Glarner, Tondo, Prints from the Mourlot Press (after) 1964

Description

Lithograph on vélin d'Arches paper. Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued. Good condition. Notes: From the album, Prints from the Mourlot … more Lithograph on vélin d'Arches paper. Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued. Good condition. Notes: From the album, Prints from the Mourlot Press, 1964. Published by Fernand Mourlot, Paris, and National Collection of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.; printed by Mourlot, Paris, October 27, 1964. Excerpted from the album, This album was finished in Paris on 27th October 1964. The original lithographs and the reproductions were printed on the presses of Mourlot. The L'Imprimerie nationale, Director André Brignole, was responsible for the typography. The edition has been limited to MM examples on Vélin d'Arches and CC on Vélin de Rives reserved for the artists, the staff and the friends of the Imprimerie Mourlot.

FRITZ GLARNER (1899-1972 in Locarno) was a Swiss-American painter. Glarner was a leading proponent of so-called Concrete Art, an artists' movement whose roots lead back to the painters of De Stijl and the principles of the Bauhaus. He was a disciple of Pablo Picasso and Piet Mondrian—strongly influenced by Mondrian's theories of "dynamic symmetry". As he developed as an artist, his works began to be increasingly influenced by Mondrian's Neoplastic theory. His leaning toward nonrepresentational art had begun as early as 1929 in Paris, where he was a member of the Abstraction-Création group. Glarner took up Mondrian's motif of arranging simplified colors and forms on an architectural pattern. Glarner introduced a diagonal into the strict horizontal and vertical geometric aesthetic of Mondrian, creating new, yet equally systematic principles of composition that he termed "relational painting." Like Mondrian, Glarner limited his color palette to the primaries, red, yellow and blue. He expanded Mondrian's black "line" into a broad range of grays, used both as line and, like the primaries, as geometric areas of color. Many of his works are tondos, his signature relational principles ordered within a circle. Glarner's additions and alterations in structure and color to the Mondrian style gave his works a vitality and spatial dimensions. 24 of his works are owned by Museo Cantonale d’Arte of Lugano, Switzerland. A mural by Glarner is included in The Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza Art Collection in Albany, NY. less