GALERIE D’ORSAY FEBRUARY + MARCH 2021
AN URBAN CONVERSATION PA R I S + N E W Y O R K
AN URBAN CONVERSATION PARIS + NEW YORK PABLO PICASSO HENRI MATISSE HENRI DE TOULOUSE-LAUTREC JULES CHÉRET
SEN-1 STANLEY BOXER ROY LICHTENSTEIN FRANK STELLA ...AND MORE
FEBRUARY + MARCH 2021
AN URBAN CONVERSATION: PARIS + NEW YORK is a celebration of the artists, past & present, who are galvanizing cultural dialogues, challenging the standards of aesthetics, and pushing the possibilities of artistic expression. Visionary graffiti artist SEN-1 tells us a major theme of Hip Hop and the street art scene is that if somebody copies or tags over you, you have to “up your game” to stand apart. A similar process happened on a much larger scale in the 20th century between PARIS + NEW YORK. In France, artists like Picasso & Matisse revolutionized art as we knew it, quickly displacing the old guard. In postwar New York, the upstart artists of the downtown arts scene, in turn, replaced their European forebears. It’s a process that builds up, year after year—exactly the way a wall becomes covered in graffiti. We hope you will join us in this conversation.
PICASSO, JACQUELINE IN A FLOWERED HAT, 24 7/8” X 17 5/8” ORIGINAL LINOCUT
PICASSO, BUST IN PROFILE, 25 7/8” X 20” ORIGINAL ZINC PLATE LITHOGRAPH PRINTED IN BLACK INK
PABLO PICASSO Picasso began to gain a following from several dealers and collectors including the Russian collector, Sergei Shchukin, and Leo and Gertrude Stein. His work from 1905 to around 1908 is far less austere and the blues of his earlier work give way to pinks and greys. This work which used acrobats, dancers and harlequins as subject matter later became known as his Rose Period. In 1907 he was taken up by the dealer Daniel H. Kahnweiler. From 1910 to 1916 Picasso worked closely with Georges Braque and later Juan Gris, developing Cubism. Paper collage played a large part in this work combining everyday, found objects with paper and paint to create still life and interior scenes. The relationship between Braque and Picasso was broken by an argument. Picasso’s work of the early 1920s showed a considerable involvement in Surrealism and he exhibited alongside several the Surrealists of the time. André Breton hailed him as one of the initiators of the movement in 1928, but by the latter part of the 1920s, Picasso was painting very different images of great tenseness focusing on despair and anguish. Picasso’s ability to make crucial contributions to so many of the artistic developments of the first half of the century and yet retain his own artistic path is perhaps the factor which most sets him apart from any other artist in history. Probably the most influential and controversial figure of modern art, Picasso was at the forefront of the European avant-garde from the early 1900s until the end of the Second World War. His work involved radical intellectualism, serious political commitment and, at the same time, playful wit and association with his very public lifestyle. Very little has happened since in art history that does not demand to be seen in some relationship to his greatest achievements. PICASSO, JACQUELINE IN HEADBAND II (WOMAN WITH FLOWING HAIR), 24 3/4” X 17 1/2” LINOCUT
PICASSO, CINÉSIAS AND HIS FAMILY, 11 3/8” X 8 7/8” ORIGINAL ETCHING & THE FEAST, 11 1/4” X 9 1/8” ORIGINAL ETCHING
PICASSO, JACQUELINE READING, 29 1/2” X 24 1/2” ORIGINAL LINOCUT
MATISSE, THE SWIMMER IN THE AQUARIUM, 16 5/8” x 25 5/8” POCHOIR
MATISSE, THE BURIAL OF PIERROT, 16 1/2” x 25 3/4” POCHOIR
HENRI MATISSE In 1899, Matisse began to experiment with the NeoImpressionist technique, which he applied to one of his first major works, the celebrated Luxe, Calme et Volupté. The work was exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in 1905 and bought by the artist, Paul Signac. In the same year, along with the artists André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck, Albert Marquet, Georges Rouault, and others from Gustave Moreau’s studio, Matisse created the sensational exhibition at the Salon d’Automne, from which arose the Fauvist movement. Although Fauvism was a short-lived movement, Matisse continued to experiment with the abstract and expressive use of pure color. He argued that an artist did not have complete control over color and form; instead, colors, shapes, and lines would come to dictate to the sensitive artist how they might be employed in relation to one another. He also believed in the total pictorial harmony of his art. “What I dream of,” he wrote, “is an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or disturbing subject matter… like a comforting influence, a mental balm – something like a good armchair in which one rests from physical fatigue.” While his innovative gestures made him a “radical” leader in the arts, he gained the approval of several influential critics and collectors, including the American expatriate writer Gertrude Stein. Among the many important commissions he received was that of a Russian collector who requested mural panels illustrating dance and music (both completed in 1911; now in the Hermitage, Saint Petersburg). Such broadly conceived themes ideally suited Matisse; they allowed him freedom of invention and play of form and expression. His images of dancers, and of human figures in general, convey expressive form first and the particular details of anatomy only secondarily. Matisse extended this principle into other fields; his bronze sculptures, like his drawings and works in several graphic media, reveal the same expressive contours seen in his paintings. From the 1920s until his death, Matisse spent much time in the south of France, particularly Nice, painting local scenes with a thin, fluid application of bright color. Often bedridden during his last years, he occupied himself with decoupage, creating works of brilliantly colored paper cutouts arranged casually, but with an unfailing eye for design, on a canvas surface. Matisse’s famed Jazz suite is a quintessential example of this innovative technique. Matisse died in Nice on November 3, 1954. Unlike many artists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, he was internationally popular during his lifetime, esteemed by collectors, art critics, and a younger generation of artists. MATISSE, . . . MAIS SOUDAIN LE SOLEIL, SECOUANT SA CRINIÈRE . . . (p. 43; variant II), 9 3/4” X 12 3/4” MATISSE, ...TENEBRES DE MOI-MEME, JE M’ABANDONNE A VOUS..., 9 3/4” X 12 3/4”
SEN-1, STATE OF THE REPUBLIC, 72” X 56” OIL-BASED SPRAY PAINT AND INKS ON CANVAS
SEN-1 SEN-1’s life as a street artist started at the age of 12, when he and his crew “graffiti bombed” buildings and NYC subway trains in the ‘80s. Graffiti in New York City has had a local, countrywide, and international influence. Originating in the New York City Subway and spreading beyond, it was regarded by the city’s authorities as an act of vandalism, while some viewed it as an art form. Along with other young dreamers in the early Hip Hop movement, SEN-1 felt a strong desire to represent himself and his community in the face of poverty, oppression and often death. Leaving his “SEN-1” tag large and proud around the city was a dangerously playful way for SEN-1 to develop his artistic skills and create a legacy along with his infamous IBM crew (Incredible Bombing Masters). SEN-1 became well known for his artful dialogue with other graffiti writers on the Number 1 train and was ‘WANTED’ for marking up neighborhood buildings with spray paint. Koch’s zero tolerance policy and Reaganomics of the late 80s ended the era of subway train graffiti, but not before SEN-1 had gained global recognition as a Master of Graffiti.
Despite his fame, SEN-1’s artistic career took a backseat to the challenges of daily life as a young, afro-Caribbean adult raising a family on the Upper West Side in the 90s. SEN-1 continued to consult however, for other creatives in his community which attracted the attention of fashion designer Rachel Roy. SEN-1 has provided patterns for four of Rachel’s collections and in 2009 his artwork was commissioned for 7 of MACY’S main avenue windows in NYC. SEN-1’s private collectors include musicians like Fabolous and Rita Ora, as well as First Lady Michelle Obama (in association with her “Let’s Move” program).
SEN-1, FREESTYLE, 72” X 74 1/2” OIL-BASED SPRAY PAINT AND INKS ON CANVAS
SEN-1, AN URBAN CONVERSATION, 33.5” X 43” OIL-BASED SPRAY PAINT AND INKS ON CANVAS
SEN-1, CITY LIFE, 33.5” X 32” OIL-BASED SPRAY PAINT AND INKS ON CANVAS
SEN-1, THE DECLARATION, 36” X 48” OIL-BASED SPRAY PAINT AND INKS ON CANVAS
SEN-1, JANUARY THE 6TH, 66” X 41 1/4” OIL-BASED SPRAY PAINT AND INKS ON CANVAS
SEN-1, MAD MUGSY, 55” X 59” OIL-BASED SPRAY PAINT AND INKS ON CANVAS
Kristine Feeks Hammond, Co-Director of Boston’s Galerie d’Orsay, says she’s recognized seminal moments over the past few years when it became clear graffiti and hip-hop culture had hit the mainstream. “When iconic jeweler Tiffany & Co. featured cans of spray paint as a backdrop for its jewelry in the windows down the street from our gallery, I knew doors and minds were opening,” she says. One of the masters of the medium, SEN-1, is represented by the gallery. The artist, who was both a witness to and an active participant in the emergence of the New York City street-art movement of the late 1970s and early 1980s, has become a legend for influencing the city’s graffiti style. Martha S. Folsom, Galerie d’Orsay Co-Director, says she met SEN-1 in her gallery a few years ago. “We had an immediate connection, and I was overwhelmed by his story and authenticity,” she says. “I could see his struggle laid out right there on the canvas. His paintings touch on the complex layering of the American experience and reverence for cultural history in the most compelling way. It’s telling that the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston is featuring Basquiat as its blockbuster show for 2020. With the world waking up to issues of racial injustice and diversity, this is only the beginning of a very important time in art history. We’re proud of what SEN-1 adds to that conversation. We’re encouraging our collectors to listen.” - Boston Common Magazine, The Art Issue (Dec 2020/Jan 2021)
SEN-1, 1 LOVER, 12” X 16” OIL-BASED SPRAY PAINT AND INKS ON CANVAS
BOXER, WHITE INTERIOR FIGURE, 70” X 46” OIL & MIXED MEDIA ON CANVAS
STANLEY BOXER Endlessly innovative and with a profound sensitivity to texture, Stanley Boxer was born in 1926 in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. Boxer was a prolific artist—more a “practitioner” of art by his own admission— across a number of different media, including painting, printmaking, drawing, and sculpture. Having returned to New York after his service in the United States Navy during World War II, Boxer enrolled at the Art Students League with funds he received from the G.I. Bill. He was uncompromising in his pursuit of the process of painting, spending seven days a week in his studio. Boxer’s work attracted the attention of art critic Clement Greenberg who categorized Boxer as one of the ‘colorfield’ painters. But Boxer, ever the independent, was adamant in rejecting this label, calling himself “visionless”— meaning he allowed his past art to shape his work but would by no means attempt to shift what that art should look like in the future. His art appears in the collections of many museums, including the Museum of Modern Art (NY) and the Whitney Museum of American Art, as well as the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Hirshorn Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, amongst many others. In 1975, Boxer was a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship. Stanley Boxer’s paintings are abstract compositions notable for their texture and color, in which small gestures are multiplied to form a single entity—almost as if observing cells under a microscope where individual units coalesce into a whole. His often perplexing titles (take for example, Boxer’s 1978 ‘Peckedperchingsilveredblanch’, a tonguetwister of a word, or the evocative “Cooingnoonflowerlets,” 1974) obscure any immediate understanding of the works; a deep love of language, particularly German, encouraged his playful use of words, combining suggestive nouns and adjectives in much the same way as his approach to painting merged color and form. If there is to be any single, identifiable subject to Boxer’s decidedly abstract works, it is this coming-together of disparate colors, textures, and moods. BOXER, WARMFIELD, 72” X 72” OIL & MIXED MEDIA ON CANVAS
BOXER, AMOTIONLESSSOUL, 50” X 26 3/4” OIL & MIXED MEDIA ON CANVAS
“in the manufacture of my art, i use anything and everything which gets the job done without any sentiment or sanctity as to medium. then, too, i have
“visionless” ... this is, i go where my preceding art takes me,
deliberately made a practice of being
and never try to redirect the future as to what my art should look like. this is a general credo and foundation for everything i have ever done and stands firm in its solidity as this is written.” stanley boxer
BOXER, UNTITLED FIGURE STUDY (76D-60), 20” X 25.25”
BOXER, UNTITLED FIGURE STUDY (151D-60), 19” X 24.5”
BOXER, UNTITLED FIGURE STUDY (242D-59), 17” X 20.5”
BOXER, UNTITLED FIGURE STUDY (249D-59), 20” X 26”
BOXER, INTERIOR WITH FIGURES, 66 1/2 X 55 1/2” OIL & MIXED MEDIA ON CANVAS
LICHTENSTEIN, ART CRITIC, 25 7/8 X 19” ORIGINAL SCREENPRINT
ROY LICHTENSTEIN Roy Lichtenstein was born in 1923 in New York. In 1939 he studied under Reginald Marsh at the Art Students League of New York, and the following year under Hoyt L. Sherman at the College of the Arts at Ohio State University in Columbus. He served in the army from 1943 to 1946, after which he resumed his studies and was hired as an instructor. He obtained an MFA in 1949. In 1951 the Carlebach Gallery, New York, organized a solo exhibition of his semiabstract paintings of the Old West. Shortly thereafter, the artist moved to Cleveland, where he continued painting while working as an engineering draftsman to support his growing family. In the early 1970s he explored this formal question further with his abstract Mirrors and Entablatures series. From 1974 through the 1980s, he probed another long-standing issue: the concept of artistic style. All his series of works played with the characteristics of well-known 20th-century art movements. Lichtenstein continued to question the role of style in consumer culture in his 1990s series Interiors, which included images of his own works as decorative elements. In his attempt to fully grasp and expose how the forms, materials, and methods of production have shaped the images of Western society, the artist also explored other mediums such as polychromatic ceramic, aluminum, brass, and serigraphs. Beginning in 1962, the Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, held regular exhibitions of the artist’s work. Lichtenstein participated in the Venice Biennale in 1966 and was honored with solo exhibitions in 1967 and 1968 at the Pasadena Art Museum and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, respectively. The artist was the subject of a major retrospective at the Guggenheim in 1994, three years before his death on September 30, 1997. LICHTENSTEIN, COMPOSITION IV, 22 1/4” X 27 3/8” ORIGINAL SCREENPRINT
Frank Stella was born in 1936 in Malden, Massachusetts. After attending high school at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, he went on to Princeton University, where he painted and majored in history. Early visits to New York art galleries would prove to be an influence upon his artistic development. Stella moved to New York in 1958 after his graduation. From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, Stella created a large body of work that responded in a general way to Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick.” During this time, the increasingly deep relief of Stella’s paintings gave way to full three-dimensionality, with sculptural forms derived from cones, pillars, French curves, waves, and decorative architectural elements. To create these works, the artist used collages or maquettes that were then enlarged and re-created with the aid of assistants, industrial metal cutters, and digital technologies.
STELLA, SHARDS VARIANT 1A, 45 1/2” X 39 3/4” ORIGINAL LITHOGRAPH & SCREENPRINT
FRANK STELLA
In the 1990s, Stella began making freestanding sculpture for public spaces and developing architectural projects. In 1992–93 he created the entire decorative scheme for Toronto’s Princess of Wales Theatre, which includes a 10,000-square-foot mural. His 1993 proposal for a kunsthalle (arts center) and garden in Dresden did not come to fruition. His aluminum bandshell, inspired by a folding hat from Brazil, was built in downtown Miami in 1999. In 2001, a monumental Stella sculpture was installed outside the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Stella’s work was included in several important exhibitions that defined 1960s art, among them the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s “The Shaped Canvas” (1964–65) and “Systemic Painting” (1966). His art has been the subject of several retrospectives in the United States, Europe, and Japan. Among the many honors he has received was an invitation from Harvard University to give the Charles Eliot Norton lectures in 1983–84. Calling for a rejuvenation of abstraction by achieving the depth of baroque painting, these six talks were published by Harvard University Press in 1986. The artist continues to live and work in New York. STELLA, SINJERLI VARIATION SQUARED WITH COLORED GROUND I, 32 X 32” ORIGINAL LITHOGRAPH & SCREENPRINT
HENRI DE TOULOUSE-LAUTREC The art of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec forever changed the way the world perceives Paris. Combining the honesty of plein-aire painting and the realistic style that characterized the Barbizon painters’ view of nature, Lautrec exposed the underbelly of Parisian nightlife. Like the impressionists Edgar Degas and Jean-François Raffaëlli, Toulouse-Lautrec contributed to the artistic revolution whereby elements of social consciousness became as important to a painting’s narrative as psychological representation. The emotional reaction that the combination of these two factors invoked in the public characterized the shift of art into the modern age. Toulouse-Lautrec was to lithography what Rembrandt was to etching. Like Rembrandt’s self-portraits, which were revolutionary in their exploration of human expression, Toulouse-Lautrec’s numerous paintings of the model Carmen Gaudin (c. 1880’s) successfully captured a range of human emotions. From fatigued laundress to indifferent prostitute, she came to embody a variety of disparate characters through his masterful touch. Toulouse-Lautrec’s ability to “dissect” his model’s emotions both reflected a form of rigorous observation that marked the essence of scientific experimentation in the 19th century, and resulted from early childhood experiences. Growing up with an unexpressive mother and an absent father, Toulouse-Lautrec was trained at an early age to interpret the subtler nuances of tacit feelings. Toulouse-Lautrec died in 1901 at the age of 36, having suffered from a late form of dwarfism called pycnodysostosis. At the time of his death, his oeuvre consisted of 5000 drawings, 350 lithographs, and 500 paintings.
TOULOUSE-LAUTREC, LA PASSAGÈRE DU 54 - PROMENADE EN YACHT, 23 15/16 X 16 1/8” ORIGINAL LITHOGRAPH
CLOCKWISE: TOULOUSE-LAUTREC, JANE AVRIL – JARDIN DE PARIS, 15 7/16 X 11 3/8” LITHOGRAPH; MUCHA, JOB, 15 3/8” X 11 3/8” LITHOGRAPH; STEINLEN, MOTOCYCLES COMIOT, 15 11/16” X 11 3/8” LITHOGRAPH; GRASSET, ENCRE L. MARGUET, 15 5/8” X 11 3/8” LITHOGRAPH
CALDER, LES PYRAMIDES GRANDES, 29 1/2 X 43” COLOR LITHOGRAPH
ALEXANDER CALDER Alexander Calder was born on July 22, 1898, in Lawnton, Pennsylvania, into a family of artists. In 1919, he received an engineering degree from Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, New Jersey. Calder attended the Art Students League, New York, from 1923 to 1926, studying briefly with Thomas Hart Benton and John Sloan. As a freelance artist for the National Police Gazette in 1925, he spent two weeks sketching at the circus; his fascination with the subject dates from this time. He made his first sculpture in 1925; the following year he made several constructions of animals and figures with wire and wood. Calder’s first exhibition of paintings took place in 1926 at the Artist’s Gallery, New York. Later that year, he went to Paris and attended the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. In Paris, he met Stanley William Hayter, exhibited at the 1926 Salon des Indépendants, and in 1927 began giving performances of his miniature circus. The first show of his wire animals and caricature portraits was held at the Weyhe Gallery, New York, in 1928. That same year, he met Joan Miró, who became a lifelong friend. Subsequently, Calder divided his time between France and the United States. In 1929, the Galerie Billiet gave him his first solo show in Paris. Around this time, he also encountered James Johnson Sweeney, future Guggenheim Museum director, who would become a close friend and supporter. Calder began to experiment with abstract sculpture and in 1931 and 1932 introduced
moving parts into his work. These moving sculptures were called “mobiles”; the stationary constructions were to be named “stabiles.” He exhibited with the group Abstraction-Création (Abstraction Creation, 1931–36) in Paris in 1933. In 1943, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, gave him a solo exhibition. During the 1950s, Calder traveled widely and executed “gongs” (sound mobiles developed around 1948) and “towers” (wall mobiles developed around 1951). He won the Grand Prize for sculpture at the 1952 Venice Biennale. He exhibited, along with other pioneers of Kinetic art including Yaacov Agam and Jean Tinguely, in Le Mouvement (Movement) at the Galerie Denise René, Paris, in 1955. Late in the decade, the artist worked extensively with gouache; from this period, he executed numerous major public commissions. In 1964–65, the Guggenheim Museum presented a Calder retrospective. He began the “totems” in 1966 and the “animobiles” in 1971; both are variations on the standing mobile. A Calder exhibition was held at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1976), and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2003). Calder died on November 11, 1976, in New York. CALDER, LES TROIS OEUFS, 29 3/8 X 43 1/4” COLOR LITHOGRAPH
CHÉRET, MUSÉE GRÉVIN, 48 X 34 1/4” LITHOGRAPH
JULES CHÉRET Jules Chéret was a renowned painter and lithographer. Chéret was born in Paris, France, and his family was considered poor, though most of the family members had artistic leanings. At the age of 13, the artist left school and became an apprentice to a lithographer for three years. Chéret became increasingly interested in painting and enrolled at the École Nationale de Dessin to study art. Chéret went to London to study photography from 1859 to 1866, and was greatly influenced by British Art, especially printing and poster design. When Chéret returned to France, he took up poster printing and made posters for different theaters, including Eldorado, the Moulin Rouge, and the Olympia. Apart from the British poster printers, Chéret was also influenced by Rococo artists, such as Antoine Watteau. The demand for Chéret’s work grew, and he started working for different outfits, such as municipal festivals, beverage companies, and even pharmaceutical companies, producing different graphic advertisements. Chéret was given the tag Father of the Women’s Liberation when he began producing huge paintings of free-spirited females,
CHÉRET, QUINQUINA DUBONNET, 15 5/8 X 11 3/8” LITHOGRAPH
widely known as Chérettes, which were very much in contrast to the then-prevailing norm of depicting females as puritans or prostitutes. Examples of Chéret’s paintings include L’Arc en Ciel (1893), Grand Bal Masqué (1896), and Musée Grevin, Théâtre les Fantoches (1900). Chéret was instrumental in the emergence of printers and poster designers in the late 1890s. He created the Maîtres de l’Affiche collection in 1895. This was a collection of reproductions from 97 Parisian artists, and the work inspired different artists, including Charles Gesmar. Chéret retired to Nice, France, when he was an old man. The French government awarded him the Légion d’honneur in 1890. Chéret exhibited his work in different institutions, including the Louvre and the Salon, both in Paris, France. Chéret’s works are found in various institutions around the world, including the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Japan; the Folkwang Museum, Essen, Germany; and The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY.
SAM FRANCIS Samuel Lewis Francis was born on June 25, 1923, in San Mateo, California. He began painting in 1944 after being diagnosed with spinal tuberculosis, resulting from a U.S. Army Air Corps accident. In 1947 he studied privately with painter David Park, and soon gave up his intended medical studies. He experimented with the dominant and emerging styles of the late 1940s, particularly Abstract Expressionism and Surrealism, eventually developing a personal style of abstraction focused on dripping, cell-like forms, an allover instability, and sensitivity to color and light, as in Opposites (1950). In 1950 Francis moved to Paris and attended the Atelier Fernand Léger, where he was exposed to the work of Pierre Bonnard and Henri Matisse, which reinvigorated his interest in light and vibrant color, visible in his 1953 painting Big Red. A visit to Japan in 1957 coincided with an opening up of expanses of white space in much of his work, and his subsequent move to a larger studio in Paris resulted in the production of large-scale paintings and mural commissions, including a 1959 painting for the Chase Manhattan Bank, New York.
FRANCIS, YEA, 8 5/8 X 5 1/8” BOUND BOOK, THE COVER PAINTED IN WATERCOLOR
Francis returned to California in 1962 and resumed painting with combinations of bright colors. In the late 1960s, however, color increasingly vanished from his canvases. In 1973 he formed a lithography production company, which published his own prints. Over the next decades, Francis’s style in painting and print production evolved from the depiction of bright, centrally placed shapes evocative of Tibetan mandalas (influenced by Jungian psychology) to his late-1970s exploration
FRANCIS, AND PINK, 27 3/8 X 41 3/8� LITHOGRAPH
of more severe grid structures to a 1980s fascination with snakelike forms and colorful drips. His final decades of artistic production paralleled a succession of publishing, nonprofit, and visionary enterprises: in addition to his lithography studio, Francis formed a wind harvesting and alternative energy company in 1975; formed the Lapis Press, which focused on eclectic scholarship, in 1984; created a naturopathy-based medical research center in 1987; and founded the Sam Francis Art Museum in 1990 to perpetuate his artistic legacy and support charitable donations. Galerie Nina Dausset, Paris, gave Francis his first solo exhibition in 1952, and he has been the subject of dozens more at institutions that include the Pasadena Art Museum (1959); Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (1967); Centre national d’art contemporain, Fondation Rothschild, Paris (1968); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1972); Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (1979); and Museum of Modern Art, Toyama, Japan (1988). He was included in 12 Americans at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1956), and in Documenta, Kassel, West Germany (1964). In the last year of his life, Francis, suffering from cancer and unable to use his right hand because of a fall, painted 150 small works with his left hand. Francis died on November 4, 1994, in Santa Monica, California.
MIRÓ, THE WISPY FLY, 17 1/4” X 7 3/4” ORIGINAL COLOR WASH, ETCHING AND AQUATINT; THE CRICKET UNDER THE MOON, 16 3/4” X 8 3/8” ORIGINAL COLOR WASH, ETCHING AND AQUATINT; THE FROG, 14 5/8” X 8 5/8” ORIGINAL COLOR WASH, ETCHING AND AQUATINT
JOAN MIRÓ As Miró emerged onto the international art scene, he began to associate with other influential early modernists. In 1917, he met the painter Francis Picabia and in 1920, upon his first trip to Paris, he was introduced to Pablo Picasso. Miró’s work at this time showed a wide range of influences, including the bright colors of the Fauves, the broken forms of Cubism, and the powerful, flat two-dimensionality of Catalan folk art and Romanesque church frescoes of his native Spain. But under the influence of the Surrealist poets and painters he associated with in the early 1920’s, his style matured and he began to draw on memory, fantasy, and the irrational to create works of art with twisted organic shapes and odd geometric constructions that were visual representations of Surrealist poetry. José Dalmau organized Miró’s first solo exhibition in Paris in 1921. Additionally, his work was included in the famous Salon d’Autumn of 1923. In 1925 he took part in the First Surrealist Exhibition and, along with Salvador Dali, was recognized as one of the leading Spanish Surrealist painters. Miró also experimented in a wide array of other media, concentrating on etchings and lithographs for several years in the 1950s and also working in watercolor, pastel, collage, ceramics, and paint on copper and Masonite. In 1954, he received the Grand Prize for Graphic Work at the Venice Biennale and in 1958 he was given a Guggenheim International Award for the two large ceramic murals he executed for the UNESCO building in Paris.
MIRÓ, WEAPONS OF SLEEP, 25” X 30 3/4” ETCHING AND AQUATINT
MOTHERWELL, LA CASA DE LA MANCHA, 24 1/4” X 29 3/4” ORIGINAL AQUATINT, LIFT-GROUND ETCHING AND AQUATINT
ROBERT MOTHERWELL An articulate, intellectual talent among the abstract expressionist set, Robert Motherwell was born in 1915 in the State of Washington. While attending Stanford University (1932 – 1937), Motherwell took his first trip to Europe. After receiving his undergraduate degree, he began graduate coursework in philosophy at Harvard University. During a stay in Europe in 1938-1939, he had his first one-person exhibition in Paris. In 1940, he studied art history with Meyer Schapiro at Columbia University, and through Schapiro, he met many European Surrealist painters. Motherwell soon devoted most of his time to painting. After settling in New York in 1941, he began writing and lecturing on modern art and became associated with the group of MOTHERWELL, UNTITLED (PHOENICIAN RED), 22.5” X 20.13” MONOTYPE IN COLORS American artists whose work had been influenced by the surrealists’ ideas of automatism, a process of making art through subconscious free association - Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, William Baziotes, and Hans Hofmann. Motherwell, the youngest of this group of abstract painters, sought to create imagery that communicated the emotional truths of an authentic self and reflected a collective human consciousness. In 1944, Motherwell held his first New York solo exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery; that same year the Museum of Modern Art was the first museum to purchase one of his works. By 1949 Motherwell reached his mature style, creating large paintings that employ simple shapes in a manner reminiscent of Franz Kline’s forceful black on white images. Unlike Kline, Motherwell’s paintings had a strong political and literary content, specifically in his Elegy to the Spanish Republic series, creating a new series of oils, and executing numerous collages, including The Phillips Collection’s Mail Figure. During the 1950s and 1960s, Motherwell expanded his writings on art, and as a leading art theorist taught painting at Black Mountain College in North Carolina and at Hunter College in New York. In 1958, he married a leading figure of the second-generation abstract expressionist, Helen Frankenthaler, who became his third wife. Following their divorce in 1971, he established permanent residence in Greenwich, Connecticut. Two years later, Motherwell married the German photographer Renate Ponsold. He continued to expand his artistic repertoire in paintings, prints, and collages. Motherwell died in 1991 in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
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