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Michael Knigin
Silkscreen Surrealist Pop Art Print "Pas De Deux"

2006

About the Item

Print without matte is 19" X 13". Michael Knigin was born in 1942 in Brooklyn, NY. He attended and graduated from Tyler School of Art, Temple University. He received a Ford Foundation Grant to study fine art lithography at the renowned Tamarind Lithography Workshop, in Los Angeles and collaborate with Rufino Tamayo. After graduating college in 1966, Knigin started teaching at the Pratt Graphic Center in Manhattan, an extension of the Pratt Institute, devoted to fine arts and graphic prints. There he started a fine art lithography workshop. After a year and a half he opened his own publishing company, Chiron Press, and added a silkscreen printing facility. This was the first facility in the United States that combined lithography and screen-printing. The shop remained in existence for over seven years, printing and publishing editions for the most renowned contemporary artists, including Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Louise Nevelson, Kenneth Noland, Larry Poons, Tom Wesselman and Paul Jenkins. After selling Chiron Press in 1974, Knigin was invited by the Israel Museum and the Jerusalem Foundation to establish the first professional lithography workshop in Israel, the Burston Graphics Art Centre in Jerusalem, and to train a group of young Israeli artists. 1975-76 The Burston Graphics Center, Jerusalem, Israel, 1972 Professor Yale University, New Haven, Conneticut, 1967- 2003 Full professor Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, N.Y., 1996 Adjunct Professor L.I.U., Southampton, N.Y. In 1988 he was appointed to the NASA Art Team and was sent to the Kennedy Space Center to visually interpret the launch of the space shuttle Discovery, celebrating NASA's return to space after the Challenger's disaster in 1986. In 1991 he was recalled to interpret the touchdown of the space shuttle Atlantis at Edward's Air Force Base. Along with these honors, he has received many awards including Cleo Award for art direction, a fellowship of the American Film Institute in Los Angeles, an Art and Technology Grant, two Certificates of Merit from the National Society of Illustrators. SELECTED COLLECTIONS the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Albright-Knox Museum, The National Collection of Fine Arts, The Carnegie Mellon Institute, New York University, The New York State Council on the Arts, The Minnesota Museum of Art, The Library of Congress, The Mexico City Museum of Modern Art, The Mint Museum, U.S. Air Force, The Brooklyn Museum, The Cooper Hewitt Museum, The Israel Museum, Playboy Enterprises, Bank of Tokyo Smithsonian Museum of American Art. His work has been featured in many publications such as the New York Times, Art in America, and Art News. He has also co-authored 2 books on lithoggraphy, "Contemporary Lithographic Workshops Around the World" and "The Technique of Fine Art Lithography", published by Van Nostrand Reinhold.
  • Creator:
    Michael Knigin (1942 - 2011, American)
  • Creation Year:
    2006
  • Dimensions:
    Height: 20 in (50.8 cm)Width: 16 in (40.64 cm)
  • Medium:
  • Movement & Style:
  • Period:
  • Condition:
    Good, please see photos.
  • Gallery Location:
    Surfside, FL
  • Reference Number:
    1stDibs: LU3826659532
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    Reclining Cubist Nude Woman Max Weber (April 18, 1881 – October 4, 1961) was a Jewish-American painter and one of the first American Cubist painters who, in later life, turned to more figurative Jewish themes in his art. He is best known today for Chinese Restaurant (1915), in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, "the finest canvas of his Cubist phase," in the words of art historian Avis Berman. Born in the Polish city of Białystok, then part of the Russian Empire, Weber emigrated to the United States and settled in Brooklyn with his Orthodox Jewish parents at the age of ten. He studied art at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn under Arthur Wesley Dow. Dow was a fortunate early influence on Weber as he was an "enlightened and vital teacher" in a time of conservative art instruction, a man who was interested in new approaches to creating art. Dow had met Paul Gauguin in Pont-Aven, was a devoted student of Japanese art, and defended the advanced modernist painting and sculpture he saw at the Armory Show in New York in 1913. In 1905, after teaching in Virginia and Minnesota, Weber had saved enough money to travel to Europe, where he studied at the Académie Julian in Paris and acquainted himself with the work of such modernists as Henri Rousseau (who became a good friend), Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and other members of the School of Paris. His friends among fellow Americans included some equally adventurous young painters, such as Abraham Walkowitz, H. Lyman Sayen, and Patrick Henry Bruce. Avant-garde France in the years immediately before World War I was fertile and welcoming territory for Weber, then in his early twenties. He arrived in Paris in time to see a major Cézanne exhibition, meet the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, frequent Gertrude Stein's salon, and enroll in classes in Matisse's private "Academie." Rousseau gave him some of his works; others, Weber purchased. He was responsible for Rousseau's first exhibition in the United States. In 1909 he returned to New York and helped to introduce Cubism to America. He is now considered one of the most significant early American Cubists, but the reception his work received in New York at the time was profoundly discouraging. Critical response to his paintings in a 1911 show at the 291 gallery, run by Alfred Stieglitz, was an occasion for "one of the most merciless critical whippings that any artist has received in America." The reviews were "of an almost hysterical violence." He was attacked for his "brutal, vulgar, and unnecessary art license." Even a critic who usually tried to be sympathetic to new art, James Gibbons Huneker, protested that the artist's clever technique had left viewers with no real picture and made use of the adage, "The operation was successful, but the patient died."[8] As art historian Sam Hunter wrote, "Weber's wistful, tentative Cubism provided the philistine press with their first solid target prior to the Armory Show." The Cellist...
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He was influenced in his choice of art form in part by reading the published letters of Oskar Kokoschka (Der Fetisch, 1925) and Surrealism. Bellmer's puppet doll project is also said to have been catalysed by a series of events in his personal life. Hans Bellmer takes credit for provoking a physical crisis in his father and brings his own artistic creativity into association with childhood insubordination and resentment toward a severe and humorless paternal authority. Perhaps this is one reason for the nearly universal, unquestioning acceptance in the literature of Bellmer's promotion of his art as a struggle against his father, the police, and ultimately, fascism and the state. Events of his personal life also including meeting a beautiful teenage cousin in 1932 (and perhaps other unattainable beauties), attending a performance of Jacques Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann (in which a man falls tragically in love with an automaton), and receiving a box of his old toys. 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  • German Surrealist Hans Bellmer Etching Engraving Print Cecile Reims Surrealism
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  • German Surrealist Hans Bellmer Etching Engraving Print Cecile Reims Surrealism
    By Hans Bellmer
    Located in Surfside, FL
    After Hans Bellmer (German, 1902-1975) Surrealist engraving, etching after drawings from a 1942 notebook, engraved in 1974-75 by Cecile Reims Printed by L'Atelier de Chalcographie du Louvre, Paris, Having printed monogram lower left in plate, pencil notations and #7/10 and 'Musee du Louvre' blindstamp verso Dimensions: Sheet 11 X 7.5, Plate size 6.5 X 4 Hans Bellmer ( 1902 – 1975) was a Polish born German artist, best known for his drawings, etchings that illustrates the 1940 edition of Histoire de l’œil, and the life-sized female sculpture mannequin dolls he produced in the mid-1930s. Historians of art and photography also consider him a Surrealist photographer. Bellmer was born in the city of Kattowitz, then part of the German Empire (now Katowice, Poland). Up until 1926, he worked as a draftsman for his own advertising company. Bellmer is most famous for the creation of a series of dolls as well as photographs of them. He was influenced in his choice of art form in part by reading the published letters of Oskar Kokoschka (Der Fetisch, 1925) and Surrealism. Bellmer's puppet doll project is also said to have been catalysed by a series of events in his personal life. Hans Bellmer takes credit for provoking a physical crisis in his father and brings his own artistic creativity into association with childhood insubordination and resentment toward a severe and humorless paternal authority. Perhaps this is one reason for the nearly universal, unquestioning acceptance in the literature of Bellmer's promotion of his art as a struggle against his father, the police, and ultimately, fascism and the state. Events of his personal life also including meeting a beautiful teenage cousin in 1932 (and perhaps other unattainable beauties), attending a performance of Jacques Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann (in which a man falls tragically in love with an automaton), and receiving a box of his old toys. After these events, he began to actually construct his first dolls. In his works, Bellmer explicitly sexualized the doll as a young girl (his work bears connection to the works of Bathus). Hirschfeld has claimed (without further argumentation) that Bellmer initiated his doll project to oppose the fascism of the Nazi Party by declaring that he would make no work that would support the new German state. Represented by mutated forms and unconventional poses, his dolls (according to this view) were directed specifically at the cult of the perfect body then prominent in Germany. He visited Paris in 1935 and made contacts there, such as Paul Éluard, but returned to Berlin because his wife Margarete was dying of tuberculosis. He was part of the circle of Surrealist luminaries such as Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Joan Miro, André Masson, René Magritte, Alberto Giacometti and Salvador Dali as well as women artists—such as Frida Kahlo, Dorothea Tanning and Leonora Carrington. Bellmer produced the first doll in Berlin in 1933. Long since lost, the assemblage can nevertheless be correctly described thanks to approximately two dozen photographs Bellmer took at the time of its construction. Standing about fifty-six inches tall, the doll consisted of a modeled torso made of flax fiber, glue, and plaster; a mask-like head of the same material with glass eyes and a long, unkempt wig; and a pair of legs made from broomsticks or dowel rods. One of these legs terminated in a wooden, club-like foot; the other was encased in a more naturalistic plaster shell, jointed at the knee and ankle. As the project progressed, Bellmer made a second set of hollow plaster legs, with wooden ball joints for the doll's hips and knees. There were no arms to the first sculpture, but Bellmer did fashion or find a single wooden hand, which appears among the assortment of doll parts the artist documented in an untitled photograph of 1934, as well as in several photographs of later work. Bellmer's 1934 anonymous book, The Doll (Die Puppe), produced and published privately in Germany, contains 10 black-and-white photographs of Bellmer's first doll arranged in a series of "tableaux vivants" (living pictures). The book was not credited to him, as he worked in isolation, and his photographs remained almost unknown in Germany. Yet Bellmer's work was eventually declared "degenerate" (entartete kunst) by the Nazi Party, and he was forced to flee Germany to France in 1938, where Bellmer's work was welcomed by the Surrealists around Andre Breton. He aided the French Resistance during the war by making fake passports. He was imprisoned in the Camp des Milles prison at Aix-en-Provence, a brickworks camp for German nationals, from September 1939 until the end of the Phoney War in May 1940. After the war, Bellmer lived the rest of his life in Paris. Bellmer gave up doll-making and spent the following decades creating erotic drawings, etchings, sexually explicit photographs, paintings, and prints of pubescent girls. In 1954, he met Unica Zürn...
    Category

    20th Century Abstract Prints

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  • German Surrealist Hans Bellmer Etching Engraving Print Cecile Reims Surrealism
    By Hans Bellmer
    Located in Surfside, FL
    After Hans Bellmer (German, 1902-1975) Surrealist engraving, etching after drawings from a 1942 notebook, engraved in 1974-75 by Cecile Reims Printed by L'Atelier de Chalcographie du Louvre, Paris, Having printed monogram lower left in plate, pencil notations and #7/10 and 'Musee du Louvre' blindstamp verso Dimensions: Sheet 11 X 7.5, Plate size 6.5 X 4 Hans Bellmer ( 1902 – 1975) was a Polish born German artist, best known for his drawings, etchings that illustrates the 1940 edition of Histoire de l’œil, and the life-sized female sculpture mannequin dolls he produced in the mid-1930s. Historians of art and photography also consider him a Surrealist photographer. Bellmer was born in the city of Kattowitz, then part of the German Empire (now Katowice, Poland). Up until 1926, he worked as a draftsman for his own advertising company. Bellmer is most famous for the creation of a series of dolls as well as photographs of them. He was influenced in his choice of art form in part by reading the published letters of Oskar Kokoschka (Der Fetisch, 1925) and Surrealism. Bellmer's puppet doll project is also said to have been catalysed by a series of events in his personal life. Hans Bellmer takes credit for provoking a physical crisis in his father and brings his own artistic creativity into association with childhood insubordination and resentment toward a severe and humorless paternal authority. Perhaps this is one reason for the nearly universal, unquestioning acceptance in the literature of Bellmer's promotion of his art as a struggle against his father, the police, and ultimately, fascism and the state. Events of his personal life also including meeting a beautiful teenage cousin in 1932 (and perhaps other unattainable beauties), attending a performance of Jacques Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann (in which a man falls tragically in love with an automaton), and receiving a box of his old toys. After these events, he began to actually construct his first dolls. In his works, Bellmer explicitly sexualized the doll as a young girl (his work bears connection to the works of Bathus). Hirschfeld has claimed (without further argumentation) that Bellmer initiated his doll project to oppose the fascism of the Nazi Party by declaring that he would make no work that would support the new German state. Represented by mutated forms and unconventional poses, his dolls (according to this view) were directed specifically at the cult of the perfect body then prominent in Germany. He visited Paris in 1935 and made contacts there, such as Paul Éluard, but returned to Berlin because his wife Margarete was dying of tuberculosis. He was part of the circle of Surrealist luminaries such as Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Joan Miro, André Masson, René Magritte, Alberto Giacometti and Salvador Dali as well as women artists—such as Frida Kahlo, Dorothea Tanning and Leonora Carrington. Bellmer produced the first doll in Berlin in 1933. Long since lost, the assemblage can nevertheless be correctly described thanks to approximately two dozen photographs Bellmer took at the time of its construction. Standing about fifty-six inches tall, the doll consisted of a modeled torso made of flax fiber, glue, and plaster; a mask-like head of the same material with glass eyes and a long, unkempt wig; and a pair of legs made from broomsticks or dowel rods. One of these legs terminated in a wooden, club-like foot; the other was encased in a more naturalistic plaster shell, jointed at the knee and ankle. As the project progressed, Bellmer made a second set of hollow plaster legs, with wooden ball joints for the doll's hips and knees. There were no arms to the first sculpture, but Bellmer did fashion or find a single wooden hand, which appears among the assortment of doll parts the artist documented in an untitled photograph of 1934, as well as in several photographs of later work. Bellmer's 1934 anonymous book, The Doll (Die Puppe), produced and published privately in Germany, contains 10 black-and-white photographs of Bellmer's first doll arranged in a series of "tableaux vivants" (living pictures). The book was not credited to him, as he worked in isolation, and his photographs remained almost unknown in Germany. Yet Bellmer's work was eventually declared "degenerate" (entartete kunst) by the Nazi Party, and he was forced to flee Germany to France in 1938, where Bellmer's work was welcomed by the Surrealists around Andre Breton. He aided the French Resistance during the war by making fake passports. He was imprisoned in the Camp des Milles prison at Aix-en-Provence, a brickworks camp for German nationals, from September 1939 until the end of the Phoney War in May 1940. After the war, Bellmer lived the rest of his life in Paris. Bellmer gave up doll-making and spent the following decades creating erotic drawings, etchings, sexually explicit photographs, paintings, and prints of pubescent girls. In 1954, he met Unica Zürn...
    Category

    20th Century Abstract Prints

    Materials

    Etching

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