Mar 10, 2005 - Sale 2036

Sale 2036 - Lot 25

Price Realized: $ 2,990
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,200 - $ 1,800
ROBERT BLACKBURN
Color Symphony.

Color lithograph, 1960. 400x560 mm; 153/4x221/8 inches, full margins. Edition of 15. Signed, titled, dated and inscribed "Ed. 15" in pencil, lower margin. A superb impression of this scarce, important print with strong colors.

From 1957 to 1963, Blackburn served as the first master printer at Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE), West Islip. 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. In the current work, Blackburn reveals the stylistic influence of Frankenthaler, Grace Hartigan and Larry Rivers, early practitioners at ULAE, further developing his own abstract imagery from this period into something looser and more fluid.

In 1963, he began to operate his own Manhattan workshop full time, providing an open graphics studio for artists of diverse social and economic backgrounds, ethnicities, styles, and levels of expertise. Under his direction, the Printmaking Workshop became one of the most vital collaborative art studios in the world.