalisées du 6 décembre 1957 au 29 janvier 1958, 1972. Published by Albert Skira, Éditeur, Genève; printed by Roto-Sadag S.A. Genève, December 20, 1972. Excerpted from the folio (translated from French), This album contains the series of preparatory tests in black and VII color studies, reproduced, made by Pablo Picasso for the decoration of the home of the delegates at the Palais de l'UNESCO in Paris, was completed to print on December 20, 1972 on the presses of Imprimeries Roto-Sadag S.A. and Atar S.A. in Genève. The edition of this album is as follows: CXXV examples numbered from I to CXXV, XXV examples, out of commerce, numbered H.C. I to XXV, reserved for the artist and the publisher. Each of these albums contains an etching by Pablo Picasso, signed and numbered...

Libra, by Deming King Harriman; collage, print, figurative, gold, tarot, horoscope, metallic gold edge, on glossy heavy card stock with pink design on reverse.

Medium: original lithograph. Printed by Mourlot in 1975 and published for the "Miro Lithographe II" catalogue raisonné. Size: 12 1/2 x 19 1/2 inches (320 x 490 mm). Not signed. Cond...

large scale photograph of billboard sign with conceptual message in iconic landscape of the American West. A series of images capturing the unique infi...

Nan Goldin Lydia Lunch at the Russian Baths, 268 East 10th Street, 1985 poster, 2018 Offset lithograph poster (unsigned, unnumbered and unframed) 17 × 22 inches Published by The Kitchen in 2018, on the occasion of their Gala honoring Nan Goldin and Lydia Lunch Provenance Acquired from The Kitchen on the occasion of their 2018 Gala Also accompanied by Certificate of Guarantee from Alpha 137 Gallery Excerpt from The Kitchen description of this event: “During the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, icons Goldin and Lunch were vanguards of post-punk New York. Both women have presented their work at The Kitchen throughout the years, consistently returning to premiere new works that went on to exemplify their careers. Goldin’s portraiture of her close-knit circle of friends in New York became emblematic of her generation’s grappling with the social issues of the time, from the epidemic of drug addiction to the AIDS crisis. Lunch is revered as a radical progenitor of No Wave music, fronting the influential Teenage Jesus and the Jerks and collaborating with acts like JG Thirlwell, Birthday Party, and Sonic Youth. Lunch has a broad artistic practice, also working in film, visual art, writing, and spoken-word. Goldin and Lunch have also collaborated on numerous occasions. For instance, the cover of Lunch’s 1995 album Drowning In Limbo featured a portrait of her taken by Goldin. Lunch also posed for Goldin’s project for The Village Voice’s short-lived fashion insert Vue in 1985. Shot as part of an editorial called “Masculine/Feminine,” the image of a reclining Lunch at Russian baths in the East Village was ultimately not included in the final layout, and we were pleased to be present the image for the first time as a limited-edition print in support of The Kitchen. At The Kitchen in November 1980, Goldin presented slides as part of Dubbed in Glamour, a three-day event of “spectacle and extravagance” organized by Edit deAk that featured primarily women artists. Introduced by Cookie Mueller, who served as the master of ceremonies, these slides were an early version of Goldin’s landmark work The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, which continued to take shape during the next few years. The Bush Tetras, who performed at this year’s gala, also participated in Dubbed in Glamour. In 1994, Goldin returned to The Kitchen to premiere three slideshows for the first time in the United States as part of the winter lecture series curated by Ira Silverberg. The first slideshow developed from her 1992 award-winning book The Other Side, which lauded the drag queens she lived with and among in New York. During the ‘70s, when Goldin first moved to the city, the people she lived with became not just her subjects, but also her chosen family. The second slideshow was a series of intimate self-portraits. The evening concluded with a collection of Goldin’s images that traced her relationships to her close friends Alf Bold, Gilles Dusein, and Cookie Mueller and celebrated the joy of their lives and the pain of their deaths from AIDS. In 1985, Lunch first appeared at The Kitchen as part of the two-night screening series of experimental short films, Super 8 Motel. She and Richard Kern...

Paper Size: 22 x 28 inches ( 55.88 x 71.12 cm ) Image Size: 22 x 28 inches ( 55.88 x 71.12 cm ) Framed: No Condition: A-: Near Mint, very light signs of handling Additional Det...

Paper Size: 15 x 11 inches ( 38.1 x 27.94 cm ) Image Size: 15 x 11 inches ( 38.1 x 27.94 cm ) Framed: No Condition: A-: Near Mint, very light signs of handling Additional Detai...

"Nu Assis I" is a large serigraph reproduction by Henri Matisse, utilizing his renowned cut-out technique. Released by Silvio Zamorani Editore in Italy, this print has the approval o...

Lithograph on vélin Mohawk Superfine Smooth paper. Paper Size: 11.937 x 8.96 inches. Inscription: Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued. Notes: From the folio, In Memory of My Feelings,...

Rare unopened Robert Rauschenberg designed Talking Heads Speaking in Tongues: In 1983, legendary pop artist Robert Rauschenberg designed the album cover for Talking Heads’ acclaimed...

"An Inland View in Atooi, One of the Sandwich Islands (Kauai, Hawaii)" is an original 18th century engraving from a drawing by John Webber (1751-1793), who was the artist who accompa...

Supercomb created by Jean Michel Basquiat for his exhibition at Yvon Lambert, Paris in 1988. Super vibrant colors with many interesting details of images and text combined in Basquia...

This is a rare and iconic poster from the first printing created by the legendary Andy Warhol for a special exhibition held in Sweden in 1983. Designed as a tribute to the legendary ...

Peter Max, German/American (1937 -) - Statue of Liberty, Year: circa 1986, Medium: Poster, Image Size: 30.5 x 15 inches, Frame Size: 44.25 x 28.25 inches

Paper Size: 15 x 11.5 inches ( 38.1 x 29.21 cm ) Image Size: 15 x 11.5 inches ( 38.1 x 29.21 cm ) Framed: No Condition: A-: Near Mint, very light signs of handling Supplemental Condi...

ABOUT THIS PIECE: Julio Larraz is an expert draftsman, adroitly sketching his subjects and enlivening them with vibrant color. Larraz is recognized for his precise and detailed techn...

Medium: original lithograph by artist Regina Cassolo Bracchi, better known simply as Regina. Printed in 1956 for the very rare Documenti d'Arte d'Oggi, published in Milan by Groupe E...

Düsseldorf (German Cities), 1970 24 x 33.8 in. / 61 x 86 cm Screen print in one color on offset lithograph, black on white card. “for Paul” written in pencil lower middle. Signed and...

Artist: Salvador Dali Title: Passiflora laurigera (Le vine, Passionflower) Portfolio: 1968 Flora Dalinae Medium: Photolithograph, etching, and pochoir in colors on BFK Rives Date: 19...

Artist: Alexander Calder (1898-1976) Title: "Convection" (from the Braniff International Airways Flying Colors Collection) Year: 1974-75 Medium: Lithographs on Arches paper Size: 20 ...

Paper Size: 21.25 x 36.75 inches ( 53.975 x 93.345 cm ) Image Size: 14 x 36.75 inches ( 35.56 x 93.345 cm ) Framed: No Condition: C: Several Signs of use and handling, some visible m...

"El Champion" by Brian Viveros is an archival pigment print on 310gsm Museum Natural Fine Art Paper with an edition of 100. It is numbered (47/100) and s...

This lithograph is part of my private collection. It is original and pencil signed and numbered by the artist.

Original The Rocky Horror Picture Show vintage movie poster, professionally linen backed with original fold marks restored, The Rocky Horror Picture Show. A different set of jaws. ...

Joan Miró (Spain, 1893-1983) 'Sala Gaspar, Metras and Belarte Gallery (avant la lettre)', 1964 Lithograph on Paper (Cahiers d'Art magazine Nº4-5) Original lithograph without signing ...

Medium: lithograph (after the poster). Printed in Paris in 1950 by Mourlot Freres, this lithograph faithfully reproduces the original Toulouse-Lautrec poster in a smaller-size format...

An original Joan Miro lithograph on BFK Rives with signature in the plate (printing). Printed and published by Arte Adrien Maeght, Paris. Nicely framed. Artist: Joan Miro, Spanish...

Lithograph on vélin paper. Inscription: Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued. Good condition, . Notes: From the album, Chagall, Vitraux pour Jérusalem. Published by Musée des Arts Déco...

Boris Lovet-Lorski, 'Untitled (Black Woman Crouching)', lithograph, edition 250, 1929. Signed and numbered 16 in pencil. Number 16 of Volume 2, a series of...

Helen Frankenthaler Variation II on Mauve Corner (Harrison, 17), 1969 Lithograph in colors on Chatham British paper Signed, dated and numbered 14/21 in graphite pencil on the front Published by ULAE, West Islip, NY, with their blind stamp Frame included Accompanied by gallery issued Certificate of Guarantee Lithograph in colors on Chatham British paper Signed, dated and numbered 14/21 in graphite pencil on the front Published and printed by ULAE, West Islip, NY, with their blind stamp Literature: Frankenthaler, A Catalogue Raisonné: Prints 1961-1994, Harrison, no. 17, ppg. 106-109 Accompanied by gallery issued Certificate of Guarantee Elegantly floated and framed in a museum quality wood frame under UV plexiglass Measurements: Framed: 23.75 (vertical) x 28.75 (horizontal) x 2 inches Artwork: 20 inches (vertical) x 25 inches (horizontal) “What concerns me when I work is not whether a picture is a landscape… or whether somebody will see a sunset in it. What concerns me is, did I make a beautiful picture?” - - Helen Frankenthaler This is Frankenthaler's first silkscreen, produced for the portfolio New York Ten, which includes works by other New York-based artists at the time such as Roy Lichtenstein, Jim Dine, Tom Wesselmann and Claes Oldenburg. (She created her first lithograph in 1961) Other examples of this edition are found in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, MOCA Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum, the Philadelphia Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, and numerous regional museums and institutions in the United States and worldwide. Helen Frankenthaler, A Brief 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...

Medium: original lithograph. Catalogue reference: Mourlot 82. Printed in 1952 at the atelier Mourlot for the art revue Verve (Volume 7, Number 27-28) and published in Paris by Teriad...

Will Barnet The Book, from the 1776 USA 1976: Bicentennial Prints portfolio, 1975 Silkscreen in colors on white Arches wove paper Pencil signed, titled and numbered 65/75 on the fron...

Lithograph and stencil on vélin pur chiffon d'Arches paper. Inscription: Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued. Good condition; unframed. Notes: From the folio, Faunes et Flore d'Antibe...

Paper Size: 33 x 24 inches ( 83.82 x 60.96 cm ) Image Size: 27.25 x 23 inches ( 69.215 x 58.42 cm ) Framed: No Condition: A: Mint Additional Details: Poster for the Cone Collect...

Tableau, Japanese, limited edition lithograph, black, white, red, signed, number Shinoda's works have been collected by public galleries and museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Brooklyn Museum and Metropolitan Museum (all in New York City), the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, the British Museum in London, the Art Institute of Chicago, Arthur M. Sackler Gallery of the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., the Singapore Art Museum, the National Museum of Singapore, the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, Netherlands, the Albright–Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, the Cincinnati Art Museum, and the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut. New York Times Obituary, March 3, 2021 by Margalit Fox, Alex Traub contributed reporting. Toko Shinoda, one of the foremost Japanese artists of the 20th century, whose work married the ancient serenity of calligraphy with the modernist urgency of Abstract Expressionism, died on Monday at a hospital in Tokyo. She was 107. Her death was announced by her gallerist in the United States. A painter and printmaker, Ms. Shinoda attained international renown at midcentury and remained sought after by major museums and galleries worldwide for more than five decades. Her work has been exhibited at, among other places, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the British Museum; and the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo. Private collectors include the Japanese imperial family. Writing about a 1998 exhibition of Ms. Shinoda’s work at a London gallery, the British newspaper The Independent called it “elegant, minimal and very, very composed,” adding, “Her roots as a calligrapher are clear, as are her connections with American art of the 1950s, but she is quite obviously a major artist in her own right.” As a painter, Ms. Shinoda worked primarily in sumi ink, a solid form of ink, made from soot pressed into sticks, that has been used in Asia for centuries. Rubbed on a wet stone to release their pigment, the sticks yield a subtle ink that, because it is quickly imbibed by paper, is strikingly ephemeral. The sumi artist must make each brush stroke with all due deliberation, as the nature of the medium precludes the possibility of reworking even a single line. “The color of the ink which is produced by this method is a very delicate one,” Ms. Shinoda told The Business Times of Singapore in 2014. “It is thus necessary to finish one’s work very quickly. So the composition must be determined in my mind before I pick up the brush. Then, as they say, the painting just falls off the brush.” Ms. Shinoda painted almost entirely in gradations of black, with occasional sepias and filmy blues. The ink sticks she used had been made for the great sumi artists of the past, some as long as 500 years ago. Her line — fluid, elegant, impeccably placed — owed much to calligraphy. She had been rigorously trained in that discipline from the time she was a child, but she had begun to push against its confines when she was still very young. Deeply influenced by American Abstract Expressionists like Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell, whose work she encountered when she lived in New York in the late 1950s, Ms. Shinoda shunned representation. “If I have a definite idea, why paint it?,” she asked in an interview with United Press International in 1980. “It’s already understood and accepted. A stand of bamboo is more beautiful than a painting could be. Mount Fuji is more striking than any possible imitation.” Spare and quietly powerful, making abundant use of white space, Ms. Shinoda’s paintings are done on traditional Chinese and Japanese papers, or on backgrounds of gold, silver or platinum leaf. Often asymmetrical, they can overlay a stark geometric shape with the barest calligraphic strokes. The combined effect appears to catch and hold something evanescent — “as elusive as the memory of a pleasant scent or the movement of wind,” as she said in a 1996 interview. Ms. Shinoda’s work also included lithographs; three-dimensional pieces of wood and other materials; and murals in public spaces, including a series made for the Zojoji Temple in Tokyo. The fifth of seven children of a prosperous family, Ms. Shinoda was born on March 28, 1913, in Dalian, in Manchuria, where her father, Raijiro, managed a tobacco plant. Her mother, Joko, was a homemaker. The family returned to Japan when she was a baby, settling in Gifu, midway between Kyoto and Tokyo. One of her father’s uncles, a sculptor and calligrapher, had been an official seal carver to the Meiji emperor. He conveyed his love of art and poetry to Toko’s father, who in turn passed it to Toko. “My upbringing was a very traditional one, with relatives living with my parents,” she said in the U.P.I. interview. “In a scholarly atmosphere, I grew up knowing I wanted to make these things, to be an artist.” She began studying calligraphy at 6, learning, hour by hour, impeccable mastery over line. But by the time she was a teenager, she had begun to seek an artistic outlet that she felt calligraphy, with its centuries-old conventions, could not afford. “I got tired of it and decided to try my own style,” Ms. Shinoda told Time magazine in 1983. “My father always scolded me for being naughty and departing from the traditional way, but I had to do it.” Moving to Tokyo as a young adult, Ms. Shinoda became celebrated throughout Japan as one of the country’s finest living calligraphers, at the time a signal honor for a woman. She had her first solo show in 1940, at a Tokyo gallery. During World War II, when she forsook the city for the countryside near Mount Fuji, she earned her living as a calligrapher, but by the mid-1940s she had started experimenting with abstraction. In 1954 she began to achieve renown outside Japan with her inclusion in an exhibition of Japanese calligraphy at MoMA. In 1956, she traveled to New York. At the time, unmarried Japanese women could obtain only three-month visas for travel abroad, but through zealous renewals, Ms. Shinoda managed to remain for two years. She met many of the titans of Abstract Expressionism there, and she became captivated by their work. “When I was in New York in the ’50s, I was often included in activities with those artists, people like Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Motherwell and so forth,” she said in a 1998 interview with The Business Times. “They were very generous people, and I was often invited to visit their studios, where we would share ideas and opinions on our work. It was a great experience being together with people who shared common feelings.” During this period, Ms. Shinoda’s work was sold in the United States by Betty Parsons, the New York dealer who represented Pollock, Rothko and many of their contemporaries. Returning to Japan, Ms. Shinoda began to fuse calligraphy and the Expressionist aesthetic in earnest. The result was, in the words of The Plain Dealer of Cleveland in 1997, “an art of elegant simplicity and high drama.” Among Ms. Shinoda’s many honors, she was depicted, in 2016, on a Japanese postage stamp. She is the only Japanese artist to be so honored during her lifetime. No immediate family members survive. When she was quite young and determined to pursue a life making art, Ms. Shinoda made the decision to forgo the path that seemed foreordained for women of her generation. “I never married and have no children,” she told The Japan Times in 2017. “And I suppose that it sounds strange to think that my paintings are in place of them — of course they are not the same thing at all. But I do say, when paintings that I have made years ago are brought back into my consciousness, it seems like an old friend, or even a part of me, has come back to see me.” Works of a Woman's Hand Toko Shinoda bases new abstractions on ancient calligraphy Down a winding side street in the Aoyama district, western Tokyo. into a chunky white apartment building, then up in an elevator small enough to make a handful of Western passengers friends or enemies for life. At the end of a hall on the fourth floor, to the right, stands a plain brown door. To be admitted is to go through the looking glass. Sayonara today. Hello (Konichiwa) yesterday and tomorrow. Toko Shinoda, 70, lives and works here. She can be, when she chooses, on e of Japans foremost calligraphers, master of an intricate manner of writing that traces its lines back some 3,000 years to ancient China. She is also an avant-garde artist of international renown, whose abstract paintings and lithographs rest in museums around the world. These diverse talents do not seem to belong in the same epoch. Yet they have somehow converged in this diminutive woman who appears in her tiny foyer, offering slippers and ritual bows of greeting. She looks like someone too proper to chip a teacup, never mind revolutionize an old and hallowed art form She wears a blue and white kimono of her own design. Its patterns, she explains, are from Edo, meaning the period of the Tokugawa shoguns, before her city was renamed Tokyo in 1868. Her black hair is pulled back from her face, which is virtually free of lines and wrinkles. except for the gold-rimmed spectacles perched low on her nose (this visionary is apparently nearsighted). Shinoda could have stepped directly from a 19th century Meji print. Her surroundings convey a similar sense of old aesthetics, a retreat in the midst of a modern, frenetic city. The noise of the heavy traffic on a nearby elevated highway sounds at this height like distant surf. delicate bamboo shades filter the daylight. The color arrangement is restful: low ceilings of exposed wood, off-white walls, pastel rugs of blue, green and gray. It all feels so quintessentially Japanese that Shinoda’s opening remarks come as a surprise. She points out (through a translator) that she was not born in Japan at all but in Darien, Manchuria. Her father had been posted there to manage a tobacco company under the aegis of the occupying Japanese forces, which seized the region from Russia in 1905. She says,”People born in foreign places are very free in their thinking, not restricted” But since her family went back to Japan in 1915, when she was two, she could hardly remember much about a liberated childhood? She answers,”I think that if my mother had remained in Japan, she would have been an ordinary Japanese housewife. Going to Manchuria, she was able to assert her own personality, and that left its mark on me.” Evidently so. She wears her obi low on the hips, masculine style. The Porcelain aloofness she displays in photographs shatters in person. Her speech is forceful, her expression animated and her laugh both throaty and infectious. The hand she brings to her mouth to cover her amusement (a traditional female gesture of modesty) does not stand a chance. Her father also made a strong impression on the fifth of his seven children:”He came from a very old family, and he was quite strict in some ways and quite liberal in others.” He owned one of the first three bicycles ever imported to Japan and tinkered with it constantly He also decided that his little daughter would undergo rigorous training in a procrustean antiquity. “I was forced to study from age six on to learn calligraphy,” Shinoda says, The young girl dutifully memorized and copied the accepted models. In one sense, her father had pushed her in a promising direction, one of the few professional fields in Japan open to females. Included among the ancient terms that had evolved around calligraphy was onnade, or woman's writing. Heresy lay ahead. By the time she was 15, she had already been through nine years of intensive discipline, “I got tired of it and decided to try my own style. My father always scolded me for being naughty and departing from the traditional way, but I had to do it.” She produces a brush and a piece of paper to demonstrate the nature of her rebellion. “This is kawa, the accepted calligraphic character for river,” she says, deftly sketching three short vertical strokes. “But I wanted to use more than three lines to show the force of the river.” Her brush flows across the white page, leaving a recognizable river behind, also flowing.” The simple kawa in the traditional language was not enough for me. I wanted to find a new symbol to express the word river.” Her conviction grew that ink could convey the ineffable, the feeling, "as she says, of wind blowing softly.” Another demonstration. She goes to the sliding wooden door of an anteroom and disappears in back of it; the only trace of her is a triangular swatch of the right sleeve of her kimono, which she has arranged for that purpose. A realization dawns. The task of this artist is to paint that three sided pattern so that the invisible woman attached to it will be manifest to all viewers. Gen, painted especially for TIME, shows Shinoda’s theory in practice. She calls the work “my conception of Japan in visual terms.” A dark swath at the left, punctuated by red, stands for history. In the center sits a Chinese character gen, which means in the present or actuality. A blank pattern at the right suggests an unknown future. Once out of school, Shinoda struck off on a path significantly at odds with her culture. She recognized marriage for what it could mean to her career (“a restriction”) and decided against it. There was a living to be earned by doing traditional calligraphy:she used her free time to paint her variations. In 1940 a Tokyo gallery exhibited her work. (Fourteen years would pass before she got a second show.)War came, and bad times for nearly everyone, including the aspiring artist , who retreated to a rural area near Mount Fuji and traded her kimonos for eggs. In 1954 Shinoda’s work was included in a group exhibit at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art. Two years later, she overcame bureaucratic obstacles to visit the U.S.. Unmarried Japanese women are allowed visas for only three months, patiently applying for two-month extensions, one at a time, Shinoda managed to travel the country for two years. She pulls out a scrapbook from this period. Leafing through it, she suddenly raises a hand and touches her cheek:”How young I looked!” An inspection is called for. The woman in the grainy, yellowing newspaper photograph could easily be the on e sitting in this room. Told this, she nods and smiles. No translation necessary. Her sojourn in the U.S. proved to be crucial in the recognition and development of Shinoda’s art. Celebrities such as actor Charles Laughton and John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet bought her paintings and spread the good word. She also saw the works of the abstract expressionists, then the rage of the New York City art world, and realized that these Western artists, coming out of an utterly different tradition, were struggling toward the same goal that had obsessed her. Once she was back home, her work slowly made her famous. Although Shinoda has used many materials (fabric, stainless steel, ceramics, cement), brush and ink remain her principal means of expression. She had said, “As long as I am devoted to the creation of new forms, I can draw even with muddy water.” Fortunately, she does not have to. She points with evident pride to her ink stone, a velvety black slab of rock, with an indented basin, that is roughly a foot across and two feet long. It is more than 300 years old. Every working morning, Shinoda pours about a third of a pint of water into it, then selects an ink stick from her extensive collection, some dating back to China’s Ming dynasty. Pressing stick against stone, she begins rubbing. Slowly, the dried ink dissolves in the water and becomes ready for the brush. So two batches of sumi (India ink) are exactly alike; something old, something new. She uses color sparingly. Her clear preference is black and all its gradations. “In some paintings, sumi expresses blue better than blue.” It is time to go downstairs to the living quarters. A niece, divorced and her daughter,10,stay here with Shinoda; the artist who felt forced to renounce family and domesticity at the outset of her career seems welcome to it now. Sake is offered, poured into small cedar boxes and happily accepted. Hold carefully. Drink from a corner. Ambrosial. And just right for the surroundings and the hostess. A conservative renegade; a liberal traditionalist; a woman steeped in the male-dominated conventions that she consistently opposed. Her trail blazing accomplishments are analogous to Picasso’s. When she says goodbye, she bows. --by Paul Gray...

This rare exhibition poster features an early drawing by Christo titled "The Gates XXIII," depicting the view from Central Park West with the Dakota in the background. The drawing wa...

Paper Size: 14.25 x 17.25 inches ( 36.195 x 43.815 cm ) Image Size: 14.25 x 17.25 inches ( 36.195 x 43.815 cm ) Framed: Yes Frame Size: H: 15.25 x W: 18.25 x D: .75 in. Condition...

Medium: offset lithograph (after the watercolor). Printed in 1970 on velin bouffant paper from the Papeteries Casteljoux and published in France by Edito-Service Geneve. This reprodu...