Tag: lithography

Elizabeth Murray

Elizabeth Murray, “Untitled” (State II), 1980, Lithograph Printed in Black Ink on Wove Paper, 45.7 x 63.5 cm, Detroit Institute of Arts

Elizabeth Murray was an American painter whose lively imagery and reconsideration of the rectangle as the traditional format for painting was part of a reinvigoration of that medium in the 1970s and ’80s. She is sometimes described as a Neo-Expressionist. The American art critic Roberta Smith considered her to have “reshaped Modernist abstraction into a high-spirited, cartoon-based, language of form.”

Murray was raised in small towns in Michigan and Illinois, and she attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (B.F.A., 1962) and Mills College in Oakland, Calif. (M.F.A., 1964). She taught at Rosary Hill College in Buffalo, N.Y. (1965–67), and then moved to New York City.

After experimenting with reconciling late-minimalist painting with aspects of identifiable subject matter, Murray literally began to push the edges of the rectangle in works such as “Children Meeting” (1978), with large bulbous forms and lines pressing against the edge of the canvas. As if to make the exterior edges of her painting correspond to the energetic rhythms of the various elements pictured within—highly stylized objects such as coffee cups, tables, and chairs, as well as less-definable shapes—she began to create shaped canvases.

Elizabeth Murray carried her experimentation further during the 1980s, when she began to use multiple canvases for a single work. Her “Painters’ Progress” (1981), for example, is a unified image composed of 19 canvases. She evolved a personal and sprightly range of curved imagery, much of which made reference to art-historical styles. In the 1990s, in works such as “Careless Love” (1995–96), she constructed her canvases to extend a bit from the wall, giving them sculptural and spatial qualities.

Henry Justice Ford

Henry Justice Ford, Illustration of Beowulf from Andrew Lang’s  “The Red Book of Animal Stories”, 1899

Henry Justice Ford was a prolific and successful English artist and illustrator, active from 1886 through to the late 1920s. Sometimes known as H. J. Ford or Henry J. Ford, he came to public attention when he provided the numerous beautiful illustrations for Andrew Lang’s Fairy Books, which captured the imagination of a generation of British children and were sold worldwide in the 1880s and 1890s.

Joseph Mugnaini

Joseph Mugnaini, “Mr. Moundshroud”, 1971, Etcihing/ Aquatint, 40.6 x 31.1 cm, Collection of Ray Bradbury

This print was in Ray Bradbury’s personal collection. It is from a series of etchings done by Joseph Mugnaini for a collection of Ray Bradbury’s stories.

Joseph Anthony Mugnaini was born in Viareggio in the Tuscany region of Italy in 1912. He Immigrated with his family to the United States when he was three months old. He became an American citizen in 1941 and taught at the Pasadena School of Fine Arts, among others.

A talented lithographer, he is best known for his collaborations beginning in 1952 with writer Ray Badbury, who regarded him as both a friend and the best interpreter of his stories. As a result, he did the covers and interior art for several first editions of Bradbury’s works, as well as related projects like illustrations for a 1962 cartoon adaptation of Bradbury’s story “Icarus Montgolfier Wright”, originally printed in 1956.

For many, Mugnaini’s trademark style – an elongated human figure against a minimal or symbolic background – is indelibly linked with Bradbury’s fiction, explaining why his covers and interior art are still being used for recent editions of his works. Still, it should also be remembered that Mugnaini did provide evocative covers for a few books by other genre writers, including Robert Crane’s “Hero Walk”, Theodore Sturgeon’s “ A Touch of Strange”, and Louis Charbonneau’s “No Place on Earth”.

Francisco Goya

Francisco Goya, “Modo de Volar (Way to Fly)”, Plate 13 from the “Disparate” Series, The Third Grouping of Plates of the “Disasters of War”, 1816-1823

“The Disasters of War” was not published during Goya’s lifetime, possibly because he feared political repercussions from Fernando VII’s repressive regime. Some art historians suggest that he did not publish because he was sceptical about the use of images for political motives, and instead saw them as a personal meditation and release. Most, however, believe the artist preferred to wait until they could be made public without censorship. A further four editions were published, the last in 1937, so that in total over 1,000 impressions of each print have been printed, though not all of the same quality.

Goya worked on the “Disasters of War” during a period when he was producing images more for his own satisfaction than for any contemporary audience. His work came to rely less on historical incidents than his own imagination. Many of the later plates contain fantastical motifs which can be seen as a return to the imagery of the “Caprichos”, his prints on the universal follies of Spanish society. In this, he is relying on visual clues derived from his inner life, rather than anything that could be recognised from real events or settings. “Modo de Volar” is an example of that return to the “Caprichos” imagery.

Charles Le Brun

Charles Le Brun, Lithographic Drawings Illustrating the Relation Between the Human Physiognomy and That of the Brute Creation

Charles Le Brun was a French painter, art theorist, interior decorator and a director of several art schools in the 17th century.  As court painter to Louis XIV, who declared him “the greatest French artist of all time”, he was a dominant figure in 17th-century French art and much influenced by Nicolas Poussin.

Le Brun primarily worked for King Louis XIV, for whom he executed large altar piecies and battle pieces.. His most important paintings are at Versailles. Besides his gigantic labours at Versailles and the Louvre, the number of his works for religious corporations and private patrons is enormous. Le Brun was also a fine portraitist and an excellent draughtsman, but he was not fond of portrait or landscape painting, which he felt to be a mere exercise in developing technical prowess.

What mattered was scholarly composition, whose ultimate goal was to nourish the spirit. The fundamental basis on which the director of the Academy-based his art was unquestionably to make his paintings speak, through a series of symbols, costumes and gestures that allowed him to select for his composition the narrative elements that gave his works a particular depth. For Le Brun, a painting represented a story one could read. Nearly all his compositions have been reproduced by celebrated engravers.

And then there were the delightfully bizarre studies he produced. He lectured on animal and human physiognomy, or facial features, and demonstrated the “signs that identify the natural inclination of men” to eagles, owls, goats, rams, lions, and other animals.

Michael Goro

Michael Goro, “La Belle Fenetre”, Etching / Engraving, Date Unknown

“Looking for subject matter I find simple things that we see every day, things that become symbolic once they are taken out of context. I experiment with the juxtaposition of places, faces, and architectural designs that reflect my diverse personal experiences. My story is a vivid illustration of the end of the last century – a time of deconstruction, discontinuity, and dislocation. I find that black-and-white prints convey contradictory images better than any other medium by reducing them to the most basic color contrast. My work provides the full spectrum of techniques ranging from renaissance engraving to digital photogravure.” – Michael Goro

Thornton Willis

Thornton Willis, “Omaha Flash”, 1985, Lithograph on Rives BFK, 22 x 30 Inches, Edition of 30

Often grouped in the 1980s with abstract painters Sean Scully and Elizabeth Murray, Willis used a zigzag shape to explore figure ground relationships in a series of oil stick drawings on paper and paintings consisting of layers of rolled acrylic paint that created multi-colored strata within each stripe or resulted in a multicolored background topped by a solid colored zigzag.

Of the resulting pictorial tension, critic David Carrier observed in 1984, “Even from a distance, we glimpse Rothko’s soft edges; even close up, we known that Stella’s lines are straight edges. By contrast, when approached, Willis’ hard-edged zigzags dissolve into a sequence of painterly layers whose gestural structure has no direct relation to that larger form which it defines.”

John Himmelfarb

John Himmelfarb, “Uzzle”, 2001, Color Intaglio on Bluff Rives Paper, 20 x 23 ¾ Inches, Edition of 25

The Chicago-based artist John Himmelfarb, for n in Chicago in 1946, is a master printmaker, working frequently and simultaneously with lithography, intaglio, serigraphy, and the computer. A distinctive calligraphic quality unites this work, and as John Brunetti has observed, it reflects his belief that drawing is “an extension of handwriting, closest to recording the immediacy of the artist’s observations and states of mind; a fusion of verbal and visual language.”

Uzzle possesses the dense field of symbols and signs culled from Neolithic pictographs, Asian and Arabic alphabets and global religious symbols typically found in his prints. On February 16, 2001, the artist oversaw the printing by Gary Day using a plywood plate for the brown areas and zinc plates for the remaining colors. He was assisted by Julie Sopscak and Melissa Corwin.