Spaightwood Galleries

To celebrate our current exhibition, "Through a woman's eyes: Impressionism to Surrealism," we have completely revisded all of the Käthe Kollwitz pages. adding new prints, rephotographing almost everything, and adding information from the now authoritative catalogue raisonné by Alexandra von Knesebeck.

Thanks to several requests from interested collectors, we have just added a number of pages (or redone previously existing pages) for a number of artists. We recently decided to add another 26 mixed media intaglios from George Rouault's masterpiece, the Miserere. Formerly we had about 8 pieces on one page and part of another; now we have 34 on four pages, many with extensive commentary. We also wrote a brief introductory study of the series, generally ranked with Chagall's Etchings for the Bible, as one of the two most important series of religious prints of the twentieth century and one of the greatest extended print series of all times. Speaking of Chagall, we recently added three new pages to our extensive representation of his work on our website. During his career, Chagall had many close friends who were poets or novelists and he frequently collaborated with them in producing deluxe artists books with original etchings or lithographs published in limited editions. We have had several of these on our website for years, pages devoted to Gogol's Dead Souls (1923-27), the Fables of La Fontaine (1927-30), Etchings for the Bible (1930-39, 1952-56), Lithographs for the Bible (Verve, 1956), Drawings for the Bible (Verve, 1960), and The Story of the Exodus (1966). We have added three more sets of etchings to this group: the complete set of five black and white etchings from Marcel Arland's Maternité (1925-26), a story, told in reverse chronologically, that begins with a woman who is assumed by all of her town to have killed her newborn illegitimate child and ends with her lover climbing into her bedroom through her window to impregnate her. We have also acquired 6 of the 10 color etchings from Jean Paulhan's Des Mauvais Sujets (1958), the story of a young boy who suddenly realizes that Descarte's disctum, "I think, therefore I am," doesn't hold for him: he has passions, he imagines things, therefore he must be a beast ("Je suis un bête"). The etchings are among Chagall's most whimsical and moving. Finally, we also present four of the fifteen aquatints illustrating Et sur la terre (1977), a collaboration with his old friend, Andre Malraux, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, hero of the Resistance against the Nazis, and Minister of Culture in the government of Charles de Gaulle, that is based upon a previously unpublished text Malraux wrote in 1939 about his experiences fighting on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War against Franco and his Fascist and Nazi allies.

The other major new acquisition in the realm of 20th-Century art is a set of 10 Kandinsky woodcuts from Klange (published in 1913 by R. Piper in Munich in an edition of 300 impressions) that manifest the process by which his art ceased to be devoted to a subject outside of the art and instead became a quest for a balance of form and color within the art (even—perhaps especially— in the black and white woodcuts). A number of these works were translations of paintings into woodcuts and, Roethel observes, "in most cases the graphic transformation [as he himself said] turned out to be 'better than the painting.' " Later in his life, Kandinsky began to feel very strongly that these works were too little known and he began publishing selections in deluxe art reviews like Cahiers d’Art and XXe Siécle. After his death, his widow, Nina Kandinsky continued the practise, and allowed Galerie Maeght, to whom she had entrusted the exhibition and sale of Kandinsky's paintings and watercolors, to publish several of his woodcuts for Klange in Derriere le Miroir; she also allowed the publication of four more in a special issue of XXe Siécle published as an Homage to Kandinsky. Finally in 1971, she allowed a deluxe printing of 10 of the Klange woodcuts (five in color and five in black and white) in a reprint of one of his theoretical texts, Regard sur le Passé / Rückblicke. In this boxed set of unbound pages printed on large sheets (380x280mm) of Arches paper published in an edition of 100 portfolios (the first 40 also contained a set on Japon paper) signed by her on the justification page and numbered, she choose seven woodcuts (4 in color) that had not been elsewhere reprinted along with three also found in the 1966 Homage to Kandinsky. Each of these here appears in with a specially-made signature drystamp (a K inside a triangle) similar to the signature Kandinsky cut into his woodblocks. There are no pencil-signed impressions of any of the Klange woodcuts. All 10 of these pieces are shown at Klange.

We have also reworked or added a number of webpages devoted to old master prints and drawings, including Lucas van Leyden, Hendrik Goltzius, Jacob Matham, Jan Saenredam, and Aegidius Sadeler, with many more to come; we will also be adding two works by Giorgio Ghisi after Michelangelo to the group of web pages we recently added featuring drawings and or prints by Parmigianino, Girolamo Fagiuoli, Giorgio Ghisi, Cherubino Alberti, Annibale Carracci, and Gerolamo Scarsello as part of an updating of our Italian Renaissance print offerings this coming summer. In a departure for us, we have also added a page showing pages from a fifteenth-century North-Italian hand-illuminated bound manuscript on vellum containing five hand-painted miniatures (the Virgin Mary (twice), St. Peter, St. Paul, and St. James as well as one page of mixed text and music and one of music. The entire 26-page bound manuscript is available here. We recently purchased five etchings by Rembrandt; one has already sold, but the rest are now available for viewing along with a new drawing by someone in Rembrandt's circle (you can see it at School of Rembrandt). We are also offering a special limited-time special on a complete bound set of the 4th edition of Goya's Disasters of War. For information, please click here.

The Impressionists, Post-Impressionists, and Fauves continue to be of interest to us (as witnessed by our Fall 2002 show), and we have added new works by Renoir (a very early nude in a very small edition), Mary Cassatt (two lovely color drypoints and a beautiful impression of Denise holding her child), drawings by Eva Gonzales, Manet's only pupil, Maximilien Luce and Henri-Edmund Cross as well as one of Cross's color lithographs in his pointillist mode, and several new pieces by Whistler (an etching and three lithographs) as well as a signed nude by Dufy, two etchings hand-colored in gouache and watercolor by Rouault that show him working out the final color scheme for Christ au Faubourg / Christ in the Neighborhood, one of the pieces in The Passion. We have acquired several more mixed media pieces from Rouault's Miserere. (executed during the 1920s and published in 1948). We have added fourteen beautiful pieces to our Fauves selections, a rich Vlaminck etching in a proof before the edition (see it at Vlaminck) and five Derain lithographic nudes executed in the late 1920s from the collection of the publisher, five more with the studio and artist signature stamps on the verso, indicating that they were in Derain's studio at the time of his death and were sold under the supervision of the French government, two smaller signed red lithographic figure studies, and an ink drawing of a bull with Derain's signature stamp.

For Modern Masters: Original Prints by Braque, Chagall, Giacometti, Matisse, Miró, Picasso, we added two Chagall etchings from The Bible (1930-1937 and 1950-1956), three large lithographs from The Story of The Exodus, and three works celebrating the wonders of love from two deluxe artist's books produced during the 1960s and 70s, Man, Woman, and Angel from Celui qui dit les choses sans rien dire / Those who say things without saying anything (published in 1975 in an edition of 225) and two original color lithographs from Sur la terre des dieux / On the gods' earth (published in 1975 in an edition of 120). We have also just acquired a signed color lithograph indicating Chagall's approval of a proof to serve as the model for the edition published in Fernand Mourlot's Souvenirs et portraits d'artiistes. Having sent one of our favorite Giacometti's off to England, we were feeling lonely; we have rectified that by adding two superb lithographs from the 1960s, one of which still remains. It is hard to imagine going too long without adding new works by Joan Miró, and the links will take you to our completely revised pages for our February-April 2004 Miró exhibition with lots of new pieces added for the first time.

Many of our fall 2002 acquisitions focused on works by German Expressionists and included a number of woodcuts and lithographs from the teens and early 1920s by Barlach, Gott, Grosz, Heckel, Hofer, Kandinsky (10 woodcuts from Klange in a special edition of 100 impressions—signed on the justification page by Nina Kandinsky—with a special drystamp monogram), Kaus, Kirchner, Klee (from 1919 and 1920), Kokoschka, Kollwitz, Ludwig Meidner (a beautiful signed portrait of Frau Bella Chagall from 1922), Schmidt-Rotluff, and Max Slevogt from Die Aktion and Der Bildermann, German periodicals that allowed artists to try to react to the war and to the seething discontent and social transformation that followed from it. In addition, we are currently showing two drawings by Georg Tappert on the web and will add a third shortly. We also have a number of signed lithographs by Kokoschka (from 1913) reflecting his obsessive but doomed love-affair with Alma Mahler and five (of the seven) signed woodcuts for The Transformations of God by Barlach. We will also be adding pages for some lesser known German Expressionists as time permits, including Wilhelm Wagner, who specialized in nudes and was influenced by Egon Schiele in his post 1920 works. Among the Russian avant-garde, we have recently acquired a wonderful gouache by Nataliya Goncharova.

Surrealism is also of great interest to us, and we will have added to the web fifteen wonderful surrealistic lithographs, eight etchings, some screenprints, and a watercolor by Leonor Fini, a Dorothea Tanning lithograph, and a stunning piece by René Magritte. We have also acquired a drawing by the late Jean Tinguely, Niki de Saint Phalle's husband and a wonderful large Niki de St. Phalle lithograph featuring several of her Nanas. Also on view in the Surrealism show are two new additions by Picasso, both etchings with aquatint, one from the Sable Mouvant suite, the other from the 156 suite (published in an edition of 50 with xx numbered artist's proofs, of which ours is one) with the stamped signature, six new large color lithographs (one an Hommage a Picasso, five from the Pleni Luna / Full Moon Suite) by Wifredo Lam.

We will shortly be adding many more new works, including a large screenprint by the late Jules Olitski and paintings on paper and canvas by Jonna Rae Brinkman on the theme of 9/11/01 (Brinkman's studio in Brooklyn was just across the river from where the World Trade Center used to be; she began working on a series of pieces on the morning of 9/11, shortly after the second plane hit). In the meantime, you can console yourselves by browsing the 11 pages of Garache aquatints, lithographs, drawings and paintings we have added to the web.