Jim Melchert "Untitled" From Suite 10 West Coast Artists 1967 Reproduction Print

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Artist: Jim Melchert – American (1930 - 2023)
Title: “Untitled” from the suite: 10 West Coast Artists, Collector’s Press, 1967
… Read more Artist: Jim Melchert – American (1930 - 2023)
Title: “Untitled” from the suite: 10 West Coast Artists, Collector’s Press, 1967
Year: 1967
Medium: Lithograph on BFK Rives paper
Size: 30 x 22 inches.
Publisher: Collector’s Press, San Francisco
Edition: 75.
Signature: Signed lower right in pencil
Embossed publisher’s chop lower left of the Collector’s Press, San Francisco;
Embossed printer’s chop lower left “K”
Numbered: 39/75 lower right in pencil
Condition: Excellent

This lithograph is from the notable portfolio “10 West Coast Artists” containing ten prints, title page and colophon page, published by Collector’s Press in San Francisco in 1967. Prints by Keith Boyle, Bruce Conner, Richard Diebenkorn, Roy de Forest, Sidney Gordin, Frank Lobdell, James Melchert, Manuel Neri, Frank Ruvolo, Peter Voulkos are in the portfolio. The print has no margins – it is full bleed. The print is in excellent condition.

Jim Melchert was at the center of the Bay Area’s artistic growth and served as Visual Arts head at the NEA and Director of the American Academy at Rome. His work has been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Oakland Museum of California, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the University Art Museum at UC Berkeley. Melchert worked in a variety of media, including drawing, film, and ceramics. The path of his artistic development is conceptual, and his ideas led him to a unique process involving ceramic tiles: breaking them, drawing on them, reassembling them and painting the new constructions with glaze.

Jim Melchert was born in 1930 in Ohio. After his undergraduate studies in art history at Princeton he taught English in Japan for four years in exchange for the rich experience of living there. Returning to the States he earned degrees in painting at the University of Chicago and afterwards ceramics under Peter Voulkos at the University of California, Berkeley. Finding the Bay Area to be receptive to artists in the way that watering holes are to migratory birds, he settled in Oakland and thrived on the interaction among his colleagues and young artists at UC-Berkeley where he taught. In 1977 the National Endowment for the Arts brought him to Washington, DC to direct its Visual Arts Program for four years. From 1984 to 1988 he joined the American Academy in Rome as Director.

One can see from the diversity of Melchert’s art work that he is a maverick who disregards many of the canons that define disciplines. His travels throughout the Mediterranean in the 1980s introduced him to ceramic tile as a medium ripe for further investigation. Among the places where his work has been exhibited are the Whitney Museum and the Museum of Art and Design in New York; the Museums of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Houston, and Los Angeles; the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston; at the Museums of Modern Art in San Francisco, Tokyo, and Kyoto; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and Documenta 5 in Kassel, Germany. Source: Jim Melchert website See less