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Estimate: $ 1,000 - $ 1,500
ANNE RYAN The Quest.
Color screenprint on smooth, black wove paper, 1945-50. 295x265 mm; 11 3/4x10 1/2 inches, full margins. Signed, titled and numbered 10/10 in white ink, lower margin. A superb impression of this extremely scarce print.
Following a troubled marriage, Anne Ryan (1889-1954) moved with her children to Majorca, where living was inexpensive and the major museums of Europe not too far away. Reinvigorated, she returned to New York (she grew up in New Jersey and often visited New York City) to pursue a career in art that she had only previously dabbled in while being a mother. She became friends with the sculptor Tony Smith and the painter Hans Hofmann, who encouraged her artistic talents. Her first solo exhibition at Rose Fried's Pinacotheca Gallery in 1941, which featured representational and abstract paintings, brought Ryan some recognition, but she continued to rely on her writing to earn a living. Some of her first prints appear in this year, and include landscape etchings, figure studies and images of constellations that evoke Abstract Surrealism. The current print was most certainly produced during her time at Atelier 17, where she learned to make color woodcuts from a 1945 class taught by Louis Schanker.
