Lithograph #1

 

William Samuel Schwartz

  1896 - 1977 (biography)

1928  

lithograph 

13 5/8 x 18 3/4" image 

pencil, lower left on old mat; stone signed, lower center of image. 

impression number 15 from an unstated edition 

signed and dated in the stone in image, lower center; pencil numbered as "Impression #15" and titled in lower left mat corner 

Metropolitan Museum of Art obj. no. 2016.761.11 

Strathmore cream wove, attached by artist onto ivory 2 ply mat. 

published 

artist 

14778 

$1,200.00 

Chicago-based, Russian-born artist William Schwartz graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago in the 1917. It was there that he was introduced to the work of Wassily Kandinksky, whose aesthetic philosophy soon began to inform Schwartz's work.

"Lithograph #1," the artist's first lithograph, is a Modernist, somewhat Cubist, highly abstracted Chicago cityscape, drawn in flattened surfaces with the litho crayon. Schwartz's compositions delved into both abstraction and representation and his attempts to merge the two, as in this image of a cigar shop on a street corner with what appears to be a church dome in the background. Heavy clouds billow above the scene as people walk to and from their errands.

Schwartz worked in lithography for only 10 years, producing some 60 prints in editions that consisted of between 16 and 73 impressions. He titled them chronologically, eschewing descriptive titles. This was his first attempt at the medium.