Tag: lithography

Ruffino Tamayo

Graphic Work by Rufino Tamayo

Rufino Tamayo’s legacy in the history of art lies in his oeuvre of original graphic prints in which he cultivated every technique. Rufino Tamayo’s graphic work, produced between 1925 and 1991, includes woodcuts, lithographs, etchings and “Mixografia” prints. With the help of Mexican painter and engineer Luis Remba, Tamayo expanded the technical and aesthetic possibilities of the graphic arts by developing a new medium which they named Mixografia.

This technique is a unique fine art printing process that allows for the production of prints with three-dimensional texture. It not only registered the texture and volume of Rufino Tamayo’s design but also granted the artist freedom to use any combination of solid materials in its creation. Rufino Tamayo was delighted with the Mixografia process and created some 80 original Mixographs. One of their most famous Mixografia is titled Dos Personajes Atacados por Perros (Two Characters Attacked by Dogs).

Tom Killion

Five Woodcut Engravings by Tom Killion

Californian-born Tom Killion takes inspiration from 19th century Japanese prints to recreate epic engravings of American landscapes. He describes his technique, tongue-in-cheek, as “faux ukiyo-ë” to emphasize his aesthetic debt to the landscape prints of early 19th century Japan, but also to acknowledge his embrace of early 20th century European / American wood-engraving and book illustration techniques and styles as well. Among his influences are both the Japanese ukiyo-ë landscape masters Hokusai and Hiroshige, but also European and American wood-engravers such as Eric Gill and Rockwell Kent.

Killion carves his images into cherry, all-shina plywood, Amsterdam linoleum and other block materials using Japanese handtools. He prints his often elaborate, multi-colored images on handmade Japanese kozo papers using oil-based inks and a German hand-cranked proofing press.

Robert Motherwell

Robert Motherwell, “Spanish Elegy”, Lithograph, size , 25 3/8 x 21 3/8 inches,  printed in black on Chine Appliqué and red Japanese Gampi paper mounted on white Arches Wove Paper

Robert Motherwell was a major figure of the Abstract Expressionist generation. His work encompassing the automatism of the Surrealists, the expressive brushworks of action painting, and the saturated hues of field painting.

At the age of eleven, Robert Motherwell was awarded a fellowship to the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, and went on to the California School of Fine Arts in 1932. He received his BA in philosophy from Stanford University in 1936. Beginning his career as a painter in 1939 in Paris, he had his first solo exhibition of his work. Motherwell returned to the United States and studied art history at the Columbia University from 1940 to 1941. 

It was there that Matherwell met Roberto Matta, Meyer Schapiro, and other exiled European artists associated with Surrealism. Emotionally charged brushwork and severely structured abstract were painted during this period, but in 1943, Motherwell produced a series of dark, menacing works in response to World War II. 

The work for which he is best known, the series “Elegy to the Spanish Republic XXXIV” (1953-1954), are large abstracts that reflect his generation’s despair at the lost cause of the Spanish Civil War. During the 1950s, Motherwell spent most of his time lecturing and teaching, notably at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. It was during this time he worked on his most influential literary achievement, “The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology” published in New York in 1951.

In 1952, Robert Motherwell and abstract painter Ad Reinhardt produced the journal “Modern Artists in America.” Motherwell was married to Helen Frankenthaler, also an abstract artist, from 1958 to 1971. During the years 1968 to 1972, Mortherwell worked on a series of paintings called “Open,” which reflected the new style of color field painting. His later works returned to the more traditional Abstract Expressionist style.

Richard Lindner

Richard Lindner, “Profile”, from Lindner’s “After Noon” Portfolio, Edition 250

Richard Lindner was born in Hamburg, Germany to an American mother and German father. He enrolled in the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich in 1925. Fleeing Nazi Germany, Lindner moved to the USA, and worked as a magazine illustrator for Vogue, Fortune and Harper’s Bazaar.

In 1952 he began his career as a painter. Critiques have call Lindner’s work “mechanistic cubism.” Streetwalkers, continental circus women, and men in uniforms are Linder’s primary subject matter. Richard Lindner taught at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and Yale University.

Lindner’s work was influential to an entire generation, and he was honored by the Beatles, who included him in the second row of people depicted on the Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band LP cover. He died in 1978.

George Wesley Bellows

George Wesley Bellows, “Man on His Back, Nude”, 1916, San Diego Museum of Art

This is a very rare, rich proof impression printed in a black/ purple ink. The edition consists of only 19 prints. It is one of only two lithographs by George Wesley Bellows in which he depicted male nudes.

An American painter, lithographer and illustrator, George Bellows was born in Columbus, Ohio in 1882. He attended Ohio State University from 1901-1904, but moved to New York before graduating to study at the New York School of Art under Robert Henri.

In 1911, Bellows began contributing pictures to the radical journal “The Masses”, which gave him the opportunity to work with like-minded artists such as Stuart Davis, Boardman Robinson and John Sloan. He produced several anti- war drawings during the time of the First World War and completed a series of paintings and lithographs concerning the war.

Bellows moved to the Chicago Art Institute in 1919 and illustrated novels, including several by H.G. Wells. While in New York in 1925, an attack of appendicitis caused his death.

James Steuart Curry

John Steuart Curry, “The Missed Leap”, Lithograph on Cream Wove Paper, 1934, Smithsonian American Art Museum

John Steuart Curry traveled with Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus for months in 1932, making studies for later paintings and prints. A trapeze artist misses her partner’s outstretched hand in the lithograph “Missed Leap,” and while Curry has fringed a lower corner with a net, she appears to be dropping straight toward a starred target on the floor below.

Alison Saar

Alison Saar, “Snakeman”, 1994, Woodcut and Lithograph Printed in Color on Oriental Paper, Image and sheet: 27 7/8 x 37 1/8 in.

Alison Saar is an American sculptor, painter and installation artist. She was born in Los Angeles, California, and grew up in Laurel Canyon, California. Her parents were Betye Saar, a well-known African-American artist, and Richard Saar, an art conservationist. . She received a BA from Scripps College (Claremont, CA) in 1978, having studied African and Caribbean art with Dr. Samella Lewis. Saar’s thesis was on African-American folk art. She received an MFA from Otis Art Institute, now known as Otis College of Art and Design  in Los Angeles, California in 1981.

Her sculptures and installations explore themes of African cultural diaspora and spirituality, and her studies of Latin American, Caribbean and African art and religion have informed her work. Saar’s fascination with vernacular folk art and ability to build an oasis of beauty from cast-off objects are evident in her sculptures and paintings.

Andrea Rich

Andrea Rich, “Thistle”, 2001, Woodcut on Hosho Paper, 50.8 x 60.1 cm, Edition: 4/30; Collection of Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum, Wausau, Wisconsin

Since 1980, internationally recognized woodcut printmaker and artist Andrea Rich has traveled the world observing wildlife in their natural habitat. Madagascar, New Zealand, Costa Rica, Africa and Europe are some of the places outside North America that she has visited in search of interesting subjects. She then designs her drawing based upon personal observations in the field, carves and hand-pulls prints in her studio in Santa Cruz California.

A typical print requires ten to twenty blocks. Working in the studio full time, a print could take two or three weeks to design and carve the blocks, and another two weeks to press as many as 20 colors on each print. Editions of her work generally number 30 or less.

Max Ernst

Max Ernst, “Deux Oiseaux (Two Birds)”, Colour Lithograph, 1975

Max Ernst was born in Brühl, near Cologne, the third of nine children of a middle-class Catholic family. His father Philipp was a teacher of the deaf and an amateur painter, a devout Christian and a strict disciplinarian. He inspired in Max a penchant for defying authority, while his interest in painting and sketching in nature influenced Max to take up painting himself.

In 1909 Ernst enrolled in the University of Bonn, studying philosophy, art history, literature, psychology and psychiatry. He visited asylums and became fascinated with the art of the mentally ill patients; he also started painting that year, producing sketches in the garden of the Brühl castle, and portraits of his sister and himself. In 1911 Ernst befriended August Macke and joined his Die Rheinischen Expressionisten group of artists, deciding to become an artist.

In 1912 he visited the Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne, where works by Pablo Picasso and post-Impressionists such as Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin profoundly influenced his approach to art. His own work was exhibited the same year together with that of the Das Junge Rheinland group, at Galerie Feldman in Cologne, and then in several group exhibitions in 1913.

Felix Jenewein

Felix Jenewein, “The Plague”, Colour Lithograph, 1901, One of Six Plates in a Portfolio with Title Pages and Introduction by Karel B. Mádl.

Subject described by Karel B. Mádl as follows: “The first victims of the plague fall suddenly in the open air, under a ruddy sky, in which hangs ghastly the pale disc of the moon, and moves the threatening tail of the comet. The mighty body of the traveler is struck down as by lightening, and is cut down in deadly convulsions. The strong limbs quiver and are being contorted. Death came down among the people with terrible violence and the witnesses of this visitation are terror stricken. Two figures only suffice to show us the sad, voiceless land, and the painter places us into the midst of the dismay, caused by the plague.”

Kawase Hasui

 

Kawase Hasui “Night Rain at Omiya”, 1930

Born in May of 1883, Hasui Kawase was one of modern Japan’s most important and prolific printmakers. He was a prominent founder of the shin-hanga, or new prints, movement whose artists executed traditional subjects in a style influenced by Western art.

At the age of twenty six, Hasui ceased working at his family’s rope and thread wholesaling business and studied Western style painting under Yōga-style artist Okada Saburōsuke for two years. Hasui then approached Nihonga artist Kiyokata Kaburagi, the leading master of the bijin-ga genre, to teach him; it was Kiyokata who gave him the name ‘Hasui’, which translates as ‘water gushing from a spring’.

At the studio of Kiyokata, Hasui studied traditional Japanese painting and ukiyo-e, a genre of art which flourished from the seventeenth though the nineteenth centuries.. He worked almost exclusively on landscape and townscape prints based on sketches and watercolors he made during travels around Japan. Hasui’s work depicted not only those famous places typical of early ukiyo-e masters, but also featured locales which were obscure in urbanizing Japan. Unlike other artists, he did include the captions and titles that were standard in traditional ukiyo-e prints. Among Hasui’s most original and best known works were his snow scenes rendered with naturalistic light, shade and texture. 

During a career which spanned over forty years, Hasui designed approximately six hundred-twenty prints and worked closely with publisher Shōzaburō Watanabe, an advocate of the shin-hanga movement. Through the efforts of American art patron Robert Miller, his work became widely known in the West. In late 1953, the government Committee for the Preservation of Intangible Cultural Treasures commissioned Hasui to make a collection of traditionally-made prints. The production of these works were carefully documented and, in 1956, he was named a Japanese Living National Treasure. 

Hasui Kawase died on November 27, 1957 at the age of seventy-four. He left a large collection of his woodblock prints and watercolors, many of which are linked to the woodblock prints, oil paintings, traditional hanging scrolls, and several folding screens. In 1979, Author Narazaki Munishige published Hasui’s biography and compiled the first comprehensive, annotated listing of all his known works