Mary Ryan Gallery ADAA The Art Show 2022 Catalogue

Cover: Emma Amos

Lena Toni Tina (detail), 1982-2008

Silkscreen, etching, handmade paper with pulp painting and handmade weaving by the artist with fabric and thread (triptych)

Image Dimensions: 47 x 31 1/2 inches (119.4 x 80 cm) each

Framed Dimensions: 51 3/8 x 35 1/4 inches (130.5 x 89.5 cm) each Triptych, overall: 51 3/8 x 109 3/4 inches (130.5 x 278.8 cm)

Variant edition of 8

ART DEALERS ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA 2022

ADAA THE ART SHOW

November 3–6, 2022

Booth C3

BENEFIT PREVIEW

Wednesday, November 2, 2022, 5–9 PM

PUBLIC HOURS

Thursday and Friday, November 3–4, 12–8 PM

Saturday, November 5, 12–7 PM Sunday, November 6, 12–5 PM

LOCATION

Park Avenue Armory Park Avenue at 67th Street New York City

The Art Show Benefit Preview supports the Henry Street Settlement in New York City. www.theartshow.org

GALLERY PUBLIC HOURS

Tuesday–Saturday 10 AM–6 PM

GALLERY LOCATION

Mary Ryan Gallery 515 West 26th Street New York City

A few notes on this catalogue:

All works are signed by the artist unless otherwise indicated.

Please note that all artwork is subject to prior sale, and prices may change according to availability.

Mary Ryan Gallery is pleased to participate in the 2022 ADAA Art Show. The gallery is presenting a selection of landmark prints and drawings by a range of twentieth century artists, including Emma Amos, Camille Billops, Fred Eversley, Helen Frankenthaler, Sam Gilliam, David Hockney, Maira Kalman, Alex Katz, Henri Matisse, Joan Mitchell, Robert Motherwell, Donald Sultan, and Andy Warhol, among others. The diversity of works on view—ranging from Fred Eversley’s experimental pigment print, to Frankenthaler’s tour-deforce woodcut, to Matisse’s sumptuous aquatints—demonstrates the gallery’s longstanding commitment to the innovative nature of printmaking.

You can find the gallery’s presentation at booth C3.

WORKS ON VIEW

EMMA AMOS

CAMILLE BILLOPS

FRED EVERSLEY

HELEN FRANKENTHALER

SAM GILLIAM DAVID HOCKNEY

MAIRA KALMAN

ALEX KATZ

ROBERT LONGO

HENRI MATISSE

JOAN MITCHELL

ROBERT MOTHERWELL

DONALD SULTAN ANDY WARHOL

EMMA AMOS

(b. 1937, Atlanta, GA – d. 2020, Bedford, NH)

Emma Amos’s printmaking oeuvre boasts a remarkable range in scale, medium, and technical innovation. Consistent throughout Amos’s wide ranging practice was her desire to break the rules of media, and, importantly, her choice of subject.

Lena Toni Tina depicts three influential women of Amos’s time: Lena Horne, Toni Morrison, and Tina Turner. Lena Horne was a singer and actress, as well as a civil rights activist who fought to perform for integrated audiences and collaborated with Eleanor Roosevelt and the NAACP. Toni Morrison was a celebrated award-winning author, similarly involved in civil rights politics, continuously fighting for racial and gender equality. She is pictured here wearing a Kente cloth sash which Amos hand-wove. Tina Turner is one of the best-selling recording artists of all time, and outspoken about the realities of racism in the music industry. Depicting these three powerful Black women as politically involved cultural icons together on one stage, Amos offers dimension to the flattened narratives around Black women who were both artists and activists.

This triptych, which Amos began in the early 1980s, marks an era in Amos’s career where she began including her own hand-woven fabrics in her works—an innovation that speaks to her boundary pushing practice as an artist. Amos handmade the paper used in this work at Dieu Donné in New York.

Lena Toni Tina, 1982-2008 Silkscreen, etching, handmade paper with pulp painting and handmade weaving by the artist with fabric and thread (triptych)

Image Dimensions: 47 x 31 1/2 inches (119.4 x 80 cm) each

Framed Dimensions: 51 3/8 x 35 1/4 inches (130.5 x 89.5 cm) each Triptych, overall: 51 3/8 x 109 3/4 inches (130.5 x 278.8 cm) Variant edition of 8

Published by the artist

Throughout her career, Emma Amos sought to reclaim power over the canon of images and narratives imposed on her and fellow artists of color. She frequently inserted her own likeness, or images of fellow Black women, in masterworks of the Western canon. In doing so, Amos resists the forces of objectification and subordination which often plague representations of Black women in art history.

Amos employs this cunning method of appropriation in Ms X, in which she replaces the White subject of John Singer Sargent’s Madame X (1883-84) with a Black woman. Amos manipulates the original painting in this monoprint with her usual vibrancy and trademark use of African textiles and her own handweaving. Departing from the somber palette Sargent used in his painting, Amos embraces vivacious crimsons, buttery yellows, and soothing greens to render the setting of her monoprint. She then applies these triumphant pigments through rapid, energetic marks, underlining Ms X’s dynamic contrapposto pose. As a result, Amos’s work emerges as a celebration of Black beauty, building on the reserved elegance of Madame X by infusing the composition with joy, dynamism, and vitality.

Amos handmade the paper used in this work at Dieu Donné in New York.

Ms X, 2008

Monoprint with paper pulp painting on collaged handmade paper, handmade weaving by the artist and African fabric collage

Paper Dimensions: 48 x 31 1/2 inches (121.9 x 80 cm)

Framed Dimensions: 51 3/8 x 35 1/4 inches (130.5 x 89.5 cm)

Variant edition of 10

Published by the artist

“I hope my work offers some clues to our problems and articulates a different perspective. I try to stand outside myself and exercise control over what I see.”

— Emma Amos in conversation with bell hooks, 1993. Published in the exhibition catalogue Emma Amos: Paintings and Prints 1982-1992, College of Wooster Art Museum, 1993

CAMILLE BILLOPS

(b. 1933, Los Angeles, CA – b. 2019, New York, NY)

“Among fantastic foliage, nonsensical writing, and whimsical creatures, a nude black woman lounges in an imaginary landscape. She is an odalisque, black and sexually available. She is a black Venus whose posture channels the Western traditions of reclining nudes by Rubens, Titian, and Manet. She is a Jezebel, deceptively submissive and dangerously erotic. Camille Billops’s character performs a matrix of mythic identities ascribed to women in the 1974 etching I am Black, I am Black, I am Dangerously Black. With typical tongue-in-cheek humor, Billops, a New York artist and filmmaker, used satire and whimsy to reject simplified notions of blackness and question the social and sexual expectations of black women.”

—Adrienne Childs, “Activism and the Shaping of Black Identities (1964-1988),” The Image of the Black in Western Art, 2014.

I am Black, I am Black, I am Dangerously Black, 1973 Etching and aquatint with chine collé

Paper Dimensions: 22 x 30 inches (55.9 x 76.2 cm)

Framed Dimensions: 27 1/4 x 31 3/4 inches (69.2 x 80.6 cm)

Edition of 20, 4th State

Published by the artist Printed at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop

Other impressions of this print can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, NY; and the Yale University Library, CT.

FRED EVERSLEY

(b. 1941, Brooklyn, NY)

Fred Eversley is known for approaching artmaking through the lens of a scientist, having trained as an engineer and supervised the construction of NASA laboratories in the 1960s. Inspired by energy in all forms, Eversley is primarily interested in creating kinetic, sculptural experiences out of otherwise non-kinetic forms. To achieve his final compositions, he uses high-gloss surfaces characteristic of the “finish fetish” movement. Popular in California, where Eversley is based, the “finish fetish” movement is a slick interpretation of the minimalist movement, which uses reflective finishes—resins, fiberglasses, and polyester films—to evoke the mechanized, dynamic surfaces of surfboard patinas and muscle cars.

Eversley translates his preoccupation with energy and kinetics into print form in his 2021 Untitled series. In these aqueous prints, Eversley distorts images of predictable patterns—grids and windows—allowing them to melt, bend, and drip with spontaneity and incalculability. Eversley renders these fluid compositions using glossy, laminated polyester film which reflects the surface, light, and movement. Despite the art world’s historical exclusion of Black artists of his generation, Eversley’s work is central to the story of the Light and Space movement in the 1960s and 1970s.

Untitled, 2021

Pigment print on reflective silver film 34 1/2 x 34 1/2 inches (87.6 x 87.6 cm)

Edition of 18

Published by Benefit Print Project

HELEN FRANKENTHALER

(b. 1928, New York, NY – d. 2011, Darien, CT)

Upon tackling her landmark Tales of Genji project, Helen Frankenthaler was faced with the challenge of adapting the technical realities of woodcuts to recreate her signature gestural style. Tales of Genji, a series of six woodcut prints named after an 11th century Japanese epic by Murasaki Shikibu (the world’s first woman novelist), shows how Frankenthaler was ultimately able to create “a woodcut with painterly resonance.”

Tales of Genji V was made using one stencil and 21 woodblocks, the grains of which trickle down the picture. In this woodcut, Frankenthaler adapts her trademark color staining from her painted œuvre—a technique in which she thins and layers pigments atop one another. The artist began with painting her ideas on pieces of wood that were carved by a ukiyo-e trained Japanese carver. The astonishing 49 colors are remarkable in terms of their brightness, tones, and watery semi-translucency. Tales of Genji is the pinnacle of Frankenthaler’s experimental investigation into woodcut printmaking.

“Frankenthaler’s body of woodcuts occupies a singular place both in her diverse œuvre and in the history of postwar art,” wrote John Yau in a 2011 essay. “Their evanescence and painterly effects are unrivaled. By achieving delicate and transitory states through her merging of color and wood, the artist transformed the underlying conception of ukiyo-e woodcuts and their attention to fleeting beauty into a contemporary abstract idiom.”

Tales of Genji V, 1998

Woodcut in 49 colors, stencil on rust, handmade paper

Paper Dimensions: 42 x 46 3/4 inches (106.7 x 118.7 cm)

Framed Dimensions: 46 11/16 x 51 1/2 inches (118.6 x 130.8 cm) Edition of 36

Published by Tyler Graphics

Other impressions of this print can be found in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, Sydney, Australia; Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University, IN; and the Walker Art Center, MN.

Credit

Helen Frankenthaler and Kenneth Tyler in the artist’s studio with a wood panel maquette, 1995

Kenneth Tyler Collection, National Gallery of Australia.

SAM GILLIAM

(b. 1933, Tupelo, MS – d. 2022, Washington, DC)

Emerging in the Washington D.C. scene of the mid 1960s, Sam Gilliam is known for elaborating upon and disrupting the ethos of Color School painting. Finding a middle ground between the gestural nature of his Abstract Expressionist contemporaries and fellow color field artists working in the Northeast, Gilliam developed a signature style of layered, gently thinned paint on canvas.

Gilliam began applying this avant-garde approach to his works on paper starting in the 1970s. His spirit of freedom and willingness to let chance play its part is reflected in the irregularly layered application of semi-transparent, organic patches in his works on paper, Anchor (1973 and A Fog in the Hollow (1974).

In Anchor, the artist defies the rigidity of the silkscreen medium with splatters and drips; his composition is dual, a central square sewn into the foreground of the silkscreen seemingly inverts the colors of its background. In A Fog in the Hollow, Gilliam repeats more regular, circular forms in energizing greens and blues with delicate exclamations of red and yellow. These works represent Gilliam’s early engagements on paper, an activity that became a significant part of his artistic practice. Bill Weege, the founder of Tandem Press, said of Gilliam’s printmaking process, “There is almost no way to reconstruct the creation of these prints, so many were the means.”

Anchor, 1973

Silkscreen with collage and sewn thread

Paper Dimensions: 23 x 30 inches (58.4 x 76.2 cm)

Framed Dimensions: 29 1/2 x 36 1/2 inches (74.9 x 92.7 cm)

Variant edition of 10

Published by the artist

A Fog in the Hollow, 1974 Silkscreen

Paper Dimensions: 24 x 36 inches (61 x 91.4 cm)

Framed Dimensions: 34 3/4 x 47 7/8 inches (88.3 x 121.6 cm)

Variant edition of 20

Published by the artist

Other impressions of this print can be found in the collections of the Akron Art Museum, OH; and Cincinnati Art Museum, OH.

“Only when making the work can I determine the many languages that form the planes on which it is to exist. Like abstract phrases the many intentions of the work (before an audience) passes through an intuitive sieve… The work was not planned, there are ploys, however, to the way it was laid out and then put together.”

— Sam Gilliam, 1973 Portrait of Sam Gilliam in his paintsplattered studio, Washington DC, 1980. Getty Images

Untitled (2007) exemplifies Sam Gilliam’s artistic experimentation in its unabashed deconstruction and reconstruction. Here, Gilliam cut apart his work and fastened it back together using both adhesive and thread, adding oil paint and hand coloring to the collage. While allowing the various fields of color gradients to overlap and interact, the filament also brings a sense of permanence and sturdy texture to the work on paper.

In 1972, Gilliam became the first Black artist to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale; in 2005, the Corcoran Gallery of Art organized a traveling retrospective of the artist’s work; and in 2018, Dia: Beacon presented a semi-permanent installation of Gilliam’s paintings.

Untitled, 2007

Collage with oil paint, hand coloring, and sewn thread on paper Paper Dimensions: 29 x 41 inches (73.7 x 104.1 cm)

Framed Dimensions: 34 x 45 3/4 inches (86.4 x 116.2 cm)

DAVID HOCKNEY

(b. 1937, Bradford, UK)

David Hockney is a prolific and experimental printmaker who began producing prints early in his career, and has since worked with etching, lithography, woodcut, and silkscreen, among other techniques. Contrejour in the French Style is an example of his technical innovation.

In 1973, Hockney relocated to Paris to work with the master printer Aldo Crommelynck. Crommelynck, who had closely collaborated with Pablo Picasso, introduced Hockney to a new method of color etching that allowed for greater spontaneity than the traditional approach in the creation of the color plate. In Contrejour in the French Style, Hockney puts to action the techniques he learned in France. The print, which is based on a 1974 painting of the same title (Museum Ludwig, Germany), follows the composition of the painting closely, but in this reinterpretation, Hockney depicts the interior scene with a variety of intaglio techniques to create variations of line and texture. The brightly lit window is one that Hockney saw upon visiting the Louvre earlier that year. “The first time I went, I saw this window with the blind pulled down and the formal garden beyond,” Hockney explained. “And I thought, oh it’s marvelous! Marvelous! This is a picture in itself.” The pointillated, speckled wallpaper is rendered with sugar-lift; the brilliant sunlight on the walls of the alcove with soft-ground etching; the golden blind and clipped lawn of the garden with aquatint; and the intricately crosshatched parquet floor with hard-ground etching.

Contrejour in the French Style, 1974 Etching and aquatint

Image Dimensions: 29 x 29 1/4 inches (73.7 x 74.3 cm)

Paper Dimensions: 39 1/8 x 36 1/4 inches (99.4 x 92.1 cm)

Framed Dimensions: 43 3/8 x 40 1/2 inches (110.2 x 102.9 cm) Edition of 75

Scottish Arts Council 167

Published by Petersburg Press, New York and London

Other impressions of this print belong in the collections of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, NY; and the National Gallery of Victoria, Australia.

MAIRA KALMAN

(b. 1949, Tel Aviv, Israel)

Maira Kalman’s irreverent style—at times humorous and at others bittersweet—captures the beauties and banalities of modern life. Best known for her whimsical yet probing imagery, her illustrations explore the human condition using objects, interiors and figures as foils to create poignant pictures of daily life. Training her sensitive eye on the inimitable women in her life, Kalman captures with quiet power the essence of women that have captured her imagination via the objects that fit between their hands. Mary Ryan Gallery represents Maira Kalman’s original artwork and is presenting its first exhibition of her work, Women Holding Things, which accompanies the publication of Kalman’s latest book. The exhibition is on view through November 12.

“What do women hold?” Kalman asks. “The home and the family. And the children and the food. The friendships. The work. The work of the world. And the work of being human. The memories. And the troubles. And the sorrows and the triumphs. And the love.”

Image Dimensions: 9 3/8 x 7 1/2 inches (23.8 x 19.1 cm)

Paper Dimensions: 15 x 10 7/8 inches (38.1 x 27.6 cm)

Woman Holding her Red Cap After Swimming Across the Hudson River, 2021 Gouache

Further demonstrating Kalman’s ability to infuse joy into the everyday are the still lives accompanying her Women Holding Things portraits. Exemplifying Kalman’s masterful still life practice is Paris Bed. Executed through a range of joyful pinks, yellows, and reds, Paris Bed activates and animates the sleepy interior of a classical Parisian chambre.

Paris Bed, 2022

Gouache

Image Dimensions: 9 1/2 x 7 5/16 inches (24.1 x 18.6 cm)

Framed Dimensions: 20 x 16 inches (50.8 x 40.6 cm)

ALEX KATZ

(b. 1927, Brooklyn, NY)

Alex Katz’s practices of painting and printmaking are deeply entwined, as many of his print projects are based on his paintings. The Black Dress project was first completed as a series of paintings executed on door panels, depicting women dressed in Breakfast-at-Tiffany’s-styled “little black dresses.” The subsequent set of prints—made up of nine, nearly life-sized figures, each wearing their own interpretations of “the little black dress”—is an ode to simplicity. All nine women, each a friend of the artist’s, casually lean back against a vivid yellow background, exuding an air of confident elegance. The prints are deeply saturated with close to 20 layers of ink to achieve a rich depth of color. Mary Ryan Gallery launched this series with a solo exhibition in 2015.

In response to this project, noted fashion designer Calvin Klein wrote: “Alex Katz’s Black Dress series is modern and wonderful. And, ironically, it has absolutely nothing to do with fashion. His portraits have such strong color fields and clean lines. And despite their apparent simplicity, they’re extremely expressive and perfectly capture the essence of his subjects. You can’t help but notice these women, these beautiful enigmas drawn in bold and certain strokes. You wonder who they are, how they live, what they feel, just exactly what they have going on.”

Alex Katz signing his Black Dress Series., c. 2015. Credit Widewalls.

Black Dress 9 (Christy), 2015

Silkscreen

Paper Dimensions: 80 x 30 inches (203.2 x 76.2 cm)

Framed Dimensions: 83 3/4 x 33 3/4 inches (212.7 x 85.7 cm)

Edition of 35

Published by Lococo Editions

Black Dress 5 (Ulla), 2015

Silkscreen

Paper Dimensions: 80 x 30 inches (203.2 x 76.2 cm)

Framed Dimensions: 83 3/4 x 33 3/4 inches (212.7 x 85.7 cm)

Edition of 35

Published by Lococo Editions

Katz uses outline drawings such as Clarice (often referred to as his “cartoons”) as pounce tracing patterns to transfer full size images onto canvas prior to painting. Clarice, rendered in red chalk and charcoal, is in effect a ghost of Katz’s precise and rigorous practice: the remnants of chalk left behind from Katz’s pouncing blur the initial lines of the drawing and creates an enigmatic painterly effect. A visual insight into the artist’s process, Clarice is neither template nor stencil, but a selfprompting guideline; a crucial step within Katz’s multi-layered process resulting in a stand-alone— and beautiful—object. “I don’t think that there’s a quality difference between a painting, a drawing, a graphic, or a stage set,” Katz explains.

Clarice, 1978

Charcoal and red chalk

Paper Dimensions: 47 1/2 x 33 3/4 inches (120.7 x 85.7 cm)

Framed Dimensions: 55 3/4 x 41 3/4 inches (141.6 x 106 cm)

ROBERT LONGO

(b. 1953, Brooklyn, NY)

Best known for his photorealistic drawings and works on paper that examine the role of politics and power, Robert Longo gained recognition in the 1980s for the multimedia body of work Men in the Cities, which depicts sharply dressed businessmen and women in contorted poses. Begun in 1982, the series of lithographs expands on charcoal drawings initially based on photographs.

Longo was inspired by a scene from Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1970 black-and-white film, The American Soldier, in which two gangsters appear to “dance” while reeling in pain after being shot in a gunfight. Interested in these theatrical, free-falling yet graceful movements, Longo dressed his friends in suits and photographed them on the rooftop of his New York studio, sometimes throwing tennis balls at them to encourage drastic movements of their limbs. Frozen in these moments, seemingly caught between agony and ecstasy, the final images are lyrical and emotive, despite the subjects’ sober, buttoned-up attire.

Joseph and Ellen from Men in the Cities, 1999

Pair of two lithographs

Paper Dimensions: 70 x 40 inches (177.8 x 101.6 cm) each

Framed Dimensions: 73 1/2 x 43 3/4 inches (186.7 x 111.1 cm) each Edition of 50

Published by Hamilton-Selway

HENRI MATISSE

(b. 1869, Le Cateau-Cambrésis, France – d. 1954, Nice, France)

One of the most important artists of the 20th century, Henri Matisse created over 800 prints throughout his distinguished career. A master of color in his paintings, the etchings, lithographs, woodcuts, and linocuts he produced prove how evocatively he could express himself in black and white—often paring his subjects down to a few fluid lines to suggest a figure or form. Matisse never ceased to experiment with new mediums: he made his first aquatint at the age of 62.

In these works on paper, the artist reduces the subject’s features to bold sweeps of black brushed directly onto the copper plate. His prints, Nadia. Visage aux yeux obliques (1948) and Nadia au sourire enjoué (1948) picture Nadia Sednaoui, a model whom Matisse was introduced to through his son-in-law, Georges Duthuit. These portraits demonstrate the prolific artist’s ability to convey the fine nuances of his sitter’s facial features—pursed lips, subtle cupid’s bows, flared eyelashes— through gentle, understated flicks of ink. Matisse made at least fifteen of these sumptuous aquatints capturing Nadia’s effortless profile throughout his career.

Nadia. Visage aux yeux obliques, 1948

Aquatint

Image Dimensions: 17 1/8 x 13 3/4 inches (43.5 x 34.9 cm)

Paper Dimensions: 26 1/8 x 19 3/4 inches (66.4 x 50.2 cm)

Framed Dimensions: 33 x 28 inches (83.8 x 71.1 cm)

Edition of 25

Duthuit 803

Other impressions of this print can be found in the collection of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, France; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Nadia au sourire enjoué, 1948 Aquatint

Image Dimensions: 13 1/2 x 11 inches (34.3 x 27.9 cm)

Paper Dimensions: 22 1/8 x 14 7/8 inches (56.2 x 37.8 cm)

Framed Dimensions: 28 x 24 3/8 inches (71.1 x 61.9 cm)

Edition of 25

Duthuit 792

Other impressions of this print can be found in the collections of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, France; and Musée Matisse, France.

Bédouine au grand voile, 1945 Aquatint

Image Dimensions: 12 1/2 x 9 7/8 inches (31.8 x 25.1 cm)

Paper Dimensions: 19 7/8 x 15 inches (50.5 x 38.1 cm)

Framed Dimensions: 26 x 22 5/8 inches (66 x 57.5 cm)

Edition of 25

Duthuit 775

Henri Matisse at his desk in his villa in Vence, c. 1950. (Photo by Graphic House/Archive Photos/Getty Images)

JOAN MITCHELL

(b. 1925, Chicago, IL – d. 1992, Paris, France)

Joan Mitchell was a leading figure of Abstract Expressionism and one of the youngest and only women members of ‘The Club,’ the East Eighth Street gathering place where prominent Abstract Expressionists met for weekly discussions in the 1950s. Mitchell’s printmaking activity occurred in spurts of productivity every decade or so. She began making prints in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In 1981 she traveled to master printer Ken Tyler’s studio in Bedford, NY following his insistence that her painterly vision—composed of fluid filaments of color and calligraphic landscapes—could be translated into lithographs. The Sides of a River series are an example of the work she produced during this time that pushed the technical limits of its medium.

Sides of a River I, 1981

Lithograph

Paper Dimensions: 42 1/2 x 32 1/2 inches (108 x 82.6 cm)

Framed Dimensions: 46 1/4 x 36 1/4 inches (117.5 x 92.1 cm) Edition of 70

Published by Tyler Graphics

Other impressions of this print can be found in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; the National Gallery of Australia; the Tate Modern, UK; and the Walker Art Center, MN.

ROBERT MOTHERWELL

(b. 1915, Aberdeen, WA – d. 1991, Provincetown, MA)

A pioneering Abstract Expressionist painter and printmaker, Robert Motherwell was one of the youngest artists of the New York School, which also included Philip Guston, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko.

Untitled presents four spontaneous lines brushed on a lush, vermilion red aquatint ground. Reminiscent of his “window” series of paintings from the late 1960s, the composition can be read as a nod to Henri Matisse’s window paintings from the 1920s. In any case, the characteristically brilliant electricity of Motherwell’s Untitled is underpinned by the free-handed nature of his lines, which were designed to reveal—much like an autograph—the inner sensibility of the artist.

Untitled (E.&B. 135), 1973

Aquatint and lift-ground etching

Image Dimensions: 23 3/4 x 35 3/8 inches (60.3 x 89.9 cm)

Paper Dimensions: 29 1/2 x 41 1/4 inches (74.9 x 104.8 cm)

Framed Dimensions: 32 5/8 x 44 1/2 inches (82.9 x 113 cm)

Edition of 50

Engberg & Banach 135

Published by the artist and Dain-Schiff Gallery, New York

DONALD SULTAN

(b. 1951, Asheville, NC)

Throughout his career, Sultan has revisited and reinvented the still life genre with images of lemons, poppies, playing cards, fruits, and flowers. Interested in contrast, he explores such dichotomies as beauty and roughness, nature and artificiality, realism and abstraction. He often uses rough or industrial materials such as tar, spackle, conte crayon, and charcoal to render basic geometric and organic elements with a formal minimalism.

White and Green Mimosa Leaves with Yellow Dec 14 2021 demonstrates Sultan’s careful negotiation of natural delicacy and manmade materials. Thomas Loughman describes Sultan’s drawing as an “aggressive and dense composition built up from strokes so rough, the surface seems almost gravelly… (Sultan uses) the blooms as a way to bore backward into the composition.”

White and Green Mimosa Leaves with Yellow Dec 14 2021, 2021

Conte crayon, charcoal, and graphite on paper

Paper Dimensions: 48 x 60 1/2 inches (121.9 x 153.7 cm)

Framed Dimensions: 58 3/4 x 70 inches (149.2 x 177.8 cm)

Mimosa June 2 2022, 2022

Charcoal, conte crayon, and graphite on paper

Image Dimensions: 48 x 60 1/2 inches (121.9 x 153.7 cm)

Framed Dimensions: 57 3/4 x 70 inches (146.7 x 177.8 cm)

ANDY WARHOL

(b. 1928, Pittsburgh, PA – d. 1987, New York, NY)

Andy Warhol’s pioneering silkscreen prints exemplify the accessibility of the midcentury movement. Turning away from his usual inspiration—commercial imagery found in mass media— Warhol’s Flowers find their inspiration in the June 1964 issue of Modern Photography magazine. Struck by executive editor Patricia Caulfield’s photograph of seven hibiscus flowers processed three times through different darkroom approaches, Warhol square-cropped Caulfield’s photograph before manipulating it so that only four of the original seven flowers fit. Warhol developed ten compositions using this motif, each with different color combinations. Unifying each variant in the series is Warhol’s consistent reduction of each flower to its most essential outline. In this lithograph, the artist focuses on soft colors that stand in contrast against the stark fluorescence of his grassy, graphic background. Finding himself in a legal suit with Caulfield in 1966 over this lithograph series, Warhol solely used his own photography for the remainder of his career.

Flowers, 1964

Lithograph

22 3/4 x 22 1/2 inches (57.8 x 57.2 cm)

Edition of 300

Published by Leo Castelli Gallery, New York

Feldman and Schellmann 11.6

Other variants of this print exist in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago,, IL; Broad Museum, CA; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Museum of Modern Art, NY; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Italy; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY; Stedelijk Museum, The Netherlands; and Whitney Museum of Art, NY; among others.

Andy Warhol, Philip Fagan and Gerard Malanga, New York, 1964. Photo by Ugo Mulas.

Andy Warhol in his studio, The Factory