1982 "New Beginnings" Joseph Raffael Original Expressionist Color Lithograph

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Description

Artist: Joseph Raffael (American, 1933-2021)
Title: New Beginnings
Date: 1982
Medium: Color lithograph
Sheet size: 33.5 x 31.75 inches
Framed … Read more Artist: Joseph Raffael (American, 1933-2021)
Title: New Beginnings
Date: 1982
Medium: Color lithograph
Sheet size: 33.5 x 31.75 inches
Framed Size 38 x 38 inches
Signature: Signed, dated lower center
Edition: 86 plus proofs. This one: Printer’s Proof 2/6

This exceptional color lithograph is immediately recognizable as the work of noted American artist Joseph Raffael. The print and mat are in very good condition with no flaws to note. The frame is in fair condition with some scratches.

Joseph Raffael - February 22, 1933, Brooklyn, New York - July 12, 2021, France

Joseph Raffael was the youngest of three children and the only son of Sicilian and Swiss-Irish parents, Joseph Marino Raffaele and Cora Kaelin Raffaele. He became interested in drawing at age 7, and spent his high school years taking classes at the nearby Brooklyn Museum.

From 1951-54, he attended Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City, along with fellow students R.B. Kitaj and Paul Thek. Upon graduation from Cooper Union, Raffael received a fellowship to the Yale Summer School of Art and Music in Norfolk, Connecticut. Through the support of his instructor Bernard Chaet, Raffael was awarded a scholarship to the Yale School of Art, where he studied color and drawing with Josef Albers and received his BFA in 1956.

Instead of pursuing a master's degree, he moved to NY to become a painter, where he worked freelance part-time at Jack Prince Textile Studio, alongside Carolyn Brady, Audrey Flack, and others, while working nights and weekends on his paintings. In 1958, he won a Fulbright fellowship to study for two years in Florence and Rome, and began painting complexly colored watercolors of flower forms. He mounted his first New York exhibition of his Umbrian watercolors in 1963, at the d’Arcy Galleries, while at the same time battling hepatitis from which he almost died; when he recovered, he shifted to "real life" images based on photographs.

Raffael’s distinctively original art has earned critical praise ever since the mid-60s, while he was living in New York City and, later, in Marin County, California. During this period, his circle of artist friends in New York included the British photorealist Malcolm Morley, the painter Don Nice, the writer Linda Rosenkrantz, the photographer Peter Hujar and, in California, the artist William T. Wiley. In 1965, he had a solo exhibition at Eleanor Ward’s Stable Gallery. In 1966, he taught at University of California Davis.
He married his first wife, the artist Judy Davis, in 1968, and lived in Bennington, Vermont, commuting to New York to teach at the School of Visual Arts. In 1969, they moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where Raffael taught at UC Berkeley and later at California State University in Sacramento. In 1972 he began his "water painting" series using photographs of rivers taken for him by painter friend William Allan. In 1973, Raffael quit teaching to paint full-time; he received first prize at the Tokyo International Biennale in 1974.

The death of his son Matthew and divorce in 1980 caused him to focus more on the spiritual, including imagery related to Buddhism. He began a relationship with his spiritual counselor, Lannis Wood, in 1984; they married in 1986 and moved to the south of France, where he resided, working in watercolors and acrylics. In 1988, Raffael began the Lannis in Sieste series, a group of paintings featuring over a dozen of his wife in repose.

Raffael's work was featured on the cover of the June 2007 issue of Watercolor Magic magazine, and on the covers of the May 2009, May 2014, and September 2017 issues of The Artist's Magazine. He became well known with a 1973 Time Magazine article by Robert Hughes A Slice of the River, showcasing his signature water paintings. Hughes called Raffael “a very American figure recognizable from his 19th-century prototypes along the Hudson River and the Yosemite Valley; the painter as Italian altar boy in the cathedral of nature. These sumptuous works both dazzle and pull the viewer into the whirling vortex of the painting with a quiet force. Despite their iconic serenity when seen from a distance, Raffael’s paintings disclose a bejeweled profusion of incident close up.” Hughes concludes that the artist’s color-drenched canvases display “a tender virtuosity without parallel in other American figurative painting today.”

In 2016, for the first time in 20 years, Raffael moved away from his previous large-format work and began a new, ongoing series of small-format watercolor paintings.

In 2018, Raffael collaborated David Pagel – professor, art critic and contributor to the Los Angeles Times – to produce Talking Beauty: A Conversation Between Joseph Raffael and David Pagel about Art, Love, Death, and Creativity.

In his November 2018 review of the book in the San Francisco Review of Books, critic Grady Harp wrote, "...the joy of this book is slowly reading the interchange of ideas form the exchanged emails between these two men – comments on life, death, art and artists, writing, creativity, children, pets – all blended into a wondrous tapestry of the essence of being truly alive."

On May 19, 2019 his wife Lannis Wood Raffael died after a long period of health crises. Before her death, Raffael completed his painting "For Lannis: 1944-2019".

Subsequent to her passing, he began a series of paintings called "Ellegy", the works which followed were all highly focused, close-up views of a flower. He has said that the painting application and intention had been heightened by a sense that Lannis was now integral to the process.
EDUCATION

1953-54 Attended Cooper Union, New York

1954 Summer Fellowship Yale-Norfolk School

1954-56 Attended Yale School of Fine Arts, BFA, studied with Josef Albers

1958-59 Fulbright Fellowship to Florence and Rome

TEACHING EXPERIENCE

1966 University of California, Davis

1967-69 School of Visual Arts, New York

1969 University of California, Berkeley, Summer

1969-74 California State University at Sacramento

PRIZES AND AWARDS

1975 Purchase Prize, Concours d'Antiques, Oakland Museum, California

1974 First Prize, Tokyo International Biennial, Japan

1960 Louis C. Tiffany Fellowship See less