USA - Prints and Multiples

Andy Warhol Portrait of Roy Lichtenstein, 1975 Polaroid dye-diffusion print Authenticated by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, bears the Foundation stamp verso Frame included: Framed in white wood frame with UV plexiglass; with die-cut window in the back to show official Warhol Foundation authentication stamp and text Measurements: 9 9/16 x 8 9/16 x 9/16 inches (frame) 3 1/2 x 2 3/4 inches (window) 4.16 x 3.15 inches (Artwork) Authenticated and stamped by the Estate of Andy Warhol/Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts An impressive piece of Pop Art history! A must-have for fans and collectors of both Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein: This is a unique, authenticated color Polaroid taken by one Pop Art legend, Andy Warhol, of his most formidable contemporary and, in many respects, rival, Roy Lichtenstein. One of only a few portraits Andy Warhol took of Roy Lichtenstein, during one tense photo shoot. Both iconic artists, colleagues and, perhaps lesser known to the public, rivals, would be represented at the time by the renowned Leo Castelli Gallery. The truth is - they were really more rivals than friends. (the rivalry intensified when Warhol, who was working with Walt Disney, discovered that Lichtenstein painted Mickey Mouse before he did!!) Leo Castelli was committed to Roy Lichtenstein, and, it's easy to forget today, wasn't that interested in Warhol as he considered Lichtenstein the greater talent and he could relate better with Roy on a personal level. However, Ivan Karp, who worked at Castelli, was very interested in Warhol, as were some powerful European dealers, as well as many wealthy and influential American and European collectors. That was the start of Warhol's bypassing the traditional gallery model - so that dealers like Castelli could re-discover him after everybody else had. Warhol is known to have taken hundreds of self-portrait polaroid photographs - shoe boxes full - and he took many dozens of images of celebrities like Blondie and Farrah Fawcett. But only a small number of photographic portraits of fellow Pop Art legend Roy Lichtenstein -- each unique,- are known to have appeared on the market over the past half a century - all from the same photo session. This is one of them. There is another Polaroid - from this same (and only) sitting, in the permanent collection of the Getty Museum in California. There really weren't any other collaborations between these two titans, making the resulting portrait from this photo session extraordinary. It is fascinating to study Roy Lichtenstein's face and demeanor in this photograph, in the context of the great sense of competition, but perhaps even greater, albeit uneasy respect, these two larger than life Pop art titans had for each other: Like Leo Castelli, Roy Lichtenstein was Jewish of European descent; whereas Warhol was Catholic and quintessentially American, though also of European (Polish) descent. They were never going to be good friends, but this portrait, perhaps even arranged by Leo Castelli, represents an uneasy acknowledgement there would be room at the top for both of them. Floated, framed with die cut back revealing authentication details, and ready to hang. Measurements: 9 9/16 x 8 9/16 x 9/16 inches (frame) 3 1/2 x 2 3/4 inches (window) 4.16 x 3.15 inches (sheet) Authenticated by the Estate of Andy Warhol/The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Estate Stamped: Stamped with the Andy Warhol Estate, Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts stamp, numbered "B 512536P", with the Estate of Andy Warhol stamp and inscribed UP on the reverse. Bears the Warhol Foundation unique inventory number. Roy Lichtenstein Biography Roy Lichtenstein was one of the most influential and innovative artists of the second half of the twentieth century. He is preeminently identified with Pop Art, a movement he helped originate, and his first fully achieved paintings were based on imagery from comic strips and advertisements and rendered in a style mimicking the crude printing processes of newspaper reproduction. These paintings reinvigorated the American art scene and altered the history of modern art. Lichtenstein’s success was matched by his focus and energy, and after his initial triumph in the early 1960s, he went on to create an oeuvre of more than 5,000 paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures, murals and other objects celebrated for their wit and invention. Roy Fox Lichtenstein was born on October 27, 1923, in New York City, the first of two children born to Milton and Beatrice Werner Lichtenstein. Milton Lichtenstein (1893–1946) was a successful real estate broker, and Beatrice Lichtenstein (1896–1991), a homemaker, had trained as a pianist, and she exposed Roy and his sister Rénee to museums, concerts and other aspects of New York culture. Roy showed artistic and musical ability early on: he drew, painted and sculpted as a teenager, and spent many hours in the American Museum of Natural History and the Museum of Modern Art. He played piano and clarinet, and developed an enduring love of jazz, frequenting the nightspots in Midtown to hear it. Lichtenstein attended the Franklin School for Boys, a private junior high and high school, and was graduated in 1940. That summer he studied painting and drawing from the model at the Art Students League of New York with Reginald Marsh. In September he entered Ohio State University (OSU) in Columbus in the College of Education. His early artistic idols were Rembrandt, Daumier and Picasso, and he often said that Guernica (1937; Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid), then on long-term loan to the Museum of Modern Art, was his favorite painting. Even as an undergraduate, Lichtenstein objected to the notion that one set of lines (one person’s drawings) “was considered brilliant, and somebody’s else’s, that may have looked better to you, was considered nothing by almost everyone.”i Lichtenstein’s questioning of accepted canons of taste was encouraged by Hoyt L. Sherman, a teacher whom he maintained was the person who showed him how to see and whose perception-based approach to art shaped his own. In February 1943, Lichtenstein was drafted, and he was sent to Europe in 1945. As part of the infantry, he saw action in France, Belgium and Germany. He made sketches throughout his time in Europe and, after peace was declared there, he intended to study at the Sorbonne. Lichtenstein arrived in Paris in October 1945 and enrolled in classes in French language and civilization, but soon learned that his father was gravely ill. He returned to New York in January 1946, a few weeks before Milton Lichtenstein died. In the spring of that year, Lichtenstein went back to OSU to complete his BFA and in the fall he was invited to join the faculty as an instructor. In June 1949, he married Isabel Wilson Sarisky (1921–80), who worked in a cooperative art gallery in Cleveland where Lichtenstein had exhibited his work. While he was teaching, Lichtenstein worked on his master’s degree, which he received in 1949. During his second stint at OSU, Lichtenstein became closer to Sherman, and began teaching his method on how to organize and unify a composition. Lichtenstein remained appreciative of Sherman’s impact on him. He gave his first son the middle name of “Hoyt,” and in 1994 he donated funds to endow the Hoyt L. Sherman Studio Art Center at OSU. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Lichtenstein began working in series and his iconography was drawn from printed images. His first sustained theme, intimate paintings and prints in the vein of Paul Klee that poked lyrical fun at medieval knights, castles and maidens, may well have been inspired by a book about the Bayeux Tapestry. Lichtenstein then took an ironic look at nineteenth-century American genre paintings he saw in history books, creating Cubist interpretations of cowboys and Indians spiked with a faux-primitive whimsy. As with his most celebrated Pop paintings of the 1960s, Lichtenstein gravitated toward what he would characterize as the “dumbest” or “worst” visual item he could find and then went on to alter or improve it. In the 1960s, commercial art was considered beneath contempt by the art world; in the early 1950s, with the rise of Abstract Expressionism, nineteenth-century American narrative and genre paintings were at the nadir of their reputation among critics and collectors. Paraphrasing, particularly the paraphrasing of despised images, became a paramount feature of Lichtenstein’s art. Well before finding his signature mode of expression in 1961, Lichtenstein called attention to the artifice of conventions and taste that permeated art and society. What others dismissed as trivial fascinated him as classic and idealized—in his words, “a purely American mythological subject matter.”ii Lichtenstein’s teaching contract at OSU was not renewed for the 1951–52 academic year, and in the autumn of 1951 he and Isabel moved to Cleveland. Isabel Lichtenstein became an interior decorator specializing in modern design, with a clientele drawn from wealthy Cleveland families. Whereas her career blossomed, Lichtenstein did not continue to teach at the university level. He had a series of part-time jobs, including industrial draftsman, furniture designer, window dresser and rendering mechanical dials for an electrical instrument company. In response to these experiences, he introduced quirkily rendered motors, valves and other mechanical elements into his paintings and prints. In 1954, the Lichtensteins’ first son, David, was born; two years later, their second child, Mitchell, followed. Despite the relative lack of interest in his work in Cleveland, Lichtenstein did place his work with New York dealers, which always mattered immensely to him. He had his first solo show at the Carlebach Gallery in New York in 1951, followed by representation with the John Heller Gallery from 1952 to 1957. To reclaim his academic career and get closer to New York, Lichtenstein accepted a position as an assistant professor at the State University of New York at Oswego, in the northern reaches of the state. He was hired to teach industrial design, beginning in September 1957. Oswego turned out to be more geographically and aesthetically isolated than Cleveland ever was, but the move was propitious, for both his art and his career. Lichtenstein broke away from representation to a fully abstract style, applying broad swaths of pigment to the canvas by dragging the paint across its surface with a rag wrapped around his arm. At the same time, Lichtenstein was embedding comic-book characters figures such as Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck in brushy, expressionistic backgrounds. None of the proto-cartoon paintings from this period survive, but several pencil and pastel studies from that time, which he kept, document his intentions. Finally, when he was in Oswego, Lichtenstein met Reginald Neal, the new head of the art department at Douglass College, the women’s college of Rutgers University, in New Brunswick, New Jersey. The school was strengthening and expanding its studio art program, and when Neal needed to add a faculty member to his department, Lichtenstein was invited to apply for the job. Lichtenstein was offered the position of assistant professor, and he began teaching at Douglass in September 1960. At Douglass, Lichtenstein was thrown into a maelstrom of artistic ferment. With New York museums and galleries an hour away, and colleagues Geoffrey Hendricks and Robert Watts at Douglass and Allan Kaprow and George Segal at Rutgers, the environment could not help but galvanize him. In June 1961, Lichtenstein returned to the idea he had fooled around with in Oswego, which was to combine cartoon characters from comic books with abstract backgrounds. But, as Lichtenstein said, “[I]t occurred to me to do it by mimicking the cartoon style without the paint texture, calligraphic line, modulation—all the things involved in expressionism.”iii Most famously, Lichtenstein appropriated the Benday dots, the minute mechanical patterning used in commercial engraving, to convey texture and gradations of color—a stylistic language synonymous with his subject matter. The dots became a trademark device forever identified with Lichtenstein and Pop Art. Lichtenstein may not have calibrated the depth of his breakthrough immediately but he did realize that the flat affect and deadpan presentation of the comic-strip panel blown up and reorganized in the Sherman-inflected way “was just so much more compelling”iv than the gestural abstraction he had been practicing. Among the first extant paintings in this new mode—based on comic strips and illustrations from advertisements—were Popeye and Look Mickey, which were swiftly followed by The Engagement Ring, Girl with Ball and Step-on Can with Leg. Kaprow recognized the energy and radicalism of these canvases and arranged for Lichtenstein to show them to Ivan Karp, director of the Leo Castelli Gallery. Castelli was New York’s leading dealer in contemporary art, and he had staged landmark exhibitions of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg in 1958 and Frank Stella in 1960. Karp was immediately attracted to Lichtenstein’s paintings, but Castelli was slower to make a decision, partly on account of the paintings’ plebeian roots in commercial art, but also because, unknown to Lichtenstein, two other artists had recently come to his attention—Andy Warhol and James Rosenquist—and Castelli was only ready for one of them. After some deliberation, Castelli chose to represent Lichtenstein, and the first exhibition of the comic-book paintings was held at the gallery from February 10 to March 3, 1962. The show sold out and made Lichtenstein notorious. By the time of Lichtenstein’s second solo exhibition at Castelli in September 1963, his work had been showcased in museums and galleries around the country. He was usually grouped with Johns, Rauschenberg, Warhol, Rosenquist, Segal, Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Indiana and Tom Wesselmann. Taken together, their work was viewed as a slap in the face to Abstract Expressionism and, indeed, the Pop artists shifted attention away from many members of the New York School. With the advent of critical and commercial success, Lichtenstein made significant changes in his life and continued to investigate new possibilities in his art. After separating from his wife, he moved from New Jersey to Manhattan in 1963; in 1964, he resigned from his teaching position at Douglass to concentrate exclusively on his work. The artist also ventured beyond comic book subjects, essaying paintings based on oils by Cézanne, Mondrian and Picasso, as well as still lifes and landscapes. Lichtenstein became a prolific printmaker and expanded into sculpture, which he had not attempted since the mid-1950s, and in both two- and three-dimensional pieces, he employed a host of industrial or “non-art” materials, and designed mass-produced editioned objects that were less expensive than traditional paintings and sculpture. Participating in one such project—the American Supermarket show in 1964 at the Paul Bianchini Gallery, for which he designed a shopping bag—Lichtenstein met Dorothy Herzka (b. 1939), a gallery employee, whom he married in 1968. The late 1960s also saw Lichtenstein’s first museum surveys: in 1967 the Pasadena Art Museum initiated a traveling retrospective, in 1968 the Stedelijk Musem in Amsterdam presented his first European retrospective, and in 1969 he had his first New York retrospective, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Wanting to grow, Lichtenstein turned away from the comic book subjects that had brought him prominence. In the late 1960s his work became less narrative and more abstract, as he continued to meditate on the nature of the art enterprise itself. He began to explore and deconstruct the notion of brushstrokes—the building blocks of Western painting. Brushstrokes are conventionally conceived as vehicles of expression, but Lichtenstein made them into a subject. Modern artists have typically maintained that the subject of a painting is painting itself. Lichtenstein took this idea one imaginative step further: a compositional element could serve as the subject matter of a work and make that bromide ring true. The search for new forms and sources was even more emphatic after 1970, when Roy and Dorothy Lichtenstein bought property in Southampton, New York, and made it their primary residence. During the fertile decade of the 1970s, Lichtenstein probed an aspect of perception that had steadily preoccupied him: how easily the unreal is validated as the real because viewers have accepted so many visual conceptions that they don’t analyze what they see. In the Mirror series, he dealt with light and shadow upon glass, and in the Entablature series, he considered the same phenomena by abstracting such Beaux-Art architectural elements as cornices, dentils, capitals and columns. Similarly, Lichtenstein created pioneering painted bronze sculpture that subverted the medium’s conventional three-dimensionality and permanence. The bronze forms were as flat and thin as possible, more related to line than volume, and they portrayed the most fugitive sensations—curls of steam, rays of light and reflections on glass. The steam, the reflections and the shadow were signs for themselves that would immediately be recognized as such by any viewer. Another entire panoply of works produced during the 1970s were complex encounters with Cubism, Futurism, Purism, Surrealism and Expressionism. Lichtenstein expanded his palette beyond red, blue, yellow, black, white and green, and invented and combined forms. He was not merely isolating found images, but juxtaposing, overlapping, fragmenting and recomposing them. In the words of art historian Jack Cowart, Lichtenstein’s virtuosic compositions were “a rich dialogue of forms—all intuitively modified and released from their nominal sources.”v In the early 1980s, which coincided with re-establishing a studio in New York City, Lichtenstein was also at the apex of a busy mural career. In the 1960s and 1970s, he had completed four murals; between 1983 and 1990, he created five. He also completed major commissions for public sculptures in Miami Beach, Columbus, Minneapolis, Paris, Barcelona and Singapore. Lichtenstein created three major series in the 1990s, each emblematic of his ongoing interest in solving pictorial problems. The Interiors, mural-sized canvases inspired by a miniscule advertisement in an Italian telephone...

IVER ROSE (1899-1972) BREAD LINE ca. 1935 Lithograph, signed, titled and no. 22/85 in pencil. Image 15” x 17 3/8. Large margins, sheet 18 x 22”. Generally good condition. Some slig...

Paper Size: 31.5 x 23.75 inches ( 80.01 x 60.325 cm ) Image Size: 31.5 x 23.75 inches ( 80.01 x 60.325 cm ) Framed: No Condition: A-: Near Mint, very light signs of handling ...

This limited edition print, titled Composition, May 1953, is a striking work on thick paper, showcasing the artist's distinctive style. The print is hand-numbered 30 out of a limited...

This original exhibition poster for Romare Bearden's work titled The Woodshed refers to a piece he created in 1967. The Woodshed depicts a scene filled with rich, layered imagery tha...

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

This exquisite lithograph by David Hockney (born 1937), titled Letter L, from the folio Hockney's Alphabet, Drawings by David Hockney, originates from the 1991 edition published by A...

From the iconic Flowers portfolio of ten individual floral prints created by Andy Warhol in 1970, Flowers #71 is an original color screenprint, hand-signed in ballpoint pen, and numb...

Artist: Norman Rockwell Title: Law Student Year created: 1976 Signed by the artist Medium: 10-Color Lithograph on papier d'Arches Edition: 9/200 Height (inches): 32½ Width (inches): 23¾ This piece is unframed Born in New York City in 1894, Norman Rockwell always wanted to be an artist. At age 14, Rockwell enrolled in art classes at The New York School...

London: Gebbie & Husson Co., 1879 Héliogravure and engraving on cream wove paper, 10 1/4 x 12 1/4 inches (258 x 310 mm), full margins. In good condition with some very minor margina...

Donald Judd Untitled, 1980 Signed "Judd" in pencil lower right margin and numbered Aquatint on etching paper Image 24 1/4 x 29 1/4 inches Sheet 29 1/8 x 34 inches Edition 29/150 Pro...

Boris Lovet-Lorski, Untitled (Portrait of an African Woman), lithograph, edition 250, 1929. Signed and numbered 13 in pencil. Number 13 of Volume 2, a series of 10 lithographs publis...

Work of the Spanish artist SALVADOR DALI. Engraving of the series LA VIDA ES SUEÑO. Printed signature and date, as issued Catalog. OFFICIAL CATALOG GRAPHYC WORKS BY ALBERT FIELD Page...

Art Production Fund Limited Edition Beach Towel (NEW in shrinkwrap), 2014 Digital print on brushed cotton beach towel 70 × 60 inches Edition of 1000 Fabric manufacturer's label to ed...

Etching and drypoint on heavy cream laid paper, 3 3/4 x 3 1/4 inches (96 x 83 mm), narrow margins. In very good condition with some minor surface soiling. [Björklund's second state ...

Artist: Christo (1935 - 2020) Title: Wrapped Trees Vertical Size: 31" x 23" inches Type: Lithograph Poster Hand Signed Christo was born in 1935 in Gabrova, Bulgaria. (He would drop ...

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...

Medium: original lithograph. Printed in Paris in 1961, this is one of the Jean Cocteau lithographs for Andre Verdet's "Montagnes Marines", publ...

GOING TO CHURCH is an original hand drawn lithograph (not a photo reproduction or digital print) printed on archival printmaking paper 100% acid free, using hand lithography techniqu...

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,...

signed and numbered lower right edition of 60 Catalogue raisonné 00717 Published by Simmelink Sukimoto Editions Internationally recognized painter and printmaker Alex Katz was born...

Jean Solombre, French (1948 - ) - Reflection, Year: 1980, Medium: Etching with Aquatint on Arches, signed, numbered and dated in pencil, Edition: 19/125, Image Size: 11 x 11 inch...

London: Thomas Mclean, 1835. Etching with hand coloring in watercolor on cream wove paper. 5 3/8 x 7 3/4 inches (135 x 195 mm), full margins. A lovely well inked impression with fres...

This poster reproduction of Alexei Jawlensky’s Crown of Thorns captures the artist’s bold Expressionist style and spiritual depth. The subject’s mask-like face, rendered in thick bru...

Hank Laventhol, American (1927 - 2001) - Plum, Year: Circa 1980, Medium: Aquatint Etching, signed and numbered in pencil, Edition: 300, AP XXXV, Image Size: 20 x 15.5 inches, Siz...

This exquisite lithograph by Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015), titled Formulaire rouge (Red Form), originates from the 2012 publication Revue Cahiers d'Art, 2012, no. 1, Ellsworth Kelly. ...

Nicholas Panesis, 'Negro', 1934, color lithograph, edition 18. Signed, dated, titled, and numbered 8/28 in pencil. Initialed in the stone, lower right. A fine impression, with fresh colors, on buff wove paper, with margins (1 1/8 to 2 3/8 inches). Minor glue staining at the extreme sheet edges verso, where previously taped (not visible recto), otherwise in excellent condition. Very scarce. Matted to museum standards, unframed. Image size 10 5/8 x 8 1/2 inches; (270 x 216 mm); sheet size 14 13/16 x 10 15/16 inches (376 x 278 mm). Created for the California Works Progress Administration, Federal Art Project (WPA). Impressions of this work are held in the public collections of La Salle University Art Museum (Philadelphia), U.S. General Services Administration, and Weisman Art Museum (University of Minnesota). ABOUT THE ARTIST Born in Massachusetts, Nicholas Panesis (1913-1967) studied art at Syracuse University, NY, and went on to teach ceramics at Alfred University, NY. Panesis moved to San Francisco in the early 1930s shortly before settling in Los Angeles, where he worked for different animation studios...

Medium: original lithograph. This lithograph is from the rare 1953 "Improvisations" portfolio, published by the Artists Equity Association of New York on the occasion of the 1953 Spr...

ABOUT THIS PIECE: French photographer Ludwig Favre recently road tripped to California. His pictures of California's iconic architecture and beaches carry the same romantic feel of a...

Tom Wesselmann Shiny Nude (Stealingworth, 33), 1977 Silkscreen on glossy cast-coated Kromekote paper 8 × 8 inches Edition of 1000 (AP/1000) Pencil numbered ...

Printer’s ink from rubber stamp on vélin Dalton natural bond paper. Paper Size: 8 x 8 inches. Inscription: Unsigned, as issued. Notes: From the folio, Rubber Stamp Portfolio, 1977. P...

Artist: Romare Bearden (1911-1988) Title: Girl in the Garden (Gelburd/Rosenberg 62) Year: 1979 Medium: Lithograph on vélin d’Arches paper Edition: 33/150, plus proofs Size: 28.75 x 2...

“Man is Only a Memory” is a captivating silkscreen by Ernest Trova, published in 1969 by Multiples, Inc. This artwork, part of a small edition of fewer than 300 pieces, was created f...

This abstract landscape limited edition print by Elwood Howell features a cool, green and pale blue palette. The artist's signature high horizon line forms a very slight valley at th...

This exquisite lithograph by Marc Chagall (1887–1985), titled Vision de Paris (Vision of Paris), from Verve, Revue Artistique et Litteraire, Vol. VII, No. 27–28, originates from the ...

Lithograph on vélin d'Arches à la forme savoir paper. Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued. Good condition. Notes: From the volume, Dans l'Atelier de Picasso, 1957. Published by Fernan...

BESSIE MAE is a hand drawn, limited edition lithograph/linocut by the African American artist JONATHAN GREEN printed in 10 colors using hand lithography techniques and linoleum cut o...

Paper Size: 30 x 23.25 inches ( 76.2 x 59.055 cm ) Image Size: 30 x 23.25 inches ( 76.2 x 59.055 cm ) Framed: No Condition: A: Mint Additional Details: Shoes, 1980 by Andy Warhol, pr...

This is a 19th century hand-colored folio-sized lithograph entitled "Dendrortyx Leucophrys" (White Eye-browed Partridges) by John Gould, published in his monograph 'A Monograph of the Odontophorinae, or Partridges of America' in London between 1844-1850. Reportedly only 250 copies were printed. The print depicts two partridges, one standing and the other lying apparently on sand, surrounded by high grass. A landscape of plants and possibly water is seen in the background. This beautiful hand-colored lithograph is presented in a double cream-colored mat. There is one tiny spot in the left lower corner, faint spots in the right upper print and mild toning about the periphery which is covered by the mat. It is otherwise in excellent condition. It is accompanied by the original text page. John Gould (1841-1881) was an English contemporary of the American John James Audubon. Gould published his first illustrated book on birds in 1831 entitled "A Century of Birds from the Himalaya Mountains", followed by "Ramphastidae" and "Birds of Europe". He then extended the scope of his travels and research to include Australia, New Zealand and New Guinea, drawing birds in their natural habitat. Artists, such as his wife Elizabeth Gould, Henry Richter and Edward Lear, transferred his drawings to hand printed and hand colored stone lithographs, which are known for their beauty, detail and accuracy. As well as an exceptional and prolific artist, Gould was an outstanding scientific naturalist. In approximately 50 years he created approximately 3,000 lithographs of birds...

This exquisite lithograph after Marc Chagall (1887–1985), titled Ares und Aphrodite (Ares and Aphrodite), from Homer, Die Odyssee (The Odyssey), originates from the 1989 German-langu...

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...

Paper Size: 13 x 17 inches ( 33.02 x 43.18 cm ) Image Size: 13 x 17 inches ( 33.02 x 43.18 cm ) Framed: Yes Frame Size: H: 14 x W: 18 x D: .75 in. Condition: A: Mint Additiona...

Steve McCurry Sharbat Gula, Afghan Girl, Pakistan (Hand Signed), 1984 Offset Lithograph poster Hand signed by the photographer in black felt pen on the front 24 × 20 inches Unframed...

Paper Size: 37.75 x 54.5 inches ( 95.885 x 138.43 cm ) Image Size: 27.5 x 54.5 inches ( 69.85 x 138.43 cm ) Framed: No?Condition: A-: Near Mint, very light signs of handling Shipping...

Guillaume Corneille Red Nude and Bird 1981 Nu Rouge Á L'Oiseau Print, Signed Lithograph on wove paper 25.5 x 20 " inches Signed in pencil and dated and marked AP 25/25 ( Artist Proo...

Paper Size: 10.25 x 39.5 inches ( 26.035 x 100.33 cm ) Image Size: 6 x 35.5 inches ( 15.24 x 90.17 cm ) Framed: No Condition: B: Very Good Condition, with signs of handling or age...

This reproduction silkscreen poster features Romare Bearden's vibrant work Early Carolina Morning, published by American Vision Gallery Inc. The piece has ...

Artist: Roy Lichtenstein Title: Nude With Blue Hair Medium: Relief print on Rives BFK mold-made paper Date: 1994 Edition: 28/40 Sheet Size: 57 7/8" x 37 5/8" Image Size: 51 5/16" x 3...

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...

ARTIST: Salvador Dali TITLE: Imaginations & Objects of The Future Liquid Tornado Bath Tub MEDIUM: Etching SIGNED: Hand Signed by Salvador Dali PUBLISHER: Merril Chase, Chicago/Al...

Artist: Andy Warhol (1928-1987) Title: Jacqueline Kennedy (Jackie II) Year: 1966 Medium: Silkscreen in colors on wove paper Size: 24 x 30 inches Condition: Excellent Inscription: Sig...

Incised signature in aluminum, annotated "Artists Proof" and titled; ink on top smudged If you've ever visited the Guggenheim Bilbao, you should get this stunning mixed media on alum...

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...

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

Artist: Ralph Steadman Title: Brain of Hunter S. Thompson Medium: One color silkscreen on White Rising Stonehenge Deckle Edge Paper Size: 11 x15 Inches Edition: of 800 Year: 2010 No...

'The Plaza, Sunset Glow', drypoint, c. 1920s, edition not stated. Signed in pencil and initialed in the plate, lower right. Titled 'The Plaza, Sunset' and annotated 'no. 165' in ink, in the bottom left sheet corner. A superb, luminous impression in dark brown ink, with selectively wiped plate tone; on cream wove paper; the full sheet with margins (1 to 2 1/4 inches). Pale tape stains on the top sheet edge, recto, well away from the image, otherwise in excellent condition. Matted to museum standards, unframed. A view across 'The Pond' in New York City's Central Park, toward Grand Army Plaza...

This woodcut black and white is part of my private collection. It is in very good condition. It is artists signed in the lower right and numbered o the left. Atelier Othon-Friesz

Tipped in color plate produced in 1962 for a rare official Lucio Fontana artist monograph published by famed art book publisher Harry N. Abrams, Inc. (not included), during the artis...

Louis Icart, After, French (1888 - 1950) - Coursing 3, Medium: Offset Lithograph on paper, signed in plate, Image Size: 14.5 x 23.75 inches, Size: 16 x 25 in. (40.64 x 63.5 cm), D...

Ten lithographs in excellent condition, with portfolio cover. The ten artists included in the 1946 portfolio "Mexican Art: A Portfolio of Mexican People and Places" include: Ángel Bracho / Francisco Mora / Fernando Castro Pacheco / Raúl Anguiano / Alberto Beltrán...