(Dancer in spotlight)

 

Jan Stussy

  1921 - 1990 (biography)

c. 1970  

lithograph 

14 x 10" image size 

pencil, lower right 

not stated 

signed and noted "printer's proof"; printer's chop "JF" in lower left sheet corner 

 

heavy cream wove 

published 

artist 

14200 

$400.00 

Post-war Southern California was a hotbed of Abstract and experimental art, music. Jan Stussy, a tireless and prolific experimenter himself, dove headfirst into the din and worked in several mediums, including painting, printmaking, film, and even a line of surf and skateboarding culture clothing. Through it all, lithography was a mainstay.

In the late 1960s and through the 1970s Stussy's lithographs focused primarily on the human figure set within an intimate boundary, such as a box or a stage. Among his most recognized works was a series titled "Family of Acrobatic Jugglers," which presented abstracted figures with long, tapering legs and arms posed in shadow boxes, similar to this image of a nude dancer. Here, however, the figure is less contained by walls but is still caught within a boundary: the stark circle of a spotlight. Her shadow is stamped in lavendar-blue on the white wall behind her, and her face, shrouded in a cloud of dark hair, remains a mystery.

This impression was printed by master printer Joe Funk, with whom Stussy worked at the Lynton Kistler Print Workshop in Los Angeles.