?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 2,000 - $ 3,000
ROBERT MOTHERWELL Roth-Händle.
Brushed aquatint printed in black and photo-offset collage on Auvergne à la Main paper, 1974-75. 492x400 mm; 19 3/4x15 3/4 inches, full margins. Initaled and numbered 45/53 in pencil, upper right. Published by Brooke Alexander, Inc., New York. A very good impression.
Robert Motherwell (1915-1991) studied printmaking with Kurt Seligmann in New York in 1941 and through him was introduced to other emigré Surrealistists including Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp and Roberto Matta. Motherwell's interest in Automatism equalled that of the Surrealists and eventually led him to Hayter and Atelier 17 in New York, where he produced his first experimental intaglio prints in 1943-44 (see illustration below). At the encouragement of his then wife Helen Frankenthaler, Motherwell made some early lithographs at ULAE in West Islip in the early 1960s, and this became a springboard to a fertile career as one of the most prolific painter-printmakers of the Abstract Expressionist movement. Motherwell made more than 400 works in all printmaking media which, like the current lot, frequently parallel themes from his contemporaneous paintings. Belknap 137.
