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Pichet et Oiseau - Ville de Honfleur (after) Georges Braque, 1964
Located in New York, NY
This lithographic poster was created after Georges Braque, from an original etching published by the Gallery Maeght "The Pitcher and Bird". It was repro...
Category
1960s Modern Still-life Prints
Materials
Lithograph
Seasons 1981 Photo Color Copier Print Photograph Museum Collected Art Xerography
Located in Surfside, FL
SEASONS (1981)
This is for the single print listed here. (not the outside folder or title sheet)
Title: Man in Profile. This one is not hand signed although the rest in the portfolio were. (it might just have been an oversight and been missed)
Seasons explores the seasons of Man, Woman, Child, Civilization, Nature and Technology. First digital artwork purchased by the Metropolitan Museum.
Date: 1980-1981
Medium: vintage color photocopy print.
“I worked at The Metropolitan Museum in 1981, when they acquired [Lesley’s] SEASONS portfolio.
We knew we wanted it, even though we didn’t have a category for it.” David Kiehl, Curator of Prints and Special Collections The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City...
Category
1980s Contemporary Color Photography
Materials
Color
Gavin Dobson, Melted Summers - Rocket, Colourful Art, Affordable Art, Art Online
By Gavin Dobson
Located in Deddington, GB
A nod to summer, to pop art and sadly to global warming due to human activity.
Originally from the North East of England, Gavin graduated in Fine art in 2000, and has been building ...
Category
21st Century and Contemporary Pop Art Still-life Prints
Materials
Paper, Screen
Fiery Idol
Located in Long Island City, NY
Artist: Michael Knigin, American (1942 - 2011)
Title: Fiery Idol
Year: 1978
Medium: Screenprint, signed and numbered in pencil
Edition: AP
Size: 29.5 x 20 in. (74.93 x 50.8 cm)
Category
1970s Pop Art Still-life Prints
Materials
Screen
Sharp Looks, limited edition print, floral art, affordable art
Located in Deddington, GB
Vicky Oldfield
Sharp Looks
Limited Edition Collograph Print
Edition of 20
Size: H20cm x W16cm
Sold Unframed
Please note that insitu images are purely an indication of how a piece may...
Category
2010s Impressionist Figurative Prints
Materials
Paper
Look at me! Photography Fine Art Print Limited Edition Signed
Located in Slovak Republic, SK
Photographed by Sandra Salamonova, limited edition of 10, signed by the author, fine art print.
Category
21st Century and Contemporary Abstract Still-life Photography
Materials
Photographic Paper, Color, Digital
$294 Sale Price
79% Off
Nature Morte au Coquetieu, Framed Minimalist Still Life by Mario Avati
By Mario Avati
Located in Long Island City, NY
Artist: Mario Avati, French (1921 - 2009)
Title: Nature Morte au Coquetieu
Year: 1966
Medium: Mezzotint, signed and numbered in pencil
Edition: 31/75
Image Size: 10 x 11.5 inches
Fra...
Category
1960s Post-Modern Still-life Prints
Materials
Mezzotint
A Long Romance, still life art, floral art, plant art, contemporary art
Located in Deddington, GB
A long romance is a limited edition hand coloured unique collograph print by RBA artist Vicky Oldfield. The artist is renowned for her distinctive pictures; the subjects are the stor...
Category
2010s Contemporary Still-life Prints
Materials
Paper, Watercolor
Libby And Bumblebee, Guy Allen, Limited Edition Print, Animal Art, Black
White
By Guy Allen
Located in Deddington, GB
Please note the price is for the unframed original etching .
Libby and Bumblebee is an original etching, engraved onto a copper plate, from which Guy Allen creates an impression of ink onto paper. To create his pieces, Guy Allen marries the traditional technique of etching with timeless subject matter and print making processes, for a more contemporary twist.
Guy has adopted a unique approach to etching by using a stippling effect on the plate, a labour intensive pointillist technique which gives the images a detailed finish and highlights his skill in freeform drawing and etching.
Image size: 29cm x 40cm
Approximate size when framed: 45cm x 65cm
Medium: Etching and gold leaf
Edition size: 75
Year completed: 2017
Size: H:40 cm x W:29 cm
Accomplished print maker Guy Allen (b.1987) grew up surrounded by Norfolk’s natural beauty. The theme of the animal world is central to Guy’s work and inspiration. His limited edition original etchings showcase his brilliant draftsmanship in a contemporary way. Guy graduated from Central Saint Martins School of Art in 2011, but discovered his passion for the traditional etching process while studying at the École Nationale Supérieure Des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 2010. In 2012 Guy trained as an assistant print maker at the highly respected Curwen Studios, Cambridge, under Mary Dalton and Stanley Jones, where he mastered other types of printmaking. Today Guy works as a full time artist, splitting his week between his London and Norfolk studios, accompanied by trusty wire haired...
Category
21st Century and Contemporary Photorealist Animal Prints
Materials
Gold Leaf
A Group of Six Pears.
Located in London, GB
POITEAU, A. and P. TURPIN.
Traité des arbres fruitiers: A Group of six Pears.
H. Perronneau for T. Delachausée, Paris, 1807-1835.
A group of six stipple-engraved plates printed in c...
Category
Early 1800s Naturalistic Still-life Prints
Materials
Engraving
$9,797
Gentle Spirit No 12, Floral Statement Art, Light Bright Contemporary Art
Located in Deddington, GB
A photogram is a photographic image made without a camera by placing objects directly onto the surface of a light-sensitive material such as photographic paper and then exposing it t...
Category
2010s Contemporary Still-life Prints
Materials
Photogram
Aloe Vera, Still Life Art, Floral Art, Cacti Art, Bright Art, Affordable Art
By Kerry Day
Located in Deddington, GB
A lovely spiky Still life of an Aloe Vera Plant by Kerry Day is a original varied limited edition, multi layered screen print. Printed onto Somerset paper, it has been printed to the...
Category
2010s Pop Art Still-life Prints
Materials
Paper, Screen
Great Britain, Money Map Art, Map Art, Finance Artwork, Great British Artwork
Located in Deddington, GB
Great Britain is a limited edition geographical print with pearlised screen print detail by Justine Smith. This artwork is prints onto 330gsm Someset satin paper. The use of differen...
Category
2010s Contemporary Landscape Prints
Materials
Paper, Archival Ink, Inkjet
Tulips , 62x43cm, print on canvas.Edition 20 pcs.
Located in Yerevan, AM
Tulips , 62x43cm, print on canvas.Edition 20 pcs.
Category
2010s Pop Art More Art
Materials
Canvas, Color
$250 Sale Price
50% Off
Gavin Dobson, Tomato Vine, Affordable Art, Kitchen Art, Contemporary Art
By Gavin Dobson
Located in Deddington, GB
Gavin Dobson
Tomato Vine
CYMK Silk Screen Print
Edition of 50
Size: H 70cm x W 50cm
(Please note that in situ images are purely an indication of how a piece may look).
Based on an o...
Category
21st Century and Contemporary Contemporary Still-life Prints
Materials
Paper, Screen
A Nice Shadow Photography/Print Limited Edition signed
Located in Slovak Republic, SK
Print, limited of 15. Signed by the author.
Category
21st Century and Contemporary Abstract Still-life Prints
Materials
Color, Digital, Archival Pigment
$228 Sale Price
84% Off
Cherry Blossom Bear Cub, Impressionist Style Handmade Print, Animal Art
By Tim Southall
Located in Deddington, GB
Spring is definitely in the air when cherry trees are in bloom. Lusciously pink and so heady. Clambering through a riot of colour, a bear cub gazes at a yellow butterfly as a couple ...
Category
2010s Impressionist Animal Prints
Materials
Paper, Screen
A Long Romance, Floral Art, Modern Still Life Print, Handmade Collagraph Print
Located in Deddington, GB
A long romance is a limited edition hand coloured unique collograph print by RBA artist Vicky Oldfield. The artist is renowned for her distinctive pictures; the subjects are the stor...
Category
2010s Impressionist Interior Prints
Materials
Paper, Watercolor
Eliza Southwood, Kwaremt, Limited edition cycling print
Located in Deddington, GB
Eliza Southwood Silk screen print, Kwaremont of 50 x 70 cm on Colourplan 320 gsm . Cycling print for sale.
Size: H:70 cm x W:51 cm.
Artist...
Category
21st Century and Contemporary Contemporary Landscape Prints
Materials
Screen
Summer (Blue Corsage), Floral Print by Melanie Greene
By Melanie Greene
Located in Long Island City, NY
Artist: Melanie Greene, American
Title: Summer (Blue Corsage)
Year: 1979
Medium: Serigraph, signed and numbered in pencil
Edition: 50
Size: 30 x 22 in. (76.2 x 55.88 cm)
Category
1970s Contemporary Still-life Prints
Materials
Screen
Illustration of Ballet Slippers
By Thomas Watson Greig
Located in London, GB
Chromolithographed illustration of a pair of Ballet Slippers, printed with gold and silver inks.
[Published by David Douglas, Edinburgh, 1900].
Plate...
Category
Early 1900s Naturalistic Still-life Prints
Materials
Lithograph
Agent X, One Queen 210 White, Contemporary Art, Affordable Art, Art Online
By Agent X
Located in Deddington, GB
ONE QUEEN 210 WHITE [2021]
Limited Edition
Flowers
Edition number 100
Image size: H:71 cm x W:50 cm
Complete Size of Unframed Work: H:71 cm x W:50 cm x D:1cm
Sold Unframed
Please not...
Category
21st Century and Contemporary Contemporary Portrait Prints
Materials
Paper, Giclée
Blue Whale, Gavin Dobson, Limited Edition Silkscreen Print. A four layer CYMK
By Gavin Dobson
Located in Deddington, GB
Gavin Dobson
Blue Whale
Limited Edition Print
A four layer CYMK Screen Print on Paper
Edition of 100
Sheet Size: H 50cm x W 70cm
Sold Unframed
Please note that in situ images are pu...
Category
21st Century and Contemporary Pop Art Animal Prints
Materials
Paper, Screen
Joan Miro - Original Abstract Lithograph
By Joan Miró
Located in Collonge Bellerive, Geneve, CH
Joan Miro Miro Original Abstract Lithograph
Artist: Joan Miro
Printer : Mourlot
Portfolio: Souvenirs et portraits d'artistes
Year: 1972
Edition: 800
Ref...
Category
1970s Abstract Abstract Prints
Materials
Lithograph
Unity Photography Fine Art Print Limited Edition
Located in Slovak Republic, SK
Fine Art Print, limited edition of 10, signed by the author. The building behind doesn t exist anymore.
Category
21st Century and Contemporary Abstract Still-life Prints
Materials
Digital
$465 Sale Price
73% Off
Jane Peart, On the lookout, Limited edition animal print
By Jane Peart
Located in Deddington, GB
On the Lookout by Jane Peart [2021]
limited_edition
Digital drawing on paper
Edition number 100
Image size: H:29 cm x W:24 cm
Complete Size of Unframed Work: H:48.5 cm x W:33 cm x D:1mmcm
Sold Unframed
Please note that insitu images are purely an indication of how a piece may look
A digital drawing of Humboldt penguins...
Category
21st Century and Contemporary Contemporary Animal Prints
Materials
Paper, Digital
Andy Warhol FLOWERS Hand-Colored Screenprint
By Andy Warhol
Located in Lake Worth Beach, FL
Artist/Designer; Manufacturer: Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Marking(s); notes: signed; ed. 236/250; 1974
Materials: screenprint hand-colored with Dr. Martin's aniline watercolor...
Category
1970s Pop Art Landscape Prints
Materials
Screen
Phish Tour Print Nashville Tennessee by Justin Helton on Rainbow Foil Art Paper
Located in Draper, UT
Justin Helton is a graphic designer/illustrator specializing in design for the music industry. He is probably best known for his excellent gig posters, which usually comprise of quite detailed illustrations, beautiful typesetting and are all printed by hand. Justin works from Knoxville, Tennessee, creating work for bands such as Phish, The Avett Brothers...
Category
2010s Conceptual Animal Prints
Materials
Foil
Gentle Photography Print Limited Edition Signed
Located in Slovak Republic, SK
print, structure/ Bauhaus chair, limited edition 15. Signed by the author.
Category
21st Century and Contemporary Abstract Still-life Prints
Materials
Color
$475 Sale Price
66% Off
Elizabeth Quandt
Aries III
Limited Edition, Signed Etching of Ram
s Head
Located in San Rafael, CA
Elizabeth Quandt (1922 - 1994)
Aries III, 1978
Etching on Arches paper
Singed and dated in pencil, lower right
Edition IX/L (9/50)
With artist's embossed stamp to lower center
Image 11 1/2in H x 6 1/2in Lin x 11in: Sheet 22 1/4in H x 18in L. Unframed.
The ram's skull pictured was found entwined in a stand of trees in Mendocino by the artist's grandchild, Timothy Brien Mailliard.
The first 25 prints in this edition of 50 are identified by Roman numerals and comprise the portfolio suite...
Category
Late 20th Century Contemporary Still-life Prints
Materials
Etching
Art of the 80
s New York Exhibition-Poster
Located in Chesterfield, MI
PEMA
Art of the 80's, New York Exhibition-Poster. Measures 36 x 24 inches Unframed. Plate Signed. Fair/Distressed Condition.
Category
1980s Still-life Prints
Materials
Lithograph
$100 Sale Price
20% Off
Seasons 1981 Photo Color Copier Print Photograph Museum Collected Art Xerography
Located in Surfside, FL
SEASONS (1981)
This is for the single print listed here. (not the outside folder or title sheet)
Title: Butterfly. This one is hand signed and dated verso.
Seasons explores the seaso...
Category
1980s Contemporary Color Photography
Materials
Color
Flower Mandala Baroque Photo Contemporary Feminist Art Digital Photograph Print
Located in Surfside, FL
Portia Munson (American, b. 1961), "Flower Mandala Baroque", pencil signed, dated, 2003 and titled by hand along lower margin, Artist Proof.
19 X 14 (sig...
Category
Early 2000s Still-life Prints
Materials
Digital Pigment
Fresh Blooms, Vicky Oldfield, Contemporary still life art, Landscape art
Located in Deddington, GB
Fresh Blooms by Vicky Oldfield
Hand signed by the artist
Limited Edition Collograph Print
Edition of 30
Image Size: H 19.5cm x W 15.5cm
Sheet Size: H 35.5cm x W 30.5cm x D 0.1cm
Sol...
Category
21st Century and Contemporary Art Deco Landscape Prints
Materials
Paper, Ink
Salvador Dali - The Woman of the Shoe - Original Stamp-Signed Etching
Located in Collonge Bellerive, Geneve, CH
Salvador Dali - The Woman of the Shoe - Original Stamp-Signed Etching
Stamp signed by Dali
Edition of 294 copies.
Paper : Arches vellum.
Dimensions : 16x12".
Catalogue Raisonné : ...
Category
1960s Surrealist Figurative Prints
Materials
Etching
Set of Three Engravings from Curtis
s "Flora Londinensis" /// Botanical Flowers
Located in Saint Augustine, FL
Artist: William Curtis (English, 1746-1799)
Titles: "Epilobium Tetragonum (Square Stalked Willow Herb)" (Vol. 2, Plate 131), "Stellaria Holostea (The Greater Stitchwort)" Vol. 2, Pla...
Category
1770s Old Masters Still-life Prints
Materials
Watercolor, Laid Paper, Engraving, Intaglio
Mary Knowland, Poppy 16, Monoprint, Unique Print, Affordable Art
Located in Deddington, GB
Poppy 16
Monoprint
Unique Print
Image Size: H 29cm x W 19cm
Mount Size: H 45cm x W 37cm x D 0.5cm
Sold Unframed
Please note that insitu images are purely an indication of how a piece may look
Poppy 16 is a monoprint by Mary Knowland. A symbolic flower, the Poppy expresses both the fullness of Spring and remembrance in the Autumn. Mary Knowland enjoys working with the Poppy’s colour and form in this original monprint. It is printed on a very pale cream paper with a mount to match.
Mary Knowland, artist, paints landscapes and life drawings. Mary Knowland is represented by Wychwood Art online and in our art gallery in Stow on the Wold...
Category
21st Century and Contemporary Contemporary Still-life Prints
Materials
Paper, Monoprint
Juniper Berry by Aaron Fink - still life
By Aaron Fink
Located in New York, NY
This colorful original still life lithograph depicting a juniper berry was printed as part of an edition of 100 in collaboration with Eric Mourlot in 1993.
Certificate of Provenance...
Category
1990s Still-life Prints
Materials
Lithograph
Set of Two Hand-Colored Lithographs from Roscoe
s "Monandrian Plants" /// Botany
Located in Saint Augustine, FL
Artist: William Roscoe (English, 1753-1831)
Title: "Maranta Arundinacea (Arrowroot)" and "Phrynium Grandiflorum"
Portfolio: Monandrian Plants of the order Scitamineae, Chiefly Drawn ...
Category
1820s Victorian Still-life Prints
Materials
Watercolor, Lithograph
Bob Marley X Shepard Fairey Print To Catch A Fire Dennis Morris Signed Music
Located in Draper, UT
"Marley was sometimes fiery, sometimes joyful, sometimes contemplative, but always visionary and poetic. I love this intimate, thoughtful moment Dennis captured and I’m honored to tr...
Category
2010s Street Art Portrait Prints
Materials
Screen
Digital Iris Print "Good Internal Object" Pencil Signed w Initials edition of 15
By Charles Long
Located in Surfside, FL
This is for the one print listed here.
Internalized Page Project Vol II. color Iris digital prints on paper, each initialed on verso and numbered from edition of 15. printed & publis...
Category
1990s Surrealist Abstract Prints
Materials
Digital
Georgia O
Keeffe - Jack-in-the-Pulpit, No. IV, Limited Edition Print
By (after) Georgia O
Keeffe
Located in Hamburg, DE
This limited edition reproduction of Georgia O’Keeffe’s Jack-in-the-Pulpit, No. IV (1930) captures the bold, abstracted form of the flower in rich color and detail.
Printed in five...
Category
20th Century Modern Abstract Prints
Materials
Offset
Gochka Charewicz - Herbarium - Original Signed Lithograph
Located in Collonge Bellerive, Geneve, CH
CHAREWICZ Gochka (XXe)
Michel Butor's Herbarium
Signed and numbered 2/29
Dimensions: 42 x 32 cm. Toutes marges.
Category
1980s Modern Still-life Prints
Materials
Lithograph
Flowers 3, Pop Art Red Screenprint by Knox Martin
By Knox Martin
Located in Long Island City, NY
Artist: Knox Martin, American (1923 - )
Title: Flowers 3
Year: 1981
Medium: Screenprint on Heavy Hand-Made Paper, signed in pencil
Edition: 300, HC
Paper Size: 42 x 30 inches
Prin...
Category
1980s Modern Still-life Prints
Materials
Screen
Hour Glass, Surrealist Aquatint Etching by Hank Laventhol
Located in Long Island City, NY
Hank Laventhol, American (1927 - 2001) - Hour Glass, Year: circa 1980, Medium: Aquatint Etching, signed and numbered in pencil, Edition: 300, AP XXXV, Image Size: 24 x 16 inches,...
Category
1980s Surrealist Still-life Prints
Materials
Etching, Aquatint
Yellow Rose, Surrealist Aquatint Etching by Hank Laventhol
Located in Long Island City, NY
Hank Laventhol, American (1927 - 2001) - Yellow Rose, Year: circa 1980, Medium: Aquatint Etching, signed and numbered in pencil, Edition: 300, AP XXXV, Image Size: 24 x 16.5 inch...
Category
1980s Surrealist Still-life Prints
Materials
Etching, Aquatint
Lithograph - Flowers
Located in Collonge Bellerive, Geneve, CH
after Henri MATISSE (1869-1954)
Lithograph after a drawing of 1941
Printed signature and date
Book plate from Aragon. Henri Matisse: Dessins, Thèmes et Variations : précédés de "Matisse-en-France". (M. Fabiani: Paris 1943).
Vélin Paper
Dimensions: 32 x 24 cm (12 x 9")
This lithograph is one of a rare edition made during the Second World War (1941 - 1943) by the Fabiani Editions.
MATISSE'S BIOGRAPHY
YOUTH AND EARLY EDUCATION
Henri Emile Benoît Matisse was born in a tiny, tumbledown weaver's cottage on the rue du Chêne Arnaud in the textile town of Le Cateau-Cambrésis at eight o'clock in the evening on the last night of the year, 31 December 1869 (Le Cateau-Cambrésis is in the extreme north of France near the Belgian border). The house had two rooms, a beaten earth floor and a leaky roof. Matisse said long afterwards that rain fell through a hole above the bed in which he was born. Matisse’s ancestors had lived in the area for centuries before the convulsive social and industrial upheavals of the nineteenth century. Matisse grew up in a world that was still detaching itself from a way of life in some ways unchanged since Roman times. The coming of the railway had put Bohain on the industrial map, but people still traveled everywhere on foot or horseback.
Matisse’s father, Émile Hippolyte Matisse, was a grain merchant whose family were weavers. His mother, Anna Heloise Gerard, was a daughter of a long line of well-to-do tanners. Warmhearted, outgoing, capable and energetic, she was small and sturdily built with the fashionable figure of the period: full breasts and hips, narrow waist, neat ankles and elegant small feet. She had fair skin, broad cheekbones and a wide smile. "My mother had a face with generous features," said her son Henri, who always spoke of her with particular tenderness of the sensitivity. Throughout the forty years of her marriage, she provided unwavering, rocklike support to her husband and her sons. Matisse later said: "My mother loved everything I did." He grew up in nearby Bohain-en-Vermandois, an industrial textile center, until the age of ten, when his father sent him to St. Quentin for lycée.
Anna Heloise worked hard. She ran the section of her husband's shop that sold housepaints, making up the customers' orders and advising on color schemes. The colors evidently left a lasting impression on Henri. The artist himself later said he got his color sense from his mother, who was herself an accomplished painter on porcelain, a fashionable art form at the time. Henri was the couple’s first son.
The young Matisse was an awkward youth who seemed ill-adapted to the rigors of the North; in particular, he hated the gelid winters. He was a pensive child and by his own account he was a dreamy, frail and not outstandingly bright. In later life he never lost his feeling for his native soil, for seeds and growing things he had encountered in his youth. The fancy pigeons he kept in Nice more than half a century after he left home recalled the weavers' pigeon-lofts tucked away behind even the humblest house in Bohain.
Matisse's childhood memories were of a stern upbringing. "Be quick!" "Look out!" "Run along!" "Get cracking!" were the refrains that rang in his ears as a boy. In later years when survival itself depended on habits of thrift and self-denial, the artist prided himself on being a man of the North. When Matisse in turn had children of his own to bring up, he chided himself for any lapse in discipline or open display of tenderness as weakness on his part.
In 1887 he went to Paris to study law, working as a court administrator in Le Cateau-Cambrésis after gaining his qualification. Although he considered law as tedious, he nonetheless passed the bar in 1888 with distinction and began his practice begrudgingly. Once Matisse finished school, his father, a much more practical man, arranged for his son to obtain a clerking position at a law office.
PAINTING: BEGINNINGS
Matisse’s discovery of his true profession came about in an unusual manner. Following an attack of appendicitis, he began to paint in 1889, when his mother had brought him art supplies during the period of convalescence. He said later, “From the moment I held the box of colors in my hands, I knew this was my life. I threw myself into it like a beast that plunges towards the thing it loves.” Matisse’s mother was the first to advise her son not to adhere to the “rules” of art, but rather listen to his own emotions. Matisse was so committed to his art that he later extended a warning to his fiancée, Amélie Parayre, whom he later married: “I love you dearly, mademoiselle; but I shall always love painting more.” Matisse had discovered "a kind of paradise" as he later described it. His drastic change of profession deeply disappointed his father.
Two years later in 1891 Matisse returned to Paris to study art at the Académie Julian and became a student of William-Adolphe Bouguereau. After a discouraging year at the Académie Julian, he left in disgust at the overly perfectionist style of teaching there. Afterwards he trained with Gustave Moreau, an artist who nurtured more progressive leanings. In both studios, as was usual, students drew endless figure studies from life. From Bouguereau, he learned the fundamental lessons of classical painting. His one art-schooled technical standby, almost a fetish, was the plumb line. No matter how odd the angles in any Matisse, the verticals are usually dead true. Moreau was a painter who despised the "art du salon", so Matisse was destined, in a certain sense, to remain an "outcast" of the art world. He initially failed his drawing exam for admission to the École des Beaux-Arts, but persisted and was finally accepted.
Matisse began painting still-lives and landscapes in the traditional Flemish style, at which he achieved reasonable proficiency. Most of his early works employ a dark palette and tend to be gloomy. Chardin was one of Matisse's most admired painters having made four the French still-life master paintings in the Louvre. Although he executed numerous copies after the old masters he also studied contemporary art. His first experimentations earned him a reputation as the rebellious member of his studio classes.
In 1896, Matisse was elected as an associate member of the Société Nationale, which meant that each year he could show paintings at the Salon de la Société without having to submit them for review. In the same year he exhibited 5 paintings in the salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, and the state bought two of his paintings. This was the first and almost only recognition he received in his native country during his lifetime. In 1897 and 1898, he visited the painter John Peter Russell on the island Belle Île off the coast of Brittany. Russell introduced him to Impressionism and to the work of Van Gogh who had been a good friend of Russell but was completely unknown at the time. Matisse's style changed completely, and he would later say "Russell was my teacher, and Russell explained color theory to me." Matisse also observed Russell's and other artists' stable marriages. This probably influenced him to find in Amélie Noellie Parayre, his future wife, his anchor.
The Dinner Table (1897) was Matisse’s first masterpiece, and he had spent the entire winter working on the oeuvre. Though the Salon displayed the piece, they hung the work in a poor location, disgusted by what they considered its radical, Impressionist aspects.
Caroline Joblaud was Matisse's early lover for four years during his initial struggles to affirm his artistic direction and professional career. Caroline (also called Camille) gave Matisse his first daughter Marguerite in 1894, who after Matisse's marriage to Amélie Noellie Parayre was warmly accepted contrary to conventional hostility such arrangements provoked. Caroline posed various times for the artist’s compositions while Marguerite served many times as a model for Matisse throughout his life.
MARRIAGE WITH AMÉLIE NOELLIE PARAYRE
The Matisses of Bohain and the Parayres of Beauzelle had outwardly nothing in common, and there was no reason why Matisse and Amélie should ever have met. But in October 1897 Matisse went to a wedding in Paris and happened to sit next to her at the uproarious banquet that followed. There had been no banal flirtation between them, even when the wine flowed, each recognized the other as true metal, and when they got up from the table she held out her hand to Henri Matisse in a way that he never forgot. Matisse at that time was not yet the professorial figure of legend. He was known as a prankster, as a ribald and anti-clerical songster, and as someone who had once broken up a café concert performance just for the hell of it. Amélie's relatives operated at that time within a social, intellectual, and political context of which Matisse had had no previous experience. They stood for free thinking, for the separation of church and state, and for the secularization of the French educational system. Her family, better off that that of Matisse, provided the support he needed for the budding artist. When Matisse married Amélie in January 1898, they had been introduced only three months after.
Amélie's Aunt Noélie and two of her brothers ran a successful women's shop called the Grande Maison des Modes. Before her marriage, Amélie had shown a gift for designing, making, and modeling hats for a fashionable clientele. In June 1899, she found a partner and opened a shop of her own on the rue de Châteaudun. This allowed Henri and herself to live, with Marguerite, in a tiny two-room apartment on the same street. Madame Matisse, fervently loyal, would play a fundamental role in the life and career of the artist for more than 40 years. Marguerite was to become her father's lifetime mainstay
In 1902 disaster struck. Amélie’s parents were disgraced and financially ruined in a spectacular scandal of national scope, as the unsuspecting employees of a woman whose financial empire was based on fraud. Thanks to his early years in a lawyer's office, Matisse was able to busy himself to great effect in the organization of his father-in-law's defense. When all about him lost their heads, burst into tears, and felt more than sorry for themselves, Henri Matisse dealt with their problems one by one. The ordeal had taken its toll, in more than one way. His doctors ordered Matisse to go to Bohain and take two months' complete rest. Amélie had lost both her hat shop and the apartment on the rue de Châteaudun. For the first time, Henri, Amélie and the three children were united in Bohain, having nowhere else to go.
Hillary Spurling, one of Matisse’s biographers, asserts that Amélie’s memories of that public disgrace nurtured a “suspicion of the outside world” that would always mark the Matisse family. The Matisse family formed a kind of hermetic unit which revolved around the artist’s work and profession. They fitted their activities according his breaks and work sessions. Silence was essential. Even during the years when Matisse lived mostly alone in Nice, an annual ritual of unpacking, stretching, framing and hanging ended with the whole family settling down to respond to the paintings. The conference might last several days. Then the dealers were admitted.
Matisse and his wife had had two sons, Jean (born 1899) and Pierre (born 1900). He was not always in peace with his family. He wrote that their views were not always in accord “which disturbs me considerably in my work, for which I require the most complete calm and from those how surround me, a serenity that I cannot find here. I intend to move to a village a few league away.” Pierre, his brother, Jean, and Marguerite remained close to their father through every vicissitude, and Matisse, in his last invalid years, was devoted to his several grandchildren.
In 1899, at a time when his paintings displayed rebellious talent but not much clear direction, Matisse began attending classes in clay modeling and sculpture. Assigned to copy one of the sculptural masterpieces in the Louvre, he selected Jaguar Devouring a Hare a violently precise work by Antoine-Louis Barye. Later, whenever his paintings seemed stuck, he turned to sculpture to organize his thoughts and sensations.
Influenced by the works of the post-Impressionists Paul Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh and Paul Signac, and also by Japanese art, Matisse made color a crucial element of his paintings. Matisse said, "In modern art, it is indubitably to Cézanne that I owe the most." By studying Cézanne’s fragmented planes -- which stretched the idea of the still life to a forced contemplation of color surfaces themselves -- Matisse was able to reconstruct his own philosophy of the still life.
Many of his paintings from 1899 to 1905 make use of a pointillist technique adopted from Signac. In 1898, he went to London to study the paintings of J. M. W. Turner and then went on a trip to Corsica.
After years in poverty, Matisse went through his "dark period" (1902-03), moved briefly to naturalism, went back to a dark palette and told friends in 1903 that he had lost all desire to paint and had almost decided to give up.
Fortunately, Matisse was able to earn some money painting a frieze for the World Fair at the Grand Palais in Paris. He also traveled extensively in the early 1900s when tourism was still a new idea. Brought on by railroad, steamships, and other forms of transportation that appeared during the industrial revolution, travel became a popular pursuit. As a cultured tourist, he developed his art with regular doses of travel.
FAUVISM
Matisse's career can be divided into several periods that changed stylistically, but his underlying aim always remained the same: to discover "the essential character of things" and to produce an art "of balance, purity, and serenity," as he himself put it. The changing studio environments seemed always to have had a significant effect on the style of his work.
In these first years of struggle Matisse set his revolutionary artistic agenda. He disregarded perspective, abolished shadows, repudiating the academic distinction between line and color. He was attempting to overturn a way of seeing evolved and accepted by the Western world for centuries by substituting a conscious subjectivity in the place of the traditional illusion of objectivity .
Matisse hit his stride in the avant-garde art world in the first years of the new decade. He explored the modern art scene through frequent visits to galleries such as Durand-Ruel and Vollard, where he was exposed to work by Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, and Vincent van Gogh.
Matisse’s first solo exhibition took place in 1904, without much success. In 16 May 1905 he arrived in the charming Catalan port of Collioure, in the south of France. He soon invited the painter André Derain (1880-1954), 11 years his junior, to join him. By 1905, Matisse was considered spearhead the Fauve movement in France, characterized by its spontaneity and roughness of execution as well as use of raw color straight from the palette to the canvas. Matisse combined pointillist color and Cézanne’s way of structuring pictorial space stroke by stroke to develop Fauvism - a way less of seeing the world than of feeling it with one’s eyes. When the Fauve summer drew to an end, Derain left Collioure with 30 paintings, 20 drawings and some 50 sketches, never to return, while Matisse departed some days later bringing back to Paris 15 finished paintings, 40 aquarelles, over 100 drawings. He returned Collioure in the summers of 1906, 1907, 1911 and 1914. The lure of the sun would prove always to have powers of restoration to the artist throughout his life particularly after periods of great emotional exertion.
When Fauvist works were first exhibited Salon d'Automne in Paris they created a scandal. Eyewitness accounts tell of laughter emanating from room VII where they were displayed. Gertrud Stein, one of Matisse's most important future supporters, reported that people scratched at the canvases in derision. "A pot of paint has been flung in the face of the public" was the reaction by the critic Camille Mauclair. Louis Vauxcelles described the work with the historic phrase "Donatello au milieu des fauves!" (Donatello among the wild beasts), referring to a Renaissance-type sculpture that shared the room with them. His comment was printed on 17 October 1905 in Gil Blas, a daily newspaper, and passed into popular usage. Derain himself later called the Fauves' color "sticks of dynamite." The painting that was singled out for attacks was Matisse's Woman with a Hat, a portrait of Madame Matisse. This picture was bought be was bought by Gertrude and Leo Stein, a fact which had a very positive effect on Matisse who was suffering demoralization from the bad reception of his work.
Matisse continued his experiments in Collioure, visible in the painting The Open Window and the View of Collioure , also a characteristic work of Fauvism in its raw color and disregard for details. Both of these works of the landscape in the French Mediterranean present a distinct development towards the spontaneous and uninhibited style.
Other than André Derain, Georges Braque, Raoul Dufy and Maurice Vlaminck were also members of the Fauve movement. However, Matisse’s intimate friends among artists were mostly easygoing minor painters, such as Albert Marquet. Matisse’s temperamental aloneness made him prey to vertiginous depressions. He later recalled a breakdown that he underwent in Spain, in 1910: “My bed shook, and from my throat came a little high-pitched cry that I could not stop.”
From the onset of is career women were from one of the cardinal motifs of the artist's production. His Joy of Life (1906) draws us into the world of hallucinatory vividness composed of nymphs set in an idyllic open fields dressed in pure color and sensual outline. Two women lounge in the sunlight while two more chat on the edge of the forest. One crouches to pick some flowers while her companion weaves a chain of them into her hair. A couple embraces each other while another group engages in a lively round-dance in the distance. In this way, Joy of Life depicts woodland nymphs engaging in a celebration of their life, their womanhood, and their sexuality.
Due to the recurrent incidence of nude women and intensely sensual interpretation many observers have assumed that as a man Matisse must have been a hedonist. On the contrary, historic examination demonstrates that in reality, he was rather a self-abnegating Northerner who lived only to work, and did so in chronic anguish, recurrent panic, and amid periodic breakdowns. While Picasso recompensed himself, as he went along, with gratifications of intellectual and erotic play Matisse did not. In an age of ideologies, Matisse dodged all ideas except perhaps one: that art is life by other means.
Matisse’s uninhibited celebration of women is often believed to have initiated from Cézanne’s painting Three Bathers (1882) (which he had acquired for himself along with a Van Gogh and a Gauguin). However, Matisse depicts women as nurturing, welcoming, and unlike the forbidding, massive clay-like presence of those of Paul Cézanne.
FAME
The decline of the Fauvist movement, after 1906, did nothing to deter the rise of Matisse. From 1906 -1917 he lived in Paris and established his home, studio, and school at Hôtel Biron. Among his neighbors is sculptor Auguste Rodin, writer Jean Cocteau, and dancer Isadora Duncan. Many of his finest works were created in this period, when he was an active part of the great gathering of artistic talent in Montparnasse, even though he did not quite fit in with his conservative appearance and strict bourgeois work habits. In fact, the aim of Matisse’s art was something less than revolutionary. In 1908, in a famous statement drawn from “Notes of a Painter,” Matisse declared as his ideal an art “for every mental worker, for the businessman as well as the man of letters, for example, a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.”
Matisse's personal habits were incredibly regular. On a typical day rose early and worked all morning with a second work session after lunch, followed by violin practice, a simple supper (vegetable soup, two hard-boiled eggs, salad and a glass of wine) and an early bedtime.
In 1906, he created a series of 12 lithographs, all variations on the theme of a seated nude. He chose to share his graphic work with the public almost immediately. The lithographs were exhibited at the Druet Gallery in Paris the same year that they were produced, and the woodcuts were shown at the Salon des Independants in the spring of 1907.
In 1907 Appolinaire, commenting about Matisse in an article published in La Falange, said, "We are not here in the presence of an extravagant or an extremist undertaking: Matisse's art is eminently reasonable." Notwithstanding newly-won fame, Matisse's work continued to encounter vehement criticism and it was difficult for him to provide for his family. His controversial 1907 painting Blue Nude was burned in effigy at the Armory Show in Chicago in 1913. Contrary to the fate of the Impressionists, Matisse and other Fauves were able to exhibit in art galleries. In 1908 Paul Cassirer, the German art dealer and editor who played a significant role in the promotion of the work the French Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, staged an exhibit of Matisse’s works in Berlin. In the same year the American photographer Alfred Stieglitz in New York organized him one-man show in his tiny Manhattan gallery called 291 which effectively introduced Matisse the powerful American art market.
In the first decade of his notoriety as the leader of the Fauves, Matisse was more admired by foreigners than by the French. It was, after all, the Russians and the Americans who acquired significant collections of his early work almost as quickly as it was created. The great Matisses we see in the Paris museums today were mostly acquired after the artist's death in lieu of death duties. It took the French a good deal longer to understand Matisse's greatness-longer, certainly, than the international cadre of aspiring talents that flocked to his classes when he was still one of the most controversial figures in the Paris avant-garde.
In the summer of 1907, Matisse and his wife went on a long trip to italy "for work and Pleasure," visiting Venice and Padua, where they admired Giotto's frescos. In Florence the were the guests of the Steins in their villa in Fiesole. From this base matisse visited Arezzo, to study Piero della Francesca, and Siena, attracted by the early Sienese painters, especially, Duccio.
PICASSO, GERTRUDE STEIN AND THE CONE SISTERS
During the first decade of the 20th century Americans in Paris Gertrude Stein, her brothers Leo Stein, Michael Stein and Michael's wife Sarah took keen interest in Matisse's art. In addition, Gertrude Stein's two friends from Baltimore. Clarabel and Etta Cone, became major patrons of Matisse and Picasso, collecting hundreds of their works.The Cone Sisters acquired their first Matisse in 1906 and, during the next four decades, went on to form one of the world's great collections of his art. The Cone Collection not only contains major works from every phase of Matisse's long career but reflects the sisters' special interest in his Nice period, when a new complexity of form and psychology entered the ever intense surface allure of his paintings.
In April of 1906 during a gathering at the house of the legendary Gertrude Stein, Matisse was introduced to Pablo Picasso who was 11 years younger. Picasso and Matisse were poles apart aesthetically and their life styles were no less so. Matisse was markedly taller and more polished than the stocky, cocky Catalan, was then ruler of the turbulent Paris avant-garde art scene. The two were said to have always been looking over their shoulders at each other. It is well-known that after their rivalry grew, sides were taken. Picasso later said: "No one has ever looked at Matisse's paintings more carefully than I; and no one has looked at mine more carefully than he."
One key difference between their pictorial concepts was that Matisse drew and painted from nature, while Picasso was much more inclined to work from imagination. The subjects painted most frequently by both artists were women and still lives, with Matisse more likely to place his figures in fully realized interiors.
Gertrude Stein, who loved stirring things up, wrote, "the feeling between the Picassoites and the Matisse-ites became bitter." Although Matisse dryly noted that "our disputes were always friendly," it should be pointed out that Picasso and his friends threw suction-cupped darts at Matisse's 1906 Portrait of Marguerite (which Picasso had obtained in a trade for his own Pitcher, Bowl and Lemon, from 1907). While the rift between the two artists eventually healed, the one between their supporters remained.
ACADEMIE MATISSE IN PARIS & SERGEI SHCHUKIN
In 1909, with the Matisse family lived in a former convent on the Boulevard des Invalides, in Paris, where the artist conducted a painting school. His immense notoriety, which had been confirmed in 1905-06 by Joy of Life, a work which seemed to trash every possible norm of pictorial order and painterly finesse.His friends organized and financed the Académie Matisse in Paris, a private and non-commercial school in which Matisse instructed young artists. It operated from 1911 until 1917. Hans Purrmann and Sarah Stein were several of his most loyal students.
Although it lasted for only three years (1908-11), and yet, during its brief existence the Académie Matisse became one of the principal crossroads of modern painting for a number of gifted European and American artists.
Given the reputation Matisse had acquired as the"wild man" of modernist color, it must have come as a shock to some of his early students that the program of instruction he offered was remarkably conservative. As Jean Heiberg, the first Norwegian to enroll in the Académie, later wrote in a memoir: "The school had, at Matisse's suggestion, acquired a copy of two antique sculptures from the Louvre, Mars and an archaic sculpture, which he often used to demonstrate. Every now and then he got completely rid of the life model and we only drew from the plaster casts, and his critiques then were no less profitable."
Among Matisse’s students was Olga Meerson, a Russian Jew who had studied with Wassily Kandinsky in Munich and, already possessed of an elegant style, sought to remake herself under Matisse’s tutelage. Amélie suspected the worst. Perhaps a combination of Amélie’s jealousy and Meerson’s neediness caused a Matisse to end the connection, with bad feeling all around. Meerson moved to Munich, where she married the musician Heinz Pringsheim, a brother-in-law of Thomas Mann. Never having fulfilled her promise as a painter, she committed suicide in Berlin, in 1929. One of Matisse's biographers, with access to much of the artist's correspondence, contends that the artist, after his marriage, rarely, if ever, had sex with models, despite his apparent feelings for many.
Two Russian art collectors stood out at the beginning of the 20th century: the cloth merchant Sergei Shchukin (1854–1936) and the textile manufacturer Ivan Morozov (1871–1921). Both acquired modern French art, developed a sensibility for spotting new trends, and publicized them in Russia.
In this period, Matisse had initiated his fecund association with the Russian textile magnate and visionary collector, Sergei Shchukin. The artist created one of his major works La Danse specially for Shchukin as part of a two painting commission. Inspired by a circular dance-- perhaps a sardana - performed by fishermen at Collioure, this painting embodies the clash between the sacred and reality. Human hands link together, but they form a divine spirit. Moreover, Matisse all but abandoned perspective The work ’s flatness emphasizes the idea, colors, and material, a notion that made Matisse a model for Modernists. The other painting commissioned was Music, 1909.
Shchukin was considered by some almost as a co-producer of some of the artist’s greatest works and was strongly commuted to the French painter’s work. Concerning the violent attacks on his friend, the Russian wrote to the artist: “The public is against you, but the future is yours.” By 1914 Shchukin’s house in Moscow contained thirty-seven Matisses. “He always picked the best,” the artist said.
During the political revolution Lenin expropriated Shchukin collection in person but allowed Shchukin to remain, in servants’ quarters, as caretaker and guide. He died in Paris, in 1936. The collection is now in the Hermitage and Pushkin Museums
From about 1911 to 1915, Matisse struggled with the ideas of Cubism, an experiment he felt he was "not participating in" because it did not "speak to [his] deeply sensory nature."
MOROCCO
Like many avant-garde artists in Paris, Matisse was receptive to a broad range of influences. He is one of the first painters to take an interest in various forms of “primitive” art. His art was profoundly influenced by Easter art as well.
Matisse first flirted with the idea of visiting Morocco after a trip to the Moorish part of Spain in the winter of 1910. This taste of the Moors incited a flame of hope that there would be greater inspiration to paint in Morocco. Furthermore, well aware of the exotic subjects in Morocco that had engendered a wealth of inspiration for the famous French painter Delacroix when he visited the country over eighty years before, Matisse felt Morocco would stimulate his painting genius in ways Europe could not. He strove for neither the picturesque nor the pornographic.
In Morocco, Matisse seems to have had difficulties finding models who would pose for him, particularly women because of the law of the veil. Only Jewesses and prostitutes were exempt. Luckily, Matisse to have found the prostitute Zorah for the purpose although he did not paint her as a prostitute. Instead, in his first picture of her, Zorah en Jaune, sexual themes are most conspicuously absent from the canvas. As a prostitute used to exposing and flaunting her body, Zorah could have easily been painted nude or with less clothing to show herself off, but instead Matisse chooses to keep her clothed and posed with prudence. Unlike the primitive, nude Western women in the Fauve Joy of Life. Moroccan Zorah is clothed with respect and detail to her finer characteristics. He is developing his ability to paint with awareness of the non-sexual qualities of his subject, a movement away from Fauve women.
Many of Matisse's Moroccan paintings are covered only in the thinnest washes of pigment, as if he wanted the texture of the unpainted canvas to show through so that it would add rawness to the browns and grays.
Matisse's odalisques have been described as "elaborate fictions" in which the artist re-created the image of the Islamic harem using French models posed in his Nice apartment. The fabrics, screens, carpets, furnishings and costuming recalled the exoticism of the "Orient" and provided a theme for Matisse's preoccupation with the figure and elaborate patterns of exotic fabrics.
Although Matisse's interest in textiles are evident in his compositions made during his 1906 trip to Morocco, it didn't begin as a typical European attraction to the exotic. It was already present to him as a descendent of generations of weavers, who was raised among weavers in Bohain-en-Vermandois, which in the 1880's and 90's was a center of production of fancy silks for the Parisian fashion houses. Like virtually all his northern compatriots, he had an inborn appreciation of their texture and design. He understood the properties of weight and hang, he knew how to use pins and paper patterns, and he was supremely confident with scissors.
Matisse was known to be an avid collector of fabrics, from his days as a poor art student in Paris to the latter years of his life, when his Nice studio overflowed with Persian carpets, delicate Arab embroideries, richly hued African wall hangings, and any number of colorful cushions, curtains, costumes, patterned screens, and backcloths. Textiles soon became the springboard for his radical experiments with perspective and an art based on decorative patterning and pure harmonies of color and line. When he moved house, he also moved his fabrics, describing them as "my working library." He added to the collection all his life, from markets in Algeria, Morocco and Tahiti to the end-of-season sales of Parisian haute couture.
The revitalizing spirit of Morocco would live on in the artist's imagination until the cutouts of the artist's last years.
AFTER PARIS
Matisse continued to evolve in unexpected directions even though never became an abstract painter (though some of his most adventurous works, such as the View of Notre Dame of 1914 or the Yellow Curtain of 1916 come close). His motifs were always recognizable, and the tension between the subject and the formal aspects of the painting was a central concept of his artistic ideal.
Matisse moved to Nice in 1917 to distance himself from wartime activity, where bright, warm colors showed him "simpler venues which won’t stifle the spirit." His spirit became loyal to the "silver clarity of light" in Nice, and he returned to Paris only for a few months each summer. The years 1917–30 are known as his early Nice period, when his principal subject remained the female figure or an odalisque dressed in oriental costume or in various stages of undress, depicted as standing, seated, or reclining in a luxurious, exotic interior of Matisse's own creation. These paintings are infused with southern light, bright colors, and a profusion of decorative patterns. They emanate the atmosphere suggestive of a harem.
In 1929, Matisse temporarily suspended easel painting and traveled to America to sit on the jury of the 29th Carnegie International and, in 1930, spent some time in Tahiti and New York as well as Baltimore, Maryland and Merion, Pennsylvania.He was especially thrilled with New York. An important collector of modern art, and owner of the largest Matisse holdings in America, Dr. Albert Barnes of Merion, commissioned the artist to paint a large mural for the two-story picture gallery of his mansion. Matisse chose the subject of the dance, a theme that had preoccupied him since his early Fauve masterpiece Joy of Life.
Americans were prominent among Matisse's patrons throughout his career, beginning with the Steins (Leo Stein bought Joy of Life right out of the Salon in 1906) and including the Cone sisters of Baltimore and the notoriously cantankerous Barnes. The foundational Matisse monograph was written during his lifetime by another American, Alfred Barr. Also important in promoting Matisse's presence before the transatlantic public was the Manhattan gallery founded in 1931 by the artist's son, Pierre, who remained a prominent figure in the New York art world for almost six decades. In addition to his father, he represented Balthus, Calder, Dubuffet, Giacometti, Miro, Tanguy and others, many of them also friends.
Throughout his long and productive career, Matisse periodically refreshed his creative energies by turning from painting to drawing, sculpture and other forms of artistic expression. In his lifetime he also produced 12 illustrated books which were known as “livre d’artiste” (artist’s book), a specific type of illustrated book that became common in France around the turn of the century. These books were deluxe, limited editions, meant to be collected and admired as works of art, as well as, read. This process began when Swiss publisher Albert Skira first approached the modern master in 1930 to illustrate the work, Poesies, by 19th century French symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé . Matisse responded to Skira’s invitation with great enthusiasm and that summer, devoted most of his attention to the commission while he was residing in Paris. The result was a collection of 29 beautiful etchings, of which the Museum will display 16. The subject matter, like the poems themselves, varies considerably, although many of the images reflect the artist’s vacation to the South Pacific. Matisse’s etchings of Mallarmé’s poems are considered among his greatest works in the print medium. In 1941, again for Skira, Matisse began one of his most complicated and successful printmaking projects, Florilege des Amours de Ronsard, illustrating the love poems of 16th century French Renaissance poet Pierre de Ronsard. Ronsard’s subject and strong imagery lent themselves gracefully to Matisse’s favored themes of fruits, flowers, the female form and portraits. The artist selected the poems himself and translated the work from Renaissance French to contemporary French for the publication of the anthology
DIVORCE & LATE FAMILY RELATIONSHIPS
For all his long-lasting friendships with other artists, famous and obscure, Matisse's days and nights were absorbed by solitary labor. Playing the violin seemed a more intimate consolation for decades of critical abuse than the affections of his wife and children.
Although their marriage was still somewhat fragile, the Matisses had decided to stay on in Nice when their lease expired at Place Charles-Félix in the summer of 1938.
Matisse and his wife were separated in 1939 after 41 years when Amélie tried to dismiss the coolly efficient young Lydia Delectorskaya, an orphan refugee from Siberia, who had been hired as Amélie’s companion. However, the Matisses’ marriage ran afoul not of any romantic rival but for the artist’s wish to stand on his own. The first climax came years before in 1913, when Amélie sat more than a hundred times for the Portrait of Madame Matisse. A friend’s diary reported at the time. “Crazy! weeping! By night he recites the Lord’s Prayer! By day he quarrels with his wife!” The portrait, which was the last work to enter Shchukin’s collection, caused Matisse “palpitations, high blood pressure and a constant drumming in his ears.” Such frenzy was not rare when Matisse had difficulty with a painting. He referred to the painting years later in a letter to her as “the one that made you cry, but in which you look so pretty.” Amélie ceded routine leadership of the family to Marguerite. The 1913 portrait was his last painting of her.
Matisse and his wife met the last time to discuss details of their legal separation, in July 1939. One of its key provisions was that everything would be divided equally between the couple.
The meeting took place in Paris at the Gare St. Lazare and lasted thirty minutes, during which Amélie Matisse kept up a flow of small talk while her husband."My wife never looked at me, but I didn't take my eyes off her...," Matisse wrote on the night of that final encounter: "I couldn't get a word out.... I remained as if carved out of wood, swearing never to be caught that way again." "I'm going to try to isolate myself as if I were still absent,'' Matisse announced on his first return to Paris since the official separation from his wife, 'rarely leaving his apartment except for visits to the cinema (his first color film, starring Danny Kaye...
Category
1940s Modern Still-life Prints
Materials
Lithograph
Surrealist Still Life with Lemon - Original Lithograph Handsigned and Numbered
Located in Paris, IDF
Georges ROHNER
Surrealist Still life with Lemon, 1972
Original lithograph (Mourlot workshop)
Handsigned in pencil
Justified HC (hors commerce)
On Japan paper 76 x 54 cm (c. 29,9 x 2...
Category
1970s Surrealist Still-life Prints
Materials
Lithograph
Seasons 1981 Photo Color Copier Print Photograph Museum Collected Art Xerography
Located in Surfside, FL
SEASONS (1981)
This is for the single print listed here. (not the outside folder or title sheet)
Title: Bird (in flight). This one is hand signed and dated verso.
Seasons explores the seasons of Man, Woman, Child, Civilization, Nature and Technology. First digital artwork purchased by the Metropolitan Museum.
Date: 1980-1981
Medium: vintage color photocopy print.
“I worked at The Metropolitan Museum in 1981, when they acquired [Lesley’s] SEASONS portfolio.
We knew we wanted it, even though we didn’t have a category for it.” David Kiehl, Curator of Prints and Special Collections The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City.
Lesley Schiff (born 1951) is an American fine artist. Schiff studied painting at the Art Institute Chicago before developing her signature practice using color laser printers to create images. Her work is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Mead Art Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art and other major museums, corporate and private collections globally. Lesley Schiff revolutionized the photocopier from being an office tool to just another instrument in the artist's arsenal. Rather than addressing the tool in her work, Schiff instead uses the photocopier like a paintbrush to realize her vision. Once a painter, Schiff says: “I never intended to stop painting. I just decided to start painting with a modern tool. Working with the color laser printer keeps you in your culture. It's like America. Plugged in. Electronic. Direct." Painting with light, Schiff's body of work outlines a cycle of life: man, woman, child, civilization, nature, technology. More recent works challenge the viewer to understand the concept of eye-levels and perspectives, reinventing the way we see. Schiff's work was the Metropolitan Museum of Art's first digital acquisition, and most recently, was featured at the Whitney Museum of American Art in "Experiments in Electrostatics".
She uses a color laser printer “like a paintbrush” to create her art. She has said about her work and her tool: “I never intended to stop painting. I just decided to start painting with a modern tool. Working with the color laser printer keeps you in your culture. It's like America. Plugged in. Electronic. Direct—but no matter how hi-tech my tools become, I’m a painter, but instead of painting with oils, I paint with light.
The Whitney Museum will show Lesley Schiff's pioneering SEASONS portfolio in its entirety. Many prominent collections acquired SEASONS as their first digital artwork.
She participated in the Punk Art show in the 1970's. Her work kind of relates to Fluxus and Dada.
Leslie Schiff moved from Chicago to New York in the early 1970s. Much of her art involves collage and the Xerox photocopy machine. Her images are rooted in her personal psyche and have an intuitive meaning that is not always easily understood. In exhibitions, Xerox sheets are combined and displayed decoratively on the wall. Schiff has also created books; and made video and sound tapes. She was included in the seminal New York/New Wave 1981 exhibition show at MoMA PS1 along with Jean-Michel Basquiat, William S.Burroughs, David Byrne, Larry Clark, Crash (John Matos), Ronnie Cutrone, Brian Eno, Nan Goldin, Keith Haring, Ray Johnson, Joseph Kosuth, Robert Mapplethorpe, Kenny Scharf, Steven Sprouse, Andy Warhol and Lawrence Weiner.
She did a “visual biography,” comprised of portraits of Bob Dylan—depicted at different ages, from his 20s to his 60s—illustrations of his lyrics, and images of iconic objects like his sunglasses and harmonica. Schiff collaborated with Matthew Carter...
Category
1980s Contemporary Color Photography
Materials
Color
Seasons 1981 Photo Color Copier Print Photograph Museum Collected Art Xerography
Located in Surfside, FL
SEASONS (1981)
This is for the single print listed here. (not the outside folder or title sheet)
Title: Toy Snake. This one is hand signed and dated verso.
Seasons explores the seaso...
Category
1980s Contemporary Color Photography
Materials
Color
Seasons 1981 Photo Color Copier Print Photograph Museum Collected Art Xerography
Located in Surfside, FL
SEASONS (1981)
This is for the single print listed here. (not the outside folder or title sheet)
Title: Flowers in Hand. This one is hand signed and dated verso.
Seasons explores the seasons of Man, Woman, Child, Civilization, Nature and Technology. First digital artwork purchased by the Metropolitan Museum.
Date: 1980-1981
Medium: vintage color photocopy print.
“I worked at The Metropolitan Museum in 1981, when they acquired [Lesley’s] SEASONS portfolio.
We knew we wanted it, even though we didn’t have a category for it.” David Kiehl, Curator of Prints and Special Collections The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City.
Lesley Schiff (born 1951) is an American fine artist. Schiff studied painting at the Art Institute Chicago before developing her signature practice using color laser printers to create images. Her work is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Mead Art Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art and other major museums, corporate and private collections globally. Lesley Schiff revolutionized the photocopier from being an office tool to just another instrument in the artist's arsenal. Rather than addressing the tool in her work, Schiff instead uses the photocopier like a paintbrush to realize her vision. Once a painter, Schiff says: “I never intended to stop painting. I just decided to start painting with a modern tool. Working with the color laser printer keeps you in your culture. It's like America. Plugged in. Electronic. Direct." Painting with light, Schiff's body of work outlines a cycle of life: man, woman, child, civilization, nature, technology. More recent works challenge the viewer to understand the concept of eye-levels and perspectives, reinventing the way we see. Schiff's work was the Metropolitan Museum of Art's first digital acquisition, and most recently, was featured at the Whitney Museum of American Art in "Experiments in Electrostatics".
She uses a color laser printer “like a paintbrush” to create her art. She has said about her work and her tool: “I never intended to stop painting. I just decided to start painting with a modern tool. Working with the color laser printer keeps you in your culture. It's like America. Plugged in. Electronic. Direct—but no matter how hi-tech my tools become, I’m a painter, but instead of painting with oils, I paint with light.
The Whitney Museum will show Lesley Schiff's pioneering SEASONS portfolio in its entirety. Many prominent collections acquired SEASONS as their first digital artwork.
She participated in the Punk Art show in the 1970's. Her work kind of relates to Fluxus and Dada.
Leslie Schiff moved from Chicago to New York in the early 1970s. Much of her art involves collage and the Xerox photocopy machine. Her images are rooted in her personal psyche and have an intuitive meaning that is not always easily understood. In exhibitions, Xerox sheets are combined and displayed decoratively on the wall. Schiff has also created books; and made video and sound tapes. She was included in the seminal New York/New Wave 1981 exhibition show at MoMA PS1 along with Jean-Michel Basquiat, William S.Burroughs, David Byrne, Larry Clark, Crash (John Matos), Ronnie Cutrone, Brian Eno, Nan Goldin, Keith Haring, Ray Johnson, Joseph Kosuth, Robert Mapplethorpe, Kenny Scharf, Steven Sprouse, Andy Warhol and Lawrence Weiner.
She did a “visual biography,” comprised of portraits of Bob Dylan—depicted at different ages, from his 20s to his 60s—illustrations of his lyrics, and images of iconic objects like his sunglasses and harmonica. Schiff collaborated with Matthew Carter...
Category
1980s Contemporary Color Photography
Materials
Color
Clare Halifax, F is for Flamingo, Limited Edition Alphabet Print, Bright Art
Located in Deddington, GB
Clare Halifax
F is for Flamingo
Limited Edition 3 colour screen print
Edition of 100
Sheet Size: H 38cm x W 37cm x 0.1cm
Sold Unframed
Hand printed by the artist onto somerset satin ...
Category
21st Century and Contemporary Art Nouveau Animal Prints
Materials
Paper, Screen
Fred Deux - Cosmic Root - Signed Original Serigraphy
By Fred Deux
Located in Collonge Bellerive, Geneve, CH
Fred Deux - Cosmic Root - Signed Original Serigraphy
Signed and Numbered on Z (Edition of 26)
Dimensions: 76 x 56 cm
Fred Deux
Fred Deux, illustrator, oral poet, writer, and, under...
Category
1970s Surrealist Still-life Prints
Cyrilla Pulchella Scarlet-Flowered Cyrilla /// English Botanical Flower Print
Located in Saint Augustine, FL
Artist: William Curtis (English, 1746-1799)
Title: "Cyrilla Pulchella Scarlet-Flowered Cyrilla" (Vol. 11, Plate 374)
Portfolio: The Botanical Magazine; or, Flower-Garden Displayed
Ye...
Category
1790s Victorian Still-life Prints
Materials
Watercolor, Engraving, Intaglio
Look at me, limited edition pink and grey flower print, Collograph Flower Art
Located in Deddington, GB
Vicky Oldfield: Look at Me. Limited Edition Print.
Edition of 20 (Unique)
Sold Unframed.
Signed by the artist in pencil.
Vickys’ strong images are created using collagraphs, an exp...
Category
2010s Contemporary Still-life Prints
Materials
Paper
Strelitzia
By Nall
Located in New York, NY
Signed edition 44/ 99
Line engraving in Arches paper
Image size 19 x 11 1/in
Paper size 26 x 19 1/2 in.
Matted 29.5 x 21 Inches
Category
1990s Contemporary Still-life Prints
Materials
Engraving, Etching
$1,100
Salvia cana (Woolly Sage) /// Botanical Botany Flowers Plants Science Art Print
Located in Saint Augustine, FL
Artist: Nathaniel Wallich (Danish, 1786-1854)
Title: "Salvia cana (Woolly Sage)" (Plate 116)
Portfolio: Plantae Asiaticae Rariores; or, Descriptions and Figures of a Select Number of Unpublished East Indian Plants
Year: 1830-1832
Medium: Original Hand-Colored Lithograph on J. Whatman paper
Limited edition: 254
Printer: Engelmann, Graf, Coindet & Co., London, UK
Publisher: Richard Taylor for Treuttel & Würtz, London, UK
Reference: Nissen BBI No. 2099; Pritzel No. 9957; Stafleu-Cowan No. 16583; Dunthorne No. 326
Sheet size: 21.13" x 14.25"
Condition: Some scattered tiny handling creases to sheet. Has been professionally stored away for decades. In excellent condition with strong colors
Rare
Notes:
Provenance: private collection - Aspen, CO. Lithography by Maltese artist...
Category
1830s Victorian Still-life Prints
Materials
Watercolor, Lithograph
E is for Elephant, Clare Halifax, Limited Edition Prints, Alphabet Art, Gift Art
Located in Deddington, GB
Clare Halifax
E is for Elephant
Limited Edition 3colour screen print
Edition of 100
Sheet Size: H 38cm x W 37cm x 0.1cm
Sold Unframed
Hand printed by the artist onto somerset satin p...
Category
21st Century and Contemporary Abstract Geometric Animal Prints
Materials
Paper, Screen
Macho, Abstract Signed Screenprint by Arman
By Arman
Located in Long Island City, NY
Artist: Arman
Title: Macho
Year: 1979
Medium: Silkscreen on Arches, Signed and Numbered in Pencil
Edition: 150, AP 30
Size: 30 in. x 22 in. (76.2 cm x 55.88 cm)
(framed larger)
Category
1970s Pop Art Still-life Prints
Materials
Screen
Night Music, Signed Pop Art Screenprint by Arman
By Arman
Located in Long Island City, NY
Artist: Arman, French (1929 - 2005)
Title: Night Music
Year: circa 1978
Medium: Serigraph, signed and numbered in pencil
Edition: 150, AP 30
Size: 39.25 in. x 27.75 in. (99.7 c...
Category
1970s Pop Art Still-life Prints
Materials
Screen
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