Original Prints

We are currently showing 100 works by Antoni Tàpies (Spanish, 1923-2012), another giant in the line of Picasso and Miró of anti-fascist, Catalonian patriots who helped transform art in the 20th century. The winner of the 1958 Carnegie Prize, Tàpies has had major shows at The Museum of Modern Art (NY), The Guggenheim Museum (1962, 1995), The Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), the Musée d’Art Moderne (Paris), the new Jeu de Pomme (1994, Paris; 304-page catalog published Paris: Reunion des Musees Nationaux, 1994), the Hayward Gallery (London), the Louisiana Museum (Copenhagen), the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (Buffalo), the Nationalgalerie (Berlin), and many others. Sir Roland Penrose’s Tàpies concludes by noting that "the ultimate purpose . . . [of Tàpies’ art] is transcendental" and that his "deepest hope is of the transformation of mankind" through his art, which unveils "a cosmogony in which nothing whatsoever is mean." As Tàpies has written himself, he seeks "to remind man of what in reality he is, to give him a theme for reflection, to shock him in order to rescue him from the madness of inauthenticity and to lead him to self-discovery." In a New York Times review of Tàpies’ 1995 retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in NYC, Alan Riding suggests that Tàpies works show an attempt to "reach ultimate reality through introspection . . . to achieve ‘the ultimate mysterious unity’ that links the entire universe."

Acclaimed by Robert Motherwell as the greatest living European artist shortly before Motherwell died, Tàpies made printmaking one of his central activities and his prints have always been recognized as a major part of his oeuvre; they were celebrated in a large retrospective organized by The Museum of Modern Art in 1991 that circulated to a number of museums in the US, Central and South America from 1991 to 1993. In connection with their show, the Museum of Modern Art published Tàpies in Print (a retrospective of his prints and illustrated books, showing about 100 works), probably the best introduction to his graphic works. In addition to our featured work, Llibertat/Liberty, a large, beautiful original color lithograph at a very special price, Spaightwood Galleries will have over 100 works (selected from the more than 200 works in our inventory, more of which will be appearing soon on our web site) on display. You can begin to browse the 12 pages devoted to Tápies at http://www.spaightwoodgalleries.com/Pages/Tapies.html but seeing them in the flesh is far more satisfying. We are open Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m and Sundays from noon to 5 p.m. We are also available by appointment most weekdays (call locaally at 508-529-2511 or from out of state at 800-809-3343 if you are planning a trip to visit.

P.S. The print on illustrated above is Taches et chiffres / Spots and figures (Galfetti 330), an original color lithograph, etching and aquatint with carborundum made in 1972 and published in an edition of 75 signed and numbered impressions (of which ours is n. 16/75) by Maeght Editeur in Paris, Tàpies' long-term dealer, and illustrating his love of surfaces. Image size: 750x1050mm. Mat size: 36x48 inches. Price: Please call or email for current pricing information.

P.P.S. When Tàpies died, BlouenArt Info posted a picture-essay on the web containing 12 illustrations, one a recent photograph of the artist, and the other 11 came from the first page of our 12 Tàpies web-pages our website (see above for the link).

At the moment, we have 12 web-pages on our website dedicated to showing some of the works of Antoni Tàpies. You can explore them by clicking here.

We have 6 panels on the long walls of the gallery that give us about a 9'x9' space for showing art above the bookshelves that line the gllery. We also have two end-walls that give us about the same space (though without the bookshelves) and two walls in front just past the entry way. We also have 4 walls (two each at the beginning and end of the two long walls) that allow us to hang one or two large pieces. See below for a few examples from our current show of original prints by Antoni Tàpies.

P.S. the two pieces at top are in 36"x28" frames; the two rows of three beneath them are in 24"x30" frames.

Top left: Panier et signes noir / Basket with black marks (G. 741). Original color lithograph, 1980. 75 signed and numbered impressions, of which ours is n. 41/75. Image size: 516x680mm. Price: Please call or email for current pricing information.
Top right: Ban de Loo, Cologne (G. 1090). Original color lithograph, 1972. 180 signed and numbered impressions for the Cologne Art Fair; ours is an H.C. Image size: 550x760mm. Price: Please call or email for current pricing information.
Middle left: Carres / Squares (G. 139). Original color lithograph, 1967. 75 signed and numbered impressions (of which ours is n. 10/75). Image size: 450x620mm. Price: Please call or email for current pricing information
Middle center: Noir sur fond blanc (G. 280). Original color lithograph, 1971. 150 signed and numbered impressions (of which ours is n. 93/150). Image size: 550x755mm. Price: Please call or email for current pricing information.
Middle right: Clau del foc 21 (G. 731). Original color etching and aquatint, 1973. 25 signed and numbered impressions (1/25-25/25) and 26 impressions numer A-Z (ours is an H.C.). Image size: 325x485mm. Price: Please call or email for current pricing information.
Bottom left: Rouge et crayon (G. 531). Original color lithograph, 1975. 100 signed and numbered impressions (ours is an H.C. impression). Image size: 420x750mm. Price: Please call or email for current pricing information
Bottom center: U no es ninju / Nobody is a nobody (G. 727). Original color etching and carborundum, 1975. 75 signed and numbered impressions (ours is n. 71/75). Image size: 420x750mm. Price: Please call or email for current pricing information
Bottom right: Sous zero / Under zero (G. 731). Original color lithograph, 1979. 75 signed and numbered impressions (of which ours is n. 39/75). Image size: 450x533mm. Price: Please call or email for current pricing information

This wall on the other side of the gallery contains only five pieces: 2 carborundum etchings from the Negre i roig series (Negre i roig VI: Signes noirs (G. 614) and Negre i roig XII: Lettre C (G. 620; another impression of this work was in MoMA's exhibition of Tàpies' prints, Tàpies in Print) in 28"x36" frames on top ; 3 36" x28" works in different media (two color lithographs on the ends, one color lithgoraph with embossing in the center: Affiche avant la lettre Musée d'art moderne de la ville de Paris (G. 964), original color lithograph, 1984 (ours is n. 13/120). Commissioned by the M.A.M. for their retrospective of Tàpies' works. Image size: 722x502mm. Price: Please call or email for current pricing information.
Variation on a musical theme II (G. 1143). Original lithograph in black and gray with embossing, 1987. Ours is n. 10/75. Image size: 701x540mm. Price: Please call or email for current pricing information. This was part of a series of 22 Variations, 5 of which were included in MoMA's exhibition of Tàpies as a printmaker, Tàpies in Print.
Affiche avant la lettre 173 (G. 719), original color lithograph, 1979 (ours is n. 13/120). Image size: 650x505mm. Price: Please call or email for current pricing information.

Calligraphique (G. 1139). Original color lithograph, 1989. 75 signed and numbered impressions (ours is n. 11/75). Image size: 1160x770mm. Price: Please call or email for current pricing information.

To get a sense of the size of this work, the frame is 58x36 inches.

Negre i roig III (G. 611). Original color etching with carborundum and flocking, 1989. 75 signed and numbered impressions (ours is an H.C. impression). Image size: 1160x770mm. Price: Please call or email for current pricing information.

One of Tàpies' most acclaimed works, this work was included in MoMA's retrospective of Tàpies as a printmaker and illustrated in Tàpies in Print, the catalog of the show that, tragically, only illustrated a small selection of the show. Our memory is that there were over 130 works in the show; the book only illustrated about 1/3 of them.

Top left: Affiche avant la lettre 231 (G. 964). Original color lithograph, 1984. 120 signed and numbered impressions (ours is n. 13/120). Image size: 960x600mm. Price: Please call or email for current pricing information.
Scotch. Original color lithograph, 1973. 120 signed and numbered impressions plus 40 from i/xl to xl/xl (ours is an artit's proof label a/p). Image size: 960x600mm. Price: Please call or email for current pricing information.
Affiche avant la lettre Le sables d'Olonne. Original color lithograph, 1978. 150 signed and numbered impressions ours is n. 133/150). Image size: 870x610mm. Price: Please call or email for current pricing information.
Roig i negre II (G. 1021). Original color etching and aquatint with carborundum on hand-made paper, 1985. 99 signed and numbered impressions, of which ours is n. 29/99. Image size: 960x1250mm (or 37-3/4x49-3/16 inches). Price: Please call or email for current pricing information. This very 3-dimensional work on paper is more like a 3-dimensional work than a 2-d work on paper. Carborundum is the magic ingredient that gioves the work dimensionality.

Also featured in the show: Roig i negre V (G. 1024). Original color etching and aquatint with carborundum on hand-made paper, 1985. 99 signed and numbered impressions, of which ours is n. 30/99. Image size: 960x1250mm (or 37-3/4x49-3/16 inches). Price: Please call or email for current pricing information.

We have over 100 Tàpies original prints in the show and another 30 or so available for viewing, but we ran out of wall and floor space without putting all of our Tàpies on display. Tàpies is one of the most important artists of the late 20th-early 21st centuries. It would be a shame to miss seeing his works on the wall: they won't go way when the show is over (unless we sell some of them because we own them all), but seeing them as a group is a much more powerful experience than seeing them one at a time. Prices for the Tàpies original prints run from Please call or email for current pricing information to Please call or email for current pricing information.

Art Gallery in Worcester MA

Some history: Spaightwood Galleries was founded in 1980 in Madison Wisconsin by Andy Weiner and Sonja Hansard-Weiner and moved in 2004 into our current site in Upton Massachusetts (we are about forty-five minutes west of Boston via the Mass Pike to Exit 11 (I-495 South) then exit at Exit 21-B Upton (the first exit south of the Pike); go 5.5 miles directly to the gallery in the former Upton Unitarian Church on the corner of Highway 140 and Maple Ave [click for views of our new home and exhibition space]). We are also about 40 minutes from Worcester MA, 90 minutes from Hartford CT and 3 hours from Manhattan. Now thirty-five years later we have an inventory of over 9000 works, most on paper, ranging from the late fifteenth century to the present. In the days to come we will continue to add pages (currently we have over 770) and images (currently over 6000) to this site, but the best way to find out what we have will be to e-mail us (spaightwood@gmail.com) or call us for more information (one of the reasons I retired after 35 years at the University of Wisconsin as a Professor of English and an Affiliated Professor of Law was to get caught up; one of the reasons Sonja retired after 28 years at Madison Area Technical College was to make sure I do). By clicking on the link for Recent Exhibitions, you can get a sense of the shows we have put on at the gallery since the end of 2000 when we launched this site. For those who find indexing by show a bit cumbersome to negotiate, we offer a start at a more comprehensive alphabetical listing, divided into artists born before 1800 and those born after. As usual, the presence of a link means you can click through to the image(s) or page(s); the absence of a link indicates that we have not yet photographed the work(s) of that artist in our inventory, but we would be happy to do so on request as time permits. Click for Artists listing. For a profile on Andy and Sonja, the co-owners of Spaightwood Galleries, click here.

Spaightwood usually presents between three to five shows a year. Most of our shows feature works by artists of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, though we also have about 2000 old master prints and drawings in our inventory. In any given year, about 600 works of art appear on our walls. Our recent shows (see below) give a sense of the variety of what we show.

After our Tàpies show, we will present one-person shows dedicated to the works of
Gérard Titus-Carmel and Claude Garache

Immediately prior to our Tàpies show, we presented exhibitions of works by Joan Miró (about 130 works from 1929 to 1978), which followed shows dedicated to Marc Chagall (about 140 works), Contemprary American Women Artists and Contemporary Male artists (2 shows with a common core: we had too many large works to fit them into one show), and Pierre Alechinsky.

Top center: L'ouvrge du vent (M. 342, 1962), 2nd row: L'arbre des voyagers (M. 2-M. 5; but actually Miró's first 4 original lithographs since M. 1 is dated 1930, our M. 2 is the bon à tirer proof signed in blue ink by Miro and dated March 1929 and M. 5 is dated 3-29 in the stone), and Personnages devant la mer (D. 13, 1934); 3rd row: Cahier d'art I and II (D. 14-15, 1934), Aidez l'Espagne! (D. 17, 1937), Femme pour XXe Siecle (D. 40, 1938), and L'Antitête II (D. 59, 1947—proof before hand-coloring), as well as 4 larger lithographs leaning against the wall below.

Marc Chagall (1887-1985), Nuit d'été / Summer Night (M. 696). Original color lithograph, 1973. 50 signed and numbered impressions on Arches (of which ours is 24/50) plus 12 impressions of only the black stone on Japon Imperial. Image size: 555x375mm on Arches paper measuring 685x500mm. Price: Please call or email for current pricing information.

Chagall frequently chose his subjects from literary texts including Gogol's Dead Souls, The Fables of La Fontaine, The Bible, The Arabian Nights, Daphnis and Chloe, and The Odyssey. In 1976, he did a series of 50 black-and-white lithographs on Shakespeare's The Tempest. In view of his interest in literary texts, I would like to suggest that this is not simply any summer night, but a depiction of Titania, the Queen of the Fairies in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, being wooed by Nick Bottom the Weaver after his transformation by Puck into a "translated" version of himself, with the ass-head making immediately clear that Bottom is an ass whatever the visible form his head takes on. As someone who taught Shakespere regularly at the University of Wisconsin–Madison for 35 years and whose first publication ws an article on A Midsumer Night's Dream (subsequently cited as one of the most significant articles on the play in a 10-year survey of criticism on the play, this work is especially delightful for me).

P.S. The colors above are far more accurate than the ones in volume 5 of the catalogue raisonné of Chagall's lithographs, where the woman's pink hair is shown as bright red and the cock flying upper left is outlined in bright orange, a color also prominent in the reproduction of the bush lower left.

During 2014, we presented two shows focusing on contemporary American artists (we had planned to present one show, but had too many works to fit into one show so we had to do two), one focusing on works by women (including Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, Louise Nevelson, Elaine de Kooning, Pat Steir, Nancy Graves, Jennifer Bartlett, Louise Bourgeois, Louisa Chase, Lee Krasner, Judy Chicago, Susan Rothenberg, Niki de St. Phalle, Judy Pfaff, Dorothea Tanning, Joan Snyder, Susan Crile, Suzanne McClelland, Elizabeth Murray, Betye Saar, Emmi Whitehorse, Elizabeth Murray, Hollis Sigler, Lynda Benglis, Jane Freilicher, Harmony Hammond, Anita Jung, Lesley Dill, Karen Kunc, Judith Murray, Jonna Rae Brinkman, and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith. The exhibition of works by male artists featured 26 works by Robert Motherwell, 8 works by Jules Olitski, 6 works by Jim Dine and 5 by Andy Warhol, and works by Richard Diebenkorn, Ellsworth Kelly, Larry Rivers, Sam Gilliam, James Rosenquist, Roy Lichtenstein, Christo, Warrington Colescott, Robert Cottingham, Lester Johnson, George Segal, Jack Beal, Bill Weege, Sam Francis, Richrd Bosman, Richard Lindner, Manel Llédos, Don Reitz, Robert Indiana, Saul Steinberg, Jasper Johns, Philip Pearlstein, Mel Ramos, Allen Jones (from the Pop Art Portfolio), Nicholas Krushenick, Alex Katz, John Himmelfarb, and Robert Stackhouse. We began with the idea that we would put up a show of contemporary American artists and discovered that we had too many works to fit on the walls (and the floors) of our 4000 square foot viewing space, so we split the show into two parts, one featuring works of art by women, the other works by men, with a common core group of smaller pieces at the entry to the gallery (for a tour of the show, please see the two Gallery Tour links above Gallery Tour 1 (not quite done yet) and Gallery Tour 2). The tour of the women's works from the first version of this show can be seen at Womanshow2014.

Helen Frankenthaler (American, 1928-2011), Cleveland Orchestra (Harrison 70, Williams College 68, Tyler 193). Original 8-color screenprint, 1978. 150 signed and numbered impressions (of which ours is n. 42/150) plus xxv signed and numbered artist's proofs on white Arches cover paper printed at Tyler Graphics in Bedford Village NY. This print was created as a fund-raiser for the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra, whose logo is printed underneath Frankenthaler's signature. "To achieve the brushstroke marks that give the print its painterly quality, the artist drew directly on the screens with liquid tusche. This method of screenmaking allowed her the gestural freedom that is not available in either the hand-cut film process or the photo-stencil methods" (from the first catalogue raisonné of her prints published by Williams College, p. 134). One of Frankenthaler'smost painterly prints. Image size: 560x760mm. Price: Please call or email for current pricing information.

Beneath the signature and the reddish area, the logo of the Cleveland Museum can been. We have matted over the logo since Frankenthaler seemed to suggest that as a possibility by signing it to permit the option, but it is still presnet and could be rematted to show the four edges of the work. For more works by Frankenthaler, plese click here.

Joan Mitchell (1926-1992), Composition Vert / Noir: Fields. Original color lithograph, 1990. 125 signed and numbered impressions on Arches published by La Difference, Paris. Image size: 762x562mm. Price: Please call or email for current pricing information.

Louise Nevelson (American, 1899-1988), Untitled Composition. Original color intaglio and torn-paper collage with gold leaf and silver foil, 1976. 75 signed and numbered impressions. A Very beautiful and mysterious print. Image size: 173x183mm. Price: Please call or email for current pricing information.

Each of the bays on the two long walls of the gallery are about 106 inches wide and have a usable height from the top of the bookshelf to the moulding in the center of each wall of about 100 inches: tall enbough for 3 rows of 28-1/4 inch frames, but not for four; just as the walls are not wide enough for 3 36-1/4x28-1/4 inch frames, just two (however three 36x28 inch frames fit nicely).

Pierre Alechinsky, was one of the founding members of the COBRA group (the name comes from the cities where the artists involved originally works: COpenhagen, BRussels, and Amsterdam) in 1948, the first winner of the Andrew W. Mellon Prize in 1977 (the Nobel Prize for artists, so to speak), and the Grand Prix National for Painting from the nation of France, his adopted home (Alechinsky represented Belgium at the Venice Biennale in 1960 and France at the Sao Paolo Biennale a few years later). Alechinsky has been recognized in recent years as one of the most significant living the artists. The art market has long noticed his stature: one of his paintings sold at auction about 25 years ago for over Please call or email for current pricing information,000 back when a two-million dollar painting was a thing at which to marvel. Alechinsky was just barely out of his teens when he burst onto the art scene as one of the original members of the COBRA group, and over the years he has emerged as one of the most imaginative and witty artists of our times. Alechinsky devotees are everywhere. John Russell, who in 1986-87 devoted three separate columns in The New York Times to Alechinsky, saw him as "a man of strange blameless passions. Decorated invoices, worthless stock certificates, obsolete air-force navigational charts and ancient hand-written archival materials spark his imagination. . . . He has a taste for nature’s upheavals." Carlos Fuentes, the Mexican novelist for whom "the garden is the center of the world," described Alechinsky as a man who "paints gardens. . . . He knows that the history of gardens is the history of all of us. . . . Alechinsky . . . chooses any of the forked paths of the manicured gardens at Blois or Hampton Court and then transforms them, ferociously, into the savage gardens of the primitive mind, the original unity of dream and awareness, reason and imagination, desire and reality." Indeed, it may be that it is his dream of recovering that lost unity that makes him, as The New York Times called him, "a poet of entanglement, [who] resolutely turns the emphasis away from himself, preferring to act rather as historian and referee than as autobiographer. . . . His touch is light, his thought rapid, his view of the world as sharp as it is benign. There is no better companion, and not many who keep us so consistently amused and are so generous with their findings." Alechinsky has had major retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art and The Guggenheim Museum in NY, The Museum of Arts, Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh (in 1977, the Year of the Snake), The Palais des Beaux-Arts and the Musées Royeaux des Beaux Arts in Brussels, the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Vile de Paris and the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Boymans-von-Beuningen in Rotterdam, the Louisiana Museum in Humlebaek, Denmark, and museums in Aalborg, Brême, Copenhagen, Darmstadt, Des Moines, Düsseldorf, Gordes, Hanover, Marseille, Metz, Mexico City, Munich, St. Paul de Vence, Toronto, and Zurich.

Spaightwood Galleries, Inc.

To purchase, call us at 1-800-809-3343 (1-508-529-2511 in Upton MA & vicinity) or send an email to spaightwood@gmail.com.
We accept AmericanExpress, DiscoverCard, MasterCard, and Visa.
We also accept wire transfers and paypal.

For directions and visiting information, please call. We are, of course, always available over the web and by telephone (see above for contact information). Click the following for links to past shows and artists. For a visual tour of the gallery, please click here. For information about Andy Weiner and Sonja Hansard-Weiner, please click here. For a list of special offers currently available, see Specials.

All works are sold with an unconditional guarantee of authenticity (as described in our website listing).

Copyright 2004-2017, Spaightwood Galleries, Inc.

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Visiting hours: Saturday 10:00 am to 5:00 pm and Sunday noon to 6:00 pm and other times by arrangement.
Please call to confirm your visit. Browsers and guests are welcome.