Fine Art Prints by Modern Masters

The annual Fine Art Print Fair, the world’s the largest international art fair, celebrating 500 years of printmaking, was scheduled to be held at the Javits Center in New York, but the Center has been turned into a 1,000-bed field hospital during the coronavirus, so the Fair will be held online through June 13th.

The Fair includes works by some of our favorite printmakers, like David Hockney and Andy Warhol.

David Hockney

David Hockney has been sheltering in place in his home in Normandy. He has been drawing every day and encouraging others to do the same.

The 82-year-old artist, whose iPad drawings have become iconic, has been encouraging others to use this quiet time to look around and see the beauty that surrounds them.

His drawings have inspired a competition, in conjunction with the Châtelet theatre in Paris, France Inter radio and the Centre Pompidou. Hope for Spring encourages everyone to create an image that captures the season and to lift the spirit of those of us who are in lockdown because of the coronavirus.

Entries for Hope in Spring: draw like Hockney can be sent to hockneyprintemps@sabir.paris or posted on social media with the hashtag #HockneyPrintemps

Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol was a collector. He saved everything from movie ticket stubs to his medical records and Polaroids that he took of his friends.

Every day he would take a pile of stuff from his desk and place it in a box, which he labeled TC for Time Capsule. After his death in 1987, the six hundred and ten boxes were sent to the Andy Warhol Museum in his home town of Pittsburgh.

Seven years ago, art critic Blake Gopnik began to sort through the boxes. The result of Gopnik’s research is a 976-page biography titled, Warhol.

Journalist Joan Acocella reviewed the book for the New Yorker:

Warhol once tried to give an old friend one of his Marilyn Monroe silk screens, and the man, who disliked Pop, said, “Just tell me in your heart of hearts that you know it isn’t art.” Warhol, imperturbable, answered, “Wrap it up in brown paper, put it in the back of a closet—one day it will be worth a million dollars.” He was right, Gopnik says, but off by two orders of magnitude: in 2008, a Warhol silk screen sold for a hundred million dollars. There was no huger reputation than Warhol’s in the art of the sixties, and in late-twentieth-century art there was no more important decade than the sixties. Much of the art that has followed, in the United States, is unthinkable without him, without his joining of high culture and low, without his love of sizzle and flash, without his combination of tenderness and sarcasm, without the use of photography and silk-screening and advertising.

Andy Warhol was part of a group of artists represented by influential art dealer Leo Castelli. He depicted ten of those artists in his 1967 work, Portrait of the Artist, and multiplied each portrait ten times in ten different colors on 3-D polystyrene boxes, each measuring about 2 x 2 inches.

The artists represented in the work are Robert Morris, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Larry Poons, James Rosenquist, Frank Stella, Lee Bontecou, Donald Judd, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol himself.