?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,000 - $ 1,500
LEONARD PYTLAK (1910-1998)
Untitled (Foundry). Color screenprint. 400x320 mm; 15 3/4x12 5/8 inches, wide margins. Signed twice in pencil, lower right. 1946-47.
A very good impression with strong colors.
Pytlak, a native of Newark, New Jersey, attended the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Art as well as the Art Students League in New York. He was a painter as well as a printmaker and executed murals while working for the WPA in the 1930s. In 1938, Pytlak joined the special screenprinting unit led by Anthony Velonis in the Federal Art Project's Graphic Arts department in New York, where he was among the first artists to use screenprinting as a fine art medium. He was a founder of and became president of the National Serigraph Society and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for printmaking in 1941. He would continue to promote the medium through exhibiting and teaching throughout his career. Between 1941 and 1949, Pytlak is estimated to have created 96 screenprints, and during these years he had several solo exhibitions, including at the ACA Gallery, New York in 1942; the Weyhe Gallery, New York, in 1944; the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., in 1948; and the Serigraph Gallery, New York, in 1949.
