Untitled
9 1/2 x 9 1/4 inchesUntitled, 1973
paper: 9 1/2 x 9 1/4 inches
frame: 10 3/4 x 10 3/4 inches
Edition of 300
Signed and Dated "Serra 1973" in pencil bottom right recto
Numbered in pencil bottom left recto
Verso stamped in black "© Copyright 1973 By Richard Serra Printed At Styria Studio"
Printer Styria Studio
Publisher Experiments in Art & Technology
Literature
Berswordt-Wallrabe, Richard Serra: Prints 1972-2007, Richter Verlag, 2008, not illustrated
Provenance
Glenn Horowitz Booksellers, East Hampton, New York
Sotheby’s, New York, October 26, 2019, Lot 253
Private collection, New York (Acquired from the above)
Museum Collections
Moderna Museet, Stockholm
Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.
Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis
Portland Art Museum, Portland
Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Princeton Art Museum, Princeton
Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis
Seattle Art Museum, Seattle
Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge
Davis Museum at Wellesley College, Wellesley
Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis
Deerfield Museum Consortium, Deerfield
Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum, Miami
Additional Photos
Full Sheet
Edition number lower left
Signature & Date lower right
In the early 1970s the New York–based group Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) put together a collection of some of the most important American art of the 1960s, including Pop, Minimal and conceptual practices, with the aim of donating it to a public museum.
RICHARD SERRA: NEW YORK COLLECTION FOR STOCKHOLM
In the early 1970s the New York–based group Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) put together a collection of some of the most important American art of the 1960s, including Pop, Minimal and conceptual practices, with the aim of donating it to a public museum. They chose thirty works by thirty artists in a variety of mediums and selected the Moderna Museet in Stockholm as the recipient due to its strong history of support for American contemporary art. To help raise the funds necessary to build the collection, E.A.T. asked each of the selected artists to create a work as part of a portfolio consisting primarily of lithographs and screen prints. Thus The New York Collection for Stockholm portfolio was created.
E.A.T. was founded in 1966 by the engineers Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer along with the artists Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman.1 As a not-for-profit organization intended to promote technological advances in the arts, E.A.T. initiated programs and projects that paired artists and engineers or scientists for one-to-one collaborations. The organization’s aims, as formulated by Klüver and Rauschenberg, were to: • Maintain a constructive climate for the recognition of the new technology and the arts by a civilized collaboration between groups unrealistically developing in isolation. • Eliminate the separation of the individual from technological change and expand and enrich technology to give the individual variety, pleasure and avenues for exploration and involvement in contemporary life. • Encourage industrial initiative in generating original forethought, instead of a compromise in aftermathand precipitate a mutual agreement in order to avoid the waste of a cultural revolution.
The catalyzing event for E.A.T. was an exhibition titled 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering. Held in October 1966 at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York City, the project brought together nearly forty engineers from the nearby Bell Laboratories and ten contemporary artists to create a series of performances. These cutting-edge collaborations involved rethinking the use of many of the technologies of the time, including radio control, doppler radarand light sensors. Following this first large-scale experimentation, E.A.T. was officially formed.
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To pursue their goal of donating a significant collection of contemporary art to a public museum, in the early 1970s E.A.T. approached Pontus Hultén, director of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm and a strong supporter of American art. E.A.T. had originally intended to assemble the collection using a grant from the United States Department of the Treasury and donate it to an American museum, but that plan fell through. Rather than let the project dissolve, they chose the Moderna Museet as the recipient. Klüver and Hultén, in consultation with dealers, art historiansand other museum professionals, selected thirty artists and artworks across mediums for what became a preeminent collection of American art by an illustrious roster of participants. Many of the artists and their dealers were generous in the outright donation of their works to the collection. The Swedish government also participated by contributing half of the money necessary to acquire the works. To help raise the remainder of the funds, each of the artists agreed to make a print for a portfolio that could be sold to support the project.
To realize this plan, E.A.T. enlisted the help of Adolph Rischner, the master printer at Styria Studioand the master woodworker and sculptor Peter Ballantine. The prints were to be small in scale—nine by twelve inches—and "one strike," meaning simple, single-run screen prints or lithographs, although many of the artists broke with these rules and created prints of greater complexity with multiple runs. The edition size for each of the hand- pulled prints was 300, an impressive feat for Styria Studioand each portfolio was meant to be housed in a Honduran mahogany box built by Ballantine. In the end, however, only a few wooden boxed sets were made, as mahogany was added to the endangered species list and export was banned. The project was completed in 1973.
The 1970s are often considered the glory days of big print shops in the United States. Recently established print publishers such as Gemini G.E.L., U.L.A.E. (Universal Limited Art Editions), Crown Point Pressand Landfall Press were in full swing, each seemingly trying to outdo the others with feats of printing prowess. The New York Collection for Stockholm portfolio contains prints by several artists known for breaking new ground in printmaking at those shops, including Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenbergand James Rosenquist.
Some of the prints in the portfolio feature images and content that relate directly to the artworks in the donated collection. Dan Flavin’s print consists of a portrait of the Russian artist Vladimir Tatlin and a small image of one of Flavin’s fluorescent sculptures from his Monuments series, created in homage to Tatlin’s unfinished works, positioned in the bottom righthand corner. Robert Breer produced a lithograph that resembles a stencil version of one of his kinetic sculptures that were often seen wandering about at E.A.T.’s events.
With its variety of contributors known for their work across multiple mediums, the portfolio reflects the wide-ranging experimentation defining the New York art scene in the late 1960s and early 1970s. E.A.T.’s grassroots effort and their dedication to productive partnerships offered a paradigm of collaboration that extended from the work of E.A.T. to the print shop. As an extraordinary object and a prescient time capsule of American art embodied in print, The New York Collection for Stockholm portfolio is as relevant today as ever.
Richard Serra, who set out to become a painter but instead became one of his era’s greatest sculptors, inventing a monumental environment of immense tilting corridors, ellipses and spirals of steel that gave the medium both a new abstract grandeur and a new physical intimacy, died on Tuesday March 26, 2024 at his home in Orient, N.Y., on the North Fork of Long Island. He was 85.
Mr. Serra’s most celebrated works had some of the scale of ancient temples or sacred sites and the inscrutability of landmarks like Stonehenge. But if these massive forms had a mystical effect, it came not from religious belief but from the distortions of space created by their leaning, curving or circling walls and the frankness of their materials.
