ArtBohemia

Link: http://www.panorama.sk/go/mapa.asp?lang=sk&sv=2&mc=1802&mid=1#tm

Monografia o grafickom diele Albína Brunovského.
Slovenský a anglický text obsahuje kompletnú grafickú tvorbu z rokov 1960 až 1997, 645 reprodukovaných grafík vo farbe, množstvo zatiaľ nepublikovaných kresieb, kompletnú bibliografiu, zoznam grafík s údajmi o nákladoch, použitých grafických papieroch a tlačiaroch.
Objednat Albín Brunovský - Kompletné grafické dielo 1960 - 1997 lze zde: http://www.panorama.sk/go/mapa.asp?lang=sk&sv=2&mc=1802&mid=1#tm

Link: http://www.henri-matisse.net/models.html

by Hilary Spurling
Smithsonian Magazine, October 2005

In September 1940, less than three months after Paris had surrendered to Hitler’s armies, artist Henri Matisse, stranded in Nice on the Mediterranean coast, sent a moving letter to his younger son, Pierre, in New York City, explaining why he now needed a model to paint more than ever. France was humiliated and defeated. Like millions of other citizens driven from their homes by the German invaders, Matisse had fled south, taking no more than he could carry, living precariously from one day to the next, and ending up in Nice, where a nervous population expected imminent invasion by Fascist Italian troops.

Matisse was 70, sick, helpless, fearful for his family and friends, and appalled by what had happened to his country. All he could do was work, but he said he dreaded the daily confrontation with form and color on canvas so much that he couldn’t face it without the consoling human presence of the pretty young film extras he paid to pose for him. That’s what keeps me there, surrounded by my fruit and flowers which I get to grips with little by little, almost without noticing . . . and then I wait for the thunderbolt that is bound to follow.”

The French expression for thunderbolt—coup de foudre—means “love at first sight,” with all the undertones of violence and risk that were an intrinsic part of Matisse’s passion for painting. Anxiety and dread hung over his studio sessions. Toward the end of his life he told an interviewer that each canvas began as a flirtation and ended up as a rape. He said it was himself, not his subject—or rather it was the feelings his subject aroused in him—that had to be raped. The subject itself could be fruit, flowers or a fabric screen, as often as a human sitter. The young women who posed for him all learned to live and work in the atmosphere of almost unbearable tension generated by Matisse’s effort to express his emotions on canvas—an effort that drained all his strength.

Amélie
It was precisely his aura of desperation and danger that had first attracted Matisse’s wife, Amélie, who posed for or presided over every one of the great revolutionary canvases he produced in the first years of the 20th century. “As for me, I’m in my element when the house burns down,” she said coolly, in response to the howls of outrage provoked by her husband’s work. The riotous colors of his Woman in a Hat and Portrait of Madame Matisse, both painted in 1905, unnerved contemporaries. His notorious Blue Nude—a fiercely distorted picture of Amélie reclining in a sunlit glade beneath palm fronds—seemed grotesque and obscene when it was first shown in Paris in 1907. Even to Matisse’s faithful supporter, the young American critic Walter Pach, it felt like a punch between the eyes.

Matisse’s reputation as a Modernist leader was built on this sort of shock. So his followers saw it as an unforgivable betrayal when he moved from Paris to Nice ten years later and started painting good-looking young women in transparent tops and harem pants lounging on cushioned divans. “He’s given in, he’s calmed down, the public is on his side,” Matisse’s friend, politician and collector Marcel Sembat, wrote in disgust when the French state bought Odalisque in Red Culottes in 1922. Sembat’s view of Matisse at this stage as an essentially frivolous and decorative lightweight would set the tone of response to his work for decades to come. It was useless for Matisse himself to protest that his odalisque paintings of the 1920s and ’30s were a series of chromatic experiments, a long, grueling preparatory phase without which he could not have produced the astonishing cut-and-painted paper compositions constructed directly from color in the last decade of his life. The conventional verdict dismissed him, at the time and afterward, as a kind of 20th-century Fragonard, turning out sexy pictures for rich men’s Manhattan apartments and villas in the south of France.

Matisse himself knew perfectly well that the erotic charge in his work came from a passionate desire that overrode straightforward lust. It was painting itself that seduced him over and over again with each fresh canvas. In old age when he was too weak to stand all day at the easel, he feared going blind as well “because of having flirted for too long . . . with these enchanted colors.”

All his life Matisse drove his models as well as himself to the limits of endurance. He insisted it was better to risk ruining a painting than be satisfied with a surface likeness. It’s always necessary to force your whole being beyond this stage, he told his daughter, Marguerite, because it’s only then that you start to make discoveries, and tear yourself apart in the process.

Greta
Matisse paid with insomnia and panic attacks for his inability ever to be satisfied with what he could already do. The models were generally exhausted, sometimes mutinous, often apprehensive in the early years, when they had to come to terms not only with public ridicule but with their own private misgivings. Even the boldest, Matisse’s student Greta Moll, was horrified to find her features discolored and her limbs distorted on Matisse’s canvas. Amélie herself wept in distress when she saw the last painting he ever made of her, the grave and beautiful Portrait of Madame Matisse of 1913, with stony black eyes set in a delicate masklike gray face.

It took courage to pose for the extraordinary portraits Matisse made before World War I: The Girl with Green Eyes, The Algerian Girl, Girl in Green, Girl with Black Cat. The confident gaze and frank body language of these young women, painted almost a century ago, speak directly to us today, although contemporaries could see little in these portraits but meaningless jumbles of color outlined in ugly black brushstrokes.

Marguerite
The sitters included the painter’s then teenage daughter, Marguerite (always one of his favorite models), and two of his students. But the one he returned to most often was a professional model named Loulou Brouty, who spent a whole summer with the Matisses in a remote Mediterranean fishing village in 1909. The entire family liked Brouty. She amused the children (Marguerite, Jean and Pierre), was company for Amélie, and took swimming lessons from Henri between painting sessions. She was a typical Parisienne, earthy and tough, with dark hair, catlike features, a lithe body and skin so richly tanned by summer’s end that Matisse’s pupils nicknamed her “the Italian sunset.”

The pictures he painted of Brouty startled everyone, including the painter himself. Marcel Sembat and his wife bought one of them, a seated nude that made them scream out loud the first time they saw it. “We had come across a strange little canvas,” wrote Sembat, “something gripping, unheard of, frighteningly new: something that very nearly frightened its maker himself. On a harsh pink ground, flaming against dark blue shadows reminiscent of Chinese or Japanese masters, was the seated figure of a violet-colored woman. We stared at her, stupefied. . . all four of us.” Sembat said afterward that the picture only made sense once you stopped trying to read it as a conventional nude and responded instinctively to the sensations of dazzling light, heat and shade conveyed by its patchwork of colors. “You see, I wasn’t just trying to paint a woman,” Matisse explained. “I wanted to paint my overall impression of the south.”

Lorette
The story illustrates exactly what Matisse meant when he said he needed a model to humanize the ordeal of painting. In 1905 it was his wife who stared calmly out from conflagrations of blazing color on canvases that looked to the public and critics like the work of a wild beast. In 1909 it was the sturdy, self-possessed Brouty who pointed the way to a new visual language that would lead eventually to the somber, powerful, semiabstract works Matisse produced at the height of the carnage during WorldWarI. Toward the end of the war, when he had gone as far as it was possible to go at that stage toward abstraction, he turned to another professional model, this time an Italian called Lorette.

There was nothing in the least alluring about The Italian Woman, Matisse’s first painting of Lorette, with her hollowcheeks, sticklike bare arms and cheap, flimsy blouse. The picture’s geometrical construction of black lines and curves somehow emphasized the touching pathos of this sad and wary hired model, dressed in an outfit hopelessly unsuited to the freezing temperatures of a Paris winter. The Italian Woman was the last of a series of canvases in which Matissehad stripped painting down to its purest and most austere form. Now he was restless, and ready to throw off the constraints of abstraction. It was at this point that Lorette’s professional training as a model kicked in to liberate both of them. She adored dressing up, switching from waiflike innocence to sumptuous abandon, seeming to change mood, age, even size, as readily as she tried on costumes. Matisse painted her as a flirtatious Spanish señorita in a lace mantilla, a turbaned inhabitant of a Turkish harem and a Parisian cocotte.

He responded to Lorette’s lead as spontaneously as a dancer taking to the floor, painting her energetically from odd angles in strange perspectives, and improvising endlessly inventive rhythmic variations on the central theme of her strong features, heart-shaped face and black hair. Their relationship set a pattern for his future partnerships with models, each of which took on the obsessive intimacy of a love affair played out on canvas. Matisse painted Lorette nearly 50 times over a period of 12 months, breaking off only when he moved his workbase from Paris to a hotel in Nice in 1918.

It was over a year before he found anyone to take Lorette’s place in the provincial resort of Nice, where prospective models were so rare that painters had to wait in line for their services. Antoinette Arnoud was 19 years old, pale and slender, with worldly tastes and an inborn sense of French chic. Matisse responded to her love of style with a hat that he made himself from a cheap straw base with a white ostrich plume curling over the brim. Arnoud wore the new hat with a panache that made her simple white housecoat seem like a ball gown.

Daily painting sessions alternated with hours on end devoted to drawing. Matisse set himself the almost impossible task of retaining the concentrated simplicity and force of his work without sacrificing the sensual texture of fur, feathers, fabric or fluff. He returned over and over again to a lace collar, drawing it in minute detail (“each mesh, yes, almost each thread”) until he had got it by heart and could translate it at will with two swift lines “into an ornament, an arabesque, without losing the character of lace, and of that particular lace,” he once said. The same process was repeated with her embroidered tunic, hat, hair, hands and face. Energy pulses between the lines of the letters Matisse wrote home from the small hotel room in Nice where he lived, slept and worked, having finally succeeded in narrowing his existence down to painting alone. “I’m the hermit of the Promenade des Anglais,” he announced with pride to his wife.

For the public, the quality of Matisse’s pictures at this stage was more or less completely obscured by the lifestyle they depict. French Window at Nice shows Arnoud, with bare legs, long loose hair and scarlet harem pants, seated beside the bed in the painter’s hotel room. People drew the obvious (but as it now turns out, erroneous) conclusion from the fact that Matisse posed the young girls who sat for him in the 1920s amid all the trappings of an affair, endlessly painting one or another of them wearing a slip at the dressing table, half-dressed in a wrapper over a pot of coffee or newly emerged from the bath.

The painter himself said that these Nice interiors are suffused with sublimated sexual pleasure. He claimed that the intensity of his feelings discharged itself through the colors and forms orchestrated on canvas around the models’ bodies, and the evidence suggests this was true. In all the weekly, sometimes daily letters he exchanged during these years with his wife and children, there is nothing to suggest tension on this score, neither defensiveness on his part nor resentment on theirs. Matisse and his wife treated the succession of models in Nice as adoptive daughters. No one who knew him well at the time ever doubted that these women were working partners, not sexual conquests.

Sex, in fact, was one of the things Matisse grumbled about having to do without in Nice. So far as modeling went, he applied the same rules to human beings as to a fish dinner. “I’ve never sampled anything edible that had served me as a model . . . ,” he explained, describing a plate of oysters brought for him to paint from a nearby café by a waiter, who later fetched them back to serve to his customers at midday. Matisse said it never occurred to him to tuck into his oysters for lunch: “It was others who ate them. Posing had made them different for me from their equivalents on a restaurant table.”

Henriette
The same seems to have been true of the models for his odalisque paintings of the 1920s. The first of these odalisques—sprawling in “harem costumes” on improvised divans—was Antoinette Arnoud’s successor, Henriette Darricarrère, who was working as an extra when Matisse spotted her in the film studios in Nice. He liked her natural dignity, the graceful way her head sat on her neck and, above all, the fact that her body caught the light like a sculpture. Aballet dancer and musician, Henriette became part of the family in the seven years she worked for Matisse. His wife grew especially fond of her, and he himself taught her to paint.

Matisse said it was essential to start by finding the pose that made any new model feel most comfortable. Henriette’s specialty was discovered by accident after a carnival party attended by Matisse and his daughter, dressed respectively as an Arab potentate and a beauty from the harem. Marguerite Matisse, Lorette, even Antoinette Arnoud, all tried on turbans and embroidered Moroccan tops, but it was Henriette, always modest, even prim, in her street clothes, who wore the filmy blouses and low-slung pants without inhibition, becoming at once luxuriant, sensual and calmly authoritative.

The pictorial possibilities she opened up for Matisse were enhanced by her exceptional sensitivity and stamina. He saw the work they produced together as an increasingly complex orchestration of colored light and mass, culminating in his Decorative Figure on an Ornamental Ground, which was almost as incomprehensible in 1926 as the BlueNude had been nearly 20 years earlier. The painting is a riot of exuberant trompe l’oeil wallpaper, flowers, fruit and patterned textiles, all pinned firmly in place by the pale upright figure of Henriette. She looked as impersonal and unyielding as a side of packaged butcher’s meat to Matisse’s friend, the painter Jules Flandrin, who was baffled and exhilarated in equal measure: “I can’t begin to convey the brilliantly successful contrast between the wallpaper flowers and the woman so skillfully mishandled,” he wrote to a friend. Soon after the completion of Decorative Figure, Henriette left to get married.

Lydia
Over the next eight years Matisse gradually abandoned easel painting, experimenting with prints, inventing cut-paper techniques and working on large-scale decorative murals, until the advent of a new model in 1935. She was a Russian named Lydia Delectorskaya, and by her own account she could hardly have been more different from the dark-eyed, black-haired, olive-skinned southern types he had preferred until now. Lydia, who came from Siberia, had long golden hair, blue eyes, white skin and finely cut features: the looks of an ice princess, as Matisse said himself.

Born in 1910, the only child of a doctor (whom she adored), Lydia had been orphaned and forced to flee Russia in the turmoil after the 1917 revolution, ending up a penniless exile in Nice. She was surviving precariously on nothing but her pride, her resourcefulness and her unbudgeable will when, in 1932, she found temporary work, first as a studio assistant, then as a domestic, with Matisse and his wife. It was not for another three years that the painter asked her to sit for him. Lydia was 25, Matisse was 65. She thought of him as a kindly and polite old gentleman because (unlike previous artists, who had taught her to detest modeling) he never pawed at her or tried to take off her clothes. “Gradually I began to adapt and feel less ‘shackled,’ ” she wrote, “...in the end, I even began to take an interest in his work.”

The first paintings Matisse made of Lydia combined the phenomenal virtuosity that had cost him so many years to perfect with his original instinctive ability to compose spontaneously in color. Matisse’s son Pierre told his father that he had renewed himself as a painter with Pink Nude, for which Lydia modeled over a period of six months in 1935.

Lydia, the "ice princess"
That autumn Lydia posed for a drawing of a nymph being wooed by a satyr, a theme Matisse had first painted some 30 years earlier, when, as she said herself, his handling was far more brutal than in the variation he did of her. “With me, he knew how to be gentle and seductive. He was charming, and so touching. He knew how to tame me.” Matisse said he came eventually to know her face and body by heart, like the alphabet. The collaboration they established together gave Lydia a new sense of power and purpose. As she added the duties of studio manager to those of principal model, painting became the central core of her life as it was of Matisse’s.

It was their working alliance, rather than any question of adultery, that precipitated a crisis in Matisse’s marriage. Faced with an ultimatum from Amélie (“It’s me or her”), Matisse chose his wife and sacked Lydia, but it was too late. Amélie, still furious over what she viewed as his betrayal, left her husband early in 1939. Lydia, returning briefly to help out in the studio in Paris, found herself trapped with Matisse in a stream of people fleeing invasion after the declaration of war with Germany. “A decision had to be made there,” she said, “as to whether or not he was to take me with him.” Matisse drew Lydia in her traveling hood at the start of the long journey they were about to make together through war-torn France. She remained at his side for the rest of his life.

Visitors to Matisse’s studio never tired of speculating about the role of the beautiful, enigmatic secretary known as “Mme Lydia,” but few doubted that his survival depended on her, both as a man and an artist. In his closing decade in the face of exhaustion and failing health, Lydia made it possible for him to produce his final masterpieces—the chapel at Vence and the colored paper cutouts now generally agreed to be among the greatest inventions of the 20th century. Matisse died on November 3, 1954. He was 84. The day before, Lydia had come to his bedside with her newly washed hair wound in a towel turban, accentuating the classical severity and purity of the profile Matisse had so often drawn and painted. He sketched her with a ballpoint pen, holding the last drawing he ever made out at arm’s length to assess its quality before pronouncing gravely, “It will do.”

Link: http://www.artaujourdhui.info/article/5633/%20%3Cbr%3Etarget=

FROM 16 APRIL TO 13 SEPTEMBER 2008 Opening on Tuesday 15 April from 6 to 9 pm

From Abstract painting to Realist works, a very colorful itinerary that crosses all of the XXth century

MUSÉE DE LA POSTE 34 boulevard de Vaugirard – 75015 PARIS
INFORMATION: Tel : 01 42 79 24 24 Website : www.museedelaposte.fr
OPENING HOURS: Open every day, except for Sundays and holidays, from 10 AM to 6 PM.
RATES: Normal rate 6.50 €, reduced rate: 5 €. Free for those under 13.
CURATOR: Josette Rasle
SCENOGRAPHY: Patrick Bleau
PRESS CONTACT: Marie-Anne Teulat Tél : 01 42 79 23 29 E-mail : marie-anne.teulat@laposte.fr

This large retrospective dedicated to Charles Lapicque, with 85 paintings, most of them emblematic, and 60 drawings from different museums (Pompidou Centre, museum of Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, the museums of Dijon and Besançon), is the first in the last 40 years. It shows that the artist, attached to the New School of Paris, is one of the most original of the XXth century and an innovator, in particular in his use of color and space. His work echoes those of medieval, baroque and modern painting

The butcher's wife and the transformers

Born in 1898, Charles Lapicque died in 1988. Throughout his long career his work was both disconcerting and seductive, from the most conventional painting to works that either Mondrian or Jacques Villon would have gladly claimed as their own. He painted, almost simultaneously, transformers, automobiles, a butcher's wife, a roast, landscapes, still lives, or even sails of boats. This surprising variety, expressed in a seductive palette that is served by perfect technical control, somehow reflects his life: after being an employee of the electric distribution in Normandy, he took up his studies when the crash of 1929 hit France and presented his doctorate, with a thesis on L'Optique de l'œil et la vision des couleurs (The eye's optic and the vision of color). Lapicque was not only an artist but a champion tennis-man as well and was included on the list of the Just by the State of Israel for his activity during W W II.

With Lipchitz's support

Charles Lapicque started his first paintings before 1920. He repeated though that he had only started painting in 1939, since he considered his work prior to that time not important. Yet it is interesting for various reasons, for it proved that the artist as a young man was immediately in phase with his time and that early on he explored, in his own manner and with talent, the aesthetic research of the moment, and then placed it in his works. The fact they are quite mismatched disconcerts us and yet we appreciate their boldness. Lapicque, while slipping with ease from one manner to another, did not dissipate his talent but rather proved to be a born researcher, who would remain avid for discoveries all of his life. The sculptor Jacques Lipchitz noted this right away and recommended him to Jeanne Bucher. The gallery owner organized his first exhibition in 1929.

Experiences with color

1939 remained nevertheless the year in which his past research on the grading of colors in space helped him reach his personal success. Lapicque conquered his personality of a creator by assimilating all the contributions from his predecessors - we can mention among his influences glass blowers, earthenware and tapestry makers, as well as Cézanne, the Cubists, Dufy, whom he admired for his «limpidity, the unusual transparency of the world » and of course Matisse and Delaunay. Lapicque himself participated in the renewal of Abstract art, and became in turn a master for his peers. After the war, Lapicque also produced landscapes, series on history, on race tracks, on the countries he visited, from Italy to the Algerian desert, up to a rococo ensemble on chocolates and sugared almonds, thus proving the diversity of his art and of his motifs of inspiration…

In 2009, three museums will associate to co-produce an exhibition on Charles Lapicque, bringing together oil paintings, acrylics, drawings, tapestries and sculptures. The exhibition will show at the Musée de l'Hospice St Roch in Issoudun from 13 March to 31 May 2009, at the Musée Unterlinden in Colmar from 15 June to 8 November 2009, and at the Musée de l'Abbaye Sainte-Croix at Sables d'Olonne from 15 December 2009 to 15 March 2010. To coincide with these events a richly illustrated monograph will be published and will aim at demonstrating the innovating character of the artist's work.

dvě jeho itografie najdete i na stránkách internetové aukční galerie ArtBohemia: http://www.artbohemia.cz/scripts/galerie.php?author=lapicque&hnuti=0&rok_od=&rok_do=&min_cena=&orderby=1&orderdirection=ASC&search=+vybrat&nazev=&zanr=0&technika=&max_cena=

Charles Sorlier (1921-1990)
Returning to Paris after his sojourn in America during World War II, Chagall met a young wizard of lithographic techniques when visiting the famous Parisian printer Mourlot: Charles Sorlier. Sorlier was soon to become to head of the lithography department at Mourlot's. Artists such as Miro, Léger, Picasso and Matisse took their litho stones to Mourlot's to have them printed. Sorlier compiled a reliable 'catalogue raisonné' for many of these artists. Sometimes he transferred their art onto litho stones, a job at which he was expert.
It was Sorlier who never ceased to encourage Chagall to create colour lithographs. The two were friends and close collaborators for the rest of Chagall's life. Chagall was so pleased with Sorlier's work that he sometimes appended his own signature to it, as with the poster-size colour lithographs of the twelve stained-glass windows for the synagogue in the Hadassah university medical centre in Jerusalem.
http://www.chagall.nl/www/sorlieren.html

artprice: last works at auction: (updated: 01-mars-2007)
Angel with Candlestick, after Marc Chagall
The Tribe of Levi, after Marc Chagall
Romeo and Juliet, after Marc Chagall
Carmen, after Marc Chagall
The Magic Flute, after Marc Chagall
Sirene with Pine, after Marc Chagall
Couple in Mimosa, after Marc Chagall
Sunset, after Marc Chagall
The Tribe of Asher, after Marc Chagall
The Tribe of Zebulon, after Marc Chagall
The Tribe of Levi, after Marc Chagall
Romeo and Juliet, after Marc Chagall
Saint Jean Cap Ferrat, after Marc Chagall
Le pain et le vin, d'après une peinture de B.Buffet, affiche
Toréador, d'après une peinture de B.Buffet
Roses et mimosas, after Marc Chagall
Sirene with Poet, after Marc Chagall
Romeo and Juliet, after Marc Chagall
Reitturnier in Ascot, nach Raoul Dufy
La Révolution (1933-1950), nach Marc Chagall
The Angel of Judgement, after Marc Chagall
Carmen, after Marc Chagall
The Tribe of Dan, from Jerusalem Windows, after Marc Chagall
The Tribe of Simeon, from Jerusalem Windows, after Marc Chagall
Couple with Bouquet, after Marc Chagall
Roméo et Juliette, after Marc Chagall
Reiter im Park, nach Raoul Dufy
Roses and Mimosas, after Marc Chagall
The Tribe of Zebulun, after Marc Chagall
Romeo and Juliet, after Marc Chagall
The Revolution, after Marc Chagall
http://www.artistsearch.com/artists/SORLIER_CHARLES.htm

Picasso, Pablo: Picasso, LE GOUT DU BONHEUR, A Suite of Happy Playful, and Erotic Drawings ; New York, Harry N. Abrams, Inc. F/VF box has some rubbings, Introduction by Jean Marcenac, This Album comprises three of Picasso's studio sketchbooks dated respectively by the artist according to day, month, and year, as follows, 25-4-64 - 20-5-64, 15-9-64 - 6-10-64, 8-10-64 - 9-10-64. This is the sole edition of recreations that will ever be made of there hitherto unpublished drawings and three publishers have collaborated in its creation. Harry N, Abrams, Inc., New York, Editions cercle d'Art, Paris, Carl Schunemann Verlag, Bremen. The combined edition has been limited to 1998 Albums for the entire world, and these have been divided into three parallel but seperate editions, one for each of the participating publishers,and each separate edition has been numbered from 1 to 666. The re-creations in this Album were printed in the fall of 1970 in the studio of Guenther Dietz, Munich, under the personal supervision of Pablo Picasso. They are in the exact size of the original drawings, and were produced through a unique process that employs the same type of materials as used by the artist, instead of the usual printing inks. Grease crayon, lithographic tusche, lead pencil, and charcoal are among the artist's materials used in making the re-creations in this Album. The paper is handmade and is pure rag Velin d'Arches.

In the 1600s Rembrandt created his famed etchings, noted world-wide for their delicacy of tone and intricacy of detail. In Rembrandt's later years these etching were in great demand by collectors. At Rembrandt's death in 1669, many of his plates had been cancelled or destroyed. However, there remained an important body of approximately 100 plates which were still capable of producing fine quality impressions. For nearly a hundred years (1669-1767) the whereabouts of the bulk of his plates seemed shrouded in mystery. Over time (1785-1906) some of Rembrandt's plates began to pass through various hands, beginning with C.H.Watelet, then Pierre Francois Basan, Auguste Jean, afterward in 1906 to Alvin Beaumont together with Michel Bernard.
By the 1800's, Rembrandt's surviving plates were very worn and flat. Amand-Durand (1831-1905), a noted engraver of that time, decided to remedy this with his own skill. He researched and studied those pieces available in collections, and then spent the major part of his life exactly duplicating Rembrandt's images onto copper plates, achieving great quality through his own technical abilities. He published a complete set of very fine reproductions of all the Rembrandt etchings.
These recreations of Rembrandt's work were called Amand-Durand's after Rembrandt. Their incredible clarity and exactness was also achieved because Amand-Durand used as his guide, not the worn and flat plates, but the first and second state etchings of the master's original works.
References indicate that Armand-Durand's skill was already known to experts of the 19th and early 20th centuries. George Duplessis, Conservator of the cabinet de Estampes in 1855, so appreciated the genius of Durand that he had his work published in books which now belong to the Bibliotheque Nationale in France. It was Amand-Durand who was used as master etcher in such books by Duplessis as Histoire del la Gravure, an anthology of European engravings so valuable that it is kept under lock and key in most noted art libraries. Thus, what we get is a master duplicating a master 200 years later.
Durand, like Rembrandt often did, sold his etchings for book illustrations until his death in 1905. At that time they were purchased by the Dominique Vincent family, who continued to sell them as book engravings to Bibliotheque Nationale and the Louvre Museum as wonderful and exact duplications of the original states of Rembrandt's etchings. Sporadically, though, they would also sell them to interested private parties and dealers, and it was this that caused whispered storied to spread among the entire community!
It is said among art circles, although quietly, that in the early 1900s a number of these Amand-Durand after Rembrandt etchings did find their way into famous hands and collections much to the dismay of many. This was the rumour floating around until a certain discovery in the early 20th century. In early spring of 1985, a noted American art dealer doing research in Europe on the availability of Rembrandt etchings, stumbled upon some so questionably perfect that he decided to dig even further. Intense study revealed that these were, in fact the noted Amand-Durand etchings that had been alluded to for so many years!
After of determination he located the French family Dominique Vincent who had been completely unaware of the flurry they were inadvertently creating with the prints.
Both the Louvre and the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris had been purchasing these etchings to enable the French to see the incredible story behind them. The American dealer, in turn, purchased all 348 original copper plates so the American public could also see this incredible story… of how a noted craftsman through his skill and dedication to the great master Rembrandt, created work of such quality that repercussions were felt throughout the entire art community.
347 Plates exist of which each subject is individually hand pulled. The Reference Nos. Refer to the Bartsch Catalog and the Dover Catalog of "The Complete Etchings of Rembrandt."

The modern history of posters began with Jules Cheret, who in the 1850's revolutionized the lithography printing technique by adding color. The poster as an advertising vehicle quickly spread from France throughout Europe and to the US. The drab broadsides with an overabundance of type were replaced with bright colors and often scantily clad women inviting the viewer to go to the Folies Bergere, to buy Absinthe Robette, or to shop for clothing, perfume or biscuits. It quickly became known as the art of the streets, and collecting was so widespread in the 1890's that one could buy a Toulouse-Lautrec poster in Paris or Chicago.
In the United States, poster advertising exploded in the 1890's with Harper's and other popular magazines issuing monthly posters. Circuses such as Ringling Brothers or Barnum & Bailey preceded their arrival in towns all across the country with posters plastered on every vacant wall. World Wars I and II led to the use of the poster as a propaganda tool; posters encouraged citizens to enlist, conserve, produce and buy bonds.
Posters as advertising messages declined after WWII with the use of color in periodicals and television. Posters were truly ephemeral pieces of paper. They were pasted over, torn down and discarded when the event or campaign ended. It is a testament to their beauty, interest and cultural value that some few survived. Throughout the periods of poster production collectors obtained the latest designs by bribing the workers pasting up the posters, tearing the posters off a wall, or by purchasing them from the publisher or specialty shops.
Collecting as a passion or hobby has gone through several periods of intense interest. During the "poster craze" of the 1890's large private collections were assembled in Europe and the US. The patriotism of the two World Wars led to collecting once again. Today, people all over the world are not only collecting vintage posters but are for the first time displaying them in their homes and offices. Corporations are buying back posters they once discarded. Museums are discovering posters in their dusty storerooms and putting them on display. These activities and the last 30 years of ever-increasing interest confirm that posters are gaining recognition not only as wonderful decorative objects, but also as important artistic and cultural artifacts.
For 30 years Poster Plus has carried a wide variety of Original Vintage Posters. From 1890’s European advertising to American Travel Posters. From WPA, World War Propaganda, and Circus Posters to Artist exhibitions. We invite you to visit our gallery or browse our extensive collection online.
Poster Conservation
Poster Plus began doing poster conservation work in 1975 for our own vintage inventory, and since 1989 our services have been widely used by collectors, galleries and museums. Our work is represented in the collections of The Chicago Historical Society, The Polish Museum of America, The Library of Congress and important private collections.
The backing of posters with fabric dates back to 19th century France, where posters were occasionally glued to linen for reinforcement. This provided some protection, but with the passage of time the paper continued to become brittle and was frequently torn by stress. Modern backing techniques have eliminated this problem by using an acid free paper between the poster and the fabric. We use a #12 weight cotton artist’s canvas as our backing fabric. The adhesive used is wheat paste treated to inhibit mold growth.
Damaged
Restored
Why fabric-back a poster? The principal reason is to provide support for the paper.
It also enables the conservator to flatten the folds and to more easily make repairs. It is our experience that japan paper backing alone (common in parts of Europe and among museum conservators) does not offer sufficient support and over time folds may reappear and stress the poster. Fabric backing also eliminates the waviness that can occur when the poster is framed.
Reversibility is a concept that is important in all conservation work, because today’s curators and collectors are only temporary custodians of a cultural object (the poster) that will have continuing and timeless interest for future collectors. We strive to make certain that materials and techniques that are applied to the poster are not harmful over time and are reversible to bring it back to the state in which we found it.
Restoration can dramatically improve the appearance of a poster. Damage caused by clear adhesive tape, residual stains, water marks and dirt can be easily repaired; combining this with the replacement of lost paper can bring the poster back to virtually its original state.

Revue artistique et littèraire. Paraissant quatre fois par an. ; Paris. Edition Verve. 1937-1960. 4to, 38 issues in 26 volumes. Publisher's boards or wrappers. A complete run of one of France's most famous art periodicals. Verve is renowned for the quality of its production (the lithography by Mourlot) and the breadth of subject matter, with contributions by Gide, Malraux,
Tagore, Vollard, Sartre, Joyce, Hemingway, Lorca, etc. No. 1 December 1937 Cover designed by Matisse from gouache decoupee. Lithographs by Leger, Miro, Rattner and Bores. No. 2 Spring 1938 (March-June) Cover designed by Braque. Lithographs by Kandinsky (2) and Masson (2). No. 3 June 1938 Cover designed by Bonnard. Lithographs by Chagall, Miró, Rattner and Klee. No. 4 January-March 1939 Cover designed by Rouault. Lithographs by Matisse and Derain. Nos. 5-6 July-October 1939 Cover designed by Maillol. Lithographs by Guys, Braque, Rouault, Derain, Leger, Bonnard (2), Matisse (2), and Klee. No. 7 April-July 1940 Les TrŹs Riches Heures du Duc de Berry Calendar. No. 8 September-November 1940 Cover designed by Matisse from gouache decoupèe. Lithograph by Bonnard. No. 9 October 1943 Les Fouquet de la BibliothŹque Nationale. No. 10 October 1943 Les Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry. Images de la vie de Jesus. No. 11 March 1945 Les Fouquet de Chantilly: Les Heures d'Etienne Chevalier. Vie de Jesus. No. 12 March 1945 Les Fouquet de Chantilly: Les Heures d'Etienne Chevalier. La Vierge et les Saints. No. 13 November 1945 'De la Couleur.' Special issue devoted to Matisse during the years 1941-1945: cover, title-page and frontispiece designed by Matisse from gouache decoupee. Nos. 14-15 February 1946 Jean Bourdichon. Les Heures d'Anne de Bretagne. No. 16 November 1946 Rene d'Anjou. Traitè de la Forme et Devis d'un Tournoi. Nos. 17-18 August 1947 'Couleur de Bonnard.' Special issue devoted to Bonnard during the years 1932-1947: cover and frontispiece designed by Bonnard. Nos. 19-20 April 1948 'Couleur de Picasso.' Special issue devoted to Picasso, cover specially designed by Picasso. Nos. 21-22 October 1948 'Vence 1944-48.' Special issue devoted to Matisse and his work done at Vence between 1944-48: cover and frontispiece designed by Matisse from gouache decoupee, and 40 designs specially made for this issue. No. 23 April 1949 Le Livre du Coeur d'Amour ƒpris du Roi Renè. Cover designed by Matisse. No. 24 April 1950 Contes de Boccace. Peintures du Manuscrit des Ducs de Bourgogne. With cover design and aquatints specially made for this issue by Chagall. Nos. 25-26 October 1951 'Picasso at Vallauris.' Special issue devoted to Picasso and his work done at Vallauris between 1949-51: cover and frontispiece specially designed for this issue by Picasso. Nos. 27-28 December 1952/January 1953 Cover design and lithograph frontispiece by Braque. Lithographs by Braque, Matisse, Laurens, Giacometti, Masson, Leger, Miro, Bores (2), Gromaire (2), and Chagall (Visions de Paris). The original lithographs in this issue are: Miro/1 double-page colour lithograph, Chagall/Series of 8 lithographs, 'Visions de Paris,' 3 in colour, 5 in black and white. Nos. 29-30 September 1954 'Picasso and the Human Comedy. A Suite of 180 Drawings by Picasso (Suite de 180 Dessins de Picasso)' Special issue devoted to Picasso and his work done at Vallauris between 1953-54: cover specially designed for this issue by Picasso. Contains 14 colour plates. Nos. 31-32 September 1955 'The Intimate Sketchbooks of G. Braque (Carnets Intimes).' Special issue devoted to Georges Braque, with cover specially designed by Braque. Contains 20 colour plates. Nos. 33-34 September 1956 Chagall 'Illustrations for the Bible.' Special issue of 29 original lithographs by Chagall: 16 colour, 12 black and white, original colour lithograph titlepage, and cover specially designed by Chagall. Nos. 35-36 July 1958 'The Last Works of Matisse 1950-1954 (DerniŹres oeuvres de Matisse 1950-1954).' Special issue devoted to Matisse, with 39 colour lithographs, 38 black and white, and cover specially designed by Matisse. The first lithographs were printed under the artist's direction in 1954. Nos. 37-38 July 1960 Chagall 'Drawings for the Bible.' Special issue of 24 original colour lithographs, 96 black and white reproductions, and cover specially designed by Chagall.

Department of English & Philosophy
College of Arts and Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Stout
Dr. Robert Schuler, Professor
153D Harvey Hall
715.232.1454
schulerr@uwstout.edu
Fax: 715.232.2093

In 1941 the great painter Henri Matisse, recovering from traumatic surgery at the age of seventy-two, cultivated the art of the cut-out. By maneuvering scissors through prepared sheets of paper, he inaugurated a new phase of his career. Often confined to his wheelchair or a bed because of the surgery for duodenal cancer, two pulmonary embolisms, a prolapsed stomach, constrictions of the solar plexus, and the exhaustion caused by unrelenting insomnia, we can see him poised, in rapture, scissors ready for the inspiration to carve out color and shape together. The cut-out was not an abdication from painting and sculpting. It was a launching forward into a new plane of creativity and joy. Matisse said, "Only what I created after the illness constitutes my real self: free, liberated" (Flam Retrospective 378). Moreover, continued experimentation with cut-outs offered Matisse innumberable opportunities to fashion a new, aesthetically pleasing environment: "You see as I am obliged to remain often in bed because of the state of my health, I have made a little garden all around me where I can walk... There are leaves, fruits, a bird" (Cowart 233).
With his assistants, Matisse evolved a discipline:
A general system was then devised whereby his studio assistants brushed Linel gouaches on sheets of white paper.
The dried, colored papers, stockpiled as supplies, were available to Matisse at any given time. He often quite spontaneously cut out elements and placed them into compositions. As the play between consciously sought-for and the fortuitously-arrived at effects worked into their balances the projects moved toward completion. In the meantime many of them were posted about the studio walls (Cowart 14).
In the hand-written script that adorns Jazz, one of his cut-out masterpieces, Matisse speaks of the artist's need to be ever fresh:
A new painting should be a unique thing, a birth bringing a new face into the representation of the world through the human spirit. The artist should call for all of his energy, his sincerity, and the greatest possible modesty in order to push aside during his work the old cliches that come so readily to his hand and can suffocate the small flower which itself never turns out as one expected (Matisse xvi).
The Linel gouaches were employed because they "directly corresponded to commercial printers ink colors" (Cowart 17) and would reproduce perfectly. The cut-outs pulsate with energy. The bright, vibrant Linel colors, deep and Light Japanese Green, vert Emeraude (Imitation veridian), Deep Cadmium Yellow, Deep Cadmium Red, Deep Persian Red, Persian Violet, and Yellow Ochre (Cowart 274), keep leaping in front of our eyes.
Matisse seems to have executed the cut-outs with great joy. They allowed him to reach a goal:
The cut-out paper allows me to draw in color. It is a simplification. Instead of drawing an outline and filling in the color -- in which case one modified the other -- I am drawing directly in color, which will be the more measured as it will not be transposed. This simplification ensures an accuracy in the union of two means... It is not a starting point but a culmination (Cowart 17).
John Hallmark Neff sees the use of the cut-out as a logical step in Matisse's search for "the ultimate method":
each cut-out is a gesture, a continuous contour whose rightness depends on his ability to sustain the rhythm of his act, the flow of scissors through painted paper, a momentum which ensuredthe wholeness and integrity of each shape (Cowart 22).
Over the years I have developed some ideas, based on observations by Matisse, that have helped me to view and to meditate upon the cut-outs and the procedures which Matisse followed in making them. 1). The cut-out allowed Matisse to fashion shape and color at one and the same time. Matisse: "Thatís the reason I now work with cut-outs, in order to get a more powerful expression of pure color through the sharpness of the outline" (Flam Retrospective 383); 2). Colors directly affect the emotions. Matisse: "Thus simple colors can act upon the feelings with more force, the simpler they are. A blue for example, accompanied by the brilliance of its complementaries, acts upon the feelings like a sharp blow on a gong. The same with red and yellow; and the artist must be able to sound them when he needs to" (Flam On Art 196); 3). Colors must have strong relationships with one another; they must be positioned properly. Matisse: "It is not enough to place colors, however beautiful, one beside the other; colors must also react on one another. Otherwise, you have cacophony" (Flam On Art 216); 4). The cut-outs, especially the larger ones, posted on the walls of Matisse's studio, become a decorative, highly ornamental environment that was and is aesthetically and spiritually pleasing. We have countless photographs to prove that Matisse was his own interior decorator. He could improvise to his imagination's content by maneuvering the image/forms around their backgrounds, by placing cut-outs that were variations on a theme next to one another.Matisse: "There are flowers everywhere for those who want to see them" (Flam On Art 174).
Jazz: the title was well chosen. In a letter to Brother Rayssiguier, Matisse crisply defined it: "the talent for improvisation, the liveliness, the being at one with the audience" (Schneider 666). Jazz, indeed, and almost all of the other cut-outs I have seen, abound with lively improvisation. Each cut-out shape is an exercise in fresh observation and execution. But both Jazz and musical jazz display the rehearsed discipline that lies behind successful improvisation. Whereas the jazz musician improvises within a composition by re-discovering, rehearing riffs and progressions he has hit upon while rehearsing, Matisse instructed his assistants to move the completed cut-out figures around the colored or white backgrounds, again and again, experimenting, improvising, until the final, most desirable arrangements were achieved.
The colors and the animated shapes disport themselves with undeniable liveliness. We cannot be sure of what Matisse means by "being at one with the audience" -- but I would like to venture a guess. For many years I have had copies of individual "scenes" from Jazz posted on the walls of my study and my desk. They always delight me, they always inspire me with the joy that is involved in pure making, and they have become an irreplaceable part of my physical and psychological environment. A tribute to my love of jazz and my love of Matisse's art.
Some riffs or solos or passages from Jazz trigger my imagination. Perhaps "The burial of Pierrot" is the comic burial of the old Matisse, Matisse before his illnesses. The border is not solid. It is composed primarily of tiny pink teardrops or raindrops, although a few black drops appear at the bottom. Just above them yellow raindrops or teardrops dive. The eye moves from image/shape/color to image/shape/color. Strange root-squiggle forms, quite stubby, arise. White, they are echoed by the white plume in the horse's headdress, the stockier, squarer legs of the horse, the blue ornament on the side of the carriage, the white and blue back of the carriage. The funereal carriage -- we must remember that it is a circus wagon -- is a fabulous mechanism; it is clopping along on wheels that are out of round into black space. At the top, wedged within a magnificent bright magenta rectangle, are images of the leaves of the Maritime Arrowhead (Cowart 109). This cut-out is a feast for the eyes.
I love "The Nightmare of the White Elephant." Pure colors and pure shapes. The movement. There are no borders. Perhaps the sinuous black shapes guide our eyes toward the suspended white image, borne by red bolts and slashes above a blue star. But the black shapes, squiggles and roots and knobbed branches, seem to be living creatures, almost arm in arm in a dance across space. Thus, my eyes travel right to left from black branch or root or cell, around space and stop at the red flares sailing past white, over the blue star, red, white, and blue emerging from a searing yellow background. No nightmares here. A delight of thĐĎ ŕˇ± á
The many cut-outs titled "Lagoon" flourish with flower/amoeba forms. In "Lagoon I," Matisse has placed the positive of the magenta cut-out, the image carved out by the scissors, in relationship to the negative image, that which the scissors discarded, at least for the moment. Both kinds of lagoon shapes swell beyond the usual flower/amoeba form and become a long, sinuous swirl. One has a blackish bottom as if stationary, rooted, while the other floats freely in light blue space above a white, many-legged crawling form. A knobby-headed creature enters from the left. The right border is an orange shape that matches the bottom magenta shape, blockish on one side, possessing many waving tendrils on the other. A green squiggly, knobby form floats upward toward a white tendrilled figure cut out of black.
"Lagoon III" features forms that seem even more animalistic. Matisse has swollen, as it were, the forms so that the black one would seem to be a many-humped snail or snake, another a blue fish with a large maw, a blue antlered figure which is opposed to the bright red, caterpillar-like figure, and the last, a green trap of curled up claws.
For what seems to be the majority of his cut-outs, Matisse created and continually improvised upon a form I am going to name his "biota." Suggestive of animal or floral shapes, Matisse's biota are knobby, squiggly, several-lobed, many-footed or many-shooted. In Henri Matisse: Paper Cut-outs, they are referred to as "animal or undulating forms;" "alga;" "algae forms;" ěanimal and undulating forms;î "sea floor animals and plants;" "oceanic forms;" a "suspended dispersion of marine elements;" "plant forms;" "arabesques;" "leaf forms" and flowers. Matisse forged an amoeba-like form, a little cell that pushes, seeks, outwards in several directions. A germ that could shoot out to grow in whatever direction seemed most fruitful. It could bloom and climb like a stem or a flower; it could spread like a leaf. Matisse's shapes could be the fluttering wingtips of a hawk, exploring the wind. A hub of a fluid wheel moving outwards.
Pierre Schneider, in his monumental study Matisse, offers the idea that this form stems from the unconscious:
This protean form, which will be seen in the large gouaches to come, is all vigor, bringing to life all it touches. At once algae, hair, shell, coral, cloud, the human body, it demonstrates the kinship between the various kingdoms, the 'interpenetration of feeling.' It is, in a way, the symbol of the unconscious, that is, of the inner life (668).
"Fleurs de Neige" is one of the loveliest, one of the most fanciful cut-outs. Within squares of magenta, orange, and green, the sinuous forms condense, become wider, like snowflakes, fat snowflakes. The figure at the bottom right rises tall like a series of grouped stems. At top right the black form echoes the branching roots theme of some of the Jazz compositions. All of these figures grow, expand, search for space before your eyes. Some seem to have feet that can propel them out of the frame. Indeed, these portals of color are flowering with life. Yes, snow flowers in flakes, and brings blossoms to the places that it falls.
In "Les Velours" (Velvet) Matisse experiments once again with color arrangements. Not a single one of the twelve panels (or sheets to which the life-forms are glued) is white. Two are orange, two are blue, one is paler orange, one gray, one black, one mahogany. To say the least, the mixtures of color are unusual. White seahorses and horns and trees, knobby, squiggly, rooty shapes, float against the mahogany background. Red and yellow leaves, horny, leafy globules, drift downwards in blackness, a contrast apparently Chinese in inspiration. Light blue forms sprout out of light gray. Three black and blue skeleton-like tree forms spread across one dark orange panel; the other dark orange panel contains a smaller replica of the Lagoon form. In the middle large red roots, flanked by smaller blue trees, spread across the light orange soil. White lagoon figures are crammed into the blue panel. A light green panel is packed with six figures, four horned orange figures drifting downwards, two black ones arcing up. Edged with a black stripe, a green panel explodes with two white lagoons. The quadruple triptych ends with two yellow horned lagoons dancing out of blue.
Matisse improvises in "Les Velours" by contrasting colors with one another. White against a mahogany background. Red and yellow against black. Blue and black forms against gray; black branching against dark orange, light orange; white against green.
In "The Sheaf," leaf-forms, seed forms, radiate upwards and outwards, almost fill the white panel. Green, red, blue, orange, even black, often they seem to be hands exploring space. They have been launched into air. A fountain of colors, navy blue, dark green, blood red, orange, spouting out. Cowart suggests that Matisse has been inspired by Bergson's Evolution Creatrice: "For life is tendency, and the essence of the tendency is to develop in the form of a sheaf, creating, by its very growth, divergent directions among which the impetus is divided." (261). The multi-armed or footed or budding shapes flow -- or march -- outwards, across the background. These are not huddled stalks; energy -- "the impetus" -- is not bound. It has been released to penetrate into the surrounding space. Once again Matisse's central image is that of a budding life-force, a cell burgeoning outwards, an utterly dynamic form.
Matisse's "Sheaf" should be placed in the entryways of colleges and universities, art schools, courts, churches, places of public assembly. It is a paean to fertility, creativity, joy, joie de vivre.
One of the most famous cut-outs, "les betes de mer," contains, at the left bottom, the many-legged, three-humped monster "camel," a surging image of life questing horizontally through, nose sniffing into, a rose purple screen.
The sinuous forms that enter "Composition, Blue Background" suggest that there are no edges to the composition, that life-forms have clambered in, clasping, from the outside. One receives the strong impression that Matisse is trying to fill space in a dynamic and ornamental manner. When one looks at the wall of Matisse's study, covered with cut-outs, he gets the idea that space must be filled with flourishes. In "Composition" two figures are variations on a snake shape. Four different versions of a leaf form sail down across the left half. A four-legged amoeba-like creature marches at botttom left. Surrounding a black flower, blossoming across blue.
I see Matisse, full of joy, applying ornamental designs to the space surrounding him. Some of his earlier canvases display a desire to seed space with ornamental images. I am thinking of "Interior with Eggplants;" "Checker Game and Piano Music;" and "Nude Standing at the Mantelpiece," to name a few. Certainly the Tree of Life window in the Dominican Chapel of the Rosary at Vence exhibits the desire to enhance and embellish space with ornamentation. Two large cut-outs, "The Parakeet and the Mermaid" and "Large Decoration with Masks" swarm with rich, colored images. I hear a mantra filling the air: Create/improvise; arrange/compose; delight, delight.
Perhaps "Mimosa" reigns as the most energetic and kinetic of the cut-outs. Yellow-tendrilled, snake-like, sinuous flower forms surge over gray-hooded black shoots. Other Matisse biota fill the bright and light orange and mahogany panels: several black stylized idol forms and huge blue amoeba forms that seem to establish a triad; black long-legged spider forms. The colors are vivid, surging, a bit ominous.
The sinuous yellow dancing shape surrounds, perhaps rises out of, the gray-hooded black figures and dominates the center of the composition. It flowers outwards, and perhaps, as in the "Bataille des Fleurs" of Nice, conquers all of the other flower forms and receives the approval of the totemic black forms placed above and below on the left and in the middle on the right. Just below the totemic figures three black butterflies sail out of similar blue rooted or celled forms. A black spider drops from the right top corner. A long, dangling multi-branched black shape, a root system, stretches out below the mimosa. These images fill the orange squares, three-quarters of the composition, and the mahogany square at the bottom left. Matisse's biota surge forth, almost completely filling, with vibrant colors, brief space.
In the cut-outs Matisse improvised, with gusto, a lovely, forceful, and ornamental new art form. In a conversation with Brother Raysigguier, Matisse observed, "The primary quality of a work of art must be its decorativeness" (Schneider 704). Above all, this innovative, improvisatory art became a series of environments that nourished the mind and the soul. Environments that inspire while filling the immediate space with beauty and delight, and joie de vivre.
Works Cited
Cowart, Jack, et al. Henri Matisse: Paper Cut-outs. St. Louis and Detroit: The St. Louis Art Museum and the Detroit Institute of Arts, 1977.
Flam, Jack D., ed. Matisse: A Retrospective. New York: Beaux Arts, 1988.
Flam, Jack D., ed. Matisse on Art . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
Matisse, Henri. Jazz. New York, Braziller, 1984.
Schneider, Pierre. Matisse. New York, Rizzoli, 1984.

Marilyn Monroe (F&S 26). Color screenprint after Warhol, c. 1970. Edition unknown. Sunday B. Morning, a Swiss publisher, has issued portfoilos of both Warhol's Marilyns and his Flowers. Each print is stamped on the verso, "Fill in your own signature," a reference to Warhol's habit of signing his works on the verso and his use of rubber stamps.
These silk-screens are in the Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonne with details of how Warhol fell out with some of "The Factory" - his studio - and they took the original silkscreens to Belgium where they printed more. Instead of a rubber stamp on the back saying "Andy Warhol" these have a stamp saying "Sunday B Morning" and " Add your own signature here". The very thing Warhol had objected to, i.e. that the signature was more important than the art, had happened to his work.
Sunday B Morning Screen Print of Warhol's famous Marilyn Monroe image from Warhol's original screens. Stamped Sunday B Morning and "Sign your name here" on verso.
An icon of twentieth-century pop art, Warhol began work on the famous portraits of Marilyn Monroe in 1962. He used the medium of silkscreen printing (where fabric is stretched over a frame to hold stencil designs and carry ink onto the paper) to produce iconic portraits, often with repeated imagery of celebrities such as Elvis Presley, Liz Taylor or Marilyn Monroe herself. These silk screens were produced circa 1970 by Warhol's studio, The Factory in New York, who took the screens to Belgium and printed more from them, extending the earlier edition that was signed by Warhol and limited to only 250 prints. These slightly later silk screens are stamped on the verso "Sunday B. Morning" and "Add your own signature here". This series of prints was produced in ten colour schemes.
The celebrated critic Robert Hughes writes on Warhol's fascination with serial images, which he repeats throughout his work like a mantra invoking the commodification of life and love, politics and religion:
"It all flowed from one central insight: that in a culture glutted with information, where most people experience most things at second or third hand through TV and print, through images that become banal and disassociated by being repeated again and again and again, there is a role for affectless art. You no longer need to be hot and full of feeling. You can be supercool, like a slightly frosted mirror…. . Warhol extended it by using silk screen, and not bothering to clean up the imperfections of the print: those slips of the screen, uneven inkings of the roller, and general graininess. What they suggested was not the humanizing touch of the hand but the pervasiveness of routine error and of entropy… ."
(Robert Hughes, American Visions)
Published by Sunday B. Morning. Unsigned set - during printing Warhol argued with his publishers and withdrew from the agreement resulting in many copies being left unsigned. Original silk screen prints, printed in colors from photographic enlargements. In perfect condition.
Unsigned set - during printing
Warhol argued with his publishers and withdrew from the agreement resulting ...

Be sure to buy quality. All prints sold via Sunday B. Morning.com are handmade screenprints on hard paper, using the same techniques as the original prints printed by Andy Warhol and the Factory in the late 60's.
We sometimes find poor quality Marilyn Monroe prints on the market ; that aren't even screenprints at all. Some prints are on light paper, others are offset prints, posters...
We offer you handmade quality that will stand for years. You will not see the difference with the original signed prints from the 60's.
This makes the opportunity to buy something that is regarded as one of the "Art-masterpieces of the 20th century". Own something after Andy Warhol.
This auction goes for this beautifull print. It is one of the most sought after : "the Silver Marilyn Monroe". It is 36" x 36" or 91.4cm x 91.4cm on white hard quality paper. At the back there are the 2 stamps "Published by Sunday B. Morning" and "Fill in your own signature".