Andrew Robison, with Judith Brodie, Ruth E. Fine, Margaret Morgan Grasselli and Sarah Greenough Dürer to Diebenkorn: Recent Acquisitions of Art on Paper, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1992
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"Unique treasures from Crown Point Press are three working proofs for Diebenkorn's Combination, 1981 . . . which the artist altered by drawing and/or collage as he developed the image. He considerably modified the forms and made major shifts in color, converting the green field to a reddish one and in reverse changing a red tone in the spade form at the upper right to a green. . . .
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"Artist Sam Francis made a generous gift of fifty-five prints to the National Gallery last year. Particularly exciting is his untitled work of 1983 . . . our first of Francis' very beautiful monotypes. It is one of an important group of unique images printed from woodblocks . . . in the early 1980s. Francis' strong colors and powerful forms were printed from multiple pieces of plywood, irregular in shape and size, that were laid onto a wooden base, and together they functioned as a matrix. In combination with areas of intense color, Francis used ghost images made from wood that had previously been printed in other works in the series; the thin film of ink that remained achieved gentle modulations of pale tone that heighten the wood grain. His loose painterly marks result from splattering color directly on his matrix as if on canvas. The balance of Francis' gift is a little-known series of self-portraits of penetrating intensity as as wonderful humor, printed in etchings and lithography during the early 1970s.
"Another generous artist-donor last year was June Wayne, the founder of Tamarind Lithography Workshop, which was active in Los Angeles from 1960 to 1970. In addition to facilitating the art of lithography for hundreds of others, Wayne also accomplished an impressive corpus of her own prints. This year she donated twenty-five of these dating from 1951 to 1987 to fill gaps in our collection . . . including the portfolio Solar Flares, 1983 . . . Brilliantly colorful, Solar Flames, Solar Burst, Solar Flash, Solar Wave . . . and Solar Refraction are printed on paper bearing the artist's own watermark and enclosed in a Mylar wrapper that acts as title page and colophon.
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Richard Diebenkorn (b. 1922)
Sam Francis (b. 1923)
June Wayne (b. 1918)