ARTIST Robert Stanley MEDIUM Screenprint on Paper DATES 1970 DIMENSIONS Sheet: 40 x 29in. / 104.14 x 71.2cm SIGNATURE Signed, "Bob Stanley '70" lower right in pencil TITLE "Lake lll" EDITION Edition: 110, this is "69/110" as written in pencil lower center PUBLISHER C&D Editions, New York, Blind stamp in margin CONDITION Excellent, Like New, See Photo's GENERAL INFO This print and several others I am offering are new to the market as they were in the private collection of a former New York art dealer who retired here in South Carolina and have been in storage for over 50 years. Bob Stanley (1932 - 1997) Bob (Robert) Stanley was a painter whose early work was figurative painting about contemporary American life. In the 1960s and early 1970s, he based his paintings on photographs, which he manipulated from black and white ot larger than life colored shapes. Stanley first worked in collage and in an abstract expressionist style but in 1963 turned to painting polarized two-color canvases based on images clipped from newspapers and magazines of rock and pop stars, sporting events and pornography. He made no attempts to disguise his images' origins in photography; they have the high key contrast and exaggerated chiaroscuro of photographs made under harsh lighting. This deliberate artificiality is a strong link to pop art, with its homages to technological production. Enlarged and often rendered in two equally saturated colors (red and green, for example), his images could border on the abstract or be powerfully explicit, earning him the sobriquet of "the pirate of Pop”. His art, always about ordinary things, was rooted in the sublime, making ordinary objects seem special. His essence as an artist was that he gave full play to both the erotic and emotional and the craft - dispassionate and objective. Works from the mid-sixties include paintings of Mick Jagger, the Beach Boys, the Beatles, the Supremes, the Shirelles Hedy Lamarr and Monica Vitti as well as images from football games and the Indianapolis 500. In the late 1960s Stanley started using his own photographs, basing paintings on images of tree branches or the ground, and also using pictures of life-drawing models. His preferred medium was acrylic and sources for his work subjects included coloring book figures, puzzles, graphs and scientific diagrams. Stanley had his first solo show at the Paul Bianchini Gallery in 1965 and thereafter exhibited regularly in New York City and Europe. His work is represented in many public and private collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in Manhattan; the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, the Milwaukee Art Museum and the Herbert and Dorothy Vogel collection.