1980 New York City Subway Geometric Silkscreen by Saul Chase Brighton

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This is just a great original piece. I recently acquired a collection of wonderful original prints by well listed New … Read more This is just a great original piece. I recently acquired a collection of wonderful original prints by well listed New York artist Saul Chase. They actually came from someone who had worked with the artist around the time that these were done. A few of them were actually even prints that had original touch ups to them with watercolor and ink. Some sort of work product in developing the final serigraph. For those not familiar with the artist, I have included his biography below. His works are in both the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian as well the Brooklyn Museum of Art and others. This is one of my favorites. Titled 'Brighton Local' it is great view of the doors of a subway in a stop. A wonderful large image measuring 21 x 16 inches on complete original sheet measuring 28 1/4 x 22 inches. Signed and dated, titled, and numbered in pencil just below the image. Image is in outstanding condition with just a few very minor handling creases. There are some obvious charcoal smudges to the right margin but those would easily be covered up with a proper matte and frame. They dont effect the image at all. Really an outstanding example of the artist's work. If you collect or like the artist's work, check my store for the other couple I am offering. Prints are stored in poster tubes and will be shipped that way.

For those not familiar with the artist, his biography from a gallery that sells his work reads: "Chase graduated from City College of New York, where he also received his M.A. degree. He taught for six years in vocational schools before he had his first solo show at A. C. A. Galleries in 1973. A realist with a predilection for geometric abstraction, Chase works loosely from photographs, but dissects and reconstructs the buildings, store fronts, streets, bridges, and skies captured by his camera. Chase's urban landscapes are devoid of people and action and possess a precise linearity and atmospheric clarity that derive from the rectilinear planes and surfaces of his subjects. A great admirer of J. M. W. Turner, Chase describes his scenes as memories of visual events and says his goal in painting is ambiguity: "the multiple levels that paint can achieve. The beauty of Saul Chase's work arises out of the inherent contradiction between his subject and the rendering. Chase paints the urban landscape of barren streets, warehouses, beaches, and subways in contrast with a palette of soft muted colors. There is nothing as complicated as simplicity and to achieve his deliberate monotones Chase may use as many as 103 colors in a single painting. In recreating the memory of an event Chase rebuilds his vision of the urban landscape as a facsimile of his initial impression. Recently Chase has turned to silk screen printing as a medium finding it ideal in translating his visions.

If you dissect a Saul Chase painting and reduce it to its basic compounds and materials you will not find the painting, something more is expressed through the artist. That something more is beauty. Analyze and dissect a painting too carefully and the beauty will disappear. The whole is always more than the sum total of the parts. Saul Chase's paintings are very simply beautiful, a not often used adjective in the art world, where much of the beauty has been theorized out of the canvas in favor of mental gymnastics. On the other hand, Chase's paintings are to be approached totally through the heart. They are images washed clean of prejudices. They emerge as if reborn. The urban landscape is presented with innocence and wonder. This is the "landscape" Chase grew up with in the Bronx. Chase developed a deep rapport with his environment, as children do, oblivious to preconceived ideas, knowing no other world but the one within. As unconcerned with the pedestrian idea of "objective reality,” the subway station, Coney Island and the I ND as identities disappear, existence arises luminous as a tension caught in the cobweb of our minds. See less