Jun 10, 2014 - Sale 2353

Sale 2353 - Lot 19

Price Realized: $ 2,500
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 2,000 - $ 3,000
ROBERT BLACKBURN (1920 - 2003)
Color Symphony.

Color lithograph on cream wove paper, circa 1960. 400x560 mm; 15 3/4x22 1/8 inches, full margins. Artist's proof, aside from the edition of 15. Signed, titled, and inscribed "A/P" in pencil, lower margin.

From 1957 to 1963, Blackburn served as the first master printer at Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE), West Islip, NY. In most cases, he taught the artists, including Jim Dine, Helen Frankenthaler, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg, how to make lithographs, sharing his sensibility of the medium and his approach to the stone. Blackburn's own prints from the period show the stylistic influence of Frankenthaler, Grace Hartigan and Larry Rivers, early practitioners at ULAE, with his adoption of their more fluid and organic forms.

In 1963, he began to operate his own Manhattan workshop full time, providing an open studio for artists of diverse social and economic backgrounds, ethnicities, styles, and levels of expertise. Under his direction, the Printmaking Workshop became known internationally as a vital, collaborative art studio.