Author Archives: Robin Starr

Relief prints use the raised relief of a printing matrix, such as a block of wood, to carry the ink to make prints.  A rubber stamp is essentially a relief print.  If you made prints as a kindergartener by carving a potato with a plastic knife, you have made a relief print.  Woodcut is the oldest printmaking technique and was popular in both Asia and in Europe.  It predates the year 1,000 AD. 

In Western art, as early as the 16th century printmakers like Albrecht Dürer saw the short comings of the technique, compared to the slightly newer technique of engraving and intaglio printing.… Read More

Both Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood eschewed pure abstraction, and by any polar model both artists must be viewed as representational rather than Modernist. For both Benton and Wood narrative takes precedence, and Regionalist art is often perceived as a form of propaganda supported by the government during the Great Depression and in the lead up to World War II.i As one of Jackson Pollock’s teachers, Thomas Hart Benton was continually berated for his seemingly anti-Modernist stance.… Read More

Pop Art takes its name from the integration of commercialized popular culture into art—it is closely associated with the New York art scene starting in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Pop Art was, in part, a response to the dominant movement preceding it: Abstract Expressionism. The AbEx artists such as Pollock, de Kooning, Frankenthaler, and Rothko rejected traditional representational art as elitist. In their view, most traditional art required viewers to have a sophisticated knowledge of history, religious iconography, literature, and classical mythology.… Read More

Understand the terms used throughout catalog descriptions for Fine Art at Skinner. Robin S.R. Starr, Vice President and Director of American & European Works of Art, explains and illustrates how, where, and why these terms are used at Skinner in the accompanying video.

Glossary of Terminology:

Attributed toThe work may be by the artist’s hand, but leaves some question or doubt as to actual authorship.

School ofA work of an unknown follower executed in the style of the artist and contemporary in period.… Read More

The art of Wolf Kahn is challenging to categorize. Working primarily in oils and pastels, his loose, gestural brushstrokes take their cue from Abstract Expressionism. He regularly uses horizontal bands of color, as seen in his 1992 pastel, Pond in a Red Landscape. These planes are reminiscent of the works of Mark Rothko with one small exception. Kahn includes subtle verticals with myriad tree trunks: Kahn’s subject matter is very much representational.… Read More

Every artist works differently and is inspired by different things, but print-making gives us the unique opportunity to view the creative process at work. When an artist makes a print, they create the matrix from which prints can be pulled. This might be a copper plate that has been etched or a lithographic stone that the artist has drawn on with crayon, but the process has an inherent flaw. The finished artwork is an impression from that matrix rather than the matrix itself, so the artist needs to pull an impression in order to know how their art actually looks.… Read More

Are you looking at a work of art, but can’t decide whether you’re looking at an original painting or a reproduction? Don’t panic. To bust the vast majority of repros all you need to do is look closely.

Ask yourself if there a reason the work looks suspicious? Maybe the colors look a little off, like an old Kodachrome slide or that faded poster that used to hang in your dorm room? Maybe the texture of the surface seems wrong; it looks like the paint is applied with heavy impasto (meaning thick, loose, brushstrokes) but the surface is flat as a pancake?… Read More

Joan Miró is best known as a painter of Surrealistic figures that dance across flat surfaces like alien cartoon creatures searching for a party. Wise collectors know that he was also a skilled and prolific printmaker, working in lithography and intaglio techniques for much of his career. He began experimenting with printmaking in the 1920s, but it wasn’t until later in life that he pursued it vigorously.

Like many artists, Miró had particular themes and subjects which reoccurred throughout his career.… Read More

One of the youngest of the Ashcan School artists, George Wesley Bellows began making prints in 1916. Like his paintings, his lithographs incorporated a wide breadth of subject matter, depicted in realistic, often gritty, detail that signified American city life in the early 20th century in all of its vast varieties. Skinner is lucky enough to have eight works in the January 2018 Fine Prints & Multiples auction, spanning his career and interests.… Read More

Pablo Picasso was a dynamic, creative force. He was intrigued by and experimented with countless media throughout the course of his long and illustrious career. Picasso’s Cubist oil paintings – some incorporating collage – of the 1910s changed the world of Western Art forever.  He worked in crayon, pencil, and pastel and was a prolific printmaker as well. He created sculptural works from a broad range of materials including bronze, glass, and wood.… Read More