Artist: Antonio Saura Spanish (1930-1998)
Title: Crucifixion
Plate: 1C.09
Original lithograph on white wove paper
From the One Cent Life Portfolio
From edition of 2000
Printed by Maurice Beaudet, Paris, 1964
Published by E.W. Kornfield, Bern, Switzerland
unnumbered as issued
Unobtrusive center fold as issued
Shipped boxed flat
Certificate of Authenticity.
Image Size: 16 in x 15 in 40.6 cm x 38.1 cm
Sheet Size: 23 in x 16 1/8 in 58.4 cm x 40.9 cm
Price: $300.00
"Beyond useless discussions of figurative or abstract art is the imperious necessity to express oneself as one is,” the artist once remarked, “making ours all the energetic possibilities of the universe." Antonio Saura
"The canvas is a battlefield without limits." Antonio Saura
Antonio Saura
Antonio Saura was a Spanish Post-War artist who is considered one of the most important avant-garde painters of his time. Initially inspired by the Surrealist artists who were his contemporaries, Saura was largely self-taught, and was influenced as a child by classic Spanish painters like Francisco Goya and Diego Velázquez. A childhood illness of tuberculosis led to a long confinement, during which he began painting and writing. Saura would later help found the avant-garde group El Paso, or “The Step,” in Madrid, who were interested by furthering the strategies of American Abstract Expressionism and French Art Informel. Saura’s work has been exhibited around the world." (Artnet.com)
"In the 1950s and 1960s, Saura made a series of paintings of a crucifixion scene that recall Velázquez’s own 1632 composition at the Prado. Saura’s limited palette, constrained brushstrokes, and gruesome subject matter also evoke Pablo Picasso’s work of the late 1930s, especially the monochromatic Guernica (1937). Saura, like Picasso, was struck by the photographs of the bombing of the Basque capital, but Saura’s expressive brushstrokes more directly index his emotional response to wartime death and destruction." (nytimes.com)
Portfolio Cover by Lichtenstein
One Cent Life Portfolio
The 1964 One Cent Life Portfolio was written by Walasse Ting, edited by Sam Francis, and published by E.W. Kornfeld. This ambitious project of loose limited edition color lithographs, beautifully incorporates American Pop and European Expressionism.
See Greg's collection of One Cent Life
The complete portfolio includes 62 original lithographs by Pierre Alechinsky, Karel Appel, Enrico Baj, Alan Davie, Jim Dine, Sam Francis, Robert Indiana, Asger Jorn, Roy Lichtenstein, Joan Mitchell, Claes Oldenburg, Mel Ramos, Robert Rauschenberg, Jean-Paul Riopelle, James Rosenquist, Antonio Saura, Bram Van Velde, Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann and other American and European POP artists.
"It very quickly became the manifesto of a new generation of painters and the expression of the new pictorial research that they were engaged in….” (Gemini Fine Books & Arts, Ltd.)