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SUSAN SHEEHAN GALLERY On the cover: Brice Marden Detail of: Cold Mountain Series, Zen Studies Plate 5, 1991
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Josef Albers Gray Instrumentation I, 1974 Screenprints Sheet size: 19 x 19 inches, each Printer and Publisher: Tyler Graphics, Bedford, New York Edition: 36, plus proofs Catalogue Raisonné: Danilowitz 225.1-225.12 Each sheet is signed, titled, and numbered The complete portfolio of twelve screenprints
Josef Albers (1888–1976) is best known for his formulaic compositions that explore relationships between colors. In 1950, he began his famous series of paintings titled Homage to the Square, which he would continue until his death. These paintings explored the ideas he would later articulate in his 1963 book Interaction of Color. Around the time the book was published, Albers began exploring the same ideas by making portfolios of limited edition prints. Like the Homage to the Square paintings and drawings, most of Albers’s prints feature squares of different sizes and hues arranged in a precise manner, nested symmetrically in the center of the composition. Unusually, Grey Instrumentation I features squares in different shades of one color—gray—rather than different colors entirely. As a result, this portfolio presents as harmonious and subtle in contrast to the bright color combinations that characterize most of Albers’s other print portfolios. Albers executed Grey Instrumentation I with master printer Kenneth Tyler at his workshop in Bedford, New York. Albers moved to New Haven, Connecticut in 1950 to become the chair of the new Department of Design at Yale University and therefore resided much closer to Tyler’s studio, which enabled them to experiment together more freely. For Albers, Grey Instrumentation I marked a departure from his previous more colorful work, and for this reason he relied on Tyler’s expertise to execute the project. Attesting to this collaboration, Tyler recalls Albers bringing him leaves, twigs, and stones from the Bedford studio garden, asking him to match the colors in ink.
Josef Albers discussing Gray Instrumentation II proofs at his studio, Orange, Connecticut, 1975. Photographer: Katherine Kamaroff Goodman
This very rare complete set retains its original linen-covered portfolio case, title and colophon pages, and six interleaving sheets printed with poems by the artist. Among the last print portfolios Albers completed before his death, Grey Instrumentation I represents the quiet culmination of decades of color-based work and the poetic nuance the artist saw in each of his compositions.
Josef Albers and printer Kenneth Tyler at Tamarind Lithography Workshop, Los Angeles, California, circa 1963-64
Jasper Johns Usuyuki, 1982 Silkscreen Sheet size: 29 1/2 x 47 1/4 inches Printer and Publisher: The Artist and Simca Print Artists, Inc., New York Edition size: 52, plus proofs Catalogue Raisonné: ULAE 227 Signed, dated, and numbered
“During the late 1980’s Marden became interested in calligraphy. Based on the poems of a celebrated Chinese poet named “Cold Mountain”, it is made up of tangled webs and vertical gestures suggesting poetic couplets. The etching process for this print—sugarlift—allows for flowing gesture, which Marden created by dipping a stick in a sugar solution and drawing with it on a prepared etching plate.” Debroah Wye Chief Curator Emerita, Department of Prints and Illustrated Books Museum of Modern Art
Brice Marden Cold Mountain Series, Zen Studies 1-6, 1991 Medium: Etchings with aquatint Sheet size: 27 1/4 x 35 1/4 inches, each Printer: Jennifer Melby Publisher: Brice Marden Edition: 35, plus proofs Catalogue Raisonné: Lewison 43/1-6 Each sheet is signed, dated, and numbered The complete set of six etchings
Brice Marden (b. 1938) is best known for his lyrical abstractions and minimalistic yet organic compositions. Throughout the 1960s, he created paintings and prints focused on monochromatic, geometric forms, but by the late 1970s he sought new inspiration. Intrigued by Chinese culture, he specifically developed an admiration for traditional Chinese calligraphy and Taoist philosophy in the mid-1980s, which led him to create the Cold Mountain Series. The title and form of the series are culled from the famed Cold Mountain poems, written in the 9th century by the Chinese monk Han Shan. The flowing black lines in the artist’s Zen Studies allude at once to both Chinese calligraphy and the work of Jackson Pollock and the New York School of abstractionists. To achieve the wispy, gestural lines seen across this series, Marden used the sugarlift process, in which one dips a stick in a sugar solution and then draws directly onto a prepared etching plate, working from top to bottom across the plate—not unlike Chinese calligraphy. Marden began each work in the series by drawing a Cold Mountain poem—all of which consist of four vertically arranged couplets of five characters—onto the plate, starting in the top right corner and layering forms as he moved. Marden believes that minimalism “is not an elimination of things. It can be the amalgamation of a lot of things, brought to a very refined state.” Although his early work is commonly described as minimalist, the more recent Cold Mountain Series is replete with evidence of Marden’s hand and his interest in organic forms. Even when working with rigid angles and lines, Marden embraced “foul biting,” or ink seeping through the ground, which rendered his lines imperfect. Marden’s receptiveness to accidents during the printing process proved complementary to the compositions of the Zen Studies: pushing to the edges of the plate but not surpassing them, the lines in the Zen Studies convey the artist’s open yet methodical approach. Individual works from the Cold Mountain Series appear in the collections of institutions worldwide notably, the Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and Tate Britain, but complete sets of all six prints are very rare.
Brice Marden in his studio, Greenwich Village, New York, 2012
Ellsworth Kelly Green Curve (State I), 1988 Lithograph Sheet size: 37 1/2 x 84 inches Edition: 15, plus proofs Printer and Publisher: Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles Catalogue Raisonné: Axsom 222 Signed and numbered
Ellsworth Kelly Green Curve (State II), 1988 Lithograph Sheet size: 37 1/2 x 84 inches Printer and Publisher: Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles Edition: 15, plus proofs Catalogue Raisonné: Axsom 223 Signed and numbered
Ellsworth Kelly Red Curve, 1987-88 Lithograph Sheet size: 26 x 84 inches Printer and Publisher: Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles Edition: 25, plus proofs Catalogue Raisonné: Axsom 214 Signed and numbered
American artist Ellsworth Kelly’s (1923–2015) work explored the power of pure color and form over gesture. The crisp edges and vivid blocks of color that comprise Kelly’s Curves series indicate the skill with which these lithographs and the entire series were produced, as his interest in stark white negative space left no room for error. Negative space plays an important role in all of Kelly’s prints and paintings, as seen in the varied widths of Green Curve and Red Curve. In fact, he once remarked that the margins surrounding the forms in his prints were “thought out as much as color and shape” and that “negative space is just as powerful as the space of the object.” Thus although two-dimensional, the saturation of color and the unique forms of Kelly’s Curves prints clearly allude to relationships between architecture and space. The eponymous rounded curves of the forms in each print also point to the lasting influence of artists Kelly met in Paris in the 1940s, including Joan Miró, Jean Arp, and Constantin Brancusi.
Throughout his career, Kelly used printmaking not as a way of planning or reevaluating his paintings, but as a tool for exploring the ideas he was also considering in other mediums. These curve prints from 1987–1988 serve as an important precursor to the Curves paintings Kelly would go on to make in the 1990s. Marking an important turning point for the artist, all of the Curves paintings feature shaped canvases with one rounded side, and although they look even, the forms’ other hard edges are deceptively imprecise. Before the 1990s, Kelly had long created paintings of such shapes, but always on rectangular canvases. That he moved to his now-iconic shaped canvases shortly after executing the Curves prints suggests that working in this medium helped Kelly push and explore ways of representing the relationship between curved forms and negative space.
Ellsworth Kelly in his studio in Spencertown, New York, 2015 Photograph: Jack Shear
Ellsworth Kelly Colored Paper Image II (Dark Green Curves), 1976 Colored and pressed paper pulp Sheet size: 46 1/2 x 32 1/2 inches Edition: 17, plus proofs Printer: Ellsworth Kelly and Kenneth Tyler, fabricated at HMP Paper Mill, Woodstock, Connecticut Publisher: Tyler Graphics Ltd., Bedford, NY Catalogue Raisonné: Axsom 142 Signed and numbered
Ellsworth Kelly Nine Squares, 1976-77 Screenprint and lithograph Sheet size: 40 1/2 x 40 1/2 inches Printer and Publisher: Tyler Graphics Ltd., Bedford, New York Edition: 44, plus proofs Catalogue Raisonné: Axsom 164 Signed and numbered
Jasper Johns Flag I, 1960 Lithograph Sheet size: 21 7/8 x 29 3/4 inches Printer and Publisher: ULAE, West Islip, New York Edition: 23, plus proofs Catalogue Raisonné: ULAE 4 Signed, dated, and numbered
Jasper Johns Flag III, 1960 Lithograph Sheet size: 22 1/4 x 30 inches Printer and Publisher: ULAE, West Islip, New York Edition: 10, plus proofs Catalogue Raisonné: ULAE 7 Signed, dated, and numbered
Helen Frankenthaler Savage Breeze, 1974 Woodcut Sheet size: 31 1/2 x 27 inches Printer and Publisher: ULAE, West Islip, New York Edition: 31, plus proofs Catalogue Raisonné: Abrams 47 Signed, dated and numbered Other impression of this rare print are in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Art Institute of Chicago, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., Williams College Museum of Art, and Baltimore Museum of Art.
Dan Flavin For K. Malevich I and 2, 1988 Aquatints Sheet size: 22 5/8 x 31 1/4 inches, each Printer: Aldo Crommelynck, New York Publisher: Pace Editions, New York Edition size: 18, plus proofs Each sheet is signed, titled, dated, and numbered
American minimalist artist Dan Flavin (1933–1996) is best known for his sculptural works featuring white and colored fluorescent light tubes. He also created several series of prints that relate directly to his interest in pure light and color. Flavin produced this pair of aquatints with master printer Aldo Crommelynck. This Belgian-born printer, who first apprenticed with Roger Lacourière in Paris, had a virtuosic command of traditional intaglio printmaking techniques. He made prints for Joan Miró, Fernand Leger, Alberto Giacometti, and with his brother Piero, made all of Picasso’s prints after 1961. In 1986, Crommelynk set up a workshop in New York, and began working with Jasper Johns, David Hockney, Howard Hodgkin, and Jim Dine.
The aquatint printing technique allows the artist to make pristine, large tonal surface areas. In these prints, Flavin achieved uniform, highly saturated fields of color and the results were enhanced by his use of textured, wove paper. The process was only deceptively straightforward, though — as Commelynck recalled, in trying to achieve the level of uniformity Flavin desired, 30 percent of the prints were discarded due to dust or other inconsistencies on the plates. As a result, this pair of prints is very rare.
As the title suggests, these prints serve as an homage to Kazimir Malevich, an icon of early Russian constructivism to whose work Flavin looked for inspiration throughout his artistic career. The angular forms and blindingly bright orange of the prints evoke Malevich’s geometric yet lyrical compositions. Flavin periodically referenced art historical or contemporary influences in the titles of his works, but the recurrence of Malevich in works ranging from neon sculptures in the 1960s to these prints from 1988 speaks to the significant fascination he had with this artist.
Dan Flavin in his New York studio with his son, circa 1966
Robert Rauschenberg Breakthrough I, 1964 Lithograph Sheet size: 41 1/2 x 29 7/8 inches Printer and Publisher: ULAE, West Islip, New York Edition: 20, plus proofs Catalogue Raisonné: ULAE 22 Signed, dated, and numbered
Robert Rauschenberg Breakthrough II, 1965 Lithograph Sheet size: 48 x 33 7/8 inches Printer and Publisher: ULAE, West Islip, New York Edition: 34, plus proofs Catalogue Raisonné: ULAE 23 Signed, numbered, and dated
Robert Rauschenberg (1925 -2008) first met Tatyana Grosman, the renowned founder of Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE) in the early 1960s when she was delivering lithographic stones to Jasper Johns. At the time, the two artists lived in the same loft building in downtown New York. In 1962, he made his first prints at ULAE and a life-long collaboration began. In 1964, Rauschenberg developed a new lithography technique. He would push lithographic tusche through commercial photo silkscreen matrixes to transfer images onto the stone. Rauschenberg rarely repeated images from his silkscreen paintings in his prints, but several appear in Breakthrough I and II. The horizontal element in the upper center of the composition is an image of Diego Velásquez’s mid-17th century masterpiece Venus and Cupid (Rokeby Venus). This same appropriated image is also featured in the paintings Crocus of 1962 and Barge made the following year. The artist also embraced the existing crack in the lithographic stone and incorporated it into the composition, obviously enjoying the chance occurrence. After completing Breakthrough I, Rauschenberg left for a tour with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. When he returned, he revisited the composition by adding three colors to create Breakthrough II. Each impression of Breakthrough II varies because the stone had begun to further deteriorate.
Robert Rauschenburg at ULAE, West Islip, New York, 1962
“For every artist,” said Rauschenberg, “there was a different shape to her (Tatyana Grosman’s) affection.” Maternal to some, deferential to others, she was somewhat exotic to all of them. But to Rauschenberg, she was the Cerberus he could whisk out of the studio (if only temporarily) as well as the uncanny eye who could always see what was wrong. She responded to his antic ways; he loved her for her fanatic sense of quality.”
Esther Sparke Universal Limited Art Editions, A History and Catalogue: The First Twenty-Five Years, 1989
Tatyana Grosman at Universal Limited Art Editions, West Islip, Long Island, 1968
Frank Stella Copper Series, 1970 Screenprints and lithographs Sheet size: 16 x 22 inches each Printer and Publisher: Gemini G.E.L., Los Angels Edition: 70, plus proofs Catalogue Raisonné: Axsom 39-45 Each signed, dated, and numbered The complete set of seven lithographs and screenprints
In 1960, Frank Stella (b. 1936) created his first paintings using shaped canvases in a series known as the Aluminum Paintings. Stella described his decision to create these notched canvases as one informed by the pattern of the paintings, which featured bands. Pioneering this approach to creating paintings with sculptural qualities—which he termed “maximalist” painting—Stella continued to experiment with shaped canvases and metallic materials throughout the 1960s, moving quickly from aluminum to copper. Creating compositions of bands in copper paint allowed Stella, as he stated in an interview, “to be able to have what I think were some of the virtues of abstract expressionism, but still have them under a kind of control – but not control for its own sake, a kind of conceptual painterly control.” Each of the Copper Paintings were named for historic mining towns in Colorado whose deposits have been depleted since their heyday in the early 20th century. In the 1970s Stella returned to the Copper Paintings to produce this series of lithographs and screenprints, which, like the paintings, feature irregular shapes, a muted yet metallic color palette, and rigid patterns. To mirror the effect of the shaped canvas in two dimensions, Stella produced non-rectangular compositions and printed them in alignment with the left-hand margin of the sheet. As a result, when seen together, the prints draw the eye to the irregularity of the forms. This complete set of prints thus acts as an homage to Stella’s inaugural exploration into his signature shaped canvases while also revealing the relationship between his printmaking and painting practices.
Frank Stella in his studio, New York, 1959
Louise Bourgeouis He Disappeared into Complete Silence, Plate 8, 1947 Engraving Sheet size: 10 x 7 inches Printer: The Artist at Atelier 17, New York Publisher: Gemor Press Edition: Projected edition of 54, edition not completed Catalogue Raisonné: Wye/Smith 36.3 Signed and titled
Louise Bourgeois He Disappeared into Complete Silence, Plate 1, 1947 Engraving Sheet size: 10 x 7 inches Printer: The Artist at Atelier 17, New York Publisher: Gemor Press Edition: Projected edition of 54, edition not completed Catalogue Raisonné: Wye/Smith 29.2 Signed and titled
Louise Bourgeois He Disappeared into Complete Silence, Plate 3, 1947 Engraving Sheet size: 10 x 7 inches Printer: The Artist at Atelier 17, New York Publisher: Gemor Press Edition: Projected edition of 54, edition not completed Catalogue Raisonné: Wye/Smith 31.3 Signed and titled
Louise Bourgeois He Disappeared into Complete Silence, Plate 4, 1947 Engraving Sheet size: 10 x 7 inches Printer: The Artist at Atelier 17, New York Publisher: Gemor Press Edition: Projected edition of 54, edition not completed Catalogue Raisonné: Wye/Smith 32.2 Signed and titled
Louise Bourgeois He Disappeared into Complete Silence, Plate 7, 1947 Engraving Sheet size: 10 x 7 inches Printer: The Artist at Atelier 17, New York Publisher: Gemor Press Edition size: Projected edition of 54, edition not completed Catalogue Raisonné: Wye/Smith 35 Signed and titled
Shorty after moving from Paris to New York in 1938, Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) began making prints. She primarily worked out of Stanley William Hayter’s famed Atelier 17, which had also relocated from Paris in 1940. There she learned both technical and stylistic methods from Hayter and the many artists whom he worked with at the time, including Joan Miró and Max Ernst, while pursuing her own artistic vision. As a result of these influences, Bourgeois’s early prints, especially those included in the portfolio, He Disappeared into Complete Silence, have a distinctly surrealist character. These prints also reveal the influence of the cityscape of New York City, evidenced by the towering vertical forms seen throughout the portfolio.
He Disappeared into Complete Silence was born out of Bourgeois’s desire to establish herself in the New York art scene. In early 1947 she decided she could accomplish this by publishing a portfolio of prints assembled from her output at Atelier 17. The nine prints included in the portfolio thus were not initially conceived as a set but rather reflect Bourgeois’s core aesthetic and conceptual concerns at the time. She described the subject of the portfolio as “the lowering of self esteem. It is a descent…a descent into depression. But I believe in resurrection in the morning. This is a withdrawal but it is temporary. You lose your self esteem, but you pull yourself up again. This is about survival…about the will to survive.”
Louise Bourgeois reworking an early copper plate for Chamfleurette (1994) at her home and studio on 20th Street, New York, 1995 Photograph: Mathais Johansson
He Disappeared into Complete Silence became Bourgeois’s primary focus throughout 1947. She agonized over the number of prints to include, potential titles, and methods for assembly. She even visited the Print Room at the Brooklyn Museum to study various methods for assembling print portfolios. She labored over these works, each image had multiple states and variants, most of these are now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. As a result of these studies, she determined she wanted to include text alongside the printed images. She composed a number of parables to accompany the prints over the course of the year, writing when inspiration struck. She was not precious about matching the parables to specific prints and later reflected that the pairings had been made somewhat hastily, recalling, “It was a real exorcism just to get all the prints out.”
Regardless of the forethought, or lack thereof, that determined their order and assembly, Bourgeois has articulated specific relationships between each of the nine prints in the series. For example, the first three plates are characterized by “architectural idealism,” especially related to the urban environment of New York, while the later plates have a darker mood and greater sense of realism. Bourgeois described some of the plates as more “open” than others, explaining of the portfolio as a whole: “There is the presence of both closed and transparent moods. It is the swing of moods from night to morning. The distance between them is very great and there is a danger of cracking.”
Louise Bourgeois at the printing press in her home and studio on 20th Street, New York, 1995 Photograph: Mathais Johansson
Upon assembling the prints as an unbound book, she sent copies to influential members of the New York art scene, including Clement Greenberg. She even placed ads and produced promotional postcards to market the publication and her artistic output as a whole. This effort was met with moderate success—for example, MoMA director Alfred Barr acquired a copy for the Museum’s collection—but the project was not especially beneficial nor lucrative. This was in part due to the fact Bourgeois gave so many copies away in an attempt to promote herself. For this reason, signed prints from the original printing are exceedingly rare. Complete sets are housed in the collections of MoMA, New York; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; The British Museum, London; Spencer Collection at The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations; and The Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio. Frustrated that the 1947 planned edition of 54 was never completed, she worked intermittently on reissuing the portfolio from 1984 through 2005 when the second edition was issued, a process complicated by the fact that the original printing plates could not be found and had to be remade.
Louise Bourgeois in the studio of her apartment at 142 East 18th Street, New York, circa 1946. Photograph: The Easton Foundation
Andy Warhol Flowers, 1970 Screenprint Sheet size: 36 x 36 inches Printer: Aetna Silkscreen Products, Inc., New York Publisher: Factory Additions, New York Edition: 250, plus proofs Catalogue Raisonné: F&S II.67 Signed and numbered, verso
Andy Warhol Flowers, 1970 Screenprint Sheet size: 36 x 36 inches Printer: Aetna Silkscreen Products, Inc., New York Publisher: Factory Additions, New York Edition: 250, plus proofs Catalogue Raisonné: F&S II.64 Signed and numbered, verso
Ellsworth Kelly Colored Paper Image XVI (Blue Yellow Red), 1976 Colored and pressed paper pulp Sheet size: 32 1/4 x 31 1/4 inches Printer: Ellsworth Kelly and Kenneth Tyler, fabricated at HMP Paper Mill, Woodstock, Connecticut Publisher: Tyler Graphics Ltd., Bedford, NY Edition: 24, plus proofs Catalogue Raisonné: Axsom 156 Signed and numbered
Brice Marden Ten Days, 1971-72 Etchings eith aquatint Size: Various, approximately 22 x 30 inches, each Printer: Kathan Brown Workshop, Oakland, California Publisher: Parasol Press, New York Edition: 30, plus proofs Each sheet is signed, dated, and numbered The complete set of eight etchings
Following a few one-off printing experiments in the 1960s, Ten Days is the first print portfolio Brice Marden (b. 1938) created. He began seriously exploring the medium of etching in 1971, producing two grid prints and a third untitled work that he and the publisher, Parasol Press in New York, deemed too muddy to release. Shortly thereafter he traveled to Oakland, California on the recommendation of Robert Feldman, Parasol Press’s owner, to further test the medium with Kathan Brown at her eponymous workshop. Marden brought the plate for the unsuccessful untitled work to Brown, who produced a much clearer impression with it. This would become the first print in the Ten Days portfolio, so named for the period of time over which the prints were produced. When he arrived at Brown’s studio, Marden did not set out to create a print series, hence the variation in composition seen across Ten Days. However, while they are not directly related, each of the prints in the portfolio features a grid. Although a common motif among minimalist artists at the time, Marden’s grids differed from those of Agnes Martin or Sol LeWitt. While Marden’s grids were mathematically precise, their lines were slightly imperfect, drawn by hand with small errors left uncorrected. In Marden’s words, the grid “came out of the shape of the paper or the shape [it] define[s]. There was always some sort of reference, very rarely arbitrary. But with the grids, I always thought drawing on the layers of graphite was the labor of the drawing. It’s possessing it, making it yours. You start out with this rectangle and you make it yours by marking it over and over.” Marden also printed his grids using methods that emphasized the hand behind the process. Although not representational, the compositions and colors that characterize the Ten Days prints evoke the context in which they were made: the Bay Area. Marden observed that despite being in an urban area, one could still see the sky everywhere in Oakland. The balance of light and dark in the prints’ grids coupled with Marden’s periodic use of silver, blue, and burnt umber ink speaks specifically to this observation. As the title intimates, Ten Days represents a burst of productivity and inspiration for Marden. Through his fruitful collaboration with Brown, he rapidly familiarized himself with the etching medium. For example, some of the prints in the series feature etching with aquatint, a technique Brown showed him when he expressed a desire for further clarity in his line prints. As a result of this successful experiment, Marden embarked on a period of intense printmaking over the next decade. This superlative portfolio thus represents a significant moment in the artist’s career and in the history of Kathan Brown Workshop which would later become Crown Point Press.
Brice Marden, circa 1975
“Of all the etchings in the world, this one has influenced me the most.” Brice Marden
Barnett Newman Untitled Etching 2, 1969 Etching with aquatint Sheet size: 31 x 22 1/2 inches Printer and Publisher: Universal Limited Art Editions, West Islip, New York Edition: 27, plus proofs Catalogue Raisonné: BNF 250 Signed, dated, and numbered
John McLaughlin Untitled, 1963 Lithograph Sheet size: 18 x 21 1/2 inches Printer and Publisher: Tamarind Lithography Workshop, Los Angeles Edition:19, plus proofs Catalogue Raisonné: Tamarind 815 Signed, dated, and numbered, verso
Vija Celmins Untitled Portfolio, 1975 Lithographs Sheet size: 16 3/8 x 20 1/8 inches, each Printer and Publisher: Cirrus Editions, Los Angeles Edition: 75, plus proofs Catalogue Reference: MMA6-MMA9 Each sheet is signed, dated, and numbered The complete set of four lithographs
Edward Rushca Eye, 1969 Lithograph Sheet size: 17 x 24 inches Printer and Publisher: Tamarind Lithography Workshop, Los Angeles Edition: 20, plus proofs Catalogue Raisonné: Tamarind 2529 and Engberg 12 Signed, dated, and numbered
Edward Ruscha Sin, 1969 Lithograph Sheet size: 14 x 15 inches Printer and Publisher: Tamarind Lithography Workshop, Los Angeles Edition: 20, plus proofs Catalogue Raisonné: Tamarind 2541 and Engberg 22 Signed, dated, and numbered
Edward Ruscha Zoo, 1969 Lithograph Sheet size: 9 5/8 x 11 3/4 inches Printer and Publisher: Tamarind Lithography Workshop, Los Angeles Edition: 20, plus proofs Catalogue Raisonné: Tamarind 2542 and Engberg 23 Signed, dated, and numbered
Kerry James Marshall Me, 2012 Linocut Printer: The Artist Publisher: PrintWorks Gallery, Chicago Edition: 5, plus proofs Signed, titled, dated, and numbered
Kerry James Marshall (b. 1955) is best known for his sumptuous paintings that co-opt the vocabulary of canonical Western painting to spotlight the African American experience. The breakthrough that led him to this subject matter came in 1980 when he painted A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of his Former Self, a modestly sized self-portrait. In Marshall’s words, “From the moment from that painting, everything else I did was trying to create this model in which the black subject would be central, not peripheral to, the kinds of paintings I wanted to make. The condition of blackness in the paintings would be more absolute, not provisional.” Marshall’s output as a printmaker is not extensive—he has produced only two other editioned self-portraits over his four-decade career. This linocut was created on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of PrintWorks, a beloved Chicago gallery that presented prints by artists primarily known as painters or sculptors. Marshall, who is based in Chicago, was among the 66 artists who submitted self-portraits for the anniversary exhibition.
PrintWorks specifically requested small works, which suited Marshall’s printmaking practice perfectly. Marshall typically makes some of his prints on a small scale since he prefers to produce them in his studio using a modest press with a small printing-bed that he acquired as a student. Unlike many artists who traditionally create prints in a large, professional studio working collaboratively with a team, when producing prints like Me, Marshall prefers to work alone. As a result, his print editions are often limited, making the images especially rare.
Intimately cropped and evocative of folk art through Marshall’s use of line and color, this print serves as a testament to Marshall’s formal artistic training and his influence across local and national arts communities. Like much of Marshall’s output, the print points to the longstanding influence of artists such as Charles White on both his bold style and his general commitment to figuration. White himself produced many figurative prints at a time when representational art was not in vogue, and he instilled in Marshall the sense that regardless of content, if an image is executed well, “the ideas will take care of themselves.” Thus, formal mastery aside, the title of the print, Me, stands in stark contrast to Marshall’s 1980 portrait, asserting a confidence that resonates with the message of his works in other media. Kerry James Marshall in his Chicago Studio, 2015
Donald Judd Untitled, 1961-78 Woodcut Sheet size: 13 3/4 x 20 3/4 inches Printer: Roy C. Judd Publisher: Edition der Galerie Heiner Friedrich, Munich Edition: 25, plus proofs Catalogue Raisonné: Schellman 26 Signed and numbered
In the 1960s Jasper Johns often lived in Edisto Beach, South Carolina, down the Atlantic coast from Cape Hatteras, the famous site of storms off North Carolina. The name alone induces predictable responses, so firmly is it associated with the hurricane season. As a geological entity it is a rather dangerous place to be, a place to look out for danger, and a signal. It represents several concepts at once: caution, indication, and signification. Presenting a composition titled Hatteras, Johns offers data that alludes to those ideas: an imprint of an arm that seems to have signaled to one side, thus creating a symbol or sign in the form of a circle; three bands labeled with the names of colors, although the bands themselves are not colored and it is not at all certain that the words indicate the colors correctly, even though we are prepared to accept their visual information; a vague shape that disconcertingly intrudes onto the circle (from other works by Johns of this time it may be identified as the imprint of a foot on sand) which Johns has circled, perhaps cautioning that it needs to be excised. Riva Castleman American Impressions Prints since Pollock, 1986 Director, Department of Prints and Illustrated Books Museum of Modern Art
Jasper Johns Hatteras, 1963 Lithograph Sheet size: 41 x 29 inches Printer and Publisher: ULAE, West Islip, New York Edition: 30, plus proofs Catalogue Raisonné: ULAE 15 Signed, dated, and numbered
Alexander Calder The Big I, 1944 Etching Sheet size: 11 1/4 x 16 inches Printer: Atelier 17, New York Publisher: The Artist and Wittenborn & Co., New York Edition: 30, plus proofs Signed, titled, and numbered
SUSAN SHEEHAN GALLERY 136 East 16th Street New York, NY 10003 Tel: 1-212 489-3331 info@susansheehangallery.com www.susansheehangallery.com