Don Nice was born in Visalia, California, in 1932. He studied at the University of Southern California before completing his training at the Yale School of Art, where he was part of a generation of American artists grappling with the legacy of Abstract Expressionism and the rising tide of Pop. Nice found his own distinctive path — one rooted in close, affectionate observation of the everyday objects and natural specimens of American life.

Nice is associated with the Superrealist tendency in American painting, though his work carries a warmth and personal quality that sets it apart from the cooler detachment of many of his contemporaries. His paintings and prints celebrate the vernacular — sneakers, candy, matchbooks, sporting goods, animals, and foodstuffs rendered with loving precision against clean white grounds. There is nothing ironic in his gaze. These are objects chosen because he finds them genuinely worthy of attention, and his handling of them communicates that feeling directly to the viewer.

His prints Book of Matches, Tootsie Pops, and Asparagus were produced at Hollanders Workshop, New York, in collaboration with Fred Genis and Irwin Hollander. Each takes a single humble subject and elevates it through careful composition and immaculate technique — the lithographic medium lending itself beautifully to the crisp edges and saturated colour that define his style. The Big Sneeker series — produced in full colour, black and white, and white on black — demonstrates Nice's interest in exploring a single subject through multiple variations, each print a different way of seeing the same familiar form. The sneaker, an icon of American popular culture, becomes in his hands something almost monumental.

Nice taught for many years at the School of Visual Arts in New York, where he influenced generations of younger artists. His work is held in numerous American public collections and remains a warm, generous contribution to the story of American realism. see more

Hedda Sterne was born in Bucharest, Romania, in 1910. She studied art in Bucharest, Vienna, and Paris before fleeing Europe ahead of the Second World War and settling in New York in 1941. There she became embedded in one of the most remarkable artistic communities of the century — the New York Abstract Expressionists — and was the sole woman included in the famous 1951 Life magazine photograph known as "The Irascibles," a portrait of fifteen artists who had protested the conservative direction of American art. Characteristically, Sterne stood apart from the group, positioned slightly above and behind the others, as if observing from her own vantage point.

That independence defined her entire career. While her work emerged from the same milieu as de Kooning, Rothko, and Newman, Sterne resisted categorisation with remarkable consistency, moving freely between figuration and abstraction, between painting, drawing, and printmaking, always following her own inquiry rather than any prevailing movement. Her work ranged from dense urban machine imagery in the 1950s to delicate linear abstractions, vertical compositions, and deeply personal meditations on nature and time.

Her prints Metaphores and Metamorphos I and II were produced at Hollanders Workshop, New York, in collaboration with Fred Genis and Irwin Hollander. The titles signal her enduring preoccupations — transformation, correspondence, the way one thing becomes or reveals another. The lithographic medium, with its capacity for subtle tonal gradation and fluid mark-making, suited her exploratory sensibility beautifully, and the prints carry the same quality of sustained, searching attention that animates all her best work.

Sterne continued to work and exhibit into her nineties, earning growing recognition late in life for a body of work of remarkable range and integrity. She died in New York in 2011 at the age of one hundred. see more

June Wayne was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1918. Self-taught as an artist, she began her career as a painter before discovering lithography in the late 1940s and recognising in it a medium of extraordinary expressive potential. What followed was a lifetime of creative and institutional commitment to printmaking that transformed the art form in America. In 1960, with a grant from the Ford Foundation, she founded the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles — an institution that single-handedly revived the craft of fine art lithography in the United States by training master printers and bringing major artists to the medium. Her contribution to American printmaking is without parallel.

As an artist in her own right, Wayne produced a body of prints of remarkable ambition and intelligence. Her work ranged across cosmic imagery, cellular and astronomical forms, and pointed social commentary — she was never an artist content to make beautiful objects alone, but one who believed art had a responsibility to engage with the world. Her prints are visually arresting and conceptually serious in equal measure, combining scientific curiosity with a strong sense of moral purpose.

Her prints Lemmings, Crush, and Two Thousand Too Soon, produced in collaboration with Fred Genis, reflect this characteristic combination of visual power and social urgency. The titles alone signal her intent — collective self-destruction, pressure, and a world moving too fast toward an uncertain future. Lithography, the medium to which she had devoted so much of her professional life, becomes in these works a vehicle for ideas of genuine weight and consequence.

Wayne received numerous honours throughout her career including the National Medal of Arts, awarded in 2011 in recognition of her transformative contribution to American art.

June Wayne died in Los Angeles in 2011 at the age of ninety-three. see more

Jacques Lipchitz was born in Druskininkai, Lithuania, in 1891. He moved to Paris in 1909, where he immersed himself in the artistic ferment of Montparnasse and formed close friendships with Picasso, Juan Gris, and Modigliani. Through his deep engagement with Cubism, Lipchitz found his distinctive sculptural voice — a language of interlocking planes, fragmented forms, and dynamic mass that would establish him as one of the foremost sculptors of the twentieth century.

Fleeing the Nazi occupation of France, Lipchitz emigrated to the United States in 1941. His later work grew increasingly expressive, moving away from Cubist rigour toward more fluid, mythological, and emotionally charged subjects — figures in struggle, ancient archetypes, and themes drawn from Jewish history and scripture. In 1972 he contributed to the Tree of Life lithograph suite, published by Hadassah in New York and printed at the celebrated Il Bisonte studio in Florence, to commemorate his monumental bronze sculpture destined for Mount Scopus in Jerusalem — a project that demonstrated both his enduring commitment to his Jewish identity and his sustained engagement with printmaking as a medium worthy of his most significant subjects.

His prints Sculptural Forms, Three Sculptural Forms, and Sculptural Forms (Blue) were produced at Fred Genis's workshop at Oudkerk in Friesland, the Netherlands, in the early 1970s. The works translate his signature sculptural preoccupations into the lithographic medium — interlocking masses and layered forms rendered with a solidity and depth that retain the feeling of objects existing in three-dimensional space, the rich textures echoing his characteristic gouged plaster and clay-working techniques.

Jacques Lipchitz died in Capri, Italy, in 1973. His work is held in major collections worldwide including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Tate Modern in London. see more

James Rosenquist was born in Grand Forks, North Dakota, in 1933. Before establishing himself as one of the leading figures of American Pop Art, he worked as a billboard painter in New York — an experience that profoundly shaped his artistic vision. His large-scale paintings juxtapose fragments of consumer culture, advertising imagery, and the human figure in ways that are simultaneously seductive and unsettling, reflecting a society saturated with commercial imagery.

Rosenquist made his first lithographs in 1964–65 at Universal Limited Art Editions at the invitation of Tatyana Grosman. Fred Genis first met Rosenquist at U.L.A.E. in 1967, re-proofing Expo 1967 Mural — Firepole, initially printed by Priede. The work closely relates, as do most of Rosenquist's prints, to a painting of the same title — a monumental 33-foot mural painted for Expo 1967 in Montreal, Canada.

It was at Hollanders Workshop in 1970 that Rosenquist made seven lithographs with Genis and Hollander. The most technically complex of these was Area Code — a diptych printed in sixteen colours, a feat that demonstrated both the ambition of the artist and the extraordinary skill required of the printer to realise it. When Genis was working in the Netherlands in 1973, he was commissioned by Petersburg Press to collaborate with Rosenquist again on Flower Garden, extending a creative partnership that had by then spanned nearly a decade.

Rosenquist's prints are characterised by the same cinematic scale and fragmented imagery as his paintings — works that demand both technical mastery from the printer and a willingness to think boldly about what a lithograph could be.

James Rosenquist died in New York in 2017, leaving behind one of the most distinctive bodies of work in postwar American art. see more

Jasper Johns was born in Augusta, Georgia, in 1930. One of the most influential American artists of the twentieth century, Johns emerged in the mid-1950s with paintings of flags, targets, letters, and numbers that challenged the dominance of Abstract Expressionism and helped lay the foundations for both Pop Art and Minimalism. His work occupies a singular position — cool and cerebral on the surface, yet charged with philosophical complexity beneath.

Johns came to lithography through Tatyana Grosman at Universal Limited Art Editions, making his first print in 1960. His early subjects — targets, flags, numbers — were not simply carried over from his paintings but transformed through the medium, each print becoming what Johns described as a metamorphosis of the image rather than its repetition. As he noted in his Sketchbook Notes in 1965: take an object, do something to it, do something else to it. Each subject carried endless permutations, references travelling back and forth between paintings, drawings, and prints in a continuous conversation.

Between 1967 and 1968 Johns made six lithographs with Fred Genis at U.L.A.E., four of which took targets as their subject. Each work made separate references back to earlier pieces, and on occasion the stones themselves were reused from one work to the next — the physical material of printmaking becoming part of the meaning.

Johns has worked extensively in printmaking throughout his career, producing a body of graphic work widely regarded as among the most significant of any postwar artist. His prints are held in major collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Jasper Johns continues to live and work in the United States. see more

John Cage was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1912. A composer, writer, and printmaker, he studied composition, harmony, and counterpoint with Buhlig, Weiss, Schoenberg, and Cowell, before becoming a catalyst in the worlds of music, art, literature, and performance. From 1944 to 1968 he was musical director of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in New York, and his influence spread far beyond music, touching visual art, literature, and philosophy in equal measure.

Cage is best known for his fearless dismantling of conventional ideas about what music could be. His 1952 composition 4'33" — in which performers sit in silence, allowing ambient sound to become the work — remains one of the most discussed pieces in twentieth-century art. His exploration of chance operations, drawn from his deep engagement with Zen Buddhism and the ancient Chinese I Ching, led him to develop compositional methods that removed personal intention from the creative process entirely. As Cage himself put it: "I use chance as a discipline. The choice is in asking the right question."

His first graphic work was produced at Hollanders Workshop in 1969, and he later received the Grand Honor at the Tokyo International Print Bienniale in 1979. As a visual artist, Cage brought the same philosophical rigour to printmaking that defined his music — works animated by indeterminacy, natural form, and the beauty of the unplanned mark.

A passionate amateur mycologist, Cage was a founding member of the New York Mycological Society, and mushrooms became a recurring presence in his visual work. His written collections Silence (1961) and A Year from Monday (1967) remain foundational texts for anyone interested in experimental art.

John Cage died in New York in 1992, leaving behind a body of work that permanently expanded what art could be. see more

Josef Albers was born in Bottrop, Germany, in 1888. He studied and later taught at the Bauhaus — the legendary German school of art and design that fundamentally reshaped the visual culture of the twentieth century — before fleeing the rise of National Socialism and emigrating to the United States in 1933. He joined the faculty of Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where he taught for sixteen years, and later became chair of the Department of Design at Yale University. As both artist and educator, his influence on successive generations of American artists was immense and enduring.

Albers is best known for his celebrated series Homage to the Square, begun in 1950 and continued for the rest of his life — a sustained, systematic investigation into the interaction of colour through the simplest of formats: nested squares of flat, unmodulated colour. The series, comprising hundreds of paintings and prints, demonstrates that colour is never absolute but always relative — that the same colour will appear entirely different depending on what surrounds it. It is one of the most rigorous and illuminating bodies of work in modern art, as much scientific inquiry as artistic practice.

His print White Line Square, produced in collaboration with Fred Genis at Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles, is a precise and beautiful expression of his lifelong preoccupations. The introduction of a white line between the nested squares creates a luminous interval — a breath of space that alters the relationship between the colour fields in ways both subtle and dramatic. Lithography, with its capacity for the flattest, most even areas of pure colour, was ideally suited to the demands of his practice, and the Tamarind workshop's exacting standards matched his own perfectly.

Josef Albers died in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1976. His work is held in virtually every major museum collection in the world. see more

Lee Bontecou was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1931. She studied at the Art Students League in New York before receiving a Fulbright scholarship to Rome, where she spent two formative years developing the sculptural vocabulary that would make her one of the most distinctive and unsettling presences in postwar American art. Returning to New York in the late 1950s she found her place among a generation of artists redefining what sculpture could be — and promptly took that conversation somewhere entirely her own.

Bontecou is best known for her large wall-mounted relief sculptures of the 1960s — powerful, brooding constructions of welded steel and salvaged canvas that open onto dark, seemingly bottomless voids. These works are simultaneously mechanical and organic, suggesting jet engines, mouths, flowers, and wounds all at once. They carry a visceral psychological charge quite unlike anything else being made at the time, and their influence on subsequent generations of artists has been considerable. After withdrawing from the New York art world in the early 1970s to focus on teaching and her own independent practice, she was rediscovered by a new generation in the 1990s and her reputation has continued to grow ever since.

Her prints Seventh Stone, Eighth Stone, Ninth Stone, and Tenth Stone were produced at Universal Limited Art Editions, New York, in collaboration with Fred Genis and Tatyana Grosman. The sequential titling — each work named simply for its stone — speaks directly to the lithographic process itself, acknowledging the physical material of printmaking as integral to the work's identity. The prints carry the same brooding, centrifugal energy as her sculptures, dark forms pulling the eye inward toward a space that feels simultaneously threatening and compelling.

Lee Bontecou continues to live and work in the United States. Her work is held in the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, and major collections worldwide. see more

Mark Tobey was born in Centerville, Wisconsin, in 1890. One of the most spiritually and philosophically adventurous painters of the twentieth century, Tobey spent decades exploring the intersections between Eastern and Western visual traditions, developing a style of intricate, allover mark-making he called "white writing" — a dense, luminous calligraphic technique that predated and influenced the Abstract Expressionist movement, though Tobey always remained apart from it.

Tobey's work was shaped by wide-ranging travel and deep spiritual inquiry. A convert to the Bahá'í Faith in the 1920s, he spent extended periods in England, the Middle East, and Japan, where he studied Zen calligraphy and ink painting. These influences permeated every aspect of his practice, giving his canvases a meditative quality quite distinct from the gestural energy of his New York contemporaries. In 1960 he moved permanently to Basel, Switzerland, where he lived until his death.

His collaboration with Fred Genis came about in 1973, when Paul Cornwall-Jones, director of Petersburg Press in London, contacted Genis at his workshop in Oudkerk in the Netherlands and commissioned him to print a group of lithographs from Tobey in Basel. Genis travelled to Basel carrying two lithographic stones, a number of plates, and transfer paper. Initially the two men worked together for three weeks, Tobey making his first lithographs on transfer paper before moving to work directly onto the plate with a brush — a method that suited his calligraphic instincts, as seen in Chinese Memories. Genis returned to Friesland for proofing, then came back for the artist to make corrections, with several further visits required to complete the project.

Mark Tobey died in Basel in 1976, leaving behind a body of work that quietly bridged East and West across five decades of dedicated practice. see more

Maryan was born Pinchas Burstein in Nowy Sącz, Poland, in 1927. His early life was defined by catastrophic loss — he survived Auschwitz and several other concentration camps, losing his entire family in the Holocaust, and was liberated in 1945 having endured experiences that would mark every aspect of his subsequent art. After the war he made his way to Israel, then to Paris, where he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts, before settling permanently in New York in 1962.

Maryan's work is raw, urgent, and deliberately uncomfortable. His figures — grotesque, clownish, and deeply human — emerge from a visual language shaped equally by his traumatic history and his dark, sardonic humour. He painted and drew obsessively, producing images of masked figures, performers, and outcasts that oscillate between the tragic and the absurd. His art refuses the consolations of beauty or resolution, insisting instead on bearing witness to suffering while refusing to be defeated by it. He signed his work with a single name — Maryan — as both an act of artistic identity and a quiet reclamation of selfhood.

His prints Untitled and Dog, produced in collaboration with Fred Genis, carry the same restless, searching energy as his paintings — figures and forms that seem to push against the boundaries of the page with barely contained force.

Maryan died in New York in 1977 at the age of forty-nine, leaving behind a body of work that is only now receiving the sustained international attention it has always deserved. see more

Peter Takal was born in Bucharest, Romania, in 1905 — the same city that would later produce Hedda Sterne, his contemporary and fellow émigré to New York. Takal studied art in Berlin and Paris before settling in the United States, where he became known as a painter, draughtsman, and printmaker of quiet distinction. His work occupies a contemplative space — lyrical, restrained, and deeply attentive to the natural world.

Takal's art is characterised by a delicate economy of line and a sensitivity to light that reflects both his European training and his sustained engagement with landscape. His paintings and prints often depict trees, hillsides, and natural forms rendered with a spare elegance that owes something to both the European modernist tradition and the meditative qualities of East Asian brushwork. There is nothing superfluous in his compositions — every mark earns its place, and the spaces between marks carry as much meaning as the marks themselves.

His prints Hillside and Tree Black and White, produced in collaboration with Fred Genis, reflect these qualities with particular clarity. Created at Hollanders Workshop, New York, with Fred Genis and Irwin Hollander, the works demonstrate how lithography — with its capacity for the finest gradations of tone and the most sensitive transfer of drawn line — suited Takal's sensibility perfectly. Hillside carries a luminous atmospheric quality, while Tree Black and Whitedistils his subject to its essential structure, the stark contrast of the composition giving the image a stillness and strength that is quietly commanding.

Takal exhibited widely throughout his career and was a respected presence in the New York art world for decades. His work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and numerous other American institutions.

Peter Takal died in New York in 1995. see more

Robert Morris was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1931. One of the most intellectually restless and formally adventurous artists of the postwar era, Morris was a central figure in the development of Minimalism in the 1960s before moving decisively beyond it — into Process Art, Land Art, installation, and politically charged conceptual work. Few artists of his generation ranged as widely or questioned as persistently the nature of art objects, the role of the viewer, and the relationship between art and power.

Morris studied at the Kansas City Art Institute, the California School of Arts and Crafts, and Reed College, before completing a Master of Arts at Hunter College in New York. His early Minimalist sculptures — simple geometric forms in industrial materials — were among the defining works of that movement, insisting on the viewer's physical presence and perception as essential to the work's meaning. But Morris was never content to remain within any single position, and his subsequent practice expanded to encompass felt scatter pieces, earthworks, and installations of increasing psychological and political complexity.

His Five War Memorials series was produced at Hollanders Workshop, New York, in collaboration with Fred Genis and Irwin Hollander. Each work in the series takes as its subject a different form of organised human destruction — a concrete star bearing the names of the fallen, a crater trailing smoke, scattered atomic waste, a trench filled with chlorine gas, and an infantry archive intended to be walked on barefoot. The series does not memorialise war so much as indict it, confronting the viewer with the physical and moral weight of collective violence in ways that are unflinching and deeply affecting. That such a series was realised through the intimate, craft-based medium of lithography only deepens its impact.

Robert Morris died in Kingston, New York, in 2018. see more

Robert Rauschenberg was born in Port Arthur, Texas, in 1925. One of the most inventive and energetic figures in postwar American art, he studied at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where he encountered John Cage and Merce Cunningham — relationships that would shape his entire creative life. His Combines of the 1950s, which merged painting with everyday objects, helped dismantle the boundaries between art and life and paved the way for Pop Art, Conceptualism, and performance.

Rauschenberg came to lithography in 1962 through Tatyana Grosman at Universal Limited Art Editions. Until then, he had considered lithography an archaic medium with little relevance to the twentieth century. Working on stone changed his view entirely. As he described it, he came to recognise the unique possibilities of stone — and the realisation that anything capable of creating an image on stone was potential material.

That conviction led to some of the most technically adventurous printmaking of the era. At U.L.A.E. in 1967, working with Fred Genis, he began experimenting with transferring magazine illustrations directly onto stone — a process with no set formula, requiring Genis to find ways to dissolve ink and make the transfer possible without losing the image. Some photographs transferred sharply; others printed in quick-drying inks would not transfer at all. Chance became part of the method, with blurs, distortions, and unexpected textures incorporated into the final work. His prints Drizzle (1967), Gamble (1968), and Waterstop (1968), all produced at U.L.A.E., reflect this spirit of creative problem-solving between artist and printer.

Rauschenberg received the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 1964 and continued to work prolifically across painting, printmaking, and performance until his death in 2008. see more

Sam Francis was born in San Mateo, California, in 1923. He began painting at the age of twenty while recovering from a serious spinal injury sustained during military service — an experience that turned him decisively toward art. He spent much of the 1950s in Paris, where he became associated with the lyrical abstraction movement and developed the luminous, colour-saturated style that would define his career. From Paris he made frequent journeys to Europe, South America, and Asia, and maintained a deep and lifelong connection with Japan, where he exhibited widely and was greatly admired.

Francis's paintings are celebrations of colour and light — expansive fields of brilliant hue punctuated by pools of white, marks that seem to float and breathe on the canvas. His work shares certain qualities with Abstract Expressionism but is warmer and more joyful in spirit, less concerned with existential weight than with the pure pleasure of colour in space. Over five decades he produced a body of work of remarkable consistency and vitality, moving between large-scale canvases, works on paper, and printmaking with equal fluency.

His prints Abstract 3 Shapes, Up and Down, Untitled, Five Stone Untitled, Very First Stone, and Four Stone Untitled were all produced at Hollanders Workshop, New York, in collaboration with Fred Genis and Irwin Hollander. The titles of several works — Very First Stone and Five Stone Untitled in particular — speak directly to the lithographic process itself, acknowledging the stone as both tool and collaborator. Francis embraced lithography wholeheartedly, finding in it a medium that could carry his characteristic qualities of luminosity, spontaneity, and chromatic richness with full conviction.

Sam Francis died in Santa Monica, California, in 1994, leaving behind one of the most joyful and generous bodies of work in postwar art. see more

Walasse Ting was born in Shanghai, China, in 1929. He moved to Paris in 1952, where he fell in with the CoBrA movement — the loose international grouping of artists from Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam whose work embraced spontaneity, folk imagery, and raw expressive energy as a counterpoint to the austerity of postwar European abstraction. From Paris he made his way to New York in the late 1950s, where he became a vivid and distinctive presence in the downtown art world, equally at home among the Abstract Expressionists and the emerging Pop generation.

Ting's work is immediately recognisable — bold, sensuous, and exuberantly alive. He painted women, flowers, cats, and birds in thick, gestural strokes and blazing colour, combining the calligraphic fluency of his Chinese artistic heritage with the directness and scale of American painting. His imagery is frankly celebratory, suffused with erotic energy and delight in the physical world. In 1964 he edited and co-published One Cent Life, a landmark artists' book featuring lithographs by Sam Francis, Joan Mitchell, and Andy Warhol among others — a project that placed him at the centre of the international print world.

His prints Coitus Interruptus, The Secretary, Waterproof, Lunch, and Flower, all dated 1969, and Snow Sludge 1970, were produced at Hollanders Workshop, New York, in collaboration with Fred Genis and Irwin Hollander. The works are characteristic Ting — bold, playful, and charged with the same uninhibited energy as his paintings. Lithography suited him perfectly, the medium's directness allowing his instinctive mark-making to translate without loss onto the printed page.

Walasse Ting died in Amsterdam in 2010, leaving behind a body of work as warm, colourful, and life-affirming as any of his generation. see more

Ulfert Wilke was born in Bad Tölz, Germany, in 1907. He studied in Europe before emigrating to the United States, where he built a career as both a practising artist and a respected museum director — serving at the Louisville Art Center, the University of Iowa Museum of Art, and the Honolulu Academy of Arts. That combination of deep institutional knowledge and sustained creative practice gave him an unusually broad perspective on the art of his time, and he moved comfortably between the roles of artist, curator, collector, and advocate throughout his life.

Wilke's art was shaped by two powerful and complementary influences — the gestural abstraction of the New York School, among whose leading figures he counted close friends, and the calligraphic traditions of East Asia, which he studied with genuine scholarly seriousness. He collected Asian art extensively and travelled repeatedly to Japan, where he engaged directly with masters of ink calligraphy. The result was a body of work that occupies a singular position — neither purely Western abstraction nor Eastern calligraphy, but a genuine synthesis of both, in which the single expressive mark becomes the fundamental unit of meaning.

His print Calligraphy, produced at Hollanders Workshop, New York, in collaboration with Fred Genis and Irwin Hollander, is a natural expression of his deepest artistic preoccupations. Lithography — with its capacity to capture the most nuanced qualities of a drawn or brushed mark, preserving the weight, speed, and intention of the original gesture — was ideally suited to work of this kind. The print carries the same meditative intensity as his paintings, each mark placed with the precision and deliberateness of a calligrapher who understands that how a line is made is inseparable from what it means.

Ulfert Wilke died in Honolulu, Hawaii, in 1987. see more

Willem de Kooning was born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, in 1904. Largely self-taught, he trained as a commercial artist before making his way to the United States in 1926, arriving in New York with little more than his ambition. Through the 1940s he found his footing among a generation of artists who would reshape Western painting, and by the 1950s he had emerged as one of the most powerful voices in American art, most closely associated with Abstract Expressionism.

De Kooning's canvases are energetic and restless — built up and scraped back, layered with marks that are simultaneously visceral and sensuous. Unlike many of his peers he never entirely abandoned the figure, and his celebrated Women series of the early 1950s remains among the most debated bodies of work in postwar art.

Printmaking did not occupy a central role in de Kooning's practice. His first essay into lithography was in 1960 at the University of California at Berkeley, and his second in 1967 with a single lithograph contributed to Portfolio 9 at Hollanders Workshop. It was the relaxed and warm atmosphere of Hollanders that lured him back to the medium in 1970. Lithographic stones were taken to his studio at East Hampton — but, in Fred Genis's words, "he hated it." Aluminium plates followed with no greater affinity. Finally Genis and Hollander offered him transfer paper, which he could spread on the floor and work on as he did with drawing and painting. It proved the solution.

From June 1970 to June 1971 he produced twenty-four lithographs at Hollanders — eighteen by transfer method, two drawn directly onto aluminium plate, and four drawn directly onto stone, including the monumental Stanton Street and With Love.

De Kooning died in East Hampton in 1997 at the age of 92. see more

William Gropper was born in New York City in 1897, on the Lower East Side — the teeming, impoverished neighbourhood that shaped his entire artistic and political vision. The son of Jewish immigrant parents who had fled persecution in Eastern Europe, Gropper grew up in poverty and carried that experience directly into his art, spending a lifetime giving visual form to the struggles of working people, immigrants, and the dispossessed. He studied under Robert Henri and George Bellows, two giants of the Ashcan School, who encouraged his instinct for social observation and his belief that art should speak plainly to ordinary life.

Gropper became one of America’s most celebrated political cartoonists, contributing for decades to publications including the New York Tribune and Vanity Fair, where his sharp, economical draftsmanship and satirical wit made him a formidable and widely read voice. He was called before the McCarthy hearings in 1953, a distinction he wore as a mark of honour.

In 1967 Gropper was formally invited to collaborate as artist-in-residence at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles — one of the most significant printmaking institutions of the twentieth century. Founded by June Wayne in 1960 with a Ford Foundation grant, Tamarind was established with a clear mission: to revive the craft of fine art lithography in America by training master printers and bringing major artists to the stone. The workshop transformed American printmaking, and an invitation to work there represented the highest recognition of an artist’s standing in the field. Working directly with Tamarind’s master printers, Gropper produced his print suite including The Teacher and The Immigrants — subjects of deep personal resonance. The immigrant experience was his own inheritance, and the figure of the dedicated teacher a recurring symbol of hope in his visual world.

William Gropper died in Manhasset, New York, in 1977. His work is held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Library of Congress, and major collections across the United States. see more