Lithograph Abstract Prints

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...

Kandinsky at Galerie Karl Flinker - 1977 Exhibition Poster - in Ink on Paper Poster with a reproduction of "Merry Structure" by Vassily Kandinsky (Russian, 1866-1944). This posted i...

Artist: Alexander Calder Title: Plate 1 Portfolio: Derriere le Miroir #173 Medium: Lithograph Year: 1968 Edition: Unnumbered Frame Size: 21 1/4" x 17 1/4" Sheet Size: 15" x 11" Image...

This exquisite heliogravure after Pierre Soulages (1919–2022), titled Planche No. 2 (Plate No. 2), from the folio Pierre Soulages, Peintres d'aujourd'hui (Pierre Soulages, Painters o...

Julio LE PARC (1928-) Diffraction (Transformation), 1988 Original lithograph, airbrush and stencil Signed in ink Numbered / 100 copies On black wove paper, 56 x 38 cm (c. 22 x 15 in...

This exquisite lithograph after Henri Matisse (1869–1954), titled Mademoiselle L.L. (Miss L.L.), from the album Portraits par Henri Matisse (Portraits by Henri Matisse), originates f...

This exquisite lithograph by Joan Miro (1893–1983), titled Les Trois Bleus (The Three Blues), from the folio Derriere le miroir, Sur Quatre Murs (Behind the Mirror, On Four Walls), N...

This exquisite lithograph by Henri Matisse (1869–1954), titled Coeur d’amour epris (Heart of Love Taken), from Verve, Revue Artistique et Litteraire, Vol. VI, No. 23, originates from...

Pablo Picasso The Ballet Dancer, 1954 Lithograph on paper 32 x 24 cm - sheet 55.5 x 49.5 cm - Framed unknown edition size Printed signature Reference: Bloch #767 and Mourlot #259 Fr...

Joan Miró - Maravillas con variaciones acrósticas en el jardín de Miró III Date of creation: 1975 Medium: Lithograph Media: Gvarro paper Edition: 1500 Size: 49,5 x 35,5 cm Condition:...

Karel Appel Sitting in a Landscape Animals and monsters series Year 1979 Print - Lithograph 22.0'' x 30'' inches Edition: signed in pencil and marked 160/160 Karel Appel is one of t...

David Hockney Richard Strauss: Los Angeles Music Center Opera (Hand Signed and Inscribed), 1993 Offset Lithograph (hand signed and inscribed by David Hockney) 30 × 20 inches Signed a...

This exquisite lithograph by Jean Cocteau (1889–1963), titled Sans titre (Untitled), originates from the 1964 album Recettes pour un ami, illustrations de Jean Cocteau (Recipes for a...

Robert Motherwell (1915-1991), alongside Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning, made up the quartet of American abstract painters that radically defined Modern paintin...

Joan MIRO Red Composition, Preface to 52 Affiches, 1963 Original lithograph in colors (Atelier Mourlot, Paris) Signed in pencil by Fernand Mourlot Dated in pencil Numbered on / 125 ...

Artist: Dale Chihuly (1941) Title: Venetian Series Year: 2018 Medium: Lithograph, silkscreen and acrylic on Waterford paper Edition: 79/125 Size: 37 x 25 inches Inscription: Signed a...

This exquisite heliogravure after Nicolas de Stael (1914–1955), titled Ciel a Honfleur (Sky at Honfleur), from the folio Nicolas de Stael, Peintres d'aujourd'hui (Nicolas de Stael, P...

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,...

David Hockney David Hockney - 60 Years of Work - Tate Britain original poster, 2017 Offset lithograph and digital print 24 × 16 1/2 inches Unframed, unsigned and unnumbered Provenanc...

Lithograph, 1972 Handsigned by the artist in pencil and numbered 187/300 Publisher : Galerie Putman Printer : Clot, Bramsen & Georges (Paris) Catalog : Chenivesse n°9 Arches Paper W...

"Water in swimming pools changes its look more than any other form. If the water surface is almost still and there is a strong sun, then dancing lines with the color of the spectrum appear everywhere." - - David Hockney David Hockney Offset Lithograph poster (Deluxe Hand Signed Limited Edition) on Parsons Diploma Parchment Paper, accompanied by COA from the Publisher and Olympic Committee 36 × 24 inches Pencil signed and unnumbered from the Edition of 750 (there was a separate, larger unsigned edition) Unframed Also accompanied by gallery issued Certificate of Guarantee One of the most coveted, historic and popular David Hockney limited editions created - beloved by American and international collectors alike: The official edition of this work is 750, but the publisher famously destroyed unsold editions after the Olympic Games and only about 200-250 are said to remain. This hand signed limited edition iconic Hockney work was printed as one of the fifteen Official Fine Art Olympic Posters for the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. (the XXIII'rd Olympiad). It depicts an aerial view of a swimmer under rippling water broken up into 12 squares. A statement released by the 1984 Olympic committee explains the set as follows - "The posters commissioned for the 1984 Olympics contain an enlightened selection of the best American artists with special emphasis on those who work in Southern California...As the Games develop, transpire and pass into memory, these fifteen posters contain the images, forms and symbols that will represent the 1984 Olympics in the museums, galleries, homes and the minds of people all over the world.” This work is NOT to be confused with the ubiquitous plate signed poster of the same image, which was printed on different paper in an open edition.) In 1982, the Olympic Committee commissioned 15 artists to create posters for the 1984 Games in Los Angeles. Hockney designed this offset lithograph depicting Olympic swimming. It was printed on Parsons Diploma Parchment paper in 1982, in an edition of 750, hand signed in pencil by the artist. Even though this print was published in an edition of 750, after the first marketing blitz, the publisher destroyed the remaining portfolios of signed prints - literally discarding hundreds of them in the dumpster. The Olympic Committee commissioned these portfolios to celebrate and promote the 1984 Olympics, and nobody expected the individual prints to have such enduring value. As the executives running the short-term promotional campaign were neither prophets nor curators, they saw no reason to hold on to these huge prints...

Fantasy, Japanese, limited edition lithograph, black, white, red, signed, titled 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 exquisite lithograph after Alberto Magnelli (1888–1971), titled Hommage a San Lazzaro (Homage to San Lazzaro), from the album San Lazzaro et ses Amis, Hommage au fondateur de la...

Hannes Grosse Title: Gestural Abstraction Medium: Color silkscreen Size: 23 × 16 inches Year: 1969 Signed and dates by the artist COA provided Condition: Overall good vintage condit...

This is an original poster designed by Jean Dubuffet for his 1968 exhibition Painted Sculptures at Pace Gallery, held from April 13th to May 18th. Created by the artist specifically ...

Paris: Mourlot Press, 1964. Lithograph in colors on Velin d’Arches paper, 6 3/4 x 10 inches (170 x 253 mm), full margins. Published by Fernand Mourlot and Jean Adhemar, 1964. In ver...

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

This exquisite lithograph by Joan Miro (1893–1983), titled La Melodie acide (The Acid Melody), from the folio 14 original lithographs by Joan Miro "La Melodie acide" (The Acid Melody...

Alexander CALDER Les Travestis du Reel, 1979 Original vintage lithograph poster Printed in Atelier Arts-Litho Printed signature in the plate 82 x 57 cm (c. 32.2 x 22.4 in) Excelle...

Original San Fermin Pamplona running of the bulls, vintage poster. Archival linen backed in very fine condition ready to frame. Artist: Alonso Astarloa....

Through The Ages by Toko Shinoda, black and white signed lithograph calligraphy 11/35 obituary published by CNN March 2021 Celebra...

This exquisite heliogravure after Pierre Soulages (1919–2022), titled Planche No. 5 (Plate No. 5), from the folio Pierre Soulages, Peintres d'aujourd'hui (Pierre Soulages, Painters o...

Joan Miró Lithographie Originale II Color Lithograph Year: 1981 Size: 12.5 × 9.6 inches Catalogue Raisonné: Cramer 177, Der Lithograph IV, 1969-1972 Publisher: Maeght Editeur, Paris,...

Joan Miro (Spain, 1893-1983) 'Joan Miró. Fotoscop', 1974 lithograph on paper 12.9 x 20.5 in. (32.7 x 52 cm.). The size of the stamp paper has been slightly modified. Its original dim...

Colour lithograph, 1890. 210mm by 285mm (sheet). From W Peck's 'A Handbook and Atlas of Astronomy', 1890. Sir William Peck FRSE FRAS (1862 – 1925) was a Scottish astronomer and scien...

This is a lifetime edition - hand signed and numbered by Jean-Michel Basquiat himself in Basquiat's lifetime. Many younger collectors don't appreciate the difference between the numerous posthumous estate authorized prints...

This exquisite lithograph by Alexander Calder (1898–1976), titled Anneaux sur noir (Rings on Black), originates from the historic 1973 folio Derriere le Miroir, No. 201. Published by...

Artist: Alexander Calder (1898-1976) Title: Friendship, Braniff International Airways Flying Colors Collection Year: 1975 Medium: Lithograph on vélin d’Arches paper Size: 20 x 26 inc...

Artist: Sam Francis (American, 1923-1994) Title: "Untitled (SF-348) (Fresh Air School)" Portfolio: Fresh Air School *Unsigned edition Year: 1972 Medium: Original Lithograph on white ...

This exquisite lithograph and pochoir by Joan Miro (1893–1983), titled Femme et oiseau dans la nuit (Woman and Bird in the Night), from the album XXe Siecle, Nouvelle serie No. 8, or...

Joan Miro, Spanish (1893 - 1983) - Sculptures (M. 950), Year: 1974, Medium: Lithograph on BFK Rives, signed in the plate, Image Size: 16.25 x 24 inches, Size: 20.5 x 29 in. (52.0...

This exquisite heliogravure by Joan Miro (1893–1983), titled Femme et Oiseau IX/X (Woman and Bird IX/X), from the folio Joan Miro, Femmes (Women), originates from the 1965 edition pu...

Günther Förg (Germany, 1952-2013) 'Erker-Gallery', 1995 Original poster from exhibition of 1995 lithograph on paper 36.5 x 22.6 in. (92.7 x 57.4 cm.) Unframed Ref: FOR100-201 Günthe...

Untitled, 1969 By Mark Rothko 1998 Medium: Offset Lithograph Paper Size: 47.5 x 35.5 inches ( 121 x 90 cm ) Image Size: 41.25 x 32.25 inches ( 105 x 82 cm ) Edition Size: Unknown

This exquisite lithograph by Joan Miro (1893–1983), titled Sans titre (Untitled), from the folio Maravillas con variaciones acrosticas en el Jardin de Miro (Marvels with Acrostic Var...

This exquisite lithograph by Joan Miro (1893–1983), titled Le Soleil Noir (The Black Sun), from the folio Derriere le miroir, No. 151–152, originates from the 1965 edition published ...

This exquisite lithograph by Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944), titled Les etoiles (The Stars), from Verve, Revue Artistique et Litteraire, Vol. I, No. 2, ...

This exquisite lithograph by Alexander Calder (1898–1976), titled Sans titre (Untitled), from the folio Derriere le miroir, No. 156, originates from the 1966 edition published by Mae...

Color Lithograph on Arches paper realized by Sonia Delaunay in 1972. Hand signed in pencil, dated 72 and numbered 43/90. Prov. Private Collection, Milan. Very good condition.

Woman is a vintage Lithograph realized by Claude Garache in the 1975. Maeght Editor, France on the rear. Good condition.

CONDITION: EXCELLENT PERFECT FOR COLLECTING! ! ! Mujer Con Brazos Altos en Rojo (Affiche Avant Lettre) (from the Mujeres portfolio) 1969 lithograph in colors 30.875 h x 23.875 w i...

Joan Miro Lithographie Originale V (Abstract, Modern, Surrealism, Colorful, Iconic) Color Lithograph Year: 1977 Size: 12.5 × 9.6 inches Framed: 18.25 x 15.5 x 1 inches Catalogue Rais...

Artist: Joan Miro, Spanish (1893 - 1983) Title: Sculptures (M. 950) Year: 1974 Medium: Lithograph, signed in the plate Image Size: 19 x 27 inches Size: 20.5 x 29 in. (52.07 x 73.66 ...

ANDRE LANSKOY (French / Russian 1902-1976) 1966 Original color lithograph on watermarked Arches paper The title sheet was hand signed in pencil on the justification page by the arti...

Joan Miró - Maravillas con variaciones acrósticas en el jardín de Miró IX Date of creation: 1975 Medium: Lithograph Media: Gvarro paper Edition: 1500 Size: 49,5 x 71 cm Observations:...

This exquisite lithograph by Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015), titled Rouge, bleu, vert, jaune (Red, Blue, Green, Yellow), originates from the historic 1964 folio Derriere le Miroir, No. ...

Woman is a vintage Lithograph realized by Claude Garache in the 1975. Maeght Editor, France on the rear. Good conditions.

This exquisite offset lithograph after Jasper Johns (born 1930), titled Untitled, originates from the publication Art in America, May 2014. Published by Art in America, LLC, New York, and Sharon Coplan Hurowitz, New York; sponsored by Christies Inc., New York; and printed by Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE), Bay Shore, at Official Offset Corporation, Amityville, 2013, this work reflects Johns ongoing investigation into symbol, perception, and repetition. In Untitled, Johns extends his celebrated exploration of marks, motifs, and coded visual language through a composition that merges conceptual clarity with painterly nuance, embodying the subtle rigor that defines his mature graphic work. Executed as an offset lithograph on velin Giama Natural paper, this work measures 15.125 x 10.875 inches (38.42 x 27.62 cm), with centerfold as issued. Signed in the plate and unnumbered as issued. Printed by Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE), Bay Shore, at Official Offset Corporation, Amityville, one of the most respected collaborative printmaking ateliers in the United States. Artwork Details: Artist: After Jasper Johns (born 1930) Title: Untitled, from Art in America, May 2014 Medium: Offset lithograph on velin Giama Natural paper Dimensions: 15.125 x 10.875 inches (38.42 x 27.62 cm), with centerfold as issued Inscription: Signed in the plate and unnumbered as issued Date: 2013 Publisher: Art in America, LLC, New York; Sharon Coplan Hurowitz, New York Sponsor: Christies Inc., New York Printer: Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE), Bay Shore, at Official Offset Corporation, Amityville Catalogue raisonne reference: Carlos Basualdo, Scott Rothkopf, Jasper Johns Mind/Mirror, Whitney Museum of American Art, 2021, No. 27; The Prints of Jasper Johns: A Catalogue Raisonne, ULAE, New York (forthcoming), No. 324. Condition: Well preserved, consistent with age and medium Provenance: From the May 2014 publication Art in America, published by Art in America, LLC, New York About the Publication: This special Art in America project was conceived as a contemporary homage to Jasper Johns’ long and distinguished history of printmaking innovation. Commissioned in collaboration with Sharon Coplan Hurowitz and sponsored by Christies Inc., the project brought together Art in America and Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE) to create an original print that would bridge the worlds of fine art publishing, contemporary criticism, and Johns experimental graphic language. Printed at the renowned ULAE in Bay Shore and completed at Official Offset Corporation, the work reaffirms ULAEs foundational role in the evolution of Johns printmaking practice, which began at the atelier in 1960. For this publication, Johns developed a composition that synthesizes decades of explorations into mark-making, coded systems, repetition, and perceptual inquiry, extending the intellectual rigor and visual subtlety that have defined his contribution to American art since the 1950s. Distributed within the May 2014 issue, the project functioned as both a democratic expansion of Johns audience and a continuation of his long-standing interest in the intersection between mass media, printmaking processes, and the shifting boundaries between high art and printed dissemination. Today, this project is recognized as one of the most significant print-related collaborations between a major art periodical and an American master, embodying Johns lifelong dialogue between image, idea, and the materiality of print. About the Artist: Jasper Johns (born 1930) is widely regarded as one of the most influential and transformative American artists of the postwar era, a painter and printmaker whose groundbreaking fusion of abstraction, symbolism, and conceptual inquiry placed him in direct dialogue with towering modernists such as Pablo Picasso, Alexander Calder, Alberto Giacometti, Salvador Dali, Joan Miro, Wassily Kandinsky, Marcel Duchamp, and Man Ray while establishing a new visual and intellectual foundation for contemporary art; emerging in the mid 1950s with his revolutionary paintings of flags, targets, numbers, alphabets, and other everyday symbols, Johns rejected the emotional volatility of Abstract Expressionism and instead introduced a cool, analytical approach grounded in the semiotic play between object and image, employing encaustic, collage, graphite, and sculptural relief to create layered works that examine how meaning is constructed and perceived; his dialogues with Duchamps conceptualism, Picassos structural inventiveness, Miro and Kandinskys color logic, Giacomettis existential figuration, and Man Rays experimental attitude helped shape a singular aesthetic that directly influenced and helped catalyze Pop Art, Minimalism, and Conceptual Art, inspiring contemporaries and successors including Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Frank Stella, Donald Judd, Bruce Nauman, Glenn Ligon, Christopher Wool, Mark Bradford, Mark Grotjahn, and Wade Guyton; celebrated for more than seven decades, Johns work is held in the worlds most prestigious museums—including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Tate Modern, the Centre Pompidou, and the Moderna Museet—and he is recognized as one of the most intellectually rigorous and technically inventive artists of the 20th and 21st centuries; his market remains exceptionally strong, with his highest auction record achieved on November 11, 2014, when Flag (1983) sold for 36000000 USD at Sothebys New York. Jasper Johns lithograph...

Lithograph on vélin Chiffon de Mandeure paper. Signed in the plate and unnumbered, as issued. Good condition, with centerfold, as issued. Notes: From the album, Lithographies et Eaux...

This exquisite lithograph by Jean Cocteau (1889–1963), titled Scene XXIII, Les Monstres Sacres (Scene XXIII, The Sacred Monsters), originates from the 1957 album Jean Cocteau de l'Ac...