?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 10,000 - $ 15,000
ROBERT MOTHERWELL Three Figures.
Color lithograph on Somerset paper, 1989. 1404x1017 mm; 55 1/4x40 inches, full margins. Signed and numbered 5/80 in pencil, lower right. Printed and published by Tyler Graphics Ltd., Bedford, with the blind stamp lower right. A superb impression of this very large lithograph with vibrant colors.
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 Stanley W. Hayter and Atelier 17 in New York, where he produced his first experimental intaglio prints in 1943-44.
At the encouragement of his then wife Helen Frankenthaler (see lots 38-41), 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 426.
